Thursday, August 13, 2009
The President and the Postal Service
.
If your mailman seems a tad ticked off today. Here's why...
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[The net's covering the gaffe but I'm unaware any of the nets have covered - anyone?]
FLASHBACK (yesterday) >Last point {today} re: health care: Caught a sound bite from Obama's town hall yesterday where he answered a question re: how the private insurance industry is to compete with a government entity that doesn't have to worry about making a profit, is subsidized, etc., to which he answered that he expects the private sector to be able to compete - and pointed to UPS and FedEx and added that it's the US 'Post Office that's having problems'.
Priceless - or would be, if anyone in the MSM pointed out his tacit admission of exactly why the government must be kept out of health care:
How Will Media Spin Obama's 'It's the Post Office Always Having Problems
Let's make one thing perfectly clear: Barack Obama without his teleprompter is like a trapeze artist without a net.
That was likely never more apparent than at the President's healthcare town hall meeting Tuesday when he actually said:
"I think private insurers should be able to compete. They do it all the time. I mean, if you think about, if you think about it, um, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine. Right? The, uh, no they are. I mean, it's the post office that's always having problems. "
Yep. The supposedly most intelligent person ever to be in the White House really said these words as a reason why Americans should trust government to provide their healthcare.
How will this public performance by the President be reported in the next 24 hours? Stay tuned...
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FNC Notes Media Obsessing Over Conservative Protest Origins, But Not Lib Protests
On Thursday's The O'Reilly Factor, FNC host Bill O'Reilly hosted a discussion with FNC analyst and former CBS News correspondent Bernard Goldberg, as the two pointed out the mainstream media's double standard in "obsessing" over how protesters who have been challenging ObamaCare were organized, but have shown no interest in protesters organized by left-wing groups...
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Media Ignore Democrat Astroturfing at Pelosi Event
As media members fell all over themselves last week calling town hall meeting protesters part of an angry mob financed by conservative organizations, they were totally disinterested in evidence of astroturfing by Democrats at an event attended by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cali.).
To highlight the supposed impact of stimulus funds on healthcare services, Pelosi joined Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) and Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) at the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless’s Stout Street Clinic in Denver Thursday.
As marvelously reported by LookingattheLeft.com, a Democrat organization made sure that healthcare reform supporters were not only in attendance for the event, but were also nicely equipped with professionally made lawn signs... [snip]
But here's the best part:
This clinic is adjacent to Denver’s day laborer pickup street, Park Avenue. Being fluent in Spanish, El Marco asked these guys “¿hablan ingles?” “casi nada” was the reply from our amigo on the left. I asked him if he could tell me what the signs said. “¿Quien sabe?” (who knows?) was all he said to me, with a big grin. I’m kicking myself for not asking them how much they were getting paid to support the 'grassroots'.
Ironic indeed, but maybe more so is how media totally ignored this. According to LexisNexis, not one major national news outlet felt this obvious astroturfing by Democrats was newsworthy.
The most powerful and obvious astroturfing is regularly performed by the left given their connection to unions and community organizers. I guess falsely accusing Republicans of manufacturing dissent is much more important to today's so-called journalists than exposing when Democrats actually do it.
In the end, if we actually had an honest media rather than advocates with bylines, they'd see through these absurd claims by the left and report the truth to the electorate.
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Will Media Investigate Astroturf Recruitment At Craigslist?
While the media pointed their hypocritical fingers at town hall meeting protesters for supposedly being organized by conservative backers, they've conveniently ignored an aggressive recruiting campaign by liberal organizations looking to help President Obama get his agenda through Congress.
Take for example the following advertisement placed at the online website Craiglist for New York City Monday (h/t Patrick Ruffini):
**TALENTED LEADERS needed to work for health care reform $11-16/hour**
Or how about some of these identified by Dr. Melissa Clouthier Sunday for Sacramento, California (h/t Walt Gilbert):
Aug 7 – Make social change – Help Pass Obama’s Health Care Reform!!! – (Sacramento) img <
Aug 4 – Help pass Obama’s Health Care Reform!!! Earn $9-14 an hour!!! – (Sacramento) img <
Aug 3 – ***Help Pass Obama’s Health Care Plan and Earn $325-$500/Week – (Sacramento, CA) img <
Jul 31 – Help Pass Obama’s Health Care Reform! Earn $325-550 per week! – (Sacramento) img <
What do these ads seem to all have in common other than helping to pass ObamaCare?
A group called The Fund for the Public Interest:
Fund For The Public Interest is a national nonprofit organization working to increase the visibility, membership and political power of the nation’s leading environmental and progressive groups. Current Fund partners like Sierra Club and Human Rights Campaign are expanding their donor base and passing tougher legislation against air pollution, forest clear-cutting, hate crimes, and special interest money in politics.
Now, they're recruiting for folks to help pass ObamaCare.
Is there anything wrong with it? No.
But if the media are going to accuse town hall protesters of being organized by outside forces, maybe they should take a close look at what the Left is doing to get Obama's agenda passed.
Or would that be too much like journalism?
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Just who are these health care protesters?
Nancy Snyder says she kept quiet when abortion was legalized and prayer in schools was eliminated. Not this time.
''They did it for prayer, they did it for abortion, and they're not going to do it for our health care,''
the 70-year-old nurse from Philipsburg, Pa., said Wednesday as she and her husband Robert, 74, a retired coal miner, waited in a long, snaking line for Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter...
[Damn extremists.]
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Georgia man convicted of aiding terrorist groups
A 23-year-old Georgia man has been convicted of aiding terrorist groups by sending videotapes of U.S. landmarks overseas. A jury in Atlanta found Ehsanul Islam Sadequee (EH'-suh-nool sah-DEE'-kee) guilty Wednesday morning. Prosecutors say Sadequee could face up to 60 years in prison.
Prosecutors say the pair took a series of videos of the Pentagon and the Capitol and that Sadequee later sent them to suspected terrorists overseas...
[Boy I hope nobody was wire-tapped to learn of this - that would be horrible.
I.e., GWOT.]
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AMERICAN TERRORISTS
ISLAMIC MILITANTS HAVE TAKEN 20 BOYS FROM MINNESOTA TO FIGHT IN SOMALIA. WHAT HAPPENS IF THEY COME BACK?
MINNEAPOLIS - One by one, 18 months ago, they began disappearing: Young boys, academic overachievers, the caretakers in large families, responsible and conscientious all. A few months later, three or four, from St. Paul, Minn., like the others, simultaneously went missing.
Then, last Nov. 4, seven or eight young men - whose families assumed they were out in the streets, celebrating the election of Barack Obama - vaporized.
"We immediately rushed to the FBI," says Bihi. "We knew."
About a week later, Burhan, his friend Mustafa Ali, 17, and about five other boys - like those gone missing before them - resurfaced in Somalia, where it is believed they are being trained, most against their will, as terrorists by an al Qaeda-linked group called al-Shabab ("the youth" in Somali)...
[GWOT]
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Is ‘Islam’ at war with us?
Last week, John Brennan, the assistant to the President for homeland security and counterterrorism approvingly recalled a key point in the speech Mr. Obama delivered in Cairo in June: "America is not and never will be at war with Islam." Unfortunately, that statement ignores the fact that the decision as to whether the United States is at war with anybody is not entirely up to our leadership or people.
The real question is: Is 'Islam' at war with us?
It is certainly true that hundreds of millions of Muslims the world over are not seeking to wage war against the United States, or other non-Muslim states. America has, as Mr. Brennan noted in his remarks before the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on Thursday, a powerful interest in not making all those who practice Islam into our enemies.
Yet, it would be a grave mistake to construe the problem we face as John Brennan proceeded to do in his speech at CSIS: "We are at war with al Qaeda which attacked us on 9/11 and killed 3,000 people. We are at war with its violent extremist allies who seek to carry on al-Qaida's murderous agenda." He described that agenda as seeking "to replace sovereign nations with a global caliphate."
Unfortunately, that is the stated goal of all those who adhere to what authoritative Islam calls Shariah - a number that includes many millions of people the world over. Mr. Brennan's speech made no reference to this wellspring of jihadism...
[More, re: 'soft' (political) and legal jihad - and they are connected. Highly Recommended > ]
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Russia sees U.S. space threat, builds new rocket
The United States will be able to hit any target in Russia from space by 2030, the commander of Russia's air force said on Tuesday, announcing that Moscow will develop a new air defence system to avert the threat.
"The development of air and space offensive weapons by foreign states demonstrates that by 2030 radical changes will take place in the exploration of air and space as an integral sphere of armed struggle,"
Russia is negotiating a new nuclear arms deal with the United States to replace the 1991 START-1 pact which expires in December -- part of an effort by both countries to improve their thorny relationship...
[I.e., all pre-negotiation bluster - but we'll likely 'trade' something away in return for their scaling back their 'plans'.]
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The Alinsky Way Vs. the American Way
It takes neither a genius, nor a shrink, to see why Alinskyite Democrat pols are so confused by all this 1776 Redux confronting them in their home-district townhalls. Since they are so accustomed to calling up pals in unions and various other community agitators for a little rent-a-mob action to bolster support for their agendas, they naturally project this tactic onto anyone opposing their issue positions... [snip]
Those in the Democratic Party, who have adopted the Alinsky Way and thrown out the American Way, have done so with less than altruistic intentions. Keeping citizens as little children, incapable of doing for themselves, is the way to winning their votes and keeping them dependent upon the power of the state, which Democrats hope to control now and forever.
Now, there is a most telling anecdote in Horwitt's biography of Alinsky, which perfectly demonstrates the fundamental difference between the Alinsky Way and the American Way...
[Recommended > ]
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WE BROKE THE BANK
The United States is functionally bankrupt.
Let's look at the simple numbers of our national debt. Our on-the-books national debt is $11.6 trillion, but off-the-books federal debt, including Medicare and Social Security, is $107 trillion:
- This is the amount we should have in the bank, according to the federal government's own accountants, to pay for our current promises to our retirees and future retirees.
- This doesn't include unfunded obligations that we have to the pensions and benefits promised to federal workers and veterans.
- Nor does it include huge unfunded pension and benefit obligations for other public employees at levels below the federal government.
- Now our total annual national output, or gross domestic product (GDP), is about $14.3 trillion.
- Total federal receipts, or income if stated in business terms, are about $2.5 trillion.
- This means that our debt to federal income ratio is about 47, and that ratio assumes that the federal revenues are free to retire the obligations, which they are not.
That's pretty darn broke.
Ask any accountant, banker, or anyone remotely familiar with simple accounting knowledge if we can service this debt, and the collective answer is a resounding "no." Any business with these ratios would be a complete basket case, hopelessly bankrupt.
But unlike General Motors Corp., there is no one with the wherewithal to bail out the United States...
[Yet they're still increasing spending.]
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GOVERNMENT KEEPS ON HIRING, ADDING TO PRIVATE-SECTOR BURDEN
Even as millions of private-sector jobs have disappeared in the past year, government hiring continues to expand across the country.
The United States shed 5.5 million private-sector jobs over the 12 months beginning in May 2008, but taxpayers were required to support 116,000 more federal workers than a year ago.
State government added another 21,000.
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CARBON OFFSETS: SCAM, NOT SALVATION
Under a cap & trade scheme, a country (or company) can meet its emission targets by paying others to reduce their emissions. To facilitate this process, the United Nations created the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), an international market where buyers who need to offset their emissions can purchase carbon credits from developing countries -- effectively paying for emissions reductions by others.
Unfortunately, proving that emissions cuts are reductions that wouldn't have occurred without the offset payments is difficult. Recent evidence reveals that offsets are vulnerable to fraud and actually increase costs:
- Almost three-quarters of CDM-registered projects are already complete at the time of approval and do not need carbon credits.
- Nearly 40 percent of those projects represent "unlikely or at least questionable" emissions cuts and between a third and two-thirds of CDM offsets do not represent actual emission cuts.
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ExxonMobil is Green. Will Media Notice?
From the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 to the high gas prices of 2008, the mainstream media has spent years finding ways to bash ExxonMobil. But here’s something the media should have a hard time finding fault with Exxon for: in its August 24 issue, Forbes magazine named ExxonMobil the “Green Company of the Year.”
Forbes’ Christopher Helman praised the oil and gas company for its efforts to go green. And it’s about time ExxonMobil got some positive press.
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Fortune Editor Breaks With CNNers On ObamaCare; IDs 5 Freedoms Lost, Inevitable State Control
...A close reading of the two main bills, one backed by Democrats in the House and the other issued by Sen. Edward Kennedy's Health committee, contradict the President's assurances. ....
page by page, the bills reveal a web of restrictions, fines, and mandates that would radically change your health-care coverage....
Tully then lists and discusses the five freedoms lost under ObamaCare:
- Freedom to choose what's in your plan
- Freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, or pay your real costs
- Freedom to choose high-deductible coverage
- Freedom to keep your existing plan
- Freedom to choose your doctors
So for Americans in large corporations, "keeping your own plan" has a strict deadline. In five years, like it or not, you'll get dumped into the exchange. As we'll see, it could happen a lot earlier....
The employees who got their coverage before the law goes into effect can keep their plans, but once again, there's a catch. If the plan changes in any way -- by altering co-pays, deductibles, or even switching coverage for this or that drug -- the employee must drop out and shop through 'the exchange'...
[Likewise for all points made; explicit language directly contradicting the assurances being sold to the people who are satisfied with their current care - an ~80% majority.
They're duping us again, and the cost will be great.]
Wow. After ready Tully's column, even those who have deeply imbibed the kool-aid won't be able to say they weren't warned.
[MUST READ > ]
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DETROIT: THE TRIUMPH OF PROGRESSIVE PUBLIC POLICY
Imagine a city where all the major economic planks of the statist or "progressive" platform have been enacted:
- A "living wage" ordinance, far above the federal minimum wage, for all public employees and private contractors.
- A school system that spends significantly more per pupil than the national average.
- A powerful school employee union that militantly defends the exceptional pay, benefits and job security it has won for its members.
- A powerful government employee union that does the same for its members.
- A tax system that aggressively redistributes income from businesses and the wealthy to the poor and to government bureaucracies.
- In 1950, Detroit was the wealthiest city in America on a per capita income basis.
- Today, the Census Bureau reports that it is the nation's second poorest major city, just "edging out" Cleveland.
While correlation is not causation, it is striking that the decline in per capita income is exactly what classical economics predicts will occur when wage controls are imposed and taxes are increased.
Specifically, "price theory" predicted that Detroit's artificially high business costs caused by excessive regulation and above-market labor compensation rates imposed by so-called "living wages" would lead to an increase in unemployment - now the highest of any city in the U.S.
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Dan Rather Pleads for White House Action on News Media
Would you believe that Dan Rather is calling on former President George W. Bush to lead a blue-ribbon effort to reform the news media? Well, obviously, the disgraced ex-CBS News anchor is not trusting the future of journalism to Bush, but in an op-ed in Sunday’s Washington Post, he is asking President Barack Obama “form a commission to address the perilous state of America’s news media.”
Rather insists he is not asking for any kind of a “government bailout” or “government control” of the media, just a high-profile discussion of the state of the media:
Why bring the President into it? Because this is the only way I could think of to generate the sort of attention this subject deserves. Academia and think tanks generate study after study, yet their findings don't reach the people who need to be reached.... [like climate scientists?]
The old news model is crumbling, while the Internet, for all its immense promise, is not yet ready to rise in its place -- and won't be until it can provide the nuts-and-bolts reporting that most people so take for granted that it escapes their notice.
This is a crisis that, with no exaggeration, threatens our democratic republic at its core. But you won't hear about it on your evening news, unless the message can be delivered in a way that corporate media have little choice but to report -- such as, say, the findings of a presidential commission.
It’s inconceivable, of course, that Rather or any other media big shot would ask former George W. Bush or any other Republican to lead such an effort. If Bush had ever entertained such an idea on his own, Rather would have led the charge against it as a huge intrusion on the media’s independence. But Rather is evidently comfortable with the idea of an Obama Commission on the news media — a sign just how closely journalistic liberals identify with political liberals.
The ills of journalism, as Rather sees it, are a subordination of the news product to the profit motive, and decay in the newspaper industry that threatens the nuts-and-bolts reporting that supports broadcast and much of the Internet.
A new media is growing up without government help or direction. Contrary to Rather’s argument, there are actually more news sources available to everyday citizens, not fewer, and the news is becoming less “homogenized” thanks to the Internet. When liberals like Rather ask for the government’s help, it usually means they don’t like the direction that the free market is headed.
And, if he wouldn’t trust a Republican president to fix the media, why should any of us trust a Democratic president with the job?
[This guy fabricated a story against a sitting President of the United States - and the MSM are still giving him air/print time.
The history of 'public' communication has been on of ever restricted public influence, with ever fewer and fewer 'owners' from book publishers for the few literate to radio station owners - a few per town at best, to TV which at one time limited editorial control down to three - count 'em; three - networks.
Now the internet has again allowed a free {of editorial control} forum for the competition of ideas {some junk - some not} - and the old guard hates that. Imagine; a democracy of the little people without the 'guidance' of our enlightened intellectuals.
Folks like Rather should be laughed out of town - but don't expect anything like that from the MSM - which for my entire adult life has been part of the problem, and nothing to be salvaged.]
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Matthews: 'Is Sarah Palin a Poster Girl for Racism?'
On Wednesday's Hardball, MSNBC host Chris Matthews hosted a discussion with Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker and Salon's Joan Walsh as the trio discussed Parker's latest column, "A Tip for the GOP: Look Away," in which she argues that the Republican party is hurt by being centered in the South with its history of racial politics.
Matthews, who would later theorize that Sarah Palin will exploit white racism by visiting "cul de sacs of whitedom," set up the segment by reading a line from Parker's column which compares Palin to a white character in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking Bird who falsely accuses a black man of raping her, leading to his false conviction and death in prison.
Parker suggested that Palin is indeed a "poster girl for racism," though "not consciously," and alluded to white racism being incited by a white woman and black man being pitted against each other, as in Sarah Palin versus Barack Obama, or in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird.
[Just when you think it's not possible to stoop any lower...]
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A tale of two professors and Sarah Palin on Obama's 'death panels'
"The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And whowill suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course.
The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."
According to Cornell University law school's William Jacobson, writing for the Legal Insurrection blog:
"The incoming fire has been withering, as usual. Palin is accused of becoming the 'Zombie Queen,' certifiably insane, 'clinically wrong,' and espousing a 'gruesome mix of camp and high farce.'
"These critics, however, didn't take the time to find out to what Palin was referring when she used the term 'level of productivity in society' as being the basis for determining access to medical care. If the critics, who hold themselves in the highest of intellectual esteem, had bothered to do something other than react, they would have realized that the approach to health care to which Palin was referring was none other than that espoused by key Obama health care adviser Dr. Ezekial Emanuel (brother of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel)."
"Put together the concepts of prognosis and age, and Dr. Emanuel's proposal reasonably could be construed as advocating the withholding of some level of medical treatment to a baby born with Down Syndrome. You may not like this implication, but it is Dr. Emanuel's implication not Palin's."
Put another, less charitable way than Professor Jacobson chose, the analyses of Palin critics would be more likely to be taken seriously if they displayed at least a modicum of intellectual honesty.
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Comedienne Kathy Griffin Draws More Viewers Than Chris Matthews
Although the glory days of Chris Matthews and his MSNBC program "Hardball" are surely a thing of the past, getting beaten in the prime time cable ratings by a D-list comedienne has got to add insult to injury.
Filling in for Larry King on CNN Monday, Kathy Griffin -- with a guest lineup that featured Joan Rivers, the parents from TLC's "Toddlers and Tiaras," and Levi Johnston -- actually drew more viewers than Matthews.
Here are the numbers posted by Drudge (h/t Paul Bedard):
CABLE NEWS RACE
NITE OF AUG 10, 2009
FOXNEWS O'REILLY 3,814,000
FOXNEWS HANNITY 3,118,000
FOXNEWS BECK 2,417,000
FOXNEWS GRETA 2,388,000
FOXNEWS BAIER 1,988,000
FOXNEWS SHEP SMITH 1,833,000
MSNBC OLBERMANN 1,243,000
MSNBC MADDOW 1,082,000
CNNHN GRACE 875,000
CNN KATHY GRIFFIN 810,000
MSNBC HARDBALL 710,000
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