TELLING IT LIKE IT IS !

Air America Crashes, Burns — Will Anyone Besides Franken and Maddow Notice?

Posted by Dana Loesch Jan 21st 2010 at 5:01 pm in Air America, NPR, Talk Radio, liberal media, media bias

Air America announced today, with little fanfare, that it is ceasing operations and filing for bankruptcy, citing “tough economic times” as the reason. Quite honestly, I’m shocked that they didn’t blame Bush. Or global warming.

It’s not the economy, stupid.

Talk radio continues to thrive and do exceptionally well – in the conservative market. There is a reason for this, and it has nothing to do with unfairness but everything to do with the free market.

Mainstream media operates as little more than a mouthpiece for the current administration. Every nightly news anchor from Katie Couric to Brian Williams has an acknowledged bias – different from people like Keith Olbermann and Glenn Beck who have admitted biases, whose programming operates not as news, but as op/ed. Newspapers more often than not also have a slant – this according to a Pew Research Center poll: Seventy-four percent said news organizations tend to favor one side in dealing with political and social issues. Eighteen percent said they deal fairly with all sides.

The accompanying headline for this poll? “Public Trust in US Media Eroding.”

Why is it eroding? Because people aren’t sheep; they recognize the bias – “objective” journalists refuse to acknowledge what the public knows anyway and continue to operate under the assumption that they’re delivering the straight story and when they aren’t, no one can tell.

So why would people want to listen to admittedly biased radio programming that is little more than an echo of what they hear on television or read in the paper? Liberal talk on the radio doesn’t perform well because it is not a sequestered to a niche – It’s everywhere in the media universe. Conservative talk radio. on the other hand, performs well because the radio is the only place, besides Fox News that people can go for right-sphere opinions.

Which is why, with the failure of Air America, expect the left to ratchet up its demand for a renewal of the Fairness Doctrine as a way for it to survive on the radio while the right demands nothing similar of the television and newspaper industries – the latter of which is currently requesting public financing or tax credits. NPR gets taxpayer dollars and still slants to the left, as evidenced by their recent “Learn to Speak Tea Bag” video.

Liberal radio performs poorly because its format already dominates other markets. And it will continue to perform poorly until the day comes when the rest of the media is at least balanced, if not fair.

The hitch is that the man-caused catastrophic global warming theory is dead, and it needs to be buried. Evidence had been mounting for years that there were problems with the global warming model; most telling was that the globe refused to warm up. Carbon emissions continued apace, but the world began cooling. This is why true believers abandoned the “global warming” brand name and tried to shift the debate to the more ambiguous label “climate change,” which is something the rest of us like to refer to as “weather.”

The dam broke with Climategate when hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit revealed that global warming advocates had for years attempted to hide conflicting data and silence their professional critics. British authorities have determined that the university broke freedom-of-information laws by denying information to scientists seeking to check claims that global warming was caused by human activity.

Evidence is emerging that the data had been rigged all along. Russian analysts noted that British temperature calculations excluded data from 40% of Russian territory, much of which showed no increase in temperature in the past 50 years. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also cherry-picked data, cutting Canadian data sources from 600 to 35 and relying on only one monitor for all of Canada above the Arctic Circle. This was done even though Canada operates 1,400 weather stations, 100 of which are in the Arctic.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is having its own scandal regarding a finding in its Nobel Peace Prize-winning 2007 report that glaciers in India were rapidly disappearing. It is now revealed that this dramatic claim was based not on years of patient observation and research but anecdotes from a hiking magazine and a student’s master’s thesis. IPCC Chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri knew about the erroneous information before December’s Copenhagen climate summit but maintained the falsehood. He even denounced a report from India that showed the glaciers were in far less jeopardy as “unsubstantiated research.”

Climate scientists have to come to grips with some highly inconvenient truths. World temperatures continue to decline as carbon emissions increase. Chilly Scotland is facing its coldest winter in a century. Arctic sea ice is not vanishing. Polar bears are experiencing a baby boom. Water vapor appears to play as important a role in the climate as carbon emissions. Sunspot activity may be more important than both combined. Meanwhile, climate change fanatics seek to blame capitalism and productivity for global warming, global cooling, too much snow, not enough snow, hurricanes, tornadoes and even the Haiti earthquake.

The increasingly discredited theory of carbon-based, man-caused global warming needs to be discarded, and the scientists who sought to squelch skeptics and artificially inflate their own reputations must be disciplined. This deception needs to cease as does the teaching and indoctrination of it in schools, universities, and society. Too many lies are being taught by ideologues without proof.

Yes, we need to be good stewards of the earth but not worship it. Natural resources were given to humankind to utilize and manage for their benefit.  The more efficiently this is accomplished, and wisdom we use in that accomplishment, the better it will be. There is always room for more technologies that will help this happen.

When the “Green Police” commercial came on during the Super Bowl, I was at first distracted.  As the commercial wore on, however, it seems the commercial is an attempt at humor from Audi, which can be taken one of two ways.

Way #1: Audi is as fed up as most of us with the legalistic approach of government-worshippers who want to enforce responsible behavior through the power of the state.  In a good stab at such misguided beliefs, Audi basically tried to sell an awesome car to people fed up with getting in trouble with the viciously politically correct.  I am okay with this view, though the imagery was still very scary.

Way #2: Audi agreed with the stance that would require governmentally enforced global eco-wackoism and thought it was funny to poke fun at people who don’t share the extreme “granola” viewpoint.

Obviously, the commercial was so controversial because it rang close to the truth.  Many of us share the viewpoint that ecological hysteria is being used to increase statist’s power at the expense of individual freedom.  Just like wars, if a government can get people freaked out enough (i.e. the world is coming to an end, we will be nuked in five minutes, the earth is going to overheat, the polar ice-caps are melting, global warming, and now, the ever-flexible “climate change”-allowing people to freak out when temperatures trend in either direction) then they can justify taking emergency, draconian measures to enforce their “protection.”  It used to be that this protection was from enemies in war.  Now the protection is against ourselves and neighbors who dare to flush their toilets a bit too often.

This is tragic.

Why? … because the loss of individual freedom will kill everything else.  The parasite in totalitarian government always ends up killing its host (usually millions at a time).

But there is another tragedy, too.  It is the tragedy that will certainly befall our environment if the extremists succeed in giving something like the Green Police the power the commercial showed us.  What some don’t seem to understand is that totalitarian, tyrannical, communistic, socialistic governments have a very consistent track record of being the worst polluters.

For those of us who truly enjoy nature and care about passing a clean, well-cared-for planet on to our grandchildren, and who also realize that the private sector is more effective at administering nearly anything when compared to pervasive governments, the issue is a hot one.  There is no way a statist power of even the most invasive kind can effectively control the behavior of 6 billion people.  It is up to individual responsibility and stewardship.  This has always been accomplished best through community activism, social norms, private enterprise, proper incentives aligned to reinforce the correct behavior, and the like.  None of these are perfect, and we have a long way to go, (if only all the effort toward empowering government toward this end were being used to empower the private sector) but, rest assured, they will far surpass the efforts of any government to make a difference, and, they come with the additional benefit of individual freedom instead of its opposite.

Government is like a sledge hammer.  It is only good at one thing, and the use of a sledgehammer is obvious.  However, when you are a sledgehammer, every problem tends to look like a cinder block in need of smashing.  A sledgehammer can be used to cut a board in half, but it will do a messy and destructive job of it.  (Don’t even get me started on how the sledgehammer works on the economy!)  The board may eventually be pulverized into two pieces, but not as effectively as it would have had the correct tool been used.

The question isn’t whether or not we should be responsible stewards of planet earth.  Of course we should.  The question is rather which tool is most appropriate to bring about the most effective results.  History is clear that individual initiative and the private sector properly incentivized are consistently far superior to the government sledgehammer.  The people who don’t believe this don’t read history, I guess, or haven’t traveled enough to third world countries.  Or maybe, just maybe, they simply want the power and prestige governmental decree in service to a worthy political correctness can bring.

First the Obama administration backed off on prosecuting pornography and drug use, and now it’s hoping to ease restrictions on international sex trafficking.  With barely a peep from the press, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is trying to overturn a key policy of PEPFAR-the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.  Under this new rule, the countries that receive HIV/AIDS dollars under PEPFAR would no longer have to oppose prostitution and sex trafficking-which was a condition of the funding under President Bush.

Since 2003, PEPFAR has been one of the most successful initiatives launched by the U.S. government to combat HIV/AIDS in Africa.  It was initially passed in 2003 with the anti-sex trafficking provision, and both were reauthorized last year.  Every time this program comes before Congress, anti-prostitution organizations have fought to ensure that your taxpayer dollars wouldn’t flow to organizations that promote the trafficking of human beings.

Apparently, the Obama administration thinks that position is too restrictive.  Instead of protecting the most vulnerable, this President is trying to relax the rules for groups that exploit women and children!  Not only is prostitution associated with several health, emotional, and physical risks, but it’s also one of the leading causes of HIV/AIDS in these regions.  Some reports estimate that close to 70% of prostitutes in certain areas are infected with this disease.  Of course, this begs the question: Why would we fund the fight against HIV/AIDS in Africa if our own policy is promoting it?

Senator Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) ability to sway all 60 Democratic Senators to vote for his health care bill monstrosity wasn’t an exploit of legislative prowess-but taxpayer-funded bribery. On the heels of the “Louisiana Purchase,” a deal that saw Senator Mary Landrieu (D-La.) pocket $300 million in pork, Senator Reid stuffed billions more into the Democrats’ stockings in exchange for their crucial Sunday night vote. In the leadership’s edition of “Let’s Make a Deal,” Senator Ben Nelson (D-Nebr.) was the biggest winner of all. While Americans in the other 49 states will have to pick up the tab for the bill’s expansion in Medicaid, the Nebraska Democrat made sure his state got off scot-free. He traded in his pro-life scruples for a guarantee that the Cornhuskers will never pay a cent toward the government’s plan. And for what? An abortion “compromise” that may actually be worse than the actual bill.

Under Senator Nelson’s opt-out plan, states can refuse to offer abortion coverage-but their taxpayers will still be subsidizing the states that don’t! Meanwhile, the senators from Vermont and Massachusetts watched the Nebraska deal unfold and decided to negotiate for something similar. All together, these statewide exemptions could cost a minimum of $1.2 billion! Pennsylvania, New York, and Florida all protected their Medicare programs from cuts, while other states will have to find ways to manage with the scaled-back program in the underlying legislation.

Also, Senators Nelson and Carl Levin (D-Mich.) have made sure that certain insurance companies in their states are off the hook from a new $7 billion dollar tax. On page 328 of Senator Reid’s manager’s amendment, Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), the master of illicit sweetheart deals, got his kickback-a $100 million bonus for the University of Connecticut to do with whatever they want. A staunch supporter of the public option, Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) was “persuaded” to drop his concerns after Senator Reid offered his state a $10 billion grant for “community health centers”-money that could easily be funneled to facilities that perform abortions. Playing hard-to-get certainly has its advantages in this new political climate.

Yesterday, some of the Democrats who didn’t get the same incentives are kicking themselves. When Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) couldn’t get past the reporters swarming Ben Nelson on her way to the cloture vote, she quipped, “I know I’m not as important as Senator Nelson. I didn’t get the money for my state. I was too stupid.” To read more about how this bill could destroy American medicine, check out this excellent op-ed from Sunday’s Wall Street Journal, ” Change Nobody Believes In.” We do have one quibble with the article though. Senator Nelson might think he got abortion restrictions (he didn’t), but even he admits he isn’t quite sure.

Geraldo, Dr. Phil, Lindsey Graham, Evan Thomas and others … get your heads out of the sand! Stop trying to protect Islam. Shame on those trying to medicalize mass murder. Call him what he is … a terrorist … he is a coward and a murderer. Stop inventing excuses due to political correctness. Political correctness is a danger to society.

The system has bought into political correctness and the media is all too happy to applaud it … it hasn’t just killed real journalism … it has now killed real Americans! Every pontificating politically correct official, who has been too cowardly to do the right thing, should be held accountable as accomplices to those murdered!

Most of FOXNews, less Geraldo, and ABC are the only mainstream media who are actually doing their homework. Even the FBI ruled out links to terrorism right at the beginning saying they didn’t want to go down that road.

U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al-Qaida, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case told ABC News, according to an ABCNews.com report.

Hasan, murderer of 13 people and wounding 29 others at Fort Hood, also worshipped at the same mosque as two of the 9/11 terrorists. According to the London Sunday Telegraph, Hasan attended services at the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Va., during 2001 at the same time as Sept. 11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hamzi and Hani Hanjour. Funeral services for Hasan’s mother also was held at that mosque. The imam at the mosque at the time Hasan attended services there was Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric who has been described as a supporter of al-Qaida. A third 9/11 hijacker attended al-Awlaki’s lectures in California. Now, the FBI wants to interrogate Hasan to see if he met or knew al-Hamzi or Hanjour, reports the Telegraph.

Lieberman, senate panel chair said, “There are very, very strong warning signs here that Dr Hasan had become an Islamist extremist and, therefore, that this was a terrorist act,” he told Fox News. “If that is true, the murder of these 13 people was a terrorist act.” There will now be a senate panel probe whether the army missed warning signs that Hasan, a army psychiatrist, may have been preparing an attack.

Hasan also made a six figure salary yet lived very low key … where did his money go? Following the money will yield important results.

Radical Islam comes from Islam and nowhere else … those are the roots. There are some great Americans who are classified Muslim, that is because they are classified that from their birth heritage, but do not practice Islam to the radical extent … sort of like “Islam-lite.”

When it is all said and done, there must be a change in policies to eliminate this political “incorrectness” disguised as diversity that provides dangerous protectionism policies to specific people groups.

As the suicidal Democratic congressmen proceed to rubber-stamp the Obama healthcare reform despite the drubbing their party took in the 2009 elections, the president trotted out the endorsements of the AMA and the AARP to stimulate support. But these – and the other endorsements – his package has received are all bought and paid for.

Here are some of the deals:

• The American Medical Association (AMA) was facing a 21% cut in physicians’ reimbursements under the current law. Obama promised to kill the cut if they backed his bill. The cuts are the fruit of a law requiring annual 5% to 6% reductions in doctor reimbursements for treating Medicare patients. Bravely, each year Congress has rolled the cuts over, suspending them but not repealing them. So each year, the accumulated cuts threaten doctors. By now, they have risen to 21%. With this blackmail leverage, Obama compelled the AMA to support his bill … or else!

• The AARP got a financial windfall in return for its support of the healthcare bill. Over the past decade, the AARP has morphed from an advocacy group to an insurance company (through its subsidiary company). It is one of the main suppliers of Medi-gap insurance, a high-cost, privately purchased coverage that picks up where Medicare leaves off. But President Bush (43) passed the Medicare Advantage program, which offered a subsidized, lower-cost alternative to Medi-gap. Under Medicare Advantage, the elderly get all the extra coverage they need plus coordinated, well-managed care, usually by the same physician. So more than 10 million seniors went with Medicare Advantage, cutting into AARP Medi-gap revenues.

Presto! Obama solved their problem. He eliminates subsidies for Medicare Advantage. The elderly will have to pay more for coverage under Medigap, but the AARP – which supposedly represents them – will make more money. (If this galls you, join the American Seniors Association, the alternative group; contact sbarton@americanseniors.org. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

• The drug industry backed ObamaCare and, in return, got a 10-year limit of $80 billion on cuts in prescription drug costs. (A drop in the bucket of their almost $3 trillion projected cost over the next decade.) They also got administration assurances that it will continue to bar lower-cost Canadian drugs from coming into the U.S. All it had to do was put its formidable advertising budget at the disposal of the administration.

• Insurance companies got access to 40 million potential new customers. But when the Senate Finance Committee lowered the fine that would be imposed on those who don’t buy insurance from $3,500 to $1,500, the insurance companies jumped ship and now oppose the bill, albeit for the worst of motives.

The only industry that refused to knuckle under was the medical device makers. They stood for principle and wouldn’t go along with Obama’s blackmail. So the Senate Finance Committee retaliated by imposing a tax on medical devices such as automated wheelchairs, pacemakers, arterial stents, prosthetic limbs, artificial knees and hips and other necessary accoutrements of healthcare.

So these endorsements are not freely given, but bought and paid for by an administration that is intent on passing its program at any cost.

What was Major Nidal Malik Hasan doing before he went on his shooting rampage at Fort Hood? He was giving away his belongings and copies of the Koran. Why would he do that? Because, he had made his decision to execute his terrorist act of killing Americans, as he shouted “Allahu Akbar”, or “god is greatest” while opening fire on military personnel at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 people (12 soldiers and 1 civilian) and wounding 38, according to the base commander, Lieutenant General Robert Cone.

The gunman Hasan showed no signs of worry or stress when he stopped at a convenience store for his daily breakfast of hash browns, said Jeannie Strickland, manager of a local 7-Eleven. “He came in just like normal,” she told the Houston Chronicle, “nothing weird, nothing out of the ordinary.” Video footage shown on CNN of Hasan in a shop in the morning – about six to seven hours before the shooting – showed him looking relaxed as he made purchases. Therefore he was totally aware of what he was going to do and very calm about it. Not liking to shoot didn’t seem to bother him today.

Hasan was an American born Muslim. An Imam who knew him said you would never know he would have done such a thing. He also said he was a devout man and was concerned about how to be a “better Muslim.” Therein lies the problem … to be the best Muslim is to embrace everything the Koran says and everything Muhammad decrees you need to embrace. This includes killing the infidel … those who are not Muslim or will not embrace it. It also designates those promised virgins if you die while sacrificing your life for the decrees of Muhammad. Hasan would have been drawn to this as he was looking for a beautiful devout Muslim wife but unable to find one. He also was proselytizing those he was counseling with Islam.

Then to top it all off the FBI while going through Hasan’s phone and computer records found website postings by a man identifying himself as Nidal Hasan who was sympathetic to suicide bombings. Federal law enforcement officials told Associated Press that Hasan had come to their attention at least six months ago because of his web postings, which discussed suicide bombings and other threats.

One of the web posts that authorities reviewed was a blog that equated suicide bombers with a soldier throwing himself on a grenade to save the lives of his comrades. “To say that this soldier committed suicide is inappropriate. It’s more appropriate to say he is a brave hero that sacrificed his life for a more noble cause,” said his post. “Scholars [sympathetic to Islam] have paralleled this to suicide bombers whose intention, by sacrificing their lives, is to help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers.” Another post said, “If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory.”

Looking at these facts, and others that will be found, really point to the reason of this senseless slaughter was Hasan’s commitment to Islam. Any other conclusions will just be bogus smokescreens from the political correct crowd. Radical Islam always starts with Islam. The media will try to leave this factor of Islam out of the equation at every step possible. The FBI was even warned to be careful of how it reported its findings

Hasan was a Muslim terrorist, not a person who snapped from potential deployment, but bowed in obedience to Islam. Leftist media, and Dr. Phil, don’t blame public policy, for Hasan’s decision to murder. Hasan should not even still been in the military but due to the political correctness of protecting Islam was allowed to stay. This was a dangerous decision to make as we now see the consequences of keeping him around.

Hasan is responsible for his actions and who he became from his Islamic teaching. He made the decision to become a terrorist. It is time to get rid of the political correctness in the military.

If a Christian went on a rampage like this … guess what would be blamed!

FORT HOOD’S 9/11

CALL THIS HORROR BY ITS NAME: ISLAMIST TERROR

The UN has in front of them the Defamation of Religions Resolution which it plans to introduce later this year. Everyone should be in opposition to this resolution.

The Defamation of Religions Resolution seeks to criminalize words or actions against the religion of Islam as attacks. As incredible as it sounds, passing this resolution could allow a Christian to be persecuted under UN approval. You need to voice your protest of this resolution.

This resolution seeks to protect the Islamic religion instead of individuals who hold other religious beliefs. The result is that this resolution gives UN sanction to Muslim majority countries to persecute Christians and other religious minorities for not sharing the same beliefs as Muslims. It also provides legitimacy to these countries’ blasphemy laws which are often used to accuse, imprison, and even murder Christians.

While Defamation of Religions Resolutions have been introduced and passed in previous years, causing many Christians to lose their lives, it is up again this year for re-authorization. Policy experts at the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom believe there is an opportunity to defeat it this year.This resolution needs to be defeated as a human rights issue.

After weeks of parading around Maine as the faces of compassion and normalcy, the masks of same-sex “marriage” have finally come off. So have the gloves. After Tuesday’s defeat, homosexual activists are shocked, they’re angry, and now they are determined to make the voters pay.

In a new campaign, the people of Maine Marriage Equality have decided to unleash some California-style harassment on the churches that publicly sided with traditional marriage … Question 1. Ever the sore losers, the Left is calling on it’s supporters to file IRS complaints against any house of worship that supported marriage as God intended it. Intimidation is what they do best, and Maine Equality is hoping to show off those talents by stripping Maine churches of their tax-exempt status. Fortunately it is completely within a church’s legal rights to preach on social issues, particularly as they pertain to Scripture.

Once again, liberal extremists are showing that this debate isn’t about tolerance – but domination. It’s not about the freedom to marry – it’s about losing the freedom to speak publicly about your beliefs. That’s why liberals so intent on publishing the names of donors and supporters of marriage initiatives. They want to exact a steep price for any opposition to their agenda. At the very least, this vicious intolerance should show congregations that what’s at stake in this fight is nothing less than their liberty.

Kudos to the people of Maine.