Sunday, July 22, 2012

The MSM and other problems



What’s New Today

Story #1 looks at the Brian Ross identification of James Holmes as a possible member of the Tea Party.  #2 looks at the issue of the support Barack Obama has with people on the left.  #3 looks the problems with Dodd Frank.  #4 is an excellent satire rewriting Genesis.  #5 gives you ten lessons you can glean from the book, Barack Obama: The Story.




Today’s Thoughts

Remember the Obama fund raising suggestion that brides register to have people donate their gift money to the Obama campaign?  Well, they’ve gone one more step which is just creepy.  They have announced a raffle to have Barack Obama appear in a family picture with the lucky winning family.

The MSM’s defense of Obama’s comment regarding “you didn’t build it” is akin to the quote by Robert McCloskey, “I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.” 

In the past month, President Obama has twice let us know what he really thinks of the private sector.  Looking at unemployment, he told us that “The private sector is doing fine” even though the unemployment rate is above 8 %.  Then he told us that If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” 

Economic milestones during Obama’s presidency.  1) Unemployment above 8% for 41 straight months passing a total of 39 months above 8% before that since World War II.  2)  America’s credit rating downgraded for the first time in history.  3) Canadian’s average net worth surpasses Americas for the first time in history.  America has its first (then second, third and fourth) trillion dollar deficit in history.   Which is that?  Hope or change? 
  

1.  Is Brian Ross an aberration to the Rule?

It wasn't just that ABC's Brian Ross was wrong in suggesting that the "Jim Holmes" he found on a Tea Party website was the same man who committed the heinous crime in Aurora, Colorado.  It's that it was indicative of stupidity and corruption.

If Ross had thought for a moment and possessed a grasp of reality, he would've realized that "Jim Holmes" is a common name belonging to hundreds of men throughout the nation. If he had some integrity and a desire to be even-handed, he would have vetted the information more before airing it -- just as he would have if at issue had been an alleged left-wing association.

Just imagine if someone appeared on TV shortly after the Aurora tragedy and stated, not just to provide biographical info but with an ominous implication, "We now know that Holmes attended UC Riverside...." Now, I'll be the first to say that modern academia does teach insanity; nonetheless, since this school isn't known to orchestrate terrorist acts, it wouldn't leap to mind to implicate it in Holmes's atrocity.  The fact is that any given person will have had a number of associations in his life, and few, if any, will bear relevance to a crime he may commit.

So there can be only two reasons why ABC would mention a possible Holmes/Tea Party (TP) association: either its people want to demonize conservatives every chance they get, or they think traditionalist thought constitutes a pathology. It turns out that Effluent Stream Media leftists are deeply involved in doing the former and generally believe the latter...  

How many tragedies have we seen in the last three years where the left wing media has question whether the person responsible was associated with the Tea Party? 

2.  Will the left come out and Support Obama?

Is the left turning against the reelection campaign of Democratic President Barack Obama? That's the impression one gets from a recent article in the left-leaning Huffington Post.  

In an article titled, "The Obama Campaign Is Unworthy of a Democratic President," Georges Ugeux, who identifies himself as the chairman and CEO of Galileo Global Advisors and an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School, writes, "As a Democrat and a staunch support of Barack Obama, I am completely disgusted by his campaign.  Are we talking about the President of the United States? Are we talking about a principled man who has boosted our ideal for a fair and equitable America? Does this have anything to do with the American people?"

Ugeux goes on to accuse Obama's campaign of "harassment" by incessantly calling and emailing to ask for campaign cash--"Even those of us who asked to only receive selective information."
To that "presidential" harassment one needs to add what the Democratic Party does: strangely enough they only call and e-mail to collect money. Never to tell us what are the important causes for the Party.
Then, the liberal law professor complained that, for the Obama campaign, "It's all about money." …


Obama as it turns out isn’t something different.  He’s just another sleazy politician.


3.  Dodd Frank:  The worst is yet to come

It’s been two years since President Obama signed the Wall Street-reform bill that has come to be known as Dodd-Frank. So has it succeeded in creating “safer and more modern rules of the road for the financial industry,” as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner claims?

Good question. To a large extent, we really can’t answer, even though a full 24 months has elapsed since Dodd-Frank became law. Why? Because many of the rules remain unwritten, creating tremendous uncertainty among affected firms and consumers. Dodd-Frank didn’t so much create new rules as create the institutions that would set up the rules. And most of those rules don’t yet exist.

According to Jonathan Macey of Yale Law School, “Dodd-Frank is not directed at people. It is an outline directed at bureaucrats and it instructs them to make still more regulations and to create more bureaucracies.” In essence, Congress punted. Lawmakers outsourced their constitutional duties -- and on an important issue that affects millions of people.

What happens, then, to accountability?  To the rule of law? “The Constitution creates three branches of government, yet administrative agencies and vast bureaucracies operate in practice as a headless fourth branch,” Heritage Foundation scholar Matthew Spalding writes in his new book Changing America’s Course.

But don’t assume, just because we haven’t felt the full effect of Dodd-Frank, that it’s causing no harm now. The uncertainty caused by fear over what the bureaucrats may or may not do is hardly helping an economy struggling its way through a fragile recovery still rife with unemployment.

Plus the rules that the legislation did actually spell out have hardly been helpful to consumers. Consider bank fees, to take one of the most obvious examples. Dodd-Frank included a provision that put the federal government in charge of setting the “interchange” fees that retailers pay the banks for processing debit-card transactions, even though such fees had nothing to do with what caused the financial crisis of 2008. So the Federal Reserve last year dictated limiting what banks can charge for processing debit-card purchases, from an average rate of 44 cents a transaction, to seven to 12 cents -- a drop of as much as 84 percent….


Dodd Frank needs to be repealed and then replaced with actual regulations rather than another bureaucracy.  Do you feel safer at the airport with a nationalized TSA?  Or do you feel now they are uniformly doing stupid things across the board? 


4.  Iowahawk’s reinterpretation of Genesis

1Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the balanced, publicly-funded birds the Lord Govt had made to sing news to the economy. The serpent was on the AM band. He said to the retail sector, “Did Govt really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’? ”
20 "Only yours, serpent," said the retail sector.
21 Don't be a wuss,” the serpent said to the retail sector. 22 “For Govt knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will wise to Govt's scam.”
23 When she saw that the fruit was pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, and also free to download, she took some and ate it. She emailed a copy to her wholesaler, and he ate it; and then the wholesaler to the manufacturer, and he to the servicer. 
24 Then the eyes of all of them were opened, and they realized they were being taxed naked; so they outsourced fig leaves to make coverings for themselves. 
25 Then the economy heard the sound of the Lord Govt returning from vay-cay with the demigovts Osha and Tarp and Irs. It was the cool of the day, and they were hiding their profits from the Lord Govt among the trees of the garden. 26 But the Lord Govt called to the manufacturer, “Where are you?”
26 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid, so I sought a tax shelter.”
27 And Govt said, “Who told you that your profits were yours? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from? ”
28 The man said, “The retailer made me —she has a thing for serpents.”
29 Then the Lord Govt said to the retailer, “What is this you have done?”
30 And she said to the Lord Govt, “Don't take that tone with me, fat boy. And why should I give you my profits?”…


This is great satire.  Iowahawk wrote 40 verses while I’ve posted only 12.  It’s a pretty good interpretation of what Obama must feel regarding the private sector.  How did tell you that your profits were yours?


5.  10 Things we learned from Barack Obama: The Story

1.  He told classmates he was an Indonesian prince. “His grandfather [Stanley] had told strangers that the boy was a descendant of ali ‘i, native Hawaiian royalty. In Obama’s later memoir, he recalled boasting at Punahou that his father was an African prince. Some classmates remembered it differently, that first he claimed his father was an Indonesian prince” (p. 268).

2.  Far from the poverty that Obama describes in Dreams, Obama hobnobbed with rich Indonesians. “Barry’s new classmates [at Besuki School in Indonesia] included the sons and daughters of lawyers, bankers, doctors, members of Parliament, and government officials” (p. 235). While his home may have been modest, his education in Indonesia certainly wasn't.

3.  Everyone, including the now-Governor of Hawaii, acknowledges that Obama got into Punahou in large part because he was black and connected. Obama writes that he got in thanks to Gramps’ boss. “My first experience with affirmative action, it seems, had little to do with race,” Obama wrote in Dreams, p. 87). But Maraniss delivers a more detailed picture:…

4.  Maraniss says ‘Pop,’ a poem that Obama wrote for Occidental’s literary magazine, was about Frank Marshall Davis

5.  Maraniss’s description of Frank Marshall Davis is laughable. He writes of FMD: “already approaching seventy, a black journalist, poet, civil rights activist, political leftist, jazz expert, and self-described 'confirmed nonconformist' who wore a gold earning in his pierced right ear and had been under surveillance by the Honolulu bureau of the FBI because of his past associations with the Communist Party" (p. 270). In fact, thanks to Paul Kengor’s indispensable book, The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, we know that he was an unrepentant Marxist who continued to peddle his ideology well into his eighties.

6.  Maraniss has contempt for those of us who want to vet the president even when his profession won’t, calling us “strange armies of ideological pseudohistorians” who “roam the biographical fields in search of stray ammunition” (p. xxiii).

7. Even when he was young, Obama knew the power of manipulation with words. In his English class at the prestigious Punahou School, the discussion turned to what people should most fear. “The answers included loneliness, death, hell, and war. Then Barry straightened up… ‘Words,’ he said. ‘Words are the power to be feared most... Whether directed personally or internationally, words can be weapons of destruction’” (p. 300)….


Keep reading if you want to know some of the facts about BHO the MSM won’t tell you. 

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