I thank (blame) your side for helping ours blow it. It takes more than just a little over 50% to pass a bill in most cases. I think it takes 2/3rds majority.
I thank (blame) your side for helping ours blow it. It takes more than just a little over 50% to pass a bill in most cases. I think it takes 2/3rds majority.
you need a civic's class
the only 2/3's is the number of states needed to amend the constitution
all common rules and laws only need 50% plus 1 vote in both the house and senate
------------------ Question wonder and be wierd are you kind?
Question: How many votes are needed to pass a bill in the house? Answer: A simple majority the first time but to over-ride the presidents veto it must be a 2/3 win.
I guess we both could be right on this one depending on the situation.
[This message has been edited by avengador1 (edited 09-03-2009).]
I grew up in a storybook family. My parents, refugees from the urban jungle, felt like royalty in our little suburban home. They even referred to our lives as a fable, with a happily ever after ending.
The problem for me was the disconnect between what my parents said and what I experienced. As a kid my life felt more like a Greek tragedy than a fairy tale. While my parents partied hardy, I was bored out of my gourd at home.
When what you're told doesn't jive with your own eyes, you proceed in one of two directions. One way is to grow up and invent new myths for your life. You delude yourself into believing people love you when they don't. You're convinced that you're happy when you're not.
Or you can follow another trajectory, the one I've traveled -- you develop a highly attuned BS detector. Your detector goes off loud and clear any time someone says one thing and does another.
When I was younger I'd frequently ignore the blare of my BS alarm because I wanted so much to be loved and accepted. I hooked up with people whom I knew from the get go were bad news, and I suffered the inevitable consequences. I fell hook, line, and sinker for leftist ideology though the contradictions became more apparent year by year.
When I learned to stand on my own two feet, I started trusting my BS detector, and it's rarely failed me since. I can usually tell right away whether someone is a trustworthy person or full of crap.
I've had friends admonish me for being judgmental and implore me to give people the benefit of the doubt. But it's not uncommon for that same friend to admit to me months later that I was right; the person was a Class A jerk.
Since Obama and the far Left are ruling our fair nation, my BS detector has been blasting like a siren. While conservatives prefer reality, the Left lives in fantasyland with its home base being the past.
In the liberal's eyes, life is all about atrocities, unfairness, every single awful thing that has happened since time began. It's a black and white world of good guys and bad guys, damsels in distress, and pseudo-heroes dispatched by the Democratic Party.
A favorite yarn of the Left is Camelot, the home of the Kennedy family -- John Sr. and Bobby, the saints who sacrificed their lives for this country; John Jr. who tragically died too young; and now Teddy.
While the Kennedy's did some good for this country, creating icons out of them is as foolish as a grown adult still believing in Santa Claus. For a tyke, the idea of Santa and elves and fairy godmothers offers refuge and comfort in an overwhelming world. When adults invent tall tales, all they're doing is fleeing from reality.
The talking heads now tell us we have a new Camelot, with Obama's smiling visage a reminder of the young JFK. Michelle, in her designer clothes, is presented as another Jackie, with pretty young children in tow.
When I ponder the Left's fascination with fairy tales like Camelot, my mind flashes on that great courtroom scene in the flick, A Few Good Men, when the grizzled Colonel Jessep (Jack Nicholson), bellows at pretty boy, Tom Cruise, "You want answers? You can't handle the truth!" And I think that progressives live in a hallucinatory world because the harsh realities of life stun them.
What is the truth? The Kennedys were not paragons of virtue. John F. Kennedy was a disreputable womanizer who escalated our presence in Vietnam, the war the Left most detests. Bobby assisted John with smuggling women in and out of the White House. John Jr. dismissed expert advice about inclement weather and flew his small plane anyway, with his pregnant wife and her sister on board, all perishing.
And Ted Kennedy paid some poor schlemiel to take a test for him at Harvard, and got them both kicked out (though Ted pulled some strings to get himself readmitted). He left Mary Jo to slowly asphyxiate in an air bubble while he fled the scene and constructed an alibi. Ted Kennedy may have even covertly supported the Soviets during the Cold War (isn't that treason?)
Michael Jackson, Ted Kennedy, all the Kennedys; the Left edits out the unflattering details about its heroes, leaving only a chimerical world, a Camelot on earth. But what is Camelot anyway? It's a made up place of dreams and wishes that come true if you only believe hard enough. It's the bedtime story we tell our children to lull them to sleep when they're afraid of the dark.
In Buddhism, there is a rich tradition of storytelling, but these poignant tales are designed to wake people up, not pacify them. One that touches me is about a Buddhist master whose main teaching is, "Life is an illusion. It's all an illusion."
One day the master's son is tragically killed, and the teacher is incapacitated by grief. He sobs and wails in his room for weeks on end.
The disciples are unnerved by his being so ravaged by grief. One student volunteers to talk to him, and timidly approaches the master in his room.
"Master, don't you remember what you always tell us? That everything is an illusion."
The teacher looks up, and in between sobs he cries out, "Yes, I know. But the death of a child is the greatest of illusions."
It takes great courage for all of us, Zen masters and the like, to live in the world as it is, not as we want it to be. It challenges us to open our eyes and our hearts every day to both the miracles and tragedies of a human birth, what the Buddha himself called the "ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows."
Conservatives recognize that life cannot be easily pigeonholed into good and bad, fair and unfair because we don't know what adversity is doing to us.
What appears at the time as calamitous may have shaped our character and fortified our courage. The ancient Chinese understood this; in their language, the symbol for crisis means both danger and opportunity.
But liberals think that life should just be about the l0,000 joys. If there is sorrow, it means that something went terribly wrong, and someone should pay.
If I had to name the number one reason why the Left hates the Right, it would be this: because we shine the harsh light of reality on the Left's starry eyed hopes and dreams.
We expose their illusions for what they are -- naive, grandiose, even dangerous. As forcefully as Dorothy ripped open the drapery in the Land of Oz, we reveal that Obama and his ilk are not wizards, just little men and women behind a curtain.
Even when the Left tries to hide the sins of their heroes by canonizing them, we see through the charade. We know that effusive tributes and mile long processions do not exonerate immoral behavior.
For us, personal behavior matters. If a man abandons a woman to die, or sleeps with little boys, or calls his grandma a "typical white woman," this speaks volumes about his character.
So the Left detests us because, to them, we're the spoil sports. We're the mean parents who break up the party and make all the children go to bed. We lecture them to mind their manners, respect their elders, and "Who do you think you are to talk to me that way?"
We expose their hair brained plots to change the world for what they really are -- castles made of sand that will vanish with the first strong wind.
We unveil everything they're hiding from, all the cold, cruel facts of life that render them helpless: that in the grand scheme of things, human beings are quite small; that none of us can or should play God; and that there are consequences for cruel or evil behavior.
And perhaps most of all, we trigger in their memory banks those excruciatingly vulnerable moments when the bubble burst, the truth broke through, and they were forced to look reality squarely in the face.
When they had to hear, "Daddy's moving out"; or "Yes, this will hurt but only for a while"; and, "I'm sorry but your kitty won't be coming home from the vet."
Or, what must feel utterly crushing to a youngster, "No, there really isn't a Santa Claus."
The abrupt resignation of White House aide Van Jones, deep in the news hiatus of Labor Day weekend, will probably be forgotten in a few days. But it's a story that still deserves elaboration for what it says about the political coalition that helped to elect President Obama and whose demands are leading him into a cul-de-sac.
As a candidate, Barack Obama was at pains to offer himself as a man of moderate policies, and especially of moderate temperament. He said he would listen to both the right and left, choosing the best of each depending on "what works." He sold himself as a center-left pragmatist. When his radical associations—Reverend Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers—came to light, Candidate Obama promptly disavowed them. Now comes Mr. Jones, with a long trail of extreme comments and left-wing organizing, who nonetheless became the White House adviser for "green jobs." This weekend he too was thrown under the bus.
However, Mr. Jones wasn't some unknown crazy who insinuated himself with the Obama crowd under false pretenses. He has been a leading young light of the left-wing political movement for many years. His 2008 book—"The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems"—includes a foreword from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and was praised across the liberal establishment.
Mr. Jones was a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, which was established, funded and celebrated as the new intellectual vanguard of the Democratic Party. The center's president is John Podesta, who was co-chair of Mr. Obama's transition team and thus played a major role in recommending appointees throughout the Administration. The ascent of Mr. Jones within the liberal intelligentsia shows how much the Democratic Party has moved left since its "New Democrat" triangulation of the Clinton years.
Mr. Jones's incendiary comments about Republicans and his now famous association with a statement blaming the U.S. for 9/11 had to have been known in some White House precincts. He was praised and sponsored by Valerie Jarrett, who is one of the two or three most powerful White House aides and is a long-time personal friend of the President.
Our guess is that Mr. Jones landed in the White House precisely because his job didn't require Senate confirmation, which would have subjected him to more scrutiny. This is also no doubt a reason that Mr. Obama has consolidated so much of his Administration's governing authority inside the White House under various "czars." Mr. Jones was poised to play a prominent role in disbursing tens of billions of dollars of stimulus money. It was the ideal perch from which he could keep funding the left-wing networks from which he sprang, this time with taxpayer money.
This helps explain why the political left is so upset about Mr. Jones's resignation. Listen to David Sirota, another left-wing think-tank denizen and activist, who wrote the following Sunday on the Huffington Post Web site:
"Finally, the Jones announcement will inevitably create a chilling effect on the aspirations of other movement progressives. Van is a fantastic person who has done fantastic work. He's kept his advocacy real and didn't compromise his principles. And so when he was appointed to a high-level White House job, it seemed to validate that you could, in fact, keep it real and also advance in American politics and government. That is to say, his story seemed to prove that an outsider could also succeed on the inside—and that outside advocacy doesn't automatically prohibit you from one day working on the inside."
Mr. Sirota is speaking for many on the movement left who believe they helped to elect Mr. Obama and therefore deserve seats at the inner table of power. They are increasingly frustrated because they are discovering that Mr. Obama will happily employ "movement progressives," but only so long as their real views and motivations aren't widely known or understood. How bitter it must be to discover that the Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck, who drove the debate about Mr. Jones, counts for more at this White House than Mr. Sirota.
No President is responsible for all of the views of his appointees, but the rise and fall of Mr. Jones is one more warning that Mr. Obama can't succeed on his current course of governing from the left. He is running into political trouble not because his own message is unclear, or because his opposition is better organized. Mr. Obama is falling in the polls because last year he didn't tell the American people that the "change" they were asked to believe in included trillions of dollars in new spending, deferring to the most liberal Members of Congress, a government takeover of health care, and appointees with the views of Van Jones.
The man the left loves to hate scores again! Few people provoke as much derision among media swells as Glenn Beck, but that man knows how to expose misconduct and get results. Michael A. Fletcher reports in the Washington Post:
The National Endowment for the Arts has reassigned former communications director Yosi Sergant, who had become the latest target of FOX News talk show host Glenn Beck.
Acting NEA communications director Victoria Hutter said Thursday that Sergant had left the communications post. The move came after he had come under attack from Beck, a conservative commentator who accused Sergant of attempting to use taxpayer money to fund art to support the president's initiatives.
Sergant's reassignment came after the resignation last weekend of environmental adviser Van Jones, who had been criticized for weeks by Beck.
In an alternate universe where the mainstream media were not left wing ideologues, Beck would be garnering Peabody awards and maybe even a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering misconduct in high places. But the media and academic establishments are far too corrupt and committed to propagandistic support of Obama for that to happen.
Meanwhile, newspaper and magazine circulations continue to decline, and broadcast network news ratings are in the toilet. MSNBC and CNN attract fewer viewers than last year. All the while, Beck's listenership and viewership soar, despite the attempt by an organization Van Jones founded fulminating at advertisers in order to encourage an advertiser boycott.
Thanks for hanging tough and exposing the creeps, Glenn!
well in the real world BECK is a NUT who is a modern version of tailgunner joe but without the power to indite people every once in a while he finds a problem but rants and raves and spins and lies far more then he a true help to making the nation a better place to live much like the rushed limball he speaks ten lies for every fact
and very like you and your buddys here fails to see any of the many faults of the totally failed neo-conned voodoo plan or the nasty corrupt men who are on the dark [right] wing
------------------ Question wonder and be wierd are you kind?
[This message has been edited by ray b (edited 09-11-2009).]
well in the real world BECK is a NUT who is a modern version of tailgunner joe but without the power to indite people every once in a while he finds a problem but rants and raves and spins and lies far more then he a true help to making the nation a better place to live much like the rushed limball he speaks ten lies for every fact
Wrong. He shows PROOF, often in the person's OWN WORDS.
quote
and very like you and your buddys here fails to see any of the many faults of the totally failed neo-conned voodoo plan or the nasty corrupt men who are on the dark [right] wing
regularly when he was on CNN I was amazed by his BS and outright lies kinda like a nitely train wreak a horror show but hard not to watch just to see what BS he spinns next on occasion now on fox or FAUX unfair and unbalanced news to much FAUX is a cause of brain damage I fear too many here have suffered from that inc you
------------------ Question wonder and be wierd are you kind?
Rick Moran What to do if you're the "newspaper of record" and fail to record the facts of a big story - even after it's over?
Lie, lie, lie - then lie some more reports Kyle Smith of the New York Post:
"Our Washington bureau was somewhat short-staffed during the height of the pre-Labor Day vacation period."
What's next? "My dog ate the copy?"
Jill Abramson, the managing editor, admitted only to being "a beat behind" the story but added that the paper had caught up - after the saga was over. The EMS equivalent of this statement would be, "Sorry I didn't take your 911 call for four days. At least I was in time for the funeral."
Although Abramson's excuse was not an excuse, she proceeded to offer another one: "Mr. Jones was not a high-ranking official."
Oh. And here I was, thinking that he was "one of Mr. Obama's top advisers," as I was told by, well, The Times, on its Caucus blog on Sept. 5. Confusing, confusing.
Only in Timesland can you be in charge of doling out $80 billion in contracts ("A Small White House Program" - The Times' John M. Broder, on Sept. 6) and be less important than the Naked Cowboy.
The Times was aware of the story, knew it was bigger than most of the stuff it puts in the paper every day, and had plenty of resources to cover it.
But The Times purposely ignored it because it was hoping that the story would go away, because it likes people like Comrade Jones and was hoping he wouldn't be forced out. The Times doesn't like people like Glenn Beck and didn't want him to be able to claim Jones's scalp. The Times' prejudice blinded it to the fact that Jones' fall became obvious on Friday, when a White House spokesman refused to defend him.
Smith adds, "The Times has still not told its readers that Jones is or was a communist, calling this notion merely a charge made only by Republicans - we all know how nutty they are! - not as a fact." In the world of the New York Times, when someone actually admits to being a communist, that doesn't count and blame must be pinned on the opposition for daring to take the guy at his word.
Don't they see how ridiculous they look? Why not tell the truth? Do they think their reputation as an independent paper can be retrieved?
regularly when he was on CNN I was amazed by his BS and outright lies kinda like a nitely train wreak a horror show but hard not to watch just to see what BS he spinns next on occasion now on fox or FAUX unfair and unbalanced news to much FAUX is a cause of brain damage I fear too many here have suffered from that inc you
So in other words, you don't watch him on Fox, haven't seen his latest programs, and claim it's all B.S. and spin - yet he posts audio and video of people's OWN WORDS, stuff like Van Jones ADMITTING he's a communist?
ray...you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
well if you can't figure it out yourself stay out of political threads
neo = new con = conservative but conn or conned = one who has been the victim of a conficendence game or scam ______________ the fact that working class people support the party of the rich ______________ and that party will never do anything for them as it only is for the richest
------------------ Question wonder and be wierd are you kind?
Liberals are having difficulty understanding the grass roots opposition to President Obama's plans for the government takeover of the health care industry, as well as the President's loss of support since his election. Equally disconcerting to liberals was the massive turnout on September 12th to protest a Federal government that is too big, too intrusive, and far too corrupt. As one who attended the September 12th rally at the Capitol, let me offer liberals the following explanation for what is happening.
Legendary football coach Vince Lombardi said, "Fatigue makes cowards out of all of us." And what are the American people these days if not fatigued? Bombarded with bad news from the 24-hour news cycle, is it any wonder that the American people are exhausted? Consider a few examples.
An estimated fifty trillion dollars or more in investor wealth is lost in a matter of weeks in the stock market collapse. Meanwhile a few speculators, Wall Street executives, and maybe even some of America's own politicians make out like bandits. The result is that the American people rightly wonder why they should bother to work hard, put money in a 529 college fund, a 401(k) retirement plan, or save for a new car if it can all be wiped away in the blink of an eye. And Americans are fatigued.
Americans are told the H1N1 swine flu virus is coming and there is little they can do to protect themselves. And Americans are scared.
A young girl is kidnapped and held captive for 18 years, repeatedly raped, made to live in a tent, and forced to be a mother to two children when she was still a child herself. Americans wonder how they can possibly protect their children from such evil. And Americans are afraid.
The Associated Press publishes a photograph of a heroic young Marine taken while he lay dying on a battlefield far from home, ignoring pleas from the young Marine's parents, the United States Marine Corps, and requests from the Secretary of Defense not to publish the photo. Concurrently, op-ed pieces in any number of news publications detail how the war in Afghanistan is lost, or that no matter the outcome, confronting America's enemies can't possibly be worth the sacrifice anyway. As a consequence, the American people question their commitment to confront Islamic terrorism and their solemn duty to pursue America's enemies far from her shores. And Americans are drained.
Medicare and Medicaid, to say nothing of Social Security, are bankrupt and the American people are told the only hope to sustain them is to accept yet another government-run healthcare program that promises even greater encroachment on their most personal freedoms. And if the American people dare to object, their own elected officials and broadcasters on the evening news label them Nazis, Brown Shirts, racists, and right-wing domestic terrorists. And the American people are shattered.
The list of attacks on the American conscience is endless. There is no doubt that the American people are fatigued and as Vince Lombardi well knew, fatigue makes cowards of us all. More importantly however, it is cowardice that the Left relies on to impose its will.
The American people have endured a decades-long effort to discredit their values and belief system and relentless attempts to make them believe their history is worthy of ridicule. The mugging began years ago with attacks on Judeo-Christian values and accusations of intolerance. It continues today with the President giving speeches overseas decrying American excess, ignorance, and arrogance, and culminates at home with political infighting over outrageous borrowing and spending by the members of Congress. Now with majorities in both the House and the Senate and control of the White House, liberals believe the ultimate goal to fundamentally change the Nation (or destroy it in the process) is finally within reach.
In the nick of time however, the American people have shaken off their shared fatigue. Try as they might, the majority of the American people simply cannot reconcile their own view of America with the views of liberals who want to radically change the Nation. In spite of the Left's efforts to convince them otherwise, the American people know without question that the United States has been the greatest force for good the world has ever known. Americans know that a strong, albeit imperfect, America isn't just good for Americans, but for the rest of the world as well.
More Americans are wiser now too and many now recognize the tactics the Left will employ to advance their agenda. More Americans finally understand that Leftists will refuse to argue the facts and will never accept responsibility for their own policies. For example, they will never acknowledge that crime, abortion, out of wedlock births, welfare claims, drug use, and a countless list of other social ills occur most often in areas where Democrats have had a lock on the political landscape for decades. When challenged, liberals will do their best to change the subject. Anyone who disagrees with liberal objectives will be shouted out of the room or otherwise intimidated. Ultimately, anyone who opposes the liberal agenda will be labeled a racist, a Nazi, or worse.
It is a formidable defense that Americans have been reluctant to engage, but they have had enough. From the financial meltdown to bailouts, from stimulus packages, to TARP, TARP II, and TARP III, from Cap and Trade to health care reform, the American people have had it with corrupt government. And they know too that the endless stream of "news" that inundates their daily lives is a deliberate attempt to beat them down.
After decades of abuse at the hands of the Left, the American people can clearly see the great and gathering political storm on the horizon. Two opposing forces will collide and the outcome will be critical to the future of America. On one side there is a corrupt, elitist political machine, the embodiment of politics in America. On the other side are the troubled, but still free people of the United States of America. The growing opposition to all things government is America's recognition that it requires courage, not cowardice, to preserve freedom. That liberals either cannot, or do not want to see it coming speaks to their willingness to believe that if Americans are fatigued enough, they will lack the courage to fight back against a Leftist agenda.
The electorate is weary from the unceasing attacks on the American sense of right and wrong. But make no mistake; the American people will rest to clear their collective head. While resting, perhaps Americans will further befuddle their liberal tormentors and take comfort in the words from the book of Psalms, Chapter 3, a suggestion that prior to the liberal ambush of American values would have been considered mainstream.
Lord, so many are against me. So many seek to harm me. I have so many enemies. So many say that God will never help me. But Lord, you are my shield, my glory, and my only hope. You alone can lift my head, now bowed in shame.
Then I lay down and slept in peace and woke up safely, for the Lord was watching over me. And now, although ten thousand enemies surround me on every side, I am not afraid.
The Psalms isn't meant to be a gratuitous biblical reference, but rather is meant to serve notice that Americans no longer care what politicians and a complicit media think of them. Americans are among the most benevolent people on earth, but they are tired of being mocked and lampooned for deeply held opinions and beliefs. Instinctively, Americans have always embraced their solemn duty to fight for freedom. Not easily provoked and slow to anger, the American people have always fought for what is right once called into action. It should therefore come as no surprise to anyone, least of all liberals that Americans are protesting in waves.
What politicians in general and liberals in particular don't understand is that no matter how fatigued Americans might be, Coach Lombardi's paradigm simply does not apply. Fatigued? Yes of course, many times and perhaps even still. But never have the American people been cowards. Elitist politicians don't understand what is happening because they don't want to understand it. Whether they figure it out in time to save their own political hides, or not, is immaterial. The political storm is gathering. When it hits, my money will be on the American people.
Aaron Gee With the success of the recent 9/12 protests the left is running scared. The Democratic Party needs the collective eyes of the nation to be taken off the ball if they have any hope of sliding what they are pitching across the plate. Some Democrats and media simply try to ignore what happened, either under-reporting the size and scope of the protests, or going on the Sunday morning talk shows and calling the protesters wrong and in the minority. The new media is all over the story of both the 9/12 protests and the main stream medias attempt to downplay and under report the tea party events.
Joe Wilson's outburst during the joint session is also being latched on to by some Democrats in an attempt to divert attention from the success of the 9/12 project and now there is talk of censure. This will get lots of main stream media attention and there will be little talk on Capitol Hill about limited government or tea parties.
Race has always been a good "go to" play for the far left and now is no different. Maureen Dowd opined that the reason that Wilson dared say such a thing was that he couldn't take the fact that the president is black. The White House has rejected that argument and accepted Wilson's apology, but that isn't good enough for house democrats. Perhaps if the House spends the next week discussing race, censure, and Wilson they won't have to discuss health care, taxes, or cap and trade.
President Obama said when discussing Wilson's apology "we have to get to the point where we can have a conversation about big, important issues that matter to the American people without vitriol, without name-calling without the assumption of the worst in other people's motives". How much vitriol versus conversation do you think we will see on the house floor or in the media regarding Wilson's slip? Will we have a national conversation about being respectful to the president and call out the democrats who cried "no" and booed President Bush? Doubtful.
The American people have been lied to quite a bit lately, from heartfelt delivery of dishonest speeches, to the media reporting on their fellow Americans. Keep your eye on the ball America.
Another Republican Pedophile Scandal by James Buchanan
Just when many people were thinking the Mark Foley scandal was settling down and that there couldn’t possibly be more Republican pedophiles, a new scandal has erupted. A CBS news article reports “Overseers of the House of Representatives’ program for teenage assistants this week discussed a camping trip that Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., took with two former interns and others in 1996 — an outing now under review by the Justice Department, a congressional source said Tuesday. The overseers, consisting of three lawmakers and two senior House officials, did not have any new information beyond recent news stories on the Kolbe trip. The source is familiar with the discussions but is not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. The conference call Monday involving the Kolbe trip shows that the people responsible for the teenage assistants’ program are casting a wider net following revelations that ex-Rep. Mark Foley was sending overly friendly e-mails and sexually explicit instant messages to former male interns known as pages.”
Many rank and file Republicans in Hogbottom, Arkansas and Flyover, Kansas had absolutely no clue that the Republican Party has an overabundance of closet Gays and that a Gay Republican pedophile scandal was even possible. George Bush and Karl Rove were perfectly happy letting little old church-going ladies vote for some truly sickening individuals. Dennis Hastert is in trouble for not throwing Foley out much earlier. Hastert’s claim that he didn’t know about the scandal was quickly contradicted by other Republicans. (According to the “Young Turks” radio show, Mr. Hastert reportedly shares his Washington DC home with a long-time male friend. Hastert’s “wife” stays in a hotel when she visits DC.) An L.A. Times article reports “Gays hold many prominent positions in government and business in Washington. But in the GOP ranks, homosexuality is still politically risky. In fact, with the exception of the military, perhaps no institution in America has as strong a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach as the Republican Party… Minnesota state Rep. Paul Koering, a Republican who came out publicly last year. ‘The very first time I ran, I literally almost made myself sick worrying about somebody finding out I was gay.’ Congress has three openly gay members, one of them a Republican — Jim Kolbe of Arizona, who is retiring when this term ends. Kolbe acknowledged his sexual orientation in 1996 after a gay magazine was about to ‘out’ him for voting against government recognition of same-sex marriages.”
There have been persistent rumors that two of the top Republican Party’s officials, Ken Mehlman and Karl Rove, are closet Gays. One Republican politician, Michael Huffington came close to becoming a Senator for California and few people knew he was a closet Gay. There is a rumor that there is “A List” of Gay Republican politicians and operatives, who may soon be outed to shake up the Republican base. The Gay pedophile scandal appears to have hit the accelerator on ruining the GOP’s reputation.
The L.A. Times also reported ” ‘While pro-homosexual activists like to claim that pedophilia is a completely distinct orientation from homosexuality, evidence shows a disproportionate overlap between the two,’ Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said this week in a message to supporters.” The Family Research Institute is one of the few resources on the web, which talks about actual facts and statistics about homosexuals. The Republican Party has only three openly Gay Congressmen, but it now has two pedophile scandals. One thing seems certain, there a lot more closet Gays in the GOP and the pedophile scandal may yet claim more Republicans.
[This message has been edited by Pyrthian (edited 09-15-2009).]
Remember Timothy Treadwell, the bear enthusiast and environmentalist who lived for many seasons with the coastal grizzly bears in Alaska? And, remember what happened to Timothy and his girlfriend that fateful season in 2003 while they were living among the grizzlies? Sadly, those same grizzlies Timothy had grown to love and understand killed and partially ate both him and his girlfriend.
You see, while Timothy understood the danger involved with getting so close to a wild predator, he never really imagined those bears would kill him. Any rational thought of imminent danger Timothy may have had previously, was overruled by his obsession to live with the wild grizzlies year after year. Unfortunately for Timothy and his girlfriend, the grizzlies finally did what all predators do -- kill and eat.
With the Obama administration's latest cowering move to the Kremlin to abandon a missile defense plan for Europe, our new president continues his Treadwell-like behavior, on a foreign policy path with many predatory leaders who both articulate and pose an imminent threat to America. President Obama does perceive the danger to America in getting close to these murderous dictators, but like Timothy Treadwell, he refuses to allow sound reasoning to interfere with his overwhelming obsession to befriend them all.
But while Treadwell chose to endanger only himself and his girlfriend, President Obama is making a clear choice to endanger all of America with his reckless foreign policy.
Foreign leaders like Chavez, Ahmedinejad, Kim, Castro, and yes, even Putin, to name a few, are all predators just like the Alaskan grizzly. And all predators have habits and instincts that make them unpredictable, dangerous and eventually deadly.
Predators are also very patient and cunning when it comes to selecting their prey. They usually seek out the weak or injured so they can increase their chances of a successful kill. The predators President Obama is trying to befriend and get close to are being patient and cunning with him as well.
In less than ten months, President Obama's new policies have taken our country from being the world's strongest superpower to a weak and vulnerable nation being singled out as a prime target by these predators. Like the plight of Timothy Treadwell, it's only a matter of time for America before these predators do what they do -- kill and eat.
Forty years ago, a term was coined to describe the voices of ordinary, patriotic, religious Americans who sought to live their lives in peace: the "Silent Majority." In November 1969, almost four decades ago, Vice President Agnew made the first direct assault on the leftist media in his Des Moines speech, which noted that almost everything that Americans knew of politics and current events was filtered through the newsrooms of the three television networks. An excerpt from that famous speech describes the leftist prison of those who govern our news:
"We can deduce that these men read the same newspapers. They draw their political and social views from the same sources. Worse, they talk constantly to one another, thereby providing artificial reinforcement to their shared viewpoints. Do they allow their biases to influence the selection and presentation of the news?"
What has changed in the last forty years? Does the vast corporate and institutional wealth, which alone props up the left, still skew the news, the entertainment, the information presented as fact by those who govern the television networks, Hollywood, academia, nonprofit organizations like ACORN, the American Bar Association, AARP, and labor unions? Of course! Agnew later offered some concrete suggestions on how these elitists could make themselves more aware of how ordinary Americans felt. But, of course, the left has never seen its role as understanding and reflecting America but rather transforming the "mistake" of America into the left's image of a socialist utopia.
Those of us who recall the Reagan years also recall the absolute hatred expressed for Reagan by these media hacks. They gasped when he called the Soviet evil empire an "Evil Empire." They accused him of senility, of ignorance, or everything nasty that they could dream up. How shocked were these same media representatives when President Reagan died five years ago, having been virtually invisible to America for more than a decade, at the huge numbers of Americans who waited patiently for hours to view our dead leader? Without prompting by the leftist media, without more than obligatory notice by the elites, Americans openly mourned this great leader in numbers larger than any president since Lincoln. Even John Kerry, who never had a kind word to say about Reagan as president, felt obliged to pay his phony tribute.
Compare this to the highly publicized, openly political funeral of Teddy Kennedy. The elitist Left would not permit us a moment away from eulogizing this inconsequential younger son of a shady political dynasty. He had been very much in the public eye for many years, giving a major address at the Democratic National Convention last year. But aside for manufactured sentiment, only the politically cynical really showed admiration for Teddy.
Rasmussen in a September 11 poll confirmed how Americans really feel about ideology: all political labels except "being like Reagan" are in growing disfavor; the term "progressive" (a leftist hiding behind a different moniker) is becoming unpopular; and only fifteen percent of Americans consider being called "liberal" a positive. What Rasmussen reports fits perfectly with Gallup, which recently showed conservatives outnumbering liberals and Battleground Polls, which for almost a decade have consistently shown sixty percent of Americans identify themselves as conservatives (not liberals and not moderates.)
The Silent Majority forty years ago was cowed, afraid, and ashamed. It members, the majority of good Americans, felt the sting of being called a racist, sexist, fascist, or whatever other casual insult the Left sought to hurl. The voices of conservative American now include many black Americans, huge numbers of women, lots of Jews, and more Hispanics. These Americans have seen how the left mistreats Clarence Thomas and Sarah Palin: they know that any bigotry that exists in American politics is primarily on the left.
Through nimble media which move much faster and more accurately than the clumsy giants of doctrinaire Leftism, the Silent Majority now increasingly commands the attention of engaged Americans, while the New York Times, CNN, PBS, and Hollywood are slouching toward the carnival freak show of American media.
The Silent Majority transcends political party. Its members see the Republican Party as simply a mechanism to carry out its agenda, just like the elitist left sees the Democratic Party as a vehicle to advance a sort of surreal political madness (just ask honest liberals like Joe Lieberman.) So when President Bush whipped Republicans to unite with Democrats immigration "reform," the Silent Majority yelled "No!" with a voice heard up and down the corridors of Washington power.
This group of engaged citizens, this vast majority of the American people, this corps of hardened veterans in the left's war on God, family, and country, see in the left a foe, not a friend. The Silent Majority understands that the left here, like the terrorists abroad, leave no options but defeat or victory. Led only by common hopes and shared principles, trusting few in Washington but trusting the heart of America implicitly, now talking and writing and organizing by the tens of millions in hundreds of thousands of small groups, what was once call the Silent Majority is now, most definitely, the Not-So-Silent-Majority.
Thomas Lifson Imagine if an official of a major conservative organization received 25 year prison sentence for child molestation. Would the media avert their eyes? Yet the head of the Sacramento chapter of major Obama ally, the Service Employees International Union, a man who represented thousands of state employees, received this sentence earlier this week, and the media yawned. Here is an account from the website of a local television station in Sacramento:
A former union official and California Department of Insurance employee was sentenced Tuesday to 25 years in prison after entering no contest pleas to charges of child molestation, possession of child pornography, and manufacturing child pornography.
Jaime Enrique Feliciano, who served as a chapter president of Service Employees International Union Local 1000, which represents thousands of Sacramento-area state workers, had previous convictions for child molestation and failure to register as a sex offender.
Thomas Lifson The cluelessness of the left on display this morning, in the juxtaposition of two articles this morning. First, Michael Gerson in the Washington Post, on the loss of the former courting rituals, as sexual liberation encourages earlier onset of sexual activity, sequential intimate relationships, and the like:
How is this working out? Not very well. Relationships defined by lower levels of commitment are, not unexpectedly, more likely to break up. Three-quarters of children born to cohabiting parents will see their parents split up by the time they turn 16, compared with about one-third of children born to married parents. So apart from the counsel of cold showers or "let the good times roll," is there any good advice for those traversing the relational wilderness? Religion and morality contribute ideals of character. But social science also indicates some rough, practical wisdom. [snip]
... the age of first marriage is important to marital survival and happiness. Teen marriage is generally a bad idea, with much higher rates of divorce. Romeo and Juliet were, in fact, young fools. Later marriage has been one of the reasons for declining national divorce rates. But this does not mean the later the better. Divorce rates trend downward until leveling off in the early 20s. But people who marry after 27 tend to have less happy marriages -- perhaps because partners are set in their ways or have unrealistically high standards. The marital sweet spot seems to be in the early to mid-20s.
Third, having a series of low-commitment relationships does not bode well for later marital commitment. Some of this expresses preexisting traits -- people who already have a "nontraditional" view of commitment are less likely to be committed in marriage. But there is also evidence, according to Wilcox, that multiple failed relationships can "poison one's view of the opposite sex." Serial cohabitation trains people for divorce. In contrast, cohabitation by engaged couples seems to have no adverse effect on eventual marriage. [emphasis added]
The second article comes from Arianna Huffington, puzzled at the decline in female happiness:
According to study after study, women are becoming more and more unhappy. This drop in happiness is found in women across the social and economic landscape. It doesn't matter what their marital status is, how much money they make, whether or not they have children, their ethnic background, or the country they live in. Women around the world are in a funk.
And it's not because of the multitude of crises we are facing. Women's happiness has been on a downward trend since the early 1970s, when the General Social Survey, a landmark study, began examining the social attitudes of women and men -- who, by the way, have gotten progressively happier over the years.
When you think about all that has happened over the last four decades -- with women securing greater opportunity, greater achievement, greater influence, and more money -- the decline in our collective state of mind seems to defy logic, and raises the vexing question: What in the world is going on?
Thomas Lifson Let any conservative in the media have an effect, and a counterattack will come from medial lapdogs of the left. Now the Glenn Beck has drawn political blood, he has a bulls-eye on his forehead. Poltico notices that the hyping of an alleged rivalry between Rush Limbaugh and Beck is underway, ignoring the fact that Rush has appeared on Glenn's Fox News show recently. Not exactly the behavior of someone scared of losing his dominance. Of course, the media has been demonizing Rush ever since he first succeeded in national syndication. Now they have a new game to play with Beck, and the clumsy attempt to gin up a rivalry out of whole cloth.
The left is quite properly terrified of the widespread and broad-based populist movement building in America in opposition to Obama's transformation strategy. They never counted on this happening. Expert astroturfers themselves, they are not really familiar with the notion of a genuinely popular political movement. In their minds, a political movement needs ideological direction from above, financial support, and a network of allied groups in order to succeed. They can't deal with a movement in which leaders generate themselves spontaneously out of a deep grounding in the American founding tradition.
[Politico quoted Mark Levin, whose Liberty and Tyranny has sold one million copies. The political ramifications of this book will not sink in to intellectuals for at least a generation, but it has empowered activists, enabling them to awaken friends, neighbors, and family to the nature of the paradigm shift underway.]
The lack of a single charismatic leader makes the movement difficult to fight. So they need to pick a target, personalize it, and freeze it, in the Alinskyite formulation.
Coming in the wake of CNN's studious ignoring of the ACORN tapes -- the biggest political story of the week -- this sort of attack backfires. When Jon Stewart is making fun of you, your circulation and advertising are falling off a cliff, and your cable news operation is even whipped by MSNBC, this is pathetic.
Despite steady progress in achieving their ambition, lefties have acquired neither clue nor interest in how things actually work. Imagine the destruction when the revolucion has transferred power from the oppressor class to them. Suffice that whatever works now isn't controlled by lefties, which is why whatever does work, works.
The lefties' only work experience has been organizing protests, crafting slogans and manipulating the media. But regular Americans, in addition to their day jobs in building America and making it work have now also learned the stagecraft of protesting, sloganeering and leveraging the alternative media, while upstaging the mainstream media.
Unlike regular Americans, lefties have never produced anything that works -- neither in the private nor public sector. They have no frame of reference to assess whether their new world order will work; they haven't participated in building what works today. Nor have they ever built any sort of successful competing socio-economic model on any scale to show the rest of us that their future state on a larger scale could work.
More frightening, lefties don't care. Their only interest is to exercise the power of overthrow and erasure. David Horowitz, erstwhile lefty , now turned socio-political critic of the left, reminded Glenn Beck in a recent interview that the end game of Obama's radical movement is simply power. Power has been the goal of the leftist movement for nearly a hundred years, most fervently in America since the late 1950s, today more than ever as they finally have critical mass to achieve their centennial ambition.
In the 1960s, it was "tear down the house, we'll figure out how the plumbing works later." Of course the radicals then were more of an academic curiosity and convenient villain for the so-called silent majority than serious challengers to what works. It was easier then to dismiss those radicals as fringe socio-engineers, pivoting off the baroque sexual politics of poets, painters and librettists in the 1930s. Yet even WH Auden, leading lefty poet extraordinaire whose "making, knowing and judging" marked his works in the 1930s, freely using his art to drive political speech, had largely abandoned that propaganda genre a decade later .
The politics of oppression and grievance mongering, focusing on gaining enough power to expropriate what the oppressor class owns -- capital, means of production and accumulated wealth -- has found its renewed stride mostly due to economic dislocation brought about by globalization. Riding on a wave of generic discontent, the radical class still has no idea how capital is formed or wealth created -- much less once drained and dissipated how to rejuvenate and re-bloom.
They deny any suggestion, despite abundant evidence, that accumulated wealth, whether from small business owners, inventors, entrepreneurs or major corporations, once confiscated and redistributed for consumption rather than reinvestment, cannot be replaced, at least very easily. And their quest for power knows no limits. The means to be used has been laid out in their street manifesto, Saul Alinsky's "Rules For Radicals", resulting in the likes of Van Jones placed within walking distance of the West Wing. All quite deliberate according to script.
Punish capital formation and profits by unrelenting taxes and wage and price controls for anyone not a union member; control energy production and distribution; legislate human behavior through government health care and strictly ration broad band communications to only friendly messengers. All the while manipulate the media with one non-stop message: we will deliver social justice. That's the plan. And as Karl Rove has said, once the left controls health care, they will own the emotional dimension of the national debate. Anyone who would then oppose national health care, trim it or reform it would be hostile de facto to advancing social justice.
Every year the debate would be framed around the spending priorities for government health care. The left would occupy the high ground commanding enough votes from the permanently aggrieved, the "take but never pay" class who pay no taxes, convinced they are victims of racism and capitalist exploitation.
It is this class of the permanently aggrieved, with nothing more to lose, unaffected by 50 years of unrequited loyalty to the Democrats, who still eagerly await another handout, more entitlements, perhaps even reparations, the grand prize. Libertarians and conservatives would be arguing to deaf ears the merits on freedom of choice, limited government and financial liquidity.
In the meantime health care as a political and natural right will be the established norm championed by the left in achieving social justice -- their shorthand for redistributing economic means and denying individual liberties. Voters who pay taxes, thus broadly identified in the oppressor class, know if they lose the health care battle they will never regain enough traction to repudiate the agenda of expropriation and revenge promised to the permanently aggrieved through the left's usual dramatic theatrics, deux ex machina. While the American system admittedly hasn't always worked for everybody, its replacement wouldn't work for anyone.
Which is why these are perilous times. Which is why those who have the most to lose have finally said "Enough!" Which is why the health care debate has been the tipping point. Which is why the radical agenda is being derailed by regular Americans beginning with health care.
The firestorm in full force from regular Americans at town hall meetings in August was captured by the new media, YouTube, its origins a counter cultural techno-phenomenon now owned by millions of everyday people. YouTube along with all the other unrestrained ubiquitous web communications have replicated the hundreds, perhaps thousands of pamphlets and broadsheets from nearly every city, village and town in the pre-Revolutionary War period as chronicled by Bernard Bailyn in "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution."
The "Guns of August" so-to-speak and the September march on the Mall reaffirmed the unique American character mixing free expression and pragmatism-- knowing what works and being prepared to defend it. Regular folks countered the ideology of power, corruption, ineptitude and sacrifice of individual liberty, using their voice to reject the radical left's path to a grim collectivism.
"Don't Tread On Me" worked well enough for Benjamin Franklin in the 1770s. It is now enjoying a fitting reprise.
[This message has been edited by fierobear (edited 09-19-2009).]
well in the real world BECK is a NUT who is a modern version of tailgunner joe but without the power to indite people every once in a while he finds a problem but rants and raves and spins and lies far more then he a true help to making the nation a better place to live much like the rushed limball he speaks ten lies for every fact
and very like you and your buddys here fails to see any of the many faults of the totally failed neo-conned voodoo plan or the nasty corrupt men who are on the dark [right] wing
Please show proof, and not just say so of one lie. After all you were calling someone out the other day about the same thing.
almost all laws only require 50% plus one vote to pass along with a whitehouse approval so no it does not take two partys or the demo's to do
your side had many many years of total control and they blew it be a man and admitt that simple fact
Republicans only had total control for 4 years.
That's when the Democrats started to cry about "Rights of the Minorities" and "Power Sharing".
The Republicans made a huge mistake by being nice to the Democrats and allowed them to have some say during the short 4 years that Republicans had control.
Once it flipped... Democrats sshit on the Republicans and kept them out of everything.
Lesson learned: Never trust a Democrat. They'll screw you over and lie to you in a heart beat.
Why did Pyrthian post about this, when he was defending this exact type of behavior in another thread or two? Is it because he is being a hypocrite or a liberal? I guess it doesn't matter, as they both are the same.
Why did Pyrthian post about this, when he was defending this exact type of behavior in another thread or two? Is it because he is being a hypocrite or a liberal? I guess it doesn't matter, as they both are the same.
I think we decided that Pyrthian is a contrarian. He like to take up a side in a debate, and it's not necessarily always the same side.
Examining liberalism? I have a question; this has puzzled me for years. How is it you good lefties can do something students of the mind say is impossible, namely, hold two contradictory thoughts in your head at the same time. You do this all the time.
More and bigger government. The history of the world is that more and bigger government always deprives the individual of freedom and economic opportunity. Yet you refuse to accept this, claiming " it will work this time; our plan is different."
Conservatives are oppressors. Yet you are the ones who call names, spew the hatred, refuse to answer for your incivility, and divide people by race.
You never discuss why your answers fail.
You claim about abortion, " It's a woman's body and her choice." No, it isn't. That child is very carefully separated from the mother's body; the two bodies never exchange blood. The child has an entirely different genetic pattern from the mother, so it cannot possibly be her body. These two facts make it obvious to anyone with a fifth grade education that pregnancy is not about " just the woman."
How do you do this? Obviously, by not being grounded in reality, or even caring about reality and truth. Because its about power and control, isn't it? Its about the very idea of anyone running their own life being abhorrent to you. Yet the bulk of you will be enslaved by those you chose to give the power to. How hard is it for you to see that?
Examining liberalism? I have a question; this has puzzled me for years. How is it you good lefties can do something students of the mind say is impossible, namely, hold two contradictory thoughts in your head at the same time. You do this all the time.
More and bigger government. The history of the world is that more and bigger government always deprives the individual of freedom and economic opportunity. Yet you refuse to accept this, claiming " it will work this time; our plan is different."
Conservatives are oppressors. Yet you are the ones who call names, spew the hatred, refuse to answer for your incivility, and divide people by race.
You never discuss why your answers fail.
You claim about abortion, " It's a woman's body and her choice." No, it isn't. That child is very carefully separated from the mother's body; the two bodies never exchange blood. The child has an entirely different genetic pattern from the mother, so it cannot possibly be her body. These two facts make it obvious to anyone with a fifth grade education that pregnancy is not about " just the woman."
How do you do this? Obviously, by not being grounded in reality, or even caring about reality and truth. Because its about power and control, isn't it? Its about the very idea of anyone running their own life being abhorrent to you. Yet the bulk of you will be enslaved by those you chose to give the power to. How hard is it for you to see that?
While he doesn't address your specific questions, Evan Sayet's excellent lecture on "How Modern Liberals Think" at the Heritage Foundation a few years ago might give you some insight. It's very much worth listening to:
1. Vehemently, often fanatically opposing progress or reform die-hard, mossbacked See politics. 2. Clinging to obsolete ideas: backward, unprogressive.
The term reactionary is most often used to describe conservative politicians. I have purposely omitted the terms "conservative" and "ultra-conservative" from the choice of synonyms provided above. It seems that the modern liberal movement in American politics is the one "opposing progress or reform," especially regarding race relations. The reactionary inclinaton is most visible in the fulminations of the legacy television network news divisions and the editorial policies of the New York Times, the Washington Post and their acolytes.
Despite the metamorphosis of American culture in the 20th century provided by civil rights law, integration, and Affirmative Action policies in business, education and government, reactionary liberals continue to pretend that the United States remains locked in a quasi-Jim Crow embrace.
To their detriment, the reactionary liberal media has elevated former (one is tempted to use the word disgraced or at least disgraceful) President Jimmy Carter as their figurehead. The peanut narcissist's remarks reflect the refusal by reactionary liberals to accept that criticisms leveled against the policies of Barack Obama are substantive in nature:
"I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African-American," Carter said in an NBC interview. "Racism ... still exists, and I think it's bubbled up to the surface because of a belief among many white people, not just in the South but around the country, that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country." l
The refusal to accept objective criticism is just one of many traits shared by Carter and Obama. An unfounded faith in one's own moral superiority based on intellectual vanity and narcissism are shared by both Democrats as well. The circumstances leading to their unlikely elevation to the office of POTUS are quite similar too. Like Barack Obama, Carter was elected in a flurry of reactionary liberalism whipped up by a complicit media. While Obama floated in on a wave of Bush Derangement Syndrome, Jimmy Carter squeaked into office riding the lingering media feeding frenzy provided by the bloated corpse of the Watergated Nixon administration. The woeful legacy of Carter's Presidency is beginning to look like a template for the abject failure of the Obama Presidency:
"The former President is not content having left office with high inflation, high interest rates and high unemployment. Nor is he content with having signed into law the Community Reinvestment Act -- strengthened by President Bill Clinton -- which played a major roll in the eventual housing market meltdown. Nor is he content with having cut the legs from under the Shah of Iran, which led to the establishment of the Islamic theocracy in Iran -- a state that pursues a nuclear weapon, funds the terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah, and continues to undermine the fledgling democracy of Iraq. Nor is he content -- as ex-President -- with writing a book in which he likened the state of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians to South Africa under apartheid." (ibid)
No, Mr. Carter extends his moral opprobrium of criticisms of the Obama administration as a sort of smoke-screen to deflect fully legitimate questions about the honesty, integrity and ability of the sitting President and his assembled staff. Is it racism to criticize the identical failings in Obama that we abhorred in the Carter administration? The sitting President certainly has even higher unemployment than the Carter administration, while his monetary policies suggest that high inflation and higher interest rates are coming soon. Obama's policies toward Iran and the elimination of the missile shield for Eastern Europe couldn't be more simpatico with Carter's approach if Zbigniew Brzezinski were National Security Advisor again.
Carter and the reactionary liberal media that supports him clearly long for the days when the race card was trump. Prior to the development of the blogosphere and the creation of Fox News, media cries of racism or its doppelganger, McCarthyism, went unchallenged, or at least the challenges were unheard by most Americans. The rise of the alternative media assures that those who attempt to end debate with the charge of racism may just be dealt out of the next hand. Any chance of history casting a kinder, perhaps forgiving eye upon the miserable failure of the Jimmy Carter Presidency is gone. The peanut narcissist should have "gone gently into the night" of history without the preening self-importance and smug moralizing demonstrated every time he sees a microphone or picks up a pen.
With his strident assumption of moral superiority and defective judgment hogging national headlines, Mr. Carter has assured that he will be able to contemplate the derision he has earned before he shuffles off this mortal coil. Once again the reactionary liberal movement has over-played its hand and thereby rendered itself and its useful idiot, Jimmy Carter, into laughing stocks.
Sometimes in the history of a nation what appears to be an action that could lead to long term disaster may, in fact, be its long term salvation. A case in point: the election of Barack Obama as President and the Democrats in full control of the Congress. To be certain the far left domination of government was not a situation to be wished for but in a perverse way one that was necessary.
Over the past fifty years, regardless of who was in the White House or in charge of Congress, no one has been able to halt the incessant spread of left-wing radicalism in our institutions and the uncontrolled spending and growth of government. When a President as accomplished as Ronald Reagan was unable to do so it is apparent that no future Republican President or Congress, short of major national catastrophe, will ever be able to fully turn back this tide as they cannot overcome the apathy of the people and the hostility of a partisan media, entertainment establishment, academia and federal bureaucracies.
A long as the American people remained largely disengaged the damage done to the society as a whole and to the long term financial health of the country was unknown to the vast majority of the population. This indifference has begun to show some change as the reality of the nation's future comes into focus, but that reality has started to come to the fore only as the result of the policies being perused by a far left government.
Today, thanks to a confluence of two factors, the opportunity exists to reverse the course we have been on and change the political power structure in the country.
The first: the emergence of alternative news sources to once and for all break the stranglehold of the dissemination of news by the traditional outlets dominated by the left.
The second: The election of a radical left-wing President and a Congress controlled by the same radical element of the Democratic Party.
President Obama is an offspring of the 1960's radical movement. He has spent most of his life surrounded and tutored by members of this group. He is the culmination of the ideal stealth candidate able by his gift of rhetoric, race and good timing to ascend to the office of President. The left found, as Joe Biden put it "a clean and articulate" nominee with surface charm and charisma able to fool enough citizens into voting for him.
A trait common to those on the far left is an inability to have any humility; there is an intense conviction of superiority both intellectually and in their capability to rule the masses. The true believers are incapable of hiding their philosophy and, once elected, are convinced that nearly everyone does or should share their dedication to the power of a central government. Those that do not conform will be demonized. These extremists will move heaven and earth to achieve their ends regardless of any long term consequences and cannot avoid shouting from the rooftops what they are doing as tribute to themselves.
The determination of Obama and the Congress to exploit the financial and economic crisis in order to pass their radical agenda has had the effect of kicking over the rocks and exposing for all to see the undermining of the social and fiscal foundation of the nation by the left-wing radicals in Congress, the Administration and within many of our institutions.
Would the country be as aware of the following if not for an extremist government in power in Washington? Acorn and the "community organizer" groups have been revealed to be nothing more than corrupt partisan hacks exploiting the poor and the taxpayers. The unions and their leaders exposed as power hungry ideologues with no interest in the long term well-being of their members. The mainstream media's willingness to lose all credibility with the vast majority of the public with its not so subtle cheerleading for their preferred politician has become obvious to all. The Democratic Party, at one time the self-declared defender of the little guy, has openly declared war on small business and capitalism. The Democratic members of Congress have been revealed to be indifferent to the voters, incapable of reading bills and fully in the pockets of liberal special interests groups
Further the Administration has blithely declared a tripling of the national debt over the next 10 years as if it were immaterial. President Obama has championed "health care reform" and a "carbon tax" in an attempt to control the day-to-day lives of the American people. There are now 32 advisors (czars), to the President, most being left-wing ideologues, with the power to implement his agenda, none of whom have been approved by the Senate.
While the readers of the American Thinker, viewers of Fox News and the listeners to Rush Limbaugh may be expected to be aware of these factors, now with the backdrop of unfettered spending, the high jobless rates and the potential for national bankruptcy more and more of the general public has become aware of the radical nature of the present government.
President Obama and his Party have failed to understand the basic character of the American people and the many polls taken over the years showing this to be a right of center country. They further underestimated the power of the alternate media before they had an opportunity to silence it. While the timing may have been there to have to have a "moderate" Barack Obama elected President, the timing to turn the United States into a bastion of socialism was not. The infiltration of the various institutions by the left has not been in place long enough to change the character of the majority of the population and the use of the strategy of guilt to intimidate the American citizens has run its course, it has been overused.
To date the damage done has been considerable, but it is not irreversible. In essence Barack Obama and the Congress won their offices too early in the history of our nation to achieve all their objectives; by doing so and overreaching this left wing government has given the country an opportunity to awaken from its 50 year slumber and repair the foundation. Only a radical Presidency and Congress could have achieved this before it was too late. The only questions that remain: will the aroused and more knowledgeable populace continue to be aware and elect those that will make the changes necessary and will we as a nation take advantage of this potential reprieve?
The shepple will continue to follow their Messiah and his cohorts, as they can do no wrong in their eyes. They are too blinded and deaf to hear or see anything bad happening, they just ignore this outright. They won't realize how deep in shat they are, until it comes time to pay the piper, then it will be too late.
Wow. The left is getting "slaughtered" in Germany's elections. Even in strongly socialist Europe, they recognize that conservative/right wing politicians, and pro-business policies, are what makes for a better economy.
Rick Moran This may be a harbinger of things to come or, just as likely, a purely German reaction to the failed programs of the social democrats. But Chancellor Angela Merkel's return to power has come with a price. Her center right Christian Democrats saw their majority shrink but in a big surprise, the pro-business Free Democratic Party increased their share of deputies in the Bundestag and Merkel will be forced to make concessions to the FDP if she wants them in her governing coalition.
As America veers hard left, Germany and the rest of Europe appears ready to lurch rightward; and how ironic is that?
It should be noted that Germany - and Europe's "right" is hardly conservatism as we know it in the US. But perhaps most significant in these German election results was the "slaughter" of the social democrats and their leftist allies.
Claus Christian Malzahn writing in Spiegel Online:
Nevertheless, the big loser of Sunday's election is still undoubtedly the center-left Social Democrats. Their result is below even the historic low that the party suffered in 1953 and which took it years to recover from. After 11 years in government, the party, whose status as one of Germany's two main parties seems to be in question since Sunday's election, is going into the opposition. The party is only 10 percentage points ahead of its upstart far-left rival, the Left Party. The Left Party is the result of a merger between the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) -- the successor to the communist party that ruled East Germany -- and WASG, a group of trade unionists and disgruntled former SPD members based in western Germany, and has managed to significantly eat into the SPD's share of the vote since it was founded in 2007.
The mood that is now gripping the SPD could easily be described as panic. Already on Sunday, Frank-Walter Steinmeier staked his claim to be the party's floor leader in parliament. By doing so, he wants to send out a message of continuity during this hour of worst possible defeat. But the developments on Sunday night look less like continuity than a break with the past. Germans are experiencing the end of an SPD as they have known it since the 1960s.
Right of center parties are also gaining ground in most of the rest of Europe and have been for more than a year. Perhaps more than "conservative," these parties are seen as "pro-business" and in severe economic downturns, it makes sense to elect people who will promote policies to help companies start hiring again and get the economy moving.
Might this be a recipe for success in 2010 for Republicans? Time will tell whether the GOP can get its act together in order to come up with a coherent message that will convince the American people that Republicans have the ideas that will get us out of this mess created by too much spending, too much taxing, too much government interference in the economy, and too much Obama.
Angela Merkel squeaked out a plurality in the German Bundestag four years ago and formed, along with the leftist Social Democrat Party, a grand coalition to govern Germany. Those conservatives who expected a major change in Germany were bound to be disappointed: the parties of the left in Germany formed an actual majority in the Bundestag, and Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) could not form a government to actually move Germany away from collectivism with the market-oriented Free Democrats.
All that changed on September 27. The German general election followed almost exactly the script written by several years of polling data in Germany. The Christian Democrats substantially increased their strength in the Bundestag and, in alliance with the also robust Free Democrat Party, Merkel can form a right of center government in Germany. The Christian Democrats remain the strongest party in the Bundestrat, that part of the German national legislature which reflects the prerogatives and powers of German states. This means that Merkel can now pursue those policies that she actually feels will help revitalize the private sector in Germany and that German foreign policy, traditionally the province of the Free Democrats in the CDU/FDP coalition, will be at least as sympathetic to us as in the past government.
Many pundits will, quite rightly, argue that the victory of the CDU/CSU and Merkel in Germany, like the pending victory of the Conservative Party and Cameron in the United Kingdom, means something very different than a conservative victory in America. These pundits are right. A "conservative" party in Europe is not nearly as conservative as a conservative party in America. But there is another point to these European elections: the left commands a rapidly shrinking percentage of the voters in European nations.
The percentage of the vote which the Social Democrat Party received in this German general election was the lowest since the end of the Second World War (or the lowest percentage in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany.) The historic left, the socialist left of Barack Obama and the Democrat Party, is wildly unpopular in the most important democracy in Europe. The Merkel message of lower taxes, nuclear energy, and market solutions to economic problems resonated with voters.
What is true in Germany is also true in other major democracies in Europe. The Conservative Party in Britain has been winning local elections all over the United Kingdom and the polls for the last two years have shown that Gordon Brown and his Labour Party will receive historically low percentages of the vote in the next British general election, sometime before next July.
The disillusionment that Europeans feel for old style socialism seems clear. Whether right of center governments will be able to transform electoral majorities into real change is another matter. Certainly Maggie Thatcher was able to do just that in Britain twenty years ago. Americans, after eight years of Bush Republicanism know the perils of having a nominally "conservative" government which often tries to pander to the left.
Conservatives should not expect miracles out of Merkel. She, and Germany as a whole, wants good relations with Russia. That is not a failure of conservatism in Germany but rather a reflection of how Germans across the board view Russia after the end of communism and the liberation of the Warsaw Pact nations. That is not good for America, but Russia -- which has only half the area and population of the old Soviet Union and has none of the Warsaw Pact satellites, is not a real military threat to America.
But there is no doubt that Merkel is as good as America can expect from Germany in supporting Israel (the German Chancellor was granted the unusual honor of addressing, as a head of government and not a head of state, the Knesset, last year.) Schroeder, the Social Democrat who ran Germany before Merkel, went out of his way to poke America in the eye; Merkel shows no such animus. Angela Merkel has also been portrayed as a right-wing extremist on social issues, although in American political terms, she is definitely in the middle of the road on abortion, gay rights, and similar social issues.
Anyone who belongs to the CDU (Christian Democratic Party) or the CSU (Christian Social Union -- the Bavarian counterpart of the CDU) is overtly religious, and although it is easy to overstate how much this affects the policies and philosophies of the CDU-CSU, the parties to the left of it all almost palpably hostile to religion. The SDP and its ancestor parties going back to the beginning of the Twentieth Century were overtly atheistic.
The victory of Merkel, her party, and her party's Free Democrat allies is not a triumph of American conservatism in Europe, but it is an emphatic and clear rejection of the political alternatives to religious belief, individual liberty, and free economic markets. We are not winning in democratic elections around the world, yet. But, in many places, our enemies have stopped winning. Sunday was another blow to European leftism.
Looks like Obama's new Regulatory Czar - the guy who will be proposing regulations on a variety of subjects - wants to be able to have a "chilling effect" on stuff said on the internet that the left doesn't like...
Rick Moran If you did not support the president's trip to Denmark to lobby for the Olympics coming to Chicago, you are an unpatriotic moron.
If you opposed bringing the games here, you hate America.
Those are the deep thoughts brought to us by the netnuts in blogdom and even the White House , who equated RNC Chair Michael Steele's opposition to Obama's trip (that 43% of Americans opposed also) with not "rooting" for America.
Now some might think it hypocritical for the left to point to anyone and say they hate America or wish America to fail. Given the incredible crap George Bush had to put up for 8 years from this crew, it might behoove our lefty friends to recall their own cheering on the insurgency in Iraq, gloating over American casualties, and generally acting as if losing the war would be a good thing.
And when they protest a bit too much that it's simply not true, remind them of what Gary Kamiya wrote in Salon Magazine as our troops were rolling to victory over Saddam's army: (Via Ace )
I have a confession: I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong. Wished for the Iraqis to be more nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I'm not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people who oppose the war have told me they have had identical feelings. Some of this is merely the result of pettiness -- ignoble resentment, partisan hackdom, the desire to be proved right and to prove the likes of Rumsfeld wrong, irritation with the sanitizing, myth-making American media. That part of it I feel guilty about, and disavow. But some of it is something trickier: It's a kind of moral bet-hedging, based on a pessimism not easy to discount, in which one's head and one's heart are at odds. Many antiwar commentators have argued that once the war started, even those who oppose it must now wish for the quickest, least bloody victory followed by the maximum possible liberation of the Iraqi people. But there is one argument against this: What if you are convinced that an easy victory will ultimately result in a larger moral negative -- four more years of Bush, for example, with attendant disastrous policies, or the betrayal of the Palestinians to eternal occupation, or more imperialist meddling in the Middle East or elsewhere?
Lefty blogs today are full of accusations that the right hates America and hopes Obama fails. How one can connect the two - tying the person of the president to whether one loves their country or not - escaped much of the left for the last 8 years. They have suddenly discovered that they love America in the same way that the right does - at least as long as Obama is the president. So let's allow them their spite. No one takes their charge that the right hates America seriously - I mean, really now. Who are they kidding? They just spent the last 8 years telling the right that their blind love of America was destroying us. Now all of a sudden the right hates the country? Phooey. I devoutly wish that the left's discovery that they love America the same way that conservatives love her will be a permanent thing. But somehow, I think the next president - whoever she may be - will cause liberals to revert to type and see our flaws all to clearly while ignoring our virtues.
A new, conservative friend cracks up when she hears my phone message. As a therapist, I'm required to state, "If this is a psychiatric emergency, please call 911."
Roaring with laughter, she says, "Robin, the whole country is having a psychiatric emergency!"
And she's right, because people running this country are off: off balance, off-world, off-putting, off their meds.
Gallows humor, a knot in your stomach when Obama speaks, poor sleep. Your body is telling you that something is wrong.
Even out here, things are starting to feel spooky. While it's always weird central in Berkeley, now there's a malaise in the air.
Yes, there are plenty of people so far into the communist schtick, they would gladly sacrifice their children, their granny, and their life savings for the Left.
But most liberals still want their houses, jobs, Hondas and iPods. When they voted for Obama, they weren't giving a thumbs up for the country to go the way of Ché.
So there's a strange, foreboding vibe in these parts; that creepy feeling you get when you know there's bad news ahead.
Many liberals look dazed and confused because they have no language, no information, no way of understanding what in the world is going on.
Interestingly, there's this eerie silence about Obama. You don't hear a peep about him. Or course, liberals are still foaming at the mouth about Sarah Palin, tea baggers, birthers, and all things conservative.
But adulation for Obama: Missing in Action. A telling sign: the life size black and white cardboard doll of Obama in a storefront near my office has been taken down. Where did it go -- to the local recycling center with other discarded Obamabilia?
Because I'm a psychotherapist, I'm intrigued by what goes on inside and outside. People not only suffer because of neurotic minds, but because of what people do to us when they abuse their power.
The family dramas, problems at work, or dysfunction in D.C. unnerve us. As Presidential nominee, Michael Dukakis, indelicately put it, "Fish rots from the head down."
We have people at the highest echelons of our government who may be rotting this nation. They espouse twisted notions of humanity, like de-evolution and forced sterilization. They eat, drink, and sleep revenge.
They are throwing much of this country, at least those of us who are paying attention, into a psychiatric emergency -- into trauma.
They dominate. They control. They terrorize.
They are abusers.
Which is no surprise if you understand where Obama comes from. He was not schooled in the Martin Luther King, Jr. tradition of unity and nonviolence, as most naive liberals thought.
Obama was educated in the Malcolm X way, the American political mafiosi: the Weatherman, Black Panthers, Black nationalists.
What were these groups' lesson plans? "Blue eyed devils," "Jewish dogs," "By any means necessary."
While the media and schools have whitewashed history, these groups were filled to the rafters with gangsters. Today's young radicals use sociopaths like Huey P. Newton as their role models, not the beneficent King.
So when Sarah Palin's life is threatened for speaking the truth, this is the work of thugs.
When Michael Savage is banned in Britain for passionately defending our country, this is persecution.
When citizens receive death threats for deigning to ask a question about health care, this is terror.
Some people think that Obama is just a harmless sheep in wolf's clothing because he doesn't raise his voice. If his underlings cause mayhem, well, that's not his fault.
But the best and the brightest of abusers never get their hands dirty.
Their work is done through a look, a blank stare, a grin, a devilish laugh. They can incite trouble without lifting a finger.
So if you feel uncomfortable, and tense, and scared, this is why. This is what abusers do.
They cause terror in us because of something old and something new. The old: memories get triggered of past trauma: our bad tempered parent, or abusive spouse, or bully boss.
The body remembers. Suddenly you are 6 or l3 or 30 again, and you may respond with the same helplessness and anger and panic.
But there's also new trauma, what's happening right underneath our noses; the never ending assaults on our freedom.
The daily force feeding of leftist ideology designed to control every aspect of our lives. The health care rationing that threatens our families. The strangling of business through Big Brother intrusions.
Joining with dictators; yawning when Iran and North Korea threaten; abandoning our allies. Indoctrinating our children and trying to turn them into the little Benedict Arnold's.
The trauma of Obama -- it's all around us, it may be in us if we're having symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder (for instance, nightmares, intrusive images, numbing, physical symptoms, problems sleeping or eating).
But this isn't post traumatic, because there is no post here, and that keeps much of the nation in trauma/survival mode: fight, flight, freeze.
Fight: we're fighting back nonviolently through active participation;
Flight: we fantasize about fleeing;
Freeze: we can become frozen with fear, like a deer in the headlights.
Or a fourth reaction to danger, fawning: cow towing to Obama by doing his bidding. A Stockholm Syndrome, where the captive aligns with the abuser in hopes of winning favors.
There's a final "F," the most formidable one, the one taking root and flourishing all across the country: it's faith. Faith in a Higher Power or ourselves or the American system or its people.
Ordinary citizens rising up, like a phoenix. This awakening might prove to be Obama's most enduring legacy.
The miracle of a soccer mom attending a protest for the very first time; an elderly man bravely stepping up to the mike at a Town Hall; strangers forming life long bonds at Tea Parties or online, at sites like American Thinker. People like me snapping out of the leftist trance.
In time, the Trauma of Obama may be overshadowed by the Mock of Barack: people speaking up, from Bozeman to Boise to Boston -- and refusing to become one of Obama's hench men or victims.
When I behold the courage and dignity of my fellow citizens, I recall a powerful Buddhist tale:
The cruelest, most violent Samurai in Japan decides he wants to become enlightened. He bursts into the home of an esteemed Zen Master and demands that the Master teach him how to become enlightened.
The Zen Master looks deeply into his eyes and says, "No. You are a dirty, vicious Samurai. I will not teach you."
Enraged, the Samurai yanks out his sword and places it right at the Zen Master's neck. He hollers, "Do you have any idea who I am? I am the cruelest Samurai in the world. I can cut your throat and not blink an eye."
Without skipping a beat, the Master calmly responds, "Do you have any idea who I am? I can let you slit my throat and not blink an eye."
The Samurai falls to his knees, sobbing, overcome by the presence of a man mightier than his sword.
Those of us who are paying attention know the truth. With our eyes and hearts and minds wide open, we see them; we're on to them.
Emboldened by faith and righteous anger, we confront the Powers that Be.
Carrying our children's future; sheltered by the strong arms of our forbearers; awash with grace; we speak in one thunderous voice.
