Bozell's News Column -- 12/20/2005 -- The Media’s Shabbiest Moments -- Media Research Center

Bozell's News Column -- 12/20/2005 -- The Media’s Shabbiest Moments -- Media Research Center

In August, NBC’s “Today” show was in Iraq, and Specialist Steven Chitterer told co-host Matt Lauer that "Morale is always high. Soldiers know they have a mission. They like taking on new objectives and taking on the new challenges." Lauer won the “Good Morning Morons Award” for interjecting: “Don’t get me wrong here, I think you are probably telling me the truth, but a lot of people at home are wondering how that could be possible with the conditions you’re facing and with the attacks you’re facing. What would you say to those people who are doubtful that morale can be that high?” Captain Sherman Powell unloaded a quote for the ages: "Sir, if I got my news from the newspapers also, I’d be pretty depressed as well."

Elections 2000 --- The Leave Us Alone vs. the Takings Coalition

Elections 2000 --- The Leave Us Alone vs. the Takings Coalition:

Grover G. Norquist, MD

There are two competing coalitions in American politics today that are organized around how one views the relationship between the individual and the state.

In the past, the Republican and Democrat parties had within them a broad ideological range. Regional differences --- North vs. South --- and religious and immigrant status had a great deal to say about whether one viewed himself as a Republican or Democrat. The Roosevelt coalition held together in the Democrat party a solid South with ethnic immigrants and Catholics in northern cities.

But starting in the 1970s, the two parties and the liberal and conservative coalitions that surround them began to separate out along lines of policy rather than region or ethnicity.

The Reagan Republican party and conservative movement can best be understood as a coalition of individuals and groups that --- on the issue that brings them to politics --- want the federal government to leave them alone.

The "Leave us Alone" coalition includes taxpayers who want the government to reduce the tax burden, property owners, farmers, and homeowners who want their property rights respected, gunowners who want the government to leave them and their guns alone, homeschoolers who wish to educate their own children as they see fit, traditional values conservatives who don't want the government throwing condoms at their children and making fun of their religious values.

The Leave us Alone coalition also includes those Americans who serve in the military and police as they are the legitimate functions of government that protect Americans' right to be left alone by foreign agressors or domestic criminals.

The modern American left is a "Takings Coalition," a coalition of groups and individuals who view the proper role of government as taking things from one group and giving to another. This often is in the form of money. And the recipients of others money are usually the leaders of the "Takings Coalition."

The Takings coalition consists of the Trial Lawyers, the corrupt Big City Machines, the Labor Union Bosses and the two wings of the Dependency Movement --- those who remain trapped in dependency and those who make $80,000 a year managing the dependency of others and making sure they don't get jobs and become Republicans. They are joined by the various coercive Utopians who want to reorganize society through force to make us stop wearing leather or driving sport utility vehicles or owning large toilets or otherwise run our lives as they see fit.

The Left puts forward the fiction that the Right want to force their morality on others. However, the homeschooler movement does not demand that homeschoolers be recognized as an alternative lifestyle. Gunowners do not insist that schools teach ten year olds books entitled "Heather has Two Hunters."

The good news for friends of liberty is that the "Leave us Alone" coalition is growing. In 1965, only 10 percent of Americans owned shares of stock, in 1980 it was only 20 percent, today 50 percent of Americans own stock in IRAs, 401Ks, and mutual funds. As more and more Americans own shares of stock the politics of hate and envy becomes more difficult. In 1965, a politician could say, "I will steal money from corporations and give it to you," and 90 percent of the people in the room might think this a good idea and only 10 percent would clearly see that they would be paying for this government largesse. Today, the same politician's bluster would find fully half of this audience reacting: "Hey, that is my retirement income you are looting."

As more and more Americans own shares of stock, the idea of reforming Social Security to allow Americans to invest some of their FICA taxes is winning popular support unimaginable only a few years ago.

Americans also want the death tax repealed and the Republicans in the House and Senate --- with some Democrat support --- have just voted to phase out the death tax.

More and more Americans are homeschooling. Increasing numbers of minority parents want to have school choice to send their children to private, religious or parochial schools. They want to be left alone to raise their own children.

More and more Americans are starting small businesses and becoming self-employed, working from home. They are all likely recruits for the Leave us Alone coalition.

The 2000 election will tell us the relative strength of the "Leave us Alone" coalition vs. the "Takings Coalition."

Mr. Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform, http://www.atr.org.

Originally published in the Medical Sentinel 2000;5(6):209. Copyright ©2000 Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS).

Bill Moyers interviewing Grover Norquist.

I'm surprised there wasn't an explosion like when matter and anti-matter meet.

http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_norquist.html

GROVER NORQUIST: And we now have 27 versions of that at the state capital level, including one in New York City. So we're taking the model of the "leave us alone" coalition from the national level to the state level as well.

BILL MOYERS: "Leave us alone?"

GROVER NORQUIST: Um-hmm. Look, the center right coalition in American politics today is best understood as a coalition of groups and individuals that on the issue that brings them to politics what they want from the government is to be left alone. Taxpayers, don't raise my taxes. Property owners, don't restrict or limit my property. Home schoolers, let me educate my own kids. Gun owners, don't restrict my Second Amendment rights. All communities of faith, Evangelical Christians, conservative Catholics, Mormons, Muslims, Orthodox Jews, people want to practice their own religion and be left alone to raise their own kids.

.....

BILL MOYERS: But what about those real people we saw in that film, the woman who needed the health insurance, who needed the health coverage, who was going to have to take $400 out of her $800 a month salary to meet medical costs that she didn't have?

GROVER NORQUIST: I think you have to look at the total level of what government does to her in terms of the taxes that they impose on...

BILL MOYERS: She's not paying much taxes, though, at $800 a month.

GROVER NORQUIST: And she's got...well, she's paying sales tax in that state, she's paying Social Security taxes in that state.

BILL MOYERS: But aren't all of those taxes sort of the membership dues we pay for living in a cooperative and collaborative society?

GROVER NORQUIST: Well, first we have to decide what we want the government to do. What is it legitimate to require with force people to pay for? It is not charity. I mean, guys with guns will show up if you don't pay your taxes and take that money from you. And I think that we want in order to have a free society to have as little as possible done coercively.
....

BILL MOYERS: What would you do about real life situations like this? This is a story out of New Jersey, the caseworker who closed a child abuse investigation and to a mother whose son was found dead in a locked basement here on Sunday had been working on more than 100 other investigations at the same time. That's more than six times the national standard recommended by national child advocacy groups. The New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services says its field agents juggle an average of 35 cases. Why shouldn't those of us who are well off be taxed a little more to try to make a system like this work for those who have nothing at all?

GROVER NORQUIST: Because I'm not interested in saving that system. I'm interested in saving and protecting the kids that that system is supposed to help.

BILL MOYERS: How would you do it?

GROVER NORQUIST: Well, I've been active with groups, the Institute for Children and some of the pro-adoption groups in Washington, D.C. The last numbers I saw, there are about 500,000 kids in foster care, about 50,000 kids free to adopt, and more than a million parents looking to adopt. And we have state rules and federal rules that are being liberalized, but that up until this point have made it difficult for kids to get adopted. And, the rules are...the Federal government gives subsidies to state governments, institutions like that, for every kid they keep in foster care, and they lose the subsidy if they get the kid adopted. That is the wrong kind of incentive to have. Nobody should have 100 kids they're chasing after...

BILL MOYERS: This is the real world, this is the only system these people have.

GROVER NORQUIST: We need to get them out of that system and into families where they're adopted. There are more people who want to adopt than there are kids that need to be adopted. And the government is in the way of having that happen.

BILL MOYERS: But in the meantime, can we hire more caseworkers, more people, to look after these children?

GROVER NORQUIST: As we're finding out, the government isn't looking after those children, and no government can look after children the way a family could, the way parents could. Let's get those kids into real families and adopted by real families who will take care of them.

More Great Grover Norquist

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/architect/interviews/norquist.html

In addition, the age cohort that is most Democratic by party ID are people who grew up and became 21 years of age between 1932 and 1952. People of that age who came of age during the New Deal and the Great Depression are now 70 to 90 years old, and every year 2 million of them pass away. So the Democratic Party -- the Yellow Dog Democrats are passing away, and the 20- and 30- and 40-year-olds coming up are more likely to be Republican than Democrat. So they have a demographic disaster ahead of them for the next 15 years that mirrors what happened to the Republicans from '60 to '75. That was the period where the older people who were passing away were Republicans who had become 21 years old before the Great Depression, and if you were north of the Mason-Dixon Line, you were Republican.

So there are these period[s] of times when younger people look around and decide to be more Republican or more Democrat, and they hold that until they die. And so the Republican Party had this implosion in their numbers from '60 to '75, and the Democrats are in the middle of that now.

http://reason.com/9702/fe.int.norquist.shtml

He argues that there is an emerging "Leave-Us-Alone Coalition" of property owners, anti-tax activists, gun owners, home- and private-schoolers, small business owners, religious conservatives, and libertarians who want the government to stop interfering in their lives. By contrast, the constituencies of the New Deal alliance (what he calls the "Takings Coalition," because they want to transfer money and power from some people to others) of labor unions, government employees, trial lawyers, government contractors, and government grant and welfare recipients are shrinking. As government shrinks, Norquist says, the Takings Coalition implodes.

The distinction between the Leave-Us-Alone Coalition and the Takings Coalition is that we think the proper role of the state is to protect people. The abortion issue will never be solved because the disagreement is over whether there are one or two people involved. The question isn't who should be left alone--the question is, "How many people are there?" With abortion, if there's one person, then the role of the state is to protect that person and let her have an abortion. If there are two people, then both of them deserve protection.

I don't know any pro-choicers who say, "There are two distinct human beings here--kill one." And I don't know any pro-lifers who say, "No, there's only one person here and we want to compel her to have a baby." But that doesn't mean they should disagree about whether the government should steal people's property or grab their guns or about school choice.

I know lots of people who are pro-choice and are radical libertarians.

Two Great Norquist Quotes:

"We do not have two prices of bread - one for the poor and one for those who earn more. All goods and services have one price for all Americans," Norquist said. "Government should be the same. We should all pay the same price (tax) for government."

"Some politicians are elected by voters that do not pay the true cost of government," Norquist said. "We should not be surprised that voters who get subsidized government want more of it."

Going Stronger; What conservatives understand about taxes

Going Stronger; What conservatives understand about taxes

BY: Peter Beinart, The New Republic
DATE: May 21, 2001
SECTION: Page 18
LENGTH: 1170 words

Why isn't there a liberal Grover Norquist? Norquist runs a group called Americans for Tax Reform. But that's not his real job. His real job is to host a meeting every Wednesday that brings together every species of conservative--gun nuts, home schoolers, anti-environmentalists, capital gains tax cutters--to plot strategy. Why is this important?

First, it keeps conservatives on-message. If the White House says America needs a tax cut because the economy is tanking (as opposed to last year, when it said America needed a tax cut because the economy wasn't tanking), Norquist's meeting makes sure everyone is reading from the same script.

Second, Norquist's meeting facilitates inter-conservative back-scratching. It reminds UPS (to take a hypothetical example) to donate money to the Christian Coalition's gay-conversion program so the Christian Coalition will tell its members that federal ergonomics rules violate Judeo-Christian morality.

But, most of all, the meeting helps the conservative movement set priorities. It's through Norquist's conclaves that conservatives learn that the White House isn't going to push for school vouchers, or an immediate increase in defense spending, or a loosening of the arsenic standard. And it's through them that conservatives disgruntled with those decisions are told to play along--or else.

One reason there isn't a liberal Grover Norquist is that Norquist is an unusual guy--shrewd, fanatically committed, catholic in his devotion to all right-wing causes, big and small.

Another is that Norquist has access to money--from corporations looking for tax breaks or freedom from regulation--and that money gives him the leverage to keep fractious conservatives in line.

Liberals don't have an activist of Norquist's stature and savvy. And given their often adversarial relationship to corporations--which provide most of the real money in politics--they don't have his finances, either. But there's a larger reason conservatives have produced a Grover Norquist and liberals haven't: Conservatives have a central, unifying purpose, and liberals, at least right now, do not.

A great deal of ink has been spilled in recent years on the crisis of post-cold-war conservatism. Conservatives no longer have the Soviet Union to define themselves against; they no longer have welfare; they no longer have soft-on-crime liberals. All that is true--but they still have taxes. Economic conservatives may hate taxes because they believe they undermine liberty, and social conservatives may hate taxes because they believe they undermine the family, but both groups hate them with a passion. Norquist understands this, and it's what holds his Wednesday meetings together. It's no coincidence, after all, that the man convening them is first and foremost an anti-tax crusader. His congregants know that while they may occasionally have to cave on education, the environment, or affirmative action, they will all go to the mat on taxes, and a victory on taxes will justify everything else. George W. Bush understands this too. He saw his father, the man who won the Gulf war and nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, nonetheless denounced by conservatives because of his apostasy in raising taxes. And W. has governed accordingly. The tax cut is his number-one priority; number two isn't even close.

This is why Bush, and conservatives, are winning the tax cut battle: They care more. While support for tax cuts is clearly the top priority for conservatives, opposition to tax cuts isn't the top priority for liberals. Ralph Neas, director of People for the American Way, has gamely enlisted an array of liberal groups in a "Fair Taxes for All" coalition. But while Neas may be able to get lots of liberal organizations to say they oppose the tax cut, he can't get them to make it a priority.

Feminist and civil rights groups are hoarding their resources for the fight over judicial nominations.

Environmentalists have taken to the airwaves against Bush's environmental policy, not his budget.

The AFL-CIO is more concerned about permanent normal trading relations with China, Bush's assault on ergonomics rules, and various anti-union guidelines instituted by the Labor Department.

The Naderites care more about stopping the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

You can see the difference between conservative and liberal priorities in the recent budget votes in the House and Senate.

Republicans who opposed the tax cut genuinely feared conservative retribution. And for good reason: As Michael Crowley reported in tnr ("Central Casting," May 14), the Norquist-allied Club for Growth threatened to back primary challengers against GOP moderates who didn't support the president. The result was that every single House Republican voted for Bush's tax cut, and the three Senate Republicans who didn't were the subjects of attack ads in their home states. By contrast, House and Senate Democrats who defected from their party's position to support the tax cut feared--and received--no such retaliation.

You could make a case that taxes shouldn't be the top liberal priority of the Bush era. Or, at least, you could make a case if you had a good alternative. But liberals don't. The alternative favored by culture-war liberals, as far as I can tell, is the judiciary. Last month 42 of the 50 Senate Democrats participated in a retreat at which feminists, civil rights leaders, and academics rallied them against Bush's impending nominations to the courts. (As far as I know, liberals never held a similar event on the tax cut.) Fights over judges are really proxies for fights over abortion and affirmative action. But there's simply no way those identity-politics battles can serve as liberalism's overriding purpose, because they hold little or no appeal to that large chunk of the left motivated by economics. Unlike tax cuts, they are inherently parochial. The alternative focus suggested by the economic left--globalization--is even worse. The unions were clearly more galvanized by the nafta and fast-track fights than they are by the tax cut; and, by sinking Al Gore, the Naderites made it clear they considered his support for free trade more significant than his opposition to tax giveaways for the wealthy. To the extent it is allowed to define left-liberal politics, the anti-globalization movement will wreak political disaster and moral catastrophe. And it will alienate upper-middle-class pro-choicers as much as abortion rights alienates blue-collar hard hats.

Grover Norquist is right: Taxation, defined broadly to encompass government redistribution of wealth, is the central political question of the moment. A tax cut as large as Bush's effectively predetermines how government will (or will not) respond to a vast array of other issues--entitlements, defense policy, environmental regulation, health care, education, welfare, you name it. Conservatives understand this. Liberals, for the most part, don't. And that's why conservatives are winning.

The Adrenaline Vault Forums: Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy

The Adrenaline Vault Forums: Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy: Jim Meyers
Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2005


This is a great book. Schweizer is dead on in scewering liberals. It may appear self-serving for a conservative to say, "When I commit hypocrisy it's different than when liberals do it, so let me say as a libertarian, it is different; in exactly the way Schweizer describes. Perhaps conservatives need to learn to be more tolerant of people's vices but liberals need to just drop fuckin' dead.

Bumperstickers I'd like on my SUV

Gun control is a tight group. (picture of tight group of bullet holes)
This SUV protected by Glock .45 Security System.
Buddhist on Board.

To be continued...

Rwandan Genocide - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Where were all the liberals and blacks in America in 1994 when the Rwandan Genocide was going on?

Apparently they were too busy congratulating themselves over protesting South Africa's apartheid to issue nary a peep. What a classic "do what feels good" hypocritical liberal moment. We care more about blacks being discriminated against by whites than about blacks being massacred by blacks.

A Great Example of Liberal Hypocrisy

Wendy Murphy, a victims' advocate I've seen on The O'Reilly Factor before, gave a great example of liberal hypocrisy. O'Reilly was discussing another of those hot older women having sex with teenage boys (Lisa Lynette Clark) and Ms. Murphy pointed out that the same "ACLU types" who are all in favor of saying "he's 14 years old and that's old enough to make his own sexual decisions...let's let these 14 year olds have sexual liberty and do what they want with whom they want" are the same ones who "come out of the woodwork" when a couple of teenagers go on a shooting rampage or kill people or commit crimes and say "you know the brain of a 14 year old is not even fully developed and they have no understanding of the consequences of their actions!"

Does "victims" in the first sentence above have to be possessive? Someone let me know.

Great.

1. I've figured out how to edit my links...thanks to the handy "how to edit your links" link. LOL
2. I changed it to read "How to Edit Your Links"...and so it good. (inside joke with John)
3. The changes seem to showing up without having to clear any caches so that's great!
4. I've figured out how to post...it's pretty easy when you are permanently signed into the Blogger so this should go good.
5. Now I'll try and "Blog This" something. yee-hah!

Okay.

Well, it appears I figured out why I couldn't get my blogroll to work. It had to do with clearing out my cache. I didn't want to start posting until I had that worked out because I figured if that was a problem from the beginning...were there going to be so many other things wrong with blogger.com that I would want to switch to something different?

I'm still a little concerned because I thought I cleared the cache on another computer and, at the time, still couldn't see the blogroll. I will test this shortly by going back to the other computer but for now, though, I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and assume its going to work. Now that that seems behind me, I can get down the business of actually blogging.

1. I know how to make a post. That's good.
2. I need to figure out how to edit how the links the are showing up.
3. Add a couple more blogs to the blogroll.
4. Blog a couple of things.

Online...At Last!

Well, I'm online, at last. Let's see where this goes. :-)