This:
I too am part of the 99% and those assholes don’t speak for me.
Jamie posted this at 9:43 AM CDT on Thursday, October 13th, 2011 as Dirty Hippies
October 13th, 2011
You Don’t Speak for Me
May 11th, 2011
The No-Brain Award
Here is an example of why it is impossible to take Ezra Klein seriously as a “moderate” liberal:
The Pay for War Act: War costs money. When we don’t pay for it, it costs even more money, because we have to pay interest on the debt we rack up and the absence of fiscal discipline keeps us from making hard choices.
That’s why Sen. Al Franken’s Pay for War Act should be such an easy sell. The resolution says nothing about the legitimacy or desirability of armed intervention. It just says that we, rather than our grandchildren, should bear the cost of the conflicts we start.
As Franken said in an eloquent speech on the floor of the Senate, “The idea that we should pay for our wars is not a Democratic idea, and it’s not a Republican idea. It’s not left or right. It’s not antiwar, it’s not pro-war. It’s just common sense.” Or, to put it slightly differently, it’s just a No-Brainer.
His blog post is ostensibly a list of bills that are non-partisan. Well, no Ezra, they aren’t. It may seem that way to a closeted coastal liberal like yourself, but its not quite that clear to us rubes in the rest of the country. How about this, oh purveyor of Journo-list, support a bill that requires us to pay for EVERYTHING. Like say a balanced budget amendment. Apparently paying for fuzzy liberal wealth redistribution programs on credit is fine and dandy, but freeing millions from oppression is not.
Masking rank partisanship as pragmatic bipartisanship is why most american’s are fed up with both liberals and conservatives, Republican’s and Democrats.
Time to grow up.
Jamie posted this at 10:58 AM CDT on Wednesday, May 11th, 2011 as Dirty Hippies, Journalism
November 2nd, 2010
Sanity? Maybe. Intelligence? Nope.
Wow.
Jamie posted this at 10:42 AM CDT on Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010 as Dirty Hippies
August 14th, 2010
Problems of the Overregulated Workplace
Reading this news story, I thought, “Surely they’re blowing things out of proportion.” But then I glanced at the preposterously long text of the initiative (seriously, can no one write laws anymore with less than 10,000 words?) and the Chamber of Commerce’s accessible legal summary (caution: PDF). I’m not a lawyer yet, but some of the Chamber’s points seem to be valid.
If that’s the case, though, it says a lot less about Prop. 19 than it does about the overregulated status of the California workplace.*If California employers are already so restricted that they can’t discriminate among applicants based on legal, recreational drug use, is it really Prop. 19′s fault that its passage would result in employers not being able to refuse to hire applicants because they’re potheads? If current regulation requires that employers make “accommodations” for employees who consume mind-altering prescription drugs, is it really Prop. 19′s fault that its passage would result in employers having to make “accommodations” for employees who smoke prescribed marijuana?
From a heighten-the-contradictions approach, the Chamber should welcome Prop. 19 to help show Californians how overregulated employers already are. If, after Prop. 19, employers start getting sued for firing employees who smoked pot on the job, even a state as regulation-happy as California might realize it’s gone too far.
*A little anecdotal information. During my six years in the Golden State, I worked for five paying employers. Since I left several years ago, I have received settlement checks from 2 of them as a result of class action lawsuits. At both of those workplaces, I was subjected to the supposedly illegal activity that resulted in the settlements, but I’m not at all convinced that either employer did anything wrong. In fact, both were, in my opinion, engaged in perfectly reasonable business practices that did not oppress me one whit. But California is the sort of place where reasonable business practices will cause you to pay the college bills of plaintiff lawyers’ children.
Apollo posted this at 12:43 PM CDT on Saturday, August 14th, 2010 as Dirty Hippies, The Law Is An Ass--An Idiot, Who's Your Nanny?
March 4th, 2010
You Simply Cannot Make This Up
The leader of a the anti-Reality protests at UC Davis is a fifth year women’s studies major.
I’ve thought for a long time that the opulence of American higher education – universities with tuition greater than the average income of an American family, fundraising departments raising hundreds of millions to fund endowed chairs for tenured faculty who produce nothing of worth and will earn six figures well into senility, unnecessary administrative employees as far as the eye can see, with most of the actual work of teaching students being done by minimum wage adjuncts and TAs – is unsustainable. It simply makes no sense to have so much of our national wealth and resources tied up in doing so little, when it could be done for so much less.
This probably isn’t the reckoning I’d like it to be (though it would be delicious if said reckoning began in the UC system), but I think we’re going to see much more of this. When soft institutions meet hard times, Reality won’t much care how much it’s denounced in scholarly journals.
Apollo posted this at 9:54 PM CDT on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 as Dirty Hippies, Edjamacation, It's Economics - Stupid!
December 31st, 2009
Silly Radley, the First Amendment’s for Porn
Surely there are some things here that are disturbing to those of us of a libertarian bent. But the fact that this didn’t get noticed in America – the event happened in September, and Reason is just now taking notice; personally, I’d forgotten it happened – should tell us something.
We’re now on our third generation of school children (I was part of the second) going through the public education system and being taught that the First Amendment exists primarily to protect hardcore pornography and slanderous journalists. I took a constitutional law course while an undergrad, and am now in my third year of law school, and I can’t recall more than a small handful of discussions about the First Amendment applying to actual political protest.
I’d like to think that’s because we take the right to political protest for granted. That’s normally been the case in America. However, the First Amendment, like every protected right, can only do so much. The less it protects, the better it protects it; the broader its protections are spread, the thinner they become. Libertarians frequently argue that we should protect even the most extreme speech as a sort of outward barrier, as though this will protect all speech that is less extreme. But the fact is that a large number of people simply aren’t that gung ho about protecting the rights of their countrymen to post rape porn videos on the internet. If all speech is equal, rather than protecting rape porn with the vigor with which they protect mundane political speech, a part of the population will instead protect mundane political speech with all the vigor with which they defend rape porn. Which is to say, not much.
Though Balko misses the mark when he says that the G20 summit was when we needed the First Amendment the most. A bunch of foreign leaders gathered in an American city attracting a motley crew of protesters from all around the world grousing about insubstantial abstractions is not, I reckon, what the Founders had in mind. The leaders weren’t there to get a gauge of popular opinion, the issues were so large that no matter how many protesters showed up it would not have given an accurate gauge of the opinion of those effected by G20 policies, and the protesters themselves were a group with a history of violence and disorder. I don’t think much of what Balko complains of should have happened, but my sleep won’t be troubled much.
We’ve seen with the Tea Party movement that American political protest is alive and well when it really “matters the most” – spontaneous and representative demonstrations of discontent with elected officials’ actions on specific matters, performed in a time and place so as to actually convey that message to the elected officials. If libertarians want more than that core of political speech protected by the First Amendment, they need to pick their fights a little better. It may not be as simple as choosing between Hustler and G20 protesters (and what kind of choice is that?), but it might well be. In a libertarian paradise the First Amendment might well protect every fart as free speech and every orgy as a peaceable assembly, but here in our fallen world, one amendment can only do so much.
Apollo posted this at 11:39 AM CDT on Thursday, December 31st, 2009 as Dirty Hippies, Liberty and/or Security
September 3rd, 2008
They Have Seen the Light
I was perusing some of the comments to posts at DailyKos today and I noticed a strong theme that has become one of the chief talking points of liberals during the Bush II years. They want a president who will respect The Constitution.
WHEW! Finally! They have seen the light. I guess this means that they will all now support unfettered 2nd Ammendment Rights, eliminate speech codes as they violate the 1st Amendment and overturn Roe v Wade because an implied right within an implied right is no grounds for interpreting a fairly straightforward document.
Well now that we have all that out of the way I guess we can get back to fighting terrorists and winning in Iraq.
Jamie posted this at 5:10 PM CDT on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 as Dirty Hippies
July 21st, 2008
Howler of the Day
A post so full of nuttiness that he should be sued by Snickers.
A murderous, gulag running thug like Fidel Castro is “a great leader for his people”. Yes those barely seaworthy “rafts” coming to Florida from Cuba must be because they are testing their vaunted “free” healthcare system.
Give me a damn break.
Jamie posted this at 11:30 AM CDT on Monday, July 21st, 2008 as Dirty Hippies, Humor
July 1st, 2008
ACLU v. DNC
The DNC has been trying to fence off an area where protestors can protest without disrupting the proceedings; now the ACLU (H/T) is arguing that this violates the protestors’ First Amendment rights:
But the American Civil Liberties Union and several advocacy groups have filed an amended complaint to their lawsuit against the U.S. Secret Service and the city and county of Denver that says protestors and demonstrators may have their First Amendment rights violated by security restrictions.
The ACLU has said it wants to avoid the conditions that existed during the 2004 convention in Boston, where protesters were caged, infuriating First Amendment advocates.
The first phase of the lawsuit asked the court to compel the city and the Secret Service to disclose the information on protest restrictions.
During today’s hearing before Judge Marcia S. Krieger, the attorney for the groups, Steve Zansberg, said the city and the Secret Service had provided the information sought in Phase One.
The second phase of the lawsuit will address whether the restrictions are unconstitutional.
Much as I would enjoy seeing the fence taken down so hooligans could wreck havoc at the convention, I’m forced to side with the DNC on this one. I think preventing your convention from being disrupted is defending your First Amendment right against people who might not respect these rights. Republicans, take note: if this lawsuit declares fences unconstitutional, your own convention in Minneapolis will face much worse than the Democrats face in Denver.
Hubbard posted this at 10:33 AM CDT on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 as Audacity of Hype, Dirty Hippies
June 16th, 2008
Cognitive Dissonance Watch
This juxtaposition is almost as good as my “Darwin Fish/Save The Pandas” one that inspired much of our panda-hatred:
1) Hello, I am a judge who believes Ohio’s method of lethal injection is cruel and unusual because it causes excess pain.
2) I love
mass-murderering commie thugrevolutionary Che Guevara.
Like Jonah, I feel kinda bad for Obama for getting unnecessarily dragged into this.
Tom posted this at 1:57 PM CDT on Monday, June 16th, 2008 as Dirty Hippies, I, For One, Welcome Our Judicial Overlords!
April 21st, 2008
Why History is Important
For the love of god Hippies, if you don’t want to learn basic history, please shut the hell up:
(H/T)
Jamie posted this at 9:56 AM CDT on Monday, April 21st, 2008 as Commie Recrudescence, Dirty Hippies
February 7th, 2008
Berkeley Surrenders
The staunch moral pacifists flaming hippie cowards in Berkley have graciously shifted positions surrendered faster than French infantrymen:
As six Republican senators devised a plan to yank $2.3 million in federal funding for Berkeley programs, the mayor of the famously liberal city apologized Wednesday for his hard stance against a Marine recruiting center.
Two City Council members vowed to soften their stance as well.
Just to get the timeline right. First they ban the people that keep them safe. Then they are faced with losing their government funding with the possibility of no longer sucking on the federal government teat. Then they surrender like the moral cowards we all know them to be.
Yep. That sound about right.
Jamie posted this at 5:47 PM CDT on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 as Dirty Hippies, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior
February 5th, 2008
The Rock No More
Memo to San Francisco: This is why the rest of America hates you.
Voters consider changing Alcatraz to peace centre
Tue Feb 5, 3:20 AM ETSAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – San Francisco voters will decide on Tuesday whether to remove the famous Alcatraz Prison visited by thousands of tourists a day and instead create a “global peace centre.”
Alcatraz is one of the primary tourist draws to San Francisco – a place full of history – and they’re going to tear it down for a global peace center? That’s some smart thinking there hippies.Also I highly doubt anyone would pay to see a movie about Sean Connery and Nic Cage storming a Peace Center filled with dreadlocked, hemp wearing peace activists.
Hmmm….on second thought.
Jamie posted this at 3:21 PM CDT on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 as Dirty Hippies
February 1st, 2008
DeMint to Berkeley: @$*% You.
And he’s now my favorite senator:
U.S. Senator Wants to Revoke Funding From City of Berkeley, Calif., for Vote to Boot Marines
Friday , February 01, 2008
WASHINGTON —
U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., says the City of Berkeley, Calif., no longer deserves federal money.DeMint was angered after learning that the Berkeley City Council voted this week to tell the U.S. Marine Corps to remove its recruiting station from the city’s downtown.
“This is a slap in the face to all brave service men and women and their families,” DeMint said in a prepared statement. “The First Amendment gives the City of Berkeley the right to be idiotic, but from now on they should do it with their own money.”
“If the city can’t show respect for the Marines that have fought, bled and died for their freedom, Berkeley should not be receiving special taxpayer-funded handouts,” he added.
Sen. DeMint will appear Saturday on FOX News Channel — on FOX Online With Jamie Colby — between noon and 2 p.m. ET.
Jamie posted this at 5:24 PM CDT on Friday, February 1st, 2008 as Dirty Hippies, Heroes
January 31st, 2008
Semper Fi
The moronic pinko hippies in Berkley have decided that the men who defend their freedoms every day are unwelcome in their city:
Berkeley gives Marines the bootCity Council says recruiting station not welcome; military mum for nowArticle Last Updated: 01/31/2008 12:53:41 PM PST
BERKELEY — Hey-hey, ho-ho, the Marines in Berkeley have got to go.That’s the message from the Berkeley City Council, which voted 8-1 to tell the U.S. Marines that its Shattuck Avenue recruiting station “is not welcome in the city, and if recruiters choose to stay, they do so as uninvited and unwelcome intruders.”In addition, the council voted to explore enforcing its law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation against the Marines because of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. And it officially encouraged the women’s peace group Code Pink to impede the work of the Marines in the city by protesting in front of the station.In a separate item, the council voted 8-1 to give Code Pink a designated parking space in front of the recruiting station once a week for six months and a free sound permit for protesting once a week from noon to 4 p.m.
When you believe that the simpletons of Code Pink have more legitimacy than the United States Marine Corps you should be checked for mental illness. Don’t these high minded socialists understand that their freedom to stink of patchouli and wear hemp sandals is protected every single day by the men they seem to enjoy maligning?Our entire country would be better off if Berkley mysteriously fell into the sea.
Jamie posted this at 4:02 PM CDT on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 as Commie Recrudescence, Dirty Hippies