-By Warner Todd Huston
This is a reading of my op ed from a month ago on why I want Obama to fail, the next Publius Forum podcast. Enjoy…
Feel free to visit the Publius Forum TalkShoe page to see my past podcasts. New podcasts appear approximately monthly, or whenever the mood strikes me to do one.
-By Warner Todd Huston
Our friends over at Radio Equalizer caught liberal radio talker Mike Malloy in a bit of hypocrisy. Malloy obviously thought his wife was a scream as she pretended to be Governor Bobby Jindal portraying him as an outsourced computer tech from India replete with cutsey faux Indian accent. Malloy’s wife acted as if Jindal was the Simpson’s character Apu, or something.
Continue reading “
Lib Talker Malloy And a Racist Spoof: Jindal As Computer Tech from India”
-By Warner Todd Huston
We all saw the rocky performance that Bobby Jindal gave in his response to the president’s not-the-state-of-the-union speech earlier this week. There was a lot of wincing going on during and after his performance. But, let me stress the word “performance,” here. It was NOT the basic theme of the speech that was so bad. It was but how he delivered it.
Still, despite his less than show-stopping performance, a lot of second guessing on Jindal started to waft about conservative circles. The “he’s not ready yet” stuff was everywhere. So, we need to remind ourselves of just what sort of stuff Governor Jindal is made of. That reminder comes in the form of his reaction and efforts during Hurricane Katrina. If you want a show-stopping performance, there you have one.
A Reminder of What Jindal’s Made of”
-By Warner Todd Huston
And the effort to prevent the people’s vote by Republican insiders jealous of their unaccountable positions rolls ever onward in Illinois, the most corrupt state in the union.
Earlier in the week I wrote about the regrettable system in Illinois that governs the selection of members of the central committee of the Illinois Republican Party, the group that runs the state party. I reported on the singular fact that the rank and file membership of the GOP cannot elect their leaders and that these committee members, the people that plan every move the party makes, are selected by back room deal making among local committeemen, ward bosses and precinct captains, etc.
Update: Unelected Ill. GOP Committeemen Stall Effort for Free Elections”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Ron Moore, AFL-CIO local president and Examiner writer, absurdly and irresponsibly claimed on February 25 that “the Republican Party” is trying to “foment rebellion” inside the U.S. military against President Obama. This is exactly the sort of irresponsible charges that the left loves to throw around to create fear and loathing, sadly.
Moore bases the untruths in his headlined, “Is the Republican Party fomenting rebellion among the armed forces as a political tactic?,” on the fact that individuals that happen to be Republicans — or once were — are still pursuing the Obama birth certificate issue. But he takes that extra untenable step to say that these few people represent “the Republican Party.”
Union Prez: GOP ‘Fomenting Rebellion’ In Military Against Obama”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Ben Smith of Politico reports on some interesting union-on-union hatin’ this week.
HERE responds: ‘Tactics of anti-union bosses’
A official in the the HERE wing of the feuding UNITE HERE union responded just now to mailings from the union’s other wing casting its leaders as examples of labor corruption.
“This is an example of Bruce Raynor’s take-no-prisoners tactics,” the official, Pilar Weiss, told me, referring to UNITE HERE’s president. “They are no different from the the mail from the most anti-union employers.”
Weiss dismissed a UNITE leader’s charge that HERE has a history of corruption — such questions were “way in our past,” she said, and raised questions about spending at UNITE and the Amalgamated Bank, which it controls.
“It’s disappointing that people who call themselves labor leaders would resort to the tactics of anti-union bosses,” she said.
One footnote on the wider ramifications of the battle: Weiss said a prominent labor operative, Steve Rosenthal, had been running the campaign, and Rosenthal confirmed in an email that he’s an advisor to Raynor. Rosenthal is also a close advisor to SEIU President Andy Stern, who backs Raynor’s call for splitting the union.
The last bit, the “footnote,” is of special interest. Here we see again the heavy handed, take no prisoners version of SEIU President Andy Stern’s brand of unionization.
Unions a-Hatin’ on Unions”
-By Marie Jon’
There are people who have many misconceptions of Christianity. Some believe it is a heavy weight of do’s and don’ts piled upon one’s shoulders. Others believe that it’s an “if you sin, you’ll go to hell” doctrine.
Some believe that preachers are only in the pulpit to make money. There is the proverbial lie that God is always watching to catch you when you make a mistake, and there’s the pesky inconvenience of attending church in the first place.
The human mind can create a list of impossible expectations that lead to fear and a spiritual disconnect of hopelessness. Eventually, people who feel this way close their Bibles and never darken the doors of a church. They make the decision simply not to believe in God anymore.
The Pendulum Swings”
-By Warner Todd Huston
The Dontgo movement had a great gathering in downtown Chicago to protest this economy killing Obama generational debt plan.
-By Warner Todd Huston
Obama is about to unleash a $3.552 TRILLION budget on this poor nation. So, if we each of us were expected to fork over our share of that tab, what would it cost us? Well, according to Toby Harnden, blogger for the Daily Telegraph, it would amount to $25,573.48 each.
I don’t know about you but, I just don’t have it.
So how much will President Barack Obama’s budget cost us? The projected 2010 budget of $3.552 trillion can be found on page 114 of the “New Era of Responsibility” budget here.
The US Census bureau estimates that the current US population is 304,059,724. Dividing the $3.552 trillion by that gives us close to the $11,833 that Drudge came up with. ABC’s Jake Tapper reports that there wil be $989 billion in new taxes over the next decade.
I’m an American taxpayer and the starkest figure is what this could cost me. The latest figure I could find for the number of US taxpayers is 138,893,908 returns in 2007 here. By my reckoning, that’s $25, 573.48 each.
What Will Obama’s Budget Cost You? $25,573.48… EACH!”
-By Warner Todd Huston
We all remember the drubbing that conservatives took during the campaign when they openly worried, and even directly charged, that Barack Obama was a far left radical. Pointing to the racist Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the domestic terrorist William Ayers and wife, and several others of Obama’s close friends and associates conservatives sounded a clarion call to alert the country that we were about to get one of the most extremely leftist presidents ever.
Of course, the so-called rational and presumably non-partisan commentators that abound in the center left of the chattering classes scoffed at what they claimed to be the wild demagogues on the “extreme right” who then said Obama was a radical. They have for the last two years excoriated anyone that worries about how far to the left Obama is, saying that Obama is just an average Democrat that seeks to “bring us together.”
Obama’s Radical Appointees Piling Up”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Remember how during the run up to the election, all the left pundits and talking heads and their compatriots in the Old Media said that no white person would vote for Barack Obama? Well, despite the singular fact that Barack Obama convincingly won the popular vote in a country that sees a majority of its voters are white, the Old Media is still insisting that all southerners are slavery-loving, neo-confederates that are no different than they were in 1860.
For the Washington Post, Robert S. McElvaine is here to tell us in “The Red, the Blue and the Gray” that Barack Obama is “just like Lincoln” in the same way that Lincoln didn’t get the south’s vote in 1860. Professor McElvaine also intimates that this is because the south is little different than it was in 1860.
Bet you southerners didn’t know that you are all still slavers and racists, eh?
Professor: Southerners are Slavery-Loving Racists”
-By Warner Todd Huston
The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), the union friendly law currently sitting idle in Congress awaiting a Big Labor financed president to get around to addressing it, has some very interesting supporters. We’ve been told, of course, that we shouldn’t worry about Barack Obama and his followers, that they are just as American as anyone else. That claim of red-blooded Americanness is a bit hard to reconcile, however, where it concerns the EFCA.
While taking a small uptick in numbers the last few years, union membership has been down compared to the heyday of union labor in the US. Unions backed Obama with many millions of dollars during the campaign and have been keenly interested in enacting the EFCA, a bill that will help grow union membership in the country. They expect pay back for supporting Obama and he’s pledged to give it to them.
These Are the People Supporting EFCA”
-By Warner Todd Huston
One has to wonder about the thought process of some people. Dan Gilgoff, Faith reporter with U.S. News and World Report and Huffington Post writer, is a perfect example of what I am talking about. After a February 23 posting on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s Catholic faith, Gilgoff followed up the next day with a post claiming that Sarah Palin fans were smearing Jindal over his supposedly “secret Muslim” faith. Where did Gilgoff get such a ridiculous idea? Why, from just two commenters that posted on his entry of the 23rd, that’s where.
That’s right, just two people claiming in the comments section of his U.S. News post that Jindal was a secret Muslim was enough for Dan Gilgoff to decide that Sarah Palin’s entire support base is smearing Bobby Jindal as a secret Muslim. Just two people. Two nuts is enough for U.S. News and World Report to slander Sarah Palin and all her followers as crazy, racist, hatemongers.
U.S.News: Claims Palin Supporters Are Smearing Gov. Jindal as ‘Secret Muslim’”
-By Warner Todd Huston
In the hours after President Obama’s not-the-state-of-the-union address, the Networks rounded up the usual suspects to give reply to the speech. CBS, for its part, found the always smiling John McCain asking for his reaction to Obama’s starry-eyed rhetoric and long list of promises.
The prosaic, yet perky, Katie Couric asked McCain if Obama “convinced him at all” with the rhetoric? McCain, after saying Obama’s was “a very effective speech,” seemed, though, to call the president a liar — though certainly in the nicest way possible.
McCain Warms to Calling Obama a Liar”
-By Warner Todd Huston
The ACLU finally gets one right by taking the side of a beleaguered bait shop owner in Clearwater, Florida that is under attack by city officials over a mural of game fish painted on the outside walls of his bait shop.
City officials are claiming that the fish painting is an “advertisement sign” that falls under a beautification ordinance prohibiting large signs for businesses. The City has fined the shop’s owner Herb Quintero $700 and is warning that a further $500 a day fine can be imposed unless he paints over the fish.
Bait Shop Owner Under Attack By City over Fish Painting”
-By Warner Todd Huston
During his not-the-state-of-the-union speech last night, president Barack “givitaway” Obama said the following:
“I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it.”
Sorry, Prez, but while we did make the automobile an integral part of American life, while we did popularize the personal vehicle for the whole world, and while we certainly revolutionized its manufacture… we just didn’t invent the automobile.
What Obama Said About Cars That Bush Would Be Slammed for…”
-By Thomas E. Brewton
Computer models were the tools employed to inflate the subprime mortgage balloon that precipitated collapse of our financial markets. And the same sorts of inherently faulty computer models are generating proclamations that President Obama’s near-trillion-dollar stimulus and mortgage protection programs will create millions of new jobs and restore the economy to prosperity.
The old saw is “garbage in; garbage out.” When the computer model is too complex and attempts to cover too wide a scope, its output is worse than useless; disaster is just around the corner.
Continue reading “
The Limitations of Econometric Computer Models”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Once again CNN goes over the top in its gobsmacked praise of its Obammessiah. This time appropriating Ronald Reagan’s famous “morning in America” theme and assigning it to President Obama as a result of his not-the-state-of-the-union speech last night. In reality, Obama’s speech was more like a moaning in America as opposed to that bright new morning that Reagan invoked.
Worse, Reagan’s main theme for his “morning in America” ideal was to provoke Americans into a renewal of the American way of self-reliance, one removed from sucking at the teat of government. On the other hand, Barack Obama’s main point was that without government, without The One and all his fixes, we are all doomed.
It was obvious to anyone’s ears that Obama’s theme was as far removed as Reagan’s as can be.
CNN Claims Obama The New Ronald Reagan, Reassigns ‘Morning in America’ to The One”
– By Warner Todd Huston
Before I get to the problem of the Illinois Republican Party, a question: how do we get our government officials in the U.S.A.? Answer: we elect them. Now, you may be wondering why I begin here with something so simple, something we all take as a given? Let me answer that…
We DON’T elect them in Illinois. At least where it concerns selection of our Republican state central committeemen, anyway. It’s shocking, I know, but in the Illinois Republican Party, the voters have NO SAY WHATEVER in who takes a seat on the state central committee for the Ill GOP.
In Illinois, even the corrupt Democrat Party elects their central committeemen by rank and file voters. But not the Republicans. In the Illinois GOP the folks that guide our entire party establishment are afforded their seat by the selection of local precinct committeemen only, not by the votes of rank and file Illinois Republicans. The people have no direct say. None.
Here’s Another Reason Why the Illinois GOP is Useless…”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Remember that juicy story last week of the Chinese mistress that convinced her rivals and her lover to go for a drive? The mistress that then drove them all off a cliff in revenge for being dumped for one of the rivals by the lover?
Great story. It had pathos, humor, revenge and… apparently it never happened. The U.S. media picked this story up from the Chinese speaking media and ran with it last week but obviously didn’t do much by way of checking the accuracy of the tale. Turns out the Chinese “reporter” that wrote the story pulled a Jayson Blair — he made up the whole thing.
On That Story of Chinese Mistress Driving Lover and 4 Rivals off a Cliff… A Fake Story”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Seriously, do the kindly folks at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel’s editorial board even know what the definition of the word logic is? In theirs headlined, “Hysteria fuels sales of guns and ammo,” the Sun-Sentinel takes Floridians to task for being so stupid as to be afraid of Obama’s gun banning plans, claiming that Obama “didn’t do it.” But, even after telling readers no one wants to ban guns, the piece ends with the Sun-Sentinel editorial board advocating for the banning of guns! So the message is, no one wants a gun ban but we should ban guns? This is the sort of logical disconnect that fuels the very “hysteria” that the paper is claiming to want to dispel.
And this ridiculous about face isn’t the only illogical idea or uninformed claim the piece makes, either. Just about every word in this piece proves that the editorial board of the Sun-Sentinel is wholly uninformed about the Constitution and the technical aspects of firearms, not to mention being uninformed about the various gun banning bills floating about Congress and the several states at this very moment.
So. Fla. Sun-Sentinel: Slams Hysterics Over Gun Banning While Advocating Gun Banning”
-By Warner Todd Huston
The Public Service Research Foundation has finished its research into how union membership was distributed throughout the US for 2008. It looks like some very useful info:
The Public Service Research Foundation has announced that it has updated its state-by-state, sector by sector tables and charts on employment, union membership and union density for 2008 and is making them available.
Information about union membership is obtained from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey and is released annually in its report on Union Members http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
A State-By-State Breakdown of Union Membership for 2008″
-By Frank Salvato
There has been much debate surrounding the issue of whether or not President Obama’s Presidential Determination No. 2009-15 of January 27, 2009, effectively provided funding for members of Hamas to immigrate to the United States. While the determination itself did not include specific verbiage to that effect, just like reading the Koran without using the Hadith as a guide, reading the Presidential Determination without understanding the intent of the Migration & Refugee Assistance Act of 1962 and the accomplishments of the charged State Department organization, the Bureau of Population, Refugees & Migration, would lead even the learned to a conclusion that denied a reality.
Determining the Intent of the Presidential Determination”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Here is our Crossactionnews.com podcast for 2/24/09.
Feel free to visit the Publius Forum TalkShoe page to see my past podcasts. New podcasts appear approximately monthly, or whenever the mood strikes me to do one.
-By Warner Todd Huston
Former Union thugs admit that the Employee Free Choice Act is just what unions want to force, coerce, cajole, embarrass and fool potential members into joining “by hook or crook.”
-By Warner Todd Huston
The self-aggrandizing denizens of Hollywood constantly scold Americans over a lack of national healthcare. It is the biggest failure of American society ever that there is no cradle to the grave program for free health care, they constantly tell us. And now, in keeping with these nearly universal Hollywood “principles,” to prove how Hollywood is far more moral than we lowly citizens of flyover country, and to show that they are better than the great unwashed in the backwaters of America… Hollywood is closing its nearly 90-year-old Motion Picture Fund hospital and accompanying long-term living facilities for aging actors.
Yep, dumping it. Walking away from the facilities for free healthcare for actors. Fuggedaboutit.
Sean Penn has advocated for national healthcare in the U.S. basing his interests upon his close personal friendship with the dictatorial, socialist president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. The twin activists of Susan Sarandon and hubby Tim Robbins have claimed that healthcare is one of the most important issues facing the country today. Many of Hollywood’s biggest stars have been heard to lament about how healthcare is something that only the caring, you know, care about, and stuff.
Hollywood Extols National Healthcare While Closing Its OWN Actors Hospital and Long-Term Care Facilities”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com seems to think that Bill Clinton’s nonexistent boogie men, “the militias,” are back. Why are they back? Because all white people are angry, racists that are mad that Obama got elected, of course. What else could have dredged up this fantasy from the depths of the liberal’s worst nightmares of the 1990s? Somehow, though, it’s a bit hard to imagine Greenwald’s main premise considering the fact that millions of those same white Americans Greenwald so fears actually voted for Obama.
But, in an effort to scold Fox News for airing Glenn Beck’s recent “War Room” segments, Greenwald indulged in precisely the same sort of behavior he claims Beck does, namely that of making wild, unsubstantiated claims about the “other” side.
Greenwald imagines that militias are again on the rise because Barack Obama is “an exotic other occupying the White House” and because the U.S. is a “declining imperial power,” these things upsetting to gun-owning, white folks, apparently. Greenwald also scoffs at the “militia movement” that Clinton talked about in the 1990s because they “completely vanished” once George Bush became president in 2000, that this shows they really had no principles he says.
The 1990s are Back, Glenn Greenwald is Worried About Angry White Racist Militias”
-By Thomas E. Brewton
Asked about long-term inflationary effects of government deficit spending that he recommended to combat the Depression, economist John Maynard Keynes’s flippant dismissal was, “In the long run we are all dead.”
Keynes’s irresponsible mode of thinking has become Congress’s accepted way of dealing with any problem having more than a six-months horizon. Exhibit A is the refusal of Democrat/Socialists to face up to the looming unfunded liabilities of the Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid funds. Exhibit B is the near-trillion dollar stimulus bill, to be funded largely by the Fed’s bookkeeping entries creating fictitious, fiat money out of thin air.
Continue reading “
The Long and Short of It”
-By Warner Todd Huston
My good friend, Ken Marrero over at Blue Collar Muse, did some interesting research into where the money from Tennessee’s share of the so-called stimulus payoff ends up going. Ken notes that there is a lot of money floating around but little of it goes to stimulate the economy. In fact, it seems that the lion’s share goes to government and its grasping needs as opposed to the economy.
According to Marrero, The Volunteer State stands to have a windfall of $3,779,708,000 thanks to the pork-laden bill passed by Congress and President Obama. The list of payouts is impressive, but it really does show that only a small amount of the total could be considered an economic stimulant.
Tennessee’s Stimulus Share Stimulates Government, not Economy”
-By Warner Todd Huston
One of the fixes that Democrats are insisting upon to save people’s homes is the idea of the “modified mortgage.” A modified loan is an offer to homeowners that have either become delinquent in payments or have become overwhelmed in interest to have their loans reinstated with certain modifications that are expected to make payments lower to the borrower. The idea is that the troubled homeowner can forestall foreclosure and stay in their home.
Sounds like a great program. The bank or mortgage holder can continue getting paid without all the hassle or foreclosing and taking possession of the house, the homeowner is not thrown out in the street and with all that turmoil avoided, society is in approximate harmony. And, with Democrats making noise on how they support these sorts of programs, they get to pretend they care about Mr. and Mrs. America down on their luck.
It’s a win-win for everybody, right?
The Failure of ‘Help’: ‘Modified Loans’ Don’t Modify Repayment”