Arizona elections

Ok, enough of those committing crimes! When the hell will real law enforcement officers actually start holding real criminals responsible? This is not a Maricopa County problem, this is not an Arizona problem, this is a National Security problem that affects our entire country. I… https://t.co/wsl64a6VCJ

— LTG (R) Mike Flynn (@GenFlynn) February 24, 2023

You're Welcome

It appears that some people have an issue with this tongue-in-cheek post from yesterday. 

Colorado killer, James Holmes, ties to academia

A young man who recently dropped out of the University of Colorado is the deranged killer of a dozen people in a movie theater in Colorado early this morning.

It is unclear at this point if he was motivated by President Obama's campaign rhetoric to hit back twice as hard, the poisonous atmosphere of ideological Leftism that influences university students, was a member of the Occupy movement or if he simply didn't like another Batman movie. One thing we know for sure, despite the desire of George Stephanopolis and Brain Ross of ABC News to blame the Tea Party, the killer, James Holmes, was not a member of that broad middle class movement. Instead, he seems to have been a perpetual student and part of ABC's audience.

So I looked at it and I am amazed to find that it meets pretty much all the standards of a professional journalist.

What is there to disagree with?   Let's analyze it:

James Holmes is a killer …. in Colorado.  Check.

Age 24 makes him a young man.  Check.

He has ties to academia?  It’s a safe bet that he’s been going to one school or another since he was 6 years old and the University of Colorado confirmed his status.  Many, many news stories tie a person’s identity to their occupation, their hobbies or avocation, something I’m doing here.   Check.

Was he deranged?  Too early to tell, so I may have to offer a retraction (a la Brian Ross) on this one.

Like other members of the media, it’s almost incumbent upon us to speculate on his motivation.  But instead of choosing the usual MSM talking points I chose my own.  Note how Sarah Palin was accused of motivating the murderer who shot Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others in Tucson.  Using the exact same lack of evidence I have every right to speculate that the eliminationist rhetoric of Obama, the pervasive Leftist indoctrination of academia, the often violent Occupy movement or the movie itself motivated Holmes.  It’s waaaay too late to take the Palin smear back.  The aggressor sets the rules in combat and these are the rules that apply.   Check.

Despite the efforts of ABC to smear the Tea Party and tie them to this murderer, we know it’s not true.  We KNOW that because the Holmes they tagged as a Tea party member is not the killer.  Check.

It appears that in the 24 years of his life he’s always been a student so we can call him a perpetual student.  Check.

And finally, we have a high degree of confidence that anyone who has ever watched TV in their lives has viewed programs on the ABC network.  Check.

So far I would classify my analysis as having much more basis in fact than the proven lies disseminated by ABC and Brian Ross.

You’re welcome.

Ariz. seeks online donations to build border fence

Doing the job the feds don't want to do.

So far  33,921 have donated $1,566,278.00

"You are dead!"

Is issuing death threats - shouted to the person being threatened - in a public forum the sort of thing that President Obama should condemn?



What will Paul Krugman say?

It's Magic

The technique of stage magic is misdirection. And Obama is a master of it. Example: the Tucson speech. A speech in which he said that political rhetoric was not the cause of the murders, but then spent the rest of the speech talking about political rhetoric.

Reading about parts of Obama’s speech, I was puzzled by the accolades it got from the Right. He gave them three words: “It did not,” (and they were not even in the written version of his speech) and they were ecstatic. Without those words, the entire speech could be read as an indictment of Conservative political rhetoric as the root cause of the rampage. After being pummeled by the Left for generations, the Stockholm Syndrome is alive and well among Conservative pundits. They need …they want … they desperately desire validation from the Left, and Obama is Leftist in Chief.

Byron York has an excellent analysis of this in the Washington Examiner.  After stating that political rhetoric was not responsible for the shooting ...

...the president couldn't very well use the shootings as the premise for a national conversation about the tone of political debate, could he? Yes, he could. It might seem like a stretch -- even to a calculating Democratic strategist -- for Obama to portray Jared Loughner's insanity as the proper starting point for a national debate about civility in politics. Yet that is what he did.

And employing a tactic that in a less sentimental atmosphere would have been seen as breathtakingly cynical, Obama enlisted Christina Taylor Green, the nine year-old girl killed in the shootings, to support his cause. "She saw [politics] through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often take just for granted," Obama said. "I want to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us -- we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations."

How can America live up to Christina's expectations? According to Obama, by making sure that her death "helps usher in more civility in our public discourse…because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make [the victims] proud." In other words: Christina would have wanted us to tone down the rhetoric. The calculating Democratic strategist would have been very, very happy.

According to the Left, the shootings should not spur a national debate over the detection and treatment of the mentally ill, internet gaming, the conspiracy movie Zeitgeist or books by Hitler or Marx – all of which have ties to Loughner. No, the debate should be about shutting down the voices on the Right, voices that he never heard, not even through the fillings in his teeth.

That’s a pretty good trick.

UPDATE: It turns out that one of the people Loughner shot is also a violent Leftist nut.

Another Madman Firing Indiscriminately

Click on the LINK.

Jared Lee Loughner and "privileged discourse."

Something has been nagging me in the back of my mind. Where – this side of sanity – would you expect to hear the question: 'What is government if words have no meaning?'

It’s the question Jared Loughner posed to Gabrielle Giffords at a meeting in 2007. Then I read this at Small Dead Animals … it was an “aha” moment.   Of course; the faculty lounge in the English (or "Fill in the Blank Studies”) Department of any university.

Jared Lee Loughner, appears to be insane. But if we are going there, let's go the full distance: He appears to be an atheist Nietzschean enthusiast for the Communist Manifesto whose obsession with language resembles the PC fixation on "privileged discourse." So let's try to stick to the facts.

What about another Loughner quote:

[I’m]…talking about the kind of existentialist chaos that exists in our own lives and our inability to overcome the sense of alienation and frustration we experience when we try to create bonds of intimacy and solidarity with one another…

I kid, I kid.

That’s a quote from Cornel West that I found at the top of a Google search of famous quotes by West.

Here is John Derbyshire on West's book Race Matters:

... it was just so badly written and constructed that you couldn't tell what it was trying to say. You could have scissored that book up into its constituent words, rearranged them in random order, printed the result as another book, and not been able to tell the difference.

I am totally confident that if you provided the Loughner question to any modern English professor and told him or her that the quote was by West (I'm not picking on West, he's the first verbose whackjob that came to mind), they would give you an interpretation that is anything other than the meaningless mental meanderings of a nut. In that respect, the modern academy is much like the emperor in the fable with the wonderful new clothes, they will see something if it validates their ego.

It's another thing they can't stand about Sarah Palin; she calls BS where she finds it.

Pat Caddell: NY Times columnist Krugman ‘a flat-out asshole’

From Small Dead Animals (one of my favorite sites)

Pat Caddell is a lifelong Democrat. He is a public opinion pollster & adviser who worked for Democrat presidential candidates Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden, George McGovern, Gary Hart, and Jerry Brown. His credentials on the Left side of the political aisle are rock solid.

But he is also a man of principle and a proud American who only wants the best for his country.

So he called Paul Krugman an asshole.

The Daily Caller:

On Fox News Channel’s Friday airing of “Red Eye,” host Greg Gutfeld wondered if the media were in denial over the notion it had little to do with the actions of Jared Loughner, the suspect in the recent Tucson, Ariz. shooting.

“Here’s an interesting point — as the truth comes out about this nutcase, doesn’t it seem like the media can’t believe that the killer doesn’t care about them?” Gutfeld asked. “It’s like they think they had an impact on him, when in fact all he cares about is UFOs.”

That led Caddell to launch into a rant about the media, specifically naming New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman and Newsweek and Daily Beast columnist Jonathan Alter.

“[T]he point is – you know, this thing started – I have to say, when I look at [Paul] Krugman and Jonathan Alter, with his advice and the president, ‘Don’t let this go to waste – let’s make it like Oklahoma City,’ and Krugman who is just a flat-out asshole, I’m sorry – these people what they did…”

Once More unto the Breach of Civility

David Kahane at National Review gets the tone exactly right. 

Who’s to blame for Tucson? Why, Sarah Palin and you, of course.




Like many of us stalwart men of the Progressive-Media-Entertainment Complex, I have never been so beamish. As the president explained so eloquently Wednesday night, what happened in Tucson was a tragedy and all, but watching the wild-eyed Nobel laureate, Paul Krugman, pin the Glock on the elephant in the pages of the New York Times was simply wonderful. Based on nothing more than the loud voices coming through the fillings in his teeth, our bearded, pot-bellied superhero leapt into action the day after the Tucson shootings and started pointing the finger of blame where it always belongs: at Sarah Palin and the “climate of hate” she has brought down from Mystery, Alaska, to torment us here in the Lower 48. Naturally, a few of you protested that there was no actual evidence that the hated succubus who haunts our fever dreams and saps our purity of essence had anything to do with the gunman. Nor did any of the other right-wing crazies on our (symbolic!) hit lists — and you Limbaugh-loving teabaggers know who you are....


In the fantasy world in which we dwell, the only thing that counts is what’s inside our heads, and in our heads is where Sarah Palin lives and where she willfully continues to insert herself into the national conversation. Raised on relativism, psychiatry, and sociology; on values instead of morals; on transactional relationships instead of “absolute truths”; on heavy-metal music, atheism, and abortion on demand — we long ago slipped the moorings of empiricism and have ascended to the rarefied heights of Cockaigne and Cloud Cuckoo Land. Black is white, up is down, in is out — this is our world and you’re not welcome to it. Because it’s not for you to say what you do and do not stand for — we’ll be the judge of that....


You seethe with anger over the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama II, still believe along with the racist Framers that black people are only worth three-fifths of white people, and that women belong barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, unless they’re in the delivery room. On the slightest pretext you will reach for your guns, especially in a toxic atmosphere like this one, and, like that right-wing assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, you will commit any atrocity — even if it means “disguising” yourself as a Marxist and pro-Castro agitator just to fool us. There’s no end to your devilry.


So is it any wonder we immediately assume that you personally are responsible for everything bad that occurs in the world, you and Sarah Palin? Your very existence can only be an encouragement to nutballs, crazies, weirdos, and jackasses everywhere either to pick up a gun and start shooting, or to think about picking up a gun and start shooting, which to us is exactly the same thing. Like the somnambulists in Christopher Nolan’s Inception, we’ve drilled down so far into our dreams that reality and fantasy are indistinguishable, and we figure that if credentialed Ivy Leaguers like ourselves can’t tell the difference, why should you Dogtooth State Teachers College johnnies be any different?


Forget all that stuff we were saying about knives and gunfights and enemies and hanging Joe Lieberman in effigy, killing Henry Hyde, etc.; that was just our typical, high-spirited use of metaphor. Putting aside all the smashed plate-glass windows, the “Days of Rage,” and the photoshopped pictures of %$#@BUSH#$@! as the love child of Dracula and Hitler; we’re just a bunch of pot-smoking, fun-loving pacifist draft-dodgers at heart. This violence thing — we don’t really mean it, and you know it....


You, on the other hand, could be sitting on the sofa in your living room in your jammies, watching Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm with your dozens of dogs and children, slurping a Shave Ice and snuggling with the old ball and chain you’ve been irrationally tethered to for the past 20 years, and we would know — we would just know — that under the cushions you’ve got an AK-Uzi with 47 rounds in it, locked and loaded and on full automatic, or whatever, and you’re just itching to use it on us or one of our protected minority groups, all of whom you loathe because, after all, you are nothing if not haters.


Which is why I’m beaming. Because we lovers finally stood up to you swaggering bullies, who dominate every conversation even if there’s only one of you in the room against a dozen of us. We unleashed “The End Is Near” Krugman, foam-flecked Chris Matthews, dyspeptic Bill Maher, and every other arrow in our quiver to pin you against the wall, fill you full of lead, eviscerate you, decapitate you, burn your houses to the ground, rape your women, loot your treasure, and send your children into slavery. Like Sherman marching through Georgia, we sent our caissons rolling along, brought down the hammer and targeted you for —


Whoops! Got carried away with my martial metaphors there!

Read the whole thing!

Addressing a Blood Libel

A day before Sarah Palin posted her response to the accusations of being complicit in the murders in Tucson, the Wall Street Journal printed an op-ed by Professor Glenn Reynolds: The Arizona Tragedy and the Politics of Blood Libel and no media firestorm erupted.  What a difference when Sarah Palin makes exactly the same argument.

Ed Driscoll has a good summary of the problem that the MSM has because of the blood libel it has spread regarding Conservatives and the Tea Party in general and Palin, Limbaugh, Beck and others specifically.  He makes his point brilliantly with this photoshopped image:

The answer to Driscoll's question can be found in a column by Donald Luzatto, who wrote The rush to judgment this morning which is partly incomprehensible and the parts that are comprehensible are wrong. Let’s take his comments in order.

When U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot and six others killed in Tucson, it took literally moments for politicians and pundits to start blaming each other.

This is simply, deliberately and maliciously wrong. Within moments politicians were not blaming anyone.  As the news broke the media was gettin it wrong.  Then the Media pundits on the Left lost no time blaming the Right, specifically focusing on Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. The two at the forefront of the attack were Paul Krugman in the NY Times and Markos Moulitsas in Daily Kos. Following these attacks, the rest of the MSM followed suit with virtually every story including images of Palin’s map which showed districts that were being targeted by conservatives in the last election for wins over Democrats. The implication was while there was no evidence that Palin pulled the trigger, (hint, hint, nudge, nudge) a map showing potentially vulnerable Democrat districts indicated by surveyor’s marks was actually an invitation for someone to kill Democrats. The members of the MSM, with their ignorance about guns were calling these marks the crosshairs on a gun sight and assigned the blame for the murders in Tucson, not on a deranged killer, but on their enemies on the Right.

We’ve carried some of that chatter on these pages because it was and is representative of the conversation going on, and we thought you should know.

There are lots of things the Virginian Pilot refused to print on its pages to let us know what's going on, things like the Mohammad cartoons that caused fatal riots worldwide.  I have no knowledge of the process by which the Pilot decided to print Krugman’s blood libel on its editorial page; but if the ravings of Krugman was a vital part of the “conversation” so were the ravings of the killer, which the Pilot did not carry, or the response by Palin, which the Pilot did not print either.

Then there’s this:

Nevertheless, I’m sorry. Not for printing the finger-pointing pieces, but that this national conversation of ours has gotten so counterproductive, so destructive.

Have you ever seen a more perfect example of “it’s not my fault, it’s yours?”

The New York Times has been rightfully criticized for jumping, within hours, to the conclusion that the martial language of the right wing led to the shooting. It was an assumption unworthy of a thoughtful editorial board. Not because the tone of the right wing and the left aren’t worth criticizing. They certainly are. But because Jared Lee Loughner’s motives are so occluded by what appears to be a thorough mental illness that we may never understand them. Paul Krugman, a columnist for The Times, sadly connected similar dots.

Seeing that the vast majority of the people were not buying the media narrative – that Right wing “eliminationist rhetoric" in Krugman’s words - was to blame, Luzatto wisely decided to throw the NY Times under the bus. But he can’t help assuming, with evidence to the contrary, that the NY Times has a "thoughtful editorial board." To help Luzatto out, are Loughner’s motives so occluded? Are the ravings of a mentally ill person who wrote “die bitch” on a letter sent by his victim so incomprehensible? And what does that last sentence mean; the one about Krugman connecting the dots? Is Luzatto calling Loughner and Krugman both nuts, or are the dots that Krugman used to connect Palin to the murders legitimate?

Luzatto - and most of Palin's critics on the Left - has a problem with Palin’s use of the term “blood libel” even though Professor Alan Dershowitz, no right winger he, has defended her use of the term.

If The Times’ editorialists and others actually believe the tea party set the table for Loughner, even if indirectly, then there is nothing left to say. If Sarah Palin and her supporters truly believe critics are persecuting her, then there’s no changing their minds.

What to make of this comment? There is a lot left to say if the NY Times continues its attempt to blame the Right for the murders. It is the right and the duty of anyone who values the truth and civility to point out that this is a “blood libel.” And if Palin’s critics, who are some of the most powerful figures in the media and the Democrat party, are smearing her with accusations that she is somehow responsible for the murders in Tucson are not persecuting her, what does actual persecution look like?

Some terms, like “blood libel” have become generic terms, like Kleenex or Xerox, despite efforts of their owners to protect their use. “Holocaust” is going the same way. The reason is simple; it’s a good descriptive term for an accusation that‘s so evil and out of bounds that it’s infamous. The attacks on Palin are of this nature and her use of the term was right and proper. Her use was also deliberate. Palin is a battler, unlike the typical career politician whose tenure in office depends on blandness coupled with the protection of incumbency. Think about how she got to be governor of Alaska. She battled both the entrenched Republican establishment and the Democrats to win the Alaska Governorship. Conservatives are thrilled to find someone who is willing to battle for them, who will not back down or apologize for the words they use. I’m thinking of one of a long list of Republicans who were accused of using the wrong words and thought that apologizing would make it go away: Senator citizen George Allen who was touted as presidential material and was a well-respected Virginia Governor. No political figure who wants to reach the top will ever succeed if she allows her opponents to define her and who backs down when challenged. Palin will win because she’s not following the tried and true Republican path to failure.

Read the rest of Luzatto's column if you will. It’s the kind of thing that Obama does well, having demonized his enemies either in person or via surrogates; he then gives a speech in which he rises above it all, laying the blame on everyone except himself.

One of the primary reasons for the acrimony is that the political class have failed. They are failing to protect us from attack while making air travel a travesty. They are failing to protect the nation’s financial future. Schools are failing entire generations of children.  Illegal aliens are crossing our borders by the millions while even more millions of jobs are outsourced and Americans are being thrown out of work.  They have denied that programs like Social Security and Medicare are in the process of going broke. They have added a monstrous new entitlement that will only accelerate the process of national bankruptcy. They are responsible for creating a housing crisis which led to a financial panic with led to high unemployment as far as the eye can see. They have created energy policies that are driving the price of fuel ever higher. By preventing the development of domestic oil, we are funding the war effort of Muslim extremists.  These same policies are turning millions of tons of food into an inefficient fuel additive while around the world food prices are skyrocketing. You may disagree, but the vast majority of the country agrees with me. For evidence, note that when the last Congress left town it had an approval rating in the single digits.  No one likes them. 

What do all these policies have in common? They are all Liberal prescriptions. The last election saw an historic repudiation of Liberalism and for the first time in several generations a truly broad based populist movement sprang up … the Tea Party. But Liberals are not going to allow their hands to slip from the levers of power if they can help it and the murders in Tucson were seized on as an opportunity to smear the Tea party and one of its leading lights – Sarah Palin – as dangerous enablers of murder. A decade ago it may have worked; talk radio was still young and the New Media was just being born. The Internet as a means of popular communication and dialog still had limited exposure. The NY Times was still setting the agenda for the old media and the alphabet networks. No more. The information and communication revolution lives. The Tea Party fought back … and to the despair of those whose voices were once the only ones speaking … it won.

Get used to it.

NOTE: This essay has been edited since first posted.

Why do these Liberals feel no fear in making death threats to Sarah Palin in the open?

William Jacobson raises an interesting question Death Wishes Like It's Party Time

He questions whether the people wishing her dead via bullet, or cancer or dying "gnashing her teeth" are making death threats in a legal sense. Perhaps, perhaps not. But keep in mind that Loughner wrote on a letter from Representative Giffords:  "Die Bitch."  Before this weekend, we didn't know if it was a threat or a wish.  We do now.

In the comments "V the K"  notes that

I think it's because violent, impulsive, hate-filled people are drawn to social groups where such behavior is acceptable. Since the left is far more accommodating of hate (provided it is directed at approved targets) than the right, haters are drawn to the left.

Let's not also forget that political violence is not merely tolerated on the left, but actually celebrated. No one on the right is going to show up at a Tea Party rally in an Eric Rudolph T-shirt. There are no right-wing collegians with posters of Tim McVeigh on their walls. But mass murderers like Che Guevara and Mao Tse-Tung and cop-killers like Mumia Abu Jamal are celebrated as heroes on the left; and their images adorn T-shirts, posters, and flags at most any progressive gathering.

I had never considered that, but he's absolutely right.

Is Barack Obama’s Rhetoric Responsible for the Tucson Massacre?

Rush Limbaugh is making a big point about the fact that Good Morning America (GMA) interviewed a friend of the shooter who said he never listened to political radio, did not watch TV, but was a big fan of Liberal conspiracy movies claimed that 9/11 was an inside job and that Jesus was a myth; that big bankers were evil.

Rush then went on to play some Obama speeches and referred to his Leftist allies in Hollywood.

Ann Coulter reviews the law regarding Federal pre-emption of state law. Obama case against Arizona falls flat.

Ann Coulter has done the best job of anyone I know in the media of reviewing Team Obama's case against the Arizona immigration law. She demolishes the Federal pre-emption argument. Read the whole thing.

Excerpt:

In the seminal case, De Canas v. Bica (1976), the court held 8-0 that a California law prohibiting employers from hiring illegal immigrants was not pre-empted by federal law.

The court -– per Justice William Brennan -- said that the federal government's supremacy over immigration is strictly limited to: (1) a "determination of who should or should not be admitted into the country," and (2) "the conditions under which a legal entrant may remain."

So a state can't start issuing or revoking visas, but that's about all it can't do.

Manifestly, a state law about illegal immigrants has nothing to do with immigrants who enter legally or the condition of their staying here. Illegal aliens have neither been "admitted into the country" nor are they "legal entrants."

Indeed, as Brennan noted in the De Canas case, there's even "a line of cases that upheld certain discriminatory state treatment of aliens lawfully within the United States." (You might want to jot some of this down, Mr. Holder.)

So there's no "field pre-emption" of state laws dealing with aliens, nor is there an explicit statement from Congress pre-empting state regulation of aliens.

On top of that, the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld state laws on immigrants in the face of pre-emption challenges. Arizona's law is no more pre-empted than the rest of them.

Unless, of course, Obama is right and it's a violation of federal law to enforce federal immigration laws, which is the essence of the Department of Justice's lawsuit.

Arizona Governor Blasts Eric Holder

It seems a lot of the feisty Republicans are women.  Good.

From Human Events:

"I would much prefer for them not to file suit, given the fact that they could take the money and help me build a fence on my border," Brewer said in an interview with three HUMAN EVENTS editors by phone from Phoenix.

If this sign was posted in the Bronx, Compton or Detroit, it'd make the papers the next day. But because it's in Arizona and we're racists Nazis for wanting to walk in the countryside without fear of getting shot, it's a non-story.

From American Digest.

AZ Governor, Palin Criticize AG Eric Holder For Not Reading Law

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin today launched an effort aimed at educating the country on the federal governments failure to secure our nations southern border and its failure to address the human tragedy that is occurring as a result.

HIT BACK TWICE AS HARD!

YOU GO GIRLS.