The New York Times has begun selling front-page display ads, a first for
the paper.
The paper has sold small-classified liners on the front page prior to this move, but decided to sell display ads in such a desirable position because of declining advertising revenue.
You’ve seen the media hype all the civilian casualties, women and children, before. In fact, it has become fashionable to report on women and children casualties as a result of war. We see it in our media and everywhere else in the world. We see it in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in Lebanon and the Gaza strip. Not so much in Israel, at the hands of Hamas. Since Israel’s enemy and our enemy choose to use their own families as human shields, women and children casualties are a given. So media, spare me the tears please.
The United States late Saturday blocked approval of a U.N. Security Council statement calling for an immediate cease-fire between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers, diplomats said.
With no history nor expectation that Hamas will live at peace and accept the existence of Israel, the US did the right thing at the UN. All the bleeding 
hearts be dammed. That war, as in any war, is not going to end until one side or the other wins it. Or to put it another way, until one side loses it. ‘Cease fires’ where Islamofascists are concerned is Osama-speak for back up, regroup, re-arm, and attack another day. Not surprisingly, the Useless Nations has no memory of this tact, or Tora Bora, or Sadr City, or Fallujah.
Meanwhile, let the terrorist cleansing begin. It’s called peace through strength, not peace through surrender. And why doesn’t Israel have the same right to self-defense as other nations?
At this point, it is beginning to look like PEBO has his first test coming up shortly. Will he support our ally, or the terrorists and Iran?
links: Diplomats say US blocks UN statement on Gaza | The Jews Face a Double Standard
Regarding the ‘just discovered’ parody of a reporter’s idea of PEBO, Frances Rice, chairman of the National Black Republican Association, responds to the new-found ‘controversy’ in this open letter to President-Elect Barack Obama. It’s time to start walking the walk and show us his healing powers, to his own party. Frances Rice is a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel, a lawyer and she can be contacted at www.NBRA.info
OBAMA THE MAGIC NEGRO
By Frances Rice
Click here to listen to: “Barack the ‘Magic Negro’ (That’s What the LA Times Called Him)”
If it were not so hypocritical, it would be comical how Democrats and their media allies have created a media firestorm over a parody on racism in the Democratic Party. The Democrats’ display of rank hypocrisy on race is a familiar scenario. First, Democrats exhibit vile racism. Then, any Republican who points out the Democrats’ display of vile racism is attacked by Democrats as being racist.
The current target of this Democratic Party racial jujitsu is RNC chairman candidate Chip Saltsman. So, what did Saltsman do to warrant being called a racist? Well, he dared to distribute a music CD with a parody about the fact that black Democrat David Ehrenstein called Sen. Barack Obama a “Magic Negro” in an article published by the left-wing, Democrat-controlled “Los Angeles Times.” Huh?
None of the people now trashing Saltsman uttered one peep of protest when the article entitled “Obama the Magic Negro” was first published in the “Los Angeles Times” on March 19, 2007 with the subtitle: “The Illinois senator lends himself to white America’s idealized, less-than-real black man.” Below is the link to that article.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-ehrenstein19mar19,0,5335087.story?coll=la-opinion-center
Sadly, some high-profile Republicans who should know better have joined the Democrats and the mainstream news media in their Republican bashing frenzy.
Lost in the media uproar is the fact that the parody has been broadcast several times on the radio, and the satirical content understood by the more than 20 million listeners of the popular Rush Limbaugh Show. One is left to wonder if the critics have even listened to the parody.
Where was all this outrage over racism when the Democrats used despicable racial stereotypes (just as Democrats did during the days of slavery and Jim Crow) to slur black professionals, such as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State Colin Powell and former Maryland Lt. Governor Michael Steele?
Brazenly, on the left-wing Internet website called “The News Blog,” Democrats posted a doctored photograph of Steele, depicting him as a “Simple Sambo.”
Cartoonist Jeff Danziger depicted Rice as an ignorant, barefoot “mammy,” reminiscent of the stereotyped black woman in the movie Gone with the Wind who remarked: “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ no babies.” Black comedian Harry Belafonte and Rev. Al Sharpton publicly denounced Powell as a “House Negro.” NAACP Chairman Julian Bond equated the Republican Party with the Nazi Party and called Rice and Powell “tokens.”
The liberal media showed not a hint of concern about racial insensitivity when Obama campaigned for white Democrat Benjamin L. Cardin and against Michael Steele during the 2006 Maryland senate race, not long after Obama issued a letter of support for the re-election of white Democrat and former Ku Klux Klansman Robert Byrd.
Not one word of angst was uttered by the liberal press when a black Democrat pundit on national television called black Democrat Juan Williams a “Happy Negro.” What offense did Williams commit that resulted in such a vicious racial slur? He had the temerity to defy the Democratic Party’s “thought police” and wrote a book called “Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-end Movements and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America.” His book exposes how the failed socialist polices of the Democrats who have been running black communities for the past 40 years have turned those communities into economic and social wastelands.
As author Michael Scheuer stated, the Democratic Party is the party of the four S’s: slavery, secession, segregation and now socialism. Visit the website www.NBRA.info on the Internet to see the racist cartoons of Rice and Steele and the details about the Democratic Party’s 150-year history of racism.
The time is long overdue for Republicans to stop cowering over the issue of race. Republicans should cease attacking fellow Republicans for telling the truth about Democrats, recapture the Republican Party’s rich civil rights legacy, and shed the light of truth on the failed socialism and racism in the Democratic Party – past and present.
Frances Rice is a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel, a lawyer and chairman of the National Black Republican Association. She can be contacted at www.NBRA.info
Note: Two of the leading RNC chairman candidates are black Republicans Ken Blackwell whose website is http://kenblackwell.com/and Michael Steele whose website is http://www.steeleforchairman.com/
Right now, in the heat of the battle, while military jets and attack helicopters are flinging munitions all over Gaza doing surgical strikes, and with foot soldiers about to enter to mop up the last of the enemy, Hamas, journalists are complaining that Israel won’t let them in.
Israel is continuing to bar foreign journalists from entering the Gaza Strip, despite a Supreme Court decision to allow a limited number of reporters to enter the territory.
The ban has been in place since a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas began to fray on Nov. 5 as militants intensified rocket fire on Israel.
That’s a toughie for me. On the one hand, it is better that they stay alive than to go in there where they could be blown up. On the other hand, they could go there and get blown up.
Economically speaking, times are tough. Just how long it will take to recover from the current financial situation will depend on the solution. So far, I’m not seeing the right solution. Driven by political objectives instead of economic ones, both Bush’s and Obama’s medicine will make matters worse.
Then, there are some people that think we’ve just grown too big for our own britches and maybe we need to reevaluate this whole capitalism thing. Like Timothy Garton Ash, writing in the guardian.co.uk suggesting that ‘a large part of humankind has to be excluded from the happy benefits of growth or our way of life has to change.’
On its face, that represents a false choice. His reasoning behind it is no friend to freedom. It is socialism to one degree or another.
His article about capitalism making hard choices misses the obvious. Ash says . . .
It must be obvious that the planet cannot sustain 6.7 billion people living as does today’s middle class in North America and western Europe – let alone the projected 9 billion world population in mid-century. Either a large part of humankind has to be excluded from the benefits of prosperity or our way of life has to change.
The ‘obvious’ to me means freedom and free-market economies. What the rest of the deprived world needs is freedom. It is not a coincidence that the most desperate parts of the world lack such freedom. Prosperity does not beget prosperity. Freedom does.
Would not the goal be to see them help themselves for once in a few thousand years, like the US has done in these last 230 years, rather than to dismiss what has demonstrably worked by having government run the show? When people have a choice of being free to speak, free to move, free to market, free to keep private property, and free to worship, or not, they will choose freedom. And when they do, they will go a long way in resolving their problems.
link: 2009 brings hard choices over the future of capitalism
While perusing PEBO’s website, I was excited to see another ‘position’ that Barack Obama and I agree on, getting political motivations out of the Dept of Justice. Frankly, it was encouraging to me that he admits to seeing it. Especially now with U.S. Attorney Patrick (Scooter Libby) Fitzgerald as Special Prosecutor investigating llinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, detailed in this post on Dec. 10.
Q: “What will you do as President to restore the Constitutional protections that have been subverted by the Bush Administration and how will you ensure that our system of checks and balances is renewed?” Kari, Seattle
A: President-elect Obama is deeply committed to restoring the rule of law and respecting constitutional checks and balances.That is why he has pledged to review Bush Administration executive orders. President-elect Obama will also end the abuse of signing statements, and put an end to the politicization that has taken place within the Department of Justice and return that agency to its historic and apolitical mission of fair and impartial administration of justice.
(emphasis added)
Does this mean we can expect to see Barack Obama take it to Fitzgerald? Oh well, maybe I’m not on the same page with Barack on this.
related links: change.gov: Open for Questions:Response | Patrick Fitzgerald, Still The Prosecutor’s Prosecutor?
Here’s an interesting take, and proposal on ‘Card Check,’ the quid pro quo of Democrats for labor unions.
Let the unions have their “card check” provision–allowing them to substitute publicly-collected, signed cards saying “we want a union” for a secret ballot vote. If the union gets 51% of the employees to sign the cards, it gets recognized. But let the employer also collect cards from employees who don’t want a union. If the employer gets 51% the union has to go away for five years. You’d hear soon enough about how collecting cards in public is unfair, opening the door to pressure tactics, intimidation, etc.. …
links: Kausfiles | Employee Free Choice Act Is Democrats’ Quid Pro Quo
Is it just me, or does Kwanzaa seem to come earlier and earlier each year?
This year, I believe my triumph over this synthetic holiday is nearly complete. The only mentions of Kwanzaa I’ve seen are humorous ones. Most important, for the first time in eight years, President George Bush appears not to have issued “Kwanzaa greetings” to honor this phony non-Christian holiday that is younger than I am.
It is a fact that Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by a black radical FBI stooge, Ron Karenga, aka Dr. Maulana Karenga. Karenga was a founder of United Slaves, a violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers and a dupe of the FBI.
In what was probably ultimately a foolish gamble, during the madness of the ’60s the FBI encouraged the most extreme black nationalist organizations in order to discredit and split the left. The more preposterous the organization, the better. Using that criterion, Karenga’s United Slaves was perfect. In the annals of the American ’60s, Karenga was the Father Gapon, stooge of the czarist police.
Despite modern perceptions that blend all the black activists of the ’60s, the Black Panthers did not hate whites. They did not seek armed revolution. Those were the precepts of Karenga’s United Slaves. United Slaves were proto-fascists, walking around in dashikis, gunning down Black Panthers and adopting invented “African” names. (That was a big help to the black community: How many boys named “Jamal” currently sit on death row?)
Whether Karenga was a willing dupe, or just a dupe, remains unclear. Curiously, in a 1995 interview with Ethnic NewsWatch, Karenga matter-of-factly explained that the forces out to get O.J. Simpson for the “framed” murder of two whites included: “the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, Interpol, the Chicago Police Department” and so on. Karenga should know about FBI infiltration. (He further noted that the evidence against O.J. “was not strong enough to prohibit or eliminate unreasonable doubt” — an interesting standard of proof.)
In the category of the-gentleman-doth-protest-too-much, back in the ’70s, Karenga was quick to criticize rumors that black radicals were government-supported. When Nigerian newspapers claimed that some American black radicals were CIA operatives, Karenga publicly denounced the idea, saying, “Africans must stop generalizing about the loyalties and motives of Afro-Americans, including the widespread suspicion of black Americans being CIA agents.”
Now we know that the FBI fueled the bloody rivalry between the Panthers and United Slaves. In one barbarous outburst, Karenga’s United Slaves shot to death Black Panthers Al “Bunchy” Carter and Deputy Minister John Huggins on the UCLA campus. Karenga himself served time, a useful stepping-stone for his current position as a black studies professor at California State University at Long Beach.
(Sing to “Jingle Bells”)
Kwanzaa bells, dashikis sell
Whitey has to pay;
Burning, shooting, oh what fun
On this made-up holiday!
Kwanzaa itself is a nutty blend of schmaltzy ’60s rhetoric, black racism and Marxism. Indeed, the seven “principles” of Kwanzaa praise collectivism in every possible arena of life — economics, work, personality, even litter removal. (“Kuumba: Everyone should strive to improve the community and make it more beautiful.”) It takes a village to raise a police snitch.
When Karenga was asked to distinguish Kawaida, the philosophy underlying Kwanzaa, from “classical Marxism,” he essentially explained that under Kawaida, we also hate whites. While taking the “best of early Chinese and Cuban socialism” — which one assumes would exclude the forced abortions, imprisonment of homosexuals and forced labor — Kawaida practitioners believe one’s racial identity “determines life conditions, life chances and self-understanding.” There’s an inclusive philosophy for you.
Coincidentally, the seven principles of Kwanzaa are the very same seven principles of the Symbionese Liberation Army, another charming invention of the Worst Generation. In 1974, Patricia Hearst, kidnap victim-cum-SLA revolutionary, posed next to the banner of her alleged captors, a seven-headed cobra. Each snake head stood for one of the SLA’s revolutionary principles: Umoja, Kujichagulia, Ujima, Ujamaa, Nia, Kuumba and Imani – the exact same seven “principles” of Kwanzaa.
Kwanzaa was the result of a ’60s psychosis grafted onto the black community. Liberals have become so mesmerized by multicultural nonsense that they have forgotten the real history of Kwanzaa and Karenga’s United Slaves — the violence, the Marxism, the insanity. Most absurdly, for leftists anyway, is that they have forgotten the FBI’s tacit encouragement of this murderous black nationalist cult founded by the father of Kwanzaa.
This is a holiday for white liberals — the kind of holiday Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn probably celebrate. Meanwhile, most blacks celebrate Christmas.
Kwanzaa liberates no one; Christianity liberates everyone, proclaiming that we are all equal before God. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Not surprisingly, it was practitioners of that faith who were at the forefront of the abolitionist and civil rights movements.
Next year this time, we’ll find out if our new “Halfrican” president is really black or just another white liberal. If he’s black enough to say the “brothers should pull up their pants,” surely Obama can just say no to Kwanzaa.
Ann Coulter, Dec. 24, 2008
What, surely you didn’t think that was my writing. Well said as only Ann Coulter can.
Below is an open letter to the President, the Congress, and the American people concerning reform of the Federal Tax Code from economists and educators in the United States. For those unfamiliar with The Fair Tax, this letter will give you a good overview of it. The letter can also be found at FairTax.org. Please share it with others.
Continue reading An Open Letter to the President, the Congress, and the American people
Starting with an AP report of civil unrest and peaceful protests, and Russian riot police reacting by beating and kicking protesters and journalists, and ending with no mention of or comment from either Russia’s President, Dmitry Medvedev, or Russia’s Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, the story of what looks like Russia’s biggest problem, freedom, is being minimized while Russia’s Navy in the Western hemisphere takes center stage.
Riot police clubbed, kicked and detained dozens of people who gathered at a holiday celebration in Russia’s Far East Sunday as hundreds protested across the country over a hike in car import tariffs.
Rising unemployment and a sharp slide in the ruble have driven discontent across Russia and the Kremlin fears the deteriorating economic situation could lead to public unrest.
With domestic car production suffering, the government this month announced higher import tariffs on automobiles, prompting several protests. The demonstrations have been most vehement in Vladivostok, Russia’s largest Pacific port, where nearly all private cars are imported from Japan.
Hundreds rallied in the city Saturday for the second weekend in a row and demonstrators hoped to rally again on Sunday.
But authorities refused to authorize the demonstration and hundreds of riot police blocked off the city square where it was planned.
Soon after, some 500 people gathered around a traditional Russian New Year’s tree on Vladivostok’s main square, singing songs and dancing. It was unclear how many were thwarted demonstrators, and there were no placards or signs of political protest, but riot police demanded that people disperse.
Putin’s idea of progress is to return to the 20th century Soviet Union. Raising protectionist tariffs, squelching public dissent, silencing political opponents, and controlling the press, hallmarks of Khrushchev and Gorbachev, is the direction that the ‘new’ Russia is headed.
An Associated Press reporter watched as several people who resisted were beaten with truncheons, thrown to the ground and kicked. Several parents were detained as their children watched.
“Riot police encircled the group … even those just passing by, and they started taking people away without any sort of comment,” said Olga Nikolaevna, a 62-year-old pensioner who witnessed the incident.
An AP reporter saw at least 10 journalists detained by police, who demanded several turn over videotapes and photo memory chips and wrecked a Japanese TV crew’s video camera. Some journalists were beaten and kicked, including an AP photographer. National TV channels, which are state-controlled, ignored the demonstrations.
The Kremlin has sidelined political opponents and put tight controls over civil society and the media, rolling back many post-Soviet freedoms.
For Putin, this is a case of history repeating itself. He seems hell-bent on resisting freedom, like Gorbachev did, instead of embracing it. Boris Yeltsin embraced it, and won. Putin and his puppet president fear freedom and the power and prosperity that freedom and a free-market economy can deliver to the Russian people. Rather than being a champion of freedom, they are proving to be an enemy of it.
link: 