No freakin' way.

The End of the American Experiment.

The country has taken a decided lurch to the left. One that I don't see a recovery from. The ethos of America has changed. Not overnight, but there is a definite change. The pull yourself up by your bootstraps America is fading. The entitlement generation is on the rise. As businesses line up for more government handouts, the Fairness Doctrine, a new tax regime and the potential for nationalized healthcare looms, the Founding Fathers would be left scratching their heads.

Simple but true.

"I prefer American democratic capitalism to Euro-social democracy."

During a recent conversation with a registered republican who is considering voting for Obama, he expressed his frustration with the current "same as it ever was" mentality from Washington and the McCain campaign. His biggest grievance was the pick of Palin as a running mate. Well, which is it? Do you want another Beltway insider and more of the same, or do you really want change? Someone who brings a point of view for typical Americans. Don't attack her "lack of experience." Not in this election. Not when Obamas four years in a presidency would be his longest in ANY job.
See the rest of the Michael Novak article here.

Methodology.

The Messianic Style [Victor Davis Hanson]

Individually, the extra-electoral efforts are irrelevant. But in the aggregate, they start to add up. In 1996 Obama goes to court, challenges the petition signatures of mostly African-American voters, and gets all his rivals eliminated from the ballot and so de facto runs unopposed.

In 2004 sealed divorce records were strangely released destroying the chances of his chief Democratic rival Blair Hull; then in the general, lightning again struck, and Republican front-runner Jack Ryan's sealed divorce records were likewise mysteriously released—and he too crashed, in effect, leaving Obama without a serious primary or general election rival.

In this campaign, Acorn galvanizes to register voters and almost immediately runs into serial charges of voter registration fraud. Now an Obama ad runs asking Americans simply to take the day off to help get out the Obama vote: apparently American businesses, universities, and the government all are supposed to sacrifice hundreds of millions of dollars in lost collective work days to subsidize the Obama campaign in order "to change history"?

When one marries all that with the swarming of radio stations when someone like Stanley Kurtz goes on, the threats to go to court to stop ads, or the blacklisting of TV stations who dared to conduct tough interviews, the same old pattern reappears of by any means necessary. And in turn the explanation for all that?

The messianic style—the cosmic tug to "change history", or stop the seas from rising or the planet from heating, juxtaposed with the creepy faux-Greek columns, Michelle's "deign to enter" politics snippet, the fainting at rallies, the Victory Column mass address, the vero possumus presidential seal, and the 'we are the change we've been waiting for' mantra—reflects the omnipresent narcissism: the exalted ends of electing a prophet always justify the often crude and all too mortal means.

If this is considered 'right', I'd rather be wrong with McCain.

Man, I've been saying this for almost 10 years...

"...would have put to rest the notion that graduation from law school was any proof of either wisdom or morality."

Pulled from a Victor Davis Hanson article over at NRO

Link here.

Attention all undecided voters: Read this.

Is it any wonder newspapers are dying? This guy is exactly right. Public relations machine.

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?
By Orson Scott Card

Editor's note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of journalism.

An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled "Do Facts Matter?" ( http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com] ): "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means . That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That's where you are right now.

It's not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.

You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.

This article first appeared in The Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro, North Carolina, and is used here by permission.

Bailout blah.

What an incredible time.

$700 BILLION?!?

I'm having a hard time believing this "bailout" is necessary now. Shouldn't we actually have a crash first? Don't get me wrong, I don't want a crash and hope it doesn't happen, but sheesh.

If we truly are on the verge of a crisis, should our congressional "leaders" be taking a break?

Can we stop the blame game until this is resolved? A true crisis calls for leadership, not fingerpointing, politicizing, posturing or campaigning.

I've already been paralyzed by the presidential campaign as far as posting here goes. I'm waiting to see how this bailout develops....

USA Women’s Beach Volleyball Team Thanks the Prez (VIDEO)

The Decline of Hollywood.

Let me offer the electron elbow to the Left Coast and my dear friend, Mr. "Vote Libertarian!"

I really liked this article by Andrew Klavan in the Washington Post.

In a previous post, I alluded to the "one party effect" on creativity in Hollywood. I think this negative effect extends to culture and "art" (whatever that means).

I also found his reference to a "gray list" interesting. Hollywood elites and the left in general are always proclaiming the right is engaging in "McCarthyism." (Just try and say "Department of Homeland Security" at any Los Angeles hot spot). But that NEVER happens in high level, power suit studio meetings. NEVER.

Snidely funny election stuff.

Thought this was funny enough to place here.


It's unlikely you'll vote for Obama if you....

1. aren't a news anchor.
2. read the New York Times for pretty much the same reason the NSA monitors radio transmissions.
3. automatically conclude that the person laughing in the car next to you must be listening to Rush. Or maybe Obama off teleprompter.
4. dislocated your shoulder trying to explain Obama's position on Iraq to co-workers.
5. find autobiographies generally more interesting when the author has, you know, done something.
6. remember the Carter Administration.
7. would give a month's pay to play Jack Bauer's partner on 24.
8. increasingly agree with Mark Steyn that "almost everything [Obama] says is, well, nuts."
9. think it's relevant — despite what the sophisticates say — that several of Obama's mentors and associates have displayed a dislike for America or a disdain for Americans.
10. think it's relevant that several of McCain's mentors and associates are American heroes of historic magnitude.
11. think about 9/11 more than once a year.
12. have concluded that Larry the Cable Guy makes way more sense than Howard Dean.
13. feel a little safer during turbulence when your pilot is a calm "white haired dude."
14. thought about Hillary's 3:00 a.m. phone call ad when you first heard about Russian tanks in Georgia.
15. wonder why Obama felt it necessary to give a speech on patriotism.
16. get sorta creeped out by 200,000 Germans chanting "Obama! Obama!"
17. think the jury may still be out on Harvard Law School.
18. suspect "merci beaucoup" is French for "empty suit."
19. doubt that teleprompters are really magical dispensers of good ideas.
20. know in your gut that defiantly withstanding 4 1/2 years of torture trumps all of Obama's qualifications and accomplishments combined — regardless of what the elite pundits say.
21. repeatedly find yourself asking "Change to what?"
22. have ever used the term "pompous twit' in the same sentence with "Marx," "Marcuse," or "Sartre."
23. don't like being told what to do — especially by someone who hasn't done it.
24. really like ticking off the media, Hollywood, academics, and PC busybodies everywhere.
25. weren't born yesterday.

From Peter Kirsanow over at NRO

Kid gloves for Barry.

See this in the NYT.

Just bizarre. Barry has this thing in a cakewalk. You can't joke about him. You can't question his past. You have no track record to judge him against. He is the true Teflon candidate.

Isn't it a form of racism to not joke about him? Aren't the white comedians and talk show hosts racist for excluding him from their jokes and monologues based on his race? Hmmm, may have to call the Civil Rights Commission.

Jimmy Kimmel gagged on this interview. Barry is "so polished" that there is no possibility for comedy. Seriously? What about the raw ambition that it takes to actually want to be the Prez? No fodder there. How about the former "spiritual advisor"? Well, that would just be mean. Everybody knows that being mean isn't funny. Comedy shouldn't have an edge.

The Letterman guy kacked too. "We can't manufacture perception"? What? Isn't that what great comedians do? Plus, it's really hard to manufacture comedy. If only there were writers and joke-maker guys around to help with this.....

What is going on around here? Sadly, there doesn't seem to be anybody willing to answer that question or take on Barry. Yep, it's a laydown for him. This thing is over. Sorry Johnny Mac.

Hollywood, life and the creative process.

What an interesting view of Hollywood from this article.

First, the keying of cars is not limited to Hollywood and SoCal. I have a colleague that had a Bush-Cheney sticker on his car keyed here at work. In the county garage. We had the same conversation. It would never occur to me to key a car with prominent Democratic stickers. Heck, my arm would get tired. But the fact is, that sticker is on a car that belongs to somebody else. If they want to advertise their idiocy, have at it, Hoss. Keep you mitts off the private property, got it?

Second, I wondered if a close and dear friend has resorted to shouting out "Vote Libertarian" to ensure the operatives from Hollywood that he is in fact on board. Per our recent discussion, we can change our treatment to make the Guantanamo detainees the heroes, really, we can.

Third, I think Breitbart nailed the withering of the creative process. So what are all the people in Hollywood in it for? The art? The money? The politics? The power? Here comes the cynic in me......

Can orations carry a guy to the White House?

The impetus for this post is an article by Mark Steyn.

I happened to be watching tv just before Ursala the Sea Witch exited the race. One of the networks played Obama and McCain speeches back to back. The Obama speech wasn't the one cited in Steyn's article, but was equally flowing and mellifluous. Obama does have a great grasp on public speaking. Much like a preacher. You almost want to believe what he says. Almost.
The Dems will try to tell us how terrible life is in the U.S. right now. High gas prices, horrible economy, oh and don't forget Bush's war. We need change, folks. I mean, we aren't Europe yet. We have work to do. Not that the current problems have anything to do with failed policies and ideas from Europe. Laissez-faire immigration coupled with Draconian environmental laws. Oh yeah, that can't miss. If Barry does win, I'm sure we'll look back at the time The United States of America tried to become the European Union and how much that hurt.

It's like a trainwreck. I can't look away.

Call it a morbid fascination. Reading this article about Slick Willie just reinforces some of the long held beliefs I've had about him and his wife. Is this a hit job by Vanity Fair, because I'd never vote for her, but this article can't help, can it?

Caution, the article is lengthy.

“We are fighting to eliminate you.”

The "religion of peace" has a long history of violence, especially against the West. In the early stages of this blog, a fine west coast mind put forward the "religion of peace" canard.

I like this article. It reminds me of Conan the Destroyer: "What is best in life?" Conan "Crush your enemies. See them driven before you. Hear the lamentation of their women."

The article is also relevant. Oh but wait, we should dialogue with these guys. Right. How do you conduct negotiations with people that consider the fact the you are talking a sign of weakness? Better yet, why? Appeasement as a policy has a long and sorry history of being totally ineffective. The fact that the United States has done something about terrorism is significant. It's important that we are trying to change the status quo. Nobody likes war, but sometimes it's the best tool.

Look, you can also tie in Sharon Stone. See this quote:

Upon entering the city of Bukhara in 1220 he proclaimed: “If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.”

She is just like Genghis Khan when she says that China is being punished by an earthquake for it's treatment of Tibet. Or at least has the same "...pagan, a shamanist" belief system. (Just as an aside, I don't know much about Tibetan Buddhism, but is that a tenet of the religion? A vengeful god/gods punish for our misdeeds?)

Hippocrite celebrities.

Or "Hippy-Crites." Those wacky British.

Still, another reason not to get info from any Hollywood source (I don't consider Squeeze a Hollywood source. He lives in Studio City).

Article.

I gotcha.

Why we can't leave Iraq.

This is a pretty good article.

The heart of the matter:

I was on the ground in Iraq for 16 months, and in that time I talked to hundreds of Iraqis. Some didn't like us; some wanted us to leave, but most did not. What they wanted was for America to live up to its word. They wanted us to rid the country of terrorists and militias so that they could live in peace.

They were willing to help us, but they are not a stupid people. They know that if they commit to the American side and the Americans abandon them as we did in 1991, it means death for them and their families. They know this, and it is real. It is not an abstract idea for them.

Most Iraqis don't support Al-Qaida and the militias, but when our commitment to stay in Iraq and finish the job is in doubt -- as it was when Sen. Harry Reid went on TV and said, "this war is lost" -- Iraqis are going to hedge their bets. They may not support the militias, but when they are betting their lives, most of them are not going to commit to America unless they are assured that America is committed to them.

Nice quote, Mr. Defendant.

So I'm reading this article, mildly interested, when I get to the last line......Wha? Huh?

Is this guy a moron or what? So let me get this straight, I'm getting accused of being involved in satanic rituals that include rape and torture and while I'm being interviewed by the local newspaper, I whip out that quip?

Have you seen the Guinness commercials with the pilgrim? You've got brass, son.

Racism, Obama and stuff.

I see I've fallen in a NRO rut lately. So I ventured over to WeeklyStandard and found this article to be compelling.

I don't see how Obama can separate himself from this Wright guy (preacher seems too dignified). Why am I constantly astounded by these issues of race? It must say something about my own naivete, which I find lamentable. My own serious lack of introspection? A limited intellect? Bull-headed?

On the other hand, it's only March. There's a long way to go to the Presidential election.