Dood!

I'm sure people have already seen this, but it needs to be seen again!

Just when liberals thought it was safe to start identifying themselves as such, an acclaimed, veteran psychiatrist is making the case that the ideology motivating them is actually a mental disorder. “Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded,” says Dr. Lyle Rossiter, author of the new book, “The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness."

"Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave… The roots of liberalism – and its associated madness – can be clearly identified by understanding how children develop from infancy to adulthood and how distorted development produces the irrational beliefs of the liberal mind… When the modern liberal mind whines about imaginary victims, rages against imaginary villains and seeks above all else to run the lives of persons competent to run their own lives, the neurosis of the liberal mind becomes painfully obvious."

A-yup. There's that old quote "Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think Conservatives are evil." I'm not so sure that I agree with that quote anymore. At this point, I'm beginning to think that the Far Left is not so much stupid as it is insane.

Found at KisP.

Next up in California

A special badge that gun owners will be forced to wear to identify them as such. Phil has a link to a bill that the California state legislature is considering.

On Tuesday, April 8, the Assembly Public Safety Committee will consider legislation that would require gun owners to obtain a “permit-to-purchase” before buying handgun ammunition.

Introduced by State Assembly Member Kevin De Leon (D-45), Assembly Bill 2062 puts ammunition sales in the crosshairs. AB2062 would require that law-abiding gun owners obtain a permit to buy handgun ammunition and would impose severe restrictions on the private transfers of handgun ammunition. Applicants for a “permit-to-purchase” would be required to submit to a background check, pay a $35 fee, and wait as long as 30 days to receive the permit.

Doesn't that make you feel safe? No? Why not? Oh, because criminals don't bother with actually following laws? They get their ammo anyway without a stinking permit? What a shock!

Under AB2062, it would be unlawful to privately transfer more than 50 rounds of ammunition per month, even between family and friends, unless you are registered as a “handgun ammunition vendor” in the Department of Justice’s database. Ammunition retailers would have to be licensed and store ammunition in such a manner that it would be inaccessible to purchasers. The bill would also require vendors to keep a record of the transaction including the ammunition buyer’s name, driver’s license, the quantity, caliber and type of ammunition purchased, and right thumbprint, which would be submitted to the Department of Justice or the number of his handgun ammunition purchase permit. Vendors would be required to contact the purchase permit database, to verify the validity of a permit before completing a sale. All ammunition sales in the State of California would be subject to a $3 per transaction tax. Lastly, mail order ammunition sales would be prohibited.

So, under this bill, if I gave my wife 100 rounds of ammo to go to the range...... I'd be a criminal. 100 rounds is two boxes, folks. That's a decent amount to practice with. The Kalifornia state gummint is just showing it's totalitarian roots, as all Democrat American Communist Party controlled legislatures do in the end. As old Rodger said, "A Socialist is only a Communist without a gun." The policies and laws advocated for by the Left are totalitarian in nature, with the end result being citizens converted into subjects to be ruled over by the elite few who think they know what's good for you.

What, you think I'm kidding? Then please explain the overwhelming amount of nanny-state laws and government control in areas where the Democrat American Communist Party rules unopposed. California. New York City, and I don't give a shit what Nanny Bloomberg calls himself, he's a totalitarian. The Republicans need to kick his ass to the curb. That they haven't done so already shows the depths to which the GOP has sunk. Boston, MA. San Francisco is a petri dish of Leftist ideologies. You want to see what the Left will do when they grab power? Just look at the places they already have the power, and see if you want that where YOU live. Do you want higher taxes? Do you want gun control? Do you want the government to have more and more control over your daily life? What you do and where you do it? Just let the Left gain power, and *poof* your personal freedoms can be gone tomorrow!

And lest anyone think that totalitarians can only be found in the Democrat American Communist Party, think again. A quick scan of the GOP can yield a hoard of totalitarian jerks who belong to the GOP for political convenience; i.e. they couldn't get elected as a Dem, so they call themselves Republicans to get on the ticket. Nanny Bloomberg is the perfect example. Lincoln Chafee was another good example. Arlen Specter from PA. The list goes on. And the GOP accepts these totalitarian assholes for political benefit as well, which just means that the GOP is as corrupt as the Donks.

Remember folks, "POLITICS" is a conglomeration of two words - POLI, from Greek, meaning "many", and TICKS, from English, meaning "blood sucking parasites". Mash them together, and you get POLITICS, meaning "many blood sucking parasites". There's your language lesson for today. You're welcome.

Bookmark this

Copy it, link to it, print it out and spread it around, because this has GOT to leave a mark.

Whereas the Democratic Party has never apologized for their horrific atrocities and racist practices committed against African Americans during the past two hundred years, nor for the residual impact that those atrocities and practices and current soft bigotry of low expectations are having on us today,

Whereas the Democratic Party fought to expand slavery and, after the Civil War, established Jim Crow Laws, Black Codes and other repressive legislation that were designed to disenfranchise African Americans,

Whereas the Ku Klux Klan was the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party, and their primary goal was to intimidate and terrorize African American voters, Republicans who moved South to protect African Americans and any other whites who supported them,

Whereas, according to leading historians (both black and white), the horrific atrocities committed against African Americans during slavery and Reconstruction were financed, sponsored, and promoted by the Democratic Party and their Ku Klux Klan supporters,

And it just keeps going on from there....

Whereas Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka (a 1954 decision by Chief Justice Earl Warren who was appointed by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower) was a landmark civil rights case that was designed to overturn the racist practices that were established by the Democratic Party,

Whereas after Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt received the vote of African Americans, he banned African American newspapers from the military shortly after taking office because he was convinced the newspapers were communists,

Whereas Democratic President John F. Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Law, opposed the 1963 March on Washington by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and was later criticized by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for ignoring civil rights issues.

Whereas Democratic President John F. Kennedy authorized the FBI (supervised by his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy) to investigate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on suspicion of being a communist,

I wonder what would happen if this were left lying around liberal enclaves on either coast? I think I would be able to hear the heads exploding from down here.

Found at KisP.

Is Obama Wright? - Pastor Jeremiah Wright & Senator Barack

As a follow up to:

Vote for Obama or you're a racist!
The Messiah said the hate is your fault......
The fallout for falling short...
Obama's 'Checkers' speech
Barack Hussein Obama's hateful Reverend......3/17/2008 1:58:00 PM...
Obama is a master of the 'BigLie'......3/15/2008 6:54:00 PM...
The 'Rev' of Hate and Mentor to Barack......3/12/2008 6:27:00 PM...

Still busy

For anyone who doesn't know, I'm the choir director for the chapel. No, it's not an official position. No, I don't get paid for it. It's more a case of "Oh hey, you know how to read music? TAG, YOU'RE IT!"

Anyways, for those non-Christians out there, it's Holy Week. Today is Holy Thursday. Tomorrow, Good Friday. Saturday is the Easter Vigil and Sunday is Easter. And I'm the choir director. Which means that by the end of Saturday night, I won't have much of a voice left, and Sunday afternoon is going to be spent drinking beers and telling the rest of the world to go away. Y'see, when you're just in the choir, you can skip a mass or two and rest your voice. The director has to be there for every. Single. Mass. My priest is getting a little sick of seeing me in the chapel. "Dave, what are you still doing here? I saw you hear at lunch!"

Oh, and I'll be eating dark chocolate as well. Not because it's Easter, but because I like chocolate. And maybe I'll have some rum in between beers. Because I like rum too. And I can't get good single malt scotch here to save my life.

So anyways, I'm going to be busy all weekend. And after this weekend, anyone associated with the chapel is going to collapse on their couch and go "Whew! It's over!" Posting is going to be a little bit light until then.

Toodles!

So, feel warmer yet?

No? It's no wonder. Claire and Phil are both playing "Whack-a-Goracle" today, with... *gasp* FACTS! Which we all know the Global Warming cultists can't stand.

The Earth isn't burning up. The oceans aren't going to swamp New York F'n City. We're not all going to die. Although I wouldn't shed too many tears if San Francisco got swamped by a tidal wave.

PFM

That stands for Pure Fucking Magic. Go read this post on KisP, where some doofus in Olympia has multiple orgasms while recounting a dream he had about Obama.

Now, how does PFM work into this? Because it's the only damn way any of this dude's drug-fueled fantasy is ever going to happen:

"We saw black, white, brown, Asian people mixing together in block parties, laughing."

How? PFM! The guy who sat in a church being preached to by a racist who blamed all the country's problems on Whitey ain't gonna make it happen!

"We saw good, quality schools with children happy to be learning."

How? PFM! So far the only thing Obama has suggested is throwing more money at the problem. Gee, that's worked so well in the past, didn't it? We spend more money per student than damn near any other country in the world; I think there's only five or six countries ahead of us in school expenditure. And yet we rank THIRTY-SIXTH in the world in terms of literacy, math, and science.

A whole lot of good that money did, right? Don't change anything else, just add more money. PFM! But Obama just wants to do it again, only HARDER!

Yeah, I stole that last line from Kevin Baker. It fits, so I used it.

"We saw no more crime as the guns had been rid from the streets."

You mean like in Britain? Where despite a total and complete ban on handguns, gun crime just keeps on rising! Total crime keeps on rising? "Hot" burglaries, or break-ins that occur while the occupants of the house are home, just keep on rising! But what makes this idiot think that crime would drop if we got rid of guns? PURE FUCKING MAGIC, that's what! Show me the worst ten crime ridden cities in America, and I'll show you ten cities with gun control. But somehow, Obama is just going to wave his hands and make it happen? PFM!

"We saw no more pollution! The skies were blue, no smog even over LA!"

Pipe dreams again. Tell me, once internal combustion engines are banned, and oil is banned, and gasoline is banned, and people begin to starve to death because food isn't getting shipped, trucked or driven into their urban shithole, what will you do then? Just how are you going to accomplish all this? I guess it's another case of PURE FUCKING MAGIC!

"We saw people going back to work in buildings that were once emtpy. Empty because the jobs had been shipped overseas. Now they were back at full operation."

Any idea how you're going to accomplish that? Especially since Obama wants to tax the living shit out of anything that moves and makes money? Why the FUCK do you think the jobs are leaving in the first place? Why do you think people are leaving California in droves? Why do you think Buck Knife left California, where it was founded, and began manufacturing knives in Post Falls, ID? If you make it hard to do business, then people will do their business elsewhere. And when Obama-rama-ding-dong begins jacking up the tax rates, even MORE people will leave. And they'll take their companies with them. But I guess Obama will just wave his hands, and POOF! PURE FUCKING MAGIC!

"This is the future I saw, this is the future of a new nation, with a new kind of leader at the helm."

New new new! Change change change! Hope hope hope! It's a new era of changy hopyness! Except for the fact that Obama is a product of the Chicago political machine, part of the majority party, and hasn't done a single damn thing except march in lockstep with the far Left. But somehow he'll be different, right? Not like the others! How?

PURE FUCKING MAGIC!

What a load of complete and utter tripe. The fact that there are oxygen thieves out there writing this crap makes me weep for my country.

The obligitory Obama post

Since he gave this big, heart-pouring speech and all.

Listen, this isn't about Obama not holding his hand over his heart and refusing to say the pledge of allegiance.

This isn't about Obama refusing to wear a US flag pin.

This is about Obama's relationship with a racist, hate-filled, loony kook of a pastor for over twenty years. A pastor who says that blacks should sing "God Damn America" instead of "God Bless America". A pastor who believes that the US government created the HIV virus to keep blacks in check. A pastor who believes that the US government gives crack to black people. A pastor who claimed that America deserved what happened on September 11th. Nice video of it in that last link there. A man who wants to talk about the "original sin of slavery" in this country.

Hey Obama? Guess what? Both my mothers family and my fathers family came to this country after the civil war. I've never owned slaves. NOBODY IN MY FAMILY HAS EVER OWNED SLAVES. But you want to claim that I'm part of the "original sin of slavery" because...... I'm white? You know what that is, asshole? That's racism.

And after listening to the man who was your pastor for over twenty years, I think I can see exactly how you feel. Yeah, that crackpot who blames everything on whitey. The one who married you and your wife. The one who baptized your kids. The one who you've supported for twenty-plus years. And the one who has been spewing hatred and racial division for that time, while you sat in his congregation and nodded your head.

You cannot tell me that Obama sat in this mans church for two decades and doesn't believe in what was being preached. Hell no. Which leaves two options: Either Obama fully agrees with Rev. Wright, in which case he's a sorry sack of shit and racist to boot, or he doesn't believe in what the Reverend is preaching, in which case he's only going to that church just for the publicity, the public face if you will, and that makes him a fake, a fraud, and a charlatan. Now tell me again how he's going to heal our country's wounds? Bullshit. Let me quote a bit from his speech, if I may:

…Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety .....

Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor.

The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.

Hey, you know what I constantly see? I see Obama identifying himself as a black man. A black this, part of the black that, black vs. white, etc., etc., etc.

I know I'll probably get misquoted by some moonbat, but I'm going to say it anyway - I don't want a President who considers himself a black American. I want a president who considers himself an American, and who doesn't give a shit what color his skin is. I don't consider myself a white American. I don't consider myself an Irish-American, or an Italian-American, I AM AN AMERICAN. Period. Full stop. Do not add anything to that, do not continue, do not hyphenate that at all, just leave it as it is. I am an American.

I will not accept ANYONE for president who won't say the same thing. Barak Obama does not consider himself an American, he considers himself a BLACK American.

That is unacceptable. And anyone who still continues to label themselves based on the color of their skin is unfit to represent the country. It's not me saying he's unfit because he's black. He is unfit because he segregates himself by his own actions.

If the first way that you identify yourself is due to the color of your skin, then you are a racist. That's a hard truth that people don't want to hear, but it's still the truth. Black-American. Asian-American. Mexican-American. African-American. Italian-American. Arab-American. You are placing your racial identity before your country, and that will tear a country apart faster than anything. You are saying that the color of your skin, or where your family came from is more important than where you are now. It's more important than what this country can provide. You are separating yourself from me because my skin is a different color than yours.

That is racism. And I will not elect a racist to be president.

Preaching to the choir here, boss

But hell, it needs to be repeated, and maybe someone will see it and have a light go on.

Decent, mature people show tolerance toward their adversaries, treating them with respect and arguing points with them reasonably. You only hear them complain about corruption when there’s genuine evidence of it. Immature people, however, constantly hurl accusations against their adversaries, calling them cheats, liars, corrupt, and the like; it’s characteristic of the immature to blame other people for their failures.

In a healthy society, immaturity is recognized for what it is, and mostly ignored. However, if society has deteriorated to the point that the immature equal or outnumber the mature, and if the immature congregate on one side of an issue or in one party, over time the stream of invective takes on a substance of its own; the constant accusations become evidence in themselves of the presence of corruption among the mature.

Here in America, the constant, irrational accusations by Democrats against Republicans has created the impression, particularly among Democrats but also uncomfortably common among independent voters, that Democrats play fair but Republicans cheat; that Democrats are tolerant, Republicans intolerant; that Democrats care about the poor, while Republicans dismiss them; that Democrats defend the Constitution, while Republicans ignore it; etc.

The accusations, themselves, have become increasingly irrational, to the point that a huge percentage of the populace is convinced that the Bush administration either planned the 9/11 attacks or knew about them in advance and deliberately let them happen, even though there’s not the slightest evidence of either. The list of unsupported, unsupportable accusations against Republicans has grown long: Diebold, Halliburton, “lies about Iraq,” “blood for oil,” “Bush=Hitler,” etc. Democrats have taken to calling for and wishing for the President’s assassination. Michelle Malkin wrote a book about the derangement of the Democrats, and lists relevant posts on her blog under headings like “unhinged,” “moonbats,” “Bush Derangement Syndrome,” and other categories that document a culture of immaturity gone berserk in their hatred of all things Republican.

Yet another piece that needs to be printed out and left in offices, coffee rooms, etc. etc.

There have been several, corrupt political machines in America, usually operating in large cities: Tammany Hall in New York, the Prendergast machine in St. Louis, the Daley machine in Chicago, the Rizzo machine in Philadelphia, etc. These have several things in common, but the most notable is that they’re all Democrats. There is no such thing, in American history, of a large, urban, Republican, corrupt political machine. Facts are stubborn things. And yet, I occasionally hear some voter exclaim that “all the cheating seems to be from the Republicans.”

I'd like to point out that the Daley machine is still alive and kicking in Chicago; the Left turned Seattle into another political fraud in 2004, and ACORN is still commiting vote fraud today, all in the name of electing Democrat America Communist Party members.

Yep.

Found at the Geek's place.

Media Malfeasance

I'm a day late and a dollar short posting this, but dammit, it needs to be posted, re-posted, and posted again. The whores and trollops that are the Main-Stream Media have once again pushed Democrat American Communist Party propaganda rather than the facts.

It’s hard to believe that the Pentagon and the White House have still not figured out the dynamics of war reporting in this age. Any report with this kind of impact will be the target of leaks, and probably by those least inclined to support the war. The leaks will go to others who don’t support the war, and they will get the first opportunity to define reality in the media. This is exactly what happened to this report on the Harmony documents; it’s a textbook case of media spin.

In fact, as I noted yesterday, the captured Iraqi documents show that Saddam Hussein funded at least two al-Qaeda groups, including Ayman al-Zawahiri’s group Egyptian Islamic Jihad. He also created and funded terrorist groups in Somalia in 1993 to attack the US troops there at the time. Another group which received funding, the Bahrain-based Army of Mohammad, received funding specifically because they intended to target America and Americans, with full knowledge that the AoM received its direction from Osama bin Laden.

When you couple a partisan, agenda pushing, biased media with a White House press office that seems to be it's own worst enemy, well, this is what you get. Of course, if the MSM doesn't push the Democrat American Communist Party talking points, the kool-aid guzzling poltroons of the media often just refuse to report any news that doesn't fit their agenda.

Ever since then, the media have sought to play down Iraq. They have pulled back coverage, not because of fatigue, but because they have been proven incorrect in their rush to portray it as a military failure. They have grudgingly noted the progress made in Iraq since last year’s change in strategy and tactics, and barely noticed when Iraq began passing the reconciliation legislation demanded by Congress this year and last.

The American public has noticed the improvement. Support for staying in Iraq until the successful completion of the mission has risen significantly. Even the Iraqis want us to remain in Iraq, if not in the current role for very much longer, in order to help fight terrorism and bolster their security. The media, which like the Democrats mostly bid on failure, seems churlishly determined not to report on the success for reasons other than “fatigue”.

Can you just imagine what life in this country could be like of the MSM were fair and objective? Can you imagine what life in this country could be like of the MSM weren't Leftist whores, bought and paid for?

Nice dream, isn't it?

Tying in to the post below

Curmudgeonly & Skeptical has a post up about Kalifornia's court ruling against home-school. Lots of links to good articles.

The Ragin' Mrs. and I were having dinner over at the neighbor's house, and the topic of public education came up. Needless to say, I don't think they'll ever discuss that topic around me again, if they ever invite me over again. I got a little vocal. OK, a lot vocal. Bottom line is, the publik skool sistim is messed up. Probably not salvageable. It needs to be scrapped and redesigned from the bottom up. And the first thing to do is to change who is allowed to teach, and why.

Meanwhile, we learn that those “credentialed” teachers so prized by California courts and teachers’ unions compare very unfavorably to people credentialed in other professions. To become “credentialed,” teachers have to major in education. According to economist Walter Williams: “Students who have chosen education as their major have the lowest SAT scores of any other major. Students who have graduated with an education degree earn lower scores than any other major on graduate school admissions tests such as the GRE, MCAT or LSAT. Schools of education, either graduate or undergraduate, represent the academic slums of most any university. As such, they are home to the least able students and professors with the lowest academic respect."

Clearly, too many “credentialed” teachers don’t know much. Or, to paraphrase Maine humorist Tim Sample: “They don’t even suspect much.” The slow ones – and trust me, there are a lot of slow ones in public education – don’t want any light shining on just how slow they are. That’s why they fight standardized testing for teachers. The first time Massachusetts forced new teachers to take a basic competency test in 1998, an astonishing 59% of them failed. These were college graduates (education majors) taking a test that Massachusetts House Speaker Thomas Finneran said: “a reasonably educated ninth grader could pass.”

Former Boston University President and Massachusetts Board of Education Chairman John Silber wanted to eliminate teacher certification, or “credentialing” as California calls it, because it was keeping really bright people out of the teaching profession. However, teachers’ unions blocked him. Why would unions favor credentialing when they disdain standardized tests? Because it’s easy to pass college education courses and difficult to pass standardized tests which cannot be fudged. I’ll bet a lot of the 59% who flunked the teacher test graduated with honors from their college education departments. Grade inflation there is rampant.

If it weren't for three teachers at my high school, I would have dropped out, gotten a GED and moved on with my life. It was that worthless. Most of the important knowledge I have I learned after I left that particular hell hole. I can't think if anything that a publik skool does that a private school can't do better with less money. Everyone always swoons when they hear how much private school costs. Really? Does anyone look to see how much is being spent per student in the publik skool sistim? In many cases, it is MORE than the tuition of a private school. My niece goes to a private school, and the tuition is around $7,000 a year. That's a nice chunk of change, no doubt. But the publik skool sistim where they live spends approximately $8,000 a year PER STUDENT.

And yet publik skool students as a rule cannot begin to compare with private school students. Someone is getting ripped off. Us.

At this point, I can't think of any good reason to keep America's publik skool sistim in place. It's failing, miserably, time and time again. It doesn't need more money, it needs a complete and total overhaul. And the teacher's unions need to be taken out back and shot for the good of the country.

Damn those fundies!

We all know the state of publik skools in America sucks. There's no question. Well, one Susan Jacoby lays it all on the line.

With her new bestseller, “The Age of American Unreason,” Susan Jacoby adds fuel to the public bonfire. Americans are not only increasingly knowledge-challenged, she argues: they’re also proud of it. “America is now ill,” she writes, “with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism.” This new, insidious strain–at odds with reason, objective facts, and modern science–has grown over the past twenty years, she writes, and is incredibly dangerous for American culture and politics.

…For Jacoby, Protestant fundamentalism, particularly in its resistance to the teaching of evolution in public schools, is intellectual enemy number one.

Got that? It's not the curriculum based on self-esteem rather than actual results that's at fault. Nope. It's not the constant lowering of standards that's at fault. Nuh-uh. It's not the mediocrity of the teachers protected by tenure and a DNC backing union that's at fault. Nah, it's those damn religious whackos!

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

Found at Cold Fury.

Barack Hussein Obama's "God Damn" Minister

Barack Hussein Obama may not be a Muslim, but he's no Christian like I've ever heard of:The 'Rev' of Hate and Mentor to Barack (video links)

"Barack knows what it means living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people," Wright said. "Hillary would never know that.

"Hillary ain't never been called a nigger. Hillary has never had a people defined as a non-person."
...
"US of KKK A," -- Rev. Jeremiah Wright
...
"Hillary is married to Bill, and Bill has been good to us. No he ain't! Bill did us, just like he did Monica Lewinsky. He was riding dirty."
...
“Fact number one: We’ve got more black men in prison than there are in college.

"Fact number two: Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run.

"We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of professional killers. ... We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. ... We conducted radiation experiments on our own people. ... We care nothing about human life if the ends justify the means.

"And ... And ... And! God! Has got! To be sick! Of this shit!"
...
“The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people,” he said in a 2003 sermon. “God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”
...
“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye,” Rev. Wright said in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001.

“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost,” he told his congregation.
...
"Racism is alive and well. Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run. No black man will ever be considered for president, no matter how hard you run Jesse [Jackson] and no black woman can ever be considered for anything outside what she can give with her body."
...
"America is still the No. 1 killer in the world. . . . We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns, and the training of professional killers . . . We bombed Cambodia, Iraq and Nicaragua, killing women and children while trying to get public opinion turned against Castro and Ghadhafi . . . We put [Nelson] Mandela in prison and supported apartheid the whole 27 years he was there. We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God."
...
"We supported Zionism shamelessly while ignoring the Palestinians and branding anybody who spoke out against it as being anti-Semitic. . . . We care nothing about human life if the end justifies the means. . . ."
...
"We started the AIDS virus . . . We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty. . . ."
...
"His depth on analysis [sic] when it comes to the racial ills of this nation is astounding and eye-opening," Mr. Wright said of Mr. Farrakhan. "He brings a perspective that is helpful and honest."
...
" Mr. Obama went on to explain Mr. Wright's anti-Zionist statements as being rooted in his anger over the Jewish state's support for South Africa under its previous policy of apartheid. As with his previous claim that his church gave the award to Mr. Farrakhan because of his work with ex-offenders, Mr. Obama appears to have made that up." -- WSJ's Kessler

Barack Hussein Obama's "God Damn" Minister blames you for 9/11.

YAF’s Jason Mattera confronts JFKerry(D)

As a follow up to the latests frauds from the newest phony soldier, eg. "Phonies", who misrepresent their service to claim moral authority and are selectively featured by the MainStreamMedia in spite of their non-representative views:

Winter Soldier II : Ludicrous Lies on Parade

Michelle Malkin

Hot Air TV: Sen. John Kerry confronted about Winter Soldier II (video)

We’ve got another joint YAF/Hot Air TV production for you, just in time for the anti-war confab known as “Winter Soldier II” that kicks off in Washington, D.C. tomorrow and runs through Sunday. YAF’s Jason Mattera, our intrepid special correspondent who cornered Jack Murtha in September, is back in the halls of Congress.

This week, Jason caught up with the original Winter Soldier, Sen. John Kerry, and confronted him about his unsubstantiated, troop-smearing testimony.

And no... JFKerry(D) has still not released his military records.
Cross Posted at DANEgerus

Thugs, jackboots, and the US Government

It seems like the jackbooted thugs of the BATFU don't like criticism. Because while Ryan Horsley of Red's Trading Post was in court, dealing with said thugs, one US Marshal Judicial Security Inspector David A. Meyer (dave.meyer@usdoj.gov) took Mr. Horsley aside, and directed him to deliver a message to David Codrea, the owner of the Blog The War On Guns.

"Inspector Meyer asked me to contact you in regards to posting any information with the intent to threaten, intimidate, or incite the commission of a crime of violence against that covered official... "

In short, the thug said "You tell him to shut up, you see? 'Cause otherwise we're gonna pay a visit to HIM, see? And he won't like it!"

Mr. Codrea's response.

If you ever needed proof that the FedGov was way overgrown and too big for it's britches, here's yet another clue-by-four across the forehead. Good on Mr. Codrea for not backing down. And the Federal Government can go to hell.

I love my country, but I fear my government.

Awakening

I can't agree with everything this guy says, but it seems to me that he's waking up to a few realities.

And I began to question my hatred for "the Corporations"—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.

And I began to question my distrust of the "Bad, Bad Military" of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world. Is the military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the corporations—they are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of our country into separate working groups, if you will. Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither are you or I. So, taking the tragic view, the question was not "Is everything perfect?" but "How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose definition?" Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well.

Ten bucks says all his hoity toity pals, who used to praise his work and hang off every word he said, now treat him like a pariah and shun him like a leper. Seriously, you have to read the whole thing.

Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described independent (read "conservative"), and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out.

And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. And in doing so, I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).

And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.

Found at Curmudgeonly & Skeptical.

And since I'm the only one who hasn't mentioned it yet

Elliot Spitzer, the governor of New Yawk, got busted schlepping a prostitute to the tune of $5,000 a pop.

Sauce for the goose and all that. Petards, hoisted thereupon, etc.

What did people expect? Let's go over all this again:

1) He's a politician.
2) He's from New York.
3) He's a Democrat American Communist Party member.

That's three strikes right there. He's crooked. It's not a matter of if he's crooked, it's only a matter of if he would get caught. And he did. And oh by the way, any other politician who meets those three standards is crooked as well.

Also, 90% of the politicians from California. Both parties. Crooked. Count on it.

Going to quote it whole

Because cutting it into bits and pieces would not do it justice, and I want this posted around the world.

Now I know that going back to what education once was and its purpose are over. Further, there have always been more ways to learn a trade than to get an education. That’s a feature, not a bug. Learning a trade was once the near-exclusive bastion of apprenticeships and there’s something to be said for that method.

As Aesop said, the problem with learning a trade at a university is that you learn it wrong, although it does provide grounding in the concepts. I know that is true for folks who come out with Theatre/Film degrees, at the (typical) ripe old age of 24--when it is TOO late to begin pursuing an acting career (unless you’re a character actor). Unless the goal is to teach acting, a degree in it is useless from a professional-actor standpoint.

But that isn’t why parents send their little darlings off to get a degree in Theatre/Film. They do it so their starry-eyed kids will have a “fall back” when the reality of their hopes and chances are dashed, and they get serious about life and making a living. So we have parents who are all too anxious for their children’s hopes and dreams to be destroyed, crushed by the realities of life, for the “better” purpose of making a living.

As I said, the purpose of that type of degree is totally useless in the sphere of working in the field (although the old boy/girl network it provides has been useful to many).

What is astonishing, however, is the complete disconnect on what has been happening in the world and the *gasp* coincidence of destroying education, its purpose, and what it once meant.

We have folks with parchment on their walls running industry, with the morals of sharks. They have come out of the degree mills with the ability to make money--lots of it, and they see that as the goal and purpose in life.

It wasn’t THAT long ago that the perspective was entirely different. Making a living, even a good one, was seen as a means, but not the end. The goal of making a good living was to enable one to afford a life of quiet contemplation, of travel, and of the finer things that the education gave the student the taste for. Now the acquisition of possessions, however tawdry and banal, is seen as the goal.

The acquisition of wealth, for the sake of being wealthy, is now the exclusive pursuit of far too many.

It is no surprise at all that we have disasters like Enron and WorldCom. They were run by men with degrees, and technical competencies in their respective fields, but no education whatsoever. It is no surprise that the pickings for elected representatives is tiny, as if non-existent.

If they had ANY education they would not have been the scoundrels and cads they show themselves to be.

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (to name just two) were educated men… probably a handful of the last of them America produced. It isn’t an accident that they devoted a great portion of their life to public service. That’s what educated men do.

Business once cared about an education degree because it provided some degree of certainty that the person you were dealing with had their priorities in proper order. They could be counted on to do the right thing, to be men of honesty and integrity, with morals to avoid all temptations. The great burden of their education made it near-impossible for them to do otherwise. The great big baton of Western Civilization had been passed to them, and dropping all that man had learned and become was just too magnificent to allow it to be casually set aside when there were financial benefits or carnal pleasures to be had.

Education is not education when it provides anything with which to make a living, or anything we might think of today as “useful.” It concerns itself entirely with how you make your life, not your living. An educated man can learn any trade, but a tradesman can do only what he has been trained to do. The minute it becomes something to do, instead of something that is, it is no longer education.

We have this perception that honesty, integrity, and character are things that are endowed in men like legs and arms. And they are not. Civilizing people was the goal of education--exclusively. That small segment of the population, no more than 1% to 5% who were educated, went out into the world with these high ideals and kept them alive.

Now we have Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and an assortment of bad boys. Wealth itself is lauded as a demonstrative of something important. “Pioneers of Industry” are even lauded, and not recognized for the pirates they’ve become.

There are a few institutions that remain committed to education, but they suffer from the pressures of parents and industry to provide skill-training. Their programs have been altered to such an extent that they might as well throw in the towel completely.

Nock was once asked to become the chair of philosophy at a prestigious university. He’d written extensively on the subject, lamenting the loss of education throughout the world (and that was in the 1920s). He politely declined the offer, saying he’d be a useless bungler. He said that all that he would know how to do would be to take his students on their first day of class to the school library, and with great fanfare open the doors and point to the books, “there” and leave them to it.

We’re going to have to figure out how to do it differently. There are a few parents who get this and understand it, but they do it without fanfare or notice… and then there are folks like Mark (who started this thread), wanting to pursue knowledge for the sake of bettering himself, and by extension, the world around him.

We could achieve it in a myriad of ways--through the formation of Socratic Societies (there are quite a number out there, if folks look). The salon tradition is sickly, but not dead.

I doubt, however, that we’ll achieve any measure of success. We’ve gone too far down the road of believing that “all men are created equal” speaks to quality of character, rather than equality in the law, and anything that smacks of elitism is immediately shot down as bad.

All we have left are the books… and if we can keep them from the fires or banned lists, they might continue to serve their purpose… for the few who seek them out and can understand them.

Education in and of itself doesn't mean a damn thing, especially with schools and universities today. Without a foundation to build on, all an education gets you is an over-educated simpleton who can't be trusted to do much of anything. I've seen way too many people who have an education, but don't know the first thing to do with it. They have the know-how, but not the know-why.

Think I'm kidding? Look at all the Democrat American Communist Party politicians, advocating for policies which have been tried and failed. The people who vote the politicians in have degrees, don't they? How can they then advocate for a system of government which has been shown to fail in every country it's been tried?

They have an education, but that just doesn't mean what it used to.

Why you should carry a gun

Because you never know when some deranged Leftist is going to try to gun people down. Or plant a bomb. Standard Leftist/Marxist. They can't win with ideas, so they have to try to intimidate with violence. Just following the standard communist doctrine there. Problem for them is, they haven't disarmed us yet.

There's a maxim that I try to teach the various kids around here. A maxim that I try to live by:

"Don't start the fight. But make damn sure you finish it if someone starts it."

Found at Michelle Malkin.

You want a peek into a conservative mind?

Then go forth and read. Here's a little taste:

I'm tired of it. Tired way down deep. It's the new slave class, the new Company Store that makes me pay for the fantasies and guilt trips of the privileged few who score a sweet government job. And will continue to vote largesse unto themselves as long as they can get away with it. And nobody on the Left will ever use the word, "greedy" for such. I read today where Wellstone didn't provide Workers' Comp for his campaign staff that died with him in the plane crash, so the taxpayer, the little guy, gets to ante up one more time. He was another one, another Hope and Change hypocrite.

Fuck 'em all. Fuck FDR and LBJ and O-ba-ma.

Found at Spat's place.