The Smoke Break

You want some brie with that whine?

The Democrats’ Dilemma

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“If you voted for Obama in ’08 to prove you were not a bigot,
vote for anyone else in ’12 to prove your not an idiot.”
(Comment at FOX News website)

This weekend’s FOX News poll asks the question:  Could Obama Face Rival for Democratic Nomination?  But the real question is SHOULD he?

In his Saturday address, a few hard-core Kool-Aid drinkers and the media hacks paid to listen heard the obvious:  “You’ve got a right to be frustrated. I am. Because you deserve better. I don’t think it’s too much for you to expect that the people you send to this town start delivering.”

What President Lame Duck conveniently forgets to mention is that HE is one of the “people” sent to Washington and voters expected HIM to deliver.  And to deliver better; more than just petulant, divisive snarking and pointing fingers and admonitions to eat our peas while he and Marie…errr…Michelle spend our tax money on Waygu beef and vacation after vacation.  The people who voted for him expected that his ability to orate off a teleprompter was a result of having real-world leadership abilities; they didn’t expect things like a budget so far out in left field even the most progressive liberal entitlement-mentality derangement syndrome Democrats couldn’t find a way to hold their noses to vote for it.

So now, after growing the deficit faster in two years than G.W. did in eight and unemployment refusing to budge no matter how much phantom “shovel-ready” is thrown at it, we are being told that very same 9+% unemployment is really the equivalent of jobs; apparently because in the Ivy League bubble-land of unicorns and fairy dust money earned by one person and given to another to spend on necessities is still money earned and spent; even though there is no multiplier in the equation and so this merely maintains a consumption status quo simply by saying it is so it magically creates “growth”.

The American people aren’t stupid.  That kind of “new math” only proves the growing suspicion that public education ain’t what it’s cracked up to be.

Any Democrat who can still harbor a tiny shred of self-respect should see the writing on the wall.  It’s not the Tea Party pointing out the serious economic and Constitutional problems in this country and insisting on grown-up, real-world solutions that is the problem here, it’s that their Chosen One who has failed them.  Rather spectacularly, I might add.

If they were smart they’d give Obama a cardigan and a primary challenger.

Happy Birthday, America

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Beloved Republic and mankind’s greatest experiement in allowing ordinary people to demonstrate the true length and breadth of their personal potential, in short order you proved the Founders correct in their optimism. 

Yet at the same time, as fighting breaks out over the Constitutionality of the debt ceiling, federal bailout after federal bailout and the individual mandate of Obamacare, with career politicians fattened on the tax payments of those ordinary people leading the charge to discard that precious document as being somehow “naive” or “out of touch”, our Pantywaist In Chief prefers to indulge in his predilection for golf and the race card and proves the Founders correct in their greatest fears.

 In his first inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson wisely admonished that America must “…pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter–with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens–a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.”

How far we’ve come since Jefferson felt the need to lay out such clear warning.  There is no need to lay out the ever-lengthening laundry list of crimes against those once self-evident truths that have been perpetuated on a daily basis over the last 3/4 of a century by tragic, frightened little souls who harbor no goal but that of replacing King George.  The question we now face on this, the 235th birthday of the most powerful nation in the history of this world, is do enough of us remember the great gift we were given and are we strong enough wrest it back again?

If I have one wish for America today, it is that the answer is yes.

God bless America.

Why A “Third Palestinian Intifada” Is Immoral & Just Plain Wrong

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Time for a little history lesson as the Middle East continues to burn unchecked and Arab Palestinians swarm social media sites like Facebook to rally other anti-Semites to attack Israel again; prompted by a liberal’s recent cruel blathering that “EVERYTHING that is wrong w/U.S. Mideast Policy falls at the feet of our blind support for Israel; a nation created by stealing from others and founded upon lessons not learned in the Holocaust.”

 There were no such issues nor anyone called a “Palestinian” prior to the end of WWI when the Turks, by their association with Germany, lost the war.  The southern portion of their Ottoman Empire was “mandated” to France and Britain under the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916 which assigned (“mandated”) Lebanon and Syria to France and assigned “Palestine” (today’s Jordan, Israel and “West Bank”) to Great Britain, who liked the idea of having Palestine be the national Jewish homeland.   (Note that to be “Palestinian” meant one could be either Arab or Jew and both were living across this entire area without problems.)

 In 1923 came GB’s administrative mandate that Jews would be permitted only west of the Jordan river.  In effect, GB “chopped off” 75% of the originally proposed Jewish Palestinian homeland to form an Arab Palestinian nation called Trans-Jordan (renamed “Jordan” in 1946).  Bottom line:  the Palestinian Arabs now had their very own “Arab Palestinian” homeland while the remaining 25% of west of the Jordan River would be the Jewish Palestinian homeland.

 But this wasn’t enough for the Arabs and those who were living in the Jewish Palestine went on the offensive.  Witness the Hebron massacres of 1929 and later the 1936-39 “Arab Revolt.” GB gave up on the whole thing and turned the matter over to the U.N. in 1947 and they decided to settle things by proposing Resolution 181, which essentially gave more of the original 25% of Jewish Palestine to the Arabs based on population concentrations.  The Jews agreed but the Arabs rejected it, wanting the entire original 25%.

 Israel was then officially “born” on May 14, 1948 and on May 15, 1948, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Yemen together invaded Israel. Most of the Arabs living within the boundaries of the newly born country were encouraged to leave by the invading Arab armies to facilitate the slaughter of the Jews and were promised all Jewish property after the Arab armies won the war.  They left because it made (sick) sense:  let someone else do the dirty work and come back later to claim the spoils.

 But 19 months later, their calculated risk to leave turned out to be a bad idea.  It cost Israel a full 1% of its entire population but they won the war.  The Arabs who did not leave are today’s Israeli-Arab citizens; those who chose to leave in hopes of later gains were the first wave of “Palestinian Arab refugees.”  At the end of it all, what remained of that almost-created second Arab Palestinian State ended up with Egypt occupying the Gaza Strip and Trans-Jordan occupying Judea-Samaria (a.k.a. the “West Bank” of the Jordan River) and Jerusalem. In the next year (1950) Trans-Jordan formally merged this West Bank territory into itself and granted all those “Palestinian” Arabs living there Jordanian citizenship.  Since Trans-Jordan was then no longer confined to one side of the Jordan River, it renamed itself simply “Jordan.”  The bottom line here is that the Arabs of Palestine ended up with nearly 85% of the original territory of Palestine; now called Jordan but in reality a little more than their original share, the ARAB Palestine.

 Now consider this:  From 1949-67, when all of Judea-Samaria (the West Bank and Jerusalem} and Gaza were 100% under Arab (Jordanian & Egyptian) control, no effort was EVER made to create a second Palestinian State for the Arabs living there.  It is laughable to say Israel should now provide these same Arabs with their own country when their fellow Arabs failed to do so.

 This is apparently because the Arabs had other plans for in 1967 the Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian armies mobilized along Israel’s narrow and seemingly indefensible borders in preparation for a massive invasion to eliminate her. The battle cry heard throughout the Arab world was then, as it continues to be, “Slaughter the Jews” and “Throw the Jews into the Sea!”  How embarrassing that once again, but only six days later, Israel won this war, too, and in doing so gained the entire Sinai Peninsula.  Through their own actions, the Arab losers became simply more “Palestinian Arab refugees”.

 It makes no sense to to me, but in 1982 Israel gave the rich Sinai Desert back to Egypt.

 And so the nonsense from the Arab side continues.  The best way I have heard this put is that the so-called “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” is essentially, “In many ways an Islamic religious jihad against the Jews.”

 So spare me any sop about Israeli “persecution” and Jewish “understanding”.  If anything, the Jews have been far too soft in the face of this Arab insanity.  Insanity now spreading around the internet like wildfire with calls for a Third Palestinian Intifada on May 15, 2011.

Unnecessary Services?

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If a government shutdown includes only “unnecessary services” (military pay not included), why does it take 800,000 people to perform them and why don’t we just cut them permanently?

That’s the question that kept running through my mind as our unrepresenting representatives in Congress through cat turds at each other in the Washington sandbox this week.  The left-wingnuts got their panties in a wad over the thought of properly defunding Planned Parenthood; Representative Louise Slaughter went so far as to accuse the GOP of being out to kill women.  President Walking Eagle slipped and showed enormous transparency when he called a bill intended to fund only the military through the rest of the year and thereby get that concern off the table a “distraction” – are you listening, beloved servicemen and women?  Your Commander In Chief values entitlements to his voting block more than he does your willingness to lay your lives on the line in defense of his freedom to make an idiot out of himself.  Again.  He is so concerned about what the wacks in the U.N. who hate the United States think he’s willing to illegally send you into Libya but doesn’t see caring for you as worthy of his attention.  Only his veto.

Shameful doesn’t even begin to cover it.

The Shariah “Revolution” Comes Out Of The Closet

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I find it more than a little offensive that in doing a bit of research before posting this piece I find next to no mention of this upcoming nonsense from any of the lamestream media outlets.  Such silence speaks volumes about how we as a society have become so open-minded our brains have fallen out.

“The event is a rally, a call for the Sharia, a call for the Muslims to rise up and establish the Islamic state in America.”  (Anjem Choudary, leader of the extremist group, Islam4UK, which is banned in Great Britain)

Accompanying this wack Choudary, who would dare to stand on American soil and on March 3rd condemn the very freedoms that allow such a dirty and unholy piece of work to promote seditious activity, is Abu Izzadeen, convicted of inciting terrorism in Great Britain and Sayful Islam.

“We hereby call upon the Muslims in the US, particularly in New York, Michigan, Chicago and Washington DC to take lessons from their Muslim brothers and sisters in North Africa and the Middle East and rise to implement the Shari’ah in America.

“On 3rd March 2011 From 1pm to 4pm (local time), at Pennsylvania Avenue, outside the White House, the Muslims will let the tyrant Barack Obama and the American people know that a new constitution beckons the US called the Shari’ah, and that this worldwide revolution will see it implemented inshaa’allah (God willing) very very soon.”

Since there have been no reports that these jihadists have been denied entry into the country, it appears that President Walking Eagle must be hoping for a little of that old Chris Matthews tingle by way of Choudary repeating last year’s 9/11 antics when he led protesters in burning the American flag outside the U.S. embassy in London.  Maybe he figures a little beer summit can overcome the name-calling, too?

Progressives’ Last Stand?

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You can’t miss what’s been going on in Madison, Wisconsin.  The media is all over the union protests against Governor Walker’s budget proposal that asks for public sector union contributions to their above-average benefits and the so-called birthplace of the American progressive movement now appears to be where liberalism finally begins to die.

And to that, dear readers, I can naught but say, “Good riddance”.

We here at Smoke Break are just average Americans.  I have personally worked for the same company for almost 28 years and since the start of the Obamanable Administration have taken a 5% pay cut while paying more for my health insurance each year.  Once upon a time I had money accruing in a company pension but that went by the wayside many years ago in favor of the more fashionable (and personally responsible) 401k, towards which my company has not always matched my own contributions but I have continued to save for my own retirement anyway.  Despite these things, along with the continuing rise in the basic cost of living, I have continued to faithfully pay on my now-underwater mortgage and continue to shy away from the accumulation of personal debt.

I do these things because they are the right things to do.  Certainly I have other options and certainly I have weighed them but my choice today is to stay put, keep giving 110%, and use my dollars and the ballot box to vote in favor of those things that made this country great; spending my money at companies who operate fairly and honestly by their own choice and supporting Constitution-adhering goverment representatives by my votes.

I don’t pay taxes at the local, state or federal level in order for those who make the choice to work in the public sector – to “serve” – to waste that money clammering for more than what I, who pay their salaries, have myself.  Truth be told, if we held our government to its intended role, we wouldn’t need half of those public sector employees at all.  And we certainly don’t need teachers dragging their students to protests, teaching them that lying about being sick is ok and that democracy is only good when your party has the majority and can make up the rules to suit themselves as they go along. 

And gods know we don’t need the doctors who have stepped into the fray and are outright lying to support the lies of the protesters.  This is unethical and every one of them should be heavily sanctioned, if not lose their medical license for how can they ever again be trusted? 

Doctors from numerous hospitals set up a station near the Capitol to provide notes to explain public employees’ absences from work. Family physician Lou Sanner, 59, of Madison, said he had given out hundreds of notes. Many of the people he spoke with seemed to be suffering from stress, he said.

“What employers have a right to know is if the patient was assessed by a duly licensed physician about time off of work,” Sanner said. “Employers don’t have a right to know the nature of that conversation or the nature of that illness. So it’s as valid as every other work note that I’ve written for the last 30 years.”

Stress, my ass.  I stress every month when I sit down to pay the bills but I don’t fake being sick in order to rail against the company that pays me to work for them.  In the real world, exactly how long would THAT last?

Even President Walking Eagle has been able to figure out you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.  He supports the unions, because they take member dues and use them to elect Democrats.

Which is why Wisconsin now has a Republican governor and GOP majority legislature.  It’s just too bad that GOP majority isn’t quite enough to pass Governor Walker’s budget without their fleebagging Democrat counterparts present.

Lessons Of Two Evils

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The following two pieces bear sharing in their entirety.  They make the current situation in Egypt quite clear and so I find myself at a loss for words to describe the disappointment and even the despair with which I have been viewing the Obamanable Adminstration’s push to reward Islamic jihadists at the cost of what will surely be a great many innocent lives.

Salim’s article has also put into perspective something I’ve been trying to get my head around for a while now.  The family who runs a local smoke shop here are Catholic immigrants from Iraq, naturalized American citizens who cherish the foundations of this beloved country and one evening the youngest sister and I were loosely discussing politics and terrorism.  She shared with me some of the horrors of the first-hand accounts they had received about the attack last October on Our Lady of Salvation Chaldean Catholic cathedral in Baghdad and then said something that, at the time, I thought a bit odd.  That despite the evils that accompanied his dictatorship, the one thing Saddam Hussein had done right was to keep religious peace in Iraq and Catholics, like their family, had always felt safe and free to worship.  After his removal, this protection ceased and so it is that so many Christians have fled the country; literally fleeing for their lives.

I’m certainly no fan of dictators but when, as Salim points out below, “there is an absence of a culture that embraces and supports individual freedom” then until such a culture develops one must choose between the lesser of two evils.  And it is abundantly clear that the Muslim Brotherhood has never been and is not now the lesser.  With its ties to violence from the start – from embracing Sharia law to underground work with the Nazis and implication in the assassination of Prime Minister Mahmud Fahmi Nokrashi, the attempted assassination of Prime Minister Gamal Abdel Nasser and the assassination of President Anwar El Sadat with numerous untold murders in between – its original credo that “Allah is our objective; the Quran is our constitution, the Prophet is our leader; Jihad is our way; and death for the sake of Allah is the highest of our aspirations” makes the claim that members should use non-violent means to achieve its ends merely sheep’s clothing.

It is abundantly clear the Obamanable Administration has an inordinate fondness for sheep.  Such fondness now puts all of us in peril.

So now, the articles. 

By SALIM MANSUR, QMI Agency

Last Updated: February 5, 2011 2:00am

 History lessons are useful, and when events are in flux it is the past that can shed light on what the future might hold.

 Autocracies, as I have indicated in recent columns, have shelf life. But there are caveats in any generalization, and the shelf life of any particular autocracy could get extended beyond its expiry date.

 The current crisis in Egypt erupted with surprising speed for President Hosni Mubarak. The public demonstrations demanding an end to his 30-year rule has undermined him and very likely, as he has himself indicated, will end his presidency.

 But the Egyptian state over which Mubarak has presided since Oct. 6, 1981 — the terrible day when President Anwar Sadat was gunned down by soldiers with links to the terrorist offsprings of the Muslim Brotherhood — remains more or less intact.

 Mubarak’s Egypt, in the language of political science, fits the description of the authoritarian-bureaucratic state in which military officers and civilian technocrats hold the commanding heights of the economy and security.

 Mubarak, as president, is only the third public face of an Egypt that emerged out of the military coup of July 1952, which overthrew the monarchy established in 1805.

 The man behind the coup was Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser, and on his demise in 1970, succeeded by Sadat, followed by Mubarak on Sadat’s death.

 Egypt is the Arab world’s largest Sunni Muslim state and, hence, a balancing power since 1979 to Shiite Iran’s regional ambitions. Al-Azhar, the mosque-university in Cairo, is also Sunni Islam’s highly respected centre of religious authority.

 The internal foe of the Egyptian state is the Muslim Brotherhood. A political movement founded in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna, the Brotherhood has sought to merge its jihad-based ideology with mainstream Sunni belief expounded by Al-Azhar.

 Since Nasser’s crackdown on the Brotherhood and execution of some leaders, such as Sayyid Qutb, the movement has worked hard to adapt to changing circumstances even as it consolidated its relationship with and financial support from Saudi rulers.

 What remains unchanged is the Brotherhood’s goal of establishing a Sunni theocracy, and support for its affiliates in the region, such as Hamas in Gaza, towards achieving similar end.  In the long history of Egypt, and in the Arab world, there is an absence of a culture that embraces and supports individual freedom. Arab politics has no example of an individual such as Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela or Vaclav Havel with unquestionable credentials of a democrat and a liberal providing leadership for a democratic alternative.

 It is also ironic that the traditional doctrine of Sunni Islam taught in Al-Azhar gives preference to order — even when order is despotic as it has been in Muslim history — over anarchy.

The misfortune of Egyptians is to be squeezed between the military’s iron fist and the Brotherhood’s ideology. In such circumstances, it is a delusion to expect democracy to sprout unattended in the desert of Arab autocracy without self-sacrificing leaders to prepare the grounds.

 Egypt survived the immense ignominy of defeat in the June 1967 war with Israel and Sadat’s murder. It will likely ride the present crisis, and this is not to be decried when the alternative is Muslim Brotherhood acquiring power.

 salim.mansur@sunmedia.ca
 

A Moving Letter from Salim Mansur

Claire Berlinski, Ed. · 12 hours ago

Salim Mansur sent me the link to his latest column about Egypt. It is excellent, but what struck me even more was the note he sent me with it. I asked his permission to publish it, which he kindly granted me. 

Dear Claire:

Below is my column from today on Egypt. Since I do not have an opportunity to write in public more than one column per week, I am limited to what I can say. Extremely distressed by the crew in Washington, and in most European capitals. Media is so corrupted by left-leaning thinking that there is not much of an analysis to be expected in the media that is now competing with facebook, twitters, etc. The dumbing down of thinking is itself a huge problem the West is facing now as it tries pathetically to undertstand/explain politics and history of other cultures when it no longer has faith in its own civilizational values. I despair, and so I follow Samuel Pepys who confined himself to his diaries while London burned and I am trying to devote my time to reading and writing of my own (that of course I might not be able to publish, and even if published few will read).

I am more convinced now, as I wasn’t when Paul Kennedy wrote about the rise and fall of great powers, that the West has gone over the tipping point in its terminal decline. That intelligent people, or people who claim to be intelligent, (I have in mind the talking heads in the U.S. media such as Chris Matthews or Fareed Zakaria) cannot make the difference between the sham of the Muslim Brotherhood talking about freedom and democracy and the generic thirst in man to be free. These are the people who have like the Bourbons learned nothing and forgotten nothing. They are glibly about to put the Lenins of our time into trains heading for Moscows of our time, they find nothing odd that they are pushing for the Muslim Brotherhood to be taken into governing when everything needs to be done to keep the Muslim Brotherhood out even as one carefully negotiate the long historic transition of Arab societies from tribal autorcracy and military dictatorships to representative rule and constitutionally limited government. I read you when I can, and I wish that you and others like you were closer to the main media control in the West, or in government.

Take care, and God bless.

Salim

For what it’s worth, my response:

Dear Salim:

We’ve entered into advanced insanity now. It’s casually noted by the endlessly babbling talking heads that yes, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership has said it would tear up the peace treaty with Israel, but really, worrying about that just shows that all one cares about is Israel. Does it occur to no one that in an Israeli-Egyptian war (my God, just typing that is so horrible), it is not just Jews who would die? And that indeed, the very logic of the anti-Israeli propaganda so often advanced — that casualties in such violence fall disproportionately upon Israel’s adversaries — suggest what this would mean for the very Egyptian people these nitwits claim to care about so deeply?

I do Muay Thai as a hobby, and my gym is full of young Turkish boys of about draft age. Lovable kids, full of themselves and bravado and youth and life and good health. Muslims all, of course. Cheerfully accommodating the middle-aged Jewish American woman in their midst who unaccountably seems eager to do such an unlikely sport. It’s Egyptian boys of about the same age, all young and just as full of sweet puppyish life, who would be sent to fight a war that the Ikhwan is now loudly telling the world it craves. They would die in the tens of thousands before ever having a chance to go to school, fall in love, raise a family. Like young boys have always died in wars these wicked old fools somehow always survive. To point this out is now Ikwhanophobic, in the newly-coined term, and I did not imagine that a word could annoy me even more than “Islamophobic,” but I suppose life always has the capacity to surprise us.

Warmly,

Claire

The Week That Wasn’t

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A tragedy unfolded in Arizona last Saturday.  The kind of tragedy that gives grown-ups pause to remember, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”  The kind of tragedy that causes adolescents to point the finger in order to avoid facing the reality that one way or another they, too, are someday going to die.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the lamestream media.  Once word got out that Representative Giffords and others had been shot, media hacks from coast to coast dropped their Kool-Aid-filled sippy cups and any semblance of maturity or self-control and began to slip and slide in their drool as they frantically tripped over each other trying to be the first to get the scoop.  And so despite that the shooting happened around 10:15 a.m. it wasn’t until nearly 2:45 p.m. any news outlet correctly reported Giffords was not dead.

It was one of journalism’s lowest, most pathetic and disgustingly revolting points in recent memory. 

I read story after story in search of facts I knew could unfold but slowly; what I found most telling were the comments from obviously progressive liberals and Obamabots who glommed onto the Soros-backed reporting to loudly and most often crudely blame any and everyone right of center for the actions of one lone lunatic.

How quickly they forget what doesn’t fit their divisive, hateful paradigm.  Much venom was ironically spewed about the GOP and the right allegedly inciting violence with their political rhetoric, but here is just a taste of the inconvenient truth:

December 13, 2004, DLC’s Blueprint Magazine presents its “targeting” strategy: 

  

“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” (Barack Obama, 6/14/2008)

 

  

“I want you to argue with them and get in their face.” (Barack Obama, 9/17/2008)

 “We don’t mind the Republicans joining us.  They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.”
(Barack Obama, 10/25/10)

 

For a more comprehensive look at what the progressive left considers “civil political rhetoric”, Michelle Malkin posted a hefty list of left-wing hate…errr…free speech spanning the last decade.  She’s also posted a nice little primer outlining the left’s attacks on itself.   Attacks that, of course, in the “for thee but not for me” bubble world of progressives have nothing to do with the rhetoric of the left.

As for the shooter:

Jared Lee Loughner has what was described as strange and unpleasant face-to-fact contact with Rep. Giffords (2007).

Loughner is rejected for military service (December 2008; reasons undisclosed but suspected as related to drug use).

Loughner is registered as an Independent but does not vote in the 2010 mid-term elections.

Loughner’s favorite books are stated to include Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto. (YouTube, MySpace; 1/8/11)

Loughner’s mother works for the Pima County Board of Supervisors (DHS, 1/10/11)

Loughner has a rap sheet showing multiple arrests but no criminal record (DHS, 1/10/11)

A safe at Loughner’s home contained a form letter from Ms. Giffords’ office thanking him for attending a 2007 “Congress on your Corner” event in Tucson, an envelope with handwritten notes, including the name of Ms. Giffords, as well as “I planned ahead,” “My assassination,” and what appeared to be his signature (FBI affidavit, 1/10/11)

None of this makes any difference to the left, however.  The week has been filled with pompous rantings that continue to lay the blame everywhere except where it truly belongs:  on insane Jared Lee Loughner.  Even the memorial service held at the University of Arizon was a cringe-inducing sham; when did it become fashionable to hand out rah-rah t-shirts to attendees and when did respect come to include booing the governor but scream and cheer and throw those t-shirts around when the president snidely chides the nation about the nasty rhetoric that marked his own campaign and continues to mark his presidential tenure even though, according to him, it had nothing to do with the deaths of those he was allegedly there to honor?  His “announcement” about Gabrielle Gifford opening her eyes, couched in calculated but stereotypical messiahnic self-aggrandizement, was flat-out embarrassing.

And exactly was that moronic statement about aligning your values with your actions, anyway?  Seems to me that’s exactly what the left has done and it’s only created more and more divisiveness.

I felt so sorry for the families of the victims.  Well, at least the ones who hadn’t ridden there on the bash-righty bandwagon.

Quotes From Your Children?

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While there is great beauty in the freedom of expression allowed by the internet, it also shows the ugliness depths to which our society has degenerated as encouraged by the hypocrisy of the progressive ideology.

The following is a series of Twitter posts made after last weekend’s tragic shooting spree in Arizona.  WARNING:   it is graphic.

Freedom of speech may be a right, but it does not automatically grant the moral grounds to call for someone else’s death.  I would hope that if you know any of these people or if you know their parents, you tell them in no uncertain terms that this kind of  behavior is completely unacceptable and has consequences.  (For example, were any of them my employee, they would find themselves without a job.) 

Harry Reid Intends To Make Your Vote Irrelevant

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I hope the GOP has some armored cajones and a few hidden IEDs to take down this one.

Harry (the Grinch) Reid, circa 2008, on the thought of Republicans changing the rules of the Senate to create a simple majority requirement to break a filibuster:

“What the Republicans came up with was a way to change our country forever,” Reid stated. “We would in fact have a unicameral legislature where a simple majority would determine everything that happens … the Senate was set up to be different. That was the genius, the vision, of our Founding Fathers.”

Harry (the Grinch) Reid, on the eve of the arrival of that shellacking 112th Congress:

“…Reid held a closed-door meeting last week in which he said he may by a simple majority change the rules, including Rule 22, on the first day of the 112th Congress.”