Monday, December 1, 2008
The day’s top political news:
Hillary named Secretary of State today
Hardly an example of the Obama promise of “change”
Will Hillary again face having to dodge sniper bullets in war torn venues such as Bosnia?
Obama seems to be taking the advice of “The Godfather” – keeping his enemies close
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20081201/D94PVQP00.html
9 headless bodies found at Tijuana lot
The bodies of nine decapitated men have been found in a vacant lot in Tijuana, part of a wave of violence that has claimed at least 23 lives in less than 24 hours in this border city.
The heads were discovered in plastic bags near the bodies. Three police identification cards were also found in the bags.
Lack of viable security along our Southern border should be a major issue.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/6139986.html
A pending proposition: a body similar to the International Court of Justice in The Hague to be the supreme legal authority on issues regarding the environment.
The court would fine countries or companies that fail to protect endangered species or degrade the natural environment and enforce the "right to a healthy environment".
Converting Al Gore’s unproven theories into international law.
The obvious intrusion into matters that should be strictly internal policies and decisions is unacceptable to thinking people. “International” courts and groups always veer to the left in their actions – any doubt of that fact can be confronted by checking the actions of the UN…hardly a shining example.
Opinion:
Illegal immigration – a critical issue avoided in the recent campaign
It is not surprising that illegal immigration -- one of the most emotional and compelling issues of our time, was totally overlooked in the recent presidential campaign.
Despite the fact that only a few months earlier, attempts by the Senate, the media, and the White House itself were rejected and defeated by an aroused American grass roots. Americans who are paying attention wont stand for amnesty.
It’s not surprising that neither candidate ignored this issue. After all, John McCain had sponsored an amnesty immigration bill, -- co-sponsored (incredibly) by Teddy Kennedy – a politician who, until his recent illness, was universally despised. (Now we have only Barney Frank to despise, but that’s another story)
Obama is a liberal Democrat, so he will welcome any and all illegal aliens with open arms. After all, his ACORN is already geared to getting these aliens registered to vote and getting them to the polls. No help in opposing illegal immigration will come from ANY Democrat – and none has spoken out against the plague.
Obama has even admitted during the campaign that he supports giving drivers licenses to illegal aliens. Expect an Obama government to be big time advocates for amnesty on demand. They’ll embrace the entire invasion and encourage more to come.
Shame on them!
Beyond the bill passed by the GOP House that would have effectively confronted the issue (it was rejected by Senate liberals), there has been no effective response from the GOP side of the aisle either. Bungling of the issue by the Bush White House was a key factor in the 2006 GOP loss on Capitol Hill.
The long discussed border fence is, of course, in limbo these days – watch the pro illegal alien minions within the Obama group to find a way to kill the entire project. Middle Eastern illegal immigrants have been streaming across our borders. Some, without doubt, are intent on creating radical Islamic cells through which to raise war on Americans.
It should be noted that at least two of the terrorists involved in the Indian assault, were British – former Pakistanis.
Americans who are paying attention worry about a similar assault on US soil. It could happen as quickly as saying “9/11”. That brutal attack was invited by a weak response to terror attacks on this country by the Clinton administration. Clinton tried to ignore the attacks and even allowed terrorist tyrant OBL to walk free again and again and again. No wonder Islamic terror feels it can attack us whenever it fits their plans.
Cracking down on illegal aliens streaming into this country, wont solve the threat of those already here. Confronting them will have to be left to the FBI and other such agencies.
But normal America can again rise up as it did when the amnesty bill was close to passage, and force some form of effective barrier to be erected along our border. Of course Obama and his minions will vigorously oppose such legislation and will fight back against efforts to cut off illegal immigration. Quite the opposite.
Illegal immigration, as an issue, has become submerged since neither presidential candidate was likely to support effective measures. Now that election is over. An advocate for illegal immigration is assuming power in the White House and a House and Senate has become dominated by other liberals who will support inviting the illegals to come to our country – rape our facilities – and pose a quiet threat to our people.
We have all seen the dreadful pictures from India. We can only pray we don’t seem similar photos from an American population center. But at the same time, we know we cannot look to Washington to protect us at all.
Quite the contrary.
It’s up to us again – we need to replicate the effective grass roots issue that killed amnesty a few months back. Sound the alarm.
Buddy
Top blogs of today:
1.
ISLAMIST BLOOD LUST AND HATRED
COMING SOON TO A NEIGHBORHOOD NEAR YOU
"There is evil there that does not sleep. The great eye is ever watchful. It is a barren wasteland, riddled with fire, ash, and dust. The very air you breathe is a poisonous fume." - Boromir, Lord of the Rings
"I am angry. I am sick in my soul. The West refuses to engage this enemy that has declared all out war on our civilization. The media, the UN, the political elites bow to Islam. They refuse to speak its name. They refuse to stop immigration. They are afraid." -- Pamela Geller, Atlas Shrugs
If you think you have been told the truth about the monstrous terrorist attack in Mumbai, think again. The central clearinghouse for information about the horror and evil perpetrated on those in the Taj Hotel -- especially the Jews and Israelis -- is not to be found in the New York Times, or even at Fox News. It's at Geller's site. Educate and inform yourself. Those of us who read her reports know that Geller -- "Atlas" is the canary in the coal mine. She gets it before anyone else. And she's trilling loudly and urgently to sound the alert. It's coming...
Muslims unmercifully tortured the victims. Jews got it the worst.
WE, THE PEOPLE, MUST FIGHT THIS WAR. Our elected officials are on the Saudi payroll, emasculated by petrodollars. Obama declared on page 261 of his book, should the political winds shift ......he would side with the Muslims.
The left will not fight this war. Historically, leftists have always slept with totalitarian regimes. We are witnessing it here in the US yet again. What is discouraging are those on the right that have turned tail on the war and moved left.
They have become part of the problem.
We must stop the State department from importing whole Muslim communities - they come and seek to impose sharia and Islamic supremacism. We must pass Tancredo's jihad legislation. We must get on a war footing.
Go, read it all and learn about the t ruth, the real horror the media isn't telling you. Our children's survival depends on your knowledge, wisdom, courage, and our willingness and ability to fight back and defend ourselves.
More at:
http://radiopatriot.blogspot.com/2008/11/islamist-blood-lust-and-hatred-coming.html
2.
Making the World Safe for Marxism
Randall Hoven
I thought communism was defeated when the Berlin Wall came down. I'm now thinking we did not defeat communism at all. . .
In the novel Catch-22 there is a character named Howard Snowden who is injured when his aircraft is shot. The novel's protagonist, Yossarian, treats the wound on Snowden's leg and thinks he's done a satisfactory job of tending to his injured crewmate. It is a recurring vignette in the novel, but we don't get to its conclusion until near the end of the novel.
After thinking Snowden's wounds adequately treated, Yossarian opens Snowden's jacket. He finds him basically eviscerated; his intestines are pouring out of a hole in his chest. His case is hopeless. Snowden dies muttering "I'm cold" and all Yossarian can do is say, "There, there."
I thought communism was defeated when the Berlin Wall came down. I'm now thinking the Wall falling was the equivalent of treating Snowden's leg. We did not defeat communism at all.
It is almost commonplace to accuse someone of being like Hitler or acting Nazi-like. (Googling "bush hitler" yields 1,300,000 hits, for example.) Yet you are considered beyond the pale, and possibly insane, to even suggest that someone might harbor Marxist sympathies. To question someone's dedication to traditional American or merely Western ideals = calling him communist = being Joe McCarthy = we now know you're nuts.
Case number one is Representative Michele Bachman. She merely suggested that the press should look more intently to see if some Democrats and Barack Obama in particular harbor anti-American attitudes. The headline at the Huffington Post? "Michele Bachman Channels McCarthy. Obama Very Anti-American. Congressional Witch Hunt Needed." Contributions to Bachman's political rival poured in.
Of course Rep. Bachman neither called Obama "very anti-American" nor called for a congressional investigation of any kind. But in a world where facts no longer matter, so what? (You can read the transcript of her Hardball interview here.) Even the Republican Party abandoned her, until it found out the controversy was bringing contributions into her campaign like crazy. Amazingly, she survived her re-election bid.
Case number two is Representative Paul Broun, who had the audacity to say this:
"It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he's the one who proposed this national security force. I'm just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may -- may not, I hope not -- but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism."
We don't have to go all the way to the Huffington Post to find this one denigrated; we need only go so far as James Taranto writing in the online Wall Street Journal. He puts this one under the headline, "How Not to Revive the GOP":
"Here is a helpful rule of political rhetoric: When you begin a sentence, ‘It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but . . .,' you probably shouldn't finish it."
(I guess what we really need are more Jim Jeffords and Lincoln Chafees. "Real Republicans vote Democrat" could be our new motto.)
We are now at the point where any utterance at all that merely questions whether a politician leans Marxist is immediate grounds for dismissal, derision and even banishment from the Republican Party and the public conversation. It is "McCarthyism" in reverse, or more properly, real McCarthyism as it actually happened, meaning the accuser is the one who suffers, not the accused.
But what if they are Marxist?
Excuse me, but isn't the great lesson we were supposed to learn from Nazism to recognize such evil before it reaches critical mass - to quash such movements before things get violent?
As a reminder, the Holocaust count was 11 million; communism killed 100 million.
If we do not allow ourselves to call something "wrong" or "evil", we yield the battle without even a fight. Yet to refrain from such "invective" is what is now called "civil discourse" and the right "tone."
Bill Ayers called himself a "small ‘c' communist." Is it OK to call him a communist? Barack Obama said this in one of his autobiographies (at least he said it on tape, whether or not he wrote the book himself ):
"To avoid being mistaken for such a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk rock performance poets."
Here's a hint: you have to be pretty steeped in leftist thought to even know that the adjective "structural" goes with the noun "feminist."
Obama was essentially a "red diaper baby" who was raised and educated by Marxists to be Marxist. Communists really did spy on us. They had secret meetings. Communism is no longer "strange"; it is taught in our schools, sometimes by Marxists. Obama went to such schools, took such classes and personally sought out Marxists. Bill Ayers calls himself a communist. Barack Obama's run for elective office was kicked off at a meeting in Bill Ayer's house. His voting record was the most liberal in the Senate in 2007, or left of self-avowed socialist Bernie Sanders.
Are we not to infer the obvious?
More at:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/11/making_the_world_safe_for_marx.html
3.
Our Idol-elect
Exclusive: Psychiatrist Lyle Rossiter on why so many Americans worship Barack Obama
Note: Lyle H. Rossiter Jr., M.D., is a forensic psychiatrist and author of "The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness."
Charismatic, brilliant, mesmerizing. These and other glowing attributions have been assigned to President-elect Barack Obama in a wave of electoral celebration. As he bounds up steps and strides across platforms to roars of approval, tears of joy on ecstatic faces, even swoons, greet his eminence. A harsh political critic, formerly intent on altering his anatomy, now weeps in his presence. A woman widely known for her wisdom dubs him "The One." The Phenomenon himself modestly declares: "We are the ones we have been waiting for," though he really means "I am The One you have been waiting for." With his dazzling debut on the world's political stage, even foreigners have suspended their fashionable contempt for all things American. Millions now acknowledge a new Idol.
Of course, there is nothing new about the human tendency to create idealized personas, especially in politics. In fact, idealizing others is part of normal human development. The toddler-age child believes his mother is the most wonderful person in the world. Overlooking her flaws, he expects her to protect him (even if she doesn't), to meet all his needs and desires (even if she doesn't) and to relieve his pain (even if she doesn't). By age 4 or 5, his bond with her will include something akin to worship. In those same preschool years, he will likely idealize his father for real or imagined powers, again, with something akin to worship.
By their late grade school years, children idealize rock stars and sports heroes. "Overestimation of the object," as we psychiatrists sometimes call it, is surely present when we fall in love: the newly struck lover invariably idealizes his beloved. In our adult spiritual lives, our reverence for the deity is defined in part by its inherent idealism and by our expectations of salvation. In the normal course of development, we idealize certain ethical and moral principles, and at the core of our patriotism lies a deep reverence for the political ideals that define our country. Idealizing is in our genes.
If idealizing other persons and things is indeed normal in our human nature, we may then ask whether this tendency can go awry. That is, if we pervert this process, can we unwittingly cause ourselves serious problems? The answer is: "Yes, we can!" In fact, we have already begun.
When a child's development proceeds well enough, his tendency to overvalue others is gradually neutralized to become a mature capacity for realistic admiration. Instead of starry-eyed worship of grand illusions, the mature citizen admires and idealizes proven values. He reveres, among other things, certain time-honored virtues and the people who practice them, especially the personal ideals of honesty, integrity, self-reliance, courage, persistence and dependability; the political ideals of individual liberty, the rights of property and contract, and the rule of law; and the ethical ideals of mutuality, decency and charity, among others.
When development does not proceed well enough, the longing of the child for a benevolent parent with superhuman powers persists into adulthood. The search for an Idealized Other easily contaminates the immature citizen's judgment on political matters, with grave implications for societal sanity. His wish for a loving caretaker in the flesh aborts his moral commitment to the abstract principles essential to civilized freedom. Instead of seeking through limited government those protections that allow him to make a good life for himself, the immature adult seeks an omnipotent leader and benevolent government to provide it for him. In his fondest fantasy, The Modern Parental State will meet his needs and desires, rescue him from his mistakes and quiet his existential angst; The Modern Permissive Culture will indulge his appetites and rationalize his sins. The Idealized Leader who brings "Change We Can Believe In" will make us all, as Jacquez Barzun observed in "From Dawn to Decadence," "safe and at ease in a hundred ways."
There is more. As Critical Review's Jeffrey Friedman has systematically observed for years, and Fox News and Jay Leno and have informally recorded on the street, very large numbers of the American electorate are profoundly ignorant about how societies work. Our government-run school systems have committed educational malpractice for decades in failing to teach children the responsibilities of citizenship in a free society, the fundamentals of economics in free markets, the political foundations of ordered liberty and the dynamics of voluntary social cooperation. The uneducated citizen expects government to run his life with myriad regulations, pay his bills with other people's money and force others to "cooperate" with him for his benefit. Like a dependent child, he seeks freedom from want and risk, not freedom to live responsibly as he chooses.
Ignorance combined with immaturity can be politically devastating. On Nov. 4, 2008, massive numbers of immature and ignorant American voters failed to understand the ominous implications of Barack Obama's personal history: his adolescent tutelage with Communist activist Frank Marshall Davis, his 20-year filial relationship with hate-filled Jeremiah Wright, his political and business dealings with terrorist William Ayers, his real estate transactions with felon Tony Rezko, his Fannie Mae connections to the sub-prime mortgage debacle, his vote in the Illinois Senate against medical care of aborted-live babies and his radically liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate. On Nov. 4, 2008, millions of immature and ignorant American voters saw Obama as a loving father of two little girls but ignored his choice to send them every Sunday to hear the vile racist and socialist rants of a mad preacher.
More generally, the combined immaturity and ignorance of the American electorate has produced millions of voters who understand almost nothing of substance in a candidate's policy proposals but eagerly welcome him as an adoptive parent. The natural result of this process is a population increasingly seduced by the utopian promises of collectivism. Norman Thomas' fondest dream, that America will embrace European socialism with all of its Marxist delusions, is becoming a reality. All of this has been brilliantly exploited by President-elect Obama, who has kept his message of change wonderfully vague and ambiguous, for the most part, while presenting himself as an unusually articulate and charming man ready to help everyone in need. With a few exceptions, he has been as evasive about his real economic, social and political intentions as he has been secretive about the political influence of his education at Columbia and Harvard. Having not defined himself clearly to America's voters, he has made himself into an ideal target on which they can project whatever idealized traits they wish for.
Mr. Obama's vagueness has not been complete, however. He told Joe the Plumber about his intent "to spread the wealth around," and he told Bill O'Reilly that taking money from rich people and giving it to a struggling waitress was "the neighborly thing to do." But spreading the wealth around Obama-style is classical redistributionist socialism. There is nothing neighborly about the IRS taking one citizen's money at gunpoint and giving it to someone else, even if she is struggling. In fact, in a May 2001 National Public Radio interview, Obama lamented the U.S. Constitution's "blind spot" regarding "redistributive change" and the fact that the Supreme Court had "never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and [into] more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society." These statements reveal the fundamentally collectivist philosophy of our president-to-be and his intent to use the power of government to bring about a drastic change in America. Furthermore, it is virtually certain that he will consolidate a liberal Supreme Court for decades to come. What Mr. Obama has in mind is change that no lover of liberty can ever believe in.
The prognosis for freedom in America is guarded at best. If a man's character can be judged by the company he keeps, and if what he says is any indication of what he intends, then a large number of immature and ignorant voters have just elected a very dangerous man to the most powerful office in the world.
Rossiter's acclaimed book "The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness" more fully explains the consequences of modern liberalism.
4.
A DEAFENING SILENCE ON OBAMA’S MISSING BIRTH CERTIFICATE
It is no mystery that the leftist media have refused to mention this potentially looming Constitutional crisis in virtually all of their print and electronic coverage. Having shilled for Obama for the past two years - dismissing his longtime radical associations, obfuscating his radical voting record, and taking a pass at their jobs of vetting a presidential candidate - their failure to cover the most explosive story of the 2008 campaign speaks volumes about collusion of the highest order.
Then there are the late-night comics, as well as snarky "humorists" like Bill Maher and Jon Stewart, who take pride in being irreverent and "outing" both people and subjects that others avoid. Not a word.
But what about the failure of the powerful conservative media - how to explain their total blackout of this story? Let's look at their reactions:
• Fox News: Total Silence. Did the healthy shares that Saudi Arabia bought of Fox influence the network's non-coverage of this story? After all, it's no secret which candidate the Saudis endorsed! We know that TV shows, including Fox, are on a seven-second delay, the better to bleep out offensive or inappropriate material. Doesn't it strike Fox viewers as strange that not one of their outspoken guests, even once, mentioned this story? Who warned them not to?
• Rush Limbaugh: Total Silence. Why has the Excellence-in-Broadcasting's "Dr. of Democracy" - the man who eats sacred cows for breakfast - not touched this story?
• Mark Levin: Total Silence. Why has this popular radio host, commonly known as "the Great One," abandoned his well-deserved reputation as a Constitutional scholar to studiously not address this Constitutional issue?
• Laura Ingraham: Total Silence. Here is another radio powerhouse and former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas taking pains not to mention this case...not a word!
• Bill O'Reilly: Total Silence. Yes, the guy who claims he's "just looking out for the folks"...voiceless!
• Sean Hannity: Total Silence. The iconic radio and TV host who tackles every controversial subject under the sun...missing in action!
I could go on and on, but you get the picture. The very people - the so-called loyal opposition - who should have been shouting this story from the rooftops for months on end went mute. Ordinarily they would be the first to tell you that our Republic has no more precious document than the U.S. Constitution - a document that set the stage for the greatest experiment in human freedom since the beginning of recorded history. People like me - and multi-millions of others - are aware of what happens when the "salami tactics" of tyrants are employed in the service of leftwing ideology.
First, there is a charismatic character promising "change" and "hope," but who changes his tune once in power. Second there is a whittling down of the laws of the land and the arrogant dismissal of the documents on which the nation was founded. Third there is the blacking-out of all media that disagree with Dear Leader's message. And fourth there is the rounding-up and incarceration - or worse - of all dissidents.
This is not theory. This is history. But while both left and right media thought it appropriate to comment at length about Obama's seven-page Questionnaire for those seeking work in his administration - a probing that makes a Pap Test, mammogram, colonoscopy, and endoscopy in one visit seem mild by comparison - not one of these cowardly journalists has asked the simple question: Mr. Obama, where is your birth certificate?
Or were they not cowards but patriots?
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2008/07/atlas-exclusive.html
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