Category: philosophy & politics

Mrs. Obama’s Lucrative “Public Service”

The Corner on National Review Online
As she has many times in the past, Mrs. Obama complains about the lasting burden of student loans dating from her days at Princeton and Harvard Law School. She talks about people who end up taking years and years, until middle age, to pay off their debts. “The salaries don’t keep up with the cost of paying off the debt, so you’re in your 40s, still paying off your debt at a time when you have to save for your kids,” she says.

“Barack and I were in that position,” she continues. “The only reason we’re not in that position is that Barack wrote two best-selling books… It was like Jack and his magic beans. But up until a few years ago, we were struggling to figure out how we would save for our kids.” A former attorney with the white-shoe Chicago firm of Sidley & Austin, Obama explains that she and her husband made the choice to give up lucrative jobs in favor of community service.

What she doesn’t mention is that the helping industry has treated her pretty well. In 2006, the Chicago Tribune reported that Mrs. Obama’s compensation at the University of Chicago Hospital, where she is a vice president for community affairs, jumped from $121,910 in 2004, just before her husband was elected to the Senate, to $316,962 in 2005, just after he took office. And that does not count the money Mrs. Obama receives from serving on corporate boards. She would have been O.K. even without Jack’s magic beans.

Obama: is America ready for this dangerous leftwinger?

Obama: is America ready for this dangerous leftwinger? | Gerard Baker – Times Online

America is certainly moving left in the post-George Bush era. The long period of conservative ascendancy is clearly over, buried by a Republican Party of recent years that has preached intolerance and practised incompetence. That a new era in American politics is beginning is not in doubt. But are Americans really ready to leap all the way across in one go to embrace a European-style Left?

There is a caste of left-wing Americans who wish essentially and in all honesty that their country was much more like France. They wish it had much higher levels of taxation and government intervention, that it had much higher levels of welfare, that it did not have such a “militaristic” approach to foreign policy. Above all, that its national goals were dictated, not by the dreadful halfwits who inhabit godforsaken places like Kansas and Mississippi, but by the counsels of the United Nations. What this British Commentator cannot know is just how much of Obama’s rhetoric may just be aimed at his base to help win his Party’s Nomination.

Was Obama A “Red Diaper Baby”?

Political Affairs Magazine – Rethinking the History and Future of the Communist Party
This is an excerpt from a speech transcript in the Official Communist Party Magazine. It will be picked up by the blogs looking for the “red diaper baby” raised:  In Hawaii was an African-American poet and journalist by the name of Frank Marshall Davis, who was certainly in the orbit of the CP – if not a member – and who was born in Kansas and spent a good deal of his adult life in Chicago, before decamping to Honolulu in 1948 at the suggestion of his good friend Paul Robeson. Eventually, he befriended another family – a Euro-American family – that had migrated to Honolulu from Kansas and a young woman from this family eventually had a child with a young student from Kenya East Africa who goes by the name of Barack Obama, who retracing the steps of Davis eventually decamped to Chicago. In his best selling memoir ‘Dreams of my Father’, the author speaks warmly of an older black poet, he identifies simply as “Frank” as being a decisive influence in helping him to find his present identity as an African-American, a people who have been the least anticommunist and the most left-leaning of any constituency in this nation. The reasearch that dug this up came, from of all places, a Libertarian, Anti-Communist New Zealand Blogger The evidence here appears to have some scholarly credibility; as opposed to the earlier lies of his ihadist schooling in Indonesia, using the Koran to take the oath of office and refusal to say the Pledge of Allegiance.

The Rise Of The Independent Party

Lexington | A declaration on independents | Economist.com
ONE of the most interesting political videos on YouTube features a young Obama supporter, Derrick Ashong. A camera-wielding interviewer collars Mr Ashong in the street and starts to pepper him with questions. The interviewer assumes that his victim’s casual appearance—he is wearing a baseball hat, a shell necklace and is chewing gum—betokens an equally casual approach to politics. “Do you have any specifics?” he demands aggressively. “What are their policies?” Mr Ashong delivers a series of carefully argued replies that could form the basis of an editorial in a serious newspaper. The interviewer is increasingly abashed. But, having delivered his defence of Barack Obama, Mr Ashong concludes the interview by saying “I’m independent. I’m not a Democrat. I might vote for McCain.”

The Grand Old White Party Confronts Obama

The Grand Old White Party Confronts Obama – New York Times
The Token Conservative on the NY Times Editorial page continues the Obama Coronation Chorus arising from the Media. Whatever the potency of his political skills and message, Mr. Obama is also riding a demographic wave. The authors of the new book “Millennial Makeover,” Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais, point out that the so-called millennial generation (dating from 1982) is the largest in American history, boomers included, and that roughly 40 percent of it is African-American, Latino, Asian or racially mixed. One in five millennials has an immigrant parent. It’s this generation that is fueling the excitement and some of the record turnout of the Democratic primary campaign, and not just for Mr. Obama.

Even by the low standards of his party, Mr. McCain has underperformed at reaching millennials in the thriving culture where they live. His campaign’s effort to create a MySpace-like Web site flopped. His most-viewed appearances on YouTube are not viral videos extolling him or replaying his best speeches but are instead sendups of his most reckless foreign-policy improvisations — his threat to stay in Iraq for 100 years and his jokey warning (sung to the tune of the Beach Boys’ version of “Barbara Ann”) that he will bomb Iran. In the vast arena of the Internet he has been shrunk to Grumpy Old White Guy, the G.O.P. brand incarnate.

‘I don’t hate Muslims. I hate Islam,’ says Holland’s rising political star

‘I don’t hate Muslims. I hate Islam,’ says Holland’s rising political star | World news | The Observer
Get ready for a new furor from the Netherlands, where census figures show that Muslims will be the majority by 2015. How will the tolerant to-a-fault Dutch react? Geert Wilders has got nothing against Muslims. He just hates Islam. Or so he says. ‘Islam is not a religion, it’s an ideology,’ says Wilders, a lanky Roman Catholic right-winger, ‘the ideology of a retarded culture.’

Wilders has been immersing himself in the suras and verse of seventh-century Arabia. The outcome of his scholarship, a short film, has Holland in a panic. He is just putting the finishing touches to the 10-minute film, he says, and talking to four TV channels about screening it. The Dutch government is planning emergency evacuation of its nationals and diplomats from the Middle East should the Wilders film be shown. It is alarmed about the impact on Dutch business.

‘We already have more than 6,000 mosques in Europe, which are not only a place to worship but also a symbol of radicalisation, some financed by extreme groups in Saudi Arabia or Iran,’ argued Filip Dewinter, leader of Belgium’s Flemish separatist party, the Vlaams Belang, who organised the Antwerp get-together. ‘Its minarets are six floors high, higher than the floodlights of the Feyenoord soccer stadium,’ he said of a new mosque being built in Rotterdam. ‘These kinds of symbols have to stop.’ Horror! The secular temple, our Colosseum, where our gladiators entertain us, is being overshadowed by a rising barbaric religious invasion.

Continue reading “‘I don’t hate Muslims. I hate Islam,’ says Holland’s rising political star”

Would Obama Be Good for Business?

Is Obama Good for Business?
But Obama has also taken several steps that aren’t typical of his fellow liberal senators. He has stocked his Capitol Hill staff with employees whose résumés include McKinsey, the old Andersen Consulting, and other nonpartisan business advisory firms. He joined forces with conservatives on bills designed to improve ethics and transparency in Washington. He voted for a bill in 2005 that made life harder for trial lawyers—a traditional Democratic constituency—by allowing defendants to shift cases more easily to federal court, which can be less favorable to plaintiffs. And he pushed an outside-the-box proposal that would help Detroit automakers pay legacy health-care costs on the condition they reinvest the subsequent savings into hybrids and other fuel-efficient cars.

Some of the names that might fill in the org chart in an Obama Administration are also telling. Obama—whose own father was a Kenyan economist with a PhD from Harvard University—has cultivated a group of economic advisers. They’re generally careful technocrats, and are led by University of Chicago professor Austan Goolsbee. Among the others: Jeffrey Liebman and David Cutler of Harvard and Christina and David Romer of the University of California, Berkeley. Goolsbee has shown a preference for making economic initiatives easier to understand and use, an effort Obama calls “iPod government.”

Will the Real Obama Please Stand Up

Here we have the Left-wing citing a litany of links to prove that Obama is a right-winger.
Make Them Accountable / He ain’t a saint: A citizen’s guide to Barack Obama

And then we have the leading Right-wing magazine saying that “Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was the most liberal senator in 2007, according to National Journal‘s 27th annual vote ratings.”

As long as Obama can continue to succeed by just delivering his formidable inspirational message, he can be the “Big Tent”, which will continue to be filled with our hopes. As he said in his 2004 keynote speech at the Democratic Convention: “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America.”

Just like the business cycle, there is the political cycle. There was the Kennedy-era swing to the left and the Reagan counter-swing to the Right. Now with both houses and the presidency held by the Republicans the swing is going back the other way again. With the same party leading the House, Senate & Presidency, the Democrtas will over-reach, just like the Republicans just did, and there will be another counter-reformation. That is the rythmn of life, of change. You can make the analogy back to the counter-reformation against Martin Luther’s revolt from the Catholic Church (the dominant political party of the Middle ages). So if its the Democrats turn, I would gamble on Obama, an unknown, over Hillary, a known.

A school-mate, from a prominent Republican family who is working for Obama, says he is a quick-study and may surprise us. If the Democrats blow it, then the pendulum will swing back again to undo the damage.In the meantime it would really mess with the rest-of-the-world’s head and their preconceptions about the US to elect Obama, especially the Jihadists.

If Obama Doesn’t Win

Next Up for the Democrats: Civil War – New York Times
Frank Rich doesn’t think that the Clintons will go quietly. He says: Last month, two eminent African-American historians who have served in government, Mary Frances Berry (in the Carter and Clinton years) and Roger Wilkins (in the Johnson administration), wrote Howard Dean, the Democrats’ chairman, to warn him of the perils of that credentials fight. Last week, Mr. Dean became sufficiently alarmed to propose brokering an “arrangement” if a clear-cut victory by one candidate hasn’t rendered the issue moot by the spring. But does anyone seriously believe that Howard Dean can deter a Clinton combine so ruthless that it risked shredding three decades of mutual affection with black America to win a primary?

back_on_the_plantation.jpgA race-tinged brawl at the convention, some nine weeks before Election Day, will not be a Hallmark moment. As Mr. Wilkins reiterated to me last week, it will be a flashback to the Democratic civil war of 1968, a suicide for the party no matter which victor ends up holding the rancid spoils.

Education Divides Democrats

Questions for Dr. Retail – New York Times
The essential competition in many consumer sectors is between commodity providers and experience providers, the companies that just deliver product and the companies that deliver a sensation, too. There’s Safeway, and then there is Whole Foods. There’s the PC, and then there’s the Mac. There are Holiday Inns, and there are W Hotels. There’s Walgreens, and there’s The Body Shop. And as the post below points out there are Latte Liberals a nd Dunkin’ Donuts Democrats. If Obama loses the Nomination, the resulting backlash could put another Republican in the White House.

Hillary Clinton is a classic commodity provider. She caters to the less-educated, less-pretentious consumer. As Ron Brownstein of The National Journal pointed out on Wednesday, she won the non-college-educated voters by 22 points in California, 32 points in Massachusetts and 54 points in Arkansas. She offers voters no frills, just commodities: tax credits, federal subsidies and scholarships. She’s got good programs at good prices.

Barack Obama is an experience provider. He attracts the educated consumer. Continue reading “Education Divides Democrats”