I figured something out about bullies, though, in those first few days of the seventh grade.  Even with my yet-developing twelve-year-old mind, I realized that a bully has an advantage other than size over his target: A bully will do things to you that you wouldn’t do to him. The bully has no compunctions, no sense of decency that might impede him in his goal of creating torment. Where you might be happy with punching him in the gut and walking away as he lay breathless on the ground, the bully’s contentment lies in beating you to a bloody pulp. And even if it doesn’t, you don’t know that.  You’ve been plagued by that sense of fair play, while the bully, as far as you can tell, respects no boundaries.  He would sell his soul to beat you if it came to it. The psychological advantage lies with him.

     Today, you can see that scenario played out in the American political arena. The disinterested and careful observer will recognize that psychological advantage as belonging to the left, to the progressives. The tea parties are a prime example. Where tea partiers are happy just to show up, to carry signs and make impassioned speeches, the progressives bar no holds in their own efforts to counter their enemy’s success. They will employ tactics and strategies that would leave a conservative twisting in his sheets at night under a burden of guilt. Progressives have called on their soldiers (probably not the best term here) to infiltrate tea parties with purposely-illiterate and racist signage, while posing for the cameras as friendly conservatives. Democrat congressional leaders recently gathered the minorities in their ranks and staged a walk through a crowd of Washington tea-partiers, all with the intent of generating racist comments. When that failed, several of those Democrats resorted to claiming that it had happened anyway.  At a tea party rally in Nevada, progressives attempted to reroute tea party busses, one of which they bombarded with eggs.

     Progressives will deploy an arsenal of weapons that give them a distinct advantage over their opponents, who have no such arsenal. These weapons include lies, subterfuge, deception, circumvention of the law (think: A.C.O.R.N.), threats (Blank Panthers at voting booths), and even physical assault and vandalism. In one instance, in Wisconsin, progressives slashed the tires on a fleet of Republican voter-transportation vehicles. A black Democrat congressman vandalized his own Georgia headquarters and claimed the perpetrators were racist conservatives. One progressive-radio show-hostess fell down in an apparent drunken stupor, bruised herself, and made a beeline to her friends in the media to claim she’d been attacked by conservatives. At a town hall meeting in St. Louis, members of the progressive Service Employees International Union physically assailed a black man—at whom they also hurled racist epithets—for handing out “Don’t Tread on Me” signs. (An offensive concept, to be sure.)

     The list goes on. The point is, Democrats—progressives, communists, liberals, statists, whatever—are bullies. The president is a bully. He and they will resort to measures for which their conservative opponents would have no stomach. It is notable that conservatives are without a counterpart to Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, which is the Machiavelli-style handbook of Marxist political strategy that President Obama and his fellow Democrats have studied, taught, and follow to the letter. It details the most productive use of lies, subterfuge, and humiliation, by which the astute Marxist can achieve success in defeating capitalism. The mind of a conservative cannot comprehend the willingness to resort to such behavior. Nor can a conservative imagine herself ever sinking to such a level as to conceal her true aspirations. But then, conservatives have nothing to hide; their goals are clear and open for the world to see. There is no “The ends justify the means” mindset directing the conservative politician or activist.

     That said, the conservative’s political arsenal is limited to such mundane items as truth, transparency, honor, and worthy intentions, which puts him or her fighting into the sun in the battle for America’s soul. A conservative knows the enemy has no such limitations, and that makes his task all the more daunting. Progressives will impugn, they will humiliate, they will create false diversions. They will stand in front of cameras and hurl bizarre accusations that are in no way associated with reality. Progressive leaders will lie with the lightest of tongues; if caught, the practiced progressive will deny having ever made the statement, or he will employ exculpatory phrases such as “out of context,” or “a few misplaced words,” or “I hadn’t had enough sleep.”

     Sometimes, when caught in an attempt at deceit, the progressive politician will simply scream “racism” (or, on occasion, one of its evil twins: homophobia, sexism, etc.) as a diversion.  Progressives believe—and often with good reason—that word to be kryptonite, and that to hurl it is to render all further discussion pointless. It is the magic sword. The hapless victim must forget everything else and scramble to prove the charge false. But while charging racism is a weapon unto itself, it is also part of a greater modus operendi—that of publically assigning the progressive’s own negative qualities and intent to his enemy. This is done, of course, to misdirect and disguise true progressive goals and ideals. In the meantime, the conservative opponent is playing by codes both written and unwritten.  One gladiator, with mace and shield, fights to the death, while the other wields a penknife without his opponent’s lust for spilled viscera. Progressives are bullies, conservatives are not.

     As for my bully, one day I pulled a pack of cigarettes from my gym locker (I was cool, dontcha know) and offered him one. I don’t know why that ended it for him, but it did. In all the years we were the closest of friends, I never did have to duke it out with him. Not that this is instructive in any way whatsoever. Offer a cigarette to a liberal, and he’ll spray you with something, call the cops, and sue. Politics should NEVER be about conciliation, anyway. And, like jihadists, any conciliatory gesture will be seen by progressives as weakness. No, you have to go after liberals with all you’ve got and never let up. You, though, as a conservative, just have to do it with smaller—but more honorable—artillery.

Glenn Kinyon (Guest Blogger)

Among the findings:

• The President’s plan would create a new federal agency charged with monitoring health insurers to make sure that proposed premium increases are not “unreasonable” or “unjustified.”  This agency could compel private insurers to lower premiums, offer rebates or “take other actions to make premiums affordable.”

Really? We need to create a new federal agency? Is this agency going to continue the success of Fannie Mae? Freddie Mac? The Post Office?

• The President’s plan would also dictate that health insurers cover those with pre-existing conditions and saddle them with billion in new taxes and fees.

The President has submitted a plan that will allow Congress to dictate to American businesses how they should run their businesses? Weird, I thought this sort of tyrannical mentality is what created America.  It’s surely something our Founding Fathers fought against and kept in mind as they drafted our Constitution.

• Health insurance is one of the least profitable industries America.  In terms of profit margin, in 2009 it ranked a dismal 87th out of 215 industries; their overall profit margin was a mere 3.4 percent.

We’ve covered this one before. The myth of the “fat cat” insurance companies is just that, a myth.  Proctor & Gamble makes a bigger profit when you go to the store and buy Clorox than insurance companies do when you purchase a policy.

• The President’s proposed combination of new taxes and price controls would cause a wave of health insurer bankruptcies, devastating the industry and reducing health insurance options for consumers.

This whole sentence should be in bold.  “Will not raise taxes on families making less than $250k/year” blah, blah, blah. Rhetoric.

• Eventually, the shrinking pool of private insurers would force the government to enact a single payer system to provide the insurance that Congress mandates that all Americans have.

Umm, hmm. Mandates?  Please see above. 

And let’s not be fooled by the “But the government mandates that we have auto insurance, what’s the difference?”  rhetoric (there’s that word again) being used by supporters.  The difference is we can choose not to drive.  With President Obama’s plan, that choice disappears.  If there are no private insurers then we face another “crisis” forcing the government to step in with another bailout.  Only this time, it’s for the American people.  Have we not learned over the course of a year how quickly the government likes to give up control of something once they finally get it?

The report can be read in it’s entirety here.  Please, please read it.  Go to other sites, both for and against it; educate yourself.  And then please, get involved.  Calling, emailing or writing your representative in Congress takes less than five minutes.  Then do the same thing with your state representatives.  Write a letter to the editor of your newspaper.  Call in to talk radio shows.  Talk to your neighbors and friends about what this kind of legislation will do to our future…to the future of our children; and, to the future of our country.

**emphasis added

Well, not exactly.  Charles Krauthammer sums it up very nicely.

And the Democrats are delusional: Scott Brown won by running against Obama not Bush. He won by brilliantly nationalizing the race, running hard against the Obama agenda, most notably Obamacare. Killing it was his No. 1 campaign promise.

Here’s another of my favorite quotes:

An astonishing 56 percent of Massachusetts voters, according to Rasmussen, called health care their top issue. In a Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates poll, 78% of Brown voters said their vote was intended to stop Obamacare. Only a quarter of all voters in the Rasmussen poll cited the economy as their top issue, nicely refuting the Democratic view that Massachusetts was just the usual anti-incumbent resentment you expect in bad economic times.

via The meaning of Scott Brown | Op-Ed Contributors | Jerusalem Post.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday she does not have the votes to pass the Senate’s version of a health insurance bill that is now in severe jeopardy of being scrapped.

So Congress, we hope you hear this warning shot loud and clear.  You either get it, or you don’t.  To ensure that you have a clear understanding about what’s coming next really matters very little to us. 

We the People are not finished yet; and we’re taking back our seats and our voices, one race at a time.

Okay, so we can’t say for sure that Chicago’s population per se is growing.  We have enough to worry about here in Missouri to keep track of their actual population.  But almost certainly, the thuggery known distinctly as “Chicago politics” is spreading.  Apparently having overtaken Washington D.C., it has now spread all the way up to Massachussetts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZs61VCJvTg

In 1981, the world watched as the Polish Communist government, consenting to orders from Moscow, declared martial law and shot or imprisoned dissenters.  After a meeting with Romuald Spasowski, the Polish Ambassador and his wife who had defected to America just the day previous, Ronald Reagan did an extraordinary thing*.  He asked, on Christmas Eve in 1981, for the American people to light a candle and place it in their window as a sign of support with the people of Poland who sought freedom.  To show the people of Poland we understood that “the light of liberty still glows in their hearts.”

This Christmas Eve is not like that Christmas Eve.  There is not martial law in America, that “great, shining city upon a hill.”  We have, however, been given the dubious “gift“ of health care (despite our overwhelming opposition) by our Congress with the vote early this morning by the Democrats in the Senate who also voted to raise the federal debt limit by $290 billion to $12.4 trillion.  And yet we, the American people, are still not being heard. 

So today, as we did 28 years ago, let us light a candle and place it in our window.  Today though, let our candles reaffirm our own belief of freedom and liberty.  Let them show that the principles proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and put into action by the Constitution still define us; as a people, and as a nation.

Merry Christmas and may God continue to bless America!

Oh, but wait. Before I run around in a panic because I’m not doing “enough”, I have a question. Just a teeny, tiny one if you can spare a second.

What does this mean?

The latest hit to climate-change credibility comes via an embarrassing revelation from Ben Santer, one of the lead authors of the 1995 U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group I report, which is one of the holy documents of global warming theology. Mr. Santer admitted that he deleted sections of the document that stated that humans were not responsible for climate change.

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