Carver County Judiciary Investigation Requested

Julianne Ortman, member of the Judiciary Committee for Senate, on April 17, 2012 has sent a letter to the Chief Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court asking for an immediate review of Carver County Family Court proceedings to help restore confidence in the courts.  Several other legislators have also signed onto the document.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/89923217/OrtmanLetterToSupremeCourt

There have been long standing issues with judicial actions in Carver County that have no explanation and violate first amendment rights.

One outstanding case is that of Lea Sage-Banken  carvercountycorruption.com.  A young mother who was divorced by her husband while she was pregnant with their third child, and was then denied access to her children with no specified reason. Current law generally has a presumption of 25% parenting time, but such was not the case in Carver County in this case.  Shortly after the birth of her third child, the court took the baby away, giving sole rights to the wealthy father.

There were no finding of fact, no abuse, alcoholism, psychological evaluations or any other charges to indicate or explain why she should be denied rights to see her children.  The outrageousness of this case, and the free speech issue, is such that most other judges and lawyers simply say it cannot happen.  And often simply no longer respond when presented documents from the case.

This case was first discussed on Speechless last year, September 22, 2011.  Here is the video of that interview.

Lea Banken then put up a blog, carvercountycorruption.wordpress.com to discuss the issues of her case and show just cause of claiming corruption in the system.  The judge in the case, Judge Richard C. Perkins, objected and issued an order to take down the blog.  Then he issued a fine of $50/day, ultimately totaling thousands of dollars.  There were a number of people involved in the blog beyond just Ms Banken.  While this seems a clear violation of free speech, stifling legitimate criticism, that blog was ultimately forced down by the judge.  Another blog, carvercountycorruption.com, was created by a group continuing the efforts to expose many more cases of unreasonable behavior in Carver County Family Court.
 
In testimony before the legislature, the following video shows Judge Jeff Thompson calling blogs on the internet the "vanity press of the demented".  He claims that "lazy judges, bad judges, arrogant judges," are well policed and held accountable by the board of judicial standards, and basically denies judicial corruption.  When Lea Banken testifies immediately following you can see Judge Thompson in the background reacting to her.  Minnesota State Rep Steve Simon (DFL 44A) then waves aside the claims of corruption as disgruntled litigants who simply don't like the outcome, stating a "wrong call" is not corruption.  While the distinction is a valid one, it ignores the first amendment violations and failing to issue findings of fact and conclusions of law etc that are present in the cases presented.

There are other cases in Carver County that show a similar trend of ignoring the rights of the citizens and they have also been testified to before the House and Senate committees this year.  While nothing has yet been rectified, the legislative request for investigation is a significant step forward in the effort to hold the Carver County Family Court Judiciary accountable.

Tax Day 2012, next year Taxmaggedon!

If your like many others, you abhor Tax Day.  Might even make you want to attend the annual Tax Cut Rally Saturday, April 28, 2012 at the State Capital.  The excessive spending in Washington, with the dramatic increase in the Administration bureaucracy (here and here) and the frivolous spending exemplified by the recent GSA scandal should put you off pretty strongly.

In fact such reactions just may have culminated in a new "honor" last year for Minneapolis which made it into the top 10 tax procrastinating cities in the country for the first time

Intuits Comments on Minneapolis first time showing in the top 10 procrastinator cities:

Minneapolis – (First timer!): So many theaters, so little time! The TwinCities must be too busy theater hopping instead of hopping to start those
taxes!

But a more realistic/rational reason is likely the depths of distrust and dislike for our taxation system, and government arrogance as typified by the GSA scandal.  However if you didn't dislike the tax system before, or even if you did, you are in for a very rude awakening next year.  Unless the unlikely happens and President Obama and the Democratic Senate see the light on helping to fix the impending avalanche of taxes due to occur for 2013, when current law expires! 
An analysis shows:

If President Obama and Congress fail to act this year, an enormous, unprecedented tax increase will fall on American taxpayers starting on January 1, 2013. The Washington Post called the looming tax increase “Taxmageddon,”[1] and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke called it a “massive fiscal cliff.”[2]
...
Congress and President Obama have developed a penchant for waiting until the very last minute to act on pressing tax legislation. In 2010, they waited until late December to extend the expiring Bush tax cuts for two years. At the end of 2011, they waited again until late December to extend the expiring payroll tax holiday. They should break themselves of this bad habit.
Instead, Obama and Congress should remove the uncertainty clouding jobs and family finances by removing the threat of Taxmageddon now. Businesses, families, and investors need to know as soon as possible that this massive tax increase will not hit them as they awaken on New Year’s Day 2013.

The Democrats (incl Rep Betty McCollum) and their minions in the media have taken great efforts to paint the "Bush Tax Cuts" as a favor done for the wealthy.  The truth is a little different.  It greatly increased the progressiveness of the tax system and gave huge benefits to the lower income groups, virtually eliminating many from paying any income taxes at all.

The Bush tax cuts included a radical increase in the progressivity of the Tax Code.  "[T]he share of overall tax liabilities of the top 1% increased from 22.9% to 25.3%, as the result of a tax system which became more progressive since 2000."  Bush "cut the lowest income tax bracket by one-third and doubled the refundable child tax credit -- taking 10 million low-income families off the income tax rolls. In fact, the poorest 40 percent of households now pay zero income taxes, and many actually receive checks from Washington on April 15."

Our Congressional Representative of course does not agree with that and follows the Obama message of increasing taxation.  From Rep Betty McCollum's website:

Rep. Betty McCollum, a Democrat, has never voted to instate or extend the Bush tax cuts. She said she's not about to start now.

But isn't Rep McCollum and President Obama's message that they wouldn't increase taxes on middle and lower income people? Yet that is where the main impact of these cuts are:

Taxmageddon Hits the Middle Class: Taxmageddon falls primarily on middle- and low-income Americans. That’s because 60 percent of the Bush tax cuts went to middle and low-income taxpayers. The expiration of the patch on the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) will cause these taxpayers to pay a tax they were never supposed to be hit with, and the expiration of the payroll tax cut is a tax hike almost exclusively on middle- and low-income families. That’s just the direct impact. Americans at all income levels will feel the pain of Taxmageddon because it will slow job creation and wage growth.

The failures to address the lapsing "Bush Tax Cuts" accounts for about 34% of the Taxmageddon bill, but another tax that has been coming up year after year is the AMT, which accounts for an additional 25% of Taxmageddon.  The AMT was/is another misguided attempt to "tax the rich"

Congress enacted the AMT in 1969 following testimony by the Secretary of the Treasury that 155 people with adjusted gross income above $200,000 had paid zero federal income tax on their 1967 tax returns. (See Appendix for the AMT’s legislative history.) In inflation-adjusted terms, those 1967 incomes would be roughly $1.17 million in today’s dollars.

The AMT has the typical "unintended consequences" that have since become a threat to the middle class that requires an annual change in law to prevent

Another important tax break that's late in getting renewed -- assuming it does -- is the higher exemption from the dreaded alternative minimum tax. Originally envisioned as a way to capture at least some tax revenue from ultra-rich taxpayers who took advantage of other provisions to pay very little in taxes, the AMT now hits an estimated 3.8 million taxpayers. The number of people paying AMT would skyrocket by as much as 30 million if lawmakers don't get around to passing their annual "patch" in time -- and the extra tax bill could come to $8,000 for some of those taxpayers.

Sound familiar?  Its a lot like the motivations for the current discussions for the "Buffet Rule", which is targeted to affect wealthy taxpayers, except its namesake Warren Buffet. The Buffett Rule would affect only 2% of the 400,000 Americans making more than a million. That’s why it raises only $47 billion over the next decade.  Imagine an alternative of a 1% cut in each department in the federal government?  That would reduce spending by $33.6 billion.  And it would not create yet another impending unintended consequence for us to have to deal with in the future.  Hmmm, maybe revisiting the concepts like the fair tax, the flat tax, or possibly even the 999 plan (as long as its kept that way, er..., perhaps too much opportunity there for increasing the tax) don't sound so bad.

Voter ID Impersonation Does Exist

Last month the Minnesota ACLU placed a bet with Minnesota that they would pay $1000 for proof of a case of voter impersonation in the last 10 years.

"There is no voter impersonation fraud in Minnesota," said ACLU-MN Executive Director Charles Samuelson, "and we are willing to bet on it."

As pointed out on Look True North, this was a convenient time frame to be able to exclude the cases where, "Channel 5’s Tom Hauser pointed out that in 1997, KSTP reporters uncovered several instances of voters using false identities to vote and some were even convicted."  As a publicity stunt this had great promise for the opponents of Voter ID, with highly improbable downside risk.

Everyone thought this would be an impossible to achieve task, as the current system allows only very loose election day registration (which 500,000 some did) such that the votes will be counted even when the subsequent voter verification (postal verification cards) fails after the fact.  Since there is no way to identify the person who voted, after the fact, there is virtually no possibility of conviction or even charging.  However Minnesota Majority has found a case in Anoka County where a Mother voted using her daughter's name and certified it herself, thus giving documented evidence.  This is a clear case of voter impersonation that has been carried to court.

Here is the video of the press event

Dan McGrath of Minnesota Majority has obtained the court records that show that the mother appears to have requested an absentee ballot on September 24, 2008.  She then voted and signed with her daughters name, certified it as herself on Oct 26, 2008.  Her daughter then voted in person, 10 days later (how long is a phone call?), on Nov 4.  When the felony charged case came to court, the mother had 2 charges dismissed, the false certificate charge was stayed.  She received a year of probation, was required to pay $200 court costs, and the records were essentially expunged. Making it extraordinarily difficult to find the case, as Dam McGrath states in the video. One argument from the ACLU and LWV is that voter impersonation is a felony, why would anyone risk it.  Aside from the virtual impossibility of finding and charging for it, the court was clearly not wanting to leave any significant mark on her record, or to acknowledge the very real fraud perpetrated.  So what should they fear?

Minnesota ACLU's Chuck Samuelson denies that the Voter ID argument is won,

"the fact that it was caught and prosecuted proves Minnesota doesn't need voter photo ID".  

An odd turn of phrase since the whole point of his bet was that it had to be a case where it was officially caught and charged/convicted.  Which by his initial logic was to be a convincing argument.  It would seem that no amount or quality evidence will be considered adequate for those who argue against any reasonable verification system.

The problem of Voter fraud, and the potential for affecting the elections since the votes count and cannot be removed, is very significant.  This is pointed out in the Minnesota Majority analysis of the undeliverable Postal Verification Cards (the best evidence available for voter fraud).

In Minnesota’s 2008 general election (a presidential election year), 6,224 Election Day registrants provided unverifiable names and/or addresses resulting in challenge due to PVC returns for reasons other than forwarding addresses after voting.
1,244 Election Day registrants provided unverifiable addresses when voting in Minnesota’s 2010 election (a non-presidential election year). Even if only a fraction of these returned cards were the result of fraudulent registrations, the numbers could be significant enough to affect the outcome of several elections. In 2008, Minnesota’s US senate race was decided by just 312 votes and a state representative was elected by just 13 votes in 2010.

The burden on the State for election integrity is to assure that the treatment of all voters is "substantially equivalent".  There is a clear division here that fails that test.  Voters who properly register before the election day must have their identity confirmed before their vote is counted.  Voters who show up on election day and register do not have their identity confirmed, or found false, until after their vote is irrevocably counted.  This fundamentally violates the trust we should have in our election process.

Media Matters, Not Truth

When we read or watch news we always want to be able to know what is true, and what is not. Human nature is to believe that which agrees with our world view, and to dismiss what doesn't fit. It takes a significant event in our lives to change our way of thinking. We always wanted to think journalists and media news sources to be impartial purveyors of truth and honest evaluations, because for the most part we are dependent upon it.  This is a constitutional responsibility of a Free Press.  But if abrogated it diminishes the capability of the citizens to limit excesses of the government.  For that purpose the press was to be kept separate of the government and not obedient to a single faction.   But since the days of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite we have learned that they are really just people relating stories, always with their own world view inescapably shaping the message that gets portrayed.  In a book "Bias" by Bernard Goldberg, 28 year veteran of CBS, wrote

(page 2) "Nor is it easy to write about other friends at CBS News, including an important executive who told me that of course the media tilts left -- but also warned that if I ever shared that view with the outside world he would deny the conversation ever took place"
(page 4) "Sadly, Dan [Rather] doesn't think that any critic who utters  the words "liberal bias" can be legitimate, even if the critic worked with Dan himself for two decades.  Such a critic cannot possibly be well meaning.
But real media bias comes not so much from what party they attack.  Liberal bias is the result of how they see the world."

For Bernard Goldberg, the revelation was that

"TV journalism had become a showcase for smart-ass reporters with attitudes, reporters who don't even pretend to hide their disdain for certain people and certain ideas that they and their sophisticated friends don't particularly like."

This revelation came about from consideration of the CBS news reporting during a Presidential Campaign

"Engberg's voice covered pictures of Steve Forbes on the campaign trail. 'Steve Forbes pitches his flat-tax scheme as an economic elixir, good for everything that ails us.'  Scheme? Elixir? What the hell kind of language is that, I wondered?"

Well it was among the signs of the progressive world view that has overwhelmed what we refer to as the main-stream-media. Producing a massive repetitiveness of the subtle message of derision that has convinced many that what they don't like is not a legitimate viewpoint.

It repeated with the "Fake But Accurate" campaign, that resulted in the dismissal of Dan Rather and several others at CBS.  A view that even though the charges and sources were demonstrated to be completely fraudulent and forged, the prevailing view of the MSM was that it was still "accurate".

It has been refined with even more activism and politically motivated operations at the new breed of "watchdogs" at Media Matters. That Media Matters is overtly partisan is not the issue.  The degree to which they influence and interact directly with, and possibly between, the Media, the Democrats and the White House is.

You might be saying that Fox News is doing the same thing as Media Matters (collusion), as this article on the Daily KOS about an "expose" of an RNC memo by Jon Stewart tries to portray.   But even as comedian Stewart's video riff (available in the article) shows, Steve Doocy (Monday 2/20) actually stated

"the RNC sees trouble for the president regarding this, and apparently they sent out something according to the papers called pundit prep"

which Stewart hears and portrays as evidence that Fox is taking direction from the RNC.  However Steve Doocy was reading, or "taking direction", directly from the Saturday 2/18 New York Times 

A recent “Pundit Prep” document cited the national debt, unemployment and the price of gas as the three best ways to define the “Obama economy.”

Well as Jon Stewart states about viewers who take him too seriously, "Its a comedy show! Not news!".  But when you watch it, as so many young people do, you end up believing the lie that Stewart has so vividly and comedically portrayed.

But is Media Matters dramatically more involved/colluding with the Democratic Party and the Media? In a series of articles written at the Daily Caller, from interviews with former colleagues at Media Matters, and internal documents

The group operates in regular coordination with the highest levels of the Obama White House, as well as with members of Congress and progressive groups around the country.  ...
“We were pretty much writing their prime time,” a former Media Matters employee said of the cable channel MSNBC. “But then virtually all the mainstream media was using our stuff.”
...Media Matters staff had the direct line of MSNBC president Phil Griffin, and used it. Griffin took their calls....
Reporters who weren’t cooperative might feel the sting of a Media Matters campaign against them. “If you hit a reporter, say a beat reporter at a regional newspaper,” a Media Matters source said, “all of a sudden they’d get a thousand hostile emails. Sometimes they’d melt down. It had a real effect on reporters who weren’t used to that kind of scrutiny.”
...
A group with the ability to shape news coverage is of incalculable value to the politicians it supports, so it’s no surprise that Media Matters has been in regular contact with political operatives in the Obama administration.
...
Media Matters also began a weekly strategy call with the White House, which continues, joined by the liberal Center for American Progress think tank. Jen Psaki, Obama’s deputy communications director, was a frequent participant before she left for the private sector in October 2011.

Every Tuesday evening, meanwhile, a representative from Media Matters attends the Common Purpose Project meeting at the Capitol Hilton on 16th Street in Washington, where dozens of progressive organizations formulate strategy, often with a representative from the Obama White House.

The Daily Caller analysis of the war against Fox News story

A little after 1 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2009, Karl Frisch emailed a memo to his bosses, Media Matters for America founder David Brock and president Eric Burns. In the first few lines, Frisch explained why Media Matters should launch a “Fox Fund” whose mission would be to attack the Fox News Channel.

“Simply put,” Frisch wrote, “the progressive movement is in need of an enemy. George W. Bush is gone. We really don’t have John McCain to kick around any more. Filling the lack of leadership on the right, Fox News has emerged as the central enemy and antagonist of the Obama administration, our Congressional majorities and the progressive movement as a whole.”

“We must take Fox News head-on in a well funded, presidential-style campaign to discredit and embarrass the network, making it illegitimate in the eyes of news consumers.”

“So, [Fox News] is no longer a news organization. This is a political organization, and their aim is to destroy a progressive policy agenda. They’d rather win in the ballot box than see any sort of real debate on health care. It’s a real shame.”

Ed Morrisey at Hot Air points out the real problem with this,

The real issue was the fact that MMFA did that while coordinating closely with the White House, which prompted the question of whether Barack Obama and his staff weren’t really the hands pulling the strings on its MMFA marionette.

So what was going on at the White House at the time that Frisch sent this memo to Brock?  It was just within days that Obama and his administration launched their weird war on Fox News.  On October 11th, White House communications chief Anita Dunn — one of MMFA’s main contacts at the White House — went on a nine-minute tirade about Fox on CNN, calling it “an arm of the GOP.”

For Media Matters truth is no longer the goal and independence no longer desired.  Identifying an enemy/pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it, is their goal.  Alinsky rule number 13. So in the battle of ideas one, unscrupulous, but effective technique is to paint your opponent as not worth listening to, illegitimate. The constant repetition of this message is usually effective at convincing people, regardless of the accuracy of such accusations.  That way you don't have to listen or consider that which you don't agree, you can dismiss it as an unacceptable source.

Charity vs Government Provision

Nothing seems more confused today than the understanding and relation of charity and the government entitlement culture.

On the show Jan 18, 2012 show, "The Five" with Progressive Commentator Bob Beckel, they were having a discussion where Andrea Tantaros was speaking with Beckel about conservatism and Rush Limbaugh, and they played a clip where Limbaugh said, "We conservatives do not see black, white, male, female, gay, straight.  We look at people, we see potential. We want the best for everybody. We know what's holding them back, it's government." 

Tantaros:  So Rush's point, Rush actually says that government's holding people back.  I actually think it's government telling people that it's okay to sit on your butts and we'll give you checks every month.

Beckel:  No, I don't think that's what the government says.

Tantaros:  Because it's good for the economy [as a government stimulus].

Beckel: We liberals made a terrible mistake going back 30 years ago, we made a dependent society  because we thought we were doing the right thing.  We had things like public housing, we had welfare payments, and all that bred a dependency, and it was our responsibility. We did it for the right reasons we need to change that.  But the way you change that is not to say its an opportunity society alone that's going to do it.  Its going to require some government intervention, that's our point.

Video of Beckel's statement


The next day Mr. Beckel reviewed it again and said

"what I want to repeat here is that there is going to be a need for government to help certain people in our society, many of whom come from the inner city, many of whom are minorities, and they are going to require some government intervention to help them.  We went too far is what I said, and I still believe, I said it yesterday, and I'll say it again today, we did it for the right intentions in many cases the wrong outcome".

Mr. Beckel's analysis admits that the outcome, the unintended consequence, of the progressive social policy was the creation of a dependency society.  But that we should be content that it was done for the "right reasons" and to prescribe more government to fix it.  A solution that, since it is an essentially symbiotic relationship, would seem doomed to inevitable failure.  This does demonstrate one very important step in addressing and solving issues. We have to admit the instances where we went wrong, and Mr Beckel did that on the behalf of his fellow Progressives.  An admission I am sure many will thunderously hold against him.  While I can agree with Mr. Beckel's statement that there will always be some among us who will need assistance, a helping hand, the unfettered access to "living on the dole" will only make the dependency society increase.  Larger government breeds this and cannot reduce it because it is antithetical to its nature.  We have to break the cycle and understand that an individuals need does not create an unlimited obligation on the part of society to fulfill it.

The seductive nature of government entitlement intervention is the central theme of an article posted by Catholic scholar Professor Paul Rahe.  Professor Rahe’s entire scholarly career [Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, Yale, Cornell, and Hillsdale] has been focused on studying the origins and evolution of self-government within the West. He is also member of the Catholic Church. The prompting for his writing was the recent controversy about government enforced edicts over religious liberty, mandating contraception supply to Catholic organizations. It's message is equally true for Protestant theologians and practitioners whose support of the entitlement "nanny state" overshadows their own message of personal responsibility and liberty.  Professor Rahe's message (hat tip PowerlineBlog) is as universally applicable to Protestant, Evangelical, and even secular organizations as it is to the Catholic brethren he is writing to.

Professor Rahe begins with a history that shows

that the Church worked assiduously to hem in the authority of the Christian kings and that its success in this endeavor provided the foundation for the emergence of a parliamentary order. ... It was the Church that promoted the principles underpinning the emergence of parliaments. It did so by fostering the species of government that had emerged within the church itself. Given that the Church in the West made clerical celibacy one of its principal practices (whether it was honored in the breach or not), the hereditary principle could play no role in its governance. Inevitably, it resorted to elections.

Then he shows the modern loss of that liberty of conscience

This is what the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church forgot. In the 1930s, the majority of the  bishops, priests, and nuns sold their souls to the devil, and they did so with the best of intentions. In their concern for the suffering of those out of work and destitute, they wholeheartedly embraced the New Deal. They gloried in the fact that Franklin Delano Roosevelt made Frances Perkins – a devout Anglo-Catholic laywoman who belonged to the Episcopalian Church but retreated on occasion to a Catholic convent – Secretary of Labor and the first member of her sex to be awarded a cabinet post. And they welcomed Social Security – which was her handiwork. They did not stop to ponder whether public provision in this regard would subvert the moral principle that children are responsible for the well-being of their parents. They did not stop to consider whether this measure would reduce the incentives for procreation and nourish the temptation to think of sexual intercourse as an indoor sport. They did not stop to think.

In the process, the leaders of the American Catholic Church fell prey to a conceit that had long before ensnared a great many mainstream Protestants in the United States – the notion that public provision is somehow akin to charity – and so they fostered state paternalism and undermined what they professed to teach: that charity is an individual responsibility and that it is appropriate that the laity join together under the leadership of the Church to alleviate the suffering of the poor. In its place, they helped establish the Machiavellian principle that underpins modern liberalism – the notion that it is our Christian duty to confiscate other people’s money and redistribute it.

At every turn in American politics since that time, you will find the hierarchy assisting the Democratic Party and promoting the growth of the administrative entitlements state. At no point have its members evidenced any concern for sustaining limited government and protecting the rights of individuals. It did not cross the minds of these prelates that the liberty of conscience which they had grown to cherish is part of a larger package – that the paternalistic state, which recognizes no legitimate limits on its power and scope, that they had embraced would someday turn on the Church and seek to dictate whom it chose to teach its doctrines and how, more generally, it would conduct its affairs.

In my lifetime, to my increasing regret, the Roman Catholic Church in the United States has lost much of its moral authority. It has done so largely because it has subordinated its teaching of Catholic moral doctrine to its ambitions regarding an expansion of the administrative entitlements state.

This loss is a loss for us all.  And it restoration will be slow and difficult.  The message fights against the current stream of the entitlement mentality, and the culture of dependency that it has created. But for those who value personal individual liberty, it is a restoration that is needed.

Extremist, labeling as a strategy

A favorite pastime, or is it a strategy, of the liberal left has been to call Conservatives “extremist”, “racist”.  It has been particularly profuse and common from the more liberal quarters of the Democrat hierarchy Barack Obama’s White House , Nancy Pelosi, (here and here), Harry Reed, Debbie Wasserman Shultz (here here  here here and here), and also from Rep. Betty McCollum during a townhall (“the house republican majority has pushed a different legislative agenda and I think its pretty extreme”).  The only way these statements are true is to do violence, as in the Federalist Papers description, to the center and right of the political spectrum and excise them from consideration.

NYTimes: President Obama’s political advisers, looking for ways to help Democrats and alter the course of the midterm elections in the final weeks, are considering a range of ideas, including national advertisements, to cast the Republican Party as all but taken over by Tea Party extremists, people involved in the discussion said.

Democratic Cry "Extremist"

Angry charges of "Extremists!" have become common and ubiquitous. It seems rarely do leading Democrats, such as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, ever talk about Republicans without adding the charge of extremist. Listen to them and it becomes quite clear that they believe "extremist" Republicans in Congress are the root of all evil. And, that these very "extremists' that are responsible for the American credit-worthiness downgrade, loss of competitiveness, high unemployment, and a sluggish economy.

So what was the classic definition of extremist?  To be extreme you had to espouse positions and attitudes that only a small fraction of Americans would agree with or consider reasonable, perhaps like members of the Weather Underground.  The definition of the offense of extremism is less permanent than a politician’s campaign promise, and mutates to permit government policies that few “centrist” people would previously have accepted.  To be repetitively intolerant of the views of perhaps more than half of Americans and to marginalize and denigrate them for political advantage, while currently part of the political tool set, does not make the claims true.

Robert F. Kennedy said, "What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents."

By this definition it seems to be more of a projection by liberals of their own sentiments than a reality of their opposition.  The extreme language and outrageous ad hominem accusations that border on or exceed slander and libel are simply a vehicle to try to eliminate contrary opinion from the marketplace of ideas. 

Two cases of this have presented themselves this week. 
A commenter on my blog calling Dennis Prager a “right wing extremist” (clearly not a listener) in part because of his (and my) stand on Voter ID.  A position in common with close to 80% of Minnesotans and 75% of Americans (here and here) and even 62% of Democrats , which I should imagine clearly makes it not extreme, by any definition.

and the outrageous ad hominem  New Yorker Magazine coverage of Rick Santorum,

To educated liberals of almost any description, Santorum is an abomination. It’s not just that he’s a pro-life, anti-gay, anti-contraception Roman Catholic of the most retrogressive and diehard Opus Dei variety. It’s his entire persona. With his seven kids, his Jaycee fashion code, his nineteen-seventies colonial MacMansion in northern Virginia, his irony bypass, he seems to delight in outraging self-styled urban sophisticates: the sort of folks who buy organic milk, watch The Daily Show, and read the New York Times (and The New Yorker, of course).

What is a Political Extremist?

Extremists can be left-wing or right-wing, but their views are typically far beyond the boundaries of logic.
Political extremist refers to a person or group that holds a set of beliefs that diverge from society's norm to a great degree. Extremist is a derogatory term, and to label someone as such is to accuse him or her of holding radical views that do not hold up to scrutiny or logic. They show disdain for the rights and liberties of others, but resent the limitations of their own activities. Extremists will use drastic measures to gain attention and support their various pursuits, including violence. Groups that are commonly labeled as extremist include Neo-Nazis, white supremacists such as Skinheads, and Holocaust Deniers. Extremists have many ironic qualities, such as the need to define themselves by naming their enemies. They favor censorship of their enemies but use intimidation and manipulation to spread their own assertions and claims.

Laird Wilcox [member of the ACLU] identifies 21 alleged traits of a "political extremist", ranging from behaviour like "a tendency to character assassination", over hateful behaviour like "name calling and labeling", to general character traits like "a tendency to view opponents and critics as essentially evil", "a tendency to substitute intimidation for argument" or "groupthink".  All behaviors prominent in the Democratic tactic of labeling Conservatives.

The tactic of continually labeling Conservatives as “extremists” is yet another instance of the application of Alinsky rules: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” and of course “Rule 6: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.”

Ron Paul at Bethel University

For my libertarian friends I offer a rare treat, an entire Ron Paul Speech, unedited. He was introduced by Representative  Kurt Bills  (R) District: 37B

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnJYX28LeuI

Ron Paul Spoke at Bethel University Feb 4, 2012
Doors opened at 4:45 p.m. and soon after 5 p.m., the 1,600-seat Benson Great Hall was at full capacity. Several hundred hopeful event-goers were turned away by campus security. The event was sponsored by students at the University.
Paul speaks on his conservative economic ideas and foreign policy of nonintervention, deeply rooted in the Austrian School of economics.

His views on the economy, size of government, and love of the Constitution offer much even to a less libertarian conservative