Comparing the D.C. gun case to Roe v. Wade

2 comments November 23rd, 2008

Conservative columnist George Will EXAMINES the “judicial subjectivity” of two controversial Supreme Court rulings.

Bill O’Reilly’s dumbest comment ever (a difficult achievement): The Internet has a liberal bias

24 comments November 22nd, 2008

 

The Internet is a medium open to the opinions of whoever bothers to post them —  be they commies, fascists, vegetarians, Kiwanians, stamp collectors, cross-dressers or fans of Alan Keyes.

But Fox News superstar Bill O’Reilly SAYS the Net is dominated, as if by conspiracy, by liberals.

John McCain and Tina Fey (as herself, not Sarah Palin) appeared on cover of Life four years ago!

1 comment November 22nd, 2008

The hypocrisy of socialism in the red states

12 comments November 21st, 2008

 

In the final days of their ill-fated campaign, John McCain and Sarah Palin ran around the country warning everyone that Barack Obama’s tax plan amounted to a socialistic scheme to take money from certain groups of people and give it to certain other groups.

McCain is not so stupid that he actually saw Obama’s plan as Marxism or anything of the sort, but he seems to have figured that the booboisie would buy it.  After all, some people just don’t understand that every tax at every level amounts to redistribution of wealth. Call it socialism, if you like, but it’s an inescapable fact of all forms of government.

The U.S. government, for example, takes in boatloads of tax revenues and then spends all that money on various projects and programs. The money, in effect, gets redistributed.  In that sense, McCain was not entirely wrong when he said that Obama was running for the job of “redistributionist-in-chief” (a line that prompted great chortling among McCainiacs who considered it a deft put-down).

But there’s one way of looking at this federal redistributionism that’s never mentioned by the likes of McCain or Palin. I refer to the division of the 50 states into separate groups of giver states and taker states.

The giver states are those that pay more in federal taxes than they get back in federal spending. The taker states are those that get back more in federal spending than they pay in federal taxes.

According to the latest available data from the Tax Foundation, Obama’s home state of Illinois  is a giver state. It gets back only 75 cents for every dollar it pays in federal taxes. On the other hand, McCain’s home state of Arizona is a taker state. It gets $1.19 back for every dollar it pays in federal taxes.

Now, here’s where this dichotomy becomes even more interesting: Of the 22 states McCain carried in the recent election, 21 of them are taker states. Obama carried 11 taker states (about half as many as McCain), but he also carried 16 of the 17 giver states.

Looking at it another way, 139 of McCain’s 173 electoral votes came from taker states while 243 of Obama’s 365 electoral votes came from giver states.

Similarly stark patterns pertained in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004. George W. Bush won most of his electoral votes from taker states while Al Gore and John Kerry won most of theirs from giver states.

So, there you have it. Republican presidential candidates, with all their scary rhetoric about the Democrats’ socialist agenda, do much better among voters in states that reap the lion’s share of benefits from the federal government’s redistribution programs. The conservative states generally are leeching off taxpayers in the more liberal states.

How’s that for hypocrisy?

The strange, unfounded fear among right-wingers about Democrats and the Fairness Doctrine

4 comments November 20th, 2008

 

For reasons that only the most talented psychologists could fully explain, the cultural conservatives whose grip on reality is most tenuous are convinced, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that Barack Obama and the rest of those terrible Democrats are going to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine and thereby silence right-wing talk radio.

It’s a silly theory, as we see HERE.

The end of capitalism as we know it?

8 comments November 20th, 2008

Michael Moore makes some INTERESTING POINTS, some with which I agree and some with which I don’t.

The GOP’s “divorce from the intelligentsia”

8 comments November 20th, 2008

 

The Economist, a British journal, offers a GRIM ASSESSMENT of the Republican Party’s future in light of its turn toward anti-intellectualism.

Here’s just a taste of this provocative essay:

There are any number of reasons for the Republican Party’s defeat on November 4th. But high on the list is the fact that the party lost the battle for brains. Barack Obama won college graduates by two points, a group that George Bush won by six points four years ago. He won voters with postgraduate degrees by 18 points. And he won voters with a household income of more than $200,000—many of whom will get thumped by his tax increases—by six points. John McCain did best among uneducated voters in Appalachia and the South.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, public favor for the Republican Party continues to DECLINE.

The myth of Lincoln’s “Team of Rivals”

13 comments November 19th, 2008

 

As an inveterate Lincoln buff (I have scores of books about Honest Abe), I’ve taken great interest in all the media speculation of late concerning Barack Obama’s purported interest in emulating the manner in which Lincoln assembled his Cabinet.

The gist of all this, if you don’t know, is that Lincoln appointed a bunch of his former political rivals to Cabinet posts in an admirable gesture of bipartisanship.  Obama is said to be set on following much the same course.

The textbook for this strategy is historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s best-selling book of a few years ago, “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.”

I loved that book and took encouragement from word that Obama is bent on using Lincoln’s recipe for making a Cabinet.

But alas, historian Matthew Pinsker has a COLUMN in the Los Angeles Times in which he submits that Lincoln’s team of rivals was a failure.

Oh, well. That doesn’t mean Obama can’t make the formula work. 

Liberal media want us real Americans to think al-Qaida doesn’t like Obama

10 comments November 19th, 2008

 

As everybody who listens to talk radio knows, Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim terrorist whose election to the presidency was engineered by an evil conspiracy involving the al-Qaeda network and its stooges in the U.S. media.

But some Americans don’t listen to talk radio, and it’s those folks who are the target audience for the latest falsehood from the traitors in the media. They want us to believe that al-Qaeda has INSULTED Obama — as if he isn’t one of their own.

Don’t be fooled, patriots! Quick! Turn on Rush Limbaugh or Fox News or some other trustworthy source of news. Don’t let the MSM convince you that Obama must be OK if al-Qaeda says bad things about him.

Be strong, good people!

Conservative columnist: “Armband religion is killing the Republican Party”

2 comments November 19th, 2008

 

Kathleen Parker, the conservative scribe whose derisive column about Sarah Palin a few months ago earned her a mountain of hate mail from unhinged right-wingers, is likely to receive more such treatment for having written THIS.

But Parker’s correct (which is something I don’t often say about her stuff).