Ruminations on music, culture, America and the world stage
NY-23 is down to Owens and Hoffman- and too close to call.
This should once and for all put to rest the notion that MSM chin-rubbers or sufferers from Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome or those with kinky ideological preoccupations ought to pick our candidates for us. I mean that not only in the context of Doug Hoffman, but also Sarah Palin, whose endorsement of Hoffman propelled him to formidable-contender status.
Gotta hand it to the State Department’s Thomas Shannon: he knows how to switch from patty-cake mode to Chicago strong-arm tactics when the situation calls for it.
If you thought there was more to the basic headlines this morning about a “deal” being reached in Honduras than what the MSM wire services were giving you, you were right, as Nice Deb demonstrates. Peel away enough levels, and there’s George Soros.
America is coming out of its flat-line state, blinking its eyes, and looking up at the murderous grin of the nurse (the FHer regime) standing over it, syringe full of deadly legislation and corruption in hand, and thinking, “Oh, my God! No! I will not let this monster kill me off!”
If either of the east-coast governor races – Virginia is the most likely – breaks for freedom and the revival of the United States, the diabolical nurse standing over us had better get ready to leave the room and fast.
I like this blogging technique. I’ve tried it a few times, but you have to be really good at it to drive home an important point. Pundit and Pundette offer up a series of links on seemingly disparate subjects, until you get to the very last observation, which is offered by – who else? – Mark Steyn.
One of the ten most important speeches in the history of the United States of America. Forty-five years ago today.
Harry Reid’s brain must be spinning at a gazillion RPMs trying to come up with some trick to keep the public option in health care legislation now that Joe Lieberman has denied him his 60 votes.
. . . is playing the EU, the IAEA, the US, and the civilized world generally for a gaggle of fools.
Today’s line-up makes for a perfect lesson in this. October saw a slump in consumer confidence. That’s because everyone is skittish about prospects for the future, given that the Senate is determined to put a public option in its health-care bill, and is holding hearings on the latest packaging of cap-and-trade.
On her radio show this morning, Laura Ingraham was taking calls from small-business owners. They were calling in from Iowa, Virginia, North Carolina, various other places, with tales of layoffs and holding off on capital expenditures like equipment until they have some idea how cumbersome and costly it’s going to be to operate in a year.
Recovery is an odd term for the current state of economic affairs, it seems to me.
J. Robert Smith at Pajamas Media characterizes the shift to Hoffman in the New York 23rd-district race, and to Rubio in the Florida race as evidence of a nationwide “earthquake.” We should also add the New Jersey and Virginia gubrernatorial races to that body of evidence.
Perhaps Smith wanted to preserve the conceptual tidiness of his point, and that might be good for the purposes of really driving home the reality of this shift. That New York race really does pit the GOP establishment against actual citizens who are conservative. Add to their strong feelings about Hoffman – and Scozzafava – the endorsements of Palin, Thompson, Santorum and Pawlenty, and one sees the magnitude of the shift in the platelets underneath us all.
Leon Russell performing Hank Williams’s “Jambalaya” on an early 1965 episode of ABC’s Shindig. That’s Glen Campbell on banjo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ1_ThpKjT0&feature=related
And, just for grins, here’s a late-64 Russell-on-Shindig performance of “High Heel Sneakers.” How cool would that be to have a bunch of gyrating babes on top of your piano?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yme_DnIfR6I&feature=related
TCM’s way of commemorating the 1983 attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut.
Neoneocon observes that Peggy Noonan is steppng away from her Obama’s-cool-Palin-isn’t stance. She notes, however, that Noonan won’t draw the next logical conclusion to which her rethinking process leads: TCM holds the American people in utter disdain. As Neo puts it, he sees his personal magnetism as a tool with which he can bring about his agenda, which is herding us into a state corral.
Col. Richard Kemp of the British Army holds a moral mirror up to the UN Human Rights Council so it can gaze at its own monstrousness.
I was recently told by a frequent BN commenter that my firm belief that TCM is deliberately trying to permanently cripple the American economy was preposterous and outrageous. Actully, “asinine” was his term. Here’s the essential question that must be put forth at such a conversational juncture: then why is he presiding, with the breeziest of attitudes, over a 9.8 percent official unemployment rate (It’s actually much higher when those who have given up looking for work are factored in), and a federal deficit that the CBO and the GAO are telling us in the starkest terms is unsustainable, advocating a socialist health care plan and a cap-and-trade law, either of which would further balloon this deficit, driving managerial talent out of the private sector with pay-czar edicts, and incurring national debt that has its holders in the form of bonds (mainly the Chinese) increasingly doubtful about our ability to ever make good?
It’s not just some isolated quirk of his. It’s not as if he wants to wreck the economy, but on all other levels is a normal, patriotic guy. This is all of a piece.
He’s a leftist, and what he really wants is the entire essence of America brought low. This desire to bring wealth creation, inventiveness and opportunity to a grinding halt springs from the leftist’s desire to make all human beings “equal.”
It’s the same impetus that drives his foreign policy: the apology tours, the sitting through Ortega’s diatribe, accepting the Chomsky book from Chavez, the refusal to make decisions regarding Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea, the use of his chairing of a UN Security Council meeting to preen about some kind of world without nuclear weapons, the reneging on the missile-defense system in Eastern Europe. It’s expansionism with a smile, glib and slick equalizing of all the nations and by extension all the people in the world, with himself doing the defining of this term “equal.”
American decline is not even the end product of his vision. That can now be more clearly seen as a flat, grim world in which human beings undergo the atrophy of their most humanizing aspect: their yearning for freedom.
. . . and once again, Iran contemptuously plays them for fools.
. . there’s a chance that the wake-up call is reaching a critical mass.
So, now that your own bunch is wise to the split-it-up-and-hide-the-cost ploy, what’s your next move, Most Equal Comrade?
The MSM sees in full, stark clarity how the TCM regime views freedom of information and decides its sense of solidarity lies with its own field, journalism, rather than hopey-changey jackboot-ism.
Everybody’s getting the wake-up call.
The only downside to the news that TCM’s approval ratings had a greater rate of slide than any comparably situated president in fifty years is the fact that he doesn’t care. He sees these numbers and his reaction is, “Well, time to pull out all the Chicago thug / Bill Ayers / Saul Alinsky tactics.” Demonize the insurance companies, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Fox News. Keep referring to what his predecessor did. Cut executive pay at bail-out-recipient companies by 90 percent. Encourage Congress to split socialist health care into two bills to hide its true cost. Sign away American sovereignty in Copenhagen in December.
More of us every day realize he’s a very bad human being, and certainly a grim nightmare as a president, but most North Koreans realize that about Kim Jong Il.
It’s really and truly very iffy as to whether a recognizable United States will be where we live by Easter.
One thing’s for sure: this is no time to let up.
The towering Richard Cheney’s address to the Center for Security Policy. Video or text, take your pick.
David Solway at Pajamas Media on the peril posed by the mentality that pooh-poohs the ongoing terrorist threat, a threat that breathes down our necks and doesn’t relent.
