I posted the opinion piece below my note yesterday. I used the name SMGOP. The article was clearly attributed at the bottom of the piece and the contact information included SMGOP in the name so there should have been little confusion as to the source.
It appears that "Sam Sell" may habe found the information in the article so upsetting he needed to try and use the letter of the law to get it silenced. The complaint was that this piece was possibly being posted incorrectly ( he could have e-mailed to check and find out before making an unfounded accusation). [Portion deleted. Discuss the topic. Don't attack other posters.] Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer!
(For those who are unfamiliar with what a block warden or blockleiter is go here: Web Link
And now - once again; some apparently threatening information:
"The belief that liberals care more about the poor may scratch a partisan or ideological itch, but the facts are hostile witnesses."
--Hon. Don R. Willett, Texas State Supreme Court Justice, Texas Review of Law & Politics
There are many arguments about perception and reality. Ultimately, perception is not reality but for all intents and purposes it might as well be. If you can get enough people to act on a false impression then the truth really doesn’t matter.
We encounter this daily. When we read the news, whether it is good old fashioned newsprint or the hundreds of blogs available online, when we watch Jon Stewart, Chris Matthews, or Bill Maher, we all hear how Republicans are rich, old, white men. We learn that Republicans are greedy and selfish, that Republicans want to deny people jobs, healthcare, housing, and an education.
They must be very scary people! How can any sane thinking person identify as a Republican if those are their values?
As it turns out, the only thing truly scary is the fact that these notions, which are an outright fabrication and demonstrably false, are being touted as gospel by our “respected” news sources.
Let’s start addressing these myths about Republicans by taking a look at the charitable donations of righties versus lefties.
A book by Syracuse University Business Professor Arthur C. Brooks, titled "Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism," examines the data on this very topic, and while the book made a splash on both sides of the aisle a few years ago when it came out, it’s findings have seemingly been forgotten and drowned out by the continuous, droning, and automaton-like repetition of the very incorrect ideas that it refuted.
Before we launch into the findings in the book, let’s qualify Syracuse University a bit, just so nobody gets the idea that we are dealing with a professor from the Limbaugh Institute or the Heritage Foundation here. The University Chancellor, a woman, has a list of publications which include speeches such as, “The Value of Diversity in Higher Education” and “Women as Academic Leaders: Insider Voices with Outsider Values.” Syracuse has a special program called “STOPbias,” the “STOP” being an acronym for “Spot It, Talk About It, Open Your Mind, Prevent It.” This is, as the righties would say, “Liberal Academia” at it’s finest.
So what does this book have to say?
The findings include the following data:
-Income for liberal families averages 6 percent higher than those of conservative families, yet conservative families gave, on average, 30 percent more to charity than the average liberal-headed household.
-George Bush carried 24 of the 25 states where charitable giving was above average.
-In the 10 reddest states, in which Bush got more than 60 percent majorities, the average percentage of personal income donated to charity was 3.5 percent. Residents of the bluest states, which gave Bush less than 40 percent of their vote, donated just 1.9 percent.
(Web Link
-If liberals gave as much blood as conservatives do, the nation’s blood supply would increase by 45 percent.
These are just a few of the conclusions reached from the data in the book.
Of course, the quote at the top of this column comes from Don Willett in his review of this book in a Texas Law Journal. “Come on!” you say. He’s a right-wing Texas judge – his idea of fun probably consists of monster pickup trucks crushing rows of Priuses, and plinking gophers in his backyard with his .22 long barrel.
While that may or may not be true, and if it is true it may or may not matter to the validity of his review, the fact is that the data in the book has been openly acknowledged by the left as well, and has not, as far as we can tell, been disputed or called into question by anyone on either side of the fence.
In fact, the book was the inspiration for a piece in the New York Times by self-admitted liberal and Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist Nicholas Kristof, titled “Bleeding Heart Tightwads,” wherein Kristof not only acknowledges the truth of the Brooks’ data, but corroborates it by citing other sources which are consistent with it: A Google survey showed average conservative charitable contributions were double those of liberals, and the Catalogue of Philanthropy, a group of over 300 nonprofits nationwide, consistently finds that Red States contribute more, while Northeastern States (heavily democratic) contribute less.
(Web Link
Incidentally, Kristof also found similar truths on the international scale – Americans give to charity far more than Europeans (read: more liberal/socialistic folks). Americans give 1.67 percent of their GNP. The stingiest group of people on Earth (his words, not ours!) are the French with 0.14 percent. (That’s about one tenth of one percent- about 14 times less than Americans).
How about another shock to liberal sensibilities? In the United States, liberal millionaires actually outnumber conservative millionaires. Somehow the GOP has gotten stuck with the stigma that if you are rich, you must be a Republican and your gains are ill-gotten. Democrats play the class warfare card about the "rich getting richer," but as it turns out, it's those same liberal Democrat politicians who are getting richer, even during this down economy. (Note that Nancy Pelosi's wealth grew by 62 percent in one year from 2009 to 2010, as reported in The Hill newspaper). Somehow the policies they espouse fatten their wallets at the expense of the middle class. As for bad character, please note that Democrat Bernie Madoff gave $25,000 annually to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign.
Why, if this information is acknowledged as true by people on both sides and has gone unrefuted, and is out there for all to see and digest, does it seem to be constantly ignored and willfully contradicted in everyday political dialogue both at the national level in the mainstream media (MSM) and locally, among your own friends and neighbors in your community?
Could it be that everything the commentators say is not always true? Could it be that people with their own agendas are trying to mislead you into adopting their worldview, by misstating the worldview of their opponents?
Answering such questions is above our pay grade, but it wouldn’t be the first time that a populace has been intentionally misled for purposes of political and financial gain. In fact, someone I think we all know once said: “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.”
Now, quoting Hitler may make us sound crazy, but to us, the total disregard for and drowning out of hard data by merely repeating the opposite of those facts is real madness. And it is exactly what we see today.
The truth is out there, and as the facts uncomfortably prove, the only way to truly make the Republican Party the party of the stingy is for a huge number of Democrats to re-register as Republicans and start voting for our candidates. I encourage you to consider it.
The San Mateo Republican Party will address more myths in future columns. If you want to contact us, you can e-mail us at info@smgop.org. Put “Rossetti-Evanns” in the subject line. The authors of this article, Lisa Rossetti and Richard Evanns, are proud Republicans.
