The Stafford Voice

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Conservative

Like, Is Sarah Palin Totally Conceited?

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by Ann Coulter

In the October issue of Vanity Fair now on newsstands, Michael Gross reverts to junior high school to issue gossip-girl digs at Sarah Palin. Next up in Vanity Fair: “Sarah Palin Super Stuck Up; Thinks She’s All That.”

Gross dramatically reveals, for example, that her speech in Wichita, Kan., was “basically the same speech she gave 18 hours earlier to the Tea Party group in Independence (Mo.).”

A politician repeated lines in a speech? You must be kidding! Hello, Ripley’s? No, you cannot put me on hold. This is a worldwide exclusive. I’m sitting on a powder keg here.

Gross also apparently believes Vanity Fair readers will be tickled, rather than appalled by this story about Palin:

“Sometimes when she went out in public, people were unkind. Once, while shopping at Target, a man saw Palin and hollered, ‘Oh my God! It’s Tina Fey! I love Tina Fey!’ When other shoppers started laughing, the governor parked her cart, walked out of the store, and drove away.” (That jackass was lucky Sarah didn’t have her moose rifle with her.)

A random encounter with a rude, abusive jerk in public is supposed to make her look bad? Liberals have really lost their minds about Palin. They’d laugh if someone hit her with a baseball bat.

Gross also includes a strange exegesis about Palin’s tipping. It seems an unnamed bellman at an unnamed Midwestern hotel “waited up until past midnight for Palin and her entourage to check in — and then got no tip at all for 10 bags.”

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Money Is Not What Schools Need

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by John Stossel

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently claimed: “Districts around the country have literally been cutting for five, six, seven years in a row. And, many of them, you know, are through, you know, fat, through flesh and into bone … .”

Really? They cut spending five to seven consecutive years?

Give me a break!

Andrew Coulson, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, writes that out of 14,000 school districts in the United States, just seven have cut their budgets seven years in a row. How about five years in a row? Just 87. That’s a fraction of 1 percent in each case.

Duncan may be pandering to his constituency, or he may actually be fooled by how school districts (and other government agencies) talk about budget cuts. When normal people hear about a budget cut, we assume the amount of money to be spent is less than the previous year’s allocation. But that’s not what bureaucrats mean.

“They are not comparing current year spending to the previous year’s spending,” Coulson writes. “What they’re doing is comparing the approved current year budget to the budget that they initially dreamed about having.”

So if a district got more money than last year but less than it asked for, the administrators consider it a cut. “Back in the real world, a K-12 public education costs four times as much as it did in 1970, adjusting for inflation: $150,000 versus the $38,000 it cost four decades ago (in constant 2009 dollars),” Coulson says.

Taxpayers need to understand this sort thing just to protect themselves from greedy government officials and teachers unions.

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Fools Money – Part 2

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by Thomas Sowell

Words are supposed to convey thoughts, but they can also obliterate thoughts and shut down thinking. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, a catchword can “delay further analysis for fifty years.” Holmes also said, “think things, not words.”

When you are satisfied to accept words, without thinking beyond those words to the things– the tangible realities of the world– you are confirming what philosopher Thomas Hobbes said in the 17th century, that words are wise men’s counters but they are the money of fools.

Even in matters of life and death, too many people accept words instead of thinking, leaving themselves wide open to people who are clever at spinning words. The whole controversy about “health care reform” is a classic example.

“Health care” and medical care are not the same thing. The confusion between the two spreads more confusion, when advocates of government-run medical care point to longer life expectancies in some other countries where government runs the medical system.

Health care affects longevity, but health care includes far more than medical care. Health care includes such things as diet, exercise and avoiding things that can shorten your life, such as drug addiction, reckless driving and homicide.

If you stop and think– which catchwords can deflect us from doing– it is clear that homicide and car crashes are not things that doctors can prevent. Moreover, if you compare longevity among countries, leaving out homicide and car crashes, Americans have the longest lifespan in the western world.

Why then are people talking about gross statistics on longevity, as a reason to change our medical care system? Since this is a life and death issue, we need to think about the realities of the world, not the clever words of spinmeisters trying to justify a government takeover of medical care.

American medical care leads the world in things like cancer survival rates, which medical care affects far more than it affects people’s behavior that leads to obesity and narcotics addiction, as well as such other things as homicide and reckless driving.

But none of this is even thought about, when people simply go with the flow of catchwords, accepting those words as the money of fools.

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Preserve, Protect and Defend

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by Ed Feulner

Even America’s bitterest enemies understand why we mark July 4th with parades, speeches and fireworks: to celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence. We’re proud of our nation, and justifiably so.

So why do we virtually ignore September 17th? That’s the date, in 1787, when our Founding Fathers signed the Constitution. And if any one factor can explain why our republic has endured — indeed, thrived — for 223 years, it is this unique charter, which outlines the form of government best designed to safeguard “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness,” as the Declaration puts it.

Yet today, on many issues, this vital document is frequently ignored, even undermined, by some of the very people who have taken a public oath to uphold it.

Consider the debate over Arizona’s immigration law. Here we have a state understandably frustrated by the federal government’s failure to control the flow of illegal immigrants. So it passed a law to enforce immigration laws already on the books. Hysteria ensues. The Justice Department demands that the law be struck down.

Susan Bolton, the federal judge who subsequently ruled on the law, didn’t go that far, fortunately. But she did suspend certain parts of it, such as a provision authorizing the arrest of an individual “where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien and is unlawfully present in the United States.”

Why? Because that might go against the Obama administration’s practice of not enforcing immigration law in many of these cases. But what she could not say is that the Arizona law was somehow inconsistent with the actual federal immigration law. She simply relied on judicial fiat to produce a conclusion that flouts precedent and tradition. Is she unaware that it’s her job to interpret the law, not rewrite it?

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Fools Money

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by Thomas Sowell

Seventeenth century philosopher Thomas Hobbes said that words are wise men’s counters, but they are the money of fools.

That is as painfully true today as it was four centuries ago. Using words as vehicles to try to convey your meaning is very different from taking words so literally that the words use you and confuse you.

Take the simple phrase “rent control.” If you take these words literally– as if they were money in the bank– you get a complete distortion of reality.

New York is the city with the oldest and strongest rent control laws in the nation. San Francisco is second. But if you look at cities with the highest average rents, New York is first and San Francisco is second. Obviously, “rent control” laws do not control rent.

If you check out the facts, instead of relying on words, you will discover that “gun control” laws do not control guns, the government’s “stimulus” spending does not stimulate the economy and that many “compassionate” policies inflict cruel results, such as the destruction of the black family.

Do you know how many millions of people died in the war “to make the world safe for democracy”– a war that led to autocratic dynasties being replaced by totalitarian dictatorships that slaughtered far more of their own people than the dynasties had?

Warm, fuzzy words and phrases have an enormous advantage in politics. None has had such a long run of political success as “social justice.”

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Barack Obama’s 5 Cacophonous Notes

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by David Limbaugh

I never expected President Barack Obama to be promoting my new book, “Crimes Against Liberty,” but that’s virtually what’s happened with his recent speeches on the economy. It’s as if he’s determined to validate every premise I assert in “Crimes Against Liberty.”

All the elements are there: his thin-skinned narcissism, his deceit, his militant partisanship, his bullying and his dogged adherence to his disastrous policy agenda against all evidence of its failure and against the express will of the American people.

His full-throated class warfare was on clear display. With him, it’s always us against them. He praised “Wisconsin’s working men and women,” that is union members, as if no one else works or contributes to the economy or society.

Expanding on this theme, he paid homage to the middle class — the people whose taxes “in any form” he promised he would never raise — before signing the excise tax on tobacco, trying to pass the cap-and-trade bill, shoving through Obamacare and its 14 to 19 new taxes, which will total some half a trillion dollars over the next decade and fall hardest on middle-income groups. A value-added tax is even on the table.

He claims to be the middle class’s greatest champion but fails to explain why his economic policies — not George W. Bush’s, not John Boehner’s — are devastating that very group and bankrupting our children’s futures.

No, the acceptance of personal accountability is not in his makeup. It’s still Bush’s fault that our unemployment rate hovers between 9 and 10 percent despite Obama’s promise that it would not exceed 8 percent if he passed his stimulus bill. Now he says “there’s no silver bullet” to fix these problems. But that’s not what he said during the campaign. He was the silver bullet who would cause the oceans to subside and whose policies would “jump-start this economy again.”

He ratcheted up his class warfare theme with this assertion that only those at the top of the economic ladder are doing well, while the middle class is being left behind. If that’s true, does it mean he will finally acknowledge the failure of his policies? After all, the middle class (and all groups) fared far better under President Bush. But don’t hold your breath.

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Never Forget

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by Oliver North

According to the “experts,” anyone older than 10 will remember traumatic events for the rest of their lives. That’s certainly true of the thousands of World War II veterans and family members I have met doing interviews for our “War Stories” series on Fox News Channel. All of them can recall where they were when they learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor, whom they were with and what was said. It should be the same for the terror attack nine years ago on Sept. 11.

My friend Tom Kilgannon, president of Freedom Alliance, and I clearly remember all those things and more about that terrible day. At 8:30 a.m., we boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 238 in Detroit, headed for Reagan National Airport. Fifteen minutes later, the aircraft lifted off on time, and we headed south toward our nation’s capital in a cloudless blue sky. We never arrived at our intended destination.

Shortly before we were due to land at Reagan Airport, the captain announced over the public address system that the aircraft was being diverted to land at nearby Dulles International Airport — but offered no explanation as to why. Tom, who was sitting across the aisle from me, soon gave us the answer.

“As we began our descent into Dulles International Airport, I checked my pager,” he recalled. “Young people today forget this was before BlackBerrys and iPhones were available. The screen on my pager was full of breaking news alerts:

“‘Plane Crashes into World Trade Center.’

“‘Second Plane Crashes into World Trade Center.’

“‘Fireball Reported at Pentagon.’

“‘Car Bombs Reported at State Department and Capitol Hill.’

“These and other headlines flashed across my pager. We now know that in the haste to report the horrible events of that morning, some of those initial accounts turned out to be inaccurate, but when I showed you my pager, I said, ‘Oh, dear God, I think America is under attack.’ Other passengers — having recognized you at the boarding gate and aboard the flight — inquired what was going on. That’s how we — and most of them — learned what had happened.”

Shortly after Tom showed me the electronic messages, the captain addressed the passengers from the cockpit. He informed us that multiple terror attacks had taken place while we were en route to Washington and that when we landed at Dulles, we were to immediately exit the aircraft and be escorted out of the closed airport terminal.

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The Union Boondoggle

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by Michelle Malkin

President Obama calls his latest attempt to revive the economy a “Plan to Renew and Expand America’s Roads, Railways and Runways.” I’m calling it “The Mother of all Big Dig Boondoggles.” Like the infamous “Big Dig” highway spending project in Boston, this latest White House infrastructure spending binge guarantees only two results: Taxpayers lose; unions win.

The plan would add at least $50 billion more to the nearly $230 billion already allocated in the original trillion-dollar stimulus law for infrastructure. Less than one-third of that infrastructure stimulus money has been spent, but the urgency to pile on has increased exponentially as the midterm elections approach and unemployment hovers near 10 percent. So, the president says he wants to “put people back to work” through a new “upfront investment” in surface transportation, airports and the air-traffic control system paid for by repealing tax incentives for the oil and gas industries — followed by massive, unpaid-for expenditures on pie-in-the-sky high-speed rail, “environmental sustainability” and “livability,” whatever that means.

Obama spoke emotionally at an AFL-CIO rally on Labor Day about unemployed construction workers. A “lot of those folks, they had lost their jobs in manufacturing and went into construction; now they’ve lost their jobs again,” he said. “It doesn’t do anybody any good when so many hardworking Americans have been idled for months, even years, at a time when there is so much of America that needs rebuilding.”

But here’s the rub: Not all workers are equal in Obama’s eyes. And most of them will remain “idled” by the Democrats’ own design. The key is E.O. 13502, a union-friendly executive order signed by Obama in his first weeks in office, which essentially forces contractors who bid on large-scale public construction projects worth $25 million or more to submit to union representation for its employees.

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Time to Put Up or Shut Up

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by Thomas Sowell

When people learn that you are an economist, they often want you to predict which way the economy is going. There seem to be more than the usual number of calls for such predictions lately. But an economist should be more aware than others are of how hazardous such predictions can be.

One reason is that what happens in the economy is affected by what politicians do in Washington– and who can predict what politicians will do?

However, let me go out on a limb, and try to predict what politicians will not do.

What would probably get the economy recovering fastest and most completely would be for the President of the United States and Congressional leaders to shut up and stop meddling with the economy. But it is virtually impossible that they will do that.

Think about telling all the millions of people who have lost their jobs, their homes or their businesses: “I really messed you up but, hey, nobody’s perfect. So I’m going to leave things alone now.” In fact, that would be hard even to tell yourself.

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The Need to Get America Working

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by Ted Nugent

Sadly, there isn’t much to celebrate about Labor Day this year.

With unemployment hovering near 10% and real unemployment around 15%, many fellow Americans are laboring to find a job. With the job market so bleak, some Americans have actually quit looking. That doesn’t even register with me.

Many other Americans are underemployed while many others are worried about keeping their job. Many of the good jobs Americans once had are gone for good.

The economy is in shambles, possibly bordering on a depression. Some economists are saying we have not even seen the worst of it yet. Some even claim America is just a few years away from a financial meltdown similar to what happened to Greece.

Home sales are down. Same with commercial real estate. The stock market is sliding south. The national debt is over $12 trillion and growing. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are nearing financial insolvency. Almost everything we buy is made in some other country.

States and cities all across America are also on the verge of going bankrupt. Unionized public employees with their sweet-heart deals at taxpayer expense is one of the significant reasons why some cities and states are in such dire financial conditions.

Unionized public employees have better deals than the taxpayers who are funding them. Federal employees make twice as much as their private sector peers. This is all beyond bizzarro.

The question we all need to ask is: What went so terribly wrong?

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