Tag Archives: Big Media/Big Tech

That didn’t take long. Left and Right attack Rand Paul.

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I was pleased and surprised to see a very thoughtful defense of Rand Paul in the Wall Street Journal:
Taken at face value, the question itself–How would you have voted if you had been in the Senate as an infant?–is silly. It is a reasonable question only if it is understood more broadly, as an inquiry into Paul’s political philosophy. The question within the question is: How uncompromising are you in your adherence to small-government principles?

Paul gave his answer: Pretty darn uncompromising–uncompromising enough to take a position that is not only politically embarrassing but morally dubious by his own lights, as evidenced by this transcript from the Courier-Journal interview, provided by the left-wing site ThinkProgress.org:

Interviewer: But under your philosophy, it would be OK for Dr. King not to be served at the counter at Woolworths?

Paul: I would not go to that Woolworths, and I would stand up in my community and say that it is abhorrent, um, but, the hard part–and this is the hard part about believing in freedom–is, if you believe in the First Amendment, for example–you have too, for example, most good defenders of the First Amendment will believe in abhorrent groups standing up and saying awful things. . . . It’s the same way with other behaviors. In a free society, we will tolerate boorish people, who have abhorrent behavior.

Again, Paul could have given a “straight” answer to the question–a flat “no”–that made clear his personal disapproval of discrimination while evading what was really a question about his political philosophy. Far from being evasive, Paul has shown himself to be both candid and principled to a fault.

We do mean to a fault.

Greece Needs Capitalism and Freedom

The mainstream media would have us believe two myths about the Greek financial crisis: one, that the inability of the Greek government to meet its debt payments is a threat to the Euro and perhaps to the European Union itself; and, two, that Greek “austerity” would be a disaster for the Greek people.

The mainstream media takes it for granted that the proper “solution” is for some entity to bail out the Greeks—perhaps the European Union (EU), the European Central Bank (ECB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), or some combination. Furthermore, the assumption is that when markets go up it is due to speculation that a bailout is imminent and that when markets go down it is due to some roadblock to an expected bailout. When the governments and their agencies agree upon the proper form of new loans, and/or loan guarantees, along with a token reduction in Greek spending, all will be well. In other words, the mainstream media portrays this financial crisis as one that can only be resolved by more government intervention.

First lets look at the so-called threat to the Euro, which is equated as a threat to the EU itself. Greece uses the Euro as its legal monetary unit. When Greece joined the EuroZone (not all EU members are members of the EuroZone, meaning they have not yet exchanged their national currencies for Euros), the Greek drachma was exchanged for Euros. Now all transactions in Greece are denominated in Euros. Greek citizens buy and sell using Euros. The Greek government spends Euros and, when it runs a budget deficit, it borrows Euros from private banks…the ECB being restricted by treaty from buying sovereign debt. The Greek crisis is simply that the Greek government is spending more Euros than it receives in tax payments, and private banks are balking at lending it more.

Since the Greeks no longer have a national currency, they cannot debase it and pay off their creditors with cheapened drachmas. So, the Greek government is left with the choice of raising taxes, cutting spending, or some combination of the two that will satisfy its creditors. Now, would someone please tell me why and in what form this Greek financial crisis, serious as it is to the Greeks themselves, constitutes a threat to the Euro? (Read more from patrickbarron.blogspot.com)

Corporate Media Plays Down Pro-Illegal Immigration Thugs Who Terrorized Santa Cruz

Imagine the uproar if 200 Tea Party members had gone on a rampage through a downtown city, smashing windows, starting fires, and spraying graffiti everywhere, the corporate media would be all over it, and yet gangs of pro-illegal immigration demonstrators do this and much worse on a regular basis, with no national news coverage whatsoever.

“A large group of protesters demonstrating at a May Day rally for worker’s and immigrant rights downtown broke off into a riot vandalizing about a dozen businesses around 10:30 p.m. Saturday, police said,” reports The Santa Cruz Sentinel.

An Associated Press report states that eighteen businesses were damaged as pro-immigrants rights activists engaged in violent riots, spraying graffiti, smashing windows, setting fire to shop fronts, and causing damage to a cost of up to $100,000 dollars. (Read more from prisonplanet.com)

Government Motors is using government money to pay back government money to get more government money

Newsbusters has a nice story on this that links to a Forbes story on this house of lies. GM received $50B in bailout funds while only $6.7B of that amount was deemed a loan (at 7% interest). As most folks know, most of the bailout money was given to GM, by the US and Canadian governments, in return for a large stake in the company. As to how the loan is being paid back, as Shikha Dalmia of Forbes explains:

As it turns out, the Obama administration put $13.4 billion of the aid money as “working capital” in an escrow account when the company was in bankruptcy. The company is using this escrow money–government money–to pay back the government loan.

Additionally, as Dalmia goes on to say,

Sean McAlinden, chief economist at the Ann Arbor-based Center for Automotive Research, points out that the company has applied to the Department of Energy for $10 billion in low (5%) interest loan to retool its plants to meet the government’s tougher new CAFÉ (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards. However, giving GM more taxpayer money on top of the existing bailout would have been a political disaster for the Obama administration and a PR debacle for the company. Paying back the small bailout loan makes the new–and bigger–DOE loan much more feasible.

The gist of this is – if you didn’t catch it – that General Motors will get a DOE loan at 5% to pay off its 7% loans, so essentially it is a refinance of debt, at a lower rate, with the Government playing banker with your money. Even the awful, pro-bailout Charles Grassley referred to this as the TARP Shuffle. In a letter from Grassley to Timmy Geithner, he stated:

On Tuesday of this week, Mr. Neil Barofsky, the Special Inspector General for TARP, testified before the Senate Finance Committee. During his testimony Mr. Barofsky addressed GM’s recent debt repayment activity, and stated that the funds GM is using to repay its TARP debt are not coming from GM earnings. Instead, GM seems to be using TARP funds from an escrow account at Treasury to make the debt repayments. The most recent quarterly report from the Office of the Special Inspector General for TARP says “The source of funds for these quarterly [debt] payments will be other TARP funds currently held in an escrow account.” See, Office of the Special Inspector General for TARP, Quarterly Report to Congress dated April 20, 2010, page 115.

Furthermore, Exhibit 99.1 of the Form 8K filed by GM with the SEC on November 16, 2009, seems to confirm that the source of funds for GM’s debt repayments was a multi-billion dollar escrow account at Treasury—not from earnings.

Yet so many people, including those in the media, are swept off their feet by the lies. A really, really, really bad article on cars.com has the nerve to make this Mickey Mouse statement:

Essentially, GM no longer needs emergency government aid to stay afloat. While the taxpayer still has a sizable investment wrapped up in the automaker, GM has returned to decent health for the time being.


(Read more from lewrockwell.com)

From the Forbes article: But when Mr. Whitacre says GM has paid back the bailout money in full, he means not the entire $49.5 billion–the loan and the equity. In fact, he avoids all mention of that figure in his column. He means only the $6.7 billion loan amount.

But wait! Even that’s not the full story given that GM, which has not yet broken even, much less turned a profit, can’t pay even this puny amount from its own earnings.

So how is it paying it?

As it turns out, the Obama administration put $13.4 billion of the aid money as “working capital” in an escrow account when the company was in bankruptcy. The company is using this escrow money–government money–to pay back the government loan.

Journal editor given ultimatum over peer review

THE editor of a journal which publishes controversial medical ideas claims he has been told that he will be fired unless he agrees to make the journal peer-reviewed.

“Medical Hypotheses is the last of the non-peer-reviewed journals in the mainstream scientific literature,” says Bruce Charlton, the editor facing the ultimatum. “They are going to sack me on 11 May unless I unconditionally accept the changes to the journal.”

Elsevier, which also publishes New Scientist, is demanding the changes after it withdrew two controversial papers that Medical Hypotheses published last year, one of them questioning whether HIV causes AIDS. Following an internal review, Elsevier ordered Charlton to introduce peer review and to devote extra attention to potentially controversial articles.

Charlton says that peer review would undermine the spirit of the journal, which is to challenge prevailing dogma. At present, Charlton alone decides what to publish.

Rob Heller, a spokesman for Elsevier, says the company has acted ethically towards Charlton but, “as owner of the journal, we have every right and obligation to make the final decision on the editorial policies of the journal”. (Read more from newscientist.com)

NPR and CNN worry that Global Warming may have caused Iceland’s Volcano!!!

This is just too bizarre:

Diana Rehm (NPR): We do wonder whether there’s human involvement in all of these eruptions, earthquakes, storms –

Elise Labott (senior State Department producer for CNN): – and how much global warming has a role in it. You know we’ve seen a lot of wacky weather but that’s just a microcosm for what’s happening around the world and how much climate change is contributing to earthquakes and volcanic ash – it’s a really good

question.

(From johnrlott.blogspot.com)

WSJ shills for big government

The Wall Street journal reports (here) that

The U.S. government’s rescue of wobbly companies and financial markets is starting to look far less expensive or long-lasting than once feared.

As momentum grows at companies that looked like zombies just a few months ago to repay taxpayers for lifelines they got during the financial crisis, the projected cost of the bailout is shrinking to just a fraction of previous estimates. Treasury Department officials say the tab is likely to reach $89 billion, which includes the Troubled Asset Relief Program, capital injections into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, loan guarantees by the Federal Housing Administration and Federal Reserve moves such as buying mortgage-backed securities and propping up the commercial-paper market.

completely ignoring the Fed’s balance sheet which ballooned by over $2 trilling since January.

NY Times Obituaries for 3 Communist mass murderers, and 1 anti-Communist mass murderer

Below are the headlines of four obituaries that have run in The New York Times. The first is that of the recent obituary of the Anti-Communist Augusto Pinochet. The next three are those of the obituaries of the Communist mass murderers Mao, Stalin, and Lenin. Please be sure to note how many are described as having ruled by terror.

December 11, 2006, Augusto Pinochet, Dictator Who Ruled by Terror in Chile, Dies at 91

September 10, 1976, Friday, . . . Mao Tse-tung Dies in Peking at 82; Leader of Red China’s Revolution

March 6, 1953, Friday, Stalin Rose From Czarist Oppression to Transform Russia Into Mighty Socialist State; RUTHLESS IN MOVING TO GOALS

January 24, 1924, Thursday, ENORMOUS CROWDS VIEW LENIN’S BODY AS IT LIES IN STATE; Wait Hours in Snow and Zero Temperature Outside Moscow Nobles’ Club. COFFIN CARRIED FIVE MILES Members of Council of Commissars Stagger Under Load, Refusing Gun Caisson. LENIN CALLED A CHRISTIAN Archbishop Summons Synod to Declare Founder of Bolshevism Member of Church. ENORMOUS CROWDS VIEW LENIN’S BODY

(Read more from blog.mises.org)

Few More Sources Pick Up Metal Manipulation Story

Huffington Post: It’s Ponzimonium in the Gold Market

PR Newswire: Silver Short Squeeze Could Be Imminent
JP Morgan took over the concentrated short position in silver from Bear Stearns and gained complete control over the paper price of silver. Within weeks, JP Morgan was able to manipulate the price of silver down to below $9 per ounce. NIA believes they were able to drive the price of silver down through “naked short selling,” selling paper silver that is unbacked by physical silver.

Torture Apologist become Washington Post Columnist & Obama’s indifference

“Courting Disaster” (Regnery; $29.95), by Marc A. Thiessen, a former speechwriter in the Bush Administration, begins by imagining the horror that would have resulted had the plot succeeded. He conjures fifteen hundred dead airline passengers, televised “images of debris floating in the ocean,” and gleeful jihadis issuing fresh threats: “We will rain upon you such terror and destruction that you will never know peace.”

The plot, of course, was thwarted—an outcome that has been credited to smart detective work. But Thiessen writes that there is a more important reason that his dreadful scenario never came to pass: the Central Intelligence Agency provided the United Kingdom with pivotal intelligence, using “enhanced interrogation techniques” approved by the Bush Administration.

. . . .

Yet Thiessen is better at conveying fear than at relaying the facts. His account of the foiled Heathrow plot, for example, is “completely and utterly wrong,” according to Peter Clarke, who was the head of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorism branch in 2006. “The deduction that what was being planned was an attack against airliners was entirely based upon intelligence gathered in the U.K.,” Clarke said, adding that Thiessen’s “version of events is simply not recognized by those who were intimately involved in the airlines investigation in 2006.” Nor did Scotland Yard need to be told about the perils of terrorists using liquid explosives. The bombers who attacked London’s public-transportation system in 2005, Clarke pointed out, “used exactly the same materials.”

Thiessen’s claim about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed looks equally shaky.

. . . .

Recently, Thiessen was hired by the Washington Post as an online columnist. Neither a journalist nor a terrorism expert, he got his start as a publicist for conservative politicians, among them Jesse Helms, the late Republican senator from North Carolina. After Bush’s election in 2000, he began writing speeches for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and, eventually, became a speechwriter in the Bush White House.

. . . .

Thiessen’s effort to rewrite the history of the C.I.A.’s interrogation program comes not long after a Presidential race in which both the Republican and the Democratic nominees agreed that state-sponsored cruelty had damaged and dishonored America. The publication of “Courting Disaster” suggests that Obama’s avowed determination “to look forward, not back” has laid the recent past open to partisan reinterpretation. By holding no one accountable for past abuse, and by convening no commission on what did and didn’t protect the country, President Obama has left the telling of this dark chapter in American history to those who most want to whitewash it. (Read more from newyorker.com)