The gloves are off tonight over at NRO!

The media would like the American right to be represented by the likes of Bob Dole and John McCain, decent old sticks who know how to give dignified concession speeches. Last time round, we went along with their recommendation. If you want to get rave reviews for losing gracefully, that's the way to go. If you want to win, look at whom the Democrats and their media chums are so frantic to destroy: That's the better guide to what they're really worried about.

Labels: left-wing media, liberals

This is a work in progress and I still have to source the authors. I took some liberty with the bit about the liberal(s) lust for dictatorship.

I originally wanted to title the post 'Why Daddy is a Democrat' but this title fits better. This was an easy list to compile since liberals seem to exemplify cognitive dissonance.

(1) Liberals assume that their cosmic humanitarianism and brotherly egalitarianism exempt them from following mere mortal laws. [Victor Davis Hanson]

Example: Rangel Failed to Disclose $500,000 in Assets for ’07

(2) In order to enact state planning, and superimpose an overarching government plan onto our own messy agendas, we must bow to a technocracy. [Victor Davis Hanson]

Example: Find a copy of Liberal Fascism or The Road to Wigan Pier

(3) Mythologizing Guevara, Castro, and the Communist dictatorship must never end because some dismaying percentage of liberals actually like (prefer?) them. [Source Jay Nordlinger]

Example: "You can think whatever you want to about Fidel Castro, but he was one of the brightest leaders I have ever met." (Rep. Diane Watson [D])

(4) Embracing liberal policies grants a politician carte blanche in his personal or private life. [Andrew Breitbart]

Example: The Silky Pony (AKA John Edwards) and Ted Kennedy

(5) Liberals aren't good with numbers. [Commenter on Ace of Spades HQ]

Example: "We have to spend money to keep from going bankrupt"

(6) Liberals Love the Masses; They Just Don't Want to be Seen With Them [Ace from Ace of Spades HQ]

Example: "We won't smell the tourists anymore." (Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid [D])

(7) Liberals need a leader to put their minds in the right place to do the right thing. They are not heroic individualists seeking to extend America’s promise but conformists who chose to sit out and complain during the tough years in order to ensure their guy got in the next go-around. [Andrew Breitbart]

Example: The Pledge

Labels: connecticut post, cuba, dodd, liberals, pelosi, rangel

This is from The Economist:

Within Hollywood, of course, the Academy Awards still matter a great deal. Prestige and acclaim are hard currency in the film business, in many ways more valuable than money. The danger is that Hollywood’s taste in its own products is becoming as removed from public opinion as its political views are outside the American mainstream. What viewers will see on Sunday night is an industry talking to itself.

Labels: hollywood, liberals

Investor's Business Daily examines the market sell off (30% in six weeks).

My favorite quote:

"Business leaders are demonized. Yes, there are bad eggs out there like the Madoffs and Stanfords. But most CEOs are hugely talented, driven, highly intelligent people who make our corporations the most productive in the world and add trillions of dollars of value to our economy.

They don't deserve to be dragged before Congress, as they have been dozens of times in the past two years, for a ritual heaping of verbal abuse from the very people most responsible for our ills — our tragically inept, Democrat-led Congress."

Obama misspent his "mandate" when he outsourced the spending bill to Pelosi/Reid.

Why?

Did Obama owe them for his victory? Was his transition team too lazy to draft something on their own? Was his plan to have Pelosi/Reid own this travesty all along?

Or is Obama just a charlatan, slippery enough to hide his hard-core lefty ideology from a gullible public hungry for change after two decades of Bush/Clinton/Bush?

I'm not sure America would have given Obama a "mandate" for European style socialism had they known the truth. It's unfortunate he was abetted by the media (derelict in its duty) because the real cost of this debacle is now becoming clear. As Kudlow wrote a month ago capital is on strike and all those evil CEOs progressives decry provide the ornaments of civilization.

There is hope though! Congressional approval ratings were at an all time low in July (Gallup) and this cadre of miscreants (Pelosi/Reid/Dodd/Rangel/Frank) will be put before the American public again in 2010.

Related
Tea Party USA Watch: Taxpayers coming together

Labels: dodd, liberals, obama, pelosi, rangel, reid

$850,000,000,000

The European Social Welfare State Bill
“Stimulus” you can’t afford
Stimulus Bill Near $900 Billion (WSJ)
Stimulus Bill Carries $347B in Interest
Republicans Object to Stimulus Dollars for ACORN
Stimulus 101: The Pelosi-Reid-Obama Debt Plan

The Hysterical Style

If anyone wished to know what the baby-boomer generation would do when, in its full maturity, it hit its first self-created, big-time recession, I think we are seeing the hysterical results. After two decades of unprecedented economic growth, rampant consumer spending, and unimaginable borrowing to satisfy our insatiable appetites, we are suddenly going into even larger debt and printing trillions of dollars in paper money to ensure that someone else after we are gone pays the debt. As if the permanent solution to a financial panic and years of spending wealth we didn't create were a government take-over of the economy in the manner we currently witness in Spain, Italy, and Greece—or the high-tax, high-spend ethos of a bankrupt California.

Labels: democrats, generational conflict, liberals, obama, pelosi, reid

Please, please, please take the pledge.

Labels: hollywood, liberals, obama

An Uneasy Feeling
I distilled from the press coverage and the crowds and the punditry yesterday that for all too many suddenly a vote for Obama redeems America. Now, to paraphrase Michelle Obama, for the first time in their lives they are apparently proud of the United States.

So I am surprised that suddenly the election of a single individual means that we are united, patriotic, proud of America? Suddenly Okinawa or Antietam, or all those who died at the Argonne, are ours to claim again?

But America was always ours, the public, and the nation transcends the proposition of whether Obama gets elected or not—given that the United States, in its worst hour, was better than the alternatives at their best. So I think it would be wise to cool it on the “I am now proud of America” rhetoric. If getting your way means suddenly the dead at Iwo or those who were blown up in B-17s over Germany are at last your own and matter, then we are in deep trouble.

More from Victor Davis Hanson

As Obama begins to govern and as the public sees that he simply borrowed Bush’s foreign policy rhetoric, jazzed it up with his cadences and pauses, and then took either Bushites or Democratic centrists and called them hope and change, and as he glued new rhetorical veneers on the Patriot Act and FISA, and as he alienates many by making decisions other than voting present, and as the gaffes begin (Biden and Michelle can’t be put under wraps forever), and the Chicago fumes linger (Blago ain’t through yet), the fawning media will begin to look embarrassed, then ridiculous, and finally completely bankrupt. They offered no audit of Obama, no tough treatment, no honest examination of his flips, no balance in their treatment of Bush, and they will soon pay a terrible price for that derelection and worse, as the public sees them as the state megaphones that they have so sadly become. The only suspense? Will they play Pravda to the end?

The point of all this? Excuse me, but as a cynic I confess the politics of the left are now about power, ego, status, and the notion of control, rather than genuine concern for the planet, or the creed of egalitarianism or for freedoms of the people. The conservative grandee at least lives by his unapologetic creed, one that we sometimes abhor, but accept is consistent with the natural law of the jungle in that the stronger and more capable claim that that they deserve a greater material reward for their greater accomplishments or, barring that, even unabashedly for their greater luck in being born lucky.

But for the leftist. the desire for wealth, status, exceptional treatment, all this earns the additional wages of hypocrisy. We all know the conservative failing—that a Larry Craig or Mark Foley who preaches constraint and traditional values are themselves slaves to nefarious and destructive appetites. But ignored are their liberal counterparts in hypocrisy—that men and women of the people no more wish to live as the people than the rich they so loudly despise. If some conservatives adopt the patina of a Cato’s stern agrarian conservatism to mask their own weakness for drink, or drug, or sex, then at least grant such psychological states exist for many liberals who demand global parity as a sort of psychological get out of jail card for their cravings for money, status, and privilege.

Labels: dodd, left-wing media, liberals, obama, pelosi, rangel, reid

Bush and the Bush-Haters
It can be stated without fear of serious argument that no previous president has been treated as brutally, viciously, and unfairly as George W. Bush.

Bush 43 endured a deliberate and planned assault on everything he stood for, everything he was involved in, everything he tried to accomplish.

His detractors were willing to risk the country's safety, its economic health, and the very balance of the democratic system of government in order to get at him...

Labels: left-wing media, liberals

In Love With Obama
The Post and all the other lame-stream media are in the grips of an irrational love-worship and it's annoying and dangerous. You cannot love this man unless you love-worship the government.

But the lame-stream love-struck media is very selective. They do not love the Constitution or the Bill or Rights. That is clear, because they do not promote and protect our individual liberty – just the rights that they enjoy.

They do not love the two party system. Their hatred seeps through every scolding, judgmental article they write about the loyal opposition.

They do not love church. They scoff and sneer at the religious.

They do not love the businessman. They attack and criticize his success. They cheer when the governments' loot his bank account. They grin when taxes and regulations do him in. They can barely hide their disgust with Capitalism and simple profit. I guess it's so long since they made a profit they have forgotten how it feels to succeed.

The Connecticut Post participates in the adulation with this hard-hitting reportage. The Connecticut Post can't find receivership fast enough.

Obama: Available at a store near you

Related
Left adjusts to a new patriotism under Obama

Obamamania in Overdrive as Inauguration Looms

Major Starbucks Push Will Encourage Community Service
"This is very much in line with the national call to service that's been put out," said Starbucks spokeswoman Lisa Passe. "Everyone has heard loud and clear that this is a time to act, and what Starbucks is doing is breaking down the barriers of how to connect with your local community."

Limestone Commentary
Who the **** put out that national call? ACORN?

Labels: left-wing media, liberals, obama

It was to encourage liberals/progressives to spread their zeal for bureaucracy, taxes and regulation (nanny-laws) to States like Colorado, New Hampshire and Texas. Consider the curious case of California as it follows in the footsteps of Michigan and Massachusetts...

California has followed the grim path of the Great Lakes states

Labels: liberals

Congressional Performance
Approval of Congress Drops to Single Digits Again

I wonder why? Here's a little ancillary evidence.

Exhibit 1
With economy in shambles, Congress gets a raise

Exhibit 2
Caroline Kennedy’s Moment—A Sad Reflection of Our Times

"The probable appointment of Caroline Kennedy, the 51-year-old daughter of former President John Kennedy, to fill Secretary-of-State nominee Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate seat is both laughable and yet a parable for our bankrupt times."

Exhibit 3
Report: Jesse Jackson Jr. Is Senate Candidate Number 5

"The revelation may prove to be a problem for Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. "Candidate Number 5" is referred to by Rod Blagojevich as being willing to fork over a million dollars for Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich's campaign should he run for reelection for the Barack Obama Senate seat,. This was told to Rod Blagojevich, it is alleged, by associates of Candidate Number 5."

Exhibit 4
Dodd deflects question on mortgages

"Dodd was one of two senators implicated earlier this year in allegedly receiving preferential rates on two loans. Conde Nast's Portfolio, citing Countrywide documents, claimed that the company made two loans to Dodd in 2003, trimming three-eights of a point from a $506,000 loan to refinance a townhouse in Washington. A second loan to refinance a house in Connecticut was written at a quarter point below the going rate. After the Countrywide scandal broke, Dodd promised the media that he would disclose information about his mortgages."

Labels: democrats, dodd, liberals, pelosi, rangel

"In the great contest to determine the worst Times story ever, many, so many, are called, but few are chosen. To make it to the zenith of awfulness, a Times story must not only be factually distressed, it must also achieve that tone of absolute smugness that perfectly reflects and soothingly reinforces the self-righteous sensitivities of its readership."

- Roger Kimball

Absent a taxpayer bailout the NY TIMES may print their last pamphlet in 2009. Fish mongers and recreational sportsman hit hardest.

The New York Times (NYT) has to repay $400 million in debt in the first half of 2009. It does not have the money. It plans to mortgage its headquarters, but it is uncertain what that will bring in an uncertain real estate market. The firm’s Boston Globe and regional newspaper operations lose money, so they will be hard to sell. NYT is controlled by the Sulzberger family which has super-majority voting shares. That won’t matter much when the company runs out of money. Another big media operation, perhaps News Corp (NWS) which owns The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, will come in and auction off what it can and keep the flagship New York Times newspaper and NYTimes.com website.

Labels: left-wing media, liberals

"Nothing is ever achieved without bloodshed, lies, tyranny and injustice, but on the other hand, no considerable change for the better is to be expected as the result of even the greatest upheaval."
     - George Orwell

This is one of my favorite George Orwell quotes and a reminder to all those coffee house liberals with Wi-Fi blogging the revolution™ and waiting to change it and re-arrange it.

And some more Victor Davis Hanson (I thought it was apropos):

As I wrote earlier, the shrill Left is increasingly far more vicious these days than the conservative fringe, and about like the crude Right of the 1950s. Why? I am not exactly sure, other than the generic notion that utopians often believe that their anointed ends justify brutal means. Maybe it is that the Right already had its Reformation when Buckley and others purged the extremists—the Birchers, the neo-Confederates, racialists, the fluoride-in-the-water conspiracists, anti-Semites, and assorted nuts.—from the conservative ranks in a way the Left has never done with the 1960s radicals that now reappear in the form of Michael Moore, Bill Ayers, Cindy Sheehan, Moveon.org, the Daily Kos, etc. Not many Democrats excommunicated Moveon.org for its General Betray-Us ad. Most lined up to see the premier of Moore’s mythodrama. Barack Obama could subsidize a Rev. Wright or email a post-9/11 Bill Ayers in a way no conservative would even dare speak to a David Duke or Timothy McVeigh—and what Wright said was not all that different from what Duke spouts. What separated Ayers from McVeigh was chance; had the stars aligned, the Weathermen would have killed hundreds as they planned.

Russell Kirk predicted where this viciousness (anointed ends justify brutal means) would end:

"Ideology makes political compromise impossible: the ideologue will accept no deviation from the Absolute Truth of his secular revelation. This narrow vision brings about civil war, extirpation of "reactionaries", and the destruction of beneficial functioning social institutions."

Mission Accomplished

Labels: connecticut post, democrats, liberals, obama, pelosi

This is from Victor Davis Hanson. His entry on California, as noted by Glenn Reynolds, is very sad.

California is now a valuable touchstone to the country, a warning of what not to do. Rarely has a single generation inherited so much natural wealth and bounty from the investment and hard work of those more noble now resting in our cemeteries—and squandered that gift within a generation...

Related
California unemployment jumps to 8.2%, third-highest in the U.S. - (LAT)
What Does Obama’s European Socialism Model Look Like? - (The Lonely Conservative)
Obama backs off tax increases; Schwarzenegger mulls tripling car taxes, raising pet taxes, and more

Labels: liberals, obama

...is a new WWII, minus the war part of course.

Related
Here comes the WPA

Labels: liberals, obama

This is one of the signature techniques of the left: The co-option of historical memory. You still have the same outward dress — the cenotaph, the dignitaries, the poppies, the old stooped veterans — but the meaning of the event is hijacked and inverted. The contamination of Remembrance Day by this ghastly woman is disgusting even by her standards.

Source

The blogger with many visions™, in predicting his own story of the days to come, would augment that post with this quote from Stephen Hicks:

"Postmodernists are not individuals who have reached relativistic conclusions about epistemology and then found comfort in a wide variety of political persuasions. Postmodernists are monolithically far Left-wing in their politics...Postmodernists are the most likely to be hostile to dissent and debate, the most likely to engage in ad hominem argument and name-calling, the most likely to enact "politically correct" authoritarian measures, and the most likely to use anger and rage as argumentative tactics. Whether it is Stanley Fish calling opponents of affirmative action bigots and lumping them in with the Ku Klux Klan, or whether it is Andrea Dworkin's male-bashing in the forming of calling all heterosexual males rapists, the rhetoric is very often harsh and bitter."

Labels: liberals

My other brother (not this one) is fairly apolitical but asked when I thought the animosity between the left/right was going to end. I told him that neither McCain or Obama will bring peace because the nation will remain polarized until one side is brought to heel (by force if necessary). The left will never let go of 2000 and the right will never forget the vitriol spewed at GWB for the last eight years. It hasn't helped that people on the left have been whipped into a frenzy and driven to rage by the media, academia, and the arts.

I also find it truly laughable that some of the publications that systematically demonized GWB for eight-years are now asking that Obama be afforded the opportunity to heal the nation (world) unencumbered by rancor and dissent while their unhinged minions engage in lunacy like this (see below) on fresh targets.

Barbarians at the Gates--of the White House
Nowhere has the vileness of the Left been more sickening than in its treatment of Governor Palin...I don't think there is any precedent in our history for the shameful manner in which the Left has treated Sarah Palin...It is interesting to contemplate what a semi-pornographic video about Barack Obama, playing on the same sort of prejudices and stereotypes that are so disgustingly on display in Sullivan's video, would look like. Frankly, I can't imagine such a video being made, let alone featured on the web site of the once-proud Atlantic magazine. But on the Left, anything goes--the more slimy and disgusting, the better.

Labels: left-wing media, liberals, obama

The attacks on Joe Wurzelbacher by the MSM are a bit laughable. Joe was in his yard when Obama approached him but has now earned the ire and scrutiny of the fifth estate. Joe is an affront to the establishment because he has ambition. Joe, like my old Portuguese landlord, wants to do more...to be more...to earn more. And my landlord did. He barely spoke English but he retired to Portugal a very wealthy man.

The other thing about my landlord- he didn't make his money trading paper. He earned it with sweat and I never resented him for it (even when I was writing rent checks).

Perhaps the best summary of where this country is headed is in this article by Mark Steyn.

The heart of the American Dream is aspiration. That’s why people came here from all over the world. Back in eastern Europe, the Joe Bidens and Diane Sawyers of the day were telling Joe the Peasant: “Hey, look, man. You’re a peasant in the 19th century, just like your forebears were peasants in the 12th century and your descendants will be peasants in the 26th century. So you’re never gonna be earning 250 groats a year. Don’t worry about it. Leave it to us. We know better.” And Joe the Peasant eventually figured that one day he’d like to be able to afford the Premium Gruel with just a hint of arugula and got on the boat to Ellis Island. Because America is the land where a guy who doesn’t have a 250-grand business today might just have one in five or ten years’ time.

I think the story of Tito Munoz is equally inspiring because it demonstrates the growing divide between what the liberals think is right for us and what we're individually capable of.

And Obama's spread the wealth scheme is offensive to a free and hard working people...His plan - to spread the economic "success" that his party has engineered in New Jersey and Michigan - will fail because it has since time immemorial.

He is penalizing those who are trying to better themselves. He is stifling innovation and changing the course of a great and prosperous nation. No central planners have ever created prosperity by punishing those who seek to earn more by the sweat of their brow.

"It's not that I want to punish your success. I want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance for success, too. My attitude is that if the economy's good for folks from the bottom up, it's gonna be good for everybody. I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody." - Barack Hussein Obama

Labels: economics, left-wing media, liberals, obama

This Op-Ed by Thomas Sowell reminds me of this equally complementary quote by Abraham Lincoln:

"If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."

Sowell's Op-Ed received a title change in the Connecticut Post from, "Do Facts Matter" to "Don't believe everyone else; this is all the fault of liberals".

Either way, Sowell provides a strong and factual indictment of the high-ranking Democrats (including Obama) involved in the housing crisis as well as the complicity of the media to investigate.

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

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

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

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

The root causes of this crisis are being ignored by the media and obscured a cult of personality (Seattle hosts an Obama Youth Parade). Obama and his slippery cohorts have been the beneficiaries. As Sowell writes

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

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

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

Labels: end times, left-wing media, liberals, obama, weekend

The attempt to centralize all power in the one capital city and, indeed, in its administrative quarter, means the assimilation of all possible rival institutions from monasteries to television stations, from harbour authorities to charitable foundations. All these can be eliminated in the name of democracy or efficiency, and the result is the creation of the one government machine into which all problems are fed and from which all wisdom is to emerge. All that is initially lost is the likelihood of the government's having to listen to informed criticism from outside its inner circle of officials. Thereafter the problems centre upon the growing size and complexity of the central administration. As the civil servants multiply there is an ever-increasing distance between the citizen and the nameless people who will ultimately decide upon his application, protest, or appeal.

- C. Northcote Parkinson

The Fourth Estate has already been absorbed (see below).

A Gallup survey says 52 percent of Americans do not trust news media, up from 30 percent in 1972. Are the two tied? Of course, they are. Who’s responsible for that?

Labels: end times, left-wing media, liberals, quotes

The Anchoress gives a pep talk on media bias after stating the cold hard facts:

By the way, we’re outnumbered. Team Mainstream has all the heavyweights, the guards, the tackles and the microphones, too - so they call the plays the way they see them, regardless of what is actually happening.

This is how I know we're grossly outnumbered:

Immigration 08' (Mobilizing Immigrant Voters) - "Simon Rosenberg has worked in national politics and the media world for more than 20 years."

GOOD Sheet: Coming to America - The GOOD Sheet (progressive agitprop) is being distributed by Starbucks.

Glenn Reynolds echoes The Anchoress:

EARLIER, I promised some thoughts on what to do about the news media's outright campaigning for Obama. They're not just in the tank, they're functioning as arms of the campaign, and Obama's strategy shows that he knows that and is relying on it.)

If you want to have a media environment that isn't dominated by the Gwen Ifills and Keith Olbermanns of the world, you need to ensure that other kinds of voices flourish. That means supporting the alternatives with your eyeballs, your subscriptions, your advertiser-patronage -- basically, your money. Businesses need money to flourish. There's a vast underserved population out there, for news, entertainment, movies, etc., and if people start serving it, the current "mainstream" media won't be so mainstream anymore. So if you're unhappy with current offerings, put your money where your mouth is.

I suppose Glenn's strategy will work until the DEMS pass the Fairness Doctrine.

Labels: democrats, immigration, left-wing media, liberals

Poor Nancy is SO blind with BDS that she's lost all her faculties. I would send her a coupon for some DEPEND® Undergarments if I thought she could figure out how to put them on.

Before your infant mind buys what agitprop CNN/NPR is selling 95 DEMS voted against the bailout (40% of Pelosi's caucus).

Related (Nacht und Nebel)
How the blogger with many visions™ knows the end times are coming.

◙ Exhibit 1 - YouTube pulled the video of the brainwashed children worshipping Obama. The remix can be viewed here.
◙ Exhibit 2
◙ Exhibit 3
◙ Exhibit 4
◙ Exhibit 5

Labels: democrats, left-wing media, liberals, pelosi

...berserk with BDS and maybe in need of medication, out-patient services, and restraining orders.

The Atlantic should have Googled Jill Greenberg before hiring her

Atlantic Monthly Editor to Offer Apology to McCain for Photog’s Doctored Pics

The Atlantic's PR Flacks: Jill Greenberg "Disgraced Herself," But We Stand By the "Respectful Cover" That Did Run

Unrepentant Photographer Turns McCain Into a Monster

That McCain Photo Controversy...

Media Bias: Personnel Is Policy

The Atlantic's McCain Cover

McCain Photo Fallout at The Atlantic

Labels: left-wing media, liberals

While some over privileged folks chase ghosts, prattle on endlessly about community/authenticity and invent injustice and bogeymen Yoani Sánchez fights tropical totalitarianism, one blog post at a time.

Let’s Push Raul Castro into Reforming Cuba
Earlier this year a Cuban blogger named Yoani Sanchez was selected as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential list. Sanchez, who faces incredible hardships to post her writings on her blog because of the purposeful lack of Internet access on the island, also won Spain’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. She writes about the absurd nature of life in Castro’s Cuba with her beautifully descriptive prose.

Related
"On Monday, August 24, a dissident punk rocker named Gorki Aguila was picked up by Cuban police for allegedly committing the Orwellian crime of “pre-criminal dangerousness.” Aguila, who fronts a band called Porno Para Ricardo, writes lyrics that are harshly critical of the regime.

On the appointed day, Gorki’s trial was postponed, then postponed again as a throng of supporters and members of the international media waited outside the court. In the matter of just one week, Gorki Aguila went from being a relatively unknown punk rocker to a cause célèbre. Raul Castro officially had a hot potato on his hands. Finally, at 5:00 p.m. (eight hours behind schedule) Gorki was brought into one of the regime’s kangaroo courts. He faced anywhere from one to four years in prison if convicted (everyone gets convicted). Then something unusual happened. The charges were reduced to a simple case of “disobedience” and Gorki was convicted (remember, everyone gets convicted) and sentenced to pay a fine of 600 pesos, which is roughly $40, about two months’ salary in Cuba.

Yes, changes are occurring in Cuba. The going rate for calling Fidel Castro a “c*ck sucker” on the island was reduced from a lengthy prison sentence to a $40 fine, a bargain that is sure to increase the levels of remittances to the island. This was most certainly a change that Raul Castro never envisioned having to make when he ascended to his brother’s throne."

Limestone Commentary
America is great because you can be wildly unproductive, use all kinds of excuses for it, and still call any elected official a c*ck sucker (or retarded cowboy fellow). Even better, Hollywood, academia and the MSM will help you.

Labels: cuba, left-wing media, liberals

This is from The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell. He is a hero to the left but his wit (and subsequent conversion) was somehow lost on them.

It may help to refer to zombietime to see how his seventy year-old description still has tremendous relevancy. One of my favorite images is the F*** Middle America in the Hall of Shame. The cranks are also complemented by legions of fabulously wealthy, vacation-home owning, Ivy League educated, Prius driving, Europe traveling, NPR listening, Crate and Barrel shopping limousine liberals. It's Nancy Pelosi meets this guy.

"Question a person of this type, and you will often get the semi-frivolous answer: "I don't object to Socialism, but I do object to Socialists." Logically it is a poor argument, but it carries weight with many people. As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.

The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle class. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years' time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar drive, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting. This last type is surprisingly common in Socialist parties of every shade; it has perhaps been taken over en bloc from the old Liberal Party. In addition to this there is the horrible- the really disquieting- prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. Once sometime gets the impression that the mere words "Socialism" and "Communism" draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, "Nature Cure" quack, pacifist and feminist in England. One day this summer I was riding through Letchworth when the bus stopped and two dreadful-looking old men got on to it. They were both about sixty, both very short, pink and chubby, and both hatless. One of them was obscenely bald, the other has long grey hair bobbed in the Lloyd George style. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. Their appearance created a mild stir of horror on top of the bus. The man next to me, a commercial traveller I should say, glanced at me, at them, and back again at me, and murmured, "Socialists," as who should say, "Red Indians."

Labels: liberals, obama

"But Sarah Palin didn’t court this anger with more anger. That would be a turn-off. What most frustrates Americans is that we are a happy, optimistic, can-do people ceaselessly harangued by media solons, delusional academics, post-sovereign Eurocrats, and the Democrats who love them. While we free and feed the world, they can’t tell us enough that we’re racist, imperialist, torturing louts. We know it’s a libel, an endless stream of slander. But we also know it’s an absurd libel. We’re tired of hearing it, but taking it too seriously would give it power it doesn’t deserve..."

This is every lefty I've ever met. America is ALWAYS wrong and patriotism is the religion of a Neanderthal. The only enlightened people are the intellectuals from the right schools in the northeast, San Franciscans, and Europeans.

Labels: left-wing media, liberals, obama

Some thoughts from Peggy Noonan on Sarah Palin.

Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing -- who is really one of them and who is not -- and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.

And Victor Davis Hanson has given us a new definition.

Palinize: to slander and caricature a working-class female public figure for the noble advancement of liberalism.

Labels: left-wing media, liberals, obama

"Fellow citizens: If the Hanoi Hilton could not break John McCain’s resolve to do what is best for his country, you can be sure the angry left never will."

- President George W. Bush

More from the ANGRY left...

I have never seen, and I admit that I could never have imagined, such shameful, out-of-control, frenzied, angry, condescending, and pathetic journalistic malpractice. The ignorant assault on Palin’s accomplishments and experience, the breathless careless airing of deranged rumors about her private life, the staggeringly indecent mistreatment of her teenage daughter in a difficult time, the ill-informed piling on about the vetting process, the self-intensifying circle of tisking nodding heads utterly detached from a straightforward political event, have been amazing and eye-opening.

The reigning emotion of it all has been anger—anger at being surprised, anger at being denied the spectacle...

Labels: liberals

What do you get when you combine a liberal(s) 1st grade grasp of economics with their 3rd grade "mastery" of history?

Obama wants to repeat the mistakes of Herbert Hoover, raising individual and corporate taxes and siphoning needed investment capital out of the markets and into the hands of bureaucrats. It doesn’t seem like much of an economic recovery program.

Source

For conservatives, seeing is believing; for liberals, believing is seeing...

Labels: economics, liberals, obama

Barack Obama Sr., recall, was in the U.S. to study economics to help with the development of his dirt poor, resource rich country, Kenya. (A country the U.S. hoped to save from the clutches of the Soviets and the devastation of communism.) God only knows what he learned at Harvard, but, as the IBD piece mentions, he went home to Kenya where, among his other activities, he wrote an article for the East Africa Journal offering a vivid critique of such capitalist entrerprise as existed in Kenya at the time.

The article, called "Problems Facing Our Socialism," makes the economic case that high taxes are morally and practically good, if the government then uses them to provide for the people. How high should the tax rates be? "Theoretically," he wrote, "there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed." Yes, you read it: a 100% tax rate is fine. Obama Sr. continued, " It is a fallacy to say there is a limit (to tax rates), and it is a fallacy to rely mainly on individual free enterprise to get the savings." Free enterprise — bad.

Source: Confiscatory Tax Rate Dreams from my Father

Labels: democrats, liberals, obama

(1) Taking on the Left’s speech-chillers

(2) Editorial: Wine-and-cheese thuggery

(3) Imagine the MSM Reaction...

(4) THE LEFT TAKES THE HIGH ROAD

Labels: democrats, liberals, obama

"But public sentiment might just as easily have switched the other way is press criticism of Soviet objectives, not to mention Soviet atrocities in Eastern Europe, had been as free as it was over Churchill's intervention in Greece. When he sent in British troops to frustrate a Communist takeover, the American newspapers were quick to accuse him of imperialist ambitions."

Countdown to Victory by Barry Turner

The good news now is that a majority of Americans believe the media is biased and in the employ of liberals.

Labels: left-wing media, liberals

"I have always loved longitude, I love latitude; it’s in the stars. But longitude, it’s about time...Time and clocks and all the rest of that have always been a fascination for me."

Nancy Pelosi speaking about a painting in her office, Jan Vermeer's "The Geographer."

[NRO]

Labels: democrats, liberals

"I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions." - Obama™

Perception

(1) But "citizen of the world" is a utopian, unreal, angelic, inhuman term, an abstraction of the sort that leads to immense bloodshed as human irregularities are hacked off and angularity is loudly planed away...The Berlin speech also explains why Obama is more likely to praise an "ideal" America than the real America. He is bewitched by abstractions and lofty ideals. That is how he touches the secret chords of the heart of so many millions, the teenage romanticism of a world without different real interests, without the clashes of culture, the force of political arguments about who gets what, when, and how. (Source)

(2) It's America's most powerful drug. Once on hopium, you won't care if Iran has nukes or if taxes are raised during a recession or whether Obama keeps flipping and flopping on everything from foreign wiretaps to withdrawing troops from Iraq.

Who cares? Relax. Hopium is your friend. (Source)

Reality

(1) "His [Churchill] good friend, as he liked to call Franklin D. Roosevelt, was of another school of diplomacy. Having served his political apprenticeship in the first German war, he was imbued with the idealism of Woodrow Wilson. The failure of the League of Nations, Wilson's brainchild, only made him more determined to bring his own skills to bear on creating a new world order based on mutual trust."

"But even Roosevelt must have taken a deep breath when he signed up for the Declaration on Liberated Europe which, in theory, committed the Big Three to helping the freed nations 'to destroy the last vestiges of Nazism and Fascism and to create democratic conditions of their own choice'. The President lived just long enough to recognize the depth of cynicism measured by these words. In late March, sixteen Polish resistance leaders were lured to Moscow on the pretense of discussing the agreed broadening of the Lublin administration. Instead they ended up in the Lubianka prison where they were tortured into confessing to fabricated charges..."

Source: Countdown to Victory by Barry Turner

It's a bit "apples to oranges" because Roosevelt actually had experience (unlike Obama™) and Fascists are liberals.

Labels: liberals, obama

There's enough marketing savvy/sizzle in Obama™ the brand to make AdvertisingAge® - The Need for Partnership at a Time of Fragmentation. Obama™ the brand, with it's shiny doubleplusgood newspeak and iPod aesthetics, has many intelligent people fooled.

Related
The Brand Called Obama

Old Glory in Berlin
The television feed of Obama's internationalist speech in Berlin frequently cut to Germans waving American flags. Perhaps it's just the cynic in me, but I noticed that they all appeared to be the exact same size and make. It was almost as if some outside entity (a presidential campaign, perhaps?) handed them out in order to deliver the best possible visual images during the speech. Video of anti-American Europeans once again embracing the stars and stripes in an organic display of hope and unity would certainly be powerful stuff. The question is whether the Obama campaign manufactured this image for political gain. If they did, the press bought it hook, line and sinker.

The digital divide
The gap between technologists supporting Republicans and Democrats continues to widen. In addition to financial support, influential technologists like Chris Hughes are now providing strategic support to Obama.

"In a great collaborative effort, Barack Obama partnered with Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook, to develop a web presence and better employ the social networking that helped engage younger voters and clinch the Democratic nomination. The campaign also had a very well-organized grassroots effort with first-hand knowledge of the political climate and voting protocol in each state and the expertise to resonate with local communities. The collective skills of these local partners helped the "Obama brand" connect with its audience and raise capital in record proportions."

The left was quick to embrace the tools built by the technologists. A quick survey of reddit on Friday showed mostly anti-conservative, anti-Semitic or general BDS articles. The "what's hot" of reddit included; Send Rove to jail petition passes 100,000, John McCain Covered Up $4 Billion Theft For Friend, and Lev Leviev, Israel's richest man, buying blood diamonds, funding illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, undermining the prospects for Middle East peace.

I'm not sure the technologists are enough to be the margin of victory for Obama in 2008. What is evident is the technologists represent yet another lever in the arsenal of mind-molding establishments that Democrats can depend on in the general election. And what's most frightening about Al Gore's relationship with Steve Jobs (and Sergey Brin's with Obama) is the technology available today assuages the liberal need for a sense of order (more aptly defined as Fascism).

Labels: democrats, end times, left-wing media, liberals, obama