The Democrats and their Hypocrisy

Sometimes hypocrisy knows no bounds....

The price tag for President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration gala is expected to break records, with some estimates reaching as high as $150 million. Despite the bleak economy, however, Democrats who called on President George W. Bush to be frugal four years ago are issuing no such demands now that an inaugural weekend of rock concerts and star-studded parties has begun....

...In 2005, Reps. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., and Jim McDermott, D-Wash., asked Bush to show a little less pomp and be a little more circumspect at his party.

"President Roosevelt held his 1945 inaugural at the White House, making a short speech and serving guests cold chicken salad and plain pound cake," the two lawmakers wrote in a letter. "During World War I, President Wilson did not have any parties at his 1917 inaugural, saying that such festivities would be undignified."

The thinking was that, with the nation at war, excessive celebration was inappropriate. Four years later, the nation is still at war. Unemployment has risen sharply. And Obama pressed Congress to release the second half of a $700 billion bailout package in hopes of rescuing a faltering banking industry.

Obama's inauguration committee says it is mindful of the times and is not worried people will see the four days of festivities as excessive.

"That is probably not the way the country is going to be looking at it," said committee spokeswoman Linda Douglass. "It is not a celebration of an election. It is a celebration of our common values."

Of course, the total price tag of the inauguration is going to cost in excess of $160 million. But apparently, excessive spending to celebrate the ascendancy of the The One is perfectly acceptable to this hypocritical Democrats. Once again, the country is suffering, and the Democrats are perfectly willing to flaunt that fact while they live it up in Washington, D.C. Obama asks the American people to sacrifice, but is perfectly unwilling to sacrifice even the smallest morsel of his coronation.

The American people should look at the Democrats spending on the inauguration, take a step back, and realize that Democrats and their supports are in it for themselves and not for America's middle and working class families. Because no party should waste this much cash while families (you know, the people Democrats claim they are working day and night far) are suffering so much.

The Return of O'Chutzpah

Man, Martin O'Malley has really jumped off of the deep end:

During his third visit to the capital in little more than a week, Gov. Martin O'Malley suggested that his administration's 2008 budget fix - including tax increases that required a special session of the General Assembly - is a national model for what he called the "American value of fiscal responsibility...." ..."We were asking our neighbors to sacrifice more at a time when they were already getting hammered and the dollar was already being weakened," O'Malley said. "None of these decisions were made lightly." But he added: "I believe that the people that we serve actually have a far greater capacity to embrace, understand and make investments than sometimes we give them credit for."

I have no idea what planet O'Malley is living on right now. I really don't.

Part of the reason that we are "getting hammered", Governor, is because of your fiscal imprudence and lack of leadership. It is you Governor, who are ultimately responsible for our pocketbook walls. It is YOU Governor whose lack of leadership has brought our state and our families alike to the precipice of economic disaster.

For Governor O'Malley to call his spend, tax, spend some more policy as "a model of responsibility" makes me question the Governor's fitness for office. Clearly, Governor O'Malley doesn't give a damn about the people of Maryland to make such a ridiculous claim.

It is past time that Maryland have somebody in the Governor's Mansion who puts the people of Maryland first. And clearly, Martin O'Malley puts government, special interests and most important his political career far ahead of the needs and concerns of the taxpayers.

This never ending Racialization is getting old

Once again, Eric Luedtke goes tries to equate conservatism to racism again, this time in regards to school vouchers:

Vouchers is one of those, an attempt to apply a radical conservative ideology to a public good. To give you an idea of what I mean: Milton Friedman, the great conservative economist who wrote Capitalism and Freedom, not only proposed school vouchers, but argued that the Civil Rights Act is not necessary because market forces will end discrimination. I'm sure Rosa Parks would have been comforted to know that if she had not sat down on that bus, the free market would have eventually solved segregation for her.

An unnecessary, pointless cheap shot at Friedman. It would also be a cheap shot to note that the Civil Rights Act would not have been necessary had Democrats not supported Jim Crow laws for 80 years, so I won't say it.

But how come the privileged Caucasians over at Free State Politics equate everything conservative to racism? You might almost think that they have no other arguments to stand on.

I'll address Luedtke's nonsense comments on education in a separate post....

Sycophantic Obsequiousness

FSP is once again touting the merits of Al Gore's hypocritical, pie in the sky plan to railroad the U.S. towards clean energy without regard to economic consequences. But, of course, the fringe element never lets the facts get in the way of a good story and the pseudonymous poster "lefty" is exposing the fringe element for what they truly are.

In the comments in that post, "lefty" decides to launch into an attack on me personally instead of discussing the (lack of) issues I brought up regarding Gore's hypocrisy and the clear lack of a consensus on climate change. Instead of discussion, I get stuff like this:

So if I write a blog entry that says that all conservatives are deranged sociopaths who like to have carnal relations with goats, would it be OK for a bunch of allegedly influential liberal bloggers to pick up the story and create a similar feeding frenzy, on the grounds that the "consensus is building that Brian Griffiths and his conservative friends are all goat f*****s"? That's the moral equivalent of what you're claiming. The problem is that this kind of stupid-ass feeding frenzy only happens on the starboard wing of the blogosphere.

Classy.

These are the type of people that are, unfortunately, at the vanguard of the left-wing movement here in Maryland. People who a sycophantic and obsequious to whatever the Democratic Party is standing for today, and will stoop to any level to keep discussion, dissent, and debate out of site and out of mind. As I stated before, people like "lefty" believe in the Plutocracy, that they know better than you and that it is their Geia-given right to shout you down for disagreeing with them.

I feel bad, because I can go to bed every night with my conscious clear that I am thinking for myself and supporting policies in the best interest of my state and my country, not blindly following bad ideas in the name of the party.

Predestined Outcome

Nothing like seeing an expensive government commission appointed by Governor O'Malley with a predetermined outcome:

Gov. Martin O'Malley today announced the appointment of Benjamin Civiletti, a prominent Baltimore lawyer who served as U.S. attorney general during the Carter administration, as chairman of a commission to study the death penalty in Maryland.

The commission begins its deliberations as O'Malley, a staunch opponent of capital punishment, has moved toward ending Maryland's de facto moratorium on executions by ordering the drafting of procedures for the use of lethal injection. O'Malley, a Democrat, made that decision on the advice of counsel after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Kentucky's use of lethal injection protocols that are virtually identical to Maryland's.

Of course, we already know that Govenror O'Malley opposes the death penalty, but lacks the political guts to take steps in order to support its eradication. Instead, he is going to appoint a commission to "study" the issue, coming to the conclusion naturally that the death penalty should be abolished, to give O'Malley the political cover he needs to do what he wants to do.

Of course seeing that O'Malley put a cabinet member from the least competent Presidential administration of the modern era really make it hard to take O'Malley and his death penalty commission seriously....

David Paulson needs to lay off the bong water

David Paulson is either or drugs or has completely lost his mind:

It's not every day that the state Democratic Party's communication director and one of Maryland's most prominent Republicans agree on a party's political fortunes. But after former Lt. Gov. Michael Steele told a crowd of Republicans that "the Republican brand quite frankly sucks," David Paulson emailed PolitickerMD.com to express his empathy for Steele's idea.

"I don't disagree with Michael Steele on his low opinion of the Republican brand - it's in the toilet for a lot of reasons," Paulson wrote in an email to PolitickerMD.com. "But Republicans who think they only have a branding problem are fooling themselves. This isn't a public relations problem. This is a public trust problem."....

..."Andy Harris is just more of the same - all talk and no action, especially when it comes to gas prices," Paulson wrote to PolitickerMD.com. "If Harris is so concerned with gas taxes why didn't he sponsor a bill as a state senator? He has even failed to officially request that any action be taken now. Proof once again that Harris (sic) all talk and no action."

Paulson concluded the email by criticizing Republicans even further: "Republican hypocrisy is not a branding problem. It's more like we-can't-believe-you-because-we-don't-trust-you problem."

Wow.

I mean, wow.

The Democrats in this country and this state have repeatedly found themselves to be either under some sort of cloud involving shoes, involving money stored in freezers, involving shady land deals, involving undisclosed employers, involving State Senators with drugs, involving unsafe vehicles on the road, accepting bribes, nepotism at the state and county levels, firing political appointees after spending millions to investigate Ehrlich doing the same, appointing lobbyists to patronage gigs, and nominating a pre-packaged walking, talking scandal waiting to happen for President.

And David Paulson thinks that Republicans are hypocrites that can't be trusted. He needs to either get a mental examination, or he needs to lay off whatever substances he is currently using. Because nobody can be as self-deluded as he is.

It's true Republicans that have a branding problem for their inability to follow their principles while governing at the national level. But I'd say we look pretty good standing next to the chain gang wandering the streets under the label of the Maryland Democratic Party these days....

Manufactured Outrage

Leftist Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the newly created University of California, Irvine School of Law is an interesting fellow. Not because he is described as a constitutional law expert, but because of his manufactured outrage when it comes to judicial activism:

The Supreme Court's invalidation of the District of Columbia's handgun ban powerfully shows that the conservative rhetoric about judicial restraint is a lie. In striking down the law, Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion, joined by the court's four other most conservative justices, is quite activist in pursuing the conservative political agenda of protecting gun owners.

If the terms "judicial activism" and "judicial restraint" have any meaning, it is that a court is activist when it is invalidating laws and overruling precedent, and restrained when deferring to popularly elected legislatures and following prior decisions.

Never before had the Supreme Court found that the Second Amendment bestows on individuals a right to have guns. In fact, in 1939 (and other occasions), the court rejected this view. In effectively overturning these prior decisions, the court both ignored precedent and invalidated a law adopted by a popularly elected government.

And the article goes on like this in a relatively uneducated line of thinking.

What's humorous is that the generally accepted view of judicial activism is that such activism creates rights or constitutional violations out of thin air without regard to the Constitution. Regardless of your position on the issues, such creation of rights existed with issues such as abortion and as with gay marriage: courts magically created these rights out of thin air without any Constitutional citation. It's hard to interpret the Second Amendment as it is written and say that such right is being created out.

It seems like a lot of Chemerinsky's beef seems to be that the court in Heller overruled precedent. And I have always found the reliance on precedent to be a very lame-ass, weak-kneed concept. If Courts rely on precedent, particularly when precedent is wrong, that does not help propagate the Constitutional rights of anybody. This is something I wrote about last November in another article regarding guns:

Lasson also completely whiffs on the concept or precedence. Under Lasson's worldview, the Supreme Court's decision in 1939's United States v. Miller is sacrosanct on the issue and cannot be challenged. Of course, there are a number of fallacies with the concept of precedence. Why should a decision be continued to upheld when it is wrong? Under Lasson's warped logic that means that Brown vs. Board should never have been issued as it stood due to the precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. And under the same logic, Tileston v. Ullman and Poe v. Ullman would have precluded the decision in 1965's Griswold v. Connecticut...and that case paved the way for Roe v. Wade . I don't hear Lasson arguing the concept of precedence in those cases because the decisions do not match with his leftist worldviews.

And Chemerinsky's argument follows the same predictable mad leftist ranting.

It concerns me that Chemerinsky has been tasked to start a new law school as it's dean, mainly because I worry that there will be more lawyers manufacturing synthetic outrage while misinterpreting the role of the court in society and threatening our basic Constitutional rights as Americans...

O'Malley out of touch, out of control

Governor O'Malley is going farther and farther to prove that he has lost touch with reality when it comes to Governing Maryland.

First, take a look at his comments regarding Nancy Grasmick:

Gov. Martin O'Malley called longtime state schools chief Nancy S. Grasmick "a pawn of the Republican Party" yesterday, and other top Democrats said she should resign, indicating on the opening day of this year's legislative session that they might make good on threats to force her out.....

Speaking during a morning taping of WYPR-FM's Marc Steiner Show, O'Malley, a Democrat, said that if Grasmick refused to resign he would support legislation enabling the state school board to replace her with someone who is not a "poster child for No Child Left Behind or a pawn of the Republican Party."

"I'm looking forward to a new superintendent, and I'm looking forward to bringing one [on] in the very near future," O'Malley said.

The concept of long-time Democrat Grasmick being a "pawn of the Republican Party" is laughable considering Grasmick's history. She started out as a Schaefer appointee, remember, and has often been criticized over the past decade or more (often by Republicans, mind you) of the state of Maryland's school system. Of course, O'Malley's thoughts on the matter look even more mindless when you consider that you consider that Maryland school are ranked third in the nation .

Then there is this gem from his opening remarks to the House of Delegates yesterday:

"Important work remains to be done," O'Malley told House members. "As we proved before, progress is possible."

If anything, Governor O'Malley has proved that with him progress is not possible. His continued adherence to outdated ideas of the role of Government, ideas that came forth with the Great Society in the 1960's, prove that Governor O'Malley is committed to progress only for his own political career. O'Malley's continued support of higher taxes and unaffordable spending priorities certainly prove that O'Malley is not committed to making progress for Maryland's working and middle class families.

Maryland cannot make progress when we have a Governor who is out of touch from certain realities, and out of control with his attempts at abusing his power. It's as clear as day that Maryland will not be able to provide a livable future for the working and middle class families of Maryland until Martin O'Malley is no longer Governor of this state and replaced with a Governor who actually cares about the plight of Maryland's citizenry...

Misfiring on all cylinders

University of Baltimore Law Professor Kenneth Lasson goes on a predictably leftist, completely unscholarly tirade about the 2nd Amendment in the Sun this morning. And after this complete reinterpretation of the concept of precedent, he drops this gem:

The justices should recognize that law professors are not always straight shooters.

I couldn't have said it better myself. Because Lasson drapes his warped views on the subject around nothing but his own background as a hack masquerading as a law professor.

The main problem I have with Lasson's arguments is the fact that he only gives one side of the story. He wishes to talk about the financial backing of the NRA without adequately exploring the financial backing of gun grabber groups like the Brady Campaign. What about Michael Bloomberg's illegal campaign to fight firearms? Yeah, no mention of that.

Nor did Lasson mention his work as an "Expert" for the Second Amendment Research Center. That outfit is supported by The Joyce Foundation, an outfit with a notorious anti-gun bias, and whose grant list includes grants to both the Bloombergers, Handgun-Free America, and the Violence Policy Center, which of course supports the outright ban on handgun ownership amongst other out there policies. Lasson's cover-up of his affiliations (and the Sun letting him get away with it) is appalling.

Lasson also completely whiffs on the concept or precedence. Under Lasson's worldview, the Supreme Court's decision in 1939's United States v. Miller is sacrosanct on the issue and cannot be challenged. Of course, there are a number of fallacies with the concept of precedence. Why should a decision be continued to upheld when it is wrong? Under Lasson's warped logic that means that Brown vs. Board should never have been issued as it stood due to the precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. And under the same logic, Tileston v. Ullman and Poe v. Ullman would have precluded the decision in 1965's Griswold v. Connecticut...and that case paved the way for Roe v. Wade . I don't hear Lasson arguing the concept of precedence in those cases because the decisions do not match with his leftist worldviews.

I am thankful only that Lasson's concluding statement lets me know that Lasson himself realizes he is a hack and should not be taken seriously. My concern is that my taxpayer dollars pay for a a professor to be this intellectually dishonest...

To read something educational about the Second Amendment, check out the source list put out by überblogger, UCLA law professor (and good lord willing future Supreme Court Justice) Eugene Volokh.