Saturday, November 10, 2007

Congress Wants to Put Out Cigarettes, Ultimately Charge You for SCHIP

Congress is taking new whacks at the cigarette industry, banning tobacco Congress is taking new whacks at the cigarette industry, banning tobacco sales in Senate buildings and -- more importantly -- seeking a significant federal tax increase on cigarettes according to the Associated Press.
Other congressional actions could have a far greater impact on the industry. A Senate committee recently approved legislation that would, for the first time, allow federal regulation of cigarettes. The bill, also pending in the House, would require the Food and Drug Administration to restrict tobacco advertising, regulate warning labels and remove hazardous ingredients.
If cigarettes are legislated and taxed out of existence, where will the money come from to fund Democrat health programs like SCHIP?

The answer to that question is, and must be, higher taxes passed along to the middle class.

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Friday, November 9, 2007

Iraq: Good News is Not News

The news that there is no violence in Iraq is HUGE news. However, the reporting template is all about burning cars; exploding IEDs; dead people in the streets; mangled children; crying mothers; blasted vehicles and buildings.

It comes as no surprise that a PEW poll supports the conclusion: when it comes to Iraq, good news is not news.
News coverage of Iraq is now significantly less than it was at the start of the year. In January, roughly a quarter of the overall newshole (26%) in newspapers, TV newscasts, websites and radio was devoted to news about Iraq. In October, the war received only half as much coverage on average (13%), according to data compiled by the Project for Excellence in Journalism's News Coverage Index.
Of course, the folks at PEW will try to say public interest is down and that is why there is less coverage. However, you and I both know the news outfits will exhaustively cover topics they are interested in regardless of their audience's interest. You need look no farther than the last year's worth of coverage of the Democrat presidential candidates to have the proof.

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Thursday, November 8, 2007

So, Libs Now Care About Iraqis?

When Steve Fainaru writes in The Washington Post about Blackwater shootings in Iraq, we are somehow supposed to now believe that liberals, the same liberals who want the U.S. to cut and run from Iraq, are now liberals whose bleeding hearts go out to Iraqis wronged by the big, bad, US of A.

Give me a break.

It would be different if the Post's efforts weren't so transparent. However, the story simply follows the same tired old 'white guilt' media template in lieu of quality reporting.

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Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Yesterday's Election: Lib Setbacks Trump Small Dem Advances

Who do they take us for, anyway?

While the little boneheads over at wet rags such as The Washington Post and The Politico slobber over the small gains made by Democrats in the Virgina state senate and Kentucky governorship as portents of things to come, the hacks conveniently ignore the cold truth: this go-around liberalism failed.

The Guardian
reports that Utah voters on Tuesday killed the nation's first statewide school voucher program that promised tax dollars for private tuition, no matter how much a family earned or whether kids were in bad schools.

- New Jersey voters rejected the state's plan to borrow $450 million over 10 years to finance embryonic stem cell research.

Other liberal ballot measures failed under the weight of conservative votes:

- In Oregon, residents decided against hiking the cigarette tax to pay for a new kids health care program. Voters opted not to raise the cigarette tax by 84.5 cents a pack - to $2.02 - to fund health insurance for about 100,000 children now lacking insurance coverage but covered by existing state and federal programs.

- Voters in the northeast Ohio city of Streetsboro, where a 19-year-old fell short of reaching a runoff in the mayoral primary last May, raised the legal age to run for mayor or council from 18 to 23.

- Voters in 16 North Carolina counties soundly rejected a proposed land transfer tax in Tuesday's election, a big victory for home ownership and housing affordability.

- In Denver, voters were asked whether to make the private use and possession of marijuana the city's lowest law enforcement priority. Elected officials and police said it would have little effect since state and federal law supersede local law decriminalizing the drug.

In 2005, Denver passed an initiative making possession of small amounts of marijuana legal. It's had little effect. Police and prosecutors continue to follow state law, which marijuana proponents tried but failed to change through a vote last year.

- Residents of Hailey, Idaho, a former mining town with about 3,500 registered voters, approved three measures to legalize medical marijuana, make enforcement of marijuana laws the lowest police priority, and legalize industrial hemp. They rejected an initiative that would have legalized marijuana and required the city to regulate sales.

- The Passamaquoddy Indians were asking approval to operate a racetrack casino with up to 1,500 slot machines in the town of Calais, Maine, where downturns in the seafood and paper industries have made the economy the worst in the state. The question trailed slightly with about three-quarters of precincts reporting.

- Mississippi: Gov. Haley Barbour (R-Miss.), admired for (if not reported about) his handling of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, overwhelmingly wins reelection, 58-42 percent over attorney, Democrat John Eaves.

If pundits are looking for a message for `08 in this election, the message is liberal tax plans on the ballot will FAIL.

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Tuesday, November 6, 2007

GOP Blamed For Keeping Cheney Impeachment Bill Alive

It's a good thing The Hill isn't followed much outside the Beltway. Because if it was, some of the things that get written there would be laughed offline.

Take Jonathan E. Kaplan's story Republicans keep Cheney impeachment bill alive for example:
House Republicans on Tuesday prevented Democratic leaders from blocking a resolution to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney.

The vote to table the privileged resolution, offered by Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinch, began as a largely party-line vote to kill the measure, but Republicans developed a strategy to force Democrats to debate the resolution by supporting Kucinich. GOP leaders felt as though it was in their interest to debate the measure because it would make Democrats look bad.
At this point, it's foolish to think Republicans have so much power they can actually MAKE Democrats look bad ... the Democrats seem to be doing an exemplary job of that themselves.

But more to the point, it is the Democrats who have whining about impeachment and it is the Democrats who are beholden to their far-left types who think impeachment is one of the most pressing issues for Congress to deal with. It's not the fault of Republicans if the Democratic leadership cannot control their Kos-reading kooks.

The real news here is that Republicans have used the liberal caucus to out-fox the Democrats yet again.

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Liberal Disasters, An Abbreviated History

It's a long list of short-sightedness.

Jeffrey Lord, writing in The American Spectator, brings us his favorites:

Forced School Busing
Welfare
Luxury Tax
Alternative Minimum Tax
Bringing Peace to Vietnam and Cambodia
Free Love
Drugs
Liberalism today as a philosophy is burning up faster than Southern California. Bereft of common sense, wreaking havoc on whole sections of the American and global population, it is still being championed by followers utterly oblivious to the consequences already long on the record.

"I have a million ideas," Senator Clinton said recently, thoughtfully adding that "the country can't afford them all."
At least liberals are finally coming out of the closet and telling us who they are for a change.

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NBC Admits to Actively Promoting Liberal Bias

Well, well, well ... it's about time for an admission of the obvious.
“It happened naturally,” Phil Griffin, a senior vice president of NBC News who is the executive in charge of MSNBC, said Friday, referring specifically to the channel’s [liberal] passion and point of view from 7 to 10 p.m. “There isn’t a dogma we’re putting through. There is a ‘Go for it.’”
The New York Times today reports:
Riding a ratings wave from “Countdown With Keith Olbermann,” a program that takes strong issue with the Bush administration, MSNBC is increasingly seeking to showcase its nighttime lineup as a welcome haven for viewers of a similar mind.

Lest there be any doubt that the cable channel believes there is ratings gold in shows that criticize the administration with the same vigor with which Fox News’s hosts often champion it, two NBC executives acknowledged yesterday that they were talking to Rosie O’Donnell about a prime-time show on MSNBC.
Andrea Billups, at The Washington Times writes The Project for Excellence in Journalism and Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy have found that the media are more sympathetic to Democrats and more hostile to the GOP in covering the current presidential race. The morning chat shows are the worst offenders with newspapers not only favoring Democrats but also giving major props to Hillary and Barack while going negative on Republican contenders. So much for balance.
Before Fox News came along, most of these folks got away with it as the norm, too.
Amen.

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Monday, November 5, 2007

FT.com: Democrats Now Party of the Rich

For the demographic reality in America, the Democratic party is the new “party of the rich.” More and more Democrats represent areas with a high concentration of wealthy households. Using Internal Revenue Service data, the Heritage Foundation identified two categories of taxpayers – single filers with incomes of more than $100,000 and married filers with incomes of more than $200,000 – and combined them to discern where the wealthiest Americans live and who represents them, reports FT.com.
Democrats now control the majority of the nation’s wealthiest congressional jurisdictions. More than half of the wealthiest households are concentrated in the 18 states where Democrats control both Senate seats.
Hollywood elites, jet-setting global warming gurus, and lest we forget, the Norman Hsus -- they are all rich, all liberal, all Democrats.

Let the class-warfare begin!

Read it.

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Why Lie When There's Truth to Expose?

When a lack of talent is substituted for good sense.

Last Wednesday, Philip Klein writes in The American Spectator, while researching a column about the growing hatred of Rudy Giuliani among liberals, I reviewed a portion of Olbermann's show from the prior evening in which he and Arianna Huffington discussed why Giuliani was a liar:
The jumping off point for their conversation was a comment Giuliani reportedly made in which he said that leading Democrats want to invite Osama bin Laden to the White House. The sensationalistic remarks had been first reported by the Associated Press on Monday, and caused a stir among anti-Giuliani bloggers. But when reviewing Olbermann's show, which broadcast a video clip of Giuliani's comments, I noticed that Giuliani didn't say Osama, but actually said Assad. As in, Syrian President Bashar Assad. This stripped the statement of any of its shock value, because Assad was one of the leaders who Barack Obama has, in fact, said he would be willing to meet with in Washington, with no preconditions, within the first year of his presidency. After discovering the error, I did a blog post reporting my findings, and assumed that all of the news outlets that erroneously reported what Giuliani said would have to issue corrections.

The reason I made that assumption is that I had spent more than three years as a reporter with Reuters, and though it may be hard for some to believe, I was required to issue an immediate correction whenever I made an obvious factual error, no matter how minor. It was always a considerable embarrassment to have my name appear under a headline that began with the all-in-caps word "CORRECTED," but I understood that part of being a journalist was owning up to errors as soon as they were brought to my attention. (Some examples from the archives here and here.)

The first few hours following my initial post on the error reaffirmed my understanding of standard journalistic practice. Andrew Sullivan, who had lambasted Giuliani based on the inaccurate remarks, issued a correction. The AP also corrected its story. It seemed natural to me that Olbermann would quickly have to follow suit. But the only mention of Giuliani on Wednesday night's show was yet another segment attacking him.
Read it.

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Sunday, November 4, 2007

Dems Still Think Bush is on the Ballot

It cracks me up sometimes what passes for journalism inside the beltway. Take The Politico's Ben Smith, for example. In Smith's blog today, he observes a new and big change in Obama's approach to this election ... Barack Hussein has started attacking President Bush!

Huh?

The last time I checked, these Democrats were, and have been for some time, running against Bush. In fact, it's actually a JOKE in some conservative circles that when the general election comes, the Democrats will have been running against someone who isn't on the ticket for so long they'll probably won't know WHO they are running against.

It looks like Ben Smith got the story backwards. He quotes Obama as saying:
Here’s the good news -- for the first time in a long time, the name "George Bush" will not appear on the ballot. The name "Dick Cheney" will not appear on the ballot. The era of Scooter Libby justice, and Brownie incompetence, and the Karl Rove politics of fear and cynicism will be over.
I may or may not be an idiot, but that sure seems like Obama has figured out that Bush ISN'T on the ballot. What passes for journalism inside the beltway....

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