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Liberals Tag

Posted by David Gerstman on June 12, 2014 17 Comments
As Bryan Jacoutot documented here three months ago, Maryland's health exchange was a complete failure. In private industry or nearly any other field of endeavor, an employee who is responsible for such a visible failure would be subject to demotion or firing. But this is politics. And this is Maryland. So the Washington Post recommended that the employee responsible for this fiasco ... should be promoted. In its endorsement ahead of the June 24 primary the paper with the largest circulation in Maryland endorsed (Lieutenant Governor) Anthony Brown for Maryland governor. The key paragraph in the endorsement is here:
No doubt, Mr. Brown, who is Gov. Martin O’Malley’s anointed successor, is a mainstay of the Democratic establishment and a paragon of the status quo. That status quo includes the state’s blatant failure to build a functioning online market for private health insurance — a failure over which Mr. Brown presided, or was supposed to preside. It also includes substantive accomplishments, including making the state more welcoming to gays and immigrants and replenishing the transportation fund in support of public transit.
So let's see if I get this. Despite the fact that Brown messed up his most significant assignment as Lieutenant Governor - concrete failure - that should be balance out by the fact that he made Maryland more welcoming - an ephemeral accomplishment at the best? As far as the transportation fund, taxing people is what government does best. Had he (and his boss, Governor O'Malley) replenished the fund while limiting the growth of government, that would have a real accomplishment. But taxing and spending is hardly a defining skill for an executive. Then there's the previous paragraph that's also kind of baffling.

Posted by Bryan Jacoutot on February 19, 2014 65 Comments
A recent report released by the National Science Foundation has garnered quite a bit of media attention after revealing a survey that found 25% of Americans couldn't correctly answer the question, "does the Earth go around the Sun or does the Sun go around the Earth?" The results of the survey prompted a slew of snark from national media outlets such as Time and Yahoo!. Even the tech site c|net felt the survey warranted some coverage. But after the snark had settled, people began to seriously question how so many individuals in a country like the United States could be so wrong about a seemingly basic question. The popular but incorrect conclusion often arrived at was that it must be those “anti-science, bible-toting righties.” A CNN Opinion piece by Sheril Kirshenbaum draws attention to my point. To be sure, I don’t think Kirshenbaum intentionally penned a hit piece on the Republican faithful. Indeed, the bulk of her article appropriately addresses the general need for improvement of science literacy. She also properly lauds the days when science was “cool,” recalling the public fascination with the Cold War space race.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 10, 2014 11 Comments
Media Meme to follow: These are great times to be a liberal in the U.S. of A.  Elizabeth Warren has ignited a progressive surge! The Hill: Liberal identification spikes. Gallup: Liberal Self-Identification Edges Up to New High in 2013 Well yes, if by spike and new high you mean exactly 1 point higher than in 2008, and 2 points higher than in 2010-2011. Here's Gallup's explanation:
Americans continue to be more likely to identify as conservatives (38%) than as liberals (23%). But the conservative advantage is down to 15 percentage points as liberal identification edged up to its highest level since Gallup began regularly measuring ideology in the current format in 1992.... When Gallup began asking about ideological identification in all its polls in 1992, an average 17% of Americans said they were liberal. That dipped to 16% in 1995 and 1996, but has gradually increased, exceeding 20% each year since 2005. The rise in liberal identification has been accompanied by a decline in moderate identification. At 34% in 2013, it is the lowest Gallup has measured, and down nine points since 1992. Moderates had been the largest ideological group throughout the 1990s, and competed with conservatives for the top spot during the 2000s. Since 2009, conservatives have consistently been the largest U.S. ideological group. The percentage of conservatives has always far exceeded the percentage of liberals, by as much as 22 points in 1996. With more Americans identifying as liberals in recent years, and conservative identification holding steady, the conservative advantage of 15 points ties the 2007 and 2008 gaps as the smallest.
The key finding, however, is not in the headline, but in the breakdown.  Only Democrats have become more liberal, the rest of the country, particularly amond Independents, is as conservative as ever (emphasis added):

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 03, 2013 32 Comments
Really, now we're going to make estimated payments to insurance companies because healthcare.gov doesn't even have a payment system? Megyn Kelly discussed this tonight. (Video added at bottom of post.) Here's the Reuters report, Short-term fix eyed for another problem with U.S. healthcare website:
Dec 3 (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's administration has found a short-term fix to pay insurance companies for plans selected on HealthCare.gov, the not-yet-complete government website used to shop for insurance required under Obama's healthcare program. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has not yet finished building the part of the website that would transfer billions of dollars in subsidies for plan premiums and cost-sharing payments to insurance companies. It is part of a long technical to-do list that has so far focused on fixing the errors and lag times in the part of the website used by consumers.... The administration is planning a "workaround" for payments, said Daniel Durham, vice president for policy and regulatory affairs at America's Health Insurance Plans. Health plans will estimate how much they are owed, and submit that estimate to the government. Once the system is built, the government and insurers can reconcile the payments made with the plan data to "true up" payments, he said.

Posted by Laurel Conrad on November 10, 2013 9 Comments
In October, Brown University protesters prevented New York City Police Chief Ray Kelly from speaking. During Kelly's talk, titled “Proactive Policing in America’s Biggest City,” protesters loudly chanted slogans and read prepared text, drowning out Kelly. A university administrator tried to reason with the protesters, but to no avail. As a result, after a failed half-hour attempt at regaining control of the room, the lecture was cancelled. As covered extensively at Legal Insurrection, the protesters have received support from several professors, two of whom also are active in the anti-Israel movement. Leftist and anti-Israel shout downs are just about the only shout downs on campus these days. But don't think it's just Brown. There is a long history of liberals and anti-Israeli groups shouting down speakers with whom they disagree. Here are five examples other than Brown:

1. Congressman Tancredo at UNC

In 2009, students at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, brought Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo's talk about illegal immigration to a halt by shouting him down. When Tancredo asked ironically, "This is the free speech crowd, right?" a student responded, "not for hate speech!" The students continued to chant, "No dialogue with hate!" as Tancredo struggled to get across a single word.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 06, 2013 35 Comments
One part of my communications with Brown Prof. Naoko Shibusawa has stuck in my mind:
"You can quote those two lines. Those only."
Shibusawa is the person featured in my post Tuesday night, Brown U. divestment committee faculty member signed 2009 letter calling Israel Apartheid state.  The post started by referencing her support for the Brown shout-down of Ray Kelly expressed in her Letter to the Editor of the Brown Daily Herald:
"... I want to point out that every movement toward social justice in U.S. history has included “misbehavior.” “Misbehavior” is a tactic of the disempowered toward disrupting the status quo.... So unlike [Biology Prof. Ken Miller who denounced the shout-down], I applaud the student protesters for their moral courage in a righteous cause against racial profiling and brutal police tactics and for their resolution in the face of the harsh criticisms they have since endured. I am proud of you. You inspire me to try to be a better teacher, scholar and person.
Shibusawa initially told me by phone “I don’t know what the purpose is [of my call] and what you want to do” and “I’ve checked out your blog.” She continued, that it “looks like you want to portray me as some sort of extremist” but “I believe in social justice.” Shibusawa then said, “You can describe me as extreme.” Fair enough.  But then the follow up email, telling me what I was allowed to say about the conversation (emphasis added):

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 03, 2013 42 Comments

Kirsten Powers in Christianity Today: Just seven years ago, if someone had told me that I'd be writing for Christianity Today magazine about how I came to believe in God, I would have laughed out loud. If there was one thing in which I was completely...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 30, 2013 29 Comments
In our two prior posts, we explained how NYC Police Commissioner Ray Kelly was shouted down at Brown University by protesters against NYC's stop and frisk policy: The protesters decided that others should not get to hear what Kelly had to say on the topic.  One protester, Jenny Li (pictured above) revelled in the shut down:
So we drafted a petition last Thursday and as of today [October 29, 2013] there are over 500 signatures. We delivered it to the Taubman Center [at Brown] and they didn't respond to our demand to cancel the lecture, so today we cancelled it for them.
It probably will not surprise you that Li is a fellow at the People for the American Way Foundation, the liberal activist group that runs the Right Wing Watch blog among other activities. Author Mychal Denzel Smith writing at The Nation plays into every stereotype of liberal intolerance in supporting the shout down, and terming it "glorious", Brown University Booed Ray Kelly and Racism (emphasis added):

The Nation Ray Kelly Booed

NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly of stop-and-frisk fame was scheduled to speak at Brown University yesterday and deliver the school's annual Noah Krieger '93 Memorial Lecture. The title of his speech, and I'm not making this up, was "Proactive Policing in America's Biggest City." What happened instead was glorious.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 20, 2013 30 Comments
Two videos have been released by Generation Operation as part of a national campus push to convince young people not to sign up for Obamacare. If young people don't sign up, Obamacare become even more unsustainable, because the voodoo-economics behind it depend on the system sucking money out of the young to subsidize the less-young. First, for the ladies: Gentlemen, you're up next -- LEAN FORWARD! This was trolling extraordinaire.  What really inflames the left about these videos is that the group receives funding from a group to which the Koch brothers contribute.  That's enough of a connection to make these videos like flames to moths. The reaction has been severe hyperventilation, and attempts to dismiss it all as nonsense.  Those reactions are trying too hard. In the world of low information voters, these types of video approaches are just what the doctor ordered.  It's the imagery that matters. Here are some of the creepiest reactions:

1. Gawker

So obsessed with the Koch brothers, they even included a gif of David Koch in the same position as Uncle Sam: Creepy Obamacare Ad - Gawker1 Gawker Koch Creepy Obamacare

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 15, 2013 21 Comments

On Friday we asked:  Which was worse: Middlebury 9/11 flag-grabbing or Oberlin racism hoax? It arose from the actions of Anna Shireman-Grabowski, a Middlebury student, who felt compelled to destroy a 9/11 memorial on campus by trashing thousands of small American flags, each one representing a...

Posted by Laurel Conrad on August 28, 2013 26 Comments
[WAJ intro: Laurel Conrad is a Cornell University Senior. This is her first post at Legal Insurrection. Laurel is President of the conservative Cornell Review, and the Cornell chapter of the Network of Enlightened Women. Laurel interned this summer at The Daily Caller. We look forward to more posts from Laurel this academic year. Follow her on Twitter.] ------------------------------------

In February 2013, a series of bias incidents occurred on Oberlin campus. The outraged campus canceled classes and received much attention from the media, including an article in the Huffington Post.

However, the two students who perpetrated the racist acts later claimed that it was a "joke" in order to "troll" the campus, according to the police report.  Notably, the lead perpetrator was a liberal student with a history of Obama activism in high school and college.

After the hoax was exposed, the Huffington Post ran an article by the Associated Press, Oberlin Racism Hoax.

However, the AP article left out one critical piece of information, that the hoax was perpetrated by a liberal.  We could not have set a better trap if we had tried.

Many of the HuffPo commenters gleefully jumped to the conclusion that the perpetrator of the hoax must be a conservative Rush Limbaugh-listening Republican.

Below, check out these hilarious 15 liberals who just can't handle the truth!

1. RNC Derangement Syndrome.

Somehow, I think that the RNC will be just fine without the pseudo-racist Obama supporter.

2. Should have gone to Liberty.

These are all certainly top-choice colleges for liberal activists!

3. Lofty conservative ambitions.

And yet on Twitter, the student described himself as an “atheist/pacifist/environmentalist/libertarian socialist/consequentialist.” Hmm, something just doesn't add up here….

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 24, 2013 19 Comments

The spate of racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, and homophobic posters and graffiti that plagued the Oberlin College campus in February 2013 was definitively exposed as a hoax led by a pro-Obama liberal anti-racist student activist seeking to get a reaction from the community. The post by Chuck Ross of The Daily...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 12, 2013 21 Comments

Every semester for the past couple of years I've been privileged to be a guest speaker at the Ithaca College course on Independent Media conducted by Prof. Jeff Cohen.  I get to regale students with stories about Legal Insurrection, some of which are true.  (FTR, all of...

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