Wed 1 Sep 2010 03:22
Bust of Michael King (Martin Luther King Jr.) has been added to the Oval Office, but there’s no place for Winston Churchill
Story Here
Image by R. Martin
Sun 29 Aug 2010 05:42
By Karen E. Crummy
The Denver Post
While Mayor John Hickenlooper was trying to put on a “world-class convention” for Democrats in 2008, a charity he helped establish was giving money to a left-wing group determined to disrupt the event at every turn.
Re-create 68 was just one of many groups that have received donations from the Chinook Fund over the years. The fund, which now donates to groups it says are considered “too new, too risky or too radical” for more traditional foundations, was established by Hickenlooper and others in 1987.
Over the next 15 years, Hickenlooper’s initial $2,000 donation turned into tens of thousands he gave to the fund, which supported everything from Colorado ACORN to the Gender Identity Center of Colorado and Denver Cop Watch.
“I don’t want to politicize this. Once you disclose one thing, you have to disclose everything,” he said Friday, adding that his donations are “private.”
The fund’s 2008 and 2009 annual reports do not list Hickenlooper as a donor. They do cite “several anonymous donors.” Earlier annual reports do not include a contributor list.
The Chinook Fund’s founding purpose was to “foster and encourage progressive social change,” according to its articles of incorporation. That mission is essentially the same today, although more specific, stating its commitment to “social justice and freedom from oppression, including but not limited to: racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, ageism, and ableism.”
Its website notes that the group has transformed in the past few years to focus more on institutional racism. Community activists help determine what groups receive funding.
Grants exceed $2 million
The group has donated more than $2 million in the past 20 years to causes that assist the homeless; mentally ill; low-income women; immigrants; gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender individuals; African-Americans; Latinos; American Indians; and Muslim American youth.
In 2007, it gave $4,000 to Re-create 68 in advance of the Democratic National Convention.
Some groups that have received Chinook grants are considered more controversial than others. For instance:
• The Harm Reduction Action Center, which educates, empowers and advocates for the health and dignity of metro Denver’s injection-drug users and affected partners.
• Transform Columbus Day Alliance, formed to support the Colorado American Indian Movement “in its efforts to transform the racist ‘celebration’ of Columbus.”
• Somos America, an immigrant-rights group that has called on Latinos to boycott Budweiser products because its distributor, Hensley Beverage Co., contributed to state lawmakers who voted for the Arizona immigration law.
• Colorado Transgender Rights Legal Defense & Education Project, which protects, defends and extends the civil rights of transgender and gender-variant people in Colorado through litigation, education and advocacy.
• Save Our Section 8 (SOS 8), a coalition of tenants pressing for subsidized housing and the creation of new low-income housing initiatives.
• Rights for All People, an immigrant-rights group that opposes the federal “Secure Communities” program, in which states and federal authorities cooperate to identify illegal immigrants booked in jail.
Doesn’t agree with all
Hickenlooper said he doesn’t agree with all the recipients of all of Chinook’s grants but doesn’t “disavow” the group either.
“I support the principle of giving some small amount of power to small organizations and letting them succeed or fail on what they think is best for the community,” he said.
Hickenlooper would not divulge what grants he agreed with and which ones he opposed. In 2003, however, he said he was “horrified” by some of the positions of Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace, a pro-Palestinian group that received funding from Chinook.
In a typical gubernatorial race, the secrecy surrounding Hickenlooper’s charitable donations, and the liberal bent of the Chinook Fund, could be “problematic” for the candidate, said independent political analyst Eric Sondermann.
“But in this environment, he has more latitude to create his own ground rules and live by those ground rules,” he said. “Not that that precludes an opponent from making an issue out of it.”
Hickenlooper is running against Republican Dan Maes and American Constitution Party candidate Tom Tancredo. Both have so far refused to turn over any part of their tax returns to The Denver Post.
Sat 28 Aug 2010 11:39
Behind the anger over the Arizona immigration mess, the Ground Zero mosque, the economy, and the new directions in foreign policy are some recurring general themes that reverberate in each particular new controversy. In sum, they explain everything from the tea parties to the wholly negative perception of Congress to the slide in presidential popularity.
1. Two sets of rules. The public senses there are two standards in America — one for elite overseers, quite another for the supposedly not-to-be-trusted public. The anger over this hypocrisy surfaces over matters from the trivial to the profound. Sometimes the pique arises because the spread-the-wealth, we-all-have-skin-in-shared-sacrifice presidential sermons don’t apply to those who do the preaching, as in the president’s serial polo-shirted golf excursions or Michelle’s movable feast from Marbella to Martha’s Vineyard.
More profoundly, an Al Gore, a Timothy Geithner, a John Kerry, a John Edwards, a Charles Rangel — the luminaries who call for bigger government, higher taxes, and more green coercion — now appear to the public as disingenuous, living lives in abject contradiction to the utopian bromides they would apply to others. So too with the media. The opinion makers at a failing New York Times, Newsweek, or CBS lost readers and viewers not just because of changing technologies, but because of incessant editorializing in which the educated and affluent, the winners in our system, berated the less educated and less well off, the strugglers in our system, as bigoted or selfish or both.
How, for example, can Americans be asked to pay higher power bills in a recession to subsidize wind power, when the green Kennedy clan worries about windmills marring its vacation-spot view?
2. The bigot card. In reductionist terms, the public now accepts that when particular groups fail to win a 51 percent majority on a particular issue, they resort to invoking racism and prejudice — odd, when candidate Obama promised a new climate of unity and tolerance. Moreover, that disturbing trend has something to do with the president himself, who has injected racial grievance into everything from the Skip Gates controversy to the debate over the Arizona immigration law.
When the open-borders interests, or the gay-marriage advocates, or the adherents of the Ground Zero mosque cannot convince a majority of Americans that their agenda bodes well for the country, they almost instinctively fall back on the charge that America is xenophobic, homophobic, or Islamophobic. Yet the public infers that these charges reflect sour grapes rather than honest analysis: Had Arizona legislators or California voters supported the progressive agenda, then, as with the 2008 Obama victory, they would have been praised in Newsweek and on NPR for their moral sense and compassion. In short, the bigot card has played itself out and is now not much more than a political ploy to win an argument through calumny when logic and persuasion have failed.
3. The law? What law? Americans accept that they cannot pass legislation in violation of the Constitution. But they do not believe that a single judge can nullify the electoral will of millions without good cause. Thus in Arizona and California, there is a sense that judges who favor open borders or gay marriage are willing to use the pretense of constitutional issues to enact such agendas despite their current unpopularity. In a general landscape in which contractual obligations are nullified, as in the Chrysler bailout, and punitive fines are imposed quite arbitrarily, as in the BP cleanup, many believe the Obama administration applies the law in terms of perceived social utility. What is deemed best for the country by an elite few is what the law must be molded and changed to advance.
If there are, for example, not sufficient votes in the Congress to pass amnesty through legislative means, why not bypass federal law through a cabinet officer’s executive fiat?
4. The futility of taxes. We talk of returning to the Clinton income-tax schedules. Yet in the late 1990s, those hikes ended up, along with the Republican cuts in mandates, balancing the budget — without new health-care surcharges, or talk of a VAT, or caps lifted off income subject to Social Security taxes. Not now. The public recognizes that the advocates of higher taxes are not willing to make the sort of across-the-board spending cuts that once succeeded in balancing the budget. In other words, those who will start paying much more of their income to the government in the form of taxes fret that, unlike the 1990s, this time the additional federal revenue won’t balance the budget, and will be all for naught.
Worse still are two corollaries. First, we are in a ceaseless spiral in which each new tax increase will lead to justifications for more spending and thus to still higher taxes. Public employees, fairly or not, have morphed in the public mind from civil servants to pigs at the salary and pension trough, and from disinterested government workers to members of a liberal social movement that will perpetuate a federal agenda of race, class, and gender politics and higher taxes through payback bloc voting at the polls.
Second, there is a growing suspicion that this administration believes in a “gorge the beast” philosophy, the antithesis of Reagan’s “starve the beast.” In other words, redistribution may be a desired end in and of itself. If greater spending demands higher taxes, perhaps that is socially preferable, since income is an arbitrary construct predicated on some sort of social injustice. In turn, the remedy demands that the federal government impose an equality of result to correct the inequities of the cavalier free market that so unfairly pays some too much and others too little.
In short, are our taxes not merely paying for federal expenditures, but also quite justifiably serving to confiscate income that we did not rightfully earn?
5. Disingenuousness. There is also a growing belief that the Obama administration is advancing an agenda that it cannot be fully candid about, because that agenda does not command broad support. As a result, we are habitually asked to believe that what administration appointees or supporters say is not what they really mean, or at least was taken out of context.
Justice Sotomayor did not really mean that wise Latinas make better judges than white males. Van Jones did not really mean that George W. Bush was in on 9/11, or that white youths are more likely to be mass murderers, or that whites are chronic polluters of the ghetto. Eric Holder no more meant that Americans are cowards than one of Anita Dunn’s heroes really is the mass-murdering Mao. We should not believe that the top priority of the head of NASA is to advance Islamic outreach, or that the president himself thinks that police routinely act stupidly, stereotype, or arrest innocent people on their way to get their kids some ice cream. Imam Rauf did not really say that we created bin Laden, or that we kill more innocent Muslims than al-Qaeda kills innocent non-Muslims.
All this dissimulation started with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose mistake was not saying the outrageous things he said — Mr. Obama and the compliant media had contextualized his corpus of hate well enough — but finally insulting the media at the National Press Club. The former was seen as a misdemeanor; the latter proved a felony.
Do Obama supporters, then, reveal their true beliefs only in gaffes and unguarded moments, while filling their official statements and communiqués with pretense?
6. A culpable America? Finally, the public has added up the apology tours, the bowing, and the constant emphasis on race, class, and gender crimes, and concluded that this administration sees America, past and present, as the story of a culpable majority denying noble minorities their rights — period.
In addition, Obama and his crew see America in isolation, without comparison to the wretchedness that exists in so much of the world outside our borders. So a logical disconnect is never quite explained. If America is so xenophobic and culpable, why would millions of Mexicans or Middle Eastern Muslims wish to immigrate here — and what exactly is America doing to attract them that their own countries are not? If Michelle Obama felt that she could not be proud of America before Barack Obama’s accession, was it the free-market system that both provoked her ire and created the capital for her to jet to Marbella?
In other words, with the race/class/gender critique of the Obamians comes very little appreciation of the bounty, freedom, and affluence that they so eagerly embrace. Surely someone in the past — perhaps even white males — must have been doing something right for America to evolve into a place that our present-day critics apparently enjoy.
How will all this play out?
There are many millions of Americans who have a rising stake either in receiving reallocated federal money or in administering its distribution. For nearly half a century, the public schools have been telling millions of children that America’s preeminence is ill-gotten, based largely on exploitation of less fortunate others, here and abroad. So the country is divided, and a president claiming to be the great healer of our age is proving to be the most divisive chief executive since Richard Nixon — and, in the view of an increasing majority of Americans, by his own intent.
Fri 27 Aug 2010 23:48
CARACAS, Venezuela—A Venezuelan politician is holding an unusual raffle to raise campaign cash. The grand prize: breast implants. For a little under $6 a ticket, donors get the chance to win the pricey operation free of charge.
Breast enlargement is widely popular in image-conscious Venezuela. In recent years as many as 30,000 women have had the operation annually, according to the nation’s Plastic Surgery Society.
Gustavo Rojas, who is running as an alternate for the National Assembly in Sept. 26 elections, said there is a great demand for the surgery.
The prize for his fund-raising effort may be a little unusual, Rojas conceded Friday, but he said it’s like raffling off a TV set or a telephone.
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One of these things is not like the other…
Flat Screen T.V.
Slim-line Telephone
Breast Implants
Fri 27 Aug 2010 06:14
Obama’s close comrade Bill Ayers
WASHINGTON — They are beginning to die out, or at least to retire. So long, suckers. Surely the Clintons, Senator Jean-François Kerry, Al-Gore, and dozens of others who presented themselves as reasonable alternatives to the radicals of the 1960s thought they were suckers. I thought about all of them this week as problems mounted for Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks thief.
Late in June death took Dwight Armstrong, the anti-Vietnam War protester who blew up a building at the University of Wisconsin, killing an innocent graduate student, Robert Fassnacht. I have always wondered about Fassnacht. He supposedly was opposed to the Vietnam war too. I wondered what his life would be like if he had not been in the building at the time the bomb went off. Armstrong and his accomplices were eventually caught. None had much promise, but there was a tremendous legitimacy to them at first, at least in comparison to those of us who favored the war.
Armstrong was sentenced to concurrent seven-year terms in prison and was paroled in 1980. On a less idealistic note he was later apprehended for running a methamphetamine lab in Indiana and sentenced to ten years in prison. He lived his last years driving a cab and caring for his mother. “My life,” he told Madison’s Capital Times,”has not been something to write home about.” Well, maybe at the end the light began to dawn.
Then there was Fritz Teufel, who turned room temperature on July 6. He began his career less spectacularly. Auspicating it as a “fun guerrilla,” the German equivalent of Abbie Hoffman (a suicide) and Jerry Rubin (death by jaywalking) demonstrated against the shah of Iran and planned to ambush Hubert H. Humphrey with cake-mix “bombs.” His politics were one part Maoism and an equal part psychoanalysis. He claimed to resent his parents’ softness toward Nazism. It led him to softness toward Mao. In time he moved to Munich and joined a radical commune, eventually enlisting in the Red Army Faction, which carried out assassinations, bombings, and kidnappings. He spent a couple of years in prison in the 1970. In 1975 he spent another stretch in prison. He devoted his last years giving interviews to journalists nostalgic for the 1960s and 1970s, but first his guests had to play him in table tennis.
Now we are told that Bill Ayers is going to retire from the University of Illinois’ Chicago campus. Ayers was a co-founder of the radical — today we would say terrorist — Weather Underground, which in the late 1960s and early 1970s engaged in quite a lot of political activism that involved bombs, but also street demonstrations and other acts of violence. Ayers was involved in blowing up a statue dedicated to police casualties in the 1886 Haymarket Riot, twice. I take that personally, for my great grandfather was, for many years, the sole survivor of that riot. As a little boy I was chosen by the Chicago Police Department to place a wreath on the monument. Today, I have a splendid picture of the monument in my office.
Ayers went on to other bombings, for instance at the New York City Police Department, the United States Capitol, and the Pentagon. He recalled these acts and others in a spectacularly ill-time memoir, Fugitive Days, which came out on September 10, 2001. We all know what happened a day later. When the New York Times quoted him as saying “I don’t regret setting bombs” and “I feel we didn’t do enough,” he relied on his formidable gifts at obfuscation to argue that he was talking about peaceful ways to end the Vietnam War, though what they might have been is unclear. All we know is that he relied mostly on bombs, and several of his colleagues blew themselves up making them. Perhaps in retirement he will explain.
Which brings me to Assange. He published last month 76,000 documents classified by the U. S. military about the war in Afghanistan. The left views this act as hugely legitimate. Undoubtedly soldiers and other friends of democracy have been killed and will be killed because of it, but Assange promises more documents. Also, he says this talk of him molesting women is a dirty trick and he hints darkly at the Pentagon. Will Assange come out of it looking like a Dwight Armstrong or a Bill Ayers? Will he perhaps manage to appear reasonable and go into legitimate politics? It is too early to tell. All we know is that history works in mysterious ways. Some become footnotes, others presidential candidates.
Thu 26 Aug 2010 02:34
VINEYARD HAVEN, Mass. — President Barack Obama will address the nation from the Oval Office and also visit troops at Fort Bliss in Texas on Tuesday to mark the end of U.S. combat operations in Iraq.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs announced the dual commemoration in a statement and Twitter post on Wednesday.
The speech with mark only Obama’s second address from the Oval Office. He first spoke from the presidential office on June 15 to address the nation about the gulf oil spill.
Meanwhile, Fort Bliss is a symbolic military venue. The sprawling Army base in El Paso, Texas, has fielded numerous units to Iraq. Last week, some 600 soldiers from the 1st Brigade Combat team returned there in two groups after their latest tours.
Obama promised in 2009 to end the formal combat mission by Aug. 31, and earlier this week the White House said the number of U.S. troops staged in Iraq had fallen below 50,000.
Iraq is scheduled to assume security for its own territory after next Tuesday, with the U.S. falling into an advisory and backup role.
Wed 25 Aug 2010 17:24
And Calderon has the unmitigated gall to criticize how we treat Mexican illegal aliens in the U.S.
MEXICO CITY (AP) – A survivor has told police that 72 people found dead at a ranch near the Mexican border with Texas were migrants kidnapped by an armed group, a federal official said Wednesday.
The bodies of 58 men and 14 women were discovered Tuesday when Marines manning a checkpoint on a highway in the northern state of Tamaulipas were approached by a wounded man who said he had been attacked by gang gunmen at a nearby ranch.
A federal official said that man had identified himself an illegal migrant. The man said he and other migrants had been kidnapped by an armed group and taken to the ranch in San Fernando, a town about 100 miles south of Brownsville, Texas, according to the federal official, who had access to the investigation. He spoke on condition of anonymity because the was not authorized to speak publicly about the case.
The official said police believe the migrants were mostly from Central America.
It was unclear if all 72 were killed at the same time – or why. Another federal official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said investigators believe the victims were killed within recent days.
The newspaper Reforma, citing a police report, reported that that the migrants had refused to pay extortion fees demanded by the armed group. The federal officials could not immediately confirm that.
Investigators had not determined who was behind the massacre. But one of the federal officials noted that the area is controlled by the Zetas drug cartel, which has diversified into trafficking of migrants trying to reach the United States.
Drug gangs often demand payment from migrants trying to cross the border and sometimes kidnap them, holding them hostage while demanding money from relatives in the United States or their home countries.
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The Mail Foreign Service has more on this story
Don’t feel too bad for these lying thieving dead illegal aliens. Their lying thieving illegal alien family members in the U.S. will end up with a financial jackpot ( and U.S. citizenship) courtesy U.S. tax payer.
Wed 25 Aug 2010 10:14
By Doug Hagmann
Under the administration of Barack Hussein Obama, the United States submitted its first ever “Universal Periodic Review (UPR) report” to the United Nations. This is the first time in the history of the United Nations that the U.S. has submitted a report to the United Nation’s Human Rights Council, which is the first step in submitting the United States to international review by some of the most repressive and abusive nations in the world. The 29-page report can be read here.
The report is the product of about a dozen conferences held across the U.S. between January and April 2010. The participants of these conferences featured such luminaries as Stephen Rickard and Wendy Patten, from George Soros’ Open Society Institute; Devon Chaffee, Human Rights First; Andrea Prasow, Human Rights Watch; Imad Hamad (a suspected member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization), American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee; Dawud Walid, Council American Islamic Relations; Nabih Ayad, Michigan Civil Rights Commission; Ron Scott, Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality; Osama Siblani, Arab American News; Shannon Minter, National Center for Lesbian Rights and Cynthia Soohoo, Center for Reproductive Rights, among others.
According to its authors, the report to the United Nations “gives a partial snapshot of the current human rights situation in the United States, including some of the areas where problems persist in our society.” Obviously, one of the “problems” identified with the report is illegal immigration and Arizona’s own initiate to solve the problem through state legislation. SB 1070 has been a particularly thorny issue to the Obama administration, which has now been moved to an international venue and potential international oversight by the United Nations. The stakes for our national sovereignty have been just raised by the submission of this document, which is the first step of “voluntary compliance” to the provisions of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council.
It is no surprise that the report is dripping with the all too familiar “blame America first” rhetoric that has been the gold-standard of “citizen of the world” Barack Hussein Obama. The report promises that “President Obama remains firmly committed to fixing our broken immigration system…” and promises to work “with fellow members of the Human Rights Council.”
Taking counsel from the list of individuals and organizations, some who have openly called for the subjugation of our country to the United Nations and supported our enemies, while engaging in self-flagellation before an international body of dubious distinction… it’s the “gold-standard” of Barack Hussein Obama.
Wed 25 Aug 2010 01:25
Dear Gawd! What the fuck is she wearing now? What the fuck is that? Please. Make it stop.
WEST TISBURY, Mass. (AP) — The wind, rain and gloom that have curtailed most outdoor activities for the past three days have done little to keep President Barack Obama from enjoying his Martha’s Vineyard vacation.
While he’s been able to sneak in two rounds of golf, he told reporters Tuesday he’s “doing a lot of reading” at the farm compound he’s rented for the first family. “I’m having a great time,” he said.
The president made the remarks, his first in public since heading out on vacation last week, as he escorted first lady Michelle Obama from the State Road restaurant.
The couple dined out for the second consecutive night, this time with Washington power broker Vernon Jordan and his wife, Ann, as well as Chicago friends Eric and Cheryl Whitaker. White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett also joined the group.
Fellow diners cheered the president and clapped as he left the restaurant. Obama paused for pictures and signed autographs. While Mrs. Obama wore a colorful print dress with contrasting sleeves, he looked more subdued in khakis, a striped dress shirt and blue outdoor jacket.
A strong thunderstorms have lashed the island off Massachusetts since Sunday, causing power outages, curtailing air transportation and forcing ferry cancellations. It’s also triggered traffic jams and long lines at movie theaters, restaurants and other indoor venues.
The Obamas are scheduled to remain on vacation until Sunday, when the president heads to New Orleans to check on the gulf oil spill cleanup and to mark the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
Last Friday, Obama kicked off his vacation with what has proved to be a prescient decision: He stopped at a Vineyard Haven bookstore and picked up three books for himself: “Freedom” by Jonathan Franzen, “Tinkers” by Paul Harding and “A Few Corrections” by Brad Leithauser.
Tue 24 Aug 2010 18:06
Former GOP congressman and now third-party gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo has picked former Republican state Rep. Pat Miller to be his running mate.
“Her consistent conservativism has been known for 25 years and her views on fiscal policy and social policy are the same as my own,” said Tancredo, now an American Constitutional Party candidate.
Miller, 63, replaces Doug Campbell, the ACP’s original lieutenant governor nominee.
Miller was a Republican state representative from 1990 to 1992. She ran against U.S. Rep David Skaggs, a Boulder Democrat, twice.
She said that when Tancredo decided to run, she volunteered to do “anything and everything to help him get elected.”
“I wasn’t expecting him to call Thursday night about doing this, however,” said Miller, who has changed her party affiliation.
“I think we can start a firestorm in Colorado. We are a straight conservative ticket.”
Tancredo left the GOP to run as a third-party candidate when both Republicans Dan Maes and Scott McInnis were embroiled in ethical scandals. He faces Maes and Democrat John Hickenlooper in the general election.
