New York Times Mentions Benghazi For the First Time in Four Days

In its Libya Warnings Were Plentiful, but Unspecific, the New York Times broke its four day embargo on the use of the word “Benghazi.” Those expecting a discussion of a possible cover up by the administration and the curious sticking to the “video story” were due for a disappointment. The article was exclusively about security arrangements and the difficulty of gauging the security threat to our embassy facilities in Libya.

American voters know about the changing administration accounts in the month following the Benghazi attacks and are curious. They must look elsewhere from the Times to get answers.

There You Go Again: New York Times Trying to Save Obama in Ohio

 In its GOP Turns Fire on Obama Pillar, The Auto Bailout, the New York Times engages in a blatant distortion to prop up Obama’s waning fortunes in Ohio. 

The Times rehashes a November 18, 2008 Romney editorial entitled Let Detroit Go Bankrupt as follows:

“Mr. Romney wrote an Op-Ed article in the New York Times — given the title by the newspaper “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.’’ In the piece Mr. Romney wrote that in the event of a bailout, “You can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.”

Notice that the Times admits it chose the misleading headline (“Let Detroit Go Bankrupt”), which served as campaign fodder for Obama for the next three years.

Anyone who bothers to read the Romney piece knows he is arguing against a federal bail out (not bankruptcy) of GM and Chrysler. A bailout would leave both unable to compete, and, indeed, you could “kiss the American automotive industry good by.”

Instead, Romney advocated a court-managed Chapter 11 bankruptcy to realign GM and Chrysler’s costs with competitors to save GM and Chrysler.  The Obama administration agreed. Obama’s car czar pushed GM and Chrysler through Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. Chrysler was, in effect, sold to Fiat.  The bankrupt “old” GM’s shares became worthless, and its assets were transferred to a “new” GM owned primarily by the unions and the federal government.

The Times somehow forgot to tell its readers that Obama agreed with Romney to “let Detroit go bankrupt.”

Romney wanted a regular bankruptcy preceding to put in place  “new labor (UAW) agreements to align pay and benefits to match those of workers at competitors.” Alarmed by his UAW allies, Obama rushed to strong arm through a political bankruptcy at taxpayer expense that shortchanged bond holders, preserved union contracts and gold-plated pensions, and made the federal government the largest single shareholder.

Do not take my word: The Washington Post’s Fact Check: Letting Detroit go bankrupt rejects Obama’s references to Romney’s  wanting Detroit to go “bankrupt.”  I quote:

“This statement is drawn from a headline — ‘Let Detroit Go Bankrupt’ (chosen by the Times)— on an opinion article written by Romney for New York Times. But he did not say that in the article…Although ‘bankrupt’ often conjures up images of liquidation, Romney called for a ‘managed bankruptcy.’ This is a process in which the company uses the bankruptcy code to discharge its debts, but emerges from the process a leaner, less leveraged company.”

Confronted with this truth, Obama’s supporters can only claim: “But there was no money for a regular bankruptcy.” Yes, there was. If the federal government could throw $80 billion at the GM-Chrysler bankruptcies, it could have put up the small amount of creditor-in-possession funds required for a regular bankruptcy.

Ohio remember:  Obama’s political bankruptcy of GM did not rescue jobs. It rescued union pay and benefits.

published in forbes.com 

Readers’ Manual on the GM Bailout:

Both Obama and Romney proposed taking GM through Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

GM went bankrupt. Its shares became worthless and its assets were transferred to a new company, which was called General Motors.

Obama used taxpayer dollars to force through a political bankruptcy that preserved union contracts and pensions, short changed bondholders, and made the unions and the federal government the new owners of GM. 

Romney favored a regular bankruptcy that would treat all GM stakeholders fairly. The government would be limited to providing bridge financing backed by GM assets to limit taxpayer exposure.

The federal government remains a major shareholder because it cannot sell its shares without revealing the extent of the taxpayer loss.

The old GM was an ideal candidate for Chapter 11. It had an established brand name, billions of dollars of revenues, and needed restructuring to lower its high labor and pension costs. It would have attracted numerous bidders. It would have emerged from bankruptcy with slightly fewer jobs, lower wages, and less generous union pensions.

Ohioans Are No Fools: Obama Did NOT Save Your Automotive Jobs

Barack Obama believes he can take Ohio voters for fools. His “I saved GM from bankruptcy” was his first whopper. As if that was not enough, Obama, aided and abetted by Bill Clinton in Charlotte, conceived an even bigger whopper: “I saved the entire U.S. auto industry.” These two claims were supposed to assure Obama Ohio’s electoral votes with its 76,000 jobs in motor vehicle assembly and manufacture of bodies, trailers and parts.

November 6 will show that Ohio voters have too much common sense to be taken in by Obama’s whoppers.

go to forbes.com

Wow! The New York Times Tells the Truth on the Benghazi Blunder (PS Obama Is Losing)

Op-ed writer Ross Douthat is a rare truth teller among the New York Times’s writers’ stable. Columnist Paul Krugman spouts daily left-wing fact-uninformed economics. Token conservative, David Brooks, pens trivia about the latest book he read. Maureen Dowd jokes about women’s issues. Only Douthat  questions the Times’ ueber-liberal party line and tells the truth.

In his Sunday October 14 Mystery of Benghazi, Douthat dissects why “White House officials continued to stress the importance of the ‘hateful’ and ‘disgusting’ video, and its supposed role as a catalyst for what Susan Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, insisted was a spontaneous attack” even as “it became clearer that the Benghazi violence was an al Qaeda operation” --- a narrative “pushed on Sunday morning programs, on late-night talk shows and at news conferences, by everyone from Rice to Hillary Clinton to the president himself.”  Per Douthat: “When Obama spoke at the United Nations shortly after the attacks, the video was referenced six times in the text; Al Qaeda was referenced only once.”

Douthat, for the first time on the pages of the venerable Times, clearly lays out the time line of what he terms the administration’s “strange denial” that the Benghazi consulate attack was a planned terrorist action.

Douthat rejects two common explanations for Obama’s “self defeating strategy,” before coming up with his own. 

go to forbes.com

Obama’s World 2050: Read Good Intentions Before the Election

The success of 2016: Obama‘s America shows there is an audience for conservative movies. Many movie-goers missed the obvious conservative message of a billionaire hero who saves Gotham City from the Occupy Gotham mob in the mega-hit The Dark Knight Rises. That Hollywood could at long last make Parts 1 and 2 of Atlas Shrugged for a niche-market represents an under-appreciated accomplishment.

If we look back, the books that have best put across a conservative message (or an anti-statist) message in the most indelible fashion have offered a vision of a future socialist or statist society. The classics, of course, are Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Now we have Bob Zeidman’s Good Intentions, a satirical novel about a future America in which political correctness has run amuck. Zeidman pictures a society in which everyone works for the state, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World “primitives” are the few remaining entrepreneurs.

Zeidman’s protagonist is Winston Jones (the counterpart of Orwell’s Winston Smith of 1984). Winston Jones is chosen by the Fairness for EveryBody Society to be the president because he has the required makeup—ethnic, racial, religious, sexual orientation, etc.—to “fairly represent the diversity of America.” In his attempt to escape his destiny as President, Jones goes about a voyage of discovery of the true America and comes to an understanding that it has veered radically off course.

The future America has solved the diversity problem by pairing couples to produce a homogenous gene pool, where everyone is alike. If we are all the same, there is equal opportunity and the government assures equal outcomes.  

Zeidman’s future Americans work for the government, where they work for the good of all. To prevent conflict in child rearing, one parent families are encouraged and the state provides an “e-father” for young boys and girls.  Property rights are not enforced because we are obliged to share with the less fortunate. In one scene, Winston encounters a frantic homeowner, in which illegal immigrants have decided to live. They ignore the plea “but this is my house” with the admonition that she should take care of the less fortunate. Perhaps they can perform some odd jobs to pay their way.

Zeidman’s future America has evolved into the ultimate nanny state. The state places patches of rubber matting around fences on which children might play along with warning signs (which make illegal the removal of the warning sign). The state protects us from ingesting things that might harm our health. In theGovMintBucks coffee shop, a “caffeinator” must be bribed to give customers sugared caffeine. After all, sugar causes obesity and hyperactivity in children and caffeine requires a prescription. Police are posted in the coffee shop to enforce these rules.

In his reluctant adventure of discovery, Winston encounters “The Documented,” a group of legal aliens that refuse to break the law and turn down government entitlements along with the mysterious Freedman Group— “subversives” who believe in free market capitalism and secretly run businesses without government interference. At the other end of the spectrum, he comes in contact with Radical Femlamism, a bizarre blending of Radical Feminism and Radical Islam.

I’ll not divulge further secrets. Just read Good Intentions and pass it on, and read it before the election.