Progressivism: A Vapid and Hollow Charade

GOP senators should filibuster the Kagan nomination.  I know, they’d lose.  But they would hopefully awaken somnolent American citizens to the loss of their natural rights.


In a rare blip of actual substance, Kagan revealed she would not move to overturn a law mandating every citizen eat a congressionally-prescribed amount of vegetable every day.  If Congress can tell us what to eat under threat of prosecution, what can they not do?  (See George Will’s questions for Elena Kagan here and here)


Prosecute Kagan for Lying to Congress
Kagan also professed ignorance of the term “Judicial Progressivism.”  This and her her studied agnosticism on natural rights (upon which our nation was founded), are enough to indict her for lying to Congress.

She was dean of Harvard Law School and she knows nothing of these issues?  Either Harvard got ripped off big time, or she’s a liar.


If a Man Can Grant it to You, A Man can Take it Away
Jacob Sullum, in his excellent Reason article explains the importance of natural rights:

Constitutional interpretation aside, Kagan's reluctance to endorse the concept of pre-existing rights was troubling because without it we cannot draw moral distinctions between legal regimes.

How can we condemn a dictator for legally authorized oppression, or say that our own Constitution is better now that it bans slavery than it was when it tacitly approved the practice?

The traditional American answer is that people have certain rights by virtue of being human, regardless of what the law says.

I include the two George Will articles because they are good thought pieces that help us ordinary folks think through constitutional concepts with concrete, real-world questions.

* - Kagan years ago called Supreme Court nomination hearings, "Vapid and hollow charades."

Mile High Miscarriage of Justice

If this don’t make your blood boil, I don’t know what will...

WHEAT RIDGE, Colo. - Admitted thieves are going free, while an elderly Wheat Ridge man is facing the possibility of spending the rest of his life behind bars, all, he says, for trying to defend his property and his life. (Fox 31 - Denver)

Two illegal immigrants (who had been arrested and released various times in Denver) tried to steal an 82 year-old man’s flatbed trailer and he shot one of the slimeballs as they were getting away. What did the Jefferson County DA do? He let the immigrants go and charged the armed citizen with four counts of attempted murder. 

This is no surprise to Coloradans. We are a fairly libertarian state suffering a liberal red rash running from Denver, through the People’s Republic of Boulder and up to Fort Collins.

** LATE BREAKING UPDATE! ** 
ICE agents arrested both illegal scumbags and are holding them on a $100,000 bond!  Kudos to local morning talk jock Peter Boyles.  Rumor has it Bill O'Reilly may pick up the story.  All that's left is for Jefferson County DA Scott Storey to climb down and admit what a gross injustice his office has inflicted on the 82 year old Robert Wallace.  

"Even if we want to, we can't just go shoot someone in our front yard"

That's what the nattering nanny says on the 9 News video.  I say Bull!  Notice the progressive use of "we can't just..."  Who says?  Defending one's property is a natural right of free people.  If more scumbag robbers were shot, there would be less robberies.     

Denver has been a de facto sanctuary city for years

When Governor Bill Ritter was DA, he routinely caught and released illegal immigrant criminals, freeing them up to drive drunk, rape and kill. When confronted with the death and destruction he had caused, he reached for the liberal playbook and blamed “the system.”

Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, “The Looper,” denies the sanctuary city charge, but ask anyone who lives there, where East Colfax now looks like Little Jalisco. The Looper wants to be our next governor, but the little Howdy Doody got caught gushing over Van Jones like a lovesick teen...

Earth to Little Looper!  Colorado is an energy industry state!

“Silent” Immigration Raids

The Obama Administration is cracking down on illegal immigration by punishing those who hire them


The New York Times is boo hooing big bleeding heart tears over the now-unemployed illegal aliens, but I congratulate the Obama administration for having the courage to do this, and for doing it in the right way:

BREWSTER, Wash. — The Obama administration has replaced immigration raids at factories and farms with a quieter enforcement strategy: sending federal agents to scour companies’ records for illegal immigrant workers.   

These  “silent raids” have resulted in...

... audits of employee files at more than 2,900 companies. The agency has levied a record $3 million in civil fines so far this year on businesses that hired unauthorized immigrants, according to official figures. Thousands of those workers have been fired, immigrant groups estimate.

Obama does something right for a change
This is the right approach befitting a humane, freedom loving nation.  It rightly places the punishment on unscrupulous employers while short-circuiting the hooting lefties who love shouting "NAZI!" every time an immigration enforcement officer does his job.       

“Instead of hundreds of agents going after one company, now one agent can go after hundreds of companies,” said Mark K. Reed, president of Border Management Strategies, a consulting firm in Tucson that advises companies across the country on immigration law. “And there is no drama, no trauma, no families being torn apart, no handcuffs.”       

Take away the jobs and the illegal aliens will eventually self-deport.  Meanwhile, raided businesses are now doing things the right way, filling out the forms and bringing in legal guest workers from Mexico and Jamaica.

I love this quote from one of the illegals who was bounced from her job:

“They are bringing people from outside,” Ms. Cervantes said, perplexed. “What will happen to those of us who are already here?”       

Thousands of American trades people and unskilled workers have been asking the same question for years, Ms. Cervantes.

Education and the Whining of America

You mean some college degrees are worth more than others?

Another day, another whiny story from the New York Times...

First it was the girl who got a degree in womens lesbian comparative religion literature studies. She’s upset because she’s $100,000 in debt and working a dead-end job for $22 an hour in high cost San Fran Sicko. As one reader commented, “She got the job she’s qualified for.”

Next, the New York Times reports on a spoiled young graduate who just can’t find a job worthy of his grossly overinflated sense of self. He’s living with mommy and daddy.

After several interviews, the Hanover Insurance Group in nearby Worcester offered to hire him as an associate claims adjuster, at $40,000 a year. But even before the formal offer, Mr. Nicholson had decided not to take the job.

Rather than waste early years in dead-end work, he reasoned, he would hold out for a corporate position that would draw on his college training and put him, as he sees it, on the bottom rungs of a career ladder. ( NY Times - A New Generation)

Good choice, Skippy! Why stoop to Abraham Lincoln’s level by working your way up? So this pampered prince continues sponging off his parents. But he worries to the reporter that the folks won’t be too pleased to hear he turned down a job. This after his grandparents paid for all his college expenses.

He’s had to work for absolutely nothing, and pay for absolutely nothing, so he values nothing. If this is the face of the new generation, our country is in big trouble.

For two-thirds of us, college is a waste of time

The 22 year old baby still living at home actually got a useful degree, unlike the first person in this article. She may have been better off learning the trade of photography. Educator Patrick Welsh says...

Over the past five years, I have seen students who didn't have the skills one would expect of a ninth-grader going off to four-year colleges where fewer than 30% of entering freshman graduate.

That means that 70% of the freshman class is likely to end up not with a diploma but a pile of debt. (USA Today - Is College Overrated?)

He goes on to point out that two-thirds of high school graduates do not need a degree anyway:

Arnold Packer, co-director of the landmark study "Workforce 2000: Work and Workers for the 21st Century," points out that in 2018 — as is the case today — two of three jobs in America will not require either a bachelor's degree from a four-year college or an associate degree from a community college.

We’re sending people off to college who really shouldn’t be there, and the drop out rate reflects that. Worse, colleges are graduating students who lack basic job skills, which ends up cheapening the value of a bachelors degree.

So what should the other two-thirds do?

Vocational training and professional licensing. Non-college credentials are gaining currency in the professional world of work. Unlike a degree, a license or certification proves to an employer that the holder has passed a comprehensive test proving she has the necessary job skills.

Welsh observes...

Jobs in health care and social assistance, leisure and hospitality, retail trade and so-called middle-skill jobs such as plumbers, electricians, legal assistants and police officers will require job specific licenses or certificates from community colleges or technical institutes, and/or on the job training.

In fact, many graduates of four-year colleges are now enrolled in community colleges to get the specific training and licensure for jobs for which college did not prepare them.

Islam’s Culture of Death

The Islamotards in Lebanon have made a death and terrorism themed tourist attraction

Beirut was once The Paris of the Levant. It is where Middle Eastern intellectuals escaped bloody regimes, women enjoyed freedom, and learning was cherished.  First the Palestinian radicals moved in, later Hezbollah hijacked the place, and the rest is history.

Resistance Land
Hezbollah's new tourist park, meant to indoctrinate visitors with the ideals of the Islamic Resistance, may be the latest sign that another war is on the horizon. (Read more at FP - Resistance Land)

Too Hot to Handle: The Naked Truth

Why we Can't Trust the News Media, #5,843

We've Investigated Ourselves and Find No Wrongdoing

A Panel at East Anglia University and paid for by East Anglia University investigated the CRU at East Anglia University and found no wrongdoing.  Here's the biggest criticism they could muster:

"The question that arises was openness in relation to how that science was then being challenged, being discussed, and the commerce that there was between them and critics and critics and challengers right round the world," he said.


Also criticised was a graph prepared for the World Meteorological Organisation, showing temperatures from 1850 ticking up sharply at the end of the 20th century.  The inquiry found the graph was misleading, but not intentionally so.

I heard they all celebrated by going off with Al Gore for a congratulatory massage...

Levi Johnson Apologizes to the Palins

"...To the Palin family in general and to Sarah Palin in particular, please accept my regrets and forgive my youthful indiscretion....I hope one day to restore your trust."

I guess the whole naked celebrity wanna-be thing must have played itself out... 

Google news returned a whole six news items about this.  But what do you expect from a news media that investigated an Ohio plumber more than it investigated a presidential candidate from a major party?

Obamanomic Uncertaintly Killing Jobs

Liberals are pointing at Republicans and screaming that they are stopping Obama’s economic recovery.  

This after they used the press as a giant bullhorn to continually badmouth the Bush economy until it finally did start sinking.  They don’t understand that unemployment benefits are not an economic stimulus...  but anyway, it’s a bog of economic ignorance and class warfare rhetoric too muddled to even try and sort out.




Here’s a Question for Sensible Americans...
If you don’t know what regulations will befall you in the near future, and your future earnings are in doubt, and you suspect taxes and fees will be raised, how will you react?   Will you blow your money, or will you stash it away?  

Simple decision, isn’t it?.  Well, businesses have reached the same conclusion:

The Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that U.S. corporations are sitting on $1.6 trillion in cash reserves, a record amount, because they are reluctant to expand in the uncertain policy environment.

It’s the Economic Uncertainty, Stupid!
Thomas Cooley tells us what’s wrong with job growth:  Economic Uncertainty.

He starts with the specter of ballooning debt at the state and municipal levels.  We know it’s there, we just don’t know how big it is yet, but we know it’s big.  Add to that...

There is also a lot of uncertainty about the extent of underfunded pension liabilities and the impact they will have because they do not typically show up on budgets.

Given the rhetoric and previous policy initiatives of the Obama administration, it is virtually certain that corporations and wealthy individuals are going to face higher taxes, but in what form?

Even the liberal NY Times gets it, although they stand the uncertainty argument on its head.  They perversely argue that now is the time to set up a program to funnel more money to states while passing cap and trade that will increase the cost of energy.  Get the pain over with so businesses can calculate the costs and press on with hiring and expansion plans.  At least they're half right...

Becoming Europe Won’t Help, Either
Even the liberal intelligentsia realize becoming Europe will only make things worse, reports Lloyd Grove at the Daily Beast:

He said jobs were going to be his No. 1 priority—there’s a huge disconnect between Washington and what’s going on out in the country,”

“The president’s economic team kept talking about a ‘cyclical’ problem. Larry Summers said jobs were a lagging economic indicator. All these things are simply wrong. The president put all his trust in the wrong economic team—an economic team that didn’t understand what was happening.”

That quote is not from a vengeful Rush Limbaugh, but from Obama supporter Ariana Huffington.  It’s the economy, stupid, and businesses, not government, fuel expansion by hiring people.  Even liberals are waking up to that fact.