If you can’t beat ‘em, beat up on ‘em is apparently the new playbook for the Democrats. John “He even looks French” Kerry, now the senior Senator from Massachusetts, voiced his view of Americans today: “We have an electorate that doesn’t always pay that much attention to what’s going on so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what’s happening.”

And it must have been an informed public that voted for hope and change …

How many ways can liberals find to call Tea Partiers and fed-up Americans dumb, lazy, disinterested, and racist?

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One must be careful not to draw exact parallels between a historical event and a current situation, at least not without sufficient evidence. I want to be cautious. However, as I was teaching a class on the Civil War era last week, I noticed what appeared to be a rather striking similarity in the fate of the Democrat party in the 1850s and that same party today.

Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas

Here’s the history: In 1854, Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois made an all-out push for a bill he sponsored called the Kansas-Nebraska Act. On the surface, it sounded good—let settlers moving into those areas decide for themselves whether or not slavery should be allowed. Douglas referred to his plan as popular sovereignty, and he saw no problem with it because for him slavery was not a moral issue. Whatever the people decided was fine.

Yet for many others, it was a moral issue, and an increasingly contentious one. The ideological divide between North and South was growing. Further, what Sen. Douglas’s bill did was to alter the agreement the Congress had reached back in 1820 with the Missouri Compromise. At that time, Congress decided to draw a line extending west from the southern border of Missouri that forbade slavery in any territory north of that line.

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Today, in 1964, the Warren Commission released its report concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating JFK. It would not be the end of the debate.

This country was founded on the principle that God endowed human beings with equal rights (under the law), which is different and distinct from equality.  We all experience a wonderful opportunity and great blessing to live in a country designed to reward more on merit than any other in history, but we denigrate that incredible distinction by promising our youngsters equivalence.

Most of us understand why communism doesn’t work: because very few people will ever willingly agree to be (or admit to being) average.  Strangely, we are unwittingly suckered into a similar lie, as advanced by our schools: the worship of a new god, Demos, i.e. democracy, or equality.  Consequently, God and prayer have been forced out of schools, (so as not to confuse students.)

Our naive public school system promotes the lie of equality indiscriminately (pardon the pun,) although even a toddler knows how dishonest it is.  In fact, young children thrive on discovering how people are different from each other, so this parity untruth simply brings them frustration. “If we are all alike, why does he have a Nintendo and I don’t, and why does she get candy in her lunch?”  As parents, we are suckered into it, too.  “Please refrain from putting candy in your child’s lunch.”  “Everyone gets a trophy!”  “No child left behind” translates to teaching to the lowest common denominator.

Do we really desire the bland landscape of equality and parity for our children, or do we want them to thrive, above and beyond other children, soar to heights only dreamt of, and excel far beyond the mean?  Only political correctness, so entirely incorrect, dictates an answer in the negative there.  Let’s face facts: we all want our own kids to sign lucrative contracts like Alex Rodriguez (with the ultimate pay-off: six-hundred homers, faster than anyone else, and a secured place in history,) or its “equal.”  There, I said it, “equal.”  We want equality, but we are not all A-Rod, and hoping for something doesn’t make it reality.

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From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Californians are left with a deeply unsatisfying choice for the U.S. Senate this year. The incumbent, Democrat Barbara Boxer, has failed to distinguish herself during her 18 years in office. There is no reason to believe that another six-year term would bring anything but more of the same uninspired representation. The challenger, Republican Carly Fiorina, has campaigned with a vigor and directness that suggests she could be effective in Washington – but for an agenda that would undermine this nation’s need to move forward on addressing serious issues such as climate change, health care and immigration.

It is extremely rare that this editorial page would offer no recommendation on any race, particularly one of this importance. This is one necessary exception.

Boxer, first elected in 1992, would not rate on anyone’s list of most influential senators. Her most famous moments on Capitol Hill have not been ones of legislative accomplishment, but of delivering partisan shots. Although she is chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, it is telling that leadership on the most pressing issue before it – climate change – was shifted to Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., because the bill had become so polarized under her wing.

For some Californians, Boxer’s reliably liberal voting record may be reason enough to give her another six years in office. But we believe Californians deserve more than a usually correct vote on issues they care about. They deserve a senator who is accessible, effective and willing and able to reach across party lines to achieve progress on the great issues of our times. Boxer falls short on those counts.

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Perhaps the most ridiculous waste of taxpayer dollars is facing a legal challenge in one California school district that is suing its teachers union to get its money back.

The Vista Unified School District is suing the Vista Teachers Association, the California Teachers Association, and the National Education Association over the wages of its local union president, which is released from teaching responsibilities to work on union business as part of the district’s collective bargaining agreement, the North County Times reports.

In school districts across the nation, local teachers union presidents are “released” from their teaching duties either full or part time to conduct union business. Some contracts also allow for “release time” for rank-and-file teachers to work for the union, or to lobby lawmakers.

The ridiculous practice often costs schools $100,000 or more per year to cover the president’s salary and benefits – in addition to the cost of a substitute teacher – to essentially provide the nation’s multimillion dollar teachers unions with free labor.

In some districts, such as Vista Unified, the union repays a portion of the expense. In many others, it doesn’t.

A lawyer for Vista Unified advised school officials that the arrangement was illegal, and those officials asked the union to repay $128,242 the district has spent on the contract provision over the past three years, the North County Times reports.

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Obama administration policies have caused “irreperable harm” to the Gulf Coast economy, stifling the energy sector and culling employment within it to a degree previously underestimated by the administration itself.

That is the conclusion drawn by Louisiana State University economics professor, Dr. Joseph Mason, author of a new critique of the Obama administration’s Inter-Agency Economic Report released last week estimating losses due to the deepwater drilling moratorium currently in effect.  According to Dr. Mason, that report understated the ban’s impact on job losses by as much as 60 percent.

During a conference call Tuesday, Mason criticized the administration’s methodology for calculating the economic effects of the ban, and said the administration used inflated, flawed logic to calculate its valuation of economic offsets—such as unemployment wages—and their counter effects on the economic downturn. He said the report was inaccurately rosy in describing the Gulf States’ economic recoveries following the BP spill.

“Those states have been irreparably harmed,” Mason said. “Essentially all of these economies have taken the summer off and are trying to get back to the baseline.”

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Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour joins the program to discuss his background and political career (he’s only the second Republican governor of MS since Reconstruction), the current political climate (“unprecedented power in the federal government”) and how he was one of few federal officials to have higher poll numbers after Katrina.

When it comes to spending, Gov. Barbour argues that you can’t spend yourself rich.  America’s problem is not the deficit, it is spending.  Salvation won’t come through tax hikes, rather taxpayers need more taxable income.  This isn’t just conservative happy talk for Gov. Barbour.  He got rid of the deficit in Mississippi even when up against a predominantly Democratic state legislature.  How?  Communicating with the people that the choice is clear: increased taxes or controlled spending.  75% preferred controlled spending.

Political handicappers often include Barbour when listing potential Republican candidates for 2012.  He does have  impressive credentials and strong positions on everything from ObamaCare and entitlements to immigration to the Ground Zero Mosque.  Nevertheless, many agree that being from Mississippi, having a deep southern accent, and likely most challenging, a career in lobbying could hurt his electability.

Gov. Barbour’s response to such criticism?

“Maybe by 2012 they’ll be ready for the anti-Obama.”

Watch the full episode below:

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Can we trust the current polls? I do not mean to level any accusations. I think that, with rare exceptions, the pollsters are doing their best to assess the trends. If nothing else, they know that accuracy pays off – that a pollster who gets things right will get a lot of business down the road.

What I have in mind is something else. I suspect that there is something afoot which the pollsters do not yet know how to measure. There is evidence that seems to me to be dispositive. No one predicted Joe Miller’s victory in the Alaska primary; no one predicted Christine O’Donnell’s defeat of Mike Castle – and let’s face it: in neither case was the margin of victory small. My bet is that in November the Republicans will take every single race – for the House, the Senate, or at the state level – in which the pollsters (including Rasmussen, the best of the lot) report that the race is even remotely close.

On 2 September, I posted a piece suggesting that the Republicans would pick up more than 70 seats in the House and would take the Senate. I now think that they will do even better than this – at least in the House. As Peter Wehner and Paul Mirengoff have noted, when Glenn Bolger of Public Opinion Strategies ran a survey recently for the American Action Network, he made a discovery of great interest:

The generic ballot shows Republicans leading 44%-39%. Besides all of the usual regional crosstabs, we also broke it out by the type of district. We looked at the sample in the 66 Democratic INCUMBENT districts that Charlie Cook lists as either toss-up or leaning Democratic at the time of the survey. In that key crosstab of Swing Democratic Incumbent Seats, the Republican lead grows to 49%-31% on the generic ballot. That is a very powerful crosstab that says the wave is coming.

Among the remaining Democratic districts (Likely/Safe Dem, and open seats), the generic ballot is an unsurprisingly 33% GOP/51% Dem — a sign that the historically safe Dem seat will remain so, while the swing seats will be a bloodbath. By the way, in all of  the GOP held seats, the generic is the reverse of the base Dem seats — 52% GOP/32% Dem. Very few, if any, Republican incumbents will be defeated.

Likewise, President Obama’s numbers with likely voters are similar to the national average — 46% approve/51% disapprove. However, in the Swing Democratic Incumbent Seats. he has a much worse 40% approve/57% disapprove. (Keep in mind, many of these Swing Seats are held by Democrats despite the fact that John McCain either won the district in 2008, or, even if losing, outperformed his national result.

On 2 November, there is going to be an electoral revolution. I doubt that it will exceed the shift which took place in 1894 – when, in the wake of the Panic of 1893, Grover Cleveland’s Democratic Party split between its goldbug Bourbon wing and the populists who would later unite behind William Jennings Bryan and, in the midterm elections held that year, the Democrats lost 125 seats and the Republicans had a pickup of 130. But it may exceed the largest shift in the 20^th century, when 101 seats changed hands in 1932.

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Today, in 1960, the first televised Presidential debate took place between JFK and Richard Nixon. Presidential politics would never be the same.

Media reports have been decrying the corporate influence in the 2010 election cycle.  If you were to read the Washington Post, New York Times, or most online media sources you would think Citizens United v. FEC is the biggest problem facing America.

That’s a narrative that President Obama has embraced.  Since the Supreme Court decided Citizens United in January, President Obama has led a vocal campaign against the decision and the First Amendment rights that it protected.  He has devoted at least three weekly radio addresses to the topic, one Rose Garden speech, and even made an unprecedented attack against the Supreme Court during his State of the Union address.

Recently, in addressing liberal donors, President Obama proclaimed:

“That’s the biggest problem that we have all across the country right now. We’ve got great candidates who are taking their case directly to the American people, but they are being drowned out by groups like Americans for Prosperity.  Nobody knows who they are.  Well, we know who they are — but nobody knows where the money is coming from, and they certainly don’t appear on those ads.

So I believe that if we are able to get our message out, if we have the same energy and focus and determination that we had in 2008 and 2006, then we will do fine.  But that requires us to understand the stakes involved in this election.  And I want everybody to understand, especially those who supported me, we are just in the first quarter here.  We’ve gotten a lot of stuff done, but we’ve got a lot more work to do.”

The real problem is that he’s only telling half the story.  Yes, corporations are financing issue advertisements, as they were allowed to before Citizens United.  But they are not the only ones exercising their rights to political speech.

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The banter continues about the Republican Party being pushed to the right by “ideologues.”

Working Americans interest in politics is motivated by how to make our lives better. They don’t care about how one set of intellectuals or pundits think the world should be against some other set of ideas of ideology. They care about the facts. How the world really is and acting accordingly.

Two principles often labeled as “right wing ideology” are that as a society we are better off with limited government and individual freedom and that as individuals we are better off being married. Is this wishful thinking of ideologues or is this reality?

Two publications just out provide factual substantiation backing up both these principles.

Economic Freedom of the World, now in its 16th edition, is an annual index published co-operatively by 70 think tanks from around the world. This team has developed measures of economic freedom and then correlates these measures with economic performance in every country in the world.

What, according to this publication, is economic freedom? The core principles are “personal choice, voluntary exchange, freedom to compete, and security of privately owned property.”

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Let’s just cut to the chase: your fearless leader Andrew Bretibart is our guest today and we cover the panoply of conflicts that seem to follow Andrew where ever he goes. A brief list: Most of Twitter, the folks in the parking lot of the Sears Center, Glenn Beck, Shirley Sherrod, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Harvey Fierstein. And that’s just in the first ten minutes. We also talk about the Tea Party, the mid-terms, and we get a valuable lesson in crowd control.

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On Friday, we received affirmation of the true nature of the Department of Justice in the Obama administration,  and its incredibly disturbing.  Christopher Coates, former chief of the Justice Department’s Voting Section, and still a DOJ employee defied his bosses orders and testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to discuss the reasons why the New Black Panther Voter intimidation case (NBPP) was dropped even though the Judge had ruled that the DOJ had already won the case.

Coates’ testimony was a shocking indictment of Obama’s Department of Justice. His testimony accused the administration of using race to determine which cases are prosecuted. Corroborating the testimony of J. Christian Adams, Coates testimony illustrates that the issue goes way beyond the New Black Panther case, the real issue is the organization charged with protecting civil rights is now a tool for increasing discrimination in the country.

He stated that his reasons going for going against his superiors and talking to the panel was the inaccurate testimony given by Assistant AG Perez:

Based upon my own personal knowledge of the events surrounding the CRD’s [civil rights division of the DOJ] actions in the NBPP case and the atmosphere that has existed and continues to exist in the CRD and in and in the Voting Section against fair enforcement of certain federal voting laws, I do not believe these representations to this Commission accurately reflect what occurred in the NBPP case and do not reflect the hostile atmosphere that has existed Within the CRD for a long time against race-neutral enforcement of the Voting Rights Act (VRA)

According to the Mr. Coates, this discrimination was also evident in the Bush Administration but his administration was fighting the bias within the DOJ. But things changed after the 2008 election:

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The Germans have a word called Schadenfreude, which roughly translates into taking pleasure in the misfortune of others.  It’s the feeling most of us had when we read about Paris Hilton’s latest arrest.

Usually you feel a little guilty, but sometimes life brings an example that’s so crazy it becomes almost funny.  In other words, you get Free Press.  This is the Professional Left group founded by the avowed socialist Robert McChesney around the time he called the United States “by any honest account, the leading terrorist institution in the world today.”

This week, Free Press became so hysterical as to be almost unhinged, acting like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.  The organization launched a full-throated “shock and awe” broadside to get the FCC to begin regulating “neutrality” over the Internet.   Along with fellow liberal travelers at Public Knowledge, Free Press posted scathing attacks suggesting that FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski had become a tool of corporate interests and a “toothless bureaucrat.”

As enjoyable as it is to watch these guys work themselves into a frenzy on Net neutrality, it’s even more fun to admire the irony: Free Press is pushing exactly the kind of Executive Branch power-grab that liberals scorned loudly during the Bush years!

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Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection commercial grabbed the hearts and souls of Americans and never quite let go. Twenty-six years later, if you say “Its morning again in America”, most people will immediately know what you are referring to.

I was only a year old when the commercial was released, and even before YouTube helped to make all things new again, I knew that phrase and commercial.

It’s simple message of renewal and scenes of Americana breathe life into a weary patriotic soul and perhaps makes us yearn for the decade that is becoming a distant memory in more ways than we would like to think of.

Except the fashion. I think we can all agree that that can stay in the past.

We all are waiting for “Morning in America” again, and it isn’t going unnoticed.

Quaker Oats recently released a new marketing campaign called “Be Amazing”. With it, they released a commercial that is almost identical to “Morning in America”… except without the 80’s fashion and statistics.

What mattered though was still there.

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For-profit education is under assault from elitists who hate the idea of free market educational institutions.  It is also under attack from bureaucrats at the U.S. Department of Education who are trying to make it hard for students to arm themselves with the education needed to find a job.  Elitism is alive and well at the Department of Education.

The Department of Education announced this week that they are “on schedule to implement new regulations of the for-profit education sector dealing with gainful employment and 13 other issues to protect students and taxpayers.”  The non-profit sector feels threatened; therefore allies in the Administration are trying to use the power of the federal government to provide non profit schools a competitive edge to slow the growth of for-profit institutions.  For-profit institutions are the trend and they are becoming more popular.

Senator Jim Risch (R-ID) has introduced legislation to prevent the Department of Education from denying federal financial aid to students attending for-profit colleges and vocational certificate programs.  Senator Risch said of his effort:

The ‘gainful employment’ rules could deny hundreds of thousands of students access to the training and skills development they need to secure a job in today’s troubled economy.  Highly-skilled workers are in high demand in certain sectors and propriety schools are uniquely qualified to meet that need.  It is simply irresponsible for the government to throw roadblocks in front of students and institutions at a time when job creation in America should be the administration’s number one priority.

Senator Risch’s legislation, S.3837, the Education for All Act, would forbid the Department of Education from singling out students from proprietary and vocational institutions and treat them differently than other students.  These institutions have proven to be uniquely qualified to help students find jobs in today’s complex economy. (more…)

Today, in 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor is sworn in as a Justice on the United States Supreme Court. Nominated by President Ronald Reagan, she is the first woman to serve on the Court.