Category Archives: Opinion

RANDOM THOTS 8/4/2010


Pajama People
About the time blogging was reaching puberty, a journalist of the traditional sort penned an article in derision of these upstarts who were infringing upon his profession. He argued that bloggers were to be dismissed as a motley lot, just muddying the waters of true journalism. They were butchers, bakers, soccer moms and cabinet makers. They were people who arose early in the morning to write their posts while still in pajamas, before getting dressed to go to work. “Pajama people” he called them.

“Unreliable and unprofessional” he said, “bloggers did not have copy editors, research staffs or the facilities for the fact checking which is essential for trustworthy reporting”. Simply put, bloggers did not have the means to support responsible reporting as did, say NBC for Dan Rather or the New York Times for Jason Blair.

There are pundits today who deride the main stream media by calling it “state run media”. Of course, it is not. But there is no denying the blogosphere is people run media.

Legislative trivia

Which Senator has had the greatest success seeing bills he sponsored pass into law since 1987?
Orrin Hatch (R) UT 66 successes

Which Senator has had the greatest failure getting bills he sponsored to pass into law?
Chuck Schumer (D) NY 684 failures

Which elected official has the highest record for being absent for a Congressional vote?
Del. Faleomavaega (D) AS
41% of votes missed since 2007

Answers provided by GovTrack http://www.govtrack.us/congress

American Samoa

What or where in the world is AS?
American Samoa, capital Pago Pago, the only U.S. territory south of the Equator. Polynesian paradise, so I am told.

Bob B

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CARD CHECK IS COMING

As the video attests, Nancy Pelosi has promised union members that the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) will be enacted. There is no better example of propagandic than the title of this proposed law. The sole purpose of the Employee Free Choice Act is to hinder free choice. The name of the bill infers exactly the opposite of the intent of the bill.

The EFCA is a simple piece of legislation. Under the proposed law union organizers only need to get half of the employees to sign a card and the shop becomes unionized. Secret balloting becomes disallowed. If the bill becomes law, intimidation and broken legs are sure to follow.

Do not fail to vote in November! Those elections will still be confidential.

Bob B

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OLIVER STONE

Director Oliver Stone went Moore Mad. From the London Sunday Times came this:

Director Oliver Stone belittled the Holocaust during a shocking interview with the Sunday Times today, claiming that America’s focus on the Jewish massacre was a product of the “Jewish domination of the media.”. The director also defended Hitler and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and railed against the “powerful lobby” of Jews in America.

Upon seeing the public furor over the remark, he  retracted his statements and apologized.  Apology accepted. He sincerely acknowledged that some of the things one believes should not be expressed in public.

However, if ever there was a man of the Left, Oliver Stone is it. Please note, this man of the left sided with Adolf Hitler in his interview with the Sunday Times. He is not the first from the Left to do so and do so. No less an icon than Charles Lindberg was a Hitler supporter. Lindberg supported Hitler (early on) because he, Lindberg, was a liberal and saw merit in Hitlers’s socialist agenda. Our liberal compatriots like to paint old Adolf as a man of the Right. Don’t believe it. Hitler’s Party was the National Socialists Party and nothing, absolutely nothing that he did would ever be condoned by the folks the Left calls ‘right wingers’, extremist or not.

KRUGMAN ON CLIMATE CHANGE

The year 2010 is the year “all hope of action to limit climate change died”, says economist columnist Paul Krugman, writing for the New York Times. Really? I wish it were true, but I am afraid Krugman is wrong again.

He continues

One of the favorite tricks of climate-change deniers: they point to an unusually warm year in the past, and say “See, the planet has been cooling, not warming, since 1998!” Actually, 2005, not 1998, was the warmest year to date.

He has a point. In 2007 NASA changed their numbers and declared 2005 to be the warmest year on record, not 1998 as they had previously reported. They do acknowledge other agencies still put 1934 as the warmest, but that’s a moot point. Some things Krugman fails to say are:

The third hottest year on record was 1921.

Three of the five hottest years on record occurred before 1940.

Six of the top 10 hottest years occurred before 90 percent of the growth in greenhouse gas emissions during the last century occurred.

NASA’s ground-based temperature records for the past 120 years’ which have been the basis for most of the claims that global warming is happening at an unprecedented rate, — have now been corrected to show that much of the warming occurred before CO2 emissions and concentrations began to rise significantly.

And that is an important point, because the real argument is not over warming, but over the cause. Is it man made as scientists Al Gore and Paul Krugman claim or is it natural, perhaps from temperature changes at the sun’s surface, as some other scientists claim? If the latter are correct, building windmills on hills to fight the sun is a bit quixotic, don’t you think? Or perhaps it is just plain silly.

The most honest of all was G. W. Bush. When asked for his for his position on the issue, he said “I don’t believe we should be making sacrifices for something we dunno.”. There is nothing silly about that.

Bob B

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CNN WOULD CENSOR BLOGS

Obama is not the only one with audacity. Wee though I may be, I have the audacity to call myself a member of “the press”, the great public press, the new press, the real press, the open press, the complete press. Freedom of the press applies equally to the New York Times, Huffington Post, Random Thots and the guy next door who started his first blog last Tuesday.

There is beauty, trash, idiocy, and profound thinking available to all, on the internet. There are lies too outrageous for the National Enquirer to publish and truths too enlightening for the New York Times to put in print. It’s there, the good, the bad; and the ugly. It’s all there. It is for the reader to discern and choose the good from the bad, the same as one does when choosing friends and companions. When government is given the power to control what our our eyes may see and what our ears may hear, the end of freedom is at the door.

The founders of this great nation trusted the people of this great nation more than they trusted the government of this great nation. The very first Amendment to the Constitution guarantees freedom from government control of speech, religion and the press. End of rant.

Why the rant? News anchors Kyra Philips and John Roberts, members of the press no less, are calling for the government, or someone to control the press, that’s why the rant. They don’t want CNN to be censored, of course, only the blogs.

Roberts:

“there’s going to come a point where something’s going to have to be done legally”. [legally = government]

Philips:

“There has to be some point where there’s some accountability. And companies, especially in the media have to stop giving these anonymous bloggers credit,”

Then this idiocy – Roberts first points out that some countries, like Iran, are closed societies where the internet may be their only source of uncensored reporting, then adds:

“But when it comes to a society like ours, an open society, do there have to be (sic) some checks and balances, not national, but maybe website to website on who comments on things?”

Huh? Because ours is a free and open society we need to control the blogs? Mr. Roberts, as you might put it, ‘there do not have to be’.

Fear not, Congress will never enact a law rescinding freedom of speech.  If however, it ever comes up in a referendum, at least 3 votes would be assured, those of  Roberts, Philips and Rather.

Bob B

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http://newsbusters.org/blogs/alana-goodman/2010/07/23/cnn-host-calls-crackdown-bloggers-wake-sherrod-incident-something-s-g

RANDOM OBSERVATIONS

Forty one cents
Washington spends $1.70 for every dollar they have. Put another way, the federal government needs to borrow 41 cents of every dollar they spend. Still, Paul Krugman, eminent Nobel Prize winning economist and darling of New York Times readers is screaming in near panic that Obama is not spending nearly enough.

Since the Nobel panel has honored Barack Obama, Al Gore and Yasser Arafat with the Peace Prize, it is only fitting to award the prize in Economics to Paul Krugman.

Tax increases you never hear about.
WOR radio host John Gambling reported on a move to require airlines to include incidental third party fees in the price of a ticket. The given reason is simplification for the consumer. Sounds good. The real reason is to increase federal tax revenue. Not so good.

A federal tax of 7.5% is charged on the price of every airline ticket. By including the ancillary charges in the ticket price, the 7.5% will apply to the fees as well as to what the airline charges for your seat. Some of these fees are themselves taxes, in which case, you will be paying taxes on taxes.

This type of tax increase is incremental and goes unnoticed. Neither new legislation nor Congressional approval is required. All it takes is a rule change that falls within the authority of a government regulator. It is taxation by fiat.

Safe sexual harassment.
If a Congressman or Senator sexually harasses a staffer and the staffer brings charges resulting in an award for damages, who pays the bill? The American taxpayer pays the bill. Fines have been assessed approaching million dollars, yet the guilty politician pays not a whit cent of it, not even the legal fees.

Bob B

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RUSSIANS KNOW THE FOREST, AMERICANS CAN’T EVEN SEE THE TREES

"HA'PNY"

British half cent (half penny) coin

The other day, my wife and I were leaving a restaurant in a tourist town. As we stepped out the door, a couple was standing on the sidewalk looking at the menu in the window. They asked us what we thought of the food and service. We had just dined there, we should know. Hold that thought.

Pravda became internationally known as the propaganda organ of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev’s Glasnost gave them an independent, if not totally free, voice. Today’s Pravda is largely free to express the thoughts and minds of the Russian people.

There is a certain form of government we call Communism. The Russians call it Marxism; academics call it Central Planning or Collectivism; the Tea Party calls it Socialism; author Mark Levin, in Liberty and Tyranny calls it Statism. There is not a ha’pny’s difference between them. The Russian people know this form of government very well. They have been dining there for years. Here is what Pravda had to say three months after the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama.

American capitalism gone with a whimper
PRAVDA 27.04.2009

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath-taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters. First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather than the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their “right” to choke down a McDonalds burger than for their constitutional rights.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different “branches and denominations” were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the “winning” side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America’s short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Weimar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These men, of course, are not an elected panel but made up of appointees picked from the very financial oligarchs and their henchmen who are now gorging themselves on trillions of American dollars, in one bailout after another. They are also usurping the rights, duties and powers of the American congress.

Then came Barack Obama’s command that GM’s (General Motor) president step down from leadership of his company. That is correct, dear reader, in the land of “pure” free markets, the American president now has the power, the self given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private companies, at will. Come hither, go dither, the centurion commands his minions.

Prime Minister Putin, less then two months ago, warned Obama and UK’s Blair, not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster. Apparently, even though we suffered 70 years of this Western sponsored horror show, we know nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, so let our “wise” Anglo-Saxon fools find out the folly of their own pride.
Again, the American public has taken this with barely a whimper…

So, should it be any surprise to discover that the Democratically controlled Congress of America is working on passing a new regulation that would give the American Treasury department the power to set “fair” maximum salaries, evaluate performance and control how private companies give out pay raises and bonuses? Senator Barney Franks, a social pervert basking in his homosexuality (of course, amongst the modern, enlightened American societal norm, as well as that of the general West, homosexuality is not only not a looked down upon life choice, but is often praised as a virtue) and his Marxist enlightenment, has led this effort. He stresses that this only affects companies that receive government monies, but it is retroactive and taken to a logical extreme, this would include any company or industry that has ever received a tax break or incentive.

The Russian owners of American companies and industries should look thoughtfully at this and the option of closing their facilities down and fleeing the land of the Red as fast as possible. In other words, divest while there is still value left.

The proud American will go down into his slavery with out a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.          Stanislav Mishin

I know, the author is disdainful, crude and given to overstatement. Even Barney Frank deserves a little more respect. But how is it so many in our land lack the vision to see where we are headed when someone 5000 miles away sees it so clearly? Somehow, I think, Stanislav Mishkin is equally perplexed.

The answer, of course, is that they have already been where we are just now going.

Bob B

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THE FRANK-DODD ACT

The name of the new package of financial regulations is The Frank-Dodd Act. Given what we know about Barney Frank, there must be more than one good joke there, but we have decided to let it be. We are not going to sully this site by saying things like ‘In naming the law, they were wise to use a dash and not an ampersand’.

By the time you read this, the bill may have been signed into law but it will not yet have been written. We say this because much of it is vague, leaving the de facto law up to the regulators to determine. For example, The Act requires each federal agency to establish an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion which is to be responsible for all matters relating to diversity in management, employment and business activities. What does that mean? What is the law? It is not yet written. The law will be, what the agency yet to be formed, says it will be.

The Act establishes a Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection with the power to close down a business that the Bureau determines poses a risk to consumers due to some measure of financial instability, instability as determined by the Bureau. In this regard one might say there is no law to observe, no law you must break for the Bureau to be able to close you down.

“No one will know until this is actually in place how it works”. Now there’s a profound truth coming straight from a Democrat, the man who wrote the bill, a man who knew whereof he spoke.

This law is to the financial industry, what Obamacare is to the health-care industry – an enormous expansion of government control over a significant section of the American economic system. It is ingenious to the extent that it empowers bureaucracies to govern by rule change without the need for legislative action.

Both The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act (all one law known as Obamacare) and the Frank-Dodd Act are major advancements in Obama’s march toward the goal of a grand centrally planned state.

Bob B<!– AddThis Button BEGIN –>

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RACISM RISING UNDER OBAMA

Farrakhan, Shabazz, Bin Laden

When a black President comes from a Black Liberation Theology church, assumes its racism when a white police officer detains a black man in Boston, appoints a black Attorney General who intervenes to discharge a clear-cut case against black members of a black supremacist organization; and when the First Lady gives speeches to a black activist organization urging continuation of the fight against slavery and Jim Crow; when these things happen, people sit up and take notice. Racism is rampant. Thank you Obama.

Few white people realize the depth of ant-Americanism and disdain for whites that is promoted by the New Black Panther organization and its adherents, but Obama knows it very well.

One of the Black Panthers that Attorney General Holder freed from prosecution was the leader of the organization.Malik Shabazz. In this video, taped in 2202, a few short months after 911 , Shabazz praises Bin Laden and cheers him on for the boldness with which he has acted and the success he has had in bringing  Jihad to America. It is a disturbing video to watch, and especially chilling to know that this man has just been protected from prosecution, by our President, over illegal voter intimidation at the polls.

It is vitally important to make it clear that the vast majority of black Americans do not hold to the extreme views of Louis Farrakhan or Malik Shabazz.

Regular readers of Random Thots know I am a great admirer of Martin Luther King. Here are some notable comparisons between the two.

King descended from slaves; Obama did not.

King dreamed of a color blind society; Obama is creating a color aware society.

King lived in the South; Obama lived in the North, as well as in Hawaii and Kenya.

King lived  in the area and in the era when blacks in the South could not eat in white restaurants or quench their thirst at white ‘public’ drinking fountains. Obama did not. He formative years started after the tide had turned, when great progress underway and when King’s dream seemed it might be, miraculously, achievable. Yet it is Barack who appears driven by resentment and King who was able to live beyond it.


The shame of it all is that our first black American President is undoing the work of Martin Luther King and it is all to the detriment of his own black community.

Bob B

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WHEN NATIONS GO BANKRUPT

Have you ever wondered what happens when a nation goes bankrupt? There is no bankruptcy court for nations. A country cannot just fade away into non-existence as can a corporation. Merger is not a way out either.

A look at the country of Greece and at the city of Oakland, California will give us a clue. Neither is quite bankrupt but both are on the verge. In Greece riots over reduction in spending have already killed a few people. In Oakland the police chief threatens not to respond to telephone calls in cases of burglary, grand theft, vandalism or auto accidents, and a list of certain other offenses. This is no doubt a threat for political purposes, but it gives us a hint as to what can happen when a government entity truly cannot pay their bills.

Policemen, firemen and teachers, will they continue to work if they are not paid? They will not and chaos is the result. Sporadic riots and looting erupt. Some people die. If the nation is one with a single payer* health plan and can no longer pay its bills, everyone’s health care is in curtailed. Radical change in government becomes acceptable, even sought for by the people.

The change can take a turn to conservative rule such as happened in Chile, or it can be reliance on the grand promises of a despot as happened in Germany. It can revert to prosperity as have Chile and Germany, or continue to meander somewhere between mediocrity and misery such as was the case for the people of the Soviet Union and its satellites. These are the inevitable ends for nations that continue to spend beyond their means, right  into insolvency. Obama is accelerating our descent into this pit. He can be stopped. He must be stopped.

Bob B

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*propagandic – for fully government paid and controlled

UPDATE July 16
Philadelphia Mayor calls for closure of firehouses.