Bear with me here. There’s a bit of a backstory …

Ten months ago, the Detroit Fox affiliate exposed a handful of Chrysler auto workers who were spending their lunch breaks drinking booze and getting high. Working on an anonymous tip from an employee inside the Jefferson North plant, WJBK’s Rob Wolchek discovered more than a dozen employees over a ten day period punched out to get pickled.

Less than two months before the story broke, Barack Obama traveled to the very plant busted in the “Problem Solvers” investigation to tout his economic policies. To add insult to injury, Chrysler received $14 billion in taxpayer-funded TARP and bail outs from January to June 2009, paying back little more than half and sticking hardworking American taxpayers with the difference.

At the time the first story broke last September, outlets like the Huffington Post and Rush Limbaugh covered it, and it gained national media attention. Chrysler fired (“suspended indefinitely”) 13 of the 15 identified in the original video, and Fox Detroit followed up just a few days later with vox pops from employees who knew those in question.

Chrysler cited two policies in their Standards of Conduct guide that “might apply” to the above situation:

Use, possession, distribution, sale or offering for sale, or being under the influence of alcohol or drugs (other than use or possession of narcotics in medicines prescribed by the employee’s physician), on Corporation property, or while operating a Corporation owned motor vehicle, or while engaged in Corporate business.

Unacceptable conduct due to alcohol or drug abuse (other than use or possession of narcotics in medicines prescribed by the employee’s physician), or conduct that indicates a potential for impaired or unsafe job performance due to drug or alcohol abuse.

The issue seemed to have died down until Wolchek staked out a popular hangout for auto workers based on two anonymous tips from inside another plant just a few miles south of the Jefferson North plant.

The hangout? A private parking lot owned by the local United Auto Workers Local 372 (the link was dead when I clicked it).

The Detroit Free Press‘ account of this story had more than 350 comments at the time of this posting, many of them defensive of the employees spending their lunch breaks drinking and smoking and hostile toward the news media for just doing their job.

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I’ve had a lot written about me in my area lately: the alterna-weekly ran a piece on me recently called “Patriot Dame,” the local daily ran a piece titled: “St. Louis activist Dana Loesch — Miss Tea Party USA?” Even more, positive and negative, after I went on “Hardball” with Chris Matthews. It was suggested to me that I take a moment to write a first-person account of who I am instead of allowing reporters define me for me. So here goes:

The first time I felt really and truly screwed over by a man was when Bill Clinton was forced to admit that he’d shacked up with Monica Lewinsky not long after he wagged his sausage-finger in the face of America and sternly intoned that he “Did. Not. Have. Sexual. Relations. With. That. Woman.” Everyone who previously entertained the possibility was made to feel ashamed for questioning the Commander-in-Chief, including me, a mere high school freshman at the time.

That was the beginning of the end of my liberally-indoctrinated upbringing, when I first began to see the Democratic party for what they really were: modern day National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage and neo-plantation owners. This is validated every time a self-described Democrat-fellating poseur feminist freaks out when I dare to point out that abortion is largely female genocide and true choice lies in which form of birth control to use before intercourse; I also see it when Democrats ignore and suppress the involvement of black conservatives in the tea party movement because it doesn’t jibe with the narrative of a party still populated by Dixiecrats who set filibuster records against the Civil Rights Act. (more…)

Revisionist historians usually wait a few years before recounting events to fit their bias. But Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift is already transcribing the autopsy report on Obama’s health-care reform with the analytical skills of a revisionist historian.

In her February 12, 2010, piece entitled “What Obama Did Wrong: On health-care reform, the president didn’t repeat Clinton’s mistakes. Obama made new ones,” Clift spins her interpretation of events as though they represent fact.

Here’s how she does it:

Obama had to tackle health-care reform in his first year because (1) he made it a key campaign promise and (2) his base of support would have felt betrayed had he not.  Okay, so health-care linked to his oft-used campaign phrase attributed to MLK…“the fierce urgency of now.”  Clift writes that it’s easy to criticize him today for taking on the issue,

…now that we’ve seen what a hash Congress made of the reform effort.

She just couldn’t make her fingers type “now that we’ve see what a hash Democrats in Congress made of the reform effort.”  So we have a clue to what follows right there in her first paragraph. (more…)

If you were around in the sixties, you remember the scene: the family gathers around the TV, listening to Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra explain in delicious detail what was about to happen as a digital clock on the corner of the screen wound its way down to zero, ever so slowly. Then – finally – the roar of the mightiest engines every built. The cheers. The majestic sight of a Saturn V creeping up past the launch gantry as mission control solemnly declared: “Lift off. We have lift off at seven minutes past the hour.”

It was heady stuff, in a world of endless possibilities. We knew, without a doubt, that we could go anywhere, do anything and that we would continue to answer the burning human question that has driven mankind to new heights for millennia: what’s out there?

The President of the United States, according to this story in the Orlando Sentinel, doesn’t seem to share that sense of wonder or to understand the educational, societal and economic value that comes along with indulging natural human curiosity about the universe we live in. If he has his way, Obama will replace the sonorous call to “boldly go where no man has gone before” with a mere murmur, to blandly study what everyone has been studying for years. (more…)