In today’s Jewish World Review:

Libertarian Rand Paul, Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate from Kentucky, shocked many conservatives when he refused to give full-throated support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Act criminalized public sector racial discrimination, and struck down laws that required discrimination and segregation. But it went much further. It outlawed racial discrimination by private actors such as restaurant and hotel owners who refused to serve blacks.

Yes, it did.

Funnily enough, though, we have here a bill that was passed by Republicans whose stipulation, as described above, was extension of its equality provisions to the private sector. Since we all know that it was Democrats who were doing most of the persecuting (see the all Democrat, all the time KKK as a prime example), the Republicans were, in effect, protecting the rights of blacks from Democrats.

Now a libertarian, who by definition is much closer to a Republican than to a Democrat, who says he doesn’t believe the government should force private businessmen to tow the line, is under fire from the Democrats, who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to begin with.

The word “convoluted” comes to my mind.

Rand’s critics also unintentionally expose the condescending way “compassionate conservatives” deem that blacks — still standing after slavery and Jim Crow — are in need of protection by rare “noble” whites from the bigot-infested world through which blacks are obviously incapable of navigating. Why else throw overboard the just and basic principle that private actors, short of engaging in force or fraud, should behave as they wish?

What about the pro-life pharmacist who considers it immoral to stock and sell the morning-after pill? What about the landlady who thinks homosexuality is immoral and refuses to rent to a gay couple? What if she refuses to rent to an illegal alien? What about the “morally straight” Boy Scouts organization that discriminates against an openly gay scoutmaster? What about the healthy 25-year-old who refuses to purchase health insurance?

Republicans go all deer-in-the-headlights when someone questions their colorblind bona fides. But when Nazi sympathizers want publicly to march, many conservatives correctly defend the “right.” Constitutional rights extend to both saints and sinners and those in between, no matter the outrage — in this instance of Jewish Holocaust survivors over the prospect of swastika-wearing fascists parading through their neighborhood.

This is freedom 101.

I find Larry Elder’s point of view highly defensable, and by extension, Rand Paul’s. Now, I also understand that the name “Paul” is not among the favorites in the GOP’s house, but on the other hand, because Rand Paul is actually right here, I wonder why the Republicans can’t seem to find the time to lend him just a little support.

Oh, I forgot.

No matter how hard they are now fighting to protect our liberty from Obama and his lefties, they are still the same Republicans who let us down in the first half of this decade and as a result lost both houses of Congress to the “progressive” lefty legions of Pelosi and Reid, and they don’t want to rock any vote-getting boats that might restore them to the majority on Capital Hill…So they can revert back to the lackadaisical, complacent, “career first, America second” fatcats they were before.

The well-intended, but misguided, passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — as applied to private conduct — sought to change not only whites’ behavior but also their “feelings.” Some blacks perceive racial hostility toward them from their local Korean grocer. But if treated with a smile and offered quality goods at fair prices, most blacks patronize the store. People expect and respond to a certain measure of respect as a customer, regardless of how the proprietors may personally “feel” about them.

Instead of defending Paul on this issue against race-card-playing leftists like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, conservatives/Republicans/pundits panicked. How are we to get the country back on the course set by its Founders if we cannot stand with the Rand Pauls of the nation on the bedrock principle of maximum personal liberty?

Well said.

Chuck here.

I saw this column earlier, by David Limbaugh, and thought “Remember when Obama said…?”

The “most open and transparent” president in American history is still playing hide-and-seek with the press, and even the liberal New York Times has begun to notice it, as indicated by this headline: “Obama Turns His Back On the Press.”

If the mainstream media were not so ideologically wedded to Obama’s big-government agenda, they would be doing more than pointing out his secrecy and hypocrisy with the occasional headline. They’d be skewering him daily for his marked inaccessibility.

Not having a genuine news conference since July would be remarkable for the least transparent administration, let alone one that made openness a signature campaign issue.

Yes, didn’t Mr. O have a lot of stuff to say, during his campaign, about how Dubya’s administration wasn’t transparent enough, and if he was elected, his would be a virtual open book?

…A case could be made that Obama’s never had a news conference that he hasn’t largely controlled. He and his handlers, from David Axelrod to Rahm Emanuel, understand the importance of managing the press to control the message in the interest of advancing the leftist agenda.

Jumping a bit here:

In one of his extemporaneous moments at Hampton University, he unwittingly disclosed the administration’s MO, not that discerning observers didn’t already know it. He openly lamented the advent of the “24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank that high on the truth meter.”

He might as well have just directly said it: “I don’t like the free flow of information in the new media, which tends to impede the advancement of my agenda, which depends on keeping the public in the dark.”

Yeah, that’s pretty cut and dried, worthy of any wannabe chief leftist.

…after tonight, but in the meantime I want to share a couple of columns here:

1. By Michelle Malkin

Back in 1984, when the late Jeane J. Kirkpatrick gave her famous “Blame America First” speech to the Republican National Convention, liberals at least waited for something bad to happen before blaming America.

Today, Obama Democrats have now mastered the treacherous art of the pre-emptive global apology. Foggy Bottom is crammed with so many “human rights” zealots embarrassed by the country they serve that the State Department mission statement should be replaced with a condolence card.

Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Michael Posner is probably not the first Obama State Department official to badmouth America in front of foreign delegations. He was just dumb enough to get caught.
Last week, the former head agitator at the transnationalist outfit Human Rights First trashed our country’s human rights record to Chinese government officials.

Here is the whole column.

The text of the referred-to Jeanne Kirkpatrick “Blame America First” speech is here.

2. By John Stossel

In America, we’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. Life, liberty and property can’t be taken from you unless you’re convicted of a crime.

Your life and liberty may still be safe, but have you ever gone to a government surplus auction? Consumer reporters like me tell people, correctly, that they are great places to find bargains. People can buy bikes for $10, cars for $500.

But where did the government get that stuff?
Some is abandoned property.

But some I would just call loot. The cops grabbed it.

Zaher El-Ali has repaired and sold cars in Houston for 30 years. One day, he sold a truck to a man on credit. Ali was holding the title to the car until he was paid, but before he got his money the buyer was arrested for drunk driving. The cops then seized Ali’s truck and kept it, planning to sell it.

Ali can’t believe it

“I own that truck. That truck done nothing.”

The police say they can keep it under forfeiture law because the person driving the car that day broke the law. It doesn’t matter that the driver wasn’t the owner. It’s as if the truck committed the crime.

“I have never seen a truck drive,” Ali said. I don’t think it’s the fault of the truck. And they know better.”

Something has gone wrong when the police can seize the property of innocent people.

“Under this bizarre legal fiction called civil forfeiture, the government can take your property, including your home, your car, your cash, regardless of whether or not you are convicted of a crime. It’s led to horrible abuses,” says Scott Bullock of the Institute for Justice, the libertarian law firm.

Bullock suggests the authorities are not just disinterested enforcers of the law.

“One of the main reasons they do this and why they love civil forfeiture is because in Texas and over 40 states and at the federal level, police and prosecutors get to keep all or most of the property that they seize for their own use,” he said. “So they can use it to improve their offices, buy better equipment.”

Obviously, that creates a big temptation to take stuff .

This is serious, folks. The police can seize your property if they think it was used in a crime. If you want it back, you must prove it was not used criminally. The burden of proof is on you. This reverses a centuries-old safeguard in Anglo-American law against arbitrary government power.

The feds do this, too. In 1986, the Justice Department made $94 million on forfeitures. Today, its forfeiture fund has more than a billion in it.

Radley Balko of Reason magazine keeps an eye on government property grabs: “There are lots of crazy stories about what they do with this money. There’s a district attorney’s office in Texas that used forfeiture money to buy an office margarita machine. Another district attorney in Texas used forfeiture money to take a junket to Hawaii for a conference.”

When the DA was confronted about that, his response was, “A judge signed off on it, so it’s OK.” But it turned out the judge had gone with him on the junket.

Balko has reported on a case in which police confiscated cash from a man when they found it in his car. “The state’s argument was that maybe he didn’t get it from selling drugs, but he might use that money to buy drugs at some point in the future. Therefore, we’re still allowed to take it from him,” Balko said.

Sounds like that Tom Cruise movie “Minority Report,” where the police predict future crimes and arrest the “perpetrator.”

“When you give people the wrong incentives, people respond accordingly. And so it shouldn’t be surprising that they’re stretching the definition of law enforcement,” Balko said. “But the fundamental point is that you should not have people out there enforcing the laws benefiting directly from them.”

Balko is exactly right.

Ah’ll be BOCK!

…in today’s Jewish World Review, and was quite happy to see that the school voucher concept is being reexamined and seen in a more positive note by elements of the left side of the aisle, who as we know were vehemently opposed to that most practical idea.

The storied Anti-Defamation League, one of the nation’s oldest civil-rights organizations, is fervent — very fervent — about the separation of church and state.

It devotes an elaborate page to the subject on its web site. It files friend-of-the-court briefs when church/state issues come before the federal or state judiciary. Whether the controversy is over school prayer, religious displays in public, or the phrase “under G0d” in the Pledge of Allegiance, ADL argues with much passion for keeping the “wall of separation” between government and religion as high and impenetrable as possible. “The more government and religion become entangled,” it has often warned, “the more threatening the environment becomes for each.”

No surprise, then, that ADL takes a hard line against school-choice voucher programs, which give parents the wherewithal to rescue their children from failing public schools and enroll them in private schools instead. Since those private schools are often church-affiliated, ADL contended in an amicus brief the last time the Supreme Court took up the issue, vouchers have the unconstitutional effect of directing “government funding to religious schools for religious purposes.”

That case was Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, a landmark decided in 2002, in which the Supreme Court disagreed with ADL. As long as vouchers enable parents to “exercise genuine choice among options public and private, secular and religious,” the majority ruled, nothing about them offends the Constitution.

But ADL’s opposition hasn’t softened. When the Senate was poised earlier this year to vote on funding school vouchers for the District of Columbia, ADL signed a letter calling for the program be killed. “Instead of sending federal money to private schools,” it urged, “money should instead be invested in the public schools.” In a five-part essay posted online, ADL claims that “vouchers pose a serious threat to values that are vital to the health of American democracy” and “threaten to undermine our system of public education.”

I’ve always held that the two major reasons the left is so opposed to school vouchers are that they do not believe that any child should be permitted to escape the “progressive” political indoctrination presented in today’s education system and that the teachers’ unions feel that vouchering students off into private schools or home schooling, out of their bailiwick, diminishes the power born of influence in the development of young minds enjoyed by said teachers’ unions.

Selfishly, these political parasites could care less about the quality of education a child receives.

The very fact that ADL claims that “vouchers pose a serious threat to values that are vital to the health of American democracy” gives you an idea how far they are willing to journey into the Land of Hypocrisy to defend their opposition to vouchers. If there’s one thing these far left-owned people hold in the least possible esteem, it’s values that are vital to the health of American democracy.

So as I said, I’m glad that there’s some refiguring in effect. The future generations of Americans, seeing as they’re the focal point of the entire issue, should also be the ones whose interests are considered of paramount importance, rather than the political agendas of self-seeking politicians and union leaders.

Needless to say, the ADL position, widely shared on the left, has plenty of critics on the right, including your humble servant. From the conservative editorialists at The Wall Street Journal to the libertarian litigators at the Institute for Justice, supporters of vouchers have frequently excoriated those who oppose them — especially teachers unions and the politicians who genuflect to them — for their willingness to keep poor kids trapped in wretched schools.

But while there may be nothing extraordinary about conservatives or libertarians embracing school choice, it takes real grit for liberals or Democrats do so. Especially when they do so from within ADL.

Three months ago, the executive committee of ADL’s Philadelphia chapter voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution endorsing vouchers. Now it is urging the entire organization to follow suit.

“We believe school choice to be an urgent civil rights issue,” the committee argued in a brief being circulated among ADL’s 30 regional offices. Despite decades of increased spending on K-12 education, “the evidence that our public education system is failing to educate our children is staggering.” ADL should reverse its longtime position “as a moral imperative,” the Philadelphia leadership urges, and “issue a resolution in favor of school choice.”

As it happens, the ADL regional board’s isn’t the only liberal voice in Philadelphia calling for greatly expanded school choice. State Senator Anthony Williams, a black Democrat and a candidate in Pennsylvania gubernatorial primary this week, is the founder of a charter school, a champion of vouchers, and an ardent believer in the power of competition to improve the quality of education. His position puts him sharply at odds with the state’s largest teachers’ union, which opposes choice and has endorsed his main opponent. But Williams — like the local ADL leadership — sees school choice as the great civil-rights battle of the day.

“Anybody who was for Brown v. Board of Education — it baffles me that they would be against vouchers,” Williams told me last week. “Brown condemned schools that were separate and unequal. Well, that’s exactly what we’re back to now — schools that are segregated by income, by ZIP Code, by race.”

Of the 20,000 children who annually enter Philadelphia kindergartens, Williams notes, almost half will drop out before finishing high school — and fewer than 2,000 will go to college. The way to fix the dreadful public schools that produce these results isn’t to shower them with more money, he says. It is to empower parents to pull their kids out and enroll them in better schools elsewhere.

Williams may not win Tuesday’s primary. Philly’s ADL chapter may not persuade the national board to follow its lead. But in swimming against the tide, both have set examples that will inspire others. Educational inequality persists. But thanks to some gutsy Philadelphia liberals, it has just lost a little more ground.

Let us travel hopefully.

…from my favorite prominent Democrat, former New York mayor Ed Koch.

Amnesty supporters see themselves as taking the high road and claim that amnesty opponents are opposed to immigration, when nothing could be further from the truth. Many amnesty opponents actually support expanding legal immigration. Currently, the Amnesty supporters see themselves as taking the high road and claim that amnesty U.S. has the highest legal immigration in the world. Every year, we allow 750,000 immigrants to enter the country legally and make them eligible for citizenship within five years. Two hundred and fifty thousand aslyees are also permitted to enter annually. Those legal immigrants have the right to work and earn a living; the asylees are eligible to work six months after applying to work. If we need more immigrants, as many think we do to expand the workforce of our graying population, then we can easily increase the number of legal immigrants.

If we give the current illegals amnesty, you can be sure that 20 or so years from now, there will be a clamor for another amnesty bill as the illegals will continue to pour in. For example, the Simpson-Mazzoli bill, adopted by Congress in 1986, was hailed as the last amnesty bill we would need because the borders of the U.S., then a sieve, would be better protected. However, our borders continued to be porous, and the number of illegals burgeoned, and here we are again with the illegals and their supporters seeking amnesty once more for ever larger numbers.

Now, why is it that Hizzoner’s fellow Democrats aren’t as cranially lucid as he is? Could it be that their political agendas are at odds with the in-your-face facts of the matter?

No country in the world has open borders that foreigners can enter at will, certainly not Mexico. Arizona has an estimated 500,000 illegal aliens living in the state and in 2009, the border patrol agents arrested 241,000 illegal aliens, which is why that state enacted controversial legislation out of frustration. Arizona’s citizens are outraged by the presence of many criminals among the people crossing their border — remember there is an ongoing drug war in Mexico with thousands of Mexicans being killed and wounded south of the border by other Mexicans. Arizona does not want that war to spill over into Arizona. Arizona citizens are also distressed with the demands made by illegals upon medical and educational services.

It would be sound and defensible policy to have the local police examine at the workplace the identity papers of all employees to ascertain whether they are legally allowed to work and, most important, ascertain if employers had intentionally violated current U.S. laws requiring employers to check the immigration status of hired workers. Those employers who intentionally violate the law should be pursued criminally and, if convicted, go to prison. Regrettably, this is not what is happening. If that policy were strictly enforced, illegal aliens would go home, since they are here primarily to get a job and send money home to their families. Recently, I saw an estimate that a million illegals had returned home because of our recession and unemployment in the U.S. which is now at 9.7 percent.

Above emphasis mine.

If we wait until an illegal alien is arrested for a crime or stopped for a moving violation to check the status of his/her citizenship, the odds are that we’d never find 1/10th of the illegal aliens north of the border.

Amnesty supporters refuse to use the term illegal aliens, preferring instead undocumented aliens. They should call them what they are: illegal. Amnesty proponents also should acknowledge that an open border policy is indefensible and irrational and has not been adopted by any other country.

If open borders were such a good idea, why don’t we try on a limited scale simply expanding the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) among Mexico, Canada and the U.S. and allow anyone living in those three countries access to jobs in any of them? Would Canada consent to that? Would Mexico? I doubt it.

Of course not. Mexico’s trying to get rid of its poor by sending ‘em all up here, and Canada, while governed mostly from the portside, isn’t stupid. Perhaps we are, however. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t elect the kind of people to office who would do unto us what these reptilian mammals on the Hill do.

During the Bush presidency, amnesty proponents were twice defeated when they tried to shove their self-defined “good policy” down the throats of the voters. Amnesty advocates believed, as they do now, that they know what is best for us, but the American public stood up and said “no.” In an election year, the voters can throw the bums out, and that is why Congress fears to bring the issue up before the November elections.

Again, my emphasis and right on target, Mayor Koch.

I read this item in today’s Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web Today, published daily as part of the Opinion Journal by James Taranto, and having been to many demonstrations in my time during which I had the opportunity to observe “peaceful” liberals in action, couldn’t resist putting in my two cents.

“In a blunt caution to political friend and foe, President Barack Obama said Saturday that partisan rants and name-calling under the guise of legitimate discourse pose a serious danger to America’s democracy, and may incite ‘extreme elements’ to violence,” the Associated Press reports from Ann Arbor, Mich.

Two thousand miles away, another AP dispatch reports, there occurred an example of exactly what the president was warning about:

Close to 20 businesses were damaged after what started as a peaceful immigrants’ rights march in downtown Santa Cruz [Calif.] turned violent, requiring police to call other agencies for help, authorities said.

Police spokesman Zach Friend said an estimated 250 people started marching through the city around 10:30 p.m. Saturday.

It was a harmonious but “unpermitted and unsanctioned event,” he said, until some in the crowd started breaking windows and spraying paint on retail shops that line the downtown corridor.

Friend said he wasn’t sure if the damage was caused by people marching in support of immigrants’ rights, or if the group was “infiltrated by anarchists.”

Anarchy signs were spray-painted on some of the buildings.

“They’re a group of people who seem to fancy themselves as revolutionaries, but what they really are are a group of morons,” Friend said.

You’ve got to love the way the AP describes this: It started as a peaceful march but “turned violent.” It was totally harmonious “until some in the crowd started breaking windows.” And the window breakers might have just been infiltrators!

At “peaceful” liberal demonstrations during which I was part of the conservative counter-demonstration assemblages (usually, what we have is the lefties on one side of the street, the conservatives on the other), I have uniformly, not just occasionally observed one constant, other than that while conservatives arrive on our own as individuals or in small groups, a large number of the liberals and entourage are bussed in from all points in order to bolster the size of their crowd for media exposure purposes, and that is that when everybody has gone:

1. The conservative side of the street is immaculate, no trash or property damage to be seen, whereas,

2. The liberal side of the street is utterly trashed, garbage all over the sidewalk, newspaper vending machines and other non-bolted-down artifacts overturned and/or tossed into the actual street, also a none-too-rare garnish of graffiti and/or broken windows.

Moving right along to complete WSJ Editorial Editor Taranto’s actual topic, which compares the biased treatment liberals receive in such situations over conservatives…

Compare this with the lead paragraph of the AP’s March 20 dispatch on the anti-ObamaCare tea-party protests:

House Democrats heard it all Saturday–words of inspiration from President Barack Obama and raucous chants of protests from demonstrators. And at times it was flat-out ugly, including some racial epithets aimed at black members of Congress.

The claims of racial epithets have since been disputed and were never substantiated, but let’s give the AP the benefit of the doubt and assume that at the time, the reporter knew of no reason to doubt the word of the congressmen making the claims.

Even so, had the tea-party protesters gotten the Santa Cruz treatment, the AP would have noted that the rally was completely nonviolent, even if it featured some ugly words; that there was no ugliness at all until the protest “turned ugly”; and that the people who (allegedly) shouted the ugly words might well have been infiltrators.

If the Santa Cruz protesters had gotten the tea-party treatment, by contrast, the AP would have described the event simply as a riot and would not have distinguished between the peaceful protesters and the violent few who might be infiltrators anyway.

What’s more, conservative politicians and commentators would be sounding a constant refrain–echoed by the mainstream media–that politicians are inciting the violence with “antigovernment” statements like this one, reported April 23 by CBS News:

President Obama suggested today that the immigration bill expected to be signed into law in Arizona is a “misguided” piece of legislation that “threatened to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and their communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe.”

We don’t think that journalists should give the Santa Cruz protesters the tea-party treatment or the tea partiers the Santa Cruz treatment. Both sides ought to get the same treatment–fair treatment–from those whose job is to cover the news impartially.

As for Obama, his efforts to demonize the opposition are unseemly and unpresidential.

Given the breadth of his policies’ unpopularity, they amount to an attack on the majority of Americans. That seems likely they will prove politically unwise as well.

That, as they (whoever they are) say, is for sure!

…as portrayed by revisionist history.

I was only going to do one post today, then I read this column by Thomas Sowell in Jewish World Review a little while ago and thought it needed another post in which to share it.

Mr. Sowell is right on point when he talks about the fact that our educational institutions have filtered slavery, as a historical subject, down to a simple affair of whites enslaving blacks, which, as inaccurate as this revisionism tends to be, is one of the cornerstones of the unjustified, even lie-based guilt trip laid on all white Americans by the political left and by certain race-card waving rabble-rousers looking for a hand-out or an edge in the game of politics.

Many years ago, I was surprised to receive a letter from an old friend, saying that she had been told that I refused to see campus visitors from Africa.

At the time, I was so bogged down with work that I had agreed to see only one visitor to the Stanford campus — and it so happens that he was from Africa. He just happened to come along when I had a little breathing room from the work I was doing in my office.

I pointed out to my friend that whoever said what she heard might just as well have said that I refused to go sky-diving with blacks — which was true, because I refused to go sky-diving with anybody, whether black, white, Asian or whatever.

The kind of thinking that produced a passing misconception about me has, unfortunately, produced much bigger, much longer lasting, much more systematic and more poisonous distortions about the United States of America.

Slavery is a classic example. The history of slavery across the centuries and in many countries around the world is a painful history to read — not only in terms of how slaves have been treated, but because of what that says about the whole human species — because slaves and enslavers alike have been of every race, religion and nationality.

If the history of slavery ought to teach us anything, it is that human beings cannot be trusted with unbridled power over other human beings — no matter what color or creed any of them are. The history of ancient despotism and modern totalitarianism practically shouts that same message from the blood-stained pages of history shouts that same message from the blood-stained pages of history.

But that is not the message that is being taught in our schools and colleges, or dramatized on television and in the movies. The message that is pounded home again and again is that white people enslaved black people.

It is true, just as it is true that I don’t go sky-diving with blacks. But it is also false in its implications for the same reason. Just as Europeans enslaved Africans, North Africans enslaved Europeans — more Europeans than there were Africans enslaved in the United States and in the 13 colonies from which it was formed.

The treatment of white galley slaves was even worse than the treatment of black slaves picking cotton. But there are no movies or television dramas about it comparable to “Roots,” and our schools and colleges don’t pound it into the heads of students.

The inhumanity of human beings toward other human beings is not a new story, much less a local story. There is no need to hide it, because there are lessons we can learn from it. But there is also no need to distort it, so that sins of the whole human species around the world are presented as special defects of “our society” or the sins of a particular race.

“Our society”.

If American society and Western civilization are different from other societies and civilization, it is that they eventually turned against slavery, and stamped it out, at a time when non-Western societies around the world were still maintaining slavery and resisting Western pressures to end slavery, including in some cases armed resistance.

Only the fact that the West had more firepower than others put an end to slavery in many non-Western societies during the age of Western imperialism. Yet today there are Americans who have gone to Africa to apologize for slavery — on a continent where slavery has still not been completely ended, to this very moment.

It is not just the history of slavery that gets distorted beyond recognition by the selective filtering of facts. Those who go back to mine history, in order to find everything they can to undermine American society or Western civilization, have very little interest in the Bataan death march, the atrocities of the Ottoman Empire or similar atrocities in other times and places.

Those who mine history for sins are not searching for truth but for opportunities to denigrate their own society, or for grievances that can be cashed in today, at the expense of people who were not even born when the sins of the past were committed.

An ancient adage says: “Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.” But apparently that is not sufficient for many among our educators, the intelligentsia or the media. They are busy poisoning the present by the way they present the past.

Spot On!

…and I’m remembering the joke NASCAR pulled a year ago, when they announced that the Obamunists had forbidden any of the automakers whom the government had bailed out to spend the money entering racing vehicles for NASCAR events.

It was quite the joke, they definitely got over on a few right thinking columnists and other commentators, bloggers and pundits, to judge by the feedback that issued forth from even a few of the better informed and more celebrated among us (not me, simply because I was rather indisposed that day -whew!)

Later in the day, of course, they did the corporate version of grinning and told the truth, that the announcement had been an April Fool’s Day joke.

I’ve been thinking, and realize that the Obama Administration and the far left dominated Congress just might be able to redeem themselves with the American people if they announced that every single thing they’ve done since a) the Democrat majority was sworn in in January, 2009 and b) Obama was ordained sworn in a year later was an elaborate April Fool’s joke and that they really aren’t communists or jihad sympathizers, but Americans who love their country, respect the Constitution and are about to vote unanimously to retract and reverse their every official act.

This is, of course, highly unlikely as it would be too much, for the American people, like waking up from a terrible nightmare to find that all is well in the world.

Unfortunately, all is not, and that is particularly true with the lying lefty loony linx who, through profoundly pounded propaganda from the kommie media and many a shovelfull of malarkey from the politicians both in the White House and on the Hill, finally won in their battle to staff the upper echelons of the U.S. Government with enemies of the state.

The only silver lining to that particular cloud is that we’ll be well rid of Barack Hussein in November 2012, at which time we’ll also have picked up the spares among the Democrat majority — the ones we won’t get to give the bums’ rush in November of this year.

However…

I actually came here to share another great Ann Coulter column, this week’s, which I received yesterday.

On the “Today” show this Tuesday, President Obama claimed the massive government takeover of health care the Democrats passed without a single Republican vote was a “middle of the road” bill that incorporated many Republican ideas.

One Republican idea allegedly incorporated into the Democrats’ health care monstrosity is “medical malpractice reform.” Needless to say, the Democrats’ idea of malpractice reform is less than nothing. Until trial lawyers are screaming bloody murder, there has been no medical malpractice reform.

The Democrats’ “malpractice” section merely encourages the states to set up commissions to “study” tort reform, in the sense that frustrated mothers “encourage” their kids not to slouch. By “study,” the Democrats mean “ignore.”

So we get more taxpayer-funded government workers under the Democrats’ “medical malpractice reform,” but not one tittle of actual reform.

Democrats manifestly do not care about helping Americans get quality health care. If they did, they could not continue to support trial lawyers like John Edwards making $50 million by bringing junk lawsuits against doctors who are saving people’s lives. (At least Edwards has not done anything else to publicly disgrace himself since then.)

At a minimum, any health care bill that purports to improve Americans’ health, rather than trial lawyers’ bank accounts, must include a loser-pays rule and a restriction on damages to actual losses — as opposed to punitive damages, which mostly serve to enrich the John Edwardses of the world, and their mistresses.

LOL!!!!

The Democrats also lyingly claim their health care reform includes the Republican ideas of competition across state lines.

I know they’re lying because — well, first because I read the bill — but also because Democrats are genetically incapable of understanding the free market. You might say it’s a pre-existing condition with them.

The Democrats will lie to anybody about anything if they believe it will help one of their destructive agendas reach fruition.

Democrats want to turn the entire citizenry into welfare recipients.

Amen to that!

Truncating a ways…

A few weeks ago, The New York Times ran an editorial noting the amazing fact that, by the middle of this year, there will be an estimated 6.8 billion people on Earth — and 5 billion will have cell phones! (Even more astounding, at least one of them is seated directly behind me every time I go to the movies.)

How did that happen without a Democrat president and Congress using bribes, parliamentary tricks and arcane non-voting maneuvers to pass a massive, hugely expensive National Cell Phone Reform Act?

How did that happen without Barney Frank and Henry Waxman personally designing the 3-foot-long, 26-pound, ugly green $4,000 cell phone we all have to use?

How did that happen without Obama signing the National Cell Phone Reform bill, as a poor 10-year-old black kid who couldn’t afford to text-message his friends looked on?

The reason nearly everyone in the universe has a cell phone is that President Reagan did to telephones the exact opposite of what the Democrats have just done with health care.

Before Reagan came into office, we had one phone company, ridiculously expensive rates and one phone model. Reagan split up AT&T, deregulated phone service and gave America a competitive market in phones. The rest is history.

The column can be found here, in its entirety.

Yeah, a second post again today.

One of the columnists in the Santa Monica Daily Press is the proverbial breath of fresh air, as while the wafer-thin paper is a liberal publication in a mega-liberal municipality, Mr. Breen’s output is two-fisted conservatism that shows no quarter but is fraught with humor at the same time (of course, so-called “progressives” are pretty easy to laugh at, when you get right down to it).

I love Breen’s columns and never miss them.

So, below, I give you a copy & paste of his column today, Too Big To Fail.

Enjoy!

Environmentalists hate people. Homo sapiens are the enemies of nature and it doesn’t matter if your family has been hereditary farmers or ranchers for generations, there is always some dirty Greenpeace hippie armed with a flatulently inflated pseudo-degree in eco-busy-body-ology that considers you a criminal if your livelihood is a danger to the existence of some mutated dung beetle.

The mentality of these enviro-weenies, who wouldn’t even know how to feed an air fern, is: “I have a college degree, still live in the basement of my parent’s house, but I am an ‘eco-expert.’ What could some yahoo farmer possibly tell me about raising free-range tofurkeys?”

Six weeks ago when I began this series on the U.S. government-induced drought of the farmlands in the San Joaquin Valley, I had a U.S. Fish and Wildlife public relations flack — Steve Martarano — respond to my initial article within six hours after it hit the newsstands. Folks, as a famous nobody I’m lucky if my local detractors harangue me within six days after I publish. Anyway, Mr. Martarano made a feeble attempt to school me on the relative merits of putting farm workers into food lines through a series of op-ed pieces which were written by global warming-friendly columnists that downplayed the importance of the people who grow our food over a near extinct minnow that has an indiscernible earthly merit.

I indulged Mr. Martarano with my customarily impolite demeanor which I reserve for unctuously lazy bureaucrats and informed him that while he was decidedly full of crap, I was also exuberantly grateful that he chose to recognize that I was obviously game to the enviro-con job which he was tasked to disseminate and that I couldn’t buy that kind of public recognition. Never forget that the grand-daddy of the “public relations” industry was Josef Goebbels who believed that the best lies are usually the biggest ones told over and over again. It’s what has made Al Gore half-a-billion dollars richer.

But, there is good news! Is it an inconvenient truth that in order to bribe two recalcitrant Democrat congressmen, Dennis Cardoza and Jim Costa, into voting for ObamaCare, the Department of Interior announced on March 16 that it was graciously increasing the Central Valley’s water ration despite a federal judge’s court order? I guess the survival of the delta smelt or obeying the law isn’t very important even if you have to hold farm workers hostage to pass an unpopular partisan healthcare bill.

One evening, over scorched red meat, cigars and single-malt scotch with my son Nathan and fellow columnist Dave Alsabery, we expounded upon the concept of “Schrodinger’s Fetish.” This “fetish” has its roots in the paradoxical thought experiment of Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger’s infamously imaginary “cat in a box” whereby, according to quantum mechanics applied to everyday objects, that a cat in a box might be alive or dead depending on an earlier entangling random event.

When this thought experiment is applied to the global warming fetishists of enviro-dorkdom, one could only reasonably conclude that environmentalism’s intellectual life or death is dependent on earlier entangling random events such as the leaked Climategate e-mails, the IPCC’s retreat from several of their key global warming positions and Greenpeace leader, Gerd Leipold, admitting that Greenpeace has lied and exaggerated about global warming and melting polar ice caps regardless of Milankovitch’s spank-me-Daddy solar calculations to the contrary.

Meanwhile, the Chicken Littles of environmental doom and gloom are running around and spewing stupid, not only from the lowliest clipboard cuckhold standing outside of Starbucks, but into the rarefied air of corporate America.

Ted Turner, owner of CNN (Commie News Network) and global warming Pimp-asaurus Rex claimed two years ago during a PBS interview that, “Not doing [anything] will be catastrophic. We’ll be eight degrees hotter in 10, not 10, but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals.”

Wow! Cannibals?

Yes, folks, you are destined to be cannibals if you don’t recycle your trash into the proper receptacles or drive a Prius. But if we’re doomed to be dinner, Michael Moore or Rosie O’donnell would be considered the main entree at any Hometown Buffet … for weeks!

Speaking of whale sushi, why is that Santa Monica’s moral relativity rears its head over a few pounds of whale meat while celebrating to sacramental levels a few pounds of locally aborted baby fetuses? It’s a simple demonstration of liberalism’s faux-rage and moral equivalency that dead whales are more important than dead babies.

Or as Ted Turner might intone, “Save the whales, be a cannibal.”

…post today, given the following.

Bret Stephens had a must-share opinion column in Wall Street Journal Online titled Lady Gaga Versus Middle East Peace.

Pop quiz—What does more to galvanize radical anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world: (a) Israeli settlements on the West Bank; or (b) a Lady Gaga music video?

If your answer is (b) it means you probably have a grasp of the historical roots of modern jihadism. If, however, you answered (a), then congratulations: You are perfectly in synch with the new Beltway conventional wisdom, now jointly defined by Pat Buchanan and his strange bedfellows within the Obama administration.

Heh, heh. Mr. Stephens hit the nail right on the head with that one.

You have to wonder, however, if the Obama Administration really believes (a), though, or are merely using that POV as a political tool as they use everything else. As we know, veracity, morality, patriotism, ethics, loyalty to the American people or even logic are all of secondary importance to the current president and his cadre when it comes to pushing one of their very un-American agendas (then again, what other kinds of agendas do they embrace?).

The definition of a “fact” with those critters is anything they have to say to get what they want, and they most definitely entertain some profound malevolence for Israel, so with that in mind…

What is that wisdom? In a March 26 column in Human Events, Mr. Buchanan put the case with his usual subtlety:

“Each new report of settlement expansion,” he wrote, “each new seizure of Palestinian property, each new West Bank clash between Palestinians and Israeli troops inflames the Arab street, humiliates our Arab allies, exposes America as a weakling that cannot stand up to Israel, and imperils our troops and their mission in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Mr. Buchanan was playing off a story in the Israeli press that Vice President Joe Biden had warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “what you’re doing here [in the West Bank] undermines the security of our troops.” Also in the mix was a story that Centcom commander David Petraeus had cited Arab-Israeli tensions as the key impediment to wider progress in the region. Both reports were later denied—in Mr. Biden’s case, via Rahm Emanuel; in Gen. Petraeus’s case, personally and forcefully—but the important point is how eagerly they were believed. If you’re of the view that Israel is the root cause of everything that ails the Middle East—think of it as global warming in Hebrew form—then nothing so powerfully makes the case against the Jewish state as a flag-draped American coffin.

Being me, I had to emphasize that part, LOL.

Anyone in the United States who isn’t brain dead, brain-washed by the evil, sleazy, treasonous, communist mainstream media, deaf, dumb and blind or just plain stupid knew long before Barack Hussein Obama was elected that he was going to go after Israel right out of the gate; after all, they are the sworn enemy of his people.

It must be tough, having to carry the torch for both Islamic jihadis and socialists at the same time.

Now consider Lady Gaga—or, if you prefer, Madonna, Farrah Fawcett, Marilyn Monroe, Josephine Baker or any other American woman who has, at one time or another, personified what the Egyptian Islamist writer Sayyid Qutb once called “the American Temptress.”

Qutb, for those unfamiliar with the name, is widely considered the intellectual godfather of al Qaeda; his 30-volume exegesis “In the Shade of the Quran” is canonical in jihadist circles. But Qutb, who spent time as a student in Colorado in the late 1940s, also decisively shaped jihadist views about the U.S.

In his 1951 essay “The America I Have Seen,” Qutb gave his account of the U.S. “in the scale of human values.” “I fear,” he wrote, “that a balance may not exist between America’s material greatness and the quality of her people.” Qutb was particularly exercised by what he saw as the “primitiveness” of American values, not least in matters of sex.

“The American girl,” he noted, “knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs and she shows all this and does not hide it.” Nor did he approve of Jazz—”this music the savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires”—or of American films, or clothes, or haircuts, or food. It was all, in his eyes, equally wretched.

Whoa!!!!

Read the rest here.