This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Society

  • George Bush made you fat

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    The Washington Post tries to lay out the case today that you’re fat, but it’s not your fault – it’s that damn George Bush in a front page article “Inertia at the Top“;

    The problem at first was that the problem was ignored: For almost two decades, young people in the United States got fatter and fatter — ate more, sat more — and nobody seemed to notice. Not parents or schools, not medical groups or the government.

    But since the alarm was finally sounded in the late 1990s, the problem has been the country’s reaction: a fragmented, inchoate response that critics say has suffered particularly from inadequate direction and dollars at the federal level.

    “The sense of this as a national health priority just doesn’t come through,” said Jeffrey P. Koplan of Emory University, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and chairman of the Institute of Medicine’s 2004 study of childhood obesity. The top recommendation of that seminal report was for the government to convene a high-level, interdepartmental task force to guide a coordinated response. No such body has been assembled.

    They accompany the article with pictures of a morbidly obese child who is ten years old and looks to be about 200 pounds and her approximately 300 pound mother. You know she’s all George Bush’s fault since he’s been the President for most of her life. And the Post does it’s best to lay her at GWB’s feet;

    “The sense of this as a national health priority just doesn’t come through,” said Jeffrey P. Koplan of Emory University, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and chairman of the Institute of Medicine’s 2004 study of childhood obesity. The top recommendation of that seminal report was for the government to convene a high-level, interdepartmental task force to guide a coordinated response. No such body has been assembled.

    Contrast that with the offensive mounted in European countries:

    See, George Bush (and probably Dick Cheney, too) purposely ignored this important report released in 2004 and they aren’t caring enough to replicate the intrusive behavior of the European countries who arrest and fine their citizens for having opinions and drawing cartoons.

    Then the Post writes a paragraph that argues with itself;

    There’s no question that the U.S. epidemic won’t be reversed by federal fiat alone; responsibility lies also with individuals, the health community, corporations, local governments and others. Still, health experts insist that strong leadership from the top is crucial. They see the Bush administration falling short of expectations and few real champions in Congress.

    The Federal government can’t do it alone – but they’d better copy those intrusive European governments and do it alone. There’s a hundred more critical things I could say about the article, but I’ll leave the rest to my readers.

    I’m just glad there’s someone to blame for the 20 pounds I’ve put on from concentrating on this blog the last six months.

  • Meyerson’s McCain’s America

    This morning Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post tries to blunt Republican campaigns impaending against Obama by penning “McCain’s America” a very weak piece that regurgitates all of the Code Pink talking points and contains little substance – and begins and ends with his personal rendition of Gilbert and Sullivan, that somehow proves a point that went right over my head. What two 19th century English songwriters have to do with 21st Century American politics, I’ll never understand. but I suppose meyerson wasn’t talking to me anyway;

     In more recent elections, Republicans have depicted Democratic presidential candidates as un-American cultural elitists heading up a dangerously diverse party.

    This year, we can expect to see almost nothing but these kinds of assaults as the campaign progresses. The Republican attack against Obama all but ignores the issue differences between the candidates to go after what is presumably his inadequately American identity. He is, writes one leading conservative columnist, “out of touch with everyday America.” His reluctance to wear a flag pin, writes another, shows that he “has declared himself superior to an almost universal form of popular patriotism.”

    There are good reasons Republicans are focusing on identity rather than issues this year: In poll after poll, there’s not a single major issue on which the public agrees with them or their presumptive nominee. Not Iraq, certainly. Not the economy. Should the election turn on the question of “What are you going to do for America?” rather than “Are you a real American?” Republicans are doomed. They offer no solutions for the stagnation (or decline) of American living standards, or for the weakening of America’s economic power. They offer no resolution to America’s war of choice in Iraq. Their party leader, the incumbent president, let a great American city drown.

    No, Hal, a good reason that Republicans should focus on “identity politics” is because that’s all Obama has to run on. It’s the basis of his entire campaign – like recent Democrat candidates, he feels he deserves the presidency, so he’s just hoping we vote for him because he cuts a dapper image on the stage. Other than some vacuous platitudes, what else does he have? Hillary’s wins in recent non-urban areas reflects Obama’s vulnerability among real Americans who want real answers to real questions. You know – the voters.

  • The “Equal Misery” solution

    Last week, the House of Representatives passed legislation designed to bail out homeowners who irresponsibly bought more house than they can afford. The bill, in essence, lets government agencies take over bad loans if the lender agrees to take less than the full amount of the loan in payment.

    Of course, the President has vowed to veto the bill and John McCain has said he’ll vote against it. According to the Wall Street Journal, the public is sharply divided;

    A Gallup Poll in late March found that 56% of Americans favor government intervention to prevent people from losing their homes because they can’t pay their mortgages, while 42% oppose it. The partisan divide was sharp: 58% of Republicans opposed intervention; 71% of Democrats and 55% of independents supported the idea.

    Republicans in Congress, of course, generally oppose the bill;

    The line was drawn sharply in last week’s House debate. Rep. Tom Feeney (R., Fla.) said less than 1% of homeowners would get help while the rest “will pay the price of this bill.”

    Rep Feeney said, “This bill is a bailout — from American taxpayers — of speculators and imprudent borrowers.” Among the winners, he said, are lenders who would otherwise lose the entire value of a loan and people who put no money down to get a home.

    Not only that, but how long will it take government to structure the actual regulations, accept application? How long from today will the first loan be taken over by any government agency? Look how long it took Congress to simply send out tax rebates by direct deposit – nearly five months. This is a bit more complicated.

    But the Democrats think this is real solution for real people. After all, it has the most important element for Democrat social bailouts – equal misery;

    Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.), who wrote the legislation, and other Democratic lawmakers insisted the bill nicks both sides. Said Rep. Jim Marshall (D., Ga.), “The deals that the borrowers get are not particularly good. The deals that the lenders get are not particularly good…. In my view, it’s a bailout for the entire economy and all of these people that have been dragged into it.”

    Borrows don’t win…check, lenders don’t win…check, the taxpayers don’t win…check – perfect! That’s what makes good socialist legislation – the equal application of misery to every problem. When everyone loses, they lose equally. That’s what the Left means when they mention equality.

    The Wall Street Journal took an indepth look at the bill and decided that CBO low balled Barney Frank’s numbers on the real cost of the legislation;

    Looking at the details in Mr. Frank’s 45-page first draft of this bill, FIS Applied Analytics estimated that taxpayer losses could reach as high as $27 billion, more than four times Mr. Frank’s estimate. The next draft, clocking in at 72 pages when it passed Mr. Frank’s committee, was miraculously scored by the Congressional Budget Office at “only” a $2.7 billion cost to taxpayers.

    According to the WSJ, CBO scored the cost lower because few lenders might not want to join in the love-fest because they might not want to only get back 85% of their loan. But Frank knows the figures are low and that it will cost taxpayers even more because the threatened lenders during the debate over the legislature;

    “I want to put the servicers on notice,” the celebrated liberal declared at a recent hearing. “If we see a widespread refusal on the part of servicers to cooperate voluntarily in what we see as an important economic problem . . . they can expect much tougher regulation in the future.”

    Stalin couldn’t have said it better.

  • Happy Mothers Day

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    Here’s gift for all of those Mothers out there, especially all of the Mothers in my life.

    It’s not my fault if any of the chocolates are missing.

    Here’s the history of Mothers’ Day from Fox News

    The McCain Mothers’ Day ad with his mother;

    [youtube T2XTDHltNVU nolink]

  • Dem Party line; whites are too racist to vote Obama

    Hillary made the comment the other day that Obama can’t carry the working white vote according to this Associated Press report;

    In an interview with USA TODAY published Thursday, Clinton noted that the coalition of voters that supported her in the Democratic nominating contest had eluded Obama and would pose problems for him in the general election.

    Senator Obama’s support among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening again. . . . There’s a pattern here,” Clinton was quoted as saying.

    So that has generated a discussion that only allows Democrats because Republicans aren’t allowed to discuss race. Paul Begala, whose head most closely resembles an egg than anyone else in politics and Hillary supporter, told Donna Brazile and CNN (as reported in Salon);

    We cannot win with egg heads and African-Americans. OK, that is the Dukakis Coalition, which carried ten states and gave us four years of the first George Bush. President Clinton — reached across to get a whole lot of Republicans and Independents to come.

    The India Daily completely missed the point and called Hillary a racist because supposedly what she really meant was that brown people are lazy;

    The non-whites not only include blacks but also Asians and others. She implied that white blue collar workers are hard working and other races are not.

    How’s it feel to be treated like a Republican, Hillary?

    The upshot is that there’s an inherent racism among working whites that would prevent them from accepting a black president. In today’s Washington Post, Alan Abramowitz puts words to the thoughts Obama supporters have delusioned themselves with since last year;

    Obama continues to have particular difficulty with one segment of the Democratic electorate: white working-class voters. In the most recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, for example, white Democrats with a college degree preferred Obama to Clinton, 59 to 37 percent. But white Democrats without a college degree preferred Clinton to Obama by a 55 to 36 percent margin.

    To some extent, Obama’s problems here stem from Clinton’s special appeal to one segment of this group, white working-class women. And Democratic candidates have been having problems with lunch-bucket whites for a long time. (Just ask John Kerry.) But there is another reason — one that many discuss delicately — why Obama is having difficulty with white working-class voters: race.

    Racial attitudes have changed dramatically in the United States over the past several decades, of course, and overtly racist beliefs are much less prevalent among white Americans of all classes today. But a more subtle form of prejudice, which social scientists sometimes call symbolic racism, is still out there — especially among working-class whites.

    The reason we won’t vote for Obama is because we’re racist. It’s not because we don’t know anything about him, or that he won’t answer questions, or the questions that he has answered scare the beejezus out of us, or his juvenile views on foreign policy – it’s because we’re not educated enough to vote for a black man.

    When I was in college, back in 1994, I was having an informal discussion with a PoliSci professor about Hillary Clinton. I told him that there’s no way I’d ever vote for Hillary. Before I could get another word out, a buttinsky female student asked me, in a very indignant tone “Why? Because she’s a woman?” I replied that I wouldn’t vote for her because she’s a socialist, but that didn’t convince the youngster, it was my underlying misogyny that kept me from being Hillaryista.

    It’s that same identity politics that has insinuated itself into the November elections. The only racism that will have any influence in the elections is that racist influence that will drive 90% of Blacks to pull the lever for Obama merely because he’s Black and the guilt-ridden politics of the rich white class who can’t bring themselves to vote against a black man despite his lack of experience or qualifications to be a leader.

    The same racism that put Ray Nagin in office after his lethal failures after Katrina. The same racism that returned Marion Berry to office after his stint in prison. The same racism that has perpetuated the culture of poverty and dependence in our inner cities for the last thirty years.

  • 3 kids suspended for ignoring school policy

    Reader Wayne sends me this from his hometown paper the Star Tribune;

    Three small-town eighth-graders were suspended for not standing at the start of the school day Thursday for the Pledge of Allegiance.

    “My son wasn’t being defiant against America,” said Kim Dahl, mother of one of the students, Brandt, who attends Dilworth-Glyndon-Felton Junior High School in western Minnesota. She said her son offered no reason for sitting.

    Brandt told the Fargo Forum that Thursday’s one-day in-school suspension, “was kind of dumb because I didn’t do anything wrong. It should be the people’s choice.”

    Well, if it was about the Pledge of Allegiance, I might agree (the Supreme Court agrees with me – it’s unconstitutional to require students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in school), but it’s more about following school policy;

    The district today is defending the punishments. The school’s handbook says all students are required to stand but are not obligated to recite the pledge. The same is true for all four schools in the district, a school official said.

    We can skip over all of the typical patriotic excuses for reciting the pledge and go straight to the fact that a rule was broken and a punishment dealt. Junior High kids don’t get to decide which rules they will and will not obey and standing up is not all that difficult. But what’s worse than a kid who thinks he can decide which rules he’ll follow? A parent who thinks their kids are adult enough to decide.

    In this case, I applaud the school for taking a stand for good order and discipline – a real rarity in this day and age.

  • IVAW goes to the people

    Back on March 15th, the Iraq Veterans Against the War partnered with their philosophical brethren, the Veterans For Peace and the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and with the support of the labor unions tried to repeat their performance of the 1971 VVAW’s Winter Soldier. Their goal was to turn back the clock to the 1970s and reestablish the myth that the American soldier (Marine, sailor, airman) is a pathological, unfeeling killer and encouraged by the government to murder innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan indiscriminately.

    Despite the huge presence of media types (about 30 different media entities by my estimate), including Al Jeezera and other traditionally anti-US journalists, the image of the American fighting men and women that IVAW was trying to portray just didn’t make it to the public.

    It could’ve been because their stories were being fact-checked as they testified and were therefore watered down, or that this time they were being protested against outside their own event. Or it could be that the stories were weak – one commenter on my own blog called the testimony “a wet firecracker”. Whatever the reason, it was a propaganda failure, utterly and completely.

    Not only did they fail in this endeavor, but because they’d asked other peace organizations to suspend their activities marking the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, those other peace organizations couldn’t assemble more than a thousand people in DC for their own protest later in the week. The whole peace movement suffered because of the IVAW’s inability to deliver on their promise of the final blow against the Bush Administration.

    So the IVAW has taken their show on the road around the media directly to college campuses and high schools around the nation. This afternoon, Adam Kokesh spoke in Oakland, CA at the Federal Building, at Marin College and at local high schools. Two more spoke at Perdue University earlier in the week. They’re insinuating themselves into every issue on local TV programs. They’re “counter-recruiting” with Texas students.

    Back in March, Evan Knappenberger, the lunatic who threatened to “blow up” Gathering of Eagles events and issued a “fatwa” on the life of Michelle Malkin, talked to high school students about his experiences in the war. Can you imagine this sociopath talking to your own children?

    Two IVAW members even held an art show in Vermont depicting images of the war as they’d like us to think as what they saw in the war. As if there was a shortage of cameras to bring back actual images.

    VFP and IVAW are still in the game, too;

    Sandy Kelson, VFP, who organized two weeks of outreach at Ft. Stewart Army base, which is home to roughly 19,000 soldiers, of which approximately 15,000 are currently deployed, talked about direct outreach at the base. In February, 2008, he and others, stood at a traffic light right before the entrance and distributed 500 copies of “Sir, No Sir!”, the Dave Zieger film about GI resistance during Vietnam, and 385 copies of “The Ground Truth”, a film documenting resistance by the military against the war in Iraq, as well as 1300 packets of leaflets, including VFP and IVAW applications, Appeal for Redress, GI Rights pocket cards, and other materials. Sometime after they did this outreach they discovered that the PX and other locations on the base were discussing the materials that they had delivered.

    Thus Spake Ortner at The Sniper discovered the IVAW’s intention to testify in front of a Congressional committee next week to counter General Petreaus’ testimony last month – from veterans who haven’t been in the theater since General Petreaus took command. As it stands right now, both TSO and I intend to team up again and attend these festivities like we did at Winter Soldier to bring you the unvarnished truth.

    I guess the point of all this is that the battle for the minds of the people against this insidious campaign to pervert the truth and turn Americans against our returning soldiers, is not over and it may have just begun. We’ve scored some significant victories in the last 14 months, but the battle continues.

    Crossposted at Eagles Up! Talon

  • We’re not sure how you hicks will vote

    Reader Jason passes on this link from Newsbusters;

    On the syndicated, “The Chris Matthews Show,” Kim Genardo, a political reporter for NBC Raleigh, North Carolina affilate WNCN, predicted that “smart, educated” North Carolina primary voters wouldn’t be swayed by Jeremiah Wright but was unsure how “conservative, white, rural voters” would vote as she admitted she’s not, “in touch with them.”

    You damn right you ain’t in touch with them, you cow. That’s how the Left has controlled the vote for years – calling conservative people stupid and making the brainless sheep feel like they’re smart for following the herd. It’s how the good Reverend Wright soaked his congregation, it’s how Bill Clinton stayed in office for eight years. It’s how the “smart, educated” Democrats ended up with two candidates who can’t summon enough common sense to answer truthfully – or even the same way twice.

    It’s how the Democrats ended up with two candidates neither of whom they can justify voting against because of purely superficial reasons.

    It reminds me of the piece that Aunt Agatha at Bloodthirsty Liberal wrote yesterday about the professor who decided she’d sue her students because “My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful,” she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. “They’d argue with your ideas.” This caused “subversiveness.” (as quoted in the Wall Street Journal).

    I’m glad I’m not smart if that’s what smart is.