ELSEWHERE

Sowell: "Liberalism at one time referred to liberty, to making people as free as possible from the control of their presumed betters, and especially free of excessive control by the government. More broadly, liberals tended to favor change while conservatives defended the status quo. All that has been turned upside down. Liberals today are for preserving not only historic landmarks but also the status quo in the welfare state, obstructing the building of new housing, fighting against letting parental choice be introduced into the school system, and are digging in their heels against letting even a small fraction of Social Security be privatized. As for freedom from government controls, liberals have pushed ever more regulation of ever more details of people's homes and businesses. In some places where liberals have been politically dominant for years, you don't dare cut down a tree on your own property, even if it is about to fall over and smash your house or smash you. Whatever the merits or demerits of any of these policies, the liberal label would never fit if the word still meant what it once meant. Meanwhile, on the other end of the political spectrum, conservatives are pushing all sorts of sweeping changes. Milton Friedman is widely regarded as the epitome of conservatism, yet for 50 years he has been arguing for radical change in our school systems by providing vouchers to let parents choose where they want to send their children to school, whether public schools or private".

A blogger has caught out the The New York Times in a bit of deceptive reporting. The NYT portrayed a critic of Tom DeLay as a Republican when she in fact has a long history of Democrat sympathies. Where was that fact-checking that is supposed to make the MSM so superior to bloggers?

The Democrats generally are in a well-justified panic over new Supreme Court appointments. They love the existing judicial dictatorship. So it is no surprise that The L.A. Times gets it exactly backwards: "Now, the battle over the confirmation process has become enmeshed with this third and most extreme stage of conservative thinking. What we are seeing, for the first time, is a fundamental challenge to the rule of law itself". It's not the GOP that is undermining the rule of law. The GOP want the rule of law back. It is arrogant Left-leaning judges who have ignored the law and replaced it by rule of their own opinions that are the problem.

With relentless use of awkward facts, Andrew Bolt puts the boot into the sick Leftist claim that the late Pope killed people by opposing the use of condoms to prevent AIDS.

Socialism impoverishes even oil-rich Norway: "In Oslo, library collections are woefully outdated, and public swimming pools are in desperate need of maintenance. News reports describe serious shortages of police officers and school supplies. When my mother-in-law went to an emergency room recently, the hospital was out of cough medicine. Drug addicts crowd downtown Oslo streets, as The Los Angeles Times recently reported, but applicants for methadone programs are put on a months-long waiting list..... After I moved here six years ago, I quickly noticed that Norwegians live more frugally than Americans do. They hang on to old appliances and furniture that we would throw out. And they drive around in wrecks. In 2003, when my partner and I took his teenage brother to New York - his first trip outside of Europe - he stared boggle-eyed at the cars in the Newark Airport parking lot, as mesmerized as Robin Williams in a New York grocery store in "Moscow on the Hudson.""

V.D. Hanson has a good roundup of past Leftist "wisdom" about Iraq so that we don't forget how comprehensively wrong they were.

There is a pathetic Leftist anthropologist here who manages to compare America today with Cambodia under Pol Pot. If they can convince us that the socialist Hitler was a Rightist, anything is possible, I guess.

My latest quote on MARXWORDS shows that Engels thought the French conquest of the North African Arabs to be a triumph for civilization.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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