Category Archives: Opinion

IF I BELIEVED

Posted on August 31, 2012 | Leave a comment

If I believed that what MSNBC broadcasts was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and if I believed the New York Times was honorable in its journalistic ethics then I would absolutely despise Republicans and everything they stand for.  There is very little ethical difference in the fourth estate ethics between outright lies and lies by omission.  The paper is particularly guilty of the latter.  The New York Times does more than claim to be the newspaper of record; it is the newspaper of record.  As such it has a responsibility greater than any other to record all the news and report it accurately.  It has failed this responsibility miserably.

In his final column, Arthur Brisbane, who very recently resigned his post as Public Editor wrote mostly about the papers steady financial demise which he blamed entirely on the rise of new media, namely twitter.  There was nary a word about the effect that content may have had on readership.  Brisbane acknowledged,

The Times’s “believability rating” had dropped drastically among Republicans compared with Democrats, and was an almost-perfect mirror opposite of Fox News’s rating. Can that be good?

Is this statement not bias itself?  Nonetheless, Brisbane is acknowledging that the paper’s perceived integrity trending downward and he does not hesitate to use the word “drastically” while inferring that an integrity rating equivalent to FOX Is bad.  Then Brisbane confirmed what has become very obvious.

Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.

The Times is bias.  Brisbane is jut reporting it.

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DEMOCRATS AGAINST DEMOCRACY

Posted on August 29, 2012 | Leave a comment

In a republic, representatives are chosen to debate and vote the issues on behalf of its citizens. The representatives are generally expected to vote according to the will of the majority but they are not bound to do so.  In a democracy however, the people vote the issues themselves and majority rules – period!  How strange it is then that the party that calls themselves Democrats is the party that so often ignores the will of the majority.

Case in point.  In the recent primaries, Tennessee Democratic Party voters elected Mark Clayton to be their candidate on the Democratic Party ticket running for the US Senate.  But the Democratic Party will have none of it.  A Party spokesperson announced that:

“The Tennessee Democratic Party disavows his candidacy, and will not do anything to promote or support him in any way.”

This in spite of the fact the Clayton received nearly twice as many votes as his closest challenger.   It goes from the ridiculous to the sublime.  The spokesperson added:

“Many Democrats in Tennessee knew nothing about any of the candidates in the race, so they voted for the person at the top of the ticket. Unfortunately, none of the other Democratic candidates were able to run the race needed to gain statewide visibility or support.”

That’s not a reasonable excuse; it’s an admission of incompetence.  It says Tennessee Democrats have no minds of their own.

I love Tennessee with its rolling hills and magnificent horse farms.  Their politics aren’t bad either.  Tennessee voted against Al Gore for president and it cost him the election.  If only the people of his home state, who presumably knew him best, had voted for him we never would have learned what a chad is and the Supreme Court would never have been involved.

Some states allow resolutions where every citizen has the opportunity to vote on an issue.  The decision may or may not be binding but it’s as democratic as it gets.  California voted on Prop. 8 in 2000 and it passed by majority vote.  The people had spoken; they made their wishes clear.  And then the Democratic Party took the issue to the California Supreme court and won a decision to have the peoples wishes overturned.  Californians followed with a new Prop. 8 in 2008.  Same issue, same result.  The people voted for it by a margin of 52 to 47.  Democrats proceed once again to have the will of the people overturned in the courts.  A better name for the Party would be the Autocrats.

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THE LOSER’S PARTY

Posted on August 28, 2012 | Leave a comment

f you tally up the numbers of highly successful people you will find roughly as many Democrats as Republicans.  However, when you count the losers it’s a different story.  The denizens of the underground economy, the gamers of the system, the perpetually unemployed and the takers from the makers flock overwhelmingly to the Democratic Party.  You can add prisoners to that list as well.  Otherwise why would Democrats occasionally move to restore the voting rights of convicted felons and Republicans always oppose it?

In the Democratic Party you are a member of a group.  Obama’s gift registry, for instance, solicits donors from 16 listed groups.  Starting with African Americans and then including Native, Jewish, Latino and even a group called LGBT Americans, finally ending up near the bottom of the alphabet with Young People.  To a conservative you are either Sid, Sally, Jose, Sarah or Bob.  To a liberal you are either a Black, Jewish, Hispanic or Gay person.  Or you may even be white Anglo-Saxon in which case you have a special burden of guilt to bear.

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WHO IS THIS MAN BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA AND WHAT WOULD HIS RE-ELECTION MEAN

Posted on August 26, 2012 | Leave a comment

The average voter knew very little about Barack Obama when he was campaigning in 2008.  So they listened to the man and judged him by what he said.  The fact that he was black also won him some extra votes.  The fact the public elected a man with such a negative opinion of America could be considered a fluke, a gigantic mistake, but one that could be corrected in the following election.  This time there are many things the voters have come to know about the man.  Powerline blog lists just a few.

Obama came of age, over a period of decades, in an environment that can charitably be described as hard-left. His father and mother were both socialists or worse. His maternal grandfather selected a mentor for young Barry who was a long-time member of the Communist Party USA. The socialist New Party listed him as a member. His friend, colleague and fundraiser Bill Ayers is a terrorist who says he wishes he had set off more bombs. His college professor Edward Said was the leading intellectual voice of those who want Israel destroyed. His law school mentor Roberto Unger was too far left for Brazil’s socialist party, and was sent back to Harvard, where he declined all interviews lest he endanger Obama’s electoral prospects. The minister who converted him to Christianity was Jeremiah “God damn America” Wright. You can go on and on.

Obama’s vision for the country is now readily available for all to see and it is the antithesis of what made this country great.  If a man with these credentials is elected a second time to lead the nation, then the America that was born in 1776 will have chosen death in 2012.  Many conservative writers warn that Obama would turn the United States into some sort of North American Europe.  They needn’t look so far afield.  His vision is more like that of Fidel Castro than Andrea Merkel.

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IF BARACK OBAMA WINS

Posted on August 26, 2012 | Leave a comment

 

Kim Strassel, writing for the Wall Street Journal had his to say about Barack Obama/s program for his second term, should he win one.

President Obama has a reputation for talking, but not necessarily for saying much. He has achieved new levels of vagueness this election season. Beyond repeating that he’s in favor of making the “rich” pay for more government “investment,” he hasn’t offered a single new idea for a second term. This is deliberate

Hope and Change meant whatever the hearer imagined them to mean.  After 4 years in office, Obama can hardly campaign on Change.  Neither can he appeal to the voters on his record of accomplishment.  That leaves little option other than tearing down the opposition.  One needs to look no further to see why this campaign is so vicious.

The choice is between Change, which in this case means Romney, or more of the same.

The same is – high levels of unemployment, diminishing prosperity of the middle class, diminishing world status of the United States, by passing Congress to rule by regulation and executive order, more crony capitalism, closed government and more class warfare.  If Obama wins this election there is nothing new he needs to do to solidify the socialist position.  America will have chosen it.  The President will be free to carry out his socialistic agenda more openly and that is what he will do.  But comparisons to Europe are misplaced.  Financial policies will be more like those of Fidel Castro than Angela Merkel.

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NEWSWEEK MAKES THE NEWS

Posted on August 20, 2012 | Leave a comment

The cover of Newsweek Magazine blares out “HIT THE ROAD, BARACK. Why We Need a New President” In the article behind the cover Niall Ferguson expresses the sentiments of many people with this comment.

Despite having been—full disclosure—an adviser to John McCain, I acknowledged his opponent’s remarkable qualities: his soaring oratory, his cool, hard-to-ruffle temperament, and his near faultless campaign organization.

Yet the question confronting the country nearly four years later is not who was the better candidate four years ago. It is whether the winner has delivered on his promises. And the sad truth is that he has not.

Actually the sad truth is Obama has delivered on his promises.  He promised in a speech to union members that he would establish us on the road to single payer (government only) healthcare, and he did.  He promised the folks at ACORN that he would put their interests first and he did.  He promised to completely transform America and he has made progress on that front too.  He may very well complete the job if re-elected.  He never did say he would get it all done in the first term.

There were, of course some promises he did not keep.  The oceans have not changed their habits.  The coal industry still exists.  He has not created a domestic police force larger than the military.  He didn’t bring the troops home immediately from Afghanistan as he said he would and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did not get to see New York City.

Why are so many people disappointed in his jobs performance?  Obama’s economic policies are what you should expect when you put a socialist in charge.  He said in his book that he only had one job in the private sector and he considered it to be “working for the enemy.”  Did you think he would focus on helping the enemy create jobs?  In his campaign he stressed his experience as a community organizer.  An organizer’s job is to agitate one group so they will be angry enough to confront another group.  Did you think he would be a uniter?  I think I know why you are disappointed.  You didn’t do your homework.

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THE FALL OF CNN

Posted on August 1, 2012 | Leave a comment

Truly objective journalism no longer exists.  The public doesn’t want it.  That’s the opinion I come to after seeing the sorry financial state of CNN .  It’s not that the network was scrupulously objective; they were not.  Nevertheless, the network’s attempts at neutrality have been honorable.  However, as a result they operate in the nether land of soft reporting.  CNN offers neither steak nor veggie platters so viewers go elsewhere for their daily feed.

FOX owns the right; its audience is loyal.  The audience is also big because FOX is honest.  MSNBC owns the left.  Its audience is very loyal but it’s small because MSNBC programming is more extreme and less honest.  If FOX’s audience is multiples of MSNBC’ audience, then isn’t FOX main stream and MSNBC something else?

There was a time when journalists saw themselves as on the front line of history with a solemn duty to record it accurately.  Now, Howard Zinn’s philosophy seems to rule the day.  Zinn taught that a journalist’s duty is to record or distort history in a manner that [the journalist believes] will lead to a better world, the truth is less important than the higher goal.  Good objective journalism breathed its last breath on June 14, 2008, the day Tim Russert died.  The nation lost a great man that day and a tradition died with him.

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PLANTING HATRED

Posted on July 30, 2012 | Leave a comment

Republicans vs Women.  What’s not to love about that headline?  Everything.  It’s from the New York Times.  Okay, It’s an editorial so one needs to allow some leeway but isn’t that over the top… or better said, under the bottom?  How about “Democrats vs. Children” for an opinion article about mid-term abortions?  Or “Democrats Against Democracy” for an opinion piece about preserving the integrity of the voting process?

The Editorial starts with this howler

“Republicans have not given up on their campaign to narrow access to birth control, abortion care and lifesaving cancer screenings.”

Really?  Republicans are against life saving cancer screenings?

”A new Republican spending proposal revives some of the more extreme attacks on women’s health and freedom that were blocked by the Senate earlier in this Congress. The resurrection is part of an alarming national crusade that goes beyond abortion rights and strikes broadly at women’s health in general.”

That statement by the Times doesn’t make the hurdle to be called hate speech.  However, asserting that Republicans are fighting life saving cancer screenings and spending taxpayer money in a campaign against women’s health in general does plant hate in the minds of the paper’s readers, many of whom are naive enough to believe such drivel.  It seems Republicans have always engaged in “extreme attacks on women’s health”, this is just a revival, a “resurrection” of a perpetual battle against women.

Love flows naturally in the human race.  Hatred needs to be stirred.  As the nation’s leading newspaper, The New York Times has the biggest spoon.  Unfortunately, they are neither careful nor truthful in how they use it.

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Posted in Opinion, Political polemics, Uncategorized

THE GOVERNMENT DIDN’T BUILD THAT

Posted on July 27, 2012 | Leave a comment

It’s 5 o’clock in the morning.  No one but the night critters are out.  It’s peaceful and I have been thinking, thinking about the Golden Gate Bridge.  The government didn’t build that, we did.  The government didn’t even conceive it.  In 1916 a privately owned newspaper, The San Francisco Daily Call published an article proposing the bridge.  A private a private structural engineer by the name of Joseph Strauss offered to build it for 30 million dollars.  The government wasn’t interested.  Five years later Strauss said it could be done for 27 million dollars.  It took eight more years after that for the government to approve it.  And then another 4 years of bureaucratic bickering passed before government authorities allowed the first pick to hit the ground.  The bridge wasn’t built by the government; it was built despite the government.

Irving Morrow and Leon Moisseiff did the designing.  They were private architects.  A private construction firm did the hands on building of the bridge.  The government doled out the money to pay for it but it was money they only had by taxing it away from the private sector.  The government doesn’t pay tax.  The government didn’t pay for it, the private sector did.  There is however one thing for which the government deserves all the credit, that’s the ribbon cutting ceremony.

Shall I tell you about the Hoover Damn or the street in front of your house?  It’s the same story.  If it hadn’t been for your money they wouldn’t exist.  If it hadn’t been for private sector enterprises to do the work the roads would still be unpaved.  We have the enterprising ingenuity of individuals working outside of the government mostly to thank for the beauty of our bridges and roads.  Hear me Mr. Obama, today’s entrepreneurs built their businesses just as surely as Thomas Edison invented the light bulb.  Or do you think the government did that too?

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MY 2 CENTS ON “YOU DIDN’T BUILD THAT”

Posted on July 26, 2012 | 1 comment

 

“People know that vast personal incomes come not only through the effort or ability or luck of those who receive them, but also because of the opportunities for advantage which Government itself contributes.  Therefore, the duty rests upon the Government to restrict such incomes by very high taxes.”

Who said that?  It was not our current president.  Here’s a clue – It was the only President in our history who presided over an even longer economic recovery than Barack Obama.  It was Franklin Delano Roosevelt in an address to Congress in 1935.  It is no coincidence that the economic policies of both presidents failed.  Minds that think alike produce results that look alike.  Roosevelt ordered thousands of young pigs to be destroyed to raise the price of pork – in a depression!  Obama ordered thousands of serviceable cars destroyed which raised the cost of transportation for lower income families — in a recession.

As the opening quote attests, Roosevelt sought to siphon money from the employer class to pay for federal government programs.  Obama seeks to do the same.  Roosevelt’s plan for recovery was to put people to work on the taxpayer’s payroll, not in the private sector.  See the CCC and WPA.  Obama’s plan is to rebuild roads and bridges (WPA) and subsidize unprofitable environmental programs like the Solyndra (CCC).

Roosevelt took measures later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.  See The Schechter Brothers and the NRA (National Industrial Recovery Act).  Obama has also been at odds with the Supreme Court.  Both presidents felt restrained by the Court, as well they should.  The Court is there to protect the people from an overreaching government.  Both presidents sought powers beyond those stipulated by our founders, albeit for different reasons.

When two presidents think so much alike and manage economic recoveries with results that are so much alike, it’s not coincidence.  It’s because their policies don’t work.  And what are those different reasons?  Roosevelt’s goal was to restore the economy and benefit lower income workers.  He just didn’t know how to do it.  Obama’s goal is to put a choker on capitalism and completely transform America.  He knows what he is doing.  It’s up to the voters not to let him do it.

 

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