There, I’m out.

It has been noted on occasion that I can also be confrontational, which is true. However, I have a long history of engaging people whose political beliefs are different than mine and keeping relationships intact. Just yesterday on Twitter I was engaged in a heated debate with a guy that began to escalate quite a bit. There was a lot of posturing, some veiled threats and generally not getting along type stuff for a while. Then we found some common ground. Today we talked about going golfing.

I mention this to prove that I am not unreasonable when people are genuinely willing to debate. Many people aren’t, however, despite their protestations to the contrary.

This is for you.

A situation arose earlier today on Twitter that led to this post. A woman who had interacted with me a few days ago began taking me to task for how harsh I was being regarding some of the May Day violence that the #OWS types were engaged in. Hey, I’m old fashioned-I think if you’re wearing a fetish mask and smashing windows with a baseball bat the cops should be able to use you as a percussion instrument if you fight them too.

As is my wont on Twitter, I went to an extreme or two. But it was all about the people committing violence.

The woman immediately accused me of saying that cops should be able to have their way with anyone engages in peaceful protest.

Lie Number One.

I indulged that and continued the back-and-forth, with a more insulting tone.

Then she began the talking points.

To deflect from the very real, ongoing violence of the #OWS crowd she trotted out the “Tea Partiers yelled the “N” word at John Lewis!” myth from the summer of 2010. She sought to distract by getting me to defend something that never happened-a classic lefty ploy that people on the right have fallen for for decades now.

Lie Number Two.

The Lewis story was a lie concocted by officials of the Democrat party and dutifully repeated in the press despite any proof whatsoever. Andrew Breitbart and his people spent a lot of time offering a lot of video proof that it DID NOT happen but the MSM ran with it anyway. It was just one of far too many false attempts to smear a peaceful, legitimate political movement. The same media lap dogs who repeated this lie have all but ignored the painfully real violence associated with the #OWS crowd.

What the Progressive Left needs to understand is that the old model of getting us to chase our tails defending something they made up WILL NOT work anymore. Of all the great tactical moves Breitbart was known for making, challenging a false premise the second it was uttered was far and away my favorite.

For too long, people on our side have been afraid to immediately cut lies off because we’re afraid of being called racist, sexist, thisist or thatist.

No more.

I will talk all day about politics with you until you attempt to change the subject with what I KNOW you know is a lie. How will I know? More often than not, it will be some garbage that has been repeated on MSNBC for weeks on end. Those people are not journalists, they’re unhinged hacks. I know, I get paid to watch them every week.

The classic diversion ploy of jumping to a new subject will be tolerated for a short while, probably two jumps. If the jump involves a talking point lie, we’re done and you’ve lost.

Another rule is one I came up with about two months ago and have adhered to pretty strictly. I will no longer engage anonymous accounts online. If you want to go off on me, have the balls to do so as yourself. It matters not to me if you have to remain anonymous for work reasons, you can go bother somebody else.

These are fairly simple rules. Tell me about the underlying philosophy or personal experience that informs your beliefs. Don’t tell me something that Chris Matthews belched up a hundred times. It’s easier to get along than you think. But you have to think.

If you’ve been referred to this post after an exchange online and find it to be unfair…shucks.

The first clip this week features shocking evidence of some journalism being committed at CNN. Brooke Baldwin grills Rep. Corrine Brown over her interest in the Trayvon Martin shooting.

Clip number two finds Dan Rather back on television, making us shake our heads at the fact that he was ever relevant. He asks Rachel Maddow if she knows any women who don’t use birth control. Um…

This is a quick one, but had to be included. It’s gaffe #1,643,972 from your One Heartbeat Away.

Going to finish this week with one to get your blood pressure up. Rock the Vote has a new ad out which purports to help explain the history of voting. It’s just that in their history the United States Army has a machine that goes around killing young Americans. Here is the link to contact these idiots and bombard them with complaints.

Now let’s hurry up and get the baseball season going.

The h/t and context for this first vid come from Guy Benson at Townhall.com. The killer quote from Wonder Boy Geithner to Paul Ryan comes at the end and it is stunning.

“You are right to say we’re not coming before you today to say ‘we have a definitive solution to that long term problem.’ What we do know is, we don’t like yours.”

Here is the full exchange between Chelsea Handler and Rosie O’Donnell on “Little People”. It’s been established that I’m not the most politically correct guy around but this conversation had even me shaking my head.

Hey kids, for the first time since the 1990s, Dick Morris gets something right!

Here’s one that we could have easily used for “It’s Not Just Me Anymore” but I found the other clip first. Congressional Black Caucus Chairman Emanuel Cleaver calls the president’s new budget a “nervous breakdown on paper”.

In this clip, the once glorious Peggy Noonan (I still haven’t quite gotten over her being duped by Obama in 2008) shows Mika Brzezinski how a thought process actually works.

Before we get to the final clip, I’d like to share my favorite CPAC 2012 moment with you. On Friday night, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a tiny woman surrounded by people just a few feet away. I never ask to have my picture taken with celebrities at these gatherings (big ego, but you all knew that) but I wasn’t going to pass up a chance to meet the great Phyllis Schlafly:

Finally, in case you missed it, here is Sarah Palin’s CPAC speech. I was watching it from the Bloggers Lounge adjacent to the balcony that overlooks the stage. The atmosphere was beyond electric, we were typing and cheering out loud and the speech left most of us in the room too depressed to have a real discussion about the candidates who were actually running.

But the bar was open.

Wow, has it already been a year since I last entered into that torturous period of repentance and guilt? I’m a Catholic but I’m not talking about Lent. The period of which I speak are those painful days leading up to, and ending with, Valentine’s Day.

I was watching my daughter gleefully make her Valentines for school and realized that this “holiday” is actually fun at one point in our lives. Kids might suffer small disappointments here and there if they don’t get a Valentine from someone they like but it is pretty stress free for them. I began to wonder how adulthood changes the day from fun to the most soul-sucking black hole on the calendar. Face it, Valentine’s Day is to emotions and male/female relations what April 15th is to disposable income. I don’t think it’s a small coincidence that Valentine’s Day has the same initials as venereal disease: they’re both hell on relationships.

If I make a blanket proclamation I know that several contrarians will show up out of nowhere to rebut it but here I go: I don’t think I’ve ever met an adult who truly enjoys V.D. You can easily write off the male part of the population. When you hear a woman say that V.D. is a stupid holiday she’s usually bitter or dating some inattentive tool who hasn’t learned how to play the game. When you hear a man say it, he really thinks it’s a stupid holiday. For us, it’s like a standardized test that the state makes us take once a year just to prove we can be in a relationship. There are no real excuses for distraction as it falls just at the end of football season and before spring training or March Madness. Evil, I tell you. For us, there is almost nothing we can do right other than remembering the day. If you buy her chocolates she’ll worry that they’ll make her fat. If you don’t buy her chocolates she’ll worry that you think she’s fat. The flowers now have toxic chemicals in them. If you propose marriage, you’re being obvious and not surprising anyone. If you don’t propose, she’s disappointed because she was expecting it. And on it goes. How we don’t all end up on the same bridge looking like some kind of synchronized suicide team still mystifies me.

Women don’t have it much easier. Poor things, your enjoyment of the day is tied into elevated expectations of romantic performance from males. There’s a sentence so loaded with oxymoron that the words almost leapt away from each other on the page. I’m not saying that we can’t be romantic, it’s just harder to do when it’s been scripted in your heads and we haven’t read it. Step away from the “Lifetime” movies long enough to drop us some hints. By “hints” I mean detailed memos explaining exactly where, what, when and how the evening plays out in the aforementioned script. Please don’t explain the “who” because we’d like to assume that we’re still involved. We’ll take it from there. You can now relax, stand in front of a mirror and practice looking surprised.

Fortunately for all of us, the raging hormones will ensure that men and women still want to be around each other despite the evil machinations of those pricks at Hallmark. We can further alleviate the barriers by getting rid of V.D. once and for all. How? Check this out: it’s a Christian saint’s feast day. Let’s simply start calling it Saint Valentine’s Day. The kids will start saying it at school. Once that happens, some miscreant from the ACLU will pop out of his hole and begin screaming about religion in school and-poof!-it’s gone. Future generations won’t be indoctrinated and men and women can one day sit around and enjoy each other on February 14th.

It’s a legacy our children deserve.

This is a fuzzy vid but gets the point across. CNN’s Soledad O’Brien nearly dislocates her shoulder patting herself on the back for getting Mitt Romney to say something ridiculous in a post-Florida speech. She shouldn’t have-despite running for president nonstop for six years, Romney still isn’t very good at it. Yet we keep hearing he’s the most ready for prime time and a general election. Ugh. That’s why my support is going here. But back to the clip. O’Brien is high-fived by CNN’s Oompa-Loompa in-residence, Roland Martin. Why? Because they got to spend a couple of minutes bashing a Republican. On the network that prides itself on being “centrist”. Yeah…no.

As I pointed out in this PJ Tatler post, we should just strap ourselves in for a pants-wetting, playground attack from the Democrats this year. The None-Too-Reverend Jesse Jackson picks up the criticism=demonization garbage meme and draws the inevitable conclusion that it will result in assassination. Because this is the first president ever to be harshly criticized. Remember that, history buffs.

We’ll finish up this week with one of Morning Joe’s occasional lucid moments. The topic? Romney’s WEALLLLLLLLTH! Money is bad only when Republicans have it. And stuff.

Thanks for watching!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Here Rick Santorum addresses the MSM double standard about which politicians get defended and which don’t.

Here the unfailingly pretentious, almost always wrong Katrina vanden Heuvel spouts some DNC talking points and gets her skinny you-know-what handed to her by George Will.

In this clip, CNN’s John King is dumb enough to revisit his stupid debate lead-off question to Newt Gingrich about the rumors his bitter ex was peddling to ABC. Newt then explains to King why he was, once again, a hack idiot for bringing the subject up. Note to Obama sycophants: this is what “professorial” actually looks like.

We’ll finish this week with a couple of non-video links.

The first is proof that even I will say something nice about President Obama. The man certainly knows his target audience.

And we finish with a great post from Commentary Magazine (which I can’t recommend highly enough) which counters more of the brain-dead Left’s “dog whistle” garbage.