One of the perks of having a newborn at home is that I can sometimes multitask rocking the little man and watching big boys play football on tv. On the downside- even with a DVR set up- I have to see some of the mass media advertisements.
The part of it that really stinks is how sports programming has totally sold out the young. The NCAA should ban alcohol and sexually-suggestive ads on all collegiate sporting event coverage. Sports is about play, play is about kids, but we live in a society that has most things completely backwards when it comes to moral values promotion. Sports- even collegiate sports is about MONEY- and even though many guys complain about the salaries of professional athletes or college coaches- they still fork out big money to go see the games- and apparently they buy the cheap beer and “Go Daddy” soft porn. So- sports is NOT about the kids because their dads and moms have made it so- the last pro football game I attended was back in the 1970’s. If I had to watch games without a DVR, I don’t think I’d watch much other than Ohio State football games. I am not a purist/protester, I have some inconsistencies to be sure. But I am not going to be happy when my boys are older and we are watching a game and a bunch of sex/alcohol message ads begin their unholy parade in my living room- am I going to have more teachable moments than ‘enjoy the game’ moments to share with my kids, just because we want to watch some game on TV?
Friday evening President Obama addressed the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. At around 22:30, he incorporates part of the preamble of The Declaration of Independence, removing “Creator”.
“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal….. endowed with certain unalienable rights, life and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”
After President Obama says “created equal…”, there is a long pause during which he scowls and blinks several times. For once, he may actually have opted to not read something that was on the teleprompter. Is looks like he is disgusted and decided it would be better not to read what the preamble actually says.
President Obama, if our Creator is not the purveyor of our human rights, then who is? The government?
President Obama’s back to school speech contained blatant lies…and if there were any students not bright enough to notice that they were hearing lies, the lies, in their particular cases, were, ironically, bigger lies. Check it out:
“Nobody gets to write your destiny but you. Your future is in your hands. Your life is what you make of it. And nothing — absolutely nothing — is beyond your reach, so long as you’re willing to dream big, so long as you’re willing to work hard. So long as you’re willing to stay focused on your education, there is not a single thing that any of you cannot accomplish, not a single thing. I believe that.”
If you believe that, you are so dumb that your chances of controlling your own destiny are especially small. But it’s absurd to tell kids that if only they dream big, work hard, and get an education, they can have anything they want. Do you know what kind of dream job kids today have? A recent Marist poll showed that 32% would like to be an actor/actress. 29% want to be a professional athlete. 13% want to be President of the United States. That’s not going to happen.
Even young people with more modest dreams — like getting a decent law job after getting good grades at an excellent law school — are not getting what they want. To say “nothing — absolutely nothing — is beyond your reach” is a blatant lie, and Barack Obama knows that very well…
…Does [Obama] look at a poor person and say, his life is what he made it? Of course not.
One of the interesting (by which I mean dull, predictable and repetitive) aspects of the 24 hour news cycle is that all forms of media have incentives to magnify and actively seek out controversy. Not only does this increase ratings/page views/newspaper sales, it provides media outlets with something – anything in a slow news month – to talk about. I can’t help but feel that the recent outburst of commentary about the construction of a mosque near the site of the 9/11 attacks is the type of story designed to increase media consumption and accomplish little else. The First Amendment is not in dispute here; freedom of religion is well established and protected by settled case law. Furthermore, the proposed mosque is to be constructed on private property, and there is no legal reason to challenge its construction. And so most of the discussion revolves (and frequently devolves) around taste and symbolism.
Hattip to Allahpundit at Hot Air. Well that didn’t take long. I have discussed here the disastrous interview that Charles Bolden had with Al Jazeera in which he stated that the foremost policy goal of NASA under the Obama administration was to reach out to Muslim nations and raise their self-esteem as to their contributions regarding science, math and engineering.
“When I became the NASA administrator — or before I became the NASA administrator — he charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering.”
It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that I hold President Obama in very low regard. I believe he is a man completely out of his depth, has shown little leadership, has sponsored fiscal and economic policies that are disastrous for the country, and is an enthusiastic supporter of abortion. It may come as a surprise to some of our readers that I believe one of Obama’s critics should be fired from his job.
General Stanley McChrystal is the head of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan. He unwisely agreed to be interviewed for a story about him in Rolling Stones. The article may be read here. In the article the General is fairly uncomplimentary about Obama and most of the Obama officials he has encountered:
When Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, he immediately set out to deliver on his most important campaign promise on foreign policy: to refocus the war in Afghanistan on what led us to invade in the first place. “I want the American people to understand,” he announced in March 2009. “We have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.” He ordered another 21,000 troops to Kabul, the largest increase since the war began in 2001. Taking the advice of both the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he also fired Gen. David McKiernan – then the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan – and replaced him with a man he didn’t know and had met only briefly: Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It was the first time a top general had been relieved from duty during wartime in more than 50 years, since Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War.
Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked “uncomfortable and intimidated” by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn’t go much better. “It was a 10-minute photo op,” says an adviser to McChrystal. “Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. Here’s the guy who’s going to run his f—–g war, but he didn’t seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.” Read the rest of this entry »
Last night you gave an address using the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as an opportunity to pontificate about many subjects. I am afraid that far from convincing me you are leading the federal government well in this disaster, you have removed beyond a doubt your indifference to the state of Louisiana. Since you rarely visited the state before the disaster (even when the un-repaired damage done by Hurricane Katrina should have called your attention), perhaps I, as a resident of this great state, can explain what you obviously don’t understand.
Solicitor General Elena Kagan, President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, is already being painted as a moderate by the media and some political interest groups. This portrayal of Kagan is difficult to dispute comprehensively because of her lack of a public record and accompanying statements that delineate her actual personal views on judicial philosophy, thus, complicating the venture of placing her on an ideological spectrum.
Despite this hermeneutical difficulty, allegedly confident political portraits have been made with the details that we do know about Elena Kagan. TheNew York Times on May 11 published a piece—“As Clinton Aide, Kagan Recommended Tactical Support for an Abortion Ban”—by Peter Baker discussing a memorandum authored by Kagan while she was working for the Clinton Administration. Kagan in the memo counseled President Clinton to support an amendment, authored by Senator Tom Daschle (D-SD), to Republican-sponsored legislation to ban partial-birth abortion that would include an exception for the “health” of the pregnant women in a ban—so broad an exception that it could be easily employed as a loophole that would prevent few, if any, partial-birth abortion procedures.
President Clinton and his advisors (in this case, Kagan) anticipated that the Daschle amendment would not secure enough votes to pass, but White House support could provide enough political cover for Democratic lawmakers who could reiterate their alleged support of the partial-birth abortion ban, but justify their vote against it because of the lack of inclusion of the broad “health” exception for the pregnant woman. In the end, the Daschle amendment failed and the Republican-sponsored partial-birth abortion ban, endorsed by the National Right to Life, was successfully sent to President Clinton who consequently vetoed it. Kagan’s advice to the President was successful and held up the passage of a partial-birth abortion ban for six years.
Douglas Johnson, the legislative director of the National Right to Life, before a joint-hearing before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and the Constitution Subcommittee of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee in 1997 said:
“The Clinton-Daschle proposal is a political construct, designed to provide political cover for lawmakers who want to appear to their constituents as if they have voted to restrict partial-birth abortions, while actually voting for a hollow measure that is not likely to prevent a single partial-birth abortion, and which therefore is inoffensive to the pro-abortion lobby.”
In other words, a better reading of the facts is not that Kagan is “in the middle” on abortion, but rather she was advising President Clinton of the pragmatic steps (endorsing a pseudo-ban on partial birth abortion) needed to defeat the actual pro-life measure. Kagan may very well be a “legal progressive” as was recently claimed from the White House defending the nominee from the political left suspicious of her liberal credentials. Read the rest of this entry »
From the only reliable source of news on the net, The Onion. I have to disagree with the Onion on this one. Whenever I want to find out what is really going on at a courthouse, I talk to the bailiffs, clerks, guards and, yes, janitors.
In recent months, primarily due to the health care debate, much attention has been given to the contentious issue of public funding of abortion. Though it is true that the status quo, for the most part, has been not to directly subsidize abortion, Americans have been both directly and indirectly subsidizing abortion in a number of ways virtually since its legalization in 1973. Read the rest of this entry »
My friend Jay Anderson at Pro Ecclesia takes the clueless David Brooks, a “conservative” commentator who endorsed Obama in 2008, to the verbal woodshed.
… The center has been losing political power pretty much my entire career. But I confess that about 16 months ago I had some hope of a revival. The culture war, which had bitterly divided the country for decades, was winding down. The war war — the fight over Iraq and national security — was also waning.
The country had just elected a man who vowed to move past the old polarities, who valued discussion and who clearly had some sympathy with both the Burkean and Hamiltonian impulses. He staffed his administration with brilliant pragmatists whose views overlapped with mine, who differed only in that they have more faith in technocratic planning.
Yet things have not worked out for those of us in the broad middle. Politics is more polarized than ever. The two parties have drifted further to the extremes. The center is drained and depressed.
What happened?
History happened. The administration came into power at a time of economic crisis. This led it, in the first bloom of self-confidence, to attempt many big projects all at once. Each of these projects may have been defensible in isolation, but in combination they created the impression of a federal onslaught…
Yeah, that’s it – “History happened”. What a bilious load of vomitous nonsense and absolute crap!
How about this for a REAL explanation, Mr. Pantcrease Admirer:
All the “post-partisan” posing was a lie. You KNEW it was a lie, but WANTED to believe the lie, so you CHOSE to believe it. You then aided and abetted the lie by writing glowingly of the “moderate” credentials of a man who had NEVER exhibited one iota of political centrism in his entire (albeit short and unremarkable) political career, all the while trashing the REAL centrist in the race who, ironically, you had up until then spent the previous 8 years heralding, fellating, and otherwise trying to foist upon the rest of us.
Meanwhile, all us yokels out here in Jesusland saw right through the lie and chose NOT to believe it. For that, you belittled us, called us a “cancer”, questioned our intelligence and intellectual curiosity, and treated us as generally inferior to your more sophisticated and urbane sensibilities. Maybe the “uneducated class” is a whole lot smarter and more politically astute than the coastal elites in the “educated class” give us credit for. At the very least, it appears that the riff-raff are a whole helluva lot smarter than you are.
I wish if they were going to quote the South Side Messiah and set his text to music, they could have picked something less banal.
Perhaps a simple hymn like this to the tune of the East is Red.
The country is blue, the sun is rising.
America has brought forth a Barack Obama.
He works for the people’s welfare.
Hurrah, He is the people’s great savior!
Barack Obama loves the people.
He is our guide
To build a new America.
Hurrah, he leads us forward!
The Democrat Party is like the sun.
Wherever it shines, it is bright.
Wherever there is a Democrat Party,
Hurrah, there the people are liberated! Read the rest of this entry »
How I wish such a debate could really be held. The Gipper vs. The South Side Messiah! Reagan succeeded in moving the country politically to the right for decades. Obama is attempting to do the same for a leftward trajectory. Reagan lost 26 seats in the House in 82, but won re-election in 84 with an economy that recovered. Obama is the opposite of Reagan politically, but I assume that he is hoping this history can repeat for him in 12. If he is Machiavellian enough he may even be hoping that the GOP takes control of Congress in the Fall, thereby giving him an opportunity to attack a Republican Congress in 11 and 12. The problem for Obama is that Reagan had a substantial part of the GOP that was completely dedicated to him. I don’t think Obama enjoys that type of authority in his party currently. If the economy continues to be weak, I believe Obama may face a serious primary challenge in 12, something Reagan did not have to worry about in 84. Reagan wasn’t just President, he was the leader of the Conservative movement in the Republican party and had been since 76. Obama enjoys no such unfied support as of now from the Left of his party.
President Obama on Friday attended a dinner at a retreat for House Republicans in Baltimore, MA. The President delivered a speech calling for bipartisanship and following this, there was a Q&A session that played out more as back-and-forth mostly civil, though sometimes heated, arguing. This went on for over an hour!
This was quite interesting considering the almost scripted and narrative (thanks to the mainstream media) nature of American politics. Lucky for the American people, it was televised.
Watching the wrenching news from Haita has been tough but necessary viewing. I couldn’t help but notice a lot of stories of Christian missions rescuing Haitian orphans to bring them to adoptive parents here in the U.S. I also noticed that the Christian adoptive parents crossed over any racial dividing lines and were intensely bonded to these suffering children. In the Christian universe there truly is no more black or white, male or female, in the arena of human dignity.
A sad story coming from Egypt where a father and daughter recently converted from Islam to Christianity. They have been attending a different church each Sunday and have slept in a different home each night in fear of the government.
In Egypt it is illegal to convert to Christianity.
Although I tend to agree with my friend Paul Zummo, the Cranky Conservative, that the State of the Union address is our annual self inflicted ritual of boring torture, I did have the State of the Union on as background noise while I went about other tasks. I was amazed at what a self-indulgent exercise in venting it mostly was. Things haven’t gone Obama’s way, and last night he decided to engage in a little Presidential talk-therapy. The tedious length, reminiscent of some of Bill Clinton’s efforts, indicated that this was an undisciplined opportunity for Obama to lash out at his opponents. Three more years of this should be as much fun for the country as my last root canal was for me.
Two points struck me as particularly odd. Obama telling Democrats in Congress that this was not a time to “head for the hills” in panic over the looming elections. This is the type of statement that he might make to them behind closed doors, but certainly not in a State of the Union address so as to remind the nation that Democrats are in panic mode. Doing so will not calm jittery Democrats in the slightest. The second point was his reopening the issue of gays in the military. I could just hear Blue Dogs from Republican areas thinking, “Well thanks Mr. President for driving another nail in my coffin in November!” Obama has obviously decided that if he is going down, he will do so as a champion of Liberal orthodoxy. I doubt if this will please the Democrat members of Congress more rooted in electoral reality.
Some people on the Left are beginning to understand just what a disaster Obama is turning out to be for them. Go here to read this interesting column by a fellow who can clearly see the electoral iceberg to which Obama is steering. Content advisory: the author is an academic and a Leftist, so there is some jejune profanity
Peaceful protests turned violent as Iranian authorities have authorized deadly force. Thus far there are fifteen (15) reportedly killed in Tehran and four (4) in Tabriz.
More details have filtered in that some Iranian policemen have refused to fire on the protesters. The hated Basiji Militia headquarters is up in flames and more reports of unconfirmed deaths from all over the country of Iran are pouring in view various media outlets.
Among those killed is the nephew of Mir Hossein Moussavi, the leader of the burgeoning opposition as well as the leading vote getter in the last election which was hijacked by the clerical ruling class. Ali Habibi Moussavi, the nephew, was shot in the chest and died at the hospital. Details are still sketchy.
The Islamic Iranian regime has barred all journalists, but pictures and footage have confirmed large demonstrations nationwide that have not been intimidated by the use of violent force.
Some showed huge crowds chanting slogans attacking President Ahmadinejad and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
President Obama has failed to respond to the growing violence in Iran outside of a standard White House response from Washington of a bland condemnation of “violence”. His hesitancy has betrayed many in the Iranian opposition to the point that if there is a regime change the opportunity to build again good relations with Iran diminishes each day as our president dawdles away in his luxurious resort home in Hawaii.
Posted by Tim Shipe 
The American Catholic 