posted June 09, 2015 09:55 AM            

Their latest cause is "traffic tickets".

With the middle east on fire and burning to the ground, with O'Bomber trying his best to bestow nuclear weapons on the terrorist nation of Iran while their leaders shout "Death to America", with the US economy in tatters and in negative growth, with a full blown invasion of the US by illegal aliens and, with O'BomberCare premiums set to skyrocket, leftists are all 'atwitter' and hyperventilating about "TRAFFIC TICKETS"!

June 8, 2015
Driving liberals crazy
Ethel C. Fenig

Thanks to the new technology and multiple forms of communication, the liberal stranglehold on presenting the news its way has been somewhat breached. And the liberals are confused. So it is time to seize the opportunity and make them crazier, but more importantly, to get our narrative out, our way. The reaction to the sacred New York Times' Shocking Revelations that Mr. and Mrs. Marco and Jeanette Rubio (retro identification, I know) accumulated 17 minor traffic violation tickets in the past 18 years is an example of what can be accomplished.

After the article was published, the citizenry did not automatically rise up and declare Rubio's candidacy dead. Instead, many conservative media outlets laughed at the story, calmly pointing out worse unmentioned similar behavior from now President Barack Obama (D), which he finally paid...17 years later, after a local paper – not the NY Times – dug up the scandal...um, news.

As his spokesperson at the time explained:

Jen Psaki, a spokeswoman for the Obama campaign, dismissed the tickets as not relevant.

"He didn't owe that much and what he did owe, he paid," Psaki said on Wednesday. "Many people have parking tickets and late fees. All the parking tickets and late fees were paid in full."

Now you can see why Obama retained Psaki. Unlike Obama's 17 years, the Rubios promptly paid their tickets. But the reaction didn't stop there. Some conservatives even dared to note that the Clintons, those average, all-American citizens, don't even drive. Others do it for them, even though the Clintons were at one time "dead broke." Only in America can you be "dead broke" and have a chauffeur or two.

Further, some creative types familiar with Twitter started #RubioCrimeSpree.

OMG! Worse than lying about Benghazi, worse than illegally deleting official government e-mails..

The tweeters had their way with the Traffic Ticket Scandal.

David Burge ý@iowahawkblog
#RubioCrimeSpree Once went through Publix express checkout lane with 11 items
3:14 PM - 5 Jun 2015

Twitchy collected What Marco Rubio Did While Hillary Was Selling Uranium to Putin, a nice sampling of tweets that exploded after this Shocking Revelation.

T. Becket Adams ý@BecketAdams
I would have loved to have been in the room when that NYT reporter pitched the Rubio citation story. Did anyone have a straight face?
10:27 AM - 5 Jun 2015

Ben Shapiro ý@benshapiro
Marco Rubio's wife has traffic tickets. I wonder if Hillary Clinton's spouse has ever done anything bad.
10:24 AM - 5 Jun 2015

And for those old enough to remember, Ted Kennedy's driving prowess prior to, during, and after that incident at Chappaquiddick was never thoroughly analyzed by the Kennedy-loving media.

Because that was different. Kennedy was a Democrat. And he was a Kennedy.

posted June 09, 2015 01:36 PM            

The fact leftists must have their little "causes" to feel good about themselves...and superior?

Or,

posted June 09, 2015 03:17 PM            

Try this out as a thought experiment: what would happen if, tomorrow morning, we had definitive proof that catastrophic climate change was impossible, wasn’t happening, and would never happen. Would Al Gore breathe a big sigh of relief and say—“Well good; now we can go back to worrying about smoking, or bad inner city schools, or other persistent, immediate problems.”

Of course not. The general reaction from environmentalists and the left would be a combination of outrage and despair. The need to believe in oneself as part of the agency of human salvation runs deep for leftists and environmentalists who have made their obsessions a secular religion. And humanity doesn’t need salvation if there is no sin in the first place. Hence human must be sinners—somehow—in need of redemption from the left.

I got to thinking about this when reading a short passage from an old book by Canadian philosopher George Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age:

““During the excitement over Sputnik, it was suggested that the Americans were deeply depressed by Russian success. I thought this was a wrong interpretation. Rather, there was a great sigh of relief from the American elites, for now there was an immediate practical objective to be achieved, a new frontier to be conquered—outer space.”

This tracks closely with Kenneth Minogue’s diagnosis of liberalism in his classic The Liberal Mind. Minogue compared liberals to medieval dragon hunters, who sought after dragons to slay even after it was clear they didn’t exist. The liberal, like the dragon hunter, “needed his dragons. He could only live by fighting for causes—the people, the poor, the exploited, the colonially oppressed, the underprivileged and the underdeveloped. As an ageing warrior, he grew breathless in pursuit of smaller and smaller dragons—for the big dragons were now harder to come by.”

Hence on college campuses today the liberal mind is relentlessly hunting after “microaggressions,” which is pretty pathetic as dragons of injustice go. Environmentalists are still after the fire-breathing dragon of climate change, now that previous dragons like the population bomb have disappeared into the medieval mists—so much so that even the New York Times recently declared the population bomb to have been completely wrongheaded.

Or perhaps a better metaphor for true-believing environmentalism is drug addiction: the addictive need for another rush of euphoria, followed by the crash or pains of withdrawal, and the diminishing returns of the next fix. For there’s always a next fix for environmentalists: fracking, bee colony collapse disorder, de-forestation, drought, floods, plastic bags . . . the list is endless.

The political scientist Anthony Downs diagnosed this aspect of environmentalism in a famous 1972 essay in The Public Interest entitled “Up and Down with Ecology—The Issue-Attention Cycle.” In analyzing the then fairly new public enthusiasm over environmentalism (though it tended to go by the term “ecology” back then), Downs laid out a five-step cycle for most public policy issues. A group of experts and interest groups begin promoting a problem or crisis, which is soon followed by the alarmed discovery of the problem by the news media and broader political class. This second stage typically includes a large amount of euphoric enthusiasm—you might call this the dopamine stage—as activists conceive the issue in terms of global salvation and redemption.

But then reality starts to intrude. The third stage is the hinge. As Downs explains, there comes “a gradually spreading realization that the cost of ‘solving’ the problem is very high indeed.” This is where we have been since the Kyoto process proposed completely implausible near-term reductions in fossil fuel energy—a fanatical monomania the climate campaign has been unable to shake.

“The previous stage,” Downs continued, “becomes almost imperceptibly transformed into the fourth stage: a gradual decline in the intensity of public interest in the problem.” Despite the relentless media and activist drumbeat and millions of dollars in paid advertising, public concern for climate change has been steadily waning for the last several years.

“In the final [post-problem] stage,” Downs concluded, “an issue that has been replaced at the center of public concern moves into a prolonged limbo—a twilight realm of lesser attention or spasmodic recurrences of interest.”

Activist liberal elites always need a Grand Cause to satisfy their messianic needs, or for the political equivalent of a dopamine rush. For such people, the only thing worse that catastrophic climate change is the catastrophe of not having a catastrophe to obsess over—and use as an excuse to extend political control over people and resources, which is the one-side-fits-all answer for every new crisis that starts through the issue-attention cycle.

Downs did think that the issue-attention cycle would be longer for environmental issues that other kinds of issues like civil rights and crime, for a variety of reasons. So environmental junkies should chill. They’ll find new ways to get their fix. They always do.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenhayward/2015/06/09/why-the-left-needs-climate-change/

posted June 10, 2015 02:57 PM            

on the other hand I have heard that Jeb Bush thinks we should return to the days of the Scarlet Letter to shame single mothers out of town. Of course they practice immaculate conception so there is no equivalent shame for the absent fathers.

I hear that Paul Ryan is desperate to push the TPP fast track thru the house and give away what is left of national sovereignties round the world

and I hear that the devout Rick Santorum thinks the Pope is unqualified to have an opinion on the destruction of our natural resources for material gain.

posted June 11, 2015 10:58 AM            

"The reaction to the sacred New York Times' Shocking Revelations that Mr. and Mrs. Marco and Jeanette Rubio (retro identification, I know) accumulated 17 minor traffic violation tickets in the past 18 years is an example of what can be accomplished."

Rubios on the Road Have Drawn Unwanted Attention
Alan Rappeport and Steve Eder

..... A review of records dating back to 1997 shows that the couple had a combined 17 citations: Mr. Rubio with four and his wife with 13......

posted June 12, 2015 09:08 AM            

The Washington Post breaks down some of the reports detailing Rubio's finances and concludes his situation is not unlike many Americans'.

A New York Times story posted earlier this week discussed Rubio's spending and saving habits, which include a lot of debt, the purchase of a boat, and cashing out retirement accounts early.

As the Post notes, however, Rubio's habits are generally in line with the national average. He is in the bottom 90 percent of homes in terms of overall wealth, and his saving habits — most homes in that 90 percent group save almost nothing every year — put him in the average.

Rubio's decision to cash out a retirement account to reportedly buy a refrigerator and help pay his children's private school tuition is a choice that many Americans make every year, despite the financial risks associated with it.

Making matters more complicated, reports the Post, is the fact that Rubio's income has fluctuated from year to year. He earned $800,000 for a book advance in 2012, for example, but last year made $174,000 from his Senate salary and another $52,000 from book royalties and his job as a college professor.

In the past, he didn't make a whole lot as state senator in Florida but then saw his income increase when he worked at a law firm.

A report last month claimed more than 8 percent of working-age people with retirement accounts made at least one withdrawal between 2004 and 2005.

Many people have mocked the Times story criticizing Rubio, from Twitter users to comedian Jon Stewart.

The Times also came out with a piece detailing the driving habits of Rubio and his wife, Jeanette.

The situation resulted in CNN's Jake Tapper comparing the Times to a political campaign:

Jake Tapper
✔ ý@jaketapper
Media organizations that feed rival Reporter B answers to questions from unfriendly Reporter A are acting like political campaigns. Unseemly
7:16 PM - 7 Jun 2015

Jake Tapper
✔ ý@jaketapper
None of us think it's ethical when campaigns do that -- cut it out. Unacceptable.
7:17 PM - 7 Jun 2015
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Marco-Rubio-finance/2015/06/11/id/650128/

posted June 12, 2015 03:39 PM            

On the whole the Press including NYT/American Thinker are throwing out whatever will be read. It keeps the sponsors paying. So if you pass it on you are the guilty party that such inanities are accepted as news.I 'll pass.