New Lenox outranks all Tea Party Express rallies thus far
10,000, organizers said. Joliet Herald-News (Sun-Times-owned) said about 5,000:
About 5,000 rally against high taxes, big government as tea party express stops in New Lenox
says London’s Daily Mail.
Dunno, wasn’t there with my people-counter. But lots and lots of people.
Creepy collectivism in these lines from the classroom speech?
If you quit on school, you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country….
Don’t ever give up on yourself, because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.
The story of America [is] about people…who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best….
What will a President who comes here in 20 or 50 or 100 years say about what all of you did for this country?…
Someone like him, he means, making it explicit:
I expect great things from each of you. So don’t let us down. Don’t let your family down or your country down.
I? Us? Then family and country. Wow. “Creepy” is right, “the president as national dad.” Straight from the shoulder of the Maximum Leader.
Or as Dr. Helen asks, “Who Cares What Presidents Think?”
Rather than this “What can you do for your country?” stuff, she refers to Milton Friedman:
The paternalistic “what your country can do for you” implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man’s belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny.
The organismic, ‘what you can do for your country’ implies that government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary. To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them.
He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors, and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served.
Can you imagine getting elected representative of the 7th Illinois district on such a platform? Telling people about their glorious personal responsibility? After 70–plus years of creeping creepy collectivism?
Spokesman Robert Gibbs about objectors to Oh-bama addressing school children:
“It’s a sad state of affairs that many in this country politically would rather start an ‘Animal House’ food fight rather than inspire kids to stay in school, to work hard, to engage parents to stay involved and to ensure that the millions of teachers that are making great sacrifices continue to be the best in the world.”
It’s in The Hill’s Blog Briefing Room, where it picked up 420 comments as of 10:30 Monday night, the first of which, by “tropicgirl,” is quite good:
This would never have happened if people did not dislike the president so much. There are many reasons for that, and Glibbs [sic] needs to take responsibility for some of that dislike he has helped create, because of his sour attitude, along with the inexperienced, off-timing and condescending reputation those around the president have helped create. [Italics added]
Yes, these are flip wise guys, from Rahm E. on down. Remember when gravitas was an issue?
The second commenter qualifies the first nicely, without shooting it down:
It’s not a matter of “liking” it’s a matter of “trusting.” I voted for him, regret it. The bottom line, “We – most of the American People” now, do not trust him.
If not most, then an awful lot. He’s a jerk.
How we doin’? Depends whom you ask. Here’s a graph worth studying:
(Oops, not all of it prints, including note that says maroon dots are actual unemployment data, everything in blue was created by Obama’s economic team.)
It’s from Innocent Bystanders by way of Power Line, which notes that Biden says the stimulus is working better than expected, then adds:
Biden’s dissociation from reality is nearly complete, but one wonders: aren’t there any journalists who are capable of looking up the administration’s predictions and asking Biden fact-based questions? Or is that considered too much work?
Yes. Too much.
Biden also plays the morality card:
“I believe this was the right thing to do morally,” Biden said in a speech the White House billed as a major address. “It was also the smart thing to do economically.”
I wouldn’t say it that way. I’d say it’s the right thing because it’s the smart thing, understood “we’d be derelict in our duty” if we didn’t do it.
But if it’s not working, it’s not smart, and therefore not right. He’s better off leaving morality out of it. It’s the last refuge of political scoundrels.
But what if “[t]he unemployment rate went up to 9.7% [in August], reversing the improvement we saw in July,” as Innocent B. says, citing Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting?
And what if jobs are down too, as here?
Sign of government activity that is neither smart nor moral.
Oh-bama is not welcome in schoolrooms in lots of places. In the Detroit area,
Districts throughout the suburbs have been hit with complaints from parents who are worried about their children hearing a message from Obama that they won’t have a chance to preview.
I wouldn’t want him talking to my kids or grandchildren. Don’t trust him.
The districts acknowledge that the message is intended to stress the importance of education and taking responsibility for learning. Some parents say the uproar is much ado about nothing.
Nope. Nothing he and Axelrod do is about nothing. Typical Democrats, always campaigning. Stay away from kids.
Mike Reno, a member of the Rochester [MI] Board of Education, said the idea behind the message is noble, but the timing is bad because of the politically charged climate.
It will always be bad, because always politically charged. Dems keep it that way.
[Rory] Cooper [of Heritage Foundation] criticized Obama for pushing his message through both the official White House Web site and Organizing for America’s BarackObama.com.
“Barack Obama needs to quit the perpetual campaign … he needs to choose which one he’s going to communicate with the American public through,” Cooper said.
But crisis mode suits them. They dare not waste crises, because those are the golden harvest times for statist schemes.
For instance, health care legislation will (a) save money and (b) provide care for all. Sure. Increase services at lower cost. No. The cost of snake oil is what should worry us. It’s going higher and higher, always does when Dems are in charge.
Later: I see Ann Coulter has an idea about that talking to school children, related to one of Oh-bama’s splendid czar choices.
Obama admin putting screws to Honduras:
The most recent example of the Obama-style Good Neighbor Policy was the announcement last week that visa services for Hondurans are suspended indefinitely, and that some $135 million in bilateral aid might be cut.
But these are only the public examples of its hardball tactics. Much nastier stuff is going on behind the scenes, practiced by a presidency that once promised the American people greater transparency and a less interventionist foreign policy.
And Hillary’s State Dept. (I think it’s hers) is contributing:
Prominent Hondurans, including leading members of the business community, complain that a State Department official has been pressuring them to push the interim government to accept the return of Mr. Zelaya to power.
When I asked the State Department whether it was employing such dirty tricks a spokeswoman would only say the U.S. has been “encouraging all members of civil society to support the San Jose ‘accord'”—which calls for Mr. Zelaya to be restored to power. Perhaps something was lost in the translation but threats to use U.S. power against a small, poor nation hardly qualify as encouragement,
says Anastasia O’Grady in Wall Street Journal.
It’s sickening. A U.S. ally, a democracy, is following its constitution — the ousted Zelaya has no case — and in the process erecting a barrier to Chavez of Venezuela. And we’re giving them grief?
Harry Reid shook hands with the ad director for the Review-Journal of Las Vegas, Bob Brown, before a Chamber of Commerce luncheon last week as part of “a meet-‘n’-greet and a photo.”
[A]s Bob shook hands with our senior U.S. senator in what should have been nothing but a gracious business setting, Reid said: “I hope you go out of business.”
Whoa. What a time to wish that on anyone. He’s our head Senate Democrat, isn’t he? Has risen to the top, you might say. Yuck.
The irreplaceable David Horowitz on why Nixon White House operative Brian Lamb did not succeed in his mission to liberalize PBS, that is, make it live up to the law that created it, to be “fair, objective and balanced”:
[L]iberals are closet totalitarians who can’t stand to have a conservative in the room.
(Notice “liberal” used twice with seemingly opposite meanings. Trouble is, the term has been hijacked.)
Horowitz, the red-diaper baby who came in out of the cold world of the left and knows where the mind-set skeletons are, cites media and academe:
There is not a single leftwing channel, network or institution — to call them liberal is an offense to language — whether it is MSNBC, CNN, or PBS, Air America, NPR, or Harvard that is capable of fairness or intellectual diversity or has the slightest interest in promoting it.
Among the “hardly any” leftwing intellectuals who support “the practice of intellectual diversity” he (generously) names three — Alan Dershowitz, Stanley Fish and Gerald Graff.
As for the rest of them:
Contemporary liberals are socialists and their instincts are totalitarian — which is expressed in their causes like single payer health care, and their sabotage of the war against Islamic fascists.
Bring that down to the everyday level and putting it in homely terms, they are fussbudgets who know what is right for you and will make you do it,.
Danny Davis was a no-show this morning at 2nd Baptist, Maywood. His office in DC had told Organizing for America (OFA), the Obama campaign agency turned policy muscle, he’d be there for a town hall. Not only was that wrong, or turned out wrong, but his office had the address wrong — 36 S. 13th Ave., vs. 436, the correct address.
This misinformation — fishy, I’d call it — sent Yours Truly on a self-conducted auto tour of Maywood, a mostly black ‘burb a few miles west of Oak Park. This was interesting — I saw a man in his back yard where he had corn growing — but not what I planned.
Two residents were as helpful as they knew how to be when I stopped and asked. One said to try Melrose Park (to the north); so I took 13th Ave. north — finding 2nd Baptist, in fact, where a cop was in the street directing people away from that location, explaining that inaccurate emails had been sent out.
I verified this with several OFA stalwarts who were as disappointed as I was, in uniform tee shirts and beautiful signs made with help of the OFA site — www.barackobama.com or if you sign on, mybarackobama.com. Chatting with them, I suggested that Republicans had sent out the false messages, which they enjoyed.
One asked me to sign a statement of support for Obamacare. I said I had some issues. She asked me what. I said the cost. She offered this solution: measure the cost by the year and not the decade, and it’s not so scary. She also opined that the money saved would balance out the cost. I said I’d have to think about it.
But wait. The costs we hear about are to the federal government, that is us as taxpayers. It’s new expenditures. So that balancing-out idea won’t work for me. I will have to go with her annual-cost suggestion and forget the ten-year business. That way, I won’t feel so bad. We parted friends, that much I know.
The Chicago and (separately) Illinois situations have a D.C. counterpart:
Mayor Adrian Fenty on Thursday dodged more questions about the education of his sons, growing visibly angry as reporters pressed on how his twin boys gained entry into one of D.C.’s top-performing public schools.
The Obamas didn’t have to stoop that low, choosing to go private, as we know.
Blithe Spirit 