harmonicminer

Andrew McCarthy makes the case that The Gitmo Volunteers are no more noble in volunteering to represent the Guantanamo prisoners than a restaurant owner who gave free food to Al Qaeda. It’s all worth reading, and it’s difficult to refute, I think.  He has some especially pointed observations about how the legal profession sees itself as being above the rest of us, particularly the left-liberal wing of it.  Read it all if you can.  Here’s the ending bit:

America’s enemies are no more entitled to counsel in pursuing legal claims than, say, a pro-life group that chooses to file a lawsuit. If I went out of my way to contribute my services for free to a pro-life group, do you suppose the New York Times would have the slightest hesitation about drawing the inference that I was sympathetic to the pro-life cause? Of course not. The Gray Lady wouldn’t pretend that I was just, in the Gillers lexicon, promoting “the administration of justice.” After all, no one would have forced me to take that case. There are countless causes that a lawyer willing to donate his services can find. When you’re a volunteer, you’re doing what you want to do, not what you have to do.

As the law is currently understood, it is legal for a lawyer to volunteer his services to America’s enemies. It is absurd, however, to suggest that we have to applaud that decision. And it is equally ludicrous to suggest that we are forbidden from drawing the obvious conclusion that a lawyer who makes such a decision is predisposed to condemn the United States and to sympathize with America’s enemies on some level.

Here’s the landscape: The Obama Justice Department is staffed with many lawyers who volunteered their services to America’s enemies. Since those lawyers have been running the department, there has been a detectable shift in favor of due-process rights for terrorists, a bias in favor of civilian trials in which terrorists are vested with all the rights of American citizens, a bias against military tribunals, the extension of Miranda protections to enemy combatants, a concerted effort to publish previously classified information detailing interrogation methods and depicting the alleged abuse of detainees, efforts to subject lawyers who authorized aggressive counterterrorism policies to professional sanction, the reopening of investigations against CIA interrogators even though those cases were previously closed by apolitical law-enforcement professionals, and the continued accusation that officials responsible for designing and carrying out the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies committed war crimes.

You may think this is a coincidence. I don’t. And I’m not going to pretend it is because some lefty lawyer screams “McCarthyism.” This isn’t demagoguery. It is cause and effect. And if it is hurting President Obama politically, that is because he deserves to be hurt for indulging it.

THIS IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH

The year is 1865. The Civil War finally comes to an end and the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution officially abolishes slavery.

For awhile, things looked pretty good for freed slaves. Just a year after the Civil War ended, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, conferring citizenship and equal rights for black people. A few months later, Congress approved the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing due process and equal protection under the law to all citizens.

Two years after the Civil War, in 1867, Congress passed Reconstruction Acts. The status of the Negro was the focal problem of Reconstruction. Though slavery had been abolished the white people of the South were determined to keep the Negro in his place, socially, politically, and economically. Enter the notorious “Black Codes.” These codes were regarded as a revival of slavery in disguise. The first such body of statutes was enacted in the state of Mississippi in November 1865.

That same year in Tennessee, a group of ex-Confederate soldiers formed the KKK, a group of domestic terrorists with a focused objective: to intimidate freed former slaves and their white supporters. Klan terrorism succeeded in preventing African-Americans from using their newly won rights. The Klan’s aim was to prevent African-Americans from voting, getting an education, competing for jobs and owning property.

By 1869, Congress approved the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteeing African Americans the right to vote.

Congress approved the Civil Rights Act in March of 1875 and by 1883 it was overturned. On October 15, the Supreme Court declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. The court declared that the Fourteenth Amendment forbids states, but not citizens from practicing discrimination.

From 1870 to 1895, many blacks gained elective office throughout the Nation, but outbreaks of violence against blacks in the South became more and more common.

It wasn’t long before America’s cities were over-flowing with former slaves and their extended families. They were migrating north to seek employment opportunities in industrial cities and to escape racism, and violence. The Great Migration from the south to north began around 1915. More than 4 million blacks –former farmers and field workers became bell hops, butlers, maids, doormen, cooks, and nannies–they shined shoes and cleaned toilets. They attended schools—many started businesses or became teachers and by 1920, African American writers, poets and artists emerged in a period of creativity known as the Harlem Renaissance. Black people started to realize the American Dream came not only in white–but black and shades of gray, as well.

Meanwhile, the KKK was raging a lynching war on Negroes in the south and Margaret Sanger and friends were devising an evil plan of their own. She was a staunch believer in eugenic controls to enforce what she called “race hygiene.” She associated with known racists and in 1926 she was the guest speaker at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Silverlake, New Jersey.

In Margaret Sanger’s book The Pivot of Civilization, (published 1922), she also called for the elimination of “human weeds,” for the segregation of “morons, misfits, and maladjusted,” and for the sterilization of “genetically inferior races.

In 1939, Sanger’s NEGRO PROJECT was initiated. The plan was simple-get rid of black people. Kill them off by limiting the growth of the population by abortion and sterilization

She knew that some blacks would figure out their sinister plot so it was decided by Sanger to take the plan to the clergy and charismatic members the black community to have them deliver the death message to their congregations.

In a letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble Sanger stated, “We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population. And the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

Notice that Sanger said the ministers should be “hired.” There are many black ministers, politicians and community organizers today who support abortion, Sanger’s form of ethnic cleansing–most of them are still “hired.” They have sold their souls for “30 pieces of silver.”

Margaret Sanger went on to become the founder of Planned Parenthood an organization that makes most of its blood money by killing children—especially black children.

Abortion providers are still being located for the most part in black neighborhoods and are still delivering the same old message–that black, poor children, living in urban areas–are not worthy of life. America would be a better place without black people.

The KKK brutally killed about 3500 black people since it began in 1865—Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood is responsible for the more than 17 million black deaths since 1973.

Every day more than 5000 babies are slaughtered by the blades of the abortion butchers—decapitated, ripped apart…killed.

How can America say we are better than the regimes of the Holocaust, Darfur, Sudan or China if we allow the butchering of America’s innocent children to continue?

This is Black History Month. Let’s remember why the killing began and then vow in Jesus’ name to end it…

Our Vice President is at it again:  Just what kind of person does it take to trash and disparage the war in Iraq at every turn, then claim credit for its success?  Apparently for Joe there is no statement too outrageous, too inconsistent or too false.  But then truth is truly just a matter of inconvenience when you are a politician in power.

Our President is at it again as well.  Apparently there is no campaign promise too big or too small that cannot be broken.  But when you believe you are “the one” I suppose promises mean only what you need them to mean at the moment.  Am I the only one who remembers the oft-spoken Obama promise of no new taxes for those who make less than $250,00 a year?

Keith Olbermann bloviates to shrinking audience

Has the countdown begun for the end of “Countdown with Keith Olbermann?” With his ratings in free-fall, and his hateful histrionics reaching new highs, even Olbermann’s former supporters on the left are tuning out. Bloggers at the Los Angeles Times and National Public Radio noted the uberdork’s 44 percent drop in listeners ages 25-54 from January 2009 to last month. “Olbermann’s showboat is sinking,” one LA Times blogger noted. “Listing in you-know-which direction.” Jon Stewart ridiculed him on “The Daily Show” for calling Massachusetts Senator-elect Scott Brown a “racist.” “There are creeping indications that the world may not have quite as much need of — or patience for — Olbermann and his shtick as it once did,” Jeff Bercovici wrote on DailyFinance.com. Olbermann struck back at Bercovici, naming him as one of the “Worst People in the World” and mischaracterizing the Web site as “right-wing.”

For a deeper understanding of why Olbermann is finally wearing thin with his audience, check out the movie advertised on this site, “Media Malpractice.” Just lick the picture in the upper right of this page.

Olbermann’s audience seems to be declining in a linear relationship with Obama’s public ratings.

Fool me once….

UPDATE:  OK, OK, enough already.  I’ve had about 20 emails/facebook messages and counting….  I meant CLICK the picture in the upper right.  CLICK the picture.  OK?

I suppose that’s what I get for typing at the spede of light.

I’ve written before about the real nature of the problem in “black America” (in quotes to make the point that there are MANY middle class black families doing just fine in the USA).  The articled linked here, Chicago’s Real Crime Story by Heather Mac Donald, covers the background of the problem of black crime in Chicago, most of which is black-on-black crime, of course. It’s a great article, worth reading completely for the perspective it brings. Here is how it ends:

Barack Obama started that work in a startling Father’s Day speech in Chicago while running for president. “If we are honest with ourselves,” he said in 2008, “we’ll admit that . . . too many fathers [are] missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. . . . We know the statistics—that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of school and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.”

But after implicitly drawing the connection between family breakdown and youth violence—“How many times in the last year has this city lost a child at the hands of another child?”—Obama reverted to Alinskyite bromides about school spending, preschool programs, visiting nurses, global warming, sexism, racial division, and income inequality. And he has continued to swerve from the hard truth of black family breakdown since his 2008 speech. The best thing that the president can do for Chicago’s embattled children is to confront head-on the disappearance of their fathers and the consequence in lost lives.

This kind of statement ought to be as obvious as 2+2=4.  It should be blindingly clear to everyone that when society and government provide incentives for bad behavior, we will get lots more bad behavior.  Nevertheless, the incentives to black women and girls to make babies out of wedlock are still there, despite “welfare reform.”  The lack of incentive to postpone sexual activity until marriage is also there, in the form of abortion mills ringing inner-city neighborhoods, making huge profits for white males who own them and operate them, and perform abortions in them.

The really tough fact to face is that even if we remove the incentives for early sexual activity and child-birth today, it will take a least a generation, perhaps two, to undo the damage that has been done by those incentives, however well-intended they may have been on the part of the politicians who enacted them.  It took us three innercity generations (about 15 years each, sadly) to get where we are today after the enactment of the Johnson Great Society programs that created those incentives, although the effects were obvious twenty years ago.

This means that it will take a degree of political will, in removing those incentives, that can withstand all of the horror stories, accusations that removing the incentives didn’t work and merely caused suffering, etc.  It will take about 20 years, at least, for the results to become unambiguously clear that removing incentives for bad behavior reduces the bad behavior, resulting in fewer births out of wedlock, fewer children abandoned by their fathers, fewer abortions, etc.

It’s much easier to blather on about environmental “sustainability,” without dealing with how well our culture can sustain itself with fewer and fewer fathers in the home, especially in minority neighborhoods.

We do need to do what we can do for those who are now in our society, but not at the cost of dooming yet another generation to the same circumstances.  But that is exactly the effect of nearly all current public assistance and welfare programs, because they encourage more people to engage in the behaviors that will create more and more people who “need” such assistance, and encourage the birth of more and more children in worse and worse situations.

There are many people now living whose situations we simply don’t have the power to fix, absent their own realization of their responsibilities, and determination to do something about them.  We DO have the power to reduce the number of people in the future who are born into similar circumstances, if we use it, simply by reducing the incentives to make babies who will be raised without fathers, and by increasing incentives to postpone sexual activity until marriage.

Sadly, I doubt that our politicians, of either party, will summon the necessary will to make the case with sufficient clarity and force that such changes in entitlement law are necessary, and are the only way to solve our current problems of poverty and crime.

In a recent discussion here, I tried to illustrate that saying about a negative behavior that “everybody does it” is generally misleading, unless some numbers are put to the observation. Yes, some groups have some bad apples. But some groups have a lot more than others. Some ideologies have had unfortunate consequences… but some have had far worse consequences.

Especially perverse is the notion that both sides have the same numbers of people with equally good motivations, so that we must “respect” all those on the other side as if they really want the same things we do, and have the same values we do.  So in a fit of undoubtedly childish sarcasm, I illustrated the absurdity of the notion that “everybody does it” and “everybody really means well” this way:

There is no difference in behavior between the right and the left. Both sides are equally respectful (or disrespectful) of the other. Both sides are equally right. Both sides are equally wrong. Both sides have the same tendency to speak hatefully of the other. Both sides have the same number of radicals. Both sides care equally about everybody and everything. Both sides have the same number of people who are committed to doing the moral thing. Both sides have the same numbers of people who are committed to their perspectives for purely selfish reasons. Both sides lie exactly the same amount. Both sides celebrate equally the personal misfortunes of the other.

Everyone is just as equal in everything as it is possible to be. We’re all just the same. No one is any more correct than anyone else. There are no absolutes, no one knows any more than anyone else, and everything is up for reconsideration at any time.

Furthermore, the communists in the Soviet Union were no worse and no better than any other political party or entity in any other nation, because everyone is basically the same, and there are no real moral differences between people who believe different things honestly.

In fact, the Chinese Communist Maoists were no worse than the Whigs…. just different. Who is to say whose values are better than whose? What gives anyone the right to say that one side’s values and policies are better than the other’s?

After all, good Christians were in favor of slavery, and quoted scripture to support it.

So nobody really knows anything with any certainty. In fact, stating one’s opinion too strongly is probably a sign of intellectual immaturity and possibly colonial intentions.

Can’t we all just get along?

(my tongue is starting to hurt, and I will now remove it before it becomes permanently bonded to the inside of my cheek)

Manifestly, everyone and every group and every ideology is NOT the same in negative consequences, negative motivations, and just plain evil.  I believe that it is far more often the Left that makes the claim of a false equality, especially by saying “the Right does it too” when some really obvious transgression is pointed out regarding the Left.

Very simply, I have the impression that the Left is rarely embarrassed, or will admit being embarrassed, by anything that anyone on the Left says or does. On the other hand, when someone on the Right goes over the line, they are likely to be chastised FROM the Right.   For example, very many on the Right were very critical of the overspending, pork barreling, and ear marking of the Republican congress before 2007.  So were many on the Left.  But the Democrat congress has topped Republican excesses by at least an order of magnitude…  and the Left is mostly silent about it.

The difference is telling.

I just watched an episode of the Powerpuff Girls in which the Gangreen Gang, so named because they all seem to have green skin, is placed in the Powerpuff Girls’ kindergarten by Jack Wednesday, Truant Officer, who seems unable to distinguish adolescent troublemakers and arch-criminals from kindergarten-age kids.  I suppose he can’t be blamed, since the teacher seems to accept these obviously too-large and too-mean “kids” into her class with open arms.

As the day proceeds, the Gangreen Gang lives up to its billing by stealing cookies, pouring milk on students, throwing paste in the other kids’ faces, etc.  Each time, the teacher somehow seems not to notice who the real miscreants are, and when the Powerpuff girls try to stop the depredations of the Gangreen Gang, the teacher admonishes them that “there’s no fighting in school” and “you just need to learn to trust strangers.”   The Powerpuff Girls protest that the Gangreen Gang aren’t strangers, they are nearly-super-villains, to no avail.  The teacher says that *she* hasn’t seen the Gangreen Gang do anything especially bad.  Of course, she hasn’t really been paying attention, a fact obvious to any viewer.

This back and forth becomes so extreme that at recess, it’s the Powerpuff Girls who are given a “timeout,” while the Gangreen Gang essentially commit assault in a game of “dodgeball” with overmatched 5 yr olds.  And even then, when the Powerpuff Girls try to tell the teacher what’s happening just outside the schoolroom window, the teacher shushes them and returns to reading her book, right up until one of the balls breaks throught the schoolroom window and nearly decapitates the teacher, who finally notices the near-carnage on the playground.

In the denouement, when the Powerpuff Girls beg to be allowed to set things right, the teacher insists there is “no fighting at school,” but with a very broad hint to the Girls, she sends them out to play (and finish) a particularly violent game of dodgeball, that leaves the Gangreen Gang on the ropes, and ready to be picked up again by Jack Wednesday, Truant Officer.  We’re supposed to think the teacher is cool because she authorized the Powerpuff Girls to “fight” without really “fighting,” though only after intolerable provocation and injury to the rest of her class.

It is, of course, only a cartoon.  Nothing like this would happen in the real world, right?  But President Obama’s foreign policy seems at least this cartoonish.

He seems not to have read or been briefed on any of the history (old or more recent) of the players, from Iran to Venezuela’s Chavez to North Korea to Russia to China to Islamofascism in all its forms.  He acts like every day is a new day, and maybe today they’ll all play nice with him.  He seems bent on following some misplaced notion of “international law” and honoring the U.N. and its ridiculous “community of nations,” including a “human rights commission” staffed by some of the most abusive governments on the planet.  In this, the U.N. is more cartoonish than the Powerpuff Girls.  It’s as if the script writers had put the Gangreen Gang in charge of the entire school district, with the more lowly gang members in charge of the welcome wagon for new students.

Obama’s inexplicable support for illegal, unconstitutional actions by former President Zelaya of Honduras, his feckless approach to a nuclear-arming Iran, his tried-and-worthless approach to the Israel/Palestinian conflict, all of these make the actions of the Powerpuff Girls’ kindergarten teacher seem positively wise and far-sighted.

At least she knows when it’s time to bend the rules.

In the meantime, Obama gives obeisance to everyone who intends ill towards the USA, including the UN, the IPCC, and every third world dictator he chances to meet.

Hope and change.  Only now, there isn’t much left of the former, and only bad omens for the latter.

Imagine you are a police officer who has just stopped a vehicle for speeding.  When you make it clear that you intend to write a ticket, the driver offers you $100 to change your mind.  This action, a felony, is called Bribing a Peace Officer and carries a maximum penalty of $10,000 and two years in jail.

Now imagine you are a United States Senator from Louisiana who is unsure of how to vote on the so-called health care bill.  Another Senator tells you they will see to it that your state receives $100 million dollars to ensure that you vote “yes” on the aforementioned piece of legislation.  This action is called political hard ball, is apparently legal, and carries no fine or threat of imprisonment if found guilty.

it would seem that our political leadership has abdicated any real responsibility to deal with the issue, let alone the merits of this 2000+ page monstrosity of a bill.  It has become entirely about politics and money.

Is there anyone out there who can say with a straight face they truly believe this is at all about improving the health care system in this country?  If so, why don’t you hop on your unicorn, fly over and meet me at the end of the rainbow.  I’ll introduce you to a lovely little leprechaun who’ll point out the pot of gold we can use to pay for government-sponsored health care.

Read the details.  Senatorial votes are for sale to the highest bidder.

Star Parker on Cavuto

When color trumps Christianity

How can black Christians allow race and color to trump Christian principles in driving their support for a leader?

Read it all.

You really have to read this whole thing. But here’s a taste.

I Still Hate You, Sarah Palin

One of the most terrifying moments of my political life came last summer at the Republican convention in St. Paul. No, I don’t mean seeing John McCain careering around the Xcel Energy Center like Eyegore in Young Frankenstein, his face frozen in a Lon Chaney Sr. rictus grin as he reached across the aisle to his erstwhile friends in the media and got his hand bitten off. Rather, I’m referring to the aftermath of Sarah Palin’s outrageous acceptance speech, which whipped up the Rotary Club delegates into a frenzy of white-boy fury that not even heckling by a brave Code Pink embed could deter. Truly a fascist classic and one that sent shivers down our collectivist spines.

Even worse was the glaze of horror on the phizzes of the assembled heroes of the Mainstream Media. Andrea Mitchell — yes, the very same Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Washington, whose employer saw no conflict of interest at all when she married then Fed pooh-bah Alan Greenspan — stood there gaping like a frog while the rest of the assembled Finemans and Matthewses and Olbermanns scurried around like roaches when the light gets turned on: What the hell just hit us? For one horrible moment, it looked as if the carefully crafted plans of David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, George Soros, and the Second Chief Directorate, first department, of the old KGB were about to gang agley.

Really, read the whole thing at the link above. Then start planning something. Anything.

There is a Twilight Zone episode called “Button, Button “ in which an unhappy couple is given an unusual offer. Push a button on a box and someone they don’t know will die, but they will get $200,000.

Mr. and Mrs. Lewis are unhappy. Their car is broken. They live in a cramped one-bedroom apartment. They’re often bickering. One day, their doorbell rings but there’s nobody there. A package addressed to both of them was left by the door. Inside it is a wooden box with a plastic dome on the locked lid. A note on the bottom says a “Mr. Steward” will come that night. He comes on schedule and explains the offer to Mrs. Lewis. If she unlocks the lid and pushes the button under the dome, someone they don’t know will die and she’ll receive $200,000, tax-free. She tells the details to her husband and he’s adamantly against it. He opens up the bottom of the box and finds nothing inside. Cynical, he throws the box into a dumpster but she retrieves it after he’s asleep. They continue to argue about whether to push the button. Finally, Mrs. Lewis presses it. Mr. Steward appears and gives them their $200,000. They’re incredulous and wonder what will happen to the box. Steward explains that it will be reprogrammed and the same offer will be given to another couple, “somebody you won’t know…”

The story is based on a short story by Richard Matheson, with a slightly different ending, but the gist of the story is the same, namely the willingness of people to receive benefits that don’t belong to them, when the only risk — really, certain doom — is to strangers.

It seems to me that this is a perfect model for the desire of many people who want to have nationalized health insurance of some sort.  Particularly if they are people who don’t now have health insurance, and want a national system to give it to them, they are perfect examples of the willingness to damage other people –  all strangers, of course — for selfish gain.

Imagine a rewrite to the story.  You are offered a button which, if you push it, guarantees that a stranger will not receive the health care they’ve always paid for, resulting in their likely death, but the reward for pushing it is that you have a minimal level of health coverage for life.

There seems to be a lot of people who are only too willing to push the button.

Of course, the entire class of people who stand to benefit the most from national healthcare — the Lefty political class that will claim it has done America a great service — will be the group that doesn’t have to live with the arrangement.  Does anyone think that the political class will settle for the DMV standard of medical care to which the rest of us will be doomed?

Button, button, who’s got the button

The Minnesota senate election results are still being contested and a final winner has not yet been declared.  At this point democratic challenger, Al Franken (of Saturday Night Live fame), leads incumbent Republican, Norm Coleman by a margin of just over 200 votes.  And to absolutely no one’s surprise Mr. Franken now wants the recount process halted.  Could it be because he has somehow miraculously overcome a 700+ vote deficit to take this slim lead?  Or does he feel that all recount efforts have been concluded fairly and completely?  What do you think?  Is there ANYONE who thinks the outcome of this election still lies in the process of simply counting votes?  I know I don’t.

As soon as the initial results showed a close finish this race became the domain of lawyers and judges.  And anyone following the recount soap opera knows there is a statistical impossibility in the way additional votes were picked up by Franken, virtually all from heavily democratic precincts!  Go figure.

Now I am no fan of Al Franken. Someday maybe someone can tell me how in the world this nouveau-burlesque comedy writer ever got even one vote.  Oh, wait…. I live in a state that elected a body builder turned movie star, whose most famous utterance is, “I’ll be back”.  Never mind about the comedy writer…

But aside from the individuals involved there is a greater issue at stake-the electoral process.  Once again we see the relative ease with which our process of electing leaders can be usurped.  All it really takes is a couple of politically motivated people in key positions with a win-at-any-cost mentality.  An elections director here, a Secretary of State there…. (see Ann Coulter’s article on this for more details).

The complex legal challenges in this case may go on for many months, maybe even longer.  But it seems to me that no matter who is ultimately declared as winner, the loser is the Minnesota voter who will be left to ponder once again…why bother to vote?

It seems that there is no story where the demands of art cannot be impressed into the service of politically correct “creativity,” and this “SAMSON” AND OPERATIC INSANITY appears to be on the same general plain as a crucifix in urine, or maybe a star of David in pig blood.

In Belgium, a government-funded opera company is presenting a bizarre reworking of the Biblical story of Samson and Delilah. This “updated” version of a nineteenth century Saint-Saens melodrama depicts Samson as a Palestinian “freedom fighter”, not an Israelite, and portrays Delilah as a despicable Israeli agent, not a Philistine temptress.

In the climax of the production, Samson straps on a suicide vest and blows-up the Israeli “oppressors.” This politically-correct operatic indulgence follows announced plans by La Scala—on of the world’s most prestigious opera-houses—to produce a full-scale musical version of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and by the Shanghai opera to offer a lavish, five hour singing-and-dancing adaptation of Marx’s “Das Kapital.” As the composer Franz Liszt once aptly observed: “All music is an insane asylum, but opera is the wing for incurables.”

Just a couple of observations, and a plug:

It WOULD be a government-funded opera company producing this trash. What private company would do it with the intent of making a profit? Of course, the Saudis will fund nearly anything that puts Israel and Jews in a bad light, and I’m just guessing that, much like Washington D.C., the Belgian government and lobbying apparatus is full of people on the Saudi payroll, who seem to own 1 out of 3 former congress critters and state department drudges.

As far as a Jewish Delilah goes, it would make more sense to cast Tokyo Rose as General MacArthur’s secret lover.

And the plug. The REAL story of Samson and Delilah, a story about sex and violence, and yet rated G.    “God Brings Down The House” is a particular show stopper.  At the link, just click the cover of Samson and Delilah, and then at the linked site you can play excerpts of the tunes.  Eat your heart out, Belgium.

Obama is proceeding with “immigration reform” (spelled a-m-n-e-s-t-y) in spite of the fact the American people clearly and unequivocally voiced their opposition to this the last time it was proposed.  Why?  Because amnesty and citizenship for illegals qualifies them for union membership.  And an increase in union membership is an increase in Democrat voters.  Obama has made no effort to disguise this as his motivation.

Obama is radically pro-abortion.  He is in favor of the killing of unborn infants with no restrictions, paid for with a government check.  He is also in favor of killing children born alive as a result of a botched abortion.  He is in favor of forcing doctors to perform abortions even if those doctors have a moral objection.

Does anyone remember Obama’s soft-spoken, relaxed and seemingly innocuous little comment to Joe the plumber?  “When you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody”.  We now see that what he meant was a wholesale destruction of capitalism and a premeditated effort to replace it with socialism.

Obama is robbing our future generations of any hope of prosperity by an orgy of federal spending unheard of in our country.

Obama is reaching into the board rooms of private companies and firing employees.  He has crossed a line between public and private sectors that is unprecedented.

Obama has just completed an international trip with the message of appeasement to our enemies.  When, in the course of human history, has appeasement ever worked?

Iran is on the threshold of becoming a nuclear power.  Is there ANYONE who thinks this is a good thing?

The laundry list of Obama appointees who were revealed to have unpaid taxes is shameful.  Is there ANY private citizen who could get away with this wanton disregard for tax laws by simply saying “Oops, I’m sorry”?

The Republican Party is currently populated with political eunichs.  Where is the voice of opposition?

Obama wants to socialize medicine.  If this happens it will complete his coup d’état and America as we know it will be gone forever.

Many citizens of this great country are simply left speechless by this apparently unstoppable. radical, ultra-liberal assault on America.  So many of us feel a combination of powerlessness and outrage in the face of what is happening.  Many are asking, “What can I do to stop this madness?”  Not all of us have a public forum from which to vent our frustrations.  Not all of us are eloquent of speech or skilled in writing.  But we all have family and friends.  We all live lives that are made up of relationships.  This is where the battle must be fought – one friend, one family, one realtionship at a time.  Those of us who do believe America is essentially good – that it was founded and made great on a firm foundation of Judeo-Christian beliefs, that it is a place where people can be free, that perserverance and hard work will be rewarded and that anyone can acheive the American dream – must share our convictions and persuade our family and friends that it is an America worth fighting for.  For outrage is not enough, feeling helpless and powerless is no excuse, and inaction is not an option.

Yeah, I know it’s starting to sound like there should be a choir humming “My Country Tis Of Thee” in the background.  I don’t care. It is a battle worth fighting…but we had better start now.