Deconstructing some media bias

from USNews.com:

In a swift and unexpected decision, the Environmental Protection Agency today rejected a petition from environmental groups to ban the use of lead in bullets and shotgun shells, claiming it doesn’t have jurisdiction to weigh on the controversial Second Amendment issue.

Dontcha just love this media bias? For whom is the Second Amendment controversial? And why is it? It’s pretty clear to anyone who is literate:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

But the media love to throw in these buzz words and phrases – like controversial – to confuse and/or manipulate the readers thought process. And isn’t it kinda strange to call anything in the Constitution “controversial”? I don’t believe that the Founders intended for that document to be “controversial”. I really believe that they wanted the people to understand it, wrote it so that the people would understand it and they didn’t expect that over 2 centuries later we would need constitutional attorneys to explain it to us.

But hey, that’s just me.

The decision was a huge victory for the National Rifle Association which just seven days ago asked that the EPA reject the petition, suggesting that it was a back door attempt to limit hunting and impose gun control. It also was a politically savvy move to take gun control off the table as the Democrats ready for a very difficult midterm election.

This is the real reason that the EPA dropped this whole thing. The NRA had nothing to do with it, even though they are absolutely correct that this is nothing more than the first step on the ladder to gun control. It was the administration that sent word to the EPA to lay off the bullet thing in order to make it easier on the Democrats who are swimming against what we all hope and pray will  be a tsunami this election year.

And then there’s this from ABCNews.go.com:,

A conservative Alabama Democrat often criticized for backing Nancy Pelosi as House speaker dodged a question about supporting her again next year by saying she might get sick and die before he has to decide.

If someone is going to say something tasteless, rude or stupid, it will have to be someone with the CONSERVATIVE label before their name, whether they are Democrats or pachyderms makes no difference. The media is going to make damned sure they work that word in, anytime they can smear those who have a conservative ideology.

Again, from my book club of one: The best novel I’ve read – twice

“Hank, what’s wrong with the country?”

“I don’t know.”

“I keep thinking of what they told us in school about the sun losing energy, growing colder each year. I remember wondering, then, what it would be like in the last days of the earth. I think it would be … like this. Growing colder and things stopping.”

“I never believed that story. I thought by the time the sun was exhausted men would find a substitute.”

“You did? Funny. I thought that, too.”

This exchange between Dagny Taggert and Hank Reardon in Atlas Shrugged crystallizes Rand’s whole image of Man as an individual. Ayn Rand had the highest regard for Man and for his inventiveness, his ingenuity, his ability to overcome and invent his way out of anything and everything, even to the snuffing out of the sun.

Atlas Shrugged sweeps the reader into its own world of larger-than-life characters—including the productive genius who becomes a worthless playboy and the great industrialist who doesn’t know that he is working for his own destruction. The story is a mystery about a man [John Galt] who said that he would stop the motor of the world—and did. Society disintegrates, food shortages spark riots, factories shutdown by the hundreds. Is this man a vicious destroyer—or the greatest of liberators? What is the motor of the world? What is required to restart it? AynRand.org

Its uplifting message of Mans ability to strive for and secure his own freedom is a universal message of all mankind, no matter his country or his station in life. His natural tendency to be a producer and keep the fruits of his production is the  core desire of all men. Atlas Shrugged speaks simply to all.

It’s no wonder that Atlas Shrugged (original title was The Strike) is #1 in readers choice best novels of all time (Random House) and makes many other top 100 best novel lists.

~~~ooOoo~~~

Rand’s explanation and definition of Objectivism:

1. Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.
2. Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.
3. Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.
4. The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man’s rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

It’s impossible for any thinking person to find argument with the bulk of her philosophy. And it fits perfectly and logically with the Founders vision of a civil society and a government of laws.

It’s no wonder that she chose to leave collectivist Russia (post bolshevik revolution) and make her home in capitalist America.