Liberal pundits are scrambling for explanations as to why Herman Cain’s poll numbers haven’t been dented by the sexual harassment allegations. With apparently more coming, they are secretly hoping that something, anything, will make drop the poll numbers of a candidate who could plausibly defuse any knee-jerk accusations of racism by the Obama campaign.

What they may not realize is that there are in a Catch-22 situation of their own making. The timing of Anita Hill’s accusations made the public suspicious from the start and aware that she was being brought forward because liberals could not win in the marketplace of ideas. The same reaction may be happening now, since all of these women were brought forward when Cain rose in the polls.

So far polls show that the public doesn’t buy into the accusations, but consider if they do.

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This recent decision has been in the making since 1990 when the class action Coleman v. Brown was filed in District Court that found that California “prisoners with serious mental illness do not receive minimal, adequate care.” Then in 2001 Plata v. Brown said “the State (California) conceded that deficiencies in prison medical care violated prisoners’ Eighth Amendment rights and stipulated to a remedial injunction.”

In 2005 when California did not comply with the “remedial injunction” a three-judge court was empowered “to order reductions in the prison population.” All of this is further explained in the recent ninety-one-page U. S. Supreme Court decision that can be found under “Recent Decisions” here and selecting Brown v. Plata.

Reading the text of the decision the court “concluded that it would be possible to reduce the prison population ‘in a manner that preserves public safety and the operation of the criminal justice system.’”

The decision says the state has created “a certain and unacceptable risk of continuing violations of the rights of sick and mentally ill prisoners, with the result that many more will die or needlessly suffer.” Further that, “The constitution does not permit this wrong.”

The court used a statement from the former heads of correctional systems in Washington, Maine, and Pennsylvania, to justify that California prisons are “criminogenic” and a statement from a chief probation officer who testified that “it seems like (the prisons) produce additional criminal behavior”. In that same passage California’s Little Hoover Commission stated, “California communities are burdened with absorbing 123,000 offenders returning from prison, often more dangerous than when they left.”

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Andrew Breitbart was in Washington last week to promote his new book, “Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World!” He visited The Heritage Foundation to talk about the Democrat-Media Complex, his conversion to conservatism, how the Clarence Thomas hearings changed his life, and his future plans. Here’s the full video of his speech (approximately 30 minutes).

If you tuned in to Rush Limbaugh yesterday, you probably caught El Rushbo talking about Andrew’s new book.  Rush reminds us that Andrew, yes, Andrew Breitbart, “was a big lefty until he heard me.”  Me, meaning…Rush Limbaugh.

By the way, great news!  Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World has been hovering between #1 and #2 on the Amazon Bestseller’s List in Non-Fiction, and between #10 and #12 Overall. Congratulations, Andrew!!!

Check out Andrew’s list of upcoming appearances and other press coverage.

Andrew Breitbart sits down with FOX News’ Sean Hannity on April 18, 2011 to discuss his new book, “Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World,” released April 15, 2011.  It wasn’t all just book conversation though…you’ll have to watch it and see!

Check out Andrew’s list of upcoming appearances and other press coverage.

John Hawkins of RightWing News recently interviewed Andrew Breitbart about his new book.  It’s a fun interview and a great read!

I always find it fascinating when people who used to be liberal say they turned to the right. That happened with you. Can you tell us about it?

Well, it’s a cliché from the left to the right. And it’s usually a story of opportunism in those few cases where the people move from the right to the left. It’s almost embarrassing to go back into my liberal background because it was about as shallow a belief system as humanly possible. It was go-along to get-along social. It was living in Los Angeles, being young, and single, and flowing with the trendy liberal crowd.

When I started to work in Hollywood at a fairly low level delivering scripts around town, listening to AM talk radio, I at first listened to it as a novelty. But I started to have certain things in my life going on such as living in a rent controlled apartment, having listened to the Clarence Thomas hearings, the OJ Simpson trial — I just started to see trends in my personal experiences that ran so contrary to what the media narratives were. At first I was flummoxed by it and then I just started to listen to certain people on the radio who were more clear thinking than the professors that I had in college.

I remember thinking when I was in college that a lot of these known Chomsky-like, verbose high lefty thinkers made absolutely no sense but I thought that was my problem. So when I started to listen to conservative thinkers and to read conservative thinkers, there was a clarity of thought. It wasn’t muddled. It wasn’t confusing. It started to make sense at an intellectual level and tie into the values that my parents gave me when I was a young kid that I diverted from when I was in high school.

So it was basically a reconnecting with everything that my parents attempted to instill in me in my youth. It has made me sleep a lot better at night, being centered and oriented with human nature as opposed to living in a world of self loathing nihilism, trying to undo human nature, and trying to create a path towards an unrealistic utopia.

Now, you were recently banned from the front page of The Huffington Post….

Oh, the tragedy of my life.

(Laughs) It is, it is. Apparently you made some sort of ad hominem attack on Van Jones and The Huffington Post has a policy against that. It must have been in place for at least two minutes or so before you were banned. Can you talk about that?

Read the entire review at RightWing News.

Check out Andrew’s list of upcoming appearances and other press coverage.

From Politico:

Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert wants Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate whether the liberal group Common Cause should lose its nonprofit status, after a conservative website published footage of protesters calling for the lynching of conservative Supreme Court justices.

The footage shows enraged protesters making inflammatory and threatening comments about Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, as well as Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas.

Gohmert said that the inflammatory remarks are more troubling given the attack on Arizona Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords earlier this year.

“We shouldn’t have any organization, especially one that says it’s nonpartisan, out there stirring up hatred and animosity to the point that people would say, “Let’s string up a justice of the Supreme Court as well as his wife,” Gohmert said.

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Many on the left, including the Center for Media and Democracy, are now challenging the veracity of Christian Hartsock and my separate but damning video selections taken at the Van Vones/Common Cause/Code Pink “Uncloak the Kochs” rally in Rancho Mirage, California, on January 30, 2011:

In a peaceful rally of more than 1,000 people, a crew of videographers who have worked with Breitbart egged a few into making outrageous, bigoted remarks on camera, then presented them as representative of the entire crowd and the rally sponsors. None of the interviewees was identified, and some looked to be wearing wigs or disguises. Given Breitbart’s history of promoting staged videos, it is difficult to have any confidence in the authenticity of the clips.

For two years the left has tried desperately to find video evidence of Tea Party participants to damn the whole. They have failed so miserably that it became necessary for the creation of the group, CrashTheTeaParty.org, which called for opponents of the Tea Party to dress up as Nazis or in other offensive uniforms, or to carry troubling signs, all in the hopes of getting the mainstream media to falsely portray the fake Tea Party protesters as authentic and representative of the whole.

Well, Christian and I needn’t instigate fake people dressing and acting foolishly, in a racist fashion, or threatening violence. Those at the Rancho Mirage anti-Koch rally (against capitalism, free markets, and gummy bears) have been more than forthright in their extremism. (And now look at what we found in Madison, Wisconsin!)

Since Lisa Graves and the Center for Media and Democracy has now challenged the authenticity of the videos we took, we feel it’s appropriate to isolate those who made the hateful remarks by name.

The first is self-identified “Roger Fraser from Chicago, and happy to be here!”

I found him yelling “revolution now!” as I was rollerblading amongst the anti-capitalism H8 chanters.

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Common Cause would have us believe they aren’t responsible for hateful rhetoric spewed at the Right from protesters at a recent Koch brothers protest they organized. A statement was issued only after it came to light that a protester had called for the lynching of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. But a review of the official event video proves that Common Cause actually worked to inspire such hate through the selection of official speakers. They cannot simply disown it now.

Common Cause condemns bigotry, hateful statements caught on film at rally

Common Cause’s 40 year history of holding power accountable has been marked by a commitment to decency and civility – in public and private. So we are of course outraged to find that a few of those attending the events around a gathering Common Cause helped to organize Sunday near Palm Springs voiced hateful, narrow-minded sentiments to an interviewer in the crowd.

In their own clips of chosen and highlighted speakers for the formal panel they organized at the protest, you will repeatedly hear the Right, their honest political opposition, cast as hateful, evil, cruel, and worse. Writing at Hot Air, John Sexton pointed out just some of the official unhinged rhetoric from Van Jones at the Common Cause event.

We will not live on an economic plantation run by the Koch brothers.

In this video, another official panelist, DeAnn McEwan, claims the Koch’s “have their fingers on the pillows that are suffocating all of us,” while citing the plight of various individuals needing intensive medical treatment. In effect, official Common Cause panelist McEwan is accusing the Kochs of being murderers. She even details a patient’s failed struggle to cling to life, in essence, blaming her death squarely on the Kochs. (more…)

Ginni Thomas’s call to Anita Hill has, not surprisingly, provoked columns and blogging speculating what motivated the call, some wanting to relive those hearings of 20 years ago.

But how about considering the simplest and most straightforward scenario?

Mrs. Thomas knows that her husband was slandered. That his name and reputation remain tarnished as result of the sleaziest kinds of lies and character assassination delivered by Anita Hill. She knows, better than anyone other than Clarence Thomas himself, the pain her husband endures as result of these lies.

The alleged point of those Senate hearings was to examine a man’s qualifications and confirm his nomination as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Justice Thomas’s performance on the Court over these twenty years has been exemplary. One might not agree with his conservative views, but his scholarship, professionalism, and original contributions are well established.

So is it inconceivable that Ginni Thomas might consider reaching out to Anita Hill to consider, after all this time, extinguishing, as only she can, the sordid cloud of innuendo that she created?

But it’s more than just how Clarence Thomas feels.

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Barack Obama’s infamous phrase “Just words.  Just speeches” keeps ringing in my ears.  While the U.S. economy crumbles and the world teeters toward war, the President busies himself with words and speeches (not to mention photo ops and vacations and parties).  Appalling, yes.  Surprising, no.  To quote Yogi Berra: “This is like deja vu all over again.”

Today’s leaders of the Democratic Party are not at all progressive.  In fact, their ideology is regressive – a throwback to an ideology popular in the 1920s and 30s and 40s.  Their vision is that people they consider the “ignorant many” should be governed by people who see themselves as the “enlightened few.”

At the core of this socialist outlook on life is what Friedrich Hayek called “the fatal conceit.”  That’s a person assuming that, if he were given unlimited power, then everything would be perfect.  He projects that government employees would act on his behalf.   He sees government employees as a proxy for his own egotistical fantasies.

A faceless bureaucracy is too impersonal, however, for some socialists, who prefer a proxy with a face.  These people prefer to focus their aspirations on a charismatic leader, who attracts hordes of followers, all dreaming that the great leader would, in fact, impose their own will on society, if only He were in charge of everything!

Relieved of the burden of having to think for themselves, these fanatics can easily find their political passions unrestrained by reason.  This fascist mentality can produce the thuggish brutality of a Benito Mussolini regime.

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Thirty-seven current Democrat U.S. Senators, along with former Senators Barack Obama and Joseph Biden, believed that Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, or Samuel Alito were not sufficiently qualified to be on the Supreme Court. Using their own standards, Elena Kagan is also not sufficiently qualified and these 39 Democrats therefore should not support her nomination.

Bork, Thomas, Roberts and Alito, at the time they were nominated for the Supreme Court, had significantly more experience, scholarship, and/or accomplishments than Kagan does now.

Bork served in the U.S. Marine Corps, in private practice for several years, as U.S. Solicitor General, as one of America’s most influential antitrust scholars, and as an U.S. circuit judge. Thomas served as Missouri’s Assistant Attorney General, in-house counsel for a major corporation, a U.S. Senate aide, Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and a U.S. circuit judge. Roberts served as Special Assistant to the U.S. Attorney General, Associate White House Counsel, Principal Deputy Solicitor General, and head of the appellate practice at Hogan & Hartson (now Hogan Lovells), which was the oldest major law firm headquartered in Washington, D.C. and which now has some 2,500 attorneys worldwide. Roberts also argued dozens of Supreme Court cases and was an U.S. circuit judge prior to his Supreme Court nomination. Alito, among other things, argued a dozen Supreme Court cases as Assistant to the U.S. Solicitor General, was U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, and was an U.S. circuit judge.

Kagan does not have this same level of accomplishment.

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Civil rights.  Inalienable rights.  Human rights.  Animal rights.  Individual rights.  Group rights.  God-given rights.  Sacred rights.  Natural rights.  Positive rights.  Negative rights.  Children’s rights.  Parent’s rights.  Patient’s rights.  Property rights.  Personal rights.  Basics rights.  Fundamental rights.

Just what is a right?  Can some rights be more basics or fundamental than others?  Which is more important, a basic right or a fundamental right?  Do the rights of the many outweigh the rights of the few?  Are rights absolute?  One could assert whole new kinds of rights and then argue about where they fit in among all the other rights.  How about essential rights, or core rights, or perhaps preeminent rights?

Definitions of the nature and origin of rights vary widely – from a gift from God, to one of Thomas Jefferson or James Madison’s tenets, all the way down to “a good thing” – but these disputes can be left to theologians and historians and scatterbrains.  Let constitutional scholars debate the fine points of original intent or understanding (of each delegate?  or the drafter of a particular clause?  or the Convention as a whole?  or Congress?  or the ratifying state conventions?).  What really matters is how rights function within our constitutional system.

A person saying he has the right to XYZ, for instance, is saying that regardless of what other people want, he must have XYZ and society must give it to him.  To admit there is such a right is to accept that the opinion of the majority on his having XYZ is meaningless; it is to accept that your opinion on the issue is meaningless, too.  As anti-democratic limitations on the scope of majority rule, rights are like provisions of the Constitution.  Indeed, they are one and the same, because in a practical sense – the only sense that matters – a right is a government policy that must be so regardless of majority will.

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Liberals love to perpetuate the stereotype that “liberal” judges rule in favor of minorities, the poor, and the little guy (Good Things), while “conservative” judges rule in favor of evil corporations, police departments, and white males (Bad Things). This parallels the stereotype that Democrat politicians help the criminally accused and the working man while Republican politicians help evil corporations and police departments.

The White House and their allies are already trying to push these long-ingrained stereotypes in preparation for this summer’s upcoming Supreme Court confirmation battle to replace Justice Stevens’ seat. Like most stereotypes, however, they are not true.

Republican Supreme Court appointees have long-stood against heinous racial discrimination. For example, President Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican, appointed Justice John Marshall Harlan, the lone justice to dissent in the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883) and Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896); these cases permitted segregation and “separate but equal” discrimination. President Herbert Hoover, a Republican, appointed Justice Owen Roberts (full disclosure: a fellow Penn and Daily Pennsylvanian alumnus), the lone Republican appointee on the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 213 (1944), a case where six Democrat-appointed justices ruled that the Constitution permitted the government to forcibly herd U.S. citizens of a particular ethnicity into concentration camps. Justice Roberts’ vigorous dissent said that “convicting a citizen as a punishment for not submitting to imprisonment in a concentration camp, [solely] based on his ancestry, without evidence or inquiry concerning his loyalty and good disposition towards the United States” was a “clear violation of Constitutional rights.” Interestingly, the liberals preferred “assembly area” as the euphemism for these concentration or internment camps.

Even Justice Stevens, whom the media now calls a “liberal lion,” did not stand up for the “little guy” nor his First , Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights as much as “conservative” justices like Justices Scalia and Thomas did.

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In my other life, I’m a food writer for The Boston Herald – a cultural raisin in the sun in the far-left world of food journalism here in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts.

Voltaire

So I was shocked, during a dinner the other night with a bunch of folks in the biz, when one local restaurant critic declared that he had “a very illiberal” view of abortion: he was pro-life! Several table-mates nearly spit up their merlot and brie.

I stood by his side, but not by his phraseology. “It’s a liberal view if you’re the baby,” I said, making my point but not many friends in the process.

The incident highlighted an issue that’s been eating at me for quite some time: the misuse of the word “liberal” in the current political lexicon.

As you know, the American cultural divide is defined by two terms: on the right we have “conservatives” and on the left we have “liberals.”

There’s only one problem: the leftists are anything but “liberal.” In fact, I stopped using the term “liberal” to describe leftists quite some time ago. I call them what they are: “leftists,” i.e., people who espouse weakness in the face of dictators overseas and favor a dictatorial big-government doctrine here at home.

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As far as white people go, you couldn’t get much whiter than Teddy Kennedy. He was utterly luminescent. Running around in his boxer shorts, chasing the college girls his nephew William brought home that night, he must have appeared almost ghost-like. Yet when he proposed Nationalized Healthcare, we soundly rejected it.

I can’t think of a bigger white cracker redneck than William Jefferson Clinton. He grew up in a trailer, and had a pick-up truck lined with Astroturf. While he was fooling around in the Oval Office, his wife tried to get Nationalized Health Care passed. America hated that idea so much, that we turned over the House and Senate to the Republicans for the first time in 40 years.

But now that Barack Obama has managed to shove a deplorable piece of questionably constitutional legislation through the corrupt purchasable legislature, we are tarred as racists for criticizing his actions.

We weren’t even allowed to hope he failed. That remark caused a lot of ruckus over the past year. For some reason if you don’t want the President’s agenda to pass, you are rooting against the Nation. Yet for eight years our opponents were allowed to get away with the remark: “I support the troops but I don’t support the mission.”

It always sounded kind of dumb to me, like “I support the Cubs, I just don’t want them to win the World Series” (and in my lifetime, they’ve yet to disappoint). Now when we on the Right say that we support the President, but not his policies, we are ignorant bigots. Which brings us around to the most common rationale you hear on the Left. “They’re only opposed to Barack Obama’s health bill, because they don’t want a black guy in the White House.”

I beg to differ.

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UPDATE: The bounty is now $100,000 for any audio/video footage of the N-word being hurled at Congressmen John Lewis and Andre Carson.

***

After 14 months of committing 100% to health care reform, the day after the signing of the Health Care bill was to mark the Democratic Party’s new primary concern: destroy the uprising, annihilate by all means necessary, the Tea Party movement.

The first sign that a plan was in place was the ham-fisted, high-camp posturing of the most controversial members of the Democratic caucus walking through the peaceful but animated “Tea Party” demonstrators on Capitol Hill. There is no reason for these elected officials to walk above ground through the media circus amid their ideological foes. The natural route is the tunnels between the House office buildings and the Capitol. By crafting a highly symbolic walk of the Congressional Black Caucus through the majority white crowd, the Democratic Party was looking to provoke a negative reaction. They didn’t get it. So they made it up.

The proof that the N-word wasn’t said once, let alone 15 times, as Rep. Andre Carson claimed, is that soon thereafter — even though the press dutifully reported it as truth — Nancy Pelosi followed the alleged hate fest, which allegedly included someone spitting, by walking through the crowd with a gavel in hand and a shit-eating grin on her face. Had the incidents reported by the Congressional Black Caucus actually occurred the Capitol Police would have been negligent to allow the least popular person to that crowd – the Speaker – to put herself in harm’s way.

That crowd was a sea of new-media equipment. Not only were tens of thousands people armed with handicams, BlackBerrys and iPods, so also was the mainstream media there, covering every inch of the event. Why did not one mainstream media outlet raise the specter that perhaps a video would exist to prove the events occurred? I am still dealing with the same press telling me we didn’t prove that ACORN was aiding and abetting criminal activity because we “did not provide enough audio and video evidence.” (Insert laugh track.) Is there not a blatant double standard at play here? Nancy Pelosi tipped her hand that race was a central part of her strategy. She invoked the Civil Rights Act and compared it with the universally reviled health care bill. Her caucus is doubling down on the civil-rights rhetoric. There are no coincidences.

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Isn’t it finally time for the behind-closed-door racial slurs to die?  If our legislators truly do represent the people, then, how is it possible that in this nation, with so many people, of so many different ethnicities and races, an individual could  be castigated for accented speech or the texture of their hair or the color of their skin?

I was born in 1958, at the cusp of one of the biggest change in our country’s ideology– the civil rights movement.  But, six years later, desegregation had still not infiltrated all aspects of our national society and in Louisiana, it had had almost no effect at all.

As  a six year old, desegregation had little impact, until the day that Bobby Kennedy came to our house and, sitting at our kitchen table, convinced my dad to “try once more” and apply to have me attend an all-white, private school in New Orleans.  That day changed my life.

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Yesterday, Washington Post columnist and former Bush II speechwriter Michael Gerson played a long slow violin solo over the death of the mainstream media. There’s nothing new in his piece. Dazed with panic as the circle of financial ruin closes in, we’ve heard this song many times before from our ink-stained dinosaurs. And true to form, Gerson can’t break the mold. It’s all there, the rose-colored glasses, denial, and a heaping helping of rationalization.

Once again, from that familiar MSM perch where one can look down their nose at the great unwashed who just don’t understand the magnificent tradition of journalism they’re about to lose, Gerson blames We the People for no longer wanting  to pay for our news and choosing partisan sources “that reinforce and exaggerate … political predispositions.”

How absurd. (more…)