Monday, September 19, 2011
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson Predicts A Constitutional Crisis If America Attacks Iran
On September 12, 2011, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Colin Powell, warned that America is being foolishly led into a disastrous war with Iran that will spark anger in the Pentagon and create a "huge constitutional crisis," in Washington. Speaking to an audience in Washington D.C., Col. Wilkerson said:Right now there is a move similar to the move with Iraq in say, 97' and 98, but today with regard to Iran. And it is made even more poisonous and dangerous by the fact that it is attached to an issue that we simply cannot deal with rationally in Washington - Israel.He added:
We're marching towards, with the neocons and others who are advocating it, another war with Iran. And the military wants out of that. There are some in the military who'll go right along with it, of course, but the basic leadership of all the services and the Joint Chiefs of Staff kept George Bush and Dick Cheney from going to war with Iran by their reluctance to go along and their constant drumbeat of 'You can't mean it, Mr. President. Another theatre in Western Asia?'
We can't even handle the two theatres we've got. And you want another theatre? You've hired enough private contractors to equate to another army, and another navy, and another marine core just to do Iraq and Afghanistan. How many contractors you're going to hire to do Iran?
We're talking about seventy one million people who are much more fused than Iraq was. You're talking about a five-year ground combat campaign to conquer a nation that is not going to give up until you've killed at least half of that population.
So, watch carefully, as we move through the next few years and these people try to build the drumbeat for war with Iran as an inevitability.
Armchair Survivalist
Whenever I get an email that begins "Someday, I'm going to...." or "I read that you really should...", my eyes glaze over and I start to develop a twitch. Over the course of the last couple of years, I have noticed an interesting phenomenon in the survival/preparedness movement. More people are talking about it and fewer people are doing it. As preparedness has become mainstream, talking heads have popped up all over the internet, on TV, in magazines and any other medium willing to capitalize on the newest multi-million dollar industry.
Every wanna be survivalist has an opinion. They have read every book, looked at every product and developed their survival strategy. They all have their pet project and to disagree with them is close to a mortal sin. They wax eloquent about their plans for food storage, alternative energy, personal hygiene and practical medical protocols. But they have never done any of it.
Jew-Free Palestinian State? Yes!
Verbatim Post
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A Jew-free Palestinian state is a wonderful idea! A salvific precedent! A new world order! It would then mean there could be an Arab-free Israel, a Albanian-free Serbia, a illegal Mexican-free America, a Muslim-free America, a Negro-free Cherokee Nation. This is what we’ve all been waiting for, right?
Wrong. The rest of us certainly aren’t getting it. No one else gets to exclude Jews, or whomever it is they want to exclude. Why should the non-existent “Palestinian people” be awarded such authority? This is not the way the world works. Racially homogeneous nations are generally those no one else wants to live in, for obvious reasons of privation, disease, immorality, and the generally depressed, miasmic social atmosphere.
“Palestinian” Ambassador to the United States Maen Rashid Areikat, reiterating his call for a Jew-free Palestinian state.Of course, the political manipulators immediately tried to reverse, or at least moderate, Maen Rashid’s hardline expression. “Jews are welcome,” they say. What artfully meaningless words. (They must hire Obama as their spokesman when he leaves America.)
Though no one has ever demanded that American Indian nations must include non-Indians amongst their citizenship (until now, anyway), America itself is expected to accommodate all foreigners–even our deadliest enemies. Our traitorous government even encourages our enemies to come. Though it is not written in any nation’s constitution, and certainly not in America’s constitution, the universal concept is that any person has the right to live anywhere in the world he wants. There is no sanctity of land or nationhood. It’s all a political process, or a economic process.
Besides, Israel can’t afford to have a seething enemy next door. The Palestinians have proven completely untrustworthy, ever-willing to cooperate with any and all of Israel’s enemies. If Israel didn’t police the Palestinian ghettos there would be major military installations in every building, with innumerable missiles pointed at Israel. The whole Arab mind-set is profoundly and consistently violent against Israel.
Also, “Jew-free” implies that the so-called “Palestinians” are the rightful owners of the land. They aren’t. There is no “Palestine,” there are no “Palestinians.” This is a fabricated socio-political illusion. They people are mostly Jordanian, some southern Syrian, and a lot of imported Arabs and some Iranians–professional mercenaries. It is an infestation of anti-Jewish factions. “Jew-free”? They’re lucky there are Jewish authorities among them. They’d have all killed each other by now.
American Indian nations? They are based on blood. If you don’t have the blood, you’re not part of the people. It is an abstraction, a theory, to think that a nation is without blood. America has blood, originally. White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant blood. The language is English. I believe the people who created the country have the right to determine who their citizens are, or aren’t. Some people are more suited to being American than others. Each country should have the right to let in whom it will, and to exclude whom it will. That is the point of nationhood, is it not?
But America is terrible confused right now. We have an alien, lying, black African Communist Muslim traitor appointed as our president. This says it all, really. This is what happens when self-righteous white Oedipal liberals are in charge. Their purpose is to destroy the fathers’ behest. This they do by removing all laws and sense designed to protect the nation. They present themselves as loving egalitarians, but they are self-righteous coercivists. They don’t believe in freedom or equality, really. They believe in their own power to rule. That’s it all. This is manifested in parasitical deconstruction, behind the propaganda slogans of “reform,” “progress,” or “change.”
There will never be a Palestinian state. There is no “Palestine.” There are no “Palestinians.” The socio-political entity could only hope to be a Muslim conclave, or a small caliphate. But, as it stands, there is not enough unity in the ghettos to even conceive of that. They barely put a soccer team together, and that’s because they part of an international philanthropic effort–and they hired an Austrian coach in 2004 and 2006 (Alfred Riedl). It’s called nation-building by fad, trend, and not a little anti-Jewish philanthropy.
The land belongs only to they who are strong enough to take it and hold it. There is no other known human experience. This modern tampering with self-righteous coercivists who think they can determine who has the “right” to what is sheer arrogance.
No one has rights. One has either strength, or weakness. Indians were strong, once. America had to negotiate with Indians. I don’t say might makes right. I say might decides what’s considered right, and enforces it. In the case of America, the fathers decided the Bible was the basic standard of right and wrong. The Bible doesn’t really advocate closed borders so much as national standards. If you want to live in a nation, you become as that nation commands. You don’t try to make that nation like you, when you’re the foreigner. The integrity and existence of each nation depends on a uniform application of its laws. Leviticus 24:22 says it all:
Ye shall have one manner of law, as well for the stranger, as for one of your own country, for I am the LORD your God.
Blithering idiot
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Mr. Obama, to Create Jobs You Need the 'Stossel Rule'
The president thinks jobs come from new laws:
“ If you want construction workers on the worksite, pass this bill. If you want teachers in the classroom, pass this bill. You want small business owners to hire new people, pass this bill. If you want veterans to get their fair share of opportunity that they helped create, pass this bill. If you want a tax break, pass this bill."
Just this week, the President said “pass this bill” 90 times.
The president is wrong. Hiring doesn’t come from new laws. It comes when government gets out of the way and leaves all of us with simple and predictable rules.
Southern Appeal for Civilized Warfare
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
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“A very interesting event in the history of this period of the war, was the unsuccessful mission of Vice-President [Alexander H.] Stephens, to the Federal authorities, designed, as explained by President [Jefferson] Davis, “to place the war upon the footing of such as are waged by civilized people in modern times.” Consistent with the forbearance and humanity, with which Mr. Davis has endeavored to prevent war [with the North], by negotiation, was this effort to soften its rigors and to abate the bitterness which it had assumed.
Recent atrocities of the Federal authorities had compelled the Confederate Government to seriously entertain the purpose of retaliation. Reluctant to adopt a course which would remove the last restraint upon the spirit of cruelty and revenge, making the war a system of unmitigated barbarism upon both sides, President Davis determined to make an earnest appeal to the humanity of the Federal authorities. In addition to this object the mission of Mr. Stephens sought the arrangement of all disputes between the governments, respecting the cartel of exchange, upon a permanent and humane basis, by which the soldiers of both armies should be sent to their homes, instead of being confined in military prisons.
To make the mission more acceptable to the Federal Government, President Davis removed every obstacle to intercourse upon terms of equality, and selected a gentleman of high position, of known philanthropy and moderation, and from several reasons likely to obtain an audience of the Federal authorities. The choice of time was not less indicative of the magnanimity of Mr. Davis.
The Confederate army was then in Pennsylvania, apparently upon the eve of a victory already assured, and which, if gained, would have placed it in the possession of the Federal capital and the richest sections of the North. At such a moment, so promising in opportunity of ample vengeance for the ravages and desolation, which everywhere marked the presence of the Federal armies, the Confederate President tendered his noble plea in behalf of civilization and humanity. With rare justice has it been said, that this position of Mr. Davis “merited the applause of the Christian world.”
Mr. Stephens was contemptuously denied even a hearing. The sequel soon revealed the explanation of the conduct of the Federal Government, by which it became doubly-chargeable for the sufferings of a protracted war, in declining to aid in the abatement of its horrors, and by abruptly closing the door against all attempts at negotiation.
General Meade had repulsed General Lee at Gettysburg, while Mr. Stephens was near Fortress Monroe. Flushed with triumph and insolent in the belief that Lee’s army could not escape destruction, the Federal authorities declared such intercourse with “rebels” to be “inadmissible.”
In other words, detention of the Confederate prisoners, and outrages upon the Southern people, were part of a political and military system at Washington, and would be persisted in.”
(Life of President Davis, Frank H. Alfriend, National Publishing Company, 1868, pp. 469-471)
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Southern Appeal for Civilized Warfare
Havelock, NC wants to ban carry in parks
GRNC VERBATIM POST =================
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Dealer and ATF discuss maintaining cover-up from disruption by Senator Grassley.
"Watch your back," the gun dealer warns the ATF Agent in an audio recording obtained by CBS News.The secretly recorded conversations are between the primary gun dealer cooperating with ATF in its "Fast and Furious" operation, Andre Howard, and lead case ATF agent Hope MacAllister.
Howard owns Lone Wolf Trading Company in Glendale, Arizona.
We have descended into the “rabbit hole”
Daily Bell: Is it true that the status quo is leading the country, and possibly the world, into totalitarianism?
Nelson Hultberg: Absolutely. We have descended into the "rabbit hole" of Alice and Wonderland politically and philosophically. Up is down, and down is up under the collectivist worldview. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less." The collectivists have so corrupted our language that the slavery of socialism is now a "new kind of freedom."
Marx understood all this very well. Corrupt the money and the language, and capitalism will fall. The statists are shameless in their shyster usage of words. And the masses are unable to see the semantic fraud involved. Thus with each passing decade, we drift further and further into total government.
The status quo of statism that began in 1913 and solidified itself with FDR and LBJ is bankrupt. It has no answers. It destroys freedom and prosperity as tuberculosis destroys breath and lungs. Yet it continues to move us into the morass of political absolutism because the integrity of our money and the clarity of our language have been turned into tools of tyranny.
FLASHBACK: Obama Says You Don’t Raise Taxes In A Recession
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In an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd on August 5, 2009, when asked how raising taxes on anyone helps the economy, President Obama said: “The last thing you want to do is raise taxes in the middle of a recession because that would suck up… take more demand out of the economy and put businesses in a further hole.”
Watergate Times Three
You think Richard Nixon's presidency was the worst scandal ever? Well, so far, anyway.
It all started with a tape holding a door open at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., discovered by a security guard 39 years ago on June 17, 1972. That discovery started a sinister chapter in America's history, fueled by the fervent investigative work of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post and ending with the president, Richard M. Nixon, exiting the White House in disgrace on August 9, 1974.
A similar Watergate scandal could erupt for Barack Obama. The only difference is that there may be three of them.
The insane Solyndra loan, the LightSquared cronyism, and the Operation Fast and Furious gun-running debacle have all come into America's consciousness at the same time. How could the government invest in a solar panel start-up that had no prospects for any kind of success, and to the tune of $535 million dollars? Why would a four-star Air Force general say that the White House tried to pressure him to change his testimony before the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee to make it more favorable to a company tied to a large Democratic donor? What were directors at the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and the ATF thinking when they persuaded gun dealers to allow more than 2,000 firearms to get in the hands of drug lords in Mexico, resulting in over 200 deaths?
These are questions that demand answers. And the American people are not mesmerized enough by the star power of their president to avoid those answers and where they might lead.
"Government intervention is the root cause of the financial crisis"
VERBATIM POST
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Well well look what the cat dragged in...
Government intervention is the root cause of the financial crisis and the maladies identified by Roubini. Many of his proposals, such as debt restructuring and maintaining liquidity to solvent borrowers, are common sense initiatives that ought to be followed immediately. But the proposals by Roubini and others that governments should borrow and print even more fiat currency to fuel further fiscal stimulus are badly considered. Economists from Paul Krugman in the US to Adam Posen in the UK all call for more stimuli. They are all wrong.
Yep. As I've repeatedly noted the premise of Keynesian Stimulus is mathematically bankrupt. We've run this for the last 30 years and yet have not produced prosperity - we instead produced serial bubbles.
Deflation does hurt debtors and lenders, but it also advantages savers and institutions with cash to buy assets cheaply. The buyers of dead banks and bad assets generate real growth and jobs. When Roubini, Posen and other mainstream economists call for measures to avoid deflation, they actually cut off one of the few ways that consumers and private business have to offset the ill-effects of secular inflation — the real culprit behind the financial crisis.
Reversion if an inflationary bubble (the S&P 500 went from about 100 to 1200 today!) is not deflation. It is mean-reversion. If you inflate something to 10x it's original size and then deflate it back, you did not experience "deflation." You repaired an unsustainable bubble.
But for the inflationary policies of the Fed and the ECB to stimulate pseudo “growth” over the past several decades, there would have been no financial bubble and no mountain of housing-related debt. Why do economists like Roubini and Krugman say we need more of this medicine? Such pathetic proposals for more-debt-driven government intervention are what pass for mainstream economic thinking today in the G-20 nations.
Keep in mind that there are still hundreds of billions in bad debts in the US and EU tied to real estate and other speculative endeavors — debt which must eventually default. Until the global financial system is cleansed of these bad debts, market volatility and uncertainty will remain high. Unless we bite the bullet and write down debts to levels that will allow private growth and employment, there will be no recovery.
You mean like this Chris?
That is what our government has created. That's the gross increase (or decrease) in GDP on a quarterly basis along with the gross increase (or decrease) in debt in all sectors.
Debt expansion must never exceed growth expansion on a durable basis. The reason is that it mathematically can't - you must always, to have a stable economy, grow from excess capital - that is, the amount of wealth left after you pay all the costs of production.
Borrowing has its uses, but it cannot replace capital formation. If it does, you get what we got. If you keep trying to run the scam you eventually go over the edge of the waterfall.
I hear roaring water around the next bend.
Some Bastiat
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Liberals say that man is not free until he is free from want and so the government must guarantee his comforts - everything from housing to health care, cellphones to sustenance. But this notion inherently contradicts itself. For the government to provide for all wants, or even just the important ones - and our leaders know the difference - they must plunder the property of other would-be free Americans. Worse yet, by attaching strings to every giveaway, they plunder the liberty of those on whom they lavish their largess. This notion of freedom destroys freedom. So a better definition must exist.
Freedom is man’s power to exercise his own faculties as he chooses as long as he prohibits no other man from doing the same. Law exists to ensure that no man takes another man’s life - other than in self-defense - or deprives him of his liberty or property. If it is wrong for one man to plunder, then surely it is equally wrong for a group of 20 men to plunder. And if it’s wrong for 20 men to plunder, then it’s equally wrong for 100 million men to plunder - even if they have codified it into law.
“When plunder has become a way of life for a group of people living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it, and a moral code that glorifies it.”
Police Misconduct NewsFeed Weekend Recap 09-17-11 to 09-18-11
Injustice Everywhere
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- 2 Ottawa ON cops have been charged with assault causing bodily harm for attacking a homeless man resulting in him suffering facial fractures when they threw him to the ground. The woman who called police to check on the man also reported the excessive use of force. [0] bit.ly/qCVV5m
- 5 Tulsa OK cops raided the home of a woman who testified for the prosecution in a recent police corruption trial and arrested her over misdemeanor traffic citations. That sounds pretty unusual, especially when you consider that she was also slated to testify in an upcoming civil suit against the department. [5] bit.ly/n05V1j
- A New York NY police chief allegedly shoved a newspaper photographer from behind during Occupy Wall Street protest, oddly this was only mentioned as a blip at the end of an article about the protest. [3] nyti.ms/oPJmf3
- New York NY police leak alleges ticket fixing scandal was uncovered during ongoing probe into cops taking drug money[3] nyp.st/roqqeU
- New York NY police have allegedly respond to a drop in revenue due to the ticket fixing scandal & quota backlash by increasing quotas for tickets & summonses [3] nydn.us/qXosKp
- Los Angeles Co CA deputies fatally shot a dog in front of several kids after they allegedly ordered the owner to get it out of his back yard so they could search it for a fleeing suspect’s weapon but they wouldn’t let him get a leash to do it. [3] bit.ly/qp1Vmi
- Key West FL cop accused of targeting news editor in DUI arrest where dashcam video contradicted his arrest report [3] bit.ly/pWuXJJ
- Seaside Park NJ cop & another person arrested on robbery & assault charges for mugging man outside bar [0] bit.ly/qWGlX9
- San Bernardino Co CA deputy arrested on unspecified charges after SWAT standoff sparked by alleged domestic dispute [3] http://bit.ly/pczivC
- Pueblo Co CO deputy in charge of evidence & property section resigns during investigation into missing cash [2] bit.ly/q4Yvjc
- Orangeburg Co SC deputy fired after state investigation into unspecified official misconduct allegations [1] bit.ly/pSlxzA
- Bogalusa LA cop arrested on 12 counts obtaining controlled substance by misrepresentation, shopped for painkillers [0] bit.ly/pzYnT1
- New Orleans LA police investigate allegations that some officers are violating policy by working details at bars [0] bit.ly/r7zQ6D
- Scotts Bluff Co NE deputy resigns after charged w/disturbing peace for loud profane language at jr high school [0] bit.ly/n30kUl
Ponzi & SS
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Ever since Rick Perry derided Social Security as a Ponzi scheme, economists and other pundits have jumped into the fray. Progressive blogger Matt Yglesias says it's "nuts" for anyone to talk like this, because Social Security merely relies on future economic growth — just like a private pension plan. Free-market economist Alex Tabarrok responded to Yglesias with links to arch-Keynesians (and Nobel laureates) Paul Samuelson and Paul Krugman, both comparing Social Security to a "Ponzi game."
In the present article I have three aims: First, I will point out that the critics are right; to the extent that Social Security "worked," it was because of its resemblance to a classic Ponzi scheme. Second, I will show how private-sector retirement planning operates nothing like this. Third, I will defend the good name of Charles Ponzi from the scurrilous comparisons — what he did was nothing like the racket known as Social Security.
Social Security's "Ponzi Game Aspects"
Paul Krugman is a famous guy with a long record of strong opinions. It's to be expected that periodically these will come back to bite him. His usual tack is to deny that his old columns meant what their plain-word reading would indicate. For example, Krugman can't believe anybody thought this column (from 2002) should be construed as his endorsement of Greenspan trying to create a housing bubble.
When it comes to Social Security, here's what Krugman wrote in late 1996:
Our Future Perhaps?
Via safetalker
Washington - President Obama, U.S. congressmen and their aides held an emergency four hour-long meeting Wednesday to decide what action to take to stem a sudden and unprecedented mass enlightenment of the US population that threatens to destabilize the Government and create a fiscal crisis.
Millions of citizens jubilantly celebrated their new awareness as they suddenly realized they have been lied to all their lives on just about everything by their psychopathic, conscienceless leaders of major corporations, government and security agencies.
Residents in all major cities across the United States awoke Wednesday morning complaining that they were experiencing an inexplicable mental clarity that was causing them to realize the way they were about to spend their day was utterly pointless, a potential health threat and would only add energy and finances to a powerful wealthy elite that had been ruling their lives since as long as they could remember.
Congress was thrown into chaos when a majority of staff decided to simply stop showing up for work until their bosses resign; in a move of solidarity, energy companies turned off the power to government buildings and military bases, while water companies shut down their water supply; repair people refused to carry out repairs for the politically well-connected and television network staff refused to report the lies they are routinely ordered to tell by their editors.
One Chicago resident's report was consistent with many similar accounts coming in from across the country. Joe, 42 told us how he had become aware of the diversionary, divide and conquer machinations of the psychopathic oligarchs, especially in relation to abortion, health care, immigration, global warming, peak oil, 9/11, fake terrorism, both current wars and past wars, 'necessary police actions', empire building and resource plundering, left vs right, evolution vs creationism, fundamentalists vs everybody else!
"Wow! I sort of felt things weren't right but to suddenly be able to see the true nature of all the lies we've been bombarded with by media and Big Government is just mind-boggling," Joe exclaimed.
"The public seems to have finally understood that they're so sick and going bankrupt because of the FDA/AMA medical mafia and Big Pharma's Gestapo death grip over absolutely everything! I've noticed how food companies, Monsanto and Big Pharma's share prices have exploded over the past few years," said Joe. "I can see it's because they have bought Congress and have a complete monopoly over our food supply, health and non-existent consideration for others' well-being."
Reports are flooding in of people deciding to buy or trade for goods with hand crafters in their own region instead of shopping at Wal-Mart. Rather than buying GMO foods at the supermarket chain stores, they've formed co-ops with their neighbors, bought fresh food in bulk and are getting together to can foods, smoke meats and pickle vegetables - followed by a barbecue. Feeling so connected and enthused by that, ordinary people across the nation are organizing all kinds of meetings to learn all the old skills that their grandparents knew that made them independent.
People are leaving the cities in droves and, en masse, have established themselves on previously restricted government land. This resulted in a veritable frenzy of house-building and barn raising parties followed, once again, by barbecues where home-made pickles were enjoyed by all.
The reasons for the mass-awakening are as yet unclear. One possible explanation has been given by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency where officials have discovered that the normally high levels of fluoride added to the nation's drinking water were "accidentally omitted." It's suspected that workers at water plants are responsible. Government Health officials have advised all citizens to carry on working as normal, eat lots of fast-food and stay glued to their TV sets in the hope that any thoughts generated in people by seeing the reality of the situation will be pacified by toxins, apathy and a return to the steady atrophy of their brains.
Citizens have been urged by the Obama administration to report anyone they witness behaving in a non-consumer-capitalist manner to Homeland Security who, with the help of FEMA, will permanently detain anyone found more than 5 meters from a Television screen.
Abandoned villages. Forgotten People & Sacred Sources
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HERE
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Vladimir Semin
Black Caucus: If Obama wasn't president, we would be ‘marching on the White House’
Unhappy members of the Congressional Black Caucus “probably would be marching on the White House” if Obama were not president, according to CBC Chairman Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.).
"If [former President] Bill Clinton had been in the White House and had failed to address this problem, we probably would be marching on the White House," Cleaver told “The Miami Herald” in comments published Sunday. "There is a less-volatile reaction in the CBC because nobody wants to do anything that would empower the people who hate the president."
CBC members have expressed concern in recent months as the unemployment rate has continued to rise amongst African-Americans, pushing for Obama to do more to address the needs of vulnerable communities.
"We’re supportive of the president, but we getting tired, y’all,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said in August. “We want to give [Obama] every opportunity, but our people are hurting. The unemployment is unconscionable. We don’t know what the strategy is."
Rather than targeting Obama’s leadership, many CBC members aimed their fire at the Tea Party movement over the summer’s congressional recess. (Oh, gee, this makes a lot of sense. I guess Logic 101 is no longer taught.) Waters said in a public meeting in her district that the Tea Party "can go straight to hell." Another member, Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.), called the Tea Party “the real enemy” seeking to hold Congress “hostage.”
Historic Confederate flag unveiled at Cape Fear Museum
VERBATIM POST
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WILMINGTON, NC (WECT) – A conserved Confederate Second National pattern flag was unveiled at the Cape Fear Museum Monday, brining a piece of history back to life.
The flag was captured in 1865 when US forces overtook Fort Fisher. It was made by local women in the 1860s and is more than 11-feet wide.
The flag traveled north and was discovered in the home of a private collector in New York. It was given to Wilmington in 1934. It's now been professionally cleaned and stabilized to go in the museum.
The Confederate Second National pattern flag will go on display in 2012, along with a 34-Star US flag that is also 11-feet wide. In 1861, the 34-Star flag was on display at a meeting of residents who were discussing the idea of North Carolina's secession.
Jack and Jill
Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill became a libertarian. What the…?
Here’s how it happened. First, the IRS took half her water in taxes. Then the Department of Justice took her bucket because it might be made out of illegal wood from India. Then the DNR fined Jill for disrupting the habitat of some creek guppy no one ever heard of.
The NLRB ruled Jill could only fetch water in Washington State and had to pay union guys to do it. TSA did a full cavity search and a double pat down of her mommy parts; that had nothing to do with the bucket of water, they just get off on that stuff. When she gasped, the EPA fined her for an excessive carbon dioxide emission.
Then Bruce and Lance named Jill in a class-action lawsuit because she got to inherit her husband’s bucket of water while they couldn’t even get married. She was banned from the Labor Day parade in Wausau because Jack never joined the water-fetchers union and voted Republican once. The USDA had her detained when a tip came in that she might have raw milk in that bucket.
President Obama decided Jill had more water than she needed, and said we would all be better off with him “spreadin’ the wet around”. Joe Biden later claimed he hydrated or moistened over 2 million Americans. One solar panel company took 365 million gallons of government stimulus water and then moved to China. Al Gore made a Power Point movie that showed Jill boiling polar bears in her bucket on coal-fired stove. He made billions off the fakery.
An angry mob stalked Jill wherever she went because she wouldn’t buy their water, shouting “shame, shame, shame” and drumming for months. When she suggested they could just Segway up the hill and fetch a pail for themselves like she did, the Congressional Black Caucus called her a racist and Maxine Waters told her to go to hell. Jimmy Hoffa said he would take sons of bitches like her out; she was pretty sure he didn’t mean on a date.
Afraid for her life, Jill went to buy a handgun but had to wait five days. Then she found out she could not carry it in her purse in Wisconsin until November anyway. While she counted the days down, a teen flashmob beat and then pistol-whipped her after the state fair. “Wow – how’d you guys get your training and permits already?” she marveled, spitting teeth. Jill was a little naïve about criminals and guns.
Ron Paul receives the most military donations, again
Although he clashed with other Republican candidates over the nation's foreign policy during the 2008 presidential primary, Congressman Ron Paul outraised every single other presidential candidate in both major parties when it came to donations from the military. With even more of the public seemingly warming up to Ron Paul's non-interventionist foreign policy this time around, it's perhaps no surprise that he's done it again.Wading through the data in the Federal Election Commission's report for second quarter fundraising this year, activists at the popular Ron Paul website, Liberty Forest, crunched the numbers and reported that their candidate had outraised every single other Republican candidate from sources that list the military as their employer, and had even outraised America's sitting Commander-in-chief, Barack Obama.
Here's the breakdown:
Cain - $6223
Romney - $5000
Bachmann - $2550
Newt - $1025
Pawlenty - $250
Santorum - $250
Johnson - $0
Total GOP (excluding Ron Paul) - $15298.00
Paul - $36739.79
Obama - $28833.99
The Day I Left the Left
Late one Saturday morning in 1990 under the skeleton-bleaching California sun, I motored through a crumbled, hilly, ashen section of East LA looking to see if any of the Hicks Boys Stoners were around to sell me some weed. Named after East LA’s Hicks Avenue, they were a loosely amalgamated gang of longhaired Mexican metalheads who shunned traditional cholo gang culture’s aesthetic trappings in favor of Richard “The Night Stalker” Ramirez-styled muerte obsessions, Satan worship, and generally aimless nihilism.
A few weeks earlier, I had written a cover story about the Hicks Boys for the Los Angeles Reader, a now-defunct free alt-weekly largely distributed in West LA. The magazine’s publisher was a short, pie-faced man with a voice so high-pitched one would suspect he was mainlining estrogen. He was slick-bald on top with a horseshoe rim of quarter-inch grey stubble around the sides and a Pixy Stix-thin footlong ponytail hanging limply in the back. Merely describing his ponytail tells you all you need to know about his politics.
The publisher didn’t like my article about the Hicks Boys. Surveying the pre-press galleys, he sniffed, “Why are you writing about these losers, anyway? They just come off like scumbags.” I tried explaining that if he’d grown up in East LA housing projects where police-chopper lights were poking into his bedroom every night and shirtless, machete-wielding cholos had terrorized his barrio since infancy, he may have had more empathy. (I still believe that.)
But he wasn’t convinced. He said he’d hired me six months earlier to give the magazine some “edge,” but he hadn’t expected a rusty, blood-covered prison shank. Shortly after my Hicks Boys story appeared, he fired me.
“It occurred to me that the only reason he wasn’t a large-scale oppressor was a simple lack of opportunity.”After skimming through the Hicks Boys’ turf a few times on that late Saturday morning, I finally spotted one of their members near a graffiti-spackled laundromat where they frequently congregated. He was threading a needle and preparing to tattoo himself.
At the time—I was 28—my political ideas were little more than the accumulated, half-digested buzzing meme-hive of left-leaning pop culture and far-left academic indoctrination. From all the Norman Lear sitcoms of my youth up to all my avowedly communist professors in journalism school, the good guys and bad guys had been clearly delinated for me. I had been encouraged to “question authority,” but never the authority of major media or academic consensus. I perceived them to be objective scientists rather than evangelical ideologues.
Liberal Psych 101 subverted the dominant paradigm until nothing made sense. It taught that cockroaches are equivalent to butterflies. It preached that success was a sign of evil and that failure was an emblem of virtue. It saw something noble in losing rather than winning. It didn’t seem so keen about “leveling the playing field” as it was on perverting natural law until they forced the game to end in a sudden-death two-overtimes tie. It published endless treatises on deconstruction without making a peep about how to reconstruct everything after destroying it.
Then as now, the left preached a Gospel of innate cognitive and physical equality among all social groups. What it did not preach was an equality of character. White people generally, and rich white males in particular, were depicted as morally defective, probably by birth.
Even though a white male, I dutifully absorbed and assented to the liberal blueprint. Journalism degree in tow, I set about to right historical wrongs. I appointed myself an advocacy journalist who would defend the poor against the rich and the weak against the strong.
In many cases, I didn’t realize I’d be defending the stupid against the smart.
Ironically, it was precisely this hands-on advocacy journalism that led me to abandon leftist thought entirely. It was a long and painful process, like an old car where the parts start to go and then one day the engine finally throws a rod. One experience after the other led to more chinks in my ideological armor than there were Chinks in Mao’s Red Army. Against my better wishes, I found I do not have the inexhaustible capacity for cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias that most leftists seem to possess.
While researching an article about wealth inequality, I came across a chart that showed the average corporate CEO’s IQ was 153, while the average manual laborer’s IQ was below a hundred. Something squirmed inside me. I didn’t want to hear this.
While reading Timothy Leary’s Jail Notes in preparation for interviewing him, I ran across a passage where Leary describes how the Black Panthers held him hostage in Algeria. I resisted what this implied. I didn’t want to know that blacks could act like slave owners, too.
While immersing myself in Orange County’s Vietnamese gang culture for a Playboy article, I was continually impressed with how these war-shattered Asians had come here penniless but owned businesses and mansions within a decade. This didn’t jibe with my belief that blacks and Mexicans were their equals.