A PSA to start your day

I likes me some zombies!

Season 2 of AMC's zombie apocalypse series The Walking Dead is back on Oct. 16.  Here is a taste.

An open letter to Morgan Freeman

African-American Tea Party organizer Ali Akbar posted this open letter on the blog Tea Party Brew in response to actor Morgan Freeman's racist anti-tea party rant.

Dear Mr. Freeman,

My name is Ali Akbar. I’m a 26 year-old African-American small business owner and a tea party activist. I’m not writing to rake you over the coals in the way that many conservatives have done in the last 48 hours. Heck, I wrote a passionate open-letter refuting many of your claims already, but this is not that. This is an honest and standing invitation. I do believe that you are wrong in what you said about the tea party, but I would rather prove it to you than castigate you for your comments.

I also understand that your reflexive comments came from experience. You grew up in a different America than the one that I was blessed to be born into. We both grew up in the south, but I never saw ‘White Only’ signs. I’ve been called a name or two in my three decades, but racism has always been the exception in my life, not the rule, as it probably was in your youth. I understand your suspicion of conservative political movements. It is rooted in pain and fear and memory, and though I never saw the horrors of segregation that you did, we share that cultural heritage.

I’ve been a fan of yours all my life. From “Driving Miss Daisy” to “Lean on Me” to “The Shawshank Redemption,” I idolized you as a boy. Growing up without a father, you were one of the strong black men in my life who gave me a model to follow. Each of the characters you played had dignity and confidence. I tried to emulate the strength you projected. While many of my friends headed down the all-too-familiar path of drugs, unwed pregnancies and crime, I’ve striven to live a life with dignity, be an example for my brothers and make my mother proud.

My favorite of your movies was “The Power of One.” I must’ve watched it a hundred times, crying every time when your character Geel Piet was killed by the racist South African. Geel Piet was brave and heroic, even in the face of death, because he knew that the hate that killed him was a trifle in comparison to the love that PK’s anti-apartheid movement was spreading. It is with that spirit that I’m writing to you this morning.

I’ve attended dozens of tea party events. I’ve helped organize them, and I’ve even spoken at a few. The tea party is not what is often depicted in the news. It is people of all colors who are terribly concerned about the direction that America is heading. We don’t trust big government to make decisions for us. And we fear that the present administration’s spending is going to lead our country down a path to insolvency, much like what Greece is currently facing.

Your comments about the tea party have caused me physical pain. You’ve rekindled the old painful paradigm of Uncle Tom – that any black man who votes Republican is some kind of sellout. It’s not true. I work hard, pay my taxes, love Jesus, and I’m good to my family and community. In effect, your comments have stereotyped an entire group of people. And I know in my soul that you must regret that on some level.

There’s already plenty of groupthink among American blacks. Over 90% of us vote Democrat with religious regularity, and we have been doing so for over fifty years. For a short time, I was one of them. I realized a few years ago that the Democrats’ promises of equality bestowed by government wasn’t working and will never work. I came to believe that redistributionist policies with the goal of social justice was essentially creating a new plantation within the federal government. Scraps might be thrown our way, but dependence on the plantation would be the inevitable result.

Over half a century since we started voting for Democrat policies, blacks in America are worse off than before. Black Americans are more likely to get involved with drugs, go to prison, and die younger than our white counterparts. Over 70% of our children are born out of wedlock. Our abortion rate has never been higher. There are two explanations for these results. 1) Blacks are an inferior race and can’t take care of themselves. 2) Despite the best of intentions, the government has created and implemented “social justice” policies that promote perpetual dependence. I choose to believe the latter. Therefore, I have become a Republican.

Mr. Freeman, I’m not asking you to adopt my political views. You’re in your seventies, and a political shift is not in your future. I’m reaching out to you because I want you to think better of your fellow countrymen. Barack Obama is in the White House, and Herman Cain just won the Florida straw poll. America is the land of opportunity for black Americans like never before.

I’m hoping that you’ll come to a tea party in Tennessee — the place of your birth. Really anywhere in the country that works for you; I’ll set it up with the one of the thousands of activists I know around our great country. I’d be delighted to introduce you to good people who will welcome you with open arms, disagree with you, and then feed you some of the best barbeque you’ve ever tasted.

Racism is an ugly thing, but I assure you that it is part of our past, not our present.

It takes bravery to admit that you may have made a mistake. But, for Geel Piet, bravery is like breathing. It’s just something you do.

I hope you’ll take me up on my offer.

Sincerely,

Ali Akbar

ali@vvclients.com

Mr. Freeman is one of my favorite actors and I was disappointed to hear that his mind had been poisoned by ignorance and hate.  I hope that he will accept Mr. Akbar's invitation and gain some first hand experience of the Tea Party.  He would be mobbed by admirers seeking pictures and autographs.  And if he took the time to speak with and listen to the participants in a Tea Party event he would learn that far from wanting Obama out of office because of his race they want a new president because Obama's policies have hurt them and their families.

Morgan Freeman is a wealthy actor who is insulated from the nearly all of the damage caused the current administration's policies.  He needs to have some contact with people who are not.

I'm not the only one who sees it

Today's Day by Dayhttp://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2011/09/29/ goes well with the American Thinker piece I posted below.

The Green's goal

I have a little free time today so I wanted to bring a few things to your attention that I ran across over the past few days.  The first of them is this essay from American Thinker on the true motives and goals of the green movement.

Green Twilight  

By J. R. Dunn

There's something satisfyingly symbolic about the unfolding Solyndra scandal.  A government "investment" based on a totally spurious Green rationale collapses, threatening to take part of the administration with it.  What more apt illustration of the current status of environmentalism?  It could scarcely go better if you'd scripted it.

It's often been said that Obama is a closet Marxist out to transform the U.S. into something resembling a people's republic.  I've never completely agreed with this contention.  For one thing, he's not precisely a Marxist; he's a Marxisant, a useful French word denoting someone who has memorized all the slogans while not bothering his head with any of the theory.  "Spread the wealth around" is a pure Marxisant statement, just as his attempts to stir up class hatred against private jet-owning billionaires is pure Marxisant behavior.  An actual Marxist would be far more subtle and convoluted, thanks to his grasp of theory and revolutionary tradition.  Obama has neither.  What he practices is bong politics, the kind of thing you'd hear in the college dorm after the third or fourth bowl: "If I was running things, man, I'd like, get rid of money, y'know?  Money messes with your head, right?  So you get rid of it, and then..."

It would be much closer to the point, and fitting in nicely with the bong ideal, to say that Obama wishes to establish a "watermelon" state, in which strict centralization and collectivization are implemented to create not a worker's paradise, but a Green utopia.  Consider the fact that many of Obama's policies -- and almost all of the most noxious ones -- are in service of some environmentalist daydream or other.  Shutting down Gulf oil exploration; new and onerous regulations for coal plants; attempts to halt exploitation of the Marcellus shale; foot-dragging on the Keystone XL pipeline; promotion of electric cars, wind power, bullet trains, and what have you.

"Obamanomics," as James Pethokoukis recently put it, "is about the top-down redistribution of wealth and income.  Government spending on various 'green' subsidies and programs, along with a cap-and-trade system to limit carbon emissions, would enrich key Democrat constituencies: lawyers, public sector unions, academia and non-profits."  Pure communism is no longer the goal -- it's the environmentalist state that lies closest to the heart of the modern social democrat.  Obama is unquestionably an authoritarian, an autocrat, whatever you wish to call him, but his hue is as much green as it is red.

So it's a real pleasure to see the entire environmentalist edifice falling to pieces just as they thought victory was in their hands.  Cap 'n' trade was dead on arrival.  Global warming is unlikely to recover from the e-mail scandal, however far the cover-up may extend.  The electric automobile has turned out to be less an automotive revolution than a third car for wealthy Democratic donors.  And now the centerpiece of the Green agenda, renewable energy, has taken what may well turn out to be a mortal hit.

Note that none of these were brought about by rational arguments or serious opposition.  Rationality per se has never made so much as a dent in the green worldview.  What happened was that all the green innovations reached a certain point where they could no longer be sustained by the illusions of the faithful, whereupon they crashed and burned.  They were overcome by their own internal contradictions more than any other single factor.

Rational opposition to the greens has consistently misinterpreted the movement's core beliefs.  Critics have concentrated on arguments that wind, solar, and squirrel-on-a-treadmill power cannot replace brute force methods such as nuclear, coal, and oil.  That electric go-carts are no substitute for technologically mature internal-combustion cars, that bullet trains cannot possibly compete with jetliners.  All this is true -- and all this is irrelevant.

It's all irrelevant because green initiatives are not meant to replace anything.  They are intended to form the basis of a new, deindustrialized society with minimal power generation, limited air travel (or travel of any sort, for that matter), and local, nonindustrial economies.  In a green society, there will be no massive power plants, no private automobiles, no jetliners.  There will be no industrial products at all beyond those required by the environmentalist elite.  Picture Al Gore, his staff, and a half-million peasants.  That is the green United States of the 22^nd century.

As I pointed out in Death by Liberalism, environmentalists have in no way been reticent about the type of society they're aiming for -- one as close to that of Neolithic hunter-gatherers as possible.  That was the last point in time when human beings were fully integrated into the ecology, when they dominated nothing, and were in large part simply animals that talked.

The goal is not to save resources or to conserve the environment.  It is to restore human beings to a point where they are simply another part of the ecology.   It will not be purely Neolithic -- however close they may be to Mother Gaia, greens have no desire to spend their nights in caves.  Agriculture will be necessary to raise ethanol crops (not to mention arugula) for the green aristocracy.  It will be a village culture, poor, primitive, and ignorant of anything other than the fact that humanity has sinned against Gaia and must make amends.  Only the green elite will be allowed power, travel, and information.

This is the society that the premises accepted by Al Gore, John Holdren, Lisa Jackson, and Barack Obama will lead to.  (Though as stated above, Obama probably grasps only the slogans.)  What they have been engaged in is setting up the basic framework for such a system.

So rational debate about kilowatt-hours, ridership, vehicle range, or anything else is simply beside the point.  The California bullet train goes from nowhere to nowhere because it is supposed to go from nowhere to nowhere.  There is no point in connecting LA, San Francisco, and San Diego if those cities are going to be shrunken to a tiny fraction of their current size, granted that they are allowed to remain at all.  Those cities are unsustainable as they now exist, and will be shut down under any serious environmentalist regime.  The bullet train's current path instead is limited to the Central Valley, the state's primary agricultural area.  Conclusions can be left as an exercise for the student.

The same is true of the fossil fuel industry.  The discovery that the Marcellus shale formations of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York hold up to 400 trillion cubic feet of natural gas would gladden the heart of any true environmentalist, who would trade safe, clean-burning domestic fuel for smelly foreign oil in a second.  But this discovery interferes with the long-term green agenda: cutting off access to fossil fuels, then shutting down entire industries as their power source vanishes.  So gas shale exploitation must be strangled -- the ideal requires it. 

Deindustrialization, depopulation, a global return to a style of living not seen since the medieval period -- with modern medicine, cybernetics, and alternate power for the lucky, of course.  Conservatives simply don't grasp this, any more than the Russian aristocracy grasped the truth of revolutionary socialism.  They knew that the revolutionaries were a threat, that any society run by their like would be a disaster, but they could not get their minds around the fact that the fate planned for them and their entire class was annihilation, either in the cellars of the Lubyanka or in the snows of Siberia.  What we look back on as history was not even a nightmare to those people.

So it's good to see the greens fail.  Not due to resistance, though there has been no small amount, and it is increasing.  It is more due to sheer unworthiness to exist.  The problem for the greens is that there is no single step from current reality to their utopia.  They must make a series of small steps, and none of those small steps are feasible.  Almost no one will buy their electric zipmobiles.  Their solar power tech can't succeed even with half-billion-dollar subsidies.  The AGW crowd can't convince anybody even with the help of open scientific fraud and a near-total media blackout.

Fourteen more subsidy applications by renewables firms are pending.  The long collapse has only begun.*

*Breaking news: the Energy Department on September 23 turned down a $275 loan guarantee to Solar City LLC while First Solar was unable to meet the deadline for a $1.9-billion guarantee.

J.R. Dunn is consulting editor of American Thinker.

Many people will be tempted to dismiss Mr. Dunn's theory that the green movement's end game is a world where a small elite (them) lives like kings on the backs of a great mass of ignorant serfs who live short hard illiterate lives of perpetual toil.

However before rejecting one should consider that the elites have built exactly that kind of society every chance they've gotten for the entire span of human history.

The fact is that the kind of society Mr. Dunn envisions as the goal of Al Gore and his like-minded brethren in the global left-wing elite has been the norm for most of human history.  What doomed those societies was technological progress.  As workers became more productive some of the surplus wealth that was created found its way into the hands of the working people who used it to improve their lives.  They began to have the money to do things like educate their children.  Craftsmen and merchants had the surplus cash and time to invent things that made them even more productive (like the printing press and insurance and joint stock companies).

The upward spiral of technological progress uplifted the lives of everyone who lived in the societies which embraced the new ways of doing things (first Europe then America) and allowed them to leave those parts of the world which rejected modernity in the dust (this is why the West is a good place to live and the Islamic world is a hell-hole).

Al Gore and his ilk have learned the lessons of history.  They know that for the common men and women to be denied freedom they must be denied knowledge, technology and power (as in cheap electricity and cheap motor fuel).  If they can take society back to a point where the average person has access only to the power of wind, water, sun and muscle then the vast majority of the population will have to devote almost every waking hour to the simple production of enough food to keep from starving.

Make all of this misery acceptable to the common man through a religious conviction that to live any other way would destroy the planet but that the anointed elite have a right to things like air travel, 24 hour electricity, air conditioning, flush toilets, cardiac pacemakers, literacy and food that has to be transported over long distances (like fresh fruit in winter) because those elites enlightened leadership is the only thing keeping the planet from being consumed in the hellfire of global climate change and you have a recipe for a stable aristocratic society that could endure for a millennium.

It is this kind of society that the global green elites are striving for.  And their movement has greater power because many of them do not even fully realize what they are doing.  To many of them, especially celebrities and wealthy dilettantes it is simply that the planet is in trouble (the earth has a fever) and they are the only ones with the wisdom to save it.  This commitment to saving the planet and all of the little people who are too ignorant to know what is good for them entitles them to ride around in luxury SUV's and fly on private jets because their time is so valuable and their lives are so important that must be protected.

Of course Al Gore's mansion uses more electricity than some Third World nations - but only because he devotes nearly every waking second to saving the earth from Big Oil and the GOP.  Of course Barack Obama and his wife take multimillion dollar vacations every other week - in the middle of a recession with levels of unemployment not seen since the Great Depression - but they work so hard saving the nation from the Tea Party and french fries.  This kind of thinking feeds upon itself and breeds more and worse.  It leads as inexorably to the kind of world Mr. Dunn predicts as death leads to decay.

This is why I have always maintained that the left is evil and must be opposed.

Bailing out the bailout

Detroit News has an article on their website about Ford's decision to pull its TV add in which a customer explains that he bought a Ford at least in part because Ford didn't take government bailout money. 

Supposedly the decision came as a response to pressure from the White House.

. . . Ford pulled the ad after individuals inside the White House questioned whether the copy was publicly denigrating the controversial bailout policy CEO Alan Mulally repeatedly supported in the dark days of late 2008, in early '09 and again when the ad flap arose. And more.


With President Barack Obama tuning his re-election campaign amid dismal economic conditions and simmering antipathy toward his stimulus spending and associated bailouts, the Ford ad carried the makings of a political liability when Team Obama can least afford yet another one. Can't have that.

The ad, pulled in response to White House questions (and, presumably, carping from rival GM), threatened to rekindle the negative (if accurate) association just when the president wants credit for their positive results (GM and Chrysler are moving forward, making money and selling vehicles) and to distance himself from any public downside of his decision.

I will leave it to my readers to draw their own conclusions about what it means for our democracy when the president can seemingly order a private business to pull an advertisement in which they simply tell the easily documented truth.  What I want to draw your attention to is the authors repetition of a myth which has been promoted aggressively by the Democrats and their left-wing allies in the media.

. . . a sizable cadre of current and would-be customers oppose the notion of taxpayer bailouts for automakers, whatever the economic costs to the industrial Midwest and the nation of letting them collapse. Meaning there's an advantage Ford can press to remind folks that it didn't receive direct payouts from Treasury.

The myth is that the choice for the government was between letting the auto makers "collapse" or bailing them out with taxpayer money.  In real life a business which is losing money not because it can't make or sell its product but because of something like excessive debt doesn't collapse absent a bailout.  What it does is seek the protection of a bankruptcy court while it restructures it debt under the authority of a bankruptcy judge.

In the big automakers case the problem was the massive costs of servicing the pension and healthcare costs of retired employees.  In GM's case something like $6000.00 in these legacy costs were attached to every car that rolled off of their assembly lines.  If the car companies had entered bankruptcy they would have been able to rewrite the deals that they made with the United Auto Workers Union and reduce these costs significantly.  This would have been bad for retired auto workers but when you allow your union to force your employer to agree to costs which it cannot possibly sustain you don't deserve a lot of sympathy.

The real reason for the bailout of the auto makers was to rescue the retired UAW members from having to pay the price of their union's bad conduct in the years when Detroit car companies were making money hand over fist because all their foreign competitors had either been bombed to ruins (Germany and Japan) or had been ruined by their government's decision to embrace socialism (the UK). 

The UAW used the threat of strikes to arm twist the auto makers into agreeing to contracts which offered employees the chance to retire at 55 and live the life of a modern lotus eater at company expense.  That this would eventually bankrupt the auto companies was not something that the union cared to consider.  The bill eventually came due and the union called upon their great socialist benefactor in the White House and an ocean of taxpayer money was poured down upon their heads.

I don't wonder that the Administration and its lickspittles in the media are so desperate to conceal these facts.  If the average voter was made aware of the fact that the bailouts were never about keeping GM and Chrysler from closing their doors and laying off all their employees and devastating the economy of the Midwest.  But were instead about keeping a bunch of retired union thugs' snouts firmly embedded in the gravy train - at taxpayer expense.  Then there would be even more hell for Obama and his party to pay next year then there already is.

The "NOT" candidate

From American Thinker:

Herman Cain shocked the GOP world on Saturday by winning the Florida straw poll, garnering 37% of the vote.

Rick Perry, whose debate performances have come under fire in the last 72 hours finished a distant second with 15%. Mitt Romney got 14% for third place.

[. . .]

Is Cain now the "Anybody but Romney" candidate? There were apparently a lot of Perry voters who switched to Cain on the fly. But do they think the Georgia businessman can win?

Put simply, if Barack Obama can win then just about anybody not currently serving time for child molestation ought to be able to win. 

Or perhaps Obama is the Harriet Miers of presidential politics.   Remember when Bush nominated Miers a number of commentators noted that the nomination of a mediocre and generally unqualified candidate for the high court was hardly unknown.  However the outcry over Ms. Miers essentially raised the bar on the quality of Supreme Court nominees. . .

I just remembered Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.  

Never mind.  

Back to the current presidential race.

Both Romney and Obama have to be worried in that the Republican primary voters are looking for an "anyone but Romney" candidate to vote for and voters nationally are looking for an "anyone but Obama" to vote for.  

This leaves the GOP in a position which it has not been in since 1980.  Pretty much anybody we nominate is going to win.  So why not forget about "playing it safe" and nominating a candidate that the mainstream media tells us is electable (you know someone like Gerald Ford, Bob Dole or John McCain) and nominate someone like Ronald Reagan.

Many people, especially Democrats, the mainstream media (sorry, redundant) and establishment Republicans considered Reagan to be a lightweight (just an Hollywood actor) and a dangerous lunatic for wanting to confront the Soviet Union.  Yet when he got the nomination he won an easy victory over Jimmy Carter because Carter was just so damn incompetent that people were willing to vote for "anybody but Jimmah" 

My choice for the Reagan of the 21st century would be Sarah Palin but she isn't the only one who fills the Not Obama, Not Romney - and the increasingly attractive Not Perry - description.  Cain might just do, as the Florida voters seem to think.

Affirmative Action Oscars

From The LA Times:

When Oscar nominations were announced earlier this year, it was impossible to avoid this unsubtle fact: All of the major nominees were white. And when the presenters had all taken their turn on the Kodak Theatre stage, not a single black man was among them, a fact that Samuel Jackson noted tartly in an email to a Times reporter.
It was a sharp turn from the 2009-10 season, when “Precious” and "The Blind Side" drew numerous accolades, and there were black nominees for best director, best picture and best actress (and black winners for best supporting actress and best adapted screenplay).

For anyone concerned about which way the Oscars could go this year, there's reason to take heart.

When I was in high school we were told that each homeroom had to nominate two girls to run for homecoming queen and that one of them had to be black.

Perhaps the Oscars could adopt a similar policy and create a rule that at least one black actor, actress, writer and director must be nominated in each appropriate category.  If no blacks win on the basis of votes then a computer can randomly select one of the black nominees to receive an Oscar by decree.

Then every year we would have a diverse and inclusive award ceremony regardless of the quality of the work that they had done the previous year and the Oscars would "look like America".  That is they would become a racial spoils system in which members of favored groups would receive handouts and set asides without any regard to merit.

Of course this system would have to be extended to other favored groups beyond blacks.  There would have to be Oscars set aside for Latinos and Asians.  Then there is the fact of the massive under-representation of trans-gendered actors in leading roles in action movies.  For example the studios should be required to produce a remake of Dirty Harry with Chaz Bono in the role of Inspector Callahan.

Or Hollywood could continue letting the Oscars be a merit based award system.  But then they gave Oscars to Al Gore and Michael Moore, so I guess the ship has sailed on that.

Looking out my back door

Not all in Hollywood were against US

I lifted this from Big Hollywood because it mirrors my thinking exactly.

The Washington Times is wrong. Hollywood wasn’t AWOL in the War on Terror. In fact, just the opposite is true. Hollywood summoned every ounce of financial and star power at their disposal to fight this war.

Unfortunately, they chose to fight for the other side.

If our history is written by honest brokers, this generation of  Hollywoodists will be remembered as those who openly enabled evil and spent hundreds of millions of dollars making bombs for the enemy — box office bombs. Over a dozen of them, specifically engineered with equal parts lies and hate and propaganda to undermine morale at home and on the battlefield in the hopes that we would lose this war. 

Never forget the crime committed in New York, Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon on that terrible day.  And never forget  how Hollywood turned on your country.

There were some exceptions, however, and chief among them was Joel Surnow the co-creator of “24.” Each week, for eight seasons, he gave this country a hero who openly loved America, did what was necessary to protect her, and who was willing to pay a terrible price for it. ”24″ also delivered the goods. Cathartic, exciting and righteous without being self-righteous, the addictive adventures of Jack Bauer became an oasis in a cesspool of Hollywood product delivering the exact opposite message. 

As the face of the program, Surnow paid a price for his apostasy and because he’s a smart man who knows how the world works, my guess is that he knew that someday he would. We all watched as some of the biggest forces in the world of entertainment and politics ganged up to exact their revenge with “The Kennedys.” Don’t believe for a second that wasn’t a form of payback.

For whatever it’s worth, we thank you, Joel Surnow.  You can’t imagine what it meant to millions of us  to have something to count on over those weeks and years — something that told us we weren’t crazy and we weren’t alone.

And thank you to the subversives who used their art and magnificent artistry to take our side through thinly veiled allegory. Thank you Frank Miller and Zack Snyder for “300.” Thank you Christopher Nolan for “The Dark Knight.”

There were others. Men like Gary Sinise who tirelessly support the troops and David Zucker who took the fight directly to that anti-American pig Michael Moore. There is also Robert Davi, Jon Voight, Kelsey Grammer, Michael Moriarty and those like them who have bravely and eloquently spoken out against the talking points issued by their Hollywood Overlords.

For fear of missing one, I won’t attempt to name everyone in Hollywood who did the right thing, who openly supported our military and refused to participate in the resume-enhancing undermining of our country. Within the context of the whole of the entertainment business, however, they make up a heartbreakingly short list. But you know who are and we know who you are and we thank you. 

The rest of you can burn in Hell.

 What a terrible testament to how far Hollywood has fallen.

John Ford was a liberal and John Wayne was a conservative.  They argued frequently about politics however they remained friends and they cooperated in the production of magnificently patriotic movies like They Were Expendable (click  the link for part one of Big Hollywood's seven part series on the production of that movie). 

We have lost that today and it is because of the venom of the left.

May they burn in hell indeed.

9/11/2001 -9/11/2011

Never

Ever

Forget

Much of TV today sucks

I hate reality shows.  Survivor, American Idol, Dancing With The Stars, The Apprentice, they all blow.  And don't get me started on Pawn Stars and Ice Road Truckers and other crap shows where we watch people doing their jobs.  I would joke and say that the next thing would be a show about garbagemen but I fully expect some kind of "Hollywood Trash Collector" show to be premiering soon.  If not that then some kind of show where  eco-nannies or poverty nazis go through people's trash and scold them for their wastefulness. 

Oh, and how about this.  Since unemployment is high and unlikely to go much lower as long as Obama is still in office how about "Real Unemployed Deadbeats of [insert city, state or county of your choice]" where the camera follows some layabouts as they spend their two years sponging off the taxpayers.

Respect must be earned

From FoxNews.com:

Republicans have decided they're not going to give a rebuttal to President Obama's jobs speech later this week, a decision House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi took as a high affront to the White House. 

At least three GOP lawmakers also have announced they're not going to show up for the presidential address. House Speaker John Boehner's office then confirmed Tuesday evening that nobody from the party would deliver an official televised response. 

Pelosi said the party's "silence" would "speak volumes about their lack of commitment to creating jobs." 

"The Republicans' refusal to respond to the president's proposal on jobs is not only disrespectful to him, but to the American people," Pelosi said. 

 No Ms. Pelosi.  What is "disrespectful to the American people" is Obama using an address to a joint session of congress to make what will amount to a campaign speech.  A speech in which he will whine about how none of the nation's problems are his fault.  About how he inherited this mess from Bush.  About how the Republicans are deliberately sabotaging the economy to make him look bad. 

He will propose a course of action so wrong-headed and disastrous that Republicans in the House will view it as dead on arrival and he will do this on purpose.  This will be done in order to give him an issue to run on next year - Republican obstructionism.  This is because he knows that any program of government action which would actually stimulate private sector growth would by necessity involve public sector shrinkage.  Taxes would have to be lowered and the tax code reformed.  Regulations would have to be evaluated with an eye to simplification or outright repeal.  Government would have to admit that there are a great many things that it does not do well and has no business (from either a constitutional or practical standpoint) even attempting. And the government payroll would have to be trimmed which would mean that many public employees being laid off.

It goes without saying that this course of action, while indisputably good for the nation, would be anathema to Obama's (and the Democrat party's left-wing base).  Therefore there is absolutely no chance that Obama anything even close to a program which would have the slightest chance of encouraging economic growth.  It simply isn't in him to put the nation's interest before his own.

So for these reasons the GOP is doing exactly the right thing in refusing to offer a reply to what will certainly be a nasty little telepromptered screed.  Doing so would elevate Obama.  A reasoned response justify his empty words and confer upon him an illusion of respectability and reasonableness which he simply does not deserve.

What Republicans should do is boycott the speech.  Let it be obvious that Obama is making a partisan speech to a partisan audience.  If a Republican legislator feels that he must attend then he or she should be polite but offer only the most tepid and brief applause, refuse to stand for any ovation started by Democrats and leave the chamber immediately after the conclusion offering either no comment to the press or making only short statements about how sad it is to see such a great nation governed by such a small and inconsequential man.

The detailed response to why Obama's program of big government tax and spend statism is exactly the wrong thing to do can come in a day or two after our economists have had a chance to analyze it.

Runnin' off to freedom

H/T: American Thinker

We should stand up for what we believe

From The American Spectator:

Most people view the anti-Catholicism faced by John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential campaign as a prejudice they are glad our nation has left behind. Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times, is obviously not one of those people. His recent "Asking Candidates Tougher Questions About Faith," if taken seriously by its readers, would re-instill the fear that any presidential candidate of faith would subsume their decision-making to the religious authority that they embrace.

It's strange that Keller would encourage such questions since he confesses, "I still remember, as a Catholic boy, being mystified and hurt by the speculation about John Kennedy's Catholicism -- whether he would be taking orders from the Vatican." It seems that the good sense of his adolescence has been lost, possibly by his years of worshiping at the altar of secular sophistication.

Keller's particular concerns are the "weird" Mormonism of Romney and Huntsman, the "fervid" evangelicalism of Bachmann and Perry, and the "conservative wing of Catholicism" supposedly represented by Santorum. Regarding Catholicism, the faith in which Keller was raised, he explicitly raises the issue faced by JFK five decades ago -- the separation of Church and State.

The level of furious mis-logic in Keller's article explains much about the decline of the newspaper under his leadership and his upcoming departure to the op-ed page. But, importantly, it represents a powerful segment of the Democratic Party elite that views the continued prevalence of traditional religious beliefs in the U.S. as the chief obstacle to its ideological aims.

[snip]

Keller poses three questions each of the GOP presidential candidates should answer -- on whether public schools should teach evolution; whether the U.S. is a "Christian nation"; and whether Muslims should be appointed to the federal bench.

The authors of the AmSpec piece, Deal W Hudson and Matt Smith, believe:

Following Keller's recommendation would only trivialize the political conversation heading toward the 2012 election. But Keller evidently sees an upside in creating a religious sideshow that would alienate moderates, a doubtful assumption, since those same moderates weren't affected by Obama's twenty years at the feet of a pastor like Jeremiah Wright.

However I tend to disagree. I think that answering those questions from a conservative perspective would help rather than hurt a candidate.  Here is how I would address each of them:


Q: Should public schools teach evolution?
A: Yes.  Public schools should give students a good grounding in the theory of evolution including the problems the theory faces such as the lack of transitional forms.  The fact that the fossil record shows large numbers of species appearing suddenly and remaining stable for million and millions of years should be explained.  The theories which have been put forward such as the "hopeful monster theory" (where a lizard lays an egg and a bird or mammal hatches from it) should be explored and it should be revealed to the students that science has absolutely no naturalistic explanation for how the massive amounts of information (terabytes worth of data) that would be needed to transform one species into another just "appear" seemingly out of nowhere.  It should be made clear to the students that the neo-darwinian synthesis is not supported by the current scientific data and that no theory which both relies only upon naturalistic processes and has any empirical evidence to support it has been advanced to replace it.  My approach does not call for teaching biblical creationism, or any other religion's "origin story".  It does not even call for teaching the theory of intelligent design.  It simply requires the schools to tell students the truth about the current state of evolutionary theory rather than engage in an intellectual whitewash.


Q: Is the US a "Christian nation"?
A: In the sense that most Americans identify themselves as Christian yes.  In the sense that America has an official state religion no.  The Constitution forbids the government from establishing a state church and from preventing any person from practicing their religion as their conscience dictates.  Provided they harm no one else of course.  You may speak in tongues all you wish, but you can't give a rattlesnake to a child to handle.  You can go to synagogue but you can't stone people who break the sabbath.  You can pray toward Mecca five times per day but you can't cut the head off a woman who refuses to wear a head covering.  The real question is what the Framers intended to prohibit in the Establishment Clause.  Did they really mean that it was an illegal "establishment of religion" to allow a voluntary student led prayer at a high school event such as a football game?  Did they really mean that allowing a local church to put a manger scene on the courthouse lawn at Christmas (or a synagogue to set up menorah at Hanukkah)  was the same thing as setting up a taxpayer funded Church of the United States?  I believe that the answer to those questions is absolutely not.  If it were otherwise they would not have created the positions of Chaplin for the House and Senate and would not have chosen to open congress with prayer.  They would not have chosen to open sessions of the Supreme Court with a bailiff shouting "God save the United States and this honorable Court!".


Q: Should a Muslim be appointed to the federal bench?
A: Yes, provided they meet the same standards that any other federal judge should be held to.  Those standards are an appropriate education and adequate experience and a record which shows an unwavering commitment to the principles of originalism.  In other words I could care less about the race, sex, religion or national origin of a judge if I believe that he or she will be what amounts to a judicial clone of Clarence Thomas.  I don't care if he is a black atheist from Zimbabwe if he will rule that the Second Amendment means that any citizen has the right to carry a firearm, openly or concealed, any place where they have a legal right to be and I don't care if she is a lesbian Wiccan whose mother was a Pacific Islander and whose father was Puerto Rican if she will rule that the Commerce Clause means absolutely nothing other than that congress can prohibit one state from placing tariffs on the products from another state and that all laws predicated on any other interpretation of the Commerce Clause are null and void.


The left is attempting not so much to drive God from the public square (they don't believe in God so as far as they are concerned He isn't there to begin with) but to drive people of faith from participation in the public life of the nation.  It is time that religious people fought back by openly and unapologetically acknowledging their faith.  Surveys show that the majority of people in the US do not believe in the blind materialistic theory of evolution, do not support government actions like the removal of the San Diego cross and take no offense at prayer at public events provided that it is not aggressively sectarian.  Leftist elites who show their contempt for America's religious heritage are also showing their contempt for ordinary Americans.  A candidate who calls the elites on that contempt will find themselves backed by a substantial majority of the American people.

No. 3 Stranglehold



One of the greatest hist from the A number 1 conservative gun-toting rocker, Ted Nugent!

Miss Ann is Talking

That means that YOU are listening!

LIBERALS' VIEW OF DARWIN UNABLE TO EVOLVE

August 31, 2011

Amid the hoots at Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry for saying there were "gaps" in the theory of evolution, the strongest evidence for Darwinism presented by these soi-disant rationalists was a 9-year-old boy quoted in The New York Times.

After his mother had pushed him in front of Perry on the campaign trail and made him ask if Perry believed in evolution, the trained seal beamed at his Wicked Witch of the West mother, saying, "Evolution, I think, is correct!"

That's the most extended discussion of Darwin's theory to appear in the mainstream media in a quarter-century. More people know the precepts of kabala than know the basic elements of Darwinism.

There's a reason the Darwin cult prefers catcalls to argument, even with a 9-year-old at the helm of their debate team.

Darwin's theory was that a process of random mutation, sex and death, allowing the "fittest" to survive and reproduce, and the less fit to die without reproducing, would, over the course of billions of years, produce millions of species out of inert, primordial goo.

The vast majority of mutations are deleterious to the organism, so if the mutations were really random, then for every mutation that was desirable, there ought to be a staggering number that are undesirable.

Otherwise, the mutations aren't random, they are deliberate -- and then you get into all the hocus-pocus about "intelligent design" and will probably start speaking in tongues and going to NASCAR races.

We also ought to find a colossal number of transitional organisms in the fossil record -- for example, a squirrel on its way to becoming a bat, or a bear becoming a whale. (Those are actual Darwinian claims.)

But that's not what the fossil record shows. We don't have fossils for any intermediate creatures in the process of evolving into something better. This is why the late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard referred to the absence of transitional fossils as the "trade secret" of paleontology. (Lots of real scientific theories have "secrets.")

If you get your news from the American news media, it will come as a surprise to learn that when Darwin first published "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, his most virulent opponents were not fundamentalist Christians, but paleontologists.

Unlike high school biology teachers lying to your children about evolution, Darwin was at least aware of what the fossil record ought to show if his theory were correct. He said there should be "interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps."

But far from showing gradual change with a species slowly developing novel characteristics and eventually becoming another species, as Darwin hypothesized, the fossil record showed vast numbers of new species suddenly appearing out of nowhere, remaining largely unchanged for millions of years, and then disappearing.

Darwin's response was to say: Start looking! He blamed a fossil record that contradicted his theory on the "extreme imperfection of the geological record."

One hundred and fifty years later, that record is a lot more complete. We now have fossils for about a quarter of a million species.

But things have only gotten worse for Darwin.

Thirty years ago (before it was illegal to question Darwinism), Dr. David Raup, a geologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, said that despite the vast expansion of the fossil record: "The situation hasn't changed much."

To the contrary, fossil discoveries since Darwin's time have forced paleontologists to take back evidence of evolution. "Some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record," Raup said, "such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information."

The scant fossil record in Darwin's time had simply been arranged to show a Darwinian progression, but as more fossils were discovered, the true sequence turned out not to be Darwinian at all.

And yet, more than a century later, Darwin's groupies haven't evolved a better argument for the lack of fossil evidence.

To explain away the explosion of plants and animals during the Cambrian Period more than 500 million years ago, Darwiniacs asserted -- without evidence -- that there must have been soft-bodied creatures evolving like mad before then, but left no fossil record because of their squishy little microscopic bodies.

Then in 1984, "the dog ate our fossils" excuse collapsed, too. In a discovery The New York Times called "among the most spectacular in this century," Chinese paleontologists discovered fossils just preceding the Cambrian era.

Despite being soft-bodied microscopic creatures -- precisely the sort of animal the evolution cult claimed wouldn't fossilize and therefore deprived them of crucial evidence -- it turned out fossilization was not merely possible in the pre-Cambrian era, but positively ideal.

And yet the only thing paleontologists found there were a few worms. For 3 billion years, nothing but bacteria and worms, and then suddenly nearly all the phyla of animal life appeared within a narrow band of five million to 10 million years.

Even the eye simply materializes, fully formed, in the pre-Cambrian fossil record.

Jan Bergstrom, a paleontologist who examined the Chinese fossils, said the Cambrian Period was not "evolution," it was "a revolution."

So the Darwiniacs pretended they missed the newspaper that day.

Intelligent design scientists look at the evidence and develop their theories; Darwinists start with a theory and then rearrange the evidence.

These aren't scientists. They are religious fanatics for whom evolution must be true so that they can explain to themselves why they are here, without God. (It's an accident!)

Any evidence contradicting the primitive religion of Darwinism -- including, for example, the entire fossil record -- they explain away with non-scientific excuses like "the dog ate our fossils."

COPYRIGHT 2011 ANN COULTER

DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL UCLICK

1130 Walnut, Kansas City, MO 64106 

Miss Ann is entirely correct here.

Darwin believed that as more fossils were discovered the missing transitional forms would turn up and give us a complete picture of the evolution of most species, including man.

It never happened and the theories that have been put forward to explain the sudden appearance of new species require more pure faith to believe than the biblical account of 6-day creation.

We are now supposed to believe some variation of the "hopeful monster" theory in which a lizard lays an egg and a bird hatches out of it.  There is absolutely no mechanism to account for this other than the intervention of an outside intellect with the power to bring about such a change but we are told that any variation of intelligent design theory is off limits because it mixes religion with science.

Yet science wishes for us to believe something which is flatly impossible.

Who are the faith-based fanatics wanting to shove their belief system down other people's throats?

Oh, and while you are grieving over the death of the "horse series" in which eohippus was supposed to have evolved into equus ponder this.

Homo Sapiens is supposed to be about two hundred thousand years old.  Yet agriculture and animal husbandry and cities and all the other foundations of modern civilization are only around 6000 years old.

Are we really supposed to believe that people whose brains were essentially identical to ours and who therefore had all the potential that we have for observation and invention did nothing for one hundred and ninety-four thousand years except figure out slightly more efficient ways to chip flint spear points?  And then one day - in three widely separated places (the Nile river delta, Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica) at essentially the exact same time and out of thin air - figured out how to lay the foundation for modern civilization? 

Think about it.  In 1/32 of the time it took our ancestors to get to "fire good, dog friend" modern man gets to "the Eagle has landed" and the launch of the iPhone 5.

Again, who are the faith based fanatics trying to shove an irrational belief system down other people's throats?