Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Faux News Exposed!



According to Barack Obama, Fox News is Faux News.  They can't be trusted.  They make stuff up. He mocks them, ridicules them, and uses his DOJ to harass their reporters.  He has been a harsher critic of Fox News than of ISIS.

This weekend we learned that there actually is a ton of faux news out there, but it's not coming from Fox.  It's coming from the Obama administration, and they are proud of it!  Just when we thought the Obama presidency couldn't be more like bad fiction, we learned that the guy running Obama's foreign policy is actually an aspiring novelist who regularly feeds fiction to the gullible and overwhelmingly liberal press.  (If that sounds like hyperbole to you, you may not know that there is not a single Republican covering this President.)  Can't make this stuff up, folks.

Remember that lame story about Benghazi being about a video?  Remember that lame story about the Iran deal being about nuclear weapons?  Turns out these were false narratives spun out of whole cloth from Obama's propaganda shop.  We learned about this only after Obama's foreign policy novelist bragged about it in a NY Times Magazine piece that ran Sunday, May 8th.  He refers to himself as a "ventriloquist"  feeding lines to the Washington press corps.  (The "p" is silent for you  MSNBC, NPR, and NYTimesers)  They lap up the fictitious narratives and repeat it out to the masses as in an "echo chamber".  (Everything in quotes, for those of you "27 year olds... who know literally nothing", is actually from the mouth of Obama's novelist.)   

As if that wasn't enough of an affront to both the credibility of Barack Obama and his stenographers in the media, we also learned that Facebook is suppressing conservative news stories and promoting liberal ones.  The guy in charge of this operation at Facebook is an Obama/Clinton donor.  Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, who run the whole enchilada, make no secret of their leftist politics, yet they sanctimoniously claim Facebook as a paragon of transparency and fairness.   (Gee, I wonder if this post will be trending on FB anytime soon?)

And just today, James Rosen, one of the few adults in the Washington press corps., and a Fox News reporter, discovered that eight minutes of his questioning of a State Department spokesperson in 2013, where she openly admits the State Department misleads the American people, was mysteriously edited out of the official video record. These are Soviet tactics, folks!  This is banana republic stuff!  Without all the delicious bananas, of course.  

In other words,  the only news bureau not taking dictation from Obama's propaganda shop is ironically the one they refer to as "Faux News".  

Again, can't make this stuff up.

Here's a summary of all this:


Thursday, May 5, 2016

Trump vs. Clinton - Milton Friedman's Ultimate Test

So Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the two best people we have come up with to be the next president.  What do we do now? 
  
I would suggest, as I do on many sticky occasions, that we turn to the wisdom of Milton Friedman:

I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. 
Milton Friedman 

Many Americans believe Hillary and Donald are precisely the wrong people.  But according to Dr. Friedman they can still do the right things under certain circumstances.

Recall in 1992 when Hillary's husband Bill was elected president with less than a majority of the electorate. Most Americans thought he too was the wrong person for the job.  For his first two years he raised taxes,  pursued big government, the economy stagnated, and the stock market lagged.  The Democrats lost big in the mid-term congressional elections of 1994.  In came Newt Gingrich and The Contract With America.  Low taxes, free trade, limited government, and welfare reform were the order of the day. The economy went on a tear.  Stock market gains were unprecedented.  The budget got nearly balanced.   And to this day Bill Clinton is known for the strong economy that came after he "triangulated" and signed into law many of the planks of Newt's contract.  Bill Clinton was forced to do the right thing despite being the wrong person.

Can the electorate make it "politically profitable" for Hillary or Donald to do the right thing despite being the wrong people?  Based on the example of Barack Obama I think we have a much better shot if our next "wrong person" is not a "historical first" from a politically favored class of citizens. Donald will not be coddled by the media, Hollywood, academia, or anyone for that matter.  He will not be given the benefit of any doubt.  He will be held to the highest of standards each and every day.

Hillary?  The historic "First Woman President"?  Not so much.    

  
And also there's this to ponder: Donald Trump has never:

And this: 


And this:


And this:  


But, of course, also this:  ;-)