JUNK JOURNALISM

A classic example of cheap-shot junk journalism was the front page above- and below-the-fold of the Strib under the date of January 30, 2009 titled: HOW DO YOU GET TO D.C.? with the sub-title: "Coleman went to court and Franken went to Florida. But the real question is . . . "



Two panel pictures involved show a salubrious Al Franken who just happened to be standing in front of a portrait of President Jack Kennedy and then there was the lugubrious shot of a wrinkle-browed Norm Coleman slumped pensively in an obvious court room chair.



The pictures are only part of the story. But clearly the pictures are designed and intended to set a tone or an "atmosphere" for all that follows. And what follows is a real journalistic gem.



Everything written about Franken is positive and light and sunshiney and all that is written about Coleman is dark and foreboding of failure. Of Franken the whole atmosphere of words is anticipation of success as the inevitable outcome. Of Coleman the conclusion is foregone that the court case is an exercise in futility.



The Strib, even as it struggles for survival by going into Chapter 11, still doesn't "get the picture" of why their advertising revenue is down and why their readership has tanked. One wonders if they ever read their own scandal sheet portrayed as mainline journalism.

LEGISLATIVE COUNTDOWN FOR SENATOR OLSEEN AND REPRESENTATIVE KALIN

Ten - Nine - Eight - . . . . . . . . . . . . . the count goes on! We are waiting for Senator Olseen and Representative Kalin to commit to the very reasonable four-way test for their votes and bill introductions in the current Session of the Minnesota legislature as outlined in the previous blog.

If legislation does not meet the reasonable four-way test why in the world would our Senator and Representative support it or vote for it?

Senator Olseen and Representative you have invited commentary from your constituents and you said you would listen to your constituents - this is our commentary to you! Are you listening?

Democrats and Republicans from your constituency clearly and undoubtedly support these reasonable four-way test questions. You have indicated you want Republicans to work in a bi-partisan fashion with you. Clearly, by definition, bipartisanship must be a two-way street. Can you walk the walk and not just talk the talk?

LEGISLATIVE TEST

1) Is it Moral/Right?
2) Is it Constitutional?
3) Is it Necessary?
4) Is is Affordable?

We call upon the good Senator Olseen and the good Representative Kalin, who have indicated a desire to work in a bi-partisan manner, to publicly commit to the above four-way test the idea for which comes from a Republican Congressman, Paul Broun, M.D., of Georgia's 10th District.

Presumably Senator Olseen and Representative Kalin should be willing to apply this reasonable four-way test to all legislation that comes before them, or any legislation that they author, in the current Session of the Minnesota legislature.

Senator Olseen and Representative Kalin will you so commit?

ATTENTION TAXPAYERS! LISTEN UP!

Quoting from Taxpayers League of Minnesota letter November 11, 2008:


"In just the last year Minnesotans have seen taxes increase by over $1 billion:

First the legislature overrode Governor Pawlenty's veto to increase the gas tax, sales
tax, and license tax, for a whopping $697 million per year in higher taxes.

Second, the legislature increased business taxes by $141 million.

Third, on November 4th, voters approved a state sales tax increase of $276 million

per year for the arts and outdoors.

THAT'S OVER A BILLION DOLLARS OF NEW TAXES IN ONE YEAR."

(end of quote)

There you have it people! Can anyone say Senator Olseen and Representative Kalin?

"No New Taxes" in reverse!

Our local legislators should be happy - "Gas Tax" Kalin and Rick Olseen - since there is already talk at the federal level to raise the federal tax on gasoline and diesel fuel, it appears, anywhere from ten to twenty five cents per gallon. And guess why - because, among other things, the "gas guzzler" vehicles are being replaced and now there is not "enough" gas tax being raised. So once again government works at cross purposes to itself - cut down the consumption but this cuts down the tax revenue so they have to raise the tax burden to make up the difference! Think what a federal tax raise will do to the ordinary wage earner or the over-the-road truckers. Many of them can't make their way as it is and pretty soon it won't pay the commuters to go to work. Oh, the wonders of government problem solving.

Has the House Hunter Found a Place Yet?

Houses in Chisago County are plentiful now and in many cases the prices have been reduced significantly. Now that Gas Tax Kalin has secure employment for the next two years I suspect he will want to settle in and buy a house so he can be "one of us" and get homestead credit while paying real estates taxes, as far as we have been able to determine, for the first time in the District he represents. That seems like a reasonable expectation on our part.

Gas Tax Kalin

Anonymous took Freedomwriter to task for giving Rep. Kalin the nickname of Gas Tax Kalin.

Anonymous identifies it as a ". . . name-calling, negative attack approach. . ."

Anonymous Democrat, you should talk to the DFL party leadership about their name-calling, negative attacks, identifying Don Taylor as a hand-picked parrot, a hand-picked blind party loyalist, and a stooge of lobbyists.

Anonymous may have just crawled out from under a rock and is thus not aware of these previous blog posts implicating the DFLers in the very thing for which he condemns Freedomwriter.

Then again, perhaps Anonymous just can’t recognize a ". . . name-calling, negative attack approach. . ." when it is bloviated by Democrats, but only when it is well-articulated by Republicans.

In addition, Anonymous has an excess of chutzpah to condemn Republicans for what the Democrats continually practice. In other words, the playing field is not level, Republicans must play by the rules—rules made by the Democrats for the Republicans to follow but not themselves.

Indeed! How embarrassing (for Anonymous)!

When you get the DFL party leadership to retract, with apology, its demeaning of Don Taylor, then we will stop using Gas Tax Kalin as a nickname. Fair enough? We just made a rule to level the playing field.

A New View On the "Buy-outs" - Evolution to Total Socialism

Probably few, in the short run, will acknowledge it but eventually the hard lesson will be learned that union power has essentially charged American business out of business.

Employers are, for all practical purposes, held hostage to the unions. Unions demand maximum wages and the demands are enforced by strikes or threats of strikes. To the employer the message is: "Pay up or we shut you down" - through the mechanism of the "strike."

The employer has two alternatives - go out of business or accede to the demands of the unions. So the employer knuckles under, the strike ends and production resumes.

The problem, then, is that the product price is so labor intensive and labor expensive that products become so high priced that the company cannot compete with, for example, foreign products produced by cheap or at least less expensive labor. Any number of citations could be listed - virtually nothing is "Made in America" anymore - but, for example, we look at the most current problem, namely, the automotive industry. Vehicle sales have dropped so severely that the manufacturer will either collapse in bankruptcy or have to be bailed out.

So, the unions having killed the "Goose" that laid the golden egg - namely the private enterprise employers that paid their wages and salaries, turn now to the only entity large enough to "bail out" the auto industry, namely, the "federal government" through its ability to raise the "bail" money by way of laying the labor burden upon the taxpayer. That's you and that's me.

The problem is not that the American product is not good but rather it is too expensive to compete price-wise. But to cover their tracks the unions find fictitious causes to blame private industry - "they are producing vehicles that people don't want so buyers are turning to foreign manufactured vehicles." Not true - buyers are turning to foreign products because they are produced by labor that is less expensive and the resultant end price is less.

The back of the private enterprise system has been broken and now the larger resource base becomes the taxpayers by way of the federal government. The Unions having killed the capitalistic free-enterprise system now turn to the socialism of the federal government bail-out in which the government essentially buys out the industries by way of the so-called bail-out and the government becomes the essential employer.

The end result is socialism - and socialism never works wherever it has been tried.

Kalin on Gas Tax

Elephant Herd: At your Friday, November 07 posting under "Labels" we read: Gas Tax, Kalin as reference points for further information.

Here's a somewhat tongue-in-cheek suggestion - since Kalin, proud of the gas tax he increased, with just a slight change and rearrangement of punctuation it could read Gas-tax Kalin.

From here on our esteemed state representative could then proudly wear the nickname Gas-tax Kalin!

Thank Kalin

A gallon of gasoline is commonly $1.999 today. The price has dropped below the $2.10 per gallon that was a benchmark before the dramatic spike in prices this last year.

It's great to see the price below the $2.00 mark. But the next time you fill up, look at the $1.999 per gallon price and realize it would have been $1.944 if Kalin and his pals had not dipped their hands into your wallet. Because they raised the gas tax 5½¢ per gallon, the price of gasoline is now $1.999 rather than $1.944.

While you are forced to feed the pig, government refuses to go on a diet.

It is $1.999

think $1.944

___________________________________________

Update 11/23/08

Gas is now $1.599

think $1.544

___________________________________________

Update 12/06/08

Gas is now $1.499

think $1.444

DFL Hypocrisy

The DFL attacked our Republican candidate as someone who would be kept in line by the party bosses (see here, here and here) as if Kalin would never vote the party line.

Of course a Democrat would never vote the party line, never parrot the party talking points, be influenced by lobbyists or be strong-armed by party bosses. It’s also true a Democrat never exercises the freedom of the Override Six, but lives vicariously through those Rogues.

Why certainly a Democrat who has voted the majority of the time with the party would never be told to toe the mark. Majority Leader, Senator Reid, was just having a friendly chat with Senator Lieberman, the Independent. Of course this doesn't have any equivalency to the claims made by Kalin's pals.

___________________________________________

News flash: Senator Reid strong-arms Senator Lieberman

Read all about it here! According to Kalin’s Minnesota pals, Democrats never do such a thing.

Time to rebuild...

Many of us saw this coming, as republicans we compromised our values in picking candidates that we thought would appease the many in place of candidates that stood for true conservative values. This landslide was inevitable, I’m not so sure that we (conservatives) stood a chance to win regardless of who ended up in the white house. It may have been worse for us if it had gone the other way. As a veteran and as a patriot, I stood behind Senator McCain once he became the candidate. There is little doubt that he has served our country with honor and has given more than most will ever give. He is a good man and I am hoping that this experience may have put him back in touch with some of the true conservative values that he seemed to have drifted away from over time.

That said, we now begin to rebuild. Where do we look for the leadership within the conservative Republican Party? Do we look for moderates such as Governor Pawlenty or do we swing the pendulum to the far right wing and embrace those who claim to be Republicans but are more Libertarian at heart?

I think that this is the perfect opportunity to rebuild our party, evaluate our platform, set the base and regroup. There have bee too many compromises to the base of our platform thanks to many who thought it best to move to the ‘center’ in order to gain or maintain seats and positions within the various elective offices.

As Ronald Reagan advised many years ago, we need to begin at the local level. I believe that we need to begin at the grass roots and start from scratch. Does our platform truly represent our values and positions? Lower taxes, responsible spending, accountability, and family values, do these sound familiar? I know that the ‘national’ platform has become convoluted by special interest and it will be nearly impossible to repair from the top. Our platform needs to be streamlined at the local level, build it again from the bottom up using the conservative Republican values and ideas that built the party of Reagan.

We have our work cut out for us…..

Do Not Give Up

Conservatives:

We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed;

perplexed, but not in despair;

annoyed, but not annulled;

struck down, but not destroyed.

Fight the good fight!

Vote for Freedom

Someone left a link in the comment section that I will bring forward in this post. Tomorrow Vote for Freedom. Watch it and be stirred.

This election comes down to a vote for freedom or tyranny.

A vote for the tyranny of more government

Obama-Biden

Franken

Kalin

A vote for freedom and self-determination

McCain-Palin

Coleman

Taylor

John McCain knows what freedom is

and he knows experientially

that bondage removes

personal freedom.

William F. Buckley Fan

You say you are trying to make a point and you criticize us for not responding. Here is some food for thought for you regarding the logic you use here, here and here.

In the picture, Joe the Farmer is criticizing Obama’s spreading the wealth around. You then criticize his criticism. However, your criticism doesn’t answer his criticism.

1. You assumed Joe the Farmer’s criticism. In fact, you don’t know what his criticism is. Earlier I had written, "This "farmer" is making a statement which cannot be fully understood without more information from him." Yet you jumped in head first and criticized an unknown, but assumed criticism. You created a straw man to criticize.

2. You then transferred Joe the Farmer’s assumed criticism of Obama’s spreading the wealth around to all the Joe the Republicans on this blog.

3. You then criticize Joe the Republicans as if they support spreading the wealth around through farm subsidies.

4. You then tell us that Republicans are hypocrites because they aren’t supposed to support farm subsidies.

5. Further, you appear to support spreading the wealth around through farm subsidies because you claim to understand the logic behind such programs.

6. So you criticize us for supporting what it appears you actually support.

Wow! Your logic is stunning. If you can follow the erudition of William F. Buckley, you should not have any trouble setting forth your case logically and cogently. Please indulge us.