When the Times Square bomb was discovered, the usual suspects in the press once again showed us how objective they really are. Geraldo Rivera, keen to outdo Keith Olbermann in the irrelevance department, blamed it all on white people, racists and conservative extremists (which are all the same thing to Jerry Rivers, apparently). And Katie Couric interviewed tiny but autocratic New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg who ventured a guess that the bomber would turn out to be: “Someone home-grown, a mentally deranged person or somebody with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health-care bill or something.” Couric didn’t even blink or question that.

Why would she?  It fit the narrative.

And let’s not forget MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer, who revealed her frustration that the suspect is an Islamic terrorist. The horror!

I mean the thing is that — and I get frustrated and there was part of me that was hoping this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country because there are a lot of people who want to use this terrorist intent to justify writing off people who believe in a certain way or come from certain countries or whose skin color is a certain way. I mean they use it as justification for really outdated bigotry.

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There’s an old saying that when you scratch a person you see what lies beneath their skin. People are defined under pressure. The press, the Administration and its allies are under pressure and what we’re seeing under their skin is something similar to the scaled aliens in the TV show “V”. The methods being employed in recent days is borderline fascist. Take that Frank Rich.

There’s an attempt to brand any dissenters of this administration as being crazed and dangerous radicals. CBS made the claim that the Tea Party is made up almost entirely of older white people, which is media code for “racist”. Apparently, having a group of white people is equal to the Klan or a Nazi march. Which is fascinating because CBS, MSNBC, et al. are groups made up mostly of older white people. Bust out the schnapps!

Of course, CBS has a poor record of polling, as theirs tends to be skewed. Gallup did a poll of Tea Partiers that found they were very close to the American mainstream except for having fewer Democrats. And this is what scares the establishment. The mainstream is against them. So they’ve decided to attack the Tea Party — and, by extension, ordinary Americans — as never before. (more…)

In this morning’s Washington Post, ombudsman Andrew Alexander made the argument that “Allegations of spitting and slurs at Capitol protest merit more reporting.” This is zombie-mediaese for “we have to keep discrediting critics of this administration at all costs!”

An ombudsman is described as “a person who acts as a trusted intermediary between an organization and some internal or external constituency while representing the broad scope of constituent interests.” But here we see that the only interest being put forth is one that serves the Democrat establishment.

Alexander made the embarrassing claim that:

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II, a black Democrat from Missouri, said a protester spit on him. Rep. Barney Frank, the openly gay Democrat from Massachusetts, was heckled with anti-gay slurs. Two black Democrats, Reps. André Carson of Indiana and John Lewis of Georgia, said protesters subjected them to racial epithets. The episodes were recounted for days in Post stories and columns. Much blame was directed at Tea Party activists.

It’s embarrassing for the Post because there were a plethora of camera crews videotaping the alleged incident and not one tape has come forth validating this claim. In fact, Andrew Breitbart has offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who has a video showing that the “N-word” was used. There have been no takers. Do you really think the media wouldn’t be showing such a tape 24/7 if it actually existed? (more…)

We use the power of persuasion first. If it doesn’t work, we try the persuasion of power.                 – Andy Stern, SEIU

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

There are only two kinds of government. Limited Government (LG) which limits the powers of the people at the top, which limits their ability to corrupt the system, and Big Government (BG) which is designed so a small elite group at the top reap all the benefits of a society and there is no limit on what they can do with their power.

All the names for forms of government like socialism, communism, fascism, etc. are merely definitions of style. BG systems all eventually drift toward some form of tyranny until they collapse from their own corruption or revolution. The most successful and stable form of government in modern times is the LG federalist model of the United States. But that has been corrupted, and now is changing into a BG system where it is doomed to fail unless events change it back.

I’ve tried to cover the history as much as I could in the limited space I had, but today I want to explore what it all means. First I highly recommend two documentaries that will help put a lot of things in perspective if you haven’t seen them. They were both made by Adam Curtis, a British film maker. The first is The Century of Self which talks about how elites have used psychology to help manufacture consent. The other is The Trap which talks about how liberal thinking helped create the nightmare bureaucratic world we live in today. Curtis has a leftward tilt, but he’s even-handed. The information he relates is well worth your time. (more…)

“If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, not your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”                –Samuel Adams, 1776

Part 1: A Primer, Part 2: Foundation, Part 3: Execution

You would think that everyone wants to be free. You would think no one wants to be ruled by tyrants of any kind. Yet many people in the so-called free world are not only selling themselves out, they are selling out the rest of us, and our descendants. And so many of them don’t even know they’re doing it. They’ve been lied to. Tricked, fooled, played. And the agents of statism intend to keep it that way.

For 100 years the Big Government (BG) loving statists have been trying to convert the bottom-up United States into top-down society. They have managed to bring it very far along this course. There are still some matters they have to resolve, but they are closer than they ever have been. They never sought to win through insurrection because war is too costly and the results of any conflict are unpredictable. They used an approach the Nazis did to great effect in Germany. They gamed the system.

Like our progressive statists, the Nazis came to power legally. They got elected and then, once in positions of authority, corrupted the system and turned it into what they wanted. The old fascists did this in a short amount of time because Germany did not have a LG constitution like the US. Our system makes it very hard to turn the state into an autocratic dictatorship. Those progressives of the ’30s, who were at first enamored of the Fascists in Europe, wanted to take over the US in the same fashion. They had been doing it since Teddy Roosevelt was elected. Roosevelt began a war on corporations, including a bizarre crusade against Coca-Cola. It would echo later crusades by politicians against American industries, demonizing them and making them out to be evil incarnate. (more…)

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”
– Alexis de Tocqueville

In part one we discussed how there are only two forms of government. In part two we discussed the history of those two forms. Now we’re going to discuss how the BG (Big Government, aka statist) types have infected our political system.

We’ve all heard the sordid history of Communism and hard socialist countries, which are all totalitarian dictatorships. Nations like North Korea and Zimbabwe are economic basket cases which have famines and moribund economies; police states in which human rights are non-existent. Cuba keeps its citizens prisoner and rations food. These are just a few examples of what happens when BG systems are taken to their extremes.

Human beings operate mostly out of self interest. BG systems allow an elite class to have complete control over every aspect of the public’s lives. Those who love power love to abuse it. (more…)

On November 5, Major Nidal Hasan, an Army Psychiatrist, walked into the Solider Readiness Center in Fort Hood, Texas and shot 43 people. Thirteen died. While he fired at them he shouted Allahu Akbar, like a stereotypical Muslim terrorist. The military should have known it was coming. He had given away all his worldly goods beforehand. He’d been in contact with radical Muslim extremeists for months including Anwar al-Awlaki, an Imam known as the “Bin Laden of the internet.”

Naturally, the first reaction from the authorities was to tell everyone not to leap to conclusions. And of course, for days afterward they were saying it wasn’t a terrorist incident. Who can forget President Obama’s reaction to the shooting, giving a shout out to someone with a smile on his face before dealing with the matter as if, “Oh yeah, there were some people shot in Texas.”

The government bent over backwards to try to make it out to be a lone nut incident and there was no mention of Islam in the Army’s initial 86-page report.

When the facts came out it was revealed that the military already knew Hasan was a risk and did nothing out of political correctness, it created quite a stir. People had to die before the military would look at how absurd its policies have been. Apparently, they need to look into them some more: (more…)

In part one, we revealed there are only two kinds of government when you strip away all the smoke and mirrors. Big Government (BG) or Limited Government (LG). Or as we will see in this chapter, “top down” or “bottom up.” The choice you make determines if you support freedom or slavery. Today we’re going to talk about why in more detail.

To start, I need to say that this chapter explores the role of religion as a tool of statecraft. It’s going to discuss how rulers use religion to get what they want. It is not a comment on the merits of any religion, just on how it’s been used.

The earliest form of government is the tribe. The tribe had a chief of some kind who made all the big decisions. The tribe went out and gathered resources and the chief got the pick of the spoils. This system was expanded as civilization grew into villages, towns and cities. There was one person at the top, a ruler. Below them was his support group, a court. And they were the major beneficiaries of whatever wealth the society created. Everyone below them got diminishing returns. This system is still in use today in varying forms. It’s called a top down system. BG systems are all top down no matter how they try to spin it.

In order to motivate the people to agree to this arrangement, the rulers used soldiers to impose their will. But even an army isn’t enough to keep people in line. These rulers needed them to perform well, to be focused on producing goods to benefit the state. So they used the earliest form of ideology: religion. (more…)

This time last year many media pundits were loudly declaring that this may be the end of the Republican party. The polls seemed to back that up. Almost every demographic was going against them.

What a difference a year makes. The once triumphant Democrats are now staring into a political abyss. And many of them are taking to the lifeboats before they go down with the ship.

Every political year politicians retire. Some of them “retire.” 14 Republicans are leaving office this year. But the story with the Democrats is much more interesting.

Evan Bayh has announced he’s retiring. The Senator from Indiana was very popular in his state. He was ahead by twenty points in the polls until a recent Rassmussen poll, taken after the Scott Brown election in MA, had him trailing congressman Mike Pence 47%-44% and leading  congressman John Hostettler by only 45%-41%. These two were planning to run against him in the fall. Bayh cited a lot of reasons for leaving, how politics in the House were trumping getting things done. That’s basically saying he doesn’t want to be associated with the current mess. (more…)

In researching my article on “Rubber Room” teachers, who are paid not to teach after being accused of a crime, I came across some information that deserves further discussion. The problem is much worse than the media would have you believe.

The teachers in these programs are the ones who managed to escape prosecution but are considered too great a risk to be allowed to return to teaching. Or else they’re the accused waiting for judgment. Or they’re people the schools can’t get rid of due to tenure deals.

In 2004, Hofstra University professor Dr. Carol Shakeshaft published a report for the United States Department of Education titled “Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature.” It was presented to Congress as part of the No Child Left Behind Act. In it, Shakeshaft stated:

As a group, these studies present a wide range of estimates of the percentage of U.S. students subject to sexual misconduct by school staff and vary from 3.7 to 50.3 percent. Because of its carefully drawn sample and survey methodology, the AAUW report that nearly 9.6 percent of students are targets of educator sexual misconduct sometime during their school career presents the most accurate data available at this time. (more…)

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is in a bit of a quandary. People have learned that global warming is a scam so they’re trying to reshuffle the deck chairs to see if that’ll save the Titanic.

Readers of the Times and the Telegraph are watching the IPCC’s credibility disappear before their eyes. The former head of IPCC has publicly said the organization risks losing all credibility if it can’t clean up its act. The head of the largest British funder of environmental research has joined the head of Greenpeace UK in criticizing the IPCC. The Dutch government has demanded that the IPCC correct its erroneous assertion that half of the Netherlands is below sea level. Actually, it’s only about a quarter. A prediction about the impact of sea level increases on people living in the Nile Delta was taken from an unpublished student dissertation. The report contained inaccurate data about generating energy from waves and about the cost of nuclear power (this information was apparently taken without being checked directly from a website supported by the nuclear power industry). The deeply environmentalist Guardian carries a story documenting the decline in both public and Conservative Party confidence in the need to address global warming.

So the IPCC is looking to redo how it fabricates gathers data. After all, there are billions of dollars at stake. Global Warming is a huge business. Nothing rings the scam register more than guilt gelt. The problem with the whole AGW pitch is it’s based on logical fallacies and computer models written on false assumptions, namely that CO2 is causing climate change. Be sure to watch the following clip, in which Lord Monckton eviscerates Al Gore and the other global-warming hoaxers who refuse to come out of their holes and fight like men:

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“My dear brothers, never forget, when you hear the progress of enlightenment vaunted, that the devil’s best trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist!”

Charles Baudelaire, Le Joueur généreux, February 7, 1864

Forget everything you think you know about politics. It is probably wrong.

There is no left or right. Communist, Socialist, Liberal, Conservative, Progressive, Democrat, Republican, those are all meaningless terms. They are used to confuse people so they miss the point. The most important point about politics there is. There are only two schools of political thought and they have predictable results. All the names and labels for them are just smoke and mirrors.

Political ideology is designed by elites to trick the masses into doing what they want. Each side tells you something designed to get your emotions going so they can play you. They get you to agree to give them more power, money and control over your lives by telling you some kind of story.

We need to put that vicious cycle to an end. It’s time to understand what their real goals are. But to free your mind, you need to be educated first. Only by seeing the road ahead can you avoid tripping on stones or falling off cliffs.

There are only two real political choices to make. And it has nothing to do with parties. It has to do with core beliefs. You are for one side or another. These sides are diametrically opposed. The best way I can describe the two choices is, freedom or slavery. That is what it boils down to. And the slave in question is you.

Do you want to be a slave or a free person? It’s your choice. (more…)

Imagine if you could get full salary and benefits for a decent paying job and you didn’t have to work to get it. All you had to do was be accused of a crime.

What crime, you ask? How about molesting school kids? That’s what the teachers‘ unions in states like California and New York State are doing: coddling accused criminals — at your expense. And it’s probably going on elsewhere as well.

Believe it or not, New York is a lot tougher on them than California. From the New York Post:

At the beginning of his 32-year career as a math teacher in Queens, Francisco Olivares allegedly im pregnated and married a 16-year-old girl he had met when she was a 13-year-old student at his Corona junior high, IS 61, the Post learned.

He sexually molested two 12-year-old pupils a decade later and another student four years after that, the city Department of Education charged. But none of it kept Olivares, 60, from collecting his $94,154 salary.

He hasn’t set foot in a classroom in seven years since beating criminal and disciplinary charges. Chancellor Joel Klein keeps Olivares in a “rubber room,” a district office where teachers accused of misconduct sit all day with nothing to do. (more…)

California has long had the reputation of being trend-setter to the nation. The Golden State was practicing Obamanomics back when Barack was still called Barry. And now its ways are catching up to it like a hard partier who looks in the mirror one day and sees the portrait of Dorian Gray staring back at him.

Get ready America: California’s unsustainable path is echoed by the federal government. One will crash before the other, giving us all a preview of things to come.

Part of what is slowly destroying California is its move from a land of plenty to a land of locusts. The state taxes and regulates resident companies to such an extreme extent it has driven many of them, and many tax-paying citizens, to other states. For decades California was a place to migrate to. Now it’s suffering an exodus. The fault lies in a political shift from being a conservative, low- tax state to a statist, high-tax nanny state. Californians used to be the freest people in the United States and the world, and now? Not so much. (more…)

A major provision of the “Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002″, aka McCain-Feingold, was largely dismissed by the Supreme Court on January 21, 2010. President Obama’s reaction was swift and almost comically over the top.

With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans. This ruling gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington–while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates. That’s why I am instructing my Administration to get to work immediately with Congress on this issue. We are going to talk with bipartisan Congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision. The public interest requires nothing less.

Uh-oh! Whenever they use the term “bipartisan” you know they’re trying to sucker us. It’s become as transparent as their disingenuous names for bills like the so called “Stimulus” which was supposed to fund “shovel ready jobs” and instead went to non-existent zip codes. Our unemployment rate went up dramatically.

But why is Obama so upset about the decision? He’s upset by unions and special interests donating large sums of money to candidates? This is the president who took $60 million from SEIU members and was visited by its head, Andy Stern, more than any other person last year. Obama’s “outrage” deserves a closer look. (more…)

Many have declared the dubious “Cap and Trade” scheme dead, so Obama went ahead and had the EPA suggest they were going to impose it under their own regulations. The truth is, they’re not likely to do that. They want the “Climate Bill” to pass because it’s designed to gouge the energy and manufacturing sector out of $646 billion in tax dollars over ten years. All to finance his crypto-socialist programs.

The Democrats see the climate bill as a cash cow, but Republicans aren’t buying it. So in his State of the Union address, the president didn’t mention cap and trade. He mentioned the “green jobs” that would be created by the “Climate bill.”

But to create more of these clean-energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.

Doesn’t that sound swell? Except nuclear power plants are already safe and sound in the US and have been for over 50 years. (more…)

Apple has announced its new iPad tablet computer, marking the dawn of a new kind of device that bridges the gap between phone and laptop. Last November I wrote about the possibilities of this device for the print world over at Big Hollywood. In short, the potential is there to revolutionize the way we read print, from newspapers, books, magazines and comics?

The cost of paper, shipping and distribution are a problem for publishers. So is making their products easily available to consumers. Stores only have limited space and money to carry books. The internet has been a great boon in that regard in terms of sales, but reading on a computer screen can be an unappealing prospect to most people. The iPad is designed to change all that: a hand-held, touch-screen device that is high resolution and extremely light (about a pound and 1/2). It’s not only lighter than a book, you can carry hundreds of books and magazines in it and read them anywhere you’d take a book.

The print business is salivating over this device, seeing it as a platform that will do for print that iTunes did for music. Except iTunes has sold a lot of songs, but it has also impacted the music business in ways few could have foreseen. Industry insiders think it destroyed the album as people started buying songs separately.  Moving their content to digital it could have similar effects on publishers and the press, but the fact is, times are changing and print has gotten very expensive. (more…)

When Air America Radio started on March 31, 2004, it featured a line up of amateurs and ideologues with the common goal of bashing the then Bush Administration, Republicans and conservatives in general. Its dubious stars were people like Al Franken, a fading comic, Janeane Garofalo, a sometime actress, comic and activist and left-wing radio personality Randi Rhodes.

After a scandal involving misappropriated funds from black school children it promptly filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy two years later. Franken, Rhodes and Garofalo abandoned ship.

But like most left-wing media ventures it has managed to keep going by being a sink hole for left-wing donors. In 2007 it was bought by Green Family Media, made up of New York real estate investor Stephen L. Green and his brother Mark J. Green for $4.25 million (US). Yesterday, “Air America Media” had to call it quits. (more…)