Month: October 2009
Critical Watching – Muslim Demographics
Pundits React To Obama Winning Nobel Peace Prize – RealClearPolitics
First Carter, then Gore, now THIS!?
Pathetic.
The Origins of Political Correctness
Excellent review of the pathology. Click the link.
John Fund: Acorn Should Not Get Federal Funds – WSJ.com
Acorn’s allies in Congress have long stopped every move to rein it in. Rep. Steve King R., Iowa, for example, has tried six times to get House floor votes restricting Acorn’s access to federal funds but has been blocked by Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s hand-picked Rules Committee members. Some Democrats have grumbled. Michigan’s John Conyers, chair of the Judiciary Committee, urged a hearing be held on Acorn abuses in March, but later told the Washington Times “the powers that be decided against it.”
via John Fund: Acorn Should Not Get Federal Funds – WSJ.com.
Post Office + unions = millions for idleness OneNewsNow.com
Many Americans may be outraged to find out that while the United States Postal Service is facing a $7 billion deficit this year and receiving a $4 billion bailout from Congress, the government agency is spending more than a million dollars each week to pay thousands of employees to sit in empty rooms and do nothing.
The Federal Times reports the Postal Service is paying out 45,000 hours of “standby time” every week — the equivalent of having 1,125 full-time employees sitting idle, at a cost of more than $50 million a year. Postal union officials estimate that 15,000 employees have spent time this year holed up in so-called “resource rooms” where they read books, do word puzzles, or sleep — and get paid for it.
Tad DeHaven, a budget analyst at the Cato Institute, says the Postal Service is experiencing serious financial woes in large part because 80 percent of its cost is tied up in labor.
“The Postal Service labor force is heavily unionized,” he points out, “and the fact that they can’t set aside these people or fire people, or reduce wages or time, or furlough [them] or anything, is all a function of the union contracts that they operate under.”
via Post Office + unions = millions for idleness OneNewsNow.com.
Jobless rate reaches 9.8 percent in September – Yahoo! Finance
Persistent joblessness could pose political problems for President Barack Obama, who pushed through an ambitious $787 billion stimulus package in February intended to “save or create” 3.5 million jobs by the end of 2010.
“We still think the overall trend is moving in the right direction,” said Christina Romer, chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. “We’re going from much larger job losses earlier this year. They are moderating. We want them to moderate more.”
Republicans note that job losses have continued despite the stimulus. “Wasteful government spending is not the solution to what ails this economy,” said Indiana Rep. Mike Pence, chairman of the House Republican caucus.
via Jobless rate reaches 9.8 percent in September – Yahoo! Finance.
Obama ACORN Ties 20 Years Deep – WSJ.com
John Fund writing on WSJ.com:Only one of the five television networks that interviewed President Obama for their Sunday shows bothered to ask him about Acorn, the left-wing community organizing group whose federal funding was cut off last week by an overwhelming vote in Congress.
“Frankly, it’s not something I’ve followed closely,” Mr. Obama claimed. . . .
Mr. Obama took great pains to act as if he barely knew about Acorn. In fact, his association goes back almost 20 years. In 1991, he took time off from his law firm to run a voter-registration drive for Project Vote, an Acorn partner that was soon fully absorbed under the Acorn umbrella. The drive registered 135,000 voters and was considered a major factor in the upset victory of Democrat Carol Moseley Braun over incumbent Democratic Senator Alan Dixon in the 1992 Democratic Senate primary.
Mr. Obama’s success made him a hot commodity on the community organizing circuit. He became a top trainer at Acorn’s Chicago conferences. In 1995, he became Acorn’s attorney, participating in a landmark case to force the state of Illinois to implement the federal Motor Voter Law. That law’s loose voter registration requirements would later be exploited by Acorn employees in an effort to flood voter rolls with fake names.
In 1996, Mr. Obama filled out a questionnaire listing key supporters for his campaign for the Illinois Senate. He put Acorn first it was not an alphabetical list.
Google censors non-liberal blo…
Google censors non-liberal blogs from search results, evidence is building.
GOOGLE’S ADMITS CENSORSHIP – Atlas Shrugs
The most powerful and protean of these Internet gatekeepers is, of course, Google. With control of 63 percent of the world’s Internet searches, as well as ownership of YouTube, Google has enormous influence over who can find an audience on the Web around the world. As an acknowledgment of its power, Google has given Nicole Wong a central role in the company’s decision-making process about what controversial user-generated content goes down or stays up on YouTube and other applications owned by Google, including Blogger, the blog site; Picasa, the photo-sharing site; and Orkut, the social networking site. Wong and her colleagues also oversee Google’s search engine: they decide what controversial material does and doesn’t appear on the local search engines that Google maintains in many countries in the world, as well as on Google.com. As a result, Wong and her colleagues arguably have more influence over the contours of online expression than anyone else on the planet.