Leftism

Government Entitlements Are Corrupting Us

Government Entitlements Are Corrupting Usby Nicholas Eberstadt –
The American republic has endured for well over two centuries, but over the past 50 years, the apparatus of American governance has undergone a radical transformation. In some basic respects—its scale, its preoccupations, even many of its purposes—the U.S. government today would be scarcely recognizable to Franklin D. Roosevelt, much less to Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson.

What is monumentally new about the American state today is the vast empire of entitlement payments that it protects, manages and finances. Within living memory, the federal government has become an entitlements machine. As a day-to-day operation, it devotes more attention and resources to the public transfer of money, goods and services to individual citizens than to any other objective, spending more than for all other ends combined. [Read more…]

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Liberals’ Illegitimate War on Women

War on Women Liberalsby Jeannie DeAngelis –
Willingness or unwillingness to prevent or terminate a pregnancy appears to be the sole criterion upon which liberal women judge how well they’re being treated.  It’s stunning that the left actually embraces the idea that taking a stand for life instantly translates into hostility toward, or contention with, the female gender.

The right to abort the unborn is so precious to left-leaning women that they are even willing to overlook the fact that 50% of the fetuses losing their lives in abortion clinics are of the gender they believe Republicans are currently waging war against.  The truth is that it’s pro-choice women who discriminate; they’re fine with liberal men being womanizers, perverts, and adulterers, and if women like Juanita Broderick consider what Bill Clinton did to her a “legitimate rape,” then the men they admire can even be alleged rapists. [Read more…]

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The Unteachables: A Generation that Cannot Learn

Indoctrination of Childrenby Janice Fiamengo –
The greatest tragedy of progressive education is not the students’ lack of skills, but of teachable character.
“The honeymoon is over.” Instructors who award low grades in humanities disciplines will likely be familiar with a phenomenon that occurs after the first essays are returned to students: former smiles vanish, hands once jubilantly raised to answer questions are now resentfully folded across chests, offended pride and sulkiness replace the careless cheer of former days. Too often, the smiles are gone for good because the customary “B+” or “A” grades have been withheld, and many students cannot forgive the insult.

The matter doesn’t always end there. Some students are prepared for a fight, writing emails of entreaty or threat, or besieging the instructor in his office to make clear that the grade is unacceptable. Every instructor who has been so besieged knows the legion of excuses and expressions of indignation offered, the certainty that such work was always judged acceptable in the past, the implication that a few small slip-ups, a wrong word or two, have been blown out of proportion. [Read more…]

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Will a Weakened American Character Defeat Paul Ryan?

Dennis Prager
Dennis Prager
by Dennis Prager –
The Republican vice-presidential candidate, Congressman Paul Ryan, is the Democrats’ political version of the Anti-Christ. He believes in self-reliance; the left believes in reliance on the state. His moral values are shaped by religion (Catholicism); the left is frightened by religious Christian politicians (and athletes, and members of the armed forces, and talk show hosts, and, for that matter, clergy). He believes in individualism; the left believes in collectivism. He believes in small government and powerful citizens; the left believes in large government and dependent citizens.

Nevertheless, the Democratic Party claims to be overjoyed at his selection as the Republican vice-presidential nominee. [Read more…]

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The Childishness of the American Left

Democrats Socialists Democrats Communists Economic Illiterate by Steve McCann –
The American left is the most self-indulgent, arrogant, and spoiled group of people on the face of the earth.  They live in a nation facing national bankruptcy and societal upheaval — a country presently subsisting on the residue of past economic achievements.  Yet the only things that matter to them are their lifestyles and imposing their self-determined superiority on rest of the American people.

The true indebtedness of the United States now exceeds $222 trillion.  Appearing on National Public Radio in August of 2011 Professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff of Boston University said:

If you add up all the promises that have been made for spending obligations, and subtract all the taxes we expect to collect, the difference is $211 Trillion.  This is the fiscal gap.  That is our true indebtedness. [Read more…]

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The Rich Don’t Make Us Poor

Christians in Post-Welfare World by Charles Kaupke –
We’ve been hearing a lot lately about the need for the wealthy to “pay their fair share” so that the federal government can pay down its debts and continue to fund programs to provide basic human necessities for the poor, such as food, shelter, and prophylactics. Their argument is that the greedy rich have been stealing increasingly large percentages of the nation’s GDP, and have been hoarding their riches, rather than generously giving them to the federal government to be used for the common good. The only solution is to increase taxes on the rich, so that instead of letting billionaires covetously hold onto (and thus waste) their excess wealth, which they don’t really need, the government can take that cash and use it much more effectively, to give the rest of us free stuff. After all, it just isn’t fair that some Americans control billions of dollars’ worth of wealth, while others struggle to make ends meet.

Sounds plausible, right? Of course it does. Unfortunately for those who make a living out of inciting class warfare, it’s not true. [Read more…]

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The “Romney killed my wife” lies disintegrate

Obama Liar-in-Chief Exposed Again by John Hayward –
The despicable ad put together by pro-Obama Super PAC Priorities USA has disintegrated into the most noxious cloud of lies, with astonishing speed.  Rarely have the waters of the political gutter washed away sewage so quickly.

Astonishingly, all three of the broadcast “news” networks managed to avoid mentioning yesterday’s biggest political story.  NewsBusters notes that NBC anchor Brian Williams droned on about “both sides getting personal”… without bothering to mention that only one side was accusing the opposing candidate of murder.

But CNN tore the Priorities USA ad to shreds, with anchor Wolf Blitzer pronouncing it “full of falsehoods.”  [Read more…]

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Liar-in-Chief Obama Tells Preposterous Lies

Liar-in-Chief Obama by Jack Kelly –
Our first president was so revered for his integrity that most believed that even as a child, George Washington could not tell a lie.

Can our current president tell the truth? Former Amb. Fred Eckert has filled a 188-page book, “That’s a Crock, Barack,” with “untrue, duplicitous, arrogant and delusional” things Barack Obama has said.

Constant practice has not made Mr. Obama a good liar. A good liar tells plausible lies, lies only when the truth could do him substantial harm.

President Obama tells preposterous lies. He lies so often and so obviously about so many things it is doubtful lying for him is merely a tactic. It’s an integral part of his character — or lack of it.

A few caveats. Often when we say something that isn’t true, we aren’t lying, because we think it is true. We are ignorant or careless or both, but we aren’t trying to deceive. [Read more…]

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Challenging Liberals on Economic Immobility

Christians in Post-Welfare World by Samuel Gregg –
When it comes to applying liberté, égalité, fraternité to the economy, modern liberals have always been pretty much fixated on the second member of this trinity. It’s a core concern of the bible of modern American liberalism: John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971). Here a hyper-secularized love of neighbor is subsumed into a concern for equality in the sense of general sameness. Likewise, economic liberty is highly restricted whenever there’s a likely chance that its exercise might produce significant wealth disparities.

So while it’s tempting to ascribe the Obama administration’s more or less naked appeal to class envy in the current electoral cycle as resulting from immediate calculations about how to defeat Mitt Romney, one shouldn’t forget just how central the endless pursuit of ever-greater economic equality is to the modern Left’s very identity. [Read more…]

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