"At their core, the New Deal, Fair Deal, and Great Society programs were aimed at assuring every child of a decent education, every worker a decent wage, and every senior a decent retirement; if that’s extreme, so are the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution."Gee, except that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were a set of articles of incorporation for a new nation, and bylaws for that new nation aimed at (1) allowing people to determine for themselves what is best for them, and (2) keeping the federal government limited enough in scope that it cannot supplant the individual's conclusions with its own.....
...though some businesses have been targeted and vandalized by Occupy Oakland protesters, there is at least one businessman who refuses to be intimidated.Meanwhile, a driver trying to get out of an Oakland BART transit station, after one of these creeps started pounding on his car hood, accelerated and hit the creep! He is unidentified at present, but hats off to him as well. Hats off to the BART Transit Cops for letting him go, too.
Phil Tagami is a well-known Oakland developer. Late Wednesday night, instead of going over paperwork or brokering deals, he was forced to defend a downtown building where he personally oversaw $50 million worth of renovations.
He also has an office there.
“We had people who attempted to break into our building,” the landmark Rotunda Building on Frank Ogawa Plaza outside City Hall, Tagami said. According to comments he made to the San Francisco Chronicle, Tagami grabbed a shotgun that he usually keeps at home, went down to the ground floor and “discouraged them.”
Although they didn’t get inside the building, vandals did scrawl graffiti on the outside walls during the post-midnight riot that broke out after Occupy Oakland’s daylong general strike, writes the Chronicle.
“I was standing there and they saw me there, and I lifted it – I didn’t point it – I just held it in my hands,” Tagami said. “And I just racked it, and they ran.”
Jean Quan, mayor of Oakland, and the Oakland City Council have made "preserving disorder" the official municipal policy. On Wednesday, the "Occupy Oakland" occupiers rampaged through the city, shutting down the nation's fifth-busiest port, forcing stores to close, terrorizing those residents foolish enough to commit the reactionary crime of "shopping," destroying ATMs, spraying the Christ the Light Cathedral with the insightful observation "F**k", etc. And how did Mayor Quan and the Oakland City Council react? The following day they considered a resolution to express their support for "Occupy Oakland" and to call on the city administration to "collaborate with protesters."
That's "collaborate" in the Nazi-occupied France sense: the city's feckless political class are collaborating with anarchists against the taxpayers who maintain them in their sinecures. They're not the only ones. When the rumor spread that the Whole Foods store, of all unlikely corporate villains, had threatened to fire employees who participated in the protest, the Regional President David Lannon took to Facebook: "We totally support our Team Members participating in the General Strike today – rumors are false!" But, despite his "total support", they trashed his store anyway, breaking windows and spray-painting walls. As The Oakland Tribune reported: "A man who witnessed the Whole Foods attack, but asked not to be identified, said he was in the store buying an organic orange when the crowd arrived."
There's an epitaph for the republic if ever I heard one.
"The experience was surreal, the man said. 'They were wearing masks. There was this whole mess of people, and no police here. That was weird.'"
No, it wasn't. It was municipal policy.
In fairness to the miserable David Lannon, Whole Foods was in damage-control mode. Men's Wearhouse in Oakland had no such excuse. In solidarity with the masses, they printed up a huge poster declaring "We Stand With The 99%" and announcing they'd be closed that day. In return, they got their windows smashed.
I'm a proud member of the 1 percent, and I'd have been tempted to smash 'em myself. A few weeks back, finding myself suddenly without luggage, I shopped at a Men's Wearhouse, faute de mieux, in Burlington, Vermont. Never again. I'm not interested in patronizing craven corporations so decadent and self-indulgent that as a matter of corporate policy they support the destruction of civilized society. Did George Zimmer, founder of Men's Wearhouse and backer of Howard Dean, marijuana decriminalization and many other fashionable causes, ever glance at the photos of the OWS occupiers and ponder how many of "the 99%" were ever likely to be in need of his two-for-one deal on suits and neckties? And did he think even these dummies were dumb enough to fall for such a feebly corporatist attempt at appeasing the mob?
I don't "stand with the 99%," and certainly not downwind of them. But I'm all for their "occupation" continuing on its merry way. It usefully clarifies the stakes. At first glance, an alliance of anarchists and government might appear to be somewhat paradoxical. But the formal convergence in Oakland makes explicit the movement's aims: They're anarchists for statism, wild free-spirited youth demanding more and more total government control of every aspect of life – just so long as it respects the fundamental human right to sloth. What's happening in Oakland is a logical exercise in class solidarity: the government class enthusiastically backing the breakdown of civil order is making common cause with the leisured varsity class, the thuggish union class and the criminal class in order to stick it to what's left of the beleaguered productive class. It's a grand alliance of all those societal interests that wish to enjoy in perpetuity a lifestyle they are not willing to earn. Only the criminal class is reasonably upfront about this. The rest – the lifetime legislators, the unions defending lavish and unsustainable benefits, the "scholars" whiling away a somnolent half-decade at Complacency U – are obliged to dress it up a little with some hooey about "social justice" and whatnot.
But that's all it takes to get the media and modish if insecure corporate entities to string along. Whole Foods can probably pull it off. So can Ben & Jerry's, the wholly owned subsidiary of the Anglo-Dutch corporation UniLever that nevertheless successfully passes itself off as some sort of tie-dyed Vermont hippie commune. But a chain of stores that sells shirts, ties, the garb of the corporate lackey, has a tougher sell.
The class that gets up in the morning, pulls on its lousy Men's Wearhouse get-up and trudges off to work has to pay for all the other classes, and the strain is beginning to tell.
Let it be said that the "occupiers" are right on the banks: They shouldn't have been bailed out. America has one of the most dysfunctional banking systems in the civilized world, and most of its allegedly indispensable institutions should have been allowed to fail. But the Occupy Oakland types have no serious response, other than the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by government-funded inertia.
(...)
At heart, Oakland's occupiers and worthless political class want more of the same fix that has made America the Brokest Nation in History: They expect to live as beneficiaries of a prosperous Western society without making any contribution to the productivity necessary to sustain it. This is the "idealism" that the media are happy to sentimentalize, and that enough poseurs among the corporate executives are happy to indulge – at least until the window smashing starts. To "occupy" Oakland or anywhere else, you have to have something to put in there. Yet the most striking feature of OWS is its hollowness. And in a strange way the emptiness of its threats may be a more telling indictment of a fin de civilization West than a more coherent protest movement could ever have mounted.Michelle Malkin posts what the lamestream media apparatchiks won't.
It's everything you'd hope it would be, and more. I would try to narrow down a few highlights for those who are pressed for time, but it's spectacular from start to finish. Especially entertaining is Colbert's interview with the "female-bodied" facilitator named "Ketchup," and her smirking consensus comrade.
Hate (Wall) Street or not, the problems we face didn't begin there. They began in Washington D.C. It wasn't the Street that squandered the Social Security Trust Fund or decided that the economy would look better with a 15 trillion dollar deficit. The Street certainly played its role in suggesting to the politicians which side of the river to throw the money in, but it was at best a bagman. And the robbers are still off the Potomac, smirking their way through Senate sessions, and trading email notes with the organizations behind the populist protests.
“Who you gonna kill today?”
This mocking goes on for a few minutes, you think he's done and he continues mocking saying "we'll go down there and you design the wall....We'll start a ladder company"...This is unbelievable.I know the Bay Area is weenie liberal, but his district (CA-13) is NOT San Francisco, NOT Berkeley, and it’s NOT the Oakland ghettoes. It's the Bay Area, so weenie liberals are the norm. However, Fremont, Hayward, San Leandro and Alameda are *suburban*. They aren’t exactly conservative hotbeds, but they *are not* Berkeley or San Francisco.
On any other day at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, Daniel Galli and his four friends would not even be noticed for wearing T-shirts with the American flag. But Cinco de Mayo is not any typical day especially on a campus with a large Mexican American student population.And what is *that* supposed to mean?
Galli says he and his friends were sitting at a table during brunch break when the vice principal asked two of the boys to remove American flag bandannas that they wearing on their heads and for the others to turn their American flag T-shirts inside out. When they refused, the boys were ordered to go to the principal's office.And what have things come to when the American flag, which all students should be able to share in common and rally around, leads to fights? These are the wages of "multiculturalism". But this is what you get when you allow leftists to take over the schools who only think they have "power" when they indoctrinate our children.
"They said we could wear it on any other day," Daniel Galli said, "but today is sensitive to Mexican-Americans because it's supposed to be their holiday so we were not allowed to wear it today."
The boys said the administrators called their T-shirts "incendiary" that would lead to fights on campus.
"They said if we tried to go back to class with our shirts not taken off, they said it was defiance and we would get suspended," Dominic Maciel, Galli's friend, said.But it *isn't* a Mexican holiday. It is hardly noticed south of the border. It was originally for Mexican Americans much as Saint Patrick's Day is for Irish Americans, and Columbus Day for Italian Americans (although the Left has trashed that day too, come to think of it).
The boys really had no choice, and went home to avoid suspension. They say they're angry they were not allowed to express their American pride. Their parents are just as upset, calling what happened to their children, "total nonsense."
"I think it's absolutely ridiculous," Julie Fagerstrom, Maciel's mom, said. "All they were doing was displaying their patriotic nature. They're expressing their individuality."
But to many Mexican-American students at Live Oak, this was a big deal. They say they were offended by the five boys and others for wearing American colors on a Mexican holiday.
"I think they should apologize cause it is a Mexican Heritage Day," Annicia Nunez, a Live Oak High student, said. "We don't deserve to be get disrespected like that. We wouldn't do that on Fourth of July."So this young lady does not think she's an American too? That is truly sad--multiculturalism at work. And with an attitude like that, times many other kids, what does this mean for the future?
The five boys and their families met with a Morgan Hill Unified School District official Wednesday night. The district released a statement saying it does not agree with how Live Oak High School administrators handled this incident.
The boys will not be suspended and they were told they can go back to school Thursday. They may even wear their red, white, and blue colors again, but this time, the day after Cinco de Mayo, there will be no controversy.Wrong. The next day, the story gets worse:
A day after five Morgan Hill students were sent home for wearing American flag t-shirts, the controversy erupted ten fold."Multicultural Education" at work! The 5th column at home.
Students at Live Oak High School made a mass and impromptu walk out of class Thursday.... Many support the school's decision and say they were offended by their classmates wardrobe choice.
Many of the students who walked out Thursday held Mexican flags as they left campus. The students walked to City Hall for a loud but calm noontime rally. There were about 200 students taking part in the protest.
....the e-mails suggest that CRU scientists have been suppressing and misstating data and working to prevent the publication of conflicting views in peer-reviewed science periodicals. Some of the more pungent e-mails:2. The corruption of the "peer-reviewed" process:
"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"
"Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith re AR4?"
"I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."
"The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty we can't."
"I'm getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU temperature station data. Don't any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act!"
The trouble with outsourcing your marbles to the peer-reviewed set is that, if you take away one single thing from the leaked documents, it's that the global warm-mongers have wholly corrupted the "peer-review" process. When it comes to promoting the impending ecopalypse, the Climate Research Unit is the nerve-center of the operation. The "science" of the CRU dominates the "science" behind the United Nations IPCC, which dominates the "science" behind the Congressional cap-and-trade boondoggle, the upcoming Copenhagen shakindownen of the developed world, and the now-routine phenomenon of leaders of advanced, prosperous societies talking like gibbering madmen escaped from the padded cell, whether it's President Barack Obama promising to end the rise of the oceans or the Prince of Wales saying we only have 96 months left to save the planet.Which brings us to:
But don't worry, it's all "peer-reviewed."
Here's what Phil Jones of the CRU and his colleague Michael Mann of Penn State mean by "peer review". When Climate Research published a paper dissenting from the Jones-Mann "consensus," Jones demanded that the journal "rid itself of this troublesome editor," and Mann advised that "we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers."
So much for Climate Research. When Geophysical Research Letters also showed signs of wandering off the "consensus" reservation, Dr. Tom Wigley ("one of the world's foremost experts on climate change") suggested they get the goods on its editor, Jim Saiers, and go to his bosses at the American Geophysical Union to "get him ousted." When another pair of troublesome dissenters emerge, Dr. Jones assured Dr. Mann, "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"
Which, in essence, is what they did. The more frantically they talked up "peer review" as the only legitimate basis for criticism, the more assiduously they turned the process into what James Lewis calls the Chicago machine politics of international science. The headline in the Wall Street Journal Europe is unimproveable: "How To Forge A Consensus." Pressuring publishers, firing editors, blacklisting scientists: That's "peer review," climate-style. The more their echo chamber shriveled, the more Mann and Jones insisted that they and only they represent the "peer-reviewed" "consensus."
The e-mails of "Andy" (as his CRU chums fondly know him) are especially pitiful. Confronted by serious questions from Stephen McIntyre, the dogged Ontario retiree whose "Climate Audit" Web site exposed the fraud of Dr. Mann's global-warming "hockey stick" graph, "Andy" writes to Dr. Mann to say not to worry, he's going to "cover" the story from a more oblique angle:
"I'm going to blog on this as it relates to the value of the peer review process and not on the merits of the mcintyre et al attacks.
"peer review, for all its imperfections, is where the herky-jerky process of knowledge building happens, would you agree?"
And, amazingly, Dr. Mann does!
"Re, your point at the end – you've taken the words out of my mouth."
And that's what Andrew Revkin did, week in, week out: He took the words out of Michael Mann's mouth and served them up to impressionable readers of the New York Times and opportunist politicians around the world champing at the bit to inaugurate a vast global regulatory body to confiscate trillions of dollars of your hard-earned wealth in the cause of "saving the planet" from an imaginary crisis concocted by a few dozen thuggish ideologues.
....you can't make informed decisions when those decisions have already been made for you by an educational establishment which has been in the liberal tank for decades. With respect to this particular subject, how many school age children have been forced to watch Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" and given the impression that a blowhard politician with no scientific credentials whatsoever, a man whose own lifestyle contradicts everything he ostensibly believes in, is the last word on the subject? How many kids have been told global warming is "settled science" without offering them a scintilla of contrasting information? How many have been brainwashed into believing that "living green" is tantamount to the religious mandate to "go and sin no more?"4. The double standard of the liberal lamestream media:
Every effort mankind has ever undertaken to obliterate individual freedom and increase the power of the state has always included the inculcation of children too young to think independently. This one is no different. If America is going to right itself, the war for our children's hearts and minds must be won.
But in order to win it, more people have to realize it exists. More importantly, they have to do something about it. This is a difficult undertaking for parents who are the front-liners in this fight. At the end of a busy day, very few people want to know—exactly—what their children are learning in school. Unfortunately, such apathy is the mother's milk of progressives for whom raising a generation of school children who disdain American exceptionalism is a prime directive. People with no particular pride in their country are a much more malleable bunch than those with a real understanding of self-reliance, Constitutionalism, and historical perspective.
A "burning planet"—only thirty-three years removed from a "freezing" one—reveals the true nature of "progressivism". It is about the accumulation of power by any means necessary. And, as evidenced by the purloined emails, even the ostensible epitome of rational thinking, aka the scientific method, is as exploitable as anything else. But such people could never get as far as they've gotten without getting the children on board.
Ironically, they have told us so. How many times has a liberal touted this or that government agenda with the idea that they're doing it "for the children." When more Americans begin to understand that the more accurate phrase it "to the children," it will be the beginning of the end for these power-hungry thugs.
The reaction to these revelations? Perhaps as revealing, if not more so, than the revelations themselves. Much like the ACORN scandal, the mainstream media—once again with the exception of Fox News—has either avoided the story completely, or sought to focus on the manner in which the emails were procured. This last bit is pivotal, because it is the basis by which the intrepid folks at the New York Times and other media sources have determined that they will withhold the damning evidence from the public: stolen material is unfit for print or broadcast.Copenhagen, despite Barack Obama's presence, seems sure to be a bust — there will be no agreement on mandatory limits on carbon emissions. Even if there were, it would probably turn out to be no more effective than the limits others agreed to in Kyoto in 1997. In any case, China and India are not going to choke off their dazzling economic growth to please Western global warming alarmists.
Apparently this is a spanking new standard for the Times, whose appetite for disseminating purloined or secret stuff goes back at least as far as the top secret, "not intended for publication" Pentagon Papers in 1971, all the way through to revealing top-secret info about how the Bush administration conducted various aspects of the war on terror.
While "errors" of omission and large dollops of hypocrisy are nothing new in the annals of MSM behavior, what is new is that they can no longer get away with them. This story has legs for two reasons: 1. it is a genuine scandal and 2. the blogosphere, unlike far too much of the MSM, will not let it go unreported simply because it doesn't jibe with the liberal agenda.
Thus on the plus side, those of you who have heard of this story realize that the old media can no longer be trusted. As a result, your understanding of what is actually happening in the world goes far deeper than the average American. That is the minus side: too many of our fellow citizens still believe watching TV news makes them informed Americans. Too be kind, they don't know what they don't know. Too be less than kind, it's long past time they learned.
Longtime Latino rights activist and former Santa Ana school board chairman Nativo Lopez has been charged with four felony counts of voter fraud and has been released on his own recognizance pending trial.
The charges stem from Lopez allegedly registering to vote at a Los Angeles office address while continuing to live with his family in Orange County. He also allegedly cast an illegal ballot from Los Angeles in the 2008 presidential primary.
He faces charges of fraudulent voter registration, fraudulent document filing, perjury and fraudulent voting, according to Secretary of State Debra Bowen. The maximum penalty if convicted on all charges would be 3 years and 8 months in state prison.
(...)
Lopez is national president of Mexican American Political Association and national director of Hermandad Mexicana Latinoamericana, both of which are advocates for immigrant rights. A controversial figure among both anti-illegal immigration activists and some community activists, Lopez was recalled in 2003 from his post as school board member after serving six years.
The charges against him were filed after Bowen’s office investigated a tip and turned the matter over to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office to prosecute. The office where he was registered to vote was the Boyle Heights branch of Hermandad Mexicana Latinoamericana, according to Bowen.
The Orange County Registrar of Voters said Lopez had been registered to vote in Santa Ana until January 2008, when he cancelled his Orange County registration.
Lopez surrendered to authorities on Wednesday. Superior Court Commissioner Alan Rubin granted Lopez's request to be released without posting bail.
The Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office had been seeking bail of $55,000, said spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons. Arraignment - when Lopez will state whether he is guilty or not guilty - was set for July 8.
In 1996, Lopez attracted controversy for registering new citizens in the congressional district where Democrat Loretta Sanchez upset incumbent Bob Dornan.
A congressional investigation later found that some voters had cast ballots before their citizenship was finalized. The Orange County District Attorney’s Office investigated allegations that Lopez’s primary organization, then known as Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, was responsible for the improper registrations but no charges were filed.
Lopez also ran into difficulties in 2002 over hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funding received by Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, whose services included citizenship training and English lessons. Prosecutors alleged that Lopez had wrongly used the education grants to pay the mortgage on his headquarters in Santa Ana.
Hermandad Mexicana Nacional agreed to pay a $600,000 settlement, but did not admit wrongdoing.
SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS) -- Vandals may have marked up the wrong church Saturday night in an apparent revolt against Proposition 8 supporters.
Black spray-painted swastikas marred the front of Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in San Francisco's Castro district. Though the church itself is gay friendly, the proposed ban on gay marriage had support from prominent Catholics up to and including Pope Benedict.Pastor Steve Meriweather told KCBS his parishioners actually share the vandals' sentiment against Prop 8. "I think it's unfortunate that they selected our community to attack," said Meriweather, "because it's the wrong one."
Some attending mass at Holy Redeemer in the heart of the Castro are calling it a hate crime. San Francisco Police have been called in to investigate.
There is an old Russian fable, with different versions in other countries, about two poor peasants, Ivan and Boris. The only difference between them was that Boris had a goat and Ivan didn't. One day, Ivan came upon a strange-looking lamp and, when he rubbed it, a genie appeared. She told him that she could grant him just one wish, but it could be anything in the world.
Ivan said, "I want Boris' goat to die."
Variations on this story in other countries suggest that this tells us something about human beings, not just Russians.
It may tell us something painful about many Americans today, when so many people are preoccupied with the pay of corporate CEOs. It is not that the corporate CEOs' pay affects them so much. If every oil company executive in America agreed to work for nothing, that would not be enough to lower the price of a gallon of gasoline by a dime. If every General Motors executive agreed to work for nothing, that would not lower the price of a Cadillac or a Chevrolet by one percent.
Too many people are like Ivan, who wanted Boris' goat to die.
It is not even that the average corporate CEO makes as much money as any number of professional athletes and entertainers. The average pay of a CEO of a corporation big enough to be included in the Standard & Poor's index is less than one-third of what Alex Rodriguez makes, about one-tenth of what Tiger Woods makes and less than one-thirtieth of what Oprah Winfrey makes.
But when has anyone ever accused athletes or entertainers of "greed"?
It is not the general public that singles out corporate CEOs for so much attention. Politicians and the media have focused on business leaders, and the public has been led along, like sheep.
The logic is simple: Demonize those whose place or power you plan to usurp.
Politicians who want the power to micro-manage business and the economy know that demonizing those who currently run businesses is the opening salvo in the battle to take over their roles.
There is no way that politicians can take over the roles of Alex Rodriguez, Tiger Woods or Oprah Winfrey. So they can make any amount of money they want and it doesn't matter politically.
Those who want more power have known for centuries that giving the people somebody to hate and fear is the key.
In 18th century France, promoting hatred of the aristocracy was the key to Robespierre's acquiring more dictatorial power than the aristocracy had ever had, and using that power to create a bigger bloodbath than anything under the old regime.
In the 20th century, it was both the czars and the capitalists in Russia who were made the targets of public hatred by the Communists on their road to power. That power created more havoc in the lives of more people than czars and capitalists ever had combined.
As in other countries and other times, today it is not just a question of which elites win out in a tug of war in America. It is the people at large who have the most at stake.
We have just seen one of the biggest free home demonstrations of what happens in an economy when politicians tell businesses what decisions to make.
For years, using the powers of the Community Reinvestment Act and other regulatory powers, along with threats of legal action if the loan approval rates varied from the population profile, politicians have pressured banks and other lending institutions into lending to people they would not lend to otherwise.
Yet, when all this blows up in our faces and the economy turns down, what is the answer? To have more economic decisions made by politicians, because they choose to say that "deregulation" is the cause of our problems.
Regardless of how much suffocating regulation may have been responsible for an economic debacle, politicians have learned that they can get away with it if they call it "deregulation."
No matter what happens, for politicians it is "heads I win and tails you lose." If we keep listening to the politicians and their media allies, we are all going to keep losing, big time. Keeping our attention focused on CEO pay— Boris' goat— is all part of this game. We are all goats if we fall for it.
"Obama simply showed up the day after he won the nomination and declared himself a centrist. Everything since has been couched in reassuring, moderate terms in brilliant salesmanship worthy of the best minds at the American Marketing Association.A full-blown commie President, combined with Communists running the House and Senate. We will regret this. But the Obamunist Associations get worse:
Obama's tax cut for 95 percent of working people is one of the reasons he has a 2-1 advantage on "helping the middle class," according to the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. Obama's proposal doesn't actually cut income or payroll tax rates. Overall, John McCain's proposal cuts taxes more than Obama for typical families. But Obama sounds more zealous about middle-class tax cuts.
On health care, Obama has attacked McCain's proposal on conservative grounds, claiming it would trash the current system of employer-provided insurance and raise taxes. As for his own proposal? It's the centrist alternative. His advertising contrasts two approaches to health care — one government-run, the other allowing insurance companies to run amok. "Barack Obama says both extremes are wrong," says the ad.
On social issues, Obama says he opposes gay marriage. Never mind that he supports repealing the Defense of Marriage Act. He says he supports reducing the abortion rate. Never mind that he supports taxpayer funding of abortion. On gun rights, his campaign has been running advertisements explaining "Barack Obama and John McCain will both make sure we can keep our guns." In his public presentation, Obama might as well be an embittered rural voter clinging to guns and religion.
Then, there's his steady demeanor. He's so even-keeled, you could practically put a level on his head and its bubble would barely move. This quality served him well during the financial meltdown. But if Obama's elected, we may look back and wonder why everyone thought passivity in a crisis spoke of extraordinary leadership skills.
Obama is able to get away with all this because he has a thin record, and what record he has the press isn't willing to examine. In the Illinois Legislature, Obama voted against legislation protecting infants born alive after abortions — votes so outrageous the press acts as if they simply couldn't have occurred. Obama can reinvent himself at will, a political Gatsby with all of America as his East Egg.
If elected, Obama will return to Washington with expanded and emboldened liberal majorities in both the Senate and the House. Congress was the un-doing of his two Democratic forebears. Carter was stiff-necked with a Democratic Congress, and that made it nearly impossible for him to govern; Clinton accommodated his Democratic Congress in 1993-94, and it pulled him to the left to devastating effect in the 1994 congressional elections."
"There was Ali Larijani, for example, the Hezbollah- and Hamas-supporting speaker of Iran's parliament, who voiced Iran's preference for a "more flexible and rational" Obama over John McCain — not that he got what you could call a media roll-out. Nor did America's own anti-white, anti-Jewish Louis Farrakhan, who recently heralded an Obama presidency as the coming age of the "the Messiah." There was a newsflash for fluffy-con endorsements at home and abroad, arcing and sputtering on a thin mix of elitism and naivete, but virtually no one seems to have noticed an Obama endorsement that came in from the National Association of Muslim American Women (NAMAW).
Big yawn? Hardly. In its endorsement, the Columbus-based Muslim women's group described itself as "pro-family" and "pro-life." But, given the record of NAMAW chairwoman and CEO Anisa Abd el Fattah, it is also pro-Hamas.
As Patrick Poole has reported, Fattah has published Hamas-ian writings contending, for example, that Zionism "violates ... every norm of decency known to the human species." Fattah has also co-authored two books with Hamas spokesman and chief political adviser Ahmed Yousef ("The Agent: The Truth Behind the Anti-Muslim Campaign in America and Al-Aqsa Intifada"). And yes, that would be the same Ahmed Yousef, who, on behalf of Hamas, endorsed Barack Obama back in April.
Both Fattah and Yousef (who fled the country in 2005 to avoid prosecution in the terrorism-related Fawaz Damra trial) used to work for the United Association for Studies and Research (UASR), an innocuously named organization founded by Hamas chieftain Mousa abu Marzook that has been described as "the political command of Hamas in the United States." The UASR, along with an interlocking network of Islamic organizations, has been designated by the government as both an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror-financing trial, and an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian-founded organization that seeks to install the Sharia (Islamic law) worldwide. Other groups so designated include the Muslim American Society (MAS), which the government said was "founded as the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States," and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), of which Fattah, it so happens, was a founding board member. (Fattah, according to her online biography, as Poole has noted, also helped develop the American Muslim Council, which was founded by convicted terrorist financier Abdurahman Alamoudi.)"
