PrairiePundit

Washington Post: A new, liberal tea party is forming. Can it last without turning against Democrats? Democrats are trying to fuse the energy of the activists who have rallied in reaction to Donald Trump’s young presidency into the liberal firmament. And although it’s too soon to tell which direction this new movement will take, there are similarities to the early days of the conservative tea party — including the threat of it turning on those who try to ride it to power. The Tea Party's issue was mostly about the dishonesty of the Democrats in their creation of Obamacare, as well as out of control spending.  It was a peaceful movement of people who cleaned up after themselves when they had massive rallies. The Democrats have a militant strain that is the equivalent of the fascists Brownshirt movement in Germany that is trying to intimidate and cause havoc.  It openly says it wants to make the US ungovernable.  It is hostile to even allowing opposing poin...

James Carafano: Progressives think they are really good at fighting wars. That is the problem. A core progressive belief is that international structures of management and arbitration would check and eventually end aggression between nations. As James Srodes notes in "On Dupont Circle," a book about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and their cadre of young reformers, they had unshakable "faith in the powers of experts to solve political issues." And, of course, they saw themselves as the experts. When conflict came, New Deal progressives ran the war effort with authoritarian zeal. FDR, John Foster Dulles, Sumner Welles and Henry Stimson felt supremely confident to lead the nation through World War II because their fellow progressives had done it before, in the First World War. Progressives prided themselves on the way they had engineered victory in "The War to End All Wars." In doing so, they blithely ignored the "slight inconveniences" that had ...

Oleg Atbashian: ... Per a friend of mine with a Ph.D. in mathematics: We scientists say that in order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first build the universe — and that takes about four billion years. But that doesn’t mean we can’t build anything new from existing resources. So telling a businessman “you didn’t build that” is pure sophistry. Such phrases have always been a preamble to looting. Coming from the president, it’s chilling. Apart from the simple  untruth  that “government created the Internet,” Obama’s words boil down to the collectivist bromide that the individual is nothing without the society and the state. As one would expect, Obama didn’t come up with it on his own. Standing on the shoulders of his collectivist predecessors, he ineptly restated  Mussolini’s motto : All individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived in their relation to the State. Benito’s fellow collectivist Adolf Hitler  agrees : Our nation ...

NY Times: Gay Marriage Ban May Cost North Carolina There about 30 states that limit marriage to between a man and a woman, including liberal bastions like California.  Are liberals going to boycott all of them?  It would be much easier for conservatives to boycott George Clooney movies.  And, what is with the Obama team's attempt to bully people who donate to Romney and his Super Pac.  There appears to be a real threat to intimidate these donors and not just avoid their businesses.  Why is that not a major story in the NY Times? The left in this country has been trying to bully people who do not agree with them from Rush Limbaugh to people you have never heard of.  There is a story there of people trying to silence people with which they have a political dis agreement.  The conduct is fascist and should be denounced.  It is as if they have lost the ability to articulate an argument that can persuade people to join t...

George Will: E lizabeth Warren , Harvard law professor and former Obama administration regulator (for consumer protection), is modern liberalism incarnate. As she seeks the Senate seat Democrats held for 57 years before 2010, when Republican  Scott Brown impertinently won it , she clarifies the liberal project and the stakes of contemporary politics. The project is to dilute the concept of individualism, thereby refuting respect for the individual’s zone of sovereignty. The regulatory state, liberalism’s instrument, constantly tries to contract that zone — for the individual’s own good, it says. Warren says:   “ There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own . Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.  ....

Jerry Doyle: ... economic fascism has a precise, defined meaning. And Barack Obama’s economic policy fulfills that meaning in every conceivable way. Economic fascism can be defined as government control over the four P’s: Product, Price, Profit Margin, and People. When the government controls the product created by the market, when it controls the price structure for product and company securities, when it controls how much profit particular companies can make, and when it controls the people who are hired and fired, economic freedom has been banished, and economic fascism reigns supreme. And economic fascism reigns supreme in Barack Obama’s America. Just look at the recent government handling of Chrysler. In a series of press conferences this week announcing Chrysler’s bankruptcy, Obama hit on all of the four P’s. First, Obama stated that Chrysler’s product had to be revamped -- and that he knew how best to do it. “For too long,” Obama said, “Chrysler moved too slowly to adapt to the...

Oliver North: Truth be told, Barack Obama may be the most charismatic and articulate public speaker in America today. Give him carefully crafted prose, well-wrapped applause lines, a teleprompter and an audience, and he will bring 'em to their feet, fired up, ready to charge the barricades. It is a gift, and he uses it well. That's what he did in his first speech to a joint session of Congress and in presenting his budget. On Tuesday evening, I listened in my car so I wasn't distracted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi jumping up every few seconds like a schoolgirl with ants in her pants. Nor could I see Joe, our vice president, semi-somnolently staring out into the crowd. On Thursday, I listened to Obama's speech again and then read the words he used after presenting the federal budget. That's why I conclude that truth be told, too often he isn't telling the truth. Maybe it's not his fault. Perhaps 27-year-old Jon Favreau, his eloquent speechwriter, just does...