Brutally Honest

People don't want to think...

... certainly not critically but Confederate Yankee does... and he does so most effectively:

John McCain's latest ad comparing Barack Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears didn't impress me that much, but appears to have made an impression on all the right people.

Why is such a simple association gaining traction, when far more troubling aspects of Obama's life being ignored or swept away?

People don't want to think about the fact that Barack Obama has no executive experience, that this legislative accomplishments are meager, and that his resume is thin. It scares them to look too deep into what he hasn't been able to accomplish... and so they don't.

People don't want to think about the fact that Obama is the first presidential candidate in our nation's history with direct ties to domestic terrorists, or radical, conspiracy-mongering clergy... and so they don't.

They look at the commanding stage presence. They bask in his oratory, carefully scripted not to offend, or to ask too much. They indulge themselves in his promise that he can be everything they need. They set aside reason. They set aside details. In a swoon, they think only about how he makes them feel now.

There's much more.  And it's good.

Seriously so.

Five for Fighting's Freedom Never Cries

"Thank you all for supporting whatkindofworlddoyouwant.com and the "Freedom Never Cries" Triwest video. We've reached our 30,000 views for Triwest's $30,000 Operation Homefront donation! As always, we are looking for more sponsors to keep us going. In the meantime, continue to pass this video on and enjoy the other clips on the site. The messages do matter."

-- John Ondrasik

Obama Returns To Race & Fear Tactics

Posted by guest blogger Locutisprime and cross posted at The Borg Perspective.

Obama says Republicans trying to scare voters

Democrat Barack Obama, the first black candidate with a shot at winning the White House, says John McCain and his Republican allies will try to scare them by saying Obama "doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills."

Stumping in an economically challenged battleground state, Obama argued Wednesday that President Bush and McCain will resort to scare tactics to maintain their hold on the White House because they have little else to offer voters.

"Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. So what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me," Obama said. "You know, he's not patriotic enough, he's got a funny name, you know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills."

During a round of appearances in Missouri, Obama worked to link McCain to the unpopular Bush, saying the Republican senator from Arizona would serve the equivalent of a third Bush term if elected. He said the country can't afford more of the same and expects different results.

"That's a definition of madness, but that's what John McCain is offering. He's offering Bush economic policies and Karl Rove politics," Obama said.

Once again Obama is returning to his race as the qualifier for his presidency. 'Don't miss this moment.'  Don't miss what moment senator Obama? You mean the moment to elect a black man president?

Obama touched on all the talking points in his speech yesterday. Don't let them make you afraid of me. Don't accept their reality that I am a risk and that I have no experience. Don't let them make you think that I am not a Christian.  After which he proceeds to attempt to solidify the opposition theory that McCain will be a third term of President Bush and that somehow Karl Rove is really orchestrating the anti Obama campaign from a clandestine GOP bunker in the Watergate Hotel.

What you are seeing folks is the real backlash and reality of Obama's recent world tour and his condescending treatment of both the media and the American people. These people (Obama campaign) have "daily polls." Bill Clinton and Dick Morris perfected that technique fifteen years ago. And Obama is playing the same hand with the same deck as we speak. Looking into the crystal ball and seeing the storm clouds forming.

He and his handlers have seen the writing on the wall of the past week in the press clippings. Since his return from the ego trip last week he has recognized that the media is no longer in his pocket. As he realizes that John McCain has picked up support and that a good many of those supposedly undecided and moderate voters, didn't like what they saw when they saw Obama traipsing around Europe, supposedly "looking presidential" and smirking at the folks back home while dodging realities about Iraq and the oil crisis and apologizing for America. With about three weeks left until the convention, Obama and his campaign are going into damage control mode and trying to hold on to what they had before the trip. But the messiah's crown has slipped and the people are finally seeing the Emperor's "new clothes."

An overinflated ego's energy policy

Inflate your tires.

Incredible.

Do nothing Congress does more nothing (UPDATED)

On Tuesday, the U.S. House of Representatives issued an unprecedented apology to black Americans for the institution of slavery, and the subsequent Jim Crows laws that for years discriminated against blacks as second-class citizens in American society.

Rep. Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Tennessee, drafted the resolution. Cohen explains the apology's long journey for Congressional approval and the significance of its timing.

-NPR.

RevLurch, in a rarely seen flash of brilliance at The DesperatePreacher Site, sums it up for me:

And it means? Politicians get to act like they did something instead of actually doing something about gas prices, foreign dependency on oil, extremist terrorist groups, and the banking crisis. I'm so glad that my congressional representatives can make a meaningless gesture that does nothing to actually improve the lives of the citizens who voted for them and pay their salary. I'm glad the United States Congress has time for empty gestures.

Preach it brother.

UPDATE: RevLurch is battling the apology apologists:

Deke in TX wrote:  Empty to you, Lurch, but maybe, just maybe, it will mean something to some and aid in healing.

As for the agenda that you outlined - that will require more consensus then exists in both houses as well as the White House.

Aid in healing what? Will there now be fewer "racists" because of what congress did? Will fewer inner city kids grow up hopeless because of what congress did? Will schools be improved? Will I no longer have to be subjected to abusive "hate speech" masquerading as "diversity training?" I doubt it. This is just an attempt by a congress that has done absolutely nothing to make it look like they did something.

And guess what, when I pay somebody a six figure salary with generous benefits to do a job, that is difficult as you so succinctly stated, I expect them to do it. I know it's a tough road and there is hard work to be done. This kind of political posturing is just a waste of time. As you stated, it will require more consensus and to get there we need to be working toward that consensus. We need to not be dealing with past issues that are for the most part, not relevant to the current issues facing our country. If we work on those issues I brought up, it goes a long way to helping people of all races.

He has a blog here, I'm thinking we should go over and encourage him as he fights the nonsensical.

Obama, not Presidential material, just another celeb

This is good... and true... and will leave The Left furious... pass it on:

And just so to drive the point home some, let's go back, for embellishment and substantiation:

Don't you just get chill bumps listening to it?

And then, if you have any sense, you realize it's just a bunch of celebrities, in an expertly produced video aimed at tugging at you emotionally (and not intellectually), doing nothing more than promoting a peer.

Nothing. More.

And should you fall for it, should you buy the crapola being sold, you'll get...

More. Nothing.

Because in the end, this guy is nothing more than an empty suit, dressed up nicely by a bunch of handlers, all of which are hard core leftist/Marxist/Socialist/Utopianist nincompoops.

Don't fall for it.  Think critically about it.  Granted, McCain is tough to champion but I'm at a point where anyone but Obama will do.

I blame Bush

Someone ought to:

The U.S. had 12% fewer homeless last year than in 2005, and the greatest decline occurred among those who chronically live on the streets or in emergency shelters, according to a federal report to be released Tuesday.

"This is a success story," says Dennis Culhane, a University of Pennsylvania professor and co-author of the report by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). He attributes the decline to better tracking and to increased efforts to house the "chronically homeless" — disabled adults who are continuously homeless for at least a year.

The number of people on the street or in emergency shelters on a single night in January, the month in which the tally was taken, fell from 763,010 in 2005 to 671,888 last year, the report says. Most were homeless temporarily. Among those who were chronically homeless, the number fell from 175,914 in 2005 to 123,833 in 2007.

HOMELESS IN AMERICA: Read the full report (pdf file)

"This reduction is the largest documented decrease in homelessness in our nation's history," says Philip Mangano, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which coordinates federal efforts. He says it shows that the increase in housing units for the long-term homeless, funded by HUD and communities, is working.

Where's the Religious Left on this?  Why wouldn't they be praising the news?  Isn't this the sort of thing they should (and rightly) be ecstatic about?

Jim Wallis... where are you on this news?

Landstuhl's Command Sergant Major on the Obama non-visit with injured troops

Via National Review Online:

Having spent two years as the Command Sergeant Major at Landstuhl Hospital, I am always grateful for the attention that facility receives from members of Congress. There is no more important work done by the United States Army than to care for those who have been wounded in the service [of] our country. While Americans troops remain engaged in two hot wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is a steady stream of casualties to the hospital, and a steady stream of visitors who wish to meet with those troops and thank them for their service.

Senator Obama has explained his decision to cancel a scheduled visit there by blaming the military, which would not allow one of his political advisers to join him in a tour of the facility. Why Senator Obama felt he needed an adviser with him to visit U.S. troops is unclear, but if Senator Obama isn't comfortable meeting wounded American troops without his entourage, perhaps he does not have the experience necessary to serve as commander in chief.

Booyah!

That's gonna leave a mark

Bob Owens on the Left's selective outrage:

As innocuous as that post [on the Tennessee shootings] was to most normal people, online progressive activists and bloggers, wasting no time in trying to twist the tragedy to their political advantage, flooded my inbox and the comments section of that post with crude language and spittle-flecked, half-formed thoughts of rage.

Some claimed that by writing this post, I was "a lying fascist thug," apparently for merely pointing out that in addition to his stated hatred of gays and liberals, he targeted a church "after expressing beliefs to neighbors in the past that he had an abiding anger against Christianity, an anger that appears rooted in his childhood." It was later confirmed that Adkisson did have issues with religion dating back to his childhood, and that the specific church he targeted was one that was once attended by his ex-wife.

Another went off on a rant in another direction, hissing, "So if he had targeted a mosque, that would be OK because it wasn't a church, I presume. You know, them 'sand people' and all that..."

Rarely have I seen strawmen created and then slaughtered with such ferocity, especially by a political group so thoroughly untroubled by the thought of the slaughter most experts predicted would occur in Iraq if their calls for an immediate pullout in Iraq had been heeded in the past few years.

Another stated "your side launched a terrorist attack yesterday. Two innocent Americans died. Why does your side hate America so much?"

Indeed, the meme that the attack was domestic terrorism seems quite popular among some on the far left, and they have trotted out this tragedy as example of a specific kind of domestic terrorism, one that they've branded as "eliminationism."

They spare no bile or blame in asserting that Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and others in the conservative movement indirectly contributed to Adkisson's abbreviated rampage.

Give their newfound concern about domestic terrorism, and their stated disgust with those who would advocate threats of harm as a political tool via eliminationism, I find it the pinnacle of hypocrisy that they offer unswerving support and near-Messianic devotion to a political candidate who began his ascension up the political ladder with a fundraiser at the home of a well-known pair of domestic terrorists.

Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn belonged to a group that declared war against the United States, bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, and other buildings, and attempted to blow up a dance of American soldiers and their dates, only to have the pipebombs prematurely detonate instead, taking only terrorist souls.

The leftwing political blogosphere has no tolerance for domestic terrorists at all...

...unless they're long-time friends of their Presidential candidate.

There's no better skewering than the skewering of a predictable leftist meme.

Nicely done Bob, as usual.

A crisis in The Church of Chicken Little (UPDATE)

As chronicled by Alan Caruba at the Intellectual Conservative:

It’s hard to ignore the fact that the Greens are going crazy, not just in the United States, but around the world. They are increasingly frantic over the opposition being voiced against global warming, one of the greatest hoaxes in modern history.

The Greens have bet everything on global warming as the reason for giving up the use of long established sources of energy such as oil, coal and natural gas. The object has been to slow everything the modern world calls progress.

In India, a spokesman for that nation of one billion people has flatly refused to accept the global warming hoax. China shows no sign of yielding to the global warming lies. The greatest agricultural and mercantile economy to have ever existed, the United States of America, continues to thwart its own growth by yielding to the lies.

Recently the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, said that, “coal makes us sick. Oil makes us sick. It’s global warming. It’s ruining our country. It’s ruining our world.”

...

Early in July, Bret Stephens, writing in The Wall Street Journal, called global warming “a mass hysteria phenomenon,” noting that “NASA now begrudgingly confirms that the hottest year on record in the continental 48 was not 1998, as previously believed, but 1934, and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate 1954. Data from 3,000 scientific robots in the world’s oceans show there has been slight cooling in the past five years . . .”

The global warming hoax has never been about the climate. It is about competing economic theories. “Socialism may have failed as an economic theory,” wrote Stephens, “but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism.”

Arm yourself folks and read the whole thing.  Then tweak a Watermelon-ist (green on the outside, red on the inside) and pass this along to them.

Watch the wailing begin.

H/T MarineCorpVet.

UPDATE: From Classical Values:

Peter Huber in Forbes takes a look at the reality of carbon hysteria. 

A number of influential people in Russia, China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam say the planet is now entering a 30-year cooling period, the second half of a normal cycle driven by cyclical changes in the sun's output and currents in the Pacific Ocean. Their theory leaves true believers in carbon catastrophe livid.

To judge by actions, not words, the carbon-warming view hasn't come close to persuading a political majority even in nations considered far more environmentally enlightened than China and India. Europe's coal consumption is rising, not falling, and the Continent won't come close to meeting the Kyoto targets for carbon reduction. Australia is selling coal to all comers.

We used to have a saying in my day: "actions speak louder than words". Today it is "Pay no attention to the fat man, who used to be Vice President, behind the curtain."

Yes... there's more... don't be a fool and not go there.