How many liberal myths can a mainstream news announcer cram into one innocent, 90-second, top-of-the-hour news briefing?  On WABC’s New York affiliate one recent December evening, I counted eight.

First the news reader (as they more appropriately call them in Japan) cheerfully announced that seasonal hiring—inventory control agents, sales clerks, deliverymen—was way up this year compared to last year; that increased holiday spending was a sign the economy was improving; and that goods being purchased in the U.S. are unfortunately being made more often overseas.

There’s three myths right there: (1) elevated part-time hiring reflects economic health; (2) consumer spending drives growth; and (3) trade imbalances are harmful.

(1) That retailers are hiring more temporary help isn’t a sign the economy is thriving; it’s a sign there are more underemployed workers taking part-time work below their skill level.  If permanent, full-time employment were stable, we wouldn’t see such a leap in short-term hiring during peak economic season.  Increased part-time hiring also reflects employers’ reluctance to take on “full-time,” 30-hour-a-week employees whom they must soon provide health insurance per Obamacare.  read more »

An Italian immigrant, Salvatore worked 12 hours a days in waist-deep rancid water, the air fetid and filthy. Any day could be his last: Cave-ins and poisonous gas explosions commonly crushed the shafts carved into the West Virginia hillside. The pay was scarcely enough to feed his family. The squalid company-owned housing was worse. When he contracted a bacterial infection that eventually killed him, his older sons, ages 12 and 8, headed into the mines each day to support their mother and five siblings.

To the mining company, my grandfather Salvatore Quattrocchi was expendable. For his kids and millions of others in the mid-20^th Century, however, their fight for fair wages and safe workplaces provided a pathway to the American dream. Unions helped make it happen.  read more »

With all of the talk about the impending “fiscal cliff”, it’s a good time to step back from the trees and take a good look at the forest and how we got here to begin with.

For the last sixty years or so, Congress has been on an ever growing spending binge, guided by a political philosophy that government should play an ever growing role in our everyday lives – a role which requires more of our substance.  In fact, it increasingly requires more than we can spare in any given year and maintain a healthy economy.  So we borrow the rest, year after year.

This year’s federal deficit is 1.2 trillion, last year’s was 1.2 trillion and next year’s is projected to be over one trillion as well.  Our national debt, the sum total of our annual deficits, is well over 16 trillion.  And all of that is on top of the tens of trillions of dollars in “off-the-books” future obligations to entitlement programs.

When you are in a hole, stop digging, or so the advice goes.  But what do you do when voters keep electing politicians who won’t put down the shovel, but hold to the insane notion that we can somehow dig our way out?  read more »

Lena Dunham has been anointed as the “voice of a generation.” Despite the fact that she’s largely unknown, the media is gushing over the 26-year-old creator and star of the HBO series Girls and electoral virgin of Barack Obama’s “Your First Time” ad.

Glamour, which named Dunham as a recipient of the magazine’s “2012 Women of the Year” award, calls her one of the most “powerful women in Hollywood.” After an intense publishing bidding war, Random House is paying her a $3.7 million advance to share her wisdom on life. No joke.  read more »

Democrats haven’t passed a budget in years, yet somehow it’s Republicans’ fault that the country is about to go over a fiscal cliff.

Harry Reid’s Democratic-controlled Senate has, for three consecutive years, refused to pass a federal budget or even bring a proposal to the floor as required by law.  In 2011 Reid announced that passing a budget would be “foolish” because of ongoing negotiations over other fiscal matters.  Senator Chuck Schumer declared that proposing budgets was “not the point” of the Senate.  read more »

Considerable consternation erupted online over actor Gene Hackman striking a homeless person.

The headline initially informing of such was formulated without a modifier or a more colorful description such as "crazed deadbeat" or "lewd indigent" in order to make Hackman appear to be this vile individual that makes a habit of accosting the downtrodden or deriving some kind of buzz from doing so.

Quite the opposite seems to be true. From the complete account, Hackman was actually protecting his wife and the vagrant properly got what was coming to him.

Why should we care that Hackman's attacker was homeless?

Would the public have been informed of this incident if the assailant domiciled in a more traditional mode of habitation?

As in regards to race and ethnicity, many leftists will so romanticize destitution that they cultivate the perception that those characterized by this economic plight or social condition can do no wrong.

If so, are the hypertolerant going to insist that they would allow some filthy, possibly disease ridden, bum to put his hands all over their wives, daughters, or dinner dates they are hoping to impress?

The Declaration of Independence insists that, in terms of fundamental being, all men are created equal.  read more »

Many in our country worry narcissism and greed is submerging our culture; that the integrity of our ancestors is becoming a relic of a bygone era. Sound familiar? This has happened to our fellow Americans before—at a much graver cost.

Native Americans today comprise a little more than one percent of the U.S. population, but before Columbus arrived 500 years ago, more than 15 to 20 million lived in thousands of tribal communities from the Arctic to the tropics. Today, Indians are rarely acknowledged at all in public consciousness. When they are, it isn’t flattering.  read more »

The Lyndon Johnson Great Society legislation and the massive Government bureaucracy it has created going forward, has finally born the fruit it was planted to sow 47 years ago. The extortion by the permanent welfare state is now in full blossom and the takers now outnumber the makers, the producers are now the “minority” in this country.

There are underlying conditions that extortion creates that destroy the payer as well as the payee. The payer obviously suffers the financial loss of money’s that were earned by producing in an open market economy. They also suffer the loss of dignity because they see that their production is only valued as long as it supports those who produce nothing. Their self esteem and self worth are diminished as they watch the fruit of their labor being treated with disdain and indignation, as if it is a penance for working hard and sacrificing.  read more »

If you really want to understand how to fix something, you first have to take a realistic look at what is wrong with it.

After the 2004 election, Howard Dean wondered how the Democrats would reconnect with men who flew Confederate flags and had guns in their pickup trucks.  They didn’t, but have since won two presidential elections.   After 2008, the GOP was filled with hand-wringing about connecting with minority voters, but it managed to win the greatest congressional swing election in generations in 2010.

In the wake of Obama’s re-election, there is a lot of hand-wringing going on in the GOP about making changes, but not enough clear-eyed assessments of exactly what went wrong and needs to be fixed.

There are three elements to any campaign: message, money and organization.  While money was obviously not a problem, attested to by the good Christmases the children of TV station owners and media consultants are about to have, our message and organization didn’t make the grade.

The decision was made to just focus on the economy to the exclusion of almost everything else, resulting in our philosophy not being effectively communicated and connected to the everyday lives of Americans.  read more »

Can we please filibuster Democrats’ attempts to curb filibusters every time they control the Senate but don’t have a supermajority?

In anticipation of another two years of Congressional gridlock, Democrats are once again fervently trying to block Republicans from using the Senate filibuster to stop their horrific agenda.  read more »