Quickies: the fleebagger edition

A round-up of news items, columns, articles and blog posts that caught our eye next week.



First, Wisconsin and now in Indiana, Democratic lawmakers are forcing a government shutdown by turning tail and heading out of state rather than, you know, doing the job they have been paid to do by the taxpayers of their state. Elections do have consequenses and for the citizens of Wisconsin and Indiana, these consequenses mean, instead of having to face some legislative unpleasantries, certain lawmakers behave like abject cowards and abdicate their duties and responsibilities to the people they serve.

You don't even have to support Scott Walker or his public employee union reforms to recognize the disgraceful actions of these fleebaggers. This notion of "negotiating" is complete non-sense. The Democrats got their asses handed to them in November, turning over majorities of state legislatures to the Republicans and their response, their big idea, is to get out of Dodge all the while bitching and moaning about "preserving the balance of power". If all this apparently unbearable legislation is indeed so horrible, run on that assumption in 2012 and throw the Republicans out of office and then try to balance the budget.

Ah, that felt good.





Some more of that "new civility" the liberal-Left tells us we all must abide by.

Columbia University students heckled a war hero during a town-hall meeting on whether ROTC should be allowed back on campus.

"Racist!" some students yelled at Anthony Maschek, a Columbia freshman and former Army staff sergeant awarded the Purple Heart after being shot 11 times in a firefight in northern Iraq in February 2008. Others hissed and booed the veteran.

Maschek, 28, had bravely stepped up to the mike Tuesday at the meeting to issue an impassioned challenge to fellow students on their perceptions of the military.

"It doesn't matter how you feel about the war. It doesn't matter how you feel about fighting," said Maschek. "There are bad men out there plotting to kill you."

Several students laughed and jeered the Idaho native, a 10th Mountain Division infantryman who spent two years at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington recovering from grievous wounds.

Now that DADT has been repealed what are the Ivys objecting to now as justification for banning ROTC from their campuses? The military ban on transgenders? Oh, for cryin' out loud.

Can we now just cut through all the bullshit and acknowledge that the Ivys simply hate the military? Hey, it's cool.

Incidentally...

Despite Columbia being a private university, we understand they still receive federal funding. How quickly can we put an end to that?





When you lose Evan Thomas:

Only the President, only the President can break the logjam. His State of the Union was a profile in cowardice. His budget is a profile in cowardice. I hope there’s a secret plan he has here to come forward to lead us, but he hasn’t shown it yet.

Secret plan? Uh, yeah. With a Republican-controlled House, the President has a historic Only-Nixon-counld-go-to-China opportunity for entitlement reform and Thomas is hoping for a secret plan. We're in the very best of hands.



George Will On Wisconsin and its two principals.

Obama: Let's drop anymore of that "centrist" talk, shall we?

Scott Walker: If you've been paying attention to this guy's political career, this should come as no big surprise.

Penicillin or leeches?

If multiculturalism is so swell, what ever became of multimedicinalism?

KT has more on the subject, here.




It's not too late. There's still time to repent and reform but the early returns are starting to roll in and it doesn't look promising:

We baby boomers have been called, with good reason, "The Worst Generation."

Our parents survived the Great Depression, then donned uniforms to fight the Good War and save Western Civilization. We call them "The Greatest Generation." We use capital letters to honor their achievements and spirit of uncomplaining self-sacrifice.

But they gave birth to us, the cohort born between 1945 and 1964, and they gave us everything they never had. Since fate has demanded little of us, we spoiled "baby boomers" are, as former Clinton adviser Paul Begala (born 1961) has written, "the most self-centered, self-seeking, self-interested, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing generation" in U.S. history.

That epic selfishness is on full display in Wisconsin's budget battle.

Like the rest of the country, Wisconsin's government, unions and schools, led mostly by boomers, are trying to stem a tide of red ink. Unlike the federal government, Wisconsin can't just print more money or borrow from the Chinese.

So the rest of America is closely watching Wisconsin: Will the boomers finally step up, as their parents did, and do what's best for the next generation?

Stay tuned.

Oh, and we know a handful of folks born on the cusp in the late 50s and early 60s, technically boomers, who consider themselves, culturally-speaking, Gen-Xers who want absolutely nothing to do with the boomer generation and stigma for that matter.

Damn hippies.





Shut up, they explained.

Peter Wehner on Wisconsin, Big Media and its double standard when it comes to that whole civility thing.

The game that’s being played is obvious. Civility has no intrinsic worth for these individuals; it is merely another weapon in an endless political battle.

Remember, kids... this civility thing is just the ruling class's polite way of shutting down dissent.




B-Daddy reviews Avery Brewing Salvation Ale. Now, we don't want to give anything away but we wouldn't send you over there if he thought it was a crappy beer, right?



Leslie is heading to Arizona and will be phoning in reports.




Hey, wait... here's more of that civility thing we've been hearing about.

Sometimes it's necessary to get out on the streets and "get a little bloody," a Massachusetts Democrat said Tuesday in reference to labor battles in Wisconsin.

Rep. Michael Capuano (D-Mass.) fired up a group of union members in Boston with a speech urging them to work down in the trenches to fend off limits to workers' rights like those proposed in Wisconsin.

"I’m proud to be here with people who understand that it’s more than just sending an email to get you going," Capuano said, according to the Statehouse News. "Every once and awhile you need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary."

Political observers have been the lookout for potentially incendiary rhetoric in the wake of January's shooting in Tucson, Ariz., where Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D) survived an assassination attempt, six were killed, and 12 others were injured.

It's obvious these "political observers" have been doing a piss-poor job of stopping any of it.

With respect to Capuano, at a certain point, these people just become caricatures of themselves.



And finally...

Jonah Goldberg eulogizes his brother.

When Josh was at his best, he was simply the best person I knew. The Joys of Yiddish says that a mensch is “someone to admire and emulate, someone of noble character. The key to being ‘a real mensch’ is nothing less than character, rectitude, dignity, a sense of what is right, responsible, [and] decorous.”

How cool is that? Is there an equivalent term for us goys?

China the exceptional

Last week, we took on Peter Beinart and his amorous feelings towards China as a counter to his perception of the "lunatic notion" of American exceptionalism.

Again, it's come to this: how badly is the statist brand tarnished that they can no longer look to the Greece fire that is Europe as the end-state of their progressive march but rather cast their lonely eyes to China? China, where natural resource exploitation, command and control blended with crony capitalism economics and forced abortions happen.

Now others are jumping on the bandwagon: Jonah Goldberg in response to Beinart's column, explains that the concept of American exceptionalism is not new and certainly not some exclusively right-wing construct.

"The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in "Democracy in America," "and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one." Ever since, historians have argued that America's lack of a feudal past, its Puritan roots, the realism of its revolutionary ambitions and many other ingredients contributed to America's status as the "first new nation," to borrow a phrase from Seymour Martin Lipset, who spent his life writing about American exceptionalism.

Goldberg goes on to give several other examples of the study of this country's exceptionalism as a historical pursuit.

And the Washington Times, on the President's own dubiousness towards American exceptionalism, provides this quote from Margaret Thatcher:

"Americans and Europeans alike sometimes forget how unique is the United States of America. No other nation has been built upon an idea, the idea of liberty. No other nation has so successfully combined people of different races and nations within a single culture. ... Whether in flight from persecution or from poverty, the huddled masses have, with few exceptions welcomed American values, the American way of life and American opportunities. And America herself has bound them to her with powerful bonds of patriotism and pride."

Back to Goldberg:

Ultimately, it's not that liberals don't believe in American exceptionalism so much as they believe it is holding America back, which might explain why they're lashing out at the people who want to keep it exceptional. But that too is nothing new. "The Coolidge myth has been created by amazingly skillful propaganda," editorialized the Nation in 1924 about the unfathomable popularity of Calvin Coolidge. "The American people dearly love to be fooled."

Wow. We guess Americans were stupid in not appreciating liberalism back then also.

Again, what is wrong with greatness? What is wrong with having, collectively, one of the most liberal interpretations of free speech in the world? What is wrong with a firm belief in robust and transparent market economics? What is wrong with a healthy distrust of central authority? We suppose if you are fawning over China, these concepts would indeed be "lunatic".

Please remind us one more time just who the "extremists" are.

Line of the Day

"They sound like pimps complaining about the prevalence of STDs among prostitutes."



- Jonah Goldberg on Congressional leadership that should've been minding the lending and finance stores but weren't. Full article which we may have more on, here.

Bonus line (because we're givers): "When a reporter for Forbes magazine asked a Treasury spokesman last week why Congress had to lay out $700 billion, the answer came back: "It's not based on any particular data point." Rather: "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

Quickies

Possessing the wisdom and foresight we thought was exclusive to U.S. Congress, the citizens of Mexico City voted overwhelmingly to keep the Mexican petroleum industry in a state of ancient technology and stagnating production. A non-binding referendum organized by the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) declared state-owned incompetence to be a matter of national pride and thus preferable to the infusion of state-of-the-art drilling and refining techniques for which privatization and elements thereof, would allow. Mexico: bringing you the finest in socialism and crony capitalism.


No one does the self-gratification quite like ESPN and in the case of honoring, during its ESPYs award show, the once “infamous” now “famous” black power salute by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympic games, they rose to new heights. We’re not as hard over as Jonah Goldberg is in article here and though we do understand where Smith and Carlos were coming from we believe the act and the context in which it was executed was ill-advised.

Indeed, it can done… Somali immigrants taking the place of Mexican (illegal) immigrants in small-town Iowa. In the final paragraph the article graciously concedes that many of the Somalis are legal immigrants with roots in Minneapolis.

...and finally...12 years, two Presidential administrations and numerous challenges from environmental and, you know, “social justice” groups later, looks like we’re going to complete the border fence down towards Tijuana.