Liberals don't really think that "dissent is the highest form of patriotism"

Jon McNaughton, a controversial artist who often mixes religion and politics in his work, has released a new painting.

In ‘One Nation Under Socialism’ President Obama holds the U.S. Constitution as it burns.

While McNaughton previously depicted Obama stepping on the nation’s founding document, ‘One Nation Under Socialism’ glowers directly as if challenging the viewer. His right hand is holding The Constitution and his left hand is pointing to the flames.

Jerry Saltz, an art critic for New York Magazine is not amused:

When asked for an opinion Saltz said that the painting contained “Bad academic derivative realism; typical propaganda art; drop-dead obvious in message; visually dead as a doornail.”

The idea that artists are supposed to be controversial is stopped dead when the controversy does not advance the Liberal cause.

UPDATE: Is McNaughton Painting Propaganda? Read his response to a teacher.

The Plan for America's Future

Postman: Ayers family put 'foreigner' Obama through school

It's time to vet Obama, in fact, it's past time to vet Obama.  Interesting story about Obama and the Ayers family.  It may explain how a young Barack managed to get into the "right" schools and be appointed to the "right" boards.  It helps to have a wealthy and influential mentor paying your way and pulling the strings.  The Ayers family fills the bill.

Be Breitbart

Ever notice Axelrod's mustache?

What do these two politcians have in common?

Axelrod Stays Classy With Romney/Hitler Comparison

The Left’s Long-Time War on Women

It should be shocking, by the conventional narrative, that the White House of a “liberal” president would be a hostile work environment for women, but it is not at all a surprise to anyone familiar with the history of the Democrats and the Left, going back at least to the 1960s, when a prominent Democrat politician got a pass from the media for abandoning a young woman (possibly pregnant by him) to drown in his car. The same man went on to later fame as the top slice of bread in a “waitress sandwich,” and yet was so lionized by the Left that not that long ago, at the time of his death, a woman(!) wrote that Mary Jo Kopechne might have been happy to undergo the terror as her lungs filled with the brackish water of Martha’s Vineyard had she only known what a great legislator he would turn out to be.

To see similar hypocritical Leftist misogyny, we need only go back to the last time a Democrat was in the White House. Whenever a woman came forward with allegations of inappropriate sexual conduct by Bill Clinton, the response of the Clinton defenders, both in and out of the media, was to attack her credibility, character, and virtue. Advisor James Carville famously said of Paula Jones (the young Arkansas state employee whom Clinton as governor had his state police guard procure to his hotel room for the purpose of orally pleasuring him), “Drag $100 bills through trailer parks, there’s no telling what you’ll find.” Evan Thomas of Newsweek dutifully complemented the slander by declaring her on national television “just some sleazy woman with big hair coming out of the trailer parks,” though he later was compelled to apologize in print. (One wonders how residents of trailer parks felt about that, but I guess empathy for them is for the little people.) When Kathleen Willey accused the president of groping her in the White House, and was physically threatened for her trouble, feminist icon and (former) scourge of sexual harassers Gloria Steinem said that it was no problem — he was entitled to a freebie, after which Cathy Young of Reason magazine reported on “the death of sexual harassment.”

It got worse. As the Paula Jones lawsuit progressed, and the president committed acts of obstruction of justice (federal felonies) by perjury and subornation of perjury through threats and bribes, the White House was prepared to go after Monica Lewinsky, the woman about whom he engaged in such obstruction. She was bribed with jobs, and urged to in turn suborn perjury from her confidante Linda Tripp, by implying threats against her family. If the incriminating blue dress hadn’t turned up, their plan was to continue to cover up and lie, and accuse Lewinsky of being a crazy stalker. The White House orchestrated the leak of the personnel files of Pentagon employee Linda Tripp, the only person in the entire fiasco who told the truth, in an attempt (sadly quite successful) to discredit her. This included a mistaken felony arrest record that had been sealed since she was a teenager. She was vilified and maligned in the media, with late-night comedians mocking her physical appearance. It’s unlikely that many of these people were either conservatives or Republicans.

Again, no one familiar with the history of the Left should be surprised by any of this (other than perhaps the blatant hypocrisy, aided and abetted by the ever-compliant press). Misogyny and male chauvinism run deep in the roots of the modern Left. Many think that the gender feminist movement of the seventies, started by Gloria Steinem and others, was a reaction against the conventional culture of the fifties and early sixties, with its casual assertions of male superiority and paternalism (on literally dramatic display in the AMC television series Mad Men, which also shows how the attitudes evolved through the decade). But it was at least as much, if not more, a reaction against the male chauvinist pigs of the so-called New Left on campus in the mid-to-late sixties, in which the men would write up the manifestos and plan the demonstrations, expecting nothing more of the women than to satisfy their appetites by cooking for and copulating with them. Basically, it was barefoot (or naked) in the kitchen, hopefully without the pregnancy, but for which abortions were required in the event of accidents.

Read the whole thing.

The War on Men

Sarah Hoyt reacts to "The War on Women" 

Let me point out right now that if I hear that phrase once more I’m going to lose it. No, forget that. I’m going lose it right NOW.

Let me tell you what war is, okay?

War is where the enemy decimates your numbers – like, say in China where abortion is killing mostly females.

War is where you are kept from learning – like in most Arab countries, where women have restrictions placed on their education.

War is where your houses are burned, your children taken away into slavery, your goods looted, and you are dragged away in chains.

In the United States, right now, women have preferential treatment – by law – in any company that gets federal funds (which heaven help us, right now, is most of them.) Women live longer than men. Cancers that affect females get more money and more attention than those that affect only men. Women have the right to be sole deciders on abortion, and if they decide to keep the child and make the man pay, he pays. (This by the way is a complete reversal of the “penalty” of sex which used to fall mostly on women.) And if he doesn’t pay, he goes to jail. Divorce courts award custody to mothers overwhelmingly. Oh, and in college campuses, women outnumber men.

If this is war it is war on men. And I’ve had just about enough of everyone who claims otherwise.

And please don’t come back and say women have to carry babies and this is unfair. Or that men are stronger and this is unfair. Or that… This is NOT kindergarten. LIFE is unfair. NATURE is unfair. Civilization and society can only go so far to compensate for the basic inequality of nature. It is not the job of nature or government to turn us all into neuters with the exact same aptitudes and abilities. And I, for one, am glad. If you’re not, consider your relationship with your own gender. I suggest your war is mostly internal.

If you truly believe refusing to force employers to pay for birth control is a war on women, then you are fragile little flowers who deserve to experience life practically anywhere else in the world. You are also unleashing a monster. Get the government to force this and NOTHING is out of bonds. Forget selling you the rope to hang you with. The government will eventually force you to pay them to hang you.

I’d like to believe the comment is wrong which I read on some blog defining feminists as a potemkin village of bicycled fish. But judging by how American women seem to be so completely embarrassed by their vaginas that they demand all sorts of compensation and affirmation of their specialness, I’m very afraid the comment was right. These women have things like Vagina Monologues (Imagine, Penis Monologues could ONLY be a middle school play, but because it’s the FEMALE body part we’re supposed to be in awe of it. WHY?) and go on about how they’re powerful, but melt in a pile of hysteria because someone was less than respectful to them.

Read the whole thing. And then read this and this.

Man helps woman start car.

He's a hunter, carries a rifle, wears an NRA cap, drinks beer and has a pornographic magazine.  He spends two hours of his time to fix her car and she drives off.  She's a tenured professor and believes that if she did not have three female friends along she whould have been raped.  Because of the way he looked. 

Read about VICIOUS STEREOTYPES IN POLITE SOCIETY

Why Democrats Lost the Redneck Vote

From Taki's Magazine (H/T American Digest)

From Francis Fukuyama to Barack Obama to The New Yorker, nobody to the left of Joe Bageant seems to understand why poor white hillbillies prefer Republican oligarchs to the glorious rainbow coalition of the condescending. They wonder why the white working class lost the loving feeling they used to have for the Democratic Party.

Perhaps like a modern-day Squanto, I can help the lefties understand my tribe. I was born to the lower middle class and spent a couple of adult years living the life. I score a 63 in Charles Murray’s “bubble quiz,” which puts me into the “first generation middle class with working class parents” ...

The latte tribe insists that working-class peckerwoods are voting against their economic interests when they vote for Republican candidates. This may be true, but it doesn’t mean that voting for the tax-and-condescend party would be a vote for the economic interests of the world’s Archie Bunkers. NAFTA was a Clinton Administration achievement, after all. Why should Archie vote for the Meathead party that shipped his job to Mexico? Economists of all political stripes have also noted that low-income working families tend to pay an appreciable portion of their earnings in taxes. Maybe they get it all back in “services” somehow, but the working poor notice how the non-working poor live off the state without doing any work. They take it personally that working harder is penalized while left-wing policies reward being lazy and dependent. Palefaced plebeians also dislike the latte-tribe concept of “white privilege,” which says the Obama daughters should be given legal preference over poor white kids.

...

Lefties should only be confused about the white proles who still vote for them. The left’s “Why don’t you loooove me anymore?” routine with the white working class reminds me of a friend’s crazy-ex-girlfriend story. She cheated on him, lit his car on fire, and gave him the clap. She used to get drunk and scream into his answering machine at 4AM. Then she wondered why he never called back.

It’s a little embarrassing.

The Difference Between Rutherford B. Hayes and Barack Hussein Obama

The death rattle of environmentalism will be deafening.

It has too much political momentum and fanatical devotion to go quietly. The environmental establishment is a billion-dollar a year business, and there are plenty of stupid guilty rich people, idiot Hollywood celebrities, and direct-mail dupes to keep the agitation machine going for many years to come. The architecture of environmental law and regulation, and the administrative momentum of the EPA, assures that this zombie movement will continue to do great damage to the economy for a long time to come. But make no mistake—it is a bunch of brain-dead zombies that we face in the environmental movement today.

As for cause of death on the official death certificate, mark it down as “suicide, brought on by hubris.”

In which our "no stronger ally" consistently "punches above its weight."

History's Greatest Orator Recycles

And there's THIS and THIS.

Silence is consent

Socialized medicine and the "principal-agent" problem.

Richard Fernandez (read the whole thing)

Britain’s Dr George Hibbert was working as a public health care provider. You might think he was working for his patients, but that would not be strictly correct. He was more precisely working for the government, and that is not quite the same thing.

A leading psychiatrist faces extraordinary claims he deliberately misdiagnosed parents with mental disorders – decisions which meant their children were taken away from them …

He was paid hundreds of thousands of pounds by social services for the reports which tore children from their parents – many of them young mothers. He is now being investigated over shocking suggestions he distorted the assessments to fit the view of social services.

If true, it is a textbook example of what economists call the principal-agent problem, which is a fancy way of describing a situation when someone (the agent) who is supposed to be working for you (the principal) is really working for someone else.

...

The question is who Dr. Hibbert was really working for. It is an issue of more than academic interest since it turns out there was a demand by government agencies to supply children for adoptions. One way to meet that need was to take away children from unworthy parents. But first they had to be unworthy. And this is where assessments come in.

The allegation is that the doctor could make more money satisfying the agenda of the authorities than serving the needs of his patients. In the language of economists, the agent’s duty to his patients would be “costly to observe” since it would mean a lost “sale” to the government. Lawyers for the patients say, “we believe this distressing case may be the tip of a very big iceberg.”

This is a very big problem with socialized medicine. The patient may think he is the principal, but the doctor is really working for the government who's paying the bill and calling the tune. The relationship between patient and doctor today is one of absolute trust. If my doctor tells me that I have a disease that is incurable I may ask for a second opinion, but I am confident that he’s not deliberately lying to me because I’m the one paying him. When the doctor stops working for me and starts working for the government eventually he’s going to get told by the government that my disease is “incurable” because a “death panel” has determined that the medical budget won’t support my care. And he’s going to tell me that I have a terminal disease, take a pain pill, and go away.

When you take control of the agent what recourse is the principal left with?

Indeed.

Questions I want to ask George Stephanopoulos

Tell me again how Barack Obama cleaned up Chicago corruption.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE: 16 shot, 1 dead, in overnight shootings

Just another day in paradise.

Let’s Talk About the Real Issues, Mr. President

From Sarah Palin's facebook:

The far Left continues to believe American voters are not smart enough to grasp the diversionary tactics it employs to distract us from the issues our President just doesn’t want to talk about – issues that affect us all every day and must be addressed.

Exhibit A in these diversionary tactics is an absurd new attack ad President Obama has released taking my comments out of context. I’m not running for any office, but I’m more than happy to accept the dubious honor of being Barack Obama’s “enemy of the week” if that includes the opportunity to debate him on the issues Americans are actually concerned about. (Remember when I said you don’t need a title to make a difference?)

Just off the top of my head, a few of these concerning issues include:

• a debt crisis that has us hurtling towards a Greek-style collapse,
• entitlement programs going bankrupt,
• a credit downgrade for the first time in our history, a
• government takeover of the health care industry that makes care more expensive and puts a rationing panel of faceless bureaucrats between you and your doctor (aka a “death panel”),
• $4 and $5 gas at the pump exacerbated by an anti-drilling agenda that rejects good paying energy sector jobs and makes us more dependent on dangerous foreign regimes,
• a war in Afghanistan that seems unfocused and unending,
• a global presidential apology tour that’s made us look feeble and ridiculous,
• a housing market in the tank,
• the longest streak of high unemployment since World War II,
• private-sector job creators and industry strangled by burdensome regulations and an out-of-control Obama EPA,
• an attack on the Constitutional protection of religious liberty,
• an attack on private industry in right-to-work states,
• crony capitalism run amok in an administration in bed with their favored cronies to the detriment of genuine free market capitalism,
• green energy pay-to-play kickbacks to Obama campaign donors, and
• a Justice Department still stonewalling on a bungled operation that armed violent Mexican drug lords and led to the deaths of hundreds of innocent people.

I’m sure I missed a few things, but the list is just for starters. Along with millions of others, I’m willing and free to discuss these issues with the President anywhere, anytime; and I’m sure any of the four patriots currently running for the GOP nomination would also welcome the opportunity to talk about the problems everyday Americans face due to the abject failure of our current administration’s policies. The President will dismiss all of these problems by saying, “Well, uh, ‘change isn’t easy.’” But considering that candidate Obama promised to turn back the waters and heal the planet, the American people had at least a reasonable expectation that, at the bare minimum, he wouldn’t bankrupt our country.

This latest ad is quite odd, but also quite telling. It shows that our President sure seems fearful of discussing the economy, energy prices, and all the other problems people need addressed. And intended or not, now that his ad opens up the discussion of Barack Obama’s radical past associations and the radical philosophy that shaped his ideas about his promised “fundamental transformation” of our country, I welcome the media to join ordinary Americans in finally vetting Barack Obama. The media failed to do so in 2008 to the detriment of us all. Maybe this time around they can do their job.

They might start by noting the President’s heavily edited attack ad. Breitbart’s Ben Shapiro helps them out in this piece. Please read it all.

- Sarah Palin

Grace Notes

MORE FUN WITH RUTHERFORD B. HAYES:

AA Passenger Causes Disturbance After Leaving DFW Airport

Flight 2401 left Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport bound for Los Angeles. Passenger Lori Barber said about 15 minutes into the flight a man charged past her, demanding to see the pilot.

Barber told NewsRadio 1080 KRLD the man was hard to miss.

“Well he was wearing two pairs of glasses, one with a red beam coming out of the lens, and he had three or four ‘man purses’ on and he had Superman socks on,” she recalled

Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. Some people you can just look at and know their position on the environment, politics, global warming, corporations, capitalism, communism, Christianity, racism, sexism, feminism, Limbaugh, Obama, Palin, Maher and much more without even hearing them talk.