I am hating Bush more and more each day because of his socialist bailout. The free market is killing the liberal media, and Bush’s stupidity may just allow the liberal media to kill the free market.

Government aid could save U.S. newspapers, spark debate
Wed Dec 31, 2008 6:50pm EST
By Robert MacMillan - Analysis

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Connecticut lawmaker Frank Nicastro sees saving the local newspaper as his duty. But others think he and his colleagues are setting a worrisome precedent for government involvement in the U.S. press.

Nicastro represents Connecticut’s 79th assembly district, which includes Bristol, a city of about 61,000 people outside Hartford, the state capital. Its paper, The Bristol Press, may fold within days, along with The Herald in nearby New Britain.

That is because publisher Journal Register, in danger of being crushed under hundreds of millions of dollars of debt, says it cannot afford to keep them open anymore.

Nicastro and fellow legislators want the papers to survive, and petitioned the state government to do something about it. “The media is a vitally important part of America,” he said, particularly local papers that cover news ignored by big papers and television and radio stations.

To some experts, that sounds like a bailout, a word that resurfaced this year after the U.S. government agreed to give hundreds of billions of dollars to the automobile and financial sectors.

Relying on government help raises ethical questions for the press, whose traditional role has been to operate free from government influence as it tries to hold politicians accountable to the people who elected them. Even some publishers desperate for help are wary of this route.

Providing government support can muddy that mission, said Paul Janensch, a journalism professor at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, and a former reporter and editor.

“You can’t expect a watchdog to bite the hand that feeds it,” he said.

The state’s Department of Economic and Community Development is offering tax breaks, training funds, financing opportunities and other incentives for publishers, but not cash.

“We’re not saying ‘Come to Bristol, come to New Britain, we’ll give you a million dollars,’” Nicastro said.

The lifeline comes as U.S. newspaper publishers such as the New York Times, Tribune and McClatchy deal with falling advertising revenue, fleeing readers and tremendous debt.

Aggravating this extreme change is the world financial crisis. Publishers have slashed costs, often by firing thousands in a bid to remain healthy and to impress investors.

Any aid to papers could gladden financial stakeholders, said Mike Simonton, an analyst at Fitch Ratings.

“If governments are able to provide enough incentives to get some potential bidders off the sidelines, that could be a positive for newspaper valuations,” he said.

NEWSPAPERS ARE DIFFERENT

Many media experts predict that 2009 will be the year that newspapers of all sizes will falter and die, a threat long predicted but rarely taken seriously until the credit crunch blossomed into a full-fledged financial meltdown.

Some papers no longer print daily, and some not at all.

Even as industries deemed too important to fail are seeking bailouts, most newspaper publishers have refused to give serious thought to the idea, though some industry insiders recounted joking about it with other newspaper executives.

“The whole idea of the First Amendment and separating media and giving them freedom of control from the government is sacrosanct,” said Digby Solomon, publisher of Tribune Co’s Daily Press in Newport News, Virginia.

Former Miami Herald Editor Tom Fiedler said that a democracy has an obligation to help preserve a free press.

“I truly believe that no democracy can remain healthy without an equally healthy press,” said Fiedler, now dean of Boston University’s College of Communication. “Thus it is in democracy’s interest to support the press in the same sense that the human being doesn’t hesitate to take medicine when his or her health is threatened.”

Connecticut does not see trying to find a buyer and offering tax breaks as exerting influence on the press, said Joan McDonald, the economic development commissioner.

“It is what we do … with companies whether it’s in aerospace, biomedical devices, biotech or financial services,” she said. “If a company is developing laser technology, we don’t get into the business of what lasers are used for.”

Connecticut’s actions are not the first time government has helped newspapers. The U.S. Postal Service has offered discounted postage rates. Several cities have papers running under Joint Operating Agreements, created following the congressional Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970 to keep competing urban dailies viable despite circulation declines.

But the press is not the same as other businesses, said veteran newspaper financial analyst John Morton. “You’re doing something that has a bearing on political life,” he said.

Marc Levy, executive editor of the Herald and the Press, said he would not let gratitude get in the way of reporting on local political peccadilloes.

“It’s the brutal reality,” he said. “You’d say, ‘thank you very much for helping me with that, but now we have to ask you about this thing.’”

(Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

http://www.reuters.com/article/reutersEdge/idUSTRE4BU53T20081231?sp=true

The RNC is finally figuring out what the people have known for several years, that Bush is a complete failure as a leader and has no personal political convictions.

Tuesday, December 30, 2008
EXCLUSIVE: RNC draft rips Bush’s bailouts
Ralph Z. Hallow (Contact)
EXCLUSIVE:

In what would amount to a slap in the face to a sitting Republican president and the party’s Senate and House leaders, national GOP officials, including the vice chairman of the Republican National Committee, are sponsoring a resolution opposing the resort to “socialist” means to save capitalism.

“We can’t be a party of small government, free markets and low taxes while supporting bailouts and nationalizing industries, which lead to big government, socialism and high taxes at the expense of individual liberty and freedoms,” said Solomon Yue, a cosponsor of a resolution that would put the RNC — the party’s national governing body — on the record as opposing the U.S. government bailouts of the financial and auto industries.

Republican National Vice Chairman and constitutional law attorney James Bopp Jr. authored the resolution and is asking the rest of the 168 voting members of the committee to sign it.

“The resolution also opposes President-elect Obama’s proposed public works program and supports conservative alternatives,” while encouraging the RNC “to engage in vigorous public policy debates consistent with our party platform,” Mr. Bopp said.

The RNC has never played a leading policy role or any policy role except once every four years in framing the national party platform, which is quickly forgotten and almost never referred to for another four years.

See related story: Jeb Bush Senate bid a GOP remedy?

“Jim Bopp is the author of the no-bailout resolution because he wants to articulate our core principles now, not every four years when we have a presidential election,” said Mr. Yue, an Oregon member of the Committee. “This is based on the thinking that articulating political philosophy is equally important as applying it consistently.”

“Failing to do so, we have today’s identity crisis, which resulted in our losses in 2006 and 2008,” Mr. Yue said. “The bailout is a good example … In my view, if we are not going to address this, we will see more losses in 2010.”

North Dakota GOP Chairman Gary Emineth said he too has had enough of the never-ending disconnect between what the platform says and what elected Republicans do.

“It is time the party gets involved in policy issues and forces candidates to respond to the platform,” Mr. Emineth said. “Frankly the way we view the platform is a joke. We work hard to drive our principles into the platform, then candidates ignore it.”

“If the party doesn’t move in this direction, we will continue to be irrelevant. Whoever has the larger star power will continue to win, and what they stand for and believe will become less relevant,” Mr. Emineth said.

Mr. Bopp, Mr. Yue and the other cosponsors say they have the numbers to pull off this rebellion, unprecedented in the history of either party’s national committee.

“We have enough co-sponsors to take this to the RNC floor” at the party’s Jan. 28-31 annual winter meeting in Washington. “I will take it to the Resolutions Committee, but I intend to press this issue to the floor for decision.”

To the astonishment of most rank-and-file Republicans, hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts of private-sector companies were pushed through Congress last month by President Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr.

Just as astonishing, the Senate and House GOP leaders and the party’s presidential nominee supported the bailout of the financial industry, which in some cases took the form of the U.S. government’s gaining ownership of huge but financially troubled companies.

Nonetheless, not all RNC members — including some of Mr. Bopp’s fellow conservatives — are pleased with the idea of having it make policy instead of simply minding the campaign fundraising store.

Fellow RNC member Ron Nehring, chairman of the California GOP, expressed more reservations.

“We have to be careful not to confuse passing resolutions for action, or creating a situation where people interpret the lack of some resolution as an excuse for inaction on an important issue,” he said.

Historically, the elected GOP House and Senate leaders, plus the president and his advisers when the party controls the White House, make national party policy. The RNC’s sole job has been to raise money for candidates and to pass the party line down the food chain to state and local leaders.

The same has been true for the Democratic National Committee.

The Bopp-Yue vanguard say they are determined to change that.

“For the past eight years, the RNC has been the political outreach of the White House,” said Arizona GOP Chairman Randy Pullen, another resolution cosponsor who opposed what he regarded as Mr. Bush’s pro-amnesty immigration bill and his “economic policies promoting the ‘ownership society’ because they would eventually lead to the financial meltdown we are currently experiencing.”

“It is now time for the RNC to assert itself in terms of ideas and political philosophy,” Mr. Pullen added. “If we don’t do it now, when will we?”

Mr. Bopp, a social conservative who has served as counsel to pro-life groups, said, “We must stand for and publicly advocate our conservative principles as a party 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days of the year.”

The RNC revolutionaries leave no doubt they mean to turn the committee into policy-producing and enforcing machine.

“In the long-run, we want to see this committee play an active philosophical-policy leadership role for the national GOP,” Mr. Yue said.

But it remains unclear whether there exist the rules or the machinery for enforcing such a resolution on Republican elected officials.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/dec/30/rnc-pushes-unprecedented-criticism-of-bailouts/

Are Christians ready to stop being wimps and start fighting back against anti-Christian liberals? Maybe so.

Fla. woman claims ‘Merry Christmas’ got her fired
By MELISSA NELSON, Associated Press Writer Melissa Nelson, Associated Press Writer
Fri Dec 26, 1:45 pm ET

PENSACOLA, Fla. – A Christian woman claims she was fired from her job because she greeted callers with “Merry Christmas,” but the vacation rental company says it’s no Scrooge and the woman is just a disgruntled employee.

Tonia Thomas, 35, said she refused to say “Happy Holidays” and was fired, even after offering to use the company’s non-holiday greeting. The Panama City woman filed a federal complaint that accuses the company of religious discrimination. She is seeking compensation for lost wages.

“I hold my core Christian values to a high standard and I absolutely refuse to give in on the basis of values. All I wanted was to be able to say ‘Merry Christmas’ or to acknowledge no holidays,” she said Tuesday. “As a Christian, I don’t recognize any other holidays.”

Thomas said she is Baptist.

Her former employer, Counts-Oakes Resorts Properties Inc., said she wasn’t fired for saying “Merry Christmas,” but would not elaborate.

“We are a Christian company and we celebrate Christmas,” said Andy Phillips, the company’s president. Thomas is “a disgruntled employee,” presenting a one-sided version of what happened when she was fired Dec. 10, Phillips said.

Liberty Counsel, an Orlando-based legal group that advocates for people discriminated against because of their religion, is representing Thomas before the federal Equal Opportunity Employment Commission. Their complaint also accuses the company of harassing and taunting Thomas after she was fired by calling the police to watch her pack her belongs and leave.

Thomas could have hard time winning the case, said G. Thomas Harper, a Jacksonville-based labor attorney who writes a newsletter on Florida employment law.

“I wouldn’t think an employee has the right to insist (on saying Merry Christmas) unless that really is a tenet of their faith. She would have to make a strong case that was part of her beliefs, if not, it becomes insubordination,” he said.

Thomas has found another job, but she makes less than the $10.50 an hour she earned with the rental company. She said the trauma of being fired and the pay cut has made for a tough holiday season for herself, her husband and their 6-year-old son.

Harper said when it comes to holiday greetings, the smartest choice might be ignoring the season.

“The best option is just not to say anything,” he said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081226/ap_on_re_us/happy_holidays_firing

Another reason to pass more “right-to-work” laws.

Autoworkers Union Keeps $6 Million Golf Course for Members at $33 Million Lakeside Retreat

Friday , December 26, 2008

The United Auto Workers may be out of the hole now that President Bush has approved a $17 billion bailout of the U.S. auto industry, but the union isn’t out of the bunker just yet.

Even as the industry struggles with massive losses, the UAW brass continue to own and operate a $33 million lakeside retreat in Michigan, complete with a $6.4 million designer golf course. And it’s costing them millions each year.

• Click here to see photos of the UAW’s $33 million retreat.

The UAW, known more for its strikes than its slices, hosts seminars and junkets at the Walter and May Reuther Family Education Center in Onaway, Mich., which is nestled on “1,000 heavily forested acres” on Michigan’s Black Lake, according to its Web site.

But the Black Lake club and retreat, which are among the union’s biggest fixed assets, have lost $23 million in the past five years alone, a heavy albatross around the union’s neck as it tries to manage a multibillion-dollar pension plan crisis.

Critics call it a resort for union leaders that wastes money from union dues.

“It’s their members’ money that they’re spending on this thing,” said Justin Wilson, managing director of the Center for Union Facts, a union watchdog group. “The union has bigger issues at hand than managing a golf course.”

Managing the course may become a burden for the union. The UAW covers costs for the Reuther Center from the interest it earns on its strike fund, according to tax documents, but massive losses in the past five years have forced the union to make heavy loans to keep the center afloat. Critics call it a poor investment for a group with over $1.25 billion in assets.

“Unions certainly have had real estate investments in the past, but investments are supposed to make money, not bleed money,” said Wilson.

The UAW did not return calls from FOXNews.com, and a spokesman could not be reached for comment.

The Reuther Center is open 11 months of the year to offer courses on leadership, political action, civil rights and other topics; it hosts nearly 10,000 visitors annually. The UAW says it sends workers there to “learn, experience unionism (and) commit to labor’s cause,” according to their Web site.

The center was purchased in 1967 and underwent massive renovations in the ’90s under the careful watch of former UAW president Steve Yokich. “Today’s Black Lake might not exist if not for Steve Yokich,” said union member Bob Reidt, whom Yokich appointed as Black Lake’s director. “Yokich is responsible for rebuilding Black Lake.”

The UAW erected a monument to its longtime president Walter Reuther — the center’s namesake — which bears an inscription of his words: “There is no greater calling than to serve your brother. There is no greater satisfaction than to have done it well.”

But Reuther, who died in a plane crash en route to the center in 1970, never knew the satisfaction of Black Lake’s “well-groomed fairways,” a course that Michigan Golf Magazine called a “stunning visual marvel.”

Union members can play golf at discounted rates on one of the country’s top 100 courses, designed in 2000 by famed course architect Rees Jones at a cost of $6 million.

The center has a storied history. Reuther had his ashes scattered at the site, and Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz honeymooned there in 1940, well before it was bought by the UAW.

“It’s funny that they call it an education center — it’s a resort,” said Wilson. “If I was a union member, I would prefer that they rented out a room at the Ramada Inn.”

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,472304,00.html

…but I thought that the crazy global warming nuts already said that there was a “consensus” that global warming was true.

2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved

Looking back over my columns of the past 12 months, one of their major themes was neatly encapsulated by two recent items from The Daily Telegraph.

By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 10:39AM GMT 28 Dec 2008

The first, on May 21, headed “Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts” , reported that the entire Alpine “winter sports industry” could soon “grind to a halt for lack of snow”. The second, on December 19, headed “The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation” , reported that this winter’s Alpine snowfalls “look set to beat all records by New Year’s Day”.

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.

Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the “hottest in history” and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.

Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to “natural factors” such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely “masking the underlying warming trend”, and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a “scientific consensus” in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world’s most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that “consensus” which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month’s Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and “environmentalists” gathered to plan next year’s “son of Kyoto” treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for “combating climate change” with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.

Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent. All those grandiose projects for “emissions trading”, “carbon capture”, building tens of thousands more useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to “biofuels”, are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess.

As 2009 dawns, it is time we in Britain faced up to the genuine crisis now fast approaching from the fact that – unless we get on very soon with building enough proper power stations to fill our looming “energy gap” - within a few years our lights will go out and what remains of our economy will judder to a halt. After years of infantile displacement activity, it is high time our politicians – along with those of the EU and President Obama’s US – were brought back with a mighty jolt into contact with the real world.

I must end this year by again paying tribute to my readers for the wonderful generosity with which they came to the aid of two causes. First their donations made it possible for the latest “metric martyr”, the east London market trader Janet Devers, to fight Hackney council’s vindictive decision to prosecute her on 13 criminal charges, ranging from selling in pounds and ounces to selling produce “by the bowl” (to avoid using weights her customers dislike and don’t understand). The embarrassment caused by this historic battle has thrown the forced metrication policy of both our governments, in London and Brussels, into total disarray.

Since Hackney backed out of allowing four criminal charges against Janet to go before a jury next month, all that remains is for her to win her appeal in February against eight convictions which now look quite absurd (including those for selling veg by the bowl, as thousands of other London market traders do every day). The final goal, as Neil Herron of the Metric Martyrs Defence Fund insists, must then be a pardon for the late Steve Thoburn and the four other original “martyrs” who were found guilty in 2002 – after a legal battle also made possible by this column’s readers – of breaking laws so ridiculous that the EU Commission has even denied they existed (but which are still on the statute book).

Readers were equally generous this year in rushing to the aid of Sue Smith, whose son was killed in a Snatch Land Rover in Iraq in 2005. Their contributions made it possible for her to carry on with the High Court action she has brought against the Ministry of Defence, with the sole aim of calling it to account for needlessly risking soldiers’ lives by sending them into battle in hopelessly inappropriate vehicles. Thanks not least to Mrs Smith’s determined fight, the Snatch Land Rover scandal, first reported here in 2006, has at last become a national cause celebre.

May I finally thank all those readers who have written to me in 2008 – so many that, as usual, it has not been possible to answer all their messages. But their support and information has been hugely appreciated. May I wish them and all of you a happy (if globally not too warm) New Year.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/3982101/2008-was-the-year-man-made-global-warming-was-disproved.html

I received this email of a slideshow of pictures from New Orleans on December 11, during the big snow. It is from David Zoller, a photographer in NO, and he has permitted me to post this.

louisiana-snow-December 11, 2008
Merry Christmas everyone.

A great article from Oklahoma via TigerDroppings.

But it’s ok, because he’s a liberal.

Michael Lind in his recent article argues that the South is rising up again, this time in an economic civil war against the North. My first reaction was to think, “Well, at least he didn’t call us Nazi’s”. That’s progress. But because of the North-South divide of the auto bailout, yeah, the Civil War analogy is the nearest weapon at hand.

It’s hard to know where to begin with this intellectually lazy piece, but let’s start with the “race-to-the-bottom” business. Lind describes Southern strategies for employment as a “race to the bottom” by providing a low tax environment and cheaper labor. Labor was cheap in the South in the early part of the century for a simple reason, they didn’t have any jobs. In the thirties, what Lind and other talking heads would refer to as, “the glory days”, if a Southerner wanted to get a good wage job and didn’t come from the right family or own enough property, there was one good option…move North. That is, until the Tennessee Valley Authority handed out shovels for us to lean on. This is the model to which Lind wants to revert. When he says more money will flow from Blue states to Red States, he means that more government jobs must be created. You know, more road projects and more ditches dug, and more Southerners leaning on shovels.

Toyota is now edging GM in terms of market share. Japanese and German cars are superior to American cars in every division except trucks, and even trucks are close. the Toyota Prius has been around for 11 years and has been running rings around the Little Three with 40% of the hybrid market share. Building Toyotas, Hondas, and BMWs provide good jobs at $50/hr. These well paid blue collar jobs go to American citizens who pay taxes into the the system, but Lind naturally thinks that Southerners daring to get off the government teat while producing superior products that Americans actually want to buy is a race to the bottom.

Foreign car companies have been eroding away at market share for decades. The economic model of the Little Three is a failure, as demonstrated by the fact that they need a bailout despite a half century of a near oligopoly in the largest market in the world. A legacy of hostile relations between management and employees, and a top down, inefficient distribution model, and an incomprehensible groupthink preventing investment in smaller model fuel efficient vehicles are the culprits of the Little three’s downfall, not some Souther Senators. Even supporters of the auto bailout concede that bankruptcy is inevitable, they just feel that the bailout is a good jobs program. I’ve stated my ambivalence to allowing the American auto industry to go bankrupt while shoveling money into institutions like AIG making a profit on the deal, but the near consensus that these companies will come back for more, and soon, and the few concessions were made by the industry leads me to believe that the only way to innovate the American auto industry is to broker a bankruptcy. As with many tough decisions, Bush kicked the can down the road. Thankfully he bailed out a failing industry, for which he will get minimal credit, only after the GOP burned their bridges in the midwest. Politically, this kind of passive leadership is a disaster for the GOP.

There are a lot of other things wrong with this piece, but I’ll add two quick points. A raise in the minimum wage would not directly affect auto workers making well over minimum wage. But it would increase unemployment levels for a decade, similar to the glory days of the 1930s. Also, and this is a caveat that should be added to any article criticizing the flow of tax money from blue states to the South, is that states like Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia have a lot of blacks, and blacks use public services to a much larger degree than other groups. What they need in this country is a job, and if that job is at Wal-Mart or at a BMW plant, it is better than a TVA job, because that is the only option. Ford would rather build a plant in Brazil than build in the south, with right-to-work laws in place. Also, if Lind wants stronger unions he should get on board with a majority of Americans and support shipping illegal immigrants back to their home country so negotiations between management and labor won’t be undermined by cheap, quasi-legal labor. Perhaps he can dig up some old Mexican war related analogies.

First pretend to be his friend, then talk him into destroying himself.

Russia wants to negotiate arms control with Obama

2 days ago

MOSCOW (AP) — Russian news agencies quote the foreign minister as saying Moscow hopes to conduct constructive arms control talks with the new U.S. administration.

Interfax and ITAR-Tass report that Sergey Lavrov said Wednesday that Russia is eager to maintain control and verification procedures contained in the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

The START I pact expires in December 2009, and Russian and U.S. negotiators have already launched efforts to negotiate a follow-up pact. The talks have been unsuccessful so far amid a cold spell in Russia-U.S. relations.

Lavrov is quoted as saying that Moscow expects that Barack Obama’s administration will cooperate in a “constructive” way to reach a deal that would strengthen arms control.