Don’t Buy the Lies

Mark Noonan80 Comments

Just in case any of you out there are getting skittish – a few words to the wise.  First off,  here’s a headline from September, 1980:

“Campaign Kickoff; Has Reagan Dropped the Ball?” – U.S. News and World Report, 9/9/1980

In what shapes up as a tight contest for the White House, even associates of Ronald Reagan conceded that the Republican nominee got off to a sputtering start in his attempt to replace President Jimmy Carter…

Reagan, of course, went on to win by 10.

Coming out of the convention what Obama wants – and thus the MSM will do – is play up every negative aspect for the GOP and every positive aspect for Obama (even if they have to make up things to fit both narratives).  Remember, 90% of the MSM is in the tank for Obama – always has been, always will be.  They will not tell the truth.  Now, readers here know that I’ve been confident of a Romney victory:  I remain confident.  Can Obama win?  Sure he can.  Lots of things can happen in an election – maybe the American people in a majority will want to continue Obama’s destructive rule.  So be it.

But I don’t think it will happen – if it does happen it just means that we’ve allowed socialism to go too far and it will have to get massively worse before a majority are fully awake to the necessary revolution.  Fortunately – if I may use that word – the re-election of Obama will make things rapidly get massively worse so we’ll have a good shot of winning in 2016 if not in 2012.  But I don’t believe a majority of my fellow Americans are that far gone – at least 40% of them are (and thus that is the ultimate floor for the Obama vote – when he shouldn’t get more than 10%, representing the people who really profit of our corrupt system) – but not a majority.  November 6th will either prove or disprove my view – but my view of where the majority is doesn’t depend on polls (hasn’t at all this election cycle) because the polls are simply over-sampling Democrats.  My view is based upon cold, hard, facts on the ground – and all of those (such as, for instance, Romney’s 22 campaign offices in Michigan – a State Obama won by more than 16 percentage points) show, at a minimum, that Romney is even with Obama, and I think he’s actually ahead.

UPDATE:  Hot Air reports on a new poll showing Obama up by 7 over Romney in New Jersey.  Yes, New Jersey.  The State Obama won by 15 points in 2008.

Does it stand to reason that Obama can lose that much support in heavily blue New Jersey and yet not lose it in purple Ohio and Florida?  I’m telling ya – any State that Obama won by less than 5 is gone, any State won by less than 10 is “tossup”.

What is Wrong With America? We Don’t Like “Dirty” Jobs

Mark Noonan192 Comments

This could be Part 1 of a 10,000 part series, but one of the problems I’m always yammering on about it is our failure to understand that prosperity only comes when you make, mine or grow things.  Keep in mind that I consider my own work pretty much useless as compared to what any plumber, auto mechanic, doctor or drywall installer does in the course of the day.  There is some point in what I do, but I don’t kid myself in to thinking that the world would be worse off, fundamentally, if my entire job title was scrubbed from the books.  The trouble we have is that people who are government bureaucrats, college gender studies professors, lawyers, think tank employees, etc believing they are doing something as important (or even more important) than those people who grow our food and make our clothes.

As we look for ways to fix our nation, one of the most important tasks will be to re-invigorate the concept that work – real work – is honorable.  That the man or woman getting dirty day by day to ensure we have the necessities is doing something 2nd in importantce only to raising children (the fact that we don’t consider raising children to be that important – as we can see in the liberal attitudes towards stay-at-home-mom Mrs. Romney – is an article for another day).  As it turns out, Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame from television has written a letter to Romney on this very subject.  To quote:

…I shared my theory that most of these “problems” were in fact symptoms of something more fundamental – a change in the way Americans viewed hard work and skilled labor. That’s the essence of what I’ve heard from the hundreds of men and women I’ve worked with on Dirty Jobs.Pig farmers, electricians, plumbers, bridge painters, jam makers, blacksmiths, brewers, coal miners, carpenters, crab fisherman, oil drillers…they all tell me the same thing over and over, again and again – our country has become emotionally disconnected from an essential part of our workforce.  We are no longer impressed with cheap electricity, paved roads, and indoor plumbing. We take our infrastructure for granted, and the people who build it.

Today, we can see the consequences of this disconnect in any number of areas, but none is more obvious than the growing skills gap. Even as unemployment remains sky high, a whole category of vital occupations has fallen out of favor, and companies struggle to find workers with the necessary skills. The causes seem clear. We have embraced a ridiculously narrow view of education. Any kind of training or study that does not come with a four-year degree is now deemed “alternative.” Many viable careers once aspired to are now seen as “vocational consolation prizes,” and many of the jobs this current administration has tried to “create” over the last four years are the same jobs that parents and teachers actively discourage kids from pursuing. (I always thought there something ill-fated about the promise of three million “shovel ready jobs” made to a society that no longer encourages people to pick up a shovel.)…

Precisely – now, what does Mr. Rowe want?  He continues…

…Certainly, we need more jobs, and you were clear about that in Tampa. But the Skills Gap proves that we need something else too.  We need people who see opportunity where opportunity exists. We need enthusiasm for careers that have been overlooked and underappreciated by society at large. We need to have a really big national conversation about what we value in the workforce, and if I can be of help to you in that regard, I am at your service – assuming of course, you find yourself in a new address early next year…

Rowe goes on to note that he wrote Obama the same sort of letter four years ago and never heard back…but it appears that Romney has now read the letter.  Romney is unlikely as a man to lead us on a revolution – but curiously enough he is more likely than Obama (for all the “fundamental transformation of America” that Obama is on about, all he’s really doing is consolidating something that Chesterton predicted more than 100 years ago – that the Ruling Class would call itself “socialist”, put us all in property-less economic straightjackets and, straight faced, tell us they care about the little guy).  I hope that Romney really ponders the letter and starts to talk about he issues raised.  Cutting taxes and spending; very important.  Reforming our regulatory system; vital.  But unless we become an America of working people doing the dirty job of building civilization brick by brick and girder by girder, then we’re ultimately doomed.

Prayer Works

Mark Noonan12 Comments

From Fox News:

Iranian Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, who was originally sentenced to death in his native country for his Christian faith, was acquitted of apostasy charges and released from custody.

Nadarkhani, 32, was imprisoned for three years and waiting execution for refusing to renounce his Christian faith. His charges were lowered to evangelizing to Muslims, which carried a three-year sentence. He was released with time served, according to the American Center for Law and Justice, a Washington-based watchdog group that had been campaigning for the pastor’s release.

“Today our sources in Iran reported that Pastor Youcef was acquitted of apostasy and released from prison. After languishing in prison for almost three years, he has been reunited with his family,” Jordan Sekulow, executive director of ACLJ said in a statement to FoxNews.com…

Iran executed 600 people in 2011 and had 143 children on death row – under Sharia law, girls as young as 9 and boys as young as 15 are considered fully liable for their actions.  Iran is also a place where you can be stoned to death.  To nutshell it, “draconian” doesn’t begin to describe Iran’s judicial system.  And here was a man who renounced the Muslim heresy and was sentenced to death for it…and who suddenly gets his “crime” changed from apostasy to evangelizing and is hit with “time served”.  I don’t believe in mercy existing in Iran’s judicial system – something entirely outside of the barbarian brains running that show caused this to happen.

Anyone can say what they want, but I believe the prayers of millions were heard.

Time To Spell This Out For The Liberals – Again

Cluster92 Comments

Since I have read many recent posts from our resident liberals who are obviously clueless, apologies for the redundancy, as to what caused the collapse in 2008, I thought it might be a good idea to revisit that. Many of the liberals are of course still in the blame Bush, blame republican mode and pointing to, and ridiculing the absence of Bush at the RNC convention as further proof of that. The first thing I want to point out is that Bush is a very private man which is in complete contrast to the media hound that Clinton is. Furthermore, when he told us that he was retired, he meant it, another concept liberals have trouble understanding so the only surprise to conservatives would be if in fact he did show up. Secondly, the GOP has a very young and deep bench, so I am sure Bush had no desire to take time away from them, again unlike Clinton but of course the DNC bench is pretty thin anyway.

Now onto the cause of the collapse, which of course was the housing bubble. It is estimated that 1 in 7 jobs are connected with housing industry, so it was no surprise that the collapse of that industry sent shocks wave across the entire country and adversely impacted nearly every other industry. Liberals want desperately to blame Bush and deregulation for the collapse, but unfortunately for them, Bush did not enact one piece of financial deregulation legislation during his eight year term. Not one. The last piece of financial deregulation was enacted in 1999 under President Bill Clinton. Furthermore, Bush started ringing the alarm bells on the GSE’s as early as 2001, and then again in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007, and finally in 2008. Now to be fair, those warnings were ignored by Republicans and Democrats alike in all of those years, but most recently were mocked by Rep. Barney Framk and Rep. Maxine Waters when she stated that “there is nothing wrong with Fannie and Freddie” in September of 2008:

Maxine Waters: Through nearly a dozen hearings, we were frankly trying to fix something that wasn’t broke.  Mr. Chairman, we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and particularly at Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Franklin Raines.  

Now the question is, why were the GSE’s so over leveraged? Well it was because of a misguided Washington DC policy that said that everyone, including the poor should have a shot at the American Dream and at home ownership. So banks were encouraged, in fact even threatened with Fed support, if they didn’t lower their mortgage standards and start giving more loans to more home buyers. Now, knowing that much of this paper was worthless, the banks started bundling these securities and started selling them to anyone who would buy them in an effort to rid themselves of the toxic assets. And the game continued, fueled even more by rising home values and higher valued loans, in addition to HELOC’s to home owners who saw their equity grow rapidly.  When the house of cards fell, no pun intended, all that money evaporated and the economy is still suffering. Now there is no question that financial sector greed played a role, but the real culprit is the federal government, so the real question you need to ask your self is – is handing out millions of mortgages to people who have little means to pay them back, a liberal policy? Or a conservative policy? As Walter Cronkite would say, “And that’s the way it is”.

obAMATEUR’s Speech? BORING! Nothing New. Just Stale Recycled Ideas ….. Failed Ideas.

tiredoflibbs69 Comments

When you are in a tight race with your political opponent, you should not recycle a Jobs Act speech that failed to even persuade Democrats in Congress to pass your signature re-election initiative.

But that’s what the obAMATEUR did. After Bill Clinton filled the delegates with what they wanted to hear.  obAMATEUR took to the stage and reduced, reused, and recycled old states of the union speeches that have failed him for four years.

It was boring. It was unoriginal. And it was filled with more empty promises. Remember, he promised to cut the deficit in half  or he would be a one term pResident.  Clint Eastwood’s empty chair could have given a better speech than what obAMATEUR read from the teleprompter last night. And to think he wanted to give that in a 80,000 seat stadium!

This was a safe speech you give when you have a lead. This was not a speech you give in a tight race. Don’t believe me? Here are excerpts from his past States of the Union and Jobs Act speech. Lots of platitude, lots of rhetoric, little in detail, and a lot of worn out lines that have failed him before.

Listen to these lines. This speech was unoriginal. He stacked it with straw men and ignored his own two major initiatives from the first term: Obamacare and the Stimulus.

This was a failure and you know it was because he failed to even bring up his own major initiatives. On Obamacare, he mentioned parts of it, but never defended it or referenced the “Affordable Care Act” (Affordable? Rates have risen more dramatically than they would have without obAMACARE).

His only “accomplishment”, his gold ring (at least it was a couple of years ago) and he does not mention it?  He does not tout it?

As I have said before, he is fulfilling his own statement.  When you have no accomplishments, no record on which to run, there is nothing to do in a campaign but attack, obfuscate and LIE! (and please velma do not write AGAIN, “you would not acknowledge the President’s accomplishments” – LIST AND DEFEND THEM).

In short, the speech was PATHETIC.

The DNC – Unforced Errors Edition

Cluster10 Comments

Well, the convention is over and it was a spectacle to be sure. Along with buttons that read “Once you vote black, you never go back”, we were witness to the following dysfunction:

– Delegates booing the forced inclusion of God back into the platform along with recognition of Jerusalem, which not only enraged the Jews but the Palestinians as well.

– DWS lying through her teeth which did not please Israel

– Health Sec. Kathleen Sebelius stating that prior to Obamacare, being a woman was a pre existing condition and that motherhood was a liability. I am sure that warms the hearts of many great mothers out there.

– Sandra Fluke stating that prior to forcing religious institutions to pay for abortifacients, women were lost in the wilderness of an oppressive society.

– Gov. Jennifer Granholm auditioning for Glee

– Joe Biden forgetting to speak in the past tense with respect to his father.

– And Mr. Obama hitting the replay button on his 2008 nomination speech absent the Greek columns and reverberation.

The convention truly did have all the elements of an NBC mini series complete with the maniacal red headed step sister, the crazy uncle, the drunk aunt, and the arrogant cousin, which was all set up by the MSNBC crew who began the morning celebrating alcohol from a bar. They really have coined a new definition for the term political “party”.

Democrat Platform: $675 Billion in New Spending

Mark Noonan23 Comments

From the Chattanooga Times Free Press:

…The actual substance of the Democratic the platform calls for billions in new taxes, pushes for the further expansion of government and encourages federal spending to increase substantially.

In fact, the Democratic platform recommends launching a number of new federal schemes and increasing the funding for many existing programs. Among the 21 new spending proposals included in the Democratic Party platform are:

• $453 billion over ten years to fund an expansive stimulus-like job creation scheme;

• $18.4 billion over ten years to get the transportation sector to buy into alternative fuels:

• $6.5 billion over five years for global food security and agriculture research;

• $5 billion in one-time funding for clean energy handouts;

• $5 billion in one-time funding to force the government into the broadband Internet business;

• $980 million over ten years for government-funded abortions (if taxpayers’ pay for 10 percent of abortions); and

• $45 million over five years to support American Indian and Alaska Native languages.

In total, the Democratic Party platform recommends $674.8 billion in additional federal spending over the next decade…

We’re already bankrupt – $16 trillion in official federal debt and probably a hundred trillion in un-funded mandates…and here come the Democrats with plans to just spend some more money we don’t have.  These people are not in any way, shape or form connected with reality.  They appear to believe that the gravy train can just keep on rolling along forever.  Well, Democrats, it doesn’t work like that – you who are ensconced in your over-paid, over-benefitted government job might think that there’s an endless bucket of money, but there isn’t.  If you some how manage to sucker the American people in to keeping you in power and you go on with your plans then you’ll find a day – and only a few years from now – when the government checks just stop coming because there’s no money left.
I don’t back Mitt Romney for the reasons you back Obama – you back Obama because government has become your religion and Obama is your high priest.  I back Romney because he’s rational…he knows that we’re broke and unless we fundamentally change course, we’re doomed.  The life or death of the United States hangs in the balance and you Democrats – in perfect keeping with your ultimate worldview – are voting for death.  I vote for life, on all levels – Obama Must Go!

DNC Convention – Day II

Cluster86 Comments

Well so far, the Democrats have voted against God, against Israel, but in support of  tax payer funded abortion at any time for any reason. In fact, they even support aborting the child after pregnancy, so the question is for Democrats – at what age is it not ok to kill your child?

Feel free to discuss.

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan:  Well, I guess someone got a call from Flyover Country because the Donk’s decided they had to re-insert God and Jerusalem in to the platform…trouble is, it seems that at least half the assembled Democrats didn’t want to re-insert the language. Hot Air has it all.

These people are pathetic – growing more and more alienated from the American mainstream and yet remaining mostly too cowardly to admit it.

UPDATE II, by Mark Noonan:  I could barely stomach Michelle’s speech last night so I’m going to spare myself the Clinton speech.  At any rate, I can nutshell his speech:

My fellow Americans, please forget what Obama has done the past four years and try to pretend you are re-electing me.  I know I had zero to do with the prosperity you remember from the 90’s, but I so slickly took credit for it in those pre-New Media days that most of you have forgotten that I fought tooth and nail against the policies which made the 90’s work.  So, vote for Barack because he’ll continue what I did – and I don’t mean the womanizing.  Heck, I also don’t mean the taking-credit-for-the-work-of-others, either, because Obama hasn’t the wit to allow Republicans to govern and then grab all the credit.  But Obama will continue….well…humm…he’ll at least continue the lies and the feel-good, poll-tested political bullsh** you all remember so well from me.

God bless you all.

DNC Convention – Open Thread

Cluster74 Comments

I am watching MSNBC and they are all a flutter that Romney has raised more than $100 million in each of the last three months, (which should tell them something) and bemoaning the fact that Obama will be outspent. It sounds like they are already setting the stage for the excuses when he loses.

How do you think the convention is going? Be civil.

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan:  Donks make a video claiming that government is the only thing we all belong to…Team Obama, in a panic, immediately disowns the video.  These people are just sad…both in what they believe and how cowardly they are about their beliefs.