When the Democrats aren’t cheating on their taxes like Charlie Rangel or forgetting to pay them like Timothy Geithner, they’re busy lambasting Republicans for actually paying theirs—albeit at a rate unsatisfactory to them.

In yet another fantastic display of hypocrisy, the liberal mainstream media spent the week attacking Governor Mitt Romney for having a 15% tax rate.  Since the media is loath to engage in any actual investigative journalism when it comes to the Democrats, I decided to do a little of my own.  Here’s what I found.

Start with Senator John Kerry who is among the 400 richest Americans thanks to his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry’s, inheritance.  Their last publicly released tax returns in 2003 revealed that they paid a rate of 13.4% on a declared income of $5.5 million. This from the man who, just last year, tried to avoid half a million dollars in taxes by anchoring his yacht in Rhode Island rather than Massachusetts. Estimates pin Kerry’s net worth somewhere between $700 million and $3.2 billion compared to Romney’s lower net worth of $202 million.

Take a look at former Vice Presidential Candidate John Edwards’s 2003 tax returns, and you’ll find that he paid an astonishingly low rate of 5.1%.  Seems a bit low for a man with a net worth hovering around $54.7 million.

But, of course, Kerry and Edwards’ income tax rates were protected under lock and key by the mainstream media during the 2004 presidential race against President George W. Bush.   Speaking of Bush, you’ll also never hear anyone mention the fact that he paid a rate of 27.7% in the same year.

Tax rates aside, in yet another attempt to make something out of nothing, the media has been reporting relentlessly on Romney donating millions in cash and stocks to the Mormon Church, as if tithing to one’s church is somehow a negative.  Thanks to donations like Romney’s, the Mormon Church is able to sustain a large philanthropic network and send young men on two year missions that provide extensive humanitarian aid to a countless number of people in need.  If you call that bad, I’d hate to see what you call good.

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Washington (AP) Following is an edited transcript of Secretary of State Designate Joe Biden’s hearing today before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Moved by President Obama’s pleadings, Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton resigned their posts last week in order to switch positions and become America’s first Cabinet-level tag team.

On Monday, Clinton won Congressional approval to be the nation’s Number Two, adding a hefty bottom to the Democrats’ 2012 Presidential undercard.

CHAIRMAN JOHN KERRY:  Good morning, everyone.  The Committee is delighted to welcome former Vice President Biden, or, as he was referred to by White House pollsters, “Dead-Weight Joe.”

Once confirmed, he will oversee the steaming pile of dung that’s been our foreign policy under the capable Mrs. Clinton.  I assure you, Joe Biden can manage the load.

We all know America is a nation in decline, a nation hurtling toward the depths.  With his misplaced sense of humor, endearing ineptitude, and characteristic superciliousness, Joe is well-equipped to lead us into irrelevance.

Before we begin the questioning, I would like to offer a few thoughts about. . . .

. . . . defeating the worldwide scourge of male pattern baldness, preventing the unnecessary loss of trillions of innocent follicles. . . .

. . . . extraditing Dick Cheney to the Hague to account for his. . . .

. . . . returning Texas and California to Mexico, from whom we unjustly. . . .

. . . . calming Americans’ unreasoning dread of a Global Caliphate . . .

. . . . encouraging India to vaporize Pakistan, ushering in an era of peace in that troubled. . . .

Now, to save time, we’ll dispense with a self-serving statement from the Ranking Member and my esteemed colleague, Senator Lugar, and go right to questioning.  Suit you, Mr. Vice President?

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During the 2004 presidential election, President Clinton’s former chief of staff and President Obama’s current Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta offered Sen. John Kerry and his wife Teresa Heinz Kerry a sage piece of advice. The Senior Senator from Massachusetts would do well to heed it now:

“[The Kerrys] will have to seriously consider putting [their investments] in a blind trust,” Panetta said. “All of us who have served in government have had to do that.  In the end, it is the better way to go, because it removes any suspicion that a decision is self-serving. You have enough problems just making a decision, without dealing with the concern you may be putting money in your pocket.

Secretary Panetta is right. In the spirit of transparency and maintaining the public trust, Sen. Kerry must place his assets in a blind trust.

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BigGovernment.com has obtained records of Massachusetts Democrat Senator John Kerry and his wife Teresa Heinz’s stock portfolios that show almost perfectly timed pharmaceutical stock trades during the Obamacare debate, which fattened their already enormous personal fortune.

The documents further support allegations of suspicious trading leveled during Sunday’s 60 Minutes report about the explosive new book by investigative reporter and Breitbart News editor Peter Schweizer, Throw Them All Out.

Sen. John Kerry’s position on the powerful Senate Finance Committee’s Health Subcommittee gives him direct access to critical information regarding health care policy. In July 2009, pharmaceutical industry representatives met with key members of Congress to flesh out the Obamacare bill. Then, in November 2009, with the bill’s passage was looking more likely, the Kerrys’ portfolios reflect a drug stock buying spree.

First, $750,000 worth of stock in drug maker Teva Pharmaceuticals was added to their portfolios at around $50 a share. Once Obamacare passed, the value of the stock rose to $62 per share. Subsequently, in 2010, a portion of Teva holdings was dumped from the Kerry portfolio, resulting in tens of thousands of dollars in capital gains (exact profits are unclear because politicians are only required to report ranges, not exact dollar amounts). (more…)

While Obama tours the country promoting his personal donation plan, the Republican Presidential hopefuls are in a pitched battle for the nomination and arguing which tax simplification plan is best. Threatened with the possibility of rate cuts, the Media and politicians trot out the usual suspects of lies about tax hikes and tax cuts.  This is a battle Republicans must win and, to do so, they need to expose those lies.

Keep in mind that the battle between those who create wealth and those that want to redistribute it, mainly politicians, is as old as civilization itself.  We read of tax battles and even reform in every age, like Urukagina’s tax reductions in Babylonia/Sumer in 2350 BC.  Equally venerable are the constant set of demagogic lies by those against tax cuts and simplification.  It is important to note that politicians like complicated tax codes and high tax rates because they control those rates and dispense the loopholes and regulations that complicate the tax code.  Tax simplification means they lose power.  As a result, resistance to tax reform is more often the rule than reform. As for the lies, they abound, so let’s consider just a few:

Lie # 1: Tax cuts cause deficits/Tax hikes balance the budget.  The Media and the Left often say that the Reagan and Bush tax cuts led to deficits while Clinton’s tax hikes led to a balanced budget. In truth, according to the IRS, federal tax revenues rose dramatically after the overall Reagan tax cuts/reforms (98%) and the Bush tax cuts (a record $700+ billion). This is just as they did after the Harding/Coolidge cuts (61% revenue increase) and after the Kennedy/Johnson cuts (62% revenue increase).  Those are the four major income tax reductions we have had since the inception of the income tax in 1913 and every time revenues rose after they were in place – every time.

So did the tax rate cut cause a deficit? The lie, of course, is to blame the revenue gathering mechanism (tax code/rate cut) instead of the revenue spending mechanism, i.e. Congress/Presidents.  The spenders kept spending – often at an accelerated rate when they saw the new revenues.  Thus, the fault for continuing deficits lies not with tax rate cuts, which produced higher revenues, but with politicians who spent too much.

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Across the country, utility companies are in the process of installing digital AMR (Automatic Meter Reading) “smart meters”.  This will allow for remote meter reading instead of having to send a meter reader out to your home.  What appears to be a great advancement in electric meter technology will allow for your home to ultimately be connected to the “smart grid.”

Mission Point Capital Partners, “a private investment firm established by Mark Schwartz, former President and Chief Executive Officer of Soros Fund Management and former Chairman of Goldman Sachs (Asia); Jesse M. Fink, co-founder and former Chief Operating Officer of priceline.com; and Mark J. Cirilli, former Chief Investment Officer of Marshall Street Management,” explains:

The Smart Grid is a collection of energy control and monitoring devices, software, networking and communications infrastructure that are installed in homes, businesses, and throughout the electricity distribution grid. This collective system provides a “nervous system” for the grid and for customers that provides the ability to monitor and control energy consumption comprehensively in real time. Think of it as the Internet for Energy… Smart meters and other smart grid technologies… are designed with this ability, and they can provide the infrastructure that will support the implementation of responsible climate change policy. [emphasis added]

Smart thermostats, smart meters and the smart grid will provide the utility with information and the ability to monitor energy consumption throughout the country. These devices will enable them to regulate your use of electricity and turn it on and off at their discretion.  According to SmartGrid.gov, “The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act) provided the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) with about $4.5 billion to modernize the electric power grid and to implement Title XIII of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA), which focused on the Smart Grid.”  This site shows the government’s progress  in implementing smart grid technology through the country.  The money put into this is staggering! The Solyndra scandal is only the tip of the iceberg of this Administration’s green radicalism. (more…)

There is a long 20^th century history of Wall Street protests in America.  After all, Wall Street is the financial center of the country. Today, we’re in a financial crisis so Wall Street (or its financial center equivalent in other cities) is the logical place to protest, right?

Actually, we think it’s a poor second to Lafayette Park across from the White House — where the current crisis was hatched and nurtured.  No, this isn’t an anti Obama screed.  His predecessors (several of them) are far more to blame for the current economic disarray in which we find ourselves, although we think his proposed remedies are anything but remedial.

“Occupy Wall Street” and “Wall Street Greed” are great memes.  They are highly memorable and easily passed on as a rallying cry. Unsurprisingly, President Obama and the left has sought to adopt them.  Of course, the protestors are an outgrowth of the wider sense of entitlement many young people have developed (including quotas disguised under the term “diversity”).  As George Will stated in his column in The Washington Post on October 13, 2011:

“Demands posted in [Occupy Wall Street’s] name include a ‘guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment’; a $20‑an‑hour minimum wage (above the $16.00 entry wage the UAW just negotiated with GM); ending ‘the fossil fuel economy’; ‘open borders’ so ‘anyone can travel anywhere to work and live’; $1 trillion dollars for infrastructure; $1 trillion dollars for ‘ecological restoration’; ‘free college education’, and forgiveness of ‘all debt on the entire planet.”

But abuses by Wall Street are an affect, not the cause of the current economic disarray. As anyone who has read our essays knows, we carry no brief for Wall Street excesses or those of the various Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSE’s) that are the real culprits. But Wall Street was simply the vehicle by which the White House, Congress, the Fed and the Washington bureaucracy carried out very ill advised objectives. As is well known by now, the seeds of our current discontent were sowed a quarter century ago when President Jimmy Carter signed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).  This legislation and the regulatory policies that it set in motion may have been well intentioned, but as history teaches, roads paved merely with good intentions often lead where no one wants to go.

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Recently, Obama called a joint session of Congress and on September 8 he stood before it to introduce his new jobs bill. At that time, he didn’t actually have a jobs bill, but promised he would soon. Then yesterday, on the White House lawn, he basically gave a condensed version of the same speech and he was grinning from ear to ear because he actually had a bill with him this time.

The bill was the American Jobs Act of 2011. And the catch is it’s really just Stimulus Part Two: its focus isn’t creating jobs but raising taxes.

In all honesty, Obama’s job bill is basically a promise to cut taxes by raising them.

It will increase taxes on corporate jet owners by a total of $3 billion, on capital gains by $18 billion, on oil and gas companies by $40 billion, and on individuals making over $200,000 a year by a total of $400 billion (over 10 years).

This is a mess folks. The tax on corporate jet owners is class warfare plain and simple. It’s one of the taxes that Obama tries to justify with his one-size-fits-all-mantra: “Time for the wealthy to pay their fair share.”And the tax on capital gains is nothing less than highway robbery. It will be done by categorizing some capital gains from hedge funds as income, thus allowing them to be taxed (in upper tax brackets) at more than twice the normal 15% tax currently in place for capital gains.

Does it still sound like the American Jobs Act of 2011 is about cutting taxes and creating jobs to you?

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Am I the only one who grew quite tired of seeing John Kerry this weekend on the MSM talk show circuit deriding the Tea Party and what he is proffering as their responsibility for the S&P action Friday?  “This is without a doubt a Tea Party downgrade,” he fumed on Meet The Press. The common narrative being offered by Mr. Kerry et. al. is that the right-wing GOP held the prospect of not raising the debt ceiling—thus forcing a default—like a gun to the head of a hostage government.  They then defiantly maintained their ideological rigidity by rejecting any revenue increases as part of the debt compromise.  Faced with the Scylla of spending cuts with no  tax hike but the necessary debt ceiling increase, or the Charybdis of a default and potential ruin, the Democrats caved and the GOP won a pyrrhic victory while irresponsibly selling the nation’s future down the river to inevitable downgrade.

To all of the 63,239,109 citizens who voted against Kerry’s bid to be president in 2004, I thank you.  One weekend of this man was bad enough.  Only one driven by blind partisanship could blame the Tea Party for a downgrade that was, as economics professor Steve Horowitz rightly pointed out: “50 to 75 years in the making.  Us spending beyond our means, trying to do things we simply can’t do, and not having the revenues to support that spending. Spending that just shouldn’t be there in the first place.”  Indeed, the moment the New Deal kicked in, the clock started ticking.  S&P’s message was clear.  Welfare statism, the kind of pay-as-you go ponzi schemes masked as social safety nets that John Kerry pines for, is a fool’s bargain.  Ask Europe.

How dare Kerry deride representatives for following through with their commitments to their electorate?  The sweep of the House for the GOP in 2010 was as clear a mandate as can be offered by the American public that the reckless spending had to stop—a mandate to which the Tea Party representatives especially remained faithful.  They were sent to Washington to stop the out-of-control spending bus cold.  The entrenched interests like Kerry wanted the bus to continue heading off the cliff at 60 mph.  Yet, because the Tea Partiers did not want to “compromise” and slow the bus down to 30 mph they were labeled “extremists.”  They understand what Europe is learning.  The nanny state experiment that has lasted for a mere three generations is already collapsing under the weight of mathematics as so cleverly encapsulated in Margaret Thatcher’s famous quote…“you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

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Just when you thought the Progressive Movement could be more deeply invested in denial, now comes the absurd notion that somehow, the TEA Party Movement, whose pinnacle tenet is fiscal responsibility; which has devoutly insisted that the federal government cease the practice of spending beyond the tax revenue it gleans from taxpayers, that somehow it is the TEA Party Movement and their affiliated members of Congress who are responsible for the downgrade in the US credit rating by S&P and not the glad-handing spendthrifts of the big government, nanny state Progressive Movement.

“Bottom up, top down…inside out.”

Shameless partisan, Chicago Progressive operative and former senior advisor to Pres. Barack Obama, David “Say Anything, Lie, Cheat and Steal to Win” Axelrod is quoted as saying, “The fact of the matter is that this is essentially a Tea Party downgrade.”

US Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), who, it was revealed during the 2004 General Election, was fast and loose with the truth about his service in Vietnam, parroted Axelrod’s talking point, saying, Standard & Poor’s decision was “without question the Tea Party downgrade” because Tea Partiers held bipartisan lawmakers back from a bigger deal. This, even though the facts bear out that it was in fact Democrats who refused the deal, demanding almost a half trillion dollars in additional tax revenue be added to the mix.

And Howard Dean, Progressive ideologue extraordinaire, who has devolved into irrelevance since losing both his ill-fated presidential bid and the leadership post of the DNC, said, “I think they’re totally unreasonable and doctrinaire and not founded in reality. I think they’ve been smoking some of that tea, not just drinking it.”

One has to be impressed with the coordination it must take to ensure that all the political operatives in the Progressive Movement are using the exact same talking points during each and every interview almost at exactly at the same time. If one were of a curious mind the question of who is at the helm of the USS Propaganda would come to the forefront. Of course, we shouldn’t expect to find inquisitive minds of this nature within what used to be referred to as the mainstream media…they get their Cliff Notes from the same source.

Only from the minds of the Progressive Movement can we find a converse-reality in thinking so striking, so absurd, that it would condemn as being the cause of repercussions for fiscal irresponsibility those who are demanding that deficit spending come to a halt; that those who are demanding fiscal responsibility are responsible for fiscal irresponsibility.

Night is day and day is a tree.

Yet, even as the cancer of disingenuous, partisan, Progressive ideological madness comes “fast and furious” to the American people via the usual suspects in the alphabet media, it would appear that, increasingly, the American people are beginning to see through the political propaganda of the Far-Left.

A new Gallup poll – and we point out that Gallup leans Left – has concluded:

“Americans’ political ideology at the midyear point of 2011 looks similar to 2009 and 2010, with 41 percent self-identifying as conservative, 36 percent as moderate, and 21 percent as liberal.

“If this pattern continues, 2011 will be the third straight year that conservatives significantly outnumber moderates — the next largest ideological bloc. Liberalism has been holding steady for the past six years, averaging either 21 percent or 22 percent…”

“Among Republicans, conservatives currently outnumber moderates by nearly 3 to 1, 72 percent vs. 24 percent, while very few are liberal (4 percent)…

“Conservatism among independents increased fairly sharply in 2009, from 30 percent to 35 percent, largely explaining the expansion of conservatism nationally at that time, and it has held at that level since then.”

Meanwhile, a new Rasmussen Reports poll indicates that:

“…just 17 percent of likely US voters think the federal government today has the consent of the governed. 69 percent believe the government does not have that consent. 14 percent are undecided.

“The number of voters who feel the government has the consent of the governed — a foundational principle, contained in the Declaration of Independence — is down from 23 percent in early May and has fallen to its lowest level measured yet.

“Perhaps it’s no surprise voters feel this way since only 8 percent believe the average member of Congress listens to his or her constituents more than to their party leaders. That, too, is the lowest level measured to date. 84 percent think the average congressman listens to party leaders more than the voters they represent.”

So, with the Progressives and Democrats holding the Executive Branch, half of the Legislative Branch and just under half of the Judicial Branch (which, in and of itself has become increasingly useless in the eyes of the electorate), and with the overwhelming majority of American voters believing that the federal government does not have the consent of the governed, and with a mass movement of independents toward the Conservative political line of thinking – not to mention a move within the Democrat Party away from their fringe Progressive Left – is it a wise political move to continue jamming the disingenuous stick of non-factual propaganda into the political hornets’ nest that is the TEA Party Movement?

The American people have been awakened to the need to divine fact from fiction where the management of our country is concerned. This truth is self-evident in the results of the 2010 Mid Term Elections. That said, the only ones who seem to be in denial about the realities facing our country appear to be elected Progressive elitist politicians who would rather bankrupt the country while degrading its chances for recovery, all in the name of social engineering and social justice.

In times past, better men would have identified this behavior as treason. Perhaps it is time for those who identify with the principles of the TEA Party to “take the gloves off”; perhaps it is time for the American people to “downgrade” the Progressive Movement to its proper place…the rotting garbage heap of failed political ideology.

What do you think about that, Mr. Kerry? You had better go check with your puppet master for a response. Run along now.

It’s already happening – the liberal dream of a perpetual social welfare state where deadbeat liberal constituencies feed off of the work of productive conservative citizens in perpetuity is dying.  There’s no doubt about that; the only question left is how long and hard the process will be as the hideous leviathan the utopian liberal establishment has created convulses and dies.

It’s going to die hard.  And ugly.

The collapse is well-underway in Europe – Greece has gone from the cradle of democracy to a cesspool of union-fueled mobs – but America faces the same trauma.  As the contradictions inherent in the vision of a societal plan based on the notion that an ever-expanding pool of Democratic-voting serfs sucking the wealth away from the mostly Republican-oriented producers who labored to create it become more apparent, the reactions and rear-guard efforts of the terminal liberal elite will grow more extreme.

We are already seeing the liberal elite lash out in anger and frustration at what is a perfect storm of failure.  Glenn Reynolds, the legendary Instapundit, chronicles the daily disintegration, while the brilliant Mark Steyn’s cheery new book, After America: Get Ready for Armageddon, drops on August 8, 2011 – I’ll race you to Amazon to get a copy.

As the three components of the liberal establishment – the media, the unions and politicians – rage at the dying of the liberal light, the insanity meter will swing far into the red.  It’s already begun.  The Tea Party has dared to speak the truth, and the uncomfortable realities it has pointed out have destroyed the bogus consensus that has allowed the debt Titanic to sail giddily on toward the iceberg.  That’s why the establishment response is to demonize the popular movement.  We’re “terrorists” or “lunatics” or, bizarrely, “hobbits.”  Our crime is telling the truth.

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INTRODUCTION

I. Whoever Controls “The Narrative,” Controls the National Political Conversation

When it comes to most of today’s mainstream media we are no longer talking about an entity that reports truth or facts. Everything about the MSM is now about The Narrative. Even though they’re supposedly made up of separate and competing newsrooms, there’s a very good reason why the MSM as a whole is usually covering, emphasizing and amplifying the exact same stories. This is what The Narrative is and its usefulness to the MSM is how it pushes particular stories to the forefront of public awareness in order to further a political agenda — an agenda that 90% of the time is meant to aid the Left and damage the Right.

Another part of The Narrative is what the MSM chooses NOT to cover; what they willfully ignore.

You can see The Narrative at work as I write this. The same MSM that assured us that when it came to Barack Obama, the church he attended for two decades didn’t matter, is now obsessing over a church Rep. Michele Bachman’s hasn’t attended in over a year. Here you have two separate (and wildly hypocritical) narratives at work: one meant to protect a Democratic presidential candidate, the other meant to damage a GOP presidential candidate.

On the other hand, you can also see The Narrative working by what’s NOT being covered today. The same MSM that obsessed over the Valerie Plame non-story is currently all but ignoring Obama’s brewing “Fast and Furious” gunrunning scandal –mainly because it’s exactly the kind of scandal that can swamp a presidency into paralyzing, under-40 approval ratings.

II. How Alternative Media Created the MSM’s Need for a Media Matters for America

Prior to the rise of the Internet, the Left almost completely owned the narrative. The simple truth is that before Al Gore’s invention was fully realized, other than a few esteemed columnists, the media had no serious ideological competition from the Right. The rise of the Internet, however, changed all of that as citizen journalists — many of whom are motivated by the MSM’s liberal biases — found this new tool invaluable when it came to both debunking the MSM’s latest lie (the most famous being RatherGate) or reporting on stories the MSM chose to ignore for ideological reasons.

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Our country is in crisis. Not the kind of crisis liberals invent out of mid air but the kind that results from the implementation of their policies and brings a country to its knees (and proves the president a rank amateur and many of the legislators unsuited for office). We are in debt, we have an energy crisis, we have high unemployment, and we’re more worried about whether our enemies think we’re nice that we are with crushing them with our military might.

In a word: times are crazy.

Yet in the middle of all this, I can honestly say I’m still glad John McCain lost.

If you think I’m wrong, just think back to last week, when we were praying conservatives in the House would stand their ground instead of giving in to the establishment and voting for Speaker Boehner’s bill. For standing on their principles, McCain referred to them as “hobbits” and said that theirs “is the kind of crack political thinking that turned Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell into GOP Senate nominees.”

For the record, does he not know how much better off we’d be if Angle and O’Donnell had won? (Who wouldn’t trade ten McCains for one Angle and one O’Donnell?)

Please keep in mind that McCain spent every waking moment of his 2010 Senate re-election campaign appealing to the Tea Party for support, claiming he has always been conservative, and campaigning for Angle and other Tea Party candidates.

Yes – he campaigned for her. (He’s as fake as a Milli Vanilli song.)

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No one in recent memory has faced the left’s vitriol like Sarah Palin (not even George W. Bush). The over-the-top, asinine attacks she’s received have been so ubiquitous they need not even be relisted here. Just suffice it to say there is a genuine hatred of Palin throughout the MSM, the leadership of the Democrat Party, and the Republican Party establishment.

And don’t be fooled folks: they don’t hate her because of her convictions – although they despise her convictions – rather, they hate her because they can’t control her.

Fortunately, the hatred the left holds for Palin is more than overcome by the love conservatives and right-leaning Independents have for her. They see in her a refreshing image that dares cast certain issues in the prism of right and wrong, just and unjust, American and un-American, etc.

Perhaps as a group, the Tea Party has come closest to receiving the kind of vindictive normally reserved for Palin alone. There’s no doubt they’re hated as she is hated, and equally no doubt that the hatred is a result of the fact that the MSM, the leadership of the Democrat Party, and the Republican Party establishment can’t control them.

For example, during the push to get Tea Partiers to “compromise” (which is political speak for check your convictions at the door) and support Boehner 3.0, an angry John McCain took to the Senate floor and referred to Tea Party conservatives in the House as “hobbits,” Senator Lisa Murkowski , whom Alaskans foolishly elected over Joe Miller last year, referred to them as “absolutists,” and John Kerry, the haughty one, described them as a group “of extremists, who don’t understand the implications even of what they’re doing.”

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I just had forwarded to me an email written by ThirdWay.org calling for more federal intervention in the energy markets, further supporting politically deigned winners from the pool of losers that must petition for aid in order to exist. Which of course doesn’t read all that differently than the old, First Way (post-FDR, that is). But it’s got a Blair-ite marketing panache that’s worth a try, anyway.

This was noteworthy for a couple of reasons, including its acknowledgment that the renewable energy mandate you will soon hear very much about, as the next ‘other way to skin the cat’ of energy rationing, is so far as your wallet is concerned the same as the very cap-and-trade scheme for which it is Plan B:

“China is about to [sic] put a price on carbon. The UK and EU are already there. So how can the U.S. begin to compete for the $2 trillion clean energy market? …We can help do that by establishing a national clean energy standard.”

Windmill mandate equals cap-and-trade. According to its champions. Got it.

More eye-catching was the whole $2 trillion thing. Because also today per Greenwire (subscription required) Sen. John Kerry continued his silly (very silly) advocacy of this agenda — if in less humorous fashion, seeking to take advantage of tragedy for political aims: “Infrastructure, clean energy can unite Congress after Tucson tragedy — Kerry” (noting that, hey, Cong. Giffords was really big on renewable energy supports, so…).

He “call[ed] for renewed support for investment in the energy economy — especially ‘green energy’ — where the United States, he said, is losing its competitive edge in a $6 trillion market to the rest of the world and China in particular “.

Is Sen. Kerry saying, as this reporter implies, that the renewable energy market is $6 trillion? Exaggeration in support of the green agenda? Quelle horreur, Sen. Kerry! (more…)

A talk Before a Tea Party rally sponsored by the Cecil County (Md.) Patriots in Elkton, Md., 10/23/10

Twenty months ago, on February 19, 2009, business reporter Rick Santelli of CNBC took to the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to deliver his famous rant against government bail-outs, and call for “a Chicago tea party.”

Santelli may have sparked the Tea Party movement. But he only tapped into outrage that had been growing in many of us for decades.

For too long, you and I have watched helplessly as a clique of politicians, intellectuals, activists, and bureaucrats from both parties have tried to obliterate our Constitution, our capitalist system, and our personal liberty. This “bipartisan Ruling Class”—as scholar Angelo Codevilla describes it—sees itself as a moral, cultural, and intellectual elite. Codevilla says that “Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits.”

Oozing sanctimonious arrogance, viewing the rest of us as coarse, unsophisticated rubes who cling bitterly to guns and bibles, this class seeks to impose its own supposedly superior values and visions upon the rest of us, by force of law.

As we know too well, the ultimate goal of our Ruling Class is power. They exist—not to produce, not to invent, not to create—but to manipulate and master others. Ronald Reagan memorably summed up the Ruling Class’s governing outlook this way: “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

By contrast, the rest of us Americans seek power over circumstances, but not over each other. We acquire our personal sense of identity and self-esteem through productive work—not through imposing our will, values, and visions on our neighbors. We accept a “live and let live” philosophy.

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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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Oops.

Massachusetts Democrat Senator John Kerry was his Party’s 2004 nominee for President.  Two hallmarks of his losing campaign were his incredible stiffness – he managed to make 2000 Democrat nominee Al Gore look lively – and his notorious assertion that “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.”

This linguistic whiplash was part of a Kerry pattern, and led to his being branded “Senator Flip Flop.”

We are still learning just how long-standing and ingrained this Kerry pattern is.

Mike Riggs at the Daily Caller has an amazing document from the Senator’s past.  A 1998 Congressional letter to then Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman William Kennard onto which Senator Kerry signed.  The letter reads in part:

“The overarching policy goal of the 1996 Act is to promote a market-driven, robustly competitive environment for all communications services.  Given that, we wish to make it clear that nothing in the 1996 (Telecommunications) Act or its legislative history suggests that Congress intended to alter the current classification of Internet and other information services or to expand traditional telephone regulation to new and advanced services.”

Meaning Senator Kerry was stating that the 1996 Telecommunications Act did not authorize the FCC to apply its oppressive Title II telephone regulatory regime to the Internet.

Oh what a dozen years will do to Senator Flip Flop’s outlook on things.

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Illinois Governor Pat Quinn made it official: Illinois will have a special Senate election just for the lame duck session.  Thus Illinois joins Delaware and West Virginia (both having special elections) as the three states whose winners on election day will—barring a disputed election result—be seated for a lame duck session in December.  A fourth, Colorado, is less clear but may also be in play.

The lame duck session looks increasingly likely—and increasingly ambitious.  Sen. Kerry continues to stress that cap-and-trade will be on the agenda, and Sen. Harry Reid (who may be a lame duck himself after Election Day) confirmed it to the Netroots Nation audience, saying: “We’re going to have to have a lame-duck session, so we’re not giving up.”

Along with cap-and-trade, a lame duck will likely consider the recommendations of Obama’s deficit commission — a package that will include enormous tax hikes and could draw the support of some departing Republicans like Judd Gregg of New Hampshire George Voinovich of Ohio, and Robert Bennett of Utah.

And organized labor, seeing the lame duck as their last chance for a legislative return on their political investments for years, will also demand lame duck action.

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