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Skip “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”
“Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
– US Senator Barry Goldwater, GOP nomination for President, 1964
50th anniversary of their use upon accepting the GOP nomination for President in 1964 (7/16/14). (H/T: Instapundit). Ann Althouse has 10 of the best lines of that speech after the jump – such prescient with today’s Administration and Progressive aggression (emphasis mine):
Convert, move, pay the Jizya infidel tax, or die
From Yahoo News, this snippet from an announcement the newly emerging Islamic State (“Caliphate”) saying they are taking their “country” back to Muslim traditions with respect to Christians (reformatted, emphasis mine):
BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Islamist insurgents have issued an ultimatum to northern Iraq’s dwindling Christian population to either convert to Islam, pay a religious levy or face death, according to a statement distributed in the militant-controlled city of Mosul. The statement issued by the Islamic State, the al Qaeda offshoot which led last month’s lightning assault to capture swathes of north Iraq, and seen by Reuters, said the ruling would come into effect on Saturday.
It said Christians who wanted to remain in the “caliphate” that the Islamic State declared this month in parts of Iraq and Syria must agree to abide by terms of a “dhimma” contract – a historic practice under which non-Muslims were protected in Muslim lands in return for a special levy known as “jizya”.
In other words, pay a “tribute” to their Muslim overlords to be
And this is the system that Obama and the Progressives want us to “progress” towards?
The game was simple enough. Each participant was asked to throw a die 40 times and record each roll on a piece of paper. A higher overall tally earned a bigger payoff. Before each roll, players had to commit themselves to write down the number that was on either the top or the bottom side of the die. However, they did not have to tell anyone which side they had chosen, which made it easy to cheat by rolling the die first and then pretending that they had selected the side with the highest number. If they picked the top and then rolled a two, for example, they would have an incentive to claim—falsely—that they had chosen the bottom, which would be a five.
Honest participants would be expected to roll ones, twos and threes as often as fours, fives and sixes. But that did not happen: the sheets handed in had a suspiciously large share of high numbers, suggesting many players had cheated.
After finishing the game, the players had to fill in a form that asked their age and the part of Germany where they had lived in different decades. The authors found that, on average, those who had East German roots cheated twice as much as those who had grown up in West Germany under capitalism.
The problem is not just the money—roughly $100 billion a year for corporate welfare, for instance. Also disturbing is the message government is sending to all Americans. The way to rise and prosper, to expand one’s business and increase one’s income, is to seize control of the State to loot your neighbors. Gaining wealth by … Read more
El Rushbo brings up the differences on how the Democrats take care of their base vs how the Republicans treat theirs: (H/T: Breitbart-TV)
“Members of Congress must be informed to lead. And Ann Kuster is lost on the job” John Bolton, former Ambassador to the UN, has his own SuperPAC and in this ad, let’s us know his opinion about Congressman Ann Kuster (D-NH)’s performance on Benghazi is, er, lacking: (H/T: The Corner)
I prefer Mt. Dew but…. (H/T: Powerline)
Irony; Hillary Clinton thanks the Jr. Partners of the Democrat Party for doing the Democrats’ dirty work. She knows EXACTLY – and GOP Establishment wing of the GOP can’t deny it as they made big deals of what they were going to do to Conservative and TEA Party candidates. And more than a few cases (Thad Cochran / Haley Barbour insinuating that Chris McDaniel was KKK material, Walt Havenstein and the teabagger comment apology refusal), have openly and publicly acted like Democrats in their campaigns (and no, Carol Shea-Porter has never apologized for using the teabagger slur either). Will this be a moment of sober reflection by the GOP (do they care that they are killing the wing of the Party that the Democrats fear most?), continue to earn the moniker “The Stupid Party”, or finally admit that the elites in both Parties are just the same in goals (e.g., both want open borders – one advocates for it and the other keeps avoiding real actions to secure it – just ask Kelly Ayotte who was first against it before she was then for Amnesty).
Hillary Clinton thanked the Republican establishment and its big business allies for taking on the Tea Party and defeating conservative candidates like Chris McDaniel in Mississippi’s June runoff.
In a Thursday interview with Charlie Rose on PBS, Clinton said tea partiers and conservatives needed to be reined in. And she said it was about time the GOP establishment got a “wake-up call from the big business wing” that wants to continue the bipartisan big government policies that have made Washington, D.C.’s suburbs the country’s wealthiest “boomtown.” “Finally, the Republican establishment and their business supporters have woken up,” Clinton said, noting that she tells audiences, “Don’t vote for anyone who refuses to compromise.”
OK, I have to admit – it’s a bit entertaining, so why not have some fun? But this week, I’m just gonna go after a few of the Pindell questions / observations:
If the male Guardian reporter was really dedicated to getting an answer to his question, then why didn’t he just follow Brown and his staffer into the bathroom?
Maybe the journos would love to see that happen, but then again, that shows the class of the entire class. Still doesn’t devolve Brown for wearing the Political Coward award.
Why wasn’t there pressure for Brad Cook to recuse himself from the Ballot Law Commission’s question on Walt Havenstein’s residency when he himself wanted to run for governor against Maggie Hassan?
I really think the answer is rather simple by simply asking a return question: Is Cook actually running? Has he been campaigning? Nope. So why recuse even if there was idle chatter that he would?
Does everyone understand that if Attorney General Joe Foster rules in favor of Hassan on campaign contributions that New Hampshire essentially comes Texas without any real campaign finance rules?
I really do hope so
“If decarbonization is to be achieved by expanding renewables the expansion will have to come in wind, solar and biomass. So let’s take hydro out and see how far growth in wind, solar and biomass has carried us along the decarbonization path so far“: (H/T: Watts Up with That)
Once again, GrokTALK! was live this morning from 9-11am. Given the wonderful weather, that it is SUMMAH!, we know that more of you are listening on YOUR time and not ours. Steve has the audio here for downloading to listen when and where that suits you. Video – a bit more convoluted, but here it is:
Pre-Show
The Founders' belief that self-interested branches would protect their own appears to have been their single, fatal miscalculation.
— (((≠))) (@ThomasHCrown) July 9, 2014
I have been saying this for a number of years now – that Congress has been following in the footsteps of the Roman Senate – still having the self-righteous words, the rhetorical flourishes – in that it has killed it self by a thousand cuts bills. More and more, and solely for the sake of their re-election careers, deliberately fail to do their jobs. They won’t make the hard choices, the difficult decisions that we expect our elected legislators to make.
“This chart shows you how to respond next time. Although stocks and profit are indeed up as a result of the Obama administration and Federal Reserve policies, it isn’t translating to regular — non-Wall Street — Americans:” (H/T: Independent Journal Review)
Most of us on the Right remember this lady upon Obama becoming President: “I wouldn’t have to worry about putting gas in my car. I wouldn’t have to worry about paying my mortgage. You know – if I help him, he’ll help me.”. A lot of us were fearful, for we did believe him when he told Joe the Plumber that wealth was better when it was spread around – with the insinuation that he (Obama) would do so. And he has kept his promise, just not quite the way that Ms. Joseph thought. To refresh:
And her tune today – hmmm, it seems to have changed quite a bit: straight out of the Wizard of Oz:
Senator Jay Rockefeller (D., W.Va.) expressed his opposition to returning the unaccompanied children at the border back to their home countries, theorizing that the United States could benefit from any highly skilled workers among them, now or in the future. “I’m not for throwing people out,” Rockefeller tells National Review Online. “I’ve got a huge interest in science, engineering and math, etc., and those are the folks who are trained in other countries and they come here and we cut their funding. We’ve all benefited from immigrants.”
Does he think that there are highly skilled workers among the children currently at the border? “I don’t know yet, but, you know, children can become anything they want,” Rockefeller says.”
Our ancient pledge to live in a nation of laws means nothing if one party aids the executive in undermining those laws on a whim.
— (((≠))) (@ThomasHCrown) July 9, 2014
A Constitutional crisis is when one branch arrogates power to itself and the others are powerless or unwilling to stop it.
— (((≠))) (@ThomasHCrown) July 9, 2014
Is it really just for show? Everyone on the Right sees Obama as overreaching his authority (hint: 20 Supreme Court rulings against him, all 9-0 unanimously) says that the Constitutional lecturer (Obama) is not trying to govern within its confines but to break out of it. The Constitutional gives Congress the power to reign in the Reigner:
We saw what happened when the US House tried to defund Obamacare – they couldn’t take the heat. And now, the second shoe (reformatted, emphasis mine):
He runs away from debates. He avoids forums. When he is answering questions, from what I have heard and seen, he’s quite glib in starting to answer and then zig-zagging away off into tangents and not answering the questions directly. But really, to go hide out in a bathroom to avoid a reporter asking a question on an important issue??
It’s why New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), for example, went to unintentionally amusing lengths to avoid saying anything about the Hobby Lobby ruling. But as Paul Lewis reported, even Christie wasn’t as evasive as former Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), now on the campaign trail in New Hampshire. I found Brown at a table at a restaurant called Priscilla’s, introduced myself as a Guardian reporter and enquired if I could ask him some questions. Brown smiled nervously and replied: “What do you want to ask me about?”
“Hobby Lobby? That would be a start,” I said.
“I’m all set,” he replied. “We’re enjoying ourselves right now.”
On the dissolving of the dividing line of public vs private that was a foundational governing philosophy – a bug, not a feature:
…Today, indeed, we confront a transformation in the regulatory state so profound as to indicate a change at the regime level. Today, our regulatory state does not simply promulgate the kind of docile “soft despotism” Tocqueville feared, or blanket the human passions with the kind of bureaucratic uniformity Nietzsche derided as the “coldest of cold monsters.” Instead, as we still struggle to accept, it is aggressively intervening in the intimate details of everyday life as a friend to some kinds of civil liberties but an enemy of others.
The non-religious are often skeptical towards Christians that say one thing about divorce (“not!”) and doing (“I’m outtahere!”) and in many cases, rightfully so. David French at The Corner has a good post on this seeming contradiction – but then puts up this chart as part of the explanation:
It’s pretty simple: When it comes to marriage, church attendance matters more than church affiliation.
I’ve often heard the South described as “God-haunted,” in the sense that there are millions of men and women who identify as Christians, who attend church at least semi-regularly, and who at least aspire to live a Christian life as they understand it. Within that “God-haunted” culture is a very large subculture of the “God-fearing,” in the sense that they hold to the orthodox tenets of the faith, attend church regularly, and –furthermore — immerse themselves in the larger life of the church, from Sunday School to mission trips to small-group Bible studies.
It turns out that the God-haunted lifestyle is terrible for marriage. The God-fearing lifestyle is excellent. The reasons are not difficult to discern.
You know, I have had the perfect title roaming around my head for years: “Everything in politics I first learned in church”.
Or rather, not saying words to the contrary: CASA (pro-illegal immigration group) Director Won’t Say If He Would Discourage Illegal Immigration All that stuff about “comprehensive immigration reform”? Yeah, we know what it is now…. (H/T: CNSNews)