Month: December 2013
No Cartoons This Week, Headed to Vegas Christmas Day ~ Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
Bailout for Insurance Companies A Logical Conclusion ~ The Hammer
Dennis Prager Takes Us On a Tour De Force from Duck Dynasty to Silent Night, `Gay Cakes` all the Way To Woody Allen
Video Description:
Dennis Prager brings the listener on a look into the Left’s proclivity to censor, demand identical thought (politically correct thought… not even actions), to teach children to censor historically religious practices “once” Constitutional (like singing “Silent Night” in school), to forcing a baker to bake a cake in lieu of jail time. Prager ends with Woody Allen’s “despair” that is demanded of the non-God view (atheism). I include not only video of what Dennis’ producer was sampling audio from [Woody], but I include the entirety of the question and response to/from Woody Allen at the end of the Prager bit.
A bit long, but well-worth it… especially for some commentary on the Woody piece. Woody Allen references some of the classical thinkers on the issue, hear more of them talk about the reality of their non-faith here: http://vimeo.com/27609417
- For more clear thinking like this from Dennis Prager… I invite you to visit: http://www.dennisprager.com/
- The entire show of Prager first dealing with this admission from Woody Allen can be found here: http://www.mrctv.org/audio/atheism-logical-conclusions-and-woody-allen
Question and Answer w/Ravi Zacharias (Life, Ethics, and Meaning)
Phil Robertson Also Made Congress Mad! ~ Leno
An Awesome `Homecoming` Surprise by a Veteran For His Son
WOW! Terry Bradshaw Talks About Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty ~ I Had No Idea!
Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill on `Ruination`
Tom Bethel, “Ruination,” The American Spectator, December 2013, Vol. 46 (no. 10), page 44.
….Over generations the U.S. has accumulated plenty of capital (and I don’t just mean our assets). Subconsciously, the president and his allies seem to have decided: “Let’s go ahead and spend that capital for our own political advantage.” The country will survive. “Social justice,” meaning equality, is what they say they want. If getting there means blowing some capital, well, only heartless right-wingers will object.
Here are some recent figures published by Robert J. Samuelson of the Washington Post:
✦ In 1955, defense spending was 62 percent of federal outlays and spending on “human resources” (the welfare state) was 22 percent. By 2012 the figures were reversed; welfare was 66 percent, defense 19 percent. Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Pell grants and Social Security’s disability program are all postwar creations.
The metastasis of the welfare state has been enabled by something that would have amazed Adam Smith. Earn a decent living and you will pay thousands of tax dollars into the Treasury, and have one vote. Receive food stamps, housing subsidies, and child support from the government, perhaps to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, and you too will enjoy one vote. You probably won’t owe any income taxes either. It’s a formula for instability.
John Stuart Mill saw the danger of a system like ours as far back as 1861:
✦ The receipt of parish relief [welfare] should be a peremptory disqualification for the franchise. He who cannot by his labor suffice for his own support has no claim to the privilege of helping himself to the money of others. By becoming dependent on the remaining members of the community for actual subsistence, he abdicates his claim to equal rights with them in other respects.
And remember, Mill was the big progressive of his time. If a politician made that comment today, it would qualify as a hate crime. Yet we keep hearing how far to the right we have moved.
Mill couldn’t have known how much worse things would get, both in Britain and in its former colonies. Consider the U.S. budget. For 51 of the last 60 years the government has spent more than it has taken in; in the latest year, $700 billion more. Total debt now exceeds $17 trillion, and unfunded liabilities (including such details as future Social Security payments) run into the hundreds of trillions. The Ponzi scheme is sustained by printing money to keep interest rates low. It is an unstable structure, to put it mildly….
Unanimity: `Media Leans Left,` Journalists from the NYT’s, NBC News, and CNN Agree
NewsBusters reports on unanimity of viewpoint that the unanimity of viewpoints are liberal:
“Top journalists from The New York Times, NBC News and CNN acknowledged Wednesday that, generally speaking, the national media has a liberal bias,” Politico’s media reporter Dylan Byers noted in a December 18 post recapping a Politico Playbook breakfast discussion held earlier on Wednesday morning.
More than one panelist opined that it’s not just that journalists tend to be liberal on policy questions but that they live and work in environments which are socially liberal. “I live in northwest Washington, none of my neighbors are evangelical Christians [and] I don’t know a lot of people in my kid’s preschool who are pro-life,” New York Times writer Mark Leibovich noted. Fellow Washington, D.C.-based journalist Jake Tapper picked up on that thread:
A certain type of person becomes a reporter, and generally speaking… the kind of person who is a reporter in Washington, D.C., or New York City has never worked a minimum-wage job outside of high-school… has never experienced poverty, is not an evangelical Christian, like much of the country is.
There are a lot of experiences that the kinds of people who are reporters, editors, producers, etc., in Washington, D.C., and New York City have not had.