The Obama Economic Record

Good job.

source: US Senate Republican Policy Committee

Article: "College may be dangerous for men"

In an aptly titled column "College may be dangerous for men," the September 14, 2011 Phyllis Schlafly report nails the mark on this "We must repudiate men" dogma. 

The feminist apparatus is constantly grinding out phony statistics about sexual assault and harassment, accusations that men are naturally batterers, and that women never lie or make errors in sexual allegations. The feminists are unrepentant about the way they and the prosecutors (toadying to the feminists) accepted and publicized lies that destroyed the reputations of the Duke Lacrosse men and of Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Now, even more than before, colleges push this propaganda - not sure why the federales have to press it in to the universities, like thumbs in so much clay. I'll never forget when one of my best friends was hauled away, thrown in jail for fitting a very vague DESCRIPTION of an assailant. Name pushed through the press, legal fees, and no apology or significant change in status, just that he was no longer a primary suspect of interest - or whatever the bureau-cowardspeak is that says one thing, but not totally, as to leave inroads open later if they want to change their mind.

I wish I could send this article to my friend, to hopefully help him feel a bit vindicated, but the potential cost is too great; that I might resurrect damaging feelings of his undeserved public humiliation.

QOTD

"Be as good as your dog thinks you are."

~From a sign outside a church here in Mudville, U.S.A.

"If you voted for Obama in 2008 to prove you’re not racist, you’ll have to find someone else to vote for in 2012 to prove you’re not an idiot."    ~Unk.

"Babel, Inc.:  We live in the era of the great divider, not the great uniter.  People letting themselves identify strictly inside party lines must be insane at the wheel, and our country's brakes have been cut.  Democrats fancy themselves intellectual giants using big-kid words like 'jingoists' to describe people that love the United States. If you hate the United States, the Democrats love you, but not as much as they love themselves. Republicans dislike the Democrats, which makes sense because the Democrats have turned hypocrisy into an art form. Other than that, they don't dislike much else, because they are in want of a position.  The Independents?  They just have a strong dislike for the political plutocracy." ~Cagey

"Without a common moral code and Christian heritage, our nation will splinter into Balkanized factions. There would be no social glue to hold us together any longer. Since the 1960s, America’s cultural disintegration has accelerated. We have become more secular, more perverse and ultimately, more decadent."  

"The modern left understands one fundamental reality: Destroying Christianity destroys the culture and civilization it spawned. They are inextricably linked. This is why socialists, such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Saul Alinsky and George Soros, have championed militant anti-Christianity, free love, contraception and abortion. Smash the family and traditional morality and the economic system they gave birth to - capitalism - will fall."   ~Jeffrey Kuhner 

Patriotism in action

Decision point:

Appear on 'The View' and go to a fundraiser later;

                                 OR

Speak to 45,000 scouts at the 100th anniversary Boy Scouts of America Jamboree.

Yeah.
Don't worry, he gets paid to make the big decisions.

More musings of little consequence

Same instructions as usual today: print, tape to stall. 

1. I recently submitted this ironic headline to Fark and was hoping to be rewarded with a "Page One!" but no joy.  "Students burning the -Mexican- flag presents rare dilemma for progressives"  I really was in the mood to rake some muck, no luck.

2. Presenting the worst cover of all time:  The Final Countdown  Heh.

3. Have any of you seen the 1980s flick "Streets of Fire"?  Looks like some essential 80s knowlege for the ol' grape.  Funny how I got there. I was looking up background on the soundtrack from "Bubblegum Crisis," (same kinda genre as "I Need a Hero," what is that called, allegrissimo?); which said it was influenced by Streets of Fire; which said Streets of Fire was a seminal work for the 80s despite low sales (a kind of Grease, Little Shop or Rocky Horror?). 

The Fixx, gods of English new wave music and featured in the credits, have always been a force in their own right. With all of their uniqueness and range, it would make sense that something on the cutting edge like their "Deeper and Deeper" would have found its way into a movie of this kind of significance, even though I was suprised by their appearance.  So, I'm hoping the movie won't be a disappointment. I don't always look at movies in the straightforward way:  "Bob is here. Bob gets in a pickle. Bob saves the day. The end." I'll be looking for cool cues from the period, looking laterally for influences, whether I like riding the vibe 'til the end...

4.  I'm pi$$ed off at Wal-Mart and their mega-pals as usual. I'm working on an editorial on the banality of a fifth Petco coming to town. We are a country that can't avoid steering into the most mordant irony.
People say, "Let the consumers decide," but there is no way that even the anti-WM crowd could gain a foothold in stopping them. There are too many dregs that would still go there even if they flew a red star.
 
5. I'm a centrist, but the presidential burger outing a few days back was inappropriate.  If I had just had this somber, solemn meeting with one of my at-war generals and relieved him, I think I would eat in that day. Jiminy freaking Christmas.  Aaaaand - with that off my chest, I'm back to refraining from political posts again.

6.  QOTD context comes from a discussion on incorporating lawyerly negotiation skills in dealings with tribal leaders in Afghanistan.

Lawyers spend years learning how to be adversarial. Very few law schools offer any training in mediation whatsoever, and the few that do only train their students in evaluative mediation (focused on property settlements).


They learn NOTHING about dealing with the human factor in a negotiation (such as when one party feels they need an apology from the other party before they can move forward w/ the negotiation in good faith).


If successful negotiation is what they want, they need people who have spent years learning how to resolve conflict in a cooperative way that can address the emotional content of a conflict as well as the material aspect, not attorneys who will likely stay so focused on the letter of the law that they will lose sight of the spirit of the law and inadvertently make matters worse.  - "fyrewede"

People seem to have this idea that "they" (for any given value of them) are aliens, with strange, unknowable, and often irrational motives; certainly, with nothing in common with "us" or our motives and ways of thinking. Instead, we ascribe stereotyped motivations to "them" and expect that if we believe hard enough, things will work out the way we think. "They" will welcome us as liberators. "They" hate our freedoms. "They" want to see the poor suffer. Pick your "they", pick your irrationality, and have at it. It's a surefire route to guaranteed failure.


Winning, whether it's in the marketplace or on the playing field or on the battlefield, requires knowing your enemy. You have to know how he thinks. How he reacts. What his motivations are. What his goals are. What he's done in the past to achieve them. If you don't study those, if you assign him some self-generated (and often irrational) motivation, you're going to lose, because you're not fighting the enemy -- you're fighting your own straw man. The enemy doesn't have to deceive you about what he's going to do and why; you're doing it yourself. You're the best player on the other team.

It's true in relationships, too. "She just likes driving me crazy" ... how often have you heard that? (substitute "he" as needed) Do you like driving people crazy? Well, this is Fark, that might not be the best question to ask some people here ... but in general. Do you like to drive your friends, lovers, family, etc., crazy, just for the sport of it? Unlikely. So why ascribe a motive like that to someone else? They're no more likely to be trying to drive you crazy than you are to do it to them. By blinding yourself with that false image, you're totally missing whatever is motivating them to do whatever is driving you crazy ... which means you can't fix it ... and in the end, you've got a broken relationship and a therapy bill; you lose.

It's easy to spot who's never served in the military in comments like that. They're the ones who start the name-calling and peen-waving at any mention of any tactic other than unrestrained slaughter. They're the ones who think wars are about killing, not about winning. - Worldwalker

On the outgoing commander, U.S. Forces Afghanistan/ISAF

   For the record, General McChrystal offered his resignation from his post today, he was not "fired."  I'm trying to imagine how he feels right now: hopefully at peace, and hopefully justified.

   General Petraeus, the CENTCOM commander with the Roman god-warrior name might encounter tight reins, I don't know. When he testified before Congress in 2008, he didn't seem to have any shortage of angry congressmen and media outlets breathing down his neck.  More, and more catch-22s will be revealed after the turnover, mark my words.

   I really wonder how much analysis the White House did of the actual Rolling Stone article, which purportedly is incompatible with anything the administration has ever heard about the military. Other than following the herd, I would love to see some more airing of grievances.  Part of what perpetuates this mess is that probably fewer than 1% of the people opining on the article or the debate - have actually read the damned article!

• Oh, and it is a magazine primarily for counter-culturists.  Serious news?  I do concede it was a very well-written article.  And if it creates pangs of disappointment of Obama for his core of voters (the hip sophists, maaaaaaaan), this poses a problem for the politics of control. 
• OH, and where is the part where Gen. McChrystal criticized the White House?  The only thing I infer from the article is that the staff behaves like men fighting a war.  These men have their hands tied behind their backs due to restrictive ROE, and counter-insurgency, when it succeeds, takes a long time. 
• And what is the end-state?  The questions Obama asked two years ago as Senator actually seem to make sense (Washington Post), and I don't get the feeling that he was overcritical of Gen. Petraeus at the time despite contrary assertions; everything made sense with the exception of his outrageous statement that he felt that Iraq was a "massive strategic blunder."  That there leaves me asking who the hell is the home team?
• What priority does Afghanistan hold?  We need a new key speech - but it has to be meaningful: something that will last longer than 5 minutes in the news cycle.
• Did the squirrelly little aides with chips on their shoulder queue up and relish using their slings and arrows on our General?
• What would be expected by allowing a Rolling Stone journalist this kind of access, and how seriously should criticisms be taken?  Well, I'll pre-empt us both and stab at an answer:  It probably worries our chiefs to a great degree, in a political environment that feels a need to formulate its own media messages.
• I have a friend, a Marine, who tells me Obama came away smelling like a rose today.  So what do you expect the prevailing sentiment "over there" would be?  (I can only speculate.) As my favorite Marine author says, "When you try to be their friend, you've already lost."  So the staff wasn't trying to make friends.  Blame them? 
• Two more quotes: "One thing worse than confidence in their weapons is lack of confidence in their leaders."  This applies to everyone, so bear in mind the historical difficulty with running counterinsurgencies.  Malaya (The Brits say that one was a success), The French in Algeria, the U.S. in Vietnam. 
• How do you promote unpopular policy?  As the Rolling Stone article reveals, the general had the thankless job of trying to provide the rationale for this kind of protracted war, and the restrictive operating environment.  By reading how the general set up his command center (a huge "open briefing"), joining in field operations (extremely rare, in fact unheard of), and by seeing that he didn't sugar-coat, the casual reader should get the sense that this man cared about what he did and he did it well.  "A lot of Marines from the 'old school' disdain telling their troops the 'why' of an order by saying they have no right to know why. That's hogwash! If that youngster is going to willingly go die by your order, he damned surely has a right to know why. Get into the habit with the little things."  - Gene Duncan, USMC (Ret.)   The general did his best to explain the "why" and never went around saying, "Those guys in Washington surely are messed up."

   The "Runaway General" article appears almost a relief valve for ground truth.  Read the article!!!  And if you fancy more reading, read this article I alluded to earlier (The Examiner - Rush Limbaugh comments).  I'm left of his comments, but the ROE problem sticks out. 

   As Newsweek tells us yesterday, "What's essential is a public atmosphere of mutual respect between the civilian and military leaderships. Generals demand that political leaders respect their professional expertise. In return, it's expected that generals understand the multiple pressures weighing on their civilian leaders, and respect—even if they don't agree with—whatever compromises these pressures dictate. The system can cope with almost anything, so long as both sides understand the role and responsibilities of the other." 

   It's true this is the foundation of the relationship between civilians and the military (the missing dynamic is national will).  I remember a senior lieutenant-grade DoS civilian taking early leave from his post in-country as a sign of protest when the new administration left a very pregnant pause before beginning to reveal its mission objectives for the Afghan coalition.  Does the allegedly neutered new National Security Strategy offer insight how we get there?  And, is this Rolling Stone article a protest of the administration, or its strategy, or either?  I think it's reality.  If I were president, I might eke out a WTF, but c'mon.

   I did think it was hilarious that the article implied McChrystal cringed upon receiving an e-mail from the head State Dept. rep for Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke. "Try not to get any of that on your leg," a staff member joked to the journalist. Noteworthy is the paragraph on small DoS resources vs. immense DoD resources,  I can only imagine the friction between the entities. I don't have a fix on the civilians, but I feel that you don't find much decisive leadership in their ranks gaggle.

   Gen. McChrystal is a balls-out leader of warriors and the event of his early departure is a shame, unless new blood truly effects the conceptualization and execution of game-changing strategy.  Whether pragmatist, idealist, there is a long road ahead.  

Nice Dream

Nice Dream (Link)

I had a really great dream during a nap today.

Dreams so often blur the lines between sleep and reality.  That is, to say, they seem so real at the time.  They are real, as far as we know.

I've been thinking a bit lately about this man-hater, this slug named Kagan, who through no fault of her own, was awarded a spot as U.S. Solicitor General despite 31 senators voting negatively.  I know that positions awarded like this one tend to be political in nature, but what if someone truly objective (remember the blindfold on the lady justice came along?  Would both sides of the aisle come to an agreement in these modern United States?

Now, she's up for U.S. Supreme Court justice, which will be rammed through given the liberal balance of power in U.S. government, despite doubts on her morality; despite her lack of experience; despite her preposterous banning of military recruiting and ROTC at Harvard while working there.  A likely constitutional revisionist and relativist who can sit there and tinker around for a nice, loooooong time. 

I would refuse to go to Harvard, given the opportunity. Come to think of it, I'm glad we don't recruit there. The military has no room for those who lack humility and honor, the silver-spooned and vain.

In my nice dream, I had gone with my friend Rusty to a big Harvard gala.  Just as the festivities let out, we stole our way up scores of stairs to the roof of the student union, atop a large hill.  Then, turning around, the view of the town of Cambridge was quite breathtaking.  The stairs were made of white limestone, like you'd see outside the SCROTUS (Supreme Court).

And then, we urinated all over the streets of Harvard from our bird's eye view.  Not a trickle, but thousands of gallons flooding the area until you had something briefly resembling the waterways of Sicily. 

"Teachable moments": Doublespeak for "Caution, P.C. pitfalls near"

I love how everything's a "teachable moment" after elitist Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. accused police Sgt. James Crowley of being a racist, and President Obama needlessly injected himself into the swirling fracas. Surely advised to diffuse the growing race crisis he himself had fomented, President Obama invited both to the now famous "Beer Summit," and called the grievous errors in judgement "a teachable moment." Journalist Katie Couric used the term in a different situation in an interview.

'Take that thing off your head'
by WorldNetDaily
"Maybe it's because her dad served in the U.S. Marines ... or because her high school mascot is a fierce-looking eagle ... or because she plans to enlist in the Army next summer after graduation to defend her country ... whatever the reason, when Heather Lawrence saw a Muslim student refuse to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and recite it with the class, the 16-year-old Junior ROTC member saw a teachable moment and took it. And for that, she's been suspended five days."
Read the latest now on WND.com.

"You have someone in the States who is able to enjoy our educational and health care systems, yet it's okay for them to be disrespectful, and it's not okay for my daughter to speak her mind," Mark Lawrence told the Tampa Tribune. "That's her First Amendment right. That's her freedom of speech."

A real teachable moment would be to urge people, including the disrespectful immigrant child in the story to start loving their country and not parading their defiance around like they're anything special.

Bombshell indictment of Donkey shenanigans appears in Salon.com

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down." - Camille Paglia

Excerpted from: http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2009/08/12/town_halls/index.html


Camille Paglia is the University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.


No need for me to boast in a period of national political turmoil, so please don't interpret this as such. However, there is a need to rally - being that events fall ever quickly from public consciousness in time for the next news story - and it is the shift in balance of what's making news today that deserves examination.

A haymaker of an article appeared in Salon.com this week (Wow, on Salon?), probably leaving many rat-out-your-parents ethics libs catatonic. This honest indictment by Camille Paglia is some of the finest writing I've seen: graceful, dot-connecting, cogent. Rarely will one of the left's own have the honesty to dare criticize her cronies. Some of the GOP ignore this painful lesson (prominent voices in the party admit they're in disarray and have long been in tatters), but Sen. McCain, the former presidential candidate obviously hadn't when he impaled himself with his own lance, courting the hispanic "open-the-floodgates" lobby, and shishkebabing the rest of the party with him.

So when honest, courageous voices like Paglia's surface, we need to listen well. Her courage invested with this is pallates taller than the shoebox I saw mustered by the GOP in producing a leader for the 2008 election. It's courage we've seen highly evident in these vitriolic town hall meetings capturing so much press (!) and I'm hopeful for Salon for producing an alternative viewpoint. I won't go as far as being "optimistic" though.

Americans, far too long feeling helpless to throw a wedge in the revolving door of legislators and MSM antics quickly forget what a house of cards is in their midst. How often can grassroots America stand by while their intelligence is insulted? From "flyover states" to "astro-turf," it's evident how far out of touch the liberal elite is with its constituency. A unique feature of Paglia's article is making us confront the cumulative nature of these looney goings-on in government. She not only talks the health-care reform debacle, she stacks up all the other remarkable stories which had quickly scuttled away, winds up, and sends them all reeling:

• Speaker of the house (3rd in line to the Presidency) "Representative" Nancy Pelosi calling private citizens "Nazis"

"House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down."

• - Not-so subtle caste warfare from the White House (Don't jump to dismissing the storied "beer summit" and criticism as racism)

"Of course, it didn't help matters that, just when he needed maximum momentum on healthcare, Obama made the terrible gaffe of declaring that, even without his knowing the full facts, Cambridge, Mass., police had acted "stupidly" in arresting a friend of his, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Obama's automatic identification with the pampered Harvard elite (wildly unpopular with most sensible people), as well as his insulting condescension toward an officer doing his often dangerous duty, did serious and perhaps irreparable damage to the president's standing. The strained, prissy beer summit in the White House garden afterward didn't help. Is that the Obama notion of hospitality? Another staff breakdown."

• Incomprehensible information warfare thrust initiated by former jour-nihilist, now comms-Chief-of-Staff backfiring: http://www.breitbart.tv/spokesman-calls-fox-news-host-flabbergasting-for-questioning-white-house-request-for-fishy-e-mail/ "Report fishy concerns about health-care to flag@whitehouse.gov"

"But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration's outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable "casual conversations" to the White House."



Paglia's article is a modern-day Crisis. Thomas Paine would be proud. Pulitzer, please.

Brace yourselves for commie freako impact...

You've caught me in a grim mood, genteel reader.

My inbox this weekend had the makings of a big anti-American wallop in the works, a harbinger of unabashed iconoclasm well in the open:

1. Hate crimes statutes, a.k.a. thought crimes, (call them what they REALLY are) are percolating again. This screams against reason. Every crime is committed with a degree of hatred toward law and order. Why should there be double jeopardy for something done with an evil or at least untoward end in the first place? This threat stifles free speech, and sets a nihilistic snowball in motion toward 'everything's relative', 'if it feels good, do it.' No problem there - but anything counter to opening the floodgates in the spirit of said 60s mantra, then you're intolerant, and must defend against a label rather than advance with reason. A popular tactic of the scions of community organizing.

2. Jesus missing from speech: Why did The White House request the symbol representing Jesus be covered at the President's speech at Georgetown last week? At least The Sermon on the Mount was mentioned in the President's speech. Crickets.

3. Gov't vs. USMC: Look at the so-called Haditha massacre. Your troops are becoming scapegoated for doing their jobs and will need to henceforward second guess all of their battlefield decisions based on the fear of being prosecuted. Not a good situation to be in. May have been a similar instance with the SWAT vs. the evil CA parolee two weeks ago (the parolee killed 4 officers). I'm told the police followed restrictive ROE which made them less able to act, because heaven knows everytime a thug is killed, it's the fault of vindictive policemen. Lt Col Chesani has been absolved at least twice for any wrongdoing. How is it in the govt's best interest to spend this much time and resources trying to convict one of their own, and a war-hero?

4. Targeting right-wing speech: This exceptionally stupid report was another politically motivated attack on conservatism (see earlier post, 'Fusion Centers'). Napolitano, a former governor of the state of Arizona, could have done more, much more to stem the flow of invaders from south of the border during her tenure, but acted contrary to the wishes of her constituency based on personal politics - unethical and absurd. Now she's DHS? Good job.

5. Breaking news: (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,517137,00.html)

Excerpt:
Miss North Carolina Kristen Dalton was crowned Miss USA on Sunday, but the big story to come out of the normally politics-free telecast was Miss California's comments regarding gay marriage. When asked by judge Perez Hilton, an openly gay gossip blogger, whether she believed in gay marriage, Miss California, Carrie Prejean, said "We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite. And you know what, I think in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that's how I was raised." Keith Lewis, who runs the Miss California competition, tells FOXNews.com that he was "saddened" by Prejean's statement.

[End.]

So she was asked a loaded question by a pervert, responded in kind with her beliefs, and will probably be targeted by '1' and '4' above. I tell you what, friends: It's a race to the bottom. Any reasonable person should be outraged at the swirling cloud of anti-reason looming in. So brace yourselves. At least Miss U.S.A.'s standing up for normalcy, and maybe bought one more week for those of us that would like to speak out in public for the American way.

It's a student council election - who cares?

Remember high school when the cliques squared off for student council candidacy? It was a popularity contest. Now, as adults, we get the essentially the same thing. A face guy and a lousy figurehead. Why can't third parties gain any traction here? If only we could get a candidate that stood for normalcy, I'd be all over that.

CHANGE: Example of my weekend accomplishments

Cagey JG - changing America one question at a time.

Dear Gatorade:

I am sad to report that Gatorade is NOT in me.

I've fiercely scoured every 7-11, etc., in Virginia Beach and I can't find Fierce Melon anywhere.

Please airdrop a crate of Fierce Melon to my home and feature me in your next commercial.

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To whom it may concern:

What is the comic significance of "Bluto" Blutarsky's "COLLEGE" t-shirt? I intuitively find it funny, but can't articulate why.

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Glad I'm getting so much done this weekend! Working for you, accomplishing REAL CHANGE.