Unbelievable. – PR
ABC: ‘Pelosi Says She Has Much In Common With The Tea Party’
Falklands Fallacy
Diplomacy: The U.S., which backed Britain to the hilt when Argentina invaded its Falklands in 1982, has suddenly gone neutral on who has sovereignty over the islands. This is much more than a bad slap to our best ally. More:
Left’s ‘Coffee Party’ repeats the mistake of ‘Air America’.
“There You Go Again.” Ever bereft of an original idea, liberals can only copycat.
An’ it’s about time! More of this, please.
Rhode Island School District Fires Entire Staff of Failing School
February 26, 2010 9:10 AM
Central Falls High School in Rhode Island has been among the state’s lowest-performing schools for seven years. Only 7 percent of students are proficient in math, and fewer than half graduate.
This month, school superintendent Fran Gallo fired the entire staff of Central Falls after teachers’ unions refused to acquiesce to reforms that would have lengthened the school day, required teachers to provide tutoring (with pay) and attend summer workshops (with pay). The sticking point was that the superintendent could not find money to pay teachers for a school day lenthened by 30 minutes. The new schedule would have had them working from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. instead of 8 a.m. to 2:25.
They will all be able to reapply, but only 50 percent can be rehired. Brilliant negotiating on the union’s part.
Gallo had this to say, shortly before the firings… More
Hat tip Poor Richard.
by Sibyl West
Don’t get too excited. This piece in the UK Guardian was actually written by Paul Harris in Texas.
“Debra Medina blah blah blah Tea Party Movement blah blah blah Sarah Palin blah blah blah property rights blah blah gun ownership.”
You know it by heart. As long as she doesn’t have to answer questions live on air it should be alright this time.
Great timing btw.
The NewRevolutionNow guyz and grrlz got together to talk precinct initiatives and resolutions. Here’s a taste of the day.
The TEA Party Effort One Year Along
One year ago, on February 27, 2009, a few 1,000 people gathered outside the Cowtown Grill in Fort Worth. Some carried signs reading “Taxed Enough Already”. No one there knew each other, but all were there for a common purpose, even if we could not easily articulate it at the time. We knew it was something much deeper than taxes & spending.…
“While we have had hucksters in the White House before – Bill Clinton comes immediately to mind – we haven’t in the past been confronted with a huckster who fundamentally dislikes America.”
According to the newest CNN Poll, American’s just don’t trust their government anymore. Gee, I wonder why? (Hat Tip: Brietbart’s Big Government) – PR
Poor Richard sez: Just wondering: Since the Left was all for carving out “hate speech” from constitutional protection, at what point does Keith Olbermann’s outrageous rants, false accusations, and outright lies qualify as unprotected “hate speech”, prosecutable under the law?
The 13th Fairy sez: When Olbermann becomes a Republican and speaks against Dems his diatribes will qualify as hate speech. That happens five minutes after hell freezes over.
As it stands at the moment, Democrats are the privileged upper class here in 21st century America. They can say and do whatever they want with impunity, and the “protected” lower classes of conservatives and Republicans are allowed to exist as long as they pay the tax. In other words, we actually already have something along the lines of sharia here in this country. All the mo’s men have to do is just become Democrats and the system is already in place. They’re working on that, btw.
As Atlas Shrugs Pamela Geller is fond of saying: Truth is the new hate speech.
Commentary by the Bargain Citizen
The following links to an excellent piece. The issue is one that deserves much more attention and scrutiny.
There was a small yet powerful sliver of insight during the Health Care Summit when Obama actually boasted that there are now two million federal employees. It was inadvertent, he was making a point that having such a large pool of employees participating in the federal health insurance plan helps to control costs. Still, this simple statement illustrates that Obama finds the ever growing size of government innocuous. It’s as though there are no negative consequences whatsoever, even when we are broke.
Conversely, I found it horrifying.
Unlimited and unworkable growth
There appears to be no squeezing more productivity out of the public sector when times are tough – it just grows and grows. This public sector growth can only siphon off an ever larger amount from those who actually create wealth and consequently provide the revenue that our government needs to operate.
Catching on to the troubling equation here? With each new federal employee our impending fiscal doom is hastened.
Need I remind you – there is no money! We are now on the hook for nearly $13 trillion, not to mention an estimated $65-100 trillion in the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare. Yet, in Obama’s budget proposal for fiscal 2011, we will borrow 40 cents of every dollar we spend, resulting in another $1.6 trillion of national debt. It’s as though Washington is just playing matchstick poker, able to walk away unscathed after losing the farm.
Wealth redistribution first, then collapse
We are approaching a day of reckoning in which we’ll all realize that the direction of our government is not merely about choosing between competing philosophies but the inevitable choice of maintaining our way of life versus something akin to societal collapse. Anyone notice that little soiree presently taking place in Greece? More government cannot possibly lend itself to the outcome that we would all much prefer.
When it comes to public employee unions marketing and lobbying for more, Americans should recognize that this is government effectively first taking their money and then using it to beat them over the head. In this heavy-handed climate, the public sector grows unabated, ever more rapidly outpacing growth in private sector wages, the economy, population, you name it.
While one hand of government calls for shared sacrifice, even decries the private sector, the other hand lavishes itself with a workforce whose average salary of $71K is now 43% greater than their private sector counterparts. Never mind that public sector benefits and pension plans far outpace that of the average American and that many of those plans are on a fiscal path that is wholly unsustainable. From 2000 to 2008, as GDP grew an average of 3.6% per year, total federal employee compensation grew an average of 5.8%, resulting in the annual compensation gap between federal employees and the private sector doubling to $60K.
But the feds aren’t alone. Like their auto union brothers and all those “legacy costs” before them, many state and local government employee unions, teachers, police officers, etc. are traveling the same precarious road. You can only pay people so much for so long for nothing in return before the house of cards tumbles.
Reality bites
In California, where state law allows police officers to draw 60% of their salary in pensions after 20 years or 90% after 30 years, Californians must effectively pay for two and a half cops every time they put a new one on the street. This is but one of many similar scenarios contributing to the most populous state in the union drowning in a sea of red ink.
In the last ten years, while America’s population has grown by 10.8%, outlays for civilian federal workers have grown from $144.8 billion to $240 billion.
In the last eighteen months alone, the federal workforce has ballooned by 193,000 jobs while the private sector has shed 7.5 million.
Welcome to what they call economic stimulus.
History of public sector unions shows why they should be banned
By: Mark Tapscott
Editorial Page Editor
02/27/10 4:26 PM EST
Doug Ross has a useful and concise history of public sector unions that demonstrates with undeniable clarity why public sector unions should never have been allowed to organize in the first place.
Unions can make sense in the private sector where the purpose of an enterprise is to provide products and services needed by people who can pay for them and in the process allow the firm to generate a profit to be shared in mutually agreeable proportions among owner and employees. The profit is the essential measure of whether the enterprise is viable.
But in the public sector, there is no such measure because the state can only tax wealth created by others. So in order for public sector employees to gain a bigger share of tax revenues, either the taxes must be increased or spending on some other public activity – police protection, public schools, regulation of prescription drug safety – must be decreased.
Read more at the Washington Examiner
by Sibyl West
“Think what you do when you run into debt; you give to another power over your liberty.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
“War is not the best engine for us to resort to; nature has given us one in our commerce, which if properly managed, will be a better instrument for obliging the interested nations of Europe to treat us with justice.” –Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Pickney, 1797
From CNN Deputy Political Director Paul Steinhauser
After the year we’ve just lived through, this is no surprise to anyone with a brain. The ‘shock’ and suprise to CNN is that Obama has not only lost Independents,he’s lost Reagan-Democrats as well. Try inversing the numbers for impact.
I cannot recall such a poll question ever being asked before. Can you? - PR
Agree Gov’t is a Threat?
Republicans 70%
Independents 63%
Democrats 37%
Disagree Gov’t is a Threat?
Republicans 30%
Independents 37%
Democrats 63%
Washington (CNN) – A majority of Americans think the federal government poses a threat to rights of Americans, according to a new national poll.
Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal (whose check Mayor Rudi Giuliani rejected after the 911 attacks) owns a 7 percent stake in News Corp — the parent company of Fox News — making him the largest shareholder outside the family of News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch. Alwaleed has grown close with the Murdoch enterprise, recently endorsing James Murdoch to succeed his father and creating a content-sharing agreement with Fox News for his own media conglomerate, Rotana. Read more…
Here he is on Fox News talking about our pizza boy prez’ policies.
More on the Prince from Diana West (Yes we are related – we’re Americans!)
Alwaleed’s long march through U.S. institutions is a mainly post-9/11 progression greased by his purchase of about a 5.5 percent stake in News Corp. in 2005, and his purchases, I mean, gifts, of $20 million apiece to Georgetown and Harvard Universities, also in 2005.
There have been other eye-catching displays of Alwaleed’s largesse — $500,000 in 2002 to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Hamas- and Muslim-Brotherhood-linked entity, and a whopping $27 million, also in 2002, to the families of Palestinian “martyrs,” aka suicide bombers. These, along with Alwaleed’s self-described “very close relationship” with Murdoch son and apparent heir-apparent James, a left-wing global-warmist with virulently anti-Israel views, should only deepen Americans’ concerns about Fox’s ties to “the prince.”
Alwaleed is connected to the man who helped get Bam into Harvard, Khalid al-Mansoor.
There is so much more.
Click on the image above to read more
