In part one, I made some pretty harsh claims about Social Security – you know how its name implies a sense of “security” then when you reach your golden years you find out that what it really does is leave you penniless on a subsistence check. Then, if you end up not being able to live on your own, the government takes all your assets and throws you in a “home”. If you’re lucky, your relatives might have enough to bury you but if not, tough luck because the government’s pittance to bury paupers is a measly $250 – not even enough for a pine box. I’ll admit, it does sound harsh. But it happens all the time in the land of the free and the home of the brave. How many of you know a relative of have heard of a friend’s relative who had to sell an elderly relative’s house because they had to move to a nursing home? How many people have heard the advice that smart families transfer the assets out of grandma and grandpa’s names so they don’t get taken away before they die penniless and on Title 19? It’s a hell of a deal isn’t it? Bust your ass your entire life to save what you can for retirement and end up having it taken all way from you before you die broke. That’s been the promise of Social “Security” for many low to middle income people in the past.
Of course we’ve got the leg up on grandma and grandpa because we’ve come to realize that Social Security wasn’t intended to be the be all and end all of our retirement savings. That’s what 401ks and IRA and various other investment accounts are all about. That’s all well and good. But take a look at your Social Security outlay on your next check and realize that the 7.5% your employer pays basically doubles the amount you see on your check. Then think about the fact that all of this could be cash in your check if the government wasn’t taking it out to pay someone else’s benefit. Then think about how much farther along you’d be towards saving for retirement if that money – your money – was actually yours to save and invest. Most of us probably would have been able to survive the last bear market in pretty good shape. While you’re at it, think about the fact that right now you are busting your ass to save for retirement in spite of Social “Security” – Social “Security” that might not even be there when you retire. This, in itself, is an admission that Social “Security” is a failure – it impedes your efforts to save for your retirement by transferring your money to someone else.
The solution to this Social Security boondoggle is simple – personal responsibility (what a novel concept!) Give the money back to the people who earned it and trust them to save for their own retirement – something liberals think we’re all too stupid to do. We can’t be trusted with our own money because we’ll piss it away. There a simple solution to this. Make people prove on their tax return (or by some other means if we wise up and eliminate the income tax in favor of a flat tax – fat chance) that they are saving at least the 15% they would have contributed to Social Security. I’m not one to favor big government, but if a little more big brother will give me my hard-earned money back to invest for myself, I can handle it. If some people just can’t bring themselves to save for retirement, have the government take it out of their check and piss it down a rat hole as they do with all of our money now. At any rate, it’s your choice. And I’ll bet you any amount of money that most of us could do a better job with our money than the government can. While you’re at it, you might have enough to help your folks out in their old age as was the case before everybody got caught up in the notion that grandma and grandpa’s well-being in their golden years was the government’s problem.
This leaves the question of what to do with the old folks we’ve sold up the river with this scam. Have a phase out of the payroll deduct and the benefit so that Social Security in it’s current form goes away as current recipients die off. We don’t need it. It doesn’t work. Phase it out and get rid of it.
When it comes to the creeping rot of Socialism, it’s a viscous cycle. People who don’t have their own money to save and invest for their old age because the government is taking it from them under the guise of helping them probably don’t have the money to save for medical expenses either. That’s okay, we’ve got another big, wasteful nanny-state solution to the problem – Medicare.
Medicare, that second-biggest Socialist boondoggle, now costs the taxpayers $250 billion a year, up from $109 billion a year just 14 years ago which was some $100 billion more than it was actually projected to cost in 1990 when it was conceived in the early 60s. Incidentally, Medicare is now projected to go bankrupt in 2019 if we don’t do something now (read, raise taxes or reduce benefits or both) and to top it all off, we’re about to add another $60 billion or more to it with the recent prescription drug boondoggle. Medicare is just a small part of the overall third-party-payer system of health care we have in this country that’s helped drive health care costs through the roof. In fact, you can trace the beginning of the true explosion in health care costs back to the mid-60’s when the government began paying health care expenses for the elderly and the supposedly indigent through Medicare and Medicaid. Couple that with the widespread belief that it’s up to someone else to provide our health care (typically employer with the help of a health insurance policy – admittedly with some of the premium paid by the employee) and any semblance of a free-market system for health care has flown completely out the window. After all, if you’re not paying for it, what does it matter how much it costs?
This whole deal has come back to bite us in the ass because now we have health insurance companies jacking up insurance rates to us to help them pay for huge increases in medical expenses brought about, in part, by the fact that people don’t care how much the insurance company pays because at lest they’re not paying. (A patently false and shortsighted belief.) In the middle of this whole mess you have Medicare, where retirees still have to pay thousands of dollars a year for insurance to cover what Medicare doesn’t pay AND a premium taken out of their Social “Security” check every month to pay for Medicare. We’ve managed to mess up the entire health care system pretty badly through the notion that that has blossomed since the days of FDR that we shouldn’t have to be responsible for paying our own medical expenses. Because this backwards notion has been allowed to proliferate and because of the outrageous cost of health care, there is no easy solution to this one. Medical savings accounts are a part of the solution, but not all of it by any means. Anyone who has spent any time at all looking at the failure of socialized medicine around the world knows that socialized medicine – the Kerry campaign’s code words for it are “affordable health care for all” – isn’t the answer either. If it was, we wouldn’t have the absolute best and most advanced health care in the world right here, despite the shortcomings in our funding of it. (And you commies out there don’t bother trying to tell me that the best health care in the world exists in Cuba) We also wouldn’t have rich people from foreign countries with socialized medicine flocking here for health care when the private pay health care system in their country isn’t up to the task. Yes, just because places like Great Britain and Canada have socialized medicine doesn’t mean they don’t have private health care. The well-paid doctors treat the rich and the poor doctors work for the inferior public systems the government has so benevolently established for the “peasants”. (Much like “affordable health care for all” would end up being here.)
These, the two biggest social programs are shining examples of the failures of this great country’s experiments with socialism: “From each according to his ability to each according to his need” just doesn’t work. This country didn’t grow into the most successful civilization in the history of the planet in just over 200 years by redistributing wealth, but politicians these days – on the right as well as the left – don’t want to confront the situation and bring about real change. All they want to do is tinker with these two failed experiments in socialism, keeping them on life support for a few more years when what we really need to do is admit that the patients are both brain dead, pull the plug and start over. The left doesn’t want to do this because they are intent on growing and nurturing their classist nanny-state where the government takes care of us peasants who are too stupid to fend for ourselves. The right doesn’t have the guts to confront the issue either. Why? Because at the mere mention of the smallest of changes in Social “Security”, they know the leftists will demagogue them out of office with the notion that Trent Lott, George Bush, John Ashcroft and Dick Cheney will personally be running from house to house and hospital bed to hospital bed throwing old people out into the gutters and torching their homes. Remember in 2000 when the mention of allowing people to invest 2% of their Social ‘Security” money caused Gore, Daschle, Gephardt and the like to just about blow a gasket? I beleive the mantra was “George W. Bush wants to gamble with YOUR Social Security”.Two percent, for God’s sake! The next time the issue of what to do to keep Social Security and Medicare limping along comes up, we all need to make our voices heard. We need to let the politicians know that we need real reform, not just another Band-Aid solution that robs us of our prosperity while promising only that the Social “Security” trust fund might – might – last another 1.49782 years longer.
But all is not lost in the land of the Great Society. We’ve been making slow but steady progress in reducing the dependence of the slothful on that other set of socialist programs – food stamps and housing assistance, commonly known as welfare. Although we’ve seen reductions in the welfare roles over the past eight or nine years, the government still shamelessly pushes these programs worse the a pushy telemarketer. And the maddening part about these programs is that a little personal responsibility would go a long way to virtually eliminating them altogether, leaving what’s left of them to go to the truly needy.
Take the food stamp program. (Oh, I forgot, it’s now officially a nutrition program. Apparently it’s easier to sell the idea that the nanny state is making sure “low income” kids are being well nourished than it is to sell the idea that the nanny-state is feeding them.) What parent of an elementary school kid hasn’t see the shameless way the schools push food stamps and the school lunch program? As a parent I’ve witnessed it myself. And I’m sure it’s a lot worse in cities than it is in flyover country where I live. At school registration a couple weeks before school starts, they pepper you with questionnaires and flyers telling you to think about what your income is and giving you the guidelines at which you would qualify for free or reduced price lunches. These flyers also inform you that, if you already get food stamps, you’re a shoo-in for free lunches for your kids. Of course they also point out the reverse: if you qualify for free lunches and you don’t get food stamps yet, by golly we can hook you up with food stamps quicker than you can say “I’m hungry.” Whatever happened to the good ole’ PB&J in a paper sack? You can bet that peanut butter costs less than giving away free lunches. If I couldn’t afford to buy my kids hot lunch, that’s the route I would take. But there are a lot of welfare pushers out there paid by our tax dollars to sell these programs. Without the programs, they wouldn’t have a job. And their job is to convince “poor” people that filling out an application and getting a free lunch for your kid is a lot easier in the long term than coming up with creative, low-cost cold lunch ideas. And it doesn’t stop at school. One of the first things many immigrants are taught upon arriving in this country – in their language, not the one we speak here – English – is how to access the welfare system. And just in just in case this isn’t enough instruction on how to get the taxpayers to buy your food for you, you can just go surf the web. (Considering that 48% of the households in this country that are classified as below the poverty line own their homes and 96% of all “poverty stricken” households have a color television or two, there’s probably a fairly good number that have computer and Internet access as well.) The first ten or so hits that pop up when you type “food stamps” into Google offer to show you how to access the food stamp program.
And of course, wherever you’ve got a social program, you’ve got the Democrats there to demagogue any opposition to it. Any suggestion that we modify the food stamp or school lunch programs is met with cries that Republicans want to see children starve. We’re an evil bunch, us conservatives; we drag the aged kicking and screaming out of their homes, burn them down, thrown them out of the hospitals, and for an encore, we run around snatching food out of the mouths of starving children.
Despite my rant about food stamps, we’ve made significant progress in reducing welfare dependency in this country over the past eight or nine years. This is due to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. You know that any act containing the words “personal responsibility” in the title couldn’t have anything to do with Democrats and it didn’t. Welfare reform was a part of the Republican Contract with America. Democrats were forced to go along with it because of its overwhelming popularity. Then, William Jefferson “I did not have sex with that woman” Clinton was basically forced to sign it into law. Of course he didn’t believe in it. But he could use it as a campaign issue – he signed it into law less than three months before the 1996 election – and with the public’s strong support of the elements of the Contract With America, he could ill afford to veto it and hope to win reelection.
It worked. In 1995, we spent $22 billion on the food stamp program and by 2001 we’d reduced that to $17 billion. But it had crept back up to $19 billion in 2002. Presumably, in continued back in the wrong direction in 2003. If GW and the congress don’t have the political will to do something more to reduce welfare spending, we’ll be right back where we started – and worse – in no time. Newt Gingrich attacked the problem (and a whole host of others) head on and for it, his ideas were demagogued to death and he was run out of town on a rail.
Admittedly, the food stamp program is peanuts when you compare it to the rampant, out of control, bankrupt socialist system of Social “Security” and Medicare – along with the massive senior citizen drug “giveaway”. But with the same type of political courage and vision of the Contract with America and the right plan, we can come up with a solution to this broken, socialist system. Not only can we, we have to. Because from each according to his ability to each according to his need is becoming too widely accepted in this country. If we don’t’ get away from this notion that it’s somebody else’s responsibility to take care of me – or my relatives – in our old age, or to feed my family if I don’t have the will to do it, this mentality will be so entrenched in our society that one day it will be full-blown Socialism in the USA.
Read more!
Saturday, March 27, 2004
Monday, March 22, 2004
The United Socialist States of America
Forbes on Fox had an insightful topic on 3/20/04. Socialism is creeping into the U.S government and the economy and could threaten the stock market! BLOW ME DOWN! GET OUTTA HERE! YOU”VE GOT TO BE KIDDING! SAY IT AIN”T SO! In his lead in to the program, David Asman announced that they would be exploring the radical notion that Socialism is perhaps as big a threat to our country as terrorism.
Welcome to the party Fox News and Forbes – better than 70 years too late.
Socialism HAS been a bigger threat to this country than terrorism ever since the Democrats hero Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced it in the 30’s. It’s more insidious than terrorism because it’s been allowed to creep up on an American public that been asleep at the wheel. They used deception to sell it to us all those many years ago and by now, most ordinary citizens have gotten used to Socialism in our representative republic – it’s become a part of the political landscape. In fact, hardly anyone is alive these days who can remember when there weren’t some vestiges of Socialism in place in this country. It’s been creeping into our society, unnoticed by most, for the last 70 years. What am I talking about? Well, there’s no better example of this creeping Socialism than the granddaddy of all social programs conceived by the administration of the granddaddy of 20th Century liberalism – FDR. Yes, I’m talking about Social Security – the social program that started it all, where the deception begins with the name and gets worse from there. What we have now is a program that robs people of the ability to use their money to provide for themselves and save for retirement, leaving them virtually penniless in their old age and living in abject poverty on a subsistence check provided by the government that has robbed them of their ability to provide for themselves in old age. Social Insecurity is the hardly original but apt moniker for this largest of government Ponzi schemes.
As with all supposedly well intentioned liberal programs, it started with a wild overstating of the problem to get people to buy into the big-government solution for it that will solve everything. Back in 1935, at the height of the dustbowl and the Great Depression, the idea that big government would rush in to save you wasn’t a tough sell. Couple this with a breathtaking underestimation of the actual costs, and you have the boondoggle we’re stuck with today.
I’ve never been very good at math, a fact that figured very heavily into my decision to switch my major from Hotel and Restaurant Management in college, which required math, to journalism, which required something I could actually do – write. But it doesn’t take a trigonometry major to figure out that when Ida May Fuller – the first recipient of monthly Social Security check -- paid pennies per month in for a couple years and ended up taking $22,000 out in benefits, the math just don’t work. This should have raised a red flag, but apparently no one was paying attention.
Now days, what we pay into Social Security is hardly pennies. – Let’s take the case of Joe Worker Bee as an example. Joe pays $137 a paycheck into Social Security. Although Joe would probably love to get a return upon retirement that’s proportional to what ole’ Ida May got, the truth is that Social Security is projected to go bankrupt about the same time Joe is slated to retire – somewhere in the 2027-2030 range. But the Social Security Administration is making absurd claims to Joe about money they aren’t even sure will be there when he retires. He’s paying $137 a paycheck – and don’t forget his employer is getting dinged for another 7.5%, or an equal amount to Joe that could be going into his check were they not forced to pay it to the government in Joe’s name. So this is about $550 a month. It’s not invested – God forbid that we would allow peasants like Joe to invest even 2% of their Social Security fund as President Bush once proposed – it’s just sitting there. Yet on Joe’s last Social Security statement, it said that, at Joe’s normal retirement age (which keeps getting older and, in Joe’s case is now 68. Pity those of you in your 20’s. At this rate your “retirement” age will be in your late eighties) Joe’s benefit will be $1600 a month. Aside from the fact that $1600 a month might buy Joe a nice cardboard box and a prime spot under the local freeway overpass in 2030 if he’s lucky, it’s better than twice as much as he’s paying in. Considering this money is not being invested, how does that work? Short answer: it doesn’t.
Earlier, I said that the money isn’t invested, it just sits there. That’s not even correct. What actually happens is all the Social Security money goes into the general fund and is used for ongoing expenses. What goes in the Social Security Trust Fund you might ask? An IOU. So everyone who is currently paying into the fund, is paying for the benefits of current recipients. So not only isn’t the $550 a month Joe and his employer are paying into Social Security being invested, the principal isn’t even being saved – it’s wealth that’s being transferred to a whole bunch of other Ida Mays out there. What’s left to pay Joe’s benefits in retirement? That’s right: NOTHING, ZERO, ZIP, NADA. The government is relying on a whole bunch of other busy workers bees to work so their wealth can be transferred from them to Joe. (Which brings to mind the famous socialist phrase “from each according to his ability to each according to his need.”) You see how this doesn’t work?
Now consider this. Joe’s a baby boomer – in on the tail end of those born from 1947-1964. The older of these “boomers” are now reaching retirement age. They born in an era where it was not uncommon for people to have 4,6,8, even in some cases 10, kids – a lot of worker bees to pay into the pot for Ida May and her fellow retirees. Back when Ida May retired, there were something like 39-40 workers paying for the benefits of one retiree. Now it’s down to three workers for every one retiree and will soon be less than that. With the all the people born in the most baby-happy period in our history set to retire over the next 20 years, how is this ratio going to work. Answer: it isn’t. The boomers aren’t being replaced by an equal number of happy worker bees to pay their Social “Security” benefits. The tens of thousands of dollars Joe paid into Social “Security” will be gone, gobbled up by that big socialist machine, the Federal government and Joe will be left with nothing. Joe’s just SOL, broke and living on title 19 (another socialist boondoggle) under a bridge somewhere.
This intricate dissection of the Social “Security” system – the largest and most prolific social Ponzi scheme ever invented by government is only the most egregious example of Socialism in our government. It illustrates perfectly why Socialism – in full or part—never works and always collapses under the weight or it’s own bureaucracy. We have met the socialists and they are us. And, as I said, it ain’t just Social Security. The productivity in real dollars of labor and costs of goods and service drained from our economy due to the socialist programs that have been implemented in this country over the past 70 years far exceeds any economic damage wrought by terrorism. In fact having the government pay people not to produce drains precious government resources that could be used to fight the fight for our lives and freedom – the War on Terror. In addition, it drains the precious resources produced by millions of citizens that would be otherwise poured into the economy to make this country a greater economic power than it already is. Is Socialism a worse threat to this country than terrorism? Hell yes it is to answer the question quite bluntly. It’s a vile, creeping rot that’s been terrorizing our economy for decades and it’s about time we woke up and revolted against it.
Say tuned for the next installment of Socialism in the USA where will run down the whole list of social programs and detail exactly how they rob all of us of our security and prosperity.
Read more!
Welcome to the party Fox News and Forbes – better than 70 years too late.
Socialism HAS been a bigger threat to this country than terrorism ever since the Democrats hero Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced it in the 30’s. It’s more insidious than terrorism because it’s been allowed to creep up on an American public that been asleep at the wheel. They used deception to sell it to us all those many years ago and by now, most ordinary citizens have gotten used to Socialism in our representative republic – it’s become a part of the political landscape. In fact, hardly anyone is alive these days who can remember when there weren’t some vestiges of Socialism in place in this country. It’s been creeping into our society, unnoticed by most, for the last 70 years. What am I talking about? Well, there’s no better example of this creeping Socialism than the granddaddy of all social programs conceived by the administration of the granddaddy of 20th Century liberalism – FDR. Yes, I’m talking about Social Security – the social program that started it all, where the deception begins with the name and gets worse from there. What we have now is a program that robs people of the ability to use their money to provide for themselves and save for retirement, leaving them virtually penniless in their old age and living in abject poverty on a subsistence check provided by the government that has robbed them of their ability to provide for themselves in old age. Social Insecurity is the hardly original but apt moniker for this largest of government Ponzi schemes.
As with all supposedly well intentioned liberal programs, it started with a wild overstating of the problem to get people to buy into the big-government solution for it that will solve everything. Back in 1935, at the height of the dustbowl and the Great Depression, the idea that big government would rush in to save you wasn’t a tough sell. Couple this with a breathtaking underestimation of the actual costs, and you have the boondoggle we’re stuck with today.
I’ve never been very good at math, a fact that figured very heavily into my decision to switch my major from Hotel and Restaurant Management in college, which required math, to journalism, which required something I could actually do – write. But it doesn’t take a trigonometry major to figure out that when Ida May Fuller – the first recipient of monthly Social Security check -- paid pennies per month in for a couple years and ended up taking $22,000 out in benefits, the math just don’t work. This should have raised a red flag, but apparently no one was paying attention.
Now days, what we pay into Social Security is hardly pennies. – Let’s take the case of Joe Worker Bee as an example. Joe pays $137 a paycheck into Social Security. Although Joe would probably love to get a return upon retirement that’s proportional to what ole’ Ida May got, the truth is that Social Security is projected to go bankrupt about the same time Joe is slated to retire – somewhere in the 2027-2030 range. But the Social Security Administration is making absurd claims to Joe about money they aren’t even sure will be there when he retires. He’s paying $137 a paycheck – and don’t forget his employer is getting dinged for another 7.5%, or an equal amount to Joe that could be going into his check were they not forced to pay it to the government in Joe’s name. So this is about $550 a month. It’s not invested – God forbid that we would allow peasants like Joe to invest even 2% of their Social Security fund as President Bush once proposed – it’s just sitting there. Yet on Joe’s last Social Security statement, it said that, at Joe’s normal retirement age (which keeps getting older and, in Joe’s case is now 68. Pity those of you in your 20’s. At this rate your “retirement” age will be in your late eighties) Joe’s benefit will be $1600 a month. Aside from the fact that $1600 a month might buy Joe a nice cardboard box and a prime spot under the local freeway overpass in 2030 if he’s lucky, it’s better than twice as much as he’s paying in. Considering this money is not being invested, how does that work? Short answer: it doesn’t.
Earlier, I said that the money isn’t invested, it just sits there. That’s not even correct. What actually happens is all the Social Security money goes into the general fund and is used for ongoing expenses. What goes in the Social Security Trust Fund you might ask? An IOU. So everyone who is currently paying into the fund, is paying for the benefits of current recipients. So not only isn’t the $550 a month Joe and his employer are paying into Social Security being invested, the principal isn’t even being saved – it’s wealth that’s being transferred to a whole bunch of other Ida Mays out there. What’s left to pay Joe’s benefits in retirement? That’s right: NOTHING, ZERO, ZIP, NADA. The government is relying on a whole bunch of other busy workers bees to work so their wealth can be transferred from them to Joe. (Which brings to mind the famous socialist phrase “from each according to his ability to each according to his need.”) You see how this doesn’t work?
Now consider this. Joe’s a baby boomer – in on the tail end of those born from 1947-1964. The older of these “boomers” are now reaching retirement age. They born in an era where it was not uncommon for people to have 4,6,8, even in some cases 10, kids – a lot of worker bees to pay into the pot for Ida May and her fellow retirees. Back when Ida May retired, there were something like 39-40 workers paying for the benefits of one retiree. Now it’s down to three workers for every one retiree and will soon be less than that. With the all the people born in the most baby-happy period in our history set to retire over the next 20 years, how is this ratio going to work. Answer: it isn’t. The boomers aren’t being replaced by an equal number of happy worker bees to pay their Social “Security” benefits. The tens of thousands of dollars Joe paid into Social “Security” will be gone, gobbled up by that big socialist machine, the Federal government and Joe will be left with nothing. Joe’s just SOL, broke and living on title 19 (another socialist boondoggle) under a bridge somewhere.
This intricate dissection of the Social “Security” system – the largest and most prolific social Ponzi scheme ever invented by government is only the most egregious example of Socialism in our government. It illustrates perfectly why Socialism – in full or part—never works and always collapses under the weight or it’s own bureaucracy. We have met the socialists and they are us. And, as I said, it ain’t just Social Security. The productivity in real dollars of labor and costs of goods and service drained from our economy due to the socialist programs that have been implemented in this country over the past 70 years far exceeds any economic damage wrought by terrorism. In fact having the government pay people not to produce drains precious government resources that could be used to fight the fight for our lives and freedom – the War on Terror. In addition, it drains the precious resources produced by millions of citizens that would be otherwise poured into the economy to make this country a greater economic power than it already is. Is Socialism a worse threat to this country than terrorism? Hell yes it is to answer the question quite bluntly. It’s a vile, creeping rot that’s been terrorizing our economy for decades and it’s about time we woke up and revolted against it.
Say tuned for the next installment of Socialism in the USA where will run down the whole list of social programs and detail exactly how they rob all of us of our security and prosperity.
Read more!
Sunday, March 14, 2004
Compare and Contrast:
From the video taped purportedly recorded by Al Qaeda;
"We declare our responsibility for what happened in Madrid," according to a government translation of the statement delivered in Arabic. "It is a response to your collaboration with the criminals Bush and his allies."
Posting from MoveOn.org’s Action Forum page:
Title: Liberal Media - try "Killer Bush"!
"So far, America's Andropov - Emperor Bush the 1st, who criminally established this "Mighty Wurlitzer" CIA Mafia media influence and control program, maintains complete iron-fisted military-industrial control over all media in this country. – Written by Phillip Prescott, so-called liberal wiiter from Detroit Michigan."
Phillip, the folks at AlQaeda appreciate your continued support and I’m sure a membership card is on it’s way to you in the mail.
It took me less than ten minutes to come up with this type of scurrilous comment on the web site that wants to get "ordinary people" involved in politics again and there were many more where this came from. I submit to you that with these types of "ordinary people" out there, who needs Al Qaeda? Not only do we have to fight terrorists around the world, we have to fight the liberal dogma of American terrorists from within our own borders.
Read more!
"We declare our responsibility for what happened in Madrid," according to a government translation of the statement delivered in Arabic. "It is a response to your collaboration with the criminals Bush and his allies."
Posting from MoveOn.org’s Action Forum page:
Title: Liberal Media - try "Killer Bush"!
"So far, America's Andropov - Emperor Bush the 1st, who criminally established this "Mighty Wurlitzer" CIA Mafia media influence and control program, maintains complete iron-fisted military-industrial control over all media in this country. – Written by Phillip Prescott, so-called liberal wiiter from Detroit Michigan."
Phillip, the folks at AlQaeda appreciate your continued support and I’m sure a membership card is on it’s way to you in the mail.
It took me less than ten minutes to come up with this type of scurrilous comment on the web site that wants to get "ordinary people" involved in politics again and there were many more where this came from. I submit to you that with these types of "ordinary people" out there, who needs Al Qaeda? Not only do we have to fight terrorists around the world, we have to fight the liberal dogma of American terrorists from within our own borders.
Read more!
The Real Lying Crooks Are at it Again
By now we all know that John F’in Kerry, the "presumptive" Democratic nominee for President has refused to apologize for calling the Bush Administration “the most crooked, lying group I’ve ever seen”. Even his non-apology was a lie:
"I have no intention whatsoever to apologize for my remarks," Kerry said Thursday in front of a group of Democratic senators he just met with. "I think the Republicans need to start talking about the real issues before the country."
This is a quote, but not an exact quote. What he started to say, as all of us who heard it know, is "I think The Ad …" instead of Republicans. A little Freudian slip there that indicates pretty clearly that, despite the denials, Kerry was slinging mud at the Bush Administration. Why? Because the Bush campaign accurately represented Kerry’s record – and his intentions – in a political ad. The ad claimed that John Kerry would raise taxes by nearly a trillion dollars and is based on the premise that $900 billion is what Kerry agreed it would cost for his plan to provide health care to the masses:
Kerry Accepts Thorpe’s $900 Billion Estimate When Asked. SEN. JOHN KERRY: "[I]f you look at $75 billion a year, the president has just passed a tax cut, 54 percent of which went to 1 percent of Americans, which was about $352 billion. … That’s the choice of this race." PBS’ MARGARET WARNER: "But your plan totaled, as scored by an independent authority, $900 billion over ten years." KERRY: "Yes."(PBS’ “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” 7/2/03)
A simple application of logic tells you that, if he refuses to increase the deficit, yet proposes $900 billion in new spending, he'll have to raise taxes. And he says he will -- on people with incomes of over $200,000 a year.
One problem -- the facts are that it can’t be done solely by raising taxes on only people making over $200,000 a year:
Despite His Rhetoric, Kerry Cannot Pay For His Health Care Proposal By Only Raising Taxes On People Making More Than $200,000. If Kerry repealed the Bush tax cuts solely for those making $200,000 or more, it would only result in $250 billion over 10 years. ("Kerry: 'Worst Jobs Record' Since Hoover," The Washington Post, 7/11/03; David Wessel, Op-Ed, "View From The Right: Tax Increases Ahead," The Wall Street Journal, 2/19/04)
So there is a factual basis for the Bush campaign’s claim that Kerry would raise taxes. No lying and no crookedness there.
This is just one of three main FACTS cited in this ad that are researched and backed up on GeorgeWBush.com – no lying, mudslinging or crookedness involved.
Not so for the Kerry campaign and it’s supporters:
You’ll hearing Kerry out there on the stump saying things like this (taken directly from his web site):
George W. Bush has chosen tax cuts for the wealthy and special favors for special interests over our economic future. John Kerry has a plan to rebuild our future, starting with 3 million jobs in his first 500 days – and a plan to ensure that workers can achieve the American Dream in our changing economy.
Anyone one of you middle class folks (myself included) who reaped the benefit of tax bracket changes and received rebate checks for $400 last summer (and smaller ones in previous summers) for each child you have know that the idea that George Bush only cut taxes for the wealthy is a bald-faced lie. Yet you’ll hear this theme throughout the presidential campaign. WHO ARE THE LYING CROOKS???????
Another thing you’ll hear over and over again from the Kerry campaign and the Democrats is that this economic recovery (from the Clinton recession – the fastest growing economy since Reagan was president) is a "jobless recovery" and that George Bush has lost jobs. Aside from the fact that the president is not responsible for creating jobs, but is responsible for setting economic policy that makes job growth possible, this is a lie. The facts, taken from the NewsMax.com web site, are this:
# The 5.6 percent unemployment rate is the lowest in two years and below the average of the 1980s (7.3 percent) and '90s (5.8 percent), and still continues to drop. (A rate, incidentally, that has been considered nearly statistical full employment in some Democratic administrations.)
# The nation's economic output revealed the strongest quarterly growth in 20 years. The data for the fourth quarter of 2003 show that the civilian labor force rose by 333,000, while the number of unemployed in the labor force dropped by 575,000, and the number of so-called discouraged workers is less than .3 percent of the workforce, according to Paul Kersey of the Heritage Foundation.
# Consumer spending grew between 4 percent and 5 percent last year, and real hourly earnings rose 1.5 percent. Real earnings have risen over the last three years.
# Exports doubled to 19 percent in the fourth quarter, compared to less than 9 percent in the third.
# The number of American workers is at an all-time high of 138.5 million, a level never before attained in U.S. history.
# Jobless claims are 10 percent below the average of the last 25 years and still falling.
# Hiring indices are up, even in manufacturing.
# Productivity growth is extremely high.
Obviously, Bush Administration policies are setting up economic conditions that create job growth.
AGAIN, I ASK YOU WHO ARE THE LYING CROOKS???????
And it’s not just the Kerry campaign that is engaging in lying and crookedness. Other Democrats and liberal groups that support Democratic causes engage in worse lying and crookedness than the Kerry campaign. As an example, we’ll use MoveOn.org, a group that is running an ad claiming that George Bush wants to take away overtime pay from people. Problem is it’s a lie.
The new rules would actually raise the salary at which you could consider a lower-paid employee exempt from overtime by $14,000 a year. This means that millions of Americans who now don’t get overtime pay WOULD get overtime pay or a large increase in salary. The rules could result in a reduction of overtime pay for employees in some jobs making more than $65,000 a year, but even this is uncertain and the vast majority of hourly employees make far below $65,000 a year and would therefore be unaffected by any change of this sort. But, if you’ve seen the MoveOn.org ad, it’s clearly designed to scare the crap out of the average worker and lead them to believe that George Bush wants to rob them of their overtime pay. But flat-out bald-faced lies are nothing new to MoveOn.org. The whole premise that their organization is founded on is a lie.
They claim they are just an innocent little organization dedicated to as they say “bring ordinary people back into politics.” They claim that “Because MoveOn.org has only a tiny staff, our basic operating costs are very low.”
MoveOn.org’s operating costs are apparently large enough to fund a nationwide television campaign of lies to smear George W. Bush and a political action committee. And apparently George Soros, a liberal billionaire financier who has stated that he would spend all of his billions to defeat George Bush in the next election, is one of those ordinary people the "tiny staff" at MoveOn.org wants to bring back into politics, according to this, from CNN.com:
In November, billionaire philanthropist George Soros and his business partner, Peter Lewis, pledged a $5 million matching grant -- a dollar for every two raised by MoveOn members -- to create a $15 million advertising campaign to defeat President Bush. National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman George Allen responded with an online petition denouncing Soros.
You may recall that MoveOn.org is the group that ran a proposed television ad on their site that compared Bush to Hitler and then denied they sponsored it.
AGAIN I ASK YOU, WHO ARE THE LYING CROOKS?????
If John Kerry wants to talk about lying crooks, he need look no further than himself and his supporters. Democrats lied and engaged in all sorts of crookedness in 2000 in an attempt to get Al Gore elected and they're starting in on it again this campaign season – only far sooner than they did with Gore. That’s why we’ve got to do a better job of getting out there and telling the truth and not letting them get by with their lies. Or this time they may lie themselves right into the White House. But it doesn’t end with the campaign. They’ll be working overtime (something they claim George Bush wants to steal from American workers) to steal the election as they tried and failed to do in 2000. More on that later.
Read more!
"I have no intention whatsoever to apologize for my remarks," Kerry said Thursday in front of a group of Democratic senators he just met with. "I think the Republicans need to start talking about the real issues before the country."
This is a quote, but not an exact quote. What he started to say, as all of us who heard it know, is "I think The Ad …" instead of Republicans. A little Freudian slip there that indicates pretty clearly that, despite the denials, Kerry was slinging mud at the Bush Administration. Why? Because the Bush campaign accurately represented Kerry’s record – and his intentions – in a political ad. The ad claimed that John Kerry would raise taxes by nearly a trillion dollars and is based on the premise that $900 billion is what Kerry agreed it would cost for his plan to provide health care to the masses:
Kerry Accepts Thorpe’s $900 Billion Estimate When Asked. SEN. JOHN KERRY: "[I]f you look at $75 billion a year, the president has just passed a tax cut, 54 percent of which went to 1 percent of Americans, which was about $352 billion. … That’s the choice of this race." PBS’ MARGARET WARNER: "But your plan totaled, as scored by an independent authority, $900 billion over ten years." KERRY: "Yes."(PBS’ “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” 7/2/03)
A simple application of logic tells you that, if he refuses to increase the deficit, yet proposes $900 billion in new spending, he'll have to raise taxes. And he says he will -- on people with incomes of over $200,000 a year.
One problem -- the facts are that it can’t be done solely by raising taxes on only people making over $200,000 a year:
Despite His Rhetoric, Kerry Cannot Pay For His Health Care Proposal By Only Raising Taxes On People Making More Than $200,000. If Kerry repealed the Bush tax cuts solely for those making $200,000 or more, it would only result in $250 billion over 10 years. ("Kerry: 'Worst Jobs Record' Since Hoover," The Washington Post, 7/11/03; David Wessel, Op-Ed, "View From The Right: Tax Increases Ahead," The Wall Street Journal, 2/19/04)
So there is a factual basis for the Bush campaign’s claim that Kerry would raise taxes. No lying and no crookedness there.
This is just one of three main FACTS cited in this ad that are researched and backed up on GeorgeWBush.com – no lying, mudslinging or crookedness involved.
Not so for the Kerry campaign and it’s supporters:
You’ll hearing Kerry out there on the stump saying things like this (taken directly from his web site):
George W. Bush has chosen tax cuts for the wealthy and special favors for special interests over our economic future. John Kerry has a plan to rebuild our future, starting with 3 million jobs in his first 500 days – and a plan to ensure that workers can achieve the American Dream in our changing economy.
Anyone one of you middle class folks (myself included) who reaped the benefit of tax bracket changes and received rebate checks for $400 last summer (and smaller ones in previous summers) for each child you have know that the idea that George Bush only cut taxes for the wealthy is a bald-faced lie. Yet you’ll hear this theme throughout the presidential campaign. WHO ARE THE LYING CROOKS???????
Another thing you’ll hear over and over again from the Kerry campaign and the Democrats is that this economic recovery (from the Clinton recession – the fastest growing economy since Reagan was president) is a "jobless recovery" and that George Bush has lost jobs. Aside from the fact that the president is not responsible for creating jobs, but is responsible for setting economic policy that makes job growth possible, this is a lie. The facts, taken from the NewsMax.com web site, are this:
# The 5.6 percent unemployment rate is the lowest in two years and below the average of the 1980s (7.3 percent) and '90s (5.8 percent), and still continues to drop. (A rate, incidentally, that has been considered nearly statistical full employment in some Democratic administrations.)
# The nation's economic output revealed the strongest quarterly growth in 20 years. The data for the fourth quarter of 2003 show that the civilian labor force rose by 333,000, while the number of unemployed in the labor force dropped by 575,000, and the number of so-called discouraged workers is less than .3 percent of the workforce, according to Paul Kersey of the Heritage Foundation.
# Consumer spending grew between 4 percent and 5 percent last year, and real hourly earnings rose 1.5 percent. Real earnings have risen over the last three years.
# Exports doubled to 19 percent in the fourth quarter, compared to less than 9 percent in the third.
# The number of American workers is at an all-time high of 138.5 million, a level never before attained in U.S. history.
# Jobless claims are 10 percent below the average of the last 25 years and still falling.
# Hiring indices are up, even in manufacturing.
# Productivity growth is extremely high.
Obviously, Bush Administration policies are setting up economic conditions that create job growth.
AGAIN, I ASK YOU WHO ARE THE LYING CROOKS???????
And it’s not just the Kerry campaign that is engaging in lying and crookedness. Other Democrats and liberal groups that support Democratic causes engage in worse lying and crookedness than the Kerry campaign. As an example, we’ll use MoveOn.org, a group that is running an ad claiming that George Bush wants to take away overtime pay from people. Problem is it’s a lie.
The new rules would actually raise the salary at which you could consider a lower-paid employee exempt from overtime by $14,000 a year. This means that millions of Americans who now don’t get overtime pay WOULD get overtime pay or a large increase in salary. The rules could result in a reduction of overtime pay for employees in some jobs making more than $65,000 a year, but even this is uncertain and the vast majority of hourly employees make far below $65,000 a year and would therefore be unaffected by any change of this sort. But, if you’ve seen the MoveOn.org ad, it’s clearly designed to scare the crap out of the average worker and lead them to believe that George Bush wants to rob them of their overtime pay. But flat-out bald-faced lies are nothing new to MoveOn.org. The whole premise that their organization is founded on is a lie.
They claim they are just an innocent little organization dedicated to as they say “bring ordinary people back into politics.” They claim that “Because MoveOn.org has only a tiny staff, our basic operating costs are very low.”
MoveOn.org’s operating costs are apparently large enough to fund a nationwide television campaign of lies to smear George W. Bush and a political action committee. And apparently George Soros, a liberal billionaire financier who has stated that he would spend all of his billions to defeat George Bush in the next election, is one of those ordinary people the "tiny staff" at MoveOn.org wants to bring back into politics, according to this, from CNN.com:
In November, billionaire philanthropist George Soros and his business partner, Peter Lewis, pledged a $5 million matching grant -- a dollar for every two raised by MoveOn members -- to create a $15 million advertising campaign to defeat President Bush. National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman George Allen responded with an online petition denouncing Soros.
You may recall that MoveOn.org is the group that ran a proposed television ad on their site that compared Bush to Hitler and then denied they sponsored it.
AGAIN I ASK YOU, WHO ARE THE LYING CROOKS?????
If John Kerry wants to talk about lying crooks, he need look no further than himself and his supporters. Democrats lied and engaged in all sorts of crookedness in 2000 in an attempt to get Al Gore elected and they're starting in on it again this campaign season – only far sooner than they did with Gore. That’s why we’ve got to do a better job of getting out there and telling the truth and not letting them get by with their lies. Or this time they may lie themselves right into the White House. But it doesn’t end with the campaign. They’ll be working overtime (something they claim George Bush wants to steal from American workers) to steal the election as they tried and failed to do in 2000. More on that later.
Read more!
Tuesday, March 02, 2004
Stamp Out the Weasels: Vote Bush
The Democrats are on their way to nominating another weaselly loser – John Kerry.
Don’t take my word for it, read the weaselly lies from his own web site:
George W Bush has chosen tax cuts for the wealthy and special favors for the special interests over our economic future. John Kerry’s priority will be middle class families who are working hard to cover the mortgage, pay the high cost of health care, child care and tuition, or just trying to get ahead.
I’m not wealthy, (at least not by my definition) and you’re probably not wealthy either. Apparently, John Forbes Heinz Kerry, who married $500 million, thinks we're wealthy because he thinks only the wealthy got tax cuts.
Also, does Kerry not realize that the reason why all of us middle class (oh, sorry, I forgot -- I'm rich) people he’s supposedly committed to fighting for have to work so hard to get ahead is that our effective tax rate, when every, federal, state and local tax is figured in is better than 40%.
As for the special interests, read this report from Political Money Line Website, www.tray.com which was posted on the Maryland Republican Party website;
As detailed in the AP report, Kerry blocked an effort to rein in the $15 billion Big Dig highway project in Massachusetts and interceded on behalf of insurer American International Group (AIG) so that they could funnel $130 million in excess government payments into private investments. Despite Kerry's claims that special interests haven't influenced him, AIG subsequently paid some of his travel expenses, and AIG executives maxed out donations to his campaign fund. In 2002, AIG gave $30,000 to Kerry's unlimited soft money fund for his presidential run. In addition, other "Big Dig" contractors contributed at least $60,000 in soft money to Kerry's 527 Citizen Soldier PAC.
As Charles Lewis of The Center for Public Integrity said, "The idea that Kerry has not helped or benefited from a specific special interest, which he has said, is utterly absurd." (John Solomon, "Kerry Blocked Law, Drew Cash," The Associated Press, 2/4/04)
And from an AP story in the Modesto Bee on 2/2/04:
Sen. Kerry, who says he hasn't taken a dime of political action committee money for his presidential campaign, in fact ran a tax-exempt political committee that collected nearly a half million dollars directly from companies and labor unions just before those types of donations were outlawed in late 2002, tax records show.
And in the same story, posted on the Modesto Bee web site, Charles Lewis weighs in again on the issue of Kerry and special interests:
They are both in up to their necks with special interest money," said Charles Lewis, head of the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington watchdog group that recently published "The Buying of the President 2004," which tracks the sources of political money for the presidential hopefuls.
"This rhetoric has a rather hollow ring to it. It is hypocritical. They are splitting hairs when they say either, 'I don't take lobbyists' money' or 'I don't take from PACs' when both have received millions from special interests anyway," Lewis said.
The first thing John Kerry will do is fight his heart out to bring back the three million jobs that have been lost under George W. Bush. He will fight to restore the jobs lost under Bush in the first 500 days of his administration. Kerry has proposed creating jobs through a new manufacturing jobs credit, by investing in new energy industries, restoring technology, and stopping layoffs in education.
Kerry’s too busy lying his heart out to fight his heart out. Recent statistics on the economy show that there has been a net gain of jobs under Bush – not a loss – and the economy is roaring back a rate not seen for 20 years.
The Democrats mascot used to be a jackass. It ought to be a weasel. We elected one weasel to two terms in the 1990s. We prevented another one from being elected in 2000. We’re just now beginning to reverse the ill effects of being asleep at the wheel in national affairs, national defense and foreign policy while we were mired in the spectacle of the president of the United States soiling an intern’s blue dress (and apparently, the Oval Office bathroom sink) and musing about what the meaning of the word "is" is. Again, the Democrats will nominate a weasel. But its too dangerous a world out there to install a weasel at the helm of this great nation. Help me bring about the extinction of the weasel. Vote Bush in November 2004.
Read more!
Don’t take my word for it, read the weaselly lies from his own web site:
George W Bush has chosen tax cuts for the wealthy and special favors for the special interests over our economic future. John Kerry’s priority will be middle class families who are working hard to cover the mortgage, pay the high cost of health care, child care and tuition, or just trying to get ahead.
I’m not wealthy, (at least not by my definition) and you’re probably not wealthy either. Apparently, John Forbes Heinz Kerry, who married $500 million, thinks we're wealthy because he thinks only the wealthy got tax cuts.
Also, does Kerry not realize that the reason why all of us middle class (oh, sorry, I forgot -- I'm rich) people he’s supposedly committed to fighting for have to work so hard to get ahead is that our effective tax rate, when every, federal, state and local tax is figured in is better than 40%.
As for the special interests, read this report from Political Money Line Website, www.tray.com which was posted on the Maryland Republican Party website;
As detailed in the AP report, Kerry blocked an effort to rein in the $15 billion Big Dig highway project in Massachusetts and interceded on behalf of insurer American International Group (AIG) so that they could funnel $130 million in excess government payments into private investments. Despite Kerry's claims that special interests haven't influenced him, AIG subsequently paid some of his travel expenses, and AIG executives maxed out donations to his campaign fund. In 2002, AIG gave $30,000 to Kerry's unlimited soft money fund for his presidential run. In addition, other "Big Dig" contractors contributed at least $60,000 in soft money to Kerry's 527 Citizen Soldier PAC.
As Charles Lewis of The Center for Public Integrity said, "The idea that Kerry has not helped or benefited from a specific special interest, which he has said, is utterly absurd." (John Solomon, "Kerry Blocked Law, Drew Cash," The Associated Press, 2/4/04)
And from an AP story in the Modesto Bee on 2/2/04:
Sen. Kerry, who says he hasn't taken a dime of political action committee money for his presidential campaign, in fact ran a tax-exempt political committee that collected nearly a half million dollars directly from companies and labor unions just before those types of donations were outlawed in late 2002, tax records show.
And in the same story, posted on the Modesto Bee web site, Charles Lewis weighs in again on the issue of Kerry and special interests:
They are both in up to their necks with special interest money," said Charles Lewis, head of the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington watchdog group that recently published "The Buying of the President 2004," which tracks the sources of political money for the presidential hopefuls.
"This rhetoric has a rather hollow ring to it. It is hypocritical. They are splitting hairs when they say either, 'I don't take lobbyists' money' or 'I don't take from PACs' when both have received millions from special interests anyway," Lewis said.
The first thing John Kerry will do is fight his heart out to bring back the three million jobs that have been lost under George W. Bush. He will fight to restore the jobs lost under Bush in the first 500 days of his administration. Kerry has proposed creating jobs through a new manufacturing jobs credit, by investing in new energy industries, restoring technology, and stopping layoffs in education.
Kerry’s too busy lying his heart out to fight his heart out. Recent statistics on the economy show that there has been a net gain of jobs under Bush – not a loss – and the economy is roaring back a rate not seen for 20 years.
The Democrats mascot used to be a jackass. It ought to be a weasel. We elected one weasel to two terms in the 1990s. We prevented another one from being elected in 2000. We’re just now beginning to reverse the ill effects of being asleep at the wheel in national affairs, national defense and foreign policy while we were mired in the spectacle of the president of the United States soiling an intern’s blue dress (and apparently, the Oval Office bathroom sink) and musing about what the meaning of the word "is" is. Again, the Democrats will nominate a weasel. But its too dangerous a world out there to install a weasel at the helm of this great nation. Help me bring about the extinction of the weasel. Vote Bush in November 2004.
Read more!
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
This is the Man Democrats Want for President
The following is a Washington Times article on "presumptive" Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry who the libs are touting as their "war hero". You read it and decide; Would you want this man running our country?
By Stephen Dinan
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
A photograph of John Kerry together with Jane Fonda at an anti-Vietnam War rally in 1970 in Pennsylvania has surfaced on the Internet, angering veterans who say his association with her 34 years ago is a slap in the faces of Vietnam War veterans.
The photograph, taken at a Labor Day rally at Valley Forge, has been circulating across the Internet, particularly among veterans. It was posted Monday on the NewsMax.com Web site.
Mr. Kerry spoke at the 1970 rally, the culmination of a three-day protest hike from Moorestown, N.J., to Valley Forge, which featured a speech by Miss Fonda and a reading by Hollywood actor Donald Sutherland.
"When he stands up with Jane Fonda, someone that is so notorious and hated by veterans, and Tom Hayden, and a couple of others as well and supports their agenda," Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, California Republican, said yesterday, "it diminishes the service some of us almost gave our lives for, and the over 56,000 people that lost their lives —it slaps their families in the face."
Mr. Cunningham was the first pilot to qualify as an ace in the Vietnam War, by shooting down at least five enemy airplanes.
"I think it's his right, but it kind of upsets you," Mr. Cunningham said. "He had honorable service, but it's a shame someone would let politics rule their life, instead of their principles."
Mr. Kerry, a Navy lieutenant, commanded patrol boats on South Vietnamese rivers and was wounded three times. On his return to the United States, he turned against the war, and at the time of the Valley Forge rally, he was beginning to gain notice as one of the leaders of the organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
He went on, in 1984, to become a U.S. senator from Massachusetts and is now the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Kerry campaign spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said yesterday Mr. Kerry should not be associated in the public mind with Miss Fonda and her later trip to Hanoi, where she was photographed sitting astride a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun.
"John Kerry and Jane Fonda were just acquaintances," Ms. Cutter said. "What's important to understand here is two things: He met her before she went to Vietnam, and he did not approve of her very controversial trip."
She said Mr. Kerry took part in the antiwar movement in order to bring U.S. troops home quickly.
"John Kerry served his country bravely," she said. "He was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts for his service, and he praised the noble service of his fellow servicemen and women. After coming home, John Kerry worked to end the war so his fellow soldiers could come home, too."
Mr. Kerry testified in 1971 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, however, citing accusations that American soldiers in Vietnam routinely committed atrocities such as beheadings, killing children and razing villages. He did not present evidence of these claims.
John Hurley, national director of Veterans for Kerry, said that the antiwar movement included a mix of people and that Mr. Kerry should not be grouped with all of them.
"There were a lot of people protesting that war, some of whom he would agree with and some of whom he would disagree with," said Mr. Hurley, who marched with Mr. Kerry in Washington in 1971. "I don't think he had any control of that. It was the issue that was dominating. Like a lot of other vets coming back, we were angry and frustrated [that] guys were dying in Vietnam for no reason."
Mr. Kerry's protesting "saved more lives than not," he added.
Still, the photograph has spread quickly among Vietnam veterans browsing the Internet.
"If you mention Jane Fonda's name to a Vietnam veteran, it's a lightning-rod reaction," says Ted Sampley, publisher of the U.S. Veteran Dispatch and staunch opponent of Mr. Kerry. "She was supposed to be antiwar, but she clearly sided with one of the belligerents, which precludes her from being antiwar. She was a partisan."
Mr. Sampley first saw the photograph Monday on the Internet and purchased it for his online newsletter. He saw it pop up elsewhere, and he soon began receiving e-mail messages from readers who had seen the photograph.
"This picture exposes just how close John Kerry was to Jane Fonda," he says. However, he says the photograph doesn't reveal anything that many veterans of Vietnam didn't already know.
"Joining the antiwar movement was possibly the worst thing he could have done to the soldiers still in the field," he said. "He basically gave aid and comfort to the enemy."
The Vietnam War, though it ended more than three decades ago, has emerged as a central issue in the presidential campaign, as it did in previous campaigns. In 2000, President Bush faced questions about his service in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam war years. Those questions have been raised again this year.
Bill Clinton was criticized in 1992, when it was reported that he used political pressure to avoid the Vietnam-era draft after he ignored a written agreement to accept a slot in the ROTC at the University of Arkansas. He was further cited for his involvement in the antiwar movement as a student at Oxford University in England, including his work in coordinating the largest antiwar, anti-U.S. demonstration on foreign soil.
Mr. Kerry tells Democratic audiences at campaign appearances that he will be able to stand up to Mr. Bush on the issue. He frequently cites Mr. Bush's appearance on the deck of the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln as misleading voters.
"I know something about aircraft carriers for real," he says.
Rep. Sam Johnson, Texas Republican, who spent nearly seven years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Vietnam, said yesterday the photograph of Mr. Kerry with Miss Fonda will hurt him nevertheless.
"I think it symbolizes how two-faced he is, talking about his war reputation, which is questionable on the one hand, and then coming out against our veterans who were fighting over there on the other," Mr. Johnson said.
Mr. Johnson recalled that his North Vietnamese captors played recordings of Miss Fonda telling U.S. troops to give up the war. "Seeing this picture of Kerry with her at antiwar demonstrations in the United States just makes me want to throw up."
•Jerry Seper and Charles Hurt contributed to this report.
Read more!
By Stephen Dinan
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
A photograph of John Kerry together with Jane Fonda at an anti-Vietnam War rally in 1970 in Pennsylvania has surfaced on the Internet, angering veterans who say his association with her 34 years ago is a slap in the faces of Vietnam War veterans.
The photograph, taken at a Labor Day rally at Valley Forge, has been circulating across the Internet, particularly among veterans. It was posted Monday on the NewsMax.com Web site.
Mr. Kerry spoke at the 1970 rally, the culmination of a three-day protest hike from Moorestown, N.J., to Valley Forge, which featured a speech by Miss Fonda and a reading by Hollywood actor Donald Sutherland.
"When he stands up with Jane Fonda, someone that is so notorious and hated by veterans, and Tom Hayden, and a couple of others as well and supports their agenda," Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, California Republican, said yesterday, "it diminishes the service some of us almost gave our lives for, and the over 56,000 people that lost their lives —it slaps their families in the face."
Mr. Cunningham was the first pilot to qualify as an ace in the Vietnam War, by shooting down at least five enemy airplanes.
"I think it's his right, but it kind of upsets you," Mr. Cunningham said. "He had honorable service, but it's a shame someone would let politics rule their life, instead of their principles."
Mr. Kerry, a Navy lieutenant, commanded patrol boats on South Vietnamese rivers and was wounded three times. On his return to the United States, he turned against the war, and at the time of the Valley Forge rally, he was beginning to gain notice as one of the leaders of the organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
He went on, in 1984, to become a U.S. senator from Massachusetts and is now the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Kerry campaign spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said yesterday Mr. Kerry should not be associated in the public mind with Miss Fonda and her later trip to Hanoi, where she was photographed sitting astride a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun.
"John Kerry and Jane Fonda were just acquaintances," Ms. Cutter said. "What's important to understand here is two things: He met her before she went to Vietnam, and he did not approve of her very controversial trip."
She said Mr. Kerry took part in the antiwar movement in order to bring U.S. troops home quickly.
"John Kerry served his country bravely," she said. "He was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts for his service, and he praised the noble service of his fellow servicemen and women. After coming home, John Kerry worked to end the war so his fellow soldiers could come home, too."
Mr. Kerry testified in 1971 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, however, citing accusations that American soldiers in Vietnam routinely committed atrocities such as beheadings, killing children and razing villages. He did not present evidence of these claims.
John Hurley, national director of Veterans for Kerry, said that the antiwar movement included a mix of people and that Mr. Kerry should not be grouped with all of them.
"There were a lot of people protesting that war, some of whom he would agree with and some of whom he would disagree with," said Mr. Hurley, who marched with Mr. Kerry in Washington in 1971. "I don't think he had any control of that. It was the issue that was dominating. Like a lot of other vets coming back, we were angry and frustrated [that] guys were dying in Vietnam for no reason."
Mr. Kerry's protesting "saved more lives than not," he added.
Still, the photograph has spread quickly among Vietnam veterans browsing the Internet.
"If you mention Jane Fonda's name to a Vietnam veteran, it's a lightning-rod reaction," says Ted Sampley, publisher of the U.S. Veteran Dispatch and staunch opponent of Mr. Kerry. "She was supposed to be antiwar, but she clearly sided with one of the belligerents, which precludes her from being antiwar. She was a partisan."
Mr. Sampley first saw the photograph Monday on the Internet and purchased it for his online newsletter. He saw it pop up elsewhere, and he soon began receiving e-mail messages from readers who had seen the photograph.
"This picture exposes just how close John Kerry was to Jane Fonda," he says. However, he says the photograph doesn't reveal anything that many veterans of Vietnam didn't already know.
"Joining the antiwar movement was possibly the worst thing he could have done to the soldiers still in the field," he said. "He basically gave aid and comfort to the enemy."
The Vietnam War, though it ended more than three decades ago, has emerged as a central issue in the presidential campaign, as it did in previous campaigns. In 2000, President Bush faced questions about his service in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam war years. Those questions have been raised again this year.
Bill Clinton was criticized in 1992, when it was reported that he used political pressure to avoid the Vietnam-era draft after he ignored a written agreement to accept a slot in the ROTC at the University of Arkansas. He was further cited for his involvement in the antiwar movement as a student at Oxford University in England, including his work in coordinating the largest antiwar, anti-U.S. demonstration on foreign soil.
Mr. Kerry tells Democratic audiences at campaign appearances that he will be able to stand up to Mr. Bush on the issue. He frequently cites Mr. Bush's appearance on the deck of the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln as misleading voters.
"I know something about aircraft carriers for real," he says.
Rep. Sam Johnson, Texas Republican, who spent nearly seven years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Vietnam, said yesterday the photograph of Mr. Kerry with Miss Fonda will hurt him nevertheless.
"I think it symbolizes how two-faced he is, talking about his war reputation, which is questionable on the one hand, and then coming out against our veterans who were fighting over there on the other," Mr. Johnson said.
Mr. Johnson recalled that his North Vietnamese captors played recordings of Miss Fonda telling U.S. troops to give up the war. "Seeing this picture of Kerry with her at antiwar demonstrations in the United States just makes me want to throw up."
•Jerry Seper and Charles Hurt contributed to this report.
Read more!
Sunday, February 01, 2004
Lurch, Opie, Uncle Al, Alfred E. Newman’s Brother and the rest of the Seven Stooges
Now that Howie, has self-destructed, what about rest of this sorry group of stooges. We’ll take Lurch first because he’s the front-runner:
John Heinz Kerry: Looks like Lurch’s younger brother. He appears to be what’s settled out of the lousy Democratic pack. You might call him he highest of the lowest common denominator.
He’s going to fight against tax cuts for the wealthy? Mr. John Heinz $500+ million net worth Kerry is going to fight tax cuts for the wealthy and fight for "working people"? Right!
He supported the war resolution now has twisted his position to say that he doesn’t support the war because it’s the politically correct thing to do in a party whose thinks its main constituencies are aging flower children and young peaceniks led astray by the aging flower children. It’s all about pandering to the wackos.
What the main plank in Lurch’s campaign platform? He wants to throw George Bush out of office. Now there’s some real vision! Nothing says more about the bankruptcy of ideas in the Democratic Party than the fact that their main "big idea" is to defeat President Bush. You want to stump John Kerry (or any other Democrat for that matter) all you have to do is ask two questions: Why defeat President Bush and what if you do? The answers you get back will be a garbled mass of liberal rhetoric that doesn’t add up to a pile of donkey crap. But if you listen carefully, you’ll hear a complete lack of vision for what this country is, what freedom means and the direction Mr. John Heinz “Lurch” Kerry wants to take this country. And you’ll realize that where John Kerry wants to take us is no place we want to go.
John Edwards: With that young-looking Southern Opie and Andy face and that "aw shucks" demeanor, John Edwards could be real trouble. He has a Clintonesque way of cloaking issues in confusing populist rhetoric that almost sounds conservative. In these times, when most people spend more time thinking about who should win American Idol than who should be the leader of the free world, Edwards could pose the same type of trouble for freedom and democracy that Clinton did only worse – he’s Clinton without the scummy film. Fortunately, the Democrats are in the process of anointing Lurch which may leave Edwards on the bottom of the Democratic ticket come fall which isn’t necessarily good for GW.
Wesley Clark – Rule of thumb -- never trust a general who’s a Democrat and good ole Wes is proving this true. He’s a nut, for God’s sake! And his campaign has taken a spectacular nose dive. The many comparisons to General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove are very appropriate.
Joe Lieberman: In order to be politically correct enough to be accepted in his party, he needs to change his name to Joe Lieberperson. Judging from his "dead heat" for third speech after he went down in flames in the New Hampshire primary, Joe’s pretty out of touch with reality. Do we really want someone this out of touch with reality to be running the country? Aside from the fact that no Democrat can be trusted to be at the helm of our great ship of freedom, we certainly don’t want a Democrat who can’t even be honest with himself and his supporters about his chances. His former running mate wouldn’t even support him! Besides, none of us could dealing with having to listen to that nasaly whine for four years.
Dennis Kucinich: Aside from the fact that he’s a stark raving socialist from hell and proud of it, he looks like Alfred E. Newman’s younger brother. Would you want one of Alfred E. Newman’s relatives running the country?
Al Sharpton: You can sum up Uncle Al in two words: Tawana Brawley. This guy is a shyster from hell. The legitimacy of his candidacy speaks volumes about the sorry state of the Democratic Party in 2004. Can you imagine if the Republicans had accepted David Duke in their list of presidential aspirants? There’s no difference except that the Democrats do it and get by with it.
Bottom line: These guys are what has risen to the top of the bottom of the barrel? Do we really want to trust any of these numbskulls with the future of this nation? NO WAY IN HELL!!!!!
Read more!
John Heinz Kerry: Looks like Lurch’s younger brother. He appears to be what’s settled out of the lousy Democratic pack. You might call him he highest of the lowest common denominator.
He’s going to fight against tax cuts for the wealthy? Mr. John Heinz $500+ million net worth Kerry is going to fight tax cuts for the wealthy and fight for "working people"? Right!
He supported the war resolution now has twisted his position to say that he doesn’t support the war because it’s the politically correct thing to do in a party whose thinks its main constituencies are aging flower children and young peaceniks led astray by the aging flower children. It’s all about pandering to the wackos.
What the main plank in Lurch’s campaign platform? He wants to throw George Bush out of office. Now there’s some real vision! Nothing says more about the bankruptcy of ideas in the Democratic Party than the fact that their main "big idea" is to defeat President Bush. You want to stump John Kerry (or any other Democrat for that matter) all you have to do is ask two questions: Why defeat President Bush and what if you do? The answers you get back will be a garbled mass of liberal rhetoric that doesn’t add up to a pile of donkey crap. But if you listen carefully, you’ll hear a complete lack of vision for what this country is, what freedom means and the direction Mr. John Heinz “Lurch” Kerry wants to take this country. And you’ll realize that where John Kerry wants to take us is no place we want to go.
John Edwards: With that young-looking Southern Opie and Andy face and that "aw shucks" demeanor, John Edwards could be real trouble. He has a Clintonesque way of cloaking issues in confusing populist rhetoric that almost sounds conservative. In these times, when most people spend more time thinking about who should win American Idol than who should be the leader of the free world, Edwards could pose the same type of trouble for freedom and democracy that Clinton did only worse – he’s Clinton without the scummy film. Fortunately, the Democrats are in the process of anointing Lurch which may leave Edwards on the bottom of the Democratic ticket come fall which isn’t necessarily good for GW.
Wesley Clark – Rule of thumb -- never trust a general who’s a Democrat and good ole Wes is proving this true. He’s a nut, for God’s sake! And his campaign has taken a spectacular nose dive. The many comparisons to General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove are very appropriate.
Joe Lieberman: In order to be politically correct enough to be accepted in his party, he needs to change his name to Joe Lieberperson. Judging from his "dead heat" for third speech after he went down in flames in the New Hampshire primary, Joe’s pretty out of touch with reality. Do we really want someone this out of touch with reality to be running the country? Aside from the fact that no Democrat can be trusted to be at the helm of our great ship of freedom, we certainly don’t want a Democrat who can’t even be honest with himself and his supporters about his chances. His former running mate wouldn’t even support him! Besides, none of us could dealing with having to listen to that nasaly whine for four years.
Dennis Kucinich: Aside from the fact that he’s a stark raving socialist from hell and proud of it, he looks like Alfred E. Newman’s younger brother. Would you want one of Alfred E. Newman’s relatives running the country?
Al Sharpton: You can sum up Uncle Al in two words: Tawana Brawley. This guy is a shyster from hell. The legitimacy of his candidacy speaks volumes about the sorry state of the Democratic Party in 2004. Can you imagine if the Republicans had accepted David Duke in their list of presidential aspirants? There’s no difference except that the Democrats do it and get by with it.
Bottom line: These guys are what has risen to the top of the bottom of the barrel? Do we really want to trust any of these numbskulls with the future of this nation? NO WAY IN HELL!!!!!
Read more!
Sunday, January 25, 2004
Dean's Done
Stick a fork in him – Dean’s done.
Yes, the angry white socialist male who made his way from Vermont to Iowa spouting truly moronic rhetoric is finished, coming in a spectacularly distant third to Kerry and Edwards in the Iowa caucuses. Although the Iowa caucuses are a minor test, they are perhaps a bellwether that this so-called doctor won’t be able to sell his idiotic message elsewhere. That’s too bad. With the incredible spew of babbling stupidity that flowed in nearly a steady stream from over those clenched teeth in the middle of his red, Archie-Bunker-like face, it would have been fun to watch Bush stomp him into the ground come November. Let's evaluate some examples of this unbridled idiocy:
"I opposed the war in Iraq".
What about the war in Iraq did you oppose, Howard? Stopping a madman who hated our guts who gassed ten of thousands of his own people with chemical weapons that didn’t exist and gunned down thousands more, burying them in mass graves; who had a now-proven connection with various terrorist groups, including Al-Quadia.
“I want to stop the half-trillion dollar deficits”
Oh really, Howard? And I suppose your plan to put a health care plan in every pot would erase the deficit.
“We’re going to take our country back.”
Take it back from whom, Howard? Socialists like you never had the country. If they did 70 years ago, we all be goose-stepping and speaking German because you would have “opposed the war” in Europe and the Pacific Rim. After all, there was no more of an "imminent threat" to the U.S. than there is now.
In the richest, most advanced country in the world in the 21st century, it's simply wrong for sick children to go without seeing a doctor because their parents can't afford it. It's wrong for a woman to find out she has late-stage breast cancer, because she couldn't afford a mammogram. It's wrong for seniors to have to choose between prescriptions they need and putting food on the table. The time has come to make healthcare for all Americans a reality.
It doesn't have to be this way in America. In Vermont, where I served as governor for the last 11 years, nearly 92% of adults now have coverage. Most importantly, 99% of all Vermont children are eligible for health insurance and 96% have it.
But that's not it. We coupled our success in insuring kids with a new early childhood initiative that we call "Success by Six." As a result, nine out of 10 parents with a newborn baby -- regardless of income -- get a home visit from a community outreach worker who's there to help them with parenting skills and to put those parents in touch with the services they may need or want. Thanks to Success by Six, we've cut our state's child abuse rate nearly in half, and child sexual abuse of kids under 6 is down by 70%.
This is socialism, Howie. It’s not what our country was founded on and it’s not what has made our health care system the envy of the world. It’s why other countries that purport to have health care for all actually have a caste system of health care where the commoners wait for routine care and the rich use the private networks that have developed. Then, if the rich want the best health care, they come here. Why? Because the free market has resulted in incentives for people to develop techniques and procedures to cure disease and fix people’s health problems. Where do the majority of breakthroughs in health care occur? In the U.S. As a doctor, you know that the idea that people needlessly die of diseases in this country because they don’t have health care is B.S. Every state has mechanisms for people who don’t have insurance to obtain care. If you have a serious medical condition, you’re more likely to die on a waiting list waiting for care in a country with socialized medicine that you are likely not to be able to get care in this country. And most of us got along just fine without Big Brother looking in on us to see if we were smart enough to figure out how to take care of our babies.
Read more!
Yes, the angry white socialist male who made his way from Vermont to Iowa spouting truly moronic rhetoric is finished, coming in a spectacularly distant third to Kerry and Edwards in the Iowa caucuses. Although the Iowa caucuses are a minor test, they are perhaps a bellwether that this so-called doctor won’t be able to sell his idiotic message elsewhere. That’s too bad. With the incredible spew of babbling stupidity that flowed in nearly a steady stream from over those clenched teeth in the middle of his red, Archie-Bunker-like face, it would have been fun to watch Bush stomp him into the ground come November. Let's evaluate some examples of this unbridled idiocy:
"I opposed the war in Iraq".
What about the war in Iraq did you oppose, Howard? Stopping a madman who hated our guts who gassed ten of thousands of his own people with chemical weapons that didn’t exist and gunned down thousands more, burying them in mass graves; who had a now-proven connection with various terrorist groups, including Al-Quadia.
“I want to stop the half-trillion dollar deficits”
Oh really, Howard? And I suppose your plan to put a health care plan in every pot would erase the deficit.
“We’re going to take our country back.”
Take it back from whom, Howard? Socialists like you never had the country. If they did 70 years ago, we all be goose-stepping and speaking German because you would have “opposed the war” in Europe and the Pacific Rim. After all, there was no more of an "imminent threat" to the U.S. than there is now.
In the richest, most advanced country in the world in the 21st century, it's simply wrong for sick children to go without seeing a doctor because their parents can't afford it. It's wrong for a woman to find out she has late-stage breast cancer, because she couldn't afford a mammogram. It's wrong for seniors to have to choose between prescriptions they need and putting food on the table. The time has come to make healthcare for all Americans a reality.
It doesn't have to be this way in America. In Vermont, where I served as governor for the last 11 years, nearly 92% of adults now have coverage. Most importantly, 99% of all Vermont children are eligible for health insurance and 96% have it.
But that's not it. We coupled our success in insuring kids with a new early childhood initiative that we call "Success by Six." As a result, nine out of 10 parents with a newborn baby -- regardless of income -- get a home visit from a community outreach worker who's there to help them with parenting skills and to put those parents in touch with the services they may need or want. Thanks to Success by Six, we've cut our state's child abuse rate nearly in half, and child sexual abuse of kids under 6 is down by 70%.
This is socialism, Howie. It’s not what our country was founded on and it’s not what has made our health care system the envy of the world. It’s why other countries that purport to have health care for all actually have a caste system of health care where the commoners wait for routine care and the rich use the private networks that have developed. Then, if the rich want the best health care, they come here. Why? Because the free market has resulted in incentives for people to develop techniques and procedures to cure disease and fix people’s health problems. Where do the majority of breakthroughs in health care occur? In the U.S. As a doctor, you know that the idea that people needlessly die of diseases in this country because they don’t have health care is B.S. Every state has mechanisms for people who don’t have insurance to obtain care. If you have a serious medical condition, you’re more likely to die on a waiting list waiting for care in a country with socialized medicine that you are likely not to be able to get care in this country. And most of us got along just fine without Big Brother looking in on us to see if we were smart enough to figure out how to take care of our babies.
Read more!
Sunday, January 11, 2004
2004 – Make it a Good Year by Voting Republican
I meant to post this a long time ago but didn't get it done. Here it is:
What’s the best thing you could do this year to improve your life and the lives of all Americans? Vote Republican. It doesn’t take a whole lot of rational thought to determine that re-electing George Bush is the best course for the country. One look at what the Democratic candidates have as the main plank of all of their platforms and you know backwards and empty their agenda is: Stopping George Bush.
Take a minute and consider why we would want George Bush to stop what he’s doing:
Do we really want to stop him from creating unprecedented economic growth with his anemic (but better than nothing) tax cut that sunsets in ten years?
Do we want him to stop winning the War on Terror?
Do we want him to stop bringing decency and respect to the presidency?
In fact, the things that he should stop doing are things that ALL the Democratic candidates want to take further:
They don’t think Bush’s $400 billion-dollar drug giveaway to the seniors goes far enough. In fact most of them would "rollback" (weaselspeak for eliminate) the badly-needed tax cuts that, although they don’t go far enough, have sparked the economy and will eventually lower the deficit to give us the same socialized medicine mess they have in countries like Canada and Great Britain.
They don’t think that Bush’s ridiculous illegal immigrant boondoggle goes far enough either. In fact, in a pre-caucus debate in Iowa tonight, they all agreed that we need to do a better job of kissing the asses of people who want to attain citizenship. Not only that, they all agreed that instead of deporting illegal immigrants (Joe Lieberperson called them "immigrants" in an apparent attempt to obfuscate the fact that they were talking about ILLEGAL immigrants), we should give them all driver licenses.
Is George Bush perfect? No. In fact some of his programs are downright Clintonian. But in the areas that mater most in today’s world – fighting the War on Terror and restoring the economy through tax cuts – he’s right on the money. He’s running for re-election and the best thing you can do for yourself and your family in 2004 is vote for him. Hopefully, he’ll be less afraid to be a real conservative in his second term when he won’t be running for re-election. The alternative is to regress into anger, hatred, despair, over-taxation and circle jerk appeasement foreign policy that puts the interests of everyone else in the world above our national security because this is all the Democrats have to offer. It’s any easy choice. Maintain the status quo while making some positive advances in economic and foreign policy or head off in a direction that will lead to the end of our country, as we know it. Which do you choose?
Read more!
What’s the best thing you could do this year to improve your life and the lives of all Americans? Vote Republican. It doesn’t take a whole lot of rational thought to determine that re-electing George Bush is the best course for the country. One look at what the Democratic candidates have as the main plank of all of their platforms and you know backwards and empty their agenda is: Stopping George Bush.
Take a minute and consider why we would want George Bush to stop what he’s doing:
Do we really want to stop him from creating unprecedented economic growth with his anemic (but better than nothing) tax cut that sunsets in ten years?
Do we want him to stop winning the War on Terror?
Do we want him to stop bringing decency and respect to the presidency?
In fact, the things that he should stop doing are things that ALL the Democratic candidates want to take further:
They don’t think Bush’s $400 billion-dollar drug giveaway to the seniors goes far enough. In fact most of them would "rollback" (weaselspeak for eliminate) the badly-needed tax cuts that, although they don’t go far enough, have sparked the economy and will eventually lower the deficit to give us the same socialized medicine mess they have in countries like Canada and Great Britain.
They don’t think that Bush’s ridiculous illegal immigrant boondoggle goes far enough either. In fact, in a pre-caucus debate in Iowa tonight, they all agreed that we need to do a better job of kissing the asses of people who want to attain citizenship. Not only that, they all agreed that instead of deporting illegal immigrants (Joe Lieberperson called them "immigrants" in an apparent attempt to obfuscate the fact that they were talking about ILLEGAL immigrants), we should give them all driver licenses.
Is George Bush perfect? No. In fact some of his programs are downright Clintonian. But in the areas that mater most in today’s world – fighting the War on Terror and restoring the economy through tax cuts – he’s right on the money. He’s running for re-election and the best thing you can do for yourself and your family in 2004 is vote for him. Hopefully, he’ll be less afraid to be a real conservative in his second term when he won’t be running for re-election. The alternative is to regress into anger, hatred, despair, over-taxation and circle jerk appeasement foreign policy that puts the interests of everyone else in the world above our national security because this is all the Democrats have to offer. It’s any easy choice. Maintain the status quo while making some positive advances in economic and foreign policy or head off in a direction that will lead to the end of our country, as we know it. Which do you choose?
Read more!
Sunday, December 28, 2003
Steve Rendall Gives Up
Another one bites the dust.
Steve Rendall, a not-so-proud liberal, "policy analyst" for the liberal and deceptively-named Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), and author of a book slamming Rush Limbaugh, folded rather than defend his beliefs. Since my last email to him Dec. 16, he has failed to respond to my challenge to back up his claims that AIDS is not 100% fatal, progressive is not just a weasel word for liberal and he is not a liberal and FAIR is actually a FAIR media analysis organization. Why didn't he respond? Because when backed into a corner and challenged on their wacko dogma, liberals can't defend their beliefs because they can't support them with facts. This is not a futile effort. I'm not attempting to get Mr. Rendall or any other liberal to change their beliefs. I'm simply pointing out their factual inaccuracies and challenging them to defend their beliefs. It's something more people need to do. Fight the liberal dogma by challenging them to defend their beliefs.
Read more!
Steve Rendall, a not-so-proud liberal, "policy analyst" for the liberal and deceptively-named Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), and author of a book slamming Rush Limbaugh, folded rather than defend his beliefs. Since my last email to him Dec. 16, he has failed to respond to my challenge to back up his claims that AIDS is not 100% fatal, progressive is not just a weasel word for liberal and he is not a liberal and FAIR is actually a FAIR media analysis organization. Why didn't he respond? Because when backed into a corner and challenged on their wacko dogma, liberals can't defend their beliefs because they can't support them with facts. This is not a futile effort. I'm not attempting to get Mr. Rendall or any other liberal to change their beliefs. I'm simply pointing out their factual inaccuracies and challenging them to defend their beliefs. It's something more people need to do. Fight the liberal dogma by challenging them to defend their beliefs.
Read more!
Monday, December 22, 2003
Happy Kwanzaa, Jailbird Ron
We all like Christmas stories. Well, I found a good one on FrontPageMagazine.com. You've heard of the true story of Christmas. Well this is the true story of Kwanzaa -- that innocuous little African holiday they teach my kids and yours about. It turns out (as those of us who are paying attention have known for quite a long time) not to be so happy and innocuous after all. Read it and get angry. Then write your local school board. We should all be pissed that they pass this crap off as some kind of black cultural celebration.
Happy Kwanzaa
By Paul Mulshine
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 26, 2002
On December 24, 1971, the New York Times ran one of the first of many articles on a new holiday designed to foster unity among African Americans. The holiday, called Kwanzaa, was applauded by a certain sixteen-year-old minister who explained that the feast would perform the valuable service of "de-whitizing" Christmas. The minister was a nobody at the time but he would later go on to become perhaps the premier race-baiter of the twentieth century. His name was Al Sharpton and he would later spawn the Tawana Brawley hoax and then incite anti-Jewish tensions in a 1995 incident that ended with the arson deaths of seven people.
Great minds think alike. The inventor of the holiday was one of the few black "leaders" in America even worse than Sharpton. But there was no mention in the Times article of this man or of the fact that at that very moment he was sitting in a California prison. And there was no mention of the curious fact that this purported benefactor of the black people had founded an organization that in its short history tortured and murdered blacks in ways of which the Ku Klux Klan could only fantasize.
It was in newspaper articles like that, repeated in papers all over the country, that the tradition of Kwanzaa began. It is a tradition not out of Africa but out of Orwell. Both history and language have been bent to serve a political goal. When that New York Times article appeared, Ron Karenga's crimes were still recent events. If the reporter had bothered to do any research into the background of the Kwanzaa founder, he might have learned about Karenga's trial earlier that year on charges of torturing two women who were members of US (United Slaves), a black nationalist cult he had founded.
A May 14, 1971, article in the Los Angeles Times described the testimony of one of them: "Deborah Jones, who once was given the Swahili title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis' mouth and placed against Miss Davis' face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vise. Karenga, head of US, also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said."
Back then, it was relatively easy to get information on the trial. Now it's almost impossible. It took me two days' work to find articles about it. The Los Angeles Times seems to have been the only major newspaper that reported it and the stories were buried deep in the paper, which now is available only on microfilm. And the microfilm index doesn't start until 1972, so it is almost impossible to find the three small articles that cover Karenga's trial and conviction on charges of torture. That is fortunate for Karenga. The trial showed him to be not just brutal, but deranged. He and three members of his cult had tortured the women in an attempt to find some nonexistent "crystals" of poison. Karenga thought his enemies were out to get him.
And in another lucky break for Karenga, the trial transcript no longer exists. I filed a request for it with the Superior Court of Los Angeles. After a search, the court clerk could find no record of the trial. So the exact words of the black woman who had a hot soldering iron pressed against her face by the man who founded Kwanzaa are now lost to history. The only document the court clerk did find was particularly revealing, however. It was a transcript of Karenga's sentencing hearing on Sept. 17, 1971.
A key issue was whether Karenga was sane. Judge Arthur L. Alarcon read from a psychiatrist's report: "Since his admission here he has been isolated and has been exhibiting bizarre behavior, such as staring at the wall, talking to imaginary persons, claiming that he was attacked by dive-bombers and that his attorney was in the next cell. … During part of the interview he would look around as if reacting to hallucination and when the examiner walked away for a moment he began a conversation with a blanket located on his bed, stating that there was someone there and implying indirectly that the 'someone' was a woman imprisoned with him for some offense. This man now presents a picture which can be considered both paranoid and schizophrenic with hallucinations and elusions, inappropriate affect, disorganization, and impaired contact with the environment."
The founder of Kwanzaa paranoid? It seems so. But as the old saying goes, just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean that someone isn't out to get you.
ACCORDING TO COURT DOCUMENTS, Karenga's real name is Ron N. Everett. In the '60s, he awarded himself the title "maulana," Swahili for "master teacher." He was born on a poultry farm in Maryland, the fourteenth child of a Baptist minister. He came to California in the late 1950s to attend Los Angeles Community College. He moved on to UCLA, where he got a Master's degree in political science and African Studies. By the mid-1960s, he had established himself as a leading "cultural nationalist." That is a term that had some meaning in the '60s, mainly as a way of distinguishing Karenga's followers from the Black Panthers, who were conventional Marxists.
Another way of distinguishing might be to think of Karenga's gang as the Crips and the Panthers as the bloods. Despite all their rhetoric about white people, they reserved their most vicious violence for each other. In 1969, the two groups squared off over the question of who would control the new Afro-American Studies Center at UCLA. According to a Los Angeles Times article, Karenga and his adherents backed one candidate, the Panthers another. Both groups took to carrying guns on campus, a situation that, remarkably, did not seem to bother the university administration. The Black Student Union, however, set up a coalition to try and bring peace between the Panthers and the group headed by the man whom the Times labeled "Ron Ndabezitha Everett-Karenga."
On Jan. 17, 1969, about 150 students gathered in a lunchroom to discuss the situation. Two Panthers—admitted to UCLA like many of the black students as part of a federal program that put high-school dropouts into the school—apparently spent a good part of the meeting in verbal attacks against Karenga. This did not sit well with Karenga's followers, many of whom had adopted the look of their leader, pseudo-African clothing and a shaved head.
In modern gang parlance, you might say Karenga was "dissed" by John Jerome Huggins, 23, and Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter, 26. After the meeting, the two Panthers were met in the hallway by two brothers who were members of US, George P. and Larry Joseph Stiner. The Stiners pulled pistols and shot the two Panthers dead. One of the Stiners took a bullet in the shoulder, apparently from a Panther's gun.
There were other beatings and shooting in Los Angeles involving US, but by then the tradition of African nationalism had already taken hold—among whites. That tradition calls for any white person, whether a journalist, a college official, or a politician, to ignore the obvious flaws of the concept that blacks should have a separate culture. "The students here have handled themselves in an absolutely impeccable manner," UCLA chancellor Charles E. Young told the L.A. Times. "They have been concerned. They haven't argued who the director should be; they have been saying what kind of person he should be." Young made those remarks after the shooting. And the university went ahead with its Afro-American Studies Program. Karenga, meanwhile, continued to build and strengthen US, a unique group that seems to have combined the elements of a street gang with those of a California cult. The members performed assaults and robberies but they also strictly followed the rules laid down in The Quotable Karenga, a book that laid out "The Path of Blackness." "The sevenfold path of blackness is think black, talk black, act black, create black, buy black, vote black, and live black," the book states.
In retrospect, it may be fortunate that the cult fell apart over the torture charges. Left to his own devices, Karenga might have orchestrated the type of mass suicide later pioneered by the People's Temple and copied by the Heaven's Gate cult. Instead, he apparently fell into deep paranoia shortly after the killings at UCLA. He began fearing that his followers were trying to have him killed. On May 9, 1970 he initiated the torture session that led to his imprisonment. Karenga himself will not comment on that incident and the victims cannot be located, so the sole remaining account is in the brief passage from the L.A. Times describing tortures inflicted by Karenga and his fellow defendants, Louis Smith and Luz Maria Tamayo:
"The victims said they were living at Karenga's home when Karenga accused them of trying to kill him by placing 'crystals' in his food and water and in various areas of his house. When they denied it, allegedly they were beaten with an electrical cord and a hot soldering iron was put in Miss Davis' mouth and against her face. Police were told that one of Miss Jones' toes was placed in a small vise which then allegedly was tightened by one of the defendants. The following day Karenga allegedly told the women that 'Vietnamese torture is nothing compared to what I know.' Miss Tamayo reportedly put detergent in their mouths, Smith turned a water hose full force on their faces, and Karenga, holding a gun, threatened to shoot both of them."
Karenga was convicted of two counts of felonious assault and one count of false imprisonment. He was sentenced on Sept. 17, 1971, to serve one to ten years in prison. A brief account of the sentencing ran in several newspapers the following day. That was apparently the last newspaper article to mention Karenga's unfortunate habit of doing unspeakable things to black people. After that, the only coverage came from the hundreds of news accounts that depict him as the wonderful man who invented Kwanzaa.
LOOK AT ANY MAP OF THE WORLD and you will see that Ghana and Kenya are on opposite sides of the continent. This brings up an obvious question about Kwanzaa: Why did Karenga use Swahili words for his fictional African feast? American blacks are primarily descended from people who came from Ghana and other parts of West Africa. Kenya and Tanzania—where Swahili is spoken—are several thousand miles away, about as far from Ghana as Los Angeles is from New York. Yet in celebrating Kwanzaa, African-Americans are supposed to employ a vocabulary of such Swahili words as "kujichagulia" and "kuumba." This makes about as much sense as having Irish-Americans celebrate St. Patrick's Day by speaking Polish. One possible explanation is that Karenga was simply ignorant of African geography and history when he came up with Kwanzaa in 1966. That might explain why he would schedule a harvest festival near the solstice, a season when few fruits or vegetables are harvested anywhere. But a better explanation is that he simply has contempt for black people.
That does not seem a farfetched hypothesis. Despite all his rhetoric about white racism, I could find no record that he or his followers ever raised a hand in anger against a white person. In fact, Karenga had an excellent relationship with Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty in the '60s and also met with then-Governor Ronald Reagan and other white politicians. But he and his gang were hell on blacks. And Karenga certainly seems to have had a low opinion of his fellow African-Americans. "People think it's African, but it's not," he said about his holiday in an interview quoted in the Washington Post. "I came up with Kwanzaa because black people in this country wouldn't celebrate it if they knew it was American. Also, I put it around Christmas because I knew that's when a lot of bloods would be partying." "Bloods" is a '60s California slang term for black people.
That Post article appeared in 1978. Like other news articles from that era, it makes no mention of Karenga's criminal past, which seems to have been forgotten the minute he got out of prison in 1975. Profiting from the absence of memory, he remade himself as Maulana Ron Karenga, went into academics, and by 1979 he was running the Black Studies Department at California State University in Long Beach.
This raises a question: Karenga had just ten years earlier proven himself capable of employing guns and bullets in his efforts to control hiring in the Black Studies Department at UCLA. So how did this ex-con, fresh out jail, get the job at Long Beach? Did he just send a résumé and wait by the phone? The officials at Long Beach State don't like that type of question. I called the university and got a spokeswoman by the name of Toni Barone. She listened to my questions and put me on hold. Christmas music was playing, a nice touch under the circumstances. She told me to fax her my questions. I sent a list of questions that included the matter of whether Karenga had employed threats to get his job. I also asked just what sort of crimes would preclude a person from serving on the faculty there in Long Beach. And whether the university takes any security measures to ensure that Karenga doesn't shoot any students. Barone faxed me back a reply stating that the university is pleased with Karenga's performance and has no record of the procedures that led to his hiring. She ignored the question about how they protect students.
Actually, there is clear evidence that Karenga has reformed. In 1975, he dropped his cultural nationalist views and converted to Marxism. For anyone else, this would have been seen as an endorsement of radicalism, but for Karenga it was considered a sign that he had moderated his outlook. The ultimate irony is that now that Karenga is a Marxist, the capitalists have taken over his holiday. The seven principles of Kwanzaa include "collective work" and "cooperative economics," but Kwanzaa is turning out to be as commercial as Christmas, generating millions in greeting-card sales alone. The purists are whining. "It's clear that a number of major corporations have started to take notice and try to profit from Kwanzaa," said a San Francisco State black studies professor named "Oba T'Shaka" in one news account. "That's not good, with money comes corruption." No, he's wrong. With money comes kitsch. The L.A. Times reported a group was planning an "African Village Faire," the pseudo-archaic spelling of "faire" nicely combining kitsch Africana with kitsch Americana.
With money also comes forgetfulness. As those warm Kwanzaa feelings are generated in a spirit of holiday cheer, those who celebrate this holiday do so in blissful ignorance of the sordid violence, paranoia, and mayhem that helped generate its birth some three decades ago in a section of America that has vanished down the memory hole.
Read more!
Happy Kwanzaa
By Paul Mulshine
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 26, 2002
On December 24, 1971, the New York Times ran one of the first of many articles on a new holiday designed to foster unity among African Americans. The holiday, called Kwanzaa, was applauded by a certain sixteen-year-old minister who explained that the feast would perform the valuable service of "de-whitizing" Christmas. The minister was a nobody at the time but he would later go on to become perhaps the premier race-baiter of the twentieth century. His name was Al Sharpton and he would later spawn the Tawana Brawley hoax and then incite anti-Jewish tensions in a 1995 incident that ended with the arson deaths of seven people.
Great minds think alike. The inventor of the holiday was one of the few black "leaders" in America even worse than Sharpton. But there was no mention in the Times article of this man or of the fact that at that very moment he was sitting in a California prison. And there was no mention of the curious fact that this purported benefactor of the black people had founded an organization that in its short history tortured and murdered blacks in ways of which the Ku Klux Klan could only fantasize.
It was in newspaper articles like that, repeated in papers all over the country, that the tradition of Kwanzaa began. It is a tradition not out of Africa but out of Orwell. Both history and language have been bent to serve a political goal. When that New York Times article appeared, Ron Karenga's crimes were still recent events. If the reporter had bothered to do any research into the background of the Kwanzaa founder, he might have learned about Karenga's trial earlier that year on charges of torturing two women who were members of US (United Slaves), a black nationalist cult he had founded.
A May 14, 1971, article in the Los Angeles Times described the testimony of one of them: "Deborah Jones, who once was given the Swahili title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis' mouth and placed against Miss Davis' face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vise. Karenga, head of US, also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said."
Back then, it was relatively easy to get information on the trial. Now it's almost impossible. It took me two days' work to find articles about it. The Los Angeles Times seems to have been the only major newspaper that reported it and the stories were buried deep in the paper, which now is available only on microfilm. And the microfilm index doesn't start until 1972, so it is almost impossible to find the three small articles that cover Karenga's trial and conviction on charges of torture. That is fortunate for Karenga. The trial showed him to be not just brutal, but deranged. He and three members of his cult had tortured the women in an attempt to find some nonexistent "crystals" of poison. Karenga thought his enemies were out to get him.
And in another lucky break for Karenga, the trial transcript no longer exists. I filed a request for it with the Superior Court of Los Angeles. After a search, the court clerk could find no record of the trial. So the exact words of the black woman who had a hot soldering iron pressed against her face by the man who founded Kwanzaa are now lost to history. The only document the court clerk did find was particularly revealing, however. It was a transcript of Karenga's sentencing hearing on Sept. 17, 1971.
A key issue was whether Karenga was sane. Judge Arthur L. Alarcon read from a psychiatrist's report: "Since his admission here he has been isolated and has been exhibiting bizarre behavior, such as staring at the wall, talking to imaginary persons, claiming that he was attacked by dive-bombers and that his attorney was in the next cell. … During part of the interview he would look around as if reacting to hallucination and when the examiner walked away for a moment he began a conversation with a blanket located on his bed, stating that there was someone there and implying indirectly that the 'someone' was a woman imprisoned with him for some offense. This man now presents a picture which can be considered both paranoid and schizophrenic with hallucinations and elusions, inappropriate affect, disorganization, and impaired contact with the environment."
The founder of Kwanzaa paranoid? It seems so. But as the old saying goes, just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean that someone isn't out to get you.
ACCORDING TO COURT DOCUMENTS, Karenga's real name is Ron N. Everett. In the '60s, he awarded himself the title "maulana," Swahili for "master teacher." He was born on a poultry farm in Maryland, the fourteenth child of a Baptist minister. He came to California in the late 1950s to attend Los Angeles Community College. He moved on to UCLA, where he got a Master's degree in political science and African Studies. By the mid-1960s, he had established himself as a leading "cultural nationalist." That is a term that had some meaning in the '60s, mainly as a way of distinguishing Karenga's followers from the Black Panthers, who were conventional Marxists.
Another way of distinguishing might be to think of Karenga's gang as the Crips and the Panthers as the bloods. Despite all their rhetoric about white people, they reserved their most vicious violence for each other. In 1969, the two groups squared off over the question of who would control the new Afro-American Studies Center at UCLA. According to a Los Angeles Times article, Karenga and his adherents backed one candidate, the Panthers another. Both groups took to carrying guns on campus, a situation that, remarkably, did not seem to bother the university administration. The Black Student Union, however, set up a coalition to try and bring peace between the Panthers and the group headed by the man whom the Times labeled "Ron Ndabezitha Everett-Karenga."
On Jan. 17, 1969, about 150 students gathered in a lunchroom to discuss the situation. Two Panthers—admitted to UCLA like many of the black students as part of a federal program that put high-school dropouts into the school—apparently spent a good part of the meeting in verbal attacks against Karenga. This did not sit well with Karenga's followers, many of whom had adopted the look of their leader, pseudo-African clothing and a shaved head.
In modern gang parlance, you might say Karenga was "dissed" by John Jerome Huggins, 23, and Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter, 26. After the meeting, the two Panthers were met in the hallway by two brothers who were members of US, George P. and Larry Joseph Stiner. The Stiners pulled pistols and shot the two Panthers dead. One of the Stiners took a bullet in the shoulder, apparently from a Panther's gun.
There were other beatings and shooting in Los Angeles involving US, but by then the tradition of African nationalism had already taken hold—among whites. That tradition calls for any white person, whether a journalist, a college official, or a politician, to ignore the obvious flaws of the concept that blacks should have a separate culture. "The students here have handled themselves in an absolutely impeccable manner," UCLA chancellor Charles E. Young told the L.A. Times. "They have been concerned. They haven't argued who the director should be; they have been saying what kind of person he should be." Young made those remarks after the shooting. And the university went ahead with its Afro-American Studies Program. Karenga, meanwhile, continued to build and strengthen US, a unique group that seems to have combined the elements of a street gang with those of a California cult. The members performed assaults and robberies but they also strictly followed the rules laid down in The Quotable Karenga, a book that laid out "The Path of Blackness." "The sevenfold path of blackness is think black, talk black, act black, create black, buy black, vote black, and live black," the book states.
In retrospect, it may be fortunate that the cult fell apart over the torture charges. Left to his own devices, Karenga might have orchestrated the type of mass suicide later pioneered by the People's Temple and copied by the Heaven's Gate cult. Instead, he apparently fell into deep paranoia shortly after the killings at UCLA. He began fearing that his followers were trying to have him killed. On May 9, 1970 he initiated the torture session that led to his imprisonment. Karenga himself will not comment on that incident and the victims cannot be located, so the sole remaining account is in the brief passage from the L.A. Times describing tortures inflicted by Karenga and his fellow defendants, Louis Smith and Luz Maria Tamayo:
"The victims said they were living at Karenga's home when Karenga accused them of trying to kill him by placing 'crystals' in his food and water and in various areas of his house. When they denied it, allegedly they were beaten with an electrical cord and a hot soldering iron was put in Miss Davis' mouth and against her face. Police were told that one of Miss Jones' toes was placed in a small vise which then allegedly was tightened by one of the defendants. The following day Karenga allegedly told the women that 'Vietnamese torture is nothing compared to what I know.' Miss Tamayo reportedly put detergent in their mouths, Smith turned a water hose full force on their faces, and Karenga, holding a gun, threatened to shoot both of them."
Karenga was convicted of two counts of felonious assault and one count of false imprisonment. He was sentenced on Sept. 17, 1971, to serve one to ten years in prison. A brief account of the sentencing ran in several newspapers the following day. That was apparently the last newspaper article to mention Karenga's unfortunate habit of doing unspeakable things to black people. After that, the only coverage came from the hundreds of news accounts that depict him as the wonderful man who invented Kwanzaa.
LOOK AT ANY MAP OF THE WORLD and you will see that Ghana and Kenya are on opposite sides of the continent. This brings up an obvious question about Kwanzaa: Why did Karenga use Swahili words for his fictional African feast? American blacks are primarily descended from people who came from Ghana and other parts of West Africa. Kenya and Tanzania—where Swahili is spoken—are several thousand miles away, about as far from Ghana as Los Angeles is from New York. Yet in celebrating Kwanzaa, African-Americans are supposed to employ a vocabulary of such Swahili words as "kujichagulia" and "kuumba." This makes about as much sense as having Irish-Americans celebrate St. Patrick's Day by speaking Polish. One possible explanation is that Karenga was simply ignorant of African geography and history when he came up with Kwanzaa in 1966. That might explain why he would schedule a harvest festival near the solstice, a season when few fruits or vegetables are harvested anywhere. But a better explanation is that he simply has contempt for black people.
That does not seem a farfetched hypothesis. Despite all his rhetoric about white racism, I could find no record that he or his followers ever raised a hand in anger against a white person. In fact, Karenga had an excellent relationship with Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty in the '60s and also met with then-Governor Ronald Reagan and other white politicians. But he and his gang were hell on blacks. And Karenga certainly seems to have had a low opinion of his fellow African-Americans. "People think it's African, but it's not," he said about his holiday in an interview quoted in the Washington Post. "I came up with Kwanzaa because black people in this country wouldn't celebrate it if they knew it was American. Also, I put it around Christmas because I knew that's when a lot of bloods would be partying." "Bloods" is a '60s California slang term for black people.
That Post article appeared in 1978. Like other news articles from that era, it makes no mention of Karenga's criminal past, which seems to have been forgotten the minute he got out of prison in 1975. Profiting from the absence of memory, he remade himself as Maulana Ron Karenga, went into academics, and by 1979 he was running the Black Studies Department at California State University in Long Beach.
This raises a question: Karenga had just ten years earlier proven himself capable of employing guns and bullets in his efforts to control hiring in the Black Studies Department at UCLA. So how did this ex-con, fresh out jail, get the job at Long Beach? Did he just send a résumé and wait by the phone? The officials at Long Beach State don't like that type of question. I called the university and got a spokeswoman by the name of Toni Barone. She listened to my questions and put me on hold. Christmas music was playing, a nice touch under the circumstances. She told me to fax her my questions. I sent a list of questions that included the matter of whether Karenga had employed threats to get his job. I also asked just what sort of crimes would preclude a person from serving on the faculty there in Long Beach. And whether the university takes any security measures to ensure that Karenga doesn't shoot any students. Barone faxed me back a reply stating that the university is pleased with Karenga's performance and has no record of the procedures that led to his hiring. She ignored the question about how they protect students.
Actually, there is clear evidence that Karenga has reformed. In 1975, he dropped his cultural nationalist views and converted to Marxism. For anyone else, this would have been seen as an endorsement of radicalism, but for Karenga it was considered a sign that he had moderated his outlook. The ultimate irony is that now that Karenga is a Marxist, the capitalists have taken over his holiday. The seven principles of Kwanzaa include "collective work" and "cooperative economics," but Kwanzaa is turning out to be as commercial as Christmas, generating millions in greeting-card sales alone. The purists are whining. "It's clear that a number of major corporations have started to take notice and try to profit from Kwanzaa," said a San Francisco State black studies professor named "Oba T'Shaka" in one news account. "That's not good, with money comes corruption." No, he's wrong. With money comes kitsch. The L.A. Times reported a group was planning an "African Village Faire," the pseudo-archaic spelling of "faire" nicely combining kitsch Africana with kitsch Americana.
With money also comes forgetfulness. As those warm Kwanzaa feelings are generated in a spirit of holiday cheer, those who celebrate this holiday do so in blissful ignorance of the sordid violence, paranoia, and mayhem that helped generate its birth some three decades ago in a section of America that has vanished down the memory hole.
Read more!
Tuesday, December 16, 2003
Steve Rendall Continues to Flail Away .. and I Pummel Him Again
This time, Rendall wrote his responses within my email. I've bolded them and my response follows the initial email. Although humorous, this exchange is getting a little tiresome and his arguments are just too easy to refute. Unless he comes up with an extraordinary rebuttal (which isn't likely), this will probably be the last installment of my debate with Rendall that I'll post. Check it out for yourself at FAIR.org. This group is a liberal think tank (I know -- that's an oxymoron) masquerading as a "media watchdog group".
Mr. Rendall.
Thanks for your response. It's not often that you'll find a liberal who even attempts to defend their beliefs or try to back them with facts. Your response falls far short of being factual or mounting much of a defense of your beliefs but at least it's a response which is more than you can say for most liberals who are challenged on their beliefs. The typical response to for the liberal to retort with nasty names. Now, it's time to pick apart you response point by point - with facts.
First of all, I would challenge you to copy and paste my response to your Hannity column into your email program and bold the portions containing the "name calling tirade". The only name I called was a suggestion - in jest - of a more descriptive (and accurate) name for your group. Sorry you can't take a joke. And sorry, calling a liberal a liberal doesn't count as name-calling, even though I'm sure you'd like it to.
Steve Rendall:
Nonsense. You called us "yahoos." Don't tempt me to add "liar" to my perfectly accurate description of you as a name caller.
Secondly, progressive is a term that most people who aren't politically aware don't understand. Most people recognize the word liberal for what it is - liberal, which is why liberals like you mask your bias with the word "progressive". (I don't mind being called a conservative and don't have to obfuscate the label with misleading synonyms.) Combine a misunderstanding of the word "progressive" with the misleading first sentence of your opening paragraph, (FAIR, the national media watch group, has been offering well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986.) and it's easy to see how someone could mistake your group for being unbiased. When I see Jeff Cohen on panel discussions regarding the media on the "conservatively biased" Fox News (which, somehow, despite it's radical conservative bias, manages to find room for Cohen and other "progressives" on their panels) it's in the role of an unbiased critic of the media. Indeed, your very name is misleading. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, implies fairness and accuracy, the definition of which, in any rational person's mind, is an absence of bias.
Steve Rendall:
First of all, I am not a liberal. When it comes to liberals I like to quote Heywood Broun: "liberals are the first ones out of the room when a fight breaks out." In addition, as I was growing up liberal American politicians were prosecuting illegal wars and assassinating and attempting to assassinate foreign leaders (Diem, Lamumba and Castro for starters.)
"Progressive" is an broad term encompassing liberals, democratic socialists, left libertarians and other left leaning tendencies. (Libertarianism originated on the left.)
I'm sorry I don't have time to educate you on the subtleties of U.S. political tendencies, though it's clear that you need educating.
And on Jeff Cohen and Fox News Watch: You haven't the slightest idea what you are talking about. Jeff and Laura Flanders (also of FAIR) were hired to be the left-leaning media critics on the show. If you hadn't figured that out from watching them (they've been off the show for years) you have a real perception problem.
As far as my "AIDS tirade" goes, you mention a "homophobic" (there's a FAIR word) Christian right activist's concerns about the spread of AIDS in a book published in 1989 (and presumably written earlier than that) a time when there were real questions about the spread of AIDS (ask the family of Kimberly Bergalis). Yet the connection I make between questions regarding the spread of this 100% fatal disease and the fact that it's illegal to inquire of the status of someone who is essentially walking around a ticking time bomb, goes right over your head.
Steve Rendall:
Again AIDS is not 100% percent fatal-- besides the significant success of protease inhibitors there have been some sero conversions -- where once sero-positive patients become sero-negative-- that are not entirely understood.
The way the media distort the facts on AIDS (such as your myth that AIDS is not 100% fatal) is certainly "applicable to media criticism work." Your comment on my "AIDS tirade" proves a couple of maxims about liberals. 1) Your (opposing) point is only relevant if a liberal deems it so and 2) because I'm a liberal, whatever I say is true - don't complicate my distortions with facts. The facts are that, while expensive drug cocktails have prolonged life for many AIDS patients in this country and other industrialized nations by as much as 10 years or more, they all eventually die or will die of complications of AIDS. In developing countries in Africa, without these drugs 2.4 million people died of AIDS in 2001 and 28 million or more are infected. As far as heterosexual transmission of AIDS among monogamous partners who don't use IV drugs, it just can't happen unless some other method of transmission that you liberals are loathe to admit ever happens occurs. That's an indisputable fact.
Steve Rendall:
Nice try. On the subject of the impossibility of monogamous heterosexuals contracting HIV, you are trying to slither away from what you wrote in your first note. Here's it is: "Is it FAIR not to point out that the risk of monogamous heterosexuals getting AIDS through sexual contact is non-existent..."
As you see, you made no mention of drug use in that passage. Like I said, nice try. BUT, even by adding the 'drug use' wording your bases are still not covered: Monogamous heterosexuals can contract HIV if their single partner does not act monogamously-- a not uncommon occurrence.
Can you say "oops!"
You really haven't thought nearly deeply enough about this to present any sort of intelligent commentary.
Finally, the idea that the mainstream media is centrist is laughable at best. Examples of liberal bias in the mainstream media abound. I'll deal with this in my next installment of this discussion. As far as the idea that less than five percent of your criticism is dedicated to conservative pundits, that isn't what's reflected in your home page. Of the 19 links to original pieces on FAIR's home page, five of them were dedicated to criticism of O'Reilly, Limbaugh and Hannity. That's better than 25%. Combine that with your use of openly liberal interest groups in a book that nit-picks Limbaugh to death, and you're hardly painting a FAIR or accurate picture. If you're going to have a blatant liberal bias, don't call yourselves FAIR and don't hold yourselves out to be fair and accurate. Because you're neither.
Steve Rendall:
That you cannot muster a single fact to defend Limbaugh against FAIR's copious evidence documenting his falsehoods speaks volumes. You've seen my evidence, don't write back until you have some of your own.
Sincerely, Steve Rendall
Hi Steve,
Here's my latest installment:
Mr. Rendall,
You liberals are humorous. Yes you are a liberal. I'm not interested in your shades of gray nuances about the differences between liberals and I'm not interested in your liberal re-education about the political "subtleties" of liberalism. It's just another way to obfuscate your unpopular political beliefs and transform them into something minimally palatable.
At the risk of sending you of the thin skin off the deep end about another name-calling tirade, I'll tell you that attempting to engage a liberal in meaningful debate is like poking a weak, toothless, clawless old bear with a stick (Hmm, a weak, toothless bear, what an appropriate animal for a liberal mascot). The more you challenge them, the more surly they get, growling and spitting, but never coming up with any substantive response to your goading.
I will ask politely one more time, copy and paste my previous email into your email program and bold the name-calling tirade. You can't because it didn't happen. Another perfect example of "if a liberal says it it must be so and don't try to confuse the issue with facts." If I was as thin-skinned as you (and most other liberals) are, I'd whine about the "name calling tirade" you opened with when you labeled me a name caller in your first response. (I'm really on a tirade now! Not only did I call you a "yahoo" (oooh!), I've now likened you to a toothless bear and called you thin-skinned. You wanted a tirade, you've got a tirade. I won't be as uncivil as to call YOU a liar, but if the shoe fits.)
As far as the AIDS claim goes, it isn't even a nice try on your part and I�m not backing down: AIDS is 100% fatal. Eventually, everyone who contracts full-blown AIDS dies from it or its complications. Being HIV positive is not fatal in all cases and in some cases, people who a re HIV positive, such as Magic Johnson, go into complete remission. But being HIV positive is different from having full-blown AIDS. Again, explain away the rampant epidemic of AIDS in African countries where they don�t have ready access to protease inhibitors and the like.
As far as the monogamous couples deal goes, okay, I didn't explicitly state what I implied -- couples who are monogamous and have no other risk factors cannot get AIDS -- that's a fact. AIDS is still a disease that afflicts primarily homosexual males, people who have unprotected sex with multiple partners and IV drug users -- refute that please.
The Limbaugh thing is a great attempt at liberal slight of hand, but it doesn't counter my point that the idea that FAIR spends less than five percent of it's time critiquing the right is ridiculous. But if you want to bait and switch, I'll go along with you because the topic you switched to is a loser for you as well.
First of all, where is your "copious evidence documenting (Limbaugh's) falsehoods"? It�s certainly not in your book. The fact that you quote a "scientist" from the radical Environmental Defense Fund slamming Limbaugh, isn't evidence that he's wrong. The EDF is comprised of such a bunch of quacks (there I go again on a name-calling tirade) that their top link under "campaigns in the news" urges people to help them keep beating that dead horse global warming. Anyone who is up to speed on the issue can tell you that the theory of man-made global warming has been largely de-bunked (although the media still continue to treat it as irrefutable science). Read this excerpt from an article by James K. Glassman in the site capmag.com:
Lately, some environmentalists, in an effort to win approval for Kyoto-style restrictions, have made radical claims about future warming. Some have pointed to an article published in the journal Nature by Michael Mann and his colleagues, which found that "Northern Hemisphere mean annual temperatures for three of the past eight years are warmer than any other year since [at least] 1400 A.D."
The Mann research is commonly known as the "hockey stick," for the shape of a graph that shows temperatures roughly flat from 1000 through the early 20th century, then rising sharply on the right-hand side, like the blade-end of a hockey stick. The United Nations used Mann's research to declare that "the 1990s has been the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year of the millennium."
A new paper, however, published in the journal Energy and the Environment, repudiates the Mann claims. Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick examined Mann's data and found his research "contains collation errors, unjustifiable truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculation of principal components and other quality control defects."
A new computation, with the errors corrected, discovered that the "late 20th Century is unexceptional compared to the preceding centuries, displaying neither unusually high mean values nor variability." In fact, temperatures were higher during periods in both the 15th and 16th Century than they were in the late 20th Century.
The gradual warming (and cooling) of the earth is a natural cycle and yet your expert �scientist�s� group continues to sound the alarm bell:
The Earth is heating up. By burning fossil fuels and clear-cutting forests, humans are adding carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases to the atmosphere at a perilous rate. The consequences of global warming are potentially catastrophic. But there is hope. You can help to undo global warming.
Do you remember Paul Ehrlich's book the population bomb? According to Ehrlich, most of us should have starved to death by now. And yet there is more per capita food production in the world now than ever before.
Who can forget Carl Sagan standing on the fringes of the flaming Iraqi oil fields during the closing days of Gulf War I and predicting a nuclear winter-like scenario for the region due to the smoke. Did it happen? No.
Quoting someone who comes from the militant environmentalist point of view and would probably identify with the ravings of Erlich and the late Carl Sagan as an unbiased source on the validity of Limbaugh's claims is sloppy (if not dishonest) journalism (there I go again on a name-calling tirade). And please don't try to tell me that Michael Oppenheimer's political views are well known or that the average uninformed Joe is going to be aware of the EDF's political bias cause it just ain't so.
Well, it's time to close this installment, but not before taking issue with you -- again --for your organization's misrepresentation of itself. I've talked to many people of different political stripes over the past couple weeks and asked them what their definition of "fairness and accuracy" as it applies to media criticism is. Everyone has nearly the same answer and that is fair and impartial, covering both sides of the issue. Indeed, that's what you'll find when you look up information on Jeff Cohen's career. The vast majority of citations list him as "media critic" or "recognized as one of the foremost experts in media analysis and criticism". The only clear reference I've found to Jeff Cohen as being a "liberal media critic" is when Eric Burns eludes to Cohen's political bias on the closing comments of the last Fox News Watch Cohen appeared as a regular on (in May of 2002, not "years" ago as you asserted). Most people wouldn't know that the founder of the "media watchdog group" FAIR was an attorney for the ACLU before founding FAIR. And most people wouldn't know that this "media watchdog group" has it's teeth firmly planted in the asses of prominent conservative pundits while being absolutely toothless when it comes to the rabid anti-American vitriol spouted by such people as Michael Moore and many other liberals.
The simple fact of the matter, Mr. Rendall, is that it's not that difficult being a policy analyst for a liberal think-tank masquerading as a "media watchdog group" when the vast majority of the mainstream media share your political bias.
Yours Truly,
Steve Bowers
Read more!
Mr. Rendall.
Thanks for your response. It's not often that you'll find a liberal who even attempts to defend their beliefs or try to back them with facts. Your response falls far short of being factual or mounting much of a defense of your beliefs but at least it's a response which is more than you can say for most liberals who are challenged on their beliefs. The typical response to for the liberal to retort with nasty names. Now, it's time to pick apart you response point by point - with facts.
First of all, I would challenge you to copy and paste my response to your Hannity column into your email program and bold the portions containing the "name calling tirade". The only name I called was a suggestion - in jest - of a more descriptive (and accurate) name for your group. Sorry you can't take a joke. And sorry, calling a liberal a liberal doesn't count as name-calling, even though I'm sure you'd like it to.
Steve Rendall:
Nonsense. You called us "yahoos." Don't tempt me to add "liar" to my perfectly accurate description of you as a name caller.
Secondly, progressive is a term that most people who aren't politically aware don't understand. Most people recognize the word liberal for what it is - liberal, which is why liberals like you mask your bias with the word "progressive". (I don't mind being called a conservative and don't have to obfuscate the label with misleading synonyms.) Combine a misunderstanding of the word "progressive" with the misleading first sentence of your opening paragraph, (FAIR, the national media watch group, has been offering well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986.) and it's easy to see how someone could mistake your group for being unbiased. When I see Jeff Cohen on panel discussions regarding the media on the "conservatively biased" Fox News (which, somehow, despite it's radical conservative bias, manages to find room for Cohen and other "progressives" on their panels) it's in the role of an unbiased critic of the media. Indeed, your very name is misleading. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, implies fairness and accuracy, the definition of which, in any rational person's mind, is an absence of bias.
Steve Rendall:
First of all, I am not a liberal. When it comes to liberals I like to quote Heywood Broun: "liberals are the first ones out of the room when a fight breaks out." In addition, as I was growing up liberal American politicians were prosecuting illegal wars and assassinating and attempting to assassinate foreign leaders (Diem, Lamumba and Castro for starters.)
"Progressive" is an broad term encompassing liberals, democratic socialists, left libertarians and other left leaning tendencies. (Libertarianism originated on the left.)
I'm sorry I don't have time to educate you on the subtleties of U.S. political tendencies, though it's clear that you need educating.
And on Jeff Cohen and Fox News Watch: You haven't the slightest idea what you are talking about. Jeff and Laura Flanders (also of FAIR) were hired to be the left-leaning media critics on the show. If you hadn't figured that out from watching them (they've been off the show for years) you have a real perception problem.
As far as my "AIDS tirade" goes, you mention a "homophobic" (there's a FAIR word) Christian right activist's concerns about the spread of AIDS in a book published in 1989 (and presumably written earlier than that) a time when there were real questions about the spread of AIDS (ask the family of Kimberly Bergalis). Yet the connection I make between questions regarding the spread of this 100% fatal disease and the fact that it's illegal to inquire of the status of someone who is essentially walking around a ticking time bomb, goes right over your head.
Steve Rendall:
Again AIDS is not 100% percent fatal-- besides the significant success of protease inhibitors there have been some sero conversions -- where once sero-positive patients become sero-negative-- that are not entirely understood.
The way the media distort the facts on AIDS (such as your myth that AIDS is not 100% fatal) is certainly "applicable to media criticism work." Your comment on my "AIDS tirade" proves a couple of maxims about liberals. 1) Your (opposing) point is only relevant if a liberal deems it so and 2) because I'm a liberal, whatever I say is true - don't complicate my distortions with facts. The facts are that, while expensive drug cocktails have prolonged life for many AIDS patients in this country and other industrialized nations by as much as 10 years or more, they all eventually die or will die of complications of AIDS. In developing countries in Africa, without these drugs 2.4 million people died of AIDS in 2001 and 28 million or more are infected. As far as heterosexual transmission of AIDS among monogamous partners who don't use IV drugs, it just can't happen unless some other method of transmission that you liberals are loathe to admit ever happens occurs. That's an indisputable fact.
Steve Rendall:
Nice try. On the subject of the impossibility of monogamous heterosexuals contracting HIV, you are trying to slither away from what you wrote in your first note. Here's it is: "Is it FAIR not to point out that the risk of monogamous heterosexuals getting AIDS through sexual contact is non-existent..."
As you see, you made no mention of drug use in that passage. Like I said, nice try. BUT, even by adding the 'drug use' wording your bases are still not covered: Monogamous heterosexuals can contract HIV if their single partner does not act monogamously-- a not uncommon occurrence.
Can you say "oops!"
You really haven't thought nearly deeply enough about this to present any sort of intelligent commentary.
Finally, the idea that the mainstream media is centrist is laughable at best. Examples of liberal bias in the mainstream media abound. I'll deal with this in my next installment of this discussion. As far as the idea that less than five percent of your criticism is dedicated to conservative pundits, that isn't what's reflected in your home page. Of the 19 links to original pieces on FAIR's home page, five of them were dedicated to criticism of O'Reilly, Limbaugh and Hannity. That's better than 25%. Combine that with your use of openly liberal interest groups in a book that nit-picks Limbaugh to death, and you're hardly painting a FAIR or accurate picture. If you're going to have a blatant liberal bias, don't call yourselves FAIR and don't hold yourselves out to be fair and accurate. Because you're neither.
Steve Rendall:
That you cannot muster a single fact to defend Limbaugh against FAIR's copious evidence documenting his falsehoods speaks volumes. You've seen my evidence, don't write back until you have some of your own.
Sincerely, Steve Rendall
Hi Steve,
Here's my latest installment:
Mr. Rendall,
You liberals are humorous. Yes you are a liberal. I'm not interested in your shades of gray nuances about the differences between liberals and I'm not interested in your liberal re-education about the political "subtleties" of liberalism. It's just another way to obfuscate your unpopular political beliefs and transform them into something minimally palatable.
At the risk of sending you of the thin skin off the deep end about another name-calling tirade, I'll tell you that attempting to engage a liberal in meaningful debate is like poking a weak, toothless, clawless old bear with a stick (Hmm, a weak, toothless bear, what an appropriate animal for a liberal mascot). The more you challenge them, the more surly they get, growling and spitting, but never coming up with any substantive response to your goading.
I will ask politely one more time, copy and paste my previous email into your email program and bold the name-calling tirade. You can't because it didn't happen. Another perfect example of "if a liberal says it it must be so and don't try to confuse the issue with facts." If I was as thin-skinned as you (and most other liberals) are, I'd whine about the "name calling tirade" you opened with when you labeled me a name caller in your first response. (I'm really on a tirade now! Not only did I call you a "yahoo" (oooh!), I've now likened you to a toothless bear and called you thin-skinned. You wanted a tirade, you've got a tirade. I won't be as uncivil as to call YOU a liar, but if the shoe fits.)
As far as the AIDS claim goes, it isn't even a nice try on your part and I�m not backing down: AIDS is 100% fatal. Eventually, everyone who contracts full-blown AIDS dies from it or its complications. Being HIV positive is not fatal in all cases and in some cases, people who a re HIV positive, such as Magic Johnson, go into complete remission. But being HIV positive is different from having full-blown AIDS. Again, explain away the rampant epidemic of AIDS in African countries where they don�t have ready access to protease inhibitors and the like.
As far as the monogamous couples deal goes, okay, I didn't explicitly state what I implied -- couples who are monogamous and have no other risk factors cannot get AIDS -- that's a fact. AIDS is still a disease that afflicts primarily homosexual males, people who have unprotected sex with multiple partners and IV drug users -- refute that please.
The Limbaugh thing is a great attempt at liberal slight of hand, but it doesn't counter my point that the idea that FAIR spends less than five percent of it's time critiquing the right is ridiculous. But if you want to bait and switch, I'll go along with you because the topic you switched to is a loser for you as well.
First of all, where is your "copious evidence documenting (Limbaugh's) falsehoods"? It�s certainly not in your book. The fact that you quote a "scientist" from the radical Environmental Defense Fund slamming Limbaugh, isn't evidence that he's wrong. The EDF is comprised of such a bunch of quacks (there I go again on a name-calling tirade) that their top link under "campaigns in the news" urges people to help them keep beating that dead horse global warming. Anyone who is up to speed on the issue can tell you that the theory of man-made global warming has been largely de-bunked (although the media still continue to treat it as irrefutable science). Read this excerpt from an article by James K. Glassman in the site capmag.com:
Lately, some environmentalists, in an effort to win approval for Kyoto-style restrictions, have made radical claims about future warming. Some have pointed to an article published in the journal Nature by Michael Mann and his colleagues, which found that "Northern Hemisphere mean annual temperatures for three of the past eight years are warmer than any other year since [at least] 1400 A.D."
The Mann research is commonly known as the "hockey stick," for the shape of a graph that shows temperatures roughly flat from 1000 through the early 20th century, then rising sharply on the right-hand side, like the blade-end of a hockey stick. The United Nations used Mann's research to declare that "the 1990s has been the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year of the millennium."
A new paper, however, published in the journal Energy and the Environment, repudiates the Mann claims. Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick examined Mann's data and found his research "contains collation errors, unjustifiable truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculation of principal components and other quality control defects."
A new computation, with the errors corrected, discovered that the "late 20th Century is unexceptional compared to the preceding centuries, displaying neither unusually high mean values nor variability." In fact, temperatures were higher during periods in both the 15th and 16th Century than they were in the late 20th Century.
The gradual warming (and cooling) of the earth is a natural cycle and yet your expert �scientist�s� group continues to sound the alarm bell:
The Earth is heating up. By burning fossil fuels and clear-cutting forests, humans are adding carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases to the atmosphere at a perilous rate. The consequences of global warming are potentially catastrophic. But there is hope. You can help to undo global warming.
Do you remember Paul Ehrlich's book the population bomb? According to Ehrlich, most of us should have starved to death by now. And yet there is more per capita food production in the world now than ever before.
Who can forget Carl Sagan standing on the fringes of the flaming Iraqi oil fields during the closing days of Gulf War I and predicting a nuclear winter-like scenario for the region due to the smoke. Did it happen? No.
Quoting someone who comes from the militant environmentalist point of view and would probably identify with the ravings of Erlich and the late Carl Sagan as an unbiased source on the validity of Limbaugh's claims is sloppy (if not dishonest) journalism (there I go again on a name-calling tirade). And please don't try to tell me that Michael Oppenheimer's political views are well known or that the average uninformed Joe is going to be aware of the EDF's political bias cause it just ain't so.
Well, it's time to close this installment, but not before taking issue with you -- again --for your organization's misrepresentation of itself. I've talked to many people of different political stripes over the past couple weeks and asked them what their definition of "fairness and accuracy" as it applies to media criticism is. Everyone has nearly the same answer and that is fair and impartial, covering both sides of the issue. Indeed, that's what you'll find when you look up information on Jeff Cohen's career. The vast majority of citations list him as "media critic" or "recognized as one of the foremost experts in media analysis and criticism". The only clear reference I've found to Jeff Cohen as being a "liberal media critic" is when Eric Burns eludes to Cohen's political bias on the closing comments of the last Fox News Watch Cohen appeared as a regular on (in May of 2002, not "years" ago as you asserted). Most people wouldn't know that the founder of the "media watchdog group" FAIR was an attorney for the ACLU before founding FAIR. And most people wouldn't know that this "media watchdog group" has it's teeth firmly planted in the asses of prominent conservative pundits while being absolutely toothless when it comes to the rabid anti-American vitriol spouted by such people as Michael Moore and many other liberals.
The simple fact of the matter, Mr. Rendall, is that it's not that difficult being a policy analyst for a liberal think-tank masquerading as a "media watchdog group" when the vast majority of the mainstream media share your political bias.
Yours Truly,
Steve Bowers
Read more!
Tuesday, December 09, 2003
Steve Rendall Responds ... and I Respond Back
The latest correspondence between myself and Steve Rendall, a Senior Analyst for the misnamed liberal group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR):
Dear Mr. Bowers.
As a name caller you really aren't entitled to a reasoned response, but I found so many misapprehensions in your note that I couldn't resist correcting them. Among your errors...
* You wrote: "you purport not to have a political bias." Where do we purport that? Answer: We don't, your statement is false. I would suggest that next time you decide to attack a group with a name calling tirade, that you take the time to learn a few basic, easily-found facts about the group. We state our left-of-center point of view right up front. In our prominently displayed mission statement, "What is FAIR," we proclaim ourselves "progressive". http://www.fair.org/whats-fair.html
* Your AIDS tirade is ridden with errors of fact and mostly not applicable to media criticism work. For instance, your beef with those arguing that people with AIDS should not have to disclose their illness, has virtually nothing to do with media criticism. Your claim that AIDS is "100% fatal" is false, as is your statement that "the risk of monogamous heterosexuals getting AIDS through sexual contact is non-existent."
* You say that we spend a lot of time "slamming" conservative pundits (I wonder if you would use the same verb to describe conservative criticism of liberal pundits?) But you are wrong again, less than 5% of our media analysis and criticism is directed at the right, most of the rest targets the largely centrist mainstream media.
* You say we *attempted* to discredit Limbaugh. This is more a question of opinion than fact, but I think Limbaugh was substantially discredited by our work. I could show many examples (e.g after our report David Letterman dubbed Limbaugh "The Lyin' King") but here's one of my favorites: after comparing our original report on Limbaugh, to Rush's "rebuttal" to our report, Limbaugh's favorite daily, the Washington Times, gave FAIR the higher marks.
Mr. Bowers, you are free to believe Limbaugh's falsehoods. You may agree with Rush that the NY Times never published a story on Whitewater (the Times BROKE the Whitewater story), or that Iran Contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh never handed down a single indictment (he delivered 14). But no one should believe you if you do.
Finally, your accusation that the sources we used to debunk Limbaugh are less reliable than Limbaugh, cannot be taken seriously. If you were serious you would have cite errors on the part of our sources. Until you are able to show evidence debunking our work and the reliability of our sources, your charges are simply empty and meaningless.
Thanks for your interest.
Sincerely,
Steve Rendall
Senior Analyst
FAIR
Mr. Rendall.
Thanks for your response. It’s not often that you’ll find a liberal who even attempts to defend their beliefs or try to back them with facts. Your response falls far short of being factual or mounting much of a defense of your beliefs but at least it’s a response which is more than you can say for most liberals who are challenged on their beliefs. The typical response to for the liberal to retort with nasty names. Now, it’s time to pick apart you response point by point – with facts.
First of all, I would challenge you to copy and paste my response to your Hannity column into your email program and bold the portions containing the “name calling tirade”. The only name I called was a suggestion – in jest – of a more descriptive (and accurate) name for your group. Sorry you can’t take a joke. And sorry, calling a liberal a liberal doesn’t count as name-calling, even though I’m sure you’d like it to.
Secondly, progressive is a term that most people who aren’t politically aware don’t understand. Most people recognize the word liberal for what it is – liberal, which is why liberals like you mask your bias with the word “progressive”. (I don’t mind being called a conservative and don’t have to obfuscate the label with misleading synonyms.) Combine a misunderstanding of the word “progressive” with the misleading first sentence of your opening paragraph, (FAIR, the national media watch group, has been offering well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986.) and it’s easy to see how someone could mistake your group for being unbiased. When I see Jeff Cohen on panel discussions regarding the media on the “conservatively biased” Fox News (which, somehow, despite it’s radical conservative bias, manages to find room for Cohen and other “progressives” on their panels) it’s in the role of an unbiased critic of the media. Indeed, your very name is misleading. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, implies fairness and accuracy, the definition of which, in any rational person’s mind, is an absence of bias.
As far as my “AIDS tirade” goes, you mention a “homophobic” (there’s a FAIR word) Christian right activist’s concerns about the spread of AIDS in a book published in 1989 (and presumably written earlier than that) a time when there were real questions about the spread of AIDS (ask the family of Kimberly Bergalis). Yet the connection I make between questions regarding the spread of this 100% fatal disease and the fact that it’s illegal to inquire of the status of someone who is essentially walking around a ticking time bomb, goes right over your head. The way the media distort the facts on AIDS (such as your myth that AIDS is not 100% fatal) is certainly “applicable to media criticism work.” Your comment on my “AIDS tirade” proves a couple of maxims about liberals. 1) Your (opposing) point is only relevant if a liberal deems it so and 2) because I’m a liberal, whatever I say is true – don’t complicate my distortions with facts. The facts are that, while expensive drug cocktails have prolonged life for many AIDS patients in this country and other industrialized nations by as much as 10 years or more, they all eventually die or will die of complications of AIDS. In developing countries in Africa, without these drugs 2.4 million people died of AIDS in 2001 and 28 million or more are infected. As far as heterosexual transmission of AIDS among monogamous partners who don’t use IV drugs, it just can’t happen unless some other method of transmission that you liberals are loathe to admit ever happens occurs. That’s an indisputable fact.
Finally, the idea that the mainstream media is centrist is laughable at best. Examples of liberal bias in the mainstream media abound. I’ll deal with this in my next installment of this discussion. As far as the idea that less than five percent of your criticism is dedicated to conservative pundits, that isn’t what’s reflected in your home page. Of the 19 links to original pieces on FAIR’s home page, five of them were dedicated to criticism of O’Reilly, Limbaugh and Hannity. That’s better than 25%. Combine that with your use of openly liberal interest groups in a book that nit-picks Limbaugh to death, and you’re hardly painting a FAIR or accurate picture. If you’re going to have a blatant liberal bias, don’t call yourselves FAIR and don’t hold yourselves out to be fair and accurate. Because you’re neither.
Yours truly,
Steve Bowers
Read more!
Dear Mr. Bowers.
As a name caller you really aren't entitled to a reasoned response, but I found so many misapprehensions in your note that I couldn't resist correcting them. Among your errors...
* You wrote: "you purport not to have a political bias." Where do we purport that? Answer: We don't, your statement is false. I would suggest that next time you decide to attack a group with a name calling tirade, that you take the time to learn a few basic, easily-found facts about the group. We state our left-of-center point of view right up front. In our prominently displayed mission statement, "What is FAIR," we proclaim ourselves "progressive". http://www.fair.org/whats-fair.html
* Your AIDS tirade is ridden with errors of fact and mostly not applicable to media criticism work. For instance, your beef with those arguing that people with AIDS should not have to disclose their illness, has virtually nothing to do with media criticism. Your claim that AIDS is "100% fatal" is false, as is your statement that "the risk of monogamous heterosexuals getting AIDS through sexual contact is non-existent."
* You say that we spend a lot of time "slamming" conservative pundits (I wonder if you would use the same verb to describe conservative criticism of liberal pundits?) But you are wrong again, less than 5% of our media analysis and criticism is directed at the right, most of the rest targets the largely centrist mainstream media.
* You say we *attempted* to discredit Limbaugh. This is more a question of opinion than fact, but I think Limbaugh was substantially discredited by our work. I could show many examples (e.g after our report David Letterman dubbed Limbaugh "The Lyin' King") but here's one of my favorites: after comparing our original report on Limbaugh, to Rush's "rebuttal" to our report, Limbaugh's favorite daily, the Washington Times, gave FAIR the higher marks.
Mr. Bowers, you are free to believe Limbaugh's falsehoods. You may agree with Rush that the NY Times never published a story on Whitewater (the Times BROKE the Whitewater story), or that Iran Contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh never handed down a single indictment (he delivered 14). But no one should believe you if you do.
Finally, your accusation that the sources we used to debunk Limbaugh are less reliable than Limbaugh, cannot be taken seriously. If you were serious you would have cite errors on the part of our sources. Until you are able to show evidence debunking our work and the reliability of our sources, your charges are simply empty and meaningless.
Thanks for your interest.
Sincerely,
Steve Rendall
Senior Analyst
FAIR
Mr. Rendall.
Thanks for your response. It’s not often that you’ll find a liberal who even attempts to defend their beliefs or try to back them with facts. Your response falls far short of being factual or mounting much of a defense of your beliefs but at least it’s a response which is more than you can say for most liberals who are challenged on their beliefs. The typical response to for the liberal to retort with nasty names. Now, it’s time to pick apart you response point by point – with facts.
First of all, I would challenge you to copy and paste my response to your Hannity column into your email program and bold the portions containing the “name calling tirade”. The only name I called was a suggestion – in jest – of a more descriptive (and accurate) name for your group. Sorry you can’t take a joke. And sorry, calling a liberal a liberal doesn’t count as name-calling, even though I’m sure you’d like it to.
Secondly, progressive is a term that most people who aren’t politically aware don’t understand. Most people recognize the word liberal for what it is – liberal, which is why liberals like you mask your bias with the word “progressive”. (I don’t mind being called a conservative and don’t have to obfuscate the label with misleading synonyms.) Combine a misunderstanding of the word “progressive” with the misleading first sentence of your opening paragraph, (FAIR, the national media watch group, has been offering well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986.) and it’s easy to see how someone could mistake your group for being unbiased. When I see Jeff Cohen on panel discussions regarding the media on the “conservatively biased” Fox News (which, somehow, despite it’s radical conservative bias, manages to find room for Cohen and other “progressives” on their panels) it’s in the role of an unbiased critic of the media. Indeed, your very name is misleading. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, implies fairness and accuracy, the definition of which, in any rational person’s mind, is an absence of bias.
As far as my “AIDS tirade” goes, you mention a “homophobic” (there’s a FAIR word) Christian right activist’s concerns about the spread of AIDS in a book published in 1989 (and presumably written earlier than that) a time when there were real questions about the spread of AIDS (ask the family of Kimberly Bergalis). Yet the connection I make between questions regarding the spread of this 100% fatal disease and the fact that it’s illegal to inquire of the status of someone who is essentially walking around a ticking time bomb, goes right over your head. The way the media distort the facts on AIDS (such as your myth that AIDS is not 100% fatal) is certainly “applicable to media criticism work.” Your comment on my “AIDS tirade” proves a couple of maxims about liberals. 1) Your (opposing) point is only relevant if a liberal deems it so and 2) because I’m a liberal, whatever I say is true – don’t complicate my distortions with facts. The facts are that, while expensive drug cocktails have prolonged life for many AIDS patients in this country and other industrialized nations by as much as 10 years or more, they all eventually die or will die of complications of AIDS. In developing countries in Africa, without these drugs 2.4 million people died of AIDS in 2001 and 28 million or more are infected. As far as heterosexual transmission of AIDS among monogamous partners who don’t use IV drugs, it just can’t happen unless some other method of transmission that you liberals are loathe to admit ever happens occurs. That’s an indisputable fact.
Finally, the idea that the mainstream media is centrist is laughable at best. Examples of liberal bias in the mainstream media abound. I’ll deal with this in my next installment of this discussion. As far as the idea that less than five percent of your criticism is dedicated to conservative pundits, that isn’t what’s reflected in your home page. Of the 19 links to original pieces on FAIR’s home page, five of them were dedicated to criticism of O’Reilly, Limbaugh and Hannity. That’s better than 25%. Combine that with your use of openly liberal interest groups in a book that nit-picks Limbaugh to death, and you’re hardly painting a FAIR or accurate picture. If you’re going to have a blatant liberal bias, don’t call yourselves FAIR and don’t hold yourselves out to be fair and accurate. Because you’re neither.
Yours truly,
Steve Bowers
Read more!
Friday, December 05, 2003
Carl Be Smokin' Some Crack!
Nathaniel Jones apparently wasn't the only one on PCP and coke. It would seem like Carl Parrott, the Hamilton County coroner, is too. Here's what he had to say about the death of a morbidly obese black man on coke and PCP (according to a CBS news report):
Hamilton County Coroner Carl Parrott said his autopsy showed that Jones suffered from an enlarged heart, obesity and had intoxicating levels of cocaine, PCP and methanol in his blood.
Parrott said the death will be ruled a homicide, but that such a ruling "should not be interpreted as implying inappropriate behavior or the use of excessive force by police." (Just what the hell is this bit of illogic supposed to mean? Either someone caused his death intentionally (a homicide) or they didn't. Isn't this an admission that this was NOT a homicide?)
Jones' body had bruising on the lower half, but did not show signs of blows to the head or organ damage, Parrott said.
The coroner said he had to rule the death a homicide because it didn't fall under other categories of a death in Ohio: accident, suicide or natural. (So we're supposed to believe that the death of a grotesquely obese man with a bad heart and high levels of three dangerous drugs in his system after super-human exertion isn't a natural or expected outcome?)
Jones' death certificate will list a cause of death as an irregular heart beat because of a stress reaction from the violent struggle, Parrott said.
Who was responsible for the violent struggle???? Anyone who sees the WHOLE tape and hears the WHOLE transcript knows that the racist bigot black man on PCP and coke was responsible for the violent struggle. Better call it suicide, Carl. All the cops were trying to do was subdue an angry 350-pound black man on PCP in the most professional manner possible. This guy killed himself. What are you on Carl????????
And yet here's what the purposely-deluded race baiters have to say about it according to the same CBS news report:
"Another black man has been killed at the hands of the Cincinnati police, but it's nothing new," said one man. "The city is divided, black and white, but the blacks always die."
If we continue to have people in our society who are consumed by the type of colossal ignorance demonstrated by this statement, we won’t survive as a society for a whole lot longer.
Read more!
Hamilton County Coroner Carl Parrott said his autopsy showed that Jones suffered from an enlarged heart, obesity and had intoxicating levels of cocaine, PCP and methanol in his blood.
Parrott said the death will be ruled a homicide, but that such a ruling "should not be interpreted as implying inappropriate behavior or the use of excessive force by police." (Just what the hell is this bit of illogic supposed to mean? Either someone caused his death intentionally (a homicide) or they didn't. Isn't this an admission that this was NOT a homicide?)
Jones' body had bruising on the lower half, but did not show signs of blows to the head or organ damage, Parrott said.
The coroner said he had to rule the death a homicide because it didn't fall under other categories of a death in Ohio: accident, suicide or natural. (So we're supposed to believe that the death of a grotesquely obese man with a bad heart and high levels of three dangerous drugs in his system after super-human exertion isn't a natural or expected outcome?)
Jones' death certificate will list a cause of death as an irregular heart beat because of a stress reaction from the violent struggle, Parrott said.
Who was responsible for the violent struggle???? Anyone who sees the WHOLE tape and hears the WHOLE transcript knows that the racist bigot black man on PCP and coke was responsible for the violent struggle. Better call it suicide, Carl. All the cops were trying to do was subdue an angry 350-pound black man on PCP in the most professional manner possible. This guy killed himself. What are you on Carl????????
And yet here's what the purposely-deluded race baiters have to say about it according to the same CBS news report:
"Another black man has been killed at the hands of the Cincinnati police, but it's nothing new," said one man. "The city is divided, black and white, but the blacks always die."
If we continue to have people in our society who are consumed by the type of colossal ignorance demonstrated by this statement, we won’t survive as a society for a whole lot longer.
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