| Author | Message | ||
     Reindog |
You ain't seen nothing yet when the Employer Mandate goes in to effect. Layoffs and part-time downgrades are virtually certain with the "incentives" of Obamacare.  | ||
| Reindog |
Most Presidents are really good at negotiating and dealmaking with the opposition party. This pResident ain't so adept.  | ||
| Reindog |
Politics of Hate and Envy By Walter E. Williams · Jan. 29, 2014 Part of the progressive agenda is to create hate and envy. One component of that agenda is to attack the large differences between a corporation's chief executive officer's earnings and those of its average worker. CNNMoney published salary comparisons in “Fortune 50 CEO pay vs. our salaries.” Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf's annual salary is $2.8 million. CNN shows that it takes 66 Wells Fargo employees, whose average salary is $42,400, to match Stumpf's salary. It takes 57 Wal-Mart employees, who earn $22,100 on average, to match CEO Michael Duke's $1.3 million. At General Electric, 44 employees earning $75,300 a year match CEO Jeff Immelt's $3.3 million salary. For people with little understanding, such differences seem patently unfair. Before touching on the fairness issue, let's look at some high salaries that progressives ignore. Forbes lists the “Highest-Paid Football Players 2013.” Drew Brees, quarterback for the Saints, earned $40 million. If the average Saints organization employee earned $45,000, it would take almost 900 of them to match Brees' salary. Patriots quarterback Tom Brady earned $31.3 million, and Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant earns $23.5 million for playing basketball. It would take the earnings of more than 1,200 workers making $45,000 a year to match the earnings of Brady and Bryant. But the “unfair” salaries of sports players pale in comparison with movie stars. According to Forbes' listing of the highest-paid actors, Robert Downey Jr. earned $75 million from June 2012 to June 2013. Channing Tatum: $60 million. Hugh Jackman: $55 million. Let's suppose the cameraman working with Downey earned $60,000. It would take the salaries of 1,250 of them to equal his salary. Oprah Winfrey's 2012 salary came to $165 million, thousands of times what the earnings of people who work for her are. Though sports and Hollywood personalities earn multiples of CEO salaries, you'll never find leftists and progressives picketing and criticizing them. Why? The strategy for want-to-be tyrants is to demonize people whose power they want to usurp. That's the typical way tyrants gain power. They give the masses someone to hate. In 18th-century France, it was Maximilien Robespierre's promoting hatred of the aristocracy that led to his acquiring dictatorial power. In the 20th century, the communists gained power by promoting public hatred of the czars and capitalists. In Germany, Adolf Hitler gained power by promoting hatred of Jews and Bolsheviks. I'm not equating America's progressives and liberals with Robespierre, Josef Stalin and Hitler. I am saying that promoting jealousy, fear and hate is an effective strategy for leftist politicians and their followers to control and micromanage businesses. It's not about the amount of money top executives earn. If it were, politicians and leftists would be promoting jealousy, fear and hatred toward multi-multimillionaire Hollywood actors, celebrities and sports stars. But there is no way that politicians could usurp the roles of Drew Brees, Kobe Bryant, Robert Downey Jr. and Oprah Winfrey. That means celebrities can make any amount of money they want and it matters not one iota politically. Do you think President Barack Obama would stoke the fires of hate and envy by remarking that he thinks that “at a certain point, you've made enough money” – as he did in a 2010 Quincy, Ill., speech – in regard to the salaries of Winfrey, Brees and Hollywood celebrities? Why the high salaries? Ask yourself: If a corporate board of directors could hire a person for $45,000 who could do what a CEO could do, why would they pay CEOs millions? If an NFL team owner could hire a person with the athletic ability and decision-making capacity of Drew Brees for $100,000, why would he pay Brees $40 million? If some other actor could have created as many box-office receipts, why would movie producers have paid Downey $75 million? There's another important issue. If one company has an effective CEO, it is not the only company that would like to have him on the payroll. In order to keep him, the company must pay him enough so that he can't be lured elsewhere; source: http://patriotpost.us/opinion/22972 | ||
| Sifo |
   This one, I just find the correlation very interesting. I know correlation isn't causation, but it would make for a pretty interesting study.  | ||
| Reindog |
Standing Up Against Wealth-Shaming By Michelle Malkin · Jan. 29, 2014 America, we have a bullying epidemic. No, not the school bullying issues that get constant attention from Hollywood, the White House and the media. No, not the “fat-shaming” and “body-shaming” outbreaks on Facebook. The problem is wealth-shaming. Class-shaming. Success-shaming. The State of the Job Creator is under siege. Last week, a prominent self-made tech mogul dared to diagnose the problem publicly. His passionate letter to The Wall Street Journal decried the “progressive war on the American 1 percent.” He called on the left to stop demonizing “the rich,” and he condemned the Occupy movement's “rising tide of hatred.” The mini-manifesto was newsworthy because this truth-teller is not a GOP politician or conservative activist or Fox News personality. As he points out, he lives in the “epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco.” No matter. The mob is shooting the messenger anyway. But maybe, just maybe, his critical message in defense of our nation's achievers will transcend, inspire, embolden and prevail. The letter-writer is Tom Perkins, a Silicon Valley pioneer with an MIT degree in electrical engineering and computer science and a Harvard MBA. He started out at the bottom at Hewlett-Packard, founded his own separate laser company on the side and then teamed up with fellow entrepreneur Eugene Kleiner to establish one of the nation's oldest and most important venture capital firms, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. A hands-on dynamo, Perkins immersed himself in the science and technology of the companies in his portfolio. He even accompanied them on sales calls. He poured his heart and soul into the business of business. Perkins achieved great wealth for himself, his partners and his clients – and the world is a better place for it. Kleiner Perkins' groundbreaking investment in Genentech planted the seeds of the biotech revolution. An MIT profile notes that in its first three decades, the firm “made more than 475 investments, generating $90 billion in revenue and creating 275,000 jobs” and “funded 167 companies that later went public, including Amazon, AOL, Genentech, Google and Netscape.” Because he dared to compare the seething resentment of modern progressives to Kristallnacht and Nazi Germany, the grievance industry attacked Perkins and dismissed his message. His former colleagues at the venture capital firm he founded threw him under the bus. Left-wing punk journalists immediately branded him “nuts” and a “rich idiot.” Please note: Not one of those sanctimonious grievance-mongers had anything to say about the Molotov cocktail-fueled riots and fires set by the Occupy mobs at banks, car dealerships and restaurants in Oakland that provoked Perkins' comparison in the first place. While he regrets invoking Kristallnacht specifically, Perkins unequivocally refused to back down from his message defending the “creative 1 percent.” He reiterated his fundamental point in a TV interview on Monday: “Anytime the majority starts to demonize a minority, no matter what it is, it's wrong. And dangerous. And no good ever comes from it.” Perkins also chastised those who bemoan “income inequality,” including his erstwhile “friends” Al Gore, Jerry Brown and Barack Obama: “The 1 percent are not causing the inequality. They are the job creators. … I think Kleiner Perkins itself over the years has created pretty close to a million jobs, and we're still doing it. It's absurd to demonize the rich for being rich and for doing what the rich do, which is get richer by creating opportunity for others.” Amen, amen and amen. Perkins barely scratched the surface of the War on Wealth that has spread under the Obama regime. Anti-capitalism saboteurs have organized wealth-shaming protests at corporate CEOs' private homes in New York and in private neighborhoods in Connecticut. Hypocrite wealth-basher and former paid Enron adviser Paul Krugman at The New York Times whipped up hatred against the “plutocrats” in solidarity with the Occupy mob. New York state lawmakers received threatening mail saying it was “time to kill the wealthy” if they didn't renew the state's tax surcharge on millionaires. “If you don't, I'm going to pay a visit with my carbine to one of those tech companies you are so proud of and shoot every spoiled Ivy League (expletive) I can find,” the death threat read. In Perkins' own backyard, Bay Area celebrity rapper Boots Riley infamously penned “5 Million Ways To Kill a CEO” (“Toss a dollar in the river, and when he jump in/If you find he can swim, put lead boots on him and do it again.”) before making cameo appearances at vandal-infested Occupy Oakland marches over the past few years. But the most dangerous threats to the nation's job creators don't come from Oakland rappers or social justice guerillas or San Francisco neighbors griping about tech workers' private buses and big homes. The deadliest threats come from the men in power in Washington who stoke bottomless hatred against “millionaires and billionaires” through class-bashing rhetoric and entrepreneur-crushing policies – while they pocket the hard-earned money of the achievers trying to buy immunity. It's high time to shame the wealth-shamers and their cowed enablers. Silence is complicity. source: http://patriotpost.us/opinion/23011 | ||
| Aesquire |
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/01/29/america s-first-dictator-beck-explodes-over-president-obam as-state-of-the-union-address/ | ||
| Aesquire |
http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2013/12/26243/ A World Without Uncle Sam A cash-strapped America no longer has the resources to continue as the world’s policeman, as its craven capitulation to Tehran makes clear. For Australia the message is chilling A good read. and.... http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2013/12/beijing s-six-coming-wars/ | ||
| Aesquire |
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/us/politics/stat e-of-the-union-as-it-was-spoken-and-as-decoded.htm l?emc=eta1&_r=0 A hard core Obama supporter sent me this, she thought it was funny. so do I. | ||
| Reindog |
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| Reindog |
Love the golf clubs and pen sidearm.  | ||
| Reindog |
Time for this petty dictator to either resign or be convicted at his impeachment trial in 2015. Hold your nose and vote Republican at all costs this November.  | ||
| Sifo |
I'm not sure where in Chicago these folks are, but it seems there's a ray of hope that people may be opening their eyes. | ||
| Sifo |
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| Reindog |
"Boiling Frogs" is the latest Afterburner episode by Bill Whittle. | ||
| Reindog |
Hanson knocks it out of the park with this piece. Relative moralism and truth is killing us and creating an Orwellian apathetic population. I especially implore Liberals to read this piece and think. The Poison of Postmodern Lying By Victor Davis Hanson · Jan. 30, 2014 All presidents at one time have fudged on the truth. Most politicians pad their resumes and airbrush away their sins. But what is new about political lying is the present notion that lies are not necessarily lies anymore – a reflection of the relativism that infects our entire culture. Postmodernism (the cultural fad “after modernism”) went well beyond questioning norms and rules. It attacked the very idea of having any rules at all. Postmodernist relativists claimed that things like “truth” were mere fictions to preserve elite privilege. Unfortunately, bad ideas like that have a habit of poisoning an entire society – and now they have. Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis was recently caught fabricating her own autobiography. She exaggerated her earlier ordeals, lied about the age at which she divorced and was untruthful about how she paid for her Harvard Law School education. When caught, Davis did not apologize for lying. Instead, she lamely offered that, “My language should be tighter.” Apparently, only old fogies still believe in truth and falsehood – period. In contrast, Davis knows that promoting a progressive feminist agenda is “truth,” and she only needs to be “tighter” about her fabrications to neutralize her reactionary critics. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren for years falsely claimed that she was a Native American. That fabricated ancestry proved useful in upping her career trajectory. When pressed about her racial background during her 2012 campaign, the Harvard law professor denied any deliberate misrepresentation and went on to be elected. Such progressive crusaders assume that they serve the greater truth of social change. In the gospel of postmodern relativism, what did it matter if the president of the United States promised that Obamacare would not alter existing health-care plans when it was clear that it would? Instead, the good intentions of universal health care are the only truth that matters. For that matter, the “law” that requires a president to enforce legislation passed by the Congress is likewise a construct. If ignoring bothersome laws – whether the individual mandate and timetable of Obamacare, or federal immigration law – serves a greater social justice, then such dereliction also becomes “truth.” Blindly enforcing legalistic details of the law that are deemed no longer in the interest of the people would be the real lie, or so the reasoning goes. Without notions of objective truth, there can never be lies, just competing narratives and discourses. Stories that supposedly serve the noble majority are true; those that supposedly don't become lies – the facts are irrelevant. When Sen. Hillary Clinton in 2007 heard the factual details of the successful Iraq surge as related by Gen. David Petraeus, she said it required a “suspension of disbelief.” In her postmodern sensibility, fighting an unpopular war was a lie, but opposing it was the truth – and the actual metrics for whether the surge was working or not were simply an irrelevant narrative. Later, as secretary of state, Clinton dismissed the circumstances surrounding the murders in Benghazi with the callous exclamation, “What difference does it make?” She had a postmodern point. If President Obama, then-United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice and Clinton herself all wrongly and deliberately assured the nation that a politically incorrect video had triggered the attacks in Benghazi, were they not on the right side of opposing religious bias and helping a progressive president to be re-elected? How could that good intention be a lie? If Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied under oath to the Congress that the National Security Agency does not snoop on American citizens, how can that be perjury if Clapper's goal was to silence Obama's right-wing critics? For that matter, if Clapper wanted to show tolerance for Islamists, how could it be a lie when he testified earlier that the radical Muslim Brotherhood was “largely secular”? By what arbitrary rules can one claim that “Piss Christ” or other provocative anti-Christian art is blasphemous or inferior, if its apparent purpose is to lessen the influence of a purportedly pernicious religion? Was Obama's autobiography truth or fiction, or something in between – as hinted by the president himself when he was caught in untruths and then backed away from some of his stories, claiming they were now just “composites”? Part of old America still abides by absolute truth and falsity. A door is either hung plumb or not. The calibrations of the Atlas rocket either are accurate and it takes off, or inaccurate and it blows up. Noble intentions cannot make prime numbers like 5 or 7 divisible. But outside of math and science, whose natural truth man so far cannot impugn, almost everything else in America has become “it depends.” Admissions, hiring, evaluations, autobiographies, and the statements of politicians and government officials, all become truthful if they serve the correct cause – and damn any reactionary discrepancies. To paraphrase George Orwell, everything is relative, but some things are more relative than others. source: http://patriotpost.us/opinion/23025 | ||
| Oldog |
The Most transparent administration ever truly is transparent, Most of the folks who follow this thread have seen 2016 this is appauling... yes we have transparency, its quite easy to see thru the Chicago thug tactics of the pResident, and the department of inJustice http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/DSouza-Dershowitz -targeting-selective/2014/01/29/id/549845?ns_mail_ uid=63737729&ns_mail_job=1554442_01302014&promo_co de=1655F-1 | ||
| Reindog |
Thanks for the D'Souza indictment information. This pResident's administration uses Soviet style tactics to silence ANY opposition. Alan Dershowitz is hardly a Conservative and weighs in. Read the article that Oldog posted.
If you Leftists think that it can't happen here, it already has. Here is a file photo of the person "responsible" for Benghazi. Obama is a rogue administration that should be removed either by resignation or indictment. | ||
| Sifo |
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| Reindog |
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| Reindog |
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| Glitch |
http://youtu.be/0rs_Yic1yoM | ||
| Cityxslicker |
Al Jezeera - the self affirmed mouth piece of muslim terrorism and islamic hegemony; by their own admission - supports and parrots the pResident's talking points of the SOTU address http://america.aljazeera.com/features/2014/1/the-r eal-state-oftheunion.html Liberals, what more do you need to churn your stomach? | ||
| Ducbsa |
"Liberals, what more do you need to churn your stomach?" I'm sure Occupiers would say that Al Jizzera is "balanced." | ||
| Sifo |
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| Reindog |
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| Oldog |
The O Riley Interview commentary This is telling, I watched the house hearings on the IRS targeting, the witnesses in their own words. I am almost speechless at barrys comments OH BTW its Fox's Fault, Good keep it up kids! JAFL http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/02/03/not-eve n-smidgen-corruption-obama-downplays-irs-other-sca ndals/ | ||
| Reindog |
What is amazing is that some people still support Obama. To reiterate, there are only three kinds of Obama voters: * Useful idiots. * People on the take. * Those who despise America and wish it destroyed. Have you watched the O'Reilly interview? Obama truly is NOTHING more then a Chicago thug (sorry you Soviets..."thug" is not a racist word). Obama is truly exposed as a sickening excuse for a human being when O'Reilly refused to let him pontificate and run with the ball. Good job, Bill. It is time for this pResident to resign or be indicted. | ||
| Fredfast |
Mad Dog - Your red/blue map means that you don't get any more Harleys. And by the way you conveniently left out five blue states which changes your map dramatically. | ||
| Oldog |
Bill is entertaining when the talking heads start spewing off of point and he is quick to bring them to task. I bet he was polite direct and factual, he is at times rude but he is direct sorry i can't stomach barry, harry, joey, nancy, chucky(ny) [ most dems ] | ||
| Oldog |
BTW Rein, If you have not read it Killing Lincoln was a page turner. |
