Story from the center-left Politico.
Excerpt:
The Coakley adviser’s memo: National Dems Failed to Aid Coakley Until Too Late
[…]— From the beginning, Brown labeled President Obama’s health care and cap and trade plans as tax increases. Polling throughout the race showed this to be the most effective attack on Coakley.
There were other policies that hurt Coakley, but this was the most effective.
More here from Gateway Pundit.
Awesome. Just awesome.
Here’s MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on Republican Scott Brown. (H/T Newsbusters)
Excerpt:
Lost in the angst about Obama and Coakley is the little-recognized real headline of this vote. You have heard Scott Brown speculating, talking out of his bare bottom, about whether or not the President of the United States was born out of wedlock. You have heard Scott Brown respond to the shout from a supporter that they should stick a curling iron into Ms. Coakley’s rectum with the answer, “We can do this.”
You may not have heard Scott Brown support a Constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, or describing two women having a child as being quote, “Just not normal.” You may not have heard Scott Brown associating himself with the Tea Party movement, perhaps the saddest collection of people who don’t want to admit why they really hate since the racists of the South in the sixties insisted they were really just concerned about states’ rights. You may not of heard Scott Brown voting against paid leaves of absence for Massachusetts Red Cross workers who had gone to New York to help after 9/11.
In short, in Scott Brown we have an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against woman and against politicians with whom he disagrees. In any other time in our history, this man would have been laughed off the stage as an unqualified and a disaster in the making by the most conservative of conservatives. Instead, the commonwealth of Massachusetts is close to sending this bad joke to the Senate of the United States.
News Busters has the video. This is what happens when you only listen to people who agree with you. It becomes impossible to focus on substantive policy debates and evidence, and you start to go after people personally. The way to stop it is to seek out the best people on the other side and to read their work, or better yet, see them in a debate. Leftists shouldn’t look at tea party protesters, they should look at Thomas Sowell.
In one way, this suits me well. Brown is going to get elected to the Senate today in Massachusetts, and I hope that the way that the left wing media portrays him will drive him further to the right, and make him more concerned about bypassing the media to talk to the people directly. The more they insult him, the less sympathy he will have for compromise, and the less he will be influenced by what the elite think of him.
This long article from Reason magazine is must reading. (H/T ECM)
The author, Greg Lukianoff, is the the president of FIRE (Foundation for individual Rights in Education).
Here are some of the scariest parts:
Other codes promise a pain-free world, such as Texas Southern University’s ban on attempting to cause “emotional,” “mental,” or “verbal harm,” which includes “embarrassing, degrading or damaging information, assumptions, implications, [and] remarks” (emphasis added). The code at Texas A&M prohibits violating others’ “rights” to “respect for personal feelings” and “freedom from indignity of any type.”
[…]Fordham, for example, prohibits using any email message to “insult” or “embarrass,” while Northeastern University tells students they may not send any message that “in the sole judgment of the University” is “annoying” or “offensive.”
[…]The University of Idaho bans “communication” that is “insensitive.” New York University prohibits “insulting, teasing, mocking, degrading, or ridiculing another person or group,” as well as “inappropriate…comments, questions, [and] jokes.” Davidson College’s sexual harassment policy still prohibits the use of “patronizing remarks,” including referring to an adult as “girl,” “boy,” “hunk,” “doll,” “honey,” or “sweetie.” It also bars “comments or inquiries about dating.”
[…]Until 2007 Western Michigan University’s harassment policy banned “sexism,” which it defined as “the perception and treatment of any person, not as an individual, but as a member of a category based on sex.” I am unfamiliar with any other attempt by a public institution to ban a perception, let alone perceiving that a person is a man or woman. Even public restrooms violate this rule, which may help explain why the university finally abandoned it.
[…]In fall 2008, a professor at Central Connecticut State University called the police on students who gave a presentation in his speech class arguing for the safety value of concealed carry.
And the conclusion is worth citing in full:
With all these examples of authoritarian bullying and systemic miseducation about rights, we shouldn’t be surprised to discover that students are learning not only to accept censorship but to censor each other. Just before I completed this article, more than 10,000 copies of the official student newspaper for the University of Arizona were stolen and dumped by students who were upset about an article.
Newspaper theft is common on college campuses, with the most chilling examples culminating in public burnings. Students have burned other students’ newspapers at schools as prestigious as Cornell, Boston College, Dartmouth, and the University of Wisconsin. In 2008 multiple incidents were reported in which students destroyed pro-life students’ protest displays, including an incident at Missouri State University in which students smashed dozens of Popsicle-stick crosses and another at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point in which a member of the student government tore up the crosses one by one in broad daylight. His defense: “Since [abortion] is a right, you don’t have the right to challenge it.”
When students come to believe that censoring rival points of view is not only permissible but laudable, the potential damage goes far beyond campus. Our colleges and universities produce our scientists, our business leaders, our lawyers, and our legislators. The habits formed in college inevitably seep into the other major social institutions.
In 1957 the U.S. Supreme Court said of the nation’s colleges, “Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die.” The Court was right. The next generation needs to learn the practices of a free people. If it doesn’t, we shouldn’t be surprised if, when it takes its turn to run our republic, values such as free speech and tolerance are treated like rusty, battered antiques: quaint, mysterious, and best kept in the basement.
FIRE is an important organization that I respect, and you should know about their work.
WINTERY KNIGHT 