Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy in the JFK assassination

The most accurate account of who killed JFK. So serious, the History Chanel has been stopped from showing the TV series by a lawsuit from LBJ’s family and Democratic Party lawyers.

 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy is November 22, 2013. Yet, in a half-century, we have just a fraction of the truth published.

file://localhost/Users/gregmichael/Desktop/The%20Men%20Who%20Killed%20Kennedy.JPG

Any deep coverage of the assassination didn’t come from major newspapers. The best investigations have come from book authors and movie directors. The reputation of newspaper journalists has fallen from its peak in the early 1960s. The botched coverage of the Kennedy Assassination followed by decades of one-sided news stories coming from Democrat talking points has taken it’s toll on newspapers. In the early ’60s, the top 50 cities had two or three competing newspapers. Today, only New York, Boston and Chicago have two newspapers still publishing.

Was it color television that came in the late ’60s, or was it the content and ethical character of the newspapers editors and journalists?

Oliver Stone’s “JFK” presented many pieces of one of the most corrupt high crimes in U.S. history, but it failed to investigate the dangerous loose ends.

Within a week of the assassination, LBJ established what would be called the Warren Commission. Ten months later, the Warren report was issued with the “magic dancing bullet” and no mention of dozens of odd deaths.

With the Internet, authors, citizen journalists, and bloggers are doing a much better job uncovering the cover-ups than the elite media. How could that be? A rule of economics is choice. We had much fewer choice in news media until the internet came of age.

Take for example the assassination of JFK. Testimony has been hidden from the public for decades.

“Yeah, I had the son of a bitch killed. I’m glad I did. I’m sorry I couldn’t have done it myself!”

These were the words of Carlos Marcello, the Mafia godfather of Louisiana and Texas. And he was talking about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I believe he was played by John Candy in Oliver Stones “JFK.”

Marcello’s admission is in uncensored FBI files at the National Archives, detailed for the first time in a new encyclopedic book “Legacy of Secrecy,” by Lamar Waldron.

Waldron’s 848-page blockbuster was published in November, 2008. It involves 20 years of research that began in 1988 when he didn’t know that Mafioso Marcello had confessed to JFK’s murder back in 1985. The FBI kept this fact a secret for more than two decades. The Warren Commission released its cover-up version of the death of JFK at the hands of a lone assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald and a magic bullet.

IN 1963, only weeks after JFK was killed, the FBI questioned 14 Marcello mob associates. Yet the godfather’s name doesn’t even appear in the Warren Report. This secrecy shows that the government all the way up to LBJ had a hand in the cover-up at the very least, he appointed the Warren Commission and never had any questions directed to him.

Such as have you ever met Jack Ruby? Do you know Carlos Marcello, what do Mr. Ruby and Mr. Marcello do for a living?

In their war against organized crime and essentially the Mafia, President Kennedy and his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy were never able to convict any members of the Marcello crime family. And Marcello didn’t make his admission of guilt until he was serving a long prison sentence as a result of an FBI sting.

The FBI groomed an informant who became Carlos Marcello’s cellmate. These tapes have never been released but they reveal the godfather standing in the prison yard, flying into a rage and cussing the Kennedys.

Marcello confessed that he’d also met Lee Harvey Oswald and brought him into the plot via that Louisiana character David Ferrie, played by actor Joe Pesci in Stone’s  “JFK.” Now it is coming to light that the movie was very close to the truth.

A fictional account of the JFK assassination titled “Deadly Delusion” by Jim Jarman is also very close to the real truth. Jarman describes how Oswald had been groomed to be a patsy for a couple of years by a special rogue unit of the CIA with a dotted line to the Mafia. Oswald was not a marksman, but the perfect fall guy.

Marcello also admitted that it was he who had set up Jack Ruby “in the bar business in Dallas.” Ruby did his bit for the Marcello plot when he killed Lee Harvey Oswald before he could implicate anyone else. Later Ruby died in his cell just two weeks before he was scheduled to give new testimony before a Congressional investigation.

Leading up to the crime of the century was the crime of the decade. Marilyn Monroe was found naked facedown on her bed, dead. The mass media chimed in immediately with stories of her drug use. The LA coroner’s report stated that the starlet died from an overdose of barbiturates. Yet, her stomach is nearly empty with no pill residue and no vomit on her bed of floor.

The story not widely circulated for decades, was that Sam Giancana (with CIA connections) had Monroe murdered by a team of four hit men who entered her home, taped her mouth shut with duct tape and squirted a lethal suppository of barbiturates and chloral hydrate into her rectum so there would be no vomit or deposits in her stomach. Like Marcello, Giancan lost millions in casino holdings in Cuba and was enraged over the failed “Bay of Pigs fiasco.” Adding insult to injury, Bobby Kennedy was going after the Chicago and New York mafia. Let’s not forget that the Kennedy family made its fortune from Papa Kennedy, a mafia drug and rum runner from Al Capon’s days.

Marcello does not care who knows that he help orchestrate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The former mobster boss also claims that he knew Jack Ruby, and he had him kill Lee Harvey Oswald.

Malcolm Wallace who was on LBJ’s payroll for special projects for more than 10 years.  He was a “hit man” and a expert marksman who had murdered as many as 18 or 19 people for Lyndon Johnson, according to the testimony of Johnson’s mistress, Madeleine Duncan Brown. There was one unidentified fingerprint at the time of the initial investigation of the sixth floor Texas Schoolbook Depositor. Finally in 1998 this fingerprint was identified as belonging to Malcolm Wallace.

Many crucial witnesses were brutally murdered right before their scheduled appearances to testify under oath before the House Assassination Committee. On 9th August, 1984, Billie Sol Estes’ lawyer, Douglas Caddy, wrote to Stephen S. Trott at the US Department of Justice. In the letter Caddy claimed that Billie Sol Estes, Lyndon B. Johnson, Mac Wallace and Cliff Carter had been involved in the murders of Henry Marshall, George Krutilek, Harold Orr, Ike Rogers, Coleman Wade, Josefa Johnson, John Kinser and John F. Kennedy. Caddy added: “Mr. Estes is willing to testify that LBJ ordered these killings, and that he transmitted his orders through Cliff Carter to Mac Wallace, who executed the murders.

“Madeleine recalled that ” after Johnson emerged from the Murchison meeting he walked up to her, and grabbed her by the arms and whispered in her ear, “After tomorrow those S.O.B.’s, the Kennedy’s, will never embarrass me again – that’s no threat – that’s a promise.”

The next morning Kennedy and Johnson got into a heated argument over the motorcade seating arrangements. Johnson insisted that his friend Connally and his wife ride with him in the rear vehicle. When Kennedy refused, Johnson stormed out of the room in a rage.

The next morning, Johnson’s Secret Service men came up to the motor cycle police and told them that the parade rout had been changed. It would no longer be going straight down Main St. but it would be making a turn onto Houston Street. They also told the motor cycle police not to ride next to the Presidents car, but to make sure that they stayed back behind the car, so that the crowds of people (and the assassins) would have a unrestricted view of the President. Johnson also changed the order of the cars in the motorcade, instead of his car being second, he put a car load of Secret Service men between his car and the President’s.

Interview and job hunting tips for journalists

Mick Gregory at Large

More stories from journalists who are surprised that they have been let go.

“After 17 years as a staff photographer, I was laid off via phone call on August 1st while on vacation. A lousy phone call. Does it get any more classless than that? Ok, what the Chicago Sun Times did to their photo staff gets a really special prize. Still, I thought/hoped my work would speak for me. No explanation other than the standard corporate spiel was given: “Due to reduction in staff, your job has been impacted by that… Here’s the HR rep.”

And that was that. It leaves you reeling and your head swirling with unanswered questions with no answers. I wasn’t the last hired, I’m not the oldest, I hadn’t been there the longest, I didn’t have the highest salary. I have no dependents costing the company extra money. I won awards (was even nominated for a Pulitzer), mentored students and interns, worked well with co-workers and do have tremendous ties to this community.

The past few years to ‘that’ phone call I received, work was pretty much a living hell as I witnessed the destruction of a pretty darn good newspaper (The Clarion-Ledger/ Jackson, Ms.) by people who didn’t want to be there, resented being there, had no ties to the community and didn’t want any.

When ‘it’ happens, it hurts, angers and stuns. I’m not sure what the reporter is going for with his story. But will it be any different from any other painful story? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

It’s truly is a hellish thing to be my age (55) and not have a steady income. Tell him that the myriad of paperwork involved in one’s “separation” is daunting, frustrating and seemingly endless. Tell him how frightening it is to be my age and not have health care. I know there are hundreds rowing this same boat with me… or, worse. Jim, mention those same things and apply it to job hunting, especially in this economy, in a market saturated with those same rowers stroking against a strong current. You try not to despair.” — John Dough

Amy Miller writes:

I know many excellent reporters and photographers being laid off, and while it makes for sad, depressing copy, as a reporter, what I really want to read is a thorough, in-depth analysis of the decisions a company such as Gannett has made since the advent of the Internet, especially continued raises to the top brass while continuing to slash resources at local newspapers almost to the point of nonfunctionality. Just ask anyone about Gannett’s ill-fated “Real Life Real News” strategy around 2004, when it blamed declining readership on too much hard news. It’s time to hold these news companies accountable for the regrettable and self-interested business decisions that have helped dismantle the news business and not just lay all the blame on Internet and Craigslist. While the Internet and smartphones are certainly the most disruptive factors at play, they cannot and are not the only reasons for the decline of the news business. Let’s chronicle the real tragedy: the news business itself.

Detroit Metro Times veteran Curt Guyette writes on Facebook:

After 18 years on the job, I was fired from the Metro Times on Friday. Earlier in the week we’d been told that the paper was being put up for sale, and that the information was being put on the Times-Shamrock website as we spoke, but that staff were prohibited from talking to any media about it, because the company wanted to “control” the message.

I ignored the order, and was “terminated” for “gross insubordination” and “breach of company trust.” No dispute about the insubordination; as for the breach of trust, that cuts both ways. Not sure what the future holds, but after reflecting on the situation for a few days I can say that I am relieved to be gone. The MT, for me anyway, had become a soul-killing place, and I’m happy that I’m no longer there. And now a new chapter in my life begins. Life is good.

He added this to his Facebook wall:

One thing needs to be made absolutely clear: I’ve got no gripe with the MT for firing me. My anger/resentment/disappointment/profound sorrow is reserved for what this paper I’ve been so proud of the past 18 years has become. Would I have liked to have gone out differently? Definitely. But am I sad to be gone? Not an iota. Like I said to one of my former workpals just after I got the boot, “At least there was no electroshock or forced lobotomy.” Life is good. And its going to get even better. So don’t anyone say they feel sorry for me, or that they’re sad. This is a life-changing event, that’s for sure. But just as certain is the fact that the road ahead leads to a better place.

Millions have fallen into the lower class and depend on the government for food stamps, the “Earned Income Tax Credit,” and free cell phones. It’s an historic shift that may never be reported accurately by the mainstream media. Careers are shattered, especially for Baby Boomers and the original Gen Xers. If you only read the mainstream media (MSM), you could convince yourself to jump on the food stamp gravy train. It is looking more and more attractive, especially when you can get free SmartPhones and service like millions are in Ohio and other spots in the North East. That is not a positive.

If you have been one of the highly skilled journalists or marketing professionals in major media. Your time is up.

Gannett, owner of 82 daily newspapers and 23 television stations, confirmed Tuesday that some of its local papers have cut staff over the last several weeks.

“Some of our community publishing sites are making cuts to align their business plans with local market conditions,” company spokesman Jeremy Gaines said in a statement.

The layoffs, totaling about a couple of hundred jobs, were revealed at many of the company’s local newspapers over the last 30 days. Jobs were cut both in newsrooms and business operations. Gannett also publishes USA TODAY, which has not been affected by the layoffs.

Gannett did not provide totals for the cutbacks at individual properties. Philly.com reported Monday that The (Wilmington, Del.) News Journal is cutting 28 jobs.

Cutbacks have been a frequent phenomenon at newspapers in the digital era as readers and advertisers have gravitated to computers and mobile devices. Gannett’s newsrooms, like many others, have increased their investment in digital operations as part of the company’s transformation strategy in an effort to depend less on print revenue.

In June, Gannett bought competitor Belo for $2.2 billion, which would increase its broadcast portfolio from 23 to 43 stations. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year.

Let’s get back to focusing on what is in your control. My friends in glass towers, though very productive and focused on the here and now, and gainfully employed, are always on a job hunt now. They are on the hunt every day, like tiger sharks. Some large businesses still use the infamous Enron practice of rank and yank. Many hire consultants to justify a major reorg. Most of us have survived rounds of right sizing.

Do your own business plan and stakeholder engagement analysis. Keep educating yourself and mentoring others. Build up a network of trusted friends and stay in contact with your friends and mentors from college and your first jobs.

All I am saying is remember the Boy & Girl Scouts’ code, “Be Prepared.”

Start the hunt with some of these tips:

Career sites: Linkedin.com, Twitter.com, WordPress.com, Indeed.com  and BrazenCareerist.

I like LinkedIn, let’s start there. Set up your profile from your resume. Once you are have that first draft finished, search for friends in your line of business and from college. Connect with them and see how they have written their profiles. Give a former employee or boss a good reference. Look at Groups. You will be amazed at the depth chart of Groups here. It’s networking made easy.

Brazen Careerist delivers candid, timely advice on all aspects of job hunting and success. Some recent blogs cover How to become the go-to guy (or gal), Tips to impress your interviewer and Five reasons recruiters aren’t giving you the  time of day.

WordPress is the site that I used to publish this blog. It has amazing features. Premium upgrades are very reasonable. You become your own web guru. Your friends may laugh when you tell them you blog and have a website, but when they visit your WordPress site, they should be very impressed if you have practiced a bit on the templates.

Twitter used to be the exclusive IM for journalists, I’m serious. We used to chat online about current events and helped each other out on sources and followup stories. Then Twitter went viral. My teenage daughter showed me some very funny hashtag (#) subjects, such as #thingsgirlssay; I just bit into an amazing peach, is one that cracks me up. Yes, my daughter said that. Men, try that line at the water cooler.

Indeed.com is the career site that will deliver to your email, company openings that you sign up for. Every morning I have interesting job descriptions from BP, ExxonMobil, Halliburton, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, Total, and Anadarko.

Even though I am very happily employed and making an impact in an exciting career that I have been fine-tuning my whole life, I must keep on moving, not unlike a shark.

50th Anniversary of JFK Killing Nov. 22, 2013

Dallas was the perfect stage for LBJ to control the scene of the crime of the century. Johnson owned a media empire inside Texas. He won elections by hook and by crooked attorneys. His nickname “Landslide Johnson,” was sarcastic because he always won elections by late vote counts in Democrat precincts.

Jack Ruby was connected to the Chicago mob and had a well-cultivated relationship with the Dallas Police Department. Ruby was the ideal man to shut up Lee Harvey Oswald and shut down the link to the assassination team. Ruby asked to be moved from Dallas where he feared for his life if he brought up the network he worked for. His request was not granted and he died in the Dallas jail.

Mr. Ruby had a jailhouse interview with Dorothy Kilgallen, a nationally known journalist. She reported that the interview would blow the case wide open. She gave the notes of her meeting to her friend Margaret Smith for safekeeping. Ms. Kilgallen was found dead of a drug overdose on Nov. 8, 1965. Ms. Smith died two days later. The cause of death was not known.

Carlos Marcello Mafia head with business in Chicago, Dallas and New Orleans was the financier of the assassination. Marcello’s casinos shut down by Castro in Havana cost the boss many millions. Then, Bobby Kennedy started going  after the mobs in Las Vegas and Reno, where the mob shifted its casino operations from Havana.

Jack Ruby had worked for the mafia for years and was their pay-off man for control of the Dallas police.

Karyn, the beautiful daughter of Chicago journalist Irv Kupcinet, was found strangled to death in  Los Angeles. The LA Times reported a telephone operator heard Karyn scream “They are going to Kill Kennedy” a few days before the assassination. She was strangled to death on November 26 or 27 and not discovered until Nov. 30. Investigators speculated it was a message to her father to stay silent on what he knew about Jack Ruby.

Roger Craig was a Dallas policeman on the scene the day of the assignation. He found a 7.65 Mauser in the Book Depository. That was a fly in the ointment. The plant rifle was the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle tied to Oswald. The conflict of the other rifle showed at least two shooters. Officer Craig’s findings were ignored by the Warren Commission. In 1967 Craig was fired from the Dallas PD. Later that year, he was shot while walking to his car. The bullet grazed his head. In 1973, his car was forced off a mountain road and he was badly injured. He was shot again in 1974 and in 1975 was wounded when his car blew up. Later that year, he was found dead. Authorities called his death a suicide from self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Quite the survivor, not the profile of someone who commits suicide. Note gunshot woundS.  

Madeleine Brown, a longtime LBJ mistress, implicated her high-level lover and sugar daddy, implicating LBJ on taped statements before she died in 2002. What did she have to gain on her deathbed? Only the truth and peace with her maker. 

Johnson is the key to the Kennedy assassination. He benefitted the most. LBJ was a raw man. He was well-known for using the “N” word and lifted dogs up by their ears. Inside the Kennedy inner circle, talk of dumping LBJ from the ticket was passed talk and about to be a done deal.

Good ol’ boy, Johnson ran the Dallas area police, FBI and regional CIA and Secret Service.

What luck that Lee Harvey Oswald found a job in the Texas Book Depository two weeks before the president’s route. Who would know the president’s motorcade route but Johnson and his local Dallas Secret Service connections?

Many experts believe that the shot that went through Kennedy’s neck came from the front of the limo, behind the vine covered picket fence on the grassy knoll, not the fifth floor of the Texas Book Depository to his back. Basic ballistics test also show the magic bullet that hit parts of the limo, Governor Connelly, and JFK deny science and evidence, the bullet was unscathed. The horrible explosion of the back of Kennedy’s head follows ballistics in that the backward blowout is much larger than the entry wound, again, from the front.

“I am a patsy” are the only record of Lee Harvey Oswald’s side of the story. He was silenced by a 38 slug to the gut by mob errand boy, Ruby. After a night of questioning in the Dallas PD HQ, there are no notes or recordings. Why? Was it because Oswald described the network and that he was a CIA mole planted to watch the terrorist team do a dry run? Why was Oswald seen on the second floor drinking  a Dr. Pepper 30 seconds before the shooting? Why didn’t Oswald have a real escape plan? Instead he took a public bus to South Dallas to the Texas Movie Theatre in Oak Lawn? Why did Oswald hide in a theatre if he were a radical freedom fighter? Why didn’t he try and fight to the finish? Why after all that would he say he is a patsy?

Kennedy’s body was seized and flown back to Washington D.C. without the media scrutiny. There are reports of three wounds from the front. Triangulation ensured this was going to finish the job. 

Barr McClellan, author of Blood, Money & Power: How LBJ Killed JFK, accuses LBJ of being behind the JFK assassination. Implicates others of fore-knowledge of the plot, including Texas oilmen Clint Murchison, Sr. and H.L. Hunt, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Mystery fingerprint found on sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository matches prints of Johnson aide taken in connection with a prior murder conviction.

The Men Who Killed Kennedy began with two 50-minute segments originally aired on 25 October 1988 in the United Kingdom, entitled simply Part One and Part Two. The programmes were produced by Central Television for the ITV network and were immediately followed by a studio discussion on the issues titled The Story Continues, chaired by broadcaster Peter Sissons. The United States corporation, Arts & Entertainment Company, purchased the rights to the original two segments. In 1989, the series was nominated for a Flaherty Documentary Award. In 1991, the series was re-edited with additional material and divided into three 50-minute programmes, which were also shown by ITV. A sixth episode appeared in 1995. The series typically aired in November every year and from time to time during the year. In November 2003, three additional segments (“The Final Chapter”) were added by the History Channel, but the series is no longer aired.

The ninth documentary in the series, entitled “The Guilty Men,” directly implicates former U. S. President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) and created an outcry among Johnson’s surviving associates, including Johnson’s widow, Lady Bird Johnson, journalist Bill Moyers, ex-President Jimmy Carter, Jack Valenti (longtime president of the Motion Picture Association of America), and the last-living (at the time of the outcry) Warren Commissioncommissioner and ex-President Gerald R. Ford. These Johnson supporters lodged complaints of libel with the History Channel, and subsequently threatened legal action against Arts & Entertainment Company, owner of the History Channel.

The History Channel responded by assembling a panel of three historians, Robert Dallek, Stanley Kutler, and Thomas Sugrue. On a program aired April 7, 2004, titles “The Guilty Man: A Historical Review,” the panel agreed that the documentary was not credible and should not have aired. The History Channel issued a statement saying, in part, “The History Channel recognizes that ‘The Guilty Men’ failed to offer viewers context and perspective, and fell short of the high standards that the network sets for itself. The History Channel apologizes to its viewers and to Mrs. Johnson and her family for airing the show.” Conspiracy author Barr McClellan, interviewed in the documentary, complained that although the historians examined the evidence, they did not interview him or Turner.^[1]

 

The Ayatollah Khomeini was praised by the New York Times as a saint 30 years ago. That’s when Iran’s nightmare began.

Do the Democrats want to see Syria look like Iran? Women should be barefoot and in Burkas like they now do in Iran?

 

Flashback to 30 years ago to the fall of the Shah of Iran and his pro-Western government. France and America’s Democrat party let him go.

Ayatollah Khomeini was sending daily broadcasts to his Islamic followers while “in exile in Paris.” The French gave him free international phone services so he could continue his campaign to take over Iran. Soon after, movie theaters were burned down by the scores. They were “sinners”  according to Khomeini’s Islamic teachings.

In one horror, Islamic followers, locked the doors of a theater and burned over 500 Iranians alive. There were also killings of Christians and Jews by the Khomeini mobs.

A strange call from Washington DC came in for the Shah.  It was to be A CALL FROM SENATOR EDWARD KENNEDY the leading liberal from the US, calling about human rights. It turned out to be some kind of elaborate hoax. When the Shah picked up the phone a quiet voice kept repeating “Mohammad abdicate, Mohammad, abdicate.”

Did Carter’s new CIA pull the prank?

Today. The Iranian people are fighting for their freedom and life and getting no support from the mainstream liberal media: the New York Times, Washington Post, SF Chronicle, LA Times, CNN, CBS, NBC, and America’s dominant political party, the Democrats. As they did 30 years ago the “elite liberal media”  are not reporting the crisis in Iran.

The are back on the same playbook  that  Jimmy Carter and the Democrats used in 1978 when they sainted the Ayatollah.

In fact, the NY Times described Khomeini as tolerant and “his entourage of close advisers is uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals.” The editorials went on to say Khomeini would provide “a desperately needed model of humane governance for a third-world country. Andrew Young went even further saying Khomeini would be hailed as a saint. Jimmy Carter let the former friend of the West, the Shah fall. Soon after, their were mass murders of the Shah’s government and Americans on assignment in IT and in the oil fields. One afternoon, George Link, an Exxon general manager working in Iran was being driven back to work after lunch when his driver stopped the car and got out to open a gate, an assailant leaped from the side of the road and tossed a bomb in the car. Link threw open his door and jumped out. A moment later the car exploded. Evacuations of Americans started soon after, but not soon enough.

Tensions wer running high and Paul Grimm, on loan from Texaco to try and get the Iranian oil companies back up was driving to work one morning when a shot was fired from a car following his. He died instantly.

After more bloodshed the Shah’s kingdom decided to evacuate all it’s Western employees. The expatriates assumed that their exit was only temporarty because the media was not reporting the violence. They would never return.

Within a month, Khomeini was on a chartered Air France 747, the extra seats on the flight were sold to the New York Times, Washington Post, the BBC and other European journalists to pay for the flight. 

Khomeini was resting in the first class cabin about to become the new ruler after  the Persepolis monarchy that had ruled since 330 BC.

Soon after Khomeini returned he set up his candidate to lead the new Iran. A puppet named Bazargan.

There were still 20 or so oilfield managers left, among the group was Jeremy Gilbert, an Irish mathematician who became a petroleum engineer  for BP. They remained only a few days before they realized this country was a nightmare. Gilbert was the last BP man left because he was in a hospital with a case of hepatitis. He was nearly killed there when nurses started chanting “Death to Americans” and a fellow patient beat him nearly to death.

The old regime of 2000 years in Iran was gone. Ironically, Iranians are not Arabs. Now they were ruled by an Islamic sect of Arab tyrants.

The Ayatollah now had millions of fanatical puppets killing off the middle class Iranians and ready and willing to die for their mullahs. Some of the stories were told, of the 50 American hostages captured by “students,” beaten and tortured as crowds chanted their favorite new “prayer” “Death to Americans!”

What the media didn’t tell you about was the “Death to Iranians” that carried on well into the ’80s.

The next two years brought untold terror to the world. Iraq, watching the internal blood bath and purge in Iran took advantage of the chaos and attacked their refineries and oil production cities. With the Shah dying of cancer, Jimmy Carter finally let him visit the US for medical treatment, but not stay beyond that. Some friend?

Egypt let the Shah spend his last months alive on their soil.

Meanwhile, Hussein ordered an all out war against Iran with legions of armies amassed on their shared border.

To the shock of the world, thousands of Iranian children with plastic keys to heaven around their necks ran ahead of the more important Iraqi tanks and soldiers, they were even dragging their coffins with them. The Ayatollah promised them heaven for their lives. They even used the young girls for finding land mines. Human mind sweepers.

Goats are more valuable to the mullahs. Mull that one over.

I wonder if the Iranians ever wonder why the Ayatollahs live to their 90s while they send 9-year-olds to death as human shields? Don’t the mullahs want to go to heaven? To their perfume gardens with all those virgins?

A lot more than sign waving has to go on to bring freedom to that poor country.

And now you see where this all started.

And you aren’t reading it in the newspapers in America. Their monopoly on rewriting history is over.

Iraq has it’s new freedom thanks to America’s other party, the Republicans.

Obama took two weeks to say anything about the Iranian protests and killings by the Islamic tyrants.

The media/Democrat party alliance is not reporting the side of the protesters. But TWITTER is. The day of citizen journalists has arrived.

Visit TWITTER. Sign up for a free account and search for #iranelections. Join the effort to free Iran.

This is a great source of citzen journalist sites: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=List_of_citizen_journalism_websites

John Wayne Gacy, a lifelong Democrat, got his start in Iowa too

Update: Michele Bachman mixed up John Wayne with John Wayne Gacy during her campaign stump speech in Iowa today. The famous American movie star, John Wayne was born in Iowa. John Wayne Gacy (the Democrat) got his first taste of fame when he was arrested for chasing a teenage Democrat office worker around after hours with his pants down.

I met John Wayne Gacy in 1975. I was teen working part-time at a luxury townhouse development near our home called Barrington Lakes. Gacy was a night watchman/contractor at the development site. We were told he was a “great guy,” very funny, a prominant Democrat and “Pogo the Clown” at special events. Another teenage co-worker and I talked to him once or twice. It just took a split second to form an opinion of Gacy. He was a perv, big time.

The fat slob sat in a construction trailer night after night reading dirty magazines and paperbacks. The stack was four feet high. I remember his fat, scrufty face and glazed-over, puss-filled eyes of a drug addict and drunk. And he had an old Hubert Humphrey bumper sticker on his “office” wall, along with some photos of Chicago politicians including Mayor Richard Daley. He had dreams of running for office some day. He was good friends with a new resident who rented his suite including the furniture. I forget his name, but remember the black man dressed well and paid his rent only in cash. He was a very good friend of Gacy.

It was startling to learn that the guy disappeared months later. We had to clean out his apartment. The new, designer couch had a big, greasy, filthy hole carved into the middle of the cushion. It smelled rancid. The place was wrecked.

Ten years earlier:

John Wayne Gacy seemed to have it all, two kids, a young wife and a career as a fast food manager thanks to his father-in-law in Waterloo, Iowa.

But there were strange stories circulating. It seemed that young boys were always in John Wayne Gacy’s presence. Everyone heard the stories that Gacy was homosexual and made passes at the young boys who worked for him at the fast food franchises his new father-in-law owned. Yet, people close to him refused to believe in the gossip, until May of 1968 when rumors became truths brought out in court.

In the spring of 1968, Gacy was indicted by a grand jury in Black Hawk County, Iowa for committing the act of sodomy with a teenage boy named Mark Miller. Miller testified that Gacy had tricked him into being tied up while visiting Gacy’s home a year earlier, and had violently raped him. Gacy denied all the charges against him and told a conflicting story, stating that Miller willingly had sexual relations with him in order to earn extra money. Gacy further insisted that Jaycee members opposed to him becoming president of the local chapter organization were setting him up. He was convicted to 10 years in prison becuase he had also hired a teenager to beat up Miller. He served just 18 months; his wife divorced him and he moved back to Chicago. He reportedly said that he considered his wife and kids dead.

He soon met and married his second wife, Carole. But Carole and John had drifted apart by 1975. He would be in a good mood one moment and the next moment he would be flying into an uncontrollable rage and throwing furniture. He was an insomniac and took speed. Gacy was rarely home in the evenings and when he was, he was either fixing something with the outside of the house or working in the garage. However, there was one thing that Carole was extremely worried about.

She began to find gay magazines with naked men and boys in her house. She knew that Gacy was reading them and he acted nonchalantly about his new choice of reading material. Gacy told his wife that he preferred boys to women.

Carole filed for divorce. The divorce became final on March 2, 1976.

Although Gacy had a criminal record, was working several night watchman and janitorial jobs, he refused to let it hold him back from realizing his dream of success. Being a man who thrived on recognition and attention, Gacy turned his sights to the world of politics. It was in politics that Gacy hoped to make his mark in the world. He had high aspirations and hoped to one day run for public office as a Democrat.

In 1975, Gacy became the Democrat precinct secretary treasurer. It seemed as if Gacy’s dreams of success were beginning to come true; however his career in politics would be short-lived. Troubles started to bubble up when rumors began to circulate about Gacy having homosexual interest in teenage boys.

One of the rumors stemmed from an actual incident that took place during the time Gacy was involved with cleaning the Democratic Party headquarters. One of the teenagers who worked with Gacy on that particular project was sixteen-year-old Tony Antonucci. According to Antonucci, Gacy made sexual advances towards him, and chased him in the Democrat headquarters with his pants down. According to court records, Gacy backed off when Antonucci threatened to hit him with a chair. Gacy joked about the situation and left him alone for a month.

The following month Gacy tried to trick the teen into handcuffs and believing he was securely cuffed he began to undress the boy. However, Antonucci had made sure that one of his hands was loosely cuffed and he was able to free himself and wrestle Gacy to the ground. Once he had Gacy on the ground he handcuffed him, but eventually let him go after Gacy promised he would never again try touching him. Gacy never made sexual advances towards Antonucci again and the boy remained working for Gacy for almost a year, following the incident.

When Gacy was exposed in December 1978 as a sadistic homosexual serial killer, it came as a huge shock to his neighbors, friends, local politicians and business associates.

It was also deeply embarrassing for the Democratic Party of President Jimmy Carter as Gacy was an enthusiastic supporter who had been photographed with the First Lady, Rosalyn Carter. He presented a check for $5,000 to Jimmy Carter’s campaign. The media didn’t cover the politics of the killer clown. The media filters the news that is harmful to their overall liberal Democrat creed.

Arnold Schwarzenegger describes California state workers’ million dollar benefits

The moderate Republican governor of California, “Arnold” has an above the fold opinion piece in the Aug. 27, 2010 Wall Street Journal describing the shocking hold state employee unions have on the Golden State’s taxpayers. 

A graph looks shows 1,200,000 private enterprise jobs lost in CA while the high paying state employee ranks have lost close to zero from 2008 to 2010.

“Few Californians in the private sector have $1 million in savings, but that’s effectively the retirement account they guarantee to many government employees,” said Schwarzenegger on a report from the California Department of Finance. 

Former mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown, (Democrat), said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this year that approximately 80 percent of every government dollar goes to employee compensation and benefits. 

Can you imagine the awakening the poor working stiffs in the news media may have when they realize that the liberal one party system they have supported through the years is what set in place the system in California of paying out 100 percent salaries to state workers after 20 years of service. 

Meanwhile, hundreds of loyal journalists who worked 10- and 12-hour days for 30 years face early retirement with pay outs half that of Wal-Mart part-time workers.

Will the media report that?  

Instead, the governor is being lambasted in the media for bullying state employees to cut back on their gold-plated benefits paid for by taxpayers.

“For years I’ve asked state legislators to stop adding to retirement debt. They have refused to listen. Now the Democrt leadership of the assembly proposes to raise the tax and debt again…” 

How will this end? 

My prediction is that the Dems and state workers win again. California’s taxes are going up.

But look, there is more

 

Nearly 10,000 more Americans fled Florida than moved in, according to the U.S.  Census. That followed average gains of more than 200,000 a year from 2001 through 2006.

“It looks like the first time in recorded history that Florida lost population,” Beveridge said.

California also saw a decline in the number of people coming to partake of its sand and sea. Only 1.3% of California residents moved in from out of state in 2008. That’s off from 1.4% in 2007.

For years, Americans have been fleeing the Golden State. The population kept growing only because of foreign immigration and births. All through the 2000s there has been a net loss in domestic migration, with 800,000 more Americans leaving than moving in during the three years ended in 2007. As it became more difficult to sell homes, that out-flow eased. That, combined with the newcomers, meant the population fell by only 144,000 in 2008.

The housing bubble bust, and the harm it did to employment, seems to have pushed more people to leave hot markets like California and Florida than have been drawn in by more affordable home prices.

“The Florida economy is based on growth and home construction,” said Lang. With building projects dying on the vine, unemployment soared to 7.6% for the state in 2008. It’s now up to 10.7%.

The same job problems plague many California cities, especially Central Valley towns like Stockton, Fresno and Merced. Construction-related job losses helped send state unemployment to 8.7% by December 2008 from 5.9% a year earlier. Today, some cities report breathtakingly high unemployment rates: 30.2% in El Centro; 17.6% in Merced; and 17.2% in Yuba City.

So, where are they moving?

So, if people aren’t heading for the good life in California and Florida, where are they going?

D.C., Alaska and Wyoming. (Seriously.)

The nation’s capital saw 7.6% of its residents arrive in 2008; Alaska attracted 6% more people to the Last Frontier (up a full percent from 2007); and 5.2% more people wanted to be Wyoming cowboys.

The basic trick of statistics is that small populations in these places make modest in-migration increases into large percentage gains. They’re each among the smallest states in the U.S. That’s just the opposite of California and Florida where each percentage point represents hundreds of thousands of people.

Don’t mess with Texas

In terms of net migration — those moving in minus those leaving — Texas was the star performer in 2008, with the population growing by 140,000.

That meshes with what moving company Allied Van Lines experienced. “We moved more people here than anywhere in the U.S. in the last several years,” said David King, general manager of Berger Transfer and Storage in Houston, Texas, and Allied Van Lines’ largest booking and hauling agent.

The moving company recorded 5,891 inbound shipments and 3,988 outbound shipments in 2008, a net gain of 1,903. That was just slightly lower than last year’s net gain of 2,041.

That influx may be due to the state’s employment picture, which has remained rosier than most other places thanks to the energy industry and a welcoming business climate. Plus, home prices never cycled through a boom-bust period: They’ve remained affordable, which facilitates mobility.

One year after the tragic BP oil disaster — all clear on the beaches!

Big Brother/Big Sis will use  the BP industrial accident as a way to pump a massive big government “clean energy tax” on the American middleclass and energy businesses. This kind of propaganda is considered “news” in Venezuela, Cuba and Spain. 

Here is an e-mail blast sent out to Democrats nation-wide today:
The BP oil spill is the worst environmental disaster of its kind in our nation’s history. My administration has deployed every tool at our disposal for the response efforts. Thousands are working around the clock, including some of the top scientists and engineers from around the world.

We are working to hold BP accountable for the damage to the lands and the livelihoods of the Gulf Coast, and we are taking strong precautions to make certain a spill like this never happens again.

But our Socialist work will not end with this crisis. That’s one of the reasons why I invited lawmakers from both parties to join me at theWhite House to discuss what it will take to move forward on legislation to promote a new economy powered by green jobs, combat climate change, and end our dependence on foreign oil.

Today, we consume more than 20 percent of the world’s oil, but have less than two percent of the world’s oil reserves. Beyond the risks inherent in drilling four miles beneath the surface of the Earth, our dependence on oil means that we will continue to send billions of dollars of our hard-earned wealth to other countries every month — including many in dangerous and unstable regions.

In other words, our continued dependence on fossil fuels will jeopardize our national security. It will smother our planet. And it will continue to put our economy and our environment at risk. We cannot delay any longer, and that is why I am asking for your help.

The time has come, once and for all, for this nation to fully embrace a new future. What future is that? Big Government runs free enterprise like they do the IRS and US Post Office?  

That means continuing our unprecedented effort to make everything — from our homes and businesses to our cars and trucks — more energy-efficient. It means rolling back billions of dollars of tax breaks to oil companies so we can prioritize investments in clean energy research and development.

But the only way the transition to clean energy will ultimately succeed is if the private sector is fully invested in this future — if capital comes off the sidelines and the ingenuity of our entrepreneurs is unleashed. And we can do that by finally putting a price on carbon pollution.

Many businesses have already embraced this idea because it provides a level of certainty about the future. And by pouring resources into research and development, by building new markets, we will reinvent our economy — creating opportunities for entrepreneurship, for new companies and new jobs all across the country.

There will be transition costs and a time of adjustment. But if we refuse to take into account the full costs of our fossil fuel addiction — and if we refuse to heed the warnings from the disaster in the Gulf — we will have missed our best chance to seize the clean-energy future we know America needs to thrive in the years and decades to come.

The House of Representatives has already passed a comprehensive energy and climate bill, and there is currently a plan in the Senate — a plan that was developed with ideas from Democrats and Republicans — that would achieve the same goal. This week, I met with congressional leaders to determine a path forward. But this is an issue that Washington has long ignored in favor of protecting the status quo.

So I’m asking for your help today to show that the American people are ready for a clean-energy future.

Never let a crisis go to waste… Who said that?

The story never published about the liberal millionaire who ruined the LA Times and Times-Mirror empire – Otis Chandler

Today the newspaper industry bible–Editor & Publisher was shut down.

The 12-page 8×10 inch magazine was a joke inside the industry it covered. Not always, of course, or the trade mag covering mini-monopolies wouldn’t have lasted as long as it did. The past five years, E&P’s circulation was mainly online and didn’t earn the money to pay for postage or the paper it was printed on. Many blogs earn more in advertising revenue in one day than E&P did the past five years.

The same week with the earliest snowfall on record for Houston — the first wave of elite liberals fly to Denmark for the Global Warming Summit to drink Champagne.

Now another wave of layoffs begin at newspapers large newspapers. With more copy editor and page design jobs going to India at about 60 percent less, in the age of Web-based publishing.

Imagine if newspapers had been more balanced in their coverage and actually had moderate and conservative content? Would readers and advertisers be dropping off like they are? Or is it just the medium that is the problem?

Liberals at the Los Angeles Times and the vast Times-Mirror media holdings have long praised the legacy of an eccentric, big game hunter, millionaire, car collector and liberal Democrat,  publisher Otis Chandler, the surfing heir to an empire that he knew nothing about. Otis set the liberal sharp turn left at the  LA Times, which was immediately followed by the media giant’s other holdings: The Dallas-Times Herald, Denver Post, Houston Post, Baltimore Sun and New York’s Newsday, soon after the title was granted to him by his father.

Otis like many spoiled trust fund kids turned on dear old dad and granddad and imitated the New York Times leftist, socialist dogma. It started in the late ’60s and kept up the pace until the mid-’80s when the Times-Mirror board finally fired him.  The board remained out of the public eye and sat on their hands watching the largest, most profitable media company attack the  advertisers in Dallas, Denver and Houston who had a choice, they easily moved all their advertising and public event support to the  more dominant papers in the markets: then the Dallas Morning News, Denver Post and Houston Chronicle. Liberals hate business and economics with a passion. 

The Chandler’s board got rid of the brat and some 15 years later sold out to Sam Zell of Chicago. They unloaded well before the death spiral of the industry. 

Sam Zell is playing out a Clint Eastwood spaghetti Western on the bloated staff at the once glorious flagship, the LA Times.

“Sudden Sam” Zell fired more than 400 employees since assuming ownership of the paper a few years ago. You know there are some hearty laughs over fine cigars and California merlot in the the rolling ranch lands of Southern Cal.

Unlike Otis Chandler, Zell has no regard for the Pulitzer Prize committee, the supreme soviets of mainstream journalism, who only bestow honors on the most progressive and liberal newspapers left in the land. Zell made it clear right off the bat,  that he found the paper’s New-York-Times-of-the-West pretensions, worthless and boring. He has said openly that he doesn’t even bother to read the paper unless he happens to be passing through L.A.

In a New Yorker Magazine profile, Zell described himself as an “economic conservative” and confessed that he likes the columns of Charles Krauthammer and David Brooks but thought the “rest of the New York Times’s columnists are preposterous.” He had no use for Hillary Clinton either, according to the piece: “At a recent dinner party, the mention of Hillary Clinton’s name prompted him to use a four-letter obscenity to describe her.”

Times staffers must have shivered when they read in the New Yorker profile that Zell once sent a music box as a gift to friends and colleagues that played a song deriding the Sarbanes-Oxley Act: “Sarbanes-Oxley/ They’ve got moxie/ But for businesses/ Their act is toxic/ It’s not rocket science/ We’re killing profits with compliance.”

Addressing a University of Hawaii business class a few years back, Zell said: “The idea that somehow or other the business community is full of all these greedy characters — you should see the greed in teachers’ unions! You should see the greed in any political organization!”

Chandler’s era was  “hyperpartisan,” biased and “parochial” in support of Jimmy Carter and on constant attack mode against California Republicans Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. That was the final straw for Otis.

Otis went on to killing real elephants and lions on extravagant safaris. Did you know that? Google it, there may be some bits and pieces on the web. 

Chandler and his liberal successor, Tom Johnson, (who was publisher at the Dallas Times-Herald) focused on winning the approval of East Coast socialites/socialists, had endlessly commissioned left-wing articles, boring local readers who dropped their papers in droves for the more moderate Orange County Register and in Dallas, the more conservative Dallas Morning News. In Houston, the readers left the Post and went with the Houston Chronicle. (The Post is long gone and the Houston Chronicle is among the most profitable major newspapers in America). 

The LA Times  acquired a reputation as the “velvet coffin,” a place where liberal reporters could leisurely cover topics of interest to them, (smear energy companies, HMOs, etc.)  and paint beautiful portraits of their elite friends, but of little interest to the paper’s readers and local businesses.

I know plenty of stories abut the velvet coffin. I was young bastard who worked tirelessly for the honor of being in the inner court of the Times-Mirror estate. I stood shoulder to shoulder with the powers that were. They were a smug group, flying off to Davos every year with Pinchy of the NY Times and George Soros. 

I admire the intelligent courage of the Chandlers for giving Otis the boot and later dumping the media mess he left behind. They could see that the entire industry was following the liberal lead of Otis. There are better investments to be made such as in Apple, HP, or any number of consumer products.

http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/12/next-for-outsource-news-production-jobs.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004052655

Al Gore and the Entire Democrat Party/Media Machine Pump Out Global Warming Propaganda

Copenhagen is the Mecca for Big Brother/Big Sis government elitists this month. It’s being called Dopenhagen. 

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe will have speaking slots at the podium in Copenhagen this week.

Well, why not? They are doing their part in population control. And the Democrats in the US will go along with Cap and Trade taxes on America and pass on some of the windfall to these dictators. This is getting ugly. 

Mugabe may have to apologize for burning his oppenant’s wives alive.

Here is a flash back to last year’s election from Zimbabwe.

The Mugabe political team who pulled up in three white pickup trucks were looking for Patson Chipiro, head of the Zimbabwean opposition party in Mhondoro district. His wife, Dadirai, told them he was in Harare but would be back later in the day, and the men departed.

An hour later they were back. They grabbed Mrs Chipiro and chopped off one of her hands and both her feet. Then they threw her into her hut, locked the door and threw a petrol bomb through the window.

The killing last Friday – one of the most grotesque atrocities committed by Robert Mugabe’s regime since independence in 1980 – was carried out on a wave of worsening brutality before the run-off presidential elections in just over two weeks. It echoed the activities of Foday Sankoh, the rebel leader in the Sierra Leone civil war that ended in 2002, whose trade-mark was to chop off hands and feet.

Mrs Chipiro, 45, a former pre-school teacher, was the second wife of a junior official of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) burnt alive last Friday by Zanu (PF) militiamen. Pamela Pasvani, the 21-year-old pregnant wife of a local councillor in Harare, did not suffer mutilation but died later of her burns; his six-year-old son perished in the flames.

That news report was from London. You may not have read that in the U.S. newspapers. 

Back to Global Warming. I doubt that burning bodies alive cause that much CO2. Al Gore and the UN can forgive this one transgression from President Mugabe. 

Mick Gregory

Volcanoes put out 1,000 times more CO2 than all of the autos in the world (excluding China, Russia and India). In deed, Mount Pinatubo pumped out more CO2 in its 1991 erruption than all of the man-made emmissions since the beginning of time. And there are volcanic erruptions occuring daily all over the world. That proof is graphiclly displayed in glacier ice core drillings that go back 300,000 years. The year after Pinatubo, the CO2 frozen in the ice spiked to astounding levels.

Did Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” mention any of this? More importantly, did your daily LA Times, New York Times, SF Chronicle or Houston Chronicle report this?

This is a weekly report from Universal Weather, a Houston-based, high-tech air and weather service:

Etna, Italy has an ash cloud from 18,000 feet to the surface, moving toward the north at 25 knots. Ubinas, Peru has an ash cloud from 27,000 to 18,000 feet, moving toward the west at 15 knots. Tungurahua, Ecuador has an ash cloud from 20,000 to 16,000 feet, moving toward the southwest at 10 knots. Batu Tara, Lesser Sunda Island, Indonesia has an ash cloud from 5,000 feet to the surface, moving toward the northeast at 10 knots.

These are just the volacones that are in aviation traffic lanes. There are in fact 25 volcanoes errupting every week throughout the planet every week. This has been recorded since 1965.

Isn’t it time to call your local Democrat party politician and tell him/her that you are sick and tired of the propaganda and that you will never vote for the party of Big Brother/Big Sis government again?

http://www.twitter.com
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/30511.html

What is a community organizer? ACORN stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now — James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles expose ACORN fraud

Citizen journalists exposed ACORN on camera. Now the Obama/Democrat politicians have to sever their ties with the socialist group famous for ballot stuffing, voter registrations by the tens of thousands and illegal loans by the thousands (helping fuel the financial meltdown).  The two citizen journalists asked for tax advice on opening up a house of prostitution and got some good tips from ACORN staff members. 

 

The interview was taped and now Obama has some explaining to do. Why did he pick 9-11 for the first annual day of service? Now ACORN will forever be tied to a tragic day in American history. ACORN is a brownshirt political activist group hired to rig local elections and beef up poor and illegal numbers for federal aid.  What a shitty organization? My god! 

 

Two employees at the Baltimore, Maryland, branch of the liberal community organizing group ACORN were caught on tape allegedly offering advice to a pair posing as a pimp and prostitute on setting up a prostitution ring and evading the IRS.

The video  was recorded and and posted online Thursday by James O’Keefe, a conservative activist. He was joined on the video by another conservative, Hannah Giles, who posed as the prostitute in the filmmakers’ undercover sting.

Wonder why the New York Times or Washington Post didn’t think of doing this kind of real journalism? I think you know the answer.

The video shows the pair approaching two women working at the ACORN Baltimore office and asking them for advice on how to set up a prostitution ring involving more than a dozen underage girls from El Salvador. One of the ACORN workers suggests that Giles refer to herself as a “performing artist” on tax forms and declare some of the girls as dependents to receive child tax credits.

“Stop saying prostitution,” the woman, identified by the filmmaker as an ACORN tax expert, tells Giles. The other woman tells them, “You want to keep them clean … make sure they go to school.”

Both woman appear enthusiastic to help. The tape is on YOUTUBE. Google it. 

James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles visited one of ACORN’s New York offices in August, where they picked up handy tips on how to lie on housing forms to cover up a prostitution business (”Honesty is not going to get you the house,” one ACORN official advises) and how to hide cash from their illicit business (”When you buy the house with the backyard, you get a tin…and you bury it down in there…cover it…and put the grass over it…”).

Watch the whole thing at Big Government. This is now the third videotaped sting exposing the ACORN racket’s law-undermining, truth-sabotaging counseling sessions.

If the Census Bureau no longer trusts ACORN to collect data as a result of these videotapes, why is Congress still allowing taxpayer money to be funneled to the ACORN Housing Corporation?

AHC has received an estimated $16 million in taxpayer funds between 1997-2007, according to the Employment Policies Institute.

 ACORN is now managing apartments in Bedford-Stuyvesant for the newly completed Atlantic Avenue Apartments.

 

The video footage — which has been edited and goes to black in some areas — was recorded and posted online Thursday by James O’Keefe, a conservative activist. He was joined on the video by another conservative, Hannah Giles, who posed as the prostitute in the filmmakers’ undercover sting.

The video shows the pair approaching two women working at the ACORN Baltimore office and asking them for advice on how to set up a prostitution ring involving more than a dozen underage girls from El Salvador.

One of the ACORN workers suggests that Giles refer to herself as a “performing artist” on tax forms and declare some of the girls as dependents to receive child tax credits.

 

 

 

 

Governor Sarah Palin, in her Wednesday night speech to 40 million Americans said, “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.” Sarah hit a grand slam with that one.

 

But what exactly were Barack Obama’s actions as of community organizer in Chicago?

 

It’s been hidden from the news that Obama was a member of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, ACORN. Google ACORN and you may be surprised to find that it is a liberal/socialist organization involved in voter fraud. Look up the lawsuits ACORN is involved in.

 

 

Obama’s community organizing involved training grievance-mongers from ACORN.

Last week, Milwaukee’s top election official announced plans to seek criminal investigatioins of 37 ACORN employees accused voter registration fraud on a massive level.

 

Obama’s campaign apologized for failing to report $800,000 in campaign payments to ACORN. They were “accidently” filed with the Federal Election Committee as money sent to “get-out-the-vote” and “advance work.”

 

The New York Post has more quotes today from upset community organizers. Joshua Hoyt, executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, says: “I don’t like seeing the really hard work that goes on in really poor communities being demeaned by cheap politicians.”

 

Hard work such as signing up non U.S. citizens as Democrats with voter cards.

 

The Arkansas connection
You know Acorn. You know the grassroots organization, now a national power, got its start here, led by Wade Rathke (pictured), who spent the group’s formative years wheeling and dealing in Little Rock before moving to New Orleans. The local affiliate remains a powerful voice for poor people.

Depending on your point of view, you’ll be saddened or gladdened to learn this shocking news:

The New York Times reports today that founder Rathke’s brother embezzled $1 million from the organization eight years ago and the matter was handled internally.He stayed on the payroll until a month ago, when whistleblowers finally forced him out.

Wade Rathke said the organization had signed a restitution agreement with his brother in which his family agreed to repay the amount embezzled in exchange for confidentiality.

Wade Rathke stepped down as Acorn’s chief organizer on June 2, the same day his brother left, but he remains chief organizer for Acorn International L.L.C.

He said the decision to keep the matter secret was not made to protect his brother but because word of the embezzlement would have put a “weapon” into the hands of enemies of Acorn, a liberal group that is a frequent target of conservatives who object to its often strident advocacy on behalf of low- and moderate-income families and workers.

Wade Rathke said he learned of the problem when an employee of Citizens Consulting alerted him about suspicious credit card transactions. An internal investigation uncovered inappropriate charges on the cards that led back to his brother.

“Clearly, this was an uncomfortable, conflicting and humiliating situation as far as my family and I were concerned,” he said, “and so the real decisions on how to handle it had to be made by others.”

If one of the prosperous businesses or public officials Rathke and Acorn have bedeviled and humiliated over the years had offered this alibi for wrongdoing, they would be in Lompoc right now.

The Washington Post to host cozy $250,000 meet and greets between lobbyists, editors and Democrats

The Washington Post’s revenue plan of facilitating expensive meetings between lobbyists, Post writers and editors, Democrat and Obama administration officials has finally been outed. There was even a slick marketing piece promoting the deal that would cost big pharmacy, trial lawyers and “green” energy lobbyists up to $250,000 to dine and meet with the elite.

Sickening. But this has been going on “informally” at the New York Times, LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Washington Post for years. Only the editorial elites didn’t charge for it.

More on media bias…

Know we know that the Washington Post and Kaiser (cheap health care) org were planning a July get together at the publisher’s elegant home. Any news in your daily newspaper about this? 

Next, we find out that about 30 elite reporters went to an “off the record” party at the White House on July 4th.

US WEEKLY — I have a new name for the racist rag: PU-US Weekly or Puss Weekly. Note the magazine didn’t touch the John Edwards cheating on his dying wife scandal.

Babies lies and scandal for Sarah Palin. Love and apple pie for Michelle Obama.

With the pressure on from blogs, and falling respect for the mainstream media, the Washington Post’s Deborah Howell did a little research and admitted to the obvious. At the same time, Pew research reports falling ratings and trust in mainstream media. Only 30 percent trust CNN.

By Deborah Howell
Sunday, August 17, 2008

Democrat Barack Obama has had about a 3 to 1 advantage over Republican John McCain in Post Page 1 stories since Obama became his party’s presumptive nominee June 4. Obama has generated a lot of news by being the first African American nominee, and he is less well known than McCain — and therefore there’s more to report on. But the disparity is so wide that it doesn’t look good.

In overall political stories from June 4 to Friday, Obama dominated by 142 to 96. Obama has been featured in 35 stories on Page 1; McCain has been featured in 13, with three Page 1 references with photos to stories on inside pages. Fifteen stories featured both candidates and were about polls or issues such as terrorism, Social Security and the candidates’ agreement on what should be done in Afghanistan.

Yes, we knew. Thanks for coming forward. It’s a day late and a few dollars short.

The Media Research Center has been reporting the fall in credibility for a decade.

1. Media Credibility Plummets, Just 30% Believe ‘Most Trusted’ CNN
“Over the last 10 years,” the just-released biennial news consumption survey from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press determined, “virtually every news organization or program has seen its credibility marks decline” and “Democrats continue to give most news organizations much higher credibility ratings than do Republicans.” Based on past Pew polls, CNN touts itself as “the most trusted name in news,” but the percent who “believe all or most” of what CNN reports has fallen 12 points, to 30 percent, since Pew first posed the question in 1998. Yet, in a sign of how far the news media have fallen in the eyes of the public, that puts CNN at the top of the 12 television news outlets analyzed, as well as above all the newspapers and online sources. Believability for ABC News, CBS News and NBC News is down six points over the past ten years, to 24 percent for ABC and NBC, 22 percent for CBS, but that’s still better than the mere 18 percent who “believe all or most” of what they read in the New York Times. The extensive polling conducted in May also discovered that the audiences for CNN and MSNBC “which were heavily Democratic two years ago, have become even more so: fully 51 percent of CNN’s regular viewers are Democrats while only 18 percent are Republicans.” And “the regular audience for nightly network news also is now about two-to-one Democratic (45 percent vs. 22 percent Republican).”

Obama, Chavez and Hillary upset with Hondurans because they won’t let their leftist president remain in office for life like Castro and Chavez

By Mick Gregory

Did CNN or MSNBC report the details? 

Hugo Chávez’s socialist-building efforts suffered a minor setback yesterday when the Honduran military were ordered by the Honduras Supreme Court to expell its leftist president  Mel Zelaya for abusing the nation’s constitution.

Zeaya, with the help of Chavez wanted to hold an illegal special election last Sunday that would change the Honduran Constitution and allow him to remain “El Presidente” for life. That is a model set by Fidel Castro and followed by Hugo Chavez. 

 This report is from the Wall Street Journal:

El President l Zelaya miscalculated when he tried to emulate the success of his good friend Hugo Chavez in reshaping the Honduran Constitution to his liking.

But Honduras is not out of the Venezuelan woods yet. Yesterday the Central American country was being pressured to restore the authoritarian Mr. Zelaya by the likes of Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Hillary Clinton and, of course, Hugo himself. The Organization of American States, having ignored Mr. Zelaya’s abuses, also wants him back in power. It will be a miracle if Honduran patriots can hold their ground.

That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.

But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.

The top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told the president that he would have to comply. Mr. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Mr. Zelaya refused.

Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court’s order.

The attorney general had already made clear that the referendum was illegal, and he further announced that he would prosecute anyone involved in carrying it out. Yesterday, Mr. Zelaya was arrested by the military and is now in exile in Costa Rica.

It remains to be seen what Mr. Zelaya’s next move will be. It’s not surprising that chavistas throughout the region are claiming that he was victim of a military coup. They want to hide the fact that the military was acting on a court order to defend the rule of law and the constitution, and that the Congress asserted itself for that purpose, too.

Mrs. Clinton has piled on as well. Yesterday she accused Honduras of violating “the precepts of the Interamerican Democratic Charter” and said it “should be condemned by all.” Fidel Castro did just that. Mr. Chávez pledged to overthrow the new government.

Honduras is fighting back by strictly following the constitution. The Honduran Congress met in emergency session yesterday and designated its president as the interim executive as stipulated in Honduran law. It also said that presidential elections set for November will go forward. The Supreme Court later said that the military acted on its orders. It also said that when Mr. Zelaya realized that he was going to be prosecuted for his illegal behavior, he agreed to an offer to resign in exchange for safe passage out of the country. Mr. Zelaya denies it.

Many Hondurans are going to be celebrating Mr. Zelaya’s foreign excursion. Street protests against his heavy-handed tactics had already begun last week. On Friday a large number of military reservists took their turn. “We won’t go backwards,” one sign said. “We want to live in peace, freedom and development.”

Besides opposition from the Congress, the Supreme Court, the electoral tribunal and the attorney general, the president had also become persona non grata with the Catholic Church and numerous evangelical church leaders. On Thursday evening his own party in Congress sponsored a resolution to investigate whether he is mentally unfit to remain in office.

For Hondurans who still remember military dictatorship, Mr. Zelaya also has another strike against him: He keeps rotten company. Earlier this month he hosted an OAS general assembly and led the effort, along side OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza, to bring Cuba back into the supposedly democratic organization.

The OAS response is no surprise. Former Argentine Ambassador to the U.N. Emilio Cárdenas told me on Saturday that he was concerned that “the OAS under Insulza has not taken seriously the so-called ‘democratic charter.’ It seems to believe that only military ‘coups’ can challenge democracy. The truth is that democracy can be challenged from within, as the experiences of Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and now Honduras, prove.” A less-kind interpretation of Mr. Insulza’s judgment is that he doesn’t mind the Chávez-style coup.

The struggle against chavismo has never been about left-right politics. It is about defending the independence of institutions that keep presidents from becoming dictators. This crisis clearly delineates the problem. In failing to come to the aid of checks and balances, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Insulza expose their true colors.

Twitter reports Michael Jackson suffered from heart attack

Michael Jackson, the 50-something pop star has just experienced a heart attack or cardiac arrest event in his Los Angeles home at approximately 2:15 p.m. (PT). Paramedics performed CPR as he was en route to the local emergency room. Twitter people were the first to report the news. Update: Reports on Twitter linking to TMZ say

Recent photo of Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson was DOA. ABC News reporting now that the King of Pop is dead. Police are beginning to control crowds at UCLA Medical Center.

Michael Jackson was on the verge launching a new world tour. Family members report it was a serious event.

By 3:30 p.m. Pacific Time, ABC announced his death.

Investment guru Warren Buffett’s outlook on newspapers is dismal

In fact, Warren Buffett has said don’t buy newspaper stock at any price. The days of the monopoly newspapers huge readership and advertising revenue are long gone.

What happened? Take a look at this modest blog’s stats: The 7-day traffic average is now passing hundreds of thousands of hits.  The majority are college graduates and in their peek buying years ages 25-55.

I predict the Boston Globe will go online with just a Friday/Sunday printed and delivered paper. 

The Boston Globe proposes to slash Guild wages by 23 percent. The talks carry on tonight and will probably end with an 18 percent cut in wages, and most and upper middle managers and no-named editors will be gone. The NY Times will handle the management. Just my prediction. 

It’s time to change the name of the United States to the United Socialist States of ACORN.

Illegal immigrants voiting for the Democrat/Socialists with the help of “community organizers” such as ACORN.
Election boards dominated by the Democrat/Socialists disgard more than 25 percent of US soldiers’ ballots. Major manufacturers are “nationalized” by the new one-party system.

Note to cool, trendy Obama supporters: Only U.S. Citizens over 18 are allowed to register to vote. Illegal immigrants and felons (in most states) do not have the right.

“It’s not who wins the votes, it’s who counts to vote,” Stalin.

ATLANTA — The Obama  Justice Department has rejected Georgia’s system of using Social Security numbers and driver’s license data to check whether prospective voters are citizens, a process that was a subject of a federal lawsuit in the weeks leading up to November’s election.

What’s wrong with a real ID check? 

“This flawed system frequently subjects a disproportionate number of African-American, Asian and/or Hispanic voters to additional, and more importantly, erroneous burdens on the right to register to vote,” Loretta King, acting assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said. 

The decision comes as Georgia awaits word on whether a law passed in the spring that requires newly registering voters to show proof of citizenship will pass muster with DOJ. Under the law that takes effect in January, people must show their proof up front just as everyone does when paying with a check.  

The Soviet Plan
Lessons were learned by watching the socialists take over Russia and transform through class and race warefare. The one-party Bolshavics took control and held it for 70 years before the people of Poland, Georgia and Romania took down the tyrants. Lessons were taken and used to prepare the American liberals for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and political insiders.

These observations are published in Pravda: 

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their “right” to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our “democracy”. Pride blind the foolish.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different “branches and denominations” were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the “winning” side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the “winning” side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America’s short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes.

America has traded places with the USSR. It’s time to congratulate the Democrat/Socialists and change the name of America in the spirit of “truth in advertising.”

Nancy Pelosi Extreme Makeover Working — (Not Her Facelifts) Her Transformation from San Francisco Liberal Progressive to Kindly Grandma, Italian Catholic

By Mick Gregory

Newt Gingrich has exposed the lies of Nancy Pelosi and is calling her actions the worst example of political power and damaging lies he has ever experienced in his lifetime. Watch the new Democrat one-party system ignor Pelosi’s poison and turn it on the few remaining Republicans.

 

 

Recent Pelosi items in the news

Chris Mathews of “Softball” calls Ms. Pelosi “a knockout.” She is amazing looking for a 68-year-old.

Update: Feb. 25, 2009 (Morning after Obama’s first State of the Union address). 

Pelosi’s face- and eye-lifts are amazing, but her biggest makeover is her political image, from a progressive Democrat/socialist, atheist, wealthy resort owner, to a middle of the road, “working class” Catholic.

 

 

Quite a makeover for newly sworn House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as her national image morphed from leader of the San Francisco liberal elite to Italian Catholic mom from Baltimore.

There was her photo-op return to the Little Italy neighborhood where she grew up as Nancy D’Alesandro, the mayor’s daughter. There was the visit to St. Leo the Great Catholic Church, where they still recite Mass in Italian several times a year.

“It’s clear Republicans are reeling today based on her outreach to Italian Catholics who, as we know, have deserted the Democratic Party in the Midwest in droves,” said San Francisco power attorney Joe Cotchett, who was among those attending the Pelosi swearing in.

While the marathon events in the nation’s capital might have resembled a coronation, those most familiar with how Washington works said Pelosi’s time in the spotlight amounted to well-calculated politics that could help her move her agenda in her first 100 days.

“A lot of people don’t know much about her, so this is a chance to fill in her profile and biography so she doesn’t just become the San Francisco liberal,” said San Francisco consultant Chris Lehane, a veteran of the Clinton-Gore White House. “This is the one time when the press will be focusing on it.”

And it may be working.

According to the results of a Rasmussen Reports national phone survey of 800 likely voters, released Friday, Pelosi’s approval rating has jumped to 43 percent — up 19 points from November.

On the other hand, the same poll also found 39 percent of those surveyed still give Pelosi the thumbs-down.

Showing off: In politics as in movies, staging is all-important to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger — and his inaugural was no exception.

Produced by Schwarzenegger family friend Carl Bendix, who has done the Academy Awards Governors Ball and other Hollywood events, and emceed by former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, the Friday affair was Hollywood through and through — including a last-minute prop to help the gimpy governor.

–Matier & Ross, SF Chronicle

Keep a score card on the liberal mainstream media. Make note that there is never a word about:

Nancy Pelosi’s age.
The age of her children — in photo-ops it is Pelosi and her youngest, prettiest grand children
Her resort, Napa Valley vineyards, and high-end restaurants and use of non-union and illegal immigrant labor.
Her total support of partial birth abortion.
How she gained the votes from Democrats for first, minority leader and now majority leader.

Notice how the San Francisco reporters go with the spin, calling her a “mom” and not mentioning any of these items.

That’s why citizen journalists are filling the void.

Miss California has same views against gay marriage as President Obama, Biden and and Hillary

President Barack Obama didn’t think the media lap dogs would do this to him just 100 days into his term. But thanks to The Donald, Obama ended up in the middle of the gay/lesbian/transgender smear campaign against Miss California.  — the debate over Carrie Prejeans Christian beliefs — in opposition to gay marriage.

At a press conference addressing Carrie Prejean’s disputed title in the Miss USA competition, pageant owner Donald Trump compared Prejean’s stated views on gay marriage to Obama’s. Bloggers on Twitter have pointed this out weeks ago. 

“It’s the same answer that the president of the United States gave,” Trump said. “She gave an honorable answer. She gave an answer from her heart.”

In her own remarks moments later, Prejean echoed Trump’s statement, telling reporters: “The president of the United States, the secretary of state, and many Americans agree with me in this belief.” Let’s be clear on this media/gay smear, Miss Prejean would be Miss USA today, if not for the biased, hate-filled attacks by the gay/lesbian/transgender political arm of the Democratic party of the U.S. Perez Hilton is the one who should be in a controversy today by the major media.

Q: “Do you support gay marriage?” VP BIDEN: “No, Barack Obama nor I support redefining, from a civil side, what constitutes marriage. We do not support that. That is basically a decision to be able to be left to the faiths and people who practice their faiths to determine what you call it.”

Who is Nancy Pelosi? What does Progressive Democrat mean? Watch Obama, Hillary and Pelosi smile and talk with Ortega and Chavez, fellow socialists

OBEY OBAMA

You won’t see the mainstream media reporting who Nancy Pelosi is.

Citizens: Print,  clip and save this free Obey Obama poster (Void where prohibited by law).

By Mick Gregory

I know quite a bit about her, having lived and worked in her San Francisco district. You won’t see the San Francisco Chronicle or New York Times mentioning that she is a multi-millionaire from earnings on her non-union Napa Valley winerey and resort hotel. Yet, the soon-to-be-crowned Speaker, gets one of the largest shares of union campaign money.

Your 68-year-old grandmother hasn’t spent as much on her home as 68-year-old Nancy Pelosi has on facelifts.
Democrats are America’s neo-progressives, better known as socialists. I lived in Nancy Peloci’s San Francisco, where transsexuals are given special status along with all the other classes of minorities and the city is a “sactuary city” for illegals.

 

Do you think I am exagerating? Progressive Democrats are America’s Democrat/Socialists — Google it for yourself. Why doesn’t the LA Times with it’s 950-person newsroom devote an afternoon of a reporter’s time to check into this?

Socialism in America is growing. Aided by such influential Congressmen as John Conyers, Ranking Member of the House Judicial Committee, and the one who will start impeachment proceedings against George Bush in the coming months. Nancy Pelosi is one of the stars of the nearly 60 other Democrats advancing socialism in America behind the “Progressive” label.

Here are a few excerpts taken directly from the web page of the Democratic Socialists of America.

“The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is the largest socialist organization in the United States, and the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International. DSA’s members are building progressive movements for social change while establishing an openly socialist presence in American communities and politics.

“At the root of our socialism is a profound commitment to democracy, as means and end. We are activists committed not only to extending political democracy but to demanding democratic empowerment in the economy, in gender relations, and in culture. Democracy is not simply one of our political values but our means of restructuring society. Our vision is of a society in which people have a real voice in the choices and relationships that affect the entirety of our lives. We call this vision democratic socialism – a vision of a more free, democratic and humane society.

0. We are socialists because we reject an international economic order sustained by private profit, alienated labor, race and gender discrimination, environmental destruction, and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo.
0. We are socialists because we share a vision of a humane international social order based both on democratic planning and market mechanisms to achieve equitable distribution of resources, meaningful work, a healthy environment, sustainable growth, gender and racial equality, and non-oppressive relationships.”
Here is what “Liberty” looks like to a socialist:
“A democratic commitment to a vibrant pluralist life assumes the need for a democratic, responsive, and representative government to regulate the market, protect the environment, and ensure a basic level of equality and equity for each citizen. In the 21st century, such regulation will increasingly occur through international, multilateral action. But while a democratic state can protect individuals from domination by inordinately powerful, undemocratic transnational corporations, people develop the social bonds that render life meaningful only through cooperative, voluntary relationships. Promoting such bonds is the responsibility of socialists and the government alike.
“The social welfare programs of government have been for the most part positive, if partial, responses to the genuine social needs of the great majority of Americans. The dismantling of such programs by conservative and corporate elites in the absence of any alternatives will be disastrous. Abandoning schools, health care, and housing, for example, to the control of an unregulated free market magnifies the existing harsh realities of inequality and injustice.”
The action agenda posted on the socialists’ web site very closely parallels Agenda 21, and the recommendations of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development. The web site boasts the creation of the “Progressive Caucus” in Congress, as well as the coalition that is working to promote the socialist agenda in Congress.

Now you know that the third person in line for the Presidency is a socialist.

Secret Service, please make sure that President Bush and Dick Chaney are not ever again with in a mile of each other for the next two years.

Imagine this, the Democrats impeach George Bush for invading Iraq, Dick Cheney becomes president, he dies of a heart attack within weeks because of his spike in blood pressure. Nancy Pelosi becomes the first women President of the United States, and another first of much more import, America’s first Progressive Democrat president.

Sources: http://www.dsausa.org/dsa.html,
http://www.sovereignty.net/center/socialists.htm

It’s time to stop the global warming propaganda machine while we still have freedom of speech

A few years ago was when Freeman Dyson, one of the world’s leading physicists, began publicly stating his doubts about global warming and backing them up. Tip: The socialists have changed the term from global warming to “climate change.” Watch the tea parties around the counrty for political climate change.

Speaking at a summit on the future at Boston University, Dyson said that “all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.” Since then he has only heated up his misgivings, declaring in a 2007 interview with Salon.com that “the fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn’t scare me at all” and writing in an essay for The New York Review of Books, the left-leaning publication, that climate change has become an “obsession” — the primary article of faith for “a worldwide secular religion” known as environmentalism.
Among those he considers to have been drinking the KoolAid, Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen, a government (tax-payer funded) employee of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.”
Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.”
William Gray, hurricane expert and head of the Tropical Meteorology Project at Colorado State University, in a 2005 interview with Discover magazine:
“I’m not disputing that there has been global warming. There was a lot of global warming in the 1930s and ’40s, and then there was a slight global cooling from the middle ’40s to the early ’70s. And there has been warming since the middle ’70s, especially in the last 10 years. But this is natural, due to ocean circulation changes and other factors. It is not human induced.
“Nearly all of my colleagues who have been around 40 or 50 years are skeptical as hell about this whole global-warming thing. But no one asks us. If you don’t know anything about how the atmosphere functions, you will of course say, ‘Look, greenhouse gases are going up, the globe is warming, they must be related.’ Well, just because there are two associations, changing with the same sign, doesn’t mean that one is causing the other.”
Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an editorial last April for The Wall Street Journal:
“To understand the misconceptions perpetuated about climate science and the climate of intimidation, one needs to grasp some of the complex underlying scientific issues. First, let’s start where there is agreement. The public, press and policy makers have been repeatedly told that three claims have widespread scientific support: Global temperature has risen about a degree since the late 19th century; levels of CO2 [carbon dioxide] in the atmosphere have increased by about 30 percent over the same period; and CO2 should contribute to future warming.
“These claims are true. However, what the public fails to grasp is that the claims neither constitute support for alarm nor establish man’s responsibility for the small amount of warming that has occurred. In fact, those who make the most outlandish claims of alarm are actually demonstrating skepticism of the very science they say supports them. It isn’t just that the alarmists are trumpeting model results that we know must be wrong. It is that they are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn’t happen even if the models were right as justifying costly policies to try to prevent global warming.”

Citizen Journalism gains status at the Washington Times, meanwhile more big cuts at the big publishers

The Washington Times promotes the  return of citizen journalism. 

 

Now this is what is called freedom of speech. Is this freedom the result of reality shows and especially America Idol? After all, rank amateurs turn out to be very good singers. 

At the same time, the cuts and shutdowns continue.

The Chicago Tribune plans to cut another 20% of its newsroom staff in yet another bid to reduce expenses amid continuing advertising declines.

Staffers were told of the impending layoffs last week, according to three people who attended a meeting on the topic. The cuts will take place over the next several weeks, the sources said.

The expected cuts are the latest attempt to reduce expenses at the paper, whose parent Tribune Co. filed for bankruptcy protection from creditors in December.

The Washington Times’ news gathering is about to become a whole lot bigger as the newspaper launches one full print page per day of news stories reported and written by average citizens in local communities. The citizen journalism project, set to debut Monday,(today) is a new take on a traditional idea.

Community-driven news has been a long mainstay in American newspapers. The Times’ version ramps up the intensity and the outreach, focusing on six communities within the larger Washington area: academia on Monday, the Maryland and Virginia suburbs on Tuesday, the District on Wednesday, local military bases on Thursday, faith communities on Friday and the charitable and the public service community on Sunday. The citizen journalists’ work will be showcased in the A-section as an additional page of Metro coverage and will provide a natural complement to the work of the newspaper’s reporters and editors. “We know there are many issues and communities we have not been able to fully cover within the confines of a newsroom budget, and we are excited to empower citizens within those communities to provide us news that will interest all our readers, ” Executive Editor John Solomon said. “While we are expanding our reach through this project, we will not be diminishing our editorial quality. Citizen stories must meet the same rigorous standards for accuracy, precision, fairness, balance and ethics as those written by our newsroom staff,” Mr. Solomon said. Each citizen journalist is provided a set of rules for their reporting and newswriting, as well as copies of The Times’ policies governing ethics, anonymous sources and other journalistic standards. While the project calls for some first-rate news wranglers, The Times also is tapping into some of its own editorial talent known for its savvy – and heart. Former Editorial Page Editor Deborah Simmons, a veteran newswoman with close ties to the local community, is supervising the coverage for the District, the suburbs, academia, faith and the charitable communities. Longtime Times columnist Adrienne Washington, a staple on local TV and radio, also will be a part of the outreach and the editing. “Deb and Adrienne are pillars within the Washington community and their journalistic prowess, community ties and passion for news are perfectly suited for this project,” Mr. Solomon said. “This is a groundbreaking project, and I’m excited to be on the launching pad. Readers know our bylines. Now we’re flipping the script.” Grace Vuoto, editor of The Times’ new Web property BaseNews.com, will edit the Thursday citizen journalism page on military base news. “Grace is leading the way in providing citizen reports from every military base in the world through BaseNews.com, and the Thursday page is an ideal extension,” Mr. Solomon said. The idea of community journalism in a print format is actually a new take on an old tradition, said Al Tomkins, a media analyst with the Poynter Institute. “Rural and county newspapers, community weeklies – they always had space devoted to the community news, written by someone local. That kind of coverage was and still is incredibly popular,” Mr. Tomkins said. “It takes its inspiration from a simpler time. But it remains an effective way to give a voice to the voiceless.” The new citizen journalism page is one of several changes launched in the past few weeks in The Times’ print edition. By Jennifer Harper | Monday, April 13, 2009

Will the rabble be able to follow the AP stylebook? (I know that is going through many of the “professionals’ minds.”

U.S. Senator Ted Stevens ‘assassinated’ by Democrat Party prosecutors and media alliance

A political assassination took place last year, and America’s “journalists” failed to report it.

Did you read about any of this in your major daily newspaper?

At one point, prosecutors were held in contempt. Things got so bad that the Justice Department finally replaced the trial team, including top-ranking officials in the Public Integrity Section, which is charged with prosecuting public corruption cases.

The straw that apparently broke Holder’s back was the discovery of more prosecutorial notes that were not turned over to the Stevens defense team as required by law. The notes were discovered by the new prosecution team, which was appointed in February.

With more ugly hearings expected, Holder is said to have decided late Tuesday to pull the plug. Justice Department officials say Holder wants to send a message to prosecutors throughout the department that actions he regards as misconduct will not be tolerated.

 

 

In a move first reported by National Public Radio, NPR, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said he has decided to drop the case against Alaska’s former U.S. Senator, Ted Stevens, Republican, rather than continue to defend the conviction in the face of persistent problems stemming from the actions of prosecutors.

“After careful review, I have concluded that certain information should have been provided to the defense for use at trial,” Holder said in a statement Wednesday. “In light of this conclusion, and in consideration of the totality of the circumstances of this particular case, I have determined that it is in the interest of justice to dismiss the indictment and not proceed with a new trial.”

In a separate statement, Stevens’ lawyers praised Holder’s decision and said it was “justified by the extraordinary evidence of government corruption in the prosecution of Senator Stevens.”

The lawyers, Brendan Sullivan and Robert Cary, called the case “a sad story and a warning to everyone. Any citizen can be convicted if prosecutors are hell-bent on ignoring the Constitution and willing to present false evidence.”

The judge in the Stevens case has repeatedly delayed sentencing and criticized trial prosecutors for what he has called prosecutorial misconduct. At one point, prosecutors were held in contempt. Things got so bad that the Justice Department finally replaced the trial team, including top-ranking officials in the Public Integrity Section, which is charged with prosecuting public corruption cases.

 

Statement From Ted Stevens

“I am grateful that the new team of responsible prosecutors at the Department of Justice has acknowledged that I did not receive a fair trial and has dismissed all the charges against me. I am also grateful that Judge Emmet G. Sullivan made rulings that facilitated the exposure of the government’s misconduct during the last two years. I always knew that there would be a day when the cloud that surrounded me would be removed. That day has finally come.
 
“It is unfortunate that an election was affected by proceedings now recognized as unfair. It was my great honor to serve the State of Alaska in the United States Senate for 40 years.
 
“I thank my wife Catherine, as well as my family, friends, and colleagues in the United States Senate who stood by me during this difficult period. I also want to thank the great number of Alaskans who offered their prayers and support.”

Newspaper journalists and most broadcast news departments are not the government watchdogs they promote themselves as. In fact, they are fascilitators and  often public relations agents for the Democrat Party.

This is why online Webs, blogs and social communications sites have become so popular.

Chronicle to purge 150 starting April 1 — A cruel April fools joke?

The SF Chronicle’s carbon footprint is getting smaller, about 150 people smaller.  Some may feel a little foolish now about turning off their lights for Earth Hour, especially when they learn that Al Gore kept the lights on in his 9,000 sq ft mansion. California’s power use didn’t budge. It was a dim idea. 

Back to the lights out on newspapers top heavy with executive editors: 

“Until the current newspaper crisis, you rarely heard politicians or activists bleating about how important newspapers were to self-government. They mostly bitched about what awful failures newspapers were at uncovering vital data. The only group that holds a consistently high opinion of newspapers is newspaper people,” Jack Shafer.

He cites a recent Pew study that shows most people don’t care if their local newspaper folds, and he says they have a point — few of the stories printed every day “are likely to supercharge the democratic impulse,” and even the ones that do, generally fail to spur voters to do anything.

 

Slate‘s Shafer laughs at the high-minded talk of the critical role newspapers play in a democracy, declaring, “I can imagine citizens acquiring sufficient information to vote or poke their legislators with pitchforks even if all the newspapers in the country fell into a bottomless recycling bin tomorrow.”

Shafer shows that some of the people arguing for the importance of newspapers — academics and liberal activists — have shown little love for them in the past.

CHRONICLE UNIT BULLETIN — It’s official!

More than 80 Chronicle staff members took the severance deal on March 31, 2009. The overall number will be 150 in the next two weeks. Is anyone keeping a talley? Has it been 500 cuts the last four years? That’s my estimate.

 

Because of the large number of employees volunteering for termination during The SF Chronicle’s voluntary termination period, the WARN Act provisions requiring 60 days advance notice of involuntary layoffs is not valid. That means that after April 1, another 80 will be given their walking papers.

The company would have no legal need to give the 60-day notice provided for under the WARN Act.

Some members have said that they would not apply for the voluntary termination package and would, instead, wait for the layoff in order to get 60 days notice and the additional pay involved. Given the current situation, however, the Guild advises against taking this course of action because it appears there is a good possibility that the 60 days additional notice with pay won’t materialize. Remember that after April 3, 2009 no member regardless of age can receive the Supplemental Pension Benefit as a lump sum and all will have to take it as a monthly annuity. So if the Supplemental Pension Benefit as a lump sum from the Guild Pension Plan is important to you, and if the 60 days notice you were counting on is no longer a solid possibility, and you are certain you want to leave The Chronicle, we suggest that you should strongly consider volunteering to terminate your employment by the 5 p.m. March 31 deadline.

So, if another 50 or more rush to get your modest buyouts. The remainder who wait very well could end up with an extra 60 days pay.  Not a bad bet. And there are still 60 days of skiing at Heavenly and Squaw Valley.

 “Until the current newspaper crisis, you rarely heard politicians or activists bleating about how important newspapers were to self-government. They mostly bitched about what awful failures newspapers were at uncovering vital data. The only group that holds a consistently high opinion of newspapers is newspaper people,” Jack Shafer.

 Names of Chronicle staff taking the buyouts are piling up like winos in front of the Salvation Army food kitchen.   

Some of the paper’s veteran reporters and biggest names are leaving. It looks like music, books and arts coverage will be hit hard, as well as the photo department.

 Here are the names so far:

 Joel Selvin, who has covered the rock and roll scene for 30 years or so.

 Carl Hall, a longtime science reporter currently on leave.

 Tom Meyer, editorial cartoonist.

 Zachary Coile, a long-time reporter in the Washington D.C. bureau.

 Nancy Gay, who covers 49ers football and other major league teams. 

Three of the papers top culture writers are departing, including:

 Jesse Hamlin, Edward Guthmann, and Heidi Benson. They frequently profile authors, actors, and musicians.

Sabin Russell, who has covered science for decades.

Alison Biggar, the long-time editor of the Chronicle Magazine.

Sylvia Rubin, who covers fashion.

Bernadette Tansey, a biotech reporter. (She has been writing a new feature each Sunday that I love, a round-up of books on a particular business topic, but done in a very clever way.)

The photography department will take a big hit as six photographers, including Pulitzer-Prize winner Kim Komenich, are departing. The others include Michael Maloney, Craig Lee, Eric Luse, Mark Costatini and Kurt Rogers, a sports photographer

Other departures include:

Kevin Albert, editorial assistant

Greg Ambrose, copy editor

Charles Burress (who has covered Berkeley for years.)

Peter Cafone, sports copy editor

Ken Costa, graphic designer

Elizabeth Hughes, copy editor
Leslie Innes, Datebook editor
Timothy Innes, foreign news wire editor
Rod Jones, copy editor, news
Eric Jungerman, designer
Kathy Kerrihard, library researcher
Simar Khanna, editor of Home and Garden section

Even lower level employees are taking the bum’s rush:

Bonnie Lemons, copy editor, news
Glenn Mayeda, editorial assistant, sports
Johnny Miller, library researcher
Dan Giesin, sports night copy editor
Janice Greene, editorial assistant on the op-ed page
Shirley-Anne Owden, copy editor, features
Courtenay Peddle, copy editor, news
Lee Sims, copy editor, news
Michelle Smith, a sports reporter who covers women’s basketball
Patricia Yollin, metro reporter

There are many, many more. Please post what you know on comments.

 So the list will grow longer. Hearst wanted to lay off as many as 225 workers, (and threatened to shutter the paper) but backed off after the Newspaper Guild agreed to cuts in vacation time and seniority rules.

I wonder how these soon to be retired professionals feel now about their liberal politics, the kind that use their taxes to pay for the Mayor Gavin Newsom to fly off to Davos, Paris and London to mingle with the rich and powerful world leaders, while the “good people” work 50-hour weeks and pay nearly 50 percent of their wages in tax?

This is a profile of journalists in Gawker:

“While journalists might continue to forge forward despite workload, deadlines and salary issues, they will not stand by as the foundation of journalism crumbles beneath them. At that point, they will quit,” the study concludes. Hey! Anyone want to start a rock band or a truffle farm with me? Clips not required.

 

New York Times burried Obama ACORN major donor story before the election

‘New York Times’ Spiked Obama Donor Story

The New York Times building is shown in New York on June 2008. The Times pulled a story about Barack Obama’s campaign ties to ACORN. (Frank Franklin II/Associated Press)

Congressional Testimony: ‘Game-Changer’ Article Would Have Connected Campaign With ACORN

Constitutional crisis.

This story was published in the Philadelphia Bulletin. Did you see this in your local favorite newspaper?

By Michael P. Tremoglie, The Bulletin

Monday, March 30, 2009

 

A lawyer involved with legal action against Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) told a House Judiciary subcommittee on March 19 The New York Times had killed a story in October that would have shown a close link between ACORN, Project Vote and the Obama campaign because it would have been a “a game changer.” 

Heather Heidelbaugh, who represented the Pennsylvania Republican State Committee in the lawsuit against the group, recounted for the ommittee what she had been told by a former ACORN worker who had worked in the group’s Washington, D.C. office. The former worker, Anita Moncrief, told Ms. Heidelbaugh last October, during the state committee’s litigation against ACORN, she had been a “confidential informant for several months to The New York Times reporter, Stephanie Strom.”

Ms. Moncrief had been providing Ms. Strom with information about ACORN’s election activities. Ms. Strom had written several stories based on information Ms. Moncrief had given her.

During her testimony, Ms. Heidelbaugh said Ms. Moncrief had told her The New York Times articles stopped when she revealed that the Obama presidential campaign had sent its maxed-out donor list to ACORN’s Washington, D.C. office.

Ms. Moncrief told Ms. Heidelbaugh the campaign had asked her and her boss to “reach out to the maxed-out donors and solicit donations from them for Get Out the Vote efforts to be run by ACORN.”

Ms. Heidelbaugh then told the congressional panel:

“Upon learning this information and receiving the list of donors from the Obama campaign, Ms. Strom reported to Ms. Moncrief that her editors at The New York Times wanted her to kill the story because, and I quote, “it was a game changer.”’

Ms. Moncrief made her first overture to Ms. Heidelbaugh after The New York Times allegedly spiked the story — on Oct. 21, 2008. Last fall, she testified under oath about what she had learned about ACORN from her years in its Washington, D.C. office. Although she was present at the congressional hearing, she did not testify.

U.S. Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc., the ranking Republican on the committee, said the interactions between the Obama campaign and ACORN, as described by Ms. Moncrief, and attested to before the committee by Ms. Heidelbaugh, could possibly violate federal election law, and “ACORN has a pattern of getting in trouble for violating federal election laws.”  

He also voiced criticism of The New York Times.

“If true, The New York Times is showing once again that it is a not an impartial observer of the political scene,” he said. “If they want to be a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, they should put Barack Obama approves of this in their newspaper.”

Academicians and journalism experts expressed similar criticism of the Times.

When newspapers start reporting the news, and both sides to an issue, letting us make up my own mind, rather than having it influenced by the unionist/socialist agenda, we will start reading again…until then, God save the Internet.

Dems to ban modern firearms, labeling them assault weapons?

This is the big one. Hillary is discussing how the Mexican border is our problem because so called “assault weapons” are flowing from the USA to Mexican drug lords. 

Funny, I call them home defense weapons.

Here comes the government gun grab, take away Americans’ Second Amendment rights to own firearms and protect their family’s lives and do it for Mexico? How gullible do they think we are? 

We all know that the Mexican drug gangs have military, fully automatic weapons from China and Eastern Europe and are exporting tons of drugs and scores of people every day over our borders. Why would banning modern home defense firearms from Americans stop or even slow the drug violence and human trafficing? 

It’s “new speak” coming from the Obama/Orwellian Big Brother/Big Sis government. 

The progressive Democrats are going to ignore a major tenant of the Constitution out of fear, I believe of a civilian backlash.

Tip of the day: Buy guns and bullets. They are the new gold. 

 

 

The Obama administration didn’t waste more than a month to seek to reinstate “the assault weapons ban” (really the modern home defence firearm band) that expired in 2004 during the Bush administration, Attorney General Eric Holder said today.

Wednesday Attorney General Eric Holder said that the Obama administration will seek to reinstitute the assault weapons ban which expired in 2004 during the Bush administration.

(AP Photos/ABC News Graphic )

“As President Obama indicated during his campaign, there are just a few gun-related changes that we would like to make, and among them would be to reinstitute the ban on the sale of assault weapons,” Holder told reporters.

Holder said that putting the ban back in place would not only be a positive move by the United States, it would help cut down on the flow of guns going across the border into Mexico, which is struggling with heavy violence among drug cartels along the border.

Really, why can’t we stop the flow of humans and drugs along the border?

“I think that will have a positive impact in Mexico, at a minimum.” Holder said at a news conference on the arrest of more than 700 people in a drug enforcement crackdown on Mexican drug cartels operating in the U.S.

How are Americans to defend themselves, with only 150-year old gun technology against Mexican drug runners and a well armed new U.S. socialist police state?

Imagine the government making a law that kept new computer or cell phone technology from the public?

Which country’s citizens is Obama concerned about?

California dream turning into a nightmare for middle class

California has turned into a high-tax, socialist state where the working middle class has to support millions of illegals and highly paid government employees. The state income tax has now broke the 10 percent barrier. The number of people leaving has for the first time in 70 years outpaced the incoming number, (including illegals).

Nevada, Arizona, California and Florida had the nation’s top foreclosure rates. In Nevada, one in every 70 homes received a foreclosure filing, while the number was one every 147 in Arizona. Rounding out the top 10 were Idaho, Michigan, Illinois, Georgia, Oregon and Ohio.

Among metro areas, Las Vegas was first, with one in every 60 housing units receiving a foreclosure filing. It was followed by the Cape Coral-Fort Myers area in Florida and five California metropolitan areas: Stockton, Modesto, Merced, Riverside-San Bernardino and Bakersfield.

The Scobleizer has written a good blog post on the subject. Scoble is an IT and social media guru in Silicon Valley who often visits Texas. He interviewed the Texas governor, Rick Perry and they Twitter each other. Even after the real estate bubble burst in 2005-06, and homes fell in price by 20 percent each of the last three years, homes are still overpriced and only 10 percent of California  households can afford median-priced homes. Nationally, 50 percent can afford the median-priced home.

The state of California has lost it’s glamorous image. I think of it now as a congested, welfare state with the highest taxes in the United States and the largest “public” workforce to support. Did you know that most of the government employees retire at full pay after 20 years of service?

http://scobleizer.com/2009/03/24/is-california-is-setup-for-a-brain-drain/comment-page-2/#comment-2008731

Joel Kotkin of the SF Chronicle wrote this piece in 2007.

California has been losing ground in the new millennium. In 2004-05, it fell to 17th, behind not only fast-growing Arizona and Nevada but also Oregon, Washington and rival “nation-state” Texas.

Job creation has been even less impressive. In the Bay Area and Los Angeles, it can only be considered mediocre or worse. If not for the strong performance of the interior counties of the state — what Bill Frey and I call the “Third California” — the state already would be rightly considered a laggard when it comes to creating employment.

More disturbing, as California’s population has grown — largely from immigration — per-capita income growth has weakened. From the 1930s to as late as the 1980s, Californians generally got richer faster than other Americans. In 1946, Gunther reported, Californians enjoyed the highest living standards and the third-highest per-capita income in the country.

Today, California ranks 12th in per-capita income. And it’s losing ground: Between 1999 and 2004, California’s per-capita income growth ranked a miserable 40th among the states.

This slow growth reflects a gradually widening chasm between social classes. Although the rest of the country has also experienced this trend, the gap between rich and poor has expanded more rapidly in California than in the rest of the country.

Today, notes a recent study by the Public Policy Institute of California, California has the 15th-highest rate of poverty of all American states. When cost of living adjustments are made, only New York and the District of Columbia fare worse. Tragically, many of California’s poor are working. Somehow, this does not seem the best road to the governor’s dream of a “harmonious” society.

How did this happen to our golden state? There are many causes.

Certainly poverty has been greatly exacerbated by huge waves of immigration, particularly from Mexico and other developing countries. But other states — including Texas and Arizona — have also absorbed many immigrants, as well as people from the rest of this country, and have not experienced similarly strong jumps in their poverty rates.

Changes in the economy are clearly suspect. From the 1930s to the 1980s, California created a broad spectrum of opportunities for white- and blue-collar workers alike. Even the 1990s expansion, suggests Debbie Reed of the policy institute, helped reduce poverty by expanding a wide range of employment opportunities.

Today, economic growth in California — like that in much of the Northeast — seems tilted largely toward elites. Once a state known for its relative social democracy, the Golden State is becoming what Citigroup strategist Ajay Kapur has dubbed a plutonomy, dominated largely by a small wealthy class and their spending.

For example, despite all the hype about the renewed Internet boom in Silicon Valley, there has been only modest expansion of employment, even in the past year. Undoubtedly lavish takings by a relative handful of engineers, managers and investors are boosting high-end restaurateurs in San Francisco and revving up BMW sales, but benefits don’t seem to accrue as much to assemblers, midlevel managers and other high-tech workers.

Similarly, the governor’s entertainment industry friends, as well as art and developer elites close to Mayors Antonio Villaraigosa and Gavin Newsom, may feel these are the best of times. But Los Angeles and San Francisco, along with Monterey, now suffer a poverty rate of more than 20 percent, among the highest level in the country.

Parallel to these developments, California is losing its once broad middle class, the traditional source of its political balance and much of its entrepreneurial genius. Outmigration from the state is growing and, contrary to the notions of some sophisticates, it’s not just the rubes and roughhouses who are leaving.

Indeed, an analysis of the most recent migration numbers shows a disturbing trend: an increasing out-migration of educated people from California’s largest metropolitan areas. Back in the 1990s, this was mostly a Los Angeles phenomena, but since 2000, the Bay Area appears to be suffering a high per-capita outflow of educated people.

This middle class flight is likely driven by two things: greater opportunities outside the state and the cost of housing in-state. Over the past 50 years, housing prices in coastal California in particular have grown much faster than elsewhere; the Bay Area’s rate of housing inflation over the past 50 years has been twice the national average.

Given the shrinking per-capita income advantage for being in California, moving elsewhere increasingly makes sense, particularly for those who do not already own homes and don’t have wealthy parents. In some parts of the state, barely 10 percent of households can now afford a median-price home; in the rest of the country that number is roughly 50 percent.

These trends suggest that California could be devolving toward an unappealing model of class stratification. As educated white-collar and skilled blue-collar workers leave, businesses in the state will be forced to truncate their operations — perhaps having an elite research lab, design office or marketing arm in California but shunting most midlevel jobs elsewhere.

Newspaper editors purged MBAs from management years ago

Newspapers have not been blessed with the best and the brightest managers. Why? The executive editors sabotage real management and have purged MBAs from their ranks. Kill off the competition.

This is from the WSJ Deal Journal column, a Q&A with Mr. Knee, a highly respected  investment consultant

DJ: What would be your advice to newspaper owners?
Knee: You have seen people outsource everything from printing to editorial and indeed, any kind of journalism where your scale in the local community does not provide you with an advantage should be gotten elsewhere. If you find out how many people the large papers sent to the national conventions, you would wonder whether that’s economically justified. You have to focus on your competitive advantage, which is local. When the smoke clears, the local newspaper, which may not be the sexiest part of the newspaper industry but is overwhelmingly the largest and most profitable part of the industry, will be a smaller and more-focused enterprise whose activities will be directed to those areas where their local presence gives them competitive advantage and they will continue to generate as a result better profits than the supersexy businesses in the media industry asking for government or nonprofit help like movies and music.

The newspaper industry has not been blessed with the best managers, and generations of monopoly profits do dull the senses. On the journalism side, I think many managers would rather have avoided a fight with journalists than actually force them to think harder about what their readers want, rather than what they want their readers to want. In the economic environment we’re in, newspapers can’t afford to do every six-part investigative series they could have done before.

Meanwhile, the rank and file newspaper reporters who were busy covering their beats, don’t make much compared to the executive editors. 

Moma don’t let you’re kids grow up to be newspaper reporters. Have them study business, engineering, law or sales, even bar tending would earn them a better living. The executive editors who scratched their way to the top make big bucks for a while, until the host dies from bad management anyway. 

Ever wonder what kind of money the nation’s top newspapers pay their best journalsits? The top rung of the latter is set by the Newspaper Guild. Once you’ve lasted five or six years after about four years at a small daily and tuition of at least $20,000 a year at a respected J-school, this is it.

New York Times pays the most, $1,675.28 a week after two years. But that’s where it stays fixed until the next Guild negotiations. Of course, New York City has the highest cost of living expenses in the U.S.

Reuters pays $1,587.93 a week after six years.

The San Francisco Chronicle pays $1202.24 a week for six years of journalist experience. I know that is top for the Guild scale, but many of the hard workers, who put in more than 38 hours a week get additional pay above scale.

Consumer Reports takes the No. 1 position with $1,80410 a week scale after four years of experience. The union-biased “non-profit” magazine pays more that the New York Times or San Francisco Chronicle for their pro-union advertorial reports on products.

Can new online newspapers chage for its content? Jeff Jarvis of the LA Times says “No!” And he explains himself very well:

How’s that for a direct answer? Every rule has its exceptions — this one only a few: The Wall Street Journal (paid by expense accounts), Consumer Reports (which serves reviews, not news), iTunes (we may play a unique performance over and over, but I don’t read even my articles more than once) and porn (which is suffering the same problem newspapers are thanks to free competition from, uh, amateurs). But the rule of the new, post-scarcity economy is clear: Charging for news online is dangerous folly. Why? Let me count the reasons if not the dollars:

Once news is known, that knowledge is a commodity and it doesn’t matter who first reported it. There’s no fencing off information, especially today, when the conversation that spreads it moves at the speed of links.

There will be no limit to competitors. Readers, like water, will follow the path of least inconvenience. It’s impossible to compete against free. Have papers learned nothing from Craigslist?

In the old-content economy, one could make much money selling many copies of a product. In today’s link economy online, we need only one copy, and it is the links to it that give it value. So rather than complaining that Google should pay them for aggregating their headlines, news organizations should be grateful that Google does not charge for the links it gives and the readers it sends. Indeed, we should be spending our effort figuring out how to get more links to original reporting to support it.

Putting your content behind a wall cuts it off from the conversation and robs it of influence. Just ask New York Times columnists how much they disliked the pay wall the paper finally demolished.

Not all newspapers are going bankrupt. Many, in small monopoly markets are among the most profitable businesses in America with profit margins much higher than oil companies, Apple, EBay, Cisco, Sprint, AT&T, Google or Microsoft.  Gannett has the lion’s share of these markets. And also the highest ratio of MBAs in the media business. 

Major city newspapers will go nonprofit to keep influence

Major cities such as San Francisco, Washington D.C., LA, Chicago, New York, Houston and Philadelphia may convert the serviving newspapers into nonprofits to keep their political and philanthropic status. 

The San Francisco Chronicle will be the first to test the entity. 

San Francisco investment banker Warren Hellman and other prominent SF  lawyers and investors made an informal proposal  last week to Hearst, owners of the San Francisco Chronicle about helping the troubled daily paper become a nonprofit, San Francisco attorney Bill Coblentz told the SF Business Times.

Hellman and Coblentz discussed the idea, then Coblentz conveyed it to former San Francisco Examiner editor and publisher William R. Hearst III, who is a Hearst Corp. director and an affiliated partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. William is one of the working Hearsts who lives in the Bay Area and keeps touch with The Chronicle on a daily basis. It’s unofficially the Hearst flagship, though in money making ability, their Houston Chronicle is by far the financial headquarters. 

“What happened after that, I don’t know,” said Coblentz, who is out of town.

The proposal would be for a nonprofit corporation “to take over the Chronicle,” with Hearst Corp. continuing to provide some philanthropic support, Coblentz said. Details remain sketchy. It’s unclear if the proposal is being seriously considered.

 

Editorial-wise they are already PBS in print, aren’t they? 

 

Natasha Richardson dies, victim of Canadian nationalized health care?

Sadly, Natasha Richardson died after her simple ski accident on a “bunny hill” in Canada. After spending a day in a Canadian hospital with only observations, she was rushed to a well-equipped New York hospital where it was discovered the 45 year old was brain dead. 

Why wasn’t there a scan and X-ray? The normal procedures in a head trauma. The blood could have been drained and prevented her death. That is a snapshot of what socialized health-care is about. Basic services. Get to a U.S. hospital as soon as possible. 

Helmets will become much more popular on the slopes. Nationalized healthcare will still be on Obama’s agenda. The media will not go there.

But of course, citizen journalists will.

Here are some facts that you may never see in your “friendly neighborhood media” —

Despite spending more on health care than any other industrialized country in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) except Iceland and Switzerland, Canada ranks poorly in several categories according to a new study by the Fraser Institute. 

For instance:

• Canada ranks 17th in the percentage of total life expectancy that will be lived in full health.
• It also ranks 22nd in infant mortality, 15th in perinatal mortality and fourth in mortality amenable to health care.
• Other rankings for Canada included 9th in potential years of life lost to disease, 10th in the incidence of breast cancer mortality and 2nd in the incidence of mortality from colorectal cancer.

Further:

• On an age-adjusted, comparative basis, Canada, relative to comparable countries of the OECD, has a small number of physicians, ranking 24th out of 28 countries.
• Notably, Canada had the second-highest ratio among 20 OECD countries for which data were available in 1970.
• Since 1970, however, all but one of these countries have surpassed Canada’s growth in doctors per capita.
• While the age-adjusted proportion of doctors in Canada grew by 24 percent, the average increase in the proportion of doctors in the other 19 countries was 149 percent.

With regard to age-adjusted access to high-tech machinery, Canada performs dismally by comparison with other OECD countries:

• Canada ranks 13th of 24 in access to MRIs and 18th in access to CT scanners.
• It also ranked 7th of 17 in access to mammographs, and tied with two other nations at 17th of 20 in access to lithotriptors.

Lack of access to machines also means longer waiting times for diagnostic assessment, and mirrors the longer waiting times for access to specialists and to treatment found in the comparative studies examined for this study.

Source: “The Fraser Institute: High-Priced Canadian Health Care System Provides Poor Access to Care Compared to Other Nations,” Fraser Institute,” November 5, 2007.

For study:

http://www.fraserinstitute.org/COMMERCE.WEB/product_files/HowGoodHC2007.pdf

Progressive Democrats set stage to bring back ‘The Fairness Doctrine’

The Orwellian “Fairness Doctrine” is  about to be forced on America by the Democratic party. 

It is a throw back to FDR when Democrats (America’s socialists) were in complete power in the government and the Fairnes Doctrine is anything but fair. Look for a name change here. 

President Reagan ended the “Fairness Doctrine”

 

As heard on the Bill Press Radio Show on Thursday, February 5, 2009:

Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) spoke with Bill about the possible return of the Fairness Doctrine in some form.

BILL PRESS: So, is it time to bring back the Fairness Doctrine?

SENATOR DEBBIE STABENOW (D-MI): I think it’s absolutely time to pass a standard. Now, whether it’s called the Fairness Standard, whether it’s called something else — I absolutely think it’s time to be bringing accountability to the airwaves. I mean, our new president has talked rightly about accountability and transparency. You know, that we all have to step up and be responsible. And, I think in this case, there needs to be some accountability and standards put in place.

BILL PRESS: Can we count on you to push for some hearings in the United States Senate this year, to bring these owners in and hold them accountable?

SENATOR DEBBIE STABENOW (D-MI): I have already had some discussions with colleagues and, you know, I feel like that’s gonna happen. Yep.

Sleepless in Seattle — The Post-Intelligencer shuts down — lives online

Last week: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has told employees they “might” lose their jobs as soon as next week after a deadline for Hearst Corp to sell the newspaper passed last Monday. 

The news is out, the  146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer prints its last edition tomorrow.

The P-I will continue to “live” on the Internet with a much smaller staff.

I like it. It’s a mix of current and archival. Mikey likes it!

http://www.seattlepi.com 

Owner, the Hearst Corp. reports it has failed to find a buyer for the newspaper, which it put up for sale in January after nine years of financial losses. There are no more suckers left with enough trust fund money to waste.

The end of the print edition leaves The Seattle Times as the only major daily newspaper in the city. 

The TV stations will be there tonight and tomorrow capturing the historic day.

Seattle has been counting TV, and now the internet as their favorite news sources. Do you think people will wait for the Seattle Times to find out?

 

 

Last week:

Read between the lines: Boxes for removing personal items and shredding bins are scheduled to be delivered to the PI floors this week.

Clues suggest Hearst plans to close the P-I shortly

Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports on its own demise

Just after Hearst spokesman Paul Luthringer claimed that “we are still evaluating our options,” Post-Intelligencer staffers learned that boxes and bins are scheduled to be delivered to the newsroom later this week — some for materials to be taken home, others for notes that require shredding. “It would be nice to have some clarity,” says business reporter Joseph Tartakoff. “It’s really hard to plan your work when you’re not sure if you’ll be around the next day.”

The New York Times sold off the majority of its new sky scraper in New York and has a long-term rent agreement. The company no longer owns the roof over its head.

Next, McClatchy announced massive layoffs, and Hearst’s Seattle PI is about to turn into a shadow, online only edition. Meanwhile, back at Hearst’s figurative flagship, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Media Guild has accepted big cuts just to keep most jobs. The Denver Rocky Mountain News shut down a week or so ago. 

McClatchy Co. is shearing another 1,600 jobs in a cost-cutting spree that has clipped nearly one-third of the newspaper publisher’s work force in less than a year.

The latest reduction in payroll announced Monday follows through on the Sacramento-based company’s previously disclosed plans to lower its expenses by as much as $110 million over the next year as its revenue evaporates amid a devastating recession.

The layoffs will start before April. No fooling.

 Several of McClatchy’s 30 daily newspapers, including The Sacramento Bee and The Kansas City Star, already have decided how many workers will be shown the door. Close to 2,000. 

 

Only 33% would miss their local paper if it folded

Pew Research report
Just 43 percent  of Americans say that losing their local newspaper would hurt civic life in their community “a lot,” according to a Pew Research poll. And even fewer, only 33 percent say they will miss their local newspaper if it folds.

Back to the West Coast

Negotiators for the Guild and the San Francisco Chronicle reached a tentative agreement Monday night changes to the collective bargaining agreement in line with cost cuts planned by Hearst. 

The agreement will require approval by Chronicle Unit Guild members. (They will approve or lose their jobs wholesale). 

A ratification meeting will be scheduled as early as Thursday of this week. Time and place will be announced on Tuesday as soon as a large enough facility can be secured.

In view of the latest terms agreed today, the Guild Negotiating Committee recommends membership approval.

The terms reached late Monday include expanded management ability to lay off employees without regard to seniority. All employees who are discharged in a layoff or who accept voluntary buyouts are guaranteed two weeks’ pay per year of service up to a maximum of one year, plus company-paid health care for the severance term, even in the event of a shutdown – which today’s agreement is designed to avoid.

Guild membership will remain a condition of continued employment for all employees. However, new hires in certain advertising sales positions will be given the option of membership, even though they will retain Guild protection under the contract.

On-callers will be limited to no more than 10 percent in any classification or department.

Pension changes are not part of this agreement, but are being discussed by pension authorities and must be implemented under terms of the Pension Protection Act, due to the recent declines in investment markets. Because those changes may affect the decisions of many members concerning buyouts, we are attempting to reach some key understandings now as to the nature of the changes and when they will take effect.

A lunch-hour meeting on Wednesday March 11, with our pension plan’s lawyer will be held at the Guild Office, 433 Natoma, Third Floor Conference Room.

A bulletin summarizing all the proposed contract changes will be issued Tuesday. A set of the complete proposed amendments will be available on the Guild’s Web site (mediaworkers.org) as soon as possible.

Management is seeking to change the union contract as part of an attempt to cut costs and keep the paper operating under the ownership of the Hearst Corp.

The company said Feb. 24 it would sell or close the paper unless the Guild agreed to changes in the labor agreement in effect through June 2010.

The leaders in the former cash cow industry thought they could just transform to their pages of expensive advertising to Web pages. Sorry. The Web is very competitive and readers will not put up with page after page of ads to follow the news. 

McClatchy is down for the count. The stock is hovering below $1 and will soon be kicked out of the New York Stock Exchange. 

The The Sun of Myrtle Beach and the  Macon Telegraph — McClatchy papers, announced last week that they were outsourcing printing, they joined what one experts are calling the last stage of the dying industry.

Chuck Moozakis, editor-in-chief of Newspapers & Technology, found in a December survey piece that the flight from printing includes mid-sized papers like the two last week, small papers, but also very big ones like the San Francisco Chronicle. Dow Jones has already closed plants in Denver and Chicago and could shutter 10 of the 17 around the country that have printed The Wall Street Journal.

 

“There is a lot of iron sitting out there now,” Moozkis reported.  

“What’s more sobering is the amount of press capacity now available within operations with relatively new presses” like Detroit and Denver. Losing the Rocky Mountain News press run — when it closes (not if) — won’t help, and some of the same impact will come as the two Detroit papers have reduced distribution of a smaller print product most weekdays.

 

 The carbon footprint of newspapers is enormous. At least the unemployed “progressives” can be happy that they are no longer contributing to the worst global warming industry on the planet. 

Anna Nicole Smith Is Dead at 39. Two years later, justice.

By Mick Gregory

Killer good looks. Now her doctors and former lawyer and “boyfriend” charged with criminal intent. Finally, justice may come to punish the monsters behind Anna’s death.

Howard K. Stern, her lawyer-turned-confidant, and Drs. Sandeep Kapoor and Khristine Eroshevich were charged in an 11-count felony complaint on Thursday, including conspiracy, unlawfully prescribing a controlled substance and prescribing, administering or dispensing a controlled substance to an addict.

“These individuals repeatedly and excessively furnished thousands of prescription pills to Anna Nicole Smith, often for no legitimate medical purpose,” California Attorney General Jerry Brown said in a statement. His office is expected to release more details about the case at a news conference Friday.

Anna Nicole’s fame and tragic end were all thanks to the mass media, and perhaps her fantasy of becoming Marilyn Monroe (another victim of mass media). Print and TV sold copies and advertising off her life. The tabloids especially made a lot of money off of her dramatic ups and downs. You can’t help but feel pity for her.

The Houston blonde bombshell, Anna Nicole Smith died in Hollywood, Florida this afternoon at the Hard Rock Cafe and Casino. The former model and Playboy Playmate collapsed at the South Florida casino and couldn’t be revived.

A tragic ending to a People Magazine life. The past year she experienced the birth of her daughter and death of her son. She was 39 years old. Anna Nicole Smith used her good looks to leap from trailer park trash to super stardom.

var bt_counter_type=1;
var bt_project_id=798;

The media chased her around, like Princess Diana. It’s very similar to what the San Francisco Chronicle is trying to do to Barry Bonds. Some reporters even made money on a book written from illegal grand jury testimony. But Bonds has much more self control, talent and intelligence than Anna Nicole. He understands the way the media works. He hasn’t given interviews in a decade. His grand jury testimony has his statements made under oath, that he never knowingly took illegal steroid drugs.
And he’s about to be the all-time home run king.

Ask yourself this, which is harming and killing more young people? Bulimia and diet pills that girls take to just try and fit the model look? Or performance enhancing herbal remedies and vitamins that athletes may use to heal injuries and extend their careers?

Why isn’t the Chronicle looking into Nancy Pelosi’s carbon footprint? Or her hiring of non-union, illegal workers? Or, why not look at the monopoly that Shorenstien has on parking fees and downtown office space?

What do you think?

People are calling Obama a socialist — so join me — says Hugo Chavez

Venezuelan El Presidente, Hugo Chavez, on Friday called upon US President Barack Obama to follow the path to socialism, which he termed as the “only” way out of the global recession. “Come with us, align yourself, come with us on the road to socialism. This is the only path. Imagine a socialist revolution in the United States,” Chavez told a group of workers in the southern Venezuelan state of Bolivar. 

Note to Hugo, Obama is a socialist, you are preaching to a follower of Big Brother overseeing all the good workers paying half or more of their earnings to the government.

Even a New York Times reporter asked Obama to speak up on his socialist “progressive” political views.

 

 

The controversial Venezuelan leader, who taunted the United States as a source of capitalistic evil under former president George W Bush, added that the United States needs a leader who can take it to a “higher” destiny and bring it out of “the sad role that it has been given, as a murderous, attacking power that is hated all around the world.” 

Chavez said that people are calling Obama a “socialist” for the measures of state intervention he is taking to counter the crisis, so it would not be too far-fetched to suggest that he might join the project of “21st century socialism” that the Venezuelan leader is heading.

The funny thing, the Rocky didn’t know it was on life support for the last 10 years

The JOAs have just prolonged the death of failing newspapers. It’s time to pull the plug.

 

They fancy themselves literary geniuses, some of them do, when they are merely expert at the craft of certain formula which bear little relation to communicating with readers at the highest level. Or they fancy themselves tough-nosed reporters simply because they work in Chicago, and wail about the (falsely alleged) error rates of valuable tools like Wikipedia, without having even gone through the fact-checking process of a typical monthly magazine that will humble any newspaper reporter within minutes (trust me, I know).

The industry is still discussing inverted pyramids instead of the art of the link and how it changes the narrative structure of what we do.

Please die already. — The Beachwoodreporter.com.

Time is up for Obama to blame Bush. The stock market crash is all Obama’s

As 2009 began, three weeks before Barack Obama took office, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 9034 on January 2, its highest level since the autumn panic. On March 2, the Dow fell another 4.24% to 6763, for an overall decline of 25% in two months and to its lowest level since 1997. The alarming message here is that President Obama’s policies have become part of the economy’s problem. Investors with “skin in the game” aren’t falling for the socialist trillion dollar spending plans from the Democrat Party in full power in Washington D.C. They have it all for two years minimum. 

After five weeks in office, it has become apparent that Obama’s Big Brother spending policies are slowing, if not stopping, what would otherwise be the normal cycle of economic recovery. From punishing business and eliminating legal deductions to wasting scarce national treasury, Obama is creating more anxiety and less confidence in the economy — and is helping prolong what may have been a minor recession.

In fact, by historic standards, two successive quarters of negative GNP will have not been reached until the end of March. And early numbers point to growth in January.

The “blame Bush” game is over and has been since the election last November. In fact Congress has been ruled by the Democrat Party the past two years. Bush and Cheney were lame ducks. Had there been a vice president groomed for the presidency, there may have been more blame to pin to Bush. 

Former President Bush warned of the financial problems eight times the past two years and was downplayed by the Democrats in power, aided by the mass media. Barney Frank in fact, was as guilty as Ken Lay of Enron for “happy talk” about Fanny and Freddie bad loan policies.

 

 

 

The Democrats who now run Washington don’t want to hear this, because they benefit from blaming all bad economic news on President Bush. And Mr. Obama has inherited an unusual recession deepened by credit problems, both of which will take time to climb out of. But it’s also true that the economy has fallen far enough, and long enough, that much of the excess that led to recession is being worked off. Already 15 months old, the current recession will soon match the average length — and average job loss — of the last three postwar downturns. What goes down will come up — unless destructive policies interfere with the sources of potential recovery.
— Wall Street Journal

 

 

Another 50 thrown under the bus at the Columbus Dispatch

The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch is reducing the size of its newsroom, laying off more than 45 people effective on April 3, management of the newspaper announced today. No foolin’. 

“These are challenging times for many industries, including the newspaper industry,” said John F. Wolfe, publisher and CEO, who explained the changes to the staff. He’s the one who owns five suits. 

“We avoided staff reductions as long as possible long after many other news organizations took such action.”

While the newspaper readership remains strong and stable, Wolfe said the economy and market forces have pushed advertising revenue steadily downward. And advertising revenue provides the majority of funds needed to pay salaries and buy paper and ink.

Editor Benjamin J. Marrison said the newsroom staff reductions will hasten a restructuring of the newsroom to put a sharper focus on local news, local sports, enterprise reporting, and building a more robust online presence at Dispatch.com. Haven’t we heard that before? 

He said the reductions will result in some changes in the news pages in the coming months, which he will explain to readers in his “Inside Story” column as plans for those changes are mapped out.

“We will have a smaller but no less dedicated staff working each day to bring our readers the news of central Ohio,” Marrison said. “Our mission remains the same: to provide compelling, relevant, timely and accurate reports about this community. We’ll be working even harder now to make that happen.”

Maybe there is time for “senior editors” with two suits to get hired on at the Obama comunications/propaganda center for “Fairness.” 

Journalists can feel better knowing that soon, the Dispatch won’t be contributing to global warming. 

Maybe it can be called a hate crime to layoff reporters? 

On another front–the biggest losers in the media game–McClatchy News can’t even get pennies on the dollar for some of the papers they spun off from their horrible investment in Knight-Ridder.

A McClatchy spokesman said the company may not be able to recover $5.3 million owed by newspapers it had sold to companies that have recently filed for Chapter 11. That’s putting it mildly. 

The write-off pushes McClatchy’s fourth-quarter loss to $27 million, or 33 cents per share, up from the $21.7 million loss the company reported in February, according to a regulatory filing late Monday.

The company declined to say which papers still owed it money, but three former McClatchy properties filed for bankruptcy protection this year: The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News, owned by Brian Tierney’s Philadelphia Media Holdings, and the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, controlled by the private-equity firm Avista Capital Partners.

The McClatchy stock teeters on the prospect of being delisted by the New York Stock Exchange. You can smell death in the boardroom. 

Obama Creating the United Socialist States of Amerika — trillions spent on Big Government programs

Back in the USSA. We don’t know how lucky we are, eh! Back in the USSA! 

WE GOT YOUR  MONEY     GONNA SPEND YOUR  MONEY   GONNA PRINT SOME MORE  MONEY

 

Antonia Ferrier, a spokeswoman for House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), said Gibbs was trying to create a distraction by responding to Limbaugh.

“What we are seeing is a desperate attempt by Democrats to distract attention away from a multi-trillion dollar spending spree taking place in Washington,” Ferrier said. “Creating a boogeyman to change the subject does nothing to alter the fact that there are 9,000 earmarks in the omnibus spending bill, that the economic stimulus bill contained no Republican input or that their budget would increase taxes on all Americans.”

Mick Gregory

The EU is on the verge of crumbling as Obama and Gordy Brown use the banking crisis to nationalize and build more power for central government.

Historians will look back and say this was no ordinary time but a defining moment: an unprecedented period of global change, and a time when one chapter ended and another began.

The scale and the speed of the global banking crisis has at times been almost overwhelming, and I know that in countries everywhere people who rely on their banks for savings have been feeling powerless and afraid. But it is when times become harder and challenges greater that across the world countries must show vision, leadership and courage – and, while we can do a great deal nationally, we can do even more working together internationally. — Gordy Brown, UK Prime Minister

Anyone who took Economics 101 remembers the root cause of inflation — the central government prints massive amounts of currency. Change is coming. Inflation is coming my friends. From near zero under Bush (the evil one) to what may rival Zimbabwa in about a year or two. 

What will happen to the Democrat/Socialist Party’s plan to tax “only the rich?” We will all be the rich. Any two income household making over $210,000 will be taxed at the super high rates of Jimmy Carter, LBJ and FDR. 

That is coming. Bet on it. We will be wards of the state with more than 50 percent of our wealth taxed by the Democrats. The home mortgage deduction has been taken away from those like Joe the Plumber. Welcome to the USSA. We don’t know how lucky we are, eh! 

 

 

 

Back on Uncle Sam’s plantation 
Star Parker – Syndicated Columnist – 2/9/2009 8:00:00 AM

 

Six years ago I wrote a book called Uncle Sam’s Plantation. I wrote the book to tell my own story of what I saw living inside thewelfare state and my own transformation out of it.

I said in that book that indeed there are two Americas — a poor America on socialism and a wealthy America on 
capitalism. 
 
I talked about government programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS), Emergency Assistance to Needy Families with Children (EANF), Section 8 Housing, and Food Stamps.

A vast sea of perhaps well-intentioned government programs, all initially set into motion in the 1960s, that were going to lift the nation’s poor out of poverty.

A benevolent Uncle Sam welcomed mostly poor black Americans onto the government plantation. Those who accepted the invitation switched mindsets from “How do I take care of myself?” to “What do I have to do to stay on the plantation?”

Instead of solving economic problems, government welfare socialism created monstrous moral and spiritual problems — the kind of problems that are inevitable when individuals turn responsibility for their lives over to others.

The legacy of American socialism is our blighted inner cities, dysfunctional inner city schools, and broke n black families.

Through God’s grace, I found my way out. It was then that I understood what freedom meant and how great this country is.

I had the privilege of working on welfare reform in 1996, passed by a Republican Congress and signed 50 percent.

I thought we were on the road to moving socialism out of our poor black communities and replacing it with wealth-producingAmerican capitalism.

But, incredibly, we are going in the opposite direction.

Instead of poor America on socialism becoming more like rich American on capitalism, rich America on capitalism is becoming like poor America on socialism.

Uncle Sam has welcomed our banks onto the plantation and they have said, “Thank you, Suh.”

Now, instead of thinking about what creative things need to be done to serve customers, they are thinking about what they have to tell Massah in order to get their cash.

There is some kind of irony that this is all happening under our first black president on the 200th anniversary of the birthday ofAbraham Lincoln.

Worse, socialism seems to be the element of our new young president. And maybe even more troubling, our corporate executives seem happy to move onto the plantation.

In an op-ed on the opinion page of the Washington Post, Mr. Obama is clear that the goal of his trillion dollar spending plan is much more than short term economic stimulus.

“This plan is more than a prescription for short-term spending — it’s a strategy for America ‘s long-term growth and opportunity in areas such as renewable energy, healthcare, and education.”

Perhaps more incredibly, Obama seems to think that government taking over an economy is a new idea. Or that massive growth in government can take place “with unprecedented transparency and accountability.”

Yes, sir, we heard it from Jimmy Carter when he created the Department of Energy, the Synfuels Corporation, and the Department of Education.

Or how about the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 — The War on Poverty — which President Johnson said “…does not merely expand old programs or improve what is already being done. It charts a new course. It strikes at the causes, not just the consequences of poverty.”

Trillions of dollars later, black poverty is the same. But black families are not, with triple the incidence of single-parent homes and out-of-wedlock births.

It’s not complicated. Americans can accept Barack Obama‘s invitation to move onto the plantation. Or they can choose personal responsibility and freedom.

Does anyone really need to think about what the choice should be?

 

Rocky Mountain News publishes final edition Friday

Poynteronline.org holds a podcast/blog later today on “Is it time to exit newspaper journalism?” What do you think they will say? 

Here is the final edition. It has a sad, final edition look to it. http://eatthedarkness.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/rip-rocky/

 

  

Joe Mahoney © The Rocky

Executives from  Scripps, announce their decision on the future of the Rocky Mountain News in the 150-year-old newspaper’s newsroom on 2/26/09 in Denver. In December 2008, the Rocky’s parent company put the paper up for sale, citing multi-million dollar annual losses. No offers were made. Nobody was that slow on the uptake on the future of newspapers.

  

 

 

  

Photo by Darin McGregor © The Rocky

A man stops to read the ticker on the outside of the Denver Newspaper Agency building announcing that the Rocky Mountain News is closing and that it will publish its last edition on Friday. Photograph taken in Denver Thurs. Feb 26, 2009.

  

Photo by Joe Mahoney © The Rocky

 

  

Photo by Joe Mahoney © The Rocky

Executives from E.W. Scripps Co., announce their decision on the future of the Rocky Mountain News in the 150-year-old newspaper’s newsroom on 2/26/09 in Denver. In December 2008, the Rocky’s parent company put the paper up for sale, citing multi-million dollar annual losses.

Share Your Thoughts

What do you think about Scripps’ decision to close the Rocky? We want to hear your thoughts. You can talk live with Mark Wolf by clicking here, or send a letter to the editor at letters@rockymountainnews.com

• BLOG: Official announcement at Rocky
• VIDEO: Scripps announces closure of Rocky Mountain News
• SLIDE SHOW: Rocky staff members get news of closure
• NEWS CONFERENCE: Recession forced closure, Boehne says

The Rocky Mountain News publishes its last paper today (Friday).

Rich Boehne, chief executive officer of Rocky-owner Scripps, broke the news to the staff at noon today, ending nearly three months of speculation over the paper’s future.

“People are in grief,” Editor John Temple said a noon news conference.

But he was intent on making sure the Rocky’s final edition, which would include a 52-page wraparound section, was as special as the paper itself.

“This is our last shot at this,” Temple said at a second afternoon gathering at the newsroom. “This morning (someone) said it’s like playing music at your own funeral. It’s an opportunity to make really sweet sounds or blow it. I’d like to go out really proud.”

Boehne told staffers that the Rocky was the victim of a terrible economy and an upheaval in the newspaper industry.

“Denver can’t support two newspapers any longer,” Boehne told staffers, some of whom cried at the news. “It’s certainly not good news for you, and it’s certainly not good news for Denver.”

Tensions were higher at the second staff meeting, held to update additional employees who couldn¹t attend the hastily called noon press conference.

Several employees wanted to know about severance packages, or even if they could buy at discount their computers.

Others were critical of Scripps for not seeking wage concessions first or going online only.

But Mark Contreras, vice president of newspapers for Scripps, said the math simply didn’t work.

“If you cut both newsrooms in half, fired half the people in each newsroom, you’d be down to where other market newsrooms are today. And they’re struggling,” he said.

As for online revenues, he said if they were to grow 40 percent a year for the next five years, they still would be equal to the cost of one newsroom today.

“We’re sick that we’re here,” Contreras said. “We want you to know it’s not your fault. There’s no paper in Scripps that we hold dearer.”

But Boehne said Scripps intended to keep its other media, both print and in broadcast, running.

“Scripps has been around for 130 years. We intend to be around another 130 years,” Boehne said. “If you can’t make hard decisions, you won’t make it.”

After Friday, the Denver Post will be the only newspaper in town.

Asked if pubilsher Dean Singleton now walks away with the whole pie, Boehne was blunt.

“He walks away with an unprofitable paper, $130 million in debt and revenues that are down 15-20 percent every year,” Boehne said.

Asked if Singleton would have to pay for the presses now, Boehne added, “We had to kill a newspaper. He can pay for the presses.”

Reaction came from across the nation and around the block.

“The Rocky Mountain News has chronicled the storied, and at times tumultuous, history of Colorado for nearly 150 years. I am deeply saddened by this news, and my heart goes out to all the talented men and women at the Rocky,” U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet said in a statement. “I am grateful for their hard work and dedication to not only their profession, but the people of Colorado as well.”

At the Statehouse, Rep. Joe Rice (D-Littleton), said the paper would be missed.

“The Rocky Mountain News has been a valued institution in Denver,” he said.

“It’s a sad, sad day.”

Long-time Denver real estate agent Edie Marks called the Rocky a voice of reason, moderation and common sense.

“I think that it was the fairest newspaper, the most diverse, and am important part of my daily life,” she said. “I’m going to miss it tremendously.”

On Dec. 4, Boehne announced that Scripps was looking for a buyer for the Rocky and its 50 percent interest in the Denver Newspaper Agency, the company that handles business matters for the papers. The move came because of financial losses in Denver, including $16 million in 2008.

“This moment is nothing like any experience any of us have had,” Boehne said. “The industry is in serious, serious trouble.”

Didn’t Obama sign the trillion dollar stimulous bill in Denver? What did that do for the Rocky? 

More Layoffs at the Denver Post

Updated Feb 26:

Note to “journalists:”  Your socialist views promoted Obama and the Democrat Party take over of Colorado. Businesses small and large are the enemy of Democrats. They were your advertisers. Does Big Brother spend advertising in your newspaper?

The Denver Post announced the layoffs of six newsroom managers Wednesday as part of a cost-cutting effort. Big deal, you think? After hundreds have been “let go” over the past two years? Yes. It is big for them.

Dismissed, effective Friday, were Gary Clark, managing editor of news; Mark Cardwell, managing editor of online news; Erik Strom, assistant managing editor of technology; Ingrid Muller, creative director; Cynthia Pasquale, assistant city editor; and Stephen Keating, online special- projects editor. Keating will continue to work on a project for Post owner MediaNews Group.

The layoffs come as dozens of newspapers across the country are cutting staffs and budgets to deal with steep declines in advertising and circulation.

“These departures were forced by budget cuts I have to make,” Post editor Greg Moore said in a memo to staffers. “I think you all know the financial challenges facing this industry and this newspaper.”

MediaNews Group is negotiating with union-covered Post employees for $2 million in wage and benefit concessions.

Rocky Mountain News owner E.W. Scripps has put that newspaper up for sale, and may close it, because of mounting financial losses.

Scripps imposed companywide pay and benefit cuts Wednesday at its newspapers and television stations, although the Rocky Mountain News reported that the cuts will not apply to the News.

The reductions, announced in an e-mail from Scripps chief executive Rich Boehne, were reported in several Scripps newspapers. Scripps declined to publicly release what it described as an “internal employee memo.”

I wrote about Times Mirror pulling the plug on The Denver Post, Dallas Times-Herald, and Houston Post, some 13 years ago, next they sold the family jewels, the rest of Times Mirror to the Tribune Co., and we all know about Zell’s offer to take the company private.

This is what is in store for all the former Times Mirror papers:

Layoffs, cuts to the bone.

Memo from Denver Post editor Greg Moore

To The Staff:

On Monday, April 23, in the auditorium on the first floor, we will have two very important staff meetings. I don’t think there is any secret that our newspaper and others have been facing some challenging times.

Even though just a year ago we went through buyouts in an effort to reduce costs, the financial situation facing the paper and the Denver Newspaper Agency requires additional measures be taken. At meetings at 11 a.m. and again at 4 p.m., we will explain details of another round of buyouts in an effort to cut expenses without having to do layoffs. These buyouts will be offered to Guild and exempt employees. I really hope we are able to achieve the savings we need and every effort has been made to construct an offer that will help us get there. The meetings will give us a chance to share details of the offers with you and answer questions. I know this is tough and introduces more anxiety in already difficult times. But we will get through it.

See you then,

Greg

While the Chandlers live like royalty in California.

 

Singleton should be praised for saving the Denver Post. It very easily could have been the Post shutting down today instead of the weird, tabloid Rocky Mountain News.

Chronicle’s chronic losses lead to major cuts at the Bay Area’s largest newspaper — papers coast-to-coast cutting staff

The San Francisco Chronicle ready for some major “right sizing.”

After some more streamlining in addition to a new printing process off site, the largest newspaper in Northern California should begin to be profitable again.  

In a posted statement, Hearst said if the savings cannot be accomplished “quickly” the company will seek a buyer, and if none comes forward, it will close the Chronicle. The Chronicle lost more than $50 million in 2008 and is on a pace to lose more than that this year, Hearst said.

Frank J. Vega, chairman and publisher of the Chronicle, said, “It’s just a fact of life that we need to live within our means as a newspaper – and we have not for years.”

Vega said plans remain on track for the June 29 transition to new presses owned and operated by Canadian-based Transcontinental Inc., which will give the Chronicle industry-leading color reproduction. That move will save a few million annually due to the reduction of highly paid pressmen.

If the reductions can be accomplished, Vega said, “We are optimistic that we can emerge from this tough cycle with a healthy and vibrant Chronicle.”

The company did not specify the size of the staff reductions or the nature of the other cost-savings measures it has in mind. The company said it will immediately seek discussions with the Northern California Media Workers Guild, Local 39521, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Local 853, which represent the majority of workers at the Chronicle.

“Because of the sea change newspapers everywhere are undergoing and these dire economic times, it is essential that our management and the local union leadership work together to implement the changes necessary to bring the cost of producing the Chronicle into line with available revenue,” Frank A. Bennack, Jr., Hearst vice chairman and chief executive, and Steven R. Swartz, president of Hearst Newspapers, said in a joint statement.

From the Newsosaur:

SF Chron cost-cut target equals 47% of staff

If the San Francisco Chronicle had to slash enough payroll to offset the more than $50 million operating loss threatening its future, nearly half of its 1,500 employees would be dismissed.

That’s the magnitude of the challenge facing the managers and union representatives who were tasked today by Hearst Corp. to find a way to cut the paper’s mushrooming deficit – or else.

After losing more than $1 billion without seeing a dime of profit since purchasing the paper in 2000, the Hearst Corp. today threatened to sell or close the Chronicle if sufficient savings were not identified to staunch operating losses surpassing $1 million a week. Without significant cost reductions, the losses would accelerate this year as a result of the ailing economy, said Michael Keith, a spokesman for the paper.

To wipe out a $50 million loss, let alone make a profit, the paper would have to eliminate 47% of its entire staff

Meanwhile, on the East Coast:

The latest Hartford Courant (former Times-Mirror newspaper) layoffs were announced last night – political reporter Mark Pazniokas is among those cut from the newspaper. We’ve been told these names as well – please correct us if we have anything wrong: Jesse Hamilton of the Washington bureau,  Religion Reporter Elizabeth Hamilton, Business Reporter Robin Stansbury, Environment Reporter David Funkhouser, reporters  Steve Grant and Anna Marie Somma, sportswriter Matt Eagan,  itowns editor Loretta Waldman, itowns reporter Nancy Lastrina, administrative assistant Judy Prato, Marge Ruschau, Features copy editors Adele Angle and David Wakefield, and library staffer & researcher Owen Walker.

We’re told that editor/reporter Kate Farrish resigned earlier this week as did editor John Ferraro.

Denis Horgan is calling it the Mardi Gras Massacre.

Paul Bass has more in the New Haven Independent.

Now, back to Texas:

Memo from San Antonio Express-News’ editor

From: Rivard, Robert
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 10:44 AM
To: SAEN Editorial
Subject: We are canceling this morning’s news meeting for obvious reasons.

Colleagues:

By now you have read Tom Stephenson’s message to all employees. Every division of the Express-News will be affected, including every department in the newsroom. Incremental staff and budget cuts, we are sorry to say, have proven inadequate amid changing social and market forces now compounded by this deepening recession.

It is not lost on us as journalists in this difficult moment that we have built an audience of readers, in print and online, that is larger and more diverse than at any time in our century and half of publishing. We have done that at the Express-News through a commitment to excellence and public service. Now we must find ways to maintain these high levels of journalistic distinction even as valued colleagues depart. It is an unfortunate but undeniable fact that declining advertising revenues are insufficient to support our operations at current levels. At the same time, more and more people have become accustomed to reading us at no cost on the Internet. As a result, we are reducing the newsroom staff by some 75 positions, counting layoffs and open positions we are eliminating.

As a first step to securing our future and continuing to serve the community, we are undergoing a fundamental and painful restructuring of the newsroom staff. We will have fewer departments and fewer managers, and yes, fewer of every class of journalist. After we reorganize and consolidate additional operations with the Houston Chronicle, we will then turn to finding new ways to create and present the journalism we know is vital to the city and the region. There is every indication the community we serve recognizes our importance and wants the Express-News to succeed.

The newsroom leadership team will begin now to meet with individuals whose jobs are being eliminated. Brett Thacker and I are working with these editors to carry out such notifications as swiftly and humanely as possible. No one is being asked to leave the Express-News today unless you so choose. March 20 will be the final day for those whose jobs are being cut, at which time they will then receive involuntary separation packages that include two weeks’ pay for each year of service up to one year’s pay, along with other benefits. Some production journalists involved in the consolidation project with the Houston Chronicle will be asked to stay on until that project is completed in the coming months. Those who do stay until the completion will receive their separation packages at that time.

We have worked to preserve the size and depth of our newsroom in every imaginable way these past months and years, but events beyond our control have overwhelmed those efforts. Newsrooms become like families, but companies in every industry reach a point where they face fundamental, sometimes harsh change in order to preserve their viability. We are at that point. Most of you read yesterday’s news regarding the San Francisco Chronicle and recently became aware of pending staff cuts at the Houston Chronicle. Our intention is to get through these difficult days and work to remain an indispensible source of news and information through the recession and beyond.

Hearst purchased the Chronicle in 2000, but soon afterward felt the impact of an economic downturn in the dot.com sector as well as the loss of classified advertising to Craigslist and other online sites. The problems have been exacerbated by the current recession.

In the news release, the privately-held, New York-based company said that the Chronicle has had “major losses” since 2001.

Back on the West Coast, there is no safe haven.

Sacramento Guild bracing for job cuts

Woe is us, McClatchy warns

Media Workers Guild – 12 Feb 2009

Sacramento Bee employees should expect a serious wave of layoffs in early March, as well as other cost-cutting measures now being considered, including wage cuts and mandatory furloughs as McClatchy Newspapers’ financial crisis worsens, company representatives told the Guild’s bargaining committee in a 90-minute session Thursday.

Mercury Bargaining Bulletin 9

Mercury News wants $1.5 million cut from wages and benefits

 

California Media Workers Guild – 10 Feb 2009

Mercury News negotiators said Tuesday they need to find $1.5 million by cutting wages and benefits paid to Guild members annually in the face of the economic woes facing the company. The company’s announcement came at a bargaining session Tuesday that kicked off an effort by management and the Guild to expedite the process of reaching a new contract to replace the one that expired October 31.

“Given the losses the Chronicle continues to sustain, the time to implement these changes cannot be long. These changes are designed to give the Chronicle the best possible chance to survive this economic downturn and continue to serve the people of the Bay Area with distinction, as it has since 1865,” Bennack and Swartz said in their statement.

“Survival is the outcome we all want to achieve,” they added. “But without specific changes we are seeking across the entire Chronicle organization, we will have no choice but to quickly seek a buyer for the Chronicle, and, should a buyer not be found, to shut down the newspaper.”

The Hearst statement further said that cost reductions are part of a broader effort to restore the Chronicle to financial health. At the beginning of the year, the Chronicle raised its prices for home delivery and single-copy purchases.

Hearst owns 15 other newspapers including the Houston Chronicle, San Antonio News-Express and the Albany Times-Union in New York . Hearst announced Jan. 9 that in March that if a buyer is not found it will close Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which has lost money since 2000.

Vega said readers and advertisers will see no difference in the Chronicle during the discussions with the unions.

“Even with the reduction in workforce, our goal will be to retain our essential and well-read content,” Vega said. “We will continue to produce the very best newspaper for our readers and preserve one of San Francisco ‘s oldest and most important institutions.”

The Chronicle, the Bay Area’s largest and oldest newspaper, is read by more than 1.6 million people weekly. It also operates SFGate, among the nation’s 10 largest news Web sites. SFGate depends on the Chronicle’s print news staff for much its content.

The San Francisco Bay Area is home to 21 daily newspapers covering an 11-county area.

The Chronicle’s news staff of about 275, even after a series of reductions in recent years, is the largest of any newspaper in the Bay Area.

“While the reductions are an unfortunate sign of the times, the news staff has always been resilient in San Francisco ,” said Ward Bushee, editor and executive vice president. “We remain fully dedicated toward serving our readers with an outstanding newspaper. We are playing to win.”

The area’s other leading newspapers – the Bay Area Media News Group that includes the San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times and Oakland Tribune – also have seen revenues decline sharply and cut staff.

These problems are a reflection of those faced by newspapers across America as they experience fundamental changes in their business model brought on by rapid growth in readership on free internet sites, a decline in paid circulation, the erosion of advertising and rising costs.

Advertising traditionally has offset the cost of producing and delivering a newspaper, which allowed publishers to charge readers substantially less than the actual cost of doing business. The loss of advertising has undermined that pricing model.

In the case of the Chronicle, Vega said the expense of producing and delivering the newspaper to a seven-day subscriber is more than double the $7.75 weekly cost to subscribe.

At the beginning of the year, in an effort to evolve its business model and offset its substantial losses, the Chronicle raised its subscription and newsstand prices, taking a cue from European papers that charge far more than their American counterparts.

“We know that people in this community care deeply about the Chronicle,” Vega said. “In today’s world, the Chronicle is still very inexpensive. This is a critical time and we deeply hope our readers will stick with us.”

The challenge the Chronicle faces, Vega said, is to bring its revenues from advertising and circulation into balance with its expenses so that the newspaper can at least break even financially.

“We are asking our unions to work with us as partners in making these difficult cost-cutting decisions and reduction in force to ensure the newspaper survives,” Vega said.

Michael Savage will have some candid comments on the layoffs. What about the content of the Chronicle’s “news?”

The union reps “negotiate” their fate:

Cost-Cutting Talks Begin – 

Guild leaders met with representatives from The Chronicle and Hearst Corp. this morning to discuss the company’s cost-cutting proposal.

We opened the meeting by underscoring our commitment to our membership and the community to do all we can to reach an agreement that will keep The Chronicle open and return it to profitability.

The company seeks a combination of wide-ranging contractual concessions in addition to layoffs, the exact number of which the company said it did not yet have. For Guild-covered positions, the company did say the job cuts would at least number 50. Other proposals include removal of some advertising sales people from Guild coverage and protection, the right to outsource — specifically mentioning Ad Production — voluntary buyouts, layoffs and wage freezes. 

We plan to closely analyze this proposal over the next few days and explore every possible alternative. Meetings will be held to discuss details with members of the bargaining unit. An informational membership meeting will be held from 5-7 p.m.tonight (Tuesday Feb. 25) at the Guild office, 3rd floor conference room.

Management reiterated its commitment to keeping The Chronicle open and to working with the Guild to secure a viable future. Despite the difficult economic environment, we are confident that by working together we can find solutions to any problems that confront us.

If you have any questions or suggestions, contact your shop steward or e-mail Unit Chair Michelle Devera, Local President Mike Cabanatuan or Unit Secretary Alissa Van Cleave.

In solidarity,

Michelle Devera, Chronicle Unit chair, michelleatsfchronunit@gmail.com
Michael Cabanatuan, Local President, ctuan@aol.com
Alissa Van Cleave, Chronicle Unit secretary, vancelave44@hotmail.com
Wally Greenwell, Chronicle Unit vice chair
Gloria La Riva, president, Typographical Sector
Carl Hall, Local Representative

Philly Newspapers Rolled – Inquirer and Daily News in free fall

Bankruptcy documents filed Sunday by Philadelphia Newspapers LLC, The Inquirer and Daily News and seven affiliated suburban publications report the newspaper group bought  from McClatchy (the troubled chain that Knight-Ridder unloaded in 2005) is asking the court for bankruptcy protection. The Philly group paid McClatchy  $562 million for the papers. The value of the assets is far lower than that just a few years later.

You have to admire the business knowledge of the Knight-Ridder family share holders who knew when to fold them and chuck them off before the business trends became obvious.

This report in Forbes Magazine is by Wm. P Barret, former Dallas Times Herald and Philly Inquirer reporter and editor. He has good sources. 

The Inquirer and Daily News join a growing list of newspapers forced into bankruptcy after sharp declines in advertising destroyed their ability to service big debts taken on when they changed hands. A day earlier, Journal Register Co. (nyse: JRC – news – people ), parent of Connecticut’s New Haven Register and 178 other weekly and daily newspapers, sought bankruptcy-court protection. The same fate befell the Minneapolis Star Tribune last month. In December, Tribune Co., whose holdings include the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and Newsday, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. All newspapers have suffered sharp ad revenue declines due to Internet competition and the recession, but those that recently changed hands in leveraged deals are the most vulnerable.

The bankruptcy threatens to wipe out the $150 million equity investment made by Tierney’s Philly group, which included local labor unions and business interests. It also raises the prospect of big losses by the lenders that provided the balance of more than $400 million in debt financing. The list of largest unsecured creditors was topped by Royal Bank of Scotland (nyse: RBS – news – people ), which is owed $22 million. As of Jan. 31, the company said it still owed $395 million to lenders.

 

“The debtors’ assets and going concern value are worth less today than they were worth in 2006,” Thayer wrote. He added that Philadelphia Newspapers had 2008 free cash flow–before interest, taxes, depreciation or amortization–of $36 million. That is expected to drop 31% to $25 million this year, Thayer wrote. It is from cash flow that debt-servicing payments are made.

Thayer’s statement hints at hard-ball tactics on all sides as Tierney’s team fought to restructure its finances outside of court. A Tierney request in November for $20 million in equity investment from lenders was rejected. Then this month, Thayer wrote, lenders countered with a proposal that the money be a loan and demanded an answer to their proposal within 48 hours–and without providing a copy of the paperwork describing fees for their loans.

In a memo to employees, Tierney said the company has asked the hometown bankruptcy court to allow payments of benefits and pensions. A bankruptcy filing usually halts such payments, at least initially. In recent years, many employees of the Inquirer and Daily News have taken buyouts or have been laid off.

Thayer’s affidavit says Tierney’s management has “dramatically improved the operations.” But one thing not specified was print circulation numbers of the Inquirer and Daily News, both Pulitzer Prize-winning newspapers. Latest audited figures put their combined daily circulation at 398,000, on the order of half what it was when the papers’ main competition, The Philadelphia Bulletin, went out of business in 1982.

Has the earth been visited by space aliens? Kucinich and Pelosi think so. Do the math.

The idea of space travel is fun and provides great entertainment. I’m sure there are many forms of life similar to earth in the universe. But if you do the math, you will see that it doesn’t matter. The space aliens are not going to visit earth and probe Democrat House representatives’ rectums in Cleveland Ohio, or San Francisco like Democrat Dennis Kucinich insists happened to him and friends of his in Hollywood. Nancy Pelosi who like her friend Kucinich, may look like an alien from another galaxy, that’s a fact, but her basic math skills are lacking. 

 

Kucinich is currently the chairman of theDomestic Policy Subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. He is also a member of theEducation and Labor Committee.

Kucinich heads committees on education? That should be against the law.

We need to increase teaching math, science and economics in our schools. That’s a fact.

Meanwhile the stock market continues to crash today. Investors understand economics and simple math and that spending billions on more government programs is not what drives an economy. 
A team led by Jochen Greiner of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics determined that the huge gamma-ray burst occurred 12.2 billion light years away. Pluto is 12 light hours away.

Can you imagine man travelling in a vehicle that is 1,000 times slower than the speed of light? It would take 12.2 million years to visit a neighboring  solar system.  That’s the time equivalent to going back to the days dinosaurs roamed the earth. Planet of the Apes, it would not be. Planet of the volvox colonies. 

The concept that a rocket or space craft could ever travel at the speed of light are comic book science, much like man-made global warming. Let’s say man ever could achieve the speed of light of a space craft? Think about the speed and distance.

Happy Valentine’s Day. Wife of Islamic TV network exec beheaded

 

Muzzammil Hassan, right, founder of Bridges TV (Islamic CTV format), is charged with murder in the beheading of his wife, Aasiya Hassan, left, in Orchard Park (exclusive suburb of Buffalo, NY).

                    

Woops there goes another fact about the religion of peace.  

Muzzammil Hassan came to America from Pakistan 25 years ago. He became a successful banker in Buffalo, New York, near the famed Niagara Falls.

While he and his wife were happy to be in the United States, they were upset by the negative perceptions of Muslims, and particularly how this perception might affect their children.

That is how they came up with the idea of Bridges TV. Mr. Hassan’s wife challenged him to start it.

“I had no background in television. I didn’t know anything about TV. Her comment was, ‘you have an M.B.A. (masters degree in business) why don’t you write a business plan?’”

He quit his job at the bank and for the next three years worked developing an English language television network that offers news and entertainment for Muslims. Stonings, beheadings, car bombings perhaps?

Hassan hopes Bridges TV lives up to its name by uniting American Muslims and by helping non-Muslims overcome the negative images they may have of both Muslims and Islam.

That was in 2004. Now, five years later, as far as I know, Muzzamil is still concerned about “negative perceptions” of Muslims held by Americans.

But his wife has no worries in that department. In fact, she has no worries at all.

Orchard Park police are investigating the gruesome killing, the beheading of a woman, after her husband — an influential member of the local Muslim community — reported her death to police Thursday, Feb. 12.

Police identified the victim as Aasiya Z. Hassan, 37. Detectives charged her husband, Muzzammil Hassan, 44, with second-degree murder.

“He came to the police station at 6:20 p.m. [Thursday] and told us that she was dead,” Orchard Park Police Chief Andrew Benz said late this morning.

Muzzammil Hassan told police that his wife was at his business, Bridges TV, on Thorn Avenue in the village. Officers went to that location and discovered her body.

Muzzammil Hassan is the founder and chief executive officer of Bridges TV, which he launched in 2004, amid hopes that it would help portray Muslims in a more positive light. This unfortunate incident will not help. 

The killing apparently occurred some time late Thursday afternoon. Detectives still are looking for the murder weapon. 

“Obviously, this is the worst form of domestic violence possible,” Erie County District Attorney Frank A. Sedita III said today. 

Authorities say Aasiya Hassan recently had filed for divorce from her husband. 

“She had an order of protection that had him out of the home as of Friday the 6th [of February],” Benz said. 

Muzzammil Hassan was arraigned before Village Justice Deborah Chimes and sent to the Erie County Holding Center. 

It’s too bad the order of protection was useless. A 12 gage Mossberg shotgun would have been a much better thing to do than waste time on a restraining order.

 

 

Truth Commission headed by Democrat Patrick Leahy to start Soviet-style show trials

Mirroring the former Soviet Union’s Communist Party of the 1950s, today’s one party government in the USA (totally in the hands of the Democrat Party) are on a power grab.

Get ready for show trials! Democrat Patrick “Leaky” Leahy, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, urged a commission as a way to heal what he called sharp political divides under former President George W. Bush and to prevent future abuses.

How about the abuses of Congressional Democrat Party hacks like Leahy?

And what’s with that permenant forced smile, it’s like the Dali Lama’s?

Leahy is an example of the “change” Obama promised? That hack has been around for 40 years.

He compared it to other truth commissions, such as one in South Africa that investigated the apartheid era of tribes hacking each other to death. 

Is this a free country? Next, the Fairness Doctrine will be pushed through. 

“We need to come to a shared understanding of the failures of the recent past,” Leahy said in a speech at Georgetown University.

Be afraid, but what can we do about it? Next “the Fairness Doctrine.”

Bill Clinton said that there needs to be either “more balance in the programs or have some opportunity for people to offer  countervailing opinions.” Clinton added that he didn’t support repealing the Fairness Doctrine, an act done under Reagan’s FCC. 

In the past week, a couple Democratic Senators, Debbie Stabenow and Tom Harkin, have both spoken favorably about the Fairness Doctrine, or holding hearings on radio “accountability.” What you don’t know is that Stabenow’s hubby is a big investor in Air America.

Coverup: Were Wildfires Started by Terrorists?

Mick Gregory

Updated Feb. 9 2009

The wildfires in Australia are reported to be arson and an act of terror and mass murder according to the Prime Minister

U.S. officials monitoring terrorist web sites have discovered a call for using forest fires as weapons against “crusader” nations, in what may explain some recent wildfires in places like southern California and Greece.

A terrorist website was discovered recently that carried a posting that called for “Forest Jihad.” The posting was listed on the Internet on Nov. 26 and reported in U.S. intelligence channels last week.

The statement, in Arabic, said that “summer has begun so do not forget the Forest Jihad.”
The writer called on all Muslims in the United States, Europe, Russia and Australia to “start forest fires.”

The posting quoted imprisoned Al Qaida terrorist Abu Musab Al-Suri, as saying “Jihad is an art just like poetry, music, and the fine arts. There are people that draw and there are others that are jihadists. They both act upon inspiration.”

Al-Suri is a senior Al Qaida leader captured in Pakistan in 2005 who is believed to be in U.S. custody.

Updated Nov. 16, 2008

Here we go again. 

 

The cause of most of the blazes was not known, though at least one of the major fires here was deemed of suspicious origin.

The outbreak of fires came a week shy of the one-year anniversary of a series of blazes in Southern California that destroyed more than 2,200 homes, killed 10 people, burned more than half a million acres from the Mexican border to Santa Barbara County and resulted in the largest evacuation in state history.

Oct. 28, 2007
The largest fire, in San Diego County, has burned more than 300 square miles but was 90 percent contained as of Sunday. State officials said blazes still threatened 12,000 homes in the region, though firefighters were optimistic that the cool weather would enable them to get the fires under control within about a week.

Santa Anna winds fueled as many as 24 separate wildfires last week, ravaging more than 500,000 acres and destroying 2,300 buildings, according to the California Office of Emergency Services. The fires have been responsible for 12 deaths and 78 injuries.

One has to wonder how 24 separate fires started?

Oct. 27, 2007
A “predictive and astrological analyst,” Dr. Louis Touri, was on ‘Coast to Coast A.M.’ about last night. He said that it was his opinion that these California fires were a terrorist act.

 

 

 

He makes a good point. I believe these fires are too far apart in distance and in too many in number to have all started by random acts of nature.

Oct. 26, 2007
Half a million acres have been destroyed in California.

“Arsonists are not highly regarded in the prison population. They are seen as cowardly,” said Timothy Huff, a retired FBI criminal profiler. “When an arsonist strikes his match, he cannot predict the ultimate consequences. This is what makes them despicable criminals.”

Any video of Palestinian women making that funny turkey sound, rejoicing over this?

Now it is 2,000 homes and businesses destroyed. Note to Islamic fascists: This is a free country, this is America. We will rebuild. The devistation will actually cause a building boom and help the depressed real estate market. See how free enterprise works?

As of Friday morning, this is what we know. Nine people are dead, 11, including two suspected arsonists who was shot by sheriff deputies fleeing from an apparent fire flash point behind a college and another ramming police cars. So far, no descriptions of the men. (I’m thinking if they are white guys or black guys we would know by know.)

More than 1,000,000 were evacuated. Thousands returned home to ruins today. Nearly 18,000 customers in the San Diego area remained without power Thursday. A San Diego Gas & Electric Co. (SDOPH) helicopter attempting to restore power crashed Thursday morning, but all four people aboard escaped injury. The cause of the crash wasn’t immediately known.
Medical examiners were trying to establish the identities of the man and woman whose bodies were found near Poway, north of San Diego, said Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman Jan Caldwell. The bodies were found in a cinderblock, garage-sized building behind a home that sits alone atop a hill overlooking the San Diego Wild Animal Park.

The pair are believed to be related, officials said. Neighbors said they last saw them around midnight Monday when they told the two to evacuate, according to Caldwell.
Flames also claimed the life of a 52-year-old man in Tecate.

Oct. 25, 2007

The FBI, ATF, the Orange County Fire Authority and the California Department of Forestry will officially state that the massive Santiago Canyon Fire – which has caused an estimated $10 million in damage – is being declared arson, and a $50,000 reward is being offered to find the arsonist. Today, more than one million people have been evacuated, six have died and more than a billion dollars in expensive real estate has gone up in smoke.

As wildfires ripped through Southern California, a 41-year-old illegal immigrant was arrested on suspicion of arson after quick-thinking Woodland Hills residents allegedly saw him lighting a fire and called 911, police said this morning.
Woodland Hills residents saw a man lighting a fire then walking away about 4:30 yesterday on a hillside near Del Valle Street and Ponce Avenue. After calling police, the residents followed him to a restaurant and waited for police to arrive.

Police booked Catalino Pineda, a day laborer, into the Los Angeles County Jail where he was being held on an arson charge. Bail was set at $75,000.

Pineda is a native of Guatemala. He is currently on probation for making excessive false emergency reports to law enforcement, police said.

What about a description of the “alleged” arsonist killed by police?

FBI, ATF, the Orange County Fire Authority and the California Department of Forestry announced that the massive Santiago Canyon Fire — which has caused an estimated $10 million in damage — is being officially declared an arson, and a $70,000 reward is being offered to find the arsonist. Two points of origin have been identified. A $250,000 reward is in the offing. Any leads? Yes. 250 have come in already.

Oct. 24, 2007
Amid new blazes adding to the firestorm already devistating the Southern California region, a man in Hesperia has been arrested on suspicion of arson, and police reported shooting and killing another arson suspect after chasing him out of scrub behind Cal State San Bernardino.

Law enforcement officials said today that they didn’t know whether either of the men had started any of the more than a dozen large fires that have devastated Southern California in recent days, including the nearby Lake Arrowhead blaze. The brush fire in Hesperia was quickly extinguished by residents.

Investigators have said that at least two of the huge wildfires, one in Orange County and the other in Temecula, were the work of arsonists. What are the Islamic websites in America saying? They seem rather quiet.

Oct. 23, 2007
Today we have half a million evacuated from their homes in Southern California, more than 1,000 destroyed homes and several missing or dead from 13 wildfires.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, called it “a tragic time for California,” and declared a state of emergency in seven counties and redeployed California National Guard members from the border to support firefighters.

Oct. 22, 2007
Could terrorists have started the fires? Please don’t ask. You are racisit if you even think Islamic terrorists would do this.

Update: News is coming out that several of the fires are looking like arson according to officials of Orange County.

Nearly a dozen wildfires spread across Southern California on Sunday, killing one person near San Diego, destroying several homes and a church in celebrity-laden Malibu, and forcing hundreds of thousands from their homes down the coast to San Diego.

FLASHBACK: June 20, 2007
The FBI alerted law enforcement agencies this summer that an al-Qaeda terrorist now in detention had talked of masterminding a plot to set a series of devastating forest fires around the western United States.

Did you read about that in your mainstream media?

How many of the major forest fires since 1990s have been caused by arson? How much has been covered up for “public safety?”

I understand economics. There is no way we can afford to have the National Guard stand over the millions of wooded acres near population centers. It may be a good tactic to hide the fact that several of the wild fires may be linked to terrorists. Why give them credit?

We could ask the Muslims in the U.S. to help identify the pigs among them and help us stop plots like these.

Law enforcement officials suspect several of the California wildfires that have killed scores of people and consumed more than 800,000 acres and destroyed more than 3,000 homes were deliberately set – increasing speculation there is a terror connection to the blazes.

The fire that caused most of the death and destruction three years ago has produced one arrest so far — Dikran Armouchian.

The fires are now among the deadliest and costliest disasters in California, second only to the Oakland Hills fire. I’ll have to dig up some names of any suspects.

“The fire when it gets started there will be of biblical proportions,” Andrea Tuttle, director of the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, told the New York Times. “It’s going to be the most intense fire that we have ever seen.”

While California law enforcement authorities investigate an eyewitness report of arson in the recent Lake Tahoe fire, there is new evidence terrorism was behind other recent wildfires in Europe and Australia.

In the devastating forest fires that swept through the Maures mountains near the French Riviera in 2004, investigators found Molotov cocktails (gasoline bombs), were used to ignite the blazes that killed at least four and destroyed 50 homes.

Luc Jousse, the mayor of Roque-Sur-Argens, called the fires “a new form of terrorism.” President Jacques Chirac threatened those responsible with “sanctions of an extraordinary gravity.”

The fires in France were the worst ever in the region. They were followed by riots by Muslim youths in the suburbs of Paris last year that destroyed more than 3,000 automobiles.

In addition, southern Italy also was hit last summer with devastating wildfires also believed to be the result of arson.

In August, Australian authorities launched an investigation into reports al-Qaida planned to spark brushfires in a new wave of devastating terror attacks.

An FBI memo to United States law enforcement agencies revealed a senior al-Qaida detainee claimed to have developed a plan to start midsummer forest fires in the U.S.

The terrorist hoped to mimic the destruction that devastated Canberra last summer, killing four people and destroying more than 500 homes, as well as in other parts of Australia.

The memo, obtained by the Arizona Republic newspaper, said the unidentified detainee revealed he hoped to create several large, catastrophic wildfires at once.

“The detainee believed that significant damage to the U.S. economy would result and once it was realized that the fires were terrorist acts, U.S. citizens would put pressure on the U.S. government to change its policies,” the memo said.

The detainee told investigators his plan called for three or four operatives to travel to the U.S. and set timed explosive devices in forests and grasslands.

“Australian security authorities are aware of reports that al-Qaida has considered starting brushfires in the U.S. as a form of terrorist attack,” said a spokeswoman Australian Attorney General Daryl Williams. “Arson attacks are just one of a wide range of scenarios which have been considered as part of our investigations into al-Qaida’s ability to conduct attacks in Australia.”

In fact, Arab terrorists in Israel have started dozens of major forest fires over the years.

As far back as 1988, Israeli police caught more than a dozen Palestinian adults in the act of setting fires, while other Arabs confessed to arson after arrest. Some fires followed specific calls by underground Arab terrorists. A leaflet issued by the Palestinian uprising’s underground leadership called for ”the destruction and burning of the enemy’s properties, industry and agriculture.”

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said at the time: ”The need to set fires, which also leads to murders, is in my eyes worse than fundamentalism.”

Israeli nature reserve authorities said 408 fires in May and June of 1988 destroyed 400,000 acres of land, nearly seven times the acreage burned from 1974 to 1986.

Last year, Gilad “Gidi” Mastai, chief ranger in the Galilee region of Israel, told the Jerusalem Post: “It’s extremely hard to find arsonists, just like it’s hard to close off the Green Line to terrorists. The forests here are on the front line.”

But, he said, the vast majority of deliberate fires are started by Arabs with political motives.

Forest rangers often need the help of the Israel Defense Forces to battle the terror blazes.

Arson cases account for one-third of Israeli forest fires. “Political” arsonists cause the most with negligent hikers a close second.

This mass murder by fire from the religion of peace in 2002:

GODHRA, India – Muslim attackers armed with stones and kerosene descended on a train carrying hundreds of Hindu nationalists Wednesday, setting fire to four cars and killing 57 people.

Fourteen of the dead were children and 43 other people were injured, many critically, when a mob attacked the train as it pulled out of Godhra shortly after 6:30 a.m., Gujarat state officials said.

Fearing the attack would ignite sectarian riots, Indian officials immediately stepped up security across this vast, religiously divided nation. The prime minister urged Hindus not to retaliate.

The nationalists belonged to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or World Hindu Council, a group seeking to build a temple at the disputed holy site of Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh. Ten years ago, fighting between Muslims and Hindus over Ayodhya killed 2,000 people.

Most of the 2,500 Hindu activists on board the Sabarmati Express were returning from Ayodhya and were bound for Ahmadabad, 95 miles to the south.

This “hate crime” was in Washington State in 2004.
Mirza Akram, 37, owner of Continental Spices Cash & Carry was arrested at the store yesterday on a federal warrant accusing him of arson. Police also said a second man helped set the July 9 fire that caused an estimated $50,000 damage.
“We suspected him right away,” said Julianne Marshall, spokeswoman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Marshall declined to go into detail about why Akram was immediately suspected of the arson.

After the fire was doused at the grocery, at 315 E. Casino Road, Everett police and firefighters found a gasoline can and a derogatory message directed toward Arabs spray-painted on a wall. A white cross was spray-painted on a refrigerator in the back of the store, which specializes in Pakistani, Indian and Middle Eastern groceries. Nobody was injured in the fire.

Everett police spokesman Sgt. Boyd Bryant said investigators believe the store owner set the fire because he was experiencing financial difficulty. “That was his motive, to collect from insurance,” Bryant said.

This happened last year.
Demonstrators protesting caricatures of Islam’s prophet set fire Sunday to a building housing the Danish mission in Beirut. Security forces shot tear gas into the crowd and fired their weapons in the air in a desperate attempt to stop the onslaught.
Casualties, fires and damage of public property were reported in the violence, which came a day after protesters in neighboring Syria torched the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus.
Thousands of protesters took part in the protest against publication of caricatures of Islam’s revered prophet in European newspapers. The protest quickly degenerated into violence when groups of Islamic extremists tried to break through the security barrier, prompting troops to fire tear gas and water cannons from fire engines to try to disperse them, said the official.

What can we do? Keep the major fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Wire reports from WorldNet Daily and Google Alerts.

True liberal/socialist, Ruth Bader Ginsburg held out for cancer surgery until after the election

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had surgery Thursday for pancreatic cancer, raising the odds that one of the U.S. Supreme Court’s leading liberals—will step down this year. So that someone of her political views will now be certain with an Obama and Democrat Congress. 

Ginsburg, 75, has been a justice since 1993, appointed by Bill Clinton. She has been increasingly vocal in recent years about socialist nanny state issues. 

Pancreatic cancer is often deadly, if not caught early. Was Ginsburg so worried about McCain Palin winning the election that she put off her cancer treatment? That is really taking one for the Democrat party. Ginsburg is a true Progressive.

McClatchy about to be kicked off the New York Stock Exchange as stock falls below $1 dollar.

The elegant McClatchy stock certificates for Class A stock are worth more than the stock itself. *

 

This report is directly from a McClatchy press release. The McClatchy Company today (Feb. 5) reported a net loss from continuing operations in the fourth quarter of 2008 of $20.4 million, or 25 cents per share.

McClatchy also announced that it was notified by the New York Stock Exchange  that it is not in compliance with the NYSE’s continued listing standards. The NYSE’s notice dated February 4, 2009 indicated that on February 2, 2009, the company’s average share price over the previous 30 trading days was $0.98, which is below the NYSE’s quantitative listing standards.

The NYSE listed companies must maintain an average closing price of any listed security above $1 per share for any consecutive thirty trading-day period. McClatchy plans to notify the NYSE of its intent to cure this deficiency and has six months from the date of the NYSE notice to cure the non-compliance. The company’s Class A common stock will continue to be listed on the NYSE during this interim period, subject to compliance with other NYSE listing requirements and the NYSE’s right to reevaluate continued listing standards. In reality, the stock is now considered a “penny stock” and things had better shape up in the next six months. 

There was no report on what McClatchy was doing about its carbon footprint and efforts to slow climate change. 

Revenues in the fourth quarter of 2008 were $470.9 million, down 17.9% from revenues from continuing operations of $573.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2007. Advertising revenues were $388.3 million, down 20.7% from 2007, and circulation revenues were $67.0 million, up 1.4%. Online advertising revenues grew 10.3% in the fourth quarter of 2008 and were 10.9% of total advertising revenues compared to 7.8% of total advertising revenues in the fourth quarter of 2007.

Using cash from operations and proceeds from asset sales, the company repaid $30 million of debt in the quarter and $433 million for all of 2008. Debt at the end of the fiscal year was $2.038 billion, down from $2.471 billion at the end of 2007.

Restructuring plan to calm banks and other investors

McClatchy noted in a press release that the duration and depth of the economic recession have taken a severe toll on its advertising revenues. Given the unprecedented deterioration in revenues and with no visibility of an improving economy, the company is continuing to reduce expenses. McClatchy announced that it is developing a plan to reduce costs by an additional $100 million to $110 million, or approximately seven percent of 2008 cash expenses, over the next 12 months beginning later in the first quarter of 2009.

Details of the plan have not yet been finalized. In addition, the company will freeze its pension plans and temporarily suspend the company match to its 401(k) plans, effective March 31, 2009. The company will extend a salary freeze for senior executives in 2009 that was implemented in 2007. The company previously announced that it had implemented a company-wide salary freeze from September 2008 through September 2009. Gary Pruitt, McClatchy’s chairman and chief executive officer, also has declined any bonus for 2008 and 2009. In addition, other senior executives will not receive bonuses for 2008.

 

The loss from continuing operations for the entire year of 2007 was $2.73 billion, or $33.26 per share, including the effect of the non-cash impairment charges taken in 2007. Adjusted earnings from continuing operations(1) were $110.9 million, or $1.35 per share, in fiscal 2007 after considering the non-cash impairment charges and adjustments for certain discrete tax items. The company’s total net loss, including the results of discontinued operations, was $2.74 billion, or $33.37 per share.

 

Management’s Comments

Commenting on McClatchy’s results, Pruitt said, “2008 was a difficult and disappointing year. We faced troubled economic times and structural changes in our business.

 

“But the economy remains mired in recession and our industry is still in a period of transition. The advertising environment continues to be weak and we expect print advertising revenues to continue to be down. While we do not have final advertising revenue results for January, we know that the month was slower than the fourth quarter. We don’t have any better sense than other market observers as to how long the current recession will last and we do not yet have visibility of revenue trends.

“We must respond with both continued rigor in driving our revenue results as well as permanently reducing our cost structure. At McClatchy we are quickly becoming a hybrid print and online news and information company.

“Evidence of our cost reduction efforts can be found in our results. Excluding severance and other benefit charges related to our previously announced restructuring plans, cash expenses were down 14.4% in the fourth quarter and were down 11.5% in all of 2008.

“This necessary transition to a more efficient company is especially painful in a horrible economy and we have had to make some very difficult decisions to keep the company safe,” Pruitt said. “Even so, we are determined to treat our employees well and secure their retirement as best we can. So while we have announced that we are freezing our pension plans and will temporarily suspend 401(k) matching contributions as of March 31, we will continue to offer competitive benefits for our employees. We expect to offer a new 401(k) plan later this year that will include both a matching contribution (once reinstated), plus a supplemental contribution that is tied to cash flow performance. I recognize the sacrifices our employees are making to help us get though this difficult time and I appreciate their loyalty to McClatchy. I am confident that the McClatchy team is up to this challenge and we will see brighter days when the economy finally turns.”

Pat Talamantes, McClatchy’s chief financial officer, said, “Our new cost initiatives, combined with our 2008 efforts, are designed to save approximately $300 million annually before severance costs. Approximately $60 million of savings has been realized in 2008, and $44.7 million of severance costs associated with these programs has been expensed in 2008 and largely paid.”

“Despite the downturn in advertising revenues, we still continue to generate significant cash and are using it to repay debt,” Talamantes said. “Our debt at year end is $2.038 billion, down $433 million from the end of 2007. Based on our trailing 12 months of cash flow, our leverage ratio is currently 5.1 times cash flow and our interest coverage ratio is 2.8 times cash flow as defined by our bank agreement — well within the allowable covenant thresholds. We have $159 million in availability under our bank credit lines, and have no significant debt maturities until June 2011. We believe that we can work through this difficult environment, and we expect to make further progress in paying down debt in 2009.”

Other Matters

McClatchy also announced that it was notified by the New York Stock Exchange (the “NYSE”) that it is not in compliance with the NYSE’s continued listing standards. The NYSE’s notice dated February 4, 2009 indicated that on February 2, 2009, the company’s average share price over the previous 30 trading days was $0.98, which is below the NYSE’s quantitative listing standards. Such standards require NYSE listed companies to maintain an average closing price of any listed security above $1.00 per share for any consecutive thirty trading-day period. McClatchy plans to notify the NYSE of its intent to cure this deficiency and has six months from the date of the NYSE notice to cure the non-compliance. The company’s Class A common stock will continue to be listed on the NYSE during this interim period, subject to compliance with other NYSE listing requirements and the NYSE’s right to reevaluate continued listing standards.

Consistent with the growing industry practice, McClatchy will discontinue issuing monthly revenue and statistical reports after this release. McClatchy is among the last newspaper companies to report advertising results monthly, and without comparable industry information, management does not believe monthly revenues are as useful to investors. The company will continue to provide revenue trends and other statistical information on a quarterly basis with its earnings releases.

*Class B stock is the stock held by the family, so that has voting rights and much more value when the assets are finally sold. It’s the same model used by the New York Times.

Sarah Palin has executive and energy experience

When the price of oil reached nearly $149 a barrel and the price at the pump broke the $4 barrier, energy became the top issue of this election. The Democrats (or European socialists if you prefer) are slow to understand economic issues and are still chanting Green Party slogans while the rest of the country has discovered that oil drilling in America has been shut down for the past 30 years off the coast of the U.S.

Sen. John McCain picked a super star in Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska. She knows more about the oil industry than Obama, Biden, Pelosi and Harry Reed put together. Pali’s husband has been a North Slope oilfield engineer.

It’s time to realize that Norway and the UK are drilling and producing billions off their coasts in the North Sea and off the western coast of Norway. Russia has revived to a world power again from oil reserves.

Only the United States remains stupefied by environmental screed. Billions of barrels of oil and natural gas remain untouched in ANWR and off the coasts of California, Washington, Oregon, Florida ant the Carolinas.

Cuba, China and Venezuela are about to start producing oil miles off the U.S. coast.

America is about to be treated to a lesson in economics.

McCain picks Sarah Palin! McCain picks Palin! The Energy to Run America!

Published on Aug 29, 2008 

Sen. John McCain has taken center stage the day after Obama’s coronation at the Democrat Convention by announcing his VP at high noon. It’s Sarah Palin she has it all, good looks right out of central casting, intelligent speaker, family values and governor of Alaska. She is an environmentalist and understands drilling for oil is a must for U.S. energy independence.

She has positive energy and wit. She will be able to out debate Biden and show that the Republicans trust a women for high office. She has a  real life, not a life-long  politician like Biden and so many other Big Brother Democrats. 

The mother of five is an avid runner. Here is an article from the WSJ in September:

WSJ. Magazine
Gov. Sarah Palin: Midnight runs and caribou dinners

Coming Saturday Sept. 6 in the debut issue of WSJ. Magazine, a conversation with Gov. Sarah Palin about her unusual workout and fitness routine. Preview excerpt

By JEN MURPHY
August 29, 2008 1:42 p.m.

Brian Adams for WSJ. Magazine

Gov. Sarah Palin has always been a runner. Her parents were marathoners and high school track and cross-country coaches. “Running was a family affair,” she says. “I didn’t have much choice. Thankfully, I’ve never tired of it.”

Gov. Palin, a mother of five kids, says exercise is still very much a “family thing.” She and her husband, Todd, also an athlete, named their first son Track because he was born in that sport’s season. Gov. Palin (above, near Mendenhall Glacier, outside of Juneau) and her family live in Wasilla, about 45 miles north of Anchorage.

Workout

MORE ON GOV. PALIN
 

 

• McCain Taps Gov. Sarah Palin as Presidential Running Mate

• Bio and Photo Gallery

“Conventional running is my sanity,” Gov. Palin says. Having recently given birth to her fifth child, the governor is trying to get back to her old workout routine. She was running 7 to 10 miles almost every day but switched to aerobics classes at her gym when she became pregnant. She has worked her way back up to running three miles every other day.

In the summer, when it’s always light, she’ll sometimes run as late as midnight. In the dead of winter, when it’s dark, she sneaks in an afternoon run, or else grudgingly runs on the treadmill at home or at the gym in the evening. Gov. Palin keeps dumbbells at home, but she says most of her upper body strength comes from snowmobiling with her family. “It’s the best upper body workout you could ever have,” she says. “You’re maneuvering through hundreds of pounds of powder.” (Todd is a four-time champion of the Tesoro Iron Dog, the world’s longest snowmobile race.)

Brian Adams for WSJ. Magazine

Gov. Palin in Juneau, Alaska

Diet pitfall

“My family and I eat a healthy diet heavy in wild Alaskan seafood, moose, caribou and fresh fruit,” she says. “I guess my biggest pitfall is breakfast. I know it’s the most important meal of the day but I still haven’t bought into it. I hate to admit it, but a skinny white-chocolate mocha is my staple in the morning.”

Workout gear

“My ideal fantasy is to be running on a hot dusty road just wearing running shorts and some kind of top that wicks away sweat. But in reality I’m running in 20-below temperatures, so I wear layers of fleece and always a good outdoor waterproof trail shoe. Right now I’ve been running in Nike Air Structure Triax. And I always wear sunglasses. My kids tell me to put them on so I don’t freak people out when they see me with a goofy hairdo and no makeup.”

While I’m working out

“I’m thinking about my next speech. I usually write my best speeches and letters [in my head] while out running. That is my inspired time.”

Postworkout food

“Nothing. I just drink water.”

Workout pitfall

“Being pregnant every few years. If I get lazy and go weeks or months without exercising it’s not because of circumstances but because I’m being less disciplined. Shame on me.”

Visit http://palinforvp.blogspot.com/

Drill here, drill now!

Sarah Palin

McCain should pick Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska for VP

This post was published on Aug 25, 2008 

There is talk that Sen. John McCain will take more air out of the Democrat Convention by announcing his VP on Thursday. Good plan. Now, make it Sarah Palin and he will get some of Hillary’s disenfranchised voters. Palin has it all, good looks right out of central casting, intelligent speaker, family values and governor of Alaska.

She has positive energy and wit. She will be able to out debate Biden and show that the Republicans trust a women for high office.

Visit http://palinforvp.blogspot.com/

Drill here, drill now!

Sarah Palin

California Real Estate Foreclosures and Falling Prices Finally Reported After Three Years of Industry Red Flags

By Mick Gregory

Foreclosures rise 500 percent in key Bay Area counties. (Reported one year ago).

I’d imagine a lot of Bay Area readers of the San Francisco Chronicle are wondering why they didn’t see any investigative reporting three years ago.

That’s because the realtor organizations were feeding the business reporters rosy press releases. Plus, very few reporters have MBAs or have even taken Economics 101 for that matter.

Foreclosures and default notices are reaching historic numbers in California and especially the high-tax, left-leaning Bay Area. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that in the fourth quarter of 2007, according to real estate stats released today.

Banks repossessed 31,676 homes in California in the October-November-December period, according to Data-Quick Information Systems, a La Jolla research firm. That was a dramatic 421.2 percent increase from 6,078 in the year-ago quarter. I predicted 200,000 for 2007 and 08.

More that 31,000 families lost their homes in California the past three months.

In the Bay Area, foreclosures rose a stunning 482.5 percent to 4,573 in the fourth quarter, compared with 785 a year ago. Contra Costa County, with 1,558 foreclosures, up 533.3 percent from a year ago, had the most, followed by Alameda County with 1,026 (a 514.4 percent increase) and Solano County with 704 (up 528.6 percent).

We moved from the Bay Area to Houston three years ago. My MBA and my wife’s law and real estate background paid off. We could see the bubble bursting in the near future and we timed it just right with a little luck. I built a river rock fireplace makeover and we had contractors put in hardwood floors and granite counter tops.

Our good friends Marjon and his wife, both attorneys, were studying the same red flags and moved out of California a few months ahead of us, after they did some extensive remodeling that included a new second story deck off their master suite and granite, of course.

So many of our friends and neighbors said “how could you leave California for Texas?”
(They were so smug.)

The Data-Quick company gives its services a little self promotion in the report.

“Foreclosure activity is closely tied to a decline in home values,” Data-Quick President Marshall Prentice said in a statement. “With today’s depreciation, an increasing number of homeowners find themselves owing more on a property than its market value, setting the stage for default if there is mortgage payment shock, a job loss or the owner needs to move.”

It was the most foreclosures since DataQuick began tracking them in 1988 and more than double the previous peak of 15,418 foreclosures in the third quarter of 1996. The fewest foreclosures recorded were in the second quarter of 2005, when 637 homes were repossessed.

Mortgage default notices, sent by lenders when homeowners are several months behind on payments, also hit record highs. Default notices are the first evil step of the drawn out foreclosure process. Once you fall about five or six months behind, the banks know you will never dig yourself back out.

Statewide, lenders sent 81,550 default notices, up 114.6 percent from 37,994 in the fourth quarter of 2006. It was up 12.4 percent from 72,571 in the third quarter of 2007. It was the most defaults since DataQuick began tracking them in 1992.

On Thanksgiving, we were at friends’ home in Texas, (they also came from California) having moved just a few months after us. There home has a saltwater pool and the two-story structure is about 3,200 sq. ft., a short walk to a large lake.

We laughed and congratulated ourselves as we realized that all five families at the party were from California.

Why did we leave? The state income tax is just under 10 percent, plus each employee has to pay disability tax, it went up about $600 per worker this month. Any connection to the job losses and mass exodus? Hey, but the lettuce is cheap! What about the weather, the mountains, the beaches?

Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy in the JFK assassination

The Men Who Killed Kennedy

The end of elite liberal media empires and rise of citizen journalism

 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy is November 22, 2013. Yet, in a half-century, we have just a fraction of the truth published.

file://localhost/Users/gregmichael/Desktop/The%20Men%20Who%20Killed%20Kennedy.JPG

Any deep coverage of the assassination didn’t come from major newspapers. The best investigations have come from book authors and movie directors. The reputation of newspaper journalists has fallen from its peak in the early 1960s. The botched coverage of the Kennedy Assassination followed by decades of one-sided news stories coming from Democrat talking points has taken it’s toll on newspapers. In the early ’60s, the top 50 cities had two or three competing newspapers. Today, only New York, Boston and Chicago have two newspapers still publishing.

Was it color television that came in the late ’60s, or was it the content and ethical character of the newspapers editors and journalists?

Oliver Stone’s “JFK” presented many pieces of one of the most corrupt…

View original post 1,226 more words

Jackie Kennedy Suspected Power-Crazed Johnson

Who benefits? That is the first question police ask. Jackie suspected that it was her husband’s successor who was the mastermind behind the pilot to murder JFK, says former Nixon advisor Roger Stone. Jackie said her husband believed strongly that Johnson shouldn’t become president and, int the months before his death on November 22, 1963.Jackie knew that Johnson and his cronies despised the Kennedy family and Johnson was jealous of the Camelot image of the family. Both the president and Bobby often shunned and ridiculed Johnson.

Greensboro News Record August 25, 2013, Employment very bad, Middle class people who have never been out of work find themselves chronically unemployed and slipping into poverty

Millions of Americans are now government dependents. 51% don’t pay income taxes, many actually look forward to the check in the mail after April 15 for the “Earned Income Tax Credit.” The top 4% are paying for those checks and the free Obama phones.

Citizen WElls

Greensboro News Record August 25, 2013, Employment very bad, Middle class people who have never been out of work find themselves chronically unemployed and slipping into poverty

“North Carolina’s unemployment rate fell for the fourth consecutive month in May to 8.8 percent, but the slight drop was largely due to a shrinking labor force rather than the creation of new jobs, economists said.”…Raleigh News Observer June 21, 2013
“Middle-class people who have never been out of work find themselves chronically unemployed and slipping into poverty.”…Greensboro News Record August 25, 2013

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”…George Orwell, “1984″

 

Good news.

The Greensboro News Record, which has recently been reticent to report the dismal jobs situation in the Triad and NC, has produced a realistic report and placed it on the front page.

From…

View original post 322 more words

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 28,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 10 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.