Today's Links of Interest

Jon Stewart and the Burden of History. This gets a bit personal for my tastes, but it's an interesting take.

Saddam: What We Now Know. As I've said before, he didn't have stockpiles of WMDs, but he had programs to develop them and he provided extensive support for terrorist organizations.

Fast and Furious: Whistle-blowers Allege Corruption, Cartel Ties:

Two former law enforcement officers allege that they cannot get anyone to investigate allegations that the Mexican drug cartels have corrupted U.S. law officers and politicians in the El Paso border region.

Your State University Doesn't Want You (it wants foreign and out of state students who pay out-of-state tuition)


Tea Party, Liberals Play Nice at Harvard (There's a Harvard Law Tea Party!)


Symposium on Deregulating the Legal Profession


The World Will Be More Crowded - With Old People


Gallup Says Americans Express Historic Negativity Toward U.S. Government. Two points of interest:

• Americans believe, on average, that the federal government wastes 51 cents of every tax dollar, similar to a year ago, but up significantly from 46 cents a decade ago and from an average 43 cents three decades ago.

• 49% of Americans believe the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. In 2003, less than a third (30%) believed this.

Rasmussen Reports Says Only 17% Say U.S. Government Has Consent of the Governed

What is the Tea Party?

Two articles about what the Tea Party actually is.

Dan Balz writes in the Washington Post, What the tea party is -- and isn't. Balz reports on a set of papers on the Tea Party delivered at the recent American Political Science Association conference. He touches on demographics, effectiveness, the history of the Tea Party movement, and expectations for the future.

In response, Don Surber writes The Blind Men and the Tea Party, wherein he notes that a bunch of liberal poli sci profs research the Tea Party and find exactly what liberals have been saying they would find. He notes some rather obvious questions that should have been asked, but most importantly that there was no comparison with anything on the left.

Today's Links of Interest

Goldberg: My Rick Perry Problem, and Ours

Murphy: Tea Party Rage Dies

Alter: You Think Obama's Been a Bad President? Prove It

Wehner: Answering Alter's Challenge

Ransom: Obama is a Bad President

Boehner Blasts Obama Over Increase in Regulations

Lewis: It's the Economy, Dummkopf!

Book Review: The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield

Book Review: Special Interest / Class Warfare (on school reform in the US)

And finally, Is Gibson Guitar the Target of a Politically-Motivated DOJ Investigation?

The Bowles-Simpson Report

The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform was an interesting project. According to Wikipedia, the report required a super-majority of 14 (out of 18) votes to be formally endorsed by the commission. It failed, 11-7. Nevertheless, the report was endorsed by 10 ex-chairs of the president's council of economic advisers from both Democratic and Republican administrations. It offered a way out, but Obama and the Democrats ignored it and the Republicans followed their lead.

Bowles-Simpson was probably the last chance for a true bipartisan solution to the deficit battle. Failure to take it seriously lead to the brink. Once there, both the establishment politicians and the Tea Party dug in. For their actions on the brink, both sides are equally culpable, but it was the establishment politicians who drove us to the brink, and for that, they should be pilloried in every public forum. Instead, the Tea Party is demonized, and all those with a stake in business as usual, all those who will deny Americans any genuine chance of hope, any real change, are piling on.

Terrorism. Tea Party. Hobbits. Sorted Out by Sgt. Mom.

Sgt. Mom has a good post clarifying some of the key differences between terrorism, the Tea Parties, and hobbits.

Some of her commenters object, claiming the Tea Partiers are economic terrorists. My reply is still that, if any political group in America can be defined as economic terrorists, all those who put us in this economic situation, from 1937 to today, most qualify.

One bizarre commenter even called the Tea Partiers "definitely the nearest thing this country has yet produced to true fascism." Weird kind of fascists that call for a weaker, more decentralized government; less government control over the economy; and less government-corporate cronyism.

Civility in Politics

James Taranto's column, "Civility: The Denouement":

Hey, what ever happened to civility?

That's not a rhetorical question. Back in January, after a madman shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and a crowd of her constituents, gravely wounding her and killing six, the liberal elite briefly developed an obsession with the supposed dangers of uncivil political rhetoric.

Before a suspect had even been identified, as we noted Jan. 10, Fitzsimmons, the Tucson cartoonist, was on CNN blaming "the right in Arizona" for "stoking the fire of heated anger and rage" and making the attack "inevitable." Fitzsimmons later apologized, but former Enron adviser Paul Krugman did not. Sources inside Krugman's head told him that the Tea Party dunnit ...

There were many other examples, including Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker, who complained of "shocking vituperation and hatred, virtually all of it coming from people who call themselves conservatives." When his fellow liberals falsely accused conservatives of mass murder, Hertzberg was unshocked. ...


Then it was February, and the liberal elite lost all interest in policing "the boundaries of public discourse." The faux goo-goo group Common Cause held a rally where participants urged the lynching of Supreme Court justices. Liberals--including at least one Democratic congressman--employed actual violent rhetoric against Wisconsin's Gov. Scott Walker, whose state budget reforms stripped government employee unions of many of their expensive privileges.

And now, of course, all of liberaldom is likening the Tea Party to terrorists. But really, that message is entirely consistent with the one in January, and indeed with the message the liberal elite has been propagating since the early days of the Obama administration: that the Tea Party is illegitimate.

I would add that the actual reasons given are irrelevant; they will say anything at all to delegitimize the Tea Party regardless of any truth, surely, but also regardless of whether they contradict themselves.

Taranto's whole piece is well worth reading, as usual.

Finally, a good word for the LA Times, whose Andrew Malcolm condemns the vice-presidents eliminationist rhetoric.

Related:Anti-Tea Party Vitriol

Anti-Tea Party Vitriol

Annhilating Democracy with the Tea Party

Tyranny of 87 Must Stop

The Tea Party is a real threat to America

Kerry: Tea Party a group of 'Absolutists' who don't understand what they're doing

The Tea Party Taliban

So, the Tea Party are crazy extremists, but the Glorious Compromisers of both parties who, over the last 80 years, have in unmitigated greed, pornographic power lust, and undiluted narcissism sunk us into this position are the sane ones who we should all hail as our saviors.

Annihilating Democracy? That's Crony Capitalism (see Fannie and Freddy, corporate welfare, etc.). Tyranny? Every usurpation of state and individual rights by the ever-ravenous federal government is tyranny. The Tea Party a real threat? You mean, citizens learning about and getting involved with their own government threatens your ideological goals. Kerry is such a joke ... but, YOU, Senator Kerry, have helped put us here, so if you have known what you were doing then you have intended to bring America to the brink of destruction, and if you haven't, then you're a tool, an absolute tool. And Taliban? Taliban? Please. Again: The rest of the political establishment has brought us to the brink of destruction, not of two ancient statues, but of the economic lives of 300,000,000 people and all their descendants, and all because of your ideological inflexibility and greed.

Do we need more revenue? Sure, but the last century tells us that if the government raises taxes, they will just spend it; they won't pay down the debt. So no more taxes until we make structural changes that will eliminate the debt. We don't trust you.

And yes, if what the leftist media reports is true about how much the various plans would cut were true, one of them might be acceptable. But time after time politicians and their brown-nosing media enablers have heralded on front pages that huge sums have been saved or cut only to admit, on page 27, three weeks later, that those cuts / savings were really just accounting gimmicks and the deal really raised spending by billions. We don't trust you.

We don't trust you at all, and you have given us every reason not to do so.

And all those sycophants of the Grand Compromisers who are building up hatred for the Tea Party are idiots, or they expect us to be idiots. Why would we EVER again trust the political wheelers and dealers who put us in this position? To do so would be madness, idiocy, extremism of the worst kind. Doing so would destroy us, destroy democracy, destroy our world.