Liberal/Progressive  Derangement Syndrome By Peter Burrows elburropete@gmail.com 2/4/14

I recently watched a John Stossel show where he and guest Bob Beckel discussed raising the minimum wage.  Beckel, who was campaign manager for Walter Mondale’s 1984 presidential campaign, is probably best known these days as the token liberal on Fox‘s “The Five“ show.

Bob’s liberal bona fides were on full display in his heated support for raising the minimum wage.  He showed all  the symptoms, listed in any textbook on abnormal psychology, of  what is commonly known as Liberal/Progressive Derangement Syndrome (LPDS), a mental illness which leads to total irrationality .

For those not familiar with this devastating cognitive affliction, let me run through its various symptoms as I saw them ravage poor Bob.

1) Liberals have a deep psychological need to display their moral superiority.   Nothing satisfies this need better than a cause that fires up feelings of righteous indignation, outrage at an injustice, an unfairness, an inequality, an exploitation.  Bob was seething at the plight of people trying to make a living in this great country on the current minimum wage of only $7.25 an hour.

2) LPDS sufferers see victims everywhere, victims who need to be saved by them.  This doesn’t require any actual victims, just perceived victims.  In Bob’s eyes, anyone working for the minimum wage is a VICTIM!

3) Where there are victims, there must be villains, evil doers, exploiters, polluters, whatever. In this case, Bob‘s evil doers are those rotten, dirty bastard EMPLOYERS who pay poverty wages to Bob‘s victims.  Once again, there doesn’t have to be any actual villains, just perceived villains.

4) These victims are helpless pawns in an unfair system and are not to blame for their plight. People aren’t poor because they quit school, have out-of-wedlock babies, take drugs etc.  No, those are symptoms of an uncaring, free-enterprise society.  Thus, Bob displays the typical LPDS mind set: The individual doesn’t count because “it takes a village.”

5) This intolerable state of affairs can be fixed by passing a law or starting a government program that usually spends lots of money and shows how compassionate liberals are.  These programs don’t have to work.  In fact, they can do actual harm, but the Bobs don’t care as long as the programs make the Bobs feel good about themselves.  Eliminate poverty? Just raise the minimum wage. Problem solved for all the Bobs, but not all the kids who can‘t get jobs as a result.

6) The above law or program will not require liberals to make any personal sacrifices.  Bob doesn’t have any employees, but he’s sure a big shot with everybody else’s payroll.  President Obama, the day after his State of the Union Speech, displayed this symptom when he said about raising the minimum wage, “It’s time to give America a raise.”  GIVE? Who’s going to do the giving, Mr. President?

7) Liberals never let facts spoil their vision of reality. FACTS DON’T MEAN A DAMN THING.  Facts don’t have a chance against emotions.  Bob got so carried away he pounded the table and declared that there had never been a study, “Not one!” that had showed increasing the minimum wage did any harm. Poor Bob. In this, he is just flat wrong.

This last symptom has recently been the subject of a series of five articles by the economist Thomas Sowell entitled, “Fact Free Liberals.”   He devoted an entire column to the minimum wage in his 1/22/14 column, “Fact-free Liberals, Part II,” in which he wrote, “Various studies going back for decades indicate that minimum wage laws create unemployment, especially among the younger, less experienced and less skilled workers.”

The economist Walter Williams, in his 1/8/14 column, Politics and Minimum Wage, wrote: “There’s little debate among academic economists about the effect of minimum wages. University of California, Irvine, economist David Neumark has examined more than 100 major academic studies on the minimum wage. He reports that 85 percent of the studies ‘find a negative employment effect on low-skilled workers.’ ” Poor Bob probably only read the other 15 percent.  Sure.

I could bore readers by citing specific, recent studies, but let me close by noting that the late Milton Friedman over FORTY YEARS AGO decried the effect of minimum wage laws on black teen unemployment: “The minimum wage hits (them) particularly hard. I’ve often said the minimum wage rate is the most anti-negro law on the books.”

Recent unemployment numbers show black teen unemployment almost double that of white teens. Forty years and liberals still haven’t learned.

LPDS: Incurable.

Neither Scrooge Nor Patsy Be – Part Three by Peter Burrows elburropete@gmail.com 1/24/14

In “Part Two,“ I discussed the reaction of a liberal young lady who was on Sean Hannity’s show last fall featuring seven liberal college kids and seven conservative college kids.   She said the show illustrated how liberals were compassionate and generous, conservatives selfish and stingy, or something to that effect.

She was wrong on two counts. The first, discussed in Part Two, was that non-liberals don’t think spending other peoples’ money qualifies as being compassionate.   Liberals, with their “it takes a village” mentality, can’t understand this.

The second and most important difference is that non-liberals think that most “compassionate” uses of tax dollars are either wasted or do more harm than good.   It’s is not just the disincentives built into welfare, but the inherent waste and corruption that always creeps into government programs.

A study published in April of 2012, The American Welfare State, by Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute, lists 126 different federal programs to wage war on poverty, costing $668 billion in 2012.  Combined with state and local spending, he estimated we spend almost $1 trillion per year, or $61,830 per poor family of three, who if they received these benefits in cash , would get them TAX FREE!

If you suspect that all that money, instead of going to poor people, is going to the troops bravely fighting poverty from foxholes in government offices, you’ve broken the code. “Gosh,” you say, “why don’t we just give that family of three HALF that amount, $30,915, and eliminate all the poverty programs and save a ton of money?”

WHAT? AND FIRE ALL THOSE OVERPAID UNDERWORKED GOVERNMENT WORKERS?  YOU HEARTLESS CONSERVATIVE SCROOGE!

And those brave government poverty fighters, like their brethren in governments jobs around the world, know how to protect their turf.  Anybody who tries to cut these programs faces the indignant, self-righteous fury of the liberal establishment, which includes the mainstream media and most of the clergy.

The food stamp program, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, is a good example. The number of people receiving SNAP has doubled to almost 50 million since 2008 under Obama, thanks in large part to the recession, but also to aggressive promotion and the elimination of work requirements for Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents – ABAWDs.

What critics fail to note, is that the SNAP enrollment also doubled between 2001 and 2007 under President Bush in a time of relative prosperity.  This means that the program has a life of its own, independent of the economy: It grows in good times and REALLY GROWS in bad times. ABAWDs getting free rides forever may fire up the critics, rightfully so, but they’re less than 10% of the total.

In dollar terms, the program has grown in the last dozen years from $17 billion a year to $78 billion.  Republican efforts to cut $40 billion from the estimated levels of spending over the NEXT TEN YEARS, that’s $4 billion a year on average, met with typical demagoguery.  Rep. James McGovern (D-MA) called it “one of the most heartless bills I’ve ever seen.”  (Patsy be he.)

Remember, we’re not talking actual spending cuts, just cuts to estimated spending, the level of which is conveniently obscured by the government practice of base-line budgeting.

If SNAP was in fact a real life line for the poor, who could argue?  Unfortunately, the program has always been gamed by the recipients.  One simple fact that liberals just don’t get: Poor people are poor, not stupid.  SNAP dollars are supposed to go for basic necessities, not booze and cigarettes.  Yeah.  Right.

The black market rate for SNAP benefits, now conveniently dispensed via a debit-like card called an Electronic Benefits Card, is anecdotally about fifty cents on the dollar. Until the beginning of this year, when welfare reform is supposed to close the “strip club loophole,”  these EBT cards were being widely abused.

In her 1/11/3 column, EBT Abuse: The Cash-for-Drunkards Program, Michelle Malkin notes that right here in the Land of Enchantment there were abuses going on: “In New Mexico, Jim Scarantino of Watchdog.org reported that in just a three-month period, EBT cards were used at multiple liquor stores, girly bars, smoke shops and casinos –.”

There has never been a concerted effort to crack down on SNAP abuse, for obvious reasons. The liberals are loath to question anybody’s integrity, especially if the program buys votes for Democrats, and the Republicans are too cowardly to get tough because they fear being called heartless or – GASP! – racists.

While I would eliminate SNAP, fire hundreds of bureaucrats and increase cash benefits in lieu of food stamps for the truly needy, that’s not going to happen.  Too many people with vested interests, too many uncritical supporters who need to be “compassionate”.

I do have an idea that I think would cut the cost of the program by fifteen percent or so, and that would be fifteen percent reduction right now, in real spending, not some mythical budget cut ten years from now.

The idea is quite simple: SNAP cards should be redeemable for CASH at seventy cents on dollar at any FDIC insured bank or savings and loan.  Since this is a better deal than the black market fifty cents,  recipients should welcome the option. It could be called “The SNAP Flexibility And Freedom Act.”

I’m betting fifty percent of the SNAP recipients would take advantage of this new and wonderfully compassionate program, which is how I’d sell it.  (Fifty percent taking a thirty percent reduction equals an overall fifteen percent reduction.)

Democrats will oppose it, for the simple reason that it would expose the waste in the program, and raise questions about  waste in many other poverty programs.

I emailed Rep. Pearce with the idea, but no response.  Sigh. Nobody listens to me.

Neither Scrooge Nor Patsy Be  12/13/13

A few weeks ago I came across Sean Hannity interviewing a panel of college kids, seven liberal and seven conservative.  I normally don’t watch Hannity, but this time I did because I wanted to see if the lib-kids met my expectations. They did.

One liberal young lady, for example, began to hyperventilate about how she wanted to live in a world where there were police, firefighters, ambulances, schools, blah blah blah, gush gush gush, and all the good stuff associated with government.

Her implication was that liberals like herself are morally and intellectually superior because THEY want the law and order we pay for through taxes, while anybody who wants to cut taxes wants to return to the law of the jungle.

Well now, young lib-lady, this may come as a shock to you, but we all want to live in the civilized world you describe, but the issue is not civilization vs. anarchy.  The issue is how a society keeps in check the self interests of the people in government.

In other words, how do we balance the needs of society vs. what the government bureaucracies want? They aren’t the same thing. Regardless of what the bureaucracies are supposed to do, their real number one job, as they see it, is looking out for themselves.  People act in their self-interest. That’s how the world works.

One of the principles of our society is (was?) government is supposed to work for the people, not the other way around, and the other way around is what happens if we the people don’t keep an eagle eye on those in government. Power is inherent in government, and the old adage that power corrupts is not a myth.

So, questions for the young lady:  Can government workers be paid too much?  Can government workers be retired too early? Can government workers enjoy pensions and benefits that are too generous?  Yes, to all of the above.  In fact, government workers ARE paid too much, retired too early, retired too generously, and, to add salt to the wound, are damn near impossible to fire.

The government gravy train stretches all the way from the school down the street to Washington, D.C., and passengers include retired 52 year-old teachers, city managers paying themselves $790,000 per year (Google: Bell CA) and GSA managers sitting in hot tubs in Las Vegas on the taxpayer dime.

Overpaid bureaucrats are perhaps the least of things to fear from government, but it is not a trivial problem. In the last twenty years or so, state and local government pay, pensions and benefits have grown to far exceed private sector levels and have exploded into huge liabilities that cannot be paid. Cannot. Period. Detroit.

Pay and pension troubles in Detroit and elsewhere are finally sparking public awareness of the problem, but the grim economic realities were no secret to anybody paying attention.  Many cities have been teetering on the edge of financial collapse and bankruptcy for years, e.g. San Jose, Baltimore, Houston, Harrisburg, and on and on, but the really biggie is Chicago, where President Obama’s former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is the Mayor.

Emanuel has told state legislators that Chicago’s “day of reckoning has arrived.” Emanuel would like the state of Illinois to bail Chicago out, but that’s not going to happen.  Illinois is itself a basket case. He’ll soon ask the Federal Government to ride to the rescue. That’s not going to happen either.  You want your 1040 to take a hit to rescue a city that pays the average city worker $95,406 per year, and allows some of them to retire as early as 50?

Taxpayers have been conned, robbed and sucker-punched by government employees, their unions and their elected enablers.  The mutually beneficial partnership of public unions and the liberal politicians the unions generously support has begun to run out of other peoples’ money. The government gravy train is starting to derail across the country.

Expect public unions to scream bloody murder as their pay and benefits get cut. The largest public employee union is The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME.  That‘s usually pronounced af-SCAM-me.  How appropriate. Scam me, scam you, scam all of us, but the patsy-public is starting to catch on to the scam.

Attorney General Holder was right when he said we were “a nation of cowards” on racial matters, but there are a few notable exceptions, my favorite being Thomas Sowell.  Sowell is an economics professor who has written so many books over the years that his friend and contemporary, Walter Williams, has said he must “write with both hands.”

Now in his 80’s, Dr. Sowell shows no signs of slowing down. One of his best-ever efforts, in my opinion, is “Intellectuals and Race,” published just this year. It’s not a long book by Sowell standards, 139 pages plus “only” 35 pages of footnotes.  It’s so succinctly written that I’m finding it tough to outline.

Sowell also is a prolific syndicated columnist, and three of his recent columns inspired my Eric Holder musings: Race-Hustling Results – I, II and III, published October 22, 23 and 24.  The third column Sowell ended with this observation about “discussions of race:”

“Thought is long overdue. So is honesty.”

And so, Dr. Sowell, is “courage”, which you were too modest to add because you’ve shown so much of it over the years.   Nowhere is this more apparent than in the first sentence of the above article: “One of the reasons for being glad to be as old as I am is that I may be spared living to see a race war in America.”

Race war.  Finally, somebody with the guts to say it.  In my opinion, at least some of the recent boom in gun sales is because whites are frightened by the rampaging black crime in America that is starting to spill over onto Main Street, and is directed more and more against white individuals and white-owned businesses.

As Sowell writes:  “While some of these attacks make it into the media as isolated incidents, the nationwide pattern of organized black on white attacks by thugs remains invisible in the mainstream media –.”  He adds: “–the racial makeup of the attackers and their victims is usually ignored by the media, and public officials often deny that race has anything to do with what happened.”

This is one of those issues that finds the mainstream media, MSM, living in a world of delusion not shared by most of America.  To the MSM, if white people are buying guns it’s because of inherent racism, not because they have anything to fear.  I sometimes think MSM should stand for “mainstream morons.”

Adding to the problem is President Barack Hussein Obama, who shows an unseemly quickness to bring race into play, and who uses racial polarization as a political tactic, one that seems to work. For instance, His DOJ is eager to prosecute states over voter ID laws, but not so eager to prosecute Black Panthers for voter intimidation. There’s a long list of similar actions.

Perhaps nothing illustrates Obama’s despicable race baiting politics more than his embrace of the Reverend Al Sharpton.  Thanks to the complicit (cowardly?) MSM, most people don’t remember or have never heard of Sharpton’s unrepentant conduct concerning Tawana Brawley, Crown Heights, or Freddie’s Fashion Mart.  This guy makes David Duke look good.

I was shocked when 60 Minutes described Sharpton as “a trusted White House advisor” (5/19/11).  If you want to see why I think Barrack Obama is the worst president this country has ever had, Google up “Obama Sharpton Photo” and you’ll find pictures of a smiling President Obama and a smiling Al Sharpton, arm in arm.

By the way, ever heard of the “Knockout Game” being played by ghetto gangs, sometimes called “polar bear hunting?”  You haven’t heard of it? I didn’t think so. Race war? Don’t blame the polar bears.

Eric holder, shortly after he was sworn in as the nation’s first black Attorney General, said America was “a nation of cowards” because we weren’t having a “national conversation” about race issues.  At the time, I thought, “Wow! He’s got that one right.”

I also thought: “Of course, guilty white liberals have been kissing your butt for so long, Mr. Holder, you wouldn’t recognize an honest conversation about race issues. You should spend some time with Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Star Parker and a half-dozen other blacks I could name.”

I suspected Holder didn’t want that kind of “national conversation” though.  He wanted one where everybody blamed whitey for all of black America’s ills, and where everybody agreed to continue affirmative action, increase welfare spending,  raise the minimum wage and continue all the other programs that have been so destructive  to black Americans.

In other words, he wanted to continue to keep blacks on “Uncle Sam’s Plantation,” to borrow the title of Star Parker’s remarkable book.  The prescient LBJ must be looking up with a smile on his face. (Google: “Kessler Inside the White House”  for LBJ’s memorable quote on the political future of black America.)

I hoped I was wrong about Attorney General Holder and that the presidency of Barrack Obama would mark the beginning of a “post racial” America. How silly of me. Under Obama, racial tensions have worsened and our cowardice continues unchecked.

For instance, when President Obama said, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon (Martin),” nobody in the mainstream media, NOBODY, had the guts to call him a race-baiting, divisive demagogue.  NOBODY called him to task for weighing in, very inappropriately, with a gratuitous, stupid remark on a case yet to go to trial.

Gee, Mr. President, would your son have ACTED like Trayvon?  Isn’t that the question Martin Luther King would have asked? Any other President would have been justly excoriated, but not our first black president. Oh, no, mustn’t criticize Barack Obama, lest you be accused of being a racist.  Cowards, that’s what we are, and we have a long history of being race-cowards.

Why, for instance, is there only one Jesse Jackson in jail, Jesse Jackson, Jr.? Why hasn’t Jackson senior been put on trial for being the “Godfather of Shakedowns,” to use the phrase from Harry Stein’s book, “No matter what….they’ll call this book racist.”

Why hasn’t Jackson’s organization, Rainbow/Push, been audited by the IRS in over 18 years?  Are they too busy with Tea Party groups?  We all know why, don’t we?  We’re cowards.

Nowhere is this cowardice more on display than on MSNBC, where the Reverend Al Sharpton hosts a one-hour show, PoliticsNation.   Sharpton, a race-baiting, anti-Semitic moron, was called a “trusted White House adviser” on 60 Minutes (5/19/11.)  He and President Obama can be seen in a smiling, arm- around- shoulder pictures if you Google “Obama Sharpton photo.”

To get a better perspective on the Reverend Al, Google up “Sharpton Tawana Brawley”, “Sharpton Crown Heights”, and “Sharpton Freddy’s Fashion Mart.”  Having this guy as a “trusted White House advisor” is comparable to having David Duke in a similar role for a white president.  The press would be apoplectic.
(See also: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/03/al-sharpton-s-long-bill-of-goods-from-tawana-brawley-to-primetime.html)

President Obama’s Sharpton connections shouldn’t surprise anyone who was paying attention to Obama’s history.  The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a racist worthy of a black-sheeted KKK, was Obama’s pastor for twenty years.  Oh, I’m not supposed to call a black person a racist because only white people can be racists because only white people have power blah blah blah.  If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.

9/22/13

Sometimes I almost feel sorry for the Republicans.  The Democrats are about to beat ‘em like a drum, and it seems like everybody knows it, even a few Republicans.

The occasion is the annual raise-the-debt-ceiling charade, in which the party not holding the presidency threatens  to block the debt-ceiling increase unless some demand is met.  This year the House of Representatives, controlled by the Republicans, just voted to defund ObamaCare. There is no chance this will get through the Democrat controlled Senate. Even if it did, the President would veto it. Furthermore, any attempt to tie defunding ObamaCare to raising the debt ceiling is guaranteed to backfire.

The President, more than once, has demanded Congress pass a debt ceiling increase without any conditions. None. Nada. The man is not for compromising.  In fact, he is daring the Republicans to not raise the debt ceiling.  He will then shut down the government and we‘ll see pictures of starving babies, uncollected garbage, shuttered hospitals, old people in overturned wheelchairs and military personnel selling pencils on street corners. All the fault of the uncaring, obstructionist Republicans.

It’s like watching Lucy and the football, only it’s not Lucy holding the ball, it’s President Obama, and it’s not Charlie Brown, but the Republicans who are about to land on their butt.

Advice to the Republicans: (1) Pick fights you can win.  (2) When picking a fight with a president, remember the president has what Teddy Roosevelt called a “Bully Pulpit“ and a Democrat president has the slavish backing of the mainstream media to amplify and endlessly repeat his “Bully Pulpit” sermons.

There is no question that ObamaCare is going to be a disaster. The operative words are “going to be.”  Let it rot on the vine for a couple of years, get nice and  foul, and then prune it off.  In the meantime, why not go after government programs that have a proven record of failure?

If the Republicans want to use the debt ceiling to put the spotlight on some much needed budget cuts, they could start by demanding the elimination of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD.  No government agency in the history of America has caused more damage, with the possible exception of the Federal Reserve.  This is a story the American public needs to know.

HUD was at the heart of the 2008 recession, one of our worst ever.  For over two decades, HUD not only encouraged but REQUIRED irresponsible home mortgage lending, unchecked by either Republican or Democrat administrations, but especially encouraged by Democrats, a few of whom became multimillionaires in their GOVERNMENT jobs.

The concept of “claw back”, in which profits from illegitimate enterprises are recovered by the courts, even from innocent participants, is something that the Republicans should explore. This happened to innocent investors in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, some of whom got out with profits only to have those profits confiscated years later by the courts.

Why not the same for those who received millions from Fannie Mae and its sister GSE, Freddie Mac?  Ever heard of Franklin Raines?  Jamie Gorelick?  James Johnson?  There are probably many others, but those three Democrats come to mind as people who walked away from government jobs with many millions of dollars in their pockets, dollars from the illusory profits of their employer, Federal National Mortgage Corporation, a.k.a. Fannie Mae, the GSE run by HUD.

The best summary I’ve seen of this sorry situation was an editorial in the Wall Street Journal September 17, 2013, by Peter Wallison: “Five Years Later, Don’t Mention the Feds. Washington and the media are peddling a narrative that discounts the government’s role in the financial crisis.”  I would say it’s more like hiding the government’s role.

For a more thorough analysis, read “Reckless Endangerment” by Gretchen Morgenson, (Times Books, 2011.)  Morgenson is assistant business and financial editor for The New York Times, which should give her credibility with the “Government is God” crowd.

The bottom line is that HUD, 2012 budget of $37 billion, should be abolished. In fact, all of the federal government’s housing support activities should be abolished. The Constitutional justification for such activity is weak to nonexistent. In addition, some people should go to jail, including former and current members of the House and Senate. (See page 187 of Reckless Endangerment.)

It will never happen because the Republicans don’t want to rock the government boat.  And they wonder why there’s a TEA Party.

The Myth of White Paranoia 9/15/13 elburropete@gmail.com

Expect to frequently hear the phrase “voter suppression” between now and the elections in 2014, and probably thereafter if the Democrats don’t do well.  Democrats have been using the phrase to fire up the minority voters they so depend on, specifically Blacks and Hispanics, but the recent recall elections in Colorado, which resulted in two gun-control Democrats being ousted, was also quickly blamed on “voter suppression” by DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.

She cited Colorado’s new restrictions on mail-in ballots and not voter ID laws as the source of “suppression,” and not once did she mention how this disproportionately effected minorities, so I guess even white folks can be  “victims” of “voter suppression.”   Obviously, the Democrats think “voter suppression“ is a good marketing tool, and they’re probably right.

They don’t have to worry about the mainstream media challenging the charge, which falls apart under even the most cursory examination of the numbers.  Here’s what Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal said on Fox News,  8/13/13, about voter ID laws: “There is simply no evidence that these laws suppress black voter turnout.  States like Indiana, Georgia, Tennessee, have some of the strictest voter ID laws in the country.  In those states last year, black voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout.  If Republicans are trying to suppress the black vote, they are doing a spectacularly bad job of it.”

Of course, true believers and useful idiots don’t let facts get in the way of deeply satisfying righteous indignations over such injustices as “voter suppression.”   In fact, the suppression charge is just one of many that form a tapestry of “racism” leveled at befuddled Republicans.  Immigration reform is another, as is stop-and-frisk, even when the practice is supported by a big lib such as Mayor Bloomberg of NYC.

Republicans who think these tactics appeal only to the relatively uninformed minority voter are making a BIG mistake. This was brought home to me when I attended a university forum last month in which two distinguished professors of Mexican heritage made the remarkable statements that voter ID laws, immigration reform, and racial profiling, specifically stop-and-frisk, were a manifestation of desperate white racists who were acting out of FEAR, fear that whites will soon be in the minority.

Since I know and respect both of these gentlemen, I have no doubt they actually believe this.  The older of the two said he had experienced racial profiling “many times.”

I have never experienced racial profiling. I have never been in a room in which I was the only, or one of only a few, white people.  I have never experienced the fear or apprehension of a “minority” person.   Consequently, I have no idea what the professor was talking about when he said “fear” was at the root of things like voter ID laws.  Both professors are guilty of projecting their personal feelings and experiences, and coming up with a profoundly distorted view of reality.

To illustrate, let me list a few people whom I would like to see prosper, multiply, and rule the world.  I flatter myself that these are my kind of folks, but in reality they’re all far more accomplished and far more courageous than I’ll ever be: Deneen Borelli, Rev. C.L. Bryant, Herman Cain, Ben Carson, Larry Elder, Mia Love, Lloyd Marcus,  Delroy Murdock, Star Parker, Charles Payne, Condi Rice, Jason Riley, Tim Scott, Thomas Sowell, Michael Steele, Clarence Thomas, David Webb, Allen West, Walter Williams, Crystal Wright and many more.

OOPS! I left out a few people I would be happy to have in charge of immigration reform, or, for that matter, in charge of the world: Linda Chavez, Ted Cruz, Humberto Fontova, Michelle Malkin, Susanna Martinez, Marco Rubio.

Every one of the people in the above two paragraphs would be most welcome at any TEA Party meeting anywhere in America, and at least a couple are active TEA Party members.  This shouldn’t surprise anybody.  The TEA Party is interested in the content of a person’s character, not the color of their skin.