Category: Opinion

Andrew Klavan tells it like it is

From the May 27, 2009 Dennis Prager Show

The great Thomas Sowell visits The Dennis Prager Show to discuss his new book, ‘The Housing Boom and Bust.’  More great insights from Dr. Sowell!  Enjoy!

Laying the smack down

The great free market economist Milton Friedman listens to Phil Donahue’s liberal lines and then unapologetically sets him straight with an adult, grown up world view.  It’s hard to argue with Mr. Friedman -- he’s clearly right, after all.

Hat Tip to The Mark Levin Show, for broadcasting this audio on February 5, 2009.

A meeting of the great minds!

I was pleased this morning as I sat down at the desk of the Silver State Chronicles with my cup of morning java.  I tuned into my favorite morning radio show, The Dennis Prager Show, to learn that the guest in his first hour was the legendary Dr. Thomas Sowell, one of my favorite economists and thinkers!

Please enjoy the interview!

Nobody whips liberals quite like my brother, Twenty Pound Sledge

Merry Christmas, Happy 2009, and God Bless always, pal!

The company one keeps…

A closer look at the embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevic. Read the whole story at Michelle Malkin’s site.

The Democratic Culture of Corruption
by Michelle Malkin

Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi can stop clucking now. For the last three years, Democratic leaders cheered GOP ethics woes. Dean accused Republicans of making “their culture of corruption the norm.” Pelosi touted cleanliness as a liberal virtue. But with the eye-popping pay-for-play and bribery case against Democratic Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich topping a year of nationwide Democratic scandals, the corruption chickens are coming home to roost.

U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald called the breadth and depth of charges against Blagojevich and his Democratic Chief of Staff John Harris “staggering.” That’s an understatement. Anything that breathed was a potential shakedown target. It’s the Chicago way. Democrat Blago’s so dirty he’d hit up a children’s hospital for money. Oh, wait. He’s accused of doing that, too.

Democrat Blago allegedly conspired to use his power to appoint President-elect Barack Obama’s vacant Senate seat as a bargaining chip for financial payment. He explored trading on that authority for an appointment as Health and Human Services secretary or as an ambassador or for installment in a cushy union position. (He discussed his trading scheme with an unnamed “SEIU (Service Employees International Union) official” and unnamed “various consultants” in Washington.)

According to the criminal complaint released yesterday, he also tried to leverage his influence over the sale of Wrigley Field (owned by Tribune media company) in an attempt to get Chicago Tribune editorial writers who called for his impeachment fired — which illustrates the very perils of media/government entanglements I warned about in my newspaper bailout column last week. His wife, Patricia Blagojevich, was apparently in on the thuggery, too. Taking a break from her first lady duties advocating “on behalf of women and children,” she is heard in taped discussions about the Chicago Tribune/Wrigley Field deal telling a governor’s aide “to hold up that f**king Cubs sh*t. … F**k them.”

The Battle of the Century

Watch Darth Barack exposed by my LA brother, Twenty Pound Sledge!

The GOP should hire Twenty to do real commercials for them.  And be White House Press Secretary!

A snoozer!

Some insight from the great Mark Steyn on the second McCain-Obama debate, with some genuinely rich imagery!  The Corner at NR…

Keep your sunny side up [Mark Steyn]

Republicans have cause to be disappointed by last night: As everyone says, Obama wins by not losing. He looks more and more as if he’s already the president, while McCain prowling the stage seeking to “connect” looks more and more like Yosemite Sam after the dynamite* failed to go off.

Nevertheless.

Before everyone succumbs to a terminal case of inevitabilititis, it’s worth remembering we’ve been here before. In the last months of the primary campaign, the press kept assuring Hillary fans that Obama’s victory was inevitable and the shriller the media Obamaboppers got, the more bluecollar Dems sat on their hands. In the end all the King’s horses and all the King’s men had to drag the guy across the finish line. You couldn’t replay his spectacular victory in slow-motion because it was already slower than any slo-mo technology ever invented.

So we already know there’s a huge disconnect between the unstoppable Messianic force promoted by the media and the cooler appraisal by actual voters. What’s happened since primary season? The Iraq surge (McCain’s unique selling point) is a victim of its own success and has dwindled away to an irrelevant footnote, and the front pages are full of a supposed economic catastrophe which the crude rules of politics suggest any fool should be able to hang on the incumbent.

Yet Obama still can’t open up a solid lead. After all, why would record numbers of viewers watch the vice-presidential debate if the election’s already over?

Meanwhile, the supposedly damaged Republican brand is proving suprisingly resilient. I see one of the two New Hampshire seats that flipped blue in ’06 may return to the red fold next month. Where’s the blowout?

(*A lot of the dynamite is well past its sell-by date: Two references last night to Ronald Reagan negotiating with Tip O’Neill. No one remembers who Tip O’Neill is. McCain might as well have been evoking misty watercolor mem’ries of Talleyrand at the Congress of Vienna. Obama, by contrast, is all future – which is understandable, given his past.)

[UPDATE: A reader responds:

Listen, Mark, sunny side up is fine but this one is over easy.]

It is a privilege to call you my brother!

My good pal, Twenty Pound Sledge in Los Angeles officially endorses John McCain & Sarah Palin!  Way to go, pal!

Earmarks: The Alien Menace

The fine folks at Reason Magazine made this great video about some of Congress’s wasteful spending. It includes a special look at SETI, the long-time Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence project that hasn’t found any evidence of interplanetary communication signals since the late 1960s.