Here is the problem. Obama has the federal government on a hiring spree. Government workers such as those in the SEIU already make 30-300% more than their private sector counterparts. The IRS is hiring 16,000 new agents to enforce new ObamaCare taxes.
If this was a part of an overall budget cutting plan I could live with this, but while federal employees who donate to Democrats are getting fat & happy off of us, at the same time the administration wants to sock it to the workers in the federal government who usually vote GOP and that would be the military.
President Barack Obama — who came to power with the help of government employee unions across the nation and has lavished on them hundreds of billions in stimulus funds to keep them on federal, state and local payrolls with no strings attached — is moving to cut spending on salaries for military personnel.
The Pentagon contends that Congress simply has been too generous with troops during the past decade.
In fact, lawmakers have lavished so much money on troops, according to the Post, that service members are now better compensated than workers in the private sector with similar experience and education levels.
For example, the military brass claims that an average sergeant in the Army with four years of service and one dependent would receive $52,589 in annual compensation, according to the paper. This figure includes basic pay, housing, and subsistence allowances, as well as tax benefits.
Meanwhile, a U.S. postal letter carrier, with no supervisory or hazardous duty, makes approximately $80,000 a year when all benefits are factored in.
Critics of the Obama administration’s efforts to cut soldier’s pay say America’s security has been strengthened by higher pay rates, as qualified veterans are re-enlisting at record rates, reversing the problem the military witnessed just a few years ago.
If you are not a comic book fan from the 70′s & 80′s when this story was first written it is very likely you would have been lost and wondering “who are these people”.
The problems with Iron Man II are several but they emanate from one key point, they tried to keep the movie short by gimping the story thus leaving it with huge gaps. Keeping the movie short means you can get more plays per day and maybe set an opening weekend revenue record.
Enough.
Stan Lee, the creator of the Marvel Comics Universe, has a reputation for telling great and wonderful stories in his comics. My advice to Stan is to do what feels right and just tell the story.
The Iron Man II story revolves mostly around Tony, Pepper, Tony Stark’s best friend Lt. Col. Rhodey, and Nick Fury played by the great Samuel L. Jackson.
Finally Tony and Pepper start to fall in love, but it comes as a total shock because they do no real exposition and growth in their relationship till the end when Tony tells her his “secret” and wham they are kissing. It is barely believable.
Tony ‘s best friend (Rhodie) steals one of the Iron Man suits and Tony can stop him but doesn’t. How do we know that this Lt. Col. Rhodie is Tony’s best friend? Well either you read the comics 30 years ago and knew this like I did, or you found out in the movie when someone says “your best friend just stole one of your suits”, or you remembered the few moments he was on screen in Iron Man I. Each Iron Man suit comes with an intelligent computer that only answers to Tony Stark named Jarvis. All Tony would have to do was say “Jarvis shut down suit two” and that’s it.
There is no character exposition of Lt. Col. Rhodey at all so it was simply not believable that they were best friends. There was no build up of a relationship between them and even at the end of the movie you are still not left giving a rip if “Tony’s best friend” lives or dies.
Planet Earth to Marvel Comics; without good character exposition the audience will not care about the character.
This goes double for Nick Fury. Nick Fury is the head of a secret organization (think of them as Section 31 from Star Trek) called SHIELD. Tony Stark completely cooperates with SHIELD which is not believable because he routinely tells the United States government to go fly a kite. But maybe if they spent six minutes cultivating a relationship between Nick Fury and Tony Stark we might buy it.
I heard the whispers in the theater and after in the hall people wondering what is this SHIELD guy?
My message to Marvel, stop screwing these stories up, fix Iron Man II in the directors cut and start telling a story about people we can care about as I know full well you are capable of doing even if it means a 2 and a half hour movie.
With that said there are many delightful aspects to the film: The Senate hearing scene was wonderful, Tony saying that he has had enough of the liberal agenda and the pressure groups that come with them, and the human side of Tony that shows how difficult it is for a man of great ability and creativity to be surrounded by so many people who are just out for their own narrow-minded selfish wants or incapable of appreciating Tony for the wonder that he really is (I felt this way in college where I often had to dumb down my own work for the class either to please a professor or to not intimidate fellow students. It really is very frustrating).
Last but not least, Mickey Rourke deserves an award for what was a beyond brilliant performance as the “bad guy” in this film. Words cannot do justice to what he brought to the character so I will not even try.
I say Iron Man II deserves 3 and a half stars. It could have been and should have been a 4 and a half star film.
This is what the Democrats say, “We need more regulation” because government only has your best interest at heart.
This kind of corruption is called “Corporatism”, “Political Market Economics” and my least favorite term “Crony Capitalism” because once the government cronies get involved it ceases to be capitalism.
Meanwhile, Joan Rivers is bumped off a Continental flight as a national security risk after which they abandoned her at a closed airport, Dr. Laura Schlesinger was getting repeatedly felt up by TSA when she was going to fly till she had enough and totally went off on them on her popular radio show (I was listening that day), Ann Coulter gets the frisk from the TSA, and Rush Limbaugh now tries to avoid flying commercial because of the harassment.
Remember, these are the idiots that some of you want running our health care.
Confessed terrorist Faisal Shahzad was removed from the Department of Homeland Security travel lookout list sometime after Barack Obama came into office.
Sources tell CBS News that would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad appeared on a Department of Homeland Security travel lookout list – Traveler Enforcement Compliance System (TECS) – between 1999 and 2008 because he brought approximately $80,000 cash or cash instruments into the United States.
The New York Times reported that the person who bought Faisal’s apartment back in 2004 was interviewed by federal investigators.
George LaMonica, a 35-year-old computer consultant, said he bought his two-bedroom condominium in Norwalk, Conn., from Mr. Shahzad for $261,000 in May 2004. A few weeks after he moved in, Mr. LaMonica said, investigators from the national Joint Terrorism Task Force [JTTF] interviewed him, asking for details of the transaction and for information about Mr. Shahzad. It struck Mr. LaMonica as unusual, but he said detectives told him they were simply “checking everything out.”
Barack Obama began shutting down Bush-era terrorist investigations last year including the investigation of Faisal Shahzad.
We all know what happened next.
Last week Faisal almost blew a hole in the middle of Times Square.
The only thing that saved the people of New York was Faisal’s incompetence.
UPDATE: Faisal Shahzad had contacts with several other terrorist leaders including the radical American-born Muslim cleric Anwar Awlaki, the Taliban Chief, and the Mumbai Massacre mastermind.
Shahzad also had a web of jihadist contacts that included big names tied to terror attacks in the U.S. and abroad, including the figure who has emerged as a central figure in many recent domestic terror attempts – radical American-born Muslim cleric Anwar Awlaki.
Besides Awlaki, sources say Shahzad was also linked to a key figure in the Pakistani Taliban, its Emir Beitullah Mehsud, who was killed in a drone missile strike in 2009. The Mehsuds had been family friends of Shahzad, who is the son of a former high-ranking Pakistani military officer.
The problem in Illinois is progressivism that punishes success and favors leviathan government and the corruption that goes hand in hand with the constant politicking progressivism requires.
In fairness all of Illinois’ problems are not the fault of this one guy so in that respect the ad is a little too slick for my taste, but the description of the situation Illinois is in is directionally accurate.
For baseball fans, 2009 was the year of the Yankees. For job seekers, it was the year of the Great Recession. And for people who track baby names, it was the year of the vampire.
The Social Security Administration released its annual rundown of the most popular names for newborns on Friday, and flying up the list was an ancient name with modern fame: Cullen, the surname of one handsome bloodsucker, Edward, in the frighteningly popular vampire films “Twilight,” based on the best-selling novels by Stephenie Meyer.
Cullen materialized at 485, leaping almost 300 spots from 2008 for the biggest increase of any boy’s name; it wedged firmly between Braiden and Kason.
But the nation’s fascination with the undead may not end there. The most popular boy’s name was Jacob, an eternal favorite that happens to be the name of the buff rival of paler-than-thou Edward: Jacob Black. The most popular name for girls was Isabella, the progenitor of Bella, the love interest of both Edward the vampire and Jacob the werewolf. Just plain Bella logs in at 58.
Mark Hinkle, a spokesman for the Social Security Administration, said that about 22,000 children were named Isabella, out of 4.1 million babies, and nearly 21,000 new Jacobs are toddling about. Mr. Hinkle noted that Jacob had held the crown for most popular boy’s name for 11 years — something he suggested Ms. Meyer might have noticed.
Jayden became much more popular as a name about the same time as the “Jaden” variant of the name did in the last few years. “Jayden” was the name of a guest character in Star Trek: The Next Generation and “Jaden” is very well known in the Star Wars universe for famed Jedi Knight Jaden Korr.
The more the central planners plans fail the more the planners plan. And the result is prices up, income down, wealth creation down, availability of goods are down. Yet this is the system that so many leftist academics favor and Hugo Chavez is the one that is so often defended by indoctrinated professors and students.
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) – Venezuela’s annual inflation rate has surpassed 30 percent after consumer prices surged in April.
The Central Bank and National Statistics Institute on Friday reported a 5.2 percent increase in consumer prices during April, driving up the annual rate to 30.4 percent.
President Hugo Chavez’s government has been struggling against the highest inflation rate in Latin America and a weakening economy in general.
Prices increased 11.3 percent from January to April, up from 6.7 percent inflation in the same 2009 period.
Venezuela’s economy shrank by 3.3 percent last year amid a downturn in its all-important oil industry. It’s the nation’s first recession since 2003.
The country imports most of its food, and Chavez on Friday announced the government will create an import-export corporation aiming to break with the private sector’s “hegemony.” It wasn’t immediately clear how the new state entity would operate.
Chavez said wealthy Venezuelans involved in the import business “buy abroad, come here and ask for more than it really costs.”
So of course Chavez blames the people doing the importing. Well if you persecute those doing the importing and you try to keep them from making a profit, they will stop importing and import to somewhere else. So the people get even less goods which drives up prices.
So maybe government decides that it will do the importing, but the government is so cronied up and inefficient that the prices go up even more. When that happens the government will blame the manufacturers for wanting to make a profit. Maybe the manufacturer will get sick of Chavez’s crap and sell to someone else who is less of a headache.
It is never the planners fault; just ask a planner.
WASHINGTON (AFP) – – Troubled US government-backed mortgage firm Freddie Mac on Wednesday asked for an additional 10.6 billion dollars from the Treasury Department to cover losses.
Announcing a 6.7 billion dollar loss in the first quarter, Freddie Mac said it would need the new funding by June 30 this year.
The Washington-area company has already received more than 50 billion dollars in taxpayers cash to cover losses from toxic assets.
It warned that further demands would be on the way: “Freddie Mac expects to request additional draws,” the firm said in a statement.
“The size and timing of such draws will be determined by a variety of factors that could adversely affect the company’s net worth.”
In 2008, the government pledged to ensure that Freddie Mac, and its larger sister organization Fannie Mae, kept a “positive net worth.”
The deal was designed to prop up the vital US housing market from collapsing totally and pushing the economy over the precipice.
But in a sign that the US housing sector is still in difficulty, Freddie said the percentage of its loans not paid on time or in full rose to 4.13 percent in the first three months of the year.
In the final three months of last year the rate stood at 3.98 percent.
Sam Adams, he’s considered the Father of the American Revolution. A rich white slave owner? Well, yes- I’ll give you that he was white..but he was very much against slavery..and rich? Not so much.
Sam Adams was called “The Patriarch of Liberty”. He was the original revolutionary radical. Of all the Founders, it is Sam Adams that I identify with the closest.
Be prepared to learn more about the founders than you ever learned in school.
On April 28, while speaking in Iowa, President Obama denounced Republicans who “exploited” the immigration issue “for political purposes.” President said Arizona’s new immigration law would “undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans.” He painted an alarming picture: “local officials are allowed to ask somebody who they have a suspicion might be an illegal immigrant for their papers. But you can imagine, if you are an Hispanic-American in Arizona — your great-grandparents may have been there before Arizona was even a state. But now, suddenly, if you don’t have your papers and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you’re going to be harassed.”
Pretty scary rhetoric. And President Obama isn’t alone in making these claims. Take some of the statements on the Sunday morning talk shows this past weekend:
Not to be outdone, Congressman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) alleged on New York City’s WPIX: “That is outrageous for a governor and a state to support something that a local policeman will determine by sight whether a person is illegal. . . . a governor of one of our fifty states and the legislature has passed something that is racist in nature, that jeopardizes the lives Americans.” He claimed that local police will arrest people simply based on the color of their skin: “they will enforce the federal illegal immigration laws by allowing local police men to take a look and determine whether they are illegal and arrest them. And I would think that you would agree with me that they are talking about people of color. Now I think that is outrageous.”
So, do all these politicians have a point or is it just scaremongering? Unlike the couple thousand plus page laws passed in Washington that are filled with very complicated legalese, the Arizona law, along with the minor clarifications passed last week, is only about four pages long and is written in pretty straightforward English. Anyone reading the law will clearly see that the claims made by some Democrats are false.
As a matter of fact, Arizona legislators themselves didn’t want the police to have the power to simply “ask somebody who they have a suspicion might be an illegal immigrant for their papers.” So they set up not just one but two requirements. First, police must have “lawful contact,” meaning officers must already have detained an individual they suspect violated some other law.
This coming from a person who has accused the Tea Party of all sorts of horrible things and violence, in spite of the fact that the only violence that has happened at Tea Party events is from far left union thugs.
This is political correct silly narrative run amok and it is coming from people who claim objectivity.
Of course this is a part of the larger far left narrative of the far left and 9/11 “truthers” that the war on terror is not a war, it is not about radical Islam, rather it is all George Bush’s fault.
BREWER: I mean the thing is is that and I get frustrated and there was part of me that was hoping this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country because there are a lot of people who want to use this terrorist intent to justify writing off people who believe in a certain way or come from certain countries or whose skin color is a certain way. I mean they use it as justification for really outdated bigotry.
And so there was part of me was really hoping this would not be the case that here would be somebody who is not the defined. I mean he’s accused he’s arrested you know I don’t want to convict him before it’s time to do so. He’s the guy authorities say is involved. But that being said I mean we know even in recent history you have the Hutaree militia from Michigan who have plans to let’s face it create terror.
That’s what they were planning to do and they were doing so from far different backgrounds then what this guy is coming from. So, the threat is not just coming from people who decide that America is the place to be and you know come here and want to become citizens. Obviously this guy did.
ED Morrissey Comments:
Yes, Contessa, there does seem to be a lot of people who want to “justify writing off people who believe in a certain way” as either terrorists or racists. Your network employs more than a few.
NewsBusters ads:
This isn’t the first time journalists have worried about the effect of Muslim extremists being responsible for terrorist acts. On November 7, 2009, Newsweek editor Evan Thomas worried:
EVAN THOMAS: I cringe that he’s a Muslim. I mean, because it inflames all the fears. I think he’s probably just a nut case. But with that label attached to him, it will get the right wing going and it just — I mean these things are tragic, but that makes it much worse.
If you think this man is just hard on Obama, he wrote a book about Bush that said many of the same things. Scheuer has such a superior understanding of this enemy that most people hit a wall of cognitive dissonance when listening to him because this enemy is so different. Interestingly enough, Thomas Jefferson and some of the other Founders wrote about radical Islam which is very interesting indeed.
The biased and flawed Walter Lippman style of journalism is dying a slow death and quite frankly deserves to die. The WSJ and new papers like the Washington Examiner are the future.
Figures released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations show average weekday circulation fell 8.7 percent in the six months that ended March 31, compared with the same period a year earlier.
Sunday circulation fell 6.5 percent.
Neither decline was as steep as the comparable one documented in the last reporting period. From April through September of last year, average weekday circulation dropped 10.6 percent and Sunday circulation fell 7.5 percent.
Even so, the top 25 newspapers in the country showed some huge losses.
The San Francisco Chronicle’s weekday circulation dropped nearly 23 percent from the year before to 241,330.
At The Washington Post, average circulation fell 13.1 percent during the week to 578,482 and 8.2 percent to 797,679 on Sunday.
USA Today lost 13.6 percent of its circulation and averaged 1.83 million. That extended a slump that began with a slowdown in travel during the recession, which trimmed sales where USA Today is especially popular, such as hotels and airports.
USA Today’s decline last year allowed The Wall Street Journal to surpass it as the newspaper with the biggest U.S. circulation. In Monday’s report, the Journal once again posted the only gain in circulation among the top 25 newspapers that had comparable figures from a year ago. It grew its circulation 0.5 percent to 2.09 million. The Journal can count online readers because it charges them to read its website, while many newspapers can only count print subscriptions and newsstand sales.
The Journal is also looking to put itself further ahead of the No. 3 newspaper, The New York Times, which saw an 8.5 percent decline in weekday circulation during the most recent period and a 5.2 percent drop on Sundays. The Times’ average circulation was 951,063 on weekdays and 1.38 million on Sundays.
Failing and dangerous union schools, godless curriculum, cronyism, corrupt government, central planning, high taxes, low freedom, wealth transfers, and gun control all work together to make the productive and the jobs flee. That is the mix that generates a Chicago and a Detroit.
Two state representatives called on Gov. Pat Quinn Sunday to deploy the Illinois National Guard to safeguard Chicago’s streets.
Chicago Democrats John Fritchey and LaShawn Ford said they want Quinn, Mayor Richard Daley and Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis to allow guardsmen to patrol streets and help quell violence. Weis said he did not support the idea because the military and police operate under different rules.
“Is this a drastic call to action? Of course it is,” Fritchey said. “Is it warranted when we are losing residents to gun violence at such an alarming rate? Without question. We are not talking about rolling tanks down the street or having armed guards on each corner.”
What he envisions, Fritchey said, is a “heightened presence on the streets,” particularly on the roughly 9 percent of city blocks where most of the city’s violent crimes occur.
Weis previously identified those “hot spots” and said he plans to create a 100-person team made up of selected and volunteer police personnel to respond to crime there. If guardsmen were to assist police, they could comprise or contribute to that force, Fritchey said.
So far this year, 113 people have been killed across Chicago, the same number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined in the same period, Fritchey said.
“As we speak, National Guard members are working side-by-side with our troops to fight a war halfway around the world,” Fritchey said. “The unfortunate reality is that we have another war that is just as deadly taking place right in our backyard.” While the National Guard has been deployed in other states to prevent violence related to specific events and protests, the Chicago legislators said they are unaware of guardsmen being deployed to assist with general urban unrest.
In the Indiana GOP Senate primary there are five candidates. Of those five my personal favorite is Don Bates. Bates has real life economic experience and he has a thought process that sees past the obvious and mundane. Bates has indicated that the problem in politics is not so much as right/left as it is people in power not respecting the boundaries of their office. Bates truly gets it. If Bates loses I would be thrilled to see him run for office again.
Marlin Stutzman and Congressman Hostettler are both very able and worthy candidates as well and would serve Indiana with distinction. I think it is a very good thing for Hoosiers to have so many great candidates to choose from.
Former Senator Coats has spent time as a lobbyist and taking a look at that client list has given me a cause for concern. Coats may be able to separate the two interests, but I do not feel like he has made much of an effort to convince me that he has. Also Coats has supported some gun control proposals that even many Democrats would not support. I am still open to listening to Coats but I have not heard enough yet.
As far as Congress District 2 both Jackie Walorski and Jack Jordan are worthy and able candidates who would be a better representative than Joe Donnnelly to be sure. Both candidates have their own advantages and shortcomings. Jackie is wildly popular and is likely to win by such a margin that any endorsement would be pointless. Not to say that Jack Jordan didn’t run a good campaign, because he ran a very good one. I expect and hope to see Jack Jordan run for office in the future.
As far as Congress District 3 Mark Souder vs. Bob Thomas. This pick is an easy one. Mark Souder is the man to vote for to be sure. Bob Thomas is a carpet-bagger from Indianapolis who has run the most dishonest primary campaign I have ever seen in Indiana. I could go into details but how many paragraphs would you like me to provide you? To put it directly Bob Thomas’s political advertisements are often not directionally accurate.
As I write, I have my papers on me — and not just because I’m in Arizona. I’m an immigrant, and it is a condition of my admission to this great land that I carry documentary proof of my residency status with me at all times and be prepared to produce it to law-enforcement officials, whether on a business trip to Tucson or taking a 20-minute stroll in the woods back at my pad in New Hampshire.
Who would impose such an outrageous Nazi fascist discriminatory law?
Er, well, that would be Franklin Roosevelt.
But don’t let the fine print of the New Deal prevent you from going into full-scale meltdown. “Boycott Arizona-stan!” urges MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, surely a trifle Islamophobically. What has some blameless Central Asian basket case done to deserve being compared to a hellhole like Phoenix?
Boycott Arizona Iced Tea, jests Travis Nichols of Chicago. It is “the drink of fascists.” Just as regular tea is the drink of racists, according to Newsweek’s in-depth and apparently non-satirical poll analysis of anti-Obama protests. At San Francisco’s City Hall, where bottled water is banned as the drink of climate denialists, Mayor Gavin Newsom is boycotting for real: All official visits to Arizona have been canceled indefinitely. You couldn’t get sanctions like these imposed at the U.N. Security Council, but then, unlike Arizona, Iran is not a universally reviled pariah.
Will a full-scale economic embargo devastate the Copper State? Who knows? It’s not clear to me what San Francisco imports from Arizona. Chaps? But, at any rate, like the bottled-water ban, it sends a strong signal that this kind of hate will not be tolerated.
The same day that Mayor Newsom took his bold stand, I saw a phalanx of police officers doing the full Robocop — black body armor, helmets, and visors — as they marched down the street. Goosestepping? No, it’s actually quite hard to goosestep in those steel-reinforced kneepads. So just regular marching. Naturally, I assumed they were Arizona state troopers performing a routine traffic stop. In fact, they were the police department of Quincy, Ill., facing down a group of genial tea-party grandmas in sun hats and American-flag T-shirts. They were acting at the behest of President Obama’s Secret Service, who rightly recognized a polite knot of citizens singing “God Bless America” as a clear and present danger to the republic.
If I were a member of the Quincy PD, I’d wear a full-face visor, too, because I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the mirror. It’s a tough job making yourself a paramilitary laughingstock.
And yet the coastal frothers denouncing Arizona as the Third Reich or, at best, apartheid South Africa seem entirely relaxed about the ludicrous and embarrassing sight of peaceful protesters being menaced by camp stormtroopers from either a dinner-theater space-opera or uniforms night at Mayor Newsom’s reelection campaign.
