• Pragerisms

    For a more comprehensive list of Pragerisms visit
    Dennis Prager Wisdom.

    • "The left is far more interested in gaining power than in creating wealth."
    • "Without wisdom, goodness is worthless."
    • "I prefer clarity to agreement."
    • "First tell the truth, then state your opinion."
    • "Being on the Left means never having to say you're sorry."
    • "If you don't fight evil, you fight gobal warming."
    • "There are things that are so dumb, you have to learn them."
  • Liberalism’s Seven Deadly Sins

    • Sexism
    • Intolerance
    • Xenophobia
    • Racism
    • Islamophobia
    • Bigotry
    • Homophobia

    A liberal need only accuse you of one of the above in order to end all discussion and excuse himself from further elucidation of his position.

  • Glenn’s Reading List for Die-Hard Pragerites

    • Bolton, John - Surrender is not an Option
    • Bruce, Tammy - The Thought Police; The New American Revolution; The Death of Right and Wrong
    • Charen, Mona - DoGooders:How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help
    • Coulter, Ann - If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans; Slander
    • Dalrymple, Theodore - In Praise of Prejudice; Our Culture, What's Left of It
    • Doyle, William - Inside the Oval Office
    • Elder, Larry - Stupid Black Men: How to Play the Race Card--and Lose
    • Frankl, Victor - Man's Search for Meaning
    • Flynn, Daniel - Intellectual Morons
    • Fund, John - Stealing Elections
    • Friedman, George - America's Secret War
    • Goldberg, Bernard - Bias; Arrogance
    • Goldberg, Jonah - Liberal Fascism
    • Herson, James - Tales from the Left Coast
    • Horowitz, David - Left Illusions; The Professors
    • Klein, Edward - The Truth about Hillary
    • Mnookin, Seth - Hard News: Twenty-one Brutal Months at The New York Times and How They Changed the American Media
    • Morris, Dick - Because He Could; Rewriting History
    • O'Beirne, Kate - Women Who Make the World Worse
    • Olson, Barbara - The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House
    • O'Neill, John - Unfit For Command
    • Piereson, James - Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism
    • Prager, Dennis - Think A Second Time
    • Sharansky, Natan - The Case for Democracy
    • Stein, Ben - Can America Survive? The Rage of the Left, the Truth, and What to Do About It
    • Steyn, Mark - America Alone
    • Stephanopolous, George - All Too Human
    • Thomas, Clarence - My Grandfather's Son
    • Timmerman, Kenneth - Shadow Warriors
    • Williams, Juan - Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It
    • Wright, Lawrence - The Looming Tower

Where do American Marxists like Obama come from? From your favorite bigotted university!

 The following article is by Katherine Kersten, the only politically conservative soloist  allowed on the newspaper’s Marxist orchestrated staff here in the Twin Cities…..and  only a part time one at that.   She has spoken to our local Minnesota Prager Discussion Group upon occasion reciting her experiences at this Soviet expanse of self-righteous newspeak propagandists.

The Tom Emmer she refers to in the article below is the Republican Tom Emmer who lost the Minnesota governorship to multimillion dollar man, troubled Democrat Mark Dayton, by a couple thousand votes in a state where the entire establishment including the courts is Democrat run,  which includes  vote counting.l…..

Minnesotans are proud to be called Progressives, a name which suggests  they graduated from university.     It certainly beats being called Christian or a farmer.      Katherine Kersten writes:

Conservatives on campus? A case for courts

  • Article by: KATHERINE KERSTEN , Star Tribune 

http://www.startribune.com/opinion/otherviews/137317798.html

Tom Emmer may be out of luck. But a similar dispute in Iowa has gone legal.

 

What was Tom Emmer thinking when he applied for a faculty position at Hamline University? Surely he knows that our campus intelligentsia generally view conservatives like him as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals.

At many campuses, Emmer might have made it to the second round of interviews if he had been a disabled “person of color” or confused about his sexuality. But even then he probably couldn’t have overcome the cardinal rule of campus “diversity” — diversity of political views will not be tolerated.

Given his rejection by Hamline (after he thought he had a job), Emmer might be pleased to know that some aspiring conservative faculty members who are victims of political discrimination are gaining new traction through the courts.

Take Teresa Wagner, whose case was recently considered by the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over Iowa, Minnesota and other Midwestern states.

Some might question Wagner’s sanity, since she applied — and was turned down for — a position at a law school whose 50-member faculty includes only one registered Republican.

Was this hotbed of liberalism Berkeley, or an Ivy League university where (one suspects) conservatives risk being burned at the stake?

No. The school in question was in the heart of Corn Country: the University of Iowa.

As a conservative, Wagner was guilty of several “venial” sins that the high priests of faculty diversity might have forgiven had she confessed and begged for absolution.

But Wagner had committed one unforgivable sin: She is prolife, and actually once worked for the National Right to Life Committee in Washington, D.C.

A law school dean advised her to disguise her past — in particular, her offer of a tenure-track position at one of the few American law schools that don’t immediately run conservatives off campus.

Two deans actually recommended her for the Iowa position, and student evaluators gave her the highest possible ratings.

But Wagner’s reputation preceded her, and the faculty rejected her application. According to the Eighth Circuit’s opinion, issued in December 2011, the law school chose to hire a candidate whose credentials were inferior to hers, but who had made clear to the faculty that he was a political liberal.

The law school could have hired Wagner as well, since it had two open positions of the same kind. But the faculty chose to hire just one person, rather than give a job to Wagner.

When Wagner applied for a lower-level summer position, she didn’t even get an interview. Instead, the faculty chose a candidate who had just graduated from law school, but who had worked for the prochoice faculty member who had led the opposition to Wagner.

But the story doesn’t end there, as it so often does in these matters. Wagner took on the high priests of diversity, and brought a federal court action on First Amendment grounds.

(Sorry, Tom Emmer, the First Amendment carries no weight in hiring cases at private universities like Hamline.) In December, the court ruled that her case had sufficient merit to go to trial.

The court’s reasoning was revealing. First, the court drew a discriminatory inference from the law school’s grossly skewed 49-to-1 ideological composition. If this is a suspect ratio that may justify hiring lawsuits on First Amendment grounds, then most public education institutions in America may be vulnerable.

Second, the court noted the incestuous nature of the hiring process at the University of Iowa Law School.

While deans and the hiring committee technically have some authority in this respect, in reality, an ideologically homogenous faculty wields authority and creates cookie-cutter replicas of its ideological biases in its new hires. The court found this constitutionally problematic.

The Wagner case raises important questions of several kinds. Among them:

Why do many faculty members view the presence of conservatives at our institutions of higher learning as such a threat? Why was the 50-member University of Iowa Law School faculty willing to fight so hard to avoid exposing students to two conservative teachers, instead of just one?

And why don’t law professors — of all people — understand the mandate at the core of our nation’s founding document?

The judges who ruled for Wagner found this disregard for the Constitution deeply troubling. In deciding that her case may proceed to trial, they quoted William O. Douglas, one of the most liberal U.S. Supreme Court Justices of the last half century: “No more direct assault on academic freedom can be imagined than for the school authorities to [refuse to hire] a teacher because of his or her philosophical, political, or ideological beliefs.”

Unfortunately, though today’s universities purport to worship at the altar of diversity, the first rule in their creed is that diversity of ideas will not be tolerated.

Comment:   Unfortunately today’s Americans, both conservative and Liberal with  all shades of the inbetween, are so poorly educated they have no knowledge of Marxism, its lure, its corruption, its newspeak, its sanctimony,  its evil, its history and the horrors of  its atheism and  contempt for mankind.    Marxism has caused the deaths of over 100,000,000 human beings since its appearance in the 19th century.

President Barack Hussein Obama is its salesman in our country.   He has no love for this country or its historic struggles.    As a matter of fact, his disgust arrises from his own racial bigotry added to his own sense of entitlement and its opportunities to hook up being a minority.

His training was Marxist……whose enemy is free enterprise, and free human expression.   He, as a Marxist, is ‘religiously’ devined  to devote  HIS  governing powers to destroy  citizens’   personal freedoms, tranfering their responsibilities, knowledge, duties and liberties which  traditional America has historically expected from its citizens.    

He, being  Barack Obama and his  future Obamaling Marxists, according to Marxist dogma  are better qualified and educated  to gather  the POWER of the State into  their hands, so they can determine who is equal and who is not, and who are to enjoy the nation’s riches .

As in all modern Marxist miasmas, bureaucrats hustle to get in line for power.   Marxism used to be spread by bloodshed with mass killings of the uninvited in assembling their tyranny.   In feminized democracies they sweet talk the population, accentuating and organizing diversities to sabotage the culture, encourage its rot, and then, pretend to be the salvation by creating equality for all people.

They know the human female isn’t interested in liberty and would never cause trouble to attain or defend it.    She demands security…..a commodity the tyrannical left is very anxious to provide everyone and EVERYONE’S PERIL

Dear fellow Americans….you are paying a huge price preferring ignorance, gluttony, and pleasure over the sweet fragrance of knowledge with understanding.      Your cathedrals of learning are in the hands of  your liberty  killers.      How on Earth do you plan to survive when they are also in the White House?

Tim Tebow versus Tom Brady…..All Americans in the Best Show in Town

I love sports and always have.   My dad was a good athlete.   He played  varsity baseball, basketball  and football   all four years in high school in Hope, North Dakota, and competed in track regionally, representing the state in competitions in Chicago, in 1918.   His teams were state champions several of those years.

He played competitive softball in St. Paul until his early 50s and anchored his bowling team beyond that.  

The first professional team I recognized was from St. Louis.  My favorite uncle and aunt (with whom I lived one spring and summer when I was six years old, had moved in early 1944 from Minneapolis to St. Louis to become Southeast  regional manager of the Liggett Drug Company.   

I had discovered professional baseball from listening to the radio  that year.   I was crushed when my uncle and aunt moved.   To soothe my sorrow, uncle told me to listen to the radio for baseball  scores and think of him and auntie when St. Louis was mentioned.    From April through summer that year I not only followed St. Louis baseball on radio, every morning I’d check the newspaper box scores and standings of  the St. Louis  teams.

Notice the plural of the word ‘team’.   For in 1944 St. Louis claimed two major league baseball teams, the St. Louis Cardinals, the pride and joy of the city especially from  Dizzy and Paul Dean fame, and the poor ‘sister’ of the family, the St. Louis Browns, who had never played a game  in the World Series  in the history of major league baseball.    Within a decade following the War, the franchise was exiled to Baltimore  where it got oxygen for the first time since 1944.

My favorite teams in the ‘majors’  in those days were the perennial losers, the Philadelphia Athletics, Washington Senators, the Philadelphia Phillies, and Pittsburgh Pirates…….I felt sorry for these  losers.   They won so seldom each win became  a thrill.

Between the Browns and the Cardinals, therefore, my rule for fanship made me back the Browns…….for believe it or not, the Browns were competing  for the American League championship in 1944.   To this day I can remember my  favorite American League pitchers, Nelson Potter who competed as hero  with Bob Muncrief, both of the Browns   for top spot in my hopes and dreams.    The St. Louis Cardinals were perennial winners; the New York Yankees of the National League.

From late August into October every late afternoon I’d search the radio for daily baseball scores.   The Cards were  winning as expected.    What was not expected shocked all baseball-interested.    The St. Louis Browns were in a day-to-day battle  against the Yankees and Detroit, I think it was…..a three way tug-of-war for the American League championship.

The Browns eked out its  one and only American League Championship that 1944, and were to play the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series…….during the same period of the greatest bloodbaths for American troops in the Pacific theater of World War II.

By World Series time the Allies were commanding advances both in both Europe and the Pacific…..The “war effort” was  full speed ahead.

Part of that full speed ahead  included volunteer efforts by school kids of which I was one.    During World Series time about a dozen  of us ‘guys’ were organized to scour  the undeveloped ‘empty’ lot spaces in our part of St. Paul to collect milkweed pods.  

The troops on the Pacific front needed life preservers.    Before the war the main ingredient world-wide for buoyancy in life preservers was kapok, i.e.  fiber from seeds of some kind of tropical tree growing in  the jungles of Netherlands East Indies, Thailand and British Malaya……all under Japanese control.

It was discovered that the  ‘silks’ from the pod of the American milkweed, Asclepia syriaca, served as an excellent substitute for kapok silks.      So, during  World Series Saturday and Sunday that 1944,   I went milkweed hunting in the fields of St. Paul.    I can’t remember who the adult ‘guide’ was, but it was a ‘he’ and he was also following the World Series via a radio which sat in his car…..a very static ridden kind of radio.    He loved the World Series.   I loved my Browns.

The Cardinals, as expected, won the World Series that fall, 4 games to 2.   But, I was on a roll as a sports fan.  The next season I followed the Minnesota Gopher football team over the radio airwaves.   Bernie Bierman was the coach and on  one of the Saturdays of  my Gopher devotion, I listened to them defeat Nebraska 61-7.      

My favorite coach of all time is Bill Belichick.   My favorite quarterback is Tom Brady……both won me over about ten years ago when Brady, an unknown then, a  late season  fill-in quarterback led  the Patriots to the Super Bowl and a win over the  St. Louis Rams led by my previous favorite quarterback in the NFC that year,  Kurt Warner.

I face a similar dilemma this very day.    Tom Brady and the Patriots are facing the wonderfully uplifting,  Tim Tebow,  with  the Broncos to move on to the championship game of the American Football Conference.

Sorry, lefties, this Tim Tebow is one terrific dude as well as a winsome quarterback in the NFL.    We don’t see too many Tim Tebows anymore.    They run against the rules of  Political Correctness which  serve our Marxist oriented national state.

I am ‘praying’ Tim does well in the game, but I have to go for the Patriots’  Bill Belichick and Brady.   I want this ‘best’ to win another Super Bowl.   John Fox is and has been an  outstanding coach.  He has let Tim be creative….except perhaps for two of the three recent losses before the Broncos  ’lucked’ into the post season competitions on the final day of the regular season.  

I’ll root for them again another day.  

 Whether Tim Tebow wins or loses today, he still is an All American Star, so I  want to leave this following article with you, dear readers.   It was sent  by Mark Waldeland:

I believe in Tim Tebow

ReillyBy Rick Reilly
ESPN.com
 
 
 I’ve come to believe in Tim Tebow, but not for what he does on a football field, which is still three parts Dr. Jekyll and two parts Mr. Hyde.
 
 No, I’ve come to believe in Tim Tebow for what he does off a football field, which is represent the best parts of us, the parts I want to be and so rarely am.
 
 Who among us is this selfless?
 
 Every week, Tebow picks out someone who is suffering, or who is dying, or who is injured. He flies these people and their families to the Broncos game, rents them a car, puts them up in a nice hotel, buys them dinner (usually at a Dave & Buster’s), gets them and their families pregame passes, visits with them just before kickoff (!), gets them 30-yard-line tickets down low, visits with them after the game (sometimes for an hour), has them walk him to his car, and sends them off with a basket of gifts.
 
Home or road, win or lose, hero or goat.
 
 Remember last week, when the world was pulling its hair out in the hour after Tebow had stunned the Pittsburgh Steelers with an 80-yard OT touchdown pass to Demaryius Thomas in the playoffs? And Twitter was exploding with 9,420 tweets about Tebow per second? When an ESPN poll was naming him the most popular athlete in America?
 
 Tebow was spending that hour talking to 16-year-old Bailey Knaub about her 73 surgeries so far and what TV shows she likes.
 
 MORE FROM TIM TEBOW

For Tim Tebow’s take on being named America’s most popular athlete, click here.

 ”Here he’d just played the game of his life,” recalls Bailey’s mother, Kathy, of Loveland, Colo., “and the first thing he does after his press conference is come find Bailey and ask, ‘Did you get anything to eat?’ He acted like what he’d just done wasn’t anything, like it was all about Bailey.”
 
 More than that, Tebow kept corralling people into the room for Bailey to meet. Hey, Demaryius, come in here a minute. Hey, Mr. Elway. Hey, Coach Fox.
 
 Even though sometimes-fatal Wegener’s granulomatosis has left Bailey with only one lung, the attention took her breath away.
 
 ”It was the best day of my life,” she emailed. “It was a bright star among very gloomy and difficult days. Tim Tebow gave me the greatest gift I could ever imagine. He gave me the strength for the future. I know now that I can face any obstacle placed in front of me. Tim taught me to never give up because at the end of the day, today might seem bleak but it can’t rain forever and tomorrow is a new day, with new promises.”
 
 I read that email to Tebow, and he was honestly floored.
 
 ”Why me? Why should I inspire her?” he said. “I just don’t feel, I don’t know, adequate. Really, hearing her story inspires me.”
 
 It’s not just NFL defenses that get Tebowed. It’s high school girls who don’t know whether they’ll ever go to a prom. It’s adults who can hardly stand. It’s kids who will die soon.
 
 For the game at Buffalo, it was Charlottesville, Va., blue-chip high school QB Jacob Rainey, who lost his leg after a freak tackle in a scrimmage. Tebow threw three interceptions in that Buffalo game and the Broncos were crushed 40-14.
 
“He walked in and took a big sigh and said, ‘Well, that didn’t go as planned,’” Rainey remembers. “Where I’m from, people wonder how sincere and genuine he is. But I think he’s the most genuine person I’ve ever met.”
 
 There’s not an ounce of artifice or phoniness or Hollywood in this kid Tebow, and I’ve looked everywhere for it.
 
 Take 9-year-old Zac Taylor, a child who lives in constant pain. Immediately after Tebow shocked the Chicago Bears with a 13-10 comeback win, Tebow spent an hour with Zac and his family. At one point, Zac, who has 10 doctors, asked Tebow whether he has a secret prayer for hospital visits. Tebow whispered it in his ear. And because Tebow still needed to be checked out by the Broncos’ team doctor, he took Zac in with him, but only after they had whispered it together.
 
 And it’s not always kids. Tom Driscoll, a 55-year-old who is dying of brain cancer at a hospice in Denver, was Tebow’s guest for the Cincinnati game. “The doctors took some of my brain,” Driscoll says, “so my short-term memory is kind of shot. But that day I’ll never forget. Tim is such a good man.”
 
 This whole thing makes no football sense, of course. Most NFL players hardly talk to teammates before a game, much less visit with the sick and dying.
 
 Isn’t that a huge distraction?
 
 ”Just the opposite,” Tebow says. “It’s by far the best thing I do to get myself ready. Here you are, about to play a game that the world says is the most important thing in the world. Win and they praise you. Lose and they crush you. And here I have a chance to talk to the coolest, most courageous people. It puts it all into perspective. The game doesn’t really matter. I mean, I’ll give 100 percent of my heart to win it, but in the end, the thing I most want to do is not win championships or make a lot of money, it’s to invest in people’s lives, to make a difference.”
 
 So that’s it. I’ve given up giving up on him. I’m a 100 percent believer. Not in his arm. Not in his skills. I believe in his heart, his there-will-definitely-be-a-pony-under-the-tree optimism, the way his love pours into people, right up to their eyeballs, until they believe they can master the hopeless comeback, too.
 
 Remember the QB who lost his leg, Jacob Rainey? He got his prosthetic leg a few weeks ago, and he wants to play high school football next season. Yes, tackle football. He’d be the first to do that on an above-the-knee amputation.
 
 Hmmm. Wonder where he got that crazy idea?
 
 ”Tim told me to keep fighting, no matter what,” Rainey says. “I am.”
 
Comment:    Thanks, Tim Tebow, for being Tim Tebow.
 
 
 

Rick Reilly, ESPN: “I believe in Tim Tebow”

I believe in Tim Tebow

ReillyBy Rick Reilly
ESPN.com
 
 
 
 I’ve come to believe in Tim Tebow, but not for what he does on a football field, which is still three parts Dr. Jekyll and two parts Mr. Hyde.
 
 No, I’ve come to believe in Tim Tebow for what he does off a football field, which is represent the best parts of us, the parts I want to be and so rarely am.
 
 Who among us is this selfless?
 
 Every week, Tebow picks out someone who is suffering, or who is dying, or who is injured. He flies these people and their families to the Broncos game, rents them a car, puts them up in a nice hotel, buys them dinner (usually at a Dave & Buster’s), gets them and their families pregame passes, visits with them just before kickoff (!), gets them 30-yard-line tickets down low, visits with them after the game (sometimes for an hour), has them walk him to his car, and sends them off with a basket of gifts.
 
 Home or road, win or lose, hero or goat.
 
 Remember last week, when the world was pulling its hair out in the hour after Tebow had stunned the Pittsburgh Steelers with an 80-yard OT touchdown pass to Demaryius Thomas in the playoffs? And Twitter was exploding with 9,420 tweets about Tebow per second? When an ESPN poll was naming him the most popular athlete in America?
 
 Tebow was spending that hour talking to 16-year-old Bailey Knaub about her 73 surgeries so far and what TV shows she likes.
 
 MORE FROM TIM TEBOW

For Tim Tebow’s take on being named America’s most popular athlete, click here.

 
“Here he’d just played the game of his life,” recalls Bailey’s mother, Kathy, of Loveland, Colo., “and the first thing he does after his press conference is come find Bailey and ask, ‘Did you get anything to eat?’ He acted like what he’d just done wasn’t anything, like it was all about Bailey.”
 
 More than that, Tebow kept corralling people into the room for Bailey to meet. Hey, Demaryius, come in here a minute. Hey, Mr. Elway. Hey, Coach Fox.
 
 Even though sometimes-fatal Wegener’s granulomatosis has left Bailey with only one lung, the attention took her breath away.
 
 ”It was the best day of my life,” she emailed. “It was a bright star among very gloomy and difficult days. Tim Tebow gave me the greatest gift I could ever imagine. He gave me the strength for the future. I know now that I can face any obstacle placed in front of me. Tim taught me to never give up because at the end of the day, today might seem bleak but it can’t rain forever and tomorrow is a new day, with new promises.”
 
 I read that email to Tebow, and he was honestly floored.
 
 ”Why me? Why should I inspire her?” he said. “I just don’t feel, I don’t know, adequate. Really, hearing her story inspires me.”
 
 It’s not just NFL defenses that get Tebowed. It’s high school girls who don’t know whether they’ll ever go to a prom. It’s adults who can hardly stand. It’s kids who will die soon.
 
 For the game at Buffalo, it was Charlottesville, Va., blue-chip high school QB Jacob Rainey, who lost his leg after a freak tackle in a scrimmage. Tebow threw three interceptions in that Buffalo game and the Broncos were crushed 40-14.
 
 ”He walked in and took a big sigh and said, ‘Well, that didn’t go as planned,’” Rainey remembers. “Where I’m from, people wonder how sincere and genuine he is. But I think he’s the most genuine person I’ve ever met.”
 
 There’s not an ounce of artifice or phoniness or Hollywood in this kid Tebow, and I’ve looked everywhere for it.
 
 Take 9-year-old Zac Taylor, a child who lives in constant pain. Immediately after Tebow shocked the Chicago Bears with a 13-10 comeback win, Tebow spent an hour with Zac and his family. At one point, Zac, who has 10 doctors, asked Tebow whether he has a secret prayer for hospital visits. Tebow whispered it in his ear. And because Tebow still needed to be checked out by the Broncos’ team doctor, he took Zac in with him, but only after they had whispered it together.
 
 And it’s not always kids. Tom Driscoll, a 55-year-old who is dying of brain cancer at a hospice in Denver, was Tebow’s guest for the Cincinnati game. “The doctors took some of my brain,” Driscoll says, “so my short-term memory is kind of shot. But that day I’ll never forget. Tim is such a good man.”
 
 This whole thing makes no football sense, of course. Most NFL players hardly talk to teammates before a game, much less visit with the sick and dying.
 
 Isn’t that a huge distraction?
 
 
“Just the opposite,” Tebow says. “It’s by far the best thing I do to get myself ready. Here you are, about to play a game that the world says is the most important thing in the world. Win and they praise you. Lose and they crush you. And here I have a chance to talk to the coolest, most courageous people. It puts it all into perspective. The game doesn’t really matter. I mean, I’ll give 100 percent of my heart to win it, but in the end, the thing I most want to do is not win championships or make a lot of money, it’s to invest in people’s lives, to make a difference.”
 
 So that’s it. I’ve given up giving up on him. I’m a 100 percent believer. Not in his arm. Not in his skills. I believe in his heart, his there-will-definitely-be-a-pony-under-the-tree optimism, the way his love pours into people, right up to their eyeballs, until they believe they can master the hopeless comeback, too.
 
 Remember the QB who lost his leg, Jacob Rainey? He got his prosthetic leg a few weeks ago, and he wants to play high school football next season. Yes, tackle football. He’d be the first to do that on an above-the-knee amputation.
 
Hmmm. Wonder where he got that crazy idea?
 
 ”Tim told me to keep fighting, no matter what,” Rainey says. “I am.”
 
Article sent by Mark Waldeland.
 
 
 

Despite Newt, Perry, and Huntsman Slink into Marxist Obamaland, USA is still Conervative

Ronald Reagan’s conservative revolution

 marches on in America

By World      at   the Telegraph:

Ronald ReaganRonald Reagan’s conservative revolution is still going on

Twenty-three years on from the end of the greatest US presidency of the 20th century, the conservative revolution led by Ronald Reagan continues. America may be led by the most Left-wing American president of the modern era, but the nation remains at its core a deeply conservative country, with conservatives holding a huge lead over liberals in the latest Gallup poll. According to Gallup:

Political ideology in the U.S. held steady in 2011, with 40% of Americans continuing to describe their views as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 21% as liberal. This marks the third straight year that conservatives have outnumbered moderates, after more than a decade in which moderates mainly tied or outnumbered conservatives.

… Sizable segments of Americans identify with each of the three major ideological groups on the U.S. political spectrum; however, in recent years, conservatives have become the single largest group, consistently outnumbering moderates since 2009 and outnumbering liberals by 2-to-1.

Significantly, there has been a shift to the Right in recent years among Independents. As Gallup notes:

Independents — who make up the largest political group in the country – have been steadier ideologically than either major party group over the last decade. However, since 2008, the proportion describing themselves as moderate has declined slightly, from 46% to 41%, and the proportion who are conservative has increased slightly, from 30% to 35%. Currently, the largest segment of independents describe their views as moderate, while significantly more identify as conservative than as liberal, 35% vs. 20%.

What explains the continuing strength of conservatism in America, and the resurgence in conservative support since Barack Obama took office? There can be no doubt that the Obama administration’s big government agenda has given conservatism a significant boost in the past three years, illustrated by the huge impact of the Tea Party in shaping the political debate. As Gallup’s surveys show, Americans’ fear of big government is now at near-record levels, with nearly two thirds of Americans identifying it as the greatest threat to the country in a December 12 poll:

Americans’ concerns about the threat of big government continue to dwarf those about big business and big labor, and by an even larger margin now than in March 2009. The 64% of Americans who say big government will be the biggest threat to the country is just one percentage point shy of the record high, while the 26% who say big business is down from the 32% recorded during the recession. Relatively few name big labor as the greatest threat.

Most Americans are disillusioned with the direction the country is taking, with an increasing role for the government in people’s lives, whether it is socialised health care, taxpayer-subsidised bailouts for government agencies and favoured manufacturers, mounting business regulations, or rising stealth taxes. As Gallup found: “throughout 2011, an average of 17% of Americans said they were satisfied with the way things are going in the United States. That is the second-lowest annual average in the more than 30-year history of the question, after the 15% from 2008. Satisfaction has averaged as high as 60% in 1986, 1998, and 2000.”

European-style excessive government spending and interference in the economy doesn’t cut it in the United States, and the growing power of conservatism and the stagnant position of liberalism is a reflection of that. There is a vibrancy  in the conservative movement that is sorely lacking on the Left, which is stuck in a 1960s radicalised mindset. Significantly, the Occupy Wall Street movement is a flop, the impact of which has been minuscule compared to the conservative advance that swept Congress in the mid-terms of 2010. In contrast to an ideologically arid Left, conservatives are offering bold solutions to America’s economic problems – solutions inspired by the original vision of the country’s Founding Fathers.

Conservatism is thriving in America today because liberty, freedom and individual responsibility are at the heart of its ideology, one that rejects the foolish notion that government knows best. And its strength owes a great debt to the conviction and ideals of Ronald Reagan, who always believed that America’s best days are ahead of her, and for whom the notion of decline was unacceptable. As the Gipper famously put it, in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in 1988:

Those who underestimate the conservative movement are the same people who always underestimate the American people.

Adult Rep. Allen West Reminds the Ditsies in America, ‘War is Hell’

Rep. Allen West on the reaction

to the Marines incident:

 “Shut your mouth; war is hell”

 by Tina Korbe     at   HotAir:

 
“Candidly, the story of a handful of Marines videotaping themselves urinating on dead Taliban fighters is a subject I’ve feared to broach because it is heart-breaking to think those men so lost their sense of shared humanity — if only for those minutes — as to do what they did. Rep. Allen West has given me a way to write about it, though, by saying it all better than I ever could. In an e-mail to The Weekly Standard, West wrote:

I have sat back and assessed the incident with the video of our Marines urinating on Taliban corpses. I do not recall any self-righteous indignation when our Delta snipers Shugart and Gordon had their bodies dragged through Mogadishu. Neither do I recall media outrage and condemnation of our Blackwater security contractors being killed, their bodies burned, and hung from a bridge in Fallujah.

All these over-emotional pundits and armchair quarterbacks need to chill. Does anyone remember the two Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division who were beheaded and gutted in Iraq?

The Marines were wrong. Give them a maximum punishment under field grade level Article 15 (non-judicial punishment), place a General Officer level letter of reprimand in their personnel file, and have them in full dress uniform stand before their Battalion, each personally apologize to God, Country, and Corps videotaped and conclude by singing the full US Marine Corps Hymn without a teleprompter.

As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell.

Without excusing the vulgar, distasteful, disgraceful (insert your adjective here) desecration committed by the Marines themselves, West reminds us that civilians can never fully understand the magnitude of the sacrifices they ask men and women to make on their behalf.

Words of support for the troops are needed now as always, but they’re hardly forthcoming. The Republican presidential candidates, for example, have made no statements of support for the predominantly well-behaved troops as a buttress against the effects on public opinion of the administration’s eager denouncement of the few. William Kristol highlights their silence:

Give me a break. More importantly, give our troops a break. Yes, the Marines who appear to have done what they did should be reprimanded or punished, as they would have been in the normal course of things once their deed came to light. I will even grant that some higher-ups might have felt it prudent to deplore what happened, based on realpolitik considerations of depriving our enemies of excuses to whip up sentiment against us in the region (though I’m doubtful the effort to do this isn’t more counterproductive than not). But the administration’s reaction is over the top. And it smells of cheap self-righteousness and moral posturing from an administration that, to be honest, hasn’t devoted a whole lot of time to thanking our troops for what they’ve been doing in very difficult and dangerous circumstances.

Maybe it was too much to expect senior officials to make the common sense points that 1) this incident is not something to get hysterical about, and 2) it needs to be put in the context of the admirable behavior of 99 percent of our troops 99 percent of the time. But aren’t there Republicans around who might want to make this point? I gather, for example, that there are several people running for the Republican presidential nomination. Maybe one of them could say a good word about our troops?

Those who do dare to speak up are promptly attacked for it. Big Journalism’s Dana Loesch describes the backlash she’s received for a few statements she made on her radio program yesterday to the effect that the reaction to the incident has been overblown:

This is nothing but an exercise in situational, exploitative outrage, and it completely proved the point I was making. The phrases “defile” and “desecration” popped up in my replies on Twitter every minute or so. If “desecration” is a concern for progressives, where was their outrage when the remains of over 200 Air Force members were dumped in a landfill? I’ve seen more outrage towards our troops over this incident than I have ever seen towards the Taliban themselves who’ve beheaded soldiers (American and Afghan), raped and tortured women, sent out suicide bombers, and carried out horrific attacks.

The disproportionate anger on the part of progressives is fueled by their dislike of our military. That['s] what this proves. The left is attacking me so they can give the Obama administration a pass–unlike what they did with Bush and Abu Ghraib. Like it or not, I’ll stand up for our troops no matter which president is in charge.

The situation has never called for histrionics, but it has always called for a sober recognition that the reality of war is unfathomable to those who’ve never experienced it, and it is up to us, who remain in comfort while others fight our battles, to sing the praises of those who bear with the unbearable in a brave and noble manner — and to help however we can to restore to those veterans who’ve lost it a deep, abiding conviction in the dignity and worth of the human person.”

Comment:   A thousand cheers for Rep. Allen West!!    How about sending only the womanish  in American society to ’man’ the  combat zones overseas  with only tapdancing as military  training.   That should represent more perfectly those who control the American media.

Romney Ad Responds to Gingrich Acid

The following is an immediate and  brief response ad to the wild and erroneous charges made in a video ad by supporters of Newt Gingrich against Mitt Romney while he was leading Bain:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/01/13/romney_ad_gop_field_embarrassing_themselves_by_taking_the_obama_line.html

Peggy Noonan on the Newt Gingrich Affair in South Carolina

The Battle for South Carolina

Romney needs to rebut the Bain attacks, quickly and substantively

by Peggy Noonan   at   the Wall Street Journal:

“Newt’s a battering ram who’ll wind up in splinters, but he can do plenty of damage along the way. The candidate people immediately speak of here when talk turns to the GOP primary is a man named Romneybut. “I like Romney but I could change my mind.” “I like Romney but I like Santorum too.”

People take a kind of chagrined pride in the state’s past reputation for crazed, malice-laden, bare-knuckle political brawling; they look away and laugh if you speak of Lee Atwater’s old charge that a Democratic candidate had a “psychotic neurosis” and received electroshock therapy “hooked up to jumper cables.”

But that was two generations ago, the old world. South Carolina’s modern now, fully wired, demographically on the move. They still open up the first meeting of the statehouse GOP caucus with unifying prayer—”My wife’s being operated on at 2 p.m. today, I’d ask you to pray that the Lord guide the surgeon’s hands,” “Bob Smith died in a car accident last weekend, please pray for his family”—but some people are looking down not only with reverence. They’re also checking their BlackBerrys.

No one knows what’s going to happen, because South Carolina takes pride in being prickly. They have a 30-year history of picking presidents, and nobody tells them who to pick. “New Hampshire thinks it’s independent? Our great-great-great-great-grandfathers fired on the flag!” That’s state GOP Chairman Chad Connelly, sunny and garrulous. He’s building up excitement and running out of breath doing it. “This thing is wide open. It’s a battle royal. People are undecided. The debates will be decisive. South Carolina is the focal point of the world the next 10 days!” It is a great talent in life to spin relentlessly and not at all alienate the spinee.

All that said, if Mitt Romney wins here, he will win the nomination. And it’s likely he will win here—that Romneybut will become Romney. But it’s a real question how much damage will be done to him along the way.

People don’t embrace Mr. Romney, they circle back to him. They consider him, shop around for something better, decide the first product they looked at will last longest and give value, and buy.

The non-Mitt candidates continue, fracturing the conservative vote. Because no one dropped out after New Hampshire, no consolidation of the non-Mitt vote can begin here and get in the way of the buying. Newt Gingrich, tops in state polls a few weeks ago, has damaged himself by the means and manner of his campaign. Rick Santorum will have appeal, but he’s voted against right-to-work legislation, and South Carolina is a big right-to-work state. Ron Paul will have appeal too, not only in the coastal cities but among active and retired military personnel, who’ve been fighting the wars the past 10 years.

Mr. Romney has the support of Gov. Nikki Haley, 39, an Indian-American who rose with the tea party and won after receiving Sarah Palin’s endorsement. She backed him early, to signal to her supporters that it was OK. In an interview this week, she said the issues are “jobs, spending and the economy. Everyone in South Carolina knows somebody who’s out of work.” State unemployment is 9.9%, higher than the national average. “I’ve killed myself to bring jobs here. I need a president I can work with.” “I don’t want anyone tied to Washington. I have a great respect for business people to create jobs and make tough decisions. . . . Romney can do that.”

Mr. Romney has a national organization that he can plug in locally, and money. And now momentum, which will prove crucial.

The chief argument here for Mr. Romney has been that he is electable, the most rightward viable candidate. That was powerfully reinforced by his victory in New Hampshire. “If he has a 25% ceiling, how come he just won with 39%?” His victory speech, more like an acceptance speech, was powerful: He finally brought all the strands together. This is what my candidacy means, this is what I’ll do. That speech will have positive reverberations.

South Carolina continues to evolve. Retirees from the North increasingly populate the coastal towns and cities. They are economic conservatives, sympathetic to business. The top of the state, the Greenville/Spartanburg area, is heavily Christian conservative but less so. “It was the knot on the Bible Belt, now it’s the knot on the fiscal belt,” says a Romney backer. International companies, and their networks of suppliers, have had an impact.

The evangelical vote is split, and the economic calamity of the last four years has, in a way, become a values issue itself. Efforts to help the poor and the unborn, to have and raise children, to keep families together, are not made easier by a stressed economy. Social and economic issues are blending.

This is what you pick up about Mr. Romney in South Carolina: He is presentable, electable and a businessman. He knows what a spreadsheet is. He made money. He can help set up the circumstances where everyone else makes money too. And he is a conservative. He has the vibrations of a Massachusetts moderate—Newt isn’t wrong about that—because he was a Massachusetts moderate. But now he holds conservative positions. He’s not going to change them again, because you get only one chance to change in politics, not two. He is, therefore, perversely reliable. He’s not going to get into the White House and announce: “By the way, I’m pro-choice again, ha.”

The factor the media expected to hurt Mr. Romney—evangelicals will, en masse, reject the Mormon—isn’t likely. Part of the reason is the big blend: Bias feels like self-indulgence in a time of crisis. What could hurt him, what actually promises to, is the Bain Capital attacks, the half-hour mini-documentary and the commercials derived from its message.

The documentary is first-rate agitprop: Mr. Romney has a nice smile but in real life he’s a pious, new-class operator who swoops in, buys companies, breaks them up, lines his pockets, and calls it freedom. Might this gain traction in a high-unemployment state with a long populist tradition? I think so. You should see the faces of the people who talk about being laid off.

It’s not clear whether Mr. Gingrich will air the documentary in South Carolina. If he does, he’s going for broke.

Those who run the Romney campaign would be fools not to answer it, quickly and substantively, not only with a defense of free enterprise but with a defense of Bain. Are claims in the ad not true? Say it. Is there a case that more jobs were created by Bain than lost? Make it—with workers in front of workplaces that now exist because Bain existed.

A full-throated, detailed defense of Bain that is also a defense of economic freedom and free markets might not only benefit Mr. Romney. It just might help valorize, or rather revalorize, the reputation of capitalism, which has taken a beating the past few years and not recovered. That, actually, might be a public service.

The Obama campaign wanted to launch its Bain attack in the fall. Mr. Romney can face the attack now, head on, and begin not inoculating himself from the issue but exhausting it.”

2011 Found Obama’s U. S. More Financially Insolvent than 2010

A Step Backward for Economic Freedom in 2012

from the National Center for Policy Analysis:

“The 2012 Index of Economic Freedom, published Thursday by the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal, documents a world in which economic freedom is contracting, hammered by excessive government regulations and stimulus spending that seems only to line the pockets of the politically well-connected, says Edwin J. Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation.

Most of the decline in economic freedom was in countries in North America and Europe.

  • Canada, the United States and Mexico all lost ground in the index, and 31 of the 43 countries in Europe suffered contractions.
  • Government spending rose on average to 35.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) from 33.5 percent last year as measured by the 2012 index.
  • The United States’ economic freedom score dropped to 76.3 in 2012 from 81.2 in 2007 (on a scale of 0-100).
  • U.S. government expenditures have grown to a level equivalent to over 40 percent of GDP, and total public debt exceeds the size of the economy.

There are some bright spots.

  • Economic freedom has continued to increase in Asia and Africa.
  • In fact, four Asia-Pacific economies — Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand — top the Index of Economic Freedom this year.
  • Taiwan showed impressive gains, moving into the index’s top 20.
  • Eleven of the 46 economies in sub-Saharan Africa gained at least a full point on the index’s economic freedom scale, and Mauritius jumped into the top 10 with the highest ranking — 8th place — ever achieved by an African country.

The 2012 index results confirm again the vital linkage between advancing economic freedom and eradicating poverty.  Countries that rank “mostly unfree” or “repressed” in the index have levels of poverty intensity, as measured by the United Nations’ new Multidimensional Poverty Index, that are three times higher than those of countries with more economic freedom.

Positive measures of human development in areas such as health and education are highly correlated with high levels of economic freedom, and economically free countries do a much better job of protecting the environment than their more regulated competitors.

Source: Edwin J. Feulner, “A Step Backward for Economic Freedom in 2012,” Wall Street Journal, January 12, 2012.

For text:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204257504577151241847335540.html

For more on Economic Issues:

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=17

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 127 other followers