Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Unlike Obama, she actually does have small donors

Remember how Obama kept saying that most of his campaign contributions came from small donors?

Uh.
Turns out its not true.
Guess who actually is getting small donors? According to AP, Michelle Bachman.
...Bush and Obama depended more on thunderstorms of money — bundles of checks collected by big-money donors, each written for the maximum amount allowed by law. Bachmann's accounts are instead filled with small contributions sent by devoted supporters.


Cool for Michelle. Although that won't quell the liberal belief that she's being sponsored by corporations.

World's Worst Gaffe

I've seen some ridiculous gaffes by Obama, but this one took the cake.

I need to start by introducing you to Medal Of Honor winner, Sergeant First Class Jared C. Monti. Jared lost his life in Afghanistan. According to the official website:
With complete disregard for his own safety, Staff Sergeant Monti twice attempted to move from behind the cover of the rocks into the face of relentless enemy fire to rescue his fallen comrade. Determined not to leave his Soldier, Staff Sergeant Monti made a third attempt to cross open terrain through intense enemy fire. On this final attempt, he was mortally wounded, sacrificing his own life in an effort to save his fellow Sohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifldier. Staff Sergeant Monti's selfless acts of heroism inspired his patrol to fight off the larger enemy force


The president presented his parents with the Congressional Medal Of Honor, after giving this 14 minute speech on Jared.


It is a moving ceremony, one which I'm fairly certain that the parents will not forget.

Oh...
...but our president did...


While visiting Fort Dunn, the president said:
“First time I saw the 10th Mountain Division, you guys were in southern Iraq. When I went back to visit Afghanistan, you guys were the first ones there. I had the great honor of seeing some of you because a comrade of yours, Jared Monti, was the first person who I was able to award the Medal of Honor to who actually came back and wasn’t receiving it posthumously.”


This truly is the worst possible gaffe the president could have committed.
Now granted, he did call the parents to apologize. But this fits under the heading of "imagine if Bush said this...?"
Because if this were any other president, we'd still be talking about this today.


Sunday, June 26, 2011

Jon Stewart can't admit he was wrong

I hate, hate, hate when people can't admit when they were wrong.

No one is more problematic at this then Jon Stewart. Granted, admitting that you're wrong isn't as funny as sticking to the premise that you're right in lieu of the fact that Politifact screwed you to the wall.

So let's start here. 3 minutes in... Stewart says:


"Who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers? … Fox viewers, consistently, every poll."


This is not true.
Politifact Fact-checked the statement, and called Stewart out on it.
According to one media study they cited:
Fox actually scored better than its two direct cable-news rivals -- MSNBC, which is a liberal counterpoint to Fox, and CNN, which is considered more middle-of-the-road. Also scoring lower than Fox were local television news, the evening network news shows and the network morning shows.
Ouch.
Politifact concludes, after showing several different studies:
So we have three Pew studies that superficially rank Fox viewers low on the well-informed list, but in several of the surveys, Fox isn’t the lowest, and other general-interest media outlets -- such as network news shows, network morning shows and even the other cable news networks -- often score similarly low. Meanwhile, particular Fox shows -- such as The O’Reilly Factor and Sean Hannity’s show -- actually score consistently well, occasionally even outpacing Stewart’s own audience.
Of course, Jon Stewart admitted he was wrong, and moved on.
Oh wait.
He didn't.
Ugh. Like the rest of the left, he doubled down instead of admitting that he was wrong. Stewart went on the air to say that if he was wrong, it was because he watches Fox News... whom he still claims is consistently wrong.


To keep his claim true, Stewart quotes a number of Politifacts.
The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Fox News False Statements
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full EpisodesPolitical Humor & Satire BlogThe Daily Show on Facebook


Uh, but wait wait wait.

Fox was never reviewed by Politifact, as a network.

They DO review individual people who have made statements on opinion programs, and then they find the statements to be true or false. In fact, if you notice, the very first quote that Stewart refers to comes from Glenn Beck. After that, he kinda doesn't mention/refer to the fact that the statements he's quoting are from opinion makers on Fox.
However, Politifact does list them in one, handy, statement. What you'll notice is that Stewart is using statements from Beck, Palin, O'Reilly, and even Karl Rove as "Fox News" statements.

Now most people understand that if you list off a bunch of commentaries, you'll find people who have statements that aren't completely true. And if Stewart did that, he'd have to admit that the same thing happens on other networks.

Like... I dunno... lets do this with MSNBC.

Olbermann:
"Subsidies for oil and gas companies make up 88 percent of all federal subsidies. Just cutting the oil and gas subsidies out would save the U.S. government $45 billion every year."

FALSE

"Yes, this would be the same congressman (Rep. Pete Hoekstra) who last year Tweeted the whereabouts of a top-secret mission to Iraq."
FALSE


Maddow:
"Despite what you may have heard about Wisconsin’s finances, Wisconsin is on track to have a budget surplus this year."
FALSE

Fox News "said the New Black Panther Party decided the election for Barack Obama."
FALSE

"President Bush never did one interview with the New York Times during his entire presidency."
FALSE

Gov. Sarah Palin "got precisely zero support for her call for Alaska's Democratic Senator Mark Begich to resign because Ted Stevens' corruption conviction was overturned."

FALSE

Ed Schultz:
Under changes being debated, state employees in Wisconsin "who earn $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 a year might have 20 percent of their income just disappear overnight."

FALSE

With his decision on whether to fire Gen. Stanley McChrystal, President Obama "has to fix yet another problem he inherited from the Bush administration."

PANTS ON FIRE

"Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu received almost $1.8 million from BP over the last decade."

PANTS ON FIRE

(Whew... starting to get tired from all of this copy/paste)

Joe Scarborough:
The health care reform bill "is the largest tax increase in U.S. history."

FALSE

President Obama has never received a paycheck from a profitmaking business in his entire life.


FALSE

Lawrence O'Donnel:

"There are no similar clips of Newt Gingrich talking about how ineffective President Bush was in trying to control North Korea."

FALSE


Now I'm not even on the staff of Comedy Central writers, and I came up with that 'short' list, from just 4 people who appear on MSNBC. Should I presume that Stewart did the same thing as I did, when he researched Fox? That he took the time to compare it to other networks?

Of course he didn't. Because like many people on the left, he can't admit that his premise was wrong. He will continue to look for evidence that proves him right, ignoring anything to the contrary.

There is a thin difference between ignorance and arrogance.
Ignorance is not knowing.
Arrogance is the presumption that you already know.

Friday, June 24, 2011

Our real liabilities; long term US debt

The biggest problem that we're going to encounter in the future is the money that the government has not allocated, for items they promised to pay for.

In a corporate environment, these are known as liabilities. Corporations have to use accrual accounting instead of cash accounting.

In cash accounting, its real easy to calculate your balance. You just indicate revenue - expenses.
So if you spent $50,000, but made $60,000, you would indicate $10,000 of profit.
Now here's where things get complicated.
Let's say that you owe $200,000 to someone who billed you for services to your business, but you didn't have to pay the bill for another 2 years.
In cash accounting, you still had $10,000 of profit. On paper, your business is making money.

Corporations can't use cash accounting for this reason. They have to indicate what their liabilities are on their balance sheet. Somewhere on their financial statement, they would have to indicate that they owe $200,000.

How does this relate to our government?
Our government does what no business would ever be allowed to do: they put off obligations (money owed), often sell bonds to cover these expenses, and then indicate a balance that doesn't reflect this debt.

If I've lost you, you can always read this USA Today report that puts it into perspective.
The $61.6 trillion in unfunded obligations amounts to $528,000 per household. That's more than five times what Americans have borrowed for everything else — mortgages, car loans and other debt. It reflects the challenge as the number of retirees soars over the next 20 years and seniors try to collect on those spending promises.

Most people are familiar with the fact that we are currently $14 trillion in debt as a country, or that we are now running deficits of over $1 Trillion a year. In this post, I explained how the current administration is now running a deficit averaging $1.7 Trillion a year. But most people aren't aware of how much we truly are in debt.

So as you listen to congress talk about cutting $10 billion, or even $50 billion from the budget, and as you hear congressmen protecting their pet projects, remember that figure: $61.6 Trillion.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Obama campaign "misleads" in video

ABC News reports that Obama's 2012 campaign is trying to mislead its minions in their latest video. The video is reportedly a compilation of issues that the Republicans talked about in the latest debate. However...
...the video, which Messina calls a “highlight reel” and the DNC titled “What in the world are they talking about?” selectively uses clips from the 2-hour forum suggesting that the candidates were focused on idiotic issues, or battles from the past, when all of the topics the video hammers the Republicans for talking about were ones they were asked about at the forum.

Huh... the DNC is dishonest? When did that happen?
Here's the video, below.



If you want to compare that to what they were actually asked about... watch the CNN video. The debate actually starts 2:15 in: