Say Anything Blog

Clarice Feldman

For some time Code Pink has been demonstrating against the war outside Walter Reed Hospital, to the great distress of the wounded soldiers and their families. This is simply unconscionable. Who are these people?

Brave counter-demonstrators have shown up regularly and voluntarily to show their support for the troops, and the Code-Pink crowd has dwindled. Among the regulars holding up the line for Code Pink is Bruce Wolfe, of local 2 of the Office and Professional Employees Union, who’s called the soldiers “scabs”. One of the counter-demonstrators reports:

This week, one of their newbies came by our troop-support rally at the gates by mistake, and spilled the truth: a labor union had recruited this worker to show up at the lefties’ phony “vigil.” The worker’s remarks clearly revealed that standing outside the Walter Reed Army Medical Center with anti-war signs wasn’t a personal choice, but a workplace commitment demanded by a union representative.

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Read the whole thing.

Lefties banding together against our troops?
Whatever you do, don’t question their patriotism!

Dana Blanton

NEW YORK — Nearly one out of every five Democrats thinks the world will be better off if America loses the war in Iraq, according to the FOX News Opinion Dynamics Poll released Thursday.

The percentage of Democrats (19 percent) who believe that is nearly four times the number of Republicans (5 percent) who gave the same answer. Seven percent of independents said the world would be better off if the U.S. lost the war.

Overall, 11 percent of Americans think the world would be “better off” if the U.S. lost the war, and 73 percent disagree.

Opinion Dynamics Corp. conducted the national telephone poll of 900 registered voters for FOX News from Sept. 25 to Sept. 26. The poll has a 3-point margin of error.

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But don’t question their patriotism.

FEWER SMOKERS

Percentage of the U.S. adult population that smokes:

• 1965: 42.4%

• 1970: 37.4%

• 1974: 37.1%

• 1980: 33.2%

• 1985: 30.1%

• 1990: 25.5%

• 1995: 24.7%

• 2001: 22.8%

• 2004: 20.9%

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (latest figures available)

Lawmakers in two California cities are casting votes this month on unprecedented legislation that would widen a growing voluntary movement by landlords and resident associations to ban smoking inside apartments and condos.

Today in Calabasas, the City Council plans to vote on expanding its anti-smoking law to bar renters from lighting up inside existing apartments. It would exempt current resident smokers until they moved but would require all new buildings with at least 15 units, including condos, to be smoke-free.

Next Tuesday, the City Council of Belmont is scheduled to cast a final vote on a similar measure that won initial approval last week. The ordinance, which applies to apartments and condos, would allow fines and evictions if neighbors complained and smokers didn’t heed warnings.

The legislative push, which has triggered death threats against council members, is a controversial part of a mostly voluntary effort to prod landlords and condo associations to adopt smoke-free policies.

[...]

Feierbach says she never intended to create a stir, but she expects other cities to follow Belmont. “We really broke ground,” she says.

Noel Sheppard

Americans willing to look at the manmade global warming debate with any degree of impartiality and honesty are well aware that those spreading the hysteria have made a lot of money doing so, and stand to gain much more if governments mandate carbon dioxide emissions reductions.

In fact, just two months ago, ABC News.com estimated soon-to-be-Nobel Laureate Al Gore’s net worth at $100 million, which isn’t bad considering that he was supposedly worth about $1 million when he watched George W. Bush get sworn in as president in January 2001.

Talk about your get-rich-quick schemes, how’d you like to increase your net worth 10,000 percent in less than seven years?

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Read the whole thing; it gives the details of Gore’s global warming scam, and how his hustle simply dwarfs Enron and Global Crossing, for instance.

Noel Sheppard

As NewsBusters reported Sunday, the leftwing organization responsible for the recent smear campaigns against Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, Media Matters, has direct ties to the Clintons.

To be sure, folks on the left, and in the media that support them, will either deny this connection, or ignore it.

In the end, that’s going to be hard to do, for on August 4, while speaking at the YearlyKos convention in Chicago, the junior senator from New York boasted of “institutions that I helped to start and support like Media Matters and Center for American Progress.”

Transcript at the site.

Despite the usual lying leftie denials, Hillary is on record with this one.

When elitist politicians and pundits in Old Media rail against “the rich,” the implicit assumption is that it’s the same people, year after year, who are getting over on the rest of us.

On Friday, using the 1982 and 2007 Forbes 400 lists (2007’s main page is here), John Tamny at Real Clear Politics nuked that perception (HT Instapundit; bolds are mine), and landed a not-so-subtle broadside on the campaign of John Edwards:

..... capitalist economies are far from stationary, and for evidence we need only look to a graph in the latest issue that shows the makeup of the first Forbes 400 in 1982 compared to the latest.

Even though the wealth gap is a positive in most economies for driving the economic creativity of those not-yet-rich, much is made of it in the media and among politicians who worry about individual wealth consolidation even more than they do the corporate kind. A quick look at the Forbes 400 would surely assuage some of their fears.

Indeed, of the charter members of the first Forbes 400, only 32 remain today. Far from a country where only the rich get richer, the wealthy in the US are very much a moving target. While there are 74 Forbes 400 members who inherited their entire fortune, 270 members are entirely self-made. Though many attended Harvard, Yale and Princeton, there are countless stories within of high school and college dropouts, not to mention others who grew up extremely poor. Politicians who regularly engage in class warfare would do well to keep the Forbes 400 out of the hands of their constituents, because it makes a mockery of the kind “Two Americas” rhetoric suggesting the existence of a glass ceiling that keeps hard workers at the bottom of the economic ladder. To read the Forbes 400 is to know with surety that the U.S. is still very much the land of opportunity.

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Noel Sheppard

This is really hysterical, folks, and definitely requires all drinking vessels be properly stowed before continuing.

Just days before Rush Limbaugh was attacked by a number of press outlets for discussing “phony soldiers” on the air, ABC’s Brian Ross did a segment on “World News with Charles Gibson” dealing with “phony heroes...scam artists...posing as the war heroes they never were, claiming credit for acts of courage in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Marvelously, this story was aired on Monday, September 24, just three days before Limbaugh made his comments. And, as noted in a NewsBusters posting by the MRC’s Brent Baker, the report even mentioned the same “phony soldier,” Jesse Macbeth (pictured to the right), that Limbaugh did on his program Thursday.

Will media attack ABC with the same zeal they did Limbaugh?

While you ponder, what follows is a full transcript of this segment (video available here, h/t Rush Limbaugh.com):

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Could there be any more compelling evidence of the essential hypocrisy of the left/MSM/Dems/MoveOn?

They are obviously targeting those who dissent from their ideology, which is completely improper for people who want to run this country.

Noel Sheppard

Last week, two of the leading conservatives in the media, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, were dishonestly and unprofessionally attacked by press outlets that cherry-picked out of context remarks from lengthy radio broadcasts in order to vilify outspoken personalities whose opinions they don’t agree with.

Unfortunately, as folks around the country saw this play out on their television sets and newspapers, few were at all familiar with the organization behind the smear campaigns, or that this same group started the firestorm which ended with radio host Don Imus being terminated by NBC and CBS in April.

Maybe more importantly, even fewer citizens are aware that this organization is linked directly to Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as billionaire leftist George Soros.

[...]

Media Matters’ links to Hillary are at once intimate and multitudinous, and the organization’s devotion to her is nothing short of profound. In 1996 (eight years before Media Matters’ creation), the then-conservative David Brock was commissioned (with a $1 million advance) by the Simon & Schuster subsidiary Free Press to write a hard-hitting expose of Hillary. But the book, completed in 1997, turned out to be nothing more than a tepid, distinctly sympathetic account of the former First Lady’s life. That same year (1997), Brock publicly announced his political epiphany, unequivocally recanting his previous negative writings about the Clintons and embracing the liberal/Left cause. During this period, Brock developed a close relationship with Neel Lattimore, Senator Clinton’s openly gay press secretary and close confidante. Brock would eventually hire Lattimore as a director of “special projects” for Media Matters.

Brock’s affinity for Mrs. Clinton grew over time, and vice versa. According to Glenn Thrush of Newsday, Hillary “advised Brock on creating” Media Matters in 2004, “encouraging the creation of a liberal equivalent of the Media Research Center, a conservative group that has aggravated Democrats for decades.” Thrush reports that Hillary still “chats with [Brock] occasionally and thinks he provides a valuable service . . .” “For her part,” Thrush adds, “Clinton’s extended family of contributors, consultants and friends has played a pivotal role in helping Media Matters grow from a $3.5 million start-up in 2004 to its current $8.5 million budget.”

[...]

In fact, after Imus was fired by NBC and CBS, Media Matters published a 6,000-word article entitled “It’s Not Just Imus,” listing other political enemies of the Clintons such as Glenn Beck, Neal Boortz, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, Michael Smerconish, and John Gibson.

As Perazzo stated, “By eliminating such conservative voices from the airwaves, Media Matters could effectively insulate much of the American public from ever hearing about the negative traits and hidden agendas of Hillary Clinton, and thereby, in essence, ensure her ascendancy to the Oval Office.”

Well, last week, Media Matters went after Limbaugh and O’Reilly, and, sadly, many in the press bought their smears hook, line, and sinker without fully investigating what both hosts really said, and what the context of their statements were.

Maybe even more disgraceful, as press members parrot the cherry-picked reports from Media Matters, they are mute concerning the organization’s ties to a former president and current Democrat front-runner to win the White House in 2008.

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Failing this, media are simply acting as a conduit for propaganda from one presidential candidate to the public which is something that should be completely unacceptable to all Americans regardless of political leaning.

Read the whole disgusting thing.
When I say that the MSM is essentially the Democrat Ministry of Propaganda, it isn’t hyperbole.

JOHN WILEN

NEW YORK (AP) - Oil futures fell Friday as a late flurry of selling overcame an earlier rally driven by the steadily weakening dollar.

Early in the day, crude prices rose to near record levels as the dollar’s drop against other currencies sparked buying by investment funds. But in the midst of that rally, analysts noted that oil’s fundamentals are weak. Many believe it’s only a matter of time before oil begins a seasonal price decline.

[...]

Read the whole thing.
So, market forces are having a greater effect than the falling dollar?  Oh my!
What about all the scareology?  Maybe it just wasn’t true.

Where are the headlines on this?  Think Matthews, Olberman, CNN, NBC, CBS and ABC will be all over this one?  Oil prices might be even lower when the new quarter begins next week.  Don’t depend on the MSM to make a big deal out of this good economic news.

There are signs that the global Islamic jihad movement is splitting apart, in what would be a tremendous achievement for American strategy. The center of the action is in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the very territory which is thought to harbor Usama, and from which Al Qaeda was able to launch 9/11. Capitalizing on existing splits, a trap was set and closed, and the benefist have only begun to be evident.

[...]

The Strategy is working

Despite liberals’ claims that al Qaeda terror cells are a bogey-man of the Bush Administration used to scare people to vote Republican, we can now see a direct case in which a terror cell was activated for a specific purpose: to save their jihadist buddies dying at Tora Bora.

The claim that fighting a terrorist is “giving them what they want” is one of the greatest fallacies of our time. When they attack us, it is for a specific purpose. When we do the exact opposite of what they want, they lose. They want us to disengage in the places they want to control, and then go home. Fighting them militarily, politically, economically, and diplomatically is the only way to defeat them. Giving in to them only makes them stronger.

The Bush Administration, most likely through the CIA and DIA, has pulled off a fantastic maneuver to split the global Islamic jihad movement at its base. This is the kind of stuff we may not hear about in detail for another fifty years. Congratulations to our President and our brave soldiers and intelligence assets for making this happen.

Al Qaeda is losing in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The fact is now inescapable that they have lost the ability to impose their political will on the West, although this does not mean they still can’t hurt us.

Those politicians, Democrats or Republicans, who are calling for disengagement now are severely misinformed.

[...]

Rick Moran

There can really be only one option if you want to fight climate change and are a Democratic member of Congress; raise taxes, of course. Lots:

“I’m trying to have everybody understand that this is going to cost and that it’s going to have a measure of pain that you’re not going to like,” Rep. John Dingell, who is marking his 52nd year in Congress, said Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press.

Dingell will offer a “discussion draft” outlining his tax proposals on Thursday, the same day that President Bush holds a two-day conference to discuss voluntary efforts to combat climate change.

But Dingell, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that will craft climate legislation, is making it clear that he believes tackling global warming will require a lot more if it is to be taken seriously.

“This is going to cause pain,” he said, adding that he wants to make certain “the pain is shared in a way that is fair, proper, acceptable and accomplishes the basic purpose” of reducing greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels.

Dingell certainly likes that word “pain,” doesn’t he? Just exactly what kind of “pain” does the Michigan Congressman have in mind?

A 50-cent-a-gallon tax on gasoline and jet fuel, phased in over five years, on top of existing taxes.

A tax on carbon, at $50 a ton, released from burning coal, petroleum or natural gas.

[...]

What Dingell is offering is a quick way to get the country into a deep recession. And this is what we have to look forward to if a Democrat is elected president.

Read the whole thing.

If there is no other reason to vote Republican, the abysmal economic ignorance of the Dems is enough.
BTW, Charlie Rangel also has a monster tax increase in the works.  More on that in an upcoming article.

Those who want to discredit the United States and to deny our role as history’s most powerful and pre-eminent force for freedom, goodness and human dignity invariably focus on America’s bloody past as a slave-holding nation. Along with the displacement and mistreatment of Native Americans, the enslavement of literally millions of Africans counts as one of our two founding crimes—and an obvious rebuttal to any claims that this Republic truly represents “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” According to America-bashers at home and abroad, open-minded students of our history ought to feel more guilt than pride, and strive for “reparations” or other restitution to overcome the nation’s uniquely cruel, racist and rapacious legacy.

Unfortunately, the current mania for exaggerating America’s culpability for the horrors of slavery bears no more connection to reality than the old, discredited tendency to deny that the U.S. bore any blame at all. No, it’s not true that the “peculiar institution” featured kind-hearted, paternalistic masters and happy, dancing field-hands, any more than it’s true that America displayed unparalleled barbarity or enjoyed disproportionate benefit from kidnapping and exploiting innocent Africans.

An honest and balanced understanding of the position of slavery in the American experience requires a serious attempt to place the institution in historical context and to clear-away some of the common myths and distortions.

1. SLAVERY WAS AN ANCIENT AND UNIVERSAL INSTITUTION, NOT A DISTINCTIVELY AMERICAN INNOVATION.

[...]

2. SLAVERY EXISTED ONLY BRIEFLY, AND IN LIMITED LOCALES, IN THE HISTORY OF THE REPUBLIC – INVOLVING ONLY A TINY PERCENTAGE OF THE ANCESTORS OF TODAY’S AMERICANS.

[...]

3. THOUGH BRUTAL, SLAVERY WASN’T GENOCIDAL: LIVE SLAVES WERE VALUABLE BUT DEAD CAPTIVES BROUGHT NO PROFIT.

[...]

4. IT’S NOT TRUE THAT THE U.S. BECAME A WEALTHY NATION THROUGH THE ABUSE OF SLAVE LABOR: THE MOST PROSPEROUS STATES IN THE COUNTRY WERE THOSE THAT FIRST FREED THEIR SLAVES.

[...]

5. WHILE AMERICA DESERVES NO UNIQUE BLAME FOR THE EXISTENCE OF SLAVERY, THE UNITED STATES MERITS SPECIAL CREDIT FOR ITS RAPID ABOLITION.

[...]

6. THERE IS NO REASON TO BELIEVE THAT TODAY’S AFRICAN-AMERICANS WOULD BE BETTER OFF IF THEIR ANCESTORS HAD REMAINED BEHIND IN AFRICA.

[...]

In short, politically correct assumptions about America’s entanglement with slavery lack any sense of depth, perspective or context. As with so many other persistent lies about this fortunate land, the unthinking indictment of the United States as uniquely blameworthy for an evil institution ignores the fact that the record of previous generations provides some basis for pride as well as guilt.

Democrats should run Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for president. He’s more coherent than Dennis Kucinich, he dresses like their base, he’s more macho than John Edwards, and he’s willing to show up at a forum where he might get one hostile question—unlike the current Democratic candidates for president who won’t debate on Fox News Channel. He’s not married to an impeached president, and the name “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad” is surely no more frightening than “B. Hussein Obama.”

And liberals agree with Ahmadinejad on the issues! We know that because he was invited by an American university to speak on campus.

[...]

Columbia’s “tradition” is to shut down any speakers who fall outside the teeny, tiny seditious perspective of its professors.

When Minutemen leader Jim Gilchrist and his black colleague Marvin Stewart were invited by the College Republicans to speak at Columbia last year, the tolerant, free-speech-loving Columbia students violently attacked them, shutting down the speech.

Imbued with Bollinger’s commitment to free speech, Columbia junior Ryan Fukumori said of the Minutemen: “They have no right to be able to speak here.”

[...]

So the one thing we know absolutely is that Bollinger did not allow Ahmadinejad to speak out of respect for “free speech” because Bollinger does not respect free speech.

Only because normal, patriotic Americans were appalled by Columbia’s invitation of Ahmadinejad to speak was Bollinger forced into the ridiculous position of denouncing Ahmadinejad when introducing him.

[...]

“Tolerance of opposing views” means we have to listen to their anti-American views, but they don’t have to hear our pro-American views. (In Washington, they call this “the Fairness Doctrine.")

[...]

At Ahmadinejad’s speech, every vicious anti-Western civilization remark was cheered wildly. It was like watching an episode of HBO’S “Real Time With Bill Maher.”

[...]

Matthew Balan

The racist lefties just can’t keep their mounths shut:

Even after the Juan Williams “idiots at CNN” rebuke, CNN still pressed on about Bill O’Reilly’s race remarks, and a guest on Wednesday’s “Newsroom” took the language being used against O’Reilly and Williams to new lows. Syracuse University professor and blogger Boyce Watkins appeared on the CNN program, and compared O’Reilly to a murderous movie villain and to Iranian president Ahmadinejad. “If the villain in a movie comes up and says, ‘I love you very much,’ that usually means he wants to kill you. The fact is that Bill O’Reilly is a guy who has made a career demeaning, degrading, and devaluing every black institution he can get his hands on.... You know, he’s about like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, when it comes to making ridiculous assertions and waiting for people to respond.”

After his villain/Ahmadinejad comparison, Watkins blasted NPR host and Fox News contributor Juan Williams for coming to O’Reilly’s defense. O’Reilly’s race comments had come from an hour of his radio program that involved a segment with Williams. “Juan Williams sitting there, is sort of the ‘Happy Negro’ agreeing with Bill O’Reilly, doesn’t impress me at all. A man cannot walk into your home and congratulate your mother for not being a prostitute and not expect you to be offended.”

[...]

“Media-generated nonsense” - that’s a good description of this whole affair.

Read the whole thing.

When you want real racism, you have to go to the lefties.

Find it here

Just when you think the Dems/lefties couldn’t get any more ridiculous…

Colmes: Conservatives Shouldn’t Complain ‘Conservative’ Ahmadinejad at Columbia
By Brad Wilmouth

According to Alan Colmes, since evil dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not a liberal, but instead a “conservative,” then conservatives in America should not be offended because the Iranian leader received better treatment on a college campus than some of America’s conservative political figures, some of whom have been met with attacks with pies or other violence. Such was the absurd argument suggested by the liberal FNC host during a discussion on Monday’s Hannity and Colmes. Colmes commented to conservative guest/author David Horowitz: “Ahmadinejad’s not a liberal. He’s a conservative. He’s very right wing. He was welcome at Columbia University. You shouldn’t be complaining. Phil Donohue, Hillary Clinton, they’ve been all booed off stages. You don’t talk about that.” (Transcript follows)

[...]

Read the whole thing.  This goes right along with the leftie lie that the pro-slavery, pro-segregation, KKK-joining Dems were “conservatives”
Lefties lie; it’s all they have.