Michael Smith, guest blogger, on truth, facts, conspiracy theories and bias in politics

Interesting isn't it? How many people:

- Who can't stand the conspiracy theories of Alex Jones but believe the Steele dossier is real.

- Refuse to believe that the Hillary Clinton campaign was not connected to Russian "interference" when there is clear evidence they paid the law firm Perkins Coie to pay Fusion GPS who paid Christopher Steele.

- Believe Donald Trump committed campaign finance crimes, yet Hillary Clinton did not.

- Continue to insist that illegal aliens commit less crime than legal immigrants and citizens:

1) when every single illegal immigrant has already committed one misdemeanor if they have crossed the border once and a felony if they are repeat offenders, and

2) when illegal immigrants make up approximately 9% of the total population but 27% of the prison population.

- Believe if the Second Amendment was ignored and all guns were banned, there would be no more gun crime but don't accept that enforcing current immigration law to completely ban illegal immigration would end crime by illegal immigrants.

- Believe that one non-NRA member committing a gun crime means all NRA members are responsible, but one Islamist committing a terrorist act does not mean all Muslims are responsible.

- Don't believe a border wall will be effective, but build fences around their property and lock their doors.

- Believe "toxic masculinity," misogyny, sexism and sexual violence against women are problems, but importing people from cultures where these aspects are common is not.

- Believe the real issue in the Mollie Tibbetts murder is not that the murderer was here illegally, it was that he was a male.

- Claim to oppose fascism and racism while engaging in fascist and racist acts.

- Believe for speech to be free, it must be restricted or banned (for certain people).

- Believe it is totally intellectually consistent to say private social media companies can choose their customers, but a private cake bakery cannot.

- Believe that a scandal is only a scandal if the New York Times, the Washington Post, or CNN says it is.

- Believe sexual harassment is always real and the accuser should always be believed without question as long as the accusations aren't against #metoo members - then it was consensual and the accuser is a liar.

Of course, these are prominent features of our hypocritical progressive friends. For them, cognitive dissonance is a feature, not a bug.

None of this - not a single damn instance - is about the referenced situation - it is all about the political position of the person and how best to protect that political position. It's making up rules and crap "facts" as they go along just to keep their agenda alive and moving.

Bryant Gumbel vs. the NRA

Who has killed more Americans--Planned Parenthood which both the President and Democrats support or the NRA? Democrats put abortion in the political presidential platform and call it women's health. Or wait, let's leave out the NRA and just say murder/suicide by guns, most illegally owned. And let's not say all aborted babies, let's reduce that to just aborted black babies. How about that Bryant? 38% of the abortions are for black women.

Annual deaths in the U.S. by: Guns - 31,000+ (19K suicide, 12K homicide or accident) Abortion - 1,200,000+ but that's only counting medical and surgical, not chemical.

Balance and intelligent political discussion on the Daily Beast

The Beast likes to throw red meat to its regulars to gin up comments. The context is something about the NRA and Cuccinelli losing the governor’s race in Virginia, which is why Noe suggested that after defeating him, the Republicans and Tea Party people should be shot in the head.  Of course, the GOP doesn’t like the Tea Party either, and literally abandoned the Republican candidate.

What we’ve come to expect—David Gregory

 

Day 100, and counting

"Today (yesterday April 29) marks the 100th day of Barack Obama’s presidency; a presidency that is every bit as comfortable as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s was in blending the power of big government, big business, and big labor into one national industrial policy. And just as under FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Act, the result of the Obama agenda will be fewer small businesses, less jobs, and a longer recession. UCLA economists Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian have found that the NIRA accounted for 60% of the weak recovery and prolonged the depression by seven full years. President Obama’s senior advisor David Axelrod has called the 100-day benchmark a Hallmark Holiday. Does Hallmark sell a condolence card for the death of free enterprise?" Free enterprise's 100th Day Death March

The National Run Around

We can expect FDR type programs from BHO, for in your face, God Almighty inspired government regulations, and jack boots on the necks of non-compliant plumbers. But with better looking graphics and logos, given that his campaign man is a media guru. The National Recovery Association was called the National Run Around because of the hundreds of codes that impeded business, and the WPA, Works Progress Administration, was called the We Piddle Around.



"The economic impact of the NRA was immediate and powerful. In the five months leading up to the act’s passage, signs of recovery were evident: factory employment and payrolls had increased by 23 and 35 percent, respectively. Then came the NRA, shortening hours of work, raising wages arbitrarily, and imposing other new costs on enterprise. In the six months after the law took effect, industrial production dropped 25 percent. Benjamin M. Anderson writes, "NRA was not a revival measure. It was an antirevival measure . . . . Through the whole of the NRA period industrial production did not rise as high as it had been in July 1933, before NRA came in.

To run NRA, FDR chose "General Hugh "Iron Pants" Johnson, a profane, red-faced bully and professed admirer of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Thundered Johnson, "May Almighty God have mercy on anyone who attempts to interfere with the Blue Eagle" (the official symbol of the NRA, which one senator derisively referred to as the "Soviet duck"). Those who refused to comply with the NRA Johnson personally threatened with public boycotts and "a punch in the nose."

Roosevelt next signed into law steep income tax increases on the higher brackets and introduced a five-percent withholding tax on corporate dividends. He secured another tax increase in 1934. In fact, tax hikes became a favorite policy of Roosevelt for the next ten years, culminating in a top income tax rate of 90 percent.
Read Reed.