“The Tea Party movement is not just about Republicans anymore“

With those words, Mark Falzon filed his Petition of Nomination today to challenge Frank Pallone in the 6th district Democratic primary on June 8th. Running under the campaign slogan, “Democrat: Tea Party Approved“, Falzon may very well be the first person in the Country to challenge an incumbent Democrat in a Democratic primary under the tea party banner. Pallone, a staunch liberal who takes credit for writing parts of the original House version of ObamaCare, is an 11-term incumbent who hasn’t had a primary challenger since 1994.

Mark Falzon and his tea party support structure think that’s plenty long enough.

In a move that should help to shatter the nonsensical mainstream media myth that the tea parties are a “fringe”, demographically-uniform group of some kind, Falzon hopes his filing will inspire other Democrats around the country to challenge the left-wing radical extremists who have hijacked the Democratic Party in their own districts.

In Falzon’s words, “we are a true grassroots movement impacting both parties, tens of millions of us rising to save this beloved nation.”

We’ll be keeping the closest eye imaginable on Mark’s campaign to unseat the 20-year incumbent. Stay tuned and get ready to rumble.

The comparison isn’t precise, so few are, but Chris Christie, in his quest to right New Jersey’s fiscal ship of State, has shown a brass ideological constitution and political savvy to which we aren’t accustomed here in Jersey.

Over the past few weeks, Christie has been engaged in an increasingly bitter fight with the NJEA and its President, Barbara Keshishian, over the Governor’s proposed education spending cuts and, more importantly, over his completely reasonable request that the teachers union agree to a one-year pay increase freeze to stave off the need for the cuts that would directly affect students.

The union has, in response, told New Jersey taxpayers and students to pound sand. Christie, with echoes of Ronald Reagan, isn’t backing down.

New Jersey is facing an absurd $10.7 billion budget deficit for fiscal 2011; the end result of years of unchecked spending and the corresponding, inevitable shrinking tax base. Between 2004 and 2008, New Jersey lost approximately $70 billion in wealth and revenue as our State’s businesses and affluent residents took the fast train out of Dodge to avoid being taxed to death. The exodus was and is the wholly predictable yet avoidable result of liberal tax and spend policy. New Jersey’s chickens, as they say, have come home to roost.

But rather than agreeing to contribute a very small portion of their publicly funded salaries to help bring the State’s finances back into a sustainable equilibrium, what is the NJEA’s solution to the problem? Take it away Barbara:

…[by] reinstating a very modest tax on the very wealthiest New Jersey residents, those making more than $400,000 per year.

A quote by Benjamin Franklin, often incorrectly attributed to Albert Einstein, on the definition of insanity comes immediately to mind.

Just this week Christie has, 1) “offer[ed] more state aid to school districts whose teachers agree to a wage freeze for the 2011 fiscal year” and, 2) agreed to allow teachers who renegotiate their contracts before May 22 (with the one-year pay hike freeze) to forego the new 1.5% contribution toward the cost of their health benefits. The union has thus far refused to support either modest concession. But it’s all about the kids, right?

Chris Christie is writing the playbook on fiscal sanity for the rest of the Country before our very eyes and is taking head-on the NJEA’s greed and selfishness in the process. Christie has made it abundantly clear that teachers themselves are not the issue, however misled by their union so many of them have been for so long.

Ask yourselves the following question: if the NJEA is truly concerned with full funding for New Jersey’s kids, why won’t they agree to a one-year wage freeze in order to ensure that that happens?

The Gipper would be proud of Chris Christie. I know I am.

Finally, an exhaustive list into which we can neatly put each and every member. By show of hands, which of the following are you:

1. Ayn Rand secular libertarians
2. Fundamentalist Christian evangelicals
3. Birthers
4. Birchers
5. Racists
6. Xenophobes
7. Ron Paulites
8. Cold warriors
9. Zionists
10. Constitutionalists
11. Vanilla Republicans looking for a high
12. Militia-style survivalists

I suppose tangentially (and partially) I could qualify for at least four (secular libertarian, cold warrior, Zionist, Constitutionalist) and simply by virtue of my opposition to socialized medicine, five (racist) designations, which would mean that I’m almost 50% pure tea partier.

Sweet!

Of course, as if it needed to be said, this list is both incomplete and completely idiotic, but we wouldn’t want to hurt Mr. Kim’s heightened Asian sensibilities now would we.

(Ok now it’s definitely five)

In an article primarily explaining the Cloward-Piven theory from the Left’s perspective, Mr. Kim notes that one of the reasons why Cloward-Piven is eaten up by the tea party and the Right is because of its versatility; every group mentioned above can find somethingattributable to Cloward-Piven.

Personally, I’m not much of a Cloward-Piven conspiracy theorist for the simple reason that the liberal foot soldiers responsible for carrying out the conspiracy just aren’t very bright as a rule. I’d go so far as to say the vast majority of liberal rank and file are too stupid to do their own taxes, let alone execute a far-reaching conspiracy intended to hasten the fall of Capitalism. (On the other hand, we all know that a good number of the liberal elite can’t do their own taxes either, so perhaps I need a more cogent illustration)

Don’t get me wrong, there can be little serious argument that the Left in general and its leaders in particular most certainly want to hasten the fall of Capitalism, I just don’t think the “performance artists” at ACORN, Project Vote or the Nation for that matter are smart enough to do so willingly.

Wasn’t it nice of the Nation to categorize the entire tea party for us though? Give yourselves a round of applause Nationites.

In any event, I can tell you that the overwhelming majority of tea partiers I’ve met couldn’t self-identify with a single one of Mr. Kim’s categorizations; most of the movement never cared about, thought of or discussed politics or philosophy outside of their own families before 2009…which I suppose makes them de facto racists because we just happened to inaugurate our first mulatto President in January of that year.

I stand corrected.

Recognize though that Mr. Kim’s list is really nothing more than another, more realistic strategy in which the Left has engaged for a century now; divide, categorize and demonize any individual or group with whom they disagree or from whom they perceive a threat to the imposition of their worldview.

I for one have a lot of work to do to make myself the purebred tea partier I need to be.

Or I could just settle for being called an American.

Funny, I thought it would have been much higher than that: (via HotAir)

However, a Smart Politics analysis of nearly 70 oral State of the Union Addresses since the mid-1930s finds the text of Obama’s speech on Wednesday evening to have one of the lowest scores on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test ever recorded by a U.S. President.

The Flesch-Kincaid test is designed to assess the readability level of written text, with a formula that translates the score to a U.S. grade level. Longer sentences and sentences utilizing words with more syllables produce higher scores. Shorter sentences and sentences incorporating more monosyllabic words yield lower scores.

I take this as not so much an indictment of Obama’s intelligence as it is one of his penchant for lying and lecturing. Understand this well folks, he has to lecture because no man on Earth can articulate a principled, rational, intelligent defense of modern liberalism borne of a Marx/Lenin/Mao collectivist ethos. It’s simply not possible. It cannot be done.

So instead of trying in vain to do so, he lies. Instead of trying to do so, he uses short soundbite lies to lecture us like a scolding parent. I’m quite certain that often when I used to get lectured by my parents (usually before I talked back and got my ass kicked), they lied through their teeth. Parents don’t have to rationally explain to their kids why they screwed up; they just tell them that they screwed up and to not do it again…or else. Obama uses this method often in his speeches. The SOTU was only the longest, most clear expression of this to date:

As such, the speech by ‘the professor’ stands in contrast to his predecessor, ‘the cowboy,’ George W. Bush, who was frequently skewered by the left and late-night talk show hosts for his public speaking abilities, his intelligence, and his misuse of the English language.

Bush averaged a Flesch-Kincaid score of 10.4 across his seven State of the Union Addresses – or nearly two full grades higher than Obama’s speech. Bush’s speeches also averaged 2.4 more words per sentence than Obama, at 19.0.

In other words, the text of George W. Bush’s speeches are expected to be understandable (in written form) by an average sophomore in high school, whereas Obama’s speech should be understandable by a junior high school student.

One could also make a strong argument that adherents to the modern progressive ethos are far less analytical than those of us who adhere to the ‘classic liberal’ school. Modern progressivism is a soundbite philosophy: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorace is Power. There’s no thinking required. Just get into college, get lectured and regurgitate the professor’s lies ad nauseum. That’s the playbook from which very few deviate. Whether in the halls of power, the media or the classroom, no attempt is made to critically analyze the foundations of and irreconcilable internal inconsistencies within the collectivist dogma. Why would they when it’s so much easier to just berate your political and intellectual adversaries with ad hominems and label them every vile insult in the book. Keith Olbermann sums up this approach nicely with his “[i]n short, in Scott Brown we have an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against woman and against politicians with whom he disagrees.”

Your average, stupid 8th-grader understands that. There’s no need to understand why it’s true or not true because it’s so much easier not to. Modern progressive-liberalism is the penultimate expression of lazy thinking, which is literally perfect for the times in which we live today.

The best thing about the tea party movement, for me, is that millions of people who otherwise may never have seen this ethos for what it truly is have taken a profound intellectual interest in understanding what makes people like Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barack Obama tick.

The vast majority of them, I predict, will not like what they see. That is how you build a “permanent” majority.

And does a, surprisingly, decent job of not sucking out loud:

At just past eleven o’clock last Tuesday night, Russell Cote was standing in the gilt-speckled lobby of Boston’s Park Plaza Hotel, a whiskey on the rocks in one hand and a homemade-style Scott Brown for senate sign in the other. Brown, the newly elected U.S. senator for Massachusetts, had just given a rambling but measured victory speech in the upstairs ballroom. Now Cote, a 32-year-old tea-party activist who’d driven from his home in New Jersey to volunteer in Brown’s campaign, was engaged in a more succinct celebration—cocking back his head and sending a boozy howl in the direction of a giant crystal chandelier.

When Cote was done braying, I asked him what it was about Brown that had compelled him to come from Jersey—and his fellow tea-partyers to journey from as far as Hawaii. “Forty-one!” he yelled, “forty-one!”—as in the 41st GOP vote in the Senate that Brown now represents, giving Republicans the ability to filibuster Obama’s health-care legislation, or anything else they desire. But what about Brown himself? Cote was quieter now. “To be honest,” he confessed, “I only know a little about him.”

“Braying”…heh. I like that.

First, the kudos. I was impressed that NY Magazine took the time to fact-check the story. Sometime yesterday I received a Facebook message and then a call back from a pleasant enough, if not somewhat annoyed and mildly condescending young lady who asked all the right questions and, as it turns out, got the facts right. For that, I say ‘well done Molly’.

To the author, Mr. Jason Zengerle, I offer the same. Read the whole piece, as it’s tepidly insightful if not likewise a tad bit supercilious. His thesis is that the ‘tea party movement’, in rallying to Scott Brown, has tempered its otherwise hard line stance on ideological purity and displayed a certain adroitness:

Once considered long on dogmatic passion but short on strategy, the tea-partyers displayed nimbleness and, for the first time, pragmatism.

Now, I for one most certainly haven’t backed off my demand for ideological purity in any given candidacy, but that’s always been on a sliding scale depending on locale. Zengerle, for his part, completely misinterprets NY-23, as so many liberals have, by insisting that “the tea-partyers helped drive her out of the race and, in the process, wound up handing the seat to her erstwhile Democratic opponent (whom she ultimately endorsed) when the third-party candidate they backed proved too right-wing to win.”

That, of course, isn’t even remotely what happened but I’m not going to waste the time explaining that to Jason here. Ok I will. The evidence is overwhelming that had the local GOP stepped up and Dede bowed out in time to have her name removed from the ballot, not to mention had the usual ‘lie, cheat and steal’ Democratic voting philosophy not been in full swing, there isn’t really an argument that Doug Hoffman wouldn’t have made up the roughly 4,000 votes that separated him from Bill Owens.

But liberals misdiagnose, misinterpret and misunderstand pretty much everything, so I won’t lay into Jason here as he’s simply analytically limited by his political persuasion.

The point is that when an otherwise reliably leftist rag like New York Magazine starts offering relatively even-handed and intelligent analysis of the tea party movement, (if not months behind the curve), it means that, at least on a local level, liberals might just be starting to get the idea here that we’re not going away, we believe in what we’re doing and that we can win anywhere.

Far from “Bagging It”, as the title of Jason’s article so ingeniously proclaims, those of us tired of mind-numbing fiscal irresponsibility, outright Congressional fraud and breathtaking arrogance at every level of Government, will continue to march into “every tenement and every hamlet, from every state and every city” until the philosophy of Marx and Mao finally dies the slow, agonizing death it deserves.

So, nice job Jason. I have to warn you though, once your squinting eyes open just wide enough to see the sunlight pouring in through the window…it’s hard to go back to sleep.

What is it?

(via HotAir)

David Brooks is a blithering idiot. Period. Fully aware of sounding like a pompous ass myself, by whatever metric you choose to measure intelligence, I would dust Brooks twice on any topic before breakfast.

And yet, I’m likewise quite certain that I’m not a part of this “educated class”:

The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year.

The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.

The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply.

Every single one of those “ideas” is an incredibly stupid idea both in theory and practice. They are not “educated” ideas; they are “elitist” ideas short on substance but long on the potential for self-congratulatory prowess. “If I believe in them, smart people will think I’m smart!” That’s literally the mindset. Not one of them is defensible in logic, reason or experience and yet half-wits like Brooks repeatedly refer to them as “educated”. Why?

Because David Brooks, like his elitist cohorts on the Left, while being far from “educated” are instead self-conscious children in desperate need of acceptance from their peers. I’ve said it here dozens of times now that Barack Obama, his power structure and the Elitists in the legacy media are not smart, if that word is to have any meaning whatsoever; they’re simply decent speakers or writers of woefully average intelligence who think and therefore believe that they’re ‘smarter’ or more ‘educated’ than you or I. They believe this because their echo chamber reassures them of the superiority of their “educated” ideas. It’s a depressing scenario to observe.

Sometimes I like to think I’m Neptune, God of the Sea…doesn’t make it so:

Personally, I’m not a fan of this movement. But I can certainly see its potential to shape the coming decade.

David Brooks is not a fan of this movement for two reasons: First, he’s deathly afraid of it. That much shines through with every petty attack he’s made over the last eight months.

Second, Brooks is not a fan because he sees a large, popular movement full of people actually smarter than he is who hold and believe in ideas that are diametrically opposed to those of the Elitistated Class. His self-conscious anxiety roars to the surface and he shudders quietly…unable to comprehend why so many people believe differently than does he and his ilk. He rationalizes it the only way he can; it must be because the people in the movement are afraid of him and therefore reflexively rebel against the ideas of his Elitistated Class.

Anyone out there afraid of David Brooks?

To even this critique of Brooks as best I can, I will say that the mere fact that he recognizes the “potential” of the movement to shape the coming decade puts him head and shoulders above the rest of the Elitistated Class.

For that, Brooksie, kudos.

In recognition of the vegetative state in which the Constitutional Republic known as the United States of America presently finds itself. Considering the worldwide ramifications of such a demise, should it come, I’d say four days of mourning is actually a little short…dont’cha think?

Is this really what people think was intended when we ratified the Constitution? Open-air fraud, hundreds of millions of dollars in vote-buying, messianic pronouncements from on high about how we live our daily lives, demonstrable lies told with nary a whiff of conscience and the intentional bankrupting of the public trust? Really?

In retrospect, “audacity” was quite the word choice for Obama’s ghost-written second book, wasn’t it? The audacity of our “leaders” is something stunning to behold. The bold heedlessness of restraints with which the wanna-be despots in charge operate is utterly breathtaking, in my humble opinion. There’s 536 of them, counting the President. There’s 300 million of us. What are we doing?

I know what we’re doing; we’re still respecting the system on our end. We’re assembling, protesting and petitioning our government for a redress of grievances, each of which is a step in the process. The problem is, there seems to be no reciprocal respect on the part of the leadership. I’m not sure the system can survive where one side continues to respect the process while the other side does not. And there can be little argument today that the ‘other side’, in fact, does not.

Everybody knows this, or, at least everybody whose head isn’t lodged squarely in the sand. And I admit that somewhere just shy of half the population of this country is afflicted with that unfortunate condition of head-in-sandness. The question, as always, is what do we do about it.

I am convinced as of this day that the year of our Lord 2010 will be one future historians look back on with the starry-eyed awe of the proverbial kid in a candy store…or, in an updated version of that ‘ol yarn, like a kid who gets an XBox for Christmas.

For now I guess we can only continue to press, continue to contact and continue to rally, but I’m somewhat apprehensive that all of it will be in vain. In the spirit of a new year and a new decade, there is still part of me that believes we can reverse course entirely peacefully and without chaos. But there’s likewise a part of me that sees widespread civil disobedience with far-reaching consequences on the horizon.

My only hope is that the people who still believe in the Exceptionalism of the United States of America as originally conceived are prepared, if that day comes, to do what is necessary.

You have my word…I will be.

No, seriously. (via HotAir)

Dating and social network site BeautifulPeople.com has axed some 5,000 members following complaints that they had gained weight.

The members were singled out after posting pictures of themselves that reportedly showed they had put on pounds over the holiday period.

The site allows entry to new members only if existing members vote them as sufficiently attractive to warrant it.

[…]

As a business, we mourn the loss of any member, but the fact remains that our members demand the high standard of beauty be upheld,” said site founder Robert Hintze.

Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded.”

Kudos Beautiful People.com! No, I’m not kidding. As it appears that nothing has happened in this story…yet…I’m just gonna go off on a preemptive rant here, mm-kay?

Listen up people because I’m only going to say this once; private discrimination on any ground should be perfectly acceptable in a free society. Legally coerced assembly and its synchronal diminution of private property rights is what’s anathema to liberty. It ain’t a club or a website that only lets skinny people in…or one that only lets fat people in for that matter.

And yes folks, that goes for whites, blacks, browns, females, males, trannies, gays, blondes, brunettes, redheads, Asians, Irish, Italians, Swedes, lumberjacks, accountants, sewage treatment plant divers, snake-charmers, lawyers, doctors, hippies, moon people, mermaids and any other characteristic, mutable or immutable, that you can possibly think of.

If you or I own a house, or a business, we are both perfectly within our rights to include and/or exclude anyone on any basis with or without a reason. That is the essential nature of property rights. Without that stick in the bundle there may as well be no property rights at all.

It’s that simple.

Are the blokes over at BeautifulPeople.com a bunch of jerks? Maybe, I couldn’t tell you. Can you hate them for being jerks? Of course you can. Should you have the right to sue if you’re axed from the site because you packed on a few after that 8th crescent roll and nearly drowned in the cranberry sauce? Absolutely not. Get back on the treadmill if you want another crack at membership crybaby.

And trust me folks, this is coming from a guy who can stand to lose 10…at least, and probably 20, optimally.

Get over yourselves people. You ain’t special.

Russ

I’m conflicted on which way to go with this:

As we head into the final stretch on health reform, big insurance company lobbyists and their partisan allies hope that their relentless attacks and millions of dollars can intimidate us into accepting the status quo.

So I have a message for them, from all of us: Not this time. We have come too far. We will not turn back. We will not back down.

But do not doubt — the opponents of reform will not rest. So I need you, the members of Organizing for America, to fight alongside me.

We must continue to build out our campaign — to spread the facts on the air and on the ground, and to bring in more volunteers and train them to join the fight. I urgently need your help to keep Organizing for America’s 50-state movement for reform going strong.

Please donate $5 or whatever you can afford today:

https://donate.barackobama.com/FinalStretch

Let’s win this together,

President Barack Obama

I don’t have a link because the quote is verbatim from an email I got today from Organizing for America-”a project of the Democratic National Committee…not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee”. Know thy enemy. They know you.

I seem to be asking questions in this form a lot these days but, does anyone remember W. sending emails during his tenure flat-out calling 51% of the American public “partisan allies” of big insurance, or relentless intimidators of anything? Look, my conflict starts there because I don’t consider being an “ally” of insurance companies in this fight to kill ObamaCare a bad thing. So in that respect, so what.

On the other hand, it’s pretty clear what he means, ain’t it? By “partisan allies” he means us teabagging, racist, obstructionist, slavery-loving evil-mongers who just won’t get on board the Magic Bus to Wonderland with him.

And he signs these emails. He doesn’t pitch his case, he doesn’t make an argument to fact and he doesn’t engage in any of the vaunted egghead ideals of debate and discussion on the merits/demerits of health care reform.

Nah. We’re all just “partisan allies” of big insurance. For shame people.

Listen to that language again:

So I have a message for them, from all of us: Not this time. We have come too far. We will not turn back. We will not back down.

Hear that folks? The 41% of voters with their knives and pitchforks at the ready are not gonna turn back now. They sure as hell ain’t backing down. All of them.

Them’s fightin’ words where I come from.

If you haven’t already…gear up.

Dr. Walid Phares, (learn his name), director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and author of “The Confrontation: Winning the War against Future Jihad”, has a post at the Counter Terrorism blog about the inevitable counter-counter terrorism strategy of the Taliban now that they know we’ll be out sooner than later:

The jihadi war room is now aware that the administration has narrowed its scope to defeat the so-called al-Qaida organization while limiting its goal to depriving the Taliban from achieving full victory, i.e. depriving them “from the momentum.” In strategic wording this means that the administration won’t give the time and the means, let alone the necessary long term commitment to fully defeat the Taliban as a militia and militant network.

Yup, that’s exactly what it means.

Can anyone else think of another time in American military history where our plan has been so carefully laid out for the enemy? Now I get the fact that nobody in the administration seems to have a coherent answer themselves as to how etched in stone the 18-month pullout really is, but does anyone think for a second that the semantics of that plan make a lick of difference to the Taliban? These people have been fighting this fight for 1300 years…they can wait 19 or 20 months:

By the time the US deadline to withdraw would be reached, in 2011, 2012, or even beyond, the future forces of the enemy will be ready to be deployed. One wave of terrorists will be weakened by the action of the U.S. and NATO armed forces, while the next wave will be prepared to take over later.

[...]

As many analysts have concluded, all the jihadists war planners have to do is to wait out the hurricane of escalation. The deadly deadline proposed in the strategy has no precedent in the history of confrontation with totalitarian forces. The Taliban waited out eight years, what are two, three or eight more years, if the U.S.-led coalition’s action is not qualitatively (not just quantitatively) different?

This is the point I don’t think our collective military and defense apparatus has quite yet gotten. They’re not constrained by Western politics in their fight. They don’t have to worry about election cycles and popular sentiment. Their goal is crystal clear and their will is unbreakable.

We are, we do and ours is not.

I don’t have the answer here by any stretch of the imagination. All I know is that despite Gen. McChrystal’s passionate belief that he can get the job done in 18 months, the fact remains that the Taliban have no immediate plans of ceasing fire or abandoning their goal.

Now, again, I hope I’m wrong. I hope McChrystal is the brilliant military strategist many think he is and that he has a plan to both significantly disrupt their ability to recruit and reload and train enough committed Afghans to keep it that way when we do eventually leave. I really hope so. But people like Walid Phares understand our enemy better than most people at the Pentagon and he’s not so optimistic:

In a nutshell, the new strategy is convenient to that Taliban war room: They now can figure it all out until the Mayan year of 2012 — and way beyond.

All that it takes for democracies to offer the totalitarians victories is to not understand the latter’s long-term goals. And we’ve just done that, so far.

So far.