The President of the United States, Barack Obama, has been portrayed on a political graffiti poster with a black bar over his eyes and the words ‘HYPE’ written underneath. He is also wearing a lapel reading ‘Abolish THE FED’. The poster was put up on a building in Venice, Los Angeles. Source
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Michele Malkin- Acknowledging the historic nature of Obama’s presidency (“the first black American”) is one thing. Deifying him with creepy spiritual references (“red, yellow, black and white, all are equal in his sight” is cribbed from the famous hymn “Jesus Loves the Little Children;” cheering “you are No. 1”) is quite another. Burlington Township (NJ) school officials said Thursday the recording and dissemination of the video was “unauthorized,” but acknowledged that the Obama praise session was part of the students’ official curriculum.
Carney-Nunes’s Obama book was on prominent display during the students’ performance. It is a tool, she says, that “allows children to see themselves through the inspirational story of President Obama growing up as an ordinary child asking, ‘Who will change the world? Ultimately, he realizes that he will.’” Seeing everything through the lens of Obama, as his incessantly self-referential United Nations speech demonstrated, is a trademark of the perpetual Obama campaign.
This O-cult lesson is exactly the kind of junior campaign lobbying activity that White House officials planned around the president’s education speech. Alert parents and administrators called out the Department of Education’s activist, Obama-centric education manuals before the event. Federal officials altered the language. Obama delivered an innocuous speech. But on cue, education radicals goaded students to engage in political activism.
They can
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WSJ- PITTSBURGH, Sept. 25 -- President Obama and the leaders of France and Britain on Friday blasted Iran’s construction of a previously unknown uranium enrichment facility and demanded that Tehran immediately fulfill its obligations under international law or risk the imposition of harsh new sanctions. read more
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President Carter, as a candidate, said he would cut five to seven billion dollars from the defense budget. We must let him know that while we agree, there must be no fat in our armed forces. Those armed forces must be capable of coping with the new reality presented to us by the Russians, and cutting seven billion dollars out of our defense budget is not the way to accomplish this. Some years ago, a young President said, we will make any sacrifice, bear any burden, and we will, to preserve our freedom.
Governor Ronald Reagan (R-CA)
Conservative Political Action Conference
Washington, DC. February 6, 1977
I have always been puzzled by the inability of some political and media types to understand exactly what is meant by adherence to political principle. All too often in the press and the television evening news it is treated as a call for “ideological purity.” Whatever ideology may mean—and it seems to mean a variety of things, depending upon who is using it—it always conjures up in my mind a picture of a rigid, irrational clinging to abstract theory in the face of reality. We have to recognize that in this country “ideology” is a scare word. And for good reason. Marxist-Leninism is, to give but one example, an ideology. All the facts of the real world have to be fitted to the Procrustean bed of Marx and Lenin. If the facts don’t happen to fit the ideology, the facts are chopped off and discarded.
I consider this to be the complete opposite to principled conservatism. If there is any political viewpoint in this world which is free from slavish adherence to abstraction, it is American conservatism.
When a conservative states that the free market is the best mechanism ever devised by the mind of man to meet material needs, he is merely stating what a careful examination of the real world has told him is the truth.
When a conservative says that totalitarian Communism is an absolute enemy of human freedom he is not theorizing—he is reporting the ugly reality captured so unforgettably in the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
When a conservative says it is bad for the government to spend more than it takes in, he is simply showing the same common sense that tells him to come in out of the rain.
When a conservative says that busing does not work, he is not appealing to some theory of education—he is merely reporting what he has seen down at the local school.
When a conservative quotes Jefferson that government that is closest to the people is best, it is because he knows that Jefferson risked his life, his fortune and his sacred honor to make certain that what he and his fellow patriots learned from experience was not crushed by an ideology of empire.
Conservatism is the antithesis of the kind of ideological fanaticism that has brought so much horror and destruction to the world. The common sense and common decency of ordinary men and women, working out their own lives in their own way—this is the heart of American conservatism today. Conservative wisdom and principles are derived from willingness to learn, not just from what is going on now, but from what has happened before.
The principles of conservatism are sound because they are based on what men and women have discovered through experience in not just one generation or a dozen, but in all the combined experience of mankind. When we conservatives say that we know something about political affairs, and that we know can be stated as principles, we are saying that the principles we hold dear are those that have been found, through experience, to be ultimately beneficial for individuals, for families, for communities and for nations—found through the often bitter testing of pain, or sacrifice and sorrow.
One thing that must be made clear in post-Watergate is this: The American new conservative majority we represent is not based on abstract theorizing of the kind that turns off the American people, but on common sense, intelligence, reason, hard work, faith in God, and the guts to say: “Yes, there are things we do strongly believe in, that we are willing to live for, and yes, if necessary, to die for.” That is not “ideological purity.” It is simply what built this country and kept it great.
Let us lay to rest, once and for all, the myth of a small group of ideological purists trying to capture a majority. Replace it with the reality of a majority trying to assert its rights against the tyranny of powerful academics, fashionable left-revolutionaries, some economic illiterates who happen to hold elective office and the social engineers who dominate the dialogue and set the format in political and social affairs. If there is any ideological fanaticism in American political life, it is to be found among the enemies of freedom on the left or right—those who would sacrifice principle to theory, those who worship only the god of political, social and economic abstractions, ignoring the realities of everyday life. They are not conservatives. read more
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Iowahawk - It’s true — U.S. government demand for art and art-like products has never been higher! Uncle Sam and the good folks at the National Endowment for the Arts are on the lookout for go-getting, obedient artists like you for a fast-paced career in state propaganda. With the quick and easy Federal Art Instruction Institute course, now you too can get a first class ticket on the federal art gravy train!
Tell Me More!
From heath care to the economy to the environment, Washington has become infested with pesky state enemies who are clogging up the legislative pipeline and making life miserable for our cool, art-loving president. That’s why he has ordered the NEA to fund obsequious bohemians to help him exterminate the competition and drive traffic to his hip new website Servile.gov. The Federal Art Instruction Institute will show you how to get off funemployment and on the payroll of this exciting $3.6 trillion growth industry!
How can the Federal Art Instruction Institute help me?
Unlike traditional art schools, the Federal Art Instruction Institute doesn’t waste your time on boring Post-Modernist theory, messy bodily fluids, or painful self mutilation. With our easy-to-learn program you will quickly learn how to channel your natural artistic ability and suburban self-loathing at state enemies who, when you think about it, are a lot like your parents.
Can you draw triangles? The Federal Art Instruction Institute will show you the easy way to turn them into Ku Klux Klan hoods. Turn them upside down and they become scary vampire fangs! Even a simple black rectangle can become a Hitler mustache with our easy to learn methods.
Our award winning studio instructors includes some of the top young professional kowtowers, bumnuzzlers and bootlicks working in the government art field today — people like Buffy Wicks, Yosi Sergant and Michael Skolnik. They will keep you up to date on all the hot new policy trends and enemy lists, and what your patrons at the NEA need you to do about it. Using tried and true traditional art techniques from Cuba, Germany and central Asia, they will teach you how to pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it — for big cash prizes! read more
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NYP — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said yesterday she is clueless about an amendment to prohibit government funds for embattled ACORN, although it overwhelmingly passed the Senate Monday and the White House is calling for the group to be held accountable.”I don’t even know what they passed,” Pelosi told The Post yesterday. “What did they do? They defunded it?” The amendment to suspend housing grants was a stunning blow to the community-activist group — and came as some Democrats and the White House have been backing away from the group.
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First there was “Countrywide Chris” Dodd (D-Conn.), whose combination of poor judgment and possible corruption qualifies him to be Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. Then there was Tim “TurboTax” Geithner, whose false tax return filings qualify him to be Secretary of the Treasury. And now, in keeping with the Democrats’ recent tendency to have scoundrels in the highest positions involving regulation of the nation’s finances, we have the Chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.), who recently filed amended financial disclosure reports showing a net worth about double what he had previously reported. (Rangel’s original 2007 disclosure form and the amendment can be seen here in pdf form.)
In addition to showing his net worth increasing from a range of $516,015 and $1,316,000 to a range of $1,028,024 to $2,495,000 in his amended 2007 financial disclosure form filed last month, Rangel also reported substantial 2007 income and several transactions involving mutual fund sales, purchases, and exchanges which he had not disclosed earlier. The new numbers are not small, especially as a percentage of Rangel’s total net worth.
For example, while Rangel was reporting net worth in the area of $1 million, he “overlooked” two accounts worth over $250,000 each (one checking, one mutual fund), another bank account, several other mutual fund accounts, and holdings of stock and land totaling another roughly $300,000. In other words, Rangel’s unreported assets were worth about as much as his reported assets.
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GP–Next week the Obama Administration will allow Ahmadinejad, Castro, Chavez, Gaddafi and several other international thugs into New York City to speak in front of the United Nations General Assembly. However, one country’s president will not be allowed into the United States.
President Roberto Micheletti from Honduras will not be allowed to enter into America. The Obama Administration revoked his visa back in July.
For the first time in our nation’s history, the Obama administration is siding with Marxist leaders Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, Raul Castro and Evo Morales in condemning our democratic ally Honduras.
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New plantation owner
Malkin: Barack Obama can no more disown ACORN than he could disown his own name. He IS ACORN. And ACORN is him. And the “accountability” that White House flack Robert Gibbs says they take “extremely seriously” doesn’t extend to Team Obama itself — and the accountability they have evaded for pouring more than $800,000 into an ACORN front group for campaign advance work that was mysteriously re-classified as “get-out-the-vote” work.
American Thinker —The shocking ACORN videos produced and distributed by James O’Keefe, Hannah Giles and Andrew Brietbart reflect the founding purpose of ACORN: creating chaos to overwhelm the system.
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“According to reliable sources, Obama administration officials are on their way to Poland and the Czech Republic to deliver very bad news. The administration intends to cancel completely the missile defense sites that had been promised to these governments by the previous administration.”
Goldfarb also links to a post by leading defence expert Gary Schmitt, who writes:
“Guess who’s coming to dinner (in Warsaw)? Four senior Obama officials, including Under Secretary of State for Arms Control Ellen Tauscher and Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security “Sandy” Vershbow, are apparently in the air right now on their way to Poland. Why? If the Washington hot rumor mill is right, to deliver the news to the Poles and then the Czechs that the administration has decided not to go forward with a missile defense system for Europe and the United States against the budding missile threat from Iran.”
This is bad news for all who care about the US commitment to the transatlantic alliance and the defence of Europe as well as the United States. It represents the appalling appeasement of Russian aggression and a willingness to sacrifice American allies on the altar of political expediency. A deal with the Russians to cancel missile defence installations sends a clear message that even Washington can be intimidated by the Russian bear.
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Here is today’s must read By Howie Carr on the gushing and tingly way MSNBC is portraying Ted Kennedy.
I never voted for Ted Kennedy, not once, and neither did maybe a quarter to one-third of the Massachusetts electorate, although you’d never know that from the echo chamber of the mainstream media since his death in Hyannisport late Tuesday night.
While offering condolences to the Kennedy family at this sad moment, it is important to note that his life was not as simple, nor heroic, as is now being portrayed. On the cable channels yesterday, his fellow Senate graybeards, of both parties, were lamenting the passing of what was invariably described as Ted Kennedy’s “collegial” Senate - where voices were seldom raised, and partisan bickering ended when the gavel came down to end the session.
All of which would have come as a surprise to Robert Bork, the Supreme Court nominee of whom the collegial Ted said in 1986:
“Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters . . .”
So much for collegiality. Of course, Kennedy is now endlessly lauded for his support of “women’s rights,” i.e. abortion. But into the 1970s, before the Roman Catholic Church’s influence began to wane, Kennedy was a traditional pro-life New England Democrat.
Here was his take on abortion in 1971: “Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certainrights which must be recognized - the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old.”
There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, that in his first Senate campaign in 1962, Kennedy was shaking hands at a factory-gate during a shift change. A haggard worker began berating him about how he’d never worked a day in his life. According to the legend, at that point another salt-of-the-earth blue-collar type leaned in and t
old Kennedy, “Never worked a day in your life, kid? You ain’t missed a thing.”
But in fact he had. Yesterday the tributes kept mentioning his commitment to the “working class.” He fought for, as President Obama said on Martha’s Vineyard of all places, “an America that is more equal and more just.”But more equal and more just for some people than for others. When it came to the white ethnic working class from which his father came, Kennedy just plain didn’t get it. Whether it was court-ordered busing in Boston in the 1970s, or the affirmative action policies that stymied the careers of so many of his family’s traditional voters, Kennedy never grasped the depth of the blue-collar frustration as he veered left. And what infuriated them even more was that so many of them had grown up in homes where on one side of the mantel was a faded photo of the martyred JFK, and on the other the pope, with a dried-up palm frond given out at Mass on Palm Sunday between them.
Chappaquiddick, of course, never went away. But sometimes Kennedy could seem oblivious even to that ultimate blemish on his career. In 1974, when President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for his Watergate crimes, Kennedy issued this thundering statement:
“Do we operate under a system of equal justice under law? Or is there one system for the average citizen and another for the high and mighty?”
On issue after issue he was wrong - the nuclear freeze, the Reagan tax cuts, the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, which he assured his Senate colleagues would not lead to a “flood” of immigrants into America’s cities. With a Tele-Promp-Ter, he could be articulate, but when he wasn’t using his glasses to read a prepared statement, he was often an oratorical mess. In 2005, at the National Press Club, he referred to the current president as “Osama bin La-uh, Osama Obama, uh Obama.”
And yet he was always protected by most of the media, who shared his views on just about everything. In 1962, at the behest of President Kennedy, the Boston Globe played the story of his expulsion from Harvard below the fold on the front page. To the very end the Globe did its best to shield him - last week the struggling Times-owned broadsheet broke the story of his deathbed attempt to change the Massachusetts law on Senate succession, without mentioning that he himself had lobbied in 2004 to enact the law he was now denouncing as undemocratic. Only then, he was for stripping the governor of his right to fill a Senate vacancy, because, you see, that governor was a Republican.
The Globe reported that Kennedy was extremely concerned that the people of Massachusetts would have no representation in the Senate for five months until the special election. The fact that he had already missed 97 percent of the Senate roll-call votes in 2009 was not noted until the next day - in a different newspaper.
The hagiography will continue throughout the weekend. We all agree that Ted Kennedy should rest in peace. But let’s not forget that there was more, much more, to his “legacy” than is being reported on MSNBC.
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Some say Ted Kennedy was a philanderer and lacked any sense of morality or honor. They point to the day Kennedy had left the scene of a fatal car crash on the small island of Chappaquiddick on Martha’s Vineyard, taking the life of 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne. The second-term senator waited nearly 10 hours to report the accident and offered no explanation other than he “panicked.”
Those who do not have powerful connections would have been charged with manslaughter and faced justice for leaving a woman in 7 feet of cold water alone and dead overnight. He just slept it off. Those in the media who praise his stint as a hero in the senate without mentioning this example of privilege and cowardice as usual give half the story.
From ABC- The details of the July 19 accident were salacious: a Regatta Weekend reunion party at a friend’s cottage with all married men (except one) and six women — the “boiler room girls” — who had worked together on Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign.
After a day of sailing and heavy drinking, Kennedy drove his black Oldsmobile sedan off a small wooden bridge into Poucho Pond, trapping Kopechne in seven feet of water. On July 26, 1969, Kennedy delivered the television speech that saved his senatorial seat. Speaking to the nation for just 13 minutes, he described a cookout “for a devoted group of Kennedy campaign secretaries” and denied the rumors of drunk driving or “immoral conduct.” He acknowledged his failure to report the accident promptly as “indefensible” and described the “irrational” thoughts that consumed him that night, such as
wondering “whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys.” Even those who had faith in the senator worried about his ability to handle a crisis. Friends testified in an inquest that after the accident a confused and crying Kennedy, trying to blame the accident on others begged, “What am I going to do, what can I do?”
Within five days of the accident, Kennedy’s lawyers arranged for him to plead guilty to leaving the scene of the accident involving personal injury with a two-month suspended sentence and one-year probation.
Michelle Malkin- There is a time and place for political analysis and criticism. Not now.
Yes, there will be a nauseating excess of MSM hagiographies and lionizations — and crass calls to pass the health care takeover to memorialize his death.
That’s no excuse to demonstrate the same lack of restraint in the other direction. Not now.
The Anchoress– I remember being 11 years old and watching Kennedy make a statement on television after the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. What seems vivid in my memory is something I am no longer sure of: was he wearing a neckbrace during that speech? Perhaps that was another time, or my memory is fouled up from all these years of news-watching.
I do recall his voice quivering as he suggested that his family seemed to be under some terrible curse. With the 1968 murder of RFK still fresh in our Catholic memories, and JFK’s death still a long-opened wound, my parents were moved by Kennedy’s tremors.
I was moved. My mother who, I must admit, had a bit of a morbid streak about her, counted off the Kennedy tragedies, “Joe, killed in the war; Kathleen killed in an airplane; Rosemary institutionalized after a botched lobotomy….JFK assassinated…Bobby assassinated…what family can endure this? His mother is a woman of sorrows.”
Well, true that. The loss of one child is something a parent never gets over. Rose Kennedy lost 4 in their prime. And being married to Joe Kennedy could not have been a bed of roses, either.
Someone emailed me a moment ago wondering how long it would take for Kennedy’s death to be politicized – specifically by the left, specifically in order to push through the rapidly souring Obamacare, and “wouldn’t that be a dreadful and classless thing?”
The answers, at least on Twitter, are “immediately,” and “yes, dreadful and classless, but nothing less than Kennedy himself would have expected and participated in”; it is what politics has devolved to, after all. Even as he lay dying, the “Liberal Lion” was trying to finagle a means of protecting his Senate seat for his party. Or, someone was. And already on Twitter, the Obamacare proponents are insisting that Kennedy’s death will “give Obama the push he needs, to pass his plan.” After 50yrs of trying to confiscate other peoples money in the form of taxes or opening the door for the immigration mess from his 1965 bill, R.I.P Sen. Kennedy maybe now after 40yrs Mary Jo can rest now too…..mpress
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While the masses obsess over the latest celebrity-murder or search the net for pics of Brit Brit having a bowel movement, Obama and his socialist army are busy waging revolution against the average working American. These admitted radicals are writing laws (the stimulus) that congress never read. Obama must have thought “these ignorant Americans” until they got cocky and health care beat their asses. The stimulus bill that passed may be the biggest theft of treasure a country has ever endured. mpress
Hot Air– A short biographical sketch of revolutionary turned “green jobs czar” Van Jones that’s missing one tiny detail from his resume: He co-founded Color of Change, the lefty outfit that’s spearheading the much-publicized boycott of Beck that may or may not actually exist. It’s a little shady that Beck doesn’t disclose that here, although maybe he mentioned it at some other point in the show. Can anyone who watched from start to finish confirm or deny? Either way, consider this a vivid illustration of Karl’s theory that one of the reasons Obama’s gone czar-crazy is to bypass the Senate confirmation process. Imagine the field day the GOP would have with Jones’s past if he had to answer questions.
Van Jones is President Barack Obama’s “Green Jobs Czar.” His official title is Special Advisor on Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. The 41-year-old Yale Law School graduate and civil rights lawyer is also the founder of California’s Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, “a non-profit agency for justice, opportunities and peace.” (code for Communism)
Van Jones said, ”I met all these young radical people of color — I mean really radical, communists and anarchists. And it was, like, ‘This is what I need to be a part of.’ I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary. I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th. By August, I was a communist.”
In 1994 the group of activists Van Jones was involved with Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), a collective which “dreamed of a multiracial socialist utopia”.
According to the leftist blog Machete 48. Returning to Van Jones, with all the shimmer associated with a rising star, many forget that a man now advising the president was a member of a revolutionary organization in the SF Bay Area called STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement). Throughout the group’s history, Van Jones was seen as a public figure within the Bay Area left and a leading member of STORM. read
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When all else fails
ALBANY - Gov. Paterson blamed a racist media Friday for trying to push him out of next year’s election - launching into an angry rant that left even some black Democrats shaking their heads. Read more: nydailynews
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The Obama White House is behind a cynical, coldly calculated political effort to erase the meaning of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks from the American psyche and convert Sept. 11 into a day of leftist celebration and statist idolatry.
This effort to reshape the American psyche has nothing to do with healing the nation and everything to do with easing the nation along in the ongoing radical transformation of America that President Obama promised during last year’s election campaign. The president signed into law a measure in April that designated Sept. 11 as a National Day of Service, but it’s not likely many lawmakers thought this meant that day was going to be turned into a celebration of ethanol, carbon emission controls, and radical community organizing. read more
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From washingtontimes.com
“There’s a real question at stake now. Is President Obama creating a civil war in our own country?” Mr. Voight tells Inside the Beltway.
“We are witnessing a slow, steady takeover of our true freedoms. We are becoming a socialist nation, and whoever can’t see this is probably hoping it isn’t true. If we permit Mr. Obama to take over all our industries, if we permit him to raise our taxes to support unconstitutional causes, then we will be in default. This great America will become a paralyzed nation.” Be outraged, Mr. Voight advises.
“Do not let the Obama administration fool you with all their cunning Alinsky methods. And if you don’t know what that method is, I implore you to get the book ‘Rules for Radicals,’ by Saul Alinsky. Mr. Obama is very well trained in these methods,” he continues, citing a television campaign critical of the Republican Party and contentious town-hall meetings about health care reform.
“The real truth is that the Obama administration is professional at bullying, as we have witnessed with ACORN at work during the presidential campaign. It seems to me they are sending down their bullies to create fist fights among average American citizens who don’t want a government-run health care plan forced upon them,” Mr. Voight says. “So I ask again. Is President Obama creating a civil war in our own country?”
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A brunette beauty anonymously slimed model Liskula Cohen — creating a blog called “Skanks in NYC,” whose sole purpose was to blast the cover girl — because the blogger believed Cohen had badmouthed her to her boyfriend, sources told The Post. But there’s no question who’s the classier lady.Cohen said she’s willing to let bygones be bygones — despite being the victim of now-unmasked blogger Rosemary Port’s smears. Early yesterday, Cohen slapped her frenemy with a $3 million lawsuit for “defamation in the form of libel and intentional emotional distress,” for calling her such names as “ho,” “hag” and “skank.” But Cohen last night told her lawyer, Steven Wagner, to drop the action. ”This is about forgiveness,” Cohen said. “It adds nothing to my life to hurt hers. I wish her happiness.” read more NYP
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D-Listed: Little is known about Lina except for the fact that she’s absolutely nuts. On the show, Lina says she is a real estate sales associate who travels a lot, but some hos think she might be a high-paid pussy peddler. That makes sense, because Lina does look like she can give you a beej from the heavens one minute and stab you in the neck for not paying up the next.
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A paedophile with a 30-year history of abusing children is being prescribed Viagra on the NHS - and there is nothing the authorities can do to stop him. Roger Martin, 71, merely has to visit his GP to obtain the libido-enhancing drug, even though experts warn it will enable him to continue preying on children despite his age. The probation officers who oversee Martin are powerless to interfere with the administration of prescription drugs. He does not have to tell his GP about his criminal past and even if he does, doctors cannot take convictions into account. Martin suffers from numerous illnesses including diabetes, for which Department of Health guidelines say Viagra can be prescribed. He has forced himself on a string of youngsters and his latest assault was on an 11-year-old girl last year.Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news
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IBD Washington: House Democrats are demanding that 52 insurance companies provide them with documentation of their pay policies and other business practices. What is happening to this country?
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The global-warming movement isn’t really about climate. It’s about stunting the economic growth of the West. That’s why groups like Greenpeace like to “emotionalize” rather than conduct and promote actual science. They’re interested in specific outcomes, not scientific truth, and that specific outcome is statist control over energy production and economic activity to redistribute wealth. H/T Hot Air
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What happens when all the capitalists leave a communist socialist slave state? Just look at Cuba. The leftists favorite tyranny.
(IBD) Central planners announced this week that they were fresh out of money to buy toilet paper — yes, toilet paper — for the island’s 9 million citizens. But not to worry. A nameless official for state-run monopoly Cimex and quoted by Reuters assured that “the corporation has taken all the steps so that at the end of the year there will be an important importation of toilet paper.”
The predicament would be funny if it wasn’t so pathetic. But toilet tissue is hardly the only item Cuba is lacking. Food itself is in short supply, with red bean and chickpea rations cut by a third, according to the Miami Herald. Special hard-currency-only stores for the elites have mysteriously failed to open after last week’s “inventory,” with no explanation given.
There’s no gas, either. The Associated Press this week reported that state planners have decreed that oxen — yes, oxen — would replace tractors in the fields, a bid to conserve fuel. This, despite the fact that Cuba gets 100,000 barrels of oil a day from Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela — effectively free, because Cuba never pays its bills.
But again, not to worry: Cuban socialists say the ox represents progress because it’s so eco-friendly.
As these examples of Cuban progress roll in, CNN is presenting Cuba’s socialized health care system as “a model for health care reform in the United States,” according to a report on the cable network last week. The report credits low cost and universal coverage.
“How does Cuba do it?” gushed the CNN anchor. “First of all, the government dictates salaries. Doctors earn less than $30 per month — very little compared to doctors elsewhere. And priority is given to avoiding expensive procedures, says Gail Reed (a contributor to the Cuban communist party propaganda organ Granma), who’s lived and worked in Cuba for decades.”
But instead of pluses, these features are at the root of why the Cuban system is not a model. Government-dictated salaries — like Medicare payments here — reduce incentives for doctors to provide quality care. And when cheap procedures are a priority — as they are, say, in the U.K. — teeth get pulled instead of filled. But the basic problem with socialism is that there’s literally nothing there.
CNN gives little attention to the fact that hospitals in Cuba have no Band-Aids and are short on aspirin and actual medicine. Photos from TheRealCuba.com show hospitals strewn with filthy mattresses, infested with cockroaches and full of bony patients nursing ugly bedsores. The only plenty within Cuba’s universal coverage system is one of want.
The scary thing is that if you copy that system, the same shortages appear. Take Venezuela, which is following the socialist model and now suffers shortages of milk, meat, steel, gasoline and tires. (Yes, it too had a run on toilet paper a few years back.)
This week, the country crossed its first milestone for socialist street cred. It was forced for the first time in its history to import a crop it has grown exquisitely well since 1730: coffee.
The problem with the telltale shortages in Cuba isn’t a few incompetents at a state-owned toilet-paper company or some hurricane that’s wiped out its crops. Nor is it the U.S. trade embargo of which the country constantly complains.
“The system itself is dysfunctional,” explains Brian Latell, a leading expert on Cuba at the University of Miami. “Workers have scarcely any incentive to be productive. The distribution and transportation systems have broken down.”
Even with slight improvements from the newer Raul Castro administration, “it’s a centrally planned economy and still highly centralized. There’s little private enterprise and initiative.”
The shortages are a natural byproduct of central planning, price-fixing and a system that disregards human nature.
Yes, four hurricanes did damage estimated at $10 billion last year, Latell acknowledges. But Cuba has also been a bad credit risk for nearly 50 years, he adds, limiting its own access to credit out of loathing for capitalism. That has cut into the nation’s productive capacity, which was once one of Latin America’s highest.
Now, “they’re not producing anything to speak of to earn hard currency, they’re not exporting to earn, and the economy is in a terrible state,” Latell says.
An economic system that can’t supply its people with commodities as basic as toilet paper is no model for anyone.
As Cubans prepare for life without toilet paper the leftists in America marvel at the power and control their hero Fidel has amassed.
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WTF is happening? Obama, Hip Hops first president, has asked homies to snitch on each other. Encouraging citizens to contact the office at flag@whitehouse.gov if they got an email or other information about health reform “that seems fishy”— If there is anything Hip Hop hates it is snitches. Russell Simmons made millions of dollars hating on snitches. Can you imagine Russell and Sean chillin and listening to some Bad Boy shit in the VIP and a loud tipsy conservative homey screams something fishy like “I think the Health Care bill sucks!” After the music screeched to silence would Russell demand the loser elaborate on this “fishy” comment? Maybe he might pull out his Blackberry and send Obama an email snitching this “fishy” prick out. Where are the leaders of the never snitch no matter what brigade? Perhaps Hip Hop is run by pussy ass snitches…
In fact Hip Hops #1 law is never snitch. The real thug mobsters who run the inner city streets have laid that law down with blood. Any homicide detective that works Liberty City could tell you that as soon as they can walk children are taught not to snitch out their peeps. Have you ever heard a rap song that encouraged snitching?
Maybe the people at whosarat.com will ad Obama and all his snitches to the rat list. It may be interesting to see how Obama reacts when someone in his administration snitches on his ass. It will happen, although as proven by Clinton these progressives are very loyal and rarely rat on their own.
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Newsbusters-In their watchdog role of keeping the public informed, the New York Times has over the years disclosed government secrets regarding anti-terrorism tactics, overseas prisons, interrogation tactics, and military tactics, that critics contend have harmed the effectiveness of the programs and put America and our military at greater risk.
In fact, in 2008, the Times even published the name of an interrogator who got Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to talk, against the wishes of the interrogator’s lawyer and the CIA. The interrogator and his family fear for their lives, but that’s okay, because the public has a right to know.
Debbie Schlussel-Whenever the New York Times has a scoop that, if published, will jeopardize America’s national security and the safety and lives of countless Americans, it errs on the side of . . . spilling the beans. Then, the “newspaper of record” spews some boilerplate about “the public’s right to know,” “informing public debate,” blah, blah, blah, yadda, yadda, yadda.
But, when it comes to the safety of one of its own–a New York Times reporter–well, then, mum’s the word
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It seems Washington has turned into one huge Ponzi scheme and the people are the victims while the politicians and their contacts get rich…
(suntimes) As U.S. stock markets plummeted last September, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin, sold more than $115,000 worth of stocks and mutual-fund shares and used much of the money to invest in Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
The Illinois senator’s 2008 financial disclosure statement shows he sold mutual-fund shares worth $42,696 on Sept. 19, the day after then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke urged congressional leaders in a closed meeting to craft legislation to help financially troubled banks. The same day, he bought $43,562 worth of Berkshire Hathaway’s Class B stock, the disclosure shows.
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Talk about a hand job
It took a nearly severed tongue for the pitchman to realize prostitutes are bad news. read
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Tyler Weinman appeared to be a well-adjusted teenager
A teenager recently arrested on marijuana charges is accused of torturing, mutilating and killing almost 20 cats in South Miami-Dade in less than two months. Read
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Obama roadmap hero
Doug Ross has a great example of the Alinsky tactics used by the ex Community Organizer. Check out how Obama uses the “there are those” straw–
On Middle East Peace (06-04-2009): “…There are those –
On Intolerance (06-03-2009): “…to this day, there are those--
On Terrorism (05-21-2009): “On one side of the spectrum, there are those—
On Science (04-27-2009): “…there are those –
On Cap-and-Trade Taxes (04-14-2009): “There are those—
On Turkey (04-06-2009): “…I know there are those –
On the G8 and Financial Regulation (04-01-2009): “…this notion that somehow there are those –
On the Iranian People (03-20-2009): “…There are those –
On Taxes (3-18-2009): “. there are those —
On the Stimulus Package (03-06-2009): “...There are those —
On Health Care (03-05-2009): “…today, there are those —
On Taxes (09-26-2008): “…we all would love to lower taxes on everybody. But here’s the problem: If we are giving them to oil companies, then that means that there are those who are not going to be getting them…”
On Abortion: (09-01-2008): “…Choice is about how we lead our lives. It’s about our families and about our communities. It’s about our daughters and whether they’re going to have the same opportunities as our sons. There are those who want us to believe otherwise…”
On Statism (08-28-2008): “…I know there are those —
On Accepting the Nomination (06-03-2008): “…There are those –
On Good Governance (02-18-2008): “…There are those –
On Allowing Illegal Immigrants to Get In-State Tuition (DREAM Act) (01-31-2008): “…There are those –
On John Kerry’s Candidacy (07-27-2004): “… there are those –
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“The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawardedly enslave themselves. A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn’t the world being round that agitated people, but that the world was not flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.” Dresden James
(chron) WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama plans to fire the inspector general who investigates AmeriCorps and other national service programs amid a controversy between the IG and Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, who is an Obama supporter and former NBA basketball star.
The IG, Gerald Walpin, was criticized by the U.S. attorney in Sacramento for the way he handled an investigation of Johnson and his nonprofit group, St. HOPE Academy, which received hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal grants from the Corporation for National Community Service. The corporation runs the AmeriCorps program.
Our Evita
(Malkin) Some decisions about CNCS are being made by First Lady Michelle Obama, according to service advocates (who asked not to be named). Last week, Mrs. Obama announced that her chief of staff, Jackie Norris, would move to CNCS as a senior adviser. Officials said yesterday that Norris is scheduled to arrive on June 22.
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Who would have thought that for 20 years a large congregation of religious Marxists in Chicago would spawn the next POTUS? Remember those good old days when the Rev. Wright would express his hate towards America? Along with a great gospel chorus and a then unknown Community Organizer who would cover those big ass ears of his and claim to never having heard a word of Jew hate?
The media seems so out of breath over the Holocaust Museum shooting. They go out of there way to point the problem at Conservatives, but they seem to overlook the little fact that Conservatives love Israel. It’s the Marxist racists like those in Obamas former congregation that cheer sermons from the pulpit of a real Jew hater.
No one in the state run media was curious about the Nazi like Anti-Semite in Chicago back in the day. Could anyone but Barack Obama surround themselves with Jew haters for 20 years and have nothing stick?
(ABC) A reporter from the Daily-Press of Newport News, Virginia, caught up with President Obama’s former mentor and pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, this week at the 95th annual Hampton University Ministers’ Conference. Asked if he’s spoken to his former parishioner since he become President, Wright told David Squires, “them Jews ain’t going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter that he’ll talk to me in five years when he’s a lame duck, or in eight years when he’s out of office.”
Wright said he would tell the president, if he could, to stay true to himself. “He’s gotta do what politicians do,” Wright said. “Ethnic cleansing is going on in Gaza, “Ethnic cleansing the Zionist is a sin and a crime against humanity, and they don’t want Barack talking like that because that’s anti-Israel.”
Rev. Wright also said that “the Jewish vote, the A-I-P-A-C vote, that’s controlling him, that would not let him send representation to the Darfur Review Conference, that’s talking this craziness on this trip, cause they’re Zionists, they would not let him talk to someone who calls a spade what it is. “
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The “test” our super smart VP talked about during the campaign may be getting closer. The reaction, which Biden said Americans would question has been enacted by dissing Israel. Obama is on a dangerous path with Israel who has a track record of acting when cornered…
Was there a subliminal message intended from the White House to Netanyahu in Jerusalem, who is publicly resisting attempts by Mr. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to force Israel to stop any kind of settlement activity in occupied territories once and forever?
Whether or not it is true, it shows the mood in Israel. They feel cornered. The reactions out of Israel reflect that feeling.Netanyahu is making a speech Sunday, in part as a response to Mr. Obama’s address to the Arab world last week in Cairo.
Israel’s Channel One TV reported that Netanyahu was told Tuesday by an “American official” in Jerusalem that, “We are going to change the world. Please, don’t interfere.” The report said Netanyahu’s aides interpreted this as a “threat.” read
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‘The Muslim World’
By Mark Steyn
As recently as last summer, General Motors filing for bankruptcy would have been the biggest news story of the week. But it’s not such a very great step from the unthinkable to the inevitable, and by the time it actually happened the market barely noticed and the media were focused on the president’s “address to the Muslim world.” As it happens, these two stories are the same story: snapshots, at home and abroad, of the hyperpower in eclipse. It’s a long time since anyone touted GM as the emblematic brand of America — What’s good for GM is good for America, etc. In fact, it’s more emblematic than ever: Like General Motors, the U.S. government spends more than it makes, and has airily committed itself to ever more unsustainable levels of benefits. GM has about 95,000 workers but provides health benefits to a million people: It’s not a business enterprise, but a vast welfare plan with a tiny loss-making commercial sector. As GM goes, so goes America?
But who cares? Overseas, the coolest president in history was giving a speech. Or, as the official press release headlined it on the State Department website, “President Obama Speaks to the Muslim World from Cairo.”
Let’s pause right there: It’s interesting how easily the words “the Muslim world” roll off the tongues of liberal secular progressives who’d choke on any equivalent reference to “the Christian world.” When such hyper-alert policemen of the perimeter between church and state endorse the former but not the latter, they’re implicitly acknowledging that Islam is not merely a faith but a political project, too. There is an “Organization of the Islamic Conference,” which is already the largest single voting bloc at the U.N. and is still adding new members. Imagine if someone proposed an “Organization of the Christian Conference” that would hold summits attended by prime ministers and presidents, and vote as a bloc in transnational bodies. But, of course, there is no “Christian world”: Europe is largely post-Christian and, as President Obama bizarrely asserted to a European interviewer last week, America is “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” Perhaps we’re eligible for membership in the OIC. Read more
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It is no secret that the State Dept. is chuck full of America hating career employees.. How many Hollywood biggies are treasonous?
(Gateway) Here’s the shocking part (kidding)…A Walter Myers from Ashburn, Virginia donated to the Obama Campaign this past year. UPDATE: The Castro-lover attacks Tony Blair in a 2006 article in The Telegraph, via LGF:
A senior American official has spoken of “the myth of the special relationship” between the United States and Britain, arguing that Tony Blair got “nothing, no payback” for supporting President George W Bush in Iraq. Kendall Myers, a leading State Department adviser, suggested that Mr Blair should have been ditched by Labour but the party had lacked the “courage or audacity” to remove him. Funny, he sounds like your typical America-hating Leftist.
The 72-year-old retired State Department employee — who had enjoyed top-secret security clearance — and his wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, 71, appeared in federal court Friday, charged with serving as illegal agents for Cuba for nearly 30 years and conspiring to deliver classified information to its government. They pleaded not guilty.
According to documents unsealed Friday in Washington, Myers, a former analyst on Europe for the State Department, and his bank employee wife agreed in 1979 to deliver U.S. secrets to Cuba. Federal authorities called the couple’s spying for Havana “incredibly serious.”
Investigators allege Myers — at the behest of the Cuban Intelligence Service — landed a job at the State Department, gained sensitive clearance and traveled with his wife to Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America, and New York to meet with Cuban agents. He told an undercover FBI source he was so successful he received ”lots of medals” from the Cuban government, and that he and his wife enjoyed a rare private meeting in 1995 with Fidel Castro. read
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Is NBC the equivalent to “State Run” media? Like Pravda NBC has turned into an appendage of the Obama administration dependent on cap and trade laws to expand their power. How can anyone trust what NBC reports if if they are spokespeople for Obama?
EXCLUSIVE: GE/NBCU TRYING TO STIFLE OTHER MEDIA’S COVERAGE OF COMPANY: Immelt Orders Nielsen Media Iced Over GE-NBCU-Obama Story: NBCU’s Zucker Follows Orders And Freezes Out The Hollywood Reporter For Past 6 Weeks
It’s a very dangerous situation when any huge multinational corporation wages war against media companies. Especially when that huge multinational corporation is General Electric, which itself owns a media company, NBC Universal, and it’s using all its power and influence and money to try to harm another media company, Nielsen, and Nielsen Business Media, and its trade publication The Hollywood Reporter. This certainly sounds like a situation which the FCC, and the FTC, and the U.S. Justice Department should be investigating. Just one problem: the controversy stems from GE/NBCU’s coverage of President Obama. Here’s what happened: read more
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(nbc) Broward Drops Charges Against Plax. A technicality helps Burress beat four traffic tickets.
(wsvn) Was Air France Flight 447 downed by wind and hail from towering thunderheads? By lightning? Or by a catastrophic combination of factors?
(cbs4) GM Selling Hummer Brand. Move Comes One Day After Filing For Bankruptcy Protection.
(wplg) A Miami-Dade County prosecutor was arrested Saturday evening, accused of attacking a pizza delivery woman.
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The Obama administration may assume that GM and Chrysler customers will remain loyal to the brands. But look, there weren’t enough loyal customers last year to save them. So the government car wizards must assume that the new, leaner GM and Chrysler will lure customers away from Ford and the foreign brands. But wait, Ford’s been gaining market share against the two new government automobile companies lately.
So down the track awaits Unintended Consequence (UC) #1: The old GM and Chrysler that once commanded a cadre of loyal customers now has new owners. Who’s to say they’ll remain loyal? When your favorite restaurant comes under new ownership, and that ownership has a reputation for serving bad food elsewhere, do you keep eating there? Only if you want food poisoning.
When sales of Chevy’s and Hemi’s continue to decline, the government will have to act to protect their — meaning “our” — investment (bailout). That’ll require special tax breaks for Chevy-Hemi buyers, and higher taxes on those who buy other brands in order to make up the lost treasury revenues.
When that doesn’t work, here comes UC #2: Additional tariffs on imported automobiles. But since many foreign brands are now manufactured in U.S. plants, that’s won’t work. So, foreign manufacturers operating U.S. plants will be subject to a Value Added Tax (VAT) to subsidize unsold government cars.
When people prefer the quality and superior fuel efficiency technologies of, say, Toyota and Honda, that’ll trigger UC #3: Forced downsizing, and even closure, of foreign brand U.S. manufacturing plants in the face of government pressure to unionize their work force. That means lost jobs for non-union American auto workers. The UAW will cry crocodile tears.
UC #3 will trigger UC #4: Tariff retaliation from nations who have auto plants here but also import products from the U.S. In short, a trade war.
And then there’s that major fault line in the Obama administration’s plan for the American Green Fleet. The federal government has taken over much of an industry that it knows nothing about operating for a profit. In fact, it has no clue how to operate anything for a profit. It’s only knows how to be a cost center, not a profit center.So the government — meaning “we” — will subsidize the inevitable, sustained losses of Government Motors and the new Chrysler. Ten of billions more coming in bailouts.
And that will lead to UC#5: We won’t have enough money to keep GM and Chrysler alive indefinitely, even with the Federal Reserve’s printing presses running in overdrive. The only way for GM and Chrysler to succeed, for awhile longer, will be for the government to substantially reduce competition from foreign brands and tax gas to the point that Ford’s profitable reliance on trucks and SUV sales drives it, too, into bankruptcy. Anyone want to bet against that eventually happening?
Then, finally, there’s UC #6: Many us have bought our last GM or Chrysler product and will abstain from further purchases on the following consumer principle, that still lives in this as yet only partially socialized nation.
”The real bosses, in the capitalist system of market economy, are the consumers. They, by their buying and by their abstention from buying, decide who should own the capital and run the plants. They determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. Their attitudes result either in profit or in loss for the enterprises. They make poor men rich and rich men poor. They are no easy bosses. They are full of whims and fancies, changeable and unpredictable. They do not care a whit for past merit. As soon as something is offered to them that they like better or that is cheaper, they desert their old purveyors. With them nothing counts more than their own satisfaction. They bother neither about the vested interest of capitalists nor about the fate of the workers who lose their jobs if, as consumers, they no longer buy what they used to buy.” Bureaucracy, Ludwig von Mises, 1944, pp. 20-21
To succeed, the Obama administration will ultimately have to monopolize most of the U.S. auto fleet. Half-way measures won’t work. Just ask the USPS about their competitive disadvantages in operating against FedEx, UPS, et al. The impact of the train wreck that will complete the devolution of the U.S. auto industry is coming. And it won’t be pretty.
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Cuba 50 Year Celebration Tour
