Plausibly Undeniable
Both the left and the right are guilty of manipulating standards, textbooks and curricula to favor their own narrow view of American history, world history, social studies and all the other malleable subjects not math and hard science.
Zombie turns an angry eye towards both the Tweedledees and Tweedledums.
Great read. First in a series.
The good news is there’s one less thug in Dallas. (And you know it wasn’t his bike, either.)
The bad news is too many people at the Dallas Morning News still don’t understand the basics of guns and gun laws in Texas.
Hall then pulled out his licensed pistol and shot Lewis multiple times, according to police.
One more time: Guns are not licensed in Texas, nor are they registered. People can get a license to carry a concealed handgun.
Let’s first say yes, the cameraman is a being a total dick, but in America you have the right to be a total dick. He’s also a conspiracy loon (”New World Order”, “Illumati scum” and so on.) But you have the right to be that, too.
So having said that, let’s go to the tape.
Search without consent? Check.
Violation of the 4th amendment? Check.
Anger over being videotaped in public doing the public’s work? Check.
Arrest cameraman for exercising his free speech rights? You betcha it’s a check.
Skip to the 5:50 mark.
If you have any doubts, they charged him with a felony and then dropped all charges the next day.
He says things like this:
But if we hope to continue to attract world class businesses and corporations to Dallas and avoid bigger cuts in future budgets, the answer is clear: We must increase taxes in order to preserve and enhance the quality of life for all our residents.
Seriously.
This is the kind of ignorance of basic business 101 that rivals former Dallas City Councilman Leo Chaney, who once told me that investors would build another Mockingbird Station in his district if only he got the area zoned for it. Never mind things like demographics, traffic, demand, or any of the other fundamentals retail developers weigh.
Every time there’s a budget crunch, they cut the kind of services that anger people enough to where they accept a tax increase — cutting library hours, community pools, park maintenance.
What they don’t do is cut, or don’t cut enough, is where it counts — city payroll and civil service pensions.
Oh, and how’s that $500 million city-owned hotel working out? Glad they’re spending half a billion smackers on that?
Thank you, The Onion.
Skip to the 0:58 second mark. This guy is awesome.
I never understood why anyone thought Robin Hood was some kind of socialist. He robbed from the tax collectors and gave the money back to the people who earned it. But Cathy Young goes even further, saying the Ridley Scott libertarian Robin Hood is the closest thing to the original legend we’ve seen.
The Ridley Scott film Robin Hood has drawn some critics’ political ire. In The Village Voice, Karina Longworth laments that “instead of robbing from the rich to give to the poor, this Robin Hood preaches about ‘liberty’ and the rights of the individual” and battles against “government greed.” New York Times critic A.O. Scott strikes a similar note, mocking the movie as a “medieval tea party” and declaring: “You may have heard that Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor, but that was just liberal media propaganda. This Robin is…a manly libertarian rebel striking out against high taxes and a big government scheme to trample the ancient liberties of property owners and provincial nobles.”
Whatever you may think of Scott’s newest incarnation of the Robin Hood legend, it is more than a little troubling to see alleged liberals speaking of liberty and individual rights in a tone of sarcastic dismissal. This is especially ironic since the Robin Hood of myth and folklore probably has much more in common with the “libertarian rebel” played by Russell Crowe than the medieval socialist of the “rob from the rich, give to the poor” cliché. At heart, the noble-outlaw legend that has captured the human imagination for centuries is about freedom, not redistribution, a fact that is reflected in many previous screen versions of the Robin Hood story.
The earliest Robin Hood ballads, which date back to the 13th or 14th century, contain no mention of robbing the rich to give to the poor. The one person Robin assists financially is a knight who is about to lose his lands to the machinations of greedy and unscrupulous monks at an abbey. (Corrupt clerics using the political power of the Church are among Robin Hood’s frequent targets in the ballads.) The Sheriff of Nottingham is Robin’s chief opponent; at the time, it was the sheriffs’ role as tax collectors in particular that made them objects of popular loathing. Robin Hood is also frequently shown helping men who face barbaric punishments for hunting in the royal forests, a pursuit that was permitted to English nobles but strictly forbidden to the lower classes. In other words, he opposes privilege bestowed by political power rather than earned wealth.
