Crush Liberalism

So the right is screwing the poor and the elderly?

This has got to be one of the most disgusting things I’ve read in a while. Hat tip to ManicNole for bringing this to my attention. From the Washington Times (and picked up by the blogosphere, once again picking up the slack for lazy and/or partisan journalists in the MSM):

Did Al Franken’s liberal radio network Air America divert city money for the elderly and inner-city children to itself? That’s the question people should be asking this week after the revelation that the New York Department of Investigation is looking into whether hundreds of thousands of dollars were illegally transferred from a Bronx community center to Air America. Only a community paper and a few Internet bloggers seem interested in what could be an egregious case of illegal funneling of tax dollars to a private, partisan organization.

In late June, city officials designated the Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club, a nonprofit organization that runs mentoring programs for children and day care for Alzheimer’s patients, a “non-responsible city contractor.” Investigators found “significant inappropriate transactions and falsified documents that were submitted to various City agencies.” The city subsequently suspended the club’s contracts, which run well into the millions.

It turns out, according to sources quoted anonymously by the Bronx News, that the mishandled money went to Air America. One source claims that $480,000 was wrongly transferred. The city investigation is concentrating on Charles Rosen, the club’s president for 15 years, and Evan Cohen, the development director, who is a former chairman of Air America. Mr. Cohen resigned from Air America in May after the network’s leasing plans in Chicago, San Francisco and elsewhere fell through.

The network’s plans fell through because of its failure to grasp the concept of capitalism. While its founders are well versed in it, its pinheaded on-air personalities bite the hands that feed them. But I digress…continuing:

No one has claimed that Messrs. Cohen or Rosen sought to profit personally from any transfers. The money was said to have been a “loan” from the community center to Air America, which Air America would repay with interest at some point in the future. But why the public till should be tapped to rescue a foundering news outlet was a question no one seemed to consider. Maybe Air America officers thought spending public funds on their network was a truly compelling public interest. It isn’t, of course, and if the allegations are true, they reveal a misuse of tax dollars to support a partisan organization.

(snip…)

Most of the mainstream newspapers have ignored this story. We only found out about it through the reporting of Brian Maloney, who pieced a story together on his blog “The Radio Equalizer” which was picked up by syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin. The New York Daily News buried an item at the end of a column of news briefs. There was nothing in the New York Times, which has heaped flattering coverage on the flailing network.

Air America is struggling to find listeners, leaders and reliable funding. But should it take money from children and the ailing elderly? Al Franken and Randi Rhodes, ever the defenders of the “little guy,” should explain this one.

Let’s assume that public money that would have benefitted Alzheimer patients were pilfered and transferred to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or some other right-of-center talk radio ideologue. Does anyone doubt for a millisecond that the New York Times and the rest of the leftist MSM would be all over the story like Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd on a waitress?

Aren’t liberals supposed to be for the little guy, i.e. the poor, the children, the elderly, and the sick? Aren’t right-wingers supposed to be the evil ones, trying to screw those same groups of people? Maybe Franken and company can pin this one on Karl Rove, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Halliburton, drilling in ANWR, Florida 2000, etc.

July 29, 2005 Posted by crushliberalism | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Race-baiting poverty pimp scores another win

Jesse Jackson, the shameless shyster, has cried “wolf” once again. Alas, ESPN gave in. From the Washington Post:

When programming executives at ESPN came up with the idea to send their main news show on a 50-state tour, they failed to include the one place in the country that is home to the White House, the U.S. Capitol and almost 600,000 residents.

The cable sports network paid for its omission.

The D.C. mayor issued a press release complaining of a monumental dis. A local radio political commentator threatened to call for a boycott of the network. And, yesterday, the Rev. Jesse Jackson jumped into the fray and called an ESPN executive to proclaim the District as worthy of a traveling television show.

Now I did go to college at Florida State, and I admit that I didn’t take a geography course there, so cut me some slack here. But if my memory serves me correctly, Washington, D.C. is not a state. To quote that intellectual giant Bobcat Goldthwait: “Magellan, get a f###ing map!”

No, I’m not dissing D.C., but why call it a “50-state” tour if you’re going to D.C., too? Anyway, read the article. It looks like ESPN did the French thing and gave in.

July 29, 2005 Posted by crushliberalism | Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

LA Times: "silly" to think being in good shape helps mental performance

Hey, what do doctors know anyway? Hat tip to Little Green Footballs and Tammy Bruce:

In a piece for the Los Angeles Times on July 22, 2005, titled “The (over)exercise of Power,” Jonathan Chait notes he finds the president’s interest in exercise “disturbing.” He bleats, “What I mean is the fact that Bush has an obsession with exercise that borders on the creepy.” As opposed to a president’s obsession with Big Macs and a certain intern?

Chait finds the fact that the president makes time to exercise “astonishing.” He then notes: “My guess is that Bush associates exercise with discipline. … The notion of a connection between physical and mental potency is, of course, silly. …”

Really? Not according to the medical establishment and the surgeon general’s office, which notes the benefits of exercise. Such as? Better sleep, reduced tension and stress, reduction of high blood pressure, reduction of anxiety and depression, reduced risk of colon and breast cancer, healthy bones, muscles and joints, improved self-image, and generally improved physical health.

For the most powerful man on earth, the man on whose shoulders the fate of the free world rests, the president clearly recognizes exercise is an imperative component to his being able to do the job.

Chait tries to assert his point about the “silliness” of connecting exercise with mental acuity by arguing, “Consider all the perfectly toned airheads in Hollywood — or perhaps, even the president himself.” The last time I checked, most actresses in Hollywood are emaciated, they are not “perfectly toned.” There is a difference between being thin and being healthy — a distinction lost on Chait and Hollywood in general.

It would be easy to dismiss Chait as just another “journalist” who makes a living hating the president, but there’s more to it than that. You see, leftists harbor a personal jealousy of people unlike them.

(snip…)

President and Mrs. Bush and the Roberts family make the mistake of not pledging allegiance to the decline of culture. They insult the Left by reminding intellectually lazy Slaves to Decay like Chait and Givhan that class, decorum and respect still exist. Tradition, caring for one’s family and caring for oneself are still values that prevail.

Is Lynne Stewart to be the new American beauty standard? Is Michael Moore, and the slow suicide of morbid obesity, to be sought after? Is Ward Churchill to be the New Ideal Man? Is the discipline brought by exercise and self-restraint so frightening that we would prefer to have a quadruple-bypass like Bill Clinton?

After all, if you care enough about yourself to resist a Big Mac and Krispy Kreme, you would also have the discipline to resist an intern. Unless, of course, your world is one where there are no standards, exercise is “creepy,” and looking good is “old fashioned.” Theirs is a world, as Bill Clinton mused, where you do what you want “because you can.”

Thank goodness Americans are deciding they deserve better.

Bic Macs, Krispy Kremes, and interns…good. Caring about your health…creepy. Thanks for the clarification, Left Coast.

July 29, 2005 Posted by crushliberalism | Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Dean goes off the deep end…again. So what else is new?

I frequently state that every time Howard Scream…er, Dean…opens his piehole, it feels like Christmas has come early. Hat tip to my friends at Moonbattery for this hilarious gem:

In a startling display of his total disconnect from conventional reality, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee Howard Dean treated members of the College Democrats of America last Friday to some of his most rabid demagoguery to date. The students were educated in the bizarre alternate reality inhabited by Dr. Dean, in which President Bush is to blame for the Supreme Court’s recent decision allowing private property to be seized so that new private owners can develop it.

“The president and his right-wing Supreme Court think it is ‘okay’ to have the government take your house if they feel like putting a hotel where your house is,” Dean bellowed.

Anyone who follows the news will be aware that Bush has yet to place a judge on the Supreme Court. Anyone who follows it closely will know that it was the court’s left-wing contingent — Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer — who with the help of Kennedy passed the disturbingly unconstitutional ruling that eminent domain can be used to seize private property for commercial development. The court’s three conservatives — Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas — all dissented, as did O’Connor.

Wiser Democrats have been trying to get the doctor to take his medication, or at least tone down his public outbursts, going so far as to denounce some of the outrageous insults he has directed at Republicans — to no avail, evidently, as Dean was in true form in front of his fellow adolescents at the CDA’s annual convention.

Drawing the curtain on the era of moral integrity personified by the Clintons, Republicans have brought a “culture of corruption” to Washington, according to Dean.

“If we want it back, we’ll have to buy it back,” he growled, plainly spelling out the strategy of George Soros and leftists from the entertainment industry.

“We are Democrats because we have moral values,” Dean brayed, milking the line for extra laughs by explaining that moral values entail balancing the budget and supporting a “strong public education system” — which some would interpret to mean pandering to teachers’ unions at the expense of students’ educations.

After whipping the cognitively challenged crowd into a frenzy with his divisive rhetoric by calling Republicans bigots, Dean shrieked over the applause, “I am sick of being divided!”

In support of his firm stand against divisiveness, he declared that Republicans only care about children before they are born, not afterward.

It’s easy to imagine the speech running on until men in white jackets emerged from the crowd with oversized butterfly nets, frightening Dean away from the podium.

I seldom feel the need to respond to or get worked up over Howie’s diatribes, mainly because I just take it for granted that enough people can see how clearly loony the man is. Had he been the Dems’ nominee last year, it’s quite possible that Bush would have won all 50 states (though deep blue state Vermont, Howie’s home with socialists Bernie Sanders and Ben & Jerry, would have been a toss-up). Yet even had Bush won all 50 states, the left would still insist there was no mandate.

July 29, 2005 Posted by crushliberalism | Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Appeasement and bribery never work when dealing with tyrannical forces.

Mona Charen has a great column on how well appeasement and bribery worked with North Korea, and how the left didn’t (and still doesn’t) get it. Column here, excerpt follows:

Do you remember North Korea? It’s the country Sen. John Kerry and the Democrats kept asserting was more of a threat than Saddam’s Iraq during the campaign of 2004. Funny, they haven’t mentioned it since. They’ve reverted to the customary Democratic methods of dealing with threats in non-election years: appeasement, bribery, denial and blame America — not necessarily in that order.

The Clinton administration certainly attempted the appeasement and bribery technique. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright traveled to Pyongyang to flatter the regime. In 1994, we signed the “Agreed Framework” — a deal that required North Korea to cease work on its graphite-moderated nuclear power plants (which can produce weapons-grade plutonium) and promise to sin no more. In exchange, we agreed to supply North Korea with two light water nuclear reactors (the $4 billion cost was shouldered mostly by Japan and South Korea).

Additionally, the United States agreed to supply North Korea with 500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil annually gratis, to compensate for the loss of energy from the nuclear reactors it was, in theory, shutting down. The U.S. further provided formal assurances that we had no plans to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against North Korea.
There you have the perfect liberal approach. The thinking behind it is clear as a bell. North Korea is not aggressive; it is frightened, thus the assurances about our peaceful intentions. North Korea is not building nuclear power plants in order to become a nuclear bully boy, but only for electricity for its people. We’ll cheerfully provide that.

Ya gotta long for the good ol’ days of Bill Clinton, huh? Sure, he ignored the issue of terrorism for eight years, but it’s fairly difficult to pay attention when your getting your putter polished by an intern your daughter’s age…so cut the man some slack! Sure, he sold nuclear technology to the NorKoms and ChiComs (the latter in exchange for campaign contributions). Sure, both of those things happened to compromise our national security interests under Bill Clinton’s watch…but hey, were our 401k accounts in great shape or what?! Exactly what Clinton policies or proposals contributed to the boom of the 1990′s is anyone’s guess, but don’t let a little thing like that get in the way of perpetuating ignorant assertions that the man singlehandedly improved the economy! But I digress…continuing:

It failed miserably. A few years after signing this accord, the North Koreans fired a missile over Japan. Secretary of State Albright raced to a microphone to announce that “We agree, and we have let the North Koreans know, in no uncertain terms, that the August 31 launch was a dangerous development.” But, she added stubbornly, “Our engagement with North Korea through the Agreed Framework remains central to our ability to press for restraint on missiles and for answers to our questions about suspicious underground construction activities.”

So because we were bribing them not to cheat, we’d earned the right to complain when they did? Of course the North Koreans cheated. At first they hotly denied they had cheated, but later, they proudly proclaimed the fact. Today, they claim and few doubt that they possess at least some nuclear weapons. North Korea has shared its technology in the past with Iran and Libya, and since the nation is literally starving (communist economies always produce bumper crops of poverty), and since Kim Jong Il is a vain and sinister leader, we must assume that North Korea might sell nuclear weapons to the highest bidder.

This is the table that has been set for us. While many liberals seem to think that the greatest threats we face arise from the Patriot Act or from “Bush’s lies,” the truth is that bitter and evil men still seek the power to destroy as many of us as they can possibly hit.

As many people as they can hit. Not white people. Not black people. Not conservatives or Republicans or libertarians. But as many people as they can hit. That means they want liberals dead, too. They want us ALL dead. You folks do understand that, right?

Appeasement worked with Hitler. Uh…no, wait, it didn’t. He still marched through Europe and attacked Britain, who had up to then appeased Hitler greatly.

Well, it worked with the USSR. Uh…no, wait, it didn’t. They built up a huge nuclear arsenal to use against us until they spent themselves into bankruptcy.

OK, appeasement worked with al Qaeda in Spain. Uh…no, wait, it didn’t. al Qaeda tried to attack Spain again after the gazpacho-eating surrender monkeys tucked tail at the ballot box to vote in a socialist appeaser. “Initially, it appeared that terrorists targeted Spain because of the government’s support for the U.S.-led war in Iraq. But weeks after outraged Spaniards voted out their pro-U.S. government and the new leaders announced the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq, another bomb was found on the tracks of a high-speed train line.” What?? You mean al Qaeda lied? No way!

Appeasement and bribery of evil makes the insane assumption that your good will is going to be matched by an evil entity’s good will. Does that sound the least bit rational to you?

July 29, 2005 Posted by crushliberalism | Uncategorized | Leave a Comment