Category Archives: News

The Next Generation of News is Here

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Over the past decade, people have become less and less reliant on newspapers, and the mainstream media in general. Part of this is due to the fact that in a 24-hour news cycle, waiting for the next morning’s paper delivery — or, even the evening news — is too long a wait to find out what you need to know. However, another aspect is simply that traditional forms of media such as the New York Times and Newsweek suffer from simply not being interesting, or overly informative. Talk radio, opinion journalism, and more importantly, blogs, have become increasingly more important in the news and entertainment industry, with 59% of Americans under 40 saying they get news from the internet. There is a new generation of news out there, and we need to be ahead of the curve to meet the growing demands.

We are pleased to announce that StrictlyRight.com has been acquired by the Landmark Report, and as of March 31st, 2011, will feature its content on a new website, The Landmark Report (LandmarkReport.com.) In addition to conservative political commentary, Landmark Report will feature opposing views, debate, entertainment news, sports, film and movie reviews and loads more categories, along with a community-based focus allowing its readers and podcast listeners to get everything they need from one place.

A major part of this transition is that I, Andrew Lawton, will be heading up this project as Landmark Report’s Editor-in-Chief. While it will be hard to leave Strictly Right, I know that having the opportunity to write more — on a full time basis fortunately — about a variety of topics, and feature many more talented writers will be best for both our readers and myself. As far as my podcasts, they will remain to be produced by Take That! Media as Strictly Right and Strictly Pop, but will now be available through LandmarkReport.com, as well as various other forms of media such as photo galleries, online T.V. channels, and other podcasts.

This new project is a big one, but it’s one that can revolutionize media in the world as it will be a project that breaks boundaries, reaches all corners of the globe via the internet, but still will be operating as a brick-and-mortar business at the same time (very special announcements to follow.)

In order for Landmark Report to meet the goals that we are confident it will, we need a team of talented writers behind us generating original content and sharing content from their own blogs and websites to always have a cross-section of writers covering all different topics, from all different angles, in all different parts of the world. If you are interested in contributing either original content or having your writing featured on Landmark Report through cross-posting to build your audience and portfolio, please send your interest and/or a writing sample to landmarksubmissions@gmail.com.

This is a big undertaking, but it’s our way of being a part of the new wave and shaping the next generation of news.

Categories to Write In (Also accepting pitches for departments not on this list):

  • Politics (Any ideology)
  • World, national or regional (state/provincial) news
  • Religion
  • Sports
  • Business/Finance
  • Entertainment
  • Movies/Music
  • Book Reviews
  • Culture/Lifestyle
  • Technology

NRO: Reassessing Warren G. Harding

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This article from National Review about one of the most derided presidents in American history seems particularly pertinent in the age of Obama. A “return to normalcy” and end to socialist experimentation is exactly what is needed today:

Reassessing Warren G. Harding
And a call for normalcy.

By Ryan Cole & Amity Shlaes

Change isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. That’s what most of us have come to realize in recent years, whether the change proposed came from Pres. Barack Obama or the Tea Party movement. Still, most haven’t quite reached the point where we oppose change and fight for stability.

Maybe we ought to: Maybe sometimes it is the time for no change. That, at least, was the position of Warren Harding. Warren who? On the presidential roster, Harding is POTUS 43. No, that doesn’t mean he’s replaced George W. Bush: Harding’s “43” is his aggregate rank among presidents. Since there’s a tie somewhere in there, this means Harding is the worst-ranked president in the history of our land.

Still, the most despised chief exec had something to say about the issue that’s preoccupying the country. Nowhere did Harding put the case against change, and the case for realism, better than in his inaugural address, delivered 90 years ago today.

When Harding sat down to plan that address, he was confronting a nation suffering the kind of uncertainty that is familiar to us today. After the war, unemployment hit 14 percent. Inflation raged. The economy contracted severely, and the stock market followed suit. Restless veterans and angry workers thought they might imitate the revolutions taking place overseas.

In his 1920 campaign, Harding ran as the anti-revolutionary: He sought “a return to normalcy.” His choice of Calvin Coolidge as his running mate underscored his commitment to that concept. Coolidge stood for caution and for drawing the line at extremism. It was Coolidge who had pulled a pre-PATCO and, Reaganesque, fired the Boston police force for leaving the city to looters when they went out on strike in 1919.

One of our problems today is that politicians are unwilling to concede certain truths about the economy. One is that housing prices may fall more. Another is that government intervention will inevitably force upon us a period of inflation. Yet another is that wages may not go as high as we like until the economy sorts itself out. Instead of skirting those issues, Harding spelled them all out, trusting voters to accept the truth.

While government would do all it could, there were imbalances it could not rectify, Harding allowed. “Perhaps,” he said, “we never shall know the old level of wages again.” To assume that life might be instantly reordered was also to overreach: “There is no instant step from disorder to order. We must face a condition of a grim reality, charge off our losses and start afresh.”

Next Harding turned to the topic of change. “Any wild experiment,” the new president said, “will only add to the confusion.” He went on: “Our supreme task is the resumption of our onward, normal way. Reconstruction, readjustment, restoration, all these must follow. I would like to hasten them.”

Harding went on to lay out what he thought normalcy should be like: “I speak for administrative efficiency, for lightened tax burdens, for sound commercial practices, for adequate credit facilities . . . for the omission of unnecessary interference of Government with business, for an end to Government’s experiment in business, and for more efficient business in Government administration.”

If Americans could accept all these realities, the new president argued, “We can reduce the abnormal expenditures, and we will. We can strike at war taxation, and we must.”

Harding was right. The decade began with a recession. But soon enough, and while Harding was still living, those other things he predicted did follow. After Harding’s Teapot Dome Scandal in 1923, and his death that summer, the new president, Coolidge, sought to clear his own administration of scandal. But Coolidge was careful not to abandon Harding’s theme of normalcy. Normalcy for both presidents meant keeping government out of the way, reducing what the scholar Robert Higgs today calls “regime uncertainty.” Harding and Coolidge after him honored Harding’s inaugural-speech promise to drop the nation’s high tax rates. Harding promised to create a Bureau of the Budget, and did. New presidential authority from the law he signed in 1921 aided both him and his successors in their effort to trim spending.

Normalcy gave the United States a Wunder-decade of strong growth, low unemployment, and little inflation. Americans got cars and electricity for the first time. They got healthier. The federal budget moved into surplus and stayed there. The 1920s also saw strong productivity gains, so strong that Americans began to accomplish in five days what they used to in six.

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WSJ: The World Needs a Strong GOP

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From the Wall Street Journal:

The World Needs a Strong GOP
Republicans can show the way with careful fiscal conservatism at home and quiet idealism abroad.

By DAVID DAVIS

It is always hazardous for outsiders to offer opinions on a foreign country’s political landscape, and as a lifetime admirer of America and its values I have always been cautious in doing so. Nevertheless, the world today is as volatile and dangerous as it has been for a long time, and it needs a strong and coherent Republican Party leading American opinion and policy. With the streets of the Arab world in flames, an ever more ascendant and ambitious China, and a global financial crisis that has not been well managed, let alone resolved, the rest of the world needs America to be a confident champion of Western values.

As a political movement, the various strands of Republican opinion have a force and vigor rarely witnessed elsewhere in the Western world. What is more, each strand brings its own wisdom and insight to the political debate.

Take, for example, the tea party movement. European liberals deride it as unsophisticated and simplistic. Yet we should remember that they said much the same of Ronald Reagan when he was alive, even as they now recognize him as the great, world-class statesman that he was. Discovering the right answer after the event is a luxury often exercised by the political left, but not one that we can afford now.

So the tea party brings vigor, but it also reflects a skepticism about big government that is a wisdom of our times. In the aftermath of a historically unprecedented bank rescue and economic stimulus, and in the absence of a serious intellectual answer to the banking crisis, who is to say that they are entirely wrong?

Similarly, it is fashionable to dismiss the neoconservatives for their aggressive foreign policy. I am uncomfortable with some of the incompetences of Western interventions, but the current explosion of unrest across the Arab world adds some validity to their claim that democracy is a universal human value wanted by everybody, irrespective of their culture, religion and history.

Even more unfashionable with the political left are the social conservatives in Republican ranks. It may be that the problems facing the U.S. economy will ensure that social issues take a back seat to candidates’ fiscal policies, but to America’s 60 million evangelical Christians social issues still matter. Those candidates seeking the Republican nomination in 2012 who choose to ignore social-issues voters will do so at their peril.

It would be naive to claim that the Republican Party, with its 47 senators, 241 representatives and millions of voters, can be neatly divided into a small number of distinct factions. It is potentially problematic for the Republicans, however, that there are groups within the GOP which hold widely different views not only about the party’s policy priorities, but also about what those policies should be.

For instance, there is a sharp divide within the GOP on federal spending. A recent Pew survey showed that Republicans identifying themselves as tea party supporters would broadly welcome cuts in spending on education, social-security and environmental programs, while non-tea party Republicans were more supportive of increased spending in these areas.

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IBD: A Free Iraq Prevented Nuclear Libya

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From Investors Business Daily:

Leadership: For years, Barack Obama called Iraq “a dumb war.” But considering how that conflict undeniably scared Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi into ending his WMD program, the 2003 invasion has never looked smarter.

‘I don’t oppose all wars,” future President Barack Obama told Chicagoans Against War in Iraq during a 2002 rally. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war … a rash war … the cynical attempt by … armchair, weekend warriors in this (Bush) administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”

Obama called the plan to liberate Iraq an “attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us.” And he warned that it “will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaida.”

Goading the then-commander in chief, Obama said: “You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to make sure that the U.N. (nuclear) inspectors can do their work … let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people.”

Today, after two years of President Obama, our “so-called allies” like Egypt are destabilized, or threatened, and in danger of becoming enemies — nothing “so-called” about it.

Turns out that if it hadn’t been for those “armchair warriors” and their “dumb war” in Iraq, Libya might well be a nuclear weapons power today. All the U.N. inspectors in the world wouldn’t be able to stop Gadhafi from using atomic and chemical weapons to slaughter tens or even hundreds of thousands of his own people to keep himself in power, instead of just conventional weapons to kill a fraction of that number.

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Ann Coulter: Uncivil Unions

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From Human Events:

Uncivil Unions
By Ann Coulter

As Obama rakes in historic campaign contributions from Wall Street money, liberals claim Republicans are beholden to “the rich.” However that may be, it is far more true, and far less remarked upon, that the Democratic Party is the party of public sector unions.

And now, the nation watches helplessly as public sector unions and their Democratic allies say to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker: Nice state you got there, governor. Be a shame if something bad happened to it.

For Democrats, the purpose of government is to generously provide jobs for people who otherwise couldn’t be hired — because their skills, attitude or sense of entitlement are considered undesirable in the private sector. And no, I’m not just talking about Barack Obama.

Democrats use taxpayer money to fund a government jobs program, impoverishing the middle class and harming the people allegedly helped by the programs — but creating a vast class of voters who owe their jobs to the Democrats.

This is a system designed to ratchet up costs. Look at the history of every entity where public employees have unionized, and you will find that not only are government workers paid more, but there are also a lot more of them doing a lot less useful work.

There could be two students per class, and the Democrats would still be campaigning for “smaller class size,” so that the government would be required to hire more public school teachers to staff classes with one student. For Democrats, the purpose of public education in this country is not to teach children; it’s to create jobs for “educators.”

Forget the nonsense about working men with dirt under their fingernails, slugging it out at dangerous jobs with a heartless management riding them to get more production at lower wages –- those guys are what liberal journalist Harold Meyerson calls “dead weight.”

We’re talking about government employees, most of whom — when they show up to work at all — sit in comfortable, air-conditioned offices, kick off at 3 p.m., are entitled to endless sick days, personal days and holidays, whose performance can never be evaluated and who retire at age 50. (Again, I’m not focusing just on Barack Obama here.)

Government employees are even worse than welfare layabouts. In a triple-whammy for the taxpayer, they are: (1) hideously expensive, (2) impossible to fire, and (3) doing things you don’t want done at any price.

Hey, guess what? I’m from the government, and I can burn down your garage for $300!

NO! I’M NOT INTERESTED!

OK, fine, I’ll do it for you for $20.

BUT I DON’T WANT MY GARAGE BURNED DOWN AT ANY PRICE!

OK, the guys with the matches and gasoline will be by sometime between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. one day next week.

As with so many other things, such as vegan restaurants and the crack epidemic, California leads the country in destruction by government unions.

California’s civil service unions have employed all the usual thug techniques –- regular strikes (illegal until the California Supreme Court approved them in 1985), rolling strikes, the “blue flu” (cops and other public-safety workers calling in “sick”) — all of which are almost as harmful to the state as when they actually show up for work.

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This story is Canadian in so many ways

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What’s more Canadian than waiting for hours in a hospital waiting room for treatment? Being forced to wait in a Tim Horton’s instead.

Hallway medicine is hitting new highs in congested Lower Mainland hospitals, as was demonstrated Monday night when Royal Columbian Hospital was forced to use its Tim Hortons outlet as an overflow ward.

Fraser Health officials say a combination of multiple trauma case airlifts earlier in the day and heavy pressure on the emergency department led staff to put patients in the hospital coffee shop.

It’s an unusual example of what has become a routine problem across the region: too many patients and not enough beds.

“Last night the hallways were two and three stretchers deep with patients,” said Dr. Sheldon Glazer, an emergency physician at Royal Columbian, the region’s trauma centre.

“This is just a natural progression of what we’ve been dealing with for a long, long time,” Glazer said. “We are forced to see patients in waiting rooms, in hallways and, now, in the Tim Hortons.”

The veteran ER doctor says halls jammed with stretchers are both inefficient and dangerous – particularly if a fire broke out.

Whenever the inevitable topic of wait times comes up in a discussion about healthcare, proponents of the socialist system will say, “Well, no system is perfect.” They’re absolutely correct. So assuming that the private and public system both have their flaws, which is preferable — having to spend money on insurance or medical care instead of having it for free? Or, dying while waiting for ‘free’ medical care? Seems like a simple decision to me.

Regarding my recent hospitalization, I stated — and still maintain — that I am not going to engage in a debate about healthcare, because my opinion still holds. However, despite the extraordinary emergency care I received, follow-up wait times were unacceptable. In the internal medicine unit, patients were being admitted who had been waiting in the emergency room for upwards of three and four days. Were they dying? No, but they certainly weren’t getting any healthier.

The Tim Horton’s spin on this story makes it more amusing, but being so backed up that you can’t even have patients in the waiting room is a serious problem that needs to be addressed. Even under perfect circumstances, the province of British Columbia considers it a success if patients are admitted with less than 10 hours of waiting.

Remember, I had a stroke in a waiting room. But hey, at least I didn’t have to pay anything (just ended up hobbling around like an old lady with a walker, but whatever.)

H/T KonReport

Sowell: Is Democracy Viable?

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Is Democracy Viable?
By Thomas Sowell

Those who see hope in the Middle East uprisings seem to assume that they will lead in the direction of freedom or democracy. There is already talk about the “liberation” of Egypt, even though the biggest change there has been that a one-man dictatorship has been replaced by a military dictatorship that has suspended the constitution.

Perhaps the military dictatorship will be temporary, as its leaders say, but we have heard that song before. What we have also heard, too many times before, is the assumption that getting rid of an undemocratic government means that it will be replaced by a freer and better government.

History says otherwise. After Russia’s czars were replaced by the Communists, the government executed more people in a day than the czars had executed in half a century. It was much the same story in Cuba, when the Batista regime was replaced by Castro and in Iran when the Shah was replaced by the Ayatollahs.

It is not inevitable that bad regimes are replaced by worse regimes. But it has happened too often for us to blithely assume that overthrowing a dictator means a movement toward freedom and democracy.

The fact that Egyptians or others in the Middle East and elsewhere want freedom does not mean that they are ready for freedom. Everyone wants freedom for himself. Even the Nazis wanted to be free to be Nazis. They just didn’t want anybody else to be free.

There is very little sign of tolerance in the Middle East, even among fellow Muslims with different political or religious views, and all too many signs of gross intolerance toward people who are not Muslims.

Freedom and democracy cannot be simply conferred on anyone. Both have preconditions, and even nations that are free and democratic today took centuries to get there.

If there was ever a time when people in Western democracies might be excused for thinking that Western institutions could simply be exported to other nations to create new free democracies, that time has long passed.

It is easy to export the outward symbols of democracy– constitutions, elections, parliaments and the like– but you cannot export the centuries of experience and development that made those institutions work. All too often, exported democratic institutions have meant “one man, one vote– one time.”

We should not assume that our own freedom and democratic form of government can be taken for granted. Those who created this country did not.

As the Constitution of the United States was being written, a lady asked Benjamin Franklin what he and the other writers were creating. He replied, “A republic, madam– if you can keep it.” Generations later, Abraham Lincoln also posed it as a question whether “government of the people, by the people and for the people” is one that “can long endure.”

Just as there are nations who have not yet developed the preconditions for freedom and democracy, so there are some people within a nation who have not. The advance toward universal suffrage took place slowly and in stages.

Too many people, looking back today, see that as just being biased against some people.

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WSJ: Why Koch Industries Is Speaking Out

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From today’s WSJ:

Why Koch Industries Is Speaking Out
Crony capitalism and bloated government prevent entrepreneurs from producing the products and services that make people’s lives better.

By CHARLES G. KOCH

Years of tremendous overspending by federal, state and local governments have brought us face-to-face with an economic crisis. Federal spending will total at least $3.8 trillion this year—double what it was 10 years ago. And unlike in 2001, when there was a small federal surplus, this year’s projected budget deficit is more than $1.6 trillion.

Several trillions more in debt have been accumulated by state and local governments. States are looking at a combined total of more than $130 billion in budget shortfalls this year. Next year, they will be in even worse shape as most so-called stimulus payments end.

For many years, I, my family and our company have contributed to a variety of intellectual and political causes working to solve these problems. Because of our activism, we’ve been vilified by various groups. Despite this criticism, we’re determined to keep contributing and standing up for those politicians, like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who are taking these challenges seriously.

Both Democrats and Republicans have done a poor job of managing our finances. They’ve raised debt ceilings, floated bond issues, and delayed tough decisions.

In spite of looming bankruptcy, President Obama and many in Congress have tiptoed around the issue of overspending by suggesting relatively minor cuts in mostly discretionary items. There have been few serious proposals for necessary cuts in military and entitlement programs, even though these account for about three-fourths of all federal spending.

Yes, some House leaders have suggested cutting spending to 2008 levels. But getting back to a balanced budget would mean a return to at least 2003 spending levels—and would still leave us with the problem of paying off our enormous debts.

Federal data indicate how urgently we need reform: The unfunded liabilities of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid already exceed $106 trillion. That’s well over $300,000 for every man, woman and child in America (and exceeds the combined value of every U.S. bank account, stock certificate, building and piece of personal or public property).

The Congressional Budget Office has warned that the interest on our federal debt is “poised to skyrocket.” Even Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is sounding alarms. Yet the White House insists that substantial spending cuts would hurt the economy and increase unemployment.

Plenty of compelling examples indicate just the opposite. When Canada recently reduced its federal spending to 11.3% of GDP from 17.5% eight years earlier, the economy rebounded and unemployment dropped. By comparison, our federal spending is 25% of GDP.

Government spending on business only aggravates the problem. Too many businesses have successfully lobbied for special favors and treatment by seeking mandates for their products, subsidies (in the form of cash payments from the government), and regulations or tariffs to keep more efficient competitors at bay.

Crony capitalism is much easier than competing in an open market. But it erodes our overall standard of living and stifles entrepreneurs by rewarding the politically favored rather than those who provide what consumers want.

The purpose of business is to efficiently convert resources into products and services that make people’s lives better. Businesses that fail to do so should be allowed to go bankrupt rather than be bailed out.

But what about jobs that are lost when businesses go under? It’s important to remember that not all jobs are the same. In business, real jobs profitably produce goods and services that people value more highly than their alternatives. Subsidizing inefficient jobs is costly, wastes resources, and weakens our economy.

Because every other company in a given industry is accepting market-distorting programs, Koch companies have had little option but to do so as well, simply to remain competitive and help sustain our 50,000 U.S.-based jobs. However, even when such policies benefit us, we only support the policies that enhance true economic freedom.

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George Will: Why Liberals Love Trains

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From Newsweek:

High Speed to Insolvency
Why liberals love trains.

By George Will

Generations hence, when the river of time has worn this presidency’s importance to a small, smooth pebble in the stream of history, people will still marvel that its defining trait was a mania for high-speed rail projects. This disorder illuminates the progressive mind.

Remarkably widespread derision has greeted the Obama administration’s damn-the-arithmetic-full-speed-ahead proposal to spend $53 billion more (after the $8 billion in stimulus money and $2.4 billion in enticements to 23 states) in the next six years pursuant to the president’s loopy goal of giving “80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail.” “Access” and “high-speed” to be defined later.

Criticism of this optional and irrational spending—meaning: borrowing —during a deficit crisis has been withering. Only an administration blinkered by ideology would persist.

Florida’s new Republican governor, Rick Scott, has joined Ohio’s (John Kasich) and Wisconsin’s (Scott Walker) in rejecting federal incentives—more than $2 billion in Florida’s case—to begin a high-speed rail project. Florida’s 84-mile line, which would have run parallel to Interstate 4, would have connected Tampa and Orlando. One preposterous projection was that it would attract 3 million passengers a year—almost as many as ride Amtrak’s Acela in the densely populated Boston–New York–Washington corridor.

The three governors want to spare their states from paying the much larger sums likely to be required for construction-cost overruns and operating subsidies when ridership projections prove to be delusional. Kasich and Walker, who were elected promising to stop the nonsense, asked Washington for permission to use the high-speed-rail money for more pressing transportation needs than a train running along Interstate 71 between Cleveland and Cincinnati, or a train parallel to Interstate 94 between Milwaukee and Madison. Washington, disdaining the decisions of Ohio and Wisconsin voters, replied that it will find states that will waste the money.

California will. Although prostrate from its own profligacy, it will sink tens of billions of its own taxpayers’ money in the 616-mile San Francisco–to–San Diego line. Supposedly 39 million people will eagerly pay much more than an airfare in order to travel slower. Between 2008 and 2009, the projected cost increased from $33 billion to $42.6 billion.

Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute notes that high-speed rail connects big-city downtowns, where only 7 percent of Americans work and 1 percent live. “The average intercity auto trip today uses less energy per passenger mile than the average Amtrak train.” And high speed will not displace enough cars to measurably reduce congestion. The Washington Post says China’s fast trains are priced beyond ordinary workers’ budgets, and that France, like Japan, has only one profitable line.

So why is America’s “win the future” administration so fixated on railroads, a technology that was the future two centuries ago? Because progressivism’s aim is the modification of (other people’s) behavior.

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