ORWELL RIDES AGAIN. CHECK YOUR NEIGHBOR’S ORIENTATION.

Posted on August 4, 2012 | Leave a comment

We are talking here about your neighbor’s political orientation and not his procreation inclination.  Team Obama’s exploitation of the voting system is unprecedented.  One must give the devil his due it has been said, the Team does not let any aspect of technology go to waste.  If you want to know how your neighbors generally vote you don’t even need to leave your house to find out.

Simply use your mobile device to go to the website Obama for America and download the mobile app for free.  Plug in and your address, or any address, and a street map displays with little blue flags on the houses of the Democrats.  There is nothing intrinsically devious about this; it is disquieting nonetheless.  It is one more block in the creation of the house of Orwell.  Devices already in your TV tell someone what you are watching at night.  GPS transmitters already in some cars tell someone exactly where you parked on Tuesday from 3:11 until 4:27 pm.  One wonders if 100 years from now thought transmitters may be planted in newborns at birth with thought receivers on sale at Radio Shack.

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Posted in News, Satire

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JUSTAPHOTO – IN THE DRINK

Posted on August 4, 2012 | Leave a comment

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Posted in Just photos

IT’S KRUGMAN TIME AGAIN

Posted on August 3, 2012 | 2 comments

Today’s column begins “There has been plenty to criticize about President Obama’s handling of the economy.”  And then he goes on to criticize Congress for “this week’s refusal to implement debt relief by the acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency…”  For a minute I was concerned that Krugman had adopted views dangerous to his continued employment by the New York Times.

Further reading relieved my fears.  The debt relief he is calling for would increase the federal debt.  (I should have known better than to think otherwise.)  The debt relief he espouses is government assistance for people who bought houses with mortgages they could not afford.

The columnist closes with “As I said, Mr. Obama has made plenty of mistakes.”  “If our economy is still deeply depressed, much – and I would say most – of the blame rests not with Mr. Obama but with the very people seeking to use that depressed economy for political advantage.”

There you have it, straight from the pen of a Nobel Prize Winning economist.  The President has made plenty of mistakes but when it comes to Barack Obama even his own mistakes are not his fault.

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Posted in Economy

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YOU DIDN’T WIN THAT OLYMPIC MEDAL ON YOUR OWN. PAY THE TAX

Posted on August 2, 2012 | Leave a comment

You won a medal? Okay, fork up, the metal in the medal has a melt-down value and the federal government taxes it.  For the bronze that’s two dollars please.  I kid you not; this is for real.  Marcus Rubio has submitted a bill to end this utterly absurd tax.  Here is the link.  Let’s see what the Democrats do.  What if an athlete is rich?

Yes, there is more to the story.  The tax on the melt-down value is an insult that only a government could devise but the politicians want some real money too.  As though the insult weren’t enough, it comes with a slap in the face – tax on the honorarium.  Using the bronze as an example again, the honorarium is $10,000.  Typically the athlete would get $ 6,498 of that and the rest would go to the IRS, according to numbers supplied by  Americans for Tax Reform.

Why should the government get that?  Is it because the medal winner didn’t win it on his own?  How did he get to the gym to train, didn’t he or she use the roads?  Perhaps there should be a surcharge for cyclists and runners because they actually perform their mastery in competition on public roads.  Ridiculi, ridiculum, does the whole world run on idiocy or only Washington?

Rubio has a winner in this bill.  If the Democrats approve it, it bodes well for Rubio.  If they oppose it, they risk the wrath of Olympic fans.  The amount of money raised by the ‘US Tax on Olympic Achievement’ pales, pales, pales into insignificance compared to the negative statement it makes.  Let us honor our winners, not take a piece of their flesh.

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Posted in News, Pictoons, Satire

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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

RADICAL-IN-CHIEF From New York to Havana

Posted on July 29, 2012 | Leave a comment

This post continues the series of chapter summations of Radical-In-Chief by Stanley Kurtz.

The book takes the reader into the world of Barack Obama prior to his emergence as a national figure.  The Preface makes a bold opening statement.  The chapters that follow are evidential arguments that substantiate the statement.  The author’s documentation is exhaustive and the source attribution is impeccable.  The source notes alone number 1,119 and take up 63 pages.

*****

Chapter 3
From New York to Havana

Reliable information about Obama’s activities during his stay in New York is difficult to come by. However, there is ample evidence on which to make some reasonable assumptions.  An examination of the content of the Socialist Scholars Conferences he attended is an indication of what interested Obama at the time.

Jesse Jackson. The conferences occurred during the period when Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition was in the forefront of the news. In Dreams, Obama speaks of attending a large Jackson rally while in New York. Jackson thought “it was time for blacks to ‘re-negotiate our relationship with the Democratic Party’ and force Democrats to the left.” The Democratic Socialists of America did not consider Jackson to be a socialist but the militant faction within the DSA supported him as a means to transform the Democratic Party.

Martin Luther King. The 1984 SSC promoted the idea that Dr. King converted to socialism toward the end of his life. The claim was made the he had come to believe “America is much, much sicker than I had realized” and that “the whole structure of American life must be changed.” Kurtz doubts this assertion is correct.

James Cone. Cone is credited with being the father of black liberation theology in America. Cone promotes the notion that “black church people need to be open to the need for a ‘total reconstruction of society along the lines of Democratic socialism’ and that Capitalism is ‘a system that offers no hope for the masses of blacks’.”

Kurtz reasons that (a) knowing Cone’s views from hearing him speak at the 1984 SSC and (b) knowing that Cone was Jeremiah Wright’s mentor, Obama would have been aware of Wright’s radical message before he chose him as his pastor.

Havana. Following the Socialist Scholars Conventions, Cone, Wright and Jesse Jackson travelled together to Cuba in a show of support for Castro in his struggles with America during the Reagan presidency. Jackson made headlines when he ended a speech with chants of “Long live Castro! Long live Martin Luther King! Long live Che Guevara!” The Rev. Wright was proud of his trip and mentioned it from time to time in the Trinity Church bulletin. Obama had to be aware of it.

Nader. In May of 1985 Obama took a job as an organizer for Ralph Nader’s NY Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG). Earlier, Nader’s Brooklyn office was one of the first groups to pressure banks into lending into high-risk neighborhoods with sub-prime loans.

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Posted in Book Reviews

THE COST OF TAPE and WHY THERE ARE NO JOBS

Posted on July 27, 2012 | Leave a comment

Congressman Mike Kelly got a rousing ovation from this brief speech on the House floor.  It ranks with Rick Santelli’s “stop the spending” rant that gave birth to the Tea Party.

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Posted in Audio/Visual

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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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Posted in Opinion, Political philosophy, Political polemics

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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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Posted in Economy, Opinion, Political philosophy, Political polemics

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