Hillbilly White Trash

Sauce for the goose

2012-01-09T12:02:00.001-05:00

Texas Rep. Ron Paul's final full day of campaigning in New Hampshire got off to a bizarre start here Monday when he was met by a bullhorn-toting man with a rubber boot on his head who challenged him and President Obama to a "panty-wrestling match to decide it all."

The man, who goes by the name "Vermin Supreme" and is running for president, was waiting in the parking lot as the libertarian icon exited a local diner here and slowly inched his way through the media horde to his black SUV.

"Ron Paul, Ron Paul, Ron Paul, Ron Paul," Vermin purred into the bullhorn, playfully taunting the 12-term Texas congressman. "You are surrounded by the media. The media owns you now."

I mention this only because it is nice to see the shoe being placed on the other foot. Usually it is Ron Paul's borderline sane pod-people followers harassing other candidates.

Time to take a side

2012-01-07T22:46:00.001-05:00

As things now stand in the Republican primary Mitt Romney leads with a surging Rick Santorum trailing by a small margin and Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul fighting for third place. Huntsman and Perry are lagging so far behind that neither of them is a serious factor. Herman Cain and Michelle Bachmann have withdrawn.

It is time now to take a stand for a candidate. With Cain and Bachmann out of the race the only serious conservative is Santorum. Yes, I know that Perry is conservative in many ways but the fact is that the only way you win statewide office in Texas is by pandering to Mexicans.

The issue of amnesty for illegal aliens (mostly Mexicans) is critically important to the survival of the United States as a free and prosperous nation. I don't want to have to wage another gigantic battle over amnesty with a Republican president like we had to do with George W Bush. So that simply disqualifies Perry from consideration. The issue is just too important to take a chance on.

Gingrich might be conservative today, but he will not necessarily be one tomorrow. If the wind blows right Newt will run to the right but if the wind blows to the left he will run to the left. He whored himself out to Freddie Mac (and that is the only fair term for what he did), he swallowed the global warming hoax hook line and sinker when it seemed that was the wave of the future and he'll trash any fellow Republican from Rush Limbaugh to Ronald Reagan if he sees an advantage in doing so. Newt is a preening narcissist of a magnitude that almost matches Barack Obama and he has an ego the size of Mt. Rushmore (upon whose side he believes his face belongs). And before we leave the subject of Newt we should also take note of the fact that what we have seen of the current Mrs. Gingrich suggests that if she were to become the First Lady she would combine the worst aspects of Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama. While this alone would not disqualify Mr. Gingrich from consideration when taken with his other negatives it becomes clear that he is this season's turd in the GOP's punchbowl.

And Ron Paul? Please, get serious. No average American who shed a tear wile watching Schindler's List or reading The Diary of Ann Frank is going to vote for a candidate who favors throwing Israel under the bus (or under the treads of a Syrian T-80). This goes double if that candidate also has no problem with lunatic Twelvers getting nuclear weapons to play with.

Mitt Romney is a liberal in every way other than fiscal policy. Mitt will tell voters whatever they want to hear but when he holds office he will move to the left. All we really need to know about him is that he is the choice of the RINO establishment. A fact proven by John McCain's endorsement.

So there just isn't a conservative in the race now other than Rick Santorum. Now I do realize that Santorum isn't perfect. He is too enamored of George W Bush style "compassionate conservationism" for my tastes. However that is about the only downside to him that I'm aware of.

Against that tendency to think that government ought to "help people" by throwing taxpayer money at them - different from the modern "progressive" idea that government ought to "help people" by throwing taxpayer money at them while micromanaging their lives in a way that Stalin could only dream of - there are Mr. Santorum's many strengths.

Chief among them his clear understanding of the civilizational struggle the West is engaged in against militant Islam. Another of Santorum's strengths is his understanding of the fact that the foundation upon which both freedom and prosperity are built is morality. Mr. Santorum understands, like the Founding Fathers, that we cannot achieve and maintain either wealth or liberty unless we are a virtuous people.

Santorum has a proven ability to appeal to middle class voters even in areas which are not strongly supportive of the GOP and do it without adopting left-wing positions. Unlike other Northeastern Republicans like Giuliani in New York, Christie in New Jersey and Romney in Massachusetts Mr. Santorum gets blue state votes while championing red state policies.

Obama has handed the GOP a magnificent opportunity. By his conduct in office he has given his opponent in the upcoming election the closest thing to a sure thing since the days of Nixon's Watergate and Carter's malaise. Since we really don't have to worry all that much about "electability" this time around (53-56% of the American people are going to do exactly what I am going to do on election day - walk into the voting booth and pull the lever for whoever is running against Obama) we have the chance to pick the person who will be the best president, not just the best candidate.

Given the people who have chosen to run this time around Rick Santorum is the man who would make the best president and conservatives should stop holding out hope that our dream candidate (whoever that happens to be) will come forward and take the nomination in a brokered convention. Neither Sarah Palin nor Marco Rubio nor [insert name here] is going to emerge from the proverbial smoke filled room to become the next Ronald Reagan.

Rick Santorum is a conservative and he absolutely can beat Barack Obama. Republicans should unite behind him now or else we face a high probability that we will be saddled with John McCain II in the upcoming election.

Tonight's Music

2012-01-06T22:01:00.001-05:00

Ron Paul is an ass clown

2011-12-30T19:01:00.000-05:00

Don Feder writing about Ron Paul:

To "get" Ron Paul you have to understand libertarianism -- an ism every bit as delusional as Marxism. The National Libertarian Party, which first ran a presidential candidate in 1972, hasn't had many wins -- electing 4 state legislators in as many decades, as well as a planning commissioner here and an alderman there. Ron Paul is its greatest success.

The Texas congressman is far and away the most prominent proponent of what I like to call rightwing utopianism. Libertarianism is to authentic conservatism what Barack Obama is to 19th century liberalism.

Inspired by Ayn Rand (Ron named his son, the future senator, Rand Paul), Libertarianism was an outgrowth of 1960s campus conservatism. Like ideologues of the left, libertarians of the day were on a never-ending quest for ideological purity and the foolish consistency Emerson derided. (They still are.) Unlike traditional conservatives, libertarians came to oppose the Vietnam War and what they called "prohibitionist" drug policies. You must be consistent, libertarians lectured us. If you support economic liberty, then you must support "personal liberty" (legalized abortion, freedom to use soul-destroying drugs) and the libertarian principle applied to foreign policy -- isolationism.

During the Cold War, economist Murray Rothbard (one of the foremost libertarian theorists) once observed that if we lost the rest of the world and the Soviets invaded America, we could always take to the hills and launch a guerrilla war, a la "Red Dawn." Libertarians have never been hampered by reality.

Some libertarians drifted into anarchy, others organized the National Libertarian Party. Ron Paul was the party's 1988 standard-bearer.

I understand libertarians because I was one, from roughly 1968 (when I read "Atlas Shrugged") to 1982. I was a vice chairman of the New York Libertarian Party in the early '70s. When I lived in the Seattle-area, later in the decade, I ran a libertarian supper club, which brought in a young Texas congressman as a speaker. My road to recovery began with "The Conservative Mind" by the great Russell Kirk and Whittaker Chambers' "Witness."

Other than abortion, there is no particular on which Ron Paul differs with either libertarianism or the Libertarian Party. Like them, he would legalize hard drugs and abolish age of consent laws, which violate the rights of 24-year-olds to have sex with 14-year-olds.

Like the average libertarian, Ron Paul is a dogmatic isolationist.

Rothbard believed our involvement in the Second World War was a tragedy:

"Our entry into World War II was the crucial act in foisting a permanent militarization upon the economy and society, in bringing to the country a permanent garrison state, an overweening military-industrial complex...."

A former aide to the congressman, Eric Dondero says Paul told him the United States had no business being involved in World War II. "When pressed, he often brings up conspiracy theories like FDR knew about the attacks of Pearl Harbor weeks before hand.

The 2010 platform of the National Libertarian Party sets forth a foreign policy difficult to distinguish from the lunacy of Michael Moore and Code Pink: The former provides:

"Our foreign policy should emphasize defense against attack from abroad and enhance the likelihood of peace by avoiding foreign entanglements. We should end the current U.S. government policy of foreign intervention, including military and economic aid."

In 1973, Rothbard observed:

"The libertarian position, generally, is to minimize State power as much as possible, down to zero, and isolationism is the full expression (of that doctrine) in foreign affairs."

Not only does Paul march in lockstep with Rothbard and the L.P., he even believes the United States should have no opinion on foreign developments. Thus, Dr. Paul was the only member of the House of Representatives to vote against a 2005 resolution condemning Ahmadinejad's call to "wipe Israel off the map" and a 2009 resolution "expressing support" for Iranian pro-democracy demonstrators.

And yes, Ron Paul has intimated, on more than one occasion, that the United States is to blame for the 9/11 massacre. He claims al-Qaeda slaughtered 3,000 U.S. civilians because America is "bombing them," because we have military bases in the sacred sand pit and because we support Israel over the dear Palestinians. Wonder who he blames for the Muslin conquest of Constantinople in 1453? The CIA wasn't around then, was it? Or for the Christmas bombings of Nigerian churches?

In a 2003 speech, Paul said we should pay attention to bin Laden, when he explained his grievances against America.:

"The U.S. defiles Islam with its bases ... its initiation of war against Iraq (notwithstanding Saddam's pacifism), with 12 years of persistent bombing, and weapons being used against the Palestinians, as the Palestinian territory shrinks and Israel's occupation expands."

As you'd expect, Paul is insouciant about nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran's incinerate-the-Jews/establish-a-worldwide-caliphate regime . Why wouldn't they want nukes? "Internationally, they'd be given more respect." Besides, "they are surrounded." (If only Israel would stop threatening to push the Shiites into the sea.) What's Tehran going to do with one or two nuclear weapons, Paul asks? Why Israel has dozens. Hint: The Iranians crazy enough to use them. A nuclear war would be just the thing to usher in the 12th imam.

On the Jewish state, Paul doesn't deviate one iota from L.P. party-line. Libertarians view Israel as the engine that drives what they call U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. Israel is said to sap our resources, drag us into their wars and make the Muslims -- who are otherwise peace-loving and well-disposed to our way of life -- hate us.

In his essay, "War Guilt in the Middle East," Rothbard excoriated Israel's "aggression against Middle East Arabs," "confiscation of Arab lands" and its "refusal to let these refugees (Palestinians) return and return the property taken from them." He had nothing to say about the equal number of Jews driven from Arab lands by pogroms at the time of Israel's founding.

Dondero says his ex-boss loathes Israel and "sides with the Palestinians and supports their calls for the abolishment of the Jewish state, and the return of Israel, all of it, to the Arabs." While Dr. Paul hotly denies that he's anti-Israel (his campaign calls Dondero a "disgruntled" ex-aide) everything he's done or said about the Middle East seems to confirm the charge.

Ayn Rand, who unintentionally provided the impetus for the movement, disdained libertarians, calling them "right-wing hippies.' She was unequivocal in her support for Israel, which she explained this way in a 1974 appearance: "When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are."

Ron Paul may be delusional, but he is a consistent. Neither mass murder, terrorism, the advance of militant Islam, nor nuclear weapons in the hands of fanatical regimes will shake a libertarian's faith in his dogma: We have no foreign enemies. If certain states want to kill us, it's our fault. Nothing is worth fighting for -- unless it's abolishing the Federal Reserve System.

I'd like to follow Ron Paul around to Republican gatherings, pointing at him and shouting "stranger, danger" Stranger this you cannot get.

First, before I get to all the things I agree with Mr. Feder about I would point out that ending the "war on drugs" is not a position taken only by libertarian nut-jobs. No less a conservative luminary than William F Buckley, Jr. championed ending the drug war because the damage caused by the attempt to criminalize drugs is worse than the damage done by the drugs themselves.

Now on to the modern-day libertarians. Like Mr. Feder I was also once a card-carrying, dues paying member of the Libertarian Party. I still agree with a great deal of what they believe regarding the need to limit the federal government to its constitutionally mandated areas of responsibility.

However what caused me to part ways with the LP was their failure to understand that sometimes"providing for the common defense" requires more than sitting within our borders and waiting for an enemy to attack and only then springing to the defense.

Sometimes, whenever possible in fact, the best way to defend the nation is to deal with the problem before it actually lands troops on your shores (or hijacks planes and flies them into your buildings). For example if the US had maintained the kind of involvement with Europe at the end of WWI as it did at the end of WWII - forming a NATO-like defense alliance and integrating military operations and basing troops in Germany and other European nations it is very unlikely that there ever would have been a Third Reich or a Second World War.

I also parted company with the libertarians over the issue of Israel. As Ayn Rand observed when savages and civilized men fight you reflexively side with the civilized men. If you want an example of this consider the unfortunate nation of Zimbabwe. Had the civilized nations of the world supported the admittedly flawed, but still civilized government of Rhodesia when it was under assault by Marxist savages (savages because they were Marxist) enormous suffering could have been averted.

The fact is that Israel is a civilized nation surrounded by savages. The Muslim nations which are arrayed against Israel are a collection of totalitarian dictatorships and murderous Islamic theocracies who practice female genital mutilation, who allow fathers to murder their teenage daughters for bringing shame upon their families by "allowing" themselves to be raped and who stone to death anyone who attempts to renounce the evil seventh-century death cult in favor of any more enlightened humane (and less bat-shit crazy) religious philosophy. In a fight like that you don't remain neutral and you don't side with the bunch holding the signs which say "behead those who say that Islam beheads its enemies".

I also part company with the libertarians on the issue of our borders. The LP believes that people have a natural right to freedom of movement which means that it is nobody's business if the entire population of Mexico wants to move to the United States. That the new Mexican citizens would vote with the progressive left to bring about the kind of oppressive socialist welfare state that the libertarians claim to hate seems lost on them.

In fact a great deal seems lost on them. Libertarians think of themselves as rational secular people and they expect that all other people share that rational and secular outlook. The fact that the mullahs of Iran might really truly believe that the Hidden Imam will return and bring Islamic paradise to the world if they nuke Israel is lost on them.

It is also lost on them that in WWII the Soviet Union the British Commonwealth, the Empire of Japan and the Third Reich were locked in a death struggle and the British did not have the power to carry the day by themselves. Only the entrance of the United States into the war kept all of Asia from becoming a Japanese empire of blood and slavery and all of Europe and the Middle East from becoming a playground for either Adolph Hitler or Joseph Stalin.

In the real world the libertarian ideal of free trade with all and alliances with none becomes Swiss banks receiving deposits of gold pulled from the teeth of Holocaust victims while Swiss chemical companies sell the components of Zyklon B to the SS.

But this is all lost on Ron Paul and his pod people. The reason that libertarians just don't "get it" is that not really a political movement but a utopian fantasy which attracts anti-American malcontents in exactly the same way that Marxism does. If you are one kind of chronically unhappy basement dweller you go take a public shit in Zuccotti Park to stick it to all the Wall St. fat cats, or if you're the other kind (the kind with more than a passing acquaintance with soap) you hack online polls in order to make Ron Paul look like the popular choice of the nation.

Either way you are simply expressing an irrational dissatisfaction with the nation which gave you a higher standard of living and more opportunity than any citizen, subject or resident of any nation in the history of the entire freaking planet.

Cain survives

2011-11-11T07:59:00.001-05:00

Robert Stacy McCain has an essay on The American Spectator website titled Campaign Crisis Tests Cain in which he speculates that the debate Wednesday night might have been a turning point for Mr. Cain.

When Wednesday's Republican presidential debate ended, CNBCswitched to a post-debate panel featuring Larry Kudlow, who ravedthat Herman Cain had an "unbelievably good debate tonight" and saidCain's performance "blew me away."

The Atlanta businessman had help from a friendly audienceat the debate, held at Michigan's Oakland University. Whenmoderator Maria Bartiromo asked whether sexual harassmentallegations against him raised "character issues," the crowd booedthe question. And they loudly cheered Cain's answer: "The Americanpeople deserve better than someone being tried in the court ofpublic opinion based on unfounded accusations." When Bartiromo'scolleague John Harwood tried to get Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romneyto address the accusations against Cain, the crowd again booed thequestion, and applauded when Romney refused to criticize Cain.People "can make their own assessment," Romney said, and that wasthe last time the topic was raised all night.

It is far too early to say that Cain has put theaccusations behind him, but by the time Wednesday's debate ended,his successful performance had apparently changed the narrative ofwhat seemed a potentially campaign-killing crisis just 48 hoursearlier.

[. . .]

The boos and cheers from the audience at Wednesday'sdebate in Michigan seemed to indicate that Republicans are notready to abandon Cain, and may be ready to rally behind him. Caincontinues to lead the RealClearPolitics national poll average, as he has for the pastthree weeks. Sometimes the wind is tempered to the shorn lamb, andany sense that Cain's campaign is in jeopardy was overshadowedduring the debate by the blunderof Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who found himself unable to name thethird of three federal departments he proposed to eliminate. Thatprompted one top fundraiser to declare to a reporter that Perry'scampaign is "over."

Ten days into the campaign crisis provoked by theaccusations against him, Herman Cain is not yet out of the woods,but after Wednesday, he may be able to see sunshine breakingthrough the trees.

One thing I disagree with is that it is "far too early to say that Cain has put the accusations behind him". I think that Mr. Cain has successfully moved past all the accusations that have been brought forward to this date. The primary reason why I do not believe that the current imbroglio will damage Cain's standing before the GOP primary voters - or the national electorate next November, for that matter - is laid out in the afore mentioned Ann Coulter column:

Herman Cain has spent his life living and working all over the country -- Indiana, Georgia, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Washington, D.C. -- but never in Chicago.

So it's curious that all the sexual harassment allegations against Cain emanate from Chicago: home of the Daley machine and Obama consigliere David Axelrod.

Suspicions had already fallen on Sheila O'Grady, who is close with David Axelrod and went straight from being former Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley's chief of staff to president of the Illinois Restaurant Association (IRA), as being the person who dug up Herman Cain's personnel records from the National Restaurant Association (NRA).

The Daley-controlled IRA works hand-in-glove with the NRA. And strangely enough, Cain's short, three-year tenure at the NRA is evidently the only period in his decades-long career during which he's alleged to have been a sexual predator.

After O'Grady's name surfaced in connection with the miraculous appearance of Cain's personnel files from the NRA, she issued a Clintonesque denial of any involvement in producing them -- by vigorously denying that she knew Cain when he was at the NRA. (Duh.)

And now, after a week of conservative eye-rolling over unspecified, anonymous accusations against Cain, we've suddenly got very specific sexual assault allegations from an all-new accuser out of ... Chicago.

Herman Cain has never lived in Chicago. But you know who has? David Axelrod! And guess who lived in Axelrod's very building? Right again: Cain's latest accuser, Sharon Bialek.

Bialek's accusations were certainly specific. But they also demonstrated why anonymous accusations are worthless.

Within 24 hours of Bialek's press conference, friends and acquaintances of hers stepped forward to say that she's a "gold-digger," that she was constantly in financial trouble -- having filed for personal bankruptcy twice -- and, of course, that she had lived in Axelrod's apartment building at 505 North Lake Shore Drive, where, she admits, she knew the man The New York Times calls Obama's "hired muscle."

Throw in some federal tax evasion, and she's Obama's next Cabinet pick.

The reason all this is relevant is that both Axelrod and Daley have a history of smearing political opponents by digging up claims of sexual misconduct against them.

John Brooks, Chicago's former fire commissioner, filed a lawsuit against Daley six months ago claiming Daley threatened to smear him with sexual harassment accusations if Brooks didn't resign. He resigned -- and the sexual harassment allegations were later found to be completely false.

Meanwhile, as extensively detailed in my book "Guilty: Liberal 'Victims' and Their Assault on America," the only reason Obama became a U.S. senator -- allowing him to run for president -- is that David Axelrod pulled sealed divorce records out of a hat, first, against Obama's Democratic primary opponent, and then against Obama's Republican opponent.

One month before the 2004 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, Obama was way down in the polls, about to lose to Blair Hull, a multimillionaire securities trader.

But then The Chicago Tribune -- where Axelrod used to work -- began publishing claims that Hull's second ex-wife, Brenda Sexton, had sought an order of protection against him during their 1998 divorce proceedings.

From then until Election Day, Hull was embroiled in fighting the allegation that he was a "wife beater." He and his ex-wife eventually agreed to release their sealed divorce records. His first ex-wife, daughters and nanny defended him at a press conference, swearing he was never violent. During a Democratic debate, Hull was forced to explain that his wife kicked him and he had merely kicked her back.

Hull's substantial lead just a month before the primary collapsed with the nonstop media attention to his divorce records. Obama sailed to the front of the pack and won the primary. Hull finished third with 10 percent of the vote. [Given that this happened in Chicago we also have to consider that the accusations and controversy served to shield the effects of massive voter fraud as well. No one would think to question the numbers so the Democrat machine was free to stuff the ballot boxes as much as they wanted to - LC]

Luckily for Axelrod, Obama's opponent in the general election had also been divorced.

The Republican nominee was Jack Ryan, a graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard law and business schools, who had left his lucrative partnership at Goldman Sachs to teach at an inner-city school on the South Side of Chicago.

But in a child custody dispute some years earlier, Ryan's ex-wife, Hollywood sex kitten Jeri Lynn Ryan, had alleged that, while the couple was married, Jack had taken her to swingers clubs in Paris and New York.

Jack Ryan adamantly denied the allegations. In the interest of protecting their son, he also requested that the records be put permanently under seal.

Axelrod's courthouse moles obtained the "sealed" records and, in no time, they were in the hands of every political operative in Chicago. Knowing perfectly well what was in the records, Chicago Tribune attorneys flew to California and requested that the court officially "unseal" them -- over the objections of both Jack and Jeri Ryan.

Your honor, who knows what could be in these records!

A California judge ordered them unsealed, which allowed newspapers to publish the salacious allegations, and four days later, Ryan dropped out of the race under pressure from idiot Republicans (who should be tracked down and shot).

With a last-minute replacement of Alan Keyes as Obama's Republican opponent, Obama was able to set an all-time record in an Illinois Senate election, winning with a 43 percent margin.

And that's how Obama became a senator four years after losing a congressional race to Bobby Rush. (In a disastrous turn of events, Rush was not divorced.)

Axelrod destroyed the only two men who stood between Obama and the Senate with illicitly obtained, lurid allegations from their pasts.

In 2007, long after Obama was safely ensconced in the U.S. Senate, The New York Times reported: "The Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece (on Hull's sealed divorce records) later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had 'worked aggressively behind the scenes' to push the story."

Some had suggested, the Times article continued, that Axelrod had "an even more significant role -- that he leaked the initial story."

This time, Obama's little helpers have not only thrown a bomb into the Republican primary, but are hoping to destroy the man who deprives the Democrats of their only argument in 2012: If you oppose Obama, you must be a racist.

I have to disagree with Miss Ann on that last point. In the fever swamps of liberal/progressive thought supporting Cain is absolute proof positive that one is a racist! Because Cain is black and doesn't have his snout stuck down deep in the trough of of government entitlement that other black "leaders" feed upon. Rather Cain had fled the liberal plantation and rejects the patronage of the Democrat party.

He is unwilling to sell out the nation and his fellow African-Americans for a place at the table of the current power structure. He is unwilling to work for policies that keep black people ignorant and dependent upon the state.

This makes him a mortal enemy (as all conservatives are) to the political left, but because he is black he occupies a place of extraordinary vilification in that by his very existence, he disproves the left's narrative of American life.

Mr. Cain (like Clarence Thomas, another blood enemy of the left) achieved success without relying on the mechanisms of the state and so can serve as an example to other blacks that they do not need to either subsist on welfare, turn to crime or rely upon affirmative action to get and keep jobs for which they are not qualified. Rather by rejecting the handouts of the left and applying themselves they can be excellent in their own right. They can earn a place at the top by staying in school and working hard, by practicing self-discipline and believing that success is possible for those who toil to achieve it (in other words doing all the things that get black kids derided for "acting white").

This is to the Democrat party what sunlight is to a vampire. If even 20% of black Americans voted Republican the Democrats would never win a presidential election and would win damn few congressional contests.

Democrats know this and they are desperate to keep blacks in their place.

It is also why they are so desperate to open America's borders and get amnesty for the millions of Mexicans illegally in this country. They need a replacement minority that can be controlled in the event that the black population (or even a large minority of it) wises up and realizes that the white liberals they have been voting for are responsible for much of their misery and the black "leaders" they have been trusting have in fact sold them out.

This is the essence of the furor to destroy Herman Cain as it was the driving force behind the attempt to destroy Clarence Thomas. It is why every black conservative who dares to step forward and declare him or herself is attacked is attacked and smeared.

This is why the Chicago machine bestirred itself to vomit out a small parade of women who were willing to falsely claim that Mr. Cain "harassed" them. This is why Republicans have been unwilling to play along and boot him out of the race. We know that they are trying to play us and we ain't going along.

Either learn from history or shut the frak up already

2011-11-02T13:19:00.000-04:00

From Mercer Tyson writing on The American Thinker:

Bad-mouthing Romney is like saying Ronald Reagan was a failure because he didn't colonize China. Romney is a conservative who will work well with a GOP Congress. His flipflopedness is both on purpose and irrelevant. Time to get off his back.

Previously I wrote an article on American Thinker promoting the ticket of Romney and Rubio, and boy, did Romney and I get soundly thumped by many of the AT readers. I consider the attacks on Romney from conservatives to be unwarranted, incorrect, and self-destructive.

[. . .]

While I love Herman Cain, I fall into the group of those who are Cain skeptics; people who say they like Cain but don't think he can win.

IF Mr. Tyson could point back to electoral victories by Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush in his reelection campaign, Bob Dole and John McCain then he would have a point. He would have an even better point if he could speak of how Ronald Reagan (who was painted as an insane warmonger by the MSM) went down to a humiliating defeat against Jimmy Carter in 1980. He would cement his point if he could point to the polls which showed John McCain ahead until choosing uber-conservative Sara Palin to be his running mate after which his campaign collapsed.

But he cannot do any of those things. RINO moderates Ford, H.W. Bush, Dole and McCain lost (the elder Bush won when he was perceived as Reagan's third term but lost when he proved that he was no conservative). George W Bush was also perceived to be a true conservative when running for his first term and won reelection because he was commander-in-chief during a war which still enjoyed broad public support in the aftermath of 9/11.

Ronald Reagan, a genuine conservative, was tarred as an evil warmonger, lacking in compassion and probably senile was elected in a landslide and won reelection in an even bigger landslide.

John McCain was behind in the polls and was considered to be a joke by most on both the left and right until he picked Sarah Palin. At that point he started running nearly even with Obama and at one point even pulled ahead. Only the collapse of the housing bubble and beginning of the Great Recession catapulted Obama into a decisive lead.

In other words every time since 1980 we try it Mr. Tyson's way we go down in flames and every time we back a true conservative (or someone who is thought to be a true conservative) we win.

They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result.

A necessary corollary to that would be that sanity is defined as expecting things to work the same way in the future as they have worked in the past.

So let us be as sane as possible and nominate the most believably and consistently conservative candidate we can find in the expectation that he (or she) will win.

Like the Klan with iPhones and the Internet

2011-11-01T08:38:00.000-04:00

This is long, but very worthwhile. I would also note that one of the most common targets of the inquisition were ethnically Jewish men who had converted to Christianity (or whose families had converted before they were even born) who had achieved success in business. They were accused of secretly practicing Judaism by jealous business rivals and the Church/State authorities were eager to play along and torture "confessions" out of the accused because that would lead to the confiscation of all their assets (and the cancellation of outstanding loans). It was a dandy racket. The local lord or bishop would fatten his treasury and the less successful businessmen would rid themselves of a competitor.

We can see the same kind of thing happening here. If Cain is removed from the race it will benefit Romney, the less successful competitor for the GOP nomination, and the rest of the Republican establishment as well as the Democrat/progressive complex of elected politicians, unions (especially public sector unions), the mainstream media and academics.

Lincoln's "Living Dog"

By Jeffrey Lord on 11.1.11 @ 6:09AM

Herman Cain's a threat to both the left and the GOPEstablishment.

"A living dog is better than a deadlion." -- Abraham Lincoln on the choice betweenhimself and Stephen A. Douglas

Well, well, well.

Or as Private Gomer Pyle used to exclaim:"Surrrrrrr-prize, surrrrrr-prize, surrrrrr-prize!"

You know why all this flapdoodle over Herman Cain andcharges of sexual harassment, charges that Mr. Cain has flatlydenied? (Here in this Fox News exclusive Herman Cain is what Abraham Lincolncalled a "living dog.")

A living dog? Yes, and we'll come back to this in a momentbecause it bears directly on what's happening here. As Herman Cainthe "living dog" comes under the inevitable attack from the left,if conservatives understand where they are, where they appear to beheading, where they've been, it becomes easier (although perhapsnot easy) to understand what to do next -- and how and with whom todo it.

There are two parts to this disgraceful attack. Both mustbe examined to understand exactly what is going on with thisstory.

Part One? History. And this history has two partswithin.

So let's begin -- and let's be blunt.

Let's recall in some detail how this racial game -- and itis a racial game -- is played.

Liberals and the Democratic Party have a twocenturies long vivid and extremely graphic history ofracism. (Detailed previously here ). From the almost thirty -- thirty! -- party platformsthat either supported slavery or segregation or chose to be silenton the subject, to an alliance with the Ku Klux Klan, electing Klanmembers to all manner of political offices federal, state andlocal, not to mention supporting everything from lynching to theracial quotas of today, racism has been the life blood of theleft.

Part and parcel of all this has been the fine art ofportraying black men as sexual predators. And dealing with theseblack men so accused in a terrifyingly horrific fashion: they wouldbe lynched.

One could fill cyberspace with these stories, but perhapsone of the more famous is the story of Emmett Till. PBS once did adocumentaryon the Emmett Till case and as the crescendo rises from the liberalmedia lynch mob about Mr. Cain it is worth a look at what PBS noteson its website about this particular issue.

Said PBS, no outpost of conservatism:

Some whites espoused the idea that black men were sexualpredators and wanted integration in order to be with white women….Lynchings were frequently committed with the most flagrant publicdisplay. Like executions by guillotine in medieval times, lynchingswere often advertised in newspapers and drew large crowds of whitefamilies. They were a kind of vigilantism where Southern white mensaw themselves as protectors of their way of life and their whitewomen. By the early twentieth century, the writer Mark Twain had aname for it: the United States of Lyncherdom…. Lynchings werecovered in local newspapers with headlines spelling out thehorrific details. Photos of victims, with exultant white observersposed next to them, were taken for distribution in newspapers or onpostcards. Body parts, including genitalia, were sometimesdistributed to spectators or put on public display. Mostinfractions were for petty crimes, like theft, but the biggest oneof all was looking at or associating with white women. Many victimswere black businessmen or black men who refused to back down from afight. Headlines such as the following were notuncommon:
"Five White Men Take Negro Into Woods; Kill Him: Had BeenCharged with Associating with White Women" went over TheAssociated Press wires about a lynching in Shreveport,Louisiana."

Did you catch those two particular sentences above? Thesetwo:

Most infractions were for petty crimes, like theft, but thebiggest one of all was looking at or associating with white women.Many victims were black businessmen or black men who refused toback down from a fight.

To restate. Black businessmen who refused to back down from afight were lynched because they had been "looking at or associatingwith white women."

And who is Herman Cain? That's right. A prominent blackbusinessman. A black man who is refusing to back down from a fight.A black man who, quite obviously from his business career in alargely white country, necessarily is "looking at or associatingwith white women."

Now, bearing this history in mind, let's recall the secondpart of this history -- the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinskyepisode.

Several years after the term "high-tech" lynching explodedon the scene at the confirmation hearings of now-Justice ClarenceThomas -- Thomas, recall, is a conservative black man married to awhite woman -- the American left had a mysterious change of heart.After furiously insisting that "women tell the truth" in matters ofsexual harassment, and that the real story was that men didn't "getit" -- Bill Clinton came along and liberals did… shocking, I know…a 180.

As the damn broke on Clinton's sexual behavior --including allegations of rape (from Juanita Broaddrick, a one-timesupporter), groping in the Oval Office (Kathleen Willey, anothersupporter and White House volunteer), dropping his pants asgovernor and asking state employee Paula Jones to "kiss it" --liberals suddenly had a whole different world view.

Did I mention that Bill Clinton is a white man and aliberal?

Sorry. Bill Clinton is a white man and aliberal.

So what exactly were the responses back then in the day?When the man in question was not a black conservative but a whiteliberal?

Clinton's critics, fumed liberals, were uptight, religiousfanatics. A massive liberal campaign was launched -- directly fromthe Clinton White House -- to discredit every single woman orconservative who took issue with Clinton's womanizing. Clinton'scritics, scorned James Carville, were determined "to wash allthe sodomites and fornicators out of town."

Also from Carville the memorable gem "Drag ahundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know whatyou'll find." A reference, of course, to Paula Jones, who wasquickly deemed to be an unsophisticated redneck rube.

Of a sudden, not all women told the truth.

Kathleen Willey was trashed. Juanita Broaddrick filed alawsuit -- and was promptly audited by the Clinton-controlled IRS.Paula Jones was humiliated, mocked and smeared from one end of thecountry to the other for everything from her accent to her economicand educational status. Liberals were ruthless. Absolutely totallyruthless. And among other things, ironically established aconsensus that sexual harassment is no big deal.

Let's move on from history to politics.

To begin, what was Lincoln talking about? Why does HermanCain fit precisely Lincoln's "living dog" description? What do weneed to understand here?

Lincoln borrowed his point from the Bible (Ecclesiastes9:4: "For to him that is joined to all the living there ishope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.") in hisfabled House Divided speech, using it to contrast himself withStephen A. Douglas. Said candidate Lincoln: "A living dog isbetter than a dead lion."

By which Lincoln meant that a man who cares nothing forthe task at hand is what he termed a "caged and toothless" lionwhen it comes to doing the job that needs to be done. Lincoln wasreferring to Douglas's unwillingness to end slavery. In today'sworld Cain is effectively using the same sentiment to illustratehis differences with rival Mitt Romney and others -- PresidentObama included -- on everything from how to approach changing thetax code (Cain's 9/9/9 plan) to putting the brakes on the growth ofgovernment and, most tellingly, refusing to buy into the dime storeNew Deal mentality that has become a hallmark of Establishmentmoderate Republicans.

As the polls show, Mr. Cain is gaining fans because of hisperformance in the GOP debates. He is being perceived as apotential "living dog" in the White House -- all teeth and energyin tearing relentlessly into the problem. How, the question arises,can a President Romney possibly oppose the growth of governmentwhen he went out of his way as governor to increase it?Demonstrating he not only didn't oppose the idea of big governmentbut that he now seems bent on convincing the public they shouldn't care thathe doesn't care.

And how can the GOP Establishment in Washington becommitted to the task when so many feed off of that very samegovernment? Are not Romney and the larger GOP Establishment thevery embodiment of Lincoln's "caged and toothless lion"? Is notHerman Cain -- his color quite aside -- a more serious politicalthreat to both the GOP Establishment and the LiberalEstablishment as opposed to just another politicalcompetitor?

We are in the midst of a tremendous popularity surge forMr. Cain. Poll after poll is emerging both nationally and now inIowa showing him at the front of the GOP pack. Like clockwork, andprecision clockwork at that, now comes forth the allegation, an"exclusive"in the liberal media outlet Politico, of"inappropriate behavior" that was "sexually suggestive." Yearsago.

Let's again be blunt. Mr. Cain is black. Were his femaleaccusers white? Politico doesn't say. Certainly thePolitico lists two white male reporters in the byline ofthe Cain story. One, Kenneth Vogel, is an ex-staffer for the far left George Sorosfunded Center for Public Integrity, as noted here.

And the tie between the left and lynching, as PBS notes,"black businessmen" who were "looking or associating with whitewomen" and "who refused to back down from a fight" is historicallyairtight.

But whatever the color of Mr. Cain's accusers both thepattern of this attack as well as the reason for it is crystalclear.

You might call it The Meaning of the President2012.

The presidential election of 2012 will mark the 48th yearsince the defeat at the 1964 Republican Convention of thethen-dominant Republican moderates by conservatives. The avowedcomplaint then from infuriated moderates was that conservatismcould not win elections, much less govern the country.

In practice, the loss of elections has since occurred whenmoderates (Ford, Bush 41, Dole, McCain) headed the ticket. Closeelection victories rather than landslides have resulted when thenominee campaigned as a moderate (the "compassionate conservatism"of George W. Bush). And under the command of both Bushes, from theraising of taxes (in violation of 41's "read my lips" pledge) toBush 43's embrace of such as a Medicare prescription drug programand education's No Child Left Behind -- the size and cost ofgovernment has increased.

It seems altogether obvious that the size and cost ofgovernment -- now with the country dangling precipitously over thecanyon of a $15 trillion debt -- will not decrease with aRepublican president until a flash point, a crisis, is reachedwithin the Republican Party itself. Reached, resolved andpassed.

To borrow from Abraham Lincoln: A party divided againstitself cannot stand. A conservative party that is led by a moderatewill eventually split asunder.

The GOP won't dissolve or disappear. But just as Lincolnpredicted of America in the middle of the slavery controversy, theGOP will become all one thing or all the other. Eitherconservatives will continue the party's evolution back into theparty of American conservatism it was at its founding, or moderateswill make moderation -- the idea of the dime store New Deal --palatable everywhere into the farthest reaches of theGOP.

Lest there be anyone who thinks the chances of the latterare unthinkable, it would be important to think of party historyexactly in terms of these last 48 years since 1964. If one thinksof the federal government as, say, a governmental version of thepopular movie franchise Transformers (described by Wikipedia as thestory of: "alien robots who can disguise themselves bytransforming into everyday machinery") a clearer picture ofwhat has been happening to the GOP for those 48 years can beseen.

Some of the more visible "everyday machinery" that hasbeen transforming the robotic federal government into even largersize with a costlier price tag has been welded on courtesy of themoderation impulse of various Republican presidents.

Contemplate that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)now run amok in the Obama era was a creation of Richard Nixon. Orthat Bush 43 dismissed the Reagan idea of getting rid of thegrowing bureaucracy that is the Department of Education as not"realistic' of leadership and instead decided in favor of launchingan expansion of the federal government's role in education bylaunching No Child Left Behind -- with no less than the late"Liberal Lion" Senator Ted Kennedy as his partner. Not to mentionthe Bush signing of McCain-Feingold and Sarbanes-Oxley.

And so on… and on.

The first GOP platform after 1964 -- 1968 -- found theRepublican Party that nominated Richard Nixon that year including aplank titled "The Individual and Government" whichstated:

In recent years an increasingly impersonal national governmenthas tended to submerge the individual. An entrenched, burgeoningbureaucracy has increasingly usurped powers, unauthorized byCongress. Decentralization of power, as well as strictCongressional oversight of administrative and regulatory agencycompliance with the letter and spirit of the law, are urgentlyneeded to preserve personal liberty, improve efficiency, andprovide a swifter response to human problems.

But by July of 1970, a bare two years and four months later, theNixon Administration created the EPA -- by executive order. Therewas not a single enabling piece of legislation from Congressinvolved. The Nixon executive order opened the door to a massivenational intrusion of what the platform specifically said the GOPopposed -- "an increasingly impersonal national government (that)has tended to submerge the individual." Beginning operations inDecember of 1970, EPA is now a federal behemoth employing almost18,000 full-time employees, daily injecting into everyday Americanlife proposed rules and regulations on everything from globalwarming to commercial boilers to private property.

In one recent case cited by the Heritage Foundation, the problems with moderateRepublican presidencies is vividly illustrated.

Alaska small businessman Krister Evertson, who had neverhad a run-in with the law in his life, was run off the road andjailed by a SWAT team armed with automatic weapons. Why? Because hehad not used a properly approved EPA label he had never heard offor a small shipment of sodium. Evertson wound up doing two yearsin prison.

When did this happen?

That's right. In 2004 -- when the EPA was under theadministration of one George W. Bush.

Thus the "dime store New Deal" of moderate Republicans --in this case from Nixon to Bush -- at work in practice. (Here isMr. Evertson's congressional testimonyfrom 2009.)

This is now a considerably polished approach by GOPmoderates. So run-of-the-mill routine that in his memoirs PresidentGeorge W. Bush apparently never thought his signing of theSarbanes-Oxley "Corporate Responsibility" legislation was worthmentioning. The compliance costs for American business from thisgem of Republican regulatory moderation were predicted to be $1.2billion. In fact, they now hover in the stratosphere of $35billion. And this from a president who ran on a platform with aplank promising -- no kidding -- "Common Sense inRegulation."

These few examples (and many more not mentioned here) showprecisely where conservatives and the Republican Party are now --and where they will continue to head unless serious change is athand.

In effect the philosophical strategy or lack thereof thathas guided the Nixon, Ford, and two Bush presidencies over the last48 years since that return to basics that was the 1964 Conventionhas exactly built almost to specification a Republican Party whichhas a conservative political foundation supporting moderate if notliberal governments. Governments which in turn wind up creatingregulatory nightmares like the EPA or Sarbanes-Oxley and therest.

Which means conservatives watching the 2012 jockeying forthe Republican presidential nomination face a considerable task toprevent the continuation of this trend. Plainly, Romney promises inso many words that a Romney presidency would re-channel thethinking of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and the father and sonBushes. He honestly pretends to nothing else.

Leaving conservatives across the country knowing what mustbe done. Yet struggling to understand how -- and importantly withwhom -- to do it.

What they are actually doing is examining the field forLincoln's "live dogs." Those who care strongly enough about thechanges they are promising and plan to look back in their farewelladdress to the nation as they leave office with the satisfactionthey sank serious teeth into the task -- with results to show forit.

Or, as Reagan himself put it in his farewell address tothe nation in January of 1989: "My friends: We did it.We weren't just marking time. We made a difference."

Added into this mix, working hand in glove with thedime-store New Dealers, is the drive by this or that Republicanconsultant and lobbyist to convince conservatives they can't winindependent votes and simply shouldn't care that the nextRepublican president would turn out like four of the lastfive.

That means something must be done to stop the popularityof Herman Cain.

Which in turn leaves a wide field of "suspects" for thosewho would seek to torpedo the Cain campaign. No one yet knows thesource here, but in this day and age of the Internet it isdifficult to believe they will escape unrevealed.

Was the source a GOP consultant/lobbyist with ties to aCain rival?

Or was it a left-winger acting on the centuries' old andwell proven animus of the left for the uppity black man -- a hatredthat once summoned the noose of the lynchers? And now, if you are aconservative black man like Herman Cain or Clarence Thomas beforehim as opposed to a white liberal man like Bill Clinton -- makesyou the target for exactly that same animus. Except this time it'sa high tech lynching, fed to a couple of lefty white male reportersat Politico.

Either way, one thing is clear.

Abraham Lincoln would recognize Herman Caininstantly.

Why?

Because Herman Cain is exactly Abraham Lincoln's "livingdog" incarnate. Which makes him one very big, double-barreledthreat. To both the GOP Establishment, because of his outsiderviews. And the left wing, because he's a black man withconservative views.

What is this sexual harassment story really allabout?

Somebody wants that damnable living dog Herman Cainrounded up.

And Politico is supplying the politicalrope.

About the Author

Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political director and author. He writes from Pennsylvania at jlpa1@aol.com.

http://spectator.org/archives/2011/11/01/lincolns-living-dog

A little more than a year to go. Can we survive?

2011-10-27T13:04:00.000-04:00

Some thoughts on The Walking Dead

2011-10-22T11:13:00.001-04:00

This post was mostly eaten by blogger when I first put it up and this has been my first chance to fix it.

I caught the first (and now the second) episode of AMC's The Walking Dead and had a few thoughts.

1. This is left over from last season. What's the deal about guns being so scarce that someone had to go back into the heart of zombie occupied Atlanta to retrieve a bag of firearms? This is Georgia in the heart of the American Southeast. If you want a gun just go into any house and chances overwhelmingly favor finding a few laying around. If you don't want to enter a private residence then go into any gun store, pawn shop, sporting goods store or any big box "mart-mart" and you'll find at least rifles and shotguns. Also you can go into any sheriff's office, city police office or state highway patrol office or National Guard armory. In the NG armory you just might find full auto weapons and explosives as well.

2. This season they are searching for the missing girl and hear church bells. They find a church which is clearly identified as "Southern Baptist". They find that the bells are recorded chimes (we will not ask where the electric power came from) and set about to exploring the building. Upon entering they find a giant crucifix hanging behind the pulpit - just like one might find in a Roman Catholic church, but would not see in a Southern Baptist church.

3. What's with the ratty old camper? They are in the Atlanta metropolitan area! There are dozens of dealerships with brand new RV's, some nearly the size of Greyhound buses that they could help themselves to. There are also plenty of dealerships full of new SUV's that they could expropriate.

4. And while we're on vehicles why have the redneck ride a chopped Harley with hangers when a good dirt bike would be far more practical? After all he could go off road when necessary and maneuver through much tighter areas. But why have a motorcycle riding point anyway since a biker would be much easier for the zombies to unseat and dine upon than someone enclosed in a car? It would be better to tow the bike behind the camper and use it when needed.

5. They need to have a wrecker with winch and push-board to ride point so that it can clear obstructions. An armed man can ride shotgun.

6. Disarming everyone is a spectacularly bad idea. The theory is that only the two deputies are trained to use firearms however the alternative is to give everyone an edged weapon. Ask yourself this, which is easier to use without training, a handgun or a sword?

It seems very obvious to me that the writers and directors of this show have never been south of Washington DC.

It's time to thin the herd

2011-10-22T09:52:00.001-04:00

There have been enough debates by now for the public to have formed an impression of the candidates who are contesting for the GOP nomination and so it is time for those with no chance of being the party's standard bearer to step aside so that remaining debates can focus upon those the public had decided to take seriously.

Michelle Bachmann would make a very good president, but the impression she has made is not adequate to give her the victory and she should withdraw. That she does not indicates that she is no longer running for president but for vice president or, and more likely, Speaker of the House. There is nothing wrong with these ambitions, but continuing to advance them in this forum is destructive to the GOP and its chances of picking a thoroughly vetted candidate that can defeat Obama next year.

Much the same can be said of Rick Santorum. He would make a wonderful president, but it won't be him. At least not this time around. I think he knows this. In fact I think he has always known this. His goal in entering the race was either to secure the VP slot or another cabinet position. Or to increase his stature back home in Pennsylvania for another Senate run.

Newt Gingrich just might be narcissist enough to have thought he could have gotten the nomination and then won the White House. But probably even he was not that delusional. This is almost certainly a vanity run for Newt whose real purpose is to allow him to raise his speaking fees and get a new book deal or two. Of course a cabinet post or even the vice presidency could also be in his sights. Whatever his true agenda remaining in the race only harms the party and by extension the nation. Newt is smart enough to understand this so if he chooses to remain in the race it will be because he has made the conscience choice to put his interests ahead of the country's.

John Huntsman never had a chance but is probably too stupid to have realized it. Remember when the White House leaked that Huntsman was the one Republican that Obama feared running against. No? Don't be embarrassed it was only in the news for about two days. Democrats always do this. They leak the name of some clueless liberal RINO that they know that they could beat in their sleep as the "one Republican that could defeat us" and hope that the GOP takes the bait. Like we did in 2008. The result is always the same. When we bite we go down in flames.

Ron Paul is the best guy in the race on domestic fiscal issues however his views on national security and the closely related field of foreign policy utterly disqualify him from serious consideration. If you want to know what Paul's response to a threat from a foreign power would be just look at how The US and the Great Powers of Europe dealt with Hitler. That is Paulism in a nutshell. Except that when Germany invaded Poland Europe did, at last" go to war. If Paul had been running things I doubt that even the Blitz would have stirred him to combat. After all war is the health of the state. Paul knows that he isn't going to be president. This campaign is just a way for him to raise his stature for future book sales and speaking engagements.

Rick Perry might make a good president. He has a good record as governor of Texas but his views on illegal immigration are deeply troubling. If 10 plus million Mexicans suddenly gain the right to vote in US elections they will give the Democrats an unbeatable electoral majority for at least the next 50 years. From that point forward every president and congressional majority will be like Obama/Pelosi on steroids. If you want America to become Venezuela vote in a president and congressmen who favor amnesty. Having said that it is still a fact that Perry is the popular governor of a large and very prosperous state so he must, for at least a little while longer, be taken seriously as a candidate in the primary process. If he continues to implode over the next couple of months he should leave but for now he has a legitimate place in the race.

Herman Cain never expected to get this far but now he is the front runner. While he has not thought out clear positions on all the issues that a president will have to deal with (especially foreign policy) he has good instincts and as a very successful CEO knows how to seek and follow good advice from legitimate experts. As the frontrunner he absolutely has a place in the race. In fact right now he is the candidate I'm backing.

Mitt Romney. What can you say about Mitt? He has been running for the presidency since 2007. I supported him back in 2008 after the Thompson candidacy imploded as the only man who could keep John McCain's name off the top of the ticket but that was just a choice between the lesser of evils. Romney should not be president but his place as the number 1 or 2 candidate in polls earns him a place one the stage.

As things now stand the debates are so crowded with also-rans in the race only for ego or to further other ambitions that it becomes impossible to examine the three serious candidates properly. It is very important that they be encouraged to withdraw.

The mainstream media will not put pressure on any RINO candidate to leave the race while they will restlessly hammer an conservative candidate. It will be up to rank and file Republican voters to push the dead wood off the stage. That means that those with a soft spot in their hearts for Bachmann or Santorum need to face reality and let their candidate know that it is time to leave and throw their support behind Perry or Cain (preferable Cain).

Ron Paul supporters are as hopeless as he is. Libertarianism is a utopian cult which at its heart is as anti-American as the nihilist death-cult of progressive liberalism. Ron Paul's pod-people supporters don't give a rats ass about the good of the nation as long as they get to run wild through the primary process spray painting their graffiti all over the walls and gaming the results of every electronic poll to make it look like Paul has the support of more than a handful of basement dwelling malcontents.

To sum up the campaign season started early this year so the time has already come to thin the ranks of the candidates. Otherwise we will wind up with Mitt Romney running against Barack Obama. Liberal-lite running against Liberal-extreme.

Not a good outcome for the nation no matter who wins.

Trying so hard to take them seriously

2011-10-14T11:08:00.000-04:00

H/T: American Thinker

It better

2011-10-12T17:12:00.002-04:00

More good news

2011-10-12T16:56:00.002-04:00

From USNews:

Here's how much political trouble President Obama is in: A new poll by the authoritative Evolving Strategies firm finds that Herman Cain, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney would all beat Obama it the election were held today.

Worse for Obama: the poll, which showed some 1,000 Americans videos of both Obama and the candidates speaking on the economy, backed up recent analysis that the president has lost his mojo when it comes to tackling the deepening recession and blaming Republicans for standing in his way.

Evolving Strategies put the video spin on their poll because most of the Republican presidential candidates still aren't known outside of Washington, the early primary and caucus states and to political junkies. Their idea was to show respondents a video clip and have them read a short 120-word biography.

As a result, the respondents felt they had more information and familiarity with the candidates and felt better making a judgment on a head-to-head contest question. Ironically, Obama still beat a "generic" Republican, but not the three front runners. Unfortunately for Obama, since the GOP primary race is now known, there is no more generic candidate to wish for.

[Read: Cain Jumps 20 Points Ahead of Romney in Poll.]

It is too soon to tell who the nominee will be but things are looking good for Cain and as things stand now that it good for the country.

So clever that only Satan could have thought it up

2011-10-12T09:34:00.000-04:00

Ross Kaminsky in The American Spectator's website:

Robert Jeffress, the pastor of the First Baptist Church inDallas, made news last week when referring to Mormonism as a cultwhile introducing Texas Governor Rick Perry to the Values VotersSummit.

In the past couple of days, Jeffress is doing anything butbacking away from his comments, saying on Sunday that "Part of apastor's job is to warn his people and others about falsereligions. Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Mormonism are allfalse religions. And I stand by those statements."

My views on these various religions aside, this sort ofrhetoric is distinctly unhelpful in reaching the goal thata majority ofAmericans now share: ending theObama administration after one term.

The "mainstream" media are already foaming at the mouthover Jeffress's remarks, using them to reinforce their journalismschool-learned bias against Republicans as small-minded biblethumpers, or perhaps, to coin a phrase, as people bitterly clingingto religion.

If Mr. Kaminsky gets his way Satan will have won a victory of incalculable magnitude. He will have literally guaranteed that no Christian can be elected president of the United States.

If the mainstream media's (and Ross Kaminsky's) attempt to force GOP candidates to prove their worthiness for office by affirming that a non-Christian cult is a legitimate Christian denomination it will have the same effect as making candidates deny the deity of Christ, his bodily resurrection and his future return. All indispensable bedrock doctrines of true saving Christian faith.

Mormons do not believe that God is eternal. They believe that he was born a mortal human in the distant past on a distant planet (a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away) and that he earned his godhood by perfect obedience to the Mormon religion. They believe that upon his death he was judged worthy and elevated to godhood and that he then called out the name of all his wives who then were elevated to the status of goddesshood. That he then formed his own heaven and earth (our earth) out of already existing materials and began populating his heaven by having sex with his goddess wives, who became pregnant and gave birth to babies who had only spirit bodies. The first of his spirit children was Jesus and the second was Lucifer. They call this life in spirit form before getting a body "the preexistence".

After a goodly number of spirit children were created the Mormon god called a counsel and asked his offspring to bring plans to the table on how he was to govern the world he was preparing to populate. Lucifer proposed a plan to force all humans to believe and obey their heavenly father and Jesus proposed allowing men to possess free will.

The Mormon god chose Jesus' plan and in anger Lucifer defied his father and drew one third of the spirit children with him into his rebellion. They became Satan and the demons and they attempted to overthrow Elohim (the Mormon god's proper name). Some spirit children fought bravely in support of their father and some were cowardly and did not take part in the fighting.

The Mormon god then created Adam and Eve and ordered them to be fruitful and multiply in order to create physical bodies for his spirit children to incarnate into. The reason Mormons are instructed to have large families is to create more bodies for the spirits in the preexistence. Those spirit children who fought bravely in the battle for heaven in the preexistence were rewarded by being born with skin that was "white and delightsome" while those who had displeased god would have a "skin of blackness".

"And he had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, and they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them."
From the Book of Mormon - 2 Nephi 5:21

It should be pointed out here that all this has happened before and all this will happen again (just like in Battlestar Galactica). This happened on Elohim's home planet and on the planet of the god who created Elohim's planet. It is happening on countless planets across the universe at this very minute.

On each of these planets a Jesus will be born and go to the cross in order to begin the work that a future Joseph Smith will finish when he is called by the god of that world to become the prophet of the Mormon religion. And on each of those planets some number of men will be perfectly faithful to the demands of Mormonism and will earn their own godhood. They will the create their own planets and the whole process will start over and so on into eternity (each cycle is called a "heavenly round").

I could go into more details but you get the point. There is simply no way that this is compatible with biblical Christianity and forcing presidential candidates to say that it is will do nothing more than exclude believing Christians from the presidency.

Of course this is a free country and anyone may believe anything he pleases. I am also aware that we are electing a national political leader not a national Sunday school teacher. And I am aware of Heinlein's dictum that "one man's religion is another man's belly laugh".

I have no objection to a Mormon as president - as long as he is a genuine constitutional conservative who understands that socialized medicine is not just bad for the entire nation when imposed by the federal government but bad for any individual state when imposed by that state's government. Who understands that the Second Amendment means exactly what is says and who has a clear and consistent record opposing abortion.

None of which can be said about Mitt Romney - BTY.

However I refuse to allow the claim that Mormonism is a legitimate form of Christianity to stand. It is not. To make claiming that Mormonism is true Christianity a test of whether someone should be allowed to become president is no different that making a Jew (like Joe Lieberman) affirm that Jesus was the true messiah or making an atheist affirm his belief in an "all-powerful creator god".

Individual Americans have the right to use religion as a basis for their decision on who to vote for if they wish to do so. We are free to vote only for Southern Baptists or Roman Catholics or Wiccians or atheists or any other faith or non-faith as we see fit. However we owe it to ourselves to know exactly what we are doing when we do it.

Essential bedrock doctrines of the Mormon faith have no more common ground with biblical Christianity than Hitler does with Netanyahu. Making a Christian who knows what Christians believe say that Mormons are not a cult is making him deny his faith.

If GOP candidates like Perry or Bachmann buckle under this pressure and affirm that Mormons are Christians then they have denied Christ (1 John 2:19)

Yawn

2011-10-12T07:25:00.005-04:00

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie says he is backing Mitt Romney for president as "the man we need to lead America" and said attacks on his Mormon religion are "beneath the office of the president of the United States."

So, one RINO endorses another RINO.

Is anyone surprised?

The incredible imploding presidency of B. Hussein Obama

2011-10-10T23:31:00.000-04:00

From The New York Post:

Aimless Obama walks alone

Last Updated: 3:45 AM, October 9, 2011

Posted: 2:49 AM, October 9, 2011

The reports are not good, disturbing even. I have heard basically the same story four times in the last 10 days, and the people doing the talking are in New York and Washington and are spread across the political spectrum.

The gist is this: President Obama has become a lone wolf, a stranger to his own government. He talks mostly, and sometimes only, to friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett and to David Axelrod, his political strategist.

Everybody else, including members of his Cabinet, have little face time with him except for brief meetings that serve as photo ops. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner both have complained, according to people who have talked to them, that they are shut out of important decisions.

The president’s workdays are said to end early, often at 4 p.m. He usually has dinner in the family residence with his wife and daughters, then retreats to a private office. One person said he takes a stack of briefing books. Others aren’t sure what he does.

If the reports are accurate, and I believe they are, they paint a picture of an isolated man trapped in a collapsing presidency. While there is no indication Obama is walking the halls of the White House late at night, talking to the portraits of former presidents, as Richard Nixon did during Watergate, the reports help explain his odd public remarks.

Obama conceded in one television interview recently that Americans are not “better off than they were four years ago” and said in another that the nation had “gotten a little soft.” Both smacked of a man who feels discouraged and alienated and sparked comparisons to Jimmy Carter, never a good sign.

Blaming the country is political heresy, of course, yet Obama is running out of scapegoats. His allies rarely make affirmative arguments on his behalf anymore, limiting themselves to making excuses for his failure. He and they attack Republicans, George W. Bush, European leaders and Chinese currency manipulation -- and that was just last week.

The blame game isn’t much of a defense for Solyndra and “Fast and Furious,” the emerging twin scandals that paint a picture of incompetence at best.

Obama himself is spending his public time pushing a $450 billion “jobs” bill -- really another stimulus in disguise -- that even Senate Democrats won’t support. He grimly flogged it repeatedly at his Thursday press conference, even though snowballs in hell have a better chance of survival.

If he cracked a single smile at the hour-plus event, I missed it. He seems happy only on the campaign trail, where the adoration of the crowd lifts his spirits.

When it comes to getting America back on track to economic growth, he is running on vapors. Yet he shows no inclination to adopt any ideas other than his own Big Government grab. His itch for higher taxes verges on a fetish.

Harvey Golub, former chairman of American Express, called the “jobs” bill an incoherent mess. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, he said that among other flaws, the bill includes an unheard of retroactive tax hike on the holders of municipal bonds.

“Many of us have suspected that economic illiterates were setting the economic policy of this administration,” Golub wrote, adding that the bill “reveals a depth of cluelessness that boggles the mind.”

The public increasingly shares the sentiment. A new Quinnipiac polls finds that 55 percent now disapprove of Obama’s job performance, with only 41 percent approving. A mere 29 percent say the economy will improve if the president gets four more years.

The election, unfortunately, is nearly 13 months away.

The way Obama’s behaving, by then we’ll all be talking to portraits of past presidents, asking why this one turned out to be such a flop.

Can't say that anything here surprises me. This is the first time in Obama's life that he has been held accountable for his actions. There is no one here to step in and rewrite a "C" term paper into an "A" for him (or just change the grade). No ghost writer to take his notes and turn it into the autobiography that he couldn't finish. No unspoken agreement among his fellow law students to refrain from commenting on the fact that his only signed article was something that would have embarrassed a high school senior taking college prep courses.

Little Barry is all on his own and even the MSM can't (and is increasingly unwilling to try to) disguise the fact that his is simply in way over his head. He was unqualified for the job. Had no experience to help prepare him for the job and had never come face to face with any of the hard cold realities of the real world outside of a very brief stint in a private sector law firm in which he said that he felt that he was "behind enemy lines".

Obama has never before had to consider that the faculty lounge Marxism that he absorbed from his moonbat mother, from his Marxist professors, from the "structural feminists" and "radical foreign students" that he deliberately and exclusively cultivated as friends during his college career might just be utterly wrong. Never before has little Barry had to face the fact that the ideas for a utopian society based on the radical redistribution of wealth that he has never even once thought to question might fail disastrously when put into practice.

And now he can't process the fact that nothing that he has done has worked. Marxism really is The God That Failed.

If the reality of the horror that Marxism brings hadn't been out there for any thinking person to see before Obama was even born I might feel a bit sorry for him. But as it is I can have no sympathy. He made his bed and now he must lie in it.

The tragedy is that for the next 15 months the rest of us must lay there with him.

Evil Corporations Hypocrites

2011-10-08T13:41:00.000-04:00

This was posted on Knowledge is Power and is one of the best commentaries on the current stupidity going on in New York, and other large (and no so large) cities.

Groveling before the MSM

2011-10-08T12:02:00.001-04:00

I just read a piece on American Thinker by Robert Eugene Simmons Jr. entitled Palin's Withdrawal Means Obama Wins. I would urge you to go and read the entire thing if you have wondered, like Rush Limbaugh, at the way that beltway Republicans cringe and cower before the mainstream media.

Mr. Simmons begins:

Unfortunately, it looks like the forces of smear, slander, and threat have finally claimed their intended victim. With Palin's announcement that she won't run for president, the election is essentially over.

The calculus is fairly simple: the media and GOP establishment want Romney to be the nominee. Once a progressive is at the head of the Republican ticket, low turnout for Republicans will hand a narrow victory to Obama.

This is very much the way it would have gone in the past when there was no alternative to the MSM. However in 2011 the mainstream media is dying and Fox News, talk radio and the internet are where a majority of people now get their news.

Think about it. George W Bush left office with an approval number in the low 30's but it took the MSM nearly six years to get it there. He was reelected despite the foaming hatred of the left's propaganda organs (otherwise known as broadcast network news, CNN, MSNBC and most daily newspapers). In the days before Rush Limbaugh created modern talk radio and Al Gore gifted the world with the internet it would have only taken the MSM two years to poison the public against a sitting president and his political party.

And the MSM is less influential now than it was in 2006. At least if you take viewership and sales figures seriously.

Mr. Simmons reasons:

So here is how the election will go. The media hasn't seriously opened up on Herman Cain, but most assuredly they will. Cain has been in business for decades, and the liberal media will troll through every relationship, every business deal, every word he has ever spoken. If that fails, the lies will start. To see evidence of this, we need not look at far as Palin. Rick Perry, another progressive, was attacked for something that someone painted on a rock on land his family leased out. That narrative will be used to attack both Perry and Cain -- Perry for having "allowed" it and Cain for making a big deal over "nothing." Both narratives will be forwarded, potentially in the same program. Once the liberal media goes through Cain's past with a fine-toothed comb, they will doubtless find disgruntled business adversaries, accusations of infidelity, and more.

A couple of points need to be made here. One, Perry's slide in the polls among GOP primary voters began before the foolishness about the rock. In fact almost all of the governor's fall is attributable to his poor debate performance and his views on illegal immigration. Conservatives, who make up the bulk of GOP primary voters, were disgusted with his use of left-wing talking points to defend his support for in-state tuition for illegals in Texas.

Of course the media is going to give Cain a colonoscopy, just like they will do to whoever wins the Republican nomination. But our side now has just as loud a voice - if not a little louder - than they do. Remember how the left-wing media destroyed the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and how Kerry was swept to an easy victory in 2004? No, because that isn't what happened. The Swift Boat Vets took away what was almost the only thing that made John Kerry attractive to mainstream voters - his war record. And nothing that CBS/NBC/ABC/CNN/MSNBC/The Washington Post/New York Times/Newsweek/Time and all the others combined could do could stop the process because the people had just as many places to go to hear the truth as they could to hear the MSM's lies.

Simmons does make one good point:

Furthermore, Obama will eviscerate Romney in the debates. When the subject of health care comes up, Obama will challenge Romney, who will have to reiterate the lame excuse for the statist intrusion he signed into law in Massachusetts. Obama will also be able to point to Romney's support of Brady and other gun control bills, state-run health care, and any number of other progressive-statist stances Romney has taken , or vacillated in and out of, in the past. Obama doubtless has an excellent research team, and they will be in full force to try to destroy Romney. This will suppress the voter turnout.

But this doesn't mean that Obama will win next year. This is just why, at the end of the day, Romney doesn't have any better chance of getting the GOP nomination than the "Rent Is Too Damn High" guy does.

Then there is one more factor that has to be considered. Ronald Reagan in 1980.

This was before Rush Limbaugh or Fox News or the internet. Yet Reagan, who was hated by the RINO establishment and the Left and its media outlets, crushed Jimmy Carter and then won reelection in an even bigger landslide four years later.

That was because Jimmy Carter was one of the worst presidents in the history of the Republic. In fact we haven't had a president as bad, let alone worse, than Carter since - Barack Obama.

That is why the Republican nominee, whoever he or she is, will win next year. The nation is going to be so sick of Obama (as they already are) that they will elect anyone who is not currently serving time for child molestation.

Republicans need to remember this and refuse to be intimidated by the increasingly irrelevant dying dinosaur media. We need to pick a candidate who has the ideas, the courage and the energy to turn this nation around and stop its decline and restore us to our proper place in the world.

Any of the announced GOP candidates would be vastly better than Obama, even Ron Paul or Mitt Romney. However Republicans are in a position this year where we do not even have to consider settling for "the best we can get under the circumstances".

We three candidates in the race now who would make wonderful presidents, Cain, Bachmann or Santorum. Let's focus on one of them and let the MSM worry about how the New York Times is going to handle the transition from "America's Paper of Record" to a weekly shopper.

Steve Jobs - ART (Assumes Room Temperature)

2011-10-07T14:07:00.002-04:00

By now you have heard about Apple's Steve Jobs assuming room temperature. Many have waxed rhapsodic about what a good businessman Mr. Jobs was and about how uber-cool his products are. All very true.

Jobs was a very smart and inventive man and he was a master marketer.

However Jobs was also a left-liberal who used his wealth and the power of his reputation to promote the very policies which place an obstacle in the path of anyone trying to replicate Apple's success. Which, I suspect, is at the heart of most limousine liberals liberalism. The desire to keep the super rich people's club as exclusive as possible.

When you strip away all the hype what Jobs did was give us really cool toys to distract us from the fact that he was trying to deprive us of our liberty and prosperity (strange isn't it how the public policies he advocated would have drastically shrunk the pool of potential customers who could have afforded his products).

At the end of the day Jobs was either a very stupid man in all areas other than his particular field of expertise or he was a profoundly evil man for promoting political ideas which would have done, and are doing, great harm to his nation.

Either way I will neither miss him nor morn him.

Good News!

2011-10-07T13:52:00.000-04:00

From YahooNews:

In news sure to inject shock and awe into the Republican political primary season, a Zogby poll released Thursday showed Herman Cain leading the Republican field, topping former front-runner Mitt Romney by an astonishing 20 points. Cain would also narrowly edge out Obama in a general election, the poll found, by a 46 to 44 margin.

Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, would lose by a point to the president, 40 percent to 41 percent. Texas governor Rick Perry, who has slipped in the polls of late, would lose to the president 45 percent to 40 percent.

The poll found that 38 percent of Republican primary voters said they would vote for Cain if the primary were held today. Eighteen percent said they would throw their support to Romney, while 12 percent each said they would vote for Perry and Texas congressman Ron Paul. No other candidate attracted double-digit support.

This is the second month in a row in which Zogby has found Cain leading the pack; he has surged another 10 points ahead of his competitors since September. Romney, on the other hand, has remained in the same place, while Perry’s share of the primary vote in the Zogby poll has steadily declined since he announced his candidacy in August.

Other pollsters have found Cain at or near the top of the field, with Fox News declaring him a top-tier candidate following its poll last week. That poll found Cain had 17 percent of the vote, trailing Perry by just two points and Romney by five.

A CBS News poll released Tuesday found Romney and Cain tied at 17 percent, with Perry trailing at 12 percent; a YouGov/Economist poll released Thursday found Cain leading with 21 percent, four points ahead of Romney.

With Palin opting out of a 2012 run, Perry revealing an inability to capture the loyalty of GOP primary voters and Bachmann fading to also-ran status Cain is stepping forward to take the status of Republican front runner and save the party from another Republican establishment candidate in the spirit of McCain/Dole/Ford - which is surely what Mitt Romney would turn out to be.

A PSA to start your day

2011-09-30T06:40:00.001-04:00

I likes me some zombies!

2011-09-30T06:29:00.001-04:00

Season 2 of AMC's zombie apocalypse series The Walking Dead is back on Oct. 16. Here is a taste.

An open letter to Morgan Freeman

2011-09-30T06:23:00.001-04:00

African-American Tea Party organizer Ali Akbar posted this open letter on the blog Tea Party Brew in response to actor Morgan Freeman's racist anti-tea party rant.

Dear Mr. Freeman,

My name is Ali Akbar. I’m a 26 year-old African-American small business owner and a tea party activist. I’m not writing to rake you over the coals in the way that many conservatives have done in the last 48 hours. Heck, I wrote a passionate open-letter refuting many of your claims already, but this is not that. This is an honest and standing invitation. I do believe that you are wrong in what you said about the tea party, but I would rather prove it to you than castigate you for your comments.

I also understand that your reflexive comments came from experience. You grew up in a different America than the one that I was blessed to be born into. We both grew up in the south, but I never saw ‘White Only’ signs. I’ve been called a name or two in my three decades, but racism has always been the exception in my life, not the rule, as it probably was in your youth. I understand your suspicion of conservative political movements. It is rooted in pain and fear and memory, and though I never saw the horrors of segregation that you did, we share that cultural heritage.

I’ve been a fan of yours all my life. From “Driving Miss Daisy” to “Lean on Me” to “The Shawshank Redemption,” I idolized you as a boy. Growing up without a father, you were one of the strong black men in my life who gave me a model to follow. Each of the characters you played had dignity and confidence. I tried to emulate the strength you projected. While many of my friends headed down the all-too-familiar path of drugs, unwed pregnancies and crime, I’ve striven to live a life with dignity, be an example for my brothers and make my mother proud.

My favorite of your movies was “The Power of One.” I must’ve watched it a hundred times, crying every time when your character Geel Piet was killed by the racist South African. Geel Piet was brave and heroic, even in the face of death, because he knew that the hate that killed him was a trifle in comparison to the love that PK’s anti-apartheid movement was spreading. It is with that spirit that I’m writing to you this morning.

I’ve attended dozens of tea party events. I’ve helped organize them, and I’ve even spoken at a few. The tea party is not what is often depicted in the news. It is people of all colors who are terribly concerned about the direction that America is heading. We don’t trust big government to make decisions for us. And we fear that the present administration’s spending is going to lead our country down a path to insolvency, much like what Greece is currently facing.

Your comments about the tea party have caused me physical pain. You’ve rekindled the old painful paradigm of Uncle Tom – that any black man who votes Republican is some kind of sellout. It’s not true. I work hard, pay my taxes, love Jesus, and I’m good to my family and community. In effect, your comments have stereotyped an entire group of people. And I know in my soul that you must regret that on some level.

There’s already plenty of groupthink among American blacks. Over 90% of us vote Democrat with religious regularity, and we have been doing so for over fifty years. For a short time, I was one of them. I realized a few years ago that the Democrats’ promises of equality bestowed by government wasn’t working and will never work. I came to believe that redistributionist policies with the goal of social justice was essentially creating a new plantation within the federal government. Scraps might be thrown our way, but dependence on the plantation would be the inevitable result.

Over half a century since we started voting for Democrat policies, blacks in America are worse off than before. Black Americans are more likely to get involved with drugs, go to prison, and die younger than our white counterparts. Over 70% of our children are born out of wedlock. Our abortion rate has never been higher. There are two explanations for these results. 1) Blacks are an inferior race and can’t take care of themselves. 2) Despite the best of intentions, the government has created and implemented “social justice” policies that promote perpetual dependence. I choose to believe the latter. Therefore, I have become a Republican.

Mr. Freeman, I’m not asking you to adopt my political views. You’re in your seventies, and a political shift is not in your future. I’m reaching out to you because I want you to think better of your fellow countrymen. Barack Obama is in the White House, and Herman Cain just won the Florida straw poll. America is the land of opportunity for black Americans like never before.

I’m hoping that you’ll come to a tea party in Tennessee — the place of your birth. Really anywhere in the country that works for you; I’ll set it up with the one of the thousands of activists I know around our great country. I’d be delighted to introduce you to good people who will welcome you with open arms, disagree with you, and then feed you some of the best barbeque you’ve ever tasted.

Racism is an ugly thing, but I assure you that it is part of our past, not our present.

It takes bravery to admit that you may have made a mistake. But, for Geel Piet, bravery is like breathing. It’s just something you do.

I hope you’ll take me up on my offer.

Sincerely,

Ali Akbar

ali@vvclients.com

Mr. Freeman is one of my favorite actors and I was disappointed to hear that his mind had been poisoned by ignorance and hate. I hope that he will accept Mr. Akbar's invitation and gain some first hand experience of the Tea Party. He would be mobbed by admirers seeking pictures and autographs. And if he took the time to speak with and listen to the participants in a Tea Party event he would learn that far from wanting Obama out of office because of his race they want a new president because Obama's policies have hurt them and their families.

Morgan Freeman is a wealthy actor who is insulated from the nearly all of the damage caused the current administration's policies. He needs to have some contact with people who are not.

I'm not the only one who sees it

2011-09-29T12:04:00.000-04:00

Today's Day by Dayhttp://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2011/09/29/ goes well with the American Thinker piece I posted below.

The Green's goal

2011-09-29T11:54:00.001-04:00

I have a little free time today so I wanted to bring a few things to your attention that I ran across over the past few days. The first of them is this essay from American Thinker on the true motives and goals of the green movement.

Green Twilight

By J. R. Dunn

There's something satisfyingly symbolic about the unfolding Solyndra scandal. A government "investment" based on a totally spurious Green rationale collapses, threatening to take part of the administration with it. What more apt illustration of the current status of environmentalism? It could scarcely go better if you'd scripted it.

It's often been said that Obama is a closet Marxist out to transform the U.S. into something resembling a people's republic. I've never completely agreed with this contention. For one thing, he's not precisely a Marxist; he's a Marxisant, a useful French word denoting someone who has memorized all the slogans while not bothering his head with any of the theory. "Spread the wealth around" is a pure Marxisant statement, just as his attempts to stir up class hatred against private jet-owning billionaires is pure Marxisant behavior. An actual Marxist would be far more subtle and convoluted, thanks to his grasp of theory and revolutionary tradition. Obama has neither. What he practices is bong politics, the kind of thing you'd hear in the college dorm after the third or fourth bowl: "If I was running things, man, I'd like, get rid of money, y'know? Money messes with your head, right? So you get rid of it, and then..."

It would be much closer to the point, and fitting in nicely with the bong ideal, to say that Obama wishes to establish a "watermelon" state, in which strict centralization and collectivization are implemented to create not a worker's paradise, but a Green utopia. Consider the fact that many of Obama's policies -- and almost all of the most noxious ones -- are in service of some environmentalist daydream or other. Shutting down Gulf oil exploration; new and onerous regulations for coal plants; attempts to halt exploitation of the Marcellus shale; foot-dragging on the Keystone XL pipeline; promotion of electric cars, wind power, bullet trains, and what have you.

"Obamanomics," as James Pethokoukis recently put it, "is about the top-down redistribution of wealth and income. Government spending on various 'green' subsidies and programs, along with a cap-and-trade system to limit carbon emissions, would enrich key Democrat constituencies: lawyers, public sector unions, academia and non-profits." Pure communism is no longer the goal -- it's the environmentalist state that lies closest to the heart of the modern social democrat. Obama is unquestionably an authoritarian, an autocrat, whatever you wish to call him, but his hue is as much green as it is red.

So it's a real pleasure to see the entire environmentalist edifice falling to pieces just as they thought victory was in their hands. Cap 'n' trade was dead on arrival. Global warming is unlikely to recover from the e-mail scandal, however far the cover-up may extend. The electric automobile has turned out to be less an automotive revolution than a third car for wealthy Democratic donors. And now the centerpiece of the Green agenda, renewable energy, has taken what may well turn out to be a mortal hit.

Note that none of these were brought about by rational arguments or serious opposition. Rationality per se has never made so much as a dent in the green worldview. What happened was that all the green innovations reached a certain point where they could no longer be sustained by the illusions of the faithful, whereupon they crashed and burned. They were overcome by their own internal contradictions more than any other single factor.

Rational opposition to the greens has consistently misinterpreted the movement's core beliefs. Critics have concentrated on arguments that wind, solar, and squirrel-on-a-treadmill power cannot replace brute force methods such as nuclear, coal, and oil. That electric go-carts are no substitute for technologically mature internal-combustion cars, that bullet trains cannot possibly compete with jetliners. All this is true -- and all this is irrelevant.

It's all irrelevant because green initiatives are not meant to replace anything. They are intended to form the basis of a new, deindustrialized society with minimal power generation, limited air travel (or travel of any sort, for that matter), and local, nonindustrial economies. In a green society, there will be no massive power plants, no private automobiles, no jetliners. There will be no industrial products at all beyond those required by the environmentalist elite. Picture Al Gore, his staff, and a half-million peasants. That is the green United States of the 22^nd century.

As I pointed out in Death by Liberalism, environmentalists have in no way been reticent about the type of society they're aiming for -- one as close to that of Neolithic hunter-gatherers as possible. That was the last point in time when human beings were fully integrated into the ecology, when they dominated nothing, and were in large part simply animals that talked.

The goal is not to save resources or to conserve the environment. It is to restore human beings to a point where they are simply another part of the ecology. It will not be purely Neolithic -- however close they may be to Mother Gaia, greens have no desire to spend their nights in caves. Agriculture will be necessary to raise ethanol crops (not to mention arugula) for the green aristocracy. It will be a village culture, poor, primitive, and ignorant of anything other than the fact that humanity has sinned against Gaia and must make amends. Only the green elite will be allowed power, travel, and information.

This is the society that the premises accepted by Al Gore, John Holdren, Lisa Jackson, and Barack Obama will lead to. (Though as stated above, Obama probably grasps only the slogans.) What they have been engaged in is setting up the basic framework for such a system.

So rational debate about kilowatt-hours, ridership, vehicle range, or anything else is simply beside the point. The California bullet train goes from nowhere to nowhere because it is supposed to go from nowhere to nowhere. There is no point in connecting LA, San Francisco, and San Diego if those cities are going to be shrunken to a tiny fraction of their current size, granted that they are allowed to remain at all. Those cities are unsustainable as they now exist, and will be shut down under any serious environmentalist regime. The bullet train's current path instead is limited to the Central Valley, the state's primary agricultural area. Conclusions can be left as an exercise for the student.

The same is true of the fossil fuel industry. The discovery that the Marcellus shale formations of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York hold up to 400 trillion cubic feet of natural gas would gladden the heart of any true environmentalist, who would trade safe, clean-burning domestic fuel for smelly foreign oil in a second. But this discovery interferes with the long-term green agenda: cutting off access to fossil fuels, then shutting down entire industries as their power source vanishes. So gas shale exploitation must be strangled -- the ideal requires it.

Deindustrialization, depopulation, a global return to a style of living not seen since the medieval period -- with modern medicine, cybernetics, and alternate power for the lucky, of course. Conservatives simply don't grasp this, any more than the Russian aristocracy grasped the truth of revolutionary socialism. They knew that the revolutionaries were a threat, that any society run by their like would be a disaster, but they could not get their minds around the fact that the fate planned for them and their entire class was annihilation, either in the cellars of the Lubyanka or in the snows of Siberia. What we look back on as history was not even a nightmare to those people.

So it's good to see the greens fail. Not due to resistance, though there has been no small amount, and it is increasing. It is more due to sheer unworthiness to exist. The problem for the greens is that there is no single step from current reality to their utopia. They must make a series of small steps, and none of those small steps are feasible. Almost no one will buy their electric zipmobiles. Their solar power tech can't succeed even with half-billion-dollar subsidies. The AGW crowd can't convince anybody even with the help of open scientific fraud and a near-total media blackout.

Fourteen more subsidy applications by renewables firms are pending. The long collapse has only begun.*

*Breaking news: the Energy Department on September 23 turned down a $275 loan guarantee to Solar City LLC while First Solar was unable to meet the deadline for a $1.9-billion guarantee.

J.R. Dunn is consulting editor of American Thinker.

Many people will be tempted to dismiss Mr. Dunn's theory that the green movement's end game is a world where a small elite (them) lives like kings on the backs of a great mass of ignorant serfs who live short hard illiterate lives of perpetual toil.

However before rejecting one should consider that the elites have built exactly that kind of society every chance they've gotten for the entire span of human history.

The fact is that the kind of society Mr. Dunn envisions as the goal of Al Gore and his like-minded brethren in the global left-wing elite has been the norm for most of human history. What doomed those societies was technological progress. As workers became more productive some of the surplus wealth that was created found its way into the hands of the working people who used it to improve their lives. They began to have the money to do things like educate their children. Craftsmen and merchants had the surplus cash and time to invent things that made them even more productive (like the printing press and insurance and joint stock companies).

The upward spiral of technological progress uplifted the lives of everyone who lived in the societies which embraced the new ways of doing things (first Europe then America) and allowed them to leave those parts of the world which rejected modernity in the dust (this is why the West is a good place to live and the Islamic world is a hell-hole).

Al Gore and his ilk have learned the lessons of history. They know that for the common men and women to be denied freedom they must be denied knowledge, technology and power (as in cheap electricity and cheap motor fuel). If they can take society back to a point where the average person has access only to the power of wind, water, sun and muscle then the vast majority of the population will have to devote almost every waking hour to the simple production of enough food to keep from starving.

Make all of this misery acceptable to the common man through a religious conviction that to live any other way would destroy the planet but that the anointed elite have a right to things like air travel, 24 hour electricity, air conditioning, flush toilets, cardiac pacemakers, literacy and food that has to be transported over long distances (like fresh fruit in winter) because those elites enlightened leadership is the only thing keeping the planet from being consumed in the hellfire of global climate change and you have a recipe for a stable aristocratic society that could endure for a millennium.

It is this kind of society that the global green elites are striving for. And their movement has greater power because many of them do not even fully realize what they are doing. To many of them, especially celebrities and wealthy dilettantes it is simply that the planet is in trouble (the earth has a fever) and they are the only ones with the wisdom to save it. This commitment to saving the planet and all of the little people who are too ignorant to know what is good for them entitles them to ride around in luxury SUV's and fly on private jets because their time is so valuable and their lives are so important that must be protected.

Of course Al Gore's mansion uses more electricity than some Third World nations - but only because he devotes nearly every waking second to saving the earth from Big Oil and the GOP. Of course Barack Obama and his wife take multimillion dollar vacations every other week - in the middle of a recession with levels of unemployment not seen since the Great Depression - but they work so hard saving the nation from the Tea Party and french fries. This kind of thinking feeds upon itself and breeds more and worse. It leads as inexorably to the kind of world Mr. Dunn predicts as death leads to decay.

This is why I have always maintained that the left is evil and must be opposed.

Bailing out the bailout

2011-09-28T07:30:00.002-04:00

Detroit News has an article on their website about Ford's decision to pull its TV add in which a customer explains that he bought a Ford at least in part because Ford didn't take government bailout money.

Supposedly the decision came as a response to pressure from the White House.

. . . Ford pulled the ad after individuals inside the White House questioned whether the copy was publicly denigrating the controversial bailout policy CEO Alan Mulally repeatedly supported in the dark days of late 2008, in early '09 and again when the ad flap arose. And more.

With President Barack Obama tuning his re-election campaign amid dismal economic conditions and simmering antipathy toward his stimulus spending and associated bailouts, the Ford ad carried the makings of a political liability when Team Obama can least afford yet another one. Can't have that.

The ad, pulled in response to White House questions (and, presumably, carping from rival GM), threatened to rekindle the negative (if accurate) association just when the president wants credit for their positive results (GM and Chrysler are moving forward, making money and selling vehicles) and to distance himself from any public downside of his decision.

I will leave it to my readers to draw their own conclusions about what it means for our democracy when the president can seemingly order a private business to pull an advertisement in which they simply tell the easily documented truth. What I want to draw your attention to is the authors repetition of a myth which has been promoted aggressively by the Democrats and their left-wing allies in the media.

. . . a sizable cadre of current and would-be customers oppose the notion of taxpayer bailouts for automakers, whatever the economic costs to the industrial Midwest and the nation of letting them collapse. Meaning there's an advantage Ford can press to remind folks that it didn't receive direct payouts from Treasury.

The myth is that the choice for the government was between letting the auto makers "collapse" or bailing them out with taxpayer money. In real life a business which is losing money not because it can't make or sell its product but because of something like excessive debt doesn't collapse absent a bailout. What it does is seek the protection of a bankruptcy court while it restructures it debt under the authority of a bankruptcy judge.

In the big automakers case the problem was the massive costs of servicing the pension and healthcare costs of retired employees. In GM's case something like $6000.00 in these legacy costs were attached to every car that rolled off of their assembly lines. If the car companies had entered bankruptcy they would have been able to rewrite the deals that they made with the United Auto Workers Union and reduce these costs significantly. This would have been bad for retired auto workers but when you allow your union to force your employer to agree to costs which it cannot possibly sustain you don't deserve a lot of sympathy.

The real reason for the bailout of the auto makers was to rescue the retired UAW members from having to pay the price of their union's bad conduct in the years when Detroit car companies were making money hand over fist because all their foreign competitors had either been bombed to ruins (Germany and Japan) or had been ruined by their government's decision to embrace socialism (the UK).

The UAW used the threat of strikes to arm twist the auto makers into agreeing to contracts which offered employees the chance to retire at 55 and live the life of a modern lotus eater at company expense. That this would eventually bankrupt the auto companies was not something that the union cared to consider. The bill eventually came due and the union called upon their great socialist benefactor in the White House and an ocean of taxpayer money was poured down upon their heads.

I don't wonder that the Administration and its lickspittles in the media are so desperate to conceal these facts. If the average voter was made aware of the fact that the bailouts were never about keeping GM and Chrysler from closing their doors and laying off all their employees and devastating the economy of the Midwest. But were instead about keeping a bunch of retired union thugs' snouts firmly embedded in the gravy train - at taxpayer expense. Then there would be even more hell for Obama and his party to pay next year then there already is.

The "NOT" candidate

2011-09-25T21:18:00.001-04:00

From American Thinker:

Herman Cain shocked the GOP world on Saturday by winning the Florida straw poll, garnering 37% of the vote.

Rick Perry, whose debate performances have come under fire in the last 72 hours finished a distant second with 15%. Mitt Romney got 14% for third place.

[. . .]

Is Cain now the "Anybody but Romney" candidate? There were apparently a lot of Perry voters who switched to Cain on the fly. But do they think the Georgia businessman can win?

Put simply, if Barack Obama can win then just about anybody not currently serving time for child molestation ought to be able to win.

Or perhaps Obama is the Harriet Miers of presidential politics. Remember when Bush nominated Miers a number of commentators noted that the nomination of a mediocre and generally unqualified candidate for the high court was hardly unknown. However the outcry over Ms. Miers essentially raised the bar on the quality of Supreme Court nominees. . .

I just remembered Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.

Never mind.

Back to the current presidential race.

Both Romney and Obama have to be worried in that the Republican primary voters are looking for an "anyone but Romney" candidate to vote for and voters nationally are looking for an "anyone but Obama" to vote for.

This leaves the GOP in a position which it has not been in since 1980. Pretty much anybody we nominate is going to win. So why not forget about "playing it safe" and nominating a candidate that the mainstream media tells us is electable (you know someone like Gerald Ford, Bob Dole or John McCain) and nominate someone like Ronald Reagan.

Many people, especially Democrats, the mainstream media (sorry, redundant) and establishment Republicans considered Reagan to be a lightweight (just an Hollywood actor) and a dangerous lunatic for wanting to confront the Soviet Union. Yet when he got the nomination he won an easy victory over Jimmy Carter because Carter was just so damn incompetent that people were willing to vote for "anybody but Jimmah"

My choice for the Reagan of the 21st century would be Sarah Palin but she isn't the only one who fills the Not Obama, Not Romney - and the increasingly attractive Not Perry - description. Cain might just do, as the Florida voters seem to think.

Affirmative Action Oscars

2011-09-22T07:33:00.000-04:00

From The LA Times:

When Oscar nominations were announced earlier this year, it was impossible to avoid this unsubtle fact: All of the major nominees were white. And when the presenters had all taken their turn on the Kodak Theatre stage, not a single black man was among them, a fact that Samuel Jackson noted tartly in an email to a Times reporter.
It was a sharp turn from the 2009-10 season, when “Precious” and "The Blind Side" drew numerous accolades, and there were black nominees for best director, best picture and best actress (and black winners for best supporting actress and best adapted screenplay).

For anyone concerned about which way the Oscars could go this year, there's reason to take heart.

When I was in high school we were told that each homeroom had to nominate two girls to run for homecoming queen and that one of them had to be black.

Perhaps the Oscars could adopt a similar policy and create a rule that at least one black actor, actress, writer and director must be nominated in each appropriate category. If no blacks win on the basis of votes then a computer can randomly select one of the black nominees to receive an Oscar by decree.

Then every year we would have a diverse and inclusive award ceremony regardless of the quality of the work that they had done the previous year and the Oscars would "look like America". That is they would become a racial spoils system in which members of favored groups would receive handouts and set asides without any regard to merit.

Of course this system would have to be extended to other favored groups beyond blacks. There would have to be Oscars set aside for Latinos and Asians. Then there is the fact of the massive under-representation of trans-gendered actors in leading roles in action movies. For example the studios should be required to produce a remake of Dirty Harry with Chaz Bono in the role of Inspector Callahan.

Or Hollywood could continue letting the Oscars be a merit based award system. But then they gave Oscars to Al Gore and Michael Moore, so I guess the ship has sailed on that.

Looking out my back door

2011-09-22T07:04:00.000-04:00

Not all in Hollywood were against US

2011-09-11T15:33:00.002-04:00

I lifted this from Big Hollywood because it mirrors my thinking exactly.

The Washington Times is wrong. Hollywood wasn’t AWOL in the War on Terror. In fact, just the opposite is true. Hollywood summoned every ounce of financial and star power at their disposal to fight this war.

Unfortunately, they chose to fight for the other side.

If our history is written by honest brokers, this generation of Hollywoodists will be remembered as those who openly enabled evil and spent hundreds of millions of dollars making bombs for the enemy — box office bombs. Over a dozen of them, specifically engineered with equal parts lies and hate and propaganda to undermine morale at home and on the battlefield in the hopes that we would lose this war.

Never forget the crime committed in New York, Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon on that terrible day. And never forget how Hollywood turned on your country.

There were some exceptions, however, and chief among them was Joel Surnow the co-creator of “24.” Each week, for eight seasons, he gave this country a hero who openly loved America, did what was necessary to protect her, and who was willing to pay a terrible price for it. ”24″ also delivered the goods. Cathartic, exciting and righteous without being self-righteous, the addictive adventures of Jack Bauer became an oasis in a cesspool of Hollywood product delivering the exact opposite message.

As the face of the program, Surnow paid a price for his apostasy and because he’s a smart man who knows how the world works, my guess is that he knew that someday he would. We all watched as some of the biggest forces in the world of entertainment and politics ganged up to exact their revenge with “The Kennedys.” Don’t believe for a second that wasn’t a form of payback.

For whatever it’s worth, we thank you, Joel Surnow. You can’t imagine what it meant to millions of us to have something to count on over those weeks and years — something that told us we weren’t crazy and we weren’t alone.

And thank you to the subversives who used their art and magnificent artistry to take our side through thinly veiled allegory. Thank you Frank Miller and Zack Snyder for “300.” Thank you Christopher Nolan for “The Dark Knight.”

There were others. Men like Gary Sinise who tirelessly support the troops and David Zucker who took the fight directly to that anti-American pig Michael Moore. There is also Robert Davi, Jon Voight, Kelsey Grammer, Michael Moriarty and those like them who have bravely and eloquently spoken out against the talking points issued by their Hollywood Overlords.

For fear of missing one, I won’t attempt to name everyone in Hollywood who did the right thing, who openly supported our military and refused to participate in the resume-enhancing undermining of our country. Within the context of the whole of the entertainment business, however, they make up a heartbreakingly short list. But you know who are and we know who you are and we thank you.

The rest of you can burn in Hell.

What a terrible testament to how far Hollywood has fallen.

John Ford was a liberal and John Wayne was a conservative. They argued frequently about politics however they remained friends and they cooperated in the production of magnificently patriotic movies like They Were Expendable (click the link for part one of Big Hollywood's seven part series on the production of that movie).

We have lost that today and it is because of the venom of the left.

May they burn in hell indeed.

9/11/2001 -9/11/2011

2011-09-11T08:52:00.003-04:00

Never

Ever

Forget

Much of TV today sucks

2011-09-09T20:49:00.001-04:00

I hate reality shows. Survivor, American Idol, Dancing With The Stars, The Apprentice, they all blow. And don't get me started on Pawn Stars and Ice Road Truckers and other crap shows where we watch people doing their jobs. I would joke and say that the next thing would be a show about garbagemen but I fully expect some kind of "Hollywood Trash Collector" show to be premiering soon. If not that then some kind of show where eco-nannies or poverty nazis go through people's trash and scold them for their wastefulness.

Oh, and how about this. Since unemployment is high and unlikely to go much lower as long as Obama is still in office how about "Real Unemployed Deadbeats of [insert city, state or county of your choice]" where the camera follows some layabouts as they spend their two years sponging off the taxpayers.

Respect must be earned

2011-09-07T16:41:00.003-04:00

From FoxNews.com:

Republicans have decided they're not going to give a rebuttal to President Obama's jobs speech later this week, a decision House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi took as a high affront to the White House.

At least three GOP lawmakers also have announced they're not going to show up for the presidential address. House Speaker John Boehner's office then confirmed Tuesday evening that nobody from the party would deliver an official televised response.

Pelosi said the party's "silence" would "speak volumes about their lack of commitment to creating jobs."

"The Republicans' refusal to respond to the president's proposal on jobs is not only disrespectful to him, but to the American people," Pelosi said.

No Ms. Pelosi. What is "disrespectful to the American people" is Obama using an address to a joint session of congress to make what will amount to a campaign speech. A speech in which he will whine about how none of the nation's problems are his fault. About how he inherited this mess from Bush. About how the Republicans are deliberately sabotaging the economy to make him look bad.

He will propose a course of action so wrong-headed and disastrous that Republicans in the House will view it as dead on arrival and he will do this on purpose. This will be done in order to give him an issue to run on next year - Republican obstructionism. This is because he knows that any program of government action which would actually stimulate private sector growth would by necessity involve public sector shrinkage. Taxes would have to be lowered and the tax code reformed. Regulations would have to be evaluated with an eye to simplification or outright repeal. Government would have to admit that there are a great many things that it does not do well and has no business (from either a constitutional or practical standpoint) even attempting. And the government payroll would have to be trimmed which would mean that many public employees being laid off.

It goes without saying that this course of action, while indisputably good for the nation, would be anathema to Obama's (and the Democrat party's left-wing base). Therefore there is absolutely no chance that Obama anything even close to a program which would have the slightest chance of encouraging economic growth. It simply isn't in him to put the nation's interest before his own.

So for these reasons the GOP is doing exactly the right thing in refusing to offer a reply to what will certainly be a nasty little telepromptered screed. Doing so would elevate Obama. A reasoned response justify his empty words and confer upon him an illusion of respectability and reasonableness which he simply does not deserve.

What Republicans should do is boycott the speech. Let it be obvious that Obama is making a partisan speech to a partisan audience. If a Republican legislator feels that he must attend then he or she should be polite but offer only the most tepid and brief applause, refuse to stand for any ovation started by Democrats and leave the chamber immediately after the conclusion offering either no comment to the press or making only short statements about how sad it is to see such a great nation governed by such a small and inconsequential man.

The detailed response to why Obama's program of big government tax and spend statism is exactly the wrong thing to do can come in a day or two after our economists have had a chance to analyze it.

Runnin' off to freedom

2011-09-06T20:51:00.000-04:00

H/T: American Thinker

We should stand up for what we believe

2011-09-03T11:21:00.003-04:00

From The American Spectator:

Most people view the anti-Catholicism faced by John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential campaign as a prejudice they are glad our nation has left behind. Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times, is obviously not one of those people. His recent "Asking Candidates Tougher Questions About Faith," if taken seriously by its readers, would re-instill the fear that any presidential candidate of faith would subsume their decision-making to the religious authority that they embrace.

It's strange that Keller would encourage such questions since he confesses, "I still remember, as a Catholic boy, being mystified and hurt by the speculation about John Kennedy's Catholicism -- whether he would be taking orders from the Vatican." It seems that the good sense of his adolescence has been lost, possibly by his years of worshiping at the altar of secular sophistication.

Keller's particular concerns are the "weird" Mormonism of Romney and Huntsman, the "fervid" evangelicalism of Bachmann and Perry, and the "conservative wing of Catholicism" supposedly represented by Santorum. Regarding Catholicism, the faith in which Keller was raised, he explicitly raises the issue faced by JFK five decades ago -- the separation of Church and State.

The level of furious mis-logic in Keller's article explains much about the decline of the newspaper under his leadership and his upcoming departure to the op-ed page. But, importantly, it represents a powerful segment of the Democratic Party elite that views the continued prevalence of traditional religious beliefs in the U.S. as the chief obstacle to its ideological aims.

[snip]

Keller poses three questions each of the GOP presidentialcandidates should answer -- on whether public schools should teachevolution; whether the U.S. is a "Christian nation"; and whetherMuslims should be appointed to the federal bench.

The authors of the AmSpec piece, Deal W Hudson and Matt Smith, believe:

FollowingKeller's recommendation would only trivialize the politicalconversation heading toward the 2012 election. But Keller evidentlysees an upside in creating a religious sideshow that would alienatemoderates, a doubtful assumption, since those same moderatesweren't affected by Obama's twenty years at the feet of a pastorlike Jeremiah Wright.

However I tend to disagree. I think that answering those questions from a conservative perspective would help rather than hurt a candidate. Here is how I would address each of them:

Q: Should public schools teach evolution?
A: Yes. Public schools should give students a good grounding in the theory of evolution including the problems the theory faces such as the lack of transitional forms. The fact that the fossil record shows large numbers of species appearing suddenly and remaining stable for million and millions of years should be explained. The theories which have been put forward such as the "hopeful monster theory" (where a lizard lays an egg and a bird or mammal hatches from it) should be explored and it should be revealed to the students that science has absolutely no naturalistic explanation for how the massive amounts of information (terabytes worth of data) that would be needed to transform one species into another just "appear" seemingly out of nowhere. It should be made clear to the students that the neo-darwinian synthesis is not supported by the current scientific data and that no theory which both relies only upon naturalistic processes and has any empirical evidence to support it has been advanced to replace it. My approach does not call for teaching biblical creationism, or any other religion's "origin story". It does not even call for teaching the theory of intelligent design. It simply requires the schools to tell students the truth about the current state of evolutionary theory rather than engage in an intellectual whitewash.

Q: Is the US a "Christian nation"?
A: In the sense that most Americans identify themselves as Christian yes. In the sense that America has an official state religion no. The Constitution forbids the government from establishing a state church and from preventing any person from practicing their religion as their conscience dictates. Provided they harm no one else of course. You may speak in tongues all you wish, but you can't give a rattlesnake to a child to handle. You can go to synagogue but you can't stone people who break the sabbath. You can pray toward Mecca five times per day but you can't cut the head off a woman who refuses to wear a head covering. The real question is what the Framers intended to prohibit in the Establishment Clause. Did they really mean that it was an illegal "establishment of religion" to allow a voluntary student led prayer at a high school event such as a football game? Did they really mean that allowing a local church to put a manger scene on the courthouse lawn at Christmas (or a synagogue to set up menorah at Hanukkah) was the same thing as setting up a taxpayer funded Church of the United States? I believe that the answer to those questions is absolutely not. If it were otherwise they would not have created the positions of Chaplin for the House and Senate and would not have chosen to open congress with prayer. They would not have chosen to open sessions of the Supreme Court with a bailiff shouting "God save the United States and this honorable Court!".

Q: Should a Muslim be appointed to the federal bench?
A: Yes, provided they meet the same standards that any other federal judge should be held to. Those standards are an appropriate education and adequate experience and a record which shows an unwavering commitment to the principles of originalism. In other words I could care less about the race, sex, religion or national origin of a judge if I believe that he or she will be what amounts to a judicial clone of Clarence Thomas. I don't care if he is a black atheist from Zimbabwe if he will rule that the Second Amendment means that any citizen has the right to carry a firearm, openly or concealed, any place where they have a legal right to be and I don't care if she is a lesbian Wiccan whose mother was a Pacific Islander and whose father was Puerto Rican if she will rule that the Commerce Clause means absolutely nothing other than that congress can prohibit one state from placing tariffs on the products from another state and that all laws predicated on any other interpretation of the Commerce Clause are null and void.

The left is attempting not so much to drive God from the public square (they don't believe in God so as far as they are concerned He isn't there to begin with) but to drive people of faith from participation in the public life of the nation. It is time that religious people fought back by openly and unapologetically acknowledging their faith. Surveys show that the majority of people in the US do not believe in the blind materialistic theory of evolution, do not support government actions like the removal of the San Diego cross and take no offense at prayer at public events provided that it is not aggressively sectarian. Leftist elites who show their contempt for America's religious heritage are also showing their contempt for ordinary Americans. A candidate who calls the elites on that contempt will find themselves backed by a substantial majority of the American people.

2011-09-02T08:58:00.000-04:00

No. 3 Stranglehold

One of the greatest hist from the A number 1 conservative gun-toting rocker, Ted Nugent!

Miss Ann is Talking

2011-09-02T08:55:00.001-04:00

That means that YOU are listening!

LIBERALS' VIEW OF DARWIN UNABLE TO EVOLVE

August 31, 2011

Amid the hoots at Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry for saying there were "gaps" in the theory of evolution, the strongest evidence for Darwinism presented by these soi-disant rationalists was a 9-year-old boy quoted in The New York Times.

After his mother had pushed him in front of Perry on the campaign trail and made him ask if Perry believed in evolution, the trained seal beamed at his Wicked Witch of the West mother, saying, "Evolution, I think, is correct!"

That's the most extended discussion of Darwin's theory to appear in the mainstream media in a quarter-century. More people know the precepts of kabala than know the basic elements of Darwinism.

There's a reason the Darwin cult prefers catcalls to argument, even with a 9-year-old at the helm of their debate team.

Darwin's theory was that a process of random mutation, sex and death, allowing the "fittest" to survive and reproduce, and the less fit to die without reproducing, would, over the course of billions of years, produce millions of species out of inert, primordial goo.

The vast majority of mutations are deleterious to the organism, so if the mutations were really random, then for every mutation that was desirable, there ought to be a staggering number that are undesirable.

Otherwise, the mutations aren't random, they are deliberate -- and then you get into all the hocus-pocus about "intelligent design" and will probably start speaking in tongues and going to NASCAR races.

We also ought to find a colossal number of transitional organisms in the fossil record -- for example, a squirrel on its way to becoming a bat, or a bear becoming a whale. (Those are actual Darwinian claims.)

But that's not what the fossil record shows. We don't have fossils for any intermediate creatures in the process of evolving into something better. This is why the late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard referred to the absence of transitional fossils as the "trade secret" of paleontology. (Lots of real scientific theories have "secrets.")

If you get your news from the American news media, it will come as a surprise to learn that when Darwin first published "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, his most virulent opponents were not fundamentalist Christians, but paleontologists.

Unlike high school biology teachers lying to your children about evolution, Darwin was at least aware of what the fossil record ought to show if his theory were correct. He said there should be "interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps."

But far from showing gradual change with a species slowly developing novel characteristics and eventually becoming another species, as Darwin hypothesized, the fossil record showed vast numbers of new species suddenly appearing out of nowhere, remaining largely unchanged for millions of years, and then disappearing.

Darwin's response was to say: Start looking! He blamed a fossil record that contradicted his theory on the "extreme imperfection of the geological record."

One hundred and fifty years later, that record is a lot more complete. We now have fossils for about a quarter of a million species.

But things have only gotten worse for Darwin.

Thirty years ago (before it was illegal to question Darwinism), Dr. David Raup, a geologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, said that despite the vast expansion of the fossil record: "The situation hasn't changed much."

To the contrary, fossil discoveries since Darwin's time have forced paleontologists to take back evidence of evolution. "Some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record," Raup said, "such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information."

The scant fossil record in Darwin's time had simply been arranged to show a Darwinian progression, but as more fossils were discovered, the true sequence turned out not to be Darwinian at all.

And yet, more than a century later, Darwin's groupies haven't evolved a better argument for the lack of fossil evidence.

To explain away the explosion of plants and animals during the Cambrian Period more than 500 million years ago, Darwiniacs asserted -- without evidence -- that there must have been soft-bodied creatures evolving like mad before then, but left no fossil record because of their squishy little microscopic bodies.

Then in 1984, "the dog ate our fossils" excuse collapsed, too. In a discovery The New York Times called "among the most spectacular in this century," Chinese paleontologists discovered fossils just preceding the Cambrian era.

Despite being soft-bodied microscopic creatures -- precisely the sort of animal the evolution cult claimed wouldn't fossilize and therefore deprived them of crucial evidence -- it turned out fossilization was not merely possible in the pre-Cambrian era, but positively ideal.

And yet the only thing paleontologists found there were a few worms. For 3 billion years, nothing but bacteria and worms, and then suddenly nearly all the phyla of animal life appeared within a narrow band of five million to 10 million years.

Even the eye simply materializes, fully formed, in the pre-Cambrian fossil record.

Jan Bergstrom, a paleontologist who examined the Chinese fossils, said the Cambrian Period was not "evolution," it was "a revolution."

So the Darwiniacs pretended they missed the newspaper that day.

Intelligent design scientists look at the evidence and develop their theories; Darwinists start with a theory and then rearrange the evidence.

These aren't scientists. They are religious fanatics for whom evolution must be true so that they can explain to themselves why they are here, without God. (It's an accident!)

Any evidence contradicting the primitive religion of Darwinism -- including, for example, the entire fossil record -- they explain away with non-scientific excuses like "the dog ate our fossils."

DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL UCLICK

1130 Walnut, Kansas City, MO 64106

Miss Ann is entirely correct here.

Darwin believed that as more fossils were discovered the missing transitional forms would turn up and give us a complete picture of the evolution of most species, including man.

It never happened and the theories that have been put forward to explain the sudden appearance of new species require more pure faith to believe than the biblical account of 6-day creation.

We are now supposed to believe some variation of the "hopeful monster" theory in which a lizard lays an egg and a bird hatches out of it. There is absolutely no mechanism to account for this other than the intervention of an outside intellect with the power to bring about such a change but we are told that any variation of intelligent design theory is off limits because it mixes religion with science.

Yet science wishes for us to believe something which is flatly impossible.

Who are the faith-based fanatics wanting to shove their belief system down other people's throats?

Oh, and while you are grieving over the death of the "horse series" in which eohippus was supposed to have evolved into equus ponder this.

Homo Sapiens is supposed to be about two hundred thousand years old. Yet agriculture and animal husbandry and cities and all the other foundations of modern civilization are only around 6000 years old.

Are we really supposed to believe that people whose brains were essentially identical to ours and who therefore had all the potential that we have for observation and invention did nothing for one hundred and ninety-four thousand years except figure out slightly more efficient ways to chip flint spear points? And then one day - in three widely separated places (the Nile river delta, Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica) at essentially the exact same time and out of thin air - figured out how to lay the foundation for modern civilization?

Think about it. In 1/32 of the time it took our ancestors to get to "fire good, dog friend" modern man gets to "the Eagle has landed" and the launch of the iPhone 5.

Again, who are the faith based fanatics trying to shove an irrational belief system down other people's throats?

Scaming the taxpayer

2011-08-30T06:59:00.002-04:00

Wisconsin Town Bars Republicans From Labor Day Parade

In previous years, Republicans have worked the parade route, but this year they will not be allowed to take part. The parade is organized by local unions, which said Wisconsin Republicans "have openly attacked worker's rights."

Wisconsin politics — which hasn't been pretty of late — has made its way into a local Labor Day parade. The organizers of the Wausau Labor Day parade announced they would not let Republican lawmakers take part in the Sept. 5 display. The parade is organized by 30 local unions.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports:

In a statement, [Randy Radtke, president of the council,] added that the parade is intended to celebrate working men and women and what the labor movement has given them: weekends, a 40-hour workweek, child labor protection and a safe working environment.

It should be pointed out that all those "gifts" of the labor movement to the working men and women were only made possible by advances in worker productivity made possible by entrepreneurial capitalism (imagine a campaign to give people free air travel before the airplane was invented). The same entrepreneurial capitalism that the current labor movement, and its allies in the Democrat party view as a blood enemy and are attempting to destroy.

It was not until advancing technology made it possible for employers to give those benefits to workers that a movement to bring them about became possible. In other words the labor movement was not a response to long hours, poor working conditions and low wages. Rather it was an early indicator that it was becoming possible to relieve those conditions.

The fact is that those improvements would have come about anyway even without the labor movement. It just would have taken a little longer for employers to begin raising wages and improving conditions to attract and retain good workers. As society has advanced socially the ethos of employers has moved more and more toward providing generous benefits to workers and labor unions have become less and less necessary. This is why the share of the private workforce represented by unions has been in steep decline for decades.

Add to this the union's tendency to support political candidates and policies that more and more Americans find objectionable and it becomes highly unlikely that organized labor will enjoy any kind of private sector comeback.

This is why the labor movement has concentrated more and more on the public sector. However public sector unions have never been a good idea. No less a liberal luminary than FDR pronounced the idea of unionizing government workers as “unthinkable and intolerable."

The reason that public worker unions are so toxic is that in a private sector labor negotiation on one side of the table sits management - representing the owners of the company - and on the other sits the union - representing the employes of the company.

The two sides have representation at the table. In the case of a public sector labor negotiation the situation is different. On one side of the table sits the public employee union and on the other sit politicians who depend for reelection upon campaign contributions from unions as organizations and from individual union members. They also depend upon the votes of public employee unions and upon those union members to staff their campaigns at the grass roots level. If you doubt me try this experiment. Come to the DNC convention in Charlotte next year and take a poll of the delegates and see just how high a percentage of them are members of public sector unions.

So in a public sector labor negotiation only one side - labor - is effectively represented at the table. The great mass of private sector tax payers are shut out of the process and no one looks out for their interests. And here is a dirty little secret. Private sector workers are a big segment of those tax payers who have no representation at a public sector labor negotiation.

Private sector union members may think that they stand in solidarity with public sector union members however the reality is that public sector workers are parasites whose only way of increasing their prosperity is to make the private sector workers poorer. This is because government at any level produces nothing. It creates no wealth and to survive it must drain the wealth of the private sector.

Most advocates of labor unions can only cite gains made decades in the past as justification for the continuing existence of unions. There has been no advance in the situation of the average worker in the United States in at least the last 35 years which can be attributed to the intervention of organized labor. Workers in the private sector have largely woken up to the fact that they mostly no longer need unions to look out for them. Public sector workers will never come to that conclusion because in their case collective bargaining is a way for them to gain control of both sides of the negotiating process and write their own ticket.

However the price of that ticket is too high for the rest of us to continue paying.

Advice from the master

2011-08-28T21:13:00.001-04:00

North Carolina needs a new governor

2011-08-28T16:10:00.000-04:00

And a new state legislature that will clean up some of the accumulated crap left over from past Democrat controlled state government. From Confederate Yankee:

North Carolina Governor Declares Every Concealed Carry Permit in eastern NC Invalid Due to Hurricane Irene

Thanks to a brain-dead state law foisted upon us by a Democratic state legislature (N.C. Gen. Stat. § 14-288.7), every time the governor—in this instance, Democrat Beverly Perdue—declares a state of emergency, it is illegal from that moment onward to carry a concealed weapon until the state of emergency has been declared over.

14-288.7. Transporting dangerous weapon or substance during emergency; possessing off premises; exceptions. (a) Except as otherwise provided in this section, it is unlawful for any person to transport or possess off his own premises any dangerous weapon or substance in any area:
(1) In which a declared state of emergency exists; or
(2) Within the immediate vicinity of which a riot is occurring.
(b) This section does not apply to persons exempted from the provisions of G.S. 14-269 with respect to any activities lawfully engaged in while carrying out their duties.
(c) Any person who violates any provision of this section is guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor.

We've dealt with this bit of Democrat-generated stupidity before.

Governor Purdue made this declaration while the state was at work, meaning everyone who has a carry permit and lives east of Interstate 95 who was away from home instantly became a criminal by proclamation.

If we look at Google Maps, that means that a carry permit holder in Wilson dining at the Cracker Barrel is perfectly legal, but the permit holder a block to the east filling up on gas at the Kangaroo Express is now a criminal.

Ridiculous.

Update: I'd forgotten we were stuck with this crap last year as well.

An honest person going out to scrounge for supplies after a natural disaster like an earthquake or hurricane as well as someone who has to go to work or to seek medical attention in an area experiencing riots has a greater need to be armed.

The Democrat National Convention is coming to Charlotte next year. What if your daughter worked as a nurse in a downtown clinic there? She would need to show up because of the greater need for medical services the Convention will require. Someone will need to treat all the extra cases of venereal disease such a gathering will bring to town. Not to mention all the bottles, candles and other objects vacuum locked into men's anuses that will have to be extracted (and all the hamsters, gerbils and white mice that will need to be rescued from colons). Then there is the ever present possibility that the scum and filth which make up the core of the Democrat Party will pull a 1968 and let their true natures come out to play.

Wouldn't you want your little girl to have a .40 caliber Glock tucked into her purse when she threads her way through that mass of human debris?

Hat Tip: KisP

Top Ten Conservative Songs

2011-08-28T13:33:00.001-04:00

No. 4 Der Kommissar

After The Fire sings about the soul destroying oppression of communist East Germany.

Ignore at your own peril

2011-08-28T13:22:00.000-04:00

I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that almost anythign worth saying about the modern world has already been said by Rudyard Kipling.

THE GODS OF THE COPYBOOK HEADINGS

by Rudyard Kipling

AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,

I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.

Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn

That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:

But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,

So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,

Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,

But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come

That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,

They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;

They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;

So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.

They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.

But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life

(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)

Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,

By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;

But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew

And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true

That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.

That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

More about Ass-Clown Ron Paul

2011-08-28T13:17:00.001-04:00

Patrick at the Pagan Temple left this comment to my post on Ron Paul’s ass-clowness.

“Actually, I agree in principle with Paul's foreign policy as much as I do his fiscal, economic beliefs. But where I do part company with him, in the strongest possible terms, is his naive views of Israel, the Middle East and Muslims in general, and Iran in particular. Those things betray a simplicity and even an ideological blindness that renders him unfit for office.”

I have a lot of fun tweaking the Paul supporters or “Paul pod-people” but like Patrick I agree with most of his economic policies. It is his libertarian views on foreign affairs that I cannot respect.

Paul's "naive views" are his foreign policy. What libertarians fail to realize is that George Washington’s “no entangling alliances” doctrine was a pragmatic calculation based on the infant Republic’s weakness compared to the great European powers – not an expression of an ideal.

The ideal embraced by all the founders (including men as different as Hamilton and Jefferson) was an America that would be at least the equal of any of the European powers in matters military, economic and political; an America that could act anywhere on the globe to protect its interests. This is why we went to war in North Africa against the Barbary Pirates to protect our sea lines of communication. This is why WWII was the right thing to do and why the long Cold War against communism was the right thing (including all the proxy wars like Korea and Vietnam and El Salvador and Nicaragua).

Even the idea that the Founders didn’t want America to have an “empire” as the term is currently defined by the left doesn’t hold water. The War of 1812 was as much about a US desire to capture Canada and bring it into the Union as it was about keeping our sailors from being impressed by the Royal Navy.

US support of Texas’ war of independence and the Californian Bear Flag Rebellion both had territorial aggrandizement at their heart. Can anyone but the most insane left-wing multiculturalist look at the way that the average Mexican lives and not think that the West Coast and Southwest are better off as part of the USA?

Our support for Cuba’s independence from Spain was begun by people who wanted to see Cuba become a state in the Union. That effort was defeated by “anti-imperialists” in the legislature, to the extreme detriment of the Cuban people.

Both the United States and the world are better off with an active and involved US than without it. Just as the British Empire did enormous good in its day (India is vastly better off for having been a British colony) The US has done in its and hopefully our day is long from over.

The current war against Islam is just the latest war against an existential threat to enlightened "classical liberal" culture. From Christendom's first war against an expansionist Islamic empire to England's war against the fanatical Roman Catholic Spanish Empire to the United Kingdom's war against Napoleon's fanatical atheist French empire to the modern wars against fascism, Nazism and Marxism free people cannot remain free by hiding behind the illusion of secure borders (like the French hiding behind the Maginot Line) and practicing appeasement abroad.

During the Second World War Switzerland embodied the libertarian ideal of maintaining a strong national defense but avoiding entangling foreign alliances while trading freely with all. In fact they made enormous profits by trading with both the Axis and Allied powers while showing no moral aversion to taking payment from the Germans in gold extracted from the teeth of Jewish Holocaust victims.

What would the world look like today if the United States and the British Commonwealth had taken the same attitude?

What will the world look by the middle of the 21st century if we take that attitude toward the Islamic world today?

Why can't Ron Paul and other libertarians see that?

These things happen for a reason

2011-08-28T11:55:00.001-04:00

From Philly.com:

The Maryland teenager secretly arrested by the FBI for allegedly conspiring with the woman from the Philadelphia suburbs known as Jihad Jane also spoke of a Columbine-style plot with a Pittsburgh-area friend in a jihadist chat room, according to sources and documents.

"I had a lot of thoughts about you today," Mohammed K. wrote to his Western Pennsylvania pen pal late last year. "About us both doing martyrdom operations together in my school. . . . It was like we both were in a big truck and had guns and we were shooting randomly at a huge crowd of kids."

The chats provide new insight into a boy who at age 15 allegedly began helping Colleen LaRose, aka "Jihad Jane," the 48-year-old Pennsburg woman who U.S. officials say represents a disturbing new face of homegrown terrorism.

Mohammed K. was 17 and a high school senior in Ellicott City, Md., when he allegedly wrote those threatening words. The Inquirer is not publishing his last name because he is a juvenile.

Mohammed's chat room friend was Emerson Begolly, a Pennsylvania State University student who was soon charged with soliciting unrelated terror attacks. Transcripts of the chats were publicly filed in that case.

During the Nov. 22, 2010, chat, Mohammed told Begolly he lived near National Security Agency headquarters in Fort Meade, Md.

"The place where I live is a HOTBED of NSA and all the security agencies of Amrika (sic)," Mohammed wrote. "And the kids who study in my school proudly state that their parents work in NSA and FBI, and even carry key chains - piss me off."

"Like Columbine?" Begolly asked.

"Na'am, lol" Mohammed wrote, using the Arabic word for "yes" and Internet slang for "laughing out loud."

It could not be determined Saturday whether the authorities took any immediate action based on the threatening remarks, which were reported to the FBI by the anti-jihadist group MyPetJawa.

Neither Jeffrey Lindy, the Philadelphia lawyer representing Mohammed K., nor FBI spokesman J.J. Klaver would comment. Police and school officials in Howard County, Md., could not be reached.

Juvenile cases in federal court are rare, and terror cases rarer still. Federal law prohibits government officials from discussing them.

In February, LaRose pleaded guilty to terror-conspiracy charges as part of a failed plot to kill a Swedish artist whose cartoon of the prophet Muhammad with a dog's head had insulted many Muslims.

It has gotten to the point where it is almost boring to take note of stories like this as they have become so common.

America went to war with two nations in response to Islamic terrorism and we have killed or captured most of the top leadership of al Qaeda, including bin Laden himself. However our failure to identify the nature of the problem (which is nothing more or less than Islam itself) and our suicidal fealty to the culturally lethal ideologies of multiculturalism and political correctness have rendered us almost defenseless against this kind of home grown jihad and seriously hampered our ability to deal with the problem on an international level.

Right after Sept. 11 president Bush hosted Islamic religious leaders at the White House to prove that the US was not at war with Islam. Then it came out that most of those imams were tied to terrorism in some way. TSA screeners at airports are told not to pay any special attention to people who look Arab/Middle Eastern for fear of being accused of profiling. If an Arab looks so suspicious that the screener just has to pay special attention to him (like the wires from his bomb vest are sticking out from under his jacket) they also have to pull aside several octogenarians and make them remove their adult diapers and fondle the genitals of a few three-year-old girls just to prove they aren't singling out an Arab/Muslim for special attention.

Christian and Jewish clergy must be banned from the 9/11 memorial service at Ground Zero but a building ruined by wreckage from one of the 9/11 planes (making it as much a part of Ground Zero as the WTC site) must be torn down so that a giant Islamic Victory Mosque can be built.

The United States has helped to bring about regime change in Egypt and Libya (actually going to war in Libya's case) to replace governments that were bad but not currently supporting Jihad terrorism with far worse governments that are connected with organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda.

The United States and Western Europe (that part of the world once known as Christendom) has seemingly lost faith in itself. In its value to the world. It is very likely too late for Europe but not for the US. That is if we screw up our courage and face facts and take appropriate action.

But our window of opportunity is rapidly closing. The next presidential election must be about more than jobs and debt. It must be a reaffirmation of the United States', and Western civilization's, inherent value and ongoing necessity in a world where the only alternatives are one kind of tyranny or another.

Top Ten Conservative Songs

2011-08-25T23:42:00.000-04:00

No. 5 - Janie's Got A Gun

A great song about a young woman who takes responsibility for her own safety.

Top Ten Conservative Songs

2011-08-24T23:32:00.000-04:00

No. 6. That Ain't My America

This is Lynyrd Skynyrd at their best.

Ron Paul is an ass clown

2011-08-24T23:24:00.000-04:00

And here's why!

Florida Republican Congressman John Mica offered the following morally clear Amendment (5/25/2011-H.AMDT.318 (A018) Amends H.R.1540):

Amendment requires that the rules of engagement [ROE] allow any military service personnel assigned to duty in a designated hostile fire area to have rules of engagement that fully protect their right to proactively defend themselves from hostile actions.

The results? (tallied here):

143 out of 185 Democrats present -- 77% -- voted against this amendment; 217 out of 235 Republicans present -- 92% -- voted for it.

As for the two Republicans in Congress running who are Presidential candidates, Michele Bachmann voted for the amendment; Ron Paul against it.

Mr. Paul's views on fiscal matters are just about perfect and if that were all there was to him I would vote for him in a heartbeat. However there are also his libertarian views on defense and security policy and his libertarian "just surrender and get it over with" attitude makes him unfit for the White House.

Having said that I would still pick him over Obama.

Top Ten Conservative Songs

2011-08-22T23:15:00.001-04:00

No. 7 Heroes by David Bowie.

Two lovers escaping from communist tyranny by going over the Berlin Wall.

No sympathy

2011-08-22T10:08:00.002-04:00

Our friend Patrick who blogs at The Pagan Temple has posted his thoughts on the fatwa that was issued against late night TV douchbag David Letterman.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

David Letterman shills for the political party which has the vapors any time any one takes note of the simple fact that we are at war with people who believe that the Koran is the word of God and who follow the example of Islam's founding prophet.

Let Mr. Letterman reap what the people he votes for - and gives millions of dollars of in-kind contributions to by using his show to mock conservatives (you know, the people who want to STOP the people who want to cut Dave's tongue out) - have sown.

Top Ten Conservative Songs

2011-08-22T00:27:00.000-04:00

Number 8 is Manhattan Project by Rush.

Canadian group Rush has a number of songs which are loved by conservatives. For example Trees, a song about the cruelty of enforced equality.

Then there is Red Barchetta, a song about a distopian future in which environmental extreamist have gained control and remade the nation in their image.

Free Will and Tom Sawyer are celebration of the independant spirit.

All things consdered it is no mystery why they have never been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Delusion alright, but not in the GOP

2011-08-22T00:09:00.000-04:00

There is an essay by John Ziegler on American Thinker in which he argues that the withdrawal of Tim Pawlenty dooms the GOP's chances of defeating Barack Obama next year. He believes that by failing to line up behind Gov. Pawlenty Republicans have proven that they are "delusional".

You can go read his piece for yourselves but his argument boils down to this. Sarah Palin can't be elected because she resigned her governorship of Alaska before her term was complete and thus became a "quitter". Of course the fact that Obama quit his Illinois State Senate job to run for the US Senate and then his US Senate job to run for president (if Obama serves out his complete term as POTUS this will be the first elected office he has ever held in which he didn't quit) did not stop him from being elected.

Ron Paul can't win because he is a nut. Rick Santorum can't win because he opposes the radical gay agenda. Herman Cain can't win because of his inexperience. Newt can't win because of the global warming commercial he made with Nancy Pelosi and John Huntsman can't win because he was a part of the Obama administration and has only good things to say about him.

Michelle Bachmann can't win because she is a woman and associated with the Tea Party and is a member of congress in a period when congress isn't popular and Rick Perry can't win because he is from Texas and can therefore be compared to George W Bush.

In Mr. Ziegler's mind the only GOP candidate other than Pawlenty who has even a ghost of a chance of defeating Obama is Mitt Romney but since about half of the GOP primary voters don't like or trust him he probably won't get the nomination.

Unless Republicans stop "deluding" themselves and follow exactly the same kind of campaign "logic" that led them to choose John McCain as their candidate in 2008.

How well did that work out for us?

The fact is that Barack Obama is in the same kind of trouble, and for the same reasons, that Jimmy Carter was in 1980. He is such a disaster as president that the public will elect someone that they would not otherwise take a chance on just to get rid of him.

Remember that Ronald Reagan was not popular among the moderate wing of the GOP nor among independents. He would never have gotten the Republican nomination and he would have never won the general election if Carter had not made himself so toxic. Just like Obama has done.

Obama has become so hateful to conservatives that they will not accept anyone who does not represent a sharp contrast to him in the primaries. Newt has proven himself to be someone who will stick his finger in the air and say whatever he has to say at any given moment but no one believes him any longer. Ron Paul is a Libertarian not a conservative. Mitt Romney still thinks that RomneyCare - the inspiration for ObamaCare - was a good idea (although he believes it should be imposed on the nation state-by-state rather than from Washington). Huntsman is a serious candidate only to the mainstream media and the more left-leaning wing of the Republican RINO caucus.

Palin, Perry, Bachmann, Cain and Santorum could each probably beat Obama and any of them would be acceptable to the GOP base. The choice will come down to which one gets Republican primary voters the most fired up and that will be determined by which one is the most willing to attack Obama head on.

The fact is that whoever gets the Republican nomination is going to be savaged by the mainstream media. They even turned on John McCain and he was their darling - before he tried to defeat B. Hussein Obama. Choosing our candidate by which one we think will be least offensive to people who hate us and want us to lose is the only way that we can guarantee Obama's reelection.

Something to think about

2011-08-21T17:59:00.001-04:00

John F Kennedy - Harvard
Lyndon B Johnson - Southwest State Teachers' College
Richard Nixon - Duke
Gerald Ford - Yale
Jimmy Carter - United States Naval Academy
Ronald Reagan - Eureka College
George H.W. Bush - Yale
Bill Clinton - Yale
George W Bush - Harvard
Barack Hussein Obama - Harvard

Of the past ten presidents of the United States all but three of them attended Ivy League schools and Duke University, alma mater of Nixon, is ranked #9 nationally, above several of the Ivy League 8.

The question I have is this. Why do we value attendance at an elite school in a presidential candidate? The best president since the turn of the 20th century, Ronald Reagan, attended what most would call a second tier school while Barack Obama, one of the four worst presidents in the entire history of the nation, attended elite Harvard.

Since JFK every president except Johnson and Reagan have graduated from an elite college. Do we like what these "best and brightest" have done with the nation?

I don't doubt that you have to be very smart to get into a school like Harvard. However history is full of very smart men who were shaped and directed by very evil cultures (Lavrenti Beria, Albert Speer and Mao Zedong are three who come to mind).

I think that a definite pattern is visible when we consider that the nation's dire situation has been shaped by leaders who have attended the "best" schools in the nation. And it isn't just the past ten presidents who show this pattern. Consider men like Woodrow Wilson (Princeton and Johns Hopkins) and FDR (Harvard) and the pattern only grows more clear.

Our elite universities take some of the smartest young men and women in the nation and turn them into people who think that what the welfare state has done to the black population is a model for what should be done to the rest of the nation's people.

Think about this the next time you hear some leftist or RINO sneer at the fact that Sarah Palin attended the University of Idaho.

Top Ten Conservative Songs

2011-08-20T16:14:00.000-04:00

Tonights song which I class as conservative comes to us from the group Cheap Trick. From their first, self titled LP.

Number 9. Taxman Mr. Thief

Of course we also have to mention the Beatles song that inspired this Cheap Trick number, Taxman.

Some thoughts on Wisconsin

2011-08-20T11:07:00.001-04:00

I'm sure that everyone remembers this incident from earlier in the month:

According to witnesses, a group of anywhere from 30 to 100 young black men descended on the Wisconsin State Fair last night, beating fairgoers and looting carnival games, in what witnesses said were racially-motivated attacks, Milwaukee's WTMJ reports.

One witness named Eric, an Iraq veteran, said the attacks reminded him of war:

"I had a black couple on my right side, and these black kids were running in between all the cars, and they were pounding on my doors and trying to open up doors on my car, and they didn't do one thing to this black couple that was in this car next to us. They just kept walking right past their car. They were looking in everybody's windshield as they were running by, seeing who was white and who was black. Guarantee it."

Another witness, Norb Roberts, corroborated that: "We were just like cattle being herded out of the park, and they were picking and choosing who they wanted to beat on," he said.

Officials have not yet given an estimate of how many attackers were involved or how many fairgoers were injured.

You will also remember that this occurred against the backdrop of the recall elections in Wisconsin where Democrats were attempting to oust Republican legislators who had cooperated with Governor Walker in saving a large number of state worker's jobs by making some extremely modest cuts in their benefit package.

This sent the left into paroxysms of foaming madness because unionized state employees are NEVER supposed to do with LESS for ANY REASON WHATSOEVER.

You will remember that this effort to introduce some measure of fiscal sanity was seen as an exercise of the TEA Party.

And you will also remember (the remembering is almost over now) that the left has been smearing the TEA Party with charges of racism since its very first days.

Now weave all these memories together into a single tapestry and then stand back and behold the picture. A mob of young black men who have for the past several months been hearing from the media, from the pulpits of their churches, from community organizers and political leaders that they've been taught to respect (like Al Sharpton), from their parents and teachers and from their peers that racist white people are trying to destroy their lives.

These young black men then go to a place where a large number of (mostly white) people are gathered and begin attacking white targets of opportunity - and tweeting and texting their peers to encourage them to come join the mayhem.

Does this come as any kind of true surprise?

Where has the media been on this? The same media that was only too happy to help Bill Clinton blame Oklahoma City on Rush Limbaugh and the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords on Sarah Palin (two slanders which had absolutely no basis in reality) have been absolutely silent about the reasons that a mob of young African-Americans might have - at that particular time and place - decided that it was acceptable and desirable to attack random white people.

Is that the stench of hypocrisy I smell?

Top Ten Conservative Songs

2011-08-19T23:41:00.001-04:00

Over on Big Hollywood Deanna Murray has posted her list of "Songs to Empower the Conservative to Take Action". Of her ten songs the only two I've actually ever listened to are Journey's "Don't Stop Believin" and Kenny Loggins' "Danger Zone". However it got me thinking about what my top ten list of "conservative" songs would be.

First off, I don't require that the songs be political or have an explicit conservative message; just that they have a theme or strike a cord that would appeal to an American conservative.

I'll be posting my picks tonight and over the next nine days. Let me know if you agree with my choices or if you have any alternate suggestions.

10. Catch Me Now I'm Falling by The Kinks.

I heard this on the radio the other day for the fist time in several years and it resonated with me considering the difficuties that the US is currently experiencing. It reminded me of the editorial written by Canadian journalist Gordon Sinclair back in 1973.

Wise words

2011-08-18T16:57:00.003-04:00

Today's Wisdom

2011-08-12T14:04:00.000-04:00

Shit is drawn to fans like flies are drawn to shit.

All human planning should take this fact into account.

Fjordman - RIP

2011-08-06T10:24:00.001-04:00

Andrew Bostom has some tragic news for us:

My colleague, the perspicacious Norwegian essayist Fjordman (whose prolific writings can be read here), was compelled to surrender his anonymity after reluctantly granting an interview to Verdans Gang (published in English, here).

An hysterical, morally cretinous press and blogosphere -- Norwegian, other European, and American -- which had initially accused Fjordman, falsely and recklessly, of being the Brevik mass murderer, continues to persist that he was Brevik's "main inspiration," a charge akin to accusing the Beatles of "inspiring" Charles Manson, or Jody Foster "inspiring" John Hinckley.

Fjordman, real name Peder Jensen, made this announcment in the VG interview:

After the terrorist attack and his blog being cited as an influence, Jensen says he will never use the alias Fjordman again.

- I don't wish to be associated with Breivik and his horrible actions, he says.

The response of the media and the left-wing establishment (sorry redundant) in both Europe and the United States to the monstrous crimes of Andres Behring Breivik has been as sad as it was predictable. Instead of focusing attention where it belongs, on the evildoer himself, the effort to exploit the tragic deaths of the innocent for propaganda is in full swing.

The left thrashes around trying to connect any person who as had the good sense to recognize the danger to Western culture posed by multiculturalism in general and Islam in particular (and the courage to speak our write about that danger) to the murderous actions of Mr. Breivik. Of course they conveniently ignore citations by Breivik of people the left respects (just like the media ignored the fact that large sections of the Unibomber manifesto were indistinguishable from Al Gore's gaseous tome Earth in the Balance.

Of course I'm not suggesting that Mr. Gore has the slightest shred of responsibility for the crimes of Ted Kaczynski any more than Rush Limbaugh was responsible for Timothy McVeigh, Sarah Palin for Jared Loughner, or Richard Wagner for the Holocaust.

But then I'm not an hysterical lying left-wing maggot.

I don't blame Mr. Jensen for wanting to distance himself from Anders Behring Breivik in any way possible. Since he lives in a time and place where people can be sent to jail for saying anything remotely critical of Islam. However it is deeply tragic nonetheless.

I hope that Mr. Jensen will continue to write. He is very intelligent highly learned and willing to say that which the dominant culture definitely does not wish to hear (can anyone say "speaking truth to power"?).

That the police and political establishment in his home country seem eager to place legal blame upon him for the actions of a madman is in its own way a far greater tragedy than the actions of that madman.

Get on the bus

2011-06-01T09:30:00.000-04:00

Michelle Malkin comments on the media's reaction to Sarah Palin's bus trip:

In the 1970s, "The Boys on the Bus" exposed how a clubby pack of male political reporters ruled the road to the White House and shaped the news. Four decades later, an outsider gal from Alaska has commandeered the 2012 media bus -- and left Beltway journalism insiders eating her dust. We've come a long way, baby.

Amid frenzied speculation over her potential presidential campaign plans, former GOP Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin launched an all-American road trip with her family this Memorial Day weekend. Establishment media types didn't get reserved seats or advance notice of her itinerary. Palin rubbed the Washington media mob's institutional sense of entitlement right back in its face. "I don't think I owe anything to the mainstream media. I want them to have to do a little bit of work on a tour like this," she jabbed.

Robbed of the reflexive genuflection customarily paid by publicity-seeking candidates to the political press, scribes, cameramen and producers on the campaign trail began howling louder than the Rolling Thunder Harleys that Palin rode along with on Sunday in Washington, D.C. One miffed CBS News producer, Ryan Corsaro, pouted that the O.J. Simpson-style media caravan giving chase to Palin had created hazardous working conditions for all the intrepid news correspondents.

"I just hope to God that one of these young producers with a camera whose bosses are making them follow Sarah Palin as a potential Republican candidate don't get in a car crash, because this is dangerous," Corsaro said. Puh-lease. As if traveling America's highways to historic tourist spots were akin to driving in an armored tank on Baghdad's road of death.

In Philadelphia, a pair of news helicopters braved treacherous conditions to monitor the enemy on the ground. Soon, editors tracking the story from their cubbies will be filing workers' comp claims asserting exposure to secondhand exhaust fumes from Palin's bus. And I'm counting the minutes until some cub reporter double-parks somewhere in hot pursuit of Team Sarah and demands that she pay his ticket. I mean, how dare Palin "make them follow" her!

As my friend and blogging colleague Doug Powers put it: "Reporters whining about Palin are like kids who can't reach the cookie jar because she keeps moving it."

For more than two years, Palin-bashing journalists (on the establishment left and the right) have mocked the conservative supernova while milking her for headlines, circulation, viewership and Web traffic.
They lambaste her as trivial, while obsessing over her shoes, glasses and hair -- and turning one of her misspelled words on Twitter into Watergate.

They label her a grievance-monger for calling out media double standards and then kvetch, moan and wallow in a pool of self-pity when she doesn't spoon-feed them coveted political scoops.
They call her dumb and then run around in circles trying to figure out her "mystery" tour and blame her for "faking them out."

They blast her for incompetence, but grudgingly acknowledge that she is a master of social media who has changed the rules of the presidential campaign game.

The Atlantic's Garance Franke-Ruta griped that "reality TV star Palin" was "treating pol reporters like paparazzi -- needing and hating, inviting and making chase." Perhaps Franke-Ruta needs a reminder of what a truly parasitic press-pol relationship looks like. I have stacks of Obama 2008 profiles exulting over his glistening pecs and soaring oratorical skills, followed by countless spurned-lover laments from reporters disappointed about the control freaks who stage-manage his every press appearance.

What makes Sarah stand out in the national GOP field is that she is beholden to no one and controls her own destiny. She doesn't need media kingmakers to make her. They need her. She doesn't need newspaper or TV producers to drive her story. She drives them. Crazy.

The unhinged reaction of the Palin-hating convoy reveals what its attendants fear most: a politician who doesn't fear them.

My advice to the press would be to ignore her. After all if she is such a lightweight then why pay her any attention at all, right?

But they can't bring themselves to ignore her. They hate her so much that they have to follow her around in the vain hope that she will do something to validate their opinion of her as an abject fool. After all, what if she got off the bus and said that she looked forward to visiting all 57 states, or signed the guest book at the Liberty Bell and put down the wrong year or tried to answer a question about health care reform and started gibbering about "breathalyzing inhalators".

Such foolishness would prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that she was a true moron, an empty-headed ditsy nincompoop who deserved to get no closer to the White House than the guided tour.

Right?

Mountain Art

2011-05-28T10:41:00.000-04:00

This fresco is titled "Suffer the Little Children" and was painted by artist Ben Long. It hangs in the E.H. Sloop Chapel on the campus of the Crossnore School near Grandfather Mt. in Western North Carolina.

Run Sarah run!

2011-05-27T08:30:00.000-04:00

PRINCETON, NJ -- Mitt Romney (17%) and Sarah Palin (15%) now lead a smaller field of potential Republican presidential candidates in rank-and-file Republicans' preferences for the party's 2012 nominee. Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, and Herman Cain essentially tie for third, with Cain registering 8% support in his initial inclusion in Gallup "trial heat" polling. Notably, 22% of Republicans do not have a preference at this point.

I would remind everyone that Mrs. Palin hasn't even announced her candidacy at this point and is till running almost within the margin of error against someone who has been campaigning almost since the end of the 2008 elections.

Of course the reentry of Gov. Palin into the national spotlight with her announced tour of historiacally important locations throughout the US and the film about her acomplishments as governor of Alaska (see clip) are strong indications that she is preparing to launch a bid for the Oval Office.

The movie, which is set to premier in early voting states in July with a wider release planned for later.

Lowering the price at the pump

2011-05-23T23:20:00.000-04:00

Gas prices have begun to drop, at least in my neck of the woods, so we will hear less and less demagoguery from Washington over Big Oil's "obscene" profits and what government needs to do about them but I wanted to ask one question while the issue was still fresh in people's minds.

If the goal is to lower the price a the pump then how will raising the amount of taxes which the oil companies must pay (and thus increasing their cost of doing business) help?

I mean that businesses don't really pay any taxes. Taxes are a cost just like labor and materials and the power, water and phone bills. Companies pass those costs through to their customers. That means that part of the purchase price you pay for a television or a car or a Quarter Pounder meal at McDonald's reflects the corporate taxes paid not only by the retailer you made the purchase from, but also all the taxes paid by vendors who sold something to the retailer.

In the case of the Quarter Pounder it includes the taxes paid by the cattle feeder who raised the beef and the wheat farmer who grew the raw material for the bun. Along with the farmers who grew the onions and cucumbers that became the pickles and the tomatoes which were processed into ketchup. Then the slaughterhouse and the flour mill and the bakery and that doesn't take into account the potatoes and the packaging materials and the trucking companies that delivered all the various components to the places of processing. And the taxes of the people who did the processing.

So I ask any leftist who might stop by here, is your blind stupid hatred of "Big Oil" so great that you will be willing to pay more for gas and for any product that requires petroleum based fuel in its production or distribution just so you can "stick it to them"?

For me, but not for thee

2011-05-23T22:56:00.000-04:00

Mark Steyn adds his thoughts on DSK and the attitudes of the left toward the "special people":

Yes They Kahn!
Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the other elevated souls of the governing class are above your bourgeois standards.

Back when he was still the officially designated Next President of France and not an accused rapist, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was glimpsed at the annual IMF soccer tournament wearing a T-shirt emblazoned “YES, WE KAHN!” (Monsieur le directeur was not participating in the game: The field he likes to play requires more horizontal exertions, as even the deferential and protective French media have begun belatedly to acknowledge.) In consciously mimicking the slogan of another and very successful presidential candidate, the IMF boss and Socialist party candidate improved upon it — or, at any rate, made it more accurate.

“Yes, We Can”? Er, no, actually, you can’t.

But yes, he Kahn!

A man is presumed innocent until proven guilty, and it will be for a New York court to determine what happened in M. Strauss-Kahn’s suite at the Sofitel. It may well be that’s he the hapless victim of a black Muslim widowed penniless refugee maid — although if that’s the defense my lawyer were proposing to put before a Manhattan jury, I’d be inclined to suggest he’s the one who needs to plead insanity. Whatever the head of the IMF did or didn’t do, the reaction of the French elites is most instructive. “We and the Americans do not belong to the same civilization,” sniffed Jean Daniel, editor of Le Nouvel Observateur, insisting that the police should have known that Strauss-Kahn was “not like other men” and wondering why “this chambermaid was regarded as worthy and beyond any suspicion.” Bernard-Henri Lévy, the open-shirted, hairy-chested Gallic intellectual who talked Sarkozy into talking Obama into launching the Libyan war, is furious at the lèse-majesté of this impertinent serving girl and the jackanapes of America’s “absurd” justice system, not to mention this ghastly “American judge who, by delivering him to the crowd of photo hounds, pretended to take him for a subject of justice like any other.”

Well, okay. Why shouldn’t DSK (as he’s known in France) be treated as “a subject of justice like any other”? Because, says BHL (as he’s known in France), of everything that Strauss-Kahn has done at the IMF to help the world “avoid the worst.” In particular, he has made the IMF “more favorable to proletarian nations and, among the latter, to the most fragile and vulnerable.” What is one fragile and vulnerable West African maid when weighed in the scales of history against entire fragile and vulnerable proletarian nations?

Yes, he Kahn!

Before you scoff at Euro-lefties willing to argue for 21st-century droit de seigneur, recall the grisly eulogies for the late Edward Kennedy. “At the end of the day,” said Sen. Evan Bayh, “he cared most about the things that matter to ordinary people.” The standard line of his obituarists was that this was Ted’s penance for Chappaquiddick and Mary Jo Kopechne — or, as the Aussie columnist Tim Blair put it, “She died so that the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act might live.” Great men who are prone to Big Government invariably have Big Appetites, and you comely serving wenches who catch the benign sovereign’s eye or anything else he’s shooting your way should keep in mind the Big Picture.

Yes, Ted Ken!

Nor are such dispensations confined to Great Men’s trousers. Sec. Timothy Geithner failed to pay the taxes he owed the United States Treasury, but that’s no reason not to make him head of the United States Treasury. His official explanation for this lapse was that, unlike losers like you, he was unable to follow the simple yes/no prompts of Turbo Tax: In that sense, unlike the Frenchman and the maid, Geithner’s defense is that she wasn’t asking for it — or, if she was, he couldn’t understand the question. Nevertheless, just as only Dominique could save the European economy, so only Timmy could save the U.S. economy.

Yes, they Kahn!

How’s that working out? In the U.S., Geithner is currently running around bleating that we need to raise the $14 trillion debt ceiling another couple of trillions. On the Continent, the IMF, an institution most Westerners vaguely assume is there as a last resort for Third World basket cases, is intimately involved in the ever-more-frantic efforts to save the Euro from collapse. Good thing we had these two indispensable men on the case, or who knows how bad things would be.

The arrest of a mediocre international civil servant in the first-class cabin of his jet isn’t just a sex story: It’s a glimpse of the widening gulf between the government class and their subjects in a post-prosperity West. Neither Geithner nor Strauss-Kahn has ever created a dime of wealth in his life. They have devoted their careers to “public service,” and thus are in the happy position of rarely if ever having to write a personal check. At the Sofitel in New York, DSK was in a $3,000-per-night suite. Was the IMF picking up the tab? If so, you the plucky U.S. taxpayer paid around 550 bucks of that, whereas Strauss-Kahn’s fellow Frenchmen put up less than $150. So if, as Le Nouvel Observateur suggests, France and America really do belong in entirely different civilizations, the French one ought to start looking for a new patron for the heroic DSK’s lifestyle.

Full disclosure: I’ve often stayed at the Sofitel myself, though without billing Western taxpayers for the pleasure. Nor do I generally require the three-grand suite. Given how comfortable the Sofitel’s more modest accommodations are, I wonder whether even M. Strauss-Kahn does. Especially when he’s presiding over an IMF with a budget deficit of some $400 million. But perhaps it would be unreasonable to ask so famously unzippered a man to tighten his belt. After all, according to Ben Stein, my former colleague at The American Spectator, DSK is “one of the most recognizable people on the planet.” Many’s the time I’ve seen him exiting a swank restaurant with Justin Bieber and Lindsay Lohan and said, “Hey, there’s Dominique Strauss-Kahn with Wossname and Thingummy!”

Fortunately, when the burdens of recognizability get too great, M. Strauss-Kahn is able to retreat to his house in Washington, or his apartment in Paris, or his second apartment in Paris, or his riad in Marrakesh. Oh, c’mon, you provincial bozos: A “riad” is a palatial Moorish residence built around an interior courtyard. Everyone knows that. A lifetime of devoted “public service” in “socialist” France isn’t yet as remunerative as in Mubarak’s Egypt or Saddam’s Iraq, but we’re getting there. As the developed world drowns under the weight of Big Government, the gilded princelings of statism will hunker down in their interior courtyards and guard their privileges ever more zealously. Once in a while, as in that Manhattan hotel suite, a chance encounter between the seigneurs and their subjects will go awry, but more often, as in the Geithner confirmation, it will be understood that the Great Men of the Permanent Governing Class cannot be bound by the rules they impose on the rest of you schmucks.

Yes, they Kahn. You, not so much. After Charlie Rangel, chair of the House committee that writes America’s tax laws, was “censured” by Congress for multiple infractions of, er, America’s tax laws, a Washington Times reporter invited him to imagine what punishment the “average American citizen” would have received had he done what the Congressman did. “Please,” Rangel told her. “I don’t deal in average American citizens.”

If only.

This attitude, which is endemic in the ruling class of both Europe and America, is a cancer which will destroy Western Civilization if left untreated.

Of course there will always be some level of elitism and corruption in politics but when it gets to the point where the ruling class and their sycophants are openly saying that there should be a double standard then you know that the loss of freedom is very nearly an accomplished fact.

It reminds me of the Chinese general who addressed the international press after the Tiananmen Square Massacre had been broadcast live around the world to a horrified world and just kept repeating "It never happened".

When those in power no longer bother to even pretend that they are living by the same rules that the "ordinary people" must follow or no longer to even pretend that they are not lying about their crimes and abuses then you know they no longer fear those they govern.

Our Founding Fathers knew that when the government does not fear those over whom they exersise authority then government will become tyranny.

A dramatic reading

2011-05-21T09:15:00.000-04:00

The Colbert Report
Tags: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Normally I pay very little attention to Colbert, but this time (even though he doesn't realize it) he did the GOP a giant favor.

Go to 3:30 for the funny part. And remember, Newt brought this entirely upon himself.

A Commenter on The Corner observes:

That article unfairly truncates the statement. It continues:

"Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of. And unto this, Ur Newt, destined to wear the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon a troubled brow. It is I, his chronicler, who alone can tell thee of his saga. Let me tell you of the days of high adventure...To the hell fires with Paul Ryan. He's evil; a sorcerer who can summon demons. His followers' only purpose is to die in his service. Thousands of them...

Newtonian Politics

2011-05-19T13:27:00.000-04:00

Quin Hillyer in The American Spectator:

So there was Speaker Newt Gingrich, talking about himself as a "world historical figure," yet petty enough to say that he was now motivated to really stick it to President Bill Clinton because Clinton made him exit from the back rather than the front of Air Force One.

And there was Gingrich explaining that he had trouble negotiating effectively with Clinton because Clinton made him melt.

Then there was Gingrich strutting around like a puffed-up popinjay, saying that he would "never again, as long as I am speaker, make a speech without commenting on" the Lewinsky scandal, and ordering that TV ads be run about the matter, while having at another time said he would not use it to try to score cheap political points.

There was the Gingrich who led an "ethics offensive" against Democratic Speaker Jim Wright but who then himself was rebuked by the whole House for serious ethical misconduct.

There was the Speaker Gingrich who established such a history of double-dealing and backstabbing that he was the subject of an unprecedented, mid-session coup attempt.

There was Gingrich blowing the 1998 elections by overdoing his blood lust about the impeachment inquiry while completely capitulating on spending.

There was Gingrich claiming that he was lured into an illicit affair because of "how passionately I felt about this country," which led him to have "worked too hard."

Gingrich is the kind of guy you can pick up at the airport for a fundraising event who will spend the whole 25-minute car ride talking about himself while failing even to ask for the name of one of the people picking him up -- or even pretending to listen when the driver tries to introduce Gingrich to his passenger.

There was the Gingrich who wisely insisted that Medicare revisions be kept separate from Appropriations negotiations that eventually led to the famous "government shutdown," and then there was the speaker who acquiesced to Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas's insistence that a minor Medicare fix be included, thus handing a huge PR victory to Clinton and leaving the entire GOP House communications apparatus on a limb, utterly unprepared.

There was Gingrich eight years later strongly supporting the prohibitively expensive Medicare prescription drug entitlement.

While Gingrich was speaker, Republican congressmen and their staffs never could be sure from day to day what whim would send Gingrich running to the cameras with yet another world-changing policy proposal, or whether the new proposal would contradict what he had insisted what was near-holy writ just the day before, or maybe the week before. Staffers also never knew when, without ascertaining the facts, Gingrich would publicly throw them under the bus.

Meetings of various groups of Republican staffers were always quite a show when Gingrich was due to attend. There he would sweep in like an emperor, surrounded by a fawning retinue at whom he barked -- no, make that yapped -- orders as if they were chattel. More lunging than striding toward the microphone, he would launch into an over-decibeled lecture, absolutely full of (what he considered) his own unmatched wisdom, explaining what he said were frankly and fundamentally the essential insights into how, frankly, the world really worked at a fundamental level that despite its frank fundamentalness could not be understood by the peons in the room unless he himself laid it out for them in dialectic terms. Fifteen minutes later, having sufficiently impressed his subjects with how ignorant they would be if he weren't there to enlighten them, he would lunge out again, while renewing his yapping directives to his retainers.

There was the Gingrich who was for cap-and-trade before he was against it, but who now denies that he ever was for it. He was for intervening in Libya before he was against it. He was for Dede Scozzafava before he was against her (and he was flat-out insulting conservatives for opposing her before he sucked up to them for their insight in opposing her).

He said his blast at Paul Ryan's plan was "responding precisely to how [David] Gregory asked the question," even though Gregory's question was in no way, shape, or form as hostile or challenging as Gingrich now claims, and even though not even Gregory came close to attaching any derogatory label such as "radical… right-wing social engineering."

Gingrich is a man with all the self-discipline of golfer John Daly, combined with the verbal incontinence of a Tourette's sufferer except without the actual medical malady as a valid excuse. He's a man who can't keep his mouth shut, his pants zipped, his ego in check, or his tempter restrained. He's as steady as a mechanical bull, as brilliant as a fallen star, as able to keep perspective as Dadaist art.

When the former Speaker stuck both feet and several other appendages into his mouth last Sunday on Meet the Press, it was a perfect manifestation of the essential Gingrich. His logorrhea is innate and apparently uncontrollable. Conservatives should trust him the way the frog trusts the scorpion.

There are a number of articles about Newt out there that I'm going to be posting today and tomorrow. I share the consensus that he is a man without a true moral center or any genuine core beliefes, other than what is good for Newt.

Miss Ann is talking

2011-05-19T09:33:00.004-04:00

TO LIBERALS, EVERY WOMAN LOOKS LIKE A HOTEL MAID

by Ann Coulter
May 18, 2011

I suppose we'll know the truth when the DNA testing comes back, but close observers of privileged liberal men are not shocked by the accusations against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the socialist head of the International Monetary Fund. (And you thought you were getting screwed by your banker!)

Only in Hollywood movies are handsome lacrosse players from nice families seen as likely rapists. In real life, they look more like the 5-foot-2-inch Roman Polanski or pudgy, unathletic Bill Clinton -- or the homunculus 5-foot-2-inch Strauss-Kahn.

But, it is argued, how could Strauss-Kahn possibly think he could get away with the violent rape of a chambermaid in a $3,000-a-night hotel room, booked in his name?

First of all, Strauss-Kahn has evidently gotten away with treating the fairer sex as his playthings for some time. No wonder his nickname among the French is "le grand seducteur," which I believe roughly translates to "the short, tubby serial rapist."

The New York Times reports that as far back as 2007, Brussels journalist Jean Quatremer remarked on Strauss-Kahn's troubled behavior -- "close to harassment" -- toward women, saying the press knew all about it, but never mentioned it because "we are in France."

When Strauss-Kahn was appointed to the I.M.F., Quatremer sardonically warned that the international institution was not the same as France, but instead had "Anglo-Saxon morals."

Second, it's not unheard of that a wealthy liberal would assume the law does not apply to him. Actually, let me restate that: Wealthy liberals always assume that laws don't apply to them. After all the waivers the Obama administration has been dishing out like candy, are there any liberals left to whom Obamacare will apply?

We might also ask how a governor of New York could think he could get away with hiring prostitutes to service him in similarly pricey hotels, bringing them across state lines, and using his friend's names to book the girls, year after year.

But Eliot Spitzer thought he could get away with that. Fortunately he has been brought to justice and sentenced to hosting a lame show on CNN.

Still, rape is a more serious crime than being a frenzied masturbator paying for sex. For that, I give you Andrew Luster, multimillionaire Max Factor heir, whose mother gives to every liberal cause under the sun from Barbara Boxer and Loretta Sanchez to Moveon.org, Emily's List and pro-gay marriage groups. (If only her son had been gay!)

Her son not only drugged and raped a string of women, but made videotapes of his crimes.

On the tapes, Luster can be seen sodomizing unconscious women with lighted marijuana cigarettes, candles and plastic swords, and then talking into the camera about the unconscious women lying on his bed. The tapes were carefully labeled with titles like "Shauna GHBing," referring to gamma-hydroxybutyric acid, known as a date-rape drug.

Luster was cataloging video evidence of his own criminal acts -- and yet he thought he could get away with it.

He almost did, too, fleeing the country during his 2003 trial. He was caught and is now serving 124 years in prison, having been convicted, in absentia, of 86 crimes, including 20 counts of drug-induced rape, 17 counts of raping an unconscious victim, and multiple counts of sodomy and oral copulation by use of drugs.

Also out of Southern California we have Roman Polanski, the legendary director of two good movies and about a hundred unbelievably horrible ones, who drugged and anally raped an underage girl, according to the police report.

Not only did Polanski think he could get away with it, he did get away with it by fleeing the country (to France) when he discovered, to his shock and dismay, that in America, a person can actually be sentenced to prison for drugging and raping a 13-year-old. That was in 1977. He has never been brought to justice.

Liberals supported Polanski's evasion of punishment for child rape, with the Hollywood left denouncing his arrest in Switzerland a couple of years ago, howling that he had suffered enough! Wasn't he prevented from coming to the U.S. to pick up his Oscar in 2003?

You know who's suffered enough? Anybody who sat all the way through "The Pianist."

Liberal male misogyny goes back even farther than Polanski's three-decades-old child rape.

As Phyllis Schlafly points out in her book .Feminist Fantasies (with a stirring foreword by Ann Coulter), for centuries, famous left-wing men have treated "their wives and mistresses like unpaid servants."

Their credo might well have been, "From each, according to my needs ..."

Schlafly bases her review of liberal woman-haters on the book "Intellectuals" by historian Paul Johnson. Among the left-wing heroes highlighted by Schlafly from Johnson's book are Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ernest Hemingway, Henrik Ibsen, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Karl Marx.

Johnson writes that the pint-sized -- 5 foot 2 1/2 inch -- communist-sympathizing Sartre "was notorious for never taking a bath and being disgustingly dirty." He said admiringly of the Nazis, "We have never been as free as we were under the German occupation."

The flyweight Sartre famously turned Simone de Beauvoir into his "mistress, surrogate wife, cook and manager, female bodyguard and nurse." (Sadly, she never learned how to give someone a sponge bath.) All the while, the smelly midget committed a stream of infidelities, viewing women "as scalps to add to his centaur's belt."

In "the annals of literature," Johnson writes, "there are few worse cases of a man exploiting a woman."

As he got older, Sartre's sexual conquests got younger, including teenaged girls.

Like Spitzer, Luster and Polanski, liberal men seem driven by their massive insecurities (often based on physical defects, such as their diminutive size or soap allergies) to choose unconscious, illiterate, servant-class and teenage females as their sex partners. But let's not drag pocket-sized Woody Allen's name into this, as my column appears in many family newspapers.

Karl Marx kept a female slave from the time she was 8 years old, eventually using her not only as a servant but as his mistress, never acknowledging his child with her or paying her at all. She waited on him hand and foot while he explained to the world that profit is the stolen surplus value of the laborer. Like so many liberal icons, Marx seldom bathed and left his wife and children in poverty.

As Schlafly says, no wonder liberal women think men are pigs: Their men are pigs.

Maybe Strauss-Kahn is innocent, but students of liberal comportment base their suspicions of his guilt not on fairy tales from Lifetime: TV for Women, but on 200 years of disgusting sexual behavior by liberal men.

COPYRIGHT 2011 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL UCLICK
1130 Walnut, Kansas City, MO 64106

Miss Ann is at her best today.

Of course we must recognize that Democrats and socialists (sorry, redundant) have no monopoly on ill treatment of women. Just consider Arnold Schwarzenegger and Newt Gingrich. But at least conservatives can console themselves with the knowledge that Arnold's behavior in office and Newt's behavior out of office prove that neither of them is a true conservative.

And while a Republican can be a "serial groper" and adultrer like Arnold or a general asshole like Gingrich it still seems to take a true man of the left to descend to the level of forcable rape, like Bill Clinton, Dominique Strauss-Kahn or Roman Polanski.

What I find most interesting about the whole Strauss-Kahn affair is the reaction of the French people and press. Apparently if a Frenchman has the proper left-wing credentials forcing his penis into an unwilling woman's mouth or up her anus is no big deal.

But then that's what the American left and mainstream media (sorry, redundant) said about Juanita Brodaddrick's entirely credible allegation of forcible rape against Bill Clinton. Apparently to Democrats the fact that the statute of limitations had expired meant that the issue was not even to be considered in evaluating Bill Clinton's character.

And then we have to remember Woopie Goldberg's characterization of Roman Polanski's holding a 13-year-old girl down and sodomizing her while she cried and begged to be let go as "not rape-rape".

It would seem that wherever one goes the whole world over leftist men and women share the belief that the female of the species was put upon this earth to service left-wing men, whether they want to or not..

Ben Stein hurts himself

2011-05-18T10:43:00.000-04:00

In an essay on yesterday's American Spectator Ben Stein, who I usually like, embarrassed himself by getting all weepy and indignant at the treatment of accused rapist Dominique Strauss-Kahn .

1.) If he is such a womanizer and violent guy with women, why didn't he ever get charged until now? If he has a long history of sexual abuse, how can it have remained no more than gossip this long? France is a nation of vicious political rivalries. Why didn't his opponents get him years ago?

2.) In life, events tend to follow patterns. People who commit crimes tend to be criminals, for example. Can anyone tell me any economists who have been convicted of violent sex crimes? Can anyone tell me of any heads of nonprofit international economic entities who have ever been charged and convicted of violent sexual crimes? Is it likely that just by chance this hotel maid found the only one in this category? Maybe Mr. Strauss-Kahn is guilty but if so, he is one of a kind, and criminals are not usually one of a kind.

Since his arrest we have heard that this is not an isolated incident. Some who know Mr. Strauss-Kahn have been worried that something like this might come to light for some time.

3.) The prosecutors say that Mr. Strauss-Kahn "forced" the complainant to have oral and other sex with him. How? Did he have a gun? Did he have a knife? He's a short fat old man. They were in a hotel with people passing by the room constantly, if it's anything like the many hotels I am in. How did he intimidate her in that situation? And if he was so intimidating, why did she immediately feel un-intimidated enough to alert the authorities as to her story?

I admit that I've never stayed in a $3000 per night hotel, but I have spent several nights in a hotel whose rooms are currently renting for over $700 per night and I heard no noise from any other room or the hallway or the street (until I opened the window to catch some of the noise from Bourbon St. one block over).

As for how Strauss-Kahn could overpower an hotel maid I guess that Mr. Stein doesn't realize that the typical working mother doesn't spend half her time in the gym like the young Hollywood actresses that he associates with back in Los Angeles.

And the part about her feeling "un-intimidated" enough to file charges is stupid enough not to require a response, but I'll give one anyway. She was "un-intimidated" enough to talk to the police after the rape, when she was no longer in the presence of her rapist. When his arms weren't wrapped around her, when his weight was no longer pressing down on her and when his penis was no longer being thrust into her. By Mr. Stein's logic any woman who reports being raped must be lying because if she had really been raped she would always be so frightened of her attacker that she would never dare to come forward.

4.) Did the prosecutors really convince a judge that he was a flight risk when he was getting on a flight he had booked long beforehand? What kind of high-pressure escape plan is that? How is it a sudden flight move to get on a flight booked maybe months ago?

Can anyone say Roman Polanski? From France it is a short flight, or drive, to a nation with no extradition treaty with the US where Strauss-Kahn could live out his life in luxury.

5.) Mr. Strauss-Kahn had surrendered his passport. He had offered to stay in New York City. He is one of the most recognizable people on the planet. Did he really have to be put in Riker's Island? Couldn't he have been given home detention with a guard? This is a man with a lifetime of public service, on a distinguished level, to put it mildly. Was Riker's Island really the place to put him on the allegations of one human being? Hadn't he earned slightly better treatment than that? Any why compare him with a certain pedophile from France long ago? That man had confessed to his crime. Mr. Strauss-Kahn has not confessed to anything.

One of the most recognizable people on the planet? What world does Mr. Stein live on? Quick, show of hands - who knew what this guy looked like before the news hit? Nobody?

As for putting him in Riker's Island that is what NYPD does with people who have been accused of crimes like rape and who are not eligible for bail. And he is not eligible for bail because he possesses the money and the contacts to escape the country with or without a passport.

And if Mr. Stein thinks that working for an international organization which seeks to milk the American taxpayer in order to fund global socialism is a "lifetime of public service" I wonder why he is writing for a magazine like American Spectator rather than one like Mother Jones.

6.) People accuse other people of crimes all of the time. What do we know about the complainant besides that she is a hotel maid? I love and admire hotel maids. They have incredibly hard jobs and they do them uncomplainingly. I am sure she is a fine woman. On the other hand, I have had hotel maids that were complete lunatics, stealing airline tickets from me, stealing money from me, throwing away important papers, stealing medications from me. How do we know that this woman's word was good enough to put Mr. Strauss-Kahn straight into a horrific jail? Putting a man in Riker's is serious business. Maybe more than a few minutes of investigation is merited before it's done.

Mr. Stein is supposed to be a lawyer so I would hope that he would know that the police have a procedure that they follow when investigating an allegation of rape which involves a medical examanition of the victim.

And then we have his continuing obsession with Riker's Island. What Stein seems to be saying is "Why would the police find the word of this insignificant peon so compelling that they would treat a wealthy and important global socialist in the same manner that they would treat any average American citizen in the same circumstances?".

Again I wonder why Stein is writing for American Spectator and not Daily Kos or the Huffington Post.

7.) In this country, we have the presumption of innocence for the accused. Yet there's my old pal from the Ron Ziegler/ Richard Nixon days, Diane Sawyer, anchor of the ABC Nightly News, assuming that Mr. Strauss-Kahn is guilty. Right off the bat she leads the Monday news by saying that Mr. Strauss-Kahn is in Riker's... "because one woman stood her ground..." That assumes she's telling the truth and he's guilty. No such thing has been proved and it's unfortunate for ABC to simply assume that an accusation is the same as a conviction. Maybe he's in jail because one person didn't tell the truth. I don't know one way or the other, but I sure know that there has been no conviction yet.

In this he does have a point regarding the media, we all remember the Duke Lacrosse players. However as Harlan Ellison pointed out the presumption of innocence applies to a person's treatment in a court of law not the court of public opinion. If Diane Sawyer stepped over the line and stated that Strauss-Kahn was guilty of rape and he is not convicted in a court of law he can sue her and ABC for liable. Perhaps Mr. Stein would take the case.

I think that the business about Stein's "Nixon days" takes us to the heart of the issue with him. Nixon, for those too young to remember, was more liberal than LBJ on domestic fiscal issues. He is hated by the left because he exposed Ivy League darling Alger Hiss as a Soviet agent and got him sent to jail not because of anything he did while president (including Watergate).

Stein's father was one of Nixon's economic advisors and Stein holds Nixon out as one of his major political heroes. For someone like this instinctively coming to the defense of an international socialist like Strauss-Kahn would be a natural thing to do.

8.) In what possible way is the price of the hotel room relevant except in every way: this is a case about the hatred of the have-nots for the haves, and that's what it's all about. A man pays $3,000 a night for a hotel room? He's got to be guilty of something. Bring out the guillotine.

No, it is just pointing out the hypocrisy of another Lear jet liberal. Here is a man who was once a member of the Communist Party, who left not because he disagreed with their goals but because he saw more opportunity to further his political career as a socialist, wallowing in those luxuries available only to the very wealthy. $3000 hotel rooms (complete with maid "service" for me, but not for thee). There is also the fact that as the head of an outfit that gets most of its funding from the United States most of that three grand per night might well have been ripped from working American's paychecks.

I don't know Mr. Strauss-Kahn. I have never laid eyes on him in person. He may well, in the future, be found guilty of atrocious conduct towards the complainant and maybe towards others. But, so far, he's innocent, and he's being treated shamefully. If he's found guilty, there will be plenty of time to criticize him and imprison him. But nothing has been proved yet except that the way this case has been handled so far is an embarrassment to this country.

Yes Mr. Stein Strauss-Kahn is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law but his treatment has not been "shameful". He has been treated like any other person who has been credibly accused of a violent felony and who poses a serious flight risk. What would have brought shame upon this nation is if a rich and connected man had been treated with the kid gloves that you wish had been employed in this case.

I've been hard on Ben Stein here so let me close with giving credit where credit is due and congratulate him on being able to get through an entire essay without once mentioning Ferris Bueller.

Cops gone wild

2011-05-17T07:29:00.001-04:00

John Stossel brings us the latest outrage from the "Only Ones".

A story in today's Philadelphia Daily News shows why it's so important that citizens be allowed to videotape cops - it can be citizens' only way to fight back against police abuse of power.

This incident happened several weeks ago in Philadelphia to Mark Fiorino, a 25-year-old IT worker who carries a gun on his hip at all times for self defense. He got the gun after several friends were mugged.
But he didn't count on attacks by police:

On a mild February afternoon, Fiorino, 25, decided to walk to an AutoZone on Frankford Avenue in Northeast Philly with the .40-caliber Glock he legally owns holstered in plain view on his left hip. His stroll ended when someone called out from behind: "Yo, Junior, what are you doing?"

Fiorino wheeled and saw Sgt. Michael Dougherty aiming a handgun at him.

What happened next would be hard to believe, except that Fiorino audio-recorded all of it: a tense, profanity-laced, 40-minute encounter with cops who told him that what he was doing - openly carrying a gun on the city's streets - was against the law.

"Do you know you can't openly carry here in Philadelphia?" Dougherty asked, according to the YouTube clip.

"Yes, you can, if you have a license to carry firearms," Fiorino said. "It's Directive 137. It's your own internal directive."

Fiorino was right. It was perfectly legal to carry the gun. But that didn't matter to the cop:

Fiorino offered to show Dougherty his driver's and firearms licenses. The cop told him to get on his knees.

"Excuse me?" Fiorino said.

"Get down on your knees. Just obey what I'm saying," Dougherty said.

"Sir," Fiorino replied, "I'm more than happy to stand here -"

"If you make a move, I'm going to f------ shoot you," Dougherty snapped. "I'm telling you right now, you make a move, and you're going down!"

"Is this necessary?" Fiorino said.

It went on like that for a little while, until other officers responded to Dougherty's calls for backup.
Fiorino was forced to the ground and shouted at as he tried to explain that he had a firearms license and was legally allowed to openly carry his weapon.

"You f------ come here looking for f------ problems? Where do you live?" yelled one officer.

"I'm sorry, gentlemen," Fiorino said. "If I'm under arrest, I have nothing left to say."

"F------ a------, shut the f--- up!" the cop hollered.

The cops discovered his recorder as they searched his pockets, and unleashed another string of expletives.

Fiorino said he sat handcuffed in a police wagon while the officers made numerous phone calls to supervisors, trying to find out if they could lock him up.

When they learned that they were in the wrong, they let him go.

But only temporarily. Fiorino posted the audio recordings on youtube, and now they are harassing him again:
A new investigation was launched, and last month the District Attorney's Office decided to charge Fiorino with reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct because, a spokeswoman said, he refused to cooperate with police... He's scheduled for trial in July.

If one listens to the audiotapes, it's hard to imagine how a reasonable person could charge Fiorino (and not the cops) for disorderly conduct.

Police have a difficult and dangerous job and they deserve our support and respect. However when they behave in a manner such as this they should be dealt with, by their departments and the criminal justice system, with savage ruthlessness.

At the very least this cop should lose his badge and pension and ideally serve some time in prison.

I'm sure that other cops would say the Sgt. Dougherty is a "good cop" and would bring up all the criminals that he has taken off the streets. But you know what? I don't give a damn. This kind of abuse of authority is utterly unforgivable. It betrays an attitude which proves Robert A Heinline's adage that "civil servant = civil master" - at least in their own minds.

What happened here is clear. Sgt. Dougherty and his brother officers were deeply offended at an ordinary citizen tresspassing onto what they believe should be their monopoly of going armed in public and they decided to teach him a lesson in how to keep his proper place.

As Mr. Stossel points out this incident is why it is so vital that citizens be legally able to record the actions of police officers. If they will not restrain themselves out of respect for the law, their oaths or simple right and wrong they just might be shamed into proper conduct.

I'll bet you any amount of money that cops in Philadelphia are pissing and moaning about how unfair it is and how put upon they are at having their conduct held up to public scrutiny. Well tough. They work for us not the other way around.

A TV Post

2011-05-12T07:39:00.000-04:00

By now the networks and cable channels have made their decisions about which shows are comming back and which are cancelled and the results have been officially announced or leaked to the entertainment media.

Here are a list of the shows that I care about one way or another.

ABC:
Castle has been renewed.

CBS:
Blue Bloods has been renewed
Criminal Minds has been renewed
Hawaii Five-O has been renewed

NBC:
Chuck has been renewed

Fox:
Fringe has been renewed

CW:
Supernatural has been renewed

And some stinkers that needed to get the boot have been axed as well, like Lie to Me on Fox and The Cape and Chase on NBC.

Some crap shows have also been renwed like Harry's Law and Survivor. And some very good shows like The Chicago Code and Detroit 1-8-7 have either been officially cancelled or are hanging by the thinnest of threads.

In the case of Detroit 1-8-7 it could very well be that ABC execs don't want to go into 2012 with a show about how hopelessly corrupt Chicago politics are when they are going to be going all out to reelect a Chicago politican to the presidency.

On Cable, FX's Justified has been renewed for 13 episodes, Rescue Me is about to air its final season and Sons of Anarchy will be back later this year. On other cable outlets the popular shows Burn Notice, In Plain Sight, Covert Affairs, White Collar and Royal Pains are all comming back.

Romney won't back off Romneycare - must not really want to be president

2011-05-10T22:24:00.000-04:00

W. James Antle, III writes:

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney will be giving a speech Thursday in which he is expected to tackle head-on the similarities between the health care bill he signed into law and the legislation signed by President Obama that Romney promises to repeal. We don't know exactly what Romney is going to say yet, but the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza gives us some previews:

"He's going out early and will be on offense when it comes to repealing Obamacare," said one Romney aide to speak candidly about the strategy behind the speech.
What Romney won't do, according to aides, is apologize for signing the health care law in Massachusetts.
Instead, he will, in essence, double down on the argument he has made about the Massachusetts plan for the past 18 months or so - that it was the right decision for that state at that particularly time and was never meant as a national model.

The trouble with this approach is that the most substantial real-world evidence we have that Obamacare won't work is the failure of similar features in Romneycare. Mitt Romney is staking out a position that makes it difficult for Republicans to make that argument. The best Republicans will be able to do is say, "We know Obamacare is likely to produce crowded emergency rooms, long medical wait times, and increased costs to the taxpayers because that's what a similar plan did in Massachusetts. But that Massachusetts plan was the right decision for that state at that particular time. It's only bad nationally."

I have to disagree with Mr. Antle. This does not make it harder for Republicans it makes it easier.

When Republican voters step into the voting booth to choose which person to nominate to be the GOP candidate to run against Obama they will have one less name to consider. Because no one who is still defending the system which Obamacare was modeled on has any business being on our ticket next year.

And we shouldn't be giving serious consideration to Chris Christie either. While he is the best man that a deep blue state like NJ is ever likely to elect he is, when compared against the standards of the South, Midwest and Southwest (regions the GOP must win to capture the White House), a liberal who happened to have paid attention in economics class.

Of course I would take either of them over Obama, but then I would take Charlie Sheen over Obama.

At least Sheen wouldn't try to ruin the economy, or deliberately alienate our allies, or grovel and abase himself (and our nation) before our enemies. . .

Fatboy Dim speaks out

2011-05-09T01:01:00.007-04:00

From NewsBusters:

Ever looking to criticize the American populace from his cardboard platform, filmmaker Michael Moore lashed out Thursday on CNN at supporters of Osama bin Laden's assassination. "We've lost something of our soul here in this country," he said of the mission to kill the al Qaeda leader rather than capture him and try him in court.

A guest on Piers Morgan Tonight, Moore contrasted the assassination with the post-World War II Nuremburg trials. He claimed that America then, unlike now, put itself above the level of its enemies by trying their leaders instead of simply executing them.

The liberal filmmaker ripped Americans' disregard for a trial and their support of an assassination. "The second you say that, you're saying that you hate being an American," he huffed. "You hate what we stand for, you hate what our constitution stands for....We should be standing up and saying 'listen, damn it, we're Americans. This is the way we do it. You commit a crime, we put you on trial.'"

I wonder how Fatboy feels about the death of Japanese Admiral Yamamoto (who planned the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor) whose plane was deliberately targeted and shot down by the US military:

Following the fall of Guadalcanal in February 1943, Yamamoto decided to make an inpection tour through the South Pacific to boost morale. Using radio intercepts, American forces were able to isolate the route of the admiral's plane. On the morning of April 18, 1943, P-38 Lightnings from the 339th Fighter Squadron ambushed Yamamoto's plane and its escorts near Bougainville. In the fight that ensued, Yamamoto's plane was hit and went down killing all on board. The kill is generally credited to 1st Lt. Rex T. Barber.

I have news for Mr. Dim. Lt. Barber wasn't trying to force Yamamoto's plane to land so that the admiral could be arrested and made to stand trial.

What Fatboy doesn't seem to understand is that 9/11 was an ACT OF WAR, not a "crime" in the sense of a purse snatching or even the Oklahoma City bombing. The attack on Sept 11 was an act of war committed by an international terrorist organization with the active support of one sovereign nation (Afghanistan) and the under the table support of several others.

The Clinton administration's determination to treat similar acts of war (the first WTC bombing and the attack on the USS Cole) as matters for the criminal justice system were contributing factors to the 9/11 attacks because they were perceived by our enemies as signs of weakness (which they were). Osama bin Laden was led to believe that he would face no consequence for his actions more forceful than having a warrant for his arrest issued.

And 3000 Americans died.

But to be fair to Fatboy I have to admit that he raised one legitimate point:

Moore added later that he "would like to know" how long the Obama administration has known the location of Osama bin Laden.

I too would like to know how long our "efficient, steely-nerved, multitasking, black ninja gangster president" sat on his ass waiting for the best time to order the hit in order to help his reelection chances before WikiLeaks and the arrest of one of the CIA officers keeping watch on the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad forced his hand. And even then we learn that Leon Panetta had to work around the president’s "persistent hesitation to act".

Of course we know that our mighty warrior of a president had to sleep on it over a span of around sixteen hours before making his "courageous" decision to send far better men than himself into a military stronghold in the heart of a nation which is only nominally an ally in order to cut the head off the al Qaeda snake.

Just as we now know that our young and hip president (who combines the knowledge of von Clausewitz with the wisdom of Sun Tzu and the daring of Hannibal) had to be retrieved from a golf course to pose for that picture in which he and his national security team pretended to be watching the Abbottabad raid unfold in real time (in which he still managed to look like the smallest person in the room - didn't they run that past Axlerod before releasing it?).

But all-in-all we have to rack Fatboy's suspicion about the timing of these affairs up to the stopped clock being right twice a day effect. In his zeal to find something - anything - to condemn his country and countrymen over he is forced to take some shots at his own president (and we know that when all is said and done that he will be voting to reelect Obama).

In the end this tantrum from the Flake from Flint is like all his other bloviations, a tale told by a leftist, full of sound and fury, signifying psychosis.

bin Laden dead

2011-05-02T07:50:00.000-04:00

From American Thinker:

Osama bin Laden was killed last week after a firefight at a compound outside of Abbottabad, Pakistan. The attack was lead by U.S. Special Forces under the direction of the CIA. ABC News is reporting that a DNA match has confirmed the identity of the leader of al Qaeda and the mastermind of the 9/11 massacres.

President Obama announced the success of the operation late Sunday evening. Crowds gathered outside the White House in celebration of the death of bin Laden. People sang the national anthem and chanted "U.S.A. – U.S.A."

While having bin Laden killed on his watch is certainly a feather in Obama's cap it must have truly galled him to hear American citizens expressing the hated and despised sentiment of patriotism right outside ~~his royal palace~~ the White House.

More to come.

Tonight's Music

2011-04-07T00:39:00.003-04:00

This was featured on tonight's episode of my favorite show, Justified.

Things are not looking good for Raylen.

Pray for him.

BTY, the group is called Ollabelle. They are from NYC and are named for the great Appalachian singer/songwriter Ola Belle Reed.

We always knew it

2011-03-25T09:18:00.001-04:00

Tonight's Music

2011-03-24T02:03:00.000-04:00

Gaelic Storm's Johnny Jump Up, about the evils of drinking hard cider.