Beagle Scout

That’s what BlogNetNews says! Read it and weep, oh ye of little faith. And “Y’all Politics,” I’m coming for you next.

ROFLMAO

Something must be wrong with the algorithm, because there’s no freaking way!

Starting at 6 in the morning, James Carville grunts out “whazgoanawn” to Rahm Emanuel and George Stephanopoulos. A little later, Paul Begala joins the conversation. Through the morning, the four pals commence to hatching the conventional wisdom for the day. They decide on the spin they will encourage in the media, so as to best help out the new President. The Messiah, President Government, Lord Barack Obama the Most Merciful, whatever you call him he is blessed to have three such good pals of his chief of staff going out into the news to preach his sermons. And that doesn’t even include Chris “Tingler” Matthews and his obamagasmic leg. Emanuel talks about policy, outlining some proposal or other that the Democrats can use to score points against Republicans, and his pals give him feedback on how it will work, and how he can improve it.

Begala said he often can’t remember the originator of any particular insight: “We talk so much — was this my idea that James changed, or was this George’s observation that Rahm tweaked?”

Andrew Malcolm comments:

Many political operatives of both parties participate in such daily or weekly calls to ensure they’re all on the same talking points page and to exchange gossip and tips and anticipate what the opposition is going to say that day.

What’s different in the revelation about this group, however, is that one of them (Emanuel) is a key operative in the current administration with a huge political stake in getting its message out its way, and the other three can go on TV as alleged observers and pass along the talking point line that best benefits their pal Rahm. All free, until now, of any apparent conflict or caveats.

Something to keep in mind the next time you watch George “reporting” on ABC or Carville and Begala “commenting” on CNN or somewhere.

Ed Morrissey comments:

It looks like a deliberate propaganda campaign, especially since none of the three have bothered to mention their cozy relationship with Obama’s right hand man. Viewers should know that these three commentators check in daily at the White House to see what the story of the day might — or should — be.

All I have to add is this nifty picture. I think it says it all.

I’m fond of the way those Soviet ambassadorial uniforms turned out, and the Serbian ambassadorial uniform on Begala is pretty slick too.

Gif version also available.

Turns out that the lefty’s google bomb that aimed the words miserable failure at President Bush’s bio is now pointing at the bio of arugula eating President Messiah, the arrogant one.

If you find this intriguing, you should definitely copy the html below to a new post on your site. It doesn’t really work in the comments because of the rel=”nofollow” stuff so make sure it’s an actual post.

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<a href=”http://rt.tc/obamayahoo”>Turns out</a> that the lefty’s google bomb that aimed the words <a href=”http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/president_obama/”> miserable failure </a> at President Bush’s bio is now pointing at the bio of <a href=”http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/president_obama/”>arugula</a> eating <a href=”http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/president_obama/”>President Messiah</a>, the <a href=”http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/president_obama/”>arrogant</a> one.

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Technorati Tags: Obama, Politics

Bill Ayers, Obama buddy and neighbor, likely Obama ghostwriter, co-founder of and bomb-maker for the terrorist Weatherman/Weathermen/Weather Underground and author of the charming (not!) revolutionary communist manifesto Prairie Fire, is writing again. He’s at Huffington Post with the rest of the high Q score reprobates, natcherly.

In his first blog at HuffPo, Ayers talks about Obama and education reform. Most of the education reform portion of the article identifies the same problems any conservative education reformer would see with the government monopoly schools. Schools are there to dumb kids down, to turn them into good worker bees who can work in the factories that the government monopoly schools were designed to complement. The factories have been driven out of America by ecowarriors, trial lawyers, and their allies, but the schools have not adjusted. Public Schools are not now and never have been there to teach kids how to think, how to become adults who understand the principles that underlie their wants, and have a plan for their own success and thriving in life. Schools are there to turn kids into factory worker sheeple who drink a sixpack every night while watching the ball games.

As far as that goes Ayers and I agree.

Here is where we do not agree.

Obama is not a monarch — Arne Duncan is not education czar — and we are not his subjects. If we want a foreign policy based on justice, for example, we ought to get busy organizing a robust anti-imperialist peace movement; if we want to end the death penalty we better get smart about changing the dominant narrative concerning crime and punishment. We are not allowed to sit quietly in a democracy awaiting salvation from above. We are all equal, and we all need to speak up and speak out right now.

Ayers talks a good game in most of the article as he identifies the weaknesses in education. But in this paragraph he gives away his game. He is not in favor of teaching kids how to think with ideologically neutral materials. Rather than teaching kids how to use logic and reason to dismantle bad arguments, or how to use empirical methods to test economic and sociological assertions, Ayers intends to use the teachers’ higher status compared to their students to brainwash the students into “changing the dominant narrative” concerning all sorts of things: Private property; human rights; class warfare; not just crime and punishment.

Keep that on your mind as we dig into into Ayers’ past to disinter his hidden goals. Zombie transcribes an interview with Larry Grathwohl, an undercover FBI agent who infiltrated the Weather Underground, in which he relates the gang’s plans for how to carry out their revolution.

I bought up the subject of what’s going to happen after we take over the government. We, we become responsible, then, for administrating, you know, 250 million people.

And there was no answers. No one had given any thought to economics; how are you going to clothe and feed these people.

The only thing that I could get, was that they expected that the Cubans and the North Vietnamese and Chinese and the Russians would all want to occupy different portions of the United States.

They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called the counter-revolution. And they felt that this counter-revolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing re-education centers in the southwest, where we would take all the people who needed to be re-educated into the new way of thinking and teach them… how things were going to be.

I asked, well, what’s going to happen to those people that we can’t re-educate; that are die-hard capitalists. And the reply was that they’d have to be eliminated. And when I pursued this further, they estimated that they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these re-education centers. And when I say eliminate, I mean kill. 25 million people.

I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees from Columbia and other well known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people.

And they were dead serious.”

And they still are. As Zombie demonstrates, Ayers still believes everything now that he believed then. He still anticipates a rebellion against the US government, perhaps after Obama drives the economy further into a ditch. Imagine 10% inflation combined with 15% unemployment, falling house prices, and stagnant wages. People will not have enough money to survive, there will be bankruptcies everywhere, and revolution is a serious and dangerous possibility. Ayers has always intended to be on the front line, a revolutionary vanguard poised to organize the revolution, turn it into a communist coup and a mass slaughter.

In Prairie Fire Ayers stated the first step toward revolutionary communist hegemony is to impose socialism. Socialism has always, everywhere produced misery and violence. This is exactly what revolutionary communists like Ayers like about socialism. It prepares the ground for a revolution they can subvert and take over, to end up as the revolutionary elite, a communist aristocracy ruling a victim nation with guns, hunger, and terror.

SUMMING UP

My problem with Ayers’ ideas for educational reform is that Ayers does not wish to improve education. He likes the idea of brainwashing students instead of educating them. His desired change is to turn the students into a different brand of sheeple: vicious partisans for the new Red army.

It would be a good idea to keep on eye on the elderly but still dangerous Ayers.

Here is his RSS feed.

Technorati Tags: Terrorism, Socialism, Communism, Revolution, Bill Ayers, Education, Culture War

President Obama made campaign promises that he’d severely restrict lobbying. Yesterday, on Wednesday, he signed an anti-lobbying ethics order to prevent executive branch appointees who leave from coming back to lobby any agency in the executive branch, and to prevent lobbyists to executive branch agencies from working for the administration for at least two years. Democracy 21 describes the rules for lobbyists joining the Obama administration as follows.

It prohibits any presidential appointee who served as a lobbyist during the two-year period prior to joining the Administration from working in any agency or department that they had lobbied, for a two-year period after they join the Administration.

It also provides that a person who served as a lobbyist during the two-year period prior to joining the Obama Administration cannot for the first two years after being appointed to the Obama Administration participate in any particular matter on which the person lobbied or in the specific issue area in which the particular matter falls.

Today, on Thursday, it came out that Barack Obama nominated William Corr for deputy secretary of Health and Human Services, who lobbied that agency last year on behalf of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. Also nominated was William J. Lynn III for the number two position at Defense, who lobbied the Pentagon for Raytheon last year. In two days Obama has gone from promising very restrictive anti-lobbying rules to breaking them. When asked how this worked, press secretary Robert Gibbs replied, “Even the toughest rules require reasonable exceptions.”

Also announced yesterday, Obama signed an order to shut down Guantanamo in one year. He has reversed the Mexico City policy, which allows the US Government to fund abortions overseas, and promises to sign the horrible Freedom of Choice act, which repeals all Federal and State restrictions on abortions, even parental notification rules for minor age children and bans on partial birth abortion, and punishes as criminal the choices of medical professionals not to participate in abortions.

Will there be reasonable exceptions for those who oppose the homicide of innocent children in the womb? Probably not. Reasonable exceptions only apply when they are what the new President wants.

In other words, what we are talking about here is the President refusing to live by his own rules. This is traditional behavior for the Pelosi/Reid Democrat Congress, but it’s rather brazen for this President to do it before the ink is dry on his brave new anti-lobbying rules. And it is most definitely not what is meant by the Rule of Law. Wikipedia has a reasonable definition that starts like this (my bolding).

The ‘rule of law’, in its most basic form, is the principle that no one is above the law. Thomas Paine stated in his pamphlet Common Sense (1776): “For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

But this is the Messiah, Lord Barack Obama the Most Merciful, and the quality of his mercy is not strained: Certainly not when it comes to himself. So what if he doesn’t follow his own rules. That is for peasants. Obama is something else, an aristocrat at least, perhaps a king or a messiah. He is above the law.

And that explains the loose way his credit card processing worked during the campaign. How much of his $600M came from foreigners and Americans who were exceeding the $2300 limit again? I guess we’ll never know. Obama, while promising to run the most transparent administration ever, has not released any of that information.

It also explains how he intends to follow the Army Field Manual when it comes to interrogating big cheeses from Al Qaeda: Reasonable exception. He won’t be challenged on it by the press or the left (but I repeat myself). He can get away with it, because he is special.

It’s good to be king!

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, Corruption, Democrats

There are more geese now than there used to be because the environment supports life better than it used to.   –me

What am I talking about? Time Magazine has been bloviating about how the US Airways plane ran into the flock of geese because of global warming. You see, the annual number of bird strikes by aircraft has gone from 1,759 in 1990 to 7,666 in 2007. They say the reasons are either

1. New, quiet commercial airplane engines can’t be heard by birds. It seems that environmentalists believe that two quiet engines are much worse than four 140 decibel screaming, howling jet engines for the environment. At least until they disturb the sleep patterns of peregrine falcons or suburban raccoons.
2. Habitat destruction and climate change has disrupted migratory patterns of birds. It’s funny how all the “climate change” made bird migrations move directly into the path of aircraft, and no bird migrations moved out of aircraft paths.

#3 would be that there are more birds flying around than there used to be because the environment supports a lot more of them.

Technorati Tags: Common Sense, Bird strikes, Flight 1549

January 19 – Guantanamo Bay Cuba
by Peter Crouch & David Nugent (JKN)

Top officials in the office of the President Elect have revealed that as soon as Barack Obama is sworn in as President of the US, Guantanamo Bay Detention Center will be closed and renovations will begin to transform the detention facility for notorious terrorist war criminals into a top echelon, exclusive resort and residential health spa. The famous bay itself will be redubbed Rock Candy Bay, and the new, twin facilities will be the Abu Fatty Resort and the adjoining Rock Candy Mountain Health Spa. Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna will be the director of the new facility. He promises to continue the tradition of the salads, halal meats, and middle eastern specialties. The new facility intends to capitalize on the name recognition of Gitmo and market intensively to wealthy jetstream liberals like Pamela Anderson and Anne Hathaway, and also to wealthy Saudis and Pakistanis who may be curious or nostalgic about the facility.

Prices start at $2001 per night, meals included. Liquor and attractive Cuban escorts are extra. Photographers are guaranteed to be kept away from the resort by the minefields that the Cuban government has placed around it, which will appeal to glitterati and the jet-set crowd. Private beaches, plentiful fishing, and the health spa facilities fill up guests’ recreation hours in the seaside tropical paradise. A brochure for the resort says, “The meals will include meats prepared according to Islamic guidelines, along with fresh bread, vegetables and yogurt. With nearly all guests fasting in the daytime during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, chefs have arranged for a post-sunset meal and a midnight meal. Traditional desserts and honey also are served during the Ramadan observances.”

Guevara adds with a wry smile as he puffs on a Cuban Montecristo cigar, “the experience including the food is going to be so good, if they don’t like it they ought to be shot.”

Guests at Gitmo getting shot. Now that’s the kind of change America voted for when it elected Barack Obama, along with turning Gitmo into a high class resort for guys from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan!

Technorati Tags: Satire, Humor, Obama, Elections

The St. Petersburg Times put together a list of 510 campaign promises Obama made and promises to keep track of how he does with the list. As the paper reports, this list has more promises in it than the first term campaign promises from Clinton in 1992 and Bush in 2000 combined together. Bill Clinton made 204. George W. Bush made 177.

• Reverse Global Warming
• Lower the Seas
• Keep Jerusalem United
• Split Jerusalem
• Talk to Terror Sponsors without Preconditions
• Establish reasonable preconditions before speaking with Terror Sponsors

Those are some of the promises the Obameter does not list. (more…)

Tradition does not come from nothing.

The first man and woman lived their life in a natural way. They first behaved in instinctive ways and modified their behavior based on the results of their actions until they assembled a coherent way of living. Their children imitated their way of living, as children often do, and tweaked some parts based on results. Bit by bit, generation after generation, on it went, building a tradition. From these family traditions grew traditions of clan, tribe, nation, and civilization. Traditions have the weight of the past in them. They are human ways of surviving that have been proved to work over hundreds and thousands of years.

Historians and anthropologists tell us that our kind of monogamous marriage is a relatively recent development. Earlier peoples tried many other forms of marriage: polygamous; polyandrous; monogamous and monoandrous; matrilocal; patrilocal; matrilineal; patrilineal; both patrilineal and matrilineal simultaneously; group and ladder arrangements; even matrilocal and matrilineal non-marriage in which women couple freely with any men who please them, raising their children in their own mother’s home (or village) with their brothers serving as adult male role models for the children and men left without domestic responsibilities. The Western tradition settled on monogamy for historical reasons, and stayed with it because it is kinder to women and children than other family forms, because its inherent stability allows wealth to accumulate, because it allows all the men in society to marry thus bringing peace to society, and because children have a better chance of living to adulthood in monogamous families.

I can hear some of my readers complain. “But this isn’t marriage. Marriage is true love. It is companionship. It is a committment to remain eternally infatuated with one person, until it ends.” My counterargument is that marriage as a family form is important. It has to do with the way that people reproduce and accomplish long-term goals that take more than alifetime. “Be fruitful and multiply,” is not only God’s command, it is the central fact of all life, including human life. Reproduction is our purpose as living beings, if you will. Certainly if we do not reproduce then we will be no more than a footnote in a hundred years.

Compare the concept of marriage as a family form, the structure in which humans reproduce, to the concept of marriage as sexual companionship. One continues our kind. The other gratifies libido and provides pleasure. One has long-term effects and encourages the accumulation of wealth and technological progress. The other is basically short-term. While exceptions happen, the structure of the two types of marriage will necessarily produce quite different effects.

From looking at marriage in the anthropological way to looking at marriage in the romanticized 20th century way as sold by Hollywood is a leap from marriage as a family form to marriage as an expression of true love between two adults, with children as an afterthought or even a distraction from its purpose. The two kinds of marriage are not the same. We could say marriage is family. Or we could say marriage is companionship and eternal infatuation. But when we say both we confuse the issue and render the word “marriage” meaningless.

Is a lustful gaze across the dance floor at the senior prom the foundation of a lifetime together? I’m convinced that marriage as an expression of true love between two people is an adolescent parody of real marriage, which holds family as its purpose. Our modern society has extended childhood into the teen years, pushing back the onset of adulthood from puberty, where it used to be reckoned, to the age of 21 when it’s legal to get drunk. With the invention of adolescence, society has transformed many formerly adult things into adolescent versions. Perhaps the most important of these is marriage.

I believe that changing the popular definition of marriage from its function to create a family, both nuclear and extended, was a big mistake. It has driven down the rate of reproduction in the West to the point where populations are dying off badly enough that our Ponzi scheme social security funds are poised to fail, and our sparse population is attracting hungry migrants from more crowded parts of the world.

It’s time to change the definition back. Marriage should mean children. Marriages without children are sad and incomplete and deserve our sympathy and kindness. They are not the model which families blessed with children should emulate.

Technorati Tags: Marriage, Conservatism

At the Market Ticker, Karl Denninger recommends extreme stinginess and prudence for all Americans, and if it can be managed a peaceful revolution against the debt-financed fiscal idiocy that we have been practicing since the onset of the 1929 Depression. Otherwise, violent revolution is always an option for the dark days Denninger sees for 2010.

Have a taste of his analysis of the economy as it is.

Debt has risen at a faster rate than GDP for the last seven years.  This has led to a falsely-stated increase in GDP, in that when debt rises faster than GDP (on a percentage of GDP basis) what you’re doing is financing expansion through debt that is not being paid down through production.  Due to the nature of interest, that being the compound nature of it, this constitutes a pseudo-Ponzi Scheme that must fail.  It now is failing, yet The Media continues to report falsehoods on exactly what is going on with households (and for that matter, businesses as well.)

Now try his analysis of what is to be.

• The economy will not recover in 2009.  Job loss will continue through the year and unemployment will reach 8% in the “headline” statistic by the end of the year.  U-6 (broad unemployment, or the closest to “real” unemployment without government “cooking”) will top 15%.  All the “talking heads” are predicting a turnaround in the second half of 2009.  They will be wrong.  Look at their records for 2008 – all of them were predicting closes at or above 1500 for the S&P 500.  Why does CNBC continue to put people on the air who, if you listened to them, cost you 40% or more of your money?
• Deflation, not inflation, will become evident well beyond housing.  Other capital goods beyond housing will see real price declines for the first time since the 1930s.  Debt is inherently deflationary; the “hyperinflationists” will once again be shown to be wrong (how many years running will it be now?)
• Housing prices will continue to decline.  I believe we’re about halfway done with the price correction.  Those who think we will turn this in 2009 are wrong – unless we get an all-on collapse in prices in early 2009, which I do not believe will occur.  I’ve heard several claims we will have positive year-over-year home price changes in 2009.  I’ll take the other side of that bet.

That’s just a small taster of the entire article. It’s not all doom and gloom. He has actual advice on what you and I and other ordinary people should do in this mess. In short, you should read it now!

Technorati Tags: Economy, 2009, Prediction