The Camp Of The Saints

AT THE POINT OF A GUN

2009-12-03T17:03:00.008-05:00

From Accuracy In Media, L. Daniel Glover reporting, we learn:

Rep. Henry Waxman trekked from Capitol Hill to Federal Trade Commission headquarters today to deliver a message to journalists and news consumers: All of you need to reach a consensus about working with the government in order to bail out the struggling news industry.

The California Democrat, who chairs the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, didn't say it quite so bluntly, but his point was clear. "Government's going to have to be involved, in one way or the other," to save journalism from an ongoing "market failure" that will only worsen without intervention, Waxman said.

He spoke at the second day of an FTC workshop on how journalism can survive in the Internet era.

Waxman bemoaned the demise of newspapers across the country, including in Denver and Seattle, and warned that the troubling media trends will continue. "This recent depression in the media sector is not cyclical," Waxman said. "It is structural."

"Congress can't impose a solution" to that structural problem, he said. But the government should partner with the media industry to ensure a sound future for journalism. Waxman praised the record of "independent" reporting in U.S. history and said it has implications for democracy.

"There needs to be a consensus within the media industry and the larger community it serves" before the government acts, Waxman said. "We have to figure out together how to preserve that kind of reporting."

Spoken like a true fascist [and I mean that in the actual sense of the word, not in the deceitful way the Left has thrown around the word for years (see TERM #6 below blog postings)].

Anytime, anytime, the government forms a partnership with a private business or industry it holds the figurative majority stock in the company or companies. It has the power to force the private businesses involved to do whatever it wants done [as Ayn Rand so eloquently put it 'at the point of a gun']. And the company or companies can do nothing about it. This is most especially true when the government is holding the purse strings. Once the weed of government germinates inside of a company or industry, it feeds off them and its growth is uncontrollable because they've got might on their side. All controlling power eventually and inevitably accures to the government and the employees are absorbed into the Borg-like Collective.

And those working or owning the private businesses involved in such an arrangement who are in favor of the 'collaboration' all end-up becoming enslaved to the government. Many are willing to do this [see the rest of the AIM report and read their sheep-like comments]. And, I suspect, because, in this case the vast majority of people in the news business are Leftists, they will happily sit there while their shackles are applied. They will be overjoyed morphing into apparatchiks.

Tip of the fedora to Dan Riehl for bringing this report to my attention. After he justifiably labels this whole specific situation as repulsive, he comments:

We can not allow this to happen. I'll give them my keyboard when they take it from my cold, dead hands. And it won't be the only thing I'm carrying if they try to come for it! It's time to start drawing lines in the sand around our freedoms and our Rights. It isn't only felons and degenerates that have them. That's the America the progressives want, not an America for us. We need to stand up against what's going on in Washington now more than ever and turn things around beginning with the mid-term elections in 2010.

Hear, hear, Dan. The rubber is meeting the road and we, if we want to call ourselves 'Americans', have to act, and act quickly over the next year. Or else we may have to ask ourselves Questions We Can No Longer Avoid.

Stacy McCain, as you would expect, is up-in-arms over this as well:

Sad as it is for an old newsman to see the industry circling the drain (especially the worsening woes of the Washington Times) I'd go back to driving a forklift before I'd work for a newspaper dependent on bailout money swindled from the taxpayers.

This "gimme" attitude -- that government has an obligation to support us at the expense of our fellow citizens -- is antithetical to liberty....

...

Want to tell Henry Waxman to shove his newspaper bailout up his notorious nostrils? Just support your favorite bloggers, and we'll make sure he gets the message.

Bailout? We don't need no stinkin' bailout!

When they kick in your front door
How ya gonna come
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun?

The Camp Of The Saints

2009-12-01T19:01:00.001-05:00

I may be moving the DISPATCHES blog from my main site to here.

-Bob Belvedere

A STRANGE FELLOW

2009-11-25T15:36:00.029-05:00

Paco states what a lot of us are thinking these days:

At this stage, I would not be surprised to learn that Obama collects string, holds imaginary conversations with W.E.B. Dubois, fervently believes that George Bush is the Anti-Christ, and secretly puffs on coffin nails jammed into an extra-long cigarette holder a la FDR while he delivers the latter’s “Four Freedoms” speech in front of a mirror every Saturday night.

He is a strange fellow, this president of ours, with an outlook that is oddly alien to the American traditions and culture that most of us seem to take in with our mother’s milk, and whose forward-looking vision is, in reality, an unending gaze into the rearview mirror (shopworn leftist panaceas may be closer than they appear). And perhaps even more strikingly, he has the temperament of a loony-bin Napoleon, strutting about with a supreme (and supremely unjustified) self-confidence in his ability – an act that is wearing thin even among his fellow inmates, and that is growing positively alarming to his keepers. I mean, even something as otherwise unsurprising as hypocrisy in a politician takes on overtones of weirdness with Obama. In fact, in his abrazos with leftist caudillos, his bowing (can scraping be far behind?) to desert despots and ageing emperors, his shameful apology tours, his dog-like return to the vomit of Iranian “good faith”, the president has managed a feat unique in my experience: he has turned hypocrisy inside-out by redefining it as the tribute that virtue pays to vice.

Barack Hussein Obama is the worst kind of spoiled brat. All his life he has been told that he is special by people either taking pity on him and his situation or by those who have sought to indoctrinate him. For whatever reasons, he has never been put in his place and told that he is not the Golden Child—that, ultimately, he's not that special. Consequently, Mr. Obama is not a fully-formed adult.

He is also not very smart or creative. Oh, he is profoundly skilled, sly, and able to absorb facts like a superior sponge, but it is pretty clear now that he has never really questioned the premises of the ideas that have been fed to him. He merely spouts tired old discredited Leftist bromides from a failed philosophy.

Such people as him are convinced that they are above average in a unique [key word] and outstanding way. This feeling gets repeatedly re-enforced by the teachers, mentors, friends, relatives, and allies around them. This type of person has not been challenged nor has had his intelligence questioned in any serious way. Therefore, faced with no challenges to justify and defend what he believes in, and constantly having his image of himself as something special re-enforced, he comes to believe of himself as near-omniscient—a classic narcissist, lacking empathy for others, having an inflated self-image, 'characterized by an unusual coolness and composure, which is shaken only when the narcissistic confidence is threatened, and by the tendency to take others for granted or to exploit them'.

Now that Barack Hussein Obama is finally facing real and determined opposition at home and abroad, his first reaction has been rage and anger at those who challenge and question his actions or motives. This is the kind of reaction one gets from a spoiled rotten brat. In a child it is hard enough to control, but in someone with the access to such power as the Presidency of the United States confers, it is near impossible to control.

QUESTIONS WE CAN NO LONGER AVOID

2009-11-21T15:02:00.002-05:00

In a posting over at The Other McCain this afternoon, after citing several recent examples, we get some very thought-provoking ruminations from Smitty:

People in positions of trust seem increasingly criminal in their approach to their tasks. Worse still, and this is the question I'm throwing out here, is the only remedy for honest people to engage in increasingly lawless behavior, with break-ins here and feigned criminal activity there, in order to support reform?

These were non-violent acts. One hopes that the reasonable, honest and sane can generate sufficient revolution at the ballot box to preclude worse.

This has been on my mind, as of late, as well. As I wrote yesterday in the final paragraph of my posting on Obamacare:

If we lose this battle, then we must work even harder to throw out each and every member of the Congress who voted for this power grab next year and neutralize the Executive. If we fail at those two things, then it would appear our only recourse will be, shall we say, a more 'active' resistance.

We may be facing many of the same choices that the Founding Fathers did. I think that each and everyone of us who loves America must be prepared for this scenario. One has to ask oneself: how far are you willing to go to preserve, protect, and defend the United States against all enemies domestic?

The Leftists in power seek nothing less than an overthrow of EVERYTHING America is and stands for. They want nothing less than to make everyone subservient and enslaved to their version of the state. And they are willing to do so by any means necessary. We have no choice now but to take the time and contemplate what we are willing to do, how far we are willing to go, as the situation gets worse. And signs indicate that it WILL get worse.

I had hoped that it would not come to this, that we would be forced to ponder such questions. But our hand has been forced because we let the cancer that is Leftism gain a solid foothold in America.

In the first sentence of his posting, Smitty asks: 'Are we moving into a new stage in the struggle for liberty?'

The answer appears to be a resounding 'YES!'.

The Founding Fathers warned us that everyone must pull guard duty in the fight to retain our freedoms and liberties. A final question: will you shirk your duty?

A final thought: How friggin' sad that it's come to this.

TEST PIC POST

2009-08-06T20:39:00.003-04:00

TEST

2009-07-30T21:22:00.002-04:00