Author: Papa Giorgio

Dennis Prager Takes Us On a Tour De Force from Duck Dynasty to Silent Night, `Gay Cakes` all the Way To Woody Allen

Published by Papa Giorgio

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

 

Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill on `Ruination`

Published by Papa Giorgio

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

Published by Papa Giorgio

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.

…read more…

Anti-White/Anti-Rich, Rich White Guy, Says White Jesus Kills

Published by Papa Giorgio

Some info on Tim’s unsightly past from Top Conservative News:

Tim Wise is an extreme left-wing Cultural Marxist. Despite living in a ritzy all white neighborhood in Nashville, one of America’s whitest metro areas, he constantly spews venom at white people. On November 5th, 2012, he has even publicly called on his followers to murder members of the Florida TEA Party [tweet below]. Despite his public call for murder, CNN continues to put him on the air. Tim Wise writes books saying that white people make too much money and should share with black people. Wise, who has make a fortune with this schtick, is substantially wealthier than most Americans of any race. Apparently, sharing your money with black people is only for the little guys!

Recently Tim Wise spoke at Indiana University. Before his speech, several of his fanatical supporters turned violent and attacked a group of protesters with pepper spray and other weapons. Police apprehended one of the thugs and he is being charged with a felony.

The Examiner adds to the narrative unfolding:

…”Here’s the reality,” Wise said. “The image of a white Jesus has been used to justify enslavement, conquest, colonialism, the genocide of indigenous peoples. There are literally millions of human beings whose lives have been snuffed out by people who conquered under the banner of a white god.”

Moreover, he said, “black folks can think Jesus is black and view Christ as black, but at the end of the day, the image that has been used to dominate Christianity in this world and on this planet is the white image.”

“The white Jesus, white god imagery has resulted in death. That’s something folks ought to deal with,” he added.

Filmmaker Rochelle Oliver accused Kelly and others of racism against black people for believing Santa Claus is white, Hadro added.

“[P]eople who think like Megyn Kelly believe it’s more comfortable for them to believe that there is a white man flying around the earth with magical reindeer than to believe that a black man in the year 2013 can actually be kind, can be loving and can actually be caring toward children,” Oliver said.

Defense attorney Mel Robbins said Kelly had nothing to apologize for and called Oliver’s statement “absurd.”

“Well, I can’t imagine Christmas morning at your house, Tim,” Robbins said.

Ultimately, Wise said, it was the billions of advertising dollars spent that helped propagate the image of a white Jesus.

Ironically, the White House used a white Santa at Michelle Obama’s reading of “The Night before Christmas” at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. on Monday.

One would have to ask: Does Oliver think Michelle Obama is racist for using a white Santa?

…read the rest…

Here is an extended debate on cultural diversity that comes via Smash Cultural Marxism’s post on Tim Wise:

NSA Reprimand ~ Judge Involkes Founding Fathers (Larry Elder)

Published by Papa Giorgio

From the Washington Examiner:

A U.S. federal judge has moved into the NSA spying scandal in a timely enough manner to begin to give hope to frightened U.S. citizens that there may be a way to make the government respect their rights. The Washington Post reported on Dec. 16, 2013, a U.S. federal judge has ruled the NSA’s collecting of phone records is probably not constitutional. On Monday U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon ruled that the National Security Agency’s collection of virtually all Americans phone records is almost certainly not constitutional.

U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon has found that a lawsuit presented by Larry Klayman, who is a conservative legal activist, has “demonstrated a substantial likelihood of success” based on the Fourth Amendment guarantees of privacy protections against unreasonable searches. Judge Leon has said, “I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval.”

USA Today reports that the lawsuit brought by conservative activist Larry Klayman against NSA spying may very well succeed. Judge Leon has issued a preliminary injunction against the NSA telephone spying program. However, he suspended the order to allow an appeal by the Justice Department, which said it has been reviewing the decision….

…read more…

The Wall Street Journal points out how the Judge may have overstepped his bounds:

Federal Judge Richard Leon has become a sudden political celebrity after his remarkable opinion holding that antiterror surveillance is unconstitutional and, even more remarkably, enjoining the entire program. If only his legal reasoning were as compelling as his new repute.

Klayman v. Obama was filed in the D.C. district court in the backwash of the Edward Snowden disclosures and claims that the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of telephone records violates the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches. Judge Leon’s 68-page opinion stays his injunction pending appeal.

The largest flaw is that the Supreme Court already considered the constitutional claims at stake here, and Judge Leon simply waves off the relevant precedent of Smith v. Maryland. That 1979 decision by Harry Blackmun —no conservative—held that the warrantless police installation of a pen register that collected telephony metadata was not a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.

While obtaining the content of phone calls requires a warrant, the High Court ruled that people have no “reasonable expectation of privacy” for information about phone calls such as the date, time and length of their calls and the numbers they dial. Such transactional data inevitably belong to the service provider, not to individuals—and the NSA acquiring them is no different than the local police doing it in Smith.

NSA collection may even be less invasive, to the extent the vastness of its database that does not include names or addresses is a greater guarantee of anonymity. Queries of this repository are supervised by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and then passed to the FBI to determine if a specific number should be investigated for links to terror cells, with further legal restrictions thereafter.

Judge Leon argues the NSA program now constitutes a search because changes over the last 34 years, including cell phones and the advance of the government’s technological capacities, mean that Smith no longer obtains. The High Court’s precedents don’t have a statute of limitations, but Judge Leon riffs that “I am convinced that the surveillance program before me now is so different from a simple pen register that Smith is of little value.”

[….]

Judge Leon’s opinion is likely to be reversed on appeal, but that doesn’t mean it can’t do political damage in the meantime. It lands amid the renewed left-libertarian campaign to treat terrorists the same as domestic criminals, and with a President who seems unwilling to publicly defend the powers he has used for five years.

Judge Leon seemed to be playing to this chorus with such polemical flourishes as “almost-Orwellian technology” and James Madison “would be aghast.” This is the stuff of political campaigns, not judging, especially from a lower federal court. Less excitable appellate judges will have to provide a Constitutional reeducation.

…read more…

`We Thought He Was Going To Be The Next Messiah` ~ Barbara Walters

Published by Papa Giorgio

“He made so many promises. We thought that he was going to be – I shouldn’t say this at Christmastime, but – the next messiah.” “We”? The media? The left? Both?

(NewsBusters) It’s also worth noting that this came the day after the Washington Post said Obama was responsible for three of the top ten biggest Pinocchios of the year, and five days after PolitiFact awarded him the Lie of the Year.

Some messiah, Barbara.