Dallas Cowboys: Jerry Jones vs. Jimmy Johnson: The Story of Jerry’s Cowboys

Posted on February 26, 2014 by Ederik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat 

As good as the Dallas Cowboys were in the 1990s with their three Super Bowl championships, three NFL championships, four conference finals appearances, and five NFC East titles and a lot of playoff victories, they could’ve been so much better had Jerry Jones gotten out of Jimmy Johnson’s way and let him run the Cowboys’ football operations department concerned with who was on the team and so forth and let Jerry worry about what Jerry is good at, which is managing the finances.

Jerry Jones had and still has the title of General Manager of the Dallas Cowboys even though he is also the owner of the franchise. But everyone in and around the NFL, and the fans as well, knew who was calling the football personal shots in Dallas, which was Jimmy because Jimmy was making the personal decisions, which was part of his job and in his contract. Jerry handled the contract negotiations of players that Jimmy wanted to sign and bring back but the Cowboys of the 1990s were built by Jimmy Johnson.

Jerry Jones wasn’t an NFL man before purchasing the Cowboys in 1989.   He was someone who learned very fast on the job, but Jimmy Johnson was his man to run the team and they had been childhood friends in Arkansas. Jerry knew Jimmy’s college football career very well at Miami Florida and in Oklahoma and had the guy he wanted all along, but he couldn’t handle Jimmy getting the credit for building the Cowboys and returning them to power in the 1990s.  That is why they broke up.

In 1989 Jimmy Johnson inherited a 3-13 Cowboys team from 1988 with a huge deficit when it came to talent, especially young talent and young veteran talent, with most of their star players making their mark in the 1970s and early 1980s. Jimmy saw this right away and decided that the best way to rebuild the Cowboys was to get worse before getting better and releasing or trading or asking veteran Cowboys to retire to make room for college draft picks and young talented free agents.

The Cowboys went from 1-15 in 1989 to 13-3 by 1992, winning back-to-back Super Bowls in 1992 and 1993 and doing it all through the draft and signing young talented free agents and trading for those players. That is how Jimmy Johnson rebuilt the Cowboys and he deserves most of the credit for this.  Had Jerry Jones’ big fat ego not gotten in the way, Jimmy would be in Dallas probably 10 to 15 years and we are talking about perhaps the greatest NFL dynasty in history.

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ABC News: 1968 Republican National Convention: William F. Buckley VS Gore Vidal

Posted on February 26, 2014 by Rik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat 

By 1968 the Republican Party was definitely moving right ideologically, with Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan having enormous influence in bringing to the GOP what would be called conservative libertarians today. And Richard Nixon with his 1968 presidential campaign did a lot to bring in what is now called the Religious right, but the GOP still had a solid progressive faction led by Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York and others whom the GOP leadership had to take seriously.

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ABC News: 1968 Republican National Convention: William F. Buckley VS Gore Vidal

Posted on February 26, 2014 by Rik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat 

The ultimate debate, when it comes to wit, humor, and intelligence was between Gore Vidal and Bill Buckley. You don’t need a moderator in a debate like this and there really wasn’t one, with Howard Smith letting Vidal and Buckley basically just go at it because the two men could carry the conversation by themselves and knew where to go and what they wanted to say. They also both listened to each other and knew how to respond to their opponent’s legitimate points in an intelligent way.

It would be nice to see more debates like this, with two people literally just going at it and no one asking questions but just giving them topics to talk about.  They already knew what to say because they knew what they thought. That should go without saying, but a lot of politicians and candidates either don’t know what they think or do not know how to express it in a way that doesn’t hurt them politically, so they are afraid to say what they think.

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Nevada Policy Research Institute: Las Vegas Mob Wars- Government-Funded Mob Museum

Posted on February 26, 2014 by Rik Schneider

 

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Source:Google Plus via Rik Schneider– Las Vegas Mob Museum 

Source:The New Democrat

Las Vegas and Southern Nevada in general became a personal State for the Italian and Jewish mafias, an area they developed and owned by means of legitimate investments in Vegas that served as a cover for their criminal activities, turning Vegas into a bank they could use to fund their criminal operations but also to buy the politicians and public officials needed to keep law enforcement off their backs.

Then you add the crooked elements of organized labor in the 1940s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and perhaps even longer than that with Jimmy Hoffa, Sr., and company, which had all the resources they needed not only to stay in business but also to keep the politicians and public officials at bay and to send the message through their henchmen and hit men that messing with them would have a heavy price in terms of lives lost or ruined.

Las Vegas is the ultimate story of starting from scratch and building a major city with all the investments, businesses, and land as well as people to maintain these operations. The American mafia, Italian and Jewish for the most part, had a huge role in this along with the people they brought with them. As in government and organized labor, it took really clean, powerful people unconcerned about whether the mafia would destroy them to bring down these characters.

Nevada Policy Research Institute: Government-Funded Mob Museum

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The Federalist: Opinion: David Harsanyi: “Rand Paul is Right, Social Conservatives Should Embrace Libertarianism”: Why Conservatives Shouldn’t be at Odds with Libertarians

Posted on February 26, 2014 by Rik Schneider

The Federalist: Opinion: David Harsanyi: Rand Paul is Right, Social Conservatives Should Embrace Libertarianism

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I don’t want to sound overly technical here but it all depends on what you mean by a social conservative. If you are talking about conservative, which means to conserve, then from a political standpoint that means being in favor of conserving social freedom, which is the ability of people to manage their own own lives without big government interfering. If this is what a social conservative is, then great, I give you Rand Paul, and conservatives and libertarians should be able to work well together.

Conservatives like to talk about the dangers of big government, and if you are a conservative, at least in the American sense, then you are opposed to big government interference in our economic and personal lives. If you are worried about government interference and you want to conserve your freedom, meaning to limit the size of government, then you should not be in favor of a Federal marriage amendment because you believe marriage is a State issue, to use one example. Why? Because conservatives are also Federalists, who believe in States’ rights and local control.

But if we are talking about religious conservatives and how they relate to libertarians, then we are talking about a whole new ballgame because what is conservative politically is not always conservative religiously. Yes, if you are a conservative, political or religious, you believe in conserving life, and I know of some religious conservatives who are opposed to the death penalty as well as abortion, for example.

But with issues like marriage, privacy, pornography, women’s place in the world, if you are a religious conservative, you are interested in conserving how society as it was previously and seriously putting limits on these areas to preserve our moral health. However, if you are a political conservative you probably believe this is not the business of government, especially the Federal government, to oversee what free adults do in the privacy of their own homes.

The Republican Party at its best going forward, if it wants to remain a major party, will be conservative libertarian with the potential for growth because it then would be able to compete with the Democratic Party throughout the country and probably continue to have a strong base in the South, with religious conservatives who will have nowhere else to go and with young people who are managing and running businesses including their own and do not want big government interfering in their economic or personal lives.  With a coalition like this, the GOP would do very well in the future.

There should be no friction between conservatives and libertarians because they tend to believe in the same things although differ when it comes to national security and foreign policy. However, the real friction will continue to be between libertarians and the Christian right, who for obvious reasons will never get along very well because libertarians see government at all levels as too big and the Religious right sees government as too small as it relates to our personal lives.

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Profiles in History: Marilyn Monroe’s Subway Dress From The Seven Year Itch

Posted on February 25, 2014 by Erik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat 

One of the most famous scenes in Hollywood history happened in one of the most conservative times in American history, the 1950s, when women weren’t expected to show off their physical beauty and were looked down upon when they did. In this scene, the goddess of Hollywood, Marilyn Monroe, showed millions of people around the world part of what she had to work with from a physical standpoint and a big reason why she was so popular.

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Movie Clips: Video: Vertigo 1958: Judy Jumps

Posted on February 25, 2014 by Erik Schneider

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The movie Vertigo had several sad scenes.  Madeline, played by Kim Novak, supposedly dies  and Scotty, played by Jimmy Stewart, who was in love with Madeline,  is committed to a mental hospital because of his reaction to her death.  But Judy, also played by Kim Novak, a goddess of a women dies for real.  She is my favorite character in the movie because with all the supposed freedom in the world,  she was so vulnerable.

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VOA News: Luis Ramirez: Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel Plans Biggest Army Cuts Since World War II

Posted on February 25, 2014 by Erik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat 

Secretary Hagel’s proposed cuts in the defense budget address activities that the United States can no longer afford and no longer needs to be doing. This is not about making the United States weaker when it comes to national security and not being able to successfully deal with any threat in the world whether it is North Korea or international terrorism or being able to deal with humanitarian crisies that come up when authoritarian states murder and brutalize their own people.

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Retro Trailer Spot: Video: The Candidate 1972 Official Trailer

Posted on February 25, 2014 by Derik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat

I love the movie The Candidate for several reasons.  Perhaps the main one is that it has given me an idea for a book about an anti-establishment liberal candidate or perhaps a John McCain Conservative Republican. They face each other in the general election with the anti-establishment candidate  beating the establishment, talking point, sound-bite, candidate who always plays it safe in hopes of offending the fewest.

The Candidate is a movie about a little guy running against  big time politicians and the big time political establishment in the Democratic Party. He’s Bill MacKay, played by Robert Redford, running against his own party and against Mr. Establishment,  U.S. Senator Crocker Jarman played by Don Porter. McKay’s campaign manager played by Peter Boyle is part of that Democratic establishment but wants to run an outsiders campaign without allowing the outsider MacKay to get too far out in left field.

You see these two men fighting  against each other in the campaign. The outsider Bill MacKay runs his campaign based  on his beliefs.  He gives voters a  good idea of who he is and speaks his mind.  He probably doesn’t use a speechwriter for the whole campaign.  His opponent, three-term incumbent U.S. Senator Crocker Jarman just tries to be likable expressing traditional America values, speaking mostly to older voters.  He says you should reelect me because I stand up for America etc.

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Murray Rothbard On Neoconservatives

Posted on February 25, 2014 by Ederik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat 

Except for Jack Kemp, who definitely wasn’t a Neoconservative but a Barry Goldwater/Ronald Reagan get big government out of my wallet and bedroom classical Conservative, Murray Rothbard pretty much nails what Neoconservatives are when he called them statists and I would add right-wing statists, in fact, borderline fascists.

Neoconservatives basically represent the neo-right in America.  They say economic freedom is a good thing generally but that low-income people should benefit from it as well.  They are not completely against the safety net. When it comes to things like education and job training and encouraging business’s to invest in low-income areas, they are somewhat progressive.

But when it comes to foreign policy they believe America is the sole superpower and should always remain that way at any cost.  They tend to judge military power by the size of the national security budget.  They ignore the the details of capabilities and threats and cannot articulate any specific objectives of military action.  They see America’s number one job in the world as the military  promotion of a very general notion of democracy even in places where the people have no experience of it and no knowledge of how to participate in it..

The American religious-right believes that the country has been going downhill morally since the 1960s and that we have too much personal freedom.  They believe that it is time for government to intervene in personal behavior even inside of the home.

When I think of Neoconservatives, Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum come to mind pretty quickly.  Representative Bachmann would like to see a much smaller government when it comes to economic policy than Senator Santorum who is a true Neo-Con, across the board.

The Heritage Foundation is perhaps the lead organization in Neoconservative thinking.

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