Is Disrespecting the President OK? Hypocrisy Run Amok

From Reason magazine, an essay on the question: Is It Cool To Call the President a Bastard Again?

For years, we were told that criticizing the occupant of the White House was “rank disrespect,” as Jonathan Capehart wrote in the Washington Post. Opposition to the sitting president was very likely motivated by racism, Charles M. Blow mused in The New York Times. “Openly defying and brazenly disrespecting your president, while hoping that he fails, is not called patriotism … It is called treason,” insisted one particularly moronic meme by Occupy Democrats.

But a few years of experience can have a wonderfully transformative effect on political culture. One election later, and Americans who once insisted that saying mean things about an elected official was unseemly and unforgivable have rediscovered the liberating potential of dissent.

But with Trump:

And, where once Hollywood celebrities issued a thoroughly creepy “pledge to serve Barack Obama” when he took office as president, eight additional years of seeing the duties of that office exercised led us to singer Madonna saying she’s thought a lot about “blowing up the White House.”

Madonna made her comments at a massive Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration during which hundreds of thousands of regular Americans promised to resist the new chief executive before he’s even had a chance to start rivaling the damage inflicted by his predecessor.

It’s all such a welcome change.

For the libertarians at Reason, it is a welcome change, since the notion that a strong, righteous president will set everything right in the country is a huge threat to liberty. When all your hopes are invested in the president, then you’ll condone illegitimate exercises of power. Remember Obama and his pen and phone.

And the “blow up the White House” comment by the ageing slut Madonna is, in fact, no real threat to the Republic. But then, neither was the stupid “birther” notion that Obama was born in Kenya. But please, let’s just have an end to the hypocrisy.

A Libertarian Evaluates Trump

From the libertarian Reason Magazine:

Well, for starters, allowing liberals to determine my level of anxiety — which would be full-blown, round-the-clock histrionics — over what’s nothing more than another election would be foolish. Until it’s not. The era of Trump hasn’t even started yet, and the entire establishment keeps using the term “era of Trump” as if things have actually changed.

They haven’t. If you’re genuinely interesting in being an effective critic of the next president, acting like Adolf Hitler is pounding at your doorstep every time Trump tweets something might not be the most effective plan in the long run.

Not to mention, the left has been such an astonishing hypocrite on so many issues related to Trump that it’s a bit difficult to move forward without pointing it out. Joining activists who’ve spent years attacking the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth and Tenth Amendments— and now the Electoral College — in a newfound veneration of the Emoluments Clause is a bit much. Of course, Trump should be held accountable for his potential conflicts of interest, and one hopes conservatives who value good government will stand up when tangible evidence emerges that they exist. But the critics on the left aren’t serious about the Constitution. They’re serious about the Democratic Party.

Who can take journalists seriously — who’ve never once uttered a word of concern over the Democratic Party’s crusade to empower government to ban political speech by overturning Citizens United — when they lose it over a tweet about flag-burning? If it were up to them over the past eight years, Trump would now be imbued with far more power to achieve the things they fear — unilaterally. There was more angst over the president-elect ditching a reporting pool to have a steak than there was over any of President Obama’s numerous executive abuses. So when you hear people say democracy needs journalism “now more than ever,” remember that they’re admitting they weren’t doing their job yesterday. We also needed journalism more than ever back then.

Those who kept telling us that Hillary Clinton’s corrupt foundation and blatant favor-trading with the world’s most illiberal regimes were merely a conspiracy theory now act as if the republic will crumble if Trump’s hotel hosts the same Bahraini princes that were buying access in the Obama administration. The same people who told us Clinton’s emails were “bullshit” and a silly distraction are now horrified that former Gen. David Petraeus — who, like Clinton, shouldn’t be in any Cabinet, but who, unlike Clinton, actually paid a price for his mishandling of classified information — is under consideration for a position in the new administration.

Moreover, Trump hasn’t really done anything out of the ordinary — not yet.

What’s really upset Democrats, it seems to me, is that traditional conservative policy proposals — the sorts of thing Republicans have campaigned on for years, and the policies that have helped them win over 1,000 local seats and governorships and two wave elections — will probably be moving forward. The overwrought rhetoric used to describe the overturning of Obamacare or the reforming of entitlements — “gutting,” “privatizing” etc. — would be precisely the same if we had President-elect John Kasich.

Trump’s Cabinet nominees are the kind of run-of-the-mill selections any Republican would pick. You’ll remember that last week America was supposed to freak out about the chaos and sluggishness of the transition process. Then it was supposed to freak out about the potential white-maleness of the Cabinet. Well, his Cabinet members Nikki Haley, Elaine Chao, Seema Verma and Betsy DeVos are going to be just as extreme to the left as an actual extremist.

Trump, in other words, has been a much better President Elect than he was a candidate — a few crazy tweets to the contrary.

Harsanyi (the author of the piece) goes on to criticize Trump on sound libertarian grounds: his crony bailout of Carrier Corporation and his massive infrastructure proposal. But Harsanyi adds that these don’t signal a new era of American politics. They are a very traditional, if deplorable, way of doing things.

Trumps actions vindicate those, like local talk show host Mark Belling, who decided to suck it up and support Trump as the least bad of two bad choices. As for the never Trump people, like talk show host Charlie Sykes, they are slightly embarrassing — but only slightly, since Trump was a truly terrible candidate.

American democracy will survive, and its prospects are a lot better than they seemed a mere month ago.

Liberal “Diversity” at the Huffington Post

Notice anything about this @HuffingtonPost editors meeting? 💃💃💪🏼💪🏼 pic.twitter.com/7sg4SyraPa

— Liz Heron (@lheron) May 20, 2016

Donald Trump On Illegal Immigration. Wait! That’s Not Trump!

Who Needs Guns?

Greenpeace: Workers on Strike

From the very left wing San Diego Free Press:

On August 5, 16 of 19 canvassers for Greenpeace in San Diego walked off the job. They were followed by a majority of the Sacramento office. 22 total employees of the Frontline program, Greenpeace’s in-house fundraising program, have had enough of labor policies that give them no job security.

The strike, led by two veteran canvassers in Socialist Alternative San Diego, comes against an organization that claims to be progressive. However, Greenpeace uses a quota system where even veteran fundraisers can be fired for missing quota two or three weeks consecutively. Senior workers bring in six or seven times their salary in recurring donations, yet are routinely fired. Morale is understandably very low. But choosing to resist, they have mobilized in defense of their jobs and dignity. Non-profits beware: the persuasive skills developed by your employees can be used against you. Instead of selling Greenpeace, organizers now sell the strike against it.

Tara Dawn, a strike member from the Sacramento field office, said “As a single mother, I work hard week in and week out not knowing if I’ll have a dependable paycheck to keep a roof over our heads. That is a very difficult reality to face. I love my job and the organization I work for, but myself and the all of the other canvassers deserve to see reform.”

Resistance to reform, both in senior and mid-level Greenpeace administration, emphasizes the presence of “the worker elite”. Despite being former fundraisers themselves, low-level managers have decided not to stand in solidarity with their former co-workers, their interests now aligning with their superiors. In the absence of help from those potential allies, the street-level workers have banded together, using democratic methods and a sophisticated media campaign to damage Greenpeace’s most valuable asset: its image and reputation.

Canvassers have great labor power for two main reasons. First, because they gather monthly donations, each $20 donation that is not gathered is multiplied, since most people donate for 9 or 10 months before canceling. Second, attempts to bring in strikebreaking replacements are frustrated because good canvassers emerge from training, not raw talent. The trainers are on strike, thus nobody can truly be their replacement.

Socialists everywhere should stand in the new areas of labor struggle. Thousands of vulnerable canvassers for all sorts of non-profits can learn from a strong victory.

Their Facebook page is: facebook.com/GreenpeaceOnStrike
Their strike fund page is: crowdrise.com/GreenpeaceOnStrike

We generally take a dim view of strikers. They are usually what economists call “rent seekers.” “Rent,” in the technical jargon of economists, means “rip off.”

Our view is that if somebody doesn’t believe they are being paid decently by their employer, they should go find another job. If the employer can fill their position with a qualified worker at the same wage (and benefits package) they were being paid decently. If the employer can’t, then the market is telling the employer “you are going to have to up the compensation for this job.” That’s fair enough.

But that’s free market logic, and it’s nice to see the hoity–toity leftists who run Greenpeace faced with the same sort of demands that they endorse when directed at profit-making capitalist enterprises.

Are the Democrats Pro-Choice?

Smug Liberals Demand “Civility” in Discourse

Liberals to Women Who Don’t Conform: Face Sexist Slurs

From Kirsten Powers on The Daily Beast:

“What about saying that she’s a whore?”

No, I wasn’t eavesdropping on a Duke fraternity meeting. This was the suggestion of an aide to Democrat Jerry Brown on how to deal with his GOP rival for the California governorship, Meg Whitman.

Brown’s response? “Well I’m going to use that.”

Not anymore.

Once a tape of the conversation was leaked, the Brown campaign apologized.

While we, sadly, are all too familiar with the casual misogynistic comment, what perhaps is more surprising is where these slurs lately have been coming from—progressive bastions like the Brown camp, and liberal women.

Last month, liberal talk show host Stephanie Miller laughed uproariously when a female guest on her show said that if she ever met Michelle Malkin, “I would kick [her] right in the nuts,” and warned, “Wear a cup, lady.”

Charming.

Or how about this: “You have to lift their skirts to find out if they are women. You sure can’t find out by how they vote.” This is what Democratic Rep. Janis Baird Sontany of Nashville said earlier this year of her female GOP colleagues.

Or this: “Sarah Palin may be a lady, but she ain’t no woman,” as Cinta Wilson wrote during the tsunami of anti-Palin hysteria in 2008. In her Salon piece, Wilson went on to refer to the Alaska governor as a “Christian Stepford wife in a ‘sexy librarian’ costume” and the GOP’s “hardcore pornographic centerfold spread.”

Who needs misogynist men when liberal women will do the job for you, often sounding that shopworn theme that women GOP candidates are somehow inauthentic women?

Palin, of course, has been the target of many such smears. She was derided as, “Bush in a skirt” on Huffington Post, and at The Washington Post, Wendy Doniger blogged of then-VP candidate Palin: “Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.”

Not that liberal men are much better.

Ann Coulter is often referred to as “Mann-coulter” on political blogs in an effort to de-feminize her. And MSNBC’s Keith Olberman once referred to Malkin as a “mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick.”

In a Salon column last month headlined “Forget about the tea party—what about the crumpets?” Gene Lyons wrote that, “The most entertaining aspect of the 2010 election season has been the rise of the right-wing cuties—political celebrities whose main qualification is looking terrific on television. From where I sit, in a comfortable chair in front of the tube, the GOP Cupcake Factor has enlivened an otherwise dreary campaign season.”

You, Sir, are a pig.

The “cuties” in question are a former Governor (Palin), a current Congresswoman (Michelle Bachmann) and a current Senatorial candidate (Christine O’Donnell.) Lyons take on O’Donnell was this: “Everybody knows some poor fool who married a woman like that.”

To anyone who believes that a man with the same religious views as O’Donnell would have received the same nonstop vicious mockery, I have one name for you: Mike Huckabee.

Yes, sexism matters—as does gender. But whereas you never hear anyone claim that men should vote a particular way because of their gender, feminists have no trouble treating women like pre-schoolers who have to be herded into the right camp, a camp that is apparently preordained at birth. In an interview with Katie Couric last year, Gloria Steinem said that where conservative women stand “is squarely against what most women need and want. If [women] still vote for them, they are voting against themselves, which is quite tragic to me.”

This kind of attitude should be antithetical to feminist thought because it is infantilizing to women.

Politically, I agree very little with any of the conservative women mentioned in this column. But they have the same right as any woman to be treated with respect and dignity. Every time anyone—liberal, conservative, man or a woman—engage in sexist smears, all women lose.

Of course, blacks who fail to play the role assigned to them by white liberals and leftists — the role of perpetual grievance mongers — face the same nasty response.

All of which tells something about contemporary liberalism. It’s not defined (as classical liberalism was) by a set of ethical principles. It’s defined by its division of the whole world into “oppressor” groups and “victim” groups.

Liberals pride themselves on siding with the “victims.”

Thus when the “victims” fail to play their assigned role, it’s a direct frontal assault on liberals sense of self-righteousness and self-worth. Of course, that is met with aggression.

But as Powers points out, this is profoundly demeaning to the “victim” groups in question. It means they are not allowed to reach independent conclusions. It means they are not allowed to stray off the liberals’ plantation.

Happily, liberals can’t (yet) use government coercion to shut such people up. So all they can do is demean and deride them.

A Word to the Liberals on Tolerance

An article in the September number of The Warrior by Ethan Hollenberger deals with two attacks on the Catholic mission of Marquette and other Catholic institutions: the requirement by a Democratically controlled state legislature that all health plans must pay for birth control, and the recent activism favoring hiring Jodi O’Brien, who is both openly lesbian and scornful of Catholic teaching on homosexuality.

The issue for Marquette is whether or not it will follow its moral leader Pope Benedict XVI, a theologian who shares the opinion of Wisconsin’s Bishops. Marquette is a Jesuit University being forced to abandon Catholic teachers to appease non-Catholic employees who have willingly chosen to work at the University.

It seems to me . . . the Left isn’t happy with allowing Marquette keep its Catholic identity. Marquette is always being lobbied to disregard the Church’s moral leaders for a more “progressive” worldview. We see Christian values being attacked in New York City with the building of the Mosque near ground zero. If a person does not want that Mosque built, he is “Islamophopic.” If a person doesn’t want a dean who writes contrary to Catholic values, he is “homophobic.” And, if a person believes the Catholic teaching of abstinence before marriage, not preventing conception, or taking life, he is living in an older time. Folks, the tolerance goes both ways. Progessives, your worldview differs greatly from Catholic teaching, deal with it. Stop forcing Marquette to abandon its Catholic tradition. Finally, walk the talk and tolerate diversity!

Indeed, for way too many liberals, “tolerance” means accepting things they think are OK, like abortion and homosexuality. They can’t conceive of it requiring tolerance of opinions that they disagree with.

The Real Agenda Behind “Hate Crime” Laws

From the Washington Examiner:

This story comes to us from Broward County, Fla. Teah Wimberly, 16, is charged with murdering Amanda Coll, a friend and classmate at Dillard High School in Fort Lauderdale. Both girls were 15 at the time of the shooting.

According to police, Ms. Wimberly wanted more than just a friendship with Collette, whom she’d known since childhood. Wimberly wanted a lesbian relationship with Collette, who rebuffed the idea, news reports indicate. On Nov. 12 of last year, police say, Wimberly took a .22-caliber handgun to school and fatally shot Collette.

Wimberly’s trial started last week and is expected to continue this week. This may be the first time you’ve read about the case, unlike when Matthew Shepard was murdered in Wyoming or when James Byrd was dragged to death in Jasper, Texas.

My guess is you know plenty about those latter two incidents. Shepard was gay; two men beat him to death because he was gay. Byrd was a black man whom three white supremacists chained to a truck, dragged through the streets of Jasper and beheaded.

Both grisly crimes, to be sure. And when President Obama signed a new federal “hate crimes” law recently, it was called the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

That’s a misnomer, because the law prevents nothing of the sort. And it creates classes of victims and perpetrators, as if some victims of violent crime are better than others, or the perpetrators of the same are worse.

And therein lies the answer about why Wimberly wasn’t charged with a hate crime. She’s the wrong sexual orientation: lesbian. Had she been a heterosexual teen who shot a lesbian, you’d have been able to repeat the details of this story verbatim, because that’s how many times you’d have heard it.

Wimberly is also the wrong race: She’s black, or, as the current PC term goes, African American. Her victim, Colette, was also a “person of color,” to use yet another annoying PC term.

I’ll repeat what I’ve said about “hate crimes” laws for some time: They should be more correctly called “bust whitey’s hump” laws. These laws target whites who commit crimes against “people of color.” You’ll rarely see them used against “people of color” who commit crimes against whites. And it’s even rarer to see them used against “people of color” who commit crimes against other “people of color.”

Ever heard of Cheryl Greene? She was a black girl killed by members of a Mexican-American gang in Los Angeles. There have been some very nasty brown-on-black crimes committed in Los Angeles recently, but like the Amanda Collette murder, most media outlets give them little to no coverage.

The victims are the right color, but, dang it, the perps just aren’t. Nothing makes for the perfect hate crime like a white perp and a victim who’s a “person of color.”

Or, if you’re like the Obamas of the world, a victim who’s gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or transsexual. The purpose of the Shepard-Byrd Act was to add them to the list of approved “hate crimes” victims. At least that’s what the law’s supporters would try to con us into believing.

The truth is this: Supporters of “hate crimes” laws don’t want to criminalize the conduct of those who commit crimes based on race, religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation. Wyoming and Texas both had murder statutes on the books that allowed the killers of Shepard and Byrd to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. It’s not like the murderers escaped punishment.

No, supporters of “hate crimes” laws want to criminalize certain thoughts and ideas. That makes them far more dangerous than those who commit nonviolent “hate crimes.”

The yokels who’d burn a cross on a lawn, paint a swastika on a synagogue or yell the dreaded “F” bomb at a gay couple are, at worst, insufferable bigots. At best they’re simply royal pains in our collective neck.

But those who want to criminalize thoughts and ideas will soon lead us down the path to totalitarianism. Given my druthers, I’d gladly suffer the annoyance of the silly, nonviolent acts of a few idiotic bigots than trust an advocate of “hate crimes” laws to govern this nation.

Those Offensive Anti-Obama Signs

From the RealNews blog:

Ever since the Tea Party phenomenon exploded onto the political scene a few months back, the Left has been up in arms over the inflammatory and offensive rhetoric featured on some of the signs and placards displayed by those in attendance. Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and Rachel Maddow, among others, have fumed repeatedly about the bad taste exhibited by many of those expressing their displeasure with the President and his policies.

The Huffington Post ran a feature on this subject, titled “10 Most Offensive Tea Party Signs,” which singled out, among others, the following winners — or perhaps “losers” is a more apt term:

• “Obama’s Plan: White Slavery”
  
• “The American taxpayers are the Jews for Obama’s ovens”
  
• “Our tax $ given to Hamas to Kill Christians, Jews, & Americans”
  
• “Obama: What you talking about Willis? Spend my money?”
  
• “Obama loves taxes, bankrupt USA, loves baby killing”
  
• “Barack Hussein Obama: The new face of Hitler”
  
• “Barack Obama supports abortion, sodomy, socialism, and the New World Order”
  
• “Obama was not bowing [to the Saudi king]. He was sucking Saudi jewels.”

OK, that’s pretty rough stuff, and not at all civil. Of course, since there have been literally hundreds of thousands of protesters at tea party protests, carrying tens of thousands of signs, we have to expect a few to be pretty nasty.

But we have a collection of things said about the President that tops that.

• One sign exhorted Americans to “kill” the President and “bomb his f—in White House.”
  
• Another said, “I’m here to kill” the President.
  
• Another urged the powers-that-be to “hang” the President.
  
• Another said the President “is the disease, death is the cure.”
  
• Another said the President is “the only dope worth shooting.”
  
• Another showed a likeness of the President’s face with a bullet hole in the forehead, oozing red blood.
  
• Another called explicitly for the “death” of the “pig” in the White House.
  
• Another displayed a caricature of the President’s disembodied, bleeding head.
  
• Others featured the President’s face accompanied by such captions as: “Wanted: dead or alive,” and “Death to the dictator.”
  
• Another showed the President’s neck being fitted with a noose.
  
• Still another showed the image of a noose accompanied by a caption urging us to “support” the President (i.e., with the noose).

But how in the world did the Huffington Post miss the second set of really nasty signs, and single out the first set?

Simple, the second set of signs are from protests directed against George Bush.

Apparently, demanding the murder of George Bush isn’t any big deal to the people who are crying crocodile tears over the lack of civility shown toward Barack Obama by some of the tea party protesters.

The signs on the second list, calling for the death of George Bush, can be seen here.

Actually, Liberals Don’t Believe in Freedom to Dissent Either

From Andrew Breitbart on Real Clear Politics:

John Mackey - the founder, CEO and marketing genius behind Whole Foods - finds himself in an organic, unsustainable mess with his carefully cultivated affluent, liberal customer base after penning an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal titled, “The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare.”

For starters, Mr. Mackey opens with a line from known-liberal-allergen Margaret Thatcher that features the dreaded “S” word: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” Then he goes on to provide eight sensible free-market solutions gleaned from his company’s well-regarded employee health care program.

Mr. Mackey, a free-market libertarian, is now at the mercy of an unforgiving grass-roots mob intent on destroying his company. More than 25,000 people have signed on to a Whole Foods boycott on Facebook.

“Whole Foods has built its brand with the dollars of deceived progressives,” the online petition reads. “Let them know your money will no longer go to support Whole Foods’ anti-union, anti-health insurance reform, right-wing activities.”

A complementary Web site, WholeBoycott.com, features unintentionally comical video testimonials from aggrieved former customers. The mainstream media have picked up on the story and fanned the flames.

And here is the most perceptive part of the piece.

The success of Whole Foods is largely built on Mr. Mackey’s understanding of the liberal mind. It wants the good life - but with instant absolution for the sin of conspicuous consumption. Whole Foods is marketing at its best. Iconography and slogans throughout the store - not unlike those Barack Obama used to win the presidency - tell the shopper they are saving the planet in large and small ways.

The product is so good even conservatives and skeptics are willing to play along.

But Mr. Mackey missed the key ingredient of modern liberalism: intolerance to the ideas of nonliberals. And this miscalculation may prove to be devastating to his multibillion-dollar business.

Everywhere one looks these days, the intolerance of self-avowed liberals is on display. Especially since Mr. Obama came to power.

The purportedly open-minded and empathic among us who now run everything - save for NASCAR and Nashville - openly wage war against those who dare disagree.

Witness Steny Hoyer and Nancy Pelosi’s joint-penned editorial in USA Today in which the House’s two top Democrats describe those publicly questioning Mr. Obama’s proposed health care system overhaul as “un-American.”

One need not go back too far in the political time machine to recall a time when the same people were claiming that the term “un-American” was being tossed at liberals for opposing the Iraq war, and that Republicans were stifling free speech.

Examples were rarely, if ever, given. It just was. And we were told this was a very, very bad thing.

The Dixie Chicks brilliantly used this sob line to become a Rolling Stone magazine cover staple, a blue-state crossover and an international cause celebre. A chorus line of would-be liberal celebrity martyrs took a similar marketing tack proclaiming McCarthyism was again afoot - as conservative Hollywood kept its collective mouth shut knowing that support for President Bush or the war was an instant career-killer.

Yet amid the cries of “dissent is patriotic” - a phrase seen on the bumper stickers of cars in the Whole Foods parking lot - the antiwar movement grew and grew, unfettered by the war’s supporters or by the party in power.

As the Hollywood Left churned out antiwar film screeds, it was creating a narrative of its victimhood as it victimized Mr. Bush and his administration with the false accusation that dissenters were being persecuted. But now that they are in power, Democrats are brazenly wielding punitive weaponry against dissenting Americans and are using the power of the state to shut up citizens.

The Democratic leadership - and its friends in the mainstream media - seem determined to brand opposition to the president’s legislative agenda as illegitimate, even racist in origin. Individuals and grass-roots organizations are helping the statists’ cause by advocating boycotts and other means of stifling dissent.

The strategy is clear: Intimidate people from speaking up or from attending public protests by telegraphing that anyone can be made a demon for standing up and exercising basic, constitutional rights.

Of course, we need to be clear on one thing: people do have the right to boycott anybody they want to boycott. Any conservative who thinks the public statements of (say) the Dixie Chicks are obnoxious is free, in a capitalist economy, not to buy their CDs.

But people have the right to do all sorts of things that are, in effect, fascist.

All John Mackey did was express an opinion on Obama’s health care proposals. That was “offensive” only to people who get “offended” at hearing opinions they disagree with expressed — even in perfectly civil terms.

Gore Supporters’ Energy Hypocrisy

This has been all over conservative talk radio, but we can’t resist including it here.



It’s not just cheap fun at the expense of the energy nannies.

It points to the reality of environmentalism.

Affluent environmentalists expect to have plenty of energy themselves in the Green utopia they are trying to bring about.

They can afford $8.00 per gallon gas.

They will often make minor and symbolic sacrifices in support of their claim of righteousness. They may live on the East Side of Milwaukee, and bike to work downtown. But that’s not difficult if you have enough money to pay the inflated real-estate prices on the East Side.

They may drive a hybrid auto. After all, they can afford one, while working class Americans can’t.

But they will never forego the opportunity to jet off to some exotic location for a vacation.

Being affluent and elitist, they expect all their privileges and prerogatives to continue just fine in their Green utopia. That less affluent people will be harmed is something they don’t much care about. Indeed, they view it as their proper role to tutor “lessor breeds” on how to live their lives -- and to use coercion, if necessary, to do it.