Hilarious Vid - Obama Lets The Daze Go By

Can you imagine what someone could do with 'Burning Down The House'?

Hee-hee!

Cheerfully swiped from Ace

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Obama bin-Lyin'...On The New Jobless Benefits Bill

If you remember, I wrote Monday about Obama's use of the ol' class warfare rhetoric to avoid answering the simple question posed by the Republicans on his new Jobless benefits bill. Namely, how are we going to pay for it?

The Democrats and the White House have not even bothered to submit a budget for this year to a vote, but simply 'deemed it passed', so this was not exactly a frivolous question.

But..we now have the real answer: hey, we'll just add that $34 billion to the deficit and the National Debt.

On hearing that, the Republicans reminded Obama about his remarks the last time this came up, after he signed a previous extension of unemployment benefits November 6th of last year.

"Now, it's important to note that the bill I signed will not add to our deficit. It is fully paid for, and so it is fiscally responsible," he said.

So before, Obama said that an extension of unemployment benefits needed to be paid for fully, but now, with the midterms looming...eh, what's another $34 billion of debt?

The reporter on this story, Mark Knoller says he asked White House Spokeshole Robert Gibbs about this, and Gibbsy said he would checkout what Zero said about this back in November and get back to him...which of course, Gibbsy never did.

No surprise there, hmmm?

Remember what I said about how to tell whether the current occupant of the White House is lying....are his lips moving?

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Hysterically Funny Vid: Keef Olbermann Compares Shirley Sherrod To Dreyfuss Case!

I know, it's Glenn Beck but even so - their send up of Keefie is too laugh-out-loud funny!

As far as Olbermouth goes, as far as I'm concerned, comparing what happened to Alfred Dreyfus with what happened to Shirley Sherrod is frankly anti-Semitic. There's no comparison between the two.

What a sad buffoon of a man he is.

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My Latest At American Thinker: "Government By Diktat"

Barack Hussein Obama signed the ill-named Financial 'Reform' bill today, a massive tax increase and socialist piece of legislation Zero had the nerve to sign in the Ronald Reagan Building.

Increasingly, we face government by diktat at the expense of our freedom, and my latest at American Thinker takes this head on, using ObamaCare and the financial 'reform' bill as prime examples:

The Obama administration and its Democrat allies in Congress have been able to impose serious detrimental changes on America virtually by fiat, with comparatively little notice. I found out about it in an innocuous enough-seeming story...just a short piece in the New York Times, way back in the paper on page a-16, in a story that purports to be about health care. Note the opening paragraph:

The White House on Wednesday issued new rules requiring health insurance companies to provide free coverage for dozens of screenings, laboratory tests and other types of preventive care.

This means no more co-pays or deductibles for things like lab work, tests, screenings, routine vaccinations, prenatal care, and regular wellness visits for children and infants. It even extends to counseling for smoking obesity and AIDS tests.

But the most important thing is where these "new rules" originated. There is a whole slew of newly created government bureaucracies in both ObamaCare and the new financial reform bill that have no legislative oversight and are answerable to no one except the White House. They can arbitrarily decide to stick their hands in the pockets of private businesses as they deem fit with new rules and regulations, exactly as they're doing here.

But wait -- isn't making this kind of preventive care free supposed to reduce costs by making it more affordable and accessible?

Aside from the fact that argument ignores the constitutional principles involved (government taking of private property, for starters), it's also factually bogus. Never forget that, as the Obama administration itself finally admitted, ObamaCare is designed to be a tax bill and a transfer of wealthto people the regime feels are more deserving.



What happens when you own a hot dog stand and announce you're giving away free hot dogs every day, all you can eat? Everybody shows up, including people who normally don't bother with hot dogs or who choose to spend their money elsewhere. Hey, why not? It's free, isn't it?



You get a lot more "business" -- but it doesn't put a single cent in your pocket. As a matter of fact, it substantially ups your cost of doing business because of the increased use of utilities, materials, wear and tear on your facilities, and increased payroll because your employees have to work longer and harder to satisfy the new demand. Some of them actually quit because of the increased workload and stress and just do something else.



This increased "business" will also undoubtedly affect your quality, as you must constantly look for ways to buy cheaper materials and hire cheaper labor to try and survive and offset what it's costing you to stay in business.



Even worse, your real customers, the people who used to like to come to your stand because you provided quality hot dogs at a very reasonable price with good, friendly service, start avoiding your business like the plague. Because it now takes literally hours to get a hot dog from a rude and harassed staff, parking is a nightmare because of the crowds, and the hot dogs themselves now smell and taste like cheap, canned cat food.



Substitute your local HMO, Medical Insurance plan, or health care provider for the hot dog stand, and health care for the hot dogs, and you've just gotten a preview of what's going to happen to your health care...only with two important differences.

Read it all here

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Watcher's Council Nominations - Ra-aa-aa-cism Edition

The Watcher's Council is a group of some of the most incisive blogs in the`sphere. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one of their own and one from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council.Then we vote on the best posts, with the results appearing on Friday.

This week, we have a special treat for you as Tom White of VA Right joins our coven. You'll love his debut post on Why the TEA Party Should Ignore the NAACP.

So, let's see what we have this week....

Council Submissions

• VA Right – Why the TEA Party Should Ignore the NAACP
• Rhymes With Right – Some Observations On The Utah Illegal Immigrant List
• The Colossus of Rhodey – Watch out — Oliver Stone’s “Secret History of the United States” is coming
• Joshuapundit – Obama And The Apocalypse Blues (Remix Version)
• Snapped Shot – The Washington Post Finds Waste
• Right Truth – Obama by any other name — would still smell as rotten
• The Razor – Someday Everyone Will be a Nazi for 15 Minutes
• The Provocateur – The Ghettoization of Obama
• Bookworm Room – When is a burqa not a burqa? When it’s a weapon.
• The Glittering Eye – The Beginning of the End
• Wolf Howling – Redemption?

Non-Council Submissions

• Bearing Drift – NASA Reaching Out to Muslims? AWESOME. submitted by VA Right
• Big Government — Michael Zak – The Ku Klux Klan, Terrorist Wing of the Democratic Party submitted by Rhymes with Right
• American Heritage.com – Philadelphia Story: Professor Ellis on Constitutional Compromise submitted by The Colossus of Rhodey
• The Other McCain – Jews and Israel: Death by Relativism submitted by JoshuaPundit
• IsraellyCool - A Taste of “Concentration Camp” Gaza: The Grand Palace Hotel submitted by Snapped Shot
• Samson Blinded – We cannot coexist submitted by Right Truth
• Katie, The Pirate King – Can You Believe Anything That This Administration Says? submitted by The Razor
• Dick Morris - DEMS DESERT OBAMA submitted by The Provocateur
• Pat Condell – No mosque at Ground Zero submitted by Bookworm Room
• Walter Russell Mead’s Blog -Nuking Westphalia: Obama’s Deep Convictions Point to War With Iran submitted by The Glittering Eye
• Dennis Prager @ NRO – NAACP Confirms, Election Of A Black President Made No Difference submitted by Wolf Howling
• Rabbi Kaufman @ Yourish - J Street’s New Ad – The Community of Hypocrisy submitted by The Watcher

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Welcome Alvin Greene!

Hi, Rob Miller.

Alvin Greene (greeneforsenate) is now following your tweets on Twitter.

A little information about Alvin Greene:

457 followers 56 tweets following 684 people

The country's most honest and most qualified Democrat Senate candidate is now following me on Twitter!

Well done, Mr. Greene.

If you were running against, say Lindsay Graham one state south instead of Jim DeMint, I might actually endorse you for the Senate!

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Shirley Sherrod Offered Her Old Job Back - As Some Brand New Questions Arise

It appears the bus has gone into reverse and that USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, after a conversation with Obama is begging her to hop back aboard - maybe with a promotion.

And why not? As far as I'm concerned, this woman is simply a class warfare kommissar who uses race to frame her entire reference. Why shouldn't she get her job back? She fits in perfectly with the Obama Administration.

Another side benefit for the Left is that this is conveniently timed to knock the air out of the latest revelations in the JournoList scandal..proof that major media figures involved in it conspired to kill the Jeremiah Wright scandal during the 2008 election, for instance.

Not to mention some tidbits like JournoList member Sarah Spitz saying that her fondest wish was to witness Rush Limbaugh having a fatal heart attack.

Or accusing Tea Party member of being Nazis and racists. Or calls to have the Federal government shut down Fox News.

Having Ms. Sherrod in the spotlight was very convenient for the lackeys and flacks of the Ruling Class.

And there's another back story I just became aware of thanks to blog pal and Newsbusters contributor Terry Trippany. You see if Shirley Sherrod goes back to work for the government, there are some major conflict of interest questions to be answered.

Her previous background and how and why she was hired might just also have had a little something to do with why she was thrown under the bus so quickly.

You see, only days before she was hired by USDA Secretary Vilsack, she and her husband made quite a juicy $13 million settlement with the Feds in a lawsuit involving New Communities, a group she founded with her husband and other families in Pigford vs Vilsack which involved minority farmers as plaintiffs, including the Sherrods:

The settlement acknowledged racial discrimination on the part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the years 1981-85. ... New Communities is due to receive approximately $13 million ($8,247,560 for loss of land and $4,241,602 for loss of income; plus $150,000 each to Shirley and Charles for pain and suffering). There may also be an unspecified amount in forgiveness of debt.

Hmmm..

But this wasn't the first massive payout on the Pigford case, as Tom Blumer relates:

The Pigford matter goes back a long way, and to say the least has a checkered history, as this May 27, 2010 item at Agri-Pulse demonstrates (bolds are mine):

As part of a April 14, 1999 class action case settlement, commonly known as the Pigford case, U.S. taxpayers have already provided over $1 billion in cash, non-credit awards and debt relief to almost 16,000 black farmers who claimed that they were discriminated against by USDA officials as they “farmed or attempted to farm.” In addition, USDA’s Farm Service Agency spent over $166 million on salaries and expenses on this case from 1999-2009, according to agency records.

Members of Congress may approve another $1.15 billion this week to settle cases from what some estimate may be an additional 80,000 African-Americans who have also claimed to have been discriminated against by USDA staff.

... Settling this case is clearly a priority for the White House and USDA. Secretary Vilsack described the funding agreement reached between the Administration and advocates for black farmers early this year as “an important milestone in putting these discriminatory claims behind us for good and in achieving finality for this group of farmers with longstanding grievances."

However, confronted with the skyrocketing federal deficit, more officials are taking a critical look at the billion dollars spent thus far and wondering when these discrimination cases will ever end. Already, the number of people who have been paid and are still seeking payment will likely exceed the 26,785 black farmers who were considered to even be operating back in 1997, according to USDA. That’s the year the case initially began as Pigford v. (then Agriculture Secretary) Glickman and sources predicted that, at most, 3,000 might qualify.

At least one source who is extremely familiar with the issue and who asked to remain anonymous because of potential retribution, says there are a number of legitimate cases who have long been denied their payments and will benefit from the additional funding. But many more appear to have been solicited in an attempt to “game” the Pigford system.

Can you say 'reparations'? Sure you can.

But that leads to other questions.

Was Ms. Sharrod's employment with the USDA in a cushy political sinecure part of the arrangement for the settlement of the suit?

Why did the Sherrods receive a massive settlement for a combined $300,000 in "pain and suffering" payments, when the average payout in this suit is about $72,000?

New Communities ended its operations back in the 1980's, and a lot of the farmers in the original class action suit already signed off for the settlement they received. So what's being done with the $13 million in additional settlement money? Where did it go and who's getting it?

If the GOP takes the House and receives subpoena power, I'm sure this would be a productive area for prospective committee chair Darrel Issa to delve into. As a matter of fact, yours truly will be sending it his way.

As for Shirley Sherrod, she may some day be getting a lot more attention than she bargained for.

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The Humanitarian Crisis That Is Gaza - Scenes From A Mall

One big concentration camp....just one look at the starvation and deprivation portrayed in this video should convince you.

The Gaza Mall opened July 17th, and as the Elder Of Ziyon writes, it must all be made with string and glue - because everybody knows there's no building material in Gaza.

(The video is from an original Channel 2 report. Must be an evil Zionist plot)

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A Racist By Any Other Name

The main story in the 'sphere today concerns one Shirley Sherrod, the USDA's Georgia director of Rural Development who 'resigned' after Andrew Breitbart aired a clip of her speaking to an NAACP audience and confessing that she didn't 'give the full force of my help' to a white farmer facing bankruptcy because 'his own kind could take care of him.'

True to their fully deserved reputation for supporting justice and racial equality, the NAACP audience laughed and expressed their appreciation at that part of the speech. This was just days after the NAACP accused the Tea Party movement of racism.

As it turns out the video was edited ( Breitbart insists he didn't do it) and the balance of the speech turns out to be mere boiler plate class warfare rhetoric, wherein Sherrod insists that she learned that her attitude was wrong.

Well, actually, she learned nothing. She actually is a racist the way I see it. And so is a good part of her audience.

If you look at the entire clip, it's quite clear she sees things in black and white, them and us terms.To her, it's still all about racial bean counting, and she's really simply a class warfare kommissar. She just uses race as a tool to justify her views.Take a look at this three minute snippet from the part of the video Breitbart didn't release and make up your own mind:



Sherrod claims that the White House forced her to resign. Awww.

So are we supposed to be upset because this political hack was sacrificed by her own because they want to save the race card for themselves to use in the coming midterm?

Tough.

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Tisha B'Av - Mourning And Renewal

Today is Tisha B'Av, which in English is the ninth day of the month of Av in the Hebrew calender.

It is a day of prayer, fasting and mourning. Both the First Temple and Second Temple in Jerusalem were destroyed on this exact date, 656 years apart.

Tisha B'Av has an evil repute in Jewish history. On this same date, the following tragedies occurred aside from the destruction of the First and Second Temples:

• The sin of the twelve scouts sent by Moses who spoke disparagingly about the Land G-d promised the Jews traditionally occurred on Tisha B'av, causing the delay in entering the Holy Land.

• The Romans crushed Bar Kokhba's revolt and destoyed the city of Betar, killing over 100,000 Jews, in 132 CE

• The First Crusade was declared by Pope Urban II in 1095..with the result that 10,000 Jews were murdered wholesale in its first month and most of the Jewish communities in France and Germany were destroyed.

• The Jews were violently expelled from England in 1290 after the Blood Libel and were not allowed to return to England until the days of Oliver Cromwell, four hundred years later.

• Jews were expelled wholesale from Spain in 1492 after living peacefully in the country for five centuries.

• On Tisha B'Av 1914 (August 1, 1914), World War I began, causing the devastation of Europe and setting the stage for the Holocaust.

• On Tisha B'av 1941, Nazi leader Hermann Göring gave a written authorization to SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) to "make all necessary preparations" for a "total solution of the Jewish question" in all the territories under German rule.

• On the eve of Tisha B'Av 1942, the mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto began, mostly to Auschwitz and Treblinka.

• In 1994 the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires was bombed by agents of Iran, killing 86 and wounding 300 others.

The Book of Lamentations, the Book of Job, portions of Jeremiah and chapters of the Talmud that discuss the laws of mourning are traditionally read. Aside from that, Torah study is prohibited as it is considered a pleasant activity.

So in the midst of this mourning, what should members of the tribe consider?

At the risk of sounding complacent, there is some comfort in having survived the determined attempts by the most powerful empires of their time to exterminate us. They are gone, and we survive., and that is perhaps a lesson in itself that there is a heavenly power at work in spite of everything.

It's also worth noting that the truly horrid things that happened to the Jews over the centuries after the destruction of the Second Temple and the diaspora happened because the Jews were defenseless, with no country to call their own. That of course is no longer true, but it might just be that some of the atrocities visited on the Jews had the hidden benefit of convincing even those in relatively comfortable circumstances that a strong, powerful country and a haven was an absolute necessity.

Certainly that was the case of Theodore Herzl, a thoroughly assimilated Austrian Jewish journalist who had no thoughts at all about Zionism - until he covered the Dreyfuss case in France back in 1894 ( a mere 116 years ago) and saw the mobs in the Paris streets howling for the death of the Jews.

At that point, he realized that no matter how long they lived in Europe, no matter how much they regarded themselves as good, patriotic Austrians, Frenchmen, Germans, et al the Jews would always be aliens, always regarded as the Other. So he went home, laid out the case for Zionism by writing Der Judenstaadt and helped give birth to a modern miracle.

In its short history, Israel has redeemed Jews from Europe, Ethiopia and the entire Middle East who would have died otherwise. Had a strong, powerful Israel existed only twenty or thirty years earlier, the Six Million would not have perished.

That's something that's worth considering, especially for those self-hating Jews and others who make their religion out of disparaging and attacking the world's only Jewish country.

Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel once said that to him,the holiest spot in Israel was not the Kotel, the Western Wall but the tiny booth at Ben Gurion airport where a Jewish customs agent sat stamping entry visas.

On this Tisha B'av, as we mourn the horrors of the past, let us not forget to remember the hope of the future.

Napoleon, oddly enough, was one person who foresaw that future. He once passed a synagogue during the Ninth of Av, looked inside and saw Jews sitting on the floor, barefoot and weeping. When he asked why, he was told the Jews were mourning over the destruction of their Holy Temples. “How long ago did this occur?”, he asked. “About 1,500 years ago”. “In that case”, said Napolean, “there is no doubt that their Temple will be rebuilt. A people capable of crying for so long over its destroyed Temple and Land will eventually find its way home.”

The Jews are once again home. May the Holy Temple, the Beit Hamikdosh be rebuilt soon, and in our time.

-selah-

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Obama And The Apocalypse Blues (Remix Version)

Charles Krauthammer warns us that the first act of Barack Hussein Obama's radical restructuring of America is over, but the second act is set to begin after 2012.

As Krauthammer sees it, Obama is a political mastermind who sees 2012 as the real prize and has pretty much accomplished all he can accomplish in his first term. He advises Republicans not to break out the champagne and underestimate Obama.

He has a point, but an overstated one with a few flaws in it.

True enough..Obama has managed to shove through ObamaCare , a bogus trillion dollar stimulus and now financial 'reform'. All in all, it amounts to a new era in government control and the largest transfer of wealth from the American taxpayers to government and what I refer to as the non-taxpaying class in America's history.

To put it another way, it amounts to the colonization of America's Heartland by the Urban Blue enclaves in places like DC, Chicago and on the coasts, the creation of a well-funded Bourbon elite of bureaucrats, 'activists', government functionaries and academia at the expense of the middle classes and private enterprise.

Obama has made substantial progress towards this goal. But the important thing is, will it hold?

Barack Hussein Obama is far from the political mastermind Krauthammer sees him as. He's made far too many obvious mistakes for that, and the only thing that's kept him from becoming a national joke is his race, the Democrat's majority that's enabled him to push his agenda through and a toadying, sycophantic media. The truth is, he has yet to actually face a political foe on anything like an even playing field since Bobby Rush beat him like a gong in Obama's initial race for a House seat back in Chicago.

He won his Senate campaign against Jack Ryan solely because Ryan's kinky and sealed divorce records were mysteriously leaked to the public by Obama's political allies in Chicago, and John McCain was a candidate even most of his own party disliked who ran one of the most inept campaigns in recent history. Anyone seeing Barack Obama beating him by six points as evidence of political genius would probably see Oscar De La Hoya winning a ten round decision on points over a 50-year-old out of shape bar brawler the same way.

While I agree with Dr. Krauthammer that his Royal Malignancy shouldn't be underestimated, the coming midterms are going to be an important referendum on Obama's presidency. Given that Obama's insane spending, massive tax increases and anti-business legislation has pretty much insured that the economy is going to be the same or worse this November, the Republicans stand to take the House and actually have a decent shot at taking the Senate.

The trick is going to be twofold - first,obtaining a veto proof majority, at least in the House. And second, convincing the American people that things are different now. To do that, they will have to speak honestly to the American people, for a change.

Barack Hussein Obama is not officially on the ballot, but the reality is that he and his presidency are very much the issue.Obama cannot run from his execrable record.The Republicans have to have the courage and ability to hold that record to the light for everyone to see, and let the American people decide for themselves whether they want Obama's enablers back in Congress.

For instance, the Republicans need to once and for all forcefully rebut Obama's whine about how he was left with the 'Bush recession' by reminding the electorate that it is Congress, not the president who makes decisions on the budget and where the money was spent. And since January of 2007, those decisions were in the hands of the Democrat- dominated Congress, including a certain Senator Barack Hussein Obama..who voted for the very spending ( when he bothered showing up) he's now blaming George W. Bush for.

They need to castigate the president for his inept handling of foreign policy, energy, and the disasters in Nashville,Kentucky and the Gulf Oil Spill.They need to promise to restore America's prosperity and its place in the world, just as Reagan did in 1980.

More importantly, the Republicans running for office need to provide an alternative. The must differentiate themselves from what's been happening in Washington and campaign in 2012 on clear-cut conservative principles, without any weaseling. They need to make the case for repealing Obama's agenda completely, lowering taxes, cutting spending and bringing jobs back and they need to do it in those twenty second sound bites that make the media.

A first step in the right direction, and one that will weed out the pretenders is a firm declaration of concrete principles, similar to the one Newt Gingrich masterminded ( and please, don't give the Left a ready made soundbite by naming it something like a 'contract with America).

As our Founders discovered, a written declaration has a number of benefits. It clarifies things and gives people a record of principles and pledges they can refer to. It encourages the strong and trustworthy and weeds out the sideliners and marginal actors. And it goes a long way towards convincing people you are serious.

If the GOP fails to elucidate their principles clearly, if they merely campaign like the latest aspirants to the ruling class, the GOP will go the way of the Whigs.

If the Republicans manage to control a least one house of Congress with a veto proof majority, there's a lot they can accomplish, provided they're clear in their beliefs, unwilling to be co-opted and willing to wage what amounts to war for the country's heart and soul. Or at least, capable of being coerced into doing the right thing.

As I mentioned, Congress, not the president controls budgeting and funding. There's a great deal of Obama's agenda that can be overturned simply by not funding it. For example, take away the funding to pay for the extra IRS agents to oversee the penalties for not abiding by ObamaCare and you cripple it until it can be overturned and repealed. Cut the funding for the numerous overseeing bureaucracies in ObamaCare and financial 'reform' and you essentially make the legislation meaningless.

Another example of what can be done involves issuing subpoenas and appointing a special prosecutor for a number of interesting items the ranking Republican in the House Oversight Committee Daryl Issa has been asking the White House about - so far, without success.A majority in the House and control of that committee gives the Republicans subpoena powers.

Of course, the chief thing the new GOP dominated Congress needs to be charged with is stopping Obama's showpiece for his second act, amnesty for millions of illegal aliens.If that's all the next Congress does, it will be a major victory.

The real purpose of the Democrat party is actually a simple one - bribe people with goodies they didn't earn at the expense of others in exchange for votes and power. It was none other than Benjamin Franklin who declared that the tipping point of our Republic would come when what he referred to as the indigent classes could vote themselves benefits and stipends at the expense of others.

Obama's coalition consists of two groups, one at the top and one at the bottom.At he top are the Bourbon class previously mentioned - the bureaucratic, the well-placed and the academic elites who form what amounts to a privileged ruling class for America at the expense of the rest of us. At the bottom are the non-taxpaying indigent groups, who are to be bribed at the expense of the taxpayers for their votes.

Creating a huge, easily manipulated, poorly educated Democrat-for-life voting bloc is exactly the tipping point Mr. Franklin was talking about. That's the key to the whole ballgame and will decide whether we continue to keep our Republic or descend into civil war when 'the rich' find themselves increasing frozen out of societies' benefits while paying the tab for the ones the government deems more deserving than they are.

If the Republicans succeed in reaffirming who they are and keeping faith with their innate principles , 2012 will be Prez Zero's swan song, not his second act. And more importantly it will be the final victory over the Gramscian warfare unleashed against the United States by the Soviets almost 80 years ago. It will be the start of a difficult but ultimately successful American renewal.

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America's Ruling Class

If you read nothing else today, take the time to look at America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution in the American Spectator by Angelo M. Codevilla.

In the piece, Codevilla examines and defines America's elites and ruling class and dhow they came to rule over the majority of Americans he refers to as being in the 'country class' with a clarity and historical perspective I haven't seen much of elsewhere:

Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several "stimulus" bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations. Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind. Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government's agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to. Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about "global warming" for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class's continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.

Never has there been so little diversity within America's upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America's upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and "bureaucrat" was a dirty word for all. So was "social engineering." Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday's upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

Dr. Codevilla examines the criteria of the minority ruling elites and makes the point that what defines them is neither money, academic excellence or even prominance but outlook and attitude.

Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century's Northerners and Southerners -- nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, "prayed to the same God." By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God "who created and doth sustain us," our ruling class prays to itself as "saviors of the planet" and improvers of humanity. Our classes' clash is over "whose country" America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark's Gospel: "if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand." {...}

Other explanations are counterintuitive. Wealth? The heads of the class do live in our big cities' priciest enclaves and suburbs, from Montgomery County, Maryland, to Palo Alto, California, to Boston's Beacon Hill as well as in opulent university towns from Princeton to Boulder. But they are no wealthier than many Texas oilmen or California farmers, or than neighbors with whom they do not associate -- just as the social science and humanities class that rules universities seldom associates with physicians and physicists. Rather, regardless of where they live, their social-intellectual circle includes people in the lucrative "nonprofit" and "philanthropic" sectors and public policy. What really distinguishes these privileged people demographically is that, whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government. They vote Democrat more consistently than those who live on any of America's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Streets. These socioeconomic opposites draw their money and orientation from the same sources as the millions of teachers, consultants, and government employees in the middle ranks who aspire to be the former and identify morally with what they suppose to be the latter's grievances.

Professional prominence or position will not secure a place in the class any more than mere money. In fact, it is possible to be an official of a major corporation or a member of the U.S. Supreme Court (just ask Justice Clarence Thomas), or even president (Ronald Reagan), and not be taken seriously by the ruling class. Like a fraternity, this class requires above all comity -- being in with the right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs. Once an official or professional shows that he shares the manners, the tastes, the interests of the class, gives lip service to its ideals and shibboleths, and is willing to accommodate the interests of its senior members, he can move profitably among our establishment's parts.

If, for example, you are Laurence Tribe in 1984, Harvard professor of law, leftist pillar of the establishment, you can "write" your magnum opus by using the products of your student assistant, Ron Klain. A decade later, after Klain admits to having written some parts of the book, and the other parts are found to be verbatim or paraphrases of a book published in 1974, you can claim (perhaps correctly) that your plagiarism was "inadvertent," and you can count on the Law School's dean, Elena Kagan, to appoint a committee including former and future Harvard president Derek Bok that issues a secret report that "closes" the incident. Incidentally, Kagan ends up a justice of the Supreme Court. Not one of these people did their jobs: the professor did not write the book himself, the assistant plagiarized instead of researching, the dean and the committee did not hold the professor accountable, and all ended up rewarded. By contrast, for example, learned papers and distinguished careers in climatology at MIT (Richard Lindzen) or UVA (S. Fred Singer) are not enough for their questions about "global warming" to be taken seriously. For our ruling class, identity always trumps.

Much less does membership in the ruling class depend on high academic achievement. To see something closer to an academic meritocracy consider France, where elected officials have little power, a vast bureaucracy explicitly controls details from how babies are raised to how to make cheese, and people get into and advance in that bureaucracy strictly by competitive exams. Hence for good or ill, France's ruling class are bright people -- certifiably. Not ours. But didn't ours go to Harvard and Princeton and Stanford? Didn't most of them get good grades? Yes. But while getting into the Ecole Nationale d'Administration or the Ecole Polytechnique or the dozens of other entry points to France's ruling class requires outperforming others in blindly graded exams, and graduating from such places requires passing exams that many fail, getting into America's "top schools" is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile. American secondary schools are generous with their As. Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secret that "the best" colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages. No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in. The most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to criticism nor release their academic records. Thus does our ruling class stunt itself through negative selection. But the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself by the presumption of intellectual superiority.

Codevilla examines the history of how this came about, and postulates what it will take to change it. Because it definitely is a scenario that is bound to change. As he puts it, sooner or later, well or badly, that majority's demand for representation will be filled:

The rulers want the ruled to shut up and obey. The ruled want self-governance. The clash between the two is about which side's vision of itself and of the other is right and which is wrong. Because each side -- especially the ruling class -- embodies its views on the issues, concessions by one side to another on any issue tend to discredit that side's view of itself. One side or the other will prevail. The clash is as sure and momentous as its outcome is unpredictable.

Benjamin Franklin famously said that the Founders had given us a Republic - "if you can keep it."

In the last part of the piece, Codevilla examines exactly what it might take to undue the harm done to our Republic in the last few decades. How that plays out could well provide an answer to Benjamin Franklin's implicit question.

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The Question Obama Won't Answer On The Jobless Benefits Bill

In view of the Republican blockage of the Democrat's proposed jobless benefits bill, all the usual class warfare lingo so beloved of the Left has had a fresh airing, especially by the Kommissar-In-Chief.

"It's time to do what's right, not for the next election, but for the middle class," Obama said in a presidential statement in the Rose Garden this morning. He accused the Republicans of being out of touch,lacking compassion and of poisoning small puppies, and he was joined by the usual suspects.

The Republicans response? They simply want to know where the $34 billion to fund it is going to come from.

"Everyone agrees on extending the additional unemployment insurance, but the Democrat way is to insist we add it to the national debt at the same time, while blocking Republican efforts to pass the same extension without the debt," said Don Stewart, spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

Considering that the Democrats and the White House have not even bothered to submit a budget for this year to a vote, but simply 'deemed it passed', these are not exactly inconsequential concerns. Especially when you have an administration that has quadrupled the deficit in a mere 18 months.

To those of you wondering where the money to fund yet another federal extension of your unemployment benefits went, here's the answer: Obama and his pals already spent it.

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Canadian Mom To Go Free In Honor Killing

In an astounding ruling, Aset Mogomadova will serve no jail time for killing her 14-year-old daughter.

In October, Judge Sal LoVecchio acquitted Magomadova of second-degree murder and found her guilty of manslaughter in the 2007 death of her daughter Aminat. He sentenced her to probation for three years, with the idea that she would return to the court for further sentencing afterwards.

The judge rejected an argument by Crown prosecutors Mac Vomberg and Sarah Bhola, who wanted Magomadova, a Chechen Muslim immigrant to Canada to receive a 12-year prison term. Instead LoVecchio simply suspended her sentence.

The killing occurred in the family home in February, 2007, after Aminat and her mother got into an argument over her conduct.

Magomadova claimed Aminat came at her with a knife, after which she wrapped a prayer scarf around her daughter's neck until Aminat lost consciousness.

A knife was found in the room, but the daughter’s fingerprints were not on it.

LoVecchio rejected the original plea of self-defense, but ruled that the killing was unintentional....even though medical examiner Dr. Sam Andrews testified that the killing by strangulation would have taken at least 2 1/2 minutes. It also seems problematic that a young, active teenager armed with a knife would be outmaneuvered while coming at an older and obviously overweight adult, get a scarf thrown around her neck and not even manage to cut her assailant once.

“I really strongly disagree [with the sentence]. It sends a massively huge message to the rest of the country and the world that her daughter’s life was valueless,” said Joe Wamback, co-founder and chairman of the Canadian Crime Victims Foundation.

“Even though this girl may have been a handful and trouble, that’s not the issue. The issue is human life. Sentencing is not just about the criminal, but has to speak for the victim and to denunciation.”

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LATMA's Latest Vid - Featuring Vladimir Putin!

Cutting edge satire from LATMA,( Hebrew with English subtitles)from the crew that brought you the Gaza Flotilla song 'We Con The World'.

A few crib notes so you get some of the more local humor - Rishon LeTzion is firmly within Israel's pre '67 borders...the Arab woman pictured as 'showing her true face' is Arab Knesset member Haneen Zoabi (Balad, who was sanctioned by the Knesset and lost her parliamentary immunity for her participation in the Gaza flotilla aboard the MV Mavi Marmara....( yes, in Israel they allow Arabs who are openly anti-Israel to serve in the Knesset)and Israel's soccer team did not do all that well in the FIFA World Cup.

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Obama Administration Admits ObamaCare Is A Tax Bill

As you know, from Day One I and others have been telling you that ObamaCare is a tax bill designed to redistribute wealth to Obama's notion of 'the more deserving'. The president has made quite a show of denying this obvious fact.

Until now, when it's time to go to court and defend it. Now, the administration is defending mandating participation under penalty of a stiff fine by saying ObamaCare come under the federal government's power to tax:

Administration officials say the tax argument is a linchpin of their legal case in defense of the health care overhaul and its individual mandate, now being challenged in court by more than 20 states and several private organizations.

Under the legislation signed by President Obama in March, most Americans will have to maintain “minimum essential coverage” starting in 2014. Many people will be eligible for federal subsidies to help them pay premiums.

In a brief defending the law, the Justice Department says the requirement for people to carry insurance or pay the penalty is “a valid exercise” of Congress’s power to impose taxes.

Congress can use its taxing power “even for purposes that would exceed its powers under other provisions” of the Constitution, the department said. For more than a century, it added, the Supreme Court has held that Congress can tax activities that it could not reach by using its power to regulate commerce.

The Administration is trying to get lawsuits against ObamaCare's legality dismissed by claiming it's a tax bill because federal law requires that the taxes be paid first before any adjustments are made.

However, that's only an argument on the penalty, which doesn't address the 5th amendment issue of a governmental taking of private property.

Even more egregiously, ObamaCare is requiring people to buy goods and services from private entities. That's not a tax - it's forcing Americans to engage in compelled economic activity and forced private contracts.

No court has ever found any Constitutional authority for the federal government to force that sort of thing - so far.

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Sex And State Power

My pal Bookworm has a great piece up on American Thinker...here's a sampling:

For many years, physicists have tried to find a unified theory of everything. They have faith that somewhere out there, there is a theory that will explain the physical properties of all things, without any exceptions. I'm not sure that dream will be realized in the scientific arena, but I think I might have stumbled across a unified theory that underlies statist philosophies, whether they are socialist or theocratic: sex.

Before you get too excited, this article isn't going to be about voluptuous women in slinky, abbreviated clothes, or scantily clad men with rippling pecs and washboard abs. Sorry.

Instead, this article focuses on the sordid, depressing, government-controlled side of human sexuality. That is, it examines sex not from the viewpoint of any given individual's particular desires, but from the viewpoint of a state intent upon gaining maximum control over that same individual.

Those of us who came of age before the 1980s, when the Judeo-Christian, Western tradition, though battered, was still ascendant, view our sexuality as a private matter. We believe that our bodies are our own property, which means that we should not be touched or controlled sexually without our consent. A person raised with this worldview inevitably believes as well that his ability to control his body is the essence of his individuality. This physical individuality is the antithesis of slavery, which represents a person's ultimate lack of control over his body.

Statist regimes, of course, cannot tolerate self-ownership, which is the natural enemy of government control over the individual. The easiest example one can find of a statist regime using sexuality to deny individuality and dominate its citizens is, of course, Islam.

A wise friend of mine once opined that Islam's entire quarrel with the West rests on its fear that Western values will undermine Islam's control over its women and, with that, its control over the men who benefit from a system that subjugates one half of the population to the control of the other half. There's a great deal of truth in that observation.

Unlike most other conflicts, Islam's quarrel with the West does not revolve around borders, water supplies, or economic control over assets. Instead, it focuses on culture -- and the heart of the Islamic cultural difference with the West, at least in the Muslim mind, is Islam's statist determination to erase a woman's individuality through control over her sexuality.

In the Muslim world, women are viewed as temptresses, and men as feeble creatures incapable of resisting feminine wiles. The only way to control the anarchy that this perceived sexual imbalance creates is for the State -- and remember that Islam and the State are indistinguishable from each other -- to exert total dominion over the women within its reach.

The best way to regulate women is to remove them entirely from view. Islam has traditionally relied upon harems to isolate women from view (and, not coincidentally, from the body politic). This practice is still used in Saudi Arabia, where women may not leave the home unless they are accompanied by a male family member.

Should the imprisonment option be unavailable, however, wrapping the women in completely obscuring, shapeless mountains of cloth is an adequate substitute. Women so enveloped, aside from losing any individuality, are relatively dysfunctional and, therefore, are entirely dependent on men.

Read the whole thing

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American Traitor Lynne Stewart Resentenced To 10 Years In Prison

Sometimes you roll the dice and get more than you bargained for.

Lynne Stewart, described in the NY Post as a 'civil rights lawyer' was originally sentenced to two years, four months in jail back in 2006 for her activities as the attorney for Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, the so-called `blind Sheik'who was the mastermind behind the first World Trade Center bombing.

This 'civil rights lawyer' a member of the communist front National Lawyers Guild got her jail time for conspiring with two other defendents, Mohamed Yousry, an Arabic interpreter, and Ahmed Abdel Sattar, a U.S. postal worker to carry secret messages between the sheik and senior members of the fascist Muslim brotherhood and Rahman's al Qaeda-connected Islamic Group, in violation of the federal laws against providing material support to terrorists, rules of attorney client privilege and Federal rules she had agreed to designed to keep the blind cleric from inciting violence and plotting terrorist strategy with his followers as a prerequisite for representing Rahman.

Stewart used every legal trick she could to avoid being sent to jail, even to the extent of trying to have the court declare that Rahman's orders to his thugs were `protected speech'!

An appeals court finally ordered a new sentencing, saying the judge needed to consider whether she committed perjury. Federal Judge John Koeltl was happy to oblige..and since she did perjure herself, he's abided by the appellate court's order for new sentencing - 10 years in prison.

Once upon a time, we used to hang traitors.

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The Facebook Fatwa

The social networking site Facebook is the target of the latest Islamo-seethe fest.

A group claiming to represent 2.5 million Muslim Facebook users says they're going to leave Facebook and jump to a low rent Muslim imitator called Madina.com unless four pages Facebook removed are reinstated and their additional demands are met.

The four pages were:

* Facebook.com/Rassoul.Allaah
* Facebook.com/Logo.Ramadan
* LikesFacebook.com/I.Love.Mohammed
* Facebook.com/Quran.Lovers

And so far, Facebook hasn't revealed what the content of these pages were or why they were removed. I'd love to know why.

The group has been spamming the same comment over and over on Facebook blogs.Notice how they single out moderators with Jewish sounding names:

Facebook Admins, Moderators, Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Sheryl Sandberg, and Matt Cohler; Although you have attended the world's best communication skills courses you have been most successful in growing great hatred and hostility between you and Muslims around the world, but seriously this time you have caused an almost unrepairable damage.

Only a few weeks after your irresponsible behavior during the Everybody Draw Mohammed Day events you most aggressively removed four of the largest Islamic Facebook Pages of total fans/likes over 2.5 million Facebook members. That happened on the morning of Thursday 8th July, 2010.

These four Facebook pages were totally peaceful and free of any hate speech, but you removed it ignoring the feelings of more than 2.5 Million Facebook Muslims and disrespecting over 1.5 Billion Muslims worldwide.

And now since that is what it had come down to you, with your irresponsibility and fake preach of freedom of speech, have left us no other choice other than permanently boycotting Facebook. And now we are giving you a 2 weeks notice - ending at midnight of 21st July, 2010 - to fulfill our demands or else we will leave Facebook for http://madina.com/.

Our demands are:

1- Reactivating the four pages that have been disabled
2- Adding a Facebook Term that illegalizes disrespecting all Islamic religious symbols, including Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) and the Qur'an, as well as Prophet Moses (PBUH), Prophet Jesus (PBUH), and the original Bible
3- Disabling any Facebook Page, Group, or Event that shows direct or indirect disrespect towards Islamic religious symbols

What they're really looking for,I think, is to make Facebook a no-go zone for any discussion of Islam or Islamism or related topics.

It will be interesting to see how Facebook handles this.


(hat tip Daled Amos)

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Watcher's Council Results, 7/13/10

The Council has spoken! Here are the results of our weekly Watcher's Council contest.

This week's council winner was The Razor for Life in a Vise, a somber look at the people the Obama Administration isn't including in its roster of The Deserving, and the possibilities that could ensue when government ignores them.

Our non-council winning post was NASA Unveils New Plan for Muslims in Outer Space, a brilliant satire by Sultan Knish based on Obama's Head of NASA's al-Jazeera interview and his statements about Muslim outreach being NASA's primary goal.


Here are the full results:

Council Winners

• First place with 2 2/3 votes! – The Razor - Life in a Vise
• Second place with 2 votes – Rhymes With Right - An Interesting Question On Obama’s Citizenship
• Third place *t* with 1 vote - Bookworm Room – Parallels between Obama’s green economy plans and, well, other governments’ economic changes
• Third place *t* with 1 vote – The Colossus of Rhodey – Foundation’s Triumph review and the fate of human destiny
• Third place *t* with 1 vote - Wolf Howling – Obama & Keynes, Hayek & Laffer
• Fourth place with 2/3 vote - The Glittering Eye - What Recovery?
• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote - Joshuapundit – Abbas: ‘No point in direct talks with Israel now’
• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote - Snapped Shot – Speechless

Non Council Submissions

• * First place with 2 2/3 votes! – Sultan Knish - NASA Unveils New Plan for Muslims in Outer Space submitted by JoshuaPundit
• Second place with 1 2/3 votes - Steve Malanga @ City Journal – The Beholden State submitted by Wolf Howling
• Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes - Mighty Optical Illusions – Media Manipulation Illusion Example submitted by Snapped Shot
• Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes - Chesler Chronicles – Muslim Honor Killing Elephants in the Room at the New York Times submitted by Rhymes with Right
• Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes - NormBlog - Table Talk (by Eve Garrard) submitted by The Watcher
• Fourth place with 1 vote – Walter Russell Mead’s Blog – The Big Green Lie Exposed submitted by The Glittering Eye
• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote – Big Government – Chicago Machine Deserves NAACP Not the Tea Parties submitted by The Provocateur
• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote - Don Surber – Malcolm: The Unstoppable Sarah Palin submitted by The Watcher
  

As always, congratulations not only to the winners but to the participants.

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