Monday, September 27, 2010

Sunday, September 19, 2010

The Disappearing Middle Class

"Redistribution of Wealth" -- the Ruling Class isn't talking about its own wealth. Why is a government composed of millionaires so opposed to cutting taxes in any way, shape, or form? Simple: those laws won't apply to them. Why would the media back all kinds of laws and regulations on speech/press? The media will have friends on those boards. They will be able to do and say things their competition will not. Why did health care go through even with so many opposed? Congress, the president, and other Ruling-Classers are exempt. The entire system is being rewritten to insulate the Ruling Class, just as Marx advocated.

A great article! The Disappearing Middle Class

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Obama's Vanishing Sex Appeal

From the Daily Beast
by Tunku Varadarajan
None of this would be worth a moment’s conversation had Obama not carried so much political support by dint of his sex appeal, which was an amalgam of his youth, his seeming dynamism, his idealism (always carefully curated, but always palpable), and his cinematic visual imagery—etching his chin up at a camera, eyes far away; long, lean, loping strides; basketball; bare chest on beach. The great downside of all that came when he had to fill the seductive, pulse-quickening profile with presidential substance. The real world has quarried away at him in the form of Iran, BP, North Korea, Israel, Afghanistan, the economy, the Tea Party, and the like. The result has not been “hot.” It’s been room temperature.

Twenty months into office, Obama stands exposed as a floundering Man, not a panacea-laden Superman. Even his relationship with his wife has hurt his sex appeal: Uxorious men are never sexy for long.

The promise of “otherness” and change that had made Obama so sexy to so many stands shorn of its magic. He has tried to do too much, and as a result has done too little well: And failure is not sexy. He has given speech after speech to a restless, increasingly irritated nation, like a man trying to “talk” about the relationship when a girl wants to be ravaged; he has been a preachy, professorial windbag—in a word, charmless. This hasn’t merely diminished his sex appeal; it has killed it stone dead. Obama now looks more like tank-commander Dukakis than the George Clooney of our national narrative…

…Which leaves America without a single politician of stature with any sex appeal at all. It’s enough to make one weep.

Saturday, September 4, 2010

What a putz. Mr. Unpopular? Maybe he should be labeled Mr. Illiterate.

Smartest President in History Botches Oval Office Rug Quote
By Thomas Lifson in American Thinker

Woven into the new presidential seal rug adorning the Oval Office is a misattributed quotation, offering us a perfect metaphor for the Obama presidency. Jamie Stiehm reports in the Washington Post:

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." According to media reports, this quote keeping Obama company on his wheat-colored carpet
is from King.

Except it's not a King quote. The words belong to a long-gone Bostonian champion of social progress. His roots in the republic ran so deep that his grandfather commanded the Minutemen at the Battle of Lexington.

For the record, Theodore Parker is your man, President Obama. Unless you're fascinated by antebellum American reformers, you may not know of the lyrically gifted Parker, an abolitionist, Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist thinker who foresaw the end of slavery, though he did not live to see emancipation. He died at age 49 in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War.

A century later, during the civil rights movement, King, an admirer of Parker, quoted the Bostonian's lofty prophecy during marches and speeches.

Apparently, Obama himself believed the quotation to be from King. Stiehm writes:

My investigation into this error led me to David Remnick's biography of Obama, "The Bridge," published this year. Early in the narrative, Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, presents this as "Barack Obama's favorite quotation." It appears that neither Remnick nor Obama has traced the language to its true source.

The error perfectly encapsulates the shallowness of Barack Obama's intellect, and his lack of rigor. Obama is a man who accumulated academic credentials while giving no evidence whatsoever of achieving any depth. He was the only president of the Harvard Law Review to graduate without penning a signed article in that esteemed journal. His academic transcripts remain under lock and key, as do his academic papers.

For the sort of people like David Brooks of the New York Times, who are impressed by fancy degrees and a sharp crease in the trousers, Obama may appear to be the smartest ever occupant of the Oval Office. But, as the old joke goes, deep down, he is shallow. Underfoot, literally, there is woven into his background a prominent vein of phoniness.

For some reason or other, Obama has been able to skate through academia and politics without ever being seriously challenged to prove his depth. A simple veneer of glibness has been enough to win the accolades of the liberal intelligentsia. But now that he has actual responsibilities -- including relatively trivial ones like custodianship of the inner sanctum of the presidency -- his lack of substance keeps showing up in visible, embarrassing and troubling ways.

The ultimate irony is this: Obama's idol, Martin Luther King, had a long pattern of plagiarism, something airbrushed out of his story by the forces of political correctness, but well recognized by scholars of his written work. Clayborne Carson, the dean of King scholars, and director of the King Papers Project at Stanford acknowledges, "instances of textual appropriation can be seen in his earliest extant writings as well as his dissertation. The pattern is also noticeable in his speeches and sermons throughout his career."

There is no evidence that King attempted to claim authorship of the quotation woven into the Oval Office rug, so far as I know. Responsibility for this act of appropriation appears to lie on the presidential shoulders. Obama has his own pattern of appropriating things -- such as the money due to bondholders of GM and Chrysler, which he gave to the UAW, which he found more deserving, no matter what the laws of bankruptcy said about senior creditors.

When governments screw up postage stamps, the results become far more valuable to collectors, as in the case of the most expensive 20th century US postage stamp, the "inverted Jenny".

In a similar way, the botched Oval Office rug becomes a precious symbol of the Obama presidency, based on an image fabricated out of symbols rather than substance, and misappropriating valuable elements of America's history. The only question remaining is whether or not President Obama will choose to keep the rug in his office.

If the president keeps it, it instantly becomes the most interesting facet of that hallowed space, the first thing any visitor will want to (discreetly, with a quick downward glance) check out and silently chuckle about. Can you imagine the mirth that a visiting head of state would experience?
But if the president decides to excise the embarrassing carpet, what does he do with it? If he burns it, then the flames become a symbol of his failed presidency. If he auctions it off, as he should, it would fetch an enormous price -- enough to help reduce the deficit, or pay for some more fancy clothes and shoes for Michelle -- but then become an everlasting symbol of his ignorance.

As in so many other aspects of his presidency, Barack Obama has put himself into a no-win situation. Fortunately, the victims this time do not include the entire American people, but only Obama's image and the private donors who putatively paid for the rug.

or more aptly its the Summer Wreckovery


Friday, September 3, 2010

Obama's military leadership can only be called scandalous.



During the past week, 22 Americans were killed over a four-day period in Afghanistan. This is not a place about which decisions should be made in order to placate congressmen, pass health care and thereby maintain a president's political standing. This is a place about which a president should make decisions to best succeed in the military mission he himself has set out.

From Charles Krauthammer

Thursday, September 2, 2010

How Barack Obama Became Mr. Unpopular. This from Time Magazine? How can it be that our Savior has fallen from grace?


How Barack Obama Became How Barack Obama Became Mr. Unpopular
By Michael Scherer

The Barack Obama that most Hoosiers remember voting for can still be found on YouTube. He stands before a cheering Elkhart high school gymnasium in August 2008, tireless, aspirational, promising a new America of jobs and hope. "We can choose another future," says the newcomer with the funny name. "So I ask you to join me."

Today that view of Obama is harder to find in Indiana. A couple of weeks back and a dozen miles west of Elkhart, hundreds gathered in another school gym — except this time it was for a job fair. With the local unemployment rate above 12% and rising again this summer, about a third of the employer display tables stood empty. Julie Griffin, who voted for Obama in '08, sat down at the room's edge, well dressed and discouraged. After 23 years as a payroll administrator at a local RV plant, she got laid off 18 months ago. "Really, what has he been doing?" she said when I asked about Obama's efforts to help people like her. "I guess I don't know what he is doing." (See TIME's 2008 Person of the Year: Barack Obama.)