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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: 2MAR$ who wrote (65353)	2/4/2015 9:26:08 AM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 69300

LOL That's hilarious. Here's some of Obama's achievements: • First president to violate the War Powers Act. • First president to be held in contempt of court for illegally obstructing oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. • First president to require all Americans to purchase a product from a third party. • First president to abrogate bankruptcy law to turn over control of companies to his union supporters. • First president to by-pass Congress and implement the Dream Act through executive fiat. • First president to order a secret amnesty program that stopped the deportation of illegal immigrants across the U.S., including those with criminal convictions. • First president to cancel the National Day of Prayer and to say that America is no longer a Christian nation. • First president to arbitrarily declare an existing law unconstitutional and refuse to enforce it. • First president to tell a major manufacturing company in which state it is allowed to locate a factory. • First president to withdraw an existing coal permit that had been properly issued years ago. • First president to actively try to bankrupt an American industry (coal). • First president to fire an inspector general of AmeriCorps for catching one of his friends in a corruption case. • president to win a Nobel Peace Prize for doing NOTHING to earn it. • First president to repeat the Holy Quran and tell us the early morning call of the Azan (Islamic call to worship) is the most beautiful sound on earth

To: 2MAR$ who wrote (65353)	2/5/2015 1:46:11 AM
From: Greg or e	1 Recommendation Recommended By Brumar89 Respond to of 69300

Elsewhere (149) Kevin Williamson on lifestyle leftism and class disdain: Progressivism, especially in its well-heeled coastal expressions, is not a philosophy — it’s a lifestyle. Specifically, it is a brand of conspicuous consumption, which in a land of plenty such as ours as often as not takes the form of conspicuous non-consumption: no gluten, no bleached flour, no Budweiser, no Walmart, no SUVs, no Toby Keith, etc. The people who set the cultural tone in places such as Berkeley, Seattle, or Austin would no more be caught vaping than they would slurping down a Shamrock Shake at McDonald’s — and they conclude without thinking that, therefore, neither should anybody else… There is no meaningful evidence that organic foods are more nutritious or safer, but the lifestyle progressives who run the Boulder schools insist on them, along with yoga. What’s banned? Chocolate milk. And Charles C W Cooke on leftist in-fighting and the endless search for ideological purity: “I am out of ideas,” the socialist blogger Freddie DeBoer admitted yesterday afternoon, before inquiring rhetorically what he is supposed to conclude when he sees so “many good, impressionable young people run screaming from left-wing politics because they are excoriated the first second they step mildly out of line?” Among the things that DeBoer claims lately to “have seen, with my own two eyes,” are a white woman running from a classroom simply because she used the word “disabled”; a black man being ostracised for suggesting that there is “such a thing as innate gender differences”; and a Hispanic Iraq War veteran “being berated” for using the phrase “man up.” Worse for him and his interests, perhaps, DeBoer also claims to have under his belt “many more depressing stories of good people pushed out and marginalised in left-wing circles because they didn’t use the proper set of social and class signals to satisfy the world of intersectional politics.” What, he asks in exasperation, is he supposed to say to them? I daresay that if I had been in any of the situations that DeBoer describes, I would have walked happily out of the class. Why? Well, because there is simply nothing to be gained from arguing with people who believe that it is reasonable to treat those who use the word “disabled” as we treat those who use the word “n**er”; because there is no virtue in arguing with people who refuse even to entertain the possibility that they might be wrong. If you want to find bad faith theatrics and unshakeable idiocy presented as virtue, head for the Clown Quarter of the nearest university. It’s where you’re most likely to find the word “privilege” deployed as an ad hominem* device. A way of saying, “Your opinion doesn’t count (or doesn’t count as much as mine) because you have a certain level of melanin, or a penis, or the wrong kind of upbringing, or an insufficient number of hang-ups and fashionable pretensions.” Think of it as a kind of Maoist snobbery, in which, as Jesse Walker notes, the unwary are denounced for the rhetorical equivalent of using the wrong cutlery. In my experience, the personalities to which such things appeal aren’t terribly interested in civility or justice, “social” or otherwise. What they seem to be interested in is opportunist scolding and one-upmanship, that all-important social positioning. And so what you see, and see quite often, isn’t concern for the supposedly vulnerable; it’s an assertion of status and a pay-off for all that wound-up dogmatism. It’s how professed egalitarians let us know they’re better than us. Because they really do have to let us know. Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.