Nothing displays the blatant hypocrisy of the liberal intelligentsia like an act of mass murder.

There’s many examples to choose from in the wake of the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords, but take this gem by The New Yorker’s George Packer:

…for the past two years, many conservative leaders, activists, and media figures have made a habit of trying to delegitimize their political opponents. Not just arguing against their opponents, but doing everything possible to turn them into enemies of the country and cast them out beyond the pale. … This relentlessly hostile rhetoric has become standard issue on the right. (On the left it appears in anonymous comment threads, not congressional speeches and national T.V. programs.)

Got that? On the right, it’s standard operating procedure. It must be Sarah Palin! But on the left, it’s just some fringe forum posters, nothing organized by say the Democratic National Convention or a Democrat politician, right?

Mr. Packer must have missed the 2004 Democratic National Convention election guide titled “Behind Enemy Lines,” and putting a bullseye on key Bush states:

Mr. Packer must have missed popular liberal blogger Daily Kos using the bullseye against none other than… Gabrielle Giffords!

Mr. Packer must have missed this this 2006 election advertisement by Democrat Harry Mitchell placing his Republican opponent in a sniper’s rifle sight:

For eight years of the Bush administration I heard nothing but hate-filled, outlandish angry rhetoric from Democrats. But now, all of the sudden, it’s indecent?

The bottom line is one has to be a complete idiot to believe that if only Sarah Palin didn’t run a poorly-designed graphic, or if only Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity weren’t on the air, then we wouldn’t have mass murder.

Don’t believe me? Go ask Gerald Ford’s family what they think of “Squeaky” Fromme.

(Here are some more examples).

Great commentary by Byron York:

On November 5, 2009, Maj. Nidal Hasan opened fire at a troop readiness center in Ft. Hood, Texas, killing 13 people. Within hours of the killings, the world knew that Hasan reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar!” before he began shooting, visited websites associated with Islamist violence, wrote Internet postings justifying Muslim suicide bombings, considered U.S. forces his enemy, opposed American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as wars on Islam, and told a neighbor shortly before the shootings that he was going “to do good work for God.” There was ample evidence, in other words, that the Ft. Hood attack was an act of Islamist violence.

Nevertheless, public officials, journalists, and commentators were quick to caution that the public should not “jump to conclusions” about Hasan’s motive. CNN, in particular, became a forum for repeated warnings that the subject should be discussed with particular care.

“The important thing is for everyone not to jump to conclusions,” said retired Gen. Wesley Clark on CNN the night of the shootings.

“We cannot jump to conclusions,” said CNN’s Jane Velez-Mitchell that same evening. “We have to make sure that we do not jump to any conclusions whatsoever.”

“I’m on Pentagon chat room,” said former CIA operative Robert Baer on CNN, also the night of the shooting. “Right now, there’s messages going back and forth, saying do not jump to the conclusion this had anything to do with Islam.”

The next day, President Obama underscored the rapidly-forming conventional wisdom when he told the country, “I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts.” In the days that followed, CNN jouralists and guests repeatedly echoed the president’s remarks.

“We can’t jump to conclusions,” Army Gen. George Casey said on CNN November 8. The next day, political analyst Mark Halperin urged a “transparent” investigation into the shootings “so the American people don’t jump to conclusions.” And when Republican Rep. Pete Hoekstra, then the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, suggested that the Ft. Hood attack was terrorism, CNN’s John Roberts was quick to intervene. “Now, President Obama has asked people to be very cautious here and to not jump to conclusions,” Roberts said to Hoekstra. “By saying that you believe this is an act of terror, are you jumping to a conclusion?”

Fast forward a little more than a year, to January 8, 2011. In Tucson, Arizona, a 22 year-old man named Jared Lee Loughner opened fire at a political event, gravely wounding Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, killing a federal judge and five others, and wounding 18. In the hours after the attack, little was known about Loughner beyond some bizarre and largely incomprehensible YouTube postings that, if anything, suggested he was mentally ill. Yet the network that had shown such caution in discussing the Ft. Hood shootings openly discussed the possibility that Loughner was inspired to violence by…Sarah Palin.

Read the rest.

Never forget.

The “falling man” photograph is to me one of the most horrifying reminders of that dark day. What hell they must have endured that throwing themselves from 100 stories was the least agonizing option.

A word about all the proposed “Koran burnings.” It’s idiotic, and in this case does accomplish drawing moderate and sensible persons into a war of extremities. Having said that, as we approach the 10th anniversary of 9-11 just 365 days away, it’s also a lesson in the folly of appeasement. For 9 years and two administrations our government and most of our media have gone out of their way to avoid addressing what 9-11 really was. Is it any wonder that all of that political correctness and appeasement has empowered our own elements of extremism? — Ironically, the very thing the kumbayah “Coexist” bumper-sticker movement has championed has made it more likely that a preacher in middle American can feel justified in burning a stack of Korans. Taking a line from the “root cause” playbook, perhaps had our government and media not always taken the side of political correctness, and outlandish double standards, and been a little tougher in some responses to terrorism, such frustration would not be ingrained in the populace.

No matter, as former Sen. Fred Thompson pointed out, when the 9-11 mosque was announced these appeasement fools — including but predictably our president — focused on the legality instead of the sensibility of such an act. Conversely, they do not back a Gainesville preacher’s legal right to burn Korans, rather the sensibility.

That’s the double standard that empowered this act to begin with.

I’d be curious to see the retorts from every Hollywood Chavez loving Leftist:

Venezuela, More Deadly Than Iraq, Wonders Why
By SIMON ROMERO
CARACAS, Venezuela — Some here joke that they might be safer if they lived in Baghdad. The numbers bear them out.

In Iraq, a country with about the same population as Venezuela, there were 4,644 civilian deaths from violence in 2009, according to Iraq Body Count; in Venezuela that year, the number of murders climbed above 16,000.

Even Mexico’s infamous drug war has claimed fewer lives…

Venezuela is struggling with a decade-long surge in homicides, with about 118,541 since President Hugo Chávez took office in 1999, according to the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a group that compiles figures based on police files. (The government has stopped publicly releasing its own detailed homicide statistics, but has not disputed the group’s numbers, and news reports citing unreleased government figures suggest human rights groups may actually be undercounting murders).

There have been 43,792 homicides in Venezuela since 2007, according to the violence observatory, compared with about 28,000 deaths from drug-related violence in Mexico since that country’s assault on cartels began in late 2006.

Caracas itself is almost unrivaled among large cities in the Americas for its homicide rate, which currently stands at around 200 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to Roberto Briceño-León, the sociologist at the Central University of Venezuela who directs the violence observatory.

That compares with recent measures of 22.7 per 100,000 people in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, and 14 per 100,000 in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city. As Mr. Chávez’s government often points out, Venezuela’s crime problem did not emerge overnight, and the concern over murders preceded his rise to power.

But scholars here describe the climb in homicides in the past decade as unprecedented in Venezuelan history; the number of homicides last year was more than three times higher than when Mr. Chávez was elected in 1998.

Be sure to check out Tom Gross’ Mideast Dispatch Analysis and his coverage of a new mall opening in Gaza. Let’s just say it’s a far cry from the typical Lamestream media reports about the impoverished in Gaza. Here’s an excerpt worth highlighting:

“On a day when (because EU Foreign Policy Chief Baroness Ashton is in Gaza) the BBC and other media have featured extensive reports all day long on what they term the dire economic situation in Gaza, why are they not mentioning the new shopping mall that opened there yesterday?

“When leading news outlets mention the so-called humanitarian flotillas from Turkey, why do they omit the fact that life expectancy and literacy rates are higher, and infant mortality rates are lower in Gaza than corresponding rates in Turkey? Have they considered that perhaps the humanitarian flotillas ought to be going in the other direction, towards Turkey?”

In Turkey, life expectancy is 72.23 and infant mortality is 24.84 per 1,000 births.

In Gaza, life expectancy is 73.68 and infant mortality is 17.71 per 1,000 births.

Turkey has a literacy rate of 88.7% while in Gaza it is 91.9%. (It is much lower in Egypt and other Arab countries where Israel did not establish colleges and universities in the 1970s and 1980s.)

Gaza’s GDP is almost as high as Turkey’s and much, much higher than most of Africa that gets 1,000th of the aid per capita that Gaza gets from the West. (Source for above info: CIA World Factbook)

World hunger organizations report that 10-15 million children below the age of 5 die each year, and 50,000 people die daily. One-third of all deaths in the world are due to poverty.

While famine kills millions of children in Africa, India, and elsewhere, life expectancy for Gaza Arabs, at 72 years, is nearly five years higher than the world average. In Swaziland, for example, life expectancy is less than 40 years, and it is 42 years in Zambia.

Meanwhile Western governments, misled by Western media, continue to pour more and more money into Gaza for people that don’t need it, while allowing black Africans to starve to death.

As the correspondent for one of Japan’s biggest newspapers said to me last week, “Gaza and the West Bank are the only places in the world where I have seen refugees drive Mercedes.”

Don’t look now but mainstream media (aka the lamestream media) is beginning to throw up the white flag and admit that their cure for supposed man-made global warming and our reliance on foreign energy sources is just to use less electricity.

How will this happen? First by guilt, then by force.

In the heat wave, the case against air conditioning

By Stan Cox
Sunday, July 11, 2010; B03

Washington didn’t grind to a sweaty halt last week under triple-digit temperatures. People didn’t even slow down. Instead, the three-day, 100-plus-degree, record-shattering heat wave prompted Washingtonians to crank up their favorite humidity-reducing, electricity-bill-busting, fluorocarbon-filled appliance: the air conditioner.

This isn’t smart. In a country that’s among the world’s highest greenhouse-gas emitters, air conditioning is one of the worst power-guzzlers. The energy required to air-condition American homes and retail spaces has doubled since the early 1990s. Turning buildings into refrigerators burns fossil fuels, which emits greenhouse gases, which raises global temperatures, which creates a need for — you guessed it — more air-conditioning.

A.C.’s obvious public-health benefits during severe heat waves do not justify its lavish use in everyday life for months on end. Less than half a century ago, America thrived with only the spottiest use of air conditioning. It could again.

Just consume less energy! What a novel idea. Ignore that people in developing nations would gladly slit your throat to enjoy the energy consumption advantages you have thanks to 200-plus years of liberty and innovation (converting to horsepower – Americans use about 4.5 horsepower per capita, while their counterparts in Pakistan and India use less than 0.25.”[ Courtesy of Power Hungry by Robert Bryce) Ignore that there's a direct relationship between the amount of electricity a country generates and its GDP (America is top in both electrical generation and GDP, followed by China and then the Western world with a high rank by Russia too [Bryce again]). No, no, our lifestyle, says this pretentious Ghia worshiper, is too “lavish.” No doubt his next commentary will extol the virtues of horse-drawn carriages (while ignoring disease from horse manure concentrations) and candles to replace light bulbs (ignoring productivity loss, among other things).

Once again the Greens’ definition of progress is technological regression.

How will this be done?

First by guilt trips by those like Mr. Cox. Then next via “smart utilities,” which is a fancy way of saying that your power company, under fiat by the government, will dictate the amount of energy you may use since we Americans aren’t like Pakistanis and Indians and can thus afford the energy prices. It’s no joke, unfortunately. It’s being seriously considered by the Leftist Greens and their government enablers.

[WND] In “Climategate [A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam],” [Brian] Sussman warns readers about the coming Smart Grid, Smart Meters, Smart Thermostats and Energy Star appliances – which he says will allow unseen bureaucrats to regulate all of the appliances in America’s homes.

“This is not fantasy,” says Sussman, an award-winning television meteorologist, “This is reality. Smart Meters have already replaced the whirling, old-fashioned electric meters on the side of millions of houses in America – they monitor electricity usage minute-by-minute and can be read remotely. The remote controlled Smart Thermostats are being installed as well and further enable bureaucratic control the temperature of your abode. The Smart Grid, which was mandated in the 2007 Energy bill and funded with ‘stimulus’ money, is coming next. The grid will possess interactive broadband capabilities to further control all of the new generation Energy Star appliances you will be forced to purchase – like your washer, dryer, water heater, and even your flat screen TV.”

Sussman notes the pandering tone of the Washington Post piece. “Look at the arguments presented in this story,” says Sussman. “In a post-AC nation, we’re told that ‘Congress will adjourn for the summer, giving ‘tea partiers’ the smaller government they seek,’ or that on a hot summer evening we’ll all trade the electrical stove for the barbeque and eat on the porch. Do the environmentalists and their media partners think Americans are that easy to fool?

“I live in California,” Sussman adds. “On certain summer evenings it’s illegal to have a barbeque. Guess will just have to stick to a salad.”

And why are the Greens forced to do this? Because it’s not about the environment or “saving” the planet from imaginary tidal waves swallowing San Francisco after polar icecap thaws, but it’s about control, and socialism, and collectivism, and increasing the power of the state. It’s about eroding personal liberty, and what’s more liberating that power consumption?

The Greens know that the facts are coming out, and the future of renewables simply cannot mathematically replace our need for oil, coal, natural gas (or nuclear) fuels. Wind and solar, for example, fail miserably in how we measure utility consumption: power density, energy density, cost, and scale.

For instance, again quoting from Robert Bryce:

The energy sprawl of renewables can easily be illustrated by comparing the footprint of a typical U.S. nuclear power plant, in this case, the South Texas Project, with that of wind and solar. Using conservative calculations—which means counting all 12,000 acres of the South Texas Project’s land area as part of the two-reactor plant’s footprint—yields a power density of about 300 horsepower per acre (56 watts per square meter). Compare that with wind power, which produces about 6.4 horsepower per acre (1.2 watts per square meter). Or look at solar photovoltaic, which produces about 36 horsepower per acre (6.7 watts per square meter). The results: Wind power requires about 45 times as much land to produce a comparable amount of power as nuclear, and solar photovoltaic power requires about 8 times as much land as nuclear. The corn ethanol scam is even worse, requiring about 1,150 times as much land as nuclear. … Thus, if the world’s policymakers really want to quit using carbon-based fuels, then we will need to find the energy equivalent of 23.5 Saudi Arabias every day, and all of that energy must be carbon-free.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg too. Because of intermittent breeze and sunlight, both solar and wind must be backed by traditional power sources, which as the Danes have learned, makes such power sources unsustainable without huge subsidies from government.

But that won’t stop the subsidies, of course. But just be prepared for the next bi-pronged attack of guilt and artificial outages.

Wow, when you’re a former media-darling Democratic president and the Associated Press starts to turn on you, you must have bad ratings. Here’s how the AP describes Barack Obama’s panel to investigate the Gulf oil leak:

Only one of the seven commissioners, the dean of Harvard’s engineering and applied sciences school, has a prominent engineering background — but it’s in optics and physics. Another is an environmental scientist with expertise in coastal areas and the after-effects of oil spills. Both are praised by other scientists.

The five other commissioners are experts in policy and management.

The White House said the commission will focus on the government’s “too cozy” relationship with the oil industry. A presidential spokesman said panel members will “consult the best minds and subject matter experts” as they do their work.

The commission has yet to meet, yet some panel members had made their views known.

Environmental activist Frances Beinecke on May 27 blogged: “We can blame BP for the disaster and we should. We can blame lack of adequate government oversight for the disaster and we should. But in the end, we also must place the blame where it originated: America’s addiction to oil.” And on June 3, May 27, May 22, May 18, May 4, she called for bans on drilling offshore and the Arctic.

“Even as questions persist, there is one thing I know for certain: the Gulf oil spill isn’t just an accident. It’s the result of a failed energy policy,” Beinecke wrote on May 20.

Two other commissioners also have gone public to urge bans on drilling.

Co-chairman Bob Graham, a Democrat who was Florida governor and later a senator, led efforts to prevent drilling off his state’s coast. Commissioner Donald Boesch of the University of Maryland wrote in a Washington Post blog that the federal government had planned to allow oil drilling off the Virginia coast and “that probably will and should be delayed.”

Boesch, who has made scientific assessments of oil spills’ effects on the ecosystem, said usually oil spills are small. But he added, “The impacts of the oil and gas extraction industry (both coastal and offshore) on Gulf Coast wetlands represent an environmental catastrophe of massive and underappreciated proportions.”

An expert not on the commission, Granger Morgan, head of the engineering and public policy department at Carnegie Mellon University and an Obama campaign contributor, said the panel should have included more technical expertise and “folks who aren’t sort of already staked out” on oil issues.

I have to admit, I never thought there’d come a day when I embed a Rachael Maddow video in this blog…

There’s a lot of good points in that MSNBC video, but there’s also a healthy heaping of MSNBC lamestream media slant, and a typical Left wing ignorance of economics.

Two quick points: (1) the oil companies aren’t drilling deeper out of choice but because federal and state governments and environmental groups (lawsuits) make it impossible to drill in either shallower water or on land (ANWR, for example, or in the Dakotas).

(2) It doesn’t surprise me that Rachel Maddow is lacking economics 101 education — while petroleum may be the highest in terms of total profit its tax bill and expenses are also sky high. Thus in terms of profit margin, petroleum is more in line or quite behind other industries. IT Networking, for example, and software both enjoy much higher profit margin (20%+ versus about 11-12% for petrol). US petro-giant Exxon-Mobile, for example, ranks 60th.

This, too, is a commentary a week old but bears repeating — George Mason University Prof. Daniel Klein promotes a Zogby survey that found persons self-identified as Democrats and liberals do very poorly on questions regarding the laws of economics. What’s sad it that it’s all pretty basic stuff.

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 this case, percentage of conservatives answering incorrectly was 22.3%, very conservatives 17.6% and libertarians 15.7%. But the percentage of progressive/very liberals answering incorrectly was 67.6% and liberals 60.1%. The pattern was not an anomaly.

The other questions were: 1) Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services (unenlightened answer: disagree). 2) Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago (unenlightened answer: disagree). 3) Rent control leads to housing shortages (unenlightened answer: disagree). 4) A company with the largest market share is a monopoly (unenlightened answer: agree). 5) Third World workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited (unenlightened answer: agree). 6) Free trade leads to unemployment (unenlightened answer: agree). 7) Minimum wage laws raise unemployment (unenlightened answer: disagree).

How did the six ideological groups do overall? Here they are, best to worst, with an average number of incorrect responses from 0 to 8: Very conservative, 1.30; Libertarian, 1.38; Conservative, 1.67; Moderate, 3.67; Liberal, 4.69; Progressive/very liberal, 5.26.

Americans in the first three categories do reasonably well. But the left has trouble squaring economic thinking with their political psychology, morals and aesthetics.

To be sure, none of the eight questions specifically challenge the political sensibilities of conservatives and libertarians. Still, not all of the eight questions are tied directly to left-wing concerns about inequality and redistribution. In particular, the questions about mandatory licensing, the standard of living, the definition of monopoly, and free trade do not specifically challenge leftist sensibilities.

Yet on every question the left did much worse. On the monopoly question, the portion of progressive/very liberals answering incorrectly (31%) was more than twice that of conservatives (13%) and more than four times that of libertarians (7%). On the question about living standards, the portion of progressive/very liberals answering incorrectly (61%) was more than four times that of conservatives (13%) and almost three times that of libertarians (21%).

The survey also asked about party affiliation. Those responding Democratic averaged 4.59 incorrect answers. Republicans averaged 1.61 incorrect, and Libertarians 1.26 incorrect.

First, some great recollection of history by the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, for the world’s Helen Thomases. The recently retired friend of moral equivalence and relativism, Helen Thomas, left in shame last week after a candid moment in which she explained on video how she’d promote Middle East Peace: “Tell them [Jews in Israel] to get the hell out of Palestine. … Go home. Poland. Germany. And America and everywhere else.”

Well, I don’t know about “everywhere else,” but after World War II, many Jews did attempt to “go home” to Poland. This resulted in the murder of about 1,500 of them — killed not by Nazis but by Poles, either out of sheer ethnic hatred or fear they would lose their (stolen) homes.

The mini-Holocaust that followed the Holocaust itself is not well-known anymore, but it played an outsized role in the establishment of the state of Israel. It was the plight of Jews consigned to Displaced Persons camps in Europe that both moved and outraged President Truman, who supported Jewish immigration to Palestine and, when the time came, the new state itself. Something had to be done for the Jews of Europe. They were still being murdered.

In the Polish city of Kielce, on July 4, 1946 — more than a year after the end of the war — rumors of a Jewish ritual murder triggered a pogrom in which 42 Jews were killed. All were Holocaust survivors. The Kielce murders were not, by any means, the sole example of why Jews could not “go home.” When I visited the Polish city where my mother had been born, Ostroleka, I was told of a Jew who survived Auschwitz only to be murdered when he tried to reclaim his business. In much of Eastern Europe, Jews feared for their lives.

That’s great history by Cohen.

Just one retort, however, counters Jonah Goldberg — it seems Mr. Cohen hasn’t always been intellectually honest himself:

I really liked Richard Cohen’s column today on Helen Thomas, in which he makes it sound as if he thinks Thomas is 100 percent wrong. But it’s kind of hard to square with this Cohen column from a few years ago. In his July 16, 2006, Washington Post column, Cohen wrote:

The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.