Surfacing…..

Like Zee in her post below, I have been somewhat mortified that the good old US of A could elect a beginner for President in these complicated times, but there you go, what’s done is done, we have to wait and see how badly the neophyte screws up before being thrown out in 2012. [You'd think I'd be a little circumspect in my predictions, well in the words of the prophet, No Way!] He’s made a good start on the screwing up if reports of Hill as Sec of State and Eric Holder of Marc Rich pardon fame as Attorney General turn out to be true. Goes right along with Wright, Ayers, Rezko and co. The leopard’s spots remain the same.
The media has a lot to answer for in Obama’s victory, what a job they did on Sarah Palin that when given one of O’s or Bidens idiot statements to attribute, they automatically think it must have been her. I hope they get their just reward and I note that the NYT is trading today at $7.08, down from $18.66 one year ago. There is a God.

I have other reasons for not posting much, seven day work week, daughter and grandchildren and all the other everyday activities that take up time. I have played a trick on myself, kept my clocks on summer time, gets me up early in the morning and to bed earlier than would otherwise be the case at night. It’s cool too, I feel like I’m in my own little time/space one hour separated from the rest of the world. it’s restful and liberating at the same time. Am I making too much of it? Well so be it. I like it.

One more reason, it’s November and winter is coming on……

Update. From NRO, comment on the Eric Holder appointment.

He is convinced justice in America needs to be “established” rather than enforced; he’s excited about hate crimes and enthusiastic about the constitutionally dubious Violence Against Women Act; he’s a supporter of affirmative action and a practitioner of the statistical voodoo that makes it possible to burden police departments with accusations of racial profiling and the states with charges of racially skewed death-penalty enforcement; he’s more likely to be animated by a touchy-feely Reno-esque agenda than traditional enforcement against crimes; he’s in favor of ending the detentions of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay and favors income redistribution to address the supposed root causes of crime.

In any other time, Holder would simply be an uninspired choice. But these are not ordinary times — we face a serious, persistent threat from Islamist terrorists. At the same time, Democrats have expressed outrage over both the alleged politicization of the Justice Department and the reckless disregard of its storied traditions. For these times, it is difficult to imagine a worse choice for AG than Eric Holder.

Much has been made, and appropriately so, of Holder’s untoward performance in the final corrupt act of the Clinton administration: the pardons issued in the departing president’s final hours. Of these, most notorious is the case of Marc Rich, an unrepentant fugitive wanted on extensive fraud, racketeering, and trading-with-the-enemy charges — but granted a pardon nonetheless thanks to the intercession of his ex-wife, a generous donor to Clinton’s library and legal-defense fund.

I wonder how many who voted for Obama knew this is what they’d get.

This and That.

I haven’t posted ‘my tree’ for a while, there isn’t much change during the summer months unless I can happen to be there with unusual weather or activity of some sort. But now it’s Fall, it was a fabulous day here in Toronto, temp was in the low seventies with a cloudless sky and I had time to pop down the ravine where the tree lives.

…

The world has seen far worse than the 21st century has given us so far, The Dark Ages after the fall of Rome, the Muslim hordes that almost took Europe over several hundred years in the Middle Ages, [yes, I know, they're at it again, and in a more insidious manner, but I don't see them succeeding] and the 1914-18 War, the effects of which are with us still, but has there ever been a time with such a frivolous, shallow population as it seems a majority of the Western people are? The US has just elected a nonentity with no experience and no achievements other than a shape shifting and therefore unknowable entity. In the UK, the BBC, the staid old dependable Auntie Beeb which saw us through the war and has been a byword for all the highest culture of the west, has lost its rudder and drifts aimlessly in a sea of multi-culti, lowest common denominator trash.

Now, from that same erstwhile respected BBC, there is this:

FOR YEARS David Bellamy was one of the best known faces on TV.

A respected botanist and the author of 35 books, he had presented around 400 programmes over the years and was appreciated by audiences for his boundless enthusiasm.

Yet for more than 10 years he has been out of the limelight, shunned by bosses at the BBC where he made his name, as well as fellow scientists and environmentalists.

His crime? Bellamy says he doesn’t believe in man-made global warming.

The loony left has infested the infrastructure of the media, schools and academia like an army of termites, mindlessly chewing away at the foundations of the West. Two things kill termites, powerful poisons and fresh air. Since the left has covered itself well and does a pretty good job of keeping all the doors and windows shut tight on its activities, they may not leave much choice for those of us who prefer to live in the open.

…

Melanie Philips as usual does a good job of laying out why we conservatives don’t buy into the Obamamessiah and his Oprah-esque New Age b/s:

In Britain, there is a collective swoon over the election of Barack Obama. Media superlatives have exhausted the lexicon of cliches. Journalists wept with joy over his acceptance speech. Even members of the Conservative shadow cabinet are firmly in the fan club. There’s been nothing like it since… well, I was going to say Dianamania, but actually the person who most comes to mind at this moment is Britain’s former prime minister, Tony Blair.

Like Obama, Blair took the country by storm when he won the first of his three general elections in 1997and threw the Conservative party completely off balance (indeed, it still hasn’t recovered). Like Obama, Blair was charismatic, eloquent, hip, and relaxed, in cruel contrast to the bunch of sleazy, incompetent throwbacks to the paleolithic era in the departing Conservative administration. Like Obama, Blair was seen as a messiah figure, who would lay his hands upon a broken nation and bring healing where there was discord. And like Obama, Blair had an agenda of change.

Blair was widely considered to be a conservative cuckoo in the Labour nest. Indeed, he came to power because he symbolically trashed the party’s commitment to state-control socialism, thus establishing his credentials as a centrist. What few realized at the time was that in fact he was a radical of a different stripe. He wanted to remake Britain and even change human nature itself, wiping out prejudice and ushering in a new world order of progressivism.

Read it all and wonder why we don’t get clear thinking people like this as our leaders.

Trenchant and True Comment of the Day

BRACE FOR IMPACT

StudSupreme
11/04/2008
10:51:54 pm PST

They did their job ‘well’, didn’t they?

Howard Dean.

Daily Kos.

Move On.

World Can’t Wait.

Code Pink.

ACORN.

Huffington Post.

The Nation.

They studied the mindless energized mass movements created by Fascism, National Socialism, Communism.

They studied how Pravda communicated.

They analyzed the tactics used by Mao in his revolutionary conquest, and afterwards during the Cultural Revolution.

They learned from Goebbels and the demagoguery of the Third Reich.

A N D

I T

W O R K E D .

An incontestable and unopposable supermajority in Congress.

A Marxist President.

A Supreme Court with possibly FOUR upcoming vacancies.

A soon-to-be-formed National Internal Security Force – beyond the FBI, Home Sec or any other agency, as well armed as the US Armed Forces – that is targetted at THE YOUNG, who will be trained and indoctrinated so that they are IDEOLOGICALLY PURE.

And a combined media relations arm of the Mainstream Press and Hollywood who are their willing ideological partners.

There will be a movement to destroy books, film and television programs of the past that spoke praisingly of the lone hero or the pioneers.

There will be federal legislation to permit blocking and intervention in all literature, broadcasts and public discourse that is considered……….”Unfair.”

A dark cloud hangs over the Bald Eagle, and her banner with Stars and Stripes hangs limp.

I have a sister. My sister is hardly a conservative. She called me today. She wants advice and support from me to go gun shopping because she feels she needs to buy a firearm for home defense.

I spent my vacations this year travelling around the West. Folks were curious, interested, incredibly polite, totally genuine, warm, friendly, completely open and honest. They lived and worked outdoors, and really did look and act like can-do, energetic Frontiersmen. I would have been honored to call any of them Friend if I had known them better.

They’ll come under fierce attack in the coming years, as the powers that be will try to eradicate their heritage and imposing The New Thinking.

You’ll see George Soros and Warren Buffett amass fortunes vastly greater than the ones they already have.

Congrats, NYT.

Congrats, Marcos Moulitas.

Congrats, Bill Ayers.

Congrats, Reverend Wright.

You will see America wounded multiple times by her own elected leaders, hemorraging, pummeled, chained, hobbled. And you will feel undisguised joy at the crime against the World that you have managed to commit – the crime of crippling the greatest defender of the innocent, the liberator of nations from the grip of tyranny, whose lady carries a torch on high for all to see so that they can come to the Light and be Free.

Stalin, Brezhnev, Mao and Hitler will be smiling and chuckling in their graves.

This ain’t over, folks.

You think Sarah Palin can lead the Republicans back to the True Path and step forward in 2012 to get America back on the Path that Washington, Jefferson and Franklin put us on, following the principles of the Enlightenment?

I can guarantee you that DailyKos and the rest of the lunatic left entourage will feel SO STOKED by their new power that they will feel emboldened enough to actually attack her physically, maybe even try to kill her.

BRACE YOURSELVES.

The sons of Marx will be doing their absolute best over the next four years to destroy the nation founded on the ideas of Adam Smith and the minds of the Enlightenment, a true pillar of hope and faith in the potential greatness of the individual, a nation that has invented the modern age, split the atom, walked on another planet, and sent its electromechanical scouts called Pioneer and Voyager out into the cosmos, and set BILLIONS of others FREE.

A nation where my own ancestors came, fleeing places without any opportunity, hope or future, to simply have the chance to build something, unfettered, to create a real vision of hope and a future for themselves or – more typically – sacrificing their own happiness and future for the sake of offering opportunity to their children.

I feel like shit tonite.

LGF Comment

America, God Has Ceased to Shed His Grace on Thee

Mourning America

I mourn America. Her spirit, the spirit of liberty, is now in exile. It can not live in a land ruled by fools and strutting despots. My allegiance is to that American spirit and to the Constitution upon which all freedoms flow.

But to Barack Hussein Obama I pledge my unwavering enmity and sworn opposition.

We are a nation out upon a wicked sea without a captain. A pretender and a puppet will soon desecrate the White House. I will extend Barack Obama no grace. But I will use all the breath left in me to oppose all that  he is and all that  he stands for.

The office of the presidency has now become as devalued as  our dollar. I will extend to it and the man who will soon soil it not a modicum of respect. Because liars and charlatans and owned men deserve none. And owned you are Barack Obama, down to your atrophied soul and your bitter, brittle bones.

May the despair that you usher in to this once great nation rebound back to you in full measure.

The Battle is Over, the War Begins

But we are a long way from surrender. The battle is over, the war begins. The United States government now falls into the hands of the enemies of this country and civilization for a time or forever. And that is part of what the war is about. The country has been in the hands of people we disagreed with, but never in the hands of people whose views are as diametrically opposed to ours as anything in the Third Reich or the Kremlin. In their hands Federal power becomes enemy power. The more ineffective and tied up they are, the less damage they can do.

The battle against them must be twofold, first to limit the damage they can do while in power, and secondly to plan and prepare to retake Congress and then the White House in a coherent and orderly manner without the chaos and backbiting that has characterized the last year of this campaign. It will be all too easy to fall into the blame game and to let it devour us, too much of the conservative movement and the anti-jihad blogsphere is already fractured. The goal now must be to heal those fractures, to create unity around a single purpose, to liberate America again.
[...]
For my own part I do not recognize Obama as my President, nor will I refer to him as such. He has no legal right to serve in office nor has he won a legal election. Nor do his cronies have any right to serve in any position they are appointed to.

We have a long journey through dark lands ahead of us. Let us hope to soon once again emerge into the light. (Sultan Knish)

McCain vs The Obamination

Image Source

What Will We Hear From Iraq Once Obama Rules?

I wonder if Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro, (D-Conn.) and Rep. John Dingell, (D-Mich.) have been fitted for their Obama brown shirts yet. If we expect to hear the truth about events in Iraq after the Obama steals office, we likely are going to be hard pressed to find it. Even more so than we have been.
Look at this maneuver from DeLauro and Dingell.

FCC Probe Signals Democratic Attack Machine

A Federal Communications Commission investigation of on-air military analysts is providing a glimpse of what Democrats and an Obama administration will do to critics once they capture Washington.

The FCC has sent letters to some of the nation’s most prominent military analysts — some of them pro-President Bush and pro-war — suggesting they may have broken the law when they appeared on television stations to comment on and explain the war on terrorism.

The FCC investigation raises the question of whether a Democrat-controlled Congress and White House next year will investigate — and perhaps criminalize — all sorts of actions taken by the Bush administration. Obama is leading in all presidential polls, while Democrats are set to greatly increase their hold on the House and Senate.
[...]
The probe is sending chills through the ranks of military commentators, some of them decorated war heroes who share their expertise with millions of lay viewers. They see it as one in a series of moves the Left is making to intimidate and shut up its critics.

“We are seeing the dawn of a new era of the current Democratic leadership trying to muzzle free speech and the First Amendment,” retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney, a Fox News analyst, told HUMAN EVENTS. “It may be the most invasive intrusion that we have seen in our history. There will be more of these tactics to follow.”

Said retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely, one of Fox’s first defense analysts, “It’s an affront to freedom of speech. As retired officers, we’re private citizens and can say anything we want under the First Amendment. The whole thing was to explain to the American people what was going on in war and analyzing it.”
Continue reading….

I wonder what other surprises Obama has in store when he establishes his Reich. I ran into this screen shot below when going through some notes. LGF posted it in June, found on Obama’s site.

Will Obama Goes After Our Soldiers?

Discovered in the directory left wide open by the Obama site designers: a PDF file containing Obama’s plan to “hold accountable any perpetrators of war crimes” in Iraq.

And something tells me they don’t mean Al Qaeda.

(Source: LGF)

Fred Thompson

A Message from Fred Thompson

Via… LGF

A Few Things….

First here is Michelle Obama telling the truth:

I think he’ll regret not listening to her, a few years in the Senate with maybe some achievements, a little older and maybe a little wiser, [well that wouldn't take much] who knows, he might have run a winning campaign and become President. Now all that is out of the window as candidates seldom get to take a second bite at the cherry.

Evan Sayet, he of the marvellous video lecture, How Modern Liberals Think,

also thinks McCain will win and is pretty convincing about it.

John McCain has the upper hand in the November 4th election. How can I say that when the polls show Obama leading by anywhere from one (IBD, the most accurate pollster the last time out) to 13 from the folks who brought you Dan Rather and the use of forged documents to try and steal the election just four years ago. A brief look at the methodolgy of these polls — the degree of over-sampling of Democrats corresponding almost to perfection with the degree of Obama’s “lead” in them — shows a tight race, with McCain actually leading by a point or two.

This reality is underscored by events within the campaigns which, when analyzed, show an Obama camp in desperation.

That will have to do for tonight, me velly tired, and for the next six weeks I’ll be on a seven day work week so blogging will be sparse. Except to celebrate on Nov 5th of course.

PS. I meant to include a link to this interesting column by Fouad Ajami in the WSJ.

Tell the Whiners, the Nanny Staters………

“Decadence begins,” wrote the French thinker, Denis de Rougemont, “when people no longer ask, ‘What are we going to do?’ but rather ask, ‘What is going to happen to us?’ ”

Arnold Beichman on ‘Democracy’s Beacon‘ in the Washington Times.

Great essay, I’ll read it all later when I have time!

H/T Brothers Judd.

History.

From The Daily Telegraph, this is live footage shot in 1904 in Edwardian London.

The film was shot in 1904 as a ‘travelogue’ for Australians curious about life in what was “one of the most exciting cities anywhere”, according to Professor Ian Christie.

He discovered the 12 minute reel while trawling through archives in Canberra.

Prof Christie said: “It’s a rather clever mixture of what we would expect to see – such as the Embankment, Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square – but it also has these wonderful close ups of individuals.

“There’s an old lady sleeping rough on a bench, children encouraging a dog to swim in the Thames, children paddling in one of the ponds in St James’s Park.”

But some things never change.

“There’s a wonderful shot of roadworks on the Strand,” he said. “The catalogue says, ‘Street up as usual’. Road works were obviously a common feature of London in 1904 too.”

Other scenes show roads packed with horse-drawn traffic, the city “absolutely teeming with people”, fish traders at Billingsgate Market and shoe-shiners in the West End.

The footage, shot of 35mm film, also shows subtle insights into life such as the way people walked, he added.

The academic, professor of film and media history at Birkbeck College in London, said the film, called Living London, was shot by pioneering Anglo-American film-maker Charles Urban.

It was a big hit in Australia with audiences who had either emigrated or had never seen the land of their forefathers.

“It wasn’t easy to hop on a plane then,” he said.

An advertisement for the film displayed in small-town Australia read: “Sites along a route on the most important thoroughfare in London, not merely showing street scenes but incredible ‘Snapshots’ of the various human types, their different occupations and pleasures.”

Prof Christie said it was a “fascinating panorama of life in London at the beginning of the last century”.

The fragment was probably only about a quarter of the whole film, he said.

Living London is one of 15 archive films about the capital to be shown on Friday evening (October 24).

The programme of short films, collectively titled London Loves, will be screened in Trafalgar Square at 6.30pm.

The event is part of the London Film Festival , which runs until October 30.

Not a motor vehicle in sight but it looks just as congested as now.

Update. Aha! Watching it again I saw one ‘motor car’ sneaking through in the first few seconds of the film.

Obama, Oprah and ‘The Secret’.

We’ve had ‘Hope and Change’, ‘The One’, the Rally in Berlin, the Styrofoam Grecian Temple, Air Obama with it’s seat labeled President, the fake Presidential Great Seal, references to himself as President and now, before the people have decided who will be the next President, we have already The Inaugural Address.

Cut now to Oprah and her promotion of the book The Secret.

Steve Martin used to do a routine that went like this: “You too can be a millionaire! It’s easy: First, get a million dollars. Now…”

If you put that routine between hard covers, you’d have “The Secret,” the self-help manifesto and bottle of minty-fresh snake oil currently topping the bestseller lists. “The Secret” espouses a “philosophy” patched together by an Australian talk-show producer named Rhonda Byrne. Though “The Secret” unabashedly appropriates and mishmashes familiar self-help clichés, it was still the subject of two recent episodes of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” featuring a dream team of self-help gurus, all of whom contributed to the project.

The main idea of “The Secret” is that people need only visualize what they want in order to get it — and the book certainly has created instant wealth, at least for Rhonda Byrne and her partners-in-con. And the marketing idea behind it — the enlisting of that dream team, in what is essentially a massive, cross-promotional pyramid scheme — is brilliant. But what really makes “The Secret” more than a variation on an old theme is the involvement of Oprah Winfrey, who lends the whole enterprise more prestige, and, because of that prestige, more venality, than any previous self-help scam. Oprah hasn’t just endorsed “The Secret”; she’s championed it, put herself at the apex of its pyramid, and helped create a symbiotic economy of New Age quacks that almost puts OPEC to shame.

They call it the Law of Attraction, the idea that if you just want something you will attract it to you and bingo you will have it. Didn’t work for Hillary, probably she’s not quite infantile enough to believe in fairy tales. She could though have taken a tip from the physicist who had a horseshoe on the wall over his desk. His colleague Niels Bohr saw it and said, “I didn’t know you were superstitious”. “Oh I’m not”, said the physicist, “but I’ve been told it works whether you believe it or not”.

Obama, New Age Idiot. Now you know.

No Thanks to Obama, Pelosi, Reid and Co.

From Strategy Page:

The Americanization Of Iraq

October 23, 2008: Many Iraqis have become infatuated with the American military. Not just the efficiency with which they fight, but also how they go out of their way to avoid civilian casualties, and try to help Iraqis recover from decades of tyranny and terrorism. This doesn’t get a lot of publicity, but it is changing Iraq on a fundamental level.

The new Iraqi Army wants to be just like their American counterparts. Iraqi military uniforms look very much like the U.S. ones. The weapons and vehicles are the same. And the Iraqis are emulating how U.S. troops move, as well as how they look. In combined operations, it’s often difficult to tell, at a glance, who are the Americans, and who are the Iraqis. More than once, during a firefight, an American soldier dives for cover next to what he thinks is another G.I. But when he talks to the other “American”, he comes face-to-face with an Iraqi face talking back to him in Arabic. Fortunately, both armies use the same hand signals (a form of sign language used during combat, when voice commands cannot be heard, or when you want to maintain silence.) So the two will communicate with hand signs and get on with the battle.

Iraqis also noticed that the U.S. concept of “Civil Affairs” (soldiers trained to work with civilians in a war zone) worked. So now Iraq has its own civil affairs troops, who usually operate with their American counterparts. This has worked very well, especially in Sunni and Shia radical neighborhoods where anti-Americanism is still alive and well. Iraq is still divided by religious and political differences, and the Iraqi civil affairs specialists see themselves as having lots to do for a long time.

More importantly, many Iraqis are trying to emulate U.S. military bureaucracy. While these administrators get little respect from the combat troops, they are seen by Iraqis as paragons of modernity and efficiency. That they are, which is one reason the U.S. combat troops are so effective. The right supplies tend to get to the right place at the right time. In Iraq, that rarely happens, not in the civilian world, or the military. Iraqi commanders have noticed how the American military support organizations operate, and want to set up Iraqi equivalents. That’s a difficult chore, mainly because of the corruption that is endemic to the region. But at least there’s a trend, an effort to not just look like Western troops, but to administer the military organizations in the same way.

This more than anything is why the Iraq war was fought, to drag the Middle East Arab countries out of the quagmire that they have been in for centuries which could no longer be tolerated in our age of horrific weaponry and modern communications.
Tell the left that the consequences of a just war can give real fuzzy warm feelings, unlike the kitsch kind that they so love to wallow in, peace and love not war and all the other juvenilia that they have yet to grow out of. I wonder if John Lennon whose talents did so much to promote such crap would have grown out of it, I like to think he would have, he was a very realistic fellow when he started out. Between the drugs, Maharishi and Yoko, he went more than a little round the bend.

Comment of the Day: Bar Stool Economics

Posted in: The Stop Obama Tour in Colorado

31 Sizzlack 10/21/2008 11:12:52 am PDT

Bar Stool Economics

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten

comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would

go something like this:

Bar Stool Economics

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.

The fifth would pay $1.

The sixth would pay $3.

The seventh would pay $7.

The eighth would pay $12.

The ninth would pay $18.

The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that’s what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the

arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. ‘Since you are

all such good customers,’ he said, ‘I’m going to reduce the cost of your

daily beer by $20.’ Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the

first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free.

But what about the other six men – the paying customers? How could they

divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’

They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that

from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end

up being paid to drink his beer.

So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill

by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each

should pay.

And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).

The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).

The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).

The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).

The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).

The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to

drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare

their savings.

‘I only got a dollar out of the $20,’declared the sixth man. He pointed to

the tenth man,’ but he got $10!’

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ exclaimed the fifth man. ‘I only saved a dollar, too.

It’s unfair that he got ten times more than I got’ ‘That’s true!’ shouted

the seventh man. ‘Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The

wealthy get all the breaks!’

‘Wait a minute,’ yelled the first four men in unison. ‘We didn’t get

anything at all. The system exploits the poor!’

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks so the nine sat down

and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they

discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between all

of them for even half of the bill!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, journalists and college professors, is how

our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most

benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being

wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start

drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

David R. Kamerschen, Ph.D.

Professor of Economics

University of Georgia

For those who understand, no explanation is needed.

For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.

On Powell’s ‘Transformational Figure’.

Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion, takes on the bureaucratic Colin Powell’s endorsement of Obama.

I agree with Gen. Powell that Obama would be a “transformational figure.” But what sort of transformation are we talking about? The United States is the richest, freest, most powerful nation in history. What would it look like after Obama, abetted by a Pelosi-Reid Congress, got done with their transformation?

Yes, that’s right, Virginia, it would be poorer, markedly less free, and less powerful.

Interesting conclusion, go see.

It’s Nana Mouskouri’s Birthday….

……so take five minutes out of your busy day to relax. [Though you should feed the sound through your stereo for it to sound as it should.]

Game Changer?

American Thinker thinks it may be.

Another Lefty.

I had this e-mail from one of my lefty customers who is surprisingly quite a good friend and a hell of a nice fellow.

Hey T, I understand why people was certain views. I even appreciate the basic pro-life arguments (though I am pro-choice). I used to like McCain a few years ago before he sold his beliefs down river to pander to the religious right.
But I have to say that the McCain-Palin bullshit coming out of their mouths now is nothing short of shameful. They truly disgust me.
I cannot believe the US electorate could vote for such hateful and dishonorable candidates. The thought of these two clowns running the world is about as frightening as frightening gets.

To which I replied:

Hi —–, The choice seems to me to be between a bunch of juvenile fantasists:

http://www.osforobama.com/in/

or the grown ups:

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=308530236252361

But as Thomas Sowell says in his book, ‘A Conflict of Visions’, both the left and the right want what’s best for society, they just have a different vision of the way to achieve it and so we will be forever talking past each other.

He’s right about one thing, it truly is frightening but not for the reasons he thinks.

In Mild Defense of Philip Larkin.

Well, Zee took me to task over the poem I posted of Philip Larkin and I don’t altogether disagree with her, it was a curmudgeonly poem and PL was a curmudgeonly type. [Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that, I'm an apprentice one myself] and for someone who had such weird parents as he had, it’s not surprising that he would come up with ‘This Be The Verse’. [His father for instance kept a statue of Hitler on the mantelpiece! His mother was a chronic complainer] Also you know, the English are a pretty weird lot generally, even more so in the twenties, thirties and forties, the time in which PL grew up. Given all that, he was probably wise to not have any children himself.

Then there is this empathetic, beautifully descriptive poem:

Dublinesque

Down stucco sidestreets,
Where light is pewter
And afternoon mist
Brings lights on in shops
Above race-guides and rosaries,
A funeral passes.

The hearse is ahead,
But after there follows
A troop of streetwalkers
In wide flowered hats,
Leg-of-mutton sleeves,
And ankle-length dresses.

There is an air of great friendliness,
As if they were honouring
One they were fond of;
Some caper a few steps,
Skirts held skilfully
(Someone claps time),

And of great sadness also.
As they wend away
A voice is heard singing
Of Kitty, or Katy,
As if the name meant once
All love, all beauty.

Anyone who could write that can’t be all bad.

Barack Hussein Obama and His ACORN Minions Trying to Steal the Election

The Barack Obama – ACORN – Voter Fraud Connection.

OHIO MAN BRIBED BY ACORN ACTIVISTS TO REGISTER TO VOTE 72 TIMES

I Bet He Makes Obama Beam With Pride

A man at the center of a voter-registration scandal told The Post yesterday he was given cash and cigarettes by aggressive ACORN activists in exchange for registering an astonishing 72 times, in apparent violation of Ohio laws.

“Sometimes, they come up and bribe me with a cigarette, or they’ll give me a dollar to sign up,” said Freddie Johnson, 19, who filled out 72 separate voter-registration cards over an 18-month period at the behest of the left-leaning Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

“The ACORN people are everywhere, looking to sign people up. I tell them I am already registered. The girl said, ‘You are?’ I say, ‘Yup,’ and then they say, ‘Can you just sign up again?’ ” he said.

Johnson used the same information on all of his registration cards, and officials say they usually catch and toss out duplicate registrations. But the practice sparks fear that some multiple registrants could provide different information and vote more than once by absentee ballot.

ACORN is under investigation in Ohio and at least eight other states – including Missouri, where the FBI said it’s planning to look into potential voter fraud – for over-the-top efforts to get as many names as possible on the voter rolls regardless of whether a person is registered or eligible.

It’s even under investigation in Bridgeport, Conn., for allegedly registering a 7-year-old girl to vote, according to the State Elections Enforcement Commission.

Pro-SoetorObama Vote Fraud Drive

Lefty lawyer Sandy Newman founded Project Vote, a 501(c)(3) organization, to register voters in welfare offices and unemployment lines with the explicit goal of turning back the Reagan revolution.

The two groups are inextricably linked – and at their nexus is Barack Obama. Despite his denials of any association with the group, Obama’s political DNA is encoded with the ACORN agenda.

As I’ve noted previously (”ACORN: O’s Ugly Ally,” June 26), Obama trained ACORN members in Chicago. In turn, ACORN volunteers worked on his Illinois campaigns and ACORN’s PAC endorsed him in this year’s Democratic primaries back in February.

And Newman hired Obama in 1992 to lead Project Vote efforts in Illinois. The effort’s motto: “It’s a Power Thing.” Today, the Obama campaign’s “Vote for Change” registration drive is running in parallel with ACORN/Project Vote, targetting the same sorts of people.

It’s an all-out scramble to scrape up every last unregistered voter sympathetic to Obama’s big-government vision. “Our volume,” Obama campaign manager David Plouffe bragged of the voter-registration program, “is going to be enormous.”

Quantity over quality. That’s the ACORN way – and the fraud allegations keep piling up

Continue reading here…

Martial Law?

WMR has learned from knowledgeable Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) sources that the Bush administration is putting the final touches on a plan that would see martial law declared in the United States with various scenarios anticipated as triggers. The triggers include a continuing economic collapse with massive social unrest, bank closures resulting in violence against financial institutions, and another fraudulent presidential election that would result in rioting in major cities and campuses around the country.

In addition, Army Corps of Engineer sources report that the assignment of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team (BCT) to the Northern Command’s U.S. Army North is to augment FEMA and federal law enforcement in the imposition of traffic controls, crowd control, curfews, enhanced border and port security, and neighborhood patrols in the event a national emergency being declared. The BCT was assigned to duties in Iraq before being assigned to the Northern Command.

On April 3, 2008, WMR reported on a highly-classified document regarding the martial law scenario: WMR has learned from knowledgeable sources within the US financial community that an alarming confidential and limited distribution document is circulating among senior members of Congress and their senior staff members that is warning of a bleak future for the United States if it does not quickly get its financial house in order. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is among those who have reportedly read the document. The document is being called the “C & R” document because it reportedly states that if the United States defaults on loans and debt underwriting from China, Japan, and Russia, all of which are propping up the United States government financially, and the United States unilaterally cancels the debts, America can expect a war that will have disastrous results for the United States and the world. “Conflict” is the “C word” in the document. The other scenario is that the federal government will be forced to drastically raise taxes in order to pay off debts to foreign countries to the point that the American people will react with a popular revolution against the government. “Revolution” is the document’s “R word.

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