Political Digest September 7, 2009

Happy Labor Day, when few labor. A holiday honoring those who strive to make the American economy uncompetitive in the global market place. And to mark the end of summer, reconciling us, I suppose, with how quickly our lives will be over, just as the summer is.

Change you can believe in
Met a woman at a party last night, who told me she has just bought the first gun she ever owned, and took a four-day class in using it.

Town Hall Meeting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IYLqtYEYeI&feature=player_embedded
Want my money-come & take it!

Not This Pig
http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/not-this-pig/
That said, almost a year ago, I wrote that the Democratic congressional chest-thumping for Afghanistan, as the good war, would cease as soon as Bush left office and that Afghanistan, not Iraq, was always going to be the harder, messier war in the long run. Just as the John Kerrys of the world lined up on October 10, 2002, to authorize the Iraq war to bolster their security fides in what they then thought would be another walk-through, only to bail with “Bush made me vote that way”, so too they sought cover in anti-war protest over Iraq by praising Afghanistan as the good war, thinking it was won, Iraq was lost, and Bush was in power. Now Bush is history; Iraq is quieter; Afghanistan is heating up. So? An Obama invasion into Pakistan in ‘hot pursuit’? I don’t think any of them ever realized that they would own Afghanistan and their own bellicose rhetoric would come back to haunt them. Have there been any New York Times exposes about our post-Jan. 20, 2009 Predator assassinations in Pakistan, in which we obliterate houses, families and all, without Miranda rights or habeas corpus (what candidate Obama himself once deplored)? (And if the State Department was supposed to oversee private guards responsible for embassy security in Kabul, and the State Department in turn was responsible to the White House, does the administration have culpability in the fashion that the rogue sex-perverts guards at Abu Ghraib, supposedly reflected the Bush-era military? If we blow up 90 in Afghanistan is it a war crime, or an honest mistake? When you turn the media into Pravda it becomes impossible to keep the party line straight sometimes.)

Pledging allegiance to our beloved Obama
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/president-obama-saddam-2552741-time-one
The always-entertaining Mark Steyn: "Mr Obama," wrote Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal, "has grown boring." Amazing, but true. He's a crashing bore, and he's become one in nothing flat. His approval ratings have slumped – not just among Republicans, not just among independents, not just among seniors, who are after all first in line for the death panels. But they've fallen among young people – the starry-eyed members of the Hopeychangey Generation who stared into the mesmerizing giant "O" of his logo and saw the new Otopia. According to the latest Zogby poll, Obama's hold on the young is a wash: 41 per cent approve, 41 per cent disapprove. Zogby defines "young" as under 30, so maybe the kindergartners corralled into his audience this week will still be on side, but I wouldn't bet on it. The President's strategy on Jan. 20 was to hurl all the vast transformative spaghetti at the wall – stimulus, auto nationalization, cap'n'trade, health care – and make it stick through the sheer charisma of his personality. Unfortunately, the American people aren't finding it quite so charismatic, and they're beginning to spot the yawning gulf between the post-partisan hopeychangey rhetoric and the budget-busting, prosperity-throttling, future-beggaring big government policies. No wonder the poor chap's running out of material. At the time of writing, one of his exercises for America's schoolchildren is to suggest what you'd like him to do in his next speech. Here's mine: Call in sick, sir. You'll be doing your presidency a favo

Revolution
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/revolution.html
Excerpt: With this analogy in mind, now we can see clearly what's been happening in the United States during the last three decades. While conservatives have been working to improve our democracy and our free-market economy, liberals have been working to replace our democracy with a dictatorship, and our free-market economy with a command economy controlled by the government. The liberals couldn't say this aloud, because if they did the American people would have tossed them out of office on their ears. So the liberals worked covertly, feigning support for democracy and for the free market while working diligently to undermine both. This is why our politics has been so partisan, so vicious, and so deadlocked. This is why words have lost their meaning in Washington, why we can never get to the bottom of anything, why we lurch from one manufactured scandal to another. It's all been part of a decades-long effort by the liberals to throw sand in our eyes -- to keep us from seeing clearly where they really want to take us. (And this explains why, when we question their judgment on some issue, they go berserk and accuse us of questioning their patriotism. They're afraid we're on the verge of catching on. If you want to have some fun, the next time you're chatting with a liberal and he goes nuts when you call him a socialist, say to him: "I'm so sorry you're offended. Please tell me, what is there about socialism you don't like?" You won't get a coherent answer; he'll just accuse you of a hate crime.)

The Perspective Of A Russian Immigrant
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=335660545427204
Excerpt: In the USSR, economic equality was achieved by redistributing wealth, ensuring that everyone remained poor, with the exception of those doing the redistributing. Only the ruling class of communist leaders had access to special stores, medicine and accommodations that could compare to those in the West. The rest of the citizenry had to deal with permanent shortages of food and other necessities, and had access to free but inferior, unsanitary and low-tech medical care. The egalitarian utopia of equality, achieved by the sacrifice of individual self-interest for the collective good, led to corruption, black markets, anger and envy. Government-controlled health care destroyed human dignity

Jack Webb Schools Barack Obama on Healthcare
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4r6YCUtxfs&feature=player_embedded
Entertaining video.

Glenn Beck Boycott Lessons Not Learned
http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/2009/09/glenn-beck-boycott-lessons-not-learned.html
Excerpt: The failure to get your message out is not the problem. The problem is your message. Your feeling of being politically lost is the result of your own myopia.

A Short Course in Brain Surgery
http://www.freemarketcure.com/brainsurgery.php
Highlights the plight of an Ontario man with a cancerous brain tumor who crossed the border to the U.S. to get the medical care that is rationed in his home country.

Time to let prisoner, a WWII POW, go home to die
https://mail.google.com/mail/?hl=en&zx=zuxyox2yik6i&shva=1#inbox/12390157ff133657
Excerpt: The 1997 trial of Keech made area headlines. A prisoner-of-war during World War II, the one-time Marine defended the murder of his son-in-law, calling it a consequence of post-traumatic stress syndrome brought on by his incarceration in a Japanese prison camp. "My father is in prison because he killed my abusive husband to protect my son, my mother, and me," his daughter Nancy said in a recent advertisement she ran in the Press-Telegram.( Muslim Locherbie bomber yes, Marine vet, no.)

Al Qaeda-Linked American Terrorist Unveiled, As Charges Await Him In U.S.
Http://Www.Foxnews.Com/Story/0,2933,546510,00.Html
Excerpt: A week after the 9/11 attacks, a young Muslim at the University of South Alabama told the school's newspaper it was "difficult to believe a Muslim could have done this." Now, eight years later, he is professing to launch attacks himself and calling on others to join the fight, as terror-related charges await him at home in Alabama, FOX News has learned exclusively. Abu Mansour al-Amriki — or "The American" — has become one of the most recognizable and outspoken voices of terrorist propaganda.

When Compassion Is Cruel
http://townhall.com/columnists/SteveChapman/2009/09/06/when_compassion_is_cruel
Excerpt: People don't always get what they deserve in this world, so it is gratifying to see when someone does. It happened Wednesday when a California parole board insisted that Susan Atkins, a 61-year-old amputee with incurable brain cancer, live her few remaining months in prison rather than the embrace of her loved ones. This may sound like pointless excess inflicted on someone whose crime, committed 40 years ago, is ancient history. But even to mention Atkins without first mentioning her victims is an affront. In 1969, she repeatedly thrust a knife into an innocent woman who was eight and a half months pregnant, killing her and her unborn child.

Scotland Isn't the Only Country Releasing Terrorists
http://townhall.com/columnists/FloydandMaryBethBrown/2009/09/04/scotland_isnt_the_only_country_releasing_terrorists
Excerpt: We also heard outrage from Washington, but we cannot help but feel it is feigned anger. Our assessment after a careful review of Obama administration policy, forces us to conclude that it virtually guarantees future Lockerbie, 9/11 and Khobar towers-type terrorist attacks. As early as the day after his inaugural celebration, Barack Obama signed a presidential directive ordering the closing of the Guantanamo detention center. Congress rebelled and refused to fund the closing, but the policy impasse is still unresolved. The question of where Obama plans to house terrorists in the USA is an ongoing debate, but the presidential directive to close Guantanamo by 2010 still stands. The pace of terrorist releases has also quickened under the Obama administration. Obama released Binyam Mohamed from Guantanamo in February of 2009 where he had been detained since 2004. He was arrested in Pakistan at the Karachi airport in April 2002 for using a false passport in an attempt to travel to the UK. He admitted to training at the Al Farouq terrorist training camp. He was believed by counter terrorism experts to be a conspirator in the Jose Padilla plot to explode a radioactive dirty bomb in the United States.

The Politics of Personality
http://townhall.com/columnists/DavidRStokes/2009/09/06/the_politics_of_personality
Excerpt: “What’s Your Pledge?” “To be a servant to our president,” says Demi Moore. “To be of service to Barack Obama,” says Anthony Kiedis. We are witnessing something beyond the every-day attempt to package a political leader in a compelling way. In fact, we may very well be watching the emergence of a cult of personality. To some, even the suggestion of this is absurd because we associate such things with despotism. How could a free society fall prey to such a thing?

Feminist leader Naomi Wolf howls as her justifications of Islamic misogyny are exposed
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/027475.php
Excerpt: Leftist feminist Naomi Wolf, like other Leftist feminists, have in their overriding multiculturalist relativism a soft spot for Islam and its oppression of women. Phyllis Chesler, Jamie Glazov and David Horowitz have noticed, and the sparks are flying.

Michael Kruse of the St. Petersburg Times: Poster boy for biased pseudo-journalistic propaganda
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/027473.php
Excerpt: So here it is on video: Michael Kruse was right there, he heard me attribute the statement properly, and then he made the decision to strip out the attribution and characterize the statement as if it were an out-of-the-blue assertion from a paranoid blogger. That's what they call "journalism" these days!

Shame: Jack Straw admits Lockerbie bomber's release was linked to oil
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/027471.php
Excerpt: Jack Straw has reignited the row over the release of the Lockerbie bomber by admitting for the first time that trade and oil were an essential part of the Government’s decision to include him in a prisoner transfer deal with Libya. The Justice Secretary said he was unapologetic about including Abdelbaset al Megrahi in the agreement, citing a multi-million-pound oil deal signed by BP and Libya six weeks later. The admission directly contradicts Gordon Brown's insistence only days ago that oil deals were not a factor in the prisoner's release.

Van Jones Scandal Threatens Obama Presidency
http://www.aim.org/aim-column/van-jones-scandal-threatens-obama-presidency/
Excerpt: But the White House has to know that, if Jones goes, the questions won't end. Who appointed him? Who looked into his background? Who knew what and when?
Gibbs knows that the Jones controversy undermines confidence in the President, who bears ultimate responsibility for the appointment. Gibbs also has to know that, if Jones' background can sink Jones, the President himself is in trouble. Obama has decades of friendly associations with communists and terrorists, ranging from Communist Party USA member Frank Marshall Davis in his youth in Hawaii to communist terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn in Chicago when he was doing community organizing and running for political office. By comparison to Obama, when it comes to nefarious connections, Jones is a piker. Curiously, it's not Jones' communist background which has proven to be the most controversial. Rather, it's his two apologies in a week for statements calling Republicans "assholes" and having signed a 9/11 truth statement blaming the terrorist attacks on U.S. officials.

So they get him out over Labor Day, hoping no one is paying attention:
Van Jones Quits In The Middle of the Night
http://newsrealblog.com/2009/09/05/van-jones-quits-in-the-middle-of-the-night/
Another Obot slinks away. Victor David Hanson writes on his blog: How strange that we now learn of Van Jones’s long record of venom, but are told that he did not really mean it, and that the White House was unaware of these statements. Yet we know that Jones was selected because of, not despite, his provocations. Cf. Obama honcho Valerie Jarrett’s ecstasy: “Oooh. Van Jones, alright! So, Van Jones. We were so delighted to be able to recruit him into the White House. We were watching him, uh, really, he’s not that old, for as long as he’s been active out in Oakland. And all the creative ideas he has. And so now, we have captured that. And we have all that energy in the White House.

Missing channel pirate ship carried Russian arms for Iran
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6823300.ece
Excerpt: The Kremlin then ordered a naval rescue mission which involved destroyers and submarines. Any evidence that the Kremlin had let advanced weaponry fall into the hands of criminals or be sold to Iran would be highly embarrassing, so military officials believe a “cover story” was concocted.

AP picture of wounded Marine sparks debate
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090904/ap_on_re_us/afghan_death_ap_photo
Excerpt: "Why your organization would purposely defy the family's wishes knowing full well that it will lead to yet more anguish is beyond me," Gates wrote. "Your lack of compassion and common sense in choosing to put this image of their maimed and stricken child on the front page of multiple newspapers is appalling." (Well, if it sells papers, it can’t be wrong, can it?)
The disdain on the combat soldier for most “journalists” was captured here:
Hamburger Hill - "They take a side, you just take pictures"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHuOwXnnKyE

Without Tort Reform, It Isn't Health Care Reform --It's a Plaintiffs' Lawyers Protection Act
http://townhall.com/columnists/HughHewitt/2009/09/04/without_tort_reform,_it_isnt_health_care_reform_--its_a_plaintiffs_lawyers_protection_act
Excerpt: President Obama wants everyone to sacrifice. Well, not quite everyone. There is one group that President Obama doesn't mention, one group he doesn't demand sacrifice for the greater good. President Obama is protecting the plaintiffs' lawyers who sue doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies and reap billions in fees from the tort lottery. Though the broken, out-of-control tort system drives the cost of medicine through the roof, President Obama hasn't demanded any changes to that system, like a cap on pain and suffering damages, or a cap on lawyers' fees, or an excise tax on plaintiffs' contingency awards.

Saudis persecute Shi'ites as unbelievers
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/027463.php
Excerpt: Well, they've chased every other religion out of the country, so that leaves the Shi'ites to beat up on. And you know there's a problem with the vaunted "Islamic tolerance" when Islamic intolerance is so rife even among different Muslims, all the way back to the dispute over Muhammad's successor.

Time's up on Iran
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0909/glick090409.php3
Excerpt: Over the past few weeks evidence has piled up that Iran is not years away from being capable of building nuclear bombs at will. It is months away. As the latest report by the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran's nuclear program makes clear, at its present rate of uranium enrichment, Iran will have sufficient quantities of enriched uranium to build two atomic bombs by February. What is most notable about this IAEA finding is that it comes in a report that does everything possible to cover up Iran's progress and intentions. Israel responded angrily to the report alleging that the agency's outgoing director Muhammed el Baradei suppressed information that confirms the military nature of Iran's program.

Make my high holiday
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/regional/go_ahead_make_my_high_holiday_hLuhUCAbI9z2DATpOzJkIO
Excerpt: Fearing jihadists will attack synagogues during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, a group of badass rabbis has developed a program to turn your average shul-goer into a lean, mean fighting machine. The group, which calls itself the International Security Coalition of Clergy, was founded by Rabbi Gary Moscowitz, who boasts a black belt in karate, teaches martial arts and was an NYPD cop for nine years.

The Corps Teaches Harvard
http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2009/09/marine_harvard_090409w/
Excerpt: Harvard Business School recently touted the Marine Corps’ leadership philosophy as effective not only on the battlefield but in the office, too. The Sept. 1 “Management Tip of the Day” on Harvard Business Publishing’s Web site summarized Marine Corps leadership principles and encouraged corporate executives to rethink theirs. The post, titled “3 Things You Didn’t Know About Marine Corps Leadership,” says contrary to popular misconceptions, the Marine Corps is not a place where people mindlessly follow orders. “In fact, the Marine Corps is a highly effective organization that thrives by empowering” Marines, the post reads.

Join the Grassroots Movement to Make Barack Obama's Third Term Possible!
http://www.end22.com/
Imagine Bush or Reagan is president & this was going on!

Never Underestimate The American People
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYnDcEKYFc4&feature=PlayList&p=4D8FC2CC9C65EEF6&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=90
Great Tea Party Commercial, supposedly made by a teen.

A revolutionary seven months in America
http://commonamericanjournal.com/?p=1924
BO’s accomplishments.

Obama Takes a Page From Alinsky Handbook
http://www.newsmax.com/politics/obama_saul_alinsky/2009/09/01/254809.html
Excerpt: Throughout Barack Obama’s campaign for the White House, he never tired of referring to the three years he spent as a community organizer on Chicago’s South Side and its relevance to his life since then. However generic the term may sound to the average ear, it had a very specific meaning to young Barack Obama. It was a term of art used by the self-described Marxist tactician Saul Alinsky, author of “Rules for Radicals” and erstwhile mentor of Obama. As an organizer with the Developing Communities Project in the mid-1980s, the young Obama learned Alinsky’s tactics, and found a way to bring about the radical changes he and his friends had discussed during their days at New York’s Columbia University. In his first book “Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race And Inheritance,” Obama writes that he chose his friends at Columbia carefully — chiefly politically active black students, Marxist professors, structural feminists and punk rock performance poets.

China's national flag to go up in White House on Sept 20
http://sz0043.ev.mail.comcast.net/zimbra/mail#24
Be nice. The Chinese might stop lending us money!

Essay: The President Without a Country
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/pat-boone/2009/09/03/essay-president-without-country
Excerpt: Thinking about these and other statements made by the man who wears the title of president. I keep wondering what country he believes he's president of.