"ALL CAPS IN DEFENSE OF LIBERTY IS NO VICE."

Saturday, March 15, 2008

WHAT OBAMA'S HANDLING OF WRIGHT TELLS US ABOUT OBAMA:

AFTER TRYING TO FINESSE HIS RELATIONSHIP FOR THE LAST YEAR, OBAMA HAS FINALLY TOSSED WRIGHT OVERBOARD.
  • HIS MENTOR,
  • HIS PASTOR,
  • THE MAN WHO CONVERTED HIM,
  • MARRIED HIM,
  • AND BAPTIZED HIS CHILDREN.
  • WHO COINED THE PHRASE FOR HIS SECOND BOOK.
  • HIS MORAL COMPASS.
  • WRIGHT WAS TOSSED ASIDE BECAUSE DESPITE ALL THAT HE HAD MEANT TO OBAMA AND DONE FOR OBAMA, HE GOT IN THE WAY OF OBAMA'S AMBITION.
  • THIS IS NOT NEW FOR OBAMA.
  • AFTER HIS BREAKTHROUGH 2004 "KERRY CONVENTION" SPEECH, HE TOSSED ASIDE HIS LONGTIME LITERARY AGENT - THE PERSON WHO CONVINCED HIM TO WRITE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND SOLD IT.
OBAMA IS A DISHONORABLE MAN.

OBAMA IS A LEFTIST, RACIST, EGOTIST, A LIAR AND A CAD.

THERE ARE NO REGULAR "AMERICANS" FOR THE LEFT

In a revealing web posting defending the racist, anti-American hatemonger Jeremiah Wright, the United Church of Christ's Rev. Steve Gray is quoted as follows:

Gray, a member of First Congregational UCC in Indianapolis, has worshiped several times at Trinity UCC and is most impressed by the overflowing sense of welcome it extends to visitors.

"When you're Euro-American, the people [at Trinity UCC] are so exceedingly gracious, warm and welcoming. They hug you and say, 'Welcome to our church!'"

Many, including Gray, point with appreciation to Trinity UCC's generous support of denominational and ecumenical ministries. From 2003 to 2007, Trinity UCC gave more than $3.7 million to Our Church's Wider Mission, the UCC's shared fund for connectional mission and ministry.

What I learn from that, is that we are all hyphenated now. There is no such thing as an American. There are only African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Euro-Americans. What a bunch of garbage!

What I also learn is that for the UCC leadership, it's all about the benjamins.

It is also interesting to note that Jeremiah Wright's church is the largest single congregation in the UCC, a predominantly white, leftist denomination that was the first organized Protestant denomination to ordain an openly practicing homosexual man, and to endorse same-sex marriage.

I'm also wondering why Jeremiah Wright did not choose a traditionally African-American denomination, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church or the National Baptist Convention. Would it be because a more "mainline" African-American denomination wouldn't tolerate his socialistic and racist extremism? And why did Barack [middle name redacted] Obama choose this particular extremist as his spiritual mentor, rather than a more mainstream African-American minister? Could it be that the radical political extremism of Jeremiah Wright is what attracted Barack Obama (or perhaps it was Michelle Obama) to Wright in the first place?

BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA IS A LIAR

This is the first in a short series of posts in which I want to make a few simple observations about Barack [middle name redacted] Obama.

In order to keep it simple, I am going to post one proof of one observation in each post.

To begin with, so we all know with what we are dealing, Barack Obama is a LIAR.

In a post he put up at Ariana Huffington's site, Obama made this claim:
The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation.
That statement is a baldfaced lie. Barack Obama was well aware of Jeremiah Wright's potty-mouth anti-American ranting during the 22 years he has been an active member of that Church.

The proof comes from an article the New Duranty Times published over a year ago, reporting that Obama had decided to dis-invite Wright from the announcement of his candidacy for the Presidency. And why did he do that? The Times reported:

Mr. Wright said that in the phone conversation in which Mr. Obama disinvited him from a role in the announcement, Mr. Obama cited an article in Rolling Stone, “The Radical Roots of Barack Obama.”

According to the pastor, Mr. Obama then told him, “You can get kind of rough in the sermons, so what we’ve decided is that it’s best for you not to be out there in public.” [Emphasis added.]

Barack Obama has known all along what Jeremiah Wright preaches. And he knew it would be damaging to his campaign.

To claim otherwise is just a stupid schoolboyish lie.

Let me give you more evidence. (Hat tip: Rocco DiPippo.) Back in August, 2007, reporter Jim Davis visited Obama's church. This is what he witnessed:

Wright laced into America's establishment, blaming the "white arrogance" of America's Caucasian majority for the woes of the world, especially the oppression suffered by blacks. To underscore the point he refers to the country as the "United States of White America." Many in the congregation, including Obama, nodded in apparent agreement as these statements were made.

The sermon also addressed the Iraq war, a frequent area of Wright's fulminations.

"Young African-American men," Wright thundered, were "dying for nothing." The "illegal war," he shouted, was "based on Bush's lies" and is being "fought for oil money."

In a sermon filled with profanity, Wright also blamed the war on "Bush administration bulls--t."

Senator Barack [middle name redacted] Obama sat in the congregation and nodded his agreement as Wright preached "a sermon filled with profanity" in which he blamed the woes of the world on American white people. Obama nodded his agreement.

And now he has the audacity to claim that "
The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation." That's audacity!

And for lagniappe, let me add that to make his lying disclaimer in a statement on the Huffington Post, instead of facing the press, shows you that in addition to being a liar, Obama is also a coward.

No matter how much money Tony Rezko and George Soros donate to his campaign, Americans are not going to elect a lying coward as President. Not now, not in 2012, not never.

Party like a blogger at Spring BlogFest East!

Fausta and Parkway Rest Stop are hosting Blogfest East 2008.


This isn't a picture from last year's Blogfest East, but you will have this much fun!

If you live anywhere within traveling distance of New Jersey, New York City or Pennsylvania, the party is too close to miss.

The party is Saturday April 5, 2008 (starting at 6pm and going to... whenever, loser) at Triumph Brewing Company in Princeton, NJ. Space in the Sky Suite is limited, so get to stepping!

Why Winning in Iraq is so Critical

Victor Davis Hanson has an outstanding analysis of the Iraq war up today. Among the important points Hanson makes is why America's success is so important. It is no wonder that the Democrats and their allies in big media has gone virtually silent on a War America is winning; if the public knew what was really at stake and how dramatically things have turned around, it would have a completely different view of who has been wrong--and who has been right all along:
... Once promised to be the singular issue of the current presidential campaign, the war has receded to background noise of the primaries. An ascendant Barack Obama pounded home the fact that, unlike Senator Clinton, he never supported the removal of Saddam Hussein and always wanted to get Americans out of there as fast as he could; it may well prove that a more circumspect Obama soon won’t want to mention the war and, as hinted by aides, wouldn’t jerk the troops out should he be the next president.

Rarely in American history has a war been so often spun, praised, renounced, disowned, and finally neglected. And the result is that a number of questions remain not just unanswered, but unasked. We have not been hit since 9/11, despite the dire predictions from almost everyone of serial attacks to come. Today if a Marine recruitment center is bombed, we automatically assume the terrorist to represent a domestic anti-war group, not al-Qaeda — a perverse conjecture impossible to have imagined in autumn 2001.

In response to that calm, the communis opinio is that we hyped the threat, needlessly went to war, mortgaged the Constitution — just collate the rhetoric from the Obama and Clinton campaigns — when there was never much of a post-9/11 threat from a rag-tag bunch of jihadists in the first place.

What is never discussed is how many Islamists flocked to Iraq, determined to defeat the U.S. military — and never got out alive. Or, more bluntly, how many jihadists did the U.S. Army and Marines kill in Iraq rather than in Manhattan?

And what was the effect of that defeat not only on the jihadists, but also on those who were watching carefully to see whether the terrorists should be joined in victory or abandoned in defeat? Who really took his eye off the ball — the United States by going into Iraq, as alleged, or Osama bin Laden and his jihadist lieutenants by diverting thousands there to their deaths, as is never mentioned?

When the war started, contrary to the current rhetoric, Osama bin Laden was popular in the Middle East, and the tactic of suicide bombing had won a sizable following. But after the war was fought, and despite years of anti-American rhetoric, bin Laden has never polled lower while support for suicide murdering in the Muslim Middle East continues to decline.

In 2001, the Arab street apparently thought, for all the macabre nature of suicide bombing, that it at least had brought the United States to its knees and such a takedown was considered a good thing; in the latter reflection of 2007 and 2008, it worried that such a tactic brought the United States military to its region, and guaranteed the defeat of jihadists along with any who joined them.

Iraq, as no one ever imagined, ended up as a landscape in which the United States and al-Qaeda would battle for the hearts and minds of the Arab world on the world stage. And in Anbar Province, the jihadists are losing — losing militarily and losing the support of the local Sunni population. Again, whereas the conventional wisdom holds that we have radicalized an entire generation of young Muslims, it may turn out instead that we have convinced a generation that it is not wise after 9/11 to wage war against the United States. In any case, there is no other constitutional Arab government in the Middle East that actively hunts down and kills al-Qaeda terrorists.

When the insurgency took off in late 2003, Europe immediately triangulated against the United States, courted the Arab world, and hoped to deflect jihadists by loudly proclaiming they were vehemently against the war in Iraq. This is in itself was quite remarkable, since the entire recent expansion of the European Union to the south and east had been predicated only on a partnership agreement with the United States to extend NATO membership — alone ensuring these weak new European affiliates American military protection.

Irony abounds: Since 2003, Europe — not the United States — has experienced a series of attacks, and near-constant threats, ranging from bombed subways and rail stations to Islamic demands to censor cartoons, operas, films, and papal exegeses.

It is in Europe, not in post-Iraq Kansas, where a Turkish prime minister announces to Muslim expatriate residents that they must remain forever Turks and assimilation is a crime; it is in post-Iraq Europe, not Los Angeles, where politicians and churchmen talk of the inevitability of Sharia law; and it is in post-Iraq Europe, not the United States, where honor killings and Islamic rioting are common occurrences.

Why? A number of reasons, but despite all the misrepresentation and propaganda, the message has filtered through the Middle East that the United States will go after and punish jihadists — but also, alone of the Western nations, it will risk its own blood and treasure to work with Arab nations to find some alternative to the extremes of dictatorship and theocracy. Europe, in contrast to its utopian rhetoric, will trade with and profit from, but most surely never challenge, a Middle Eastern thug. ...
Read the whole thing.

I have always said that Bush will be regarded as a great President by future historians, simply because he did the right thing in Iraq and because he stood his ground against a decidedly unfavorable headwind. I think this VDH piece explains why this is so--better than anything I've seen lately.

UN Issues License to Kill (Jews)

Why is the United States still bankrolling a lion's share of the costs of this anachronistic anti-Semitic collection of Socialists? Why is my tax money paying for this scam? I can't wait until the day we have a Presidential candidate who has the guts to tie UN funding to its performance. I'll vote for that guy in a New York (or Geneva) second:
Stories such as this AP account flag the new UN report by special rapporteur John Dugard. Dugard's provides an appalling example of the role playled by the United Nations in disseminating the most virulent forms of contemporary anti-Semitism. The report essentially licenses terrorism against Israel. Dugard explains that there are two kinds of terrorism -- one "mindless" and the other killing Israelis in the name of "national liberation." The latter is "inevitable," according to Dugard.

Dugard's report arrived too late to be recognized properly in the State Department's report on global anti-Semitism, but Eye on the UN has posted a petition protesting Dugard's report.

OFFENSIVE COMPARISONS CONTINUE

Barry Rubin talks about how Israeli policy in dealing with Islamic terrorism is being compared to nazism, which is simply offensive.

THE UNITED CHURCH OF CHRIST SEES OBAMA AS A GODSEND

According to this article in the March 15, 2008 edition of the Washington Post:
CLEVELAND -- For the United Church of Christ, a graying, Cleveland-based denomination that has lost more than 40 percent of its members since the 1960s, Sen. Barack Obama is a godsend.

Church leaders expect more people to come knocking on UCC doors as their most widely known member raises awareness of the denomination through his Democratic presidential campaign.

Some church officials consider him a walking billboard for a denominational advertising campaign welcoming believers of all races, ages and sexual orientations....

[...]

The attention Obama brings to the UCC is almost all positive, experts on religion and politics say, because they share similar political views and Obama's message of inclusion fits with the denomination's advertising campaign.
And the UCC denomination is not much concerned about Jeremiah Wright's racist, America-hating diatribes either:
So far, few church leaders seem fazed by criticism directed at remarks by the minister of Obama's home church, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

[...]

...[Church president] Thomas praised Trinity as "a great gift to our wider church family and to its own community in Chicago."...
Obama and his church are resurrecting racial hatred in America. Furthermore, before it's all over, Christianity will be besmirched in general.

Even if Obama is not on the ticket or elected, he's doing plenty of damage to America right now.

The uber high-class ethics of Barack Obama

Dan Riehl has blockbuster news:

...Mrs. Obama’s compensation at the University of Chicago Hospital, where she is a vice president for community affairs, jumped from $121,910 in 2004, just before her husband was elected to the Senate, to $316,962 in 2005, just after he took office.

[An Obama earmark set aside] $1 Million For Construction Of A New Hospital Pavilion At The University Of Chicago. In 2006, Obama requested that the University of Chicago receive $1 million to support its Construction of New Hospital Pavilion.

Talk about a quid pro quo.

Also see: The Worst of Jeremiah Wright.

Hat tips: Jack M. and Larwyn

Bureaucratic bungledom

The tale below from Australia will sound familiar to anyone who has tried to get a large bureaucratic organization to fix something. Yet the Left want to saddle us with ever more bureaucracy! The only explanation which makes sense of such insanity is to say that their carefully-masked hatred of us all trumps the "compassion" that they claim

Last year I had a bizarre brush with the bureaucracy. I got locked in an argument with the taxman, and emerged with a fine for my trouble. Why? Because I had the temerity to tell him he wasn't charging me enough income tax. After I submitted my annual return he sent me an assessment saying I'd made an arithmetic error of $12,012 and enclosing a refund cheque for $3878. Phew. I'd been expecting a bill for $1948. But I knew it was too good to be true. I checked and confirmed there'd been no error in my arithmetic.

I could have let the taxman's mistake ride, but I had a feeling that, should it be discovered, the bureaucrats might find a way to blame it on me. In my position, I couldn't risk that. Or maybe it was just the pedant in me. Anyhow, I sat straight down and wrote to the taxman, explaining (wrongly, as it turned out) how I imagined the mix-up had occurred and asking for the $12,012 to be added back to my taxable income. Naturally, since the refunded money didn't belong to me, I didn't bank the cheque.

I heard nothing for almost three months. Then, on the very day I'd posted another letter reminding the taxman I'd had no response to the first one, I got a call from a woman in the Tax Office. From memory, she was in Brisbane. She called to tell me my letter made no sense and that the refund was correct. A furious argument ensued, with me insisting that, far from the taxman owing me money, I owed him.

I asked if she had my return in front of her. No, its content had been entered into the computer and it wasn't available. We argued back and forth until she asked if I'd claimed a $12,012 deduction for Australian film industry incentives. No, of course I hadn't. Ah. That $12,012 was the total of my supplementary income. Whoever punched my figures into the computer had mistakenly entered it one line down, the line for film industry deductions. So I win the argument and am complimented for my honesty. Leave it with me, I'll get it fixed.

I hear nothing for more than two months, when I get another phone call from another woman in the Tax Office. This one was in Parramatta (by now I'm keeping notes of conversations). She was just calling to say my letter made no sense and that the refund was correct. Another furious argument, but this time shorter as I produce my trump card: contrary to what you see before you, I made no claim for a film industry deduction. Another win. I explain that, since I knew I wasn't entitled to the refund, I hadn't banked the cheque. Oh. Then would I mind sending the cheque back to her? Really? Why? It's the Tax Office's cheque, so all you have to do is cancel it.

She was doubtful. Cheque cancelling wasn't done by her section. But she agreed to cancel it and issue a new assessment. At least she got on with it. Within a week I received an amended assessment giving me 26 days to pay $6028. Huh? Well, there's the $1948 I always owed them, plus the $3878 refund I wasn't entitled to, plus $202 as a "shortfall interest charge". The ungrateful blighters. They'd charged me interest for having the use of their money when I hadn't banked their cheque.

I fully intended to stand on my dig, paying the money I owed but refusing to repay a refund I hadn't actually received and certainly refusing to pay what amounted to a fine for being honest. But that would have required another carefully worded letter, and time got away from me. So I banked the cheque and waited (just to make sure they hadn't cancelled it after all), then paid up.

Source


Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your handy-dandy summary of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH

Some global warming summaries

THE KYOTO PROTOCOL AND GOVERNMENT CORRUPTION

By Per G. Fredriksson et al.

Abstract

Does environmental lobbying affect the probability of environmental treaty ratification? Does the level of government corruption play a role for the success of such lobbying? In this paper, we propose that a more corruptible government may be more responsive to the demands of the environmental lobby.We use several stratified hazard models and panel data from 170 countries on the timing of Kyoto Protocol ratification to test this hypothesis. We find that increased environmental lobby group activity raises the probability of ratification, and the effect rises with the degree of corruption.

FULL PAPER at Public Choice (2007) 133: 231-251 (PDF)

ENVIRONMENTALISM AND THE COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT

Environmentalism is, among other things, an attack on science. This is not the first concerted campaign against science and reason. From the mid-18th to the early 19th century a social movement explicitly attacking science and reason dominated the intellectual culture of the European Continent. The Continental Counter-Enlightenment was forged during a ferocious Republican-Royalist conflict. This social movement was a reaction by the aristocracy to modernization. Their attack on science and reason was an effort to thwart any common-sense empirical policy discussion about feudalism, monarchism and clericalism which they admitted were irrational institutions. In the Continental Counter-Enlightenment's clear and profound legacy one finds the roots of Fascism and Environmentalism.

Much more here

NOAA: COOLEST WINTER SINCE 2001 FOR U.S. and GLOBE

The average temperature across both the contiguous U.S. and the globe during climatological winter (December 2007-February 2008) was the coolest since 2001, according to scientists at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. In terms of winter precipitation, Pacific storms, bringing heavy precipitation to large parts of the West, produced high snowpack that will provide welcome runoff this spring.

A complete analysis is available online here

GLOBAL WARMING: THE SACRIFICIAL TEMPTATION

By Serge Galam

Abstract

The claimed unanimity of the scientific community about the human culpability for global warming is questioned. Up today there exists no scientific proof of human culpability. It is not the number of authors of a paper, which validates its scientific content. The use of probability to assert the degree of certainty with respect the global warming problem is shown to be misleading. The debate about global warming has taken on emotional tones driven by passion and irrationality while it should be a scientific debate. The degree of hostility used to mull any dissonance voice demonstrates that the current debate has acquired a quasi-religious nature. Scientists are behaving as priests in their will "to save the planet". We are facing a dangerous social phenomenon, which must be addressed from the social point of view. The current unanimity of citizens, scientists, journalists, intellectuals and politicians is intrinsically worrying. The calls to sacrifice our way of life to calm down the upset nature is an emotional ancestral reminiscence of archaic fears, which should be analyzed as such.

FULL PAPER here

Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your handy-dandy summary of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH

Friday, March 14, 2008

MOTOONS AN ISSUE AT THE OIC

The letters "OIC" stand for the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which just wrapped up a two-day summit in Dakar Senegal.

From the AP article "Muslims Nations: Defame Islam, Get Sued?":
The Muslim world has created a battle plan to defend its religion from political cartoonists and bigots.

Concerned about what they see as a rise in the defamation of Islam, leaders of the world's Muslim nations are considering taking legal action against those that slight their religion or its sacred symbols. It was a key issue during a two-day summit that ended Friday in this western Africa capital.

The Muslim leaders are attempting to demand redress from nations like Denmark, which allowed the publication of cartoons portraying the Prophet Muhammad in 2006 and again last month, to the fury of the Muslim world....
Read the entire AP article HERE.

Apparently a larger group than Islamic activists in Jordan may resort to some form of litigation-ifada.

At the summit, Sada Cumber, the U.S. envoy to the OIC emphasized how much America respects Islam.

2008 grinds on as the The Year of Silencing Voices.

Additional reading on the topic of the OIC.

RECORD SNOWS IN EASTERN CANADA CLOSE SCHOOLS, COLLAPSE ROOFS

XINHUA:
More than 150 schools are closed Friday in Canada's eastern city of Montreal over fears that snow-covered roofs may collapse, reports reaching here said.

Thousands of students are getting the unexpected break ordered by the city's biggest school board, which said it does not take any chances with the safety of students.

The schools will remain closed at least until Monday, when the rooftop snow is expected to be cleared, Canadian Press said.

Meanwhile, students at an elementary school in western Quebec were sent home early Friday morning over concerns about heavy snow on the roof.

The whole province of Quebec have been worried about rooftop snow after three women were killed when a roof collapsed at a specialty food center in a small town north of Montreal Wednesday.

The province has had near-record snowfall this winter, including more than 50 centimeters over last weekend, according to forecasters. Several roof collapses have occurred as a result of accumulated snow during the season.

The amount of snowfall in nearby Ontario province is also nearing historical records. A family in Ottawa had to flee their house in a panic early Monday morning when the roof started to collapse under all the snow that fell over last weekend.
HAS AL GORE STFU YET!?

THE OBAMA BUBBLE HAS BURST: PROOF THAT OBAMA KNEW OF AND APPROVED WRIGHT'S RACISM

  • A QUOTE IN BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA JUNIOR'S FIRST BOOK.
  • FROM OBAMA'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
  • WRITTEN A DECADE BEFORE HE WOULD EVEN CONSIDER RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT OF THE USA.
HERE'S AN EXCERPT - (OBAMA IS QUOTING A SPECIFIC SERMON OF WRIGHT'S - ONE WHICH OBAMA FELT WAS PARTICULARLY MOVING AND PARTICULARLY IMPORTANT TO HIS LIFE):

“It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere…That’s the world! On which hope sits!”

And so it went, a meditation on a fallen world. While the boys next to me doodled on their church bulletin, Reverend Wright spoke of Sharpsville and Hiroshima, the callousness of policy makers in the White House and in the State House.
  • THIS PROVES THAT OBAMA LIED TODAY WHEN HE CLAIMED THAT HE HAD NEVER HEAR WRIGHT PREACH IN A RACIST WAY. NYTIMES:
    “The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation,” he said.
  • THAT'S A LIE. OBAMA NOT ONLY HEARD A RACIST SPEECH BY WRIGHT - IN PERSON, HE DID WORSE: HE ACTUALLY PRAISED A RACIST DIATRIBE BY WRIGHT.
THIS IS THE REAL OBAMA: A RACIST; A SOCIALIST.

HIS POTENTIAL ELECTION IS A REAL AND PRESENT DANGER TO THE REPUBLIC.

UPDATED Welcome to the "Politics of Change"

Barack is SO, SO sorry... All those years when the Good Rev. Wright married him and baptized his daughters...and accepted all of Barack's big contributions to his Ministry...and went globetrotting with his buddy Louis (I never met a white man I liked) Farrakhan--well the poor victim Barack Obama just must not have been paying good attention to what this guy was about...

Just like he wasn't paying attention when the crook Rezko's wife bought him his new front yard, gratis (ok maybe for a political favor or 100...); or when Rezko himself donated a quarter of a mil (that we know of) to his campaigns (that one just came out today); nor when all that earmark money went to his own wife's business.

Rookie mistakes. Just a bit of bad judgment, no trouble here. Barack had his eyes on the "big picture, that's all." So let's let bygones be bygones and let's make the guy President now...

Right.

Victor Davis Hanson has got it exactly right: this isn't going away; not even for some call girl. I think we are witnessing the implosion of the Obama campaign:
Betrayed?

The problems with Rev. Wright and Sen. Obama are fivefold. They won’t go away, but they will raise dilemmas for him that have no analogy, no parallel with other religious leaders of dubious past declamations who have supported the other candidates:

1) The Obamas were not merely endorsed by, or attended the church of, Rev. Wright, but subsidized his hatred with generous donations, were married by him, and had their children baptized by this venomous preacher; there is nothing quite comparable in the case of Sens. Clinton and McCain.

2) Rev. Wright’s invective is not insensitive or hyperbolic alone, but in the end disgusting. And when listened to rather than read, the level of emotion and fury only compound the racism and hatred, whether in its attack on the Clintons, or profanity-laced slander of the United States and its history, or in gratuitous references to other races. Its reactionary Afrocentrism, conspiracy-theory, and illiberal racial separatism take us back to the 1970s, and compare with the worst of the fossilized Farrakhan—and have no remote parallel in the present campaign.

3) Sen. Obama has proclaimed a new politics of hope and change that were supposedly to transcend such venom and character assassination of the past. Thus besides being politically dense, he suffers—unless he preempts and explains in detail his Byzantine relationship with the Reverend—the additional charge of hypocrisy in courting such a merchant of hate. And then he compounds the disaster by the old-fashion politics of contortion and excuse by suggesting the Rev. Wright is not that controversial, or is analogous to the occasional embarrassing outburst of an uncle—some uncle.

4) There is a growing sense of betrayal among some of his supporters. Sen. Obama promised to transcend race; millions of sincere people of both parties took him at his word and invested psychologically and materially in his candidacy. Part of his message was that collectively America had made great progress, and their Ivy League and subsequent careers, in addition to his rhetoric of inclusiveness and tolerance, bore witness to that progress in racial equality. Now we learn, that for much of his career, he was not only attending hate-filled sermons against “rich white people” and the “g-d d——d America” (in hopes of solidifying his racial fides in regional Chicago politics?), but subsidized that ministry of intolerance. So while he promised an evolution beyond the race-identity politics of Jesse Jackson or the Rev. Sharpton, his own minister trumped anything that either one of those preachers might have sermonized. All in all—a betrayal.

5) The timing is especially troubling. In delegate mathematics, Obama seems to have the nomination; but this scandal—and it is a scandal despite the best efforts of sympathetic journalists to downplay it—will only cause worry for the super delegates, who now must either nominate a candidate (no doubt the vast right-wing conspiracy is examining the multivolume DVDs of Rev. Wright’s collective corpus of hatred) who will bleed all spring and summer, or “steal” the nomination from the “people” and “hand it over” to Hillary.

So now in place of a critical discussion of issues from taxes to the war, welcome to the Politics of Change.
The Democrats have a BIG problem; even Hillary may not want him on her ticket now... He portrayed himself as such a "uniter", and now it appears he has spent over 20 years with one of the biggest racist bigots around. Nice try.

In his zeal to outdo the Queen of Identity Politics, Barack Obama has now reaped what he himself has sown. But not because he is black; rather, because he quite simply does not have the judgment to be President.

UPDATE: Tom McGuire isn't buying either:

This Rolling Stone article from Feb 2007 titled "The Radical Roots of Barack Obama" looks like a gold mine. Lots of material on Wright (but nothing on Ayers). This next passage gives a flavor of what Obama is pretending he did not hear in church [but do note my confusion following the excerpt]:

Wright takes the pulpit here one Sunday and solemnly, sonorously declares that he will recite ten essential facts about the United States. "Fact number one: We've got more black men in prison than there are in college," he intones. "Fact number two: Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!" There is thumping applause; Wright has a cadence and power that make Obama sound like John Kerry. Now the reverend begins to preach. "We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of professional KILLERS. . . . We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. . . . We conducted radiation experiments on our own people. . . . We care nothing about human life if the ends justify the means!" The crowd whoops and amens as Wright builds to his climax: "And. And. And! GAWD! Has GOT! To be SICK! OF THIS SHIT!"

This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr. Wright is not an incidental figure in Obama's life, or his politics. The senator "affirmed" his Christian faith in this church; he uses Wright as a "sounding board" to "make sure I'm not losing myself in the hype and hoopla." Both the title of Obama's second book, The Audacity of Hope, and the theme for his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 come from Wright's sermons. "If you want to understand where Barack gets his feeling and rhetoric from," says the Rev. Jim Wallis, a leader of the religious left, "just look at Jeremiah Wright."

Obama wasn't born into Wright's world. His parents were atheists, an African bureaucrat and a white grad student, Jerry Falwell's nightmare vision of secular liberals come to life. Obama could have picked any church — the spare, spiritual places in Hyde Park, the awesome pomp and procession of the cathedrals downtown. He could have picked a mosque, for that matter, or even a synagogue. Obama chose Trinity United. He picked Jeremiah Wright. Obama writes in his autobiography that on the day he chose this church, he felt the spirit of black memory and history moving through Wright, and "felt for the first time how that spirit carried within it, nascent, incomplete, the possibility of moving beyond our narrow dreams."

Ouch. [But hold on - per this article, the Rolling Stone is reporting on the same speech described by today's WSJ as having been delivered at Howard University; this YouTube video tracks both sets of excerpts. I suppose he could have delivered it twice. But word for word? So what was the Rolling Stone reporter thinking about? I'll guess - Howard University is in Washington DC, as is Obama's Senate office, and he got muddled.]

Let's cut to the Times for more on Obama's choice of minister:

It was a 1988 sermon called “The Audacity to Hope” that turned Mr. Obama, in his late 20s, from spiritual outsider to enthusiastic churchgoer. Mr. Wright in the sermon jumped from 19th-century art to his own youthful brushes with crime and Islam to illustrate faith’s power to inspire underdogs. Mr. Obama was seeing the same thing in public housing projects where poor residents sustained themselves through sheer belief.

In “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Obama described his teary-eyed reaction to the minister’s words. “Inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones,” Mr. Obama wrote. “Those stories — of survival, and freedom, and hope — became our story, my story.”

Mr. Obama was baptized that year, and joining Trinity helped him “embrace the African-American community in a way that was whole and profound,” said Ms. Soetoro, his half sister.

Whoa. It is hardly as if this is the church Obama's parents selected and he inherited. He sought out Wright, was moved by Wright, and is now pretending he had no idea Wright said these things. ....

CONDOLEEZA MAKES ANOTHER FALSE MORAL EQUIVALENCE

Secretary Rice pisses me off more and more - it seems like ever since she got to the State Department she's been brainwashed by its Arabists and anti-Semites. Here's another example:
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday that not enough has been done by the Israelis or the Palestinians to demonstrate their commitment to peace.

''I have not hidden the fact that I think that there is a lot of room for improvement on both sides concerning both their obligations,'' Rice said.

''Frankly, not nearly enough has happened to demonstrate that the Israelis and Palestinians fully understand or are somehow fully acting'' on what needs to be done, she added.

''Without following 'road map' obligations and without improvements on the ground, it's very hard to sustain this process,'' Rice said.
This is total BULLSHIT. First, she's a hypocrite because she recently said the Roadmap was dead because it was a hindrance to a settlement because it required the PA to stop the terror before Israel has to do anything. RICE - QUOTE:
"The 'road map' for peace, conceived in 2002 by Mr. Bush, had become a hindrance to the peace process, because the first requirement was that the Palestinians stop terrorist attacks. As a result, every time there was a terrorist bombing, the peace process fell apart and went back to square one. Neither side ever began discussing the 'core issues': the freezing of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the right of Palestinian refugees to return, the outline of Israel's border, and the future of Jerusalem.

"The reason that we haven't really been able to move forward on the peace process for a number of years is that we were stuck in the sequentiality of the road map.
WHEN SHE MADE THESE STUPID REMARKS, SHE KILLED THE ROADMAP - NOT ISRAEL.

And then there's the underlying false equivalence: in her mind now it seems, Israel's pin-point/targeted retaliations for unprovoked rocket attacks from Gaza are the same as those unprovoked attacks.

This is insane and evil thinking - and it will get us NOWHERE.

The only way forward for the so-called Arab Palestinians and the Israelis is the way belligerent nations have always moved forward: one must be utterly defeated so the victors can dictate terms which will be accepted.

Everything between now and then is merely a delay of the inevitable. And the sooner the Israelis demolish Hamas and Fatah and all the other jihadoterror groups the sooner there will be REAL PEACE.

Between now and then it would be REALLY REALLY helpful of Rice would STFU and let the Israelis do whatever they have to do - TO WIN.

Peace is a by-product of victory.

WHAT HAPPENS IF QUALIFICATIONS AND DOWNMENTS FOR MORTGAGES ARE DEEMED RACIST AND THEN OUTLAWED? YOU GET A HOUSING BUBBLE WHICH BURSTS

10KSNOOKER:
The American Dream Downpayment Initiative of 2003 has become the mortgage disaster of 2008. Allowing people to buy houses they are clearly not qualified to afford, with the ability to repay borrowed money of a pissant, has consequences. No one wants to talk about it-- Why not? It was so much fun allowing illegal aliens and other unqualified people to get mortgages, that have now for the most part walked, why shouldn't we talk about it? Government caused the disaster, shouldn't we all know about it.

Qualifications for mortgages were deemed 'discrimination'.
RTWT.

DOUBLE STANDARD ALERT: WHAT IF MCCAIN'S PRIEST WAS ANTI-BLACK?

OBAMA AND OBAMA'S PREACHERMAN ARE GETTING A PASS - SO FAR - WHICH MCCAIN WOULD NEVER GET. MORE HERE.

OBAMA IS A BAD PERSON WITH A BAD AND UN-TRUSTWORTHY PERSONAL HISTORY

The NYTIMES had a piece on Obama's weird mother today.

Here's what I learned:

Obama's father left him and his mother when he was 2.

His step father left them both and Obama's half-sister.

His mother chose to leave Barack Hussein Jr when he became a teen - and he was happier to live with grandparents who left him alone, than to be with his mother.

THE FIRST CHANCE HE COULD (AFTER HIS SPEECH TO THE KERRY CONVENTION MADE HIM A NATIONAL STAR ON THE LEFT), he broke the contract he had with the literary agent who gave him the idea he could sell his autobiography, and sold it.

The family he has lived with the last 20 years is principally made up of his anti-American/anti-white wife, and his anti-American and anti-white pastor and the children he baptized.

He climbed the ladder in Chicago by fronting for a slumlord and the Chicago Machine which the slumlord helped to finance.

These are salient and troubling parts of his biography. To me, they are moments which inspire anxiety: I can;pt imagine a whole trustworthy person emerging from that... mess. I can see a chameleon emerging from it, an opportunist - one who deep inside hates whites and is prepared to put on any "happy face" and do ANYTHING to get ahead personally.

That;s why he joined that big anti-white church: to get ahead in the Chicago ghetto. It's why he did Rezko's bidding, and the bidding of the Chicago Machine ever since.

BOTTOM-LINE: There is NOTHING is Obama's biography which inspires hope or confidence in me.

I would not trust him to be my lawyer. I would not trust him to be my state senator or Senator or President or Vice president.

THE ASTUTE BLOGGERS HAD ANOTHER BIG STORY FIRST: THE LATEST CAPTURE AND TRANSFER OF AN AL QAEDA BIGGIE

IT WAS ALL OVER THE MSM AND BLOGOSPHERE TODAY: BIN LADEN AIDE CAPTURED AND TRANSFERRED TO GITMO. AP had it TODAY. The MSM followed suit during the day.
  • WE WERE 100% RIGHT.
And blogospheric jihadi-hunter Numero Uno, Dr Rusty Shackleford of THE JAWA REPORT correctly and generously gave THE ASTUTE BLOGGERS the lead HAT TIP:
Top bin Laden Aide Captured!

Muhammad Rahim, a top Osama bin Laden aide, has been captured and transferred to Guantanamo Bay. Earlier this week news reports out of Hungary indicated that the CIA was moving a high-level prisoner. Same guy? Magic 8-Ball says, yes.

Regular readers of TAB know we do this all the time.
SPREAD THE WORD!
BLOGROLL US!

More here.

Murder and Mutilation....or Waterboarding?

For some reason, I am not hearing Keith Olberman debating Chris Matthews on MSNBC on whether chopping off fingers (or heads) ought to be "allowed". Go figure.

Meanwhile, our murderous sociopathic enemies continue to take hostages, mutilate them, and kill them--while in the meantime utopian nutjobs on this side of the pond argue as to whether pouring water up an inhuman monster's snout ought to be "permitted" or not. Please.

You will excuse my non-PC sensibilities, but we are in a WAR for the survival of our civilization here; count me in with Don Surber:

The enemy mails severed fingers of Western hostages. And I’m supposed to worry about some terrorist getting water poured over him?

And I don’t want to hear about retaliation.

KSM beheaded Daniel Pearl long before we waterboarded KSM.

Anyway, AP reported: “Severed fingers of five Western hostages were reportedly sent to U.S. government officials, giving the men’s relatives hope that they are still alive, a brother of one of the missing men said.”

It quoted the twin brother of a hostage, Patrick Reuben, a Minneapolis police officer: “certainly hopeful, but there’s nothing definite right now.”

The bastards took 5 hostages in 2006: Paul Reuben, a former St. Louis Park, Minn., police officer; Joshua Munns of Redding, Calif.; John Young of Kansas City; Jonathon Cote of the Buffalo, N.Y. area, and Bert Nussbaumer of Austria.

The AP report is here.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, true, but waterboarding is to mutilating hostages what running a red-light is to DUI.

I disagree with the analogy only in degree: to me the difference between what these inhuman monsters do and waterboarding is more akin to rolling a Stop sign compared to intentional vehicular manslaughter; and it is nothing short of criminal to sit back and say nothing as "feel good" moral relativists try and equate the two.

The Inequality Myth

Excerpt:

Class warfare is once again a campaign theme. The Democratic candidates are railing against the "tax cuts for the rich," lamenting the stagnation of middle-class incomes, and decrying the deepening woes of the poor. In her January response to President Bush's State of the Union address, Hillary Clinton cited "seven years of stagnant wages, declining incomes and increasing inequality." Barack Obama echoes this theme by referring repeatedly to the "middle-class squeeze."

First, we can easily dismiss the notion that the poor are getting poorer. All the Census Bureau tells us is that the share of the pie consumed by the poor has been shrinking (to 3.4% in 2006 from 4.1% in 1970). But the "pie" has grown enormously. This year's real GDP of $14 trillion is three times that of 1970. So the absolute size of the slice received by the bottom 20% has increased to $476 billion from $181 billion. Allowing for population growth shows that the average income of people at the bottom of the income distribution has risen 36%. They're not rich, but they're certainly not poorer. In reality, economic growth has raised incomes across the board.

Since 1970 there has been a dramatic rise in divorced, never-married and single-person households. Back in 1970, the married Ozzie and Harriet family was the norm: 71% of all U.S. households were two-parent families. Now the ratio is only 51%. In the process of this social revolution, the average household size has shrunk to 2.57 persons from 3.14 -- a drop of 18%. The meaning? Even a "stagnant" average household income implies a higher standard of living for the average household member. Last year, the Census Bureau published a new set of income statistics that adjusted for changing household size and composition. In a single year (2006), this "equivalence-adjusted" computation increased the income share of the poor by 8% and reduced the standard measure of inequality (Gini coefficient) by 4%. Such "equivalency" adjustments would mute unadjusted inequality trends even more.

The supposed decline of the poor and middle class is exaggerated even more by the dynamics of population growth. When people look at the "poor" in any two years, they think they're looking at the same people. That's rarely true, especially over longer periods of time. Since 1998, the U.S. population has increased by over 20 million. Nearly half of that growth has come from immigration, legal and illegal. Overwhelmingly, these immigrants enter at the lowest rungs on the income ladder. Statistically, this immigrant surge not only reduces the income of the "average" household, but also changes the occupants of the lowest income classes.

To understand what's happening here, envision a line of people queued up for March Madness tickets. Individuals move up the line as tickets are purchased. But new people keep coming. So the line never gets shorter, even though individuals are advancing. Something similar happens with the distribution of income. People keep entering the distribution line from the bottom. Even though individuals are moving up the line, the middle of the line never seems to move. Hence, an unchanged -- or even receding -- median marker could co-exist with individual advancement. The people who were at the middle marker before have moved up the distribution line. This is the kind of income mobility that has long characterized U.S. income dynamics.

When you look at the really big picture, it's apparent that living standards are rising across the entire spectrum of incomes. Just since 2000, GDP has risen by 18% while the population has grown by 6%. So per capita incomes have clearly been rising. The growth of per capita income since 1980 or 1970 has simply been spectacular.

Some people would have you believe that all of this added income was funneled to the rich. But the math doesn't work out. The increase in nominal GDP since 2000 amounts to over $4 trillion annually. If you assume that all that money went to the wealthiest 10% of U.S. households, that bonanza would come to a whopping $350,000 per household. Yet according to the Census Bureau, the top 10% of households has an average income of $200,000 or so. The implied bonanza is so absurd that the notion that only the rich have gained from the economic growth can be dismissed out of hand.

More here

Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your handy-dandy summary of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH

A test of global warming theory for smart High School kids to do

(From Will Alexander)

This requires nothing more than high school science, two long data sets (global air temperatures and sunspot numbers) and Microsoft Excel. If readers have children or grandchildren in their families who are familiar with Excel, I strongly suggest that they encourage the youngsters by offering suitable rewards, to undertake the following tasks and interpret the results. The rest of this challenge is addressed to these budding scientists.

Task 1.

Obtain a copy of the annual global air temperature data from 1850 through to 2006 used in the IPCC reports. Load it into Excel and plot it on a graph.

What do you see? The sharp upward trend since 1980 and the sustained high values during the past six years are very clear. This is the graph that the IPCC relies on for evidence of human causality of global warming. Their argument is that this graph is proof of a causal linkage between increasing greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power stations, heavy industries and transport, and increasing global temperatures.

There are serious problems with this conclusion. Not only has there been no sustained increase in global temperatures since 1998, but during the past year global temperatures have shown a marked decrease. This is causing panic among the climate change fraternity. For reasons that remain a complete mystery, the IPCC failed to take the obvious next step. Could this increase be the consequence of a concurrent increase in solar activity? This is extremely important as the solar linkage has to be eliminated before this temperature increase can be attributed to human activities.

Task 2.

Now that you have got the hang of it, it is a simple matter to produce Excel graphs that show the temperature and sunspot data as well as the corresponding linear trend lines. It is common practice in preliminary time series analyses to split the record into two parts and examine them separately. The year 1913 is the beginning of the first double sunspot cycle during the past century and a convenient point to split the data. Analyze the two split records separately in Excel.

Note that while during the period 1913 to 2006 both the sunspot numbers and the global temperatures show increasing trends, during the earlier period 1850 to 1912 BOTH the global temperatures AND sunspot numbers showed DECREASING trends during this 62-year period. Given the above information, it would be a very brave scientist who continues to claim that there is NO linkage between variations in global temperatures and corresponding variations in sunspot activity. Even more importantly, the IPCC scientists were negligent, bordering on irresponsible, not to carry out these simple analyses that go to the very core of climate change science, and need only a few hours of effort using readily available computer software.

Task 3.

The next task may be difficult to understand and you may need some help. You are required to produce a solar periodicity table that can be used for subsequent analyses. You will have the honour of being among the few people in the world to have produced such a table for this purpose. The years during which the sunspot minima associated with the double sunspot cycle occurred are readily identified in the annual sunspot data. These, together with the number of years between them are as follows. 1843 (24) 1867 (22) 1889 (24) 1913 (20) 1933 (21) 1954 (22) 1976 (20) 1996

It is now possible to produce a solar periodicity table that will allow any time series data to be rearranged and analysed using the solar period as a basic time unit. Produce a table with nine columns and 24 rows. Enter the following numbers in the first row 1, 1843, 1867, 1889, 1913, 1933, 1954, 1976 and 1996. Now enter the following numbers in the second row 2, 1844, 1868, 1890, 1914, 1934, 1955, 1977, and 1997. Can you see what we are doing? The first column is the period year and the other columns are the periods whose lengths vary from 20 to 24 years. Call this Table 1.

Task 4.

Make another periodicity table but leave the years blank. Instead, enter the sunspot numbers for the corresponding years in Table 1. Add another three columns to the table and give them headings lowest, highest and average. Call this Table 2. Analyse the data in the rows one by one in Excel and fill in the values in the last three columns.

Now comes the most important diagram in the whole climate change science. Draw a graph with the period years 1 to 24 on the horizontal axis and the sunspot numbers on the vertical axis. Connect the average values with a continuous line and draw vertical lines connecting the highest and lowest values for each period year from 1 through to 24. Excel will do this for you.

What do you see? These are the two sunspot cycles that make up the double sunspot cycle. Note that they have different shapes. Notice in particular that the second cycle is much less active than the first cycle. We are now in year 13 (see Table 1). This means that the world has just entered a quiet period associated with the second cycle. This is why global temperatures have started cooling. You do not have to be a solar physicist to reach this conclusion.

Conclusions

You have now discovered something that very few scientists in the world have discovered. When you are looking for the evidence of the relationship between solar activity and the world's climate all that you have to do is to create a solar periodicity table, enter the data in the table (for example sunspot numbers, temperature, rainfall and river flow) and then plot the results. If you do this you will find solid evidence (i.e. PROOF) of the linkage between these climatic processes and the double sunspot cycle.

You can now suggest that your parents contact me by email at alexwjr@iafrica.com and I will send them a more detailed set of notes on this subject that I presented at a course for practising civil engineers earlier this year. We civil engineers are more interested in facts than in abstract theories that have no practical applications.

Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your handy-dandy summary of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH

WHO CAUSED THE HOUSING RECESSION - WHICH THREATENS THE WORLD'S ECONOMY? ALAN GREENSPAN

IT'S ALL GREENSPAN'S FAULT. BBC:
...global banks and hedge funds have been buying mortgage-backed securities.

These were assets which offered strong returns and were seen as relatively safe investments because the US housing market had been enjoying relatively robust and uninterrupted growth.

However, their value has plummeted in recent months after higher interest rates led to a drop in the housing market and a surge in mortgage defaults ...

AND PLENTY OF PEOPLE WERE COMPLAINING AT THE TIME THAT GREENSPAN
SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN RAISING RATES.

  • IF HE HADN'T RAISED RATES SO MUCH FROM 2004-2006, THEN WE WOULD NOT BE WHERE WE ARE TODAY.
  • I'S ALL HIS FAULT.
  • FROM JUNE 2004 TO JUNE 2006 GREENSPAN RAISED RATES EVERY CHANCE HE COULD.
  • IT HELPED GET US A DEMOCRAT CONGRESS AND A HOUSING RECESSION WHICH IS THREATENING THE WORLD ECONOMY.
  • IT'S ALL HIS FAULT.

2006
December 12
October 25
September 20
August 8
June 29
May 10
March 28
January 31

...
...
...
...
25
25
25
25

...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...

5.25
5.25
5.25
5.25
5.25
5.00
4.75
4.50
2005
December 13
November 1
September 20
August 9
June 30
May 3
March 22
February 2

25
25
25
25
25
25
25
25

...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...

4.25
4.00
3.75
3.50
3.25
3.00
2.75
2.50
2004
December 14
November 11
September 21
August 11
June 30

25
25
25
25
25

...
...
...
...
...

2.25
2.00
1.75
1.50
1.25
2003
June 25

...

25

If ANOTHER Obama Scandal were to fall in the Forest ... ?

Glenn Reynolds notices more "Chicago Way" shady dealings surrounding Barack Obama...and his increasingly controversial wife:

THE CHICAGO WAY: Obama earmark goes to hospital where his wife works, shortly after his wife gets a big raise. If he were a Republican, this would be a scandal.

UPDATE: But there was also an earmark for the "High Explosive Air Burst Technology Program."

Meanwhile, Rick Moran takes us on a trip down His Holiness' Memory Lane of Corruption--it's not pretty:

For a United States Senator, Barack Obama has been doing a lot of explaining about the company he has kept for the last 17 years or so.

Take some Joe Blow Alderman off the streets of Chicago and examine his friends and acquaintances and you’re bound to come up with a couple of unsavory characters that straddle the line of legality with regard to city contracts or their business dealings.

But Obama is not some regular Machine pol juicing the way for his ward heeling friends so they can grow fat and rich at taxpayer expense. He is a United States Senator and the Democratic Party’s frontrunner for President of the United States. One would think a higher standard might be in order regarding such a man’s associates.

One would think.

The constant refrain of Obama defenders is that he is being unfairly criticized because his problematic friends and acquaintances represent nothing more than “guilt by association.” Taken on a case by case basis, such a defense might ring true. But Obama’s problem is that he has so many friends and associates where “guilt by association” is the explanation given by his campaign that one begins to wonder when we can declare the candidate just plain “guilty” of using horrendous judgment and question whether his connection to some of these characters actually goes beyond innocence of wrongdoing.

Then Moran proceeds to go down the list, one by one. You will definitely want to check it out.

And then you will want to ponder this: when this man--who has been a Senator for a year and a half, and prior to that whose only real experience was as an Illinois State Senator...for two years--is arguably within striking distance of the most powerful office on Planet Earth. And when this is happening at what just might be the nation's most critical juncture of its 200+ year history; well you would think that our national media just might want to vet the guy, instead of acting like a screaming teeny-bopper watching the Beatles at Shea Stadium. There is a bit more at stake here than whether the crowd can hear "She Loves You".

The Obama candidacy has probably gotten less real scrutiny--with fewer big media journalists probing deeply into the many disturbing questions surrounding Obama--than anyone in recent memory. Yet paradoxically, it is difficult to remember an election where the stakes have ever been higher. A country on the precipice of economic disaster; a country at War with a wordwide enemy bent on its destruction.

Isn't it about time we demanded more from the very "free press" that is supposed to protect the public trust? , Shouldn't we know everything we need to know before setting foot into that voting booth, no matter where it leads?

Instead, big media's kid gloves treatment of Obama has been nothing short of disgraceful. Is it because he is half-black, and the big bad media is afraid to offend the sensibilities of Politically Correct academics and the like? Is it because Elvis gives a good canned speech (provided he doesn't have to answer any hard questions or think on his feet)? Or is it simply that the trade of journalism has become so decrepit, so corrupt, that even a corrupt politician hailing from a corrupt city, surrounded by corrupt friends looks good in comparison?

The peril that the nation and world are in at this crossroads in history ought to be enough cause any real journalist to take very seriously the stories that Glenn and Rick are pointing to above; or at least enough so that they would doggedly follow each lead to wherever it might go--before a candidate that no one seems to want to ask any questions about gets his hands on the most powerful office in the world.

Now of course, getting the story is only half of the equation; the other half is actually reporting the story to the public. In this area, Obama's own home-town newspapers seem to think his record has some serious enough questions to warrant intense scruitiny. But among the National media, finding anyone with the curiosity of the local Chicago reporters seems to be the exception rather than the rule. And this fact is just as disturbing as are the highly questionable associations of a "Messianic" candidate that no one seems to want to vet properly.

I'd say this election was just a teeny bit more important than that. But it does give one pause: is the blogosphere going to have to do all of the heavy lifting for this, the most important election in our lifetimes?

Probably so. And that, my friends is the real tragedy here.

UPDATE: Wretcherd adds yet another disturbing twist, which speaks volumes about the character of both Obama and Hillary:

When Paul Krugman complained that the bitter internecine conflict between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton meant that "a large part of the progressive movement seems to have lost its sanity" he must have meant Crazy Like a Fox. It would be more accurate to say that progressive politics has now come to resemble extremist politics. Consider the tactic of plausible deniability.

Plausible deniability refers to informal arrangement through which a person may deny any connection to a disreputable activity he actually orders. The two ends to this clever arrangement are the protected principal and the secret agent acting on the mastermind's behalf. When Geraldine Ferraro said that "if Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position" only to resign after Hillary Clinton expressed her high-minded indignation, were the two acts unrelated?

Or consider how hijackers and hostages takers get the authorities' attentions by demonstrating their seriousness.

The principle followed by kidnappers in Baghdad who sent five severed fingers belonging to "four Americans and an Austrian taken hostage more than a year ago in Iraq" was that if you want to be taken seriously you have to demonstrate how far you are willing to go in order to get what you want. And although neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton have sent anyone actual severed fingers yet, both have amply shown their astonished supporters that they are willing to ignite race war, tear the Party apart or engage in political cannibalism to serve their own individual ambitions. What's really awesome about Hillary and Barack is not their resumes but the lengths to which they are willing to go.

Plausible deniability. Severed political fingers. These tactics are not a demented application of rational rules but the rational application of the demented rules of left-wing politics. The problem with the axiom "by any means necessary" is that it means "by any means necessary". Neither Hillary nor Barack have lost their sanity. But the rules themselves have been taken to their own inevitable conclusions.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

PENTAGON REPORT: SADDAM AND AL QAEDA WERE LINKED

  • IT SHOWS THAT THERE WAS INDEED A LOT OF COLLUSION BETWEEN SADDAM AND AL QAEDA RIGHT UP UNTIL THE WAR.
QUOTE FROM THE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
Captured Iraqi documents have uncovered evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism, including a variety of revolutionary, liberation, nationalist and Islamic terrorist organizations.

While these documents do not reveal direct coordination and assistance between the Saddam regime and the al Qaeda network, they do indicate that Saddam was willing to use, albeit cautiously, operatives affiliated with al Qaeda as long as Saddam could have these terrorist-operatives monitored closely.

Because Saddam's security organizations and Osama bin Laden's terrorist network operated with similar aims (at least in the short term), considerable overlap was inevitable when monitoring, contacting, financing, and training the same outside groups.

This created both the appearance of and, in some way, a "de facto" link between the organizations.

At times, these organizations would work together in pursuit of shared goals but still maintain their autonomy and independence because of innate caution and mutual distrust.

Though the execution of Iraqi terror plots was not always successful, evidence shows that Saddam’s use of terrorist tactics and his support for terrorist groups remained strong up until the collapse of the regime.
HOW IS THE MSM DISTORTING IT? HERE'S A SAMPLING:
AND SO ON...

THESE MSM STORIES CAN NOW BE SEEN AS NOTHING MORE THAN LIES - PROPAGANDA. PROPAGANDSA WHICH, IF BELIEVED, MAKES US ALL LESS SAFE.

HOW?! SIMPLE:
  • IT MAKES US GENERALLY MORE RETICENT TO RELY ON INTEL' TO MAKE PREEMPTIVE MOVES AGAINST POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS FOES.
  • THIS MEANS WE ARE MORE LIKELY TO GET HIT FIRST.
  • AND, IT MAKES A LOT OF PEOPLE MORE DISTRUSTFUL OF BUSH, AND OF THE GOVERNMENT AND THAN WE SHOULD BE.
  • AND THIS MAKES US MORE VULNERABLE, TOO.
  • THE LEFT - WHICH CONTROLS THE MSM - DOESN'T MIND IF WE GET HIT AGAIN: THEY BASICALLY BELIEVE THAT WE SHOULD BE HIT FIRST BEFORE WE TAKE ANY ACTION (THEY'RE AGAINST PREEMPTIVE WAR),
  • AND, THEY OFTEN EXPRESS THE OPINION THAT WE DESERVE TO BE HIT - LIKE OBAMA'S PASTOR.
WHICH IS WHY I HAVE LONG ARGUED THAT BEFORE WE CAN DEFEAT THE JIHADIST WE HAVE TO DEFEAT THE LEFTIST.

HEY OBAMA, PASTOR WRIGHT, GET A LOAD OF THIS: SOME "NIGGAHS" SINGING PRO-AMERICAN SONGS!

THESE AFRICAN-AMERICAN PERFORMERS ARE BETTER AND MORE REPRESENTATIVE AND MORE PATRIOTIC THAN THE HATE-FILLED RACIST RANTING PASTOR WRIGHT.

OR OBAMA.

GOD BLESS THEM ALL.

AND GOD BLESS AMERICA.

WATCH DONNA SUMMER SING "GOD BLESS AMERICA" (NOT "GOD DAMN AMERICA"), AND WATCH WHITNEY SING OUR NATIONAL ANTHEM, AND WATCH RAY CHARLES SING "AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL" - AND THEN WATCH YOLANDA ADAMS SING "MY COUNTRY TIS OF THEE".

THEY ARE GREAT AMERICANS!

OBAMA AND WRIGHT ARE AWFUL.








ARABS IN GAZA RENEW ROCKET ATTACK ON ISRAEL: 30 ROCKETS FIRED

Haaretz: At least 30 Qassam rockets fired into Israel from Gaza - since WEDNESDAY
At least 30 Qassam rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip into Sderot and other Gaza-area communities since Wednesday night, shattering a recent lull in Gaza fighting and highlighting the fragility of efforts to move Israel and Gaza's Islamic Hamas rulers toward a truce.

Ten mortar shells were also fired at Israel's south.

Two rockets struck urban areas and the rest hit open areas. No one was hurt but some property damage was reported.

Gaza militant groups said late Thursday that they had fired 64 rockets and mortar shells at Israel during the course of the day Thursday.

The Prime Minister's Office said on Thursday that Israel holds Hamas accountable for every rocket fired by the different militant groups in the Gaza Strip.
THE STUFF IS ABOUT TO HIT THE FAN... JPOST:
The quiet in the western Negev came to an abrupt end on Thursday as 28 rockets slammed into Sderot and other Gaza-belt communities. The rockets were fired by Islamic Jihad in response to an IDF operation Wednesday night in Bethlehem during which the group's military commander in the city was killed.

Several rockets landed in Sderot and one scored a direct hit on the playground of a high school in the city. Close to 10 mortar shells were also fired into Israel.

Five Islamic Jihad operatives were killed on Wednesday, including Mahmoud Shehada, the commander of the group in Bethlehem who was wanted by Israel for the past eight years for his involvement in a number of deadly terror attacks since the eruption of the second intifada.

Defense officials dismissed claims that Israel had agreed to a cease-fire and pointed to remarks made Wednesday by Defense Minister Ehud Barak that "Israel will respond when and where it wants to."

"Nothing happens in the Gaza Strip without Hamas knowing about it," a senior defense official said. "Even though the rockets are fired by Islamic Jihad, Hamas is responsible."
I THINK THAT HAMAS WILL PAY A VERY HIGH PRICE. AND SOON...
  • IT IS JUST FOR THEM TO PAY DEARLY.
  • AND IF DONE WITH THE PROPER SEVERITY AND PRECISION, IT CAN CREATE SOME PERIOD OF PEACE.

A WINTER 2007-2008 ROUND-UP: SNOW AND COLD RECORDS BROKEN GLOBALLY

TODAY (VIA GLENN), WE LEARN THAT GREEN BAY ANNOUNCED THIS WAS THE WORST WINTER FOR SNOW SINCE THEY BEGAN KEEPING RECORDS OVER 100 YEARS AGO!

GREEN BAY IS NOT ALONE - AND WE'VE BEEN KEEPING TRACK:
  1. SNOW IN MISSISSIPPI
  2. RECORD SNOWS BURY COLUMBUS OHIO
  3. ANOTHER COLD SNAP HITS THE UK
  4. GLOBAL WARMING HASN'T HIT THE UK:
  5. Snow Expected As Cold Snap Sweeps Britain
  6. WINTER STORM BRINGS ONE METER OF NEW SNOW TO AUSTRIA
  7. EVEN MORE SNOW COMING DOWN ON CHINA!
  8. NORTHERN USA SNOW RECORDS BROKEN
  9. Earth in midst of widescale global cooling
  10. IOWA: ONE OF THE SNOWIEST WINTERS IN DECADES
  11. UK Daily Express: "GLOBAL WARMING? IT'S THE COLDEST WINTER IN DECADES"
  12. More global cooling: Global cooling hits Greece; Heavy snow forces record closing of Kansas City airport; Harsh and snowy winter prompts Colorado to feed starving deer for only 3rd time in 25 years
  13. TURKEY'S SNOWIEST WINTER IN DECADES CONTINUES
  14. SNOW IN SAN DIEGO
  15. RECORD COLD FREEZES MUMBAI (BOMBAY); SEVERE COLD AND ENERGY CRISIS THREATEN LARGE PARTS OF TAJIKISTAN'S POPULATION; Afghanistan has worst winter in living memory
  16. RECORD BREAKING COLD IN THE MIDWESTERN USA
  17. TURKEY IS HAVING ITS WORST WINTER IN DECADES
  18. SEVERE WINTER WEATHER KILLS DOZENS IN KASHMIR
  19. EUROPE HAS LOTS OF SNOW
  20. WEATHER FORECAST: BAD NEWS FOR THE ECO-NUTSIES AND THE LEFT
  21. UK GETS ITS FIRST SNOWS OF WINTER; THE CONTINENT GETS THE MOST SNOW IN OVER 50 YEARS!
THERE'S MORE:
WHAT DOES IT ALL ADD UP TO?
  • SIMPLE: AGW = BS.
  • AND PLEASE: SOMEONE TELL AL GORE TO STFU.
  • AND SOMEONE ELSE, PLEASE TELL MCCAIN TO ABANDON MCCAIN-LIEBERMAN AND CARBON TAXES.

GOD DAMN OBAMA

The big story is that the man who converted Obama, and married him, is an anti-American racist who preaches hatred of whites and America.

He actually preached from the pulpit that God should Damn America and that we should ding that instead of God Bless America. [See below!]

On Christmas.

Obama subscribes to this view or he would've left the church long ago.

NEED MORE PROOF?

Michele Obama sounds awfully like the pastor.

It all fits on with the fact that Obama won't wear a flag-pin, and won't put his hand over his heart during the playing of our National Anthem.

If Obama wants to prove he is NOT a racist who hates America, then he can condemn the pastor and leave the Church immediately.

If he doesn't condemn the pastor, then Obama can go to God-damned Hell as far as I'm concerned.



Wow. Stunning.

Others blogging on this:
Carol Platt Liebau / TownHall Blog: Does Barack Agree?