Archive for April, 2010

Bob Maistros

News Flash: President Obama today declared a halt to all new offshore oil drilling until an investigation is completed into the recent deadly rig explosion off the coast of Louisiana.  The decision comes less than a month after the President had cleared the way for new drilling off the coast of Virginia, among other areas.  Said presidential advisor David Axelrod, “No additional drilling has been authorized and none will until we find out what happened here and whether there was something unique and preventable here.”

Stop, baby, stop!

Breaking News: The White House today stopped air travel nationwide until a probe is carried out of the crash of a twin-engine, two-passenger plane in Ottumwa, Iowa.   A senior spokesperson stated, “We’re not letting any additional planes to take off until we find out whether there is anything to be learned from this tragic incident that can be applied nationwide and what is being planned for future air travel.”

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Kelly Anderson Wright

Forget the politicians’ clever sound bites and soulful promises: Our federal government doesn’t care about us. Despite our pleading to five presidential administrations, the Feds have failed to protect our international border with Mexico. Arizona just can’t take it anymore.

If you want something done right, do it yourself.

Can you blame them? Arizonans have endured 25 years of steadily increasing border crime, violence, drug trafficking, kidnapping and murder. Arizona lawmakers finally took matters into their own hands and passed a state law that mirrors federal law, making it a crime to be an illegal immigrant in Arizona. Their logic is, if the Feds won’t enforce the immigration laws already on the books, they will, in their state. Arizona tienes cajones, hombre! (Translation: Arizona has balls, dude!)

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Jill Ciminillo

I have to admit, my first impression of the 2010 Mitsubishi Lancer Sportback was a kind of disappointment. It looked good on the outside, but the ride was a little slow and uninspiring.

Then again, it didn’t help that I had recently driven the all-new Mazdaspeed3. And. LOVED. It.

But to compare this version of the Lancer Sportback to the Mazdaspeed3 is like comparing apples and oranges. Sure they’re both fruit, but everything else is different.

2010 Mitsubishi Lancer Sportback

So, when you compare the Lancer Sportback to other apples, it actually stacks up pretty well. Other apples on the chopping block include: the Mazda3 5-door, the Toyota Matrix and the Subaru Impreza WRX 5-door. It beats everything except the Matrix on pricing, and overall its 5-year/100,000-mile warranty beats them all. Read the rest of this entry »

Brett Noel

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Large version for newspaper publication.

Greyscale version for newspaper publication.

Bruce Fisher

The most telling chart in a new study of Wall Street’s role in the recent economic crash is the one that shows the trend-line for bonuses. Bonuses are those enormous end-of-year payouts to star bankers that make the rest of us wonder if there’s any connection between work and reward. It’s like profit-sharing in a normal business, except that on Wall Street, as far back as the Reagan days when novelist Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities lampooned it all, it’s normal for a banker to get a million-dollar bonus even when the bank he works for loses money.

The sign says it all.

The Fiscal Policy Institute’s new study reports that every year since 1998, even in years when Wall Street firms’ profits were down, billions were paid in bonuses. During the crash in 2007 and 2008, when the big banks lost so much money that we taxpayers had to bail them out, bonus payouts were more than $50 billion. In 2009, when Wall Street made more than three times as much in profits as in any previous year on record, bonuses, never small, were back up into the pre-crash stratosphere. Taxpayers are still waiting for several hundred billion dollars of our federal bailout money to be repaid, but the real-life Tom Wolfe characters wait for nothing. Meanwhile, millions of other Americans are still recovering from the crash that the speculators and their Washington colleagues engineered.

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David Karki

Arizona did the right thing in passing federal immigration law at the state level.  Contrary to liberal media hysteria and liberal politician race-war mongering for electoral gain, this was nothing extreme. The state government merely passed a bill making the exact language in federal immigration statutes a part of state law. This allows state and local police to enforce the law that Congress and the president haven’t for the last quarter century.

Actually . . .

In other words, they simply took the responsibility into their own hands that the federal government has been totally derelict in having shirked for the past quarter century. If the scumbag politicians of both parties had simply done their Constitutional duty and defended a border – i.e. built a wall and defended it – none of this would have been necessary or happened.

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Andy Hefty

JACKSONVILLE – My wife was approached by a neighboring friend today, supposing that I would be all worked up over the appointment and controversial confirmation of University of North Florida professor Parvez Ahmed to the Jacksonville Human Rights Commission.

Whatevs.

OK, so the Jacksonville City Council approved a Muslim professor to the City’s Human Rights Commission. I suppose that I should care. Frankly, I don’t.

Let’s get this straight: an elitist government executive (Mayor John Peyton) appoints an elitist government college professor (Parvez) to an elitist government position, where an elitist government legislative body approves him.

While it’s true that Ahmed was in high leadership of a terrorist-sympathizing organization, the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), he has more than once and very publicly distanced himself from their more radical stances against American and Israeli interests.

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Bob Franken

What an interesting juxtaposition in the Senate Tuesday. At that hearing of the Investigation Subcommittee the parade of insolent Goldman Sachs gangbangers basically made it clear they were way higher and mightier than the peoples’ elected officials of any government.

I'm an outlaw, baby.

In effect, they told astonished committee members that concepts such as honesty and ethics, and certainly shame, were alien in Goldman snake pits. All that mattered, as they peddled their indecipherable and deceptive exotic mortgage packages, was that they added new profits to their pile of ill-gotten gains.

Meanwhile, over on the Senate floor, the Republicans once again were blocking the Financial Reform legislation, which, among other things, would establish requirements and oversight for the very derivatives Goldman Sachs and the other hustlers in their cabals used in their elaborate and massive financial flim flams.

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Andy Hefty

So, the Planet California strikes again.  But this time, it’s not in what many (including myself) will call the Nanny State.  This time, it is downright tyranny.  The Los Angeles Times reports that County Supervisors of Santa Clara County will ban toys in fast-food meals designed for children.

Chalk me up as an ardent protestor of such I-know-better-than-you elitist mentality.

No government can fix this.

Do fast-food meals make kids fat?  No!  Over-indulging parents who are unwilling to keep discipline in their house make children fat.  If you want to put the brakes on childhood obesity, let’s put the stigma back into place.  Trash the government-mandated “sensitivity training” (what communist nations of yesteryear used to call re-education camps) and let people suffer the consequences of making poor decisions.

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Steven Hutson

Not a day goes by that I don’t thank God that I live in a free country.  For all of our problems, on our worst day, we remain the land of the free, a place of endless opportunity. No wonder so many people long to get here, by car or boat or tunnel or hang glider or inner tube, any way they can.  And since I did nothing to earn such a privilege myself, I have no problem with sharing the wealth with others.

But not by theft, nor fraud, nor deceit.

Case in point: Yesterday’s Los Angeles Times had a feature story about Ekaterine Bautista, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who was denied citizenship after serving six years in the U.S. Army.  Turns out, she qualified for

Soon to be irrelevant?

enlistment only by impersonating her aunt, a U.S. citizen who now lives in Mexico.  She was hoping to take advantage of a decades-old law that allows (legal!) foreign nationals to earn citizenship by serving in the armed forces, particularly in wartime.  And now that her ruse has been discovered, she may end up being forcibly returned to her home country.

Of course, the Times account was little more than an op-ed piece in the guise of hard news reporting.  They reported Bautista’s crime, yet refused to recognize it as such.  The headline itself is telling: “A misstep may mean deportation.”
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