Instead of a debate, Mitt and Newt should settle this like men

I would like to suggest a good, old-fashioned dance competition. Last man standing wins the delegates from Guam.

Personalize funny videos and birthday eCards at JibJab!

Who Hates Rick Santorum?

For those not familiar with the name, Dan Savage is a homosexual activist and cyber-bully who spends a pathological amount of time trying to take down Rick Santorum and other social conservatives. He has engaged in rampant, vile cyber-bullying and has even publicly threatened to kill and rape them - all in good fun, of course.


He has hijacked Santorum's name and created a sexually oriented website that is the first search result for "Santorum," thanks to Google bombing - all in good fun, of course.


Savage also supports public outing of his political enemies, including the outing of an 18-year-old who worked on Tom Tancredo's campaign in 2007. All in good fun, of course.


Molotov Mitchell at Worldnet Daily, an avowed "Ron Paul guy," whose "second choice is "Rick - Santorum, that is," thought it might be a good idea to expose "the hollow life form known as Dan Savage."

"Dan Savage is the perfect representative for the gay lobby. A filth-spewing hate activist that claims same sex marriage is beautiful, but then actively brags to the New York Times how he cheats on his spouse. He's a miserable creature, Dan Savage, and in 2003, he went after Rick Santorum."

All in good fun, of course.

UC Davis Pepper Spray Incident - What Really Happened

Mic check...
Mic check...
If you let them go...
If you let them go...
We will let you leave...
We will let you leave...
From Davis, to Greece, F*** the police!

We've all seen the video clip of the UC Davis police officer calmly hosing down "peaceful" student protesters with pepper spray, as if he were spraying weed killer on his flower beds on a lazy Saturday morning.


What we haven't seen are the events that led to this police action. When seen in context, it's clear that the police used disciplined restraint and it's incredible that nobody was seriously injured.


The protesters had been warned the day before that their tents were illegally occupying the quad and were ordered to remove them. The next day, the protesteres were again ordered several times to remove the tents. When they refused, police proceeded to remove them:





This was clearly a volatile situation. The dozen or so police, who were in riot gear and carrying pepper guns, were seriously outnumbered and being challenged by the protesters, who were constantly in their faces with cameras and were refusing to comply with police orders. The hundreds of students who were swarming the encampment area could have easily overwhelmed the police and one loon in the crowd with a weapon could have turned the situation into a tragedy of Kent State proportions.


Several protesters who attempted to impede the police action were arrested, which angered the protesters. The chanting resumed:

I propose...
That we pass a resolution...
To demand the cops...
Off the quad...

Apparently proper English usage is not a priority at UC Davis.


The group then marched en masse to the area where the students who had been arrested were being held and surrounded the police. The jeering mob attempted to "negotiate" with their hostages, saying they would allow the police to leave if they released the students who had been arrested.


At this point the situation had escalated far beyond a peaceful protest to an angry mob that was threatening the police. The officers were armed, but it was clear throughout the video that they had no desire to harm (or even arrest) the protesters. They waited an excruciatingly long time before they proceeded to use pepper spray on the students and continued to warn them of the consequences if they refused to move.


It was also clear that the students wanted the situation to escalate in order to make the police look bad. Upon being warned that the next step would be pepper guns, one student shouted, "Are you going to shoot students?" which set off angry chants of, "Don't shoot students! Don't shoot students!" One student in the crowd [11:50] says, "Who's got their own?" It's frightening to think what could have happened.


You can imagine what must have been going through the minds of the police officers at that point. I'm sure some of them are parents, perhaps some with children the same age as the protesters. No doubt they've been trained to de-escalate these situations and to use the least amount of force necessary to get everyone out safely while maintaining law and order. At the same time, they've got cameras in their faces recording every word and every move. One wrong move and they'll find themselves on YouTube or worse, in court. They have to make split-second decisions while they are surrounded by an angry mob of students who are screaming and jeering at them.


What could go wrong?


Fortunately, the occupiers decided to release their hostages (as if they had the right to detain them in the first place):

We are willing...
To give you a brief moment of peace...
So that you may take your weapons...
And our friends and go...
Please do not return....
We are giving you a moment of peace....
We are giving you a moment of peace. ..
You can go....
We will not follow you.....
We will let you leave...

These students are too young to remember what happened at Kent State University on May 4, 1970 and who knows what, if anything, they're being taught about that event at UC Davis. Four college students were killed and nine wounded when National Guard troops fired on protesters in the midst of a raucous protest.


A review of history recalls that the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had spent the months leading up to the Kent State shootings organizing, agitating, and occupying on the KSU campus. The campus had been radicalized in part, through propaganda spread by an SDS manual called "The New Radicals in the Multiuniversity," which laid out the plan:

"The next stage of the movement is the most crucial and delicate -- the formation of a Student Strike Coordinating Committee. There are two pre-conditions necessary for its existence. First, there must be a quasi-radical base of some size that has been developed from past activity. Secondly, either a crisis situation provoked by the administration or a climate of active frustration with the administration or the ruling class it represents must exist. The frustration should be centered around a set of specific demands that have been unresolved through the established channels of liberal action. If this kind of situation exists, then a strike is both possible and desirable."

The result of course, was a campus that became a powder keg. The shootings were the culmination of months of escalation by radicals disregarding the rule of law and provoking police and university authorities. Whether or not the National Guard members were justified in firing on the students is the subject of another discussion. However, the lesson of Kent State remains: intentional escalation by radical activists can lead to volatile and sometimes dangerous situations. Backing the police into a corner and detaining them in order to flex your muscles is not an exercise of your first amendment rights.


The students at UC Davis seem oblivious to the fact that they are putting everyone involved in danger. They are laughing and joking, acting as if nothing could possibly go wrong in this angry mob scene. History tells us otherwise when the rule of law is ignored and radicals take over.

 

Students lob a tear gas canister back at Ohio National Guard troops on May 4, 1970, the date that four students were shot and killed and nine others wounded|Chuck Ayers/Kent State University Archives

The Arrogance of our Republican Overlords

The Ohio Republican Party (ORP) is in the midst of a public squabble that is not only causing division within the upper echelon of the party, but is exposing the arrogance of those who consider themselves to be the upper echelon of the party.


It's no secret that ORP Chairman Kevin DeWine and and Governor John Kasich are not the best of friends. Both Kasich and House Speaker William Batchelder (R-Medina) called for his resignation shortly after Republicans swept into office in 2010, taking over the House, Senate, and all statewide offices.  Batchelder and Kasich had accused DeWine (cousin of former Senator and current Attorney General Mike DeWine) of not putting party resources behind some incumbents and not supporting Kasich.


DeWine refused to resign and the party tensions continued to ferment. During the heat of the battle over Kasich's union reform law repeal this past fall, DeWine played host to Mitt Romney, who visited a call center where Romney made one of the biggest blunders of his campaign, refusing to support Kasich and the union reforms. Romney reversed himself the next day. Some have blamed DeWine, speculating that the event was either a ploy to embarrass Kasich or incompetance on DeWine's part.

This week things finally came to a head.  Party Chairman Kevin DeWine, knowing that Republicans were working behind the scenes to unseat him, went public. He complained to the entire State Central Committee that he was being targeted by Kasich and in a speech posted on the ORP website, blamed the divisions on the desire for "profit, arrogance, and the petty pursuit of power."


Speaker Batchelder shot back with a memo to the House Republican Caucus, condemning DeWine's public rant (and listing his failures as leader of the ORP).


This is a lot of inside baseball, especially if you don't live in Ohio. But there was a line in DeWine's speech that stood out to me. It really gives us some insight into how these people think and why we are stuck with ineffective RINO's year after year after year and  why we conservatives feel like we are hitting our heads against a brick wall. DeWine said this:

"The only people who can dash Barack Obama’s hope to slip back into office are the people here in this room."

Did you know that? Did you know that the 66 members of the Ohio State Central Committee are the ONLY people who can stop Barack Obama? I, for one, had no idea that Kevin DeWine, et al were so powerful. If I had known, I would have been in Columbus kissing rings and paying homage to our Republican Overlords.


This is the all-powerful Ohio Republican party that chooses our candidates for us and slaps fake Tea Party endorsements on their mailings and picks winners and losers before the primaries.  Kevin DeWine, thinks we are too emotional and not bright enough to figure these things out for ourselves. When challenged before the 2010 primary, he wrote this:

"Finally, I've seen and heard a lot of ridiculous accusations lately about the role of the Ohio Republican Party in this primary election. Understandably, much of it is motivated by the heightened emotions of political primaries and too often spread with little to no accountability through email, blogs, and social media sites. Unfortunately, most of it is flat out false, and it's typically generated by people who find the truth just too inconvenient for their agenda. I want you to know you can always contact my office or email me directly if you want answers to any rumor or accusation about something we're doing. This election is too important to let "noise" distract us from the real goal of winning in November."

So we, the people, are the "noise" and they, the Overlords, are the only ones who can save us from Obama. They know what's best. We just need to be quiet and go along with their grand plans for our state.


Got that? Now who is going to save us from our Republican Overlords?




Cross Posted at RedState

Newt's Romp on the Green Couch with John Kerry

"Because you want the government to pay for it with a great big tax credit. If it's big enough to do what you say, it's actually going to be more expensive than having the private sector go out and capitalize it in the private market....You want the research, you want the tax credit. That's a government solution." Sen. John Kerry

[Entire debate]

[Newt debate clips]

Four years ago, Sen. John Kerry and House Speaker Newt Gingrich took to the podiums at NYU's Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service to have an unstructured debate about solving the environmental crisis. Newt began by stating that there was a consensus in the scientific community that the earth was getting warmer and that human activity was contributing to that warming, but rejected the idea that we are headed for an immediate catastrophe.

Still, he felt it was important enough that the government needed to get involved:

"So, it is a problem. We should address it. And we should address it very actively."

He proposed what he thinks are "economic" solutions:

"[23:12] And I have to start with the idea we have an absolute requirement as a human race to be committed to economic growth. We also have a requirement, if you're going to be realistic about the environment, to be committed to economic growth in China and India, which means, any serious strategy has to be thinking through what would green development look like in Africa? And what would a green economy look like in India and China? And for that to happen, I would argue, that we have to have a very strong commitment to finding new incentives, to use new science and new technology, and to maximize the rate of innovation. Because you would actually like - the Chinese are going to have cars. The question is, could we accelerate the development of hydrogen cars so the cars they have don't add to carbon loading?" [emphasis added]

He then takes a moment to impress the intelligentsia in the room at NYU with his superior intellect:

"[23:17] So the challenge to us to lead the world, and I agree entirely with whatever criticism the Senator wants to make in general about the absence of American leadership. I'm not gonna stand up here and defend our failure to lead. I am going to say our leadership should start with science, technology, entrepreneurship, and that we should focus on developing new approaches...."

No kidding...that was actually Newt and not John Kerry and not Barack Obama. We must ask if this will be our next Green President's theme as he jets off to all those UN-type environmental justice conferences. Or has he repented of bashing his country among the liberal elite?

To be fair to Newt, he gives a valiant argument against carbon cap and trade. No one would come away from this debate with any inkling that he would want to impose this on the American people. That doesn't mean he doesn't favor other government solutions for dealing with his vision of our "green" future:

"[49:18] So I start with, I want a really big solution. I believe a really big solution has to mean very rapid change. And his is a core argument. I'm not talking about a laissez-faire market. I'm in the Alexander Hamilton/Theodore Roosevelt model. I'm for an incentivized market where, for example, we have very substantial tax credits for the auto industry to convert over to dramatically better cars. We have a very substantial tax credit to trade in the oldest and most polluting of cars. We have a very significant tax credit to go to a clean coal technology. Because if you don't help provide the capital - the morning you provide he incentives, there will be 50,000 entrepreneurs trying to figure out how to get the money. The morning you try to do it by regulation, there will be 50,000 entrepreneurs hiring a lawyer to fight you. It's a fundamentally different model."

He goes on to talk about 20-year tax credits for wind farms and paying to retrofit gas stations for E-85, ethanol to dramatically decrease "carbon loading." Then he displays an astounding measure of cognitive dissonance:

"[53:27] We're arguing over whether bureaucracy is a better way to be urgent or whether science and technology translated by entrepreneurs into products is a better way to be urgent. And I would argue, most of American history argues, that the market can move faster than a bureaucracy to provide solutions if you incentivize the market."

Aside from this sounding eerily like Obama's first three years in office, throwing around the word "market" when you're proposing a government subsidy to pick winners and losers is completely bipolar. Henry Hazlitt, in his concise manual, Economics in One Lesson, explained it this way:

"It is obvious in the case of a subsidy that the taxpayers must lose precisely as much as the X industry gains. It should be equally clear that, as a consequence, other industries must lose what the X industry gains. They must pay part of the taxes that are used to support the X industry. And customers, because they are taxed to support the X industry, will have that much less income left with which to buy other things. The result must be that other industries on the average must be smaller than otherwise in order that the X industry may be larger" (p.101).

Kerry recognized Newt's hypocrisy and rightly called him out on it. If you watch the entire debate, Kerry seems to have the upper hand throughout. Newt is subdued and conciliatory. At one point Newt boasted,

"[1:19:15] And when I was speaker, I think it's fair to say, that on things, that on a whole range of biodiversity issues, I intervened again and again on the side of the environment."

Kerry replied, "Absolutely!" and the room erupted in applause.

John Hinderaker over at the Powerline blog has an interesting comment about Newt's mild-mannered performance:

"Gingrich can be a fire-eater before a friendly audience, but he has a history of turning conciliatory when he has to deal with actual Democrats. One recalls his embarrassing tributes to President Clinton during the days when Clinton was eating Gingrich’s lunch in budget negotiations. Like most conservatives, I am fond of Newt and will always be grateful for his leadership in the years leading up to the 1994 GOP takeover of the House, and in the early aftermath of that takeover. But there is little in Newt’s record to suggest that he would be the most effective conservative standard-bearer in a presidential election."

More important, we just can't say with any confidence that he would be willing to dismantle the massive administrative state that currently rules our country. Indeed, he may just rearrange the deck chairs.

The Club for Growth has excellent White Papers on all the presidential candidates. While they rightly compliment Newt on many of his accomplishments as House Speaker, they note his propensity for promoting his pet projects with tax credits:

"Gingrich has an affinity – all too common even among conservative politicians – for gimmicky, special interest tax incentives that empower politicians to pick winners and losers in the marketplace. His favorite device is the tax credit.

In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Gingrich proposed a six month, $1,000-per person tax credit for 50 percent of the cost of personal travel more than 100 miles from one’s home. The idea sounds nice, but just as Cash for Clunkers only expedited the purchase of cars people were going to buy anyway (at non-car buying taxpayers’ expense), Gingrich’s Cash for Getaways would only have subsidized trips people were going to make anyway, enabling a transfer payment to frequent travelers from families without the time or inclination to travel. This proposal would also require more government to administer and oversee compliance. It is not a fiscally conservative policy. While perhaps not a large issue in itself, this is indicative of an approach Gingrich has frequently advocated. At times he has sponsored bills or issued proposals to do the following:

• A tax credit for the purchase of home computers used for educational or professional purposes.
• A $1,000 tax credit for low-income first-time homebuyers.
• Refundable tax credits for auto companies for the cost of flex-fuels cars, hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and the development of hydrogen cars.
• Tax credits to encourage investment in biofuels and “renewable forms of energy.”
• A permanent 50 percent tax credit for research and development, or at least for “companies that are willing to take on government's ‘grand challenges’ (for example, the first inhabitable moon base).”
• A special business tax credit for “corporations that fund basic research in science and technology at our nation's universities.”

Along with these gimmicky tax proposals, Gingrich voted for at least one tax increase during his time in Congress. In 1984, he supported a $50 billion tax bill that closed $15 billion in loopholes, eliminated a tax break on interest income, increased cigarette taxes, and raised taxes on distilled liquor. "

Again, these tax gimmicks are not conservative, free market solutions, but transfers of wealth from one group to another.

Much of Gingrich's appeal is based upon his performance in the debates and his supposedly superior intellect. It's become such a mantra that I fear conservatives are becoming the new Obama Girls. Having above-average debate skills is a job requirement for a candidate. Technically, it's not in the job description for the Commander in Chief. While strong debate performances are a necessary evil in this age, let's not fool ourselves into believing that the best spokesmodel will be the best president while ignoring the record. The Democrats did that last time around and it didn't turn out so well.

Cross-posted at RedState