Recently in Righteous Paranoia Category

Very little surprises me about the ever more nonsensical, illogical, and incompetent Obama Administration. Two of the latest examples of this dysfunction: federal fines placed upon fuel companies for failure to blend certain biofuels in gasoline and diesel even though those biofuels don't exist; and new regulations imposed by NOAA that seriously cripple the New England fishing industry even though the need for those restrictions cannot be justified.

With every move Obama and his minions make we move closer to the dystopian hell of Atlas Shrugged. I figure it's only a matter of time before something like Directive 10-289 is handed down by executive order from Obama. (Don't think it won't happen. One clueless leftist on the WSJ Forums suggested stopping the economic abandonment of California by otherwise viable businesses by making it illegal for them to relocate out of state or to trim jobs. Others on the forum informed this idiot that such a thing is tantamount to slavery and illegal seizure of private property without due process or just compensation - the 13th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution, respectively. But then the Left doesn't really like the Constitution, does it?)

Because stupid things like this have been happening a little bit at a time, most of the people in the US don't realize it's happening. But if Obama tried to shove his agenda down our throats overnight there would be armed rebellion by the states and a Second Civil War could result. Except this time it wouldn't be North versus South but Red versus Blue.

Is it possible Booing might get its way in regards to the NLRB action trying to block it from opening its new Dreamliner plant in South Carolina? If this AP report is accurate, the answer might be yes.

However, this 'win' for Boeing might be a Pyrrhic victory as it was contingent upon a new four year bargaining agreement with the Machinists union.

The National Labor Relations Board filed a lawsuit earlier this year alleging that Boeing violated labor laws by opening the South Carolina line. The agency claimed that Boeing was punishing Washington state workers for past strikes and said the company should return the work to Washington. Boeing has vigorously denied the charges, claiming it opened the South Carolina plant for valid economic reasons.

The agreement would call for the new 737 Max aircraft to be built at union facilities in Renton, Wash., said Tom Wroblewski, president of Machinists Union District 751.

Wroblewski said that if union members vote to approve the deal in the coming weeks, the union would inform the NLRB that it has no further grievances with Boeing.

The article goes on to say that since the union no longer has a grievance against Boeing, the NLRB would likely stop pursuing the case. (Even if it does, that doesn't mean the NLRB wouldn't pursue it some future time should the "need" arise...like another negotiation for a union contract.)

I have to ask whether the lawsuit filed on behalf of the union by the NLRB was nothing more than leverage for the union to get a better deal. After all, two of the three sitting members in the NLRB are staunch union supporters, with one of them a former administrator for the SEIU.

Something stinks about this whole thing, something legally actionable if it turns out the NLRB acted against Boeing at the behest of union leaders in order to gain an advantage at the bargaining table. Since we can't count on either the Department of Labor or the Justice Department to investigate this matter, maybe it's time for Congress to step in. It would have to be the House rather than the Senate as a majority of the Senate is beholden the the unions and would be unlikely to allow such an action to take place.

I just hope this doesn't give the Left here in the US any ideas, but I'm not holding my breath:

UK Labour Party wants journalism licenses, will prohibit non-licensed journalists.

Oh, yeah, that will go over well. But considering the "shellacking" Labour took during the last election, I'm not all that surprised.

The UK Labour party's conference is underway in Liverpool, and party bigwigs are presenting their proposals for reinvigorating Labour after its crushing defeat in the last election. The stupidest of these proposals to date will be presented today, when Ivan Lewis, the shadow culture secretary, will propose a licensing scheme for journalists through a professional body that will have the power to forbid people who breach its code of conduct from doing journalism in the future.

Given that "journalism" presently encompasses "publishing accounts of things you've seen using the Internet" and "taking pictures of stuff and tweeting them" and "blogging" and "commenting on news stories," this proposal is even more insane than the tradition "journalist licenses" practiced in totalitarian nations.

So the scheme would even ban unlicensed blogging or Internet posts. Of course I can understand why the socialists in the UK would want to do so - control the dialogue and you control the thought of the "proles" and the results of elections. Truth and fact would become a thing of the past because the socialist/statist/authoritarian Left believe they are the only arbiters of the truth.

You know statists like Obama, Biden, Pelosi, and Reid would love nothing better than to control all of the media rather than just the portions of the MSM already in their pockets. If they could silence their critics then everything would be just perfect for them because they'd be able to sell any lie as the truth (Freedom = Slavery, Collective Good/ Individual Bad, and so on).

But there is one big difference between the UK and the US - we here in the US still have our guns and the Left knows it. Our brethren in the UK have been all but stripped of their means to fight back if it ever came to that unless they were willing to emulate the faux Guy Falkes in V for Vendetta.

(H/T Instapundit)

Over the past year and a half I've listened to a large number of people disparaging the Tea party movement. Most of them have been card-carrying Democrats (or at least those with the belief they know how to spend my money better than I do). Others have been RINOs or part of the so-called "Establishment" Republicans.

The Tea party has been excoriated in the press, with the New York Times, the Washington Post, and a number of other media organs of the Left leading the way. Washington politicians and other Beltway insiders have derided the Tea party as "hobbits", "terrorists", "Nazis", "racists", "jack-booted thugs", and a whole host of other derogatory labels.

As the volume of hateful rhetoric aimed at the Tea party and its supporters has increased, it has made me and others realize that the groups making these accusations must be really getting nervous. As one commenter to this piece wrote, "If you're getting a lot of [flak], you must be over the target." And so it must be as the Tea party gains supporters throughout the country at a local, state, and national level because they're tired of being ignored by the Coastal elite and the Beltway intellectuals.

My most memorable run in with an unabashed Tea party hater took place at our business when one of our customers went on a rant about "those goddamn Tea partiers wanting to take everything away from us!" There was no way I could not respond, so I asked her where she'd gotten that idea. Apparently she'd read it in the paper, in this case the Boston Globe. (One must remember, the Globe is owned by the NYT and has the same editorial policies as its parent corporation.) I calmly informed her that if her opinion was based solely on what she'd read in the Globe, then she'd been misinformed and lied to. She saw the Tea party as a bunch of religious fundamentalists bent on depriving the poor, doing away with Social Security and Medicare, and undoing decades of civil rights advances. I had to remind her that many of the civil rights advances came from the GOP, not her sainted Democrats. I reminded her the KKK were primarily Southern Democrats, not Republicans. I reminded her it was the Democrats who started us down this path of unsustainable spending going all the way back to FDR. I reminded her that it was LBJ who decided his Great Society was the answer to all of our society's problems, that it had failed miserably, and that it was funded by stealing from the Social Security trust fund.. I reminder her it was the Democrat majorities in Congress going back to 2007 that multiplied the annual deficits to many times that of all of Dubya's deficits combined.

I gave her the URL for the Contract From America website which explains the Tea party platform, none of which deals with social issues she claims the Tea party is involved with. She wasn't interested. Instead she chose willful ignorance and adherence to libelous propaganda from those who do not have her best interests at heart.

Maybe she will care when the country is unable to pay its bills and all of the government support she is 'owed' ends because there's no money left to pay for it all. Maybe she will care when all "the rich" she's constantly complaining about are either driven into bankruptcy or flee with their wealth to friendly climes and no one is left to pay for everything she is owed.

But I'm not holding my breath.

UPDATE:It appears Senator John Kerry has decided to add fuel to the fire by expressing his opinion that the media should not give equal time to those "absolutely absurd notions" voiced by the Tea Party because their opinions "are not factual."

What a putz.

It's no secret I'm a fan of Ayn Rand's Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. In both I've seen far too many parallels to what's been happening in our country, particularly since 2007.

The seeds for our self-destruction were laid a long time ago and now, in some places, are bearing fruit. All one needs to do is look at the state of Illinois and the city of Detroit. Both illustrate exactly what Rand wrote about over 50 years ago.

As Dan Mitchell explains, plans for a number of Detroit neighborhoods outlined in a CNBC report sounded familiar.

But there was also something about this story that rang a bell. It took a few minutes, since I'm getting old and decrepit, but then I realized that "blighted areas" was an eerily familiar term. Didn't Ayn Rand use that term in one of her books?

Indeed, she did. Thanks to the miracle of Google Books, here is one of several passages in Atlas Shrugged that references Detroit--oops, I mean "blighted areas":

No railroad was mentioned by name in the speeches that preceded the voting. The speeches dealt only with the public welfare. It was said that while the public welfare was threatened by shortages of transportation, railroads were destroying each other through vicious competition, on "the brutal policy of dog-eat-dog." While there existed blighted areas where rail service had been discontinued, there existed at the same time large regions where two or more railroads were competing for a traffic barely sufficient for one. It was said that there were great opportunities for younger railroads in the blighted areas. While it was true that such areas offered little economic incentive at present, a public-spirited railroad, it was said, would undertake to provide transportation for the struggling inhabitants, since the prime purpose of a railroad was public service, not profit.

Fifty years ago, the book was viewed as a dystopian fantasy. Today, Greece, Illinois, and Detroit are making Ayn Rand seem like a prophet.

When I reread Atlas Shrugged a couple of years ago, the hairs on the back of my neck rose. Everything Rand had created in her novel was happening at that moment. (I have to admit I had little appreciation for the book when I read it the first time over 35 years ago. I guess history gives one a little more perspective.) Many of our present day "betters" are characters right out of the novel. What makes matters worse is that their ignorance of how the economy works is not so much a lack of exposure to it so much as willful ignorance on their part. They don't want to know how things work in the real world because they know better how to remake things into their version of utopia. Too bad they're wrong because their version of utopia is hell on earth for everyone else.

As mentioned earlier, all we have to do is look to Detroit to see how well that's all worked out. There are plenty of other examples of this just in the US alone, like Newark and Jersey City in New Jersey, and Gary, Indiana. If you need larger examples then states like Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, and California should suffice. All are suffering under decades of enlightened rule by our betters (though New Jersey has a glimmer of hope in the form of Governor Chris Christie). If that isn't enough for you then look to Greece and Portugal to see how things have worked out there.

We see example after example after example of how our supposed "betters" are no such thing, being no better than what Rand called "looters" in Atlas Shrugged, for that's what they are.

You know it's getting bad when a rogue federal agency is being used as a bludgeon to punish critics of the present administration. (Of course the critics aren't so much saying anything about the Obama Administration so much as showing them to be the know-nothing socialist chumps they are.)

In this case the EPA is doing its darnedest to cripple the Texas economy by using environmental rules never meant to apply to the situation in Texas. By trying to force Texas to abide by the EPA's Cross State rules regarding coal-fired power plants and setting a very short deadline by which Texas must comply, Texas will lose a considerable amount of its electrical generation capacity.

But somehow I doubt Texas is going to cave in to the socialist yokels running the EPA and will call their bluff, in effect telling them in true Texas fashion to "Come And Take It", or as the PJ Tatler writes it, "Kiss my ass!"

Such an action by the EPA can have nothing but negative consequences, particularly for the Obama Administration and for the power of the ever expanding government bureaucracies. As Obama and his czars try to clamp down on the economy and drive even more businesses to the brink, the backlash is likely to sink any chance the President has for re-election.

Let's hope this is the case as we can no longer afford the destructive forces of this know-nothing administration.

My opinion of zero-tolerance policies has always been low, seeing them as the last refuge of the incompetent, lazy, or lawsuit-shy school administrators.

Now it appears that after over 10 years of increasingly draconian zero tolerance polices, the trend is reversing itself, with schools loosening their policies or abandoning them all together. Some of the reasons for this are easy to figure out, with the main one being the policies have hurt far more students than they have ever helped. It could also be the lawsuits, investigations, and ridicule being heaped upon those who created and enforced those policies over the years. But it can all be boiled down this: They. Don't. Work.

The American Psychological Association reported in a 2008 journal article that research has found no evidence that zero-tolerance policies have a deterrent effect or keep schools safer.

Over the years, "zero-tolerance" has described discipline policies that impose automatic consequences for offenses, regardless of context. The term also has come to refer to severe punishments for relatively minor infractions. Some schools boast of using zero-tolerance; others insist that they do nothing of the sort.

It would be great if all school systems were dialing back the use of zero tolerance policies, but that isn't the case. Instead, some are becoming even harsher, creating even more backlash and more discipline problems. It sounds almost like the old saw, "Beatings will continue until morale improves!"

Some school systems zero tolerance policies have devastating effects on students caught up in them, damaging or destroying otherwise good kids in the name of discipline. In some cases, those closed-minded policies have killed, with students taking their own lives after being run through the ringer for what would otherwise be a minor infraction.

Fairfax [Virginia] parents tell stories of going into the process without an attorney and finding their children under fire at adversarial hearings. These families contend there is no impartial judge but instead a presumption of guilt. They say there is little discussion of a student's well-being, psychological state or the cause of the misconduct.

"The parents feel very often that they are in the middle of criminal prosecution - that there is no balance or context and the facts are skewed to the negative," said Bill Reichhardt, a Fairfax lawyer whose firm has handled more than 100 school discipline hearings in Virginia.

It sounds more a like kangaroo court, where even if you should happen to be innocent, you are still guilty. Can there be any question whether these policies do far more harm that good? Who are these policies supposed to be helping - the administrators? Or the students? It certainly appears from here the answer is the former, with the latter relegated to scholastic (and social) purgatory.

Is it any wonder more parents might want to send their kids to private schools or home school them so they won't have to subject them to such a nightmarish code of discipline? (I guess I must also conclude they'll also do so to ensure their kids also get a decent education, something these zero tolerance policies do not guarantee, but you get my point...I hope.)

It's time to end the reign of zero tolerance policies for they serve no one well, claims to the contrary notwithstanding.

As I read this Professor Stephen L. Carter piece about the uncertainties of government regulation and its effects on businesses and hiring, the more I nodded my head in agreement. Everything I read reflects what I've heard from a number of business owners here in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire: Without knowing exactly what government is going to throw at us in the way of ever more overreaching (and expensive) regulations, there's no way we're going to hire anyone new. Period.

A lot of middling and small businesses have seen their margins shrink, leaving them very little in the way of wiggle room when new government regulations and requirements hit them. How is any business going to plan for the future when government "regulation" is now such a big unknown? With most of the new regulations having absolutely nothing to do with safety, environmental issues, or pay, but more often financial matters, all they do is add unneeded costs to businesses. Sometimes those new rules and regulations turn an otherwise profitable business into an unprofitable one, and when that happens far too many of them close.

All of these regulations do nothing but provide more employment for government workers, not workers actually producing goods and services our economy depends upon. How is this supposed to help our economic recovery?

(H/T Instapundit)

OK, so I misspoke about what Part 2 would be about. Originally I was going to cover energy, but thoughts and righteous indignation about the EPA overrode that plan.

********************

One of the government agencies that has most recently caused FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) among business, and indirectly the people, is the EPA.

While it is the EPA's purview to help safeguard the environment, lately it has been going outside its mandate and trying to regulate economic activities it sees as affecting the environment. This is particularly vexing considering both Congress and the courts have told the EPA they do not have power to do so.

One of the EPA's latest 'crusades' involves energy. In this case making sure it is less available and far more costly. In particular they're trying to impose stricter regulations on the electric utilities and oil companies, bypassing the usual means of doing so and imposing them without the consent of Congress.

Jeff Holmstead, who directed the EPA's air and radiation office from 2001 to 2005 during the Republican President George W. Bush's administration, told the commission the new rules will quickly change policies that have been stable for 40 years. He called the new regulations an "unprecedented" amount of change for power companies.

Part of the problem is that some of the EPA's new rules overlap and contradict many existing rules, both its own and those of other governmental agencies and departments overseeing the energy industry. This leaves the power companies and oil exploration and drilling firms in a bind, making it impossible for them to be in compliance with all the rules and regulations imposed upon them. The EPA also ignores state rules and regulators rather than working with them, which only adds to the confusion.

This is a government agency that has gone rogue and believes it doesn't have to answer to anybody. It ignores the law, ignores the courts, ignores Congress, and ignores the Constitution. It believes it is above the law. It hands down edicts and expects everyone to follow them without question or dissent regardless of the effects on the economy or the environment.

Don't believe me? Then how about the EPA's efforts to 'clean up' the upper Hudson River in an attempt to remove polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) embedded in the silt at the bottom of the river? Their clean up has done far more harm than if they'd left things alone.

By ordering a dredging operation along 40 miles of the Hudson, the EPA has created a disaster of governmental proportions in this quiet upstate community. For six months in 2009, floating clamshell diggers shoveled day and night, pulling sludge from the river bottom around Fort Edward and depositing it onto barges. Six days a week, 24 hours a day, these barges, containing a total of 286,000 cubic yards of sediment mixed with old PCBs, were offloaded into that massive dewatering facility. There the soggy material was treated and squeezed in giant presses. The cakes of compacted sludge were then moved by truck onto 81-car trains, parked on a new spur of the Canadian Pacific Railway extending into the site. Five of these trains were in constant rotation, circulating the 4,400-mile round trip between the facility and the final dump site in Texas.

It was a Herculean attempt at remediation but one that actually increased PCB levels in the Hudson for a time; it also wreaked havoc on locals' lives and imposed huge costs on General Electric. And all this work was only "Phase I" of the EPA's plans. The government is now compelling GE to spend billions of dollars on Phase II, an even larger and longer operation. Dredging will recommence this spring.

And once they start dredging again the PCB levels will rise dramatically and stay that way as long as they continue removing all that silt on the river bottom. That doesn't even take into account the huge amounts of energy expended or pollution generated to clean up the river. They would have been better off to leave it where it was. It wasn't going to go anywhere. Instead, they've made things worse all in the name of "Saving The Environment." It's yet another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences coming into play. Government agencies are pretty good at invoking it.

Maybe it's time to rein in the EPA, to remind them that they work for us and not the other way around. Better yet, to ensure they get the message it might be worthwhile to slash their funding to zero for year. Then refund it the following year after an exhaustive review of the EPA's overreach and implementation of proper controls upon the agency.

The battle between Wisconsin Republican lawmakers (including governor Scott Walker) and the public sector unions continue.

It seems the unions have decided to borrow a page or two out of old-time union playbook by sending letters to small businesses that, in effect, tell them "Support us and our cause...or else." Gee, it didn't take them long to resort to extortion to get their way, did it? While the unions could have claimed there was a misunderstanding, the union executive who sent the letters says he means what he wrote, so there's no possibility they can claim such a misunderstanding. The gist of the letter:

Dated March 28, 2011, the letter is addressed to "DEAR UNION GROVE AREA BUSINESS OWNER/MANAGER," in Racine County. And it begins with this warm greeting: "It is unfortunate that you have chosen 'not' to support public workers rights in Wisconsin. In recent past weeks you have been offered a sign(s) by a public employee(s) who works in one of the state facilities in the Union Grove area. These signs simply said 'This Business Supports Workers Rights,' a simple, subtle and we feel non-controversial statement given the facts at this time."

We doubt "subtle" is the word a business owner would use to describe this offer he is being told he can't refuse.

The missive concludes by noting that, "With that we'd ask that you reconsider taking a sign and stance to support public employees in this community. Failure to do so will leave us no choice but do [sic] a public boycott of your business. And sorry, neutral means 'no' to those who work for the largest employer in the area and are union members."

The threat is implicit: put a sign supporting us in your window or we'll make sure it will negatively affect your business.

How...how...mob like. Vito Corleone would be proud.

Are we sure we want people like this to be working for us? Better yet, do we want them to have this kind of power over us?

Since this 'incident' the union has been back-peddling, removing signs from the businesses that knuckled under to the union extortion. But that doesn't undo the fact that they threatened business owners into 'supporting' them, meaning they've lost any credibility or moral high ground. They proven themselves be nothing more than thugs.

It wouldn't surprise me to find they've opened themselves to prosecution under RICO statutes. But somehow I doubt the US Attorney General will direct federal prosecutors to investigate such matters, considering his track record when it comes to dealing with corruption and coercion.

Why that is the case is ably described by Andrew C. McCarthy, one of the few adults working at National Review these days. The brutal and sadistic murder of the Fogel family was, in a perverse way, more dreadful than the horrific calamity that struck Japan around the same time. I'm thinking of the jubilant reaction to it by Palestinians in the street.

Oh, how I miss the days when John O'Sullivan was the editor of NR and Peter Brimelow was publishing front-page stories!

And another important insight is provided by the underappreciated reporter Charlotte Allen. Touring the streets of Cairo for the Weekly Standard, she discovers that what the typical Muslim yearns for is very different from what we yearn for. "It's as if they live in their own world," she concludes. (I may be paraphrasing.)

I have no doubt you've noticed gas prices have been going up. The last time I filled the tank on the trusty F150 I paid $2.979 per gallon for regular. From what I've been seeing and reading elsewhere, that's cheap.

Then I hear it's quite possible we could be paying up to $5 per gallon by next year. Is it due entirely to the price of oil on the world market? Or could it be because our own government is making fuel more expensive because they really don't know what the hell their doing, or worse, are doing it because of of a hidden agenda? Somehow I have a feeling it's more the latter than the former.

Years ago when Clinton won the Presidency, I asked a friend of mine in the oil and gas industry if he was upset. He said, "Not really. Democrats usually do things in such a way that always benefits the oil industry. It's never good for Americans though. They try to limit what we do, which only makes demand higher. Oil prices always go up, which is always good for us. Sadly, not so good for everyone else." It turns out he was right. And Obama is doing exactly that. The drilling bans, poor planning, and Obama's total ignorance of the oil industry in general has brought us here.

--snip--

I've noticed that this is a pattern with the Obama administration. They put a policy in place based on a "misrepresentation." But by the time it's discovered to be a lie, the policy or law has been passed. Done.

Now, along with record high unemployment, we will have record high gas prices.

I've already seen the effects of $5 per gallon has on certain economic activities, and it's not pretty.

A few summers ago marine gas prices hit $5 on some parts of Lake Winnipesaukee, with the average price around $4.50. To say there were very few boats out on the lake would be an understatement. Automotive gas prices were around $4 as well and tourism in the state fell off and was well below normal. Everyone felt the effect of the higher gas prices and they weren't good. But somehow the Obama administration will try to tell us it's actually good for us.

With the Wikileaks controversy growing and their determination to publish classified State Department and US military documents regardless of the cost in human lives and international relations, I have to wonder whether it's time to classify Wikileaks as a hostile foreign intelligence operation and to sanction them just like any other such operation.

They have certainly shown disregard for international law and have worked with anti-American elements within this country, trying to cover themselves as some kind of journalism organization. If I recall correctly, using a cover as a journalist in order to perform espionage is a hostile (and illegal) act. Maybe it's time to be hostile in return and to terminate their operation "with extreme prejudice."

Bill Whittle tackles yet another myth about the Tea party, specifically immigration and racism. As Bill tells us, far too many Tea party detractors have labeled us "stupid uneducated Neanderthals. We're white trash rednecks, knuckle-dragging proto-Nazis, KKK-loving violent extremists ready to execute anyone who won't bend their knee to the upcoming Christian theocracy...Oh, and we're domestic terrorists." We've also been accused of being anti-immigration. We're not. We're anti-illegal immigration. There's a big difference.

I'll let Bill explain it as he does so far better than I can.


I must admit I like his suggestion about going to Jessica Alba's or Lady Gaga's house and showing them up for the hypocrites they are.

An Austrian mother being charged for a Hate Crime for telling the truth about Islam. And she certainly is in a position to know. I wish I were making this up.

Far too many people really have little understanding of the Second Amendment and why the Framers of the Constitution included it. And many of those same people have the mistaken belief that disarming a law abiding citizenry will somehow lead to less crime and violence despite abundant evidence to the contrary.

In the next is his series, Bill Whittle explains why 'they' are mistaken and why so many of the rest of us own and carry guns.


As the old saying goes when it comes to dealing with violent criminal miscreants, "Better to be judged by twelve than carried by six."

What's going on with Brian D. Aitken should not be happening. If you read the link, you'll have trouble believing it. That a judge could act so arbitrarily and with such prejudice is a sad commentary on our times. And talk about anti-gun bias on the bench!

At first glance, this is a tremendous miscarriage of justice, something written by Albert Camus.

HT: NJ Coalition for Self-Defense

NY State acts similarly in disregarding the federal law, part of the Firearms Owners' Protection Act, that allows one to travel with a locked, unloaded firearm.

What we need to do to remind people of the distinction between unalienable rights, God-given that can't be bartered away without a tyranny being present, and alienable, which aren't so important. It's a safe bet to state the rights in the Bill of Rights are of the first kind. The Second Amendment is my conceal-carry permit. But that kind of thinking is going to get me in trouble some day. Progressives don't believe in natural rights the Founders did.

It is ridiculous that all shoes have to be taken off before flying. But what to do when a choice is given between a "pat down" or a machine seeing to the flesh?

I have to fly sometime, don't I? It must be especially tough if one is female, though. Does one have to be a timid creature about indiscreet searches?

HT: Mike W.

It's obvious from reading the number of screeds decrying the Tea parties and their alleged anti-abortion, pro-fundamentalist, anti-poor/pro-rich beliefs that far too many on the Left have absolutely no understanding of the movement or of the people within it. The Left has ascribed so many patently false motivations to the Tea parties that it's difficult for those wanting to know what the they're all about to find the truth.

First, I have a small bit of advice: Listen to what people are saying about the Tea parties. Which ones are sounding the most hysterical and screaming about the Tea parties and what they stand for the loudest? Chances are they're the ones that are lying. And who is screaming the loudest?? Why, the Left, of course.

Second, take a look at the Contract From America. It explains the main tenets of the Tea party movement. It's a short read, with only 10 parts, and each part only a small single paragraph. It will take all of two minutes to read.

Third: Take look at this video by Bill Whittle. It pretty much explains the core beliefs of the Tea party and its supporters. (This video is only Part 1, with more to follow.)



Nowhere in the video or the Contract From America is any mention made of religion, abortion, homosexuality, or stealing from the poor to give to the rich. (By the way, who would want to 'steal' from the poor? They don't have any money to steal, something the Left always ignores.)

It's all about letting Washington and the various state governments know that we're all sick and tired of being told by people nowhere near as wise as we are nor anywhere near as experienced how to live our lives. We're all sick and tired of having our hard earned money taken from us to be spent on things we don't need, don't want, or find so wasteful as to be no better than theft.

Any questions?

It has become quite evident to me and many millions of others that the Powers-That-Be, meaning the so-called 'Political Class', are clueless and out of touch with the rest of America and the people who live there. What's worse, they are convinced they are the anointed, the only ones with the knowledge, wisdom, and the will to use it even though those they look down upon see them as nothing more than elitist snobs without a lick of common sense or decency.

What's sad is the 'common folk' - that's you and me - are right and they are so incredibly wrong. The political class has no advanced wisdom, no special knowledge divulged to them through secret and ancient organizations, and no divine right or ability to rule you, me, or anyone.

They are nothing more than a mutual admiration society striding within the halls of power with impunity, an undeserved sense of entitlement, and the arrogance to believe they are the only ones with the answers. They believe the rest of us are incapable of running our own lives and need to be taken care of. That's ironic considering how many of them can't even run their lives. They have the same problems, the same foibles, the same weaknesses, the same flaws as everyone else. But somehow I doubt you'd ever get them to admit that, for to do so would mean they aren't any more enlightened than the rest of us and that doesn't track with their belief system.

How do I and the rest if America know this? Because we see it every day on the news, on CSPAN, in the newspapers, and in almost every law passed by Congress or a large number of blue state legislatures over the past few years. Our wishes, our desires, our demands, and our knowledge of the real world is dismissed out of hand because we aren't them. Never mind that we're the ones who pay the bills, create the jobs, build the cities, grow the food, and everything else they depend on. Without the rest of us they are nothing.

Wait. What the heck am I saying? I meant to say that even with us they are nothing. Perhaps it is time for them to learn this truth.