The “Coffee Party” founder in danger of ouster, as coffee partiers (all fifty of them) want a more radical leader

Annabel Park says there’s no coup in the works to remove her as the leader of the Coffee Party movement and replace her with someone more angry, radical and willing to be confrontational with conservatives. But a recent article in Newsweek suggests otherwise.

Park, contacted through Facebook, criticized the Newsweek article and it’s author Steve Tuttle for quoting a woman at a Washington DC Coffee Party who said the movement would die “unless we get someone a little more powerful.”

The movement will die unless it comes up with a purpose deeper than “trying to act like they’re smarter than their competition…

I’ve long been ambivalent about the “war on drugs”, to the point where I’ve come to favor ending it.  Combining the American appetite for drugs  with prohibition means that the market favors the more desperate, ruthless criminals – which is why Mexico is more dangerous than Iraq right now; more Americans have died of non-overdose-related causes – gang crimes and robbery-murders, mostly – directly attributable to the “War” than died in Vietnam.

So yeah, I favor decriminalizing at least pot.

But on the other hand, as the US passes yet another April 20 “National weed day”…:

Those who weren’t within whiffing distance of a college campus or a reggae concert may not have realised that Tuesday was ‘4/20’, the celebration-cum-mass civil disobedience derived from ‘420’ – insider shorthand for cannabis consumption.

…I’m reminded of the the simple fact that pot smokers are the most irritating people in the entire world.

Worse than Rosie O’Donnell talking in a Fran Drescher voice.

Worse than Crispin Glover and Al Gore doing a rap duet.

Worse than whatever you’re imagining.

So I think we should legalize pot.  I also think we should legalize hitting cheeba monkeys with bats.

Fair enough?

The Tea Parties rallied to protest, and call attention to, the Obama Administration’s ruinous financial policies (which, to be fare, are in a few instances continuations of Bush-era policies, only accelerated many times over).

The response:  “some of you might get violent!”

Don’t change the subject.  We were talking about the Obama Administration’s ruinous financial policies.

If I’m talking with you, or commenting on your blog, about the the Obama Administration’s ruinous financial policies, and you start babbling about “the avalanche of violence”, I’m not even going to take time out to remind you that every single act of actual, as opposed to threatened, violence this past year has been committed by a leftist of one kind or another.  Every single one.  No exceptions.

No.  I’m just going to tell you “don’t change the subject”.

And if I’m talking with Bill Clinton (unlikely as that may be) about the Obama Administration’s ruinous financial policies, and he starts prattling about Oklahoma City, I will tell him “don’t change the subject”, too.

Changing the subject when you’re backed into a corner in a debate is the mark of a poor debater or a weasel lawyer.

Changing the subject to defame the person who is beating you in an argument – and we are beating you, Democrats, nationwide, and we’re going to beat you like cheap brisket this November – is the mark of the poor debater whose got everyone’s worst interests at heart.

So don’t change the subject.

To:  Betty McCollum

From: Mitch Berg, your unwilling constituent

Re:  You are a tool in the literal sense of the term.

Rep. McCollum:

When Members of Congress compare health care protesters and spending dissidents to ‘mass-murderers,’ ‘militias,’ or ‘extremists’ – in the hopes of scoring political points is like pouring gas on the fire of repression.

The Members of the House, Democrats and Republicans – have a duty and an obligation to end the dangerous name-calling that can only inspire the extremist media and your not-very-bright supporters who keep crashing planes into buildings, shooting professors, and beating people up in the streets.

Put another way, Rep. McCollum – I’m not saying you’re a totalitarian.  I’m just saying that real totalitarians need lots of people like you running society to make their job easier.

That is all.

Well, no, it’s not.  You also said:

“Only last month a Fox News commentator, with Members of Congress next to him, rallied a Tea Party crowd by disparaging Congress and calling the crowd ‘all these Tim McVeigh wannabes here’ to the crowds cheers and applause.

Rep. McCollum:  certainly you – a member of a party who’s leading intellectual light is Jon Stewart – can’t tell me you don’t “get” satire and sarcasm?

“When Members of Congress compare health care legislation to ‘government tyranny,’ ‘socialism,’ or ‘totalitarianism’ – in the hopes of scoring political points is like pouring gas on the fire of extremism.

“The Members of this House Democrats and Republicans – have a duty and an obligation to end the dangerous name-calling that can only inspire the extremist militias and phony patriots.

“In the most free, prosperous and greatest democracy on earth it is time to return to a civil, decent debate of public policy.

“I don’t want another ‘Oklahoma City’ to ever take place again.

Dear Representative Idiot.  You are comparing protesters to mass-murderers.  When it comes to civil debate, you are the problem.

Civil debate will return to Washington when you are chased from office.

And lest you and your idiot enablers in the local leftymedia are still trolling looking for more “extremists”, I mean “chased from office this November”.

As part of my continuing examination of my extremism – because Janet Napolitano believes that as a conservative pro-life low-tax second-and-tenth-amendment activist, I must be an extremist – let’s look at our culture.

“Culture” is a huge topic, and it’s hard to even define where the left and right diverge, or on what each side actually believes, to say nothing of what their opponents believe.

For example, one of the putative big battles in the “culture war” twenty years ago was the campaign by Tipper Gore, wife of then-future lisping fraud and Vice President Algore, to put warnings on music that had “offensive” lyrics.   Was it conservative?  Was it liberal?

Perhaps a little bit of both – and who cares?  Because while that particular argument, like many, mixed elements of both sides of the aisle – conservatives fretting about the downfall of civilization, liberals  about the system that’d make young males write the kind of rap and metal lyrics that’d make them be so antisocial in the first place – it was fairly irrelevant.

Because while there are many facets to what both conservatives and liberals believe what our culture is, and what is should be, it really boils down to two major differences of opinion:

• Conservatives believe that our society is a free association of equals who create a government that governs by consent of the people, and should generally operate within restrictive boundaries – the Tenth Amendment, for a quick example.  Liberals believe that society is – I’ve heard an amazing number of liberals use this exact description – a parent, riding herd on his/her unruly or needy children, trying to help them grow up to be good citizens, kissing their owwies and putting them in time-out and keeping them out of trouble until they’re ready to take over for themselves.
• Conservatives believe that while mankind is deeply imperfect and utterly imperfectible, the concept of the United States is in and of itself one of immense nobility; it is a “shining city on a hill”, a place where government is a useful subordinate to the nobility of the individual.  It’s an ideal toward which most of the world – the sane part – aspires.   Liberals tend to believe that our society is perfectible, through the graces of a benevolent government rather than any intrinsic virtue in the American system.

Now, the battle is usually expressed through an endless series of group ad homina; liberals slur “Tenthers” as advocates of slavery; conservatives see liberals as hive creatures, Borg with no identity outside the larger organism.

At any rate – I believe that America works best when we not only do see ourselves as a free association of equals, but act like it.  And when government limits itself, rather than  you or me.

Yep.  I’m a radical!

April 19 may be the most fraught date in American history – for good or evil, instruction or paranoia, right or wrong.  And its’ stacked-up layers of symbolism are going to be popping out from the news, spinmeisters and commentary all day long, and beyond.

The pants-wetting class is knotted up about a couple of marches planned for today; one, a group of armed Second Amendment activists, plans to hold a demonstration at a park in Virginia – the closest point to America’s political and traditional murder capitol, Washington DC, at which a law-abiding citizen can legally carry a gun.  And another group, the “Second Amendment March” or SAM, plans a march (unarmed, unfortunately) on the Capitol.

And that’s got the gun-grabbing left’s paranoia and mania for specious symbolism cranking overtime:

[“Second Amendment March” founder Skip Coryell] claims he chose April 19 “because it is the 235th anniversary of Lexington-Concord.” However, the date also carries a rather unfortunate significance: the day militia sympathizers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Let’s stop right there.

“Militia sympathizers”?  That’s chipped from the same block as Andy Birkey’s swerve into collective guilt by association last week, when he (and, one presumes, the editors at the Soros-funded Center for “Independent” Media, which former Mindy staffers themselves noted actually call the shots and want the site to be a  flak organ for centrally-driven propaganda) used an irate, profanity-riddle phone message from someone who claimed to be a Tea Partier to try to impugn the entire Tea Party.   McVeigh and Nichols were criminals; if they “sympathized” with the Oakland Raiders, “Iron Chef” and “Twilight”, it wouldn’t mean that football fans, foodies and dozey teenagers had some dark inner secret.

“The Militia” in the US is everyone.  “A well-regulated militia being necessary for the preservation of liberty, the right of the people to keep and bear arms…” is what the Constitution says, in that little bit right after the part about freedom of speech that seems to be the only part most liberals ever read.   And the Supreme Court said “The People” means all of us in the Heller decision, two years ago.

The “militia” that the pants-wetting class is exercised about is not “the militia”.  It is a tiny collection of people with unfashionably acerbic views on society that the media and the pants-wetting class have set up as a boogeyman to scare society into place.

But let’s not stop with the significant anniversaries.  There are two more:

April 19 also marks the end of the weeks-long siege of the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, TX. Dan Casey of the Roanake Times reported that “[s]ome activists in the gun-rights movement have tried to talk Coryell out of organizing” the march, fearing that the “political timing is bad” or that it “might lead people to believe the gun movement is a paper tiger with a few loud voices.”

It’s also the date of the Warsaw Uprising – which should be the story that people keep in mind when they think of “militias”.  The Jews of Poland had been herded into huge, miserable, starving ghettos while the Nazis built their extermination camps.  By April 19, 1942 many of them were already dead, of starvation or disease or murdered by their guards.

And a small band of Jewish patriots – “extremists”, as someone like Andy Birkey or ThinkProgress might call them today – decided it would be better to die with dignity and have a chance, however thin, at liberty than to quietly be sucked into Hitler’s death machine.  With a few stolen pistols and molotov cocktails, they rose, threw the Germans out of the Ghetto, and for a few weeks became a speed bump to Hitler’s “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem”.

The media and left (ptr) focus on the April 19 of Oklahoma City (where a couple of cartoon characters that belonged in a movie about fringe lunatics managed to kill 168 Americans) and Waco (where a group with very unfashionable religious views ran afoul of their own leader’s delusions, a deeply-stupid government raid, and some very bad luck with chemicals) because it fits their narrative; the big mass of people between the Hudson and the Sierra Madre need to be controlled, lest they hurt themselves.

But the April 19 of Lexington and Concord is a symbol of the power of We The People – which disturbs that other narrative.  And the April 19 of Warsaw shows why it should be the duty (in the patriotic sense, if not also statutory) for every law-abiding American to own and be proficient with firearms – so that the next batch of Nazis can’t show anyone how very much more powerful than the pen the sword really is.

Of course Coryell’s fears are completely baseless. Obama has no intention of taking any anyone’s gun rights. In fact, during his campaign for president, Obama said, “I believe in the Second Amendment, and if you are a law-abiding gun owner, you have nothing to fear from an Obama administration.”

And why would Obama say that, after a career spent in gun-grabbing governments and working for gun-control-advocating non-profits?

Because of Americans who march to show Congress and the states that we are here, we’re better citizens than most, and we’re not going away.

Citizens like me.  Not Timothy McVeigh.

I wish I could be in DC.

…that my two not-so-little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the media’s bobbleheaded droogs by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

The conservative blogosphere – at least the A through D lists – have been really reticent about assigning blame in the »  beating of Bobby Jindal aide Allee Butsch and her boyfriend last weekend at the Southern Republican Leadership conference in New Orleans.  Conservative bloggers, for example, led the way in showing that the couple weren’t wearing Sarah Palin pins, which was an initial story about the crime:

Allee Butsch suffered a broken leg from the beatdown outside to the SRLC dinner at Brennan’s Restaurant in New Orleans. She had her leg operated on over the weekend and it will take her months to recover. Her boyfriend Joe Brown suffered a broken nose, a broken jaw, and a concussion. They were attacked after leaving the Southern Republican Leadership Conference dinner at Brennan’s Restaurant.

Police have no suspects, and are doing their best not to release uncorroborated information to the public.  And conservative bloggers aren’t jumping the gun in any numbers to call this a political hate crime – something that Steny Hoyer, Rep. Lewis, Rep. Cleaver, Nancy Pelosi and the Twin Cities AFSCME should try.

Now, I’m not going to jump to any conclusions, and I’ll say up front that the following execise is purely conjectural.

But do me a favor and turn on your stereotype radar when you read the lone description available among the five attackers:

Police are looking for a Caucasian male who appeared to be dirty, in his 20’s, 6′1″ tall, thin build with a thin face. He had a beard and auburn color hair in a pony tail. He was wearing a light color T shirt and dark color pants. Up to 5 men beat the couple after they left the GOP event on Friday night.

A dirty twentysomething white guy in a ponytail.  I mean, if it were a dirty fiftysomething in a ponytail and a beard, you’d think  “a bunch of meth addicts jumped the kids”.  But most twentysomethings have to spend a lot of time, money and effort to affect that kind of look.

The Twin Cities AFSCME has not yet told us whether they consider this  a threat to them from the Tea Party.

Wednesday, Andy Birkey at the Minnesoros “independent” wrote about an episode involving an angry caller leaving a profane, uncivil message at a local AFSCME office.

Birkey:

[AFSCME’s flak] forwarded audio of the call along with the identity of a person she says the calls were tracked to.  That individual, a local business owner, she says “claims to be an organizer of the Tea Party protest at the State Capitol tomorrow.”

Birkey ran the “organizer” claim uncritically, without any fact-checking; apparently AFSCME flaks are considered unimpeachable sources.

But since I was on the stage with every single one of the Twin Cities’ Tea Party’s “organization” last night, I asked around if anyone had heard of the alleged caller, “Ed Motch”.  Was he an organizer?  Was he even prominent enough among the Twin Cities’ small community of non-major-party tax activists that anyone even knew the guy’s name?

Nobody had ever heard of the guy.  A casual google of “Ed Motch” shows that most of the references to him come from…the Mindy.

To be fair to the Mindy, the rest of the Twin Cities media – Fox9, WCCO and MPR – repeated AFSCME’s claim that this…:

“Hey you [expletive] piece of [expletive]. Your days are [expletive] numbered sucking at the public tit. This [expletive] is over. I saw that [expletive] ‘Tax the Rich’ ad again. We don’t you come and visit tomorrow at the [expletive] little party we’re going to have on the 15th at the capitol. Why don’t you show up there with your [expletive] union signs. That’d be just [expletive] wonderful. Come you you gutless [expletive] wonders, show up!”

…was a “threat”.   An uncivil. profane tirade, certainly, and not an invitation in good faith to the event, but “threat?

Apparently it is, if AFSCME, like Steny Hoyer, Rep. Cleaver, Rep. Lewis and Nancy Pelosi, say so.

Please, by all means bring videocams and cameras to the Tea Party; if you see someone with an objectionable racist sign, get a picture and send it to your favorite blogger.  More importantly, ask them questions.  Find out who they are, why they are doing what they’re doing.  The left is actively planning to send stooges with racist signs to try to discredit the Tea Parties; this is the sort of thing that deserves to backfire.

And keep it to questions and pictures.  Let the other guys, per usual, do all the violent stuff. 

(But if you are possessed to beat someone up, it’s be so poetically just if you’d wear an SEIU T-shirt when you do).

(more…)

…and I was wondering if anyone could tell me how to find a “coffee party” today?

Anywhere?

Anyone?

Let me know. 

Mmm.  Coffee and debate.

I just got a message:

I am [name redacted]: I am a big DFLer, who was a key player in our 2008 legislative landslide, and who is working on one of the front-running DFL gubernatorial campaigns.  I am on a first-name basis with every single DFL leader; I am welcomed into every DFL legislator’s and candidate’s office with my first name.  I am, in DFL terms, the shizzle.

I hate you, Merg, and I am going to kill you; I am going to shoot you in the face as your friends and relatives look on in mute horror.  And then I’m going to steal a helicopter and drop a huge firebomb on the Tea Party, killing all you Teabagger wingnuts.

By the way, hundreds of my public-employee union friends helped me write this email, and want you to know they’ll be there to defile the corpses afterward. 

Please don’t print my name.

Since this key DFL player (seriously!  That’s what his message said!) asked me not to print his name, I must respect his wishes. 

But wow – it’s a threat!  Honest!  From someone claiming to be a huge DFL organizer!   At the head of an angry mob!

Wow. 

So will the DFL and all liberals repudiate this violent threat?  Or do they approve of death threats?

Hey, if Andy Birkey can impugn an entire movement based on his blithe assurance that a crank caller claimed to be a key Tea Partier, really, what’s the problem with the above?

[Note to the dense; the above is pure satire; unlike Steny Hoyer, Reps. Lewis and Cleaver, I make no claim that these slandrous claims are true.   And unlike Andy Birkey, I’m not going to insult your intelligence by asking you to generalize about an entire party, union or movement based on – let’s be bluntly honest – transparent bullshit).

Someone left some naughty messages at the local AFSCME headquarters.

Andy Birkey at the Minnesoros “Independent” notes that AFSCME and the police know who it is, but…:

[An AFSCME spokesperson] revealed the caller’s identity, and states that his business is on record as a vendor for the state of Minnesota; she shared documentation of that fact with this site. The Minnesota Independent’s call to the individual was not returned, so we’ll refrain from revealing his or her identity at this time.

But, all of that aside, Birkey will reveal [I’ll add emphasis] that…:

A local chapter of AFSCME, the national public workers’ union, says it received three expletive-laced phone messages from a person claiming to be a Tea Party member in response to the union’s new ad urging support for fair taxation in Minnesota.

Wow.  That’s a pretty damning conclusion!  And on what does Birkey base this?

[AFSCME’s flak] forwarded audio of the call along with the identity of a person she says the calls were tracked to.  That individual, a local business owner, she says “claims to be an organizer of the Tea Party protest at the State Capitol tomorrow.”

So let’s summarize; Andy Birkey, apparently at the assurance of a PR flak from a group that has a vested interest in attacking the Tea Party, not only claims on the eve of the national Tea Party protests that an “organizer” (we know this because he claimed it on his phone message!) is threatening a local union (???), to the point where he headlined his story “TEA PARTY SUPPORTER THREATENS AFSCME OFFICE“…

…but won’t say who it is, so that we Tea Partiers can find out who has allegedly so sullied the honor of our movement?

Hmmm.  The hell you say.

And what exactly was the “threat?”

“Hey you [expletive] piece of [expletive]. Your days are [expletive] numbered sucking at the public tit. This [expletive] is over. I saw that [expletive] ‘Tax the Rich’ ad again. We don’t you come and visit tomorrow at the [expletive] little party we’re going to have on the 15th at the capitol. Why don’t you show up there with your [expletive] union signs. That’d be just [expletive] wonderful. Come you you gutless [expletive] wonders, show up!”

Um, what’s the threat?  I get it, profanity is unpleasant and all, but the only “threat” seems to be sympathy for cutting government jobs, and an acid invitation to come to the Tea Party with union signs to see what people thought of ’em.

As to the AFSCME flak?  Well, the union can be happy they’re getting their money’s worth; she’s certainly on message…:

“The tea party has a history of inciting angry mobs, so given that, we filed the report…

I’d ask her to provide examples of “angry mobs”, but I’m sure she’ll be on a contractual coffee break when I call…

I’ll be calling the AFSCME office for clarification.  Let’s see if that gets reported as a “threat”, too.

UPDATE:  Welcome, Politics in Minnesota readers.  I update this story in this piece.

In downtown Saint Paul, someone with a bone to pick with Republicans went nuts with graffiti about a year ago.  He or she vandalized a couple of lampposts with black magic marker, saying:

HANG
THE
GOP

They’ve sat, unmolested, since probably the winter of ’08-’09 (and somehow never got investigated by the FBI).

Today, I noticed that of them had been countervandalized:

HANG in
THEre,
GOP

I’m sure someone’s going to be contacing the ACLU for stifling their artistic expression.

PJ O’Rourke once observed that social change happens wherever the babes are.

Wags over the years have noted evidence in Ukraine…

…and Lebanon…

…and there’s evidence all around us

I’m not the one to say conclusively if that’s right or not.  But if it is…

…then the left is screwed blue.

(more…)

I’ve told the story before.  One of the most illuminating lectures I’ve ever gotten on human nature was from my 11th grade history teacher, Mr. Dudley Butts – who was perhaps the most “Big Lebowski”-ish football head coach I’ve ever met. 

He’d been drafted during the Vietnam War; he was proud to point out that he’d been stationed in Washington DC, and the Viet Cong never attacked the Capitol on his watch; mission accomplished. 

And he told us that during basic training, as they were doing any of the things that mimicked killing people – at the rifle range, while doing bayonet drills and hand-to-hand combat practice – the drill sergeants never referred to their targets as humans.  They were always collections of not-quite-human memes; “gooks” and “charlies” and “slopes” and so on.  It took him a while to realize this wasn’t just the mark of a bunch of bigots with sergeant stripes; there was a method to it.  It was much easier to train people who’d spent 18 years of their lives being taught “thou shalt not kill” to kill if you taught them to kill something that wasn’t really human. 

Likewise, the theory goes, it’s easier to convince people you’re right if you get them to believe that your opponent isnt’ operating from rationalism or intelligence.

The Alinski-schooled left has known this for decades, of course.  Which is why over my years of blogging the left has followed such utterly predictable memes in referring to conservatives – “ignorant wingnuts” in their parlance.  Christians are “extremists”; Second Amendment activists are “crazy gunnies”; they never get exercised and motivated, they “Melt down” or “whine”.  Above all – or, in terms of plausibility and intelligence, below all – they never operate from bases in rationality, experience, knowledge of history or cognitive processes of any kind; the only conservative motivation is “fear”. 

I’ve never accused Lori Sturdevant of being much more than a willing water-girl for the DFL and all it stands for.  I didn’t expect any different from her “coverage” of the Bachmann/Palin rally.    I wasn’t disappopinted:

Minnesotans who tuned in to Wednesday’s Minneapolis rally on behalf of U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann and featuring former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin heard a lot about “freedom” and “liberty.” Those words are taking on a new partisan edge in this election year, not unlike the tinge acquired by the words “family values” a few years back.

Well, let’s shoot for accuracy, here – and we’ll have to do the shooting, because Sturdevant certainly won’t; the “partisan edge” to “family values” was pretty much entirely a product of the left and media (ptr). 

It’s a digression – but then, so was Sturdevant’s reference.  Offsetting penalties. 

Onward:

Those words also seem to be acquiring new definitions in the mouths of Republican politicians. Freedom seems to have a lot to do with the ability to avoid buying health insurance, thereby forcing others to pick up the tab for one’s hospital stay, should one’s good health run out.

Right.  That’s the motivation behind the Tea Parties and all of conservatism, Lori; getting someone else to pick up your tab.

It has nothing to do with believing in limited government, let alone the sense that for most people, Obamacare “fixes” something that needed a tune-up, not a complete overhaul.

Liberty, on the other hand, seems to be about building new nuclear power plants, drilling for oil just about anywhere, paying little or no taxes, and avoiding health and safety regulations in one’s business life.

Oooh, can I play?

Liberalism seems to be about being ashamed to be an American, being thankful to Mother Government for allowing you to exist, and shutting up and doing what your lords and betters tell you to do!

Liberty is also evidently compromised or diminished when the federal government takes emergency action to limit the collapse of major banks and prevent the demise of the nation’s homegrown auto industry.

Well, yeah.  As a matter of fact, it is; when there is no freedom to fail, then there is truly no freedom to succeed.  Badly run businesses should fail; in a true free-market economy, no business ever gets to be “too big to fail”. 

Those countercyclical rescue efforts came in for repeated scorn, from Bachmann, Palin and their warmup man, Gov. Tim Pawlenty — although many of the moves were initiated by a president they supported, George W. Bush.

“A President they supported?”  I can’t speak for Pawlenty, Bachmann or Palin, but I don’t know a single genuine conservative who supported Bush’s Kennedyesque spending. 

Let’s step aside for a moment, here.  When it comes to analyzing dissent, there are really two types of commentators; the ones that painstakingly develop taxonomies that shoehorn all of human nature’s wondrous complexity into implausibly neat but inevitably-pejorative, utterly-unnatural and completely self-serving boxes to make themselves sound all academic and serious, and everyone else:

Times of major economic and social change seem to spawn two kinds of political leaders in America — those who seek to help people overcome their fears and adapt, and those who play on fear and offer the vague promise that unsettling changes can be slowed or reversed.

Which is, of course – pardon a rare disgression into Old English – festering, reeking bullshit.

All political motivation is a complex mixture of education, tradition, self-interest, fear, communitarianism, and all manner of base and noble impulses.  Every person’s motivations are different; I’m a conservative because my study of history shows that statism is a cancer, and that limited government leaves the most room for humanity’s most noble natures to emerge, because the Constitution is fundamentally libertarian-conservative and if we don’t follow the Constitution then what the hell do we follow, because I “fear” the competence and motivations of this nation’s current “elite” and what it’ll do to the country I’ll leave my offspring, and because it is my right and duty as a free American citizen to fight for what I believe within our political process.

Likewise, Lori Sturdevant is a liberal because she’s been painstakingly indoctrinated into being a petty statist and D-list elitist, all of the “cool” people in her field have always been liberals, and she fears all of us peasants.

I mean, as long as we’re oversimplifying and caricaturing those we disagree with…

 Bachmann and Palin demonstrated Wednesday why they are among the nation’s leading exemplars of the latter category. Their success, this year and in 2012, will depend in large part on Americans staying fearful for a lot longer than Americans typically do.

I saw no fear on Wednesday.

But I read it all throughout Sturdevant’s column on Thursday.

Like Mr. Butts’ drill sergeants, Sturdevant is trying to tell her audience that her enemies – all us Teabaggers, Gunnies, Taxpayers-Leaguers, Wingnuts, God-Botherers, Bitter Gun-clinging Jeebus freaks and the whole lot – aren’t really as human as they are.

It’s an axiom of politics – all politics, really – that people get the government they deserve.

Kevin O’Brien at the Cleveland Plain Dealer thinks that people are finally starting to realize they deserve better:

For many a year now, officeholders of both major parties have worked hard to earn the distrust of ordinary Americans. It appears that they finally have succeeded.

If only ordinary Americans hadn’t been so inattentive. If only ordinary Americans hadn’t been so trusting. If only ordinary Americans hadn’t been so damnably nice, the country would be in a better position to manage its finances today.

But when have Americans not tried to look for the good in every situation? When have we not been slow to recognize the need to deal with forces, foreign or domestic, aligning against our best interests?

Somewhere along the way our media and current ruling class (PTR) got the idea that “unity” and “bipartisanship” and phony harmony was better than conflict in pursuit of our best interests.

Over the past year, this has gotten rocked on its heels:

This past year,

Hallelujah.

The people who are angry today are more in tune with this nation’s founders than ordinary Americans have been in decades.

“But wait! The founding fathers were smart!”

Er, yeah.  Smart enough to know that government needs to be taken out and beaten back down to size with baseball bats once in a while.

The United States has an intricate system of checks and balances, and a government structure based on a separation of powers, and a Bill of Rights that safeguards the rights of states and the rights of the people precisely because the greatest collection of political talent and philosophical insight ever assembled on this continent — and maybe anywhere on this planet — looked at the concept of government and said, “We need to make a really small cage for this thing, then be careful not to overfeed it.”

We seem to have lost the care-and- feeding instructions about a century ago. We let government out of its little cage and it has been consuming everything it can lay its paws on ever since. In the last 45 years, it has been on a real binge, and in the last year and a half, it has taken bigger bites than a lot of people thought possible.

What was the stupid old bumper sticker?  “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention?”

Well, outrage isn’t needed.  Just a whole bunch of the focused motivation that comes from a constructive response to anger.

Back in 2006, when a collapse at the Sago mine in Utah killed 13, the left and media (as always, pardon the redundancy) blamed President Bush. The precedent was obvious; mine safety is the Presideht’s responsibility.

Today, after the worst mining disaster in 26 years, though, we learn that mine safety is apparently not the job of the President.

No.

It is, however, entirely related to management’s ostensible political sympathies.

As the left becomes more and more depraved in defense of the administration its’ hold on power, expect to find the plague, the Spanish Inquisition and auto accidents blamed on the Tea Party as well.

But just remember, Democrats – someday you’ll be out of power.  Maybe someday soon.  And you’re setting a crappy precedent for civility in dealing with the minority.  There’s that whole wind/whirlwind thing you might wanna think about.

Again, just saying.

The IRS notes that the wave of Tea Partier threats and violence against that most intrusive and divisive arm of government, the IRS…

…well, isn’t:

The country’s chief tax collector pushed back Monday against assertions that working for the Internal Revenue Service has become more dangerous as a result of growing anti-government sentiment and the recent passage of President Obama’s health care plan.

“No, the risk has not increased,” IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman said. “There has been a lot of stuff in the press about increased threats, which is actually inaccurate.”

…

Some liberal groups and bloggers also have raised fears that anti-tax and anti-government rhetoric employed on talk radio and by protesters within the “tea party” movement could incite violence against IRS agents.

Which was really what it was all about, all of it – the specious claims of racist slurs and threats, the victorian vapours about the tiny fringe of Tea Partiers with objectionable signs, and conservative talk radio as a whole – without exception; impugning dissent.

It’s kind of good to see, actually.  I remember how depressing it felt to realize that Bob Dole’s only campaign message in 1996 was “I’m not Bill Clinton”; about the only thing the Dems have so far going into November is an albatross of a “health care” plan, and constant chants of “teh teabaggerz are teh crazee, and we not be they”.

And that’s not so bad.

Insurance companies report that people, fresh from wondering when Obama would pay their mortgage and put gas in the car, are pawing after the free health care:

Questions reflecting confusion have flooded insurance companies, doctors’ offices, human resources departments and business groups.

“They’re saying, ‘Where do we get the free Obama care, and how do I sign up for that?’ ” said Carrie McLean, a licensed agent for eHealthInsurance.com. The California-based company sells coverage from 185 health insurance carriers in 50 states.

McLean said the call center had been inundated by uninsured consumers who were hoping that the overhaul would translate into instant, affordable coverage. That widespread misconception may have originated in part from distorted rhetoric about the legislation bubbling up from the hyper-partisan debate about it in Washington and some media outlets, such as when opponents denounced it as socialism.

Or it might be because that’s exactly how its proponents have been pitching it all along.

Women in Portland, Maine  W “protest” social mores and laws by marching topless about the place…:

The women, preceded and followed by several hundred boisterous and mostly male onlookers, many of them carrying cameras, stayed on the sidewalk because they hadn’t obtained a demonstration permit to walk in the street. About a thousand people gathered as the march passed through Monument Square, a mix of demonstrators, supporters, onlookers and those just out enjoying a warm and sunny early-spring day.

After the marchers reached Tommy’s Park in the Old Port, some turned around and walked back to Longfellow Square, but most stayed and mingled in the park. Some happily posed for pictures.

…and then getting outraged that anyone thought it was out of the ordinary:

Ty McDowell, who organized the march, said she was “enraged” by the turnout of men attracted to the demonstration. The purpose, she said, was for society to have the same reaction to a woman walking around topless as it does to men without shirts on.

However, McDowell said she plans to organize similar demonstrations in the future and said she would be more “aggressive” in discouraging oglers.

So let me get this straight, Ms. McDowell; you want to “desensitize” society, as it were, to topless women…

…but you’re going to do it by not only parading about topless, but being “aggressive” about anyone that takes notice, thus giving the ebulliently-un-PC the two things they love to watch the most – boobs and confict?  It’ll be like a hockey game with partial nudity.

Joe Doakes of Como Park writes:

And that, right there, is the essence of the entire Progressive mind-set.  We acknowledge that we are legally free to wander around topless, but that’s not enough; we must control what the rest of you THINK about us wandering around topless.  Or else we’re victims.

That’s pretty much it.

One of the big political “stories” last week was the “threat” letter sent to thirty-odd US state governors, including Governor Pawlenty.

The City Pages’ “Blotter”  caught part of the “story’s” big problem;

[The putative senders’] agenda: “The Restore America Plan is a bold achievable strategy for behind-the-scenes peaceful reconstruction of the de jure institutions of government without controversy, violence or civil war.”

The letter’s message: Resign in three days, or we’re coming to get you.

Big whoop, Pawlenty told the AP.

And as much as I’ve bagged on the sloppy, trite, meaningless nature of most of the post-Steve-Perry City Pages existence, it’s here that they do a bit of due diligence that most of the rest of the Twin Cities media would have done well to emulate; they did some checking – or, to be accurate, they quoted some people who had some some checking:

And maybe with good reason. Mother Jones magazine traced the group’s Web site owner via a readily-available Internet domain search engine:

Turns out goftr.com and guardiansofthefreerepublics.com are registered to one Clive Boustred of Soquel, California–a British-educated former South African soldier with an apparent knack for “anti-terrorist warfare,” computer consulting, and conspiracy theorizing. The sites–and the “group”–appear not to have existed before he registered them, about two months ago.

In other words, “Guardians of the Free Republic” are no more a “movement” than, say, “Citizens for a Supine “Safer” Minnesota”.

So kudos to the City Pages; they didn’t buy the hype.

Which is more than we can say for much of the media.  I tuned into National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” last Friday.  And Saturday.  They carried the story with breathless credulity, noting that an FBI agent had noted that the “real threat” wasn’t so much from GotFR, but from  people who “might” be inspired to copy them, or follow through on the “Threat”. 

In other words, according to a chunk of the media and Barack Obama’s government, the opposition to President Obama is loaded with people who’d just loooove to start tossing governors from office without waiting for elections.

Which is, again, the meme we were talking about last week; the Administration, media and left’s (pardon the rare and difficult triple-redundancy) are trying to portray all dissent from Obama as teetering on the edge of extralegal depravity.

The arrests of nine “[insert inflammatory catchphrase here]” “Christian Militia” members in Michigan have focused America’s attention the American media and those who still pay attention to it on the “problem” of “militias” which, by the way, have been shrinking since their heyday in the 1970s through early 1990s.

During the 90s, “militias” became the Democrat boogeyman, after a number of well-publicized and very ugly incidents; the Medina shootout, the Ruby Ridge massacre, and of course the Oklahoma City bombing.  Under fire during his first term before his epic setback in the ’94 elections, the Clinton Administration sought to distract the nation with a huge, sinister, conspiratorial internal enemy, the “militia movement”; the 1994 Crime Bill, larded with civil rights violations that dwarfed much of what had the left up in arms during the Bush administration, was at least partly in response to this huge “movement”…

…that, except for the actions of Timothy McVeigh (who, says the government, was not acting as part of a huge shadowy conspiracy), had almost no affect on crime or any other area of life in the US – certainly not as compared to the “war on drugs”, which was a product of a perfect storm of social engineering from both the right (“drugs are bad”) and the left (decades of welfare dependence and warehousing the poor in the inner city).

At any rate, even though the numbers of people involved in the lefty boogeyman version of “militias” was never big, and has dropped since the nineties, the image that the left propagates – paunchy, hate-clogged, drawling,  white rednecks in camouflage with AK-47s – is a control panel full of hot buttons for the left, purpose-designed to scare – is back, for the moment at least, bigger and badder than ever. 

Because with a Tea Party afoot across the land and the President’s poll numbers falling faster than Hillary Duff’s career bell curve, there are lots of center-to-left voters to be scared back into line.

And fear’s first cousin is ignorance.  I’m getting deja vu all over again from the comments, the blog posts, the talk show calls; the left is duly frightened of the great, unwashed horde (and the tiny, unconvicted band that was the excuse for the left to declare “militias” the boogeyman of the month again). 

It reminds me of something I wrote two years ago about the 25th anniversary of the Medina Shootout, and Hollywood’s reflections on all those crazy people between the Hudson and the Sierra Madre:

But the Hollywood take on the area, and the locals, was bemusingly warped.  Part of it was the Central Casting version of small-town people; although North Dakota is a place where you can hear the Fargo accent (”Yah, sure, you betcha”) in a hundred little main street cafes and bars, the show had the local farmers speaking with cornpone Arklahoma drawls.  The locals, to Hollywood, were out of Gomer Pyle or, given the sinistry of the subject matter, maybe Deliverance. 

Worse?  While there was support for Kahl (and even more criticism of the Feds’ heavy-handedness, arrogance, and occasional contempt for due process in the way they carried out the manhunt in the immediate wake of the shootout), Manhunt in the Dakotas showed something that was almost an active guerilla movement, with rocks and shots aimed at passing police cars, threats, Gross (and Larry Hunt as “Chief Walters”, a composite and sympathetic Jamestown police chief) being harrassed while driving in the countryside, and – in the movie’s climactic scene – the two walking, nervous, down “Jamestown”’s main street as the “local radio station” played the pro-Kahl song (with a cheery intro from the DJ), both of them keenly aware of the hateful gazes of the locals (by now all of them seemingly Kahl-sympathizers) boring through them both, as if they were fully-bedsheeted Klansmen scurrying through Compton.

It was nonsense, of course – and, like the “militia” mania that served to distract parts of America from Bill Clinton’s foibles, and is being rolled out now to distract us from Obama’s economy, and scare “moderates” into line behind The One, it’s a cynical lie.

More tomorow.

With the government’s sudden fixation with violence and terrorism (as defined by Janet Napolitano, at any rate), it’s worth going over what “security” is.

The big picture, of course, is important; government has a constitutional duty to defend the country.  It’s one of a very, very short list of duties actually spelled out for a legitimate government in the Constitution; it’s one of the few legitimate reasons any government exists. 

Secure the borders?  Absolutely.  There is not a nation in the world worth the title that doesn’t protect its own sovereignty.  There’s a reason for this; we formed a nation for a reason.  We intend it to be disctinct from other nations.  If tomorrow all of the world’s other nations upheld freedom, the rule of law, the value of the individual, and (after November, 2012, God willing) the free market.  Of course, the United States is a nation of immigrants, and indeed we need immigrants to keep rejuvenating this nation; nations with unchanging cultures become ossified and stagnant.  But the key is that immigrants must come to the United States, rather than bringing Ireland or Finland or Greece here. 

But that’s fodder for the upcoming “Culture” installment.

Protecting us from criminals?  Yep.  That too.  The law-abiding citizen should be secure on his/her property, with his/her possessions, and his/her rights.  The law should

Which is where government keeps screwing up.  It’s not just governments run by crime bosses and warlords – Russia and Tadjikistan and the Congo – that break this rule.   In the UK, a law-abiding citizen who defends his home, property or self from a burglar, robber or attacker with any kind of force frequently faces stiffer punishment than the criminal involved.  In Chicago – a city prowled by gangs armed barely a degree behind the Fedayin Saddam fashion curve – the full weight of the city’s legal system waits to fall upon the citizen who dares resist the thugs with a .22 handgun.

Any dictator can make you “secure”; the streets of Rome were safe enough under Mussolini.  But that’s not security, any more that a dictator (or university dean) giving you a few minutes to say what you want within a bunch of carefully set-up guidelines is “freedom of speech”.  “Security” that exists only at the pleasure and to the purposes of ones’ leaders – masters, really – isn’t security at all.  It’s the kind of “Security” that a flock of sheep get when escorted by a pack of wolves; it exists only for the needs of the wolves, not the flock.

“No problem, Mitch.  America’s not like that!”

Gun control laws that burden the law-abiding more than criminals – that’s almost all of them – don’t enhance “security”. 

Property forfeiture laws that penalize the innocent (which one is supposed to be, until proven guilty) do not make us more “secure”.

Federal “watch lists” that stimatize mainstream (if temporarily out-of-power) dissent make us less secure.

A government policy that is more accomodating to those that would kill us than to those who have defended us doesn’t make us more secure.

That’s what I want; that’s what this nation needs; a government that knows “Security” protects the nation while upholding the citizen.

Wow.  I am an extremist!

It’s spring break along the Gulf Coast, and that means it’s time for thousands of bobble-headed college kids to flock to the beach, get completely drunk on Mom and Dad’s money, and pass out in pools of their own vomit.

And when you mix alcohol and post-adolescents, you get trouble:

In related news, Steny Hoyer has demanded that House Republicans condemn the “avalanche of violence” that the Tea Parties have brought to Spring Break.