Hey, remember when Debbie Wasserman-Schultz decided she was going to play civility cop?: You probably don’t remember. It happened a long time ago, in a different political era. By which, of course, I mean “January.” That was when her friend Gabby Giffords got shot and she and the rest of the left decided, with not a shred of justification, to treat it as a Teachable Moment about Republican incivility. As I say, you probably don’t remember. But Laura Ingraham does, just like she remembers The One lecturing us about scaring the elderly before Pelosi started prattling on about the coming senior apocalypse. I know I said it once before today, but it bears repeating: Excellent job, Mr. President. Of all the shameless hacks in Washington whom you could have chosen for the DNC, you picked one whose shamelessness is truly exceptional. I can’t wait for the next lecture on how “we can agree without being disagreeable.” (HotAir)
NBC Doesn’t Object to Dem Calling GOP Budget a ‘Death Trap,’ But Was Outraged Over Death Panel Claims: On Tuesday’s NBC Nightly News, a report on the Republican 2012 budget proposal included a sound bite from Democratic Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who decried the plan and ranted: “Medicare would become little more than a discount card. This plan would literally be a death trap for some seniors.” Capitol Hill correspondent Kelly O’Donnell setup the outrageous quote by simply noting: “Democrats call the Republican plan too severe, saying it would hurt the most vulnerable.” After the clip of Schultz, O’Donnell went on to conclude her report without offering any rebuttal to the claim. Following O’Donnell’s report, Williams did a news brief on Schultz being named the new head of the Democratic National Committee: “One more note on politics. Florida Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who we saw right toward the end of Kelly’s reporting there, was named the new head of the Democratic National Committee today. And she will keep her day job in Congress at the same time.” Again, no reaction to Schultz’s extreme rhetoric over the GOP budget plan. In contrast, on the September 9, 2009 Nightly News, Williams could barely conceal his outrage at conservative claims that ObamaCare would include government death panels: “[President Obama] has seen his message hijacked as town meetings have exploded with wild and false rumors of death panels deciding when a human life should end….no one believed we would be here at this point tonight, that they would get rolled over an issue – a false issue like death panels, that the resistance would be this high.” Back on January 12, appearing on the CBS Evening News, Schultz called for more civility in the wake of the Tucson shooting, while denouncing “violent” rhetoric: “Let’s remember that Gabby herself talked about, just a few weeks ago, the fact that individuals who shall remain nameless, used violent images and words in her campaign and she talked about how important it was that we dial it back….we all agree that the language and the tone and the tenor of our debate has gotten too intense and that we need to lead by example.” How quickly she forgot. (NewsBusters)
This story comes from the Orange County Registerand documents yet another company leaving the sunshine state:
California has changed dramatically since 1941, when Carl and Margaret Karcher scraped together about 325 bucks to start a hot dog cart in Los Angeles – a precursor to a drive-through restaurant they opened in Anaheim and which grew into the Carl’s Jr. fast-food empire. The Karchers were household names in Southern California, not just for their restaurants but for their activism in conservative politics and Catholic charities.
Whatever you think of the Karchers’ politics, you’ve got to love the entrepreneurial story that surrounds their success and what it said about California in its heyday. The Karchers – he died in 2008 and she in 2006 – came to the Land of Opportunity from the staid backwater of Upper Sandusky, Ohio.
California has beckoned many Midwesterners – and people from every part of America and the globe – not just because of its pleasant weather, but because of a culture of openness that allowed creative people to go as far as their ideas would take them. Unfortunately, people with energy and creativity are now likely to go elsewhere, to places where the state government has different attitudes toward the private sector.
Indeed, CKE Restaurants, parent of Carl’s Jr., is likely to move its headquarters from Carpinteria, near Ventura, to Texas and is undergoing a rapid expansion of restaurants in the Lone Star State. Right before the budget circus got going Wednesday, CKE CEO Andrew Puzder spoke at the California Chamber of Commerce, blocks from the Capitol dome. Like most of us, Puzder loves California and has no interest in leaving it, but he told harrowing tales about doing business in a state that has gone from an entrepreneurial heaven to a bureaucratic nightmare.
“It costs us $250,000 more to build one California restaurant than in Texas,” he said. “And once it is opened, we’re not allowed to run it.” This explains why Carl’s is opening 300 restaurants in Texas and only maintaining its presence in California. Texas has lower taxes than California, but the reason for the shift has more to do with regulation and with the attitude of the respective governments.
Puzder complained about the permitting process here, where it takes eight months to two years to open a new restaurant compared to an average of 1 1/2 months in Texas. In California, restaurants have to provide new curb cuts, new traffic lights, you name it. The company must endure so many requirements and must submit to so many inspections that it becomes excessively costly – and the bureaucrats are in charge of the project.
Once the restaurant is open, Puzder said, the store’s general managers are not allowed to run the business as if they own it. That’s the key to the company’s customer service approach – allowing general managers to do whatever it takes to make customers happy. But California’s inflexible, union-designed work rules, for instance, classify general managers as regular employees. They must be paid overtime for any work beyond an eight-hour day. They must take mandated breaks at specified times.
The Carl’s Jr. CEO notes some of his reasoning in this decision that should alert Californian’s to the problems in creating a robust economy… or in killing it:
…“It costs us $250,000 more to build one California restaurant than in Texas,” he said. “And once it is opened, we’re not allowed to run it.” This explains why Carl’s is opening 300 restaurants in Texas and only maintaining its presence in California. Texas has lower taxes than California, but the reason for the shift has more to do with regulation and with the attitude of the respective governments.
Puzder complained about the permitting process here, where it takes eight months to two years to open a new restaurant compared to an average of 1 1/2 months in Texas. In California, restaurants have to provide new curb cuts, new traffic lights, you name it. The company must endure so many requirements and must submit to so many inspections that it becomes excessively costly – and the bureaucrats are in charge of the project.
Once the restaurant is open, Puzder said, the store’s general managers are not allowed to run the business as if they own it. That’s the key to the company’s customer service approach – allowing general managers to do whatever it takes to make customers happy. But California’s inflexible, union-designed work rules, for instance, classify general managers as regular employees. They must be paid overtime for any work beyond an eight-hour day. They must take mandated breaks at specified times.
If a busload of customers comes to a store, these general managers must sit back and do nothing if they are on a break period. Most states have 40-hour workweek rules, meaning employees are paid overtime after exceeding 40 hours of work in a single week. In California it is based on the day, which limits the ability of managers to work, say, six hours one day and 10 hours the next day. Puzder complains about these industrial-era requirements that impede flexibility and harm customer service.
And California law encourages “private attorney general” lawsuits against private businesses over overtime and other regulatory rules, which has created a huge financial incentive for attorneys to file questionable legal actions against restaurants.
“It’s not like we have kids working in coal mines or women working in sweatshops,” Puzder said. It’s not as if his workers in other states, where these regulatory rules don’t exist, are oppressed, he added. “How does this help us instill entrepreneurial values?” He wonders how all these nonsensical rules teach people about being independent from the government rather than dependent on it….
Camera.org, a highly recommended site for bias against Israel in the media, reports on the retraction of the Goldstone Reportthat needs to be inculcated into the psyche of bloggers in preparation to answer the liberals who still cite this report which most rejected when it came out (save the liberal U.N. backers and anti-Semites around the world). As Camera comments on this about-face:
In examining the New York Times’ record on the Goldstone report, one cannot help but come to the conclusion that the newspaper is more interested in promoting as credible an investigation that even its leader has repudiated than in objectively reporting on its shortcomings. Unfortunately, this is unsurprising coming from a media outlet that is increasingly moving from objective news reporting to advocacy journalism.
That accusation was contained in a report to the United Nations by Richard Goldstone, an eminent South African judge who had been used by the international community previously to investigate war crimes. That Goldstone was also a Jew and a Zionist made the charge all the more powerful.
Now, though, Goldstone has retracted his findings. He no longer believes that Israel intentionally targeted civilians during the Gaza war (although he still believes Hamas did) and says that any deaths were inadvertent — the usual fog of war, the usual panicked decision. For Israel, it’s like the governor has called the warden — it’s been reprieved and taken off death row.
Once again, rockets are being fired into southern Israel from Gaza, some of them going up the coast as far as Ashkelon, a major city and port. Before the last war, from April 2001 to the end of 2008, 4,246 rockets and 4,180 mortar rounds were fired into Israel, killing 14 Israelis and wounding more than 400. The rockets have since been improved. Should more than the occasional rocket actually make it all the way to Ashkelon (one came close Monday) or should one of them come down on a school, another war with Hamas would start a moment or two later. Israel has already hit back, but not in force. In addition, a West Bank settler family of five was recently murdered in their home by what are universally thought to be Palestinians. This, too, has put Israel on edge.
This resending of the report has consequences reverberating towards the Obama Administration that should be highlighted in the 2012 Elctions. In fact, it has even caused the likes of Rabbi Schmuley Botech to comment on Samantha Powers (someone whom I just blogged on as well), he says the following:
On my recent lecture tour in South Africa the subject of Judge Richard Goldstone came up quite a lot. Whether it was the dinner in Johannesburg at the home of Chabad head Rabbi David Masinter where acquaintances of the judge were in attendance, or at Sea Point Synagogue, South Africa’s largest, where I lectured and whose Rabbi, Dovid Weinberg, had officiated at Goldstone’s grandson’s Bar Mitzvah in Johannesburg, or my speech for Chabad of Cape Town and later in Pretoria, the man whom the media describes as a ‘respected international jurist’ and who had falsely accused Israel of war crimes was never far from anyone’s lips.
South Africans are among the world’s proudest Jews and most ardent Zionists. So it was understandable that they would detest Goldstone, viewing him as a traitor to his people, a man who engaged in a blood libel against the Jewish state in order to enhance his standing at the United Nations.
I have personally never agreed with this assessment of Goldstone, seeing him instead as one of Lenin’s ‘useful idiots,’ a man so full of his own pomposity and self-righteousness as to be utterly blind to simple notions of right and wrong. Like Jimmy Carter before him, Goldstone is one of those well-meaning ignoramuses whose view of morality is that whichever is the party without tanks and an air force must be the party who is just. This knee-jerk reaction to always champion the underdog, notwithstanding their evil actions explains the shockingly obvious statement in Goldstone’s recent Washington Postapology to Israel in which he wrote, “In the end, asking Hamas to investigate [its own crimes] may have been a mistaken enterprise.” It took a famous judge three years to come to the conclusion that asking a terrorist organization hell-bent on exterminating Israel to impartially report its own atrocities was not his brightest idea.
[….]
Much more troubling, however, are the comments attributed to Samantha Power, the rising star of the Obama Administration who is being discussed as a replacement for Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. I am a huge fan of Power’s 2002 book A Problem from Hell, detailing how America refused to intervene to stop repeated genocides in the twentieth century. I have repeatedly extolled the Pulitzer-prize winning book in lectures and columns and believe it should be required reading by every American High School student. I was also not surprised to read that it was Power who was instrumental in persuading an always reluctant President Obama to intervene in Libya to stop Gaddafi from slaughtering his people. It was therefore with considerable sadness that I learned of Power’s troubling statements on Israel, comments that require her immediate clarification lest she compromise her own moral credibility. American Thinker and other publications have reported that Power said that the United States should send in a massive military force to protect the Palestinians from Israel. And that she maligned the American pro-Israel lobby with her advocacy of “alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import [the pro-Israel lobby] and… sacrificing…billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel’s military, but actually investing in the state of Palestine.” Is Power really arguing for greatly reducing or eliminating American military aid to Israel and channeling it instead to the Palestinians who have repeatedly used foreign aid to foster hatred of Jews in schools, line the pockets of corrupt officials, and promote terrorism?
There is more, with Power seemingly criticizing the New York Times in 2003 for being insufficiently critical of Israel after it attacked terrorist-saturated Jenin. Of Israel’s presence in Lebanon, Power wrote in her book, Chasing the Flame, that what sparked Israel’s invasion of Lebanon was “dispossessed Palestinians and Israeli insecurity,” where in truth Israel invaded Lebanon to stop the incessant stream of rocket attacks that terrorized its northern cities. The phrase ‘Israeli insecurity’ implies that Israel is paranoid rather than reflecting the reality of a Lebanon dominated by Hezbollah, whose genocidal aim is the destruction of Israel.
One should take note that while the New York Times is about as bad as they get, it is not taxpayer funded like NPR (National Public Radio)! Here is an example of the bias found at NPR on this matter, followed by a video of the European Union voting on March 10th of 2010, adopting the Goldstone Report:
NPR:
18,321 words in pro-Arab only segments;
4,934 words in pro-Israel segments.
Bias in number of Arab-only vs Israeli-only segments:
63-percent Palestinian/pro-Arab only segments;
37-percent Israel/pro-Israel segments.
You may contact this European Parliment member, Annemie Neyts-Uyttebroeck, via email to enquirer why she supported such bad reporting and took the positions she did in the above video – “knowing now what we did then [at least reasonable people].” – annemie.neyts-uyttebroeck@europarl.europa.eu
Gal Holiday and the The Honky Tonk Revue was founded in the summer of 2004 as Vanessa Niemann set out to create a band that harkened back to her rural roots in the mountains of Western Maryland. Having been raised on folk and bluegrass music, she longed for a re-connection to her musical kinsfolk in her new home of New Orleans where she had been transplanted 5 years earlier. Following Hurricane Katrina, The Honky Tonk Revue returned to New Orleans with the unwavering support of longtime bass player and Natchitoches, Louisiana native, Dave Brouillette, the capable North Carolina drummer, James Clark and the addition of veteran guitarist, Dave James upon his return to the Crescent City in early 2008. Supplementing the band’s sound is the inclusion of the pedal steel guitar, the shoes of which are filled by numerous players including the exceptionally proficient Steve Spitz. The band has recreated itself while maintaining a devotion to the spread of country music in Southern Louisiana and the oral traditions of rural America and radio hosts of yore with Gal’s research and history of each song played.
The Honky Tonk Revue plays Vintage Honky Tonk, Rockabilly and Classic Country music with a heavy dose of Western Swing for good measure. They sit poised on the edge of a country music revolution with the marketplace awakening to a new generation of musicians who have a deep-seated love and appreciation for the tried and true honky tonk sound of their predecessors; musicians like Webb Pierce from West Monroe, LA, Hank Williams and less known musicians from the past like Helen Hall, a hard hitting Texas song writer who experimented with country in its various forms including rockabilly. What better Pied Pipers to lead us to country music salvation than Gal and her motley band of country boys?
Linnzi Zaorski is an American indie jazz singer and songwriter based in New Orleans, Louisiana. She started out performing with the New Orleans Jazz Vipers, and then formed her own backing band, Delta Royale, when she had the opportunity to get a regular gig in New Orleans.
Recorded in 2004, Hotsy-Totsy includes Zaorski’s first original composition, “Better Off Dead”, and standards such as “Hernando’s Hideaway” and “It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)”. Delta Royale added violin and washboard to the ranks, and recorded without clarinet or drums. Offbeat Magazine describes Zaorski’s first songwriting effort as fitting “snugly in the confines of Depression-era pop music”.
Samantha Power is the architect of Obama’s Libyan “war” policy. Which is at odds with her previous views considering she is a huge fan of Noam Chomsky, who talks incessantly about America’s hegemonic attitude towards the world. In a review of one of Chomsky’s books, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (The American Empire Project), where she states that,
With the United States increasingly suspect around the world — a recent Gallup poll found that 55 percent of citizens in Britain thought the United States ”posed a threat to peace,” while a June BBC survey found that 60 percent of Indonesians, 71 percent of Jordanians and even 25 percent of Canadians viewed the United States as a greater threat than Al Qaeda…. ‘Hegemony or Survival” is a raging and often meandering assault on United States foreign policy and the elites who shape it. Drawing upon case after historical case of violent meddling (Iran, Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Kosovo, etc.), Chomsky argues that the Bush administration’s war on terrorism builds upon a long tradition of foreign interventions carried out in the name of ”liberation” or ”counterterror,” of special interests run amok and of disdain for international institutions that dare to challenge American hegemony.
It is interesting that Chomsky and other leftists (like Samantha) do not want the U.S. to be involved in world affairs for natyional security reasons like terror or energy, rather — as Stanley Kurtz explains — these leftists expect to dabble in world affairs for the following reason:
Superficially, Power’s chief concern is to put a stop to genocide and “crimes against humanity.” More deeply, her goal is to use our shared horror at the worst that human beings can do in order to institute an ever-broadening regime of redistributive transnational governance.
Liberal foreign-policy expert Steve Clemons actually calls Power “the primary architect” of our Libyan intervention. The New York Times has gone so far as to characterize our humanitarian action as “something of a personal triumph” for Power.
How can these elitists say one thing and then change their tune in just a couple of years. It seems that the major difference between Republicans and Democrats in their foreign policy is that Republicans act militarily and as a leader in regards to national security (Constitutional). Democrats seem to act only with humanitarian offenses happen while giving away command and control to other nations and bodies (not Constitutional). In regards to this humanitarian intervention, she says that we must “must forswear up front . . . commercial or strategic interests in the region.” While we do not get much oil from Libya, our coalition does, which leads Kurtz to point out that:
Arguments that Power developed to support past interventions are proving a poor fit for our Libyan operation. She dismissed claims that the Rwandan genocide was merely a case of “civil war” or “tribal violence.” Now her critics argue that Libya is not a Rwanda-style genocide, and that Power’s eagerness for a humanitarian showcase has led us to intervene in what really is a tribal civil war.
And what of her stringent conditions? In practice, she seems to have stretched her own standards of “large-scale crimes against humanity” to produce a specimen case, in an effort to entrench her favored doctrines in international law. Who knows if more people will now be casualties in the extended civil war enabled by our intervention than would have been killed in Benghazi last month? Power worried just after 9/11 that an America soon to be militarily overstretched might give up on humanitarian interventions. Now she has helped to entangle us in an expensive and open-ended adventure at a time when we truly are at our limits — and at a time when dangers continue to spread in countries far more strategically significant than Libya.
And why should we be scared to death of Powers?
A long conversation with Power in 2003 convinced 1960s revolutionary Tom Hayden that she was a fellow-traveler of sorts, even if Power was not as systematically suspicious of American military force as a true Sixties-vintage radical would be. In Hayden’s assessment, Power’s originality was “to see war as an instrument to achieving her liberal, even radical, values.” Hayden was right. The important thing about Power is not that she favors humanitarian intervention, but that she seeks to use such military actions to transform America by undoing its sovereignty and immobilizing it, Gulliver-style, in an unfriendly international system.
Power’s aforementioned second book, Chasing the Flame, celebrates the life of a United Nations diplomat, Sergio Vieira de Mello, who died in a terrorist attack in Iraq in 2003. Vieira de Mello was a Sixties radical of international scope. Hailing from Brazil, he became a committed Marxist while studying at the Sorbonne. He was among the violent protesters arrested during the student uprising in Paris in 1968. His first published work was a defense of his actions.
Vieira de Mello went from student radicalism straight to a job with the U.N. in 1969, and brought his intense anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism with him. Later he became a bitter critic of Israel. A United Nations “patriot,” he carried around a well-worn copy of the U.N. Charter the way an American senator or Supreme Court justice might take a copy of the U.S. Constitution wherever he went. Vieira de Mello’s colleagues used to say that his blood ran U.N. blue. As the U.N.’s most charismatic and effective diplomat (said to be “a cross between James Bond and Bobby Kennedy”), Vieira de Mello is the hero around whom Power attempts to build a following for her ideals of global governance.
Power explains that Vieira de Mello never really surrendered his Sixties ideals, even as he transformed himself from a passionate ideologue into a “ruthless pragmatist.” The young America-hating Vieira de Mello grew into a mature diplomat who could charm Pres. George W. Bush, even while lecturing the commander-in-chief on the follies of Guantanamo Bay. In other words, Vieira de Mello learned to manage his public persona, appealing to American leaders with arguments (allegedly) based on American national interest.
This is clearly Power’s ideal for herself. In fact, she tells us in her acknowledgments that the point of the book is also “the point of my career.” Power even cites the uncanny resemblance between Vieira de Mello and Obama. Of course, Obama’s Alinskyite training stressed the need for community organizers to advance their quietly held leftist ideological goals through “pragmatic” appeals to the public’s “self-interest.” (For more on that, see my study of Obama.)
