Poligazette

Bob McCarty Goes Undercover: Leftists Talk Socialized Medicine

On his increasingly popular Fox News show yesterday, host Glenn Beck talked about labor unions, “Cadillac Health Plans” and socialists. As usual, Beck explained wonderfully what these people are trying to do and why you should be worried about it.

Shortly after Beck’s show, conservative blogger Bob McCarty published videos he made last year of some of the leftists involved in the scheme to push socialized medicine through Americans’ throats. Be sure to watch them.

The first video shows UAW International Union’s Jerry Tucker talking about what he calls a “Lambourghini Health Plan.”

Watch it at NewsRealblog.

©2010 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Palin Joins Fox News As a Contributor

The always reliably leftist New York Times reports that former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin signed a multi-year contract with Fox News today. She will appear on the network’s programming on a regular basis.

Although many expected Palin to get her own show on Fox News when she resigned as governor of Alaska last year, the report says that she will not have her own regular program. Instead, she will host an “occasional series that will run on the network from time to time.”

The deal is of course good news for Palin and her fans, but also for Fox. Whether you disagree or agree with her views, and whether you do or don’t believe she could one day be (a good) president, you’ve got to admit that she has a lot of influence and especially a lot of supporters (also see the tremendous success of her memoirs Going Rogue: An American Life).

Read the whole thing here.

©2010 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Cluelessness of Ron Paul (UPDATED)

Ron Paul is lecturing the Republicans again, but this time it’s just hilarious. His point? That Republicans should avoid cozying up to “tea party” protesters because doing so might align them with wackos:

Paul is a favorite among the tea party crowd, but the former Republican presidential candidate suggested that the GOP should be wary of aligning themselves too closely to protesters who can be unpredictable in their actions and messaging.

The cluelessness of Paul’s criticism is mind-boggling. His own political prominence has been built on his willing association with fringe groups that are anything but “on message” — crowds of unkempt and costumed characters who endlessly spammed internet sites whenever Paul’s name was even mentioned and who personally and physically intimidated voters at caucuses all across the country with their bizarre behavior. His embrace of conspiracy theories about international Jewish bankers, the United Nations, and 9/11 “truth”, his repeated flirtations with openly racist groups like Stormfront, his neglect in allowing his name to be used to promote racist hate literature, and his bizarre proposals to replace the U.S. dollar with hundreds of competing currencies printed by private individuals render Paul the very last person who should lecture others about being careful to stay on message and avoid associating with crazies.

Nonetheless, his underlying point is sound, because I guess even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Republicans should avoid allowing the present difficulties to cause them to embrace fringe loons … like Ron Paul himself.

UPDATE: As if to prove my point that the mere mention of his name brings forward a bunch of obsessed wackoes, a bunch of Ron Paul spambots showed up immediately after this post was posted and posted the same vulgar and abusive comments we have grown to expect from Ron Paul cultists. Rather than delete their spam comments individually, we have simply closed the comment thread for this post.

©2010 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Dodd Would Be Fox In The Chicken Coop

When a U.S. Senator and former Democratic Presidential contender is forced from office in part because of his corruption in accepting sweatheart mortgage loans from the same companies at the heart of the 2008 financial meltdown, what is the worst possible next job for such a man?

Heading up the U.S. Treasury Department would surely be high on the list.

Of course, don’t expect progressives to demand any accountability and responsibility. Partisanship comes first, middle, and last these days. And concerns about corrupt government officials with the power and incentive to do grave damage are so last term. Look! Over there! It’s that evil horrible Sarah Palin! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

©2010 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Progressive Hypocrisy On Transparency Now

In 2001, when then Vice President Dick Cheney held closed meetings to draft an energy bill, progressives went berserk. They concocted elaborate schemes of oil executives being given the keys to U.S. energy policy, demanded Congressional hearings, considered impeachment, and filed lawsuits to demand the meetings be opened up. They preened with fetishes of democracy and transparency, insisting that they as the minority party had a transcendent moral right to be included in the deliberations over the transformation of a key area of the U.S. economy.

But now, as Democratic Congressional leaders convene to circumvent the normal conference process for the explicit purpose of excluding the minority party while considering the transformation of 20% of the entire U.S. economy, progressive bloggers and other activists are notably silent. Meanwhile, the White House is stonewalling media inquiries into President Obama’s blatant reversal of his campaign promise to open up any and all health care reform negotiations for broadcast on C-SPAN.

Can’t have the great unwashed see the sausage being made, you know, especially when it is so vitally important to blow certain things by them without them becoming aware of them, such as the proposals for cuts in Medicare payments to doctors that will result in thousands of Medicare patients being unable to find any physicians that will see them and the proposals to subject the health plans of middle class union members to confiscatory taxes that could double or triple the overall tax burden of those taxpayers. Shhh! Be wery quiet. We’re hunting wabbits!

UPDATE: Look at the reaction on Memeorandum. The silence from progressive bloggers is, as always, deafening. Their hypocrisy knows no bounds.

©2010 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Are Republicans and Tea Partiers “Going More Conservative”?

The Christian Science Monitor is reporting this morning that Sarah Palin will headline the first-ever Tea Party Convention. The report includes an interesting discussion about the future direction of the tea party movement, a la Howard Kurtz:

“[W]ith two wars, a continuing terror threat, huge federal deficits, and a major healthcare overhaul in the works, there is no shortage of disaffection out there … and that could prove to be political dynamite,” writes the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz. Against that backdrop, writes Mr. Kurtz, “The tea types can either blossom into a Perotista-style third-party movement or be subsumed to some degree by the GOP.’”

What really caught my attention, though, was a comment by Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University:

But courting what many call a fringe and inchoate movement carries huge risks . . .

He says a Republican shift toward the Reaganesque Tea Party ideal could lead to a sort of pogrom for moderate Republicans, forcing out those (think Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe) who don’t hew precisely to rock-hard conservative principles around economic freedom and limited government interference.

“The Republican Party is trapped by their base, which is going increasingly conservative,” says Mr. Abramowitz.

I wondered: Does Professor Abramowitz have empirical evidence demonstrating that the Republican Party is “going increasingly conservative”? So, I checked out his CV. I didn’t have time to delve into his recent journal articles, but it does appear that Professor Abramowitz has been conducting research on the increased polarization of the American electorate, partisanship, and demographic shifts that have contributed to an increase in the size of the Democratic Party voting base versus the Republican base. Nowhere did I see that the professor made an effort to independently define what conservatism means and then measure how Republican voters have moved toward or away from that definition.

If we accept that polarization is happening, it does not necessarily mean that one side is “going more conservative” while the other side is “going more progressive.” If the electorate shifted en masse to the left, for example, yet became more polarized at the same time, the conservatives could be both less conservative AND more estranged from their ideological opponents than they were before.

Many commentators have been saying lately that Republicans and tea party participants are “going more conservative,” without having much empirical support for that supposition (at least that I have seen). It’s one thing for a poltical hack to make unuspported, politically-motivated statements, but we expect better from our university-trained social science faculty.

Let’s briefly ponder the hypothesis that Republicans (and tea partiers) are “going more conservative.” Does that hypothesis even seem promising? On the surface, it would appear that Republican voters are feeling more economically conservative of late in response to TARP, stimulus, the health care “reform” fiasco, the threat of cap and trade, etc. However, non-progressives tend to accept and internalize the discourse of the progressive vanguard and their allies in the mainstream media and academia. Conservatism cannot be defined mostly in relation (or reaction) to whatever form the Democratic/progressive agenda is taking at that moment. If the Democratic/progressive regime has become hyper-ambitious and dominates all the levers of federal power, increased opposition to that agenda is by no means evidence that the oppositional voices are “going more conservative.” To accept that assumption is to give the progressive agenda more power to shape the dominant discourses.

The other problem with the above mentality is that it presents Republicans and tea partiers as reactionaries, which is what the Democrats/progressives want. Yet, in the last several decades, Republican voters, and American society in general, have become increasingly more accepting of “progressive” cultural trends. It’s possible that some attitudes have slightly reversed in the last few years in response to aggressive efforts to institutionalize gay marriage, etc., but that is not necessarily the case.

The above issues are not just about semantics. The long, successful effort to brand opponents of the progressive agenda as reactionary poses significant, long-term dangers to the American republic. It is human nature to expect (or hope) that powerful changes in society represent a positive wave of the future – modernization, progress, material improvement, greater efficiencies, more choices. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. In the first half of the 20th century, many of the brightest minds in Europe and America believed that the wave of change sweeping through the Russian empire, and later the USSR, was a positive force for progress. In reality, these forces presaged a regressive wave of mass poverty, servitude, and brutality.

I would never falsely equate hard-line, totalitarian Soviet Bolshevism with the veiled cultural Marxism of late 20th, early 21st century radical American progressivism. Americans must be aware, however, that not all demands for progress, in theory, necessarily lead to more progress in the real world. You can be a vehement proponent of tolerance, freedom, and a “live and let live” culture and yet fight against ideological currents that seek to undermine the very foundations of America’s traditional civil society. When the coercive power of the state begins to elevate the priorities of multiculti group-based identity politics over “liberty, families, opportunity, free markets, and decency,” the nation’s long-term prosperity is in jeopardy. Moreover, America’s experiment in free governance will become increasingly vulnerable to domestic and international threats.

©2010 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Progressives Right On Immigration

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and progressives are doing better than that with regards to at least one issue — immigration. A new study at the Center for American Progress claims that comprehensive immigration reform leading to legalization for millions of immigrants could yield $1.5 trillion in benefits to the U.S. economy through higher wages and productivity.

Opposition to immigration reform — often with racist overtones — has unfortunately become a core cause in many conservative circles. Often the objection is cultural, as promoted by the late political scientist Samuel Huntington — the perception that immigration threatens a core American identity and that the current crop of Hispanic immigrants is uniquely resistant to cultural assimilation. Others focus on the issue of legality, arguing that illegal immigrants are lawbreakers and should be treated as such.

Both themes are misguided and contrary to sound conservative principles. The cultural claim is historically unfounded. Previous waves of immigrants — Irish, Chinese, German, Eastern European — were always thought at the time to be resistant to assimilation. Such views were always proved wrong within a couple generations. There is simply no evidence for the Huntingtonian hypothesis, even leaving aside its transparently racist foundations.

The issue of illegality is simply a problem of exaggeration. Yes, illegal immigrants broke the law, but probably so did you when you exceeded the speed limit on your way to work this morning. The issue isn’t whether or not illegal immigration is illegal, but rather what the appropriate consequence should be. If individual immigrants have committed other crimes, particularly violent crimes, even progressive plans for immigration reform would concede that imprisonment and deportation is the appropriate response to those other crimes. But illegal immigration in and of itself is a victimless crime. These are people merely trying to survive and support their families. It is hardly just to treat them as violent or dangerous felons in response. Payment of a moderate fine is more appropriate, and a path to legalization should be provided for those that have been otherwise contributing members of their communities.

And that leads to the economic argument that conservatives should prize but which they for some reason ignore and cede to progressives. Immigration is an economic plus. Surveying the economic and demographic performance of the world’s democracies, a pattern quickly emerges. Those with highly restrictive immigration policies — Japan, for example — are struggling to find ways to fund their basic government services for an aging population while the economy is crippled by labor shortages. There simply is a lack of people to pay the taxes necessary to fund the government’s entitlement programs. Because of its generally restrictive immigration policies (few European countries allow paths to citizenship for immigrants, relegating them to marginalized and occasionally violent ghettos) Europe is rapidly approaching a situation that will potentially be even more serious than Japan. But, in contrast, the American economic and government budgetary difficulties have been perpetually mitigated by a source of low-cost labor not available in Japan. And going back over a century, immigrant communities drawn by the magnetism of American openness have provided a source of economic vibrancy and entrepreneurship that has driven the engine of American prosperity time and time again. In addition to bringing in low-cost labor, American openness attracts the world’s best and brightest. The bottom line is that openness to immigration serves economic prosperity on multiple levels. Conservatives betray their own principles when they ignore these facts.

©2010 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

“The System Failed”

Nearly two weeks after a close call on a Detroit bound flight, The President of the United States finally recognized something which had been obvious to most ordinary men and women in the street on December 25, 2009: The system failed. Dear Watson, that fact was elementary. Even if our President couldn’t see what the fuss was over, and why he should spoil his holiday with family in Hawaii, the public recognized the event for what it is: a failure of airport security, a failure of anti-terrorist practices, a failure of the national Homeland Security administration. A failure of the advisers closest to the President, and a failure of his administration to deal actively, not passively, with the threat posed by militant Islamists.

While all of those are truly failures, there are others. Even the in-the-tank lamestream media are starting to reach the same conclusions – that this President isn’t measuring up as well as the promises made on the campaign trail. That perhaps he really is something of an empty suit, a telegenic guy who speaks well in public, but doesn’t really understand how to govern. Perhaps the critics in the summer of 2008 had a point the media might have delved into: Was there really anything in the background of a community organizer and academic with only a partial term in the U.S. Senate, and no legislative record that really prepared him adequately to be President? What about his packing his administration with political cronies and friends instead of a genuinely bi-partisan administration of excellent leaders as promised in the campaign? Yes, that was a failure as well. There really is little worthy of acclaim that the administration can point to a real achievements as it completes its first year. The critics are suggesting the President is failing.

This should bring no pleasure to the Rush Limbaugh backers. The President’s failure is also our failure. As citizens, the majority o the electorate should look at this failing presidency, and realize that the failing grad is not just Mr. Obama’s. It is their failing grade as well. By failing to demand accurate and complete reporting, by failing to vote for a presidential candidate based on actual qualifications, and not looks and charisma, the citizens failed in their duty.

Is there any way to redeem this situation? It might help to consider voting for competent members of congress this year. To seriously consider the wisdom of electing both houses of Congress and the president form the same party. That seems to have been unsuccessful under the Republicans, so it should not surprise us that it is not working any better under Democrats. I’m not the first man to suggest this, but here it is: A Republican majority in either the House or Senate might actually help President Obama rescue his failing administration. President Clinton’s greatest success came with a Republican congress. That is something to keep in mind when voting. Three Democratic senators, including the flawed and corrupt Roland Burris, have announced their intent not to run for re-election. Electing Republicans in their places might be one way for the electorate to address their failure to think in 2008. Food for thought.

©2010 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Andrew Sullivan Finds A Use For The U.S. Military — Restraining Israel

Andrew Sullivan, who continues to build on his journey away from moderate conservatism and into the welcoming arms of the extreme left, has added another key piece of that transformation — anti-Israel hostility. Sullivan, who in addition to being completely obsessed with hating Sarah Palin was a prominent anti-war voice during the Bush administration, seems to have found a military cause he can endorse — containing Israel and providing a shield for Hamas, behind which they could safely launch a continuing rain of missiles on to Israeli civilians:

My own view is moving toward supporting a direct American military imposition of a two-state solution, with NATO troops on the borders of the new states of Palestine and Israel. I’m sick of having a great power like the US being dictated to in the conduct of its own foreign policy by an ally that provides almost no real benefit to the US, and more and more costs.

Of course, Sullivan is wily enough to throw in a pro forma condemnation of Hamas too:

And, yes, I’m also sick of the war crimes and theocratic insanity of Hamas, and the lame passive-aggression of the PA, and the inability of the Palestinian leadership to prepare for actual governance as opposed to the victimized preening and theatrics and violence they prefer to the difficult compromises required if we are to move forward.

But the effect of what Sullivan supports would be to give Hamas a kind of support they could never have dreamed of — a military force patrolling their borders with the explicit mission of preventing any Israeli response, but without any mission that would allow them to actually go in and shut down Hamas’ own missile factories, smuggling routes, and launch sites. And the bonus would be a ready supply of propaganda foils, for there is little doubt that if Hamas attacked the NATO force Sullivan proposes, Sullivan would eagerly join the ranks of those who would insist that there be no consequences, lest doing so harm the Palestinian civilians behind which Hamas routinely shields itself. The belief that Sullivan would favor Hamas is made evident by his embrace of the old anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about those rascally Jews exercising a conspiratorial dominance in the U.S. government that trumps U.S. national interests. (To preempt the whining of anti-Israel progressives: No, not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, but as shown by the Nazis’ reliance on exactly the same conspiracy theory, this particular variety definitely is.)

But at least Sullivan has made clear his priorities. He opposes military action by U.S. except when the purpose of the military action is to restrain Israel. Then it’s fine.

©2010 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

WaPo: Dodd Will Not Run In 2010

After facing scandal after scandal for months, Washington Post analyst Chris Cillizza wrote tonight that Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd will not announce today that he will not run for re-election this year.  As we all know by now, Dodd’s problems started after he allegedly got a sweetheart deal on his mortgage from Countrywide before that firm’s downfall in 2008.  He was further pushed down in the polls for his improper handling of the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac meltdown, for misreporting the actual value of a vacation home by several hundred thousand dollars, and finally for his flip-flop on the insertion of a clause limiting executive pay into 2009’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Basically, Dodd’s days have been numbered since early last year and, apparently until recently, everybody but Dodd was knew it.

Assuming Dodd does drop out, he will most likely be succeeded by state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, assuming the latter gives up a chance to challenge Joe Lieberman in 2012, and really does have Senatorial ambitions.  Now, I would not normally call an election so early, but I think it is hard to overstate Blumenthal’s popularity here in Connecticut.  The way he operates – he will go after any company he thinks is doing something wrong – has strong bi-partisan support.  It will be very hard for any Republican to successfully argue that what he’s done for the last twenty years makes him unfit for the Senate.  Even Rob Simmons, who was beating Dodd in the polls before this news, will have an uphill battle against a Blumenthal candidacy.

Of course, I don’t think it is quite time for the Dems to start planning the “we saved the seat” party just yet, but if I were a Dem, I’d have started jamming Blumenthal’s phone line and inbox with demands that he run the moment this news came out.

©2010 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.