Friday, September 30, 2011
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.
Posted by Lemuel Calhoon at 6:29 AM | Links to this post
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.
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.
Posted by Lemuel Calhoon at 6:23 AM | Links to this post
Thursday, September 29, 2011
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.
Posted by Lemuel Calhoon at 12:04 PM | Links to this post
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.
By J. R. Dunn
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.
Posted by Lemuel Calhoon at 11:54 AM | Links to this post
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
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.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.
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.
. . . 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.
Posted by Lemuel Calhoon at 7:30 AM | Links to this post
Sunday, September 25, 2011
The "NOT" candidate
From American Thinker:
[. . .]
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.
Posted by Lemuel Calhoon at 9:18 PM | Links to this post
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Affirmative Action Oscars
From The LA Times:
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.
Posted by Lemuel Calhoon at 7:33 AM | Links to this post
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Not all in Hollywood were against US
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.
Posted by Lemuel Calhoon at 3:33 PM | Links to this post
Friday, September 09, 2011
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.
Posted by Lemuel Calhoon at 8:49 PM | Links to this post
Wednesday, September 07, 2011
Respect must be earned
From FoxNews.com:
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.
Posted by Lemuel Calhoon at 4:41 PM | Links to this post
Tuesday, September 06, 2011
Runnin' off to freedom
Posted by Lemuel Calhoon at 8:51 PM | Links to this post
Saturday, September 03, 2011
We should stand up for what we believe
From The American Spectator:
[snip]
The authors of the AmSpec piece, Deal W Hudson and Matt Smith, believe:
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.
Posted by Lemuel Calhoon at 11:21 AM | Links to this post
Friday, September 02, 2011
No. 3 Stranglehold
One of the greatest hist from the A number 1 conservative gun-toting rocker, Ted Nugent!
Posted by Lemuel Calhoon at 8:58 AM | Links to this post
Miss Ann is Talking
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?
Posted by Lemuel Calhoon at 8:55 AM | Links to this post
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Scaming the taxpayer
It should be pointed out that all those "gifts" of the labor movement to the working men and women were only made possible by advances in worker productivity made possible by entrepreneurial capitalism (imagine a campaign to give people free air travel before the airplane was invented). The same entrepreneurial capitalism that the current labor movement, and its allies in the Democrat party view as a blood enemy and are attempting to destroy.
It was not until advancing technology made it possible for employers to give those benefits to workers that a movement to bring them about became possible. In other words the labor movement was not a response to long hours, poor working conditions and low wages. Rather it was an early indicator that it was becoming possible to relieve those conditions.
The fact is that those improvements would have come about anyway even without the labor movement. It just would have taken a little longer for employers to begin raising wages and improving conditions to attract and retain good workers. As society has advanced socially the ethos of employers has moved more and more toward providing generous benefits to workers and labor unions have become less and less necessary. This is why the share of the private workforce represented by unions has been in steep decline for decades.
Add to this the union's tendency to support political candidates and policies that more and more Americans find objectionable and it becomes highly unlikely that organized labor will enjoy any kind of private sector comeback.
This is why the labor movement has concentrated more and more on the public sector. However public sector unions have never been a good idea. No less a liberal luminary than FDR pronounced the idea of unionizing government workers as “unthinkable and intolerable."
The reason that public worker unions are so toxic is that in a private sector labor negotiation on one side of the table sits management - representing the owners of the company - and on the other sits the union - representing the employes of the company.
The two sides have representation at the table. In the case of a public sector labor negotiation the situation is different. On one side of the table sits the public employee union and on the other sit politicians who depend for reelection upon campaign contributions from unions as organizations and from individual union members. They also depend upon the votes of public employee unions and upon those union members to staff their campaigns at the grass roots level. If you doubt me try this experiment. Come to the DNC convention in Charlotte next year and take a poll of the delegates and see just how high a percentage of them are members of public sector unions.
So in a public sector labor negotiation only one side - labor - is effectively represented at the table. The great mass of private sector tax payers are shut out of the process and no one looks out for their interests. And here is a dirty little secret. Private sector workers are a big segment of those tax payers who have no representation at a public sector labor negotiation.
Private sector union members may think that they stand in solidarity with public sector union members however the reality is that public sector workers are parasites whose only way of increasing their prosperity is to make the private sector workers poorer. This is because government at any level produces nothing. It creates no wealth and to survive it must drain the wealth of the private sector.
Most advocates of labor unions can only cite gains made decades in the past as justification for the continuing existence of unions. There has been no advance in the situation of the average worker in the United States in at least the last 35 years which can be attributed to the intervention of organized labor. Workers in the private sector have largely woken up to the fact that they mostly no longer need unions to look out for them. Public sector workers will never come to that conclusion because in their case collective bargaining is a way for them to gain control of both sides of the negotiating process and write their own ticket.
However the price of that ticket is too high for the rest of us to continue paying.
Posted by Lemuel Calhoon at 6:59 AM | Links to this post