He says that, and then he goes right on throwing stones. In September, while substituting for Limbaugh, Erickson opined on the radio that minimum-wage workers didn’t warrant sympathy, because they were mostly either high-schoolers or people who deserved to be where they were. “If you’re a 30-something-year-old person and you’re making minimum wage, you’ve probably failed at life,” he said. The week before that comment, Erickson had begun his seminary courses.
Frum: Republican Boomers become “Conservative”
What boomers mean when they call themselves conservative is that they have begun to demand massive cutbacks to spending programs that do not directly benefit them. Seventy-five percent of Americans nearing retirement age in 2010 had less than $30,000 in their retirement accounts. Not surprisingly, then, boomers say they want no change at all to the Medicare and Social Security benefits they have begun to qualify for. They will even countenance tax increases on high earners to maintain those benefits. But compared with older Americans in the late 1980s, today’s aging boomers express less support for such fiscally liberal statements as “It is the responsibility of the government to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves.”
.. Boomers’ conservatism is founded on their apprehension that there’s not enough to go around — and on their conviction that what little resources there are should accrue to them.
.. This generational tension thrusts the Republican Party into an awkward spot. The elderly and disabled consume 41 percent of all federal spending.
.. The latter explains why budgetary politics in the Obama years has grown so polarized: the GOP’s largest voting constituency has convinced itself that it cannot afford any compromise at all.
The Twilight of Antonin Scalia
And some of what they read was not in the majority opinion but in Scalia’s dissent. In fact, about half of the opinions explicitly cited Scalia’s words. A representative passage by Judge Timothy Black, a district judge in Ohio, wrote:
And now it is just as Justice Scalia predicted—the lower courts are applying the Supreme Court’s decision, as they must, and the question is presented whether a state can do what the federal government cannot—i.e.,discriminate against same-sex couples … simply because the majority of the voters don’t like homosexuality (or at least didn’t in 2004). Under the Constitution of the United States, the answer is no ….
No words Scalia would write in the October 2013 term would be remotely as important or influential as his 2012 “prediction.” That’s because disguised within the flamboyant rhetoric, he had made an important legal concession.
Conservatives Reaction to Ferguson
Many conservatives were unsettled by the militaristic response from law enforcement officials in Ferguson — a show of force that they said dangerously resembled the actions a police state would take.
.. “When you couple this militarization of law enforcement,” he added, “with an erosion of civil liberties and due process that allows the police to become judge and jury — national security letters, no-knock searches, broad general warrants, preconviction forfeiture — we begin to have a very serious problem on our hands.”