The Refreshing Air of Truth Waffs from NY Times via Public Editor, Art Brisbane

Obsessive Koch disorder: Art Brisbane responds

    by Scott Johnson from PowerLine:

We posted the letter from Koch Industries spokesman Melissa Cohlmia to New York Times public editor (ombudsman) Art Brisbane regarding the Times’s ludicrous treatment of the Koch Brothers in “Obsessive Koch disorder.” Brisbane has now responded with what I take to be almost endearing candor. Key quote:

This brings forward another ingredient in this situation: The Times’s audience. That audience consists of New Yorkers, by and large a liberal population, and national readers, many of whom select The Times because it mirrors their views.

I remain steadfastly opposed to the paper proffering only liberal perspectives in news coverage. But in the opinion-based features of the paper, The Times is within its right to do this. In my view, it makes for predictable and sometimes very dull reading. But others apparently don’t agree.

What oft was thought…

Brisbane’s response is posted in its entirety at KochFacts.com, where it is accompanied by Cohlmia’s original letter and her response to Brisbane. Here is Brisbane’s response:

From: Art Brisbane
Sent: Tuesday, January 10, 2012 2:09 PM
To: Cohlmia, Missy
Subject: Re: Koch Industries

Ms. Colhmia: thanks for your message. You should not be surprised that the Koch brothers are mentioned frequently in The Times, as they have chosen to play an active role in the political sphere in a presidential election year. I am prepared to address specific instances that you believe are problematic but I don’t think the sheer volume is anything that is per se inappropriate. You state that all 50 mentions were negative but what I have to work with are the specific examples you provided. All but one emanate from writers who produce critical reviews, op-ed pieces, magazine commentaries as opposed to news coverage. One is from ClimateGate, a contracted content provider that appears on NYTimes.com.

I will agree in the broad sense that, taken together, it is clear that this community of opinion-based writers — as distinct from news reporters producing material for the main news sections — clearly share a worldview that is liberal and antithetical to the Koch brothers’ political perspective. That they find ways to lace their writing with these views is perhaps unfortunate. I would be happier if The Times had a more diverse mix of such writers, leading to perspectives that are not universally of one political persuasion.

But we are talking here about The Times, and as you note others have deemed it a liberal newspaper. I have not yet written a piece pronouncing on this issue broadly (a couple of my predecessors did so, and perhaps I will do so before I am done). With that caveat, I have no problem stating here that in the domain where opinion writers ply their trade for The Times, the liberal view is overwhelmingly dominant. The Times is within its rights to contract for such material, as the opinion sphere is distinct from the news sphere, and there can be little doubt that the Times ownership and editorial page ascribe to a liberal perspective.

So when you cite a comment by Paul Krugman that most oligarchs don’t live where their wealth originated, it should be no surprise that he is hostile to the Kochs. The same might be said for Mark Bittman, whose liberal perspective is clearly on display in the piece you referenced. I don’t see why you mentioned the ClimateWire piece, as it simply identified the Kochs as co-founders of Americans for Prosperity, a basic factual statement that as far as I know is correct. The Kochs should be long past hoping for anonymity.

The Tommasini piece, I thought, was not so hostile as you suggested. Yes, you were mentioned in context with Mad King Ludwig, with whom few philanthropists would care to be associated, but also with the Medicis and Andrew Carnegie, who as far as I know are highly esteemed in the world of philanthropy (indeed are viewed as paragons of it). The writer was simply noting that it is the 1 percent who typically support the arts, a point that seems to be beyond dispute.

With respect to the Ariel Kaminer piece, she quotes one person who says fundraising campaigns attract donors of diverse perspectives, a point that seems friendly to your side of the issue. She does make the crack about Tchaikovsky’s strange bedfellows but her piece is really quite restrained. Remember, as well, that she is responding to a letter from a reader who has herself expressed opposition to the Koch brothers, so the context for the discussion is hostile in part because of the reader question, not Kaminer’s response. This brings forward another ingredient in this situation: The Times’s audience. That audience consists of New Yorkers, by and large a liberal population, and national readers, many of whom select The Times because it mirrors their views.

I remain steadfastly opposed to the paper proffering only liberal perspectives in news coverage. But in the opinion-based features of the paper, The Times is within its right to do this. In my view, it makes for predictable and sometimes very dull reading. But others apparently don’t agree.

Sincerely,
Art Brisbane
public editor

Comment:   It is a given that in a free society a privately owned publication has the right to choose its own  political persuasions.   Until now, the smoke from this news empire has clouded truth with the pretense that is prints all of the news fit to print.    Instead, the 2012 version of the New York Times is a fundamental partner of  the Marxists in government determined to move the nation toward government dictatorship over citizen life.

Rumblings from the Leftwing Urban Black Plantation Racist Culture

Those who have lived with and learned from racists all or most of their lives typically believe everyone thinks and acts just as  they do,  as racists.   The following article, I believe is a case in point.

The most virulent communities preaching racist hate and division in America today are in those within the Democrat Party-controlled  urban black plantation populations and at the Black Studies departments at nearly every corner American university in the country.   Here is a sample written in  an article from the Nation:

The GOP’s Blatant Racism    by   Gary Younge  at   the Nation:

In the British original of The Office the main protagonist, David Brent (US reincarnation: Michael Scott), wistfully recalls a tender moment during his favorite war film, The Dam Busters, involving the hero pilot, Wing Commander Guy Gibson. “Before he goes into battle, he’s playin’ with his dog,” says Brent.

“Nigger,” says his sidekick, Gareth (Dwight in the States), recalling with glee the name of the dog.

Brent flinches, eager to mitigate the slur. “Yeah!… it was the ’40s,” he says, “before racism was bad.”

The problem with the illusion of a postracial society is that at almost any moment the systemic nature of racism, its legacy, methods and impulses, might have to be rediscovered and restated as though for the first time. If the problem has gone away, those who point it out or claim to experience it are, by definition, living in the past. Those who witness it in action must be imagining things. Those who practice it are either misunderstood or maligned.

So it has been these past few weeks with Republicans on the stump, campaigning as though in a time “before racism was bad,” when Rick Perry’s family had a hunting lodge known as Niggerhead and white people could just run their mouth without consequences. In Sioux City, Iowa, Rick Santorum was asked a question about foreign influence on the economy. As he meandered incoherently through his answer, he came out with this gem:

“I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.”

“Right,” said one audience member, as another woman nodded.

“And provide for themselves and their families,” Santorum added, to applause. “The best way to do that is to get the manufacturing sector of the economy rolling again.”

The black population of Sioux City is 2.9 percent. In Woodbury County, in which Sioux City sits, 13 percent of the people are on food stamps, an increase of 26 percent since 2007, with nine times as many whites as blacks using them.

Just a few days later, in Plymouth, New Hampshire, Newt Gingrich told a crowd, “I will go to the NAACP convention and explain to the African-American community why they should demand paychecks…[instead of] food stamps.” African-Americans make up 0.8 percent of Plymouth’s population. Food stamp use in Grafton County is 6 percent—a 48 percent increase since 2007.

And then there’s Ron Paul, who would like to repeal civil rights legislation and who once claimed that “order was only restored in LA [after the Rodney King riots] when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks.” Or at least newsletters bearing his name did—newsletters he paid for and once defended. Paul now claims that they had nothing to do with him.

The point here is not to accuse the GOP hopefuls of racism. That would be too predictable and has been done with great effect elsewhere, prompting denials that are beyond pathetic. Ron Paul, it turns out, has been passing as Malcolm X. “I’m the only one up here and the only one [including] in the Democratic Party that understands true racism in this country is in the judicial system,” he said. Santorum’s defense, on the other hand, is that he temporarily lost the ability to speak English. The best he could come up with, after several attempts, was that he really said “blah” people.

Neither is the point to show how Republicans leverage racial anxiety for electoral effect. According to the Agriculture Department, more whites use food stamps than blacks and Latinos combined. By coloring poverty and food insecurity black, even in areas where few black people exist, Republicans hope to spin food stamps as a racial entitlement program, diverting attention from their attempts to balance the budget on the stomachs of the poor. Republicans want to slash spending on food stamps by around 20 percent and in June voted to cut the WIC (Women, Infants and Children) program, which provides assistance to poor pregnant women, mothers and children, by 10 percent. All of this is important. But efforts to encourage whites to identify with their race rather than their class, as though the two could be separated and then ranked, is an age-old ploy perfected first by Southern Democrats.

No, what feels new here is the collapse of the broad consensus about racial discourse in electoral politics since the ’60s. The Nixon Strategy dictated that racism would continue to be an integral part of electoral campaigns, but those who used it would work in code. Reagan visited Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered, to talk about “states’ rights” and went on to trash “welfare queens”; George W. Bush spoke at Bob Jones University; his dad had “Willie” Horton (the architect of that ad is now on Team Romney). The point was to frame a politics that scapegoated blacks in a manner that racists would recognize but that would also provide plausible deniability against accusations of racism.

Today it seems as though Republicans who might be put off by racist rhetoric are in short supply, as though the presence of a black president has left them blind to their own sophism. No candidate’s polling numbers nose-dived after his remarks; there was precious little in the way of mainstream media frenzy—as recently as 2006, George Allen’s “Macaca moment” cost him his Senate seat. There is no parsing these statements. They are what they are. We are back to the days when conservatives feel comfortable calling a spade a spade. Some commentators have described it as a dog whistle: a call set to a tone that rallies some without disturbing others—a special frequency for the inducted. But this is no dog whistle. This is Wing Commander Gibson taking his mutt for a walk and calling him loudly and fondly by name.

Jonathan Alter: Daley Going Back to Chicago “Where they Stab you in the Throat!”

The lefty, often a strident one, Jonathan Alter writes the following at Bloomberg regarding the ‘demise’ of the once  welcomed former Chicago Mayor,  William M.  Daley to the Obama White House.   Sometimes  even these days, strident lefty propagandists can settle down to bump into truth from time to time.    Whether this is such a moment with Jonathan Alter, I do not know, so read on and make up your own mind:

How Bill Daley Died a Death of

a Thousand Cuts: Jonathan Alter

The resignation of William M. Daley as President Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff brings to mind the words of David Wilhelm when he left his post as chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 1994: “I’m going back to Chicago where they stab you in the front.”

Obama was reportedly stunned that Daley quit after only a year in the post, but he shouldn’t have been. The affable Chicago banker had already experienced Washington’s classic death of a thousand cuts.

Some background: The youngest and smartest son of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley was never part of the Obama inner circle. After I broke the story in late 2006 that Daley would offer an early and important endorsement of the freshman Illinois senator, a Chicago source informed me that Daley had no particular love for Obama. He backed Obama over Hillary Clinton in part to stay on the right side of Chicago’s blacks in anticipation of a now-abandoned plan to run for governor of Illinois.

In the summer of 2007, when Obama trailed Clinton by more than 20 points in most polls, Daley, by then co-chairman of the Obama campaign, essentially gave up on his candidate, telling friends that Obama had impressed everyone with his fundraising and set himself up nicely for the future but wasn’t going to make it in 2008. Obama loyalists, remembering that Daley had stopped fighting for Al Gore in the 2000 election aftermath against George W. Bush and Jim Baker when he was Gore’s campaign chairman, took note. There was no serious effort to bring him into the Obama administration in 2009.

Ambassador to Business

When Rahm Emanuel left as White House chief of staff in the fall of 2010 to run for mayor of Chicago, he pushed the president hard to hire Daley as his replacement. Emanuel argued that his friend and fellow Chicagoan would help repair the White House’s relationship with the business community (a task Emanuel didn’t think Valerie Jarrett was handling well enough) and was the best man for Job One — getting Obama re-elected.

Before Obama finally settled on Daley, senior adviser Pete Rouse served as interim chief of staff for a few months. Rouse, who has enjoyed Obama’s confidence since he served as his chief of staff in the Senate, is unassuming, unambitious and beloved within the White House. He was, and remains, the man to see on all personnel matters, which meant Daley had little ability to hire or fire. Even before Rouse’s duties were formally expanded (and Daley’s curtailed) late last year, his close relationship with the president and the White House staff was a source of frustration to Daley.

It was hard for Daley to relish being in charge when the president’s three closest aides — Rouse, Jarrett and David Plouffe (Obama’s 2008 campaign manager) — were close to free agents.

Morale under Daley sunk, as the White House became less freewheeling and more corporate and secretive. Two upper echelon aides who had once chafed under Emanuel told me they were nostalgic for him because at least he could make things happen in the government.

All of this — plus Daley’s genuine desire to spend more time with his new wife — could have been survived were it not for unhappiness with the chief of staff on Capitol Hill.

It had been more than a decade since Daley was in the Washington scrum as President Bill Clinton’s commerce secretary, and his skills were rusty. The failure to complete a “grand bargain” on the deficit with Republicans wasn’t his fault, but didn’t reflect well on him either. His good working relationship with House Speaker John Boehner yielded nothing.

Democratic lawmakers, already annoyed at not getting more face time with the president, whispered loudly that the Obama White House was much worse than the Clinton White House at taking care of their needs. They laid this at Daley’s feet.

A Fatal Interview

Soon articles appeared that reflected grumbling from unnamed sources in Congress, some of them on the staff of the Democratic leadership. But the most damaging story came from Daley’s own mouth. I’d argue that the effective end of his tenure came on Oct. 28, 2011, when Politico published an interview with him by Roger Simon, a former Chicago Sun-Times columnist who had known him for decades.

After telling Simon that the first three years of the Obama presidency had been “ungodly” and “brutal,” he said something that was simultaneously true and unforgivable within the Democratic Party:

“On the domestic side, both Democrats and Republicans have really made it very difficult for the president to be anything like a chief executive.”

In Washington, careers can end over nothing more than a sentence fragment. By saying “both Democrats and Republicans,” Daley spread the blame for obstructionism, enraging congressional Democrats, who in a couple of cases had to be soothed by the president himself. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was particularly angry. Jack Lew, the budget director, will succeed Daley and has much better relations with Democrats on the Hill and with the White House staff.

Still, Obama wasn’t lying when he said that he values the counsel of Daley, who deserves some credit for helping him survive the roughest year of his presidency so far. But Daley’s tenure and retreat may best be remembered as the moment when Washington truly displaced Chicago as the most brutal political town in the country.

(Jonathan Alter is a Bloomberg View columnist and the author of “The Promise: President Obama, Year One.” The opinions expressed are his own.)

Comment:   Alter is a lefty standby and has appeared on the Dennis Prager Show. As   I remember he  was not winsome.   However, I do find the above article informative and well written……likely even honestly written.   That is my ‘take’ anyway.

Cal Thomas: Obamalings George Stephanopoulos, Diane Sawyer, and Steve Kroft, show off their Obamaware

Time to Run a ‘Tebow’ Media Option Play

By Cal Thomas (Archive) · Thursday, January 12, 2012

“Even fair-minded liberals, of which there must be a few, should acknowledge that the Saturday-Sunday “blitz” of the Republican presidential candidates by ABC and NBC correspondents looked like a play designed by the left wing of the Democratic Party.

Clearly the questions by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and Diane Sawyer about contraception and same-sex marriage were asked to trap the GOP candidates into delivering sound bites that the Obama re-election campaign could use against the eventual nominee and the party at large. These were the types of accusatory questions that would never be asked of a Democratic president. One would not expect to hear, for example, a question like this to President Obama: “Mr. President, millions of babies have been legally aborted in this country since 1973; how can you so callously dismiss unborn children, many of whom would now be productive, taxpaying citizens, by taking a pro-choice stance on abortion?”

This is how it works: if you are a journalist who clearly favors the re-election of President Obama, you ask questions of Republicans in an effort to make them look foolish, forcing them to address subjects other than the economy and threats to national security. When you question Democrats, you ask questions people care most about and usually allow the answer, however inaccurate, to go unchallenged.

During last Sunday’s NBC News/Facebook debate on “Meet the Press,” the conservative Media Research Center (mrc.org) found that, “Out of the 41 questions directed to the six Republican presidential candidates…, 25 of them were from the left, 13 questions were neutral, mainly about the campaign horse race and electability, and only three questions pressed the candidates from the right.”

On “60 Minutes” last month, correspondent Steve Kroft delivered this fat softball to President Obama: “Since the midterm elections, you made an effort at bipartisanship. It hasn’t worked out that way. … You gave up a lot. You said you wanted a balanced approach. You didn’t get it. You cut a trillion dollars and set up the framework to cut another trillion plus, and the Republicans gave up nothing. I mean, there are people in your own party who think that you were outmaneuvered, that you were stared down by John Boehner and Grover Norquist and capitulated. … It seems to be all the compromising is being done by you…”

And so it goes in every modern election cycle. To the mainstream media, Republicans are pigheaded and unwilling to compromise with a Democratic president (or a Democratic Congress). That’s because in media-land, only Democrats want what is best for “real Americans.” Get it? MSNBC has apparently suspended conservative Pat Buchanan because that network doesn’t like his “biases,” but Democratic biases are just fine with management.

None of this will change as long as liberals continue to dominate major media.

Instead of complaining, which changes nothing, Republicans should run the equivalent of a Tebow option play. They should refuse to participate in any more dog-and-pony shows designed to trip them up. Instead, they should create their own panels with an ideological mix of interrogators.

Invite a couple of “wild card” conservative partisans like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity to add to the journalistic mix. If the “Miss America” contest could invite Limbaugh as a judge in 2010, why can’t the Republican presidential candidates invite him, or Hannity, to judge and question them? The ratings would be huge and the public would get better answers to more substantive questions than the “gotcha” questions they must now endure.

Perhaps it’s too late for this election cycle, but maybe not. All it would take is one such event and the public will instantly see what it’s been missing. After that there would likely be no turning back”.

Article sent by Mark Waldeland.

 

 

Newt Loses to Newt Spilling Marxist Poison over Romney’s Honorable Private Equity Duties

         HOW PRIVATE EQUITY WORKS

by Jonathan Macey    at the Wall Street Journal:

“ASSAULTS ON THE PRIVATE-EQUITY INDUSTRY REALLY ARE ATTACKS ON ECONOMIC FREEDOM, BECAUSE THE PRIVATE-EQUITY PROCESS IS NOTHING MORE AND NOTHING LESS THAN FREE-MARKET CAPITALISM AT WORK.   SHAME ON ALL THE PEOPLE, PARTICULARLY THOSE WHO CLAIM TO BE FRIENDLY TO CAPITALISM, WHO ATTACK MITT ROMNEY BECAUSE OF HIS ASSOCIATION WITH THE U.S. PRIVATE-EQUITY INDUSTRY.”

The above is the final paragraph of this excellent article by Jonathan Macey in today’s Wall Street Journal.   We humans are herd animals, whether Liberal or conservative.   I prefer to be honest and therefore I certainly include myself in this pack.   

Those who study our herding instincts know from research that  humans prefer not to be bothered by reading.   If they must, as so many conservatives  today feel they must due to Obamarule, they  will read the first one or two paragraphs of an article, especially one as long as this one by Mr. Macey.   I found the last paragraph about 1,000 words from now, the most compelling to remember from  this  body of the work:  

“Mitt Romney’s candidacy is subjecting the entire private-equity industry—where Mr. Romney spent most of his business career—to vicious attacks by journalists and several of his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination.

Newt Gingrich’s political action committee is sponsoring a film called “When Mitt Romney Came to Town” that accuses Mr. Romney and his former company, Bain Capital, of taking over companies, looting them, and then tossing their workers out on the street. Jon Huntsman’s attacks on his rival include the description of private equity as a business that “breaks down businesses [and] destroys jobs, as opposed to creating jobs and opportunity, leveraging up, spinning off, [and] enriching shareholders.”

This is anticapitalist claptrap. Private-equity firms make significant investments in companies, mainly U.S. companies. Most of their investments are in companies that underperform industry peers. Frequently these firms are on the brink of failure.

Because private-equity firms are, by definition, equity investors, they make money only if they improve the performance of their companies. Private equity is last in line to be paid in case of insolvency. Private-equity firms don’t make a profit unless their companies can meet their obligations to workers and other creditors.

The companies in which private-equity investors are able to turn a profit generally grow, rather than shrink. This is because the preferred “exit strategy” by which private-equity firms profit is to take the private companies in which they invest and enable them to go public and sell shares that will help the company grow even stronger. As for turnaround success stories, Continental Airlines, Orbitz and Snapple have all benefitted at some time from private-equity investment.

Or take Hertz. Ford sold Hertz to private-equity investors in 2009 for $14 billion. These investors were able to take the company public less than a year later at an equity valuation of $17 billion. The Hertz success story is consistent with the empirical data that indicate companies owned by private-equity firms typically outperform similar companies that do not have a private-equity investor (as measured by profitability, innovation and the returns to investors in initial public offerings).

Private-equity firms not only help corporate performance, but in the long run they lead to more employment and higher wages as well. The alternative to the leaner, smaller firms created by private equity are bankrupt firms that do not employ anybody. And private-equity firms tend to use more incentive-based pay than other firms. A 2008 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report shows that the companies in which private-equity firms invested had low employment growth relative to their peers, and their employment growth rose after they were acquired by a private-equity firm.

These sorts of facts are an inconvenience for some. One U.S. business publication recently announced that “The U.S. Cannot Have a Private Equity President.” The article by Forbes.com writer Robert Lenzner goes on to say that there was only one transaction in which Bain paid a significant dividend, so Mr. Lenzner could make the case that the private-equity industry is one of “company stripping, the ruthless way for a raider to exploit a weakened prey for its own profit,” and he could add that “slightly more than a handful” of the deals that Romney did “went bankrupt.”

By law, a company cannot pay a dividend unless it is solvent. It also is illegal for a director to authorize a dividend that would render a company insolvent. Corporate boards as a matter of standard practice are extremely careful about paying dividends. This is especially true for companies with board members who are sophisticated and wealthy private-equity investors, because they face personal liability for authorizing the payment of dividends by an insolvent company.

The Forbes article also goes on to assert, in the same vein as many other attackers, that “the nature of private equity is to be ruthless and only care about using as much borrowed money as possible in order to gin up the potential return on equity.”

Such an accusation fundamentally  mischaracterizes the relationshkp between debt and equity.  Equity investors do not get paid until the creditors do.   Moreover, unless those lending money to the portfolio companies of private-equity firms are abjectly incompetent, they will not lend to companies that are not highly likely, if not virtually certain to be able to repay it.  In fact, the leverage ratios -  meaning the amount of debt that a company has in proportion to its equity – of private-equity firms declined dramatically during the financial crisis, and they are only now rebounding.

At the height of the financial crisis in 2008, the GAO’s private-equity report observed that academic research “generally suggests that recent private equity LEOs (leveraged buyouts) have had a positive impact on the financial performance of the acquired companies.”  The same GAO report noted that in the 2004-2008 period it studied, none of the 500 complaints received by the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Investment Management involved private-equity fund investors.  The GAO also noted that institutional investor associations and bar associations reported that “fraud has not been a significant issue with private equity firms.”

Unlike some other investors, who trade in debt and derivatives, private-equity firms make money by investing in businesses that  make things and provide services.  This industry should be applauded, not attacked.

ASSAULTS ON THE PRIVATE-EQUITY INDUSTRY REALLY ARE ATTACKS ON ECONOMIC FREEDOM, BECAUSE THE PRIVATE-EQUITY PROCESS IS NOTHING MORE AND NOTHING LESS THAN FREE-MARKET CAPITALISM AT WORK.   SHAME ON ALL THE PEOPLE, PARTICULARLY THOSE WHO CLAIM TO BE FRIENDLY TO CAPITALISM, WHO ATTACK MITT ROMNEY BECAUSE OF HIS ASSOCIATION WITH THE U.S. PRIVATE-EQUITY INDUSTRY.” 

(emphasis by glenn h. ray)

 

Why the West is Best, by Ibn Warraq

Mark Waldeland sent the following note:

I heard some of Ibn Warraq's interview with Dennis today and was
 sufficiently impressed:
 http://www.amazon.com/Why-West-Best-Apostates-Democracy/dp/1594035768
--Mark

Below is a brief review of the book by Ibn Warraq:

We, in the West in general, and the United States in particular, have witnessed over the last twenty years a slow erosion of our civilizational self-confidence. Under the influence of intellectuals and academics in Western universities, intellectuals such as Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, Edward Said, and Noam Chomsky, and destructive intellectual fashions such as post-modernism, moral relativism, and mulitculturalism, the West has lost all self-confidence in its own values, and seems incapable and unwilling to defend those values.

 

 By contrast, resurgent Islam, in all its forms, is supremely confident, and is able to exploit the West’s moral weakness and cultural confusion to demand ever more concessions from her. The growing political and demographic power of Muslim communities in the West, aided and abetted by Western apologists of Islam, not to mention a compliant, pro-Islamic US Administration, has resulted in an ever-increasing demand for the implementation of Islamic law-the Sharia- into the fabric of Western law, and Western constitutions.

 

There is an urgent need to examine why the Sharia is totally incompatible with Human Rights and the US Constitution. This book , the first of its kind, proposes to examine the Sharia and its potential and actual threat to democratic principles.This book defines and defends Western values, strengths and freedoms often taken for granted.

 

This book also tackles the taboo subjects of racism in Asian culture, Arab slavery, and Islamic Imperialism. It begins with a homage to New York City, as a metaphor for all we hold dear in Western culture- pluralism, individualism, freedom of expression and thought, the complete freedom to pursue life, liberty and happiness unhampered by totalitarian regimes, and theocratic doctrines.

Successman Romney May Discover, He is Indeed the Man for the White House!

Today’s American consservatives demand a Messiah to defeat Marxist Barack Hussein Obama this November, 2012.   From the nastiness of the early months of the Republican battle to box Mr. Hussein Obama, they must might just be creating one from the form of success man, Mormon Mitt Romney, the malleable.

 

The very fact he is not an entrenched,  pinched doctrinaire blowhard like Ron Paul or even Newt Gingrich, the very fact he has been successful  doing his work in life  as he sees it as the bright,  highly ethical, pleasant and winsome  businessman he is, provides him the opportunity to be an exceptional American leader and savior from Obamaism.

 

Jonah Goldberg suggests Mr. Romney needs something more to accompany his smarts, smile, and soul  offering this so very cogent sentence:  

 

“If Romney were     more adept and philosophically grounded, he could make the case that he’s the guy to turn around government. You can hear him trying, but he’s not there yet”.    Oh, my, how true……isn’t that Romney jsut the guy thinking America is looking for!…….YES, I CAN HEAR HIM TRYING, and I like his noise.     Please Read On:

To take down Obama, Romney must win

Battle of the Bloat

 

by    Jonah Goldberg   at the Chicago Tribune, sent by Marian Fischer of Waseca, Minnesota:

 

“One thing is clear: At best, Mitt Romney is a work in progress.Romney is under attack for being a hugely successful private equity banker at Bain Capital. Bain identified distressed companies and found value in them for shareholders, investors and, ultimately, consumers. When things worked right, Romney and his team streamlined firms and injected fresh capital, and helped companies thrive by returning them to their “core competencies.”

He took his turnaround skills to the Winter Olympics (and, he argues, to the governor’s mansion in Massachusetts). When the 2002 games were in utter disarray, he swooped in, cut out all the self-dealing nonsense by consultants and contractors, made the fat cats and moochers pay for their own meals, and got things back on track.

It’s an impressive record, but it doesn’t prove he knows how to “create jobs.” Investors and businessmen don’t search out ways to create jobs. They search out ways to create wealth.

The private equity business came into existence because too many industries had become bloated and lazy by the 1980s, unable to compete with emerging economies around the globe. Most of that bloat is gone. Decades of global competition and the huge productivity gains from the computer and Internet revolutions have seen to that.

Where does bloat keep on a-bloating? I’ll give you one guess.

Contrary to liberal talking points, conservatives don’t oppose government per se. If we did, we wouldn’t glorify the Constitution as much as we do. After all, the one thing the Constitution does is create the federal government.

Conservatives and libertarians believe the federal government should only do those things the federal government should do. Other important things — and there are many — should be taken care of by, yes, state and local governments, but also by individuals, families, churches, charities and so on. In other words, government should get back to its core competencies and pass on the savings to the shareholders: the taxpayers.

If you don’t think government is more bloated than Dom DeLuise with an allergic shellfish reaction, you simply haven’t been paying attention. Yes, regulations hurt the private sector, but they also hamper the public sector, making it impossible for it to do what it should. The government that built the Pentagon in 16 months would probably need at least that long just to get a meeting with the EPA today.

Why did President Obama have to spend billions to discover that there’s no such thing as shovel-ready jobs? Not because there aren’t enough workers eager to pick up shovels and paychecks, but because there aren’t nearly enough bureaucrats willing to put down their clipboards.

A Government Accounting Office study last year found that more than 100 programs deal with surface transportation, 82 monitor teacher quality, 47 manage job-training programs, nearly two dozen offices or programs deal with homelessness, and some 15 agencies or offices handle food safety. Five outfits focus on getting the feds to use less gasoline. Maybe they should carpool?

And those are just redundancies; imagine how many stupid things such programs are doing. According to Sen. Tom Coburn’s “Wastebook,” the list is endless — from subsidizing “pancakes for yuppies” in Washington, D.C., to maintaining a video game preservation center in New York. It’s enough to make a cowboy poet cry. And don’t get me started on Obama’s venture socialism projects.

In nearly every sphere of life not tainted by government involvement, technology and market efficiencies have made things cheaper for the average American. According to American Enterprise Institute economist Mark Perry, color TVs from the 1964 Sears Christmas Catalog cost $750 to $800. In 2011 dollars, that would buy you not just a much better flat-screen TV, but also a refrigerator, microwave oven, washer, dryer, laptop, iPod, GPS device, DVD player and stereo — with money to spare.

Meanwhile, higher education, health care and other services distorted by government interference only get more expensive and bureaucratic. Incompetent teachers can’t be fired; competent ones can’t be rewarded. Unfunded liabilities and entitlements threaten to destroy the country. And so on.

Obviously, cost-cutting is only part of the story. The government meddles in our lives in non-economic ways too. But as Ron Paul would tell you, a government that stops wasting the people’s money by definition stops meddling in our lives.

If Romney were more adept and philosophically grounded, he could make the case that he’s the guy to turn around government. You can hear him trying, but he’s not there yet.”

(Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online.)

Note:   I am adding the above article to the category “Arts and Entertainment” for the following reason:    I consider politics an art from even though often a brutal one.   It is living sculpture with some participants forming into beautiful human blossoms with a winsome  scent of goodness, honesty,  and appealing friendship and wisdom accompanying accomplishment to the citizens of the country he leads.   

Others , like Barack Hussein Obama are quick sculpted to appear winsome with soothing voice and sweet words, but with power, their deeds become  foul, their messages dishonest and their form rots as in Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray.

Evil usually begets evil.

Why do so many CONSERVATIVES blast Romney for becoming more CONSERVATIVE?

New Gingrich ad: Romney speaks French,

              you know

 by Allahpundit   at HotAir

 

Via Matt Lewis, this is the second time in two days that Newt’s team has turned an otherwise effective spot into a caricature of an attack ad. Yesterday it was the old business about the dog on the roof of his car, today it’s the fact that, like a certain other filthy rich politician from Massachusetts whom conservatives disdain, Romney speaks French. Doesn’t famous brainiac Newt Gingrich speak a foreign language or two, or ten? This would have been a jolly fun zinger two presidential elections ago, but in case Newt hasn’t heard, we fight wars alongside the French now and everything. What does it prove? That Romney’s an elitist phony? Good news — the base already knows.

That’s the first ad below. The second is a 60-second spot his Super PAC started airing in South Carolina today. (There’s a 30-second version too.) Looks like those reports about Team Newt backing off the Bain attacks were wrong. Or were they?

A source close to wealthy donor Sheldon Adelson, who is under fire for giving $5 million to a pro-Newt Gingrich super PAC that began running TV ads attacking Mitt Romney’s career in private equity, distanced the Las Vegas casino magnate from the ads on Thursday…

And while the Adelson source said the casino magnate was “indifferent” to the “fuss,” he also strongly implied that Adelson did not want the money he gave to Gingrich to be used for ads attacking Romney’s private equity career.

“I think people want to draw a conclusion that the money goes in and all $5 million is directed just towards $5 million of Bain Capital attacks on Mitt Romney, and that that’s exactly what Mr. Adelson wanted that money to be spent on,” the Adelson source said. “What if you donate to the Red Cross, and they do a hundred different things and you wanted it to just go to people in Haiti, and they sent it to people in Somalia instead and you didn’t think that was a priority? Are you going to call the Red Cross and demand that they just send the money to Haiti? You make a donation on a basis that the people receiving the money are going to spend it in the best way that you see fit,” the source added.

Probably doesn’t matter. If Newt wins South Carolina and emerges as the Not Romney, he’ll have plenty of money flowing in from the base even if Adelson walks away. If he doesn’t win, he’s almost certainly finished even if Adelson’s willing to keep writing checks.

I can’t help feeling like there’s some happy yet unexplored middle ground ad-wise between crude Bain demagoguery and “Romney speaks French” stupidity. Any ideas, guys? Any weak spots for Mitt Romney out there that might exploited to great effect among the conservative base? Shoot me any suggestions you might have in the comments. Exit quotation from Philip Klein about the Super PAC’s new Bain ads: “Can’t wait for sequel ‘When Newt Came to town,’ about a historian who gives frank lectures that create millions of jobs.”

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/01/12/new-gingrich-ad-romney-speaks-french-you-know/

Comment:   I was quoted a number of times when I was young and more callow.   I was a Democrat then, and on some issues, a rather lefty type one at that.     Why should I be entrapped by some of these foolish college-kid type noises?

But in  my later life I was forced into private enterprise, an experience which suddenly made me almost  an adult in no time.    Especially early in that experience when I discovered those who worked for me always got paid before I did……if, indeed, there was anything left for me at all.   Often, that was the case…..or when I had to remortgage the house to help cover my business debt,   the first time, and then the second to help pay for other mortgages…….and most of these losses caused by Washington Lefty  failures and frauds within Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, not mine.

Because I was converted to the conservative cause, does that make me less of a conservative than someone who was born into conservatism?   Isn’t that what we conservative ‘evangelists’ want to do, win converts to RETURN TRADITIONAL AMERICAN VALUES BACK INTO AMERICAN LIFE…..AND SO REDUCE THE SIZE OF GOVERNMENT, REMOVE THE MARXISTS FROM POWER AND REDUCE THEIR STRANGLEHOLD OVER COURT AND BUDGET AS WELL?

MITT ROMNEY IS AN EXCELLENT EXAMPLE OF  THE POWER OF CONSERVATIVE EVANGELISM.   THAT HE DOES NOT YET SEE THE ERROR OF HIS WAYS  REGARDING ROMNEYCARE IN MASSACHUSETTS MEANS WE HAVE TO DO A BIT MORE CONVINCING. 

Mitt Romney is an all around fine, successful, patriotic, conserative and religious  American who got elected to the governorship of a Lefty state, Massachusetts.    That is proof of his abilities to connect with many kinds of voting Americans.   HE IS THE BEST CANDIDATE IN THE  FIELD WITH THAT PROVEN ADVANTAGE TO WIN INDEPENDENTS AND LIBERALS TO OUR AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE CAUSE to defeat the Marxist, Obama.

We will probably never connect with the Marxists.   They and their Occupy Wall Street hoodlums will always represent the social and political underworld of tyranny and deceit.

William Kristol: The Republican Political Show Must Go On!!

‘The Last Chance’?

What about the “millions of primary voters” after the first three states?

by  William Kristol   of  the Weekly Standard:

I’m flattered to be welcomed by Karl Rove, writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, to membership in the GOP establishment. I’m even more pleased by Rove’s statement that “No group of power brokers can pressure others into uniting behind one candidate. Millions of primary voters and caucus-goers will select the GOP’s nominee. That’s good enough for most of us.”

 It’s certainly good enough for me.

But how is a professed deference to “millions of primary voters” consistent with the statement, a couple of paragraphs earlier, that “South Carolina will be the last chance for several candidates”? Why would South Carolina be the last chance? Rove explains: “It will be hard to justify going on after being at the back of the pack in three contests—especially with Florida’s 10 expensive media markets and four million registered Republican voters for this closed primary looming at month’s end.”

But if South Carolina is to be “the last chance for several candidates,” then who would be left, per Rove, for the “millions of primary voters and caucus-goers” in the remaining 47 states to select among? Can’t all or almost all the candidates at least “justify” going on to Florida on January 31, where the total vote count for the Republican primaries will pass one million? Otherwise, “millions of primary voters and caucus-goers” will not in fact have selected the GOP nominee—it will have been several hundred thousand voters, in only three states. And even after Florida, there will have been less than three million votes cast. The Democratic race in 2008 didn’t conclude until 40 million votes had been cast. And, I’d note, Barack Obama did better in the 2008 general election than his predecessors who had clinched the race earlier—better than John Kerry in 2004, better than George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000, and better than Bob Dole in 1996.

Rove is of course right, to a point: Whatever happens in South Carolina, it will be daunting to stay in against the Romney juggernaut. That’s not because Romney has rolled up so many votes (25 percent in Iowa and 39 percent in New Hampshire aren’t show stoppers, after all), but because of the Romney organization and money. (Rove himself suggests the centrality of money when he refers to “Florida’s 10 expensive media markets.”) Romney deserves credit for putting together his organization and amassing all that money. Those factors, along with other qualities, may well propel him to the nomination.

Fair enough. Money matters. But do we really want a Republican party where money talks, and candidates walk?

Comment:   There are certain people in America, unfortunately too few these days, who have sufficient  command of the nation’s political settings, who have a welcoming presence, and who possess a verbal ability to share his or her understandings and expectations from honesty, sincerity, with the goal of sharing valuable and accurate knowledge.

Among our American black population, there is nearly no honest one  these days in the political arena…..for nearly all in the political arena are racists from the left with nearly no interest or abilities to recognize honesty.   I think it is a cultural matter, a natural infection of peoples confined to a plantation living governed by a political party.   However, there are so many devoted and admirably honest of these  Americans living within  the shadows of  conservatism these days, it aids cementing my own political understandings and position…..which are constant at the core, but always challengeable on the perifere.  

Many appear with Dennis  Prager  on Dennis’ radio show.

One has to admire president Barack Hussein Obama for his shrewd disingenuousness and dishonesty.    Although I can recognize the advantages of such skills in a football quarter back, I detest these  tyrants in a culture which is dedicated to  promote Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness in ones society who uses  duplicity as  his or her  daily habit.

Among women in the broader political sphere, there are so few, they nearly don’t exist……except for Condelezza Rice, perhaps.

Then there are the good folks of today’s America…..the truly honorable, well educated, sensitive, broad thinking individuals…..nearly all of whom are conservatives these days…..Charles Krauthammer, Dennis, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell,  Shelby Steele, Paul Ryan,  Evan Bayh….people whose opinion one seeks for a cleaner clearer view of issues.

There may  others, but these few are among the very  best.   William Kristol is among them and is always worth our ‘eye or ear’.

I am not certain from my distance here in this cubby hole surrounding my computer I agree with Mr. Kristol, except for his argument heard elsewhere reminding me that the bulldog renegade, the untrustworthy Ron Paul, will stay in the race no matter what.    Although I have now come to the conclusion I do like Mitt Romney, and am likely to like him better as his campaign continues, do I really want this cobra, Paul, to be the only Republican trapsing around the country embarrassing me as a conservative Republican?    NO……good luck, then to Rick Santorum.

Let the Republican cause to recover American from Obama Marxism  go forward without Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, and maybe even  the guy from our Embassy in China.