As I have been saying for a couple of weeks now, I have been in the process of starting up a new blog--not on Blogger. It's been a bit shaky because the format and processes are a bit different... and, it's still a work in progress.
It's not been easy with my schedule being what it has been. But I have been diligently seeking moments when I can work on it and get it together, as fast as I possibly can. Since I am a verified IT idiot, it hasn't gone together with the greatest of ease.
So, I have decided that before people lose interest and tire of waiting for it, I will unveil it now. I will continue to tweak it as I go along, much like I did this one.
So here it is, the GRAND OPENING of the new home of LA Sunset:
Mark it on your blogrolls and/or bookmarks, and tell your friends about it. I am looking forward to many good discussions there, now and in the future.
A Michigan man who won $2 million in a state lottery game continues to collect food stamps 11 months after striking it rich.
And there's nothing the state can do about it, at least for now.
Leroy Fick, 59, of Auburn won $2 million in the state lottery TV show "Make Me Rich!" last June. But the state's Department of Human Services determined he was still eligible for food stamps, Fick's attorney, John Wilson of Midland, said Tuesday.
Character must be at an all-time low in this country. The attitude that everyone owes a person is at an all-time high. "I am going to get what's mine, whether I earned it or not" is a value that has been proliferated by government.
I am still exploring all of my options. As of now, I am in a busy stretch in my real life so I haven't had a lot of time to devote to thinking about a new blog.
I don't want to be impetuous and do anything rash, just because Blogger is no longer meeting my needs. Which host to go with is a decision I will have to make, as well as whether or not to keep the name and format.
Whatever and whenever I decide, I will post it here for anyone who is interested in continuing to follow. It's time for a change, I just don't want put a half-assed effort into it.
Thank you all for your patience in this time of transition and stay posted. I may just sneak a quick post in here and there to tide over until I can get the new project up and running.
Three members, including front man Marc Bolan, met early deaths....two to motor vehicles accidents and one to some unreported illness. Bolan wrote the songs and the music. This song (off of the 1971 release Electric Warrior) is a pensive piece that seems to highlight the writer's sense and understanding of his own mortality.
I have to wonder if he (like many others) had some weird premonition of his early fate, when he was writing it:
Every one in the media and the Democratic Party is going completely gaga over the latest AP poll, showing Obama's approval rating at 60%. Yahoo puts the story out front and center.
The same poll shows 53% think he deserves re-election. Again, Yahoo wants to make sure you know this right here.
The first story doesn't mention it, the second story buries deep in the last third of the text. But to those who are willing to use their brains for a split second, all it takes is a look at the entire poll to see how heavily this poll was skewed. On page #37, you will see the respondents were 46% Democrat, 29% Republican, and 4% Independent. 20% are too stupid to know what they are.
This is significant for several reasons. The most obvious is a 17% differential between the Dems and the GOP. But the real skewing comes in the shorting of the Independents.
In reality, the Dems and Republicans represent about 30% of the electorate each. The other 30% or so is made up of Independents and other smaller parties. We always expect the Dems and the GOP to vote accordingly, but it's the Indies that win elections. And right now they are not happy with the state of the nation, as it applies to their lives.
In the second linked story, the AP makes an attempt at an explanation:
Some conservatives criticized the AP-GfK poll as heavy with responses from Democrats. AP-GfK polls use a consistent technique that starts with a random sample of the population and lets respondents identify their own political leanings. In this poll, 46 percent of respondents identified themselves as Democrats or leaning that way, while 29 percent said they were Republicans or leaning to the GOP. How people identify their leanings fluctuates in polls along with their other political opinions. The change in party identification in the current AP-GfK current poll is not a statistically significant shift from the previous poll in March, and does not by itself explain the poll findings.
Not very scientific, is it? Why not just scrap the poll, when they learn how lopsided the sample is? Answer: they don't care because they figure there are enough stupid people to accept what it says, with no scrutiny at all.
So, here we are. Once again we are going to be forced to endure the cramming of this propaganda down our throats for the next month, while more accurate polls are disregarded and ignored. Such is life when socialist statists are in charge. The state media is hard at work selling the delusion that Obama is a leader, just because he did one thing right.
He's still behind a stopped clock by a 2:1 margin.
After enduring a walkout by Democrats, the Indiana General Assembly got the job done and Gov. Daniels signed "The School Scholarship Act" into law. It may not be perfect, but it's better than letting kids get lost in a system that is a grand failure.
Choice is what makes the world better. Libertarians, everywhere, should be happy when more choices are created.
Daniels is often maligned by forces that claim to love freedom. To those people I say, he just gave back a little bit of freedom back to parents. RINOs usually do not restore freedom, they just don't take it as fast as Democrats do. But they do take it.
Just like signing the bill that strips government funding of Planned Parenthood. He signed it and gave Planned Parenthood the freedom to solicit more private donations. I am sure they don't see it that way, but the taxpayers of Indiana do.
There was a time when Pam Geller of Atlas Shrugs was a voice that could be trusted, but not anymore.
This is not to say that she is never right, because there are some times when she nails it spot on. But there are also times she gets it dead wrong and there are many blind followers who take her word for everything she ways without verification.
She often publishes posts about events that the MSM would never dare to report, and that's a good thing. We need people like her to do this more often. But there are moments when she runs with stories that are inaccurate. There are times when she presents a remarkably slanted perspective, without doing enough research before she hits the send button.
You really don't have to read much more of her post to see where she is going with this. But if you took Geller's word as gospel, you might be tempted to jump to the same weak conclusion she has.
It's hard to know where to begin to dismantle this absurd presentation, but let's start with Gov. Daniels.
Daniels is the grandson of Christian Syrian immigrants who were purged from their homeland by Muslims in the early 1900s. While he is of Arab descent, he is Christian and American. Many other Syrians were purged from their country at that time, many of them settled in Indiana, many have made great contributions to this nation.
Some became businessmen and entrepreneurs in the spirit of the American dream. Others worked in coal mines and other forms of hard physical labor. Most of them sent their children to school and admonished them to study hard, so they could make something out themselves they would have never had the chance to do in their old country.
Like other ethnic immigrants, the next generation became doctors, lawyers, teachers, and some made their parents' small family businesses even bigger. So to most intelligent rational people, it should come as no surprise that one of those families has now produced a governor.
Let's look at the award Geller froths about in her erroneous fit, the Najeeb Halaby Award for Public Service.
Najeeb Halaby Jr. was a second generation Syrian-American with multiple degrees and was a test pilot in the US Navy in WWII. His father cam here from Ottoman Syria in the late 1800s, they were Christians. His daughter became Queen Noor of Jordan, but Halaby was an American through and through.
For this reason, it should come as no surprise that there is an award that bears his name, one that was awarded to another American of Arab descent who has made great achievements in the state that elected him to straighten what was a horrible mess.
This brings us to the organization that gave the award to Daniels, the American Arab Institute. (Before we go further... please notice the order of that title, American comes first.)
It was formed by James Zogby, brother of the pollster and Christian American of Arab descent.
Yes, it is a liberal, left-leaning organization that probably disagrees with 90% of Daniels' conservative policies. Yes, it has been a staunch critic of many of the state of Israel's policies. It is political in nature, not theological. It does not promote jihad, it does not call for the eradication of Israel. It does call for a two-state solution, one that Israel is willing to accept but the Palestinians have not yet signed onto, due the growing influence of radical jihadist organizations like Hamas.
It is not CAIR, it is not ISNA.
I am sure that just as the AAI does not agree with the lion's share of the Daniels' policies, he doesn't agree with theirs either.
Geller's blog isn't the only one jumping out of their skin about Daniels right now.
Red State just had to follow suit and get on the pathetic bandwagon without knowing the facts, along with Geller. But at the least the major premise of this blogger's argument was made on policy. His assumption is dead wrong, but the mention of the award was an afterthought.
Daniels is a strong fiscal conservative. Not going to TEA party rallies does not mean he stands against the TEA Party principles of limited smaller government. He has spent the last 6+ years slashing spending, balancing the budget, creating a business friendly environment that has led to increases in jobs, and did it without punishing the rich. Does that sound like a RINO?
And as for the Jew-hating tendencies that Geller wants uninformed people to believe, here is a speech you may want to watch before you let her get you sidetracked into believing a lie.
This is Daniels receiving the Man of Achievement Award from the Anti-Defamation League:
Bottom line: Daniels is not anti-semitic, not a RINO.
He just doesn't cater to the reactionary crowd that Geller associates herself with. And if you want Barack Obama to be sitting in the WH for four more years, just let people like her hijack this dialogue and distract from the important issues of the day. She has done a fine job of reporting many things in the past and my hat goes off to her for that. But this is not about her, it is about what is best for this nation.
It is not fair to categorize this man as a Jew hater for accepting an award from an organization that represents his heritage. Doing so takes a play right out of the Democrats' playbook, which will play very well into their hands in 2012.Doing so, exposes a terrible hypocrisy and severely cripples the GOP's chances of presenting a united front against an out of control government.
But the most important thing to learn from this is tolerance and acting within the boundaries of rationality. Lumping every American of Arab descent into the mold of Islamic jihad is not fair, and not what I want this nation to become accustomed to doing. I know many and have worked with them over the years, they bleed red, white, and blue, just like any American. Even like Pam Geller.
(Hat Tip for the video, and the inspiration to write this long-winded post comes from Advance Indiana.)
First let me say that once again, I shamelessly pilfered this from IHTM, once of the fastest growing blogs on the internet. If you aren't reading them, seek professional help somewhere before it's too late.
This is a great interview that demonstrates just what happens when idiots are allowed an audience. Take a few minutes and watch Condoleeza Rice thoroughly dismantle a clearly outclassed and under-qualified Lawrence O'Donnell. If you want to see what obtuseness coupled with sheer idiocy looks like when it is contrasted with class and intellectual brilliance, it is worth the time.
Rarely do I do this here, but this is very important to understand. So I will make an exception and post my comment I left on IHTM:
The golden statement of that entire exchange was made by Dr. Rice:
“You have to act on the intelligence you have.”
Lawrence has no intelligence, so he has been relegated to the mere recitals of leftist propaganda that is fed to him by those who are as equally ignorant as he is.
I looked online at Mr. O’Donnell’s bio(s) to see his educational resume, and I have to tell you that most sites I checked say he only”attended” Harvard, if they mentioned it at all. Only Wikipedia states that he graduated, but it gives no area of study and we all know how unreliable Wiki can be sometimes. If he were truly a grad of Harvard, I would think somewhere in one of these bios it would say Bachelors Degree in _______. But this is not the case with Larry.
But let’s just say for argument’s sake, he did.
By contrast, Dr. Rice was Phi Beta Kappa and earned a B.A. (cum laude) from the University of Denver. She earned a Masters Degree in political science at Notre Dame, and a PhD from the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the U. of Denver.
We all know of her government service. She is also an accomplished pianist who has played with Yo Yo Ma. She is now a professor at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Larry is a Dem hack at MSNBC and a former shitty actor.
So, yes. You have to act on the intelligence you have. Condi did just that in this interview and Larry O acted on the intelligence he didn’t/doesn’t have.
And it showed…..greatly.
I think this pretty much sums up this block of instruction, quite well. Lawrence O'Donnell, irrelevance personified. Dr. Rice, rational thought and reasoning in human form.
An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.--Spanish Proverb
One good mother is worth a hundred schoolmasters.--George Herbert
Mothers are life sustainers, they meet the day to day physical needs of their children. Good mothers meet those same needs, as well as the emotional and spiritual.
Mothers are selfless agents who bear their children, before and after birth. They will go without, to ensure their children have their needs met. They will sacrifice their own desires until they can be sure the children get what they must have in order to survive, and thrive.
God bless mothers everywhere, today and everyday.
*Addendum: I stumbled onto this after I posted this. You have to see this:
This weekend we give a listen to one of my favorite male solo artists of all time. He has a versatile repertoire of songs he plays. But in each and every one I have heard, he brings out this Roy Orbisonesque mystique. This is to say, much of it is mysterious, pensive, and sensual.
If you are wondering what that sounds like, it's much like this one:
This one sounds like Orbison with a couple brief flashes of Morrison:
You might not have liked Reagan, I certainly disagreed with his Administration's handling of a few things. But he wasn't a fool and he had a real vision that didn't include a lot of government in it.
Another thing I suspect Reagan would have done was release the photos of Osama to show the world that perseverance and patience pays off...and to silence doubters before they become doubters. He might have approved of burying the bastard at sea, but I seriously doubt he would have been buried in accordance with Islamic Law.
1. Is a good thing and Obama deserves the credit for having the guts to make the call.
2. Is largely symbolic but still a welcome event.
2. Does not end the war, it will only escalate it.
3. Does not ensure Obama's re-election, but it will give him a bounce for a minute.
4. Does not put anyone back to work.
5. Does nothing to pay down the debt.
6. Does not bring down gas prices.
7. Does not reduce wasteful spending.
8. Does not feed one hungry mouth.
9. Does not make the world like us more. But then again, that is an unrealistic goal sometimes.....especially, when you elect to do the right thing.
I commend the President for doing the right thing in this instance. But I am not at all going to get emotional and change my overall opinion of him, just because he did one thing right for a change. The same conditions that have driven this nation into a deep ague and malaise are still present. And one man shot and killed will not change any of that.
This nation needs to change course. And fast.
Want to show some real courage Mr. President? Tell your party to go to hell. Stop the spending, stop the borrowing, and promote the free market system. And don't let Pelosi, Reid, Barney Frank, and other pukes like them politicize this operation. It wasn't a Democrat thing, it wasn't a Republican thing. It was a U.S. Military thing.
It's just not the "racist and right wing" FOX News saying this. BET is saying it because it's evidently true:
When Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, he got 43 percent of the white vote and a staggering 96 percent of the Black vote. In the ensuing years, his support amongst Americans in general has wavered—he’s currently at 45 percent approval, 45 percent disapproval—but his African-American support has been consistently high. Today, that appears to not be the case.
Just to be clear and up front: Obama is no way in danger of losing the support of the vast majority of Blacks. As of today, 85 percent of African-Americans still say they support the president. That is a lot; that is most.
That being said, however, 85 percent—a seven percent drop in the past month—is the lowest Obama’s Black approval rating has been since he took office more than two years ago. This isn’t horrible news, but it’s not good, either.
I would first submit that polls are usually skewed in Obama's favor, I am not sure who they ask. They do report their methodologies and describe their survey sampling. They can say anything they want, but we have no way of verifying who they asked.
I suspect the numbers were even less than 85%, but still a clear majority. They can only fudge the numbers so much and maintain some sense of credibility with those who aren't able to discern statistic very well.
The next portion of this article goes to minimize this information and go through the usual left wing excuses:
As we’ve told you here before, some Black Americans weren’t pleased when Obama decided to engage with Libya, with Louis Farrakhan outright denouncing the attacks. Many Americans are also extremely worried about an impending government shutdown on Friday. On top of all that, the economy is still struggling, and Black Americans especially are finding it difficult to find work.
As we head into the 2012 election season, Obama is going to need all the grassroots help he can get. In 2008, Blacks made up a full 13 percent of the electorate, which is two points higher than their last national turnout. It’s unlikely that Black voters are going to vote for Obama’s Republican opponent, but it’s possible that they’ll stay home come Election Day, and Obama can’t have that. His approval is also down amongst Latinos, from 65 percent to 54 percent.
Let this be a lesson to anyone racist and silly enough to say that Blacks support Obama no matter what out of racial loyalties. That’s’ simply not true; Blacks, like everyone else, will consider their stability and self-interest when making political decisions. And they’re doing that now.
Well, I consider myself schooled now. But what about very intelligent black men like the President and CEO of the Black Chamber Of Commerce?
Meet Harry Alford, who freely and willfully admits here in this interview with Laura Ingraham that the only reason he voted for Obama was because he is black:
You may want to jog your memory about this man. He's the one who called out Barbara Boxer's racism in a Senate hearing a couple of years ago. Listen to this stellar moment here:
I would have to say that this was one of the best moments in television, but there were too many people drinking the Kool-Aid back then to even notice this exchange.
Meanwhile, back to the main point.
Obama is losing support among blacks because there were many black people who hoped his election would mean better times for everyone. They truly thought this man was one of them.
They thought he would help them live the American dream and they are now learning what we here at PYY knew before this man was even elected. Like his racist friend in the Senate the dishonorable Barbara Boxer, he is a condescending phony whose only agenda is to make more people dependent upon government.
What we (who knew this beforehand) can take from this is comfort....comfort in knowing that our labors in exposing this ineffective leadership have not been in vain. We can see the cracks in the ceiling beginning to get wider and deeper. We saw those cracks before the 2008 election, because we were not afraid to look for them. Now that there are some paint chips and pieces of plaster beginning to fall on some heads, they are now beginning to notice the cracks as they get larger.
When BET is forced acknowledge the obvious, we know there is a golden opportunity at hand to expose more weakness in Obama's "structural" integrity.
In short, he has NOT delivered on his "pie-in-the-sky" promises and he never will. He can't---not when they keep telling us recovery is happening, things are getting better, and yet prices are skyrocketing for everything, while people (including blacks) are looking for work that is not there.
If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.---Epictetus
We are not what other people say we are. We are who, we say we are.
We determine this not only by what we say, but how we act. If our actions meet the criteria for high moral principles, we are not bound by other people's faulty perceptions.
But....if we are getting feedback that can be verified as true by more than one reputable and validating source, it is up to us to make corrections that will ensure we are living up to the highest principles that we have set for ourselves.
It is not a sin to be wrong. It is a sin to choose to remain wrong, long after it has been proven to be so.
