Thursday, December 19, 2013



The Scrooge of 2013



***************************

All the News That’s Fit to Print

I have met people who believe that we are visited by UFO’s. And I have met people who deny that there is a Leftwing media bias.

The difference between the two is that life could possibly exist on other planets, sufficiently advanced to be able to cross the interstellar void, so that the UFO believers have some basis, no matter how tenuous, to give their belief system some partial and tenuous relation to reality.

The other belief system has none. Did you read about the shooting in Colorado in the news today?

... take a look at the Denver Post’s extraordinary behavior this week after the shooting at Colorado’s Arapahoe High School. In the original story on the event, a student at the school describes his disgraced classmate as “a very opinionated Socialist”; in an updated version of the Post’s story, the shooter was not a socialist, but merely “very opinionated.” Why?

This is not the first time, nor the second, nor the third.

Nice, concise list compiled by Ace I reprint it here as a teaching aid to those who cannot see the pro-Left bias in the media.

* Sept 2009: census-taker Bill Sparkman found hanged in rural Kentucky. Media speculated it was Tea Party. (He killed himself.)

* Feb 2010: Joe Stack flies small plane into an IRS building. Anti-tax TP rhetoric blamed. (He quoted from the Communist Manifesto. Several media outlets simply scrubbed Stack’s quotation from the Communist Manifesto out of their publications of his suicide screed.)

* Feb 2010: Amy Bishop shoots colleagues at University of Alabama faculty meeting. Gun-loving Tea Party suspected. (She was an Obama voter. Dr. Amy Bishop turned out to be a potential serial killer after scrutiny revealed the unusual shotgun killing of her brother decades earlier. She was also a registered Democrat suffering from suicidal thoughts related to her failure to obtain tenure.)

* March 2010: John Patrick Bedell shot two Pentagon security. A right-wing extremist, media asked? (A registered Democrat and 9/11 Truther. To this very day, if you type “John Patrick Bedell” into Google, the very first autofill suggestion is “John Patrick Bedell tea party.” That’s not deliberate malice from Google. The predictive search is based on how often a word or phrase was searched. In other words, folks were so desperate to find out if Bedell was a tea partier, they taught Google to watch for it.)

* May 2010: massive Times Square car bomb found. Bloomberg speculates it’s someone upset about ACA. (Actually, plain vanilla jihadist scum. Mayor Bloomberg, without any information about the bomber at all, decided to speculate that it was someone upset about the new healthcare law. And nobody thought to question him on that.)

* August 2010: Amid GZM debate, Muslim cabbie stabbed in NYC. Media speculates: a RWNJ? (Actually, a Lefty art student off his meds. Even better: the Lefty art student off his meds had actually done some work for the PR firm hired to promote the Ground Zero Mosque.)

* Sept 2010: James Lee takes hostages at Discovery Chan HQ. Media speculates: climate change denier? (An environmentalist who hates humans. Lee was a particularly toxic example of leftwing nutbaggery. He was once convicted for smuggling illegal aliens into the United States. He wrote in his manifesto that he wanted to save the planet by “stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies!”)

* Dec 2010: Clay Duke shoots at FL school board. Mike Malloy blames Glenn Beck. (Actually, Media Matters among his fav sites.)

* Jan 2011: Jared Lee Loughner shoots up campaign event of Rep. Giffords. Media: TP rhetoric is to blame. (An apolitical conspiracy theorist.)

* July 2012: James Holmes shoots up theater in Aurora, CO. Brian Ross suggests he’s a TPer on live TV. (Just another unmedicated nutter.)

* Aug 2012: Floyd Lee Corkins shoots up @FRCdc based on @SPLCenter’s “target list.” Media: [crickets]. h/t @JammieWF (This was the case of the media that didn’t bark. A politically-motivated shooting in the media’s own backyard. They grudgingly covered the shooting itself, but were curiously quiet about Corkins’ motive in targeting FRC, which he explicitly said was based on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s target list.)

* April 2013: Tsarnaev bros bomb Boston Marathon. Media suggests RWNJ commemorating “Patriot’s Day.” (Actually, just more jihadist scum…. that should have been “Obama-voting jihadist scum.” Good point. The Tsarnaev’s had the whole profile of modern American mass killers: jihadists, leftists, nutters.)

* Oct. 2013: Media retroactively blames right wing for JFK assassination, calling the State of Texas a bastion of rightwing hate. (Actually, Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist defector.)

SOURCE

**********************************

California Union Pays Only 1.7% of Income in Taxes, Yet Demands Corporations "Pay Their Fair Share"

Are government employee unions any less of a leech on society than corporations?

The malcontents with the California Federation of Teachers apparently think so. As a part of the recent public school “Day of Action” – a milder, more geriatric version of the 1960s “Days of Rage” – unionists in San Francisco staged a shouting protest in front of the Westfield Mall. The chanters demanded the corporations headquartered inside the mall “pay their fair share.”

Watch the video here.

The hypocrisy comes with the fact that they want others to pay more taxes, while they themselves pay so little.

The CFT’s 2013 LM-2 financial report reveals the union received $21,866,549 in “total receipts.” That type of annual revenue is probably on par with a lot of big corporations. And the union certainly acts like a corporation in the manner in which it compensates top employees:

    ·Jeffery Freitas, Secretary-Treasurer - $166,664
    ·Daniel Martin, Executive Director - $150,557
    ·Kenneth Burt, Political Director - $140,102
    ·Fred Glass, Communications Director - $139,456

Yet the union only paid $371,150 in “direct taxes.” Labor unions are categorized as non-profits by IRS rules and therefore are immune from income taxes.

So these numbers reveal the union paid 1.7 percent of its income in “direct taxes.” Does that qualify as its “fair share?”

Us poor folks who comprise the 99 percent would like to know why this super wealthy organization, which wields as much political clout as most private companies, is allowed to skate away without contributing a “fair” amount to the high cost of government, particularly when it constantly lobbies on behalf of expensive and wasteful social programs.

SOURCE

*******************************

Inequality: Locomotive of Progress

by ALEXANDER G. MARKOVSKY

Throughout the history of civilization people have been dreaming about a perfect world: full employment, fair distribution of wealth, full satisfaction of material and intellectual needs, and equality-only to discover, to their disappointment, that this utopian system does not exist on this side of the grave.          

Given President Obama's political persuasion, his obsession with inequality should surprise no one. In numerous speeches he has emphasized the alleged dangers of inequality, including his 2012 State of the Union Address, where he elevated the subject into "the defining issue of our time.... No challenge is more urgent. No debate is more important." Or, as he recently declared, "The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American dream." He has never defined his own interpretation of equality or offered his vision of the American dream.

But to someone who had firsthand experience with Marxism-Leninism and is able to decipher the genuine meaning of the president's words, the message is loud and clear: in order to preserve the American dream we have to take from the rich and give to everybody else. It is that  simple. Unfortunately, Obama's historical memories do not seem to include the lessons of his Soviet ideological predecessors. How did this magic economic formula work out for them?          

To sell the ideology, President Obama and his Democrat supporters insist they have no intention of creating an egalitarian society; they just want to reduce the gap between rich and poor. The elusive meaning of the term "reduce," however, leaves it open to endless interpretation, especially since they have failed to express their concept in numbers. Should the gap be a thousandfold, a hundredfold, tenfold-where does it stop? Furthermore, whether we shrink the gap a thousandfold or tenfold does not change the philosophical argument. The truth is that as long as there is a gap at all, the Left will try to shrink it down to meet its ultimate objective, so unambiguously expressed in the communist slogan of the Soviet Union: "Economic Equality and Justice for All."            

Economic equality and justice sound so appealing that true believers do not even notice they are mutually exclusive because economic equality is in itself an intrinsically unjust concept. The source of all wealth is the product of man's God-given ability to innovate. This ability has not been distributed equally. As Aristotle observed 2,400 years ago, "The worst form of inequality is to make unequal things equal." If society equates the extraordinary contributions of great innovators such as Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs with those of millions of individuals not so gifted and talented, the enormous upward mobility of the last 200 years will immediately cease. Freedom enables people to use their ingenuity to generate wealth, whereas coerced economic equality suppresses the very freedom required to innovate and begets poverty.

This is the reason the magical distribution formula did not work for the Bolsheviks and will not work for the contemporary proponents of the egalitarian dream; liberals, social justice supporters, social democrats, and a few remaining communists, who refused to accept the immutable fact that freedom, inequality, hard work and wealth are interdependent. Capitalism, which embraces all these qualities, created more overall wealth during the last 200 years than was created over the preceding 7,000 years of human civilization. Capitalism elevated the lumpen proletarians (poor laborers), who, according to Karl Marx, had "nothing to lose but their chains," into a bourgeoisie or middle class, and in doing so, materialized the American Dream.          

The president's policies, such as the Affordable Care Act, the Dodd-Frank Act, and new environmental regulations, are supposedly aimed at addressing the "fundamental threat to the American dream." But regardless of the positive spin Obama uses to sell these policies, they are not about freedom and creation of wealth, which is capitalism; they are about suppression of freedom and redistribution of wealth, which is socialism. Passed over by the public and barely debated in the media, "the defining issue of our time" speech was in fact Obama's mission statement declaring his strategic imperative: economic equality via distribution of wealth.          

In his quest for the egalitarian dream the president may choose to ignore the millennia of Aristotle's reality, but he cannot change it. Inequality emanating from free enterprise is the ultimate expression of freedom and is the locomotive of progress. It gives poor, rich, and everyone in between something to strive for.

This powerful locomotive has been pulling our economic wagon from the Industrial Revolution through modern-day free-market capitalism toward what Alexander Hamilton described as "Greater perfection and happiness than mankind has yet seen."          

Paradoxically, the Founding Fathers and President Obama both aspired to equality. The Founding Fathers envisioned equality in liberty, while our president is driving the country into equality in poverty.

SOURCE

************************

Federal Judge Calls Obamacare "Totally Ineffective" While Striking Down Contraception Mandate

Yesterday, Judge Brian Cogan of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, not only struck down Obamacare's contraception mandate as applied to religious non-profit organizations, but also sent a strong signal that federal courts were losing patience with President Obama's many stitches of executive power.

Previous courts had ruled against President Obama's contraception mandate as applied to for-profit entities (see Sebelius v Hobby Lobby), but this was the first court to hold that participating in Obama's scheme to provide free birth control is a substantial burden on the free practice of religion (specifically the Catholic Archdiocese of New York and its affiliate organizations).

Finally, the court also rejected the government's argument that Obama's failure to convince Congress to "fix" Obamacare authorized him to enforce his contraception mandate in the manner he did:...

Considering how often Obama has justified his expansion of executive power on Congress' failure to do his bidding, yesterday's ruling was not only a huge victory for religious liberty, but a huge win for limited government in all spheres as well.

More HERE

**********************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

****************************

No comments: