sisu

President Obama: The conscience of the king

"Pure garbage," says Tuck, retilling the source of the exquisite, deep, dark soil he uses for planting, repotting and mulching our Chelsea Gardens (above). Fruit and vegetable scraps from the kitchen, grass clippings and dry autumn leaves from the yard. Compost 'em, mix 'em together and ted 'em periodically over three years. Turn it around, and you're looking at Pure Chelsea Gold. The plants eat it up!

"Well, you can lead a leftist to reality, BUT…" twitters Darleen Click this afternoon, and our reply:

…You can't make him think. 

Thank you, Mr. President. Like every freedom lover suddenly released from the Fear Society Lite shackles of Obamaspeak by Mr. Obama's own unwittingly self-revelatory words during a post-armageddon press conference this afternoon, we're giddy at the thought of the narrative gift he has bestowed upon us:

The private sector is doing fine. Where we're seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government. Oftentimes cuts initiated by, you know, Governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help that they have in the past from the federal government and who don't have the same kind of flexibility as the federal government in dealing with fewer revenues coming in. 

Mitt Romney's Rapid Response Team has our back:

For the president of the United States to stand up and say the private sector is doing fine is going to go down in history as an extraordinary miscalculation," Romney told the crowd.

Romney also addressed the president's argument that the federal government should help state and local jurisdictions hire more employees, citing the recent recall election in Wisconsin. Gov. Scott Walker was able to fend off a challenge there inspired by his move to block state workers from collectively bargaining.

It was too late, but "some in press working hard to explain and contextualize Obama's 'private sector' remark," twittered Byron York in the wake of the Leader of the Free World's unintended revelation of the gap between his statist vision and the world view of the average American, as expressed in Tuesday's Wisconsin anti-recall reelection of Scott Walker. The Washington Post's Ezra Klein was typical of the reflexive JournoList Talking Points:

I don’t, for the life of me, understand why people get so excited over things like this. Is there any evidence that either campaign is having trouble coming up with enough damaging quotes, out-of-context comments or grainy video clips to populate their attack ads?

"Things like this." That's the left's problem. They are forever conflating leftist fantasies with facts from the right. As we twittered Byron York:

It perfectly reveals the difference between big-govt statists like Obama and limited-govt state leaders like Governor Walker.

The last word goes to Doctor Zero aka John Hayward:

Romney says Obama is "detached, out of touch." Hell, he's hermetically sealed.

Update: Darleen Click of Protein Wisdom links!

Update II: Michelle Malkin Buzzworthy link!

Update III: Ed Driscoll links!

Update IV: Mama Grizzly Sarah Palin is on the same wavelength:

Sarah Palin slams Obama: 'Private sector doing fine' remark 'absolutely out of whack" and 'out of touch.'

Crossposted at Riehl World View.

Palin Undefeated: It's the crony capitalism, stupid!

This weekend Steve Bannon's Palin documentary ‘The Undefeated’ will be available On Demand and Pay-Per-View from a major cable or satellite company near you. We wrote about the movie — sight unseen — last June in "Palin Undefeated: 'A story of empowerment for modern women and their daughters.'" Now we can put our money where our mouth was, in the comfort of our own home. Above, sugar-and-spice Sarah (center) with her siblings.

Funny how incurious the "intellectually curious" hive mind of the left can be when it comes to all things Sarah Palin. The latest is a classic blinders-on, Journolist-talking-points-in-hand "review" of Steve Bannon's Palin Documentery "The Undefeated." (h/t Tim Graham of News Busters). Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday is the mouthpiece of this particular outpouring of Palin envy. A few excerpts and then our take:

Based on her modest demeanor and record of budget, energy and ethics reform in Alaska, it’s easy to see her appeal to McCain, who called Palin while she was at the Alaska State Fair to ask her to run for veep. What "The Undefeated" doesn’t explain — in addition to the title "Undefeated" when Palin was, actually, defeated in 2008 — is how a woman whose early career had been dedicated to transcending partisan politics became such a ferocious political warrior while on the stump. Instead, Bannon sets Palin up as a victim — of liberals, of establishment conservatives and of the "lamestream media" that his subject has become so skilled at manipulating (a talent the filmmaker strangely neglects to mention).

About that title, "The Undefeated." Ever heard of wordplay, Ms. Hornaday? Sarah Palin may have lost an election, but she fights like a girl! Disintermediating the powers that be, she picked herself up and got back in the race. The words of Sun Tzu come to mind:

To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.

Then there's Hornaday's fixation with "trascending partisan politics." You see a lot of that from the left, presumably hoping to catch the eye — and poll-tested votes — of the mushy middle. How could a "non-partisan" Palin who rooted out corruption in her OWN PARTY become "such a ferocious political warrior while on the stump"? It's the crony capitalism, stupid. Real Clear Politics has the scoop:

In her speech at the bucolic National Balloon Classic field in Indianola [tomorrow], Palin will lean on loaded phrases like “crony capitalism” and “permanent political class” in laying out her view of the U.S. political system’s deep-rooted ills, according to a source close to Palin and familiar with the content of the speech.

And this from National Review:

“She will also talk, more broadly, about how she is not enamored of the political class, both Republicans and Democrats, who do not deserve to be elected if they only continue the status quo,” the source continues. “She will discuss corporate lobbyists, White House operatives, and others who enable the vested interests.” Many of the themes from her recent Facebook post, “Conquering the Storm,” will be mentioned.

Will she or won't she? Dan Riehl says "yes" on Twitter:

Overseas trip had to be Palin's last check box. She's getting in.

Disintermediate at will:

The former Alaska Governor is scheduled to attend the World Knowledge Forum in Seoul, where she will speak alongside global economic leaders like Larry Summers and former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The conference begins Oct. 11, the same day as the GOP primary debate hosted by Bloomberg in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Update: Doug Ross Larwyn's Lynx link.

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Cloven Not Crested.

A growing chorus of "minority" Republicans are finding their voice

 

New Jersey Sistah Grizzly Cubachi (left) takes no prisoners. Watch out, Harry Reid. "Minority" Republicans are mad as hell, and they're not going to take this anymore.

"Harry Reid can't believe I'm a Hispanic Republican" writes our fiery Latina blog/twitterfriend Cubachi in an important post that's part of a growing chorus of "minority" Republicans who are finding their voice. They're pushing back against Michelle Malkin's "ethnic plantation owners," the demagoging Democrats who would project their own racism onto the tea partiers of all races among us who don't toe the politically correct, identity-politics party line. And they're disintermediating the legacy media via the internet. Cubachi's opening salvo is a challenge to the obscenely arrogant Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's assertion that he "doesn't know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican":

Well Harry, let me introduce myself. I am the daughter of Cuban exiles who have seen first hand the failures of liberal and socialist policies in their native country. My father in fact, was a political prisoner in Cuba for five years because the government deemed his speech against repression and dictatorship “hateful and dangerous.” Sort of like what you democrats say about the tea parties, although you have not thrown their members in jail … yet …

My father looked at the platform of the republican party that endorsed small government, lower taxes, and strong defense, while the democrat party embraced Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, murderers and tyrants, as some sort of folk heroes, and endorsed larger governments taking power away from the people.

Although I wasn’t born in Cuba, I witnessed for myself liberals governing the state of New Jersey. I saw the failed policies of former Governors Jim McGreevy and Jon Corzine. Unions ran the show, uncontrolled and limitless spending, massive corruption, and the highest property taxes in the nation. I, as a thinking, tax-paying citizen, can not fathom why I would support democrats that have ran this state to near bankruptcy. Heck, I see it in a larger scale in Washington, DC. Yes Harry Reid, I do think and watch the news.

As a red stater behind enemy lines here in Deepest Blue Taxachusetts, we feel a profound kinship with fellow Americans like Cubachi and other "minorities," including small-government, free-market women of Northern European descent like ourselves, demonized by our "betters" on the left side of the aisle for embracing the Founding Fathers' vision and rejecting the smothering embrace of identity politics and the nanny state. A sampling from recent archives of that rising chorus of "my people" finding their voices:

Cedra Crenshaw, who's fighting the Chicago machine

Herman Cain, whose words "Stay inspired. The people are still in charge" are an inspiration

Black Republicans National Press Club event

Other signs of unconventional Republicans finding their authentic American voices:

Pajamas Media's weekly The Minority Report

Juliette Akinyi, aka Baldilocks, "The Herding Series"

GOProud Announces Ann Coulter to Headline Homocon 2010 in New York City

Update: Michelle Malkin "Buzzworthy" link!

Update II: Juliette Akinyi links at KelseyLive.com.

Update III: "SISU has it almost right with the title of her first rate post," writes our friend Da TechGuy:

The truth is they have always had their voices, it is just the MSM has ignored them in the past and continues to do so. The point is they are unable to prevent the general public from finding them due to social media and the internet. The correct title is "A growing chorus of “minority” Republican voices are found by the public."

Crossposted at Cloven Not Crested, Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Tea Party grizzlies vs JournoList wolf pack

Fred Barnes's WSJ op ed today got us to thinking about the difference between liberal and conservative journalists. Twittering about it this afternoon, we came up with the metaphor of wolf pack behavior for the JournoList folks on the left side of the aisle. Working as a team, they select their quarry and close in for the kill in a coordinated attack from all sides. Sarah Palin is calling them "sick puppies." But what animal works best as a metaphor for journos on the Tea Party side of the aisle? See below for some answers.

"My experience with other conservative journalists is that they are loners," writes Fred Barnes in "The Vast Left-Wing Media Conspiracy" in today's WSJ. Getting his readers up to speed on JournoListGate, a vaguely bemused "Freddie the Beadle" reluctantly acknowledges there's something rotten in the state of American journalism:

Not to say there's a media conspiracy, but at least to note that hundreds of journalists have gotten together, on an online listserv called JournoList, to promote liberalism and liberal politicians at the expense of traditional journalism …

The first call I got after the Daily Caller unearthed the emails involving me was from Karl Rove. He said he wanted to talk to his "fellow racist." We laughed about this. But the whole episode was also sad. I didn't sputter at the thought of being called a racist. But it was sad to see what journalism, or at least a segment of it, had come to.

 

"Grizzlies are generally loners, but they are still North America’s most social bear. They gather at food sources and often forage in family groups," according to the Bronx Zoo website. Sarah Palin's metaphor for common-sense conservative women — "Mama Grizzlies" fiercely defending their young — resonates beyond female political candidates to become a perfect metaphor for everyday fellow Americans and social-networking citizen journalists like the Tea Partiers, both women and men, who are entering the political fray to battle the fear-and-smear machine that would douse the lights of the Shining City Upon a Hill.

Lone grizzly vs. wolf pack. Individualism vs. collectivism. The metaphors fit. On the other hand, a case can be made, as we've done before, for social networkers as flocks of birds wheeliing and swooping in unison. As with Adam Smiths "invisible hand," individual choices add up to something that redounds to the benefit of the larger community:

"Individuals, but moving in a single entity. And the reason for this behavior? Well, thousands of eyes looking for predators on the roost site. Nothing could escape their gaze, no raptor could surprise this soaring mass of bird flesh … The birds are also maneuvering for position, social position."

SAD isn't going to do it, Fred. Think of the Mama Grizzlies and Papa Bears: First you get MAD, and then you strike back. Special Forces Commander Dan Riehl has the goods at Human Events in a take-no-prisoners "Defense of Andrew Breitbart." Read it, Mr. Barnes, and take heart.

Update: Michelle Malkin Buzzworthy link!

Update II: The Anchoress links under "Unrelated Weekend Fare."

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

How Barack Obama stole the 2008 election

"The fact that Obama talks differently than Jeremiah Wright (above) does not mean that his track record is different," wrote Thomas Sowell in March of 2008, sounding a warning that went unheeded by too many of our fellow Americans, in part because of a coordinated legacy media campaign to keep the story off the front pages (see below): "Barack Obama's voting record in the Senate is perfectly consistent with the far left ideology and the grievance culture, just as his wife's statement that she was never proud of her country before is consistent with that ideology."

“I hear you, but I am really tired of defending the indefensible," the Nation's Katha Pollit whined to fellow Journolisters in a rare moment of self-awareness back in April of 2008 as revelations of Rev. Jeremiah "God Damn America" Wright's racist rantings threatened to derail Barack Obama's "historic" presidential campaign, prompting leg-tingling members of the propaganda community to brandish, "the mother of all media-as-political weaponry: the non-vetting of candidate Obama," as Andrew Breitbart crows in triumph this morning. The Daily Caller's Jonathan Strong has the gory details in "Documents show media plotting to kill stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright," those documents being, of course, leaked emails from Journolist's membership of "several hundred liberal journalists, as well as like-minded professors and activists":

According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, "Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists."

"Dressed down, they are nothing but street thugs," Breitbart nailed it. "Voter intimidation by other means,' we twittered. They're cornered now, and they'll put up a fight, but the new media are closing in, disintermediating via the internet. The blogosphere and Twitter are alive with mockery, top tactic in Glenn Reynolds's list of ways to thwart the "good intentions" of "America's Ruling Class." Twitter buddy Pundit Review captures the spirit:

@owiilis is awake! I'm looking forward to the rationalization, dissembling, diversions and excuses for JournoList. Where's the popcorn?

Update: Memeorandum trending.

Update II: Michelle Malkin "Buzzworthy" link!

Early afternoon update III: Now top story on Memeorandum as we predicted early morning.

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

EPA Cult of Death would "reap the profits of doom"

"We believe deeply that the denial of 'life's dark side in ourselves' is the key to what's wrong with the utopianist left world view," we wrote the first time we featured Max Ernst's 'L'Ange du Foyeur ou le Triomphe du Surréalisme' (1937. Oil on canvas. Private collection) back in April of 2004. The second time it accompanied our skeptical appreciation of NYT token conservative David Brooks's assertion in a column of that title, that "The darker view of human evolution is gaining clout." Third time, "the unthinkable. Self-described 'brain-dead liberal' playwright David Mamet has seen the light." Now individual revelations like Mamet's have cascaded into a tsunami of rediscovery of our nation's roots in the tragic view of human  nature.

"There are many vested interests hoping to reap the profits of doom," writes Shannon L. Goessling in a clear-eyed exposition of the stealth motives behind Obama's international progressivist Environmental Protection Agency ruling last April that carbon dioxide — the very stuff of life — is a dangerous pollutant that threatens the public and therefore must be regulated under the 1970 Clean Air Act. But the truly dangerous pollutant that threatens the public is the the soul-deadening pc propaganda of the decades-long Gramscian march through the institutions that has allowed these vulturous vested interests to get a seat at the head of the table of the body politic. More on that below, but first a few facts. As the WSJ reported in April:

This so-called "endangerment finding" sets the clock ticking on a vast array of taxes and regulation that EPA will have the power to impose across the economy, and all with little or no political debate. 

"The science is ultimately what should carry the day for public policy on climate change," declares Goessling, whose Southeastern Legal Foundation is taking 'em to court: 

There are many vested interests hoping to reap the profits of doom …

With huge vested interests pursuing a globalist agenda, it's been a Galileo-like effort to make the "skeptic" view known to the American people. Yet we are winning.

The best news is that the American people are beginning to wake up to the reality that they've been had, and they're mad as hell. Even as word of climate-science fraud and attempts to stifle skeptics began to break through the legacy media's "tribal filter on green news" last fall, a majority of our fellow citizens were telling pollsters they didn't see "global warming" as a crisis. Like the energizing spirit of the Tea Party movement itself, voters' growing recognition of Al Gore & Company's great con is "part of something bigger," as Glenn Reynolds wrote the other day in "Nashville Shows Tea Party Is America's Third Great Awakening," one of Instapundit's great distillations of what's "happening here."

Ron Futrell at Big Journalism puts it even more succinctly in a rollicking cogitation on the "Democrats and their activist old media … running in circles and working themselves into pretzels trying to define the 'Tea Party' movement":

It's the Constitution, stupid.

Exceptionalist America's brand of environmentalism used to be about individual initiative and stewardship of the earth in the trandscendentalist John Muir sense, most lyrically expressed in our all-time favorite quotation from Henry David Thoreau:

The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.

Compare and contrast nature red in tooth and claw — that part of our own human nature the "why-can't-we'all-just-get-along" left can't abide — with the totalitarianesque Green-Police Utopia of what Jonah Goldberg calls "Audi's Gorewellian Super Bowl ad." Recognition of nature and human nature is life-affirming. Green fantasies of sacrificing human freedom in the name of "saving the planet" embody a cult of death.

Chris Dodd as a Tea Party success story

"Chris Dodd as a Tea-Party Success Story," Kathryn Jean Lopez's latest at The Corner. Didn't we just SAY? Guess she doesn't follow our blog. Better late than never, we suppose:

That's what Peter Wolfgang, executive director of the Family Institute of Connecticut, argues. He tells me: "Dodd was forced out by the Left because he was a sure loser. But he was a sure loser because the people of Connecticut finally held a high-ranking member of the majority party responsible for his misdeeds. And that was only because of the work of grassroots activists who relentlessly shined a light on Dodd's failures. The conservative movement in general and the Tea Party movement in particular should take a bow. Regardless of whatever may happen next in the race for Connecticut's Senate seat, today they slew a giant."

We thought she'd never ask.