The day’s top political news:
Gore: the country has “a moral duty to pass health care reform. This year.”
Gore was on stage with Bill Clinton at a Democrat gathering in Tennessee Sunday
Both tried to offer support to Democrats in Congress being battered by having to defend Obama’s health care scam.
The pair attempted to exploit the death of Teddy Kennedy as a means of defending a health care plan many Americans don’t want.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0809/26580.html
Cheney Says He Was Proponent for Military Action Against Iran
Fox News Sunday
Former Vice President Dick Cheney hinted that, in the waning days of the Bush administration, he had pushed for a military strike to destroy Iran's nuclear-weapons program.
In an interview on Fox News Sunday, Mr. Cheney described himself as being isolated among advisers to then-President George W. Bush, who ultimately decided against direct military action.
Former Vice President Also Criticizes CIA Probe as Political Move
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125164376287270241.html
Only 46% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President's performance. That’s the lowest level of total approval yet measured for Obama.
President Obama's numbers are always several points higher in a poll of adults rather than likely voters. That's because some of the President's most enthusiastic supporters, such as young adults, are less likely to turn out to vote.
Only 25% of those polled would support keeping the present Congress.
Opinion:
Enough talk, let’s take real action
We know the problem and we can see the dust raised by the horses of an enemy charging against us and our fellow Americans.
Those enemies are liberal, left wing Democrats, and at present, they control our government.
Democrats have dominating majorities in both the House and Senate. Republicans can only maneuver to delay the threat. Fortunately, public opinion – much of it expressed in the town hall meetings and via the tea party protest movement, has managed to delay passage of Obama’s health care plan. It is also our only hope in defeating Obama’s new tax plan (hidden behind the label “Cap and Trade”) which would immediately cost each of us a solid $3,000 a year, and also raise costs substantially. In fact Obama himself admitted his Cap and Trade scam would cause costs to “skyrocket”.
Obama’s health care plan will almost certainly include a “public option” – a liberal scheme that would allow the “camel’s nose” of government involvement under the edge of the mythical “tent” of health care. “Public Option” will lead to “single payer” health care – which is a term for Canadian-style socialized medicine.
When Obama says you can keep your doctor and your insurance, he is either proving himself truly stupid, or lying to us all. Again. After all, Obama pledged those making less than $250,000 a year would not see a dime in increased taxes. Yet he makes no bones of demanding passage of the Cap and Trade tax. Obama’s having lied about taxation, predicts the likelihood he knows he is also lying about health care.
Angry crowds and demonstrators are displaying their fury. Many are calling for firing all Congressmen and Senators. While such a war chant stirs the blood, it does not cogently meet the danger and the threat.
We must meet the threat with action that can work.
We can do precisely that and are working hard on that answer this very day. Success depends on how deeply and how sincerely those who join us in condemning the liberal threat to America truly feel.
We will be counting heads regarding who is willing to actually take part – or who are satisfied with sitting on the sidelines and just griping. Griping is understandable and valid, not taking action when taking action is possible, is not,
We will lay out the plan in great detail. When it is completed and fully prepared, it will be laid out for all to see on the web site “Tell Washington No.com”. It will provide a plan for bringing home those Congressmen and Senators responsible for the threat we fact today.
Watch for it – if you are truly sincere about the feelings you and others demonstrate at town hall meetings and tea party protests. You want action? We are giving you opportunity for action.
Buddy
The day’s top blogs:
1.
Snopes – the real story
THIS MAY SURPRISE YOU, It sure did me!
For the past few years www.snopes.com has positioned itself, or others have labeled it as the 'tell-all, final word' on any comment, claim and e-mail.
But for several years people tried to find out who exactly was behind snopes com. Only recently did Wikipedia get to the bottom of it - kinda makes you wonder what they were hiding. Well, finally we know. It is run by a husband and wife team - that's right, no big office of investigators and researchers no team of lawyers. It's just a mom-and-pop operation that began as a hobby.
David and Barbara Mikkelson in the San Fernando Valley of California started the website about 13 years ago - and they have no formal background or experience in investigative research. After a few years it gained popularity believing it to be unbiased and neutral, but over the past couple of years people started asking questions who was behind it and did they have a selfish motivation? The reason for the questions - or skepticisms - is a result of snopes.com claiming to have the bottom line facts to certain questions or issues, when in fact, they have been proven wrong. Also, there were criticisms the Mikkelsons were not really investigating and getting to the 'true' bottom of various issues.
When I saw that Snopes had falsely claimed that Obama's Birth Certificate had been properly validated, I realized something was wrong with either their research and/or their credibility. It seems something is seriously wrong with both.
Then a few months ago, when my State Farm agent Bud Gregg in Mandeville hoisted a political sign referencing Barack Obama and made a big splash across the internet, supposedly the Mikkelson's claim to have researched this issue before posting their findings on snopes.com. In their statement they claimed the corporate office of State Farm pressured Gregg into taking down the sign, when in fact nothing of the sort ever took place.
I personally contacted David Mikkelson (and he replied back to me) thinking he would want to get to the bottom of this, and I gave him Bud Gregg's contact phone numbers. Bud was going to give him phone numbers to the big exec's at State Farm in Illinois who would have been willing to speak with him about it. He never called Bud. In fact, I learned from Bud Gregg no one from snopes.com ever contacted anyone with State Farm. Yet snopes.com issued a statement as the 'final factual word' on the issue as if they did all their homework and got to the bottom of things. Not!
Then it has been learned the Mikkelson's are very Democrat and extremely liberal. As we all now know from this presidential election, liberals have a purpose agenda to discredit anything that appears to be conservative. There has been much criticism lately over the internet with people pointing out the Mikkelson's liberalism revealing itself in their website findings. Gee, what a shock!
(NOTE: For the record, while we are at it – be aware that “FactCheck” is even more corrupted. It began as a dodge created by the Obama campaign to provide a “third party” refutation to charges against Obama – it has even less credibility than Snopes.)
So, I say this now to everyone who goes to www.snopes.com to get what they think to be the bottom line facts: Proceed with caution. Take what it says at face value and nothing more. Use it only to lead you to their references where you can link to and read the sources for yourself. Plus, you can always google a subject and do the research yourself. It now seems apparent that's all the Mikkelson's do.
After all, I can personally vouch from my own experience for their 'not' fully looking into things.
2.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/protest_for_me_but_not_for_the.html
Protest for Me, But Not for Thee
Kyle-Anne Shiver
What happens when the middle class feels even more victimized than the nation's poor? When American middle-class citizens feel that they are being steamrolled by a Changeopoly Blitzkrieg, engineered by the principalities and powers of overreaching government and corporate oligarchs?
When the only answer they're given to their just concerns about unsustainable debt is "We won."?
Well, those beleaguered middle-class folks might take a look at the tactics which have been working against them for four decades and decide to make use of some of those tactics themselves. Middle-class Americans, myself among them, have watched for 40 years, as one angry group after another has managed to get its way, and more and more entitlements from our purses to theirs, using the tactics designed by the liberal fascist revolutionary, Saul Alinsky.
One would need to be buried under a rock not to understand by now that small groups of angry people can get what they want.
Think ACORN and NINJA home loans.
Think Code Pink and the tarring of GW as a "war criminal."
Think ANSWER and the closing of Gitmo.
This list could fill a museum on the success of "community organizing" for "change."
So, what in the world is the legacy media doing going bonkers about it now? Why on earth would media elites not give glowing coverage to this democracy in action, the same kind they've been unabashedly heralding for decades now, every time a dozen live bodies show up with signs in a public place?
Why, I do declare, they seem to be saying with a rather concerted effort, "Protest for me, but not for thee."
What the Democrats and their bullhorns in media are telling us, the folks, is that they are plum scared down to their woolies because they now know they've lost their monopoly on information. And the left has lost its monopoly on grievance, too.
For 40 years, this Country has been blackmailed by angry Alinskyite protest into redistributing great chunks of wealth to aggrieved-status mobs under the pretense of charity or entitlement.
The scales of grievance have now tilted so far to the left that it is the middle-class, which feels itself most endangered, most unable to make its voice heard in the Halls of Congress.
Saul Alinsky, for his part, told the young radicals of the 1960s that they had to bring the middle-class into the revolution by the mid-1970s or give up altogether. Alinsky understood where the real power in America was held. Alinsky understood that power wasn't in the board rooms, but in the middle-class consumer's purse. It wasn't in the school board, but in the middle-class parent's expectations. Power wasn't even in Washington, but in the demands of the most populous group of Americans: the vast middle-class, whom he called the "have-a-little-want-mores," in keeping with his solely material worldview.
But Saul Alinsky's vision amounted to making the middle-class so "rubbed raw" with "discontent", making them feel so downtrodden that they would demand more government handouts for themselves and more government control in the hands of their political masters. Government controlling everything in the whole society was Alinsky's idea of "freedom" and "liberty."
He disavowed the power of a single individual to affect change in his own life, and always, every single time, looked to collectivist power for strength. Alinsky's vision was, of course, Marxist, but with fascist elements thrown into the mix.
Alinsky's first successes, during the 40s and 50s, were in getting the Catholic Church and other fair-weather liberals to sign onto the radical labor agenda, which has now successfully crippled the American auto industry and put it at the mercy of a federal takeover.
This corporatist model, of leaving big business in private hands, while a central government calls all the shots, is one of the hallmarks of fascist third-way activity.
But as we've learned to our dismay, the left has successfully branded conservative Americans, who continue to believe in limited government and the true separation of powers, as fascist.
So, in Nancy Pelosi's addled imagination, protesters against government control of yet another still-mostly-private American enterprise, are the ones carrying Swastikas.
Doesn't Nancy Pelosi remind you, dear readers, of the mindless scarecrow in Oz? With no independent mind of her own, she's giddily traveled the yellow-brick road and now depends upon her Wizard in Chief to call all the shots for her ninnified illusions.
What we are seeing now in townhalls across this country are middle-class people demanding that their government drop any and every plan to convert America's healthcare system to one like those failing throughout socialized Europe and Canada.
Anyone who honestly believed that a man, who had done nothing whatsoever in his entire life but go to school, shout slogans at rallies, and run for office could be an able president, have now been disabused of that fantasy. Anyone who believed that Barack Obama was a conciliator who could de-polarize a Nation, purposely polarized for 80 years by his own side, has now awakened from the spell.
Honey, even a complete nitwit knows that a president, who hires out his real job to 32 czars, is not CEO material.
And, it is those people mostly, who now are coming out of their homes and businesses in earnest dissent. They oppose the takeover of yet another part, perhaps the most intimate part, of their already over-controlled lives. And middle-class America seems anything but ready to concede and give life-and-death decision making over to the Wizard and his loyal band of Alinskyites.
The American people are anything but mindless dolts, most especially our vibrant and diverse middle-class. We are seeing some of the same Alinsky tactics employed at townhall meetings, but by a group opposed to more government control, not demanding more of it. They are the anti-fascist, anti-socialist, anti-Alinsky folks, who would prefer to keep the liberties they have, even if it means sacrifice and suffering.
This ain't what the leftists in charge expected to see. The Democrats envisioned the middle-class welcoming, with spread-wide-open arms of gratitude, these new power plays that would put more control into the hands of their beneficent bureaucracy.
Instead, the Alinskyites are being met with 1776 Redux, and all they can do is yell "Fascist" at the top of their lungs, just as they've been doing for 40 years.
What a heap of malicious poppycock.
Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. She welcomes your comments at kyleanneshiver.com.
3.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/kennedy_legacy_black_voters_jo.html
Kennedy legacy: Black voters joining the Democratic Party
Andrew Walden
After nearly a week of incessant post-mortem vacuity, not a single commentator has hit upon the real legacy of the late Kennedy political dynasty.
The Kennedys are largely responsible for making African Americans dependent on an alliance with liberal Democrats. The result--highly unstable in a democratic society -- 90% of black voters regularly pull the Democrat lever.
The 90% solid black vote tips the balance in favor of Democrats in Missouri, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Delaware, and Maryland. Without these votes, Democrats would simply cease to function as a national party. Without the Kennedys around to check anti-black electoral dynamics within the Democrats' ranks, it is an open question as to how much longer this arrangement can continue. The end of the dynasty could mark the beginning of the liberation of black voters from dependency on government.
It was the 1960 presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy which finally brought the majority of black voters out of the Republican camp and into the Democratic Party -- for 95 years the party of segregation, and before that the party of slavery. Communist Lee Harvey Oswald murdered JFK in 1963. Taking Kennedy's place, President Lyndon Johnson forced passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. In spite of the fact that Republican support was required to overcome Democrat segregationists in both houses of Congress, the votes sealed the liberal Democrats' deal with black voters. Younger brother Robert F. Kennedy, while campaigning for the Democrat Presidential nomination, would be murdered by Palestinian Arab Nationalist Sirhan Sirhan in 1968.
The price of Johnson's support for civil rights would be the "Great Society" programs which have done so much to destroy black families and--with disastrous consequences--weld black communities into dependence on the government-and the liberals who control social spending.
Their media acolytes endlessly portray the Kennedys' trajectory as morally based, but political calculation is more likely. John F Kennedy had been a close ally and personal friend of Senator Joe McCarthy and a staunch anti-communist throughout the 1950s. But as New England liberals, the Kennedys needed to manufacture a political base within the Democratic Party. Writing in Human Events, Frances Rice points out:
"Democrat President John F. Kennedy is lauded as a proponent of civil rights. However, Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Act while he was a senator, as did Democrat Sen. Al Gore Sr. And after he became President, Kennedy was opposed to the 1963 March on Washington by Dr. King that was organized by A. Phillip Randolph, who was a black Republican. President Kennedy, through his brother Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, had Dr. King wiretapped and investigated by the FBI on suspicion of being a Communist in order to undermine Dr. King."
The Kennedys' political move was matched by the Republican "Southern strategy"--deployed to scoop up white Southerners abandoned by the national Democrats. This process -- which defeated efforts by George Wallace to form a segregationist third party -- began with the choice by the 1960 Nixon campaign to not match John F. Kennedy's telephonic shows of support for jailed civil rights activists.
(NOTE: Claims by Democrats that the “Southern Strategy” was segregationist-based, are lies. The strategy was a counter point to LBJ’s out of control liberalism and hi jacking of the Democrat party. Democrats were the authors and enforcers of Jim Crow laws, Segregation, and party mandated rules for preventing Blacks from voting in several Southern states. The GOP was not involved at all. There was no party switching in post LBJ days – only Cong Albert Watson and Strom Thurmond switched parties, and neither for reasons involving civil rights. Democrats have lied to Black voters and have them enslaved on a political plantation today.)
The Southern strategy continued with Goldwater's openly anti-civil rights "states rights" 1964 campaign -- carrying five southern states for Republicans -- the first GOP Deep South wins since 1872. Nixon in 1968 carried six with another five going to the segregationist Wallace-Lemay ticket of the American Independent Party. By 1972, Republicans swept all 15 Southern states as the last ditch Democrat segregationist primary campaign of George Wallace was stopped short by a nearly successful bullet fired by Arthur Bremer.
For the first time since 1877, the Democrats previously solid South became Republican. But in 1976 Georgia Democrat Governor Jimmy Carter would win the Presidency with the backing of Southern states.
This is where Ted Kennedy first stepped in to secure the legacy of his elder brother -- by challenging Carter in the 1980 Democratic Primaries. Kennedy argued:
"We must not permit the dream of social progress to be shattered by those whose promises have failed. We cannot permit the Democratic Party to remain captive to those who have been so confused about its ideals."
Kennedy took his challenge all the way to the Convention and refused to endorse Carter's campaign against Reagan. It worked. Ronald Reagan captured the support of Carter's "born-again Christian" backers and won all the Southern states except Georgia. The threat to the liberal-black alliance controlling the Democratic Party passed. By 1984 Jesse Jackson would be winning Southern Democrat Primaries.
Carter never forgot. The headline August 27, 2009: "Carter Still Upset with Kennedy 28 Years Later."
Carter was no segregationist. But it was important to defeat him because binging black voters into the Democratic Party -- and keeping them there -- depended on driving white Southerners out.
In a 1970 New York Times interview, Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips explained the relationship:
"From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats."
The 1980 campaign was not the end of the story. At the beginning of the 2008 Democratic primary season, Ted Kennedy would for the last time play a key role in swinging Democrats away from another Democrat campaign basing itself on an appeal to white voters -- that of Hillary Clinton.
Although Bill Clinton was tagged "America's First Black President" by some, his political mentor was segregationist Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright. His partner, Hillary Clinton, was, like Barack Obama, a student of leftist Saul Alinsky. Alinsky's "community organizing" techniques were developed in segregated white Chicago communities such as "Back of the Yards" and "Bridgeport". Based on Alinsky's techniques, these "organized" communities helped launch Chicago's Daley Machine.
Bill Clinton's 2008 campaign strategy came right out of Hillary's infamous and long-hidden 1969 senior thesis on Alinsky. Alinsky's 13th Rule is: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." For three weeks in January, 2008 the Clintons and their backers did their best to polarize non-black Democrat voters against Obama, bringing up Obama's admitted past drug use and firing off one-liners like "Lyndon Johnson," "fairy-tale," "shuck and jive," and "spade work" to increasing choruses of anger from liberals and conservatives alike.
But it backfired. Ted Kennedy reportedly phoned Clinton several times warning him to tone it down. Rush Limbaugh focused a spotlight on the racially divisive subtext of what he called the Democrats' "uncivil war." Al Sharpton said Clinton should "shut up." But Clinton took no heed, willing to gamble his own party for a return to the White House.
Going after black senators is a long Clinton tradition. Life Magazine gave Hillary an initial taste of nationwide media exposure for her 1969 Wellesley commencement speech in which she denounced the first black man to be elected to the U.S. Senate in 100 years. But that was different. Her target then was a liberal Republican, Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts. In the eyes of Democrats, the Clinton attacks on Obama are wrong for exactly the same reason that Hillary's attack on Brooke was right.
When three weeks of racially tinged Clinton remarks ended with Bill comparing Obama's victory in South Carolina to those of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, Ted Kennedy had heard enough. Kennedy had in 2005 famously blurted out "Obama bin Laden". But endorsing Obama, Kennedy told a cheering Obama rally January 28, 2008:
"With Barack Obama we will close the book on the old politics of race against race, gender against gender, ethnic group against ethnic group, and straight against gay."
Caroline Kennedy, in a January 27, 2008 New York Times essay, called Obama "a president like my father."
Kennedy's reference to "Old politics" was a barely veiled assault on the Clintons for threatening to shatter the liberal-black alliance. The term also showed up in January 24, 2008 remarks by former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich:
"Bill Clinton's ill-tempered and ill-founded attacks on Barack Obama are doing no credit to the former president, his legacy, or his wife's campaign. Nor are they helping the Democratic Party. ... Now, sadly, we're witnessing a smear campaign against Obama that employs some of the worst aspects of the old politics."
It worked. Obama defeated Clinton in the primaries and the rest is history.
Now, with Ted Kennedy gone, who is left to keep these centrifugal forces in check?
Andrew Walden Edits Hawai`i Free Press