Mainstream Media Fraud

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

"Not ignorance or incompetence, not even bias, but outright fraud"

The Anchoress yesterday put up a link fest commemorating this weekend's March for Life in DC and it's more than worthy of a good gander but what struck me over there was the following video chronicling the deceptive coverage of last year's event by the mainstream media.  Watch it and understand how stupid it is to trust these yahoos to objectively cover anything countering their worldview:

See the Video Here:

March For Life

Conservative History

Explain how conservatives are the primary drivers of man’s evolution. For instance, fire can only possibly have been discovered by a conservative unworried by liberal health and safety regulations. Moreover, by learning to cook meat, Early man made it more digestible, meaning he had more energy available to develop not only his “brawnpower” but his brainpower. If Homo Liberalis had gotten his way, fire would have been banned as a dangerous substance, and we’d still be living in the trees, chewing natural, healthy, raw vegetables, burping contentedly, and being ruled by a loud, gossipy matriarchy of Oprahs and Streisands.

Obama's union cronies get ObamaCare waivers

Three local chapters of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), whose political action committee spent $27 million supporting Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, have received temporary waivers from a provision in the Obamacare law.
The three SEIU chapters include the Local 25 in Obama’s hometown of Chicago.
The waivers allow health insurance plans to limit how much they will spend on a policy holder’s medical coverage for a given year. Under the new health care law, however, such annual limits are phased out by the year 2014. (Under HHS regulations, annual limits can be no less than $750,000 for 2011, no less than $1.25 million in 2012 and no less than $2 million in 2013.)

Proof: Democrats are Socialists

Some in the Tea Party movement argue there is not a dime’s worth of difference between the Republican and Democrat parties.  Those who argue this point need to take a look at what is going on in the party of treason.

The GOP is certainly not perfect.  Although, at Tea Party Nation, we generally advocate allying with conservative Republicans, the Democrats have jump whole-heartedly into the lap of socialism.  There is not even a pretense anymore.

The new executive director of the Democratic National Committee is one Patrick Gaspard.  Most people have never heard of Patrick Gaspard. 

Currently Gaspard does for Obama what Karl Rove did for George W. Bush.   Becoming executive director of the DNC means that he will run the day-to-day operations of the DNC.  He will control the DNC machinery.

And he is a total and committed socialist.

Gaspard joined the White House with a confusing resume that includes stints at ACORN, the SEIU and the Working Families Party.  In Acorn, he was the political director for New York.   In 2007, Gaspard became a registered lobbyist for SEIU.  (Say, didn’t Obama say something about no lobbyists working for him?).

In 2001, Gaspard sent a letter saying that he was working for the Working Families Party in New York.  The WFP is a small 3^rd party in New York that is a socialist party.   The WFP was also the political party for ACORN.

The ACORN tree is kept deliberately vague.  Something like a mafia family trying to hide from the Feds.  But there is no doubt that Gaspard is up to his ears in it.   Gaspard is a student of Alinisky and like Obama grew up idolizing radical communists who hated this country and wanted to see this country turned into a socialist hellhole.

And this man is now running the DNC.

The conservative wing of the Democratic Party can forget about anything now.  Oh, wait; the party of treason no longer has a conservative wing.  The socialists in the Democratic Party have done a good job of purging conservatives from the party, at least at the national level.    Can anyone name a conservative Democrat in the House or Senate?   Not a moderate, a conservative. Someone who is branded a conservative by a conservative rating, such as the American Conservative Union’s ratings?

Gaspard’s ties to ACORN should trouble anyone, other than committed socialists, which is why you will hear no complaints from the Democratic Party.   Recently in Las Vegas, a former Executive with ACORN, Amy Busefink, was convicted of voter fraud.  ACORN itself will go on trial in April for voter fraud.  In 2008, ACORN tried to register over 400,000 fake voters in Nevada, a state of only 2.6 million.  Busefink also worked with Project Vote.  Another distinguished alumni of Project Vote, a subsidiary of ACORN, is Barack Obama.

Socialism is the enemy of freedom and the Democratic Party should probably now be called the Socialist Party.   Almost everyone in the leadership of the party of treason at one time or another was a member of a socialist party, from the Democratic Socialists of America, to the New Party to the Working Families Party.

When Ronald Reagan went to the White House thirty years ago this month, he set a goal of destroying Soviet Communism.  He succeeded.   We must set a goal of destroying socialism in this country before it is too late.

Ways to drive a Liberal Crazy

Tell them you don't give a damn about the polar bears.  And it's not because you don't like cute, fluffy, white carnivores; it's because you find it hard to accept that a species whose population has increased fivefold—from 5,000 to 25,000—in the last five decades can actually be in any kind of trouble.

Drive the Liberals Crazy (with the truth)

Next time you hear a reference to "America's first black president,"  counter by referring to Obama as "America's 44th white president." Explain that you're doing so on feminist grounds: "What? You're trying to tell me that his Caucasian mom's genetic input doesn't count? But that's so SEXIST!"

America under ObamaCare, Day 302: repeal will not add to deficit

America under ObamaCare, Day 302: repeal will not add to deficit
Posted by Staff

The Wall Street Journal reports:
The Congressional Budget Office says repealing the Affordable Care Act would increase the deficit by $230 billion over the coming decade and by a modest amount in the decade after that. The CBO estimate has become the central defense by ACA advocates fighting the upcoming repeal vote in the House.
They might want to re-think their strategy. A close examination of CBO's work and other evidence undercuts this budget-busting argument about repeal and leads to the exact opposite conclusion, which is that repeal is the logical first step toward restoring fiscal sanity.
Federal finances are buckling under the weight of unaffordable entitlement programs. So what is the primary aim of the ACA? Open-ended entitlement expansion: to more people at greater expense than anytime since the 1960's. If CBO is right, 32 million people will be added to the health entitlement rolls, at a cost of $938 billion through 2019, and growing faster than the economy or revenues thereafter.
How, then, does the ACA magically convert $1 trillion in new spending into painless deficit reduction? It's all about budget gimmicks, deceptive accounting, and implausible assumptions used to create the false impression of fiscal discipline.

6 more states join suit against ObamaCare

From Laura Ingrhams website:  

6 more states join suit against ObamaCare
Posted by Staff

Politico reports:
Six states are asking to join the most high-profile legal challenge to the health care reform law, bringing the tally up to 26 states.
“It sends a strong message that more than half of the states consider the health care law unconstitutional and are willing to fight it in court,” said Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. “I look forward to continuing to defend Florida’s families and businesses against this unconstitutional law and upholding the Constitution.”
Iowa, Ohio, Kansas, Wyoming, Wisconsin and Maine are asking a Florida judge for the right to join the lawsuit, which was also brought by the National Federation of Independent Business. Twenty states are already on the suit.
Judge Roger Vinson heard oral arguments in the case last month in Pensacola. A ruling is expected no sooner than late January.

Liberal Still Attacking Sarah Palin

The more the Liberal / Socialists attack Sarah Palin – the more I love her.   It shows that she is on the right track and the Liberals are afraid of her.  Here is part of an article from Ann Coulter I think you will love.

 

January 19, 2011

Mud Libel
by Ann Coulter

The same people who had blamed Sarah Palin for the massacre at the Tucson Safeway and then taunted her for her "silence" were enraged when she responded.

Last Tuesday, the night before Palin responded, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann mocked Palin's silence throughout his show:

-- "And why is the ever self-promoting Miss Palin so quiet?"

-- "And it's quiet, isn't it?"

-- "It's too quiet."

-- "The silence is deafening from the great Northwest."

It was deemed an admission of guilt that she hadn't spoken about the Tucson shooting or denied the accusations that she had inspired the shooter.

The next day, Palin posted a video response, and Keith immediately attacked her for "the worst timed political statement ever." It's almost as if liberals would attack Palin whatever she did.

Obama to sell America to China

Chinese President Hu Jintao came to Washington.   The question is, did he come simply as a head of state or as the leader of the country that is going to buy the United States?

Both Obama and Hu have the same vision for the future of America.  They both want to see America as a weakened, impotent power, incapable of doing anything without international assistance.   Both are doing their best to make that vision come true.

China has long been using economics to weaken our economy.   They keep their currency artificially low, resulting in huge trade deficits.  Do we want to buy something?  Odds are, it is made in China.   Where is America’s manufacturing base?  It is in China.  When GM quit making the Hummer, they sold it to China.  When IBM quit making the ThinkPad, it was sold to China.  Your iPhone? Made in China.  The list goes on.

China continues to finance American debt.  Why?  Not because it is a good investment but because the Chinese know we cannot live beyond our means forever.  The bills will come due and when they do, we will be forced to make massive budget cuts. The Chinese also know the first thing politicians will cut is military spending.  American influence will be gone from the Western Pacific and the Chinese will not have to fire a shot.

One of the most under reported parts of Hu’s trip is the fact he is going to Chicago.   Hu is bypassing other cities with larger Chinese populations in favor of Chicago.  What does Chicago have that could be so interesting to Hu?

Could it be the Obama reelection headquarters?

Obama is desperate for cash.  The Washington Post has predicted his reelection campaign could cost $1 billion dollars.  Where can he get that kind of cash?

The party of treason has never been shy about taking foreign cash, even though it’s illegal.    In 2008, Obama even received campaign contributions from Gaza (I.e. Hamas).   So where does a corrupt, unpopular President from the party of treason go for reelection cash?  China, of course.

Anyone remember Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign in 1996?  The Chinese, through various groups, funneled untold amounts of money into Clinton’s 1996 campaign.   What did the Chinese get out of it?  American technology.

A couple of weeks ago, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates went to China.  At the same time, China publicly showed tests of its new J-20 stealth fighter.  This aircraft is a huge advance for China and came as a surprise to almost everyone.

How was China able to do this?  Technology transfers from the Clinton years.  Over the last decade China has dramatically improved its missile technology.   They now have ICBMs that threaten America and new missiles that threaten our carrier battle groups. Where did that come from?  It was the return on the investment the Chinese made in Clinton.

Now Hu is in America.  He is not simply visiting as most heads of state do.  He is looking at the great nation his country is vanquishing.  And he is meeting with those in this government who put personal ambition about patriotism.   There is no doubt China will send millions in cash to the Obama reelection campaign.  The question is what will America have to pay for Obama’s deceit?

Wake Up Congress (and Obama)

January 18, 2011

Wake up Congress! UK to open up health care system to competition
Posted by Staff

Fox News reports:
British Prime Minister David Cameron says he plans to open up the National Health Service to competition.
Cameron's plans to shake up Britain’s universal health care system-- known as NHS -- will transfer much decision making authority to general practitioners, and thus bypassing administrators to cut out bureaucracy.
“We need modernization on both sides of the equation," he said in a major speech defending public sector reforms. "Modernization to do something about the demand for public health service, and modernization to make the supply of health care more efficient, which is about opening up the system, making it more competitive, cutting out waste and bureaucracy.” According to Cameron, it’s not, in these times of austerity, that “we can’t afford to modernize. It’s that we can’t afford not to modernize.”
Skeptics are already accusing him of taking a “wrecking ball” to one of the finest institutions in the country. Some doctors, nurses and union leaders wrote a letter to the editor of the London Times. Among the concerns expressed, was that bringing in competition could mean bringing down quality, because, doctors would, presumably, go for the cheapest service options in order to save money

From Cuban Blog–Generation Y

 

The Country of Long Shadows

There are two men on the corner. One is wearing an earphone while the other peers into the door of a building. All the neighbors know perfectly well why they are there. A dissident lives on one of the floors of the building; two members of the political police watch who comes and goes and keep a car nearby to follow him wherever he goes. They don’t try to hide because they want this person, who signs his name to his critical opinions, to know they’re there; they want his friends to distance themselves so as not to end up caught in the network of control, in the spiderweb of vigilance.

It is not an isolated case. Here, every non-conformist has his own shadow — or a whole group of shadows — who follow him around. The so called “securities” also use sophisticated monitoring techniques that range from bugging phone lines and placing microphones in homes, to tracking the location of their targets through signals from their cell phones. The effects on the personal lives of those who suffer these operations are so devastating that we have come to refer to State Security by terrible names such as “The Apparatus,” “The Armageddon,” or “The Crusher.”

But not even these soldiers dressed in civilian clothes can escape popular scorn. Several jokes are making the rounds about the inordinate number of “securities” surrounding each individual opponent. Whispering and looking over their shoulders, many comment sarcastically, “There is so much manpower needed in agriculture, and look at these guys here, spending the whole day watching someone who thinks differently.” Because, indeed, what a contrast it would be if, instead of criminalizing opinion, they devoted themselves to productive labor; if instead of projecting their long shadows over the critics of the system, they let them fall over some lettuce or tomatoes, over the furrows — now empty — that they could help to plant.

ACORN / Liberal–voter fraud

What you didn’t hear:  Acorn leader convicted of Vote Fraud!

While the news cycle has been dominated for the last four days with the aftermath of the Tuscon shooting, one very important story is not out there, or at least not out there with significant coverage.

An executive with ACORN has been convicted of voter fraud in Nevada.   Amy Adele Busefink was convicted of voter fraud in Las Vegas.  She was given a two year sentence, which was regrettably, suspended.

In 2008, Busefink ran Acorn’s voter registration drive in Nevada.  Nevada officials threw out an amazing 400,000  bogus registrations ACORN had submitted.  To put this into perspective, the 2009 population of Nevada, was 2.6 million!  Those kind of numbers can mean a huge impact in an election.  ACORN darling Harry Reid barely won reelection and you have to wonder how many fraudulent ACORN votes were delivered for Reid and if those votes were his margin of victory.

This type of electoral fraud and the absolute scale of it scream that all involved should be put in jail.  However, ACORN voter fraud is always to the benefit of Democrats and Busefink was lucky enough to be in front of a, you guessed it, Democrat Judge for sentencing.   Judge Donald Mosley is a member of the Clark County Democratic Party.  He has also had his own ethical campaign issues.

What is even more shocking is that Busefink, after being charged with voter fraud for her activities in 2008, then in 2010, she ran the national vote drive for Project Vote, which is an alter ego of ACORN.   Guess who else used to work for Project Vote?  None other than Barack Obama.

Busefink is not the first ACORN employee to be convicted.  The Las Vegas field director was and ACORN itself, even though it has filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy, will be tried on these charges in April.   Do not expect a lot of media coverage on that one either.

There are two real scandals here.  The first is why a group like ACORN has continued to be able to receive tax dollars for anything. ACORN’s antics have been well known, yet over the last two decades, under both Republican and Democrat administrations, they have continued to feed at the tax payer trough.

The second and biggest scandal here is why groups like ACORN and Project Vote are allowed to do voter registrations at all.   Leftist groups have developed a strategy of filing massive numbers of voter registrations at the last minute, overwhelming the ability of local election boards to verify the applications.  Last year, in both Colorado and Arizona, election offices were bombarded last minute registrations.  In Arizona, at least one in four was fraudulent and probably would have found more if they had time.

As conservatives fight back and take the country back from the Socialists, one of the our top agenda items needs to be repeal of the laws that enable these liberal groups to engage in massive voter fraud.

The question will be, will our newly elected leaders have the backbone for the fight?

Drive a Liberal Crazy–number 10

Quote G. Gordon Liddy:

"A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellowman, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money."

Spreading the Big Liberal Lies

Immediately after Congressman Gabrielle Giffords was shot, the left wing went into over drive to try and blame the Tea Party for the shooting.  There was one minor problem.

There was no evidence.

In fact, in the hours after the shooting, the evidence began to pile up that Jared Loughner was in fact a liberal.  Former classmates tweeted about his beliefs.  He was a pot head who was kicked out of community college because he was such a disturbed individual.    After twenty-four hours of ripping the Internet apart, the liberals are beside themselves with anger because the cannot tie Loughner to the Tea Party movement.

But have no fear, when the liberals really need help, they can count on the Department of Homeland Security.

DHS has magically come up with a report that says he has “ties” to an anti Semitic, anti-government group that has ads for tea party groups on its front page.

WOW!

There is a legal term for this kind of stuff.  It is MSU.  That stands for makin’ stuff up!

The leftist Politico.com reported that the Department of Homeland Security had a memo that said Loughner is “possibly linked” to a group called American Renaissance.

This is the same Department of Homeland Security that issued the infamous report on April 14, 2009, a day before the great Tax Day tea parties, warning of an upswing in “right wing extremism.”  This is the same Department of Homeland Security, who’s Secretary Janet Napolitano, claimed the border is secure and the system worked, after the underwear bomber tried to blow up a flight on Christmas day, 2009.

The group, American Renaissance, says they have no record of Loughner ever being associated or involved with them.

The obvious question that should be asked is, how about at least some evidence?

All that is there is some, at best, speculation.  Of course, the liberal media and the blogosphere are quite happy to run with the story that fits their story line.

The liberal hate group, the Southern Poverty Law Center went through convolutions to try and claim that Jared Loughner was some kind of conservative.  The Huffington Post ate that up and immediately posted the story online.

This is liberal thought and liberal journalism at its best.  Facts and the truth are ignored in favor of speculation that supports the story they want to believe.

When this nightmare first began, Tea Party Nation decided to get out early and fight because we knew this is what would happen. Regardless of the facts, the left would try to tie this to the Tea Party movement.   We are pushing back now and we need everyone in this movement to help us fight the smear the liberals are trying to put out.

We need to remind everyone, the shooter was a liberal lunatic.

Muslims offer their bodies as human shields...

Muslims offer their bodies as human shields...

... for Christians no less:

Muslims turned up in droves for the Coptic Christmas mass Thursday night, offering their bodies, and lives, as “shields” to Egypt’s threatened Christian community.

Egypt’s majority Muslim population stuck to its word Thursday night. What had been a promise of solidarity to the weary Coptic community, was honoured, when thousands of Muslims showed up at Coptic Christmas eve mass services in churches around the country and at candle light vigils held outside.

From the well-known to the unknown, Muslims had offered their bodies as “human shields” for last night’s mass, making a pledge to collectively fight the threat of Islamic militants and towards an Egypt free from sectarian strife.

“We either live together, or we die together,” was the sloganeering genius of Mohamed El-Sawy, a Muslim arts tycoon whose cultural centre distributed flyers at churches in Cairo Thursday night, and who has been credited with first floating the “human shield” idea.

Among those shields were movie stars Adel Imam and Yousra, popular preacher Amr Khaled, the two sons of President Hosni Mubarak, and thousands of citizens who have said they consider the attack one on Egypt as a whole.

“This is not about us and them,” said Dalia Mustafa, a student who attended mass at Virgin Mary Church on Maraashly. “We are one. This was an attack on Egypt as a whole, and I am standing with the Copts because the only way things will change in this country is if we come together.”

In the days following the brutal attack on Saints Church in Alexandria, which left 21 dead on New Year’ eve, solidarity between Muslims and Copts has seen an unprecedented peak. Millions of Egyptians changed their Facebook profile pictures to the image of a cross within a crescent – the symbol of an “Egypt for All”. Around the city, banners went up calling for unity, and depicting mosques and churches, crosses and crescents, together as one.

There is a time for unity, a time for coalescing, a time for merging purposed in confronting an evil.

Now is that time.

A hearty hats off to the Muslim community in Egypt who participated in this.  Most hearty hats off.

Might we see more of it, much more, across the globe.

GOP Going Wobbly

Margaret Thatcher had a great line about less than reliable allies.  She used to say, they were going wobbly on us.

I have to wonder if the GOP in the House is going wobbly on us.

The GOP rode into town this week and promised to cut $100 Billion from this year’s budget.   Suddenly that was cut to perhaps $50 billion.    The lame stream media said the GOP was discovering how hard it was to govern.  Perhaps they were just discovering how easy it was to go along without fighting.

I do not claim to be an expert in the budgeting process, however there are some things that seem obvious.  For this year, the congress has not passed a budget.  The government is funded through March 4^th with a continuing resolution.   The government’s fiscal year begins October 1^st of each year.   Using the numbers for the 2009 budget, of $3.52 trillion, the remaining budget for this year that this congress will address includes about $1.8 trillion in spending.  Out of that, they cannot cut $100 billion?

It would seem they are either unable, or more likely unwilling, to make those cuts.

Without breaking a sweat, Obama is planning to cut $78 billion from defense, which has been eviscerated already.

And the GOP cannot cut $100 billion from the budget?

I bet the Tea Party could figure out some budget cuts.

Here is one budget cut.  Eliminate the “Obama phones.”  The government is now paying for cell phones for people on welfare and the latest is the government will pay for two months of your house phone bill.  All you have to do is be on Foodstamps, Medicaid, SSI, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

As long as you make 135% of the poverty line or less, you can qualify.  This program is paid for by taxes on the phone companies. This is the fastest growing welfare program and the government will spend over $1 billion dollars on it this year.

Phones are not that expensive.  Anyone, even someone on welfare can afford a basic phone.  There is a company that offers phone service for $20 a year.  It is called Magic Jack.   Why do welfare recipients need the government to pay for their phones when there is a service out there that offers phone service for $20 a year?

I saw an ad last night on cable for anglescom.com.  They advertise that if you are on welfare, and sign up with them, the government will pay two months of your phone service.

This company finds it profitable enough to advertise this government program so they can get these people to sign up and have the government pay the company for the phone service for the welfare recipients.

And who is angelcom.com?  It is a company out of Orlando, Florida that resells telephone services for Bell South.

Can anyone say, “corporate welfare?”

House GOP, I think I have found your first billion to cut.

Open Letter to 61st Speaker of the House

From the Tea Party Nation:

Congratulations.  Yesterday was your day.  Yesterday, you became the 61^st Speaker of the House of Representatives.  That is an exclusive and elite club, perhaps second only to the Presidency. 

Yesterday you celebrated.  Today, you get down to work.

As you get down to work, there are a few things to remember.   You did not become Speaker because America suddenly fell in love with you or the Republican Party.  You became Speaker because America, lead by the Tea Party, repudiated Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and the party of socialism.

What does the Tea Party and America want you to do?

First, STOP SPENDING MONEY!

Make serious and meaningful cuts in the budget.     Waste fraud and abuse should be a top target, but there is only so much you can cut in those areas.  Other areas of the budget are going to have to be cut and you are going to have to figure out what to do with Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.   Those items account for almost 40% of government spending and the systems are broke. You are going to anger a lot of senior citizens when you start talking about this, but the simple fact is, the liberals stole the money from social security a long time ago.  You are now the guy who gets to clean up the mess.

Yesterday, David Bossie of Citizens United offered an open letter in the Daily Caller, saying that you should quickly do your symbolic vote of repealing Obamacare and move on to other things, like job creation.  You cannot create jobs when the government is making it more and more difficult to do so and Obamacare is forcing cost decisions onto employers that they are resolving by not hiring.

We all know the vote to repeal Obamacare is just that, symbolic.  However, you must push that fight.  After you vote on the bill, which Harry Reid will never allow to be voted on in the Senate, you must defund Obamacare.  It is not negotiable.  Not only is it what the American people want, it is the only way we can survive.

In 1993, the Clinton Administration proposed HillaryCare.  In my home state of Tennessee, we had a brain dead moron of a governor who wanted to curry favor with the administration so he and the Democratic controlled legislature voted to create something called Tenncare.  It almost bankrupted the state.

For the last two years, the party of socialism has been on a spending bender.   That bill has now come due.  We cannot simply raise the debt ceiling again.   The debt is now $14 trillion.  The only thing worse than defaulting on the debt at $14 trillion is defaulting on the debt at $20 trillion.

There would be terrible consequences if we default on our debt, but we cannot keep on borrowing money.  We have to live within our means.

Finally, we need a stimulus for this economy.  We cannot spend our way out of this economic disaster, but we can grow our weigh out of it.  We need tax cuts to stimulate the economy.  Pass them.  If Harry Reid is stupid enough to kill them in the Senate, then so be it.

In 1981, Ronald Reagan came to Washington.  He campaigned on conservative values.  He could have come to Washington and just played the go along game with the liberals, lead by your predecessor, Tip O’Neal, and the RINOs in the Republican party and not made any waves.  Instead, he fought hard for conservative values and we revere him today as one of the greatest Presidents of all time.

You have your Reagan moment now.  You can simply be a nice guy and compromise on legislation and the agenda.  And you might not be speaker in two years.  Or you can stand firm for a strong conservative agenda.   If you fight, it will be a bloody fight, but when you look at the great leaders of the past, they did not compromise.  They fought.

What will it be?   Do you have the Reagan in you?

Newsweek–One More Reason Why I Stopped Reading It Years Ago

Townhall Columnists Humberto Fontova Cuba Among "Best Countries in the World" (Says Newsweek)

Humberto Fontova

Cuba Among "Best Countries in the World" (Says Newsweek)

Newsweek magazine just hailed Cuba among “The Best Countries in the World,” quality-of-lifewise. “Cuba outdoes its fellow middle-income countries in quality of life,” explains the 1993 “National Magazine Award for General Excellence” winner who recently fetched one dollar on the auction bloc.

Some perspective: Between two and three hundred people (out of an average population over the decades of 18 million) died trying to breach the Berlin Wall or otherwise escape East Germany—no runner-up in the “quality-of-life” awards, even by Newsweek standards.

Well, between sixty-five and eighty thousand people (out of an average population of 8 million over the decades) have died trying to escape Castro’s Cuba, Newsweek’s “quality-of-life” winner.

German Stalinism is now happily asunder and mourned nowhere. Cuban Stalinism is alive and kicking and lavished with economic succor by many of the same governments who celebrated the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Castro’s fiefdom is also glorified by everyone from PBS to the Congressional Black Caucus to Michael Moore to Newsweek.

"A simple way to take measure of a country is to look at how many want in... And how many want out," famously quipped Tony Blair. Well, prior to Castro’s Stalinist coup in 1959, Cuba took in more immigrants (primarily from Europe) as a percentage of population than did the U.S., including the Ellis Island years. In the 1950’s, when Cubans were perfectly free to emigrate with all their property and U.S. visas were issued to them for the asking, fewer Cubans lived in the U.S. than Americans lived in Cuba.

“I can see that Cuba is much more impoverished than Haiti,” observed Gelsy Lavéque, a recent Haitian visitor to Cuba. “People here in Cuba are all sad. I watch on Cuban TV how they say Haitians are all poor. But in reality we’re less poor than Cubans. Yes, my family is poor but we have a car. We’re never hungry and were free and generally happy. Cubans, come to Haiti, we have a country much better and happier than yours.”

Fidel Castro converted a nation with a higher per capita income than half of Europe, the lowest inflation rate in the Western hemisphere, a larger middle class than Switzerland, a huge influx of immigrants and whose workers enjoyed the 8th industrial wages in the world into one that repels Haitians. And this after being lavished with Soviet subsidies that totaled almost ten Marshall Plans (into a nation of 7 million) - an economic feat that defies not only the laws of economics but seemingly the very laws of physics.

Most tragically, I daresay that many of the Cuban freedom-seekers died more horrifically than the German freedom-seekers. He'd be loath to admit it, being a Che-T-shirt-wearer and all, but Eric Burdon of the Animals wrote a song that resounds with many Cubans: "We gotta get outta this place -- if it's the last thing we ever do!"

The last thing, indeed, for an estimated one in three of the desperate Cuban escapes during the '60s, '70s and '80s. This is according to a study by the late Cuban-American scholar Dr. Armando Lago. This hideous arithmetic translates into those tens of thousands of estimated deaths at sea over the past half-century.

A consistently hot item on Cuba's black market is used motor oil: poor man's shark-repellent, they call it. Perhaps for a few minutes. I suppose we all cling to false hopes when desperate. And people get no more desperate than when striving to flee the handiwork of Newsweek’s “Quality-of-Life” winner.

A seventeen-year-old named Orlando Travieso was armed with only a homemade paddle when he was machine-gunned to death in March 1991. His crime was trying to flee Cuba on a tiny raft. Loamis Gonzalez was fifteen when he was machine-gunned to death for the same crime. Owen Delgado was fifteen when Castro's police dragged him out of the Ecuadorian Embassy where he sought asylum and clubbed him to death with rifle butts.

After so many machine-gun blasts kept disturbing their coastal subjects, the Castro brothers hit upon the scheme of having their Soviet helicopters hover over the escaping freedom-seekers, and rather than machine gun them to death, simply drop sandbags onto their rafts and rickety boats to demolish and sink them. Then the tiger sharks and hammerheads could do the Castroites' deputy-work.

Four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Newsweek Magazine’s faves were machine-gunning desperate Cubans who tried to swim into our Guantanamo Base, then retrieving their corpses with gaffing hooks. "This is the most savage kind of behavior I've ever heard of," said Robert Gelbard, deputy assistant secretary of state for Latin America during the Clinton administration (no less!). "This is even worse than what happened at the Berlin Wall!"

So what's the alternative if you can't flee Cuba? Well, in 1986, Cuba's suicide rate reached twenty-four per thousand -- making it double Latin America's average, making it triple Cuba's pre-Castro rate, making Cuban women the most suicidal in the world, and making suicide the primary cause of death for Cubans aged 15-48. At that point, the Cuban government ceased publishing the statistics on the self-slaughter. The figures became state secrets. The implications horrified even the Castroites.

But apparently the implications did not faze Newsweek.

State of the Union Address

In 2011, both Groundhog Day and the State of the Union address are scheduled on the same day.
It's an ironic juxtaposition of events: one event involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of limited intelligence for prognostication . . . while the other involves a groundhog.

Drive a Liberal Crazy

Prefer "chairman" to "chair," "chairperson," or "chairwoman"; "fireman" to "firefighter"; etc.

Conservative women are quite robust and sensible enough not to worry about PC nonsense like our language's in-built "phallocentrism." However, when trying to give offense, "actress" is perfectly acceptable since liberal actresses who take themselves seriously much prefer the term "actor."

Same old Democrat/Socialist Tricks

On Wednesday, January 5th, the new Congress will be sworn in.  And Harry Reid is already at work.  He is trying to push through new rules that will change the filibuster procedure so that the voice of Americans who told the Democrats, we do not like socialism, will not be heard.

Why was Obama so disappointed

Q: Why was Obama so disappointed when he went to a screening of The Men Who Stare at Goats?

A: Being a Muslim, he thought there would be more romance.

Desires, Dreams

Blog entry by Yoani Sanchez in her Generation Y blog.

On December 24 I woke up typing into my cell phone some wishes and short predictions of what 2011 could bring those of us who live on this Island. After sending some 140 character texts via Twitter, it occurred to me to ask my friends and acquaintances to send me their own hopes and I promised to catapult them into cyberspace. Within a few hours my Motorola inbox collapsed under the weight of so many forecasts and expectations for the coming months. Curiously, one word was repeated in the majority of those messages, the eight letters of the elusive libertad filled a good part of the text messages that came to me on Christmas Eve.

So I would like, in these final days of 2010, to post my own concept of freedom on Generation Y. In these images, filmed by a couple of young German filmmakers, I sum up my relationship with this concept absent from our lives, but not from our aspirations.

* The video is a fragment of the film “I’m Free,” by Andrea Roggan of Germany, which is still being edited.

Yoani’s comments from the video:

For me, freedom, although I don’t fully know it, signifies a goal, an objective to go toward, and I fundamentally believe that freedom is the possibility of standing on a street corner and shouting “There is no freedom here!” I believe it is a space where you can get more and more freedom.

Well, freedom begins within you. The day you wake up and say I will not to pretend anymore, I will not wear the mask anymore, I will not allow them to continue stealing pieces of my opinion, pieces of my freedom of movement… well, in my case it started when I began this adventure that is Generation Y, my blog on the internet, which is a long process of internal liberation. It is like a therapy, above all to shake off years and years of apathy, years and years of silence.

Obama’s New Years Gesture To Americans

In the last waning hours of 2010, the Obama regime has given America a certain obscene gesture, yet again.

First, Janet Napolitano is at it again.  She wants to make sure the border is secured and is devoting United States military resources.  Officials from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, were working to enforce the border.

The problem?

The border is the border in Afghanistan.  If we are teaching the Afghans how to seal their border, do you think we could seal our own?

The family of Brian Terry, Border Patrol Agent, who was murdered earlier this month, might want an answer to that question.

Barack Obama gave Americans a big flip off at the end of the year.  He took a huge family vacation to Hawaii.  Being President is a stressful job.  No one argues that.  But America is in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Instead of taking an economic vacation, Obama is spending millions so he can have his two weeks in Hawaii.  Of course, the millions are not his money.  It is our money.  He could have cut the expenses considerably by staying on a military base.  This would have given him the same beachfront venue, but would have reduced security costs considerably.   No, not for Obama.  He is instead staying on a private property, about five minutes away from the military base.  Of course, he is going on base every day with his family, but why bother him with those pesky details, like saving tax dollars.

Most Americans would love to take a Hawaii vacation. Some of them would like any vacation.  Some Americans would like to have a job so they can take a vacation.  While gas prices climb through $3 a gallon and more Americans lose their jobs, Obama’s message to them is simple.  It is one last obscene gesture at the American people for 2010.  Expect more from him in 2011.