Liberals: Trump Supporters Are Racist

The fundamental problem is simple: liberals (whom we don’t like to call “liberals” since they have ceased to have any connection with tolerant classical liberalism) tend to live in a narrow, insular little world. A narrow and insular social world (in enclaves like the East Side of Milwaukee, Manhattan, Madison and Berkeley) and in professions like journalism, academia, government bureaucracies and so on.

And in a narrow media world, where the narratives of the mainstream media are accepted as gospel.

In such an environment, it’s easy to believe that all the good people agree with you, and all those people who don’t are evil.

In such a world, it becomes acceptable to attack people who disagree, to deny them service in a restaurant, to get them fired from their jobs, to harass them, and to demonize them.

Quite simply, bigotry on the right is idiosyncratic, the product of a few deranged souls.

But bigotry on the left is social, the product of a deranged and intolerant culture.

How a Benighted Conservative Was Turned into an Enlightened Liberal

Just in, this personal account:

ST. PAUL, MN—Explaining how the string of personal insults and sharply worded accusations caused him to reevaluate every one of his political leanings, former conservative Vincent Welsh recalled for reporters Friday the belittling tirade from a college student that brought him over to the left. “It was last October and I’d just mentioned my support for a Republican congressional candidate on Twitter when this 19-year-old responded by telling me I was an ignorant asshole who hated the poor and that I was everything that was wrong with the world, and it just completely opened my eyes to how incorrect my whole worldview was,” said Welsh, fondly recounting how the sophomore sociology major converted him to liberalism on the spot by calling him a hateful bigot and saying he was too much of a “brainwashed puppet” of corporate interests to know what was best for him, instantaneously invalidating the 56 years of individual thought and life experience that had led him to his previous political beliefs. “I remember how he said anyone who didn’t support Scandinavian-style social policies was nothing more than a greedy capitalist leech and I was just like, ‘Wow, yes, that makes total sense.’ And then when he called me a fascist piece of shit and condescendingly asked if I’d ever once looked up from my copy of Atlas Shrugged, that was the moment I saw what a complete fool I’d been and knew I had to reject all my political positions and adopt his ideology in total.” Welsh then expressed his deep gratitude that the young man had even stopped to direct the series of derogatory tweets at him in the first place, saying he would likely still be a “money-grubbing racist shithead who spends all day sucking the Koch brothers’ dicks” if not for the magnanimous individual.

Yes, we are sure this sort of consciousness raising calling into account of bad ideas has turned many people, especially conservative-leaning college students, into good progressives. After all, we found this in an eminent social science journal.

Social Psychologists Finally Admit: Liberals are Prejudiced

Since the field of social psychology leans sharply left, it’s no surprise that a lot of “scholarly literature” claims that conservatives are more “prejudiced” than liberals.

Of course, “prejudice” is defined, by these professors, as disliking groups that the liberal professors like and are solicitous of. If you express negative attitudes toward such groups, it must be “prejudice” rather than some principled moral stance. If one believes homosexual acts are immoral, is one “prejudiced” or has one simply reached a different conclusion about sexual morality? The liberal social psychologists assume the former.

But sometimes, in the social sciences, empirical reality wins out.

From Politico, an article outlining recent research, titled “Why Liberals Aren’t as Tolerant as They Think: The political left might consider itself more open-minded than the right. But research shows that liberals are just as prejudiced against conservatives as conservatives are against liberals.”

This conclusion won’t surprise anybody who reads this blog; the only surprise is that several social scientists have admitted it, based on their research.

There is a long list of groups that liberals dislike, and they dislike those groups as much as conservatives dislike the groups they dislike. Citing just one example, while conservatives don’t like atheists, liberals don’t like Christians.

We, not surprisingly, think that liberal intolerance is a much bigger problem than conservative intolerance, for one simple reason: intolerant conservatives tend to be marginalized, far from centers of power, and intolerant liberals tend to be at the centers of cultural power and influence, in the media, schools and colleges, government bureaucracies. Where “social issues” like gay and transgender issues are concerned, they dominate the business world.

Thus we can’t remember when any leftist speaker on a college campus was shouted down or assaulted, but that happens to conservative speakers about once a week.

Free Market of Ideas

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Leading or Following? Democrats and Obama on Israel

From the Pew Center, an assessment of US attitudes in the Arab/Israeli conflict. As you can see (below), the pattern is clear. While Republicans continue to support the Jewish state, Democrats have moved against Israel, and now are as likely to favor the Palestinians as Israel.

So the question arises: are Democrats following people like Barack Obama, whose disdain for the Jewish state has been quite obvious, or does Obama’s disdain for Israel merely reflect a shift among Democrats generally?

Why Democrats should dislike Israel is something that needs to be explained. For most of the 20th century, Jews had the status of a politically correct victim group (although the term “political correctness” wasn’t in general use).  Liberals prided themselves on opposing antisemitism.

So what has changed?

Essentially, there is been a shift in the axis of liberal identity politics. In most of the 20th century liberals proudly supported Jews, blue collar workers and Catholics was well as blacks. But blue collar workers and Catholics have moved in a conservative direction. Jews continue to vote Democratic, but now they are much harder to portray as a victim group. They have succeeded too well in American society, and discrimination against Jews is extremely rare.

So what victim group have liberals latched onto? The Palestinians. They can be portrayed as victims, while Israel is a successful, modern, affluent state.

Siding with people who really are victims is certainly a virtue. But liberals have huge trouble dealing with groups whose problems are of their own making. They continue to portray the problems of the black community as the result of white racism. But the things that most afflict black people are a 72% illegitimacy rate and an absurdly high rate of crime by blacks who victimize other blacks. Liberals want blacks to be victimized by other people, and are embarrassed by discussion of how blacks are victimized by the bad behavior of other black people.

Likewise with the Palestinians. Liberals can’t admit that they are victimized by their own unwillingness to accept the state of Israel, their own support of terrorism, and corruption among their own leaders. It can’t be that their own bad behavior is the problem, so somebody must be oppressing them. And that “somebody” is Israel.

Thus the intellectual bad habits of liberals in domestic US politics have spilled over into international relations.

Shark Infested Waters

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted
with permission. All rights reserved.

Marquette’s Climate Survey: Conservatives Get a Voice

We were naturally suspicious of the Marquette “Climate Survey,” since such exercises usually have a politically correct “diversity” agenda, and are designed to allow campus victim groups to air their grievances which in turn allows campus bureaucrats to expand their empires with more “diversity” initiatives.

The survey had its limitations (only about 30% of eligible students, faculty and staff participated), but the results were not as the campus race, gender and sexual orientation hustlers would have liked (although they can be expected to ignore that fact). And the analysis from Rankin and Associates was fair enough.

One politically incorrect finding was that there is considerable unhappiness among conservative and Catholic members of the Marquette community with the secular, liberal and often intolerant climate on campus.

To quote a few of the findings:

Pg. 86: “Many respondents cited their Catholic or conservative values being marginalized, saying ‘Conservative Catholic views on the expression of human sexuality are not respected – not even room for dialogue.’ And that ‘There is an ongoing sense of disrespect, anger and assumptions related to the Catholic identity of our university.’”

Pg. 135: “Fifty-four respondents discussed Catholic and conservative views when discussing unfair or unjust employment-related discipline or action. Several discussed John McAdams’ suspension and dismissal, noting that ‘His only crime, sin, whatever you want to call it was telling the truth’ and that ‘A professor was fired for being critical of the University.’ People believed that ‘It seems MU protects liberal views (they can say and do anything) more than conservative ones (they will get fired if they speak out)’ and ‘If you are a conservative, you are not welcome at MU.’”

Pg. 294: “However, numerous other respondents noted that ‘this university has become Catholic and Jesuit in its name alone.’ And ‘ I don’t want to see . . . the Catholic and Jesuit tradition watered down or discounted in an effort to make others feel welcome.’ One such respondent wrote ‘Stop having Catholic students feel condemned for their CATHOLIC BELIEFS,’ and another noted that ‘As someone strong in my Catholic faith, I have been very disappointed with how little influence the Catholic Church seems to have here.’ The general sentiment from these respondents was that ‘MU has divorced the idea of social justice from Catholicism and, as a result, has embraced radical ideas … The Jesuit tradition has been secularized and that is a shame.’”

One section of the survey ask respondents whether they “personally had experienced exclusionary, intimidating, offensive, and/or hostile conduct” and if so on what basis. The report notes that:

19% (n = 791) of respondents indicated that they personally had experienced [such conduct]. Of those respondents who reported having experienced such conduct, 22% (n = 171) indicated that the conduct was based on their gender/gender identity, 19% (n = 146) on their racial identity, 18% (n = 142) on their position, and 17% (n = 138) on their political views; 15% each felt that it was based on their age (n = 119) and on their religious/spiritual views (n = 116). (pp. viii-ix)

It seems that relatively few members of the Marquette community (about one fifth) had experienced any such conduct, and no particular group was the target. It is impossible to tell, from the published tabulations, what percentage of those who experienced exclusionary, intimidating, offensive, and/or hostile conduct because of their political views were conservative, or what percentage experiencing such conduct because of their religious views were orthodox Catholic or evangelical Protestants. But terms like “many” and “numerous” clearly imply a substantial number of people.

What the survey appears to have done is to give “voice” to the voiceless, allowing students who don’t rant about “white privilege” or demonstrate blocking traffic on Wisconsin Avenue to register their views. The same goes for faculty and staff who didn’t complain when a mural of murderer and terrorist Assata Shakur was painted over.

Unfortunately, these are not the voices Marquette wants to hear, and therefore they will likely be ignored.

Election Finance and Free Speech

A talk to the Federalist Society in Madison, Wisconsin, on August 26, 2015 by Hans von Spakovsky. It’s about how liberals have tried to stiffle speech.

Politics and Science

Liberals like to claim that conservatives are “anti-science,” but in fact both Republicans and Democrats will reject science when they find it ideologically uncongenial. Stossel discusses fracking, genetically modified organisms, vaccines, global warming and other issues.

Online Liberals More Likely to Block People Who Disagree With Them

Liberals like to claim that they are open-minded and tolerant, but nobody besides liberals believes that. Indeed, liberals’ claim to be open-minded and tolerant is itself a form of close-mindedness, based on the assertion that other people are less tolerant than they.

But now we have a Pew Poll with fairly extensive information on people’s behavior on social networking sites (Facebook, etc.), including information on who has blocked or otherwise excluded people because they disagreed with their political opinions.

So who is more likely to block somebody somebody on the basis of their political opinions? Liberals, of course.

The absolute percentage of liberals who have blocked somebody (16%) does not look large. But then a lot of Facebook users sign on very infrequently, and a lot of others have Facebook friends who pretty much always agree with them, or friends who just don’t post about politics (perhaps because they are not very political). So 16% is probably a very large proportion of the the users who actually find political content that they dislike on Facebook.

The corresponding number for conservatives is 8%.

It’s possible, of course, that conservatives do a better job of “friending” only people with whom they agree. But at the minimum, this data fails to give any support to the notion that liberals are more open-minded toward diverse opinions and points of view.

Conservatives Are Happier

From the New York Times:

WHO is happier about life — liberals or conservatives? The answer might seem straightforward. After all, there is an entire academic literature in the social sciences dedicated to showing conservatives as naturally authoritarian, dogmatic, intolerant of ambiguity, fearful of threat and loss, low in self-esteem and uncomfortable with complex modes of thinking. And it was the candidate Barack Obama in 2008 who infamously labeled blue-collar voters “bitter,” as they “cling to guns or religion.” Obviously, liberals must be happier, right?

Wrong. Scholars on both the left and right have studied this question extensively, and have reached a consensus that it is conservatives who possess the happiness edge. Many data sets show this. For example, the Pew Research Center in 2006 reported that conservative Republicans were 68 percent more likely than liberal Democrats to say they were “very happy” about their lives. This pattern has persisted for decades. The question isn’t whether this is true, but why.

Many conservatives favor an explanation focusing on lifestyle differences, such as marriage and faith. They note that most conservatives are married; most liberals are not. (The percentages are 53 percent to 33 percent, according to my calculations using data from the 2004 General Social Survey, and almost none of the gap is due to the fact that liberals tend to be younger than conservatives.) Marriage and happiness go together. If two people are demographically the same but one is married and the other is not, the married person will be 18 percentage points more likely to say he or she is very happy than the unmarried person.

The story on religion is much the same. According to the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, conservatives who practice a faith outnumber religious liberals in America nearly four to one. And the link to happiness? You guessed it. Religious participants are nearly twice as likely to say they are very happy about their lives as are secularists (43 percent to 23 percent). The differences don’t depend on education, race, sex or age; the happiness difference exists even when you account for income.

Whether religion and marriage should make people happy is a question you have to answer for yourself. But consider this: Fifty-two percent of married, religious, politically conservative people (with kids) are very happy — versus only 14 percent of single, secular, liberal people without kids.

An explanation for the happiness gap more congenial to liberals is that conservatives are simply inattentive to the misery of others. If they recognized the injustice in the world, they wouldn’t be so cheerful. In the words of Jaime Napier and John Jost, New York University psychologists, in the journal Psychological Science, “Liberals may be less happy than conservatives because they are less ideologically prepared to rationalize (or explain away) the degree of inequality in society.” The academic parlance for this is “system justification.”

The data show that conservatives do indeed see the free enterprise system in a sunnier light than liberals do, believing in each American’s ability to get ahead on the basis of achievement. Liberals are more likely to see people as victims of circumstance and oppression, and doubt whether individuals can climb without governmental help. My own analysis using 2005 survey data from Syracuse University shows that about 90 percent of conservatives agree that “While people may begin with different opportunities, hard work and perseverance can usually overcome those disadvantages.” Liberals — even upper-income liberals — are a third less likely to say this.

So conservatives are ignorant, and ignorance is bliss, right? Not so fast, according to a study from the University of Florida psychologists Barry Schlenker and John Chambers and the University of Toronto psychologist Bonnie Le in the Journal of Research in Personality. These scholars note that liberals define fairness and an improved society in terms of greater economic equality. Liberals then condemn the happiness of conservatives, because conservatives are relatively untroubled by a problem that, it turns out, their political counterparts defined.

Imagine the opposite. Say liberals were the happy ones. Conservatives might charge that it is only because liberals are unperturbed by the social welfare state’s monstrous threat to economic liberty. Liberals would justifiably dismiss this argument as solipsistic and silly.

There is one other noteworthy political happiness gap that has gotten less scholarly attention than conservatives versus liberals: moderates versus extremists.

Political moderates must be happier than extremists, it always seemed to me. After all, extremists actually advertise their misery with strident bumper stickers that say things like, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention!”

But it turns out that’s wrong. People at the extremes are happier than political moderates. Correcting for income, education, age, race, family situation and religion, the happiest Americans are those who say they are either “extremely conservative” (48 percent very happy) or “extremely liberal” (35 percent). Everyone else is less happy, with the nadir at dead-center “moderate” (26 percent).

What explains this odd pattern? One possibility is that extremists have the whole world figured out, and sorted into good guys and bad guys. They have the security of knowing what’s wrong, and whom to fight. They are the happy warriors.

Whatever the explanation, the implications are striking. The Occupy Wall Street protesters may have looked like a miserable mess. In truth, they were probably happier than the moderates making fun of them from the offices above. And none, it seems, are happier than the Tea Partiers, many of whom cling to guns and faith with great tenacity. Which some moderately liberal readers of this newspaper might find quite depressing.

The fact that psychologists have a little cottage industry producing studies showing that conservatives are bad people simply reveals the deep-seated liberal bias of the profession.

We recently, for example, saw a study showing that conservatives are more sensitive to threats than liberals. So terrible: conservatives see the world as threatening.

Then, surfing the web a few minutes later, we found a study bitching about the fact that conservatives are insufficiently threatened by global warming!

So it seems the categories can be gerrymandered to produce the results the psychologists want.

Conservative Student Conference in Milwaukee

Students who are interested can apply to attend here. In fact, there is plenty of capacity, and all who apply will be accomodated.

Is the Wisconsin Public Radio Audience Ideologically Balanced?

The stereotype of public radio is that the audience skews left, and a fair amount of reputable polling supports that view.

Which is why it surprised us, when we just checked the web page of the Joy Cardin show to find two polls on the union issues that have roiled Wisconsin for months. One asked respondents whether they would sign a petition to recall Scott Walker. The other asked whether the Ohio voters “got it right” when they rejected a package of union reforms similar to those of Scott Walker in Wisconsin.


Interestingly, both polls show quite a balanced outcome.

Of course, polls where people self-select into the sample aren’t scientific. But when they have a bias, the bias is usually to over represent the people who feel most intense.

Maybe the WPR audience is not so much “union left” as the “yuppie left,” and not knee jerk in it’s support of a labor agenda. Or maybe there is some conservative campaign to pile onto this poll (although we haven’t heard of such).

Let’s just say this is a data point that conflicts with the stereotype.

Liberals Are Less Informed About Economics

From the Wall Street Journal, a story about a public opinion poll testing knowledge of economics. The author is Daniel B. Klein.

Zogby researcher Zeljka Buturovic and I considered the 4,835 respondents’ (all American adults) answers to eight survey questions about basic economics. We also asked the respondents about their political leanings: progressive/very liberal; liberal; moderate; conservative; very conservative; and libertarian.

Rather than focusing on whether respondents answered a question correctly, we instead looked at whether they answered incorrectly. A response was counted as incorrect only if it was flatly unenlightened.

Consider one of the economic propositions in the December 2008 poll: “Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable.” People were asked if they: 1) strongly agree; 2) somewhat agree; 3) somewhat disagree; 4) strongly disagree; 5) are not sure.

Basic economics acknowledges that whatever redeeming features a restriction may have, it increases the cost of production and exchange, making goods and services less affordable. There may be exceptions to the general case, but they would be atypical.

The researchers, rather generously, refused to count “not sure” against respondents. Maybe they misunderstood, or maybe they thought it is an open question (which in most cases it’s not).

What were the other questions?

The other questions were: 1) Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services (unenlightened answer: disagree). 2) Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago (unenlightened answer: disagree). 3) Rent control leads to housing shortages (unenlightened answer: disagree). 4) A company with the largest market share is a monopoly (unenlightened answer: agree). 5) Third World workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited (unenlightened answer: agree). 6) Free trade leads to unemployment (unenlightened answer: agree). 7) Minimum wage laws raise unemployment (unenlightened answer: disagree).

So here we have a test of basic economic knowledge.

How did different groups respond?

How did the six ideological groups do overall? Here they are, best to worst, with an average number of incorrect responses from 0 to 8: Very conservative, 1.30; Libertarian, 1.38; Conservative, 1.67; Moderate, 3.67; Liberal, 4.69; Progressive/very liberal, 5.26.

Americans in the first three categories do reasonably well. But the left has trouble squaring economic thinking with their political psychology, morals and aesthetics.

To be sure, none of the eight questions specifically challenge the political sensibilities of conservatives and libertarians. Still, not all of the eight questions are tied directly to left-wing concerns about inequality and redistribution. In particular, the questions about mandatory licensing, the standard of living, the definition of monopoly, and free trade do not specifically challenge leftist sensibilities.

Yet on every question the left did much worse. On the monopoly question, the portion of progressive/very liberals answering incorrectly (31%) was more than twice that of conservatives (13%) and more than four times that of libertarians (7%). On the question about living standards, the portion of progressive/very liberals answering incorrectly (61%) was more than four times that of conservatives (13%) and almost three times that of libertarians (21%).

The survey also asked about party affiliation. Those responding Democratic averaged 4.59 incorrect answers. Republicans averaged 1.61 incorrect, and Libertarians 1.26 incorrect.

Liberals and leftists like to think that their views are merely “enlightened.” Indeed, they chortled three years ago when a poll came out showing that a majority of Republicans don’t believe in evolution.

(Of course, in the same poll 40% of Democrats said they didn’t believe in evolution.)

But if Christian conservatives don’t much like evolution, liberals and leftists don’t much like economics.

But the implications of the two things are radically different. While not believing in evolution is pretty much an innocent foible (unless you want to be a biologist), not believing in economic science has nasty implications for public policy.

Further, the liberal ignorance of economics is not innocent. It’s rooted in a class-based ideology. Markets run counter to the class interests of liberals. Markets give power to people who produce wealth, and not to those who redistribute it.

Markets give power to ordinary people, who are allowed to live their lives the way they want. This is a source of frustration for people who believe they should be able to dictate the lifestyles of others.

Intercollegiate Studies Institute on Marquette Campus

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute is a conservative organization, both free market and traditionalist, that defines itself as follows.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) is a non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt educational organization whose purpose is to further in successive generations of college students a better understanding of the values and institutions that sustain a free and humane society.

Founded in 1953, ISI works “to educate for liberty” — to identify the best and the brightest college students and to nurture in these future leaders the American ideal of ordered liberty. To accomplish this goal, ISI seeks to enhance the rising generation’s knowledge of our nation’s founding principles — limited government, individual liberty, personal responsibility, the rule of law, market economy, and moral norms.

A conference on Alexis de Tocqueville, which will be coming up in just a few days, is typical of their activities.

We had lunch last week with the president of the Marquette chapter, Paco Nava, and he’s a sincere fellow committed to the values of the ISI. The organization is small on the Marquette campus, indeed Nava may be its only real activist. But it is a recognized student organization, and even a small cadre of students with some boldness and a sense of purpose can accomplish a lot. Any student who subscribes to the principles of the ISI ought to contact Nava. ISI might be the right organization at the right time and the right place.

Celebrity Republicans

From WCBS, Channel 2 in New York, a slideshow of celebrities who are (or are thought to be) Republicans and/or conservatives.

Be wary of a case or two of what may be jumping to conclusions about some celebrity’s political views. Also, the list includes a fair number of (1.) sports figures, (2.) country music stars and (3.) NACAR drivers.

But we knew that already!

Subject for discussion: who is the most surprising person on the list?

Liberals vs. Conservatives: Condensed History

From an e-mail correspondent. Don’t run to Snopes to see whether it is historically accurate.

Condensed History

For those that don’t know about history. Here is a condensed version:

Humans originally existed as members of small bands of nomadic hunters/gatherers. They lived on deer in the mountains during the summer and would go to the coast and live on fish and lobster in the winter.

The two most important events in all of history were the invention of beer and the invention of the wheel. The wheel was invented to get man to the beer. These were the foundation of modern civilization and together were the catalyst for the splitting of humanity into two distinct subgroups:

1. Liberals, and

2. Conservatives.

Once beer was discovered, it required grain and that was the beginning of agriculture. Neither the glass bottle nor aluminum can was invented yet, so while our early humans were sitting around waiting for them to be invented, they just stayed close to the brewery. That’s how villages were formed.

Some men spent their days tracking and killing animals to B-B-Q at night while they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of what is known as the Conservative movement.

Other men who were weaker and less skilled at hunting learned to live off the conservatives by showing up for the nightly B-B-Q’s and doing the sewing, fetching, and hair dressing. This was the beginning of the Liberal movement.

Some of these liberal men eventually evolved into women. The rest became known as girlie-men. Some noteworthy liberal achievements include the domestication of cats, the invention of group therapy, group hugs, and the concept of Democratic voting to decide how to divide the meat and beer that conservative provided.

Over the years conservatives came to be symbolized by the largest, most powerful land animal on earth, the elephant. Liberals are symbolized by the jackass.

Modern liberals like imported beer (with lime added), but most prefer white wine or imported bottled water. They eat raw fish but like their beef well done. Sushi, tofu, and French food are standard liberal fare. Another interesting evolutionary side note: most of their women have higher testosterone levels than their men. Most social workers, personal injury attorneys, journalists, dreamers in Hollywood and group therapists are liberals. Liberals invented the designated hitter rule because it wasn’t fair to make the pitcher also bat.

Conservatives drink domestic beer, mostly Bud. They eat red meat and still provide for their women. Conservatives are big-game hunters, rodeo cowboys, lumberjacks, construction workers, firemen, medical doctors, police officers, corporate executives, athletes, members of the military, airline pilots and generally anyone who works productively. Conservatives who own companies hire other conservatives who want to work for a living.

Liberals produce little or nothing. They like to govern the producers and decide what to do with the production. Liberals believe Europeans are more enlightened than Americans. That is why most of the liberals remained in Europe when conservatives were coming to America . They crept in after the Wild West was tamed and created a business of trying to get more for nothing.

Here ends today’s lesson in world history.

OK, just some good dirty partisan invective. Unserious fun.

Some Good Ideological Give-and-Take

It seems that a leftist at Milwaukee Rising published a post titled 50+ Things You Won’t Learn from Talk Radio.

Tom McMahon has good comebacks for each and every one of them.

Nanny State: Left & Right

From Modern Commentaries: an account of government nannyism both from conservatives and liberals.

Mike Huckabee, governor of Arkansas, is a “conservative Republican.”

He’s pro-life, and a “staunch opponent of . . . gay marriage,” which is wonderful, but he’s also drunk from the Nanny-state Kool-Aid.

After being diagnosed with diabetes, Huckabee lost 110 pounds and became a “champion of healthy lifestyles.” That’s all well and good, but Huckabee decided that because he lost 110 pounds - of his own free will and doing - he decided it would be a good idea to keep track of the BMI and obesity rates of students in all Arkansas public schools on fitness report cards.

First, the BMI is an unrelistic indicator of obesity. It doesn’t take into consideration build, bone structure, or muscle mass . . . thereby making it possible for a fit person to register overweight or obese on the BMI.

Second, there’s the issue of privacy. A child’s weight should be an issue between the parents and the physician. Not the schools. Not the government.

But of course, the most aggressive and extreme nannyism comes from the leftists.

Do they make Valentine’s Day string cheese?

I suppose you could type up slogans like “Don’t string me along” and tape them to the packages.

This, sadly, is what Valentine’s Day has become in schools where the federal wellness policy is being interpreted with revolutionary zeal.

Kids recently brought home a list of what foods will be allowed, and which are henceforth banned, from upcoming Valentine’s Day celebrations at Sunset Ridge Elementary School in the Middleton- Cross Plains School District.

The allowed list includes yogurt, pretzels, animal crackers, string cheese and air-popped popcorn with no butter or oil.

The banned list includes such Valentine’s Day favorites as cookies, candy, brownies, bars, cupcakes, Oreos and sweetened fruit juice.

And what about those pastel conversation hearts from NECCO that have been part of American Valentine’s Days since the Civil War? As one of the hearts might proclaim: “No way.”

Blogger Amy notes the absurd level of hypocrisy of the leftist nannies.

But the left, while eager and enthusiastic to ban Valentine’s Day treats, would have no problem teaching Madistan kindergarteners about same-sex marriage or alternative lifestyles. They go apopleptic whenever abortion restrictions are on the table, and demand that birth control and abortion be government-funded.

Sex, with anyone at any time and for any reason, is perfectly acceptable. In spite of the fact that it also spreads disease (some of them fatal, and without cure), and allows the gravest evil of all to cover up for a night of irresponsibility: abortion.

So being promiscuous is okay. But having a chocolate on February 14 is bad.

The simple fact is that nannyism is never based on objective policy considerations, although these may be a pretext.

It’s about imposing one’s cultural values on other people.