Not shocking at all, most liberals do not like being questioned.
Quote:
Comments can be bad for science. That’s why, here at PopularScience.com, we’re shutting them off.
It wasn’t a decision we made lightly. As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former, diminishing our ability to do the latter.
[….]
But even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader’s perception of a story, recent research suggests. In one study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard, 1,183 Americans read a fake blog post on nanotechnology and revealed in survey questions how they felt about the subject (are they wary of the benefits or supportive?). Then, through a randomly assigned condition, they read either epithet- and insult-laden comments (“If you don’t see the benefits of using nanotechnology in these kinds of products, you’re an idiot” ) or civil comments.
[….]
A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to “debate” on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.
Comments aren’t bad for science. Comments are bad for those who are stubbornly clinging to outdated scientific paradigms that are showing obvious cracks.
I guess they haven’t heard of using methods like Bad Behavior, Akismet, Disqus, and others commenting blockers. They aren’t perfect, but certainly cut down quite a bit.
[….]
There are many Warmist websites I’m blocked from commenting at. Same with other Climate Realists like Steven Goddard, Tom Nelson, Anthony Watts, etc. Because Warmists do not want debate: they want people to sit down, shut up, and smile as Government becomes more intrusive and controlling. All based on a lie.
This is pretty much what I was thinking too. If you have a blog or a website; and you do not allow comments, what you basically have is a pulpit with an empty Church. Now, I moderate comments, because this blog sometimes like to attract the attention of some trollish folk who like to make appearances here. But, anyone can comment and as long as the comments don’t blatantly violate my comment policy, I will let them stand. This is because I do not mind people coming back and commenting. I also like it when they donate, but I digress. 😉
The Navy is 20% black and Washington DC is 50.1% black. Yet the spree killer killed no black victims. Of the 13 fatalities that have been identified, one is a very Caucasian looking man from India. The rest are white. All the fatalities are civilian workers, though some are Navy veterans. Being a heavily black area and a government agency known for aggressive affirmative action, it is reasonable to assume that a large percentage of the people on site during the shooting were black. Yet, so far it appears that none of the fatalities are black.
We also know that the spree killer was a liberal who supported Obama. We know know that he talked about race and blamed white people for his shortcomings.
Mr Suthamtewakul, who runs the Happy Bowl Thai restaurant, described Alexis as being like his “big brother.” He told The Daily Telegraph: “I first met him at the Buddhist temple. He had been in the Navy but he was unemployed. I saw he was struggling with his finances, and I said why not move in and you can just pay the electricity bill? He was doing online school, something about electronic stuff and aircraft
“He never got angry with us. He was always very nice to us. He had a couple of issues with being black. He felt he hadn’t been treated right, not by the Navy, just generally. He didn’t have a lot of friends – me, my wife and family, and people from temple.”
So there you have it, a headcase black man who supports President Obama — that my friends is who killed all those people in that Navy Yard. I guess it is true what Dr. Michael Savage says, that liberalism IS a mental disorder. For that matter, so is blaming white people for all of your problems. That would be like me wanting to blame blacks as being the reason I cannot find a job. Both are just as stupid.
Oh and by the way; the media has really been trying to prove that the shooter used a AR-15 assault rifle. Sorry, no such luck. He used a shotgun, like Joe Biden said to use and a handgun. So much for that narrative. 🙄 Et tu, Mr. Morgan? Mr. Morgan?!
This is a very interesting report and it is coming from the Detroit Free Press which is basically liberally biased.
Here is the meat and potatoes of the report:
For this report, the Free Press examined about 10,000 pages of documents gathering dust in the public library’s archives. Since most of those documents have never been digitized, the Free Press created its own database of 50 years of Detroit’s financial history. Reporters also conducted dozens of interviews with participants from the last six mayoral administrations as well as city bureaucrats and outside experts. Among the highlights from the review:
■ Taxing higher and higher: City leaders tried repeatedly to reverse sliding revenue through new taxes. Despite a new income tax in 1962, a new utility tax in 1971 and a new casino revenue tax in 1999 — not to mention several tax increases along the way — revenue in today’s dollars fell 40% from 1962 to 2012. Higher taxes helped drive residents to the suburbs and drove away business. Today, Detroit still doesn’t take in as much tax revenue as it did just from property taxes in 1963.
■ Reconsidering Coleman Young: Serving from 1974-1994, Young was the most austere Detroit mayor since World War II, reducing the workforce, department budgets and debt during a particularly nasty national recession in the early 1980s. Young was the only Detroit mayor since 1950 to preside over a city with more income than debt, although he relied heavily on tax increases to pay for services.
■ Downsizing — too little, too late: The total assessed value of Detroit property — a good gauge of the city’s tax base and its ability to pay bills — fell a staggering 77% over the past 50 years in today’s dollars. But through 2004, the city cut only 28% of its workers, even though the money to pay them was drying up. Not until the last decade did Detroit, in desperation, cut half its workforce. The city also failed to take advantage of efficiencies, such as new technology, that enabled enormous productivity gains in the broader economy.
■ Skyrocketing employee benefits: City leaders allowed legacy costs — the tab for retiree pensions and health care — to spiral out of control even as the State of Michigan and private industry were pushing workers into less costly plans. That placed major stress on the budget and diverted money from services such as streetlights and public safety. Detroit’s spending on retiree health care soared 46% from 2000 to 2012, even as its general fund revenue fell 20%.
■ Gifting a billion in bonuses: Pension officials handed out about $1 billion in bonuses from the city’s two pension funds to retirees and active city workers from 1985 to 2008. That money — mostly in the form of so-called 13th checks — could have shored up the funds and possibly prevented the city from filing for bankruptcy. If that money had been saved, it would have been worth more than $1.9 billion today to the city and pension funds, by one expert’s estimate.
■ Missing chance after chance: Contrary to myth, the city has not been in free fall since the 1960s. There have been periods of economic growth and hope, such as in the 1990s when the population decline slowed, income-tax revenue increased and city leaders balanced the budget. But leaders failed to take advantage of those moments of calm to reform city government, reduce expenses and protect the city and its residents from another downturn.
■ Borrowing more and more: Detroit went on a binge starting around 2000 to close budget holes and to build infrastructure, more than doubling debt to $8 billion by 2012. Under Archer, Detroit sold water and sewer bonds. Kilpatrick, who took office in 2002, used borrowing as his stock answer to budget issues, and Bing borrowed more than $250 million.
■ Adding the last straw — Kilpatrick’s gamble: He’s best known around the globe for a sex and perjury scandal that sent him to jail and massive corruption that threatens to send him to prison next month for more than 20 years. The corruption cases further eroded Detroit’s image and distracted the city from its fiscal storm. But perhaps the greatest damage Kilpatrick did to the city’s long-term stability was with Wall Street’s help when he borrowed $1.44 billion in a flashy high-finance deal to restructure pension fund debt. That deal, which could cost $2.8 billion over the next 22 years, now represents nearly one-fifth of the city’s debt.
With all the lost opportunities over decades, with Detroit’s debt mounting, with the housing crash and Great Recession just over the horizon, 2005 turned out to be the watershed year.
Although no one could see it at the time, Detroit’s insolvency was guaranteed.
This is an interesting article on the President, and is basically what I already knew about him….
Quote:
As for Barack Obama he was the stranger with the vaguest and nebulas agendas ever. He offered Hope and Change. He also said he would fundamentally change America. Since Obama was Black and viewed as a Liberal they wanted to and still do believe Obama was somehow one of them. Obama has his own ideas and they are a lot of things but traditionally Liberal is just not one of them.
The only thing I will add to the above is this; Barack Obama is not of Clinton stripe or even Truman or Roosevelt stripe. Obama is what is known as a neo-leftist. The only difference between a neoconservative and a neo-liberal is their differences on the opinion of scope and role of Government. Both are foreign policy hawks and both are okay with big Government, as long as they control it.
Obama and his people are neo-progressives. They are also, like the Clintons, internationalist Democrats and Wilsonian foreign policy devotees as well as devotees of the frankfurt school as well.
I was not going to write about this; but seeing that I got on twitter and shot my mouth off, I figure that I could at least explain myself in long form here on the blog.
It appears that defending pedophiles and saying that they are not criminals is in vogue with the progressive left. Which is to be expected of them, seeing that they really see living, breathing babies as nothing more than a blob of tissue and not worth really to be spared what I happen to consider a butchering at the hands of a Godless doctor.
There is a painfully uncomfortable episode of “Louie” in which the comedian Louis C.K. muses that maybe child molesters wouldn’t kill their victims if the penalty weren’t so severe. Everyone I know who watches the show vividly recalls that scene from 2010 because it conjures such a witches’ cauldron of taboo, disgust and moral outrage, all wrapped around a disturbing kernel of truth. I have similar ambivalence about the case involving former Montana high school teacher Stacey Dean Rambold. Louie concluded his riff with a comment to the effect of “I don’t know what to do with that information.” That may be the case for many of us, but with our legal and moral codes failing us, our society needs to have an uncensored dialogue about the reality of sex in schools.
As protesters decry the leniency of Rambold’s sentence — he will spend 30 days in prison after pleading guilty to raping 14-year-old Cherice Morales, who committed suicide at age 16 — I find myself troubled for the opposite reason. I don’t believe that all sexual conduct between underage students and teachers should necessarily be classified as rape, and I believe that absent extenuating circumstances, consensual sexual activity between teachers and students should not be criminalized. While I am not defending Judge G. Todd Baugh’s comments about Morales being “as much in control of the situation” — for which he has appropriately apologized — tarring and feathering him for attempting to articulate the context that informed his sentence will not advance this much-needed dialogue.
I do think that teachers who engage in sex with students, no matter how consensual, should be removed from their jobs and barred from teaching unless they prove that they have completed rehabilitation. But the utter hysteria with which society responds to these situations does less to protect children than to assuage society’s need to feel that we are protecting them. I don’t know what triggered Morales’s suicide, but I find it tragic and deeply troubling that this occurred as the case against Rambold wound its way through the criminal justice system. One has to wonder whether the extreme pressure she must have felt from those circumstances played a role.
I’ve been a 14-year-old girl, and so have all of my female friends. When it comes to having sex on the brain, teenage boys got nothin’ on us. When I was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, the sexual boundaries between teachers and students were much fuzzier. Throughout high school, college and law school, I knew students who had sexual relations with teachers. To the best of my knowledge, these situations were all consensual in every honest meaning of the word, even if society would like to embrace the fantasy that a high school student can’t consent to sex. Although some feelings probably got bruised, no one I knew was horribly damaged and certainly no one died.
[….]
If religious leaders and heads of state can’t keep their pants on, with all they have to lose, why does society expect that members of other professions can be coerced into meeting this standard? A more realistic approach would be to treat violations in a way that removes and rehabilitates the offender without traumatizing the victim. The intensity of criminal proceedings, with all the pressure they put on participants, the stigma, the community and media scrutiny, and the concurrent shame and guilt they generate, do the opposite of healing and protecting the victim. Laws related to statutory rape are in place to protect children, but the issue of underage sex, and certainly of sex between students and teachers, may be one in which the law of unintended consequences is causing so much damage that society needs to reassess.
So there you have it. This above is nothing more than a progressive liberal justification of underage sex between school students and teachers — because underage kids have, as she calls it, “sex on the brain.”
What bothers me about this piece is, for one; it is saying that people that commit acts of pedophilia should not be subject to the legal system. Another thing that bothers me is this here:
Betsy Karasik – A liberal minority that thinks that Pedophiles are just perfectly fine.
No, I am not complaining that she is a woman — please, I am not that big of an idiot. What bothers me about this article and its author is that she is a liberal minority. In the world of the progressive left, you can pretty much say and do what you damned well please —- because you are liberal minority. In progressivism, being a minority of any sort is an automatic ticket to be as outrageous as you want to be, without having to worry about repercussions. It is, in fact, a cover for them.
Some from twitter might have noted that I called this idiot liberal minority woman a “Jap.” I really have no idea really, what her ethnic background is, nor do I really care. She does appear to be someone from the Asian region. For what it is truly worth, you can click here and find out what I really do truly feel about the Japanese and their idiotic Country. Some of us have not forgotten about what happened on December 7, 1941. Some people forgive and forget —- I choose not to do such a foolhardy thing. My family fought in that war, and spilled blood for that cause; and I choose not to just act like that never really happened.
As I wrote above, being a liberal minority is a ticket to be as outrageous, or as in recent times — as criminal as one wants to be; and there is a double standard when it comes to that as well. This was proven when a black thug, by the name of Trayvon Martin decided to stalk and beat the living crap out of a Latino man named George Zimmerman and ended up being shot to death by Zimmerman. Who, in fact, was defending his own life; the liberal media went crazy, calling Zimmerman a white man in hopes of starting a race riot in this Country — which failed thankfully. It seems the American people, including blacks, have a bit more restraint than the liberal media in this Country.
Now to show you what rather rank hypocrisy exists in the liberal media and in the progressive movement, altogether I give you two documented incidents:
Why is this, you ask? Because in the world of liberal minorities, especially blacks — there is a mentality, that any violence or any other sort of misdeeds perpetuated by blacks toward white people is somehow or another justified. It is to be justified by liberal progressives, and yes, blacks themselves — because of the horrible things that happened in this Country over 300 years ago. I am referring to the importation of criminal blacks into the United States from Africa to be used as slaves.
What I have just described to you is nothing more than the anti-American works of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory at work. The problem is that there are some so-called Conservatives and some so-called libertarians who are of that same mindset. There is a common name for whites who do this sort of thing; it is called white guilt.
In conclusion: This article should, not shock Conservatives and those who disagree with the progressive left; it is simply the manifestation of the works of the Frankfort School. Those who are of the Frankfurt School mentality consider anything that is moral, law abiding and or that promotes American values racist. Dr. Michael Savage said it best, “Liberalism is a mental disorder” and this Washington post opinion piece and its idiot liberal author are living proof of that fact.
American version of it or not. I simply do not trust it and this here is why. This comes via Memri TV:
Some of you might say, “But, aren’t you a Buchananite type?” Yes, indeed I am. Which simply means that I am not a fan of Wilsonian Foreign Policy and that’s all it means. If Al-Jazeera TV is putting this sort of garbage on it’s Arab speaking network, it has zero business being in the United States of America. This is nothing more than Anti-Jewish propaganda and it furthers the blood libels that the terrorists thrive on and use to commit acts of carnage.
If our President were actually worth a tinkers damn, he would tell Al-Jazeera TV, “You either do something about that, or you can pack your little network up and go back to mecca, where you truly belong.” But, because we have a President who kowtows down to Arabs and their religion, instead of defending Jewish Americans, you have this network Al-Jazeera TV here to brainwash Americans into believe that 9/11 was somehow justified.
…and that, my friends, is a great American tragedy.
Okay here is the little small problem with trusting Dick Cheney and his boss George W. Bush, they lied, as in like 935 times in a row, during their Presidency and Vice Presidency.
The Center for Public Integrity was founded in 1989 by Charles Lewis. We are one of the country’s oldest and largest nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organizations. Our mission: To enhance democracy by revealing abuses of power, corruption and betrayal of trust by powerful public and private institutions, using the tools of investigative journalism.
Anyhow, here is why I don’t trust Neocons, nor do I trust Democratic Party liberals or Neo-leftists:
President Bush, for example, made 232 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda. Secretary of State Powell had the second-highest total in the two-year period, with 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld and Fleischer each made 109 false statements, followed by Wolfowitz (with 85), Rice (with 56), Cheney (with 48), and McClellan (with 14).
The massive database at the heart of this project juxtaposes what President Bush and these seven top officials were saying for public consumption against what was known, or should have been known, on a day-to-day basis. This fully searchable database includes the public statements, drawn from both primary sources (such as official transcripts) and secondary sources (chiefly major news organizations) over the two years beginning on September 11, 2001. It also interlaces relevant information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches, and interviews.
Consider, for example, these false public statements made in the run-up to war:
On August 26, 2002, in an address to the national convention of the Veteran of Foreign Wars, Cheney flatly declared: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” In fact, former CIA Director George Tenet later recalled, Cheney’s assertions went well beyond his agency’s assessments at the time. Another CIA official, referring to the same speech, told journalist Ron Suskind, “Our reaction was, ‘Where is he getting this stuff from?’ “
In the closing days of September 2002, with a congressional vote fast approaching on authorizing the use of military force in Iraq, Bush told the nation in his weekly radio address: “The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given. . . . This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year.” A few days later, similar findings were also included in a much-hurried National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction — an analysis that hadn’t been done in years, as the intelligence community had deemed it unnecessary and the White House hadn’t requested it.
In July 2002, Rumsfeld had a one-word answer for reporters who asked whether Iraq had relationships with Al Qaeda terrorists: “Sure.” In fact, an assessment issued that same month by the Defense Intelligence Agency (and confirmed weeks later by CIA Director Tenet) found an absence of “compelling evidence demonstrating direct cooperation between the government of Iraq and Al Qaeda.” What’s more, an earlier DIA assessment said that “the nature of the regime’s relationship with Al Qaeda is unclear.”
On May 29, 2003, in an interview with Polish TV, President Bush declared: “We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories.” But as journalist Bob Woodward reported in State of Denial, days earlier a team of civilian experts dispatched to examine the two mobile labs found in Iraq had concluded in a field report that the labs were not for biological weapons. The team’s final report, completed the following month, concluded that the labs had probably been used to manufacture hydrogen for weather balloons.
On January 28, 2003, in his annual State of the Union address, Bush asserted: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.” Two weeks earlier, an analyst with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research sent an email to colleagues in the intelligence community laying out why he believed the uranium-purchase agreement “probably is a hoax.”
On February 5, 2003, in an address to the United Nations Security Council, Powell said: “What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources.” As it turned out, however, two of the main human sources to which Powell referred had provided false information. One was an Iraqi con artist, code-named “Curveball,” whom American intelligence officials were dubious about and in fact had never even spoken to. The other was an Al Qaeda detainee, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who had reportedly been sent to Eqypt by the CIA and tortured and who later recanted the information he had provided. Libi told the CIA in January 2004 that he had “decided he would fabricate any information interrogators wanted in order to gain better treatment and avoid being handed over to [a foreign government].”
The false statements dramatically increased in August 2002, with congressional consideration of a war resolution, then escalated through the mid-term elections and spiked even higher from January 2003 to the eve of the invasion.
It was during those critical weeks in early 2003 that the president delivered his State of the Union address and Powell delivered his memorable U.N. presentation.
In addition to their patently false pronouncements, Bush and these seven top officials also made hundreds of other statements in the two years after 9/11 in which they implied that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or links to Al Qaeda. Other administration higher-ups, joined by Pentagon officials and Republican leaders in Congress, also routinely sounded false war alarms in the Washington echo chamber.
The cumulative effect of these false statements — amplified by thousands of news stories and broadcasts — was massive, with the media coverage creating an almost impenetrable din for several critical months in the run-up to war. Some journalists — indeed, even some entire news organizations — have since acknowledged that their coverage during those prewar months was far too deferential and uncritical. These mea culpas notwithstanding, much of the wall-to-wall media coverage provided additional, “independent” validation of the Bush administration’s false statements about Iraq.
The “ground truth” of the Iraq war itself eventually forced the president to backpedal, albeit grudgingly. In a 2004 appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, for example, Bush acknowledged that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. And on December 18, 2005, with his approval ratings on the decline, Bush told the nation in a Sunday-night address from the Oval Office: “It is true that Saddam Hussein had a history of pursuing and using weapons of mass destruction. It is true that he systematically concealed those programs, and blocked the work of U.N. weapons inspectors. It is true that many nations believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As your president, I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq. Yet it was right to remove Saddam Hussein from power.”
Bush stopped short, however, of admitting error or poor judgment; instead, his administration repeatedly attributed the stark disparity between its prewar public statements and the actual “ground truth” regarding the threat posed by Iraq to poor intelligence from a Who’s Who of domestic agencies.
On the other hand, a growing number of critics, including a parade of former government officials, have publicly — and in some cases vociferously — accused the president and his inner circle of ignoring or distorting the available intelligence. In the end, these critics say, it was the calculated drumbeat of false information and public pronouncements that ultimately misled the American people and this nation’s allies on their way to war.
Bush and the top officials of his administration have so far largely avoided the harsh, sustained glare of formal scrutiny about their personal responsibility for the litany of repeated, false statements in the run-up to the war in Iraq. There has been no congressional investigation, for example, into what exactly was going on inside the Bush White House in that period. Congressional oversight has focused almost entirely on the quality of the U.S. government’s pre-war intelligence — not the judgment, public statements, or public accountability of its highest officials. And, of course, only four of the officials — Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz — have testified before Congress about Iraq.
Short of such review, this project provides a heretofore unavailable framework for examining how the U.S. war in Iraq came to pass. Clearly, it calls into question the repeated assertions of Bush administration officials that they were the unwitting victims of bad intelligence.
Above all, the 935 false statements painstakingly presented here finally help to answer two all-too-familiar questions as they apply to Bush and his top advisers: What did they know, and when did they know it?
A video:
The real sick and sad part is this; the same people that are having a hissy fit on the right about this program existing under Obama, are the same ones who were perfectly fine with it existing under Bush. In other words, they trusted the program under Bush. like idiots. My question to that crowd is this; why do you not trust Obama? Because he is black or because he is a Democratic Party liberal?
Anyone and I mean anyone, who puts their trust in this Government of ours, based upon partisanship is nothing more than a darned fool in my opinion. Both of these political parties are two sides of the same coin and that is corruption and big Government socialism. Both parties promote it, both parties contribute to it. Government hand outs are Government hand outs; whether it be in the forum of welfare or Government subsidies. It is big Government statist and it flies in the face of our Constitution and in the face of what this great Nation was founded upon.
Also too, unlike the anti-american idiots at WSJ; no, I do not support this one iota. I agree with Michelle Malkin, it is overreach of the highest order and yes, it is dangerous as hell.
I will say this, as someone who is not much of a Democratic Party supporter anymore; my friends, we might just be witnessing what might just be the end or at least the long-term waylaying of the Democratic Party for a long time to come. I can tell you now, that many Americans who voted for President Obama are feeling like suckers who were sold a bag of lemons. Because from what I have seen, Democrats are absolutely furious about this little revelation.
AllahPundit writes about this moron, and man is he ever right about this guy.
Take it away AP:
Matthews has made this point many times before, usually with references to Horatio Alger, but it feels extra special after a long week of President Perfect completely betraying the Hopenchange ethos of his first presidential campaign. It’s not the cheap racial demagoguery that gets me here; that’s par for the course both for him and his network, where you’ll find far dumber examples of it than this. What gets me is that a guy who’s spent his adult life in politics reacts to the dynamics of ideological differences and partisanship like a college student would. Righties dislike O because he’s a statist liberal, and sometimes an aggressive one; if Hillary wins, she’ll be hated for the same reason. Obama’s personal behavior is better than lots of pols’, but plenty of politicians who are more or less decent people in their personal conduct are roundly hated by the other team. Paul Ryan’s a nice guy with a lovely family whom the lefty commentariat loathes because they think he wants to kill grandma. Marco Rubio also seems like a decent person with a nice family; he’ll be the second coming of Hitler in 2016 to the left if he’s the nominee, his shilling for immigration reform notwithstanding. Many people who know Mitt Romney will tell you he’s a warm, generous guy in person; he’s lived cleanly too, apart from his unforgivable crime of making lots and lots of money in business. (Note Matthews’s reference to “money-grubbing” in the clip. For shame, Mitt.) All of them already are or will be regarded by liberals as monsters, not because they have any deep objection to them as people but because they’re roadblocks on the path to the society liberals want America to be. That’s politics. When you know the way to paradise, everyone in your way is the devil. And every single person reading this grasps that already. So how is it the guy who doesn’t, who shrieks like a five-year-old over political animosities, has his own TV show?
Very well put. Also too, and please know this okay? The only reason I am linking to HotAir.com on this is for following reasons:
Because I happened to see the videos there and I happened to have liked what AllahPundit said.
It is considered in blogging to be unethical to not cite sources of where you get your videos from. Yes, I know, people have used stuff here and no bothered to cite me as the source. It happens. But, I happen to believe in ethics and integrity. Because of this I cite my sources, all the time. I could care less about the hits or lack of; although, I will confess that the trackback links are nice. But, I really do not get a good deal of traffic from HotAir.com. So, the accusations of my link whoring are baseless.
Within hours of the disclosure that the federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.
Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.
The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the 9/11 attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.
