Kook Left

Alexander Cockburn, RIP

Mark Noonan6 Comments

From Counter Punch:

Our friend and comrade Alexander Cockburn died last night in Germany, after a fierce two-year long battle against cancer. His daughter Daisy was at his bedside.

Over the years, from time to time, I’ve read Mr. Cockburn’s articles and no doubt out it, he was always a far-out, leftist extremist of the most commie type.  But I have to say that I always admired his grit and determination – as well as his style of writing.  He was, naturally, quite harsh in his condemnations of conservatives, but as a good radical leftist he also had plenty of fire for the hypocrisies of the liberals – from October 28th, 2004:

…Just as Kerry consistently disdained his eager and all-forgiving left supporters before November 2, he’ll redouble his public and private displays of rejection thereafter, contemptuously wiping Michael Moore’s moist kisses from all his cheeks. The constituencies President Kerry will be eager to placate and to satisfy will be exactly the ones he has courted the whole of this election year: the Neocons in Washington, and the bankers in Wall St…

A voice of extreme dissent is stilled and I’m sorry to hear about that.

 

Remember that “New Tone” BS?

Mark Noonan75 Comments

From Politico:

Politicians recognize they give up a degree of privacy when they run for office.

But Democrats are testing the outer limits of that understanding with a practice that raises questions about when campaign tracking becomes something more like stalking.

While most serious campaigns on both sides use campaign trackers — staffers whose job is to record on video every public appearance and statement by an opponent — House Democrats are taking it to another level. They’re now recording video of the homes of GOP congressmen and candidates and posting the raw footage on the Internet for all to see…
This is just plain and simple intimidation – an attempt to scare Republicans.  By videotaping the homes (and, it seems, posting addresses on the internet) Democrats are inviting lunatics to do bad things.  Democrats complained mightily in the wake of the Giffords shooting that the mere use of targets on a map put people at risk…but now Democrats are actually giving the address, and a helpful picture of the place, to anyone on the left who takes seriously the notion that Republicans are evil and must be stopped at all costs.
If this – and the rest of the Democrat hate-mongering – doesn’t stop, then someone is going to get killed.  Depend on it.  Is there anyone on the Democrat side who has a shred of honor left and will try to stop this?

More Wasted Money For The President’s “Green Energy”

tiredoflibbs5 Comments

A U.S. Navy oiler slipped away from a fuel depot on the Puget Sound in Washington state one recent day, headed toward the central Pacific and into the storm over the Pentagon’s controversial green fuels initiative.

In its tanks, the USNS Henry J. Kaiser carried nearly 900,000 gallons of biofuel blended with petroleum to power the cruisers, destroyers and fighter jets of what the Navy has taken to calling the “Great Green Fleet,” the first carrier strike group to be powered largely by alternative fuels.

However, the fuel’s $26-a-gallon price, compared to $3.60 for conventional fuel cannot come at a worst time when the U.S. government’s budget remains severely strained, the Pentagon is facing REAL budget cuts and energy companies are finding big quantities of oil and gas in the United States.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/02/us-usa-navy-greenfleet-idUSBRE86106X20120702

Other Green Energy initiatives in the military pushed by this administration:

The Pentagon paid Solazyme Inc $8.5 million in 2009 for 20,055 gallons of biofuel based on algae oil, or $424 a gallon.

For the Great Green Fleet demonstration, the Pentagon paid $12 million for 450,000 gallons of biofuel, nearly $27 a gallon. There were eight bidders for that contract, it said.

The technology is still not yet cost effective, but to hell with the costs (as long as you’re a Democrat).  Politics and giving in to the environmentalist lobby is more important than reliable fuel to our Navy.

 

The Great Divide

Cluster1 Comment

I often watch MSNBC and CNN if only to get a sense where liberals are coming from on the current issues of the day, but in between the laughter and disbelief, I realize that we have essentially nothing in common. Nothing. Not too mention the fact that those very same liberals take personal shots at people like me at every opportunity, and like to blame people like me for nearly everything, so even if I did have something in common with them, where is my incentive to work with them?  It is shameful how hypocritical liberals are, and how eager they are to victimize people purely for political gain. Fast and furious is a good example of liberal hypocrisy – here is program that actually resulted in the death of a US Border Guard, yet liberals are shrugging it off as a racist witch hunt. Compare that to the Valerie Plame incident where the culprit Richard Armitage was identified yet liberals still called for the resignation of top officials and the possible impeachment of Bush, and yet this program only resulted in the death of a cocktail party. As far as victimization is concerned, look at nearly every liberal policy and at the root of it, you will find a manufactured victim. The war on women was an entirely contrived issue where liberals were trying to paint women as completely incapable of coping in today’s society without government distributed birth control. Not only does this display a shocking lack of faith in women’s ability, but it also ignores the fact that birth control is already widely distributed and often times for free via planned parenthood and county health clinics. So here again we have liberals willingly ignoring the facts and eagerly creating victims all for some desperate need to appear compassionate, or more likely, in a dishonest attempt to gain power. Either way, it’s un American and should not go unchallenged.

In my opinion, the divide is too great, and liberals are too unhinged to forge any reasonable compromise. Conservatives only option is too defeat them at every opportunity and once again apply common sense coupled with a strong belief in the American people, to the governance of this country.

Hate To Say I Told Them So…

Leo Pusateri91 Comments
A “Your Turn” article that I wrote a month or two ago was rejected by the St. Cloud Times editorial board. In it I said that the Right to Work amendment would make it to the Minnesota ballot in November.  I admit that I was wrong about that, though given what happened last night, I believe it will happen next November.
What I was correct about was thus:

…when the union leadership organize angry demonstrations like so many 60s hippie throwbacks or a cadres of Bolsheviks running roughshod in near-riotous mobs, they’re not doing themselves any favors. At the same time, they just don’t seem to have a clue as to just how precarious their position is, or how to fix it.

Up to this point, Minnesota’s teacher and other unions, having had the luxury of being able to act like spoiled teenagers; largely without consequence, have been virtual one-trick ponies in terms of defaulting to in-your-face, thuggish tactics to get demands met.

As Minnesota native Bob Dylan once crooned, “Oh the times, they are a changing. If Minnesota’s unions want to survive, they better damn well change with them.

Randy Krebs, St. Cloud Times editor, stated that my language was too strong.  Sometimes though, the truth hurts.  Those who work in the media, above all, should know this.

My point was that “in your face” demonstrations no longer work.  The unions instead need to focus on winning the hearts and minds of the electorate, and that would need to take place via a positive public relations campaign that you can visit here (See the Mormon Church, for example).  I am a union member, but I am also far-enough removed from the kool-aid drinking, monolithic union culture to know how the public views unions; and that in this economy, there is precious-little sympathy for their ‘plight’ and their propensity to throw temper tantrums over health care benefits, tenure issues, and the like, when many non-union counterparts are worrying about simply finding a job in this rotten economy that the democrat party, abetted by those same union footsoldiers, have created.

The Wisconsin union goons sealed their fate when they laid siege to the Capitol in Madison.  The Wisconsin Democrats sealed their fate when they retreated like ‘Brave Sir Robin‘ across the Illinois border.
There is, thankfully, a different political course upon which we as a nation are embarking; a course in which reason is gaining an equal footing with, and dare I say, is on a trajectory to soon overtake ‘might makes right’ thug tactics.

I’m just wondering how long it will take before the unions (and, incidentally, the media that blindly support them) realize this.  Or will they instead find themselves huddled together, and pouting in a feckless corner of irrelevance as the rest of the world moves (and prospers) beyond them.
UPDATE, by Mark Noonan:  Turns out there is a reason to vote for Obama.

Ed Schultz’s Campaign for Wisconsin

Retired Spook73 Comments

For those of you who don’t know Ed Schultz, he’s one of Cluster’s favorite comedians, broadcasting his ever-so-popular show from that dynamic comedy channel, MSNBC. The indomitable Schultz is waging a one-man campaign to save Wisconsin from the evil Scott Walker.  I say “one-man” because pretty much everyone else in the lame-street media has abandoned the effort.  But if it’s one thing that ol’ Ed lacks it’s shame and the capacity to be embarrassed.

Now that Wisconsin isn’t collapsing, and in fact is seeing a dramatic economic improvement, it’s somehow no longer Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, and the liberal networks have pretty much stayed away. But Schultz keeps pounding away in a panic, lamenting that not only is Walker “the worst governor in the country,” but that those evil Republicans and their capitalist funders like the Koch brothers are “trying to make it so Barack Obama doesn’t get re-elected and no Democrat ever will be elected into the White House.” Schultz warned, “There’ll never be a Democratic president in our lifetime again.  And when I say in our lifetime, I’m talking about a long, long, long, long, long time.”

We’ll find out in about 3-1/2 days whether or not  Ed’s singular efforts have been successful.  It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall in either case.

Hat-tip to Cluster for the link for this post

 

Government Spending. Does It Really Work as a “Stimulator”?

tiredoflibbs88 Comments

Listening to obAMATEUR, his fellow looters, the moochers and the mindless drones, you would think that the Stimulus and the rest of the over $5 TRILLION in spending by our so-called “leader” would have had a huge effect on the economy.  They would be touting this into the next term.

Sadly, for the looters, this is not the case.  Private spending is needed for the economy to produce the fruit we have seen from successful administrations like Reagan’s.

We have a study now published in the National Journal of Economic Research from University of California at San Diego economist Valerie Ramey.  Ramey puts the proggies lies about the success of their spending schemes to rest.

According to Ramey: “An increase in government spending never leads to a significant rise in private spending.  In fact, in most cases it leads to a significant fall.”

“A significant fall”…… say it again…..  “A significant fall……”  One true measure of the proggy belief have been the headlines concerning the economy and job growth – “an UNEXPECTED FALL in economic grown” or “an UNEXPECTED RISE in unemployment claims”, etc etc.

We already know that obAMATEUR believes that the United States is great and successful because of “government investment” code for “spending”.  Ramey also finds that government spending increases government employment .. but not private employment.

That’s it liberals keep charging on your “Bank of China” credit card and kick the can down the road to our children and grand-children.  ObAMATEUR used those words as senator when criticizing President Bush.  But those words are no longer part of his rhetoric (or any other proggy’s for that matter) while he is the one in charge.  Come November, those words will make another appearance when the proggies no longer control the White House.

UPDATE:

The budget proposed by the obAMATEUR 2012 will result in a DEFICIT of $26 trillion dollars by 2022.   If you were to spend $1,000 per minute, it would take you about 49,000 YEARS to spend $26 trillion dollars.  The obAMATEUR will do it in ONLY 10 years! What an accomplishment! – any you proggy drones whine I cannot compliment your pResident.

That’s the debt your children and grandchildren are going to have to pay.  Here is another compliment – He sure spends other people’s money very rapidly.

We can’t afford another four years of this bozo and his fellow looters.  BTW,  I am sure this budget will be UNANIMOUSLY defeated like his others.  But he will blame only the non-proggies and his loyal drones will regurgitate the dumbed down talking point.

The Survey Says: GOP Voters Are Better Informed, More Open Minded

Matt Margolis119 Comments

File this under: Duhhh!

Yet another new survey shows that Republican supporters know more about politics and political history than Democrats.

On eight of 13 questions about politics, Republicans outscored Democrats by an average of 18 percentage points, according to a new Pew survey titled “Partisan Differences in Knowledge.”

The Pew survey adds to a wave of surveys and studies showing that GOP-sympathizers are better informed, more intellectually consistent, more open-minded, more empathetic and more receptive to criticism than their fellow Americans who support the Democratic Party.

“Republicans fare substantially better than Democrats on several questions in the survey, as is typically the case in surveys about political knowledge,” said the study, which noted that Democrats outscored Republicans on five questions by an average of 4.6 percent.

This latest survey from Pew gives even more credence to an earlier survey showing liberals being much more close-minded.

A March 12 Pew study showed that Democrats are far more likely that conservatives to disconnect from people who disagree with them.

“In all, 28% of liberals have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone on SNS [social networking sites] because of one of these reasons, compared with 16% of conservatives and 14% of moderates,” said the report, tiled “Social networking sites and politics.”

The report also noted that 11 percent of liberals, but only 4 percent of conservatives, deleted friends from their social networks after disagreeing with their politics.

A March Washington Post poll showed that Democrats were more willing to change their views about a subject to make their team look good. For example, in 2006, 73 percent of Democrats said the GOP-controlled White House could lower gas prices, but that number fell by more than half to 33 percent in 2012 once a Democrat was in the White House.

Anecdotally, I have to say I see proof of this plenty. In my life I’ve lost friendships with people who couldn’t tolerate my political views. And I’ve known plenty of liberals whose views of conservatives could only be described as bigoted. I’m not saying it doesn’t go both ways at times, but it seems to me, as these surveys support, liberals are far more guilty of it.

Regarding One-Trick Ponies.

Leo Pusateri26 Comments

The cover from this month’s edition from my teacher’s union magazine:


Minnesota, like many other states, is about to become a “Right To Work” state, and it is the unions themselves that are unwittingly helping it to happen.

The unions and the democrat party have long had a nearly exclusive, symbiotic relationship. As long as the democrats remained in power, the unions were protected by the democrats; and in turn, the unions were free to act in a blatantly partisan fashion and be an unrepentant, militant arm of the democratic party.

Because of this relationship, the unions never had to worry about public relations. They could afford to be as-in-your-face-nasty-as-they-damned-well-wanted-to-be. Conservative rank-and-file members were summarily ignored. They didn’t care what the average non-union person thought. They didn’t care about winning the hearts and minds of the average American voter. They were quite comfortable in their roles as the enforcement/thug/footsoldier arm of the democratic party. But now that the democrats are largely out of power in Minnesota, as well as in a host of other state legislatures, the unions are suddenly finding themselves in the precarious position of being the toady left on a street corner whose protector has suddenly left the scene.

Now, given that “Right To Work” will no doubt make it on the ballot this November as a Constitutional amendment in Minnesota (and other states) , one would think that the unions’ very survival would depend on improving their public image. One would think that the unions would be running a full court press on public relations, running ads 24/7 extolling their virtues, and the services that their members provide to the public.

But instead, the public unions, including the teacher’s unions (of which I’m a member) have doubled-down on their self-serving, narcissistic thuggery. They haven’t yet awakened to the fact that with Right to Work going to the ballot this fall, it will no longer be the legislators (whom they used to have in their hip pocket) that they’ll have to convince. They’ll have to convince the very voters of Minnesota why they should remain a viable, omnipotent, political force.

Ergo, when the union leadership organize angry demonstrations like so many 60s hippie throwbacks or cadres of Bolsheviks running roughshod in near-riotous mobs, they’re not doing themselves any favors. At the same time,  they just don’t seem to have a clue as to just how precarious their position is, or how to fix it.

Up to this point, Minnesota’s teacher and other unions, having had the luxury of being able to act like spoiled teenagers; largely without consequence, have been virtual one-trick ponies in terms of defaulting to in-your-face, thuggish tactics to get demands met.

But as Minnesota native Bob Dylan once crooned, “Oh the times, they are a changing.”

If Minnesota’s unions want to survive, they better damn well change with them.

“Hello, Is This Thing On?”

Leo Pusateri54 Comments

Obama lifted his political skirt today as the media is now awash in how in a supposedly ‘hot mic’ unscheduled moment he told Russian President Dimitri Medvedev to pretty much ‘chill out’ and that he’d have much more ‘flexibility’ after winning his second term.

The main question to ask here, of course, is “Flexibility to do what?”

Well, perhaps candidate Obama can give us some clues:

In the full video, then-candidate Obama later stated that he is fully committed to the policy as outlined above, and that he will “keep (his) promises.”

But before you go dismissing out of hand the notion that Barack Obama keeps any of his promises, consider this:

Obama promised that health care ‘reform’ will pass; it did so, even though via the auspices of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, we indeed did not find out what was in the bill until it was passed.

During the campaign, then-candidate Obama also promised that under his policies, the cost of electricity/energy will “necessarily skyrocket.”

That too, has become reality.

There are some promises, of course, that Obama chose not to keep; and one could argue never intended to keep. One was that you’d be able to keep your doctor and your health plan under Obamacare; another that the public would never be forced to pay for an abortion under Obamacare; you know, lipstick-on-a-pig type stuff.

But make no mistake. Obama is a dyed in the wool socialist. Any promise he has made that will serve to further his neo-socialist agenda, and in the process compromise America’s economic and military security (remember, America is arrogant and needs to be taken down a few notches), you can bet your bottom dollar (that is, if you have any dollars left when he’s done with the economy) he will keep.

So, sleep peacefully under Obama’s second term, knowing that he fully intends to bring the United States into the community of feckless, neutered, third-world nations.

How’s that hopenchange working for you, anyway?