It’s true that Paul Krugman says some outlandish things- from heartily embracing the criminal Occupy folks to continuing to believe whole heartedly in Keynesian economics well past its sell date, Krugman is happy to beclown himself. Given the opportunity, and the Gray Lady seems to give him many of them, he never misses the chance to show off his condescending ignorance of pretty much everything. So, what corner has his quill painted him into today? He is taking Politifact to task for its “Lie of the Year.” He is outraged. Outraged! The folks in charge of fact-checking over at Politifact said that it’s not true that Republicans voted to end Medicare. This isn’t the place to discuss the merits of Politifact’s piece; you can read it and decide for yourself.

Liar, liar, pants on fire.

No, it’s Krugman’s wonderful hissy fit that is noteworthy.

“The answer is, of course, obvious: the people at Politifact are terrified of being considered partisan if they acknowledge the clear fact that there’s a lot more lying on one side of the political divide than on the other. So they’ve bent over backwards to appear “balanced” — and in the process made themselves useless and irrelevant.”

Well, okay, it is important to give credit where credit is due. There is a lot more lying on one side of the political divide than on the other. Not quite what Krugman meant though- Politifact certainly does have an issue with being considered partisan. As reported on these very pages, multiple times, the fact-checking website is anything but clean of partisan bias. Most of it is aimed squarely at skewering the more conservative side of the spectrum.

Which brings us to Krugman’s real issue. It’s the same thing that has caused leftists world wide to threaten patriots like Brandon Darby or denigrate those they formerly lionized like David Mamet. Once you’re on the liberal plantation, you’re there for life. If you try to espouse any view that isn’t lock step with progressive groupthink you are immediately branded an infidel with all it entails. The greatest crime to Krugman and is ilk is apostasy.

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One of the core beliefs of the Occupy movement – the idea of the 99% vs. the 1% — is not only laughable on its face but has been picked up and expanded on by lauded liberals like economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. There are a few different ways to judge the Occupy movement. You can look at the Who; the people in leadership positions for the “leaderless” movement  like Lisa Fithian or Muhammed Malik. You could examine the What; as of this writing, the 350 or so incidents of violence, sexual assault, and property destruction.

Paul Krugman, sporting a blue collar

Bring up either of these to an Occupy defender, however, and you’re sure to be met with the argument that these people and events are isolated incidents and not representative of the Occupy movement. It’s a desperate argument, the philosophical equivalent of the timeless epistemological question “How many facial hairs need to grow on a man before you can say he has a beard?” And just because no specific numeric answer is correct doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as a beard. Occupy passed the tipping point weeks ago, which is why even sympathetic mayors were forced to shut down the lawless tent cities nationwide. However, as easy as it is to criticize Occupy on the basis of its leadership and behavior, it’s more important to attack the “why” — the ideological foundation that the whole mess rests on. Occupy has a number of key ideas behind it that aren’t isolated, concepts that are clear and unique to the Occupy movement. One of those ideas is the “We Are The 99%” slogan and the corollary attack on “the 1%.” (more…)

For a month or so I’ve had this analogy kicking around in my head based on the old medical practice of blood letting.

If a patient was sick with just about anything, the answer was to bleed them, literally, and this was supposed to make them better. Problem was, more often than not this process actually made the patient sicker. Rather than question their methods, the physicians would “double down” and bleed the patient more and more until eventually, the patient died.

(Perhaps some readers will remember a recurring bit from the early days of Saturday Night Live, with Steve Martin playing Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber.)

The Keynesian approach of “stimulus” in which increased government spending is supposed to “help” the economy get restored back to health strikes me as the economic version of bleeding a sick patient. It doesn’t work. Not only does it not work, but it makes the economy “sicker”. Just like the ill informed physicians of the past, Keynesian politicians and economists ignore this failure and insist on doubling down. The solution to these people isn’t to change strategy, they think we haven’t bled enough to cure what ails the economy and they demand another round of the same failed policies, only on a grander scale.

Yesterday I saw that Paul Krugman has written an op-ed in the New York Times using this analogy… only he uses it to say calls for “austerity” are akin to the blood-letting physicians of yore. He has stumbled upon the perfect analogy to highlight his own failure as a Keynesian, but he completely misses the point. We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem, and it’s the out of control government spending that is analogous to bleeding. We need to staunch the bleeding with bandages and a tourniquet (which would be “austerity”) before we get any weaker from the loss of taxpayer dollars that have been spiraling down the drain of inefficient government.

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In practice it has turned out to be strongly redistributionist, but only because of its Ponzi game aspect, in which each generation takes more out than it put in. Well, the Ponzi game will soon be over, thanks to changing demographics, so that the typical recipient henceforth will get only about as much as he or she put in (and today’s young may well get less than they put in).

Of course we all recognize that bit of inflammatory scare-mongering from Gov. Rick Perry’s book “Fed Up!” in which he tells the inconvenient truth about Social Security that every American knows but no politician is forth-right enough to confront.  That in its current state, it is doomed to fail and leave generations that had paid into it stuck without the return they were promised. In short: A Ponzi Scheme.

Oh, wait… my mistake. Thanks to some excellent work by Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge.com I now see that the quote above is not from Gov. Perry but from a young, idealistic economist named Paul Krugman writing in the Boston Review in 1997.

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I think Rumsfeld may have been the last person in the country with a subscription to the New York Times.

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As America passed with solemn tribute the murder of 3000 citizens 10 years after September 11th, 2001, social media networks, like Facebook, were filled with tributes, thanks, passages from the bible, and pleas.  Amongst those pleas, that we spend no time on 9/11 engaging in politics.  We have many days ahead to talk about our ideas, our ideals, our desires for America and the best course of action for America.  9/11 is just not the day for politics.

And, as Americans, we watched the tributes on Saturday at Shanksville, PA.  And again, the social media networks were filled with video and audio from the day.  Specifically, people marveled at the words of former Presidents Bush and Clinton.  For whatever we think of their politics, their time in office or their time out of office, they understood what we understand – now was not the time for politics or pettiness.  9/11 is something we, as a nation, survived together.  We lost, we suffered, we felt anger, we are still angry.  But we survived.  For all of our problems, the republic is still here.

Yet, there are those who don’t understand.  Who don’t have the basic humanity one assumes would exists in the hearts and souls of Americans.  Who think their lofty position has entrusted upon them a higher intelligence, when all they have is farcical audacity and, indeed, deep seeded hate.  One of those is Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning Economist who fancies himself an intellectual.  As America has learned, we need people of intellect.  Pseudo-intellectuals always lead to unmitigated disaster.

From Krugman’s blog in The New York Times:

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

Krugman didn’t get the memo about how to act on 9/11. (As if a memo on how to be a human being is actually necessary!)  It’s like he’s wearing a clown costume to a funeral.  Because Krugman is a clown, and 9/11 is a funeral. To start, Krugman’s elitism makes him think that he knows what people in America are thinking.  His elitism has also immediately turned 9/11 in to a class war.  People on the “right” know that what happened after 9/11 was deeply shameful?  This isn’t true about people on the left? Actually, this isn’t true at all!  It is a simpleton’s strawman argument to force through a failed meme – the left is more compassionate than the right. (A meme that is also destroyed by posting such a hateful, thoughtless article on September 11th.)

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In the same way he tried to capitalize on the horrific Tucson shooting as an excuse to attack Sarah Palin and conservatives, Paul Krugman has used his New York Times blog to attack Rudy Giuliani and President George W. Bush this morning in a most disgusting way:

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te (sic) atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

There is nothing wrong with reflecting on the events of ten years ago and making social and political judgements on our leaders’ reactions over the past decade.  In fact, most of us here at “The Bigs” have done so this morning at Big Government.

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CNNs Fareed Zakaria and the New York Times’ Paul Krugman have solved our economic problems. They’ve decided that a space alien attack will save us. Aside from the guffaw factor of space aliens, there was so much wrong with this CNN segment that we must lay them out for discussion.

First on the clip is some pinhead from Harvard claiming that “infrastructure spending, that’s great.” He says he’d even borrow money for such programs. This guy thinks that if we had another giant stimulus (like a WWII Works program), why we’d be doing just “great.”

He is, of course, a Keynesian fool. Stimulus does not work. Stimulus has never worked. Further, “stimulus” itself is a misnomer. Take Illinois, for instance. It got millions upon millions of dollars in so-called stimulus money from Obama. Do you know what Illinois did with that money? It paid existing debt, it paid current bills. It “stimulated” nothing with all those millions. This happened all across the country in every state. The “stimulus” did not stimulate anything but instead went to pay exiting bills and created nothing new, supported no new projects. It was a sham.

Amusingly, this guy tried to qualify his support of infrastructure spending saying “as long as it isn’t Big Dig” sort of over spending. The “Big Dig” is a reference to the underground Central Artery/Tunnel Project undertaken by the Boston Metro Highway System that is famous for being a total boondoggle that has gone billions over budget, not to mention having so many structural and engineering failures that the whole thing is a death trap waiting to happen.

Problem is, every state project becomes a version of the Big Dig at some level. At the very least they always, always, always go over budget, at worst they become a pit of political failure and corruption. So, while this Harvard pinhead tried to qualify his position, he did so on a bed of quicksand.

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There is no need whatsoever for conservatives to marginalize those we disagree with on the other side of the aisle by referring to them as stupid or ridiculous because they keep going out of their way to do it for us.

The ongoing battles over debt, spending, taxes and the way some perceive that we should be conducting the process of governing this great nation have, if nothing, served as a perfect illustration of what is wrong with modern American Democrats. The Tea Party people driving the debate are now continually being referred to has terrorists and hijackers by leftists far outside of the cackling horde of usual suspects at MSNBC. And why? Because they had the audacity to demand that the representatives in a representative republic actually, you know, represent them.

The liberal penchant for referring to everything but terrorism as terrorism continues to mystify. And their blind spot for the common thread in real terrorism is dangerous. One can only assume that it will get worse now that Anders Breivik has given them someone to double the number of occupants in the Tim McVeigh pool of statistical anomalies they use to excuse the blind spot. The triumph of the everybody-gets-a-trophy reluctance to hurt feelings over national security is quite nauseating.

It was truly striking that Rep. Gabby Giffords returned to Congress yesterday after the Democrats and their media mouthpieces had just spent weeks defiling the “new tone” that President Finger-Wagger and his minions spent so much time lecturing us about in the wake of her tragic shooting. Jonah Goldberg addressed this latest disconnect on the part of our less-than-esteemed opponents earlier.Let us get to the heart of just what it is that has the professional American Left acting up right now.

This isn’t really about their fetish-level obsession with taxation or their enduring hatred for wealthy people who aren’t named Kennedy, Boxer, Kerry or Soros. What we have been witnessing is a full-blown meltdown over their loss of control over the narrative and the power that gives them over the common folk.

American Progressives (big “P”) are, at heart, devout elitists. It is a political philosophy that believes that a chosen few know what is best for the great unwashed. That’s why Democrats are always talking about “fighting” for you. You see, you’re simply too weak, stupid, disenfranchised and SO not riding on a corporate jet today to be fighting for yourself.

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In his latest NY Times op-ed, Paul Krugman asks, “What have they done with President Obama?” Krugman longs for the day when President Obama was forceful and transformational, as if that rhetorical facade had any substance in the first place. Those who saw Obama as merely a representation of many liberal desires knew he had no executive experience and generally avoided taking any action that might imperil his path to the White House. It was all about winning in the future, not principles. It’s as if Krugman knew this also but feigned support, all to get the guy in the White House so he could bleat about how he wasn’t up to snuff for four solid years. Or perhaps he was just drawn in by the drunken romance of it all.

The smart play in 2009 was to load up on Pfizer stock since lefties have undoubtedly been inhaling Xanax in record numbers to take the edge off the hangover.

Is it any coincidence that Pfizer went from around $12 in early 2009 to over $20 today? Look for it to keep climbing as we approach the 2012 election as lefties contemplate a Republican president in the White House. That’s a dissertation right there: “Benzodiazepine Use in Light of Broken Political Promises: A Case Study of Early 21st Century American Liberalism.”

What did Krugman expect from our celebrity president? Solid leadership based solely on personality?  Principled American liberalism? The dude’s from Chicago for crying out loud.

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Paul Krugman may be a Princeton poster child for Keynesian economics, but I am not sure how being a numbers wonk qualifies this man to comment on U.S. foreign policy that does not involve trade.  One cannot deny his academic bona fides, (after all, the world is filled with educated fools) but can very much challenge his credibility when discussing such complex matters as the Libyan intervention.  This man is by no means an impartial observer but rather an unashamed Obama partisan cut right from the mold of the New York Times editorial pages.  Combine the yin of his love affair with Barack Obama with the yang of his visceral George Bush hatred after all these years and what you get is the kind of utter nonsense and blatant hypocrisy that this man spilled out into the round table segment of ABC’s “This Week With Christiane Amanpour” this Sunday.

The topic was Libya and Obama’s ill-conceived, tardy, and ill-defined injection of US armed forces  to tip the balance of that pseudo-nation’s civil war from advantage Ghadafi to advantage, well, whomever they are.

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Alternate headline: “Paul Krugman Will Not Read This Article”

Second alternate headline: “Paul Krugman: Lolcats > Conservatives”

Over the weekend a prominent figure in the art world, a liberal, came up to a group of us from Team Breitbart following a conversation that took place both on air and off, and told us we, particularly Big Journalism EIC Dana Loesch, are very respectable spokespeople for our side.  Needless to say, we were flattered, but while I certainly didn’t attempt to sway him off of his position that we’re super cool, I would contend we are merely representative of the quality people in our movement, as opposed to exceptions to the rule that conservatives are racist, bigoted, intolerant, etc.  Clearly the sweet accolade from the sweet man had a very powerful and illustrative subtext to it: he just doesn’t know many conservatives… if any.

One of the reasons for the existence of this very blog is because many of us contend that a substantial portion of the movers and shakers on the left, like the aforementioned gentleman, tend to live in bubbles.  This is a common theme across several of the Bigs.  Hollywood, the mainstream media, and academia, to name a few high profile arenas, are so overwhelming left-of center that it’s rare to find Republicans inhabiting them at all, much less outspoken Tea Partiers like the ones who make up the Bigs team.  On the other hand, those of us on the right are constantly forced to contend with the best thought the left has to offer, or else we’d be forgoing academics in one of the world’s most educated societies, we’d be abstaining from entertainment in the country that redefined it, and as good as the fantasy of doing away with what we call “the mainstream media” sounds, that’s a process that would take decades to complete, if it’s even possible (or beneficial).

So we’re forced to listen, whether we want to or not.  The schools, entertainers, and media outlets have us as a captive audience while these movers and shakers can comfortably build a career in the world of ideas without as much as consulting with those held by (at least) half of us.

Case in point, Nobel Prize-winning Princeton Economics Professor and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.  Last week, Krugman was asked which websites he reads frequently, and after providing a list of liberals and leftists like Greg Sargent, Josh Marshall, Digby, and Atrios, he copped to not reading any conservatives online on a regular basis: (more…)

I like Iowahawk’s satire but I also like a mad Iowahawk, rendered thusly by Paul Krugman’s recent op/ed on education and states with collective bargaining. His bias superseded reason, fact replaced by union talking points. Our favorite purveyor of satire called him out.

Please pardon this brief departure from my normal folderol, but every so often a member of the chattering class issues a nugget of stupidity so egregious that no amount of mockery will suffice. Particularly when the issuer of said stupidity holds a Nobel Prize.

Case in point: Paul Krugman. The Times’ staff economics blowhard recently typed, re the state of education in Texas:

And in low-tax, low-spending Texas, the kids are not all right. The high school graduation rate, at just 61.3 percent, puts Texas 43rd out of 50 in state rankings. Nationally, the state ranks fifth in child poverty; it leads in the percentage of children without health insurance. And only 78 percent of Texas children are in excellent or very good health, significantly below the national average.

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This week, two weeks after the AZ massacre and one week after President Obama’s call for “civility,” the MSM has proved once again that it is fair, unprejudiced, professional, and full to the brim with the best of intentions.

As a conservative, I honor the admirable achievements of the professional journalists at MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. My head hangs in humbled deference at the hate-filled remarks of Obama pals, U.S. Senator Dick Durbin and Rep. Steven Cohen. Behold their collective greatness in attempting to cover-up their gaffes, lies, and hypocrisies again this week: MSM made small mention of liberal activist James Eric Fuller, who was shot in the knee at the AZ shooting and his death threat against Tucson Tea Party leader Trent Humphries. Fuller told the Post Friday:

There would be torture and then an ear necklace, with [Minnesota US Rep.] Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin’s ears toward the end, because they’re small, female ears, and then Limbaugh, Hannity and the biggest ears of all, Cheney’s, in the center.

An “ear necklace” is a reference to necklaces made from the cut-off ears of enemies in the Vietnam War era and, thus, fails Obama’s civility test.

Unlike Sarah Palin and the Tea Party Movement, the MSM did not attempt to link the incendiary statements of U.S. Senator Dick Durbin or even President Obama to Fuller’s violent actions. Durbin has called Tea Partiers “extremists” and President Obama has called on supporters to “punish our enemies.” To date, no other Fuller linkages have been made to journalists who have called Tea Partiers “terrorists,” “thugs,” “brown shirts,” and “dangerous.”

Want more?

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It’s no shock that liberal darling and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman doesn’t like the GOP or its plan to repeal President Obama’s health control law.  However, in his Sunday column he felt it necessary to not only call the Republican effort wrong, the bearded Spock called them illogical.

He begins with an anecdote to prove wrong the GOP’s insistence that the Medicare “Doc Fix,” which totals over $200 billion, should be included in the cost of Obamacare.  Many could retort Krugman’s critique by pointing out the $500 billion in Medicare that Obamacare actually cuts, so paying for another year of doctor fixes is very much related to the overall health tab of the United States.

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There’s no mincing of words in this. Considering the public isn’t buying the spin and a recent study shows how Americans find Sarah Palin more believable and sincere after her Tucson remarks, this (forgive the “violent rhetoric”) backfired on the left.

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As he sits behind bars awaiting trial, Jared Loughner is undoubtedly relishing every moment of the ruckus that he managed to stir up with his deadly rampage in Tucson. In addition to murdering six innocent human beings and wounding more than a dozen others in an act of sheer evil, the deranged gunman has set off a media and political frenzy that refuses to abate.

By various accounts, this is precisely what Loughner was hoping for. As his close friend Bryce Tierney told Mother Jones, “I think the reason he did it was mainly to just promote chaos. He wanted the media to freak out about this whole thing. He wanted exactly what’s happening.” Ironically enough, then, many of those now engaged in the shameless finger-pointing are inadvertently advancing the goals of the madman, by fulfilling his desire to create an environment of mayhem in society.

Deploying the most acerbic members of its verbal firing squads, the left has launched volley after volley of vitriol in recent days in an effort to score some political points and paint conservatives as extremists. But in so doing, they are merely extending the damage inflicted by Loughner into the sphere of public discourse, thereby undermining the very same foundations of civilization that the gunman himself was targeting. (more…)

You can’t retract hate. You can’t retract idiocy. You can’t retract bigotry. You can’t retract irresponsible claims masquerading as journalism. It’s time to fire Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, and New York Times’ Editor-in-Chief Bill Keller for printing and broadcasting blood libelous statements intended to directly link Sarah Palin, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, the Tea Party movement, and conservatives in general to the Arizona massacre on Saturday.

These phony journalists and commentators should be fired for unethical media practices, for libel, for slander, and for perpetuating the culture of hate and bigotry they falsely claim to be so passionately against.

Not even a day after the tragedy, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote an editorial called, “A Climate of Hate,” and he did so without any facts. He laced his January 9th editorial diatribe with his wish-filled assumption that Jared Loughner’s insane killing spree was linked to Sarah Palin and conservative, tea party, and talk radio rhetoric.

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For nearly 20 years now I’ve been a conservative, which means that for nearly 20 years I’ve watched the hopelessly corrupt mainstream media do their dishonest dirty work on behalf of their allies on the left. And I would love to say that what happened over the weekend surprised me, but as soon as I learned of the tragic shootings, I knew exactly what was coming because we’ve seen it all before. Those of you old enough to remember the assassination of President Kennedy also remember the media blaming a murder committed by an openly Marxist Castro supporter on right-wing anger. I, of course, remember a mercenary President Clinton attempting to use the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing to silence his own political enemies. And it’s worth remembering that these witch hunts were all successfully accomplished with the help of a complicit media that was then able to drown out reason and truth with their monopoly on the narrative.

This is simply what leftists and their left-wing media allies do, and now in the age of cable and the Internet, the broadcast networks and print publications have been joined by the likes of CNN, MSNBC, Politico, Mediaite, Media Matters, and Andrew Sullivan. In other words, the medium and names may change but  the character assassins, partisans, liars, and propagandists doing everything in their power to bring down the right — including wearing a laughably transparent disguise marked “objective” – will always be with us.

The media’s shameless political witch hunt we saw over the weekend was obviously counter-intuitive behavior to anyone at all interested in not looking like the worst kind of political opportunist. But frustration makes you stupid and the left is frustrated, especially those in the media, because they are losing. And other than embarrassing ratings and cratering circulation numbers, nothing points to their diminishing power more than Sarah Palin’s ascendancy as a bona fide political force in this country. Whether or not the former Alaskan Governor becomes president isn’t an issue. She’s already changed the face of electoral politics and even managed to gain a serious foothold on the beach of popular culture while doing so. (more…)

For the past two years the Establishment Media, the White House, the Democratic party, countless pundits, and entertainers have tried to cast the entire tea party as a group of gun-toting, Constitution-thumping, white supremacists. So it should come as no surprise when, minutes after the tragic Giffords shooting in AZ, Paul Krugman, the White House, the Daily Kos, the New York Post, and dozens of other media outlets racially-profiled the the shooter Jared Loughner, and quickly determined that he was a Tea Party member.

White man plus gun plus violence must make him a right-winger.

Of course! He must be a tea partier…he’s white! He used a gun! He mentioned that the Congresswoman betrayed the Constitution! He loves Mein Kampf! Ergo, he’s a tea partier.

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