"Just the facts M'am, Just the facts." -- Sgt. Joe Friday
In a time when debt-based federal stimulus money rains down around us out of control, these 3 measures are entirely rational.
GOP Agenda – A Pledge To America
I don’t think there’s enough lipstick in Washington to make this pig look good. It doesn’t mention death taxes, it uses weasel words about border security, it says they’ll put us on a path to balancing the budget without actually calling for a balanced budget, and they promise to give us 3 days to digest and respond to their thousand page bills.
It looks dressed up to appeal to constitutional fundamentalists without actually saying much to hold the GOP to. And this morph of the Declaration of Independence from a document stating the foundation for our right to change our system of government, to a justification for making policy changes within our existing government, is just repugnant.
Matthew Broderick played a hacker kid in the movie War Games who dialed into a government computer named WOPR, and triggered a global thermonuclear war game simulation with it. In the movie, WOPR was located at the NORAD complex inside Cheyenne Mountain and it controlled our nuclear arsenal. No one at NORAD realized there was a simulation going on and the military mobilized as if the threat was real. The plot brings the world to the brink of nuclear war as the game between the hacker and the machine plays out. Things eventually resolve and at the end the WOPR computer concludes the moral of the story–in a suitably robotic voice, “The only way to win is not to play the game.”
There you have the answer to Saul Alinsky and his Rules For Radicals.
msnbc.com news services
updated 9/18/2010 10:15:40 PM ETWASHINGTON — President Barack Obama came out swinging against Republicans in a fiery campaign-season speech to black lawmakers Saturday night, urging them to “guard the change” he was delivering with the kind of organizing that propelled the civil rights movement.
“I need everybody here to go back to your neighborhoods, and your workplaces, to your churches, and barbershops, and beauty shops. Tell them we have more work to do. Tell them we can’t wait to organize. Tell them that the time for action is now,” Obama said in his remarks.
Members of “the other side,” Obama said, “want to take us backward. We want to move America forward. In fact, they’re betting that you’ll come down with a case of amnesia. That you’ll forget about what their agenda did to this country when they were in charge. Remember, these are the folks who spent almost a decade driving the economy into a ditch. And now they’re asking for the keys back.”
“What made the civil rights movement possible were foot soldiers like so many of you, sitting down at lunch counters and standing up for freedom. What made it possible for me to be here today are Americans throughout our history making our union more equal, making our union more just, making our union more perfect,” Obama said. “That’s what we need again.”
The effort began Monday with a White House reception for black college officials. It included speeches by the president on Wednesday to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and by first lady Michelle Obama to a black caucus legislative conference that same day.
The president told the Hispanic group he is committed to an immigration overhaul, even though it has stalled in Congress. He blamed GOP opposition and said Hispanic voters should keep that in mind.
“You have every right to keep the heat on me and keep the heat on the Democrats,” he said. “But don’t forget who is standing with you, and who is standing against you. … Your voice can make the difference.”
Looking at this latest push from Obama, it’s obvious he’s dealing race cards, class envy cards, illegal immigration cards, culture cards, xenophobia cards, and probably a handful of others–pretty much red meat for everyone, whether you are for or against his hope and change.
If you’re for Obama’s change, he means to inspire you to action. But even more importantly, if you’re against Obama’s change he means to inspire you to reaction. It is in the reaction of the majority that his real power to control events lies.
Without conservative reaction to Obama’s racism, victimization and division, all he has is an echo chamber within the minority. The real play, the big fish he’s trying to reel in, is the resonance from the majority, because their reaction makes the playing field on which to continue the game.
The main goal of community organizing is to provide a continuing provocation to the majority to get them to react irrationally, emotionally, to lose control, and to thereby become subject to manipulation.
Conservatives need to stop reacting to all of the dividing philosophies promulgated by the Left. The basket full of plainly harmful and emotionally supercharged red-meat ideas that the left uses to cause division in America all deserve to be ignored. There’s nothing new there, nothing to be learned, nothing to be gained, and conservatives know this on an intellectual level.
Conservatives need to stop allowing themselves to be jerked around by their emotions. The left will carry on as they will. No one can reasonably expect to change members of a brainwashed cult. Conservatives should take themselves off the playing field and out of that game and allow the left’s ideas, such as they are, to just resonate among themselves.
If conservatives disempower the left’s harmful ideas by ceasing to react to them, I expect their politics of division will lose relevance and gradually die out. And one day we’ll be able to put Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals into the ground where they belong with him.
Silverman interviews Maes 9_17_10.mp4
With all of the loose ends in the continuing Dan Maes’ narrative, with the absence of any pro-forma policies that Maes might intend for Colorado, with the absence of any credentials that might lead one to a governor’s office, Maes leaves me with the clear impression that he continually invents and reinvents himself from whole cloth, minute by minute. He is the narrative and the narrative is all there is.
Let’s break this turkey down:
This article reeks of election year politics. It’s main value appears to be as an indicator of a linkage between John Dunn and Jim Whistler. Mr. Whistler circulated an email a couple weeks ago that grew out of a freedom of information request he had made for the 2009 county audit report. He then cherry-picked a couple pages out of the 50 page document and forwarded those pages with his own suggestions of county financial impropriety. A friend routed the email to me. I asked Mr. Whistler to release the entire audit report so that I could make an informed analysis of his charges. He refused to release the entire report.
Those are the facts as I see them. Draw your own conclusions.
Decision: Olsen & Harrington v. Tancredo, Miller, ACP & CO Secretary of State
Excerpt:
D. Plaintiffs’ First Amendment Argument Does Not Alter The Court’s Conclusions
Plaintiffs seem to contend that the Court’s construction of the statutory framework somehow implicates Plaintiffs’ rights under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. They point to Storer v. Brown, 415 U.S. 724 (1974), Colo. Libertarian Party v. Sec’y of State of Colo., 817 P.2d 998 (Colo. 1991), and Riddle v. Daley, 2010 WL 2593927 (D. Colo. June 23, 2010) and Curry et al v. Buescher, slip. op. 10-1265 (10th Cir. August 31, 2010). First, Plaintiffs do not explicitly assert a constitutional claim in their Second Amended Petition. Second, the law is clear that a court “should not decide a constitutional issue unless the necessity for such decision is clear and inescapable.” People v. Lybarger, 700 P.2d 910, 915 (Colo. 1985). Third, the associational, speech and ballot access rights at issue, if any, belong to ACP, Mr. Tancredo and Ms. Miller. Fourth, the facts of the cases on which Plaintiffs rely are distinguishable. They involve independent candidates seeking direct access by petition to a general election ballot. Such candidates are not similarly situated to candidates selected through the processes available to major and minor political parties. Finally, Plaintiffs seem to invoke these cases to make a policy argument about what they perceive as the political instability that would result from allowing someone such as Mr. Tancredo late entry into a race. It is not appropriate, however, for this Court to decide public policy. For all these reasons, Plaintiffs’ constitutional argument is not ripe for the Court’s consideration.
The GOP sponsors of this lawsuit consider Tancredo’s candidacy in the governor’s race an infringement of their 1st Am. right to free speech because Tancredo’s candidacy creates political instability for them. A more clear nanny-state predisposition could hardly be conceived. The Colorado Republican Party should be voted into obscurity for prosecuting such an offensive view.
Ask the Tea Party in Colorado. The answer is blowing in the wind and whither the wind goes, so goes the tea party. One day the Constitutionalist fishwrap from the Springs agrees with the Gazette that Maes should get out. The very next day, he’s back. The Constitutionalist loves him again. The whole state voted him off the island, but he won’t go. So what does the tea party do? They love him all over again.
Maes blew in like a fresh spring breeze with all the hope and promise you could want. Here was a successful businessman who had made millions, managed large organizations, had the experience and the stones to stand up to the powers that be. Turns out, all he had was the stones! The rest of it was a fraud, but now he’s their fraud.
Again. Today. Tomorrow? Well, they’ll have to cross that bridge when they come to it.
If tea party history is any guide, expect their sentiments to change. Perhaps when the cold winds start to blow in from the North, they’ll turn chilly about Maes once again. They seem to be a fickle bunch.
When you hang your hat on the mercurial, corruptible, shifting sands of the will of the people, you never know when it will be handed back to you, who will wear it in the interim, or what kind of dirt they’ll leave on it. That’s why the Founders built a country on the rule of law and tried to put as many roadblocks in the way of the will of the people as they could devise.
If you could pry the Elbert County Tea Party lose from it’s Facebook flag-waving-frenzy over the will of the people for a moment, you might let them in on this little secret of our shared history, however, the leader of this ragtag bunch of ersatz revolutionaries, one Mr. Rowland, isn’t into substantive debate, responding to dissent, or defending his ideas.
The fervor with which tea partyers defend the caucus system and the Republican Party of Colorado after those machineries produced mediocre 2010 candidates is frankly shocking. The tea party is not a registered political party and has no corporate or political identity at the Colorado Secretary of State. It can’t open a bank account, officially sponsor a candidate for office, or officially sponsor ballot initiatives. It appears to be a political party up for grabs that the Republicans in Colorado have currently grabbed.
Tomorrow, it could be the Constitution Party or Democrat Party who grab them. They’re an easy mark because anyone can identify themselves as a tea party candidate. As an informal association the tea party can be shoe-horned into any camp. The grassroots folks have the best of intentions but everyone knows where the road paved with good intentions leads.
My experiences at tea party rallies in Washington (9/12/09) and Denver (4/15/09) were not occasions to celebrate the Republican Party. There was a common thread of critical thinking by speakers and attendees at those rallies that held both Republicans and Democrats responsible for the big government rear-ends sitting squarely on American citizens. That the tea party in Colorado has now turned into a cheerleader for the Republican Party, while coincidentally the Colorado Republican Party has produced no qualified candidates who give any indication they will reduce the burden of government at all levels, is a huge disconnect.
A tea party that cannot uphold candidates and ballot initiatives as standards to measure against will get whatever the powers-that-be choose to give them. And that’s the role of a tool.
(click to enlarge)
The Poundstone/Maes contribution-that-wasn’t-a-contribution scandal has not yet catalyzed a discussion about the value of the caucus system in Colorado. It should.
You can’t blame the success of Maes and Buck at the Republican state assembly of caucus system delegates on the tea party. If these candidates are faulty, if they weren’t adequately vetted, and they appear not to have been, you’ve got one group to thank for that, and that’s the self-anointed precinct caucus state delegates led by Dick Wadhams and the Republican party officials from each county who consorted to present them to the voters.
So the question to Mike Rosen on the party-trumps-person theory of electoral politics is, “Does party trump delegate negligence?” Do you hold your nose and pull the lever for the apparent fraud and for the old-guard Washington-monied tea-party-poser on the thin hope that you might get some taxpayer-favoring legislation out of one of these folks some day down the road?
Or do you reasonably expect them to behave consistently within the characters they’ve already shown–characters which raise questions about how carefully they would husband Colorado’s public wealth and taxing power–and as a voter look around for alternatives? Obviously, we know how Tancredo answers that question.
These are serious failings of Colorado’s caucus system. This is what happens when the anointed run amok. A petition process where all candidates go before the voting populace from the beginning, where they all face tough questions from the voting populace from the beginning, would not necessarily produce a better outcome, but at least the responsibility for the outcome would be in the right place, and that would greatly improve our chances.
Postscript: I get nervous when I hear a politician tell me about the will of the people: Rowlands grassroots perspective and ensuing debate
It’s fascinating how the national post-primary spin has morphed Buck into an upstart outsider candidate (the one supported by millions of Washington PAC money) and Norton is now the old guard candidate (who petitioned on to the ballot because the old guard caucus system wouldn’t support her.)
And it’s fascinating that Tancredo (defender of closing American borders to illegal immigrants) got into his race by issuing an ultimatum to Maes and McInnis to withdraw, and now Maes has issued orders to Tancredo to withdraw. Who will blink first in the Tancredo vs. Maes Mexican standoff? (And does Tom even do Mexican standoffs?)
If the Republican Party leadership concludes that Maes can’t beat Hickenlooper, could they get Maes to stand down (unlikely), and would they dine on some chewy crow and nominate Norton (unlikely) ?
Rich Galen’s conclusion: [Read more…]
5/15/10 Frontier HS Gym, Elizabeth
The following are mp3 audio files (podcasts). Just right click and download them to your computer or mp3 player. Speeches are presented in the order they were given.
Candidates in today’s speeches and Q&A sessions were more substantive by a significant degree than I have seen them heretofore at Elbert County Republican Breakfast forums. This was my third tea party event but my first one in Elbert County. I would not characterize the speeches I’ve heard at previous tea party events as typically more or less substantive so my experience doesn’t help explain why candidates seemed to bring their “A games” to the tea party meeting today. Perhaps we’re entering a phase in the political season where candidates are hitting their stride and gaining confidence and strength in presenting their messages. In any event, I appreciate their seemingly tireless efforts to stand up for conservative principles for the benefit of Elbert County citizens. It takes a lot of dedication and desire to stay in the eye of the storm like they do and I hope this rebroadcast helps.
Sign a Petition to place Jane Norton
on the Republican Primary Ballot at
Pioneer Home Medical Supply
5357 Highway 86, just east of Elizabeth.
