John Wiseman's Blog – May 2012 Archive (25)

Let's start off with this dozy from my favorite, MSNBC. In this clip we get a dose of a little side show I like to call, "exactly how crazy are those Mormons any how?" The message here seems to be that there is a rumor of some disavowed prophecy in which apparently, way back in the 1860's, it was foretold that a Mormon who ran for President would actually agree that our Constitution was a good thing. Wait for this little tidbit, Mitt Romney has actually praised our founding documents, gasp!…

The conventional wisdom told us on that first Wednesday in November of 2008 that the Republican Party was dying, if not already dead.  That great paragon of intellectual honesty, Al Sharpton, now relishing his role as the go to guy for the NBC family of networks, told us all proudly that America was now officially a Socialist nation.  Paul Krugman, the very same economist who presented the theory that we could pull out of our current economic woes by preparing for an invasion by space…

There is one caveat of the headline that I wish to get out of the way quickly. Government has no business in the venture capital market. This is one of the many vital areas of our free market economy where private sector interests do worlds of good, and government interests only serve to leave a legacy of devastation.

With that caveat out of the way, let's proceed. The last two weeks, Barack Obama has pressed his attack upon Mitt Romney for his record of success at…

No matter what your political bent is, there are some things which should be flat out beyond the political fray of the moment. Those brave members of our military deserve our respect and gratitude. They serve our nation without question. They have no say in the political considerations which are used to place them into harms way. Memorial day is the day we honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of what should be a grateful nation. In November, we honor those who are still…

Peter Robinson of Uncommon Knowledge interviewing Richard Epstein and John Yoo, two constitutional scholars and lawyers associated with the Hoover Institution. They give their take on some of the cases pending in the Supreme Court. One of the many things that I found interesting with this was the lever of disagreement between two attorneys who are all together aligned on most of the major issues of the day. Some disclosure is in order. Epstein wrote several of the briefs presented to the…

Laying the monetary policies of the late 1970's completely at the feet of Jimmy Carter is not entirely fair. Those policies which some see as the result of removing the gold standard from our currency began in earnest with Lyndon Johnson, found no trouble in moving across the aisle when Richard Nixon became a President from the opposition party, saw a brief hiatus with the more fiscally disciplined Gerald Ford, who lost to Jimmy Carter. So while it is true that the concept of fiat money did…

As a child, watching my favorite television program, (at the tender age of 8, the original Star Trek fit this bill,) I can remember the character portrayed by Walter Koenig, Chekhov, claiming every single invention of man kind that showed any value as being Russian. There is no secret that Gene Roddenberry saw his 3 year hundred something episode of science fiction high camp as a symbolic back drop for the tumultuous times during which it was written. The major powers and…

A few weeks ago, as a part of my Carter retrospective, I wrote about the creation of the Department of Education. Part of my assertion was the complete failure that this Department has turned out to be. Our national ranking for our students on the world stage has dropped steadily and substantially since this cabinet level bureaucracy was created. The costs per student spent in terms of real dollars have increased as the quality of the product supplied has declined. Our top spending school…

This is a brief description of the Obama Administration's war on the good people of Tombstone Arizona. We can add this to the ongoing war he is waging on all of the people of Arizona. It seems as though the Department of Agriculture is feeling left out of the general fun to be felt by bureaucrats when they get to intrude themselves upon the common folk. Those intrusions more often than not result in a severe loss of well being for those a fore mentioned common folk. Tombstone suffered a rain…

I don't remember who said it, let alone who said it first, only that it was not me. Last year, sometime around May, I read the theory that the Occupests were nothing more than the beginnings of Barack Obama's campaign strategy focusing on the candidate that they felt would be their eventual adversary for this year's Presidential election. The theory was boiled down to two startling points. One, that the Occupest Movement was itself the child of the Obama Acorn machine…

While I am not ready to swear off being entertained all together, I do appreciate Alfonzo Rachel's sentiment. I am tired of hearing Hollywood stars lend their status afforded by fame to lobby the rest of us on subjects for which they have zero understanding and even less actual care of the consequences involved. Yes, everyone has their right to free speech, but there is something inherently dishonest in using one's star power to claim an expertise that quite frankly does not exist. In…

Many of life's lessons are capable of imparting more than one pearl of wisdom. The brightest and best among us are capable of learning not only from their own mistakes, but from those so thoughtfully provided by others as well. Enron provides one such example of this in action. Two years before Enron exploded, the company fired her accountants, Arthur Anderson, and hired a rival firm, Anderson Little. The reason given to Arthur Anderson and the shareholders of Enron was that the accounting…

While spending the last two months or so traveling around the country pretending that it was not campaigning, Barack Obama has spent considerable resources informing us that he is doing everything humanly possible for a President to expand America's oil and natural gas production. I have seen television ads which proclaimed him to be the domestic oil and gas production king, even though one of his campaign promises was to do what ever he could to, "send subtle and gradual…

Every Democrat talking point from 1992 on has been in complete lock step with Agenda 21 as proposed by the U.N. Agenda 21 is nothing more than world wide Marxism being implemented under the guise of Environmental Protection. It's all there, the Model Cities Program, relinquishing our sovereignty to a world government, global wealth redistribution schemes, complete loss of our ability to make our own decisions that concern our daily living right down to what kind of light bulbs we can use in…

North Carolina's turn to be uncomfortably placed under the lights this week. This version of the James O'Keefe gone wild video has a twist that others do not. Rather than just showing up at polling places and having the poll workers simply hand them ballots of people who they clearly were not, O'Keefe and company take the extraordinary step to find people on voting rolls who are not citizens, and yet found a way to be registered as legal voters. His team is also able to get the voting rights…

This one is more than a little creepy, so bear with me. After you read the article, which I found on Hotair, we'll discuss it in a broader sense than just a bunch of 8 year old children being asked by the State to rat out their parents in New Jersey. Before anyone points out to me that the Governor of New Jersey is a Republican and would be considered by some to be an…

As a young teen kid growing up in the mountains of West Virginia, I got to see a lot of political contradictions, and more importantly, a lot of the consequences of those contradictions. while in the 9th grade, Iran went through a revolution. I knew two people at that time who's fathers were members of the Shah's government. One was a child attending a private school in the area, who simply found himself abandoned in America once the revolution took place. The other was the daughter of a…

Lee Doren does an excellent job in destroying David Harvey's presentation advocating for Marxism in the world's economics colleges. Every time there is any type of discomfort in the free market system, the entire history is called a failure based on the last two or three years.

France, having not attempted austerity at all has declared austerity a failure. So it's off to follow in the foot steps of Greece for them. Look for riots in a few years of French youths…

There has been much discussion about what the primary votes this Tuesday actually meant. As if primary votes could ever be applied to a larger indication of the public mood. When Ned Lamont won the Democrat primary in Connecticut in 2006, that was reported to mean that the voters at large hated President Bush. Bear in mind that only the Democrat voters of Connecticut were voting in that particular election. What it meant was that the Democrat voters, and only the Democrat…

One of the arguments that many of us made against the election of Barack Obama, and before him John Kerry, was that these two men would seek to farm out our national sovereignty to the United Nations should either of them be elected as our nation's chief executive.  Of course, any one who put forward such an argument was immediately labeled as a paranoid crank and worse yet, "a racist."  So guess what is happening now.…