05/19/14

Unreasonable People

By: T F Stern
T F Stern’s Rantings

I put off writing about the sale of my rent house to accommodate the actual closing, that part of the sale when the buyer and seller sit down together, sign off on a stack of papers and everyone walks away happy. Well, it didn’t happen, at least not today and not with the folks who claimed they wanted to buy the house.

I should back up and explain that our renters forgot to take some of their personal property; no big deal, we put those items in boxes to be picked up later. There is an inexpensive desk that still needs to be taken away that we’ll leave in the garage; either that or put it on the curb for trash day.

As soon as our renters moved out the local neighborhood thieves decided the opportunity was ripe for a visit. They punched out a window to have a look around, deciding the only item worth stealing was the outside air conditioning unit which they surgically removed making it much easier for us to replace since the wiring and copper tubing was cut cleanly.

During the past week or so we’ve been down to the rent house making minor repairs to sheet rock, cleaning and preparing the house for the new owners. We held off installing a new A/C unit until the new owners would take possession of the house; no reason to tempt the local thieves.

We got a call last week from the buyer’s realtor asking would it be okay for these folks to take advantage of the weekend to start moving in and would we install the A/C unit since they were having the electricity turned on early Saturday morning. This is a young family buying their first home and so we told our realtor to go ahead and supply them with a key and we’d have the A/C unit put in Saturday since there would be somebody at the house to secure the property.

Saturday the A/C unit was installed and the house was nice and cool while I was there replacing the broken window left by the local criminal element. The house was wonderfully cool when the new family showed up with their young children. We had a chance to exchange pleasantries and walk through the house so they could see the progress made on the list they’d presented for repairs.

They were so happy to enjoy the moment as their dream of home ownership began to materialize. I explained that the new grass for the back yard where the pool had been would be delivered the following Thursday because the only sod available that day was below grade “pick over quality”. Since they hadn’t turned the water on as yet putting new sod down would be a wasted effort and they agreed that waiting until Thursday was a good idea.

I left them to begin the process of measuring for window coverings and getting used to their new home.

Sunday afternoon my son went down to finish some drywall patch work. The phone call went something like, “Dad, they took the new A/C unit; it’s gone”. My son has a way of keeping conversations simple. Many years ago I got a call from him, “Dad, do we have a second fire extinguisher?”, that kind of simplicity.

Apparently the new family hadn’t bothered to have the water turned on so they decided not to start moving in until Monday. They called their realtor who called our realtor; but the new A/C unit, the one that had already been installed and worked; well the A/C unit didn’t put up much of a struggle when the local thieves carted it off, and they took the original box it came in too.

The only reason we’d installed it prior to closing was to accommodate the new owner’s schedule for move in; what do you say to folks who don’t appreciate you did them a huge favor by letting them move in prior to closing? They didn’t offer to split the cost and it never crossed their minds to consider I’d installed a fairly expensive piece of equipment just to make their lives more comfortable.

Did I mention that my homeowner’s insurance policy has a $1400.00 deductible per claim? Yea, do the math and you can see making a claim won’t help since each claim makes your insurance rate go up.

Sunday evening we all got together down at the house to consider how to proceed; their realtor, my realtor and even the police officer who made the theft report. Their realtor kept demanding a new A/C unit be installed prior to closing (did I mention that closing was Monday morning at 10:00am?). Their realtor then demanded the house be professionally cleaned prior to move in.

Lucy and I had planned to clean the house ourselves after all the drywall work had been completed; that dust from repairs settles on everything. Something in their realtor’s tone of voice, her attitude of demanding this, demanding that; well it rubbed me the wrong way.

Thank goodness my realtor was there and stepped up to the line, explaining the reason the A/C unit was put in prior to closing was on account of a request from the buyers to start moving in early. There was a moment where I had to bite my tongue and walk outside to keep from handing their realtor a real piece of my mind. There’s a term for this type of woman, it rhymes with Witch.

I explained that no A/C unit would be installed until after closing and after funding had been provided. At that time the A/C unit would be installed and not before.

“Well how can we convince the lending firm to release funding without knowing the A/C works?” The conversation went down hill from there as the official Walk Through became a sticking point, “We can’t release funding until we know the A/C unit was installed and works properly”.

I think there’s a law against leaving dead realtor carcasses rotting on the driveway. I’m glad I keep a shovel handy just in case the need for a shallow grave pops up. She’d never be missed and it might help the new grass in the backyard; that new grass where the kid’s pool had been could use some of the fertilizer she was spreading.

Interestingly, closing was to proceed as planned, 10:00am on Monday.

We got a call from our realtor asking to go down to the house an hour prior to closing for a final walk through. They had a representative from the lender present to verify the house was ready to be transferred, that all repairs had been completed and so on. He asked about the A/C unit at which time I explained the unit would be installed just as soon as closing was completed and funds had been released.

You’d have thought I was holding him up at gun point. “Well, we can’t release funds until the job has been inspected.”
My words, “I don’t do business with unreasonable people. Either we close as planned, the A/C unit gets installed and you can check its efficiency later or we don’t; but I’m not putting in another A/C unit until we close.”

Their realtor started to play games, demanding a completed installation; but I stopped her mid sentence. I told her, “This is unacceptable”, and went outside, leaving my realtor to explain how the cow ate the cabbage. A little while later they all came outside and said closing was still on for 10:00am; but would we paint over the patch repairs inside the house… No, painting the house wasn’t part of the deal and we’d been told the buyers planned to do the inside with a different paint scheme because they didn’t like the light green and blue.

I called Lucy to let her know I was on my way home to pick her up so we could get to the closing. I ‘vented’ my frustrations, mostly the attitude of the other realtor’s demanding ways. The fifteen minute ride home permitted me to relax and prepare to move on with closing.

As we were about to leave for closing the phone rang; our realtor let us know closing wasn’t going to happen; the buyers had backed out. She reminded the buyers that they’d forfeit their earnest money so it will help cover some of the cost for the second A/C unit, the A/C unit we’d put in to make life easier for the new buyers.

Lucy and I looked at each other and we had the same kind of relief; not a major let down as we thought we might have had, as we should have had; but a feeling a mild relief. We found that remarkable.

In the movie, City Slickers II, after our heroes wandered all over hell and back only to find the treasure they’d sought was only a box of gold painted lead; that moment when they felt foolish for having spent so much time chasing after a worthless box, they looked at each other and commented, “You know, I really don’t feel as bad as I thought I should…”, that moment.

I don’t think we were supposed to sell the house, at least not to this family and certainly not with the realtor these folks had picked to represent their interests. I don’t like doing business with unreasonable people; which reminds me…

I have a very nice house that was put on the market a few minutes ago. Reasonable people may contact; Ellen Mangrum with Stay Realty 281-761-1633. (free plug for Ellen)

This article has been cross-posted to The Moral Liberal, a publication whose banner reads, “Defending The Judeo-Christian Ethic, Limited Government & The American Constitution.”

05/19/14

Obama Syndicate Assaulting Americans from Every Angle

By: Sher Zieve
Gulag Bound

Barack Obama Power Analysis TeachingIn order to effectively–and with as much certainty as is possible–decimate and destroy a country, its Middle Class must be thoroughly eradicated. The infamous Soviet-style Communist Saul Alinsky–mentor to Hillary Clinton who wrote her Senior thesis on him “There is Only the Fight…” at Wellesley College–wrote extensively about it in his book Rules for Radicals. Barack Hussein Obama is also an admirer of Alinsky and his work and actually taught ’the Alinsky Method’ to students during his days as a radical community organizer.

In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote that it would be very difficult to destroy the Middle Class in the USA because it was too well educated. So the, already, largely leftists government (“public”) school system set to the task of dumbing-down its students. They did an admirable job, to which Osama’s “elections” attest.

Another of Mr. Obama’s idols seems to be the team of Richard Cloward and Frances Piven who developed the strategy of bringing down the USA via a systematic overwhelming of virtually all of its systems but, specifically economics. They spoke of giving almost unlimited benefits to people in order to create a welfare state and collapse the system when it ran out of money…which it inevitably would with more people on welfare than are working to support them. We are experiencing this now.

Common Core Overwhelms and Replaces US School System

Common-Core-StamdardsToday, in US government schools both Marxist and Islamic propaganda are regularly taught and the curricula for these are growing markedly. Common Core–often referred to as “Communist Core”–has also made rapid progress in our school systems by promoting the false notion that it raises the standards for American students. Nothing could be further from the truth. In actuality, Common Core is changing not only the way things are taught to children and young adults but, the essence of what is being taught. One example is that of mathematics. It appears that the Common Core teaching method has done away with true mathematics and replaced it with an unknown quantity that has little-to-no reference to actual math and establishes new rules that cannot be deciphered by either teachers and parents…let alone students. Common Core is–in fact–designed to train good Communist subjects; that is subjects in the feudal sense.

The younger generations are being trained to follow and obey…not to have independent thought. In Dr. Susan Berry’s piece “Common Core Roots Lie in Ties Between Barack Obama, Bill Ayers”, she writes: “The standards were created by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers to improve academic achievement and increase accountability. President Barack Obama and his administration embraced them. Actually, Barack Obama did not simply “embrace” a concept that others developed; instead, the very roots of Common Core are in the early ideas generated by him and his fellow radical community organizer, Bill Ayers.”

Complete Cultural Upheaval, Private Armies, Return to Slavery

No society–or country–has ever withstood a total economic, political and cultural upheaval. Most notably, the ancient Roman Empire experienced it and this quickly led to its downfall. Also, in ancient Rome, with society crumbling, private armies for the wealthy elite began to spring up while other areas of the failing empire went back to the practice of creating and then using slaves for agricultural purposes.

In the US today, our traditional Biblically-based cultural norms are being thrown out by an increasingly suppressive federal government despite the will of the people. Marriage is now open to virtually any and soon-to-be-all manner of couplings. The Holy Bible is being banned in schools along with the targeting of any and all Christian thought and speech, while Islam is being actively taught. Credit classes on hard-core pornography are offered at our Colleges and Universities but, carrying placards against abortions can land one in jail.

bundy5The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) created to manage State-owned land has now become one of the Gestapo arms of the current resident in what was once our White House and is in the process of stealing land owned by private families. Lands in Texas, Nevada and New Mexico are regularly being confiscated by the thugs in the now openly anti-American BLM and federal government. Obama and his syndicate are working illegally, unconstitutionally and as fast and furiously as they can to remove the legal owners of private lands from their lands. Eventually, if we refuse to stop them, we will have nothing left. The latest theft attempt is the Laney Ranch in New Mexico, to which the Laney family claims deeds going back to 1883.

The end result of the federal government is–at least–twofold: 1. To steal the land for their own purposes; 2. To end cattle farming and begin the process of turning the USA into a meatless society. Remember the Bundy Ranch debacle only a few weeks ago? Mass graves of cattle slaughtered by BLM employees were uncovered after they had left the scene.

The BLM is only part of the “private army” Obama and one of his partners in crime Sen. Harry Reid have created for themselves. For Obama’s part, virtually all major departments of the US government have now been fully armed by the usurper with massive amounts of ammunition. This is Obama’s private army; one that will be used against American citizens and likely very soon. Obama warned us he would do it. Obviously, far too few of us listened.

Full Economic Collapse

Obama has effectively, with–until very recently–a do-nothing Congress, destroyed the US economic system and most corporations immediately bought into it! We are now on the cusp of collapse. Obama and his cronies spend on everything but this country and its people…all meant to destroy the economy and collapse the system. Obama’s minions are faking and lying about anything and everything. Unemployment figures are bogus, job creation figures are lies and False Flag events are occurring as soon as Obama’s Hollywood buddies can complete and get the scripts to him. These are meant–of course–to spread more chaos and complete confusion to “the masses” and allow him to confiscate your legally-owned guns. Note: Thus far, the gun thing hasn’t worked. However, if we continue to let him get away with his treason each and every day, eventually Obama will win the battle. Let’s don’t.

Obama-work-here-finished
At this juncture, Obama appears to be winning on each and every one of his fronts. Why? Because NO ONE is really opposing him! Want to live to see another brighter day? For heaven’s sake… fight back and quit cowering in corners! If you don’t, very soon this form of communication will be cut off from you… permanently. Your State governments hold the keys. States are now the only hope we have to survive, which–by the way–is the reason the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution were written in the manner they were. Under the US Republic‘s Constitution, the States and the people–NOT the federal government–have the real and overriding powers. It’s time to use the power we have as a hammer against the huge Obama police state or lose it forever. And above all, know you are not alone.

“Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever Thou goest“
–Joshua 1:9 KJV

—— GB ——

There is Only the Fight…
at hillaryclintonquarterly.com

How Saul Alinsky Taught Barack Obama Everything He Knows About Civic Upheaval:
at breitbart.com

Common Core Roots Lie in Ties Between Barack Obama, Bill Ayers:
at breitbart.com

Communist Goals 1963:
at uhuh.com

Fall of the Roman Republic, 133-27 BC:
at web.ics.purdue.edu

Feds Seize New Mexico Ranchers Land: County orders Local Sheriff to Stop the Feds:
http://offgridsurvival.com/feds-seize-new-mexico-ranchers-land

05/19/14

Forum: What’s The Biggest Change You’ve Noticed In America Over the Past 20 Years?

The Watcher’s Council


Change you can submit to…

Every week on Monday morning, the Council and our invited guests weigh in at the Watcher’s Forum with short takes on a major issue of the day, the culture or daily living. This week’s question: What’s The Biggest Change You’ve Noticed In America Over the Past 20 Years?

The Independent Sentinel: In the last twenty years, America’s Republic has been successfully attacked by far-left ideologues passing themselves off as mainstream Democrats, moderate Republicans, college intellectuals, journalists, religious people, and union and corporate leaders. They’ve infiltrated unions, political parties, churches, colleges, the media, corporations, government at all levels and they are slowly, successfully inalterably changing the way we think about freedom, morals, and individualism.

The majority of us no longer value rugged individualism, we are collectivists.

Morals are all relative. There is no evil, just excuses.

We no longer pride ourselves on self-reliance because we can get things for free; we invite people here for freebies and wonder why we have a nation of people expecting, no, demanding, to live off the government dole.

We have transformed Palestine into the image radical terrorist groups want us to have and we have made Israel into the enemy. We are cozy with the very people who want us dead and our values obliterated from the face of the earth.

Our representatives rob us of our freedoms and are making government into our god. As Mr. Obama accelerates the process, he is cheered by Democrats in Congress while too many Republicans look away.

People are losing their freedom of speech but because we don’t like those people, it’s okay. We can even send them to re-education camps if they have dissenting opinions or we can punish them severely for private conversations. We’ve replaced common sense with PC, which is just another tool to rob us of free speech.

They want our guns so we can truly be completely powerless victims.

Our privacy is gone.

States’ rights are evaporating and there’s little pushback.

Where once we considered anyone trying to tear down our capitalist system an enemy of the state, we now allow them to do their damage publicly. They are no longer vilified. They are mainstream and no one dare say anything out of PC-ism or out of fear we will be called conspiracy nuts.

Mr. Obama has said he is disarming us so we can never again be a powerful military force in the world, and Americans now like that idea as if all the hatred and violence aimed at us will go away if only we aren’t mighty.

An absurd and extreme interpretation of climate warming – change – chaos – disruption allows the government to steal private land, close coal plants, greatly restrict oil and gas and gives full rein to a corrupt green energy industry. It is lowering our standard of living.

The rise of big government is driving us towards bankruptcy but we were so okay with it, we voted for its worse purveyor twice though some of our votes were to atone for slavery and civil rights abuses in a warped notion of justice.

Our leaders lie to us and spread propaganda, our Supreme Court acknowledges it but is comfortable with a certain level of it, and Americans don’t seem to care all that much. Mr. Obama will tell lie-after-lie, seriously impacting our way of life, destroying our healthcare system, and he will violate law after law without much opposition. His popularity and the popularity of the Democrats has suffered little. He released tens of thousands of criminal illegals – his voting block – and it’s hardly produced the anger it should be producing.

The outside forces of totalitarianism from every other nation in the world are closing in and we now accept tyranny from our own leaders.

We aren’t even going to be Democratic Socialists at the end of this, it will be much worse and it won’t be Utopia.

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The Razor: If you want to see how things have changed watch Blazing Saddles, Airplane! or a few episodes of Hogan’s Heroes. Now imagine those movies and TV show being made today. If you’re like me you can’t. Why is that?

We now live in an age of social McCarthyism where we all must censor ourselves to avoid offending certain groups, although Christians, white men and Southerners can still be safely degraded or made fun of. As a writer I’ve found myself censoring myself more today than at any other time in the past 20 years to avoid provoking needless firestorms of hatred. Self-censorship is a form of tyranny for writers and artists, and it is one that has grown over that time period.

What’s ironic is that while we have lost our freedom to express ourselves in regard to ideas, we do have more freedom to express our sexuality. But I don’t take comfort in that. Ideas are much more important than sex, and in a way sex is a distraction or safety valve along the lines of the Orwell’s 2 Minutes of Hate in 1984. Contrary to what Gender Studies professors might believe, no regime has ever been overthrown by a sexual revolution. No elite has been replaced, no economies liberalized. Such changes originate from ideas, and with those under siege by leftist censors (in contrary to 30 years ago when the censors were of the Right Tipper Gore excepted), everything is stagnating. As a result today’s art, be it music, movies, painting or what have you is complete rubbish. Can the stultifying political correctness that pervades our society today be blamed? Absolutely.

We live in a Victorian age of sorts, where opinions must be kept to ourselves unless they agree with everyone else’s. As a child in the 1970s I used to disparage that decade for being an era of high crime, high inflation, and bad music (Punk, New Wave and some art rock excepted). But now I remember that era and the ‘80s that followed as one where we had much more freedom to think and express ourselves in ways that are discouraged today. We live with mental straitjackets. It’s insidious and it disgusts me.

Simply Jews: As the time goes by, JFK (the airport, I mean) gets dirtier, the food less palatable, the employees get more hostile, and less and less of them speak English.

The Glittering Eye: I’m not sure this is what the question is getting at but I think the biggest changes I’ve seen are a consequence of the World Wide Web, specifically the availability of broadband Internet connections affordable for the average business or home user.

Those have changed the way we interact with each other, the way we do business, the way we work, way we shop, the way we learn, and the way we play.

Some forever, not for better
Some have gone and some remain

Ask Marion: After making a list of everything that has changed over the past 20+years, it came to me that what is really missing is hope and the average American’s turn inwards instead of outward that it caused; virtually everything else is intertwined or a symptom of our loss of hope and then our reaction to it; a process that slowly began closer to 60 years ago that has come to fruition in the past 20-years… and even more so for many people after President Obama’s promises turned out to be lies.

Taking a country of people, who felt they saved the world in the name of freedom, after WWI and WWII and lived through the most amazing 100 years of change and inventions in all of history combined, to where we find ourselves today is a long process and was certainly no accident.

The evil that lies at the heart of those that aim to control the rest of us… the ruling elite, the globalists, the NWO proponents who spawn ideologies and oppressive systems like Progressivism, Socialism, Communism, Fascism, Statism … never rests and slowly whittles away at every attempt by the common man to rule himself or even to have input that blocks their paths. The Great American Experiment was their greatest thorn. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams warned us… in order for a republic to survive you must have an educated and engaged populace. We have been neither for far too long!

The Babyboomers, indulged as they (we) were by parents and grandparents of ‘the greatest generation’ who wanted to spare their kids from the hard times and realities they lived through, thought they could change the world… Then they changed focus and thought they would all be rich and successful, spoiling and simultaneously hovering over their children along the way, and now many of them find themselves without savings, without pensions and either taking care of their aging parents and jobless children or having to move in with their parents because they have lost their own home… leaving few with hope, feelings of accomplishment or even a possibility of ever retiring. As a group, the Babyboomers went from Spoiled Dreamers to Hippies, to Yuppies, to Helicopter Parents and Grandparents to disenchanted Seniors who may never retire.

Fast forward to the Millennials, ages 18 to 34, many of whom have several degrees and the student loans sans jobs to pay them to prove it, who voted for President Obama en mass, and you find a group even more disillusioned with government than those boomers who worked and voted for Nixon after giving 18-year-olds the vote were after Watergate.

If we look back over the past 20-years, the past 50-years, there have been more disappointments than moments that stirred Americans’ patriotism and dared them to dream. And politics aside, of all the presidents during that time, only Ronald Reagan inspired us as a nation with both his words and his actions and didn’t disappoint us with a scandal, something that was evident by the throngs of Americans of all ages and from both parties that lined the streets of Ronald Reagan’s funeral procession after having been out of office and out of the public eye for so many years.

What should have happened to people who had so much and lived in a country full of possibilities is that we reached out to each other, joined hands and got involved in our communities, in politics, in our kids’ education and in our churches. Instead we became isolated and pulled away from community activities, politics and hands-on involvement in our schools… and we stopped going to church. We have also let the Internet, social media and electronics rob us of the conversations and the rich values of personal interaction; many Millennials prefer texting to talking. Letters have been reduced to a #hashtag. We stopped instilling the values and traditions that made our country great and we focused on ourselves, thought we could manage our own little worlds and we filled our spare time with mind-numbing activities that helped dumb us and our children down… all supported by the under-current of those with a Progressive agenda, the Alinskyites, the focused parents and grandparents of those who are in power today.

Courage like love must have hope for nourishment; somehow Americans lost their hope and along with it their courage and drive to fight back! The change hope would bring could save America… the question is can we dig deep enough to find it and elect the politicians that would bring real hope and change in time for the elections of 2014 and 2016?

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” …Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

JoshuaPundit: There are a number of changes I could mention..but to me the biggest single change is digital electronics. It has been both a blessing and a curse, and frankly I’m not sure which way the scales tilt.

The positives are obvious – simply being able to do a search and access a large amount of knowledge on any topic imaginable is incredible. And it has been a major source of commerce.

The negatives are immense,and not nearly so obvious.Privacy is a thing of the past, and monitoring the population in a way Hitler or Stalin could only have dreamed of is a reality. Our freedom has decreased a great deal as a result.The American people have turned inward and the internet has been used effectively to spread propaganda and even slander of individuals as well as information, with the line between the two getting fuzzier each day.Objective journalism is largely disappearing and the 24 hour news cycle the internet made possible has infected our politics to the point where we now live with a permanent campaign.

Digital electronics has also been a major boon to crime (there’s a whole new category of so-called cyber-crime) plagiarism, copyright infringement and pornography, which has also infected the culture in negative ways. As a side note (pun intended), it pretty much destroyed the music business in terms of both livelihood and actual content, aided by the greed of the corporate interests that essentially purchased the industry.

The biggest negative to me is that digital electronics have made us incredibly dependent and vulnerable. At this point,communications, commerce, the food supply, power, transportation, banking, the very functioning of our society are centered around the idea of a bunch of little microchips working correctly. I don’t believe we have ever had a technological advance before that society was this dependent on, together with such limited safeguards against misuse or even major assaults like an EMP attack. Let’s hope our luck holds.

GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD: It’s the tolerance for intolerance. Ad Hominum argumentum versus any true debates. Getting called all kind of phobic or racecardist names when e’r one has some worthy points to point out about the worthiness or worthlessness of ideas shoots down debate faster than a WWI observation balloon.

Well, there you have it.

Make sure to tune in every Monday for the Watcher’s Forum. And remember, every Wednesday, the Council has its weekly contest with the members nominating two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council. The votes are cast by the Council and the results are posted on Friday morning.

It’s a weekly magazine of some of the best stuff written in the blogosphere and you won’t want to miss it.

And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter… ’cause we’re cool like that, y’know?

05/19/14

MSNBC Joins With Democrats to “Grow Hope”

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

We have often noted how NBC, and its cable-news sister network MSNBC, form a virtual arm of the Democratic Party. Now, with the creation of their new “Growing Hope” website, MSNBC has abandoned all pretense of being an actual news network, and has completely joined forces with the Democratic Party. The site operates as a Democrat voter haven, full of positive messages that tout the value of belonging to the Left and decry the faults of being a conservative. Some of these messages are quite explicit.

Lean Forward, an MSNBC motto developed in 2010, morphed into a campaign theme President Obama adopted in his 2012 campaign, and has come to mean, Vote Democratic.

The opening line on the website is, “Growing Hope is MSNBC’s invitation to Americans to share their hopes for change around issues that impact our communities.” It is something the network has taken on the road to various universities, inviting students and others to “engage with the brand and share their hopes for change around issues that impact their communities.” It sounds innocuous enough.

Instead of being a news network, however, NBC, through MSNBC, has transformed itself into part of President Obama’s Organizing for Action, the successor organization to Obama for America and, prior to that, Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. With this new website, MSNBC takes positions on almost every issue, and in seemingly every case, they side with the Democrats, and take shots at Republicans. And as the 2014 mid-term elections near, this partisanship will only get worse.

For example, a visitor to the May 14 web page for Democrats is greeted with the headlines “Bill Clinton stars in new TV ad” and the photo essay “The agenda setters: Senate Democrats.” Clearly, Democrats are the types to “Lean Forward.”

A trip to the Republican MSNBC web page, however, reveals the deep-seated disgust that this news organization has for this party. “The great GOP #fail on women,” assails readers as the headline piece, with the photo essay “GOP tries not to rock the boat at CPAC.” On the sidebar is the story, “Immigration remains ‘nuclear bomb’ for GOP.” MSNBC is trying to drive home the message that, demographically, the GOP can’t win over minorities such Hispanics, or reach out to women.

“And therein lies the problem for the GOP, which has struggled to recruit and elect Republican women for decades,” states the headline story on Republican women. “No women are polling in the top 10 for potential Republican presidential candidates two years after the party identified outreach to women as a weakness.” Is it a coincidence that the Democratic frontrunner is herself a woman?

The source for the piece, a post-doctoral fellow at Duke University, Danielle Thomsen, theorizes that this gender disparity is because the GOP doesn’t want moderate female candidates, they only want conservative ones. “Here are a few graphs to illustrate how ideological extremism in Congress, and particularly in the Republican Party, has influenced the types of state legislators who run for Congress,” states Thomsen on her website. “…because Republican women have historically been to the ideological left of their male counterparts, I suggest that the rightward shift of the GOP has had a disproportionate effect on Republican women,” she writes.

In other words, she argues that the GOP is losing women because it is too conservative. This is an apropos topic for a leftist website looking to instill confidence in its progressive readers.

“As a result, Republican women who do end up running are far more conservative than women candidates were 20 years ago,” writes Jane C. Timm for MSNBC. Timm makes sure to include Todd Akin’s inflammatory abortion comments in the story.

The MSNBC website also has a feature on “Key Senate Democrats to watch.” It offered balance by creating an adjoining page for Republicans. The balance ends there. Predictably, the website authors describe Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) as a “key player on any efforts to revive immigration and gun reform measures,” but note that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) may not be willing to “compromise” on budget and fiscal issues because he is has a primary challenge by a Tea Partier. Again, MSNBC is taking a position on issues: immigration and gun reform causes are good, fiscal austerity is bad.

Where is the news? There is only opinion here. At this point, MSNBC should openly recast itself as a progressive blog like The Huffington Post.

The issue advocacy by MSNBC becomes even more clear in a piece that Ned Reskinoff wrote on climate change, in which he states, “Billions of pounds of food go uneaten each year, even as increasingly harsh food stamp cuts make it more difficult for food insecure populations to buy any of it.”

“Now, a growing body of evidence suggests that climate change could make the situation even more unstable,” he continues. There’s always another reason for MSNBC to bring the “theory” of climate change into the public eye. Not surprisingly, they include “Green” as one of their topic categories.

As the elections near, MSNBC will begin to look much more like an infomercial for the Democratic Party as they predictably cast Republicans as “bad,” and Democrats as “good.” Voters should look elsewhere for their information. The news organization’s “Lean Forward” motto presupposes its own corollary: “Vote Democrat.”

Roger Aronoff is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Roger Aronoff.