Oops. On GBTV, we aired the same video again by mistake. Technical difficulties, we apologize (unlike Obama for the terrible state of the economy). Lucky for you, you can watch Part Two right here.
Part Two addresses the deficit blame game.
Let’s concede the blame and give Obama a break. We place all the blame for the worst of the financial crisis on Bush, even though he wasn’t still president. What do Obama’s numbers look like then? This is one of our pilot episodes, and is just a freeze in time from an ever changing financial prognosis, but smart people run the numbers, and we just tell you about them.
Yes, the leadership of the New Black Panther Party is apparently…somehow… right wing according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. You might remember the SPLC from all the times that they are quoted by the media as a non-partisan expert on everything hateful. Or, you may remember them for naming the Family Research Council a hate group.
But, do you know your hate? Let’s see! Come on and play: “Which Radical Right Wing Activist Is It?”
With the help of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Summer 2012 report on the “30 New Activists Heading Up the Radical Right” let’s see if you can figure out which right-wing hate-filled activist said what!
How do you think you did? Turn your head upside down and look at the screen to find the answers. If you can’t see them, realize that they aren’t there. Then, also realize that they will never be posted. I guess it’s just too difficult to determine a real extreme radical activist from an American historian.
By the way, next time you hear that there is a huge increase in the number of right wing extremist groups according to the SPLC, remember that they classify the New Black Panther Party leaders as ‘right wing.’
“Whether you think we should go with Ryan’s plan or you’d rather just raise taxes only on Republican millionaires by 445,000%—we need to do something.”
I know, I know. The nerve. I can’t believe he lifted “we should.”
Ok, maybe that’s not plagiarism, but Zakaria’s column in Time magazine definitely was.
Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at UCLA, documents the actual history in Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America. Guns were regulated in the U.S. from the earliest years of the Republic. Laws that banned the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813. Other states soon followed: Indiana in 1820, Tennessee and Virginia in 1838, Alabama in 1839 and Ohio in 1859. Similar laws were passed in Texas, Florida and Oklahoma. As the governor of Texas (Texas!) explained in 1893, the “mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man.”
As Adam Winkler, a constitutional-law scholar at U.C.L.A., demonstrates in a remarkably nuanced new book, “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America,” firearms have been regulated in the United States from the start. Laws banning the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813, and other states soon followed: Indiana (1820), Tennessee and Virginia (1838), Alabama (1839), and Ohio (1859). Similar laws were passed in Texas, Florida, and Oklahoma. As the governor of Texas explained in 1893, the “mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man.”
Shocking? Not to me. I’ve been saying it for a long time. Fareed Zakaria sucks.
But the mainstream media is apparently only just finding this out.
CNN, Washington Post, and Time have all suspended him from his columns after the striking similarities were found.
He is also accused of plagiarizing in his extremely awful book. You know, the book this guy was reading.
Anyway, this isn’t Zakaria’s sole contribution to the demise of journalism, either. Remember when he interviewed George Soros? Oh, that’s right. You don’t—because NO ONE watches Fareed Zakaria. But, to save you the time, it was such an embarrassing hack job, that honestly, the plagiarism thing was actually an improvement.
This once glorified journalist is the guy who is giving commencement speeches at prestigious universities like Duke and Harvard.
Yeah, about those commencement speeches…
Zakaria’s Harvard and Duke commencement speeches were essen¬tially identical, built around the same anecdotes and points and often the same language. The addresses have set some at Harvard and Duke atwitter.
“I spoke to him while he was here,” said one Duke employee, “and I got the strong impression from him that his Harvard speech would be a different presentation. Oh, well, at least Duke got it first.”
Not all of it, actually. Zakaria hit many of the same notes, including the line about ethics, in an address to the Johns Hopkins University class of 2011. He also used some of them for the Brown University class of 2009 and the Yale University class of 2007.
Great news from this weekend, Paul Ryan is Romney’s pick for VP. Great news especially if you want Paul Ryan to personally murder your grandma.
That’s what some people on the left would have you believe anyway. Paul Ryan wants to “end Medicare as we know it.” The way that the campaign is responding to that right now is basically “no we don’t.” That’s probably smart politically, but let me suggest another response. “Yup.”
Medicare, as we know it, is a complete failure.
Medicare, as we know it, can’t pay for itself.
Medicare, as we know it, covers health care costs for people like Bill Gates.
So, why are Democrats adding “as we know it” if they themselves acknowledge it has to be changed? Because they used to just say Ryan would “end Medicare”— and even the left leaning media called them out. It was even called Politifact’s lie of the year for 2011.
Politifact has been an ardent, if unlikely, defender of Ryan’s Medicare plan. They have set the record straight time and time again when big fatlyingliarswearingpantsonfirewholie say Ryan’s budget plan will end Medicare.
Politifact clarifies each time that “if you are 55 years or older already, your Medicare coverage would not change. And if you are younger, the Ryan plan would leave you with a different Medicare system, but one in which the government still played a big role in your health coverage.” That’s not exactly an encouraging quote for conservatives, and it understates how much better Ryan’s plan is than the current one, but it does show how badly democrats have been lying.
Let’s pretend for a second we live in an alternate universe where these liars are right and Paul Ryan is just out to murder Medicare. In that world, we really don’t have to worry about Paul Ryan killing Medicare. Medicare, as we know it, is killing itself.
“For instance, on August 1, three Harvard researchers published a study in theJournal of the American Medical Association (you can find it here, but it requires a subscription) that used data from the Medicare Advantage program (a much more limited experiment in insurer competition in Medicare) to consider how the Wyden-Ryan reform would have worked if it had been in effect in 2009. They found that, “nationally, in 2009, the benchmark plan under the Ryan-Wyden framework (i.e., the second-lowest plan) bid an average of 9% below traditional Medicare costs (traditional Medicare was equivalent to approximately the tenth-lowest bid).”
“In other words, even under the very constrained competition of Medicare Advantage, in which prices are set by Medicare’s bureaucracy, the Ryan-Wyden approach would have reduced per-beneficiary spending by 9 percent in a single year while still providing seniors with the same comprehensive insurance coverage. With real competition through a bidding system, the reductions in the rate of the program’s growth over time could be enormous. And if those savings don’t in fact materialize, we would just end up where we are today — which is where Democrats seem to want to end up anyway.”
Yes, I know, the new campaign slogan “Death to Medicare! (As We Know It)” probably won’t catch on anytime soon. But, Romney/Ryan shouldn’t run away from it. The current debate is like saying “Asking Glenn Beck to lose weight would end Glenn Beck as we know him.” Yes, it would. But, that doesn’t make it bad. Unless, of course, you run an ice cream company.
I would consider this the debut of Stutistics that wasn’t the debut episode. It was shot as the pilot episode a couple months ago. It is the first episode in a two part series dealing with Obama’s deficits. We needed to space out the staggering numbers so your eyeballs wouldn’t bleed. You’re welcome.
The numbers are based on Obama’s federal budget for 2012. The budget for 2013 has since come out, and the numbers are similar—just a little worse in many cases. You can check it out here if you have the emotional stability left after watching Stutistics.
Remember, we’re not using our estimates for what he’s going to spend. These are his numbers.
Well, now that number has been “adjusted” to three times the original price tag- 2.6 trillion over the next ten years. Of course, Obamacare never would have passed if we knew it would cost $2.6 trillion. It’s a pattern of lies…but, that’s all he’s got at this point.
Now, some leftists will accuse us of not giving enough blame to Bush for the financial disaster of 2009. So, next week—we’ll dump all the blame on him and examine the numbers in a different way.
I drink a lot of soda. A lot of it. In fact, it’s pretty much my favorite thing on earth. I have built a ceiling high shelf which lives in my garage, and holds 34 different flavors of soda. I’m not kidding. So, it makes sense that I am still thinking about Michael Bloomberg’s proposed ban on sodas over 16 ounces.
“Drink free or die” was the slogan a dozen or so people recently chanted outside City Hall Park in New York protesting Mayor Bloomberg’s idiotic ban on soda.
I love the idea…but is a dozen enough? It should be more like, I don’t know, 8 million?
This goes along with the recent poll that says 53 percent of New Yorkers say the soda ban is a bad idea and 42 percent disagree.
Most conservatives see this as a positive. Even in the progressive haven of New York City, the majority of people still oppose this ridiculous nanny statism. But, again, shouldn’t it be more like 100%-0%?
I’ve been to a lot of New York happy hours. I’ve participated in many of them. I’ve over-participated in many of them, too. I’ve never seen a lack of people who are pouring giant beers down their throats. How can they possibly think it is okay to ban certain amounts of soda?
I think this is a fundamental problem in communicating conservatism. Let me explain:
“Mayor Bloomberg has proposed a ban on the sale of sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces including energy drinks and iced teas. You would still be able to get refills or buy more than one serving and be able to get diet sodas, fruit juices, dairy drinks, alcoholic beverages, or any drinks sold in a grocery or convenience store. Do you think the proposal to ban sugary drinks is a good idea or a bad idea?”
Obviously, the question is worded to present the most positive spin on the soda ban. Surely, if Texas proposed a ban on contraception that would still allow you to get it at grocery stores only, it wouldn’t get such optimistic treatment.
But, the issue here is, what I call, internal translation.
People are ASKED the question:
Should government ban drinks over 16 ounces?
People ANSWER the question:
Should people drink sodas over 16 ounces?
In other words, when they internalize the question, it becomes “is drinking tons of soda a good idea?” even though what we’re really talking about is government making certain forms of soda drinking illegal.
It’s really a serious issue, because it reveals something terrible about ourselves. We (at least a lot of people) think the only way to deal with an undesirable outcome, is government action. That internal translation is something conservatives need to figure out. One that, short of controlling the media and polling organizations, I don’t have a solution for yet.
There are obviously hard core progressives that want to control every aspect of your lives, like Michael Bloomberg. But the typical person who sides with him in this poll isn’t considering their personal liberty. They are just judging whether they think people should drink a lot of soda. This is the foundation upon which terrible policy is built.
What if the question was phrased like this:
“Should you be able to choose to drink more than 16 ounces of soda at a time?”
I have to believe that gets 70-75% approval, even in New York. Remember, these are people that supposedly put such a premium on the concept of choice that they are willing to want abortion to be legal even when they say it’s a bad thing personally.
Bloomberg says the soda ban is there to protect you and help keep costs down so the city doesn’t have to keep investing in sturdier gurneys to pry you out of your house to go to the hospital or something. But he adds: “If you want to kill yourself, I guess you have a right to do it.”
Yes, I do. Unless, of course, you get your way. Which you won’t. At least in Texas.
Well, actually no, that’s a complete fabrication. But apparently, a lot of scammers are taking advantage of the fact that Obama acts as if he has an infinite stash of money that he hands out to everyone who needs it.
Victims get a bank account and routing number to use when paying their bills online, but only after giving up their Social Security numbers and other personal information. Over 10,000 people surrendered their most private information with the actual belief that Obama was just going to pay their electric bill for no apparent reason. 10,000 people! (!!)
You’re probably asking yourself how could this have happened?
A more appropriate question would be, how could this have NOT happened?
This is a guy, who is running a campaign promising to take care of you during every important moment in your life from the cradle to the grave. Why WOULDN’T you believe he’s going to pay your utility bills?
Not to mention, you have former members of his administration saying stuff like this:
“Shouldn’t we have the right and the liberty to be energy producers and not be dictated to 12 times a year by energy companies that dictate how much we’re gonna pay for energy, when we’re gonna pay it, how many asthma inhalers we’re gonna have as a consequence.”
Seriously…why would people possibly believe that Obama WASN’T just shoveling out cash to buy your vote? If you need a refresher, click here if you dare, as a seemingly thinner host from Fox News plays you the audio.
The June jobs report came out last week and the numbers were as disappointing as the tragic Cruise-Holmes divorce. Disappointing yes. Surprising, no.
Alan Krueger, chairmen of Obama’s economic advisors explained simply that the unemployment rate was, of course, Bush’s fault.
“While the economy is continuing to heal from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, much more remains to be done to repair the damage from the financial crisis and deep recession that followed.”
June was no exception, because he says that samethingeverysinglemonth.
But, if you’re still blaming the last guy, it’s probably important to actually compare your record to his. Simply put—are you better off than you were four years ago?
Since Obama took office, the government has released the unemployment rate 42 times. Of those 42 releases, the rate has been worse than it was four years before exactly 42 times. In other words, at least as far as employment, the Obama presidency has given us exactly zero months that were better than four years ago. Zero.
For those who are not mathematicians out there, that is a one hundred percent failure rate. New Slogan?
…You’ll be a tree killer and global warming enabler or something if you do.
While we’re talking about environmental murder, it is with great pleasure that I take on global warming with today’s episode of Stutistics. In case you missed the debut a few weeks ago, Stutistics is my new series on GBTV that gives you a shareable, digestable, and understandable way to absorb stats that will help defeat your annoying friends in arguments. All in 3 minutes or less.
That’s plenty of time to debunk a fantastic fail of a prediction by global warming darling, Dr. James Hansen in episode 2 of Stutistics.
The debate about global warming is always stuck on trying to prove whether the future predictions of doom from global warming alarmists are correct or not. Unfortunately, there’s no way to know. They’re predictions. They don’t get proven right or wrong for decades.
Luckily, these same people have been whining about the same thing for so long, we can check their guesses from the past. In 1988, Al Gore’s favorite scientist James Hansen laid out three scenarios for what could happen to temperatures in the future if we dismissed his cries to heed global warming.
As we show in Stutistics, his predictions and the actual temperatures don’t really match up. At all. Shocking, I know.
Climate scientist Dr. John R. Christy was one of the first people to take a hard look at Hansen’s predictions to see if they were accurate.
He’s not just some guy. He’s the exact type of accomplished scientist that the left says doesn’t exist.
Christy:
-Is a Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville
-Was awarded NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement in 1991, along with Dr. Roy Spencer.
-Received a Special Award by the American Meteorological Society “for developing a global, precise record of earth’s temperature from operational polar-orbiting satellites, fundamentally advancing our ability to monitor climate” also along with Dr. Roy Spencer.
-Has served as a Contributor (1992, 1994, 1996 and 2007) and Lead Author (2001) for the U.N. reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in which the satellite temperatures were included as a high-quality data set for studying global climate change.
-Has served on five National Research Council panels or committees and has performed research funded by NASA, NOAA, DOE, DOT
-And just because he’s a super guy, even taught the less fortunate physics and chemistry as a missionary teacher in Nyeri, Kenya for two years.
I think I’ll take Christy’s word over Hansen’s any day. But, I don’t have to take his word, and neither do you. The facts are clear, and the data tell the story. For the complete analysis of how James Hansen went spectacularly wrong on his global temperatures predictions be sure to watch Stutistics. We did the analysis originally for Fusion magazine, but you can see most up to date temperature data here.
Oh, and can someone please forward this video to Al Gore? I think he needs to see it.
Funny, Glenn’s never mentioned to me his diabolical plan to personally decimate the careers of everyone who works on Glee. Nor has he mentioned the flashy, value filled alternative musical high school television show he plans on launching.
The only conclusion I can come to, is that the mainstream media completely sucks. They took 30 seconds out of his 30 minute speech at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference in Washington DC on Friday and then made a bunch of crap up.
“A year ago I was watching the show Glee with my wife. And we watched it like this (gasps).
I mean it’s horrifying some of the things that they’re teaching high schoolers, but it’s brilliantly done. It’s brilliantly done. It’s produced brilliantly, the music brilliant, the acting brilliant, the cinematography brilliant. All of it. And I said to her at the end of it, this was about a year and a half ago, we lose. There is no way to beat that. Well yes there is. We’ve spent about a year now trying to put together a push back with artists with music but not the stereotypical conservative, Lee Greenwood music. I call it my Oedipus project, because the Left will be making out with me and they’ll never see it coming. And somebody will say Don’t you know who produced that music? No, I really like it it’s great. Oh yes, yes it is.”
So, to translate for the media: Glenn thinks Glee is really well done, but it promotes values he doesn’t like, such as promiscuous sex among teenagers. He thinks that instead of conservatives bitching about the culture, we should compete and give other options. We should make good shows ourselves that have values that are more consistent with the country we hope to have someday—i.e. significantly less consequence-free-drunk-teenaged-porking.
What Glenn didn’t say was that he wanted to destroy Glee or that he is launching his own anti-Glee TV show. Being in a lot of meetings with the guy, if he was pitching a musical high school series, I think I would have remembered it.
So, the media is either incompetent or lazy. No real news breaking there. But, it’s amazing how many of them just repeated the claim without checking.
It’s a disturbing trend in media. These sources aren’t writing about Glenn’s speech because they found something newsworthy. They’re writing about someone else’s article about Glenn’s speech, because someone else found it newsworthy. They all ingested the same (wrong) spin on the story, because none of them bothered to check whether the first guy had it right or not.
Not to mention, Glenn had said all of these things about the culture, while referencing Glee, numerous times before on national radio and TV. No one bothered to see if he had said it before. If they had, perhaps they would have understood it a little better and not made asses of themselves.
Of course, he isn’t planning a conservative rival series, as we have already covered. Perhaps worse, they are mocking Glenn for his lack of knowledge about a stupid TV series, while having no knowledge at all about the topic they’re writing about. Glenn didn’t discover Glee three years after its premiere, he’s been blabbing incessantly about that show for at least a couple of years. Honestly, I’m sick of hearing about it from him.
The media is also apparently all up in arms about how Glenn called the values of the show “horrifying.” Don’t give Glenn credit for that, give credit to these little things called the “laws of the United States of America.” They seem to classify sexual activity and substance abuse among high school students, depending on exact age and state, as “illegal.”
But, this isn’t really about Glee. It’s about how the media grabs onto a false story line and just runs with it. None of them did a minute of research with the exception of reading whichever blogger created the big bang that started this story. Just pathetic.
Glenn is wrong on one thing though. Glee sucks. It’s has nothing to do with its message–it’s just horrible. Painful. Unwatchable. Embarrassing. I would seriously rather watch Ed Schultz…though I am not willing to prove it.
