Don Surber

Kim Kardashian Santa

2011-12-27T10:08:00.002-05:00

2011-12-26T16:08:00.003-05:00

Elvis first screen kiss

2011-12-23T10:21:00.002-05:00

Ahmadinejad Assad

2011-12-16T08:08:00.001-05:00

2011-12-07T21:03:00.002-05:00

2011-12-01T10:33:00.001-05:00

2011-11-14T19:42:00.002-05:00

2011-10-11T07:58:00.003-04:00

2011-10-09T18:32:00.001-04:00

2011-10-09T11:42:00.001-04:00

2011-09-30T10:37:00.001-04:00

2011-07-18T19:03:00.000-04:00

2011-07-04T20:34:00.000-04:00

2011-07-04T08:44:00.001-04:00

2011-07-04T08:43:00.001-04:00

2011-07-01T13:37:00.000-04:00

2011-04-06T09:19:00.002-04:00

2010-12-01T17:15:00.000-05:00

2010-11-29T13:29:00.001-05:00

Democrat secret weapon: The unemployed

2010-09-05T22:13:00.004-04:00

On September 1, Chris Matthews of MSNBC had this advice for his fellow Democrats:

Let me finish tonight with the politics of this November.

If the Republicans want to roll up the score, they`re on the right path. Energized by the Tea Party grassroots, driven by a nasty economy and by a ferocious propaganda campaign that paints the Democrat in the White House as a terrorist sympathizer, they can just keep doing what they`re doing.

Democrats have a tougher task. How to win when things are so darn bad? Well, the smart, tough, hard-nosed strategy is to play to your strengths.

Democrats have always been trusted first and foremost on the economic basics — bread and butter, looking out for people in trouble. They`re the party you vote for when you`re unemployed, when you`re really need unemployment insurance, when you`re worried about retiring and needing every cent of that Social Security check you spent your life working for.

Democrats are also the people you tend to trust when you see that the grand loudly promised benefits of globalism and greater productivity are going to the boys on Wall Street, when your factory is closing, when you`re being cut from a job you`ve spent decades doing your best at.

Well, look, this is going to be a tough year for the Democrats, but if they`re smart, they`ll start talking about real ways to create jobs, making steel to build rapid rail track and fast-moving trains, bringing big, big heavy, good-paying industrial jobs back to put men and women to work here in our American neighborhoods because of real capital investments and rebuilding our subways and bridges and road systems — real jobs to replace the smell of decay with the healthy smell of construction, of dirty being moved and foundations being laid and real, good old, almost forgotten factory noise.

Oh, you`ll be knocked for talking like this. You`ll be mocked by the smoother, better off critics out there. But the working people will hear you as real, and Mr. And Mrs. Democrat may well end up with a good piece of the political action, even this November — not only that, but one day, sooner than you think, with a place in the sun.

Democrats, did you hear me? Play your strengths: work and wages.

Finally, the perpetual motion machine has been invented.

Since Democrats took over Congress, 7 million people have lost their jobs.

That means 7 million votes for Democrats.

One other thing, Chris Matthews said of his party "if they're smart, they'll start talking about real ways to create jobs, making steel to build rapid rail track and fast-moving trains, bringing big, big heavy, good-paying industrial jobs back to put men and women to work here in our American neighborhoods because of real capital investments and rebuilding our subways and bridges and road systems -- real jobs to replace the smell of decay with the healthy smell of construction, of dirty being moved and foundations being laid and real, good old, almost forgotten factory noise."

Really?

How do you make steel without mining for coal -- without putting carbon dioxide into the air -- without using some form of nuclear or carbon-based energy -- without exceeding the noise pollution limits -- without violating any of the 200 volumes of federal law and regulations that are now on the books?

Tell me.

Greens win battle over a football uniform

2010-09-05T10:31:00.003-04:00

The world is safer and greener thanks to all those enviromorons who pressured Nike to change an ad for a football uniform.

Nike is providing WVU with a special uniform for its game against arch-rival Pitt.

The uniform honors the 29 men who died in an April 5 explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in Raleigh County, West Virginia.

The left objected to there being a strip mine in the ad that shows the uniform.

Nike replaced the strip mine with a stadium.

OK.

Fine.

But why a strip mine or a stadium?

Why not an actual coal mine?

After all, they died in one.

WVU made a mistake signing up with Nike because this looks more like an exploitation than a tribute. As for the left's objections, it is a reminder of Lefty Icon Josef Stalin's observation that one man's death is a tragedy, the death of thousands is a statistic.

The Associated Press report:

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Nike has replaced the image of a strip mine with that of a football stadium in ads promoting a new West Virginia University football uniform.

Nike decided Thursday to revise the ad after environmentalists complained about the depiction of a mountaintop removal mine behind the image of a uniform intended to honor 29 men killed in the Upper Big Branch mine blast.

That mine was an underground operation.

Activists said they didn't object to the actual uniform, but that the ad appeared to be a tacit endorsement of mountaintop removal by both Nike and the university.

Both insisted that wasn't their intention.

Nike says it designed the black and white uniforms as a tribute to the state's coal mining heritage.

The uniforms will be worn for a single game this year, the Backyard Brawl at Pittsburgh Nov. 26.

Obama’s rug gets Roosevelt wrong

2010-09-05T08:09:00.001-04:00

President Obama had the Oval Office renovated. Good for him. But there is a controversy. Naturally. It concerns a quote on the rug by Teddy Roosevelt: “The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally on the welfare of all of us.”

Over at the Huffington Post, the quote is considered an endorsement of socialism.

But Susan Shelley at America Wants To Know said the quote is taken out of context. Great detective work by a great thinking American.

We know the speech today as the The Square Deal speech. Readers may decide for themselves:

Unfortunately, in this world the innocent frequently find themselves obliged to pay some of the penalty for the misdeeds of the guilty; and so if hard times come, whether they be due to our own fault or to our misfortune, whether they be due to some burst of speculative frenzy that has caused a portion of the business world to lose its head -a loss which no legislation can possibly supply-- or whether they be due to any lack of wisdom in a portion of the world of labor — in each case, the trouble once started is felt more or less in every walk of life.

It is all-essential to the continuance of our healthy national life that we should recognize this community of interest among our people. The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us, and therefore in public life that man is the best representative of each of us who seeks to do good to each by doing good to all; in other words, whose endeavor it is not to represent any special class and promote merely that class’s selfish interests, but to represent all true and honest men of all sections and all classes and to work for their interests by working for our common country.

We can keep our government on a sane and healthy basis, we can make and keep our social system what it should be, only on condition of judging each man, not as a member of a class, but on his worth as a man. It is an infamous thing in our American life, and fundamentally treacherous to our institutions, to apply to any man any test save that of his personal worth, or to draw between two sets of men any distinction save the distinction of conduct, the distinction that marks off those who do well and wisely from those who do ill and foolishly. There are good citizens and bad citizens in every class as in every locality, and the attitude of decent people toward great public and social questions should be determined, not by the accidental questions of employment or locality, but by those deep-set principles which represent the innermost souls of men.

The failure in public and in private life thus to treat each man on his own merits, the recognition of this government as being either for the poor as such or for the rich as such, would prove fatal to our Republic, as such failure and such recognition have always proved fatal in the past to other republics. A healthy republican government must rest upon individuals, not upon classes or sections. As soon as it becomes government by a class or by a section, it departs from the old American ideal.

In the history of mankind many republics have risen, have flourished for a less or greater time, and then have fallen because their citizens lost the power of governing themselves and thereby of governing their state; and in no way has this loss of power been so often and so clearly shown as in the tendency to turn the government into a government primarily for the benefit of one class instead of a government for the benefit of the people as a whole. Again and again in the republics of ancient Greece, in those of medieval Italy and medieval Flanders, this tendency was shown, and wherever the tendency became a habit it invariably and inevitably proved fatal to the state. In the final result, it mattered not one whit whether the movement was in favor of one class or of another.

The outcome was equally fatal, whether the country fell into the hands of a wealthy oligarchy which exploited the poor or whether it fell under the domination of a turbulent mob which plundered the rich. In both cases there resulted violent alternations between tyranny and disorder, and a final complete loss of liberty to all citizens — destruction in the end overtaking the class which had for the moment been victorious as well as that which had momentarily been defeated. The death-knell of the Republic had rung as soon as the active power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one special class and for its interests as opposed to the interests of others.

It is that last line, "The death-knell of the Republic had rung as soon as the active power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one special class and for its interests as opposed to the interests of others," that should be on the rug.

Sadly, TR's words have proved prophetic.

The entire speech is here.

Odd how a president whose supporters decry quotes as being “out of context” would miss something like this. Far from an endorsement of having El Presidente take over industry upon industry. TR called for self-government, the antithesis of Obamacare.

Ohio: Bush 50, Obama 42

2010-09-05T08:08:00.000-04:00

From Tom Jensen at Public Policy Polling on Tuesday: "We'll start rolling out our Ohio poll results tomorrow but there's one finding on the poll that pretty much sums it up: by a 50-42 margin voters there say they'd rather have George W. Bush in the White House right now than Barack Obama."

In 2008, Barack Obama rolled over John McCain 2,940,044 to 2,677,820.

Using Surber Math, that's a 262,224-vote margin.

What happened?

The unknown became the known.

Prince Charming turned out to be a frog.

Imagine that.

Unemployment rose by more than 3 percentage points in Ohio, topping 10% and staying there.

From Jennifer Rubin: "This tells us several things. First, Obama’s juvenile buck-passing hasn’t and won’t work. The election game plan of threatening the return of Bush isn’t going to fly. Heck, the voters wouldn’t mind having him back! Second, Obama has, to a degree we have not seen in recent years, shied away from acknowledging error. His “out” was always that Bush had messed things up — far worse than we even imagined. Now with Bush-bashing proven to be entirely counterproductive, what will Obama do to deflect blame? And finally, you have to keep faith with the American people. They may get impatient and lose perspective, but they remain exceedingly fair and possess a large reservoir of common sense (e.g., a mosque at Ground Zero is absurd, Bush was a decent man who made tough calls, we shouldn’t dump on loyal allies). It is good to be reminded of that."

Meanwhile, Obama could elect the first Republican senator from West Virginia in 52 years.

Long way to November 2.

62 days to be exact.