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The Messiah:
Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate for president, opposes lifting the ban on offshore drilling and says that allowing exploration now wouldn’t affect gasoline prices for at least five years.
Obama, that same thing was said, five years ago. Tiz the old Stalin 5 year plans, in reverse. Hell it didn’t do a hell of a lot for Stalin running it forward either.
Yes, I know a good amount about George, helping Jeb out on this one. Have property on the Gulf.
TERRE HAUTE, Ind. — Call it a lemonade standoff.
A girl whose lemonade stand was robbed of $17.50 chased the suspect into a nearby home and called police, who spent nearly an hour trying to coax the man into surrendering.
“The guy came up and was, like, ‘Give me your money,”‘ said 12-year-old Dominique Morefield, who was running the lemonade stand with a group of friends. “I was shocked. It was just my immediate reaction to chase after him.”
Dominique dashed after the man who ran into a house, and then she called police. Officers eventually persuaded Steve Tryon, 18, to come outside after 45 minutes and arrested him on a preliminary felony charge of robbery.
Tryon made an initial appearance in Superior Court on Tuesday and was ordered to be held in the Vigo County Jail on $50,000 bond. He will be formally charged Friday, county Prosecutor Terry Modesitt said.
A telephone message seeking comment was left at the office of Michael Wright, a public defender assigned to represent Tryon.
“I didn’t think anyone would come up to a lemonade stand and steal. That’s really low,” 12-year-old Fred Erstine said.
The kids said they would continue to sell lemonade, but with an adult’s supervision.
This chick can be on my team, anytime. You rock, Dominique.
He claims that a shift to electronic medical records will help save families up to $2,500 a year in his first term. Independent experts say that’s wishful thinking.
Does this guys nose grow?
HABBANIYAH — Two years ago, al-Anbar was said to be the most violent province in Iraq. It was a place where the insurgency in Iraq had begun and where the bloodiest battles took place. Today, thanks to the hard work and sacrifices made by the Marines, Sailors, Soldiers and Airmen who served in the area, it has become a model for the rest of Iraq.
Marines of 2nd Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment, Regimental Combat Team 1, have put in countless hours and have risked their lives every day to ensure their area of operations within al-Anbar Province stays that way until they leave Iraq and beyond.
“In the last year, violence in al-Anbar province has dropped 80-90 percent. The reason the province is the way it is now is a result of the hard work the Marines are putting forth every day along with their tactical patience and balance,” said Chief Warrant Officer 5 Jim M. Roussell, the assistant intelligence officer for 2nd Battalion, 24th Marines. “This battalion has worked very hard and has done an outstanding job in accomplishing its goals… and what we want to do is set up the unit that comes in after us for success”
It’s been a while since I read a book. Life is way too busy! Every night, I mean to sit down and do some serious reading. But first I have to check my e-mail. Then the headlines, because something might have happened in the past five minutes. Then a couple of my favourite blogs. Also, there’s Google.
Last weekend, for example, I went to see my sister in Chicago. We went to the Art Institute and saw that famous painting by Seurat, the one depicting the Parisian bourgeoisie strolling in the park. One lady has a little monkey on a leash.
“What’s with that monkey?” my sister wondered. So we rushed back to our hotel and Googled it.
The monkey is a satirical comment on bourgeois profligacy. Without Google, we never would have known!
Google is a cornucopia of useful and useless information. I can’t imagine life without it. Without Google, I never would have wasted an entire hour checking condo prices in Chicago, even though I have no intention of living there. I wouldn’t be able to look up movie plots, research heirloom tomato seeds or find out what Maureen Dowd is saying about Hillary.
Google has done wondrous things for my stock of general knowledge. It also seems to have destroyed my attention span. Like a flea with ADD, I jump back and forth from the Drudge Report to gardening sites that list the growing time of Green Zebras.
I am so informed! Even better, I won’t have to bother remembering anything I’ve learned. Why struggle to store facts, when Google can do it so much better?
“Is Google making us stupid?” asks Nicholas Carr in this month’s Atlantic cover story. Naturally, I skimmed the piece online, as the actual purchase of a magazine that one might take an hour to sit down and read is no longer necessary. His premise is that Google – like all new communications media – is reshaping our neural circuitry and altering our ability to process information, not necessarily for the better.
For example, I’m not the only person who has trouble reading books. Mr. Carr does too. “Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages,” he writes. “I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”
Thanks to Google, we’re all turning into mental fast-food junkies. Google has taught us to be skimmers, grabbing for news and insights on the fly. I skim books now too, even good ones. Once I think I’ve got the gist, I’ll skip to the next chapter or the next book. Forget the background, the history, the logical progression of an argument. Just give me the takeaway.
It’s occurred to me, not for the first time, that we are losing the capacity for sustained thought. It’s not just Google. It’s e-mail and BlackBerry. A friend of mine, a consultant, says she rarely has real-time conversations with her clients any more. They communicate by BlackBerry. If they have a problem, they BlackBerry her, and she’s supposed to solve it and BlackBerry them right back.
Often, they haven’t stopped to analyze what the real problem is, and even if they have, they seldom have the time or inclination to describe it.
That’s because they deal exclusively in information bits. Besides, it’s hard to convey complexity when you have 32 new e-mails and you’re typing with your thumbs.
I wonder what the world will be like when we all stop reading in the sustained and concentrated way that people used to. Fewer and fewer of us can sit still to read a newspaper, never mind a sustained argument or something as complicated as a Shakespeare play.
Hey! I bet Shakespeare wrote something about a fever’d and distracted brain. Give me a second and I’ll Google it.
This song is a bit of heavy metal, Australian made, and the band, Jerk, started getting played a few years ago. They’re way cool.
This song is pretty cool, and is called “I Hate People Like That”.
The best message in it is “They say life’s what you make it!”, which is incredibly true and sage advice for anyone a little unsure of themselves.
I’m observing my right to disagree with the following comment, made on this thread over at Baldilocks’ place.
“And I’m still waiting to for you to explain your point regard the alleged white, male Republican-ness of my readership.”
I’m sorry, I forgot you are a Republican, and therefore a fairly stupid human being who needs things explained to them like a child.
I was obviously mocking the simple, irrefutable fact that no one in the black community CARES about your opinion. 92-94% of the black community will vote for Obama, and about the same amount would have voted for him even if the Democrats nominated a white candidate.
The arrogance of black conservatives who like to pretend like they represent the black community has always amused me. But hey, I guess that explains the depthless rage and nuttiness of people like Michael “my Jewish opponent is a Nazi” Steele and Alan Keyes, who needs no introduction.
It must suck to be a part of the super-super-super-super-minority.
baldilocks sez: Thanks, Tom, for letting me know that my efforts in this post are effective. See, when trolls react to what I say in the manner that you have, I know that I’m making a difference.
And, apparently you care about what I say, don’t you, Poor Baby?
One: Republicans are not stupid, we just have incredibly different ways of thinking than Democrats. We have somewhat strong abilities in thinking for ourselves and not engaging in groupthink.
Two: I’m not so sure about the observation about who black Americans will vote for. I think those who have voted for Obama in the race so far genuinely support him, whether it’s for skin colour or policies, but I don’t think the figure voting for him can be adequately counted. I suspect when it comes to the Presidential Election, they’ll mostly vote for their pockets. Some will vote for McCain and proudly say so, some will vote for McCain and not advertise the fact, some will vote for Obama and proudly say so, and some will vote for Obama and not advertise the fact. That’s the reality of voting.
And Third: Black conservatives don’t claim to represent the community, for the most part. They know they represent themselves and no one other, unless they’re elected to an official position. This goes back to the GroupThink (TM) proposition, because we don’t do it on our side of politics, and we don’t claim to know what everyone else thinks on every issue because they’re on our team. The issue of taxes is a classic example: there’s one school of thought which believes it shouldn’t exist for any reason other to pay the wages of politicians and to make people aware of new laws, and there is another school of thought who would support paying taxes if they were spent for the purposes we’re told they are, which are to improve schools, hospitals, roads and other necessities.
George Orwell once wrote that politics was closely related to social identity. ‘One sometimes gets the impression,’ he wrote in The Road To Wigan Pier, ‘that the mere words socialism and communism draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, nature-cure quack, pacifist and feminist in England’.*
Setting aside the brilliance of much of George Orwell’s writing, I take offense at the implications and slanderous allegations he makes towards fruit-juice drinkers, nudists, sex-maniacs and Quakers.
The rest, yeah, he pretty much nailed it.
Pacifists do have their good points though.
*Quote found over at Bernie Slattery’s place.
Bits:
Japan’s most reviled serial killer – a “cannibal nerd” who preyed on primary-school girls and drank their blood – has been executed in Tokyo.
A voracious sexual predator, he kidnapped girls aged between four and seven years old, molested and murdered them. In some cases he ate parts of their bodies, in others he slept next to their corpses.
During his trial, Miyazaki sketched cartoons and often talked nonsensically. He blamed the outrages of which he was accused on a “rat man” alter-ego of himself – a character he also drew in cartoon for the court. Miyazaki’s defence rested in the argument of his lawyers that he was not mentally fit to be held responsible for his crimes. Court-ordered psychiatric examinations reached no unified conclusions.
Way to go, Japan. In the U.S. we would have fed, housed and studied a evil person such as, forever. Why? I have no damn idea.
I am attending a conference in Berlin where senior EU panjandrums are reeling around clutching their heads over the ‘disaster’ of the Irish vote against the Lisbon constitutional treaty. Of course, they take it for granted that everyone will agree that the Irish vote was a disaster. This is a given here. If you say brightly that actually you think it was the best thing that’s happened for a very long time, you are looked at with total incomprehension, disbelief and distaste rather as if you had just got up and announced that paedophilia should be made compulsory. One very senior Eurocrat sighed this evening that the Irish hadn’t really studied the constitution and so the vote couldn’t really be taken as a rejection of the constitution at all. Ah yes, of course – the people deliver the wrong result, so the people must be stupid or ignorant or both. Sack the people! After all, a stupid thing like democracy mustn’t be allowed to get in the way of the behemoth of Brussels.
A German banker expressed the heretical view that the limits of integration in Europe had now been reached and that the problem was that no-one – not the political class, not the economic class – ‘owned’ the idea of Europe. I think what he was trying to say was that the idea of Europe was intellectually dishonest, politically dangerous and culturally totalitarian, but he didn’t quite put it that way. The Top Eurocrat reacted to the banker’s somewhat tentative remarks as if someone had just thrown scalding water over him, but then composed himself to console us all with the view that the banker was a committed European and so his comments had obviously reflected the deep pain he felt at what had happened in Ireland. Clearly if the banker had actually supported the Irish his feet wouldn’t have touched the ground.
Afterwards the Top Eurocrat confided to a small knot of sympathisers that there were two alternative ways of dealing with the Irish Problem. The first was to declare that Ireland had effectively left the EU. But that wouldn’t be necessary, he smiled — because all the EU had to do now was draft another constitutional treaty and say it was entirely different.
You heard it here first.
Are the Eurocrats saying, the Irish are stupid?
Virginian Pilot and the AP shill for Obama; Provide a Direct Link to the Obama Campaign.
Bits:
Of course this is a dog bites man story. But let’s show two stories in today’s Virginian Pilot, one on McCain and the other on Obama.
The first story is about a McCain proposal:
McCain urges end to ban on offshore drilling.
It turns out that, according the David Espo, the AP writer:
It would seem unexceptional that more oil would reduce the price of gasoline. Why would we be asking the Saudis to increase production if not to reduce gas prices? Or is it the position of the Democrats that more Saudi oil will reduce gas prices while more American oil will not reduce gas prices?
But Espo refers to the proposal as a “perennial cause for controversy” and quotes an Obama supporter
The current ban on offshore drilling covers an estimated 80 percent of U.S. coastal waters.
McCain’s “plan to simply drill our way out of our energy crisis is the same misguided approach backed by President Bush that has failed our families for too long and only serves to benefit the big oil companies.”
And here’s how it ends, not with any mention of Obama’s baggage (Wright, Ayers, Pfleger, Rezko, Jim Johnson, bitter clingers, etc. etc. etc.), but with a link to the Obama campaign:
“At critical moments of transition like this one, success has also depended on national leadership that moved the country forward with confidence and a common purpose,” he said.
—
On the Net:
http://www.barackobama.comThat’s right! The end of the story about Obama on the same day that Countrywide is shown to have multiple ties to high profile Democrat politicians tied to Obama, being endorsed by the Nobel Prize Winning, Academy Award winning, stolen election losing, ultra popular Al Gore, is a link to the Obama campaign!
Barack Obama’s Fathers Day speech came as no surprise. Speaking at a black church in Chicago, at which he called out absentee fathers, especially in the black community, for acting “like boys instead of men.”
The move was part of an expected pivot to the center by Obama for the general election and a way for the exotic candidate, the father of two girls, to highlight his commonality with mainstream American culture and challenge fellow African-Americans. It’s certainly not the last time: there will be further such moves, you can be sure. With this under his belt, Obama will start the second week of his opening general election tour on the economy today with a look at his “competitiveness” agenda on Monday.
Obama, who is consolidating the Democrats following the long campaign between he and Hillary Clinton, has opened up a five-point lead over John McCain in the latest Rasmussen poll, 45% to 40%.
Meanwhile, John McCain’s new TV ad campaign continues, as does the debate over debates. McCain’s ad introduces or, actually, re-introduces this famous man in various battleground states, trying to frame the election around security rather than the economy.
McCain senior advisor Steve Schmidt tells me that the ad is airing in 54 broadcast TV markets in key swing states, a more than $3 million buy. Where exactly is it airing? Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Iowa, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Missouri. Another million or so is being spent on cable TV, where the ad will run on Fox News, CNN, Lifetime, The Learning Channel, and the Discovery Channel.
Here’s the ad’s text:
Only a fool or a fraud talks tough or romantically about war. When I was five years old, my father left for war.
My grandfather came home from war and died the next day.
I was shot down over Vietnam and spent five years as a POW. Some of the friends I served with never came home.
I hate war. And I know how terrible its costs are.
I’m running for President to keep the country I love safe. I’m John McCain and I approve this message.
Barack Obama isn’t running any TV ads. Right now.
Obama is campaigning far more aggressively against McCain and the Republicans than he did against Hillary Clinton and his fellow Democrats, hammering McCain and the Bush Administration every day now. The tyro Illinois senator said at a private fundraiser in Philadelphia the other night, featuring Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, whose machine helped Hillary win one of her biggest victories over Obama but where Obama now leads McCain: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”
That’s a rip-off of a Sean Connery line in The Untouchables. About “the Chicago Way.” Obama, of course, is from Chicago.
Well, from Chicago via Honolulu and Jakarta.
It’s hardly all good for Obama, who is actually running behind his party in what should be an excellent year for Democrats given President Bush’s near historic levels of unpopularity.
He had to cut loose his principal veep vetter, Jim Johnson, a prominent Washington insider who vetted the last two Democratic vice presidential nominees, Joe Lieberman and John Edwards. Neither of whom turned out all that well, incidentally, though not for background problems. Johnson had received favorable treatment on loans from Countrywide, a controversial firm at the center of the subprime mortgage crisis. He’s such a political fixture that it apparently didn’t occur to Obama and his team to see if he might have any problems. Whoops!
But the move comes after McCain had to let five people go from his campaign for controversial lobbying ties, including to the murderous Burmese military dictatorship and to Saudi Arabia.
Speaking of Saudi Arabia, the kingdom will next weekend host a very unusual conference which may have great bearing on this presidential election. The most important leaders of the oil cartel are bringing together, next Sunday in Jeddah, representatives of the principal oil-producing and oil-consuming nations of the world to seek a solution to the world’s oil crisis. Or at least the portion of the crisis that has led to record oil and gasoline prices.
Obama says that the oil men in the White House, President Bush and Vice President Cheney, have done little to follow through on their promise of cheap oil following the takeover of Iraq, which was viewed as having the second largest reserves in the world.
McCain says that Obama should follow his lead in moving to suspend federal gasoline taxes over the summer.
Perhaps it’s something for the two to debate. When they finally have debates.
Both have agreed to the three standard debates, slated to begin in September. But McCain, as the underdog, naturally wants more.
He’s challenged Obama to appear with him at another ten “town hall” debates. Obama countered by suggesting that the pair engaged in “Lincoln-Douglas” debates around the nation, after the fashion of the famed 1858 series of debates between Illinois politicians Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas over slavery, and a U.S. Senate seat. (Douglas won that election, but Lincoln won the debates, setting him up to win the presidency in 1860.)
It’s amusing in that McCain and Obama have both suggested debate formats that play specifically to their respective greatest strengths.
For McCain is best at town hall meetings, where he is a master. Obama is best at platform speeches, where he is a master. And the Lincoln-Douglas format is essentially a duel of lengthy speeches, rather than a debate as we have come to know it.
There’s no agreement yet between the two camps, but talks will continue this week and ultimately there will be more than the scheduled three debates.
Neither man was his party’s best debater. Obama, especially early on, as in a Las Vegas forum which I filmed and where he bombed, struggled at times as he attempted to shoehorn elements of his stump speech into much shorter debate answers. But the lengthy campaign against Clinton honed his skills.
But Clinton also was not her party’s best debater. That was John Edwards. The Republicans’ best debater? Rudy Giuliani.
For all the good it did either of those candidates. Giuliani, by the way, has resurfaced following his disastrous campaign. He is willing to help his financially-challenged party: for a cut of the take at fundraisers he headlines.
This week, Obama will continue the consolidation of his takeover of his own party. While the Clintons are on vacation — former President Bill resurfaced Thursday night to fete Warren Beatty as the liberal actor/filmmaker received the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award in Hollywood — Obama is moving most Democratic National Committee operations from Washington to Chicago, site of his own campaign headquarters. The Republican National Committee will continue to operate out of Washington, near McCain headquarters. The Beltway, in the meantime, belongs to them.
Chicago, huh? Well here come the headstone voters again. And say…isn’t this kinda’ one of those “contradictions”, I mentioned in the thread, below?
Obama’s portrait of the irresponsible absentee black father is a distorted stereotype.
Hear that Dr. Cosby?..Rather SEE it, Dr. Cosby.
Presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama thundered to long, loud and vigorous applause from a Father’s Day Chicago church crowd that black fathers don’t engage with their children.
A month before Obama made this stereotypical and plainly false assertion, Boston University professor Rebekah Levine Coley, in a comprehensive study on the black family, found that black fathers who aren’t in the home are much more likely to sustain regular contact with their children than absentee white fathers, or for that matter, fathers of any other ethnic group. The study is not an obscure study buried in the thick pages of a musty academic journal. It was widely cited in a feature article on black fathers in the May 19, 2008 issue of Newsweek. There was no excuse then to spout this myth. The facts are totally contrary to Obama’s knock.
But then again, this kind of over the top, sweeping talk about alleged black father irresponsibility from Obama isn’t new. In stump speeches, he’s pounded black men for their alleged father dereliction, irresponsibility and negligence. Whether Obama is trying to shore up his family values credentials with conservatives, or feels the need to vent personal anger from the pain and longing from being raised without a father, or criticizes out of a genuine concern about the much media-touted black family breakup is anybody’s guess. But Obama clearly is fixated on the ever-popular notion of the absentee black father. And that fixation for whatever reason is fed by a mix of truth, half truths and outright distortion.
Obama commits the cardinal error that every critic from the legions of sociologists, family experts, politicians and morals crusader Bill Cosby who have hectored black men for being father derelict have made. He omits the words “some,” “those,” or “the offenders” before black fathers. Instead, he makes, or at least gives the impression, that all, or most, black men aren’t in the home, and are irresponsible. That being the case ipso facto they are the cause for the much fingered crime-drugs-violence-gross underachievement syndrome that young black males are supposedly eternally locked into.
Obama presents absolutely no evidence to back up this devastating indictment. The worst case estimate is that slightly less than half of black children live in fatherless homes. But that’s only a paper figure. When income, education, individual background, and middle-class status are factored in the gap between black and white children who live in intact, two-parent households is much narrower.
This points to the single greatest reason for the higher number of black children who live in one-parent households. That reason is poverty. A 2007 study noted that a black father’s ability to financially contribute the majoor support in the home is the major determinant of whether he remains in the home. That’s no surprise considering that despite changing gender values and emphasis society still dumps the expectation and burden on men to be the principal breadwinner and financial provider. Put bluntly, men and the notion of manhood are still mainly defined by their ability to bring home the bacon. A man who falls short of that standard is considered a failure and loser.
The chronic near Great Depression levels of unemployment, not to mention rampant job discrimination, endemic failing public schools, and stigma of a criminal record virtually condemn many young black men to wear the tag of societal failures as men and fathers. Obama in his rap against black men as fathers says nothing about the economic devasation that drives many black men from the home or prevents them from being in the home in the first place.
Obama, undoubtedly is well intentioned in his criticism of black family problems and certainly doesn’t mean to slander all, or even most black men, as derelict, laggards and slackers as fathers. Obama, as Cosby and others who beat up on black males for alleged father dereliction, would almost certainly publicly bristle at criticism that he takes the worst of the worst behavior of some black men and publicly hurls that out as the warped standard of black America. Yet that’s precisely what he’s done. And since every utterance by him is instant news and is taken as fact by legions of supporters and admirers, that makes his fan of stereotypes about black men even more painful.
If I may, I’d like to make an observation. Hasn’t Dr. William Cosby (Bill) been Black, like long before Barack Hussein Obama, (the one running for President) was a gleem in the eye of Barack Obama Senior? If I’m wrong, would someone please let me know?
I don’t give a damn how many statements he has made, (as they are always contradicted in the next breath) as to what change he will bring, the ONLY thing this guys has brought to the table IS, race. Nothing else.
Obama is THE definition OF…One person tennis.
Still have a cable guy coming out Thursday morning. Cable modem box went out just after my last post. Went to sleep saying Fuck It….woke up around 3:30 AM and said…ya’ know I’m just in the right mood, to play with someone’s mind at Charter Cable, so I did.
Fortunately or un…instead of hearing a Bangladeshi or however the hell one spells it, spoke with a lass, in Minnesota. After everything she went through, she sets me an appointment for Thursday, saying…there is something wrong with your cable modem box.
Now how in the world could I have said, NO SHIT, to a young lady that kept saying…YEP?
The YEP, reminded me of a friend. 🙂
Low and behold, since I had slept a bit, I figure well hell, I’ll give this one more whack AND I’ll be damned, the bastard worked. So, I figured what the hell, type something….AND, I am.
For some reason, the headline on this article is such a bad pun that it’s pure gold.
The Tizona Group 