Erick Erickson's Blog, page 52

Death of the Moderate . . . Democrat

It is worth noting that on Tuesday several moderate Democrats went down in flames in Pennsylvania, continuing a trend that has escalated since 2008. Liberals do not want moderate Democrats in their caucus.

What is most interesting about it from a conservative perspective, however, is how there has not been a ton of coverage about the death of the blue dogs — more dogs dead in Barack Obama and the left’s war on dogs. Had moderate Republicans been defeated, we would have major stories on pretty much every news network and on the front page of every paper in America.

Routinely we hear that Republicans cannot win in New England, despite Republican successes in New England in 2010. Routinely we hear about the GOP driving moderates out of the party. Big tent cliches surround the stories. Rarely does the ongoing purging of the Democratic Party make such news.

In fact, the Democratic Party has become increasingly hostile to moderates, though the media rarely cares to focus on this because the reporters who’d pay attention often are to the left of the moderate Democrats and proclaim their position the center. Those moderate Democrats are, therefore, well outside the mainstream.

I do not lament the decline and fall of the Blue Dog Coalition. The United States remains a center-right nation and Democrats must continue to run as “centrist” to appeal in swing states. Their true colors ruin their chances. The fewer “centrists” they have, the more difficult it becomes for them to appeal to voters, including Hispanic voters who continue to be some of the most socially conservative voters in America.

The lesson, here, though is that partisans in both parties prefer their candidates to stand for something and fight for something. The media’s predominant bias is a good government bias and reporters hail those Republicans and Democrats who work across party lines to get things done in Washington. And what have they done?

We’re at $15 trillion and counting to what they’ve done. But it was done in the name of good government — a concept that is always framed as our salvation and will ultimately be our damnation as we go bankrupt with repeated good government compromises.

Morning Briefing for April 27, 2012

[image error]

 

RedState Morning Briefing

for April 27, 2012

 

Go to www.RedStateMB.com to get the 

Morning Briefing every morning at no charge.

 

Yes, yes, we have a new look today.  It’s because I want your undivided attention and figured shaking things up would give it to me after you finished mumbling, “There he goes again.”  

We’ll return to normalcy conservatives, I promise.  Why shake things up today?  To highlight our sister publication.

 

As I mentioned last week, this month marks an exciting new chapter for our sister publication, Human Events. The nation’s first conservative weekly and Ronald Reagan’s favorite newspaper has a dynamic new look and additional firepower to provide more news and analysis than ever before.

 

Human Events has expanded its team of reporters and will now feature deeper coverage of the issues most important to you, ranging from the economy to energy and healthcare to national security.

 

We’re proud to be part of the Human Events family. Be on the lookout this weekend for more exciting details in an email, including powerful video coverage of the new Human Events being commemorated on the floor of the House of Representatives.

 

And now, the Morning Briefing.

1.  Death of the Moderate . . . Democrat

 

It is worth noting that on Tuesday several moderate Democrats went down in flames in Pennsylvania, continuing a trend that has escalated since 2008. Liberals do not want moderate Democrats in their caucus.

 

What is most interesting about it from a conservative perspective, however, is how there has not been a ton of coverage about the death of the blue dogs — more dogs dead in Barack Obama and the left’s war on dogs. Had moderate Republicans been defeated, we would have major stories on pretty much every news network and on the front page of every paper in America.

 

Routinely we hear that Republicans cannot win in New England, despite Republican successes in New England in 2010. Routinely we hear about the GOP driving moderates out of the party. Big tent cliches surround the stories. Rarely does the ongoing purging of the Democratic Party make such news.  Read the rest of the story . . .

 

 

2.  Yet Another Reason Why Today’s Unions Suck: Dues Devour Wage Increases

 

On the eve of Obama’s NLRB unleashing its new rules giving unions the ability to hold ambush elections—that is, the evisceration of employers’ ability to question or challenge unions in their quest to cherry-pick voting units—more data was just released by the Bureau of National Affairs that calls into question why anyone in their right mind would pay dues to a union today.

In addition to the $369 billion in underfunded union (private-sector) pension plans, the abundant evidence that unions kill companies and destroy jobs, today’s unions are doing such a miserable job at the one thing they’re supposed to do—negotiate contracts—that union members should demand refunds from their union bosses.

According to the April 9th issue of the Bureau of National Affairs Daily Labor Report (subscription required), unions negotiated contracts in 2011 that, in 41% of the contracts, employees received no increase in the contract’s first year.  Read the rest of the story . . . 

3.  The Way Things Are Going, They’re Gonna Crucify Me.

Apologies to John Lennon. Concept by Al Armendariz, Administrator of EPA Region VI. Repair Man Jack posted the video with analysis here.

No apology is necessary, Mr. Armendariz. In a perverse way, your comments reveal the tactics of your agency, and more importantly, the philosophy which motivates Mr. Obama’s entire Administration.

It also speaks of the arrogance of a government that thinks its citizens are its subjects, and whose middle managers find amusement in crushing people’s lives and livelihoods.

One more thing about the Roman analogy — mmm, as I recall, that strategy didn’t work out too well for the Romans. Does Mr. Obama play the fiddle?  Read the rest of the story . . .

4.  Sign Letter for Open Appropriations Process in the House

Every elected Republican came to Washington promising to slash spending and balance the budget.  Yet, when it comes time for the most direct way to enact those spending cuts; namely, the annual appropriations bills, most of them are missing in action.

In an ideal world, Republicans should hold the upper hand in negotiations over spending bills. They enjoy complete control over the House, while Harry Reid only has a tenuous hold on the Senate at just 53 seats.  Unfortunately, as we chronicled extensively here at Red State, House and Senate GOP leaders agreed to jettison the Ryan budget halfway through the process in favor of Harry Reid’s minibus and omnibus bills, which vitiated every worthy goal of that budget.  Read the rest of the story . . .

Does Obama Have a Big Stick? #EERS

Joe Biden thinks so.

We’ll discuss it tonight on the radio. You can listen live tonight on the WSB live stream and call in at 1-800-WSB-TALK.

The show starts at 6pm.

At 8pm, Monica Perez is going to rescue me from my root canal and take over.

Consider this an open thread.

A Nobody With No Audience Gets Noticed by Mitch McConnell

Yesterday on Laura Ingraham’s radio show, she asked Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell about a recent Roll Call article that framed me as one of the loud leaders of conservatives opposed to Mitch McConnell. The Senator from Kentucky responded that he had never heard of me and I did not have an audience.

That sounds a bit like the child, when asked if he ate the cookie, replying that he had not and besides it did not taste good. If he’d never heard of me, how can he comment on my audience? If he states plainly I have no audience, how can he claim to not have heard of me? His remarks also came less than a day after I came out publicly against bronies, the adult male fans of My Little Pony. I hope that’s just a coincidence.

Mitch McConnell’s remark is just another example of him being vastly overrated as both a strategist and tactician. He claims to have advanced the conservative cause, but told Laura he has to be mindful that to govern Republicans must reach out to all Americans. Perhaps that is why in 2010, with the rise of the tea party, Mitch McConnell backed Arlen Specter against Pat Toomey, Charlie Crist against Marco Rubio (McConnell staffers went to Florida to help Crist), Robert Bennett against Mike Lee, and Trey Grayson against Rand Paul.

I grew up thinking Mitch McConnell was a right wing warrior. It turns out he’s just a typical Washingtonian appropriator who has presided over a massive expansion of the welfare state doing not much more than issuing bold platitudes as he cuts deals to expand government spending and along the way made some major tactical and strategic blunders that groups like ACORN were able to thrive.

Let’s review the record.

In the 1990′s Mitch McConnell, then the Republican manager against the Motor Voter bill, made the brilliant tactical decision to not filibuster the motion to take up the bill. Consequently it passed. ACORN and other left-wing groups were emboldened to do what they’ve done over the past two decades. Yes, people forget that it was Mitch McConnell’s tactical decision to let Motor Voter get to the floor of the Senate despite the warnings of what would happen. Passage of that law made it ever easier to engage in voter registration fraud. McConnell had the votes to stop it from being considered, but once it got to the floor of the Senate everyone knew there were enough wobbly Republicans who would not dare go on record actually opposing it on passage.

In the early 2000′s when McCain-Feingold went through the Senate, McConnell yet again cut out the legs of its opponents telling them not to worry because he’d let the Supreme Court do their dirty work for them and kill it. McConnell lost in the Supreme Court.

Mitch McConnell’s more recent record makes clear he is more interested in being Majority Leader than advancing any sort of conservative principles. It’s all about McConnell.

He is an appropriations cardinal in the Senate who has routinely stymied fiscal conservative efforts to rein in spending by Senators Coburn, DeMint, and even John McCain.

Recall, if you will, Senator McConnell didn’t just vote for the Wall Street bailouts, he rescued it from near defeat by adding earmarks to TARP after it failed in the House.

As I mentioned, in 2010 Mitch McConnell backed Arlen Specter against Pat Toomey, Charlie Crist against Marco Rubio, Robert Bennett against Mike Lee, and Trey Grayson against Rand Paul.

After House GOP made a stand on payroll tax this past winter, McConnell pulled the rug out and cut a deal with Harry Reid that paid for a payroll tax cut with increases to home mortgages. Allen West said he felt betrayed over this.

McConnell personally recruited Senator Roy Blunt to stop conservative Ron Johnson from winning a key leadership spot.

McConnell vowed to block conservatives from forcing votes on full repeal of Obamacare this year, then flipped and said he’d force votes in March when RepealIt.org threatened to run ads for him to resign, He has yet to keep his promise to force votes. McConnell’s loyal lieutenants in the Senate, at the time, explained that forcing full repeal votes on the Democrats would undermine their ability to cut deals with Harry Reid.

Senator McConnell just last week voted with Senate Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee against Paul Ryan’s budget spending levels. Last year McConnell refused to whip support for Ryan’s budget when it came up for a vote in the Senate.

Senator McConnell and his allies frequently say he has to do what he does because they must keep the moderates to be in the majority. Except 2010 gives the lie away. In races conservatives absolutely could win, McConnell sided with the moderates. Behind the scenes, on issues like Obamacare that remain hugely unpopular with the American people, McConnell cuts deals with the Democrats instead of forcing votes.

McConnell is emblematic of all that is wrong with Washington, D.C. He covets power relentlessly and only acts when it is threatened, then only doing so much as to stop the threat without actually leading. Along the way, he has been deeply complicit in putting our Republican in a position of bankruptcy.

I may be a nobody with no audience, but Mitch McConnell is a leader with no spine to lead.

Morning Briefing for April 26, 2012

RedState Morning Briefing

April 26, 2012

Go to www.RedStateMB.com to get
the Morning Briefing every morning at no charge.

1. A Nobody With No Audience Gets Noticed by Mitch McConnell

2. Planned Parenthood’s Bad, Bad Night

3. President Obama: ‘encouraging’/planning to tax into oblivion start-up businesses.

———————————————————————-

1. A Nobody With No Audience Gets Noticed by Mitch McConnell

Yesterday on Laura Ingraham’s radio show, she asked Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell about a recent Roll Call article that framed me as one of the loud leaders of conservatives opposed to Mitch McConnell. The Senator from Kentucky responded that he had never heard of me and I did not have an audience.

That sounds a bit like the child, when asked if he ate the cookie, replying that he had not and besides it did not taste good. If he’d never heard of me, how can he comment on my audience? If he states plainly I have no audience, how can he claim to not have heard of me? His remarks also came less than a day after I came out publicly against bronies, the adult male fans of My Little Pony. I hope that’s just a coincidence.

Mitch McConnell’s remark is just another example of him being vastly overrated as both a strategist and tactician. He claims to have advanced the conservative cause, but told Laura he has to be mindful that to govern Republicans must reach out to all Americans. Perhaps that is why in 2010, with the rise of the tea party, Mitch McConnell backed Arlen Specter against Pat Toomey, Charlie Crist against Marco Rubio (McConnell staffers went to Florida to help Crist), Robert Bennett against Mike Lee, and Trey Grayson against Rand Paul.

I grew up thinking Mitch McConnell was a right wing warrior. It turns out he’s just a typical Washingtonian appropriator who has presided over a massive expansion of the welfare state doing not much more than issuing bold platitudes as he cuts deals to expand government spending and along the way made some major tactical and strategic blunders that groups like ACORN were able to thrive.

Let’s review the record.

Please click here for the rest of the post.

2. Planned Parenthood’s Bad, Bad Night

An untold story today following Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primaries is what a bad, bad night it was for Planned Parenthood.

In Pennsylvania’s 134th House district, they spent an eye-popping $100,000 on a TV ad campaign trying to sink the candidacy of Republican Ryan Mackenzie by linking him to ultrasound legislation that was before the legislature.

As Politico noted, this was seen as a trial-balloon of sorts.

Please click here for the rest of the post.

3. President Obama: ‘encouraging’/planning to tax into oblivion start-up businesses.

Never mind the fact that Obama got yoghurt splashed on him last night – that’s just an ongoing hazard of being a politician running for re-election in this country. The real story here is this: the President went to Colorado to, essentially, lie to a bunch of kids about how they can get themselves out of this mess that they’re in. And it is a mess. 50% of college graduates are unemployed/underemployed; couple that with student loan debt levels that should really be frightening more people and we end up with a situation where millions of kids are getting out of college and staring DOOM right in the face. And while they are adults – and thus, responsible for their own fates – guess what? The people that connived to put them in this mess are adults, too. We expect twenty-somethings in this culture to make poor life choices, sometimes; what we don’t expect is for the generations above them to so ruthlessly take advantage of that.

Anyway: Obama’s answer in Colorado, last night? …Entrepreneurship. That’s what he was telling the kids. Start that restaurant! Develop that smartphone app! Make your own destiny! Get slammed with a tax hike on small businesses in the form of tighter restrictions on payroll tax exemptions!

…Yeah. One of these things is not like the others.

Please click here for the rest of the post.

The Second Coming of American Liberal Fascism?

During the Bush years, Bush was often compared to Hitler or Mussolini,. The focus of the attacks had to do with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and angst over the supposed erosion of civil liberties due to warrantless wiretaps, among other things. There was a lot of hyperbole. Bush was a monkey, a Nazi, a Fascist, the devil’s spawn. The hyperbole became so hysterical some conservatives jokingly took to calling President Bush “Chimpy McBushHitler Halliburton.” Many on the right go too far in attacking the motives of President Obama in the same way the left attacked Bush. It is neither rational nor sane.

President Obama is, unlike President Bush, a progressive, but he is not a fascist.

One must be careful to say such things clearly these days lest the outrage pimps on the left try to drum up outrage on less than clear precision of word choice. President Obama does however, like President Woodrow Wilson, seek to harness the power of the state for the collective good of the American people, even at the expense of the individual. Many on the right view it as a European style socialist tendency because he does so in the name of fairness and believes the government should decide what each citizen’s fair share is. Consider President Obama’s recent speeches on the free market and individualism and compare them to Woodrow Wilson saying, “American is not now and cannot in the future be a place for unrestricted individual enterprise.”

“Reasonable” people do not often talk of fascism in the modern American state, but fascist tendencies from an earlier time in American history, properly understood, are rearing up among progressives again as President Obama amps up his heated rhetoric against free enterprise, conservatives, and the wealthy. While President Obama is not a part of what it happening, it is clear progressives, inspired by his agenda, have taken matters into their own hands to extremes we have not seen for a hundred years.

Fascism, properly understood, is not a right-wing ideology. While many characterize it as such, Wikipedia, of all places, has a pretty accurate rendering, explaining that

[f]ascists advocate a state-directed, regulated economy that is dedicated to the nation; the use and primacy of regulated private property and private enterprise contingent upon service to the nation, the use of state enterprise where private enterprise is failing or is inefficient, and autarky.

During the First World War, Woodrow Wilson and the progressive movement used war as a means to rally society to the collective good of the nation. George Perkins, a financier of progressive causes at the time, boasted that the First World War “is striking down individualism and building up collectivism.” Michael McGerr, in his book A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, cited one progressive who championed the war claiming, “Laissez-faire is dead. Long live social control.”

Jonah Goldberg, in his well regarded book Liberal Fascism, noted that “[m]ore dissidents were arrested or jailed in a few years under Wilson than under Mussolini during the entire 1920s.” Americans often ignore our history and often the media forgets history when it choses to report or not report something.

In May of 1918, several hundred publications were denied access to the postal service. As Goldberg documented in Liberal Fascism, “In Wisconsin a state official got two and a half years for criticizing a Red Cross fund-raising drive. A Hollywood producer received a ten-year stint in jail for making a film that depicted British troops committing atrocities during the American Revolution. One man was brought to trial for explaining in his own home why he didn’t want to buy Liberty Bonds.”

This was the state acting on its own. Consider though the American Protective League, officially approved by then Attorney General Thomas Gregory, and composed of private citizens acting as a “secret” organization. The organization harassed individuals and businesses, threatening and bullying any who stood in the way of the goals of the state. They spied on their neighbors, read their mail, and acted in ways similar to the variously colored shirted organizations in Europe and former European colonies. In fact, even Woodrow Wilson had misgivings about them writing Attorney General Gregory, “It would be dangerous to have such an organization operating in the United States, and I wonder if there is any way in which we could stop it?” Wilson did not stop it.

These were not right wingers. The APL and similar groups may have targeted unions, but did so on the belief that unions were disrupting activities of the progressive state, e.g. undermining Wilson’s war effort.

The re-emerged progressive movement, springing to action to “agitate” (their word choice) for President Obama’s agenda is troubling. There is a pattern of behavior within the modern progressive movement against dissent echoing the progressive movement during Woodrow Wilson’s tenure. Then, progressives engaged in fascist strategy and tactics to silence opposition to Wilson’s advance of the state over the individual. Many on the left then hailed Benito Mussolini as a hero and champion of progress in the way many on the modern left hail Hugo Chavez as the same. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, progressive activists are engaging in a similar pattern of intimidation and violence that they perversely think will help President Obama, even as he himself has voiced misgivings about their tactics and sought to distance himself from some of his most ardent supporters.

Using the IRS and “Good Government” Groups To Attack Conservatives

Someone within the Internal Revenue Service leaked to the gay-rights organization Human Rights Campaign the private Form 990 of the National Organization of Marriage. The form contains a list of major donors to the National Organization for Marriage. The IRS Form 990 is available for public inspection on request, but the law is very clear that donors are to have their information redacted.

In 2008, during the fight to pass Proposition 8 in California, the referendum to ban gay marriage, donors to the Proposition 8 cause were harassed and threatened. Now donors to the National Organization of Marriage should expect the same.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (“ALEC”) had its Form 990 donor information acquired by Common Cause, an organization funded by left-wing money and that the media describes as a “good government” group. In fact, National Public Radio reporter Peter Overby reported on ALEC’s 990 a few days ago raising “questions” about ALEC and its tax exempt status. Overby’s reporting cited Common Cause, described it as a good government group, and patently failed to mention that Overby had worked for the left-wing group before working for National Public Radio.

As noted, Form 990’s are available, though Common Cause and related groups are now targeting ALEC donors. It is unclear whether ALEC had redacted its 990 donor information.

The Common Cause attack on ALEC is, in and of itself, quite ironic. Common Cause’s mouthpiece at NPR, Peter Overby, documented Common Cause’s case as did a rather hostile bit of “journalism” from the New York Times. In essence, the “good government” group argues that ALEC is a non-lobbyist lobbyist, i.e. lobbies politicians illegally while hiding behind the veneer of not being a lobbyist.

Tom and Linda Daschle are big Common Cause donors. Tom Daschle, the former Democratic Leader in the Senate, didn’t pay his taxes and was, in fact, a non-lobbyist lobbyist. But Common Cause will take his money.

The Landmark Legal Foundation’s Mark Levin, also a popular radio show host, recently highlighted troubling IRS activities against tea party groups. Many tea party groups in the country claim the IRS is attempting to undermine their 501(c)(3) tax status. The IRS attempts go beyond normal tax challenges demanding specific information into family members, outside groups, affiliates, and deep background on individuals involved as officers of the tea party groups.

The use of the IRS as a political tool to intimidate opponents of the government is positively Nixonian, but only because the income tax and IRS were barely out of the fetal stage for Woodrow Wilson.

Home Vigilantes

Left-wing groups and unions have collaborated together to threaten and cajole private citizens. In Maryland, SEIU protestors and others showed up on the front porch of a Bank of America executive’s home to pound on his windows. He wasn’t home, but his child was who barricaded himself in a bathroom. This event might not have even been reported except Fortune Magazine’s Nina Easton lived next door. When she reported on it, she too was harassed. The only reporter at the event, which clearly was not designed for the media, was a Huffington Post blogger reporting sympathetically on the union activities.

In New Jersey, school union officials showed up at the home of a school superintendent yelling profanity and harassing the family. Involved were several school teachers who taught the superintendent’s family.

Intimidation of Businesses

Radical activist Van Jones, a former White House “green jobs czar” leads an organization called Color of Change. The organization, Media Matters for America, and others are leading coordinated attacks on businesses that choose to give money to conservative causes, advertise on talk radio, and the like.

They say they are boycotting, which is their right to do. Except these are not boycotts to advance rights as in the sixties. These are boycotts to shut down opposing views. When any side typically believes it is right, it often will encourage the other side to speak loudly so everyone can hear the wrongness of their views. Not so now. The left, no doubt unable to win in the battle of ideas, has decided to shut down the battle.

Businesses are harassed. In a Fox News interview, one business owner in New York who advertises with Rush Limbaugh told the anchor his business was targeted. Women in his office were called and harassed, spoken to crudely, and threatened.

Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, and other businesses have all been targeted for harassment for giving money to conservative causes, though they give to liberal causes as well. The left is fine, obviously, with those donations.

The Koch Brothers

While the left is heavily funded by the billionaire felon George Soros, the collective organizations (and the White House) seem to have no problem attacking billionaires Charles and David Koch for funding free market think tanks and organizations committed to smaller government.

Using startling rhetoric from the Wilsonian era progressives, the left would have the American public believe that their use of billions from a foreigner turned American and felon is pure and noble, but the money spent by two brothers from Kansas is sinister.

Koch Industries has seen its businesses targeted for protest by the Occupy Movement. News shows have run less than flattering profiles of the Kochs. The New Yorker ran a hit job on the Kochs riddled with falsehoods and distortions that other left-wing activists in the media picked up, broadcast, and treated as gospel.

Recently, the left even accused the Kochs of funding George Zimmerman’s defense in the Trayvon Martin shooting. It seems no crime in America is salacious enough without accusations of involvement by the Kochs.

Progressive candidates now drop the Koch name casually suggesting their opponents are tainted by a relationship to Charles and David Koch. The Obama campaign routinely sends out campaign propaganda blaming the Koch Brothers for all of Barack Obama’s failures. During policy debates in 2010, Barack Obama’s economics adviser Austan Goolsbee revealed Koch Industries’ tax structure, information not publicly available. MSNBC blames the Trayon Martin death on the Kochs.

It is a concerted left-wing effort to make the Kochs the Typhoid Mary of American politics while casually ignoring its own money comes from a man convicted of insider trading, one of the very crimes the left highlights as a truly evil sin in capitalism.

Assaults on Religious Liberty

One the long held tenets of progressivism and fascism has been that everything should bend to the state, including religious organizations. In fact, in Liberal Fascism Jonah Goldberg notes,

Progressivism, from which today’s liberalism descended, was a kind of Christian fascism (many called it “Christian socialism”). This is a difficult concept for modern liberals to grasp because they are used to thinking of the progressives as the people who cleaned up the food supply, pushed through the eight-hour workday, and ended child labor. But liberals often forget that the progressives were also imperialists, at home and abroad. . . . [W]hile the God talk may have fallen by the wayside, the religious crusader’s spirit that powered Progressivism remains as strong as ever. Rather than talk in explicitly religious terms, however, today’s liberals use a secularized vocabulary of “hope”.

The rhetoric of religion as a social tool on the left has given way to a religious rhetoric for secularism while liberals engage in curtailing religious freedoms. Witness President Obama, in true Wilsonian fashion, rallying students to give “amens” over student loans.

The ever progressive Media Matters for America, which works hand in hand with the Obama Administration and other left-wing groups, openly declared on its IRS application for non-profit status that it would be an anti-Christian organization. Liberal attorney Alan Dershowitz and others have loudly attacked the organization for its anti-semitism. The organization routinely attacks Christian news outlets and attacks major media outlets as having a pro-Christian “bias in news reporting and analysis.”

Before the Supreme Court this year, the Obama Administration took the radically left position that the First Amendment does not contain a “ministerial exception,” a belief long held in American jurisprudence, though never actually before the Supreme Court, that churches have wide latitude in managing those it considers ministers of their faith. Even the American Civil Liberties Union would not go that far. The case, Hosanna-Tabor Church v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, saw the United States Supreme Court not only finally formally recognize the ministerial exception, but reject the Obama Administration’s position in a 9 to 0 vote. Barry Lynn, who wears the title “Reverend” to give himself authority among the left as he seeks to undermine religious liberty in the country, assailed the unanimous decision saying, “Blatant discrimination is a social evil we have worked hard to eradicate in the United States. . . . I’m afraid the court’s ruling today will make it harder to combat.”

At the same time, Catholic Bishops openly fret about the government curtailing religious liberties, limiting them solely to worship.

HHS mandate for contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs. The mandate of the Department of Health and Human Services has received wide attention and has been met with our vigorous and united opposition. In an unprecedented way, the federal government will both force religious institutions to facilitate and fund a product contrary to their own moral teaching and purport to define which religious institutions are “religious enough” to merit protection of their religious liberty. These features of the “preventive services” mandate amount to an unjust law. As Archbishop-designate William Lori of Baltimore, Chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty, testified to Congress: “This is not a matter of whether contraception may be prohibited by the government. This is not even a matter of whether contraception may be supported by the government. Instead, it is a matter of whether religious people and institutions may be forced by the government to provide coverage for contraception or sterilization, even if that violates their religious beliefs.”

State immigration laws. Several states have recently passed laws that forbid what the government deems “harboring” of undocumented immigrants—and what the Church deems Christian charity and pastoral care to those immigrants. Perhaps the most egregious of these is in Alabama, where the Catholic bishops, in cooperation with the Episcopal and Methodist bishops of Alabama, filed suit against the law:

It is with sadness that we brought this legal action but with a deep sense that we, as people of faith, have no choice but to defend the right to the free exercise of religion granted to us as citizens of Alabama. . . . The law makes illegal the exercise of our Christian religion which we, as citizens of Alabama, have a right to follow. The law prohibits almost everything which would assist an undocumented immigrant or encourage an undocumented immigrant to live in Alabama. This new Alabama law makes it illegal for a Catholic priest to baptize, hear the confession of, celebrate the anointing of the sick with, or preach the word of God to, an undocumented immigrant. Nor can we encourage them to attend Mass or give them a ride to Mass. It is illegal to allow them to attend adult scripture study groups, or attend CCD or Sunday school classes. It is illegal for the clergy to counsel them in times of difficulty or in preparation for marriage. It is illegal for them to come to Alcoholic Anonymous meetings or other recovery groups at our churches.

Altering Church structure and governance. In 2009, the Judiciary Committee of the Connecticut Legislature proposed a bill that would have forced Catholic parishes to be restructured according to a congregational model, recalling the trusteeism controversy of the early nineteenth century, and prefiguring the federal government’s attempts to redefine for the Church “religious minister” and “religious employer” in the years since.

Christian students on campus. In its over-100-year history, the University of California Hastings College of Law has denied student organization status to only one group, the Christian Legal Society, because it required its leaders to be Christian and to abstain from sexual activity outside of marriage.

Catholic foster care and adoption services. Boston, San Francisco, the District of Columbia, and the state of Illinois have driven local Catholic Charities out of the business of providing adoption or foster care services—by revoking their licenses, by ending their government contracts, or both—because those Charities refused to place children with same-sex couples or unmarried opposite-sex couples who cohabit.

Discrimination against small church congregations. New York City enacted a rule that barred the Bronx Household of Faith and sixty other churches from renting public schools on weekends for worship services even though non-religious groups could rent the same schools for scores of other uses. While this would not frequently affect Catholic parishes, which generally own their own buildings, it would be devastating to many smaller congregations. It is a simple case of discrimination against religious believers.

Discrimination against Catholic humanitarian services. Notwithstanding years of excellent performance by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services in administering contract services for victims of human trafficking, the federal government changed its contract specifications to require us to provide or refer for contraceptive and abortion services in violation of Catholic teaching. Religious institutions should not be disqualified from a government contract based on religious belief, and they do not somehow lose their religious identity or liberty upon entering such contracts. And yet a federal court in Massachusetts, turning religious liberty on its head, has since declared that such a disqualification is required by the First Amendment—that the government somehow violates religious liberty by allowing Catholic organizations to participate in contracts in a manner consistent with their beliefs on contraception and abortion.

Only immigration is arguably a front opened by conservatives, and even now conservatives in Alabama are working to find a compromise to accommodate the religious.

Not documented in the bishops’ letter is the most recent attempt by progressives in Hutchinson, Kansas — yes Kansas — seeking to slide further down the slope on gay marriage by forcing churches to open their doors to gay marriage.

The left packages these issues as “womens rights” issues or “gay rights” issues and the like, but each encroaches directly on religious liberty, which the left has decided to devalue despite our founders enshrining it in the very first right within the Bill of Rights.

Conclusion

During the Bush years, dissent was hailed as patriotic. Whistleblowers were treated as martyrs. The media highlighted positively efforts to stand up to the man. Now the left is in charge. Dissent must be silenced. Conservative commentators must be driven from television and radio, businesses must be shut down if they fund conservative causes. Individuals who contribute money to conservative causes or engage must be harassed and badgered from the town square.

It is a pernicious strain of the progressive movement rearing its head. Its pattern of practice is too eerily similar to that strain of American fascism that reared its head almost one hundred years ago heading into the second decade of the twentieth century. Even the most benign liberal technocratic rule cannot, in the long run, admit dissent, because dissent is inefficiency, the enemy of technocracy. Dissent, good for the left, simply cannot be tolerated when the left is in charge.

Raising the concern is shouted down as unreasonable, but few can claim it reasonable to shut down opposing voices except the modern American Progressive Movement. In his book History of the American People, written in 1901, Woodrow Wilson sympathetically explained away the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in post Civil War America writing,

They took the law into their own hands, and began to attempt by intimidation what they were not allowed to attempt by ballot or by any ordered course of public action. They began to do by secret concert and association what they could not do in avowed parties. Almost by accident a way was found to succeed which led insensibly farther and farther afield into the ways of violence and outlawry.

In the 21st Century, the Occupy Wall Street Movement, hailed by the left, uses similar justification of taking the law into their own hands as they drop britches and poop on police cars, harass conservatives, and dribble out confidential IRS tax information on the opposition. That’s not to equate the Occupy Movement with a perniciously evil group, but it is striking how Wilson described the KKK compared to now.

Consider domestic terrorist Bernadette Dorn of the Weather Underground talking to an Occupy rally:

Agitation lights up the truth and what occupy has done by agitating in its non-violent, beautiful, imaginative way ["direct action," someone interjects] is to teach by shifting the frame really by remaining what’s possible. And what’s possible is that capitalism cannot solve our problems. It cannot solve any of our problems and the empire is in peril. Right? Who are the emerging countries in the world? They are the BRIC nations really. . . . So I want to keep us imagining that talking and educating and organizing goes with agitating, with direct action, with manifesting what we want to be.

She described the “agitation” as non-violent, but ended by saying that “organizing goes with agitating, with direct action.” What form of direct action has the left taken? Well, frankly, intimidation against others, violence, and civil disobedience to do what they could not at the ballot box. 400 people were arrested in Oakland, CA when Occupy Oakland turned violent. An Occupy Los Angeles speaker claimed violence would be necessary. In New York, Occupy Wall Street protestors tried to block access to Wall Street. The list of violence around the country is striking compared to, for example, the tea party movement the left had demagogued as racist and violent.

Mussolini, Jonah Goldberg noted, “defined socialism and fascism as ‘movement, struggle, and action.’ One of his favorite slogans was ‘To live is not to calculate, but to act!’”

The grand difference, however, between the left and right in this late struggle and leftwing attempts to punish dissent is that, as Conn Carroll wrote

The Occupy movement is predicated on the idea of protesters (the 99%) asserting control over something that does not belong to them (Zuccotti Park, McPherson Square, Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant Plaza etc.). When you assert control over something that someone else owns (Brookfield Properties, the taxpayers, etc), there is eventually going to be a physical confrontation when that owner tries to reassert control. That is what we are seeing in police/occupier clashes across the country.

It is increasingly hard to just view the Occupy movement that way. The left, in general, is asserting control over things that do not belong to them and attempting to silence any dissent. Some on the right will blame the President or attribute it to the President. The right should be careful in stooping to the level of Bush Derangement Syndrome that so infected the Left in the Bush years.

Objectively, however, many people who wish to see Barack Obama re-elected will stop at nothing to advance what they believe is his cause.

We should not stay silent.

(A PDF version of this post is available here)

Morning Briefing for April 25, 2012

RedState Morning Briefing

April 25, 2012

Go to www.RedStateMB.com to get
the Morning Briefing every morning at no charge.

1. The Second Coming of American Liberal Fascism?

2. Obama Campaign: That Mitt Romney Comes From A Strange Family

3. Romney explains Obama’s ‘all of the above’ energy policy

4. Vast Right Wing Reign Of Terror (VRWROT)

5. Arizona Gets its Day in Court

———————————————————————-

1. The Second Coming of American Liberal Fascism?

During the Bush years, Bush was often compared to Hitler or Mussolini,. The focus of the attacks had to do with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and angst over the supposed erosion of civil liberties due to warrantless wiretaps, among other things. There was a lot of hyperbole. Bush was a monkey, a Nazi, a Fascist, the devil’s spawn. The hyperbole became so hysterical some conservatives jokingly took to calling President Bush “Chimpy McBushHitler Halliburton.” Many on the right go too far in attacking the motives of President Obama in the same way the left attacked Bush. It is neither rational nor sane.

President Obama is, unlike President Bush, a progressive, but he is not a fascist.

One must be careful to say such things clearly these days lest the outrage pimps on the left try to drum up outrage on less than clear precision of word choice. President Obama does however, like President Woodrow Wilson, seek to harness the power of the state for the collective good of the American people, even at the expense of the individual. Many on the right view it as a European style socialist tendency because he does so in the name of fairness and believes the government should decide what each citizen’s fair share is. Consider President Obama’s recent speeches on the free market and individualism and compare them to Woodrow Wilson saying, “American is not now and cannot in the future be a place for unrestricted individual enterprise.”

“Reasonable” people do not often talk of fascism in the modern American state, but fascist tendencies from an earlier time in American history, properly understood, are rearing up among progressives again as President Obama amps up his heated rhetoric against free enterprise, conservatives, and the wealthy. While President Obama is not a part of what it happening, it is clear progressives, inspired by his agenda, have taken matters into their own hands to extremes we have not seen for a hundred years.

Please click here for the rest of the post.

2. Obama Campaign: That Mitt Romney Comes From A Strange Family

Last week we pointed out the Obama re-election strategy of criticizing his wealth and religion.

After two false starts, one castigating Ann Romney for her decision to be a stay at home Mom — part of their War on Women theme — and another calling into question the reason there is a dog in the White House, one would think that the White House might try to refine their strategy a bit. But the White House is nothing if not consistent.

On Friday they dispatched the hapless Governor Brian Schweitzer (D-MT) to The Daily Beast reprise the War on Women attack and to criticize Romney’s religion.

Please click here for the rest of the post.

3. Romney explains Obama’s ‘all of the above’ energy policy

Speaking at Consol Energy’s Research and Development Facility in South Park Township, Pennsylvania the day before that state’s presidential primary, Mitt Romney took on President Obama’s energy policies, blaming them for increasing energy prices.

Please click here for the rest of the post.

4. Vast Right Wing Reign Of Terror (VRWROT)

Because the Dems no longer maintain their super-majority in both chambers of Congress, the President isn’t getting everything rubber stamped and rammed through. This means, according to David Axelrod, that the conservative Republicans are imposing a “reign of terror” on all those Republicans that want to go back to rubber stamping Obama’s agenda.

Please click here for the rest of the post.

5. Arizona Gets its Day in Court

Article 4 Section 4 of the Constitution (the Guarantee Clause) directs the federal government to guarantee the states protection from invasion. Yet, in the case of Arizona, which has been disproportionately effected by the invasion of illegal aliens and drug cartels, the Obama administration has guaranteed them nothing but lawsuits.

In April 2010, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed SB 1070, a bill designed to curb illegal immigration, into law. Among other things, this law (section 2) requires police officers who were already apprehending suspects for other crimes to check with federal authorities whether that individual is in the country legally. That inquiry can be made only if there is a reasonable suspicion that the suspect is an illegal alien.

Instead of working in concert with Arizona to protect its citizens from border-related violence, as prescribed by numerous laws of Congress, the Obama administration filed a lawsuit against Arizona in federal court. Most egregiously, that lawsuit was first announced by Hillary Clinton while she was overseas. The administration basically argued that states are preempted from enforcing immigration laws, and because the Obama administration has decided not to enforce those laws, Arizona was supplanting federal authority. The Obama Justice Department has also filed lawsuits against several other states that have passed similar legislation last year.

Please click here for the rest of the post.

Morning Briefing for April 24, 2012

RedState Morning Briefing

April 24, 2012

Go to www.RedStateMB.com to get
the Morning Briefing every morning at no charge.

1. What Do Solyndra, Mexican Drug Cartels, And Enron Have In Common?

2. Barack Obama: coming up short among female voters.

3. The NRA Lets ALEC Take the Bullet

———————————————————————-

1. What Do Solyndra, Mexican Drug Cartels, And Enron Have In Common?

Answer: all three received subsidies from the Export-Import Bank.

The Export-Import Bank is nothing more than a fund for corporate welfare backed by the American taxpayer. It’s time for Congress to shut down the Export-Import Bank for good.

Please click here for the rest of the post.

2. Barack Obama: coming up short among female voters.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on under the hood of this Hill poll showing that more voters believe that Romney & the GOP respect working women than voters believe that Obama & the Democrats respect stay at home parents. Especially since the same poll is giving the edge to Romney on who understands women’s issues better, and a tie on which party is better for women. But what I’d like to point out is another poll that was only touched upon in passing; because the information found there will be even more distressing to the Democrats. Yes, this is a burying-the-lede post. We have to do a lot of those.

Please click here for the rest of the post.

3. The NRA Lets ALEC Take the Bullet

At Grover Norquist’s Wednesday meeting a discussion about the ongoing assault against ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, came up. Multiple sources (there are hundreds in the room) tell me that the NRA representative took issue with ALEC getting rid of his public safety section. That section has drafted a model “stand your ground” law, which Florida passed.

The NRA representative claimed that if ALEC was going to run away from the fight on these public safety issues, ALEC might just run away from other issues too, e.g. immigration.

At that point the ALEC representative pointed out that ALEC had actually sought help from the NRA on “stand your ground” laws, but the NRA decided, yet again, to play it safe and wound up letting ALEC take the bullet.

Please click here for the rest of the post.

Neal Boortz is Right on “Friendlier Talk”

Neal Boortz knows what he’s talking about. He has been on the radio for forty years. He’s on more than 200 stations. He knows the industry.

There is, in talk radio, a trend toward “friendlier” talk — non-confrontational hosts who try to explain both sides of the issues with discernible biases, but no hard lines.

Talk radio, at its core, is about entertainment. The best hosts, from Boortz to Limbaugh, are entertainers first. They have bright lines, stand for something, and make it enjoyable to listen to. In an interview with Radio Ink, Boortz gets into this:

“I can see where [Smerconish] would want to go on the air and say ‘The type of talk radio I do, that’s what the consumers want. That is what they are going to be looking for in the future.’ It’s a great sales pitch to get people to sign on to your show. I still think what the consumers are looking for is, number one, entertainment. They want to be entertained. It can be a liberal, a libertarian, or a conservative. It can be far-left or far-right. If they are entertained, they are going to tune in. The ratings are going to be there and the advertisers are going to be happy.”

By the way, this is also why there are so few top notch liberal talk radio programs — liberals still have problems with humor. Oh, and to drive Boortz’s point further home, Talkers magazine reports that in March, after all the Sandra Fluke hubbub, Rush Limbaugh’s ratings are measurably up in most markets.

The NRA Lets ALEC Take the Bullet

I’m not a big fan of the NRA at the upper strata of lobbying. It plans it safe to maintain the veneer of bipartisanship, it has to be poked and prodded to get involved with hot button issues, and it frequent tries to take credit for the work of other organizations and also let others take the fall.

The NRA has become the definition of a phony boogie man. The left can use the NRA as a foil while more and more conservatives realize it more and more rests on its laurels and Charlton Heston’s memory while working as hard as possible to be a bipartisan organization. In fact, on more than one occasion the NRA has chosen not to fight on an issue because it didn’t want to hurt Democrats like Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont.

You can get more details here on my views of the NRA, including its initial stance prohibiting its board members from testifying against Elena Kagan in her Senate confirmation hearing.

This past Wednesday turned up the latest example of the National Rifle Association trying to have its cake and eat it too.

At Grover Norquist’s Wednesday meeting a discussion about the ongoing assault against ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, came up. Multiple sources (there are hundreds in the room) tell me that the NRA representative took issue with ALEC getting rid of his public safety section. That section has drafted a model “stand your ground” law, which Florida passed.

The NRA representative claimed that if ALEC was going to run away from the fight on these public safety issues, ALEC might just run away from other issues too, e.g. immigration.

At that point the ALEC representative pointed out that ALEC had actually sought help from the NRA on “stand your ground” laws, but the NRA decided, yet again, to play it safe and wound up letting ALEC take the bullet.

The funny thing is, if you search around for commentary on the “Stand Your Ground” law, more likely than not the left will cite the NRA as a culprit. Now we know, from behind closed doors, the NRA wouldn’t even help ALEC when they reached out on the issue.