All H8, All the Time

By On in Society · Add Comment

When California was considering Proposition 8 which amended the California constitution to make the definition of marriage what it always was—the union of a man and a woman—gay marriage advocates responded with the “No H8” campaign featuring something called Hollywood luminaries with “No H8” written on their cheeks and their mouths covered with duct tape. The clever play on words was a lie. Gay marriage advocates are all hate, all the time.

Judge Vaughn Walker, who failed to reveal that he was in a long-term homosexual relationship, ruled that the only reason that a majority of Californians passed Proposition 8 was that they hate gays. This was same state that was among the first to award all of the legal implements of marriage in the form of “civil unions.” There couldn’t be any reason for keeping the traditional male-female definition of marriage other than hate. The only hate was coming from Judge Walker as he had the proceedings videotaped and then proceeded to illegally release them after promising not to.

Walker, through his actions, tried to further inflame the gay mob that had used publicly available donor records to the Yes on 8 campaign to harass those opposed same-sex “marriage.”

And with last week’s Supreme Court hearings on Prop. 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act, the hate, vitriol and bias targeted at supporters of traditional marriage continued. On CNN, Piers Morgan (a useless British twit) had on Suze Orman to debate Ryan T. Anderson of the Heritage Foundation and one of the co-authors of What Is Marriage?: Man and Woman: A Defense. Only Anderson didn’t get to sit at the same table as Morgan and Orman. Morgan also repeatedly invited his left-leaning studio audience to express their displeasure at Anderson’s arguments.

On Saturday, it got much worse. Pastor Rick Warren’s 27-year-old son committed suicide. In the midst of the family’s sorrow, the No H8ers unleashed the hate that burns in their hearts.

You can find, among hundreds of comments on USA TODAY’s news story on Matthew’s death, comments such as the Cincinnati poster who says, "Either there is no God, or God doesn’t listen to Rick Warren, despite all the money Rick has made off of selling false hope to desperate people." In another comment, the same poster counsels Warren to "abandon primitive superstitions and accept the universe for what it is — a place that is utterly indifferent to us."

Some rush to add pain to the Warrens’ world because, in their view, he did not show sufficient compassion for the unremitting pain suffered by gay youths rejected by parents and peers. They were outraged when Warren took a political stand for Prop 8, which overturned legal same-sex marriage in California in 2008 and is now before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Others have appointed themselves 140-character theologians in a debate over whether someone once saved can lose his or her salvation if suicide is against God’s law. These posters, rather than waiting for Judgment Day, have ruled for hell.

You can see some more of the hate from Twitter gathered by SooperMexican here.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The gay rights movement doesn’t want tolerance, it wants acceptance. You’re not allowed to disagree with their goals or even their methods. If you do, you get the hate, vitriol and anger. The mask has slipped, but don’t expect much of the media to notice or call out the malefactors. Privately, they’re largely saying and thinking the same things.

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Hoystory and guns

By On in Democrats, Gun control, Personal · Add Comment

Two weeks ago I was in Las Vegas for the Mountain West Conference basketball tournament and because of the limited airline options in the Central Coast region of California, I arrived in Sin City several days before the tournament started.

There are a variety of businesses in Las Vegas that offer visitors the opportunity to fire a variety of guns, including fully automatic weapons. Since this is something I’m unlikely to ever get to do in California, I decided to take the plunge and spent a little over an hour firing a variety of guns. I fired a fully automatic Thompson machine gun (unfortunately without a drum magazine), an AK-47 and several other guns.

One weapon I decided to try out was the AR-15, since it’s been in the news a lot lately. It’s a nice gun. The one I used came with a laser sight on it which gave it a little bit of a video game feel. Most of the reporting you’ve heard in the mainstream media on this gun—that it’s a high-powered assault rifle designed to kill people—is a load of crap. The AR-15 isn’t high-powered. The cartridge is tiny and the thing barely has any kick at all. (The Desert Eagle 44 Magnum handgun that I fired does kick like a mule.)

What ticks me off most about the silliness of “assault weapons” bans and the absolute moral authority of Dianne Feinstein because she saw the bodies of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk (both shot by a madman with a revolver—not a rifle) is that it is somehow a substitute for serious discussion of policy.

What also ticks me off is the opportunism and hypocrisy of former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly.

Gabby Giffords AR-15 target via Breitbart.com. Hoystory AR-15 target.

Gabby Giffords AR-15 target via Breitbart.com. Hoystory AR-15 target.

Mark Kelly was recently caught purchasing an AR-15 in Arizona. A former space shuttle pilot, Kelly was allegedly making the purchase to show how easy it is to get a gun if the government has in the past trusted you with a billion-dollar spacecraft or something.

That also led the to release of a photo of Giffords in less hypocritical times with an AR-15 that she had fired repeatedly. Note that Giffords’ shooter was a nutcase with a Glock 19 handgun, not the scary-looking AR-15 that everyone wants to ban.

Take a close look at those two images above. A few things to note:

  • Unlike Giffords, I shot at a target that was not an image of a human being. (The Gun Store in Las Vegas does have a variety of targets, including ones like the one Giffords shot at along with Zombies and Clowns and Zombie Clowns.)
  • You’ve got to admit that Giffords target was asking for it. A Bezerkley cap in Arizona?
  • Prior to this experience, the last time I’d shot a gun was 20+ years ago in college.
  • That’s a pretty good grouping for someone who hasn’t fired a lot of guns.
  • I think I’m a better shot than Giffords.
  • Less of a hypocrite too.
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Return to normalcy—sort of

By On in Personal · Add Comment

OK, so the website should appear more normal than it has the past few weeks after I did some upgrading to the theme. I’ve still got a list of things to do, including some CSS editing, adding some additional graphics, etc.

The Post Ratings will hopefully return. I’ve got to get some answers on how to customize some of the php to allow that.

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The moral bankruptcy caused by abortion

By On in Abortion, Media · Add Comment

The Kermit Gosnell trial is going on in Pennsylvania. You’ll be forgiven if you didn’t see any coverage of it on the evening news. The famous Clinton formulation of keeping abortion “safe, legal and rare” is two-thirds lies. Legal is the only important one which is why Gosnell was able to run his house of horrors for so long.

And don’t think the media isn’t complicit in this . My senior project for my degree in journalism nearly 20 years ago was a study on how the Los Angeles Times routinely shaded their coverage of the abortion issue to the “abortion rights” side.

In an Associated Press story on the Gosnell trial we see just how far this groupthink has led American society from seeing the evil right in front of its eyes.

Moton, 35, had lived with Gosnell’s family during high school because of problems at home, then went to work for him years later. She earned about $10 an hour , off the books , to administer drugs, perform ultrasounds, help with abortions and dispose of fetal remains from 2005 to 2008.

She once had to kill a baby delivered in a toilet, cutting its neck with scissors, she said. Asked if she knew that was wrong, she said, "At first I didn’t."

Abortions are typically performed in utero.

Seriously? Yes, abortions are typically performed in utero (or if it’s an ectopic pregnancy in the fallopian tube) because when you kill a baby outside the womb we have a couple different words for it: infanticide, murder, homicide.

For the record: This is what is known as the Obama position on abortion. An abortion always results in a death. Even if the now-baby is somehow delivered alive, is living and breathing on its own, if the mother wanted it dead, it should die.

I hold out hope that eventually our society—and every society—will come to realize the moral depravity and horror that is abortion. Just don’t expect the media to champion this civil rights issue.

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Things that make you go ‘hmmmm…’

By On in Media, Republicans · Add Comment

Try this one on for size:

More voters trust the Democratic Party than the Republican Party on budgetary issues, according to the results of a new poll for The Hill — even though a strong majority actually prefer Republican fiscal policies.

What could explain this strange phenomenon?

The discrepancy would appear to be rooted in the GOP’s image problem, as the party attempts to recover from a bruising general election and recalibrate for a new generation of voters.

While the GOP is certainly partly to blame for its “image problem,” I would attach more blame to the media that has gleefully joined in with cheerleading the Obama position that there is absolutely nothing to cut in the federal budget—except White House tours.

The recent sequester fight is a case in point:

Joe Vornehm of Simpsonville, S.C., pulled out his ruler to count the number of column inches his local newspaper, the Gannett-owned Greenville News, had written about the budget impasse in Washington.

He found 42.5 inches on the Obama administration’s position, 6.5 inches he described as neutral and 7.5 inches on the Republican position.

…

The press has taken up the administration’s strategy, generally known as “firemen first” in political terms. When a city or state government faces a budget shortfall, the politicians immediately wring their hands and say cops and firefighters will be the first to go if taxes aren’t raised or a bond issue isn’t passed. It’s the same kind of scare tactic the media are propagating about the sequester clash. In a recent Gallup poll, more than half of those questioned didn’t really know what to think. The poll represents an honest view; the media have pushed an agenda.

And they’ve been doing it for years on every conceivable subject. The sequester was a less than 3 percent across-the-board cut. For the average American, that might be the equivalent of one less night out a month—unfortunate—but hardly the tragedy the Obama administration was peddling beforehand.

And the mainstream media wring their hands when polls show that only 6 percent of Americans are complete fools.

Journalism. Wound. Self-inflicted.

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The stupid, it burns

By On in Democrats, Idiots, Taxes · 4 Comments

So, as part of my other job that must-not-be-named I found myself over at Mother Jones, reading this article by David Corn. There’s far less to the article than Corn would have you believe. Corn attempts to make a lot of hay out four non-committal sentences in an interview House Speaker John Boehner gave back in 2011 after the sequester had been passed.

This is not about that article, but about the denizens of the comment section attached to the aforementioned article.

After one undoubtedly right-wing commenter not-so innocently asked “but haven’t we just had a tax increase,” the alternative reality of the left came down in full force. Instead of simply acknowledging that yes, we just had a tax increase but it’s not enough, the rich still have too much money, we get:

No, Dave. The Bush tax cuts–which added over one-and-a-half trillion dollars to the deficit and benefited mostly the mega rich–expired. We need tax revenues to bring down the deficit. The best people to handle the burn are the ones who got the richest from the Bush cuts over ten years and did nothing with them but send jobs overseas, speculate wildly on the stock market and crash our economy, practice business leveraging, which destroyed jobs, and parked their money in offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes like the rest of us did.

Set the super-paranoid class warfare aside for a moment and let’s focus on a couple of the supposed factual statements. First, the “cost” of the Bush tax cuts to the government, even by the left’s own bean-counters was only $955 billion over 10 years. But what’s being $545 billion off when there’s vitriol to be spewed.

Second, how exactly does allowing a lower tax rate to expire and rise to a higher one, not a tax hike. My comment:

“But haven’t we just had a tax increase.”

“No, Dave. The Bush tax cuts … expired.”

So, if you were paying less taxes before and now you’re paying more, that’s not a tax increase? Because…

Orwellian.

Reality-based denizen:

Because we have just relinquished tax cuts to return to normal tax rates.  That is restoring tax rates, not raising them.

My response:

So, if we went back to pre-JFK era tax rates where the top marginal rate was over 75 percent, that wouldn’t be a tax hike either because we’d just be “restoring” tax rates.

The only way to ever have taxes raised would be to set a rate that would be higher than they’d ever been before in recorded history. Anything short of that is “restoring” earlier rates.

You’re like a bunch of 14-year-olds playing word games.

And that’s the logic of the denial of the fact that tax rates just went up. My paycheck is smaller this year than last not because I’m in the $400,000+ income bracket, but because the 2 percent FICA tax “holiday” expired. Did my taxes go up? Not according to these geniuses, but however they want to describe it, I’ve got less money in my wallet because of it.

Reality-based denizen:

Matthew Hoy:  “So, if we went back to pre-JFK era tax rates…”

So, I am the one playing word games?

I don’t like having my taxes increased any more than you but I understand what just happened and I can explain it in rational terms even if I don’t like it.  Taxes didn’t go up- the temporary reduction expired and they returned to pre-stimulus levels (for the working class anyway).  Tax cuts for the wealthy for the past thirty plus years were permanent so if theirs go up, that will be an increase.

Only one of the two tax reductions resulted in destroying the economy.  Can you guess which one?  Of course you can’t because there is no irrational answer that is a correct answer.

My response:

Matthew Hoy:  “So, if we went back to pre-JFK era tax rates…”

RudyTwoShoes: So, I am the one playing word games?

That’s a hypothetical. Saying that if your tax rate goes from “a” to “a+2″ isn’t an “increase” because it was “a+2″ 11 years ago is contorting the meaning of increase into something that it is not. That is a word game.

Just out of curiosity. Which tax increase “resulted in destroying the economy?”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/obamas-claim-that-the-bush-tax-cuts-led-to-the-economic-crisis/2012/09/30/06e8f578-0a6e-11e2-afff-d6c7f20a83bf_blog.html

Follow the link if you like, but briefly it’s the Washington Post fact-checker giving Obama’s claim during the 2012 election that the Bush tax cuts caused the recession Three Pinnochios. It would’ve been five Pinnochios had the parties been reversed.

Finally, there was some brief back-and-forth with an individual I can only guess is still suffering from a serious case of Bush Derangement Syndrome and should be institutionalized.

The Bush tax cuts were never permanent. They were an executive order–

My response:

First statement is true. Second one is false. The president can’t change tax rates by executive order.

The idiot:

And yet, he did with some help from Darth Cheney and friends.

Really?

And I can assure you that that jackass votes—probably early and often.

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More on women in combat

By On in Military · 2 Comments

So, a thoughtful young lady posted a comment on my previous post regarding the foolish decision by the Obama administration to open up combat positions in the military to women. The worst part about this whole issue is that there hasn’t been nearly the serious discussion of this issue in the media and society as a whole that it deserves.

As we have this discussion, let’s not forget that the purpose of the military is to kill people and break things.

Before I get to Laura’s main argument, I want to point out a few things she doesn’t address.

First, War is Hell.

Second, men and women are different, both physically and psychologically. I understand men just fine. Women are completely nuts. To focus on the physical differences between the sexes is important, but it’s not the totality of the situation. Many men have a hard time with post-traumatic stress disorder and men are by their very nature more aggressive, have a heightened “fight” tendency when it comes to “flight or fight,” etc.

Now, to Laura:

But they should still be given the same chance as men. Open the horizons for them, and then see who rises up and takes the challenge. And as for changing the fitness requirements for women, you said yourself that the body types and capabilities are different, so why should biology stop a woman from succeeding? If she is willing to put in the work and can logically achieve success as well, why not make an ‘equivalent’ fitness requirement for women that takes their biology into account and makes it the ‘same’ standard as for men?

I would encourage Laura to start by reading this column by Maggie Gallagher for starters and reflect briefly on Marine Capt. Katie Petronio’s experience in what is technically a non-combat role.

Now I’d like to point out that an “equivalent” fitness requirement isn’t the “same” even if you put quotes around the words. If a man has to be able to run two miles in 15:54 and a woman in 18:54, then the standards aren’t the same. And in combat those two numbers—and many others—can mean the difference between life and death for not just the individual, but an entire squad. Is a Taliban fighter going to give a female infantryman a 3 minute head start?

Take a long hard look at what Vietnam POWs such as John McCain endured during captivity. Are we willing, as a society, to allow women to endure that—and far, far worse—in the name of opening “horizons” for them?

My answer would be “no.”

But that’s probably just because I’m a Neanderthal who believes in chivalry.

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The country’s in the very best of hands

By On in Democrats, Economics · Add Comment

Earlier this year, President Obama disbanded his Jobs Council. With the election won, Obama didn’t need the flimsy cover that he actually cared about creating jobs anymore. Not that it mattered—the council seldom met and accomplished nothing.

But at least the jobs council had people on it who created actual jobs. On Thursday, Obama sought economic advice from a group of people’s whose policies over the past several decades have led to consistently higher black unemployment rates and the destruction of the black family.

Participants in the meeting included:

• Melanie Campbell, President, National Coalition of Black Civic Participation
• Ralph Everett, President, Joint Center for Economic and Political Studies
• Wade Henderson, President, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
• Ben Jealous, President, National Association of the Advancement of Colored People
• Avis Jones-DeWeever, Executive Director, National Council of Negro Women
• Sharon J. Lettman-Hicks, Executive Director, National Black Justice Coalition
• Al Sharpton, Founder and President of National Action Network
• Rev Derrick Harkins, 19th Street Baptist Church
• Judith Browne Dianis, Co-Director, Advancement Project

No surprise, really, that Obama would include slanderer Al Sharpton in his little powwow. Is the way to get the economy running to accuse prosecutors of rape and then get sued for slander? Trickle-down economics works when the money comes from lawyers’ fees?

In other economic news, higher taxes lead to less spending. And if you’ll recall, “the rich” weren’t the only ones to get their taxes hiked on January 1.

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Consistently dishonest

By On in Media, Politics · Add Comment

Politifraud stepped in it again this week when it decided to intent-check a statement made by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio during the GOP response to President Obama’s State of the Union speech.

RubioPolitifactSequester

The statement Politifraud wanted to check was this:

"Tonight, he even criticized us for refusing to raise taxes to delay military cuts – cuts that were his idea in the first place," Rubio said.
For the record, Obama didn’t make that specific criticism in his speech, but here we’re focusing on the second half of Rubio’s statement about where the idea of the cuts originated.

After some history of how the sequester came into being, we get down to brass tacks.

Some of the most detailed reporting on sequestration is from Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward and his book The Price of Politics. Woodward’s reporting shows clearly that defense sequestration was an idea that came out of Obama’s White House.

In a world with an honest fact-checker, this would rate Rubio’s statement “True.” In a world where you had an honest liberal fact-checker, Rubio’s statement would be rated “True, but…here’s some more context.”

Unfortunately, Politifraud resides in neither of those worlds and we get “Half True.” Why?

Our ruling
Rubio said the defense cuts known that are part of sequestration were Obama’s "idea in the first place."

That doesn’t tell the whole story — particularly the fact that Obama does not favor these cuts. The White House proposed them as a means of driving the two sides to a compromise over the deficit, not as a real-world spending plan.

Still, the idea did originate with Obama’s team. We rate Rubio’s statement Half True.

Obama doesn’t favor these cuts? Four months ago he was willing to veto any bill passed to repeal them that did not meet his warped definition of balanced.

Obama has said previously that he does not want the cuts to occur, but he’s threatened to veto any bills that do away with them without a “balanced” solution to replace the cuts, which hit both defense and non-defense discretionary spending.

I will note that Politifraud has been consistent in its dishonesty, having rated an identical statement by GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney on the issue “Half True” last year. When Obama claims the sequestration “is not something I proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed,” he only gets a “Mostly False.”

It shouldn’t be so hard to rate a simple fact statement. And it wouldn’t if the partisan hacks at Politifraud were honest brokers. Instead of rating a fact statement, they’re determined to investigate intent and if they don’t like your intent, they’ll downgrade their rating.

Let’s imagine another alternate world for a second. Let’s say that in Obamaworld the sequestration idea is politically popular—certainly on the left and in the nation as a whole and enjoys 60%+ support in several major polls. At one of his frequent press conferences (this is an alternate reality, remember), Obama touts the sequester and says it was his idea and he opposes GOP efforts to undo it.

How would Politifraud rate the president’s statement? True? Half-true because a handful of Republicans originally voted for it?

This is the sort of mess you find yourself in when you get off facts and into intent. Unfortunately, it’s where Politifact and its editors live.

Addendum: I think that the algorithms at Google agree with me about labeling the Tampa Bay Times’ creature Politifraud. Take a look past the jump to find out why.

Continue Reading

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The Obama Economy

By On in Democrats, Economics · Add Comment

Saturday night I went to see the Fresno Philharmonic with my best girl. (The concert was great, by the way.) The next day she showed me the following advertisement in the program.

HomeWithinHome

You’ll have to excuse the flare from the flash on my camera phone, but I thought Lennar’s “The Home Within a Home” (Service Marked no less!) designed for “kids who’ve returned home” was a fine example of how business has been forced to adapt to the Obama economy. 

And it’s the epiphany model!

“Yes, you screwed up and re-elected him, now you’ve better hope you’ve got the capital for a new home for you, and your 20-something kids!”

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