Category Archives: Media

2010 Election, Florida, Media, Pensacola, Politics

Khavari labels Alex Sink’s business plan “empty rhetoric”

Press release from the Khavari for governor campaign follows.

Miami, FL Mar. 18 — Noted economist and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Farid Khavari dismissed Alex Sink’s new “Business Plan for Florida” as “nicely written but completely lacking substance.” Sink, Florida’s Chief Financial Officer and another Democratic candidate for governor, unveiled her plan Wednesday.

“Last week, Alex Sink finally recognized that we have a lot of unemployment and foreclosures in Florida. That’s a big step for her,” Khavari said. “We have over a million people out of work here, 800,000 homes in foreclosure, and more job losses and foreclosures to come unless we do something. Apparently it takes three years for a multimillionaire ex-banker to catch on.

“Alex Sink has held one of the most powerful jobs in Florida for three years now. She is in an ideal position to fix Florida’s economy and she is counting paper clips and canceling Blackberries while the State Board of Administration has lost tens of billions of dollars on her watch. If she had any idea how to create even one job or stop even one foreclosure, why didn’t she do anything about it?

“Let me offer Ms. Sink a little lesson in economics,” Khavari smiled. “You can’t create jobs with subsidies and tax cuts. Businesses will not hire people unless there are customers for their products and services. With rising unemployment and escalating foreclosures, high interest rates and reduced credit, insurance and health care costs out of control, how many people can afford to buy anything? No customers, no jobs, it’s really not so difficult to understand.

“Here’s another lesson in Econ 001: when you create one good job, the economy naturally creates two more jobs within a year, and those jobs create more. When you lose one good job, you lose two more within a year, and more after that.

“My economic plan for Florida was released nine months ago. It explains step-by-step, with specific examples, how to create 1,000,000 new private-sector jobs in Florida, without subsidies. All you need is leadership. You have to focus on the demand side. When there is demand, businesses will hire people regardless of subsidies and taxes.”

Khavari has also gained national acclaim for his plan to establish a state-owned bank, which would save state and local governments billions per year in interest expense, while offering 2% fixed-rate mortgages and other programs to save Floridians more billions per year. Since his announcement, gubernatorial candidates in California, Oregon and Illinois have declared state-owned banks as part of their platforms. “Our Bank of the State of Florida will balance state and local budgets without higher taxes, and make Florida recession-proof forever,” Khavari said.

Farid A. Khavari, Ph.D. is an economist and author of nine books, including Environomics. His latest book, Toward a Zero-Cost Economy, is available in stores or for free download at his website, www.khavariforgovernor.com.

Pensacola News Journal links to articles, press releases, and editorials on Dr. Farid Khavari, democratic candidate for governor of the state of Florida, HERE.

Pensacola News Journal links to articles, press releases, and editorials on Alex Sink, democratic candidate for governor of the state of Florida, HERE.

Economy, Florida, Media, Pensacola, Politics

Liberals And Free Speech, Part 2

The political tsunami that swept our country yesterday, paving the road for the socialization of health care and the end of the private health insurance industry, is one for the history books. It’s an issue that has been brewing for the last 60 or 70 years that seemed to be coming to a head last week. And so it was that I set out to see what the Left had to say about it.

I thought I would find something on the Ring of Fire. But I was wrong.

So I asked a couple questions to a post entitled ‘This Week on Ring of Fire’ . . .

All that, and no mention about ‘deeming’ major legislation to be passed without a vote? No whisper about the constitutional issues with it all?

Don’t have 60 votes? Eh, no big deal. Well, don’t have 51 votes? No problem. Let’s just skip the voting part, let the RINO’s (Representatives In Name Only) take care of substituting that process with another one.

No mention about the process at all? Like President Obama as much as said to Bret Baier when he dodged his question about the ‘process.’ The end justifies the means.

Is the ROF ducking the most important issue facing America today?

Background Note: For those not familiar with the Ring of Fire, it was an Air America Radio program, hosted by a local (Pensacola, FL) attorney named Mike Papantonio. It still is, only Air America went bankrupt for the last time a few months ago. And at its outset, Papantonio boldly claimed (paraphrasing here) that his show and network was going to be the answer to Rush Limbaugh. He mentioned Rush by name, and then some. And being a fan of Rush, my interest in this show was piqued.

What followed that was a real gem. Follow the comment thread, if you can stand it, to see what the ‘process’ was to getting an answer from the show’s producer, Farron Cousins.

Continue reading Liberals And Free Speech, Part 2 →

Economy, Media, Politics

Talking Points vs. Reality

In a swindle that would make Bernie Madoff look like an amateur, Barack Obama has gotten a substantial segment of the population to believe that he can add millions of people to the government-insured rolls without increasing the already record-breaking federal deficit.

Those who think in terms of talking points, instead of realities, can point to the fact that the Congressional Budget Office has concurred with budget numbers that the Obama administration has presented.

Anyone who is so old-fashioned as to stop and think, instead of being swept along by rhetoric, can understand that a budget— any budget— is not a record of hard facts but a projection of future financial plans. A budget tells us what will happen if everything works out according to plan.

The Congressional Budget Office can only deal with the numbers that Congress supplies. Those numbers may well be consistent with each other, even if they are wholly inconsistent with anything that is likely to happen in the real world.

The Obama health care plan can be financed without increasing the federal deficit— if the administration takes hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare. But Medicare itself does not have enough money to pay its own way over time.

However money is juggled in the short run, the government’s financial liabilities are increased by adding this huge new entitlement of government-provided insurance. The fact that these new financial liabilities can be kept out of the official federal deficit projection, by claiming that they will be paid for with money taken from Medicare, changes nothing in the real world.

I can say that I can afford to buy a Rolls Royce, without going into debt, by using my inheritance from a rich uncle. But, in the real world, the question would arise immediately whether I in fact have a rich uncle, not to mention whether this hypothetical rich uncle would be likely to leave me enough money to buy a Rolls Royce.

In politics, however, you can say all sorts of things that have no relationship with reality.

If you have a mainstream media that sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil— when it comes to Barack Obama— you can say that you will pay for a vast expansion of government-provided insurance by taking money from the Medicare budget and using other gimmicks.

Whether this administration, or any future administration, will in fact take enough money from Medicare to pay for this new massive entitlement is a question that only the future can answer, regardless of what today’s budget projection says.

On paper, you can treat Medicare like the hypothetical rich uncle who is going to leave me enough money to buy a Rolls Royce. But only on paper. In real life, you can’t get blood from a turnip, and you can’t keep on getting money from a Medicare program that is itself running out of money.

An even more transparent gimmick is collecting money for the new Obama health care program for the first ten years but delaying the payments of its benefits for four years. By collecting money for 10 years and spending it for only 6 years, you can make the program look self-supporting, but only on paper and only in the short run.

This is a game you can play just once, during the first decade. After that, you are going to be collecting money for 10 years and paying out money for 10 years. That is when you discover that your uncle doesn’t have enough money to support himself, much less leave you an inheritance to pay for a Rolls Royce.

But a postponed revelation is not part of the official federal deficit today. And that provides a talking point, in order to soothe people who take talking points seriously.

Fraud has been at the heart of this medical care takeover plan from day one. The succession of wholly arbitrary deadlines for rushing this massive legislation through, before anyone has time to read it all, serves no other purpose than to keep its specifics from being scrutinized— or even recognized— before it becomes a fait accompli and “the law of the land.”

Would you buy a used car under these conditions, even if it was a Rolls Royce?

To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.  Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.

Economy, Media, Uncategorized

Mainstream Media Breaks New Ground

The Associated Press is breaking new ground in journalism. If you pay attention to news and the news media, you are already conditioned to the method the legacy media uses to frame their bias; how they put good spin on a bad event, or bad spin on a good event, by employing the ‘more (less) than expected’ phrase.

But I’m at a loss to figure this one out. This is new.

Referring to an interview with the chief economic figure in the government, the AP makes this assessment . . .

[F]ollowing the closing of the annual session of the party-dominated national legislature, which earlier Sunday approved a blueprint to keep government spending high, though at half the rate of last year, to buffer any economic turbulence.

Can someone, anyone, explain this ‘analysis’ for me?

The bias here is in favor of government spending, which happens to be the M.O. of  economically-illiterate bleeding-heart Liberals. Otherwise, one would expect to see something like ‘draconian cuts in welfare programs.’ That there was no perspective given to either the dollar amount or the ‘rate’ also serves to obfuscate what the real news is, that government spending can be harmful to your economic health.

Maybe it is because the subject of the story is Premier Wen Jiabao of Communist China?

There are other important issues raised in this AP piece, like the global economy showing signs of unraveling (see The State Of The Welfare State), but this one kind of blew me away.

WSJ JournalNow – News – Associated Press.

2010 Election, Economy, Media, Politics

The State Of The Welfare State

And by Welfare State I’m not talking about food stamps for the poor. What I’m talking about is the focus of where President Obama and his circle of advisers want to take this country. Which is to a place where European countries are. This is a place where the government takes on the responsibility of caring for their citizens by way of their health care and retirement plans. The latter of which is called Social Security in the United States.

Right now, and before Obama became president, Social Security and Medicare are poised to bankrupt the country, if you will allow the use of the term bankrupt as an adjective. Those two programs total $42.9 trillion in unfunded mandates. Due to the demographics of our population, there will soon be people owed benefits with no money in the bank to pay for it. This isn’t a right-wing talking point. This is an economic fact.

Starting his second term, Bush opened up the debate to head off this catastrophe, but there was no support for it, and, he was derided by the media. It was labeled as the third rail, something not to be touched. Well, except to tax it. It involved ‘privatizing’ 1-1/2 percent of it and letting the person actually own his share of contribution. We all know how that ended up.

Fixing social security is still not on the President’s radar. But health care is. The solution proposed by President Obama is to essentially, increase the coverage of Medicare to include the entire country. It will also include the demise of the private health insurance industry for their inability to cover more people regardless of medical pre-conditions on the modest 3-4% profit margin they earn. This is keeping in step with the European model that Democrats in Washington seem to champion.

So what’s wrong with that?

First of all, to compare the United States with any European country is like comparing apples and oranges. Or watermelons and grapes. The economic stability of the European countries are quite shaky right now. But something deeper and more fundamental is at work which the global credit crisis has merely helped to expose. Most European countries today operate under economic and labor policies crafted during the height of the post-war baby boom, featuring middle-class entitlements like generous pension systems that allow early retirement, liberal disability programs that exempt many laborers from work, and extended unemployment systems that make going on the dole and staying there easier than in the U.S.. Europeans designed these policies in an era when there were, in many European minds, too many people competing for jobs and a bulging work population to support those who were retired or on disability.

Now, this house of cards is falling down. The demographics are nothing today like they were 60 or 70 years ago. Now, not only are there less people working, but there are more people on the government dole collecting retirement pensions. Europe has baby boomers too.  Governments, like Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal, have no money to sustain this welfare state and they and other countries face riots in the streets at the very thought of trying to reform (take away) the unsustainable benefits they have put in place.

Back to the watermelons v. grapes comparison. Many of these countries are smaller than  most states in the United States. And they’re going bust. It takes more than the audacity of hope and hubris to suppose that a country the size of the United States, already heading to default, can pull itself out by expanding a health insurance entitlement program to include the combined populations of France, Italy, Germany, United Kingdom, Spain, and Greece. Not only that, but President Obama is still claiming that it will lower the premium costs and increase the quality and availability of care. Oh, and that’s after cutting $500 Billion from Medicare first. I think we should run that proposition by the people in Canada and Europe who travel to the United States for medical treatment and see if they think that modeling a health care system after what they have would be a good idea.

The European countries are suffering from a demographic shift that is compounding their economic situation.  In addition to their workforce shrinking, and their retired populations growing, their birth rates are falling below what is considered to be a replacement rate. Clearly, they need to change course. The old paradigm of the Welfare State is not sustainable.

Although we are demographically robust compared to Europe (our working age population will increase by a projected 17 percent over the next 40 years) and we work longer, our own baby boom was so large that we will still need substantial changes in Medicare and Social Security to meet our future obligations. Meanwhile, our states face a tough road because many of them have granted European-like retirement benefits to government workers that are exacerbating state budget problems. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see a trend here. But it is a trend that seems to escape Democrats in Washington.

Why is it that, despite the history and conditions in Europe, the Obama administration insists that creating our own Welfare State here is the way to go? Obama and his advisers are of the wrong century. Still high from their heyday of the 60’s, only now they are in control of our government and espousing something called ‘social justice.’ Essentially, they are heading the country southbound in the northbound lane. And instead of advising him to turn around, they’re telling him to speed up. And before too long, this great country will be in the same shape as Greece, Great Britain, Spain, Italy, and the rest of them.

2010 Election, Media, Politics

Sen. Byrd (D-WV) Deja Vu, Obamacare

Right from the horses mouth, Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-WV), who authored the ‘Byrd rule,’ aka ‘reconciliation.’ He put an end to Hillary Care then, and for the same reasons Obamacare should be stopped now.

Speaking on the floor of the Senate about the use of reconciliation to ram through Hillarycare, Sen. Byrd said . . .

I felt that changes as dramatic as the Clinton Health Care package, which would affect every man, woman, and child in the United States should be subject to scrutiny . . .

That health care bill, important as it is, so complex, so far-reaching, that the people of this country need to know what’s  in it, and moreover Mr. President, we Senators need to know what’s in it before we vote.

{Referring to a telephone call President Clinton made to him, Sen. Byrd continues}

I could not, I would not, and I did not allow that package to be handled in such a cavalier manner. It was the threat of the use of the ‘Byrd rule.’ Reconciliation was never, never, never intended to be a shield, to be used as a shield for controversial legislation.

http://youtu.be/wTkgZrb1Q8k

Where has the ‘mainstream’ media been on this?

h/t Breitbart.tv

Media, Politics

Chicago Politics At 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

With the specter of Rod Blagojevich still fresh in our memory, his protege, President Barack Obama, seems to be doing what he knows best, having been raised on Chicago politics.

He needs Democrats to support his latest version of Obamacare.  And it’s too late, and people wouldn’t stand for, another bribe like the Louisiana purchase, or the Cornhusker kickback. But there are other ways.

Like this one.

Tonight, Barack Obama will host ten House Democrats who voted against the health care bill in November at the White House; he’s obviously trying to persuade them to switch their votes to yes. One of the ten is Jim Matheson of Utah. The White House just sent out a press release announcing that today President Obama nominated Matheson’s brother Scott M. Matheson, Jr. to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.

This ought to be the headline on the news tonight at CBS, NBS, ABS, CNNbs, and pMSNBCbs. But it won’t. Not in the context of there being anything fishy going on. What will be in the news will be the usual shoot the messenger kind of story, beginning with ‘Republicans are launching into partisan attacks, accusing the President of using backroom deals to pass his health care plan.’ Those crazy Republicans.  If there was a Republican in The White House, don’t you know the media and the Left would be screaming that the President is using political appointments to buy a vote?

Related links: Is Obama Now Selling Judgeships for Health Care Votes? | Payoffs for states get Harry Reid to 60 votes

2010 Election, Media, Politics

Obama: Shouldn't Pass Health Care Without 60 Votes

Blatant hypocrisy from Obama is no longer newsworthy. Correction, it has never been newsworthy. Remember, for Progressives and their willing accomplices in the media,  the end justifies the means. That, and the media watchdog is dead.

OBAMA 2007: You gotta break out of what I call the sort of 50-plus-one pattern of presidential politics. Maybe you eke out a victory with 50-plus-one but you can’t govern. You know, you get Air Force One and a lot of nice perks as president but you can’t — you can’t deliver on health — we’re not going to pass universal health care with a — with a 50-plus-one strategy.

OBAMA 2007: The bottom line is is that our health care plans are similar. The question, once again, is: Who can get it done? Who can build a movement for change? This is an area where we’re going to have to have a 60% majority in the Senate and the House in order to actually get a bill to my desk. We’re going to have to have a majority to get a bill to my desk that is not just a 50-plus-one majority.

OBAMA 2006: Those big-ticket items, fixing our health care system. You know, one of the arguments that sometimes I get with, uhh, my fellow progressives and — and some of these have — have flashed up in the blog communities on occasion — is this notion that we should function sort of like Karl Rove, where we — we identify our core base, we throw ’em red meat, we get a 50-plus-one, uhhh, victory. See, Karl Rove doesn’t need a broad consensus because he doesn’t believe in government. If we want to transform the country, though, that requires a — a sizable majority.

OBAMA 2005: A change in the Senate rules that really, uh, I think would change the character of the Senate, uh, forever. [snip] Uhhh, and what I worry about would be th-th-that you essentially still have two chambers, the House and the Senate, but you have simply majoritarian, uhhh, absolute power on either side, and that’s just not what the Founders intended.

OBAMA 2004: My understanding of the Senate is is that you need 60 votes to get something significant to happen, which means that Democrats and have to ask the question: Do we have the will to move an American agenda forward, not a Democratic or Republican agenda forward?

link: Flashback: Barack Obama Said Democrats Shouldn’t Pass Health Care Without 60 Votes in Senate

Economy, Energy, Media, Politics, United Nations

Investing In Global Warming, Cap And Trade

Hardly a week goes by lately where news comes out that adds to the doubt about ‘man made’ global warming. From incomplete and manipulated data, to selective science of hand-picking tree samples, to lost or destroyed supporting data, and lately to statements of Phil Jones.

Phil Jones was forced to step down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit after a series of leaked emails and other documents suggested that the data supporting global warming theories had been “cooked” and that opposing theories were being suppressed.

But this was not the end of the revelations.

“Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

“And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.”

What do you mean ‘statistically significant‘ you ask? According to Phil Jones . . .

This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level.

And associating climate change to man-made global warming, there’s this question to Jones . . .

“How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?”

Jones: “I’m 100 percent confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 – there’s evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.”

OK fine. And we now know all about their data and record keeping problems.

So what’s the point? The whole point of this ‘man-made’ global warming hysteria is to execute a transfer of wealth through whatever way possible, under the pretense that we can adjust the global thermostat as well as sea-level. It’s is a political movement that has turned into a near religion with environmentalists.

Then there’s this gem about rising sea levels . . .

Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.

Whether it by by the United Nations, the Kyoto Protocol, and more locally, the administration’s Cap & Trade legislation, all of these schemes are designed to move money from our side of the earth to the other, with the side benefit of depressing our economy and raising prices even further. I mean it just makes sense. If you’re a slip and fall lawyer, you go after the money. In the global scale, the ‘richest’ nation in the world is right here. And for anyone who was in Copenhagen, you saw who the evil one was. It was the United States, and it was capitalism.

In light of what is now known, we are starting to see signs in the US of hopping off this man-made global warming bandwagon. But not everyone.

Know who is heavily invested in this scheme? Al Gore. He probably has the most to lose when the cap and trade and carbon credit trading schemes fall through. Starting with a company he and another investor started called Generation Investment Management LLP. I’m all for capitalism, and according to Al Gore and the media, he’s just putting his money where his mouth is. The reason capitalism works is because there is risk taking. When the market demands it, entrepreneurs will provide. Responding to the market, or not, determines who wins and who looses. Gore’s company is an associate member of the Chicago Climate Exchange. A carbon credit trading exchange. (Available right now at $.10/share. Their stock fell 33% after the Copenhagen global warming festival in December.) How much Gore has invested varies from guesstimates from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars. Suffice it to say, if things go the way he hopes they will, he’ll make George Soros’ wealth look like small change.

So yesterday, either in denial or a last ditch attempt to saves his investments, or both, Al Gore opines in the New York Times ‘We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change.’ The first sentence of his opinion piece says it all . . .

It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.

Right. The sky is falling. On him. Then, from high on the mountain, not far from the burning bush, Gore ends with this. From Rick Moran at American Thinker.

Finally, this bit of weirdness that shows Gore for what he is; a megalomaniac:

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption. After all has been said and so little done, the truth about the climate crisis – inconvenient as ever – must still be faced.

Al Gore sees himself as a redeemer – as Jesus Christ. And where is there room in a democratic republic for someone who thinks that the rule of law should be an “instrument of redemption?”

Who else has put their money where their mouth is? Well, in a more muted and covert kind of way, the BBC has. They have $12.5 billion of their pension funds invested in companies whose future depends on the success of the whole man-made global warming movement and subsequent laws and regulations.

Just something to keep in mind the next time you see an article about a man-made global warming ‘crisis.’

Media, Politics, War On Terror

Obama Signs To Extend Patriot Act

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Due to expire today unless approved by Congress and signed by President Obama, the extension of the Patriot Act was approved by the House, the Senate, and signed by the President Saturday, Feb 27, 2010. Well alright!

Let’s not let our guard down and scrap the best tool in the toolbox to fight terrorism where it counts most. Within our own borders.

I’m so proud of my President today. It shows it is still possible for him to put the country’s interests ahead of what he ran on as a candidate. I must be more proud of the signing than the President though, because The White House didn’t put news of the signing into law on its website. Maybe hoping his base won’t notice?

In what could (but it won’t) be characterized in the media as a welcome sign of bi-partisanship, the House voted 319 to 97 in favor of the measure. Unwilling to put their name to it, the Senate passed it on a voice vote Wednesday night.

Stand back and watch the fur fly when Obama’s political Left base finds out about it. Like it or not, believe it or not, we are at war. It was the right thing, and the adult thing, to do.

Link: Obama signs one-year extension of Patriot Act | Senate votes to extend Patriot Act