Showing posts with label Protecting America. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Protecting America. Show all posts

Saturday, January 01, 2011

The Gold Bullion Challenge to @KeithOlbermann -- Document a Single @FoxNews Lie and Win a $1,400 Krugerrand

Update 1/8/11 8:31AM PST: All Four Media Matters Attempts Completely Blown Apart.

The self-proclaimed "Queen of All Media" -- Perez Hilton -- points us to a blistering attack on Fox News by media superstar Keith Olbermann™.

Keith Olbermann has once again taken on Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, after Twitter users lashed out at him for supporting a liberal-slanted website... He responded by writing:

FYI: in reply to "highly ironic that you support Daily Kos yet think Fox News is slanted" I said: Fox News is 100% bulls**t. And it is.

@mtovet you're right: I don't have as much hate or as many lies in me as O'Reilly

@tonyperry1 I did it because his network is full of bulls**t & O'Reilly is full of bulls**t. & if you believe them you're full of bulls**t.

@DailyRushbo let's clarify this. Fox News is 100% Bulls**t. Rush Limbaugh is 100% Pigeons**t.

Wow! He is certainly not holding back, is he?!

Isn't Perez' use of punctuation intoxicating? But I digress.

"Faux News." "Liars." "Not really a news organization." "A right-wing propaganda machine."

The progressive left and its ilk -- like the man with the golden strap-on -- have a lot of descriptions for the country's dominant cable news channel. They claim that Fox fabricates news stories.

I want them to prove it. And I've got a 1-ounce Krugerrand from my Y2K bunker* (today's spot price: $1,400) waiting for Keith Olbermann or any 'progressive' who can provide me with a documented lie repeated by Fox News reporters.

There are just four simple rules:

• Typos don't qualify ("ooh, the news ticker used a 'D' after his name, not an 'R'!").

• The lie must have been reported by at least two Fox News reporters (not analysts, reporters).

• The transcripts and/or video clips must be available on a suitably trustworthy site for verification.

• The real news story, refuting the Fox News lie, must have been correctly reported at around the same time by at least one news reporter from CNN or MSNBC (with similar links and/or transcripts from their sites).

Just one lie! That's all I'm asking for. This should be the easiest $1,400 you've ever made, Keith. You've got to have a whole database of Fox lies, right? Just post your correctly documented answer in the comments section before January 15, 2011. That's two freaking weeks!

And given the devaluation of our currency by President Training Wheels, the Krugerrand could easily be worth $1,500 by then.

Ready? Get set... go!


* Since converted to a super-secret 2038 Bunker.

Update: Media Matters submits its response. This ought to be good.

Hat tip: Ame.

Some edumucation for young progressives

Whom Despots Fear

What really happened

To the Congress:

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) doing the work Democrats won't do: sounding the public pension crisis alarm and protecting taxpayers

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) is focusing much-needed attention on the public sector pension programs that Democrats have driven off a cliff.

The country's public pension system is grossly underfunded and needs an overhaul, Rep. Devin Nunes said this week... [He] s promoting legislation designed to gauge the extent of the problem, while also establishing a ban on federal bailouts of public pension programs.

How bad is the underfunding problem?

Nationwide, the country's pension programs for public employees had roughly $1.9 trillion set aside in 2008 to pay promised retirement benefits, according to Nunes...

...Yet those same programs have liabilities totaling $5.2 trillion — a gap of more than $3.2 trillion.

Introduced earlier this month, Nunes' Public Pension Transparency Act would force state and local pension programs to report their liabilities to the federal government using a uniform accounting standard. It would also create a federal ban on any future public pension bailouts by Washington.

The bill has picked up the support of several leading Republicans, including Reps. Paul Ryan (Wis.) and Darrell Issa (Calif.).

Last week The Washington Examiner's Mark Hemingway also hit the alarm, describing the fatal default of Pritchard, Alabama on its pension obligations. Hemingway's question is a troubling one: "If the busted public pensions in small-town Alabama make for a particularly tragic tale, what kind of misery is going to unfold when some of the largest towns and states in the country run out of money?"

The public sector pension crisis is here. The nefarious alliance of corrupt Democrat politicians and their public sector union bosses have left pensioners and taxpayers high and dry. Rep. Nunes' efforts are a brave and utterly necessary start at addressing this impending catastrophe.


Linked by: Michelle Malkin and Memeorandum. Thanks!

Thursday, December 30, 2010

No one's buying your pathetic excuses, Ezra Klein: progressives are the enemies of the Constitution as surely as night follows day

Washington Post journolist Ezra Klein laid several eggs during a gaffe-filled interview on MSNBC earlier today.

Because the cable channel's ratings now trail reruns of Gilligan's Island and hospital sonograms, no one would have known except for the heroes over at NewsBusters.

They took the bullet for the rest of us and transcribed his statements regarding the new House requirement to read the Constitution at the start of the session. Among his remarks were these timeless gems:

[The Constitution] has no binding power on anything. And two, the issue of the Constitution is not that people don’t read the text and think they’re following. The issue of the Constitution is that the text is confusing because it was written more than 100 years ago and what people believe it says differs from person to person and differs depending on what they want to get done.

Well, gee Ira -- I mean Ezra, my mortgage note is nearly 30 years old. I don't really understand it very well, and my interpretation is probably different than the bank's, so our opinions as to what I should pay are amorphous -- confusing, even.

After realizing he'd become even more of a laughingstock than usual, Klein used his WaPo bully pulpit to claim he'd been misinterpreted and brutalized by conservatives.

This morning, I gave a quick interview to MSNBC where I made, I thought, some fairly banal points on the GOP's plan to honor the Constitution by having it read aloud on the House floor...

...The rather toxic implication of [my comments] is that one side respects the Constitution and the other doesn't. That's bunk, of course: It’s arguments over how the Constitution should be understood, not arguments over whether it should be followed, that cleave American politics. The Constitution was written more than 223 years ago, and despite the confidence various people have in their interpretation of the text, smart scholars of good faith continue to disagree about it. And they tend to disagree about it in ways that support their political ideology. I rarely meet a gun-lover who laments the Second Amendment's clear limits on bearing firearms, or someone who believes in universal health care but thinks the proper interpretation of the Commerce Clause doesn't leave room for such a policy.

Bzzzt! Wrong, schmuck!

Everyone with an iota of intellectual curiosity knows the history of the New Deal and how great swaths of it were ruled clearly unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. It was only after FDR's threats to stack the Supreme Court -- to bring four new Elena Kagan members to bear -- that the Democrat president was able to bully the High Court into egregious rulings like Wickard vs. Filburn.

Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942), was a U.S. Supreme Court decision that dramatically increased the power of the federal government to regulate economic activity. A farmer, Roscoe Filburn, was growing wheat to feed his chickens. The U.S. government had imposed limits on wheat production based on acreage owned by a farmer, in order to drive up wheat prices during the Great Depression, and Filburn was growing more than the limits permitted. Filburn was ordered to destroy his crops and pay a fine, even though he was producing the excess wheat for his own use and had no intention of selling it.

The Supreme Court, interpreting the United States Constitution's Commerce Clause under Article 1 Section 8 (which permits the United States Congress "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;") decided that, because Filburn's wheat growing activities reduced the amount of wheat he would buy for chicken feed on the open market, and because wheat was traded nationally, Filburn's production of more wheat than he was allotted was affecting interstate commerce, and so could be regulated by the federal government.

You read that right: a cowed Supreme Court, which had been blatantly threatened by FDR, ruled that a farmer growing wheat for use on his own farm was engaging in interstate commerce.

A more outrageous court decision you'd be hard-pressed to find.

Wickard, in particular, opened the floodgates to expansive interpretations of the Commerce Clause, never before contemplated in American history and certainly foreign to the principles enunciated by the Framers in all of their writings.

So, yes, Klein is a lying schmuck who either knows little of the Constitution's history or simply doesn't care.

The very welfare state he supports is collapsing around us: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, "Great Society" and every other disastrous Democrat brainchild hatched since the Wickard decision has America literally teetering at the brink of economic collapse.

Question: how many years has the Congressional Budget Office warned that America's entitlement spending is "unsustainable"? More years than Klein's been alive, to be sure. Yet the progressives express an insatiable desire to confiscate private property, to centralize government and to ignore the Constitution while doing so, and see no limits to the scope of government.

This country's Framers studied Cicero, John Locke, the Baron de Montesquieu, Adam Smith and others whose timeless wisdom were used to help construct a society of vast wealth, infinite freedom and limited government.

In little more than two hundred years, Americans defeated slavery, Nazism, military Shintoism and Communism; refined mass production; invented human flight; created 75% of all medical innovations on the planet; put a man on the moon; invented the telephone, the Internet and the search engine; and advanced humankind in millions of other ways, in every field and endeavor. Those achievements weren't created because of the Democrats' welfare state -- they were created in spite of them.

Yet Klein ignores history, logic and reason and claims that progressives have some sort of equal claim to the Constitution. He is a bald-faced liar. This country's founders studied thousands of years of human history -- despotic regimes, authoritarian lunatics, totalitarian zealots -- and attempted to constrain government, not the individual.

Klein clearly refutes the notions of the God-given rights of man, of private property and of carefully constructed limits on an all-powerful, centralized, authoritarian government. For progressives can articulate no limits on government, no checks on their insatiable appetite for control over the individual.

The Founders of this country would despise you, Ezra Klein. You and your progressive ilk who reject the Constitution and the Declaration. You're a buffoon and a laughingstock -- and everyone knows it.


Hat tip: Memeorandum. Linked by: Michelle Malkin, Pundit & Pundette, and Adrienne. Thanks!

Sneak Preview: 10 Photos of the Reagan Rose Bowl Float #awesome

In honor of President Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday, the Rose Bowl Parade will celebrate the life of the greatest president of the last century with a monumental float. Courtesy of Hope for America, here's a sneak preview.










If you're as big a Reagan fan as I am, it's also worth visiting the Reagan Library on the web or -- better still -- in person.

Hat tip: CB.

Sunday, December 26, 2010

The 2010 Fabulous 50 Blog Award Winners #fab50

The moment you've been waiting for is here.

We're pleased to announce the winners of the 2010 Fabulous 50 Blog Awards, the most prestigious new media awards anywhere. Or at least in the 993 area code.

These awards recognize a variety of blogs and websites operating in the conservative hemisphere of the Internet, all of which have worked tirelessly to protect America from Statism -- some in very unique ways.

So, without further ado, may I have the envelopes, please?

Best Political Blog
Best Political Analyst
Best Conservative News Blog
Best Op-Ed Website
Best News Analysis Website
Best Talker's Website
Best New Media Family of Sites
Best Group Blog
Best Media Watching
Best Media Analysis
Best Media Analysis Story of 2010
Best Linker
Best Law Blogger
Best News Aggregator
Best Blog Aggregator
World's Dumbest Blogger (Lifetime Achievement Award)
The Rockwell Award for Best Artwork
The Krugman Award for Best Story Artwork of 2010
The Dali Award for Most Creative Blogging
Best Up-and-Coming Political Analysis Blog
Best European Blog
Best Middle East Media Watching
The Daniel Simpson Day Award for Snarkiest News Blog
The Elihu Smails Award for Up-and-Coming Snark Blog
Best Beltway Reporting
Best Government Watchdog
Best News Editor
Best Science Blog
The Stuxnet Award for Best Information Warfare Campaign
Best Blogger working in Legacy Media
Best JihadFighter
Best Designated Hitter
Best Latin American Coverage
The Mr. Peabody Award for Best Time-Travel Blogging
Best Legacy Media Columnist
Best Marxist Front Group
Best Econ Blog
Best First Lady Blog
Most Creative Use of Cursewords in Political Analysis
Best New Econ Blog
Best Blog Ring
The Watcher's Council (all 2010 members of the Watcher's Council are winners)


Frequently Asked Questions


Q: Okay, I won. Where do I get my damn award badges?
A: Right here. If you have questions about installing your badge, ask 'em in the comments.

Q: *Sob*. I didn't win. Can I use one of the badges anyhow?
A: Yes, the '90 x 40 Micro' badge was designed for use by anyone, even losers blogs that did not win.

Q: You suck -- I didn't win.
A: That's not a question.

Q: Where are the 2009 Fabulous 50 Award Winners?
A: Right here.


Tuesday, December 21, 2010

It's Coming... #Fab50

It's coming.

The 2010 Fabulous 50 Awards are set to be announced later this week.

How prestigious are these awards? So prestigious I can scarcely deign to answer that question. They're so freaking awesome I don't even need to say a word.

Well, if you do need evidence, Glenn Reynolds once described his 2009 award as "the proudest moment of my life, including losing my virginity."

Michelle Malkin said that the trophy, now ensconced in plexiglass in her trophy cabinet, is her most treasured possession.

***ZZZZZZTTT!!!*** Owww, stop it! Okay, I lied!!! ZZZZZZTTT!!! Stop with the cattle prod already! For the love of... ZZZZZZZZTTT!!! Owwwwww!! Ow, ow, ow.

Alright! They didn't say those things. None of 'em said anything.

(Cleansing breath)

Anyhow, stay tuned. Later this week -- the exact date is unclear to keep you hitting the browser Reload button -- we'll unveil the 2010 Fabulous 50 Blog Awards. They represent the 50 most awesomest blogs of all time. Or at least of 2010. In this ZIP code. Or ZIP+4 code.


Award Design by: iOwnTheWorld.

Thursday, December 16, 2010

At least someone will have read it: GOP to 'paralyze' Senate by reading the disastrous 2,000-page, trillion-plus spending bill

The left-leaning political journal The Hill makes the tactic sound, oh, I don't know... dire? Their headline reads, "GOP will paralyze Senate floor with reading of 1,924-page spending bill".

Hey, schmucks: is it really too much to ask that our representatives read the damn bills before they vote on them?

I will assert the following: the 111th Congress will go down in history as the most rabid, radical and destructive enemies of the state ever to assume power in America.

Republicans will paralyze the Senate floor for 50 hours by forcing clerks to read every single paragraph of the 1,924-page, $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill.

Senate clerks are expected to read the massive bill in rotating shifts around the clock — taking breaks to drink water and pop throat lozenges — to keep legislative business on track, according to a Democratic leadership aide... The bill is so long that it took the Government Printing Office two days to print it...

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), the Senate Republican Steering Committee chairman, vowed not to back down... “If they bring this up, they’re going to read it. It’ll take them a day or two to read it,” DeMint said on Fox News. “Again, we’re trying to run out the clock. They should not be able to pass this kind of legislation in a lame-duck Congress.”

Senator DeMint, I'll say it again: you need to run for President in 2012.

I know you don't want the job. But neither did George Washington. And I happen to think that the men who don't want the job are among the best choices.


Linked by: Michelle Malkin. Thanks!

Sunday, December 05, 2010

Secret U.S. Space Plane Glides Back to Earth--And, Thankfully, Even the WikiLeaks Crackpots Don't Know What It Was Doing

The mysterious, 220-day mission of the unmanned X-37B space plane came to a quiet end on Friday.

The U.S. Air Force developed this secretive mission with the Orbital Test Vehicle 1 (OTV-1), better known as the X-37B space plane...

It is a robotic winged craft, with no humans onboard, that looks somewhat similar to the more familiar space shuttles Atlantis, Endeavour, and Discovery.

The X-37B space plane is about nine meters (29 feet) in length, has a wingspan of about four meters (14 feet), and has a height of approximately three meters (9.5 feet)... [and weighs] about 11,000 pounds...

It landed on a runway at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, at approximately 1:16 a.m. Pacific Standard Time (PST), after its first trip into space...

Its mission is Top Secret, but speculation is rife about its true operational characteristics. Among the use-cases:

• Launch anti-satellite explosives
• MAHEM - send a stream of super-heated molten metal into other space vehicles
• Direct tactical lasers and microwaves
• Launch microsatellite or nanosatellites that attach themselves to enemy satellites to disable or coopt them
• Launch and detonate e-bombs (small, directed EMP explosions) to kill enemy electronics
• Drop tungsten rods on Earth-borne targets from space ("Rods from God")

In the latter case, try imagining a telephone pole hitting Osama Bin Laden at 7,000 MPH.

Faster, please.


Images and Schematic: Space.com.

Wednesday, December 01, 2010

Photo of the Day: And they impugn Sarah Palin's intelligence?

Matthew J. O'Connor, writing at the Clarion Advisory, describes the real effects of the federal pay freeze announced Monday by President Obama.

First, there are about 2.1 million federal jobs now, and in 2009 only 177 of those received “unsatisfactory” job performance ratings—150 of those received pay increases anyway. Facetiously speaking, such competency.

Second, the average federal employee receives 30%-40% more in total compensation than the average private sector employee. Facetiously speaking, their production and results demonstrate they are worth every penny.

Third, since President Obama took office 141,000 new federal jobs have been added, and during the first 18 months of the recession federal pay rose 6.6%.

Fourth, the “freeze” is only for two years and then only affects cost of living (COLA), not bonuses or movement within the General Services (GS) pay schedule.

[Now remember] what the President said about Health Care Reform a few months ago: “No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people. If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor..."

I will leave it to the Obama lemmings to swallow his recent federal pay freeze deficit control hoax and dive off the edge of the turnip wagon, like they seem to do with almost anything Obama says-off his teleprompter.

And the legacy media endlessly reminds us that Sarah Palin is dumb and Barack Obama is some kind of genius. Okay.

Forget the birth certificate -- where are the college transcripts?


Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Stop Action Photos: How the XM-25 Works

Coolness.

A complete family of ammo is planned, including armor-piercing, anti-personnel, airburst and point-impact non-lethal rounds.

The HEAB round is a 25mm cartridge with fore and aft explosive warheads, and a mid-body airburst fuse... An operational firing scenario would involve the following: by viewing through the fire control display, the combat user puts the red-dot aim-point on the target, pushes the "Lase" button, realigns the aim-point on the target, and fires...

The range is automatically communicated upon firing to the chambered 25mm round -- and stored in the fuse logic.

Upon muzzle exit, the intelligent fuse, using a turns-counting approach, determines the distance traveled and bursts precisely over the engaged target at the programmed range.

...It leaves the enemy no place to hide.

The entire video is at StrategyPage. And Fox News has a slideshow.


I don't know this Joe Barton fellow, but I like the cut of his jib

The Washington Post headline reads, "In slideshow, Rep. Joe Barton declares war on the Obama administration."

If the Obama administration was hoping to see hints of bipartisanship from the Hill, it might want to skip over the House Energy and Commerce Committee... The committee's ranking Republican, Rep. Joe L. Barton (Tex.), has a slide presentation that he's e-mailing to colleagues:










Patton? What's not to like?


Hat tip: Memeorandum.

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Super: Star-Ledger Columnist Now Holding Contests Asking Readers to Predict the Date of Chris Christie's Next Policy Shift

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie spoke at the Republican Governors Conference [RGC] ten days ago and reportedly brought down the house. He told the audience that sometimes leaders simply have to ignore their advisers and face the tough issues head on.

The New Jersey Star Ledger's Paul Mulshine has followed the career of Chris Christie for nearly two years. And he doesn't quite recognize the current version.

[The RGC] Chris Christie sounds like a heck of guy — not at all like the Chris Christie I have been following closely for almost two years... [For example, after] a number of legislators held a press conference in the Statehouse to announce they were... protesting the new screening policies of the [TSA, Christie] declined an offer to back the resolution because, his spokesman said, it was a federal issue...

...Just for fun, I put up a post on my blog asking readers to predict how long it would take before Christie came out against the TSA. If you bet on last Monday, you would have won. In response to a question from a kid at one of those town-hall meetings he holds, Christie announced the screenings were "too invasive."

That’s just one instance in a pattern obvious to those of us who’ve been covering Christie since he entered state politics. Name an issue — from judicial activism to the Highlands Act — and you will see Christie tiptoeing up to it and finally committing when the consensus is clear.

On issues such as guns and abortion, Christie’s views have moved rightward over the years, in remarkable harmony with the rightward drift of the GOP primary electorate... His position in favor of New Jersey’s participation in the cap-and-trade program, known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, for example, would be a non-starter with Republican primary voters. Sure enough, he recently made an incremental move away from that when he told a participant in another town hall that he is becoming skeptical about man-made global warming.

Some took that as a sign that he’s serious about running for president. If so, he’ll have to start inching away from other positions associated with RINOs, or "Republicans In Name Only," such as his mushy stands on gun rights and immigration amnesty.

Christie's oft-changing positions are the antithesis of the Tea Party's immutable principles.

Global warming.

Gun control.

• Amnesty for illegal aliens.

Mike Castle.

And those are but a few of Christie's amorphous policy positions.

Some great YouTube sound-bites have immortalized Christie's fight against the public sector unions. And there is much to appreciate in his stand.

But it is clear that the Governor has substantial work ahead of him. After all, Constitutional conservatives rightfully fear the nomination of another "Maverick", the positions of whom are rooted only in political expediency.


Thursday, November 25, 2010

Gratuitous Thanksgiving 'Traveler Strips Down to Bikini to Avoid TSA Scanning, Groping' Photos

The National Opt-Out Day didn't work out, but this young lady made national news anyhow.

This is a movement I could staunchly support, in certain cases.


Thankful

Thankful for my parents, my wife and children, my siblings, cousins, in-laws and their families.

Thankful for my country and the blessing it has bestowed upon all of its citizens.

Thankful for those who serve, protecting us from seventh-century barbarians and other enemies of freedom.

Thankful for our country's police officers, fire fighters, first responders, nurses, doctors and medical personnel, many of whom work long hours on days like this one, as we lounge on recliners and sip on cold beverages.

Thankful for the conservative new media, which play an ever-increasing role in educating the citizenry, including Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds, John Hawkins, Tom Lifson, Mark Tapscott, Jim Hoft, Andrew Breitbart, Ace, Doug Powers, Noel Sheppard, Don Surber, Ed Driscoll, Dan Riehl, Anthony Watts and Tyler Durden, to mention but a few.

Thankful for this country's founders, who created the most magnificent form of government ever seen on the face of the Earth.

Thankful for the Constitutional conservatives who ran for office, win or lose, to protect us from the 80-year march of Statism.

Thankful for football (real football, not the "world's most popular sport", the championship of which inevitably ends up in a 0-0 tie), baseball, basketball, boxing and MMA.

Thankful for Ronald Reagan, Mark Levin, Milton Friedman and Barry Goldwater, who helped reestablish modern conservatism with an intellectual framework and philosophy rooted in history, facts, logic and reason.

Thankful for friends and co-workers -- past and present -- whose camaraderie and support are more valuable than any material wealth.

Thankful for great books and great authors -- Barry Eisler, Lee Child, Vince Flynn, Robert Ferrigno, Jim Thompson, A. J. Quinnell, C. S. Forester, David McCullough, Ian Toll, Raymond Chandler, Ian Fleming, Bruce Schneier, and James Bradley, to name but a few.

Thankful for the great battle in which we find ourselves engaged, representing another clash in the unending war against Statism.

Thankful for this day.