See Mediaite, "Keith Olbermann Owes Ann Coulter an Apology," (via Memeorandum), and Weasel Zippers, "Olbermann Talking About Ann Coulter: 'If This Guy Wants To Live His Life As A Woman, I'm Going To Back His Choice Up 100%'."
Penn's a great actor, but god he's a disgusting caricature of the hypocritical Hollywood communist. Nice language there as well.
More at the Los Angeles Times, "Voices -- Alexander Haig, 1924 - 2010." The Times features screencaps from articles of the day, for example: "White House Says Haig Took Correct Action."
Okay, let's put on our "racism radar" and talk some more about "racist" films. How about "Falling Down"? It's not like you wouldn't come across a couple of vatos like this, right? Seriously. Well, let's just say there are some parts of town left better unexplored. Oops,can't say that - that's RAAACIST!!
Got to hand it to that SEK! Man, that dude's got the PC goods, yo!
Plus, a link-around for my friends (in no particular order):And don't miss WyBlog who gets a generic link imploring him to update -- with hotties, preferably!* Hall of Record, "Testing BlogPress and Photo Upload."
* MAinfo, "Herman Cain Rocks CPAC!"
* The Daley Gator, "Now that is a good reach around."
* A Conservative Shemale, "Here is where I learn my lesson about skipping an FMJRA Saturday."
* The Rhetorican, "What Can Olbermann Learn From CPAC?"
* The Blog Prof, "Video: CPAC Blogger of the Year Ed Morrissey Introduced by Special Guest Rush Limbaugh."
* Blazing Cat Fur, "Jennifer Lynch Hides Behind Ruse of "Solicitor Client Privilege" to Cover Up Effort to Keep CHRC Staff From Reading Blazingcatfur!"
* Snooper Report, "Obama - Unbelievable Crook."
* Left Coast Rebel, "Obama and ACORN: New Video From Rep. Darrel Issa Proves the Obama/ACORN Alliance (and Obama's Lies)."
* Legal Insurrection, "Think Progress Targets Scott Brown Over IRS Plane Attack."
* Grandpa Johns, "Republicans: Return to Your Roots."
* Three Beers Later, "Back Door Man..."
* Snark and Boobs, "In Crystal Mangum, Duke Rape Accuser, Leftist Tactics Come Home To Roost."
* Carol's Closet, "I Have Made My Choice." [On Marco Rubio]
* Reaganite Republican, "Czech Top-Model: Eva Herzigová."
* TrogloPundit, "I know what you’re thinking: what does The TrogloPundit have in common with a bunch of glamorous and sexy supermodels?"
* Astute Bloggers, "WTF: AFTER 3 MONTH DELAY, HOLDER FINALLY ADMITS HE HAS 9 AIDES WHO ALSO DEFENDED GITMO DETAINEES."
* Pat in Shreveport, "Full Metal Jacket Reach Around: The Spring Fever Edition."
* Theo Spark, "Saturday Totty ..."
Also, at Political Hotsheet, "Breitbart: Conservatives to Go "On Offense" Against Media, Professors."
But the issue sounds a bit more complicated in Brianna Keilar's report, "Gay Republicans Draw Support, Concern at CPAC."
Also, the John Birch Society was a sponsor of the event, which has caused some controversy as well. See, Powerline, "Return of the John Birch Society?." And at ABC News, "Far-Right John Birch Society 2010" (via Memeorandum).
More on the topsy-turvy event at Los Angeles Times, "Republicans Revel, and Clash, at CPAC Conference."
Twilight comes and the mood's complete
Gonna hit the street grab some of that night time beat
My heart is beat beat beating like a drum
The night is in my veins we're gonna have some fun tonight
Light the fuse I must ignite
I'm gonna set the world alight
Light the fuse I must ignite
I'm gonna set the world alight
I wanna see you burn
I killed the cigarette I killed the light
I'm killing time the heat kills me on a hot summer night
I'm gonna dream a life live a dream
Hell for leather in my scheme of things tonight
Light the fuse I must ignite
I'm gonna set the world alight
Light the fuse I must ignite
I'm gonna set the world alight
One of the problems with posting on a political site under your own name is that those who disagree with your politics — if they don't have particularly solid ethics or scruples — can (and will) attempt at every turn to damage your reputation ...Or attempt to just destroy you altogether, but you get the idea.
You know what I think is really sick? When Michelle Malkin posted slanderous and defamatory comments about the Chancellor of the University of Santa Cruz for allowing antiwar protesters to protest military recruiters on campus, pushing the Chancellor to take her own life. I also think it's sick that Michelle Malkin on her own blog has posted comments in which she trivialized the rape and murder of the teenage Iraqi girl by American G.I.s.Check all the links above, but basically, there are no facts or truth to leftists, just the goal of total destruction.
I would argue that the film is certainly racist/orientalist in the way in which the Iraqi population is portrayed. Iraqis are depicted as either villainous or as an undifferentiated mass of passive spectators and victims. There are no images of Iraqi women which do not depict them either wailing or otherwise "hysterical". The English speaking Iraqi men, all of whom have bit parts, are completely emasculated. The American soldiers are generally depicted as brave (if insanely reckless in a cowboy fashion) and highly competent.This is such a twisted take on the film that even the commenters there (and this is an leftist academic blog) take big issue.
The one chance that the writer and director had to stage a dialog between the protagonist and an Iraqi professor is completely squandered as the professor's "hysterical" wife throws the protagonist-intruder out of her home. Perhaps I should be thankful that the writer and director did not choose to try to speak for "the other."
There is the requisite paternal engagement with an Iraqi child. However, the child apparently is indistinguishable to the protagonist from all of the other masses of poor Iraqi children who chase and throw rocks at military vehicles.
The film may not be quite as aggressively racist as "Blackhawk Down," "300," or "Zulu," the defining films in terms of racist war genre, but it is certainly a contender. There are thankfully no scenes in which a brown or black horde attacks an outnumbered group of mainly white heroes. In terms of the anti-Arab content, the film is not as bad as "True Lies" or any of the worst Hollywood films in the anti-semitic/anti-Arab genre, mainly because it does not really engage "the other" at all... so none of the more complex racist tropes are brought forth. Nevertheless, the film does continue the long tradition documented in Reel Bad Arabs.
The "tea-party" movement brewing in the 2010 elections is being driven in part by a potent force: first-time activists.
Matthew Clemente, a 20-year-old college junior, says he wasn't politically active until recently. But working at his family's Purchase Street Market in Worcester, Mass., in 2008, he says, he saw that business was down because many of the regulars were in hard-hit construction and contracting businesses.
"The taxes my dad was paying were laying on him hard, and you see these failed banks getting billions in taxpayer money after making bad investments and not playing by the rules," Mr. Clemente says. "It was disheartening."More at the link.
An outlet came in 2009 with a tea-party meeting in Worcester. There, he heard stories similar to his own, he says, of individuals trying to do the right thing only to see the government bailing out others.
He is now an activist with tea-party organizations in Boston and Worcester and says he hopes to have a strategy session in the near future to focus on the 2010 elections. He also joined FreedomWorks, a Washington, D.C., group that coordinates local activities, and has become its state coordinator.
The wife of the suicidal Texas pilot who slammed his plane into an Austin office building called the attack today an "unimaginable tragedy."As for the politicization, Matthew Yglesias has a comment. And Spencer Ackerman responds with an encore of his total lack of seriousness:
Sheryl Stack, who was mentioned in the hate-filled suicide note thought to have been left by her husband, issued a statement extending "my sincerest sympathy to the victims and their families."
"Words cannot adequately express my sorrow or the sympathy I feel for everyone affected by this unimaginable tragedy," she said.
Sheryl Stack said she would not answer any questions because of the ongoing investigation.
The sheer volume of flames and smoke pouring from the Austin office building after A. Joseph Stack slammed into with his plane has prompted authorities to investigate whether he had some kind of explosive on board, sources told ABC News.
Stack, 53, topped off his single engine Piper Cherokee with fuel before crashing into the IRS offices in a kamikaze mission designed to punish the government he believed wronged him.
The full tank of fuel is believed to have contributed to the force of the explosion and subsequent fire, which investigators believe was probably a deliberate tactic by Stack.
We can’t just play defense in this fight. What Yglesias fails to understand is that the ideology Stack subscribed to is the problem. All across the country are sleeper cells preaching hatred of the tax code, gathering in public to denounce the results of a democratic election and sow the seeds of sectarian violence. They even have a major television network sympathetic to their sick agenda. The threat is there for all to see.And we'll put Obama in the Hague as well, right Spencer?
The proper response is to go on offense. Intelligence is crucial to anticipatory self-defense, so we must authorize the use of enhanced interrogation methods to break their determined resistance. Similarly, we need to authorize lawful methods of widespread data collection, known as the Teabagger Surveillance Program, to enable us to gather the dots necessary for putting together the puzzles of future attacks. Working with our partner intelligence agencies overseas, we will rely on humane but tough methods employed by our partner agencies in more appropriate legal environments. The gloves are off.
Of course, we have determined that as long as this Long War continues, it will be necessary to conduct the same sorts of detention operations that have featured in all previous wars. Accordingly, we ought to work to design a military commissions system for trying detainees for their war crimes. To rule out its applicability on American citizens would only encourage future radicals to recruit Americans.
The important thing to remember is that this can’t be treated as a law enforcement matter. The military is most properly in the lead here, and so we need to use our military to go on offense, busting up the cells and meeting places and safe havens the extremists use to hone both their ideological and their combat skills
Like many people, Terry Hoskins has had troubles with his bank. But his solution to foreclosure might be unique.James Joyner has some ruminations on this.
Hoskins said he's been in a struggle with RiverHills Bank over his Clermont County home for nearly a decade, a struggle that was coming to an end as the bank began foreclosure proceedings on his $350,000 home.
"When I see I owe $160,000 on a home valued at $350,000, and someone decides they want to take it – no, I wasn't going to stand for that, so I took it down," Hoskins said.
Hoskins said the Internal Revenue Service placed liens on his carpet store and commercial property on state Route 125 after his brother, a one-time business partner, sued him.
The bank claimed his home as collateral, Hoskins said, and went after both his residential and commercial properties.
"The average homeowner that can't afford an attorney or can fight as long as we have, they don't stand a chance," he said.
Hoskins said he'd gotten a $170,000 offer from someone to pay off the house, but the bank refused, saying they could get more from selling it in foreclosure.
Hoskins told News 5's Courtis Fuller that he issued the bank an ultimatum.
"I'll tear it down before I let you take it," Hoskins told them.
And that's exactly what Hoskins did.
That people who are college professors can openly mock the idea that there is a history of black America worth regarding isn't sad, it's as disgusting as anything that ever came out of the mouth of Goebbels ....And here's Captain Fogg's comment this morning, at my blog, at last night's post:
Just for the record, is it possible to be a bully for responding to repeated provocation even if the response is deemed excessive by the serial provocateur? If so, we would have to rewrite a bit of history, wouldn't we, since it would have been the US bullying the Japanese after December 1941 and the English after 1776, and al Qaeda after 2001 for instance. You're the professor, you should be able to explain that easily instead of hiding behind preemptive and absurd accusations of Marxist dementia and illicit relations with various bogeymen.Actually, Captain Fogg didn't suggest Rush Limbaugh should be "fired." He declared him a traitor and enemy of the state, and that's after suggesting that Fox News viewers were akin to Hitler's willing executioners:
After all I didn't call you a bully when you accused me of planning to murder Rush Limbaugh when I suggested he be fired ...
The people who watch Fox usually don't watch anything else. They have no idea that the lies and distortions they've been hearing are often repudiated and disproved by all the other news services. They haven't a clue that one of the largest anti-American campaigns, indeed the most organized program of treason against truth, justice and democracy is broadcasting 24 hours a day. Fox is using and will use everything they can find to undermine confidence in our government and anything it does and as you can see is hoping our country will fall and our hopes will fail. To me, it constitutes as great a danger to our future as any foreign enemy or global economic collapse. Traitors, saboteurs, liars and purveyors of irrational hate, Fox News is the enemy and anyone who hopes not just for our survival, but our improvement owes it to the world to use every opportunity to expose them.So frankly, Captain Fogg can bite the bone. He's launched merciless attacks on American Power more times that I can recount, starting at Libby Spencer's blog back in the day. Surely this execrable hate-master extremist would do the Schutzstaffel proud. Pure toxic evil, mark my words.
And in case you missed it, see "Keith Olbermann's Plantation: 'Ask Yourself - Where Are the Black Faces?'"
From the caption at the viddy:
While onlookers chant praises, this masked insurgent is launching mortar shots at British and American troops. Mortar tracking technology can track the trajectory of a hostile round and fire a retaliatory shot to the exact spot where the hostile shell was fired. The effects are usually pretty final. This only requires the hostile mortar to fire 2 to 3 rounds. Count the number of mortar rounds the masked insurgent fires.
This is something else! For more information, see the Los Angeles Times, "Marine Assault Vehicles Key to Afghan Strategy." Technical details at Jane's Defense Weekly:
For the ABV role, the turret of the M1A1 Abrams MBT has been removed and replaced by a new all-welded steel structure to which has been added the latest explosive reactive armour (ERA) package. This provides a higher level of protection against anti-tank weapons fitted with a High Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT) warhead fitted to weapons such as the RPG-7 (Rocket Propelled Grenade).The commander is seated in the new superstructure and provided with a cupola armed with a .50 (12.7 mm) M2 HB machine gun. A bank of standard electrically operated grenade launchers are fitted one either side of the superstructure to cover the frontal arc ...RELATED: Snooper Report, "Marines Taking Marjah." Plus, from the New York Times, "Success in Marja Will Hinge on Civilian Surge."
This is basic teaching professionalism. I've been teaching for 16 years, 10 years as a full-time faculty member. New instructors are taught to protect themselves from sexual harassment claims before they even set foot in a classroom. Never be alone with a young women if possible, particularly in any kind of enclosed space. Office doors should be propped wide open to essentially make the room a public space. Surprisingly, the first thing a lot of young women do, innocently enough, is to close the door behind them upon entering, thinking they're being polite and protecting your privacy. But in my old office I'd immediately say, "That's okay, you can leave it open. Thank you." Which translates into "We'd better leave the door open so passersby can look in and see that our meeting is completely respectful ..."
Anyway, I utterly reject Scotty Erik Kaufman and his pathetic claims to leftist academic authority. Decency and common sense should guide us in our manners. You always treat people well, and I pride myself on my accessibility to students. Indeed, young instructors don't need Kaufman-esque academic ayatollahs telling them what's right. God, these people are mindlessly stultifying - a disgrace, really, to teaching. Leftists infantilize women and subjugate them in the PC mindset of helplessness. Every professor is a potential rapist, and thus for the left a lawsuit lies beneath every potential misunderstanding waiting to happen.
Anyway, this passage below is dealing with a little different subject matter, and hardly a soul in academe would say something remotely like this (for fear of the PC Stalinists), but I can dig some of the sentiments here as they relate to the SEK-types polluting academe:
As self-appointed guardians of modern orthodoxy and rigorous policers of our thoughts, these touchy-feely fascists go after dissenters with preachy and puritanical zeal. After all, to be left-of-centre is enlightened, while to be on the right is regarded as beyond the [pale]. Yet in my experience, the most blinkered, [judgmental] and lacking in common warmth are these brothers and sisters of the Left ...
That people who are college professors can openly mock the idea that there is a history of black America worth regarding isn't sad, it's as disgusting as anything that ever came out of the mouth of Goebbels.From TNLib:
I would have left it in sight, just to remind everyone what American "conservatism" is really about: hate, arrogance and evil.
If it were still here, I could forward it to the dean of faculty at that god-forsaken, but publicly supported college he teaches at. To think that people pay taxes to support what nearly half a million Americans died fighting.
He and Brain Rage almost started WWIII and it lasted almost as long as WWII. He hangs out at Pam's and annoys the hell out of Truth.From (O)CT(O)PUS:
He is a most despicable man. However, as vile as trolls like him are and as racist as his statement is, I doubt seriously if the university will feel compelled to act on it. Of course, if they're trying to get him for a list of other offences, this might add fuel to the fire. There could be a rule against using univ. computers for personal use but I seriously doubt it.
And then there is academic freedom and all the other freedoms, one of which is to simply delete.
Ever since I started blogging, I've wished we could filter out horrid people like DD. It would cut down on the amount of moderation the owner has to do.
And more from (O)CT(O)PUS (hyperlinks omitted):Here is an excerpt of email I just sent:
Dear Dr. Oakley,
This is to inform you that one of your faculty members, Donald Douglas, engages in a pervasive and pernicious pattern of Internet harassment. His comments would be simply annoying if it were not for racist, bigoted, and offensive content. Here is a link that illustrates the scope of the problem:
http://swashzone.blogspot.com/2010/02/racist-bigot-who-teaches-at-long-beach.html
This is a serious matter deserving of your attention.
If this harassment does not stop, please be advised that I will avail myself of all legal means to prevent such future abuses.
Sincerely yours,
cc: [name of legal counsel redacted]
Win or lose, I can't imagine the school administration will be pleased about any of this. DD has taunted me for the last time. This time, I am determined to strike back.
Some folks have been wondering if this is a real person. I assure you, the subject troll is a real person who uses a real name. Here is the online faculty page for Donald Douglas, and here is his weblog.And from Green Eagle:
The words of the subject (quoted in the above post) speak for themselves, no embellishments necessary.
I used to look at his website once in a while. Some months ago, as some of you may remember, a video of a female newscaster changing her clothes in a stadium locker room circulated on the internet. This scum Douglas got his filthy hands on the tape and featured it and screen captures from it day after day, with the most disingenuous justifications for why he was wallowing in this vile, cheap pornography.And again from Captain Fogg:
That was the last of my interest in "professor" Douglas. I suggest that this is a person with nothing to contribute to any discussion, and I believe any comment he makes should be immediately erased.
I thought it was worth having you all see it just in case he shows up on his regular rounds and pretends to be a human.And from Bloggingdino:
I have no doubt that he will make a fuss about the "censorship" here by the Jew-loving, N****,loving, far left, Commie-liberal hatemongers and that at least some of his psychotic sycophants from "American Power" will show up to rave and spew and shit on the carpet like mad dogs.
Now that you see what he's like and how he feels about every thing good and decent I'm fine with deleting him.
I'll just say that his sham use of dialect as a response to our blog entries easily crosses the line that separates legitimate expression (however contrary) from unmitigated trollery -- something this man ought to be ashamed of doing if he calls himself a professor of political science.And again from TNLib:
As for academic freedom generally, I suppose it depends on your status -- if you don't have tenure (approx. 2/3 of teachers don't), you're really not so free; but if you do, then yes, it's pretty hard to get rid of you unless you do something truly outrageous in a very public way. It ought to be hellish to spend much time around highly educated, intelligent people who justly loathe you, but I suspect that the sort of person who inspires such contempt actually thrives on it and would tend to dig in his or her heels all the more firmly. It's the whole Ayn Rand thing, you know -- "I'm the only sane and superior person here, and I'm surrounded by collectivist mediocrities! Arrrgggghh!"
bloggingdino - I don't think an individual like this has the ability to feel shame. This goes hand-in-hand with "the sort of person who inspires such contempt actually thrives on it."Honestly, I have no clue as to most of the stuff these people spew, although it's no joke that (O)CT(O)PUS contacted the president of my college.
He appears on other blogs as Anon. or whatever. Of course everyone knows who he is. All I can think is how silly that a grown man, a professor, should act so silly.
He and malcontent are cut from the same cloth. Lot's of anger there as well as the obvious racism. I have no doubt that either one of them could go postal.
What I can tell you is that Salem bought Hot Air because, if you’ll pardon a Sally Field moment here, they like us — they really, really like us. After all, they aren’t going to spend a boatload of cash (and no, I don’t have any idea what kind of boatload that might be) just to turn Hot Air into something completely different. If they wanted something completely different, they could have started something fresh with a lot less cost and competed against us instead.RTWT at the link.
When we negotiated our new relationships with Salem, both of us stressed the need to have the same editorial control and direction for Hot Air. Not surprisingly, Salem readily agreed. Now, they still own the business and can intervene when they see fit — just as Michelle could, but rarely if ever did — but they know us and our editorial choices. We clarified the process and the direction to our satisfaction. If we weren’t satisfied that we remained in position to maintain the current direction of Hot Air, neither of us would have stuck around. We did, and we’ll be around for a while, too.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be changes, of course, but most of those will be to broaden our impact and reach. Salem has a tremendous presence with its radio hosts, for instance, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see some synergy applied in that direction. Townhall, now our sister site, will remain separate from Hot Air, but we’ll probably have some opportunities to participate more often in the magazine in the future. I’m very excited about the potential for growth at Hot Air by being a part of the Salem family.
But that being said, I’m sad to leave Michelle Malkin’s family after two wonderful years at Hot Air. I don’t think I’m revealing any secrets by telling readers what a caring, sweet, and big-hearted person Michelle is. Working with her and her husband Jesse (who carried the weight of technical and human-resource management like a champ) has been the best professional situation of my life. We both told the Salem execs when we first met with them that they had very large shoes to fill, but as great as they’ve been, it will never be quite the same. Now we get to focus on being friends with the Malkins, and thanks to their many kindnesses over the past two years, we hope that lasts much longer.
Apparently, the mere acknowledgment of a fetus is a big no-no to some militant Feminists. Enough of a no-no, that one had to post about it in the community forum of Feministing.com, a hot bed of predictable Feminist shrieking and cognitive dissonance.
A Yahoo sportswriter committed the horrid politically incorrect faux-pas of writing the following about a pregnant member of the Canadian Women’s Curling team:
As with all curling teams, Team Canada features five members. Well, six, if you really want to get technical with it.
Alternate Kristie Moore, 30, is 5½ months pregnant, making her just the third athlete known to be with child during Olympic competition.
Huh. There doesn’t seem to be anything rage-worthy in those sentences, does there? Not if you are, you know, sane. However, as Jill Stanek noticed, if you are a militant feminist, it’s a different story. A member of Feministing.com’s community posted about it (I picture her taking a break from scrawling madly in her manifesto to post it, all furious and furrowed brow-y) and said the following:
Thank you, Chris Chase at Yahoo! Sports for perpetuating the myth that fetuses are people and that they are capable of Olympic curling.
Sigh. Sure, this was posted only in their community section, but it is imperative that we remember this is how some pro-abortion (as opposed to pro-choice) zealots actually think. Everything, I mean everything, is agenda driven. It’s not about women or children; it’s about radical ideology at the expense of everything and everyone else. Even life.
I find enough contempt for these people, but that's the radical left for you.
Photo Credit: Hand of Hope:
During a procedure to correct spina bifida while still in the womb, Samuel Alexander Armas, a fetus at twenty-one weeks, reached out. As Dr. Joseph P. Bruner reached and gently lifted the hand, Samuel reacted and squeezed tightly.
Twenty-one weeks is almost exactly 5½ months. Full story is here.
Since Richard Nixon was president, the Conservative Political Action Conference has provided the American Right with an annual occasion for self-evaluation. On Thursday, when some 10,000 activists gather in Washington for this year’s conference, they will find themselves part of a conservative movement significantly different than it was during the Bush administration, or even in 2009.More at the link.
A jolt of anti-Obama populist energy has upended the movement’s traditional hierarchy, lifting some new or previously low profile groups to unprecedented heights while leaving traditional powers struggling to adapt.
Ascendant are groups that focus on fiscal issues such as reducing government spending and taxation, which last year drove tens of thousands of new conservative activists to the streets and town halls in protest of big spending initiatives backed by President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats. Groups that concentrate on social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage have been relegated to a lower profile, as, to some extent, have those focusing on national security.
Grass-roots organizations have seen their membership rolls, coffers and standing boosted by the new activists, many — but not all — of whom identify with the cacophonous tea party movement.
These activists generally have been leery of the Republican Party, as well as established big-name conservative groups and leaders who made their reputations in the Washington game, particularly those seen as tainted by a pay-to-play Beltway culture or linked to a George W. Bush-era GOP establishment viewed as having abandoned its principles.
The conference will see an influx of new participants whipped up by countless grass-roots tea party groups around the country that function well outside the CPAC orbit. And true to the decentralized and disorganized nature of the tea party movement, much of its presence will be felt in ways that aren’t reflected on the official agenda of the conference, which is largely dominated by the usual conservative suspects.
“There needs to be a purging of the movement, and I think we’re already starting to see a different of hierarchy of groups,” said Erick Erickson, the Macon, Ga.-based founder of RedState.com, who predicts that “you’re going to see a much more diffuse conservative movement that is being led in large part from outside of Washington and is much more in line from the grass roots.”
Erickson, a favorite of the new activists, said, “Some of these legacy groups have become so entrenched in the Republican establishment in Washington that a lot of these new activists don’t think they can trust them.”
As examples, Erickson singled out CPAC’s primary sponsor, the American Conservative Union, as well as CPAC stalwarts including the Heritage Foundation think tank and the groups headed by Grover Norquist and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Those groups and other organizations that once formed the vanguard of the conservative movement — such as the National Rifle Association, the Family Research Council and Young America's Foundation — haven’t made major inroads in the tea party movement.
Today is the opening of the Conservative Political Action conference (CPAC) — the storied annual gathering of the Right. As I noted the other day, it’s also the season for a bumper crop of conservative manifestos, action plans, and ideological contracts.The Mount Vernon Statement, which lays out broad principles for “constitutional conservatism,” has garnered the most buzz. An elegant tribute to limited government and the Founding Fathers, the document carries the signatures of movement leaders, Beltway heavyweights, and veteran activists. Two of the most prominent backers: the American Conservative Union’s David Keene and Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist. Keene and Norquist are also CPAC chairman and CPAC board member, respectively, and partners in the Constitution Project.
I have an inconvenient, but necessary, question for those who sign their names:
Do you agree with Keene and Norquist’s views on national security and immigration enforcement?
Because in the name of “constitutional conservatism,” Keene and Norquist support the Obama/Democrat majority approach of civilian trials for terrorists. And in the name of “constitutional conservatism,” Norquist supports de facto open borders and dangerous pandering to Muslim grievance-mongers.
Here’s a bracing reminder of Keene and Norquist’s statement chastising Republicans for opposing the KSM/Gitmo civilian trials in NYC, Illinois, and elsewhere on American soil:
The scaremongering about these issues should stop.
Using a state of the art but little used prison facility like the one at Thomson, Illinois – with any appropriate security upgrades our law enforcement professionals deem necessary – makes good sense for the tax payers who invested $145 million in the facility and who are seeing millions wasted every month at the costly, inefficient Guantanamo facility. It makes sense for the community which will benefit from the related employment and has absolutely no reason to fear that prisoners will escape or be released into their communities.
But most of all it makes sense for America because it is a critical link in the process of closing Guantanamo and getting this country back to using its tried and true, constitutionally sound institutions. (emphasis added)
GOP MA Sen. Scott Brown opposes civilian trials for jihadists and made it a key campaign item. The Republican leadership on Capitol Hill opposes civilian trials for jihadists. A majority of Americans oppose civilian trials for jihadists. And it’s a sure bet that the vast majority of grass-roots activists at CPAC oppose civilian trials for jihadists.
Which makes them all “scaremongers” who oppose “constitutional conservatism,” I guess.
More later ...
RELATED: From Politico, "Marco Rubio: Belle of the CPAC Ball" (via Memeorandum).
