"Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America."—Barack Hussein Obama Inaugural Address, 20-Jan-09.

“He is subtle and likes to kill softly. As such, he is something new on the political scene, which means he will require something new from his opponents, including, first, patience.”

--Peggy Noonan at http://online.wsj.com/article/declarations.html

Based on what has been exhibited so far: the parade of tax cheats proposed into the upper echelons of the administrative functionaries, an attempt to nationalize the economy by taking over bad debts, appointing czars of various shades from car manufacturing to government efficiency and resizing of the ‘middle class’, every American of all shades and sorts of persuasion should be apprehensive respecting what America is being remade into.

It appears that the celebrated architect of Brooklyn aphorisms, Yogi Berra, was correct when he opined that the more things change the more they seem to remain the same. For one thing, the prevalence of Clinton era rethreads amongst the Obama appointments does invoke the feeling of “déjà vu all over again.” It just seems so proper and fitting that tax cheats become the characteristic attributes of Obama appointments.

What does not seem proper is that Republicans in Capitol Hill do not find it incumbent on themselves to make an issue of it. It was supposed to be the function of the minority party to be scandalized by lapses of judgment committed by the ruling party. When there is hardly any sign of protest, the American public ought to be scandalized. As Bob Dole once asked, “where is the outrage”?

We should all be outraged that the Obama Administration is implementing the Europeanization of America. We once took pride in being known as the New World. There is no pride to take in becoming the New Europe.

There is nothing subtle about how the government is buying up the private sector. There is no denying that billions of TARP dollars have gone down the drain and there is nobody to account for in an administration that does not exhibit any need to account for anything. With a filibuster proof Senate and Republicans seemingly devoid of any ideas on what the country is all about, who is going to make the Obama administration account for anything?

When journalism had succumb to the Bush Derangment Syndrome, the nation lost a very valuable asset, namely a press corps whose reason for being is to be the fiscalizer of public policy. Now we have a press corps which acts as the propaganda arm of the Obama Administration. Instead of uncovering hidden agenda in whatever the government is doing, it strives to cover up and gloss over any unpleasant implications of administration policy.

What with the Republican brainstorm taking the Hillary Clinton playbook of a listening tour in order to get ideas on how to lead? They are not even embarrassed about it. Republicans seem to have forgotten that there are such things as first principles of governance. The Republic was founded on the principle that unleashing the creative powers of the individual is what opens the floodgates of productivity to bring about the unbridled creation of wealth.

It has been accepted wisdom that elections have consequences. Liberal presidents appoint liberal judges. A liberal congress rubber stamps a liberal president. But where did Obama get his mandate for Remaking America? An electoral victory cannot be construed as a constitutional amendment.

At which point does Remaking America come into conflict with the oath to “preserve protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God”?

Asumen Acumen at http://parallaxadhoc.blogtownhall.com/

 

“Besides, the fact that these words have been so aggressively foisted upon us by Hollywood does not mean that they have lost their power to offend . . . hearing profanity produces in the brain . . . all sorts of hormones and chemicals . . . whether we say we're offended or not.”

--Mona Charen at http://townhall.com/columnists/MonaCharen/2009/05/01/expletive_deleted__for_now

There is no doubt the prevalence of “colorful metaphors” [cf. Spock, in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home] in the language represents an overall coarsening of the culture. For one thing, they do not augment the quality of discourse. To the contrary, lacing a sentence with colorful metaphors diminishes its power to communicate meaning.

Almost two generations ago, Herbert Marcuse in his One Dimensional Man decried as obscene the analgesic effect on the national culture, the practice of juxtaposing on national TV’s evening news, images of the ravages of battle in Vietnam with the seemingly balmy Ivory Soap Commercials. That we are talking whether or not profanity offends proves Marcuse’s point beyond doubt.

Eight years of the Clinton presidency officially ushered in the coarsening of the culture.  It hardly needs counting the ways: Oral sex in the Oval Office, Presidential DNA on Monica’s blue dress, erectile dysfunction commercials accepted as normal on primetime TV, wardrobe malfunction at super bowl halftime entertainment. These are minor trivialities compared to what really should be construed as offensive: the practice of abortion on demand as acceptable form of birth control.

Deploying the Supreme Court to adjudicate on the dichotomy of meaning of profanities is a colossal waste of taxpayer money. The issue should be whether or not the FCC has the mandate to prohibit use of certain words and/or phrases from the airwaves. Attempting to legislate or adjudicate a question of taste is an exercise in futility. Taste is necessarily subjective. For this very reason alone the FCC’s list of prohibited words should be beyond question by anybody, the Supreme Court justices, included.

What the Supreme Court needs adjudicate on is whether or not Standards of Decency can be promulgated by law. My take is any attempt at doing so would only give the trial lawyers more opportunity to practice their profession, lucratively.

Asumen Acumen at http://parallaxadhoc.blogtownhall.com/

 

“President Obama may turn out to be a disaster, or he may rise to greatness. At this point, nobody knows what will happen. That is the great thing about democracy and capitalism. When done right, those things give people a fair chance to succeed, and there's nothing deranged about it. “

--Bill O’Reilly at http://townhall.com/columnists/BillOReilly/2009/05/02/obama_derangement?page=2

Of threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise!

One thing at least is certain—This Life flies;

One thing is certain and the rest is Lies;

The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.

--Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/246/246-h/246-h.htm

What exactly does President Obama propose that we hope him to succeed in? He threatens that if we don’t do what he says all hell will break loose. But that if we believe in him everything will be just peachy because he is the change we can believe in. They call that kind of talk in Rhetoric 101 as double talk. Why should I want him to succeed in that?

He has been buying up troubled assets: trillions of dollars of it. And he wants to cut cost by making cabinet departments shave 100 million in their respective budgets. That’s seven orders of magnitude. A President who tries to sell that kind of math to the nation must be thinking that the public is stupid. Maybe most of us were educated in the public schools, and the fact that he was elected president was proof positive that most Americans are stupid. But one does not lead the country out of an economic crisis just by counting on stupidity to work in your favor. There is such a thing as reality. To attempt to lead by deception is to deny that reality is a factor in determining the outcome of any venture.

The federal government buying up the private sector does not exactly promise greatness. The last time this was attempted by a national government, (Cuba and North Korea come to mind) the results were unmitigated failure. North Korea provides a very instructive example as it contrasts with its southern counterpart where the private sector has been allowed to flourish. Now North Korea exports counterfeit Viagra as a primary source of hard currency and depends on China to feed her people. South Korea meanwhile has been one of the main engines of what has been known as the Asian economic miracle.

The government (federal or state) running business enterprise does not have a track record of effectiveness, let alone success. The USPS is still subsidized by the taxpayers and Amtrak goes through its periodic cycles of bailout. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac left “toxic assets” in the national business lexicon as its main legacy. Meanwhile the Chris Dodds and Barney Franks and Charles Rangles still lord it over the corridors of policy making to cheat another day.

The contention that an auto industry run by the United Auto Workers Union under the tutelage of Capitol Hill would be the promise of Paradise to come is far worse than a triumph of hope and blind faith over experience. It is unmitigated political insanity. In suchlike ventures, if I had it in my power, I will do everything to stop it from happening. 

As it stands, with both houses of Congress in Obama’s pockets and the main stream media in the tank for Obama, nobody has the power to stop him. It probably would take a generation or two for American Capitalism to recover from the criminal insanity that is being attempted by this administration.

“Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire

To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,

Would not we shatter it to bits—and then

Re-mold it nearer to the Heart's Desire!”

----Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/246/246-h/246-h.htm

 

“Mother may have thought her most notable characteristic was her Republican activism, but, for the rest of us, it was her constant, unconditional love. She was a little love machine, spreading warmth and joy wherever she went.”

--- Anne Coulter at http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=31569&page=22#c1

Ann:

*Quotation is a modified rendition to E. Fitzgerald's
translation of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat

Original: New York City, April 6, 1987
Revisited: Rocky Point, NY December 23, 2007

 

“A common denominator with Obama's easy emphasis on racial divides  . . .  form[s] a disturbing pattern seen earlier with the off-handed remarks about "typical white person," the stereotyping of rural Pennsylvanians along lines of class and race, and the 20-year long patronage of a clearly racist preacher.”

---Victor Davis Hanson at http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson042209.html

“Arabs are told to be comfortable because of Barack’s names, first and second and third, his Muslim father, his non-traditional background. In other words, anytime anyone in the US is told that racism is lurking its ugly head around every corner, be assured that Obama will broadcast his race and heritage to Europeans, Turks, Arabs, and Latin Americans.”

---Victor Davis Hanson at http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/

Speaking of racial divides, Barrack Hussein Obama did consciously select his racial identity. Despite his white mother and his white grandparents who raised him, he went off as a teenager to seek out his black identity. Contrast this with Tiger Woods who publicly objected to being identified as an African American on the grounds that it is disrespectful of his mother’s Asian heritage to be so labeled.

For the record, I am a first-generation American. I am a non-white, married into three generations of a white family.  I am a registered Independent who voted for George W. Bush in 2004 as my first exercise in citizenship.  I voted for John McCain in 2008. I am outraged that President Obama takes pride in reminding the world at every opportunity that he is not one of us because of his pigmentation and his non-white heritage.

It is so unbecoming of a President to disown history for the trivial reason that he was not yet born when the event took place (i.e., Bay of Pigs). When he went to Turkey to renounce the Judeo-Christian moral foundation of this country as no longer operative because it had given way to shared secular values, he disinherited the country from the ages of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, from Western civilization, not to mention the religious mores of the Founding Fathers. It is precisely because of its Judeo-Christian heritage that the United States has turned out to be the most charitable nation on earth.

A president is supposed to be the president of all the people: those who voted for him and those who voted for the other guy, or just plain did not vote for anybody. He is sworn to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.” That appears to be a very tall order when you are an American president who is not even proud to be an American, if not downright ashamed of being an American!

 

"Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America."—Barack Hussein Obama Inaugural Address, 20-Jan-09.

Based on what has been exhibited so far: the parade of tax cheats proposed into the upper echelons of the administrative functionaries, an attempt to nationalize the economy by taking over bad debts, appointing czars of various shades from car manufacturing to government efficiency and resizing of the ‘middle class’, every American of all shades and sorts of persuasion should be apprehensive respecting what America is being remade into.

It appears that the celebrated architect of Brooklyn aphorisms, Yogi Berra, was correct when he opined that the more things change the more they seem to remain the same. For one thing, the prevalence of Clinton era rethreads amongst the Obama appointments does invoke the feeling of “déjà vu all over again.” It just seems so proper and fitting that tax cheats become the characteristic attributes of Obama appointments.

What does not seem proper is that Republicans in Capitol Hill do not find it incumbent on themselves to make an issue of it. It was supposed to be the function of the minority party to be scandalized by lapses of judgment committed by the ruling party. When there is hardly any sign of protest, the American public ought to be scandalized. As Bob Dole once asked, “where is the outrage”?

We should all be outraged that the Obama Administration is implementing the Europeanization of America. We once took pride in being known as the New World. There is no pride to take in becoming the New Europe.

Throughout my conscious adult life one word has become so naturally associated with the notion of being "American."  The word is "Exceptionalism."  Then came the age of Obama.  Then lou and behold, as promised, things changed.  Now "Apologetics" has become the associated word.  Let the world know that the POTUS is not apologizing in my name.  I became an American as a result of a conscious adult choice.  The American I have chosen to be and the Americanism I choose to abide by has nothing whatsoever that needs apolgizing for.  Least of all to the Arab world which is breeding and exporting terrorist of the most abominable sort. 

 

 

This presidential election cycle had been one of the longest in recent memory, mainly as a result of the tediously dragged out Democratic Primaries. This partly explains why I am sort of bothered and bewildered to come across a Rasmussen Report indicating 9% of the sample to be undecided a mere hours before the actual polling booths open.

Whatever your pet issue, it is simply ridiculous that you have not made up your mind who best to lead the country after the conventions and the four debates. On all the crucial issues, e.g., the economy, the war, abortion, judicial appointments the candidates’ position could not be put in any clearer contrast than they have propounded at these events.

Let us revisit these issues for refreshers:

The war: McCain was for the surge and victory, Obama for cut and run and negotiate.

Economy: both voted for the bailout. Obama is for “spreading the wealth around,” McCain is for growing the wealth.

 Abortion: Obama for on-demand availability; McCain for parental consent restrictions.

Foreign Policy: Obama wants to make us more like Europe; McCain believes in American Exceptionalism.

Energy Policy: McCain is for oil drilling domestically; Obama believes domestic oil production is pointless.

After all these, if you have not made up your mind yet, why don’t you just close your eyes and pull the lever for McCain /Palin. After all, you seem to not know what you want, anyway!  

 

It is a very reliable indicator that somebody is going to effectively fight for our interests if that somebody has already effectively put life and limb on the line to defend us. Such a candidate is Lee Zeldin.

Deploying him to Washington after his successful tour of duty in Iraq is a very logical next step for the proven fighter and defender of the American Dream.

Pull the lever for Zeldin, McCain/Palin on Tuesday and tell your friends and family to do the same.

 

The MLK dream was: that people shall be judged by the content of their character not the color of the skin. Secretary Powell’s endorsement of B. Hussein Obama is the exact anti-thesis to this dream.

When there was buzz about Gen. Powell being the best presidential timber in the yard, he did not make public his party affiliation. Or if he did, I simply missed it. My take is, Gen. Powell was acutely aware that the color of his skin was a significant component of his popularity. A Democrat/Republican angle would slice deeply into that popularity, especially given the fact that the black community is overwhelmingly a Democratic constituency.

It is misleading to assume that he is a Republican just because he was SOSOTUS in a Republican administration. After all this Compassionate Conservatism administration nurtured a Clintonite Mineta in its cabinet.

The Powel BHO endorsement is a quintessential anti-MLK moment. It is another eloquent illustration that this presidential race is all about race. Why else is BHO billed as the transformational candidate by the MSM? It is the triumph of pigmentation over character.

Kudos to Geraldine Ferraro for being the first one to point out this fact in public. She was taken to the cleaners by the mainstream media for it. But it only further illustrates the point how this presidential race is all about race.

Speaking of racial divides, B. Hussein Obama did consciously select his racial identity. Despite his white mother and his white grandparents who raised him, he went off as a teenager to seek out his black identity. Contrast this with Tiger Woods who publicly objects being identified as an African American on the grounds that it is disrespectful of his mother’s Asian heritage to be so labeled.

When BHO repeatedly points out that he looks different from the presidents pictured in the dollar bills, better believe that he is race baiting. Also better believe that he is doing it rather effectively. This is the only explanation that seems to make sense why there is a dearth of campaign posters and bumper stickers in the NY Suffolk county neighborhoods.

I consider it an act of political cowardice to buy into this racial nonsense. We have too much at stake in this election. It infuriates me that some are intimidated into not expressing ourselves. It infuriates me that my white neighbor who took from me a McCain/Palin yard poster but does not put it up on her yard because of her next door neighbor which happens to be a household occupied by a black family.

 If we are cowered into not doing what we want during an Obama candidacy, what else will we volunteer not to do in an Obama presidency?

For the record, I am a first-generation American. I am a non-white, married into three generations of a white family.  I am a registered Independent who voted for President Bush in 2004 as my first vote as an American citizen. I am outraged that in this election cycle we seem to be effectively intimated by the Obama campaign.

So I enjoin you, fellow Americans: Don’t let the racial bigots take away your right to vote your conscience. Not in an election cycle when we are at war with bigots of all shades and colors, most prominent among them being Red!

 

This is a rejoinder to Mona Charen’s column entitled Fair Taxation.

There are Reid, Pelosi, Obama, and ‘The Combination Thereof’. It's a housewives' tale but the secret to making delicious tea: you put one spoon for each person served and one spoon for the pot.

It's a basic dialectic of existence that the combination counts for something most important. That's why marriage is not just tea for two. There's the husband (hopefully a man), the wife (most preferably a woman), and the combination thereof.

When all three branches of government is controlled by the redistributive ideology, the fact that all three are in, is the lethal ingredient that brings in the doomsday scenario.

The judiciary will follow suit. If government no longer protects and promotes the pursuit of happiness, wealth and the most productive elements of society would ship offshore to Monaco, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, and kindred places.

Then America becomes a wounded giant left to lick its wounds. This definitely is the change that Obama-mania promises.

As it is wisely said, any nation always gets the leadership it deserves!

Regain & Sustain                

Win Clean . . . Regain                

McCain/Palin