W

hat you are seeing in this photo is not a hate crime; we have it on the authority of the Los Angeles Times:

“I’m not defending this; I’m not criticizing it. It doesn’t rise to the level of hate crime,” said Steve Whitmore, spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department …. (LA Times, emphasis added)

The two misogynists in the predominantly gay city of West Hollywood made no apologies for their display when the story broke (although they’ve since taken it down following demonstrations outside their home. Whatever their motivation, it wasn’t fear of being charged with a hate crime because they had the LAPD on their side.

So if hanging Palin in effigy isn’t a hate crime, what do you think of this?

LEXINGTON, Ky. (AP) – University of Kentucky authorities were investigating Wednesday who hanged an effigy of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama from a tree on campus. …

Federal authorities have been notified, Todd said. He said the effigy violates the university’s code of ethics and won’t be tolerated. …

Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan declined to comment specifically on the situation, but said an effigy can suggest a threatening tone or be an attempt to intimidate. He said the agency is “very proactive about addressing these matters.”

The feds have been called in? The Secret Service is taking it seriously?

And one about this?

NEWBERG, Ore. (AP) – A Christian university in Oregon said Tuesday it has punished four students who confessed to hanging a likeness of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama from a tree on campus. …

The FBI is investigating whether any civil rights were violated.

“A criminal investigation is much more rigorous than an academic one, obviously,” said Beth Anne Steele, an FBI spokeswoman. She couldn’t say when the investigation would be complete.

An FBI civil rights investigation?

So why are these incidents raised to the level of requiring an investigation while the West Hollywood gay couple gets a pass?

A commenter on my first post on the West Hollywood obscenity half-heartedly offered an explanation: Women weren’t lynched for a century or more in the South, but blacks were. A valid point, but if it’s true, then it would also be a hate crime if instead of hanging the effigy they displayed Palin as a victim of domestic violence. And no reasonable person would ever think the authorities would get off their butts to investigate that as a hate crime or civil rights crime.

So I’m left with this: Hanging an effigy of a half-black man is a probable hate crime, but hanging an effigy of a white woman, especially if she’s a Republican, is not.

14 Comments »

Zombieland is at it again, this time with a speculative but fascinating reconstruction of Barack Obama’s “mystery days” in New York – a reconstruction that shows it’s likely, or at least possible, that Obama knew Bill Ayres as early as 1981.

He begins with a piece of math we all – MSM included – should have done long ago:

Barack Obama would have you believe that the bombings by the radical domestic terrorists known as The Weather Underground were something that happened “when I was eight years old” and with which he had absolutely no connection. And while it is true that their bombings started when Obama was eight years old, they actually continued until he was twenty years old.

And that means they continued until Obama’s mysterious New York years – and that he was in New York when Ayres & Co. set off one of their last bombs!

And, incredibly, the life of Barack Obama and the terror campaign of the Weather Underground nearly intersected on the evening of September 26, 1981 at an anti-Apartheid protest which turned violent at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York.

I’m tempted to say they may have intersected, rather than just “nearly.” But I don’t know for sure.

What I do know is that Obama had the same political interests as the final remnants of the Weather Underground at the exact same time in the exact same place. That as an adult he was living in the same city where and when they conducted their second-to-last terror attack, which was a protest against the Apartheid polices of South Africa — the very topic to which Obama has said he was devoted at that time. So because of all this, Obama must have known about the Weather Underground and their tactics while he was still in college. So when he met Weather Underground founder William Ayers 13 years later, Obama certainly had to have known exactly who Ayers was and what he had done.

Especially if he (Obama) is as bright as he wants us to believe he is.

Zombieland’s piece is an investigative tour de force, complete with analyses of phone books, various radical student organizations, and what is known of Obama’s life and interests while he was at Occidental, then Columbia.  It also digs into what Ayres and his wife Bernardine Dohrn were up to at the time, and concludes:

They were in the same city as each other, at the same time.
They lived near each other.
The went to school near each other.
They had the same political interests.
Their circles of friends and associates intersected.

By sheer coincidence, a decade later in Chicago, they were in the same city as each other, at the same time; they lived near each other; they had the same political interests; their circles of friends and associates intersected.

Or was it not a coincidence at all?

It’s the sort of work the New York Times should have done, but its analysis of Obama’s NY years was basically a quick shrug and a “Dunno.”  If the NYT had done this research and had hounded Obama like its hounded Palin, we might know for a fact that Obama and Ayres have known each other for 17 years, and that they met as fellow radicals waaaay back when.

But they didn’t, so we don’t.

hat-tip:  Okie on the Lam

3 Comments »

My recent post on the Cal. sanctity of marriage proposition, Prop 8, Gay Marriage and the Spread of Islamofascism, generated a rather different comment:

Hi; May I interject a real life situation. I’d like to hear your guidance on this. My mother was given a drug to take to lessen the chance of miscarriage and promote healthy babies — that’s what the doctor told her. The drug is Diethylstilbestrol, or DES. In male fetuses, it feminizes the brains of one in five of us ‘DES sons’.

I finally came to terms with this, and realized my choice was transition or die. So, I’m now a male-to-female transsexual who’s had ‘the operation.’ I’ve changed all my legal paperwork and although I still have a male body with XY chromosomes, it has been retrofitted to approximate female anatomy, which is good because if I ever end up in an accident, there will be no ’surprise’ for the first responders.

I ‘pass’ very well, thank you. Only rarely do strangers figure out I was not born this way. Most people have to be told, by me, or, more often, by someone else who just has to ‘drop the bomb.’ All my paperwork has been changed.  Legally, I’m female.  But I have to find an OB/GYN who can check my prostate during my yearly pelvic exam (yearly mammograms don’t need that level of disclosure.)

So my question to you is — knowing what you know now about me, and assuming for the moment you get absolute power to label me and make determinations on where I can and can’t go —

-Do I marry a man? Or do I marry a woman?

-Which restroom and changing facility do you feel I, a male-to-female transsexual, should use when in public spaces?

-Am I immoral?

-Am I a paedophile?

-Am I tearing down western society in support of a deviant agenda?

-Am I selfish?

I eagerly await your responses; Hazumu Osaragi

Obviously, there’s a bit of a set-up happening here, since my post wasn’t about trans-sexual issues at all.  Nevertheless, I took some time to give Hazumu a thoughtful answer.  I’d be interested in your thoughts …

13 Comments »

WaPo Excuses Obama As It Breaks Bad Donations Story

With the media asleep at the wheel, this election has seen the blogosphere (and some magazines) doing the job of the MSM in investigating Obama. Wright, Ayres, socialist leanings … all have been well reported in the blogs well before the media has turned its attention to them.

Now it’s happened again with Obama’s shameful and dishonest on-line donations system. After batting around the blogosphere for a couple weeks, the Washington Post finally got around to reporting on it this morning – on page 2, not page 1:

Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is allowing donors to use largely untraceable prepaid credit cards that could potentially be used to evade limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or to mask a contributor’s identity, campaign officials confirmed.

I would have used “admitted,” but WaPo chose the more sterile “confirmed,” but the paper pretty much gets through one paragraph OK. Then objectivity ends:

Faced with a huge influx of donations over the Internet, the campaign has also chosen not to use basic security measures to prevent potentially illegal or anonymous contributions from flowing into its accounts, aides acknowledged. Instead, the campaign is scrutinizing its books for improper donations after the money has been deposited.

The Obama organization said its extensive review has ensured that the campaign has refunded any improper contributions, and noted that Federal Election Commission rules do not require front-end screening of donations.

“Faced with a huge influx of donations” is the Obama excuse, and it takes WaPo just 43 words to give the campaign a pass for its near-criminal behavior. The theme continues hot and heavy throughout the reporting – but it’s a fake. High volume internet sales operations are able to follow correct procedures, and there’s not excuse for the Obama campaign not doing the same. Note also that the aides are “acknowledging;” they’re still not “admitting,” and that the report is piling on the excuses heavy, with later scrutinization and FEC regs.

Even WaPo can’t keep its face straight forever and finally, after the jump, it admits that the Obama excuse is a fraud:

Juan Proaño, whose technology firm handled online contributions for John Edwards’s [sic] presidential primary campaign, and for John F. Kerry’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee in 2004, said it is possible to require donors’ names and addresses to match those on their credit card accounts. But, he said, some campaigns are reluctant to impose that extra layer of security.

It takes nine paragraphs for WaPo to reveal how bad the fraud is:

The Obama team’s disclosures came in response to questions from The Washington Post about the case of Mary T. Biskup, a retired insurance manager from Manchester, Mo., who turned up on Obama’s FEC reports as having donated $174,800 to the campaign. Contributors are limited to giving $2,300 for the general election.

Biskup, who had scores of Obama contributions attributed to her, said in an interview that she never donated to the candidate. “That’s an error,” she said. Moreover, she added, her credit card was never billed for the donations, meaning someone appropriated her name and made the contributions with another card.

Mary T. Biskup would have been the lead if it was the McCain campaign that was behaving in such a renegade manner.

It takes 17 paragraphs (and a jump) for WaPo to admit that the McCain campaign, unlike Obama’s, has security measures in place – but the scoundrels preface that news with two paragraphs about bad contributions slipping through – without ever comparing the scale!

Do you think for one moment this would have been the tone of the piece were the campaigns reversed?

Media Bias 2008 covers pro-Obama media bias. Items are listed from most recent to oldest; the numbering reflects this and is not a ranking. Send Media Bias 2008 examples via “comments”‘ below, or to email2laer [@] yahoo [dot] com.

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W

ith less than a week to go ’til election day and the polls tightening, it’s no surprise that this week’s Watcher’s Council entries have a lot to do with the candidates, the media (which have had a heavy hand in this election) and the pollsters. On the latter, the Watcher of Weasels has an interesting point:

The ever tightening gap underscores points that pundits made in the weeks leading up to this point: the credibility of the pollsters is on the line so expect the wide gaps in favor of Obama to disappear because the pollsters can’t allow their reputations to suffer from their own biases.

Hmmm. A definitely mull-able point. Also mull-able are these entries.

Council Submissions

• Bookworm Room – Obama wants the government to redistribute wealth
• Joshuapundit – A Spectator At The Orgy
• Hillbilly White Trash – The gap between the media’s version and the actual truth grows wider
• Cheat-Seeking Missiles – Is a Barack Victory Predestined?
• The Colossus of Rhodey – We’re tired of it already
• Soccer Dad – The campaign and israel: take 3029
• The Razor – The Good Daughter
• The Glittering Eye – Both Candidates Suck

Non-Council Submissions

• Submitted By: Bookworm Room – Iowahawk – Balls and Urns
• Submitted By: Joshuapundit – Phillipe Karsenty/Hudson Foundation – Obama Is Already The Elected President…. In France!
• Submitted By: Hillbilly White Trash – American Thinker – Time for a Gut Check, America
• Submitted By: Cheat-Seeking Missiles – Doug Ross @ Journal – The Manifesto of the Silenced Majority
• Submitted By: The Colossus of Rhodey – The New York Review of Books – Hugo Chávez Versus Human Rights
• Submitted By: Soccer Dad – Pajamas Media – Syria-Iraq: Bloody Border, Messy Politics
• Submitted By: The Razor – Philly.com – Palin Deserves Our Respect
• Submitted By: The Glittering Eye – Winds of Change – The Newspaper Crash of 2009… And How You Can Help

As always, Council members will submit their picks on Thursday, and you’ll see the winners here on Friday morning.

Thanks, Watcher, for not rigging the ballots in this all important contest.

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It’s The Editors

Michael Malone is one of America’s most respected high-tech reporters, a fourth-generation newsman who “truly bleeds ink when I’m cut.”  Still, he writes at ABC News, this campaign’s election coverage has caused him to hide his true identity:

The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I’ve found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.

But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I’ve begun — for the first time in my adult life — to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was “a writer,” because I couldn’t bring myself to admit to a stranger that I’m a journalist.

Still, the newshound in Malone can’t allow him to blame the newshounds.  He takes a different perspective:

Furthermore, I also happen to believe that most reporters, whatever their political bias, are human torpedoes … and, had they been unleashed, would have raced in and roughed up the Obama campaign as much as they did McCain’s. That’s what reporters do. I was proud to have been one, and I’m still drawn to a good story, any good story, like a shark to blood in the water.

So why weren’t those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign? Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal?

The editors. The men and women you don’t see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn’t; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay out the editorial pages. They are the real culprits.

Why?

Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you’ve spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power … only to discover that you’re presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn’t have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you’ll lose your job before you cross that finish line, 10 years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe — and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway — all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself — an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career.

With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived fairness doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

It’s all too rational and coordinated, as opposed to the emotional hysteria that’s carried Obama to the brink of the presidency.  Still, Malone presents some interesting fodder.

Media Bias 2008 covers pro-Obama media bias. Items are listed from most recent to oldest; the numbering reflects this and is not a ranking. Send Media Bias 2008 examples via “comments”‘ below, or to email2laer [@] yahoo [dot] com.

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T

his effigy of Sarah Palin hanging by a noose from the roof of a West Hollywood home is not a hate crime, according to the LAPD.

“I’m not defending this; I’m not criticizing it. It doesn’t rise to the level of hate crime,” said Steve Whitmore, spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, who said he went out to the house himself to look at the display this morning. “Now, if there was a crime against bad taste…” (LA Times)

The mayor of West Hollywood sees it more correctly:

“While these residents have the legal right to display Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin in effigy, I strongly oppose political speech that references violence – real or perceived.”

But the readers of the LAT’s Comments Blog showed their overwhelming double standard in an on-line poll. Tell me that fears of being called racist haven’t skewed this entire election:

If the hanged effigy represented Barack Obama, do you think law enforcement would respond differently?

Yes — law enforcement would force the homeowner to remove the display 79% (992 votes)

No — the same rules protecting freedom of speech would apply 11% (139 votes)

Don’t know <1% (12 votes)

Who cares — it’s just Halloween decorations! 9% (116 votes)

So, according to the Obamaniacs who populate LA, law enforcement can be anti-racist but can’t be anti-misogynist?  Interesting … I didn’t know we already lived in an Islamic country.

But, if you want to see the double standard at its baldfaced extreme, check out this video.  No time to click? Here’s the goodies:

Announcer:  Some residents say Palin would find the murder mock-up funny.

Woman:  She loves to kill stuff and you know, with a gun, and she’s a, you know, she’s a bad-a$$.  And so, I think she’s got a good sense of humor.

Announcer:  What if it was a Barack Obama?

Woman:  Uh … I’d light the house on fire.

Got it.  Only the GOP is interjecting race into the campaign.

6 Comments »

Y

ou know the old saying, “Gays and Islamofascists don’t mix.”  Funny, yes, but there really is a nexus:  If California’s Prop 8 fails and gay marriage remains the law of the land here, look for the Golden State to become the address of choice for America’s Islamofascist population.

Islamofascists, or Islamists as I prefer to call them, don’t want to be bothered with Judeo-Christian laws and traditions that get in the way of their living the Koran in their daily lives.  That means more than just not wanting any toilets around that face toward Mecca; it means being able to live out their misogynistic “right” to polygamous marriage.

Muslims, and particularly Islamists, have a way of using local laws – laws they dislike for not being Sharia – to their advantage.  For example, Mark Steyn writes about some welfare law wrangling that’s gone on in the UK:

You can’t (for the moment) marry multiple wives within the United Kingdom, but if you contract a polygamous marriage in a jurisdiction where polygamy is legal, such as certain, ahem, Muslim countries, your better halves (or better eighths?) are now recognized as eligible for British welfare payments. Thus, the concept of “each additional spouse” has been accepted both de facto and de jure.

And elsewhere in Europe:

Thousands of polygamous marriages like Hadi’s have sprung up throughout Italy as a byproduct of a fast-paced and voluminous immigration by Muslims to this Roman Catholic country.

Despite the obvious culture clash, Italian authorities largely turn a blind eye, leaving women in a murky semi-clandestine world with few rights and no recourse when things go especially badly, as they did in Hadi’s case. …

Italy is one of several European nations faced with the issue of polygamy. In Britain and Spain, where large Muslim communities have also settled, some officials favor recognizing polygamous marriage as a way to ensure the wives’ access to pensions, medical care and other state benefits.

Steyn details at length in America Alone how Islamists and their hard to find but supposedly still around somewhere more moderate Muslim brethren have used Europe’s open society and namby-pamby multiculturalism to exploit laws protecting gay rights to make inroads toward the legalization of polygamous marriage.  After all, if a man can marry a man, why can’t a man marry three women?

Charles Krauthammer explained the logic in a 2006 WaPo column, Pandora and Polygamy:

In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as advocates of gay marriage insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one’s autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement — the number restriction (two and only two) — is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice.

This line of argument makes gay activists furious. I can understand why they do not want to be in the same room as polygamists. But I’m not the one who put them there. Their argument does.

He concludes the piece with what I forsee as the rallying cry of CAIR as it begins to hurl petrodollars by the barrel at California legislators in the days that would follow the rejection of Prop 8:

[D]on’t tell me that we can make one radical change in the one-man, one-woman rule and not be open to the claim of others that their reformation be given equal respect.

Todd Zywicki, writing at Volokh, made a similar if more inscrutable point:

Here’s my thought–the definition of marriage as one man and one woman seems somewhat arbitrary, which is why it is difficult to justify. The primary justification I can see is a Hayekian one of prudential deference to tradition unless there is an extremely strong case for rejecting it. I would distinguish this from what I would understand as a Burkean objection, which I would read as tradition being prescriptive, rather than prudential. But whether this is an accurate distinction is probably a debate for a different day.

So the question is, if you get rid of the “man-woman” prong as largely arbitrary, why does this not lead to getting rid of the “one-one” prong as well? It seems like the new line is just as arbitrary as the old one.

Indeed.  And California is just the place for this to happen.

California has liberal courts and, with Massachusetts, the nation’s longest gay rights tradition.  It has a liberal legislature that is prone to writing state laws in the name of multiculturalism and inclusion.  One doesn’t have to be a gay rocket scientist to see that in the blink of an eye, gay marriage in California will lead to a very Sharia-like polygamous marriage in California.  And if that happens and you happen to be a jihad-hungry, woman-deriding Islamist living in Kansas or Kentucky, what state would you head for?

In a closing footnote, it’s interesting that you could take this argument entirely the other way: If Prop 8 passes, it will open the door to polygamous marriage. That’s a favorite red herring of  the No on 8 set, who argue that because the proposition calls for the enthroning in our state constitution of a definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman – instead of one man and one woman – it’s all just a Mormon conspiracy to turn California into Warren Jeffs‘ new hang-out.

Chilling. It looks like either way, the Islamists could win.

23 Comments »

W

hile the more sober Dem commentators are trying to explain away Obama’s fascination with redistribution of wealth, the more blood-thirsty are busy dancing on the grave of the conservative movement. They’re forgetting that the body’s not in the ground yet.

Case in point:

The modern conservative movement is dying in front of our eyes, and its death throes aren’t pretty. As John McCain heads for likely defeat, the GOP is eating itself. Right-wing politicians and pundits who never criticized Bush in eight years are suddenly jumping ship like rats, while bitter-end loyalists angrily accuse them of being “pathetically opportunistic.” After months of veering from one tactic to the next, McCain has finally settled on one message for his campaign, but it’s absurd: claiming that the party whose signature is tax cuts for the rich is really on the side of Joe the Plumber.

Meanwhile, 3.1 million real Joe the Plumbers across America are sending Barack Obama hundreds of millions of dollars, a torrent of cash that is helping to flush the GOP down the national toilet.

That’s the always quotable (not a compliment) Gary Kamiya, writing today in Salon. (You may remember Kamiya; I wrote rather extensively in September about his appalling ignorant and sexist piece, The Dominatrix, subtitled, “Sarah Palin is trying to seduce independent voters.” In his self-penned Salon bio, he admits he:

…lives on a street with cable cars with his wife, Kate Moses, and her son Zachary. He likes big cities, ’50s paperbacks with gratuitous cleavage on their covers, Steve Young, backpacking, Italy and people who like to talk. …

After moving to California, he attended Berkeley High, where the student government was run by a dadaist cabal; put in a brief, LSD-riddled stint at Yale; and some aimless years later washed up in the UC-Berkeley English Department …

In other words, he’s one of those San Francisco loons who hasn’t invested a brain cell in trying to understand conservative thought because he’s so busy making snide jokes and outrageous statements about it, thinking all the time he’s mainstream. Oh, how I hope and pray McCain pulls it out – stopping Obamadness is fine, but grinding Kamiya’s face in his smug self-assuredness is even better!

Whatever the outcome of the election, it won’t be the death of the American conservative movement.  Kamiya seems to miss the point that McCain is not the captain of the movement. Most of us voted for someone else in the primaries and accepted McCain with some reluctance when the old fighter got the nomination as conservatives split their votes between several candidates. But since then, Obama’s hard left, redistributive politics would make Lincoln Chafee look like a conservative Republican, so McCain’s OK with us.

You just can’t blame him for what’s going on with conservatism. That happened last spring and summer, as we watched a moderate take the ticket; the campaign since hasn’t been about conservatism, despite the partial return to the fold Palin brought with her.

Back to Joe the Plumber. Kamiya can rattle his PC-approved, SF-issued blunt, wobbly saber, but he does so while ignoring the changes in the poll numbers since redistribution of wealth entered the campaign with Joe. In spouting the 3.1 million donors, he ignores that Obama is running a crooked campaign, refusing to set up contribution software that matches the donor’s address with that on the credit card, so he can steal contributions.  How many of your 3.1 million are from people who are committing fraud with Obama’s approval, Kamiya? How many are donations from King Kong, Bart Simpson or Daffy Duck?

You have to wonder what world Kamiya’s been on for the last eight years:

There’s something surreal about how fast the GOP has gone from arrogant triumphalism to its death throes. Just yesterday, the GOP’s mighty Titanic was cruising along, its opulent decks lined with fat-cat financiers and neoconservative warmongers, all smoking cigars, drinking champagne and extolling the deathless virtues of their fearless captain. The compliant media issued glowing dispatches. Karl Rove cackled with glee as he plotted out a permanent Republican majority.

Rote, rote, rote; it’s the chant of the closed-eyed Left, even down to the thought that the media, the left-leaning, Obama-backing media, are compliant to the Bushies.

Kamiya goes on with more of this sort of analysis that, while it plays well with the majority of Salon readers, wholly misses the point.  And the point is as big as an elephant.  It is not conservativism that will die should Obama be elected, it is liberalism.  The capture of the Democrat Party by the hard-left, socialist, redistributive, anti-war, anti-American minority will have been realized and classic American liberalism, already on life support, will be euthanized.

As for conservatism, should Obama win, it will grow like Topsy, becoming healthier than ever.  Americans reject redistribution, as Gallup found way back in June:

When given a choice about how government should address the numerous economic difficulties facing today’s consumer, Americans overwhelmingly—by 84% to 13%—prefer that the government focus on improving overall economic conditions and the jobs situation in the United States as opposed to taking steps to distribute wealth more evenly among Americans.

Conservatism is the only wrench the 84 percent will have available to them to throw into the cogs of Obama’s socialist machine.  Thank goodness it’s a strong wrench.

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B

logger, Bo-Sox fan (forgiven), guest radio show host, columnist and sage observer of our times Dean Barnett has passed away.  Hugh Hewitt has a touching eulogy here, which includes:

Dean told me early in our friendship that his disease had forced him to deal with the possibility of living too short a life and that he thus threw himself into everything.  This ferocious desire to live well and fully is what I will always tell people marked Dean Barnett.

Why, pray tell, would one have to have cystic fibrosis to feel that way – but isn’t that the way it is?  We who are blessed with good health can too often take life as a given, not something to be cherished, relished, celebrated, lived and filled to its fullest, every day.

Adios, Dean!

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