Friday, April 24, 2009

Karl's Weekend Reading

Our 600th blog post since our Fall 2006 launch! Leninade all around!

The left, including their comrades in the MSM, still has their panties in a bunch over the April 15 tea parties. Estimates range from 300,000 to 550,000 attendees. Kyle-Anne Shiver at The American Thinker makes a great point about our boiling point in MSM's Tea Party Cognitive Dissonance.

This mounting anger, aimed at the tyranny of a federal government -- completely off-the-rails of its Constitutionally-framed limited scope and power -- may be surfacing now due to a tipping in the fragile balance that was upheld during the G.W. Bush presidency. What was that fragile balance between our quietly continuing our personal business and our taking to the streets?

One thing and one thing only, in my opinion. As long as the federal government is doing the one job of protecting our national security and standing up for us in the face of the world's slights, we will take a great deal of folderol from our elected officials. We will suffer the profligate spending and invasions on our personal freedoms when we - at the very least - believe our leaders are stridently bent on protecting our interests and our children from harm.

When a president cuts both those legs off at the knees, as President Obama has shamelessly done for 100 days, then frustration boils over into national protest.


Obama's first 100 days has been the last straw.

Not only has this president pompously promised the wages of our children and grandchildren in a profligate spending spree that guarantees serfdom for the productive class, he has bowed, scraped, fawned and apologized his way across the entire continent of Europe.


For some fun tea party reading, click here to browse the comment section of our April 15 Cincinnati Tea Party video at YouTube. "Unhinged" is an understatement. A sampling:

Why are these people protesting taxes when they are getting a tax cut under Obama. Makes no sense.
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Just face the facts.
Republican economics = Fail
Teabaggers = Fail
You and this video = Fail
Fox = Win by getting all the Teabaggers actually think this was a grassroots effort.
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This is scary. A lot of people on the streets, not really knowing what they are campaigning about. All they think is that they should be there.

The worlds economy is up the spout and people are calling for capitalism.
Bush left the country on its knees financially, near bankrupt. Obama must be given a chance.

What a bunch of morons!


Dick Morris, that Right Wing Nut, calls Obama a Socialist (again) in his article at The Hill, Obama's Leap to Socialism. When will these people stop calling Obama a socialist, distracting from the real issues at hand, and start being part of the solution? This name calling has to be stopped!

President Obama showed his hand this week when The New York Times wrote that he is considering converting the stock the government owns in our country’s banks from preferred stock, which it now holds, to common stock.

This seemingly insignificant change is momentous. It means that the federal government will control all of the major banks and financial institutions in the nation. It means socialism.
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...whoever controls the banks controls the credit and, therefore, the economy. That’s called socialism.
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With bank profits up and financial institutions trying to give back their money, there is no need for the conversion of the government stock from preferred to common — except to advance the political socialist agenda of this administration.




Daniel Henninger at the WSJ comments on the recent photos of Obama's apologize-for-America-first tour at the Americas Summit last week. Happy photos of Obama with communists Chavez and Ortega. (You can re-arrange that last sentence if you wish). Obama and the Dictators:

Hugo Chávez is a tin-pot dictator who has debauched Venezuela's democracy. Normally in such circumstances, an American president would show reserve. The weirdly ebullient Mr. Obama did not, and that image was the photo seen 'round the world.

In New York this week, I asked a former Eastern European dissident who spent time in prison under the Communists: "If you were sitting in a cell in Cuba, Iran or Syria and saw this photo of a smiling American president shaking hands with a smiling Hugo Chávez, what would you think?"

He said: "I would think that I was losing ground."
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The Obama people seem to believe that talking top guy to top guy is the yellow brick road to progress. Why do they think that? They say Ronald Reagan negotiated over nuclear arsenals at Reykjavik. But virtually all desirable regime change in our time -- Soviet Communism, South Africa, the Philippines -- has come mainly from below, from the West protecting and supporting people in opposition to autocrats.


The maturity shown by WSJ's Holman W. Jenkins Jr. by refraining from calling Obama a Socialist and instead referring to the President as "King Barack the Mild" is refreshing. It gives us hope that we can work out our differences and work together in harmony. His opinion piece, GM Is Becoming a Royal Debacle, continues on the same topic of government ownership of GM shares. Morris calls it Socialism. Jenkins avoids the word with creative writing.

...the rights and privileges of shareholders are not worth diddly when the king is throwing his prerogatives around. He dispensed with the services of GM chief Rick Wagoner, though the king owned not a single share of GM stock at the time. His minions communicated the king's pleasure that GM consider discontinuing its GMC brand, maker of pickups and SUVs that offendeth the royal eye -- though these vehicles earn GM's fattest profit margins.

His minions haven't asked GM to give up the Chevy Volt, even after determining it will be a profitless black hole, because of the king's fondness for green.
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King Barack could take a leaf from St. Jimmy the Simple, who faced a collapse of the railroad industry. He signed the Staggers deregulation law, returning power to the industry itself to decide what services to provide and which customers to chase. What had previously been an industrial basket case, halfway nationalized already, fixed itself almost overnight.


Last, Ann Coulter, someone on the right that isn't afraid to wear our Commie Obama hat in public or call Obama names, writes at Townhall about her mother who passed away last week. Click here to read. Very moving. Our condolences.

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