Tag Archives: Pensacola

Economy, Fair Tax, Pensacola, Politics

Answering Papantonio With The Fair Tax

Below is a ‘comment’ that I left to an article Mike Papantonio wrote in the Pensacola News Journal yesterday entitled ‘No choice but to spend our way out.’ Coming from an Air America talk radio host, that is just the sort of ‘fix’ one could expect from him. But it was also an opportunity for me to ad my two cents to promote The Fair Tax as a real solution to our economic problems. And below is my reply:

If the PEOPLE only had more money left to spend, it would help to turn things around. But if the GOVERNMENT spends our (and our children’s and our grand-children’s) money, it will simply make the hole bigger.Two things to remember, when you’re in a hole, quit digging. And, like Winston Churchill said, “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.”

So how do the people come to have more money? Don’t confiscate it via taxes, let them keep more of what they earn. Unfortunately, that won’t happen in today’s current political climate. CHANGE is what is needed. Changing how the government is financed, via the Fair Tax system, will go a long way in bringing us to economic recovery, creating jobs, business, investment, and savings.

But before that will happen, a lot of politicians will have to go into a 12-step program to wean themselves from of the old way of ‘control through taxation.’

It is a shame that today, President Elect Barack Obama is saying that ONLY THE GOVERNMENT can get us out of the current situation, through spending of epic proportions, and on programs that are not going to stimulate the economy, but instead will advance his campaign promises. The solution to the country’s problem is called The Fair Tax, where the people will have their own money to spend. Where the people will then choose, through the free market, who the winners and losers will be, rather than have it taken by THE GOVERNMENT to spend it elsewhere and on their special interests.

You can see where the 12-step program is needed. But don’t hold your breath for Barack and his Cabinet to sign up for it. It is up to you and I to remind the folks in Washington that they are supposed to represent us, not control us, and push us over the economic cliff with trillions and trillions of imaginary dollars, further weakening our economy.

Please share with us any letters to the editor or blog comments that you have written in support of The Fair Tax. See you at the next meetup. Tue. Jan 20, 7pm at Philly’s Cheesesteaks & Hoagies, 3900 Creighton Road.
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Pensacola Fair Tax Advocates

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, 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.

Pensacola, Politics, Uncategorized

It's The Free-Market Stupid, Not The GOP

Most pundits on the far left, like self-described journalist Mike Papantonio, are really stretching the facts (like a slip and fall lawyer would) when he tries to whitewash the UAW’s role and its impact on the Big 3 automakers by saying that the GOP has always hated unions and that’s why, he asserts, they don’t want to bail out the Big 3. And he does this by saying that AIG, Freddy Mac, Fannie Mae are not unionized and they’re getting bailed out. Actually, none of them should be bailed out with taxpayer money. It was government intervention that put them in that position. The best thing the government can do now is to quit meddling with the free-market economy and let the market determine who wins and who loses.

So here’s my response to Mike Papantonio. AIG and the rest of Wall Street, they’re not unionized and they are failing. You say the Big 3 are failing too, but it’s not because of unions because Wall Street isn’t unionized? Nice try Mike.

I’ll tell you, Mike the journalist, what ALL of these failures have in common, in just two words. Government intervention. Intervention in a free-market economy. And there is one more commonality among all of them Mike, they are joined at the hip with Democrat lawmakers from the CRA to the UAW. That’s what they all have in common. That’s why all of them are in trouble. The Big 3 are unique however because they are unionized. For them, their problem is compounded because of the UAW and the agreements that the incompetent CEO’s signed on to. Granted it isn’t the only reason, the Big 3 have other problems as well, but it is the difference from operating in the red, or the black.

Their incompetence is echoed in their ‘plan’ before congress right now. Their plan includes the same cash-draining contracts that keep them from being competitive with the non-union automakers in the South. Because of that, they deserve and have earned the right to go bankrupt.

Reorganize, unload the union weight, be competitive, and prosper. And if it means going from Big 3 to Big 2, so be it. In a free market environment, the fittest will survive without putting taxpayers trillions and trillions of dollars into debt.

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

related links: GOP Blames Unions for Detroit’s Ills | What Caused The Economic Crisis?

Economy, Fair Tax, Pensacola

Mike Huckabee Comes To Pensacola Friday Nov 28

Former Arkansas Gov. and Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee will be coming to Pensacola Friday night. Huckabee is a supporter, a passionate supporter, of the Fair Tax. It will be for a book signing of his new book ‘Do the right thing.’

Even if you’re not interested in his book, but you support the Fair Tax, how about showing up (you know the media will be there) to thank Gov. Huckabee for making the Fair Tax part of his campaign platform as well as his continued support of it.

He will be at the Barnes & Noble on Airport Boulevard between 8-9pm. If you can’t make it, you can get the book here.

This will be his last stop of a five city trip on Friday.

link: fairtax.org

Pensacola, Politics, Race Relations

Is Same Sex Movement Getting Out Of Hand?

Where the Left and the so-called ‘gay rights’ movement is concerned, it appears that the only kind of elections they accept are the ones that go ‘their way.’ There have been ballot initiatives in 30 states so far that felt compelled to legislate the definition of marriage as a union between members of the opposite sex, and those measures passed in all of them. Given the opportunity to vote on it, it passes every time. Most recently in California and Florida.

Yesterday, we got a chance to see just how tolerant proponents of ‘gay marriage’ can be by staging protests, some not so peaceful, all around the country.

At Mount Hope Church in Michigan, a radical homosexual group disrupted an evangelical church service last Sunday. The activists rushed the pulpit, throwing condoms and buckets of glitter, using noisemakers and megaphones to scream at churchgoers and frighten children. Women ran to the pulpit and began to kiss; others shouted, “Jesus was gay!” Protests erupted outside Mormon temples in Utah and Seattle to protest the church’s support for the California marriage amendment.

Their strategy to link their cause to ‘civil rights’ simply does not fly with Americans, and certainly not with Black Americans. There is no right that straight Americans have that gay Americans do not have when it comes to marriage.

A gay man is just as free to marry a woman as I am. Similarly, a gay woman is free to marry a man. No problem. No one is preventing gays from getting married. Gays need to get a grip on the fact that they are not the mainstream of general society and learn to live with that fact, rather than trying to turn society upside down to suit their purpose, using judges that should be disbarred and politicians that should be arrested for blatantly violating the law.

I don’t believe ‘marriage’ has anything to do with rights. If it’s rights they’re after, then legislate some rights, call it a civil union, or even ‘gay married,’ but not simply ‘married.’ The latter being reserved for respect and preservation of traditional family values. Marriage is something that happens between members of the opposite sex. A judge can’t change the definition of marriage. Society via legislatures can, and I hope I’m not around if/when that ever happens.

Getting ‘rights’ for the gay lifestyle isn’t, on its face, a bad idea. Trying to equate it to normal heterosexual marriage however, is.

If gays were as proud of their situation as they seem to be, then one would think they would also be proud of that which defines them. Why not invent another hyphenated class to further delineate us? Along with ?-Americans (insert your word of choice), we’ll now have Gay-Americans. And Gay-Americans can be “gay married.” That seems to me to be a fair solution for gays that are tolerant of societal norms.

That would work, if only “tolerance” wasn’t missing from the lexicon of the gay “movement.”

related links: Gays And Marriage | Same-Sex Movement Demands Tolerance But Won’t Show Any

2008 Election, Pensacola, Politics

Escambia County & 2008 Election

The results are in. Although Escambia County remained red, the state went blue this time. City Council got some fresh faces to work with the new mayor-elect Mike Wiggins. The sheriff’s department got a new face as well in David Morgan. So the team is set. Let’s support them. Now let’s move forward.

On the national side, looking at the percentage of popular vote over the last twenty years, Barack Obama didn’t do too bad. At least he got over the 50% mark. As in the mid-term elections in 2006, any talk of a ‘mandate’ is wishful thinking. And by mandate, I mean that in a political sense, not a night out in San Francisco. We shall see how good a job he can do, among other things, as a uniter. He wasn’t my choice. But he will be our President. Now let’s move forward.

All the results are not yet in, but this is how it stands right now.

  • Obama is at 51%.
  • George H.W. Bush, 53.4% in 1988
  • Ronald Reagan, 50.7% in 1980, and 58.8% in 1984.
  • Bill Clinton, 43% in 1992
  • Bill Clinton, 49.2 % in 1996
  • George W. Bush, 47.9% in 2000
  • George W. Bush, 50.7% in 2004

The only scary thing I noticed in the presidential rundown is that there are 58 people living here that voted for Cynthia McKinney.

Continue reading Escambia County & 2008 Election →

2008 Election, Pensacola, Politics

Is Mike Papantonio A Journalist?

2 Comments

I just saw Air America Radio talk show host Mike Papantonio tell Neil Cavuto on FOX that he was a journalist and went to ‘journalism school’ for four years. They were discussing the TV reporter that asked Joe Biden some questions that no one else has asked either him or his running mate to date. Predictably, Papantonio wants her to lose her job. That’s the way the Left handles tough issues when it concerns one of their own.

At any rate, according to Papantonio’s Bio on his BIG LAW website, he doesn’t mention a journalism degree let alone attending journalism school.

That’s another thing the Left is comfortable with, telling stories in order to support a point. Much like the entire picture of just who Barack Obama is and what he is all about. Like Papantonio, he is not what he says he is or who he appears to be.