by Smitty
This week’s FMJRA salutes Rep. ‘Burnout Over Fade Away’ Massa, who went from obscurity to celebrity to ignobility with stunning brevity.
Continue reading Flaming Massa Japes Redefine Absurdity →
A Rhetorical Question, We Presume
“Isn’t It Time To Euthanize Reid’s Wife?”
Dan Riehl certainly knows how to provoke Alan Colmes to paroxysms of self-righteous indignation — a praiseworthy project in itself, quite apart from getting written up by the thought-police at Media Matters.
Speaking of euthanization, we earlier mentioned the March 16 Stop ObamaCare 2.0 event in D.C., which aims to put a merciful end to this legislative abomination. Michelle Malkin publishes a list of the key targets of the event.
UPDATE: “Dan’s a snarky bastard” — and I’m sure Tabitha Hale means that as a compliment. Just like Nancy Pelosi meant this as a compliment to unborn babies:
Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children’s health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those – one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.
Tea Party Express III: Fear and Loathing — and Ann Coulter! — in Las Vegas
BUMPED & UPDATED! SUNDAY MARCH 28: We were linked by Her Blondeness yesterday. Unfortunately, security at the Vegas event was so tight that I didn’t get to say “Hello” to her, although I did get to wave at her personal bodyguard, Floyd — shortly before two Las Vegas police officers pulled me aside and frisked me for weapons.
To explain: There was a “no media” policy at the Vegas event — absolutely no reporters allowed inside, and no audio or video recording permitted. Event organizers had not been told to make an exception for Miss Coulter’s personal friends (I scored an e-mail interview with her last week), and so I was forced to resort to pure gonzo methods. Hiding my press credentials in my pocket and tucking my notebook under my arm inside my coat, I stood in line for general admission and prayed I didn’t get searched at the gate.
Alan Choate from the Las Vegas Review-Journal did the same thing, as did at least one other reporter for a major news organization whose identity I cannot reveal due to the admittedly bizarre ethical obligations of our mutual craft). However, I can reveal that I managed to get close to the stage before Ann’s speech, until one of the event volunteers told me I had to leave the “VIP” area. Drat.
When the speech started, I had my digital micro-recorder going (hidden in my hand, which I kept down by my right side) and moved as close to the stage as I could without infringing the “VIP” zone. Floyd the bodygard was at stage left with a wire in his ear, and I managed to catch his attention by waving. That was just about the time my posture and my erratic movements attracted the attention of two LVPD officers. From their vantage point, it looked from a certain angle as if I might have a gun, and I was escorted to the back of the amphitheater where I was beaten with nightsticks, pepper-sprayed and repeatedly tasered . . .
Just kidding. Although I was scared out of my wits, fearing that I would be ejected and my recorder confiscated, once I flashed my press credentials and the cops learned that the bulge in my coat wasn’t a 9mm in a shoulder holster — that I was merely a journalist, not a dangerously deranged psycho like Dylan Ratigan or Keith Olbermann — they lightened up considerably and apologized for the inconvenience.
As a matter of fact, the police never even saw the digital recorder, which I managed to hide in my pocket before they could frisk me, and the recorder was on throughtout my frightening ordeal, so that the entire incident is now preserved on digital audio. I haven’t uploaded or transcribed the audio yet, but when I do you’ll cleary hear one of the cops ask me, “Is that a digital recorder in your pocket . . . or are you just happy to see Ann Coulter?”
ORIGINAL POST, MARCH 13: Yes, you heard that right: Her Blondeness will be in the Las Vegas area March 27 at the Henderson Pavillion:
Grassroots Nevada is pleased to present Ann Coulter for our Saturday, March 27th event in Henderson / Las Vegas. . . .
Ms. Coulter will only be here in Henderson at the Grassroots Nevada event prior to the arrival of the Tea Party Express. The event for Las Vegas will be at the Henderson Pavilion; Gates open at 3:15 pm and show begins at 3:45 pm!
This event is part of the Tea Party Express III tour, which kicks off that morning in Harry Reid’s hometown of Searchlight, Nevada:
Join us for the biggest Tea Party Express national tour to date. Starting March 27, 2010 with a Mega Rally in Searchlight, NV (hometown to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid) we will take this message across the nation all the way to the White House in Washington, D.C. on April 15th:
“You, the politicians in Washington, have failed We The People with your bailouts, out-of-control deficit spending, government takeovers of sectors of the economy, Cap & Trade, government-run health care, and higher taxes! If you thought we were just going to quietly go away, or that this tea party movement would be just a passing fad, you were mistaken. We’re taking our country back!”
Here’s the video:
OK, people, here we go. I’ve been planning a trip out West to cover the Senate campaigns against Harry Reid and John McCain, and this chance is too perfect to miss.
After Vegas, the Tea Party Express goes to Phoenix, Arizona, which is home to our good friend, Barbara Espinosa of American Freedom blog. So I can party with our good friend Ann — who is not a stuck-up douchebag like Ross Douthat — and then go check out Barbara’s good friend, J.D. Hayworth.
This is the kind of journalistic expedition that the Shoe Leather Fund has made possible in the past. It’s 2,341 miles to Searchlight, Nev. — 38 hours if I were to drive it non-stop — but Smitty tells me that flights to Vegas are cheap, so maybe I’ll leave the 2004 KIA Optima at home for this trip. Driving or flying, either way it looks like an extraordinarily gonzo trip.
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive….” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. . . .
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Now all we need is a red Chevy convertible.
Surprise! Sandinista Stooge Jim Wallis Endorses Socialist ObamaCare Bill
Being a student of Cold War history comes in handy when you see a misleading headline like this:
Pro-life group urges Congress
to pass Senate health care bill
“Pro-life group,” my butt. Go down the list of names on that petition, do a little research and you discover that these are all advocates of “social justice,” including notorious anti-American “liberation theology” types like Jim Wallis of Sojourners:
Writing in the November 1983 issue of Sojourners, ministry leaders Jim Wallis and Jim Rice drafted what would become the charter of leftist activists committed to the proliferation of Communist revolutions in Central America. Titled “Promise of Resistance,” this document called on activists to carry out various acts of civil disobedience in order to obstruct any attempt by the United States to invade Nicaragua. CISPES, the propaganda arm of El Salvador’s Marxist guerrilla movement, was invited by Sojourners to participate in acts of resistance in the event of American military intervention. Nearly 70,000 activists signed the document, which was sent to Congress, President Reagan, the Defense Department, and the CIA.
Steadfast advocates of the nuclear freeze movement, Sojourners members maintained that a U.S. nuclear buildup was “an intolerable evil” irreconcilably at odds with Christian teaching, and that “[t]he Reagan Administration remains the chief obstacle to the first step in stopping the arms race.” While assailing the Reagan administration’s defense buildup, Sojourners activists downplayed the threat posed by the Soviet Union, chastising U.S. policy-makers for their tendency “to assume the very worst about their Soviet counterparts.”
If you don’t know that the “nuclear freeze” movement in the West was an anti-American propaganda campaign actively supported by the Soviets — see this 2001 Accuracy in Media report for background — you may not understand the profound significance of that single data point. But you can still probably understand the significance of this:
Sojourners is a member organization of the Win Without War and United for Peace and Justice anti-war coalitions. It condemns the Guantanamo Bay detention center, where several hundred terrorist suspects are being held by the U.S. government. Said the Sojourners website on June 10, 2005:
“Guantanamo Bay has become not only a symbol of the U.S. government’s hypocrisy and dishonesty — or ‘disassembling,’ as President Bush might put it — around the war on terror. The prison camp has become one of the more egregious examples of the cost of unaccountable power. Human rights groups have long documented the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo, including desecration of the Quran. … The 540 prisoners at the facility have been held incommunicado, denied access to legal counsel, and, in fact, denied the most basic aspects of legal process. … Guantanamo should be closed. But simply closing the facility — and either moving the detainees to another location or returning them to their country of origin — is not enough. If the United States is to regain any credibility as an advocate of human rights around the world, it must begin to practice what it preaches in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Guantanamo, and everywhere else. The erosion of respect for human rights by U.S. personnel didn’t begin at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, and the responsibility for it goes all the way to the top.”
Sojourners also gets funding from George Soros’ “Open Society” foundation. Sojourners and Wallis were pro-Soviet during the Cold War. They are pro-Obama now.
Their anti-American, anti-capitalist agenda remains the same.
UPDATE: Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit has more background on the signatories.
UPDATE II: Left Coast Rebel links with more.
UPDATE III: Dad29 points to the heterodox tendencies of another signatory, Marquette University professor Bryan Massingale.
Exit question: What’s up with the editors of the National Catholic Reporter publishing propaganda for these clowns? I’m not Catholic, so I don’t particularly care what the answer is, but it seems like a question worth asking.
Patches Kennedy Channels Chris Farley?
by Smitty
via NiceDeb
Let’s Get Something Straight About Tea Parties And Evangelicals
by Smitty (h/t Dodgeblogium)
Just How Political Is Christianity?
. . . Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.
Mat 22:21
Actual Evangelicals are too busy evangelizing to be political. Separation of church and State, prior to Progressivism becoming the de facto State religion, still means that actual churches don’t fret politics. I’ve yet to ever see a politician near the pulpit in my local house of worship.
Thus, it is with amusement that one turns to Politico’s attempt to sew division in the Tea Party camp, emphasis mine:
The rise of a new conservative grass roots fueled by a secular revulsion at government spending is stirring fears among leaders of the old conservative grass roots, the evangelical Christian right.
Can’t say I’ve heard of any.
A reeling economy and the massive bank bailout and stimulus plan were the triggers for a resurgence in support for the Republican Party and the rise of the tea party movement. But they’ve also banished the social issues that are the focus of many evangelical Christians to the background.
The Federal Constitution is highly libertarian in character. Problems arise when DC thinks “promote the general Welfare” in the Preamble means that interfering with individuals is a good idea.
And while health care legislation has brought social and economic conservatives together to fight government funding of abortion, some social conservative leaders have begun to express concern that tea party leaders don’t care about their issues, while others object to the personal vitriol against President Barack Obama, whose personal conduct many conservative Christians applaud.
Let’s see:
- Relative to Bill Clinton, BHO is a model husband. (Golf clap).
- Cigarette smoking, not so much.
- Utter inconsistency in public statements, (boo hiss).
While not feeling qualified to set myself up in ultimate judgement of BHO as a man, I’m not sure that he’s in great shape by a Biblical measure. Who are these applauding conservative Christians, exactly?
Just How Religious Is Progressivism?
“There’s a libertarian streak in the tea party movement that concerns me as a cultural conservative,” said Bryan Fischer, director of Issue Analysis for Government and Public Policy at the American Family Association. “The tea party movement needs to insist that candidates believe in the sanctity of life and the sanctity of marriage.”
Mr. Fischer, sir, we need to split the difference here. While I fully, 100% subscribe to the sanctity of life, and I agree that the symbol “marriage” means exactly what you think it meant, means, and shall mean, from alpha to omega, I don’t think individual social concerns are a proper Federal issue, for the following reason:
You go beyond the notion of the Constitution protecting you from the Federal government, and instead assert that the Federal government can and should tell you what to do.
It is a bad enough thing that the 16th Amendment gives DC eminent domain over your wallet, Mr. Fischer. This must be repealed. Also, DC writing more invasive Census questionnaires, fretting about your education, health care, housing, and retirement are false.
Precedent sucks, on the one hand, and morality cannot be legislated, on the other. Let us disabuse ourselves of Al Gore’s notion of legislative redemption. Fret about it at your state and local level.
Drinking Al Gore’s Progressive kool-aid is exactly what the adversary would have you do. Is it possible that Progressivism is a lie from the pit?
Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them;
And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.Mat 4:8-9
I’ll serve up those dots, and let the reader connect them.
Conclusion
I go to church, not Tea Party protests, to hear preaching. The notions are orthogonal, and should remain so, in the American context.
Conversely, if I was a Progressive, wetting myself at the prospect of a Great Political Awakening, attempting to divide the house of the opposition against itself by any means available would seem a smart tactic.
For further reading, your attention is drawn to Gateway Pundit, (h/t Left Coast Rebel via Insty)
See also American Power.
For a negative example, the PuffHo. I understand what “justice” and “social” mean apart, but there seems to be magic in “social justice” that involves legislating morality. The Christian’s attention is drawn to Romans 7 for an exposition of why the law, in and of itself isn’t the answer.
Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places
That seems to be the story of the latest American jihadi:
Last Easter, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, a 31-year-old mom with a $30,000-a-year job as a medical assistant, announced to her family that she had converted to Islam. A few months later, she began posting to Facebook forums whose headings included “STOP caLLing MUSLIMS TERRORISTS!”
On Sept. 11, she suddenly left Leadville, Colo., a small town in the Rocky Mountains, for Denver, then for New York, to meet and marry a Muslim man she connected with online, her family says. . . .
Now, she is in the custody of the Irish police, along with six other individuals, arrested as part of an investigation into a conspiracy to commit murder . . .
Ms. Paulin-Ramirez is the second American woman to be linked to an alleged plot to kill a Swedish cartoonist who made fun of the Prophet Mohammed. . . .
Relatives of Ms. Paulin-Ramirez said they’re distressed because her son was with her in Ireland. The boy’s father is Mexican and hasn’t seen the child in about 5 years, said George Mott, Ms. Paulin-Ramirez’s stepfather, who lives in Leadville with her mother.
Ms. Paulin-Ramirez and her new husband had recently changed the child’s name to Wahid. . . .
Next time my kids start complaining, I’ve got the perfect comeback: “Hey, be grateful for what you got. It could be worse. You could be a half-Mexican kid named ‘Wahid’ living in Ireland.”
But here’s the real punchline to the story:
Ms. Paulin-Ramirez had married several times over the years — some of her relatives estimated she was married four times.
Lady, when your relatives have to estimate the number of times you’ve been married . . . I don’t know. At some point maybe you should start asking yourself, “Is being alone really that much worse than getting married to the next in a long series of scummy douchebags?”
But don’t let me dissuade you. Maybe Mr. Wonderful is right around the next corner. Good luck with Hubby No. 5.
I hear Charles Manson is available. Just sayin’ . . .
Milton R. Wolf, M.D. And The Foolish Notion
by Smitty
BHO’s cousin, in a sort of watered-down version of the Sarah Palin saga, seems to think that Progressives are interested in dialogue or something:
Media Matters goes after me. Love the comments! Everything from genealogy to my years in medical practice. You might have wanted to, you know, actually try to rebut the points I made in my Washington Times op-ed piece…
Sorry, Doc, but that’s not what’s up.