The Morsi lesson for Republicans by way of The Guardian:
President Mohamed Morsi has scrapped a controversial decree granting himself near-absolute powers, but insisted that a referendum on a new constitution would go ahead as planned next Saturday. The concession is unlikely to placate Morsi’s opponents. It came after Egypt’s military warned that failure to resolve a crisis over the drafting of the constitution would result in “disastrous consequences” that c
ould drag the country into a “dark tunnel”.
– The opposition called for more protests and accused Morsi of continuing to ignore the will of the people. “We call on Egyptian youth to hold peaceful demonstrations and sit-ins in all of Egypt’s squares until our demands are met,” the National Salvation Front said in a statement. Speaking to the BBC World Service, Ahmed Said leader of Free Egyptians Party and a member of the front, said: “This constitution does not represent Egyptians. We need to take time. He wants the constitution, because they want the parliament, they want the Shura council. It all has to do with the Muslim Brotherhood. They want to take over everything.”
There’s a couple of lessons for the American GOP, here… but before I mention then let’s understand that the positions held by Morsi and his opposition are not totally analogous to our own political situation. Let me be clear; Morsi is an animal that should be led out and shot. Publicly.
That said, it seems that at a very basic level, concessions made to your political opposition does not mean that your opposition is going to start liking you. Here in the states, that means that concessions to Obama and company, and this includes the press, is not going to make them like the GOP more. Does anyone remember 41’s no new taxes pledge, which he broke in a concession to the Democrats, who then used the increased taxes as a tool to defeat Bush. Secondly, take a cue, GOP from the opposition in Cairo… grow a spine and they’ll listen. No more concessions to Democrats. None. Indeed, there’s no reason to even be civil to them, anymore, anymore than they’ve been treating US with respect. Stand up and be counted as conservatives and stop apologizing and stop trying to lean to the mythical center. It’s that attitude that’s cost you the last several elections.
I know that Jason Whitlock, like is fellow members of the Klu Klux Klan, believes that blacks should not be trusted with guns. While in addition to disarming blacks, maybe Whit lock thinks blacks should banned from driving as well, from Karen Brooks:
(Reuters) – Dallas Cowboys defensive tackle Josh Brent was arrested for drunk driving and charged with manslaughter on Saturday after a car he was driving crashed and killed teammate Jerry Brown Jr, in the second tragedy involving NFL players in a week.
With over thirty thousand motor vehicle deaths per year, it is about time to ban the car culture. If there were no motor vehicles, each year over thirty thousand more people would be alive.
Governor Moonbeam, California Governor Jerry Brown runs smack into Arthur Laffer’s curve, from Orange County Breeze:
The following information was released by the California Controller.
State Controller John Chiang today released his monthly report covering California’s cash balance, receipts and disbursements in November 2012, showing total revenues were $806.8 million below (-10.8 percent) projections contained in the 2012-13 State budget.
Liberals may try to pretend that economics does not exist, but they can not escape from it.
The most shocking news since gambling was discovere4d at Ricks, from Hill:
Former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist has officially joined the Democratic Party, fueling speculation that he may run against Republican Gov. Rick Scott in 2014 after getting trounced in his 2010 Senate run.
Crist announced his decision on Twitter Friday evening, saying he was “Proud and honored to join the Democratic Party in the home of President Barack Obama!” The tweet is accompanied by a photo of Crist holding a Florida voter registration application at a White House reception alongside his wife, Carole.
The ‘pubs gain is the ‘rats’ lose.
I think Charlie Christ can look forward to the same kind of success with his new party as Arlen Spector had.
Who says the Smartest Woman in the World is too stupid to recognize her own handiwork, er reset button, from Ed Morrissey, Hot Air:
In a news conference in Dublin last night, the Secretary of State [Mrs B.J. Clinton] accused Vladimir Putin of attempting to “re-Sovietize” Central Asia under the guise of an economic partnership, and pledged that the US would take action to prevent it, reports the Financial Times:
Mrs. Clinton you should be more careful for what you wish. Your reset button worked, unlike your boss’s stimulus, or health care reform.
What every urban parent needs for Christmas, the infamous Urban Assault Stroller.
What every urban parent needs
Hat tip: aliceaitch, Doubleplusundead
Alas, if Jason Whitlock IQ was a big as his belt size. Whitlocks proves that dumb comes in overly large packages, from Newsbusters
WHITLOCK: Sports gets so much attention, and people tune out the real world, that I try to take advantage of the opportunity to talk about the real world when sports lends itself to that and try to open people’s eyes. You know, I did not go as far as I’d like to go because my thoughts on the NRA and America’s gun culture – I believe the NRA is the new KKK. And that the arming of so many black youths, uh, and loading up our community with drugs, and then just having an open shooting gallery, is the work of people who obviously don’t have our best interests [at heart
Problems, one what Whitlock believes and what is true are two different things. Two, Whitlock offers utterly no evidence that the National Rifle Association is arming anybody. Three, Whitlock has the history of gun control and the Klu Klux Klan wrong. The KKK did not like armed blacks. They shot back. So the KKK worked with local law enforcement to use gun control to disarm blacks.
Jsson Whitlock is embarrassingly stupid*, from Fox News:
Jovan Belcher, a starting linebacker for the Chiefs, murdered the mother of his child shortly before 8 a.m. Saturday. He hopped in his car, drove to the Kansas City Chiefs practice facility, thanked Romeo Crennel and Scott Pioli — and shot himself in the head in front of his coach and general manager around 8:10 a.m.
[…]
I would argue that your rationalizations speak to how numb we are in this society to gun violence and murder. We’ve come to accept our insanity. We’d prefer to avoid seriously reflecting upon the absurdity of the prevailing notion that the second amendment somehow enhances our liberty rather than threatens it.
How many young people have to die senselessly? How many lives have to be ruined before we realize the right to bear arms doesn’t protect us from a government equipped with stealth bombers, predator drones, tanks and nuclear weapon
On the back of the envelope and off the top of my head, we have about ten thousand murders per year. About half our committed using guns and about half by blacks We have northwards of three hundred million guns in the nation and what fifty million blacks. The makes a black such as Whitlock about six times for likely to murder a person and for gun to used in a murder. So in the name of national safety, which makes make more sense to get off the street, blacks or guns?
[*] Ditto for Bob Costas.
Report: Israel to detect and attack Iranian missiles while still on the ground. Sure, and AI have some Arizona beach front property for you, from a very gullible Times of Israel:
In the event that Iran attempts to fire missiles at Israel, Jerusalem will deploy giant drones stationed in neighboring Azerbaijan to destroy the missiles before they leave the ground, the London-based Sunday Times reported.
According to the report Sunday, an American-made X-band radar system deployed at the Nevatim airbase in the Negev “can detect an Iranian missile on its launchpad 1,000 miles to the northeast,” giving Israel up to 13 minutes of warning.
The report quoted an Israeli military source as saying “We’ll try to ‘kill’ them at the booster stage — the moment their engines are ignited.”
The detection range of a ground based radar of an object on the ground is under twelve miles. Radar is line of sight,and the Earth is curved.
I see the New York Times has started an attack on Thomas Jefferson. Well, not started, realy since they’ve been attacking our foundational documents and ideas for generations, now.
But why would this come up as a meme NOW, I wonder?
I’ve often said that it was a wonder to me that the Democrat party to this day holds Jefferson as an icon of the party., given his writings would seem to run directly afoul of the party and it’s positions on matters of freedom. Ponder these, as offhanded examples:
The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.
Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now.
“Laws that forbid the carrying of arms…disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes… Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.” (Quoting Cesare Beccaria)
The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it.
The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits.
Thomas Jefferson
To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father’s has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association—the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.
I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. (Back then!)
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.
What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?
Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty…. And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.
The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
The question of “why now” seems fairly simple and straightforward to answer. Or should I say, “lean forward”? One can hardly institute foundational change as Obama’s been saying, if we’re bound to the ideas and ideals of the founders such as Jefferson.
Given the Obama agenda, such a man who would write such things, needs be vilified… lest someone start using a party icon’s writings as opposition to current polices and agendas. Our history, and the words and thoughts and deeds… and the ideas… of our founders has been systematically stripped from us for decades, now… one bit at a time. Increasingly, our government schools have abandoned the teaching of the principles our country was founded on.
I see this attack on Jefferson as merely one more step down that road toward serfdom.
In the words of Dirty Harry Reid, “This city is lost”, let establish a date certain time table to pull our of Chicago, from Chicago Tribune:
Four people were shot and killed Friday night and Saturday morning, and a fifth person who may have been dead for days or weeks was found with gunshot wounds.
In addition to the shootings, a man was stabbed to death on the Southwest Side about 12:45 a.m. Saturday.
At least 11 others were wounded by gunfire in shootings from the Uptown neighborhood on the north to the Chatham neighborhood on the south, police said.
The Chicago Way need not be the American Way.
A few great truths liberals will doubtless deny, as cataloged by John Hawkins.
I am sure the Reverend Al Sharpton would be offended, if he could read and actually believed the story, from Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine:
I have a [male] slave I bought from an African country and arranged for his visa and stay till I got him to Saudi [Arabia]
His description:
1 – Black skin. Tall 172 sm. Weight 60 kilos.
2 – Castrated (excellent for working with a family) you can check him with a doctor our yourself if you have experience in the matter.
Three cheers for United Nations member state Saudi Arabia, and down with them evil Jews.
The Obama administration seems intent of destroying every private sector non-union job, from PJ Media:
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) lashed out at Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and accused him of using junk science to kill the last operating oyster cannery in her home state.
The Drakes Bay Oyster Company had been in a long fight with the Interior Department, who said the fourth-generation family business was harming harbor seal pups and native plants, and wanted to return the coastal region in Marin County to its natural state.
In 1972, the National Park Service purchased the land that housed the oyster operation and the owner reserved a 40-year right to continue its activities through November 30, 2012.
“I’ve taken this matter very seriously. We’ve undertaken a robust public process to review the matter from all sides, and I have personally visited the park to meet with the company and members of the community,” said Salazar
Is your job the next oine on Obama’s job kill list?
edited (DL)
Private sector unions are dying. The attempt last week to unionize Wal-Mart did nothing to stop the death cycle. Now after the Waterloo at Wallyworld, McLabor os going after McJob,s from Salon:
At 6:30 this morning, New York City fast food workers walked off the job, launching a rare strike against a nearly union-free industry. Organizers expect workers at dozens of stores to join the one-day strike, a bold challenge to an industry whose low wages, limited hours and precarious employment typify a growing portion of the U.S. economy.
[,,,]
But employees were clear about their reasons for walking out. “They’re not paying us enough to survive,” McDonald’s worker Raymond Lopez told Salon in a pre-strike interview. Lopez said he decided to join today’s strike because “This company has enough money to pay us a reasonable amount for all that we do … they’re just not going to give it to us as long as they can get away with it. I think we need to be heard.”
Lopez, a 21-year-old who’s been at McDonald’s for two years, said he makes $8.75 an hour as a shift manager (organizers say this isn’t a supervisory position). He works at McDonald’s and at two other jobs – catering and doing leaf work – while paying off student loans, pursuing an acting career, and helping to support his family
So just how smart is this Raymond Lopez. He went to school, but learned no skill sufficient to earn him anything other than a minimum wage job. Lopez has saddled himself with both student loan debt and a family. Apparently Lopes did not study economics in his short stay in school.
Lopez as made a bunch of poor life decisions for which he thinks his salary should be doubled and your McLunch become too expensive to eat.
