Will not be voting for Barack Obama. In his recent speech he states:

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened.

How dare Barack suggest that welfare might have had a deleterious effect on poor minorities. Does he not understand the importance the state plays in redistributing the wealth to those that, through no fault of their own, are poor?

taking full responsibility for own lives - by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Does Barack understand that the poor are indigent not because of a lack of responsibility but because of circumstance way beyond their control? Poor people are not only the hardest working, but they are also make the wisest financial choices. Despite this, circumstances way beyond their control put them in a state of poverty from which they can not recover. It has absolutely nothing to do with personal responsibility.

If Barack keeps up this kind of rhetoric I might just vote for him. Of course my vote comes at the cost of the liberals who, to stay consistent in argumentation, must reject this kind of rhetoric. I’m not sure if Barack comes out with more votes if he adopts a rhetorical theme of people taking care of themselves instead of having the state do it for them.

Apparently Charlie Rose didn’t get the message.

Seriously though this guy is hard core.

Im totally aware that this post makes no sense. Click on the link to gain clarity.

Delicious Snacks Distract Congressmen From Horrors Of War

Christopher Hitchens, an actual liberal, writes about why the Iraq war was a good thing.

This is all overshadowed by the unarguable hash that was made of the intervention itself. But I would nonetheless maintain that this incompetence doesn’t condemn the enterprise wholesale. A much-wanted war criminal was put on public trial. The Kurdish and Shiite majority was rescued from the ever-present threat of a renewed genocide. A huge, hideous military and party apparatus, directed at internal repression and external aggression was (perhaps overhastily) dismantled. The largest wetlands in the region, habitat of the historic Marsh Arabs, have been largely recuperated. Huge fresh oilfields have been found, including in formerly oil free Sunni provinces, and some important initial investment in them made. Elections have been held, and the outline of a federal system has been proposed as the only alternative to a) a sectarian despotism and b) a sectarian partition and fragmentation. Not unimportantly, a battlefield defeat has been inflicted on al-Qaida and its surrogates, who (not without some Baathist collaboration) had hoped to constitute the successor regime in a failed state and an imploded society. Further afield, a perfectly defensible case can be made that the Syrian Baathists would not have evacuated Lebanon, nor would the Qaddafi gang have turned over Libya’s (much higher than anticipated) stock of WMD if not for the ripple effect of the removal of the region’s keystone dictatorship.

…

The past years have seen us both shamed and threatened by the implications of the Berkeleyan attitude, from Burma to Rwanda to Darfur. Had we decided to attempt the right thing in those cases (you will notice that I say “attempt” rather than “do,” which cannot be known in advance), we could as glibly have been accused of embarking on “a war of choice.” But the thing to remember about Iraq is that all or most choice had already been forfeited. We were already deeply involved in the life-and-death struggle of that country, and March 2003 happens to mark the only time that we ever decided to intervene, after a protracted and open public debate, on the right side and for the right reasons. This must, and still does, count for something.

Based on the content of this asinine post, it would be reasonable to conclude that Dan writes under the pesudo name Tim Dowling.

Czechoslovakia, 1975: Despite widespread discontent with the oppressive Husak regime, a 1974 study finds active support for the government in 15% of the population, identified as pensioners, party bureaucrats, careerists, “parasites”, extremist ideologues and persons involved in the Stalinist repression who fear that liberalisation might force them to account for their crimes.

US, 2008: George Bush’s approval ratings generally hover around 30%, although one recent poll put it as low as 19%.

Czechoslovakia, 1975: Free healthcare available to all citizens.

US, 2008: 47 million Americans (16% of the population) have no health insurance. Another 16 million are “underinsured”.

Czechoslovakia, 1975: Despite an increased standard of living and the widespread availability of material goods, consumerism is failing to placate a population fed up with draconian political controls.

US, 2008: Despite a rise in the cost of living, consumerism continues to placate a population largely oblivious to the curtailment of its freedoms.

Czechoslovakia, 1975: Growth of “net material product” is at an annual average of 5.7%, exceeding the target rate of 5.1% set out in the fifth Five-Year Plan. Full employment.

US, 2008: Energy Information Administration this week predicted negative growth in the two forthcoming financial quarters, the official definition of recession. 101,000 private-sector jobs were lost in February alone.

Czechoslovakia, 1975: The granting of visas to foreigners is “arbitrary”, with denials justified under the “defence of national security”, according to dissidents.

US, 2008: The American government uses the Patriot Act to bar entry to foreign visitors on the basis of ideology, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Czechoslovakia, 1975: Torture, though not officially sanctioned, has become a covert tool of state policy.

US, 2008: Torture officially sanctioned.

You must check out this animation. Its that good.

Coming out of the dungeon that is my office I was blasted by sun, blue skies, and seventy-five degree weather. You better believe I was hit by one of these babies.

John Coleman, founder of Weather Channel states:

“Since we can’t get a debate, I thought perhaps if we had a legal challenge and went into a court of law, where it was our scientists and their scientists, and all the legal proceedings with the discovery and all their documents from both sides and scientific testimony from both sides, we could finally get a good solid debate on the issue,” Coleman said. “I’m confident that the advocates of ‘no significant effect from carbon dioxide’ would win the case.”

I could probably support this idea provided the presiding court is not the 9th circuit court of appeals. If this is the court then I already know the rulling.

This piece does a fine job of capturing my sentiment towards the news media’s current attitude toward covering the Iraq war.

Guitar Heroes chronicles the bravery of a group of American soldiers, Kiowa helicopter pilots that often engage terrorist cells at near rooftop level, at ranges so close that pilots engage the insurgents below them with rifles instead of rockets. You won’t read many stories such as these in the New York Times or USA Today. More than willing to publish one story after another alleging how our military and our soldiers are being broken, these national media outlets seem loath to print the stories of heroism and success being written by American and Iraqi patriots.

These same media organizations devoted thousands of column inches to an anti-war radical in August of 2005 for the simple act of sitting on a ditchbank in Crawford, Texas to protest the war. The coverage these news organizations afforded Cindy Sheehan has rarely been afforded supporters of the war, even those that have a far more informed firsthand opinion that most anti-war activists lack.

Cindy Sheenhan get hours and hours and columns and columns of coverage but the positive things about the war scarcely sees the front page. History will look very poorly on the way news organization covered this war. Very poorly.