Archive → January, 2012
Solyndra Scandal, Newsweek Magazine, and Mainstream Media Failure
Last week, Newsweek Magazine endorsed Barack Hussein Obama.
With the cover pronouncing Obama’s detractors as “dumb,” the magazine ignored the many questions and criticisms of Obama that Americans have, not the least of which is the Solyndra scandal.
Using a billion dollars of taxpayer money to enrich Obama campaign donors, the Obama Administration funded Solyndra with your tax money, knowing full well it was a no-go. Now, Solyndra executives are handing out bonuses , even as the company slips into oblivion. God forbid that they return to the American taxpayer whatever money they have left…and if neither the Obama Administration nor the mainstream media news outlets, like Newsweek, can criticize it nor find fault, then we have the greatest evidence of media complicity in American history.
Mainstream media complicity in covering up scandals in the Clinton and Obama administrations is well documented, and now we’ve got yet one more example today. Newsweek Magazine has no shame, and no pretense at being journalistic. Instead, Newsweek Magazine is completely dedicated to the promotion of one political party and one side of the political continuum.
We all have a shared dream
One of America’s greatest speeches, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” on the Washington mall, still inspires Americans.
The question is, who does it inspire?
In my opinion, the vast majority of Caucasian Americans are the audience today most inspired by King’s speech. They have fully accepted upon themselves not only words of King’s speech, but its spirit. It was that great majority that elected Barack Hussein Obama. Inspired by the opportunity to elect an American of color and prove wrong those who claim America is a racist place, Americans voted in Obama. The same Obama who, as Candidate Obama said he would change the dialogue on race, and who, as Candidate Obama, challenged long-held victimization identity in the black community, but who as President Obama has allowed the black community to languish in its self-inflicted pain, whose Justice Department advances anti-white racism by black racists in the name of defeating “racism.”
Mostly to its benefit, America is awash in black culture. White kids want black clothing, black music, black humor, black life partners, black sports players, black heroes, and black friends.
Americans elected a black president. America’s most conservative whites tried to elect another black president, candidate Herman Cain, who remained my top pick even after he stopped his campaign. Alan Keyes and Allen West remain political heroes to the most conservative of whites, who themselves are wrongly labeled as racists by black racists.
Racism is not a white problem today, it is a black problem, a result of an unwillingness by most blacks to accept that blacks have been accepted by the vast, overwhelming number of whites in America. By an almost universal unwillingness to either break out of ghettos and inner cities or reclaim them, to remain largely inactive where all institutions have failed, even the legendary black churches.
And I know this to be true, because I inhabit a largely white world, where the number of racist comments or experiences I witness can be counted on one hand year after year, after year, and because I inhabit a largely black city, where the problems of fragmented black family and community are played out daily on our streets to the point where I have long since lost count.
Black Americans, my fellow equal citizens, I say to you as a white American that you are as precious to me and to the vast majority of other “whites” in our great nation as are any other group of American citizens, and perhaps more so due to your longer presence here and greater sacrifices on our behalf. Skin color is irrelevant to 99.8% of white Americans. Culture, shared values, and the good content of character are relevant to 99.8% of white Americans.
American culture is the great equalizer, accepting all and any to its ranks, with the simple expectation that each citizen both appreciate and promote the America of its founding. The greatness of constitutional America is that it is designed to change, to improve, and having heard MLK’s call, arisen, and changed, it remains the greatest nation in the history of the planet. It is a place to be proud of.
Today, we are especially proud of one of our great American leaders, MLK. We all share the dream that his message will reach not only the intended white audience of 1963, but the black audience of 2012.
UPDATED: Tea Vs. Establishment Battle comes to Dauphin County
Aside from the epic power struggle over Lebanon County’s Republican Committee, and a smaller but equally strenuous 2010 battle in York County between 912 Patriots and entrenched Republicans, which ended in the summer of 2011 in favor of the Tea Party insurgents, Central Pennsylvania, and Dauphin County specifically, has not seen such a contest.
Until now.
Now, that open competition has fully arrived, and it may become open warfare. Oh sure, there have been some past skirmishes. The first skirmish involved former Dauphin County commissioner Lowman Henry being dumped in 2002 by the party in favor of a candidate the inner circle liked more; that planted a seed of factionalism.
Two years ago those rumblings erupted forcefully during the PA-17th Congressional District Republican Primary race, when traditionalists advocated party endorsements and the outsiders wanted an open primary, in the American spirit of “May the best person win.” That is, may the highest merit be rewarded with the highest accolades and well-earned support. No more skulduggery to edge out unwanted candidates and strong leaders by insiders whose interest is perceived by some to be retaining power and control.
In 2010, the outsiders prevailed in one way, with only one GOP Dauphin County group doing an endorsement (the Susquehanna Township GOP Committee). The other challenge came from a committee member, Alan, who unsuccessfully challenged party chairman John McNally for that chairmanship. Challenges are uncommon, and it was a second seed planted next to the Lowman Henry tree, or maybe it was fruit from that tree.
Soon after in 2010, those outsiders became identified with and then known as “Tea Party” activists. Their view was that they were merely seeking to return America’s conservative movement and Republican party to essential American traditions and principles. The way they were viewed by the established, inner-circle GOPers was with disquiet.
When the open insurrections began, no one thought they were more than disagreements between liberal and conservative Republicans.
Now, an open power struggle has erupted for the heart and soul of the Dauphin County Republican Party.
On the one hand are more conservative Republicans, feeling shunted aside and unappreciated, despite their significant sacrifices and hard work for the party. Some others had declared their interest in or intentions to run for certain seats, only to then find themselves carefully dissected from those seats in the new redistricting. Their own party did that dissecting.
Dauphin County GOP Chairman John McNally has declared his candidacy for the newly created and open state senate seat carved out of retiring senator Jeff Piccola’s district. York County businessman Steve Johnson has indicated his interest in the same senate seat. Johnson ran for lieutenant governor in 2010 among a slate of eight candidates.
UPDATE: Bill Seeds, a long time supervisor of Lower Paxton Township, is declaring his intention to run for the same senate seat, as is the York County Clerk of Courts. Each group is using the tried and useful divide-and-conquer method, as they cultivate new candidates from the opposing candidate’s county.
McNally has temporarily handed his chairmanship to Dauphin County commissioner Jeff Haste, with the expectation that McNally will re-occupy it if he loses to Johnson. However, long-time GOP activist and congressional candidate Toni Gilhooley has stated that she will seek the Dauphin County GOP chairmanship.
State representative Sue Helm is now challenged by a 26-year-old attorney, Jenna Lewis, who is endorsed by the GOP establishment, including much-liked Dauphin County District Attorney Ed Marsico and her own father, Judge Lewis.
Susquehanna Township is a changing political landscape, where Helm, a well-known businesswoman, barely held onto her seat two years ago against Democrat activist Gene Stilp, of The Pink Pig fame.
Conservatives unhappy with Helms’ past performance now find themselves having to choose between Helm or the very young, inexperienced, and untested Lewis. Given that Lewis has the establishment wagons circling around her, the outsiders are quietly rallying to Helm.
What intrigues me is how the Tea Party began in Lebanon and Berks counties, when then-senator Arlen Spector spoke a lot of hogwash to fed-up American Joes. The Tea Party spread to Virginia, New Jersey, New York, and Massachussettes, where Republicans swarmed rickety barricades manned by corpulent, unprepared Democrats.
Now what? With the Lebanon County Republican Party firmly in the hands of the pluralistic Tea Party, will Dauphin County go the same way? And if it does, will Perry County and Centre County follow suit?
Centre County is, after all, the home turf of state senator Jake Corman, known to many as the “Silver Spoon Senator” for having casually inherited his father’s former senate seat. Corman voted for the legislative pay raise and remains one of the very few elected officials upon whom rural Pennsylvania taxpayers have not yet sought revenge.
Like Perry County, Centre County is a deeply conservative region ripe for the same frustration and political dynamic that changed Lebanon County and has now landed squarely in Dauphin County.
Corman’s presence could be the spark that lights those other Tea Party fires.
Stay tuned.
Santorum Nails Ron Paul to the Masthead
Last night, presidential candidate Rick Santorum said the words that so many of us have long tried to find to describe why candidate Ron Paul scares us, rather than inspires us.
While Ron Paul’s domestic policies are mostly laudable and long needed, his foreign policy positions are literally insane. Crazy. Destructive and dangerous.
As Santorum pointed out, Ron Paul has had a lifetime of political activity where he has largely failed to advance his positions, whether through leadership or coalition building.
Were Ron Paul to be elected president, he would likely continue to be thwarted in those areas where he has little control, the domestic policy arena, but complete control over the military and Department of State. And that is where his views are most dangerous.
Were Ron Paul Commander In Chief, he would likely pull back American military assets from hard-won, long-time outposts across the world that guard America’s back. To Ron Paul, such bases, fleets, forces, and wings are evidence of America’s perfidy and overcommitted strength.
However, were America to do as Ron Paul desires, and dramatically reduce its overseas presence, an enormous vacuum would result, soon to be filled by America’s worst enemies.
Ron Paul is a scary man, and not qualified to be our leader. Thanks to Rick Santorum, we now know the words to describe exactly why.
Top Fake-Out of 2011
Looking back, 2011 was a year full of fake-outs. Political, sporting, and cultural fake-outs.
All of these failures to deliver left disillusioned people in their wakes. Some, like the Jerry Sandusky\Penn State sex abuse scandal, left a lot of hurt and disillusioned people in its wake, not to mention the abused boys who welcomed the miserable company into their sad world.
The top political fake-out has to be the Occupy Wall Street “movement.”
OWS is not really a movement in the sense that lots and lots of citizens belong to it and it is representative of some larger but still-quiet change coursing its way through the body politic. Heck, there might be a thousand people per state who actually participated in OWS-themed activities across America. Maybe not even a thousand people per state. Busing in professional activists and workers from across the country to protest sites is well documented. So maybe it’s 500 people per state?
We are talking about at most twelve thousand people out of a nation of 350 million, and maybe only six thousand people.
But you’d never know it from the media reporting on it. OWS and its clones in California, Ohio, Harrisburg, PA, and elsewhere had maybe a handful of people at any site except the actual Wall Street site of Zuccotti Park and the ever-ready-to-protest San Francisco. But the media treated these few people as though they were the harbingers of great change. Their violence, filthy living conditions, rapes, drug use, vandalism, incoherent rants, circular discussions, and racism were routinely ignored in reports by mainstream media outlets (on the other hand, new news outlets are sprouting up right and left, like infowars.com, as POV videoed interviews of OWS kids are posted to YouTube and other sites).
But despite the actual sparse numbers of actual participants, the once-vaunted Columbia University is now actually teaching a course called…”Occupy Wall Street.”
That’s right. Both an undergraduate and graduate level course on OWS will be taught at what was at one time one of the nation’s premier centers of higher education. No one at Columbia is really sure what will be taught in these courses, but I am willing to bet that the filth, drugs, rapes, violence, vandalism, racism, incoherence, sedition, treason, and slovenly behavior at OWS sites will not be part of the syllabus. Columbia University, like all other “Ivy League” schools, has now just dropped another notch in the estimation of middle class families looking for a good return on their investment in Little Jane and Johnny’s education.
But OWS will also live on as a “movement” to be studied, emulated, promoted.
Never mind that two years ago a pro-Second Amendment rally on the steps of Pennsylvania’s state capital that attracted 1,500 supporters from across the nation received zero mention in the local newspaper, the Patriot News, while mini protests of two to five people waving placards against the Iraq War (where have they been the past three years, one wonders) were routinely covered as though they actually represented some sizeable part of the population.
OWS does not represent many people in America. Maybe five percent, or ten percent in a really bad economy like we have now. But their friends in the mainstream media make sure that their voices and position in the news are amplified far beyond their actual numbers and importance to American political discourse and electoral outcomes.
OWS should be studied, as the biggest fake-out of 2011. And maybe one of the biggest fake-outs in American history.