Kerplunk - Common sense from Down Under: Obama - slow to support real democracy, quick to support autocracy

Kerplunk talks about Obama's support for would-be Honduran dictator Zelaya.

Isn't it remarkable that the person who was meant to re-establish America's moral authority in the world would throw his hat in with Chavez, Castro, Morales et al?

So who are they supporting?

In Honduras they have a one term limit for the position of president. The limit was introduced to ensure that the country did not go down the path of other Latin American countries that historically have seen democratically elected leaders usurp power for themselves in the same way that Chavez has in Venezuela.

Zelaya was trying to circumvent the Constitution by ensuring he could get elected for further terms.

Read it all.

Technorati tags: Honduras, Obama

Obama's SCOTUS nominee: courts make policy

JammieWearingFool has a quick analysis of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. It's not good news. His post includes a video of Ms. Sotomayor explaining how courts make policy.

Lawhawk comments as well.

Sotamayor fits the kind of approach that President Obama seeks - a liberal interpretation of the US Constitution where the Constitution is a living breathing document. The case against her is pretty persuasive, but there is nothing that the GOP can do to derail this nomination.

The only way this nomination gets derailed is if the Obama Administration didn't pick up on details that will embarrass and suggest that Sotamayor is an inappropriate candidate for the Supreme Court. That's not all that far fetched given the way that the Obama Administration has repeatedly botched nominations for a host of positions, repeatedly selecting tax cheats and those with ethical flaps.

Technorati tags: SCOTUS, Obama

A Message to the Rich

Or, the pathology of generation take.

Bill Whittle makes a lot of sense here.

You are not welcome in America any more. Take your wealth and prosperity and inventiveness and hard work and vision and insight and bold risk-taking and joy in seeing growth and wealth creation and just go away – right now, before it’s too late. Because if you stay, Joel Berg and Barack Obama and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank and Chris Dodd will continue to come after you for more and more and more and they will not ever stop – not ever – until you are forced to flee.

Read it all.

Technorati tags: Bill Whittle, John Galt, tax the rich, liberty

EFF Wonders: Did Obama Violate Copyright Law With iPod Gift?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation ponders the copyright implications of Obama's gift to Queen Elizabeth II.

President Obama reportedly gave an iPod, loaded with 40 show tunes, to England's Queen Elizabeth II as a gift. Did he violate the law when he did so?

You know your copyright laws are broken when there is no easy answer to this question.

Our copyright laws are hopelessly tangled. As the EFF put it, "none of us should want a world where even our leaders--much less the rest of us--can't figure out how copyright law operates in their daily lives."

Hat tip: David Kravets at Wired

Technorati tags: Obama, iPod, intellectual property, copyright

Sales of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged Triple

The Ayn Rand Center reports that sales of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” have almost tripled over the first seven weeks of this year compared with sales for the same period in 2008. This continues a strong trend after bookstore sales reached an all-time annual high in 2008 of about 200,000 copies sold.

Michelle Malkin reports the appearance of a new bumper sticker:

(Hat tip: Wizbang)

I read Atlas Shrugged in college. It has remained an influence on me to this day, although I've come to regard it as a so-so novel with long speeches. In light of current events, it's starting to look like prophecy.

Technorati tags: socialism, Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, John+Galt

Pork Stimulus Package

Technorati tags: Obama, socialism, stimulus package

The Cult of Personality Continues

Transylvania Phoenix reports on Obama's Little Blue Book. (Available on Amazon.)

Our nation is in deep doo-doo.

Technorati tags: Obama, Mao, cult of personality, totalitarianism

Cartoon of the day

Technorati tags: Obama, Marx

Going John Galt

Dr. Helen Smith wonders if it's time to "go John Galt" -- a reference to the hero of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, who led a strike of the productive industrialists against the government backed looters.

Obama talks about taking from those who are productive and redistributing to those who are not — or who are not as successful. If success and productivity is to be punished, why bother? Perhaps it is time for those of us who make the money and pay the taxes to take it easy, live on less, and let the looters of the world find their own way.

My question to readers is, what are some ways to “go John Galt” (legally, of course) — that is, should productive people cut back on what they need, make less money, and take it easy so that the government is starved for funds, or is there some other way of making a statement?

Think "going Galt" is too extreme? Watch this video and think again.



Technorati tags: Obama, socialism, John Galt, Atlast Shrugged

Jackie Mason's video response to Sarah Silverman

Technorati tags: Obama, Sarah+Silverman, Jackie Mason

Family Told Obama NOT To Wear Soldier Son's Bracelet

NewsBusters has the story, including audio from a radio interview with the solder's father.

Barack Obama played the "me too" game during the Friday debates on September 26 after Senator John McCain mentioned that he was wearing a bracelet with the name of Cpl. Matthew Stanley, a resident of New Hampshire and a soldier that lost his life in Iraq in 2006. Obama said that he too had a bracelet. After fumbling and straining to remember the name, he revealed that his had the name of Sergeant Ryan David Jopek of Merrill, Wisconsin.

Shockingly, however, Madison resident Brian Jopek, the father of Ryan Jopek, the young soldier who tragically lost his life to a roadside bomb in 2006, recently said on a Wisconsin Public Radio show that his family had asked Barack Obama to stop wearing the bracelet with his son's name on it. Yet Obama continues to do so despite the wishes of the family.

Read the transcript and listen to the interview. If you didn't already think Obama was a cynical Chicago machine politician, you will now.

Technorati tags: Obama

Astroturfing the Obama campaign

Is a large PR firm connected to the Obama campaign spreading false rumors about Gov. Sarah Palin in a way that appears to be a grassroots effort? Rusty Shackleford thinks so, and presents a compelling case against Winner & Associates and Obama's chief media strategist David Axelrod.

Hope, Change, & Lies: Orchestrated "Grassroots" Smear Campaigns & the People that Run Them

Extensive research was conducted by the Jawa Report to determine the source of smears directed toward Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Those smears included false allegations that she belonged to a secessionist political party and that she has radical anti-American views.

Our research suggests that a subdivision of one of the largest public relations firms in the world most likely started and promulgated rumors about Sarah Palin that were known to be false. These rumors were spread in a surreptitious manner to avoid exposure.

It is also likely that the PR firm was paid by outside sources to run the smear campaign. While not conclusive, evidence suggests a link to the Barack Obama campaign.

Read it all.

Technorati tags: Obama, Astroturfing, David Axelrod, netroots

Is This Obama’s “Dukakis In The Tank” Photo?

Keep the Change

Russian aggression is the worst it has been in 40 years, Georgian civilians are dying in the streets, Poland is threatened with nuclear annihilation, and Ukraine looks to be in the crosshairs. McCain is hammering the Russians every day while Condoleeza Rice goes to Georgia to demand Russia’s immediate withdrawal. And here is Obama, in a picture worth a thousand (wrong) words.

Is This Obama’s “Dukakis In The Tank” Photo?

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Unmitigated Audacity of Hope

The Obama campaign takes their opportunism to the next level during their Jerusalem campaign stop.
Neocon Express: Holy Obama! Messiah Campaign Signs at the Western Wall

Technorati tags: Obama, Israel

Not Wallet

Technorati tags: Obama, taxes

Joe Lieberman: Democrats and Our Enemies

This essay was published in the Wall Street Journal today, adapted from a speech the Senator gave a few days earlier.

How did the Democratic Party get here? How did the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy drift so far from the foreign policy and national security principles and policies that were at the core of its identity and its purpose? ...

There are of course times when it makes sense to engage in tough diplomacy with hostile governments. Yet what Mr. Obama has proposed is not selective engagement, but a blanket policy of meeting personally as president, without preconditions, in his first year in office, with the leaders of the most vicious, anti-American regimes on the planet.

Mr. Obama has said that in proposing this, he is following in the footsteps of Reagan and JFK. But Kennedy never met with Castro, and Reagan never met with Khomeini. And can anyone imagine Presidents Kennedy or Reagan sitting down unconditionally with Ahmadinejad or Chavez? I certainly cannot.

Read it all.

Technorati tags: Lieberman, Democrats

Barack Obama: Empty Suit or Trojan Horse?

At first, I thought Citizen Obama was merely an empty suit from the Chicago political machine. The more I read about his background and associate, it becomes obvious that he is a Trojan horse, carrying all that is wrong with the American left. Investor's Business Daily puts it very well in this editorial. 

As this long primary season drags on, the presumed Democratic nominee for president still won't bring his vision for "change" into focus. He continues to speak in glittering generalities, providing few details.
The reticence, combined with Obama's radical ties, begs the question: Is he hiding an un-American agenda? ...

Rated the most liberal member in the Senate, Obama wants to soak the most productive members of society and subsidize those who are not. He wants to hit small businesses and big corporations alike with major tax hikes — singling out for special rebuke oil producers and "Wall Street predators" who have "tricked" blacks out of their homes. At the same time, he plans to expand the welfare state with massive increases in domestic spending.

"We have more work to do," he told black graduates at Howard University last September. "It's time to seek a new dawn of justice in America. . . . We can right wrongs we see in America."

Cone says he wants to see a "new system" in America "in which people have the distribution of wealth." He adds, "I don't know how quite to do that institutionally."
Enter a Harvard-educated lawyer and Southside Chicago-trained community organizer who has a real shot at institutional power. As Obama promised black graduates at Hampton University last June, "We're going to usher in a new America."

Sounds like a Trojan horse. Will traditional America let it in?

Let's hope not. 

Technorati tags: Obama, socialism

The Audacity of the Beloved Leader

Peggy Shapiro at American Thinker has a chilling analysis of the Obama poster campaign.

Obama's Posters: Message in the Image

There is something unsettling and very familiar in the Obama poster campaign which has plastered his image over the country. The posters depict the same graphic closeup of the candidate with one block word either "Hope," "Change" or "Progress" at the bottom. I knew that I had seen this before, and then it came to me that this image appropriates the graphic style of totalitarian Soviet propaganda. It recalls the idealzed portraits and personality cult of the "Beloved Leader" such as Stalin and Lenin. The leader, face illuminated by a "holy" light, looks off to the horizon and sees the truth that is not available to his mere mortal followers, who must look up to his image.

Technorati tags: Obama, dictator, Lenin

Barry O. -- Democratic Neocon?

Jacob Aronson at TCS Daily analyzes a recent speech by Senator Obama, and his findings are surprising.

Obama's Monday night foreign policy speech is more than just clever language. He displays a commitment to moral principles and a serious foreign policy usually found in the halls of the American Enterprise Institute, or the pages of the Weekly Standard: promoting the American interest through a strong offensive military that, in conjunction with diplomatic, political and economic means, is used to remake foreign nations in a liberal democratic image. ...

There were plenty of Democratic tropes. Global climate change is mentioned, and venom for the current administration and the War in Iraq is frequent. But issues like "oil addition" are mentioned not as environmental concerns but as a way to "weaken the hand of hostile dictators." Taken as a whole, and enacted with a willingness to pursue the American interest, Obama's speech shows an understanding—dare I say a conservative understanding—of America's foreign policy challenges. If nothing else it raises the hope that, as Professor Weinberg of Puget Sound reminds us, "candidate Obama may want to bring the boys home, but President Obama will see that decision in a different light."

Read it all.

UPDATE: Ed Lasky at American Thinker advises following the money. It smells like Soros. (Hat tip: Atlas.)

Technorati tags: Barack Obama