Tag Archives: New York Times

Moral Hazard

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Last Sunday’s New York Times featured an article by David Segal entitled “Is Law School a Losing Game?“. In the piece, Segal profiles a number of law school graduates whom have been burred in debt, with little to no chance of paying back their debtors. The article is meant to be an exposé on the true value, or lack their of it, of a law school degree.

One recent graduate interviewed was Michael Wallerstein. Wallerstein graduated from Thomas Jefferson law school with a $250,000 debt, and few job prospects. His account of the time he spent at law school is strewn with stories of studies abroad, in Prague and France, and renting of a spacious apartment, all paid for with borrowed money.

However, Wallerstein had no desire to accept a true entry level position, and instead prefers to work temporary jobs and spend time with his fiancée. In fact, Wallerstein’s fiancée does not want to see her husband-to-be accept a “time-gobbling corporate law job.” Why? Because they “like hanging out together” she says.

When confronted with the fact that he could be earning more money if he had kept his job as a research assistant, not to mention be without any outstanding debts, Wallerstein says he’s still happy he went to law school:

It’s a prestige thing. I’m an attorney. All of my friends see me as a person they look up to. They understand I’m in a lot of debt, but I’ve done something they feel they could never do and the respect and admiration is important.

Wallerstein, a perfect example of the over educated NINJA generation (No Income, No Job, No Assets), says he doesn’t worry about his debt. He ignores creditors, threats of law suits, and updates on his credit score. How does he plan on getting above water? A bailout:

Bank bailouts, company bailouts — I don’t know, we’re the generation of bailouts. And like, this debt of mine is just sort of, it’s a little illusory. I feel like at some point, I’ll negotiate it away, or they won’t collect it.

The complete abrogation of any personal responsibility. Who could have seen this coming? And who could blame Wallerstein? The government has been bailing out companies that are “too big to fail,” why not assume that law school graduates are too big to fail?

Interestingly, the Times piece singles out federally backed student loans as “the gasoline that fuels the system” of massively increasing tuition fees. When consumers, students, are removed from the cost, they borrow with impunity, never stopping to ponder the consequences. Or, students expect their enormous debts to just disappear, courtesy of the tax payer.

How about an article extolling the virtues of a prudent individual, who works hard and saves his money, all to have it stolen by the government to bailout the person who went to law school without the means to pay?

Neatly tucked away in the 2,000 page Obamacare bill was a provision expanding student loans. With the government funding an ever increasing number of students, how long will it be before the government does decide to bailout underwater students?

If people have no “skin in the game,” they have no incentive to chose what would appear to be the common sense solution. If you can go to law school for half a decade, and be bailedout by the poor schlub who chose to go to work, why say no?

When the government bailsout companies that engaged in risky behavior because they are “too big to fail,” they encourage more bad behavior, evidently not just from corporations that are “too big to fail.”

2011 GOP Battle Cry: Undo Obama

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The media is atwitter over the fact that incoming GOP Congressmen have selected Carrie Underwood’s hit “Undo It” as their anthem.

Liberals in Congress and the media are worried that the GOP actually plans on fighting the Democrat socialist agenda.

Jennifer Steinhauer and Robert Pear lamented in the New York Times:

The health care law, entitlement programs, new limits on emissions of greenhouse gases from oil refineries and power plants, and other legislation that Republicans say cannot be justified by a strict interpretation of the Constitution — a document the new leaders plan to read on the House floor on Thursday — are all in the cross hairs.

While President Obama and Republicans were able to work together during last month’s lame-duck session — to the vocal consternation of the most partisan ends of each party’s base — to pass a tax package and a variety of last-minute legislation, including the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and the ratification of the anti-nuclear proliferation treaty with Russia, such bipartisan consensus seems unlikely at the outset of the new House session.

Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, who is in line to succeed Ms. Pelosi, has said that this time around he would lead efforts to revive the private sector by reducing the size of government — cutting federal regulation, taxes and spending, including the budget of Congress itself.

Mr. Boehner also said Republicans would alter House rules to make it easier to curb government spending and to require more public disclosure about the work of the House.

House Republicans plan on passing a full repeal of Obamacare as a symbolic act, acknowledging that it will be stopped in the Senate, or vetoed by the President. However, after setting the tone, the GOP plans on defunding and dismantling Obamacare piece by piece. Additionally, with Paul Ryan’s Road Map the GOP is finally starting to talk about realistic entitlement reforms.

Fueled by a reverence for the Constitution and an acknowledgment of reality, Republicans won in 2010 by representing the alternative to Obamunism. If the Grand Old Party wishes to remain in power surrender is not an option.

Mitch McConnell stated that his foremost political priority is ensuring that Barack Obama is a one-term president. Republicans are openly stating that they plan on using Obamacare as an albatross to hang around Democrats in 2012. The only way to fix the economy, and the country, is to get government out of the way. The only way to get government out of the way is to defeat Democrats. The GOP, at long last, is ready to play hardball.

On the other side of the aisle, Democrats believe that a renewed debate over Obamacare will actually help them. The Left believes that the only problem with Obama’s government takeover of healthcare is the branding. If only the American people really understood how great Obamacare is, they’d support the monstrosity.The fights over Obamacare, and liberty, are fights the GOP should welcome, and decisively win.

The legislative plan for the GOP is quite simple; Barry Goldwater spelled it out in 1960:

I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is `needed’ before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents “interests,” I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.

For a modern interpretation “Undo It” works:

Was Scrooge a Liberal or a Conservative?

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Was Scrooge a liberal or a conservative? Last week Ann Coulter and Paul Krugman both wrote articles assigning the notorious skinflint to the opposite’s ideology.

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?

The Left Throws a Hissy Fit

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Last week on TLC’s Sarah Palin’s Alaska Governor Palin went caribou hunting. The hunt was successful. The left is throwing a collective histrionic fit. They are up in arms that someone would dare kill an animal. Doesn’t that rube Palin know that grocery stores grow meat!?

First, there is the always reasonable Aaron Sorkin (who has at least one thing in common with President Obama):

Like 95% of the people I know, I don’t have a visceral (look it up) problem eating meat or wearing a belt. But like absolutely everybody I know, I don’t relish the idea of torturing animals. I don’t enjoy the fact that they’re dead and I certainly don’t want to volunteer to be the one to kill them and if I were picked to be the one to kill them in some kind of Lottery-from-Hell, I wouldn’t do a little dance of joy while I was slicing the animal apart.

I’m able to make a distinction between you and me without feeling the least bit hypocritical. I don’t watch snuff films and you make them. You weren’t killing that animal for food or shelter or even fashion, you were killing it for fun. You enjoy killing animals. I can make the distinction between the two of us but I’ve tried and tried and for the life of me, I can’t make a distinction between what you get paid to do and what Michael Vick went to prison for doing. I’m able to make the distinction with no pangs of hypocrisy even though I get happy every time one of you faux-macho s***heads accidentally shoots another one of you in the face.

So I don’t think I will save my condemnation, you phony pioneer girl.

Aaron Sorkin – always a cool and logical analyst. Where else can you go for “I get happy every time one of you faux-macho s***heads accidentally shoots another one of you in the face”? Can you imagine William F. Buckley Jr. writing “visceral (look it up)”?

Next, the always even tempered tempest in a teapot from the New York Times, Maureen Dowd, penned her weekly masterpiece on the topic of Palin’s hunting:

“My dad has taught me that if you want to have wild, organic, healthy food,” she pontificated, “you’re gonna go out there and hunt yourself and fish yourself and you’re gonna fill up your freezer.”

Does Palin really think the average housewife in Ohio who can’t pay her bills is going to load up on ammo, board two different planes, camp out for two nights with a film crew and shoot a caribou so she can feed her family organic food?

It’s amazing that Palin patronized Neiman Marcus during the campaign. Couldn’t she have spun cloth to sew her own clothes?

…The poor caribou in the Arctic Circle, a cousin to Santa’s reindeer, had to die so Palin could show off her toughness to voters and try to boost ratings on her show that have slipped since its premiere. (Next Sunday, she’s dragging up nine Gosselins to go shooting and camping.)

Sarah’s view of America is primitive. You’re either a pointy-headed graduate of Harvard Law School or you’re eviscerating animals for fun, which she presents as somehow more authentic.

In movies with animals, they often have a line in the credits assuring that no animals were harmed. In “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” they should have a line at the end assuring that “almost every living creature involved in this show was harmed.”

If only liberals cared as much about human beings getting killed! Are Dowd’s questions even supposed to be serious? Palin is not recommending that Dowd open up her window and hunt down caribou in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The program is called Sarah Palin’s Alaska. It is a travelogue. Caribou hunting is something that can be done in Alaska. It’s really that simple. Does Dowd come off as just a bit over the top in her shrill review?

Maureen Dowd, Aaron Sorkin and their claque have a rather primitive view of America:  you’re either a dumb hillbilly from ‘flyover country’ or an enlightened  scion with an Ivy League degree.

You have to love Sarah Palin’s ability to irk all the right people.

Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize Winner

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What does it take to win a Nobel Prize these days? It is one thing for the Peace Prize to go to unqualified Marxists, but shouldn’t the real prizes be reserved for deserving recipients? In case you missed it, 2008 Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman penned another gem this weekend.

Reading Krugman’s ‘Hey, Small Spender‘ requires what Hillary Clinton called “a willing suspension of disbelief.” Krugman’s premise is “if job-creating government spending has failed to bring down unemployment in the Obama era, it’s not because it doesn’t work; it’s because it wasn’t tried.” That’s right, Obama’s problem is that he “never had the kind of fiscal expansion that might have created the millions of jobs we need,” according to Krugman.

To put Krugman’s claim into perspective, Obama has put the United States deeper in the hole than Presidents Washington through Reagan. Obama has spilled more red ink in under two years than the entire country had lost in over two hundred years. George W. Bush’s ‘out of control spending’ had annual deficits smaller than President Obama’s monthly ones.

Using Albert Einstein’s definition, there is no doubt that Krugman is insane. When has increased government spending ever alleviated or reversed a recession? The results are in and Krugman’s Keynesianism has proven to be failure. The Left has been using the same playbook for nearly a century, and their policies have not worked – ever. From FDR on, the left has been bilking productive people, in a scheme to redistribute wealth in exchange for votes. Harry Hopkins, FDR’s closest adviser, explained the Democrats strategy: “tax, tax, spend, spend, elect, elect.” At least he was honest. What’s frightening is that Krugman actually believes big government intervention will rescue the economy.

Pathetic New York Times at it Again

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The latest Real Clear Politics polling average has the Republican Party leading on the generic ballot by 3.7%. Some polls have the GOP up by as much as 10%. With the likelihood of the GOP taking over at least one, if not two houses of Congress this November increasing daily, what is the leftist media to do? Once again, the New York Times is taking the lead on the left, going back to their bread and butter – publishing unsubstantiated rumors and innuendo in an effort to tarnish their enemies’ credibility.

A few weeks ago the Times went after the top ranking House Republican, John Boehner, in a coordinated attack with the White House (detailed on Strictly Right 54). In an article entitled ‘A G.O.P. Leader Tightly Bound to Lobbyists,’ the paper attempted to paint Boehner as a corporate stooge and an elitist. Turns out painting a man who has 11 siblings and worked weekends throughout his childhood to help his family get by was not such an effective line of attack. So, here comes round 2. You have to give the Times credit for their sticktoitiveness. They definitely adheres to the axiom ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.’ The New York Post is reporting that the Times is planning on publishing a story claiming that… John Boehner is having an affair:

The heat is on Republican leader John Boehner.

Liberal media outlets are trying to smear the highest-ranking Republican in the House just weeks before the midterm elections with a deal-breaking scandal before he has a chance to take the speaker’s chair from Nancy Pelosi.

A blogger from liberal Web site The Daily Kos pierced through Boehner’s security detail at yesterday’s unveiling of his leadership policy “Pledge to America” to ask if he was sleeping with a lobbyist from the Printing Industries of America.

The congressman ignored the pesky blogger with a flip camera and kept moving to his fleet of black Suburbans.

The lobbyist who was named in the confrontation and then was contacted by he Daily Kos blogger Lisbeth Lyons denied the accusations. “As you can imagine, I was stunned by such a question,” Lyons said. “I found it to be highly insulting, particularly as a female political professional, as well as unfounded. Beyond that, I have no further comment on the matter.”

Insiders on Capitol Hill are buzzing about an upcoming New York Times exposé that will detail an alleged Boehner affair. Sources say the Times is looking for the right time to drop the story in October to sway the election, similar to how the Times reported during the 2008 presidential campaign on an alleged John McCain affair that supposedly had taken place many years before and that was flatly denied by the woman in question.

“Catching Boehner with a mistress is the only way to destroy him politically before the election,” a source said.

A rep for Boehner’s office said, “This is bull[bleep]. The American people oppose Washington Democrats’ job killing, so their desperate liberal allies are resorting to outright lies. It’s low, and it’s dirty.”

As the Post story mentions, in February of 2008, when Obama was promising to lower sea levels (now he can’t even promise to lower the unemployment rate), the Times ran a hit piece on John McCain. The Times piece used unnamed sources to insinuate that Senator McCain was romantically involved with a lobbyist named Vicki Iseman. The accusations proved to be fallacious, generally the case when you rely exclusively on unnamed sources. This was of course written at the same time that the Times blacklisted any stories about John Edwards, who has since admitted to repeatedly cheating on his cancer-stricken wife – and recording the evidence of his adultery on video for posterity. And what did the very same New York Times have to say about infidelity when it involved a known pervert having an affair with a girl the age of his daughter?

Unfortunately, we seem to be creating a standard of ”truthful” self-disclosure for all would-be leaders that is neither socially desirable nor psychically possible. We’re trying to make hard and fast rules about intimate truth-telling, and they are absurd — even poisonous. Few people grow up without making some mistakes.

In fact, that same article, entitled ‘when the truth hurts’ claimed that telling the truth is evil: “Making a similar point, a European friend often berates me. ”You Americans are so naive. You think that it’s such a noble thing to tell the truth.” In her mind, the person demanding truth is a soldier at the door.” Got it? Demanding the truth makes you a Nazi in Bill Clinton’s case, according to the ‘newspaper of record.’

When it comes to Democrats the New York Times wont cover, denies and justifies infidelity. When it’s a Republican the ‘paper of record’ goes into full slime mode. The latest attack on John Boehner is a desperate effort by a deeply partisan, and increasingly irrelevant fossil. The Times has staked out its position with the smear merchants of the radical Left. Their openness and flagrant bias is no longer deniable.

Strictly Right Radio episode 43

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On this Strictly Right, Andrew and Ari look at the Obama’s opulent lifestyle, the latest in the liberal media’s list-serv Journolist e-mails, a brand new It Must Be a Liberal, a mystery plaguing the New York Times, developments in the Canadian census and more.

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

A Case for Inspector Clouseau

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In examining the case of the never declining unemployment rate, the New York Times features an article entitled “Mystery for the White House: Where Did the Jobs Go?” In this mystery, the Times searches for the answer as to why the Obama recession has not ended, and why the unemployment rate, which Obama promised would not exceed 8% if his plans were implemented, has remained stagnant, around 10% throughout his reign.

R. Glenn Hubbard (no mention if he is related to L. Ron Hubbard), the dean of Columbia’s Business School, said, “I don’t blame the administration for being off in these forecasts…[the cause of the rise in unemployment is] a mystery.” Christina Romer, the leader of the President’s economic council chimed in with “we’ve done a lot of things to look at possible explanations.” This is not the making of an Agatha Christie novel.

Unraveling the ‘mystery’, the Obama administration has found the antidote. According to the Times, Obama’s plan is to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire. This move constitutes an enormous tax hike for small businesses, the largest employers in the United States. In addition, in order to get people back to work, Obama intends to extend welfare payments for the unemployed. What better incentive to find a job than the promise of more ‘free’ government money? Finally, the White House is in favor of a government-run fund to make loans to businesses. That makes sense – the government did work wonders in the housing market. Perhaps it can be as successful in the rest of the economy.

Some Democrats want to send the United States even farther down the socialist rat hole. According to Alan Blinder, a former Clinton hack, the only solution is… New-Deal style agencies. Blinder contends that the only way to battle unemployment is to put workers onto the public payroll. What could be better than rebuilding the Civilian Conservation Corps and other alphabet agencies? By Albert Einstein’s reasoning, you could say Democrats are insane.

As for the ‘mystery’ of unemployment, there’s no need to summon Sherlock Holmes. In this ‘whodunit’ there is an obvious perpetrator: the Democratic Party. Their big spending, government increasing policies have removed all confidence in the marketplace. It has come to the point where Las Vegas real estate mogul Steve Wynn said that he prefers to do business in China because the Communist Chinese government is more predictable than their American counterpart. In other words, Obama is following in FDR’s footsteps. With Roosevelt’s ever changing ‘experiments,’ there was never any certainty in the market. As a result, businesses did not expand, and thus, unemployment never went down. This only changed when the War broke out. After the United States entered the Second World War, the Roosevelt administration realized that they needed businesses to lead industrialization effort to equip the military. To do this, Roosevelt stopped his socialist experiments’ and got out of the way. Today, with bailouts, changing regulations that no one understands, a draconian tax code, enormous tax hikes only months away, non-stop anti-business rhetoric from Washington, and ever increasing government spending the climate in the capital is highly volatile. With such great uncertainty, businesses will not expand, new businesses will not be created, and Americans will remain unemployed. Mystery solved.

NYT Red Alert

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From the New York Times:

A Texas pipeline tycoon who died two months ago may become the first American billionaire allowed to pass his fortune to his children and grandchildren tax-free…

Had his life ended three months earlier, Mr. Duncan’s riches — Forbes magazine estimated his worth at $9 billion, ranking him as the 74th wealthiest in the world — would have been subject to a federal tax of at least 45 percent. If he had lived past Jan. 1, 2011, the rate would be even higher — 55 percent.

Instead, because Congress allowed the tax to lapse for one year and gave all estates a free pass in 2010, Mr. Duncan’s four children and four grandchildren stand to collect billions that in any other year would have gone to the Treasury…

The bonanza in tax savings for Mr. Duncan’s descendants is sure to be unsettling to those who have paid estate taxes on more modest wealth — until Jan. 1 of this year, it applied to any estate valued at more than $3.5 million, taxing only the money exceeding that threshold, or $7 million for a couple’s estate.

O no! heaven forbid a “Texas pipeline tycoon” gets to pass on his hard-earned estate to his heirs without the government getting a piece of the pie. This is an American travesty.

For those of you unfamiliar with the ‘estate tax,’ it is a way for the government to tax people once they have died. Having already paid taxes on the money in the form of income tax, the government proceeds to charge citizens for the privilege of dying. You see, the government is the source of all wealth. In fact, you do not have a ‘right’ to your property. Rather, the government ‘owns’ your property and loans it to you throughout your life. As such, once you die, the source, the government, has a right to recollect what it has loaned you. That is what a death tax means.

The Times story continued: “[a]dvocates of the tax say it is unconscionable that Congressional leaders have allowed the richest Americans to reap a new tax break at a time when deficits are soaring and the income gap between wealthy and poor citizens remains near historic levels.” And there you have it. The purpose of the tax code is not really to fund the necessary functions of government. Instead, the tax code is used to “spread the wealth around.” Sadly, it is not just the peons at the Times that view the tax code through this Marxist lens – the President of the United Sates hold the very same opinion. In 2008 then candidate Obama promised to raise the capital gains tax rate. He was told that such a move would actually reduce government revenues, as it has in the past. His response was that he didn’t care – it is unfair that people “wok the stock market” and don’t pay higher taxes. Of course, there was also O’s famous run-in with Joe the Plumber. It doesn’t matter to the left that the Coolidge, Kennedy, Reagan and Bush tax cuts all actually increased government revenues. They are not interested in reality and helping people. No – they want soak the rich and make everyone equally miserable as opposed to disproportionally successful.

"These Are My People – Americans"

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America’s arbiter of decency has weighed-in on the Tea Partyers. The former President, of blue dress fame, Bill Clinton, recently told the New York Times that he sees parallels between today’s anti-government attitude, and the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City Bombing. In the article Bubba goes through the usual litany of offenses the left so causally paints their entire opposition with. He warns that Republicans are inciting violence with their rhetoric that “animates people who do things you would never do.” I didn’t catch him saying that when Nancy Pelosi called opponents of Obamacare Nazis. To put this in perspective, Clinton also tried to blame Rush Limbaugh for the 1995 bombing.

Next, the latest edition of Newsweek has an article entitled “Hate; Antigovernment extremists are on the rise – and on the march.” In the article Evan Thomas, who has actually compared Obama to God, and Eva Conant pull out all the stops to demonize regular Americans. Their case can be boiled down to this: if you oppose Obama you are an “addled war veteran,” and most likely a militiaman conspiracy kook waiting to be the next Timothy McVeigh. And guess who’s to blame for firing up these “addled veterans?”

It is hard to know how much such grim fantasies are stirred by the steady stream of conspiracy theories pushed by talk-radio hosts. Rush Limbaugh talks about the Democrats planning to “kill you” with health-care reform and suggests (agreeing with black Muslim minister Louis Farrakhan, of all people) that it “seems perfectly within the realm of reality” that the H1N1 vaccine was “developed to kill people.” Like many talk-show hosts, he uses martial language to rouse the faithful: “The enemy camp is the White House right now,” he says. Former Alaska governor turned media star Sarah Palin posted on her Facebook page a list of House Democrats who voted for health-care reform with crosshairs aimed at their home districts, while tweeting to her followers, “Don’t Retreat, Instead—RELOAD!” She strongly denied any intent to incite violence. Other conservative talkers insist their foes are preparing violent attacks on them. Glenn Beck of Fox News is the master purveyor of this particular brand of sly paranoia. He suggests that he will be the victim of violence. “I’d better start wearing a [bulletproof] vest” to guard against White House attacks, he says, and warns that the Democrats will sic goons on him to break his kneecaps.

That’s right – conservative talk radio is to blame for all of societies ills. Nothing like taking a bunch of quotes out of context and pasting them together to prove your point. Whenever regular Americans oppose socialism, the liberal media tries to paint the opposition as a bunch hateful Nazis. Isn’t time they makeup a new narrative? Also, isn’t it interesting that when 19 Arab Muslims men fly airplanes into buildings and kill 3,000 Americans on 9/11 we’re told not to stereotype or profile, yet the same people who say that are so ready to paint every patriotic American that believes in the Constitution as some sort of Timothy McVeigh wannabe nut? The left are the real haters – they hate the Constitution, they hate religious people and they despise the notion of American exceptionalism. As for who the Tea Partyers are, Norah O’Donnell found out yesterday: