I can see where he is coming from, although, I think calling Cruz a “Fraud” is a bit over the top. I especially like one part, which I will bold and underline.
What offends Mr. King is that Mr. Cruz, whose office did not respond to an e-mail message, dared other Republicans to be as pure and relentless in their opposition to the health care program as he is, even though everyone knew his tactics were doomed. It also struck Mr. King as an unprincipled attempt to change the law without consent of the voters. Losing actually means something; Mr. King himself said he had voted against the Obama health care overhaul at every opportunity, then voted to repeal it, and thinks it’s a law that ought to be undone.
“But I also believe in democracy, and I don’t mean that in a Fourth of July way,” he said. “We’ve lost on the House floor, we lost on the Senate floor, the president signed the bill, the Supreme Court held it to be constitutional, and the 2012 election was run on Obamacare as much as any issue. President Obama won.
“I still think we should try to repeal the bill. But you repeal it the same way you passed it. You get bills through both houses of Congress, and you get the president to sign it. The only way we are going to do that is by electing more Republicans and winning the presidential election.”
About two-thirds of the Republicans in the House of Representatives agree with him, Mr. King asserted: “A lot of them are intimidated by the Ted Cruz wing. There were robocalls and efforts in districts throughout the country during August against Republicans, telling them why they had to support defunding Obamacare.
“What do you accomplish? You build up this mailing list for Cruz, and a fund-raising list. And you also are going to generate primaries against people who I would consider to be good Republicans, pretty solid conservative Republicans.”
I believe when Representative King refers to “Democracy” he is simply referring to the political process in general. The fact is though that we are a Constitutional Republic and we have a process and by the process we should go. This filibustering is nothing more than a sideshow for the Republicans and it will also be used as a fundraiser for pressure groups. King is right, the Democrats won the election, and they passed a bill, fair and square. Now, the Republicans need to win some elections, like 2014 and 2016 and get the bill removed. Which is basically what I said right here.
I think there’s one way out of this, though it will not be taken by either side, because both tribes frankly loathe each other (more than they loathe Democrats).
The Establishment — the In-Tribe — has to be less condescending with the Tea Party. When I say “condescending,” I mean this: I don’t believe the Establishment is being fully candid about their goals and beliefs because they think the crazies of the Tea Party couldn’t handle the truth.
So there is a condescending sort of “yes yes of course dear” attitude in public, whereas in private they tear their hair out about the silliness of these ruffians and scoundrels.
If the Establishment doesn’t wish to do certain things — if they think certain policies are too extreme or unwise or would cause too much genuine harm — they should do the Tea Party the honor of treating them like thinking adults and say so and explain why.
[….]
To the extent that the Tea Party and Establishment are divided over such false beliefs, Then let’s discuss them honestly so that the False Beliefs can either be dispelled or, who knows, perhaps proven true.Maybe the Establishment is wrong about some things.
On the other side of the ledger, the Tea Party could sort of tamp down on the whole Righteous Wrath thing. Even though I’ve moved from “more Establishment” to “more Tea Party” over the past year, I still find the Tea Party’s frequently self-flatteries no less objectionable than David Brooks’.
We should be arguing about what is best for the country, not Who’s Got The Best Tribe. To the extent that the one devolves into the other, we should really all try to get back on track with the important thing.
Excellent post. I suggest everyone who reads here, go take a look.
President Barack Obama has recently been enduring some of the toughest and widespread media criticism of his presidency, not just from the right but, increasingly, from the center and left as well, reports Politico.
Time magazine political columnist and moderate Joe Klein, for example, told Politico’s Dylan Byers that the president’s public pronouncements on Syria are “inexplicable and perplexing and stunning.”
“Obama has lost some serious altitude: In the world, with the Congress, and most importantly with the American people,” he said.
Byers noted in his column Monday that the tone of both the news coverage and editorial analysis from reporters and pundits from across the political spectrum has been tougher on the president of late.
Even Media Matters for America, the liberal watchdog group that monitors conservatives, pointed out that there has been a new level of hostility directed towards Obama from previously sympathetic quarters.
“It is now almost universally hostile,” Eric Boehlert, a senior writer at the organization, told Politico. “It’s become consistently critical.”
Well, when you straight up lie to people in two elections, you should expect such hostility! I just have to wonder about people who go into the tank for people like Obama. I really do.
The House was scheduled to vote yesterday on a continuing resolution, which is a measure to not shut down the government. Ultraconservatives have been demanding that the House refuse to continue funding the government unless President Obama agrees to defund Obamacare. House leaders have pleaded that this approach is doomed. Instead they came up with a plan to keep the government open, attached to a separate bill defunding Obamacare. Or, as Senator Mike Lee succinctly and correctly explains, “It is not a plan to defund Obamacare — it’s a plan to facilitate the passage of a CR [continuing resolution] in a way that allows people to claim that they’re defunding Obamacare without actually doing so.”
But some ultraconservatives still want to go with the defund-Obamcare-or-shut-down-the-government plan, as opposed to the pretend-to-defund- Obamcare-or-shut-down-the-government plan. It only takes about seventeen of them to defect to dent the Republicans majority, which gives a tiny fringe enormous power. What does the vote delay mean?
My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.
It is classic soviet communism to say that there should be no difference between anyone; everyone should have the same, no rich, no poor — everyone the same. That is one the classic tenets of soviet communism.
It is gross distortion of the Bible as well. The Bible says that “God is no respecter of persons.” What it does not say, is that we should all be of one class. God never promised any sort of wealth in the Bible at all.
Again, Putin is trying and it seems to making a mockery of Obama, and quite honestly, it is quite deserved. You simply do not draw a line in the sand and then try to erase it, because it makes you look weak.
I never thought I would ever see the say, when an American President was made sport of, by a soviet-era crypto-communist. It is a sad thing to behold.
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.
I felt compelled to write a few words about Detroit’s bankruptcy. I have hoped that Detroit would be able to stave off this sort of a move, however, reality now has taken over and I feel a sense of disappointment and sadness about my home city having to just throw up the white flag to the creditors and declare the city a lost cause.
Much ink or in this day and age — many kilobytes of electronic media has been used to tell the story of Detroit’s burden and woe, mostly by people who are not from this fine part of the Country. Most have been correct in their assessments — Ezra Kline,Ed Driscoll, and yes, even Vox Popoli. Now there is a rare form of agreement if there ever was one.
There has been much debate and quibble as the when the decline of Detroit actually started. Some of the weaker minded within the ranks of the so-called “right” of the ivory kind, like to point to the Mayors of the city, who were and are still, in fact black. Personally, I being an ivory type myself simply believe that corruption and entitlement mentality were the major contributors to the decline. In addition also, there has been a marked decline in population as well. This would happen to be because there seems to be a mentality among some of the residents of that city, which is best summed up as, “what is yours is mine, if I want to steal it.” Again, this points to the entitlement mentality of the good majority of the people in that city. It is important that not all of this sad mindset is black, as there are white, and Latino thieves there as well, especially in the southwest side of that city.
Again, it saddens me to see that once-fine city now a shadow of its former self. However, I also happen to know that from ruin come new ideas and hopefully, a rebirth. I just hope the Snyder and Kevin Orr know what they are doing — because the nightmarish alternative makes even my jaded 41-year-old blood run cold. I should be honest however, and tell you that my parents and I fled that city after our house was burglarized in 1989. That little fiasco was more than enough for my dear Mother who insisted that we were moving. Smart woman she is.
Now, I do have a bit of a quibble with those who say that President Obama told Detroit to “Drop Dead.” I feel that to be a bit intellectually dishonest and downright idiotic. If Obama, by executive order, ordered Detroit’s debt paid off, by the U.S. Treasury, the so-called “right” lead by Fox News Channel would have crucified him for it! So, Obama did the right thing, and kept his Federal Government big nose out of it, like he should have, and still the smear merchants on the right still have to fault with it. If you’ll pardon my blunt vernacular; if anyone at needs to drop dead; it is the fucking idiotic, anine, partisan bullshit merchants of the so-called right in this Country. Seriously guys, piss off already. Your contempt of the Detroit area; whether because of racial animosity or political is noted. We get it, you hate Democrats — I am no fan of them either. But to sit and engage in some of the most idiotic, self-serving, partisan, bullshit is just totally asinine and it speaks volumes of your true integrity. If anyone needs to drop dead, preferable of anal cancer or something of the better equivalency — it is you all.
….and that is my opinion.
Update: Here’s a good video about Detroit via The Reaction:
One quibble: Left out of this video, are the union contracts and other such corruption which were strangling Detroit’s growth. Just my two cents.
This is a bit of a shock, I figured she would stick it out to the end:
Janet Napolitano, the U.S. secretary of Homeland Security and former governor of Arizona, is being named as the next president of the University of California system, in an unusual choice that brings a national-level politician to a position usually held by an academic, The Times has learned. Her appointment also means the 10-campus system will be headed by a woman for the first time in its 145-year history.
Napolitano’s nomination by a committee of UC regents came after a secretive process that insiders said focused on her early as a high-profile, although untraditional, candidate who has led large public agencies and shown a strong interest in improving education.
UC officials believe that her Cabinet experiences –- which include helping to lead responses to hurricanes and tornadoes and overseeing some anti-terrorism measures — will help UC administer its federal energy and nuclear weapons labs and aid its federally funded research in medicine and other areas.
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I just have to wonder about people who go into the tank for people like Obama. I really do. 
