Friday Afternoon Roundup - All the Trains Run Through Obama
Posted: 23 Oct 2009 02:43 PM PDT
 This week Obama began throwing around his weight around
more than usual. In the USSR all the trains ran through Moscow in order to
centralize control of the country. In the US today, Obama is pushing to
make sure that all the trains run through him.
First Obama's
minions began pushing the rest of the media to denounce and distance
themselves from FOX. This of course is only the latest in the Obama
Administration's long addiction to public Stalinist purges and
denunciations, but this time it was launched against an entire
network.
And second the Obama Administration now appears to be
targeting state Democrats who don't "coordinate" with the White House. The
Washington
Post spins it as the White House distancing itself from a supposedly
losing candidate in the Virginia Governor's race, but the practical upshot
of it is that it's a warning shot that blames losing candidates for not
relying enough on Obama, sending the message that the failure to
"coordinate" your campaign with the White House will be a death blow to
your candidacy.
Senior administration officials have expressed
frustration with how Democrat R. Creigh Deeds has handled his campaign
for governor, refusing early offers of strategic advice and failing to
reach out to several key constituencies that helped Obama win Virginia
in 2008, they say.
Translation, he failed to pay off ACORN, SEIU and whatever
other munchkins and 527's the Obama Administration has its deals
with.
Of course the next step is to suggest that Deeds is kind of a
racist, or forced to be a racist because everyone in Virginia is a
racist.
A senior administration official said Deeds badly erred
on several fronts, including not doing a better job of coordinating with
the White House. "I understood in the beginning why there was some
reluctance to run all around the state with Barack Obama," said the
official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to speak candidly
about the race. "You don't do that in Virginia. But when you consider
the African American turnout that they need, and then when you consider
as well they've got a huge problem with surge voters, younger voters, we
were just a natural for them."
Of course that fails to explain why if race is the issue,
Obama won in Virginia.
But a more pertinent point is that Obama's
approval rating fell well below 50 percent in Virginia, which might
actually make him a liability, for political, not racial reasons. And just
maybe Deeds wasn't willing to turn over his campaign to Obama's cluster of
radical left wing groups and unions, and mortgage the next four years,
just to have Obama come to town for a day or two, and take some
pictures.
But national Democrats are contrasting Deeds with New
Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine and New York congressional candidate Bill
Owens, who they say have more actively sought the White House's help and
more vigorously and publicly backed its agenda. Polls show Corzine in a
competitive position in New Jersey and Owens ahead, while Deeds has
turned aggressively to Obama voters in recent days in an effort to
overcome a significant deficit in the polls.
Spot the key phrase in that paragraph. That's right, it's
"and more vigorously and publicly backed its agenda"
The
real point of course is that Corzine is further left and more willing to
give the Obama Administration a blank check in New Jersey.
Although Deeds often praises the president on the
campaign trail, he has distanced himself from Obama and Democratic
policy priorities at times. At a debate in September, he declined the
opportunity to label himself an "Obama Democrat." And just this week, he
said he did not believe that a public health insurance option is
necessary and that as governor he might consider opting out of one if
Congress extends that right to states.
Again the key criticism is that Deeds hasn't been willing
to lean far enough to the left, to hyphenate his party identification with
Obama, and to back a public option.
Democrats on both sides of the Potomac River cite
prominent Democratic businesswoman Sheila Johnson's endorsement of
McDonnell in July as the first sign of trouble in the Deeds campaign.
They say Deeds let several weeks go by after his June 9 primary without
calling Johnson, the co-founder of Black Entertainment Television and
one of Kaine's leading donors.
Again Deeds just didn't pay enough fealty to the people
around Obama. All the trains have to run through Moscow
Obama.
Meanwhile in more "people around Obama" news, we have
this following lovely tidbit.
Comedian David Cross brought his stand-up routine to
Washington's Warner Theatre Wednesday night and made a shocking
confession (assuming he wasn't joking...) at the end of his routine:
That he snorted cocaine while seated just yards away from President
Barack Obama at this year's White House Correspondents' Association
dinner.
"But it's crazy and there's security, Secret Service is
standing there," said Cross. "I've got photos of all this. ... I'm there
and the president is right here and with all these people at the table"
Cross snorted some coke, he said. "Maybe 40 feet from the president of
the United States!"
Cross said he texted his friend to say, "No
way you can ever top that."
I'm sure Obama will be very angry with his fellow cokehead
for not sharing.
Meanwhile in the UK there's a flurry of worry over
BNP leader Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time and the BNP's
increase in popularity.
Of course it would be childishly easy for
any party to steal the BNP's fairly one issue thunder, by getting serious
on immigration, deporting Islamists and closing the door to out of control
immigration. But none of them show any willingness to do it, which is why
the BNP will continue holding on to a valid populist issue that anyone
with any common sense understands represents a major national crisis, and
yet one that no mainstream party wants to touch.
Until that happens
the far right will keep making political gains, while newspaper columnists
dismiss the reason for those gains as just the product of xenophobia and
ignorance. And while it's easy enough to dismiss the BNP, there is no
dismissing the immigration elephant in the room. Those same issues became
vital in elections in Italy, Holland and France. It's only a matter of
time before they play that same role in the UK and the US as
well.
Back in the US, falling
temperatures are freezing out global warming dogma.
Global warming is becoming a much tougher sell. A new
Pew Research poll says the percentage of people surveyed, who believe
climate change is a very serious problem, has dropped from 44 percent
last year to 35 percent.
Only 57 percent believe there is solid
evidence of rising temperatures. That's down 14 percent. There is a
similar drop in those who say global warming is man-made. Just 36
percent believe it, down from 47 percent.
One expert at the
left-leaning Center for American Progress, Daniel Weiss, tells the Wall
Street Journal the findings were caused by: "Right-wing media
personalities... distorting science while the mainstream media remains
trapped in its he-said, she-said narrative."
Oklahoma Republican
Senator and global warming skeptic James Inhofe says the poll reflects
concerns over proposed climate change legislation: "The more Americans
learn about cap-and-trade — the more they oppose
cap-and-trade."
Naturally the CAP folks will argue that it's all Rush
Limbaugh's fault. These of course are the same people incapable of a
rational debate, who are now busy tarring and feathering the formerly
popular Freakonomics author for questioning an element of global warming
dogma.
The duo has
been hammered with a smear campaign, unprecedentedly, before the book
has even been released.
“It reminds me of what happened when Michael Crichton
wrote ‘State of Fear,’” said Myron Ebell, director of energy and global
warming policy at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute,
which gets some of its funding from the energy industry. “The problem
for the left is that there are still some people who don’t toe the party
line who have megaphones. And anyone who has a megaphone, they’re going
to go after.”
And some of their harshest fire is saved for people on
their side of the line, who step just a bit out of line.
Continuing
the roundup, Stop Islamization has an article on
Islam, A Powerful Doctrine of Cruelty and Hate – Attempted “Honor
Killing” (Arizona)
Yesterday, another atrocity perpetrated by a follower of
the “religion of peace” occurred, this time outside of Phoenix, Arizona.
Apparently, the father of a not-Islamic-enough 20-year old daughter
decided that she had become “too western”. His “religion of peace”
response – run her (and her friend) over with his car. This peaceful
response on the part of the father in this case was meant to result in
the death of the daughter (not “peace”). According to CNN, she is in the
hospital with life-threatening injuries [1]. CNN provides no details on
the friend’s condition.
The “Arizona Republic” has several
articles [2] on this case, none of them on the front page of their site.
Both victims remain in hospital today; the “peaceful” father is still at
large.
Family and friends of the victims told detectives that the
suspect had made threats toward his daughter because she was not living
according to traditional Iraqi values, Tellef said. However, police
cannot immediately determine whether that was the motive in the
incident.(Arizona Republic [3])
What could the reporters of the
“Arizona Republic” mean by “traditional Iraqi values”? Is there some
Baathist tradition of parents killing their children because they aren’t
Baathist enough? Is this some new “traditional value” that is
post-Sadam? Or is this some Islamic tradition that is meant to destroy
children who are leaving or who have left Islam? There is substantive
precedent to believe that the cause of this barbarism and cruelty and
homicidal intent on the part of the father in Arizona is a direct result
of Islamic concepts and “legal” guidelines and obligations and nothing
else. This attempted child murder is called an “honor
killing”
The Obama administration is . . . failing to address the
more urgent and immediate threat of biological terrorism, a bipartisan
commission created by Congress is reporting today.
The report . .
. cites failures on biosecurity policy by the White House, which the
Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction says has
left the country vulnerable. The commission, created last year to
address concerns raised by post-9/11 investigations, warns that anthrax
spores released by a crop-duster could “kill more Americans than died in
World War II” and the economic impact could exceed $1.8 trillion in
cleanup and other costs.
The government’s efforts “have not kept
pace with the increasing capabilities and agility of those who would do
harm to the United States,” the report says. “The consequences of
ignoring these warnings could be dire.” Says commission Chairman Bob
Graham, a Democratic former senator from Florida: “The clock is
ticking.” . .
But who needs to prepare for bioterrorism, when we can
tackle the far more burning issue of GLOBAL WARMING. Now 10 percent off at
Borders.
In another slice of the globe worth watching news, tensions are
again escalating between China and India.
Keep in mind that the
last time the rhetoric spun out of control over a border dispute, the
result was the Sino-Indian War
Beijing - China and India have taken a vituperative war
of words and diplomatic barbs to an unusual level of tension in recent
days, prompting fears that the traditional rivalry between the two Asian
giants could spin out of control.
"The most urgent present job
for both sides is crisis management," says Han Hua, an expert on South
Asia at Peking University. "I don't think either government wants the
situation to go further downhill."
The recent angry exchanges
were prompted by a decades-old border dispute over which the two
countries went to war in 1962, and which has proved impervious to 13
rounds of negotiations since.
But deeper resentments lie behind
the spat, says Shen Dingli, deputy head of China's South Asia Research
Institute. "The structural problem is leadership," he argues. "The
question is who leads in Asia?"
At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open,
democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they
have the ability to correct them — through vigorous public debate, an
adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage
reform.
That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the
democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in
human rights. We wanted to prevent the Soviet Union and its followers
from playing a moral equivalence game with the West and to encourage
liberalization by drawing attention to dissidents like Andrei Sakharov,
Natan Sharansky and those in the Soviet gulag — and the millions in
China’s laogai, or labor camps.
When I stepped aside in 1998,
Human Rights Watch was active in 70 countries, most of them closed
societies. Now the organization, with increasing frequency, casts aside
its important distinction between open and closed
societies.
Immediately after an IDF swearing-in ceremony at the
Western Wall on Thursday night, IDF soldiers being sworn in to the
Shimshon Brigade and their parents raised signs vowing not to
participate in the evacuation of Homesh.
Homesh is a Jewish town
in northern Samaria from which all Jews were expelled by then-Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon in 2005 to demonstrate that the disengagement
expulsion of Jews was not limited to Gaza. Since then, Jews have
returned to Homesh time and time again, with the IDF expelling them each
time, often on the Jewish Sabbath.
Senator Gillibrand’s own words, from yesterday’s Wall
Street Journal, show that the real purpose of Barack Obama’s climate
change legislation is to give Wall Street speculators yet another tulip
bulb scheme to replace the mess (mortgage backed securities) for which
we are still paying with a $750 billion stimulus package, various
bailouts at the taxpayers’ expense, and ten percent
unemployment.
We encourage our readers to circulate this article,
and Senator Gillibrand’s own words, as widely as possible to show that
Barack Obama’s cap and trade agenda has very little to do about
protecting the environment and everything to do with lining the pockets
of fat-cat Wall Street speculators, the same kind that gave us the
dot-com bubble and the housing bubble, at the expense of the American
people. It is especially important to convey this message to the working
people who make up the Democratic Party’s base. We also remind our
readers that General Electric, which stands to benefit enormously from
cap and trade, raised almost half a million dollars in bundled
contributions to elect Barack Obama.
I have seen some pretty insane anti-Israel rants
recently but the Mia Farrow CNN interview I saw yesterday probably takes
the biscuit. I tried to find the interview to link to - but it is not on
either the CNN site or youtube yet. I didn't catch the start of the
interview but my understanding is that the rationale for the interview
was that Mia Farrow had visited Gaza as part of her role as 'UNICEF
Ambassador'. I heard her say something like the suffering of the
Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank was 'the worst ever seen
in the world', but that was nothing compared to what she said in
response to the interviewer Rosemary Church's question about whether her
role had led her to see the suffering of Israeli children from Qassam
rocket attacks. Her response was that the Qassam rockets fired at
them
"were only filled with mud".
..No settlement in the land of Israel has a name of
Arabic extraction. The names of settlements are mostly of Hebrew
extraction; some of Greek or Latin-Roman. In fact, no Arab settlement
(except for Ramla) has had an original Arabic name to this day. Most
names of Arab settlements are of Hebrew or Greek extraction which have
been impaired and replaced by meaningless names in Arabic.
There
is no meaning in Arabic for the names Acre, Haifa, Jaffa, Nablus, Gaza
or Jenin and the names of cities, such as Ramallah, El-Halil and El-Kuds
have no historical or philological roots in Arabic. In the year 1696,
the year in which the tour was taken, Ramallah, for example, was called
Beit El, Hebron was called Hebron and Mearat HaMachpelah was called El
Chalil (a name for Abraham of the Bible). The land was, on the whole,
empty and desolate; the inhabitants were few and concentrated in the
cities of Jeusalem, Acre, Safed, Jaffa, Tiberius and Gaza. Most of the
inhabitants of the cities were Jews, the others were Christian; there
were very few Moslems, mostly nomadic Bedouins.
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