05/11/12

The Tyranny of Cliches – A Book Review

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

Jonah Goldberg has written an incredible new book – The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas. That boy can write! 🙂 His premise is that conservatives have a distinct ideology connected to individual and economic freedom, but liberals refuse to concede that they have an ideology at all. It’s the old ‘be vague’ at all costs and baffle them with bullshit routine. Unfortunately, many fall for this crap and it is deadly to our freedoms. Liberals label conservatives as ignorant and dishonest in order to achieve their goals and accomplish their progressive agenda.

From The Blaze:

“They’re always questioning the motives of the right,” Goldberg said of liberals as they find themselves on the losing end of disagreements with conservatives.

“Since they can’t admit they have an ideology of their own, it manifests itself in weird places, and it comes out in these cliches.”

Goldberg explains that such cliches may come out as seemingly harmless, but in reality are deeply loaded ideological arguments. Examples Goldberg gave on the show were the term “social justice” and the phrase “one man‘s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

When asked by Will Cain what Goldberg believes the real liberal ideology is, the author speculated that it is the progressive dogma that “the state is the engine of history.”

And here’s an appetizer from the book:

There’s a kind of argument-that-isn’t-an-argument that vexes me. I first started to notice it on university campuses. I’ve spoken to a lot of college audiences. Often, I will encounter an earnest student, much more serious looking than the typical hippie with open-toed shoes and a closed mind. During the Q&A session after my speech he will say something like “Mr. Goldberg, I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Then he will sit down, and the audience will applaud. Faculty will nod proudly at this wiser-than-his-years hatchling under their wings. What a glorious moment for everybody. Blessed are the bridge builders.

My response? Who gives a rat’s ass?

First of all, my right to speak never was in doubt. Indeed I’m usually paid to speak. Besides, I’ve given my speech already and we’re in the Q&A time: Shouldn’t you have told me this beforehand? Second, the kid is almost surely lying. He’ll take a bullet for me? Really?

Clichés like these are a way to earn bravery on the cheap, defending principles you haven’t thought through or perhaps only vaguely support. Or, heck, maybe he really would leap on a grenade so I could finish talking about how stupid high-speed rail is. But it still doesn’t matter, because mouthing these sorts of clichés is a way to avoid arguments, not make them.

Yeah! What he said!! I love this book. It’s intelligent, cutting, entertaining and exposes liberal ideology for the dishonest propaganda that it is. Jonah is not only a brilliant author, he has a spine and tells the truth. My kind of pundit. In the daily battle against the Left, this book provides ammunition to spar with. It’s red meat for the conservative warrior.

If you loved his book Liberal Fascism, you’ll adore The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas. With the most important election of our lifetime bearing down on us, this book is one you must get and read and read again. Jonah says it so well in his book – he takes a multitude of liberal cliches and disarms them for you. And he does it with wit and passion. It is small wonder he is so admired in the conservative blogosphere.

05/11/12

America’s Most Critical Political Issue

By: Arlen Williams
Gulag Bound

Come In, to a Solution we Need,
to protect and defend the United States of America at its core,
and reset it upon its foundation.

What is our most important issue as a nation?
Is it the budget, as critical as that has gotten?
Is it anything we see in our so important Bill of Rights?
Is it even in our Constitution?

Our most important issue as a nation is our core principle, the truth that defines us, ever more critical when that truth is violated, obscured, and covered over with lies.

Our Constitution does cite it, with its first three words, “We the People.” But to see what defines our nation, makes us “exceptional” in history, affords us all our rights, and engenders our essential responsibilities, we must look to our nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence. There we find the authority from whence our Constitution draws its mandates. There we find our basis, for our shared self government.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government….

And so we read, our nation’s most important issue is Sovereignty – that God, sovereign over all, created man in his own image, for us to rule by consent of our own wills upon the earth, accountable to Him and to each other. Also self evident, that we are to rule ourselves within sovereign, thus independent nations, safeguards against the tyranny of empire reaching even to the ultimately corrupt power of global governance. A complex engine, the policing of all our rights and liberties, even our essential “Right to Life,” constantly depends on an unceasing, eternal flame as our core: Sovereignty.

In addition to our popular sovereignty, protected from without by the fences of national sovereignty, in America each state has its own kind of sovereignty, as the 10th Amendment stipulates.

And, by “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” it is self evident that parents hold a sovereign responsibility for and over their children. And the autonomy of our religion and its institutions is to be a sacred sovereignty.

Much information is provided us when we meet our sovereign responsibility to make informed and wise selections at the polls. We may know candidates’ positions on spending and taxation, on the right to life, on the natural societal element of marriage, on how they believe our various liberties are to be protected, or our national defense carried out. But where is the knowledge of what they would do with our most important issue, the Declaration Principle of Sovereignty?

Where indeed, while our property rights and many freedoms are gradually usurped by extraconstitutional, bureaucratic councils (called “soviets” in Russian) to carry out the insurrection-governance of our Sovereign People by the United Nations’ Agenda 21 guidelines. Where do we go, to find out which candidates are on the side of our sovereignty, instead of such global hegemony?

What of other issues, such as the UN Small Arms Treaty, the International Criminal Court, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea Treaty, and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child? It is the United States Senate that is given the constitutional authority to approve or to reject such treaties.

Members of the U.S. House of Representatives are also constantly faced with legislation that would erode or threaten our popular, national, state, parental, and religious sovereignties. Presently, consider the threats of CISPA, the 2012 NDAA, SOPA, and the new governmental powers of seizure of food and water that have been foisted upon our people. Also, the extensive kinetic or potential usurpations of our rights, through legislation or executive fiat, of DHS and its FEMA and TSA.

We must ask questions, by which candidates are cautioned to tell us their philosophy and rationale for similar decisions to come.

Further, some in a competing political belief system, whose mandate is world subjugation, seek to overlay and impose their Sharia Law upon our people.

And when we have a rogue president, as it appears we may for another four years, doing the bidding of the U.N., or of foreign states, or of their financiers, or of transnational corporations and their tycoons, it is Congress that must check him. So, let us draw our attention to congressional candidates.

We are bringing together a method and means of asking congressional candidates the necessary questions and doing the critical analysis, to determine what their elections should mean for our critical sovereignties. The effort is called the Sovereignty Campaign. It will not supplant the important work presently done by patriotic organziations; it will empower these with knowledge of the most vital kind.

Something is very wrong in America. Please tell us how you can help, with either time and effort, or with finances, or both. Remember, the “US” of America has to be all of us, beginning with “me.” Please help. And we will introduce you to your real opportunity to reset America upon its true foundation of sovereignty. Let us organize and execute the plan together.

Let us be about the work of assuring that those we elect will work for us as patriots adherent to our nation’s founding principle, by protecting, not inhibiting the flame of the Sovereignty of “We the People,” created in eternal God’s image. Such a flame meets its purposes only if it is shown, to give others light and as necessary, as it applies its heat and chastening effect.

We have less than half a year, in which to collect the information required, collate it, interpret it, present it, and distribute it to voters.

These last few years, Tea Party protestors began by expressing concern over the grave financial threat to our nation’s economic health, of rampant government spending and debt. By the time they truly let their voice be heard, the outcry so fervently shouted, from the natural patriotism of American hearts, was:

“You work for us!”

Let us know you care too. Ask any question, express any concern. We have an effective plan. At present, email us at [email protected] or comment below (indicate if you wish your comment kept private, or anonymous). Follow with us at twitter.com/@SovCam.

And if you may wish to help, see our 2012 Mission & press “RESET” to put America back on its foundation.

05/11/12

The Decline of The Washington Post

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

On Thursday, May 10, The Washington Post Company held its annual meeting. AIM was there because of our ownership of company stock, enabling us to grill top brass about the condition of the newspaper and the company in general. The value of the company’s stock has fallen by 50 percent over the last five years.

But the worst may be yet to come. Kaplan, the Post subsidiary that has served as the cash cow for the paper that brought us the Watergate scandal that destroyed Republican Richard Nixon’s presidency, is going through scandal and financial turmoil.

In addition to growing concern over Kaplan, a for-profit educational institution, this year’s meeting featured questions about the paper’s controversial financial relationship with newspapers owned and controlled by the Russian and Chinese governments. Post Company chairman Donald E. Graham didn’t have any second thoughts over the paper being used, through paid advertisements, to promote Russian and Chinese propaganda to an American audience.

The meeting started at 9 a.m., before many people had probably seen what the Post was reporting in its print and online editions that day.

Copies of the paper were distributed for free to shareholders. But a story about Mitt Romney supposedly bullying a gay classmate was not in the print edition of that day’s paper. The story was published in the print edition the next day, Friday, and included an old photo of a young Romney playing around by pointing a toy gun to his chin under the caption, “Give a guy enough rope and he’ll hang himself.”

These pranks and jokes happened around 1965, and conservative commentators are having fun mocking the paper for devoting so much attention to these “troubling incidents,” as the paper puts it.

What is more troubling is what has happened to the Post, which does a good job of covering local news through such papers as The Calvert Recorder in Calvert County, Maryland, but which is suffering circulation and revenue declines because of its national newspaper product. The Calvert Recorder is part of the Southern Maryland Newspapers group, which is owned by the Post.

Dana Loesch of Big Journalism points out that the Post has already corrected the Romney story, without acknowledging that a correction was made. The correction was of the paper’s report that a former Romney classmate had “long been bothered” by the Romney bullying incident, when in fact, he wasn’t witness to it and only recently heard about it. It is troubling that the Post would embellish the story and then retract the charge without comment or an apology.

Romney reportedly helped pin a boy down and cut his hair off. There is no evidence Romney knew the boy was a homosexual and Romney can’t remember the incident. Yet, this is being presented by the paper in the context of Obama standing up for the rights of the poor gays, while his Republican opponent has a history of intimidating and harassing them.

There can be no doubt that the Post intended to damage Romney’s candidacy with this “news” story. This is typical of a liberal paper that faithfully promotes most of the liberal policies of the Obama Administration—except when it comes to regulating for-profit educational companies such as Post subsidiary Kaplan.

In a story that AIM has covered extensively, the paper itself is losing money and has been kept afloat by Kaplan, which is supposed to educate people at a profit. Those profits, however, have been hit by Kaplan educational practices that that have been exposed for taking advantage of poor students seeking good jobs but who end up with tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of federal loan debt for classes and degrees that didn’t adequately prepare them for the real world.

At the annual meeting, Post chairman Donald E. Graham did not dispute the claim that the company had spent $1 million lobbying against the regulations. He himself personally lobbied members of Congress and has no apologies for it.

In order to forestall the new federal regulations, the Post even hired a lobbying firm that included former Obama aide Anita Dunn.

The additional federal regulation of Kaplan came after congressional hearings were held into its controversial practices. The scandal came to be known as The Washington Post’s Watergate.

But the Post, of course, didn’t cover this as a scandal. Instead, chairman Graham led an effort to defeat the proposed regulations. In the end, they were watered down, under the lobbying pressure, but have still taken a toll on Kaplan’s profit picture and future earnings.

Those who attended the annual meeting were lobbied themselves, as they were given a free copy of the book, Change.edu: Rebooting for the New Talent Economy, written by Kaplan chairman and CEO Andrew S. Rosen and published by Kaplan itself.

Graham urged people at the annual meeting to read the book as well as a favorable review of the book by Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates. A copy of that review, included with the book given to stockholders, was—not surprisingly—published in The Washington Post.

It was a clear-cut example of how the paper intends to use its resources on its own behalf. These are desperate times and the company is fighting for its survival.

I was tempted to ask Graham that if Gates had submitted a review that panned the Rosen book, would it have been published in the Post. I think we know the answer to that one.

It is a sensitive subject. Melinda Gates, the wife of Bill Gates, was a member of the board of The Washington Post Company from 2004 to 2010. She resigned after the release of a report from The Education Trust, funded partly by her foundation, highly critical of for-profit educational institutions such as Kaplan.

The website for the Rosen book features smiling students who have presumably benefitted from Kaplan. But as Rusty Weiss pointed out in a special report from the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, students and especially veterans targeted by Kaplan have been making some of the most important complaints against it.

Weiss noted that one review said that many students are finding that the grandiose promises of careers and large salaries from Kaplan recruiters “were merely a sales ploy—and in fact, the product offered by Kaplan has substantially less value than that offered by traditional public and private colleges.”

Now, in order to make up for declining revenues, the Post has been engaging in some more controversial financial dealings that may constitute a scandal in their own right. The Post is running paid ads from the Russian and Chinese governments that are made to look like news sections of the paper. The ads, some of them six pages long, even carry a facsimile of The Washington Post masthead.

In relatively small print it says they are paid supplements and have nothing to do with the paper’s news or editorial departments. But The Washington Post masthead or logo is more prominently featured.

In a conversation after the annual meeting, Eric Lieberman, vice president and counsel for the Post, agreed that allowing foreign regimes to use the Post masthead in their advertising might present a problem. But no promise was made to alter the practice.

The ads online are even more questionable, for the Russian ad shows The Washington Post masthead even more prominently featured above the Russia Now title of the section.

Technically, this section, or “pull-out,” from the paper is produced and published by Rossiyskaya Gazeta, an official Russian government paper.

The online China Watch advertising supplement is not as blatant. Still, it shows The Washington Post masthead on one side and China Watch on the other. China Watch is “presented” by China Daily, a state-controlled newspaper.

Readers are thus given the impression that the propaganda has the approval of the Post.

Graham wasn’t concerned about carrying the ads and even indicated he was open to more paid advertisements from questionable regimes. For him, it was a matter of revenue.

Asked if he would take an ad from al-Qaeda, he didn’t rule it out, although he said he thought that would be extremely unlikely. He pointed out that the paper had run a long column by the Unabomber and that it had helped the FBI nab the terrorist. The Unabomber’s “manifesto” was run after the FBI was consulted and agreed that it would help uncover his identity. It was not a paid ad.

The notion that the Post is getting too close to odious regimes is buttressed by the February 13 report from the paper’s ombudsman, Patrick Pexton, in an extraordinary column headlined, “Caving to China’s Demands.” Pexton noted that the Post had published the transcript of an interview with China’s vice president, Xi Jinping, which included questions and answers submitted by the Chinese regime, as if they had come from the paper.

After publishing the “interview,” Pexton said, Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli came to the conclusion that the transcript “could have misled readers into thinking it was a real interview” and so he published a correction explaining how it was manipulated by the regime.

Pexton went on to note, “It is also good to remember that The Post is tied to China through advertising revenue. Once a month The Post prints ‘China Watch,’ an advertising supplement in English that consists of stories aimed at a U.S. audience but written by China Daily, the house organ of the Chinese government. And The Post’s Web site hosts a regularly updated version of China Watch.”

This matter-of-fact statement doesn’t emphasize the questionable nature of this disturbing financial relationship, which also includes the Russian government.

It is time for the Post ombudsman, Watergate reporter Bob Woodward, and other Post reporters and editors to protest the curious financial relationships that are casting a pall over the paper’s journalistic reputation and integrity.

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected].

05/11/12

Sec Def Panetta refuses to have Pentagon plan for sequester-forced budget cuts

By: Jeffrey Klein
Political Buzz Examiner

Character, honor and integrity are in short supply in the Obama Administration, but thankfully not in the case of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who has refused to have the Pentagon plan for the Democrat-demanded sequester budget cuts, because they would demonstrably threaten the integrity of the United States military throughout the world.

And yesterday, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives joined him in the fight by passing a bill, by a pretty much party line vote of 218-199, which would prevent the $55 billion in cuts to the 2013 Pentagon budget, according to a FOXNews article today.

The Pentagon faces more than $500 billion in budget cuts over the next decade, due to the failure of the so-called “supercommittee” agree on a deficit-reducing plan last fall, to offset a second stage $1.1 trillion increase in the U.S. borrowing limit to avoid a government shutdown–after U.S. debt had been downgraded.

According to the deal, an equal amount of “across-the-board” budget cuts must come from entitlement programs, particularly Medicare and Medicaid, which have been identified by every credible source around the world as being unsustainable.

However, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said the bill will not pass his chamber unless tax [rate] increases are also part of the mix, the vote Thursday is largely symbolic, while Democrats dominate the Senate.

As usual, The White House had also issued a veto threat.

Why would Republicans not want to maintain the original “fair and balanced” deal?

Because President Obama had already tasked Defense Secretary Leon Panetta with cutting the defense budget by 10 percent over 10 years, as a gesture toward reducing the $1 trillion per year budget deficit his Administration has run since coming into office.

So, after performing a top-down reevaluation of the entire Department of Defense according to President Obama’s overall plan to “re-shape” and downsize the U.S. military, back on January 26, 2012, Panetta, along with the Joint Chiefs Chairman-Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, briefed the press on the substantial budget reductions included in their 2013 budget submission, according to Jim Garamone’s same day article in the Armed Forces Press Service.

Panetta’s new budget already has the DOD on the path to save $259 billion over the next five years and $487 billion over the next 10 years.

Sequester calls for $500 billion over 10 years–Panetta already cut $487 billion.

And this is exactly why that on February 14, 2012, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, that Panetta stated that The Pentagon is making no plans to prepare for half-a-trillion dollars in mandatory budget cuts scheduled to take effect in less than a year, according to Anna Mulrine’s February 14, 2012 Christian Science Monitor article.

Panetta said that the [additional] cuts mandated by sequester represent a “doomsday scenario” for the American military that would “virtually devastate” national defense.

Mr. Panetta emphasized the point, warning lawmakers that the cuts amount to a “meat ax” that “we are convinced would hollow out the force and inflict severe damage on our national defense.”

For that reason, top Pentagon brass say they refuse to even humor the possibility. “As the president has pointed out and I’ve emphasized, we are not paying attention to sequester.”

This is exactly what Barack Obama wants to happen.

First, he can claim [to his anti-military base] that he reduced military spending by 10 percent over 10 years–presumably to free up more money in the budget for the Liberal-loved “social welfare” programs.

Second, not matter this it is a current, contemporary fact, Democrats will not recognize Panetta’s budget cuts as meeting the requirement of the sequester…because they were ‘already made,’ and sequester requires ‘new cuts.’

So, this stalemate will likely save the devastation of the U.S. military, but give Democrats an out from having to implement the sequester on Medicare and Medicaid before the election, giving them an another “apparent victory”–exactly according to Barack Obama’s plan.

However, much the same way as the “apparent victory” of Obamacare gave Democrats a historic “shellacking” in November 2010, the way things are going so far, it appears that November 2012 is going to be much worse–because the silent majority sees right through it all.