United Liberty

Hoping he can manage to get a favorable district during reapportionment, Alan Grayson, who was fired by the voters of Florida’s Eighth Congressional District last year, announced yesterday that he will make another go of it in 2012:

WFTV learned on Monday that former U.S. Congressman Alan Grayson is running for office again.

On Monday, Grayson said he doesn’t plan to do anything different. He said he’s running again because of all the people who have reached out and asked him to. Grayson already raised nearly $100,000 in donations before filing his paperwork on Monday.

“We need somebody who’s gonna stick up for what’s right. Somebody with guts,” Grayson said.
[…]
Grayson said his approach this time around depends on the circumstances, but for the sake of supporters who sent him donations before he announced he’s running again, he said he has no plans to hold back.

“We’re fighting for our survival. We’re fighting for our jobs, our homes. We’re fighting for Social Security and Medicare,” said Grayson.

Grayson may not be running for his old seat with redistricting under way right now, he may end up running for a newly created seat for Orlando. It’s still to early to know who he will be running against.

We knew this was coming. Just days after having his ass handed to him by Daniel Webster, his Republican opponent, Grayson hinted that he would run again.

President Obama has stepped out of the shadows on the debt ceiling discussions and has taken aim at Republicans.  Unfortunately for him, most non-Democrats (and even a few of them) knew that this was going to involve a “it’s for the children” moment.  What we didn’t necessarily expect was that he would frame it as an either/or between kids and corporate jet owners.  WTF?

Over at Legal Insurrection, William Jacobson has plenty to say about it:

I watched Obama’s press conference today, and he is a wonder to behold.  He is a relentless demagogue who plays Americans against Americans and sets up false choices as part of a class warfare agenda.

Here’s a false choice (my rough transcription) which jumped out at me during the Q&A:

“Republican leaders need to ask their consituents if they are willing to sacrifice the safety of their children for a tax break for a corporate jet owner.”

This was typical throughout the press conference.  He’s the only reasonable one, the only one who cares about people, the only one trying hard to reach a “balanced” debt deal, and so on and so on, the facts be damned.  Of course, if it seems to some that he’s been detached, it’s only because he’s been so busy working on the Taliban, and bin Laden, and the Greece crisis.

He had the audacity to say with a straight face that his administration is trying to remove burdensome regulations, when in fact Obamacare and Dodd-Frank alone impose vast regulations (most of which have not been written yet, which freezes business investment) on virtually every area of the economy.

Libertarians have a tendency to come from a right wing background.  It’s not unusual for conservatives to find themselves easing over to libertarianism since many conservative espouse some fairly libertarian ideas, like how it’s not the government’s place to do a lot of the things they do.  Me?  I came from the left.  At one time, I honestly didn’t see a problem with socialism in the least.  I got better though.

So what caused this shift in ideology?

To start with, it was actually a left-leaning television show called The West Wing.  Aaron Sorkin, who would be hard to define as anything not on the left, filled his fictional White House full of colorful Democrat characters.  I was a Democrat at the time, so I was completely cool with the show being put together in such a way.

Early on in season one, Sorkin introduced a character names Ainsley Hayes.  Hayes, a beautiful and intelligent Republican, was probably there as a token character to appease the people who were convinced that the show was about indoctrinating people.  Early on, there was a conversation between Hayes and character Sam Seaborne, a typical Ivy League elite.  Seaborne argued that Republicans only cared about one of the ten amendments that made up the bill of rights, while Hayes fired back that sure, while they conveniently chose to ignore the Second Amendment.

The discussion shifted my then thinking on guns.  I’ve always loved firearms, but was willing to accept curtails on them for the betterment of my fellow man.  That one moment on a television show of all things started shifting my thought processes.  I couldn’t get behind the inconsistencies anymore.  It was fiction, but it had hit a nerve.  I started opening my mind up to other possible alternatives to policy positions I had held for years.

While I’m not a fan of Sarah Palin, the criticism recently levied by Martin Bashir, who hosts an opinion show on MSNBC, that she may somehow be breaking the law by using the American flag for advertising purposes on her bus tour; is ridiculous. Not only that, Bashir’s view of the flag code is hilariously wrong.

And as Reason notes in this quick, new video, MSNBC has had no problem using the flag for advertising purposes for its “Lean Forward” campaign:

As I noted yesterday, President Barack Obama’s deficit commission is proposing several reforms, including reigning entitlements such as Social Security. Over at American Spectator, Philip Klein writes that liberals are nervous with the president over this:

[L]iberal suspicion of Obama on Social Security can be placed at least as far back as 2007, when as a candidate in the Democratic primaries, he said the program was facing a “crisis.” Self-described “progressives” were outraged, and Paul Krugman devoted a column to describing Obama as a “sucker” for buying into the idea that the program was in deep trouble. While Obama would later emerge as a darling of liberals, it wasn’t always the case. Early on, liberals were worried that Obama’s desire to be a post-partisan politician would lead him to concede too much ground to conservatives and the Beltway establishment. Obama’s willingness to acknowledge problems with Social Security was one reason why many liberals initially saw Hillary Clinton and John Edwards as better vehicles to carry the progressive domestic policy torch.

A new Gallup survey shows that conservatives are the largest ideological group in the nation, which the polling firm calls a “record-high level of conservatism, outpacing moderates and liberals.

In an editorial at the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Klein explains that liberals/progressives have no real grasp of basic economics:

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.

Therefore, we counted as incorrect responses of “somewhat disagree” and “strongly disagree.” This treatment gives leeway for those who think the question is ambiguous or half right and half wrong. They would likely answer “not sure,” which we do not count as incorrect.

In his latest column at the Washington Post, George Will takes on the cult of big government:

Today, government finds the limitless power of dispensing not in [James] Madison’s Constitution of limited government but in Wilson’s theory that the Constitution actually frees government from limitations. The liberating — for government — idea is that the Constitution is a “living,” evolving document. [Woodrow] Wilson’s Constitution is an emancipation proclamation for government, empowering it to regulate all human activities in order to treat all human desires as needs and hence as rights. Unlimited power is entailed by what Voegeli calls government’s “right to discover new rights.”

“Liberalism’s protean understanding of rights,” he says, “complicates and ultimately dooms the idea of a principled refusal to elevate any benefit that we would like people to enjoy to the status of an inviolable right.” Needs breed rights to have the needs addressed, to the point that Lyndon Johnson, an FDR protege, promised that government would provide Americans with “purpose” and “meaning.”

Although progressivism’s ever-lengthening list of rights is as limitless as human needs/desires, one right that never makes the list is the right to keep some inviolable portion of one’s private wealth or income, “regardless,” [William] Voegeli says, “of the lofty purposes social reformers wish to make of it.”

Lacking a limiting principle, progressivism cannot say how big the welfare state should be but must always say that it should be bigger than it currently is. Furthermore, by making a welfare state a fountain of rights requisite for democracy, progressives in effect declare that democratic deliberation about the legitimacy of the welfare state is illegitimate.

According to Gallup survey, 36 percent of Americans have a favorable view of socialism. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that 53 percent of Democrats and 61 percent of so-called “liberals” have a positive view of this economic system that emphasizes collectivism over the individual.

The survey also shows:

• 95% of Americans have a positive view of small business
• 86% have a positive view of free enterprise
• 84% hold a positive view of entrepreneurs
• 61% have a positive view of capitalism, 33% hold an unfavorable view
• 49% hold a negative view of big business
• 51% have a unfavorable view of the federal government, 46% have a favorable view

If voters would actually identify what Democrats were doing as socialism, they wouldn’t have control of Congress at the end of the year. I wonder if we’ll start hearing “socialism” and “socialist” more often during campaign season.