Study Islam or get an F!

By Arnold Cusmariu

Maryland is an ocean-deep blue state, having elected Obama twice.  The governor (Martin O’Malley, former mayor of Baltimore) is a Democrat with presidential ambitions; both senators (Benjamin Cardin and Barbara Mikulski) are Democrats; the eight-member congressional delegation includes only one Republican (Andrew Harris); Elijah Cummings, Steny Hoyer, and Chris Van Hollen are powerful minority members of Congress; John Sarbanes is the son of former Senator Paul Sarbanes; a Democrat, Michael E. Busch, is speaker of the House of Delegates; another Democrat, Thomas V. Miller, Jr., is president of the State Senate; the attorney general is Democrat Douglas F. Gansler.
So, it should come as no surprise that La Plata High School officials – the school is in Charles County, Hoyer’s district – would show their true colors and go into dictatorial mode if anyone dared to challenge their authority.  Having powerful Democrats “in their pocket” – as do unions around the country generally – carries enormous clout.  There’s no need to worry about accountability when the big bosses have your back.
Luckily for us, Kevin Wood is not afraid to speak his mind to the powers-that-be, which he did last month, as reported here and here.  A Marine veteran of the Iraq war and a Catholic, Mr. Wood blew his stack when his daughter, an 11^th-grade student at La Plata High School, came home with an assignment requiring her to study Islam’s five pillars or flunk the mandatory World History course teaching this material.  He received a no-trespass order banning him from school grounds after a phone conversation with Shannon Morris, the school's vice principal, during which he reportedly told her that “you could take that Muslim-loving piece of paper and shove it up your white a**.”  The order claimed that Mr. Wood “made verbal threats against the school,” which he denied was his intent.  Evidently, in Democrat-controlled Maryland, expressing outrage to a public official about matters of policy is considered a threat to an entire institution.
La Plata High School spokesperson Katie O’Malley-Simpson denied that Mr. Wood’s concerns had merit, telling Fox News: “We’re not teaching religion, we’re teaching world history.”  Mr. Wood’s wife Melissa found this response unconvincing, commenting: “My husband’s issues, and mine too, are that they’re teaching Islam, but they are not teaching the current events on Islam.”  She added: “The people do not understand what he endured when he was over in Iraq; he lost friends, and he lost brothers and sisters to these people.”
Need I mention that ISIS beheadings are probably not included in the course curriculum, certainly not viewed as consequences of “the religion of peace”?  Ignoring or downplaying inconvenient facts about Islam is the norm in academia generally, as well as among the MSM.  The Obama administration has yet to acknowledge any link between Islam and ISIS terrorists wreaking havoc in Iraq and Syria (for now).
The La Plata High School fiasco reflects a disturbing fact of life in America: many parents feel they have completely lost control over what their children are taught in school and that no one is listening.  The feeling of helplessness is even more pronounced now that Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have been adopted around the country despite ample evidence that CCSS will harm students.
What is to be done?  Maryland’s seven Democrats are certain to return to Congress in January, so the Woods family is good and stuck – unless the publicity their case is gathering persuades La Plata High School officials to reconsider.  In any case, it’s clear who the real guilty party is here.  Voting Democrats out of office, not only at the federal level, is a critical step on the way to national recovery.  There’s a lot more at stake next Tuesday than whether Harry Reid gets to keep his job.

Trading Places: It's Time to Trim the Debate Moderators' Role

By Clarice Feldman

As this campaign season draws to an end, doubtless many will comment on what was right and what went wrong for each party. Let me beat the crowd by stating whatever the outcomes of the Congressional and state races the notion of Republicans continuing to allow Democratic operatives posing as newsmen and women to act as moderators in candidate debates is one of the most inexplicably stupid blunders of all. And yet each election it is repeated. Let this be the last time.
Here are some names and incidents that should be engraved forever on the RNC steps and in each republican officeholder’s quarters:  George Stephanopoulos, Gwen Ifill, Charlie Gibson, Candy Crowley, and James Pindell.
George Stephanopoulos
George, a key figure in the Clinton Administration, went on (with no journalistic experience) to become a newsie at ABC. In 2012 during one of the (too many) Republican candidate debates he surprisingly hit the candidates with a question about contraceptives -- certainly an odd issue for a presidential debate. Within weeks the Democrats launched their “War on Women”. Do you suppose this was a coincidence? Or, like me, do you think this was the first shot in a planned campaign, designed to appeal to single women which focus groups had accurately pegged as vulnerable to a campaign organized around emotional, appeals not rational, considerations?
Gwen Ifill
In 2008, this PBS correspondent, moderated the debate between vice presidential candidates Joe Biden and Sarah Palin without having disclosed that a book she’d authored, The Breakthrough scheduled to come out after the election, was highly complimentary to Obama and would be more saleable if he won. American Thinker’s Lee Cary detailed how biased and often uninformed her questioning was:
Here’s one of my favorite examples Cary gave:

Here's [an] Ifill bias-premised question:
"Governor and Senator, I want you both to respond to this. Secretaries of State Baker, Kissinger, Powell, they have all advocated some level of engagement with enemies. Do you think these former secretaries of state are wrong on that?"
This was a backdoor effort to support Barak Obama's "no preconditions" statement made during his nomination campaign. Ifill's bias is that there's nothing wrong with what Obama said.
Ifill knows that, diplomatically, "some level of engagement with enemies" goes on all the time, often through back channels using third parties. The idea that we don't communicate with our enemies is a Beltway media myth.
Hers was a cleverly formed question, since a "no" answer to the closed-ended query (a "yes" or "no" type question) with which it ends (Do you think...?) would sustain the notion that what Obama said is consistent with, and analogous to, what the former Secretaries of State say. Ifill uses the question to establish conceptual parity without the opportunity to challenge the premise.

Charlie Gibson
In 2008, Gibson, then with ABC news, famously implied in his questioning that Palin was ignorant of the Bush doctrine, without explaining which doctrine to which he was referring. Charles Krauthammer blasted this ill-educated entrapment noting there were over time four different “Bush doctrines”:

If I were in any public foreign policy debate today, and my adversary were to raise the Bush doctrine, both I and the audience would assume -- unless my interlocutor annotated the reference otherwise -- that he was speaking about the grandly proclaimed (and widely attacked) freedom agenda of the Bush administration.
 Not the Gibson doctrine of preemption.
Not the "with us or against us" no-neutrality-is-permitted policy of the immediate post-9/11 days.
Not the unilateralism that characterized the pre-9/11 first year of the Bush administration.
Presidential doctrines are inherently malleable and difficult to define. The only fixed "doctrines" in American history are the Monroe and the Truman doctrines which come out of single presidential statements during administrations where there were few other contradictory or conflicting foreign policy crosscurrents.
Such is not the case with the Bush doctrine.
Yes, Sarah Palin didn't know what it is. But neither does Charlie Gibson. And at least she didn't pretend to know -- while he looked down his nose and over his glasses with weary disdain, sighing and "sounding like an impatient teacher," as the Times noted. In doing so, he captured perfectly the establishment snobbery and intellectual condescension that has characterized the chattering classes' reaction to the mother of five who presumes to play on their stage.

Candy Crowley
Four years later CNN’s Candy Crowley gave Obama three minutes longer in the debate than she gave Mitt Romney; ignored the memo of understanding of the parties by asking follow-up questions and commenting on questions asked by the audience and the candidates’ answers, and famously and erroneously, insisting Romney was in error when he said Obama was not telling the truth when he claimed that the day after the Benghazi attack he had characterized it as “an act of terror”. As anyone who paid attention knew, both Obama and Hillary Clinton had claimed at that time it was a “spontaneous demonstration” occasioned by a video, and refused to call it terrorism.
James Pindell
This round, James Pindell is the uninformed moderator with his thumb on the scale.  He is a local reporter for WMUR (ABC) .In a debate in the hotly-contested New Hampshire senatorial race between Scott Brown and Jeanne Shaheen in which Stephanopoulos served as the chief moderator he wrongly suggested that Brown didn’t know the geography of the state. Not coincidentally, Shaheen’s main campaign thrust was that Brown was an outsider who didn’t know the state as she did. Unfortunately for Pindell, Brown was right and he was wrong. Pindell has since apologized, but it is unclear whether that is sufficient to undo the damage. Both Stephanopoulos and ABC refused to comment or add to the apologies to Brown. This time, the moderator’s intervention was so extreme (or the practice becoming so noticeable) that both NPR’s Cokie Roberts MSNBC’s Morning Joe hosts publicly criticized the action.

“Having that little guy just sort of ask that same little question over and over again like that and he was just trying to be so smart, and I think he [Scott Brown] handled very it well,” Roberts said. “He didn’t go the Christie route and say ‘enough with Sullivan County.’ He said ‘no, with all due respect,’ and he didn’t get flustered by it. That was the point -- the point was to fluster him and show him as a carpetbagger. I think that is the biggest strike against him [Brown]. But it ended up being a much bigger strike against the member of my trade.”                 

In my view, the “trade’s” role   in political debates has already been sufficiently discredited -- putting their thumbs on the scale, erroneous interjections, ignoring debate rules, asking irrelevant questions and largely working to advance their own interests or those of their political friends rather than to aid the conduct of useful, honest debates.
It’s time to end this charade. Questions to candidates ought to be on point (that is, on issues within the bailiwick of their offices), accurate and neutral, set before hand, and the only moderation should be a timekeeper. TV figures should have to find another way to promote themselves, their party and their careers. Campaigns are about the candidates, not about the moderators -- time to trade places and put the candidates and voters’ interests first.

The Democrats' War on America

By Greg Richards 

 

Debbie Wasserman Shultz is chair of the Democratic National Committee and spokesperson for the Democratic Party.  She thinks that the Republican Party is conducting a war on women and that individual Republicans – specifically, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin – is giving women the back of his hand and is grabbing them by the hair.

It is always embarrassing to watch a liberal try to come up with a thought, and Ms. Wasserman Shultz doesn’t quite make it to the finish line here.  So she fills in with vituperation and calumny, the stock-in-trade of the left.
But that should not obscure the fact that there is a political war going on: the Democrats’ War on America. 
The Democrats are the party of the left, and the left has no respect for the achievements of others.  Things just happen and are there to be distributed or redistributed.  They aren’t built.  They aren’t sweated for. They aren’t saved for.  They aren’t invested in.  They aren’t the result of success after years of failure.  They aren’t sacrificed for.  They aren’t the result of foresight.  They aren’t the result of discipline.  They aren’t the result of years of education.  They aren’t the result of drudgery.  They aren’t the result of disappointment overcome.  Whatever it is, you didn’t build that.  Therefore, it belongs to the government.
If all cultures are equal, if you didn’t build that, then all success is theft (hat tip to Evan Sayet).  The bigger the success, the bigger the theft.  America, being by far the most successful country in the world, in spite of being one of the youngest, therefore must be the biggest thief in the world, the world’s biggest criminal.
That’s how Saul Alinsky saw things.  He is the tutor of the left, and that is the way they see things.  The Democratic Party is the party of the left, and that is the way it sees things.  Well, if America is the world’s biggest thief, the world’s biggest criminal, then making war on her is a noble cause.  That is where the Democrats are.  That is where Ms. Wasserman Shultz is.  She is the spokesperson for that war.
How do we know that there is a Democratic War on America? 
The Democrats will not defend America.
The Democrats won’t defend the southern border.  They don’t believe in borders for America.  They believe in borders for themselves, but not for America.  A border for the White House – complete with a fence – but not for America.
The Democrats require the FBI to pretend there is no such thing as jihad.  All references to jihad have been required to be eliminated from FBI training.  And procedures.  Do you actually think that the FBI is so incompetent, so negligent, that it could not follow up on the lead the Russians provided on Tamerlan Tsarnaev?  Of course not.  The FBI was directed not to notice any “religious” – Muslim – element in terror threats.
The left is not connected to reality.  Political correctness is a term that has been coined to define the vocabulary and perceptions required by the left that are inconsistent with reality. 
We are under attack by radical Islam.  The director of the CIA, John Brennan, says there is no such thing. 
Because if there is such a thing, then American culture is superior to Muslim culture.  And the left and the Democrats, being the party of the left, don’t believe that, can’t believe that. 
So, yes, there is a political war going on out there: the Democrats’ War on America.

Stripping disposable income from the middle class

By James Longstreet

It has long been acknowledged that taxing the private and corporate sectors removes money from the economy and places it at the disposal and direction of the public or government sector.  This dampens free market activities. The government is left to allocate those monies as it sees fit.
When interest rates are held to zero, when fair market rates are depressed, when return on savings is denied, the arrangement is the same.  The effects are the same.  Although money doesn’t move to the government, as in taxation, it instead remains with the government.  The federal debt, via treasuries and other government issued paper, no longer must be "serviced", (interest paid) at fair market rates of return. The net effect to the economy is the same as "taxation."  Money that normally flows to the economy and into private hands does not.  It remains with the government. 
The much-discussed middle class has seen its disposable income continually decline.  This de facto tax on savings, this removal of a fair market return on savings via Federal Reserve policy, is just one more minus in the disposable income column.  Already affected by higher healthcare / insurance, college tuitions, real estate taxes, food and energy, the middle class must now do without a historically fair return on any savings they might have otherwise spent.
Round and round we go with a Federal Reserve chasing its own tail.   Higher oil and food prices depress other retail sales readings and economic barometers.  The Fed reacts by pumping, which results in depressing the dollar's value.  The dollar buys less oil and food, prices rise, economic barometers decline, the Fed pumps.  Rinse. Repeat.
If indeed the middle class could enjoy a return on savings, if its disposable income could indeed rise, the economic engine of a consumer with "money in his wallet" would bring back the consumption power missing from this economy. 
So, Ms. Yellen, meet Mr. Newton.  He will tell you that for every "economic" action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.  The zero interest rate policy of the Federal Reserve, which has helped Wall Street, has also taken away money from the consumer that drives the economy.  Allow fair rates to return and watch the economy, (maybe not the stock market) become revitalized.  We have tried it your way for 6 years.

The sleeper case that could bust open the IRS scandals

By Thomas Lifson

In the absence of a special prosecutor, the best opportunity for piercing the veil of secrecy and evasion that surrounds the IRS handling of groups perceived as enemies of the Obama administration lies in civil litigation.  The National Organization for Marriage has just obtained a $50,000 settlement from the IRS for its criminal release of confidential donor information to an opposition group. But so far Eric Holder’s Justice Department is not pursuing inquiries into who feloniously released that information.
The absence of any official judicial inquiry into the inner workings of the IRS processes is why it is so important to note that yesterday saw the beginning of the discovery phase in the lawsuit by Z-Street a pro-Israel organization that was told its application for tax exempt status was being delayed because:

…these cases are being sent to a special unit in the DC office to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.

Z-Street’s lawsuit alleges unlawful viewpoint discrimination, a First Amendment claim. The IRS tried several arguments to dismiss Z-Street’s lawsuit, all of which were dismissed by Washington, DC federal district court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, an Obama appointee. She noted that Z-Street was not suing to gain tax exempt status, but rather over the viewpoint discrimination evidenced by what it was told by IRS agent Diane Gentry about contradicting administration policies – the process by which the IRS made the determination on tax exempt status. In the words of the Jerusalem Post:

The Z Street case may be what forces the IRS to pull aside its carefully constructed curtain and reveal how it made decisions regarding organizations deemed out of step with the current US administration.

Judge Jackson gave the IRS until June 26 to respond to Z-Street. That deadline has now passed, so the case enters discovery. This means that Z-Street can subpoena IRS officials, place them under oath, and ask them questions about how they acted, and cross examine them closely. They can also subpoena documents and require their production. This is much different than a House committee hearing in which members have only a few minutes to ask questions, and when friendly Democrats have their opportunity to apologize for the impertinence of daring to ask questions of our IRS masters. Depositions taken under oath can last many hours and involve detailed questions.
What makes the Z-Street case unique and potentially extremely damaging is that its lawsuit was filed in August 2010. That filing placed the IRS under legal obligation to preserve records. The Wall Street Journal’s Review and Outlook column explains:

Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and legal precedent, once the suit was filed the IRS was required to preserve all evidence relevant to the viewpoint-discrimination charge. That means that no matter what dog ate Lois Lerner's hard drive or what the IRS habit was of recycling the tapes used to back up its email records of taxpayer information, it had a legal duty not to destroy the evidence in ongoing litigation.
In private white-collar cases, companies facing a lawsuit routinely operate under what is known as a "litigation hold," instructing employees to affirmatively retain all documents related to the potential litigation. A failure to do that and any resulting document loss amounts to what is called "willful spoliation," or deliberate destruction of evidence if any of the destroyed documents were potentially relevant to the litigation.
At the IRS, that requirement applied to all correspondence regarding Z Street, as well as to information related to the vetting of conservative groups whose applications for tax-exempt status were delayed during an election season. Instead, and incredibly, the IRS cancelled its contract with email-archiving firm Sonasoft shortly after Ms. Lerner's computer "crash" in June 2011.
In the federal District of Columbia circuit where Z Street's case is now pending, the operating legal obligation is that "negligent or reckless spoliation of evidence is an independent and actionable tort." In a 2011 case a D.C. district court also noted that "Once a party reasonably anticipates litigation, it must suspend its routine document retention/destruction policy and put in place a 'litigation hold' to ensure the preservation of relevant documents."
The government's duty is equally pressing. "When the United States comes into court as a party in a civil suit, it is subject to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure as any other litigant," the Court of Federal Claims ruled in 2007. The responsibility to preserve evidence should have been a topic of conversation between the IRS chief counsel's office and the Justice Department lawyers assigned to handle the Z Street case.

The potential destruction of evidence, by becoming a separate tort, opens the door for judicial inquiry into the IRS destruction of evidence. Armed with subpoenas and able to examine and cross examine people under oath, Z-Street has the potential to bust open what really went on at the IRS.
Strangely enough no major media outlet covered the opening of the discovery phase of this case. Only Gretchen Carlson of Fox News had the wit to notice, and interviewed Lori Lowenthal Marcus, head of Z-Street (and an AT contributor):

Fifteen Things You Probably Do Not Know about Psychopaths

By James G. Long

Have you ever worked for someone who you seriously thought might be crazy?  About half of all workers have such an experience within a lifetime.  The other half misses out on one of life's most perplexing and educational opportunities.
The subject is psychopathy.  Knowledge and understanding of psychopathy is now advancing, and at an accelerating rate, after a decades-long period of no growth and slow growth.  Good thing!  Psychopathy is the very worst mental disorder; psychopathy and related conditions have cost millions of lives lost and trillions of dollars wasted, though it is still very poorly understood by most people.  I am now speaking not as a medical or psychological professional, but as a professional project engineering manager who has been faced with numerous severe personnel and management problems not addressed in engineering or business school. 
Psychopathy is without a doubt the most destructive, the most deadly, and the least comprehensible of mental disorders.  So, to promote understanding of psychopathy, the following points are offered:

1. Briefly – A psychopath is a person with a very nasty personality who builds a more attractive and very fake personality to cover his frauds, transgressions, and, sometimes, murders.  A representative sample of people psychologically assessed as psychopaths includes Casey Anthony, who allegedly killed her daughter; John Wayne Gacy, who murdered and sodomized thirty-three young men and who was executed; and Jeff Skilling, who was CEO of Enron when it was destroyed in the largest corporate fraud case in history, and who is now in prison.  Andrew Lobaczewski was a psychologist in Poland during the Cold War who identified Stalin as a psychopath.

2. Rational – Psychopaths are quite rational.  Psychopaths' minds work no better and no worse than yours, except that psychopaths have a big void where most people have a conscience and moral values.  In a family setting, a psychopath typically abuses the spouse and children and is respected and is even well thought of by outsiders.  In a working environment, psychopaths choose their victims from lower-ranking individuals and take care to act properly around higher-ranking individuals.  In national and international relations, psychopaths create and exploit divisions based on ethnic, religious, national, or class differences.
   
   On first being exposed to a psychopath, a person may be quite favorably impressed.Odd things then begin to happen.Subordinates soon observe incomprehensible behaviors, including pathological dishonesty, and begin to think that the psychopath is "crazy" – or, more technically, he is psychotic.But a psychopath is not psychotic.Psychopathy is a personality disorder, and psychopaths at their worst may start wars or create worldwide financial disasters.Psychopaths are substantially or totally devoid of human feelings: no sympathy, no empathy, no guilt, no remorse, no conscience, and no sense of humor.
   
   Psychopaths are quite predatory.Not only are psychopaths without human feelings, but they are, deep down, contemptuous of all with whom they deal: superiors, subordinates, supporters, opponents, associates, and family alike.Psychopaths genuinely think that they are better and smarter than everyone else, an impression that psychopath enablers fully endorse (think Chris Matthews or the German General Staff during WWII).

3. Mental Disorders – The primary indicators for psychopathy are anti-social personality disorder and malignant narcissism personality disorder, plus tendencies toward criminal behaviors and an inability to establish mature sexual relationships.  These mental disorders are recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), though the DSM and the criteria for these mental disorders have been through many revisions as knowledge develops and fashions change.  

4. Measurement – Formal measurement of psychopathy is performed by a trained professional using Dr. Robert Hare's Psychopathy Check List – Revised (PCL-R), consisting of twenty-one items such as pathological dishonesty, parasitic lifestyle, and irresponsibility.  Not all of the items are required to assess a psychopathic condition.  Neurological exams may be used to confirm damage or defect in the brain.  Electroencephalograms (EEGs), functional Magnetic Resonant Imaging (fMRI), and Computerized Axial Tomography scans (CAT scans) are highly effective in confirming neurological abnormalities; Dr. Hare has done much original research in this area to confirm diagnoses of psychopathy.  On a macro scale, psychopaths are inefficient, incompetent, and corrupt, much like the Soviet Union.  Psychopathy is thought to be incurable at this time. 

5. Control – Psychopaths want to control you – physically, emotionally, sexually, financially, and politically.  Psychopaths want to control your soft drinks, your ability to defend yourself, your health care, and your life. 

6. Occurrence – Psychopaths are thought to be about one percent of the population.  Dr. Hare has noted that the occurrence of corporate psychopaths ranges up to four percent of corporate executives; psychopaths with the proper schooling and qualifications are attracted to positions of wealth and power, and they manipulate themselves into positions of responsibility and authority.

7. Masks – There are few overt characteristics to distinguish a psychopath from the general population, within which the psychopath can easily blend.  Dr. Cleckley's 1941 book, which first described clinical psychopathy, was entitled The Mask of Sanity.  The "mask" to which Dr. Cleckley referred takes different forms.  Ted Bundy wore fake bandages and fake arm and leg casts to attract sympathetic young women, whom he subsequently murdered.  Corporate psychopaths typically collect and ostentatiously display degrees, certifications, and awards as proof of their abilities while committing their often subtle frauds.  Jeff Skilling at Enron in particular had a rock-solid resume, including an MBA from Harvard and a partnership in McKinsey and Company, a premier business consultancy company.  Skilling is now in prison for the greatest case of corporate fraud in history, with thousands of careers disrupted and billions of dollars of corporate value lost.

8. Causes – Neurological defect or injury is often associated with psychopathy, though some cases have no known causative factors.  Cases have been reported of identical twins, one psychopathic, the other not.  Stalin, Hitler, and Saddam Hussein exhibited traits common to psychopaths, and each had been subject to abusive or neglectful parenting, possibly resulting in psychological damage.  There is another possible factor relating to an outsider status.  Napoleon was not French, but Corsican.  Lenin was not Russian, but Kalmyk and Turkic.  Stalin was not Russian, but Georgian.  And Hitler was not German, but Austrian.

9. Flavors – By far, most psychopaths operate on a family and community level, destroying family relationships, committing crimes and misdemeanors, and rotating in and out of mental hospitals, jails, and prisons, and then back into the community.  But many psychopaths tend to come in other distinct flavors depending on their personalities.  Serial-murder psychopaths and corporate psychopaths were previously mentioned.  Other flavors include military, religious, financial, and political psychopaths.  Dr. Clive Boddy made a convincing argument that the 2008 financial meltdown was the product of financial and political psychopaths.
   
   The rarest of psychopathic types is the intellectual psychopath.Karl Marx, Saul Alinsky, and Cloward-Piven come to mind.   Both Marx and Alinsky displayed psychopathic traits and inspired other psychopaths to infiltrate and sometimes forcibly seize governments, followed by characteristic psychopathic inefficiency, incompetence, and corruption in the administration of the state. 

10. Psychopath Enablers and Supporters – Family and local psychopath enablers are well-identified and can be researched on the internet.  Political psychopath enablers were institutionalized by Antonio Gramsci in his concept of "Corporate Communism," wherein Marxists were to infiltrate and take over cultural institutions: academia, media, legal, courts, and political parties.  

11. Creativity – Creative psychopaths are often audacious and leave people surprised and off balance, as when Hitler invaded the Sudetenland or when Putin invaded Crimea.  Corporate psychopaths are often credited with being creative even as their organizations suffer massive personnel turnover and financial loss. 

12. Tough Reputation – Beyond the items on Dr. Hare's PCL-R, psychopaths cultivate a reputation for toughness, but that does not mean that they get good results.  In reality, they are just very nasty personalities who abuse subordinates and may commit crimes.  Rahm Emanuel (now failing as mayor of Chicago) and Rod Blagojevich (now in prison) fall in this category.

13. Recognizing Psychopathy – Many psychologists have different interpretations of conditions similar to psychopathy.  The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) are virtually the only institutions that unequivocally accept and utilize Dr. Hare's findings on psychopathy in solving crimes and profiling criminals and criminal psychopaths.  The Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) specifically recognizes the "bully boss" but ignores the "psychopathic boss."  By whatever label, the two designations are indistinguishable for personnel turnover, financial losses, and criminal behaviors.   

14. Failure – In practical terms, psychopaths always fail, and psychopathic failure creates misery for families, communities, and nations.  Political psychopaths and their systems fail in the manner that the Soviet Union failed, leaving massive social and economic costs for their supporters and for their opponents.  This is exactly what one might expect from the world's most severe mental disorder.  Long-running psychopathic systems such as militant Islam and Marxism typically endure periods of success alternating with failure, during which massive social and economic losses are endured by everyone, supporters and opponents alike. 

15. Ending Psychopathic Expression – Dr. Hare and associates are increasingly capable of identifying a psychopath at an early age.  Many conditions are medically or legally sanctioned (eyeglasses may be required for a driver's license), and psychopathy should be in this category, with psychopaths limited in their opportunities to control others.  The Tyee had a novel but quite workable approach to corporate psychopathy: require all corporate executives to have performance insurance, with denial of insurance to those who cannot pass a psychopathy screening exam.  Internationally, the best strategy appears to be to contain psychopathic states and let them die of their own corruption, as the Soviet Union did.

Psychopathy is a common and extremely destructive mental disorder that afflicts not only the psychopath, but whole communities, nations, and the world.  We now have the tools to identify and mitigate psychopathy, if we can develop the will to do so.
James G. Long has been an army captain, a professional engineer, an author, and a blogger, with a lifelong interest in organizational management problems.  mandynamerica.com/blog/

"Remember Mississippi"

Remember Mississippi!

 

The maneuverings to keep Thad Cochran in the Senate will not soon be forgotten.

By John Fund

How far did the establishment GOP forces backing Senator Thad Cochran go in Mississippi this week? Too far, and their tactics are likely to leave permanent scars in a civil war with Tea Party forces that are out of all proportion to the importance the establishment placed on saving one 76-year-old senator’s ability to please Washington’s K Street lobbying interests.
“This is a win for the establishment, but it’s a win with an asterisk, because it’s so tainted that it might be one of those things where they’re going to be sorry they ever won the runoff in Mississippi,” Craig Shirley, a political consultant and the author of two respected biographies of Ronald Reagan, told Yahoo News this week.
The key to Cochran’s surprising victory was a disproportionately high turnout in precincts with high Democratic registration. Mississippi law permits voters to cross party lines in primaries, but it prohibits members of one party who voted in their party’s primary to participate in a runoff of the other party. It also bars them from voting in the runoff unless they intend to support the resulting nominee in the November election — an unenforceable requirement, but one that showed that the intent of the election law was, in this case, to let Republicans determine their own nominee.
The tactics used to convince black Democrats to vote for Cochran included the same kind of race-baiting that Republicans have complained about for decades. “The Tea Party Intends To Prevent Blacks From Voting on Tuesday” was the headline on a flier that indefatigable journalist Charles Johnson (twitter #chuckcjohnson) discovered had been distributed in heavily black precincts before the June 23 vote. Along with that unfounded incendiary message was a list of issue comparisons between Cochran and Chris McDaniel. Cochran was credited with such unconservative positions as support for federal pork projects and food-stamp funding. The flier carried no identification as to who produced it, a violation of federal law.
Curiously, another flier put out by the pro-Cochran Mississippi Conservatives PAC last week described Cochran’s positions in nearly identical language as the anonymous flier and even carried an identical photo of the senator. The slogan that Thad Cochran “Supports All Mississippians” is the same in both fliers.
 “I don’t know who put it out,” former governor Haley Barbour, who raised boatloads of money for the Mississippi Conservatives PAC, told my colleague Eliana Johnson. “I can’t imagine the Cochran campaign did that.”
But the Mississippi Conservatives PAC did engage in its own questionable tactics. A mysterious robo-call went out to thousands of Democratic households just before the June 23 vote. The female narrator’s message was as follows: “By not voting, you are saying ‘take away all of my government programs, such as food stamps, early breakfast and lunch programs, millions of dollars to our black universities . . . everything we and our families depend on that comes from Washington will be cut.”
As the Washington Examiner reported: “It turns out that former Republican Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s pro-Cochran Super PAC, Mississippi Conservatives, shelled out $44,000 for an offensive robo-call urging black Democrat voters to vote for Thad Cochran in the Republican primary Tuesday.”
There has been much speculation about the offensive robo-call, which trashes the Tea Party for “their disrespectful treatment of the first African American president.” The female narrator claimed that Tea Party candidate Chris McDaniel would cause “even more problems for President Obama.”
As I said, the wounds from all of this are likely to be long lasting.
“This just threw gasoline onto the flames of the civil war,” Richard Viguerie, the author of Takeover: The 100 Year War for the GOP’s Soul, told reporters this week. “What happened yesterday in Mississippi will resonate for years to come. It will become the battle cry, just like the Alamo. We will remember Mississippi.”
— John Fund is national-affairs columnist for National Review Online.

 ---------------------------------------------------

Ok, here is the plan: We will keep the house so that is not an issue. We
need to forgo the Senate possibly because truth is, it doesn't matter
because obama will not sign a thing that has a hint against his ideology
anyway. We need to just purge the Senate of the rinos. In the fall we
should vote for the dem or write in against these rinos. The call should indeed be
"Remember Mississippi", as in Remember the Alamo. This is a chance to
take these monsters and sell outs to the woodshed. We need to vote
against Cochran, McConnell, Grahm, McCain, and Cornyn to boot amongst
many others. Yes it is drastic and risky but you don't win in the end by
half stepping at this point. We the conservatives cannot let them take our vote for granted simply because the rino is the candidate. Its better to fight against your known enemy and lose than to be shot in the back by those who were supposed to be on your side.

tusc

Go Dirty and Go Heavy

By William L. Gensert

You have to give respect to the Democrats, assuredly a merry band of pugilistic progressives. They know how to fight, and they are not afraid to get dirty. It is a lesson Republicans need to learn and an example they need to emulate. 
There are rules in life, universal rules that hold true the world over -- or at the very least, should. Most of modern civilization abhors violence against women and children, as well as cheating, stealing and murder and all those other things on those stone tablets Moses brought down from the mount.
Politics, however, is not life. In politics, the only thing that matters is winning. Republicans will need to win in order for America to have half a chance of preventing what remains of this glorious nation from sliding down Barry’s toilet of hope and change.
In the Presidential Debates of 2012, Mitt Romney had Obama on the ropes, unmasking him as the moron some of us have long maintained him to be.  Yet, he did not close -- he let up -- he played the political version of prevent defense, and it cost him the election and the nation a brighter future. 
While Barry’s boys were busy portraying poor Mitt as some sort of voracious capitalistic monster, eating babies for breakfast, while rejoicing at his ability to give an unemployed steelworker’s wife cancer, Mitt did nothing. He never fought back.
Mitt never took off the gloves, because he was determined to take the high road.
In a perfect world, the high road is a path all should seek to tread. Yet, when victory is the only consideration, the low road is a surer course to the finish line. In politics, no one cares how an election is won, only that it is won.
The Democrats know how to win and the Republicans do not. 
Mitt Romney is assuredly a fine and decent man. Always on the high road, he would have adhered to the Constitution and played by the rules. The man would have made a great president. However, ‘fine and decent’ hurt him in his battle against Obama, who has never cared about rules or the high road. Barry couldn’t find the high road even if he had some choom from his Punahou prep school days and a 10-pound bag of Oreos with directions on the back.
Yet, he surely knows how to campaign; and with Barry, it is always a negative campaign.  In his first electoral victory, in 1996, he had all candidates disqualified on technicalities, allowing him to run unopposed. In 1998, he again ran unopposed for the opportunity to face a first-time Republican candidate, Yesse Yehuda. In the general election, Obama was re-elected as state senator with 89% of the vote.
In his campaign to be a United States Senator, miraculously the sealed divorced records of his primary opponent, Blair Hull were leaked to the public. That was it for Hull.
In the general, Barry was lucky enough to run against another divorced candidate, Jack Ryan. Incredibility and again miraculously, the sealed custody papers from his divorce were also released, and that was it for Jack. 
I have called Barack Obama a moron, and made no secret of my visceral dislike for the man, but I have to give him his respect for his ability to fight dirty.
In fact, the entire Democratic Party fights the same way. They will do anything to win. Anyone running for office as a Republican can expect to see his or her first love sobbing on MSNBC the Sunday before the election. 
If I were stuck in an alley, back to the wall, facing three criminals meaning to do me bodily harm, I would want a couple of Democrats by my side. They are just as likely to be armed (gun control is for us, not them), and at the very least I could expect them to fight. 
With Republicans by my side, an animated discussion on the pros and cons of using violence as a means for dispute resolution would have surely ensued while my antagonists made short work of my face. Despite overwhelming opinion to the contrary, I like my face.
Yet…
I digress; this is supposed to be an article on strategy and tactics for the 2014 midterm elections.  
We all know the liberal game plan will be “inequality,” “the war on women,” “global warming,” “Obamacare is a huge success” and last but not least, “You’re a racist you tea bagging bastard.”   
Karl Marx famously said. “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
A good case can be made that Barry’s tenure has been not only farce, but tragedy as well. In keeping with this metaphor, Obama is a sad clown.  He convinced so many he would halt the rise of the oceans and transform not only America, but also the world into a better place. 
Emperor Obama’s reign has left us with a stagnant economy, a shrinking workforce, and higher energy costs, despite some of the largest oil and natural gas reserves on the planet. On the international front, America has become the laughingstock of the world, with the Russians and the Chinese embarrassing poor Barry on an almost daily basis. 
We are forced to suffer in silence, while the rest of the world laughs, because only Americans fear our solar-panel king.
This is a story that needs to be told, and electorally it is a huge opportunity. Obama is much less popular than he was in 2010 when Democrats took a “shellacking.”  Every Democrat running for anything needs to be tied to Barry and what he has done domestically and internationally to degrade the nation.
The Democrats have their war on women, accusations a racism against anyone who disagrees, income inequality, etc., etc., etc…
Yet they have an almost unseemly attraction to the “war on women” cudgel, repeating relentlessly the falsity that women make only 77 cents to every man’s dollar.
Despite proof otherwise, Barack Obama and the Democrats will beat that 77-cent woman to death in the months preceding the 2014 midterm elections. Negative is all he knows and with the firing of Jill Abramson, he and his party will throw the New York Times under the bus as evidence.

Barack and Jill

went up the hill

Jill had a dollar on her,

Barack came down with 77 cents

as always, Jill carried his water.

The opening shot for control of the Senate was fired on April 17 when Obama took his Obamacare victory lap in the Rose Garden, bragging about 8.1 million sign-ups.  In his remarks, he actually called the ACA, “ObamaCare.” That was a tick, and it speaks volumes about our president and his understanding of the progress the ACA has made. In calling the law “ObamaCare”, he telegraphed his position with respect to the campaigns now getting underway for the 2014 midterm elections -- ObamaCare is a huge success and the debate is over. 
Have you ever noticed that the people who declare a debate over are always the ones losing said debate? 
Obama, showing a breathtaking lack of awareness, is proud of ObamaCare. His narcissistic solipsism, the sucking up of sycophants, the ululations of hagiographers and the ‘on their knees’ approach media has to all things Obama renders him incapable of any other interpretation.  In addition, the Dems are not far behind in their support and understanding.
Think about that, Barry and his minions are so out of touch they cannot see failure; they wait around until they get statistics that can be twisted into success, thinking we won’t notice.
He believes that campaigning on the success of ObamaCare will be a successful strategy.  I can’t wait.  ObamaCare is a con.  In order for it to succeed, the many must be willing to pay much more for much less, so that the few can pay not much less for not much more. Yeah, that’ll work.
In any case, every Republican running for the senate this year should label their opponent “the 60th vote for ObamaCare.” If running in an election for an open seat, their opponent “would have been the 60th vote for ObamaCare.”
A little Alinsky can go a long way. Mock and ridicule should be the order of the day in this election. Dig deep for any and all dirt on every candidate. 
If there is a “D” after their name, it has to be no holds barred. When they accuse Republicans of fighting a war against women, whether about abortion (sorry, it’s now become “reproductive rights”) or pay equity, it makes no sense for our candidate to defend himself.  Don’t’ respond, accuse.  I would wager that every candidate running for whatever in America has some wage inequality in their operation.
Make accusations, and let them stand, it’s the Alinsky way. Make the charge, and compel the Democrats to defend themselves. If it is possible to implicate the opponent in something involving a live boy (not that there’s anything wrong with that, age of consent withstanding) or a dead girl (which would always be wrong), do so, and do so vigorously. Search for it. It may be unseemly, but so what, scandal drives the vote.
The Republicans should not care about “Pinocchios.” It has never hurt Democrats; Barry got “Lie of The Year, 2013” with his “you can keep your plan” falsehood, to no appreciable damage. Ignore them.
There is a wave coming. It is literally (do I sound like Joe Biden) the best chance America has to stop the Obama juggernaut of willful idiots. Republicans need to catch that wave. They cannot allow progressives to define the issues. Republicans need to stop defending themselves and attack.
The progressive movement is at its weakest point since 2010. Simply refuse to discuss things on their terms, never defend, always attack. Tap into all those who lost their insurance, and whose premiums and deductibles increased dramatically, and all who couldn’t keep their doctor, in addition to losing their plan. The 8 million Barry brags about, includes some of those forced out of their plans by Obamacare mandates (estimates range as high as 6.5 million people) and makes no accounting for people who have not paid their premiums.
There is an ever-expanding group of people angry about what Barack Obama has done these last 5 years. These are the “people,” Republicans need to bring to the fight.  And they are legion, consisting of:
…all those who can’t find a job because of Obamanomics.
…all those who can’t buy a house because of Dodd Frank.
…all those who can’t afford the gas to get to their job or to heat their house because of the great one’s attempts to shut down energy production in America.
…and let’s not forget about Benghazi.
Conservatives need to attack, attack, attack.      
It’s the only way to win.
And, if they have to bend the truth, so be it. 
The insanity that is Barack Obama has to stop if America is to have a chance of survival. Today may be mourning in America, but if we can catch the wave in 2014 and the presidency in 2016, it just might be morning in America again. 
All we need to do is open our eyes and stop apologizing for who we are and what we believe in.
To Barack Obama, we need to tell him we never needed his “transformation” because America was never broken.

Can Election 2014 Put the Nation Back on Track?

By Janice Shaw Crouse

The latest Rasmussen poll, released on Monday, April 14, indicates that more than half of Americans (52%) disapprove of President Obama’s job performance; worse, 58 percent view ObamaCare unfavorably (the highest level of disapproval in several months). Congress, too, comes in for censure with only nine percent of voters thinking that the country will be better off if incumbents are reelected.  This new poll reveals continued pessimism about the economy, direction of the country and disappointment with Mr. Obama’s presidency.  In February, a CBS poll showed that almost 60 percent of Americans (59%) are disappointed in the Obama presidency, an increase primarily among independents. There is the predictable dismay over the economy, ObamaCare, and foreign policy, but the most troubling -- and revealing -- area of concern is that Americans, by a wide margin, think that the country is on the wrong track (63%, wrong direction to 32%, right direction).
One of the most difficult challenges officeholders face is a voting public that thinks the country is on the wrong track.  It’s hard for politicians and pundits alike to accurately assess the origins of such judgments. Is it because of specific policy positions? Or, because Americans don’t like what they see happening around them?  Or, is it because people feel worse off than they did before?  Too many friends out of work?  Or is it because they see too many changes coming at them too fast, and they fear for their future prospects given ever more government regulation and intrusion along with the government’s massive budget deficits adding daily to the ballooning national debt?
I think the public’s reactions can be explained pretty simply with three statements: (1) The current administration is very divisive and controlling.  Anyone who disagrees with the prevailing, doctrinaire pronouncements of the reigning elite is slurred as bigoted, extremist, and/or ignorant and stupid. (2) Americans’ freedoms have been abridged in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. (3) Further, this administration has consistently politicized government in unprecedented ways. The situation involving CBS News investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson illustrates all three points. Attkisson recently resigned from CBS because of how the Obama Administration squelches journalists. She told Howard Kurtz of “Media Buzz” that the “chilling” manipulation of the Obama Administration interferes “in ways that have never come to bear before.” Attkisson reports that the “pressure on journalists for just doing their jobs” by this administration is the “strongest and most forceful in her 20 years on air.” She says they are “particularly aggressive,” “secretive,” and “manipulative” in going over the heads of reporters to their bosses and that the president’s “interference is unprecedented.”
Even Politico, an influential leftist website, acknowledges that coming days will reveal whether 2014 will turn out to be “simply a good year for the GOP or a rout.” There is no question that the public is angry and disgusted with “politics as usual” and there is deep disappointment with President Obama, even among those who did not vote for him but hoped that the first black president would do well.
As Politico points out, this summer will be pivotal.  The Supreme Court will issue its decision on the contraception mandate and religious liberty, probably in June. That decision will be a rallying cry for both the left and right in the days leading up to the 2014 elections. As Politico put it: “Upholding the mandate would incense social conservatives” and “striking it down would give Democrats an issue to galvanize women’s groups.”
Obama swept into office as the reincarnation of FDR, an aura that is long gone; all the luster of a conquering hero was eroded in short order. The man whose charisma and persuasive abilities drew record votes from youth and minorities simply blew it -- even while he presided over an entrenched liberal power base on the Hill (whose approval ratings are even more dismal than the president’s). The president’s cool demeanor became oblivious detachment from the political climate; his oratorical skills degenerated into wooden reading of the teleprompter screens; his “yes we can” attitude devolved into tribalism and race baiting. Everything that the “progressives” thought they had “won” is turning out to be like sandcastles crumbling before an onrushing tide of voter anger. Even worse, the administration and congressional leaders are responsible for the mountain of debt that is stifling economic growth and which will be an albatross around the necks of countless generations to come. The public is showing that they feel the sacrifice of individual freedom inherent in ObamaCare is too great a price to pay. Democrats have clearly over-reached in their frantic push to expand government control over the private sector.
Who could have predicted at the outset of the Obama Administration -- when the president rivaled John F. Kennedy in popularity -- that the mid-term elections would find the Republicans favored for massive wins, despite voter misgivings about them? Even more astonishing, who would have believed that Democrats and Independents would be distancing themselves from the president whose promise of national transformation would saddle our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren with tens of trillions of dollars in debt from radical policies, reckless spending, and out-of-control government expansion -- the extent of which most of us still cannot comprehend?
For most of us, the election of 2014 is not a matter of campaigns, rhetoric, or local outcomes; instead, the results that determine who controls the Senate -- and thus supports or blocks the president’s radical destructive agenda -- boils down to a question of whether this nation will survive. Ultimately, the 2014 election will go a long way toward revealing whether we can take a step back from the brink.

Common Core's Dirtiest Trick: Dividing Parents and Children

By Bruce Deitrick Price

When you look back at New Math (ca. 1965) and Reform Math (ca. 1990), one of the most striking and persistent features was that parents could not understand the homework their children brought home.
Mystified parents were trying to advise mystified children.  The parents, presumably the wise members of the society, were helpless to say anything useful when confronted by the weird complexities of “reform” math, which has now been rolled forward into Common Core.
Here is a commonplace horror story that can stand in for millions of others: “When Mike and Camille Chudzinski tried to help their son with his homework earlier this fall, they were bewildered. The fourth-grader brought home no spelling lists, few textbooks, and a whole new approach to solving math problems. When he tackled multi-digit addition, for instance, Patrick did not just line up the two numbers and then add the columns, as his parents had been taught to do. Instead, he sketched out a graph with a series of arrows and marks that appeared at first to his parents as indecipherable as hieroglyphics.”
When we hear these stories, we typically focus on the comical oddity of adults not being able to do homework intended for children.  How is that even possible?  But the ramifications are anything but funny.  The real damage is that Reform Math opens up fractures throughout society.  Parents are cut off from their children.  Parents and schools are pitted against each other.  Students are alienated from their teachers and schools.
Sociologist James Coleman said that the most important thing in successful education is what he called "social capital."  Ideally, parents, kids, schools, and community are on the same page, working toward the same goals.  In this way the children feel they are doing appropriate and necessary things.  Energy is used to complete tasks, not to debate the merits of the tasks.
Imagine the situation in Reform Math when parents can’t do even elementary problems in arithmetic.  Adults are angry; children are stressed.  Parents have conferences with teachers, and they complain later in front of the children that the teachers couldn’t give them any satisfactory answers.  Why would children be enthusiastic about mastering something that their own parents find impossible and reprehensible? 
All of this tension and hostility adds up to the perfect excuse for the child to lose interest in math, and in school generally.  We hear lots of stories about children who are miserable at school.  We shouldn’t be surprised.
In short, Reform Math is bad not just because it doesn’t teach math; it’s bad because it’s a society-wrecker.  This is Common Core’s dirtiest trick. 
In an intelligently organized society, the schools would do everything possible to involve parents in their children’s education.  Our Education Establishment is doing the reverse.  Schools seem intent on making parents turn their backs on their children’s education.
Driving parents out of the equation means driving education out of the equation.
Today, whenever schools are not getting good results, the first excuse the Education Establishment offers is that parents don’t want to help.  This is diabolical.  The schools do everything possible to make parents give up on education, and then the schools blame the parents.
Professor Michael Toscano writes, “Educational success is also dependent upon closure between families and their schools. In the case of the CCSS, little real ‘social capital’ exists between parents and schools, because the standards were adopted out of the reach of parents and because they will remain out of their reach. This is a crucial mistake. Education must be a common good that emanates from the relations of families in a community.”
When New Math was first introduced 60 years ago and parents complained, the official propaganda was that the new methods were so sophisticated that parents simply weren’t ready for them.  Many in the community accepted the claim that children would finally benefit from being pushed in this way.  That was a mistake.  New Math was, for all practical purposes, irrational.  It soon self-destructed, and then we knew that it, not parents, had been flawed all along.
This pattern continues.  The community should use a commonsense “smell test.”  Schoolwork too complicated for parents is too complicated, period.  It’s not appropriate for children.
Common Core has embraced and recycled all the worst ideas from “reform” math.  One has to conclude that the people responsible are hopelessly incompetent or hopelessly ideological.
The more you reflect on the flood of horror stories, the more you feel that Common Core commissars must spend their time concocting ways to alienate children and defeat parents.  The basic taunt seems to be: “Hey, you parents.  You can gripe and complain and thereby look foolish in the eyes of your children, or you can cower in surrender as you learn to put up with the artificial nonsense that we have devised, thanks to millions in grants from the government (your taxes used against you).  Haha, suckers.  You can’t win.  Obama promised a fundamental transformation, and the first thing we’re going to transform is your sense of importance as parents.  You must learn that you are insignificant.”
The divide between parents and children is a far more critical issue than many imagined.  The proper priority is that homework should be specifically designed to bring parents and children together.  Common Core seems cunningly designed to do the opposite.  That’s the main reason it must be defeated.

Progressive (Leftist) Insurance

The right ideological credentials mean never having to say you’re sorry

By Victor Davis Hanson

How do you ensure that you won’t be ostracized, denounced, or fired if you are a media celebrity, captain of industry, or high public official?
For some, sexist banter is certainly no problem. Stand-up comedian Bill Maher called Sarah Palin a c–t and a tw-t, but suffered no ill consequences. David Letterman joked on air that Sarah Palin’s 14-year-old daughter had had sex with Alex Rodriguez during a New York Yankees game. There was no downside to that either. President Obama tosses around “sweetie” as he wishes. No problem with that. No one believes Barack could be condescending to women.
It is not just that sloppy speech can, with the right ideological insurance, become irrelevant. Inconvenient truths can be insured against too. Barack Obama’s female staffers make far less than do their male counterparts, at least by the quirky sort of standards that the president himself applies to others to win petty victories in his vaunted war against the war against women. Bill Clinton had sexual relations with a young staffer, in what feminists would call a classic exploitative situation of disparate power. Most such bosses would be fired for hitting on their young assistants. If Woody Allen were not insured as a left-wing filmmaker, he would have been ostracized out of Hollywood.
Racism is not necessarily a job killer either. How could it be, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claimed during the 2008 campaign that a “light-skinned” Barack Obama spoke with “no Negro dialect.” Joe Biden, himself a candidate in that election, said of Obama that he was the “first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.” Despite such racist drivel, a fully ideologically insured Biden was rewarded with the nomination for vice president.
No one asks Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to step down from the Supreme Court; but in a quite frightening remark, she quipped that she was surprised about the uproar over abortion: “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” Frankly, that seemed a savage thing to say, especially given the inordinate percentages of abortions among minorities and the poor. Why did an uncouth Don Imus go on forced sabbatical from radio for his racial crudity, but not, say, Stephen Colbert for his own racial buffoonery? Is it that Colbert is never dead serious in a way Imus always is? No, it’s that Colbert had taken out ideological insurance, Imus not so much.
As far as inflammatory race baiting goes, one can say almost anything one wants — with the proper ideological insurance: Collate these comments by Chris Rock (the Fourth of July is “white people’s day”), Morgan Freeman on conservative opposition to Obama (the Tea Party is “going to do whatever [they] can to get this black man outta here”), Jamie Foxx on Django Unchained (“I kill all the white people in the movie. How great is that?”), or Hank Aaron on Republicans who oppose President Obama’s policies (they’re like the KKK). Certainly racial venom is not a career ender for the fully insured. Jay-Z, a frequent White House guest, is not shy about wearing a Five-Percent Nation medallion, which reflects an ideology that considers whites inferior devils.
Insensitivity to gay concerns is supposed to be professionally ruinous. But, really, it is not either. Alec Baldwin occasionally lets loose with anti-gay slurs and seems to be doing fine. Barack Obama strongly opposed gay marriage far more publicly than did the head of Mozilla. No one asks our president to resign, or for that matter the legion of Democratic politicians who ran on the premise that marriage is properly only between a man and a woman. They all were fully covered by low-deductible ideological insurance.
Criminal activity is no barrier either. Last week, at a convention hosted by activist Al Sharpton, Attorney General Eric Holder whined to Sharpton’s audience that he and Obama have been treated unfairly, his subtext being endemic racial prejudice. But Holder’s host knows a lot about racial prejudice. At that moment, Sharpton — who concocted the Tawana Brawley mythology, defamed a district attorney, and was forced to pay libel fines for his slurs; who avoided taxes; and who helped incite a fatal race riot — was back in the news, and not for his long history of racism, homophobia, and religious bigotry.
The latest revelations about Sharpton suggest that he was an FBI informant against Mafia criminals, apparently in some fear that drug charges would be lodged against him. The fully insured Sharpton’s entire career has been predicated on racist language and demagoguery — again hardly obstacles to serial White House invitations. Holder, who called Americans “cowards” and referred to African-Americans as “my people” (try that, John Ashcroft), complained of rudeness and a general divisiveness in the country. Was he referring to Obama’s request of Latinos that they “punish our enemies” or his own racialist language? No matter: Holder pays his insurance premium quarterly with either an accusation of racism or a loud affirmation of his progressivism.
Three miscreant California Democratic state senators — two charged with multiple felonies, one convicted of them — have only recently been put on leave. They are still receiving their state salaries. Since they are left-wing and of minority status, the scandals will soon be off the front pages, and calls for their resignations will be muted.
Lisa Jackson, the former EPA director, left the agency abruptly after it was disclosed that she had created a fake e-mail persona, among other things, to give herself (a.k.a. “Richard Windsor”) an EPA award for being a “scholar of ethical behavior.” Apple rewarded such ethical behavior by giving her a six-figure income as its new environmental liaison. Note well: Had Lisa Jackson Windsor expressed doubts about man-caused global warming rather than fabricated a false identity, then she might not have landed on a lucrative Apple perch — and might have been advised by Apple’s CEO to dump her Apple stock.
Does a poor record of achievement in helping minorities get one fired? Not really. In terms of minority income and employment, Barack Obama’s five years in the White House have been an abject disaster.
Is being rich, then, a class liability? That too depends on whether you bought progressive insurance. If you are a Silicon Valley billionaire who is loudly cool, hip, and left-wing, then offshoring and outsourcing is OK. No one worries that George Soros is a European pariah speculator who was convicted of insider trading in France in 2005, or that the fully insured Steyer brothers seek to trump the Koch model of giving millions to pet political causes.
The president deplores the Supreme Court’s striking down limits on campaign donations. He can do that because he hits the 0.01 percent up for quid pro quo cash in pursuit of noble causes. John Kerry married a millionaire, then a billionaire, and then tried to avoid sales and excise taxes on his huge yacht. That was a disturbing fact, but it was not brought up on the Senate floor — in the manner that Mitt Romney was falsely accused of being a tax cheat by Harry Reid. Reid long ago took out a huge progressive umbrella policy that so far has insured him against his libelous allegations, dubious financial entanglements, and racist statements.
Perhaps the most amply progressively insured operator in the world today is Al Gore. He pays high premiums for nonstop left-wing slurs (such as suggesting that a sitting president is in cahoots with Brownshirts). Yet it pays off when someone might lodge a claim against you. Imagine the following liability and the sort of ideological insurance necessary to defend against it: First, you hype a supposed climate disaster and then offer remedies for it — with your profit margin based on the degree of hysteria you have whipped up. Second, as a big-government, green liberal guru, you sell a failed cable-television network to a carbon-spewing, Islamist Gulf sheikdom, and rush the sale to beat a new hike in the capital-gains tax rate. Third, you ignore questions about why something so worthless might be worth so much to a mostly homophobic, misogynist, and religiously intolerant Middle East monarchy.
Gore’s insurance policies guarantee that he will never be shunned as a tax-dodging robber baron eager to grab petrodollars.
Sometimes progressive insurance involves far more than just liberal rhetoric. Perceptions, however superficial, matter as well. Had George Zimmerman just insured himself by taking his mother’s maiden name and Latinizing his first name, Jorge Mesa would not quite so easily have incurred liberals’ wrath in the Trayvon Martin case. Even the New York Times would have been stumped in its crude attempts to whip up racial hatred by reinventing Zimmerman with the neologism “white Hispanic.”
A Barry Dunham would not have had the resonance with liberals that the exotically multicultural brand of Barack Obama conveys. Even a preppy-sounding President Barry Obama would have had trouble playing golf so incessantly, in a way Barack does not.
Plagiarism is usually an absolute career killer. But you can take out progressive insurance against that as well. Just ask former plagiarists Joe Biden, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Juan Williams, and Fareed Zakaria.
Instead of paying monetary premiums, one supports the proper causes, says the properly cool things, joins the right organizations, and votes the correct way, and by those means purchases a liability policy against the careless mistakes, plagiarism, offhanded lapses, sexual peccadillos, gaffes, and bad jokes that otherwise could prove ruinous.
Complain about racists with the racist Jay-Z, blast the oil companies with the petrodollar billionaire Al Gore, frolic about with a young girl in the Oval Office with Bill Clinton, copy someone else’s work with Maureen Dowd, oppose the anti-abortionists with the eugenicist-sounding Justice Ginsburg — and you will never have to say you’re sorry.
For most people in the media, entertainment, politics, sports, and academia, taking out ideological insurance is a no-brainer.