Well, the Supreme Court failed to rule the obvious, that Hillary: The Movie, was a political ad.
Be real, folks. By their own admission,
Citizens United, a conservative not-for-profit group, wanted to air ads for the movie in Democratic primary states….
That makes the purpose rather obvious, doesn’t it?
During a conference call in preparation for President Obama’s trip to Cairo, Egypt, where he will address the Muslim world, deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Denis McDonough said “the President himself experienced Islam on three continents before he was able to — or before he’s been able to visit, really, the heart of the Islamic world — you know, growing up in Indonesia, having a Muslim father — obviously Muslim Americans (are) a key part of Illinois and Chicago.”
And for those of you who require a bit of context:
say it ain’t so joe…are you bringing up the muslim rumor?
More here.
That’s what I said. When BHO goes on the ‘09 Spring European Tour and lets the world know what a fool he is and how bad the U.S. is, well…….it just isn’t his fault. WE knew this from the beginning and Barak is just being his foolish self. I mean really; is anyone shocked about his daily retorts, gaffs, no-class style and his John Wayne swagger (my humble apologies to the Duke and his kin)? Those with intelligence knew what we would get if he were elected. No, it wasn’t his fault.
It was the fault of the Obama-mites that set this scurge upon the planet. Yes, those brainless wonders whose IQ’s are stamped in every pair of shoes made (American or European-doesn’t matter). Do you think anyone in their right mind nominated McCain for the GOP candidate? Do you think anyone really believed that BHO could deliver the change that he was talking about without destroying the American economy and way of life? Do you really think that Americans wanted nothing more than to see My Belle Michele’s armpits at every event conceivable? No, it was the brainless, witless Obama-mites that did this to the world. And do they have an excuse? The answer is YES!!!!!!! One word-HULU!
Check this out! You will see that it came from the aquisition of a Chinese company. It started at the same time as BHO’s prodding to run for president. It is owned by news organizations. And as the advertisement says, “we’re aliens. And we are turning your gray matter into goo so that we can eat it up”. We have seen that those that voted Obama are brainless (corpses, mental deficients or just brain-dead) and sucked up all that alien crap till their brain-matter was goo. After all, like the website says “In Swahili, Hulu means, among other things, both “cease” and “desist.” It also gives other cute meanings in other languages; none of it good. They were not in a correct state of mind when they voted and, since there is no recovery, don’t know the problem that they have caused.
Next time you want to blame Barak for something just pause and think back before he was elected. If you remember that that was the way he was then, well, it isn’t his fault. It is the Obama-mites and HULU!
People are starting to remember why Republicans kept getting elected all those years.
The Economist magazine, October 30, 2008:
On the financial crisis his performance has been as assured as Mr McCain’s has been febrile. He seems a quick learner and has built up an impressive team of advisers, drawing in seasoned hands like Paul Volcker, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. Of course, Mr Obama will make mistakes; but this is a man who listens, learns and manages well…
In terms of painting a brighter future for America and the world, Mr Obama has produced the more compelling and detailed portrait. He has campaigned with more style, intelligence and discipline than his opponent. Whether he can fulfil his immense potential remains to be seen. But Mr Obama deserves the presidency.
The Economist magazine, March 26, 2009:
HILLARY CLINTON’S most effective quip, in her long struggle with Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination last year, was that the Oval Office is no place for on-the-job training. It went to the heart of the nagging worry about the silver-tongued young senator from Illinois: that he lacked even the slightest executive experience, and that in his brief career he had never really stood up to powerful interests…
The failure to staff the Treasury is a shocking illustration of administrative drift. There are 23 slots at the department that need confirmation by the Senate, and only two have been filled. This is not the Senate’s fault. Mr Obama has made a series of bad picks of people who have chosen or been forced to withdraw; and it was only this week that he announced his candidates for two of the department’s four most senior posts…
If Mr Obama cannot work with the Republicans, he needs to be certain that he controls his own party. Unfortunately, he seems unable to. Put bluntly, the Democrats are messing him around. They are pushing pro-trade-union legislation (notably a measure to get rid of secret ballots) even though he doesn’t want them to do so; they have been roughing up the bankers even though it makes his task of fixing the economy much harder; they have stuffed his stimulus package and his appropriations bill with pork, even though this damages him and his party in the eyes of the electorate. Worst of all, he is letting them get away with it.
No. Executive. Experience. He has never even managed a Dairy Queen. That’s how a bright guy can end up looking like such an ignorant fool, because he is ignorant – by definition – about something he’s never done. No hiring. No firing. No working with budgets. No making hard decisions that absolutely must get made.
You see what we got now people? Nobody’s piloting the ship.
File this under “HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.”
One of the few campaign promises Barack Obama appears posied to keep is to close the Guantanamo Bay military compound. So far so good, if you are a progressive terrorist sympathizer. However, where are those individuals previously held at Guantanamo supposed to go?
Answer: The Democrat stronghold of Alexandria, Virginia.
… news that the Obama administration might move some detainees from their highly controlled military fortress at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Alexandria to stand trial at the federal courthouse.
“We would be absolutely opposed to relocating Guantanamo prisoners to Alexandria,” Mayor William D. Euille (D) said. “We would do everything in our power to lobby the president, the governor, the Congress and everyone else to stop it. We’ve had this experience, and it was unpleasant. Let someone else have it.”
That’s William D. Euille, who campaigned for Obama and, well did about as much as he possibly could to help the president get elected.
More than the entertaining, buyer’s-remorse irony, which will keep us entertained quite a lot over the next few years I imagine, notice the sheer mental deficiency of this rather extreme form of NIMBYism: We welcome the terrorists to come here and enjoy fair treatment under the law … but, please don’t come RIGHT here. Come to, say, Ohio, or maybe Nevada, so our conscience is assuaged and someone else can handle the messy aspects.
Classic.
It’s looking very good for Saxby Chambliss to become the 41st Republican senator in the upcoming session.
Click here to follow the results at the AJC blog. Just keep hitting F5.
He’s running much stronger than he did in the general election.
If Chambliss does win in a landslide, let me be the first to say: Thanks, Sarah.
UPDATE: at 9:00 pm Chambliss leads by over 250,000 votes – more than 60% – with over half the precincts reporting.
UPDATE II: … and at 9:05 pm, AP calls the race for Chambliss. Thanks, Sarah.
Another quick-hit potential conversation starter:
If President Obama overreaches, we should pummel him for it and march on Washington if necessary. But he is our QB now, so as Americans we must allow him to begin his presidency with assurance that we have his back.
Prior to the 2008 elections, progressives projected onto Barack Obama their hopes and we conservatives projected our fears. From his initial steps as President-elect, it appears we have all had our expectations dashed.
Having your fears dashed, it turns out, is a pretty cool thing (with hopes, however … it’s not so great.) I said a couple times I would love to be proven wrong about my assumptions that Obama’s past statements and affiliations portended dark days for America’s future. It is looking like I was wrong.
AND I, FOR ONE, AM GLAD ABOUT IT.
I think there is a real danger and missed opportunity for conservatives if we go into the 2009 federal government period poised to reflexively trash the Barack Obama presidency. He seems to have a strong pragmatic streak. Not saying he doesn’t have some important issues to work out, but I plan to give him the benefit of the doubt for a long while.
I know after the blitzkrieg we fell under conservatives are aghast, wondering “Who were those guys and what are they going to do next?”
Is there anything Moveon.org can’t accomplish?
Well I hate to be the bearer of terrifying news, but Moveon is not going away. They are moving forward!
This video was captured by a New York Magazine crew two weeks after the election at a Moveon meeting in Manhattan.
And by moving forward I mean revving up to kick ass, take photos and eat brains.
The money quote:
“Moveon is not about an issue, it’s about the issue being that you guys cannot organize, and that we need to figure about how to f-cking do it, because …”
“Can you spare us the obscenities?”
“Sorr .. Are you? .. alright, so anyway, thanks and I’m done.”
Be afraid, be very afraid.
These will be frightening times to be a moderate in America, with this progressive behemoth coming straight down the pike. To be a conservative, for goodness sake, will be like butter waiting for the hot knife to slice into us.
Not one to avoid controversy for long, Alaska Governor and former Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin is back in the news for an interview she gave at a location that was possibly not thoroughly vetted by her public relations staff.
As Palin nonchalantly fielded questions from reporters in an ad hoc press opportunity on the occasion of her annual “pardoning” of a turkey for the upcoming Thanksgiving Day holiday, both the television cameras and audience noticed something terrible occurring in the background as the governor blithely continued the back and forth with the press.
Just outside the governor’s field of vision but completely observable by everyone else, an apparently crazed political candidate from Minnesota was crushing small dogs one after the other, saying “THIS is how we win. THIS is how we win. THIS is how we win.”
During the course of the nearly 10-minute interview, an estimated 17 small dogs were either suffocated, or mortally wounded from massive blunt force trauma.
Confronted with the video evidence, neither the governor nor her staff would comment on yet another major miscalculation by the woman who would have been next in line for the presidency of the United States of America.
With each new appointment Barack Obama makes, I see less and less reason to think he is going to be the radical leader his past and recent statements had led me to fear.
Like I told Kevin and the Chief the other night, and commented here some months ago, I would LOVE to be proven wrong on my suggestions Obama would try to squelch free speech, transform our capitalist economy into a subsection of the Department of the Treasury, open a system of gulags, confiscate our retirement accounts and unleash an army of brownshirts to ferret out thought crimes.
In fact, if instead of all the crazy progressive talk during the campaign Obama had simply proclaimed that his administration would be basically a third term of the Clinton presidency but with Hillary in a subservient position to himself, as looks to be taking shape, I’d have been down with that. There is some upside to letting the Democrats take the reins of power for a spell.
Instead of political invective we’d have seen a lot more shamanic wisdom on this blog – that I can assure you.
UPDATE: And if you want a little more feel-good, warm and fuzzy, things are really not so bad, savor this.
UPDATE II: The second George Herbert Walker Bush term.
UPDATE III: Obama to delay repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’. A little outside the topic of this post because this was not an issue keeping me awake at nights, frankly. But it goes to show 1) Obama appears to be tending toward the “center” if not center-right, and 2) The enhanced-gay-rights movement seems on a success trajectory roughly mirroring that of the Republican Party. Maybe we should all compare notes while regrouping?
UPDATE IV: And holy smokes, if somehow Barack Obama actually manages to make smoking ok again, it would be one of the greatest PR coups of all time. I remember a National Review article in the 1980s eulogizing the smoking culture, with the example of a European official on a TV panel discussion who, when asked a question, pulled one from his cigarette case, tapped it several times on the case, lit it up, took a long drag and exhaled slowly before answering. How much better style for gathering one’s thoughts, the NR writer observed, than the typical American politician who will blather nonsense for 30 seconds while the brain works to summon a cogent response. If President Obama can reawaken that sense of suave in the nation’s highest office, think about what it will do for public confidence.
UPDATE V: Here’s the best analysis I have seen:
I think that Obama is similar to Bill Clinton in one important respect. Clinton famously wanted to be President not because there was anything in particular he wanted to do, but because he craved the status of being President. In Clinton’s case, this seems to have been due to an insatiable need for approval and affection. Obama, likewise, wants to be President not in order to do anything, but because he believes that for Barack Obama to be President is an end in itself. In Obama’s case, this view is due not to a psychological craving, but rather to the historical importance of being the first African-American President.
If I’m right about that, it makes sense for Obama to be reasonably moderate. He makes history simply by being a President with dark skin; what he desperately wants to avoid is for his Presidency to be seen as a disaster or a fiasco.
This has become slightly uncomfortable, I must say.
It appears my rapturous sense of brotherhood with my fellow Obama voters last night may have been misplaced.
Zogby today published more details from the survey represented in the video and, cumulatively, I fear many of my liberal brothers and sisters are as dumb as doorknobs and probably should not have been allowed to vote.
The media bears responsibility for apparently being, in general, crooks, but c’mon, it should be each person’s responsibility to have a remote familiarity with what is actually happening in the world. Maybe you don’t have access to NewsBusters, but that doesn’t mean it’s ok to limit your information sources to cereal boxes and gum wrappers.
Click here for complete survey results.
I do not think the unprecedented ignorance of such a massive proportion of those who voted for it taints the Obama presidency or should cause more and more people to view its goals with extreme skepticism, but I do think I will have to exercise better vigilance regarding my fellow progressives because of the rampant mental torpidity in our ranks.
People talk about values. The values that have motivated me throughout my entire life as a liberal voter are grounded in the knowledge that I stand WITH, not over, the people who work and raise their kids and struggle to earn a paycheck and also, by the way, make this nation great.
Oh, sure: You can weigh the party platforms or ideologies of the day, building charts full of statistics, calling meetings, hiring experts, arguing different points of view, parsing position papers and, basically, doing all of the things that have gotten this country into the mess we are currently experiencing. That’s called the politics of the past – and THE PEOPLE are sick of it.
They are sick of the talk, sick of the infighting, sick of the backstabbing and politics of personal destruction. What the people are looking for is not the officially sanctioned “information” and “data” but the things that don’t lend themselves quite so readily to debate and statistical analysis: Things like honesty, and compassion, and clarity, and understanding.
And sometimes, the people know what is best.
The video I am about to show you was compiled as part of an upcoming study of the impact of the media on the 2008 election.
The people who commissioned the study seem to have thought they were uncovering some type of scandal but, quite the contrary, they have unwittingly unveiled the glorious reality of the sheer purity of heart that has changed our nation.
If you are anything like me, you will be moved by it … and I have to admit that after watching it three times through my heart still sings and my eyes well up each time as I watch and listen to these beautiful, forthright, focused people who I am so, so proud to stand with during this historic time.
These are my “great Americans,” who have done the impossible by overcoming the noise machine and delivering Barack Obama to the presidency. God bless them for their hearts filled with purity rather than malice. Now that they have been politically awakened, they control the future direction of our nation for generations to come, and America is well and truly fixed because of them. God bless the United States of America: now, finally, a government of the people!
Enjoy! (And have some tissues handy.)
He promised something new, and he is delivering on it: Barack Obama’s transition team will include few paid lobbyists:
To burnish Obama’s reformist credentials, Podesta on Tuesday rolled out what he billed as a tough set of ethics rules targeting professional lobbyists. But there was a loophole: Lobbyists could work on the transition as long as they stayed away from the policy areas that their lobbying involved.
As a candidate, Obama’s language when it came to lobbyists was far more emphatic. “I have done more to take on lobbyists than any other candidate in this race — and I’ve won,” he said in the South Carolina speech. “I don’t take a dime of their money, and when I am president, they won’t find a job in my White House.”
Once again I have to say: It’s about time. We have had enough corruption of our political system. Finally we have a president who intends to keep moneyed interests away from the machinery of government.
This topic has pretty much disappeared around here lately, which proves my point. What point? Why, Joe’s Maxim On The Illegal Immigration Controversy, of course.
Which is: If there are illegal aliens causing trouble on your street, you are concerned about illegal immigration. If they ain’t there, you ain’t so concerned.
I don’t know about your neighborhood, but I can tell you that thanks to the foreclosure tsunami, lots and lots of illegals have left Sterling. Guess much of that whole streamlined mortgage phenomenon was being conducted in Spanish, eh? Pepe’s closed a couple months ago. As far as I can tell, we may have one or two boarding houses left on our block but they are very discreet and it is a hell of a lot better than when we had five, three of whom were decidedly obnoxious.
Personally, I think a bunch of illegal migrants decided they stand as good a chance economically trying to make a go of it back in their own countries as here. To which I say: Good on ye, mates.
Zogby now reveals that voters in last week’s election were overwhelmingly in favor of immigration enforcement as opposed to amnesty – but the entire issue was not a factor in their vote:
– Only 32% of Obama voters considered his support for amnesty as a factor in their decisions to vote for him. 67% said it was either not a factor at all, or they voted for Obama in spite of his stance on amnesty.
– 60% of voters said reducing illegal immigration and cracking down on employers who hire them is important to them, while only 21% supported “legalizing or creating a pathway to citizenship” for illegal aliens.
– 57% of voters stated that amnesty would harm American workers and further strain public resources, while only 26% believe amnesty would aid economic recovery and ease public burdens.
And needless to say, McCain voters concerned about illegal immigration were obliged to take the clothespin-and-vodka route in order to pull the lever.
But many illegals have left. Construction has slowed. Winter is approaching. The issue has become less salient, even for Latinos, according to the research.
What this boils down to, for me, is more positive potential for the incoming Obama administration. The most egregious problem caused by illegal immigration is the negative impact on American workers – the downward pressure on salaries. Problems on our neighborhood streets run a close second, but these are much more difficult to quantify.
As the unemployment percentage creeps upward in this country, it will become more and more evident that allowing illegal workers to take American jobs and drive down American salaries is simply wrong.
Ten years ago Americans could make a living hanging drywall, doing rough carpentry, and a host of other forms of manual labor. When the opportunity to work picks back up, when housing starts are on the upswing, there is no reason that work should be going to illegals.
I have a strong hope – and faith, even – that President Obama will not turn his back on America’s blue collar workers.
