Obama Wins SC Big; FL Tomorrow

This weekend, Barack Obama took more than twice as many votes as Hillary Clinton in the South Carolina Democrat primary.  Bill responded by comparing Obama to Jesse Jackson.

 

Bill Clinton claims that his wife is not a polarizing figure, but has just been portrayed that way by the vast right wing conspiracy.

 

Things are starting to fall apart for the Clintons:  The Kennedys are lining up behind Barack Obama, as is Toni Morrison, who called Bill Clinton the nation’s “first black president.”

 

Now that she’s won Michigan and is leading in Florida, Hillary wants those two states to have their delegates reinstated.  It’s all about power with this woman, not principle.

 

John McCain is attacking Mitt Romney, comparing him to the Democrats.  Is it over Romney’s socialized medicine scheme, the cost of which will skyrocket next year?  No, it’s a distortion of his Iraq policy.  Isn’t this the first time McCain has ever criticized anybody for being too much of a Democrat?

 

Speaking of Romney, Vice President Cheney’s lesbian daughter has joined his campaign.  As if Romney didn’t have enough problems with the Christofascists.

 

John McCain, who has become the pick of the GOP establishment, picked up the endorsements of Florida Sen. Mel Martinez and Gov. Charlie Crist.

 

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jim Wooten writes that it is time to wean Americans of their dependency on big government.  I don’t see either of the two major parties trying to do that, preferring to pander to those who suckle at the government teat.

 

Ruben Navarrette also writes on “The Scary Sense of American Entitlement.”  Now if only the entitled voters would understand (or stop voting).

 

Islamists had planned on attacking transportation systems across Europe, including in Spain, until they were arrested.  Wasn’t ignoring the threat of Islamic terrorism supposed to make Europeans safe?

 

Islamists in Bangladesh tried to burn a woman alive to keep her from converting from Islam to Christianity.  This is what dhimmitude is like.

 

President Bush gives his final State of the Union Address tonight.

 

Blacks see a kind of “financial apartheid” in this subprime mortgage mess.  They think that, even though they took loans they knew they couldn’t repay, the government should bail them out, just like the “victims” of Katrina.  Will the entitlement mentality never end?

 

The mortgage “crisis” has created a ghost town in a suburb of Cleveland.  But remember, it’s the fault of the greedy banks (who are losing money) and the evil Republicans.

 

Toyota beat General Motors for the first time in global car sales.  It doesn’t hurt matters that they just make better cars.

 

An entrepreneur wants to build a 16-mile-long tunnel under Long Island Sound—with absolutely no taxpayer money.  That, my friends, is how to build a road; free market solutions!

 

Georgia is the last state to mandate the use of seat belts in pickup trucks.  Unfortunately, the meddling state legislature wants to change that.

 

A man has been charged with involuntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment after a kinky sex practice ended with his wife dead.

 

Apes are better at rapid memorization than humans.

NYT Endorses McCain

Al Gore, the High Priest of the Global Warming Religion, has increased his apocalyptic rhetoric to new heights.  Now, the polar ice caps will be gone in five years.  This despite the fact that there has been no global warming in a decade.

 

Speaking of Al Gore, Bono admitted that he has to confess his carbon-emitting sins to the High Priest.  I told you people, it’s a religion.

 

The British government now has plans to pay people to lose weight.

 

Dennis Kucinich has dropped out of the Presidential race.  Will anybody notice?

 

Because of the closeness of both Presidential races, Super Tuesday may not produce a clear frontrunner because of the delegate count.  Keep an eye on the media’s horse race, however; McCain is third in delegates right now but portrayed as the frontrunner.

 

Republicans in Arkansas did not like Mike Huckabee as Governor.  The picture they paint of him is somebody who could destroy the Republican Party as President.

 

John McCain’s mother says that McCain the candidate does not have support from the Republican base.  McCain does have support from the editorial board of the New York Times, but not from the board of the Washington Times.

 

Good news for McCain, however:  Florida, with their Hispanic population, is one state where immigration will not hurt him.

 

Dick Morris writes about how Hillary will lose South Carolina, and use that to win the nomination.

 

Democrat voters want socialized medicine twice as much as Republican voters.  Are we supposed to be surprised by this?

 

Republicans debated last night, but they couldn’t get Hillary out of their minds.  Again, I ask:  where is the conservative?

 

The Senate is upset that colleges are building their endowments while increasing tuition.  Why is it any of their business?

 

Peggy Noonan says that President Bush “destroyed the Republican Party.”  Bush just proved her right by proposing doubling the amount of taxpayer dollars sent overseas to fight AIDS.

 

Not drilling in ANWR could cost $3 trillion in the long term.

 

In local news, Bibb County has been named one of the 100 best communities for young people in 2008.  That says horrible things about the rest of the United States.

 

An IT worker in Poland proved that snail-mail is actually slower than snails.

 

Teen tramp Jamie Lynn Spears is going to give her baby to her mother.  It is probably her mother’s fault that she’s in this situation to begin with.

Cluster Obituary

Liberty, R.I.P.

 

By Jeff Scott

 

Liberty used to be one of the founding principles of the United States.  After all, the Declaration of Independence says that one of the purposes of government is to protect liberty.  In the last 230 years, however, the government has used its power to destroy the liberty of its citizens.  The worst part is that the people are not only willing to allow the usurpation of their liberties; they are apathetic towards liberty and even complicit in the destruction of liberty.  The American people do not care about preserving individual liberties because they prefer to have the government take care of them like a parent.  They prefer to have the government make their lives easier by stealing money through taxation from those who are successful and redistributing it to themselves.

 

The American people started their transition from loving liberty and fearing government to fearing liberty and loving government during the Great Depression, when they incorrectly saw the free market and economic liberty as the cause of the Depression.  The citizens living in that era wanted the government to take over and help them; President Franklin Roosevelt was more than willing to subject the American people to servitude under government to gain popular support at liberty’s expense, at one point even going so far as proposing the almost complete government seizure of all income above $25,000.  Fortunately, this did not come to fruition.  Some of the other programs Roosevelt instituted, however, continue to plague the United States.  Social Security, which today constitutes a full one-third of the annual federal budget, is the largest program of mass redistribution of wealth in American history.  The government forcefully seizes 12.4% of every dollar you earn to pay for this program, with absolutely no guarantee that you will see any return on what they want you to perceive as your investment.  Unfortunately, the ignorant masses of Americans believe that they will be incapable of surviving without what they believe to be a guarantee of Social Security when they get old, so they unquestioningly accept the status quo.

 

The problem is truly that the American people desire freedom more than they love liberty.  I know many of you are thinking that the two are one in the same; however, I am using a different context.  The liberty that I love and desire is the right of every individual to do what they wish as long as it does not infringe on the life, liberty, or property of another individual.  Most Americans today prefer freedom from the hassles of life.  They want freedom from bills, from having to pay for their own health care, housing, retirement, food, gasoline, and other living expenses.  They want freedom from responsibility.  That is not liberty.  In fact, those who receive those government handouts become slaves to the government.  They are not self-reliant; they are fully dependent upon their government masters.  In exchange, they are willing to allow the government to forcefully confiscate their earnings and desire the same, to a much harsher degree, for those who are successful and earn more than they do.  They want the government to steal from them to pay for those programs which have become their masters.  This makes the taxpayers slaves to the government as well, as they work without pay because the government steals in many cases well over one-third of every dollar they earn.

 

Liberty is not only dead in terms of economic matters.  The federal government forbids you from putting certain things in your body which they deem harmful to you.  Government at all levels tells you what you can and cannot do with your own property.  They handcuff law-abiding citizens from defending themselves by telling them where they can and cannot carry a firearm.  They determine how much water your shower and toilet can use, and how much gasoline your car can use.  The state of California even now requires that the state have control over the thermostat in homes so that they can, in times of ill-defined “emergencies,” determine how warm or cool an individual’s house can be.  These are only some of the more obnoxious examples, but they illustrate the point that government has control over every facet of our lives.

 

So anytime you hear any politician talk about freedom or liberty, ask if they are willing to eliminate the welfare state, stop stealing from successful American people, and allow individuals the freedom to behave as they wish without government infringement.  If not, then that politician is no friend of liberty, only another politician looking to enslave the American people for his own personal gain.

 

So rest in peace, liberty.  You had a good run, but the American people are more interested in shirking responsibility than in having liberty.

Cluster Column

Would the Limited-Government Candidate Please Stand Up?

 

By Jeff Scott

 

With the 2008 Presidential primary race heating up (by this edition, the Republicans will have already been through Iowa, Wyoming, New Hampshire, Michigan, Nevada, and South Carolina, with the Democrats through Iowa, New Hampshire, the meaningless Michigan, and Nevada), and Georgia’s primary date being part of the February 5 “Super Tuesday,” it is time for everybody to decide who they are going to support. 

For Democrats, this is a relatively easy task.  They have only three serious candidates, all of whom are busy beating the fascist, big government income-redistribution drum, so Democrats have a choice between a power-hungry woman looking to get back into the White House; a charismatic black Senator who speaks like a preacher; and a former losing vice presidential candidate with really, really nice hair. 

So you Democrats just have a choice of the face you want on your redistributionist candidate.  There aren’t very many real differences between Hillary Rodham Clinton-Rodham, Barack Hussein Obama, and John “Pretty Boy” Edwards in terms of their policies, so you guys get to decide on a personality.

 

Republicans and conservative-leaning libertarians have a much more difficult choice.  Sure, we can vote for a third-party candidate in November, but here in Georgia we have a primary vote that matters.  I know that I do not want to just sit on the sidelines and let the rest of the state speak while I stand silent (after all, when have I ever stood silent?).  So what do believers in limited government and defending America do in this race?  The best thing I know of is to go through the candidates, one by one, and look for the least bad in the bunch.  After all, none of them is both serious and dedicated to the principle of limited government.  I’ll take them in the order in which they finished in New Hampshire:

 

John McCain:  The longtime “Maverick” Senator who made a miraculous comeback to win New Hampshire after his candidacy was declared dead following his sponsorship of last summer’s amnesty bill.  But McCain has other negatives besides his support of amnesty for illegal immigrants.  For example, remember that McCain was a primary sponsor of the campaign finance reform bill that severely limits and even criminalizes some forms of political speech by Americans.  Should a believer in the principle of limited government support a man who supports using government to limit the speech of Americans?  Are conservatives willing to support a guy who is as willing as McCain to work with Democrats as much as McCain?  I, for one, am not.

 

Mitt Romney:  While Romney has been successful in the business world, and in his leadership of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, two words prevent him from getting my support for President:  socialized medicine.  Romney has already accomplished as Governor of Massachusetts what Hillary wants to accomplish as President:  a universal health care system.  Why Republicans have not attacked him more heavily for this issue baffles me.  You would think that comparing somebody to Hillary, a comparison that is very easy to make with Romney, would be the first thing that an opponent would do.  I know I, for one, will not support him, and that will have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he is a Mormon.

 

Mike Huckabee:  Huckabee has become the emergent major factor of this race.  He went from a third-tier nobody to a top-tier contender, despite his lack of money, because of his appeal to evangelical Christians.  I am no friend to evangelical Christian voters, but even independently of that, Huckabee has comparisons to the Clintons other than the fact that he is from the same town and once held the same office as Slick:  Governor of Arkansas.  He is the only candidate, other than the Hildebeast, to propose a national ban on smoking.  While I hold disdain for low-quality tobacco products (preferring an occasional fine cigar instead), I still cannot support a complete ban on the rights of people to choose to smoke.  Can anybody say “nanny state”?  Also, remember that, even though Huckabee claims to support the FairTax, he raised taxes more than Clinton as Governor of Arkansas.

 

Rudy Giuliani:  A joke I heard claims that, to formulate a sentence as Rudy Giuliani, you simply use a noun, a verb, and “9/11.”  Other than his banking on his reputation as New York City Mayor on that horrible day, Giuliani is also a little…weird.  He has been photographed too many times wearing drag for me to take him seriously.  Even worse was his program to get guns out of the hands of law-abiding New Yorkers.  Remember that the first step that totalitarians must take is to disarm citizens.  That’s something to expect of Democrats.  Also, don’t forget that he ran a sanctuary city as mayor of New York.  That is just localized amnesty.

 

Ron Paul:  On first analysis, you would think that Ron Paul would be my man.  I’m a libertarian, he’s a libertarian.  I believe in liberty, he believes in liberty.  So it should be a natural fit, right?  Wrong.  There is one overarching issue that prevents me from supporting Ron Paul:  He is completely unwilling to defend this nation from Islamic fascism.  He does not even see the threat from Islamic terrorism.  Defending this nation from those evil forces should be the top priority.  We may differ on how to do so (I happen to agree with Paul on his belief in isolationism), but we absolutely must fight them and destroy them.  On domestic policy, while Paul votes against unconstitutional spending bills, he is always sure to get pork projects for his district into those bills.  Sounds like hypocrisy to me.

 

Fred Thompson:  I have to admit, Fred Thompson is the candidate towards whom I am leaning ideologically.  The only problem is that he does not seem to want to be running for President.  He is strong in his convictions, which include securing the borders, fighting Islamic terrorism, and cutting taxes and spending (despite a disappointing flip-flop on the FairTax).  Unfortunately, he is not a very strong or charismatic figure.  He’s no Reagan in that regard; instead, he compares more with President Bush.  He’s a bumbling, “aw, shucks” kind of speaker—not exactly the kind of personality that anybody wants to identify with because of Bush’s lack of popularity.  He also does not have experience as a strong leader that indicates that he will fight for those principles against opposition.

 

So what to do?  At this point, I do not know.  I might write-in a professor’s name.  I might vote based on the horse race, by voting for someone to stem the tide of support for somebody else (I might especially do that to stop Huckabee).  I might vote for the least repugnant Democrat (being a registered independent has its advantages).  I do not know what I will do when I enter the voting booth on February 5.

 

Jeff Scott is the host of the Jeff Scott Show, which airs every MWF 11am-1pm on Mercer Radio (radio.mercer.edu).

We're Back!

Fred Thompson has dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination.  That, yet again, leaves me without a least-bad candidate to semi-support.

 

Speaking of the Republican Presidential race, some of Mike Huckabee’s aides are going without paychecks so that the campaign can devote more of their limited funds to advertisement.  With no money, Huckabee is likely finished.

 

President Bush has said that he will continue to do nothing to stop earmarked pork barrel spending.  This is why the Republicans lost in 2006, and will in 2008.

 

Yesterday Hillary received the endorsement from a union that I suspect shares many of the same goals as illegal immigrants.  She was sure to throw in some Spanish while she was doing so.

 

Here’s another shock about Hillary:  When she becomes President, the government will be more active in the economy.  What does that mean?  More government redistribution of wealth.

 

I’m not done with Hillary yet:  Now she wants to make Obama look like he is flip-flopping on the healthcare issue, saying that his proposal is not “universal.”  Which means, of course, that Hillary doesn’t think that Obama is socialist enough for the Democrat Party.

 

Democrats love talking about rolling back the Bush “tax cuts for the rich,” but in reality the tax code is stealing a higher proportion from the rich than ever before.

 

Russia is up to no good again.  Now they’re test-firing long-range missiles off the Spanish and French coasts.  This would be a routine test that leaves nothing to fear if Russia wasn’t also giving uranium to Iran.  Does anybody still doubt that the Russians are helping Iran become a nuclear power?

 

At least somebody gets it:  five military commanders from Western nations believe that a first-strike nuclear option must remain on the table to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.

 

Venezuelans are the latest nationality moving in mass to the United States to escape a dictator

 

Volcanoes, not global warming, are contributing to the thinning of Antarctic glaciers.

 

Despite the evidence against global warming, college professors across the country plan to stage “global warming teach-ins” to discuss solutions for global warming.  I have an idea:  Make those left-wing professors stop breathing.  After all, they do produce carbon dioxide.

 

The Florida Bankers Association is trying to establish a “No Hats, No Hoods, No Sunglasses” program to cut down on bank robbery.  Some banks are not adopting it because it might offend somebody.

 

Government schools in Atlanta are now paying students $8 per hour to stay in school and study.

 

Social people are more likely to be fat than their more reserved counterparts.  That explains all of the fat sorostitutes and frat boys. 

 

Check out the world’s largest swimming pool.

Musings on IA, NH; Return of the Jeff Scott Show

First, due to a minor surgery the Jeff Scott Show will not return this week.  We will return to the air after I return from a trip to South Carolina following the Republican candidates leading up to their January 19 primary.  The first show back will be Wednesday, January 23.  Remember that this semester, the final semester for the Jeff Scott Show on Mercer Radio, we will air every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 11am-1pm.

 

Now, I have to admit I have been surprised by the collapse of Hillary Clinton in the Democrat nomination process.  I am not, however, surprised that she has appeared to make a comeback in New Hampshire, in which she currently has a 39-36% lead with 66% of precincts reporting (and apparently the AP just called the race for the Hildebeast).  The Democrat gender gap is strongly in Clinton's favor--in NH, 57% of the voters were female, and Clinton won 47-34 (over Obama) among women.  Obama won a 12-point victory over Clinton among men.  Strange happening, however:  Obama beat Clinton by one point among unmarried voters.

 

Of course, the thing to remember when looking at these exit poll numbers is that independents have had a very strong influence on the New Hampshire primary.  44% of New Hampshire voters are registered independents, so there is a large possibility of ideological cross-over voting.  Obama won by 12 points among independents, Hillary by 11 among Democrats.

 

One thing I want to point out from the Republican side is that 52% of Republican voters polled want the next President to be more conservative than President Bush.  To me, this is the defining issue of the Republican campaign, and nobody can deliver.  Some other tidbits:  48% of Republicans support deportation for illegal immigrants, a group that voted 39-25 for Romney over McCain.  Romney is being hurt by the Mormon issue:  He lost to McCain in among the 67% of voters who believe that a candidate's religion matters.  Just a few things I found interesting about the exit polling data.

 

Again, I'll be back on the air on Wednesday, January 23 at 11am, when I will fully analyze the race to that point, including Michigan, Nevada, and South Carolina for the Republicans.  I should have special focus on South Carolina, since I will be travelling to that state to observe the goings-on there.