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jim Treacher:

I heard Carl Cameron once answered his hotel room door in a full Wonder Woman costume

I’m not sayin’ it’s true, I’m not sayin’ it’s not. That’s just what I heard. And no, I won’t tell you who said it. Under the new standard of journalism, it’s plausible until proven otherwise. And I get to decide what constitutes proof.

Better get out in front of this one, Carl!

[My link, for those of you wondering what the hell this is about.]
Jim, if Carl wants to run around hotels in her Wonder Woman costume, that’s entirely her business, as long as she doesn’t start lassoing other guests.

Meanwhile, here’s the story I want tracked down:

Been hearing unattributable talk that to deflect from Obama’s inability to deliver on his promises, or do much of anything with the economy, Democrats will divert attention the old fashioned way. Moscow Trials. The machinery is supposedly in motion to drag the entire Bush administration before congressional inquisitions. If you think there’s raw feelings now between the Obama left and constitutional Americans, you ain’t seen nothing yet. It also looks like Democrats Dodd, Frank, et al, will escape scrutiny for their major role in the subprime disaster. Sweet being a Democrat these days. eh wot?

As one of Roger’s commenters says, “Thats the step that will end liberal democracy. When going out of power leads to personal jail time or execution - no one will go out of power freely.”

Spread this one far and wide. Demand President-Elect Hussein prove it wrong.

I mean, it’s not any worse than the charge that President Chimpy personally ordered airliners flown into the World Trade Center as a kind of Reichstag Fire maneuver, is it?

Moreover, if BO is even remotely thinking of this, maybe airing it out will kill the idea, like, oh, say, exposing his entire Transition “Platform”, the one where he proposes mandatory servitude for all teenagers, made it fall down the memory hole.

(No, no, that last is absolutely true. People have screen shots.

(That’s going to have to be the rule for reporting on Obama’s Presidency. Save screenshots and local copies, because whenever he’s caught out telling the truth about what he wants to do, the official copies will disappear. )

John McCain wants you to give him the oar to the canoe. He plans to use it to fend off some of the big rocks along the way, but he’s not really going to paddle, and we’re going to continue to drift downstream towards the roaring waterfall of socialism.

B. Hussein Obama also wants the oar. He plans to paddle like mad for the waterfall, because, he says, that will get us away from those rocks as quickly as possible.

The idea that anybody should paddle us towards the shore, so that we can get out and buy our own canoes from that canoe store and paddle them ourselves, or stand in the shallows and fish, or open up our own store, or go to the lodge for a hot shower and a nice steak, or go hiking or god forbid hunting, is apparently totally out of the question.

[Moved to its own post from the entry below.]

Over at American Thinker, an excellent history lesson, and how it applies to Obama:

The only way to explain this disinterest in Obama’s past and its relationship to his present is that Americans no longer consider the label “socialist” to be a pejorative. To them, it’s just another content-neutral political ideology. In our non-judgmental age, it falls into the same category as Liberal vs. Conservative, or Left vs. Right. To most people, it just means Obama is a more liberal Liberal, or a leftier Lefty, and they already knew that.

In order to stir ordinary Americans to the sense of outrage those of us in the blogosphere feel, we need to remind them that socialism is not simply a more liberal version of ordinary American politics. It is, instead, its own animal, and a very feral, dangerous animal indeed.

It helps to begin by understanding what socialism is not.  It isn’t Liberalism and it isn’t mere Leftism.  Frankly, those terms (and their opposites) should be jettisoned entirely, because they have become too antiquated to describe 21^st Century politics.  The political designations of Left and Right date back to the French Revolution, when Revolutionaries sat on the Left side of the French Parliament, and the anti-Revolutionaries sat on the Right.  Terms from the internal geography of the French parliament as the ancient regime crumbled are striking inapposite today.

Likewise, the terms Liberal and Conservative date back to Victorian England, when Liberals were pushing vast social reforms, such as the end of child labor, while Conservatives were all for maintaining a deeply hierarchical status quo.  Considering that modern “liberals” are seeking a return to 20^th Century socialism, those phrases too scarcely seem like apt descriptors.

If it were up to me to attach labels to modern political ideologies, I would choose the terms “Individualism” and “Statism.”  “Individualism” would reflect the Founder’s ideology, which sought to repose as much power as possible in individual citizens, with as little power as possible in the State, especially the federal state.  The Founder’s had emerged from a long traditional of monarchal and parliamentary statism, and they concluded that, whenever power is concentrated in the government, the individual suffers.

And what of Statism?  Well, there’s already a name for that ideology, and it’s a name that should now be firmly attached to Sen. Obama:  Socialism.

[Emphasis mine.]

I swear, I’ve been thinking about writing this same thing, inspired by F. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, which I am now almost two-thirds of the way through.

One of the most frightening things about Serfdom, which was written in the opening years of WWII, is that Hayek identifies the socialist sources of so many ideas, memes, if you will, that are simply passed on as assumed fact, the intellectual water in which we swim.

My previous notes on this subject:

Why I am not a Conservative

The Kiln of Free Thought

Capitalism and evolution.

No Quarter, via Classical Values:

But there is a very strange air about Republican operatives. In the last three weeks, I’ve talked to real insiders in VA, GA, AL and here. They all remind me of a unit waiting to cross the line of departure on an attack. Quiet, determined, last cigarette, last “can of peaches out of the ration,” radio checks, confident. They all use the term “safely nominated” when referring to Obama.

Republican operatives want Obama “safely nominated”.

I am very, very shy of making predictions or gloating or any such thing this early in the game, particularly given my belief that the major news media are very much in the bag for Obama. There is no semblance of “fair and balanced”. They’re going to be doing their level best to get Obama elected.

The fact is, however, that McCain and the Republicans have pretty much stayed out of the fight so far. They’re rested and ready, or ought to be, while Obama will have just finished a hell of a fight with his own party.

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Here are the two Convention podiums:


Seriously, now. Which one of those looks like you’re supposed to pay attention to the Man and what he says, and which one looks like you’re supposed to pay attention to the dazzle, that the man will just be another prop?

Which one looks like it belongs in a serious campaign of ideas, and which one looks like it belongs in a Hollywood awards party, or a Red China international sports rally?

[disclosure: the lower picture is a computer-generated mockup; the actual stage is apparently not yet complete.]

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I have to reiterate, as I will often in the next few months, that I am not in McCain’s camp. He scares me for a lot of reasons that would make no sense at all to Obama supporters. (”McCain: the best Democrat in the race!”)

For the first time in my life, if I vote, it will be furtively. I will be ashamed to have cast a ballot, for anybody. This will very likely be the last national election I ever vote in, because I strongly suspect that whoever he is, the next President will prove that elections no longer matter, that The People are no longer in control of the political process.

I’ve been getting McCain campaign solicitations in the mail. They disgust me, they are so far off the mark. One of the early ones was done up to look like an official government document, and essentially ordered me to fill out the survey, and send McCain money. (Granted, it was immediately followed up by more ingratiating efforts.)

I’m pretty convinced that I will be voting for a guy who thinks my vote will give him permission to decide which of my rights I’ll be allowed to exercise, and by how much. Nuh-uh. I want to vote for the guy who will uphold his oath to defend my rights, as embodied in the Constitution, but that guy is not running.

However, Obama is the scariest candidate I’ve ever seen. He has virtually no experience. He’s Daley Machine Extruded Political Product, the embodiment of that Chicago slaughter-yard sausage you don’t want to see being made. His advisors and confidants are thugs and racist, anti-American Communists.

He’s a puppet, and the people pulling the strings are terrifying. They are not interested in letting me have any rights — they want to rule.

Oh, this is priceless.

Part of the Olympic opening fireworks display — a series of giant footprints in the sky –  was faked.

Steven Den Beste comments:

What I like best about this story is the reason why the Olympic committee did it: they were afraid that Beijing smog would make a real fireworks display look terrible.

Snort.

No, I’m not going to be oohing and aahing over the damn Olympics this year, any more than I’ll be praising the next Arafat Peace Prize winner. Billy Beck explains why:

I can’t help it: it really does strike me that the Chinese might’ve thought much better than to hire one Albert Speer as a central planner on the Olympic Games. That would be: the son of that Albert Speer.

Bonus curiosity: the Taipei Times article is written by Nina Khrushcheva. That’s Nikita Khrushchev’s grand-daughter.

Now that, right there, is what we can reasonably call diagnostic. But it’s not the quote of the day, just a plain reciting of fact.

Beck’s trade is lighting rock shows. When he sees a show, he can tell exactly what was involved in putting it on.

All over the net, I’ve seen various ravings about the Opening Ceremony. That was the biggest cued lighting production I ever saw. The scale of automated lights control was out of hand.

…

The fly-rigging was amazing, and I’d love to see the drawings. What you saw the other night was the biggest extension of rock production technology to date, and make no mistake that that’s not what it was. None of it will ever tour, but almost everything about the hardware and a great deal of the design (color saturation, for instance) can be traced directly back to San Francisco acid shows in the 1960’s, the principles and aspirations of which rock-tour crews have been dragging around ever since.

The development of that hippie technology, by the way, is the result of applied capitalism, not applied socialism, much  less communism.

From the cold eye of technique, this show was a stupendous integration of applied technology. This is what the craft can do today: show you a real-live illusion of a man running along an unfolding scroll over a hundred and fifty feet in the air along a circumference of over fifteen hundred feet.

What it cannot do is abstract the ethical purpose to which it’s put.

It was all very pretty, but I couldn’t like the look of it. If I had the fruits of over a billion peoples’ labor at my disposal, I should hope that I could paint big pretty pictures, too.

You want to know about another venue for pretty pictures?

North Korea, whose beloved leader Kim il Poofy Hair has a thing for huge flash card displays and mass dance routines. Watch the video at that link, and understand: those thousands of faceless performers are not fulfilling their own dreams, they are acting out the commands of a ruthless dictator who could order any of them to his bedroom, his torture chamber, or the firing squad, as easily as he could order these displays.

I haven’t seen the Olympic opening show. I plan not to, and I plan to spoil the enjoyment of anyone who tries to watch it in my presence.

It’s bright paint on the face of a hideous demon.

Beck has more words on the technicalities and its implications in a follow up here.

So, I’m kinda thinking maybe I shouldn’t vote this year.

…They know that my vote is a fundamental nod in favor of their existence. Go watch those creepy assholes on NBC doing their video bumpers and telling me how important it is that I should vote.

They know the whole fucking charade would fall right over if they could not claim to ‘represent’ us.

Right, right, right!

Update via my favorite African American, Kim duToit, quoting Get Liberty:

America appears to have descended into a one-party system.  And the only people today’s hand-holding politicians want to please is each other.

There is today, simply and solely, the “Governing Party.” There are those with power, and then there is everyone else.  Conservatives understand this as we have been sold out time and again on everything from tax cuts to illegal immigration to the size of the Federal budget.  And the Hard Left is quickly finding this out as the presumptive Democrat nominee, Barack Obama, moves his politics to the center to curry the favor of moderates, waffling one key issue after another—like NAFTA, public campaign financing, and the death penalty.

One major reason Americans are losing faith in their government is precisely because of broken promises.

I’m still, still, thinking I’ll vote. B. Hussein Obama represents a huge step away from limited government and individual liberty, while McCain merely twitches spasticly in place. (Then there’s the whole business about a vote for Obama being a vote for a Daley Machine puppet that still has that factory-fresh out-gassing circuit board smell, while a vote for McCain is a vote for an actual, if deeply flawed, human being with decades of experience and a proven willingness to fight and suffer for his country. Not to mention that a vote for McCain is a vote for telling the Main Stream Press Gang to go stick their titties in their inkblood-stained rollers….)

But damn, I’m gonna feel dirty.

What’s that? I should move somewhere else? (Have I mentioned the profound irony of socialist “liberals” telling me I should “love it or leave it”? This probably won’t be the last time.)

There is no place else. This is it. “The last, best, hope,” and all that. There is no “magical palace on the moon”. Plus, it’s mine. Ours. Not theirs.

However, this might be the election where the American people finally give it all away.

Gonna be an interesting fight.

…And the Federal Government wants to help.

1-800-SUICIDE is a privately owned, non-profit phone network that provides anonymous suicide counseling. A few years ago, they made a terrible, terrible mistake: they accepted a grant from the Federal Government.

Now the feds want to take control of the phone number. Likely result: instead of anonymous counseling, you get the cops.

I do not even know how to express the rage I am feeling as I type this.

I’ve said this before. I’m going to say it again now. I’m going to say it over and over and over until it sinks in:

We do not trust the government to read our mail. We do not trust the government to stop us on the street and ask for our papers. We do not trust the government to listen in on our phone calls. We do not trust the government to come into our homes and businesses and search our records or our belongings.

And yet, many of you f… — excuse me while I suppress a stream of shrieking profanity — many of you think you can trust the government with your health care? With the intimate personal records that it requires? Are you mad, or just so [deleting foul word] stupid that you cannot manage your own lives and in fact deserve to have your most intimate secrets in the hands of the people that want to turn 1-800-SUICIDE records over to the police? While taking half or more of your salary, and condemning you to a lifetime of filling out mind-numbing forms for the privilege of doing so.

God. Damn. You.

Wake the fuck up!

These people do not want to help you. They want to own you, every hair on your head, every cell in your body, every base-pair in your DNA. Every thought in your brain, if you give it to them.

Stop already. Just stop.

Because if you give them yours, they’ll take mine too, and if that happens, I will kill myself.

But I will take as many of them with me as I can, rather than let them take me away, and turn me into one of you.

God Damn You.

You asked for this.

The next President of the United States will probably give it to you, good and hard.

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“Them,” Dave? “They?” Who “Them”? That’s crazy talk, you know.

SAMHSA, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Adminsitration. Currently running 1-800-273-TALK, a competing suicide hot line. If you call this number, knowing that it is run by the feds, you deserve every single degrading humiliation they inflict on you, you idiot. Better you should just kill yourself now, OK?

Department of Health and Human Services

And the usual suspects, like the IRS, the DEA, the BATFX….

A law has just passed requiring computer technicians to have a Private Investigator’s (PI) license.

Text of the law here.

I. Am. Appalled.

And you want idiots jackboots like these in charge of your health care?

Via McQ at Q and O, the most frightening set of charts I’ve ever seen. [The narration text is on the left, with a Mute button above it if you don't have the patience to listen to it.]

Ross Perot, “the hand grenade with a bad haircut”, as McQ puts it, presents a lesson on “Suicidal Spending”, explaining what the Federal budget numbers and projections mean, and it’s bad, very. Almost all of the bad news comes from “non-discretionary spending”, that is, “entitlements” the government is required to pay out to its dependents. Most of those are Social Security, welfare, and health care, and of those, the one that’s steaming out of control is health care.

Let me emphasize: It’s not the Bushitler’s War of Lies that’s exploding the national debt. Nor is it his Tax Cuts for the Weatlhy Not Poor.

It’s us Baby Boomer hippies, and our insatiable and insane desire to put our retirement and health care in the hands of a government we don’t trust to tell us whether or not we should smoke a joint.

I’m a Boomer, ashamed of and, increasingly, frightened by that status. My Generation is responsible for reducing us to a nation of superstitious cowards, traitors, and freeloaders. As Perot’s presentation shows, the ratio of workers to retirees is falling; the pyramid scheme is cratering. Further, the public education system, the one created, operated, and managed by My Generation, is turning out bleating sheep, not productive citizens, with zero ability or desire to take care of themselves, much less their parents and uncles and aunts.

Worse, the increasing willingness of the government to tax and flat out confiscate private property means that even capitalist pigs who, unlike me, have engaged in the oppresive fascist practice of prudent financial planning, will fare no better. Their bank accounts and trust funds will be socialized to feed the restless flock.

At this point, I’m no longer worried about whether I’ll be able to retire on Social Security and Medicare. I know that’s a rapidly evaporating pipe dream.

I’m worried about having to listen to “When I’m Sixty Four” blaring through the Golden Oldies Rest Camp loudspeakers when I’m led off to take The Shower.