Posts
(Compiler's note: Are we the American people going to understand before it is too late?? This is a "must read." rca)
by Ann Coulter
The media are acting as if they completely and fully vetted Obama during the Democratic primaries and that's why they are entitled to send teams of researchers into Alaska to analyze Sarah Palin's every expense report.
In fact, the mainstream media did no vetting. They seem to have all agreed, "OK, none of us will get into this business with Jeremiah Wright, 'Tony' Rezko, Saul Alinsky, Bill Ayers and everyone's impression of an angry Michelle Obama on 'The Jerry Springer Show.'"
During one of the Democratic primary debates, Hillary Clinton was hissed for mentioning Syrian national Rezko, and during another, ABC moderator George Stephanopoulos nearly lost his career for asking Obama one question about William Ayers.
In the past week, TV anchors have taken to claiming that Obama "refuted" John McCain's statement that Obama launched his political career at the home of former Weather Underground leader Ayers.
No, Obama "denied" it; he didn't "refute" it. If "denying" something is the same as "refuting" it, then maybe the establishment media can quit harping on Palin's supposed lack of qualifications to be president, since she too "refuted" that by denying it.
Back before the media realized it needed to lie about Obama launching his political career at Ayers' house, the Los Angeles Times provided an eyewitness account from a liberal who attended the event.
"When I first met Barack Obama, he was giving a standard, innocuous little talk in the living room of those two legends-in-their-own-minds, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. They were launching him -- introducing him to the Hyde Park community as the best thing since sliced bread."
The Times has now stripped this item from its Web page, but the great blogger Patterico has preserved it for posterity on his Web page.
Obama's glib remark that "Bill Ayers is a professor of education in Chicago; 40 years ago when I was 8 years old he engaged in despicable acts with a domestic group. I have roundly denounced those attacks" -- doesn't answer anything.
First of all, the fact that Ayers is a professor of education proves only one thing: He is dumber than any person without an education degree.
Ayers is such an imbecile, we ought to be amazed that he's teaching at a university -- even when you consider that it's an ed school -- except all former violent radicals end up teaching. Roughly 80 percent of former Weathermen are full college professors -- 99 percent if you don't include the ones killed in shoot-outs with the police or in prison -- i.e., not yet pardoned by a Democratic president.
Any other profession would have banned a person like Ayers. Universities not only accept former domestic terrorists, but also move them to the front of the line. In addition to Ayers, among those once on the FBI's most-wanted list who ended up in cushy college teaching positions are Bernardine Dohrn (Northwestern University), Mark Rudd (a junior college in New Mexico) and Angela Davis (History of Consciousness Department, University of California at Santa Cruz).
While others were hard at work on Ph.D.s, Susan Rosenberg was conspiring to kill cops and blow up buildings, and was assembling massive caches of explosives. This put her on the fast track for a teaching position at Hamilton College!
Despite having absolutely no qualifications to teach, having earned only a master's degree in "writing" through a correspondence course, Rosenberg was offered a position at Hamilton within a few years of President Clinton pardoning her in 2001, releasing her from a 58-year prison sentence for participating in the murder of cops and possessing more than 700 pounds of explosives.
But Obama thinks it's a selling point to say that Ayers is a college professor.
Hundreds of college professors have signed a letter vouching for Ayers, which would be like Lester Maddox producing a letter from George Wallace assuring us that Maddox is a respected member of the community. No, really, I've got the letter right here!
The media keep citing the fact that the money Obama and Ayers distributed to idiotic left-wing causes came -- as The New York Times put it -- "from Walter H. Annenberg, the billionaire publisher and philanthropist and President Richard M. Nixon's ambassador to the United Kingdom."
Great Republican though he was, Walter Annenberg died in 2002. The money came from the Annenberg Foundation, which, like all foundations, distributes money to projects that its founder would despise. John Kerry ran for president on the late John Heinz's money. That didn't mean Republican Heinz was endorsing Kerry.
As John O'Sullivan says, any foundation that is not explicitly right-wing will become a radical left-wing organization within a few years. It could be the Association of University Women, the American Association of Retired People, the American Rose Growers, the Foundation for the Study of Railroad Engineers or the Choral Society of Newport Beach.
Left-wing radicals swarm to free foundation money, where they can give gigantic grants to one another and they will never have to do a day's work. That's exactly what Obama and Ayers did with Annenberg's money.
None of the Annenberg money went to schoolchildren. It went to Ayers' left-wing crank friends to write moronic papers that we hope no one ever reads.
Instead of teaching students reading and writing, Ayers thinks they should be taught to rebel against America's "imperialist" social structure. In 2006, Ayers was in Venezuela praising communist dictator Hugo Chavez, saying, "We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution."
He has backed a line of schoolbooks such as one titled "Teaching Science for Social Justice."
Forget about Ayers' domestic terrorism when Obama "was 8 years old." Does he agree with Ayers' idiot ideas right now?
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
It's Not the Economy; It's the Media's Economic Agenda
New special report shows how journalists turn major issues of the day to the left.
By Dan Gainor
“It’s the economy, stupid.” That little James Carville nugget from the 1992 election is as true now as it was then.
With Wall Street more of a roller coaster than an investment vehicle, ordinary Americans are worried about their future as they watch the markets shake, rattle and roll toward November.
More than half of Americans said in a September 2008 CBS News/New York Times poll that the economy and jobs are the most important issues in the presidential election. The mainstream media are feeding voters’ fears as they have done throughout the campaign – talking about an economy “in crisis,” “heading over a cliff,” or nearly “apocalyptic.”
We’ve heard some of what the candidates plan for the economy but nowhere near enough, and there is little if any discussion of the media agenda for the next four years. The media – especially ABC, CBS and NBC – have decided the economy is a winning issue for the left and are using economic troubles to push a sweeping agenda of liberal policies, regulation and big government.
Based on their coverage, we can expect four more years of economic populism from the nation’s news outlets. From health care to taxes to global warming, the networks have already made it clear where they stand, and the winning president will have to ignore that at his peril.
Look at the pathetic way the news has covered earmarks, that pesky pork that fills the bills on Capitol Hill. Only one of the presidential candidates has made it a key issue – Sen. John McCain. He’s never taken an earmark in his long career. Never.
Sen. Barack Obama on the other hand has requested $740 million in earmarks. Add his running mate, Sen. Joe Biden’s, most recent requests, and it pushes that total over $1 billion.
But when did the media become entranced by the subject? After Sarah Palin was added to the GOP ticket, so they could try desperately to link her to the famous “Bridge to Nowhere.” There were more than 50 mentions of earmarks on the three broadcast networks since Palin joined the ticket – almost as many as in the entire eight months before. Just two discussed Obama’s massive earmark requests.
Those results come from a new study by the Business & Media Institute (BMI). BMI examined how the news media push liberal economic positions for the two-part report on the candidates. The study examined network news coverage – ABC, CBS and NBC – from Jan. 1, 2008, to Sept. 30, 2008.
The findings say a great deal about the left-wing views of America’s Fourth Estate. Forget for a moment the media’s prObama stance. That helps set the scene for one election. The journalists pushing these themes could help mould the nation for generations.
In health care, the liberal theme was obvious. Networks reported the national health care problem as vastly more inflated than it really is. ABC, CBS and NBC bought into the hype that 47 million Americans are without health care at least 18 times. It’s between 10 and 20 percent of that claim.
To bolster the argument, reporters applauded Obama’s “ambitious” way to “improve” health care. Then they turned around and ignored the positives of the McCain plan and defended the idea of “government-run health care.”
The networks endorsed a similar attitude about taxes, treating cuts as a cost to government in one-fourth of all stories. That’s nearly twice the number of stories that depicted tax cuts as a “relief” to taxpayers.
NBC’s Andrea Mitchell showed one GOP candidate that journalists have a liberal view when it comes to letting people keep the money they earn. “Rudy Giuliani proposed lowering corporate tax rates and capital gains taxes, costing trillions,” she said on the Jan. 12 “Saturday Today” show.
Even when the candidates agreed, the media still pushed the agenda leftward. Both Obama and McCain back an economy-numbing cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions. It’s designed to make energy more expensive, so journalists love it – just not as much as they love climate change stories.
They’ve done nearly 500 of those warming stories in the first nine months of this year but only examined the pricey “cap-and-trade policy” 18 times. Just three of those stories mentioned costs.
While the newscasts included a great gnashing of teeth for our overall economic fate, journalists have helped ensure our economic future shifts further to the left. If the next president follows that agenda, America in four years will be a land of higher taxes, stifling regulation and sky-high energy costs.
For much of the last year, ABC, CBS and NBC have done their part to portray the American economy in chaos. Now if they get their way, they might help make it a reality.
By Dan Gainor
“It’s the economy, stupid.” That little James Carville nugget from the 1992 election is as true now as it was then.
With Wall Street more of a roller coaster than an investment vehicle, ordinary Americans are worried about their future as they watch the markets shake, rattle and roll toward November.
More than half of Americans said in a September 2008 CBS News/New York Times poll that the economy and jobs are the most important issues in the presidential election. The mainstream media are feeding voters’ fears as they have done throughout the campaign – talking about an economy “in crisis,” “heading over a cliff,” or nearly “apocalyptic.”
We’ve heard some of what the candidates plan for the economy but nowhere near enough, and there is little if any discussion of the media agenda for the next four years. The media – especially ABC, CBS and NBC – have decided the economy is a winning issue for the left and are using economic troubles to push a sweeping agenda of liberal policies, regulation and big government.
Based on their coverage, we can expect four more years of economic populism from the nation’s news outlets. From health care to taxes to global warming, the networks have already made it clear where they stand, and the winning president will have to ignore that at his peril.
Look at the pathetic way the news has covered earmarks, that pesky pork that fills the bills on Capitol Hill. Only one of the presidential candidates has made it a key issue – Sen. John McCain. He’s never taken an earmark in his long career. Never.
Sen. Barack Obama on the other hand has requested $740 million in earmarks. Add his running mate, Sen. Joe Biden’s, most recent requests, and it pushes that total over $1 billion.
But when did the media become entranced by the subject? After Sarah Palin was added to the GOP ticket, so they could try desperately to link her to the famous “Bridge to Nowhere.” There were more than 50 mentions of earmarks on the three broadcast networks since Palin joined the ticket – almost as many as in the entire eight months before. Just two discussed Obama’s massive earmark requests.
Those results come from a new study by the Business & Media Institute (BMI). BMI examined how the news media push liberal economic positions for the two-part report on the candidates. The study examined network news coverage – ABC, CBS and NBC – from Jan. 1, 2008, to Sept. 30, 2008.
The findings say a great deal about the left-wing views of America’s Fourth Estate. Forget for a moment the media’s prObama stance. That helps set the scene for one election. The journalists pushing these themes could help mould the nation for generations.
In health care, the liberal theme was obvious. Networks reported the national health care problem as vastly more inflated than it really is. ABC, CBS and NBC bought into the hype that 47 million Americans are without health care at least 18 times. It’s between 10 and 20 percent of that claim.
To bolster the argument, reporters applauded Obama’s “ambitious” way to “improve” health care. Then they turned around and ignored the positives of the McCain plan and defended the idea of “government-run health care.”
The networks endorsed a similar attitude about taxes, treating cuts as a cost to government in one-fourth of all stories. That’s nearly twice the number of stories that depicted tax cuts as a “relief” to taxpayers.
NBC’s Andrea Mitchell showed one GOP candidate that journalists have a liberal view when it comes to letting people keep the money they earn. “Rudy Giuliani proposed lowering corporate tax rates and capital gains taxes, costing trillions,” she said on the Jan. 12 “Saturday Today” show.
Even when the candidates agreed, the media still pushed the agenda leftward. Both Obama and McCain back an economy-numbing cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions. It’s designed to make energy more expensive, so journalists love it – just not as much as they love climate change stories.
They’ve done nearly 500 of those warming stories in the first nine months of this year but only examined the pricey “cap-and-trade policy” 18 times. Just three of those stories mentioned costs.
While the newscasts included a great gnashing of teeth for our overall economic fate, journalists have helped ensure our economic future shifts further to the left. If the next president follows that agenda, America in four years will be a land of higher taxes, stifling regulation and sky-high energy costs.
For much of the last year, ABC, CBS and NBC have done their part to portray the American economy in chaos. Now if they get their way, they might help make it a reality.
IRS, U.S. Banks Accept Fraud-Prone Mexican ID That Lets Illegals Into U.S. Credit Market
(CNSNews.com) - The Internal Revenue Service and U.S. banks have been allowing foreign nationals, many of whom are illegal aliens, to use a fraud-prone Mexican identifcation card that the FBI says is not a "reliable" to obtain U.S. bank accounts and Individual Tax Identification Numbers (ITINs) and thus enter the U.S. credit market. Mexican banks, meanwhile, do not accept the card--the Matricula Consular--as identification, according to the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee. ....
Government Ownership in Banks Could Cause More Problems than It Solves
By Fred Lucas
(CNSNews.com) – The federal government’s purchase of $250 billion in stocks from U.S. banks as part of the $700 billion financial bailout could cause a repeat of the same poor market discipline that caused the credit crisis, according to free market economists.
“These shares put in the hands of the government has a muting effect on incentives,” said Frank Gamrat, senior researcher at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy. “Profit-making incentives drive the economy and maximize performance. You take out that incentive when the government is going to provide capital.”
That was the problem with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-sponsored enterprises designed to provide mortgages for low-income earners, said Jagadeesh Gokhale, senior fellow in economics at the libertarian Cato Institute.
“The key point is that this big debacle started from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and that debacle happened with the backing of the government,” Gokhale told CNSNews.com.
The U.S. Treasury Department is buying $125 billion in non-voting shares in nine of the nation’s major banks and $125 billion in shares of smaller banks around the country to provide an infusion of capital and inspire the banks to make more loans.
Congress gave secretary of the Treasury the authority to do so as in vaguely worded section of the $700 billion bailout package that defined as among the "troubled assets" the secretary could buy "any other financial instrument."
Several European countries took similar steps to stabilize their economies.
Critics of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac said the two mortgage giants drive the market for risky loans because they used their tax-exempt status and government line of credit to buy up risky loans that they then turned around and sold to Wall Street firms who assume these two "government-sponsored enterprises" had an implicit government guarantee.
This time the banks will be cautious about relying on the government for security or more oversight given the failures of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, said J.D. Foster, a senior economist with the conservative Heritage Foundation.
This is the case, he said, because when government steps in, the companies are shaken up, top management is often replaced, and shareholders feel the pinch.
“It is extremely risky to make investments expecting a government bailout,” Foster told CNSNews.com.
The Treasury Department says that the stock buy in banks is temporary and that it intends to sell the shares back to private entities when economic conditions improve. However, there is no timeline to do so, and nothing in the $700 billion law requires the government to sell the shares, which also concerns some economists.
“With the buying of troubled assets, there is a clear endpoint that comes when the debt is paid off,” Gokhale said. “With purchasing stocks, there is no clear end. Taxpayers might argue they want a return. At what point do you sell again?”
The lack of a timeline for selling the stocks back to the banks or other private parties is likely to prevent the public from becoming alarmed that the banks will not be secure after a certain date, Gamrat told CNSNews.com.
But he thinks political pressure could promote the classic model of buying low and selling high in the stock market. Despite the potential revenue gains from such a move, Gamrat said it would be wrongheaded.
“If the government sells [the stocks] to make a profit, I’m not sure anyone wins,” Gamrat told CNSNews.com. “The government should sell at the same price it paid. It will show the public that this was a good faith effort to provide capital. If it is used for revenue, the government will gamble in the stock market again.”
The federal government’s purchase of $250 billion in bank stocks should already be a concern, said Sheldon Richman, editor of The Freeman magazine, who noted that the auto industry, like banks, is also seeing hard times.
“The government is not always good at picking winners,” Richman told CNSNews.com. “History shows government expands during a crisis and never shrinks after the crisis. What if Detroit’s problems continue? Will the government buy stock there?”
A bigger concern is what control the government could exert over the banks, he said. Even without a vote among the banks’ shareholders, “there are still subtle ways to control – the government regulates these banks,” said Richman. “They can say if you don’t do things a certain way, we will make life unpleasant. It’s a dangerous idea.”
The purchase of bank shares might have been necessary, said Foster, who is “concerned about the influence over the banks.”
“Even with non-voting shares, there is a lot of influence,” he told CNSNews.com. “In the long run, the worry might be whether the government likes owning stock.”
(CNSNews.com) – The federal government’s purchase of $250 billion in stocks from U.S. banks as part of the $700 billion financial bailout could cause a repeat of the same poor market discipline that caused the credit crisis, according to free market economists.
“These shares put in the hands of the government has a muting effect on incentives,” said Frank Gamrat, senior researcher at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy. “Profit-making incentives drive the economy and maximize performance. You take out that incentive when the government is going to provide capital.”
That was the problem with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-sponsored enterprises designed to provide mortgages for low-income earners, said Jagadeesh Gokhale, senior fellow in economics at the libertarian Cato Institute.
“The key point is that this big debacle started from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and that debacle happened with the backing of the government,” Gokhale told CNSNews.com.
The U.S. Treasury Department is buying $125 billion in non-voting shares in nine of the nation’s major banks and $125 billion in shares of smaller banks around the country to provide an infusion of capital and inspire the banks to make more loans.
Congress gave secretary of the Treasury the authority to do so as in vaguely worded section of the $700 billion bailout package that defined as among the "troubled assets" the secretary could buy "any other financial instrument."
Several European countries took similar steps to stabilize their economies.
Critics of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac said the two mortgage giants drive the market for risky loans because they used their tax-exempt status and government line of credit to buy up risky loans that they then turned around and sold to Wall Street firms who assume these two "government-sponsored enterprises" had an implicit government guarantee.
This time the banks will be cautious about relying on the government for security or more oversight given the failures of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, said J.D. Foster, a senior economist with the conservative Heritage Foundation.
This is the case, he said, because when government steps in, the companies are shaken up, top management is often replaced, and shareholders feel the pinch.
“It is extremely risky to make investments expecting a government bailout,” Foster told CNSNews.com.
The Treasury Department says that the stock buy in banks is temporary and that it intends to sell the shares back to private entities when economic conditions improve. However, there is no timeline to do so, and nothing in the $700 billion law requires the government to sell the shares, which also concerns some economists.
“With the buying of troubled assets, there is a clear endpoint that comes when the debt is paid off,” Gokhale said. “With purchasing stocks, there is no clear end. Taxpayers might argue they want a return. At what point do you sell again?”
The lack of a timeline for selling the stocks back to the banks or other private parties is likely to prevent the public from becoming alarmed that the banks will not be secure after a certain date, Gamrat told CNSNews.com.
But he thinks political pressure could promote the classic model of buying low and selling high in the stock market. Despite the potential revenue gains from such a move, Gamrat said it would be wrongheaded.
“If the government sells [the stocks] to make a profit, I’m not sure anyone wins,” Gamrat told CNSNews.com. “The government should sell at the same price it paid. It will show the public that this was a good faith effort to provide capital. If it is used for revenue, the government will gamble in the stock market again.”
The federal government’s purchase of $250 billion in bank stocks should already be a concern, said Sheldon Richman, editor of The Freeman magazine, who noted that the auto industry, like banks, is also seeing hard times.
“The government is not always good at picking winners,” Richman told CNSNews.com. “History shows government expands during a crisis and never shrinks after the crisis. What if Detroit’s problems continue? Will the government buy stock there?”
A bigger concern is what control the government could exert over the banks, he said. Even without a vote among the banks’ shareholders, “there are still subtle ways to control – the government regulates these banks,” said Richman. “They can say if you don’t do things a certain way, we will make life unpleasant. It’s a dangerous idea.”
The purchase of bank shares might have been necessary, said Foster, who is “concerned about the influence over the banks.”
“Even with non-voting shares, there is a lot of influence,” he told CNSNews.com. “In the long run, the worry might be whether the government likes owning stock.”
Afghanistan: Wounded Digger Lashed Self To Vehicle And Fought On
Thanks to Mongol's link in comments about this article. This story shows how just how tough our Aussie brethren soldiers are!
DESPITE being shot twice during an ambush in Afghanistan, an SAS soldier lashed himself to the front of his patrol vehicle so he wouldn't be left behind if he passed out from loss of blood and kept on fighting.The Digger is expected to be recommended for a high level bravery award.
Suffering from serious upper body wounds, the soldier struggled on to the front of his SAS long range patrol vehicle (LRPV) and, under heavy fire, used a rope to attach himself firmly between the vehicle's bull bar and radiator.
Once he was secured, and there was no chance that he would fall off if he fainted, he picked up his rifle and resumed firing at the enemy during a two-hour fighting withdrawal.
SAS troops and their special forces comrades from the Commando Regiment are well aware of the slow and painful death that awaits them if they are captured by the Taliban.
The Digger, who cannot be identified, faded in and out of consciousness, emptying several magazines as volleys of enemy rounds and rocket propelled grenades, rained down around him.
He was finally evacuated from the battle field at high speed still lashed to the front of the LRPV. [...]
A source told The Courier-Mail the Digger was now "up and about" and would recover fully from his serious gunshot wounds. His heroic deeds will be recognised when he is recommended for a high level bravery award.Several others engaged in the do-or-die battle on September 2 are also in line for top honours.
This is one heck of a story about bravery and survival. Hats off to this digger and I wish him a speedy recovery.
There was a downer to this story as due to a "glitch" the pay was docked of 100 SAS soldiers, some serving in Afghanistan. Luckily this has been fixed. This such "glitch" is no way to treat our finest and bravest allies!
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