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1. We Don’t Need a Speech. We Need Jobs.
2. DOJ Advises Gibson Guitar to Export Labor to Madagascar
3. Ezra Klein vs. the Dictionary
4. Dana Milbank: Perry Is Not A Libertarian
5. The Arrogant Left Hates Rural, Conservative America.
6. DoJ targets AT&T: The story behind the story
7. Obama Makes the Case for State Control of Surface Transportation
8. Is Ryan Lizza An Idiot or Willfully Distorting Christian Theology?
9. ‘Jihad Joe’ and the Radicalization of American Muslims
1. We Don’t Need a Speech. We Need Jobs.
President Obama and Speaker Boehner have agreed that the President will address a joint session of the Congress next Thursday. The President wanted Wednesday during the GOP debate, but John Boehner said no. Folks at the White House said the Speaker had been consulted before they put it in writing and did not object. Speaker Boehner’s staff say he was not consulted prior to receiving the President’s request. It doesn’t really matter. People are beyond tired of speeches from Washington.As the President addresses the nation, Arizona will face off against Oklahoma for a college football game and the NFL regular season will start.The President had two years with his party controlling the White House, the House of Representatives, and the Senate. They managed to pass a stimulus bill that, by 2010, was such a dismal disaster the President would not even use the word “stimulus.” Remember that press conference?The Democrats then pivoted to health care claiming it was about entitlement reform and related to jobs.Every time the President has pivoted to jobs a funny thing has happened — we’ve wound up losing more jobs.How many mulligans will we give our golfer-in-chief?Please click here for the rest of the post.
2. DOJ Advises Gibson Guitar to Export Labor to Madagascar
The Gibson Guitar saga has taken a sinister turn.It seems that the Department of Justice wasn’t satisfied with merely raiding the law abiding factories of Gibson Guitar with armed agents, shutting down their operation costing them millions, and leaving the American company in the dark as to how to proceed without shutting down.Now, according to CEO Henry Juszkiewicz, agents of the United States government are bluntly informing them that they’d be better off shipping their manufacturing labor overseas.Please click here for the rest of the post.
3. Ezra Klein vs. the Dictionary
Ezra Klein is the twenty something leftwing hack who has never had a real job in the private sector beyond the lefty think tank and pundit shops in DC. Somehow or another he got a cushy gig pretending to be objective at the Washington Post where he continues to mouth off on economic policy from a decidedly left-wing bent.It’s gotten so bad that Ezra Klein is forced to play word games and lie to win an argument on social security. Klein wants to win an argument against the Republicans on social security. So what does he do? He has to reinvent a new definition of ponzi scheme.Klein relies on liberal blogger/polisci guy Jonathan Bernstein to give him his definition, which is to define a ponzi scheme as “a fraud that relies on new investors being unaware of the program’s financing mechanism.” And OH MY GOSH!!!!! social security is fully transparent therefore it cannot be a Ponzi scheme.EZRA IS BETTER THAN WELL WHO CARES. HE WINS!!!!!Except he only wins by willfully changing the definition of a ponzi scheme. I say willfully because he can’t be that stupid can he?Please click here for the rest of the post.
4. Dana Milbank: Perry Is Not A Libertarian
A few years ago NRO’s Jonah Goldberg coined the term Conservatives in the Mist to describe what happens when liberals set out to explain conservatives to liberals. Recently, we’ve seen The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza engage in egregious and hopefully painful self-beclowning while attempting to explain garden variety Christianity to his neo-pagan readership.Now the Washington Post’s one-man Fifth Column, the absurd Dana Milbank, undertakes the task of using the Conservatives in the Mist methodology to explain to Republicans why Texas Governor Rick Perry is on the fringe. His killer argument:”Yes, Perry is passionately anti-government, or at least anti-this-government. But the man who suddenly tops the Republican presidential polls is no libertarian. Rick Perry is a theocrat.”I didn’t realize that Rick Perry had ever claimed to be a libertarian.Please click here for the rest of the post.
5. The Arrogant Left Hates Rural, Conservative America.
“It seems unjust to me that someone would be charged when they were protecting their family,” state Sen. Shawn Keough, R-Sandpoint, said after the hearing. “I’m at a loss to understand why the U.S. government is pursuing this in the manner they are.”(HT: The Spokesman Review)Let me break this down for Representative Keough. I’ll be blunt here, but without any disrespect intended. Jeremy M. Hill, a US Citizen, from Northern Idaho, shot and killed a female grizzly bear which had entered his backyard while two of his children were playing. This forced the US Government to choose whether it valued the grizzly bear more or two children of a US citizen, who happened to live in a Conservative, rural county.Please click here for the rest of the post.
6. DoJ targets AT&T: The story behind the story
Yesterday it was announced that the Department of Justice will attempt to block AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile. The deal is needed for technical and regulatory reasons to allow AT&T to compete in the 4G wireless market with Verizon, Sprint/Clearwire, and with the upcoming competitor LightSquared. So why is the Department of Justice calling it bad for competition?Enter R. Gerard Salemme. It’s not a well-known name, but it’s been an important one in the Obama administration. It’s also a name that often comes up in the ventures of one Craig McCaw. Craig McCaw is an equal opportunity donor who gives to anyone who looks likely to win, including Gore 2000, Bush 2004, and both sides in 2008.That $2,300 donation to Obama sure is paying off.Please click here for the rest of the post.
7. Obama Makes the Case for State Control of Surface Transportation
Yesterday, Barack Obama decried the gridlock that has prevented Congress from passing a long-term surface transportation bill (highway bill) as unacceptable and inexcusable. He also asserted that we must formulate a policy in which funding would be directed to those districts that need it the most, instead of politically motivated pork, such as the bridge to nowhere (which he supported in the Senate). Well, unknowingly, Obama has made a strong case for transferring surface transportation funding, and its accompanying revenue source; the gasoline tax, back to the states.Please click here for the rest of the post.
8. Is Ryan Lizza An Idiot or Willfully Distorting Christian Theology?
From Ben Domenech’s excellent Transom, I found out some news I did not have when I wrote yesterday about Ryan Lizza’s The New Yorker article where he got major, substantive facts wrong.One of the things Lizza did was tie Michele Bachmann to Francis Schaeffer and Nancy Pearcey, who Lizza opined are “dominionists.” Well, Schaeffer may be dead, but Nancy Pearcey is very much alive and has her own website. She has responded to Lizza’s piece.Please click here for the rest of the post.
9. ‘Jihad Joe’ and the Radicalization of American Muslims
AT A TIME when so many books on politics, religion, and world events are little more than puffed-up pamphlets which are simultaneously high on hyper-partisanship and low on facts, J. M. Berger‘s Jihad Joe, a treatment of the radicalization and actions of American Muslims who have dedicated themselves to “violent jihad” (the author’s chosen term), is a breath of fresh – and troubling – air. Painstakingly researched and heavily footnoted (the author, an investigative journalist, consulted thousands of pages of court records and documents obtained through FOIA request, as well as source material from the making of multiple documentaries on jihadi activities in Bosnia and in the U.S.), Jihad Joe does not couch opinion as fact, but instead makes use of often disparate stories and information sources to weave together a factual account of radicalized American Muslims, from their diverse motivations and processed of radicalization to their actions.Please click here for the rest of the post.
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