Are We in Revolutionary Times?

By Victor Davis Hanson | June 15, 2012 | National Review

Legally, President Obama has reiterated the principle that he can pick and choose which U.S. laws he wishes to enforce (see his decision to reverse the order of the Chrysler creditors, his decision not to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, and his administration’s contempt for national-security confidentiality and Senate and House subpoenas to the attorney general). If one individual can decide to exempt nearly a million residents from the law — when he most certainly could not get the law amended or repealed through proper legislative or judicial action — then what can he not do? Obama is turning out to be the most subversive chief executive in terms of eroding U.S. law since Richard Nixon.

Obama and Stalin: How They’re Alike

By Robert Ringer | May 30, 2012 | WND

Exclusive: Robert Ringer sees both leaders as soulless beneficiaries of propaganda

There have been scores of books that have attempted to pull the media mask off of Barack Obama and reveal the naked communist that resides within him. Some, like Dinesh D’Souza’s “The Roots of Obama’s Rage” and Stanley Kurtz’s “Radical-in-Chief,” have been especially revealing.

None of these works, however, has come as close to entrapping the purveyor of the biggest political scam in U.S. history as Edward Klein’s new book, “The Amateur.” I have to admit I was surprised when I saw that the book had risen to No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, even though the far-left media have virtually ignored it.

But give credit where credit is due. The New York Times, as it has done throughout its long history, once again placed the integrity of its industry-standard best-seller list above its ideological beliefs.

Though they are trying hard not to acknowledge the existence of Klein’s book, the left-wing media by now must be quietly apoplectic – especially when reading about Klein’s tell-all, three-hour interview with Jeremiah Wright. Among other revelations, Wright told Klein he was offered $150,000 by an Obama surrogate to keep his mouth shut during Obama’s run for president.

The Socialist Mask of Marxism

By Ion Mihai Pacepa | June 4, 2012 | PJ Media

History usually repeats itself, and if you have lived two lives, as I have done, you have a good chance of seeing that re-enactment with your own eyes. In 1978, I paid with two death sentences from my native Romania for helping her people rid themselves of their Marxist dictatorship, carefully disguised as socialism. Thirty years later I witnessed how the same Marxism, camouflaged as socialism, began infecting the shores of my adoptive country, the United States, which had just won a 44-year Cold War against Marxism and against its earthly incarnation, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

In a 2008 column titled “Big Political Shifts Are Underway,” Joelle Fishman, chairman of the Action Commission of the Communist Party USA, strongly endorsed the Democratic Party’s candidate for the White House, appealing to all working people in the United States to back Senator Barack Obama, in order to provide “a landslide defeat of the Republican ultra-right.”

The Left’s One-Percenter Problem

By Frank Salvato | May 17, 2012 | New Media Journal

In the aftermath of Vice President Joe Biden’s “Howard Dean” moment in Ohio this week, I was struck by the sheer magnitude of the Progressive-Democrat Left’s hypocrisy when it comes to their political attacks on the so-called “rich.” As the unwashed masses of the Occupy Movement – the overwhelming majority of which are anarchists, pseudo-Socialists, Progressive activists and union operatives – take to the streets of Chicago to protest the NATO summit, I really do have to wonder if they – the useful idiots of the new millennium – know that those who they follow are the one-percenters?

Among the leaders of the Progressive Movement and the Democrat Party, it is nearly impossible to identify anyone among them who isn’t in the one-percent, and that includes President Obama and, yes, Vice President Biden. Maybe that’s why his statement, “They just don’t get us,” made my head cock like a dog hearing a high-pitched noise. “Who’s us,” I thought to myself.

Do You Know Anyone Like Barack Obama? [Video]

Related Articles

• Anti-Obama ad with strange animals is oddly effective (theblaze.com)
• Barack Buchanan and the gay left (dailycaller.com)
• Legislative Lowdown: Obama out of the closet and into the unemployment line (dailycaller.com)
• Barack Obama, George Clooney and the $15 Million Fundraiser (newsfeed.time.com)
• Romney: Obama shouldn’t be tried for treason (dailycaller.com)
• Baller-in-Chief! Barack Obama Plays Basketball With George Clooney and Tobey Maguire (eonline.com)
• BARACK OBAMA Honored with Fried Chicken and Waffles (naijapen.wordpress.com)
• Are Barack and Michelle Obama Fans of the Kardashians? (popsugar.com)
• Standing with Barack Obama (bilerico.com)
• FOCUS: Barack Obama Has Evolved! (readersupportednews.org)
• Obama basks again in Hollywood glory, but at cost? (dailycaller.com)

Obama’s Plan to Destroy the Republic

By Erik Rush | May 10, 2012 | WND

Exclusive: Erik Rush explains ongoing steps that culminate in martial law

On April 23, Doug Hagmann exposed Canada Free Press readers to the theory that simmering social unrest in America and (to a slightly lesser extent) across the globe is “not due to Obama’s inexperience or failed policies. Rather, it is the direct result of the implementation of his successful policies.”

I’ve been saying this for some time, but I was still gratified to hear Hagmann say it, and that his column and May 7 followup piece gleaned significant exposure. Attributing his information to an anonymous insider, Hagmann outlines how the Obama administration is covertly utilizing prominent agitators among the political left to incite chaos, and eventually violence, based on racial and class factors, while the administration continues to sabotage America’s economic engine. The latter efforts are also intended to catalyze widespread civil unrest.

Implementation of this plan is, according to Hagmann’s source, being carried out via Obama’s unelected czars and heavily involves the Department of Homeland Security. From lower-level DHS agents making payments to street-level agitators, to former green energy czar Van Jones mentoring Occupy leaders, to coordination with political allies such as the New Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan, the administration has all bases covered. Cultural balkanization and another heavy hit to the economy are calculated to result in unprecedented rioting and finally widespread public pandemonium followed by implementation of martial law.

The objectives here are personal power for Obama, of course, and a coalescing of the federal government’s authority; the goal, the destruction of the United States of America as a constitutional republic.

Like the class-warfare issue, the racial component is only a part of the agenda, but this being America, it is a significant one. In the operational sense, it is both a sad irony and potentially very dangerous that the left has managed to grow up a crop of black Americans who are as ignorant, belligerent and destructive as white bigots of bygone days falsely contended.

Based on who and what I knew Obama to be – and I knew this well before he was elected – when he did win the presidency, my immediate thought was This is one mother****er who’s going to do his level best to stay in office permanently.

When I called Obama a communist in 2008 and 2009, even conservatives giggled, but it made perfect sense to me. Everyone of significance in the man’s life had either been a card-carrying communist, or their worldview was principally based on Marxism. The Black Liberation Theology (effectively an oxymoron) in which Obama was schooled for 20 years has its roots in Marxism, as does the social justice doctrine to which he, his minions and their useful liberal idiots so dearly adhere.

Read the full article here.

Related articles

• Doug Hagmann ~ The Planned Re-Election Of Obama, Revolutionary Style… (projectworldawareness.com)
• Obama: ‘2012 is Make or Break for American Marxism’ (gulagbound.com)
• He added, “It’s going… (highcountryshows.com)
• Civil War?! (highcountryshows.com)
• Leveraging Racism for Chaos – Gateway to Communism (gulagbound.com)
• Louis Farrakhan: Obama’s life in danger (glennbeck.com)
• Farrakhan does it again (glennbeck.com)
• “Fundamentally Transforming America” via the Keystone Decision (naplesgirlblog.com)
• Obama Politicizes Trayvon for Latino Audience (johnmalcolm.me)
• Understand Obama’s Ideology Well, to Know Him Well & Save America from Him (gulagbound.com)
• Beck: Progressive Mission Accomplished,’ Now on to Phase II – Communism (johnmalcolm.me)
• Jeremiah Wright Unleashed (glennbeck.com)
• The Art of Political War for Tea Parties (johnmalcolm.me)
• Obama includes Canada in his `King of World’ territory (canadafreepress.com)
• Reality 2012: Even Obama Has Lower Expectations for Obama This Time Around (biggovernment.com)
• The 4th Reich in America: How Obama’s “Rich” Replaced Hitler’s “Jews” (shereekrider.wordpress.com)
• Ever Get the Feeling the American People are Going One Way and Obama is Going Another? (biggovernment.com)
• Obama’s fundamental transformation of America! (wdednh.wordpress.com)
• The “Chicago Way” Must Be Stopped! (conservativesonfire.wordpress.com)
• Obama working on the Fundamental Transformation of Canada (canadafreepress.com)
• Obama 2012: All about Social Issues (americanthinker.com)
• Obama’s YouTube Hack-U-Mentary Censors Most Negative Feedback (wizbangblog.com)
• The American People are Fed Up (johnmalcolm.me)
• Government’s Trump Card: The Use of Force (johnmalcolm.me)
• The Blaze Magazine: A known terrorist group has infiltrated our government (theblaze.com)
• (“You don’t need the mainstream media, FOXNews, the conservative blogosphere or even Canada Free Press (CFP) to tell you that Obama has the deck of cards stacked against any realistic hope of relieving him from office”) Surviving Obama’s reelection… (gunnyg.wordpress.com)
• Sarah Palin’s Main CPAC Speech Points: Did She Sell Out? (wizbangblog.com)
• “The entire Obama presidency, in one anecdote” (wizbangblog.com)
• Letters To The Editor (jewishpress.com)
• Obama’s Coalition of the Enraged (gunnyg.wordpress.com)
• November 6, 2012 _ An American Plebiscite? (conservativesonfire.wordpress.com)
• The planned re-election of Obama, revolutionary style (askmarion.wordpress.com)

The New Reactionaries

By Victor Davis Hanson | April 29, 2012 | PJ Media

Our New Regressivism

About fifteen years ago, many liberals began to self-identify as progressives—partly because of the implosion of the Great Society and the Reagan reaction that had tarnished the liberal brand and left it as something akin to “permissive” or “naïve,” partly because “progressive” was supposedly an ideological rather than a political identification, and had included some early twentieth-century Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover.

But twenty-first century progressivism is not aimed at political reform. There is no new effort at racial unity. There is not much realization that we are in a globalized, rapidly changing, high-tech economy or that race and gender are not as they were fifty years ago. Instead, progressivism has become a reactionary return to the 1960s—or even well before. The new regressivism seeks to resurrect the machine ethos of Mayor Daley, the glory green days of the Whole Earth Catalog, the union era of George Meany, Jimmy Hoffa, and Walter Reuther, the racial polarization of the old Black Panther Party and the old Al Sharpton, and a Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, or Peter Jennings reading to us each evening three slightly different versions of the Truth.

The New Old Chicago

Barack Obama is trying to turn back the way of politics to the era of the pre-reform Chicago machine. He was the first presidential candidate to renounce campaign-financing funds since the law was enacted. He opposes any effort to clamp down on voting fraud. Even his compliant media worries that the president’s current jetting from one campaign stop to another in the key swing states is a poorly disguised way to politick on the federal government’s dime. Bundlers are, as was the ancient custom, given plum honorific posts abroad. Obama has held twice as many fundraisers as the much reviled George Bush had at a similar point in his administration. Obama supporters now target large Romney givers and post their names with negative bios on websites, as if we are back to Nixon’s enemies of the people. Websites sprout up that go after administration critics in Agnew style, but without the latter’s self-caricature. The 2008 criticism about ending the revolving door, lobbyists, and pay-for-play renting out of the Lincoln bedroom was, well…just examine the career of a Peter Orszag. An embarrassed media keeps silent about the new reactionary ethics, apparently on the premise that not to would endanger four more years of the “progressive” agenda. On matters of presidential style, we are likewise retro, as Obama sets records for playing golf, and in Marie Antoinette style the First Family bounces between Vail, Aspen, Martha’s Vineyard, Vegas, and Costa del Sol, often in separate jets, as if we, the people, receive vicarious joy from catching glimpses of the Obama versions of Camelot. We have Kennedy wannabes without their own Kennedy money.

Earth Day Forever

On matters of energy, Obama has regressed to the Earth Day mindset of the 1970s, when we were reaching “peak” oil, and untried wind and solar were soon to be the new-age remedy for soon-to-be-exhausted fossil fuels. Add up the anti-empirical quotes from Obama himself, Energy Secretary Chu, and Interior Secretary Salazar (inflate your tires, “tune up” your car, look to U.S. algae reserves, let energy prices “skyrocket,” hope gas rises to European levels, don’t open federal lands even if gas reaches $10 a gallon, etc.) and, in reactionary fashion, we are time-machined back to the campus quad of the 1970s. In this  la la world of Van Jones, evil oil companies supposedly connived to stifle green energy and hook us on fossil fuels, inferior energies that have nothing to recommend them. It is as if the revolutions in horizontal drilling, fracking, and discoveries of vast new reserves never occurred, as if Exxon and Chevron dodge taxes in a manner that Google and Amazon never would, as if efficient smaller gas engines, clean gas blends, and pollution devices have not made the American car both clean-burning and economical beyond our imagination forty years ago. The Obamians, frozen in amber, really believe oil is about to run out, “tuned up” internal combustion engines powering underinflated tires pollute as they did in the 1920s, and Teapot Dome U.S. oil companies need to be “crucified”—as regional EPA director and Obama appointee Al Armendariz, in fact, boasted. So we borrow hundreds of millions of dollars to subsidize money-losing solar and wind plants, while putting federal lands rich in oil and gas off-limits to companies eager to pay royalties, hire thousands, and supply the U.S. with its own energy—and all for a regressive ideology. Few see that Solyndra really is the new Teapot Dome.

Read the full article here.

Related Articles

• Big Oil dominates political attacks on Obama (grist.org)
• A Clueless Obama Abandons Economic Growth (spectator.org)
• Obama’s “Reptile Dysfunction” Energy Policy (canadafreepress.com)
• Oil Price Slippage Constitutes Warning (markamerica.com)
• Obama’s Plan For More Energy Dependence on China (canadafreepress.com)
• Obama’s New Gas Price Scapegoat (canadafreepress.com)
• Let the fainting begin: Obama unveils 2012 stump speech (twitchy.com)
• Kauilapele – “Let Us All Serve The Light” – And Steve Beckow’s “Periodical Reminder That Obama Serves The Light” (lucas2012infos.wordpress.com)
• Obama tells Americans not to take chance on Romney (newsinfo.inquirer.net)
• The Great Green Swindle (theblaze.com)
• Obama ramps up campaign, knocks Romney’s CEO past (lfpress.com)
• The Caucus: Romney Misleads on Obama and Energy Prices (thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Stimulus Can of Worms: Crony Capitalism, Corporate Fascism, Global Governance, Socialism, Oligarchy (johnmalcolm.me)
• Barack Hussein Obama is NOT a ‘Nice Man’ (gulagbound.com)
• Obama moves on from Lies and Damn Lies, to statistics… (wizbangblog.com)
• Job Numbers Put Obama Between Rock, Hard Place (foxnews.com)
• Romney Resurrects Solyndra, Claims Obama Blew it on Clean Energy (treehugger.com)
• Green at Any Cost: Solyndra was just the beginning (theblaze.com)
• Energy primer (jackrich.wordpress.com)
• VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Obama’s Faith-Based Energy Policy. When the summer driving season starts so… (pjmedia.com)
• HANSON: Cabinet gone wild (washingtontimes.com)
• U.S. Green Building Council Commends the White House and USGBC Member Companies for Announcing Nearly $4 Billion Investment in Energy Upgrades to Public and Private Buildings (prweb.com)

Stimulus Can of Worms: Crony Capitalism, Corporate Fascism, Global Governance, Socialism, Oligarchy

Obama Stimulus Dollars Funded Soros Empire

Van Jones at the “Take Back the American Dream” conference.

Executive Summary

Newly recently released tax documents reveal how billionaire “philanthropist” George Soros expanded his U.S.-based empire by using funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the Obama stimulus. Soros and Obama worked hand-in-glove through the stimulus, which has been called the largest single partisan wealth transfer in American history.

In 2010, tax records show that Soros, a convicted inside trader with extensive knowledge of the American financial system and government policies under Obama, deployed grantees from his Open Society Foundations¹ to lobby for and acquire federal contracts for job training, green energy, and community redevelopment programs.  By gaining control over those resources, Soros advanced his agenda for “green economics,” open borders, and increased government handouts. In short, he grew his empire, which includes much of the “progressive” movement in the U.S., as the federal government and Obama’s political constituencies grew in power and influence.

This report analyzes George Soros’s grants to organizations in 2010.  The records show massive coordination of non-profit networks in the states and nationally.  Four powerful organizations and coalitions — The STAR Coalition, The Gamaliel Foundation, the Apollo Alliance, and Green for All — are given detailed scrutiny in this regard, with the involvement of Van Jones getting special mention. Jones is the former Obama “Green Jobs Czar” fired after information about his communist past surfaced through the work of anti-communist blogger Trevor Loudon and then-Fox News personality Glenn Beck.  The lobbying power of such efforts ensured that stimulus funds flowed from taxpayers into union coffers and into the hands of other activists who had been instrumental in putting President Obama into office.

This report, “Obama Stimulus Dollars Funded Soros Empire,” includes an analysis of how Soros-funded organizations and networks operate, the strategies used to steer stimulus money to special interest lobbies, and an explanation of how taxpayers were forced to subsidize the “progressive” movement in the U.S. However, only Congress, with its investigative powers, can get to the bottom of how this money was spent and into whose coffers it ultimately ended up.

America’s Survival, Inc. (ASI) began the process of analyzing the Soros empire, which has been financed with almost $8 billion from the controversial billionaire, during an October 27, 2011, “Soros Files” conference in Washington, D.C. Reports and speeches from this conference are posted at www.sorosfiles.com The reports available at this website include How Soros Finances Marxism in America, Soros Funds Marxist Legal Groups and Terrorists, and How Soros is Subverting the Criminal Justice System. This website is updated on a regular basis.

How the “partisan wealth transfer” called the Obama stimulus was applied to Soros-funded organizations that dominate the progressive movement and President Obama’s political base. 

John Lott, an economist and co-author with Grover Norquist of the just released Debacle: Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future, writes that the Obama stimulus was “a massive partisan wealth transfer — the largest single transfer in American history.” In his book, Throw Them All Out, Peter Schweizer reveals that Soros helped craft the stimulus then invested in companies benefiting from it.

Surprisingly little has been written about George Soros’s role in the Recovery Act.  This may be due in part to the fact that Soros’s Open Society Foundations in the U.S. (Open Society Institute and Fund to Promote Open Society) only recently disclosed their 2010 federal tax records.  Whatever the reason for this delay, for almost two years it effectively concealed the influence the billionaire currency speculator exercised over the federal government’s efforts to “stimulate” the economy. Such “stimulation,” as we can see, was political in nature.

(This title is from a Soros-sponsored conference on how to use Obama stimulus dollars).

By the time hundreds of billions in federal Recovery Act dollars started flowing to the states, George Soros’s grantees were poised to take advantage of key provisions of the stimulus package.  This is unsurprising, for Soros had already distributed grants to dozens of activist groups who lobbied for inclusion of those provisions.  These organizations were then first in line for stimulus funds earmarked for “green jobs training,” “neighborhood stabilization” and other activist-driven projects.

In the alchemy of Open Society, a dollar spent on an activist can translate into ten dollars in federal subsidies. Hence, Soros and his rich allies give to the poor (and their representatives) in order to take from everyone in the middle.

For Soros, and the activist network he supports, the stimulus program represented a once-in-a-generation opportunity to play Robin Hood with other people’s money.  The Obama administration earmarked $787 billion, and much of that was for precisely the types of activities Soros favors: jobs programs, green jobs programs, green jobs programs for felons, “food justice” activism, mortgage assistance that transferred private debts to taxpayers, “neighborhood stabilization” and “weatherization” schemes that enriched community organizers, billion-dollar loans to “sustainability” start-ups, federal subsidies for schools, and social service money-sinks like Head Start. Meanwhile, Soros found other ways to meddle in the stimulus.  Many Open Society grantees received funds from Soros specifically earmarked to demand “equity” and racial diversity in the distribution of Recovery Act funds.

Soros deployed his usual arsenal of socially divisive strategies in these efforts.  He handed out grants to key minority groups to allege “inequality” in the distribution of Recovery Act funds.  These activists injected racial and ethnic politics into mortgage relief efforts and jobs programs.  Recovery Act measures to address the mortgage defaults especially empowered activists to denounce “the one percent” and accuse their fellow citizens of purported racial and anti-immigrant discrimination.

The Recovery Act was only one government initiative through which Soros prevailed upon taxpayers (largely without their knowledge or consent) to subsidize his non-profit programs.  In New York City, Soros joined forces with Mayor Bloomberg and the Robin Hood Foundation to provide seed money for expensive social programs and new charter schools.

Such projects, which enjoy rabidly enthusiastic press, frequently end up being only fractionally funded by the wealthy philanthropists who start them, while taxpayers foot the bills.  In the hands of George Soros, such private/public initiatives are a key back-door method of seizing control of the government.  They are also a back-door method of implementing socialism.  The Recovery Act speeded this process exponentially.

The Strategy

On May 10, 2010, a two-day event, “Organizing the Recovery,” was held in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Open Society Institute and the Ford Foundation. The STAR (States for a Transparent and Accountable Recovery) Coalition promoted the event and described itself as a network of groups working at the state and local levels to ensure that the Recovery Act was used to “address vital social needs and benefit those most harmed by the failed economic policies of the past.” This was an open invitation for the liberal/left to apply for funds.

The STAR Coalition consisted of:

Read the full article here.

Related Articles

• Obama Stimulus Dollars Funded Soros Empire (thesalvationtimes.wordpress.com)
• Obama Stimulus Dollars Funded Soros Empire, In Scandal That Dwarfs ACORN And GSA, Says New Report (thedaleygator.wordpress.com)
• Report: Soros’s hands in public coffer (kajunman.wordpress.com)
• Obama Stimulus Dollars Funded Soros Empire, in Scandal that Dwarfs ACORN and GSA, Says New Report (gunnyg.wordpress.com)
• Dossier of George Soros – The Enemy Within (theobamahustle.wordpress.com)
• Soros and Obama vs. Sheriff Joe Arpaio (wnd.com)
• ‘Great Schlep’ rerun gets $200,000 from Soros’ son (timesofisrael.com)
• AMERICA, The U.S. Population, Wake Up…George Soros is HERE…..via e-mail to Admin.. (capecoralblogger.wordpress.com)
• Obama Stimulus Dollars Funded Soros Empire (republicmainstreet.wordpress.com)

Living Like A Liberal

BY Matt Labash | July 19, 2010 | The Weekly Standard

It’s hard work, politicizing your whole life.

Photo Credit: Elwood H. Smith

This is a story about living the good life. Or not the good life, exactly, in the Italian, dolce vita understanding of the term. It’s more about living the better life, a comparative way of living. It’s about living better than I was before, living better than I once thought possible, living better, if you’ll forgive my candor, than do you.

Here, I use “you” to loosely mean “conservative” or even “disengaged liberal.” For living better than you is all about honesty. Honesty with you. Honesty with myself. So I’ll just level with the two of us: I used to be a conservative. I mean, I wasn’t some nutcake conservative. I didn’t follow along with Glenn Beck at home, flowcharting the lineage of Lenin to Van Jones on my kids’ Fisher-Price chalkboard. I didn’t attend Rand Paul rallies in a tricorn and a frilly blouse like some kind of colonial crossdresser. I was just a vanilla, middle-of-the-road conservative. As long as I remained undertaxed, overdefended, and unaborted, I was pretty content. Live and let live, I thought. I might have even made a good Libertarian, except I hate science fiction, think Ayn Rand was a crank with an unfortunate haircut, and would fail the house drug test (when my results came back negative).

But my lesser living was a lifetime ago. Actually, just a few weeks ago, but it feels like the distant past. It was before my road to Damascus encounter, before the illuminative flame touched my torch of enlightenment. It was B.J.K.—Before Justin Krebs.

More by Matt Labash

• Breitbart’s Last Laugh
• The Dinner Party
• The Conscience of a Conservative
• Past Their Sell-By Date
• A Hitchless World

Who is Justin Krebs, you ask? Only my sensei. My guru. The man who made plain that I had politics all wrong. I used to think along the lines of the British writer and publisher Ernest Benn that politics was “the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.” Thus, I had put my politics in my political box, and my life in my living box. When I should’ve placed all the contents in the same box—a much bigger, biodegradable one. (You can get them at Treecycle.com.)

Krebs showed me that my politics shouldn’t be just my politics, but also my religion, my sun and moon, my inhalation and exhalation. Since politics, particularly liberal politics, bring people so much joy, wouldn’t I be better off politicizing everything—the way I live and work and play? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way. The answer is a resounding “yes,” as evidenced right there in the title of Krebs’s new book: 538 Ways to Live Work and Play Like a Liberal.

The 32-year-old Krebs didn’t just write this book, which comes complete with a 538-item checklist. He’s lived it. He sharpened his liberal-living iron on the mean conservative streets of Highland Park, New Jersey; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and, finally, that repository of red state madness, the island of Manhattan. Girding him for battle were his parents—two good liberals, who sent him to a cooperative preschool, where he called all the other kids’ moms and dads by their first names. Krebs says his parents were his “playmates” as well, though all was not idyllic. There are some intimations of child abuse; they took him to a Walter Mondale rally when he was just 6 years old.

Upon graduating from Harvard, Krebs had his liberal ticket punched repeatedly. He served in the office of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. He blogs on the progressive blog OpenLeft. He is one of the founding directors of The Tank, “a non-profit arts presenter in the heart of Manhattan.” But his enduring legacy, his gift to all of us really, was hatched over a pitcher of beer.

Seven years ago, like many a good liberal, Krebs and his friends were driven to drink by the “arrogance and authoritarianism of the Bush administration.” What started as an informal vinegar session in a Hell’s Kitchen dive was formalized into a “Drinking Liberally” club, which met every Thursday, a place for activist types to talk progressive politics, network, plot strategy, and get hooched up (though its organizers remind us, “As you drink liberally, always drink responsibly”). As the club gained more members, it begat chapters nationwide and led to offshoot Eating Liberally clubs for foodies, Screening Liberally clubs for film buffs, Reading Liberally clubs for bookworms, and Laughing Liberally clubs that use “humor and laughter to spread understanding of liberal ideas and advance progressive values.” (Sounds like a scream!)

There are now 330 Living Liberally chapters in 50 states and around the globe. It’s no longer just a few longhairs knocking back pitchers of cheap suds, bitching about the Patriot Act. Living Liberally has become a way of life. There’s even a Liberal Card, a membership card which is “about showing your liberal pride, joining the liberal community and claiming your liberal discounts.” It’s printed on renewable green “CornCards,” rather than the petroleum that is blackening not only the brown pelicans of the Louisiana marshlands, but also our souls.

As Krebs writes, Drinking Liberally “has never been about drinking .  .  . it’s about progressive politics in a social setting.” It’s about all of us being “in this together.” It’s not just about “how you vote on Election Day.” It’s about “how you vote with your wallet every day.” It’s not just about “what you chant at a rally, but what you laugh at or rock out to on your iPod.” It’s about saying “it’s about” a lot, and then saying something real meaningful afterwards. Like this: “Living like a liberal is never just about making politics personal, but about making personal politics public.” It’s about alliteration.

I’m just going to be honest again: All this alliteration wet my whistle (see, it’s catching). I wanted to find out what it was all about. Krebs’s book was due for release on July 4, the day we gained our independence as a country. But I was ready to gain my own independence as an individual—independence from this disengaged, right-leaning, but mostly apolitical way of life I’d been enslaved by. So I secured an early copy.

The 538-item checklist was daunting. As Krebs admits, “Some of the ideas are hard, or even uncomfortable. You don’t have to do them all. Just think about them.” So I did. For roughly 10 days, I thought about them and undertook a good many of them. There was no way I could tackle them all. But it was clear that if I wanted to gain my independence by Independence Day by biting off a representative sample, I’d still be busier than a one-legged Obama in an ass-kicking contest. Time to get to work.

Read the full article here.

Related Articles

• Drinking Liberally – Seattle (horsesass.org)
• Special State of the Union Drinking Liberally (horsesass.org)
• Tamara Doesn’t Want To Marry A Republican! (lukeford.net)
• Super Tuesday Drinking Liberally Seattle (horsesass.org)
• OLSEN: Dangers of academia’s ‘indoctrination mills’ (johnmalcolm.me)
• Drinking Liberally – Seattle (horsesass.org)
• Opinion: The Destructive, Unmerry Pranksters (wnyc.org)
• The Illiberalism of Contemporary Liberals (maverickphilosopher.typepad.com)
• American Liberalism Is Dying, Though Its Last Gasps Are Louder Than Its Voice Ever Was (neosecularist.com)

The Ryan Test: Demagoguery Versus Ideas

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Jonathan S. Tobin | August 11, 2012 | Commentary Magazine As John wrote earlier today, liberals are convinced that Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan to be his running mate offers them a golden opportunity to savage the Republicans about the Wisconsin congressman’s budget plans. Predictably, the New York Times delivered one of the first such salvos in its editorial posted […]

Smoking Obama’s Crack and Yearning for the Mud

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Vanderleun | August 10, 2012 | American Digest [From 2008. Only the names have been changed because the target has changed.] This downward flight of intellectuals has been going on ever since the Romantic movement began its counter-revolution a couple hundred years ago. No matter how much they flap their lips it’s a fall, not […]