Tea Party or Tar and Feather Party?

Is the tea party a dangerous conservative monolith controlled by nefarious powers, as the liberals claim?  

Or is it a hapless, incoherent rabble, as the liberals claim?

They can’t have it both ways.  Actually they can.  Liberalism thrives on logical incoherence.  


Anyway, USA Today printed a most admirable article about the Tea Party Movement.  I think they nailed it:

The "Tea Party" is less a classic political movement than a frustrated state of mind.

"I don't really understand it, but I like what they stand for," says Terry Rushing, 63, of Greensburg, La., who was among those surveyed. "They just support everything I'm looking for — lower taxes, less government. ... All the good things, you know."

This is what worries establishment Republicans...

Even so, the movement is less a party than an anti-party, with no clear consensus about whom its national leaders are and a generally dyspeptic view of organized political power.

"It's a party opposed to the idea of parties," says Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian whose book about the movement, The Whites of Their Eyes, is scheduled to be published in October.

This is what worries liberals...

The Tea Party reminds her more of a religious revival than a political movement. She compares it to the Second Great Awakening in the 1830s, a religious resurgence that helped fuel temperance and abolitionism.

Much of what the tea party embraces is non-partisan:  Opposition to insane spending, bloated government and capricious regulation on individuals and businesses.  A general sense that government has gotten out of control and our representatives and bureaucrats no longer listen to us.

Skepticism is Healthy

What emerges from the polls and interviews is a deeply engaged, highly skeptical group of people — even toward others in their ranks.

The age of believing what our political heroes tell us is over.  For tea partiers, the age of political heroes is over as well.  We know we need government, and it takes people to run it.  We’ll vote for you, but we’ve also got our eye on you.  We made you, Mr. Politician, and we can break you.


The libs (and establishment Republicans) are scared witless of the Tea Party movement, and that’s a good thing.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.  -- Thomas Jefferson

Liberal Lies about Taxes

What is it with liberals and taxes?  
Despite all real-world evidence to the contrary, liberals see higher taxes as the solution to every fiscal problem.  The chart at the bottom of the post refutes this.  States with the highest levels of taxation have the worst economies and the greatest debt.  Low taxation states have healthier economies and less debt.

It Takes a Crime-Ridden Village...
The New York Times, in detailing Illinois’s budget crisis, steers clear of facts and instead plucks the liberal heartstrings by focusing on community organizer agencies...

...holding together poor and working-class neighborhoods. With an annual budget of $16 million, the agency tends to families torn by crime and violence as well as people who are psychologically stressed and abusing drugs.

Jail the violent criminals and the drug pushers and you won’t have “families torn by crime” and “people psychologically stressed and abusing drugs.”  There you go!  $16 million saved, and these counselors and their helpless wards are now free to pursue real jobs!

Of course, you need a good business climate in order to put people to work.  Last time I checked, businesses and the rich people who own them are where the jobs come from, and the data shows that a low tax environment creates jobs.  

New York Times:  Fueling Liberal Ignorance
The Times ignores all reality and repeats that tired liberal refrain that calls for more taxes.  They state:

“The state’s income tax burden is not terribly high — Illinois ranks in the bottom half of states”   

True statement.  Personal Income Taxes are not terribly high, but every other conceivable tax is!!! ranking Illinois right around the 14th highest in the nation for overall tax burden.

News articles like this serve only to confuse the issue and add to the economic ignorance of the liberal reader.    

Here is the overall taxation chart, courtesy of The Tax Foundation.  Higher number means more taxation, lower number less.

Gun Rights are Natural Rights

Self-Defense: An Inalienable Right

Statesmen from ancient Rome to the American Revolution laid the foundation in law for the right of self-defense. America's founders were influenced by these classic philosophic teachings and the European tradition derived from them.

"Civilized people are taught by logic, barbarians by necessity, communities by tradition; and the lesson is inculcated even in wild beasts by nature itself," wrote the great Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero.

"They learn that they have to defend their own bodies and persons and lives from violence of any and every kind by all the means within their power." (Claremont Institute)

 

Do you have a right to life?

The right to self-defense is the first and most fundamental right contained in Natural Law.  Without life, nothing else matters.

Think we should surrender that right to government so the state can protect us?  

OK, then riddle me this:  Does the family of a murder victim have a legal right to sue the state for failing to use its police powers to prevent the murder?

American courts have ruled again and again that police have no duty to protect individuals from deadly assault. The only alternatives for a person in such danger are to rely on the mercy of criminals or to carry a gun illegally. No one should be forced to break the law to exercise a basic right. (Claremont Institute)

Your only recourse is to your natural right of self-defense.  Take that away (violate it) and you have deprived a free person of the fundamental right to life.  Welcome to progressivism!

For an interesting and understandable legal discussion, see Volokh - Jim Lindgren

* - Cross Posted at Rational Nation

Independence Day

Happy 4th of July! 

Enjoy the long weekend, but please pause to remember those who fought and died to make that enjoyment possible. Freedom is never free.






A free people claim their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.
-- Thomas Jefferson, Rights of British America, 1774


But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.
-- John Adams


I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him.
-- Abraham Lincoln


Government's first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.
-- Ronald Reagan


Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.
-- Ronald Reagan

It Has Always Been The Soldier

It is the soldier,
not the President who gives us democracy.
It is the soldier,
not the Congress who takes care of us.
It is the soldier,
not the Reporter who has given us Freedom of Press.
It is the soldier,
not the Poet who has given us Freedom of Speech.
It is the soldier,
not the campus Organizer who has given us the
Freedom to Demonstrate.
It is the soldier,
who salutes the flag;
who serves beneath the flag,
and whose coffin is draped by the flag,
that allows the protester to burn the flag.
(Father Dennis O'Brien, US Marine Corp. Chaplain)

http://www.foundingfathers.info/
http://www.vfwpost1503.org/it's_the_soldier.html

Natural Rights

When Men enter into Society, it is by voluntary consent; and they have a right to demand and insist upon the performance of such conditions, And previous limitations as form an equitable original compact.  (Source:  Vindicatingthefounders.com)

Surprisingly (or not) I am finding that may in Left Blogistan are embarrassingly ignorant of Natural Law or Natural Rights.

Usually, these are the same people who can recite the entire "America is Evil" catechism, from slavery and womens rights, to treatment of native American and stealing land from Mexico.

(Question.  Under which government would the current residents of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Southern Colorado and California rather live?  I propose a vote, with the losers sent to Mexico and thereafter eternally vowing to STFU on this tired subject.)

Natural Law -- Our Foundation

Natural Law is a philosophy, a theory.  As such, it is open to debate and question, as is Christianity and global warming.  Natural Law is the philosophical foundation of our constitutional republic, and today it stands in stark contrast to the central economic planning and social tinkering of progressives.

Jonathan  Dolhenty explains:

What do we mean by "natural law"? In its simplest definition, natural law is that "unwritten law" that is more or less the same for everyone everywhere. 

To be more exact, natural law is the concept of a body of moral principles that is common to all humankind and, as generally posited, is recognizable by human reason alone. Natural law is therefore distinguished from -- and provides a standard for -- positive law, the formal legal enactments of a particular society.


To sum it up, then, we can say that the natural law:

• is not made by human beings;
• is based on the structure of reality itself;
• is the same for all human beings and at all times;
• is an unchanging rule or pattern which is there for human beings to discover;
• is the naturally knowable moral law
• is a means by which human beings can rationally guide themselves to their good.  

(Source:  Radical Academy)

The Rights of the Colonists, written in 1772, shows how natural rights were understood at our nation's founding.  It is a short document that describes man's natural rights and his entering into voluntary civil society with others for the mutual protection of those rights.  It logically follows that such a society's positive  laws "should conform as far as possible, to the Law of natural reason and equity." 


Simply put, a society needs man-made laws to protect the natural laws of those who voluntarily participate. 

"The natural liberty of Men by entering into society is abridg’d or restrained so far only as is necessary for the Great end of Society the best good of the whole"

It's a balancing act, and progressives have almost turned us upside-down.  To get a better understanding, take five minutes to read the document at Vindicating the Founding Fathers.

Further Reading:
Locke's Second Treatise Of Civil Government

The Principles of Natural and Politic Law

Why Progressives Must Be Crushed Like Bugs

Daley to Ignore Supreme Court Slapdown on Chicago Gun Ban  

Richard Daley, owner of Chicago and Crime Boss of the Corrupt Democrat Machine that spawned Barack Obama, has announced he won't let an inconsequential thing like the US Constitution stop him from keeping guns away from law-abiding citizens.

The Supreme Court has reaffirmed our God-given right to keep and bear arms, but Chicago progressives are readying a series of fiery bureaucratic hoops a free man must jump through in order to defend himself and his family with a firearm.  I won't stink up this blog by listing them.  

Steve Chapman had this to say about progressive mistrust of personal freedoms:

But really: Whose judgment about the value of guns to law-abiding citizens do you trust? Ordinary people defending their homes against criminals? Or a public official who is shepherded to work each day by police officers?

Indeed.  He goes on to  point out that murders have soared since the gun ban's inception:

The reality that goes unpublicized by the mayor is that the weekend before the Supreme Court decision, at least 26 people in Chicago were shot, three fatally. The previous weekend, the victims numbered more than 50, with at least eight dying. 

Daley downplays the obvious fact that his ban hasn't spared the city from "the full scope of gun violence in America."

After all, the almost total prohibition passed back in 1982 didn't have the effects promised by supporters. It failed to eradicate handguns, of which the city has an estimated 100,000. Nor did the ban establish serenity in the streets. In the decade after it took effect, homicides soared.

This is why liberals can never be trusted to run things.   The right of a person to defend herself is a fundamental unalienable right.  Daley is either drunk with power or he is crazy.

Uncle Ted on Gun Control
And now for some constitutional sanity from the Motor City Madman (who wisely abandoned Detroit for Texas)...





* - Cross-Posted at Rational Nation

Eat Yourself Thin, and Other Liberal Ideas

The Democrats, like a Florida election judge looking for an Al Gore vote, say they see signs of hope in the economy.  They are delusional.

The first delusion is that government can "create jobs."  Actually, it can, but government jobs do not spur economic growth.  If it were otherwise, all government would have to do is hire every last unemployed person and the problem would be solved.  Failed states like Illinois and California appear to have actually tried this strategy...

Democrats are just dying for another stimulus, this time it's "for the children," they tell us, when actually it's a $50 billion payoff to state governments and the teachers unions.  Can't they see that the taxpayer money they've blown so far has been wasted?

Uncertainty Kills Job Growth
We don't need more "stimulus." Government needs to remove the uncertainty that is causing employers to keep their money stashed away instead of using it to hire people:

Today investors and employers are certain that uncertainties are multiplying.

They are uncertain about when interest rates will rise, and by how much. They do not know how badly the economy will be burdened by the expiration, approximately 200 days from now, of the Bush tax cuts on high earners — aka investors and employers.

They know the costs of ObamaCare will be higher than was advertised, but not how much higher. They do not know the potential costs of cap-and-trade and other energy policies.

They do not know if "card check" — abolition of the right of secret ballot elections in unionization decisions — will pass, or how much the economy will be injured by making unions more muscular. (George Will)

Spending your way to prosperity is right up there with "Eat Yourself Thin" and "Smoke Your Way to Good Health"

The original sin—and it was nearly global—was to revive the Keynesian economic model that had last cracked up in the 1970s, while forgetting the lessons of the long prosperity from 1982 through 2007. The Reagan and Clinton-Gingrich booms were fostered by a policy environment for most of that era of lower taxes, spending restraint and sound money.(WSJ Keynesian Dead End)

Europe realizes this now.  Germany rejects further "stimulus" spending, Britain is crafting an austerity budget, and they've chopped up the credit cards Greece used to spend its way to financial ruin.

But the Obama White House blithely marches on.  Maybe they're hoping to bend the reality curve...