Tag Archives: politics

Did the Washington Post Actually Think David Weigel Was Libertarian?

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Did the Washington Post Actually Think David Weigel Was Libertarian?

How about Did Washington Post Actually Think David Weigel Was Libertarian?

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How about Did Washington Post Actually Think David Weigel Was Libertarian?

Milwaukee Dem: Arizona Is "a Ways Removed from the Border"

Peggy West, member of the Democrat Executive Committee of Milwaukee, has decided the whole Arizona anti-illegal immigration thingy is a bad idea since Arizona isn’t close to Mexico….

Sir Paul Compares Global Warming Skeptics to Holocaust Deniers – Says of Obama, "I Really Love Him"

Seems the only thing gushing more than the BP oil spill these days is the disaster brewing in Paul McCartney’s mouth.  In an exclusive interview with The Sun , McCartney takes a major swipe at global warming realists, er, deniers, by stating (emphasis mine): “Sadly we need disasters like this to show people. Some people don’t believe in climate warming – like those who don’t believe there was a Holocaust.” Well that’s putting things in perspective.  I’m not sure global warming has been proven to have caused the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion.  Missed that report.  Regardless, it remains unclear how the theory of global warming is in any way similar to the reality of the Holocaust. McCartney goes on to defend President Obama from any and all criticism concerning the Gulf disaster, culminating with the revelation that he “really love(s) him.” Because nobody was really sure where your allegiances lied after the ‘library’ swipe at former President Bush, Paul. McCartney starts with a blanket dismissal of the Obama critics: “I don’t accept the criticism of Barack over the oil spill.” He continues, “If the President of the country you spilled oil in tells you off then you’ve just got to take it or say, ‘I’m really sorry, we’ll clean it up and pay for it all by next week.” Now I ask, why didn’t BP think of that in the first place?  All of these failed attempts and confusion in trying to ‘plug the damn hole’, and all Tony Hayward had to do to make things right was say, “I’m really sorry, we’ll clean it up and pay for it all by next week.” Of his recent visit to the White House, McCartney recalls, “It was such an honour. I’d heard of the prize – it’s the biggest for popular music in the US. When the President gave it to me, I was so touched. I’m a huge Obama supporter. I really love him.” He also gushes, “I think Obama’s doing great. He’s a smart guy.” I’m not sure what it is, but McCartney is clearly smitten with our ‘smart guy’ President.  Perhaps it was his spelling of the University of ‘Sycacuse’ .  Perhaps it was his over-estimation of a tornado death toll by roughly 9,988.  Maybe it was his firm grasp of geography .  Or his love of Sioux City . No word on whether it was true that Sir Paul went on to say, “He had me at 57 states .” Based on these comments it is clear that, as The Sun interview states, McCartney has been spending too much time sitting in “a darkened room lit only by scented candles … to gather his thoughts.” Clearly the gathering isn’t working.  To be fair though, even the Dutch skimmers would have a tough time reigning in those thoughts. – Send comments or tips to rustyweiss@verizon.net . Please join me on Facebook.   Photo Credit:  AFP/Getty

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Sir Paul Compares Global Warming Skeptics to Holocaust Deniers – Says of Obama, "I Really Love Him"

MRC-TV: The June 24 ‘Media Mash’ on Hannity

“The media, for like five seconds, those with thrill up and down their legs, they were a little critical of the Anointed One and what was one of the worst speeches in the Oval Office… but as soon as he fired McChrystal and hired Petraeus, they went nuts,” Sean Hannity observed last night at the beginning of his recurring “Media Mash” segment with NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell. The Fox News host then rolled a montage compiled by Media Research Center (MRC) analyst Kyle Drennen which showed the mainstream media hailing Obama as “brilliant” for the personnel move. After the montage, Bozell noted that the same media that proclaimed Obama sacking McChrystal as “brilliant” were claiming that the president really had no choice but to fire the Afghanistan commander. “If he had no choice, then it really wasn’t really altogether all that brilliant,” the MRC president observed. Bozell and Hannity also discussed  the media’s double standard in bashing BP CEO Tony Hayward — who had been relieved of duty for overseeing the cleanup operation — for yachting over the weekend, while ignoring President Obama’s weekend golfing excursion and MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski admitting she was parroting White House talking points to defend the administration’s handling of the ongoing crisis. For the full MP3 audio of the “Media Mash” segment, click here . For video click here for the WMV file or watch the video embed above.

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MRC-TV: The June 24 ‘Media Mash’ on Hannity

Open Thread: House Passes DISCLOSE Act

Yesterday, by a vote of 219-206, the House passed a bill meant to counter the landmark SCOTUS decision in January overturning limits on corporate and union political expenditures. [T]he restrictions in the DISCLOSE Act only cut one way — against business. If you took TARP funds as a business, express political advocacy is now verboten. So GM has very limited first amendment rights, but even though arguably primary beneficiary of the auto bailout was the United Auto Workers union which got government garunteed billions directly as a result of the TARP funding — UAW can spend almost whatever it pleases, and it has a history of spending millions on Democratic campaigns. Further, under the DISCLOSE Act if a company has more than $7 million in government contracts, it has no right to political speech. But public sector unions can spend millions of recycled tax dollars campaigning for Democrats, no problem. All this will likely do is make business spend more money on lobbyists rather than campaigns. Of course, campaign spending is much more transparent than lobbying, but when it comes to the DISCLOSE act, clean elections and free speech seem to be secondary considerations to getting Democrats elected. House Minotiry Leader John Boehner said the bill “shreds our Constitution for raw, ugly, partisan gain.” Do you think that’s hyperbole?

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Open Thread: House Passes DISCLOSE Act

Margaret Thatcher Hailed as Champion for Climate Skeptics

Image credit: Iconic Photos Only a few weeks ago we saw conservative environmentalists evoking the ghost of Ronald Reagan to make the case for strong action on climate change . Now climate skeptics are getting in on the act, co-opting Reagan’s ally Margaret Thatcher as a key voice of climate skepticism. The trouble is, Thatcher’s legacy on climate change is muddled to say the least…. Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Margaret Thatcher Hailed as Champion for Climate Skeptics

No Palin Setback Too Small for Couric Who Skips How Palin ‘Acted in Good Faith’

Demonstrating that no setback for Sarah Palin which can be portrayed as a rebuke is too insignificant or relevant for Katie Couric, she made time on Thursday’s CBS Evening News to inform her viewers about a disputable technical violation of arcane law: One little word will cost Sarah Palin a small fortune. Today, state investigators in Alaska said a legal defense fund she set up while she was Governor was illegal. They said the use of the word “official” on the fund’s Web site implied it was endorsed by the office of the Governor. Palin’s lawyer says she will return the fund’s nearly $400,000. Unmentioned by Couric? How Timothy Petumenos, the investigator/counsel for the Alaska Personnel Board which issued the ruling, absolved Palin of blame. “Petumenos found the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee acted in good faith and relied on the advice of lawyers when setting up the fund,” the Anchorage Daily News reported in an afternoon posting. PDF of the board’s report , which noted: “Governor Palin complied fully with AS 39.52.210(a) by declining to take any proceeds from the Trust once the Complaint was filed pending resolution of this matter.”

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No Palin Setback Too Small for Couric Who Skips How Palin ‘Acted in Good Faith’

Urgent Priorities and Common Sense in the Gulf

The ramifications of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico have not even begun to surface. We will be dealing with the ecological damage for years as the prime nesting grounds for shrimp, oysters and countless other varieties of sea life are destroyed by the leak at the bottom of the ocean that nobody seems to be able to deal with. The economic damage is another entirely different animal that is going to rock the Gulf Coast and head inland with reverberations that will be seriously felt around the whole country. The Obama administration is completely lost on how to deal with the spill and the president seems helpless except to appoint commissions and place blame anywhere except 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. I know that an oil leak at this depth has never had to be dealt with before and is a seriously difficult thing to fix, but somewhere on this earth, somebody knows how to fix it and it’s high time to find him or her. The other part of the equation, the cleanup, is a horse of a different color and there are literally hundreds of ways to go about that, practical and simple methods that seem to either go over or under Obama’s head. I’ve seen demonstrations on television using things as mundane as the hay I feed my animals to clean up the oil. There are fabrics that have been developed that soak up the oil and reject the water and there is any number of machines people have come forward with, but none of them are appearing on the horrible scene on the Gulf Coast beaches. Why is Obama afraid to let common citizens test the methods they’ve come up with, what could it possibly hurt. Let’s just use a little cowboy logic in this situation. Bring all these people with ideas to the Gulf Coast, give them all a stretch of water to work with and see which ones work the best. That’s so simple and what can it hurt? Let the people try out their ideas. If they don’t work they can simply be disregarded without any harm to anybody. If they work the can be deployed en mass. I know the walls of the White House are covered with ivy league diplomas and Nobel Prizes, but there isn’t enough common sense in that bunch to change a spark plug. It’s time for the politicians to stop using this crisis for an excuse to raise our taxes and advance their confounded socialist agenda. It’s time for them to get out of the way and let the people with the practical ideas have a go at cleaning up this mess. And by the way President Obama, the moratorium on drilling in the Gulf is nothing less than pure dumb. You’re taking the last vestige of economic hope away from people who have no way left to make a living because no matter how much money British Petroleum ponies up, it’s going to run out way before those shrimp and oyster beds come back and long before the tourists start streaming back to the Gulf Coast. Stopping the drilling is nothing less than cheap political pandering and another sign of the total lack of experience in your administration. Just more proof of your lack of understanding and just how baffled you are by your job. You’re lost, Mr. President. Why don’t you admit it and look for some help among the great, unwashed masses. I think you’d find that we’re pretty dern good people who have been solving problems for generations. Maybe you can’t ‘plug the damn hole” but you can get out of the way and let some people with the common sense your administration lacks come in and do something right for a change. And believe me, it would really be a change.

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Urgent Priorities and Common Sense in the Gulf

CNBC’s Santelli Warns U.S. ‘Could End Up Worse than Japan’ Facing a Lost Decade

Fresh off his Tea Party cover story   in the June 24 Weekly Standard , CNBC’s Rick Santelli foresees what could be classified as an economic black hole for the United States of America. On the network’s June 24 broadcast of “Strategy Session,” the CME Group reporter explained how the country could be headed down the same path and face the economic calamity the Japanese faced in what is known as   the “lost decade.”   That period, from 1991-2000, was one which the Asian nation failed to grow economically despite countless efforts by the government to intervene. But as Santelli explained – the U.S. version of Japanese economic policies could result in Greek-style austerity measures. “The notion that we are turning into Japan has been something talked about on this floor for probably a year and a half,” Santelli said. “What changes though, is that it is now a toss up between Japan and Greece and trust me the eventual solutions or recommendations for avoiding the pitfalls of either are completely different strategies. A lot of Japanese say, ‘More Keynesian, more stimulus, spend, spend, spend, spend, spend.’ And the other side of the equation says, ‘Well then, you are going turn into Greece.’ Where does the truth lie? One thing I can tell you is, is that demographics are a big issue in this story as well. The Japanese have a demographic time bomb similar to the U.S. in terms of underfunded pensions and liabilities.” But according to “Strategy Session” anchor David Faber, the United States doesn’t face the same demographic obstacles as Japan, which has an aging population. “They also have a much older population,” Faber said. “I mean the fact is with our immigration patterns, with our birth patterns – we’re at a much better demographic point than they are, Rick – to be fair. You know, I hate to even use this but it’s true – they sell more adult diapers in that country than they do baby diapers. We don’t have that problem, thankfully.” However, as far monetary policy is concerned, the United States is positioned much differently than Japan because the world uses the dollar as a reserve currency. And that makes financing government debt much easier – but it also puts the United States in a potentially much more untenable position as well. “We could end up worse than Japan and I’ll tell you why,” Santelli said. “When Japan had their horrible decade and they were doing the sterilization and trying to print Yen, they were also issuing a pretty significant amount of debt but who was buying the Japanese debt? The Japanese. Now we have a reserve currency, so who’s buying our debt? Well, pretty much the rest of the world. People might say, ‘Well that’s a great thing, we could monetize it.’ And that’s where the trouble lies. Go to what Steve said – our government is a free-for-all of dumb ideas. And the fact is, if you have interest rates this low and a reserve currency, in a world that keeps wanting to eat in what turns out to be a cruddy cake – where does that leave us when we finally figure it out?

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CNBC’s Santelli Warns U.S. ‘Could End Up Worse than Japan’ Facing a Lost Decade