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In the Land of the Free, how free are we?  Once again, the sorry story of Brendan Eich is a great object lesson.  Over at Patheos, the Anchoress has a good piece on this growing intolerance of groupthink (emphasis mine, reformatted):

If the headline strikes some as offensive, it will nevertheless remain, because that’s the case I’m making, and I’m sticking with it: a gay CEO with a pair of brass ones needs to step up and speak truth to a growing, and most illiberal new power. He or she needs to hire Brendan Eich in some sort of corporate leadership capacity for the sake of the most fundamental of freedoms — the freedom to think what you want to think, even if your thinking is unpopular or deemed “mistaken” — and in so doing boldly declare that our society has no truck with inquisitions.

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Why Campaign Finance Should Be Anonymous: If you support secret ballots, you should oppose campaign finance law.

– Walter Hudson

And, I will remind you, at a time when President Obama held the same views.  Such a demonstration of REAL Tolerance – Obama was given the time to “evolve” but the militant gay movement wanted a scalp.   These “Liberals” are certainly “liberal” in outlook; just agree with us and all is hunky-dory.  Now we have the latest edition of retribution from the “open and transparent” database of proponents of CA Proposition 8 – those that were pro-traditional marriage.  No, I no longer support just putting out this kind of information anywhere – we see the proof that the Left is all “Happy Dance” to simply pick up that data and use it as a club, up close and personal. We keep our voting secret for EXACTLY this reason – we should also hold to the same philosophy of campaign finance to keep this violent act of retribution from happening again.  For BOTH side of any argument.

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“That” being the retribution against the long time Chief Technology Officer Brendan Eich and an extremely short term stint as Chief Executive Officer of Mozilla, the open software organization that is behind the FireFox browser and Thunderbird email program (both which I have used for years, but more on that later).  As I said before, the Progressive movement is all about removing the traditional pillars of American society, aiding (or is that completing?) in Obama’s promise to “Fundamentally Transform” America.  It made me think back to what Tyler Deaton did to advance this (emphasis mine, reformatted):

WEDNESDAY, FEB. 12: SANTORUM SPURS CRITICISM. The New Hampshire Republican Party’s decision to invite 2012 presidential candidate and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum to speak at a major upcoming event is not sitting well with a prominent GOP gay rights advocate.  The NHGOP announced Wednesday morning that Santorum will join Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Sen. Kelly Ayotte, Rep. Pete King, former Ambassador John Bolton and others at the March 14-15 Northeastern Republican Leadership Conference in Nashua, which is expected to attract Republicans from throughout the Northeast.  The stated goal of the conference is to discuss how to expand the base of the GOP to put it in a stronger position to succeed in the 2014 and 2016 elections. Tyler Deaton, current national committeeman for the New Hampshire Young Republicans and former executive director of the former pro-gay marriage group New Hampshire Republicans for Freedom and Equality, criticized the choice.

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We talk a lot about the growth of the state and the power it might usurp and abuse in the most extreme scenarios. Could you ever envision a time where the military or forces under control that are extra-military would ever turn its guns on U.S. citizens?

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The Daily Caller had what I consider to be a bit of a downer of a post.  You see, we at the ‘Grok don’t charge at all for the same thing – not even for travel expenses (emphasis mine, reformatted):

Breitbart News recently charged a Texas tea party group at least $7,000 to promote and cover the group’s rally, according to a tea party organizer involved in the planning.  On March 15, the group called Patriots Rally for Freedom held a rally in Martindale, Texas. In the lead-up to the event, organizers asked Breitbart News — which recently announced a “Texas bureau” — to cover the gathering.  But according to Ken Crow, the tea party activist and founder of TeaPartyCommunity.com who made the call to Breitbart, the site would only cover the event if the tea party group paid for it. Crow revealed the arrangement in an interview with ex-Breitbart News reporter Lee Stranahan, who posted the audio to Twitter Wednesday. Stranahan was recently fired by Breitbart.

“The big item that I really wanted was some promotion leading up to the event,” Crow told Stranahan this week.  Crow said that Dan Fleuette, the person he spoke with at Breitbart News, insisted that the media organization would need $11,000 to come and cover the event. In an interview with The Daily Caller’s Mirror blog Wednesday night, Crow said Fleuette eventually acquiesced to $7,000 plus travel expenses. But upon hearing the price, the women organizing the rally flipped out. “The girls are screaming, ‘WE DON’T HAVE SEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS!’” Crow recalled.

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I wrote about Scott Brown’s talk at Grokster Mike’s house last Wednesday here and mentioned that there were a number of questions that were asked. Here are the first two questions.  I’ll dribble  the rest out over the next few days.

Question 1:

The ads they have thrown at you over oil and that’s the oil barrel busted in the water.  What can we do?

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As I posted here, it is clear that Scott Brown, rather than supporting more Conservative issues supported more Progressive ones:

sided with a Democratic majority on 22 percent of votes in his first year, ranking him seventh among all senators.  The next year, he voted with Democrats 46 percent of the time, trailing only Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. In 2012, he rose to the top of the list, siding with a Democratic majority close to 62 percent of the time

Which should give rise to the question: if I am voting for a Republican, am I getting a Republican?  If someone has an “R” after their name, are they a “good” Republican (which NH House Minority Gene Chandler holds to) simply because of that “R” designation? 

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Funny, I don’t remember Scott Brown saying this at our meeting:  “I was the most bipartisan senator in the United States Senate.” (Scott Brown on Tuesday, March 18th, 2014 in a meeting with Republicans in Portsmouth, N.H.).  Remember these numbers: 22%, 46%, 62%.

Shaheen votes 99% with the Democrats, Brown votes 62% of the time with Democrats.  And he boasts about it?  Shades of “Monkey Business” (in another way) – he dared the Press / us to catch him?  Shaheen may be co-joined with Obama at the hips, waist, and shoulders but 62% would be more than just a shoulder bump from where I stand.  Hey Andy Leach – Did you know about this?  That Scott is openly creating his own oppo research and giving it out?

And you were worried about me videoing last Wednesday….how’s this going to play with the Conservatives in the Republican Party – unless your game plan was to write them out of consideration?  Scary proposition in an off-year primary when it is the Conservatives generally outvote the Independents and moderates.

Be careful of what you boast – somebody will take you up on it and they did!  From Politico (emphasis mine, reformatted

…”I was the most bipartisan senator in the United States Senate,” Brown said, according to a report published in The Portsmouth Herald. “I voted 50-50. So I worked with everybody. And here’s the problem, I was the most bipartisan senator.”

Well, I would certainly agree with that – that IS a problem.  Helping the opposition to 

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Betsy’s Page is run by a charter school teacher and in the years I’ve been reading her (an “aggregator” sorta like an extended version of Instapundit, or Weekend Pundit‘s “Thoughts on a Sunday”).  Here is a part of today’s “page” that speaks to that the Freedom to Achieve also means the Responsibility to Work Harder / Longer:

A teacher at Success Academy in Harlem reports a question that tugs at the heartstrings from one of his students.

One seventh grader asked me, ‘Why are so many people mad at us if we are doing so well?’

Indeed.

These children work incredibly hard, and they’re proud of their success. No one, especially without knowledge of their situation or home life or personal effort, has the right to undermine their remarkable achievements.

There’s an excellent reason why Success Academy scholars do extraordinarily well on the state exams: We believe they can. We believe all children can succeed, no matter their socioeconomic circumstances.

Our critics do not share that belief.

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 “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Mediaite:

[Jeffrey] Toobin responded that the court seems to be saying that “we give freedom of speech to people that engage in hateful speech, and so we have to give freedom of speech to people who want to give to political campaigns.” On the other hand, he noted, the dissenting justices basically said “that is all a bunch of nonsense” and that “speech is not money.” But they were defeated by a 5-to-4 margin.

The Bill of Rights was not a vehicle by which Government “gives” us Rights at all

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