2008 Election, Politics

Gay Leaders Flexing Their Muscle?

As one would expect, ‘tolerance’ to the gay movement means exactly the opposite of what the dictionary would suggest. Case in point is President-elect Barack Obama’s choice of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration.obama_warren

Upset over the fact that the minister actually believes his religion and lives his life accordingly, some feel that Obama is blowing off the LGBT sector of humanity. For his part, Obama’s choice is seen as a conciliatory gesture toward social conservatives who opposed him in November. You know, reaching out. Isn’t it curious that appealing to mainstream America is seen as reaching out? On the other hand, if Barack is not reaching out, does that mean that he is dissing the LGBT’s, or just acting like any other president-elect would?

Rick Warren, the senior pastor of Saddleback Church in southern California, opposes abortion rights but has taken more liberal stances on the government role in fighting poverty, and backed away from other evangelicals’ staunch support for economic conservatism. But it’s his support for the California constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage that drew the most heated criticism from Democrats Wednesday.

“Your invitation to Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at your inauguration is a genuine blow to LGBT Americans,” the president of Human Rights Campaign, Joe Solomonese, wrote Obama Wednesday. “[W]e feel a deep level of disrespect when one of architects and promoters of an anti-gay agenda is given the prominence and the pulpit of your historic nomination.”

In his article, notice too the connection Ben Smith draws between the LGBT group and Democrats, known to be tolerant of just about anything. Democrats’ alleged displeasure over California’s approval of a constitutional amendment to ban gay-marriage is misplaced. California is as blue a state as it gets, and they voted for it. The displeasure lies primarily in the LGBT camp. On the whole, I have more confidence than Smith does that democrats are not as intolerant as the gay community is. Am I wrong?

links: Gay leaders furious with Obama

we-told-you-so

Media

Time Magazine 2008 Person Of The Year

Cool. Time magazine’s person of the year for 2008, President-elect Barack obama_youth_04.jpgObama. Try this admission by the Times.

In one of the craziest elections in American history, he overcame a lack of experience, a funny name, two candidates who are political institutions and the racial divide to become the 44th president of the United States.

MRIOTD, Pensacola, Politics, War On Terror

Time To Save The World

Air America Radio talk show host Mike Papantonio is all about a fossil fuel replacement program, and now a chemical replacement program, because chemicals can be used as a WMD. And, they are produced by big corporations, which by definition makes them almost criminal. So why stop there?

What this country, and the world, needs is a liberal replacement program. Liberal dogma, whether in ‘public’ education, economic principles, and ‘social’ matters, is just as much a weapon of mass destruction as any nuclear bomb and al-Qaeda combined where the United States is concerned.

Bio:Mike Papantonio hosts Ring of Fire, a nationally syndicated radio show on Air America Radio and is the founder of GoLeft.tv. He is a partner in the Levin Papantonio law firm in Pensacola.

link: Chemicals in U.S. might be used as WMD

Economy, Media, Pensacola, Politics

Even Blogs Are Cutting Back

It is happening every day now. Businesses are taking actions to remain in business, not to mention be competitive in today’s economic climate. You see it happening in Newspapers, broadcast radio, and now GoLeftTV on the Internet.

Obviously, the current state of the economy is not good. But that hasn’t always been the case. These media have had problems generating revenue for years. Adding to that, one could argue that the product these media are delivering is defective to the point that there is not enough support in the free market to keep them in the black, forcing them to find a Sugar Daddy like George Soros to keep them going. Air America Radio seems to have found Big Labor, you know, one of those evil ‘special interest’ groups. Ring of Fire Radio has resorted to Google Ads. And GoLeftTV has apparently given up and moved their site to YouTube, which is free. It is a sign of the times.

related links: Go Left TV Takes On Conservative Media | Newspapers are feeling the economic pinch, too | Could Newspapers Be The Next Bailout?

Economy, Fair Tax

The Laffer Curve And The Fair Tax

The notion that increasing taxes will increase revenue is bogus. Winston Churchill nails it with this famous quote, “We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”

There are examples in the United States that demonstrate that revenues increase by lowering taxes, and decrease by raising them. There is an optimum point in the taxes/revenue equation and it has a name. It is called the Laffer Curve.

Since classical economic theory back in the early part of the 20th century economist have always known about money circulation. What is referred to as velocity. The faster money goes through the economy the more money people make and the more taxes are collected. Since then the equations have gotten a lot more complex with partial differentials, regression analysis and other mathematics. The principals are the same. The faster the economic activity the more jobs, income and taxes.

So how do we get a faster economy? There has to be some tax rate that allows maximum tax collections right? Yes there is. Arthur Laffer took a simple business principal studied by millions of business majors the world over. The maximum profit point or maximum revenue point. It the point where the price of your Chevy trucks makes you the most profit. Charge too much and you lose customers. Charge to little and you lose money. It’s not that complex. Disney does it for ticket prices. Walmart does it for their store pricing policies. All business does it. So why when Arthur Laffer does this same thing for government maximum revenues is he ridiculed for “trickle down,” “Voodoo” and other names too discredit his theory?

By understanding the Laffer Curve and the adoption of the Fair Tax, you will easily see how beneficial and growth oriented the Fair Tax would be to the economy.

Please check it out.

Link: Fountainhead Zero: Taxes 101: The Laffer Curve

Economy, Politics

Bailout Dies, Sending The Right Message

2 Comments

Yea, for now. In the auto industry’s economic troubles, or rather, the Big 3’s economic troubles, opportunities abound. Resisting the knee-jerk reaction to ‘rescue’ the Big 3 by simply throwing good money after bad, it is time to turn the lemon into lemonade by showing the socialist world how free-market economies recover from setbacks without government intervention. The path toward regaining profitability is through procedures called a Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Companies that can successfully reorganize and restructure will rescue themselves and all the jobs that go with it. And to the survivors go the rewards. Rewards to consumers, auto workers, stockholders, and the companies themselves.

Proponents, including the outgoing and incoming Administrations, of the misnomer of a process called a bailout, are saying that a bailout is necessary in order to avoid a disorderly bankruptcy process. They say this with a straight face, as though a government takeover, a nationalization, auto Czar and all, of the auto industry, including new rules on what kind of cars they have to make, will be an orderly and fiscally responsible action. A responsible action is one that gives the Big 3 a chance to reorganize into a company that can make a profit again. The ‘bailout’ plan is nothing more than a nationalization of a failing business model with taxpayers footing the bill with no end in sight.

Today, the Senate did the right thing by sending the right message to the White House,the Big 3, and the UAW.

link:

Politics

Patrick Fitzgerald, Still The Prosecutor's Prosecutor?

Can we be confident that the man who prosecuted the Valerie Plame ‘leak’ incident, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, will get to the bottom of the bribery and racketeering scandal surrounding Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich?

Patrick Fitzgerald had the reputation of being non-political and determined to investigate everything. To let the investigation take him where it will. That’s what he said he did in the Plame case (where he never had to answer why nobody was charged with the leak). This sounds good, but look at his record.

Continue reading Patrick Fitzgerald, Still The Prosecutor's Prosecutor? →

Economy, Media, Pensacola, Politics

Could Newspapers Be The Next Bailout?

That newspaper publishers are in tough times is nothing new. Circulation and advertising have been falling for a few years now. And when you consider what percentage of their advertising revenue depended on car dealers, they are seeing their difficulty being compounded.

A snapshot from today’s headlines should tell you how newspapers are going have to be creative, from a purely business standpoint, in order to survive.

The ill-advised bailouts we’ve already seen do not justify yet another one for this industry. Like automakers, this industry needs to change to meet the times as well. But not at taxpayers’ expense.

Some on the left are falling back to another FDR program, focusing on the writers that are finding themselves out in the job market. About 15,000 of them so far. So what kind of make-work program would this ‘Federal Writers Project’ look like you ask?

Right out of the Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers handbook . . .

Today, there are many dislocated “old media” journalists from newspapers, radio, and television on the street–here I declare my personal interest, as one of them–who could provide a skilled pool to staff a new FWP. But since these journalists represent only a fraction of the larger displaced workforce, it is fair to ask what the public benefit would be of money spent.

This time, the FWP could begin by documenting the ground-level impact of the Great Recession; chronicling the transition to a green economy; or capturing the experiences of the thousands of immigrants who are changing the American complexion. Like the original FWP, the new version would focus in particular on those segments of society largely ignored by commercial and even public media. At the same time, the multimedia fruits of this research would be open-sourced to all media, as well as to academics. As an example, oral history as a discipline has made great strides in the past 70 years, and with the development of video techniques, the forum of the Internet could make these multi-media interviews widely available to schools and scholars, as well as to average Americans.

And how it might work? According to Mark I. Pinsky at The New Republic, it would, naturally, involve colleges and universities, liberals’ home away from home to manage the program.

Administering the new FWP as an individual grant program through community colleges and universities could minimize bureaucracy and overhead. In consultation with the Obama administration–perhaps through the National Endowment for the Humanities–and Congress, guidelines could be established and a small staff assembled in Washington to oversee the projects, in the form of grants, rather than hourly wages. Projects could be pitched locally to colleges, or suggested and posted by them, vetted preliminarily and then approved or rejected by the national staff.

If the Obama administration decided to include the newspaper publishing industry in some kind of bailout, wouldn’t that be a conflict of interest?

link: Write Now

UPDATE: 17:20, This morning Tribune Co. was reported to be considering Chapter 11. They have now filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

2008 Election, Politics

What Obama's Change Is Like

From Barney Frank whining that Obama needs to start being President six weeks before his inauguration, to one campaign promise after another going by the wayside, to the CHANGE that Barack Obama will bring to Washington, here is what it looks like so far.

Overall, the people Obama is relying on to build his administration have represented unions; energy, environmental groups, insurance, and drug companies; Wal-Mart; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and the lobbying arm of the Washington-based Center for American Progress. The center is a think tank headed by John Podesta, former chief of staff to Bill Clinton and now co-chairman of Obama’s transition.

Had he told us the change he had in mind was to let lobbyists and special interests set up an administration for him, the election might have turned out differently.

What we have and what we are seeing, is what you get when you have a President-elect with no experience on the national stage other than running to be one.

link: AP IMPACT: Donors, lobbyists help Obama get ready

Belly up to the counter. Politics are on the menu and Ross is on the grill.