Month: August 2012

Bringing up Barack Jr.

More on the 2016: Obama’s America movie, about his upbringing. Red diaper baby indeed:

In 2008, I was initially disturbed by Obama’s bizarre hero worship of his absentee Kenyan father which sometimes bordered upon pagan idolatry. During the same 2008 campaign, by virtue of reading British newspaper articles, I was aware of the fact that Obama’s father was less of an outstanding academic and renowned economist and more of a violent alcoholic and bigamist. He was also a Marxist who believed that a tax rate of one hundred percent could be justifiable.

Equally as chilling are the backgrounds of Obama’s leftist mother and his maternal grandparents. Obama is truly a “Red Diaper Baby.” Scarier still is association with Frank Marshall Davis, a card carrying member of the Communist Party, selected by Obama’s grandparents to serve as Obama’s mentor and surrogate father figure.

This is another part of the d’Souza film that hits hard.

Teachers: Ask us, don’t measure us; money is secondary

Chi Teachers president Karen Lewis and other teacher unionists in yesterday’s Sun-Times, “Cash upfront the way to get teachers to rack up better student test scores, study finds”:

* Karen L: Economists don’t understand us. 

(Teachers are different from you and me: they don’t care about money.  But they are like you and me: they prefer not to be held to account, would rather have a sure thing.  Hence their aversion to being measured.)

* Chicago Heights teacher, one of 150 studied by U. of Chi economists and discovered to be motivated by early bonus payout which they have to pay back if scores are not up to snuff: We were snookered (by U of Chi economists, who didn’t say they were economists — point mildly contested by experimenters’ spokesperson.)  It was a bad test.

How so?  Teacher: We thought they were education professors.  Ed profs would have asked us what works.  (But Econ profs study them, not what they say.)  They don’t understand us.  (We’re different.)

* Karen L: “Nothing is better [for a teacher] than seeing the light bulb turn on” in student head.  (Not even higher pay?  Then why fight City Hall on contract money?)

Concealed-carry shooter saves cop

Kills the bad guy after warning. Read all about it nationally. No? No.:

Only local station WAFB reported this incident. FBI Supplemental Homicide Reports show that private citizens killed police attackers only three times annually since 2000. Yet an unusual and compelling story of self-defense by a concealed carry licensee gets mentioned only by local media. Media blackouts allow anti-rights propagandists to continue claiming that self-defense incidents are rare, so banning concealed carry wouldn’t be an imposition.

Thing is, if it’s not reported, it didn’t happen.

(H/T: Instapundit)

2016: Obama’s America, not for the liberal faint of heart

Dedicated libs should not be allowed to see “2016: Obama’s America,” now showing in Chi area; it would be a health risk for them, because of its blasphemous nature as they would see it, regarding their hero Obama. Others? See it, soon.

Dinesh d’Souza has put together a film that offers a fresh framework for viewing Obama — anticolonialism. A key interview is with a Kenyan writer and activist who tells d’Souza about Barack Sr.’s anticolonial feelings and convictions. Israel is “a Trojan horse” for The West in the Middle East, for instance. And Barack Jr.? He and his late father, of “Dreams” fame, are as one in their thinking. Barack Jr. is an anticolonialist in his father’s mold.

Which after an hour or so of building his framework, d’Souza illustrates, telling us what to expect in 2016 if Obama is re-elected: sharply diminished role for the U.S. in the world scene because of unilateral nuclear disarmament and because of its crippling debt, which has ballooned already and will reach five times its current level by then.

It’s an effective campaign film here. The Yorktown AMC theater audience sat quiet as mice throughout — allowing for some candy-wrapper crinkling by a young person to my right. The crowd at this 11:50 showing pretty much filled the tiered “stadium seating.” Yesterday, Sunday.  Above link gives all Chi-area showings, including AMC Showplace Galewood, just off Central north of North Ave. a few minutes drive from Oak Park.

So stay away, committed Obama-supporters; it will be too painful. But flock to it, ye Obama-objectors and -suspectors and -neutralists in the matter. Eyeful and earful awaits ye.

NY Times in-house critic gets it just right

As NY Times public editor calls it a tenure (2 years of subjecting NYT stuff to his close scrutiny from within), he comes up with a very good short description of what happens when you put a bunch of contemporary libs together and give them a newspaper to run:

“When The Times covers a national presidential campaign, I have found that the lead editors and reporters are disciplined about enforcing fairness and balance, and usually succeed in doing so,” Brisbane writes in his final column. “Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.”

It’s the air they breathe.  They are hopeless.  Time to break up the Times.

Whose kind of Terror Town is Chicago?

Eight shot last night in Terror Town, in Chicago’s once-white-posh South Shore neighborhood, of 19 shot in nine hours.  Coming up in tomorrow’s Sun-Times, a story about GUNS. 

Of course.  Mediums love stories about guns.  Allows them to be righteous about bad guys who supply them.  But what about shooters? 

They profile victims all the time, wringing hands about innocent people or kids who never had a chance, etc.  But do they profile shooters?  Why not?  Do him, his family, his neighborhood, IN DEPTH, as they say, or in shallow, early and often.

Blaming usual suspects if they must — gun suppliers, bad schools, right-wingers who lack sympathy, etc. — but while they are at it, the culture of dependency, the role of welfare in rewarding the father-free and in making fathers superfluous, the constant blame-whitey chatter from “Rev.” Sharpton and his ilk.

I ask too much and get carried away.  I have in mind a consulting of William Julius Wilson and his ilk, and a polling of pastors in the ‘hood.  I remember one I talked to decades ago after his long, long service, who told me of the pressure politicians put on him to gain his pulpit.  Someone candid but not blowing his horn.

A story featuring the pastors, and not just the ones who stage and lead marches, but ones the reporter — Chi Trib’s “Seeker” will do, or one of Sun-Times’s shoe-leather wearers-out, door-knockers, telephone-callers — finds by asking around, starting with denominational execs at to who’s who and trying at all times to separate wheat from chaff among them.

Can be done.  Beats the usual guns story, which I’m betting will quote Fr. Pfleger.  If the next guns story doesn’t quote him, I will eat my delete key.

 

 

 

Why not to call the president a communist

The provocative Cliff Kincaid wonders why “self-styled conservative media personalities feel it necessary to protect the President”:

“With more than four years of research into Davis, and more revelations coming, the burden of proof is on Barack Obama to prove that his communist connections, which continued from his growing-up years in Hawaii to college to Chicago, were the result of innocence or naïveté.
 
That will be hard for him to do, since he concealed the identity of Davis in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, calling him just “Frank” and depicting him as a poet and writer.
 
He knew that Frank Marshall Davis was an associate and mentor and that he had to protect his communist identity from public scrutiny.”

It’s the audience, stupid.  Everyone has one, and everyone limits himself to what’s acceptable to it.  The wider the audience, the more severe the limitation.

Or, as I just tweeted, the author Paul Kengor is given huge audiences — by Hannity and O’Reilly — and Cliff Kincaid complains.

Economy, economy, economy

Well well well, two U. of Colorado fellows say Romney wins handily in November.  Smart guys!

Using a state-by-state analysis of unemployment and per-capita income, academics Kenneth Bickers and Michael Berry of the University of Colorado project that Romney will win 52.9% of the popular vote and 320 electoral votes. The political scientists discuss their findings here.

Their forecast suggests that President Obama will lose in almost all of the swing states, including North Carolina, Virginia, New Hampshire, Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida…

But the polls?

Bickers said much of the polling thus far means relatively little, with much of the electorate still not focused on the race. [He and Berry] said their model focuses on the preeminent issue of the economy. Applied retrospectively, the model [picks] the correct winner in every presidential contest going back to 1980, they said.

NBC’s Chuck-You Todd (R. Limbaugh’s name for him) says the economy’s being underplayed — not by media but by the candidates.  To which Laura Ingraham: What about the major media “obsessing” over the Mo. senatorial candidate and his “legitimate rape”:

Todd: Well, this is a chicken and egg conversation. This is a distraction. I don’t think it’s a distraction you can quote, blame on the media . . .   It’s not media bias, . . . it’s what they’re covering, and the fact is we are under-covering the economy, . . .  but you cover the campaign that is in front of you.

They cover what’s there.  It’s the game they play.  Lemmings don’t go off on their own.  It never enters their minds.  That’s our major media.  It’s their nature.

2016: Obama’s America is in town

This big anti-Obama movie, 2016: Obama’s America, is in the Chi area beginning tomorrow, 8/24. 

Oak Parkers and other west suburbanites and West Siders, it’s at Yorktown Mall. 

Rated PG (!) and starring Obama himself, it “completely surprised” one fan reviewer, who had “thought it would be an emotional exhortation to get out the vote against Obama” but instead was “a factual, unemotional documentary of Obama’s life and cultural influences.”

One might come away from feeling “somewhat empathetic to Obama’s goals and dreams,” even as it presents “objective truths of Obama’s anti-colonialist influences learned first hand from his father and mentors who were card-carrying communists, Weather Underground radicals, and the like.”

The trailer is here.