The unemployment rate among young Americans has exploded to 52.2 percent — a post-WWII high. And there is little likelihood of the picture improving over the next several years.
Al Angrisani, the former assistant Labor Department secretary under President Reagan, doesn’t see a turnaround in the jobs picture for entry-level workers and places the blame squarely on the Obama administration and the construction of its stimulus bill.
“There is no assistance provided for the development of job growth through small businesses, which create 70 percent of the jobs in the country,” Angrisani said in an interview last week. “All those [unemployed young people] should be getting hired by small businesses.”
The delicious irony here, of course, is that it was these same young people who overwhelmingly voted for Obama. Now they are learning a hard lesson in how socialist economics works. And the learning is just beginning. These young Americans will inherit the trillions of dollars in debt that Obama has created. It will likely be a miserable life for these folks.
If the Republicans had any sense, they would build their election strategy in upcoming campaigns around this increasingly disillusioned demographic.
The next time someone argues that global warming alarmism is driven by science, refer them to the sad case of Mitchell Taylor, a polar bear research expert who was recently uninvited to the Polar Bear Specialist Group at the upcoming Copenhagen meeting. The reason? Mitchell does not share the prevailing opinion on the cause of global warming. An excerpt from the letter informing him of the decision:
I do believe, as do many Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) members, that for the sake of polar bear conservation, views that run counter to human induced climate change are extremely unhelpful. In this vein, your positions and statements in the Manhattan Declaration, the Frontier Institute, and the Science and Public Policy Institute are inconsistent with positions taken by the PBSG. . . .
Nothing I heard had to do with your science on harvesting or your research on polar bears – it was the positions you’ve taken on global warming that brought opposition.
In other words, politics trumps science. When political considerations shape the scientific debate, truth is the first casualty.
Some day the current global warming scare will be taught in universities as a good example of how not to do science.
With the mainstream media becoming increasingly irrelevant, and the rise of extremely partisan bloggers on the left and right, how can the average citizen find a balanced source of information to determine the truth on critical issues of the day? Ron Radosh looks at the challenges that face the news consumer trying to sort out the facts on a story like the recent ACORN scandal.
Is there any truth to the charges either side makes? If one listens simply to the TV talking heads, no one will know what is true or what is false. You watch the side you already agree with, and take the argument of those who you listen to in order to reinforce the opinion you already have.
Radosh has a point here. With partisans on both sides retreating deeper into enclaves of rigid group-think, the process of debate and compromise — which is the genius of our democratic system — becomes ever more difficult.
Radosh, however, sees a glimmer of hope in a handful of television programs that feature spirited dialogue among representatives with opposing views. As much as we might disagree with those of opposing views, it is important that we take the time to listen to each other.
This just in . . . A tea party in Pittsburg has turned violent!
These wacko conservative Republicans have begun throwing rocks at police cars, smashing plate glass windows, and engaging in other forms of anarchist behavior! Go here to see the shocking photos of these out-of-control freaks on a rampage.
What we in the media have long feared has finally come to pass — the Tea Partiers are a powder keg that can explode at any moment. Clearly, they pose the gravest threat to the Republic since Ronald Reagan.
UPDATE: Stand by . . . okay, it appears that this is not a tea party at all, but anarchists exercising their constitutional right of free expression at the G-20 summit. No news here, move along to the next story . . .
Jennifer Rubin turns the spotlight on yet another example of Hillary’s poor decision-making: Her decision to accept the Secretary of State position.
Had she stayed in the Senate, she might have inherited the mantle of liberal leadership from Ted Kennedy. Clinton might have been the one to pull a rabbit out of the hat to save health-care reform. But once again her ambition got the best of her and her self-image of super-smart, super-capable policy wonk led her to a poor career choice. Now, politics is filled with second and third acts, and maybe her political career will recover. But I’m not sure her reputation ever will.
I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of Hillary. But from now on she will be relegated largely to the late night joke circuit.
That was the reaction of an amateur treasure hunter in Britain who stumbled upon a hoard of Anglo-Saxon treasure in a neighbor’s field. Archaeologists are proclaiming it the greatest collection of medieval treasure ever found in Great Britain.
“This is just a fantastic find completely out of the blue,” Roger Bland, who managed the cache’s excavation, told The Associated Press. “It will make us rethink the Dark Ages. That’s basically what it’s going to do.”
The seventh century hoard, found by 55-year-old Terry Herbert on farmland in western England two months ago, consists of about 1,500 pieces of gold and silver, some inlaid with precious stones. So fine is the craftsmanship that experts say it could have belonged to Anglo-Saxon royalty.
The treasure will likely be sold to a museum, making the finder (and his neighbor) very rich men.
UPDATE: A much more detailed account of the story can be found here.
Jake Tapper dissects Obama’s twisting and turning during his interview with George Stephanopoulos yesterday. Stephanopoulos pressed Obama to explain why a federally enforced penalty on those who choose not to sign up for the individual health program is not a tax.
Stephanopoulos cited Merriam Webster’s Dictionary definition. “Tax — ‘a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.’”
“George, the fact that you looked up Merriam’s Dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you’re stretching a little bit right now,” said the president. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition….I absolutely reject that notion” that it’s a tax increase.
But as Tapper reveals, the proposed bill itself specifically uses the phrase “excise tax” to describe the penalty.
It’s all right thereon page 29 of the bill: “Excise Tax. The consequence for not maintaining insurance would be an excise tax.”
So the Jedi Master waved his hand and declared, “It’s not a tax.” And it was so.
Slate has created a web page for collecting what it calls “Bidenisms” — verbal malapropisms of the Vice President. The inaugural list is already quite long.
A statement becomes Bidenesque when his over-the-top attempts at folksiness fail. Unlike their distant cousins, Bushisms and Palinisms, Bidenisms generally stem more from arrogance or obliviousness than from difficulty with the English language or ignorance.
Joe Biden has always struck me as a goofy old uncle who enjoys being the center of attention at family reunions, but whose verbal mishaps leave relatives rolling their eyes. His penchant for saying dumb things makes him a fitting poster child for the Obama administration — cocksure and incompetent.
Salena Zito warns the political class that their dismissive attitude toward the surging protests will cost them.
The Tea Party phenomanon has moved Americans to mobilize and protest as never before, which makes you wonder why the media and elected officials downplay it so much.
As for racism, the majority of the electorate is white, and a majority of it voted for Obama — and people are now demonstrating because they think our country is going off a cliff, not because our president is black.
That’s the label that John Nolte places on the mainstream media, who have passed far beyond mere bias into irrational behavior in their support of the Dear Leader. They will sacrifice themselves rather than let the truth be told.
The Palace Guards know full well how the “narrative” works and each of the stories they’ve ignored at crippling expense to their own integrity and relevance represents what terrifies them most … a string that could unravel The Whole Thing.
Some time ago I wrote about the battle of Teutoburg Forest, a disastrous loss of several Roman legions in Germania in A.D. 9.
Now a Dutch filmmaker is considering making a movie based on the battle. It’s not a done deal yet, but the concept trailer looks pretty good. I’ll have to keep an eye on this one. (You can read more about the project here — but only if you can read Dutch).
Barbara Curtis participated in the Sept. 12 Tea Party march in D.C. She sees it as the beginning of a major movement that will have an historic impact on our nation. She should know — she was once a leftist hippie radical in the vanguard of the last such movement in the 60s.
What I observed — no matter how ignored or spun by the increasingly irrelevant dinosaur media — tells me that this spontaneous and improbable gathering of conservatives is just the beginning of a movement that in the end will be as culturally revolutionary as the Woodstock generation.
It’s ironic that the same baby boomers who turned the country upside down in the 60s are about to turn it upside down again. Groovy!
The Houston Chronicle’s science editor, Eric Berger, has dutifully gone along with the global warming alarmism of recent years. But not any more. Like many others, he is now struggling with the overwhelming lack of evidence for a CO2 crisis, and integrity demands that he speak up.
I am confused. Four years ago this all seemed like a fait accompli. Humans were unquestionably warming the climate and changing the planet forever through their emissions of carbon dioxide.
The problem is that some climate scientists and environmentalists have been so determined to see something done about carbon dioxide emissions — now — that they have glossed over the uncertainties.
Uncertainties like: maybe there isn’t a linear relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature, and maybe the planet will cool for a couple of decades even as carbon dioxide emissions accelerate.
Camille Paglia ruminates on the decline of the Democratic Party from the 1960s version she once knew.
Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.
Paglia’s critique explains the anger that many Americans, including some long-time Democrats, feel toward the current government.
Yesterday’s resignation of Obama’s energy czar and resident commie Van Jones – and the MSM’s deliberate effort to avoid the scandal — speaks volumes about the accelerated decline of the traditional media.
There is no conspiracy to silence progressive voices. There is no attempt “to choke the breath out of American debate” as a DailyKos blogger claims. You own CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, and PBS. You own The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The L.A. Times, the Associated Press and Reuters. You own the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House.
The failure to get your message out is not the problem. The problem is your message. Your feeling of being politically lost is the result of your own myopia.
If you want an explanation of how America has arrived at the sorry state we see today, read this article by Lance Fairchok at American Thinker. Fairchok reviews the work of French philosopher Jean Francois Revel, particularly his 1985 book How Democracies Perish. Fairchok notes the fulfillment of Revel’s projection in the current administration:
Today, the “internal enemy” chips away with manic energy, promising idyllic outcomes, using populist messages built of falsehood, creating expectations of the impossible. Spreading confusion that diminishes our national self-confidence and encourages inaction, they have infected our democracy with a guilt that has no basis in fact. Their agenda is one of deconstructive contrarianism, which they cleverly call progressivism that blames all the world’s ills on our success.
This article is a sobering description of the Left’s complicity in America’s current decline as a great nation. The trend can be countered, but only if a sizable number of Americans get actively engaged in the public arena and take their country back.
It’s clear that our punk president and his gangster government are bent on deciding, on their own and in as many areas as possible, who gets rewarded and who gets punished. Whatever you want to call it, this behavior is not characteristic of a representative government.
The editor of the Las Vegas Review Journal calls out Sen. Harry Reid for a veiled threat he allegedly made against the newspaper. The editorial has gotten wide exposure elsewhere, especially in Nevada, where the Senator is up for reelection next year.
Bravo for the editor. It’s refreshing to see a media outlet perform it’s duty of speaking truth to power.
