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Monday, May 31, 2010
God speaks.
Obama delays cancels speech at Lincoln National Cemetery because of lightning. This may not be safe," he tells audience.
The Obama Trifecta: Incompetence, Arrogance, Animus
Roger Kimball says it well.
I believe that Obama is unique in the annals of American history. It’s not any individual quality — if “quality” is the right word: perhaps “attribute” would be better — that sets him apart. It’s the combination of attributes. What are those attributes?
Peggy Noonan touched on one: enormous, all-encompassing, stupefying incompetence. The man can pose. He can preen. He cannot, judging by his performance these last eighteen months, govern. His handling, which is to say his ostentatious mishandling of the BP oil spill, is only the latest evidence that he is wildly out of his depth. That episode is shaping up to be the greatest environmental disaster in U.S. history. What has Obama done to address it? What would he do were we confronted with another sort of existential calamity? How would he react?
But incompetence is only one aspect of Obama’s make up. Two other attributes along with an under-appreciated, or at least under-commented on, character flaw that we must ponder in order to take the full measure of this post-modern American politician.
The other two attributes are 1) arrogance and 2) ideological animus.
What General Giap Can Teach Republicans About Winning in November
There’s an interesting essay by J. Robert Smith in Pajamas Media on what Republicans can learn from General Giap, the man who led the North Vietnamese to victory against both the French and Americans.
The advice caused me to think how Republican challengers can beat Democrat incumbents this November.
Assume that the Democrat incumbents are not particularly bad, not tainted by scandal, even Blue Dogs. How can they be beaten? We have an example right here in Virginia Beach: Glenn Nye. Nye is a Blue Dog who voted against ObamaCare and Cap and Trade. Outraged Democrats have written letters to the editor (and had them printed) denouncing Nye for being a traitor. His other votes are found here. That makes him a moderate as far as Democrats go. He beat a Republican incumbent, Thelma Drake in the last election.
Here’s what caught my eye:
Beyond the communist claptrap, Giap recognized that the Vietnamese who sided with the communists weren’t fighting for a workers’ paradise and international brotherhood. Pro-communist Vietnamese — peasants who did the bulk of the fighting and dying — did so to achieve national independence. Vietnam had a long history of invasion and occupation. Most Hanoi-supporting Vietnamese had a simple but powerful motivation: freedom from foreign domination.Voters, like fighters, need to be for something or someone.
Though successful challenges are mostly about making elections referendums on incumbents, voters still need reasons to be for challengers. Giving voters compelling reasons to cast ballots for challengers is an important part of the mix.
Nye is no wild eyed Liberal. He understands that he represents the military, the largest employer – the biggest business – in his distinct. What is the simplest and most powerful motivation that most American have? If the Vietnamese wanted freedom from foreign domination, most Americans want freedom from Liberal domination. They want to throw off the shackles that Obama, Pelosi, and Reed want to fasten to us. They are fearful of the crushing debt that Washington is loading on them and their children in perpetuity. They are fearful of the destruction of private enterprise as government takes over more of the economy. They are fearful that the freedom to be left alone, to live their lives as they wish, is being taken from them by ever more intrusive government command and control. They are fearful of power crazed Congressmen and women who pass two thousand page bills changing the very fabric of their personal lives without even once reading it. They see hollow men and women pretend to competence when it becomes ever more apparent that even basic understanding of facts is totally lacking.
They have thrown off the blinders that the media imposed and realize”HopeN’Change” is not a policy. That a President whose response to the biggest oil spill in American history is to point fingers and yell: “Plug the damn hole” then goes golfing followed by a vacation lacks not merely competence but any shred of empathy for the people of the country.
If I were the Republican candidate the November, I would tell the voters that Glenn Nye is probably a nice man. He’s probably an honorable man. But he’s Nancy Pelosi’s man. And if he goes back to Washington, he’ll vote for Pelosi for Speaker. And when critical votes are needed to pass bills that Obama, Pelosi and Reed want passed, Glenn Nye will vote the way they tell him – because he’s a Democrat. Glenn Nye will appear in my ad campaign, if he appears at all, embraced by Nancy Pelosi, voting for Nancy Pelosi, supporting Nancy Pelosi. In Virginia Beach, if the Republicans are wise, the vote will not be about Glenn Nye, it will be a vote against Obama, Pelosi and Reed.
And I would tie Glenn Nye to the Virginian Pilot. There is little question that they will support him in the election, but that isn't the main point. People hate the arrogance and condescension of the media as much as they hate the Liberals in Congress. I would excerpt every laudatory comment the cretins at the Pilot ever made about Glenn Nye and tell the people that he's a creature of the media.
And I would tie Glenn Nye to the Virginian Pilot. There is little question that they will support him in the election, but that isn't the main point. People hate the arrogance and condescension of the media as much as they hate the Liberals in Congress. I would excerpt every laudatory comment the cretins at the Pilot ever made about Glenn Nye and tell the people that he's a creature of the media.
Newt Gingrich and the Republicans won Congress in 1994 by making the election a national referendum. They had to create a national platform, the “Contract with America” to accomplish this, over the ridicule and opposition of the MFM. The sins committed by the Democrats prior to 1994 (remember the House Post Office?) were minor compared to the naked aggression they have shown against Middle America since the last election. This time a groundswell already exists. The Tea Party movement is proof of that. The campaign has been created by events, not focus groups. All it takes is an understanding of what people want and what people fear and people like Glenn Nye will be swept from the board.
Political pundits who see 1994 as a tsunami are going to be shocked by 2010. It will be like the Exxon Valdez compared to the BP well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. And the Democrats will be unable to cap it.
America is not in decline, America’s biggest weakness is its political class, where the decline is indisputable . . . .
America is not in decline, America’s biggest weakness is its political class, where the decline is indisputable . . . .
Mark Tapscott: Will journalists wake up in time to save journalism from the FTC?
This wouldn’t be happening if Obama was President. Impeach Sarah Palin!
If only Barack Obama had been elected and old John McCain hadn’t died, we wouldn’t have a clueless radical demagogue in the White House whose only talent is giving a speech to fire up the rubes.
If only we had listened to the media.
Oh wait ….
If only Barack Obama had been elected and old John McCain hadn’t died, we wouldn’t have a clueless radical demagogue in the White House whose only talent is giving a speech to fire up the rubes.
If only we had listened to the media.
Oh wait ….
Being pushed too far.
Dave Warren Online ...
Familiar with the attitudes of Middle Americans from living among them (unlike the urban intelligentsia of East and West Coasts), Harris provides an apologia for them that is only slightly condescending. They are people whose whole ethos is "live and let live," yet are accused of intolerance for failing to embrace progressive agendas. They are also people who powerfully resent being told how to live. And they have been pushed too far.
The Tea Party movement has arisen in the U.S. (and could easily arise in English Canada) to redress an imbalance. The election of Barack Obama put a crown on the exponential growth of the state, and his extremely ambitious statist agenda is taking Middle America, very fast, to places it has never wanted to go.
Whether you like or dislike Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh (I adore them both), they have articulated the spirit of rebellion against taxes and debt, against sprawling, parasitical bureaucracies, and against "the culture of death."
To the mainstream media -- to that liberal elite generally -- the question has not been whether we should have vast intrusive bureaucracies, but rather, what their policies should be, and how to pay for them. That is their playing field, on which they locate some "middle ground" or scrimmage line -- itself shifting constantly to the left, toward some vague, Utopian endzone. It comes as an inconceivable shock to them to discover millions of people who are not merely pushing back against this "progress" -- which they could understand -- but want no part of the game.
The Progressives always have a better public platform because that's where they are. Middle America doesn't write editorials, it works in factories and stores and offices. It's focus is on family, faith, the home and neighborhood. They don't hone their debating skills and so they are ill prepared for the ridicule of Jon Stewart and the would-be Jon Stewart writing for the local newspaper.
But like an animal that can become aggressive when it is tormented, these people can turn on their sophisticated "betters." And when they do, the intelligentsia who thought they had the lumpen proletariat in check get very afraid. Especially when they discover that they don't have any answers, no money, their answers don't work, and their emptiness is exposed. Shouting "Plug the hole" doesn't plug the hole. Telling people that you are thinking about their problems as you wake and when you sleep does exactly nothing about fixing the problem.
We have had over a century and a half of domestic peace in this country. That run of domestic tranquility maybe ending.The problem arises between these two amorphous groups when the latter take the former to be their milch cows. At least in America, that is the point at which the hicks suddenly become seriously interested in politics, organize themselves into things like Tea Parties, and go out looking for results.
This is complicated by the fact that Nanny State has come to the end of her fiscal road. Her ambitions have so far outstripped her means, that we are faced with public finance implosions. In the case of the U.S., deficits and debts were unsustainable even before President Obama and a Democrat-controlled Congress put the country on track to double them.
Any way you look at it, the crunch is coming. I do not have the illusion it will be painless, for the Nanny State is utterly unprepared for, and was anyway ill-equipped to handle, popular rebellion.
Nor have we anywhere in view the sort of politicians who could ride the tiger; who have any notion how to radically downsize a government peacefully. Yet we are getting beyond the sort of thing we can vote on.
Greens ditch polar bears. They eat too many baby seals.
The polar bear population has increased five-fold in the last 50 years. Besides, they are not nearly cuddly enough. So academic researchers are working on other symbols to make us give up rational thought and believe in man-made global warming.
It has begun to dawn on the environmental crowd that the fact that we now have five times as many polar bears as we did 50 years ago has diminished their value as a symbol of the Goddess Earth being tortured by the sins — or at least the SUVs — of Man.
The fact that they are the largest land (or ice) based predator also is a drawback.
Enter Ben Norman of EurekAlert: “Climate change is about more than just polar bears. That is the message from Dr. Kate Manzo whose research into climate change communication has been published in Meteorological Applications. The research, which reviews the efforts of journalists, campaigners and politicians to engage the British public with climate change, explores how new ‘visual strategies’ can communicate climate change messages against a backdrop of increased climate skepticism.”
It occurs to me that these people are totally unaware that the Internet can be accessed by anyone and that if they communicate via this medium, we peons in the cheap seats can find out what they plan to do to have us put our brains on ice and react like Pavlov's dogs to their stimuli.
My job right now is just to make sure that everybody in the Gulf understands this is what I wake up to in the morning and this is what I go to bed at night thinking about: the spill.
Chicagoboyz:
This statements suggests to me that Obama is probably not a citizen of the planet Earth, but rather a citizen of the planet Grqx, an interesting world located about 75,000 light-years away. The laws of nature are different on Grqx…indeed, the laws of nature are suspended there, because of the powerful force field of magic that exists on that planet. On Grqx, thinking or talking about something is equivalent to doing something about it…indeed, the magic works better if you don’t think or talk directly about the problem you’re trying to fix, but rather about your own feelings about that problem…even better, your feelings about your feelings.
Memorial Day
From Vanderleun.
"They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them." ~ Laurence Binyon
Witch hunts, approved and disapproved
Don Surber finds the un-surprising differences between State Attorneys General when it comes to investigating possible misdeeds on college campi.
Dog bites man.
From the San Francisco Examiner: “On Tuesday afternoon, Attorney General Jerry Brown said he was launching a “broad investigation” into the alleged dumping of documents and to examine finances of the CSU Stanislaus Foundation, which is hosting the June 25 event featuring the former governor of Alaska and vice presidential candidate.”
From Jerry Brown: “This is not about Sarah Palin. She has every right to speak at a university event…. The issues are public disclosure and financial accountability in organizations embedded in state-run universities.”
This of course was the first time the attorney general of California ever looked into a foundation after a speaker was hired. No inquiry was made publicly into the contracts of the various commencement speakers this year.
The faculty was silent.
But in Virginia, there is a different reaction to an inquiry.
From Canada Free Press: 810 “Virginia scientists and academics signed a petition launched by the activist Union of Concerned Scientists, protesting Commonwealth Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s investigation of former University of Virginia professor Michael Mann. The American Association of University Professors likewise opposes Cuccinelli, who is seeking documents from UVA, to determine whether there are grounds to prosecute Mann for violating the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, by presenting false or misleading information in support of applications for state-funded research.”
Cries of academic freedom only come when a liberal is examined, just like the press complaining of a lack of presidential press conferences only when a Republican is president.
Screwy.
Dog bites man.
Obama’s decision to make nice to the Arabs and insult Israel did not go unnoticed.
This is another one of those: This wouldn’t be happening if Obama was President. Impeach Sarah Palin! moments.
So far only 16 are dead. That count will go higher.
Richard Fernandez has the details on the clash between the Israeli navy and a flotilla of boats trying to break the Gaza/Hamas blockade.
So far only 16 are dead. That count will go higher.
Richard Fernandez has the details on the clash between the Israeli navy and a flotilla of boats trying to break the Gaza/Hamas blockade.
The ‘aid flotilla’ bound for Gaza met the immovable object and the resulting clash, under circumstances yet only sketchily described, may have resulted in 16 protester deaths and 6 IDF personnel injured.
It seems all those Harvard-faculty theories about how to get a Mideast peace agreement are not working like they assured themselves they would. Of course, a nuclear war there would soon lead to the peace of death. Maybe that was the plan all the time.
Is this the part where Emperor Palpatine says "I have foreseen it. Everything is going to plan?"Together those three developments — the shadow of the Iranian nukes, the missiles of Hezbollah and the loss of American support — may have fostered a regional perception that Israel is vulnerable. Certainly the flotilla organizers could not have been insensible to the rising pressure on Israel and were determined to exploit it, nor was it lost on the IDF that if they showed weakness in the face of the flotilla there would be more to follow. In one sense the flotilla put to sea on the perceived political tides and were met by IDF elements sailing on the contrary currents. The result was a clash inconsequential in itself, but not in the sparks that it may generate.
The problem is that the strategy of pressuring Israel to win brownie points with the Arab world and get the peace negotiations moving is a two edged sword. Its proponents may hope that it will provide space for the diplomats to maneuver. Having failed for decades to pull on the Arab side of the rope, they will now try the Israeli end. But it also embolden’s Israel’s enemies and makes the Jewish state that much more paranoid. The combination of Syrian and Iranian thrusting and the Israeli determination to defend itself at all costs can lead to a dangerous situation. Certainly there is enough explosive in the region to make things dangerous. Recently, the Times of London reported that Israeli nuclear armed submarines are now on rotating patrol off Iran’s coast.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
"The Dead."
Gerard Vanderleun on this Memorial Day:
In the Battle of Soissons in July of 1918, 12,000 men (Americans and Germans) were killed in four days. Vast crops of white crosses sprouted from the fields their rows and columns fading into the distance as they marched back from the roadside like an army of the dead called to attention until the end of time. American cemeteries merged with French cemeteries that merged with German cemeteries; their only distinction being the flags that flew over what one took to be the center of the arrangement. I suppose one could find out the number of graves in these serried ranks. Somewhere they keep the count. Governments are especially good at counting. But it is enough to know they are beyond numbering by an individual; that the mind would cease before the final number was reached.
To have even a hundredth of those cemeteries in the United States now would be more than we, as a nation, could bear. It would not be so much the dead within it, but the truth that made it happen that would be unbearable. This is, of course, what we are as a nation fiddling about with on this Memorial Day. We count our war dead daily now, but we count mostly on the fingers of one hand, at times on two. Never in numbers now beyond our ability to imagine. This is not because we cannot die daily in large numbers in a war. September 11th proved to us that we still die in the thousands, but many among us cannot now hold that number as a reality, but only as a "tragic" exception that need not have happened and will -- most likely -- never happen again.
That, at least, is the mind set that I assume when I read how the "War on Terror" is but a bumper strip. In a way, that's preferable to the the mind set that now, in increasing numbers among us, prefers to take refuge in the unbalanced belief that 9/11 was actually something planned and executed by the American government. Why many of my fellow Americans prefer this "explanation" is something that I once felt was beyond comprehension. Now I see it is just another comfortable position taken up by those for whom the habits of automatic treason have become just another fashionable denigration of the country that has made their liberty to believe the worst of it not only possible but popular.
Like the graves in my local cemetery, these souls too bear within them a small flag, but that flag -- unlike their souls -- is white and, in its increasing rootedness in our body politic signals not sacrifice for the advancement of the American experiment, but the abject surrender of their lives to small spites and the tiny victories of lifestyle liberation.
Dear Mr. Obama, Thank You for Doing the Right Thing on Memorial Day.
Thank you for not going to Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day. There is something sacred about that place and about that day. Those who bled and died for this country deserve to be honored and saluted by people who love their country and honor their sacrifice.
You don’t belong there. Thank you for realizing that and going to Chicago.
This wouldn’t be happening if Obama was President. Impeach Sarah Palin!
If only Barack Obama had been elected and old John McCain hadn’t died, we wouldn’t have a clueless radical demagogue in the White House whose only talent is giving a speech to fire up the rubes.
If only we had listened to the media.
Oh wait ….
If only we had listened to the media.
Oh wait ….
Hi Neighbor!
Iowahawk does it again!
Read the whole thing.
Special Guest Commentary
by the Sarah Palin Homunculus that Lives Inside Liberals' Heads
Knockity knock!
Oh hi there! I was out shooting caribou on the Arctic Cat and saw your synapse lights on, and so I said to myself, "now, gosh darn it, Sarah, you've been living inside this nice person's cerebral cortex for, what is it, almost two years now? By golly, it's about time you dropped in at their frontal lobe with a plate of your famous homemade Alaska welcome wagon cookies and introduced yourself." So anyhoo, I sure hope you like 'em. Don't want to give out a family recipe, but the secret ingredient is baby seal. I clubbed 'em fresh this morning!
Oh my goodness... you look kind of confused. I get that a lot! You were probably thinking, "hey, I only wanted to move next door to Sarah Palin -- now what in the goshdarned heck is she doing inside my brain?" Well ya see, the deal is I'm not Sarah, but boy I gotta tell ya, we sure do get mistaken all the time! No, I'm just a plain ol' homunculus Sarah Palin that your own id created to sublimate your deep-seated psychosexual neuroses. Or so those egghead books say, anyway. But if you ask me that sure sounds like a lot of elite Anti-America liberal professor gobbledegook! By the way, your id says hi.
Read the whole thing.
What Our Media Taught Me
Victor Davis Hanson:
Read the whole thing.Perspective and distance are sometime valuable. I used to think, given the enormous size of the bureaucracy and the tragic nature of the human condition, that from time to time disasters would overwhelm us — and there would be not much the president of the United States could do about them. But after Katrina, the media taught me that neither the mayor nor the governor nor the Army Corps of Engineers nor the people of New Orleans were at fault for either the vulnerability to the chance of a catastrophic Katrina or the response after its arrival. No, you see, the commander in chief is the ultimate arbiter of successful or unsuccessful reactions to all such disasters. OK, so be it.
So while I am not inclined to blame Barack Obama for the scandalous federal laxity in the now polluted Gulf, the media long ago taught me that I most certainly should.
I don’t play golf. Never have swung a club. But in the spirit of live and let live, I also never cared much for deconstructing the game in terms of culture and sociology. The media, however, in 2002, taught met that I should in the case of George Bush — that his swing and even his use of a golf cart reflected a certain class disdain for us, or at least a frat-boy frivolity at a time of two ongoing wars. So while I would like to give our present president a pass on his obsession with playing golf at a frequency far in excess to poor George Bush’s, I cannot. I am conditioned now to grasp that Obama’s golf craze is a sort of self-indulgence reflective of a disturbing narcissist who entertains a shocking indifference toward the rest of us.
The Asher doctrine applied
Powerline:
"Simply put, while McClatchy's motto is 'Truth to Power,' Asher relies on the assumption that congressmen always tell the truth. So, in the spirit of understanding what this means to McClatchy, a few other stories Asher can publish and upon which he can stake the reputation of McClatchy reporters." Rubin offers these stories:
1. "Guam is sinking." Rep. Hank Johnson (D., Ga.) said it, that's good enough for me.
2. "Aliens visit earth, stalk Denis Kucinich." After all, Rep. Denis Kucinich (D., Ohio) says it's true.
3. "Robert Mugabe is blameless in Zimbabwe's collapse." Nothing to see here: Forget the famine, forget the thuggery, forget the hyperinflation. Mugabe was just righting wrongs. After all, Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D., Ga.) said so.
4. "Television broadcasts began years earlier than we realized." After all, Joe Biden said Franklin D. Roosevelt got on TV to explain the stock market crash in 1929, even though commercial broadcasts only began the next decade.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Peggy Noonan: "He Was Supposed to Be Competent ." He was? By Whom?
Peggy Noonan wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal about Obama’s handling of the Gulf oil spill with the risible headline “He was supposed to be competent.” Leading to the inevitable question: by whom?
I would expect that the Mr. “thrill runs up my leg” Matthews would, so would Michael Moore; he considers Fidel Castro competent. So does Woody Allen who would like to see Obama as dictator for a few years, ditto for Thomas Friedman who has a not-so-sneaking admiration of the Chinese Communist government and its ability to direct its people. To the hosts who voted for Obama because he was not George Bush, to those who voted for him because he was a “clean, articulate” black man I’m not sure whether the question of competence even raised its head.
What’s baffling is that lots of people in the Center/Right, people like Peggy Noonan herself, people like law professor and blogger Ann Althouse who now regrets that vote. People like Chris Buckley who even now is making his father spin in his grave. Why were they invested in the Obama fantasy of competence or ability? Was it respect for an academic pedigree, despite the complete absence of any transcripts? Was it Harvard? Or was it the same thing that motivated the unthinking: vote against Bush and vote for the affirmative action candidate to make you feel good?
Powerline has this to add:
What is curious is that quite a few people did think that Obama would be an especially competent president. Why? What evidence was there that Obama would be a skillful administrator? Before becoming president, he had never in his life run anything more substantial than a Senate staff. His executive experience was closer to zero than that of any president in memory.
Being a good executive requires great skill. Moreover, it is not the sort of skill that anyone is born with. It takes experience to learn how to run things, to administer things, to manage things. And people. Obama has no such experience, and is therefore learning on the job. Before becoming president, he was best known for giving speeches that were often disconnected from reality. Why would anyone interpret this skill as the sign of a competent administrator?
Palin's Douchebag Stalker Suddenly Concerned About His Privacy
Joe McGinniss response to reporter coming to his door: "Get off, you're trespassing. I dont want to have to call the Wasilla Police. Get off my property. Now. I'm going to put in the call."
People who live nearby thing that McGinnis' actions are "creepy."
From JammieWearingFool:
People who live nearby thing that McGinnis' actions are "creepy."
From JammieWearingFool:
You can't make this stuff up. A deranged stalker is now so worried about his own privacy he threatens to call the police on a reporter.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Good Luck Louisiana, I'm Going on Vacation...
A little excitable, but actually a good idea. How about if Obama and his family and his retinue spend their holiday on the Gulf Coast cleaning up beaches? Spending some money where, heaven knows, people need it.
The Sestak Problem
The story coordinated by the Obama White House is so implausible as to defy belief, but it’s the best they can do in view of the situation. So how did they get here?
The problem started with Sestak who, in an effort to show his independence and differentiate himself from Specter, revealed that he had been offered a job in exchange for dropping out of the Democrat primary. Keep in mind that Sestak is not a lawyer. He’s a retired Navy Admiral. I’m convinced that he had no idea that he was accusing the Obama administration of committing a crime. The law appears to be a surprise to most of the reporters and commentators who have written about this story. It was first and primarily reported, not as a crime, but as a mild bit of sleaze.
However, since it is a criminal offense, it became a problem for the Obama Administration. Sestak continued to be blissfully unaware of the problem, stuck to his story. In fact, he could not plausibly retract it. One day someone told the media that offering a job was more than unsavory business-as-usual and now both Sestak and the Obama Administration had a problem. Sestak could not retract his story but luckily for him and Team Obama he never offered any details. Now Team Obama had a blank canvas to fill in. And Sestak, if he wanted a political future, had to cooperate, back up whatever the White House said, and make it go away.
So this is the story they came up with: “We offered Sestak an unpaid position on an obscure board (the equivalent of a White House internship) if he would give up his run for the Senate." This story is weak, unbelievable and an insult to anyone with an IQ above that of a rutabaga. It remains to be seen if the vegetables in the MFM will deep-throat this in their professional way or if this makes even them gag.
Labels:
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Liberalism,
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Obama Revises History
I was in my car listening to Rush Limbaugh when Obama began his press conference. Rush "gipped" the opening remarks Obama made. These remarks were so self-serving, so pathetically dishonest, so self aggrandizing that they could be played as a parody. In these remarks he blamed everyone else for whatever went wrong, took credit to himself for whatever was going right. It was a remarkable, and telling performance.
Obama's principal revisionism lay in his account of how his administration responded to the Deepwater Horizon explosion. To hear him tell it, the administration anticipated the worst from the beginning and reacted accordingly:...
This is pure revisionist history. A month ago, the administration's spokesmen explained that their response was graduated as understanding of the magnitude of the spill increased over time. We told the story here and here. To sum up, we can't do better than to quote the New York Times:
The federal government also had opportunities to move more quickly, but did not do so while it waited for a resolution to the spreading spill from BP....
The Department of Homeland Security waited until Thursday to declare that the incident was "a spill of national significance," and then set up a second command center in Mobile. The actions came only after the estimate of the size of the spill was increased fivefold to 5,000 barrels a day.
Read the whole thing.
Do Liberals believe that Israel should commit suicide to meet their standards?
Many observers are beginning to believe this is so. Late to the party and bringing only leftovers is a take-down of this phenomenon.
Felonies at the White House? Say it Ain't So!
David Harsanyi tells us that the Sestak bribe may be part of a pattern. He joins me and Charles Krauthammer in at first believing that the offer of a government job in return for a political act was not a crime ... in fact it was politics as usual.
Political payoffs are so commonplace in Washington that I was initially unable to muster an appropriate level of outrage at hearing that Rep. Joe Sestak had accused the Obama administration of offering him a job in exchange for his withdrawal from the Pennsylvania Democratic senatorial primary.
But it turns out not to be the case.
After reading the law in question (you see the entire thing online by searching for: "US Code -- Section 600: Promise of employment or other benefit for political activity"), it is clear that any offer of a job "directly or indirectly ... to any person as consideration, favor, or reward for any political activity ... in connection with any general or special election to any political office,or in connection with any primary election" is an illegal act.
And in case you thought that this reading of the law is partisan, here is proof that it's not ...
President Barack Obama's senior advisor David Axelrod explain to CNN's John King that though there was "no evidence" (hey, if the administration's senior advisor claims there is no evidence we should move along) if such an offer were made, it would constitute "a serious breach of the law."
Which brings us to the question: who's lying, Sestak or Obama? Let's see if there's a pattern:
If the Democratic Party's choice for the Senate in Pennsylvania is a fabulist -- as Axelrod is effectively saying -- why does Sestak's story sound so familiar to one in the Democratic Senate primary in Colorado?
In a September 2009 article headlined "D.C. job alleged as attempt to deter Romanoff," the Denver Post's Michael Riley reported that Andrew Romanoff, former speaker of the Colorado House, then still contemplating a run again against the governor-installed administration-sanctioned foot solider Michael Bennet, received an "unexpected communication" from a renowned kingmaker in Washington.
"Jim Messina, President Barack Obama's deputy chief of staff and a storied fixer in the White House political shop," wrote Riley at the time, "suggested a place for Romanoff might be found in the administration and offered specific suggestions, according to several sources who described the communication to The Denver Post."
It's beginning to be clear that Team Obama wanted to clear the decks for its candidates. Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, more than that is a pattern. My bet is that Sestak's telling the truth. I wonder if anyone will be frog marched out of the West Wing?
Silly me, Holder the Fixer is Attorney General. The Fix is in.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Tracking the President
From Rasmussen:
Obama continues to slide in the polls. That's the good news, or as Rush Limbaugh says "I hope he fails." More and more people agree. They equate Obama winning to America losing, and why not? Has he not sided with our enemies and spurned our friends?
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Wednesday shows that 23% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Forty-five percent (45%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -22. That’s the lowest Approval Index rating yet measured for this president
The MFM is still on his side, but even that may be sliding:
The Rasmussen Reports Media Meter shows that media coverage of the President has been 51% positive over the past week.
This friend of American terrorists and parishioner of America damning, racist, anti-Semites may be wondering why his policies are turning the American people against him. I happen to believe he's turning into Liberalism and Socialism's worst nightmare. This is not how it was supposed to go. Having turned the political pot up to "boil" he's not only discrediting Liberalism and Socialism to most Americans who never gave either much thought, he's going to make it more difficult for African American politicians to gain the trust of white America. After what we are experiencing with smooth talking, "clean and articulate" Obama, the next mountebank the Democrats nominate will not get the affirmative action vote.
On the other hand, Obama may have created a ready market for Black Republicans like this one: Les Phillips from Alabama. The anti-Obama. “And they’re not going to call me a racist.”
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Death of the Postmodernist Dream
For what seems to be forever, Liberals and Progressives have been telling us what a caring society should look like. It should provide generous benefits from the public treasury to the people who fail on the path of life. It should provide health care to all, paid for from that same public treasury. It should provide for a comfortable retirement at ever earlier ages, paid for in full or in part from that same public treasury. If people fall behind in their mortgage payments the public treasury should make their payments for them. If they need a new car, the treasury should provide part of the payment. If they need a new house the treasury should provide a payment. If they need new appliances the treasury should provide a payment. If they need an abortion, the treasury should pay the bill. As schools get worse and children graduate not being able to read their diplomas the public treasury should increase its school funding.
I could go on but the list of things that the government should do is, to the Liberal mind, literally limitless.
So as we head into the last 6 months before the fall elections, we finally have the answer to what happens when Liberals run things long enough. Eventually they run our of other people’s money. I was speaking to a client the other day and told him that I was hopeful despite the collapsing global economy. Because this election will be about Greece. Greece represents a nation that has implemented the policies that the Obama administration – in its wholehearted amorous embrace of the entire Liberal enchilada – lead to: national bankruptcy. And bankruptcy for a nation is not a trip to the lawyer’s office. It means rioting in the streets, people having their pay cut and streets not being repaired, broken windows staying that way. And if we go that way, there will be no Uncle Sugar to bail us out.
Victor Davis Hanson has a great essay in NRO (excerpts)
In just a few months the brave new dream world as we knew it has died — but with a whimper, not a bang.
There will be no more lectures on soft power and a Baltic-to-Mediterranean postmodern culture. Suddenly European Union expansion is dead in its tracks. The question of Turkish membership, after a decade-long controversy, has been settled without so much as a demonstration. The Europeans don’t want another Greece in their midst; the Turks don’t want German bankers running their sagging finances. A soaring Euro was supposed to reflect the sobriety of socialism; instead, it hid its profligacy, but only for a while.
So the welfare state is discredited. In the past, we used to be warned that static population growth, vast public-sector employment, early and generous retirement benefits, and high taxes were not sustainable. In recent years, those lectures were caricatured as partisan or hypothetical. No longer. The Greek meltdown — with Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain on the brink — has shown that European socialism does not work. Bankruptcy, not politics, is the final arbiter: Individuals, firms, and nations either buy particular bonds or they don’t. And a nation like Greece, in turn, either pays what it has borrowed or it doesn’t. All the op-eds in the New York Times cannot change that fact.
And that bold experiment in "Smart Diplomacy?"
I do not think the word “reset” will be used much longer to characterize American foreign policy. Reset from what to what? After all, is Iran closer to getting a bomb or further away than it was a year and a half ago? Are terrorists more or less likely to attack and kill inside the United States? Is Syria now a more or a less helpful player in the Middle East? Is Israel safer or less safe, more or less a U.S. ally? Are Putin and Chávez now more helpful players on the world scene, in appreciation of Obama’s olive branches? Does a North Korea or an Iran feel more or less emboldened to run risks in testing the status quo?
The new world order as envisioned by Obama in January 2009 was, I think, supposed to look something like the following: A social-democratic America would come to emulate the successful welfare states in the European Union. These twin Western communitarian powers would together usher in a new world order in which no one nation was to be seen as preeminent. All the old nasty ideas of the 20th century — military alliances, sovereign borders, independent international finance, religious and cultural chauvinism — would fall by the wayside, as the West was reinvented as part of the solution rather the problem it had been in its days of colonialism, imperialism, and exploitation. A new green transnationalism would assume the place of that bad old order, a transnationalism run by elite, highly educated, and socially conscious technocrats — albeit themselves Western — supported by a progressive press more interested in effecting social change than in merely reporting the tawdry news.
Most experiments in the soft sciences are hard or impossible, but Greece volunteered to be the test tube of Liberalism and Progressivism. It's what Hope N' Change looks like after a few decades. How does that look to you?
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
"Little-Noticed" is the New "Unexpected"
From Legal Insurrection: "
Click on the link for the rest.
Unexpected" has become the term of choice for the mainstream media to excuse the Obama administration's economic failures.
Yesterday I read an article in The NY Times about something unexpected in Obamacare, and one term jumped out at me (emphasis mine):
About one-third of employers subject to major requirements of the new health care law may face tax penalties because they offer health insurance that could be considered unaffordable to some employees, a new study says.... It suggests that a little-noticed provision of the law could affect far more employers than Congress had assumed.That term, "little-noticed," sure sounded familiar. It seems that we hear that term a lot.
I didn't intend on this post being so long, but the examples are so numerous:
Click on the link for the rest.
"... there is apparently no milquetoast like a reporter stiffed" by Obama
From Powerline:
It's been almost a year since Obama's last press conference, and the White House Press Corpse is OK with that. So is the local press since we hear no peep about this.
That's how a pimp treats his hos ... with contempt.
And why should we care? Knowing what we know about the desire of the MFM to roll in the hay with Obama, do we expect the White House Press Corpse to get any more information, to do any more digging, than the White House staffer who interviewed Kagan for the White House web site?
I pass along this insight from Powerline not because I expect the Press Corpse to be resurrected as a news medium, they are too far into their graves. Unlike Lazarus, they will not rise again. But it's a marker along the road that we pass to tell us how far we've come, a clue as to how badly we are served, a warning light on the dashboard telling us the engine is failing ... pick your metaphor.
And it's a constant reminder that the Internet has now become indispensable as the primary source of information to the American people.
It's been almost a year since Obama's last press conference, and the White House Press Corpse is OK with that. So is the local press since we hear no peep about this.
Obama treats them with contempt because he knows that when big tests come, they've always been on his side. There's no reason for him to think they won't be there in the future. "Most of you covered me," he told the media elite at the 2009 White House Correspondents' Association dinner. "All of you voted for me."
That's how a pimp treats his hos ... with contempt.
That's the attitude coming out of the Oval Office every day. Why does Obama do it? Because he can.
And why should we care? Knowing what we know about the desire of the MFM to roll in the hay with Obama, do we expect the White House Press Corpse to get any more information, to do any more digging, than the White House staffer who interviewed Kagan for the White House web site?
I pass along this insight from Powerline not because I expect the Press Corpse to be resurrected as a news medium, they are too far into their graves. Unlike Lazarus, they will not rise again. But it's a marker along the road that we pass to tell us how far we've come, a clue as to how badly we are served, a warning light on the dashboard telling us the engine is failing ... pick your metaphor.
And it's a constant reminder that the Internet has now become indispensable as the primary source of information to the American people.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Obama White House probe of Obama White House finds no Obama White House impropriety on Sestak
Not the sort of headline you expect in the LA Times.
Liberal commencement speaker gets bood; pig fly.
Get in their faces; punch back twice as hard.
Good for them!
Only a horrible liberal hack would lecture Arizona students about perceived “racism” at their commencement.
Unfortunately, for open-border-supporting crackpot Professor Soto, this group of graduates were not the little leftist clones she thought they were…
They booed her selfish agenda-driven speech:
We'll get around to it when we're good and ready. Until then shut up, peasants.
El Maximo Presidente Obama presents Versailles on the Potomac while hosting El Presidente Calderone
(Masque of the Red Death Ball at the White House)
Meanwhile in "another part of the forest" we see the detritus of the population of Mexico as it enters Arizona via the Sonoran desert.
This is on an 'illegal super - highway' from Mexico to the USA (Tucson) used by human smugglers.
It is estimated over 5,000 discarded backpacks are in this wash. Countless water containers, food wrappers, clothing, feces, including thousands of soiled baby diapers. And as you can see in this picture, fresh footprints leading right into it.
As we kept walking down the wash, we thought for sure it was going to end, but around every corner was more and more trash!
Oh, and lest we forget, there are real flesh and blood people involved and some of them, the prettier ones get to decorate the "rape trees."
As Michelle Obama would say: "Let the eat Wagyu."
(Masque of the Red Death Ball at the White House)
Meanwhile in "another part of the forest" we see the detritus of the population of Mexico as it enters Arizona via the Sonoran desert.
This is on an 'illegal super - highway' from Mexico to the USA (Tucson) used by human smugglers.
It is estimated over 5,000 discarded backpacks are in this wash. Countless water containers, food wrappers, clothing, feces, including thousands of soiled baby diapers. And as you can see in this picture, fresh footprints leading right into it.
As we kept walking down the wash, we thought for sure it was going to end, but around every corner was more and more trash!
Oh, and lest we forget, there are real flesh and blood people involved and some of them, the prettier ones get to decorate the "rape trees."
A rape tree is what Mexican illegals create with the panties and bras of the women they have raped along the trail to America. After they have had their way with the women and young girls, they force them to hang their panties or bras, on the trees as a sign of their conquest.
As Michelle Obama would say: "Let the eat Wagyu."
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Katyn: the long cover-up
From the New Criterion
Read the whole thing.
In the spring of 1940, the Soviet political police, NKVD, carried out a secret killing of at least 22,436 Polish prisoners; 4,421 of them were executed in Katyn. Among the countless crimes of World War II (some of them much greater in scope), this mass murder has become subject to arguably the most persistent cover-up in the twentieth century—not only by the Soviets but also, initially, by their wartime Western allies.
Read the whole thing.
Versailles on the Potomac
What is it about the Obamas that causes people peering through the glass at the White House to start seeing flashbacks to the excesses of life under the French court before the Revolution? I don’t mean casual “dates” via Air Force One to catch a Broadway show in Manhattan, inconveniencing the country’s largest city. And I certainly don’t expect the American President and his wife to have leftover meatloaf for dinner. But the image we see of the Obamas via the besotted press is one of wretched excess.
In a time when nearly a quarter of America’s population is either unemployed or underemployed, the Obamas can’t seem to help themselves.
(Masque of the Red Death Ball at the White House)
From the Torrington, CT., Register Citizen: No Taco Bell for this in-crowd
Now that you mention it, there is an amazing similarity between Marie Antoinette and Michelle Obama.
UPDATE: Doug Ross comments: "Let them eat Wagyu."
In a time when nearly a quarter of America’s population is either unemployed or underemployed, the Obamas can’t seem to help themselves.
(Masque of the Red Death Ball at the White House)
From the Torrington, CT., Register Citizen: No Taco Bell for this in-crowd
Maybe it wasn’t quite the equal of Versailles in the heydays of French monarchial extravagance. But the White House state dinner in honor of Mexico’s president certainly impressed the courtiers of the media. And why not? The gala social event did, after all, attract the top glitterati of Hollywood’s limousine liberal community.
And as if that weren’t more than sufficient cause to ooh and ahh, First Lady Michelle Obama made her regal entrance garbed in — the gawking, star-struck media chroniclers tell us — “a one-shouldered, sky-blue gown by designer Peter Soronen, cinched at the waist with a sparkly crystal-adorned belt.” For the occasion, her hubby was smartly decked out, of course, in a tux. Tables for the 200 guests were covered in triple-striped linens in “hues of Mayan blue,” and centerpieces were “handmade woven baskets gilded and filled with bouquets of fuchsia and purple gray roses, orchids, geranium foliage and prickly pear cactus.” The vittles were whipped up by guest chef Rick Bayless and included “Oregon Wagyu beef in Oaxacan black mole.”
You get the picture. No corn chips and dip out of the supermarket jar for this in-crowd. Meanwhile, President Obama and Mexico’s Felipe Calderone took a moment to offer appropriately supercilious remarks regarding the increasingly restless Tea Party peons in places like Arizona. They have turned to “potentially discriminatory” measures out of their “frustration,” said the president north of the border. This frustration apparently stems from their unschooled belief that their government ought to make at least a half-hearted effort at enforcing the nation’s immigration laws rather than ignoring these laws as a gesture of pandering to the growing Hispanic portion of the electorate.
The president south of the border subtly suggested that perhaps the Arizona ruffians’ judgment has been clouded by over-imbibing the firewater of bigotry.
You might have thought the president of Mexico would have had other concerns in the forefront of his mind besides an Arizona state law. With the nodding Obama serving as his amen corner, Calderone complained that there are divisive troublemakers in the United States who are bent on “criminalizing immigration.” Actually, it’s the United States that holds illegal immigration to be a misdemeanor and Mexico that holds illegal entry onto its soil to be a felony.
Before anybody could take exception to El Presidente’s point, however, it was time to be seated and dig into the “salad of jicama with oranges, grapefruit and pineapple citrus vinaigrette and the herb-green ceviche.”
What about the millions of destitute south of the border and the millions of unemployed or under-employed north of it?
As Marie Antoinette might have said had she been included on the guest list: “Let ’em eat tacos.”
Now that you mention it, there is an amazing similarity between Marie Antoinette and Michelle Obama.
UPDATE: Doug Ross comments: "Let them eat Wagyu."
Video News Report on "Rape Trees" Found in The Desert
According to his report:
There is something cold blooded and perverse about an American President who celebrates in a grotesque night of excess with the President of Mexico while this is going on.
A rape tree is what Mexican illegals create with the panties and bras of the women they have raped along the trail to America. After they have had their way with the women and young girls, they force them to hang their panties or bras, on the trees as a sign of their conquest.
There is something cold blooded and perverse about an American President who celebrates in a grotesque night of excess with the President of Mexico while this is going on.
U.S. Implicates North Korean Leader in Attack
WASHINGTON — A new American intelligence analysis of a deadly torpedo attack on a South Korean warship concludes that Kim Jong-il, the ailing leader of North Korea, must have authorized the torpedo assault, according to senior American officials who cautioned that the assessment was based on their sense of the political dynamics there rather than hard evidence.Not a very good sign. But then, he knew that he was facing down the Obama administration who will make this "go away."
The officials said they were increasingly convinced that Mr. Kim ordered the sinking of the ship, the Cheonan, to help secure the succession of his youngest son.
Obama on Daniel Pearl: It's an inconvenient truth.
Who but Mark Steyn can write like this?
But back to Obama and his Daniel Pearl speech:
Obama left the signing ceremony without taking a question. Because he did not want to be there. The severed head of Daniel Pearl was to him an "inconvenient truth."
Barack Obama’s remarkable powers of oratory are well known: In support of Chicago’s Olympic bid, he flew into Copenhagen to give a heartwarming speech about himself, and they gave the games to Rio. He flew into Boston to support Martha Coakley’s bid for the U.S. Senate, and Massachusetts voters gave Ted Kennedy’s seat to a Republican. In the first year of his presidency, he gave a gazillion speeches on health-care “reform” and drove support for his proposals to basement level, leaving Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to ram it down the throats of the American people through sheer parliamentary muscle.
But back to Obama and his Daniel Pearl speech:
Like a lot of guys who’ve been told they’re brilliant one time too often, President Obama gets a little lazy, and doesn’t always choose his words with care. And so it was that he came to say a few words about Daniel Pearl, upon signing the “Daniel Pearl Press Freedom Act.”Referring to Daniel Pearl's murder as if it were a natural catastrophe:
Pearl was decapitated on video by jihadist Muslims in Karachi on Feb. 1, 2002. That’s how I’d put it.
This is what the president of the United States said: “Obviously, the loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is.”
Now Obama’s off the prompter, when his silver-tongued rhetoric invariably turns to sludge. But he’s talking about a dead man here, a guy murdered in public for all the world to see. Furthermore, the deceased’s family is standing all around him. And, even for a busy president, it’s the work of moments to come up with a sentence that would be respectful, moving, and true. Indeed, for Obama, it’s the work of seconds, because he has a taxpayer-funded staff sitting around all day with nothing to do but provide him with that sentence.
Instead, he delivered the one above. Which, in its clumsiness and insipidness, is most revealing. First of all, note the passivity: “The loss of Daniel Pearl.” He wasn’t “lost.” He was kidnapped and beheaded. He was murdered on a snuff video. He was specifically targeted, seized as a trophy, a high-value scalp. And the circumstances of his “loss” merit some vigor in the prose. Yet Obama can muster none.
...
But what did the “loss” of Daniel Pearl mean? Well, says the president, it was “one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination.” Really? Evidently it never captured Obama’s imagination, because, if it had, he could never have uttered anything so fatuous. He seems literally unable to imagine Pearl’s fate, and so, cruising on autopilot, he reaches for the all-purpose bromides of therapeutic sedation: “one of those moments” — you know, like Princess Di’s wedding, Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction, whatever — “that captured the world’s imagination.”
The latest appropriation is that his “loss” “reminded us of how valuable a free press is.” It was nothing to do with “freedom of the press.” By the standards of the Muslim world, Pakistan has a free-ish and very lively press. The problem is that some 80 percent of its people wish to live under the most extreme form of Sharia, and many of its youth are exported around the world in advance of that aim. The man convicted of Pearl’s murder was Omar Sheikh, a British subject, a London School of Economics student, and, like many jihadists from Osama to the Pantybomber, a monument to the peculiar burdens of a non-deprived childhood in the Muslim world. The man who actually did the deed was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who confessed in March 2007: “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi.” But Obama’s not the kind to take “guilty” for an answer, so he’s arranging a hugely expensive trial for KSM amid the bright lights of Broadway.
Listen to his killer’s words: “The American Jew Daniel Pearl.” We hit the jackpot! And then we cut his head off. Before the body was found, The Independent’s Robert Fisk offered a familiar argument to Pearl’s kidnappers: Killing him would be “a major blunder . . . the best way of ensuring that the suffering” — of Kashmiris, Afghans, Palestinians — “goes unrecorded.” Other journalists peddled a similar line: If you release Danny, he’ll be able to tell your story, get your message out, “bridge the misconceptions.” But the story did get out; the severed head is the message; the only misconception is that that’s a misconception.
Obama left the signing ceremony without taking a question. Because he did not want to be there. The severed head of Daniel Pearl was to him an "inconvenient truth."
Rush Limbaugh explains "net neutrality"
If there is one thing that Rush is an expert on it's communication. He know that inside and out. His explantion of "net neutrality" is spot on and blood chilling. And it's what our new overlords want to enforce.
He quotes of Obama Czar Cass Sunstein:
Ann Althouse's blog deserves another look.
He quotes of Obama Czar Cass Sunstein:
Sites of one point of view agree to provide links to other sites so that if you're reading a conservative magazine, they would provide a link to a liberal site, and vice-versa, just to make it easy for people to get access to competing views, or maybe a pop-up on your screen that would show an advertisement or maybe even a quick argument for a competing view. The best would be for this to be done voluntarily, but the word "voluntary" is a little complicated and sometimes people don't do what's best for our society unless Congress holds hearings or unless the public demands it. And the idea would be to have a legal mandate as the last resort and to make sure it's as neutral as possible if we have to get there, but to have that as, you know, an ultimate weapon designed to encourage people to do better.
Ann Althouse's blog deserves another look.
Constitutional Scholar Obama? –Not so much
With so much hype and so much of Obama's past undocumented things like this make you go "Hmmm."
In what is being called ‘the biggest hustle in human history,‘ a special investigation has discovered numerous bogus claims on Barack Obama’s resume, including the outright lie that he was a ‘Constitutional scholar and professor.’
The claim turns out to be false.
If you are forced to do something are you still volunteering?
Ann Althouse asks the question and points out that our new masters are lawyers and are fully capable of torturing words until they confess:
the word "voluntary" is a little complicatedAnn Althouse appears to be (in her blog) a reasonable person (for a Law Professor in incorrigible Madison Wisconsin), but someone who managed to find enough "nuance" to vote for Barack Obama. I think it's probably Palin derangement syndrome.
The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity had all its assets, $15.2 million, invested with Madoff
The Washington Post headline reads: Theater J pulls Madoff play after objections from activist Elie Wiesel. What caught my eye was this:
The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity had all its assets, $15.2 million, invested with Madoff and lost them when the Ponzi scheme unraveled. In addition, Wiesel personally lost several million dollars to Madoff.
Somehow I never pictured Elie Wiesel a multi-millionaire. Neither did I picture him at the center of a foundation worth tens of millions of dollars. Or someone foolish enough to put all of his eggs in one basket. That part of being a famous Nazi hunter was never discussed in the things I had read about him.
Which leads me to say "Hmmm." I never associated Nazi hunting with money making. It goes to show my lack of imagination.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Reading is a good thing.
But, as we have seen this year, as multi-thousand page laws are passed and signed by Obama without anyone ever reading them, reading has become a lost art. And members of the Obama administration are not ashamed to admit they can't read.
via the Exurban League.
The Obama Strategy: "We're killing terrorists because we have no place to put them."
Richard Fernandez reports that :
Fernandez on Obama's foreign policy:
Killing wanted militants is simply “easier” than capturing them, said an official, who like most interviewed for this story support the stepped-up program and asked not to be identified. Another official added: “It is increasingly the preferred option.” …
By some accounts, the growing reliance on drone strikes is partly a result of the Obama administration’s bid to repair the damage to America’s image abroad in the wake of Bush-era allegations of torture and secret detentions. …
Some current and former counterterrorism officials say an unintended consequence of these decisions may be that capturing wanted militants has become a less viable option. As one official said: “There is nowhere to put them.”...
‘We killed them so that we would not be accused of violating their human rights.’Well, that will get the civil libertarians to shut up. If they have not already shut up because a Democrat's in the White House. Of course if you kill them you can't get any info0rmation out of them, making it harder to find out who their friends are. But the logical end of this policy will be to kill all the Islamofascists. I never though that Ann Coulter's policy prescription after 9/11 would be implemented by Barack Obama.
Fernandez on Obama's foreign policy:
Faced by the linked yet separate crises in the Middle East and in Northeast Asia the Obama administration is acting like it was shot through the central nervous system, acting in uncoordinated jerks. The alliances with Korea and Japan and the special relationships with Israel and Britain lie almost forgotten like neglected toys on the floor of a spoiled child distracted by his latest bauble. Gone are the heady prospects of Grand Bargains with the Muslim world kicked off by dramatic speeches in Cairo. Gone is the idea of a swift drawdown from Iraq; or of a comprehensive solution in the Middle East. Gone is the promise of catching Osama Bin Laden. Gone is the notion that Europe, which once hated America because of George Bush, would turn like a blossoming rose to Obama. In their place are half-finished begun threads without closure: a growing Hezbollah menace in Lebanon; a defiant Iran; a belligerent North Korea; a buffoonish but menacing Chavez; a drug war on the southern border; an Eastern Europe with the shadow of the Russian bear growing ever longer across it.
Obama: "We don't Need No Stinking Border Security Laws"
Faithfully executing the laws is for little people.
The fact that the Obama administration does not give a shit about border security, but it does like to squander money with glorious abandon is seen in three vignettes.
The first is their plan to spend seven millions of dollars upsizing and aggrandizing a Canadian border crossing, located in the middle of a Vermont farm, that accommodates 2 ½ cars per hour. They are so determined to do this that they have threatened to condemn roughly five acres of a dairy farm because the family that owns the farm does not want to sell. Claiming that this must be done for urgent national security reasons,
"Our airports, seaports, and land ports of entry are all part of an interconnected security network to facilitate entry and exit to and from our country," the agency said in a statement Tuesday. "When we fail to fortify one, we weaken the entire system, putting our national security at risk."
Meanwhile, in another part of the country, people in remote parts of the Southwest lie awake at night listening to the sounds of Illegal aliens crossing their land.
Says Mark Steyn:
They lie awake at night frightened for their children and listening for footsteps in the yard. In effect, the sovereignty of the United States of America no longer applies in this territory - and John Morton and the Department of Homeland Security are entirely cool with that.
John Morton, assistant secretary of homeland security for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, made the comment during a meeting on Wednesday with the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune, the newspaper reports."I don't think the Arizona law, or laws like it, are the solution," Morton told the newspaper.
When I read that, I had a flashback to a time many decades ago: resistance to desegregation following the Supreme Court Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation decision had Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus deploying the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the law from being implemented. President Eisenhower sent in the 101th Airborne, nationalized the Guard and the black students were enrolled.
Today we seem to have another racist as president. And he’s deploying his troops like Orval Faubus did, to block the law of the land. As we get old enough, we see history repeating itself and we shake our heads.
What has been will be again,what has been done will be done again;there is nothing new under the sun.Ecclesiastes 1:9
The final vignette is this picture of the Obamas partying with the President of Mexico whose people are fleeing his poor, corrupt and dangerous country; a country that is fast becoming a failed state. Does it bring to your mind, as it did in mine the Masque of the Red Death?
Brack Obama as Prince Prospero partying while his subjects live in fear and die.
Detainees Barred From Access to U.S. Courts
Remember when this used to bring howls of outrage and denunciations of Nazi Fascist Dictatorship and "Trampling on the constitution" and the arrival of the dark night of the Long Knives? Is this the change you were looking for?
Rubes! (Or were you just playing politics, demonizing your political opponents, but not meaning a word of it?)
WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court ruled Friday that three men who had been detained by the United States military for years without trial in Afghanistan had no recourse to American courts. The decision was a broad victory for the Obama administration in its efforts to hold terrorism suspects overseas for indefinite periods without judicial oversight.
Documents: Ruling on Detainees by Appeals PanelThe detainees, two Yemenis and a Tunisian who say they were captured outside Afghanistan, contend that they are not terrorists and are being mistakenly imprisoned at the American military prison at Bagram Air Base.
Here's a link to the Liberal Bible, the NY Slimes. Not a hint that the prophets of Liberalism disapprove.
MARK STEYN: As lazy, feckless, corrupt and violent as Greece undoubtedly is, it’s not that untypical
Mark Steyn:
Demographics is destiny:
From the Times of London: “The President of Greece warned last night that his country stood on the brink of the abyss after three people were killed when an anti-government mob set fire to the Athens bank where they worked.”
Almost right. They were not an “anti-government” mob, but a government mob, a mob comprised largely of civil servants. That they are highly uncivil and disinclined to serve should come as no surprise: they’re paid more and they retire earlier, and that’s how they want to keep it. So they’re objecting to austerity measures that would end, for example, the tradition of 14 monthly paycheques per annum. You read that right: the Greek public sector cannot be bound by anything so humdrum as temporal reality. So, when it was mooted that the “workers” might henceforth receive a mere 12 monthly paycheques per annum, they rioted. Their hapless victims—a man and two women—were a trio of clerks trapped in a bank when the mob set it alight and then obstructed emergency crews attempting to rescue them.
Unlovely as they are, the Greek rioters are the logical end point of the advanced social democratic state: not an oppressed underclass, but a pampered overclass, rioting in defence of its privileges and insisting on more subsidy, more benefits, more featherbedding, more government.
Demographics is destiny:
The problem facing the Western world isn’t very difficult to figure out: we’ve spent tomorrow today, and we can never earn enough tomorrow to pay for what we’ve already burned through. When you’re spending four trillion dollars but only raising two trillion in revenue (the Obama model), you’ve no intention of paying it off, and the rest of the world knows it. In Greece, the arithmetic is starker. To prop up unsustainable welfare states, most of the Western world isn’t “printing money” but instead printing credit cards and pre-approving our unborn grandchildren. That would be a dodgy proposition at the best of times. But in the Mediterranean those grandchildren are never going to be born. As I pointed out in my bestselling hate crime America Alone four years ago, Greece has one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet—1.3 children per couple, which places it in the “lowest-low” demographic category from which no society has recovered and, according to the UN, 178th out of 195 countries. In practical terms, it means 100 grandparents have 42 grandkids. Greek public sector employees are entitled not only to 14 monthly paycheques per annum during their “working” lives, but also 14 monthly retirement cheques per annum till death. Who’s going to be around to pay for that?
Welcome to My Big Fat Greek Funeral.
On the Falsehood of ‘The Vital Center’
Stacy McCain points out that Liberals are forever putting themselves out as "centrists" so that they can then call everyone else as "extremists." That, for example, is why Liberals will denigrate and vilify the overwhelimg majority in this country who want to end illegal immigration from Mexico, calling them "racists." "Fascists" and as bad as Hitler.
This is why I roll my eyes whenever anyone employs the term “center-right” to describe the political aims of conservatism. Chasing a ”center-right coalition” is to pursue a will-o’-th’-wisp into a swamp of confusion. It’s a snipe hunt, because so long as liberals have any influence in defining the terms — and their dominance in media and academia assure them that influence – the “center” will always be someplace acceptable to liberals.
Instead of fretting about the center, then, conservatives should aim to build a conservative majority. And one key to building that majority is to speak blunt truth about the idiocy of “centrism” — the kind of idiocy that permits people in Pennsylvania’s 12th District to vote for Mark Critz and think the result will be anything other than the advancement of a liberal agenda.
It is time to say good-bye to The Vital Center. Damn the Blue Dogs, and to hell with the RINOs. Let’s define the distinctions between conservatism and liberalism so clearly that nobody who pays attention can doubt what side they’re on.
The still-popular concept of American conservatism as a form of crypto-fascist neurosis dates back to the same era when Schlessinger wrote The Vital Center. Accusing liberalism’s critics of harboring secret totalitarian longings, of opposing liberalism because they are emotionally stunted or sexually repressed, neatly averts any discussion of whether liberal policies actually work.
I’m curious about the Democrats and the MFM (but I repeat myself) who continue this attack. Do they believe that they can turn a 70-80% majority into a minority with a ceaseless bombardment of propaganda? At one time, decades ago, that may have been possible and the American people, lacking the internet infrastructure that allows them to communicate freely and easily, may have been cowed into accepting the Party Line. But the MFM has exhausted its reservoir of credibility. The Obama Administration is no longer riding the wave of euphoria that got the Affirmative Action President elected. It’s now “US” against “THEM” and the communications structure exists to allow US to speak to each other without the censors of the MFM blocking us. The internet allows atomized individuals to meet and coalesce into groups and form power centers. Perhaps that’s the impetus behind the FCC desire to control and regulate the internet. All tyrannies try to control the means of communication. Free communication between people is a threat to a totalitarian or authoritarian government.
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