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http://goldwaterinstitute.org/blog/feds-are-coming-our-water
It’s not just Tombstone. Read this article from GI. They intend to punish us for immigration and healthcare stands. Go to BLM.gov then navigate to Our Offices, then Arizona. Read about Agua Fria, Arizona water and environment strategies. Most involve “partnering” with other “environmental” agencies and groups. Right out of Agenda 21. No I don’t wear a tin foil hat to keep the voices out so I can type accurately. Folks at Goldwater Institue don’t wear tin foil hats either. Don’t let me preach to the choir. Tell your neighbors. Support Goldwater Institute. Call your Fed and State reps and senators.
European immigrants landed in the Big Apple before settling in the heartland, and later Irish, Italians, Chinese and Puerto Ricans founded businesses and communities that have shaped the city into what it is today. Yet in recent years, New York has become less welcoming to its more entrepreneurial immigrants. Today’s New York Times discusses the byzantine system of fines and regulations that is putting street vendors, most of whom are recent immigrants, out of business:
For years, street vendors and their advocates have bristled at the penalties the city imposes. Hundreds of vendors say they have been forced out of business by the steep fines, which can quickly reach $1,000 each for even the least serious violations, advocates say. . . .
“The vast majority of tickets we see are for breaking one of these million rules they have: You’re a foot too close to the fire hydrant, a foot too close to the crosswalk, the table is too long,” said Mr. Basinski, who has been lobbying to change the fine structure for several years. “You can very quickly be at that $1,000 level for every ticket.”
Fortunately, new bills are being discussed that would change the way these fines are allocated and reduce their number, removing vendors from the burden of multiple thousand-dollar fines for such infractions as poor table placement.
Yet even if the bills pass, the larger problem remains. Like many deep blue cities, New York’s regulations make it extremely difficult to start new businesses, especially for those without the connections and money to navigate the city’s extensive bureaucracy. And while vendors operating on crowded streets do raise some serious issues, immigrants desperately need the work, and the city needs them to make a living and build new businesses.
The city’s goal should be to create conditions in which undercapitalized entrepreneurs can flourish. These are the people whose success will build the next generation of successful New Yorkers. The pushcart peddler is an American hero and our legislators should be looking for ways to promote rather than to punish them. Instead it sometimes seems like city officials forgot how New York grew and are trying to crush as much economic activity as they possibly can.
This article makes many good points, but it fails to uncover the mindset and intent behind these attacks on normal commerce.
First of all, the left wants control. Commerce that it cannot control is commerce that it wants to stop. The notion of street vendors running businesses without any sort of interference from the government makes their hackles go up.
Second, and perhaps most damning, the left literally finds it unfair that someone who has spent the time and effort to create a successful business will benefit from it, while 3rd parties who have done nothing will not. They disagree with market economics and believe that goods and services should somehow be allocated equally to everyone.
This is what they mean when they harp on about “equality.” They’re not talking about equality in any rational sense, such as equality before the law or equality of rights, but equality of material wealth. They literally believe that no one should have any more than anyone else, and they wish to hijack the state in order to enforce that vision of the world. So they seek to punish those who are taking the time and effort to increase their own material wealth since such a person is “increasing inequality.” They have a hard time attacking larger businesses, though they certainly do try, and so they target street vendors and other businesses that are particularly vulnerable, all for the sake of destroying as much wealth, and potential for wealth, as they possibly can.
In short, they are evil and insane.
Whatever the ultimate outcome of the case against George Zimmerman for his shooting of Trayvon Martin, what has happened already is enough to turn the stomach of anyone who believes in either truth or justice.
An amazing proportion of the media has given us a painful demonstration of the thinking — and lack of thinking — that prevailed back in the days of the old Jim Crow South, where complexion counted more than facts in determining how people were treated.
One of the first things presented in the media was a transcript of a conversation between George Zimmerman and a police dispatcher. The last line in most of the transcripts shown on TV was that of the police dispatcher telling Zimmerman not to continue following Trayvon Martin.
That became the basis of many media criticisms of Zimmerman for continuing to follow him. Only later did I see a transcript of that conversation on the Sean Hannity program that included Zimmerman’s reply to the police dispatcher: “O.K.”
That reply removed the only basis for assuming that Zimmerman did in fact continue to follow Trayvon Martin. At this point, neither I nor the people who assumed that he continued to follow the teenager have any basis in fact for believing that he did or didn’t.
Why was that reply edited out by so many in the media? Because too many people in the media see their role as filtering and slanting the news to fit their own vision of the world. The issue is not one of being “fair” to “both sides” but, more fundamentally, of being honest with their audience.
NBC News carried the editing even further, removing one of the police dispatcher’s questions, to which Zimmerman was responding, in order to feed the vision of Zimmerman as a racist.
The problem with the media is not that it is “biased,” but that it has dropped all pretense of basic honesty and integrity.
It would be interesting to see how history will view this period. How historians will attempt to understand the time we live in and the almost universal deceit we the public are subjected to each and every day.
A fraternity member at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln is facing expulsion from Delta Tau Delta and a college investigation after he marched around campus in camouflage waving a Confederate flag, the Lincoln Journal Star reports.
A university employee took a video of the incident after she was disturbed to see the fraternity parade past her office. The march was apparently an effort to raise money for military veterans. A screen shot from that video published by the Journal Star shows two men leading a group of at least 20 people. Another person in the march is waving an American flag, and several appear to be wearing camo.
A chapter spokesman told the Journal Star that the Confederate flag was destroyed and that the march lasted less than five minutes.The spokesman expects that student to be expelled from Delta Tau Delta. The university’s judicial affairs department is investigating, as is the national office of Delta Tau Delta.
Yet another so called “incident” and “hate crime” that will be used as fodder for the race-baiting industry of perpetual victimhood in which white people are always guilty and anyone who is not white is absolved at birth from even the possibility of sin.
Welcome to Gramscian Marxism 101.
In today’s lesson, a man was found walking around with the confederate battle flag, the act of which instantly disenfranchised everyone in the vicinity with skin darker than butter pecan ice cream. Had he not been stopped, and his flag burned in effigy, inbred toothless redneck hicks would have stormed the campus in white sheets and pointy hats, burning crucifixes on the mall and hoisting students by the neck from rafters within the student union building. The remaining students of less than pasty complexion would have been forced by the university’s administration into segregated housing, classrooms, and prevented from using the washrooms reseved for “white” students. Interracial relationships, the norm in today’s world, would be demonized and those found crossing the color line beaten and bloodied by roving bands of tribal enforcers. Aren’t we all glad that this holocaust was stopped in its tracks and civil society saved?
Meanwhile back here in the real world, an immature punk pulled a juvenile stunt that was marked primarily by its impotence. The south LOST. The slavers LOST. The racists LOST. Dead and buried, their beliefs long since rejected and tossed upon the trash heap of history. All that is left is a powerless symbol occasionally rallied around by ignorant buffoons who are equally powerless and more often than not the product of incest.
The hyper-reaction to this from those on the left betrays not their fear that racism and the thirst for segregation lurk just beneath the surface, but their certain knowledge that it does not. They bring out the histrionics and hyperbole precisely because they have nothing else they can talk about — if they expect to be listened to. They imbue instances of childish stupidity such as this with cosmic significance as a distraction from the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of their own ideas. They do not want to talk about what they believe, except amongst themselves, because they know far too well how unpersuasive their arguments are. Events like this give them the opportunity to look as if they are on the side of truth. More than a little, they subtly suggest that such a stunt reveals the thoughts and feelings of those of us on the right, a convenient straw man that saves them from having to address our ideas honestly.
For months and even years to come, this event will be a touchstone for the leftists on that campus, a shared experience through which they will remind one another just how righteous and good they are, and how wretched and evil the rest of us must be.
The politicization of higher education by activist professors and compliant university administrators deprives students of the opportunity to acquire knowledge and refine their minds. It also erodes the nation’s civic cohesion and its ability to preserve the institutions that undergird democracy in America.
So argues “A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California,” a new report by the California Association of Scholars, a division of the National Association of Scholars (NAS). The report is addressed to the Regents of the University of California, which has ultimate responsibility for governing the UC system, but the pathologies it diagnoses prevail throughout the country.
The analysis begins from a nonpolitical fact: Numerous studies of both the UC system and of higher education nationwide demonstrate that students who graduate from college are increasingly ignorant of history and literature. They are unfamiliar with the principles of American constitutional government. And they are bereft of the skills necessary to comprehend serious books and effectively marshal evidence and argument in written work.
This decline in the quality of education coincides with a profound transformation of the college curriculum. None of the nine general campuses in the UC system requires students to study the history and institutions of the United States. None requires students to study Western civilization, and on seven of the nine UC campuses, including Berkeley, a survey course in Western civilization is not even offered. In several English departments one can graduate without taking a course in Shakespeare. In many political science departments majors need not take a course in American politics.
Moreover, the evidence suggests that the hollowing of the curriculum stems from too many professors’ preference for promoting a partisan political agenda.
National studies by Stanley Rothman in 1999, and by Neil Gross and Solon Simmons in 2007, have shown that universities’ leftward tilt has become severe. And a 2005 study by Daniel Klein and Andrew Western in Academic Questions (a NAS publication) shows this is certainly true in California. For example, Democrats outnumbered Republicans four to one on University of California, Berkeley, professional school faculties; in the social sciences the ratio was approximately 21 to one.
The same 2005 study revealed that the Berkeley sociology department faculty was home to 17 Democrats and no Republicans. The political science department included 28 Democrats and two Republicans. The English department had 29 Democrats and one Republican; and the history department had 31 Democrats and one Republican.
While political affiliation alone need not carry classroom implications, the overwhelmingly left-leaning faculty openly declare the inculcation of progressive political ideas their pedagogical priority. As “A Crisis of Competence” notes, “a recent study by UCLA’s prestigious Higher Education Research Institute found that more faculty now believe that they should teach their students to be agents of social change than believe that it is important to teach them the classics of Western civilization.”
Some university programs tout their political presuppositions and objectives openly. The mission statements of the Women’s Studies program at UCLA prejudges the issues by declaring that it proceeds from “the perspectives of those whose participation has been traditionally distorted, omitted, neglected, or denied.” And the Critical Race Studies program at the UCLA School of law announces that its aim is to “transform racial justice advocacy.”
Even the august American Association of University Professors—which in 1915 and 1940 published classic statements explaining that the aim of academic freedom was not to indoctrinate but to equip students to think for themselves—has sided with the politicized professoriate.
In 1915, the AAUP affirmed that in teaching controversial subjects a professor should “set forth justly without suppression or innuendo the divergent opinions of other investigators; he should cause his students to become familiar with the best published expressions of the great historic types of doctrine upon the questions at issue.”
However, in recent statements on academic freedom in 2007 and 2011, the AAUP has undermined its almost century-old strictures against proselytizing. Its new position is that restricting professors to the use of relevant materials and obliging them to provide a reasonably comprehensive treatment of the subject represent unworkable requirements because relevance and comprehensiveness can themselves be controversial.
On the boundaries, they can be—like anything else. However, it is wrong to dismiss professors’ duty to avoid introducing into classroom discussion opinions extraneous to the subject and to provide a well-rounded treatment of the matter under consideration. That opens the classroom to whatever professors wish to talk about. And in all too many cases what they wish to talk about in the classroom is the need to transform America in a progressive direction. Last year the leadership of AAUP officially endorsed the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Excluding from the curriculum those ideas that depart from the progressive agenda implicitly teaches students that conservative ideas are contemptible and unworthy of discussion. This exclusion, the California report points out, also harms progressives for the reason John Stuart Mill elaborated in his famous 1859 essay, “On Liberty”: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”
The removal of partisan advocacy from the classroom would have long-term political benefits. Liberal education equips students with intellectual skills valued by the marketplace. It prepares citizens to discharge civic responsibilities in an informed and deliberate manner. It fosters a common culture by revealing that much serious disagreement between progressives and conservatives revolves around differing interpretations of how to fulfill America’s promise of individual freedom and equality.
It is certainly true that not all progressive professors intrude their politics into the classroom, but a culture of politicization has developed on campus in which department chairs and deans treat its occurrence as routine. “UC administrators,” the California report sadly concludes, “far from performing their role as the university’s quality control mechanism, now routinely function as the enablers, protectors, and even apologists for the politicized university and its degraded scholarly and educational standards.”
In California, this is more than a failure of their duty as educators. It is also a violation of the law. Article IX, Section 9, of the California state constitution provides that “The university shall be entirely independent of all political or sectarian influence and kept free therefrom.”
It is incumbent upon the UC Board of Regents, not to mention the governing bodies of other institutions of higher education across the country, to begin the long and arduous work of depoliticizing our universities and renewing liberal education.
A Crisis of Competence is posted at www.nas.org/images/documents/A_Crisis_of_Competence.pdf
Did I say George Wallace? I meant Marion Barry. It is so hard sometimes to keep my racist scumbags straight. They all sound so much alike.
The lecture “Why Marxism?”, is an examination of why so many people are still attracted to Marxism despite the history of totalitarianism and genocide.
Professor C. Bradley Thompson is the BB&T Research Professor at Clemson University and the Executive Director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. He has also been a visiting fellow at Princeton and Harvard universities and at the University of London.
The American was voted the winner in a contest run by the National Army Museum to identify the country’s most outstanding military opponent.
This kind of reminds me of the honor and reverence the Romans had for Hannibal Barca in the centuries following the 2nd Punic war.
“These people are not conservatives. They’re not Republicans,” Hatch angrily responds. “They’re radical libertarians and I’m doggone offended by it.”
Then Hatch, a former boxer, turns combative. “I despise these people, and I’m not the guy you come in and dump on without getting punched in the mouth.”
To me the difference between a leftist and a “conservative” who isn’t trying to reduce the size and scope of government is that there really isn’t one. The leftist steals from us to buy votes. The “conservative” does the same. The leftist’s ill gotten loot is showered upon the underclass in exchange for their votes. The “conservative’s” pilferings are put into earmarks to buy the support of the powerful within their districts.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
In researching her recent book, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” Harvard professor Theda Skocpol found that about 1,000 local tea party groups formed in 2009-2010. Today, she estimates there are about 600. A declining number, yes, but still what Skocpol, an expert on civic engagement, calls “a very good survival rate.”
“They’re not dressing up and going to demonstrations in the street. They’re meeting. They’re poring over the legislative records of these Republicans that they’ve elected. They’re contacting their representatives, and they’re keeping the pressure on. They’re following the debates, and they’re going and they’re voting.
“They’re determined,” she says, “and they haven’t gone away.”
To weigh the continuing success or influence of the tea party by inside-the-Beltway measures _ endorsements, numbers of chapters and “constituents,” dollars or even wins or losses at the polls _ is to miss the point and ignore the power of the movement today, says Skocpol. That stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what the tea party was and is.
It was never an “it,” a party with a capital “P” in the sense of a third political party, though at one point some tea party insiders may have toyed with the idea and outsiders treated it almost as such. (Consider CNN’s decision to televise the tea party response to President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address.)
Rather, it is an ideology and a style of politics _ one that “has been in the business of pulling the Republican Party away from the possibility of compromising with Democrats and further toward the hard right,” says Skocpol. “And they’ve been very successful. … They’ve taken over the Republican Party, lock, stock and barrel.”
Elizabeth Price Foley, a constitutional law professor and author of “The Tea Party: Three Principles,” calls the tea party “the new Republican base.” `’That causes a lot of people who want to dismiss the tea party to characterize them as puppets of some great wealthy conservative puppet masters,” she says. “If anything, the tea party is the one who is moving the mountain. The mountain being the Republican Party.”
To better grasp the evolution of the movement, simply follow the journeys of its people.
In March 2010, Hildy Angius, a retired public relations specialist, drove from her condo in Bullhead City, Ariz., to the huge tea party rally in Searchlight, Nev. _ what some called the Woodstock of conservatism. Then, she was president of her local Republican women’s club. Now, she serves as vice chair of the Mohave County Republican Party and is running for county supervisor.
“I think we realized that just getting together … and yelling and screaming wasn’t going to do anything,” says the 52-year-old Angius. “The best thing is to get involved at the local level in the party. Move the local party to the right … and then the local party will move the state and then the state moves the national.
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