By Linking to all 7 parts of Bill Whittle’s absolutely spectacular What we believe Series.
I’ve GOT to get him on my show.
Archive for the ‘internet/free speech’ Category
Adrienne’s Catholic Corner does a public service
Posted: November 26, 2010 by datechguy in internet/free speechTags: bill whittle, I wish I said that
Bristol Palin, Grover Cleveland and the Civil Service
Posted: November 26, 2010 by datechguy in internet/free speech, oddities, opinion/newsTags: bristol palin, culture, dancing with the starts, election 2012, grover cleveland, history, local government, Palin derangement syndrome, palin echo chamber, pop culture
I’ve never much card for American Idol, or Dancing with the stars, at game night over Dave’s house its on so I do my best to ignore it but neither one are anything that I care to watch. Unfortunately the convergence of the show with the Palin wars forced it into the news. I didn’t want to write about it at the time but now that it’s over there are some valuable lessons for everyone here.
Once Bristol Palin started to advance in the show the left started getting into a huff because better dancers were being eliminated and complained comically about the “integrity” of a vote in popularity show. It was admittedly a lot of fun watching them have a cow as she made it into the finals. This show was nothing significant but they had made it so as a way to hit the Palin’s who were simply having fun. This is and was a great example of Palin Derangement Syndrome
It was at this point that many on the right made a fatal mistake. They decided that because the left had invested themselves into this TV show emotionally that they would have to as well. This was a huge mistake and an example of the same idolatry that elected Barack Obama.
Gone was the principle of advancement by merit, that conservatives prize, gone was the opposition of special preference, we preferred Sarah Palin and by Extension Bristol Palin plus we could upset the left so many people invested themselves in an attempt to gain a victory that would feel good for a day but prove Pyrrhic. In the end the mirror image of Obama worship gave the left a talking point and a cause to smile as Bristol Palin came in 3rd. It was frankly a meaningless victory but one that got some small meaning because Palin fans made it so.
In 1884 Grover Cleveland was election becoming the first Democratic president since before the Civil war. Democrats who had been in the wilderness for a long time looked forward to the fruits of the spoils system but unfortunately for them President Cleveland’s reputation for honesty was well-earned. He was studious in replacing only the unqualified and when pressed by the party over this replied “A Democratic Thief is as bad as a Republican one.” (It is the lack of such democrats today that helped push me into the GOP). When people blindly voted for Bristol they made that same mistake that Cleveland scolded the party insiders for.
I like Sarah Palin a lot, of the candidates I believe are running only the very qualified Haley Barbour has a shot of getting my vote. Palin combines the practicality of an authentic life and a common sense approach to most issues, with the courage to stand up for things she believes in even if there is a political cost (as Lincoln said of Grant, he Fights!) when others hide in the shadows. She is however a person, I am going to disagree with her on occasion, she will get things wrong and/or make mistakes on occasion as we all do, and if we blindly follow, we are doing both her and ourselves a disservice.
Sarah Palin isn’t “the one”, nor is her family, I like them both and think she is the best choice for 2012 but I refuse to be caught up in the same throes of passion that drove the election of President Obama or the frenzy concerning Bristol Palin and neither should you.
We are conservatives for a reason, lets act as such.
Polls aren’t elections: Ann Marie Buerkle vs McClatchy Newspapers
Posted: November 24, 2010 by datechguy in congress, internet/free speech, opinion/news, politicsTags: 2010 elections, ann marie Buerkle, big red wave, election 2010, germany, Mcclatchy newspapers, media spin, polls, reality, robert stacy mccain, steven Thomma
My first meeting with Ann Marie Burekle was the day that Syracuse Post-Standard declared that she was down double digits. The poll itself was suspect but as my friend Robert Stacy McCain often says Polls aren’t elections. (this is what I constantly remind those who say Palin can’t win due to a poll that the election isn’t held today) That day Ann Marie said this:
(UPDATE video added)
Now forgetting that the poll was…shall we say interesting all that poll proved in the end was one (or both) of two things.
The Syracuse Post-Standard had an agenda
Ann Marie Buerkle worked incredibly hard and managed to turn it around in two weeks
I thought of that last night when I saw this story that leftist blogs have been jumping on:
New poll undercuts GOP claims of a midterm mandate
By Steven Thomma | McClatchy Newspapers
A majority of Americans want the Congress to keep the new health care law or actually expand it, despite Republican claims that they have a mandate from the people to kill it, according to a new McClatchy-Marist poll.
I don’t know Steven Thomma, he may be a good writer and a nice guy and kind to animals but I know this much. He is trying to BS me and the left blogs are doing the same.
We just had an election where Republicans running against Obamacare won more seats than anyone has seen in over 50 years and you are trying to tell me there is no mandate because of your poll? As I left in comments:
Yeah all those 63 or 64 congressional seats mean nothing next to a POLL
how stupid do you think we are?
Apparently they think we are pretty stupid. Lucky for people who are not suckers we have Robert Stacy McCain at the American Spectator who isn’t buying it. His piece is called The Republican Mandate:
Those people did make a difference, and in the process made laughingstocks of pundits who said they couldn’t do it, chief among them E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post.
“It will be very hard for Republicans to take the House if they don’t break the Democrats’ power in the Northeast — and they still have to prove they can do that,” Dionne wrote five weeks before Election Day, in a column that featured this quote from Dan Maffei: “When we do retain the majority… people are going to look at the map and see that the Northeast held.” Dionne predicted: “Absent a Republican wave of historic proportions, [Maffei’s] seat now seems out of the GOP’s reach.”
Unfortunately for Maffei and Dionne, that “Republican wave of historic proportions” came crashing ashore Nov. 2 with enough power to flip six seats in New York into the GOP column. In addition to Buerkle’s hard-fought win in the 25th District, Republicans also captured previously Democrat-held seats in the 13th, 19th, 20th, 24th and 29th districts. New York’s six GOP pickups was the most of any state. Republicans gained five seats in Ohio and Pennsylvania, while adding four seats in both Florida and Illinois. If such widespread victories are not a mandate for House Republicans to oppose the Democrats’ liberal agenda, whatever could be?
How did two guys in fedoras know to visit Ny-25 in October when EJ Dionne who unlike me doesn’t have to go door to door to business to pay for his radio show? We went there any saw for ourselves!
If you choose to believe Steven Thomma and McClatchy that is your prerogative. Just don’t expect us to believe or trust your opinion
And yes this will be a topic on Saturday.
Update: Put the actual video in
Stop Shouting writes the post of the decade
Posted: November 22, 2010 by datechguy in blogs, internet/free speech, media, opinion/newsTags: 2010 elections, ann althouse, blogs, byron york, conservatism fights back, election 2010, media spin, reality, still angry left
The blog stop shouting has only 4 posts in it over the last 3 years, but this one should be repeated everywhere.
You MUST go to her site and read this but I’m going to grab just a few pieces to share its awesomeness:
I have been silent long enough. I have bent, I have yielded, I have endured slander, dishonesty, ad hominem attacks and actual physical threats.
Anger is a powerful motivator.
She talks of an encounter with Code Pink, first via reason and then via counter protest, it is a priceless story, she continues:
The Left likes to use what they believe to be witty signage (although I am not sure how BUSHCHIMPHITLER qualifies as “witty”), props and sheer numbers of die hard believers and rent-a-students to validate the “justness” of their cause-du-jour and to manufacture a sense of widespread support for their “issue”.
So we took your tools and began to employ them against you. And you don’t like it very much. Except we don’t have to pay anyone to come to our rallies, and that just infuriates you further.
The left absolutely positively refuses to believe that the Tea Party is grass roots because none of their operation is, instead you get stuff like this via Ann Althouse:
Bill Lueders’s Isthmus article is subtitled “The Triumph of Stupidity.” He asks UW-Madison political science professor Charles Franklin how people could vote the way they did, and when Franklin answers “They’re pretty damn stupid,” he says “Thank you, professor… That’s the answer I was looking for.
Althouse continues:
Welcome to my world: Dane County, Wisconsin, home of people who tell themselves they are the smart people and those who disagree with them must certainly be dumb. They don’t go through the exercise of putting themselves in the place of someone who thinks differently from the way they do. But how would it feel to be intelligent, informed, and well-meaning and to think what conservatives think? Isn’t that the right way for an intelligent, informed, and well-meaning person to understand other people? If you short circuit that process and go right to the assumption that people who don’t agree with you are stupid, how do you maintain the belief that you are, in fact, intelligent, informed, and well-meaning?
What is liberal about this attitude toward other people?
Pretty damning, I’m sure the public would resent it, if they ever knew it was said as Byron York explains:
But Franklin is the real star of the story. If you read his quotes in mainstream publications, you’ll find a series of measured statements on political trends. Democrats appealing to the youth vote in the run-up to the midterms are “betting long odds, given the very long history of low turnout in midterms among young voters,” Franklin told the Washington Post recently. Final pre-election polls suggested “a Republican wave of genuinely historical proportions,” he told USA Today. Feingold’s problems had “more to do with the mood of the country than with Feingold himself,” he told the Boston Globe.
It’s all pretty unremarkable stuff. And readers would have no idea what Franklin really thinks about the voters whose opinions he’s measuring and commenting on. But now they do.
Well the Military Mom of 4 at stop shouting knows what they think and has this message to Franklin and the rest of the left in denial:
Either way, I am confident you can deduce the “tone”of my rebuttal.
Realizing that you are losing your grip on the public schools, that the youth that propelled the boy-king to victory have abandoned you, that the bitter, blue collar white workers are now Tea Party grandmas and grandpas, that you have lost control of the federal checkbook and the legislative calendar,
now you want to petition for peace?
now you cry out for civility and consensus?
I have a message for you:
Go. To. Hell.
Go read the whole thing, it will make your day!
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