Obama: Those Who Are Against Socialism Are Just Selfish

Barack Obama, via Treacher and Hot Air:

“The point is, though, that — and it’s not just charity, it’s not just that I want to help the middle class and working people who are trying to get in the middle class — it’s that when we actually make sure that everybody’s got a shot – when young people can all go to college, when everybody’s got decent health care, when everybody’s got a little more money at the end of the month – then guess what? Everybody starts spending that money, they decide maybe I can afford a new car, maybe I can afford a computer for my child. They can buy the products and services that businesses are selling and everybody is better off. All boats rise. That’s what happened in the 1990s, that’s what we need to restore. And that’s what I’m gonna do as president of the United States of America.

“John McCain and Sarah Palin they call this socialistic,” Obama continued. “You know I don’t know when, when they decided they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness.”

What about Envy?

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Talking Points Memo Thinks LA Times Khalidi Tape Issue is About Race

Josh Marshall claims the LA Times Khalidi-Obama-Ayers Tape issue is about race, apparently because the people involved are not all white, and claims Khalidi is just a harmless professor.

But Khalidi was a spokesman for a terrorist organization.

And the LA Times Khalidi-Obama-Ayers Tape issue is not about race; it's about what Khalidi and Obama say and do on the tape, who else is on the tape, and why it isn't being shown.

Is the LA Times suppressing anti-Obama information?

Does Obama express or approve anti-Israel sentiment?

Were Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn at the Khalidi going away party, and does the tape contradict Obama's claims of casual acquaintance and knowledge of Ayers' attitudes?

In short, it's all about Barack Obama's actions and Barack Obama's beliefs, not about Rashid Khalidi.

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Obama: Communists Are The Nice People

Barack Obama is trying to divert attention from his collectivist economic policies through his usual redefinition+strawman tactic. Noting that John McCain and Joe "the Plumber" Wurzelbacher called his wealth-spreading ideas "socialism", Obama complains joyfully:

"By the end of the week, he'll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten. I shared my peanut butter and jelly sandwich."

No one gets called a communist for sharing their own resources, something Barack Obama does not in fact do (unless it's for his own benefit).

Kindergarten communists share other people's toys, and other people's lunch money. Barack the Spreader wants to share other people's wealth.

If the shoe fits....

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NY Times Bashes Palin With Skewed Poll

The NY Times, a failing company grasping at the straw of relevance, put a week-old poll on the front page today, trying to claim that Sarah Palin was a "drag" on the McCain ticket.

Mrs. Palin will do well to remember this in January when she presides over the Senate.

The poll shows that Sarah is not popular among people who love Barack Obama. It was not Sarah Palin's job to appeal to those folks, but to the Republican base. She does that, because without the negative lens of wanting to elect Obama, people see she's made of awesome.

Rather than showing that Sarah Palin is a drag on the ticket, what their poll really shows is that a week ago people thought Barack Obama was going to win the election.

Here is how the poll was conducted, and also a PDF of the entire results.

We note that the poll was conducted as a random selection of telephone exchanges, weighted by population. In other words, urban areas favoring Barack Obama were more likely to be called.

Then there is this:

The combined results have been weighted to adjust for variation in the sample relating to geographic region, sex, race, marital status, age and education. In addition, the land-line respondents were weighted to take account of household size and number of telephone lines into the residence, while the cellphone respondents were weighted according to whether they were reachable only by cellphone or also by land line.

Some findings regarding voting were also weighted in terms of an overall “probable electorate,” which uses responses to questions dealing with voting history, attention to the campaign and likelihood of voting in 2008 as a measure of the probability of respondents’ turning out in November.

When they noticed that even considering the inherent bias in their questioning that their randomness wasn't random enough, they skewed the results to more closely fit what they believed.

(This post was revised. I thought at first that the NY Times poll didn't even ask about Sarah Palin, but I was wrong.)

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No, Josh, Khalidi Is Not About Race

Josh Marshall writes at Talking Points Memo about John McCain's link of Barack Obama to Rashid Khalidi, and without irony charges that it's all about race:

This is an entirely respectable, highly respected scholar. To go further into making a case for him would only be to enable and indulge McCain's sordid appeal to racism.

Khalidi is anti-Israel. Depiction of him as an unsavory character has nothing to do with him personally or his ethnicity, and everything to do with his own views of the Other.

The Khalidi controversy would disappear if the LA Times were to release the video of this harmless going away party. Who could be alarmed at the reading of poetry?

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Lest we forget what else the LA Times brought us ...

Barack, the Magic Negro.

I'd never read that March, 2008 article by David Ehrenstein before. I had assumed it was a mere puff piece on Obama. Instead, it was a patently offensive smear on all white people as closet racists. Speaking of the Magical Negro type in the movies and American culture:

He's there to assuage white "guilt" (i.e., the minimal discomfort they feel) over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest.

Listing inoffensive black actors such as Sidney Poitier and Morgan Freeman, Ehrenstein concludes that this pattern and the popularity of the type must mean that whites hunger for such a type to ease their guilt.

But the logic isn't there. Just because a series of similar characters appears in popular films doesn't mean there is a hunger for its type. As a counterpoint, consider the decision faced by the screenwriter, director, and others involved in the film. Should the character be black or white? Should they tailor the script to the actor, or pick the actor based on the script? In designing the film, should they have the character be aggressively sexual, and if so, how does that affect the plot?

It's a lot more complicated than some imaginary racialist conspiracy.

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Learn The Power of the Dark Side!

Get out of my yard!

w/t NRO

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Why Saul Alinsky Would Love Early Voting

Tom Blumer at Pajamas Media nails it:

It is becoming more obvious with each election cycle that that the widespread adoption of no-excuses-needed early voting has been a big mistake.

Read the Whole Thing, as they say.

We should not know how anyone else is voting. Saul Alinsky, in his Rules for Radicals, Barack Obama's training manual, explained that to take control, the easiest thing is to first make it appear that the system is broken.

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Ross Douthat Starting to Clue In

Douthat finally notices that no matter what the McCain campaign (or anyone else who doesn't support Barack Obama) says or does this election cycle, he or she will be called a racist. That's because liberals think of liberalism as the definition of goodness.

Since they know conservatives don't espouse liberalism, they think conservatives must be somehow corrupted by some other external force that keeps the conservative from expressing his inner liberal.

That is partly why sex scandals among Republicans (not all of whom are actually conservative) get so much attention: it reinforces to liberals that Republicans (and by extension, conservatives) are all, or substantially, deviants suffering from repression of sexual gratification. Oddly, liberals typically don't see anything wrong with the behavior itself, as long as one shouts it from the rooftops.

Similarly, liberals see Republican financial corruption as greed luring what would otherwise be a fine and good person away from liberalism, corrupted by evil corporate interests.

And finally, to Douthat's problem: liberals charge Republicans generally and conservatives specifically with racism because racism explains to the liberal why anyone would be against the obvious goodness of robbing Peter to pay Paul. Never mind the obvious injustice to Paul; there are for more Peters, and each Peter gets to vote at least once.

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Obama on LA Times Video: Israel Has No God-Given Right to Palestine, Has Committed Genocide on Palestinians

Treacher quotes a source:

Saw a clip from the tape. Reason we can't release it is because statements Obama said to rile audience up during toast. He congratulates Khalidi for his work saying "Israel has no God-given right to occupy Palestine" plus there's been "genocide against the Palestinian people by Israelis."

It would be really controversial if it got out. That's why they will not even let a transcript get out.

Alleging genocide may go over well at going away parties for Jew-hating friends, but it doesn't play well in Tampa. Or in anywhere else in the United States.

Ya see, Mr. Obama, Americans like Israel.

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LA Times Blog Reveals True Journalistic Integrity

Still under pressure to release the Obama-Ayers-Khalidi tape, the LA Times blog can't imagine that two of the 57 staff at Slate would fail to announce their intention to vote for Obama. I'd like to think they were being ironic, but I can't see it:

2 dumb Slate staffers split with wiser colleagues on Obama vote

One writer has broken ranks with Slate's slate of writers and intends to vote for John McCain! The Republican senator from Arizona.

w/t Protein Wisdom

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Take the Day Off

You've got a bunch of voting to do, and a lot of identities to keep track of. So don't let a little thing like a job get in your way. Tell your boss the Republicans in the shop can handle the business for the day -- they do so most days anyway.

You've got to vote yourself some bread and circuses.

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Why Did Obama Move to Chicago?

I think he followed William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn there.

Why would a guy from Hawaii, with a [*] degree from Columbia (in New York City), with no family in Illinois, move to Chicago?

I think it was because Bill Ayers moved there.

w/t LGF via AoSHQ.
(* updated to remove typo)

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Obama: "One Week Until We Change America"

Barack Obama has been predicting that in a short time his election would "change America". The phrase goes along with his campaign theme of change, but in typical Liberal overreach, says more than perhaps it ought to say, if the goal is not to lose votes.

Because while it's sometimes appropriate to change direction, you don't have to change who you are to change direction. And to "change America" suggests a change to who we are.

If Obama were merely talking about changing our priorities, or changing our politics, or changing direction, he would stick to saying those things. But to speak of changing America is going not to a tailor but a surgeon, expressing a desire for an alteration not to the clothes, but to the wearer.

And change America how? That is, to change something implies a prior state of being and a future one.

But the America that Obama says he wants to change from appears to be the America that his racist and anti-semitic pastor Jeremiah Wright knows: still stuck not in 1958, but in an alternate reality of 1958 in which the government conducts experiments on black people to control them. (Jerry, clue in: the government doesn't use experiments to control black people, they use the Democrats).

Taken with recent revelations about Obama's desire to redistribute wealth, it becomes pretty obvious that, as is a defining characteristic of liberals, he wants to throw away the baby with the bathwater and do away with the economic system that made America the most powerful country in the world, replacing it with a system that purports ensure social and economic justice.

But ensuring those things would require enforced equal outcomes. And no matter how many times it's tried, nor how many names it's given, tyranny doesn't work.

w/t Mona Charen, and Terrestrial Musings agrees.

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LA Times Suppresses Obama-Ayers-Khaliki Tape - Cites Journalistic integrity, and all of that.

It has been known since April that the LA Times had a videotape (or recording) of Barack Obama, Bill Ayers, and Bernadine Dohrn at a party for Jew-hater Rashid Khalidi. The Times story said

At Khalidi’s going-away party in 2003, the scholar lavished praise on Obama, telling the mostly Palestinian American crowd that the state senator deserved their help in winning a U.S. Senate seat. “You will not have a better senator under any circumstances,” Khalidi said.

The event was videotaped, and a copy of the tape was obtained by The Times.

First the Times refused to release the tape because they said they didn't want to unduly influence the election.

They said they would not reveal their sources. Journalistic integrity, and all of that.

Then they told readers who inquired about the tape that they'd already written a whole story about it -- wasn't that enough? Journalistic integrity, and all of that.


But the story is changing.

Now the Times reports that it received the tape from a source on condition that it not be released. Journalistic integrity, and all of that.

If they release it, why, their sources for tapes of messiahs heaping praise on anti-semites would just dry right up.

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Around the Web

I used to do this a lot, but ... well, I did it once, I think.

Rachel Lucas has a girl crush on the insanely crushworthy Megyn Kelly.

Ace tells us that Democrat officials in Ohio probably broke the law trying to gather dirt on Joe the Plumber, but the LA Times won't release a video they have showing Barack Obama and Bill Ayers toasting and praising their mutual buddy Rashid Khalidi.

Frank J 'splains how the 21st century works to Syria.

Gateway Pundit shows Tito the Builder revving up Republicans at a Sarah Palin rally.

Michelle Malkin shows who is post-racial.

Treacher: Sarah Palin is smart. Joe Biden can't take the heat in the kitchen.

Brian Simpson does a fine writeup on health care policy at The Minority Report.

Jeff G at Protein Wisdom points us to the American Standard's timeline on the mortgage paper corruption crisis.

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But Colin Powell Vouched ForTed Stevens

Leon H. Wolf notes at Redstate that Colin Powell testified on behalf of convicted falsifier of forms Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AL).

How could Stevens possibly have been a felonious liar, if Colin Powell vetted him?

Indeed, how can it be that Valerie Plame was "outed" by Powell's subordinate, while Powell stood by and watched as the White House was investigated?

And he endorsed Barack Obama.

Character judge: FAIL.

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Jury Duty is Patriotic

I sat on a jury once. I'd always been curious about what went on in the jury room, and so when called, I didn't take any of the several opportunities they give you to drop out. If you really don't want to serve on a jury, for whatever reason, just say "I heard about this case, and can't be objective."

But the people on my jury made me proud to be an American. Each one of us sat in the jury box, taking notes or simply watching, as the prosecution and defense walked us through the intricacies of forms and procedures used by the Illinois Department of Public Health. A local administrator was accused of fraud in allegedly cheating the State out of $10,000 or so (for the County's benefit).

The prosecution presented all kinds of evidence about how this lady put dubiously official meals on the county credit card, operated the soda machine petty cash fund in some way that was supposed to be inappropriate, and wasn't liked by the people in her office. They succeeded in making me, and I think the rest of the jury, dislike the defendant.

But, in the end, they had to show that she deliberately tried to claim money for the County that belonged to the State.

We poured over the records. It turned out that there was over $10,000 in mistaken charges, in various categories of mistakes (which we had to learn to recognize as if we were Medicaid auditors). But in every case, comparing the dates of when we were told she was informed of some class of errors to the records, that class of errors would virtually disappear.

We asked the judge if we could count the credit card junk and soda machine "slush fund" in with the Medicaid fund, and he said to read the charges: they were about Medicaid, not credit card abuse.

Having worked for State government, I know how ugly the paperwork is. I'd hate to be charged with fraud, lose my job, and be sent to jail just because I incorrectly filled out the paperwork.

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Department of Kumbaya

Department of Peace? Please, let's strangle H.R. 808 at birth:

(a) In General- The Secretary shall--

1. work proactively and interactively with each branch of the Federal Government on all policy matters relating to conditions of peace;
2. serve as a delegate to the National Security Council;
3. call on the intellectual and spiritual wealth of the people of the United States and seek participation in its administration and in its development of policy from private, public, and nongovernmental organizations; and
   
4. monitor and analyze causative principles of conflict and make policy recommendations for developing and maintaining peaceful conduct.

The Secretary of Peace will have the authority to bureaucratically muck around with the entire government, including the judiciary. The Secretary will be on the NSC, and able to leak anything that goes on there. The Department will give a cabinet-level megaphone to every lunactivist academic kook who claims to oppose something bad, though that may be trice redundant.

Kum Ba Ya.

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Gateway Pundit: Obama Kooks Paint "Field of Hope" in Pennsylvania

I guess I'm stalking Gateway Pundit lately: Obama Kooks Paint "Field of Hope" in Pennsylvania

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By Faith Are We Saved

In a 1995 interview, Barack Obama says:

EOB: I’m wondering if the ethnically-mixed couple of today, if when their child is thirty-four years old, if they’ll find it any easier to deal with these issues than you have found it?

Obama: That’s an interesting question. I’m not sure. I think in some ways there’s less novelty to the idea of mixed couples. They’re not seen as lurid or perverse in ways that I think they were thirty years ago. I think that this country is inevitably going to be undergoing changes simply due to demographics. There’s been a lot of talk about the “browning of America” ...

EOB: I was just going to use that same phrase ...

Obama: ... and I think that is going to be happening. We can’t ignore it. I think whether or not my children or your children will have to struggle with these same issues depends on what we do, and whether we take some mutual responsibility for bridging the divisions that exist right now. And I really want to emphasize the word “responsibility.” I think that whether you are a white executive living out in the suburbs, who doesn’t want to pay taxes to inner-city children for them to go to school, or you’re an inner-city child who doesn’t want to take responsibility for keeping your street safe and clean, both of those groups have to take some responsibility if we’re going to get beyond the kinds of divisions that we face right now.

So in his world, whites must pay higher taxes to heal racial division.

Thug.

Transcript (pdf) of the interview.

(w/t Gateway Pundit)

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If a Picture Is Worth 1000 Words

Then Joe Biden is worth a picture:

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Sarah Palin and Immigration

From Univision:

As governor, how do you deal with them? Do you think they all should be deported?

There is no way that in the US we would roundup every illegal immigrant -there are about 12 million of the illegal immigrants- not only economically is that just an impossibility but that’s not a humane way anyway to deal with the issue that we face with illegal immigration.

Do you then favor an amnesty for the 12 or 13 million undocumented immigrants?

No, I do not. I do not. Not total amnesty. You know, people have got to follow the rules. They’ve got to follow the bar, and we have got to make sure that there is equal opportunity and those who are here legally should be first in line for services being provided and those opportunities that this great country provides.

To clarify, so you support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants?

I do because I understand why people would want to be in America. To seek the safety and prosperity, the opportunities, the health that is here. It is so important that yes, people follow the rules so that people can be treated equally and fairly in this country.

The McAmnesty words are there, but notice the wiggle room. It's all in terms of people who are here legally versus those who aren't.

She actually doesn't answer the first question. "Should they all be deported?" becomes "We can't round them all up."

She says she doesn't favor amnesty, which is fine, except she qualifies it by not favoring total amnesty. The rest of her answer seems like a platitude, but notice that she says those here legally should be first in line for "services".

Why not say that the problem is caused by having a government that offers "services" in the first place? Government's first job is defending us from external enemies, and offering "services" to non-citizens appears to be in conflict with that goal.

But I wish she'd said: "I want to know that when I walk down the street or see a protest march that all of the people there are citizens like me, with the same, undivided loyalty to this country that my own immigrant ancestors had."

That's why I'm so disgusted with the Guest Worker Program idea. It creates an official underclass of people whose loyalty I have to question, with no effective way to tell immigrant citizen and guest worker apart. That will inevitably lead to prejudice and conflict.

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Submitted Without Comment

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Who Injected Race Into This Campaign?

Barack Obama did, that's who.

When the jarring, hate-filled sermons of Jeremiah Wright (popup warning) were revealed, by which sermons Obama claims in his books to have been led to Christian faith, he gave a laggard response, followed by a speech on race.

But while we all enjoyed hearing from him on the subject, the question wasn't how he felt about race relations in America. The question was why he spent 20 years listening to sermons about the government inventing AIDS to kill black people.

In a June campaign rally in Florida, Obama said

They are going to try and make you afraid of me. They’re gunna say you know what he’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. Did I mention he’s Black!

No one was mentioning that. It's irrelevant, except to Obama's supporters. Perhaps that's because the candidate himself has been blaming his lack of unanimous support not on the undeniable fact that he's a Marxist, but on supposed provincial attitudes, including racism (my emphasis):

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not."

"And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

By proclaiming in his Berlin speech that "I know that I don’t look like the Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city", he was injecting race, and intentionally.

There have been boatloads of stories and opinion pieces published saying that if Obama loses, it will be because of some white people can't bring themselves to vote for a black one. That argument is garbage: there is a small, tiny percentage of whites who won't vote for a non-white, but there is an order of magnitude more people voting for Obama because of his race.

Furthermore, it's a false dichotomy to say (as Jack Cafferty did in the link above) that either people want to elect Barack Obama, or they are against him because he's black. There are plenty of reasons to be against Barack Obama.

I will not stand down in the face of such an argument.

Obama's apologists are quick to cry "Racism!" whenever he's criticized, even when the charge has nothing to do with race and everything to do with politics.

Yet apart from his profound lack of qualification for the Presidency, Obama's skin color is the only thing that makes this campaign "historic". Why do people say, with some truth, that it would be wonderful, "historic", "powerful symbolism" for an African-American to be elected President, and then in the next sentence deny disingenuously that race is a motivating factor in their favor of Obama? Why is it okay to say that Obama's nomination is "historic", and yet deny that people want to see history made?

I, too, think it would be good to have a black man as President — just not this black man.

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The Ultimate Primer on Barack Obama

Courtesy Ace and some heavyweights.

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The Most Poisonous Well in History

For all the talk of his "historical" campaign, Barack Obama has shown perhaps his greatest skill at poisoning the well. In June at a campaign stop in Florida, Obama said:

They are going to try and make you afraid of me. They’re gunna say you know what he’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. Did I mention he’s Black!

The only one talking about race is Obama.

Again on the campaign trail on Monday, October 20, Obama said:

In the final days of campaigns, the say-anything, do-anything politics too often takes over. We've seen it before and we're seeing it again — ugly phone calls, misleading mail, misleading TV ads, careless, outrageous comments.

Victor Davis Hanson notes that Obama has spent more money on negative ads than anyone in history, and has stood silent while high-profile supporters or campaign create misleading TV ads, and carefully crafted and targeted outrageous comments.

But this hypocrisy is not the real point. The point is that Obama has made a pattern of denouncing attacks that haven't come. It also characterizes all phone calls, all mail, all TV ads, and all comments made by his opponents as desperation. Never mind the facts or evidence of Obama's lack of readiness to be President.

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Yes, Nicole, You Are A Racist

Over at Ace of Spades HQ, commenter Nicole writes:

Today I referred to my hair as "brown" ("dark brown" to be exact). I then proceeded to say "I hate the color brown--it's not strong enough; it's boring."

Am I a racist?

The obligatory reply from Scott in OC:

Yes, Nicole, you are a racist. Not for hating the color brown, but because you used the word "dark" in a potentially insensitive manner that could incite hatred. Shame on you. The only way to absolve yourself from this unspeakable act is to dye your hair blue and vote for Obama.

But neither Nicole nor Scott fully plumb the depths of the PC pogrom which would take place in the event of an Obama Administration, enjoying majority support in both Houses of Congress.

Nicole used the word 'color' and even labeled something a particular color. Obviously racist.

Nicole noted that something being a particular color was not 'strong' enough. Truly racist.

Nicole said she hated something for being a particular color. Clearly racist.

In the looming Obama Administration, no mention of color, except perhaps in the abstract, will be acceptable. A notable exception to this will be teaching preschoolers the names for all the colors, which will be seen as the fulfillment of a basic human right to be maintained by a Children's Administration, with a Cabinet-level Secretary of the Child.

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Vote Early, Vote Often!

The Weekly Standard blog is reporting that 25% of voters could cast their ballots early.

The ACORN strategy is now becoming clearer:

1. Register as many names as possible -- real or otherwise
2. Push early voting, so that it looks like everyone's doing it
   
3. Vote every day up to and including election day, under one of those names

I predict that if Obama wins, the margin of victory will be smaller than the number of early voters who were also registered by ACORN.

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The Tax Issue is a Distraction

We pay enough in taxes to run the government that we ought to have. We don't pay enough to run the government that we do have.

The answer is to shrink government, not increase taxes.

Because as long as the government spends more than it takes in, eventually we (or our children) will have to pay the price.

Unless, that is, we can vote ourselves out of paying taxes altogether, so that other people pay instead.

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Voting for Dollars

Barack Obama and John McCain are arguing over which tax plan would benefit this or that group of taxpayers the most.

That misses the point completely. The question is which plan is best for the country, not which is best for a particular individual.

And we don't know which plan would be best, because neither plan will be implemented. Either plan would be worked over by Congress. In Barack Obama's case, the Democrats would throw in all kinds of special interest goodies. In John McCain's case, he'd have to accept changes to get it through what is likely to remain a Democrat-controlled Congress.

What we have to look at is the basic philosophy behind each plan.

Barack Obama says he wants to soak the rich, while John McCain says he wants to cut spending.

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The American Dream

Since well before the credit market crisis first hit, we've heard a lot about the American Dream. In the context of illegal immigration, the American Dream was expressed as coming to America to build a life for a family. Much of the discussion now focuses around home ownership, as if owing a mortgage is the pot of gold at our rainbow's other end.

But that isn't it at all, and the misguided effort to prematurely supply people with homes and mortgages outside their means I think is a direct result of misinterpreting the Dream.

Now Joe the Plumber has been supposedly pursuing the American Dream by wanting to own his own small business, making money rather than earning it.

All of these things -- supporting a family, owning a home, building a business -- are just stops along the way, and are neither necessary nor sufficient components of the satisfied Dream.

The American Dream is that anyone can start with little or nothing and become as wealthy, powerful, or successful in whatever endeavor desired, limited only by ability and willingness to work.

An essential part of the Dream is that there are no limits on it. Even more, the Dream seems hard to define precisely because no one gets to say what it is that we strive to achieve; that's our call.

It's different here because we don't rely on the government, charities, the god of luck, or anything else outside ourselves to fulfill the Dream.

American Idol captures the Dream and encases it in shiny clamshell plastic packaging, almost impenetrable but apparently worth the effort for those for whom fame beckons so strongly.

Barack Obama appeals to the American Dream, and in so doing reveals Martin L. King's other Dream to be one and the same with the American Dream: Dr. King dreamed that the American Dream would apply equally to all, regardless of skin color; Obama shows that it does.

Sarah Palin does, too, and her story resonates almost as strongly with her supporters as Obama's does with his.

The fundamental American myth, and one in which I believe, is upward mobility. We're limited only by innate sloth, folly, and poor discipline.

We've always idolized those who achieve on their own merits success in life, especially from humble beginnings: Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, and many others all started with the odds against them and are remembered for their journey as well as for their destination.

Now the barons of Wall Street and those of Silicon Valley are alternately idolized and demonized, in a budding national schizophrenia. Do we still believe the Dream, or does it somehow stop at $250,000?

And will the politicians stop pretending that they have anything at all to do with helping us to achieve it?

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What Year Is It In Your World?

For months, we've hear everyone from Rush Limbaugh to CNN talk about the supposed "Bradley Effect", in which people tell pollsters they'll vote for a candidate of color, then don't.

We've heard questions put more directly: will Americans vote for a black man for President?

We've heard Barack Obama claim not to look like other candidates, not to look like the guys on the money.

We've heard Barack Obama warn us that other people would tell us that he's black.

The white Americans I know are sick of talk about people's skin color, especially when that talk is designed to make us feel as though it's still 1958 and the intervening 50 years never happened.

Look, white America is largely over the race thing. We got it a long time ago: people are people, some looking one way, some looking another. But still the Obamas of the world drag race into every discussion as if Governor Wallace (D-AL) were still standing in the doorway of the schoolhouse.

As for the Bradley Effect, I think it's a more general question of Ouija polling: the pollster asks the question and gets the desired answer.

But what do I know -- I think it's 2008 already.

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Obama's ACORN Denial of Service Attack

Barack Obama knows ACORN from the inside. He trained them.


So now that ACORN is submitting fraudulent voter registration forms in over a dozen States, the reason his $800,000 campaign expense for front work went at least partially to ACORN is now clear.

The purpose of an Internet Denial of Service attack is usually not (just) to disable the particular computer or network under direct attack, but either to draw response resources (troubleshooters) to the attacked system, or to force secondary systems to be used. Sometimes the DOS attack is merely designed to create the appearance of poor performance, so that users of the system turn to competitors or in any case away from the service it provides.

And so it is with the ACORN attack.

Rather than merely registering new Democratic voters, ACORN so clogs the system with phony registrations that it becomes nearly non-functional.

This is a result of ACORN employing people of questionable character (e.g., felons) to strong-arm and wheedle ordinary citizens into registering -- whether or not they are already registered voters (in the same district or another). Further, ACORN assigns to these unvirtuous employees quotas, making it virtually certain that the employees will submit fake registrations, en masse.

So across the country in battleground States, voter registration has ground to a halt, or limps along with demoralized staff and tarnished public image. ACORN is doing direct damage to confidence in the sanctity of our electoral process, in an attempt to destroy its overall integrity. Rather than being content to register new voters, perhaps ACORN wants to make the registration process unnecessary. After all, if the system cannot be trusted, why use it?

And remember, Barack Obama trained them.

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Comrade Obama's Tax Shell Game

Barack Obama is fond of implying that his tax proposal(pdf) will variously lower, not raise, or not affect 95% of Americans.

But only 70% of Americans pay any Federal tax at all, and many of those who do pay taxes don't pay much. So I decided to do the math. Luckily for me, Ace and the Wall Street Journal beat me to it.

Obama wants to give every "worker" $500 ($1000 for "working couples"). His web site says "workers" and "working families" are who get the cuts.

Don't call me a "worker". I'm a citizen, comrade Obama.

So clearly, the 95% figure refers to those "workers" who do pay taxes. He's going to hand out a check to everyone, but raise the rates enough that the top 5% get a tax increase. Or more properly, the government gets the increase. He has the nerve to say that even then it's not an increase, just a way to get back to the way things were when Reagan was President, 18.2% of GDP.

But he lies with the numbers: if he's going to give a cut to 95% of "workers" and everyone is going to get a cut, the money has to come from somewhere. He calls it "closing loopholes", when a loophole closes and you pay more, you get a tax increase.

And who pays more? Business, especially small businesses and oil companies. At a time when businesses are struggling to meet their short-term obligations because they can't borrow for them, Obama wants to raise their taxes.

Small businesses will obviously bear the brunt of Obama's tax increases. Busineses large and small will be forced to raise prices. And the relative trickle of companies leaving the United States, and taking their jobs with them, will become a flood as the last one out gets to turn off the compact fluorescent light.

As Fred Thompson said, under Obama's plan as long as you don't have to buy anything from a business, you'll be fine.

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I Crave the Words of Josh Treviño

I sometimes get a little thrill up my leg, even, as he breaks down some issue with his preternatural insight. And yet, when he writes this:

Rest assured that were I not in California, where the Republican ticket will struggle to break 40%, I would not be casting a protest vote of any sort. My vote for Bobby Jindal for President is intended as a protest to two entities: the McCain campaign, which has done a terrible job, and the national Republican party, which has done a terrible job of its own unrelated to the McCain campaign. That said, I don’t value my protest so much that I would knowingly contribute to Barack Obama’s margin of victory — so, make no mistake, were I in Nevada, Virginia, Indiana, or any other contested state, I would vote for the McCain-Palin ticket.

I wish he would read this:

When my girlfriend shows up for a date dressed in a particularly awful outfit, I don't say anything. I just hope for the best. At that point in the evening, I don't see any other viable options.

Or perhaps, if I could summon the temerity, this:

The election process is about more than just who wins. Sure, the winner is important, but there are other factors that have an impact on the behavior of government. For the sake of discussion, let's assume that one of the two major parties, or one of the two main contenders in a primary, will win the election. Why vote for someone else?

That piece was written in the context of third party candidates, but the logic applies here to urge the very course of action Josh has taken. Bobby Jindal, or some other True Conservative, fulfills the role of the third party for Treviño in this election. Apparently he finds persuasive the same reasoning needed to tilt against the two-party windmill.

I can understand it, on an intellectual level, but I suppose I'd have to live in California to really get it.

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Shorter Hitchens

Vote Obama - he's not as much of a Christian as Sarah Palin.
(w/t: Mark Levin)

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Redistribute the Wealth, Says The One

Barack Obama is a socialist. He believes that if one person has more than another, it's the government's right and duty to even things out.

"I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody." -- Barack Obama

Via Gateway Pundit:

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Crying Wolf About Racism a Good Thing?

It seems that every time a criticism of the Obama campaign sneaks its way through the media blockade, the final defense it must meet is a cry of racism.

Did Obama spend 20 years attending a church with an anti-semitic, racist message? Racist.

Obama friendly with terrorists? Racist (even though the terrorist in question is white).

Using his middle name? Racist.

I won't bore you by listing more examples, of which there is a seemingly endless supply.

Because what I really think is that all of these knee-jerk charges of racism may be positive in the long run, if they so diminish the charge itself that it becomes meaningless. If everything is racist, then nothing is.

However, the labeling of every criticism as racist is only part of the Obama race strategy. The other, or perhaps an other, tine of the strategy is to announce that racist attacks, even assassination attempts, are coming.

But it's all balderdash. The people who don't like Obama don't like him because his ideas suck, not because of his melanin level.

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Obama Sends Up Another Version of How He Met Bill Ayers

From Politico(via Gateway Pundit who has much more) Saith The One:

"The gentleman in question, Bill Ayers, is a college professor, teaches education at the University of Illinois," he said. "That's how i met him -- working on a school reform project that was funded by an ambassador and very close friend of Ronald Reagan's" along with "a bunch of conservative businessmen and civic leaders."[Academy emphasis added]

But Obama campaign manager David Axelrod said (and the received history has it) that Obama, fresh from suing Citibank into making a bunch of bad loans, met Ayers at the fashionable Hyde Park residence Ayers occupies with wife the former terrorist Bernadine Dohrn.

So which is it? And why the obfuscation?

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ACORN Fights Back

ACORN (Asinine Communists for Obama RegistratioN) have filed a lawsuit on behalf of a group of silent, powerless victims.

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Why Ayers Matters

Now that I no longer care who wins the upcoming presidential election between John McCain and Barack Obama, there are only a few reasons for me to blog on it.

One of those reasons is bad logic.

There are many who will see the McCain campaign highlighting the Obama-Ayers connection as mere guilt-by-association. We know that, logically speaking, associating with evil doesn't make one evil. Even if Ayers were evil, merely associating with him doesn't in and of itself make Barack Obama evil.

However, there is much more to the relationship than that. The two have known each other for years, perhaps since Obama was an undergraduate student. Ayers hired Obama to distribute between $50 and $150 million for selling anti-capitalism in the Chicago public schools. You don't hire someone to give away that kind of money unless the two of you are in sync and believe in the same goals. There is clear evidence that Obama and Ayers are cut of the same political cloth.

But when Hillary Clinton brought the subject up at a debate during the Democratic primaries, Obama said that Ayers was "just a guy who lives in my neighborhood." He lied about the relationship.

But here's the thing: Ayers was a terrorist as a young man, setting bombs in the Pentagon, at police stations, and in the home of a judge in the attempt to influence a trial. He has never repented of these actions, saying he wishes he'd done more. Obama should not have worked for him, but he did. And now he wants out of that decision.

So he says that Ayers was fire-bombing judges' homes with their children asleep in bed while he, Obama, was only eight years old, so it doesn't matter.

It's an exercise in non sequitur. The issue is not how old Obama was when Ayers did his evil; the issue is that Obama shares this guy's views and helped him spend money to promote those views. And then he lied about it.

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McCain Loses Mind

He wants the Federal government to buy up all the "bad mortgages" in the country, to write down the principal to the current value, to let people stay in their homes?

Trying to outspend the most liberal Democrat in the history of liberal Democrats.

I no longer give a damn who wins.

That's kind of freeing, now that I'm there.

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Without Preconditions

Ace quotes the Obama web site as saying that Obama "supports direct, Presidential-level talks with Iran without preconditions".

The problem is not, and has never been, meeting with our enemies, friends, or neutral countries.

The problem is not, and has never been, meeting at the appointee level without preconditions.

The problem is not, and has never been, meeting with our foes at the Presidential level.

The problem is meeting at the Presidential level without preconditions. Obama always tries to weasel, putting forth the straw man argument that Henry Kissinger supports meeting without preconditions, but fails to mention that he supports that only at the surrogate level.

The Obama campaign is fond of noting that the Bush Administration has met with Iran, so it's OK if Obama and Ahmadinejad do. But they fail to note that it is not President Bush himself, but lower-level officials, who attend the meeting.

I don't think we should meet with Iran at all, unless it's to accept their unconditional surrender. You don't negotiate with terrorists.

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Senate Puts Lipstick on Pork; Soul-Kisses Same

I think the title about sums up my take on the Senate swaddling the horrid continuation of enforced easy credit for deadbeats bill with all of the goodies any Senator ever wanted, then passing it.

The President has signalled he will sign anything that contains his $700 Billion to prop up the easy credit ponzi scheme. And lo, the Senate has complied.

My guess is the House, though receiving overwhelmingly angry feedback from you and me (you did call, right?) will pass the same unholy piece of pig slop.

Throw the bums out.

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Hair of The Dog That Bit Us

The financial crisis: companies with lots of bad mortgage paper can't get loans, and the fear is that will spread to other companies, with no exposure to tricked-out crap mortgages.

But it's not happening. Anecdotal evidence says that people are still getting mortgages, people are still delivering supplies on net 30 terms.

The whole thing is a sham and a trick to avoid short-term pain.

Well, Washington and Wall Street had their party. Liberals made sure that people who didn't deserve to get loans got them, and got to live in places they couldn't afford. But that party is now over: the oil price run-up and the real estate bubble burst have signaled the keg running dry. Now people in homes they can't afford are realizing that they've been had.

Now the people who got us into this mess want to have the government buy up all of those bad mortgages, to keep the party going. What we need to do instead is suffer our collective hangover, and remember why it is you're not supposed to drink so much.

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