The horror of bi-partisanship

It must not be forgotten that the worst and most destructive policies of the last eight years have, for the most part, been supported by both major political parties.

It strikes me that if the American people are anything other than sheep, they must seriously consider the viability of the libertarian party.

It's official

Bush is the worst president in American history.

Of course both the Democrats and Republicans in Congress have enabled him and deserve much of the responsibility for his failures, and as a result the U.S. is in for a very, very rough future.

Let's take a look at a few of his biggest mistakes:

1. The election of George W. Bush was as slim as slim gets and a reasonable man would have governed with some humility but instead he tried to use his slim margin to ram home his agenda which of course failed but did succeed in enraging the American left.

2. Post 9/11 management included bureaucratic nightmares such as the Department of Homeland security, affronts to liberty such as the patriot act, and an ill-conceived and undeclared war with ambiguous goals against an amorphous enemy.

3. The medicare prescription drug plan which was designed solely to ensure reelection and has since predictably proven to be anti-competition, wildly expensive, and a subsidy to the pharmaceutical companies that simply insured prices would continue to rise.

4. The Iraq war. This was a poorly managed, poorly planned, undeclared, ill-conceived, unnecessary, and wildly expensive war. Congress has supported this farce of foreign policy every step of the way illustrating not only their complicity in this nonsense but their cynicism and duplicity (in immediately condemning it and doing nothing to fix or stop it) as well. The consequence of this has been to completely ruin our international reputation, weaken our already shaky economic situation, and potentially radicalize another generation of muslims.

5. Nearly doubling the national debt in just over eight years. The potential effects of which include a downgrading of the U.S. credit rating and the potential for massive inflation.

6. The mortgage crisis and the bailouts.  This has been in the works mostly since Clinton, who bears much of the responsibility due his changes to the community reinvestment act, but it was the bailouts that truly made this a disaster. Our inept Congress gave away its constitutional obligation of financial oversight and allowed the treasury department unlimited, and unaccountable financial authority which it used to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars in bailouts thus effectively nationalizing our entire mortgage industry. The inevitable consequence of this is likely catastrophe... Why Congress would continue to give more and more power to someone who has shown such utter incompetence in using it shows quite clearly that they are simply biding their time until they can wield that same power - they care little for the success, security, freedom, or happiness of the American people when compared to wielding more and more power.

George W. Bush has not only destroyed the Republican party, of which McCain is its death throes, but he may have entrenched authoritarianism, imperialism, and socialism forever as natural elements of America's modern political and cultural identity. The U.S. is no longer a nation of reason, capitalism, and liberty. It is no longer the political expression of the philosophical enlightenment. It is no longer unique. It is no longer exceptional. It is no longer great.

Our demise has been in the works since Wilson involved us in World War 1 but we have had numerous opportunities to right the ship, but not anymore. The life narrative of the United States of America has run its course and its original brilliance and potential have degraded into a shameful and irrational tragedy. 

U.S. AAA rating in jeopardy?

Reuters is reporting that there is some legitimate pressure on our perfect AAA S&P rating.

Gee, with the U.S. government subsidizing incompetent and noncompetitive businesses, being excessively loose with monetary policy, racking up trillions in debt, and tens of trillions in future obligations, and then bailing out the financial sector to tune of a trillion dollars and mortgage market for five trillion, all while the airlines and auto industries clamor for bailouts as well, who would have thought that maybe our credit rating might take a hit?

Even our government can run out of money and fail if the U.S. bond market collapses when it become obvious that we can't pay our debts without using inflation to do so... and if I thought that it would teach people a lesson about capitalism I would encourage it to happen but it won't...

Ron Paul on the beginning of the mortgage crisis, the removal of much congressional oversight from the treasury dept., on the AIG bailout, and finally on the bigger inflationary problem from this.

Control

Here is a quote from an article by Vanessa Grigoriadis that has received a bit of attention from the Vdare crowd for illustrating the implicit foolish sensitivity that any frank discussion of race brings:

"As I began to finish the reporting for this article, I mentioned to an Obama aide that I was interested in the different ways that Obama presents himself to black and white audiences. The aide hit the roof over this comment, which he claimed was racially divisive, and soon I received a call from Obama’s “African-American outreach coordinator,” who apparently clarifies race issues for reporters when they are perceived to have strayed. “I appreciate what you’re saying,” said Corey Ealons, “but I think it’s dangerous, quite frankly.”

I'll leave the obvious discussion to Steve Sailer and instead ask this questions:

Does Senator Obama's campaign strike anyone else as humorless and compulsively controlling? Recall how out of sorts he was for the first week after Gov. Palin was announced by the McCain campaign...

They protest too much, methinks.

Radley Balko over at Reason's Hit&Run posted this Orwellian blurb.

The gist? The TSA changed the name of Virginia hub from transportation security operations center to the "Freedom Center."

The U.S. is supposedly the home of the freedom and liberty yet we have, of late, taken to being rather pushy about declaring it even in the face of the absurd. It strikes me as suspicious because if we are so damn free, why do we have to constantly remind everyone of it? Shouldn't it be obvious?

Perhaps nothing of late indicates that we are a little past our freedom loving prime than this.

Capitalism and the problem of Abortion

I'm a strident capitalist. I absolutely endorese individual rights, reason, the protection of private property, and the  laissez-faire system that naturally extends. It would seem that I am one Dagny Taggart reference away from an Ayn Rand wet-dream except I'm not.

Don't get me wrong, I think that Ayn Rand was a brilliant thinker who did wonders articulating something this country desperately needed... a moral defense for capitalism. The problem was that she was also something of a paranoid polemicist with borderline delusions of grandeur and a penchant for scape-goating. This resulted in her late life banishment from the intellectual mainstream that has maintained to this day by her cultish followers because of their utter inability to admit that her philosophy isn't a closed, i.e. perfect system.

The crux of the problem for her is that her philosophy gives too much control of human values to our will and rational mind when in truth, our genetic make-up accounts for much of it. This accounts for her utter inability to explain and deal with children. Humans have a genetic nature and built into it is the occasional bit of tribal altruism. This is why the question of abortion is so tricky.

I think that most reasonable human would agree that a third-trimester abortion is pretty repugnant because you have to perform an explicit act not only to remove the fetus from the womb but to kill it. That second act separates late-term abortions from first and second trimester ones. Outlawing this procedure seems only reasonable and just.

The remaining six months of pregnancy are less clear morally but beside the point. Abortion is the premiere moral and legal wedge issue (but nowhere near its most important) in America today and it may very well be tearing this country apart.

Political parties have essentially realigned along pro-choice and pro-life factions and what's been lost in the mix is political principles. The champions of reason and individual liberty are incapable of leaving abortion to discussion simply because Ayn Rand didn't and were all suffering as a consequence.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Bailouts for the Detroit auto-industry seem likely. Damn it to hell! I hate politicians...

The sickening assault of Sarah

Jay Nordlinger from the corner at the NRO has said exactly what I've been thinking this last week about Sarah Palin.

She isn't being attacked for the legitimate weaknesses she has but is instead being destroyed personally and publicly. It is a sickening spectacle to watch the jackals in action...

Carter, Clinton, Obama, and the mortgage crisis.

In 1977 Jimmy Carter signed into law the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) which forced banks away from market oriented, conservative lending into high-risk loans to unqualified customers in order to improve home-ownership rate in minority neighborhoods. He signed the CRA largely due to political pressure from left-wing activist groups and against the overwhelming opposition from the mainstream banking community.

The CRA was a poorly enforced, moderately harmful, albeit well-intended bill and it stayed that way until, in 1995, president Clinton turned it into the monster that it is today. Turning the subjective regulations into statistical mandates, Clinton essentially forced the banking industry to maintain a large percentage of their business in high-risk, low-income minority neighborhoods. The result was that the percentage of loans that qualified as CRA approved increased at more than double the rate of normal loans. Essentially, the government forced banks to put more and more of their resources into increasingly insecure, albeit politically correct investments.

It gets worse though when you look at so-called community groups like ACORN and how they use the CRA to extort millions of dollars from banks. An additional Clinton era regulation was the increased severity to a banks rating not only if they didn't fulfill enough CRA loans but also if one of dozens of activist groups complained - a simple complaint could cost the bank their rating. These so-called community groups are not blind to the power they wield and neither are the banks. There is a semi-silent but mutual agreement that if these groups don't make complaints then the banks will not only give out the required loans to unqualified minorities but that they will also give millions of dollars directly to the activist group itself. ACORN (as well as it's many, many other seedy and criminal aspects) is one of the worst extortionists of this kind and has long-standing ties to Barack Obama.

Sen. Obama has not only briefly worked for ACORN but he has also doled out millions of dollars to them by way of his work as a board of director on the Woods fund of Chicago as well as his time as an Illinois state senator. A housing bill currently in the senate, supported by Obama and ACORN would set aside millions of dollars in tax-payer money for these "community groups."

The overall effect is that banks are forced into irresponsible practices by a coalition of powerful lobbyist/activist groups, indebted or corrupt politicians, and the coercive laws that they put in place leading inevitably to financial ruin, leaving the taxpayers footing the bill for tens of billions in losses while lining the pockets of racist opportunists to the tune of millions.

Will Senator Obama likely continue the Clinton-era interventionism that helped create this economic crisis by pandering to groups like ACORN? Given his explicit support of the group up to this point, it seems likely...

Please go away!

I would like to take this moment to list some more people that I would like to see unemployed as quickly as possible:

1. Rachel Maddow - this woman reminds me of an old philosophy professor of mine. She is not a political leftist so much as she is a philosophical leftist. What I mean by that is that she is absolutely familiar with the underlying foundations of her political beliefs and she stills believes them, which makes her all the more repugnant. That being said, she has moved from the purgatory that is Air America to the near-purgatory that is MSNBC bringing her utterly conventional (if you've spent any time on a college campus of late that is) leftist ramblings. This is the type of woman who believes every charge against a conservative not because she is gullible but because the truth is an irrelevant concept to her - it's all about social justice.

2. Josh Howard - this guys a real tosser. His most recent stupidity? Declaring that the he doesn't pay respect to this country and its national anthem because he's black and thus implicitly not part of the greater American history and culture. Okay asshole...

3. George W. Bush - do you have to ask why? This time my reason is that he made no effort to put a stop to this absurd bailout of AIG and he was entirely on board for the bailout of Bear Sterns. Damn it man! Can't you do ANYTHING like an actual conservative? If I'd wanted a 1960's democrat then I would have invented a time machine, gone back in time, and voted for LBJ. Of course I didn't but it sure the fuck feels like I did.

In a just and decent world these people would be begging for change on a street corner but instead they are all in the public eye making me vaguely empathetic with Vladmir Putin and his tendency to imprison anyone that irritates him.

Georgia not just an innocent victim?

It would seem that Georgia isn't quite as innocent and virtuous as they have led the west to believe and is instead as cynical and stupid as I suggested.

And it begins

As the 2008 presidential election inevitably (yes, that's right, I said inevitably) tightened up, it was equally inevitable that chant of racism would be begin.

The left adores Barack Obama more so than any Democratic candidate in history but also despises the current Republicans enough to heighten their emotional investment - "he must win or the country is doomed."

Barack Obama is, for many Democrats, a Goldwater figure. He is the candidate that they've always wanted, not the compromise of a Rockefeller or a Clinton. They can't emotionally handle the idea of him losing and know that if he does, his ideas will essentially be abandoned as were Goldwaters. Thus, the cry of racism.

So here comes the anger, hysteria, and unseemly nastiness that have characterized the far-left of the Democratic party for the last forty years. Enjoy, because I sure won't.

The moral choice

As we rapidly approach the Nov. election I would like to take this opportunity to remind the people that your vote, like all political actions, is not so much an intellectual choice or civic duty but rather it is a moral decision.

Who will you enslave for that social program you are fond of? Who's freedoms are you willing to curtail for your own comfort? Do your fellow men owe you their property? Their time? Their lives?

Whether you are voting on an initiative in California or sitting on a jury, you are not simply a part of the process - you are the process. You are ultimately accountable for your political choices and their often severe consequences. Please choose wisely and rationally this November.

A hidden cause of the mortgage crisis

An editorial from the Investors business daily does lay a lot of the blame for the mortgage meltdown on the government - the Clinton government that is. Here are the key excerpts:

"But it was the Clinton administration, obsessed with multiculturalism, that dictated where mortgage lenders could lend, and originally helped create the market for the high-risk subprime loans now infecting like a retrovirus the balance sheets of many of Wall Street's most revered institutions.

Tough new regulations forced lenders into high-risk areas where they had no choice but to lower lending standards to make the loans that sound business practices had previously guarded against making. It was either that or face stiff government penalties.

The untold story in this whole national crisis is that President Clinton put on steroids the Community Redevelopment Act, a well-intended Carter-era law designed to encourage minority homeownership. And in so doing, he helped create the market for the risky subprime loans..."

This is what happens when the government interferes in the private market... catastrophe.

The Democrats obsession with social tinkering has now cost the U.S. economy hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, helped to destroy some of our oldest and most prestigious firms, and forced the U.S. taxpayers to foot the bill for tens of billions of dollars in loses.

The virtues of multiculturalism are debatable but we must understand that the government, by its very nature and essence, is a destructive entity that corrupts everything in its sphere of influence. 

The question of immigration

I would like to briefly discuss immigration, as it seems to fallen out of the political discussion of late.

Whether in Europe or the U.S., mass immigration is the fastest and largest migration of people in human history and it needs to be discussed. There are political ramifications, social and cultural consequences, as well as economic effects.

A nation has border integrity in order to maintain a nation-states primary virtue: it allows for culturally and politically like-minded people to exist together. That is why distinct nations have distinctly different political and social characters. If every nation becomes an egalitarian mixture of people then every nation will be essentially the same. What happens to those people that wish to live a different way?

What happens to those that wish to be libertarian freedom lovers?

What about those that love communism?

What about countries that simply adore ping-pong?

Where do those people go when every nation has become homogenized?

The world is better when people are free to move to a nation but also when that nation is free to refuse them entry. Sometimes preserving national character is a good thing, especially if you like that national character.

The problem with the multicultural egalitarians is that they disdain personal choice. They discount that perhaps the French LIKE being French for better or worse. Perhaps the homogenous Japanese would prefer to stay homogenous even with the economic consequences of an aging population.

It is perfectly reasonable for some countries to embrace multiculturalism while others do not. There needs to be an open discussion concerning the issues of mass migration and its consequences because there's no turning back the clock once the deed is done and the buyers remorse on this one might be fatal.

Let them die!

It seems that most modern politicians utterly lack courage or discipline because every time something wacky happens to rock the boat, they freak out, especially in the economy.

Take the fannie mae and mac "crisis." They aren't going to collapse (neither will Lehman's or Merrill Lynch but more on that later) because the tax payers are going to bail them out just like we bail out the airlines and railroads and anyone else who screws up. Why?

Because politicians are stupid, corrupt, weak-willed, short-sighted tossers. By bailing out companies that "are too big to allow to fail" even when they deserve too, you create an incentive for companies to tolerate risk in favor of size. 

Companies will know that no matter how crazy the risks they take, they taxpayers will bail them out if anything goes wrong. This utterly corrupts the market, rotting it from the inside out, and will inevitably lead to disaster because there won't be an incentive for these companies to improve and as a result their debt and size will only continue to increase (to insure a government bailout if necessary) and they will actually fail more and more often.

Bad companies are supposed to fail and be reborn in more competent hands. Bad companies are a cancer on the economy and they need to die. When the government fearfully bails them out it keeps that cancer alive and increases the chance that it will one day do irreparable damage to the economy as a whole.

Not only should we let these companies fail, but we should embrace it and enjoy it. Their demise means our health - it means a stronger, richer, and more nimble America. It means more jobs, better jobs, and more opportunities.

Fannie Mae, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers are all towering monuments to incompetence, recklessness, poor planning, and bad management and are no better than the criminal Enron and Worldcom. They are cancer, poison, economic death. They are fear mongers, tempters, and parasites.

Let them die so that better companies run by better people can rise in their place. 

Let them die to lighten our burden. 

Let them die because they deserve it.

Let them die. Let them die. Let them die. 

We deserve better then them. Let them die so that we can have it.

The death of a republic

I wish to make it explicitly clear to any who might read my little blog, that civilization is receding and it's probably, in part, your fault. 

You have abandoned reason, rational thought, moral courage, intellectual honesty, and the eternal vigilance necessary to preserve a free society.

Don't complain because most of the time, most of the people get exactly what they deserve and we are, as a group, getting just that. Sit back and enjoy. You earned it.

What genius thought this up?

Obama = Jesus.

I'm not a religious man and am in fact, an explicit atheist, and yet I find this comparison offensive on many levels.

The first and most obvious point is that it is a stupid, stupid, stupid comparison only to be made by people so ignorant of religious tenets and political tactics that they actual think it's a clever idea. Do they not understand the concept of blasphemy? Does it not occur to them that Christians might, just might find this a bit offensive. Do they think that average voters might not want to worship their candidate? Nope, at least the dailykos doesn't think so.

The second point is that it's factually inaccurate and reeks of nasty elitism. A community organizer is someone who goes out and lobby's the community to support some project or political agenda. They are either mercenaries or true believers. Jesus was supposedly the word of God - truth. It might have been fair to compare one of the apostles or missionaries to a community organizer but Jesus? 

The last point is that it's just creepy. I don't worship anyone and I don't want too. Obama isn't divine and he isn't salvation and he isn't a damn prophet. He's a fucking politician and what matters is his character, judgement, and ideas and when you take a look at him, he isn't the truth, he's just another politician.

This is why Democrats lose nationally. Like Mrs. Kael they simply don't understand the country they live in.

Is Sarah Palin the Devil??

In 1972, Richard Nixon swept 49 states in a crushing electoral domination over George McGovern which elicited from The New Yorker's film critic Pauline Kael this famous quote: 

"How could that be? I don't know a single person who voted for Nixon."

In that singular quote she elegantly and ironically explained her utter isolation from the bulk of America. She truly couldn't comprehend the actions of the American people because she truly didn't understand the people themselves.

Over the last two weeks Gov. Sarah Palin has endured (beyond the normal legitimate political assaults) a savage beating of outright lies, unsubstantiated rumors, misrepresentation, and ridicule from the mainstream media and left-leaning bloggers. This merciless assault on her has elicited utter confusion from a pretty diverse range of women that I've come into contact with of late. 

Women young and old, liberal or conservative, single or married, hispanic, asian, and white have all expressed, to me, shock at the vitriol and open hostility. "Why?" they ask. " I kind of like her."

Irreverent genius/buffoon Greg Gutfeld over at Fox's Redeye has a wonderful answer:

But I know the real reason why every single elitist media type is terrified of her. They've never met her. And by "her," I don't mean Sarah Palin. I mean "her," an actual normal woman with a bunch of kids, an average husband and no desire to watch "The L Word."

Spot on Greg, spot on. 

Sarah Palin has many of the same qualities that flummoxed 1960's feminists about Ayn Rand. She's a smart, successful career woman who disagrees with them. Because they are utterly incapable of imagining such a mythical creature they naturally assume that she must secretly be a religious nut, incompetent parent, country rube, liar, and political fraud. They simply can't believe that she is the real deal and they will surrender their integrity, honesty, good judgement, and reputations in order satisfy their pathological belief. 

Remember Dan Rather throwing away a long and successful career over a B.S. story about George W. Bush? Why do it? Why not do a cursory investigation? Spend a day to check the facts? Hadn't the president already failed enough to condemn him with the truth, did he need a fake story as well? Simply because in Rather's world, it HAD to be true. And so it is with the media and Sarah Palin.

Is Sarah Palin a Republican Harry Truman, a Reagan revival, another George W. Bush, or something else entirely? I don't know that answer but I do know that she's smart, tough, likably plucky and isn't afraid of anyone.

Obama under pressure?

So when the polls tighten up, excitement builds for his rival, Barack Obama goes on the offensive General Custer style. Reminds me a bid of Canada in 1993...

Rather than questioning McCain's foreign policy judgement, imperial tendencies, his utter lack of knowledge about the economy, or any other reasonable point of attack, Obama decides to call McCain out of touch.

In his latest ad, Obama's crack team suggests that McCain is out of touch because can't send an e-mail, which he really can't. The only problem is that McCain is actually quite technologically savvy and can't send an e-mail because he was tortured in Vietnam and instead of typing dictates to his wife.

Way to respond under pressure there Barack.

Jonah Goldberg at The Corner handled this one.

Running their campaign the same way they run everything else...

Here is this years most amusing article from Wonkette dealing with the problems that a Chicago girl scout troop had trying to get a little bit of free stuff from the Obama campaign.

Seriously, petty, small-minded dopes who are incapable of using their own judgement and always looking for a rule to follow or an authority to direct them. That tells you more about the underlying psychology of the Democratic party and Obama than anything else I've seen this election cycle.

Oh Maureen! Oh Matt!

So what do Maureen Dowd and Matt Damon have in common?

They are both so partisan (and possibly apathetic in the case of Dowd) that neither one of them can be bothered to fact-check anything that confirms their predetermined view of the world.

A blogger wrote and posted a series of fake Sarah Palin quotes as a parody a couple of weeks ago and ever since some of the quotes have been kicking around the rabidly excitable left-wing blogosphere, democratic mailing lists, and the empty heads of douche baggy actors.

That brings us back to Maureen and Matt, both of whom in a public forum repeated a quote about dinosaurs. Now, I suspect that Maureen, in her own acerbic way, made the mistake first and Matt just repeated it like a lemming but it's hard to say.

What I do know for certain is that for all of the problems with conservatives in America, they aren't quite as frothing, hysterical, fearful, petty, angry elitists as leftists are, for whatever that's worth.

The future of the America's political parties.

The Democratic party has long portrayed the Republicans as the party of old, greedy, out of touch, white men while they were the party that reflected America's diversity, youth, and vigor.

A more accurate assessment is that the Republican party is rapidly becoming, as Howard Dean noted, the white party. They are no longer the party of international restraint (sorry Dr. Paul, you are alone on that one) thanks in large part to Ronald Reagan, two George Bushes, and some Arab terrorists. They are no longer the party of constitutional government since abandoning those principles after Barry Goldwater's defeat in 1968. They certainly aren't the small government loving, libertarian leaning conservatives that Reagan hoped to galvanize. They aren't even the pro-business party anymore with the McCain-Palin ticket. 

The Republican party is essentially Christian and white. Ron Paul and John McCain in the same party along with Rudy Giuliani, Tom Tancredo, Patrick Buchanan, and Sarah Palin? There is no cohesive political vision that holds that group together except for Christianity.

What does that make the Democrats though? Well, they are effectively the party of blacks and Catholic, non-Cuban hispanics, baby-boomers, and explicit socialists. The Democrats having been losing control over white women as a reliable voting block since Reagan and the question of abortion ruptured the feminist movement; they've nearly completely lost white and hispanic evangelicals; Unions are rapidly diminishing in influence and power; Free-trade issues and low taxes became winning issues and were co-opted by Clinton in 1992. The Democrats where losing political viability, and quickly. 

Of course George W. Bush saved the day for the opposition party through his obscene incompetence and wild unpopularity. The Democrats had been given a new lease on life but how were they to remake themselves?

Their preferred method was to simply import voters by way of illegal immigration. That issue stalled (for now) and so they temporarily wandered in the dark with John Kerry's tired and vacuous run in 2004. Now in 2008 they have regrouped, reorganized, and recreated themselves by traveling back in time to 1968 with Barack Obama as the neo-Nixon figure.

Their 2008 platform reads like a history lesson on bad domestic ideas for the last seventy years. Tax the rich, massive regulations, huge government programs, etc. Barack Obama has capitalized on his racial-celebrity status to court the media, identity politics to build a base, rhetoric of change to court swing voters (his natural opponent was strangely enough Ron Paul - who actually had ideas), a wildly unpopular president with a wildly unpopular war to court the youth vote.

The Democrats don't have ideas and they don't want them, they want power, influence, but ultimately control which is the only thing leftists ever want. Republicans have abandoned their ideas for political expediency and have learned the cruel Randian lesson that if you sacrifice principle for practicality, you lose. Thus the future of American politics looks to be purely a demographic battle for dominance.

Deepak Chopra (?) takes a shot at Sarah Palin

So now, hero of the New Thought Movement, Deepak Chopra has written an article attacking Sarah Palin - a bit strange for a new age medical guru to be delving so harshly into partisan politics, or is it?

As it often the case when put under pressure, leftist show their true nature and that is all that has happened here. Deepak Chopra is a leftist first, and a new age guru second. Oddly, that doesn't make him unique among leftists.

Think of Wendy Doniger declaring that Sarah Palin is in fact, not a woman because she isn't a leftist, biology and facts notwithstanding. She is of the Gloria Steinem school of feminism that has nothing whatsoever to do with women and everything to do with leftist ideology. I prefer my feminism Camille Paglia style - with intellectual honesty.

That is how leftism works. They co-opt some group whether cultural, gender, race, nation, religion, etc. and use said group to push their ideas. They then discard that group when it is no longer useful but before they do that, they attack anyone that threatens their control of that group. That is what is happening now.

Sarah Palin is a vision of feminism that the left never wanted to let see the light of day and now that it has, they are enraged and terrified.

I've no intention of defending Sarah Palin's politics (although I did predict her as McCain's pick - if only I had bothered to blog about it) but she has certainly unnerved the left enough for them to unleash hell upon her. First the media assaults, overreach, and misrepresentation and now sheer insanity. Come on, sending Deepak Chopra, Matt Damon, and Roger Ebert to attack a charmingly folksy vice-presidential pick reeks of sheer terror like nothing else.

Why the bias?

The media is biased. That's a concession that any reasonably aware and competent person would have to make. To what is it biased and why are entirely debatable questions and ones that I would like to address here.

Is the media a bland, homogenized, corporate entity that crushes independent thought in favor of profits? If you ask many on the left then the answer would seem to be yes.

Is the media a haven for social liberals who are hostile to conservative religion and values? Yes again, if you ask nearly any conservative.

So who's right? Well, they are both quite wrong and a bit right.

The media IS overrun with self-described liberals who are independently hostile to conservative cultural and political values. It's true. Then again, the corporate media entities are obscenely interrelated and unquestioningly profit seeking agents. Those facts alone do not explain the full nature of the media's bias.

The simple truth is that the media is primarily biased towards statism. Why though?

Simply because journalists aren't the heroic truth seekers that they have portrayed themselves as since the 1950's (before that, journalists were often portrayed as fools) in films like Deadline U.S.A. and All The Presidents Men. The media is just like every other business in the world and most journalists are stupid, lazy, and don't want to do any more work than is absolutely necessary to please their boss so they can cash their paycheck.

Many, if not most news articles and reports are not written by so-called journalists but are simply reprinted nearly verbatim from press releases. The stock footage behind the talking heads is generally prepared in advance by some source or public relations firm and hand-fed to major news outlets. Journalists publish this prepackaged work rather than research their own material simply because it's easy.

If you are pursuing a story about the economy then talking to economists and businessmen would make a lot of sense. The same goes for ethical issues about abortion, legal theory about states rights, or science issues. The problem is that academics, specialists, and businessmen don't have press releases ready for publication nor handy-dandy stock footage ready for air. Governments, on the other hand, do.

Government manipulates the media by capitalizing on its primary weakness: it's need for immediate, new, easy stories ready for print. Government agencies provide a plethora of "sources" for lazy journalists and those sources will almost always trend towards the statist.

Governments employ hundreds of thousands of people (beyond attention seeking politicians) and those people are the real source of media bias. Their careers thrive, regardless of their political affiliation, on big government. The more government does, the more work they have. Statism is good for their careers and as a result, they favor it in their media relations.

A journalist reporting a story on the environment will likely use the EPA as a source; the pentagon or state department for a foreign affairs story; the treasury department or federal reserve when writing about the economy. Rarely will they consult an ecologist, historian, or businessman. They don't pursue the truth but rather the easiest story and that is almost always means a pro-government statist tainted story.