If you haven’t seen it yet, head over to College Insurrection for Rhode Island prof demands NRA chief’s “head on a stick”, regarding University of Rhode Island assistant professor Erik Loomis.

Loomis is outraged that he is being called out:

Oooh, the obligatory Glenn Reynolds attack on me for going after the NRA. How exciting. pjmedia.com/instapundit/15…

— Erik Loomis (@ErikLoomis) December 18, 2012

This comment to my post at CI brings up memories of the low cause-and-effect standard set up by left for rhetoric and imagery from the right:

Mark Reardon | December 18, 2012 at 10:25 am

Since I don’t Tweet, would someone tell Mr. Loomis that metaphor was explained to us very clearly when Sarah Palin was guilty of shooting Gabby Gifford because of the crosshairs on a campaign map. We’ve learned that lesson, why is he so upset we’re applying it?

Here’s what Loomis wrote at the time about Palin being unfairly blamed (emphasis mine):

From a political perspective, the big loser is Sarah Palin. Truthfully, the whole Tea Party movement loses here because a lot of Americans are flinching in the face of the violent rhetoric that propelled them to power. Many Republicans are defending themselves vociferously. Some, such as Rush Limbaugh, claim that Loughner was a liberal and a Democrat, but this just alienates most people at this time. But no one lost more than Palin.

Perhaps she was right to be irritated that people connected her with the shooting, but then again, she’s the one who had a target over Giffords’ district.

Palin never threatened anyone, and no one reasonably could have taken a standard electoral map as advocating violence.  Yet for purely policital purposes Loomis and many others held Palin to account.

What goes around comes around.

Update — Via Twitchy, Loomis has deleted his Twitter account. The past day’s tweets are saved in Google Cache.

Please tell me this is not happening, Boehner offers ‘Plan B’ in ‘fiscal cliff’ talks:

House Speaker John A. Boehner has launched “Plan B” in budget talks, announcing Tuesday that he will bring for a vote his proposal to extend expiring tax breaks for all but the wealthiest Americans who earn more than $1 million a year.

The Ohio Republican’s decision, shared behind closed doors during a morning meeting of rank-and-file lawmakers, is an abrupt shift after he and Obama substantially narrowed their differences in the latest round of talks.

How’s Plan B working out?  Thank you for raising your bid, now raise it again:

WH rejects Boehner’s Plan B — Carney says POTUS “not willing to accept a deal that doesn’t ask enough of the very wealthiest in taxes”

— Ed Henry (@edhenryTV) December 18, 2012

What an appropriate metaphor for what is about to happen to us:

Plan B is a type of emergency contraception. This is birth control that may prevent pregnancy after unprotected sex. People sometimes call it the “morning after pill.” But you don’t have to wait until the morning after sex to take it.

It is very frustrating to watch John Boehner and House Republicans twist themselves into contortions in a futile attempt to appease Obama.

Plan B failed before it was swallowed because Obama believes that he can shift the blame to Republicans based on the arbitrary deadline for taxes to rise.  There is no appeasing someone who believes he has a winning hand, there only are various levels of capitulation and surrender.

Please move on to something I have been suggesting repeatedly since early December, when it became clear Obama would not negotiate in good faith, The Christmas Strategy, or if you prefer, Plan C:

I say call his bluff. If a deal which tackles deficits from both revenue and spending can be reached this month, great.

If not, pass a 90 day extension of current tax rates and whatever else is needed to postpone the “cliff,” and go home for Christmas to give time for a Grand Bargain which puts Democratic sacred cows on the table.

Let Harry Reid refuse to bring it to a vote, and Obama refuse to sign it. Their inaction will be the reason for taxes rising for everyone.

You tried really hard.  It failed because Obama wants it to fail.

Now pass Plan C and send it over to Harry Reid.  Then go home.

It’s bad enough that people already are talking about Elizabeth Warren being a serious candidate for President in 2016, President Elizabeth Warren:

Few people have a better and more appealing story and background to seize that opportunity than Elizabeth Warren.

Which “more appealing story and background” would that be? 

The one in which she falsely claimed Native American status in the Association of American Law School directories, which were used as a hiring resource, so that she supposedly could meet others like her for lunch?  Or the one in which she falsely reported herself to Harvard and Penn Law Schools as Native American for federal reporting purposes even though she didn’t meet the federal definition?  Or the one which which she accused her father’s family of being racist against Indians such that her parents had to elope, even though all the evidence is that there was no elopement or anti-Indian racism?  Or the one in which ….

Everyone knows she’s not Native American.

So you can imagine my shock when I saw this quote from Michael Barone in The Boston Herald in a column by Michael Graham, Leftie Liz on Obama’s path to prez?

If she does run, she could make history, said Barone: “She’d be the first Native American in the White House since Vice President Charles Curtis, who was one-quarter Kaw Indian.”

What!?! Shirley he can’t be serious.  And he’s not, providing me with this clarification:

It was intended as a humorous comment.

We have to be careful when it comes to Warren’s false claim to be Native American.

While Warren’s ridiculous explanations are humorous, her conduct in assuming a Native American identity solely for employment and career purposes was not funny.

Joke carefully, there could be children watching, children who will never be taught the truth about the progressive hero, and possible presidential contender.

Via @RightInAcademia, 22 Stats That Prove That There Is Something Seriously Wrong With Young Men In America:

When are we finally going to admit that we have a very serious problem with this generation of young men in America? We have failed them so dramatically that it is hard to put it into words.

We have raised an entire generation of young males that don’t know how to be men, and many of them feel completely lost. Sometimes they feel so lost that they “snap” in very destructive ways. Adam Lanza and James Holmes are two names that come to mind.

Why is it that mass murderers are almost always young men? Why don’t young women behave the same way? Sadly, Adam Lanza and James Holmes are just the tip of the iceberg of a much larger problem in our society. Our young women vastly outperform our young men in almost every important statistical category. Young men are much more likely to perform poorly in school, they are much more likely to have disciplinary problems and they are much more likely to commit suicide.

In the old days, our young men would gather in the streets or in the parks to play with one another after school, but today most of them are content to spend countless hours feeding their addictions to video games, movies and other forms of entertainment. When our young men grow up, many of them are extremely averse to taking on responsibility. They want to have lots of sex, but they aren’t interested in marriage. They enjoy the comforts of living at home, but they don’t want to go out and pursue career goals so that they can provide those things for themselves. Our young men are supposed to be “the leaders of tomorrow”, but instead many of them are a major burden on society.

When are we finally going to admit that something has gone horribly wrong?

Read the whole article.  There is much in there that is true about the demonization and demoralization of young men that goes on in the culture, from sitcoms and advertising which portray young men as dumb-asses, to an education system with a feminist agenda which treats them as presumptive rapists.

That may explain the general decline of young men’s performance, but it’s not clear to me that it explains the tiny, tiny, tiny fraction who shoot up schools.

Update:  I heard Rush read a letter from a reader on air the other day, thanks to Browndog for the link, An Interesting E-Mail on Young, White Males:

I have not watched a second of news on the school shooting over the weekend, mainly because seeing the reporting makes me cry and unable to do much else. But I’m tuned in enough to know that once again the American leftist culture is forcing us to collectively look at the wrong reasons for the problem, and as such, we will never be able to come to grips with it, much less find a solution.  What do all of the public shootings in the last years have in common?  They were all done by young white males who were from upper middle-class families.  The problem is not guns.  That’s the easy shiny thing that the liberals flash in front of us so that we don’t look at their failed political agenda.

The problem in America today is how we have treated white boys for the last decades, and it all has at its root the unrelenting liberal political agenda.  Boys have been pushed out of two of the most important activities:  school and sports.  In an all-out effort to convince girls they can do anything a boy can, schools have ignored the natural needs and learning traits of boys and forced them to learn like girls.  Fewer boys are going to college, in part because they’re being pushed out by a feminist agenda in education.  We have rushed to dilute the energetic aggressive aspects of the male species by drugging them as children and chickifying them at every turn.

We allowed our young boys to play violent murdering video games.  These types of games are the same ones the military uses to train soldiers.  But they are being played by very, very young kids in dark rooms all over the country.  You want to ban something, ban those.  We have overlooked the devastating effects on all children of not having a father in the house.  And we have ignored and not helped boys with their mental illness.  We’ve hyperventilated endlessly over girls and their eating disorders, image issues, self-esteem, sex, blah, blah, blah, but we have most totally ignored the mental challenges that boys face.

Interesting, don’t you think?  It’s an e-mail from a female listener to the EIB Network.

After a greater number of McDonald’s stores stayed open on Thanksgiving, resulting in an estimated $36 million additional sales this year, an internal memo from the company is urging franchisees to remain open on Christmas. According to an analysis in Advertising Age, that one day accounted for almost one percentage point of their 2.5-percent increase in sale growth for the month of November:

Opening on holidays didn’t happen much in the company’s Christmases past. Richard Adams, a consultant and former McDonald’s franchisee, said that “Thanksgiving was never open. Then 15 to 16 years ago, some started staying open.” As recently as five or six years ago, “you would never even talk about being open on Christmas, even if some were open on Thanksgiving. For the franchisees, this is a big cultural shift.”

Contrast this approach with a company like Chick-fil-A, which is closed on two holidays, Christmas and Thanksgiving, as well as Sundays. Two different ways to serve their customers: one by remaining open, and therefore retaining extra sales, and the other by respecting a holiday that many of their customers celebrate. Time will tell if either strategy is more successful.

The State Department has released the independent review board report, available here.  It provides many details, but ignores the big issue, which is the White House response once the attacks started.  I’m not sure if that was outside the scope of the investigation, but there’s no explanation as to why that issue was ignored.

Here are some of  the key findings:

“The Board concluded that there was no protest prior to the attacks, which were unanticipated in their scale and intensity.”

“However, 2012 saw an overall deterioration of the security environment in Benghazi, as highlighted by a series of security incidents involving the Special Mission, international organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and third-country nationals and diplomats…”

“Given the threat environment, the physical security platform in Benghazi was inadequate.”

“Terrorist networks are difficult to monitor, and the Board emphasizes the conclusion of previous accountability review boards that vulnerable missions cannot rely on receiving specific warning intelligence. Similarly, the lack of specific threat intelligence does not imply a lessening of probability of a terrorist attack. The Board found that there was a tendency on the part of policy, security and other U.S. government officials to rely heavily on the probability of warning intelligence and on the absence of specific threat information. The result was possibly to overlook the usefulness of taking a hard look at accumulated, sometimes circumstantial information, and instead to fail to appreciate threats and understand trends, particularly based on increased violence and the targeting of foreign diplomats and international organizations in Benghazi. The latter information failed to come into clear relief against a backdrop of the lack of effective governance, widespread and growing political violence and instability and the ready availability of weapons in eastern Libya. There were U.S. assessments that provided situational awareness on the persistent, general threat to U.S. and Western interests in eastern Libya, including Benghazi. Board members, however, were struck by the lack of discussion focused specifically on Benghazi.

Using a sports team name which may be offensive to Native Americans, or ripping off their heritage and identity for your own professional gain?

The team bus of the Liberal High School (KS) Redskins, in a photo take in early November:

Professor,

On my way home this evening, I spotted Elizabeth Warren’s campaign/tour bus travelling on I-25 through Denver.

Also, if anyone cannot see the irony in this and get offended, I say “Tough.” The only thing to be offended at is the fraud imposed by a self-righteous liberal.

Matt in Colorado

If this didn’t come from long-time correspondent, photographer, reporter, bumper sticker aficionado, and music impresario Danelle, I wouldn’t believe it.

Made a quick stop at my favorite firearms shop today just to see what was in stock. The store was fully staffed, with a help wanted sign on the door.

Every salesman, the owner, his wife and all 4 of his children were waiting on customers. The place was packed. Sure enough, they had a great price on a 9mm that I had been considering acquiring. As has been reported, the Federal Background Check system is severely stressed in the last few days. So, while you’re enjoying your complimentary sandwich and soda you get to do some people watching….. and I swear I can’t make this up….

A priest and a rabbi came into the shop to look at CCL Firearms. The owner of the store waited on them personally, determined exactly what their needs and comfort levels were and made a couple of great recommendations. Both made purchases. The owner comped both men free memberships to the local range as well as lessons.

Before I left, I gave my salesman a list of pistols and rifles that I would be interested in acquiring in the near future – He added it to their very long list of orders.

Times are becoming quite interesting.

Robert Bork has died.

Roger Kimball (via Instapundit), has a good summary of Bork’s importance, which unfortunately ended up being not his scholarship but the vicious attacks by people like Ted Kennedy which gave rise to the modern left-wing smear machine:

Judge Robert H. Bork, one of the the greatest jurists this country has ever produced, died early this morning from heart complications in a Virginia hospital near his home. He was 84.

Bork was a national celebrity. Several years ago, my wife and I visited the Borks in Maine where they had taken a summer house off Somes Sound. I cannot count the times that total strangers would approach us at a lobster shack or park asking to shake the Judge’s hand and to assure him of their admiration and support.

Bork’s celebrity was only partly conferred upon him by brilliant legal work and his service as Solicitor General and then Acting Attorney General in the tumultuous Watergate years of the Nixon administration. (Andrew McCarthy wrote an excellent summary of Judge Bork’s work in The New Criterion a few years ago: “Robert H. Bork on Law and Life.”) But by far the most important fuel for fame was the riveting, not to say obscene, attack upon his candidacy for the Supreme Court in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan.

The vicious campaign waged against Judge Bork set a new low—possibly never exceeded—in the exhibition of unbridled leftist venom, indeed hate. Reporters combed through the Borks trash hoping to find comprising tidbits; they inspected his movie rentals, and were disgusted to find the films of John Wayne liberally represented. So hysterical was the campaign against Judge Bork that a new transitive verb entered our political vocabulary: “To Bork,” scruple at nothing in order to discredit and defeat a political figure. Monsieur Guillotine gave his name to that means of execution; “progressives,” those leftists haters of America who have so disfigured our national life since the 1960s, gave us the this new form of character assassination. The so-called “Lion of the Senate,” Ted Kennedy, surely one of the most despicable men ever to hold high public office in the United States (yes, that’s saying something), stood on the Senate floor and emitted a serious of calumnious lies designed not simply to prevent Judge Bork from being appointed to the Supreme Court but to soil his character irretrievably. “Robert Bork’s America,” [waj adds, video here] quoth Kennedy,

is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of democracy.

A breathtaking congeries of falsehoods that, were they not protected by the prerogatives of senatorial privilege, would have taken a conspicuous place in the annals of malicious slander and character assassination.

I wrote about this a little over a year ago, 24 years ago today, Borking was born. 

Was there ever a more obscene spectacle on the floor of the Senate than to see Ted Kennedy, who left a girl to die and used his family name and political power to escape punishment, rip into Robert Bork?

It’s unfortunate that Borking will be what people most remember about Robert Bork, while Mary Jo Kopechne is at most a footnote all but written out of existence from the history of the Lion of the Senate.

Update — A tribute (h/t Hot Air):

This reprehensible column about Tim Scott by Adolf L. Reed, Jr., a U. Penn. Political Science Professor, The Puzzle of Black Republicans:

… But this “first black” rhetoric tends to interpret African-American political successes — including that of President Obama — as part of a morality play that dramatizes “how far we have come.” It obscures the fact that modern black Republicans have been more tokens than signs of progress.

The cheerleading over racial symbolism plays to the Republicans’ desperate need to woo (or at least appear to woo) minority voters, who favored Mr. Obama over Mitt Romney by huge margins. Mrs. Haley — a daughter of Sikh immigrants from Punjab, India — is the first female and first nonwhite governor of South Carolina, the home to white supremacists like John C. Calhoun, Preston S. Brooks, Ben Tillman and Strom Thurmond.

Mr. Scott’s background is also striking: raised by a poor single mother, he defeated, with Tea Party backing, two white men in a 2010 Republican primary: a son of Thurmond and a son of former Gov. Carroll A. Campbell Jr. But his politics, like those of the archconservative Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, are utterly at odds with the preferences of most black Americans. Mr. Scott has been staunchly anti-tax, anti-union and anti-abortion.

Even if the Republicans managed to distance themselves from the thinly veiled racism of the Tea Party adherents who have moved the party rightward, they wouldn’t do much better among black voters than they do now. I suspect that appointments like Mr. Scott’s are directed less at blacks — whom they know they aren’t going to win in any significant numbers — than at whites who are inclined to vote Republican but don’t want to have to think of themselves, or be thought of by others, as racist.

Just as white Southern Democrats once used cynical manipulations — poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests — to get around the 15th Amendment, so modern-day Republicans have deployed blacks to undermine black interests…

Let me get this straight.  Tim Scott, someone who emerged politically as part of the Tea Party movement, is just a token because he was successful, and his success proves that the Tea Party movement is racist, and … oh, I’m getting lost in this lunacy.

Professor of Political Science increasingly means Professor of Propaganda.

The president has just promised to submit gun-control legislation (though not a budget) to Congress in a matter of weeks.  So now is a good time to point out that our national debate over a citizens’ ownership of guns wouldn’t be necessary—nor would the kinds of laws that the Heller and McDonald SCOTUS decisions upended ever have passed—if our Founding Fathers had confined the Second Amendment to only the second of its two clauses: “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

Period.

It’s that pesky subordinate clause, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state,” that can be blamed for all the problems.  Gun-control nuts contend that only active militia members are entitled to own guns.

Thanks to the First Amendment, one doesn’t have to be a constitutional scholar or even a lawyer (I’m neither) to opine on the plain meaning—and logic—of the Second Amendment.

Let’s begin by noting that the amendment’s second clause can be preceded by any subordinate clause of your imagination without altering its meaning.  To wit: “A high net worth being necessary to date a supermodel…”  “It being necessary to keep your friends close but your enemies closer…”

If that’s not dispositive enough for your friends and family, the logic inherent in the historical context should be.

In 1791, when the amendment was ratified, the United States of America was only a decade from a war fought to “dissolve the political bands” between the colonists and an “absolute Tyranny,” as the Declaration of Independence put it.

That war’s tactics had relied almost entirely on ballistic weapons.  Which means that if the unregulated colonists hadn’t already owned firearms in 1775, they’d have been slaughtered in minutes by George III’s well-regulated army.  In fact, they’d never have assembled in Lexington and Concord and started a revolution.

So apart from the grammatical fact that that pesky clause about militias isn’t conditional, it’s illogical to conclude that the same men who’d founded the United States and were now amending its historic constitution to guard against governmental tyranny would require that “the people” obtain official permission—or join a government-regulated organization—before they could legally bear arms to take up against that very government.

“Excuse me, sir, but can you direct me to the Revolution Office?  Me and my friends wanna get a permit so we can revolt.”

Obama held a press conference today about gun legislation, but almost all of the press questions were about the “fiscal cliff.”

Obama’s responses were truly amazing, a spiking-of-the-football approach in which he pocketed Boehner’s concession on tax rates for those making over $1 million, then moved the class warfare down to those making less.

Here’s a taste of the press conference, be glad you didn’t have to listen to the whole thing.

Obama even suggested that because of the Newtown shooting, Republicans should stop fighting with him.

Boehner responded with a 50-second live statement, in which he says the House will pass Plan B and send it to the Senate. 

Boehner appears to be taking my suggestion of passing something and then going home, but rather than merely preserve the status quo pending further negotiations next quarter (Plan C), Plan B protects everyone making under $1 million as a final solution on tax rates.

I still think the Christmas Strategy is a better strategy, but what do I know.

The New York Times today ran a demeaning Op-Ed about Tim Scott, the Republican Congressman from South Carolina who was just appointed to the seat being vacated by Jim DeMint.

The Op-Ed was written by U. Penn. Political Science Professor Adolf L. Reed Jr.,  The Puzzle of Black Republicans, and accused Republicans of engaging in tokenism by appointing Scott:

But this “first black” rhetoric tends to interpret African-American political successes — including that of President Obama — as part of a morality play that dramatizes “how far we have come.” It obscures the fact that modern black Republicans have been more tokens than signs of progress….

No number of Tim Scotts — or other cynical tokens — will change that.

In response to my post about the Op-Ed, SoccerDad suggested a look at The NY Times Masthead and Editorial Board.  Here’s that look:

There is a profound lack of diversity.

I would never be so insulting as to accuse the NY Times of tokenism, not out of respect for the NY Times, but out of respect for the person.

You’ve heard about Erik Loomis, the University of Rhode Island assistant professor of history who launched an almost psychotic, foul-mouthed Twitter tirade against the NRA, accusing it of being a terrorist organization, of complicity in and criminal culpability for murder, and a host of other invectives culminating in his wish to see Wayne LaPierre’s “head on a stick.”

This is the same Loomis who laughed when Sarah Palin was smeared with the Gabby Giffords shooting because of an electoral map the insane Jared Loughner never even saw.  He didn’t mind when the left-wing mob sought to destroy Palin over nothing.  Loomis insisted, however, that a different standard be applied to his metaphor of a head on a stick, clarifying that he only wanted life imprisonment for LaPierre.

The NRA and LaPierre’s transgressions which warranted imprisonment or worse?  They exercised their constitutional rights to petition the government for redress (the often forgotten right, often disparaged as “lobbying”) and to their own speech in favor of policies they favored.  Because he disagreed with those policies, and made illogical jumps to claims of culpability in murder, Loomis wanted them imprisoned, at a minimum.

Soon after the controversy broke I took the position that Loomis’ employer should not be contacted, because that is the tactic frequently used against me by liberals.

Yet apparently a lot of people did contact Loomis’ employer, or the employer otherwise became aware of Loomis’ Twitter vituperation, resulting in the President of URI issuing a statement distancing the University from Loomis’ tweets.

Now a variety of people are signing on to a statement at Crooked Timber rallying around Loomis on the grounds of academic freedom and free speech.

The statement focuses on the narrow issue of the “head on a stick” tweet and whether it was an incitement to violence.  The statement also creates a distraction by trying to blame Prof. Glenn Reynolds for properly characterizing Loomis’ invective as “eliminationist rhetoric” using the standard applied by the media and Democrats to the Tea Party.

The Crooked Timber statement has been signed by hundreds of people, some of whom identify as academics, others who show no institutional affiliation, and a variety of left-wing bloggers.

I don’t think Loomis should be fired, but that doesn’t mean he should be free from criticism.

And he certainly is not a hero of anything.

He’s just a guy who wanted to deprive others of the rights he claims for himself.

Update – Here’s the comment I posted at Crooked Timber:

I’m overwhelmed.

I can’t zero in on any one bumper sticker.

It worked.

From Jon, taken at the Perimeter Mall in Atlanta/Dunwoody, Georgia, with images of the other sides of the vehicle to follow:

Here is a mini-van tesselated with bumper stickers.

Methinks these stickers may be serving a functional purpose, not just opinion.

One, no one can have that many opinions. Two, check out the condition of the paint at the edge of the roof.

Sharp looking lady who was almost certainly an Obama voter was walking into the mall as I was heading out (with son’s birthday cookie cake in one hand), snapping some supplemental photos. She, too, got a real chuckle out of the van, and my observation that it must be cheap substitute for a paint job, as no one could have that many opinions – to which I hastily added, “at least, that’s what I think.” And, she got the joke.

The first American killed in the Afghan war, on November 25, 2001.

I’ve told his story before (also here), but it is worth remembering every year.

As we just finished Hanukkah and approach Christmas, we also remember the others featured previously at Legal Insurrection, Jonathan Daniel Porto, U.S. Army, Spc. Dennis Weichel , Lt. Roslyn Schulte and Melissa Harrington Hughes.

I agree with this assessment by Erick Erickson:

Republicans in Congress intend to vote today on Plan B, John Boehner’s fall back plan on the fiscal cliff.

The President says he will veto it.

In other words, the Republicans are going to go on record that they will sell out their last remaining principle — no tax increases — and get nothing from the Democrats in return. Nothing.

There’ll be no Democrat deal on entitlements. There’ll be no Democrat deal on spending. There will only be the GOP’s sell out.

Click here to call your congressman. Tell him to oppose this Republican deal. [waj - and to support Plan C]

The GOP should not go on record willing to raise taxes if the Democrats will not offer meaningful reforms now on spending and entitlements.

Plan C — the Christmas Strategy – makes much more sense. 

Preserve the status quo pending negotiations on spending reductions and entitlement reforms until after the artificial year-end deadline, which is Obama’s big pressure point, passes. 

It will be harder for Harry Reid to table, or Obama to veto, something which preserves the status quo pending further negotiations, even if they know it ultimately weakens their hand. 

And if they do nix it, they will not have the smokescreen of claiming Boehner and the Republicans walked away from negotiations.

This is a follow up to my post, I would never be so insulting as to accuse the NY Times of tokenism, regarding the demeaning accusation by University of Pennsylvania Political Science Professor Adolf L. Reed Jr. calling Tim Scott and other Republicans who are black of being “cynical tokens.”

Let’s take a look at the University of Pennsylvania Department of Political Science Standing Faculty:

I would never be so insulting as to accuse the U. Penn Political Science Department of tokenism.

Such an accusation would be insulting to the people who worked hard (like Tim Scott) to get where they are (like Tim Scott) and who (like Tim Scott) accomplished much in their lives, and who should not be insulted or demeaned as tokens just because they are part of an overwhelmingly white entity.

Respect for the accomplishments of others, apparently, is not a requirement of being a member of the Standing Faculty of the U. Penn. Political Science Department, or an Op-Ed writer at The NY Times.

John Robitaille is the type of moderate Republican we constantly are told is needed to win over centrist Democrats and independents.

But it’s not true in Rhode Island and many other blue states.

There are not enough centrist Democrats or independents willing to  consider moderate Republicans in states like Rhode Island.  In my home district, RI-01, we just reelected David Cicilline, someone even the liberal Providence Journal rejected as being untruthful, over the solid moderate Republican Brendan Doherty.

This state is run by the unions who have the Democratic policiticans in their pockets, and a populace which loves big government despite the state’s horrible fiscal position, including cities which have or are on the brink of bankruptcy.

It wasn’t always this way.  Rhode Island had a history of electing moderate Republicans to statewide office, even if the legislature was controlled by Democrats.  It was a balancing of power.

No more.  Rhode Island is a death spiral state, and we’re loving it.

Robitaille, who ran a strong race for Governor in 2010, is bowing out of running in 2014, finding that Rhode Islanders are too in love with big government for a Republican to win.  Via WPRI.com (emphasis mine):

The man who came within two percentage points of Gov. Lincoln Chafee in the 2010 gubernatorial race won’t be running for the office in 2014.

John Robitaille made the announcement on his Facebook page Wednesday morning, citing the outcome of the 2012 election as one of his reasons…

Robitaille ran on the GOP gubernatorial ticket in 2010. He garnered 34-percent of the vote, just two points shy of the 36 percent Chafee received.

Full Statement:

After careful consideration and a thoughtful analysis of the outcome of this past election, I’ve decided not to run again for Governor of RI in 2014. Among other things, the fact that the voters of this state chose not elect some very good and well-funded Republicans who could have made a difference by restoring sound fiscal policies and changing the status quo. The voters also approved every bond issue and added more debt to our state.

While the pundits, the media and political consultants say that Republicans must change in order to win, I will not change who I am nor what I believe in to win an election.

For example, during the 2010 campaign I said repeatedly that RI does not have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem. We must look seriously at every program and every dollar spent to ensure the precious tax dollars we have are being spent wisely and effectively. Evidently this message does not resonate here in RI.

RI is one of the most Democratic states in the country. 90% of the General Assembly, all of the Congressional Deligation and all of the General Officers are Democrats (including our Governor who for all intents and purposes is a Democrat.) It is clear that the voters of this state prefer a large and costly government and will continue to re-elect the same career politicians who have created this problem.

I will stay engaged and use my energies to encourage young people to become more self-reliant and innovative in an attempt to rekindle the spirit of self-reliance and entrepreneurship upon which this great country was built.

My most sincere thanks to all of my friends and supporters. I appreciate everything you have done “for the cause.”