Showing posts with label George W. Bush. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George W. Bush. Show all posts

Friday, November 11, 2011

Why can't the Republicans nominate a genuine right-wing nut?

Verne Strickland Blogmaster / November 12, 2011

CONSERVATIVES JUST NEED TO COME TO GRIPS WITH THE FACT THAT IT'S ALWAYS GOING TO BE A MITT ROMNEY TYPE WHO LEADS THE TICKET.

By Frank J. Fleming

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Parents upset (surprise, surprise) after school yearbook lists George W. Bush, Dick Cheney as worst people of all time.

Verne Strickland Blogmaster, June 2, 2011

PEOPLE, WHAT THE HECK (NO . . . WHAT THE HELL) IS HAPPENING TO THIS COUNTRY? WHERE IS THE RESPECT FOR DECENCY AND AMERICAN VALUES? THIS STORY FROM LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS, BREAKS MY HEART. IF THIS IS THE WAY OUR KIDS SEE THEIR COUNTRY, WE SOMEHOW MUST START OVER. GOD HELP US.

Cutest couple. Most likely to succeed. Class Clown. Top 5 Worst People of All Time.

OK, so that last list probably isn't seen in most school yearbooks, but it's raising the ire of parents and community members in Arkansas. The Fox affiliate in Little Rock reports the names in the Russellville Middle School yearbook include, in order, Adolph Hitler, Osama bin Laden, Charles Manson, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Parents were outraged when they discovered the list, according to the station, and, in reaction, the school district had the list with black duct tape.

Superintendent Randall Williams says the printing of the list was "an oversight," Fox 16 reports, and said he was disappointed to learn the tape could simply be peeled off the page.

"I'm furious as a parent and as a board member and as a tax payer and as a resident of Russellville," School Board Member Chris Cloud, who has two children in the district, tells the station. "It's wrong."

Williams tells Fox 16 the yearbook sponsor -- a teacher -- is "very, very, very" upset that she didn't pay more attention the page with the list, and that the yearbook editing process is being reviewed.

"I think she maybe just scanned the whole page and went on," he tells the station, adding that he can't talk about disciplinary action.

WHAT'S GOING ON DOWN THERE? IS ARKANSAS STILL SUFFERING FROM THE DEPRAVITY OF STAR CITIZENS BUBBA AND HILLARY CLINTON? GET WITH IT, HOGS, OR GET OUT! THE TEACHER GOT BURNED, PARENTS GOT FRANTIC. BUT WHO DID IT? AND WHY? WHO IS SHAPING THE MORALS AND 'PATRIOTISM' OF OUR CHILDREN?

http://www.parentdish.com/2011/06/02/school-yearbook-worst-people-list/?icid=maing-grid7|main5|dl1|sec1_lnk3|67696

Monday, May 9, 2011

FIRST LADY INVITES RAPPER TO 'POETRY READING'. HE CALLS HIMSELF 'COMMON'. HE GOT THAT RIGHT.

Verne Strickland Blogmaster

Published: 12:48 PM 05/09/2011

DAILY CALLER 


First Lady Michelle Obama has scheduled a poetry evening for Wednesday, and she’s invited several poets, including a successful Chicago poet and rapper, Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr., AKA “Common.”

However, Lynn is quite controversial, in part because his poetry includes threats to shoot police and at least one passage calling for the “burn[ing]” of then-President George W. Bush.

Back in 2003, First Lady Laura Bush held a poetry evening, and she invited several poets t reprise the work of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman. Although none of those poets had urged violence against a president, Bush canceled the event after left-of-center poets protested and threatened to disrupt the event.
Here’s a sample of Dickinson’s work that could have been presented at Bush’s event:
I’m nobody! Who are you?
I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
Here’s a sample of Common’s work, transcribed from a 2007 video with 837,613 viewers on YouTube. Students, please compare and contrast the two poems. You’ll get extra credit for counting the death threats. There is no extra credit for identifying spelling errors. By the way, ‘Uzi’ is slang for a compact machine gun:
A Letter to the Law
Dem boy wanna talk… [indistinguishable]
Whatcha gon do if ya got one gun?
I sing a song for the hero unsung
with faces on the mural of the revolution
No looking back cos’ in back is what’s done
Tell the preacher, god got more than one son
Tell the law, my Uzi weighs a ton
I walk like a warrior,
from them I won’t run
On the streets, they try to beat us like a drum
In Cincinnati, another brother hung
A guinea won’t see the sun
with his family stung
They want us to hold justice
but you handed me none
The same they did to Kobe and Michael Jackson
make them the main attraction
Turn around and attack them
Black gem in the rough
You’re rugged enough
Use your mind and nine-power, get the government touch
Them boys chat-chat on how him pop gun
I got the black strap to make the cops run
They watching me, I’m watching them
Them dick boys got a lock of cock in them
My people on the block got a lot of pok* in them
and when we roll together
we be rocking them to sleep
No time for that, because there’s things to be done
Stay true to what I do so the youth dream come
from project building
Seeing a fiend being hung
With that happening, why they messing with Saddam?
Burn a Bush cos’ for peace he no push no button
Killing over oil and grease
no weapons of destruction
How can we follow a leader when this a corrupt one
The government’s a g-unit and they might buck young black people
Black people In the urban area one
I hold up a peace sign, but I carry a gun.
Peace, ya’ll.”
The First Lady’s office did not return a call from TheDC.
*Commenter notes this may be “Pac,” as in Tupac Shakur


http://dailycaller.com/2011/05/09/burn-a-bush-michelle-obama-invites-rapper-common-to-a-poetry-reading/

Thursday, April 14, 2011

NY1 Exclusive: Donald Trump Slams "Evil" Bush, Praises Obama. Say What?

Verne Strickland Blogmaster

Verne Sez: 'Bye Bye Donnie Boy. I Hardly Knew Ye.'

By: Dominic Carter


 



If there's one thing certain about real estate mogul Donald Trump, it's that he likes to win... even though he endorsed John McCain for president.

"McCain, really, that was almost an impossible situation," said Trump. Bush has been so bad, maybe the worst president in the history of this country. He has been so incompetent, so bad, so evil that I don't think any Republican could have won."

Among other topics, Trump talks about term limits and calls the Freedom Tower a “white elephant” and an upcoming "catastrophe" for the New York real estate market.

During an exclusive interview with NY1 in his Midtown office on Fifth Avenue, Trump slammed President George Bush's foreign policies.

"You know, you can be enemies with people, whether it's Iran, Iraq, or anyplace else and you can still have dialogue. These people wouldn't even talk with him. It's terrible," said Trump.

While he had harsh words for the outgoing president, he had a much different opinion of President-elect Barack Obama.

"I think he has a chance to go down as a great president. Now, if he's not a great president, this country is in serious trouble," said Trump.

"I think [Obama's] going to lead through consensus," continued Trump. "It's not going to be just a bull run like Bush did. He just did whatever the hell he wanted. He'd go into a country, attack Iraq, which had nothing to do with the World Trade Center and just do it because he wanted to do it."

Trump was then asked if he ever thought he would see an African-American president in his lifetime.

"They always said 100 years before a black man or woman could be elected president. And the 100 years turned out to be, like, one year. He's done an amazing job," said Trump.

An Associated Press GFK poll released Tuesday shows that a majority of people share Trump's approval of Obama.

A total of 72 percent of those surveyed say they are confident the president-elect will do what it takes to revive the economy, while 68 percent say Obama will be able to carry out his campaign promises.

Strengthening the economy is a top priority for 61 percent of those surveyed.

The poll was conducted from November 6-10 by telephone interviews with more than 1,000 adults. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

<i>NY1 Exclusive:</i> Donald Trump Slams "Evil" Bush, Praises Obama
Meanwhile, no interview with the man they call "the Donald" would be complete without a little bragging.
"I'm in many, many rappers' songs. And I know them," said Trump. "50 Cent is sort of a friend of mine. I mean, he likes me. He just did a show, it was a copy of 'The Apprentice.' It will fail because he's not Trump, but he's actually a nice guy."

But to a degree, that ego may be well-earned. Trump confirmed reports that he sold a single home in West Palm Beach, Florida for nearly $100 million before the market crashed.

http://www.ny1.com/content/top_stories/88778/-i-ny1-exclusive---i--donald-trump-slams--evil--bush--praises-obama/

Friday, February 25, 2011

Is the "job" of the U.S. government wealth redistribution? Howard Dean thinks so.

Verne Strickland Blogmaster

By Dr. Paul Kengor / February 23, 2011

A teachable moment on the purpose of government recently occurred on MSNBC’s “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell,” who has picked up the torch for the departed Keith Olbermann.

It was Monday, February 7, the day after President Obama sat for an interview with Bill O’Reilly of Fox News.It was an exchange in the O’Reilly-Obama interview that inspired the teachable moment with O’Donnell.

O’Reilly asked Obama a valuable question:

O’Reilly: Do you deny that you’re a man that wants to redistribute wealth?

Obama: Absolutely.O’Reilly: You deny that?

Obama: Absolutely.


Putting aside the issue of whether Barack Obama is a redistributionist, the teachable moment for me here today—followed on MSNBC.

Lawrence O’Donnell’s guest was Howard Dean. Bear in mind that Dean is a very influential man of the Left. He chaired the Democratic National Committee, spearheading it when the Democrats took down George W. Bush in his second term, recapturing Congress in a landslide.

Those victories came after Dean challenged Bush for the presidency in 2004 and, in my opinion, did more than any other figure in ratcheting up the toxic vitriol that ultimately destroyed Bush’s presidency.

In short, Howard Dean’s opinion is not irrelevant.And so, Lawrence O’Donnell followed the O’Reilly-Obama “redistribution” exchange with this question to Dean:


O’Donnell: Governor [Dean], this is one of those things you can see he’s[Obama]afraid of discussing—what an increase in top tax rate actually does. This for me is — I feel is why Democrats so frequently lose the tax debate.You can see that they’re afraid of the tax debate.

Dean: That [interview] was an unusual thing. The president doesn’t often get mouse-trapped, especially by the likes of Bill O’Reilly…. He laid out a proposition that is we shouldn’t have redistribution. [But] that’s what governments do—is redistribute.

The argument is not whether they should redistribute or not, the question is how much we should redistribute…. The purpose of government is to make sure that capitalism works for everybody …. It’s government’s job to redistribute.


There are a bunch of objections I could raise to these statements. Primarily, however, the problem with Dean’s comments on the “purpose” and “job” of government is the complete lack of qualification. Dean gives a definition of government that is a leftist definition, provided by a modern liberal/progressive.

Howard Dean cannot, logically, honestly, factually, categorically argue that his definition is anything beyond that.Dean certainly did not offer a definition grounded in sources we would traditionally expect in America: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, specific writings of Jefferson, Madison, even John Locke. No one, and nothing, is cited.

For instance, the Declaration, written by Jefferson, edited by Ben Franklin, John Adams, and the entirety of the first Congress, approved by 56 of our founders, stated that “governments are instituted” for the purpose of securing the “unalienable rights” of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Wealth redistribution is nowhere to be found.What Howard Dean offered was an expansive modern “progressive” definition of government. That’s fine, but his terms need to be identified as just that.

Taking this a step further, note that Dean and O’Donnell both desire a federal income-tax system based on graduated or progressive rates. They believe such a system reflects and enables government’s “job” and “purpose.” They want a progressive federal income tax for the chief intention of wealth redistribution.

Here, too, this is hardly the spirit of America’s founding principles. America’s progressive income tax system did not start until nearly 140 years after the American Revolution, with implementation under President Woodrow Wilson—the progressive’s progressive—in 1913, and only after an intense, nasty debate that still rages a century later.

If Dean and O’Donnell want an early document that argues for a graduated or progressive income tax, they need to look overseas and to 1848, decades before Woodrow Wilson, with the publication of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. If you go to page 75 of the Penguin Signet Classics edition of the Manifesto, or page 26 of the on-line version (click here), you can see Marx’s 10-point program. Point two, which follows

Marx’s unapologetic call for “abolition of property,” explicitly calls for “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax.”No, I’m not calling Lawrence O’Donnell and Howard Dean communists, but I am calling them Leftists and redistributionists. That’s what they are, as is their definition of government. Their definition is, first and foremost, theirs—not America’s.

***********
Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College and executive director of The Center for Vision & Values. His books include "The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism" and the newly released "Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century."http://click.icptrack.com/icp/relay.php?r=8434635&msgid=338801&act=L8SI&c=617533&destination=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.VisionAndValues.org http://click.icptrack.com/icp/relay.php?r=8434635&msgid=338801&act=L8SI&c=617533&destination=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.VisionAndValuesEvents.com