Scandal - the liberal strategy on display

In Canada's most populous province of Ontario an election is approaching and defending their long held grip on power the provincial Liberals are facing a disaster, trailing the conservatives in the polls a drubbing has been expected for a long time.  The newly chosen leader of the provincial party has been crafting his image as a compassionate conservative for a long time now.  In the face of tanking numbers the governing Liberals have tried everything - crazy handouts to every imaginable interest group, rebates on electricity bills,

It hasn't worked so there was only one route left - scandalize your opponent. The conservative leader Patrick Brown has been hit with a sexual assault allegation for something that happened a long time ago.  Sounds familiar in the Roy Moore torpedoing, does it not?

Patrick Brown denied the allegations but has been left hanging in the wind, as has his party and the probably the chances for a conservative win in my home province. In the future it seems, unless you are a woman, as a conservative you cannot successfully run for office. This is the new modus operendi for liberals - dig up allegations from a long time ago and sit on them until necessary. It's the politics of personal destruction. It's Saul Alinsky's tactics in the extreme.

Patrick Brown has denied everything and it is just breaking so he has not had his day in court but for the liberals, courting public opinion, it doesn't matter.

Double standards on the right? I'm okay with it.

Al Franken has to go. Senator Cornyn as well.  Matt Lauer?  Good riddance. Roy Moore, may not be as pure as the wind driven snow, but SO WHAT?  I personally have stopped caring and I'm going full Alinsky on the left. 

Let's get one thing straight, sexual harassment is a bad thing. No one in their right mind will dispute that. But the left has for decades deliberately applied double standards (Alinsky-style) to conservatives and the right has been suckered by it no matter which side of the aisle the issue occurred. Now that the left is awakening to their own duplicitous evilness, we're supposed to stand up alongside them and arm in arm agree with everything they want to do now?

How well has that worked in the past for conservatives? Instead of arranging a circular firing squad we should stand back and let them implode and apply double standards ourselves. 

Dinesh D'Souza explains my thinking more eloquently.  Not that I couldn't do it myself given time to prepare it.

Ben Shaprio, brilliant as he is, fell prey to the old Democrat trick that has had a great track record for them in the past. Dinesh D'Souza isn't falling prey to the double standard. And he might have some solid ground behind him.

To sum up - push back, hard.  And when they don't push back on the left when arguing among themselves, push forward, harder.

Limbaugh lawsuit lessons

In case you missed it, Rush Limbaugh is threatening to sue the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for defamation. I don't blame him, but there's an interesting lesson Limbaugh is providing conservatives in the process, intended or otherwise.

Here's the crux of the case.

Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh threatened on Monday to sue the Democratic National Campaign Committee – a group of sitting members of Congress – over fundraising emails that claimed he advocated for rape on college campuses.

In a letter to the political organization, lawyers for America's most listened-to talker demanded a retraction and an apology.

Limbaugh, known for mercilessly needling elements of U.S. progressive culture, spent part of his September 15 show mocking a sexual consent program that The Ohio State University implemented this year...

'The modern era of feminism relies on a lot of accepted premises,' he said. 'The biggest one is that men are predators, that they're mean – in their natural state they are brutes, bullies – and that women are endangered at the slightest bit of temper or anger. This has been a tenet of feminism.'

The details of the case aside, Rush's potential lawsuit is a step in the right direction for the conservative cause because it's right out of the Alinsky playbook. It uses liberals' strengths and tactics against themselves. It's a matter of political jiu jitsu. The courts have long been a channel liberals have used for recourse, often to absurd lengths. Using their tools against them is a masterstroke of a move. Targeting their core, a powerful force for progressive political energy and money, is going after their strength and trying to weaken it.

It's also a matter of principle that if you are not playing offense then you are playing defense. For far too long conservatives have played with a defensive mindset. We are interested in defending the Constitution, tradition and the guiding principles that founded the nation and that have carried it to greatness. Those things have been under attack practically since their inception. But the defensive mindset only serves to allow conservatives to cede ground on those things at a slower pace than not defending them.

Instead, now the DCCC may have to muster resources to defend a lawsuit. It diverts their attention from their mandate of winning in Congressional elections. The best defense is a good offense. Limbaugh's timing, coming on the heels of an election in which Democrats suffered more setbacks is perect. It's a flawless action. Even if the DCCC successfully defends the lawsuit, the costs in political terms is there.

Conservatives should take note of Limbaugh's actions, they are instructional.

Left-on-Left political correctness attacks?

As a conservative, my inclination when liberals are arguing with liberals over liberal-centered issues is to stand back and let them go at each other.  So when the New York Times decided to fire Jill Abramson for demanding equal pay for equal work as Executive Editor with her regards to her male predecessor, that was my first inclination.  Provided the fight stays on the left.  I don't know that it will stay there, because it seems to be a media hot-button issue right now. 

In fact, The New Yorker for example, jumped right on the story:

Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs. “She confronted the top brass,” one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was “pushy,” a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect. Sulzberger is known to believe that the Times, as a financially beleaguered newspaper, needed to retreat on some of its generous pay and pension benefits; Abramson, who spent much of her career at the Wall Street Journal, had been at the Times for far fewer years than Keller, which accounted for some of the pension disparity. Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, said that Jill Abramson’s total compensation as executive editor “was directly comparable to Bill Keller’s”—though it was not actually the same.

The political correctness of equal pay is unequivocally a progressive agenda item.  Although equality is not a liberal-only issue.  Equality affects everyone.  But gender equality is, as every other form of equality, about equal opportunity, and not equal outcome.  Not every female would deserve equal pay with every other female in a given role, and to compare any two people, with different experience, and different skill sets will inevitably result in different value that they can offer in a role.  Therefore different pays are to be expected, always.  True equality comes from equal opportunity, not equal outcome. That would be a Marxist resolution.  Is the marketplace willing to hire female Executive Editors?  If so then equal opportunity exists.

Unless.....

That equal offer of employment comes with a clearly reduced level of compensation.  I'm not talking about 10% less - that could be attributable to a difference in experience. So too perhaps could a 30% difference in pay.  Maybe.  But a 50% difference in pay would seem to be a different scenario.  It could be gender based, or it could be a bias against Abramson individually.  Either way, the notion of equality is not being applied.

All that said, it is hard to argue that equal pay for equal work is some sort of unreasonable concept.  Within an acceptable range as defined by experience etc., it is likely the norm in most companies.  If women all end up at the bottom of the range and men all at the top, maybe there is still a problem, but proving that is not so simple.  Comparing women in company A to men in company B with similar roles is not necessarily an apples to apples comparison.   This is something that calls for a layered analysis, which is an expensive proposition to research and not necessarily even possible given the secrecy surrounding pay in many companies.  In other words, there is no easy answer, no A-HA, no "gotcha!" in this discussion.

Which is all the more reason as a conservative to step aside and watch the New York Times once again be subject to criticism and concern - especially on an issue that as a liberal media outlet, they should be championing.  Holding the NYT up to their own standards is something Alinsky might do if he were on the conservative side of the political spectrum.  I'm happy to do so, with the proviso that this doesn't turn into another attack on conservatives as per usual.  As a conservative, I believe in free markets - even when it comes to labor.  If Abramson is worth as much as her predecessor (or more, or less) she should be paid accordingly.  And if she isn't being paid what she is worth, she is free to leave and seek more gainful employment - the free market will see her get offers in accordance with what she has to offer. This should be true for every woman, and every man.  Underpaying someone will result in only being able to hire inferior employees.

As far as being able to leave for better employment, I suspect that is actually what is happening in this case already.

Thursday Hillary Bash - Raising her health issues a tactical blunder?

The purpose of the Thursday Hillary Bash is of course to bash Hillary Clinton (on Thursdays) since she just isn't qualified to be a good commander in chief.  So I do not take lightly the notion of questioning someone who questions her fitness to be president.  But in this case, I do have to wonder - was this the right route to take?

Not brain damaged, but definitely policy-challenged.

Thanks to Karl Rove, it looks like the latest focus on Hillary has surrounded her health.  In 2016 she'll be 69 years old.  I personally don't think that's too old to serve two terms as president, but when Ronald Reagan ran in 1980 at the same age as Hillary Clinton would run in 2016, many people on the left used the issue his age against him (or tried to do so).  Borrowing from Saul Alinsky, why not use Hillary's age against her? But will it be effective?

In either a stroke of genius, or a massive brush of stupidity, Karl Rove threw the issue of Hillary's health out there. But he didn't limit it to her age, he brought up brain damage, as reported by the Washington Post:

If Clinton decides to run in 2016, her age and health are certain to be talked about, given that she would be vying to become the second-oldest person in history to be elected. She would be 69, only a little younger than Ronald Reagan when he won his first term in 1980.

What had been only a secondary issue, compared with the prospect of electing the first female president, has suddenly burst to the fore. On Tuesday, the New York Post ran a provocative headline: “Karl Rove: Hillary may have brain damage.”

No R-S-P-E-C-T? Deflect.

A lot has been made in conservative media and blogs about the president not being able to spell out the title of the Aretha Franklin song "Respect".  It's fair to say that the reaction has been overblown - clearly it was just a flub.  It's also fair to say that there's a double standard in the media when it comes to giving the president a pass on it versus say Dan Quayle having done the same thing decades ago and because he was a Republican, having it turn into a federal crime.

But what is truly insidious about how presidential defenders try to use the opportunity to lash out and denigrate conservatives.  Maureen Dowd is typical in her defense of Obama.  In a recent NYT column, she intertwines the spelling error with the Ukraine situation and then starts bashing conservatives as a den of vipers, starting with the asinine assertion that foreign policy has suddenly become non-partisan, by quoting the president of the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. With a title like that, his comments have to be full of gravitas, don't they?

“What are you going to do, send the 101st Airborne into Crimea?” says Terry McCarthy, the president of the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. “The way Republicans are dumping on the president, saying anything short of Armageddon shows that he’s weak, is silly. It’s kind of shocking that foreign policy, which used to be nonpartisan, now becomes partisan so quickly.”

Excuse me?  Did she forget all of the "Bush lied,  people died." stuff?  The warmonger denouncements were reserved for only Bush, when Democrats voted to support war in Iraq too.  That was totally non-partisan?  Please Maureen spare us the phony indignation.

But she doesn't and uses that as a jumping off point to deflect the discussion of Obama's flaws (be they spelling-related or foreign policy related) by denigrating his political opposition.

More calculating conservatives pounced. Trying to rehabilitate himself, Marco Rubio told a CPAC audience here that America must “stand up to the spread of totalitarianism.”

Sarah Palin, who seems ever more viperish, deployed her Yoda syntax with Sean Hannity: “People are looking at Putin as one who wrestles bears and drills for oil. They look at our president as one who wears mom jeans and equivocates and bloviates.”

To Dowd, Rubio is merely calculating rather expressing a legitimate concern, and Palin is "viperish". That is clearly assigning motive those individuals. Ridicule your political opposition - Alinsky would be proud, but now that people know who Alinsky is, it won't work quite so well.

Hillary Clinton as enabler meme won't matter

Just assail her logic instead, okay?

Earlier this week I was quick to note the Free Beacon story about Hillary Clinton's mean-spiritedness.  That meme will be worth holding onto for the 2016 presidential elections.  But the one that confuses me is the notion being played up in some quarters that Hillary Clinton's biggest problem going into 2016 relates to her role as an enabler to Bill Clinton's philandering.  But those circles seem to be over-weighted to Democrats who'd like to see Republicans go after her for that.

No, Sotomayor, THIS is what's insulting...

According to a CBS report, Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor has stated that labeling illegal immigrants as criminals is insulting.

Sotomayor was asked at a talk at Yale Law School later in the day about her use of the term “undocumented immigrants” rather than the traditional illegal alien. Sotomayor characterized the issue as a regulatory problem and said labeling immigrants criminals seemed insulting to her.

“I think people then paint those individuals as something less than worthy human beings and it changes the conversation,” Sotomayor said.

Firstly, no one is painting them as "less than human". That's a mis-characterization of the opinions of those who oppose illegal immigration.  It's unfair to the point of absurdity.  But that's often the point when liberals talk about conservatives.  Mis-characterize their positions and then ridicule them.  That's right out of the Alinsky playbook (which can still be countered by the way).

Secondly, if I could direct your attention to the dictionary definition of the word criminal:

: involving illegal activity : relating to crime

: relating to laws that describe crimes rather than to laws about a person's rights

: morally wrong

The word illegal is in the definition of criminal. Not unexpectedly, the definition of illegal includes criminal as a synonym, below the definition.

: not allowed by the law : not legal

: not allowed by the rules in a game

Illegal immigration is called illegal because it is being done outside the law. The very definition of illegal indicates criminal activities. It is not the right of a non-American citizen to become one, without due process, and a legal application to become a citizen, or even a visitor.

What is insulting Justice Sotomayor, is that your opinion has been elevated to the level of the Supreme Court - the ultimate arbiter of legal justice in America - when it appears you do not even understand the basic concepts of law (at least, in this instance).

Interestingly, there's an article at PolicyMic that leverages the global warming crowd's tactics of changing the labels and argues that we should stop using the very term illegal immigrant. The points it makes are a likely reflection of Sotomayor's thinking on the issue.

Aside from the fact that the term "illegal immigrant" is not legally accurate, it completely dehumanizes and wrongfully criminalizes millions of people instead of their actions.

The point is their actions are indeed illegal (even in the cases when it is unintentional like it may be with second generation illegal immigrants).  The word, used in conjunction with the word immigrant, is a way to differentiate between illegal and legal immigrants. Period.  We don't say illegal jaywalkers because the fact that it is illegal is implied - there is no 'legal' jaywalking .

The other arguments made in the PolicyMic article by the way, are fatuous and based on the clichéd and ridiculous notion that American immigration laws are "draconian".  That point isn't even worth a counter-argument.  However, if you want one as Forbes noted, the United States is the most legal immigration friendly country in the world in raw numbers.  Without getting into a debate about the right level on a percentage basis (based on infrastructure and the relative ability to absorb more immigrants), the United States ranked in the top 25 of countries around the world.  That's not bad.

Illegal immigration must be addressed, and it must be addressed intelligently.  What the left, including Justice Sotomayor, are doing, is promoting a political advantage for themselves under the guise of acting humanely.  No one is suggesting rolling up in trucks and deporting children back to Cuba by force like Bill Clinton did.  Well, almost nobody.  But letting everyone in with amnesty will be as successful as a one-size-fits-all health care solution.

Immigration reform under the radar, Alinsky style

I think the current crop of progressives have developed a new tactic to add to the Alinsky playbook.  The additional rule for radicals would go something like "Overwhelm your opposition with issues all at once, and some of your objectives are sure to get through in the chaos."  That seems to be what's playing out here. A diversion, or at least, using existing circumstances as cover for an agenda item.

With Obama seeking to cement his progressive liberal achievements in his second term he is going to want to have some signature achievement to bookend his first term Obamacare passage.  What that might end up being is a political achievement - getting citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants, very likely predisposed to vote Democrat once they are eligible.   Passing the current immigration reform bill floating around Capitol Hill would cement that legacy of one ominous social/governmental achievement (Obamacare) and one political achievement of a (potential) permanent shift of voter demographics to the left, ensuring progressive liberal domination for perhaps decades.

Sliding immigration reform through the Congress would be difficult were it the sole issue facing the country.  But with government overreach at an all time high, and the myriad of scandals facing the administration, the president can leave the efforts on an immigration reform deal to his party and allow some sort of compromise (where Republicans once again get hosed on enforcement of laws) to others in his party.  And that, is creative politics.  It's not good for the country, it's good for Democrats.  It's avoiding the debate on immigration, one the Democrats probably believe they can win anyway.

But while Congress and the public's attention is focused on the scandal the chances of sneaking one agenda item through certainly are no worse and possibly higher than with so many resources who believe the rule of law should apply to immigration, being focused elsewhere.

That may seem cynical and ascribing too much deviousness to the president, but I remember the days when someone in his administration was advising "never let a crisis go to waste".

IRS files - Alinsky said pick the target, freeze it...

Yeah, what if?

A few years ago, I made a list of counter-tactics to Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals because the left was almost constantly engaged in using these tactics to defeat conservatives repeatedly and often.  It's time to revisit those rules and counter-rules because there's a lot going on with the current IRS scandal that Alinsky's manifesto is playing a role in shaping.

In fact  Saul Alinsky (who is connected at least spiritually to president Obama) in his manifesto Rules for Radicals, said the following;

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.

There are some interesting points in this that relate to the IRS unjust (and most certainly illegal) persecution of Tea Party and other conservative organizations, aside from the obvious ones but lets start with those.

How the IRS used Alinsky tactics on multiple conservative organizations

Firstly, the IRS has clearly picked the target (and perhaps it was picked for them) - conservative organizations were targeted for tax exempted status denial.  But it goes deeper.  Having picked the target they not only denied those organizations that status while granting liberal organizations status, they used that denial and delay to demand significant amounts of member details, and personal information.  That can be viewed as intimidation and unfair treatment, and it certainly was that, but it also means that they are able to collect more information about their political opposites.  They even shared some of that information about those conservative organizations with liberal ones.  That is clearly political.  The point is there is multiple political benefits to the big government left in these IRS actions.  They stalled many of these organizations from being as effective as possible during the 2012 elections.  They also collected opposition information.  It's like a football team getting to see their opponents' playbook before game day.  

In pressing those conservative organizations, the IRS clearly personalized the attacks.  They demanded personal information. 

And one of the most confounding impacts for these groups was how they were persecuted in isolation.  While this was apparently happening to hundreds of these groups, they all were handled as if they were alone in their difficulties.  More organizations are bound to come forward as they realize what was happening to them was not happening to just them.

You think the targeting is bad now?

And there's one other way that Alinsky tactics were used on conservatives across the country, not just these groups.  These IRS issues came out the same week as the Benghazi scandal was ramping up and the Justice Department was outed for spying on the media.  It's hard as conservatives to nail down a scandal, especially in the publics' mind if there are three going on at once.  You can't isolate it.  Conversely if you focus on one of these scandals, the other two might slide by unchallenged or unprosecuted. Why did three scandals hit the news cycle at the same time? Two of them may be a diversion for the most egregious one of the bunch.

Notice that Susan Rice is being promoted National Security Advisor today?  Why?  She was flat out wrong on Benghazi where four Americans were killed by a terrorist attack.  Was this the worst of the scandals?  It was certainly fatal.  So perhaps the mea culpa on the IRS scandal is entirely a diversion that the left hopes the right will get wrong on prosecuting anyway.

Now the counter-tactic

The counter is pretty straight forward and quick. User the Alinsky tactics on the IRS.  Isolate the IRS, and hammer it and keep digging and keep them back on their heels.  There is more information bound to come out. This house of cards will crumble and somewhere in an effort to save their own bureaucratic jobs, someone will eventually give up where this directive came from.

Meanwhile, as the scandal unfolds, the other two scandals can't be ignored.  Digging into the Justice Department and the State Department screw ups has to continue.  The only caveat is that it doesn't make sense to have the scandals compete for headlines. They should be brought forward sequentially because that will hold the public's attention about corruption, malfeasance and lack of qualified leadership for a longer time period leading up to 2014 and 2016.  The side benefit of that is that it allows those investigating the other two scandals time to get their details together and to present a much stronger case before bringing the details forward.  As with the IRS scandal the final point is to never let up.

Hey left, you screwed up.

You had the media. We on the right are onto that. You had the web, we're onto that too. You had the courts. We're working on that one. With all of those advances by conservatives to combat your underhanded tactics at tricking the public into voting for your progressive liberal candidates, it's only natural you'd be looking for new ways to own the voters.

Sure, some tried and true methods like public schools and unions still represent strongholds for you but they aren't enough. Your agenda requires a complete web of misinformation. You need more tactics to employ. This is especially true in the time of Obama where the screw-ups come at us in a fast and furious way. You need to run cover for the president and more importantly for the agenda.

So it's only natural I suppose that we'd see you try to juice the polls to mount a voter suppression effort. It's ironic that liberals scream about the voter suppression of voter ID laws proposed by conservatives but are more than willing to use dubious polls to disenfranchise voters.

As an aside, it's also ironic that as the party of big government you deem requiring people to present some official form of documentation to be allowed to vote as bad. You'd think you'd be all for another government issued ID for voters and perhaps another agency to manage the whole system.

But with the speed of the news cycle in the era of the Internet, we're onto you on the poll trickery much more quickly than we were with the other things you've done. While it might have some limited success short term, it won't last. Every time you try a new tactic, we will counter it. Alinsky's playbook is a set of guidelines you can no longer rely on. Everything it advocates can be countered.

You pushed us too far and we are no longer going to stand idly by and let it continue. That's ultimately where you really screwed up. Whether it takes a generation or two or three to fix, we're on it now.

Intended or not, the Clint Eastwood speech was tactically brilliant

Over at the Blog de King Shamus, the Clint Eastwood speech "fallout" gets put to bed:

Everybody’s second-favorite community organizer Saul Alinksy said that ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It works so well because it rallies your troops. Even better, when a well-played joke lands squarely on target, it causes problems for the other side. Look at how the Stalinists were so discombobulated by Clint’s mockery of their Saviour. When they went into Panic Alert Obama Defense Level Five, they spent a lot of time addressing Clint’s speech rather than dealing with Mitt Romney.

It's a great point.  You know that the Doomocrats will go hard after Romney and Ryan at their convention this week, but by focusing all of their panic on Clint Eastwood's speech right now, they ignore the content of the Romney speech and thereby stall their attacks on Romney for a little while. The whole Democratic approach to this election was to demonize Romney (and Ryan).  Demonizing Clint Eastwood doesn't help them one iota.  Not one.  No one will be voting for Clint Eastwood in 2012.  No one will be voting against him or against Romney based on Eastwood either.

What this does, is allows Romney's convention bounce to gain some traction and avoids the risk of the liberal attacks derailing the bounce.  The Democrats by positioning their convention right after the Republicans clearly want to suck the strength out of the natural convention bounce for the Republicans.  The Clint Eastwood speech whether intended or not, swayed the focus of liberal attacks to his supposedly oddball speech and Mitt Romney gets a few days of a free ride.

The other tactical brilliance of Eastwood's speech is what it did for Republicans.  A favorite Obama trick is to supposedly remain above the fray while surrogates - 'not connected with the president' mind you - serve as attack dogs.  Eastwood got in some zingers about the president in the middle of a convention that was focused on the approach that it's okay to change your mind about Obama.  Yes, he's a nice guy (ha!) but he's not a good president.  It's time for a change, because the country deserves and needs better.  That message can't be inter-mingled with attacks.  Clint Eastwood says those things and while he's a Republican supporter, he's arms length from team Romney.

Now when Democrats go into their convention armed for Bain, they are going to play to their playbook and attack Romney and Ryan.  They'll look petty while Romney gets to stay above the partisan fray and focus on economic policy and jobs.

In retrospect, Eastwood's speech may have done a lot more good for the Republican cause than at first blush.  That makes my day.

Scientists surprised at roundest object ever measured

Chains about this big, y'all.

Scientists indeed are surprised at their discovery.  I'm surprised too, but for an entirely different reason and of course, it's political in nature.

The roundest thing ever discovered?  No, it's not Joe Biden's head.  It's something a lot brighter;

However, a team of four astronomers from the U.S. and Brazil has used the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager on the Solar Dynamics Observatory to take incredibly accurate measurements of the shape of the Sun, and they found that it is almost the roundest object ever measured.

Normally, with a rotating object that has fluid properties, like the molten mantle under the Earth's surface or the liquid hydrogen inside a gas-giant planet like Jupiter, there will be a bulging at the equator. The Earth bulges so much that it's 42 kilometers wider at the equator than it is from pole to pole. This is called an object's "flattening", for which Earth has a value of 0.0033528.

By comparison, the Sun's flattening value is 9×10−6 or 0.000009. That means that if you shrunk the Sun to the size of a beach ball, the difference between the diameter at its equator and the diameter between its poles would be less than the width of a human hair.

And here I was thinking that the roundest thing ever was the liberal understanding of tolerance. If not roundest, then perhaps most circular. To whit;

-Liberals require that society be tolerant of everyone, regardless of the diversity that entails.

-But while we must be tolerant, they are quite frequently not tolerant, and angrily so, of conservative opinion.

-To justify this discrepancy they claim that they do not espouse tolerance of intolerance.

In essence they have defined tolerance as conforming to their liberal ideas, thus circumventing their own tenet of tolerance in order to suit their own viewpoint over their stated belief. Convenient, and circular.

Hmmm....I wonder what the radical Saul Alinsky would say about making your opposition live up to their own rules? I bet if he had a list of rules for radicals, it would be rule number 4.

Belated instruction for Obama on GM

The Canadian government this week made an announcement that might have been much more useful and instructive for the Obama White House had it preceded the GM auto bailout (emphasis added).

The Canadian government won’t step in to block a sale of RIM, if it comes, despite its significance not only to research and development in the area of networking, consumer electronics and the enterprise, but also to the city of Waterloo and its many thousands of resident employees. 

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said that the company “will be the masters of their own destiny,” but that he and his government would prefer them to stay Canadian, and successful. Right now, analysts say, RIM is ripe for a takeover, with a dwindling market share in key markets like North America, and a product line up that does not compete with its rivals in Apple and Google.

Implicit in those words is also the notion that there would be no bailout.  Tough love from the conservative Canadian government  to the effect of 'we will support an environment that supports your success, but you will stand or fall on your own merit'.  That may seem quaint or novel from the perspective of president Obama and his union supporters, but Canada is heading in the right direction and president Obama's United States is clearly not.  How can you tell?  Look at the debt to GDP ratios of the two nations.  Look at the unemployment rates.

The views of the White House occupant will not change, despite evidence of the need to do so.  That means that the occupant of the White House needs to change.  Of course you already knew that.  Unfortunately, in both countries - the United States and Canada, that simple, common sense is not adequately pervasive and that explains how Obama got elected and why there are cries of outrage from the far left (again in either country) every time conservatives attempt to make a difference.  The Saul Alinsky playbook is a reflexive response even for those who on the left who may not even be aware of Alinsky's rules for radicals.  Therein lies the true danger and threat to liberty.

Joe Biden, racist?

There's a media kerfuffle over Rush Limbaugh using a derogatory comment towards Sandra Fluke in his effort to debunk her silly argument in favor of subsidized birth control. He apologized for his insensitive use of the word which ultimately detracted from his argument. But in an act of political jiu-jitsu I'm going to use Alinsky Rule #4 against the left to make a point here. Make your opponent live up to their own rule book.

Joe Biden recently had this to say, in a poorly done Indian accent briefly;

Biden might be easily excused by the press for a slip of the tongue or a poorly considered attempt at humor. That would be were it not for this old piece of video from 2006;

Clearly the vice president has a chip on his shoulder for India and Indian people. 

Gingrich speaks a little too Inside Politics sometimes

Newt Gingrich mentioned in his victory speech that the president has been driven by Saul Alinsky radicalism.  If you've followed politics over the last few years, you know who that is.  I know who that is - I even wrote about countering Alinsky over two years ago.  The problem is, there's a lot of people who have no clue who that is, as CNN was forced to explain in a sugar-coated piece their political ticker blog;

In framing his attacks on President Barack Obama for a possible November showdown, Newt Gingrich repeatedly brings up the name of an influential radical organizer from the first half of the 20th century.

"Saul Alinsky radicalism is at the heart of Obama," Gingrich said Sunday in an interview with CNN Chief Political Correspondent Candy Crowley... 

And earlier, at a New Year's Eve campaign event in Iowa, Gingrich declared that Obama "really is sort of a classic Saul Alinsky radical whose basic ideas are the opposite of what we need to create jobs."...

Alinsky's most famous book, "Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals," describes a confrontational method for curing economic inequality - something most conservatives would shun.

Jimmy Fallon: Not a peep but a tweet

For those who haven't heard Michele Bachmann was on Jimmy Fallon's show yesterday and there was a problem with the intro music that played as she walked on.

Via Hot Air;

Michele Bachmann decided to up the ante today with NBC over the intro song played for her appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Appearing on Fox News, Bachmann accepted Fallon’s personal apology published yesterday on Twitter but said that the network also owes her one for the band’s choice of “Lyin’ Ass Bitch,” not to mention the boasting that followed from the band’s drummer, Questlove.

Obama's Keystone Decision: Don't Decide Yet

Click image to follow the link.

From the desk of the DO NOTHING president:  Heaven God Alinsky forbid the United States does something to reduce dependence on Middle Eastern oil.  Via the Washington Post;

The Obama administration will delay action on a controversial cross-country oil pipeline in order to assess a shift in its route, officials announced Thursday, effectively putting off a politically vexing decision until after next year’s election.

The move is the latest twist in a more-than-three-year review process that has evolved from a fairly routine decision within the federal bureaucracy to a very public debate over national energy policy. It pitted environmental activists and an array of citizens along the pipeline’s proposed route against business groups, oil companies and unions whose members would be employed as part of the $7 billion project.

In the Obama camp, there's safety in voting present on most everything between now and November 2012 unless it's something he can blame on the Republicans as a do nothing Congress.  It's about re-election only, national interest be damned.

Occupy Wall Street? Wait, what haven't you occupied?

Image: ABC.com

If the protesters who want to occupy Wall Street want think that be de-coupling power and wealth from Wall Street they will achieve a progressive nirvana, they are sorely mistaken.  I have one simple question for the protesters - over the past three years, what haven't you occupied?  

Seven Steps To A Closed Society

Conspiracy theorists both left and right always think of a closed society in terms of government control. I'm not sure exactly how many steps it takes to close a society but I do know that it's not only the government that can close a society from liberty.  Liberty requires free speech, free thought, an informed public and an engaged public. A society can be closed by an atrophy of those pillars.  It can be closed by a deliberate removal of those pillars.  In America the former course is not only more likely than the latter, it's more evident.  Taken together, seven somewhat inter-related factors (rather than 'steps' because they aren't really sequential as much as they are parallel developments) present a toxic mix for a free nation.

Watch out.