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A Berkeley Liberal Wakes Up

I've been thinking about learning how to fire a gun, maybe even buying one. Now if you are a lifelong conservative, Red State dweller, and NRA member, you might be thinking, "Big yawn. What's next? She'll be telling us what she had for breakfast?"

So let me try to convey to you the enormousness, the Alice in Wonderland quality of my even posing the question, something I've never, ever considered in my life. No one I know owns a gun. I've never seen a gun (well on a holster of a police officer but I never wanted to get up close and personal with it). I have given lots of good money over the years for gun control. Learning to fire a gun seems as ludicrous as deciding to take up brain surgery.

But, I am rethinking absolutely everything. There is not a single thing that I believed, that I held absolute and holy, that is not up for grabs. My brain is in a tizzy 24/7 and I don't know if up is down, or if east is west.

* * *

As a good, loyal liberal, I always expected others to take care of me. If I gave my unqualified loyalty to the system, I could sleep well at night. But now, with victims left bleeding, a dangerously naive government, and sheep like masses, I see the absurdity of my thinking.

* * *

As I continue on the path to independence and personal responsibility, perhaps looking to myself for protection is another step on my journey.

Why Do Liberals Bleed?

Tax Increases Could Destroy Recovery

The barrage of tax increases proposed in President Barack Obama's budget could, if enacted by Congress, kill any chance of an early and sustained recovery.

WSJ article here

Just Make Stuff Up

Victor Davis Hanson hits it again.

In the first six months of the Obama administration, we have witnessed an assault on the truth of a magnitude not seen since the Nixon Watergate years. The prevarication is ironic given the Obama campaign's accusations that the Bush years were not transparent and that Hillary Clinton, like her husband, was a chronic fabricator. Remember Obama's own assertions that he was a "student of history" and that "words mean something. You can't just make stuff up."

Yet Obama's war against veracity is multifaceted.

The rest of the article here

NOW Adds Letterman to it's Media Hall of Shame

Finally!!! The National Organization of Women steps to the plate and condemns David Letterman's sexist, misogynistic and abusive attempt at humor on Wednesday night. Whether his "joke" was focused on 18-year old Bristol Palin, as Letterman claimed in his semi-mea culpa (I don't buy it) or 14-year old Willow, his remarks were beyond the pale.

NOW Media Hall of Shame

Other liberals are beginning to sign on with their objections to Letterman's sophomoric attempt at humor. Read Amanda Fortini's remarks at Salon.

Who's to Blame for Insanity

John at Powerline addresses those who refer to the Holocaust Museum murderer as "right wing."

Various media sources are referring to von Brunn as a "right wing" murderer, more or less as they refer to people like us as "right wingers." This is a dubious characterization, to say the least: anti-Semitism is overwhelmingly a phenomenon of the Left in today's world, and Leon Wolf, at RedState, points out that Mr. von Brunn's political views are typical of those commonly expressed at the Daily Kos. No surprise there.

Top 10 Most Absurd Time Covers

From William Randolph Hearst's ginned up hysterical stories about marijuana to the "10-cent plague" comic book scare of the 1950s to The New York Times warning of "cocaine-crazed Negroes" raping white women across the Southern countryside, the media has always whipped up anxiety and increased readership via thinly sourced exposes of the next great threat to the American way of life.

And since the British sociologist Stanley Cohen defined the moral panic phenomenon in the early 1970s as hysterical overreactions to imagined threats to social order, no publication has done a better (by which we mean worse) job of scaring the crap out of post-baby boomer America than Time, the top-selling newsweekly that's dropping subscribers like the mythical meth mouth drops teeth. (Hot tip to Time: If you're looking for a cutting-edge panic to get those ad rates up again, we hear people have been freaking out about "sexting" lately.)

Reason offers this Top 10 list of the most horrifying, silly, irresponsible, or downright ridiculous Time cover panics from the past 40 years.

Obama Against the Way of the Universe

Another insightful piece from Victor Davis Hanson.

I wish the President well, but he is butting up against human nature. And that is a fight one cannot win. If one runs up nearly a $2 trillion annual deficit, and then persists in such red-ink to the point of adding another $9 trillion, all to reach an aggregate $20 trillion national debt, there are not too many options. If there were, everyone-both states and individuals-would simply spend, call it stimuli, and then find academics to offer contorted explanations why it was OK and the money need not really have to be paid back. Does Obama think his debt is like buying a house in a down market with an up market inevitable?–that is, we borrow to the max and then count on our equity to come to bail us out? But houses do not always go up, and we can't quite sell off the US to capture our speculative profit.

* * *

Obama will come to his senses with his 'Bush did it', reset button, moral equivalency, soaring hope and change, with these apologies to Europeans, his Arab world Sermons on the Mount to Al Arabiya, in Turkey, in Cairo, etc., his touchy-feely videos to Iran, his "we are all victims of racism" sops to Ortega, Chavez, and Morales. It is only a matter of when, under what conditions, how high the price we must pay, and whether we lose the farm before he gains wisdom about the tragic universe in which we live.

A sojourn at an elite university, you see, can sometimes become a very dangerous thing indeed.

Ronald Reagan, Point-du-Hoc, Normandy, 6/6/1984

"Strengthened by their courage, heartened by their value and born for their memory, let us continue to stand for the ideals for which they lived and died."

D-Day in One Sentence

From Rossputin -

As we remember those who suffered and died on D-Day for the liberation of nations which now offer insufferable anti-Americanism, it offers a chance for reflection not only on the valor of those soldiers but on the repugnant state of our society and electorate that the nation could (for some voters proudly) elect as president a man whose views seem more in tune with our competitors or enemies than with the heroic spirit of D-Day heroes and the American founding.

Ghost Baskets

Images of an abandoned German colliery. The hanging cages, or Kaue, were individually numbered and used as storage lockers for miners’ belongings.

From David Thompson Blog