Two men, an American and a Russian were arguing. One said, in my country I can go to the White House walk to the president’s office and pound the desk and say “Mr. President! I don’t like how you’re running things in this country!”
The Russian said “I can do that too!”
“Really?”
“Yes! I can go to the Kremlin, walk into the General Secretary’s office and pound the desk and say, Mr. Secretary, I don’t like how Reagan is running his country!”

-Ronald Reagan

In 1921 Lincoln Steffens, a revered lion of the liberal media establishment, visited the Soviet Union. Following his visit, Steffens commented “I have seen the future, and it works.” Steffens was taken on a Potmekin Village tour, and he saw the future in totalitarian communism.

The Pyongyang Project, an ‘educational program,’ launched by American university students, which seeks to “counteract the ‘one-sided’ coverage of North Korea in the international media,” is a worthy heir to Steffens’ unprecedented level of naiveté.

Organizers of the venture claim that “the US and North Korea don’t have established relations, and talks are indirect at best. And what we believe is that there is a need for a grassroots level of engagement that we haven’t seen yet between citizens.”Furthermore, people brought to North Korea will “experience the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for themselves and try to see a different side of a country that’s a lot more dynamic than they may have anticipated.”

On tours of the worker’s paradise, visitors had the opportunity to visit the beautiful beaches of Wonsan. There, Pyongyang Project participants interacted with denizens of North Korea who just happened to be at the beach at the same time. One fellow traveler noted that although the people seemed malnourished, they were happy.

Of course, no trip to North Korea would be complete without attending the Airing Festival, where 100,000 North Koreans preform dances and gymnastics dedicated to Supreme Leader, Kim Il-sung.

The Pyongyang Project even visited the renowned Kim Il-sung University, which will now be offering a two month study abroad program, through the Pyongyang Project. At the university one American visitor did notice a few minor red flags:

At one point during a tour through a computer lab at Kim Il-sung University, students stared blank-faced into machines that were turned off, she said, adding that some rooms in the university even felt unused and smelled of fresh wood and paint.

But don’t look behind the curtain.

Of recent attacks on South Korea, the Pyongyang Project says:

There is a heightened level of political tension that exists, and one cannot rule out the possibility of additional actions that could lead to further tensions – but I don’t see it, honestly. It was an event that occurred that has proven to be isolated.

Besides, members of the Pyongyang Project were to busy last month, preparing a protest outside President Bush’s home because he’s a warmonger!

A hint to the Pyongyang Project organizers: the people on the beach just might have not have been there by chance. North Korea is a police state. The people were there because they were told to be there. They were happy because they were told to be happy. If they were not at the designated place at the designated time, or if they were unhappy, they would not have returned home.

North Korea’s GDP per capita is $1,800. $1,800 ranks North Korea 193rd in the world, just ahead of Chad, and right behind Gambia. Sudan is 6 spots ahead of North Korea.

North Koreans are taught that Kim Jong Il had a supernatural birth, invented the hamburger and is a fashion trendsetter. Additionally, in 1994 Dear Leader played his first and only round of golf and shot 38 under par on a regulation 18 hole course, replete with 5 hole in ones. His lone round of golf is 25 strokes better than any round in history.

O, and there is this picture:

which shows the thriving South’s electrical usage, compared to the desolate North’s. At least the NorKs are doing there part in the fight against anthropogenic global warming!

It is telling that liberals constantly lavish praise on totalitarian states. Liberals look to basket cases  like the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea and California and see the future.

The reason most people have a “one-sided” view of North Korea is because the place is hell on earth. People live in abject destitution and die of starvation. Meanwhile, the certifiably insane rulers of the country live like Pharaohs. Promotion of the ‘successes’ of the totalitarian ruling claque is an asinine concept, even for university students.

‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ has been repealed. ROTC still shouldn’t be on campus.
By Colman McCarthy

Now that asking and telling has ceased to be problematic in military circles, ROTC has resurfaced as a national issue: Will universities such as Harvard, Yale and other Ivy League schools be opened to Reserve Officers’ Training Corps since colleges can no longer can argue that the military is biased against gays and therefore not welcome?

The debate reminds me of an interview I conducted over parents’ weekend at the University of Notre Dame in 1989. I sat down with Theodore Hesburgh, the priest who had retired two years earlier after serving 35 years as the university’s president. Graciously, he invited me to lunch at the campus inn. During our discussion, he took modest pride at having raised more than a billion dollars for Notre Dame, and expressed similar feelings about the university’s ROTC program. More than 700 student-cadets were in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. Few universities, public or private, had a larger percentage of students in uniform then. The school could have been renamed Fort Hesburgh.

When I suggested that Notre Dame’s hosting of ROTC was a large negative among the school’s many positives, Hesburgh disagreed. Notre Dame was a model of patriotism, he said, by training future officers who were churchgoers, who had taken courses in ethics, and who loved God and country. Notre Dame’s ROTC program was a way to “Christianize the military,” he stated firmly.

I asked if he actually believed there could be a Christian method of slaughtering people in combat, or a Christian way of firebombing cities, or a way to kill civilians in the name of Jesus. Did he think that if enough Notre Dame graduates became soldiers that the military would eventually embrace Christ’s teaching of loving one’s enemies?

…It should not be forgotten that schools have legitimate and moral reasons for keeping the military at bay, regardless of the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” They can stand with those who for reasons of conscience reject military solutions to conflicts.

They can stand with Martin Luther King Jr. and his view of America’s penchant for war-making: “This madness must cease,” he said from a pulpit in April 1967. Even well short of the pacifist positions, they can argue the impracticality of maintaining a military that has helped drive this country into record depths of debt. The defense budget has more than doubled since 2000, to over $700 billion. They can align themselves with colleges such as Hobart, Earlham, Goshen, Guilford, Hampshire, George Fox and a long list of others that teach alternatives to violence. Serve your country after college, these schools say, but consider the Peace Corps as well as the Marine Corps.

Will the Ivies have the courage for such stands? I’m doubtful. Only one of the eight Ivy League schools – Cornell – offers a degree in peace studies. Their pride in running programs in women’s studies, black studies, and gay and lesbian studies is well-founded, but schools have small claims to greatness so long as the study of peace is not equal to the other departments when it comes to size and funding.

At Notre Dame, on that 1989 visit and several following, I learned that the ROTC academics were laughably weak. They were softie courses. The many students I interviewed were candid about their reasons for signing up: free tuition and monthly stipends, plus the guarantee of a job in the military after college. With some exceptions, they were mainly from families that couldn’t afford ever-rising college tabs.

To oppose ROTC, as I have since my college days in the 1960s, when my school enticed too many of my classmates into joining, is not to be anti-soldier. I admire those who join armies, whether America’s or the Taliban’s: for their discipline, for their loyalty to their buddies and to their principles, for their sacrifices to be away from home. In recent years, I’ve had several Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans in my college classes. If only the peace movement were as populated by people of such resolve and daring.

ROTC and its warrior ethic taint the intellectual purity of a school, if by purity we mean trying to rise above the foul idea that nations can kill and destroy their way to peace. If a school such as Harvard does sell out to the military, let it at least be honest and add a sign at its Cambridge front portal: Harvard, a Pentagon Annex.

Not surprising that a liberal feels nothing but disdain for the heroic men and women of the United States Armed Forces. Because of people greater than McCarthy, liberals are free to publish drivel like the above article.

Krugman wrote:

Hey, has anyone noticed that “A Christmas Carol” is a dangerous leftist tract?

I mean, consider the scene, early in the book, where Ebenezer Scrooge rightly refuses to contribute to a poverty relief fund. “I’m opposed to giving people money for doing nothing,” he declares. Oh, wait. That wasn’t Scrooge. That was Newt Gingrich — last week. What Scrooge actually says is, “Are there no prisons?” But it’s pretty much the same thing.

Anyway, instead of praising Scrooge for his principled stand against the welfare state, Charles Dickens makes him out to be some kind of bad guy. How leftist is that?

As you can see, the fundamental issues of public policy haven’t changed since Victorian times. Still, some things are different.

…So in this holiday season, let’s remember the wisdom of Ebenezer Scrooge. Not the bit about denying food and medical care to those who need them: America’s failure to take care of its own less-fortunate citizens is a national disgrace.

How original. Not exactly the first time Newt Gingrich has been called Scrooge:

On the other hand, Ann Coulter titled her weekly column “Scrooge Was a Liberal.”  Coulter’s argument is that while liberals have a monopoly on “caring” it is religious conservatives who put their money where their mouths are:

Religious conservatives, the largest group at about 20 percent of the population, gave the most to charity — $2,367 per year, compared with $1,347 for the country at large.

Conversely, secular liberals are particularly stingy:

secular liberals give to charity at a rate of 9 percent less than all Americans and 19 percent less than religious conservatives. They were also “significantly less likely than the population average to return excess change mistakenly given to them by a cashier.”

However, Newt did say “I’m opposed to giving people money for doing nothing,” and that settles who the real Scrooge is, right?

What Newt was saying in the 90s and a week ago is that government funding of bad behavior only reinforces bad behavior. If you pay able bodied people not to work, they will remain wards of the state.

But this isn’t about good policy, it’s about which ideological camp Scrooge really falls into; an easily answered question.

Near the beginning of A Christmas Carol Scrooge is solicited for a donation to provide food and shelter for the poor over Christmas. Scrooge refuses to part with so much as one sent. His explanation? Scrooge claims that he pays enough for the poor in taxes, and that they should seek food and shelter in local prisons, poorhouses and workhouses.

Ebenezer Scrooge’s position and justification are a doctrinaire liberalism. Scrooge’s belief that government programs are there to care for the downtrodden in lieu of charities is a fundamental tenet of modern liberalism.

By the end of A Christmas Carol Scrooge becomes a conservative. Reversing his miserly attitude, Scrooge discovers that the best way to help the indigent, and everyone else, is with private charity. Instead of sending people to government-run poorhouses, Scrooge decides that he knows how to help his neighbors better than anonymous government bureaucrats. Could there be a more conservative message?

On MSNBC‘s Andrea Mitchell Reports Mrs. Mitchell grilled Senator Judd Gregg on his support of extending of the Bush tax cuts – in other words, Senator Gregg’s opposition to one of the largest nominal tax hikes in history:

The economic argument made by Mitchell is pure sophistry. ‘Tax cuts’ can be a misleading term. Tax rate reductions do not necessarily mean tax revenue reductions. The static modeling used by many economists is premised upon “ceteris paribus” – with all other things being equal. In reality, all other things are never equal.

In a dynamic economy nothing happens in a vacuum. Tax rate reductions leaves more money in the supply side, which results in businesses big and small having the needed capital to expand. A growing economy results in higher earnings and the creation of jobs. More earners means more taxpayers, the result being increased government revenues. Government revenues increased when presidents: Harding, Coolidge, Kennedy, Reagan and Bush cut taxes. This stubborn set of facts has been presented ad nauseam, and yet the Left continues to deny reality.

However, there is more to the debate surrounding taxes than just what will result in higher government revenues. In the segment above, if you disregard Mitchell’s painful economic ignorance, her point that not raising taxes costs the government money is illustrative of how Democrats think.

The Left believes that all capital belongs to the government. Furthermore, the benevolent ruling class should decide how much capital you, the citizen, is allowed to keep, in the Left’s view. Using that logic, liberals view tax cuts as a reduction in the government’s money.

The aforementioned view is diametrically opposed to the fundamental precepts of private property rights. On one side, there are those whom believe that people are entitled to the fruits of their labor – their property. On the other side is the modern Left, which believes that all property belongs to the government, and should be disbursed among “the masses” by altruistic planners.

Senator Gregg’s simple response, “it’s their money,” reflects a sound understanding and belief in private property rights.

The government does not have the moral authority to seize your wealth and distribute it as they see fit. That type of broad and arbitrary power, the very type the Democrats have pursued at least since Franklin Roosevelt, is exactly what the Constitution sets to limit.

While it is well and good that lower tax rates result in larger government revenues, it is of secondary importance. The primary issue is that when you work, you are entitled to the fruits of your labor. Tax rate reductions are not about the government losing money, they are about taxpayers keeping what is rightfully theirs.

(H/T Hot Air)

You can listen to this episode online here or subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

And Glenn Beck’s sentimental look at election returns::

(H/T TRS)

According to the Left, serving your child a hamburger is the equivalent of injecting them with heroin. All you can do is laugh, as the Left descends into insanity. One is left to contemplate the parent that sees this ad and takes the message to heart.

However, if we are going to compare things parents do to injecting their children with heroin, and filling them up with “junk” how about remaking this advertisement, but replace the hamburger with school?

You can listen to this episode online here or subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.