-By Warner Todd Huston
Governor Bobby Jindal gives a speech at the Rally For Economic Survival in Lafayette, Louisiana. Over 11,000 people gathered at the Cajun Dome to protest what they say is an assault on Louisiana’s economy by President Barack Obama.
“The fact that the federal government can’t do its job shouldn’t cost thousands of Louisianans OUR jobs.”
Jindal Calls Obama’s Actions in Gulf a ‘War’ on Louisiana”
-By Don Boys, Ph.D.
According to the moguls of the media (the News Twisters), I would appear to be an extremist although I always thought I was mainline. (As mainline as an active Christian can be.) After reading the musings from the various politicians, I may be one of those dreaded extremists.
I believe strongly (all extremists believe strongly in their positions) that government, out of control, is a wild beast. Does that make me dangerous? Didn’t all our founding fathers believe government can be a wild beast? Did they not insist on the Bill of Rights because they knew that government (made up of depraved creatures) could not be trusted? Is it unreasonable to believe that all politicians and bureaucrats should be bound by the chains of the Constitution?
Am I an Extremist?”
-By Frederick Meekins
Most Americans are no doubt aware of the tragedy of the oil slick coating the Gulf Coast from the damaged petroleum rig. What they might not be aware of is the attitude among elites of how we as citizens and consumers are simply to go along with whatever position they craft as a response regarding the matter.
A headline from the 5/25/10 online edition of the Washington Post bemoans “For Some Washington Drivers, Convenience Outweighs Calls For BP Gas Boycott”. The story laments the tendency of certain consumers who “…prioritize convenience over taking a moral or political stand.”
For starters, in this day where it is constantly pounded into our heads that no one is to impose their views on any one else or to even dare to suggest that certain values might be superior to others, on what grounds are we expected to do something because someone with no real binding authority over us tells us to?
Continue reading “
Boycott The Boycotters”
-By Selwyn Duke
While the Obama administration has chosen the southern side in the Mexican-Arizonan border war, most Americans stand with their countrymen. They are troubled by the strain illegals place on services, the drugs and thugs moving north and blue-collar job prospects moving south. Then there is another factor: the political and cultural one.
It’s well known that, should amnesty be granted to the 12 to 30 million illegals living among us, Barack Obama and his fellow travelers would capture virtually all their votes. Moreover, given the illegals’ allegiance to their homelands and today’s multiculturalist message, it’s clear that, even if they do learn English, “assimilation” won’t be high on their vocabulary list. Thus, amnesty not only would radically transform the political landscape, it would constitute a cultural tsunami. Even pundit Bill O’Reilly recognizes this, saying a couple of years ago (I’m paraphrasing), “If all the illegal aliens are granted amnesty, America will change culturally almost overnight.” But is the focus on illegal migration excessive?
What do I mean? Well, how about this proposal: What if instead of granting amnesty in one fell swoop, we did so incrementally, say, to 20 percent of illegals a year for the next 5 years? That would still have the same ill effects, you say? OK, how about one million illegals a year until the job is done? I can hear it now: “Whoa, Duke, all you’re proposing is to trade a knife through the heart for a death by a thousand cuts. A bad idea implemented more slowly is still a bad idea. And illegal means illegal.” But, wait, if Congress passed an amnesty plan, it wouldn’t be illegal.
Continue reading “
Immigration, Reconsidered”
This is some brilliant parody of the Talking Heads song “Same As It Ever Was.” This one lampoons Obama’s sad reaction to the Gulf oil spill.
Smashing work, from The PolitiZoid Channel.
They also gave us this one…
Love it.
(H/T HotAir.com and alhouse.blogspot.com)
-By Warner Todd Huston
When companies are found to have violated regulations that govern their industry, is it right that a jury of non-experts can award damages the amount of which will wipe the company off the face of the earth? That is a question that has been raised in a case recently decided against Skilled Healthcare LLC of California.
A class action lawsuit (lawsuit info here) brought by trial lawyers was filed late last year against Skilled Healthcare of California claiming that the company had violated state regulations that stipulates that nursing homes must maintain 3.2 nursing hours per patient, per day (ppd). The lawsuit claimed that the nursing homes operated by Skilled Healthcare often did not meet the requirement.
Interestingly, there was never any claim from any patient that there’d been harmed or put in danger. Not a single patient claimed personal injury before these lawyers began to file their class action lawsuit.
Continue reading “
Jury Damage Award Could Close Calif. Healthcare Facilities”
-By Warner Todd Huston
In April Lee Ohanian of the American Enterprise Institute published a paper on the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) that is a must read. But this month he published a shorter piece that is just as interesting. In it, Ohanian claims that if we increased unionism as the Obamaites want to do, we’d actually lose jobs; 4.5 million of them to be precise.
Obama has spent his entire year in office (hard to believe this much destruction only took a year) looking for ways to pay unions big dividends and despite that Congress has been dragging its feet on unions’ most cherished legislative agenda, the EFCA, Obama has been bending over backwards for them (as we discussed here).
Continue reading “
AEI: More Unions Means Fewer Jobs”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Remember when Barack Hussein Obama first became president and the left-wing Old Media universally indulged the claim that he was “just like FDR“? Of late the Old Media has backed off that hyperbolic statement, but at least in a single incident, Obama has proven indeed to be just like FDR. The similarity entails laws about which the two presidents lied to the public in order to sell them. And in both instances, the truth only came out in court.
For FDR it was Social Security. The Roosevelt Administration sold Social Security as an “insurance” program when it began to push for the policy. The truth is, of course, that Social security and its unemployment plan adjunct is in no way an insurance program. It is welfare pure and simple.
But FDR sold it as “insurance” anyway. In 1936, for instance, FDR sternly told an audience in Pennsylvania that it was an insurance program.
Continue reading “
Obama’s FDR-Like Bait and Switch”
-By Warner Todd Huston
The Morning Sentinel, a small paper from the state of Maine, has a travelogue story of the Obama’s vacation in and about Maine today. It has a very interesting little tidbit in it that should enrage every American. It is something that really shows Barack Obama’s arrogance and his obviously assumed air of noblesse oblige.
Among the exciting details of the Obama’s visit to Acadia National Park in Bar Harbor is this tidbit:
Arriving in a small jet before the Obamas was the first dog, Bo, a Portuguese water dog given as a present by the late U.S. Sen Ted Kennedy, D-Mass.…
As the rest of us toil on the unemployment line, as millions of Americans find their retirement accounts dwindling, their hours at work cut, and their pay scale trimmed, King Barack and Queen Michelle are flying their little doggie, Bo, on his own special jet airplane for his own little vacation adventure.
Well, it must be nice to be able to afford to fly your doggie about the country whenever you feel like it. It must be nice to hire people to act as your dog’s escort. It must be comforting to know that you have the power to arrange such luxury for a dog.
Continue reading “
Noblesse Oblige: Obama’s Dog Gets Own Plane on Vacation Trip”
-By Warner Todd Huston
On Thursday the Senate passed the Democrat’s financial reform bill. But even as Obama claims that this bill will “solve” the financial crisis, a look at the thing seems to prove that things financial took a back seat to giveaways to Obama’s union pals and sops to many of the Democrat’s other special interest friends.
The main union payback is the provision to allow unions and environut groups the ability to take control of the boardrooms of corporations in which they own stock through the so-called “proxy access” provision. This provision has been widely panned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups.
The Washington Times reports that there are other sops to Democrat special interests in this “financial reform” bill, too.
Continue reading “
Financial Reform? More Like Union Giveaways!”
-By Dan Scott
There comes a point in time when the cumulative actions of an individual or regime has become so outrageous that not only do they need to be called out but removed from a position of power. Over the past 19 months the country has endured a litany of embarrassment, missteps and outright criminality. The Obama regime has finally if not inevitably gone too far.
Among the many questionable actions of the Obama regime the country has been forced to endure is the continuing failure in regards to the oil spill clean up. Not only was the regime inept in its handling of the clean up by refusing help from foreign countries with the proper equipment, continually impeded clean up efforts via it’s numerous bureaucracies and then attempted to politicize one of the largest environment disasters in US history for Obama’s pet agenda item, namely Cap & Trade. To rub salt into the wound, Obama’s legal team has repeatedly attempted to put tens of thousands more people out of work via an oil-drilling moratorium. So far the Courts have struck down two attempts and Obama is trying again a third time. The effect of this latest behavior has just sent one oil-drilling rig off to Egypt with others sure to follow. To sum up Obama’s actions regarding the oil spill is incompetence. We are not talking about simple straightforward incompetence mind you, but stubbornly willful incompetence since Obama has yet to demonstrate he has actually “learned” anything from this experience. As you can see the use of the word “Administration” is a joke when recounting Obama’s actions and therefore the word regime is a far better descriptor.
Continue reading “
The Final Straw”
Tens of thousands of jobs lost to Obama’s drilling moratorium…
A Discussion on Obama’s oil drilling moratorium by Doctor Bill Cassidy, R. LA 6th Congressional District. This was filmed at the Tea Party of Louisiana July 12, 2010 townhall meeting.
-By Warner Todd Huston
If this isn’t the most perverse example of “reasoning” you’ve ever seen, then you haven’t seen any, yet. It seems the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is worried that the failure to pass an extension for unemployment insurance will deprive Illinois of “stimulus” money.
So, here is the perverse part… unemployment is for the unemployed, right? “Stimulus” is for economic growth (or at the very least economic water treading), right? So if we throw “stimulus” into the coffers of unemployment insurance, aren’t we “stimulating” unemployment and NOT stimulating economic activity?
Does this even make sense?
Continue reading “
Union Worries that Failure to Pass Unemployment Extension Means Lost ‘Stimulus’ $”
SIGN THE PETITION NOW!!! www.crnc.org/petition
The College Republican National Committee is thrilled to announce the “Don’t Put It On Our Tab” debt-awareness initiative! The national debt poses a lethal threat to our economic future, and we’re not about to let the Democrats think we are ignorant to that fact. Help the CRNC stand up and speak out for our generation by signing the petition today!
Did you know that the a child born into this world today owes over $117,000 to the DEBT alone? With unemployment rising, ‘entitlement’ programs collapsing, and debt skyrocketing how are we ever going to pay that back? The answer is through conservative reform. Join our facebook group ( http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dont-Pu… ) to stay informed 24/7 about the debt, what we are doing to combat it, and to examine potential solutions to it!
Economics 101 and what we do AFTER we repeal Obamacare…
Ed Morrissey also has some good commentary about this video at HotAir.com.
Created by the Center for Freedom and Prosperity. Visit their webpage at www.freedomandprosperity.org.
-By Warner Todd Huston
Filmmaker Michael Moore, famed for his propagandistic left-slanted portrayals of America in such films as Roger and Me, Bowling for Columbine, and Sicko, is under fire for lifting the work of a writer from the Knoxville News Sentinel and reposting it on his own site in total despite that copyright laws disallow such a practice.
On his site Random Mumblings the News Director of Innovation for the Knoxville News Sentinel, Jack Lail, reported that Michael Moore lifted an entire story and its accompanying video production from his newspaper’s website and reposted it all on MichaelMoore.com. Not only did he lift the whole story (not just excerpts, but the whole thing) and take the video to repost it on his own site, Michael Moore did not add any new content and even re-processed the News Sentinel’s video to remove their logo from the screen.
The article’s original author, the Knoxville News Sentinel’s Frank Munger, alerted Lail to the thievery prompting Lail to contact Moore demanding it all be removed. For several days Lail’s demand was ignored as Moore has been known to thumb his nose at copyright laws and intellectual property rights. Finally, though, by July 12 the Moore website removed the offending pages. (For a screen shot of Moore’s website, see the post at Random Mumblings.)
Continue reading “
Michael Moore Caught Stealing Others’ Work”
-By Warner Todd Huston
The most often used epithet cast at President Obama is that he’s a raving socialist. It is an easy charge to make what with his wanting to “spread the wealth,” his desire to destroy the autonomy of the business community and place it squarely under the thumb of government, and his constant expansion of big government . It can easily lead one to imagine that Obama thinks he’s Karl Marx incarnate. But is he? Is he really a socialist? (Download book HERE)
In her new short essay, Obama’s Not a Socialist, Stephanie Herman takes up this question and decides that while he may be a “socialist in his heart,” he is not a real socialist. Instead, Herman calls him a “corporatist.”
Before she gets to her assessment of Obama, Herman does a pretty fair job encapsulating the intellectual history of socialism from its 1800s era beginnings to today. She hits the high spots of socialist thinkers, what they imagined socialism to be, and in what climate their ideas were created.
Continue reading “
Review: Obama’s Not a Socialist, by Stephanie Herman”
-By Warner Todd Huston
When Barack Obama took office, one of the early things he did was install Hilda Solis, a long-time union operative, as head of the Department of Labor. And one of the first things she did was to ease the reporting requirements on unions, softening the violation of disclosure rules.
In August of 2009 Labor Sec. Solis immediately let it be known that her department would no longer initiate “enforcement actions against union officers and union employees based solely on the failure to file” the LM2 disclosure forms. Since that time two major unions have been caught filing inaccurate lobbying reports and disclosure statements.
Politico reports that the Center for Public Integrity has found that the “National Association of Letter Carriers have failed to detail the group’s specific lobbying activities, as required by law.” In May the group also found that the Maritime Officers union had also violated disclosure rules and had been doing so for a decade.
Continue reading “
Unions Violating Disclosure Rules”
Republican Sharron Angle is trying to unseat Senate Democrat Majority Leader Harry Reid. in Nevada. Her poll numbers look good so far.
Here is her first TV ad: Help is on the Way!
Defeating the Democrat Majority leader would be sweet, indeed. I hope everyone supports Sharron Angle.
-By Warner Todd Huston
For the last few decades sports teams across the country have nosed up to the public trough and demanded that states and cities chip in millions for the construction of new sports stadiums. To justify the public expense the claim has been made that these monstrous construction projects bring a wealth of jobs and spending on entertainment and are a boon to any city that will fund them. But are they? Do these multi-million dollar projects bring such lucrative benefits to the cities and states that pay through the nose for them?
For many years the “economic boom” idea of building stadiums seemed to make sense and city after state pumped billions of taxpayer’s dollars into such projects. But starting in the early 2000s, economists began to have enough data to show that the claims of beneficial end result of building stadiums was not as advertised.
In fact, these days economists that disagree amongst each other about so much have developed a wide consensus based on the belief that sports teams in and of themselves are not great economic engines for a city and that building giant new stadium complexes are not the automatic boon to the area such as they were sold.
Continue reading “
Want Economic Stimulus? Don’t Build a Sports Stadium!”
-By Warner Todd Huston
In case you aren’t aware of the House GOP’s YouCut program, it is a website where the GOP offers ideas that can help cut the budget and we (the voters) get to vote on our favorite ones. This voting, in turn, helps the GOP leadership focus on just what cuts the American voters want to prioritize.
Our favorite one this week is the removal of Obama’s mandated PLAs.
Continue reading “
This Month’s YouCut: Stop Obama’s Mandated Union Fees That Drive Up Construction Costs”
-By Scott Cleland
Viacom is ultimately likely to prevail in its appeal of the lower court decision in the seminal Viacom vs. Google-YouTube copyright infringement case.
If one only reads either the lower court’s decision or the press reports of it, without considering likely appellate arguments and the broader constitutional context of copyright protection, it is easy to mis-read the likely ultimate outcome here.
Both sides agreed to an expedited summary judgment process in the lower court because both sides fully expected this case to ultimately be decided at the appellate level, and most likely by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Continue reading “
Why Viacom Likely Wins Viacom-Google Copyright Appeal”
-By Warner Todd Huston
The sniping between Republican Mark Kirk and Democrat Alexi Giannoulias is beginning to get to full steam these days and Democrat Giannoulias isn’t handling it all very well. As a bank executive, he’s gone from dissembling about his efforts to loan mobsters $20 million that his bank then lost, to now as a candidate lying about his desires to raise taxes.
The latest Giannoulias gaffe comes as a result of his announcement of his tax returns. It seems that he declared a personal business loss that negated his entire tax bill and so Giannoulias paid no federal tax in 2009. Yet, as Mark Kirk says, even as Giannoulias wants to raise all our taxes, he skates by himself without paying any at all!
For his part, the Ginnoulias campaign says that the candidate never said he wants to raise our taxes. They say that Kirk is lying about it. This newest claim makes Giannoulias himself to be a “flat out” liar as far as Illinois political watchdog Rich Miller is concerned. After all, Miller has the video to prove that Giannoulias has said that he wants to raise taxes.
Continue reading “
Ill. Dem Senate Candidate Giannoulias a ‘Mob Banker,’ Now ‘Flat Out’ Liar”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Chicago Sun-Times financial reporter Terry Savage wrote a little opinion piece this week about a kid’s lemonade stand she came across in a ritzy, liberal northern suburb of Chicago. The kiddie enterprise violated one of our most sacred American principles and Savage was incensed by the whole incident.
Savage stopped to buy some lemonade from the two little girls and when she asked how much, she was told that it was free! As the girls happily gave their parent’s food away, their nanny stood beside them smiling approvingly.
Savage was unhappy with the girl’s faux generosity. “That’s not the spirit of giving. You can only really give when you give something you own.” Savage wrote, “They’re giving away their parents’ things — the lemonade, cups, candy. It’s not theirs to give.”
Continue reading “
An American Tragedy: When Commies Give You Lemons…”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Idiot Pete Stark (D, Calif.) says that the more we borrow as a nation the “richer” we get. You see, says Congressman Stark Raving, that trillions of dollars in debt proves that we are a rich people.
“If YOU’D SHUT UP,” Stark says we might be able to appreciate his genius. And if the guy that was trying to interview Congressman Stake Raving would “Get the fu*k outta here,” maybe we could all have benefited from Congressman Stark Raving’s perspicacity.
Just watch this and see why Democrats can’t be trusted to do… well, anything…
Wow, what a distempered half-wit Representative Stark Raving is.
Sadly, I see nothing to separate Rep. Stark Raving from any other Democrat. This video is pretty prosaic, really. This sort of economic ignorance piled on top of such arrogance is the Democrat Party personified.
Continue reading “
Video: Ignoramus Democrat Says The More we Borrow the Richer we Get”
(ED’s Note: Friend to the blog, Leon Weinstein who is a US citizen that emigrated from the USSR in 1974, wrote this because he is alarmed that the U.S. is headed to the hell he ran from so long ago. This is important stuff, folks. Leon KNOWS what he’s talking about as he lived through Russian Communism. We need to seriously think about his warnings…)
-By Leon Weinstein
Dear ex-compatriots who once lived under the socialist regimes of the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Cuba, China, Albania, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Venezuela of Chavez, the Argentina of Peron, and others of similar life experience!
I was born in the Soviet Union and was lucky to part with socialism and lucky & privileged to become the US citizen. However during last year and a half I am becoming increasingly concerned about the direction American leaders are steering our country to. More and more the US resembles the world you & I were fortunate to leave behind. More and more it now resembles the path Russia took a century ago – and we all know the devastating results this “experiment” caused. This is the very same path Greece recently chosen in trying to achieve another “just society.”
For years the United States was the island of sanity in the ocean of pain, suffering and injustice in which most of the world was drowning. The countries that were able to stand against tyrannies and make life bearable for their citizens did so in large part because the US was backing them with its might. If America falls, world as we know it will end. Without a strong America we will soon see China establishing its hegemony over Asia; Russia will strengthen its muscles and take back Eastern Europe; Hugo Chavez and brothers Castro will run Latin America; and a wide swath of the globe stretching from North Africa through the Middle East to Indonesia and perhaps the Philippines will become radically Muslim – fanatically massacring “infidels.”
Please read Letter to America below and (if you agree with the content) sign it, and forward it to all your friends, relatives, co-workers and pen pals. Ask your spouse and kids over age eighteen to sign it as well. Even if you never lived in a socialist country but share our concerns, we are asking you to stand with us. When signing Letter to America please choose the field “I didn’t experience socialism firsthand but I agree with you.”
Thank you all for your willingness to raise your voice and defend freedom! You & I now have an opportunity and obligation to help America, to do something for all the good we so generously received from this wonderful country.
Our voices will make a difference!
Letter to America
Written by people who came from where Obama is taking America to
“The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of ‘liberalism,’ they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened… I no longer need to run as a Presidential Candidate for the Socialist Party. The Democrat Party has adopted our platform.” — Norman Mattoon Thomas, Six times Presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America.
Continue reading “
Dear, Former Victims of Socialism/Communism, America Needs OUR Help!”
-By Warner Todd Huston
In January one of the early “successes” of the White House was the Lilly Ledbetter Act, legislation that was supposed to insure equal pay “for everybody.” Apparently, as in all Obama’s pronouncements, the outcome of Obama’s drive for “fairness” is rarely as advertised. In this case, some people are more equal than others at least if we take various White House staffer’s pay scales into account.
As it happens about 36 percent of White House staffers make a low 30 percent of what the top 23 percent earn. Bill Collier of The Freedomist calculated that 42 percent of the salary budget is paid out to only 23 percent of the staffers.
What about all that vaunted equal outcome in pay, President Obama? I thought you were all about “fairness”?
Continue reading “
Obama Fairness? White House Staffers See Amazingly Unequal Pay”
Lt. Col. Allen West is running for Florida’s 22nd Congressional District. This man is the real deal, Florida. We need men like Col. West in Washington D.C.
http://allenwestforcongress.com/
-By Warner Todd Huston
America is fast coming to a crossroads from which there will be no return if we take the wrong path. Do we take the road that leads away from America and toward a Euro-esque way of governing? Do we cast aside our American character and bury our great nation in a grave of socialist-styled authority? Do we damn our progeny to a failed superstate that violate every tenet of our original ideals?
I say we do not. I say we reject the democrat’s Euro-esque ideas and refocus ourselves on American exceptionalism. Our federal system has strayed far from our founding ideals and we may soon find that its time for a new Declaration of Independence from a tyrannical government that has usurped power from proper authority.
Since it is Independence Day this weekend, I offer this new Declaration as a rallying cry to all those willing to return to our true American character…
Continue reading “
A New Declaration of Independence for a New Revolution”
-By Warner Todd Huston
On one hand the administration and its cohorts in the Democrat majority want to use the BP oil spill as an excuse to wildly raise taxes on energy, to instill cap and trade, and to excuse more regulations in order to take control of as much of our national economy as possible, yet on the other hand when he called leaders of both parties together to talk energy Obama forbade any discussion of the BP oil disaster.
Obama obviously wants his cake and wants to eat it, too. He wants to be able to use this “good crisis” — in Chief of Staff Rham Emanuel’s words — to excuse all his attempts to grab more power and raise taxes to further hamper our economic recovery, yet when it’s time to discuss energy he doesn’t want to be bothered with questions about why his administration has failed so miserably to find solutions to the BP spill. Obama contends that the oil spill has nothing to do with energy policy, except when it does, apparently.
During the bipartisan meeting of 20 Senators Obama dismissed any injection of the BP spill into the discussion with a wave of his hand and his usual upturned nose saying, “That’s just your talking point” when Republican Senators brought up the matter.
Continue reading “
Obama Wants to Talk Energy… Well, Except for BP Spill”