Super Bowl Week
kicks off this weekend as NFL all-stars gather in Hawaii for the Pro Bowl game
on Sunday. But there is another all-star
game of sorts happening near Palm Springs this weekend. This one is not about football. But it is about
America’s other great passion-politics.
According to news
accounts in the New York Times, Politico and the Desert Sun, Koch Industries is
hosting its annual conference that has been dubbed by a representative of the
liberal Courage Campaign of California, a vehement opponent of the conference,
as "insidious."
Now I have heard of
Koch Industries and the two brothers who run this highly successful
multi-faceted company but to be honest I hadn’t heard of their conference
before this year. From the sounds of things they do attract an all-star line-up
of speakers that includes leaders from government, academia and industry many
of them conservatives and libertarians. Sounds like a good conference from what
I have read.
But this Sunday
instead of watching the Pro Bowl our friends from the opposite end of the
spectrum, the self-described "progressives" are going to do what they do
best-protest.
Folks from LA will
board buses and drive out to the desert to try and disrupt and draw media
attention to a private conference of folks they don’t agree with. Somewhere
Saul Alinsky is smiling but you can bet it ain’t in heaven because he was an
atheist.
But the question is,
what are they protesting exactly? I’m
not sure but I can guess. They don’t think the right to assemble should be
equally applied to people who have a different point of view. And, as an added inducement to get these
nice folks to take the long bus ride on a Sunday afternoon they have assembled
their own all-star cast of speakers.
To continue the
football analogy, this is their opposing team.
They’re quarterbacked by Van Jones, a onetime Obama appointee who
realized he would never get confirmed due to his past associations with Marxist
and 911-truthers among other things. And
then there is there is that liberal go to guy, Robert Reich. And they’re all
brought together by what Politico calls a "liberal watch dog group" Common
Cause.
The newspapers say
that the organizers are planning for 1000 protestors. Now even though I only have a public school
and land grant university education, according to my calculations that would
require 140 busses holding 70 passengers a piece to get all of these
progressives to the "game".
I wonder what the
carbon footprint is. Have they purchased carbon offsets for this little
venture?
It probably doesn’t
matter because pitching in to plan the conference with Common Cause is
Greenpeace who most certainly can provide some kind of liberal dispensation for
their environmental sins. Other fellow travelers on the road to the desert are
the progressive change agent the Courage Campaign and the militant California
Nurses Association. The nurses seem spend more time playing politics than
playing nurse.
And just what is
their grievance with the Koch brothers?
Some of the news accounts say the progressives
are upset because they helped bankroll Proposition 23 the failed attempt to
rollback the job-killing environmental boondoggle AB 32 in California.
But they’re fine
when their main squeeze, George Soros who has contributed heavily to Common
Cause and other liberal groups donates a $1 million to Proposition 19, which
would have legalized marijuana in California.
I guess we know what
these all-stars mean when they talk about pinning California’s future to the
"green economy."
But it goes deeper
than what the mainstream media would have you believe.
The progressives
want to silence the voices that are in opposition to their long march to remake
America into some kind of Euro Socialist utopia.
They will stop at
nothing and will turn a blind eye to the shady backgrounds of their benefactors.
They don’t mind
taking money from wealthy liberals like Soros who made his fortune by
manipulating financial markets and is known as the man who "broke the Bank of
England" making a tidy $1 billion profit and costing British taxpayers millions
of pounds.
Are Greenpeace and
other progressive environmental groups aware that their patron saint George
Soros owns a $900 million stake in the Brazilian oil giant Petrobas that is
drilling off Brazil’s coast for that evil black goo they hate?
And how do they feel
that while their favorite social programs are underfunded and under the budget
knife, the Obama Administration authorized their government to subsidize this
activity? According to the Wall Street Journal "The United States, through the U.S. Export-Import
Bank, has issued a ‘preliminary commitment’ of $2 billion and more if
needed" to Petrobas.
Drilling here and providing American jobs is bad. Drilling
in Brazil and providing Brazilians jobs is good.
At least Koch Industries invests in and owns companies that
actually produce wealth for this nation and jobs for Americans.
All
those folks who will board buses this Sunday are either fools or hypocrites.
They can’t be both.
Should
be an interesting "game" this Sunday.