While America Eats, Russia Knocks
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008From Fausta, here is what’s happening with our “good friend” Russia:
- Naval maneuvers in the Caribbean
A potential Russo-Venezuelan OPEC-like agreement for natural gas
Trade agreements throughout South America with Russia delivering food, medicine, and NUCLEAR material.
Russia does nothing accidentally. Their Georgian act of war was timed while the world was looking toward China. This action is pure, unadulterated aggression, albeit rather passive.
I wonder what is Barack Obama’s comprehensive Russian plan? Sure hope he has one. He’s being bullied already.
Cross-posted at Right Wing News and The Houston Chronicle
Obama Flips The Bird….Again–UPDATED
Monday, November 3rd, 2008Well, he’s done it before:
What is wrong with him? It’s like he’s twelve. He could be the President, it would be nice if he acted like it.
UPDATED:
For the doubters out there, puhleeeeze. The Anchoress says (and this is a long quote but only part of what she was saying and it’s worth reading the whole thing):
What a statesman! What a leader! What a uniter! While “congratulating” Clinton on running a tough race, he counterbalances graciousness with an infantile, adolescent gesture. While “congratulating” McCain on running a tough race, he counterbalances graciousness, undercuts it, actually, with an infantile and adolescent gesture. How immature.
And they’ve told us for the last 8 years that President Bush was “the frat boy,” the “child prince.” Unreal.
This second flipping off by a man who wants to rule the world tells us something important about Obama; it tells us that he is uncomfortable with the gracious or generous act.That’s an important thing to know about someone. We’ve seen Obama’s inability to be generous, before - when McCain introduced his running mate to the nation.
I’m not talking about fiscal or monetary generosity. Some are mocking Obama for returning to his under-the-bus Auntie only as much money as she has ‘donated’ to his campaign, and not a penny more, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about the generosity of spirit which a president needs if he is going to actually work for all the people of his nation, and not simply “some” of them.
It’s the generosity of spirit a president needs if he is going to be dealing with (admittedly only a few) stragglers in the press who do not already bow down in obesience to him and all of his ideas.
It’s the generosity of spirit a president needs to be able to allow his nation the freedom to speak their minds, ask questions, and even to object and to demonstrate.
Oy. What else is there to say? It’s embarrassing.
Cross-posted at RightWingNews.com
The Real Issue With Barack Obama’s Aunt–UPDATED
Saturday, November 1st, 2008The AP reveals today that Barack Obama’s aunt is 1) living in a Boston project 2) living in the United States illegally 3) living on public assistance and 4) donated to his campaign (which is illegal for foreigners to do). I hope the press leaves this poor woman alone. She is, no doubt, not the only illegal alien living off of the American taxpayer.
What I find interesting is how much it reveals about Barack Obama. In absence of his experience, we are told to vote for him because of his spectacular judgment. This episode demonstrates terrible judgment. What was Barack Obama thinking?
UPDATED:
Obama says he didn’t know:
She attended Obama’s swearing-in to the U.S. Senate in 2004, but campaign officials said Obama provided no assistance in getting her a tourist visa and doesn’t know the details of her stay. The campaign said he last heard from her about two years ago when she called saying she was in Boston, but he did not see her there.
How is it that a proud Auntie wouldn’t have contact with the potential future President of the United States? It makes no sense. She donated to the cause. She didn’t contact him otherwise?
It’s bad enough to say she’s a beloved Aunt in your book and then look the other way at her status. It’s worse to say she’s a beloved Aunt and not maintain contact for a couple years.
Barack Obama’s Friends & Beliefs
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008Sorry to beat the drum, but Bill Ayers and Barack Obama are good friends. Period. Here’s more from a victim of Ayers:
One thing that strikes me with all this, is that with the cacophony of news and the news cycle, it’s impossible to keep everything straight. This clip was five months ago. Since Barack Obama seems to want to obfuscate and disavow his relationships with all these people, I thought I’d put his friends together in one post.
Here’s Jeremiah Wright who married Barack Obama, who baptized his children and has been Obama’s “mentor”:
Here’s Franklin Raines, Barack Obama’s financial adviser to the campaign. If you’ll recall, he was the CEO of Freddie Mac who raked in over $90 million (this video is rough, but informative):
And here are the Republicans seeking to better regulate Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae. You’ll also see prominent Democrats who are calling the firing of Franklin Raines a “lynching”.
Obama wasn’t in the United States Senate to have much of a record. His record in Illinois was liberal and par for the Chicago machine. And here, Obama is taken to task for his views on infanticide and why valuing innocent life is important in principle and how it will affect other decisions:
Barack and Michelle Obama talk about pie-sharing, spreading the wealth and “neighborliness”:
This election is about a couple things: the economy and judgment. On both accounts, Barack Obama has the instincts of a secular socialist. He has the friends of a still true-blue radical. And I think Biden is right: Barack Obama will be tested to see what he’s made of. Americans can’t say they didn’t know.
The Terror Is Almost Past…Hold On Shrieking, Frightened, Huddled Masses
Wednesday, October 15th, 2008James Lileks makes me laugh and during this overwrought, handwringing, gut-wrenching, IBS-inducing political season, I’ve come to value laughter most of all. He says:
Unrelated fun around the world: “great terror plot building up,” UK spokesperson says. I long for the day when this becomes a legitimate statement by a concerned, engaged official who is working closely with the respected, trusted President of the United States, who rarely mentions terrorism except when it’s absolutely necessary – as opposed the nutwad we have now, who forced everyone to install telescreens and required us to wear 3D glasses so we could jump up and shriek in fear when a turban-wearing jack-in-the-box sprang into our living room every fortnight. I just can’t wait to stop living in constant fear, and start living in the era of Prudent Concern. It’s coming!
The last eight years of terror-stricken terrorizing have been terrifying to endure. Thankfully, if Gaia permits, Al Gore intones, and the axis of evil is righted, I mean lefted, once again, the tides will rise, the hurricane winds cease and become a mild zephyr and the terror will be gone.
21 days until the voting by dead people and criminals gets counted. Only a few months before this despotic regime passes.
Can I get a hallelujah?
Maggie’s Farm: Understanding ACORN
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008Maggie’s Farm: Understanding ACORN
Understanding ACORN.
Barack Obama Is A Socialist If……..–UPDATED
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008Forget Jeff Foxworthy, that’s too low-brow, Rethuglican humor for ya’ll. Enter the erudite Dr. Obama.
You might be a socialist…..
……if you believe in the redistribution of wealth. Obama said to a small business owner yesterday and Rachel Lucas reports:
“It’s not that I wanna punish your success, I just wanna make sure that everybody behind you, that they have a chance at success, too. I think we need to spread the wealth around.“
You might be a socialist…
……if you believe in “refundables”. Says Ace:
How does he intend to spread the wealth? By increasing the size of federal programs?
Well, that’s a start. But I’m afraid he’s going to spread it around more directly — by taking money away from people who pay taxes to directly give it to those who don’t pay taxes in the form of a “tax cut.”
A tax cut? For people who already don’t pay taxes? That’s not a tax cut, is it? That’s more like a… well, a government handout. It’s a welfare check.
Not so.
Obama prefers to call it “refundables.” Even though you’re not being “refunded” anything, you’re just being sent a thousand or two dollars from someone else’s tax payments.
Here’s a little Wiki for ya’ll who were deprived of a Harvard education and must use online references to educate yourself:
Socialists mainly share the belief that capitalism unfairly concentrates power and wealth into a small section of society who control capital, and creates an unequal society. All socialists advocate the creation of an egalitarian society, in which wealth and power are distributed more evenly, although there is considerable disagreement among socialists over how, and to what extent this could be achieved.[1]
What part of this definition does Barack Obama disagree with, actually? You see, when the government taxes a company disproportionately and redistributes the money made, it is taking profits of the company and essentially controlling how the money is spent. No doubt, the business owners have limited choices because they cannot choose how to spend the money they earn.
As I have written before, this government behavior punishes success. If it gets bad enough, people stop producing, hiring, and do business elsewhere. The POOR and WORKING CLASS people lose what jobs they have, suck more off the government teat, the government needs more tax revenue and creates an even more punitive business environment. See Michigan as socialism is stupid “Exhibit A”.
Leftists who protest at the socialist label are being obtuse. They know that all socialists are not the same, that it’s a broad category, and that Barack Obama certainly is not a Capitalism champion. So what is he, if not a socialist?
Says Investor’s Business Daily:
“I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”
He certainly does, and his unguarded statement to a voter in a key swing state is socialist economics distilled to its simplest terms.Eliminating small business capital gains taxes — whatever the details would be (and you can bet it would be a fraction of total private investment) — will not rescue the middle class from the job losses of a high-tax Obama administration planning to spend an extra $293 billion annually. It does, however, cunningly deaden charges that Obama is camouflaging a socialist agenda.
The other components of his so-called rescue, lovingly described by the New York Times as “proposals to spur new jobs, to give Americans penalty-free access to retirement savings to help them through the downturn, to urge a 90-day moratorium on home foreclosures and to lend money to strapped local and state governments” are worded to sound equally innocuous. But a close look tells another story.
His $3,000 income-tax credit for each new full-time employee hired by businesses is an obvious anti-outsourcing incentive likely to increase business costs, of which we can expect plenty more — of a directly punitive nature — in an Obama administration. He would replace the judgment of banks with that of the federal government regarding when or if to foreclose. And he wants the Federal Reserve and the Treasury to bail out spendthrift state and local governments.
And one thing that has been patently absurd is the whole 95% of people will get tax cuts. It makes no sense. Is Obama really saying that taking the money of the top 5% of American wage earners will make up for what is lost everywhere else? It makes for a good soundbite but it sounds crazy…and yet, people must believe it. The Wall Street Journal notes:
There’s another catch: Because Mr. Obama’s tax credits are phased out as incomes rise, they impose a huge “marginal” tax rate increase on low-income workers. The marginal tax rate refers to the rate on the next dollar of income earned. As the nearby chart illustrates, the marginal rate for millions of low- and middle-income workers would spike as they earn more income.
Some families with an income of $40,000 could lose up to 40 cents in vanishing credits for every additional dollar earned from working overtime or taking a new job. As public policy, this is contradictory. The tax credits are sold in the name of “making work pay,” but in practice they can be a disincentive to working harder, especially if you’re a lower-income couple getting raises of $1,000 or $2,000 a year. One mystery — among many — of the McCain campaign is why it has allowed Mr. Obama’s 95% illusion to go unanswered.
The government controls the money. And when the government controls money, it controls the citizen. Their choices are limited. Their lives constrict to the size the government deems adequate. They are boiled like frogs. Socialists count on the fact that the average person will be swayed by the class warfare rhetoric and ignore the fine print.
“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” - Winston Churchill
Obama’s hubris is that he believes socialism just hasn’t been done “right”. Never mind that it never works no matter the iteration. He’s going to try anyway. We can’t say we didn’t know ahead of time.
UPDATED:
Maxed Out Mama lays it out as usual:
Keep in mind that incomes will be trending lower for the next couple of years, due to that little thingamabobble I call a “recession”. Median income is still around $50,000. American households earning less than $30,000 are about 29% of the total. Your subsidies and credits should be mostly aimed at this group. If you want to give 95% of Americans a tax break, that means you are going to be taxing the remaining 5% monumentally more, beginning with household incomes at around $175,000.
For all intents and purposes, raising taxes that much on this group is impossible. Let’s round that group to about 4.5 million, and say that’s equivalent to 9 million individuals. That 9 million individuals would collectively have to pay over 500 billion more in taxes to pay for the refundable portion to the lower brackets. A billion has 3 more zeros than a million, so (500 billion/9 million = 500,000,000,000/9,000,000 = $55,556 per such taxpayer. Needless to say, you are not going to be taxing a person making $175,000 an ADDITIONAL $55,000 if you expect this person to keep working, much less tax a household making $200,000 an ADDITIONAL $110,000, so you are going to have to shift most of that onto much higher income persons.
Cross-posted at Right Wing News
Boomers & Barack
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008How much of the Barack Obama lovefest is rooted in Baby Boomer narcissism? That’s the question that occurred to me while contemplating why so many in the generation ahead of mine seemed so excited and irrationally so, about Barack Obama or even Hillary Clinton becoming president. The worship takes turns both comical and disturbing. The mindless devotion has undermined any notion of media fairness–maybe irreparably so. Yet they don’t care.
The quick answer: Boomers view Barack Obama as the symbolic fulfillment of an ideology put forth when they were conducting love-ins and peace protests (that weren’t very peaceful). Fighting for civil rights and equal rights and pacifism and free love, the radicals and idealists dreamed of a future where a person like Barack Obama exists. Their efforts resulted in a man like Barack Obama.
Barack Obama is the child of Kenyan socialist and sociologist who was a 17 year old teen-mother (soft treatment here)–an idealogue and an intellectual. He is biracial. His parents divorced. And he was raised, for a time, by a single mother. He received an elite education. He was schooled in the best institutions of higher learning.
In short, his success illustrates the rightness of the Left’s ideology. Barack Obama is a confirmation of the hippies’ hopes of change. Before the Boomers pass from this life into the next, they want to see the evidence of their rightness. Nothing would be better than a man like Barack Obama as president. The point is, it doesn’t have to be Barack Obama–the who doesn’t matter so much. It’s what he represents that matters. Barack Obama represents a physical manifestation of what the Boomers were talkin’ about when they were talkin’ ’bout my generation.
The only thing standing between the hope and changiness came from a Boomer herself, Hillary Clinton. Both candidates represent a struggle to overcome prejudice and discrimination. Both carry with them the symbolism of a generation’s dreams coming to fruition. This explains the outrage by the women following Hillary who were offended by the Obama campaign’s shameless sexism and misogyny. That the Left employs homophobic and misogynstic tactics doesn’t surprise conservatives. In fact, it was amusing to watch the identity politics crowd tie themselves into knots trying not to state the obvious.
Still, it is clear that for the Boomers, this fight feels as real as when they were 18, wide-eyed and hoping to change the world. For the next generation, the Generation X’ers, the angst and eagerness doesn’t feel as acute. In fact, in a world where, as Kenny Rogers sings, the best rapper is white and the best golfer is black, American culture feels pretty darn post-racial and post-gender. At least that seems true to anyone 45 and younger.
One reason Barack Obama receives little press scrutiny and in fact, loads of press-love, is because so many of these pundits cut their teeth on identity politics and dreamed an impossible dream. Well, this election it’s possible. Barack Obama’s rhetoric about this time and this place and he’s the dream, blah, blah, blah, means so much to them because it’s about them. Their marches mattered. Their free love is justified. Single parents can raise great kids. Education changes lives.
Of course the truth is far more nuanced. And while no one is claiming that sexism or racism is non-existent, it surely doesn’t define American culture these days. It’s interesting to note the generational differences. When charges of racism have been lobbed at Governor Palin she ignores them and goes after Obama as a peer. Joe Biden in contrast, looked perpetually pained interacting with Sarah Palin. It’s a generational thing that revealed that he saw a woman first and then a politician. Most younger people see both Palin and Obama as politicians who happen to be a white woman and a bi-racial man.
For Boomers, electing Barack Obama is about them, not him. They feel so invested not in the candidate, but in themselves. These politics are personal and pathologically so. Should Obama lose, his supporters lose a chance to manifest their dreams for a generation. They act as though the opportunity would never come again, but that’s patently absurd. The fact is, the hippies want to drive the multi-culti, equal rights, liberal car while they’re still young enough to enjoy it. Barak Obama is just one more hippie-to-yuppie acquisition. It’s all about them.
I Have Not Written About ACORN Much, But This Has Gotten Ridiculous–UPDATED
Friday, October 10th, 2008When there is just so much electoral monkey-business badness, it gets overwhelming. Rachel Lucas runs down the whole sordid mess and you need to read about it because informed voters actually read. It’s nice if they shower, work and brush their teeth, too. But ACORN wants just such voters–electing Obama hinges on crack heads and prisoners and dead people and big name celebrities getting out to vote over and over and over again.
Let me simplify it for you:
ACORN (Obama teaches them tactics back in the day)
|
ACORN Nailed for Fraud throughout the years
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Barack Obama Pays $800,000 to ACORN (technically a front company with the Exact Same Board of Directors as ACORN)
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Most dead, unqualified, duplicated voters ever registered
Result? Stolen election. Remember, what they accuse you of is what they’re up to. So the screeching over “George Bush stole the election” for the last eight years pretty much indicates where their heads ar at.
Updated: Instapundit has more and loads of links. This is ugly.
My brother brought up a good question: Will law enforcement and the courts even be able to wade through these misdeeds by the time the election rolls around? And if a suit is brought, what will happen?
And is 1.5 million votes a landslide? Or, should we assume that the election was actually “close”, as in McCain won, if there is anything less than a 1.5 million win for Obama?
Long Quote from Joan of Arghhhh!:
ACORN’s ends will not be diminished by the fraud. They’ve known all along that they’d be called out on this fraud. Likely they are surprised it took this long. In the meantime, hey! they get lots of extra votes for their guy.
In the end-game, it’s about frustrating bureaucracy with paperwork. It’s an old and proven Marxist ploy, and is outlined in Obama’s reading materials. If you can’t beat the system fair and square, then use its own rules to defeat it.
ACORN is required by law to turn in all applications, even ones they suspect to be fraudulent. They are absolved from the actions of individuals filling out paperwork, so if charges are forthcoming against ACORN it will be more on the order of intent to incite others to commit fraud. But I’m not an expert on this.
The anarchy is almost complete when you start hearing people saying, “who knows what’s true anymore?” “It’s too complicated.”
Meanwhile, watch the continuing complexity of these “community organizations” and action groups and their chaotic demands, redirects, and obfuscations.
The goal is simple: chaos and distrust. Get people to distrust every election. Incite fear in old institutions. Destabilize everything economic and politic. In confusion there is opportunity for someone to take the power and calm things down. Enter Obama.
Dr. Melissa
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