just a typical white person

So Many Threats, So Little Leadership

2009-04-26T11:05:00.000-07:00

The World's Punching Bag

2009-04-25T13:05:00.001-07:00

I had occasion to be in a chat room with a Canadian this afternoon. For a few weeks now this woman has pontificated on matters minute and large, the dangers of religion as well as the Constitution and the president.

She admitted she's afraid of Zed. (He who shall not be named by me unless absolutely necessary.)

I asked why if she's in Canada would she care about Zed. And she replied "If America gets a cold, Canada gets the flu."

Isn't that too bad. The whole world feels the flu coming on when we've been their punching bag since the 1950s. We have done nothing right, nothing decent, nothing noble. The Berlin Airlift, peacekeeping in Kosovo, disaster aid and relief, the Marshall Plan, Nato, aid to Africa. Absolutely nothing including helping to bring down the Soviet Union, freeing all the Eastern European countries from the oppression of communism and bringing democracy to Iraq.

It's all worthless shit from the crude cowboys. They still have the gall to have their hands out. What are they going to do now? They sense America is not available to protect them any longer. Oopsy Doopsy!

One contributory factor in the election of this marxist was the unceasing criticism of the holier than thou Europeans and Canadians. Zed promised if elected the rest of the world would love us.

Who doesn't want to be loved? So this nitwit was voted in. And now the world gets to reap what they sowed. If they had just been a little kinder, a little nicer, a little more generous in spirit to America all those years maybe America wouldn't have this catastrophe in the White House.

So go get the freaking flu. Get pneumonia. I'm not going to be lectured to any longer. Stand or fail on your own. You didn't give a rat's ass about us, don't be surprised if the sentiment is returned in kind now.

Genius at Work

2009-04-10T06:50:00.000-07:00

The exceptional have such contempt for the ordinary, because they distract them from the business of their great vanities, when all that is truly exceptional in them is their blindness.--Richard Fernandez

This is a precision thinker at work. I'll bet he didn't even notice he wrote that.

Ted Nugent: Praying For 44 to Fail

2009-04-06T08:32:00.000-07:00

Sunday, April 05, 2009

Observe how the Obama media machine and soulless liberal media jumped on Rush Limbaugh’s comments that he “wanted Obama to fail.”

Anyone with a half a brain knows Rush wants only this: for America to succeed and for anti-American policies to fail.

To leave no doubt where I, your humble Motor City guitarslinger, stands, let me report without ambiguity, that I get down on bended knee daily and pray to God that he does what he can to ensure President Obama fails.

To repeat: I pray for President Obama to fail.

Like Rush, I wouldn’t want Obama to fail if his agenda weren’t built on feeding the gluttonous, unaccountable Fedzilla beast, so clearly the enemy of the free market, of real jobs and proven economic growth.

Since that is Obama’s agenda, however, those of us who believe in a limited federal government and the wondrous wealth-and-job-creating free market should hope, pray and work to ensure Obama’s anti-free market policies fall flat on their face.

A wise man once stated that those who fail to remember the lessons of the past are destined to repeat them. If we can compare President Obama’s economic carnage agenda to anyone in the recent past, it unquestionably would be Jimmy Carter.

Carter’s deranged economic policies in the late 1970s ruined the economy and put America in the worst fiscal shape since the Great Depression.

Remember gas rationing, double-digit interest rates, stagflation?

Fast-forward just a few months after American voters fired Carter for his gross incompetence on all levels. America was on the road to a 25-year economic expansion, possibly the longest in our nation’s history.

Recognizing that unfair, punitive high taxes were the road to economic destruction, Ronald Reagan cut taxes and the economy lifted off. Interest rates fell. Inflation was curtailed. Americans went back to work in droves.

Economic emancipator

Not only was Reagan the great communicator — he also the great economic emancipator.

One would have to be brain-dead to want to return to the economic doldrums of the Carter years and further embrace European-style socialism. But that’s where it appears America is headed with Obama in charge.

His spending is dangerously reckless and virtually unprecedented. He’s committed to raising taxes on the producers and employers, something that will further drive the economy south.

To those of you who voted for President Obama, how is this hope and change working out for you?

As for Rush, his ratings have increased. More have tuned in to a wonderful show where the man entertains and informs us. He’ll take on the libs with half his brain tied behind his back, just to make it fair.

Remember your history and pray for President Obama to fail. I fear for America if we allow him to succeed.

Ted Nugent is a Waco-based musician and television show host. Contact him directly at tednugent.com.

Israel's New Government

2009-04-02T06:31:00.000-07:00

I wouldn't say it changes everything but if Bibi and the country stick to this, it is a game-changer.

Avigdor Liberman's first speech.

Good afternoon, honorable outgoing Foreign Minister, honorable outgoing Deputy Foreign Minister, incoming Deputy Foreign Minister, Director-General Ministry employees, honored guests,

When my fellow students and I studied international relations, and learned what an international system is, we learned that there is a State and there are international organizations and all kinds of global economic corporations. Things have changed since then and, unfortunately, in the modern system, there are countries that are semi-states. It is hard to call a country like Somalia a state in the full sense of the word and the same holds true for the various autonomies in Eastern Europe, in the Balkans and here as well. It is even hard to call a country like Iraq a state in the full sense of the word. And even worse, there are now international players that are irrational, like the Al Qaeda organization. And we can certainly also ask if the leader of a strong and important country like Iran is a rational player.

In my view, we must explain to the world that the priorities of the international community must change, and that all the previous benchmarks - the Warsaw Pact, the NATO Alliance, socialist countries, capitalist countries - have changed. There is a world order that the countries of the free world are trying to preserve, and there are forces, or countries or extremist entities that are trying to violate it.

The claim that what is threatening the world today is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a way of evading reality. The reality is that the problems are coming from the direction of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq.

What is important is to maintain global and regional stability. Egypt is definitely an important country in the Arab world, a stabilizing factor in the regional system and perhaps even beyond that, and I certainly view it as an important partner. I would be happy to visit Egypt and to host Egyptian leaders here, including the Egyptian Foreign Minister - all based on mutual respect.

I think that we have been disparaging many concepts, and we have shown the greatest distain of all for the word “peace.” The fact that we say the word “peace” twenty times a day will not bring peace any closer. There have been two governments here that took far-reaching measures: the Sharon government and the Olmert government. They took dramatic steps and made far-reaching proposals. We saw the Disengagement and the Annapolis Conference.

Yisrael Beiteinu was not then part of the coalition, Avigdor Liberman was not the foreign minister and, even if we had wanted to, we would have been unable to prevent peace. But none of these far-reaching measures have brought peace. To the contrary. We have seen that, after all the gestures that we made, after all the dramatic steps we took and all the far-reaching proposals we presented, in the past few years this country has gone through the Second War in Lebanon and Operation Cast Lead - and not because we chose to. I have not seen peace here. It is precisely when we made all the concessions that I saw the Durban Conference, I saw two countries in the Arab world suddenly sever relations, recalling their ambassadors - Mauritania and Qatar. Qatar suddenly became extremist.

We are also losing ground every day in public opinion. Does anyone think that concessions and constantly saying “I am prepared to concede,” and using the word “peace” will lead to anything? No, that will just invite pressure, and more and more wars. "Si vis pacem, para bellum" - if you want peace, prepare for war; be strong.

We definitely want peace, but the other side also bears responsibility. We have proven our desire for peace more than any other country in the world. No country has made concessions the way Israel has. Since 1977, we have given up areas of land three times the size of the State of Israel. So we have proven the point.

The Oslo process began in 1993. Sixteen years have passed since then, and I do not see that we are any closer to a permanent settlement. There is one document that binds us and it is not the Annapolis Conference. That has no validity. When we drafted the basic government policy guidelines, we certainly stated that we would honor all the agreements and all the undertakings of previous governments. The continuity of government is respected in Israel. I voted against the Road Map, but that was the only document approved by the Cabinet and by the Security Council - I believe it was Resolution 1505. It is a binding resolution and it binds this government as well.

The Israeli government never approved Annapolis, neither the Cabinet nor the Knesset, so anyone who wants to amuse himself can continue to do so. I have seen all the proposals made so generously by Ehud Olmert, but I have not seen any results.

So we will therefore act exactly according to the Road Map, including the Tenet document and the Zinni document. I will never agree to our waiving all the clauses - I believe there are 48 of them - and going directly to the last clause, negotiations on a permanent settlement. No. These concessions do not achieve anything. We will adhere to it to the letter, exactly as written. Clauses one, two, three, four - dismantling terrorist organizations, establishing an effective government, making a profound constitutional change in the Palestinian Authority. We will proceed exactly according to the clauses. We are also obligated to implement what is required of us in each clause, but so is the other side. They must implement the document in full, including - as I said - the Zinni document and the Tenet document. I am not so sure that the Palestinian Authority or even we - in those circles that espouse peace so much - are aware of the existence of the Tenet and Zinni documents.

When was Israel at its strongest in terms of public opinion around the world? After the victory of the Six Day War, not after all the concessions in Oslo Accords I, II, III and IV. Anyone who wants to maintain his status in public opinion must understand that if he wants respect, he must first respect himself. I think that, at least from our standpoint, will be our policy.

Look For The Silver Lining

2009-03-25T16:53:00.000-07:00

This might be one of the toughest times in the history of America. Yeah we're having a coup. The commies are trying to take over. Okay. Got the memo.

They will have a much easier time if we're demoralized. They want that. Buck up fellow Americans. Look for the good, don't focus on the negative.

The Mocking of The President Begins

2009-03-22T07:47:00.000-07:00

In general not a good thing but right now it's a great thing. This is how George W. Bush was torpedoed. Little by little but constantly for 8 years. We can get rid of 44.

SO SAYETH THE TELEPROMPTER

BONUSES ARE EXPENSIVE, BUT THAT'S OK, TALK IS CHEAP

Kyle Smith, March 22, 2009

A reading from the Book of Barack, 3:22:09.

And the Word was heard from above.

America, my flock, my followers, my enthusiasts and aficionados.

This is thine president, thine one true president. Hark and behold my words, for let it be said that I am very good at this job.

The times we live in are times of storm, and strife. Of hurt, and pain. It is a time when even I must humble and prostrate myself, to consult an authority of wisdom and insight. I speak of the Book of Roget. The Day of the Synonym has come to pass.

It is vital that I double my words, so that I might speak in double talk. Thou shouldst heed my speech, but not too closely. Attend to the measured cadences and prose poetry, not the trifles of substance. For substance is the curse of lesser mortals.The hour is upon us for the AIG bonuses to be denounced. When the knowledge was loosed upon the land that the false prophets of finance had enriched themselves with the false profits of bailout money, I was and I'd like to thank President Obama for welcoming me here from Dublin.

Excuse me, the Teleprompter just broke.

One minute, please.

Thank you for your patience.

Okay, it's back on.

Getting back into character.

Ahem.

(And the Voice did grow most wond'rously sonorous and urgent.)

I was angered, and disturbed. I was surprised, and shocked.

The masters and lords of AIG have become like unto pharaohs, and the people who toil in the valleys of the taxpayer are like unto the Israelites who are building for these pharaohs Jacuzzis and Gulfstreams.

Now it is who point the righteous finger of blame. It is I who call out, "J'accuzzi!"

I castigate AIG for this decision, which I signed off on. Mine Apostle Geithner did approve the bonuses, but with great reluctance in his heart. Now there is great reluctance, across this fair land, to believe I know what I'm doing.

So I ask my faithful flock of Democrats in Congress to join hands with me in toiling to eradicate this scourge and pestilence from the land, as soon as they have cashed their campaign checks from AIG.

I wouldst ask thou to smite from thine memory the $100,000 in AIG checks I cashed long ago.

For today I am enraged and outraged at the bonus payments, which were for favors exchanged and prearranged.

I say onto my disciple Christopher Dodd that he has strayed and betrayed. For it was he who welcomed the moneychangers into the temple of government. Yea, he did rend and blaspheme the passage in the Book of Stimulus that did decree no big bucks for bailout Beelzebubs.

I shall pursue every possible legal angle to stamp the wrath of nullification on these contracts, which were legal and binding.

I vow to stop payment on these checks, which have already been cashed and deposited.

Sordid sinners shall not prosper. I will change the AIG wine back into water. I will change the golden calf back into lowly peasant beef, of the Arby's grade. I will summon the power of IRS transubstantiation, call forth the redemptive force of 100 percent taxation of the bonuses. Though mine own disciple Charlie Rangel questions how the thing canst legally be done.

The shadows grow long. I have time for only a few more words to deliver forth onto the land, because in these days of tribulation and despair I am a busy President who must journey to the land of ESPN to fill out my tournament bracket. Then shall I till the comedy fields in the land of Leno.

I speak unto American business, to the corporations that were laid low, who came wandering desperately across the desert of bankruptcy, like unto Joseph and Mary coming into Bethlehem asking only for a suite at the Four Seasons. I say onto them and the bounties that bless them after a day's toil: Be fruitful, and multiply, but this is ridonkulous.

Kyle.Smith@nypost.com

http://www.nypost.com/seven/03222009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/so_sayeth_the_teleprompter_160695.htm

TOTUS

2009-03-19T17:14:00.001-07:00

We knew there was sentience behind 44. He didn't even know that Great Britain is in a different dvd region than America. So much for his brilliance. Brilliantine more like.

His teleprompter has come out of the closet. Hilarious, as all cutting edge truth is likely to be.

http://baracksteleprompter.blogspot.com/

Anything Goes

2009-03-15T09:10:00.000-07:00

This morning one of the movie channels aired Night and Day starring Cary Grant. It's hard to even call it a biopic. The names were correct and Cole Porter did write those songs but little else in the movie was accurate. Oh well.

This has been one of my favorite songs since I was a child. Seems strange but I suppose we can react to popular culture because it's popular and we're lemmings, and we also can discern (or we once could, I don't count on that anymore) real talent and quality. Now I think the Beatles stink but I still love Cole Porter.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

2009-03-11T07:41:00.000-07:00

Yes, when I was a small tike, channel 9 would run the same movie all day long and they ran Tony Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner starring a young Tom Courtney. Based on Alan Sillitoe's novel it portrays the poor working class of Britain in unremitting misery that's only alleviated by materialism or sex. Hollow, shallow people, unable to get ahead, unable to love, and in the final moment of being able to grasp a small but life-changing measure of success, throwing it all away in a fit of pettiness.

For some reason, this movie, which touched me so deeply for so many years and I later decided was pretty much based on the bullshit philosophy of Sillitoe's--existentialism--came to me this morning. Oddly enough it was not the hymn Jerusalem, which I was introduced to by this movie and which I still dearly love. No, it was an email from my friend in England who is not poor working class, just middle class with a quite nice house, a rental property, a dog, a car, a caravan (!) and a family. My friend said she was turning away from politics and the news, just wanted to be left alone, live out the rest of her life and when her mother dies, invest that inheritance in property because that's the only thing of value anymore.

And so we see how Great Britain will become Lesser Britain or maybe Britainistan. The social policies of the elite for so many years, generations now, have crushed the English spirit.

In The Long Distance Runner the telly soothed the spirits of the family. Today it's my friend's caravan. Please, just leave us alone to live out our lives, we promise we will not challenge you, just give us a few pleasures useful to make the time go by until we die. They have nothing left to fight for because they are no longer free men, they have reverted to being serfs.

And the ruling elites are as stupid as they ever were.

It Ain't Your Money To Spend

2009-03-08T07:39:00.000-07:00

IT AIN'T YOUR MONEY TO SPEND! ©

2009, Words by Steve Jones, Music by Kathleen Stewart

Don't spend my grandson's paycheck.
He's only two years old.
With Obama in the White House,
His future's bought and sold.
Stop this immoral spending spree.
Stop assaulting our liberty.
Let me help you comprehend:
It ain't your money to spend.

Born and bred for freedom.
Got me a lot of rights.
They're all but disappearing
Before your fiscal appetites.
You're taking the fruit of my labor
To give your next-door neighbor.
I'll say it from beginning to end:
It ain't your money to spend.

It ain't your money to spend.
You're acting like a bunch of jerks.
I'm the one who earned it.
I'm the one who works.
Your income redistribution
Doesn't jibe with the Constitution.
So I got a little message to send:
It ain't your money to spend.

You started a spending orgy and then,
You made me long for Georgie again.

You gave some cash to ACORN.
Those folks are so corrupt.
All the pork and all payoffs,
It makes me want to erupt.
Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi,
The scariest folks since Bela Lugosi.
Let me help you comprehend.
It ain't your money to spend.

Download the song for free

http://kathleensings.com/

Richard Fernandez on our predicament

2009-03-06T13:38:00.000-08:00

I've followed Belmont Club for several years and I continue to be impressed by Wretchard, a wonderfully intelligent man, a man of faith, a man who writes so beautifully that I'm always grabbing a piece of a paper to jot something down. This is a clear thinker and today there are not many of those. What follows are two comments that I had to set aside so I could, and hope anyone who comes here, will take to heart.

There are no “Good Men” of Action, they are all immobilized by the PC culture

There’s still us and while we can’t do much, we can do a little. We can begin by keeping our heads and our vision clear. No panic, no wild conspiracy theories. Just plain common sense. And that can’t be discounted. I have a little story. In the late 1980s I was in a building when a major earthquake struck. There were about 70 people in an open plan office. About three or four of the people in the office went into a total panic. Fell to the floor, started kicking in their air in hysteria. About 63 or 64 people stood rooted, immobile to the ground, wondering what to do next. About three people remained standing and you could see they were absolutely cool. They led everyone to safety and had the hysterical people carried bodily out of danger. Why? It was nature. I figure this is a universal distribution, and that in any crisis about 10% of the people will go nuts. Ten percent will know what to do. Eighty percent will stand paralyzed but will act when they get reasonable leadership.

So keep your cool, which I know you will. Don’t worry too much. Sanity is a great virtue. If things go bad you’ll see a lot of weird stuff of all kinds. Crazy stuff. If you keep cool, the majority have someone to follow. If not to safety, then at least not over the cliff. And that’s no small thing.

I don’t think we’ll ever see a Hitler again, not in the sense of a guy with a postage stamp mustache and abrupt gestures bleating out speeches. But I think the same passions which inflamed the 40s inflame men of every generation, simply because they are people too. During a time of discontinuity, there are always those who see their chance. And we would be ill-advised, I think, to assume it will this or that person beforehand. However as a general proposition, periods of crisis are times when things can go either way.

In a crisis, the opportunity aspect of the moment is often ignored, or as in the case of Rahm Emmanuel, misunderstood. He thinks it’s a chance to implement a pre-existing agenda. No. Opportunities in a crisis are windows in which we can recognize the new. Not the old. It’s the time when we see the future sail into view as a Black Swan. Rahm Emmanuel, if I understand him aright, thinks it a chance to do what he always secretly wanted but never had a chance to do. What a small man.

The real chance of greatness in crisis is to be open to the right opening doors and to ignore the wrong ones. You can’t approach the future aiming to control it. Only to say ‘yes’ to the right things. So I am consoled by the idea that we are, despite all the troubles, on the verge of a better world. But not just yet.

http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2009/03/06/as-time-goes-by/#more-2538

Doom and Gloom

2009-03-04T10:21:00.000-08:00

The world is a dangerous and scary place. Muslim fanatics (however you want to translate that) want to kill us.

Actually it seems like no one very much likes the fundamentals of America anymore but a few of us conservatives. Europe hates us and gloats mightily whenever anything bad happens to us. (Oh boy am I going to enjoy the next couple years watching them squirm.) Islamic teachings run 180 degrees in opposition to the Constitution and Bill of Rights. We have a president who was raised as a Marxist. We have democrats who are drunk on power now and spending our money like they just hit the jackpot at Vegas.

All we hear is doom and gloom. Buy gold. Get out of the stock market. Buy canned foods. Grow a victory garden. I don't know what you in the cities are going to do but please stay there.

We're in for tough times. For some of us it's going to be a real come down in lifestyle. I'm not sure I'll notice very much because I live a very moderate life as it is. I already have a garden. My car, a Ford, gets over 35 mpg. I got a great deal on Aviva running shoes at Sam's Club last month. $22. I wouldn't dream of spending an entire month's budget on a pair of shoes.

So yeah, some of you are going to suffer as we plunge downward on this rollercoaster. Then we're going to be hit with inflation--the good part is you won't be able to afford those Christian Louboutin shoes then.

I'm not sure I am sorry about this turn of events (leaving aside how much I hate cultural Marxism). People need to have their lives recalibrated and this is going to do it.

But as I said two days ago tracht gut, zain gut and I mean it.

Resume

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

  -- Dorothy Parker

I'm Sorry

2009-03-03T04:22:00.001-08:00

Remember a few years ago when all the moonbats took photos of themselves being sorry for the Iraq War? (Funny how Saddam Hussein was never sorry for anything.)

Now we have this--which I don't believe but okay let's pretend it's a real thing and I believe (because I was enrobed in some fairy dust on my way to the computer).

Wouldn't we all be thrilled if a goodly portion of the Prince Narcissus voters actually did have buyer's remorse?

We must allow that a goodly portion love him and will always love him no matter what he does because they believe America should be killed. Since America is in the initial stages of being killed, for them he's king and it's all good.

But some didn't think this through, they felt a Bon Jovi moment "I'm a cowboy, a steel horse I ride, I'm wanted---dead or alive". Immature, the response of a 17 year old boy or a 35 year old boy, they had a dose of BDS because they weren't wearing a condom when watching the news or talking to the comrades, so they voted for the Neo-Socialist (Neo-Soc from here on in) agenda without realizing it because they don't know what socialism is or what the Constitution gives them.

We have a lot of ignorant people in this country due to 40 years of socialist indoctrination and lousy teaching in public schools. So a lot of people simply rebelled against the father figure of the time, George Bush. It didn't really matter who it was, it was just a childish tantrum, a laugh, a lark.

And now we're stuck with the schmuck.

They should be sorry. They do owe America an apology and they should work with us to put this mistake right. It can be fixed. It can be rewound--sorry Mr. Levin, I'm not buying your position that it can't. But it will be difficult, nearly impossible, but America was an impossible dream. America was the first time people were to be accorded such freedom and the ruling classes would never want that. They don't want it now in Washington.

Remember the gifts you have been given. Freedoms still unknown and undreamed of over most of the world. Fight for that freedom as those before did. America is a bigger idea than the puny ideas in Barack Hussein Obama's head.

My country right or wrong.
If right, to be kept right.
If wrong, to be put right.
---Carl Schnurz

Tracht Gut, Zain Gut

2009-03-02T10:55:00.000-08:00

What does that mean? It's Yiddish for if you think good, good will result.

In the past years the moonbats took over the culture and bombarded us with their nonsensical pseudo-spiritual blather. One was supposed to think positively and the universe acting like a cosmic cash machine would belch out the goodies. Oprah is big on this. Obviously that's not going to happen but being moonbats they couldn't figure that part out. Or we are presented with a view of life that's unremittingly grim. There's nothing Hollywood likes more than a script about a couple low-life meth dealers living in a dirty trailer out in Victorville. Choose your poison, America.

We should be clever enough to know life is not as grim as the pinheads in Hollywood insist. We should also know the whole think positively dictum is flawed. You can think positively when someone is ill and they die anyway. You can think you'll get a job and you don't. Why is this post about thinking good and good will result when we all have examples that prove the reverse? Unless I'm playing a switcheroo on you and I'm going to argue that thinking that good will result from thinking good is for immature morons, you should be wondering where I'm taking you.

One day quite a few years ago when I was employed I said I prayed about something and the boss barked at me "What happened?" and I said "I felt better." He was baffled. The poor man, an ex-alcoholic, womanizer, liar, mean-spirited opera lover couldn't figure it out.

The left inherently is negative. Everything is always wrong and always requires fixing. Lots of fixing, expensive fixing, usually by them or the government. We've been force-fed this mindset for about 50 years. We're victims, we're pitiful, we're slugs. There's no God to turn to for solace, only the latest self-help book written by a moonbat. There's always therapy and moonbats love that field. There's drugs, one of their favorite things ever!

No wonder Prince Narcissus could spout a platform as nebulous as hope and change and win. He had the moonbat vote sewn up.

But that was a bait and switch because he's reverted now to the standard Left view that we're all victims, we're pitiful, we're but slugs and we need massive government intervention to save us. Funded by us. But we're too stupid to know how to spend our own money so we need big government to do it for us.

So sad.

And I see the right, the Republicans and even Conservatives, going along with this nonsense. CPAC: Epic Fail! Is the newest chant. A couple days before that it was the stupidity of the American Tea Party movement. Whether it's in politics or the economy, the knee-jerk reaction is to cut the public off at the knees and render us helpless and depressed.

Even the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages recognized that people cannot live under continued defeat and gloom. That's why there were feast days and celebrations throughout the year. You have to give people some bright spot reinvigorate them to enliven them to make life worth living.

Of course under Socialism this isn't true. You don't want the people happy. You can't control happy people. (Read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose for further illumination of this concept.) Crushed and demoralized people are owned by the state. They are mindless slaves.

We cannot save ourselves or this country if we fall into the abyss of negativity. We must begin to see there is value in taking action, any action, even if it's silly or fruitless action. Tea parties even. Why? Because action is resistance. Inaction is surrender. Do something, do anything. We will find the right things to do in time.

But wait. I haven't yet addressed the title of this post. If you think good, good will result. What do you want? A treasure chest filled with gold coins? Is that the only good you recognize? How about doing something for someone and seeing them smile? I left cookies in my mailbox for the mailman sporadically for months. One day he came to the door, put his hand on my shoulder and thanked me sincerely.

Think of the good things you can do and act on them. Believe you can make a contribution to life whether on a large stage or a small one. Focus on the good in the world, a flower, a vista, a puppy, a work of art bequeathed to us from generations past. These are the gifts we ignore. If we look for the good, we will find it. It will find us. That is the treasure in the treasure chest of life.

Am I Misremembering This?

2009-03-01T12:54:00.001-08:00

Mitt Romney--20% favor him in 2012 at CPAC this week?

Wasn't it last summer that Mitt Romney was spoken of as if he had 3 nipples and a forked tail because he was a Mormon and everyone *knows* Mormons hold odd beliefs? Because some on the right threw a tizzy fit about Mitt, we got stuck with McCain and lost the election. Thanks a lot guys, yeah, I think you're partially to blame.

Now suddenly Mitt looks attractive. Well he was always attractive, competent and a true believer in capitalism and there is also the small fact that at least he's run a company in his life which we cannot say for Prince Narcissus.

We can't do this again. We have to become adults, conduct ourselves as adults and vote like adults. If we don't this country is dead. Okay? Is that plain enough for you? America will die if left in the hands of the Neo-Socialists. So be a big picture person for the next election. Think it over. We're all depending on you.

In The Name of God, go!

2009-02-28T05:17:00.000-08:00

Oliver Cromwell Speech - Dissolution of the Long Parliament

Dissolution of the Long Parliament by Oliver Cromwell given to the House of Commons, 20 April 1653

It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter'd your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?

Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil'd this sacred place, and turn'd the Lord's temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress'd, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go!

Welcome To The Tea Party

2009-02-27T13:09:00.000-08:00

I couldn't make it to any of the protests today but as I read about them, I longed for something to do. And it came to me. I'm going to send my representatives tea bags. Just an unused tea bag with a note saying "Welcome to the tea party." If you knew who my representatives are you'd know they don't care. They're inebriated with this sudden power being conferred on them by the Commander in Thief.

(I love this photo of historic tea bags. It looks like we're going to a hangin'.)

I Am A Kulak!

2009-02-22T11:35:00.000-08:00

Yes. I was dispirited to say the least after the election and the inauguration. Things have rapidly gone from bad to worse. Obama is on an Alinksky timetable attempting to make things happen before we know the coup has taken place.

But Americans are a different breed. We have self-selected from all over the world because the foundations of America resonated with our hearts, our souls, our spirits. The disenchantment with the Hope (no one notices we're) Change (ing to socialism) Presidency (My God, how could this possibly have happened?) has begun.

I recommend you visit William Jacobson's blog to learn more.
http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/2009/02/revolt-of-kulaks-has-begun.html

Tea, anyone?

Bailout Mascot

2009-02-13T04:17:00.000-08:00

Well. When you start getting things like this in your email, you know someone was upset.

New Year Old News

2009-01-13T16:20:00.000-08:00

Took a break. It's all the same bad news anyway. The MSM slobbering over Barry. (Did you know he's going to eat the same food as Abe Lincoln--he's crackers.) The Republicans slobbering over his Cabinet choices. Closing Gitmo. It's staggering if I wasn't already reeling from last year.

Light Fantastic

2008-12-24T08:29:00.000-08:00

In A Bleak MidWinter

2008-12-23T07:06:00.001-08:00

Blagojevich

2008-12-10T09:40:00.000-08:00

Who is stupid enough to believe Obama and his camp had nothing to do with this selling the Senate seat for cash and other fine prizes?

It's not a distraction, MSM, it's Obama's character in spotlights. He has surrounded himself with the worst of the worst. And now he's President Elect. Hmph.

It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.
-G.k. Chesterton

First Terrorist War

2008-12-03T17:57:00.000-08:00

Barry is going to do nothing to help us. There will be no unicorns, or rainbows altho I would not bet against mushroom clouds. Dithering, obsfuscation and lies will mark his presidency. Let us at least see our situation clearly and Gerard Vandeleun sees about as clearly as anyone.

December 3, 2008

The First Terrorist War - Five Years Later

[First published: October, 2003 ]

Sections of "The First Terrorist War"

1. Calling the War By the Right Name.
2. Not Process But Victory Restores Freedom
3. Playing for Time is Playing to Lose
4. The Goal of Radical Islam is Our Destruction
5. The War of Two Religions
6. The Unspoken Role of the Ballistic Missile Submarines
7. Avoiding the Islamic War by Winning the Terrorist War

"[Arabs] were incorrigibly children of the idea, feckless and colour-blind, to whom body and spirit were for ever and inevitably opposed. Their mind was strange and dark, full of depressions and exaltations, lacking in rule, but with more of ardour and more fertile in belief than any other in the world. They were a people of starts, for whom the abstract was the strongest motive, the process of infinite courage and variety, and the end nothing. They were as unstable as water, and like water would perhaps finally prevail." -- T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

1. Calling the War By the Right Name.
In a war, "Know your enemy" is one of the first axioms in formulating a strategy for victory. It is an axiom the United States has ignored for over ~~two~~ seven years. Instead we’ve seen a host of euphemisms and slogans thrown up in the belief that, having had many decades of a life where ugly things are given pretty or neutral names, Americans can no longer "bear very much reality."

In the years between September. 2001 and today, the public has had little asked of it and seen nothing happen on our soil that alarms it. All is quiet on the western front.

Foggy thinking, attractive in politics, means defeat in war. War requires "a mind of winter;" a mind that is precise, cold, and unrelenting. War requires that we call things what they are and cease to skirt issues that make us, "uncomfortable." Vague names create fluffy policies, hamstrung strategies, and wishful thinking. This is where we are drifting.

To say we are "involved" in a "war on terror" extends our infatuation with euphemism and obfuscation into dangerous territory. The phrase lulls us into a state where all dangers seem unclear and distant. The "war on terror" joins an expanding list of "wars on..." such as drugs, poverty, or profuse paperwork in government. The "war on terror" implies a "process" rather than a campaign; an indeterminate series of unresolved encounters rather than decisive actions that lead to an end, to peace.

Peace is the goal of war. To accept a perpetual "war on terror" is to accept a plan for mere "management" rather than victory. The failure to plan for victory is the construction of a plan for defeat.

To those with a clear vision of this war and a knowledge of history, it is a lie that we are "involved in a war on terror." Our presidents, pundits and policy wonks may prefer it that way, but war is not the same as being "involved in a business slump" or "involved in a troubled relationship."

Wishful souls in the West may see the war as a "process;" as an exercise in supply chain management. Our many millions of avowed enemies do not. Our enemies have no truck with vague thinking and phrases front-loaded with vacillation and pusillanimous wishing. Their thinking is driven by an ancient religious doctrine designed to manipulate, exploit and harness societies into servitude.

Our enemies commitment to our destruction is adamantine. It is no accident that many of their spiritual leaders speaking from the centers of their faith call for the death of the "Crusaders." Obfuscation has no place in their plans except as if creates confusion and doubt among us. Our enemies' goals are the same goals they have held for more than 500 years. They are the goals announced several times a week in tens of thousands of mosques throughout the world. For our enemies, the wars of the Crusades and the wars surrounding the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire were merely prologues to this war.

One such wave (and not the least) I raised and rolled before the breath of an idea, till it reached its crest, and toppled over and fell at Damascus. The wash of that wave, thrown back by the resistance of vested things, will provide the matter of the following wave, when in fullness of time the sea shall be raised once more." - T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Our present reality, brought home to us in the cataclysm of September 11 (and last week in Mumbai), is that we are now fighting The First Terrorist War. We had best know it by that name. When we persist in calling it the "war on terror" our implied goal is control and containment; a "management problem". This is a lethal illusion.

In war the only acceptable outcome is complete victory. A negotiation does not end a war - - as Oslo shows. A partition does not end a war - - as we learned in Vietnam. A cease-fire does not end a war -- as we saw in the Gulf War. The Cold War taught us that a wall does not end a war. Only victory, clear and decisive, ends war and creates peace. To date, we have failed to learn this lesson. In life, when a lesson is not learned, it is repeated.

In war, language is a strategic asset. Indeed, we see daily how language,here and abroad, is used to weaken the resolve of the United States. The central problem in calling The First Terrorist War the "war on terror’ is that the phrase soothes us into accepting less than victory; makes us accept war-without-end as a new deal; a new normality where terror is accepted as the status quo. This is the state in which Israel has existed for decades as terrorist violence becomes the scrim screen against which that nation's life lurches on. Although our present foreign policy may impose this on Israel, a garrison state may, over time, prove less popular here at home. We are not yet the kind of country that easily accepts "The Forever War."

2. Not Process But Victory Restores Freedom

An open-ended "war on terror," like a ‘war on drugs" invites a continuing erosion of small liberties. As this persists, once rare infringements on liberty become the norm. If it is to be the case that the shoes of all air travelers are to be inspected from now until the last ding-dong of doom, we will all be wearing sandals on airlines for the rest of our days. In this, many are correct to be wary of the long term effects of The Patriot Act.

Short of military conquest, a free society does not lose its freedom. Rather, freedom is lost through small infringements on liberty and dignity in the name of security. A perfectly safe state is a state without freedom. As our policies look to sustain rather than defeat our enemies, we are to that degree held hostage to both our policies and our enemies. When war is reduced to a process, that process becomes a self-renewing system in the same way that the "war on drugs" has become institutionalized in our lives; a normal part of the background noise that defines our days. A strategy based on "management," on diplomacy rather than victory, leads only to the establishment of internal organizations dedicated to their own perpetuation.

During the Civil War and the World Wars of the last century certain freedoms were, at times, curtailed, infringed or suspended. Following victory in 1945 these freedoms not only returned but even greater states of equality and liberty emerged. Had the Second World War ended in a negotiated stand-off at the Rhine and Okinawa, a state of war would have continued for an unknowable time and, in such a state, a less-free United States would have been a certainty. Only the destruction of the Axis powers yielded a peace out of which freedom surged, not only in America but in the lands of her former enemies as well. Victory yields freedom in peace. An armed process yields only stasis.

3. Playing for Time is Playing to Lose
Our enemies (many of whom have studied and lived or now live among us) know us better than we are prepared to know either them or ourselves. In order to reform, rearm and launch future attacks they depend upon our belief that we are effectively managing the "war on terror." At the same time they know that, absent any large attacks, we will grow weary with small but constant losses tallied daily by our "caring and sensitive" media. They depend upon us being lulled back into the state of slumber we enjoyed on September 10th. And we grant their wishes.

If they are as wise as they are ruthless, our enemies will continue with their strategies of constant attrition and small, distant attacks. They will, for the present, avoid large shocks to the nation in hopes that the ambitions of our political factions and the intellectual lassitude of our major media will result in the defeat of the present administration in the coming elections.[Check... ] The goal of this strategy is the expectation of a more somnambulant administration less invested in war and more inclined towards the failed policies of appeasement, negotiation and payoff. [... and double check.]

When that happens our present "war on terror" will become even softer; will be said sotto voce if said at all. It will be supplanted by something resembling "a diplomatic initiative to ameliorate terrorism." In effect we shall find ourselves, as we have so often in the past under liberal guidance, trying to buy out way out of the "war on terror." Our error will be believing that we are dealing with reasonable extortionists rather than blood enemies. And the measure of our leaders’ cowardice will be how deeply they promote this belief and the false hope it engenders.

4. The Goal of Radical Islam is Our Destruction
The consequences of a political and military stand-down would be to allow our enemies the time, basing and mobility to grow in numbers, advance in training, achieve greater tactical position within and about our borders, and acquire ever more sophisticated and powerful weapons. Once they have advanced to the next level of lethality they will strike us again with an effect on our lives, liberties, property and economy more extreme than 9/11.

The goals of the Radical Islamic forces arrayed against us are the same as their factotums, the Palestinians, have for Israel. In the jihad against Israel we can see what the Islamic forces have in mind for us: the complete destruction of our systems, the occupation of our land, the usurpation of our government, and the death or conversion of all our citizens. These are the goals of Radical Islam as understood by their fundamentalists and as tolerated by the vast majority of believers.

Much has been written about these goals. Most of our scholars conclude they are only fantasies. A nuclear weapon detonated in Seattle does not care if a fantasy set it off.

Whether the goals of Radical Islam can be achieved is a matter for history to determine. It is the belief that they can be achieved that brings the First Terrorist War upon us. To the extent that we fail to recognize the intensity and commitment of our enemies in this war; to the extent we fail to match their passion for our destruction with our passion for victory; to the extent we cast our lot with our "process" as they cast their lot with their god, we weaken our ability to decisively defeat them.

Ours is a "war on terror" while theirs is a "Jihad." Our efforts are a process. Theirs are directed by divine mandate. Whether you are of a secular or religious persuasion, it is well to remember that if you go to war you’d best have God on your side.

It is time to put away the feeble designation of our actions as the "war on terror" for it is not "terror" that shooting wars engage. Wars engage combatants, armies, populations, institutions, nations and religions. It is unpopular, almost unsayable, to designate the First Terrorist War as a religious war, yet all serious people know that this is the case and that this, in the end, is what it shall come to.

5. The War of Two Religions
Through the violent attacks of a Radical Islam, two religions have been brought into conflict. The first is that of Islam, a faith that at its core requires absolute submission from its adherents, and looks towards the subjugation of the world as its ultimate apotheosis. As the youngest of the monotheistic religions, Islam is at a point in its development that Christianity passed through centuries ago. And it is not with Christianity that Islam is currently at war. Islam is saving that for the mopping up phase of its current campaign. The religion that Islam has engaged is a much younger one, the religion of Freedom.

As a religion Freedom has been gaining converts since the success of the American Revolution enabled it to go forth and be preached to the world. Freedom is easily the most popular of the new religions and historically converts nearly 100% of all populations in which it is allowed to take firm root. This is the religion which we have lately brought to Iraq.

The genius of the religion of Freedom is that it allows all other religions, from the venerable to the trivial, to exist without fear of censure or destruction. Indeed, the only thing that the religion of Freedom firmly forbids is the destruction of Freedom itself. "Thou shalt not destroy Freedom" is Freedom's single commandment. And Freedom has been shown to resist efforts to destroy it in the most ferocious way. It’s enemies would do well to ponder the fate of previous attempts to do so.

On September 11, the agents of Radical Islam began their attempt to destroy Freedom by attacking it at its core. The reaction of Freedom to this assault has been, once you consider the destructive power of the weapons systems it possesses, measured, deliberate and cautious. This is because Freedom, although sorely wounded, does not yet feel that its very existence is threatened. A more serious attack at any time in the future will put paid to that specious notion.

Following a second attack at a level equal to or exceeding September 11, any political opposition to pursuing our enemies with all means at our disposal will be swept off the table. The First Terrorist War will begin in earnest and it will not be a series of small wars with long lead times and a careful consultation of allies. The war will become, virtually overnight, a global war of violent preemption and merciless attack towards the spiritual and geographic centers of our enemy. Arguments revolving around the true meaning of ‘imminent’ will be seen as they are -- so much factional prattle. Due to the nature of the enemy, the First Terrorist War will be fought here and there and everywhere. It does not matter when or where the second serious strike on the American homeland takes place, it only matters that on the day after this country will be at war far beyond the current level of conflict.

6. The Unspoken Role of the Ballistic Missile Submarines
Since 9/11 there is one element of our strategic forces that has not been discussed. Indeed, you seldom hear a question asked about its status. That element is our fleet of ballistic missile submarines. We currently possess 18 of these "ships," but a ballistic missile submarine is known not as a ship, but as a "strategic asset."

Each submarine has 24 missile tubes. Each tube holds one missile with from 5-8 nuclear warheads. Each warhead can be targeted separately from the others. The range of these missiles is classified but is thought to be in excess of 6000 nautical miles. The total number of warheads is approximately 50% of US strategic warheads. In sum, any single one of these strategic assets can create the end of a significant portion of the world. At present roughly 40% of this fleet is deployed at unknown and unknowable locations throughout the world’s oceans.

Originally built in order to deter, these strategic assets now assume a more aggressive role in the First Terrorist War. Because of the religious nature of the war, our enemy is unlikely to be deterred by the threat of obliteration. He will view that as highly unlikely since it would, of necessity, involve us in the deaths of large number of civilians in countries known to harbor or be friendly to Islamic terrorists. He believes we would not employ these weapons. This misunderstanding of the history of Western democracies under arms and in a state of total war invites global tragedy.

Nevertheless, the character and goals of our enemy are as fixed as the words of the Koran and he is not to be dissuaded by the threat of annihilation. Only actual annihilation will, in the end, suffice and yield victory. In attempting to achieve this annihilation we can only hope that the political and military situation does not evolve to a level where the submarines would have to play a role.

7. Avoiding the Islamic War by Winning the Terrorist War
Because we are large, lumbering, impatient and somnambulant our enemy depends on these factors to defeat us. He uses the opportunities of Freedom in order to make war upon it. He is able to infiltrate our society and institutions. He is able to be infinitely patient. He plans for the decades while we can barely manage to plan from one fiscal quarter to the next.

This is a war that will play out over years and will not be resolved in months. In order to gain victory and defeat our enemy we must put in place policies and strategies that cannot easily be altered by reports, polls, or election cycles. In order to achieve this we must be, as we were in the Second World War, united in purpose. It is, sadly, the nature of our society today that September 11th's unity was fleeting. To find this unity we must suffer through one more horrendous attack the nature and timing of which will not be of our choosing.

Still, as surely as the next attack will come, so will the unity that it creates in its wake and at that point the full power of Freedom’s Arsenal will at last be used to defend it. This is the social and political conundrum that confronts us in the First Terrorist War. And this is why the war must be divorced from ‘process’ and the goal of victory be cut into the stone of the American soul.

During the Second World War, our system, with few alterations, brought us through to a peace in which there were greater freedoms than before the war. Victory validated our way of life. Not only were our freedoms intact in 1945 but they were poised, with the economy, for a great expansion throughout the rest of the century and into this. If you had proposed, in the summer of 1946, that within 50 years all minorities would be fully enfranchised, that women would be fully liberated, that homosexuals would be a dominant force with their enfranchisement only a moment away, and that an African-American could be elected President, you would have been dismissed as a socialist dreamer. And yet, here we are.

The same situation can also be envisioned as the result of our victory in the First Terrorist War at the end of a less-clear but no less threatening passage of arms. But this will only happen if we remain clear about the real nature of the First Terrorist War, and committed to unequivocal victory regardless of the costs in lives and treasure. Only by matching the determination of our enemy to destroy us will we prevail. The only thing that can defeat us are a dull reliance on management, a fascination with process rather than victory and the reluctance to believe the extent to which our enemy desires our annihilation.

Beyond victory in the First Terrorist War is a greater goal. What we must seek is not merely the "control" and "containment" of terror, for terror in this guise cannot be controlled or contained. We must come to the deeper understanding that only a complete victory over the global Radical Islamic forces can prevent the onset of a confrontation more terrible than the current war.

What we must press for in the Terrorist War is a victory so decisive that we can, in the end, avoid the larger war lurking on the not-so-distant horizon - - a true war between civilizations. That war, should it come, will not take the name of The Terrorist War, but of The Islamic War.

The Terrorist War is still a struggle that can be fought and won with conventional means. An Islamic War, should it come, would engulf the world and be anything but conventional.

"Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances."T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
====
*[NOTE: This essay was first published in October of 2003. It has recently been the subject of renewed interest at various places about the net, thanks in no small part to Joe Katzman's : 3 Touchstones, 3 Conjectures. In Katzman's article I find my effort bracketed by Stephen Den Beste's USS Clueless - Strategic Overview and Wretchard of The Belmont Club's 3 Conjectures. Now joined by Joe Katzman with Winds of Change.NET: Our Darkening Sky: Iran and the War]

http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/terrorwar/the_first_terro.php#003097

Hatikva

2008-12-02T17:06:00.000-08:00

Michal Towber sings the Israeli National Anthem

Blogging, Life, Mumbai

2008-12-01T06:11:00.000-08:00

I had two sites devoted to all things jihad. At some point I realized I was repeating myself. Everything there is to say about islam and jihad I'd said. I gave the sites up.

Now I find myself similarly perched. President Elect Narcissus somehow got himself elected and we're stuck. We must resist him mightily but I doubt if there is more new to be said. To paraphrase George Herbert "Living free is the best resistance."

We blew it. This is a democracy and we gave up. Shame on us.

Scheherazade's Better Tale

2008-12-01T06:10:00.000-08:00

Scheherazade needs a new tale

2008-12-01T06:08:00.000-08:00

Scheherazade Needs A New Tale

November 29, 2008 by Daphne

Watching the latest Islamic terrorist horror in India starts a rolling list in my head that can’t be stopped; Iran, Beirut, USS Cole, Somalia, 9/11, Spain, London. Those are just the big ones, everyday around the world Islamists murder in the name of their politicized religion. They attack women, children, the old and infirm, coreligionists, non-believers, white, brown or yellow, it doesn’t matter. An alarming portion of their fellow Muslims support their grisly agenda, some of them actively, others by dancing in the streets, expressing joy in the deaths of strangers. I hate these bastards.

I find myself increasingly repulsed by Muslim practices and beliefs. Middle Eastern, African, Asian, American, the country of origin makes no difference. Women and children treated as chattel, genital mutilation, child brides, honor killings, culturally accepted pedophilia, the black drapes and head coverings, no rights, no votes, little to non-existent educational opportunities, no voice, no choices, no recourse. Persecution of homosexuals. Imprisonment, stoning and whipping for morality crimes. Lack of free speech. The foul treatment of non-Muslims in Islamic countries. The demented hatred of Jews. Sharia Law. Wahhabism. Madrasas. Blind obedience to Mullahs. Praying towards Mecca - a place on the map few will ever see. Individuality is shut down, originality and freedom of the mind discouraged. Islam pisses on human talents that fall outside the dark walls of its faith. Hell, I even dislike their dislike of dogs.

I don’t believe Mohamed was holy or a prophet. I think he was evil incarnate carrying the words of Satan himself to a crew of desert simpletons. Islam is a barbaric, unpeaceful, vile, unthinking distortion of worship. The fact that the majority of its adherents can’t even read the Koran smacks of mindless ignorance. I see no enlightenment elevating individual singularity or acknowledging gifted greatness in this corner of archaic darkness. My lip curls at their love of theocracies, a willingness to subjugate themselves to the whims of dissolute rulers along side an ancient text they can’t even begin to comprehend, subsuming their divine individuality to a tide of dogmatic mandates. I have no use, or respect, for the people who follow this religion. I’m past tired of their bombing, shooting, acid throwing, coup d’etat loving, rioting asses and it looks like the rest of the world could stand a break from these murdering bastards, too. According to a website that does nothing but track worldwide Islamic terrorism, there have been 12,328 Islamic terrorist attacks since 9/11. Don’t tell me this isn’t an Islamic issue, the rest of us aren’t practicing murder on a worldwide scale in the name of religion.

I’m fed up. Please don’t start feeding me that lame ‘Moderate Islam’ load of bull. Sure, I know most Muslims aren’t carrying out jihad, many don’t financially support those activities, millions don’t dance in the streets and rejoice death. Answer me this though, of all of those billions who don’t participate, how many are actively fighting the Islamists? How many are working to moderate and depoliticize the Book, men, rulers and countries who support terrorism? I have yet to see the Middle East street riot to overthrow the mullahs, dethrone the Saudis, crush the morality police or stone the acid throwing scumbags who attack school girls. Where are the millions of women demonstrating for their natural human rights to keep their labias, show their arms and hair, go to school, drive a damn car? Where are the protesters when a filmmaker, writer or cartoonist is killed for expressing their thoughts on Islam? Show me the Muslim groups vocally trying to protect children or homosexuals. There is absolutely no movement among their theologians to modernize, secularize or temper the Koran. I haven’t even touched on Southeast Asia, a predominately Muslim region full of Islamic terrorism that our media regularly ignores. The vast majority of supposed moderates wallow in the same foul cesspool that breeds extremism. They don’t give a shit. Insha Allah.

Moderate Muslims don’t exist. Most followers are quietly going about their lives in this religious toilet, some are trying to remake the globe. I have no use for either group, to coin an old sixties phrase, you’re either part of the problem or you’re part of the solution. I’m past the point of trying to understand, rationalize or tolerate general Muslim inactivity to moderate their religion or issue wholesale condemnations for the large, violent arm of their faith.

I don’t care about the epithets that will come my way or the pseudo intellectual arguments defending Islam in general, I’m done with the followers of this grotesque religious abomination that’s wreaking regular havoc and death on the world. I will condemn them all until they give me good reason to reconsider their decency. A worldwide Muslim protest against the perpetrators of the latest Islamic terrorist atrocity in Mumbai would be a good start.

http://jadedhaven.wordpress.com/2008/11/29/scheherazade-needs-a-new-tale/

The Art of Socialism

2008-11-21T07:34:00.000-08:00

Christie Davies has a good sneer at socialist design at the V&A and explains why socialist economics could not work and made life ugly and uncomfortable: Cold War Modern: Design 1945 - 1970 at the V&A

Posted by Christie Davies

Cold War Modern: Design 1945 - 1970
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
25th September 2008 - 11th January 2009
Daily 10am - 5.45pm (Fridays until 10pm)

The exhibition Cold War Design at the V&A is both a disgrace and a joke. It purports to identify a cold war in design between the Soviets and the Americans between 1945-70 and to place it in an historical and economic context but it gets both the history and the economics wrong and quite disgracefully so.

It is a joke because East European design was a joke. As the tragedy of Stalin was succeeded by the farce of Khrushchev, so the crushingly ugly monumentalism of his tyranny was replaced by the badly designed everyday products that were the subject of popular humour. Stalin's architects designed crass buildings, Khrushchev and Brezhnev's designers produced rubbish artefacts. The exhibition speaks of two roads to modernism but there was never anything modern about socialism.

The exhibition tries to reduce all western consumer goods to being items in cold war competition and a by-product of technical advances made by the military.

Well designed office products by Olivetti and Italian coffee machines alike are regarded as having been made to promote the benefits of the free market. There is a dreadful ambiguity here. They did promote the benefits of the free market. Under no other system would it have been possible to design them in a way that would appeal to customers and fulfil a felt need.

Let us have no nonsense about advertisers promoting false needs. Is coffee a false need? Were the Germans who drank Ersatzkaffee made of acorns during and after World War II as false in their needs as in their coffee? Should the "false" Olivetti typewriter and its successor the word processor be ditched to bring back hunched male clerks on high stools writing copper plate in ledgers? Was it wrong to deskill Mr Pooter, the City calligrapher, and hand his work over to the pert young female products of the Board schools just to satisfy a false need for legibility?

Elsewhere in the exhibition we are asked to admire "Hedwig Bollhagen's
elegant unadorned" East German coffee set 1961, produced by one of East Germany's leading ceramicists. Her work never went into mass production even though she owned one of the country's few private businesses (her goods were traded under the counter) nor that there was never any decent coffee to put in such coffee cups as there were. In East Germany you had to measure out your life without coffee spoons. We were endlessly told during the cold war that the prices paid to peasants growing coffee were too low, never that a key reason for this was the unwillingness of the Soviet block to allow their consumers to buy the coffee they wanted.

Many of the East European designs in this exhibition were mere prototypes that never went into production. Sometimes they are elegant but it is the elegance of a Potemkin village. In an aristocratic society it is possible to admire the craftsmanship of a one-off coffee service for the very rich and to ignore the dirty clay pots from which the poor sup their beer but in industrial societies production ought to be for the broad masses and design must reflect this.

Soviet design could not do so because no-one ever considered the wishes of ordinary people. In fairness, from an aesthetic point of view, it was an egalitarian society. Even the elite lived ugly, though in far more comfortable ugliness than the moujiks. There were no Fabergė Easter eggs, but then there was no Easter either, the key occasion that in Tsarist times had brought beauty into the world of the peasant.

The well-designed Italian goods did promote the virtues of the free market but that was not their main purpose. After they had been produced, no doubt they could be placed in exhibitions and used to illustrate the superiority of the West over Soviet socialism but so what? When you are competing for prestige or propaganda you compete with what you've got.

The curators' waspish comments on the Italian Vespa motor scooter are even crasser than those about Olivetti. They stress that the Vespa was adapted from scooters used by US parachutists during the Second World War in order to portray Western goods as a spin-off of militarism. One of the sillier critics writing about the exhibition, who presumably got his ideas from what he saw, adds that the Vespa was

mass-produced with American money to bind the once-fascist nation to its consumerist cause.

But were the Italians ever so enthusiastic for Mussolini and world conquest that they ceased to seek and enjoy well-designed goods? Was it such a wrench to the fanatically militaristic Italians to give up being soldiers of an all-conquering state that they had to be placated with scooters?

Consumerism is not an ideology, not a Weltanshauung in the sense that Fascism and Communism were. Putting the suffix –ism on something does not make it a belief system. In truth there is no such thing as consumerism. Our central belief is that individuals should be free to make choices - that is our ideology; the providers of goods and services merely compete for the attention of free women and men. That is all. A scooter is a scooter is a scooter. It is not an ideology but an effective means of transportation. It only becomes an advertisement for capitalism because it does well what it is designed to do.

It is amazing to see in the exhibition as an example of good East European design a "Trabi", an East German Trabant motor car. On days when the wind blew from the East it was the main source of pollution in West Berlin. After reunification it had to be banned because of the amount of dirt it put into the air. In what sense was it well designed? It doesn't even look good.

The Eastern jokers knew far more about cars than the V&A:

How do you double the value of a Trabi?
Fill the petrol tank.
Why has the Lada got a heated rear window?
So that it keeps your hands warm when you push it through the snow.

Everywhere in the exhibition we are told how innovation and design improvements in consumer goods came from the investments in science and technology needed for competition in defence. But in that case why could the Soviets who were very good at designing tanks (better even than the Nazi ones) not transfer their skills to the designing of a decent car.

The Soviets could not even design civilian planes that worked. Their internal airlines were notorious for their bad safety record, something they concealed from their own public by not permitting stories about air crashes to get into the press. If the Soviets could design an outstanding jet fighter for their covert pilots to use in the Korean War, why could they not design a plane that could get their own citizens safely from Moscow to Tashkent or Kiev?

But the exhibition does not mention these grotesque failures that reveal how worthless Soviet design was - instead it highlights Soviet propaganda successes, notably Sputnik the first satellite and Vostok the first space capsule, the one that took Yuri Gagarin into orbit, following the dog Laika. There is a huge Soviet poster of him in the exhibition by Vadim Volikov entitled "Glory to Soviet Science, Glory to Soviet Man - the First Cosmonaut, 1961". Gagarin is flanked by a rocket and holds a red sphere in his hand with a hammer and sickle on it. The idiots running the exhibition comment

perhaps it represents the planet's future as a socialist world without national, social or class divisions.

They have no evidence for this. It might just as well mean "he holds the whole world in his hand", i.e. the Soviet Union is omnipotent.

There is one richly comic item though - the full pressure space suit worn by Alexsei Leonov for his first space walk. It was so rigid that he had problems getting back into the spacecraft through the airlock and got stuck, presumably with his head back in and his arse sticking out in space. What a wonderful comedy film that would have made. No wonder the Russians never got to the moon.

It is the principle of the entire exhibition that Soviet posters, prototypes, rhetoric and imagined utopias are placed in opposition to western achieved design. Even the Soviet lead in rockets was a mark of their incompetence in design. The Soviets could not make their warheads smaller, so they had to make their rockets bigger and ended up bolting together World War II style German rockets. Sputnik was a by-product of this and is in essence a triumph of Nazi science and of the Nazi scientists kidnapped and forcibly deported to the Soviet Union in 1945-6.
But no one in Moscow dared to sing the local equivalent of

... the widows and cripples in old London town,
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun

The simplicity of the best western design was not an attempt to off-set the horrors of Socialist Realism but a result of the endless pressure due to competition in pricing to make things cheaper by using less raw materials in production and to occupy less space in people's homes.

The only small things the Soviets ever pioneered were the miniature cameras and recording devices for the KGB on display in the exhibition. Even jewellery imitated this as in Vaclav Cagler's Neck Piece (Czech) 1968-9, a piece of futuristic jewellery with mirrored discs for covert observation. Socialist production maximises the use of raw materials because that makes total production look larger which looks good in the figures and socialist design goes for size for a similar reason. Never tell a socialist that size doesn't matter.

It was not that their designers arbitrarily chose clumsiness but rather that a system in which value is measured by cost (as in the British educational system) forced clumsiness upon them.

The transistor was an American invention and the transistor radio a Japanese triumph. If it had been left to the Soviets they would have gone on using valves because for all their investment in science education (some of it better than ours) they could never innovate. In turn their designers would have gone on producing huge boxes to hold the radios taking up half the space in their average working class family's tiny living room. It would have been seen as a suitable outlet for the huge speeches of the Soviet leaders. It would be interesting to know how quickly they phased valves out when the transistor arrived since socialist planners do not like liquidating obsolete physical plant, even though it has become effectively worthless.

There is a curious insert in the middle of the exhibition covering the year 1968. Here for reasons that are obscure is a poster from the radical French Atelier Populaire 1968, telling us "Voter c'est mourir un peu", (To vote is to die a little), showing a coffin with a ballot box on top and marked with de Gaulle's Cross of Lorraine. It is accompanied by illustrations and accounts of the police putting down student riots in France and Italy. But there is also a photo of an utterly empty Wenceslas Square in Prague. In the foreground is the photographer's watch on a wrist, showing the time when a planned rally would have been at full strength. It had been cancelled because the Warsaw pact forces had warned that they would crush it with the utmost violence.

Here we see, though it is not remarked on in the exhibition, the total contrast between the crushed Czechs who wanted freedom to vote and to purchase and the cowardly pampered scum of Paris and Milan who were against voting, against freedom, against consumption and who knew that in a democratic country they could be violent with impunity. De Gaulle was not going to crush them beneath the tracks of his tanks.

In Milan in 1968 Giancarlo de Carlo installed a barricade of freezers and television sets in the Milan Triennale held in the Palazzo dell' Arte

fashioned from the debris of modern capitalism ...[to] draw attention to the effects of modern consumerism on society.

Two hours after it opened radical protesters occupied the building! De Carlo who was obviously a devotee of onanism, a complete Kuwaiti tanker-merchant banker, tried to engage them in discussion and was upset when a week later the police threw them out.

There is something sickening about radicals who protested against the goods that were making life easier for ordinary working-class housewives but who loved Mao Tse Tung and the Cultural Revolution and even imitated its uniforms. The mass murders the famines and the total lack of freedom were acceptable to them as were the public humiliation of ordinary individuals on a scale not seen since the Nazis made the Jews scrub the streets of Vienna.

There is also much that is sickening about this exhibition that praises the horrors of socialism with faint damns. The Soviet Union in the cold war was not an alternative road to modernism and modernity but a stagnant society that blocked all possibility of reform. At the time we feared communism because of its military power. Today we despise it for its failure. The cold war was a just war and we won. That is all you need to know. There is only one reason for going to the exhibition at the V and A and that is to sneer.

Christie Davies travelled extensively in the Soviet bloc during the cold war. He is the author of Jokes and their Relation to Society, (Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 1998) in which he shows how ordinary people in those countries expressed their hatred of socialism and its failures through humour.

http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001874.php

Hey There!

2008-11-16T07:24:00.000-08:00

This has always been a favorite song. Usually when a song starts going through my mind, it means there's a message there. See if you can get the message my subconscious was sending this morning.

Where I Stand In All This

2008-11-11T05:31:00.000-08:00

In the coming days, weeks, months, years and perhaps into infinity ( if Dear Leader can delete the 2-term limit), we will speak of many things. But it's important to know where we stand and who's who. This chart will help you identify the various enemies, fools, buffoons and dupes you will confront in our Brave New Future. (See how long it takes to find your place on the chart--not as easy as it sounds!)

Chart by The New York Times, 1913

This About Says It All

2008-11-09T10:40:00.000-08:00

The voice of reason from a commenter in Australia.

That website made me want to puke. Those head-tilts are now not of compassion but condescension. As if the left has anything to teach anyone about graciousness or moderation in attitude or behaviour.

Of course conservatives will “get along” and make nice - it’s why they knew they could get away with all the atrocious things they’ve said and done the past 8 years. Did anyone hear GWB whining about all the stuff that’s been said and written about him? Has he blackballed a network for asking “tough” questions? Has he querulously queried a news anchor about being a shill for the opposing side?

Do you know why conservatives generally have the capacity for graciousness in victory and defeat? Because, as a rule, conservatives are happy with who they are. There’s no cognitive dissonance going on, because we live what we believe - we like free markets, so we consume; we actually care for our less fortunate neighbours, so we give generously (of our OWN money that we earn) and we buy their stuff so they can gain wealth; we don’t believe the economy works by taking from one and giving to the other (as though a dollar for you means a dollar less for me), so we work hard, pay our taxes grudgingly and rejoice at the success of others while working to secure our own; we don’t believe in AGW, so we don’t agonise over the recycling or flying or driving anywhere. It’s bliss.

If you’re a lefty in a western capitalist democracy, this is impossible because you are living off the wealth created by a system you think you despise. You are inherently angry and bitter all the time, because your life can’t measure up to your impossible ideals, and you are naturally self-absorbed and self-centered because of this anger and bitterness. It’s all consuming.

Of course, I’m generalising. I’m sure some of the head-tilties pictured were appalled at the treatment of the conservatives at the hands of the minority (but vocal) radicalised elements of their pseudo-religion, and in the last 8 years raised their voices again and again in protest at such unprovoked and vicious assaults on the character and person of their political opponents, all the while gently counselling their wayward brethren to focus on critiquing ideas, and having genuine debates rather than resorting to name-calling.

And I know, some conservative once called you a name so we are just as bad. Boo hoo. Go cry in your victory herbal tea, winner, and try to figure out just how to run something and lead something for once, instead of making dopey-hopey-changey noises and singing “How many times must a man blah blah” while wearing your “Abort Sarah Palin” button on your “Sarah Palin is a C***” t-shirt while waving your “GWB is not my President” banner and throwing a molotov cocktail at the McDonald’s on the corner. Oh, and did I forget to mention the “No War for Oil” hat on your head?

This makes me sound unhappy doesn’t it? But the above is what the left actually DID. It’s so bitter, angry, twisted and unhinged that merely stating the fact makes me sound bitter, angry, twisted and unhinged. So sad. (head tilt) But I weally, weally wuv you guys and want to make it work so your heads don’t explode. M’kay?(/head tilt)

JanineV of Perth (Reply)
Sat 08 Nov 08 (06:22pm)

http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/stop_the_hate

John Bolton to Barry

2008-11-06T16:57:00.000-08:00

Letter to the Next President

By John Bolton
Telegraph.co.uk | 11/6/2008

Congratulations, Mr President-elect, on your victory. After the longest presidential campaign in our history, you now have 77 days to prepare to govern. While foreigners might see eleven weeks as an eternity, you know only too well that it is precious little time to select your top advisers and then subject them to our cumbersome FBI and ethics screening of their backgrounds, their finances, their potential conflicts of interest, and whatever skeletons are hanging in their closets.

Then, of course, they need to learn the intricacies of their respective responsibilities, and, for many, begin the Senate confirmation process, which may take months. Time is already growing short.

The current economic turmoil will consume a significant amount of your Transition Team’s time and effort, and properly so. But in the wider world, our adversaries and even our friends are actively considering how to advance their interests as your January 20 Inauguration approaches.

You will have four full years of foreign-policy issues and problems, such as the rise of China and India, the decline of the European Union, and the role of Russia, but I suggest the following as priorities in your first Hundred Days:

You are the decider.

Although President Bush tried to make this his mantra, his Administration was plagued in its first term by incoherence in national security decision making. Crisp decisions were not made, strong differences of opinion among Cabinet Secretaries were not resolved, and policy too often oscillated between conflicting options with no consistency or direction.

Ironically, the Bush Administration’s second term erred in the opposite direction, almost eliminating differences in advice to the President until there was really only one voice in his ear at critical points. You must avoid both pitfalls, and you must make that clear immediately. You must resolve disagreements among your advisers, and not allow drift, and you must insist on discipline once you make a decision.

If anyone disagrees with this approach, you may invite them to do the honourable thing and resign, or not sign on in the first place. Iran Tehran’s ruling mullahs have no intention of affording you a “honeymoon”. They will move quickly to test your resolve both on their rapidly progressing nuclear weapons program and on their massive support for international terrorism.

Nearly six years of European diplomacy has failed to slow Iran’s nuclear program. Five UN Security Council Resolutions demanding that Iran halt uranium enrichment (and imposing risibly weak sanctions) have had essentially no effect.

Russia in particular is using Iran as the sharp tip of the spear to disrupt our policy throughout the Middle East. Moscow will watch what you do just as intently as Tehran. Any new President will be advised to engage in at least some renewed diplomatic effort. But do not be fooled. Insist on three months of intense, good-faith negotiations, and we will soon find out if Iran is serious.

If not, which I believe to be demonstrably the case, suspend negotiations quickly. Then, ratchet up efforts on the only options, unattractive though they are, that have a chance of stopping Iran from acquiring deliverable nuclear weapons: regime change or the targeted use of military force against Iran’s nuclear program.

If you wait longer, you will surely have the worst of all worlds: Iran with nuclear weapons, and an even greater threat of nuclear proliferation as other Middle Eastern states draw the appropriate conclusions from its success at thwarting our non-proliferation efforts.

North Korea

We are kidding ourselves if we think North Korea will ever voluntarily give up its nuclear weapons program. Even during the campaign, as the Bush Administration was squandering our negotiating leverage, North Korea continued to try to proliferate ballistic missile technology.

As with Iran, there is essentially no chance that Pyongyang will be talked out of its nuclear weapons. Moreover, with the world in near-complete ignorance about the state of Kim Jong-il’s health or plans for regime succession, even more uncertainty surrounds the intentions of this prison camp of a country. Expecting that the long-running Six-Party Talks will “solve” the North Korean problem is a delusion.

Instead, you must deal directly with China as the highest priority in our bilateral relationship, and insist that we act together to eliminate the current regime in Pyongyang and is nuclear program, and ultimately reunite the Korean Peninsula.

China needs to understand that leaving the North with nuclear weapons is not an option, and that their inaction will have an increasingly negative impact on our bilateral relationship. Beijing alone can change North Korea, and it needs to get started.

America’s Image

Do not let global “public opinion” about the United States, from Albania to Zimbabwe, dissuade you from doing what you think is right for America. Your job is to defend and advance our interests and values, a task which invariably will displease our adversaries, and even many of our friends, especially those who wish we were, well, more European in our behaviour and attitudes.

What we must do, however, is more effectively advocate the policies you will be pursuing. Failure at both the political level in Washington and abroad, and at the level of the career Foreign Service, made the Bush Administration one of the most tongue-tied Presidencies in our history. We should try to shift international public opinion to support our policies, not modify our policies to try to satisfy international public opinion. The State Department will not understand this distinction. You must.

A final word

Many U.S. and foreign commentators have been quick to tell us that America is in decline, and that our role in the future will not be what it once was. They will be correct only if you fall prey to their pessimism.

And if you do, rest assured that they will shortly turn critical of “American isolationism,” just as they have been critical in recent years of “American unilateralism.” You will never satisfy them. Defend America and its friends, and the rest will take care of itself.

Day After The Election

2008-11-05T11:06:00.000-08:00

What's left to say? We obviously have a country that is uninformed and ill-equipped to make decisions as important as this.

Go Vote

2008-11-03T16:34:00.000-08:00

Do you want this creep to be your president?

WASHINGTON PROWLER

Aunt Zeituni’s Protectors

By The Prowler on 11.3.08 @ 10:49AM

ALL IN THE FAMILY
Senior aides to Sen. Barack Obama and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick were aware that Obama’s aunt, Zeituni Onyango, was living in the United States illegally and in a South Boston public-housing project, and were monitoring her at the request of senior Obama campaign officials, according to a current employee for Obama’s key political consulting firm, AKP&D Message and Media.

Back in early 2007, as Obama’s chief campaign strategist David Axelrod was organizing and planning the Obama campaign, he identified Obama’s unique family situation — a number of half-brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, some living overseas — as a potential problem, says an employee for Axelrod’s political consulting firm, and who has done work on the Obama campaign. “Given [Obama's] father’s family history here and in Africa, David wanted the campaign to know who was who, where they lived, and what they were doing. No surprises. We knew she was here illegally. We knew her income levels, but I don’t think anyone from the campaign had had contact with her.”

Instead, according to the source, Axelrod reached out to his former client, Patrick, who had retained Axelrod’s firm for his run for governor. Onyango was living in a state-funded housing project, “so Patrick’s people could just as easily keep track of things, and could do it without drawing a ton of attention,” says the AKP&D Message and Media employee, who requested anonymity as he hopes to get a job in an Obama administration should the candidate win. “If we had Obama people around, the media would probably have found her much sooner. She was in [Obama's] book, it wasn’t like she couldn’t be found.” Indeed, that is exactly how the London Times found her.

While the South Boston housing project is managed by the Boston Housing Authority, it is a state-funded facility, according to the BHA press office, and so it would not be uncommon for state housing officials to be on the grounds or in the area. “Patrick was the go-between, he’s trusted by David and Senator Obama,” says the aide.

In fact, Patrick spent most of the past two or three days stumping for Obama up and down the East Coast. His and Obama’s relationship goes back a couple of decades, and the two actually represented ACORN together in a civil suit back in 1993. Some Republican political operatives believe that Patrick and his political team have been cutouts for un-reported cash distributed to ACORN officials around the country for Democrat “get out the vote” projects.

Some Obama aides believe that Obama was briefed at least twice by Axelrod or campaign manager David Plouffe on the status of family members. “We tracked who was talking to the press, we kept in touch with some of these people,” says an Obama campaign media aide. “Anyone who thinks we didn’t doesn’t understand just how nervous we were about all of these people, particularly the members of [Obama's] father’s family. Axelrod had everything covered.” The aide said she was never present for such a briefing, but “we all knew the candidate’s family was being taken care of, to protect their privacy and try to contain any damage.”

The Obama campaign has denied knowing anything about Onyango’s illegal status or her poor financial situation.

Shameful! Jerrold Nadler Lies

2008-11-03T04:56:00.001-08:00

It's one thing thing for a politician to lie, we expect that, but it's another thing entirely for a Jew to lie in a house of G-d. He is disgusting.

Ward Churchill dedicates his book to WU member

2008-11-02T18:04:00.000-08:00

Diane Oughton.

You can get a scan of the important pages from the same place I did. (I virus scanned it and it's clean but you should do it yourself to be sure.)

http://rapidshare.com/files/160100893/Pacifism_as_Pathology.pdf

So Churchill dedicates his book to William Ayers' girlfriend who blew herself up in a workplace accident.

But again, as with everything Barry, this has no greater implications and we're not to make anything of all these commies hanging around trying to destroy this country.

Cultural Marxism

2008-11-02T05:07:00.000-08:00

February 15, 2007

Cultural Marxism

By Linda Kimball

There are two misconceptions held by many Americans. The first is that communism ceased to be a threat when the Soviet Union imploded. The second is that the New Left of the Sixties collapsed and disappeared as well. "The Sixties are dead," wrote columnist George Will ("Slamming the Doors," Newsweek, Mar. 25, 1991)

Because the New Left lacked cohesion it fell apart as a political movement. However, its revolutionaries reorganized themselves into a multitude of single issue groups. Thus we now have for example, radical feminists, black extremists, anti-war ‘peace' activists, animal rights groups, radical environmentalists, and ‘gay' rights groups. All of these groups pursue their piece of the radical agenda through a complex network of organizations such as the Gay Straight Lesbian Educators Network (GSLEN), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), People for the American Way, United for Peace and Justice, Planned Parenthood, Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), and Code Pink for Peace.

Both communism and the New Left are alive and thriving here in America. They favor code words: tolerance, social justice, economic justice, peace, reproductive rights, sex education and safe sex, safe schools, inclusion, diversity, and sensitivity. All together, this is Cultural Marxism disguised as multiculturalism.

Birth of Multiculturalism

In anticipation of the revolutionary storm that would baptize the world in an inferno of red terror, leading to its rebirth as the promised land of social justice and proletarian equality-Frederich Engels wrote,

"All the...large and small nationalities are destined to perish...in the revolutionary world storm... (A general war will) wipe out all...nations, down to their very names. The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only reactionary classes...but...reactionary peoples." ("The Magyar Struggle," Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Jan. 13, 1849)

By the end of WWI, socialists realized that something was amiss, for the world's proletariat had not heeded Marx's call to rise up in opposition to evil capitalism and to embrace communism instead. They wondered what had gone wrong.

Separately, two Marxist theorists-Antonio Gramsci of Italy and Georg Lukacs of Hungary-concluded that the Christianized West was the obstacle standing in the way of a communist new world order. The West would have to be conquered first.

Gramsci posited that because Christianity had been dominant in the West for over 2000 years, not only was it fused with Western civilization, but it had corrupted the workers class. The West would have to be de-Christianized, said Gramsci, by means of a "long march through the culture." Additionally, a new proletariat must be created. In his "Prison Notebooks," he suggested that the new proletariat be comprised of many criminals, women, and racial minorities.

The new battleground, reasoned Gramsci, must become the culture, starting with the traditional family and completely engulfing churches, schools, media, entertainment, civic organizations, literature, science, and history. All of these things must be radically transformed and the social and cultural order gradually turned upside-down with the new proletariat placed in power at the top.

The Prototype

In 1919, Georg Lukacs became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bolshevik Bela Kun regime in Hungary. He immediately set plans in motion to de-Christianize Hungary. Reasoning that if Christian sexual ethics could be undermined among children, then both the hated patriarchal family and the Church would be dealt a crippling blow. Lukacs launched a radical sex education program in the schools. Sex lectures were organized and literature handed out which graphically instructed youth in free love (promiscuity) and sexual intercourse while simultaneously encouraging them to deride and reject Christian moral ethics, monogamy, and parental and church authority. All of this was accompanied by a reign of cultural terror perpetrated against parents, priests, and dissenters.

Hungary's youth, having been fed a steady diet of values-neutral (atheism) and radical sex education while simultaneously encouraged to rebel against all authority, easily turned into delinquents ranging from bullies and petty thieves to sex predators, murderers, and sociopaths.

Gramsci's prescription and Lukacs' plans were the precursor to what Cultural Marxism in the guise of SIECUS, GSLEN, and the ACLU--acting as judicially-powered enforcers--later brought into American schools.

Building a base

In 1923, the Frankfurt School-a Marxist think-tank-was founded in Weimar Germany. Among its founders were Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno. The school was a multidisciplinary effort which included sociologists, sexologists, and psychologists.

The primary goal of the Frankfurt School was to translate Marxism from economic terms into cultural terms. It would provide the ideas on which to base a new political theory of revoltuion based on culture, harnessing new oppressed groups for the faithless proletariat. Smashing religion, morals, It would also build a constituency among academics, who could build careers studying and writing about the new oppression.

Toward this end, Marcuse-who favored polymorphous perversion-expanded the ranks of Gramsci's new proletariat by including homosexuals, lesbians, and transsexuals. Into this was spliced Lukacs radical sex education and cultural terrorism tactics. Gramsci's ‘long march' was added to the mix, and then all of this was wedded to Freudian psychoanalysis and psychological conditioning techniques. The end product was Cultural Marxism, now known in the West as multiculturalism.

Additional intellectual firepower was required: a theory to pathologize what was to be destroyed. In 1950, the Frankfurt School augmented Cultural Marxism with Theodor Adorno's idea of the ‘authoritarian personality.' This concept is premised on the notion that Christianity, capitalism, and the traditional family create a character prone to racism and fascism. Thus, anyone who upholds America's traditional moral values and institutions is both racist and fascist. Children raised by traditional values parents, we are told to believe, will almost certainly become racists and fascists. By extension, if fascism and racism are endemic to America's traditional culture, then everyone raised in the traditions of God, family, patriotism, gun ownership, or free markets is in need of psychological help.

The pernicious influence of Adorno's ‘authoritarian personality' idea can be clearly seen in some of the research that gets public money.

"In Aug., 2003, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the results of their $1.2 million tax-payer funded study. It stated, essentially, that traditionalists are mentally disturbed. Scholars from the Universities of Maryland, California at Berkeley, and Stanford had determined that social conservatives...suffer from ‘mental rigidity,' ‘dogmatism,' and ‘uncertainty avoidance,' together with associated indicators for mental illness." http://www.edwatch.org/ ‘Social and Emotional Learning" Jan. 26, 2005)

The Orwellian cast of the pathologies named shows how far Gramsci's long march has led us.

A corresponding and diabolically crafted idea is political correctness. The strong suggestion here is that in order for one not to be thought of as racist or fascist, then one must not only be nonjudgmental but must also embrace the ‘new' moral absolutes: diversity, choice, sensitivity, sexual orientation, and tolerance. Political correctness is a Machiavellian psychological ‘command and control' device. Its purpose is the imposition of uniformity in thought, speech, and behavior.

Critical theory is yet another psychological ‘command and control' device. As stated by Daniel J. Flynn,

"Critical Theory, as its name implies, criticizes. What deconstruction does to literature, Critical Theory does to societies." (Intellectual Morons, p 15-16)

Critical Theory is an ongoing and brutal assault via vicious criticism relentlessly leveled against Christians, Christmas, the Boy Scouts, Ten Commandments, our military, and all other aspects of traditional American culture and society.

Both political correctness and Critical Theory are in essence, psychological bullying. They are the psycho-political battering rams by which Frankfurt School disciples such as the ACLU are forcing Americans to submit to and to obey the will and the way of the Left. These devious devices are but psychological versions of Georg Lukacs and Laventi Beria's ‘cultural terrorism' tactics. In the words of Beria,

"Obedience is the result of force...Force is the antithesis of humanizing actions. It is so synonymous in the human mind with savageness, lawlessness, brutality, and barbarism, that it is only necessary to display an inhuman attitude toward people to be granted by those people the possessions of force." (The Russian Manual on Psychopolitics: Obedience, by Laventi Beria, head of Soviet Secret Police and Stalin's right-hand man)

Double-thinking ‘fence-sitters', otherwise known as moderates, centrists, and RINOs bear the imprint of these psychological ‘obedience' techniques. These people-in some cases literally afraid of incurring the wrath of name-calling obedience trainers--- have opted to straddle the fence lest they be found guilty of possessing an opinion, one way or another. At the merest hint of displeasure from the obedience-trainers, up goes the yellow flag of surrender upon which it is boldly written:

"I believe in nothing and am tolerant of everything!"

Cultural Determinism

The linchpin of Cultural Marxism is cultural determinism, the parent of identity politics and group solidarity. In its turn, cultural determinism was birthed by the Darwinian idea that man is but a soulless animal and therefore his identity is determined by for example, his skin color or his sexual and/or erotic preferences. This proposition rejects the concepts of the human spirit, individuality, free will, and morally informed conscience (paired with personal accountability and responsibility) because it emphatically denies the existence of the God of the Bible.

Consequently, and by extension, it also rejects the first principles of our liberty enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. These are our "unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Cultural Marxism must reject these because these principles of liberty "are endowed by our Creator," who made man in His image.

Cultural determinism, states David Horowitz, is

"identity politics-the politics of radical feminism, queer revolution, and Afro-centrism-which is the basis of academic multiculturalism...a form of intellectual fascism and, insofar as it has any politics, of political fascism as well." (Mussolini and Neo-Fascist Tribalism: Up from Multiculturalism, by David Horowitz, Jan. 1998)

It is said that courage is the first of the virtues because without it fear will paralyze man, thus keeping him from acting upon his moral convictions and speaking truth. Thus bringing about a general state of paralyzing fear, apathy, and submission-the chains of tyranny-is the purpose behind psychopolitical cultural terrorism, for the communist Left's revolutionary agenda must, at all costs, be clothed in darkness.

The antidote is courage and the light of truth. If we are to win this cultural war and reclaim and rebuild America so our children and their children's children can live in a ‘Shining City on the Hill' where liberty, families, opportunity, free markets, and decency flourish, we must muster the courage to fearlessly expose the communist Left's revolutionary agenda to the Light of Truth. Truth and the courage to speak it will set us free.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/02/cultural_marxism.html

He Hates Us

2008-11-01T12:51:00.001-07:00

He Really Hates Us.

No, seriously. What does Barry love about America? (We'll skip Michelle, she really really hates us.)

How can a man such as this be president? In the entire, albeit short, history of America we've never had a president who so dismisses the principles the country was founded on, and frankly, as I've said for months, I'm not convinced he likes white folks. When has he ever said anything good about white people although he's certainly found opportunity to demean us. Typical White People like his left-leaning grandma, even she couldn't pass muster. Her big sin? Fearing for her safety when threatened by a man who incidentally was black. (Barry could be in therapy longer than Woody Allen and all his issues would never be solved.)

Can you imagine Barry willingly DYING for America? I can't. How could we elect a man who couldn't do that? Who wouldn't take a bullet for us?

John McCain did. He was tortured for over 5 years. Who really has steel in his spine?

What bad thing ever happened to Barry in his cushy protected, drug taking life? This has been a picnic for him. And I don't believe for one second he was demeaned for being a mulatto boy. Poles have jokes told about them, Jews, Italians, Irish, blondes. Everyone hears things said that may not be so pleasant. Why if he heard anything at all was it so soul-crushing? Because if it wasn't he couldn't use it against America and Americans.

No, Barry went on his merry way learning at his mama's knee that America was a bad bad place and the seeds of this hatred were planted in Stanley Ann's womb. Neither he nor Michelle know anything about us. They are aliens in our midst. They think the Constitution is flawed, that we're flawed and only someone as unflawed as they can put America on the path they envision.

What Barack Hussein Obama exhibits is a kind of pathology. He needs to take something good and turn it into something bad. He needs to find fault. And you can't find one person in his life who didn't and doesn't hold these same pathologies.

We right thinking Americans don't want to change paths, we think America was right from the beginning. America is a shining example of what's possible when people are free. America has always been a blessing and curses will accrue to those who believe it's a curse.

Fright Night

2008-10-31T17:20:00.001-07:00

You should be scared tonight. We are 4 days away from the possibility of having an unrepentent socialist in the White House. This will change our country, our laws, our lives, the lives of future Americans. It will be hard if not impossible to unscramble the egg. Don't think it's not a big deal if he gets in, we can get him out in 4 years. Maybe we can but how many Supreme Court Justices will be appointted in those 4 years? How many lesser court judges? How many laws and policies will be pushed through if there is a super-majority? How many giveaway policies will be created? How many have been instituted in the past that we're not still dealing with today?

Vote. Convince your friends and neighbors that Barry Obama is a dangerous man. How? By telling them the truth. This is not the X-Files but the truth is out there. It's here, that's why I started this blog so all the important articles and vids I saw would be in one place for you.

What do I think the outcome will be? I think we've been lied to. Has Barry told the truth about anything? No. Is the MSM on his side? Yes. Are the pollsters on his side? Yes. Are the polls skewed? Yes.

Why do you think Barry went back to PA? Why is Gov. Rendell sweating bullets?

Because he's not walking away with this thing. It's nowhere near as close as they've said this past week. For all we really know, McCain may be ahead. There was an insider saying the pollsters are getting an 80% refusal rate when they call to find out who the resident is voting for.
People don't want to say they're not voting for Barry. Why invited the hassle and the insults? They've seen what's happened to Joe the Plumber. It's been said loud and clear if you don't vote for Barry you're a racist. Who wants to hear that when the reason we don't want him is that he's an inexperienced socialist jerk who has done one thing in his adult life, well two, he's made friends with every low-life terrorist he came across and he's positioned himself for just this moment. He has only ever, grand narcissist that he is, wanted to be POTUS.

Deny that to him. Vote. Get everyone you know to vote. Make it a party. Celebrate it afterwards knowing you did your duty as an American citizen and patriot. Send that carpetbagger packing.

Pray if you're that kind of person. Ask God to inspire Americans to do what good Americans have always done--protect this country because it's been a blessing and a gift to all of us. America needs us now.

Hey, Where Are My Mantyhose?

2008-10-30T15:24:00.000-07:00

Obama: Not Man Enough to Be President

Without ensuring safety for America and its allies, nothing else a president does matters at all. And on this subject, Obama has promised us that his regime will be even more disastrous than Clinton's was. - Orson Scott Card

What an enormous number of sheaths!
Isn't the kernel soon coming to light?
I'm blessed if it is! To the innermost centre,
It's nothing but sheaths - each smaller and smaller -
Nature is witty!
- Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, Act V, Sc.5

When you peel off all his layers of signifying and symbolizing, of blathering and bamboozling, Obama is -- it must be said -- simply lacking in the elemental qualities of manliness necessary for the Chief Executive of the United States of America. Obama is like the onion in Peer Gynt. Once you strip off the layers there's nothing in the center.

There are a great many layers about helping people, about caring, about giving and devotion to the Obama onion. Those pungent peels work well with the poor, the grasping, the gullible, the craven, and the rich-so-rich that nothing dents their days or melts the ice in their cocktails. But the layers are just the common malarky of the con-man who hopes that by stimulating your greed for grub or good feelings now he'll be able to hoover your bank account later. It's an old con and for a lot of people it always works. That's why con-men are always with us; not because they are so smart, but because so many are so stupid. Con-artists (and Obama is a brilliant flim-flam man) not only know this, they depend upon it.

Obama, when we look at the three-card monte money game of his campaign, is very much a man with hand full of gimme and a mouth full of much obliged. Just this morning, as he has for so many mornings, he wrote to me asking for five bucks. This after he squandered so many millions just last night with his noninfomercial for flaming narcissists of all five genders. What can I say except the man and his minions can't handle money.

None of this is probative however. What is essential to me when I think about who deserves my vote is whether or not the person for whom I'm voting has the right stuff to lead this country. Right up at the top of that list for me is manliness. And by that I do not mean a quality exclusive to men. Rather I mean the old-fashioned values of courage and the ability to do the right thing, the strong thing, under pressure - regardless of the consequences. Those who do not know what I mean by "manliness" by now will never know it, but by way of example I'll cite the most recent President to possess it, George Bush.

The manliness of Bush is, regardless of the perverted souls who look upon him as the source of evil in the world, really not open to question. Some would say that it is, perhaps, too much with him, that he should have been a more subtle player in the fields of power politics. That's for history to decide in the long term. The short history is that nobody has attacked America on its home soil since September 11. This is not an accident. This is because there was, in the minds and hearts of our many enemies, no doubt as to what might happen to them and their countries if such an attack had come. No doubt. None. Niente. Nada. Zero. Zip. The only question was whether the Bush response would be in the form of an airborne division or a small, man-made sun being brought to life about 5,000 feet above their capitol city. This is not a bad question for our enemies to have in mind. The question itself keeps the terrible answer at bay.

In an essay in early September I asked: Does Obama Possess Courage?

What has Obama done that demonstrates real, classical courage? I would really like to know.
To my mind, courage is a far more necessary element for a leader of the United States to possess than any other. It even trumps experience. I've heard a lot from Obama and his supporters about it taking "courage to vote for Obama." But really all it takes to do that is to get to a polling place in November, go into a voting booth, and pull a lever, push a button, or mark a paper. It takes no courage at all.

Since then there has been nothing I've observed that makes me think Obama has a shred of personal courage. Perhaps he does, but if so he has been keeping a very low profile in courage. He's never been tested for this -- even as his opponent has met and prevailed over these tests time and again.

Indeed, given the numerous examples in word and deed from Obama and his campaign, there is every reason to begin to believe that the candidate not only lacks personal courage, but is -- in fact -- a coward; the kind of craven gangster who is used to getting others to do his dirty work while he preens before his cult of worshipers and gets fitted for another real sharp suit. Indeed, there's a whiff of something ineffably feminine about Obama. He is, at bottom, the very model of a modern metrosexual. This, of course, accounts for his appeal in the cities and among the youth. It does not reassure. When it comes to the Republic, I'd prefer Caesar over Caligula.

A brief glance around the world will tell those who are not sleeping or in a media-induced stupor that the globe is not only a dangerous place, but is getting more dangerous by the day. The overall temperature of the human race is going up, and hotter is not better. Last month, before they locked Biden in that campaign attic reserved for crazy relations and mouth-shooting wives, the VP to be told everyone that, yes, they're going to test Obama. But he said we shouldn't worry because Obama has "steel in his spine."

Really? Maybe when it comes to running internet porn site standards on his credit-card scams. Perhaps when it comes to getting his minions to try and ruin a plumber in the mid-west. Maybe when it comes to electrifying the weakest of our youth; a youth fattened on a life of peace and circuses.

But a wider world awaits the next President; a world that can kill 3,000 Americans at their place of work in a single morning. A world that wants to see, more than anything, the destruction of American hegemony so that their dreams of conquest can go forward unabated.

After thousands of years of crawling up from the swamp of totalitarianism we can see, at last, in the distance a world where this ancient nightmare is removed from the world. But we cannot get there if America does not stand.

Again. The world cannot rid itself of the terror of totalitarianism if America does not stand.

For that to happen we need to have a leader -- man or woman -- who possesses real, demonstrated courage. For that to become true we need to have a leader who has -- man or woman -- real manliness.

Obama is intelligent, charming, good-looking, stylish, well-educated and slick. He's everything that other people who value such surfaces look for... not in a leader, but in an icon. And that's what they're buying by buying Obama, an icon. A glowing plastic post-modern Jesus for the dashboard of their Prius. They know, as we all know by now, that he can talk the talk. He just can't walk the walk. He's soft talk and no stick.

I keep coming back to the one indisputable fact first spoken in Sarah Palin's acceptance speech: "There is only one man in this election who has ever really fought for you ... in places where winning means survival and defeat means death."

One of those places where defeat means death is in the Oval Office on a very bad day.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying Obama is not a man. He's just not man enough for the job.

Gerard Vanderleun

http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/american_studies/obama_not_man_e.php

PUMAs

2008-10-28T07:33:00.000-07:00

PUMA--Party Unity My A**.

I would never have imagined how determined these women are to work for John McCain now that Hillary is out of the race. They are impassioned and determined. They, unlike Obama supporters, love America and want the best for it. They think (and probably quite correctly) that McCain as POTUS would work with Hillary. They see his health care plan as reasonable. Conservatives aren't so thrilled with everything McCain but Country First indeed.

Thank you, PUMAs for all you're doing for America. You are true patriots.

It's hard to imagine Americans voting for the destruction of America as we know it. Obamabots see everything bad in America and we see it as a force for good in the world. We embrace the Constitution while Barry wants to change it.

How does that work out if Barry's elected President? The oath of office calls for the president to support and defend the Constitution and he's clearly stated he wants to change the Constitution.
What a loathsome individual he is.

If McCain wins, the commies who support Barry aren't going away. We still have a fight on our hands to defend America from these creeps.

Face of Economic Justice

Avoid the Rush, Go Now!

2008-10-25T17:39:00.000-07:00

How To Brainwash a Nation

2008-10-25T12:42:00.000-07:00

Dogs Greet Soldier Returning From Iraq

2008-10-24T11:00:00.000-07:00

Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok Shneersohn (1880-1950)

2008-10-23T16:29:00.000-07:00

Rabbi Shneersohn was the 6th Rebbe of Chabad Lubavitch and I was told this story by my own rabbi. In times of difficulty I ponder the wisdom and bravery of this rabbi. There is another way to live. In the coming days and months and years, it will undoubtedly be important for us to remember this incident and see if we can't apply it to our own lives.

First a little background and then the incident.

Dealing with the Communist Authorities

Upon his father’s death on Nissan 2, 5680 (1920), Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn was requested by the entire Chabad world to accept the leadership of the movement and become the next Lubavitcher Rebbe.

By that time conditions had greatly changed. As a result of the war and the October Revolution, Russia was in a state of constant internal strife. As usual, the Jews suffered most.

In those days Rabbi Schneersohn found himself practically alone, facing a task that required superhuman effort - the rehabilitation of Jewish communal and religious life in Russia.

He fought his struggle on two fronts, the material and the religious. Russian Jews had been reduced to the most abject poverty and suffering, and the future of traditional Judaism was gravely threatened by the policy of the G-dless Yevsektzia. (The Jewish branch of the Soviet Communist Party, responsible for anti-Jewish activities. It was subsequently dissolved by the Soviet Government.)

During his single-handed fight for the preservation of traditional Judaism in Russia against overwhelming odds, Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn realized that a new country would have to supersede Russia as a great Torah center. He therefore founded a Lubavitch Talmudic seminary (Yeshivah) in Warsaw, in the year 5681 (1921), and helped many students and staff of his Russian seminary to make their way to Poland and continue their work there. The Lubavitch Yeshivah in Poland, like its counterpart in Russia, rapidly developed into a whole system of seminaries, and hundreds of students were enrolled in its many branches.

In the meantime, Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn fearlessly conducted his work in Russia, establishing and maintaining seminaries, Torah schools and other religious institutions.

At that time Rabbi Schneersohn had his headquarters in Rostov on the River Don, but because of libelous accusations it was necessary to move from there. He took up residence in Leningrad (St Petersburg) from where he relentlessly continued to direct his activities. He organized a special committee to help Jewish artisans and workers who wished to observe the Sabbath, and he sent teachers, preachers and other representatives to the most remote Jewish communities in Russia to strengthen their religious life.

Realizing the necessity of organizing Chabad communities outside Russia, the Lubavitcher Rebbe formed the Agudas Chassidei Chabad of the United States of America and Canada, and maintained regular contact with his followers in the New World.

In 5687 (1927) the Rebbe founded the Lubavitch seminary in Uzbekistan, a remote province of Russia.

His stand against those who wanted to undermine the Jewish religion became even more perilous. The Yevsektzia was determined to stop him, and even resorted to intimidation and mental torture.

“One morning, when the Lubavitcher Rebbe was observing yahrzeit for his father, three members of the Yevsektzia rushed into his synagogue, guns in hand, to arrest him. Calmly, the Lubavitcher Rebbe finished his prayers and followed them.

Facing a council of armed and determined men, the Lubavitcher Rebbe again reaffirmed that he would not give up his religious activities, whatever threats might be made. When one of the agents pointed a gun at him, saying: “This little toy has made many a man change his mind”, the Lubavitcher Rebbe calmly replied: “That little toy can intimidate only the kind of man who has many gods-passions, and but one world-this world. Because I have only one G-d and two worlds, I am not impressed by your little toy.”

http://www.askmoses.com/en/article/556,2110169/Rabbi-Yosef-Yitzchok-Shneersohn-1880-1950-the-6th-Rebbe-of-Chabad-Lubavitch-A-Brief-Biography.html#articlepage

What Did Biden Mean?

2008-10-22T05:04:00.000-07:00

By now everyone knows that Joe Biden was addressing donors in Seattle and went off the rails about some "generated" international crisis. He said Americans wouldn't like Barry's response, that we wouldn't think he was right but stick with them.

All candidates are brought somewhat into the fold regarding the international situation--I hope they're smart enough not to give Biden details--so we might assume he heard something that stirred him to make these comments. There is a grain of truth or more in his statement over the weekend.

If we wanted to search for the obvious crisis, we don't have to look far. Israel and Iran. Iran loves to test countries. They did it to England and the Brits failed when their captured military personnel were more interested in their goody bags than resisting being taken hostage. To think Iran would test Barry, why not? Israel is always their first stated target to be wiped off the map, so imaging Iran would start there doesn't require hallucinogenic drugs.

Barry's a pacifist and a wussie so if Iran attacks Israel, isn't that really all to the good for Barry? He will be in office and no longer need the Jewish voters who he has lied to throughout the campaign. His despicable advisor Samantha Power has already suggested using the US military to help protect the Palestinians from the Israelis. He will do nothing to help Israel. We will all shriek. Barry won't care as it's all part of the longterm plan. That's when we'll be harangued to stick with him and use our influence in our communities to further convince the unbelievers of The One's astute handling of the Jewish Problem.

And this is going to happen in the first six months. What happens next? Big things, very bad things as the regime positions themselves to remain in power. They have to cut the Republicans and especially the conservatives off at the knees. The Fairness Doctrine will be enacted as quickly as possible to shut down talk radio. Then they will go for the blogosphere.

We will all be moaning "This is not the America we knew." Fools! It's not supposed to be the America we knew and loved, it's the America that has been in the imagination of Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, George Soros and Karl Marx. The United Socialist States of America.

Truth Matters

2008-10-21T17:53:00.000-07:00

Gettin' In Their Faces

2008-10-20T05:38:00.000-07:00

That's what Barry wanted so that's what we have.

This is like living through a Twilight Zone episode.

Well. Are You?

2008-10-18T10:05:00.001-07:00

A chicken in every pot, a Dacha for everyone!

2008-10-17T14:04:00.000-07:00

I think George Bush should resign after Barry wins on November 4. I mean, it's the gentlemanly thing to do. When you see how great America can be, you just want that to start immediately not in January! Michelle has been staying at the Waldorf Astoria and while there isn't a chicken in the pot there (LOL!), she has been enjoying lobster and Iranian caviar. Doesn't that sound delish? This is only a taste ;-) of what awaits all of us. Michel Cluizel and Angus Thirwell chocolates 24/7!

Everyone's been wondering where Michelle's been keeping herself. Some really mean people (Rethuglicans) have suggested she's in a padded room with her mouth duct-taped shut. No, that's not true. She's been out dacha hunting! What's a dacha? It's a weekend home. On good authority, I was fortunate enough to be sent a photo of the house in Hawaii they're going to purchase. (Or that dear George Soros is going to buy and put in Barry's name!) Hawaii is home for Barry, after all, a good place to relax and of course, the beach is right there for his adorable little daughters.

Here it is!

Because everyone gets a piece of the pie in the New America, here's the dacha my name is down for.

Why oh why do we have to wait for the election?! We know how this is going to turn out. Barry is going to win. I just don't see the point in going through the motions when Acorn has assured that all the swing states belong to us.

Wealth Spread

2008-10-17T12:13:00.001-07:00

You know that product called I can't believe it's not WealthSpread?
Yes...
When I was at the market the other day I got the store brand of I can't believe it's not WealthSpread.
And...
I can't believe the product that is called I can't believe it's not WealthSpread is not in fact WealthSpread and what I think is that both the product that's I can't believe it's not WealthSpread and the product I can't believe is not I can't believe is not WealthSpread is WealthSpread.
Excuse me?
There may be more WealthSpread around than we think.

So It Begins

2008-10-17T11:43:00.001-07:00

You think Americans are going to sit by and take it? Think again.

Joe The Plumber

2008-10-16T08:31:00.001-07:00

before the debate

after the debate

Who is John Galt?

2008-10-16T07:56:00.000-07:00

So a little Russian Jewish girl, Alisa Rosenbaum, came to America in a pretty bad mood and stayed that way for the rest of her life. Ayn Rand renamed herself to cast off every unwelcome aspect of her heritage, and came up with something called Objectivism which I couldn't begin to explain but I did read most of her books. The best is We The Living, the others took her years to write and in a way it shows. Like Sisyphus, she struggled to push these rocks up the hill. These are heavy, ponderous tomes full of emotionally distant characters. But they are not supposed to be people they are only there to convey Rand's philosophy.

My belief is that if she had spent half as much time studying Judaism, she would have found all the answers there already. But she had this supersize-me ego, which she thought was good. Well, isn't that expected? She's got an enormous ego, almost as big as Barry's and what's she going to pontificate...that having a huge ego is bad? Nah. So Judaism bad, Objectivism great.

Rand used people to achieve her own ends; she was self-centered, cold, distant just like her creation Dagny Taggart. And people love her. That's fine. I think she's wrong on most things, they think I'm wrong.

What she was definitely not wrong about was Communism. She hated it. She was against any system that dismissed the individual (don't say individual spirit, that's too much like faith and religion). Rand could not have been more for capitalism, believing it the perfect system.

So we will see a resurgence of interest in Ayn Rand from here on in. And if our prayers go unanswered and Barry does win this thing, people will be asking "Who is John Galt?"

Will we be "going John Galt"? And I think yes, unequivocably we will see that.

What does that mean? In Atlas Shrugged, John Galt, in protest against the collectivist rule, withdraws his talents from the mainstream. He will no longer contribute to the socialistic business and government that is in power and encourages others in positions of power to join him. The point is to make collectivism grind to a halt.

If you think we will be victims in a Obama-Pelosi-Reid regime, going John Galt may be one of the few solutions open to us.

Let me say two things this morning. I am Joe the Plumber. We are all Joe the Plumber.
And oddly, surprisingly, I will say something I never imagined I would say. Thank you, Ayn Rand.

Frank Marshall Davis, admitted Sex Rebel

2008-10-14T05:16:00.000-07:00

Obama's Mentor. Yup

Although identified only as Frank in Mr Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father, it has now been established that he was Frank Marshall Davis, a radical activist and journalist who had been suspected of being a member of the Communist Party in the 1950s.

Obama's true colours: Making of the man who would be US president

Mr Davis moved to Honolulu from Chicago in 1948 with his second wife Helen Canfield, a white socialite, at the suggestion of his friend the actor Paul Robeson, who advised them that there would be more tolerance of a mixed race couple in Hawaii than on the American mainland.

A bohemian libertine who drank heavily and loved jazz, he became friends with Stanley Dunham, Mr Obama’s maternal grandfather in the 1960s. Mr Davis died in 1987 at the age of 81, five years before Mr Dunham.

“He knew Stan real well,” said Dawna Weatherly-Williams, a close friend of Mr Davis “They’d play Scrabble and drink and crack jokes and crack jokes and argue. Frank always won and he was always very braggadocio about it too. It was all jocular. They didn’t get polluted drunk. And Frank never really did drugs, though he and Stan would smoke pot together.”

While his mother was in Indonesia during part of his teenage years, Mr Obama lived with his white grandparents. Mrs Weatherly-Williams said that the poet was first introduced to the future Democratic presidential candidate in 1970 at the age of 10.

“Stan had been promising to bring Barry by because we all had that in common - Frank’s kids were half-white, Stan’s grandson was half-black and my son was half-black. We all had that in common and we all really enjoyed it. We got a real kick out of reality.”

Maya Soetoro-Ng, Obama's half-sister, told the Associated Press recently that her grandfather had seen Mr Davis was “a point of connection, a bridge if you will, to the larger African-American experience for my brother".

In his memoir, Mr Obama recounts how he visited Mr Davis on several occasions, apparently at junctures when he was grappling with racial issues, to seek his counsel. At one point in 1979 Mr Davis described university as “an advanced degree in compromise” that was designed to keep blacks in their place.

Mr Obama quoted him as saying: “Leaving your race at the door. Leaving your people behind. Understand something, boy. You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going there to get trained.”

He added that “they’ll tank on your chain and let you know that you may be a well-trained, well-paid nigger, but you’re a nigger just the same.”

It has also been established that Mr Davis, who divorced in 1970, was the author of a hard-core pornographic autobiography published in San Diego in 1968 by Greenleaf Classics under the pseudonym Bob Greene.

In a surviving portion of an autobiographical manuscript, Mr Davis confirms that he was the author of Sex Rebel: Black after a reader had noticed the “similarities in style and phraseology” between the pornographic work and his poetry.

“I could not then truthfully deny that this book, which came out in 1968 as a Greenleaf Classic, was mine.” In the introduction to Sex Rebel, Mr Davis (writing as Greene) explains that although he has “changed names and identities…all incidents I have described have been taken from actual experiences”.

He stated that “under certain circumstances I am bisexual” and that he was “ a voyeur and an exhibitionist” who was “occasionally mildly interested in sado-masochism”, adding: “I have often wished I had two penises to enjoy simultaneously the double – but different – sensations of oral and genital copulation.”

The book, which closely tracks Mr Davis’s life in Chicago and Hawaii and the fact that his first wife was black and his second white, describes in lurid detail a series of shockingly sordid sexual encounters, often involving group sex.

One chapter concerns the seduction by Mr Davis and his first wife of a 13-year-old girl called Anne. Mr Davis wrote that it was the girl who had suggested he had sex with her. “I’m not one to go in for Lolitas. Usually I’d rather not bed a babe under 20.

“But there are exceptions. I didn’t want to disappoint the trusting child. At her still-impressionistic age, a rejection might be traumatic, could even cripple her sexually for life.”

He then described how he and his wife would have sex with the girl. “Anne came up many times the next several weeks, her aunt thinking she was in good hands. Actually she was.

“She obtained a course in practical sex from experienced and considerate practitioners rather than from ignorant insensitive neophytes….I think we did her a favour, although the pleasure was mutual.”

On other occasions, Mr Davis would cruise in Hawaii parks looking for couples or female tourists to have sex with. He derived sexual gratification from bondage, simulated rape and being flogged and urinated on.

He boasted that “the number of white babes interested in at least one meeting with a Negro male has been far more than I can handle” and wished “America were as civilised as, say, Scandinavia”. He concluded: “I regret none of my experiences or unusual appetites; for me they are normal.”

According to Mrs Weatherly-Williams, Mr Davis lost touch with Mr Dunham some time in the 1980s. John Edgar Tidwell, who wrote the introduction to Davis's memoir and edited a collection of his work, said that there was no mention of Mr Dunham or Mr Obama in any of Mr Davis’s papers.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/uselection2008/barackobama/2601914/Frank-Marshall-Davis-alleged-Communist-was-early-influence-on-Barack-Obama.html

Surprise! Barry Tied to Kenyan Marxists!

2008-10-13T07:51:00.000-07:00

Sunday, October 12, 2008

HYMAN: Obama's Kenya ghosts

Mark Hyman

COMMENTARY:

About 50 parishioners were locked into the Assemblies of God church before it was set ablaze. They were mostly women and children. Those who tried to flee were hacked to death by machete-wielding members of a mob numbering 2,000.

The 2008 New Year Day atrocity in the Kenyan village Eldoret, about 185 miles northwest of Nairobi, had all the markings of the Rwanda genocide of a decade earlier.

By mid-February 2008, more than 1,500 Kenyans were killed. Many were slain by machete-armed attackers. More than 500,000 were displaced by the religious strife. Villages lay in ruin. Many of the atrocities were perpetrated by Muslims against Christians.

The violence was led by supporters of Raila Odinga, the opposition leader who lost the Dec. 27, 2007, presidential election by more than 230,000 votes. Odinga supporters began the genocide hours after the final election results were announced Dec. 30. Mr. Odinga was a member of Parliament representing an area in western Kenya, heavily populated by the Luo tribe, and the birthplace of Barack Obama's father.

Mr. Odinga had the backing of Kenya's Muslim community heading into the election. For months he denied any ties to Muslim leaders, but fell silent when Sheik Abdullahi Abdi, chairman of the National Muslim Leaders Forum, appeared on Kenya television displaying a memorandum of understanding signed on Aug. 29, 2007, by Mr. Odinga and the Muslim leader. Mr. Odinga then denied his denials.

The details of the MOU were shocking. In return for Muslim backing, Mr. Odinga promised to impose a number of measures favored by Muslims if he were elected president. Among these were recognition of "Islam as the only true religion," Islamic leaders would have an "oversight role to monitor activities of ALL other religions [emphasis in original]," installation of Shariah courts in every jurisdiction, a ban on Christian preaching, replacement of the police commissioner who "allowed himself to be used by heathens and Zionists," adoption of a women's dress code, and bans on alcohol and pork.

This was not Mr. Odinga's first brush with notoriety. Like his father, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, the main opposition leader in the 1960s and 1970s, Raila Odinga is a Marxist He graduated from East Germany's Magdeburg University in 1970 on a scholarship provided by the East German government. He named his oldest son after Fidel Castro.

Raila Odinga was implicated in the bloody coup attempt in 1982 against then-President Daniel Arap Moi, a close ally of the United States. Kenya has been one of the most stable democracies in Africa since the 1960s. The ethnic cleansing earlier this year was the worst violence in Kenya since that 1982 coup attempt.

Mr. Odinga spent eight years in prison. At the time, he denied guilt but later detailed he was a coup leader in his 2006 biography. Statue of limitations precluded further prosecution when the biography appeared.

Initially, Mr. Odinga was not the favored opposition candidate to stand in the 2007 election against President Mwai Kibaki, who was seeking his second term. However, he received a tremendous boost when Sen. Barack Obama arrived in Kenya in August 2006 to campaign on his behalf. Mr. Obama denies that supporting Mr. Odinga was the intention of his trip, but his actions and local media reports tell otherwise.

Mr. Odinga and Mr. Obama were nearly inseparable throughout Mr. Obama's six-day stay. The two traveled together throughout Kenya and Mr. Obama spoke on behalf of Mr. Odinga at numerous rallies. In contrast, Mr. Obama had only criticism for Kibaki. He lashed out against the Kenyan government shortly after meeting with the president on Aug. 25. "The [Kenyan] people have to suffer over corruption perpetrated by government officials," Mr. Obama announced.

"Kenyans are now yearning for change," he declared. The intent of Mr. Obama's remarks and actions was transparent to Kenyans - he was firmly behind Mr. Odinga.

Mr. Odinga and Mr. Obama had met several times before the 2006 trip. Reports indicate Mr. Odinga visited Mr. Obama during trips to the U.S. in 2004, 2005 and 2006. Mr. Obama sent his foreign policy adviser Mark Lippert to Kenya in early 2006 to coordinate his summer visit. Mr. Obama's August trip coincided with strategizing by Orange Democratic Movement leaders to defeat Mr. Kibaki in the upcoming elections. Mr. Odinga represented the ODM ticket in the presidential race.

Mr. Odinga and Mr. Obama's father were both from the Luo community, the second-largest tribe in Kenya, but their ties run much deeper. Mr. Odinga told a stunned BBC Radio interviewer the reason why he and Mr. Obama were staying in near daily telephone contact was because they were cousins. In a Jan. 8, 2008, interview, Mr. Odinga said Mr. Obama had called him twice the day before while campaigning in the New Hampshire primary before adding, "Barack Obama's father is my maternal uncle."

President Kibaki requested a meeting of all opposition leaders in early January in an effort to quell the violence. All agreed to attend except Mr. Odinga. A month later, Mr. Kibaki offered Mr. Odinga the role of prime minister, the de facto No. 2 in the Kenyan government, in return for an end to the attacks. Mr. Odinga was sworn in on April 17, 2008.

Mr. Obama's judgment is seriously called into question when he backs an official with troubling ties to Muslim extremists and whose supporters practice ethnic cleansing and genocide. It was Islamic extremists in Kenya who bombed the U.S. Embassy in 1998, killing more than 200 and injuring thousands. None of this has dissuaded Mr. Obama from maintaining disturbing loyalties.

Mark Hyman is an award-winning news commentator for Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc.

http://www.washtimes.com/news/2008/oct/12/obamas-kenya-ghosts/

Is It Possible To Be Surprised

2008-10-11T13:44:00.000-07:00

In October or any other month?

I Don't Feel Good About This

2008-10-09T17:28:00.000-07:00

Here's Farrakhan calling Barry the messiah. Farrakhan is Nation of Islam. Barry is supposed to be a Christian. Do these 2 belief systems go together AT ALL? In the Middle East they sure don't as muslims kill Christians constantly.

Who needs a president when you can have a messiah?

Noted "White Supremacist" Weighs In

2008-10-07T11:25:00.001-07:00

As Mark Steyn tongue in check referred to Mr. Sowell. I would vote for Thomas Sowell for President so fast I would set the landspeed record.

Do Facts Matter?

By Thomas Sowell

Abraham Lincoln said, "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time."

Unfortunately, the future of this country, as well as the fate of the Western world, depends on how many people can be fooled on election day, just a few weeks from now.

Right now, the polls indicate that a whole lot of the people are being fooled a whole lot of the time.

The current financial bailout crisis has propelled Barack Obama back into a substantial lead over John McCain-- which is astonishing in view of which man and which party has had the most to do with bringing on this crisis.

It raises the question: Do facts matter? Or is Obama's rhetoric and the media's spin enough to make facts irrelevant?

Fact Number One: It was liberal Democrats, led by Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, who for years-- including the present year-- denied that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taking big risks that could lead to a financial crisis.

It was Senator Dodd, Congressman Frank and other liberal Democrats who for years refused requests from the Bush administration to set up an agency to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

It was liberal Democrats, again led by Dodd and Frank, who for years pushed for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage loans, which are at the heart of today's financial crisis.

Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury, five years ago.

Yet, today, what are we hearing? That it was the Bush administration "right-wing ideology" of "de-regulation" that set the stage for the financial crisis. Do facts matter?

We also hear that it is the free market that is to blame. But the facts show that it was the government that pressured financial institutions in general to lend to subprime borrowers, with such things as the Community Reinvestment Act and, later, threats of legal action by then Attorney General Janet Reno if the feds did not like the statistics on who was getting loans and who wasn't.

Is that the free market? Or do facts not matter?

Then there is the question of being against the "greed" of CEOs and for "the people." Franklin Raines made $90 million while he was head of Fannie Mae and mismanaging that institution into crisis.

Who in Congress defended Franklin Raines? Liberal Democrats, including Maxine Waters and the Congressional Black Caucus, at least one of whom referred to the "lynching" of Raines, as if it was racist to hold him to the same standard as white CEOs.

Even after he was deposed as head of Fannie Mae, Franklin Raines was consulted this year by the Obama campaign for his advice on housing!

The Washington Post criticized the McCain campaign for calling Raines an adviser to Obama, even though that fact was reported in the Washington Post itself on July 16th. The technicality and the spin here is that Raines is not officially listed as an adviser. But someone who advises is an adviser, whether or not his name appears on a letterhead.

The tie between Barack Obama and Franklin Raines is not all one-way. Obama has been the second-largest recipient of Fannie Mae's financial contributions, right after Senator Christopher Dodd.

But ties between Obama and Raines? Not if you read the mainstream media.

Facts don't matter much politically if they are not reported.

The media alone are not alone in keeping the facts from the public. Republicans, for reasons unknown, don't seem to know what it is to counter-attack. They deserve to lose.

But the country does not deserve to be put in the hands of a glib and cocky know-it-all, who has accomplished absolutely nothing beyond the advancement of his own career with rhetoric, and who has for years allied himself with a succession of people who have openly expressed their hatred of America.

Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/10/do_facts_matter.html

Why Do Barry's Friends Have Sex Issues?

2008-10-06T17:40:00.000-07:00

Think Frank Davis Marshall for starters.

Remembering a Sixties Terrorist

By Donna Ron
FrontPageMagazine.com | 1/4/2006

I read occasionally of former Weatherman Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, both now not only accepted, despite their bombing campaign against

America

in the 1960s and 70s, but successful , establishment educators whose opinions on social issues are taken seriously. Every time I see Ayers’ name I shudder with fear and rage and realize that I will never be able to erase the mark he left on my life one evening 40 years ago.

It was at the Undergraduate Library at the University of Michigan on a Friday night in November 1965. I was a sophomore and was living in a sorority house -- Alpha Epsilon Phi. I was walking down the stairs to leave the library. Billy Ayers was standing on the first floor and started talking to me.

I thought he was cute. There seemed to be jovial kind of instant connection between us. As I am writing this now I think he must have noticed me before , boys were attracted to me in those days , and planned to try to pick me up. As we struck up a conversation, Ayers told me very quickly about his leftist activism as if he knew this would intrigue me. In fact, I had made attempts to join SDS and the anti Vietnam War Movement on campus during my freshman year but had been put off by what hustlers the young male “activists” were. They talked in lofty ideological abstractions, but they also used their political sophistication as a lure for young women who wanted to be on the right side of the great social issues of the day. I picked up on that cynicism early and so spent much of my freshman year at Michigan trying to figure out how to act. I was politically idealistic back then and believed in Tikkun Olam -- that we had to do something to make the world better.

My freshman year at Michigan I attended the Teach-Ins and the campus demonstrations against the Vietnam War and studied hard for my Chemistry exams once a month. At the same time, I decided to pledge a sorority, partially just to prove I could and partially because young women’s options for campus living arrangements were still quite limited in those years.

Despite the caution I’d learned about young ideologues on the make, I was charmed by Bill Ayers and by his savvy talk of politics and the children’s school he was involved with. He asked me to go to a party with him and I did. I have a vague memory of the house where the party was and the people there. I think he got quite drunk and I suppose I drank too. I remember walking home with him. He was very open about himself and told me he was one of 5 children and that he was from Chicago and that his father was rich.

I felt comfortable with Bill. Throughout my life I had always had a friendly buddy-kind of connection with certain boys and felt that I was developing such a connection with him.

I remember going back to his attic apartment -- he describes it in his book Fugitive Days. He had a roommate -- a black man who was 23 and married with children. There was a couch, a table, a stereo and a sink in the room. There were two beds – Ayers’ and his roommate’s on each side of the attic wall. I slept with him there.

I came there a few times afterward to talk and to listen to his LPs. I especially loved Glen Yarbough’s album Come Share My Life. I met Bill’s roommate who also worked at the children’s school. I also met Bill’s younger brother Rick. Bill was a year older than I and his brother was a year younger. He spent a lot of time at Bill’s apartment.

Bill Ayers’ apartment was around the corner and a half a block away from the sorority house. The more time I spent there, the more out of place I felt with my sisters. Sometimes I would stop by just to keep from having to go back to a place I had begun to think of as boring. I guess it was one of those evenings -- maybe on the way back from the library, maybe just to get out of the sorority house, I don’t remember exactly. What I do recall is that when I was getting ready to leave Ayers told me I couldn’t go until I slept with his roommate and his brother. At this point Bill and I had slept together just once. I was sexually inexperienced, having had only one serious boyfriend with whom I had recently broken up.

At first I thought Ayers was joking. I got up; and went to the door. He moved quickly to block me at the doorway. He locked the door and put the chain on it. I went to the couch and sat down and told him that I had no intention of having sex with his roommate and his brother or him. He said that I had no choice but to do as he said if I wanted to get out of there. He claimed that I wouldn’t sleep with his married roommate because he was black -- that I was a bigot. I had gone to school with black kids and had them as friends all my life. I couldn’t believe he was saying that to me

I felt trapped. I had to get out of the situation I was in and because he was so effective a guilt-tripper, I also felt I had to prove to him that I wasn’t a bigot. I got up from the couch and walked over to the black roommate’s bed and put myself on it and he fucked me. I went totally out of my body. I floated beside myself on the outside and above the bed looking at this black stranger fuck me angrily while I hated myself.

After that I had to go lie down on Bill Ayer’s bed for his brother to screw me. Rick Ayers was a decent person, unlike his brother, and couldn’t go through with it He started and stopped and let me go. I also thought I had to let Bill screw me but at that point he unbolted the door and I left.

I remember going back to the sorority house and talking to my best girlfriend and telling her what had happened. But there were no words yet to describe it. There was no term “date rape” yet in our political vocabulary. The notion of a psychological rape was not on the table.

I was a mess and felt it was my fault for letting it happen. I was ashamed. Back home at the end of the semester, I got my parents to send me to a psychiatrist. What had happened affected my ability to trust in a relationship with a man and I didn’t have a close relationship again for a long time.

I graduated in 1968 and went to Europe for the summer and came back right before the Democratic Convention. I worked for McCarthy in the Indiana primary. Wherever I went over the next few years, I carried with me the shame and guilt with me. I felt it had been my fault for not putting up more of a struggle against Ayers.

I started a PhD program in clinical psych at Yeshiva University in 1969. I was also working part time for a branch of the University of Chicago Institute for Social Research which was in the same building. I was there in a room with other employees one day sitting around a big table and coding questionnaires for a research study on Head Start when we heard a huge explosion. Soon after we discovered that it was a bomb that went off in the brown stone on 10^th street which killed three buddies of Bill Ayers, who was now one of the leaders of the WeatherUnderground, a terrorist cult. One of the victims was Diana Oughton, his girlfriend at the time. I had known her: a kind soul who had worked at the Fresh Air Camp for troubled kids before she got mixed up with ever so persuasive Bill and the other Weatherman terrorists. When I found out she had been blown up, I thought how like him to send his girlfriend to make the bomb rather than do it himself.

I eventually moved to Israel, married and had a family. But for a long time I felt as if I existed in a time warp in relation to events in the US that were a continuation of the 1960s. In 1994 I returned to the States for my 30-year Mumford High School reunion. I was in NYC visiting a friend and asked about the Weathermen. He told me that Billy and Bernardine Dohrn had come up from the underground and resumed middle class life—including the radical politics—without being prosecuted for their crimes.

Later I read about Ayers and his book Fugitive Days on the Internet. This was just after the terrorist attack on 9/11 and he was entirely unrepentant for having been a terrorist himself. “I would do it again,” he told the Times when he was asked about having set a bomb in the Pentagon. I also discovered that he was a Distinguished Professor of Education at University of Illinois Chicago campus. I think that freaked me out more than anything. That a man so cruel and conscienceless could attain such a position enraged me. I contacted him by email through the University’s website. He wrote back that he didn’t remember me.

I was in Detroit in November 2001 and bought his memoir at Book Beat at Lincoln Plaza in Oak Park. I looked to see if there was some hint in it of what had become the defining event of my life. Nothing. But why should he remember me if he has convinced the world to forget, or is it forgive -- that he set out to launch a bombing campaign to blow up America?

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Here we have it : Ayers/Obama connection 1997

2008-10-05T16:22:00.001-07:00

They keep saying when Ayers was acting like a terrorist (now he's just acting like someone intent on bringing down the country) Bambi was 8. When Barry was an adult, Ayers was just a guy in the neighborhood. They keep trying to convince us the Obamas didn't KNOW Ayers. Refute this, pal.

Michelle Obama Had Ayers Speak In 1997

From the University Of Chicago Chronicle:

Bill Ayers at a panel discussion at a conference on racism at the Field Museum on Saturday, September 16, 2000.

Close-up on juvenile justice

Nov. 6, 1997

Author, former offender among speakers

By Jennifer Vanasco
News Office
Children who kill are called “super predators,” “people with no conscience,” “feral pre-social beings” — and “adults.”
William Ayers, author of A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court (Beacon Press, 1997), says “We should call a child a child. A 13-year-old who picks up a gun isn’t suddenly an adult. We have to ask other questions: How did he get the gun? Where did it come from?”
Ayers, who spent a year observing the Cook County Temporary Juvenile Detention Center in Chicago, is one of four panelists who will speak on juvenile justice at 6 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 20, in the C-Shop. The panel, which marks the 100th anniversary of the juvenile justice system in the United States, is part of the Community Service Center’s monthly discussion series on issues affecting the city of Chicago. The event is free and open to the public.
Ayers will be joined by Sen. Barack Obama, Senior Lecturer in the Law School, who is working to combat legislation that would put more juvenile offenders into the adult system; Randolph Stone, Director of the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic; Alex Correa, a reformed juvenile offender who spent seven years in Cook County Temporary Detention Center; Frank Tobin, a former priest and teacher at the Detention Center who helped Correa; and Willy Baldwin, who grew up in public housing and is currently a teacher at the Detention Center.
The juvenile justice system was founded by Chicago reformer Jane Addams, who advocated the establishment of a separate court system for children which would act like a “kind and just parent” for children in crisis.
One hundred years later, the system is “overcrowded, under-funded, over-centralized and racist,” Ayers said.
Michelle Obama, Associate Dean of Student Services and Director of the University Community Service Center, hopes bringing issues like this to campus will open a dialogue between members of the University community and the broader community.
“Students and faculty explore these issues in the classroom, but it is an internal conversation,” Obama said. “We know that issues like juvenile justice impact the city of Chicago, this nation and — directly or indirectly — this campus. This panel gives students a chance to hear about the juvenile justice system not only on a theoretical level, but from the people who have experienced it.”

As the article notes, Michelle Obama was the Director of the University Of Chicago’s Community Service program at the time. So this was surely her doing.

Still, we all must be mistaken, since we have been repeatedly reassured that Mr. Ayers “was just a guy who lived in the Obamas’ neighborhood.”

http://sweetness-light.com/archive/michelle-obama-had-ayers-speak-in-1997

Throw Da Bums Out!

2008-10-05T12:23:00.000-07:00

And after they're gone, we will truly be better off.

Back To Barack's Birth Certificate

2008-10-04T10:21:00.000-07:00

Philip Berg's case against Barry is going forward even tho the DNC did what they could about preventing Berg having a look at that birth certificate. Some don't think there is anything to this but if that's true why would the DNC tie itself in knots? Why don't they just produce the blasted thing, a real one, one that can be verified?

Barry is such a phony, such an empty suit, there must be plenty of lies in his past. Let's just hope that Hugh Hewitt knew what he was saying on Friday when he assured his radio audience that there is a big October surprise coming for Barry.

http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/pennsylvania/paedce/2:2008cv04083/281573/13/

Mark Levin 9 pm--a must listen

2008-10-01T15:45:00.000-07:00

There will be a rebroadcast of Mark Levin's show at 9 pm est. It was the most stirring speech I have ever heard on the radio. It's no wonder Sean Hannity calls him "the great one". He tackles all the current issues of today--the economy, the election and how we face the danger of our country stolen from us.

Go to http://marklevinshow.com/
Scroll down to the audio rewind box. Click on October 1, 2008 and you will hear the pep talk.

Obamajungend

2008-10-01T05:26:00.000-07:00

"Barry is great! Gives us a piece of cake!"--paraphrasing Bill Cosby.

So some 9 year old created this song for her compatriots--I'm sure it was her idea--and Hollywood got behind it so it would be professionally done, tho looks down homey in a simple way, to sing the praises of The One.

There's something so reassuring about a group of people who think it's stupid to believe in God but have no problem worshiping Barry.

Of course the vid was taken down but NoblowBama was clever enough to download it and upload it for our continuing edification. Apparently even though we're stupid enough to believe in God we're not so stupid that we can't figure out how youtube works.

Sing it out!

Barry's Narcissistic Personality Disorder

2008-09-30T16:12:00.000-07:00

Does Obama have NPD?

Posted: September 30, 2008
1:00 am Eastern

By Ali Sina
© 2008

The 2008 presidential election in America is the most crucial election in this country's history, not because the issues are that critical but because of Sen. Barack Obama. The Democratic presidential candidate's language, posture and demeanor suggest that he may suffer from narcissistic personality disorder, or NPD. NPD is a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration and a lack of empathy. The following are some of the symptoms of NPD that can be seen in Sen. Obama:

He subtly misrepresents facts, opportunistically shifts positions, ignores data that conflict with his fantasy world, is overly confident and acts presidential despite commensurate merits and his modest life achievements, considers himself above the law, talks about himself in the third person, has a messianic vision of himself and his "mission," displays false modesty while often evincing haughtiness, sublimates aggression, holds grudges and behaves as an eternal adolescent. These are narcissistic traits as seen in Sen. Obama by Dr. Sam Vaknin. The author of "The Malignant Self Love," Vaknin states, "Barack Obama appears to be a narcissist."

NPD is the prime disorder experienced by all the madmen of history – from Hitler to Stalin, Mao, Kim, Pol Pot, Osama, Khomeini, Saddam and Idi Amin. These men wreaked havoc and killed millions. They looked normal. Few suspected their insanity until it was too late.

Obama shares something else with these infamous narcissists: a chaotic childhood. One determining factor in the development of NPD is childhood abuse, such as the neglecting of his or her emotional needs.

Pathological narcissism is not run-of-the-mill narcissism – someone with a hedonistic or self-centered sense of self – but rather someone with a very weak sense of self. A child who feels inferior, due to real or perceived social rejection, will try to compensate his feeling of inferiority by a subconscious neurotic mechanism, which the pioneering psychiatrist Alfred Adler coined "Superiority Complex."

Such a person compensates his devalued and injured self with puffery, pomposity and by projecting a false image of majesty and authority. He retreats into a bubble universe of fantasy, in which he is loved, respected and omnipotent. All children create such a fantasy world. Narcissists simply don't leave it. Since, due to their extreme feeling of inferiority, they don't fit in the real world, they refuge into this bubble world of fantasy and never get out. This world of pretence becomes to them as real as the real world, to the point that they can't tell the difference. When Obama acts presidential, he is simply acting out his childhood fantasy of omnipotence and grandeur. Emotionally, he is still a hurt little boy neglected and unloved, in the body and mind of a grown up man.

Narcissists have the emotional maturity of a child, or even an animal, but the intellect of a man. They feel like a beast, but think like a human. What makes narcissists dangerous is their lack of conscience, combined with their superior intelligence and their superb performance ability that fool many. They are predators that outsmart you.

To a narcissist, reality and fantasy are intertwined. He does not just pretend to be omnipotent, omniscient and superior to others; he actually believes it to be so. His delusions of grandiosity are real to him. That is why Obama acts presidential, despite his nugatory life achievements, lack of experience and complete ignorance in economic, political and military matters, as his flip-flopping shows. Obama is a cipher, but in his mind and those of his worshipers, such as Oprah Winfrey, he is "the One," the messiah who holds the key to all human sufferings.

Narcissism is not just a character flaw, but a mental disorder. Pathological narcissists are dangerous because they look normal and they are intelligent, when in reality they live in a bubble world of fantasy. It is this incoherence, this disjunction between reality and fantasy that makes them overly confident, self-assured and authoritative.

Narcissists disguise their feeling of inferiority by projecting unusual calmness, confidence, assertiveness, dominance and focus, and almost always possess superb thespian, communication and oratorical skills. These are traits that make one charismatic and attract a stampede of votaries like flies to sugar. Narcissists are needy people who crave attention. They develop these skills and act them out with regal exquisiteness to attract love, respect and admiration. They are performers, actors, slick chameleons.

Sadly, all the grace, exuberance, equanimity, charm, positive energy and magnetism that narcissists project, are pretence. They have the same function that the Styrofoam Greek columns at the Democratic National Convention had – to impress. The world of the narcissist is the magical world of smoke and mirrors. He is an illusionist.

NPD, and people's lack of understanding of it, has made it possible for many insane individuals to rise to the pinnacles of power. It is to this disorder that we owe most of the carnage of history.

When the Bible describes Satan, it gives a textbook definition of narcissism. Narcissists are charming, charismatic, intelligent, persuasive, but deceitful and ruthless. They can seduce multitudes.

When World War II ended and its horrors became known, the world said, "Never Again." "Never Again" can only work if we choose our leaders wisely. Once a madman is in power, it is already too late.

In an article entitled "Understanding Obama: The Making of a Fuhrer," I have shown many narcissistic traits that can be observed in Sen. Obama. Should the senator have NPD, all issues in this election would pale in comparison to what is at stake.

Imagine someone with the mindset of Hitler, Khomeini or Kim Jong-il in the White House, with Congress and Senate at his feet. Can you think of a more dreadful scenario?

In the case of Hitler, the only issue that really mattered was his sanity. Instead, the Germans were hoodwinked by his charisma, his oratorical skill and his vacuous promises of change. They paid a hefty price for their negligence. Shouldn't we learn from their mistakes?

It makes no sense that cops and pilots should be required to take psychiatric evaluation prior to being trusted with a gun or an aircraft, whereas there is no such requirement for those aspiring to run a country and be commander in chief, in charge of weapons of mass destruction.

It is time for the people of the world to demand that those who want to become head of any country submit to rigorous mental checkups. Millions of lives depend on the sanity of these leaders. If the physical health of presidential candidates is important, how much more important is their mental health?

There is no basis upon which to assume Obama would become a murderous tyrant, but there are a number of disturbing traits he shares with murderous world leaders that are worrisome. He can dispel our fears by submitting to a mental checkup.

In the spirit of fairness, I am asking all candidates to submit to this test. Psychiatric evaluation for leaders seeking positions of authority must become mandatory in all countries. Without it we are playing Russian roulette with war and our lives. Imagine how many millions of lives would have been spared only in the last century if aspiring leaders were screened and madmen barred from gaining power.

If you agree this is a vital issue, which transcends all other issues, whatever your political affiliation, I urge you to please sign this petition and invite others to do the same. If enough people become concerned about Sen. Obama's mental health, they may think twice before casting their votes for him.

Knowledge is Power. Power be with you.

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=76552

Barry's Teleprompter Speaks Up

2008-09-29T17:06:00.000-07:00

(Pelosi, Reid, Dodd and Frank should be run out of Washington on the rails, btw)

Idiots

2008-09-28T14:05:00.000-07:00

They'll register dead people, felons and Dick Tracy thru Acorn in order to make "change you can wince after" happen. Vote early and vote often has always been the motto of the Chicagoland political machine. Barack learned at the feet of the masters.

To quote the fabulous movie Farmer's Daughter--"Fish For Sale!"

Barry, as floral arrangement

2008-09-28T11:25:00.001-07:00

Winston Churchill described the fate of men and movements that momentarily stand upon the crest of a wave that is about to topple over. “He was a cut flower in a vase, fair to see, yet bound to die, and to die very soon if the water was not constantly renewed.”

Barry's BFF , Tony

2008-09-27T18:15:00.000-07:00

He sure knows how to pick 'em.

Rezko redux

The fed bed . . .

September 26, 2008

BY MICHAEL SNEED Sun-Times Columnist

Tipsville: Sneed hears rumbles that convicted influence peddler Tony Rezko, whose dealings have been linked to Barack Obama and Gov. Blagojevich, is singing to the feds.

• • To wit: "I'm told by a close friend of Rezko that he's cooperating with the feds," said a Sneed source. "I don't know whether he's talking about Gov. Blagojevich or Barack Obama or anyone else," the source said.

• • The shocker: Rezko, a Wilmette businessman who was a top adviser and fund-raiser for Blago, has been locked up at the Metropolitan Correctional Center awaiting an Oct. 28 sentencing -- one week before the presidential election.

• • Background: Convicted in June of wide-ranging fraud tied to kickbacks on state deals, Rezko's involvement in real estate deals with Gov. Blago's wife, Patti, are also under federal scrutiny.

• • The backshot: Rezko's name has continually surfaced as a friend of Obama, who benefitted from a real estate deal involving Rezko -- which involved Obama's Kenwood home. Thus far, no serious paint has been splashed on Obama by the Rezko brush. But rumors abound that the feds have their eyes fixed on Blago and his wife, who firmly maintain their innocence.

• • The buckshot: Being locked up at the MCC has been known to be a sure way to break a felon's silence. Tweet. Tweet.

Barry Needs To Grow Up

2008-09-27T13:22:00.000-07:00

It doesn't seem to be the American thing to do. Which proves, underlines, that what Barry has in line is very far from the democracy and freedom we enjoy now.These are Stalinist tactics.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Contact: Jessica Robinson, 573-751-0290

Gov. Blunt Statement on Obama Campaign’s Abusive Use of Missouri Law Enforcement

JEFFERSON CITY - Gov. Matt Blunt today issued the following statement on news reports that have exposed plans by U.S. Senator Barack Obama to use Missouri law enforcement to threaten and intimidate his critics.

“St. Louis County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch, St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce, Jefferson County Sheriff Glenn Boyer, and Obama and the leader of his Missouri campaign Senator Claire McCaskill have attached the stench of police state tactics to the Obama-Biden campaign.

“What Senator Obama and his helpers are doing is scandalous beyond words, the party that claims to be the party of Thomas Jefferson is abusing the justice system and offices of public trust to silence political criticism with threats of prosecution and criminal punishment.

“This abuse of the law for intimidation insults the most sacred principles and ideals of Jefferson. I can think of nothing more offensive to Jefferson’s thinking than using the power of the state to deprive Americans of their civil rights. The only conceivable purpose of Messrs. McCulloch, Obama and the others is to frighten people away from expressing themselves, to chill free and open debate, to suppress support and donations to conservative organizations targeted by this anti-civil rights, to strangle criticism of Mr. Obama, to suppress ads about his support of higher taxes, and to choke out criticism on television, radio, the Internet, blogs, e-mail and daily conversation about the election.

“Barack Obama needs to grow up. Leftist blogs and others in the press constantly say false things about me and my family. Usually, we ignore false and scurrilous accusations because the purveyors have no credibility. When necessary, we refute them. Enlisting Missouri law enforcement to intimidate people and kill free debate is reminiscent of the Sedition Acts - not a free society.”

This could be a first

2008-09-25T09:45:00.000-07:00

A president takes office and is immediately under indictment.

Obama grant being probed

$100,000 DEAL | State to charity: What happened to garden money, other cash?

September 25, 2008

BY CHRIS FUSCO AND DAVE MCKINNEY

Obama's $100K Grant for a Garden Never Built

Barry and the financial crisis

2008-09-25T05:06:00.000-07:00

Did you think he wasn't involved in something this big?

MSM as Water Carrier

2008-09-24T06:07:00.001-07:00

Media Campaigns Hard for Obama

By Tony Blankley

The mainstream media have gone over the line and are now straight-out propagandists for the Obama campaign.

While they have been liberal and blinkered in their worldview for decades, in 2007-08, for the first time, the major media consciously are covering for one candidate for president and consciously are knifing the other. This is no longer journalism; it is simply propaganda. (The American left-wing version of the Völkischer Beobachter cannot be far behind.)

And as a result, we are less than seven weeks away from possibly electing a president who has not been thoroughly or even halfway honestly presented to the country by our watchdogs -- the press. The image of Obama that the press has presented to the public is not a fair approximation of the real man. They consciously have ignored whole years of his life and have shown a lack of curiosity about such gaps, which bespeaks a lack of journalistic instinct.

Thus, the public image of Obama is of a "man who never was."

I take that phrase from a 1956 movie about a real-life World War II British intelligence operation to trick the Germans into thinking the Allies were going to invade Greece rather than Sicily in 1943. Operation Mincemeat involved the acquisition of a human corpse dressed as "Major William Martin, R.M.," which was put into the sea near Spain. Attached to the corpse was a briefcase containing fake letters suggesting that the Allied attack would be against Sardinia and Greece.

To make the operation credible, British intelligence concocted a fictional life for the corpse, creating a letter from a lover and tickets to a London theater -- all the details of a life, but not the actual life of the dead young man whose corpse was being used. So, too, the man the media have presented to the nation as Obama is not the real man.

The mainstream media ruthlessly and endlessly repeat any McCain gaffes while ignoring Obama gaffes. You have to go to weird little Web sites to see all the stammering and stuttering that Obama needs before getting out a sentence fragment or two. But all you see on the networks is an eventually clear sentence from Obama. You don't see Obama's ludicrous gaffe that Iran is a tiny country and no threat to us. Nor his 57 American states gaffe. Nor his forgetting, if he ever knew, that Russia has a veto in the U.N. Nor his whining and puerile "come on" when he is being challenged. This is the kind of editing one would expect from Goebbels' disciples, not Cronkite's.

More appalling, a skit on NBC's "Saturday Night Live" last weekend suggested that Gov. Palin's husband had sex with his own daughters. That show was written with the assistance of Al Franken, Democratic Party candidate in Minnesota for the U.S. Senate. Talk about incest.

But worse than all the unfair and distorted reporting and image projecting are the shocking gaps in Obama's life that are not reported at all. The major media simply have not reported on Obama's two years at New York's Columbia University, where, among other things, he lived a mere quarter-mile from former terrorist Bill Ayers. Later, they both ended up as neighbors and associates in Chicago. Obama denies more than a passing relationship with Ayers. Should the media be curious? In only two weeks, the media have focused on all the colleges Gov. Palin has attended, her husband's driving habits 20 years ago, and the close criticism of the political opponents Gov. Palin had when she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska.

But in two years, they haven't bothered to see how close Obama was with the terrorist Ayers.

Nor have the media paid any serious attention to Obama's rise in Chicago politics. How did honest Obama rise in the famously sordid Chicago political machine with the full support of Boss Daley? Despite the great -- and unflattering -- details on Obama's Chicago years presented in David Freddoso's new book on Obama, the mainstream media continue to ignore both the facts and the book. It took a British publication, The Economist, to give Freddoso's book a review with fair comment.

The public image of Obama as an idealistic, post-race, post-partisan, well-spoken and honest young man with the wisdom and courage befitting a great national leader is a confection spun by a willing conspiracy of Obama, his publicist (David Axelrod) and most of the senior editors, producers and reporters of the national media.

Perhaps that is why the National Journal's respected correspondent Stuart Taylor wrote, "The media can no longer be trusted to provide accurate and fair campaign reporting and analysis."

That conspiracy not only has Photoshopped out all of Obama's imperfections (and dirtied up his opponent McCain's image) but also has put most of his questionable history down the memory hole.

The public will be voting based on the idealized image of the man who never was. If he wins, however, we will be governed by the sunken, cynical man Obama really is. One can only hope that the senior journalists will be judged as harshly for their professional misconduct as Wall Street's leaders currently are for their failings.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/09/the_man_who_never_was.html

Biden Bye-Bye?

2008-09-23T12:38:00.000-07:00

And Hillary steps in??? Color me dumb but how is that possible?

Why is Barry so gutless? DUH!

2008-09-22T10:39:00.000-07:00

Is Obama Another Dukakis?

Why is Obama so vapid, hesitant, and gutless?

By Christopher Hitchens
Updated Monday, Sept. 22, 2008, at 12:17 PM ET

Last week really ought to have been the end of the McCain campaign. With the whole country feeling (and its financial class acting) as if we lived in a sweltering, bankrupt banana republic, and with this misery added to the generally Belarusian atmosphere that surrounds any American trying to board a train, catch a plane, fill a prescription, or get a public servant or private practitioner on the phone, it was surely the moment for the supposedly reform candidate to assume a commanding position. And the Republican nominee virtually volunteered to assist that outcome by making an idiot of himself several times over, moving from bovine and Panglossian serenity about the state of the many, many crippled markets to sudden bursts of pointless hyperactivity such as the irrelevant demand to sack the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

And yet, and unless I am about to miss some delayed "groundswell" or mood shift, none of this has translated into any measurable advantage for the Democrat. There are three possible reasons for such a huge failure on Barack Obama's part. The first, and the most widely canvassed, is that he is too nice, too innocent, too honest, and too decent to get down in the arena and trade bloody thrusts with the right-wing enemy. (This is rapidly becoming the story line that will achieve mythic status, along with allegations of racial and religious rumor-mongering, if he actually loses in November.) The second is that crisis and difficulty, at home and abroad, sometimes make electors slightly more likely to trust the existing establishment, or some version of it, than any challenger or newcomer, however slight. The third is that Obama does not, and perhaps even cannot, represent "change" for the very simple reason that the Democrats are a status quo party.

To analyze this is to be obliged to balance some of the qualities of Obama's own personality with some of the characteristics of his party. Here's a swift test. Be honest. What sentence can you quote from his convention speech in Denver? I thought so. All right, what about his big rally speech in Berlin? Just as I guessed. OK, help me out: Surely you can manage to cite a line or two from his imperishable address on race (compared by some liberal academics to Gettysburg itself) in Philadelphia? No, not the line about his white grandmother. Some other line. Oh, dear. Now do you see what I mean?

Why is Obama so vapid and hesitant and gutless? Why, to put it another way, does he risk going into political history as a dusky Dukakis? Well, after the self-imposed Jeremiah Wright nightmare, he can't afford any more militancy, or militant-sounding stuff, even if it might be justified. His other problems are self-inflicted or party-inflicted as well. He couldn't have picked a gifted Democratic woman as his running mate, because he couldn't have chosen a female who wasn't the ever-present Sen. Clinton, and so he handed the free gift of doing so to his Republican opponent (whose own choice has set up a screech from the liberals like nothing I have heard since the nomination of Clarence Thomas). So the unquantifiable yet important "atmospherics" of politics, with all their little X factors, belong at present to the other team.

The Dukakis comparison is, of course, a cruel one, but it raises a couple more questions that must be faced. We are told by outraged Democrats that many voters still believe, thanks to some smear job, that Sen. Obama is a Muslim. Yet who is the most famous source of this supposedly appalling libel (as if an American candidate cannot be of any religion or none)? Absent any anonymous whispering campaign, the person who did most to insinuate the idea in public—"There is nothing to base that on. As far as I know"—was Obama's fellow Democrat and the junior senator from New York. It was much the same in 1988, when Al Gore brought up the Dukakis furlough program, later to be made infamous by the name Willie Horton, against the hapless governor of Massachusetts who was then his rival for the nomination.

By the end of that grueling campaign season, a lot of us had got the idea that Dukakis actually wanted to lose—or was at the very least scared of winning. Why do I sometimes get the same idea about Obama? To put it a touch more precisely, what I suspect in his case is that he had no idea of winning this time around. He was running in Iowa and New Hampshire to seed the ground for 2012, not 2008, and then the enthusiasm of his supporters (and the weird coincidence of a strong John Edwards showing in Iowa) put him at the front of the pack. Yet, having suddenly got the leadership position, he hadn't the faintest idea what to do with it or what to do about it.

Look at the record, and at Obama's replies to essential and pressing questions. The surge in Iraq? I'll answer that only if you insist. The credit crunch? Please may I be photographed with Bill Clinton's economic team? Georgia? After you, please, Sen. McCain. A vice-presidential nominee? What about a guy who, despite his various qualities, is picked because he has almost no enemies among Democratic interest groups?

I ran into a rather clever Republican operative at the airport last week, who pointed out to me that this ought by rights to be a Democratic Party year across the board, from the White House to the Congress to the gubernatorial races. But there was a crucial energy leak, and it came from the very top. More people doubted Obama's qualifications for the presidency in September than had told the pollsters they had doubted these credentials in July. "So what he ought to do," smiled this man, "is spend his time closing that gap and less time attacking McCain." Obama's party hacks, increasingly white and even green about the gills, are telling him to do the opposite. I suppose this could even mean that Sarah Palin, down the road, will end up holding the door open for Hillary Clinton. Such joy!

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a media fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2200587/

Democrats Did This To Us

2008-09-22T10:04:00.000-07:00

How the Democrats Created the Financial Crisis: Kevin Hassett

Commentary by Kevin Hassett

Sept. 22 (Bloomberg) -- The financial crisis of the past year has provided a number of surprising twists and turns, and from Bear Stearns Cos. to American International Group Inc., ambiguity has been a big part of the story.

Why did Bear Stearns fail, and how does that relate to AIG? It all seems so complex.

But really, it isn't. Enough cards on this table have been turned over that the story is now clear. The economic history books will describe this episode in simple and understandable terms: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exploded, and many bystanders were injured in the blast, some fatally.

Fannie and Freddie did this by becoming a key enabler of the mortgage crisis. They fueled Wall Street's efforts to securitize subprime loans by becoming the primary customer of all AAA-rated subprime-mortgage pools. In addition, they held an enormous portfolio of mortgages themselves.

In the times that Fannie and Freddie couldn't make the market, they became the market. Over the years, it added up to an enormous obligation. As of last June, Fannie alone owned or guaranteed more than $388 billion in high-risk mortgage investments. Their large presence created an environment within which even mortgage-backed securities assembled by others could find a ready home.

The problem was that the trillions of dollars in play were only low-risk investments if real estate prices continued to rise. Once they began to fall, the entire house of cards came down with them.

Turning Point

Take away Fannie and Freddie, or regulate them more wisely, and it's hard to imagine how these highly liquid markets would ever have emerged. This whole mess would never have happened.

It is easy to identify the historical turning point that marked the beginning of the end.

Back in 2005, Fannie and Freddie were, after years of dominating Washington, on the ropes. They were enmeshed in accounting scandals that led to turnover at the top. At one telling moment in late 2004, captured in an article by my American Enterprise Institute colleague Peter Wallison, the Securities and Exchange Comiission's chief accountant told disgraced Fannie Mae chief Franklin Raines that Fannie's position on the relevant accounting issue was not even ``on the page'' of allowable interpretations.

Then legislative momentum emerged for an attempt to create a ``world-class regulator'' that would oversee the pair more like banks, imposing strict requirements on their ability to take excessive risks. Politicians who previously had associated themselves proudly with the two accounting miscreants were less eager to be associated with them. The time was ripe.

Greenspan's Warning

The clear gravity of the situation pushed the legislation forward. Some might say the current mess couldn't be foreseen, yet in 2005 Alan Greenspan told Congress how urgent it was for it to act in the clearest possible terms: If Fannie and Freddie ``continue to grow, continue to have the low capital that they have, continue to engage in the dynamic hedging of their portfolios, which they need to do for interest rate risk aversion, they potentially create ever-growing potential systemic risk down the road,'' he said. ``We are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk.''

What happened next was extraordinary. For the first time in history, a serious Fannie and Freddie reform bill was passed by the Senate Banking Committee. The bill gave a regulator power to crack down, and would have required the companies to eliminate their investments in risky assets.

Different World

If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, a blizzard of terrible mortgage paper fluttered out of the Fannie and Freddie clouds, burying many of our oldest and most venerable institutions. Without their checkbooks keeping the market liquid and buying up excess supply, the market would likely have not existed.

But the bill didn't become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn't even get the Senate to vote on the matter.

That such a reckless political stand could have been taken by the Democrats was obscene even then. Wallison wrote at the time: ``It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit. The Democrats and the few Republicans who oppose portfolio limitations could not possibly do so if their constituents understood what they were doing.''

Mounds of Materials

Now that the collapse has occurred, the roadblock built by Senate Democrats in 2005 is unforgivable. Many who opposed the bill doubtlessly did so for honorable reasons. Fannie and Freddie provided mounds of materials defending their practices. Perhaps some found their propaganda convincing.

But we now know that many of the senators who protected Fannie and Freddie, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd, have received mind-boggling levels of financial support from them over the years.

Throughout his political career, Obama has gotten more than $125,000 in campaign contributions from employees and political action committees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, second only to Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, who received more than $165,000.

Clinton, the 12th-ranked recipient of Fannie and Freddie PAC and employee contributions, has received more than $75,000 from the two enterprises and their employees. The private profit found its way back to the senators who killed the fix.

There has been a lot of talk about who is to blame for this crisis. A look back at the story of 2005 makes the answer pretty clear.

Oh, and there is one little footnote to the story that's worth keeping in mind while Democrats point fingers between now and Nov. 4: Senator John McCain was one of the three cosponsors of S.190, the bill that would have averted this mess.

(Kevin Hassett, director of economic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, is a Bloomberg News columnist. He is an adviser to Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona in the 2008 presidential election. The opinions expressed are his own.)

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aSKSoiNbnQY0

Shackleford Ties Obama Campaign to Palin Smears

2008-09-22T04:34:00.000-07:00

Who's surprised? Well, no one should be. And no one's surprised that the MSM didn't do this but left it to the blogosphere.

Hope, Change, & Lies: Orchestrated "Grassroots" Smear Campaigns & the People that Run Them

Extensive research was conducted by the Jawa Report to determine the source of smears directed toward Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Those smears included false allegations that she belonged to a secessionist political party and that she has radical anti-American views.

Our research suggests that a subdivision of one of the largest public relations firms in the world most likely started and promulgated rumors about Sarah Palin that were known to be false. These rumors were spread in a surreptitious manner to avoid exposure.

It is also likely that the PR firm was paid by outside sources to run the smear campaign. While not conclusive, evidence suggests a link to the Barack Obama campaign. Namely:

Evidence suggests that a YouTube video with false claims about Palin was uploaded and promoted by members of a professional PR firm.

The family that runs the PR firm has extensive ties to the Democratic Party, the netroots, and are staunch Obama supporters.

Evidence suggests that the firm engaged in a concerted effort to distribute the video in such a way that it would appear to have gone viral on its own. Yet this effort took place on company time.

Evidence suggests that these distribution efforts included actions by at least one employee of the firm who is unconnected with the family running the company.

The voice-over artist used in this supposedly amateur video is a professional.

This same voice-over artist has worked extensively with David Axelrod's firm, which has a history of engaging in phony grassroots efforts, otherwise known as "astroturfing."

David Axelrod is Barack Obama's chief media strategist.

The same voice-over artist has worked directly for the Barack Obama campaign.

This suggests that false rumors and outright lies about Sarah Palin and John McCain being spread on the internet are being orchestrated by political partisans and are not an organic grassroots phenomenon led by the left wing fringe. Our findings follow.

WHO PRODUCED THE VIDEO?

[UPDATE: Within 1 hour of posting, "eswinner" has removed all videos from YouTube and began removing any traces of his activities. But we have the video and all relevant websites backed up.

If "eswinner" isn't Ethan Winner of the Publicis Groupe, then why did "eswinner" yank the video so quickly? Or if this was just an innocent homemade ad, then what does he have to hide? You'd think he'd want more attention for it.

I uploaded it to my YouTube acount from the original unwatermarked Google version (see below for explanation) and that is the version you now see embedded below. Here's an image that show's he had the videos in question just moments ago. Click for bigger. I'll be able to provide a backup of the original YouTube page in the morning. For now, this will have to do.]

Who is behind this video against Sarah Palin? It alleges:

Sarah Palin was a member of an Anti-American separatist organization.

It claims that Sarah Palin was a member of the Alaskan Independence Party and cites The New York Times for that source. Then it quotes the founder of that Party with some pretty outrageous statements.

But here's what FactCheck.org says about that:

[Sarah Palin] was never a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, a group that wants Alaskans to vote on whether they wish to secede from the United States. She’s been registered as a Republican since May 1982.

And The New York Times was forced to retract their earlier claim that Palin was a member of the party, blaming the error on the party's chair. That retraction was published Sept. 3rd, 8 days before the video was first made publicly available.

Sarah Palin wasn't even physically at the party's convention. The clip you see is part of Palin's videotaped welcome for the convention's opening in which she gives some general remarks about the need for party competition and then tries to draw some common ground on the need to reel in government spending. Hardly evidence of extremism or anti-American sentiment.

In our opinion the Palin smear video appears professionally produced. Especially revealing is the voice over, which has a ring of familiarity to it and which also sounds professional.

If we are correct, that means that someone paid for the ad and for the talent behind it. Yet no one identifies themselves as being behind the video.

Using techniques that we've used in the past to find the identity of online terrorist supporters, the Jawa team went to work trying to figure out who was behind what appeared, in our opinion, to be a professionally orchestrated smear campaign aimed at Sarah Palin with the ultimate goal of electing Barack Obama.

VIOLATION OF FEC RULES?

Federal election law requires that a disclaimer from those paying for campaign ads, "must appear on any "electioneering communication" and on any public communication by any person that expressly advocates the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate or solicits funds in connection with a federal election." Even when the ad is not paid for nor coordinated with the candidates election committee, "the disclaimer notice must identify who paid for the message, state that it was not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee and list the permanent street address, telephone number or World Wide Web address of the person who paid for the communication."

No such disclaimer appears on the ad in question. However, "General public political advertising does not include Internet ads, except for communications placed for a fee on another person’s web site." It is not clear to us whether a video is considered an "internet ad" or if the wording only meant to include banner ads or other more common forms of internet advertising.

All of the web only video ads that we could find produced by the Obama campaign carried the disclosure or some other clearly identifiable notice that they were responsible for its content.

It would appear that the ad, while professionally produced, was put on YouTube and then spread in such a way as to make it seem like amateurs had made it and spread it. We can't help but wonder if the missing disclaimer on the video was an intentional exploitation of a loophole meant to distance the people behind the ad from its outright lies?

We also can't help but wonder if maybe those who produced the ad believed that the lack of disclaimer constituted an FEC violation? Which would be an alternative explanation for why they did not wish to be connected to it.

Beyond the disclaimer, though, our reading of FEC regulations suggests that political campaign and 527 groups, such as Moveon.org, are required to report money spent on advertising opposing a candidate for public office. We can find no exception for advertising intended for web only campaigns.

We assume that if some group paid for the production of the video, that it would be reported to the FEC. Not doing so, we believe, would constitute a breach of federal campaign law.

PR FIRM BEHIND THE VIDEO?

The YouTube poster who uploaded the video did so under the account name "eswinner". He names his channel "AGroupofConcernedAmericans". The goal of his channel, says "eswinner", is:

Offering a fair and unbiased view towards life and politics...
I try to give an unbiased account of all things American.

The video was uploaded four times under the "eswinner" account, using different titles for each video. The video was also uploaded to Google Video on the same day and with the same title.

A Google search of other people using the nickname or account name “eswinner” reveals that someone very interested in yachts also goes by that name. There is, for example, a Picasa page under the account name “eswinner”. I won't link to that page because it also has pictures of his family, but I will include a screenshot here.

That Picasa page of "eswinner" is used by an "Ethan" advertising on Craig's List that he will rent out his yacht to interested parties. But "Ethan" also leaves his e-mail account: ewinner@winnr.com.

And just what is winnr.com? An alternate dns designation for Winner & Associates. A firm that employs one Ethan S. Winner.

Hundreds of pictures on the Picassa page belonging to "eswinner" show that the page belongs to the same Ethan S. Winner that is employed by the public relations firm of Winner & Associates. Other instances of an "eswinner" or "ewinner" posting on the internet are found sprinkled here and there. All of those postings seem to fit the profile of Ethan S. Winner and suggest that eswinner and Ethan Winner are one and the same.

The company he works for, Winner & Associates, is one of the largest PR firms in the country and part of an even larger international conglomerate Publicis Groupe, which is, "one the world's top 10 advertising and communications firms."

A firm that specializes in "helping companies survive and succeed" a "controversial issue such as a lawsuit, a government investigation, a political protest, a labor dispute, or a defective product or recall."

A firm that also happens to produce TV ads. And owns a number of affiliated firms which do similar work.

These people are professional guns for hire. Looking at their portfolio makes that clear. And they only work for big clients. The kind of clients that pay big bucks. The kind of people hired by Exxon to convince people that the effects of the Valdez spill were over. The kind of people hired to help push through oil fields in Chad and Cameroon or help companies respond to boycott threats over the Beijing Olympics.

The kind of people who would have an in-house attorney to handle PR for Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame. And get them a movie deal.

Also the kind of people hired by the European Union to help sell the new EU treaty. Who was the lead in that effort? Ethan S. Winner.

In other words, probably not the kind of people who make anti-Palin advertisements with professional voiceovers in their spare time. But also not the kind of people to be averse to running a seemingly grassroots Palin smear campaign .

What I am told by a friend in the business is called "cyber ambuscade" when done by corporations. Apparently it is common practice for corporations to try to plant untraceable rumors about their competitors. In other words some corporations pay professionals to slime the competitors.

While it is clear that W&A are very big guns for hire, those that run it have been strong financial supporters of Democrat candidates and have links to the leftist netroots that first championed Barack Obama.

TIES TO THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND LIBERAL CAUSES

This is Charles "Chuck" N. Winner, the President of the company.

Charles "Chuck" Winner was once described as:

A revered political consultant, Winner began his career working for California Gov. Pat Brown in 1958; he later worked for President John F. Kennedy. Winner is frequently called upon by a wide range of political groups, candidates and organizations for his unparalleled skills as an adviser, planner and strategic thinker.

Chuck owns $23,000 court-side seats for UCLA basketball. He's the type of guy who own horses that have raced at the Kentucky Derby.

He is a Barack Obama contributor. As are the rest of the Winner & Associate employees who share the family name. Chuck Winner contributed to Obama as early as February of 2007, which means he was a supporter from the beginning.

As have many of the employees of Strategy Workshop, headed by Leslie Song Winner and which once employed Ethan Winner who appears to have been in charge of their internet strategy. Leslie is Charles Winner's former wife, mother of Ethan, and the daughter of Alfred Song--who was California's first Asian-American legislator and a Democrat.

A cursory inquiry into the political contributions of the Winner clan--including Ethan-- also shows that they collectively contributed to: Max Baucus (D-Montana); John Morrison (D-Montana-ran for Senate); Claire McKaskill (D-MO); Democratic National Congressional Committee; Howard Berman (D-CA); Amy Klobuchar (D-MN); Albert Robles (D-CA); Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA); Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee; Sherrod Brown (D-OH); John Kerry (Pres campaign); Chris Dodd (D-CT); Wesley Clark (Presidential campaign); Diane Feinstein (D-CA); Maxine Waters (D-CA); Katrina Swett (D-NH ran against Sununu); John Dingell (D-MI)

Partner in their subsidiary of Winner & Mandabach Campaigns, Paul J. Mandabach, is an Al Franken (DFL-MN) contributor. He also contributed to Hillary, Edwards, Kerry, and Clark.

Notice a pattern here? These aren't just local Democrats, but are big name Democrats in big name races. All over the country.

But more importantly, look who else Charles Winner contributed to: ACTBLUE, "the nation's largest source of funds for Democrats" and which is "particularly favored by the netroots and left-leaning bloggers."

THE SOCKPUPPET GOES CORPORATE

Can we be sure, based on the above, that Ethan S. Winner and/or Winner & Associates was involved in production and/or promotion of the ad? No, but there’s even more evidence than what we've presented so far tending to indicate that Ethan S. Winner, Winner & Associates, and/or the Winner family are connected to this video.

As of the first draft writing of this report (9/12/2008) YouTube user "eswinner" had exactly three subscribers. One of them just happened to create a YouTube account on the very day the video was uploaded: "cnwinner".

Is “cnwinner” an account created by Charles N. Winner, founder and president of Winner & Associates? If so, that would explain why the age listed by the creator of the “cnwinner” profile [68] generally matches that of published reports on the age of Charles N. Winner.

YouTube user “cnwinner” (Charles N. Winner?) appears to be directly involved in a concerted effort to add legitimacy to the video's lies about Palin. How do we know? Because during the initial draft writing of this report a number of comments --including one by me -- have been left disputing the allegations made in the video. And our "cnwinner" (Charles N. Winner?) responds:

And “eswinner” (Ethan S. Winner?) joins in the sockpuppet game with "cswinner” (his father Charles N. Winner?), pretending to be a bystander when he is the one who uploaded the video!

Other apparent early sockpuppets included "Truthiness99" & "nowaymccain" both of whom joined YouTube within a day of the original video posting and seem eager to make claims that the video has its facts straight.

The same day (9/12/2008) another apparent sockpuppet account "gocamerica" was created. It is our opinion, based on activity under this account, that this account was created solely or primarily for the purpose of helping the video spread; "gocamerica" reuploaded the video naming it "Sarah Palin ABC Interview". Gocamerica apparently has as little problem lying about the contents of the video as he has with the lies directed at Sarah Palin in the video.

Does the user name sound familiar? As in Group Of Concerned AMERICAns or "gocamerica".

And what does "gocamerica" have to say in the thread where many of the commenters laugh at the outright lies in the video?

How transparent is gocamerica's sock puppetry? He says the same thing, word for word, in the comments thread of all four versions of the video. A cut and paste job.

Apparently someone has been taking sock puppet lessons from Glenn Greenwald!

[UPDATE: The "gocamerica" account was deleted within 2 hours of publication. Confirmed: gocamerica = Ethan Winner sockpuppet. But we backed up "gocamerica's" YouTube page. Will provide backup in the morning]

LYING ABOUT SARAH PALIN: BUSINESS OR PLEASURE?

Many of the comments seem to have been written during normal business hours. Which, if everything else wasn't enough evidence, indicates that they are probably doing this on company time. For instance, this reply by "gocamerica" to a comment I left:

You'll notice the message was left two hours before 5:16 pm Central time on 9/17/2008. Since it's highly likely that "gocamerica" is on Pacific time, then it follows that he left the comment sometime around 1:16 pm Pacific --- right in the middle of the work day.

On 9/19/2008 "eswinner" logged into his YouTube account sometime just before 3 PM Central -- or sometime just before 1 PM Pacific.

From the available evidence, it certainly appears that someone is spending time on the company clock boosting the video. Trying to get the video to go viral. To take a life on of its own. Seeing how many people have viewed it.

What appears, in our opinion, to be a third sockpuppet account was created on 9/16/2008. This account belongs to "grpcncrndamrcns" and has only one video -- the same video uploaded by "eswinner" and "gocamerica": Sarah Palin: A Heartbeat Away.

As further evidence that these two are sockpuppets of the owner of the "eswinner" account, the videos uploaded by "gocamerica" and "grpcncrndamrcns" do not bear the hallmark signs of one YouTube user reuploading a video he or she found at YouTube -- the double YouTube watermark. Instead, all versions of the YouTube video have a single YouTube watermark indicating that the person/persons probably uploaded an original unwatermarked version of the video.

[Update: Within 2 hours of initial post, "grpcncrndamrcns" deleted video as well. Confirmed, these accounts are all sockpuppets.]

GETTING THE LIE TO SPREAD WITHOUT DETECTION

And their efforts didn't stop there. Someone emailed the video to a forum administrator at the Democratic Underground--a message board considerably to the left and far nuttier than even the far left wing bloggers. Says "EarlG" about the video he posted on the very day after it was created (and the same day that this particular version was uploaded):

Nice independent YouTube attack ad. I don't know who made this, it arrived in my email inbox this morning from "A Group Of Concerned Americans." [emphasis added]

As previously noted "A Group of Concerned Americans" just happens to be the name of the YouTube channel created by a person who we have reason to believe is Ethan S. Winner (aka, "eswinner") of the W&A PR firm.

But getting a video to go viral would take more than the Democratic Underground, it would take many more in the netroots willing to push the video. The video appeared on the largest leftwing blog on 9/12/2008 and became lauded as the prime example of what the netroots should be doing on their own to smear the McCain campaign.

Daily Kos is the blog that really launched Obama's successful campaign. DailyKos diarist "geekesque" tells his audience of a plan to get this and other smear videos to go viral. And I mean just that: he admits that the video and others like it make false claims, but that the ends justify the means. It's pretty long but I'll post the whole thing just to show I'm not taking this out of context:

Viral attacks are where it's at in 2008. Emails, blogs, online news sources. Content flows upstream in today's media environment.
We can be the gun.

Indeed, if Barack can't or won't do the dirty work, then we have to do it for him. No excuses. No more hand-wringing.

Let's get to work.

How, you ask? Simple.

It's all about finding really damaging stuff--news stories, YouTubes, informative blog posts. And then circulating those with the intent of having them work their way up the media stream. Email it to your friends. Email it to any journalists whose email you have. Post it in diaries or blog comments.

Example, here is a devastating YouTube on Sarah Strangelove:

[The Palin smear video was inserted here]

You should email this to ten people. Or ten bloggers. Or both. Spread it far, spread it wide.

If you would like to do this on a regular basis, I've set up a couple of Google Groups to help out with that process.

One group, [group's name] is a gathering point for potentially damaging stories about the enemy. Folks who belong to that one can post whatever stories they find anonymously. Just post a link or create a page, and others will take it from there.

That brings me to the other group, [other group's name]. This group is the actual action group--the one where the most damaging stories collected by folks at the VMP. It's real simple. You log in or get an email alert, you copy and paste, and you email it to various folks--either friends and family or content-based websites like blogs and online news sources.

I am more than happy to add folks to either group or both. Just email me at:

[redacted e-mail]

and let me know which you'd like to join.

Let's go out and expose these bastards for what they are.

To the barricades.

Note: If you don't believe in scorched-earth politics, no one is forcing you to join this effort, of course. We all contribute in our own way.

How do DKos readers respond to the notion that spreading lies is acceptable behavior in getting their preferred candidate elected? Not a single negative response as of this writing. Here are some samples:

already sent the video on your diary to 300 contacts.
by rapcetera on Fri Sep 12, 2008 at 12:27:36 PM PDT ...

Let's hammer these bastards any way we can. We have to influence the media narrative ourselves.

Cotton Mouth

by Countificus on Fri Sep 12, 2008 at 11:58:45 AM PDT...

If you want to win without a dirty candidate... (5+ / 0-)

Recommended by:
slinkerwink, Geekesque, BachFan, kat68, Floande

...the candidate him/herself can't fight dirty.

When Johnson wanted a rumor spread that his opponent f*cked farm animals, he didn't stand up and make a speech to that effect. He told his campaign manager to spread the word on the sly.

Johnson? Remember that guy, back from when the Democrats actually won elections?

On s'engage, et puis, on voit. (Napoleon)

by sagesource on Fri Sep 12, 2008 at 12:06:48 PM PDT

Spreading the message seems to be a theme that is echoed by one "Justyn Winner" who shares an unusually spelled name with a W&A Vice President, General Counsel, and Valerie Plame representative. From a comment "Justyn Winner" left about Obama's race speech at noted leftwing blog Crooks and Liars:

Fantastic spech! the best thing people can do is to circulate a link of it or its segements to all friends and family. Exposure is essential

Knowing the right people to prod into action is the key ingredient in getting a "grassroots campaign" off the ground and making it seem "spontaneous" and "ground up". The netroots of dKos are the perfect people to contact if one wanted to spread the message, but do it in such a way that it would appear to be spontaneous and undirected.

FERTILIZING THE ASTROTURF

But it wasn't just dKos and the DU that appear to have been contacted. Also posting the video on the very day it was created is noted gay-rights activist Pam Spaulding. Jesus' General posted it the next day.

Incidentally Jesus' General, who posted the video on his own blog without comment, thought he should leave his two cents in the video's comments. It appears that he knows the video presents outright lies as truth, but he doesn't care: the other side lies, he reasons, so why shouldn't the left?

Another person interested in helping the smear go viral is David "Ben" Burch whose White Rose Society is dedicated to "fighting the new fascism" by.... lying about a VP candidate? A dedicated fan of Cindy Sheehan, of left wing radio, and of harassing Wikipedia users who don't see eye to eye with him. Burch also doesn't appear to have a problem spreading lies about Sarah Palin. It's for the greater good, you see. Nothing fascist about that!

There's no telling how many other bloggers or activists were emailed by the sockpuppet "A Group Of Concerned Americans" who we have reason to believe is Ethan S. Winner or other employees of one of the largest PR firms on the planet.

But would the people at Winner & Associates have the kind of experience to try and organize a grassroots campaign? From the Publicis website describing what W&A does.

It appears that they do.

JUST A FAMILY AFFAIR?

Even if “eswinner” is indeed Ethan S. Winner and “cnwinner” is indeed Charles N. Winner, it is possible, of course, that the attack ad on Palin is a Winner family project, unconnected to Winner and Associates and their corporate owners at the mega-PR firm of Publicis. In fact, FEC regulations carve out an exception for individuals to use their computers -- even their office computers -- to spread political messages.

There is evidence, however, from which one might reasonably surmise that the attack ad on Palin was a project of the company itself. In particular, there are indications that other employees of Winner and Associates, not members of the family, have been actively involved in dissemination of the video.

As we've already seen, "eswinner" uploaded the same Sarah Palin smear video four times giving it four separate titles. Likely seven times, really, since "gocamerica" & "grpcncrndamrcns" both appear to be just other sockpuppets; and the video was also uploaded to Google. We've already seen how someone sent the video to two prominent leftwing internet websites--the Daily Kos and the Democratic Underground--and possibly to other leftwing bloggers.

What I haven't mentioned is that a second version of the same video uploaded by "eswinner" was posted separately at the Democratic Underground on the same day as the one forum administrator "EarlG" claims it was sent to him by "A Group Of Concerned Americans."

This version was posted by DU user "stckyfngz" on Sept. 12th. Here's a screenshot:

Who is this "stckyfngz" who posted the video at The Democratic Underground the day after "eswinner" uploaded it to YouTube? There is evidence that leads us to believe that the “stckyfngz” who posted the video at DU is named Jared Liu-Klein.

Jared Liu-Klein, aka, "stckyfngz", you see works in "Public Relations". And there just happens to be a Jared Liu-Klein who donated to Barack Obama.

That would be the same Jared Liu-Klein who represented Valerie Plame for Winner & Associates.

From the Publicis website:

Associate, Winner & Associates
Jared Liu-Klein, an Associate, has almost a decade of experience in the information technology, new media, and multimedia sectors....

He is involved on the production side with several accounts, taking on roles such as conceptualization, scriptwriting, editing, and direction.

It looks like Jared does more than just represent Valerie Plame at W&A--he also helps write scripts!

Jared's mother is Carol Liu, a Democratic politician who previously served in the State Assembly & is currently running for State Senate. His father is Michael Peevey, the Gray Davis appointed President of the California Public Utilities Commission.

There was a bit of a scandal involving Jarad's parents last year when it was revealed by the L.A. Times that tens of thousands of dollars contributed to Carol Liu's campaign came from industries regulated by her husband. Businesses that also hired W&A to handle PR for them during the California Energy crisis. The crisis which would eventually lead to Gray Davis' recall.

DEEP THROAT SAYS "FOLLOW THE MONEY"

So what do we have so far? Evidence which strongly indicates that Ethan S. Winner and Charles "Chuck" N. Winner are behind a smear campaign aimed at discouraging people from voting for McCain/Palin. The production value of the ad indicates that it was produced by a professional firm. The family that runs that company has extensive ties to the Democratic Party, the netroots, and are staunch Obama supporters.

The timing of the comments seems to indicate that the video's promotion was done on Winner & Associates company time. At least one employee, Jared Liu-Klein, appears to have been instrumental in its dissemination. A concerted effort was made to distribute the video in such a way that it would appear to have gone viral on its own. There appears to be corporate sponsorship and organization behind a new "grassroots" smear campaign.

So, the million dollar question is who, if any one, paid Winner & Associates to produce this ad?

[NOTE: The Jawa Report legal department has pleaded with me to point out that everything from this point forward is pure conjecture on my part.

That said…]

THE OBAMA CONNECTION

My initial money was on George Soros who has contributed to Winner run campaigns in the past, . The sheer viciousness of the attack bears all of the hallmarks of Moveon.org.

But it could be any number of 527s that Obama has now given the wink-wink-nudge-nudge to start hammering away at McCain.

Or the money could come from an untraceable source like the "charitable organization" run by Justyn Winner.

So why would any one hire a PR firm like W&R? Did I mention that they specialize in "crisis communications?" Again, from the Publicis website:

Which leaves open the possibility that Obama or the Democratic Party might also be the ones paying for the campaign. Is there anything that might be suggestive of that? Yes there is.

First there is Ethan Winner's Facebook account. Among the 27 friends Ethan has on Facebook, one of them is David Washington. Dr. David Washington is described as a senior Obama campaign adviser in California.

In and of itself, that's not much of a link. Washington is involved in hosting fundraisers for Obama in the L.A. area, and as we've already noted the Winner family has contributed to Obama's campaign. Perhaps that explains the connection. But there are more compelling links between the video which we believe was uploaded by Ethan Winner and the Barack Obama campaign.

PROFESSIONAL WORK FOR OBAMA CAMPAIGN?

We began this post by noting that a video uploaded to YouTube appeared to have been produced with a voice over done by a professional. As this Politico article makes clear, voice over artists are often used over and over by the same campaign. That shouldn't be shocking to any one. That when called upon to make an advertisement a producer will use people that they've worked with before.

What is surprising is that voice artists are often partisans. Not only do they work for the same producers over and over, they often only work for one side of the political aisle. For instance, Betsy Ames is one of the premier voices for Republican campaigns. Kathryn Klvana is often heard on political ads -- but only Democratic ones.

We believe that the artist in the "eswinner" Palin smear video has also worked directly for the Barack Obama campaign. What we think is her voice can be heard in Obama's "Burden" video, released on Sept. 15th -- less than a week after the "eswinner" Sarah Palin, a Heartbeat Away video.

Audio from each advertisement was ripped by Dan Riehl and spliced so that a better compare and contrast between the two voices could be made. I then equalized volume levels on the two ads, producing this video. Sorry about its poor quality, I don't have the resources of a PR firm!

Are the two voices the same? You be the judge.

We think it is.

We also believe that she worked on this Obama ad, released on Sept. 20th, and this one, from August. She may be on others, but with over 1300 videos on Obama's YouTube channel we just didn't look for any more.

LINKS TO THE "KING OF ASTROTURFING" -- DAVID AXELROD

We believe the voice can also be heard on these AKP&D Message and Media produced videos. In fact, all of the female voice overs showcased on the AKP&D website seem to belong to the same woman. That's right, all of them. The same voice heard in some Barack Obama ads, and which was used for the "eswinner" slime campaign.

More importantly, though, what is AKP&D? It's the Chicago based political consulting firm headed by David Axelrod. Yes, that David Axelrod. As in the David Axelrod who is Barack Obama's chief media strategist.

David Axelrod is also known as The master of "Astroturfing", which is what PR industry insiders call the practice of "manufacturing grassroots support." As Ace notes:

It tries to disguise itself as a "grassroots" phenomenon -- but it's artificial and inorganic. Hence, "Astroturf."
And David Axelrod is notorious for making extensive use of this controversial tactic -- and was notorious for it even before he begain running Barack Obama's campaign.

According to Businessweek, one of Axelrod's astroturfing campaigns stealthily spent $15 million convincing Illinois taxpayers that their power would be shut off if they didn't approve an increase in their electric bills. It wasn't until a complaint was filed with the state's regulators that it was revealed that Axelrod's "grassroots" campaign was fully funded by ComEd -- the power company which would benefit from the rate hike.

Axelrod is a "community organizer" you might say.

This does not mean that we believe that Barack Obama's campaign is behind the stealth Palin smear campaign. In fact, a preliminary analysis of Obama's campaign expenditures filed with the FEC did not find any payouts to Winner & Associates or Publicis. But our familiarity with how to search FEC expenditures is limited, and there are tens of thousands of recorded transactions.

What we do believe we have found is that David Axelrod's firm has worked with the voice over artist in the "eswinner" Palin smear video. In fact, each and every political ad showcased on Axelrod's website that has a female voice over seems to be the same voice from the Palin smear ad. That Axelrod used her over and over again in his videos going back several years.

We also believe that Axelrod has used her in several official Obama campaign videos.

We also know that David Axelrod is considered the master of orchestrating grassroots campaigns that appear spontaneous and which are difficult to trace to him.

In fact, Axelrod has a second company called ASK Public Strategies who's sole purpose seems to be running professional astroturfing campaigns. We can't help but wonder if they ever outsource any of their work?

We also can't help but ask if the Obama campaign has ever hired Publicis or Winner & Associates to do any work for them? Or the extent to which those advertising firms hired by Axelrod on behalf of the Obama campaign subcontract out to other large corporate PR firms?

A BROADER ASTROTURFING CAMPAIGN?

We believe that the case has been made that the Palin smear video was produced by the Publicis Groupe's Winner & Associates. We believe the evidence to this effect is compelling.

We also believe that the evidence shows that W&A tried to spread the lies about Palin in such a way as to catch the attention of the left-wing netroot supporters of Barack Obama. We think it is unlikely that one of the largest PR firms in the world would do this for free. That they would pay for video production out of their own pockets, hire a well known voice actress, or that its employees would work together in their free time to help the video go viral.

So, if we're right, who paid them? As of this writing we cannot answer that question. Our initial reaction was that this campaign had all the hallmarks of the Soros funded Moveon.org, but given David Axelrod's known predilection to these type of stealth campaigns it would not surprise us in the least if the Obama campaign itself was orchestrating it.

That this is what Obama meant by "taking the gloves off". Especially given the timing of the video's release -- during the brief period when Obama trailed McCain in the polls, and when most of McCain's sudden surge was attributed to the popularity of Sarah Palin.

And if the company has been hired to stealthily spread these Palin smears, what other smears might they be paid to spread? Ones in which they more successfully covered their tracks?

The Palin smear video analyzed here fits in nicely with the post-Palin pick narrative being offered by the Obama campaign. That narrative is that John McCain may not fill out his term in office. The narrative is bolstered by questions about McCain's age, the present status of the skin cancer he once had, and by demands that his medical records be released.

The second ingredient in the narrative paints Sarah Palin -- who would take McCain's vacated Presidential office -- as not ready for the job. Obama's campaign has called her experience & intelligence into question, but there is also a "grassroots" viral campaign of deception that claims Palin is on the political fringe and is a religious lunatic.

Just in the past week, since we first began following the astroturfing of Sarah Palin, rumors have circulated that Palin was a member of the John Birch Society and that she hates rape victims. Bored with the spreading the lie that Palin thinks the Earth is 6,000 years old and that she banned books, this week the netroots are claiming that she supports witch hunts. Not metaphorical witch hunts, actual witch hunts.

Sometimes rumors and lies get spread organically with no need from direction. But sometimes what may seem to be an organic bottom up grassroots movement, may actually be led from the top and may be professionally organized.

We believe at least one such campaign to discredit Sarah Palin is currently underway. It seems highly likely that others are as well. We've done the initial work, but now it's time for the professionals to take over and ask the tough questions.

UPDATE: Within an hour of this post going up, YouTube videos implicating Ethan Winner were yanked, sockpuppet accounts deleted, and more importantly, the Wikipedia entry on David Axelrod began to edit out mentions of his well know astroturfing campaigns. Hmmm, it sounds to me like we're on to something.

---
Thanks to Jane & Stable Hand who did a lot of the Googling on this one, the Jawa team for input, and our legal division for extensive advice. Also thanks to Dan Riehl and Ace for input and help with drafts; and Patterico for putting together the bullet point summary.

By Dr. Rusty Shackleford at September 22, 2008 12:32 PM |
http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/194057.php

Speech Sarah Would Have Given Today

2008-09-22T04:25:00.001-07:00

If that monumental wuss known as Barry Obama, was man enough to stand aside and not interfere.

Palin on Ahmadinejad: 'He Must Be Stopped'

By SARAH PALIN | September 22, 2008
http://www.nysun.com/opinion/palin-on-ahmadinejad-he-must-be-stopped/86311/

Governor Palin, the Republican nominee for vice president, was scheduled to speak today at a rally in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza to protest the appearance here of President Ahmadinejad of Iran. Her appearance was canceled by rally organizers who sought a nonpolitical event. Following are the remarks Mrs. Palin would have given:

ROBYN BECK / 2008 AFP

Sarah Palin

***

I am honored to be with you and with leaders from across this great country — leaders from different faiths and political parties united in a single voice of outrage.

Tomorrow, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will come to New York — to the heart of what he calls the Great Satan — and speak freely in this, a country whose demise he has called for.

Ahmadinejad may choose his words carefully, but underneath all of the rhetoric is an agenda that threatens all who seek a safer and freer world. We gather here today to highlight the Iranian dictator's intentions and to call for action to thwart him.

He must be stopped.

The world must awake to the threat this man poses to all of us. Ahmadinejad denies that the Holocaust ever took place. He dreams of being an agent in a "Final Solution" — the elimination of the Jewish people. He has called Israel a "stinking corpse" that is "on its way to annihilation." Such talk cannot be dismissed as the ravings of a madman — not when Iran just this summer tested long-range Shahab-3 missiles capable of striking Tel Aviv, not when the Iranian nuclear program is nearing completion, and not when Iran sponsors terrorists that threaten and kill innocent people around the world.

The Iranian government wants nuclear weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency reports that Iran is running at least 3,800 centrifuges and that its uranium enrichment capacity is rapidly improving. According to news reports, U.S. intelligence agencies believe the Iranians may have enough nuclear material to produce a bomb within a year.

The world has condemned these activities. The United Nations Security Council has demanded that Iran suspend its illegal nuclear enrichment activities. It has levied three rounds of sanctions. How has Ahmadinejad responded? With the declaration that the "Iranian nation would not retreat one iota" from its nuclear program.

So, what should we do about this growing threat? First, we must succeed in Iraq. If we fail there, it will jeopardize the democracy the Iraqis have worked so hard to build, and empower the extremists in neighboring Iran. Iran has armed and trained terrorists who have killed our soldiers in Iraq, and it is Iran that would benefit from an American defeat in Iraq.

If we retreat without leaving a stable Iraq, Iran's nuclear ambitions will be bolstered. If Iran acquires nuclear weapons — they could share them tomorrow with the terrorists they finance, arm, and train today. Iranian nuclear weapons would set off a dangerous regional nuclear arms race that would make all of us less safe.

But Iran is not only a regional threat; it threatens the entire world. It is the no. 1 state sponsor of terrorism. It sponsors the world's most vicious terrorist groups, Hamas and Hezbollah. Together, Iran and its terrorists are responsible for the deaths of Americans in Lebanon in the 1980s, in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s, and in Iraq today. They have murdered Iraqis, Lebanese, Palestinians, and other Muslims who have resisted Iran's desire to dominate the region. They have persecuted countless people simply because they are Jewish.

Iran is responsible for attacks not only on Israelis, but on Jews living as far away as Argentina. Anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial are part of Iran's official ideology and murder is part of its official policy. Not even Iranian citizens are safe from their government's threat to those who want to live, work, and worship in peace. Politically-motivated abductions, torture, death by stoning, flogging, and amputations are just some of its state-sanctioned punishments.

It is said that the measure of a country is the treatment of its most vulnerable citizens. By that standard, the Iranian government is both oppressive and barbaric. Under Ahmadinejad's rule, Iranian women are some of the most vulnerable citizens.

If an Iranian woman shows too much hair in public, she risks being beaten or killed.

If she walks down a public street in clothing that violates the state dress code, she could be arrested.

But in the face of this harsh regime, the Iranian women have shown courage. Despite threats to their lives and their families, Iranian women have sought better treatment through the "One Million Signatures Campaign Demanding Changes to Discriminatory Laws." The authorities have reacted with predictable barbarism. Last year, women's rights activist Delaram Ali was sentenced to 20 lashes and 10 months in prison for committing the crime of "propaganda against the system." After international protests, the judiciary reduced her sentence to "only" 10 lashes and 36 months in prison and then temporarily suspended her sentence. She still faces the threat of imprisonment.

Earlier this year, Senator Clinton said that "Iran is seeking nuclear weapons, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is in the forefront of that" effort. Senator Clinton argued that part of our response must include stronger sanctions, including the designation of the IRGC as a terrorist organization. John McCain and I could not agree more.

Senator Clinton understands the nature of this threat and what we must do to confront it. This is an issue that should unite all Americans. Iran should not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. Period. And in a single voice, we must be loud enough for the whole world to hear: Stop Iran!

Only by working together, across national, religious, and political differences, can we alter this regime's dangerous behavior. Iran has many vulnerabilities, including a regime weakened by sanctions and a population eager to embrace opportunities with the West. We must increase economic pressure to change Iran's behavior.

Tomorrow, Ahmadinejad will come to New York. On our soil, he will exercise the right of freedom of speech — a right he denies his own people. He will share his hateful agenda with the world. Our task is to focus the world on what can be done to stop him.

We must rally the world to press for truly tough sanctions at the U.N. or with our allies if Iran's allies continue to block action in the U.N. We must start with restrictions on Iran's refined petroleum imports.

We must reduce our dependency on foreign oil to weaken Iran's economic influence.

We must target the regime's assets abroad; bank accounts, investments, and trading partners.

President Ahmadinejad should be held accountable for inciting genocide, a crime under international law.

We must sanction Iran's Central Bank and the Revolutionary Guard Corps — which no one should doubt is a terrorist organization.

Together, we can stop Iran's nuclear program.

Senator McCain has made a solemn commitment that I strongly endorse: Never again will we risk another Holocaust. And this is not a wish, a request, or a plea to Israel's enemies. This is a promise that the United States and Israel will honor, against any enemy who cares to test us. It is John McCain's promise and it is my promise.

Thank you.

NH Paper comes out against Barry

2008-09-21T14:00:00.000-07:00

It's not the Barry we knew (sob!)

Obama in the mud: So much for honesty

16 hours, 54 minutes ago

When Barack Obama first began campaigning in New Hampshire in early 2007, many voters swooned. We watched him speak to retirees in Claremont one snowy February day that year. Not a single voter we talked with before he spoke planned to vote for him. Afterwards, many said they would. The word that spontaneously came from the lips of multiple attendees: sincere. They couldn't remember a politician who spoke with such sincerity, they said. And many of them had been voting since World War II.

We wonder what those same voters think of Obama's sincerity now. In the past few weeks, Obama has thrown so many false accusations against John McCain that just keeping track of them has become difficult. And these aren't innocent errors. They are deliberate distortions of the sort Obama has always said he reviles.

Click for Editorials & Op-Eds

On Thursday, Obama said of McCain, "He has consistently opposed the sorts of common-sense regulations that might have lessened the current crisis." That's entirely untrue.

As The Washington Post pointed out in an editorial on Friday, McCain in fact has supported many new regulations of financial institutions, including some that Obama opposed. "In 2006, he pushed for stronger regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- while Mr. Obama was notably silent," The Post wrote.

Obama attacked McCain for having a top financial advisor who supported a deregulation bill a few years ago. Yet two top Obama financial advisors, with whom he met on Friday to help him form his response to the current troubles on Wall Street, supported the same bill, which was signed by President Clinton.

Also last week, Obama released a Spanish-language ad that portrayed McCain as anti-immigrant and anti-Hispanic and tried to link him to immigration policies that were not his own as well as some choice Rush Limbaugh quotes that appeared to insult Mexicans.

Anyone who has followed the immigration debate knows that McCain is the most pro-immigration Republican on the national stage and that he is not in the least anti-Hispanic. To pull quotes from Rush Limbaugh, who has completely different immigration views than McCain and who opposed him on that issue for years (and still does) is completely disingenuous. The ad is so bad that even The New York Times called it "misleading."

Obama's campaign also accused McCain of lying when McCain's campaign ran an ad saying that Obama supported sex education for kindergarteners. But the bill in question, which Obama supported in the Illinois state Senate, did indeed change state law to allow sex education for kindergarteners.

Obama has said that he won't attack John McCain's motives, only his policies. But he has repeatedly attacked McCain's motives, suggesting that he has been bought off by oil companies and lobbyists.

Obama's greatest strength as a candidate, aside from his oratorical skill, has long been his apparent sincerity and decency. Voters attracted to him think of him as that rarest of things: an honest politician. He has claimed himself that he would never engage in the sort of deceptive politicking that he says has tainted Washington for so long.

Yet here he is violating his own professed standards. This is not the Barack Obama so many voters in New Hampshire and elsewhere thought they knew. But it is the real Barack Obama. For despite his rhetoric, he is in fact campaigning so dishonestly that even The Washington Post and The New York Times have called him on it. Which means that he is in practice no different from those regular politicians against whom his entire campaign has been built.

http://tinyurl.com/4jxshd

Barry, Caught In Another Lie

2008-09-21T10:55:00.000-07:00

altered states: Changes Web editors hoped you wouldn't notice.

Did Obama Just Touch the Third Rail?Curious edits to his Social Security page.

By Peter Bray
Posted Friday, Sept. 19, 2008, at 4:36 PM ET

Barack Obama is such a hard-core wonk, his camp grinds through policy day in, day out. That may be a great quality to have in a president—but it's not necessarily a smart strategy for a presidential candidate just weeks before an election.

And this week the Obama campaign modified his position on a sensitive issue: Social Security. Compare the current "Seniors & Social Security" page with the previous version. Now, tell me why, oh why, would the Obama campaign decide to delete the following sentence: "[Obama] does not believe it is necessary or fair to hardworking seniors to raise the retirement age." Is he trying to stoke anxiety about his position on Social Security?

The new page includes some reassuring language about "work[ing] with members of Congress from both parties to strengthen Social Security and prevent privatization while protecting middle class families from tax increases or benefit cuts." Still, for those who pay attention to such things, what the new page leaves out is as important as what it puts in.

A move to the center post-convention is a well-worn path. Here are some other changes to the Obama Web site:

On education, now Obama apparently expects those who qualify for college tax credits to join jailbirds picking up trash for 100 hours on the freeway (or whatever else "community service" entails these days). Meanwhile, his position on charter schools has gotten both more pro and more con: Under the section headlined (in bold) "Close Low-Performing Charter Schools," it notes that he wants to double federal funding for them.
On the rural-issues page, he has removed the mention of pollution from industrial agriculture.
His technology page sees a drastic edit of his position on Internet privacy. He still wants to "protect the openness of the Internet," just not in such detail.
On family issues, the detail that Obama "strongly opposed" the 2005 bankruptcy bill has been removed. But there's still a lot of language in there about the "dangerous and sometimes unscrupulous business practices" of the subprime mortgage industry!

Obama could take a lesson from McCain's calciferous Web site. Mild, vague platitudes. Strong, meaningless adjectives. No details. Given the huge interest in Sarah Palin, you'd think the campaign might have wanted to take advantage and add some cool new info about America's most popular governor. Yet the recent update to her bio more or less rewords her convention speech. Yawn.

Finally, on the subject of biographies, notice how Jill Biden's biography scales back her involvement with Delaware Boots on the Ground, a group that helps military families. In the earlier version, she "created" the organization. In the latest, she just "joined" it.

http://www.slate.com/id/2200517/

Doufus loses it again

2008-09-21T10:50:00.001-07:00

Blah blah blah blah blah? This coming from a presidential candidate????

Barry Shouts At Senior Citizen

2008-09-21T08:04:00.000-07:00

The doufus is losing it.

Barry Starring in Veggie Burger Hill

2008-09-20T14:47:00.000-07:00

whaddadoufus

What is truth? What is Wisdom

2008-09-20T07:12:00.001-07:00

What asketh men to have?

Palin and Obama: What Really Is Wisdom?
by Victor Davis Hanson
PajamasMedia.com

Palin vs. Obama

The race unfortunately has been framed the last two weeks by Democrats as one of Obama versus Palin. That will stop as Obama realizes he loses should it continue. Nevertheless, the comparison of the respective experiences of a McCain and Obama is so much in favor of the former, that it requires no discussion. So I turn to Palin, given the charges that she is unfit and clueless.

Is Palin Tough?

I have been asked by many why I have such confidence in a rookie Alaskan governor, given the rigors of the campaign to follow. (Many Republican pundits apparently do not.) I think we are starting to see the answers to that question. The proverbial “they” hacked into her private email accounts. They swore that her daughter was the real mother of her Down Syndrome baby. They sent legions of reporters and lawyers to Alaska to dig up dirt. They wrote columns suggesting that she was stupid, uneducated, dishonest, a liar, and worse still. All this was the work of moralists, who, in their more extreme manifestations, tried to flood a Chicago radio station to disrupt guests, who doctored photos of McCain to subvert his portrait, who disgraced the Atlantic brand by trafficking in pregnancy rumors, and who now publish the private email of Palin.

And? She is still smiling and apparently unmoved. Had they done this to Biden, he would have gone berserk. Wait — they didn’t do this to Biden, and he seems near berserk in his daily gaffes.

So Who Is Really Experienced?

The point is this: I think it is much harder for a mother of three or four in an out-of-the-way Alaskan town to get elected to city council and the mayorship, then take on the entire Republican establishment and get elected governor than it is for a Barack Obama to emerge from Chicago politics into the Illinois state house and later Senate. The qualities that allowed a Palin to succeed without the power spouse, the identity politics, the Ivy-League cache, the fawning New York editors and D.C. insider-press will ensure she does not implode on the campaign trail — and won’t in office either.

Barack Obama, in contrast, on numerous occasions has complained how tiring, how hard, how unfair, how racist the campaign has turned out to be; Palin never. I could not imagine Obama doing his hope and change thing in the Senate while holding a one-year-old and checking on four more children at home. And I wager shooting a moose or trying to navigate a snowmobile in the chill is a little harder than shooting baskets in one’s down time or offering riffs to the fainting at a Beverly Hills get together or Presidio Heights fundraiser.

Again my point? That the much deprecated “life experience” is every bit as important to leadership as is abstract learning. Both complement each other, but so far I think Palin understands the symbiotic world of word and the world of deed far more so than does Obama. And again, we are not talking about McCain, where the contrast only widens–and is far more important.

Word and Deed, Head and Arm

Let me be a bit more specific still and indulge a bit from what I saw of these two worlds. I spent nine years as an undergraduate and graduate student — three at UC Santa Cruz, four at Stanford University, and two in Athens, Greece. In that near decade, I met all sorts of supposedly brilliant professors, undergraduates, and graduate students in the humanities — Ivy-League Ph.Ds, whiz-kids with Oxford and Cambridge degrees, Rhodes Scholars, famous archaeologists, accomplished classicists and historians, well-know humanities scholars, and Oxbridge Dons with landmark books on history and philology. In addition, the last five years I have worked at Stanford again, and often have met another array of brilliant entrepreneurs, in fields as diverse as finance, law, medicine, engineering, and computers.

I contrast all this with growing up my first 18 years in southwestern Fresno County on a 120-acre tree and vine farm, where for most of my life I knew only neighbors who worked the soil, and survived the tough environment of the local schools. And then once again from age 26 to my mid-forties, I farmed as well as taught, and so I had a good idea of what the highly educated did during the day, and what the farmers and small businesspeople did on weekends and late afternoons.

Two conclusions I drew from all of this. While civilization advances on the shoulders of the educated, it is carried along by the legs of the muscular classes. And the latter are not there by some magical IQ test or a natural filtering process that separates the wheat from the chaff, but rather by either birth, or, as often, by their preference for action and the physical world.

Second, I have seen no difference in intelligence levels between those who inhabit the world of the physical and those who cultivate the life of the mind. That is, the most brilliant Greek philologists seemed no more impressive in their aptitude than the fellow who could take apart the transmission of an old Italian Oliver tractor, fix it, and put it back together — without a manual. And I knew three or four who could. The inept mechanic seemed no more dull than the showy graduate student who could not distinguish an articular infinitive from an accusative of respect.

My seventy-year old Austrian professor who, off the cuff, could recite the lettering peculiarities of some 100 or so Athenian inscriptions on stone was brilliant — but no more intuitive or impressive than my grandfather who at 86 could scan 100 rows of vines under irrigation, instantly access how many acre feet of water were in the field, how many more needed, and then screw up or down an iron gate on a 20-foot standpipe and ensure the ditch water reached the end of each row — and only the end of each row.

You know all this in your hearts.

For most of you readers, all this is trite and self-evident. But apparently not for hundreds in politics, the media, the universities, Hollywood, and the foundations who seem to think that a fumbling nervous Obama in interviews, who grasps for a word and utters vacuous platitudes is “really” contemplative, like his Harvard Law professors; but when a Sarah Palin seems nervous under scrutiny from a pseudo-professorial, glasses-on-the-lower-nose Charlie Gibson, she is clearly an empty head with an Idaho BA.

A Ronald Reagan knew more about human nature, and thus what drives the Soviet Union than did all the Ivy-League Soviet specialists that surrounded Jimmy Carter — much less the Sally Quins and Maureen Dowds of that age. We in America, unlike the Europeans, know this intuitively, grasp that a Harry Truman figured out the Russian communists far better than did the Harvard-educated aristocrat FDR.

A Sense of Balance

I am not calling for yokelism, or a proponent of false-populism. Rather, I wish to remind everyone that there are two fonts of wisdom: formal education, and the tragic world of physical challenge and ordeal. Both are necessary to be broadly educated. Familiarity with Proust or Kant is impressive, but not more impressive than the ability to wire your house or unclog the labyrinth of pipes beneath it.

In this regard, I think Palin can speak, and reason, and navigate with bureaucrats and lawyers as well as can Obama; but he surely cannot understand hunters, and mechanics and carpenters like she can. And a Putin or a Chavez or a Wall-Street speculator that runs a leverage brokerage house is more a hunter than a professor or community organizer. Harvard Law School is not as valuable a touchstone to human nature as raising five children in Alaska while going toe-to-toe with pretty tough, hard-nose Alaskan males.

What Is Wisdom?

Not necessarily degrees, glibness, poise, or factual recall, but the ability to understand human nature. And that requires two simple things: an inductive method of reasoning to look at the world empirically, and a body of knowledge and experience to draw on for guidance.

Palin in empirical fashion bucked the Republican establishment and the old-boy network when she thought it was unreasonable; Obama never figured out or at least never questioned Tony Rezko or the Chicago machine, Trinity Church or the Pelosi-Kennedy liberal mantra — unless it proved advantageous. Palin draws on everything from position papers on ANWR to how to keep four screaming kids fed and bathed; Obama on Harvard Law Review and dispensing more public money to more Chicago interest groups.

That’s a simplification, but also an answer to the old Euripidean question “What is wisdom?”