Paul Harvey is gone. Harvey was a giant in the industry of radio broadcasting but he was a singularly different sort of news reporter. In a day when the goal of every other broadcaster seems to be to dive straight to the lowest common denominator, to celebrate to low born and venal, Harvey’s was always to uplift the listener and to celebrate the greatness of America.

With his easily parodied style, his was a distinctive voice. He was from a time when the sound was important, the delivery the thing. And deliver he did. His well used pause and distinctive cadence was so entirely compelling that one simply could not turn away.

But it wasn’t only the style and sound that interested Harvey. It was the content.

Harvey’s “The Rest of the Story” segments always, always told the story of some man or woman that struggled hard through life until they found that one thing that brought them fame, fortune or adulation. Harvey meant these stories to give us all hope. His guiding principle was that “tomorrow is always better than today.”

Paul Harvey, gone at 90. He will be missed and we will wait a long, long time to see his like again… if we ever do.

California has always been a destructive force in American politics. All too often the worst ideas from the farthest Euro-left spectrum have leaked out of the Golden State to blight the rest of America. Just one of those currently destructive ideas is the absurdly stringent fuel economy standards that California has foolishly enacted. Several western states have pegged their standards to California’s and many other states are attempting to do the same. The current effort in Illinois is one of those attempts.

Illinois H.B. 422 (see .pdf of legislation), sponsored by Karen May (D, Highland Park) creates the Illinois Clean Air Act establishing new motor vehicle emission standards based on California’s Low Emission Vehicle Program requirements.

Many in the business community in Illinois oppose this legislation for the unduly stringent requirements it would impose on the state, among other reasons. But a compelling one for me is the simple matter of Illinois allowing its laws to be crafted by Californians. What sense does it make for a state in the central part of the country to allow a state thousands of miles away, one that has vastly different environmental conditions, to write laws that will affect its own citizens? This idea alone is so unAmerican that it boggles the mind.

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MSNBC took the occasion of a triple homicide on Chicago’s south side to push its own anti-”assault rifle” meme on February 27 by including the words “assault rifle” in the headline of its story on the incident. No other media source, however, took this unusual step. So, here we have some old fashioned bias by MSNBC.

MSNBC’s version of the story clumsily screams “Man charged in assault rifle killings of 3 teens” over the top of its AP wire feed. Yet, while every story in the news and certainly every AP story mentions that the killer used an “assault rifle,” only MSNBC put the words in the headline. This befits MSNBC’s anti-gun agenda, presumably.

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Well, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Mark Morford out does himself with sycophantic, hyperbole over his Obammessiah, today, February 27. He so revels in hero worship for The One, it’s amazing that the White House doesn’t feel compelled to get an order of protection against this creepy columnist.

No one in the Old Media is more sold on The One and less credible for his girlish crush than Morford. He is a fount of mush as he wonders if he should be scared of today’s problems or suffused with lust in his heart for Obama (if you’ll remember the Carterism).

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Our friends over at Radio Equalizer caught liberal radio talker Mike Malloy in a bit of hypocrisy. Malloy obviously thought his wife was a scream as she pretended to be Governor Bobby Jindal portraying him as an outsourced computer tech from India replete with cutsey faux Indian accent. Malloy’s wife acted as if Jindal was the Simpson’s character Apu, or something.

Now, one cannot help but realize that if a conservative had indulged in such an outrageous parody of an ethnic politician, Mike Malloy would have eviscerated that action presenting it as a high crime. Yet, when he and his wife indulge in it… why it’s hilarious don’t you know?

It only goes to show the double standard of the left. For me but not for thee so often seems to be their guiding principle.

We all saw the rocky performance that Bobby Jindal gave in his response to the president’s not-the-state-of-the-union speech earlier this week. There was a lot of wincing going on during and after his performance. But, let me stress the word “performance,” here. It was NOT the basic theme of the speech that was so bad. It was but how he delivered it.

Still, despite his less than show-stopping performance, a lot of second guessing on Jindal started to waft about conservative circles. The “he’s not ready yet” stuff was everywhere. So, we need to remind ourselves of just what sort of stuff Governor Jindal is made of. That reminder comes in the form of his reaction and efforts during Hurricane Katrina. If you want a show-stopping performance, there you have one.

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Obama is about to unleash a $3.552 TRILLION budget on this poor nation. So, if we each of us were expected to fork over our share of that tab, what would it cost us? Well, according to Toby Harnden, blogger for the Daily Telegraph, it would amount to $25,573.48 each.

I don’t know about you but, I just don’t have it.

So how much will President Barack Obama’s budget cost us? The projected 2010 budget of $3.552 trillion can be found on page 114 of the “New Era of Responsibility” budget here.

The US Census bureau estimates that the current US population is 304,059,724. Dividing the $3.552 trillion by that gives us close to the $11,833 that Drudge came up with. ABC’s Jake Tapper reports that there wil be $989 billion in new taxes over the next decade.

I’m an American taxpayer and the starkest figure is what this could cost me. The latest figure I could find for the number of US taxpayers is 138,893,908 returns in 2007 here. By my reckoning, that’s $25, 573.48 each.

And the effort to prevent the people’s vote by Republican insiders jealous of their unaccountable positions rolls ever onward in Illinois, the most corrupt state in the union.

Earlier in the week I wrote about the regrettable system in Illinois that governs the selection of members of the central committee of the Illinois Republican Party, the group that runs the state party. I reported on the singular fact that the rank and file membership of the GOP cannot elect their leaders and that these committee members, the people that plan every move the party makes, are selected by back room deal making among local committeemen, ward bosses and precinct captains, etc.

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Ron Moore, AFL-CIO local president and Examiner writer, absurdly and irresponsibly claimed on February 25 that “the Republican Party” is trying to “foment rebellion” inside the U.S. military against President Obama. This is exactly the sort of irresponsible charges that the left loves to throw around to create fear and loathing, sadly.

Moore bases the untruths in his headlined, “Is the Republican Party fomenting rebellion among the armed forces as a political tactic?,” on the fact that individuals that happen to be Republicans — or once were — are still pursuing the Obama birth certificate issue. But he takes that extra untenable step to say that these few people represent “the Republican Party.”

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Remember how during the run up to the election, all the left pundits and talking heads and their compatriots in the Old Media said that no white person would vote for Barack Obama? Well, despite the singular fact that Barack Obama convincingly won the popular vote in a country that sees a majority of its voters are white, the Old Media is still insisting that all southerners are slavery-loving, neo-confederates that are no different than they were in 1860.

For the Washington Post, Robert S. McElvaine is here to tell us in “The Red, the Blue and the Gray” that Barack Obama is “just like Lincoln” in the same way that Lincoln didn’t get the south’s vote in 1860. Professor McElvaine also intimates that this is because the south is little different than it was in 1860.

Bet you southerners didn’t know that you are all still slavers and racists, eh?

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The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), the union friendly law currently sitting idle in Congress awaiting a Big Labor financed president to get around to addressing it, has some very interesting supporters. We’ve been told, of course, that we shouldn’t worry about Barack Obama and his followers, that they are just as American as anyone else. That claim of red-blooded Americanness is a bit hard to reconcile, however, where it concerns the EFCA.

While taking a small uptick in numbers the last few years, union membership has been down compared to the heyday of union labor in the US. Unions backed Obama with many millions of dollars during the campaign and have been keenly interested in enacting the EFCA, a bill that will help grow union membership in the country. They expect pay back for supporting Obama and he’s pledged to give it to them.

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We all remember the drubbing that conservatives took during the campaign when they openly worried, and even directly charged, that Barack Obama was a far left radical. Pointing to the racist Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the domestic terrorist William Ayers and wife, and several others of Obama’s close friends and associates conservatives sounded a clarion call to alert the country that we were about to get one of the most extremely leftist presidents ever.

Of course, the so-called rational and presumably non-partisan commentators that abound in the center left of the chattering classes scoffed at what they claimed to be the wild demagogues on the “extreme right” who then said Obama was a radical. They have for the last two years excoriated anyone that worries about how far to the left Obama is, saying that Obama is just an average Democrat that seeks to “bring us together.”

Oh, but were it true that Obama was a centrist at heart. Unfortunately, with each passing week it seems that Barack Obama is looking far more the radical that conservatives charged that he was during the campaign than he is the centrist hands-across-the-aisle sort that the Democrats claim he is. One need only look at many of his appointments to see just how radical Obama is aiming to turn the U.S. government for proof of this fact.

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One has to wonder about the thought process of some people. Dan Gilgoff, Faith reporter with U.S. News and World Report and Huffington Post writer, is a perfect example of what I am talking about. After a February 23 posting on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s Catholic faith, Gilgoff followed up the next day with a post claiming that Sarah Palin fans were smearing Jindal over his supposedly “secret Muslim” faith. Where did Gilgoff get such a ridiculous idea? Why, from just two commenters that posted on his entry of the 23rd, that’s where.

That’s right, just two people claiming in the comments section of his U.S. News post that Jindal was a secret Muslim was enough for Dan Gilgoff to decide that Sarah Palin’s entire support base is smearing Bobby Jindal as a secret Muslim. Just two people. Two nuts is enough for U.S. News and World Report to slander Sarah Palin and all her followers as crazy, racist, hatemongers.

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The ACLU finally gets one right by taking the side of a beleaguered bait shop owner in Clearwater, Florida that is under attack by city officials over a mural of game fish painted on the outside walls of his bait shop.

City officials are claiming that the fish painting is an “advertisment sign” that falls under a beautification ordinance prohibiting large signs for businesses. The City has fined the shop’s owner Herb Quintero $700 and is warning that a further $500 a day fine can be imposed unless he paints over the fish.

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Once again CNN goes over the top in its gobsmacked praise of its Obammessiah. This time appropriating Ronald Reagan’s famous “morning in America” theme and assigning it to President Obama as a result of his not-the-state-of-the-union speech last night. In reality, Obama’s speech was more like a moaning in America as opposed to that bright new morning that Reagan invoked.

Worse, Reagan’s main theme for his “morning in America” ideal was to provoke Americans into a renewal of the American way of self-reliance, one removed from sucking at the teat of government. On the other hand, Barack Obama’s main point was that without government, without The One and all his fixes, we are all doomed.

It was obvious to anyone’s ears that Obama’s theme was as far removed as Reagan’s as can be.

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During his not-the-state-of-the-union speech last night, president Barack “givitaway” Obama said the following:

“I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it.”

Sorry, Prez, but while we did make the automobile an integral part of American life, while we did popularize the personal vehicle for the whole world, and while we certainly revolutionized its manufacture… we just didn’t invent the automobile.

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In the hours after President Obama’s not-the-state-of-the-union address, the Networks rounded up the usual suspects to give reply to the speech. CBS, for its part, found the always smiling John McCain asking for his reaction to Obama’s starry-eyed rhetoric and long list of promises.

The prosaic, yet perky, Katie Couric asked McCain if Obama “convinced him at all” with the rhetoric? McCain, after saying Obama’s was “a very effective speech,” seemed, though, to call the president a liar — though certainly in the nicest way possible.

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Remember that juicy story last week of the Chinese mistress that convinced her rivals and her lover to go for a drive? The mistress that then drove them all off a cliff in revenge for being dumped for one of the rivals by the lover?

Great story. It had pathos, humor, revenge and… apparently it never happened. The U.S. media picked this story up from the Chinese speaking media and ran with it last week but obviously didn’t do much by way of checking the accuracy of the tale. Turns out the Chinese “reporter” that wrote the story pulled a Jayson Blair — he made up the whole thing.

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Seriously, do the kindly folks at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel’s editorial board even know what the definition of the word logic is? In theirs headlined, “Hysteria fuels sales of guns and ammo,” the Sun-Sentinel takes Floridians to task for being so stupid as to be afraid of Obama’s gun banning plans, claiming that Obama “didn’t do it.” But, even after telling readers no one wants to ban guns, the piece ends with the Sun-Sentinel editorial board advocating for the banning of guns! So the message is, no one wants a gun ban but we should ban guns? This is the sort of logical disconnect that fuels the very “hysteria” that the paper is claiming to want to dispel.

And this ridiculous about face isn’t the only illogical idea or uninformed claim the piece makes, either. Just about every word in this piece proves that the editorial board of the Sun-Sentinel is wholly uninformed about the Constitution and the technical aspects of firearms, not to mention being uninformed about the various gun banning bills floating about Congress and the several states at this very moment.

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The Public Service Research Foundation has finished its research into how union membership was distributed throughout the US for 2008. It looks like some very useful info:

The Public Service Research Foundation has announced that it has updated its state-by-state, sector by sector tables and charts on employment, union membership and union density for 2008 and is making them available.

Information about union membership is obtained from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey and is released annually in its report on Union Members http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm

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