A friend of mine posted this link on her facebook page a few days ago.  Without going into great detail, the article (written by Mark Lux) is basically a litany of stereotypes by a self-described “progressive” lamenting how backwards and frightening the modern conservative movement seems to him.  I’m not sure if my friend found it convincing or just interesting, but I thought it might be worthwhile to pass my comments along to the rest of you.  Here is a segment of my response:

I love how he starts… he puts forth his credentials as someone capable of critiquing the Conservative movement because he “flirted” with being a Republican when he was 8 years old…

He then makes the most absurd claim imaginable… that REPUBLICANS were anti civil rights (when in fact it was Lincon, a Republican, who freed the slaves… and it was Democrats who voted in far greater percentages against the Civil Rights bill than Republicans ever did. [Wikipedia people]).

He then goes on to label terrorists in Guantanamo as “political prisoners”… (political prisoners even Obama can’t seem to be able to give a trial … or release for that matter)…

He then goes on to quote the BIBLE… interpreting calls for personal generosity as some dictate for state-based welfare redistribution (while ignoring the fact Conservatives are *empirically* far more generous than liberals in terms of charitable giving)… interpreting freedom from spiritual bondage with freedom for terrorist detainees… and forgiveness of sins with (presumably) mortgage forgiveness.

Wow… talk about being out-of-touch.

Some Guy named Jake does a pretty good job explaining what’s wrong with the “coexist” bumpersticker.

Click here

also read his case for infant baptism… rather interesting stuff.

Wow.  Tough talk… but I like it.

Take something as small as Obama’s need for a word-for-word script, just to answer questions at press conferences. His teleprompter dependency is simply unprecedented. Any Republican president would be laughed out of the room with that kind of hand-holding from Axelrod, or Bill Ayers, or Michelle, or whoever is dictating the words behind the scenes. No wonder Obama is considered eloquent. Like a talking head on TV he constantly needs his writers to feed him the words, so he can pay total attention to his acting style. But even his acting is degenerating in front of our eyes: Obama is turning Obombastama. You can tell from the tone of hysteria creeping into his operatic baritone. Maybe they need to switch that reverb circuit back on? That should impress all the lickspittles of the White House press.

via American Thinker: Obama’s essence.

Jonah Goldberg, over at the corner, made one of the most brilliant observations in response to Obama’s rather absurd claim that lifting the ban on stem-cell research is not an “ideological position”:

Readers of my book (and the Corner) know that I think the cult of pragmatism is really a Trojan Horse for the preferred ideological positions of people who don’t want to have ideological arguments. It often requires an undemocratic form of argumentation in which differing points of view are dismissed as illegitimate.

And while we are on the topic of Jonah Goldberg, you should really read his latest article:

Imagine a child falls down a well. Now imagine I offer to lend the parents my ladder to save her, but only if they promise to paint my house. Would you applaud me for not letting a crisis go to waste? Or would you think I’m a jerk, for want of a harsher word not printable in this space?

I ask because I’m trying to come to terms with Rule No. 1 of the Obama administration….

“Rule 1: Never allow a crisis to go to waste,”…

If the president had admitted that he was using a national calamity for narrow partisan or ideological advantage, it would have been outrageous. Indeed, every time Karl Rove or some other administration official said anything that could be even remotely interpreted as using the war or 9/11 for partisan or ideological gain, the editorial pages and Democratic news-release factories went into overdrive with righteous indignation.

Well, now we have the president, along with his chief aides, admitting — boasting! — that they want to exploit a national emergency to further their preexisting agenda, and there’s no scandal. No one even calls it a gaffe. No, they call it leadership.

It’s not leadership. It’s fear mongering.

I wanted to pass along a few really great articles I stumbled across… (and a few plugs for some of my favorite bloggers) but don’t have time to comment on at the moment.  Enjoy.

• The Myth of the ‘Widening Gap Between Rich and Poor’
• Bush Hatred and Obama Euphoria are Two Sides of the Same Coin
• Five Truths about the Banking Crisis
• How Government Prolonged the Depression

via thewashingtonpost.com

Worry about the press? His FISA flip-flop elicited a few grumbles from lefty bloggers, but hardly a murmur from the mainstream press. Remember his pledge to stick to public financing? Now flush with cash, he is the first general-election candidate since Watergate to opt out. Some goo-goo clean-government types chided him, but the mainstream editorialists who for years had been railing against private financing as hopelessly corrupt and corrupting evinced only the mildest of disappointment…

I have never had any illusions about Obama. I merely note with amazement that his media swooners seem to accept his every policy reversal with an equanimity unseen since the Daily Worker would change the party line overnight — switching sides in World War II, for example — whenever the wind from Moscow changed direction..

Why, the man even tossed his own grandmother overboard back in Philadelphia — only to haul her back on deck now that her services are needed..

Charles Krauthammer – The Ever-Malleable Mr. Obama – washingtonpost.com

Pretty hard-hitting if I say so myself. Krauthammer is right in this: the media COULDN’T CARE LESS about Obama’s record… they excuse it, they try to justify it, they cover for him… it’s just who these people ar.

A while back I stumbled across a blog called Where’s the Outrage (can’t even remember how)… and I’ve been having an interesting argument discussion with the author, Mr. Thompson, about the advantages/disadvantages of drilling for oil.  Feel free to join in on the discussion if you want…

Anyway, he seems like a nice guy… despite my pestering.  Might as well give his blog a visit.  He’s even got his own podcast!

I am pleased to roll out the (beta) version of my new wordpress theme. Built from scratch… custom design/css and a few extra functions make this a rather bold first attempt at theme design.

bear with me as I make tweaks here and there over the next few days.

Ok… I went back to the drawing board and have finally decided to create my own wordpress theme. Any suggestions before I get down and dirty?

I just upgraded to wordpress 2.5 from 2.3ish… and my first reactions are positive.  The new images feature is awesome; but if you already have a large library of images from older wordpress versions, migrating them requires alot of page-by-page editing.  

Also, in Safari, none of the admin popup windows in the WSYWIG work.  This is a MAJOR problem that needs fixing!

Also, if you haven’t done so already, head on over to gravatar.com and set yourself up with a visual avatar… your avatar will now automatically post alongside any comments you make.

If you didn’t already know, James Tarano is one of the most witty political commentators out there.  He writes a daily email commentary called “Best of the Web Today”.  Whether it’s his usual “bottom stories of the day”, including such fascinating headlines such as 

• “Gnome Found in Oakdale Yard”–headline, Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.), June 12]
• “Banana-Flavored Twinkies Return to Shelves After Half-Century Hiatus”–headline, FoxNews.com, June 13
• “Police: Crack Found in Man’s Buttocks”–headline, WTTG-TV Web site (Washington), Feb. 1 
• “Midland Police are mum on a report of impersonation at a local apartment complex late Sunday night into early Monday morning, but did say what didn’t happen.”–Midland (Mich.) Daily News, Jan. 22

or helpful “news you can use” clips including:

•  ”Tractor, Open Liquor Don’t Mix: St. John’s Police”–headline, CBC.ca, Feb. 4
• “Double Dipping May Add Bacteria to That Super Bowl Salsa”–headline, Pantagraph (Bloomington, Ill.), Feb. 3
• “BLACK HISTORY MONTH: 3 Ways to Get a Husband”–headline, Star-Telegram (Fort Worth, Texas), Feb. 1

You’re sure to be informed and entertained.  I wanted to share with you a few portions from his latest email blast.

More ‘Accountability Journalism’

In June we noted that the Associated Press had embraced a new idiom called “accountability journalism.”   The AP’s Ron Fournier explained that the venerable wire service, long known for its just-the-facts style of reporting, now aimed to be “provocative,” telling readers not only what happened “but why it happened,” “what it might mean,” and “what it might reveal about the people who presume to be our leaders,” who “sometimes” are “just plain wrong.”

Yet he promised the AP would somehow do this without editorializing or becoming partisan. How well has it done? Here are a few examples.

An AP dispatch yesterday explained the differences in the two political parties’ processes for selecting convention delegates via presidential primaries… Here is how the AP’s David Espo sums this all up in his lead paragraph:

“When it comes to presidential primaries, Democrats and Republicans play by different rules. One party likes to share. The other, not so much.”

Nope, nothing partisan there. 

Read the rest of this entry »

Here they are … in no particular order:

1.  He supported Scholarships for ILLEGAL immigrants (link)

2.  He supported drivers’ licenses, government benefits and in-state tuition rates for illegals (link)

3.  He opposed a bill requiring proof of citizenship to vote. (link)

4.  He established a partially taxpayer-financed Mexican consulate office in Little Rock, a scheme involving the lease of building space to the Mexican government for $1 a year.  Why is the media not hounding him for this? (link)

5.  His dangerous views on terrorism and his inability to understand their motives and purpose (link).

“We must first destroy existing terrorist groups and then attack the underlying conditions that breed them: the lack of basic sanitation, health care, education, jobs, a free press, fair courts – which all translates into a lack of opportunity and hope. The United States’ strategic interests as the world’s most powerful country coincide with its moral obligations as the richest.”

As Selwyn Duke at the American Thinker put it… “does Huck know that Osama bin Laden is worth about $300 million?  I’ll also note that there is no moral obligation to use other people’s money for your government-run charities.“

4.  He says he would favor a national smoking ban (and I’m not even a smoker.  This kind of activity is just not the role the FEDERAL government should be playing.  It’s unconstitutional and reeks of an anti-freedom mentality) (link). 

5.  He is pro Taxes and Big Government (link)

5a.  Spending increased 65% from 1996 to 2004 in Arkansas while he was in office there. (link)

6.  He has expressed an ability to be easily bought with campaign contributions (link)

In Arkansas, Mr. Huckabee was investigated by the state ethics committee at least 14 times. Most of the complaints centered on what appears to be a serial disregard for government rules about gifts and outside financial compensation. He reported $112,000 worth of gifts in one year alone, nearly double his $67,000 salary… Five of the 14 investigations resulted in admonishments: Two for failing to report gifts (one was later overturned), the other three for some $80,000 that Mr. Huckabee and his wife received but failed to initially report. One of these admonishments involved a $23,500 payment to Mr. Huckabee from an opaque organization called Action America that he helped found in 1994 while lieutenant governor, and that was designed to coordinate his speeches and supplement his income.

8.  The mainstream media likes Huckabee… this is reason enough for any conservative to think twice about supporting him. (link)

Since the beginning of 2007, the Democratic National Committee has released 102 direct attacks on Mitt Romney. Rudy Giuliani has warranted 78; John McCain 68; Fred Thompson 21. Mike Huckabee? Four. The most recent of these landed back in March. GOP voters may not have examined Mr. Huckabee’s record, but the left has–and they love what they see.

 I’ve got some readers that support Huckabee… and I respect their opinions… but seriously, i think we can do better… even McCain (who I dislike) would be a more reliable candidate with a better record.