Recently in Liberalism Category

I've seen Reich taken to task before by real economists. Robert Barro of Harvard just embarrassed him on the PBS NewsHour way back on September 14, 2004. Reich has a Harvard Law degree, that's it.

But this is something to remember for a long time. Ah, those moments of clarity.

The Democrats talk a pretty good game about jobs and how they're so supportive of labor. Unfortunately what they don't tell is that their 'support' usually ends up causing labor to lose jobs. And while the Democrats blast the Republicans as being pro-business, it is those businesses that provide jobs for labor, something often overlooked or purposely ignored by them.

Here's an interesting graphic that shows an interesting correlation between which party was the majority in Congress and job growth, courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Skip at Granite Grok.

Sen. Richard Lugar glowingly remarks on the "remarkable shift" that's occurred with one in eight Americans receiving some form of welfare. While I admit the food stamp program is a bargain compared to others that are bureaucrat heavy, it's disconcerting that we're losing our ability to engage in the traditional American mores of rugged individualism.

I'm reminded that there are fewer "forgotten men" that William Graham Sumner talked about, and the title of Amity Shlaes's wonderful book.

Anyone ready for the entitlement tsunami looming ahead? It's by far our biggest problem.

Boston University Professor Laurence Kotlikoff, who pioneered the concept of generational accounting to project federal tax burdens, calculates that with no change in current law, a child born today would have to pay 84 percent of his or her lifetime income in taxes to finance an entitlement programs and other government spending.

So what are our representatives on Capitol Hill doing about it? Why, proposing to expand entitlements, of course.

One doesn't have to look far to find academics with a distorted view of America and its people. A local example: Prof. Leo R. Sandy a professor of Counselor Education and School Psychology at Plymouth State University.

The professor spouts the liberal/socialist line at every opportunity, in a weekly newspaper column and regular letters to the local papers. One of his latest pronouncements came in a letter to the editor (Laconia Daily Sun, Tuesday February 2, 2010), commenting upon Republican reactions to Obama's State of the Union address. (No direct link available.)

The Republicans had an oppositional air to them that causes me to question their commitment to the progress of this country. As regressives, they have been very effective in moving the Democrats so far to the right that nothing can be accomplished.

Excuse me? They've been moving the Democrats to the right? Not from what I and most of the rest of America have seen. With cap-and-trade, health care reform, stimulus, and a $1.6 trillion+ (and growing) budget deficit, I don't see how any of that can be considered moving the leftist Dems to the right.

Professor Sandy has never been shy about his political beliefs, espousing the leftist point of view for some time. Never mind that socialism in all its forms has failed miserably and done nothing but cause misery, poverty, and widespread diminishment or destruction of economic systems, supposedly 'for the good of the people'. He chooses to be blind to the downside of his political beliefs.

But then, he doesn't have to compete in the real world, worrying about meeting a payroll, filling out endless state and federal government reporting forms, ensuring compliance with US and foreign regulations, paying state and federal business taxes, and paying insurance premiums for a host of business policies (workman's comp, health insurance, liability insurance, etc). He doesn't have to worry about being laid off (if he has tenure), or paying for his health insurance (he's a state employee), so he's insulated from the effects of all the socialist policies and laws he supports. Then again, that's true of most academics in the soft sciences and liberal arts. They rarely have to deal with the real world. That's their biggest problem. With little or no connection to the real world, it is easy for them to support socialist ideals and policies abhorrent to average Americans.

UPDATE: Bird Dog asks the question "Why are Liberals so condescending?"

I always try to showcase unpublished writers, specifically those with political or philosophical outlooks similar to the WP team.

Without further ado, I present guest blogger William Johnson:

A very simple truth about humans, human systems, and humanities development is...that there is no system that can be exercised or imposed from any outside source or structure, no matter the theme, onto humans or any human population that can rival the effectiveness and resulting productivity of any human construct that is created from within. Humans, and Nature, are dynamic and sometimes random beings. To exercise and focus the commonality from within is of greater respect and utility of that same nature, than it is to attempt to overwhelm it and rigidly orchestrate it. In hubris or lust of power, to rend that which is Natural into something that it is not, demands an all consuming endeavor to try to compensate for its inherent frailty.

In this knowledge, when the Natural order is subjected to an unrealistic ideology, the seed of the tyrant is found. In this knowledge is part of the why they need to be invariably inevitably cruel, murderous, and despotic despite its propaganda or original beneficial intent. When healthy systems are forced, from within or without, to be something different, or distanced from what makes them healthy, it will first be stressed and eventually decay into nothingness. If the cause for the distress is ideologically driven, if the cause for the distress is linked to mans pursuit of some goal then the injected disease will be progressive. Because unrealistic/unnatural ideologies are dependent on people that are compulsive/obsessive to only a small collections of ideas, though developed to a great degree, when challenged, they will not react dynamically, they will react by concentrating on their core beliefs. By trying to regroup to this small unhealthy collection of beliefs, they will continue to distill this internal dysfunctional. When these people are in positions of political power, they will, when challenged, react with a continuation of a distillation of an incomplete, incompetent, unsustainable, and overly rigid mindset, which in turn will lead to ever increasing aggression, irrationality, suspicion, desperation, misuse of language and facts, lying, propaganda, and manipulation by multiple means to achieve fewer and fewer ends.

The ongoing pursuit of an unsustainable, ideologically driven social order will demand an ever increasing amount and breadth of brutality to sustain its power structure.

"Do the ends justify the means?" is a question debated for centuries. A battleground of moral equivocation and effectiveness. There exists a number of seductive groupings of ideas and belief systems that claim to be able to cure all of mankind's failings if only they could be fully manifested. Yet, when an ideology claims to be able to dispel some injustice or all tales of woe but is not actually capable of curing the problems despite its propaganda's assurance, then the "ends", being unattainable, are proven to be no longer the point. It's the Means that are the point. The Means to pretend to fix some problem, while never genuinely fixing or even trying. No utopia of any Socialist or Communist regime has ever conquered poverty, or given decent health care to its citizenry, or given justice to those needing it. Nor were they ever able to dissuade human greed or lust for power. But they continued to expound their virtue to do so "at any cost" and continued the requisite absorption of power and wealth to fulfill the illusion to do so. So the question is forced to be "Do the means justify the means?"

One can only respond with "....wait, what?....no..."

And unless we all answer the question the same way we will suffer the same fate so many others have suffered before us.

I'm selfish--I want them to be in a position to take care of me when I'm decrepit, which is now less than half a lifetime away. How'd it happen so fast?

Well, thanks to John Derbyshire's link from The Corner--ahem, have you read his new book? I loved it--we get the 13 careers for the next decade. Care to guess which is number one?

Daniel Hannan, who received Internet fame for his impassioned upbraiding of Prime Minister Gordon Brown last year, has a brilliant sentence in his dissection on Michael Moore and his new attack film on capitalism:

The trouble with the Michael Moore view of the world is that it elevates motive over outcome.

I've seen all kinds of reports and so-called exposés about the TEA party movement in MSM. Many were derisive, a few tried hard to be neutral, a few more were big supporters, and some were outright hostile.

But then, out of nowhere, comes a piece that even a cynic like me has to admit was pretty well balanced, and from a source I never would have thought of as fair.

Ben McGrath does a pretty good job covering the rise of TEA party activism for the New Yorker, resisting the urge to paint everyone involved with the TEA party activities as inbred right-wing rednecks beholden to Big Oil, Big Finance, and Big (place name of latest scapegoat du jour here).

My first immersion in the social movement that helped take Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts Senate seat away from the Democrats, and may have derailed the President's chief domestic initiative, occurred last fall, in Burlington, Kentucky, at a Take Back America rally.

About a thousand people had turned up at the rally, most of them old enough to remember a time when the threats to the nation's long-term security, at home and abroad, were more easily defined and acknowledged. Suspicious of decadent élites and concerned about a central government whose ambitions had grown unmanageably large, they sounded, at least in broad strokes, a little like the left-wing secessionists I'd met at a rally in Vermont in the waning days of the Bush Administration.

If there was a central theme to the proceedings, it was probably best expressed in the refrain "Can you hear us now?," conveying a long-standing grievance that the political class in Washington is unresponsive to the needs and worries of ordinary Americans. Republicans and Democrats alike were targets of derision.

Addressing McGrath's last point, more than a few Republicans have made the mistake of thinking the TEA party movement is a phenomenon automatically supportive of the GOP. They're wrong. Most Americans are sick and tired of being ignored or marginalized by both political parties. TEA party activists like me see both the Democrats and Republicans as being part of the problem, so GOP congresscritters, governors, and state legislators are no more immune from our displeasure than Democrats. (It's just that there are so many more Democrats in office these days that they're taking the brunt of our pushback.)

McGrath credits Rick Santelli, a CNBC reporter, as being the spark that started the TEA party fire with his rant on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange last February. The rant, reminiscent of Peter Finch's portrayal of Howard Beale in the movie Network, expressed the frustration so many of us were feeling at being ignored by the very people we put in office to serve us. Instead, they decided that we served them, and as such, all that was ours was theirs to use or misuse as they saw fit.

They were wrong.

And so the movement grows, as McGrath has shown.

The race for the US Senate seat formerly held by Teddy Kennedy is heating up. While Democrat Martha Coakley first thought it would be a cakewalk to the Senate, Scott Brown worked hard to disabuse her of that notion. The support he's received via fed up Massachusetts Republicans, independents, and Democrats has been amazing. So has the campaign's fundraising, pulling in about $1 million a day since the blogosphere kicked into high gear on his behalf. While Coakley has had to rely on lobbyist and special interests to raise campaign funds, Brown's funding has been grassroots, with the average donation being approximately $77 per contributor. Small donations have been pouring in from all over the country.

Coakley has shown how out of touch she is, blasting Scott Brown for taking all that "out of state" money...while standing outside the Washington DC fundraiser held for her by out of state lobbyists. The worst thing? She probably doesn't realize just how hypocritical she really was. And this is someone the people of Massachusetts should send to the US Senate?

Coakley knows her campaign is in trouble when even the Massachusetts SEIU locals are supporting Scott Brown, campaigning for him even though they aren't being paid $50 par day to hold one of his signs. Does this mean the Dems will have to bus in out-of-state SEIU members to carry signs for Coakley? Or will they be used to...umm... encourage voters heading into the polls to vote for Coakley, much like the New Black Panthers did during the Presidential elections in 2008?

The Democrats are pulling out all the stops, using every dirty trick in the book in order to get Coakley elected. The problem is that every time they do, Brown's poll numbers go up. I guess that means the folks in the People's Republic of Massachusetts have come to realize the state's Democratic leaders don't really have their best interests at heart, particularly when they keep pushing the worst possible candidate the party could have fielded like she's the second coming of Teddy.

If Brown pulls off an upset, that will give voters in other states some hope. Goodness knows we could use some here in New Hampshire, where the Democrats hold both chambers of the General Court and the Governor's office and have been doing their darnedest to push the state into insolvency with profligate spending and higher taxes at a time when no one can afford them.

Kudos to Dr. Starner Jones.

I had thought candidate Bush was the man to bring this to the nation's attention, being influenced by Marvin Olasky's superb The Tragedy of American Compassion. But, alas, I was wrong.

For the longest time the major players in the MSM have either ignored or trivialized the TEA Party movement. But no more.

Tonight, ABC's World News had a report about the 'phenomenon' of the TEA parties, showing the effect they've been having and how the movement is growing. As political analyst Matthew Dowd put it:

"I think Republicans definitely dismiss this at their peril. I also think Democrats, by trying to marginalize it, underestimate the anger out there," political analyst Matthew Dowd said.

There are a lot of angry people out there. I'm but one of them.

I find it interesting that one of the favorite politicians among TEA party supporters is former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. But it isn't all that surprising considering she implemented many of the TEA party core beliefs while she was governor, rooting out corruption, cutting profligate state spending, and scaling back the reach of state government until it was performing only the duties expected of it as laid out in the Alaska State Constitution.

The TEA parties aren't aiming their anger at any one party so much as the actions of those in Congress and the various statehouses, showing their anger at being ignored and seen as nothing more than a source of revenue for the tax-and-spenders in both the Democrat and Republican parties.

Maybe ABC started payi8ng attention when TEA party actions started bringing down politicians and party leaders who made the mistake of ignoring their constituents.

The most recent victim of "tea party' activists was Florida Republican Jim Greer, who resigned from as state party chairman this week, in part because of the activists' objections to his alliance with Florida's Republican governor, Charlie Crist, who is running for the U.S. Senate. The activists are vocally supporting Crist's opponent -- a young, outspoken conservative, Marco Rubio -- and some believe the tea party group may bring down Crist, too.

The message is getting out: Politics as usual aren't going to work this time, at local, state, or federal level. You ignore us at your own peril for we have no problem firing you come next November, if not sooner. To quote Howard Beale from the great movie, Network, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!"

It's time those in both parties pay attention because the TEA parties aren't going away.

Eliminating those pesky entrance exams for the police force? Yeah, of course! Minorities don't do as well as the Ice People--whites and asians.

So whatever it takes, baby!

As I've already written, DC so watered down its entrance exam that math was excluded. No need for that, right? Well, perhaps. When the chalk drawing needs doing and the yellow plastic needs putting up, I guess they can just wing it like Picasso. Reconstructing accident scenes? Maybe with Lego's.

 Maybe the blogger is on to something . Liberalism's twin pillars of radical egalitarianism and excessive individualism are destroying the country. We're slouching to Gomorrah, in Judge Bork's apt book title. 

It's like what they're planning on doing with science labs in Berkeley. Excellence out; equality by any means.

What happens in Berkeley and Chicago reverberates all over. Even in quaint New England towns where a 21-year-old gets hired who apparently has no experience, no prior military service, and no college degree.

It must be tough to be politically correct (PC) these days. Events can change respectable opinions faster than a weathercock being turned by the wind. Luke Ford reporting on what Dennis Prager said on his nationally syndicated radio show, "So Now We're Profiling?"

For all of my lifetime, the very notion that person X from background X might be more likely to commit a certain crime was considered racism. Not common sense. Racism. Now all of a sudden a dictate has gone out from the White House and it's no longer racism.

Now all the terrorists have to do is recruit a white grandmother from Missouri to blow up an airplane, and the rules go out the window.

An impressive display of frank, plain truth without the untruth of political correctness by Drew Cline of the Union Leader. How come that newspaper no longer signs its editorials?

Reminds me of my new year's resolution: End compliance in the use of political correctness (PC) and all its attendant terms! The "developing" world? Let's go back to the Third World or even the uncivilized world. But it'll drive the UNH professors crazy! Exactly.

Gerard Warner agrees and explains how this pernicious practice came into the free West:

There is now no area of life, however trivial or frivolous, that is not controlled by the Thought Police. And whose fault is that? Ours, of course. Our fault for not snuffing out this tyrannical nonsense at its first manifestation. Our fault for submitting to it.

I'm even considering calling blacks Negro, a perfectly acceptable word from earlier in my life. Labels have changed with dizzying rapidity: Negro, Black, Afro-American, and now African-American. This is just during my life! (I was born in '67.)

Jesse Jackson engaged in bogus revisionist thinking when he argued twenty years ago for the clearly fictitious disingenuous hyphenation (whites cannot be called that even if they hail from the Dark Continent) African-American. He was the least impressive speaker whom I listened to while a cadet at West Point. And I tried to listen to everyone. (Henry Kissenger was the best, followed closely by Dr. Donald E. Horward, a Florida State historian on Napoleon and a spectacularly gifted lecturer, and the wonderful writer of current social mores, Tom Wolfe. Sandra Day O'Connor was very poor, too.)

Negro wasn't a term foisted on Negros, as he argued; rather, it's the Spanish/Portuguese for black and when the New York Times made the editorial decision to capitalize Negro in something like 1923 there was widespread celebration within the Negro community.

I learned that from Stephen Thernstrom's "Just Say Afro," January 23, 1989, in the New Republic, which I used to subscribe to for years until the brilliant and independent-minded editor-in-chief Michael Kelly (a UNH graduate) was fired.

~ Rosalie Pedalino Porter, "Put English fluency first," Boston Herald, Saturday, 26 Dec. 2009, p. 16

Um...yeah. The council is an offshoot of Gov. Deval Patrick's Executive Order 503 launching his New Americans Agenda for Massachusetts. I agree wholeheartedly with Rosalie. This is regnant liberalism showing its true colors untethered by common sense, tradition, history, respect for the majority, or fear of ridicule. For just this reason it should make for good Howie Carr fodder for a day or so.

Rosalie's book Forked Tongue did to bilingualism what Charles Murray's did to welfare to women with dependent children: overwhelmingly demonstrated that good intentions have led to bad results.

I can't resist linking to this review of Murray's book, which helped to change the debate. The review has the stench of familiarity to me: typical liberal roadkill where assertions are made in the absence of examples. That just is simply amazing to me. I mean we teach high-schoolers preparing for the SATs to provide examples for positions they are arguing. It's so basic, yet it often escapes liberals who view themselves as Thomas Sowell has described them, as the anointed. Intentions, however, should never count for more than results. Can you guess why I'm no longer a liberal.

Ultimately the public policy changed with respect to deleterious bilingual education, at least in Calfornia, where Porter's book made headway.  Good luck in Massachusetts, which is a state that is beyond repair. I can tell that by how the corrupt liberal state views the Second Amendment, the litmus test for me, which the state's own constitution should protect.

If you're not familiar with bilingual education--the mediocre teaching of students in two languages, when the culture stipulates knowledge of one--it's a concept that quickly breaks down when literally dozens to hundreds of different immigrant groups are present, speaking a bedlam of languages.

It's doubtful we'll have school officials able to speak Azeri, for example, when the CIA is in desperate need of such people.

What fight? People are too scared of being called one of the names the Left finds handy to crush dissent. John Derbyshire pulls out the big gun for his end-of-the-year posting:

The left makes the social rules and enforces them; the right goes along meekly, with anguished, whining, sniveling apologies when the enforcers crack their whips.

Yep.

It has become quite apparent that our so-called representatives in both chambers of Congress have ceased to represent us and instead have gone off in a radical direction that will, in the end, cripple America with crushing debt, destroy an imperfect but working health care system that rivals that of any place else on the planet, erode even more of our rights, and create economic roadblocks that will do nothing but further weaken our ability to compete in the world's marketplace. It is the nightmare of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged come to life. With all of this in mind, is it any surprise a large majority of Americans are so angry with Congress and their Leftist Overlord?

We're trying in every way legally and officially possible to make clear that we don't want the radical meal we're being forced to eat. We fervently do not want to "fundamentally transform" America. But there is such a huge disconnect from our world to our representatives'. It's as if we are ghosts whom they can't see or hear! When someone refuses to listen, going so far as to ignore you, don't you shout louder? Doesn't it anger you? When you're attacked and belittled because you have to shout to be heard and you're still ignored, doesn't that infuriate you? These people miss that we passionately don't want what they want. The more they refuse to hear us, the more we try to make them. We are not going away.

We're justly and increasingly angry because our reps not only refuse to hear us, but they also chastise us for wanting to be heard. How else would they expect us to react when we feel so helpless and hopeless? No matter what we want, say, or do, our government is going to force us to eat a meal we never ordered. In addition, we keep saying, "no, we don't want this," but they keep putting affirmations in our mouths and proceeding with their radical agenda anyway. We are not enjoying the governmental rape of our country. We said "no," and "no" means "no" in every language. Why doesn't this matter? Every poll reflects the president's rapidly declining approval rating -- for good reason. And still, Robert Gibbs flippantly dismisses it. How are "we the people" supposed to feel? Certainly we do not feel happy, or even just mildly upset, about being disregarded. Far-left ideologues who supposedly espouse "compassionate" causes have no compassion for how we feel, nor do they have a clue that we are an angry mob of their own creation.

I certainly feel angry, particularly with my Congressional Representative, Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH1), who has shown a penchant for dismissing any of her 'constituents' who do not ascribe to her particular political beliefs. On more than one occasion she is alleged to have referred to those of us non-Democrats living in her Congressional District as not being her constituents. That's funny as I thought everyone living in her district was her constituent, whether we agreed with her politics or not. So much for being our representative. Instead she represents only her own points of view and the hell with the rest of us. (I have a feeling Ms. Shea-Porter will have a very rude awakening come next November when she's booted, bag and baggage, from her seat.)

Obama's falling poll numbers certainly indicate a lot of our anger, particularly when his approval rating after a little over 11 months in office is worse than George W. Bush's after eight years.

Yet there's another twist that might make we angry Americans even angrier: Pelosi and Reid's move to short-circuit the normal conference process, where differences between House and Senate versions of a given bill are hammered out. Instead, reconciling the differences between the two health care reform bills will likely be done behind closed doors, out of the public eye, with little input from members of either house. In other words, the fix will be in.

When Democrats took over Congress in 2007, they increasingly did not send bills through the regular conference process. "We have to defer to the bigger picture," explained Rep. Henry Waxman of California. So the children's health insurance bill passed by the House that year was largely dumped in favor of the Senate's version. House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel and other Democrats complained the House had been "cut off at the knees" but ultimately supported the bill. Legislation on lobbying reform and the 2007 energy bill were handled the same way -- without appointing an actual conference.

Rather than appoint members to a public conference committee, those measures were "ping-ponged" -- i.e. changes to reconcile the two versions were transmitted by messenger between the two houses as the final product was crafted behind closed doors solely by the leadership. Many Democrats grumbled at the secrecy. "We need to get back to the point where we use conference committees . . . and have serious dialogue," said Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama at the time.

But serious dialogue isn't what Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid are interested in right now. Look for the traditional conference committee to be replaced by a "ping-pong" game in which health care is finalized behind closed doors with little public scrutiny before the bill is rushed to the floor of each chamber for a final vote.

Is there any wonder why things like the TEA party movement have been growing? Is there any wonder why confrontations between members of Congress and the public have been becoming more heated and less polite? Why are the Democrats so surprised when far too many of them have been ignoring their constituents back home, ignoring their wishes, ignoring their phone calls, letters, and e-mails, and following the lead of Pelosi and Reid, neither of whom has the best interests of the American people at heart. Instead they have their own Leftist Utopia-driven agenda that has nothing to do with what the American people want or need.

And the anger grows.....

Reading The Drudge Report, where I go after my homepage of Instapundit, I read this very disturbing story from New Jersey. Looming behind it is the disturbing likelihood that the attackers were black youths, although the story doesn't mention race.

David Muneton, a thirteen-year-old honors eighth-grader, called by the school principal "a model student," was beaten within inches of death on Dec. 18. He's needed facial reconstructive surgery and may lose his eyesight. And the large pack of murderous youths reportedly numbered eleven. That fits the pattern I've seen about blacks attacking isolated individuals. Liberals have so incapacitated truthful talk about black crime that I've continually been met with shouts of alarm for stating the obvious: blacks commit murder in higher rates than whites. I shut them up using the gubmit's own statistics, (this used to work, but Obama's Justice Department appears to be hiding the evidence as I've spent some time rutting around looking for homicide rates by race) though these minimize the differences by including Hispanics with the white rate, making the black murder rate "only" eight times higher than the white. (Here's a Steve Sailer article on race and crime.)

Lawrence Auster has been on the warpath pointing out the cruelty of black crime against whites. One of the pieces of information that would have put the Duke Lacrosse scandal in context is that FBI crime statistics from 2005 indicate whites raped 0-10 black women, while blacks raped over 37,000 white women. Jesus. 

People commenting on this horrible incident are jumping to the conclusion that the psychotic thugs were black, perhaps unconsciously using the bayesian inference. They've obviously had it. It's amazing how angry the commentators are. Haven't they ever attended sensitivity training?

LA calls the disproportionate black-on-white crime wave a "black anti-white intifada."

Maybe you should look at it, before the station erases them. There's anger out there at having  not only to have send one's children to schools where such thugs also attend, but the disgusting fact that many of these dysfunctional or female-headed households who disproportionately produce the thugs are on public assistance.

Responding to the New Century's "Color of Crime," using FBI statistics, report that is available on pdf, Walter Williams writes over ten years ago to the irrefutable evidence that of all the interracial, blacks and whites, blacks were responsible for 90 percent of it, whites just 10 percent.

Williams writes:

Do you want to see the future of the US under the policies Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are trying to impose upon us? Then check out this video, courtesy of PJTV.

After 50 years of leftist policies and politics, Detroit has gone from the peak to the valley, having shrunk in population by 50%. Is that's what in store for us under leftist leadership for the rest of the country?

Conservatives are starting to connect the dots to the poster boy for liberalism. That's Detroit.

PJ TV. Very entertaining. I hope that guy had security. Chan. And me here and here. When are we going to stop piling on? Liberalism doesn't work. Detroit gives powerful evidence to this.