Year: 2009

Reason TV: FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION IN THE AGE OF OBAMA

This comes via Reason TV, it’s about an hour video:

The Synopsis:

At Reason Goes Hollywood, our 40th anniversary bash held November 14-15, 2008 in Los Angeles, Reason.tv’s Nick Gillespie led a lively debate over freedom of expression, the First Amendment, intellectual property rights, and the history of obscenity law.

Participants included Michael Robertson, founder of MP3.com and a leading advocate for innovation in copyright laws; Martin Torgoff, author Can’t Find My Way Home, a history of drugs in popular culture and a writer for the VH-1 series The Drug Years and Sex: The Revolution; and Allan Gelbard, well-known First Amendment lawyer currently representing pornographer John Stagliano (who makes a cameo appearance!) in federal court.

Approximately one hour.

Go here for an audio podcast version.

Police State: Fresno Police Officers Beat Restrained Homeless Man

The Cops say that what is not seen on the tape is important. yeah, I bet. 🙄

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Video: Excuse Me, Mr. President

Looks like not all Liberals are enthralled with the New Liberal President….

This comes via After Downing Street:

To be clear, I don’t agree with him on Afghanistan. But on the Iraq War, I do, 100 percent. As for the Bush Administration, as much as I hate to say it;  Obama will not do what this man and the far left wants, he just cannot risk the political capital on a crimes tribunal.

But it does give voice to those who are of this mindset. Furthermore, if this is the growing consensus amongst the far left and also amongst independents, who did elect him, Obama will be a one term President. Of course, if this Economic Stimulus fails, Obama will be a one term President. Because the American people are not too happy about all this money being spent. Also, Congress will pay as well. Michelle Malkin is right , the Democrats always overreach and when they do, disaster happens. Then the tide turns and the other party gets in and the same cycle repeats. Been this way since the two party system started and will be this way, until a Switzerland style of Government is implemented here. Which will never happen, too many money bags controlling the strings.

(H/T Freedom’s Phoenix)

Video: The Obama Fraud

An Excellent Video…..

(Via Freedom’s Phoenix)

Camille Paglia says: Other than the Tax Cheats and Screwing up the Stimulus Package Obama is just fine!

Seriously.

Most mainstream American voters are undoubtedly suffering from economist fatigue these days. This one calls for tax cuts; that one condemns them. One says we’re wasting hundreds of billions of dollars; the other claims that sum falls pathetically short. A plague on all their houses! Surely common sense would dictate that when Congress is doling out fat dollops of taxpayers’ money, due time should be delegated for sober consideration and debate. The administration’s coercive rush toward instant action, accompanied by apocalyptic pronouncements of imminent catastrophe, has put its own credibility on the line.

But aside from the stimulus muddle, Obama has been off to a good start. True, I was disappointed with the infestation of the new appointments list by Clinton retreads and slippery tax-dodgers. Nevertheless, I was very impressed by Obama’s relaxed, natural authority with military officers on Inauguration Day, in contrast to the early Bill Clinton’s palpable unease and exaggerated posturing. I applauded the signal Obama sent to the world by starting the closure of the Guantánamo detention center. Contrary to the rote claims of conservative talk radio, there is as yet no public evidence that every individual being held at Guantánamo is a proven “terrorist”– whom we would all agree should be severely punished. That is the entire point of a rational process of indictment and trial. If Guantánamo became a symbol of un-American repression, it is the procrastinating, paralyzed Bush administration that should be blamed.

via Camille Paglia on Obama, stimulus plans, Nigella Lawson, Mary McCarthy and Justin Timberlake | Salon.

Wow. Just. Wow. She goes on to opine for the bringing back of the fairness doctrine and also fails (or refuses) to see why Progressive talk radio is failing. Could it be that America or as most of the Liberals see it, as “Amerikkka”; just does not buy into the whole idea of the far left Anti-Capitalist, Anti-American, communist-lite nonsense that is pumped on those stations?

Others:Althouse, A Blog For All and protein wisdom

Dumb and Dumber????

Not sure what is more stupid.

The Democrat 527 group that targeted the G.O.P. or the very stupid G.O.P response that is getting them in some seriously hot water right now.

So much for partisanship eh? 🙄

As for the coordination with the White House drama, Bush did the same stuff, he just used Fox News instead. 😀 😛

Either way, the big question is, who’s the bigger idiot of the two groups?

Good place for her!

I must say, I won’t be shedding a tear over this one, at all.

Dick Morris writes over at The Hill:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is finding that her job description is dissolving under her feet, leaving her with only a vestige of the power she must have thought she acquired when she signed on to be President Obama’s chief Cabinet officer.

Since her designation:

Vice President Biden has moved vigorously to stake out foreign policy as his turf. His visit to Afghanistan, right before the Inauguration, could not but send a signal to Hillary that he would conduct foreign policy in the new administration, leaving Hillary in the role of backup.

• Richard Holbrooke, the former Balkan negotiator and U.N. ambassador, has been named special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. He insisted on direct access to the president, a privilege he was denied during much of the Clinton years.

• Former Sen. George Mitchell (D-Maine), negotiator of the Irish Peace Accords, was appointed to be the administration’s point man on Arab-Israeli negotiations.

• Samantha Powers, Obama’s former campaign aide, who once called Hillary a “monster,” has been appointed to the National Security Council (NSC) as director of “multilateral affairs.”

• Gen. James L. Jones, Obama’s new national security adviser, has announced an expansion of the membership and role of the NSC. He pledges to eliminate “back channels” to the president and wants to grow the NSC’s role to accommodate the “dramatically different” challenges of the current world situation.

• Susan Rice, Obama’s new United Nations ambassador, insisted upon and got Cabinet rank for her portfolio, and she will presumably also have the same kind of access to Obama that she had as his chief foreign policy adviser during the campaign.

So where does all this leave Secretary of State Clinton?

While sympathy for Mrs. Clinton is outside the normal fare of these columns, one cannot help but feel that she is surrounded by people who are, at best, strangers and, at worst, enemies. The competition that has historically occupied secretaries of State and national security advisers seems poised to ratchet up to a new level in the current administration.

Hillary’s essential problem is that she is an outsider in the current mix. She was the adversary in the campaign, and Rice and Powers — at the very least — know it well, having helped to run the campaign that dethroned her. Can they — and she — be devoid of bitterness or at least of normal human trepidation? Not very likely.

Sorry to say it; but it’s a good place for the old bitch. Especially after the way she conducted herself during this campaign. The ol’ biddy acted like Barack Obama was supposed to just roll over and die; and she get the fucking office of President. Why? Because her husband got a head job from an intern? Please.  Some of us have not forgotten what happened at the Waco Seige, of which her Husband was a accessory to murder.

So, as far as I am concerned, the less damage that this woman causes, while she is serving as Obama’s Secretary of State, the better.

Others: Israel Matzav, Riehl World View and Cafe Talk Aggregator

Huckabee's Folly

This is one of those stories that forced me, to actually go back and make sure that I did not blog on it previously; and so I did and I can safely say, that I was not one of the people that fell for this story. (whew!)

Once again, Mike Huckabee is talking out his rather large anal orifice. According to a report in politico.com:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee warned supporters Tuesday that the $828 billion stimulus package is “anti-religious.”

In an e-mail that was also posted on his blog ahead of the Senate’s passage, Huckabee wrote: “The dust is settling on the ‘bipartisan’ stimulus bill and one thing is clear: It is anti-religious.”

The former Republican presidential candidate pointed to a provision in both the House and Senate versions banning higher education funds in the bill from being used on a “school or department of divinity.”

“You would think the ACLU drafted this bill,” Huckabee said. “For all of the talk about bipartisanship, this Congress is blatantly liberal.”

“Emily’s List, radical environmental groups, etc. all have a seat at the decision making table in Washington these days,” he continued. “Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are in charge and they are working with an equally ‘progressive’ President Obama (remember his voting record is more liberal than Ted Kennedy!).”

There is only one little problem with this whole story. Mike Huckabee is, as always; with those on the far religious right; Wrong.

Charles Johnson over at Little Green Footballs sets the record straight:

Let’s look at the language in the stimulus bill that’s causing this freak-out, shall we?

PROHIBITED USES OF FUNDS. – No funds awarded under this section may be used for – (C) modernization, renovation, or repair of facilities – (i) used for sectarian instruction, religious worship, or a school or department of divinity; or (ii) in which a substantial portion of the functions of the facilities are subsumed in a religious mission.

Apparently we’re supposed to just forget about that pesky old Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…

The government does not fund religious schools or churches for this very reason, and the language in the stimulus bill is absolutely consistent with the Constitution of the United States.

Mike Huckabee is feeding raw meat to Christian fundamentalists, but apparently he’s forgotten that if you revoke the Establishment Clause for Christian schools and churches, you also have to revoke it for Jewish and Muslim schools and houses of worship. For some reason, I don’t think that would meet with Huck’s approval.

There are plenty of things in the stimulus bill to be unhappy about, but this issue is being cynically distorted by people like Huckabee and DeMint to stir up the far right religious wing of the GOP.

And by the way, Huckabee, DeMint, and World Net Daily have another thing in common; they’re all in favor of teaching creationism in public schools—another violation of the Establishment Clause.

Which is exactly what Huckabee, WorldNetDaily and the rest of the far right wing, Zionist types want to do:

“I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution,” Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. “But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.”

….and there you have it. The entire far right wing agenda of the Religious or Christian right in America. Subvert the Constitution of the United States of America and make America into a Christian theocracy, instead of a secular Republic that it was founded as. A secular republic which paid a feeble homage to a “God”, and not to Jesus Christ, as claimed by some on the extreme far right. You want to know why these people did this? Because they were quite wise, those who had fled Great Britain and the religious persecution that existed there at the time, knew that if they founded the United States with a language that paid homage to a particular deity or type of Religion; that they would be opening the door to same sort of persecution that the founders experienced in Great Britain.

What I blogged about above, is why I have always been gun shy, so to speak, about aligning myself with the Republican Party.  Because of the faction of those within that party who want to do that very thing. Most of them have left and joined the Constitution Party.  But there are those still within the party, who’s mind still go back to 1980, when Reagan was elected and the majority of the Republican Party was living in the delusion that the United States was going to become some Christian Republic of some sort. Needless to say, and thankfully, that did not happen. Not because I do not love the Lord, but because I happen to believe the full separation of Church and State and I reject the doctrines of the Christian Right and the Zionist movement as un-scriptural and un-Constitutional and at times bordering on a Fascist State. Freedom of Religion and FROM Religion is a right that I cherish and will fight for on this Blog, as long as I am able.

Red State Update on Obama's Stimulus News Conference

Jackie and Dunlap on Obama’s first prime-time news conference. Stimulus pimpin’ and Elkhart bashin’ ensue.