In Praise of Entrepreneurs
I won’t say that I would be the last person to praise Steve Jobs, Apple founder, but I’d certainly be way down the list.
I’ve never owned an Apple product. At the risk of heresy in these benighted times, I’ve always, when forced to use any product by that company, found them annoying, and I’ve never purchased anything from iTunes. But similarly, because I grew up as the son of a GM executive, I’ve never owned a Ford product, but I can nonetheless recognize Henry Ford (even ignoring his ideological shortcomings) as a great force in the history of not just transportation, but in transforming a nation, increasing its wealth and freedom beyond measure.
So despite my personal lack of appreciation for his inventions, I appreciate Steve Jobs as a brilliant technological visionary, and I recognize him as the kind of person who truly changes the world.
As I wrote at my blog, almost ten years ago (and not long after its founding — frightening to think that this month is my decadal bloggiversary):
I came to realize that the true revolutionaries were not people marching to the barricades, or theorizing about social philosophies in Ann Arbor or Berkeley or Paris cafes, or even the small subset of such people who actually somehow came to political power. The true revolutionaries were the technologists — those who solved societal needs not by attempting to forcibly rearrange society against human will, but rather by giving individuals new tools that allowed them to reorder their own lives within those constraints.
Gutenberg almost single-handedly (and probably unintentionally) overthrew much of the power structure of his time. Mssrs. Winchester and Colt, and the fellow who invented barbed wire, had as great an impact on the American West as Thomas Jefferson, and more than any politician from the region. Arguably, few politicians had as much impact on the twentieth century as Henry Ford, or Orville and Wilbur Wright, or Armstrong, prolific inventor of the modern radio, or Turing and von Neumann and Noyce and Jobs and Gates, and all the others who gave us the modern information revolution.
When a history of the late twentieth century is written decades or centuries from now, it seems likely to me that John F. Kennedy will be noted as “a minor politician during the era of von Braun.”
JOBS!!!! His very name and legacy of innovation are poetic justice for capitalism and free enterprise! Steve Jobs created more sustainable tax payers than the Feds could ever dream of. Innovation, R & D, manufacturing, global distribution, marketing, retail supply chain, strategic partnerships and on and on and on! Steve Jobs created products we didn’t even know we needed… amazing!
JOBS! will forever be a rally cry of free men and women across the globe that dream of changing the world from their garage. And oh yea, thanks and kudos to Wozniak too!!!!
Socialism, communism, marxism, collectivism are all at their very root a mental illness. When is the last time you got a job from a poor person???? “If you don’t have a job or haven’t become rich it is your own fault.” Herman Cain – Oct. 2011
Steve Jobs: A technology ‘artist’ with Socialist tendencies (when convenient) who was often brutal to his employees.
Folks, you better read the mans bio and learn who Jobs actually was.
I worked at Apple for five years during Jobs’ initial tenure there, leaving some months after he did (along with “1200 or so of my closest friends”).
And after watching his career after his return, including conversations with friends who were still there, his contributions vastly outweighed his personal management shortcomings.
There are people that do things and then there are people who take things. Most of the people are in the middle who niether do or take but benefit form the people that do and try to protect themselves from the people that take. People that do things love a challenge, the more difficult the better. The people that take do not want to do the difficult but want the easy way and shortcuts where none exist.
Most people just want to get by. They do want want to be confronted with difficult challenges. It is not because they are lazy, most work hard and are decent people but they are, as a whole, risk averse.
Steve Jobs, and many like him, was a person who did things. Risk was his bread and butter. All through history it was people who were willing to take a risk and do the hard things that made a difference. It used to be part of what it meant to be American to be a risk taker. This country was formed and populated by that very sort. Who else would have made the difficult juorney to come here and leave everything that was known and comfortable behind?
Steve Jobs personified what it meant to be American. He took risks and betted that his vision was the correct one. All of us have beneffited from it even if you have never owned or used an Apple product.
R.I.P. Steve Jobs. The entire world is less now that you are gone. Sadly there are not as many in the pipeline to replace you as there once was.
Steve Jobs was a major American business leader too, in accepting that AGW is real, serious, and accelerating.
That’s why Steve Jobs yanked Apple out of the US Chamber of Commerce (CoC) … because Jobs appreciated that the CoC was harming Apple’s customers by selling-out to corporate special interests.
It’s true that for some PJM/Tatler editors/readers, Steve Jobs’s executive actions are proof-positive that Steve Jobs was secretly (1) a moron, or (2) a commie, or (3) a liberal. Or all three.
But just maybe, Steve Jobs was (4) absolutely correct?
And so folks oughtta rethink the PJM/Tatler anti-AGW party-line?
Because it wouldn’t be the first time Steve Jobs was absolutely right, eh?
And that’s why America needs plenty of Steve Jobs-style business leaders.
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Apple joins Chamber of Commerce exodus over climate change scepticism
Apple becomes latest in line of high-profile departures
URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/oct/06/chamber-commerce-apple-climate-change
Or maybe Jobs had something else in common with H Ford besides being a world-changing entrepeneur: wacky and dangerous political ideas.
I can’t see so-called AGW happening myself. That alone does not make it nonexistent. It does mean I either have to become a climate science expert to find out whether it exists, or accept testimony from others as to its verity.
But I have found that so-called ‘experts’ in various fields often deliver opinions tainted by politics. In my own field of expertise, e.g., the ACOG (American College of Obstetricians) and the NIH (Nat’l Institute of Health) some years back pronounced that the word ‘pregnancy’ would now refer to that state that begins with implantation of the developing baby on the inner wall of his mother’s womb. Why did they do this? To my cynical mind it seems clear they did this so that a clinician could say with a straight face that birth control products that function solely or in substantial part by blocking implantation, thus resulting in the death of the baby and subsequent expulsion with the mother’s next menses, did not interfere with ‘pregnancy’. These products include all the hormonal methods (‘the Pill’, etc) and IUD’s. Of course, the bulk of society, including most physicians, understand that a woman is pregnant from the moment of conception. But those physicians, researchers, and medical leaders who use the new definition of ‘pregnancy’ rarely acknowledge that fact and seek to clarify the issue; they simply use the new term. Therefore I justifiably view them as untrustworthy; they either are negligently blind to the facts, or are deliberately misleading patients.
So I have found that it is not wise to blindly trust the soi-disant ‘experts’ (even physicists) about everything. Since those whose judgement I have reason to trust are telling me that ‘AGW’ is not a major problem worthy of my attention, I will resist efforts to make me expend resources to fight it.
The conjoinment of gametes is not and has never been a pregnancy, pregnancy has always begun with implantation. You aren’t “expecting” until that implantation has happened. Devices, drugs, and methods which prevent implantation or the conjoinment of gametes are not abortifacients.
You may be certain you are adhering to some earlier and finer pre-existing definition, in fact you are attempting to “move the goal posts”.
There’s a way to stick AGW into every conversation, in your world. Physicist? You’re more like nagging headache.
RIP and well done Mr. Jobs, however, despite our resident AGWer’s lame attempt at linking one knowledge set with a totally unrelated one, genius in gadgetry and marketing doesn’t translate into being knowledgable about anything else in particular. Sort of like how Tiger Woods, although a genius with a stick and a ball, wasn’t much good at relationships. You’d think someone calling himself a physicist would get that.
Thomas and Doc, perhaps it’s worth understanding why so many business leaders think Steve Jobs is absolutely right, and you are dead-wrong (along with PJM/Tatler editors), regarding the accelerating reality of climate-change.
Because these business leaders aren’t dumb, eh?
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Business leaders demand action on climate change
URL: http://www.tgdaily.com/sustainability-features/52566-business-leaders-demand-action-on-climate-change
If he was so concerned about AGW, why are most of his products manufactured in China, and not say Finland?
Enough with the AGW BS. The swindle is over, dead and all but buried. And this is NOT the place for your nonsense.
(And by the way, I have 3 university degrees including one in physics. I personally think the science is crap and the politics is even worse.)
No one’s suggesting that Jobs, business leaders or anyone else who’s been very successful, for that matter, is “dumb”. Merely that success in one field does not necessarily make one knowledgable in another. Put another way, perhaps I could interest you in a Leonard Nimoy or Telly Savalas album?
We aren’t buying any slightly used AGW panic attacks these days. Y2Kyoto?
So, you’re saying anti-AGW activism causes cancer?
Thanks for reminding folks of the AGW-cancer link, Charlie.
It’s one more reason why Steve Jobs took Apple’s corporate responsibilities seriously.
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The record-breaking Arctic ozone “hole” and global warming
URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/post/the-rare-record-breaking-arctic-ozone-hole-and-global-warming/2011/10/04/gIQAfmWwKL_blog.html
And how far back do those records go back again?
Oh Jesus Christ, can you cork it?
LOL … snork, maybe yah need to take a lesson from Steve.
Ho-hum. More AFA from the One Note Johny.
I had also read that Jobs loved Atlass Shrugged and was sympathatic to objectivism, and also suspicious of gov interference in business. I wonder if you also embrace that particular Jobs position.
And as others have stated, if jobs was that worried about global warming, then why was he doing all his manufacturering in China, when China is the worste carbon offender in the world, and not about to do anything to change it.
I bought an Apple Mac 3e for a client back in 85 or so. A very sleek, stylish little thing it was, too. After we spent a fair amount of time setting up a data base and entering data, I discovered that it was literally incapable of adding numbers. You could type them in, and it would spit them back out, but it couldn’t add them up. $2400. The client wasn’t real happy.
I think Steve Jobs was pretty good at sculpture. At computer technology, not so much. And I am sure his opinions about AGW were not based on any deep understanding of the programs used by the “climate scientists”. I will say this for the astrologers, they may not be able to predict your future, but they can definitely predict where the planets will be next year. The “climate scientists” can’t even tell you what the weather will be like in two weeks, but they think they know what it will be like at the end of the century.
And the tragedy for them — and for us — is that they will spend their energy trying to expand the sphere of the ineffective, hidebound, rent-seeking, unproductive political world, giving the Barney Franks and Tom DeLays an even stronger whip hand over the Steve Jobses and Henry Fords. And they — and we — will be poorer for it.
Most of us know about the ruinous CRA legacy of Barney Frank. Perhaps someone can inform us as to why Kevin Williamson paints DeLay with the same brush, other than to pander to so-called Independents.
During the Bush years Delay embraced earmarks, and also did a lot of business with K street, although I agree he is nowhere near as bad as Barney Frank, who was a prime cause of the housing crisis.
I’m getting a little sick of seeing Americans light candles and placing flowers outside of Apple shops just because this guy died. That is a little sick, if you ask me. This guy was a businessman and a very successful one at that. Good for him. But he certainly was not a saint and, aside from selling a lot of computers, didn’t really make mankind any better. Did the invention of the car make man a better man? Did the invention of telephones make man a better man? Did the invention of airplanes make man a better man? These are technological advances that, while they allow mankind to lead a more cushy life, doesn’t really change the nature of mankind. So let’s knock of this stuff that some guy who made a living hawking computers was the second coming of Christ. Computers may have made our lives more convenient, but they didn’t make us better people. So save the candles and the flowers and the love notes outside the Apple stores, please. Save it for the few people our current culture thinks really deserves it, like Lady Diana…(that was a joke, if some of you weren’t paying attention).
It’s the toxic cult of sentimentality, read Theodore Dalrymple
http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/spoilt_rotten/
Libertyship, you always have fresh, jolt-you-back-to-the-main-road comments.
Thanks.
If he really was a quasi-clone of Ford and John Lennon as some comments suggest, then remember that Ford was pro-Nazi and Lennon was a mumble-witted drug adict — that explains why Jobs, an indesputably great man, loved Al Gore and AGW — which, BTW, is due to peter out with the end of the longest recorded period of solar minium in 2013-14.
Al Gore, regrettably seems destined to go on forever.
Lots of funeral customs seem unpleasantly mawkish to me; this one doesn’t seem harmful.
Steve Jobs was on of the great men of history whose efforts transformed the plight of mankind. He joins the ranks with Watt, Bessemer, Tesla, and many others less familiar.
But you are correct, he did not make people better. That is impossible, except, as Christ attempts, by changing men’s hearts, one at a time. And since Christianity, there has been no other effort that holds promise to improve mankind, yet many work to destroy it.
But not altering millions of years of evolution does not negate the fact that for the efforts of Steve Jobs, billions of people are better off and so will their children. As for funding live extension research, Jobs did more than throw money at the problem, he created tools that are already proving invaluable in the outcome of patients.
Oy.
“And since Christianity, there has been no other effort that holds promise to improve mankind, yet many work to destroy it.”
You hit the nail on the head. If it wasn’t for communications technology and learning to cleanse hands and food, most non-Christian nations would still be in the dark ages (as opposed to 3rd & 4th world-countries).
Did the invention of telephones make man a better man? Did the invention of airplanes make man a better man?
All technological innovation makes man better. The technology of fire and the wheel changed the course of evolution (who survived to have offspring) and this rule applies to all transformational technologies. Man is nothing without his technology. Man is continuing to evolve. Read Dr Greg Cochran.
Libertyship46, perhaps Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address will change your mind.
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Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford University Commencement Address
Forbes Business Magazine
URL: http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2011/10/05/steve-jobs-2005-stanford-commencement-address/
No, it does not. So he had a hard life and upbringing. Big deal. Did you ever read about Andrew Carnegie and his upbringing? Yet for all his problems growing up, Carnegie became one of the richest and most famous steel manufacturers in the world. He also gave lots of his money away to charities as well, trying to help people who were not as fortunate as he was. Yet nobody lights candles or leaves flowers on this man’s grave. And one could make a case that Carnegie’s philanthropy helped more people in his day than any of Jobs’ charitable contributions. So if the only qualification for being a great man is being wealthy and selling a lot of stuff, then Carnegie was way ahead of Jobs.
My point is, we are turning people like Jobs into something they are not, some sort of national icon, and ignoring the real people who have changed the world, individuals like Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and many, many, others. I am not taking anything away from Jobs’s accomplishments, for they are many. He transformed the way we look at computers, and good for him. He also sold a lot of computers and made a lot of money. Also, good for him. But Thomas Edison created the light bulb and hundreds of other inventions, yet I don’t see him being revered as Jobs is today. Inventions are great for improving our lives. But there are a few people who have actually changed mankind, and Jobs is NOT one of them.
What a bunch of garbage. So we are to honor politicians who changed the world, but not great inventors and businessmen who did the same? To honor Carnegie, Ford, Edison, and Jobs is not to shortchange Jefferson, Adams, and Madison. I don’t even use Apple products, but I can recognize and admire the vision and genius of a Jobs. Why do you feel a need to tear him down? If you cannot recognize the great moral virtue that it takes to be a successful, non-subsidized, non-bailed-out businessman, then you need to read Atlas Shrugged.
Regarding Carnegie — and J.P. Morgan, John Rockefeller and the other great businessmen of their day: No, people do not light candles at their graves. But they should.
“So we are to honor politicians who changed the world, but not great inventors and businessmen who did the same? To honor Carnegie, Ford, Edison, and Jobs is not to shortchange Jefferson, Adams, and Madison.”
Martin Luther King was NOT a politician, neither was George Washington, who only reluctantly accepted the job of President. Many of the founding fathers, like Adams, were not professional politicians, either. So let’s get one thing straight here. People like Jobs and Carnegie did not go into business to “change mankind” or for some other altruistic reason. They went into business to make money. Plain and simple. Now there is absolutely nothing wrong in wanting to make money AT ALL. But you can’t compare that motivation with someone like George Washington or John Adams, men who literally dedicated their lives to this country and shaped it as well. I’m sorry, I don’t worship businessmen. I’m very happy if they succeed in life and I’m even happier if their inventions have a big impact on the way we live our lives (I’m sure the guy who invented refrigerators is smiling right now from heaven). But they are NOT the leaders that change the way nations are formed or how laws are made. It is one thing to lead a company, quite another to lead a nation and have a vision as to how that nation should be run.
Businessmen like Jobs are now the new celebrities. They are the flavor of the day. Though they’re contributions to society (though many) may make our lives more comfortable, remember they also got well paid for their efforts too. You can’t mention them in the same breath of a Washington, Lincoln, Adams, or Teddy Roosevelt. It’s a question of priorities, and to lump everybody in the same stack is insulting to say the least. Even YOU can probably see that.
What a strange, conflicted article. I think the author should pick up an iPad some time and use it for a while. If he has any humanity at all, he may just ‘get it’ with respect to Apple and Jobs.
As for his musings on technology, he is correct but also incomplete. Technology per se is neutral. Nuclear energy can be used to power cities or it can be used to destroy them. Computers can be used to communicate the most moving sentiments or the most vile hatred. Ultimately, it was Jobs’ unique insight in his field that it is the intersection of technology with humanity where real progress lies.
Stay foolish..
I agree with much of what Mr. Fernandez writes, but not this ahistorical whopper: “technology…has always been the driver of human progress.” I think that that rather technologically-challenged religious figure called Jesus Christ (as well as his followers like Paul of Tarsus, and many others) might have changed history just a bit–considering that his views, not to mention a religion based on his life, death and resurrection, are now those of 1/3 of the human race. Ditto, on a somewhat smaller (but still massive) scale, for that chap known as the Buddha and his contemporary, a certain philosopher known as Confucius.
Yes, many of the most influential social reformers were inadvertent ones who were primarily inventors or just tinkerers. But let’s not pretend that those are the ONLY types of folks who changed history.
Also, what about the fact that Mr. Jobs seems to have been at times less than a stellar human being? He seems to have ripped off Steve Wozniak early on, when they worked for Atari (lying to him about how much money they had to split on a project), and it’s also hard to believe that Jobs was unaware of the doctoring of the stock sales that went on about 10 years ago–to his great benefit.
Jobs was a genius regarding technology, but some of the gushing encomiums about him I’ve read in the last 12 hours border on messiah-worship. I thus like Mr. Fernandez’ piece as a useful corrective in that regard.
Since he had alGore on the board of directors, I will say he had some major gaps in smarts.
I do give him credit for his entrepreneurial prowess.
The ability to create something new that people want is the most rare and most valuable skill. I’m not knocking hard work, but it doesn’t compare to the ability to innovate. Innovation takes a lot more than creativity. Millions of people are creative, but only a handful actually turn creativity into useful products and services. Labor is essential, but all of the labor in the world didn’t invent water wheels, the internal combustion engine, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, or the iphone.
So what do liberals want to do? Equate digging a ditch to developing the iphone. Punish the creators, even the ones who do small things that nobody would hold up to the iphone.
It’s so illogical that it is impossible to believe that liberalism has anything whatsoever to do with improving life. It’s all about something else. We know what it’s about. Power, personal power.
Steve jobs was a hisotoric genius, at the level of Edison and Gutenberg. History will view him as the symbol of the creators who Obama tried desperately to destroy.
Sorry to rain on the parade, but Apple never invented anything. The GUI? Xerox. The portable music player? Creative. The Smart phone? Several. Like Microsoft, these aren’t “tech” companies, they’re marketing companies. The invention is all on the silicon side. Intel, Motorola, AMD, and a dozen more like them are the inventors and innovators. Them and the communication companies behind the scenes like Cisco. The consumer products in general and software in particular are a disgrace. There are no true multitasking OSes out there – Not even Linux. I’ve locked all of them up at one time or other. All this crap is grossly overrated.
Steve Jobs was the man who brought new products to market. That’s more important than mere inventing. Steve brought Apple II, Mchintosh, Ipod, Iphone, Ipad to market. Thanks to Steve, tens of thousands of people are gainfully employed making, selling, and servicing those products. With out those products, a lot more people might be out of work. The way out of Great Depression 2.0 lies thru introduction of new products. Nobody has ever conceived and introduced as many good salable new products as Steve. We are going to miss him.
WTF is it with Apple’s irresistible urge to slap a lowercase “i” onto everything they create? iTunes, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iThis, iThat, ad nauseum. If it doesn’t stop soon, the word “marriage” will be stricken from the dictionary and replaced with “iDo” while the CIA will be renamed “iSpy.” I wonder if Jobs will have an iFuneral.
Inventing is valuable, but there might be millions of great inventions that never saw the light of day. The most important skill is the ability to create a product that people want, which is a combination of a lot of other skills. The creator of the product is often not the inventor.
Jobs was a genius at that. He seemed to have a unique blend of capabilities: vision, drive, management, inspiration, and marketing; but he may never have invented a single thing. Since he was able to create eye-popping products over an over again, he is beyond even a guy like Gates who was actually an engineer as well as a great businessman.
I mean really, everybody knows that Xerox developed the GUI interface that has evolved into the dominant PC interface today, but what did Xerox do with it? Jobs saw it, recognized the value, and made it probably the key part of revolutionary products.
Another recent figure who was also has that unique skill set is Ross Perot. He had at least 3 major successes: EDS, the Alliance Airport and Perot Systems (which granted was a variation of EDS, but hey, others tried and failed but Perot Systems was successful). Werner Von Braun is another example from a totally different field.
Maybe this is why Edison seems to be the greatest of all. He was the inventor as well as the creator of many revolutionary products and services. Plus, the diversity of his creations is astonishing. He was like Bell Labs, Jobs, Gates and Perot inside one body.
Except that Apple has the chutzpah to pretend that they did invent these things. Even Microsoft doesn’t do that. Of course, Microsoft’s finest product came out in 1976, and nothing they did since then can touch the elegance of Altar BASIC.
Right Snark, and Michelangelo didn’t invent the statue.
Snork,
PARC didn’t invent the GUI, they were just the last in a line that included Evans and Sutherland (before the company) and SRI (particularly Doug Englebart’s group) before Jobs and Apple picked up the idea. And Apple finally shipped product using their development of it.
Apple doesn’t claim to have invented the personal music player. They did, on the other hand, bring up a viable environment around it that opened it up to just about everyone.
It may all be overrated…but it’s in use by multiple millions of people daily, spending their own money by choice.
Snork drove the nail in with one paragraph. Way to go Snork.
No, he didn’t.
He focused on one single aspect of technology, ignoring the fact that without a lot of work by people beyond the hardware and software developers, including visionaries of variable capability, none of the nifty internals would benefit the vast majority of customers and users.
How many end users actually computers and other devices made by Intel or AMD? They’re important, and critical for the products that use them. But they’re not enough on their own.
If he was right, then everyone would be making and using Heathkits, or rolling their own from individual components. Which I’ve done, and it was lots of fun at the time, if not particularly useful for day to day work.
Re Snork,
Just saying that Steve Jobs was an inventor on 300 patents. How many patents are you an inventor on?
Jobs didn’t solely invent the GUI interface, but what does that matter. All technology depends on previous technology. Jobs did the key thing, he turned the GUI interface into a comercially viable product.
Steve Jobs. May He R.I.P. and May FNC Continue to Celebrate His Life
The untimely death of Steven Paul “Steve” Jobs after a heroic battle against pancreatic cancer at the far too young age of 56 represents an incalculable loss for America and the world.
A technological, innovative genius who has been rightfully compared to Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, even to Leonardo DaVinci, Jobs deserves all those accolades. He transformed how we communicate, compute, and think. He and the technological marvels he would have introduced will be sorely missed.
What won’t be missed is the politicizing of the circumstances of his birth.
Almost as unfortunate as his passing is the media’s studied effort, not to imagine a world without Steve Jobs’ countless contributions which imagining has been explored in depth, but not to imagine a world without Steve Jobs. He came close to never being born.
Fox News was the only member of the media to dare mention the proximity he came to being aborted fifty six years before his life began and Fox has been pilloried for that mention.
In brief, Jobs’ biological parents, Joanne Schieble, an American grad student and Abdulfattah John Jandali, a Syrian Muslim immigrant, didn’t want a child for a variety of reasons and considered aborting the future genius. They scrapped that option, also for a variety of reasons, and chose instead to place their baby for adoption. He was adopted and reared by Paul and Clara Jobs who encouraged his ingenuity. The rest is history.
That history cannot be refuted anymore than it can be refuted that had Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah John Jandali decided aborting their baby wasn’t the proper path to follow. The extreme leftist organization, MediaMatters.com, differed, implicitly on the birth parents’ decision, explicitly on Fox News decision “to use his death to try to score political points.”
Two days after his death, in a snarky article titled, “In Steve Jobs Eulogy, Fox Tries to Score Political Points,” George Soros’ Media Matters didn’t precisely spell out which political points were scored on Fox’s “The Five” but presumably was suggesting that the contentious issue of abortion is a political issue.
Except to the left wing, abortion is no more a matter of politics than life itself. However, as conservative writer Ann Coulter has aptly pointed out, abortion is a virtual sacrament to liberals and anyone who disagrees with that disturbed view is an evil transgressor of political correctness.
“The Five” host Greg Gutfield evidently disagrees as does fellow panelist Kimberly Guilfoyle. Media Matters’ Solange Uwimana proceeded to score her own points . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5667.)
People Say the Darndest Things, Part Two
. . . For example, with Steve Jobs’ body barely cold, Gawker.com punctured numerous holes in the popular conception of the legacy and the persona of the man whose genius has been compared with DaVinci, Edison, and Einstein.
In brief, Gawker delved into “the dark side of Steve Jobs and the company he founded.”
While praising his innovation and achievement in “What Everyone Is too Polite to Say about Steve Jobs,” Gawker rips virtually everything else about him and Apple Inc.
Gawker contends that the innovative achiever was a tyranical, mean-spirited employer who publicly humiliated underlings, that Apple unfairly repressed information and competition, was guilty of knowingly violating child labor laws and human rights by establishing ”sweat shops” in China, that Jobs’ personal life was something of a mess, and he and his company were stingy with their billions.
Those are some darned harsh things to say, even if they are true.
Americans are accustomed to politicians uttering the darndest things–cynics would call them lies–especially during an election campaign and the current re-election campaign which began the day Barack Hussein Obama was elected president is no exception.
Still, some utterances by the POTUS–the president–and the FLOTUS–his wife stagger the imagination as much for the repetitive nature of their truth-stretching as for the pair’s blithe disregard for honesty.
Call them falsehoods, fabrications, misstatements, or the less-politic lies, our president has accumulated legions of them, few if any of which have been reported by his mainstream media.
Obama’s most recent mendacity was obviously intended tug at the heartstrings of a major constituency, public school teachers, at the same time he was trying to pull at congressional purse strings to get more billions to waste on his “jobs bill.”
At a pseudo-White House press conference on Friday, pseudo since it was really just another campaign stop, Obama cited a well-credentialed but jobless teacher Robert Baroz whom the president said he had met. As pointed out by BostonHerald.com, the president fudged the whole thing. He never met Baroz and Baroz isn’t unemployed at all, unless Boston’s K-8 Curley School in Jamaica Plain is paying him in error.
Ever true to his union and to Obama, Baroz dismissed the fudging as a mere oversight and still fully supports the president. True to their dedication to his re-election, not a soul in the MSM called Obama on his misrepresentations at the presser and once again skated away from his lies.
No stranger to prevarications, First Lady Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama also pulled a swifty last week at a Rhode Island fundraiser raising funds for, what else, her hubby’s re-election, . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5649.)