These Men (and Women) They Call “Journalists” Part 1

I apologize for today’s posting coming so late in the day.  I had some personal matters that had to be attended to which prevented me from finishing the post and getting it up on time.

We have a serious problem with the media today that well-known pundits have touched on repeatedly as we run up to the month prior to the election.  And that problem is that we now have a “media” full of “journalists” that is basically no more than the strong arm of the Democratic Party.

Look, it’s no secret that at least since Barack Obama became the Democratic nominee for the presidency during the summer of 2008 that the media has been strongly pro-Obama and anti-Republican.  It has been clear that the main stream media (MSM) wants to advance the Obama agenda and as such you rarely see a bad word said about Obama or his policies unless it is a truly egregious story.  The evidence is everywhere and I’ll be frank on this one: If you don’t see it, you are just kidding yourself.  The following are two scenarios the media likes to ignore and distort, while taking the chance to slander Mitt Romney and Republicans in the process if the chance arises:

Obama/Media Claim: Since taking office, Barack Obama’s administration has created 4.6 million jobs, “saved or created” 3 million jobs with the “stimulus” and lowered the unemployment rate.

Reality: By the time Obama took office, national payrolls had basically hit rock bottom and there was nowhere to go but up.  Regardless of who was in the White House, there was a good chance these jobs were going to be added anyway.  Additionally, the 4.6 million jobs that have come back are not the same ones that have been lost and hiring saw a major boost in 2010 due to all the temporary jobs for the census.  Surprisingly, CNN actually fact-checked Obama about his jobs numbers.  That report can be seen here.  Further, leading economists have said that just to keep up with the expanding labor force, the U.S. needs to add at least 150,000 jobs per month and that only anything over that is recovery.  Anything less is WORSE and a step back.

The claim that the stimulus saved or created 3 million jobs is incredibly hard to prove, as it has been found that many jobs Obama claimed were saved were never in jeopardy anyway.  Yet journalists go right on reporting that number.  Additionally, Obama claimed that by this point in 2012, unemployment would be at 5 percent thanks to his stimulus.  Well, it’s not!  Where’s the media on that one?  Silent.

The main reason the unemployment rate has done down under Obama’s watch is because people are leaving the labor force in record numbers.  While the “official” rate is 8.1 percent, real unemployment, the U6 number, is still hovering at 15 percent.  Yet the media won’t report that, it will only jump all over the 8.1 percent number.

Obama/Media Claim: Obama is way up in the polls, doing better than ever.  Romney doesn’t stand a chance and the race is essentially over.

Reality: The MSM is skewing the polling data so bad that is a joke.  Well, maybe it’s more of a scary problem because what they report, the general population seems to believe.  Even some Romney supporters have started to adopt a so-called “defeatist” attitude.  Let me assure you that any polling data being reported by a MSM outlet is simply false!  These polls are oversampling Democrats by as many as 10 percentage points, assuming a record turnout of Democrats while Republicans stay home.  That’s not going to happen, yet the media says this is so.

So-called “Unskewed” polling data reveals a far different reality.  When polling data is controlled and adjusted for more realistic samples, Mitt Romney is leading Barack Obama by an average of 7.8 points!  And not only that, but Obama’s “unskewed” disapproval spread stands at an average of 8.8 points!

For all of this “War on Women” talk being put out by the Obama campaign, a recent ABC/WaPo poll showed that more women favor Romney than favor Obama.  And just this week, this Bloomberg National Poll indicates that Romney now has a huge 6 point lead in who would be tougher on terrorism, a massive change from just last month.

Next week I will continue revealing more issues that show huge Democratic media bias, on topics ranging from the economy to the recent terror strikes in Libya to Afghanistan, etc. so be sure to stay tuned and check back this Tuesday, October 2^nd!

Taking on the Teachers: Romney and Education Reform

Last night one of my Facebook friends posted a primer that supposedly compared Mitt Romney and Barack Obama’s stances on education on her wall.  She provided a summary of how, as a future teacher, she found it “crazy” that Mitt Romney wanted states to reduce teacher rights and that Romney wanted to institute merit-based pay for teachers.  She then said that Romney wanted to eliminate teacher certification and railed against that!  The primer can be found here on the site “Care 2 Make a Difference,” a site with a decided liberal bias that you see as soon as you open the link.  Except the funny thing is, if you read the whole primer, it makes the Romney plan sound WAY better when I know that wasn’t their goal.

The claim that Romney wants to eliminate teacher certification is debunked and destroyed within the first few paragraphs of the primer.  All Romney wants to do is modify some requirements for certification so that it is easier for good people who want to teach to realize that dream.  It’s no secret that our country doesn’t have enough teachers; all media outlets routinely cover that story.

As for teacher’s rights, those have gotten out of control.  The recent Chicago Teacher Strike is a very relevant example of that problem.  Chicago teachers now have the highest rate of pay before benefits in the country at an average of about $89,000.  And yet Chicago students rank near the very bottom in time spent in the classroom and the graduation rate in Chicago is only 60 percent!  The person who posted the primer and those who rose to her defense were practically making out the teachers to be the victims in this case!  And one said I was misinformed because Chicago has four of the top 10 high schools in Illinois.  Four schools do not a district make.

Yes, teachers have a somewhat limited earning potential.  Public school teachers know that when they get into the profession, they are becoming public servants collecting a salary from the taxpayer.  But teachers get paid more than enough to live decent lives and the longer they teach, the more they make.  My high school history teacher, probably my best teacher ever, retired in 2012 after over 30 years on the job with a salary 10 times his starting pay!  With hard work comes reward!  Right now, too much money is going into the teacher’s pocket and not into the student!  Just look at Maryland’s higher education system which I touched on last week!

My notion that tenure is “a good thing because it protects good teachers” is also ridiculous.  Fine, standardized tests aren’t the best measure of success and we all know that.  But if a teacher is a “good” teacher, then why do they need to hide behind tenure?!  Good teachers will have natural protection because students love the good teachers!

I was the victim of a tenured teacher in 11^th grade.  I disagreed politically with my English teacher and all year she marked me lower than the rest of the class.  I had proof.  But I couldn’t do anything about it because she had a union and tenure backing her up.  Had I tried to make a case out of it, I would’ve gone nowhere and spent a lot of money doing so.

Finally, what is so wrong with merit-based pay?  One person said studies have found that merit-based pay “doesn’t work as well as it was hoped”.  Really?  Several years ago, Michelle Rhee, former Chancellor of D.C. Public Schools, developed a new labor deal (subject of this op-ed) that would have included merit-based incentives for teachers and removed tenure.  Under the plan, salaries for teachers performing well stood to rise substantially.  The maximum pay under the new system would have been $130,000!  But, because the union knew there were teachers in the system doomed to be fired under the plan, D.C. teachers rejected it and instead got much smaller raises.

The reality is that tenure and unions are holding America’s youth back.  The educational system is broken and needs to be reformed.  Unions need to be scaled back, tenure needs to be slowly reformed, phased out and replaced and merit-based pay needs to come to public schools.  Until then, students are at the mercy of unions and the threat of strikes.  Lost educational time from striking unions only makes things worse.  More money into teachers’ pockets means less money buying new technology or new computers for students.  I am confident that the Romney plan will reform education while cutting costs and that children will actually start learning more and performing better in school.  America needs to wake up and realize that.

College: Not as “affordable” as you were led to believe

Just as a “for your information” and in addition to my posting from yesterday, we did interview one black student who said he was going to be voting for Obama just because he is black.  I have updated yesterday’s posting appropriately with more information, so please check it out.

College affordability is a major issue that parents and students alike grapple with every year.  It is also a problem that both President Barack Obama and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley have said they planned to deal with.  Both have championed their “successes” on that front.  Reality check, gentlemen.  You two haven’t done anything for college affordability and as a result my family and thousands of other families like mine are hurting.

Barack Obama claims he has kept college affordable for students.  Yet according to College Board, college costs have risen 25 percent since Obama took office.  Obama also considers himself to be a champion of low student loan rates, a lie the main stream media is happy to press on the American people.  The reality is that the extension of the student loan rate was an act of Congress passed with strong bipartisan support.

Experts have also debated the ease of getting a federal student loan, another thing Obama champions on the campaign trail.  And what they say isn’t promising.

In a Diamondback article dated August 30, 2012, Jim Bach published another random act of journalism about how the federal loan program hurts students (To me, it seems as if Bach might be one of maybe three reporters at the Diamondback capable of such acts).  In the article, Cliff Rossi from the business school here at Maryland explained that easy federal loans create artificial demand for college, causing two problems.  Number one, it encourages schools to charge inflated tuition rates because of the “demand” and two, it creates a demand for jobs that far outpaces the rate of hiring.

And now we get to O’Malley, who claims he has kept tuition rates for Maryland schools very low, citing tuition “freezes” he enacted in his first term and only a 3 percent hike in the rate from last year to this year.  What he doesn’t explain is that while tuition may have been frozen during his first term, the University of Maryland raised its student fees significantly, something the local media did actually report on (surprisingly).  But since student fees aren’t technically tuition, O’Malley could claim tuition was frozen.

Second, O’Malley kept the tuition increase to just 3 percent this past summer by ramming yet another tax increase through the General Assembly in a special session that hit the middle class in this state hard.  The result?  Even though my tuition bill may have only gone up 3 percent, my family has now been saddled with an increase in their tax bill of several hundred dollars.  It would have been cheaper for my family to have paid the potential 10 percent increase in tuition instead of having it go the way it went!

Who Martin O’Malley helped with this tax increase: No one in this state.

Who it hurt:
      ·         In-state students paying not only more in tuition, but also more in higher taxes.

·         Maryland residents who send their children to out-of-state schools who had to deal with both tuition increases at those schools and higher taxes here at home.

Who gets off somewhere in the middle: Out-of-state students attending Maryland schools, who may have seen their tuition rate increase 5 percent, but who aren’t paying any new taxes to the state of Maryland in addition to that hike.

Instead of raising taxes, Martin O’Malley and the General Assembly should have spent the summer de-bloating the over-bloated higher education budget in this state.  It is a system where bureaucrats have run unchecked for far too long.  Chancellor Brit Kirwan shouldn’t be making $490,000 per year.  Nor should Wallace Loh, president of UMD, be making $450,000 per year.  The list goes on and on.

Taxes should not have been raised in Maryland this summer, the spending on obnoxious, public sector salaries should have been cut.

Jimmy Williams

Diamondback article: http://www.diamondbackonline.com/news/national/article_2ec83abc-f26e-11e1-9cb9-001a4bcf6878.html

College Students Appear Engaged, Still Very Uninformed

Today I’m providing a special “bonus” edition of the blog because I wanted to share my experiences from journalism class today.  By the way, follow me on Twitter! I actually have two accounts.  @j1mmy_williams is the account I use for sports and other general postings and @right_wing_terp is the account that I use for political posts.  I try my best to keep sports and politics from mixing on that first account, but every so often you will see a political tweet in that account.

Today in my journalism class we shot man on the street interviews with random students pulled off the street.  Each student in the class had to find a person to interview.  We asked them if they were registered voters, who they would be supporting in the presidential election and why they made that choice.  We actually got a fairly equal response in our quick survey, about half of the 20 or so people we found supported Mitt Romney and about half supported Barack Obama, with maybe three or four undecided (And one member of the Green Party, poor soul is wasting her vote).

Two things stunned me about this exercise.  First, I was surprised that the split was actually about even.  I personally expected that being on the University of Maryland campus would mean a massive slew of Obama supporters in our “sample”.  Two, I couldn’t believe how uninformed a vast majority of the people who said they support Obama were!  It was scary how little they knew about the man they want to put back in office.

One student, who identified himself as a graduating criminology major, said he will vote for Barack Obama because “he’s going to keep the student interest rates low,” and “I’m trying to find a job, and it seems like the economy is getting better under Obama.”  First off, Barack Obama had nothing to do with keeping student loan rates low, that job fell to Congress over the summer.  Obama said he would like to see the rates kept low, but ultimately the rates were kept at their present levels by a measure passed with strong bipartisan support in Congress.  The rates were never seriously in jeopardy.

Second, I’m not sure what economy this gentleman was looking at.  Today it was announced that unemployment claims were 382,000 and the forecast called for only 375,000, which still would have been ridiculous.  We also learned that U.S. manufacturing has hit its lowest point in nearly three years!  Obama promised that with his stimulus, unemployment would be in the 5 percent range today.  It’s stuck at 8.1 percent with real unemployment at 15 percent.  If this student votes for Obama and Obama happens to win, I hope he enjoys staring at the ceiling of his childhood bedroom just as much as all the other recent jobless grads do.
 
Another student said he was voting for Obama because he is part of the “47 percent”.  Nice to see that almost overnight we’ve gone from “the 99 percent” to twisting Romney’s words around to say that he hates 47 percent of America.

And another student just totally disgusted me when he came and admitted to all of us there that he was voting for Obama because he's black and Obama is black. I cannot even begin to convey just how utterly disgusted I was by that statement. The only other thing he said was that he wanted to be a part of history.  The "history" was in 2008, buddy.  This is 2012 and Obama is huring America.

To be fair, there were some concerning responses from Romney supporters.  One said he was voting for Romney because his family is Conservative.  It really would have been nice to hear some specifics besides that.  Another indicated he was leaning towards the GOP ticket but couldn’t really back up why, saying he was waiting for more information from Romney first.  However, at least these students weren’t basing their choices off completely false and twisted information like the pro-Obama students were.  The notion that economy has improved is laughable, even at its best.  For sure this was an interesting exercise and while it proved that college kids do pay attention to elections, it also proved that there are still plenty of misinformed college kids out there.

There will be another posting going up tomorrow afternoon, so be sure to check back in then as well!

Jimmy Williams

September 18th, 2012: Table Games in Maryland and Question 7

Here in Maryland, we as voters are facing several big votes on November 6th that are sure to shape the direction of this state for years to come. Notable measures we will see on the ballot include a measure to fix the awful congressional district lines that Martin O'Malley and the Democrat-controlled Maryland General Assembly drew after the last census (more on that in another post next week), Question 6 on "Marriage Equality", the DREAM Act and Question 7, which would allow Maryland to add a 6th casino site along National Harbor in Prince George's County. Question 7 might sound really good on paper, it might sound like Gov. O'Malley actually cares about the students in this state. But in reality, Question 7 won't do anything for students in this state and the measure creates inherent math problems that the Democrats in the General Assembly seem to be completely ignorant of.

First, supporters of Question 7 claim that a new casino in Prince George's County would add "hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue" for the state. Here's the problem with that: Democrats assume that when a new casino opens on the National Harbor, that all of the sudden people who have never gambled before will just start gambling out of the blue. This is not the case! When Hollywood Casino in Perryville opened in September 2010, it brought in millions in revenue because it was the only casino open in the state. This Hollywood Casino location has been followed by the opening of a casino at Ocean Downs in Berlin, Maryland and, in June 2012, the opening of Maryland Live at Arundel Mills Mall. All the while, Democrats assumed gambling revenue would somehow infinitely expand. Summer 2012 provided a harsh reality check to that. Hollywood Casino in Perryville has seen its revenues slumping drastically, so much so that now the location wants to return as many as one-third of its slot machines to the state.

The true fact of the matter is that opening a new casino on the National Harbor won't add millions in new revenue. All it will do is take the revenue provided by people who currently gamble in Maryland and dilute it even further among the four casino locations. People do not just start gambling because a new casino opens. If a casino opens in Prince George's County, people who live there will now just gamble there instead of driving to Perryville or to Arundel Mills as they have been. If there is any additional revenue, it will not be significant.

And then today in The Diamondback here at University of Maryland, we saw what Rush Limbaugh would call "a random act of journalism" about Question 7, the link for which I will provide below. In the article, Senior Staff Writer Jim Bach outlines what the anti-Question 7 commercials have been saying all along, that Question 7 really won't fund Maryland schools.

Sean Johnson, part of political and legislative affairs for the Maryland State Education Association (MESA) said in the article that the $200 million slot machines have generated so far just offset monies in the general fund that are then used for other projects. The net effect, he said, is that schools don't see any increased funding.

State Comptroller Peter Franchot, a Democrat, also forcefully condemned gambling in Maryland, saying, "It's a sad exercise to watch Democrats in Maryland approve gambling, which everyone knows is a regressive tax."

Question 7 won't help Maryland schools, we won't see millions of dollars in extra revenue. And, by the way, Martin O'Malley already jacked up taxes on thousands of families in this state in May, so supporters of the measure lied about that, too. Question 7 might not increase taxes, but Democrats took care of the tax increase anyway. Now we can only hope enough voters realize Question 7 is worthless, that it only sounds good but in reality does no good for Maryland.

Diamondback article: http://www.diamondbackonline.com/news/campus/article_712f5694-014e-11e2-b881-001a4bcf6878.html

September 18th, 2012: About the Blog and the Author

Greetings! My name is Jimmy Williams and I'd like to welcome everyone to my new blog "From the Eyes of a College Conservative"!

To provide some background information about myself, I am currently 19 years old and I am a sophomore at the University of Maryland, College Park. I live on campus and I am a Journalism and Finance double major. I work with WMUC Sports here on campus and I host a weekly sports talk show, Metro Sports Talk, on Thursday nights at 6pm. You can listen to that every week via the Internet at wmucsports.com. This semester I am on the Field Hockey broadcast crew which is a lot of fun. Maryland's field hockey team is the two-time defending national champion and this season the girls already have a 6-1 record and are ranked 4th in the country. Last year I worked with the women's basketball team during the winter and the softball team in the spring.

I've been listening to talk radio since I was six years old. I remember dancing to the Rush Limbaugh intro music when I was that little because I thought it was cool. At age 12, I called into the Sean Hannity Show and actually got on air to talk about how my 7th grade social studies teacher was lying to my class about why the U.S. was involved in the war in Iraq. I've been seriously into politics since probably 2006 and at the age of 17 I got very active in the 2010 campaign of Bob Ehrlich to try and kick Martin O'Malley out of the Maryland Governor's Mansion. This past summer, I interned at Talk Radio 680 WCBM in Baltimore with Sean and Frank in the Morning, working with them two days a week from 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. It was loads of fun and my work there has really made me want to get into political commentary and I see a blog such as this one as a perfect way to start out.

The Diamondback is the main student newspaper here on campus, with a circulation of around 13,000 at last check, even though there are nearly 40,000 students on this campus between undergrad and grad. The paper has a clear liberal bias on everything from their editorials to their news. They have 2 conservative columnists but every time they publish a piece, they are attacked by the campus community at large. I myself have written at least six guest columns in my time here at Maryland to try and counter the liberal bias but none have been published. My submissions were never even noticed apparently.

Since I refuse to write for the trash that is The Diamondback, I write for a much smaller, monthly news magazine called The Terrapin Times. we adverstise ourselves as a conservative alternative to The Diamondback, especially with our opinions section. Unfortunately we can only publish once a month at the most and only print about 1,500 copies compared to The Diamondback's 13,000 daily. We do publish online as well at umdtimes.com.

And now to the point of the blog. From the Eyes of a College Conservative will be a blog about the hot poltical issues of the week as I see them as a college student. I think readers will really enjoy my insight into political issues, maybe they'll even see something they've never seen before. In fact I hope people do learn new things here. My initial goal is to publish this blog twice a week. I'm going to aim for Tuesday and Friday, with the new post being online by 6pm on those days. If I have more time, I'll try to add a third publication day but we'll start with Tuesdays and Fridays by 6pm for now. Hopefully people actually read this and I'm excited to get started!