Intelligence Squared Debates: 'The GOP Must Seize the Center or Die'

Source:Intelligence Squared Debates- Republican political strategist Ralph Reed.

"2012 was a disappointing year for Republicans. The failure to win key swing states in the presidential election and surprising losses in the House and Senate have prompted some reflection. Was their embrace of small government, low taxes, and a strong conservative stance on social issues at odds with shifting American demographics? Or did the GOP embrace the right platform, but the wrong candidates?" 

From Intelligence Squared Debates

NFL Films: NFL 1973- Super Bowl 8- Minnesota Vikings vs Miami Dolphins: Highlights

Source:NFL Films- Miami Dolphins FB Larry Czonka taking it in for a TD.

Source:The Daily Post 

"(4K ULTRA HD) - Super Bowl VIII Highlights - RESTORED" 

From Godzilla Rocks 

I think what the Minnesota Vikings experiences in their 4 Super Bowls from 1969-76, is that if you can't run the ball against the other team and can't stop the other team's running game, you are not going to win the Super Bowl. 

You might be able to win the Super Bowl today without a running game, or at least a running game in the Super Bowl, but you couldn't do that in the 1970s, for the simple reason that the rules favored the defenses so much, both the defensive lineman and the defensive backs. 

If you couldn't run the ball in the Super Bowl in the 1970s, even if you had one of the best passing games in the NFL that season, which is what the Vikings had, your QB (in this case Fran Tarkenton) and your receivers, will be sitting ducks. Because your o-line will get run over by the d-line and linebackers, especially since they know you have to throw the ball, just to move the ball.

Like with the Kansas Chiefs in Super Bowl 4, the Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl 9, the Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl 11, the Dolphins won Super Bowl 8 at the line of scrimmage with their o-line and d-line. They ran the ball at will against the Vikings smaller front 7 and stuffed the Vikings running game the whole day.

Forbes Magazine: Fred Allen: 'Gun Control: A Congress of Cowards'

Source:Forbes Magazine- U.S. Vice President Jospeh R. Biden (Democrat, Delaware) and President of the U.S. Senate.

"Why was the Senate unable to even hold an up-and-down vote on legislation that 80% to 90% of Americans support?" 

From Forbes Magazine

"The United States Senate displayed a mass failure of leadership yesterday when it killed, without even allowing an up-and-down vote, the measure that would have required background checks for sales of guns at gun shows and on the Internet and in other commercial transactions. The action was not really about differences of philosophy or Second Amendment rights, not when polls show that 80% to 90% of Americans favor expanded background checks. It was mainly about cowardice, in both parties. Democrats feared reelection challenges from the right. Republicans feared both electoral challenges and having to support both gun control legislation and immigration reform, two middle-of-the-road initiatives both backed by President Obama.

Moreover, the Senate defeated the bill in its most cowardly way, with a filibuster defeating the will of the majority of senators. The vote was as much a mark of dysfunction as of cravenness. As Gabrielle Giffords wrote this morning:

I was elected six times to represent southern Arizona, in the State Legislature and then in Congress. I know what a complicated issue is; I know what it feels like to take a tough vote. This was neither. These senators made their decision based on political fear and on cold calculations about the money of special interests like the National Rifle Association, which in the last election cycle spent around $25 million on contributions, lobbying and outside spending.

The filibuster offended Americans across the political spectrum. It even provoked Joe Scarborough, the conservative former Republican Congressman from Florida,  to say this on his show Morning Joe this morning... 

From Forbes Magazine

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CSPAN: Senator Rand Paul at Howard University

Source:CSPAN- U.S. Senator Rand Paul (Republican, Kentucky) speaking at Howard University in Washington.

"Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) spoke to students at Howard University about the Republican Party's outreach efforts to young people and minorities." 

From Jay Argonaut

This is actually very smart politics by Senator Paul here and I'll explain why. African-Americans, including by left-wing African-Americans have been stereotyped, at least since the 1990s as a community of leftists that expect the Federal Government to do everything for them and want government to just give them things and take care of them, to make up for everything that the United Kingdom and the United States has done to them, since the 1st African was kidnapped and forced to live in North America as slaves, in the 1600s. 

The truth is, African-Americans voted Republican, perhaps not as a majority, but the Republican Party was very competitive, at least in that community, all the way through Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. It's really not until George H.W. Bush's presidential campaign of 1988 and his reelection campaign of 1992, where you started to see the African-American community as a large and reliable voting bloq of the Democratic Party, because of the Christian-Right and broader Far-Right influence in the Republican Party. 

You go back to the 1960s with Nation of Islam Minister Malcolm X, or go way before that with Frederick Douglas, Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell today, there's always been a conservative or classical liberal movement in the African-American community. 

Of course there are Socialists and Black Nationalists in the African-American community. But you can say that about every racial community in America. There's also a Christian-Right in the African-American community, like with European-Americans, especially Anglo-Saxons. 

But there's always been a core faction of African-Americans that believe in limited government, personal responsibility, fiscal responsibility, and property rights (economic and personal) and I believe those are the folks that Senator Paul was trying to reach at Howard University.

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Washington Examiner: 'Competitive Federalism Can Restore Government's Credibility'

Source:Washington Examiner- Newspaper.

"Among the most serious threats to the continued health of the American republic is the extraordinarily low esteem in which the public holds the federal government. And who can blame them when Congress and President Obama seem locked in perpetual partisan warfare, even as millions of Americans have given up on finding jobs, the economy bounces along in the weakest recovery since the Great Depression and the national debt soars to previously unimagined heights.

What is to be done? A coalition of state-based conservative think tanks led by the Oklahoma-based Liberty Foundation is advancing an old idea that if implemented could revolutionize American governance. The idea is "competitive federalism," which the coalition defines as "the powerful harnessing of our tri-partite sovereignty system that allows states to compete with each other over a broad range of issues to provide citizens with the best value goods and services at the lowest cost." Think of the difference between having only one place to buy food versus having 50.

To illustrate, imagine two scenarios: In the first, Congress and the president decide that trillions of dollars must be spent on a centralized health care insurance program managed by Washington bureaucrats. In the second, Congress and the president instead decide to return to the states the hundreds of billions of tax dollars previously spent in this arena by Washington, along with encouragement to assume the related responsibilities for insuring care and coverage.

Now, if the first scenario results in a bureaucratic monstrosity in which health insurance costs skyrocket, doctor shortages spread and the quality of care plunges, everybody in the country will suffer. In the second scenario, there can be as many as 50 distinct approaches to health care insurance. In states with failing systems, residents can pressure their officials to adopt reforms along the lines of states with successful approaches.

Under which scenario are the smallest number of people likely to suffer? And which scenario would be the most responsive to demands for reform? Would more people receive quality health care under the first or second scenario? Most Americans would likely choose the second scenario in answer to all three questions. Lest anybody think these considerations are merely theoretical speculation, recall that the founders based the Constitution on the same concept. As Publius observed in the Federalist Papers, ours is "a federal, and not a national constitution." As a result, federal powers are "few and defined," while those of the states are "numerous and indefinite," encompassing "all the objects" that "concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people," Publius wrote.

To put it in the most practical possible terms, if Californians choose a system that provides poor quality, only the taxpayers in the Golden State have to pay for it, while residents of states that choose better systems only have to pay for theirs. When the federal government imposes a uniform solution like Obamacare, all 300 million Americans pay the cost. Expect to hear more competitive federalism thinking as the federal government staggers along on its present disastrous course." 

From the Washington Examiner

The Daily Telegraph: 'Margaret Thatcher: The Woman Who Made Britain Great Again'

Source:The Daily Telegraph- Margaret Thatcher (Conservative, England) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1979-90)

"Almost 25 years have passed since Margaret Thatcher left Downing Street, and yet the full scale of her achievement is still surprisingly hard to set out. So completely has her legacy shaped modern Britain, so fully have she and her ideas been woven into its fabric, that it can be hard to appreciate the depth of our debt to this most extraordinary of individuals. For she was not one of those politicians who had the good fortune to go with the grain of her times. She was a leader who wrenched this nation from the path of demoralisation, diminishment and... 

From The Daily Telegraph 

Margaret Thatcher, in some ways was very lucky because she arrived on the seen as first Leader of The Opposition in the United Kingdom in the mid 1970s and then of course Prime Minister in 1979 at the perfect time when Britain was down and when socialism was not working and when the British were looking for a different message. Not so much different from what the United States was going through in the late 1970s. And Ronald Reagan came onto the scene.

Margaret Thatcher, didn’t set out to destroy socialism, but empower Brits to have the freedom to take care of themselves and take on more responsibility in governing their own lives. And handing more power down from the central government in Britain to the British people themselves. 

Maggie Thatcher, coming to power in Britain was truly a Conservative Revolution from when the Socialists in the Labour Party had all the power in Britain, to a time where there was a new message in Britain, that was conservative and getting government out of the business of running people’s lives.

I believe Maggie Thatcher, would be called a Northeastern, or Bob Dole even Conservative Republican in America. Someone who was in favor of having a public safety net. But that it wasn’t the job of government to take care of physically and mentally able people for their entire lives to help people who truly need it, but to help them help themselves. To put physically and mentally able people to work. Help people who are out-of-work get back to work, or go to work for the first time in their lives. As well as move Britain away from Marxist state economics and create a larger private sector in Britain.

You can also see this post at The Daily Post, on Blogger. (No pun intended)

You can also see this post at The Daily Post, on WordPress. (No pun intended)

Tania Ayde: 'Bugsy Siegel & The Flamingo Hotel'

Source:Tania Ayde- Jewish mobster and perhaps the creator of Las Vegas, Benjamin Bugsy Siegel.

Source:The Daily Post

"A film by Tania De La Cruz

Directed by Tania De La Cruz & David Villapando

Edited and Written by Tania De La Cruz

Interviews provided by:Biography. " 

From Tania Ayde 

Benjamin Bugsy Siegel was an interesting mobster. Italian, Irish or in Bugsy’s case Jewish, because he could’ve been anything he wanted to be. Because of his intelligence and charm. But because he lacked basic discipline and patience he went very far, but in a short time. But was only around for a short time. Being killed by the mob leadership in his early forties after being killed in his Los Angeles home by perhaps both the Italian and Jewish mafia’s and their leaderships. 

If you’re familiar with the film Bugsy from 1991, where Warren Beatty plays Bugsy Siegel, according to the film Bugsy’s bosses fly him back to Los Angeles from some supposed meeting. But the only meeting that Bugsy went to was his assassination, after the mob leadership decided that Bugsy was no longer worth the investment with all the money Bugsy spent to build the Las Vegas casinos and that even though Bugsy was very effective as a hitman for the Italian and Jewish mafias, as well as an enforcer, he was no longer worth the investment. Because of how bad a businessman he was. And that he needed to be taken out before he cost his bosses more money. 

Bugsy, again, had many good personal qualities about him. (Even for a murderer) But he lacked discipline and realism. He was too idealistic and too much of a dreamer, to survive as a mobster long-term. Whether you like it or not the Jewish and Italian Mafias’s, were business’s and didn’t want to associate with people who lost them money. Which is how they say Busgy in the end.

The mafia were worried that Bugsy would end up in prison or talking to police, or whatever. That he was too big of a gamble (even in Las Vegas) for them and needed to be dealt with. But without Bugsy Benjamin Siegel and Jimmy Hoffa, Las Vegas is not what it is today. A big vibrant city that it is in the Southwest and the entertainment capital of America. That is just a half-hour flight from Los Angeles. Where Americans all over the country go to everyday to have a good time. 

You take the criminal mindset away from Ben Siegel and you also discipline him without losing his imagination and vision, which is what created the Las Vegas that we know today and I think we’re talking about a brilliant businessman. But of course we’ll never know that.