Obama Continues To Try To Silence The Media

The best way to send news viral: Try to silence the news.

I wrote about the ordeal of the Obama administration trying to control and silence the San Fransisco Chronicle and the subsequent White House lies here and here. Of course Barack the Narcissist power-monger’s attempts backfired miserably as the story went viral. And of course that wasn’t the first time Barack Obama tried to strong-arm the media. It isn’t the last time, either.

Here’s more news of the maladministration of the Corrupt Obamanation attempting to strong-arm a news outlet into not printing something that could, maybe, possibly put someone in a bad light. A small California newspaper was called by the White House and told to remove a sentence that made Michelle Obama look bad. Allahpundit has the news.

C’mon, no one’s this sensitive to bad press.

Well, almost no one.

In an email to The Daily Caller, Gina Channell-Allen, president of the Pleasanton Weekly in Pleasanton, California, said that her paper “received a call from the White House asking us to take out part of the story because it reflected poorly on the First Lady.”

The story in question was a soft feature about Marine One titled, “Inside Marine One, President Obama’s helicopter,” that ran in the paper on April 20. Pleasanton staffer Amory Gutierrez “didn’t get to ride in ‘Marine One,’” she wrote in her story, “but I did get the VIP tour and took photographs of the otherwise unseen aircraft.”

She also wrote a sentence that the White House thought made FLOTUS look snooty.

“Basically the reporter said that the First Lady didn’t speak to the pilots but acknowledged them by making eye contact,” Allen wrote in her email.

As Allahpundit said, the strong-arm tactic worked and the newspaper redacted the offending sentence at the White House’s demands. But the strong-arm tactic backfired. Instead of being a practically harmless little blurb in a no-circulation newspaper, the story and the subsequent aggression and First Amendment abuse from the thin-skinned Obama team is now going viral. Massively more people will read about it and their Soviet tactics to “disappear” it.

That’s what Obama calls “transparency” in the 21st century.

Tyrannical NLRB Cannot Hide From The News

Even with the big news that Islamic Terrorist Osama bin Laden has been eliminated, the tyrannical actions of Obama’s NLRB cannot escape scrutiny. From Jazz Shaw:

The White House may have hoped that the big news about bin Laden might have people forgetting about other “little matters” which had been in the news, but in the case of the National Labor Relations Board and their efforts to stop Boeing from bringing hundreds of new jobs to South Carolina, it’s not working. The Denver Post editorial board weighs in with some rather blunt questions.

With the economy still limping, and President Obama promising to create jobs, why on earth are his appointees killing jobs in South Carolina?

A common refrain among recession-weary Americans is that we don’t make anything in this country anymore. However, workers in South Carolina have a chance to make something — Boeing 787 Dreamliners that would be flown around the world — and yet Obama’s labor-cozy appointees to the National Labor Relations Board are intent on scuttling it.

Boeing, a vital U.S. company, wants to build a plant in South Carolina and bring good-paying manufacturing jobs to the state. They’ve already poured billions into the facilities and have hired 1,000 workers. But the NLRB filed a lawsuit last month to force Boeing back to Washington state, where workers would be represented by a union. The NLRB claims Boeing decided to open a non-union plant in South Carolina in retaliation for past strikes in Washington.

So what if it did?

The NLRB’s action is beyond unsettling. The lawsuit, in effect, is an effort to tell an American company how to operate its business and to intimidate its officers.

Bear in mind this action is being taken mainly by the man Obama appointed without advice and consent of the US Senate — a man who is a former Union Boss.

No, the Obama administration is not interested in We the People; he’s only interested in the radical, Left-Wing, Socialist agenda.

On a related note, Stacy McCain brings information about all that transparency Obama lied and said we’d have, and the very strong-arm union-friendly tactics Obama is attempting to employ.

“We’ve seen a lack of transparency in the Administration’s response to FOIA requests; their secrecy about the work done by key czars, such as the Climate Change Czar and the Health Reform Czar; and, more recently, they’ve tried to require selective disclosure of the political contributions of government contractors, but not unions,” Stearns said. ”And our own investigation into the secret health care negotiations has been delayed by the Administration for more than a year.”

Stearns cited a recent report by the Center for Public Integrity which found that logs of White House visitors released by the administration “routinely omit or cloud key details about the identity of visitors, who they met with, the nature of the visit, and even includes the names of people who never showed up. These are critical gaps that raise doubts about their historical accuracy and utility in helping the public understand White House operations from social events to meetings on key policy debates.”

The Obama administration has zero interest in being honest, open, transparent, or for We the People. But he does have interest in whatever the Unions want, tyrannical government, secrecy, lies, power.

Economics And The Human Equation

Over at The Other McCain, Smitty has two economics articles that, on the surface, appear to be competing with each other. Either the Liberals are outright economic buffoons (which most grass-roots Liberals are) or they are evil plotters, scheming to destroy the “US as it is” and replace it with the “US as it should be” (which many Ruling Class Leftists are).

The economic buffoon is Larry Krugman, whom Dr Paul E Peterson (Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government; Director, Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University; Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution) deemed “a nobel prize winning fraud.” Do note, Krugman is part of the Ruling Class Leftists club, but he feeds the simpleton minds of the drone class with his stupidity.

Paul Krugman: Invisible Pimp Hand Strongly Squeezes Gay Buttock Near You

Krugman begins his NYT editorial recounting that the whole Wall Street crisis occurred on Bush’s watch. *Yawn*

So what’s the solution? The answer is regulation that limits the frequency and size of financial crises, combined with rules that let the government strike a good deal when bailouts become necessary.

I guess in the twisted mind of Krugman, regulation is like free speech; the answer to bad regulation is. . .yes, more regulation! In my ideal world, Krugman and his ilk would be forced to study control theory, where they may learn that the wages of more regulation is an overdamped system. In an ideal world, it may be OK, because almost nothing happens. In reality, you get the USSR.

Less regulation. Smaller markets, where the risks are more transparent, and the government isn’t finger-faddling everything. Crashes are like winter, a natural part of the system, chum.

Of course, Krugman goes on to explain how business leaders gave money to Republicans because those business leaders weren’t thinking about business but rather about people who were getting their sex on and the business leaders didn’t like it, or somesuch rot. It doesn’t fit at all in his nonsensical economic chatter, but it fits in perfectly in his nonsensical chatter.

Krugman really needs to learn a little about economic systems so he can quit teaching the lemmings a bunch of lies. In a vibrant, dynamic economic system, there is an absolute need for down cycles. It is those down cycles that keeps the economic system healthy; the loss of the down cycles causes the death of the economy itself.

If you have a rose garden but you never weed it, your rose bushes will be strangled by all the weeds. Your rose bushes will die, leaving nothing but weeds, and you’ll no longer have a rose garden but rather wild wilderness. If you never prune your rose bushes, you will not have any long-stem roses and the roses you do have will not be as large and magnificent as they could’ve been.

If you have fruit trees but you never prune them, the end result will be a lot of tiny fruits that are practically useless. There will be almost no benefit at all out of the trees. The branches themselves won’t be thick enough for fruit-bearing or for use as wood. The pruning of extraneous branches causes the other branches to get more nutrition, grow larger and thicker, and produce quality fruit.

The same goes in a vibrant, dynamic economic system. If the bad business structures are not allowed to fail and die, the economy as a whole suffers. The whole system will then crowd out the good businesses, not allowing them the food to grow and not allowing them to produce as well as they could, had the bad businesses been allowed to be pruned out by market forces.

Thus, preventing the natural economic cycle to run its course does not kill the bottoms. It kills the tops. It “manages the decline” until there’s nothing left to “manage.”

Not In Agreement With Insty Here

Insty links Victor Davis Hanson on the topic of America being in decline when many indicators argue for improvement.

Like Britain just after World War II, we have a leadership class that fundamentally doesn’t like the country it leads as it is, and wants to change it into something . . . less.

…
So is that a fair comparison with our Progressive Ruling Class?

I’d contend that our PRC isn’t interested in replacing the U.S. with something less. I daresay they want to scuttle the country, for all intents and purposes, by gaffing off immigration and border security, letting unions price American labor out of the market, and turning our schools into incubators for Marxist zombies.

Cloward-Piven, anyone?

According to Discover the Networks.org:

Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation… [Emphasis added. (by AT)]

There are different forms of disagreement. If Smitty were to say “The Pittsburgh Steelers will beat the Georgia Bulldogs 17-3,” and I said “I disagree,” that does not mean I think the Bulldogs would beat the Steelers. My disagreeing position would be “The Pittsburgh Steelers will lead the Georgia Bulldogs 49-0 at halftime and the game will be called.” The outcome is not in doubt, only the degree of devastation. I believe Smitty’s disagreement with Instapundit is the latter form; amplitude as opposed to direction.

Now, I don’t know if the fraud Krugman is a Ruling Class fool or a Ruling Class Elite working on fooling all the lemmings, but his work fits in with the “stupid” while the work of Ruling Class Leftists like the One-Worlder Socialist George Soros (who has absolutely no pangs of guilt for enriching himself by helping Nazis steal the wealth of the Jews) are indeed Hellbent on destroying the US economically (because, as Soros said, the US stands in the way of One-World Socialism).

The Ruling Class Leftists hate the Free Market because they cannot control it for their purposes. The lemmings hate the Free Market due to ignorance and Class Envy (which is a sin, a clear breaking of one of the Ten Commandments). And, while the lemmings continue to hate business because… well… it’s business and all business is evil, Evil, EVIL, they will never wake up to realize what they helped the Ruling Class do to them.

Conservatives Rising In Canada

Canada just held elections and the Conservatives were the real winners. The National Post, a Canadian news outlet, reports on the projected outcome. Not being up on Canadian politics, let me see if I have the gist of the details.

[Edit: Where are my manners? HT Hot Air Headlines]

The Conservative party (Tories) won a majority position as opposed to a plurality position in a multi-party format. The Liberal Party (which is centrist) lost many seats and their Opposition Party status to the New Democrat Party (which is liberal), who, along with the Conservatives, gained seats. The Green Party did something they’ve never done before: gained a seat in the Canadian Parliament. The Quebec-independence party (Bloc Quebecois) lost multiple seats and is a mere shell of its former self.

From what I gather, these results mean Canada has gone more Conservative while simultaneously going more polarized. The Conservative Party leader had, according to what I read in the article and comments, campaigned on tightening the spending belt and re-privatizing Canada’s health care system, among other things. And, from what I gather, the Conservative Party no longer needs the help of any other party to pass laws up north in Canada.

While I’m under no illusion that Canada’s Conservative Party resembles the TEA Party movement (Canada doesn’t have US history to fall back on), the ascendence of Conservatism in Canada should greatly improve Canada’s situation and even return freedoms to the Canadian people that have been slowly taken from them.

Here’s to our Northern Conservative brothers and sisters.

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Cross-Post

Is It Racism Or Xenophobia?

Either way, it’s just plain stupid bigotry.

Kathy Shaidle over at Five Feet of Fury found this bit of stupidity. Some Greek-Canadian group was highly offended that the Liberal Party (which is centrist, I guess) nominated a Haitian-Canadian for MP. So, the Greek-Canadian group sent out a message to the Greek-Canadians in the area, who vote heavily Liberal Party and told those Greek-Canadians not to vote for the Haitian-Canadian because the Haitian-Canadian is a Haitian-Canadian instead of a Greek-Canadian. Make sense to you? Because it doesn’t to me.

I suspect the Greek-Canadians wouldn’t like Martin Luther King, Jr or his message. It’s the character — not the heritage — that counts.