5. Although Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark are among Europe’s wealthiest countries, as U.S. states they would be between 14.5% and 18% below the U.S. average.

Go read the whole thing. Also this.

These are just financial, quality of life reasons I don’t want to learn from Europe. There are also cultural reasons I don’t want to learn from Europe.

When I visited Washington, D.C. and saw the mind of Thomas Jefferson writ large in the Library of Congress, I knew that I would never be embarrassed about American culture ever again. The Library, along with the D.C. architecture holds knowledge and learning and ideas that vestiges of European monarchies can only dream about.

Go to any major American city and take in the opera or the orchestra. Hell, go to any church in America. You’ll hear the sounds that make up the music of a free life.

Visit New York City and see what upward mobility means. Travel through the rolling, vast plains of the midwest and see the neat farmers fields that feed the world.

I’m not knocking Europe. Paris is the most romantic city in the world, bar none. Britain has history going back thousands of years. I get it.

Still, America’s elites need to stop foisting this b.s. about what America can learn from Europe. The only thing America should be learning is what happens when socialism comes knocking at the door. Europe should be a warning about what NOT to do when you have wealth and prosperity.

Are you sick of being lectured by these guys yet?

Liberal bloggers are so very, very brave. They can quote out of context and everything! They can also question the bravery of others while not being brave themselves. They can accuse other of hypocrisy and can’t see their own. It’s awesome. Ummmm:

I’m more than a little troubled/confused by the story of Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist who survived an attack this Friday from an axe-wielding critic by hiding in a semi-fortified panic room. (Westergaard drew one of the controversial Muhammad cartoons in 2005). I mean, there are any number of complexities about the story, but here’s the one that I’m most perplexed by.

At the time, Westergaard was looking after his five-year-old granddaughter, Stephanie. He was confronted with a terrible choice: risk being killed in front of his granddaughter, or trust that the PET, Denmark’s security and intelligence service, knew what they were talking about when they had told him terrorists usually don’t harm family members but stick to their target.

Westergaard chose to escape into his bathroom, which had been specially fortified as a “panic room”, while Stephanie was left sitting in the living room. From the bathroom he alerted the police as his assailant reportedly battered the reinforced door with the axe, shouting, “We will get our revenge!”

Both survived unscathed, although God knows how a 5-year-old processes something like that, and you’ve got to imagine her folks aren’t going to be letting Grandpa babysit again anytime soon. Still, how does one even make that choice? Was it really a rational process, as implied above? I could not even begin to say. Or judge.

Well, actually, I think that this author is judging…as am I. If there was a way to get the kid to the safe room, I’m guessing he would have, right? If he callously left her…what the hell? But of course, there’s more to the story.

From the Guardian article:

“Those minutes were horrible,” Westergaard recalled yesterday. “But I think I have got through this fairly well – and so, it seems, did my grandchild. That, of course, is the main thing. I would not have been able to live with myself if something had happened to her.”

From the outside, Westergaard’s house in Aarhus, Denmark’s second-biggest city, looks like your average suburban home. But according to the cartoonist, it is a “fortress without a moat”, equipped with security cameras and armoured windows. Living under the constant threat of revenge, he has always had to take precautions when leaving his home – visits to the gym, for example, could not be at predictable hours, so he would change his schedule every week. He carries a personal alarm and tracking device everywhere, and every day a police car would escort him to and from his work at Denmark’s biggest-selling daily newspaper.

Makes me think the above blogger wants to note the cartoonist’s hypocrisy…he’s not all that brave. While she also omits that this guy is being hounded by radical Muslims every day because of a cartoon.

Can we focus on the closed-mindedness here? Imagine, say, that the cartoon was about Jesus and years later the cartoonist had to have a police escort and a tracking device and a safe room.

It’s called perspective liberals. While you kvetch about his cowardice leaving his grand-daughter in the living room–something, I too, question–you also ignore the constant, relentless threat he lives under for being an artist who dared poke fun of the Religion of Peace. The real story is that a couple years later, psychotic Muslims aren’t enlightened enough to endure criticism of their religion and then reinforce all stereotypes of a barbaric religion by being barbaric. (Ya gotta admit, an axe is pretty barbaric, no?)

It’s also getting more difficult to ignore the Religion of Peace when their extremist adherents are trying to blow up planes on Christmas. Oh yes, they respect other religions as much as they endure insults to their own.

So, until Islam goes through a reformation, focus your ire where it belongs: On the psychotic people unwilling to embrace enlightened values like tolerance and love and peace. You know, all those things John Lennon liked to imagine. It’s not the Christians conducting a jihad, here. They’re making difficult choices like whether they have time to pull their five year old granddaughter into the safe room without getting them both killed by an ax-wielding Muslim or trying to not get blown up on their plane home on Christmas.

Have no doubt: we punched a fist into the Arab/Muslim world after 9/11, partly to send a message of deterrence, but primarily to destroy two tyrannical regimes — the Taliban and the Baathists — and to work with Afghans and Iraqis to build a different kind of politics. In the process, we did some stupid and bad things. But for every Abu Ghraib, our soldiers and diplomats perpetrated a million acts of kindness aimed at giving Arabs and Muslims a better chance to succeed with modernity and to elect their own leaders.

The Narrative was concocted by jihadists to obscure that.

It’s working. As a Jordanian-born counterterrorism expert, who asked to remain anonymous, said to me: “This narrative is now omnipresent in Arab and Muslim communities in the region and in migrant communities around the world. These communities are bombarded with this narrative in huge doses and on a daily basis. [It says] the West, and right now mostly the U.S. and Israel, is single-handedly and completely responsible for all the grievances of the Arab and the Muslim worlds. Ironically, the vast majority of the media outlets targeting these communities are Arab-government owned — mostly from the Gulf.”

This narrative suits Arab governments. It allows them to deflect onto America all of their people’s grievances over why their countries are falling behind. And it suits Al Qaeda, which doesn’t need much organization anymore — just push out The Narrative over the Web and satellite TV, let it heat up humiliated, frustrated or socially alienated Muslim males, and one or two will open fire on their own. See: Major Hasan.

Let’s see, Bush is evil. The elevation of Abu Grahib. Newsweek publishing the flushed Koran accounts and Friedman is putting the blame on the Arab press?

You have got to be kidding me.

I’m not as inclined to let Friedman off the hook as Don Surber. This back pedaling looks a lot like a subtle defense of President Obama the day before he pushes the surge in Afghanistan. Asking for more troops on the backdrop of losing more troops, seems a lot like justification to me.

And it’s charity Friedman and the liberal elites would never have extended to George Bush. And, by the way, it doesn’t take a freaking genius to know that Hasan is a terrorist. It’s rather self-evident.

Doc Zero over at HotAir’s Greenroom (who is this incredible writer?!) says this:

The media has treated Palin’s book like the mirrored scroll from “Kung Fu Panda”: every reviewer sees themselves reflected in its pages. Imagine a mainstream news magazine trying to portray any liberal woman as a lightweight, by using a photo of her in running shorts to tease its review of her major new book. Running a book review by someone who admits to skipping the last third of the book is not an insult to Sarah Palin, who was not writing for an audience of lazy media hacks. It’s an insult to the audience… including liberal readers of the Washington Post with the intellectual clarity to desire an understanding of those who eagerly devoured every single page. Palin is a phenomenon, and honest liberals would be well-advised to read her work and understand her appeal, just as conservatives should read “Dreams From My Father” to understand the mind of Bill Ayers.

The careless, sloppy disdain of the Left’s reaction to “Going Rogue” is almost as strong an argument for Palin’s politics as anything contained within its pages. The absolute lack of care and competence from the government that ran up a $12 trillion national debt is astonishing. Months of dithering over Afghanistan strategy, with American troops under fire, ends with a painfully unqualified Commander-in-Chief wailing that he wants a new set of options. The politicization of national defense ends in the absurd spectacle of a civilian trial for illegal enemy combatants… subcontracting national security to trial lawyers, and a randomly-selected pool of 12 people who never heard of 9/11.

He continues. You must read the whole thing.

The liberal establishment can barely contain their contempt for the average American life. Common sense is scorned in favor of high-minded theories. The bitterness coming from the left will only increase as President Obama, Congress and the SEIU enforcers put into place their liberal utopia and it fails utterly (as it is doomed to do because liberal policy is all theoretical and ignores little truths like self-interest and human nature).

Liberals will look, act and sound like tripping LSD Dead Head groupies as President Obama and the Democrats in Congress fail. Liberals will see things that aren’t there. Reality will cease to have meaning for them. It’s already happening. Andrew Sullivan is only the first of many to completely lose rational thought in the face of abject ideological failure.

The fresh conservative breeze Sarah Palin represents blows all those theories away. Sarah Palin stands on reality. God, family, country. Baseball, hotdogs, apple pie and …. well, Honda, I guess. She’s a “bitter clinger”. She’s prays. She births. She runs. She works. She’s the average American that libs don’t want to believe exist. And yet, there she is in all her glory. And in the face of normal, the left has come completely unhinged–ranting, skin crawling, tripping their way to a complete psychotic break.

Andrew Sullivan is only the first and most obvious. This will get worse.

RT @AnonLib “Strange that being ‘tough on terror’ = publicly soiling yourself at thought of being in same state as an imprisoned terrorist”

Newsflash lefties: You can’t have it both ways. Either these guys are scary dudes wanting to kill everyone and have buddies wanting to do the same or they’re hapless criminals who aren’t terrorists at all–they’re just misunderstood criminals. If it’s the latter, there’s no reason to be concerned which really means only a lame-o would be afraid. Therefore, you can’t claim extraordinary courage and bravery out of one side of your mouth, while diminishing the threat of these hardly-dangerous petty criminals out of the other side.

At least people who see terrorists for what they are–homocidal maniacs driven by psychotic ideology–rationally see the implicit threat to other innocent Americans, too. It is not cowardly to note a threat and protect the innocent from it. It is smart.

Sending KSM and his terrorist minions to New York City doesn’t demonstrate the lefts’ bravery, it demonstrates their stupidity. They would put innocent citizens at risk while costing the state millions. Oh yeah, brave.

UPDATED:

And this goes for you, too.

UPDATED AGAIN:

Brian Faugham notes that Mike Lupica has turned against the terrorist transfer to NY for civilian trial:

Is it truly so hard to see – as Lupica does – that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is getting exactly what he wants – the attention of the world as he mounts his own defense? Recall: the first thing Mohammed said after his capture was that he wanted to go to New York to consult with his lawyer. Rather than keeping him buried in a cell, the White House is rewarding him with the show trial of the century – one which will allow KSM to make his case to the entire world. How does this further American interests?

The great irony in this is that this process began when liberals told us that the prison at Guantanamo Bay had to be closed because it was the greatest terror recruiting tool Al Qaeda had ever had. Thanks to Barack Obama and Eric Holder, they’re getting a better one.

And that’s why the libs like Greenwald are so disingenuous. They lick their chops at making Bush look bad and fail to recognize that they kill the country in the process and feed Al Qaeda along the way. Or, maybe they do see those implications and seek the destruction of their own.

Just a couple of quick points on this. Since I already knew about this hidden agenda, what I found most striking was Krugman’s admission that even without a public option the system would largely look like a single payer system. Based on the subsidies for lower wage earners, and the fact that everyone else is paying for these with taxes on top of their insurance premiums. (And with the bills being discussed in Congress, subsidies are provided up to 300-400% of the federal poverty level).

Also, I should point out that a “Rube Goldberg device”, which Krugman used as a metaphor, is a term for an over-engineered solution to a simple problem. In this case, designed to obscure the solution they are actually looking for, i.e. single payer.

However, the critical point in all of this is the sheer scope of this deception on the part of the Administration – and the media. Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein have been two of the most prominent media advocates for healthcare reform throughout the debate this year. With numerous appearances on television and their blogs at the New York Times and the Washington Post, respectively. And while they are both unabashedly partisan, this should not excuse them from direct and honest reporting. But of course they have not been fully candid, as they were last year, because in doing so they would reveal the dishonesty on the part of the President and his Administration. (Klein has recently added a whole new layer of deceit.)

Any foot in the door will be a way for government to control health care. That’s the goal here. Krugman put it forth last year. He should be as obvious now.

But as the corporate representative finds himself fending off charges by PETA, PETA may be profiting from donations and business deals with his competitors. For example, PETA on its website discourages supporters from attending the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus; it encouraged them to protest its Denver show on September 29, 2009, for alleged animal cruelty. In 2002, PETA president Ingrid Newkirk and several colleagues reportedly hectored families attending the circus in Savannah. Then, PETA targeted MasterCard for sponsoring the Circus and encouraged supporters to send their cut-up credit cards back to the company. Ringling Brothers spokeswoman Amy McWethy, disputing PETA’s claims of animal cruelty, pointed to the company’s licensing by the USDA under the Animal Welfare Act, open access to visitors and inspectors, and an elephant conservation center that harbors retired Asian elephants and contains the largest herd of the endangered species outside of Southeast Asia. A July 28, 2009, press release on the website claims that the PETA undercover video was “deceptively edited.” McWethy says the partnership with MasterCard was for a limited duration, but PETA claimed in 2004 that their pressure led to MasterCard’s decision to end the program.

MasterCard competitor, Visa, however, offers a PETA credit card that donates one percent of all purchases back to PETA. Visa, furthermore, is a sponsor of the 2010 Winter Olympics, the very same organization that PETA targets as one of its ten prominently displayed “campaigns” for cruelty on its homepage—as it does Barnum and Bailey. The link emblazoned with the Olympics logo leads the visitor to a page that tells him to “urge the Olympic Committee to help end seal slaughter.” Visa also has relationships with other companies whose practices conflict with PETA’s stated mission: the Kentucky Derby, Omaha Steaks, Nine West shoe company, and PETCO (against whom it waged a campaign several years ago).

It’s not about the poor, persecuted pets, it’s about pockebooks and power–PETA’s. PETA is like all the rest of the leftist-grievance exploiters: they want to radically change America to a place where all living things are equal. You, a human, are equal to Fido who is equal to your potted plant who is equal to that roach you just killed. No one is better or worse. No country is better or worse. Etc.

At PETA’s own website, there’s a hilarious post about Iams, the dog food maker, being cruel because, wait for it, they test the food with dogs to see if dogs will like it. PETA does endorse V-dog, though, which is a Vegan dog food ostensibly fed to…dogs. No dog testing though, so I’m guessing eating dog vegan sucks as bad as being a human vegan. How much money does PETA get to endorse V-dog? I’m guessing that it’s enough to not inspire too much curiosity on PETA’s part.

Businesses need to stop caving to these hypocritical crazies. PETA, like all these groups, is about empowerment–their own.

Here is the hierarchy of economic safety in a politically correct charged world:

Least safe: White, middle aged, alpha-male, person of color who votes Republican, female who votes Republican
Less safe: Anybody who is white
Moderately safe: Anybody who is white and voted for Barack Obama
More safe: Anyone who is of color and voted for Barack Obama
Safer still: Anyone who is female and of color
Safest of all: Black, lesbian Obama voter (If she voted for Hillary in the primaries, she’s suspect.)

We are no longer a merit-based economy, we are a skin color and political ideology-based economy. We are exactly what Dr. Martin Luther King didn’t want: a place where people are judged not by their accomplishments, not by the content of their character, but by their color and political perspective.

And why is conservative put in brackets in the headline? Because white guys are suspect until they’re clear about their voting record. Once a white man admits that he made the “right” decision and voted for Barack Obama, people can relax…but only a little. White people are racists. They can’t help it. You just never know about white people, so it’s best to not get too comfortable.

UPDATED:

For an alternative view, Sean Hackbarth.

Racism: They’ve pulled the trump card too many times. Obama finished the narrative with his presumption of guilt with the arresting officer of his old buddy Yale professor Skp Gates.

Sexism: Between tossing Hillary Clinton like a used dinner napkin and treating Sarah Palin like the sexy high school librarian from a porno, the Left pretty much killed their credibility for loving women and equality.

“It’s for the children”: Uh, right. Tell the kids in D.C. trying to get a decent education that. Tell the 13 year old Roman Polanski rape victim. Tell the kids starving in the third world or dying from malaria because leftists won’t use DDT.

We love the poor. How about, “we love to tax the poor”. There have been tax increases already–on cigarettes that disproportionately affect the poor. Cap-n-Trade? Hurts the poor. GM buyouts? Creates poor people. School unions underperforming? Hurts the poor.

With Democrats running things, people have had just teensy taste of what liberalism does for and to a country and its people. Fundamentally all the “help” talk is really “we-don’t-think-you-have-what-it-takes” talk. Under the guise of helping, people feel disempowered and condescended to.

The health care debate revealed a callous disregard for the aging. It also showed the left’s collectivist tendencies: people aren’t viewed as individuals but as a group that either helps or harms the government’s desire for “fairness”.

Basically, the Democrats look mean and uncaring. In California, they care more about a smelt than people losing their property and livelihoods.

Anyway, the upside to their horrible positions and the nasty ideology at the foundation? When in power, it’s so much more difficult to lie. Oh, they can lie, but the policies and actions speak for themselves. People can see the truth. Ultimately, that’s good for America. Americans need to decide if they want that sort of America. Thankfully, they’re saying “no”.

For all the talk of violent mobs, crazies, Nazis, terrorists and the rest of the nasty rhetoric, TeaPartiers are a rather benign bunch. Oh yes, there’s an errant sign here or there, but perspective is in order. When you get over a million folks together, there’s bound to be a crazy. The key is to exert peer pressure to keep the crazy in check. Conservatives have been wise to exert that pressure.

The only people it serves if some deluded individual goes nutty is the neo-liberal left. They would love nothing more to point to one nutter and paint the whole movement with those actions while they enjoy a positive agitating reputation even with real terrorists in their midst. Yes, the hypocrisy is galling.

Matt Lewis addresses this hypocrisy:

.. While I would never suggest such a thing, logic seems to dictate that if Panetta believes Cheney’s warnings mean he is “wishing” for a terrorist attack, then Pelosi’s warnings might also mean she is “wishing” for violence. After all, it is reasonable to assume that Democrats would benefit from her being proven right. (Again, this according to Panetta’s logic — not mine).

The truth is that if anyone has incentive to avoid political violence — particularly anything specifically aimed at the president — it is conservatives. As Glenn Beck recently said, “just one lunatic, like Timothy McVeigh, could ruin everything that everyone has worked so hard for, because these people in Washington won’t pass up the use of an emergency. “

Ace wrote a thought-provoking piece last week and I’ve been ruminating on it since. He says:

Nancy Pelosi is being utterly hypocritical here, as she encouraged and cheered the rhetoric of incitement when Bush was President. Win-win for her, I guess she thought — such rhetoric keeps the crazies in a constant state of agitation, and if one should happen to kill Bush… well, bonus, eh?

But her hypocrisy cannot push us away from what we know to be right: Some kind of rhetoric really is fairly dangerous, and, while it won’t put any evil thoughts (or more likely — reinforce evil thoughts already long-present) in the minds of most, it does have the possibility in doing that in a few.

And it’s that few we worry about.

So, although she is a disgusting hypocrite, the definition of a hypocrite is one who takes one position when it’s convenient for her and another when it’s not so convenient, but every hypocrite then does speak for both sides of the issue.

In this particular case — at least regarding the general claim she’s making — she’s right. Extremist rhetoric which has the likelihood of encouraging someone a bit off his trolley to commit an extreme act should be avoided.

Of course, this is self-evident. I agree.

What I wonder is this: What is “extremist rhetoric”? Ironically, almost anything Glenn Beck says is viewed as “extremist rhetoric”. In fact, anyone who disagrees with neo-liberal orthodoxy is considered an extremist.

Carrie Prejean? Extremist gay hater.

Glenn Beck? Extremist Obama hater.

Rush Limbaugh? Extremist race baiting hater.

Mark Steyn? Extremist Muslim hater.

Ann Coulter? Extremist self and women-hating hater.

Michelle Malkin? Extremist illegal alien hater.

Glenn Reynolds? Extremist Tea-Party loving hater.

When center-left Obama-voting Democrats like Ann Althouse are accused of hating, really who isn’t a hater?

I’m sick of the p.c. rhetoric police. Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Michael Moore, and all the whacked out lefty pundits can say anything. The word is a tool and a sword. They wield it with impunity and want the conservatives to stay muzzled.

So, somewhere between psychotic, crazy loud-mouth libs and meek muzzled, passive, submissive conservatives there’s a balance. Incite violence? No. Stir to positive action, yes.

Yes, violence serves the Left. So does a silent majority. They’ve had it both ways for too long.