There are interesting rumblings in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer. You might almost think the left was getting ready to admit there’s a problem….naaah. That’s not going to happen.
States were $1.38 trillion short of having enough to pay their public-employee retirement bills in 2010, the last year for which totals are available for all 50 states, according [...]
Obama has offered a “compromise” on the recent HHS decision to require church-affiliated institutions to include contraception. The “compromise” is that the church-affiliated institutions won’t have to pay for the coverage. The insurers will have to provide the coverage for free to the subscribers.
Normally, I’d say this “compromise” is pure politics. Given the bipartisan attacks [...]
A government, like a family or a corporation, can support some number of economically unviable undertakings. But at some point, no matter how pleasurable or good intentioned they are, piling on too many economically unviable endeavors threatens those that are viable. The problem with Progressivism is that it cannot, even in theory, limit itself to [...]
One thing that’s abundantly clear is that the left does not value economic growth. The younger lefties, particularly, don’t seem to comprehend that their high standard of living today is the result of growth and can only be sustained with continued growth. They fail to understand that many of the things they take for granted [...]
During the fight over the debt ceiling, I kept hearing from the left that the rich need to pay their fair share. Setting aside the fact that the top 5% earn 35% of income but pay 60% of taxes, and the fact that higher tax rates on the wealthy produce less tax revenue, I expect [...]
So, it seems there’s an artist who as a very political piece that involves Jesus having sex. A lot of people are understandably offended. It’s worth noting, however, that they are expressing their annoyance without riots, deaths and violence throughout Christendom. The artist has not gone into hiding. He is not under 24 armed guard. [...]
When Rep. Kanjorski (D-PA) made his recent comments about how a program he was supporting wasn’t for “minorities” or “defectives”, my reaction was “queue the silence”. Sure enough, there’s been a whole lot of nothing made of it.
So, I’m just going to make a simple observation. Isn’t it amazing how you can say some remarkably [...]
Donna Brazile has a thoroughly inane piece over at CNN where she says the BP oil spill fiasco proves we need big government.
Of course, she never actually says what authority or resource the government lacked that would either have prevented the mile-deep blown well or allowed it to react better. Is it her contention that [...]
I had a letter published in today’s Inquirer. Amusingly, Mother Manifesto read the letter in the paper and said “yeah! right on!” before she noticed it was from her son.
It’s amazing how the people who claim to hear the echo of Jim Crow in the tea parties fail to hear the rumble of Marxism on [...]
With all the demonstrations and political violence in Greece, I’m thinking the Tea Parties must have relocated. The left, after all, is by definition calm, rational and non-violent and by default political violence only occurs on the right. Got that?
Just a few short years ago we were told that no-bid contracts going to KBR were proof of corruption and cronyism in the White House. What a difference a couple years makes! I guess the current administration must used some of that magic transparency dust it has to make this crony-free.
That or there’s a double [...]
Just weeks after ObamaCare has been signed into law we’re already starting to hear that the bill is going to raise the cost of healthcare. So it turns out the majority of Americans who were called reactionaries, racists, liars, homophobes, stupid, uneducated, violent and seditious for opposing it were, in fact, right.
Will the luminaries on [...]
It’s no secret that I find the left to be a pretty disreputable bunch. I don’t have a fancy for people who want to take my liberty away and administer my life for me. I find their condescending we’re-so-much-smarter-than-you attitude particularly loathsome. Perhaps that’s why I so thoroughly enjoy it when they put on display [...]
Speaking of lefties on the offensive, Prof. Bernstein lists a number of progressive “accomplishments” over the last century.
alcohol prohibition; coercive eugenics (upheld in an appallingly insensitive opinion by Progressive hero O.W. Holmes); residential segregation by race …bans on private schools…judicial recall elections; and restrictions on women’s participation in the labor market…immigration restrictions….segregation in federal workplaces.
But, [...]
I was recently debating a colleague on a variety of political topics. He kept repeating an often-heard lefty refrain, “Republicans want to impose their morality on people”. This is a common talking point and, and best, incomplete.
Setting aside the somewhat esoteric issue of whether all laws are a reflection of morality, is it really [...]
I had the opportunity today to attend the Philadelphia Tax Day Tea Party. It was pretty much what I expected: amusing homemade signs, flags aplenty (both U.S. and Gadsden), pleasant and respectful people. I’d even go so far as to say it was better attended than I anticipated, perhaps a few hundred people. The speakers [...]
Tyler Cowan has a link to a new paper analyzing online political reading. One of the quotes is from the paper is:
Visitors of extreme conservative sites such as rushlimbaugh.com and glennbeck.com are more likely than a typical online news reader to have visited nytimes.com.
Setting aside the issue of whether Limbaugh and Beck are appropriately described [...]
The left exaggerates the bad elements of the country’s past (slavery and discrimination, example) as a tool to discredit the better elements (such as limited government and a can-do culture that combined to produce a uniquely prosperous nation). Do they apply the same logic to their own history? To quote John Boehner, “Hell no!”.
The left’s [...]
Apropos of my previous post, I encountered this video review of some lefties during the Bush years. The closing quote: “We’ll have to kill somebody I guess.”
But the media tells us it’s the Tea Parties that are scary and dangerous. Riiiight.
I am firmly convinced that the left exists in a self-congratulatory echo chamber. This is particularly true in certain areas of the country. One of the consequences of this is often that their logic and ideas are unchallenged, untested, and just plain sloppy. They are not stupid or evil people. They simply aren’t rigorous in [...]