(1) Is he writing about Weis or Barack Hussein Obama?

"Never has so much hope and hype been built from hot air. But when you sell yourself on spec, as Weis did, sooner or later, the finished product comes in."

(2) Christopher Hitchens brings us barack to reality...

"Those who think that they have just voted to legalize Utopia (and I hardly exaggerate when I say this; have you been reading the moist and trusting comments of our commentariat?) are preparing for a disillusionment that I very much doubt they will blame on themselves. The national Treasury is an echoing, empty vault; our Russian and Iranian enemies are acting even more wolfishly even as they sense a repudiation of Bush-Cheney; the lines of jobless and evicted are going to lengthen, and I don't think a diet of hope is going to cover it. Nor even a diet of audacity, though can you picture anything less audacious than the gray, safety-first figures who have so far been chosen by Obama to be on his team?"

(3) Rich Karlgaard on The Great Tax Revolt Of 2012.

"Inflation and progressive taxes are a toxic brew. We haven’t heard the phrase "bracket creep" since Ronald Reagan ran against Jimmy Carter in 1980. Reagan knew that middle-income Americans were being inflated into higher tax brackets designed for the rich and were feeling mightily annoyed about this.

I predict the 1970s will play out again. Revolt against bracket creep will re-emerge as a top political issue soon after the economy recovers, the Fed’s easy money will spill out as high single-digit inflation and Obama will fulfill his election promise to hike taxes on the "rich." Upper-middle-class professional households earning $100,000 to $250,000 a year in 2008 dollars will find themselves inflated into higher incomes and then taxed like Swedes: Their income, payroll, state, sales, dividends and capital gains taxes will all go up--and keep going up, up, up because of inflation."

(4) Barack Hussein Obama votes present on the potential bailout for GM.

"As with all things Obama, we’ve heard every side of the argument, with no suggestion that he’s made up his mind what he actually thinks. But just judging from volume, it looks like he wants General Motors to become a ward of the state, and an investment platform for all kinds of alternative-energy-using vehicles. In the process, he’ll probably avoid rationalizing and shrinking GM’s antiquated labor contracts, healthcare obligations, and other cost structures.

It’s also possible that GM’s management themselves will push the situation to a boil now, and force the outgoing Bush people to deal with it. That would probably suit Obama just fine, as it would allow him to keep looking graceful and not have to make a decision."

Related (Countdown to 2010 and 2012)
Why Obama Looks Like a One Termer

Labels: economics, obama

(1) Stocks fall as investors ponder Obama presidency

(1a) The Age of Plenty Begins: Stocks Fall Nearly 500 Points/5% on Obama Win

(2) I like this post by John J. Miller at NRO but disagree with him on his third point. The movies may get better but I'm never giving Hollywood another dollar.

The movies will get better, as the moratorium on patriotism comes to an end. There will still be too many villainous businessmen and evil corporations, but there will also be a new sense of optimism about America's role in the world (see #2, above). Perhaps in his giddiness, some Hollywood bigshot will green-light a war movie about our heroic soldiers—Marines at Fallujah, the sacrifices of Dunham, McGinnis, Monsoor, Murphy, and Smith, etc. The stories are there, waiting to be told.

(3) Not the end of the world (this is my favorite post of the day)

(4) Results of some notable ballot measures - Arizona, California, and Flordia ban same sex-marriages!!!!

Labels: obama

Labels: obama

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

"Obama is a construct. He is a put-together illusion. He managed to use technicalities to have every opponent thrown off the ballot in his first run for the IL state senate, so that his name was the only name on that ballot. We all know it."

- The Anchoress

"Why would anyone think this guy is a left-wing radical? Just because he sought (and got) an endorsement from the Chicago branch of the Socialist International, got his training from ACORN and a Saul Alinsky outfit, wanted to surrender to terrorists, thinks the Constitution vests alien combatants with rights against the American people, fought a law prohibiting infanticide, praises Bill Ayers' views on education and the criminal justice system, approved millions in subsidies for hard Left education "reform" projects, wants to nationalize the healthcare industry (for starters), wants to transfer $850B to the international community through the good offices of the UN, and (having voted against Roberts and Alito) says he thinks the key qualifications for a Supreme Court justice — after considering a candidate's positions on affirmative action, reproductive rights, and the rights of the disabled — are "empathy" and "what is in the judge's heart"?"

- Andy McCarthy

Related
Obama and the Born-Alive Act
Louis Farrakhan Calls Obama "The Messiah" [Nice Deb]

Labels: obama

The blogger with many visions™ is a genius but that won't save him from the breadlines or the rubber truncheon.

Time Is Up Congress - And America (HT: Instapundit)

I must caution everyone - if you are not prepared for six months to two years of unemployment, you need to be. If you are dependent on credit to survive (that is, if you couldn't make it without your credit cards) you need to fix that now.

...because history shows that when government mismanages things to this degree and refuses to respond to the will of the people, a "messiah" generally appears with a "solution" - but there will be "compromises."

Labels: economics, end times, obama

Hollywood events could rake in $9M
The first event will cost $28,500 per person for dinner at the Greystone Estate. Upwards of 250 high rollers — including some of the biggest executives in film, television and music — will munch gourmet chow and get to hang out with the candidate, enjoying a little face time and posing for personal pictures.

For a second, soldout event Tuesday evening, the Obama caravan will travel just 2½ miles to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where a reception and concert will spotlight Streisand and several other performers. In addition to those attending the earlier dinner, who also get into the concert, about 500 others are set to attend just the musical affair, at $2,500 per ticket, meaning the show should rake in an additional $1.25 million.

Source

Labels: hollywood, obama

This is the candidate of change?

(1) Friends of Lehman
(2) Obama-Friendly Lehman Bros. to file Chapter 11 bankruptcy

Related

So it would appear that this is precisely what Obama has been railing against: Washington insiders lining the pockets of other Washington insiders while the taxpayers ultimately have to foot the bill. The Agent of Change, it seems, didn’t exactly walk the walk on this one.

Source

Labels: democrats, obama

Top Recipients of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
Campaign Contributions, 1989-2008

1. Dodd, Christopher J
D-CT
$133,900

2. Kerry, John
D-MA
$111,000

3. Obama, Barack
D-IL
$105,849

4. Clinton, Hillary
D-NY
$75,550

Source

Related
Cornyn calls for criminal probe of Fannie, Freddie

Labels: clintons, democrats, obama

There's trouble brewing for House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY).

Representative Charles B. Rangel has earned more than $75,000 in rental income from a villa he has owned in the Dominican Republic since 1988, but never reported it on his federal or state tax returns, according to a lawyer for the congressman and documents from the resort.

The meaty details are here and here. I like how he was was, "urged to buy the property by Theodore Kheel, a New York labor lawyer who was one of the principal investors in a plan to turn the southeast Dominican coast from a mostly deserted jungle into a tourist destination." Rangel is a true man of the people AND a conservationist to boot.

Related
Poor Charlie
Trillion-Dollar Baby
CNN Calls Rangel’s $3.5 Trillion Tax Hike a ‘Reform’

Labels: democrats, obama, rangel

Like Barack Obama said yeah it's time for a change
Pull over on the roll on the back seat (back seat)
Pop that body now you got me (got me)
You a fine chick kinda classy (classy)
Said her name was Ten now I'm grabbin (grabbin)
Cuz she got grip on the whip
With her big round booty with the silicone tits
Shit she bouncin on my lap and she tryin to own six
I whispered in her ear "Yeah (It's Hard For a Pimp)"

- Three 6 Mafia

Labels: end times, hollywood, obama

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

We've all heard his dramatic speeches before devoted followers.

And there is much to like and admire about our opponent.

But listening to him speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform - not even in the state senate.

This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting, and never use the word "victory" except when he's talking about his own campaign. But when the cloud of rhetoric has passed ... when the roar of the crowd fades away ... when the stadium lights go out, and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot - what exactly is our opponent's plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish, after he's done turning back the waters and healing the planet? The answer is to make government bigger ... take more of your money ... give you more orders from Washington ... and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world. America needs more energy ... our opponent is against producing it.

Victory in Iraq is finally in sight ... he wants to forfeit.

- Sarah Palin

Read the full text here.

Labels: 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

Hussein Obama will accept the nomination tonight on a stage designed by BRITNEY SPEARS' set designer! Depending on who you ask it either looks like a Greek temple or the White House. I think it's the latter. Maybe a form of visualization like those 2004 "Kerry President" bumper stickers? I bet a hippie invented visualization (or it evolved from the self-help movement). I know it was perfected by the Holy Church of Oprah(TM).

Labels: obama

Obama's browshirt(s) are pressed into action as Stanley Kurtz works to uncover the deeper link between Hussein Obama and Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers:

The experience was surreal, amusing, and chilling. In a matter of hours, a major national campaign had called on its legions to bully a radio show out of airing an interview with a legitimate scholar asking legitimate political questions.

Source

Related
Obama wants to silence his critics
Obama Unleashes Mob Of Drooling Supporters
Radical Chic Resurgent
"Guilty as Sin, Free as a Bird"

Labels: obama

Obama I have never seen as anything but a bag of wind, possessed of great political guile, but steeped in the faddy, solipsistic notions of post-1960s college leftism.

- John Derbyshire

Labels: obama, quotes

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

Russian aggression meets "anticipatory capitulation"

The greatest terror of postmodern Westerners is "confrontation": to be compelled into situations in which they must actually face down a bully. And, of course, taking a moral stand may sometimes lead to such "confrontations."

So, in anticipation of any course of action that could possibly lead to a "confrontation," postmoderns never take a moral stand. They look into the future, at where such a stand might lead them -- and, terrified by the prospect, they back down pre-emptively. Often, they seek some sort of "compromise" with thugs that takes the "confrontation" option off the table. "Compromise" here means: anticipatory capitulation.

This is the policy that Border's Books, Comedy Central, and the entire MSM adopted when contemplating even a hypothetical "confrontation" with Islamists who might become angry about their circulation of those Muhammad cartoons: They capitulated and refused to publish the cartoons, in mere anticipation of a possible showdown.

When Frozen Wars Heat Up

But international umbrage is wasted on Russia. They really don’t care what anyone thinks, and their veto power in the Security Council nullifies the possibility of meaningful U.N. action. Russia used force because they knew they could.

Georgia: Just the Beginning?

Putin surely understood the diplomatic fallout that likely would follow his invasion. This is a man who defies his own constitution, denies the systematic murder of inquisitive journalists and critical ex-pats, claims to seize the North Pole for his country, and assists Iran in its pursuit of nuclear status. We are limited in how we can help our Georgian ally, but Putin's brazen attack on Georgia should be a warning to the United States and our allies on Russia's border and elsewhere in the area that they need to be prepared for more of this.

Obama
25 Hints You're Not Voting for Obama

14. Thought about Hillary's 3:00 a.m. phone call ad when you first heard about Russian tanks in Georgia.

Not Ready for Prime Time (Obama on Georgia)

Maybe he should consult Clooney on the situation?

Russia's Message

Putin and Medvedev know the U.N. will do nothing in response to Russia's aggression in Georgia. They are confident that NATO members also will take no serious measures — in part because Europe depends on Russia for its energy needs, in part because Europe appears to have lost the will to fight effectively anywhere for almost anything.

Labels: obama

Jonah Goldberg, author of Liberal Fascism, opines:

But it occurred to me that the whole campaign has a literary quality to it. Obviously, every campaign wants to tell a story, provide a "narrative." But with Obama there seems to be an added layer to it. That Berlin spectacle, for example, seemed like an awfully silly thing for him to do, particularly if he had his way as originally planned and spoke at Brandeburg Gate a la Kennedy and Reagan. But it's less silly if you understand the theory behind it. That spectacle was intended to offer a coming attractions of his presidency, like a movie trailer. The Obama campaign is not much interested in focusing on issues — it's no doubt copious position papers notwithstanding. It is about aesthetics, emotions, impressions, the sense of being swept up in something. It's the perfect product for YouTube culture. "Have you seen the latest Obama video?" Of course you have, the whole campaign is a YouTube video. The Berlin speech wasn't an attempt to make himself look like a plausible Commander in Chief so much as it was a way to tease Americans that even more excitement is coming. This is what the movie will look like, and you can see it if you just buy a ticket in November.

The Oppressors!!!

An explosive fad in the 1980s, postmodernism was and is an enormous intellectual hustle in which left-wing intellectuals take crowbars and pick axes to anything having to do with the civilizational Mount Rushmore of Dead White European Males.

"PoMos" hold that there is no such thing as capital-T "Truth." There are only lower-case "truths." Our traditional understandings of right and wrong, true and false, are really just ways for those Pernicious Pale Patriarchs to keep the Coalition of the Oppressed in their place. In the PoMo's telling, reality is "socially constructed." And so the PoMos seek to tear down everything that "privileges" the powerful over the powerless and to replace it with new truths more to their liking.

Hence the deep dishonesty of postmodernism. It claims to liberate society from fixed meanings and rigid categories, but it is invariably used to impose new ones, usually in the form of political correctness. We've all seen how adept the PC brigades are celebrating free speech, when it's for speech they like.

Related
What about Google, Senator Obama?

Labels: obama

"The whole ad is about the idea of fame without portfolio. Paris Hilton is famous for being famous. She draws a crowd for no apparent reason. Well, I think he has, you know — in Senator Obama's case, is the effort to be commander in chief and the leader of the free world about portfolio?

He is a celebrity, no question about it. Somebody asked me about Germany. I said, "There goes Germany. We're going to have to get to 270 without Germany."

But this is a hysteria around a personality that's attractive, but when you look under the hood, there's not a whole lot there. So fame without portfolio is, sort of, fashionable. But leadership without experience is dangerous."

- U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina)

Related
Awesome: Andrea Mitchell Screams "Leave Barack Alone!"

Labels: obama

"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

He ventured forth to bring light to the world
The anointed one's pilgrimage to the Holy Land is a miracle in action - and a blessing to all his faithful followers

And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.

The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow...

Labels: 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

David Gergen, a man whose shallow thoughts have reached the ears of too many presidents, made the point that Obama is a great story, and his campaign knows how to make things newsworthy, while McCain is boring, and his campaign is boring and therefore not newsworthy. That, not bias, according to Gergen, explains the majority of the additional coverage he gets. What constitutes newsworthy? Gergen cited the fact that McCain is going to give his convention acceptance speech in the normal convention venue, while Obama is going to do his at a stadium packed with 70,000 people. To me, this is evocative of something Leni Riefenstahl might have documented. But the word Gergen used, over and over was "sizzle."

Source

Labels: left-wing media, obama

Victor Davis Hanson offers four reasons why McCain will incrementally continue to close the lead on Obama.

(4) Obama has a poor grasp of history, geography, American culture, and common sense — whether the number or location of states in the Union, basic facts about WWII or where Arabic is spoken, or his sociological take on Pennsylvania, etc. His advisors realize this, and are playing 4th-quarter defense by keeping him out of ex tempore, non tele-prompted hope and change venues, where his shallowness can manifest itself in astonishing ways.

Source

Obama's poor grasp of history isn't very unique. It's an inherently liberal trait that will endear him to his vacuous followers. Obama is all sizzle and no steak.

Update
Obama flunks history, again

Obama is Jimmy Carter II with some shiny new packaging and sloganeering emboldened by a rapturous [full of, feeling, or manifesting ecstatic joy or delight] press. Obama, like Jimmy, is going to be pro-Palestine and anti-Israel.

And as far as "Nazis" are concerned...I suppose they're also pure fiction like "Israel" on this map of Palestine.

Labels: obama

Fashionable headwear for conservatives from Commie Obama.

"We've always associated the soviet-style Ushanka fur hat and the ideas of the US Democratic Party with Communism. So we combined the two!"

Labels: obama

We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.

- Barack Hussein Obama

The left assured me that Bush would license these brown-shirted, truncheon-carrying shock troops. I feel cheated.

Related
Are the media airbrushing Obama’s speeches?
What is Obama's 'Civilian National Security Force'?
Obama's 'Big Brother' vanishes from speech

Labels: obama

(1) Thefts of manhole covers increase as metals prices soar
Three weeks ago 12-year-old Shamira Fingers from South Philadelphia was walking down a city street near her home when she suddenly fell into an open sewer hole.

Source

(2) Obama on Patriotism
Well, here's what Obama should have said, given his world view: "The true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is embarrassment about the Nation much of the time, and loyalty to Big Government all of the time."

Source

Limestone Commentary
Obama giving a speech on patriotism would be like Ted Kennedy mounting a vigorous defense of capitalism and free markets.

(3) Paterson Is Cheered At NYC's Gay Pride Parade
NEW YORK — Gay residents cheered Gov. David Paterson on Sunday as he joined the city's annual gay pride march a month after he directed state agencies to provide full marriage benefits to same-sex couples who were legally married elsewhere.

Source

Limestone Commentary
Super!

Labels: end times, obama

(1) Is Google Making Us Stupid?

(2) Some meaty reading from Iain Murray on rail privatization.

(3) Obama: I’d like higher gas prices, just not so quickly

Labels: obama, railroads

Obama's Campaign Is A Contradiction

"And therein lies a huge problem. Obama is loved by the Daily Kos crowd (angry lefty populists), the Huffington Post crowd (urbane coastal liberals), pro-business internationalists such as Bill Richardson, trendy suburban Republicans here and there, neo-hippie college kids, environmentalists, union members and nearly all African Americans.

That's a coalition with conflicting hopes and internal contradictions too many to name. It won't be long, therefore, before President Obama will have to seriously tick off one or more of his key constituencies. Will it be the hopeful business liberals or the angry lefty populists who rule the blogosphere? One group is sure to get shafted, big time, within Obama's first hundred days as president."

Related

Breaking News: Jim Johnson resigns from Obama campaign

Labels: obama

I haven't written too much about politics lately...Some of it is exhaustion and some of it is just circumstantial. I'm unhappy with the GOP and haven't written them any checks. The source of my unhappiness isn't the economy (sub-prime, high gas prices, inflation, and/or the dollar) or Iraq. The economy is cyclical and will emerge from it's funk (UNLESS the politicos interfere with it). According to the mainstream media we've been living in Hooverville anyway since day three of the Bush Administration so we've known nothing BUT economic misery for 7+ years!

History will judge Iraq and when you separate your emotion and consider the facts (if you can find them) a different picture emerges.

[UPDATE: This doesn't fit the DEM talking points -- World praises progress in Iraq as Baghdad seeks debt relief]

I was watching a documentary on Harry Truman on PBS and it was Truman who went and asked a Republican Congress for buckets of money to aggressively fight communism in Turkey and Greece (what a damn war monger).

My real unhappiness with the GOP has to do with corruption and a reckless abandonment of core principles. This has been done, in my opinion, for the purpose of appeasing the leftward lurch of the mob and for selfish gain. I would much rather the party remain true to the principles of limited government, private property, individual responsibility (devoid in any lefty dictionary) and free markets AND re-trench in the minority. It is, and has always been, our responsibility to take punishment for defending history, protecting the permanent things, respecting tradition, and promoting the individual over the collective. We're destined to lose (to be bloodied) but so it goes.

The party of course has tried to scare me straight. I receive solicitations from the GOP saying things like "stop the Democratic takeover." But from what? What are you offering that isn't a little less left than Pelosi/Obama/Reid? Quite frankly I'm exhausted and would much rather make some pop-corn and watch Jimmy Carter Part II. I gaily look forward to the morning in February when the mainstream media realize that, with the ghosts of Bush exhausted, that there's no one left to blame.

Sure. The mainstream media may find the 1 or 2 remaining Republicans in the House to blame but it won't sell on Main Street forever. Obama's honeymoon will be short and if his policies (open borders, naked appeasement, nationalization, higher taxes, tariffs, and BIGGER government) doesn't yield quick results, his friends in the mainstream media will struggle to find enough polish for that turd. Nancy took over as Speaker of the House in 2006 and less than two-years removed Congressional approval ratings are lower than the President's. Nancy is blaming "obstructionist" Republicans for now but soon that smokescreen will be gone. If the federal government is run like the People's Republic of California there will be enough economic pain to remind voters that socialism has failed from time immemorial. Whether or not voters do anything about it (and if the GOP can find their virgin soul) is the subject of another post.

Update
A list for the GOP:

• Reform (and cut) entitlements
• Cut spending
• Tort reform
• Lower taxes (and tax reform - flat tax)
• More trade agreements
• Treat lobbying as a criminal activity (eh, it's 6:00 AM)
• Marriage amendment
• Fight judicial activism
• Help the UN relocate
• School vouchers
• Immigration reform (beginning with border security)
• Fight (not prosecute) the global war on terror
• Privatize mass transit
• Promote private property as best means of protecting the environment and promoting conservation
• Broad incentives to industry for exploring alternative fuels (cut spending and "re-invest" those tax dollars here)
• Eliminate earmarks/pork barrel spending
• Re-introduce compulsory civil service
• Drill in ANWR (drill in the 48 states), build refineries, and build nuclear facilities (environmentalists be damned)

Labels: democrats, left-wing media, obama, the good guys

Obama, the Closer
An eloquent clean cut black man is the perfect front man for the radical Left.

By Kyle-Anne Shiver

For a Boomer like me, following the threads of the Obama movement is like a flashback from a bad 60s drug trip — an old, unwelcome nightmare.

Whether it’s Billy Ayers or Bernadine Dohrn, Tom Hayden or Jane Fonda, or any of the other lesser-knowns, 60s Marxist radicals are lining up behind Obama.

Obama’s young worshippers think they see something altogether new, a unique persona, seemingly magically transported to this moment in history to help them finally be the ones to net the elusive butterfly of socialism’s never-realized promise.

The kids think they see something new. But do they?

Sixties’ radicals see their as yet unfulfilled yearning for socialist utopia in a well-groomed, glittery, establishment-approved package.

He is the One they’ve been waiting for. Biding their time during the dark, dreary days of Reagan, throughout the self-absorbed Boomer years, into the Yuppie sellout decade, and on through the compromising Clinton years, they’ve waited and planned and hoped.

To these rabid Marxist radicals, Obama is the One, because he’s probably their last chance to see socialism triumph on our own soil. They have grasped the reality of their own mortality.

And this could be very bad news for America. Who, in his right mind, really wants anything these radicals were peddling?

Source

Labels: democrats, obama

...it's a vast empty space mostly devoid of history and awash in hypocrisy. The hypocrisy is partially the result of being flat-out ignorant about history.

Obama: Bush is Responsible for Chavez (Bzzt! Wrong!)

This is far from the first time Barack Obama has been wrong about a simple historical fact.

I’d like to hear him answer some simple questions about world history, to see exactly how much he really does know. No blow-dried media talking head will ever do this, of course, but I suspect people would be in for a real shock if they knew the depths of his historical ignorance.

Source

Labels: democrats, obama