Photo-Merge

Click here to see an incredible collection of merged-photos: B&W WWII pics with recent color pics of the same place.

U/T: IOTW and Sergey_Larenkov

Fight Back

Friday night is movie night!



U/T: NiceDeb & The Conservative Lady

Another Spy!

Anna Fermanova, 24, was working as a teacher in Texas until the imperialist Americans deported her as part of the recent Russian spy ring. We think she is mis-understood and should have been allowed to stay. Can't we all just get along?

U/T: EnglishRussia (Click For More Pics!)

Enemies of the People

"One Man's Journey to the Heart of the Killing Fields"

A documentary opening today in New York, and next week in Los Angeles.

Enemies of the People Movie Trailer from Rob Lemkin on Vimeo.

Communist [Inspired]

There are those hard-line Communists, and then there are what we call the 'Communist-Inspired'. Both have the same grand ideas and solutions for our problems, but the latter is constrained by a Constitution, must conceal their true intentions, and have learned to settle for delayed and incremental progress.

Here are a couple recent pics of both.

Found at Townhall:

And here is a recent pic from the DMZ:

Thursday Night Cigar

You can never go wrong with an Ashton.

We are still reading Robert Conquest's Stalin: Breaker of Nations.

Pages 193-194. Sound like someone else?

One of his [Stalin's] greatest characteristics was a phenomenal memory, at least in the matters which concerned him most. And he had the ability to master the facts in a variety of fields. He mistook this, as laymen often do, for the ability to understand at least the essentials of any field whatever and make informed judgements. He was to decide not only questions of economics, in which he was barely competent, but also crucial issues of, for example, biology, on which his knowledge was no more than comparable, at best, to that of an all-purpose journalist called upon to write an article, or a lawyer required to 'brief himself' for a week or two on some technical problem.

This attitude, which led to such absurdities, must in part be based on the Communist principle that a dogma transcending other knowledge had been discovered, and that political leadership, and political considerations generally, are on a higher and more comprehensive plane than all other elements of life and society, and are empowered to make final decisions. It allowed Stalin to decimate, and more than decimate, his engineers, his physicists and so on. When the Kharkov Physics Laboratory, one of the best in Europe, was destroyed by the arrest of almost all its leading staff, one of its departmental heads commented: 'You need five years to train an engineer, and even then the government had a very great deal of trouble before it could get suitable engineers for its new factories. But a capable physicist needs from ten to fifteen years' of training.'

The most crucial area in which Stalin failed to appreciate the need for specialists was, however, to be military science. Here, as we have said, he clearly believed that he himself had shown high talent in spite of a total lack of training. His destruction of the military cadres, which nearly resulted in disaster in 1941-43, was a natural result.

The Pro's of Unemployment

Ok, maybe just one "pro".

Blogger and Law Professor William A. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection has a post on the Diversity Industry.

The diversity consultant industry is pretty much like any industry; it has a product to sell and it needs to create demand for that product.

We have over 10 years in Corporate America, which means we have spent 10 full days in mandatory Diversity Training classes. And despite never having owned a slave, wanted to own a slave, or know of anybody who owned a slave, we still had to submit to 8 hours of someone speaking to us as if we either have these desires or are trying to purge these thoughts from our instinctively slave-owning minds.

The pain and suffering is twofold. As someone who performs a productive role in the company that either makes the company money or saves the company money, we had to sit there and be led by someone who offers the company nothing more than a litigation barrier and government mandated white-guilt lecture. Those were the longest days of our life.

We once sat in an all-staff meeting at a Fortune-500 company and when the CEO (a white man) offered to take questions, some shmuck stood up and asked the CEO's position on diversity. His response is now our response: "I celebrate diversity. I embrace diversity. I've hired some folks from Harvard this past year, and some from Stanford. I will continue to find and recruit the best people for the job, period."

U/T: Glenn Reynolds

Change

Van Helsing at Moonbattery ponders the "change" suggested in this clip of Commie Obama Hat Owner Glenn Beck: from soft tyranny to hard tyranny.

You decide, while we put a few more dollar bills into our Obama Cuss Jar...



U/T: Moonbattery & Glenn Beck

Nikita Khrushchev's Girls

EnglishRussia posts some pics from the March 1964 Playboy. No furry ushanka hats unfortunately...

Ladies & Gentlemen, Steve Lee

U/T: The Firearm Blog

UPDATE 7.25 We just bought his album on iTunes.

Blind Date Risks

Girls, ever have a blind date like this?



Lessons Learned:

1) Don't take your communist dictator date to bible study,
2) Don't ask him if someone has ever betrayed his trust.

Capitalism

We saw a pic of this shirt at Moonbattery. Very cool until we clicked through to Zazzle and saw they are selling it for $28.90! Could Capitalism be alive and well? Are there still people out there with that kind of cash?

And wouldn't they rather buy a stylish, sexy and warm ushanka rather than just another political t-shirt?

For the history buffs: A picture of an earlier Ushanka salesman found at EnglishRussia. It isn't as easy as it looks!

Scariest Unemployment Graph (so far)

From The Atlantic - The Scariest Unemployment Graph I've Seen Yet by Derek Thompson.

Change.

UPDATED Here are a couple other graphs we recently downloaded. We don't recall the sources, so please submit if you know!

UPDATE 7.24

Found this animated map that shows month-to-month employment changes by county.

Product Endorsement

Worth Standing In Line For

A new Leninade commercial has appeared on the net.



Our Commie Obama store still has a few bottles of this revolitious beverage left!

O-Care Repeal

MaryHunter at Moonbattery offers this picture with news on the ObamaCare Repeal efforts, and what you can do to keep the momentum towards repeal.

European

Since it is wrong to call this President a "socialist" for the reason... Well, because name-calling is bad we suppose.

We like these comments below from Harvard business and history professor Niall Ferguson at the Aspen Ideas Festival, normally a liberal festival.

Reported by The Daily Beast:

If you’re asking if the United States is about to become a socialist state, I’d say it’s actually about to become a European state, with the expansiveness of the welfare system and the progressive tax system like what we’ve already experienced in Western Europe.
---
The curse of longterm unemployment is that if you pay people to do nothing, they’ll find themselves doing nothing for very long periods of time,” Ferguson said. “Long-term unemployment is at an all-time high in the United States, and it is a direct consequence of a misconceived public policy.
---
The critical point is if your policy says you’re going run a trillion-dollar deficit for the rest of time, you’re riding for a fall…Then it really is goodbye.” A dashing Brit, Ferguson added: “Can I say that, having grown up in a declining empire, I do not recommend it. It’s just not a lot of fun actually—decline."
---
Ferguson called for what he called “radical” measures. “I can’t emphasize strongly enough the need for radical fiscal reform to restore the incentives for work and remove the incentives for idleness.

Of course, Professor Ferguson's fields of history and business are so out-dated. Remember, George W. Bush did his undergraduate degree in History and his graduate work in Business! Who wants to go back to 4.5% unemployment?! Puhlease!

Back in 5...

We're on the road for a few days for a fun-filled 4th!

While reading Robert Conquest's Stalin: Stalin: Breaker of Nations, we came across these paragraphs in Chapter 8, The Fight For Power. It is a chapter about Stalin's early years in power.

Would you pause while reading this as we did?

It is hard to keep in mind that these struggles were not conducted among politicians in the ordinary sense. Their concern was not the immediate interests of the country. They considered only the transformation of that country, and in the long run of the world, according to the precepts of a particular dogma. And they viewed their party's retention of power at all costs as the only way of achieving these ends.

Every move had to be justified in terms of the dogma. Its essentials were that class struggle is the motive force of history; that the industrial working class, the proletariat, is empowered to defeat the earlier ruling classes; and that the result will be socialism, followed by communism, a society of total freedom and equality. Meanwhile, the Communist Party, 'representing' the Russian proletariat, has come to power and has the task of ruling in the name of this (admittedly small, dwindling and apathetic) class. In any case, Lenin continued to argue that other proletarian revolutions in the 'advanced' countries would save the day for the Russian Revolution.

This notion of the transcendental role of the industrial working class, the 'proletariat' in the Marxist scheme, was of course a central conviction of the Bolsheviks.

See you in a few days. Until then, visit all the blogs in our blogroll and have a happy and safe 4th of July!

Is Obama A Socialist? Part DXXVI

WSJ's James Taranto of Best of the Web fame addresses the timeless question. And fails.

Like anyone who wants to appear moderate to their audience (see Bill O'Reilly), all they have to do is paint the two sides as extreme. Most readers are left with the warm and fuzzy feeling that the writer is measured, mature and fair.

But not all. Some readers will think the writer either stands for nothing, or is choosing to ignore some very obvious facts.

To be that above-it-all moderate, you must not discuss the nationalized automakers or redistributionist policies. A better way to avoid the obvious is to compare the right calling Obama a socialist with the Left who called Bush a fascist. Now you've diluted the credibility of the argument of one with the vacuousness of the other. Now you're just the referee between two opposing forces leading your reader towards your middle-of-the-road conclusion.

We thought Taranto would do the right thing when he referred to the definitions of socialism and fascism, but he fell flat with this conclusion:

Calling Bush a fascist is flatly false; his philosophy and administration met none of the criteria in the definition. Calling Obama a socialist, by contrast, is merely a gross overstatement.

Opportunity missed! We can only hope Taranto is attempting to do what we've recently noticed Rush Limbaugh doing. That is, to run up to the edge of calling this socialist a socialist, then letting the audience make the final leap. For example, from Rush's Wednesday show in a discussion about Kagan:

She's getting away with saying she doesn't know what progressivism is. It's like saying she doesn't know what liberalism is. I'll tell you what, we have so successfully tarnished the terms liberal, progressive, whatever they want to call themselves, they can't afford to identify with them. She's out there claiming to have no clue what progressive legalism is. That's like saying that Marx has no idea what communism is. And I'm not exaggerating.

Rush: Polished and on target.
Us: Zero polish and on target.
Others: Missing the target, so far...

For those new to Ushanka.us, we're filtering out the noise and keeping track of the actual actions of this President. Click here to see our Obama Checklist.

Leadership Fail

Imagine your family's house has a 4-foot wide hole in the roof. A rainstorm is coming, and Dad says he's going to clean out the garage. Now imagine Dad becoming President.

Keeping to his Hope and Change style of leadership, Obama has launched a new initiative - to bridge the digital divide.

Haven't heard that term in a while, have ya?

Some leaders address problems that exist. If Obama were that type of leader, he'd be spending his time on the economy, jobs, the oil spill or the Iranian nuke problem. To name a few.

Instead the non-issues of Arizona's application of federal law, corporate speech, the operations of bank, oil and auto companies, and now broadband access are his priorities. At CNN:

Washington (CNN) -- President Obama on Friday will announce new government investments in 66 projects to expand broadband connections in rural and poor areas across the country.

The $795 million in grants and loans funded by the 2009 economic stimulus act will create 5,000 jobs and generate $200 million in associated private investment, according to information provided by the White House.

The "Digital Divide" was a political issue 10 years ago. Today it is as available as milk. If you want it, you can have it. Yesterday's news: Free and Unlimited WiFi at Starbucks. Only a moron would think there is a problem here. According to DigitalDivide.org, the current location struggling for access is... Indonesia.

This all leads to the same questions about Obama:

What is this guy doing?

Is this part of some plan?

The only thing less stupid would be to give $795 million in tax incentives to Starbucks and other coffee companies to open stores in these target areas. Equal or more jobs created, $795 million in less taxes, new taxes generated, free Internet.

On the plus side, we're only talking about 1% of the Stimulus money...

McDonald v. Chicago

Postscript: Are we really pro-gun, or do we just like adding gun nut pics in our posts??

Monday's decision was welcome, but the 5-4 vote in favor of gun rights for Chicago and Oak Park residents is 4 votes short of where it ought to be, and a signal to all freedom-loving people of how close we are to being slaves. We pick our words carefully - it is THAT important.

WSJ Jess Bravin, Justices Expand Gun Rights:

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court Monday extended nationwide the right to armed self-defense, a historic conclusion to an age-old battle over the meaning of the Second Amendment.

The decision gives federal judges the power to strike down state and local weapons laws for violating the Constitution. But the court said that the right isn't unfettered, and the decision is likely to lead to years of litigation as lower courts try to determine what restrictions are reasonable. Assault-weapons bans, licensing rules and other curbs will all be subject to challenge.

While the Gun Control aspect of the ruling has received the most press, the 14th Amendment's Privileges and Immunities Clause gained some needed attention too. We're not a lawyer, so bear with us here...

The 14th Amendment has two applicable clauses: the Due Process Clause and the Privileges or Immunities Clause. For this, we'll turn to Ashby Jones at the WSJ Law Blog on Monday, Is His Gun-Control Concurrence Justice Thomas’s Finest Hour?

In order to extend the Second Amendment to laws passed by states or cities, the court was faced with a choice of two clauses embedded in the 14th Amendment. It could “incorporate” the Second Amendment to the states through the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause. Or, pursuant to the 14th Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause, it could deem “the right to bear arms” one of the “Privileges” or “Immunities” that the states are forbidden from taking away.

So you’ve never heard of the Privileges or Immunities Clause? We’re not surprised. The clause was largely neutered in a set of cases decided in 1873.

So in order to extend the Second Amendment to the states, the court seemed to be left with the Due Process Clause. That is, the court would have to rule that the right to bear arms was a right so fundamental that there could be no lawful way to abridge it without violating due process of law.
---
Commentators on the right and left urged the Supreme Court to reverse the 1873 cases and safeguard the right to bear arms through the Privileges or Immunities Clause. Such a move could have opened an avenue for individuals to claim new rights, some which might have pleased liberals, others which might have pleased conservatives.

Those arguing for resuscitation of the Privilege or Immunities Clause pinned their hopes on Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas, both known for their “originalist” approach to constitutional interpretation.

But Justice Scalia on Monday opted, along with Justices Alito and Kennedy and Chief Justice Roberts, to use the Due Process Clause. As Liptak noted, Justice Scalia, in a concurrence, “acknowledged misgivings about using the due process clause to apply Bill of Rights protections to the states” but went along with it “’since straightforward application of settled doctrine suffices to decide it.’”

But in a separate concurrence, Justice Thomas boldly went where no justice has gone before: to the arms of the Privileges or Immunities Clause.

So, for those of us trying to keep up, the Privileges or Immunities Clause seems to be the correct application of the law in this case, but previous flawed decisions have painted SCOTUS into a corner where the Due Process Clause is their only tool. Yet, one justice chose to base his concurrence on the Privileges or Immunities Clause, and none of the dissenters argued against his use of it. In other words, one more takeaway from this ruling is that all justices are in agreement that the 1873 rulings are flawed in some manner. This suggests there is "hope that Thomas’s lone dissent has planted the seeds for a constitutional reawakening rooted in the Privileges and Immunities Clause."

Randy Barnett, Prof. of Law at Georgetown University adds in his WSJ article, The Supreme Court's Gun Showdown:

By declining to take issue with Justice Thomas's impressive 56-page originalist analysis, the other justices in effect conceded what legal scholars have for some time maintained—that the court's cramped reading of the clause in 1873 was inconsistent with its original meaning. Yesterday the lost Privileges or Immunities Clause was suddenly found. And some day it may be fully restored to its proper place as the means by which fundamental individual rights are protected under the Constitution against abuses by states.

Read these articles further to see that this is a double-edged sword. Specifically, the use of the newly found Privileges or Immunities Clause may lead to rulings that liberals progressives communists may like. Fair is fair we suppose, so long as all of our fellow Americans are allowed to cling to their guns.

Robert Cottrol writes at the SCOTUS Blog about the history of racism in gun control cases in the late 1800's. He concludes:

The opinions in McDonald are rich in ironies. We have conservative justices authoring opinions which squarely confront the tragic legacy of race and its impact on American Constitutional history, while we have liberal justices wanting to largely skip over that history. We have on the other hand liberal justices pleading for states’ rights and federalism while conservative justices make the case for the soundness of incorporating the Bill of Rights as a matter of original intent. The Court got it right in McDonald but how it came to do so will fascinate students and commentators for some time to come.

Gun Blog, The Breda Fallacy, directs us to the Second Amendment Foundation and specifically to Alan Gura who argued both the Heller case and this case on our behalf. We join her in encouraging donations to the foundation.

On a lighter note, gun blog Sharper Than A Marble asks what kind of statements we'd hear from Chicago and Mayor Daley if they attacked the 1st Amendment in the same way they fought this case. Here are some of our favorites:

Under Daley's ordinances, one would need to register all their word processors with the city so police know how many word processors are in each home, and would also be required to have a valid Word Processor Owner's ID card.

It requires journalism training, both in a classroom and a city newspaper.

Chicago residents would be able to register no more than one word processor per month for each adult in a home. The ordinance "generally prohibits the possession of a word processor by any person except in the person's home," according to a city news release.

To register word processors, a resident must first get a “Chicago Word Processor Permit” from the police department. A permit would cost $100 every three years.

People who have been convicted of a dangling participle, two or more run on sentences charges or unlawful use of an apostrophe could not get a permit.

We can laugh at this - now that our gun rights have been temporarily retained...

Thursday Afternoon Cigar

A Santa Damiana was set ablaze this afternoon.

We are reading Robert Conquest's Stalin: Stalin: Breaker of Nations. In Chapter 5, Revolution, Conquest explains how 1917 might have been the year for the Revolution, but Stalin wasn't much part of it. It seems that Stalin was either active in remote regions, or a bit AWOL at other times during the challenges of 1917. While the word "ditherer" isn't used, it comes across just the same. History is best explained if there is a current example, and we'll spend the rest of this cigar trying to think of a more recent leader that always seemed distant and unattached from major events.

Oh, unrelated, yesterday was Day 70 of the Gulf Oil Spill, and the day's news was that the Obama Administration approved the offered help from several other nations.

The Spy Next Door

CLICK HERE to see advice for determining if your neighbor is a Russian spy. WARNING - article is ok, but site is NSFW.

A summary:

1. Check his liquor cabinet
2. Find out his politics
3. Monitor his speech patterns
4. Ask to see pictures of his mother
5. Invite him over to watch Rocky IV and Red Dawn

Sound advice! Let's turn on the lights of freedom and watch those Commies run for the shadows!

UPDATE 7.2: More pics of the Nikita (our name for that red headed minx) found at English Russia. Adding "Ushanka Babe" label to this post. We may not have a picture of her with the hat, but we KNOW she has one!

Anna Chapman - Naughty Russian Spy: