Gustav Takes Aim At The Gulf Coast

I've got a bad feeling about this.

I hope those along the Gulf coastline are in the process of packing up and heading out, especially those in New Orleans. There will be no shelters of last resort; the Superdome will be locked down.

It doesn't matter where you hide...

Fragments of the Mississippi Gulf Coast after Katrina

...storms this size don't leave much behind.

Is the Obama Campaign Behind Smear Sites?

This is an interesting find. Charles Johnson does the rundown, showing that Sarah Palin Supports Gay Rights and Obamadefense.com share the same IP address of 74.208.74.232.

Copy and paste that into your address bar, and guess where you end up being redirected? Obama campaign Web site, Fight the Smears.

Johnson also notes that other pro-Obama and anti-McCain web sites trace back to the same IP address. Are there IP sleuths out there who can conclusively run down the ownership of these sites?

If Barack Obama's campaign is associated with these sites (not yet proven by any stretch, I hasten to add), the campaign would seem to be in direct violation of campaign laws.

Are there any campaign law attorneys out there who could speak to this possibility with more authority?

"Opponent Research" Gone Wild

You try to find pictures of one of ours in scandalous beachwear, we'll find one of yours in a mankini.

That's the "Chicago Way."

Update: Connery's character Zed pre-plagiarized Obama in this 1974 film... or perhaps anticipated his campaign's reaction to Palin's wiping him from the news just hours after his coronation in Denver:

Stay behind my aura!

The Class of Kos

The sewer elves of the Daily Kos—the same "progressives" that wanted to "out" Chief Justice John Roberts' four-year-old son Jack—are back in the slime, trying to claim that new Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin's son Trig isn't hers.

They're trying to claim Palin's eldest daughter is actually the mother of Palin's youngest child.

They just can't seem to accept that people unlike themselves might actually chose to bring a Down's child into this world, instead of terminating it as an inconvenience... or as Obama might call it, a punishment.

Think Progress Covers Up Child Abuse in Palin Nomination Smear

Just the kind of integrity-free poison we've come to expect:

In Dayton, OH today, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) will announce that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will be his vice presidential running mate. Palin, who entered office in 2006 after running as a reformer, is touted by conservatives as being “a politician of eye-popping integrity.”

But Palin’s reformer image took a hit last month when she was accused of attempting to get a state trooper fired. That state trooper was her former brother-in-law who had gone through “a messy divorce” with her sister. After the trooper’s boss wouldn’t act on the governor’s request, she fired him. Though Palin says she doesn’t “have anything to hide” and she “didn’t do anything wrong there,” an investigation has found that one of her aides pushed the firing:

Gov. Sarah Palin on Wednesday revealed an audio recording that shows an aide pressuring the Public Safety Department to fire a state trooper embroiled in a custody battle with her sister.

Palin, who has previously said her administration didn’t exert pressure to get rid of trooper Mike Wooten, also disclosed that members of her staff had made about two dozen contacts with public safety officials about the trooper.

Of course, there is nothing that has suggested Palin had any direct involvement with pressure brought against her former brother-in-law, and it was her aides that were accused of wanting the state trooper fired.

And perhaps part of the reason the governor's aides wanted this trooper fired wasn't because he was part of a divorce, but because he shot a cow moose... out of season.

It could also have been because he was caught driving drunk... in a patrol car.

May be it even might have had something to do with the fact he tasered his 11-year-old-son.

Of course, Think Progress leaves that all out.

It doesn't help the smear they're trying to create.

First Sarah Palin Facts

• Unlike Dick Cheney, who shoots small birds with a 28-gauge shotgun, Sarah Palin hunts moose. When she shoots a lawyer, they'll stay down.
• Single-handedly responsible for the booming political "-ILF" industry.
• Husband Todd Palin's name is actually Yup'ik Eskimo for "Russell Crowe."
• Palin's son Track is so tough that when joined the Army it was decided that he will be deployed to Iraq... as an MRAP.
• A, combat pilot John McCain knew how to flew aircraft. A bush pilot, Sarah Palin knows how to land them.
• Unlike Barack Obama, whose basketball skills consist of losing pick-up games, Sarah Palin was a state championship point guard... and won it playing on a broken foot.

Add your own in the comments, and we'll "promote" the best.

Update: I surrender.

It's Palin!

Oops, sorry. This one.

I guess we'll know soon enough, won't we?

Update: Mark Levin makes the case for the Alaskan Governor:

Palin is by all accounts a principled conservative and government reformer who can contribute mightily to the decision-making that occurs in the White House. She has more executive experience in her two years as governor than Obama, Biden, and McCain combined. She is a mother of five in what appears to be a loving and functioning family. And she is someone Republicans, conservatives, and others can rally behind in the future.

From a purely tactical aspect, Palin would knock the legs out from under Obama's monopoly hold on "change." And attacks on her "inexperience" will only highlight one of Obama's greatest vulnerabilities — and he's at the top of the Democrat ticket. And because Hillary Clinton spent months telling women voters that they are being dissed by Obama, some percentage of women who normally would not vote for McCain will take a second look if Palin's on the ticket. There is no question that a Palin selection would cause the Obama camp headaches.

Bill Kristol , MSNBC, and the Chicago Tribune just called it for Palin according to their sources as well.

Is it true that Palin is McCain's Veep pick, or an elaborate head-fake?

We'll now within a few hours, but if it is Palin, I think Levin is right... providing she doesn't have any significant skeletons in her closet, she's going to be a huge problem for Obama on a number of fronts. Check out her Wikipedia biography. It has to terrify Obama's camp.

All the major networks are now quickly confirming. Over at Hot Air, they are dancing in the comments.

Time Well Spent

I pledged my time last night to watching a dedicated, talented African-American man build his dream. Of course, I'm talking about Ice Cube in "Are We Done Yet?"

Having read Tom Maguire's analysis of Obamamessiah's warmed-over populist platitudes, I strongly suspect watching the dollar-rental movie was a much better value.

David Neiwert's Interesting Idea of Double Standards

Firedoglake's resident shrieker David Neiwert has his underoos in a bunch because of what his addled mind considers a racist double standard regarding how various morons have been treated after threatening presidential candidates:

It seems there may be a reason federal law-enforcement officials are not interested in pursuing serious charges against the white-supremacist tweakers who were caught this week in Denver: The man making the decision is a Republican operative. And when it came to a threat against John McCain by a black man, he had a completely different approach.

The AP story describing the official pooh-poohing of the threat gives us a clue:

"We're absolutely confident there is no credible threat to the candidate, the Democratic National Convention, or the people of Colorado," U.S. Attorney Troy Eid said in a statement.

But when a black man in prison sent John McCain a threatening letter containing baby powder, it was another story altogether:

The man accused of sending a threatening letter to John McCain through McCain's Colorado headquarters office detailed the contents of his letter in an exclusive interview with 7NEWS Friday.

Marc Ramsey, an inmate in the Arapahoe County Jail, admitted that he sent the letter.On Friday afternoon, the US AttorneyTroy Eid announced Ramsey will be charged with knowingly threatening to harm or kill through the U.S. mail. The charge is punishable up to five years in federal prison and up to $250,000 fines.

"We won't stand for threats of this kind in Colorado," Eid said. "A death threat is not a legitimate form of political expression," Eid said.

Hmmmm. Let's see: Men with rifles, a caches of other guns and ammo, all talking about killing Obama ... they're not a "serious threat." But a man in jail sending baby powder, well, that's a "serious threat."

Lighten up, Francis.

Despite the injustices seen in the black-helicopter rantings of Neiwert, reality is something quite different.

Marc Ramsey, the black inmate, managed to successfully send the MCCain campaign the following letter, laced with a white powder.

Senator McCain,

IF you are reading this then you are already Dead!
Unless of course you can't or don't breathe.
There are numerous substances which are deadly for humans to inhale.
There are just as many time periods for signs of illness to show, by which time it's to late.
Who expects to develop cancer 40 years after Vietnam?
Only those that knew the risk and side effects of Agent Orange.
DoD, DOW, Diamond Shamrock, U.S. Surgeon General
You're out of time.
Allahu Akbar

Akeem Ramsel El

For the threat, Ramsey faces up to 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The three morons that Neiwert thinks is getting off lightly? They're only doing so in Neiwert's bizarre community-based reality:

Shawn Robert Adolf, age 33. Adolf is charged with one count of possession of a firearm by a prohibited person, one count of possession of body armor by a violent felon, and one count of possession of Methamphetamine.

Nathan Dwaine Johnson, age 32. Johnson is charged with one count of possession of a firearm by a prohibited person, and one count of possession of Methamphetamine.

Tharin Robert Gartrell, age 28. Gartrell is charged with one count of possession of Methamphetamine.

If convicted of being a felon in possession of a firearm, the defendants face not more than 10 years in federal prison, and up to a $250,000 fine. If convicted of possession of body armor by a violent felon, the defendant will face not more than 3 years in federal prison, and up to a $250,000 fine. If convicted of possession of Methamphetamine, the defendants face either 2 years in federal prison, or up to 20 years, depending on the amount of Methamphetamine possessed.

Adolf faces a sentence ranging up to 15 years and up to a $500,000 fine, or up to 35 years if he was arrested with enough meth.

Johnson faces a sentence ranging up to 12 years and up to a $250,000 fine, or up to 33 years if he was arrested with enough meth.

Gartrell, the high-on-meth driver that started this whole mess with a traffic stop, faces 2-20 years in prison.

And yet in Dave Neiwert's fantasy world, it is these guys are getting off lightly compared to the self-described terrorist sympathizer's potential sentence of up to five years.

That's some racist double standard.

Oops!... He Did It Again

Get ready for Barack Spears and the Temple of Duh:

As if a Rocky Mountain coronation were not lofty enough, Barack Obama will aim for Mount Olympus when he accepts his party's nomination atop an enormous, Greek-columned stage - built by the same cheesy set team that put together Britney Spears' last tour.

[snip]

"We've done Britney's sets and a whole bunch of rock shows, but this was far more elaborate and complicated and we had to do it in far less time," said Allen, of RDA Entertainment.

"The biggest challenge has been making sure we don't damage the playing field underneath."

Asked who is harder to satisfy - the Democrats or Britney - Allen replied: "I better not answer that."

Honestly? I just hope Obama remembers his underwear.

(h/t/ Hot Air)

Democrats Against Obama... Starring Barack Obama

As the overwhelming majority of Americans who aren't political junkies begin to get to know Barack Obama, it becomes increasingly obvious why first-term Senators with exceedingly thin resumes rarely ever run for President.

Do Not Blaspheme, Non-Believers

Instead of making a good-faith effort to explain his 21-year working and personal relationship with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, Barack Obama has chosen another route in an attempt quell the building controversy; he's having his campaign incite his followers to shout down his critics.

Obama's campaign has previously threatened broadcasters who would carry an ad linking Obama to Ayers, and has also asked the Department of Justice to shut down the group that made the ad.

The intense campaign to silence dissenting voice has also included a recent campaign email asking Obama supporters to deluge Chicago-based broadcaster WGN with complaints to pressure the radio station to cancel an appearance by Stanley Kurtz, a writer with National Review who is researching the documents of the Chicago Annenburg Challenge.

The Challenge, co-founded by Ayers and chaired by Obama, took tens of millions dollars in grant funds and public and private matching funds with the stated goal of increasing the quality of education in Chicago. The program was utterly ineffective, and some critics are suggesting that the challenge was little more than a slush fund for left-wing radicals. At least $175,000 was funneled to Ayers' friend, SDS radical, Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) (CPML) chairman and Barack Obama supporter Mike Klonsky's Small School Workshop.

I wrote earlier this week:

Barack Obama wants to convince us that it shouldn't matter that Bill Ayers, Ayer's dead terrorist bomber girlfriend, his terrorist wife and their cronies declared war on the United States and murdered its citizens. The murders, the treason, the bombings of American targets in a war they declared... all distractions.

I was dead wrong. The Barack Obama campaign doesn't want to convince us of anything. It simple wants to threaten and bully critics into silence.

Freedom of speech is nice, if you can keep it. As a blogger, I wonder how much we'll have left if ever faced with a Justice Department run by the Silencer in Chief.

Aww... I Upset Sully

"Even by the still-falling standards of the degenerate conservative movement, this was a disgusting post."

Degenerate, disgusting, whatever.

What he doesn't and can't call me is wrong.

Ayers: Bombing America Not A Big Deal

Someone should ask Barack Obama point blank: at what point during his 21-year relationship with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers (and to a lesser-documented but no less real extent, Ayer's terrorist wife and Charles Manson fan, Bernadine Dohrn) did Ayers and Obama discuss Ayer's involvement with the Weather Underground, and what was said?

In over two decades of knowing each other and running in Chicago's political cauldron of aging New Left radicals, SDS leftovers, graying Weatherman, Marxist-Leninists, angry activist priests and fringe religions, the "glory days" of the 1960s and 70s must have come up in conversation.

Did the bombings ever come up in conversations at one another's homes? Did they ever have side conversations before or after the official business of their many working relationships in the ABCs Coalition, the Woods Fund, and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge?

Mr. Obama owes us an explanation.

For his part, a three-year-old interview in a current Ayer's story fills in part of the puzzle:

In the interview, conducted three years after the September 11 attacks, Ayers argued the U.S. government had carried out "many other acts of terror ... even recently, that are comparable," and claimed he and his bomb-planting comrades were "restrained" in their actions.

Ayers, now a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, served with Barack Obama on the board of the charitable Woods Fund of Chicago for three years and helped launch Obama's political career in Illinois by hosting in his Hyde Park home an informal campaign event for the future state senator in 1995.

Ayers claimed the Weathermen were driven by "hope and love," not despair, and said he did not think the group's violent acts, targeting federal officials and local law enforcement officers, were "a big deal."

What a very interesting psychological profile Mr. Ayers must have.

Was it "hope" or "love" that led his fellow Weathermen to purchase two cases of dynamite, lengths of pipe, and roofing nails to build anti-personnel bombs?

Ayers was the boyfriend of fellow Weatherman bomb-builder Diana Oughten. Oughten was thought to be constructing massive pipe-bombs that used roofing nails for shrapnel in a Greenwich Village townhome, when they accidentally went off.

The target of those bombs wasn't to be a statute in an empty park at night.

It wasn't a federal building targeted at a time when most employees would have gone home.

The anti-personnel bombs she and other Weathermen were constructing were designed expressly to take the greatest human toll possible, and they were to be placed at a non-commissioned officer's dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey, targeting young soldiers, their wives, their girlfriends.

The multiple bombs were built to cause as much loss of life as possible, similar what Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold tried to do with their failed propane bombs at Columbine.

But the Weathermen never made it to their target of choice. The bombs they meant for innocents detonated as they were being assembled in a townhouse basement, killing terrorists Oughten, Ted Gold, and Terry Robbins.

Perhaps they would be happy to know that the bombs worked as designed, if prematurely. From the pieces of Oughten they were able to collect after the blast and other evidence, they think Oughten was standing over one of the bombs, perhaps with her hands on it, when it went off.

If the Weathermen had been successful in detonating multiple nail-filled bombs a dance filled with off-duty soldiers and their dates, would Bill Ayers still claim that the bombings of his group were " no big deal"?

Bloody taffeta and lace and the images of shocked, mutilated survivors would have changed that equation.

Just because the Weathermen were spectacularly unsuccessful in their attempts to prepare for mass murder doesn't make them any less vile.

Nor does it excuse Barack Obama from consorting with them for over 20 years.

Update: Andy McCarthy runs very much a parallel route, Bill Ayers: Unrepentant LYING Terrorist.

Due to spammers, comments are closed.

FactCheck.Org: Obama Lied About his Born Alive Votes

Barack Obama coverup attempt fails:

At issue is Obama's opposition to Illinois legislation in 2001, 2002 and 2003 that would have defined any aborted fetus that showed signs of life as a "born alive infant" entitled to legal protection, even if doctors believe it could not survive.

Obama opposed the 2001 and 2002 "born alive" bills as backdoor attacks on a woman's legal right to abortion, but he says he would have been "fully in support" of a similar federal bill that President Bush had signed in 2002, because it contained protections for Roe v. Wade.

We find that, as the NRLC said in a recent statement, Obama voted in committee against the 2003 state bill that was nearly identical to the federal act he says he would have supported. Both contained identical clauses saying that nothing in the bills could be construed to affect legal rights of an unborn fetus, according to an undisputed summary written immediately after the committee's 2003 mark-up session.

The choice of a temple theme for Obama's stage now seems even more appropriate, as his nomination is indeed turning out to be a Greek tragedy.

Jeep Jihadi Gets Up to 33 Years

Progressive university town that Chapel Hill is, they'll probably have some there protest the decision which resulted from Taheri-Azar's attempt to kill UNC-Chapel Hill students in The Pit with a rented SUV.

The Left's Obama Assassination Fantasy

There are a lot of people who have hopes of Barack Obama being the target of an assassination attempt during the Democratic National Convention this week in Denver, and not all of them are his enemies. The arrest of a four drug users with stolen weapons and a single outlandish assassination claim has made that all too clear.

Local news reporters see the possibility of a career-enhancing national story. National news reporters in mass market liberal enclaves see an opportunity to once again push a meme they've been hammering at for over a year, of a racist American heartland. This meme, of Americans as violent backwards yokels, is a meme that smug Europeans dearly love as it helps them maintain the delusion of continental sophistication in the face of their own cultural decline.

Of course, none of this would be possible without the unhinged few in a nation of 300 million that would like to see Obama dead, including thus far a halfwit bail-bondsman wannabe, a Charlotte, NC man suffering the lingering effects of a brain injury, and now a quartet of meth-addled idiots with rumored ties to white supremacists and outlaw bikers.

As you may well imagine, bloggers pounced on the story as the local news did, taking shreds of information and trying to determine just how serious of a threat Barack Obama faced.

As it turns out, not much at all:

A half dozen federal security officials have told The Mouth that the supposed plot to assassinate Barack Obama during his Thursday acceptance speech in Denver by four armed dope suspects was considered a bunch of hooey.

Tharin Robert Gartrell, 28, and several other drug suspects linked to white supremacist groups were busted Sunday after Aurora, Colo., cops saw him driving a rented pickup erratically.

"What's in plain view? Guns and a bulletproof vest," a federal agent assigned to the Democrats' Denver nominating convention told The Mouth. "One rifle had a scope sighted in at 750 yards. But he said they werent his guns."

Cops went looking for Gartrell's pals at two hotels. At the second hotel, their knock on a door prompted a suspect to leap out his sixth-story window and break his ankle in the fall, sources said. During interrogation, one of the suspects dimed out a buddy for allegedly threatening to kill Obama, officials said.

"They all had meth with them. There is no evidence of a plot other than one guy's word, and meth heads aren't that reliable (with the truth)," the federal agent said.

Meth heads aren't exactly known for being a member of any reality-based community, and so the story might have flown completely under the radar as so much drug-addled hot air were it not for the fact that weapons, ammunition and a spotting scope were recovered during the initial arrest.

But what of the weapons, and the plot alleged by a single suspect? Police have not released much in the way of detail about the weapons or any plot, but as no key details have been released to the contrary, it seems likely the scope rifles were likely factory deer rifles and conventional commercial scopes, details which authorities are expected to release in a press conference later today.

The claim of the rifle being sighted at 750 yards is simple hearsay repeating of the suspect's claim; one cannot determine wher a weapon is zeroed with any certainly by simply looking at the weapon's scope. If the police haven't fired it, they simply don't know if it is sighted at 750 yards, or if it has even been sighted at all. One must also take into account that the weapons were plain view with no protective case in the suspect's pickup truck when confiscated, and the jarring of a moderately-sized pothole could easily render a scope's zero worthless at all but close range.

There is little chance that those arrested posed any serious threat, or even had a plan at all.

An average shooter with a scoped rifle can hit a man-sized target at 100 yards with regularity. An average shooter who has been practicing can make the same shot at 200 yards with no discernible change in point-of-aim. A good shooter who knows his gun, ammunition, and wind conditions can make the shot at 300 yards most of the time, but much beyond that, wind drift, ballistics, shooter experience, imperfections in trigger control and limitations of the weapon and ammunition make such shots improbable even on a stationary target with plenty of time to prepare and fire.

Simply put, there is very little chance that anyone outside of a highly trained team of a well-trained precision long-distance shooter and a equally competent spotter could make such a shot as one at 750 yards, nor even any verified opportunity that Obama would present himself as a target in any venue at that sort of range.

Many leading liberal bloggers, of course, aren't waiting around to determine if there was an actual threat to Obama. A possibility of a threat, however non-viable, is all the excuse they need to blame the racist and ideological hate that liberals just know is at the core of every Republican's soul, and even claim that McCain needs to denounce such morons, as if he had any role, knowledge, or ties to a group of no-account meth users.

I could of course point out that these same liberal bloggers and their ideological kin have been silent in recent years as Andrew Mickel, a radical left-wing progressive Indymedia contributor, earned a spot on death row for assassinating a police officer because of his exposure to radical left wing ideologies. I could just as easily point out they've turned a blind eye time and again to video games, tee shirts, "art," and left wing hate speech which has advocated violence again conservative political figures, authority figures, and the the military. Hell... even Barack Obama himself includes among his friends of many years left-wing terrorists and murderers.

But perhaps the most sinister undertone is the hint of hopefulness among a certain element of the left wing that perhaps someone will succeed in assassinating Barack Obama.

Such a tragedy would serve as a confirmation of their firmly held beliefs that conservatives are evil, and could possibly trigger a backlash that would fill the anarchists among them with glee. At the same time, an Obama death would provide progressives with a martyred hero in place of what troubles many of them the most; deep-seated and well-placed fears that Barack Obama is precisely what his record suggests, a shallow, vain, and arrogant opportunist who has created impossible expectations with little possibility that he capable of coming close to meeting those impossibly inflated expectations.

In places liberals don't want to talk about, they'd rather have a martyr than a failure. That is the reason they pounce upon even the remotest possibility of Obama's untimely end with such fervor.

The audacity of hope, indeed.

Update: Druggies never posed a threat.

Three men who authorities initially feared were plotting to assassinate Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention are facing only gun charges — signaling they never posed a real threat.

A federal law enforcement official in Denver said the three men and a woman also arrested on Sunday are not expected to be charged with making threatening statements, conspiracy or other national security-related crimes.

[snip]

The likelihood of an assassination attempt on Democratic presidential candidate Obama was downplayed by law enforcement officials in Colorado and Washington.

"We're absolutely confident there is no credible threat to the candidate, the Democratic National Convention, or the people of Colorado," U.S. Attorney Troy Eid said in a statement.

Another AP account offers telling information, including statements that could reasonably be interpreted as clues that the weapons may have been small caliber, perhaps rimfire rifles.

"The capability and their opportunity and what they had for their weaponry — I don't see that they would have been able to carry it out," the official said on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

Nearly any centerfire rifle would have to be assumed as at least a somewhat credible threat as an assassination weapon out to several hundred yards at a minimum, but the official seems to indicate that the weapons recovered were not viewed as a significant threat with his remarks about the capability of those arrested and their weaponry. While rimfire rifles can indeed be lethal at close range, they fire tiny bullets at relatively low velocities, severely limiting their effective range.

This seems to be further hinted at in concluding paragraphs:

Law enforcement officials were also investigating whether the men were linked to vandalism shootings that targeted at least two federal buildings in Denver over the past two weeks. Windows were shot at the U.S. Custom House and the U.S. Military Entrance Processing Station on the same street in Denver's downtown Federal District.

Additionally, a bullet was recovered from a Hertz rental car that was hit on Aug. 15, and authorities are now looking to see if it could have matched the guns seized from the men.

If shots fired into federal buildings are only considered vandalism, it once again seems to indicate rimfire weapons. Additionally, most centerfire bullets, rifle or pistol, will either complete penetrate through the sheet metal and glass of cars, or shatter upon impact, in most cases not leaving behind much to recover. A rimfire bullet fired into a vehicle, however, could very well not have enough escape the vehicle or fragment, meaning that authorities could recover a bullet and potentially link it to other attack via the rifling marks left on a bullet.

Comments closed due to spammers.

Obama: Leave My Terrorist Friends Alone!

This attempt by Barack Obama to minimize the murderous acts of his long-time terrorist friends is pathetic.

Allahpundit notes:

His argument is so weak that it doesn't really qualify as an argument: Yes, we're friendly, but it's ancient history and I denounced what he did, so what’s the big deal about socializing with, um, an unrepentant terrorist? As for the submoronic point about Ayers's crimes having been committed when Obama was eight — a staple of the left's feeble defense of him on this subject — imagine what the reaction would be if Bobby Jindal, say, had struck up a chummy pen pal correspondence with Charles Manson while in his late 20s.

Charles Manson, you say? Yes we can.

On the morning of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, along with a million other readers of the New York Times (including many who would never be able to read the paper again), I opened its pages to be confronted by a color photo showing a middle-aged couple holding hands and affecting a defiant look at the camera. In retrospect, the article's headline could not have been more flesh-crawling: "No Regrets for a Love of Explosives." The couple pictured were Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, former leaders of the 1960s' Weather Underground, America's first terrorist cult. One of their bombing targets, as it happened, was the Pentagon.

"I don't regret setting bombs," Ayers was quoted in the opening line of the Times' profile. "I feel we didn't do enough." In 1969, Ayers and his wife convened a "War Council" in Flint, Mich., whose purpose was to launch a military front inside the United States with the purpose of helping Third World revolutionaries conquer and destroy it. Taking charge of the podium, dressed in high-heeled boots and a leather miniskirt -- her signature uniform -- Dorhn incited the assembled radicals to join the war against "Amerikkka" and create chaos and destruction in the "belly of the beast." Her voice rising to a fevered pitch, Dohrn raised three fingers in a "fork salute" to mass murderer Charles Manson, whom she proposed as a symbol to her troops. Referring to the helpless victims of the Manson Family as the "Tate Eight " (the pregnant actress Sharon Tate had been stabbed in her womb with a fork), Dohrn shouted: "Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild! "

Oh, yes, kids.

The lovely Ms. Dohrn, Mrs. Bill Ayers, is not just the hostess of Barack Obama's first fundraiser, but an enthusiastic fan of the way Charles Mason's cult murdered a woman who was almost nine months pregnant. Dorhn is suspected of multiple terrorist acts, including building and planting the bomb that detonated at San Francisco's Park Police Station, killing one police officer and blinding another.

Bill Ayers admits directly being involved in attacks on New York City Police Headquarters, the Capitol building, and the Pentagon.

Fellow Weathermen had 100 sticks of dynamite and boxes of roofing nails they were making into pipe bombs to massacre revelers at an non-commissioned officers dance at Fort Dix. Ayer's girlfriend at the time, Diana Oughton, was building one of the nail-filled bombs when it went off in her hands. Instead of unsuspecting soldiers and their innocent dates, these terrorists killed only themselves, that time.

Dohrn worked at the law firm of Sidley Austin thanks to Ayers family connections with the firm. Other famous lawyers at Sidley Austin you might know include summer associate Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson, later Michelle Obama.

Funny, how the incestuous circle ties itself in knots.

Barack Obama has been involved with the Ayers clan since 1987, when Obama led the Developing Communities Project, a component of the ABCs Coalition coordinated by Bill Ayers and led by Ayer's father. The Woods Fund, the Chicago Anneberg Challenge... Barack and Michelle Obama has a paper trail with the Ayers clan and Bernadine Dohrn that goes back more than two decades, and appears to be not just professional, but personal. Obama felt comfortable having his first fundraiser at the home of well-known terrorists, and I wonder; did the Obama's ever return the favor, having Dorhn and Ayers as guests in their mansion? Does Barack Obama's "judgment to lead" include exposing his elementary-aged daughters to cold-blooded killers in their own home?

Barack Obama wants to convince us that it shouldn't matter that Bill Ayers, Ayer's dead terrorist bomber girlfriend, his terrorist wife and their cronies declared war on the United States and murdered its citizens. The murders, the treason, the bombings of American targets in a war they declared... all distractions. And I was eight.

The simple fact of the matter is that though he has been given numerous chances, Barack Obama will not refute his terrorist friends. Instead, he just attempts to minimize their crimes.

Americans have every right to question why.

Thank You, Barack

I hope that I am one of the first of American gun owners to thank Barack Obama for choosing Joe Biden as his running mate. You see, I had almost forgotten just how much Joe Biden has done for gun owners and gun ownership in America, until Roger Simon reminded me.

As author of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994—also known as the Biden Crime Law according to Wikipedia—Biden's carefully-manicured hands shaped the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, a law pushed through by Democrats that specifically outlawed 19 firearms by name, and tried to outlaw many others by outlawing firearms that had two or more mostly-cosmetic features.

Because of the attempt to outlaw semi-automatic weapons by Biden and his fellow Democrats, interest in owning variations of semi-automatic rifles—and specifically those firearms Democrats ineptly tried to outlaw—began surging in 1994 and has ever slowed down, even though the law itself expired four years ago.

AR-15 and AK-pattern rifles in particular became very popular sellers during the "ban," and Biden deserves considerable credit for sparking interest in a portion of the market that until then was considered the realm of survivalists and military collectors. Now one can hardly visit a rifle shooting range without hearing the characteristic crack of a 5.56mm AR-15, or the boom of an AK-47's .30 caliber bullet, and both weapons often dominate the showcases of gun dealers. Far from banning assault weapons, the 1994 law Biden created helped marshal semi-automatics into the mainstream as some of America's best-selling firearms, while creating jobs for skilled workers at gun and ammunition companies rushing to satisfy customer demand for one of the few market segments that has kept growing.

In addition to what he's done for interest in assault rifles, we also owe Senator Biden and his fellow Democrats a special thanks for helping create an entirely new class of small, powerful, and easily concealable handguns.

One of the provisions of the 1994 law Biden drafted was a stipulation that pistol magazines would be limited to just ten rounds. At the time Biden drafted his law, American shooters were enthralled with large, heavy, service-class semi-automatic pistols with magazine capacities that seemed ever-increasing. In the age of the "wonder-nine," pistols carrying 15-18 rounds per magazine became fashionable, but Biden's law helped push the market in a radically different direction.

With handguns now limited to a specified magazine capacity by an arbitrary law, interest then grew in designing semi-auto pistols that were smaller, lighter, more powerful, and in most respects, more effective than those that came before them. An entire niche of compact and subcompact "carry guns" is directly attributable to Biden and his fellow Democrats, and these days nearly every company that make handguns serves this burgeoning market, with new models for this market sector being created every season. Entire gun companies—the very successful Kahr Arms is one shining example—arose almost purely as the result of consumer interest generated by Joe Biden's "gun ban."'

Entire shooting organizations—the IDPA, for instance—have grow as the result of Joe Biden's work, and interest in existing shooting sports in general has also greatly increased. It is fair to say, without exaggeration, that this Senator with an "F" rating from the NRA has done more for shooting sports and gun ownership than any Senator in the past 25 years, even if it was all accidental.

So thank you, Barack Obama, for selecting Joe Biden as your Veep. While it may not be what you intended when you selected him as your running mate, Joe Biden is responsible for far more hope and change within the American shooting community than you could ever know.

The Monochromatic Coalition

Unity, Obama style:

When talking with the Sun-Times, the Hillary Clinton steering committee member had a word to say about sell-outs:

Taking a final shot at Jones, Cobb said, "Calling me an 'Uncle Tom’'is beyond the pale, especially considering where he is [close] with Mayor Daley and with [Gov.] Blagojevich, I am hardly the Uncle Tom here."

Identity politics — it's what's for dinner in Denver. Can anyone doubt that this same kind of political tactic took place all over Chicago and the US? The fact that it’s still happening now says that Denver may turn out to be a meltdown — if not in front of the cameras, then off-stage.

If Team Obama wanted a show of unity from the Pepsi Center, this indicates that they haven't achieved that goal, probably because they've never set the example. For a campaign that promised post-racial politicking, its candidate and surrogates haven't been above race-baiting at the drop of a hat. This goes hand in hand with Obama's repeated baseless smears of John McCain as a racist. Emil Jones just followed Obama's lead, as Obama has followed his.

Post racial = everybody is a racist, so the word no longer has any meaning?

Oh, the Gaffes We'll Have...

And While Democrats Still Wait For A Special Sign from the Obamamessiah...

The rest of the world already knows Barack Obama's running mate is Joe Biden.

It's rather sad, really. Back on August 10, David Plouffe, Barak Obama's Campaign Manager, promised in an email to supporters that they could, "Be the first to know who Barack selects as his running mate."

Obama for America

Dear xxxxxxx --

Be the First to Know Barack Obama is about to make one of the most important decisions of this campaign -- choosing a running mate.

You have helped build this movement from the bottom up, and Barack wants you to be the first to know his choice.

Sign up today to be the first to know:

http://my.barackobama.com/vp

You will receive an email the moment Barack makes his decision, or you can text VP to 62262 to receive a text message on your mobile phone.

Once you've signed up, please forward this email to your friends, family, and coworkers to let them know about this special opportunity.

No other campaign has done this before. You can be part of this important moment.

Be the first to know who Barack selects as his running mate.

Thanks,

David

David Plouffe
Campaign Manager
Obama for America

But the email and text message quite obviously didn't come to them first as the campaign promised.

If Barackophiles went to FoxNews.com, or CNN, or the NY Times instead of signing up for a silly little text message to be delivered sometime tomorrow morning, they would already know Biden is Obama's pick.

It's got to be disappointing when you discover that the candidate you helped elect into office lied to you. It must be worse to find out he's lying to you, when he hasn't even nailed down the nomination yet.

Disappointment? Buyer's Remorse? Disillusionment?

Check.

They're Baaack...

And you thought it was over...

Crazy So Deep It Needs A Lifeguard

So, you thought that the validation of Barack Obama's printed, notarized birth certificate by FactCheck.org would be enough to shut down the Obama Truth Movement^TM (OTM)?

Guess again, suckers. A PUMA is suing to stop Obama's nomination:

In the lawsuit, Berg states that Sen. Obama was born in Kenya, and not in Hawaii as the senator maintains. Before giving birth, according to the lawsuit, Obama's mother traveled to Kenya with his father but was prevented from flying back to Hawaii because of the late stage of her pregnancy, "apparently a normal restriction to avoid births during a flight." As Sen. Obama's own paternal grandmother, half-brother and half-sister have also claimed, Berg maintains that Stanley Ann Dunham--Obama's mother--gave birth to little Barack in Kenya and subsequently flew to Hawaii to register the birth.

Berg cites inconsistent accounts of Sen. Obama's birth, including reports that he was born at two separate hospitals--Kapiolani Hospital and Queens Hospital--in Honolulu, as well a profound lack of birthing records for Stanley Ann Dunham, though simple "registry of birth" records for Barack Obama are available in a Hawaiian public records office.

And just so we're clear here: this latest attempt to disqualify Barack Obama is fratricide—sniping done by Hillary Clinton supporters loyal to the Democratic Party, and not by Republicans.

Just like the rumors of a Michelle Obama "whitey" tape.

Just like attempts to claim Obama never registered for the Selective Service.

Just like an attempt to claim Obama is a Muslim, and an Indonesian ineligible for executive office, because of what his step-father wrote on a school registration form when he was a child.

New Ad: Ayers Succeeded Where Bin Laden Failed. What Kind of Friends Do You Have There, Barack?

Simple, direct, and to the point.

Ben Smith at the Politico really disgraces himself by trying to start the meme that the ad tries to smear Obama as a Muslim and Muslims as de facto terrorists.

Uh, Ben? Bill Ayers—Barack's buddy of more than two decades—is not a Muslim.

Nice try there, Bucket, but you can't carry the water on this one.

Death of a Breastman?

University of Iowa political science professor Arthur Miller, accused of trying to trade amateur mammography for grades, has gone armed and missing:

Officers are walking Hickory Hill Park, a 185-acre wooded park in northeast Iowa City, through the rain to see if they can find Arthur Miller, a 66-year-old political science professor who was last heard from Tuesday morning.

Police believe Miller has a high-powered rifle and intends to harm himself. There is no evidence he wants to harm others, police said, but the park is still closed and nearby residents have been warned not to linger in their yards.

Miller's cell phone, wallet and ammunition were found in his car, located outside the park Wednesday morning.

It sounds like the authorities expect a suicide, which, considering the public embarrassment and potential of a lengthy prison sentence, isn't all that surprising.

Charming! Obama's Only Executive Role A Disaster

Anyone the least bit familiar with Barack Obama's rise to power knows "hope" and "change" are just words; he's built his career the old-fashioned way, by making powerful allies and casting those no longer useful to him aside.

It is those same business-as-usual allies in Chicago that are now protecting Obama from deeper scrutiny of his 21-year relationship with the Ayers family, specifically his involvement in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge with infamous domestic terrorist Bill Ayers.

At the moment the internal documents for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge are in a special collection at the Richard J. Daley Library. Think they'll ever see the light of day?

As the Chicago Tribune's John Kass put it:

The relationship between the ambitious Obama and the unrepentant Ayers is a subject that excites Republicans, who haven't really thwacked that pinata as hard as they might. It really irritates Obama and his political champion, Chicago's sovereign lord, Mayor Richard M. Daley.

"This is a public entity," Kurtz told us Wednesday. "I don't understand how confidentiality of the donor would be an issue."

You don't understand, Mr. Kurtz? Allow me to explain. The secret is hidden in the name of the library:

The Richard J. Daley Library.

Eureka!

The Richard J. Daley Library doesn't want nobody nobody sent. And Richard J.'s son, Shortshanks, is now the mayor.

Kurtz can forget about getting his hands on those documents in any useful form, and the only way they'll come to light before November is if the mainstream media starts to get irate that Obama is abusing their love for him one again. Even if that were to happen, odds are that any documents released would be "sanitized" to remove embarrassing or incriminating information. The Chicago political machine, if anything, is a wood chipper.

Not all the Chicago Annenberg Challenge documents were buried, however. At least until a few managed to slip out before the door was slammed. Those documents that have been uncovered seem to indicate Barack Obama was a spectacularly incompetent chairman, blowing through tens of millions of dollars of grant money with little or nothing to show for it.

Well, that's not entirely true.

At least $175,000 was funneled to Ayers friend, SDS radical, Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) (CPML) chairman and Barack Obama supporter Mike Klonsky's Small School Workshop. For a man who gripes about corporate handouts, it seems quite possible that Obama and Ayers may have used Annenberg Foundation grants as a form of welfare for radicals.

Obama's Twisted Argument for Infanticide

I heard an audio clip purporting to be Barack Obama's argument again the Born Alive Infant Protection Act (BAIPA) last night, but wasn't 100% sure that the audio is Obama.

Ed Morrissey notes that Guy Benson was able to dig up the Illinois legislature transcripts featuring Obama's arguments against BAIPA, and then Ed proceeds to take Obama's convoluted arguments for infanticide apart.

This passage is really remarkable for the willfully obtuse nature of Obama's arguments. By the time this debate took place, Jill Stanek had already revealed that doctors weren't providing medical care to infants born alive during abortions, at Christ Hospital, and a subsequent investigation proved that other abortion providers also abandoned such infants to die. That was the entire reason for the debate. Obama acts as if this is some curious academic hypothesis.

Instead of addressing the actual issue of infanticide, Obama twists it into a protection for abortion. He frames his own hypothetical as an abortion "for the health of the mother", but the circumstances of the mother's health has no bearing at all on whether a live infant should receive medical care. How would treating a live infant threaten the health of the mother?

Obviously, there is no physical connection between the care of the live baby and that of the mother once the baby has been born. This seems to leave us with just two options.

(1). Either Barack Obama is such a rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth left wing ideologue that he blinded himself to the fact that the Born Alive Infant Protection Act was not about the abortion rights of the mother, but the right to life-saving medical care for the living human baby, or;

(2). He was well aware of what the bill was about, and coldly chose for infanticide, not once, not twice, but on three separate votes for reasons he either cannot explain or will not explain to avoid being viewed as a monster.

As a man who coldly stated that he would see his own grandchild aborted because he wouldn't want his daughters "punished with a baby" as the result of an unplanned pregnancy, anything is possible.

"We Were Soldiers" CMoH Hero Pilot Passes

Ed Freeman, a helicopter pilot that flew fourteen missions into a hot landing zone to re-supply the 7th Cavalry and evacuate wounded soldiers in the Ia Drang Valley, has died at 80.

Check out Argghhh! for more.

Down The Memory Hole at ABC News

We know from prior experience that probing or corrective comments aren't appreciated by ABC's investigative blog The Blotter. Those comments that are "problematic,"—asking the journalists to correct shoddy research is one recurring example—disappear rather quickly.

That same fine tradition of "disappearing" comments is also now a proven tactic of the fine ABC News folks who monitor Jake Tapper's comments (I'll give Tapper himself the benefit of the doubt for now).

In the post where Tapper notes that Obama and McCain are playing hardball I left the following at 10:43:48,and immediately did a screen capture (Full text below image).

Barack Obama has been deeply involved with the entire Ayers clan--proud terrorist Bill, brother John, lefist lawyer dad Thomas--since 1987.

That's 21 years.

That's as long or longer than he's been with the Black Panther-inspired teachings of Black Liberation Theology screamed weekly from the pulpit of AIDS conspiracy-monger Jeremiah Wright.

That's as long or longer than he's called lynching advocate Michael Fleger his mentor and friend.

So please tell us, Barack Obama, why you have such deep ties with an unashamed terrorist that belonged to a group that that bombed federal buildings, committed armed robberies and murders, and even planned to slaughter innocents at a non-commissioned officers dance at Fort Dix, had Ayer's girlfriend not screwed up making the pipe bombs to be used in the attack, blowing herself to bits instead.

Please tell us, Barack Obama, how you could sit on the board of the Woods Fund, the Chicago Public Education Fund, the ABCs Coalition, etc with Ayers, and be comfortable in the company of a terrorist.

Tell us why you chose to start your political career at the home of one of your oldest allies, a man who once proudly declared war on the United States, and took up arms against it.

We're all ears.

Here are the two posts that came before and after my 10:43:48 comment that was deleted by an ABC News employee, as if it never appeared at all.

It's one thing to delete comments that are profane, trolling, personal attacks, or off-topic. Deleting a comment that lays out a compelling case for a more extensive investigation of the multi-decade relationship between a Presidential candidate and a terrorist?

That's partisan censorship of the most biased kind.

For Less than a Dollar a Day, You, Too, Can Sponsor an Obama...

Sad, sad news... one of Barack Obama's "lost" half-brothers has be discovered living in a hut in a shantytown on the fringes of Nairobi.

We can't expect presidential candidate Barack Obama to support all the children his father sired around the world, but luckily, with the Obama Family Fund, there is something you can do:

For less than a dollar a day, you, too, can help sponsor an Obama.

You can help save Obama School. Senator Obama Kogelo Secondary School is a Kenyan School named after the Illinois Senator, and one the Senator promised to support...though apparently only in spirit.

Save Senator Obama Kogelo Secondary School is a non-profit created by USAF veteran, Kenyan-American milblogger Juliette "Baldilocks" Ochieng.

Help her keep his promise. Its the only thing associated with the name "Obama" really worth giving money too.

The Chicago Way

Britain's Channel 4 did a longish (9:21) but well-researched expose on who Barack Obama really is; a typical Chicago Machine politician.

(h/t Obama's Con)

Obama Lashes Out Over Infanticide Charges, Hides Behind His Daughters

The Barack Obama Campaign is fighting back hard against charges that the candidate supporters what amounts to infanticide with a series of votes in the Illinois State Senate.

CBN News Senior National Correspondent David Brody has been in the thick of the controversy and provides a very balanced account of the "he said, she said" going on between the Obama camp and National Right to Life committee.

Having read both arguments, I tend to side with NRLC as being the more truthful.

Perhaps I'm being overly simplistic, but if Stanek is correct, and they have to issue both a birth and a death certificate for the child, Mr. Obama, it isn't an abortion. It's infanticide.

The campaign, in attempting to defend its candidate, has used his daughters as elementary-aged human shields:

The suggestion that Obama – the proud father of two little girls – and others who opposed these bills supported infanticide is deeply offensive and insulting.

Brody even seems to buy into that argument.

Obama is a father of two young girls. You can bet that attacks like that will get him or any father riled up. That language seems to be way over the top. His critics can paint him as a pro-choice liberal. That's fair but to go any further is really beyond the pale. Is Obama really sinister, a monster? That narrative may fly in some conservative circles and in chat rooms but most Americans won't buy it.

Perhaps Mr. Brody needs to be reminded of the words he quoted coming out of Mr. Obama's mouth in March.

"When it comes specifically to HIV/AIDS, the most important prevention is education, which should include -- which should include abstinence education and teaching the children -- teaching children, you know, that sex is not something casual. But it should also include -- it should also include other, you know, information about contraception because, look, I've got two daughters. 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby. I don't want them punished with an STD at the age of 16. You know, so it doesn't make sense to not give them information."

"I don't want them punished with a baby."

Barack Obama is a very wealthy man by any measure, quite capable of raising any grandchild that would result from a daughter's accidental pregnancy. That he would so casually call his own grandchild a "punishment" worth eradicating is certainly the sign of a monster in my eyes.

Your opinion may differ, but it seems to me that a man who could so casually announce that he would support—no, advocate—the killing of his own grandchild to get rid of an inconvenience, a "punishment," is certainly the kind of monster who can hear a heart-wrenching first-hand account of a nurse holding an uncared-for abortion survivor until the baby died, and still be opposed to stopping such inhumanity not just once, but on multiple occasions.

Shocker: NY Times Decries Laughably Incompetent Taliban Rout As "Complex Attack"

You've got to be kidding me:

The attack on Camp Salerno in Khost Province was one of the most complex attacks seen so far in Afghanistan with multiple suicide bombers and a backup fighting force that tried to breach defenses on to the airport at the base. It followed a suicide car bombing at the outer entrance to the same base on Monday morning, which killed 12 Afghan workers lining up to enter the base, and another attempted bombing that was thwarted shortly after.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for all three attacks in Khost. Their spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahed, reached by telephone at an unknown location, said that 15 suicide bombers, equipped with machine guns and vests packed with explosives, with 30 militants backing them up, attacked the base, one of the largest foreign military bases in Afghanistan. He claimed that some of the bombers had gotten inside the base and had killed a number of American soldiers and destroyed equipment and helicopters. This last claim was denied by General Azimi of the Afghan military.

Suicide bombers mull about while preparing for an attack against a fortified U.S./Afghan position, receive minimal support in the form of small arms cover fire from a small band of untrained militant irregulars before helicopters chop them to bits, and this is what the Times considers a "complex attack?"

No artillery or mortar support.

No mention of any flanking attack or feints.

No mention of even minimal attempts to camouflage the suicide bombers by disguising them as civilians or base workers or members of the opposite sex.

As a matter of fact, they didn't even manage a straight ahead, mindless assault into interlocking fields of fire. They got spotted well outside the perimeter and got cut to shreds while still 1,000 yards outside the base, and the majority of the Taliban seem to have been killed as they tried to flee. Is it even fair to say they were killed in an attack, when it appears they were blown to bits before the attack began?

Not that I'm singling out the Times for crappy coverage of the attack, The Scotsman account sounds like a Monty Python skit:

NATO troops and Taliban fighters clashed today after a group of the insurgents, backed by suicide bombers, tried to breach the defences of the main US base in south-eastern Afghanistan.

Backed by suicide bombers? I guess that is one way of making sure there will be no retreat.

The attack on the French base, by contrast, had far more deadly ramifications, with 10 French soldiers killed and another 21 wounded, but for the Times to try to inflate the importance or the complexity of the Taliban attack on Camp Salerno beyond the buffonish, ill-advised and utter failure that it was isn't simply bad reporting, but verges on making excuses for the other side.

A Terrorist Founded It. Obama Was Its Chairman.

That's all some need to know about the Chicago Annenburg Challenge.

Others may want more details explaining why Barack Obama directly lied about the extent of his involvement with Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, founder of the Challenge. Obama has claimed that Ayers was just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," which isn't even close to being true. Obama has had a relationship with Ayers since at least 1987...roughly as long of a relationship as he's had with racist conspiracy theorist Jeremiah Wright, lynching advocate Michael Fleger, and the other far left liberals, Marxist-Leninists, and SDS veterans that make up Obama's base of power in the infamously corrupt world of Chicago Democratic politics.

Obama kicked off his political career with a fundraiser at the home of Ayers and fellow Weather Underground terrorist (and Charles Manson fan) Bernadine Dohrn. Bill Ayers and Obama sat on the board of directors for the Woods Fund. Obama also had a relationship with Thomas Ayers (Bill's father) as Chicago Public Education Fund on the Fund's Leadership Council. He also served alongside Thomas Ayers and Bill's brother John Ayers on the "Leadership Council" of the Chicago Public Schools Education Fund. Obama was part of the ABCs Coalition, created by Thomas Ayers and coordinated by Bill. The truth of the matter is that to Barack Obama, terrorist Bill Ayers is "just some guy in the neighborhood" to which he has deep and abiding personal, professional, and political ties dating back two decades.

How deep do those ties go? Thats a very good question that it seems some people don't want answered. NRO's Stanley Kurtz had been granted access to review 132 boxes of internal documentation from the Chicago Annenburg Challenge at the Richard J. Daley Library, only to have that access barred.

Kurtz seems to think Bill Ayers might be behind blocking access to these documents. It rather makes you wonder what information those documents may hold.

RNC Accuses Obama Bundler of Supporting Iraqi Insurgency

Considering that the bundler in question is Jodie Evans, co-founder of Code Pink, it certainly seems possible:

The RNC quoted a January 15, 2006 column by Robert Novak that said, "Code Pink, At A Mock War Crimes Tribunal In Istanbul June 27, Signed A Declaration That The Iraqi Insurgency 'Deserved The Support Of People Everywhere Who Care For Justice And Freedom.'"

Evans represented Code Pink at the mock war crimes tribunal. In addition to expressing Code Pink's support for the insurgency, Evans published a statement from Istanbul personally endorsing the insurgency that has killed thousands of American troops and free Iraqis:

"We must begin by really standing with the Iraqi people and defending their right to resist. I can remain myself against all forms of violence, and yet I cannot judge what someone has to do when pushed to the wall to protect all they love. The Iraqi people are fighting for their country, to protect their families and to preserve all they love. They are fighting for their lives, and we are fighting for lies." (AlterNet, June 26, 2005)

Evans has a close relationship with the Obama campaign. She hosted Obama's first Hollywood fundraiser in February 2007, along with Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and her ex-husband Max Palevsky.

According to Evans' Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin, Evans is on a first name basis with Obama and discussed Iraq policy with Obama at another Hollywood fundraiser on June 24, 2008.

Evans is listed on the Obama website as having bundled between $50,000 and $100,000. She has also contributed the maximum $2300 to his primary campaign, according to FEC records.

But lest you think Evans is just another patriotic Democrat who was perhaps a bit overzealous with her opposition to the Iraq War, remember what she said just months ago about 9/11.

In addition to supporting the insurgency in Iraq, Evans recently expressed her agreement with Osama bin Laden's reasons for attacking America on September 11, 2001 in an interview broadcast June 3, 2008:

Jodie Evans:..."We were attacked because we were in Saudi Arabia, that was the message of Osama, was that because we had our bases in the Middle East, he attacked the United States."

Paul A. Ibbetson: "Do you think that's a valid argument?"

Evans: "Sure. Why do we have bases in the Middle East? We totally violated the rights of that country. Why do we get to have bases in the Middle East?"

Also in that interview, Evans said Code Pink's goal is to "undermine the war effort (of the United States") and that she wished Saddam Hussein was still in power.

Of course, this is an RNC press release quoting Evans apparent admission of treason or sedition (I'm not a lawyer, and don't claim to know which, if either, applies) , so I'd like to hear from our lefty readers precisely how Evans' work for the insurgency has been taken out of context.

If these allegations can be substantiated in any way, should the Obama campaign return the money Evans helped bundle? Should Obama keep up ties with a person who seems to have not admitted proudly opposing her own nation during war time, but also active worked against it?

I don't think Obama needs to give back all of the money Evans bundled, but it would send a clear signal that he will not tolerate the undermining of American foreign policy and the sacrifices of American servicemen operating in harm's way if he were to return Evans' individual contributions, along with those contributions that may have come from other individuals of similar dubious character. It would also be wise for Obama to sever further ties with Evans and other members of Code Pink, a radical organization now best know for protests attempting to shut down a Marine recruiting office and calling Marines "assassins," or worse.

Dems in Distress

Perhaps with "patriotism" being a word most often spit than said by those on the far left, perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise that the Democratic National Committee screwed this up:

Some viewers contacted 9NEWS Saturday, questioning the design of the credentials to see Sen. Barack Obama accept the Democratic Party's presidential nomination at INVESCO Field at Mile High.

The viewers say with the stars and blue field in the lower left corner, it looks like an upside down American flag. Published flag etiquette states the stars should always be displayed in the upper left corner. An upside down flag represents an international symbol of extreme distress.

Matt Chandler with the Obama campaign says the flag is not upside down. He says it is a stylized flag designed to blend the stars on Senator Obama's shirt with the flag blowing in the wind.

Natalie Wyeth with the Democratic National Convention Committee sent 9NEWS the following statement Saturday night: "The DNCC community credentials incorporate patriotic design elements. They do not depict an actual American flag. The DNCC has full and complete respect for the flag and all rules of display."

A composite of two images in a hologram, the credentials show the following.

What an interesting parsing by these two Democrats. Obama loyalist Chandler actually asks us to ignore our lying eyes, which clearly shows an inversion with the stars in the lower right orientation, while Wyeth parses that this isn't an actual flag, so the perceived slight is the fault of those who see it, not the fault of the DNCC.

The concerns of those Americans who understand flag etiquette and the meaning of an inverted flag has been compounded by some on the far left, who have noted that this is not the flag they are familiar with either, lacking the orange, crackling glow to which they have become accustomed.

(h/t Weasel Zippers and Hot Air, which notes another possible source for the inverted flag in an update.)

Jeremiah Denton Must be Lying, Too

As Andrew Sullivan, Jane Hamsher, Steve Benen, and other liberal bloggers try to discredit John McCain's story of compassion shown by a North Vietnamese prison guard as being stolen from a similar experience related between Russian author Solzhenitsyn and another prisoner, I'm forced to ask: when are the going to go after Jeremiah Denton?

Denton was another U.S Navy pilot shot down in Vietnam, a contemporary of McCain's in the same brutal North Vietnamese prisons ... and also the beneficiary of surprising Christian compassion from the North Vietnamese:

Denton also found strength in his fellow captives. The Americans were forbidden to communicate with each other. But that didn't stop them. They communicated in Morse code and other number-based codes they devised and transmitted through blinks, coughs, sneezes, taps on the wall and even sweeps of a broom.

"I experienced what I couldn't imagine human nature was capable of," Denton said. "I witnessed what my comrades could rise to. Self-discipline, compassion, a realization there is a God."

He also experienced periodic compassion from the North Vietnamese. Sometimes the guards would weep as they tortured him.

One experience, he will never forget. Denton kept a cross, fashioned out of broom straws, hidden in a propaganda booklet in his cell. The cross was a gift from another prisoner. When a guard found the cross, he shredded it. Spat on it. Struck Denton in the face. Threw what was left of the cross on the floor and ground his heel into it.

"It was the only thing I owned," Denton said.

Later, when Denton returned to his cell, he began to tear up the propaganda booklet. He felt a lump in the book. He opened it. "Inside there was another cross, made infinitely better than the other one my buddy had made," Denton said.

When the guard tore up the cross, two Vietnamese workers saw what happened and fashioned him a new cross. "They could have been tortured for what they did," Denton said.

Denton survived the war and returned home, and like McCain, became a Republican Senator.

It is also worth noting that Denton switched parties to become a Republican precisely because of the far Left's attacks on the military—including those from people like John Kerry—in the first place.

Update: And via Instapundit, a confirmation of McCain's story from another Hanoi Hilton alumni, reporting he first heard the story in 1971, two years prior to Solzhenitsyn's book coming out.

Will Sullivan, Hamsher, Benen, the Kossacks, etc apologize for attempting to discredit McCain?

Update: What's even worse than accusing McCain of stealing Solzhenitsyn's work? Finding out that Solzhenitsyn didn't write such a story. The walkbacks will be very interesting indeed.

Another Miracle in Galilee

Even God seems to be against Barack Obama, because in His wisdom, He highlights a living example of the candidate's most inhumane views.

The woman underwent an abortion and the baby, weighing 610 grams, was extracted from her womb without a pulse, hospital officials said.

A senior doctor pronounced the baby dead and she was transferred to the cooler.

Five hours later, the woman's husband came to the hospital to take what he thought was his dead baby girl for burial.

When the baby was taken out of the cooler, she began to breathe. The premature baby was then taken to the intensive care ward, where doctors were attempting to save her life.

Luckily for the baby, Barack Obama was not there to vote against care for the abortion survivor after she was discovered alive, as he has done here in the United States.

Real Messiah: 1, ObamaMessiah: 0

Related: The moral courage of ferrets.

Update: The baby passed early Tuesday.

No Common Ground?

The progessive blogosphere and Andy Sullivan—but I repeat myself—have decided to accuse former POW John McCain of stealing a story from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Russian sent to the gulags (forced labor camps) for writing ill of Stalin in a letter to a friend... a typical application of the Soviet version of the Fairness Doctrine.

Here is McCain's story:

Solzhenitsyn's tale read:

Leaving his shovel on the ground, he slowly walked to a crude bench and sat down. He knew that at any moment a guard would order him to stand up, and when he failed to respond, the guard would beat him to death, probably with his own shovel. He had seen it happen to other prisoners.

As he waited, head down, he felt a presence. Slowly he looked up and saw a skinny old prisoner squat down beside him. The man said nothing. Instead, he used a stick to trace in the dirt the sign of the Cross. The man then got back up and returned to his work.

There are, of course, no recorded instances of crosses or other Christian images ever being recorded in prisons. I jest, of course.

In Kilmainham Gaol, in the spot where a mortally wounded James Connolly was strapped to a chair before a firing squad on May 12, 1916, a cross stands. Of course, it came later.

Mamertine Prison was originally constructed around 386 B.C. but is best known for it's upside-down crosses because it's most famous alleged resident, Saint Peter, was crucified upside-down. While we don't have any witnesses that crosses or the Christian fish symbol was written in the dirt of the prison floor during the incarcerations of Peter and Paul, it seems likely such imagery was commonplace, and I'm reasonably certain neither Saint was familiar with the Russian writer who came nearly two millennia later.

Christian imagery is common in prisons around the world long before Solzhenitsyn was born, spreading as Christianity spread.

With the brutality of man's inhumanity to man common throughout the history of prisons, is it surprising in the least that in prisons around the world, guards and prisoners, enslavers and slaves, found a shared common ground in Christianity?

To disbelieve such things are possible is to not renounce John McCain, but to insist jailers are not human, just unfeeling robots incapable of grace or compassion. But I prefer to think that God is in all prisons.

It's one of the places where he's needed most.

Update: Uh-oh. Another U.S. Navy pilot who became a POW in North Vietnamese prisons is telling similar stories of surprising North Vietnamese Christan compassion. Are progressives going to try to assail his honor as well?

Why not?

They already drove him out of the Democratic Party.

Bitter and Clingy Revisited

Capturing yet again the feelings of every American from Honolulu to San Francisco, Barack Obama gave his contempt for American voters another go while raising millions first from from South Asians, then rich ($28,000 per couple) liberal Democrat donors, uttering a similar refrain:

"Now, you want to win. And saying it doesn't make it so," Obama said. "It would be nice to think that after eight years of economic disaster, after eight years of bungled foreign policy, of being engaged in a war that should never have been authorized and should never have been waged, that cost us a trillion dollars and thousands of lives, that people would say, 'Let's toss the bums out. Toss the bums out, we're starting from scratch, we're starting over. This is not working.'

"So I understand why a lot of folks are saying, 'This should just happen. Why are we having to run all these television commercials? Why do we have to raise all this money? Just read the papers. These are the knuckleheads who have been in charge. Throw ‘em out.'"

Poor Barack. He just can't seem to understand why people even want to have an election. Surely his coronation " should just happen." He shouldn't should have to go around this country raising money; it's hard. Everyone should vote for him because he's great. And we've got knuckleheads who have been in charge, you see.

And why do we have knuckleheads in charge, Saint Barack?

Must be all those blue collar, white collar, and no collar Americans who keep bitterly clinging to their guns, their religion, and Presidents that don't think America is as mean, broken, and horrible as Barack and Michelle Obama think it is.

Silk Purses, Hog's Ears

Via TPM Election Central comes word that Barack Obama's presidential campaign is once again trying to create a new marketing theme, and this one will launch tomorrow.

Why this design?

According to an Obama aide, the new effort dovetails with a renewed push by the Obama team in Pennsylvania to poke fun at John McCain's recent claim that he would rather hear the roar of "50,000 Harleys" than the cheering of 200,000 Berliners.

As the Obama camp was quick to point out, McCain opposed legislation that would have forced the U.S. government to buy American-made motorcycles.

The Obama camp's push on the issue includes running this recent ad, which was running in the York market and mocks McCain's Harley quote while pointing out McCain's position on American-made bikes, in two new markets in Pennsylvania beginning tomorrow -- the Pittsburgh and Scranton/Wilkes-Barre markets.

Obama's Pennsylvania campaign, the aide says, will be hitting the ground this weekend in around five towns around the state with stickers and flyers bearing the above "Buy American, Vote Obama" logo.

The events will feature a few dozen actual Harley riders for Obama that have been recruited for the weekend's events.

"Harley riders aren't typically supportive of Democratic candidates," the aide says. "But we're making a play for them by saying that Obama's economic policies are the true patriotic ones."

They. Don't. Get. It.

Patriotic purchasing doesn't come from buying products just because they're made in America, but instead comes from choosing American-made products because you have faith that American companies such as H-D put the time and effort into building a quality American-made product you can be proud of, making you want to own it.

There is nothing patriotic about forcing Americans to buy specific products, but socialists like Obama are by nature anti-capitalistic, so should we be surprised that his campaign gets this wrong?

Perhaps progressives really think that bikers are bitter, clingy knuckle-draggers that can be influenced by such a half-hearted effort, but I think they are going to be sorely disappointed. The pandering is simply too transparent and insincere.

Should Obama need bikers, however, I think we can find some that are a bit more his speed.

To thine own self be true, Obamamessiah.

A Perfect Home

I never quite appreciated how good of a fit Matt Yglesias was for his new home at Think Progress until I got a chance to see him in action this morning, hacking away with the intellectual dishonesty that has given Think Progress the reputation it has so richly earned (but surprisingly, hasn't yet found a way to tax).

John McCain deems the Georgia-Russia war the "first serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War"...

Satyam notes "the Gulf War, 9/11, and the Iraq War, to name a few" as possible alternatives. But beyond McCain’s seemingly poor memory, the interesting thing is the confusion in terms of high-level concepts. It was just a little while ago that McCain was giving speeches about how "the threat of radical Islamic terrorism" is "transcendent challenge of our time." Now Russia seems to be the transcendent challenge. Which is the problem with an approach to world affairs characterized by a near-constant hysteria about threat levels and a pathological inability to set priorities.

I'm no McCain fan by any stretch of the imagination, but it takes a person of true intellectual dishonesty to twist McCain's words the way these Soros drones have done.

As we now stand, Russia and the United States, two nuclear powers equipped with continent-killing ICBMs with MIRV warheads, are indeed in a diplomatic crisis over the recent Russian invasion and occupation of Georgia. It is the first serious international crisis since we last stood toe-to-toe with Moscow during the Cold War.

Is Yglesias actually daft enough to suggest that acknowledging a new or renewed threat is wrong, and that it should be ignored so you can stick with your party's pre-planned script? That's not mature statecraft. That's sticking your head in the sand... beach sand.

The Iraq War was and is a regional conflict, with little threat of expanding into a serious international crisis. The same holds true with the lower-intensity invasion of Afghanistan that began after 9/11; neither country had the weaponry or diplomatic power to engage in serious force projection outside of their regional spheres.

McCain was perfectly precise with his choice of words to describe the current crisis, just as he was when he described Iraq as the first major conflict since 9/11, leaving out Afghanistan precisely because it wasn't a major conflict, but a campaign waged primarily via special forces teams incorporating with indigenous forces and air support.

Of course, no one at Think Progress understands the first thing about the military other than the mention of them gets their spit glands revved, so that is hardly surprising.

That Yglesias would use his own blanket ignorance as an excuse to once again imply McCain is going senile is pathetic, but it's what we'd come to expect from the support mechanism of the community reality-based he now so deservedly calls home.

OTM Strikes Out Again

You've got to hand it to the Obama Truther Movement (a driven mix of Hillary loving PUMAs and conservatives)... they let few things stand in the way of their absolute certainty that Barack Obama is an Indonesian-Kenyan Muslim draft dodger...including the facts.

What I can't get is why they spend so much time focusing on trying to disqualify him using questionable documents, when his proven record is so much worse.

Who gives a crap if his last name was Soetoro as a child, when he choses infanticide today?

Why should I care if Barack Obama was labelled a Muslim (obviously meant to imply he might be a terrorist), when he started his political career at the home of proud, publicly known domestic terrorists with whom he's had a long relationship?

There are plenty of real reasons to criticize Barack Obama. Let's stick to those, shall we?

Live and Let Pie

Chef Julia Child: OSS spy?

Arkansas Democratic Party Chairman Shot Killed: UPDATE: Shooter Was Fired Employee Former Employee Claim Walked Back

Details are still coming in, but it appears a man showed up at Democratic Party headquarters, asked for chairman Bill Gwatney by name, was denied a meeting, and then pushed his way in and then shot Gwatney before fleeing.

KATV reports that police chased the suspect and that he is now believed to be dead, though that is unconfirmed at this time; Fox 16 only confirms he was shot by police.

Please pray for Mr. Gwatney and his family.

We'll update as more information becomes available.

Update: Ark Times blog has the most detail on this developing story, including the claim that the shooter switched vehicles during his attempted escape, and that he in custody. There are contradicting reports about the shooter's condition.

Update: Among other sources, WREG seems to be going the "airing the theory" route, noting Gwatney owns multiple car dealerships and that the suspect made comments about losing his job recently. That does not mean the suspect was a Gwatney employee of course—he could just as easily have some other reason for targeting Gwatney, personal or political—but until the suspect is identified, we simply won't know more.

The most recent update to the Ark Times blog also notes that Gwatney's dealerships had recent layoffs, the shooter was apparently one of Gwatney's employee's (still not officially confirmed), and that the shooter died en route to the hospital.

The national media is slow to catch up on the suspected motivations of the shooter. I'm certain that this is out of concerns for accuracy, and not an attempt to let misplaced anger simmer for as long as possible for those who would ascribe a political motivation.

Like clockwork: The paranoids denizens of the Democratic Undergound, Think Progress, and other "progressive" sites have laid the blame squarely at the feet of conservatives, talk radio... and racists?

Update: Gwatney has died.

There is some disagreement over the suspect's ID but the aforementioned Ark Times blog presently states:

...the suspect was a former employee of a Gwatney car dealership. News reports are identifying him as Tim Johnson, 50, of Searcy. According to one report, unconfirmed he was a body shop worker at a Gwatney dealership in Sherwood. A woman who answered the phone there hung up after issuing a no comment to a question. A Little Rock police spokesman, however, told Arkansas Business that the shooter was not a Gwatney dealership employee.

RTT News (a source I am not familiar with) cites police sources as confirming Johnson as the shooter.

8:26 PM Update: Significant media backtracking on earlier claims that Johnson was a Gwatney bodyshop employee, and once again returning to the latest iteration of the Ark Times blog, there may be no direct link at all:

Johnson had no prior police record, according to the Little Rock police and a motive was still unknown. "This is one of those where we may never know," said Police Lt. Terry Hastings.

Immediately after the shooting, police sources said they were working to confirm tentative information that the suspect was a former employee of a Gwatney car dealership. The Little Rock police said, however, at an afternoon news conference that the shooter, whom they did not identify, was NOT a Gwatney employee and, so far as they knew, never had been, contrary to some reports mentioned here earlier in the day. Hastings said they hoped to learn from family more about Johnson's background.

This Is Interesting...

Our buddy Jules Crittenden married up quite well, but did you know she could write, too?

"Tethered " is her new novel, and it appears to be attracting some buzz.

Proud husband Jules gushes here.

Obama Rumor Conclusively Debunked

Sorry to whiz in the conspiracyverse's corn flakes, but here's one anti-Obama rumor conclusively put to rest.

Now if we can just get other folks to drop their quixotic quests to target Obama over inane technicalities, we can more focus on dismantling him based upon things that actually matter, such as his character, his experience, his associations, and his radical political goals.

Sam Jackson... Be Very Afraid

If he's superstitious about the old wives tale of deaths coming in threes, Samuel L. Jackson should be very afraid. Jackon's movie Soul Men is in post-production. Also starring in Soul Men?

Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes.

UNC "Jeep Jihadi" Pleads Guilty

Via WRAL:

Mohammed Taheri-azar, the man accused of trying to run over students at UNC-Chapel Hill two years ago, pleaded guilty Tuesday morning to nine counts of attempted first-degree murder.

He will be sentenced later this month.

Taheri-azar was accused of driving a Jeep Cherokee through The Pit, a popular student gathering space on campus, in March 2006.

He was charged with nine counts of attempted murder. At the time of the attack, Taheri-azar told police he wanted to injure people in response to the U.S. government's treatment of Muslims abroad.

This is the Pit, the area where Taheri-azar, a UNC graduate, tried to kill his fellow students. In a March 5, 2007 court appearance he stated he "hates all Americans" and "hates all Jews."

Shockingly, the Iranian-born American citizen didn't hate American enough to leave it.

We're All Going to Burn Up or Drown... If We Don't Freeze To Death First

Your latest global warming hysteria, courtesy of one Oliver Tickell:

We need to get prepared for four degrees of global warming, Bob Watson told the Guardian last week. At first sight this looks like wise counsel from the climate science adviser to Defra. But the idea that we could adapt to a 4C rise is absurd and dangerous. Global warming on this scale would be a catastrophe that would mean, in the immortal words that Chief Seattle probably never spoke, "the end of living and the beginning of survival" for humankind. Or perhaps the beginning of our extinction.

The collapse of the polar ice caps would become inevitable, bringing long-term sea level rises of 70-80 metres. All the world's coastal plains would be lost, complete with ports, cities, transport and industrial infrastructure, and much of the world's most productive farmland. The world's geography would be transformed much as it was at the end of the last ice age, when sea levels rose by about 120 metres to create the Channel, the North Sea and Cardigan Bay out of dry land. Weather would become extreme and unpredictable, with more frequent and severe droughts, floods and hurricanes. The Earth's carrying capacity would be hugely reduced. Billions would undoubtedly die.

Why, isn't that just peachy?

Tickell's solution to the problem? He doesn't actually have one, but he won't tell you that because he's busy whoring a book, trying to cash in on the fear to the same easily-fooled people who bought into the end of the world event known as Y2K... and we know how that turned out.

Here's the facts, folks.

The temperature of the Earth rose nearly one whole degree over the past century, but has actually been falling for the past decade (PDF).

As it now stands, the global temperature now is roughly near the median temperature of the last 2,400 years.

The highest temperatures, as recorded via the chemical record of deep-core Greenland glaciers, were during the height of the Roman Empire. Obviously, this was due to Nero's fiddling while Rome burned fossil fuels.

Over a longer-term view, the relative stability of the global temperature during the most recent interglacial period is more pronounced.

Again, current global temperatures are roughly around the median temperature of the past 10,000 years. Thag the caveman must have had a Buick.

Now let us look at the past 100,000 years, so that we understood how good we've had it as humans—there wasn't a bikini season for the previous 90,000 years.

"Ah-hah!" I can hear Global Warming true believers shouting. "See how the rise of human civilization coincides with global warming? Die, Heretic!" Rest assured I will at some point, but it most likely won't be because of global warming, as an even longer view reveals. Let's look back 420,000 years.

I'm pretty sure we weren't burning many fossil fuels way back when, as "we" didn't exist.

Once again, global temperatures seem to be part of a natural, poorly understood cycle, and our current interglacial period seems ominously close to being at an end.

I'll now turn you over to Drs. Richard A. Muller and Gordon J. MacDonald, whose charts I've been so shamelessly borrowing thus far from the introduction of Ice Ages and Astronomical Causes: data, spectral analysis, and mechanisms, for the big let down for the Global Warming Faithful.

From this plot, it is clear that most of the last 420 thousand years (420 kyr) was spent in ice age. The brief periods when the record peaks above the zero line, the interglacials, typically lasted from a few thousand to perhaps twenty thousand years.

These data should frighten you. All of civilization developed during the last interglacial, and the data show that such interglacials are very brief. Our time looks about up. Data such as these are what led us to state, in the Preface, that the next ice age is about to hit us, any millennium now. It does not take a detailed theory to make this prediction. We don't necessarily know why the next ice age is imminent (at least on a geological time scale), but the pattern is unmistakable.

The real reason to be frightened is that we really don't understand what causes the pattern. We don't know why the ice ages are broken by the short interglacials. We do know something – that the driving force is astronomical. We’ll describe how we know that in Chapter 2. We have models that relate the astronomical mechanisms to changes in climate, but we don't know which of our models are right, or if any of them are. We will discuss these models in some detail in this book. Much of the work of understanding lies in the future. It is a great field for a young student to enter.

Muller and MacDonald end their book's introduction noting that we'll probably see gradual rises in temperature through the middle of this century, but the historical record suggests that it is a cooling, nor a warming, that is in the Earth's future, and that the mechanisms are not understood, clearly predate human influence, and that there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.

Feel free to disagree. However, as you run to higher ground, please just leave me the keys to the beach house, will you?

Accurate as Ever at the L.A. Times

Richard Serrano published a story in the Los Angeles on Sunday entitled U.S. guns arm Mexican drug cartels.

In a marked improvement in the accuracy of Times stories, Serrano did not utter a factual inaccuracy until the third word of the article's first sentence.

High-powered automatic weapons and ammunition are flowing virtually unchecked from border states into Mexico, fueling a war among drug traffickers, the army and police that has left thousands dead, according to U.S. and Mexican officials.

The rifles being picked up along the border are of course not automatic weapons—machine guns—but are instead semi-automatic weapons which fire one bullet per trigger pull.

Further down in the article Serrano relates without question the claim that the FN Five-seveN pistol is armor-piercing, without bothering to see if armor-piercing ammunition is available for the pistols in the United States... and of course, it isn't, being barred for all but military and police sale by federal law.

Being ever helpful, I sent Mr. Serrano an email explaining where his story was wrong and needed corrections. Serrano has thus far neither responded, nor corrected his article.

In hopes of spurring some sort of interest in correcting the article, I emailed the National section editors of the Times, and made the radical suggestion that for future articles, they may want to consider interviewing actual gun experts instead of Mexican drug dealers when discussing the capabilities of firearms.

I doubt they'll listen to such suggestions, but we can always hope.

Hamas! The Musical

Unable to beat the Israeli Defense Forces via conventional tactics, the crack Hamas Line Dancing Battalion prepares for an achy-breaky cross border raid.

HuffPo: War in Georgia Engineered To Help McCain

Sadly, he appears to be serious:

In classic "Wag The Dog" scenario there is a neat little war brewing between American and Russian proxies, and real Russian troops, in the Caucacus Mountains on the Russian border.

It couldn't come at a better time for the Republicans.

McCain gets to act and talk tough against the Russians, while Obama is on vacation in Hawaii, issuing "can't we all get along statements."

It perfectly augments Republican campaign points: Obama is not ready. He is not tough, experienced enough to deal with a dangerous world.

Do you appreciate the power and planning that went into this? I don't think you do.

Not only did McCain engineer the build-up of Russian forces along the border of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, he also orchestrated the Georgian offer of a ceasefire last week, the South Ossetia separatist's response of shelling Georgia, and the Georgian counterstrike that triggered the pre-planned Russian invasion— all carefully timed to coincide with Barack Obama's vacation.

As it is obvious to see, thousands of people have been killed and a country invaded and ripped apart, just to give John McCain a chance to sound tough. But the plot is even more insidious than HuffPo author Blake Fleetwood suggests.

Not only did McCain carefully orchestrate three armed forces in two countries in such a way that it looked like they were acting selfishly in their own best interests instead of as agents of a U.S. Presidential campaign, he also managed to convince Barack Obama to give a spineless response that made McCain sound like a far more knowledgeable, experienced, and competent leader that OBama has ever pretended to be.

The kicker?

In the absolutely most fantabulous move of all, McCain then convinced Obama to flip-flop on his previous spineless position to poorly echo McCain's stance, reinforcing it as the correct one, while gutting his own credibility and showing himself to be hopelessly incapable of performing as a President.

John McCain. He bends steel and breaks candidates and countries with his mind.

Taint Obama

From Russia, With Love.

Or As Barack Obama's childhood mentor "Uncle" Frank would say, Smash On Victory-Eating Red Army.

And as a bona fide imperialist war for oil intensifies, the progressive Left remains strangely muted.

Update: As his meager voting record show, he doesn't have what it takes to be a leader, but Barack Obama makes a great follower.

Encouraging News: Secret Service Doesn't Know Much About Bullets, May Have Jeopardized Case Against Assassination Suspect

The Secret Service agents that arrested Raymond Hunter Geisel claimed in their affidavit that 40 rounds (two boxes) of Black Talon bullets recovered from Geisel's vehicle are "armor-piercing," a claim that is categorically false.

Armor-piercing bullets have almost no legitimate use outside of shooting people wearing body armor. It is for this reason that it has been illegal to manufacture, import, transfer, or deliver armor-piercing ammunition in the United States since 1986, according to Title 18, U.S. Code Section 922.

The coating on Black Talon ammunition is merely an oxide designed to help minimize barrel fouling—it doesn't give bullets the ability to penetrate armor. The Black Talon cartridge uses industry standard velocities and hollowpoint bullets with an oxide finish. Hollowpoints are actually more likely to be stopped by body armor than most other bullet designs because of their increased surface area of the bullet shape. All ammunition recovered from Geisel's possession were types consistent with use in the shooting portion of the bail-bondsman class in which Geisel made threats.

Falsely claiming that Geisel's bullets are armor-piercing in information released to the media could be argued by an enterprising defense attorney as an intent to prejudice the case against Geisel by suggesting nefarious intent, when none could or should have been inferred by the incorrect description of the bullet type alone.

It's rather sad that one of our nation's most elite law enforcement agencies bought into an ignorant fantasy of magical coatings creating armor-piercing "cop killer" bullets, an illusion manufactured by the media and anti-gun groups more than a decade ago. It's worse that such ignorance might be used in the defense of a man who is accused of threatening political assassinations.

Barack O'Borrow? Probably Not

There is the claim that Barack Obama took an anecdote in The Audacity of Hope from a story told about G. Gordon Liddy in All the President's Men from 1976, or perhaps 1962's Lawrence of Arabia.

The YouTube video comes courtesy of the G. Gordon Liddy show, so it is rather obvious which source he'd prefer Obama cite, but I'm not willing to to say Obama necessarily borrowed this story. The only reason this claim merits a second look is the fact that Obama used the words of his friend Deval Patrick on several occasions without immediate attribution.

I've seen similar firsthand stupid tricks at parties and bars from high school through college, performed by young men fueled with testosterone and alcohol and a momentarly lapse of common sense. This form of a tough guy routine, followed with some sort of gritty catch phrase, is almost certainly older than Obama or Liddy or Lawrence of Arabia, and I would not be surprised at all to discover similar acts of bravado in ancient Greece or Rome.

Hiding the Body

It was bad enough yesterday when CNN and CBS-4 selectively edited the story about the arrest of Raymond Hunter Geisel, a man who had made threats again both Barack Obama and President George W. Bush.

Associated Press journalist Curt Anderson had one of the first accounts, if not the very first account of the arrest, posted online yesterday mid-afternoon, and it clearly noted both Obama and Bush had been threatened (my bold below).

A man is being held in Florida by federal authorities on charges of threatening to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Raymond Hunter Geisel was ordered held without bail Thursday at a brief court hearing.

The Secret Service says Geisel made the threat during a training class for bail bondsmen in Miami in late July. Another tipster said Geisel also threatened President Bush.

A search of Geisel's SUV and hotel room uncovered a loaded handgun, knives, dozens of rounds of ammunition, body armor and a machete. The SUV was wired with emergency lights.

Geisel told the Secret Service he was originally from Bangor, Maine. He contended he made no threat against either Obama or the president.

It was this story that CBS-4 doctored in their original report. They rewrote the lede sentence, but otherwise copied Anderson's account word-for-word, with the pointed removal of the key sentence in the middle paragraph, "Another tipster said Geisel also threatened President Bush."

CBS-4 removed that sentence, and moved the following paragraph up to cover the gap. Contacted this morning for comment, CBS-4 has thus far declined to provide a response explaining why they doctored the article.

CNN had the same information as the AP and CBS-4, and like CBS-4, they chose to edit out references to Bush, even though they were far more competent in their doctoring of the story, leaving behind no "tells." Their version of the doctored story stayed online for 2-4 hours before being updated, well after the damage was done.

But even after finally posting the full story after being called out by one of their commenters (and shutting down the comments section 2 minutes later), CNN wasn't quite done with their attempt to generate political and racial tensions. Now, they're now busily trying to cover their tracks.

This morning you can still access the original URL of the CNN story at:
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/08/07/breaking-man-held-for-obama-assassination-threat/

You'll only likely to get there via a direct link from a blogger, however.

If you go to the CNN Political Ticker and scroll down, the exact same story (text and headline are identical, with a link to the SS affidavit now added in the third paragraph of the replacement) now has this URL:

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/08/08/new-details-man-held-for-alleged-obama-assassination-threat/

Perhaps most telling however, is that all the comments associated from the previous story—the racially-tinged, politically motivated anger they helped generate with their selective editing—have not been ported over to the new URL.

CNN altered their original story to gin up outrage against someone they helped to portray as a "typical" racist right-winger, instead of the equal opportunity, anti-authority whackjob the more complete AP story and the very Secret Service affidavits CNN obtained seemed to indicate.

They doctored the story, and by swapping out the URLs and hiding the contents, they're attempting to play a very subtle game of hiding the evidence of the paranoia and anger they helped manufacture by shifting to a new, comment-free URL on the CNN Political Ticker Web site, while still maintaining the old URL with the comments, perhaps in hopes that those bloggers and journalists who have already linked to the primary URL won't catch up with their sleight of hand.

CNN edited out the threats against President Bush to help build on fears in the African American community and among the political left that an intolerant, racist white conservative may attempt to assassinate Barack Obama, and now they've attempted to cover up the fear they helped stoke by moving the comments generated out of public view, while attempting to deceive the bloggers who linked to the original story by leaving online, but hidden.

It didn't work, and CNN has a lot to answer for.

Unintentially Appropriate

The funny thing about true believers of any religion is how accidentally appropriate their signs and symbols may be seen by others. The L.A.-based ad agency sees—uh—"people coming together" for Obama.

Those of us who aren't as in love with the Freshman Senator would rather not grasp the symbolism.

Update Baldilocks finds a creepy Star Trek parallel.

This is a little closer to the reality he promises:

Next Up: His new campaign song, Don't Fear the Reamer.

Selective Editing?

A man has be arrested for making threats against Barack Obama.

Notice any difference in how the story is told, however?

CNN's version:

A man is being held in Florida on charges he threatened to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, according to court documents.

An affidavit filed by a Secret Service agent in U.S. District Court claims that Raymond Hunter Geisel, of Marathon, Florida, threatened to "kill, kidnap and cause bodily harm upon a major candidate for president of the United States, that is, Senator Barack Obama."

The affidavit says Geisel made the threats while attending a bail bondsman training class in Miami.

During an interview with the Secret Service, Geisel denied threatening Obama, but told agents that "if he wanted to kill Senator Obama he would simply shoot him with a sniper rifle."

He later said that comment was a joke, the agent said in the document.

AP's version:

A man who authorities said was keeping weapons and military-style gear in his hotel room and car appeared in court Thursday on charges he threatened to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Raymond Hunter Geisel, 22, was arrested by the Secret Service on Saturday in Miami and was ordered held at Miami's downtown detention center without bail Thursday by a federal magistrate.

A Secret Service affidavit charges that Geisel made the threat during a training class for bail bondsmen in Miami in late July. According to someone else in the 48-member class, Geisel allegedly referred to Obama with a racial epithet and continued, "If he gets elected, I'll assassinate him myself."

Obama was most recently in Florida on Aug. 1-2 but did not visit the South Florida area.

Another person in the class quoted Geisel as saying that "he hated George W. Bush and that he wanted to put a bullet in the president's head," according to the Secret Service.

Geisel denied in a written statement to a Secret Service agent that he ever made those threats, and the documents don't indicate that he ever took steps to carry out any assassination. He was charged only with threatening Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, but not for any threat against President Bush.

Geisel's court-appointed attorney declined comment.

In the interview with a Secret Service agent, Geisel said "if he wanted to kill Senator Obama he simply would shoot him with a sniper rifle, but then he claimed that he was just joking," according to court documents.

A search of Geisel's 1998 Ford Explorer and hotel room in Miami uncovered a loaded 9mm handgun, knives, dozens of rounds of ammunition including armor-piercing types, body armor, military-style fatigues and a machete. The SUV was wired with flashing red and yellow emergency lights.

Geisel told the Secret Service he was originally from Bangor, Maine, and had been living recently in a houseboat in the Florida Keys town of Marathon, according to court documents. He said he used the handgun for training for the bail bondsman class, had the knives for protection and used the machete to cut brush in Maine.

In the affidavit, the Secret Service said Geisel told agents that he suffered from psychiatric problems including post-traumatic stress disorder, but he couldn't provide the names of any facilities where he sought treatment.

Sorry, AP, I don't want to get sued, but need the whole thing for comparative purposes.

The suspect also hated President Bush and is quoted as wanting to put a bullet in his head, so he's an equal opportunity assassination fantasist.

Why CNN didn't think that detail was newsworthy?

CBS 4's hack editing job was even worse, cutting the Bush reference out of the middle of the story but overlooking the reference in the last line:

Federal authorities in Florida are holding a man accused of threatening to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

The man, Raymond Hunter Geisel, was ordered held without bail at a Thursday court hearing.

The Secret Service says Geisel made the threat while training to be a bail bondsman in Miami in late July. A search of Geisel's SUV and hotel room uncovered a loaded handgun, knives, dozens of rounds on ammunition, boy armor, and a machete. The SUV was also wired with emergency lights.

Geisel claims he's originally from Bangor, Maine. He said he made no threat against either Obama or the president.

I can only speculate as to why the media would remove the threat against Bush in these accounts. Is it because it is harder to portray Obama as the victim when he isn't the only one threatened, or just harder to sell the meme that the offender is probably a murderous racist when he threatens a white president as well?

Update: Updated to include AP's story. Will remove it if they ask.

Update: Interesting. After two hours of commenters blaming ignorant/racists/morons/Republicans/Hillary Clinton fans/Southerners/rednecks/anti-black/Fox News/Rush Limbaugh and white people in general, CNN shut down comments on their story at 6:45 PM, just two minutes after "hollowpoint" posted:

While he wasn't arrested for it, the racist nutjob also said that he'd like to put a bullet in Bush's head… yet CNN doesn't feel that was relevent enough to include on their blog story? The extra two sentences would've taken up too many bytes?

Or was it that CNN wanted to portray the nutjob in question as a "typical" right wing racist who wanted to kill Obama? Letting your partisan mask slip a bit are you, CNN?

Given the nature of this election, don't even try to make the excuse that it wasn't relevant, or that the story as presented doesn't create a false impression of the man arrested.

Sometime later—perhaps the 8:19PM update now showing—CNN finally posted the entire story, including the threats made by the suspect against President Bush.

After 3-4 hours of letting half-truths percolate to establish the narrative, CNN then they filled in the rest of the story, after the damage was done.

They could have posted the correct story, the entire story, before 4:00 PM. CNN posted only part of the story, allowing paranoia, biases, and dark fantasies to fester. All of these raging emotions would have been muted, if not eliminated, if it was revealed what CNN know for the beginning, which was the fact that Bush was also a target of Geisel's rage.

CNN significantly altered a story to play upon people's fears.

That cannot lightly be excused.

Update: Curiouser and curiouser... you can still access the original URL of the CNN story at:
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/08/07/breaking-man-held-for-obama-assassination-threat/

Interestingly enough, however, if you go to the CNN Political Ticker and scroll down, the exact same story now has this URL:

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/08/08/new-details-man-held-for-alleged-obama-assassination-threat/

Perhaps most telling however, is that all the comments associated from the previous story—the racially-tinged, poltically motivated anger they helped generate with their selective editing"have not been ported over to the new URL.

The whitewash continues... and then gets worse.

Advocacy Journalism Today: WaPo/Mosk Just Keeps Coming

After having Matthew Mosk's attack on John McCain discredited within hours yesterday, the Washington Post was forced into running this embarrassing correction to the A1 story.

Correction to This Article
An earlier version of this story about campaign donations that Florida businessman Harry Sargeant III raised for Sen. John McCain, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton incorrectly identified three individuals as being among the donors Sargeant solicited on behalf of McCain. Those donors -- Rite Aid manager Ibrahim Marabeh, and lounge owners Nadia and Shawn Abdalla -- wrote checks to Giuliani and Clinton, not McCain. Also, the first name of Faisal Abdullah, a McCain donor, was misspelled in some versions of the story.

In other words, the premise of the entire article was fatally undermined because a Obama-supporting journalist and his editors didn't take the time to do the basic fact-checking Amanda Carpenter did in a matter of minutes.

The same "journalist", Mosk had attempted to smear McCain in a previous manufactured story about a land deal in May.

The Washington Post's editors, perhaps thinking they can save on the cost of paper and ink by adopting the editorial business practices of the New York Times, let Mosk go to print again today with another smear, one that amounted to stating that—gosh darn it!—there was nothing illegal going on with MCCain's fund-raising, but there should be:

Sargeant told The New York Times this morning that he at times left the task of collecting the checks to a longtime business partner, Mustafa Abu Naba'a. The problem with that is that Abu Naba'a is not an American citizen. According to court records, Abu Naba'a is a dual citizen of Jordan and the Dominican Republic.

The law on this question appears to be unclear, said Fred Wertheimer, a campaign finance expert who runs the advocacy group, Democracy 21.

"There's probably very little law on this," Wertheimer said. "If it is not illegal for a foreign national to bundle checks, it ought to be, since it's illegal for a foreign national to make contributions in the first place."

As even as Democracy 21 admits, there is nothing illegal about a legal foreign national collecting the legal contributions of law-abiding Americans for a Presidential candidate.

What is perhaps even more revealing that what they said, however, is Mosk's decision to use them as a source. Democracy 21 is a far left advocacy group, run by a former Democratic Senator Dick Clark, and is funded by both George Soros' Open Society Institute, and the Joyce Foundation—yes, where Barack Obama sat on the Board of Directors for eight years.

Mosk's choice of sources is only slightly more objective than contacting MoveOn.Org for their opinion.

Paul Ryan, a lawyer with the Campaign Legal Center, said the Federal Election Commission has not explicitly addressed the question. Ryan said there appeared to be conflicting thoughts on this in a 2004 advisory opinion. For instance, in one opinion the FEC has advised that it is permissible for a foreign national to solicit a contribution, while in another it prohibits foreign nationals from playing any role in participation in a candidate's election activities, such as decisions concerning the making of contributions.

"There's a little bit of tension between these two different interpretations," Ryan said.

Matthew Mosk hasn't been able to find a way to smear John McCain, despite three abortive attempts. The questions isn't so much why Mosk is against McCain, but why the editors of the Washington Post keep letting themselves be used as a platform for his specious attacks.

Obama: America Sucks, and Only I Can Save It

The Obamamessiah has spoken:

"America is …, uh, is no longer, uh … what it could be, what it once was. And I say to myself, I don't want that future for my children."

Hot Air caught the story, and has similar statements from American's favorite pessimist, Eeyore Michelle Obama.

For a couple who wants to lead this nation, the Obamas don't seem to have much faith in it.

Update: Yeah, it does sound like him:

"The Republic is no longer what it once was." - Palpatine/Darth Sidious in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace

Though in defense of Obama/Darth Tedious, Palpatine didn't have 20 years of influence from a kooky religion being drummed into his head telling him how horrible his country was...

Ker-Thump. Another One Under The Bus

The Obama campaign finds yet another Muslim to squash under the wheels of the bus... or would that be sucked into the engines of his customized airliner?

Whichever mode of transportation you prefer, Obama has one more Muslim supporter sucking bitter exhaust fumes:

Mazen Asbahi, a Chicago lawyer who had been appointed to help Obama reach out to Muslims, stepped down on Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported late last night.

The paper had inquired about his relationship with Jamal Said, who served on a board with Asbahi in 2000 that is a subsidiary of the North American Islamic Trust, which holds titles to mosques, Islamic centers, schools, and other real estate around the country. Said had been named in an investigation of alleged Hamas fund-raisers, which ended in a mistrial last year, the paper reported.

"I am stepping down from the volunteer role I recently agreed to take on with the Obama campaign as Arab-American and Muslim American coordinator in order to avoid distracting from Barack Obama's message of change," Ashabi wrote in a statement Obama's campaign staff released last night.

Unlike some of some of the previous grill-marked victims of the Bus List, Ashabi has ties to groups possibly related to terrorism, and divorcing himself from terrorists is something we should encourage Obama to do more often in the future.

As it stands however, the two domestic terrorists that helped jump-start Barack Obama's political career with a fundraiser he attended at their home are still clinging to the bumper.

A Curious Attraction

The Democratic National Committee has decided to lash out against the McCain campaign, unwisely stumbling down a path I predicted yesterday with a Mac vs. P.C. on Oil satire.

They've launched a new campaign to link John McCain to "big oil," blithely ignoring the fact that their campaign was prebunked before it saw the light of day. They also chose to ignore the fact that the middle class and working class that makes up their base are the owners of the oil companies, with their pensions tied up in oil company stocks. When Democrats attack, these companies, they're attacking the retirement plans of average Americans.

There is also the pesky little detail of Obama himself taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions for oil-industry related individuals as well. With this their best idea, it has become rather obvious why Howard Dean flamed out as spectacularly as he did during his abortive presidential run.

But that is neither here, not there.

The DNC has new goodies online, from buttons to bumper stickers to yard signs.

Notice a common thread in all of them?

Yes, a no doubt unconscious attraction to that infamous symbol that frames the murderous live's work of Che, Lenin, Mao, and Stalin, the communist red star, first in their blessed revolutionary hearts and coming to a bumper sticker near you!

Being ever helpful, I took their campaign logo to it's logical conclusion.

Who's the Stuffy Old Candidate?

While the Paris Hilton response to John McCain's ad mocking Barack Obama as a man simply famous for being famous is something some people have actually spent time analyzing (Ann Althouse's readers have done a great deal), and the response is dismissive of Obama— Hilton wisely only refers to him as "the other guy," though I'm sure Timmy Noah, Max Blumenthal and David Gergen will find racial overtones in that as the well—the lasting effect of the ad will be based on how the two Presidential campaigns reacted.

Obama's campaign reacted with a huffy "Whatever," while McCain's camp quickly embraced it, and used it to execute a bit of political judo, noting that even a vacuous blonde starlet of no special talents has crafted an energy plan more viable than Obama's.

The old man showed an ability to laugh at himself and roll with the punches, while a humorless and stiff Obama campaign showed itself unable handle even a playful needling.

McCain may have the chronological advantage in age, but Obama's stiff old fogey routine turned this bit of unexpected theater into a clear McCain camp win.

Some words of advice for the Obama camp, courtesy of Sgt Hulka.

"Lighten up, Francis."

Global Warming Fauxtography?

Brian Ledbetter of Snapped Shot passed this along, a draft report from a global warming group that was too lazy to find an image of a flooded home that suited their ethos, and instead purchased a stock Photoshop creation to better sell their alarmism to the McMansion set.

If they put such little work in the images, it you wonder how much effort they put into the science of the report, doesn't it?

False Post-tenses?

According to author Ron Suskind (who shockingly, is trying to sell a book to the "Bushitler" base) the Bush Administration ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a document that would be used as false pretenses to help justify the Iraq War.

According to Suskind, the forged letter written to justify the invasion was released in December, 2003.

But the war began 9 months prior to the release of the document in the media, meaning they would have forged a document they didn't use for its intended purpose.

His "false pretenses" motive is obviously wrong.

"Jeremiah Wright In a Skirt"

Barack Obama's radical allies just keep cropping up:

While the media hounded Wright for his anti-American rants and while presidential hopeful Senator Barack Hussein Obama divorced him as his personal pastor, Obama’s head will be crowned by Leah Daughtry, who ardently believes in the same Marxist "Black Liberation Theology" preached by Wright.

As noted in more detail in a New York Times profile, Daughtry is Howard Dean's Chief of Staff and is running the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

The part-time pastor preaches in a church with a call for slave reparations posted in the sanctuary, on a banner reading, "They Owe Us" (but perhaps not as much as she owes D.C.).

As for her theological roots:

...Leah, who was raised according to a strict religious code that forbid females to wear pants, lipstick or makeup, took part in the protests at the age of 13. Her eyes brightened when she recalled those demonstrations and the assorted groups that joined together to give them strength, just as her voice took on extra passion when she discussed black liberation theology and the writing of James Cone.

It was this writing that Jeremiah Wright, Obama's longtime pastor, cited to support the sermons that led Obama to cut ties with Wright in April. Daughtry didn’t want to comment on the sudden distance Obama put between himself and his pastor, except to say that it pained her to see such a meaningful and private relationship come to such a public and distorted end. But she didn't put any distance between herself and Cone's book "A Black Theology of Liberation, " which she suggested I read and which relies on the words of Malcolm X to make its religious arguments. "Some may find it disconcerting, " she replied, when I asked if she feared driving away voters by standing behind ideas that could be deemed radical. "But they are far outnumbered by Americans who are concerned about the disparities. At the basis of black liberation theology is the understanding that God has a special place in His heart for those at the bottom of the ladder. " All colors are clinging there, she said, and went on to talk about the hegemony of corporations, the oppression of the people. " The right of self-determination is the concern. If I do all the right things, I will live a full and abundant life — this should be true. But it's not. Something's wrong with the equation. Americans may not call this liberation theology, but they have the sense that things aren't fair."

That's one way of spinning it.

Cone is known for radical views, arguing in the preface of A Black Theology of Liberation, "There will be no peace in America until whites begin to hate their whiteness, asking from the depths of their being: 'How can we become black?'"

Cone formed the core of Black Liberation Theology in the vitriol of Malcolm X and the militant Black Power movement, justifying the righteousness of a one-sided hate.

As Stanley Kurtz documented:

While Cone asserts that blacks hate whites, he denies that this hatred is racism. Black racism, says Cone, is "a myth created by whites to ease their guilt feelings." Black hatred of whites is simply a legitimate reaction to "oppression, insult, and terror." Cone derides accusations of black racism as a mere "device of white liberals."

Indeed, one of the most striking features of Black Theology and Black Power is its strident attack on white liberals. According to Cone, "when white do-gooders are confronted with the style of Black Power, realizing that black people really place them in the same category with the George Wallaces, they react defensively, saying, 'It's not my fault' or 'I am not responsible.'" But Cone insists that white, liberal do-gooders are every bit as responsible as the most dyed-in-the-wool segregationists. Well before it became a cliche, Cone boldly set forth the argument for institutional racism--the notion that "racism is so embedded in the heart of American society that few, if any, whites can free themselves from it."

The liberal's favorite question, says Cone, is "What can I do?" He replies that, short of turning radical and putting their lives on the line behind a potentially violent revolution, liberals can do nothing.

Presumably, Cone would view Obama's domestic terrorist friends Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn as "good" liberals.

The real liberal question to blacks, says Cone, is "What can I do and still receive the same privileges as other whites and--this is the key--be liked by Negroes?" Again, he answers, "Nothing." To prove it, he pointedly dismisses the original bogus white liberal, Abraham Lincoln, who after all was more concerned with holding the Union together than with ending slavery.

For Cone, the deeply racist structure of American society leaves blacks with no alternative but radical transformation or social withdrawal. So-called Christianity, as commonly practiced in the United States, is actually the racist Antichrist. "Theologically," Cone affirms, "Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man 'the devil.'"

James Cone informs us that the white man is the Devil... or close enough to it. What's more, he does not believe we can atone for the apparent sin of being born white. Barack and Michelle Obama found a comfortable church home for 20 years in a congregation devoted to this man's toxic home-brewed theology, as so demonstrated in bombastic, often racial terms by their pastor and mentor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

We're now approaching Obama's presumed coronation in Denver, and find that this convention is being anchored by not just an adherent, but a pastor of the same warped theology. Obama, Wright, Cone, and Daughtry share a values system that holds capitalism to be oppressive, and socialism as the way beyond racism.

Democrats proudly boast that they are the "big tent" party. Perhaps it's time they start consider being a bit more selective.

Mac & P.C. On Oil

"Hi. I'm P.C."

"And I'm Mac."

"Uh, aren't you a television host? Didn't I see you on QVC?"

"Yes. And no."

"Racist."

"Excuse me?"

"Sorry. It's reflexive at this point."

"Color me... aw never mind."

"Senator McCain, so glad that you could join us. Care to explain to everyone how you're in the pocket of 'big oil?' Hmmmm?"

"Yes. And no."

"What is it with all you bald-headed white people?"

"Excuse me?"

"'Yes. And no.' Why don't you just admit that you sold your soul to the oil companies, like I said in my ad?"

"Because it isn't true. You grossly inflated individual contributions, which by the way, you miscast as corporate contributions, which we didn't take..."

"Distractions."

"...and you neglected to mention that you took almost $400,000 for individuals in the oil industry for yourself."

"Uh...Distractions?"

"As far as it goes, however, I don't mind representing the interests of what you call 'big oil.'"

"See? Always trust in me."

"Hold your water, sunshine. What I mean is that I represent the people who make up the average shareholders and investors in oil companies."

"Fat cat Republicans?"

"No. I'm talking about the union workers, the teachers, the state government employees and small businesses that have their pensions invested in oil company stocks.

You know the majority of oil company stocks are held in retirement portfolios of average Americans right?"

"Uh, no they aren't."

"Yeah. You didn't know that, did you?"

"Umm, David Gergen said only rich people own oil company stocks."

"No he didn't. He said my Moses ad mocking your divinity was racial code calling you 'uppity.'"

"Ah, that's right."

"Though he probably thinks those 'rich' teachers, unionized workers, and other people who might not vote for you are calling you 'uppity' too. Truth be told, I think he's a bit 'touched' in the head."

"That much time with the Clintons will do that to a man."

"True dat."

"What?"

"True dat?"

"What does that mean?"

"I have no idea."

"But I hear you're doing good with your fund-raising."

"I'm wildly popular."

"So you've said before. I ran into one of your big contributors just the other day in fact."

"Them asses love me."

"Did you mean 'The masses love me"?"

"Sure. What ever floats your yacht."

"Boat."

"Distractions."

"So did you want to meet him?"

"I'm not really the touchy, feely kind.. it's why I like Internet contributions so much."

"We Love you Barack!"

"Um, err..."

"My brother and I are huge fans!"

"And huge donors."

"Um..."

"We love you Barack!"

"I'm not supposed to be seen with..."

"And why is that?"

"Because stupid, racist crack— because, bitter, clin— Aw, Hell. Because some stupid people think I'm Muslim."

"But you aren't."

"So? It doesn't matter whether things are true or not. You just have to convince people that the lies are the truth."

"Do tell."

"Come on, McCain. You've been in national politics a lot longer than my 143 days. You know we have to lie to the people to get elected. Some of us more than others, but still..."

"Go on...."

"And all I need is to get them to believe until November. And he doesn't help."

"I can haz Jerusalem?"

"Not this time around."

"Then I'm shutting down the phone banks!"

"Well, let's not do anything rash..."

"'Hope' and 'Change,' Senator Obama?"

"'Change' doesn't fuel my jet, McCain."

"Indeed."

B5ers Go Discovery Channel

At great risk to their "street cred" as milbloggers, Blake "Laughing Wolf" Powers and Jim " Uncle Jimbo" Hanson are trying out for hosting duties of a new Discovery Channel show, Blow Crap Up.

Actually, the show is titled Super Testing, but I think my description is more accurate.

Anyway, this is what they're looking for:

We’re looking for someone who is:

* In his late 30s to early 40s.

* Smart – he needs to be credible in his interactions with scientists and engineers. Science, stuntman, or engineering background is a strong plus. He does not have to be an "expert" in science or engineering per se, but should grasp the science or engineering concepts at least well enough to ask the kind of intelligent questions that our intelligent viewers appreciate.

* Tough, but an "Everyman" – He should be credible dealing with military officials, mechanics, pilots, test subjects – the whole range of folks who build things and sometimes blow things up all in the name of progress. Military, construction, or mechanical engineering background is a strong plus. He should come off as knowledgeable but likeable – and definitely a man's man.

* Charismatic, but not too "hosty" – He should be able to explain the who-what-where-when-how of the testing in a clear, direct, and always conversational way. We need someone who seems comfortable in his own skin and comfortable on camera. But he should also be comfortable letting the light shine on the real stars of the show – the people who he encounters, who make "super testing" a reality.

Do either of these guys fit the bill? If you think they do, you can vote for Laughing Wolf here, or Uncle Jimbo here.

Have at it, kids.

Race Card Solitare

If McCain's comparisons of Barack Obama and Paris Hilton are offensive, the Democratic nominee should start by blaming the person who first made that comparison.

Himself.

And in context:

There's nothing exotic or complicated about how phenoms are made in Washington, and, more to the point, how they are broken.

"Andy Warhol said we all get our 15 minutes of fame," says Barack Obama. "I've already had an hour and a half. I mean, I'm so overexposed, I'm making Paris Hilton look like a recluse."

The new senator from Illinois is dazzling another venue, in this case the Gridiron Club. It is early December and Obama won't start his new job for a few weeks. But he comes well steeped in the basic physics of hype.

"Well steeped in the basic physics of hype"?

RACIST!

(Big hat tip to Seton Motley of Newsbusters.org)

The Compassion of the Progressive Left

That saddest thing about reader reaction to Raw Story's article about Bob Novak's retirement due to a "dire" brain tumor diagnosis?

These are their moderated comments.

The Pain Tool

How arrogant is Nancy Pelosi in making this statement?

"We have a planet to save. We have an economy to grow," Pelosi said on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos". "And we can do that if we keep our balance in all of this and not just say but for drilling in unprotected and these protected areas offshore, we would have lower gas prices."

In what alternate reality do Democrats believe that continued reliance on the building of oil rigs in third-world nations is better for the planet than building much cleaner, greener oil rigs off our shores?

We're going to need the oil regardless of where it comes from, and the Democrat-led Congress is conceding the chance to "go green" by switching as much of our consumption as possible to domestic extraction methods we can control. Pelosi isn't saving the planet, she is forfeiting a unique opportunity in this nation's history to help create an environmentally-friendly domestic conventional energy market.

But then, Pelosi isn't trying to save the planet, she's trying to drive up prices. She and other liberal democrats are hoping to force us to concede to their desire for funding more R&D into alternative energy sources that do not yet exist. In effect, she wants us to put a substantial amount of our eggs in a basket that hasn't been built yet, and starve for years to come while it is being constructed, and hope that it works.

And they say Democrats don't support faith-based initiatives.

Which brings us to the second point, our economy. How can we grow an economy when Democrats are doing all they can to put a stranglehold on the extraction of fuels and development of energy sources that makes it run?

It is devastatingly clear that Democrats are purposefully crippling the economy by refusing to take steps to lower conventional energy prices, and indeed, are taking steps to make our energy concerns become a crisis by habitually and continually challenging attempts to extract proven domestic energy sources, and challenging attempts to upgrade or build new power plants. They want us to panic, and agree to fund new, unproven energy sources and technologies under duress.

That isn't democracy. That's extortion.

As for prices, elementary students can readily grasp the concept that raw materials acquired locally are going to be cheaper that paying the same globally-set prices for that material, and then paying the costs of having to ship them halfway around the world... but again, this isn't a concern for this crop of Congressional Democrats. They view your pain view it as a tool to wrest concessions from you.

So much for all the empty rhetoric about caring about the middle class.

CY Commenter "Matt" related this experience on The Economy Killers thread last week:

Ya know something?

Ive been going through a program called troops2roughnecks. It is a class put on by the troops transition team.

Well we had our first class today, and I learned an interesting tidbit of information that the politicians seem to ignore.

Like any big business, oil and drilling companies do things with tactical intent. Back in the 70s and 80s the drilling companies drilled thousands and thousands of oil and natural gas wells off the coast of the US, then capped them. They do this because they, and everyone else, knows that business is an investment. So you drill and cap, then when market price rises you extract. That way you did a bulk of the work at a lower price. Then the ban was enacted, so these wells sat and were not exploited.

Now we are looking at the ban being lifted.

According to the instructor who has over thirty years of experience in the oil fields, and has worked in everything from a routabout to CEO claims that the oil (and these are proven wells) can be turned over to market within six months. SIX MONTHS!

According to him, there were over 3000 wells dug in the Gulf, around a thousand dug off the coast of California, and between 500 and a thousand dug off the east coast. He says that something like 90% of them were proven oil.

So is there someone in the oil industry who out there can confirm or deny what this guy told Matt on the record? Are there thousands of proven and capped oil and natural gas wells off our coasts that can be producing a flow of domestic energy in months, that Nancy Pelosi and our Democrat-led Congress are stone-walling?

Activists: Killing Animals is Bad, Targeting Researcher's Family with Firebombs is "Necessary"

All my friends on the left were outraged by the Tennessee church attack last week because of the reasons for the attack cited by the deranged shooter. They (not law enforcement) subsequently labeled the shooting "domestic terrorism."

I'm sure they will issue equally ferocious condemnations of this attack shortly.

The FBI today is expected to take over the investigation of the Saturday morning firebombings of a car and of a Westside home belonging to two UC Santa Cruz biomedical researchers who conduct experiments on animals.

Santa Cruz police officials said Sunday the case will be handed to the FBI to investigate as domestic terrorism while local authorities explore additional security measures for the 13 UCSC researchers listed in a threatening animal-rights pamphlet found in a downtown coffee shop last week.

[snip]

While a spokesman said he didn't know who committed the act, the Woodland Hills-based Animal Liberation Front called the attacks a "necessary" act, just like those who fought against civil rights injustices. Spokesman Dr. Jerry Vlasak showed no remorse for the family or children who were targeted.

"If their father is willing to continue risking his livelihood in order to continue chopping up animals in a laboratory than his children are old enough to recognize the consequences," said Vlasak, a former animal researcher who is now a trauma surgeon. "This guy knows what he is doing. He knows that every day that he goes into the laboratory and hurts animals that it is unreasonable not to expect consequences."

You heard the man. According to our learned left-wing doctor, researchers that are trying to get an understanding of how the brain works deserve to have their children burned to death.

The local police captain was less than impressed.

Clark, the Santa Cruz police captain, said it was "unconscionable" for anyone to defend such acts: "To put this on par with any of the human rights issues is an absolute insult to the integrity of the people who fought and went through the human rights movement. This is what people do when they have an inability to articulate their point in any constructive way. They resort to primal acts of violence. Any reasonable person would need a logic transplant to begin to understand this level of degraded thinking."

Degraded thinking? From the animal rights crowd?

Surely, you can't be serious.

Herbert's Hissy Fit

Bob Herbert is not happy:

Gee, I wonder why, if you have a black man running for high public office — say, Barack Obama or Harold Ford — the opposition feels compelled to run low-life political ads featuring tacky, sexually provocative white women who have no connection whatsoever to the black male candidates.

In addition to being unhappy, Herbert's also a purposefully dishonest hack—Harold Ford was linked to "tacky, sexually provocative white women" because he infamously attended a Playboy Superbowl Party, as Accuracy in Media hammered home:

He [Ford] was at an event where scantily-clad women were featured attractions. How can a Democrat, a member of a political party that caters to feminists, defend that?

Would it have been accurate to depict the Playboy-type model in the ad as black? Anybody who takes a passing glance at Playboy knows that the vast majority of the "models"―the Playmates or Playboy Bunnies―are white. By chance, I was flipping through my cable channels the other night and came upon a show on the E! channel titled "The Girls Next Door," featuring Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and his current crop of Playboy "girlfriends." All of his girlfriends are white. A quick visit to the Playboy website finds no black models at all.

So an ad featuring a white and blonde Playboy-like floozy, saying, "I met Harold at the Playboy party," is quite accurate, regardless of whether Ford is black or white. But desperate pro-Democratic Party liberal media figures want to find something despicable in a commercial that is based on a simple truth.

Likewise, it is a simple truth that like Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, Barack Obama is famous primarily for being famous.

During his short time as a state legislator in Illinois, he accomplished very little of note and arguably less than many of his state office peers. Not even through his first term as a U.S. Senator, Obama is running for President based upon even less. He has not been able to establish himself as anything other than a Senate backbencher, has pushed through no bills of national significance, failed at consensus building, and has proven to be unwilling or unable to reach across the aisle to build bi-partisan support.

Like Britney Spears, Obama is great on stage, and a trainwreck of non-stop gaffes when left unattended by handlers. Like Paris Hilton, Barack Obama is famous, but no one can precisely explain why he is famous. He has risen to astronomical heights based on "buzz" instead of accomplishments, and if he falls in November, is likely to never be heard from again.

He is nothing more or less than a political pop star.

Bob Herbert, of course, doesn't want to admit this fact. Like so many who have peddled to Obama's defense, his greatest fear is that Barack Obama might be judged by the content of his character... or his lack thereof.

Obama's Netroots Supporters Continue "Blog Burning"

Let's Party Like It's 1933.

Tell me once more how progressives love free speech.

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Its the same message Concrete Bob received and Rosemary posted for him.

This is bulls**t as it appears that someone does not approve of the idea of free speech especially when the speech doesn't conform to their ideas.

Online activists thought to be loyal to Barack Obama are once against using Google's software tools to target rival political blogs for elimination as spam blogs. This occurred earlier this year when Democratic bloggers with a preference for Hillary Clinton also found themselves locked out of their own blogs, all because of spurious and apparently orchestrated claims that these blogs are spam blogs. Pro-Obama activists were blamed for those attempts at censorship as well.

Like John at Argghhh!, I don't think for a second that the Obama campaign has any official knowledge of this attempt to hamstring or terminate rival political viewpoints, but as Obama once won an election by exercising procedural tricks to have his rivals thrown off the ballot, it is certainly in line with the kind of character he has displayed in the past.

Update: Republican revolt in "Pelosi's Politburo."

Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats fled the House of Representatives, turning off the microphones and the lights as Republicans continued to debate energy policy without them.

They seem to be having loads of fun with it:

Rep Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) just pretended to be a Democrat. He stood on the other side of the chaber and listed all of the GOP bills that the Dems killed.

He then said "I am a Democrat and here is my energy plan" and he held up a picture of an old VW Bug with a sail attached to it. He paraded around he house floor with the sign while the crowd cheered.

Update: Drat! Another good 2-minute hate down the toilet.

08/02/08 Update: As noted in the Instapundit link above posted yesterday, the lockout is not targeted at specific sites, but is widespread.

From Blogger's Blogger Buzz:

We've noticed that a number of users have had their blogs mistakenly marked as spam, and wanted to sound off real quick to let you know that, despite it being Friday afternoon, we are working hard to sort this out. So to those folks who have received an email saying that your blog has been classified as spam and can't post right now, we offer our sincere apologies for the trouble.

I jumped the gun when I accepted emailed claims from some of my fellow bloggers without verifying them independently , and I apologize.

The Economy Killers

Welcome to a preview of your future, now.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have recessed Congress without passing a single appropriations bill, and the WSJ informs us that this is the first time that has happened since the 1950s.

They've effectively shutdown Congress, because of one simple reason: despite a steady increase in global demand that assures energy prices will continue a relentless rise in the long term, they refuse to allow any new domestic energy production.

Oil.

Natural Gas.

Coal.

Nuclear.

It doesn't matter. We have it, we need it, but Democrats don't want us to tap it, dig it, drill it, or use it. They feel that it is their responsibility to force Americans into using unproven energy sources, many of which are still on the drawing board. They will simply starve the nation's economy of our current resources, forcing every higher energy prices, forcing us to try to migrate to energy sources we don't yet have and which may not work, relying on an infrastructure that hasn't been built, and which may cost trillions.

Nancy Pelosi wants you to pay ten dollars for a gallon of gas. You'll be forced to drive a smaller car, restrict your travel, and use less carbon-producing fuels.

Harry Reid wants fewer coal and nuclear-fired electricity plants, and to charge you ever more for your air conditioning, your cooking, your electronics, your necessities, and your toys.

You'll payer higher costs on everything—food, clothes, medicines—and those higher costs will be passed along to businesses. Those businesses may have to start laying off all but critical personnel, and those surviving businesses will pass along the higher prices of their products and services to you, if you still among those who have a job.

You'll be forced to cut back on usage, or consider pouring money into expensive more energy-efficient appliances and home upgrades to "save" the environment and what remains of your bank account. So much for that college fund for your kids, or saving for your retirement, or having money set aside for family emergencies or illnesses.

How bad do you think it will get if Barack Obama, the untested progressive freshman Senator who seems to think he is running a coronation instead of a campaign, is elected President?

Do you think think that the exalted candidate of the fringe left environmental movement and Friend of Gore is going to suddenly shift towards a common-sense energy policy if elected? He doesn't have one now, so why would he change when he was the unwavering support of global warming truthers and a unified far left Congress behind him?

Of course, this may not be an issue for you. You may not mind adjusting to newer, smaller vehicles that cost more and can do less. You might think that the increased taxes are worth it. You may have extra money in your home budget that you would otherwise waste on frivolous things if not required to use them to pay for necessities like natural gas and electricity. I'm thrilled for you. Really. I am.

But for those of us who don't have extra money laying around in piles, this should be your wake up call.

New "Distraction" Alert: Obama Accused of Collecting $24,321.41 From Gaza Strip

Which is illegal if true, but the illegality of foreign campaign contributions well over the $2300 individual limit pales in comparison with the probability that the vast sum of money most likely would have come from Hamas, a terrorist group that had endorsed Obama earlier in the year.

For his part, Obama has publicly maintained that while he "understands" Hamas' view of him, he will not meet with them (Obama campaign advisor Rob Malley resigned in May for meeting with Hamas).

It may also be worth noting that Obama's church of 20 years, Trinity United Church of Christ, reprinted an article in their July 22, 2007 church bulletin by Hamas official Moussa Abu Marzook, denying Israel's right to exist (Obama has since severed ties with the church).

Obama has been consistent in condemning Hamas and defending Israel's military responses to rocket attacks.

Apparently, that message hasn't been received in Gaza.