(Read Project Mayhem, Part I here)

When he’s not busy encouraging Massachusetts voters to commit voter fraud to “keep these bastards out,” or condemning “tea party rhetoric” for not “rising to the president’s challenge on tone” while calling Laura Ingraham a “right-wing slut,” MSNBC’s Ed Schultz indulges his hobby of swooping into states like Wisconsin and Ohio, becoming an overnight expert on legislation he is only familiar with from having skimmed through SEIU-furnished Cliffs Notes, calling the legislation “racist” while cheerleading union rallies with applause-cuing platitudes, waving his arms in solidarity and then peacing out.

Schultz made a recent visit to Columbus, Ohio in which he had Congressman Tim Ryan (whom I had interviewed hours prior about Senate Bill 5’s alleged confiscation of safety equipment) and Senator Sherrod Brown on the show against a backdrop of union firefighters to whom, during commercial breaks, Schultz yelled that SB 5 “makes me believe Jimmy Hoffa even more that they are sons of bitches!” Throughout the broadcast Schultz and his guests parroted the manufactured mantra that the bill takes away safety equipment, perhaps almost enough times to make it true.

Admittedly breaking the SEIU’s first rule of Project Mayhem, I subsequently interviewed Schultz on camera and asked him to respond to the fact that the bill gives bargaining rights on safety equipment — which the Democrats’ earlier bill didn’t, citing the exact section number — to which he offered a Pulitzer Prize-warranting response: “That’s not what the firefighters are telling me.”

Well Ed, that may not be what the firefighters are telling you the bill says, but it is what the bill is telling me the bill says. When I later asked the author of SB 5, State Senator Shannon Jones, to respond to Schultz’s talking points, she clarified the provision in depth, noting to Schultz that “reading is fundamental.”

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I love it when Atheists proclaim to know more about people of faith than those people know about themselves.

The March 3 hatchet job on Christians perpetrated by the Secular Progressive Atheist Clown Phil Zuckerman is another case in point.  Now, Christians don’t need me to defend them.  They are the MSM’s favorite religious target.  The sad thing about Zuckerman is that it isn’t enough for him to just espouse his own lack of faith.  He has to attack other people’s faith.  I guess that’s part of the “new tone.”

Never mind that Zuckerman’s way into the article is to make a completely false statement derived from a Pew Poll.   Never mind that demonizing Christians for their support of the death penalty is done without mentioning that even left-leaning Californians support the death penalty.  Never mind that Zuckerman could have presented an intriguing non-partisan sociological study of religious and political beliefs among Evangelicals (he is a “Professor of Sociology” after all).

No, Zuckerman’s huge revelation — his entire reason for writing the article — is that Evangelical Christians are hypocrites when it comes to reconciling their religious and political beliefs.

Hypocrites.  Imagine that.  People…actual human beings….are flawed.  They say one thing yet do another! (more…)

Michael R. Blood, AP Political Writer, files this report:

LOS ANGELES (AP) – Andrew Breitbart strips off his blazer, windmills it over his head and lets it fly to the stage with a matador’s flourish. He booms into a microphone, sneering, taunting. Breath sprints to keep up with words.

A Breitbart boil is under way, before a cheering throng of tea partiers on a moonlike strip of Nevada desert back in March.

A finger stabs overhead as the conservative online publisher declares Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., a racist. An arm lances outward as he decries Republican leaders as apologists. Voice rising, Breitbart pledges $10,000, then $20,000, then $100,000 for the United Negro College Fund if proof is found to corroborate claims of racial name-calling during tea party protests on Capitol Hill.

“They decided to play lowball, hardball tactics,” Breitbart seethes. “Well, we’re going to have to play it right back at them.”

You could argue he has done just that. (more…)

The word of the week is “transparency.”  No, this isn’t the vapid hopey-changey wordage that the Obama campaign and administration has been using for the past two years, rather the transparency I’m speaking of here involves the literal process of revealing truths, exposing potentially negative material and providing a fair playground on which lovers of rational thought can explore and determine reality for themselves.  At the end of the day, transparency is all about providing access to information and ideas, while shifting power to the people to subsequently formulate conclusions.  This week, two transparency medals of honor should be given out – one to the Sunlight Foundation and the other to Andrew Breitbart (naturally).

First and foremost, in a bid to once again outdo itself in the categories of “way too cool” and “ultra useful,” The Sunlight Foundation has created a timely democracy tool that offers the American public a first-hand look into the opinions and past work of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan.  The new project, called “Elena’s Inbox” takes Kagan’s public e-mails from her Clinton administration years and organizes them in an easy-to-view format, thus providing unprecedented access and perspective.  In an e-blast from Sunlight yesterday afternoon, Jake Brewer wrote,

All of the emails sent and received by Supreme Court Justice nominee Elena Kagan during her time in the Clinton White House were recently put online… [We] built a site to take Elena Kagan’s emails and make them readable…While we’re in the middle of Kagan’s hearing for the Supreme Court, it’s fascinating to get a sense of her through her public emails.

In the past, I’ve voiced concern over Kagan’s take on the first amendment, so I personally plan to sift through her e-mails to gain a better sense of her worldview and how she’ll function on the Supreme Court. This website couldn’t have come at a better time, as the American public (and Congress) learns about the woman who might very well partially shape American law for decades to come. (more…)

Yes, it’s true: the most famous graduate of Cornell Cow College has picked up his marbles and is leaving the Daily Kos liberal lunatic asylum/playpen, hurt feelings trailing in his wake.

It seems that, in the aftermath of his less-than-enthusiastic reception of President Obama’s widely panned speech about the Gulf oil spill, the Kossacks took serious issue with him. You can read the gruesome, sorrowing details here from Politico:

Keith Olbermann announced Wednesday night that he will cease blogging for the liberal Daily Kos over a comment directed at the MSNBC host’s coverage.

Olbermann and some of his MSNBC colleagues surprised their left-leaning fans on Tuesday with eviscerating critiques of President Barack Obama’s Oval Office address on the oil spill spewing off the Gulf Coast.

“It was a great speech if you were on another planet for the last 57 days,” Olbermann said of the president’s remarks, echoing similarly negative comments from fellow MSNBC hosts Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow.

(more…)

Sitting through a Rachel Maddow commentary is difficult enough in the best of circumstances. Listening to her tortured logic (employing the word loosely) as she tried to expose the “perfidy” of lobbyist Rick Berman and Big Government editor-in-chief Michael Flynn was enough to make one’s ears bleed. Either unable or unwilling to discuss the merit of Berman’s and Flynn’s positions with regard to any particulars, Maddow relied upon a classic liberal theme song to make her point: whatever government or so-called public interests groups want to do is both altruistic and good and whatever conservatives and corporations want to do is selfish and evil.

No doubt this background music, which permeated her latest sneering rant, resonated like a symphony when heard by MSNBC’s enraptured audience of a couple dozen or so of the leftist faithful. For the rest of America, growing ever more disenchanted with the munificence of big government, it was just more liberal static.

But, once again, we must ponder the ultimately-unanswerable question: What’s the most annoying thing about Rachel Maddow?  Is it the condescendingly arrogant way in which she delivers her message, or is it the appalling ignorance that forms the foundation of her message? In this particular case, I lean toward the latter. (more…)

We use the power of persuasion first. If it doesn’t work, we try the persuasion of power.                 – Andy Stern, SEIU

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

There are only two kinds of government. Limited Government (LG) which limits the powers of the people at the top, which limits their ability to corrupt the system, and Big Government (BG) which is designed so a small elite group at the top reap all the benefits of a society and there is no limit on what they can do with their power.

All the names for forms of government like socialism, communism, fascism, etc. are merely definitions of style. BG systems all eventually drift toward some form of tyranny until they collapse from their own corruption or revolution. The most successful and stable form of government in modern times is the LG federalist model of the United States. But that has been corrupted, and now is changing into a BG system where it is doomed to fail unless events change it back.

I’ve tried to cover the history as much as I could in the limited space I had, but today I want to explore what it all means. First I highly recommend two documentaries that will help put a lot of things in perspective if you haven’t seen them. They were both made by Adam Curtis, a British film maker. The first is The Century of Self which talks about how elites have used psychology to help manufacture consent. The other is The Trap which talks about how liberal thinking helped create the nightmare bureaucratic world we live in today. Curtis has a leftward tilt, but he’s even-handed. The information he relates is well worth your time. (more…)

Last month, I attended my first ever CPAC. It was quite the experience, complete with one extended chat with Max Blumenthal. I’ve wanted to meet Max ever since he launched an attack on James O’Keefe.  I figured maybe if I asked nicely he would issue an apology to James. But to my dismay, he didn’t feel like it at the time.

I guess attitude and environment really is everything because Max was clearly not ready to switch from confrontational mode to apologist in front of several cameras and dozens of on-fire conservatives in the middle of CPAC 2010.

My parents raised me with to have a “no fear” mindset and carefully select the environments I subject myself to. It has taken lots of trial and error in my life to perfect these skills, but nevertheless, its something worth understanding.

When I was 15 a lot of exciting things happened to me: I got into surfing, I got a car, I had an exciting job and I started home-schooling. (Quick note on the homeschooling thing: it was totally my choice and I had to beg my parents to allow it. Not hard to believe if you’ve done time in the Miami-Dade Public School system.) (more…)

Two years ago today, William F. Buckley moved on to the great Firing Line in the Sky where he is, no doubt, still debating the wisdom of turning over the Panama Canal with the Gipper. Buckley’s legacy lives on, not only in the remarkable generation of writers that he spawned after he first dared to stand athwart history and yell stop but, in an odd sort of way, in the manner in which some of the liberals he defied over the course of five decades seem to pine for the great man’s genteel ways.

On a personal note, Buckley was one of the two great influences in the creative life of this particular – not particularly humble – correspondent. The other was that irascible Chicago newspaperman/Everyman: Mike Royko. It’s difficult to imagine an odder couple, but Buckley and Royko shared at least a couple of common characteristics. One took them on at one’s peril (and very few ever successfully did so) and neither could be neatly constrained within an ideological box. Royko was classically liberal, but he openly scorned the liberal elite. Buckley became the symbol of the conservative movement, but he refused to let the movement define him, cutting his own path through the ideological jungle when necessary, most famously when he argued for the legalization of many illegal drugs. Agree or disagree, both Royko and Buckley were thinkers, and honest thinkers to boot, who had a knack for expressing their thoughts with the kind of panache that left their readers breathless in awe. (more…)

In the wake of yesterday’s tragedy in Austin, it’s certainly worthwhile to ask what caused troubled software engineer Joe Stack to crash a plane into an office building that housed 200 Internal Revenue Service employees. But will the media get the story right? Perhaps, just perhaps, I’ll be blessedly wrong about this, but I don’t think so.

We know how these stories seem to go. The “unbiased” journalists from the old media working in the field first develop the story, establish the “factual record” and – once that job is done – the would-be opinion makers move on, using that “factual” docket to make their pious cases. The narrative has begun, as this AP story demonstrates. Joe Stack hated the IRS, felt that this oft-criticized agency had done him wrong and – the conclusion is easy to see – was therefore another right-wing nut job who went over the edge. He was a victim, if you will, of the hatred and fury that festers within the conservative and libertarian movements. His friends, the AP tells us, never saw it coming:

They never heard Stack talk about politics, about taxes, about the government — the sources of pain that Stack claims drove him to his death.

But, nowhere in this story does the AP drill down any further. If you read Stack’s 3,000+ word on-line suicide note, it’s clear that he didn’t hate the IRS because he despised big-government per se. He hated the IRS because he believed that the agency was in collusion with the ultimate enemy: big business. A few telling examples from Stack’s manifesto: (more…)

Juan Williams is the titular liberal on Fox News and he tries very hard to maintain the impression that the news panels are fair and balanced. To do that he routinely parrots the Democrat mantra du jour on all issues and ofn a recent Fox News Special Report he defended President Obama’s call for new energy policies and cited the need for the government to explore alternative means to reduce our dependency on foreign oil.

I’m a decade older than Williams so maybe he doesn’t recall the Carter administration as well as I do but the Department of Energy was established for that very same purpose and it has produced absolutely nothing towards that aim in over 32 years.

The energy crisis of 1973 was the impetus for President Carter to propose creation of the DOE and the enabling legislation was passed and signed into law on August 4, 1977. The DOE began operations on October 1, 1977.

On its website, this department lists all its awards and achievements but the fact is that hundreds of billions later with a budget of $24.2 billion a year, 16,000 federal employees and approximately 10,000 contract employees, we are no closer to being independent of foreign oil. That’s how a bureaucracy operates — it produces nothing except a mechanism to drain money from taxpayers. Now the banking, healthcare and auto industry are scheduled for the same ‘fix.” Heaven help us! (more…)

Abe Foxman has come out against a great and wonderful friend of the Jews, Rush Limbaugh.  That is bad enough, but it is symptomatic of a deeper problem: I have for years derided Jews in America and the Jewish lay leadership for tolerating and supporting clear and present enemies of the Jewish people among our senior ranks. It is a sickness of the soul. The liberal Jew worships at the church of human secularism. These lost souls are married to their liberal dogma.

One of the most odious of the bunch, Abe Foxman, uses the might and the soapbox of the Anti-Defamation League in an attempt to destroy friends and supporters of the Jewish people, in order to garner favor with our enemies.

On Friday Norman Podhoretz, whom I rarely cite, as his capitulation on Gaza and other existential matters of grave concern to the Jewish people have been most damaging, called Foxman out on the ADL chief’s denunciation of Rush Limbaugh as an anti-Semite.  The author of the book Why Are Jews Liberals? (from which Rush was quoting), Podhoretz called Foxman’s attack on Rush “vile” and noted that Foxman has: (more…)