Haiti has suffered from a massive natural disaster caused by an Earthquake. America is suffering from a massive Unnatural disaster caused by MARXISM. Haiti’s disaster is made worse because of its history of having a corrupt government. America’s disaster is made worse because of the Marxist takeover of its Media & Academia facilitated by Democrat President for Life FDR’s New Deal. Haiti needs massive aid to recover from the earthquake followed by the establishment of a government that actually represents the best interests of its citizens, not the fancies of its governing elite. Americans need to escape the lies of their Media & Academia so that they can recognize & reclaim their real history.

Haiti has suffered from its inception from not having a sound government. America has benefited from its inception from having a government based on individual liberty. Haiti’s “governed” as ex slaves having been continually harmed by a government with no respect for individual liberty. America’s current Democrat government of Obama, Pelosi & Reid is for the “internationale,” not Americans. Obama demonstrated this Marxist approach during the 2008 campaign by stating that Americans couldn’t just put their thermostats on 72 degrees & ignore the rest of the World. This clearly Marxist statement should’ve doomed Obama’s campaign. It didn’t because of America’s thoroughly corrupt Democrat Media.

Haiti’s resources are limited & its people impoverished by a corrupt government that operates for its own benefit. America’s resources are still unlimited although they’re being strangled by the Democrat Party’s Marxist approach. America’s problems since 1933 & the inception of the Marxist New Deal have come from too much GOVERNMENT. The Social Security program is sucking the life out of America’s financial welfare. Medicare & Medicaid have been ruining America’s health care system since their implementation. The Community Redevelopment Act has accelerated America’s financial collapse by using the Fannie Freddie system to finance those who can’t be financed.

The Haiti disaster will be used by the Democrat Media to distract Americans from their own crisis. The true horror of the earthquake will be used to cover the horror being done to America as the Democrat’s Marxist programs of Obamacare, Cap & Trade, War as a civilian crime, Amnesty for illegals & EPA’s economy destroying climate change regulations. Pray for the Haitians & vote against EVERYTHING that the Democrats want to do which is the only solution for Haiti & America’s problems.

The leftist elite establishment has blinded the people in this nation through its educational institutions, mainstream media outlets, and the entertainment industry to garner power for a repressive society. While Brother O and his Bread and Circuses Administration zealously dismantle the sleeping middle class, Americans have become unwitting accomplices to a growing underclass.

During education’s ongoing paradigm shift to a postmodern pedagogy in the mid-1980s, a fellow graduate student recognized that tenure and promotion in the academic world depended on the ability to “quack like a duck,” i.e., absorb and regurgitate the academy’s leftist world view and withhold personal opinions. In other words, outspoken conservatives are both persona non grata and underemployed in academia.

The duck motif not only extends to “journalists” in the mainstream media, but as Rush Limbaugh recently discovered, it extends to the National Football League (NFL), a league he greatly admires.

“[T]he NFL … is the most politically correct environment I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Dennis Miller on The O’Reilly Factor. “I don’t even know why Limbaugh would want to be in [it] quite frankly.”

Like many outspoken professors and journalists, Limbaugh now suffers from the pangs of outrageous injustice, being denied his dream for criticizing and mocking the nanny notions of the statist-minded elite. Limbaugh will not be afforded the opportunity that he has earned through achievement to work in the profession he loves for no reason other than his outspoken conservative views are abhorred by the leftist elite establishment.

Since it was leaked that Limbaugh was part of a group intending to buy the St. Louis Rams football team, the propagandists in the mainstream media have worked feverishly to malign his reputation, undermine his creditability, and destroy his character. They overturned rocks for race-baiting poverty pimps and scoured the NFL for nitwit jocks or any feckless team owner they could find to denounce Limbaugh as a bigot and racist before the nation.

The attack and subsequent defamation of Limbaugh adds to the list of media assaults on outspoken conservatives in order to prevent the resurgence of Reagan conservatism from entering the mainstream of American politics and undoing the leftist elites’ socialist agenda. The leftist elite establishment fears the resurgence of a conservatism of individualism, not of country clubs and boardrooms. The establishment dreads the Reagan conservatism championed over talk radio and at town hall meetings and tea parties, which respects the law and reflects the values and traditions of the people.

Statists demagogues live in constant terror of individualists who are independent, loosely connected to groups, and don’t know their place. They commission media propagandists, ready at their beckon call, to seek out and destroy them. The statist diktat is not to refute an opponent’s argument, it is to “wipe him from the face of the earth,” Sarah Palin, Clarence Thomas, and Robert Bork are noted recipients of the left’s scorched-earth and personal destruction politics.

The mainstream media have been frantically trying to deflate Sarah Palin’s ascendancy to the leadership of a national conservative movement since her dazzling acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in September 2008. Had she been a Democrat and espoused the statist ideology of Brother O or Hillary Clinton, Palin’s astounding rise from housewife, to mayor, to governor, to vice presidential candidate would have been praised by propagandists, extolled by environmentalists, lionized by leftists, and fawned over by feminists throughout the nation.

People who use common sense and apply the principles of the Constitution obstruct progressive governance, which explains why the media upended Robert Bork’s nomination and tried to stop Clarence Thomas’ confirmation to the Supreme Court. The media permitted and perpetuated the malicious, baseless allegations of the Democrat smear merchants to damage the reputations and destroy the creditability of both men.

Such reprehensible media campaigns, waged to disgrace both men, “did not resemble an argument so much as a lynching.” Bork was depicted as a judicial tyrant, his wife was falsely accused of being a Holocaust denier, and even his movie viewing habits were called into question. Likewise, Thomas was caricatured as a freakish feel-copping porno pervert in order to humiliate him, strip him of his dignity, and dishonor him for life.

The NFL’s management, owners, and players union along with most of the mainstream media and entertainment industry detest and despise Limbaugh as much as they do Palin, Thomas, and Bork. Yet Limbaugh persists in his love for the National Football League regardless of whether the sentiment is mutual.

Like the pedestaled wife of a fawning cuckold, the NFL graciously accepts Limbaugh’s lavish praises, glowing endorsements, and personal expenditures, yet abhors the very thought of embracing him. When the NFL’s leftist elite establishment denied Limbaugh limited ownership in a football franchise, it denied all outspoken conservatives and sent a subtle message to its owners, coaches, and players to suppress conservative opinion and quack like a duck.

The environment is ripe to don the special sunglasses, face the unadorned reality, and see the hideous leftist potentates and mindless moguls for the despicable fascists they truly are. In the grand scheme of things, the significance of the NFL pales in comparison to that of the USA. The country needs a wake up call, and the time has come for Limbaugh to stop chewing bubble gum and phone it in.
 

A disarmament crusade is not merely “naïve,” it’s a waste of valuable diplomatic energy, chided French President Nicolas Sarkozy following Brother O’s praise for the United Nations Security Council’s resolution calling for a world without nuclear weapons.

“We live in the real world, not the virtual world. And the real world expects us to take decisions,” Sarkozy said.

American newspapers saw fit to blackout Sarkozy’s mockery of their president’s “naïveté regarding the realities of nuclear technology.” 

Brother O lauded the agreement as a major step in stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and beginning multilateral disarmament:

“We must never stop until we see the day when nuclear arms have been banished from the face of the earth.”

Sarkozy saw fit to address Brother O’s obvious myopia and point out the glaring difference between the forest and the trees:  

“President Obama dreams of a world without weapons . . . but right in front of us two countries are doing the exact opposite. Iran since 2005 has flouted five security council resolutions. North Korea has been defying council resolutions since 1993.

[W]hat good has proposals for dialogue brought the international community? More uranium enrichment and declarations by the leaders of Iran to wipe a UN member state [Israel] off the map.”

Sarkozy concluded his derisive remarks with a call for sanctions:

“If we have courage to impose sanctions together it will lend viability to our commitment to reduce our own weapons and to making a world without nuke weapons.”

Although America’s newspapers chose not to inform the American people of the clash between Presidents Obama and Sarkozy, at least they have been spared from listening to another racism/right-wing conspiracy screed from former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

Instead of filing charges against ACORN employees for criminal violations captured on tape by hidden camera, Baltimore City State’s Attorney is looking to prosecute two investigative reporters for violating Maryland’s wiretap laws in filming the group’s lawbreaking acts.

State’s Attorney Patricia Coats Jessamy, a Brother O supporter and contributor who worked on the Maryland Women for Obama Steering Committee, issued the following statement concerning the criminal acts committed by the Association of Community Organizations For Reform Now (ACORN) employees at its Baltimore office:

“The only information received in reference to this alleged criminal behavior was a YouTube video…. [T]he audio portion could possibly have been obtained in violation of Maryland Law, Annotated Code of Maryland Courts and Judicial Proceedings Article §10-402, which requires two party consent.

If it is determined that the audio portion now being heard on YouTube was illegally obtained, it is also illegal under Maryland Law to willfully use or willfully disclose the content of said audio. The penalty for the unlawful interception, disclosure or use of it is a felony punishable up to 5 years.” [emphasis mine]

Jessamy, who has held the office since 1995, is looking to prosecute 20 year-old journalist Hannah Giles and 25-year old film maker James O’Keefe for failing to acquire ACORN’s permission to expose its heinous underbelly to the world. A nonpartisan state’s attorney would be looking to prosecute ACORN as a criminal enterprise under the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statutes.

In the video, O’Keefe and Giles show up on ACORN’s stoop seeking advice for purchasing a house to serve as a brothel. O’Keefe poses as a pimp with plans to run for Congress, and Giles is his prostitute girlfriend who intends to staff their brothel with smuggled teenage girls from El Salvador.

After making their intentions known to the ACORN workers, O’Keefe and Giles are given instructions on how to go about getting a loan to purchase the house, with further advice to list the girls as dependents on their tax returns and to train them to keep quiet about the prostitution activities.

Jessamy seems to be more interested in prosecuting violations of unauthorized taping than in prosecuting “child abuse, interstate transportation for purposes of prostitution, tax evasion,” and illegal immigration violations that may have been committed by the ACORN workers.

If Jessamy has an obsession with enforcing Maryland’s unauthorized taping law and prosecuting its violators, she fought her compulsion to selectively apply Maryland’s law on at least two occasions in 2006 and in 2000 when WMAR-TV in Baltimore used “undercover journalists with cameras to record people without their knowledge, and won awards for their efforts.”

But that was then, and 2009 is now, so when two young journalists with hidden cameras go undercover to expose a group of lawbreakers that support Brother O’s politics and policies, for Jessamy it’s more a matter of aligning with kindred spirits than with the rule of law.

Jessamy is obviously more interested in protecting fellow travelers and in enforcing the law against those who threaten Brother O’s power and policies than in carrying out her sworn duty and in upholding her oath of office.

If Jessamy presses to file charges down-the-road, will any fair-minded person look on her prosecution as anything but retaliation for uncovering the criminal activities of her president’s favorite group of community organizers? Will fair-minded people regard her authoritative actions as anything other than a tread-lightly warning for anyone who dares to uncover and expose the misdeeds of Brother O’s Obots?

I think not.

The media coverage of two journalists captured by North Korea who were released today does not pass the sniff test. The basic facts are not in dispute:

• Laura Ling and Euna Lee work for former Democratic vice-president Al Gore’s Current TV media venture.
• They went to China to interview defectors living along the Chinese border with North Korea about trafficking of women.
• They were detained for illegal entry into North Korea on March 17 by border guards.
• They were tried, convicted, and sentenced to serve 12 years of “reform through labor” in a North Korean prison.
• The U.S. public was emotionally engaged in this heart-rending story through breathless media coverage, a media-facilitated postcard campaign, advocacy websites, and candlelight vigils.
• This afternoon, former Democratic U.S. president Bill Clinton secured their release from North Korea’s “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il and the two ladies left for the U.S. with Clinton on his private plane.

There are, however, some suspicious factors in this syrupy story.

• Laura Ling is Chinese-American. Euna Lee is a South Korean-born U.S. citizen. They should both be familiar with the region both geographically and politically. It is hard to imagine that they made a blunder unaware of the consequences.
• A South Korean activist who helps North Korean refugees seek asylum, the Rev. Chun Ki-won of the Seoul-based Durihana Mission, helped the two journalists plan their trip. If they weren’t aware of the dangers, he certainly was, and he was their advisor. There is also the question of his motivation and involvement, given his professional bias.
• With full tear-jerking media coverage, their families said, “If they wandered across the border without permission, we apologize on their behalf.” Wandered across the border? It’s a RIVER. At the time, it was frozen, and they were walking on the ice (a tidbit from the Asian media, which the American MSM conveniently omitted from its reports).



• The U.S. media coverage consistently described the two as “girls.” They are NOT. Both are married, middle-aged women, one with a daughter. Ling is 32, and Lee is 36. Both were portrayed prior to this event as seasoned journalists, with Ling routinely reporting from political hot spots. I’m not alone in this observation — check out this article by Heather Michon at Open Salon.
• Then there is the extreme coincidence of precisely timing the guards’ location along the 521 kilometer-long Tumen River. Heather Michon notes:
  

  The real mystery is how the North Koreans happened to serendipitously be at the exact right place at the right moment.

• There is the sponsorship of Al “the hypocrite” Gore. Here is a man who foisted the myth of global warming on the world, while scientific data indicated the climate is cooling, and then became wealthy selling carbon offsets to the industries he victimized. If he really believed in global warming, would he be living in a mansion with a heated poolhouse and flying around in a gas-guzzling private jet? I’m suspicious of anything he is managing — there is most likely a hidden agenda. What are the random chances of this happening to obscure web journalists, and not, say, to someone from a major news outlet?
• Finally, there’s just the mere fact of the “coincidental” involvement of high-profile Democrats like Gore and Clinton.

So here’s the picture the fawning mainstream media painted for us with their disingenuous choice of wording and strategic omissions of fact. A couple of wide-eyed innocent MTV-type media ingénues — girls — inadvertently wandered across a poorly defined border, were captured by ruthless evil North Korean soldiers, and sentenced to hard labor in a wretched prison. Their worried families prayed for their safety.

The truth is that a couple of women, seasoned journalists accustomed to world hot spots, climbed from the border road in China down the steep bank to the boundary river and walked out onto the ice. They were detained by border guards, sentenced to reform through labor, and detained in a government guest house.

Remember these dear Obama friends?

Here’s my theory. Obama, who has openly demonstrated his affection for the likes of socialists Raila Odinga and Hugo Chávez, wanted more open relations with North Korea. Although he has made many bold moves toward totalitarian control in a few short months, nationalizing major banks and auto manufacturers and co-opting the census, he was concerned about awakening the American public with a quick rapprochement with North Korea.

So he and a few close confidants, Gore and the two Clintons, set up this journalistic expedition to China to create a cover for an initial softening. Who could criticize the “humanitarian” effort of Bill Clinton on behalf of two innocent young “girls” for whom a whole nation was lighting candles and praying? It all ended with this touching photo-op, showing the triumphant and successful diplomat Bill Clinton but only the black pony tails of the two “girls,” whose faces might reveal their age.

Thousands of dolphins blocked suspected Somali pirate ships when they were trying to attack Chinese merchant ships passing through the Gulf of Aden.

The picture is from Chinese Radio International, which carried the initial report. Chinese merchant ships are escorted through the Gulf of Aden by a three-ship task force, a practice initiated on Dec. 26 last year after the United Nations Security Council called on countries to patrol waters off Somalia, and after seven Chinese ships had been hijacked.

As several small pirate boats were approaching, thousands of dolphins surfaced and began playing and leaping in the air. Unable to get their small boats through the mass of dolphins, the pirates turned away.

China View reports:

Thousands of dolphins suddenly leaped out of water between pirates and merchants… The suspected pirates … stopped and then turned away. The pirates could only lament their littleness befor the vast number of dolphins. The spectacular scene continued for a while.

[Update on attendance totals here.]

Hundreds of tea parties today will protest profligate spending by our runaway Congress. More than 500 were listed by last Saturday on the interactive Google map maintained by Freedom Works, an advocacy organization directed by Dick Armey and Steve Forbes. Note that these are shown on four sequential maps because there are too many tea parties to fit in one frame. More recent updates put the total number of tea parties over 750. [You may have to use the refresh button in your browser a few times if the maps fail to load. They are stressed due to excessive traffic.]

View 2009 Tea Parties in a larger map

View 2009 Tea Parties in a larger map

View 2009 Tea Parties in a larger map

View 2009 Tea Parties in a larger map

Several websites are maintaining lists of all the sceduled events.

• The four-page long scrolling list by Freedom Works is here.
• Reputed to be the most comprehensive list is that kept by Tax Day Tea Party which is organized by states here.
• The American Family Association is supporting the Taxed Enough Already movement on their TEA Party website here. This site maintains a list of local organizers and their contact information.
• Let Freedom Ring is also promoting the tea parties here. In fact, in many areas they have waged a telephone messaging campaign in recent days urging folk to attend a party in their area.
• The 9~12 Project has a tea party page on their website.

Many of the tea parties will have well-known political or media figures in attendance:

• House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) will be in Bakersfield, CA
• House Budget Committee ranking member Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) will be in Madison, WI
• Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich says via email, “I will be at the New York Tax Day Tea Party at City Hall at 8:30 pm.”
• Glenn Beck will do his cable television show from San Antonio. Ted Nugent will be attending the Tea Party and performing the National Anthem.
• Sean Hannity will broadcast his show live from Atlanta.
• Fox News Business Show host Neil Cavuto will broadcast live from the Sacramento Tea Party
• Joe the Plumber will speak at the Taxpayer Tea Party at noon at the state capitol in Lansing, Michigan.
• From WHIO Talk Radio in Dayton, OH:
  

  The Co-founder of Engineered Control Services, Harald Zieger. An American immigrant born and raised in East Germany, Zieger was fully indoctrinated in the communist brainwashing system. He met his wife at 22 who coverted him to Christianity. He left East Germany at age 31, managed manufacturing divisions in multi-million dollar corporations, and eventually started his own business in the U.S. Harald is afraid his dream could become a nightmare as he fears the U.S. could slip into the trappings of what he left behind in East and West Germany.

• In Texas, Governor Rick Perry will visit the Austin rally midday, the Arlington rally in the afternoon and the Fort Worth rally at LaGrave Field in the evening. Way to go, Gov!

This entire movement began quite by chance less than two months ago, when CNBC reporter Rick Santelli spoke from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade on Thursday, February 19. Talking about the public wrath over the waste of the so-called “stimulus” money, he called for a “Chicago Tea Party” and the trading floor erupted in cheers (see video). Within days, cities around the country were holding impromptu tea parties.

Although the mainstream media virtually ignored the burgeoning populist movement, widely-read blogger Michelle Malkin covered the early rallies. The word got out and the movement spread. Fox News on cable television is doing a very adequate job of covering the action. The rest of the print, broadcast, and cable media seem to be downplaying the news, revealing a decidedly liberal bias. The final word — the phenomenal growth of the tea party movement, from a chance remark by a cable news reporter to a self-organized movement of huge rallies all across the country in less than two months, marks the triumph of Internet-based citizen journalism over the traditional media.

Related:

Michelle Malkin has a Tax Day Tea Party cheat sheet detailing the development of this movement:

For the Johnny-Come-Latelys in the MSM who will be dispatched by their editors to file obligatory stories about the hundreds of Tax Day Tea Party protests across the country today, here is a cheat sheet to get you up to speed….

The Fox Forum — Media Snub of Tea Parties Makes Me Want To Go:

For 8 years I suffered through news images of protests against President Bush when more media people showed up than protesters. The media would cover protests with as little as 15 people if they were protesting the war.

On April 15 America will have a nationwide protest in hundreds of cities that is predicted to be the largest in American history….

This morning I went through the various news organization Web sites to read about tomorrow’s historical day. Only FOX News had coverage of the Tea Party Protests. The rest had no coverage. NONE!….

Fox News — Tea Parties Spark Conservative Insurgency Online:

The online insurgency-in-the-making revolves around the so-called tea parties, the anti-tax protests popping up around the country….

The movement, which expanded over the last two months via the Web, is now relying heavily on independent media Web sites to track and cover the campaign….

Leslie Marshall, a nationally syndicated radio host, dismissed the tea party protests. She said the mainstream media are not covering them because they’re not worthy of coverage….

But Michael DePrimo, with the American Family Association, which is helping promote the events, said the lack of mainstream coverage hasn’t hindered organizers from getting their message out.

“It’s all over the Internet,” he said. “I’d be very surprised if any congressmen, or the White House, don’t know what’s going on.”

The beautiful Peth Msiska, currently the reigning beauty queen Miss Malawi, has entered the campaign for her country’s parliament. The Nyasa Times reports:

The reigning Miss Malawi, Peth Msiska, has hit the campaign trail, not seeking another crown but to be voted into Parliament in her country’s general elections in May 2009.

Msiska, 24, says this is the right time to join the ruling Democratic People’s Party (DPP) and run for office because she is “young, focused and determined to serve others as I have always done over the past two years in my capacity as Miss Malawi.”

Trading high heels for flat shoes, the beauty queen with a degree in accountancy has swapped fashion and charity events in Blantyre for rallies along dusty roads in her home area of Chileka, in the south of the country.

“I decided to join politics to make a difference in the lives of people, especially those in the rural areas,” Msiska told IPS….

Msiska is a powerful motivational speaker, urging young women to see themselves just as capable as men. Just like she does….

Msiska, who is single, has the backing of her family, and derives strength from praying at the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian….

Malawian women do not often venture into politics because of harassment, intimidation and cultural perceptions that bind them to domesticity….

Miss Malawi is further inspired by the vice-presidential candidate for the Republican party in the United States, Governor Sarah Palin, who won the third place in the 1984 Miss Alaska pageant.

Unlike Palin, who has received a lot of negative coverage in the American press, Msiska has been portrayed positively in the Malawi media.

“It’s high time that people realised that beauty queens can make great leaders,” Msiska told IPS.

In the US, our mainstream media keep hyping the fact that Barack Obama would be an inspiration to the world. Hello? Fifty per cent of the world is female, and Sarah Palin will be an inspiration to them!

The racist, gender-biased attitude of Obama’s supporters is mirrored in the comment of a Malawian left below the Nyasa Times article:

Just because you mentioned Palin, I will not vote for you, in fact I will help you lose!!! Africa for Obama, we want a brother to rule the World.

Tail wag: African Press International — Malawi: Beauty queen joins politics, citing Palin as inspiration

As so often happens we write a post that lends itself to an update. Well, last week I wrote the following:

The Obama campaign is driven by being an antidote to the Bush administration which, like it or not and for many different reasons (partly George’s own fault, partly through media projection), is a laughing stock not only in NZ, but around the world. Anything but Bush. Mark my words: The Obama camp is going to drive that point hard over the next two months, that McCain will be “four more years of failed Bush policies,” and the McCain camp would be wise to do as much as they can to distance themselves from the Bush administration.

OK, so that may not be the most prophetic statement ever made and may be quite obvious to anybody with a pulse who has been paying attention to the campaign with only one eye half-open — but it is nevertheless true. And here is a perfect example of the left doing just as I predicted:

…The point is that Palin, and the circus she’s brought to town, are simply a bountiful collection of small lies deliberately designed to distract the country from one big truth: the havoc that George Bush and the Republican Party have wrought, and that John McCain is committed to continuing.Every second of this campaign not spent talking about the Republican Party’s record, and John McCain’s role in that record, is a victory for John McCain.

Her critics like to say that Palin hasn’t accomplished anything. I disagree: in the space of ten days she’s succeeded in distracting the entire country from the horrific Bush record — and McCain’s complicity in it. My friends, that’s accomplishment we can believe in.

Just look at the problem John McCain faced. George Bush has a disastrous record, and the country knows it. John McCain — the current one, not the one who vanished eight years ago — has no major disagreements with George Bush (and I’m sorry, wanting to fire Donald Rumsfeld a bit sooner doesn’t qualify) and wants to continue his incredibly unpopular policies for another four years. The solution? Enter Sarah Palin, a Trojan Moose carrying four more years of disaster.

So there it is: Voting for McCain is four more years of Bush according Arianna Huffington, a very popular and influential blogger on the left. It’s all on.

But let me point out a few things. Whatever were the reasons that McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, it wasn’t them or the GOP who started sounding any horns about it. They put her out there, and the MEDIA created the firestorm — not the GOP. We can sit around and discuss all day long the idea that this is just what McCain and the GOP hoped for, and that is probably a valid topic for discussion. My view is that the media, like most of the rest of the population, has a short attention span. We have collectively short memories, and the media is no different. Nobdy had heard of Sarah Palin until she was announced as McCain’s VP running mate, and the media scrambled for stories to report on. Then they became a dog with a bone: They will chew it for all it’s worth, and when the bone is pulp and has lost its flavor, the media will be onto the next bone. Just keep that metaphor in mind.

There were some other points made in Arianna’s article that need to be addressed to keep matters in perspective. Huffington continues:

And the plan has worked beautifully. Just look at what’s being discussed just 57 days before the election. Is it the highest unemployment rate in five years? The bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? The suicide bombing yesterday in Iraq that killed six people and wounded 54 — in the same market where last month a bomb killed 28 people and wounded 72? That the political reconciliation that was supposedly the point of “the surge” is nowhere near happening? That Iraq’s Shiite government is now rounding up the American-backed Sunni leaders of the Awakening? That the reason 8,000 soldiers may be leaving Iraq soon is so more can be deployed to Afghanistan where the Taliban is steadily retaking the country?

First she cites the “highest unemployment rate in five years” which is true, but it’s only slightly higher than where it had been hovering until now; a rate of umemployment equal to that which existed during the Clinton administration when that was considered OK. A pending recession in the balance, the Fannie/Freddie bailout, and the slumping housing market is not solely germaine to the United States. This is global. Here in New Zealand we’re already in recession, and the housing market has declined severely. Property values are low; nobody in their right mind is selling; it’s a buyer’s market. In a country of only 4.1 million people 39 finance companies have gone belly-up since May 2006, leaving many investors with virtually nothing. The whole world is feeling the pinch.

Regarding the Iraq situation, all I can say is that war and conflict is fluid; the dynamics change every day, sometimes every hour. It’s not a scripted one hour TV drama. And whatever happens overseas, the war will ALWAYS be a drum the left can beat like a life insurance policy that guarantees them a certain return on the investement.

The funny thing is that most people who have an interest, I believe, already have their minds made up regarding for whom they will vote. All this back-and-forth slinging of mud by sycophants on both sides is just media fodder. It’s nothing more than a really bad bloody soap opera, reminding me of this line from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Or the lyrics to the song, “Limelight“, from drummer/lyricist, Neil Peart (a big Ayn Rand fan, BTW), of the musical band Rush, paraphrasing Shakespeare in the last stanza:

Living on a lighted stage
Approaches the unreal
For those who think and feel
In touch with some reality
Beyond the gilded cage.
Cast in this unlikely role,
Ill-equipped to act
With insufficient tact
One must put up barriers
To keep oneself intact.

Living in the limelight
The universal dream
For those who wish to seem

Those who wish to be
Must put aside the alienation
Get on with the fascination
The real relation
The underlying theme.

Living in a fisheye lens
Caught in the camera eye
I have no heart to lie
I can’t pretend a stranger
Is a long-awaited friend.

All the world’s indeed a stage
And we are merely players
Performers and portrayers
Each another’s audience
Outside the gilded cage

In case you didn’t already know it, Venezuela’s Presidente Para Vivir, Hugo Chavez, is a nutcase.

Now Hugo is courting the Russians.

Venezuela to host Russia navy exercise in Caribbean

CARACAS (Reuters) – Several Russian ships and 1,000 soldiers will take part in joint naval maneuvers with Venezuela in the Caribbean Sea later this year, exercises likely to increase diplomatic tensions with Washington, a pro-government newspaper reported on Saturday….

Plans for the naval operations come at a time of heightened diplomatic tension and Cold War-style rhetoric between Moscow and the United States over the recent war in Georgia and plans for a U.S. missile defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland….

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, an outspoken critic of Washington, has said in recent weeks that Russian ships and planes are welcome to visit the South American country.

“If the Russian long-distance planes that fly around the world need to land at some Venezuelan landing strip, they are welcome, we have no problems,” he said on his weekly television show last week….

The socialist Chavez says he fears the United States will invade oil-rich Venezuela and he supports Russia’s growing geopolitical presence as a counterbalance to U.S. power.

For some reason the Hugo suffers from latent delusions of anachronistic grandeur, seeing himself as some kind of cold-war throw-back and a cross between Che “Stalin II (and now posthumously the world’s greatest tee-shirt salesman)” Guevara and Fidel “comandante” Castro. The guy is a joke.