Mood:  incredulous

Disgust with the wide gulf between Obama's carefully cultivated image as a populist who, if he does say so himself, is too pure and honest to take money from registered lobbyists and what he really does is spreading across all political persuasions. 

Counterpunch magazine has been unsparing in shining the light of day on Barack Obama's willingness to take money from anyone with a pulse.   In fact, they've been unsparing in criticizing everything and everybody - if you need to raise your blood pressure, just spend some time surfing their Web site.  They have something to offend everyone.

Counterpunch correspondent Pam Martens has written a two-part article on exactly how much money Obama's taken, and from which lobbyists' political action committees (PACs).  I ran the first part of Ms. Martens' article a week and some days ago; here are some excerpts from the second part:

 http://www.counterpunch.org/martens05062008.html

"Bankrolling a Presidential Campaign

The Obama Bubble Agenda

by Pam Martens

The Obama phenomenon has been likened to that of cults, celebrity groupies and Messiah worshipers. But what we’re actually witnessing is ObamaMania (as in tulip mania), the third and final bubble orchestrated and financed by the wonderful Wall Street folks who brought us the first two: the Nasdaq/tech bubble and a subprime-mortgage-in-every-pot bubble. 

To understand why Wall Street desperately needs this final bubble, we need to first review how the first two bubbles were orchestrated and why.

In March of 2000, the Nasdaq stock market, hyped with spurious claims for startup tech and dot.com companies, reached a peak of over 5,000. Eight years later, it’s trading in the 2,300 range and most of those companies no longer exist. From peak to trough, Nasdaq transferred over $4 trillion from the pockets of small mania-gripped investors to the wealthy and elite market manipulators.

The highest monetary authority during those bubble days, Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, consistently told us that the market was efficient and stock prices were being set by the judgment of millions of “highly knowledgeable” investors.

Mr. Greenspan was the wind beneath the wings of a carefully orchestrated wealth transfer system known as “pump and dump” on Wall Street.  As hundreds of court cases, internal emails, and insider testimony now confirm, this bubble was no naturally occurring phenomenon any more than the Obama bubble is.

First, Wall Street firms issued knowingly false research reports to trumpet the growth prospects for the company and stock price; second, they lined up big institutional clients who were instructed how and when to buy at escalating prices to make the stock price skyrocket (laddering); third, the firms instructed the hundreds of thousands of stockbrokers serving the mom-and-pop market to advise their clients to sit still as the stock price flew to the moon or else the broker would have his commissions taken away (penalty bid). While the little folks’ money served as a prop under prices, the wealthy elite on Wall Street and corporate insiders were allowed to sell at the top of the market (pump-and-dump wealth transfer).

Why did people buy into this mania for brand new, untested companies when there is a basic caveat that most people in this country know, i.e., the majority of all new businesses fail? Common sense failed and mania prevailed because of massive hype pumped by big media, big public relations, and shielded from regulation by big law firms, all eager to collect their share of Wall Street’s rigged cash cow.

The current housing bubble bust is just a freshly minted version of Wall Street’s real estate limited partnership frauds of the ‘80s, but on a grander scale. In the 1980s version, the firms packaged real estate into limited partnerships and peddled it as secure investments to moms and pops. The major underpinning of this wealth transfer mechanism was that regulators turned a blind eye to the fact that the investments were listed at the original face amount on the clients’ brokerage statements long after they had lost most of their value. 

Today’s real estate related securities (CDOs and SIVs) that are blowing up around the globe are simply the above scheme with more billable hours for corporate law firms.

Wall Street created an artificial demand for housing (a bubble) by soliciting high interest rate mortgages (subprime) because they could be bundled and quickly resold for big fees to yield-hungry hedge funds and institutions. A major underpinning of this scheme was that Wall Street secured an artificial rating of AAA from rating agencies that were paid by Wall Street to provide the rating. When demand from institutions was saturated, Wall Street kept the scheme going by hiding the debt off its balance sheets and stuffed this long-term product into mom-and-pop money markets, notwithstanding that money markets are required by law to hold only short-term investments. To further perpetuate the bubble as long as possible, Wall Street prevented pricing transparency by keeping the trading off regulated exchanges and used unregulated over-the-counter contracts instead. (All of this required lots of lobbyist hours in Washington.)

But how could there be a genuine national housing price boom propelled by massive consumer demand at the same time there was the largest income and wealth disparity in the nation’s history? Rational thought is no match for manias.

That brings us to today’s bubble. We are being asked to accept on its face the notion that after more than two centuries of entrenched racism in this country, which saw only five black members of the U.S. Senate, it’s all being eradicated with some rousing stump speeches. 

We are asked to believe that those kindly white executives at all the biggest Wall Street firms, which rank in the top 20 donors to the Obama presidential campaign, after failing to achieve more than 3.5 per cent black stockbrokers over 30 years, now want a black populist president because they crave a level playing field for the American people. 

The number one industry supporting the Obama presidential bid, by the start of February, -- the crucial time in primary season -- according to the widely respected, nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, was “lawyers/law firms” (most on Wall Street’s payroll), giving a total of $11,246,596. 

This presents three unique credibility problems for the yes-we-can-little-choo-choo-that-could campaign: (1) these are not just “lawyers/law firms”; the vast majority of these firms are also registered lobbyists at the Federal level; (2) Senator Obama has made it a core tenet of his campaign platform that the way he is gong to bring the country hope and change is not taking money from federal lobbyists; and (3) with the past seven ignoble years of lies and distortions fresh in the minds of voters, building a candidacy based on half-truths is not a sustainable strategy to secure the west wing  from the right wing.

Yes, the other leading presidential candidates are taking money from lawyers/law firms/lobbyists, but Senator Obama is the only one rallying with the populist cry that he isn’t. That makes it not only a legitimate but a necessary line of inquiry. 

The Obama campaign’s populist bubble is underpinned by what, on the surface, seems to be a real snoozer of a story. It all centers around business classification codes developed by the U.S. government and used by the Center for Responsive Politics to classify contributions. Here’s how the Center explained its classifications in 2003:

“The codes used for business groups follow the general guidelines of the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes initially designed by the Office of Management and Budget and later replaced by the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS)...”

The Akin Gump law firm is a prime example of how something as mundane as a business classification code can be gamed for political advantage. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Akin Gump ranks third among all Federal lobbyists, raking in $205,225,000 to lobby our elected officials in Washington from 1998 through 2007. The firm is listed as a registered federal lobbyist with the House of Representatives and the Senate; the firm held lobbying retainer contracts for more than 100 corporate clients in 2007. But when its non-registered law partners, the people who own this business and profit from its lobbying operations, give to the Obama campaign, the contribution is classified as coming from a law firm, not a lobbyist. 

The same holds true for Greenberg Traurig, the law firm that employed the criminally inclined lobbyist, Jack Abramoff. Greenberg Traurig ranks ninth among all lobbyists for the same period, with lobbying revenues of $96,708,249. Its partners and employee donations to the Obama campaign of $70,650  by February 1 --  again at that strategic time -- appear not under lobbyist but the classification lawyers/law firms, as do 30 other corporate law firm/lobbyists. 

Additionally, looking at Public Citizen’s list of bundlers for the Obama campaign (people soliciting donations from others), 27 are employed by law firms registered as federal lobbyists. The total sum raised by bundlers for Obama from these 27 firms till February 1:  $2,650,000. (There are also dozens of high powered bundlers from Wall Street working the Armani-suit and red-suspenders cocktail circuits, like Bruce Heyman, managing director at Goldman Sachs; J. Michael Schell, vice chairman of Global Banking at Citigroup; Louis Susman, managing director, Citigroup; Robert Wolf, CEO, UBS Americas.  Each raised over $200,000 for the Obama campaign.)"

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 12:10 AM MDT

Updated: Monday, 14 July 2008 12:15 AM MDT

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Barack Obama has stated that the "surge" in Iraq is not working. 

Although you wouldn't know it from the so-called "mainstream media's" failure to cover the story, this is just another in a pathetic series of lies from Obama.

Don't take my word for it -  Scripps-Howard News Service's Deroy Murdock says:

"July 10, 2008, Thursday 5:03 PM EST...  "

"Al-Qaeda in Iraq's Islamo-puritanism sealed its doom


DEROY MURDOCK, Scripps Howard News Service

As al Qaeda in Iraq's fortunes wane, it has no one but itself to blame.  President Bush's troop surge indisputably has crushed al-Qaeda and other terrorists, while Iraqi soldiers have honed their ability to hammer deadly insurgents.

But much of al Qaeda's damage has been self-inflicted. Largely overlooked is the Islamo-puritanism that it inflicted on the Iraqi territories it seized.  Rank-and-file Iraqis tasted life under bin Laden-style Islam, and they gagged.  They responded by collaborating with American and Coalition forces to expel these mad zealots from their midst.

At one level, al Qaeda's religious decrees have been nearly comical.

As the Institute for War & Peace Reporting's Sahar Hussein al-Haideri revealed before she herself was murdered in June 2007, terrorists targeting what they considered pagan symbols bombed a statue of several women hauling jars on their shoulders.

"Do these statues work with police? Were they translators for the Americans or members of the dissolved Ba'ath party?" Mosul police spokesman Brigadier-General Sa'eed Ahmed al-Juburi asked the Institute. "Those terrorists are a bunch of idiots."

Al Qaeda's agenda for Mosul included a decree that clothiers cover the heads of their in-store mannequins. Some relented, and shrouded their mannequins with plastic bags.

"I don't know where these groups came from," shop owner Mutaz Ahmed told the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. "They want to take us back 1,400 years. But if you want to stay alive, you have to obey their orders."

Extremists banned soap in public baths because the Prophet Mohammed lacked it back in the 600s."

As anyone who went to school with Saudi exchange students could have told you.

"Al Qaeda took particular interest in clamping down on various food items.

"Sammoun," a type of bread popular in Mosul, also was prohibited, since Mohammed never ate it. Islamo-puritans found the sight of cucumbers and tomatoes side by side sexually charged, so they ordered produce stands to keep them apart, and told restaurateurs like Khalaf Khalid to serve them on separate plates.

'We obey them because they threatened to blow up the restaurant and kill us if we didn't,' Khalid said, back when al Qaeda was in command.

Al Qaeda also took a "Just Say No" attitude toward ice. Mohammed didn't have it, so Mosul's residents could not, either.

"They prevented production and sale of ice in Mosul from last year," Khalaf Abed Al-Hadidi, an ice manufacturer, told Agence France Presse. "Last summer was tough for us, but we couldn't use the ice factory.

As part of a general crackdown on public displays of joy, al Qaeda even banned wedding parties in Mosul."

As James Glassman, the State Department's chief of public diplomacy, observed at Manhattan's Council on Foreign Relations, "What began to turn the tide in Iraq was when Iraqis began to realize that this was a murderous ideology that was killing Muslims and justifying it by saying, 'If I think you're not a good Muslim, it's OK for me to kill you.'"

"They threatened to kill me if I used an electric shaving machine," barber Atta Sadoun told Agence France Presse. He added that al Qaeda forbade the removal of men's facial hair and forced him to install a sign saying he used scissors but no electric shaver. He said several colleagues who refused were killed. Al Qaeda also bombed women's beauty parlors."

According to restaurateur Hashim Abdullah Al-Hamdani, al Qaeda murdered two of his employees and injured his son. Why? His establishment served both male and female students from local colleges.

Episodes like these eventually led exasperated Iraqis, including Sunni imams, to work with American and Coalition forces to boot al Qaeda from Iraq. This has helped Iraq enjoy its current relative peace.

These bizarre, frightful incidents illustrate the bottomless depravity of America's chief enemy in Iraq. This is a glimpse of how Iraq could look if U.S. forces prematurely withdrew, and the bad guys returned. This also is a cautionary tale of the insanity that likely would erupt wherever al Qaeda or any of its allies gained power."

"Finally, al Qaeda's chilling tenure in Mosul and elsewhere in Iraq puts the lie to the notion that Islamofascists merely are defending themselves against America's allegedly over-assertive foreign policy and Israel's supposed anti-Muslim menace. Combating ice, cucumbers, and wedding gowns has nothing to do with the policies of the Pentagon or the Knesset. It's all about building a bridge to the 7th Century."

Mr. Murdock has the guts to speak the truth about Iraq; while it's not as safe or as peaceful as either we or the people who live there would prefer, you can say that about almost every major city in the United States.

And thereby hangs a home truth about not only Barack Obama but the entire class of politicians who make a nice living from lying to us about the origins and extent of violence in today's world - both the proximate and ultimate cause of violence is those who commit violence, not economic want or social inequity.

Murderers and muggers do what they do because they have no respect for the sanctity of other people's lives.  And the effective cure for violence isn't pouring money into social programs, or violence would have been eradicated after billions were poured into "the war on poverty," starting back in the 1960s and continuing to this day.

What we need are politicians with the audacity to speak the truth.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 6:27 PM MDT

Updated: Friday, 11 July 2008 7:30 PM MDT

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Mood:  irritated

On FoxNews' Sunday Morning show, Sen Barbara Boxer (D, CA-(ca)) once said "Nations cannot survive with foreign troops defending them."

By Boxer's reasoning Great Britain, Germany, Italy, the other countries in the military arm of NATO, Japan and South Korea should be alarmed, since their national existence has been in danger since 1945 owing to the presence of troops from the United States of America.

Germany in particular must be reeling if Senator Boxer is right, because it still has forces from several former occupying nations stationed within its borders.  Apart from economic doldrums which can be satisfactorily explained by the ravages of socialism and deficit spending, however, Germany seems to be fine. 

One of their largest multinationals, DaimlerChrysler, is not just Europe's biggest automaker (if you exclude European subsidiaries of the American-based multinationals General Motors and Ford, such as Opel, all the various national Ford operating companies, and the former passenger-car divisions of Volvo and Saab) but Europe's largest defense contractor. 

West Germany was able, based largely on its economic might, to overcome virulent threats from Mikhail Gorbachev and dire predictions and warning from politicians throughout Europe of all political leanings to reunite with its ruined Communist other half and thus eliminate Soviet Russia's strongest European ally. 

 NO ONE would have predicted as late as the mid-to-late 1980s that this would happen - that Germany would become the master of her own political destiny again, in open defiance of the Soviet Union.

Imagine, SIXTY WHOLE YEARS have passed in which all of these nations and others have been defended by American troops, and according to Barbara Boxer, their survival is in mortal danger!

The major contribution Barbara Boxer made to political discourse in the United States is that just one of her shorter public utterances can sustain many paragraphs of adverse commentary on the thinking of the knee-jerk left which she helps lead.

Seriously, would Barbara Boxer have insisted that the US withdraw from Germany, Italy and Japan on a fixed, two-year timetable after the end of World War II?  Or from the Korean peninsula by 1956?

If not, why does Barbara Boxer want to hand Iraq to Al-Qaeda, the Shia extremists and the Ayatollahs of Iran and their puppets?  Is humiliating George W. Bush and Bush's party actually so important that Boxer, Pelosi and friends must encourage the terrorists of Iraq to kill our neighbors, sons and daughters while they are at it? 

If the United States is ever balkanized - as Iraq will be if we pull out when Boxer wants to do it - it will be the crowing of chickens coming home to roost.  Barbara Boxer's cynical lies, if successful, will destroy the unity and resolve that galvanized our country into action after September 11th, 2001. 

If these people - Barbara Boxer and her friends - ever get the power they crave to the exclusion of our country's security, they will destroy our nation's will to survive as nothing has since the aftermath of the Vietnam War (another struggle against tyranny ended at the whim of the inside-the-beltway faction of the Democratic Party, with John Kerry playing a leading subversive role).

Senator Boxer made heavy weather of the fact that many of her constituents based in places like the Marine Corps air station at Twenty-Nine Palms are serving in Iraq and some of them are dying.  I'd be very interested to learn what her constituents in the US Armed Forces think of her active political support of the terrorists in Iraq (and, by extension, Al-Qaeda - which has chosen to stake their global reputation on the success of the mass murderers to destroy that country's government).

My son also died in Iraq, killed by a bomb which would probably not have been built or buried if Al-Qaeda hadn't thought they could win their war at the American ballot box (as the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese did - with the help of John Kerry and his friends in Congress).

Specialist Armand Luke Frickey, Louisiana Army National Guard and US Army privately had nothing but the bitterest contempt for the Iraqi terrorists' helpers in Congress and Big Media.  His death is directly traceable to Boxer and company's cut-throat political maneuvering and the support of the “mainstream media” to weaken our political stance in Iraq.  If nothing else, the idea that the terrorists can win if they simply kill enough Americans can be laid directly at Boxer's and her political colleagues' feet for demanding withdrawal at any cost. 

I blame Boxer and her co-conspirators for the death of my son.  They have violated the tacit agreement that "Politics ends at the water's edge" (and not for the first time).  Boxer and Company are aiding and abetting the enemy in time of war - exceeding legitimate dissent by spreading misinformation and tacitly encouraging people to murder our citizens overseas. 

There is, of course, precedent for such convictions - the handful of Japanese-Americans who collectively were "Tokyo Rose" and the pro-Fascist poet Ezra Pound were tried and convicted of such conduct.

But did ANY member of Congress during World War II utter the sort of lies and garbage that Senator Boxer and the other members of her clique routinely emit?  Constantly and publicly accuse FDR of botching the war effort?  Demand the withdrawal of US troops from the battlefront, and afterward, from occupied Japan, Germany and Italy long before genuine democracy had taken root?  Did any Congressman intrigue endlessly to stir up popular opposition to FDR or Truman with false or exaggerated charges of impropriety? 

When our military intelligence failed to predict attacks or our decision-makers botched a hard call, did the press call attention to it day and night and attribute it to malfeasance on the part of the President?  Did reporters like Michael Isikoff write inflammatory and false stories about our troops' supposedly desecrating holy objects, or highly regarded newspapers or magazines print them without fact checking and circulate them worldwide, ensuring riots in foreign countries against us? 

Were incessant and redundant Congressional investigations used to shore up innuendo against the President, then their reports ignored when no deliberate wrongdoing was found?  Did Hollywood campaign AGAINST American troops with movies that portrayed them as murderers and witless pawns during World War II?  Did movie stars constantly and with really foul mouths insult our nation's leader as a fool and a crook (again, with no hard evidence)?  Were half-wit antiwar activists elevated to the status of public celebrities and encouraged to spew obscene venom against FDR?

"Los Angeles Barbara," "Hyannisport Teddy," "Boston, Idaho, Miami and Washington John " and the others who give al-Qaeda reason to hope that they can win their war on OUR home front if they just kill enough of our troops should be tried for treason.  Their body count is much, much higher than Timothy MacVeigh's when the innocent Iraqis who have also died in terrorist activity are counted with our own dead and those of our allies. 

But on January 6th, 2005 it became very, very personal to me because of a single death.  I guess that's unfair and illogical, but that how it happened.

The anti-war extremists, especially their people in Congress, are traitors in my opinion and deserve the penalty for treason in time of war.   By law, this would be death - death at the Federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana after a proper trial and examination of that trial by appeal for legal propriety, something my son and all the other victims of terror in Iraq were denied. 

They should be tried for treason in time of war and their venality and disloyalty to the rest of us exposed minutely, with all the attention, effort and frenzy the media devoted to Dan Rather and Mary Mapes' forged Texas Air National Guard documents.

Even were they convicted by some strange chance (for their behinds are covered as Ezra Pound's and Tokyo Rose's never were - members of Congress are immune from arrest until they are impeached or Congress out of session, and their remarks considered non-actionable), the executions of Boxer and friends would still stop far short of justice. 

They would not die in an armored vehicle while hundreds of rounds of ammunition were going off around and through them, and their last moments would not be the agony of being burned alive or dismembered by explosions or bullet impacts.  No, their deaths would involve only the prick of an intravenous needle and leave much more presentable corpses than my son's.  His face was burnt off, requiring a closed casket funeral.

And I wonder how many people would attend these traitors' funerals, and what sort of people the mourners would be.  I suppose Cindy Sheehan, Dan Rather and Bill Moyers would be leading the cortege.

My son's funeral and those of his comrades in that Bradley on January 6th were outpourings of love, respect and gratitude.  His mourners were people I was proud and grateful to have met, the sort of people who will guarantee that our opponents in this struggle will fail and that the terrorists' cause be forever known as a waste and an abomination against God. 

When the time of reckoning finally comes for the paymasters of these terrorists, it will be people like my son and his comrades who level their cities and salt the ground that remains so nothing ever grows there again.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 5:51 AM MDT

Updated: Friday, 11 July 2008 6:28 PM MDT

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The Obama campaign has a Web site called "Fight the Smear," devoted to the premise that all the bad news about their candidate is smear campaigning.

Everything? 

Here is a list (not all-inclusive, by any means) of Barack Hussein Obama's accomplishments - things which are in the Congressional Record, mostly, and can easily be confirmed over the Internet:

* He voted against banning partial birth abortion.  In fact, in the Illinois State Senate, he went beyond the wishes of the abortion lobby by opposing a law they said they could live which would have required Illinois physicians to not kill babies which survived the abortion procedure.

* Obama voted "no" on notifying parents of minors who get out-of-state abortions.

* He supports affirmative action, long after this method of correcting injustices against minorities has outlived its usefulness - or even its legality, according to the Federal Civil Rights Acts (which flatly ban discrimination, period).

* Obama says he will deal with street level drug dealing as minimum-wage labor.  (So much for drugs being something Whitey invented to keep the black man down, eh?)

* He supports and has actually traveled to Africa to show his support for Raila Odinga, the man who ran on a radical Islamist platform for the presidency of Kenya, and whose supporters have murdered over 700 people after he lost that election - 70 of those lives were lost when Odinga supporters burned a church down while services were being held.  During his campaign Odinga had promised Muslim organizations that he would enforce sharia law on all Kenyans, make instruction in Islam mandatory for all school children, require all women in Kenya to wear Muslim dress... generally turning Kenya into Darfur.

Obama took time from his campaign tour in New Hampshire during the primaries to call Odinga on the phone and show support for him. 

Why hasn't the press called him on this?

* Obama has stated that he is willing to meet with left-wing despots Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jung Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

* Opposed renewal of the PATRIOT Act, despite its undeniable success in preventing a recurrence of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001.

* The first bill Obama signed that passed was campaign finance reform - the same "reform" which allows foreigners to dump millions into American campaign finance while limiting donations by American citizens.  Obama has the foreign donors - George Soros among them - to take advantage of that "feature" of McCain-Feingold.

* Obama voted "no" on prohibiting nuisance law suits by city governments against gun manufacturers (a law which allows individuals to continue to bring lawsuits against gun makers for defective merchandise, and which also had a rider banning sale of armor-piercing ammunition to private citizens).

* Supports granting driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, many of whom do not take the trouble to learn how to operate motor vehicles safely or purchase liability insurance as required by law, and who have a disconcerting habit of fleeing the country after causing traffic accidents.

* Supports extending welfare to illegal immigrants.

* Voted "yes" on comprehensive immigration reform. (which is similar to "campaign reform" in that it would allow a massive influx of illegal immigrants, and once they're in country, they're IN - no getting rid of them under this kind of "reform.")

* Voted "yes" on allowing illegal aliens to participate in Social Security.

* Wants to make the minimum wage a "living wage" (thus placing small businessmen who are already strapped by the welter of Federal, state and local labor laws closer to being out of business).

* Opposed to any efforts to privatize Social Security (thus increasing the money available to pay benefits) and instead supports increasing the amount of tax paid. (Gotta pay for the medical care and retirement of those illegal immigrants somehow, huh?)

* He voted "no" on repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax

* He voted "no" on repealing the "Death" Tax on money people inherit.

* He wants to raise the Capital Gains Tax (penalizing people who want to lower inflation and grow the nation's economy by making their savings available for investment by taxing these savings not once, but twice).

* Has repeatedly said the surge in Iraq has not succeeded, which is an outright lie (our forces have just turned Anbar province back to the Iraqi Army, after the "Sunni Awakening" has turned local sheikhs and clergy against Al-Qaeda, or as they now refer to them, "the accursed foreigners.")

Yeah, we NEED a President who does Al-Qaeda's public relations for them.

Of course, Osama, er, Obama took millions of dollars in a "home loan" from a shadowy Iraqi living in Great Britain. 

Could this be why Obama's bad-mouthing the job our troops have done in Iraq?

* He is ranked as the most liberal Senator in the Senate today and that takes real effort. 

This isn't some tag Rush Limbaugh put on Obama - it's a rating by the Americans for Democratic Action, a group of people who agree with Obama's stances on the issues.  They like him.  And they're welcome to him.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 4:35 PM MDT

Updated: Friday, 11 July 2008 7:22 PM MDT

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Mood:  mischievious

My wife just sent me this:

Senator Barack Obama was invited to address a major gathering of the American Indian Nation two weeks ago in upstate New York.  He spoke for almost an hour on his future plans for increasing every Native American's present standard of living, should he one day become the President.  He referred to his career as a Senator, how he had signed 'YES' for every Indian issue that came to his desk for approval.  Although the Senator was vague on the details of his plan, he seemed most enthusiastic about his future ideas for helping his 'red sisters and brothers'.

At the conclusion of this speech, the Tribes presented the Senator with a plaque inscribed with his new Indian name - Walking Eagle.  The proud Senator then departed in his motorcade, waving to the crowds.

A news reporter later inquired to the group of chiefs of how they came to select the new name they had given to the Senator.  They explained that Walking Eagle is the name given to a bird so full of shit it can no longer fly.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 3:37 PM MDT

Updated: Monday, 7 July 2008 3:48 PM MDT

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Mood:  not sure

Physical chemist Irving Langmuir (1881-1957) spent most of his career in the research laboratories of General Electric.  He won the Nobel prize for Chemistry in 1932 for or his discoveries and investigations in surface chemistry, which evolved into the field of thin film physics.

Four years before his death, Langmuir gave a talk at General Electric's Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory on what he called "pathological science" - things like perpetual motion (most recently asserted to have been achieved by a Mississippi inventor named Joseph Newman ), Kirlian photography, Trofim Lysenko's theory of environmentally-induced hereditary changes in plants and animals, René Prosper Blondlot's "N-rays," and many other "discoveries" which turned out to be self-delusions on the part of the scientists reporting the phenomenon in question.

Langmuir, after reviewing a colleague's upcoming talk on something called the "Davis-Barnes Effect," found that he got the same results whether or not his apparatus was working properly, or at all...  it was not a case of fraud, but of honest self-delusion and observational errors which were systematically - but unconsciously - made by otherwise highly professional, careful researchers who were so excited by what they thought was a new phenomenon that they overlooked alternative explanations for their results and miscounted events in a way which affirmed their hypothesis by making allowances for data which denied their hypothesis as being due to problems with their experimental gear.

Looking back at earlier examples of such incidents, Langmuir analyzed the work of René Prosper Blondlot's reports of "N-rays," shortly after Roentgen announced his discovery of X rays, and found remarkably similar sources of experimental error.  Langmuir studied the errors of his colleague, Blondlot and other researchers who'd made similar errors, and found that there were significant common features in these experiments.

These Langmuir called Symptoms of Pathological Science:

1. The maximum effect that is observed is produced by a causative agent of barely detectable intensity, and the magnitude of the effect is substantially independent of the intensity of the cause.
   
2. The effect is of a magnitude that remains close to the limit of detectability; or, many measurements are necessary because of the very low statistical significance of the results.
   
3. Claims of great accuracy.
   
4. Fantastic theories contrary to experience.
   
5. Criticisms are met by ad hoc excuses thought up on the spur of the moment.
   
6. Ratio of supporters to critics rises up to somewhere near 50% and then falls gradually to oblivion.

Reader, does this remind you of something?  A certain climate change theory, perhaps?

"Global warming" exhibits several of the symptoms Irving Langmuir described:

- while there have been recent changes in world climate, they don't correspond to carbon dioxide levels (the claimed causative agent) in any fashion that can be described with consistency;

- statistical analysis of the relation between climate change and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not reveal a relationship that is significant by the standards of science;

- while proponents of global warming claim predictive power for their theories, so far reality isn't cooperating with them;

- the predictions of future climate trends fly in the face of what has been observed about behavior of the Earth's climate until now;

- the ability of proponents of global warming theory to rationalize counter-intutitive developments such as the sharp DROP in world temperatures while the Earth is supposedly warming is truly remarkable.

So far, the only missing symptom is the sharp fall in the number of supporters of global warming theory.  There is no shortage of people who profess to agree with this theory despite its troubling inconsistencies, and it has become popular with politicians at the national and global level, as evidenced by Al Gore's having won the Nobel Peace Prize for espousing global warming and having promoted it as tirelessly as he has.

Of course, we've seen things like this before - eugenics was once universally accepted as received wisdom.  Compulsory sterilization was once promoted not only for those who were assessed as being mentally or physically subnormal, but those who exceeded the intellectual norm by too high a degree ("excessively high" intelligence was considered to indicate a tendency toward mental instability).  Supreme Court decisions were based on eugenics theory, state laws written based on it, and history shows how the Nazis abused it to justify murders (passed off as "euthanasia") - killings which may have happened in other countries, even the United States, as eugenics enthusiasts began trying to emulate the German example before World War Two.

After the war, the Nuremberg Trials tore the veil away from the atrocities committed by Nazi doctors in the name of eugenics; suddenly very few people outside Nazi Germany believed in eugenics any more, and papers on work done here in America involving those unfortunate enough to be considered "defective" suddenly were put away, spiked by scientific journal editors.  But it took not only years, but a catastrophic world war and grisly excesses committed by a psychotic regime run by a madman to overthrow the hold of eugenics on the world's intellectuals.

So it may well be with global warming.  As long as people are willing to squint a little when they see data that disagrees with the consensus that the Earth is inexorably getting warmer, and believe that a hundredth of a degree increase in temperature worldwide (the rise predicted by most global warming models) will have the catastrophic effects predicted by the people who have hitched their professional and political wagons to the global warming star - then it will be fashionable, perhaps even mandatory in the future to parrot the global warming credo.

But eventually the world will stop squinting.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 3:16 AM MDT

Updated: Friday, 11 July 2008 1:05 PM MDT

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Election years are bad for our perspective.  We in the blogosphere tend to give people who don't deserve very much thought or attention a lot of it, trying to point out why they shouldn't run the United States of America.

It's easy to lose sight of the fact that the we're so passionate on who runs our country because our country is worth it.

I'm not interested in comparing America with other countries.  I'm interested in living here, because I love my country.  I love this place because it is where people come from all over the world to be free, and as much as we can, we let them.  There are limits to how many people we can let in from overseas, and we always err on the unsafe side, letting more in than we should, because we're not cold-blooded and uncompassionate.  We're just not idiots.

I love my country because we are never satisfied with "good enough." America tries hard to be better to our own citizens and to everyone else, every day.   We argue with each other constantly about how best to do that, but notice that we do try and we do get better.  And there are times when we screw up badly - and we hash it out in the open when that happens.

I love my country because when it would be simpler to just close our borders and leave the rest of the world to its own devices, we go out and try to save the world instead.  Sometimes, as Saul Bellow illustrated in his allegorical novel "The Rain King," we blunder into situations where we don't know what's going on or what we're doing - but we're quick studies.  We learn fast.  (And we're forebearing enough that when a toffee-nosed little snot like Prince Edward presumes to lecture us on how naive and stupid we are in our attempts to wring right out of wrong, we let him into our country anyway, because his Mom's a nice lady.)

One of the proudest moments of my life was when someone in Parliament was bad-mouthing the United States and demanding to know why Tony Blair was so committed to the alliance between our countries. 

His answer: "Two people have offered to give their lives up for you - Jesus Christ and the American GI."  When the Prime Minister of Great Britain says this to his own countrymen by way of rebuke, we must be doing something right. 

In my family's case, it was a particularly touching tribute because my son did give his life in Iraq for his comrades, for the other Coalition soldiers in that area (including some British servicemen), for us in America and for everyone else who would prefer to live in peace and freedom than under the kind of tyranny which the 9/11 hijackers were working to impose on us.

Not a day passes I don't think of my son Luke.  And every fourth of July, I thank him for his sacrifice, and God for making him the brave, strong man he was.  I wish he were still here, but I also remember that just before he died, we spoke on the phone and he told me how much he believed in what he was doing over there.  And anyone who tells me he died for a lie is risking getting knocked on his ass, because I may be 50 years old with cancer, but I'm not dead yet.

My dad went to Germany during World War II for the same reason his grandson went to Iraq - because his country needed him to go.  I was lucky enough that there was no war when I came of military age; I enrolled in ROTC in college anyway, because military service is a strong tradition in both sides of my family.  Because my back X-rays look sort of like a road map of downtown Dallas, I didn't pass my ROTC physical but I worked as a police officer for three years, so I wound up carrying a gun as a young man anyway.

I think that it would be a good thing for most of our young people to put in some time in either the police or the military, if only to give them perspective on what it takes to make life safe for others.  Freedom is not free, and public safety requires that someone not be safe in order that others may live in safety.  It's easy to say that; somewhat more difficult to know what it really means.  Sometimes it can be very difficult.

It's difficult sometimes to understand other people's perspectives.  I can't understand why some people want to come here from other countries and impose their old way of life on those of us who were already here.  If these people want to do honor killings and keep sex slaves in their basements (like some of our Muslim guests from Saudi Arabia), people should stay where those loathsome customs are not felonies. 

We set up a country where women can expect to be treated decently, and I can't see why the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with all the religious laws they enforce on visitors to their country, can't understand that their filthy way of treating women is not only frowned on here, it is a crime.   We don't stop enforcing the law on people because their homelands float on oil.  As much complicity as the Saudi royal family had in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, they should be sincerely grateful to their distorted vision of God that we didn't just decide to use nuclear weapons on them to deliver justice.

I don't understand people who come here with a sob story about how hard life is where they're from, then expect to get away with crapping on other people once they're here.  In America, we ALL follow the law.  If you come here and think you're above the law, that you can mistreat other people for the hell of it, expect to see the inside of a jail cell - or to be sent back home if you're not from here.  The same rules apply where you're from, guys.  We don't need crooks and we don't need people who don't think the law applies to them.  If you can't deal with that, go home.

I think sometimes that we set fireworks off on the Fourth of July because they are a contentious way to celebrate, and we're a pretty contentious nation.  We don't worship consensus; we arrive at consensus after contending, more often than not.  Not necessarily warfare, and not necesarily gunfire, but even our marriages can resemble war at times.

When you think about it, freedom means that people sometimes have conflict.  Resources can be limited at times; not everyone can have what he or she wants if there's not enough to go around.  The test of a viable society is how it handles conflict, not whether or not there is any. 

The Second Amendment to the Constitution, like it or not, acknowledges that conflicts can sometimes be so heated that people require weapons to defend themselves from the strong and the politically powerful.  All the hand-waving about monopolies of armed force for the state, and the Second Amendment applying only to the National Guard, are nonsense. 

Our Founding Fathers had just come from a long conflict that started when they had had to pick up weapons because their conflict with the British government could not be solved by reason or law.  They fully intended (or at least George Mason and Thomas Jefferson did) that if that situation were to happen again, that the American people would be able to defend themselves from their own government. 

(It's ironic that left-wingers love gun control when they are so fond of shrieking about "rights" that don't even exist in the constitution, such as the "right" to privacy, the "right" to have federally-funded abortions, the "right" to compel employers to grant spousal benefits to same-sex couples and to compel governments to extend the legal protections of marriage to relationships which are not marriages.  I guess the idea of defending these "rights" with guns is ridiculous on the face of it, while defending your right to be secure in your property or your life with a gun makes instinctive sense, even to someone who believes in artificial "rights" that do not flow from a natural understanding of the proper relationship between man and society.  Liberals just instinctively realize that their "rights" will ultimately conflict with authentic rights as the Founding Fathers recognized them.)

Liberals are so wedded to the idea of gun control because they believe the government has the answer to every question and should be able to impose those answers on every citizen.  That was their perspective.  We've just allowed the courts to lie to us about the situation because we have been too lazy to fight for every one of our rights, every time.  When we decide not to contend for our rights, we should expect to lose them.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 8:42 PM MDT

Updated: Friday, 4 July 2008 9:50 PM MDT

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In the 2004 election, the Democratic Party served us up John Kerry and made a great deal of noise about his military record. 

Never mind that ALL of his unit commanders attested to Kerry's being a hot-dog who fired off grenades for the hell of it, then signed up for one of his three Purple Hearts for self-inflicted shrapnel wounds; never mind that John Kerry was also one of the organizers of the discredited "Winter Soldiers Committee" who went around lying both about their military service and about atrocities in Vietnam that never happened; never mind that Kerry got together with the VC and the North Vietnamese before the Paris Peace Talks to help them cut the best deal they could (which they then went back on).

Never mind that John Kerry was a legend in his own mind.  The Democrats went for it.  Thank God the rest of us didn't - as dismal as W's been, Kerry would have been much worse - a Jimmy Carter with an attitude (well, Carter had an attitude too, he just took it out on the White House staff, who had to stand there and take abuse from that pathetic little man).

But the Democrats told the rest of us that we had to prefer a man who had actual military service under fire to someone, who like the President, served stateside (although flying air defense missions in old Delta Dart jet fighters as Bush did struck me as risky enough - the outfit that made them, Convair, had disappeared in a series of defense contractor mergers by the time George W. Bush was flying them).

But let's look at how the 2008 candidates shape up against John Kerry.

John McCain flew missions over North Vietnam for the Navy.  He put his butt on the line over enemy territory every time he went up.  Anti-aircraft fire got him and he was captured by the Communists, placed in the infamous Hanoi Hilton POW camp, where he was tortured for five years.  He refused an early release (the Communists wanted to show that because McCain's father was an Admiral in the Navy, he would get preferential treatment) unless every prisoner in the camp with him was released.  Then they beat him most of the way to death until he wrote a phony "confession," then threw him in solitary for two years.

Of course, McCain wouldn't get any sympathy from the Democratic leadership unless he'd been suspected of Islamic terrorism and thrown into Guantanamo Bay or Al Ghraib - but we know what they're all about.

But after he and most of the other POWs were returned to America, McCain didn't do what many of us might have and take a well-deserved medical retirement.

"He remained on active duty, undergoing months of treatment and physical therapy for his injuries, attended the National War College during 1973-1974, and had his flight status reinstated in 1976 when he became commanding officer of a training squadron in Florida. He turned around a low-performing unit and won the squadron its first Meritorious Unit Commendation.

Barack Obama was 15, attending high school in Hawaii.

McCain retired from the Navy as a captain in 1981, after 21 years on active duty. He had been awarded the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Bronze Star, and the Navy Commendation Medal, for conduct before, during, and after his years as a POW.

McCain passes the John Kerry Test with all flags flying.

Obama doesn't."

Of course, this cuts no ice with weasels like retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, who opined on a Sunday morning talk show that he didn't think "getting shot down and spending five years as a POW qualifies a man to be president."

Let's put Clark's fat, stupid ass in a fighter, punch him out over enemy territory, leave him in a torture palace for five years, then check back with him.  Clark's own duty consisted mainly of making crappy decisions when he was with NATO, during Bill Clinton's Balkan Adventure. 

You can look in vain through Clark's own record for signs of courage or a backbone.  Wesley Clark was a paper pusher in a pretty green suit.  I can think of worse invective to describe this pitiful poser, with his glib dismissal of better men than he will ever be, but let's get back to the main purpose of this essay.

Are the Democrats going to switch stories on us now?  Of course they are.  They've built up another tin god with feet of clay, and at Denver this August they are going to fall down before him and worship at those clay feet.  The "John Kerry" test goes out the window, in favor of their new... lie.

Then they will imperiously tell the rest of us to vote for a cheap lawyer for a convicted felon and Chicago slumlord, instead of a man who has given most of his life to serving us, risked it, almost given it up out of loyalty to the rest of us.  And they will be wrong again.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 3:57 PM MDT

Updated: Thursday, 3 July 2008 6:20 PM MDT

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Mood:  incredulous

We hope not, but the fact remains that from January 5th (judging from the date on the Web page) to March 19th of this year, Barack Hussein Obama's Web site had this page:

For those who DON'T remember the Black Panthers (from Wikipedia.org):

New Black Panther Party

The New Black Panthers or New Black Panther Party (NBPP), whose formal name is the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, is a U.S.-based black supremacist organization founded in Dallas, Texas in 1989…

The NBPP attracted many breakaway members of the Nation of Islam when former NOI minister Khalid Abdul Muhammad became the national chairman of the group from the late 1990s until his death in 2001. The NBPP is currently led by Malik Zulu Shabazz, and still upholds Khalid Abdul Muhammad as the de facto father of their movement…

Although it says it sees capitalism as the fundamental problem with the world and “revolution” as the solution, the new party does not draw its influences from Marxism or Maoism as the original party did. Instead, in a carefully-worded, roundabout form of ethnic nationalism,  they say that Marx himself based his ideology and teachings on indigenous African cultures, and that the NBPP therefore need not look to Marxism or Maoism as a basis for their program, but can look to ideologies that stem directly from those African origins. The NBPP says it fights the oppression of black and brown people and that its members are on top of current issues facing black communities across the world. Also, it points to not all of its members being NOI, though the group acknowledges universal “spirituality” practices within the organization…

Members have referred to “bloodsucking Jews”, and Khalid Abdul Muhammad “has blamed slavery and even the Holocaust on the ‘hooked-nose, bagel-eating, lox-eating, perpetrating-a-fraud, so-called Jew’.”

Khalid Abdul Muhammad in his statement [said] that “there are no good crackers, and if you find one, kill him before he changes."

 ____

And once again, Obama's campaign accepted that endorsement until it was reprinted in conservative blogs and began to attract unfavorable attention.

Thanks to chacha and the "Sweetness and Light" blog for the above.

The graphic above and the Wikipedia quote were from:

http://sweetness-light.com/archive/new-black-panther-party-supports-obama

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 2:25 PM MDT

Updated: Wednesday, 2 July 2008 2:50 PM MDT

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Mood:  irritated

(quoted from"The Audacity of Truth," Caroline Glick, the Jersualem Post)

"Obama belongs to the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Its minister and Obama's spiritual adviser is Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.

In an investigative report on Obama published last week by the American Thinker Web site, Ed Lasky documented multiple examples of Wright's anti-Jewish and anti-white animus. Wright has called for divestment from Israel and refers to Israel as a "racist" state. Theologically, he believes that the true "Chosen People" are the blacks. Indeed, he is a black supremacist. He believes that black values are superior to middle class American values and that blacks should isolate themselves from the wider American society.

Wright is a long-time friend of the virulently anti-Semitic head of the Nation of Islam - fellow Chicagoan Louis Farrakhan. The two traveled together to Libya some years ago to pay homage to Muammar Gaddafi. Last year Wright presented Farrakhan with a "Lifetime Achievement" award.

Although last week Obama issued a statement condemning Farrakhan for his anti-Semitism, he did not disavow Wright - who married him and baptized his daughters. Obama has taken no steps to moderate his church's anti-Israel invective.

OBAMA'S affiliation with Wright aligns with his choice of financial backers and foreign policy advisors. To varying degrees, all of them exhibit hostility towards Israel and support for appeasing jihadists.

As Lasky notes, Obama has received generous support from billionaire George Soros. In recent years, Soros has devoted himself to replacing politicians who support fighting the forces of global terror and supporting Israel with politicians who support appeasing jihadists and dumping Israel.

As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Obama opposed defining Iran's Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist group. He calls for the US to withdraw from Iraq - only to return if genocide is being carried out and then, only as part of an international force. He also supports opening negotiations with Iran even if the Iranians continue to enrich uranium. In forming these views, he is assisted by his foreign policy team which includes Zbigniew Brzezinski, Mark Brzezinski, Anthony Lake, Susan Rice and Robert Malley."

All of these people are known either for their anti-Israel views or their pro-Arab views - or both. Malley, a Palestinian apologist invented and propagated the false claim that the 2000 Camp David summit between the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and then prime minister Ehud Barak failed because Israel wasn't serious about giving the Palestinians a state. This view is disputed by Barak and Clinton.

For her part, as chief foreign policy advisor to Senator John Kerry during the 2004 presidential elections, Susan Rice reportedly convinced Kerry to announce that if elected he would appoint Jimmy Carter and James Baker to serve as his envoys for Middle East peace.

Mark Brzezinski has openly called for unconditional negotiations with Iran...."

"But even in this atmosphere Obama stands out - for not only does he theoretically support appeasement, he is actively advancing the interests of Islamists seeking to take control over a state allied with the US.

Kenya currently teeters at the edge of political chaos and civil war in the wake of the disputed Dec. 27 presidential elections. Those elections pitted incumbent President Mwai Kibaki against Raila Odinga who leads the Orange Democratic Movement. While the polls showed the public favoring Odinga, Kibaki was declared the winner. Odinga rejected the results and his supporters have gone on rampages throughout the country that have killed some 700 people so far. Fifty people were murdered when a pro-Odinga mob set ablaze a church in which they were hiding.

Kibaki is close ally of the US in the war against Islamic terror. In stark contrast, Odinga is an ally of Islamic extremists. On August 29 Odinga wrote a letter to Kenya's pro-jihadist National Muslim Leaders Forum. There he pledged that if elected he would establish Sharia courts throughout the country; enact Islamic dress codes for women; ban alcohol and pork; indoctrinate schoolchildren in the tenets of Islam; ban Christian missionary activities, and dismiss the police commissioner, "Who has allowed himself to be used by heathens and Zionists."

Although Odinga is an Anglican, he referred to Islam as the "one true religion" and scorned Christians as "worshipers of the cross." Obama strongly supports Odinga who claims to be his cousin. As Daniel Johnson reported recently in the New York Sun, during his 2006 visit to Kenya, Obama was so outspoken in his support for Odinga that the Kenyan government complained to the State Department that Obama was interfering with the internal politics of the country. After the Dec. 27 elections Obama interrupted a campaign appearance in New Hampshire to take a call from Odinga."

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 1:51 PM MDT

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