"Democrats cannot capture the presidency or either branch of Congress by lurching leftward"

Here is some well considered advice for the Democrat party. It explains how Donald Trump got elected, and why, if the Democrats don't change course, Trump stands a good chance of being re-elected for another term:

Commentary: The perils of mythmaking

[...] Democrats cannot capture the presidency or either branch of Congress by lurching leftward. A candidate in the AOC/BS mold would be a hero in New York, California and Massachusetts — and a disaster in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which handed Trump the presidency in 2016 and will be critical again next year.

Ed Rendell, the former governor of Pennsylvania, stressed this point to The New York Times: “The more we have presidential candidates or newly elected congresspeople talking about the Green New Deal, talking about ‘Medicare-for-all,’ talking about socialism, the more that plays into the Trump campaign’s hands.”

Christopher Borick, a political scientist at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, added: “If you want to lock up Pennsylvania for a Democrat, the more moderate Democrats are the key.”

The numbers support them. A Gallup poll in January reported that 35 percent of Americans call themselves conservatives, the same number that identify as moderates. Only 26 percent are self-described liberals, the same portion who chose that label in 2016 exit polls.

It’s true that within the Democrats’ ranks, the percentage of liberals is rising, hitting 51 percent this year according to Gallup. But pragmatists still dominate the party. Fifty-four percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents want the party to “move closer to the center” while 41 percent “would rather it shift further left.”

The same tension between purists and pragmatists is playing out in the House, where the AOC types are calling for the rapid impeachment of the president. But Democratic leaders are taking a much slower approach, with Rep. Jerrold Nadler, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, insisting that impeachment must meet a “very high bar.”

“If you’re serious about removing a president from office, what you’re really doing is overturning the result of the last election,” Nadler told Roll Call in November. “You don’t want to have a situation where you tear this country apart, and for the next 30 years half the country’s saying, ‘We won the election; you stole it.’”

That’s why Democrats should be focusing on the next election, not impeachment. No president has ever been removed through impeachment (although Richard Nixon probably would have been the first, had he not resigned). The bar is and should be “very high.” [...]

Read the whole thing. It explains so much. Good advice, and like much good advice, will probably be ignored. Elections are about demographics, and numbers. If Democrats insist on letting the most leftist and shrill among them lead their party, they will lose again.

Also see:

How can Republicans defend Trump? Because of the Clintons

     

Glenn Beck is Airing the Dirt on George Soros

No wonder Soros is funding NPR's expansion in order to compete against FOX News. It's just one of many things Soros is doing, that's mentioned in the two transcripts from Becks most recent shows:


The Puppet Master: How much does George Soros control?

     


Five Step Plan: How George Soros is trying to bring down America

I've known about a lot of that stuff for years, I post about it occasionally. But Soros is buying influence everywhere: there is so much he's up too, I can hardly keep up with it all. I'm glad Glenn Beck is compiling it.

It's nice to see Soros' plans getting some main-stream exposure for a change. It's too bad Beck didn't do this years ago. I have to wonder if it isn't too little, too late now? But I'm not giving up hope. And forewarned is forearmed. The snake in the grass, waiting to bite you, loses the element of surprise when you know it's there. Now where's that pitch fork...
     

What Leftists and Islamists are both lacking, is empathy for and adherence to the "Golden Rule"

Can We Coexist With The Left?

The American writer Lawrence Auster had a debate with his readers regarding the possibility of splitting the USA along ideological lines. According to reader Tim W, modern Left liberalism is a universal totalitarian ideology, not a “live and let live” concept. The goal of its adherents is a world government from which no one can escape. Leftists “need conservatives but conservatives don’t need leftists. To be blunt, they can’t let us go. We’d be happy to be rid of them, because to us they’re nothing but parasites and/or oppressors. But they can’t get rid of us because we do most of the work, pay most of the taxes, provide the stability and morality that allow their depravity to thrive with less damaging results. Furthermore, the white conservative population is the buffer protecting white liberals from the minorities.”

A number of commentators questioned the viability of such a political division. Muslims believe not only that Islam is the best religion, but that it is the only true religion and that all people must be brought into its fold. Likewise, Leftists sincerely believe that Leftism is the only valid ideology, and that the whole world must be brought under its heel. Just like the very existence of self-governed communities outside of Islamic rule is considered an intolerable act of aggression by devout Muslims, so the existence of self-governed non-Leftist communities anywhere, at least if they happen to be white, is unacceptable to Leftist True Believers. They don’t just want to rule themselves; they want to rule everybody else as well.

[...]

In her book A God Who Hates, the Syrian-born ex-Muslim Wafa Sultan comments on the Islamic “culture of shouting and raiding.” She states that “My experience has been that two Muslims cannot talk together without their conversation turning into shouts within minutes, especially when they disagree with each other, and no good can come of that. When you talk to a Muslim, rationally, in a low calm voice, he has trouble understanding your point of view. He thinks you have lost the argument. A Muslim conversing with anyone else – Muslim or non-Muslim – cannot remember a single word the other person has said, any more than my mother could remember a single word of what the preacher in our local mosque said.”

Former Muslim Ali Sina notes that “there is very little difference between the Left and Islam. What is lacking in both these creeds is the adherence to the Golden Rule. Just as for Muslims, everything Islamic is a priori right and good and everything un-Islamic is a priori wrong and evil, for the Left, everything leftist is a priori oppressed and good.” Facts don’t matter. Lying about opponents and their intentions is so widespread “that it is considered to be normal.”

After it was revealed that much of the data regarding alleged man-made global warming was deliberately fabricated, which constitutes one of the largest and most expensive anti-scientific frauds in history, most of its Leftist backers continued as if nothing had happened. The fact that they had promoted outright lies and slimed their opponents based on these lies mattered little. They believe they had the right to do so, as long as their intentions were right. Muslims, too, are allowed to lie to further the spread of their ideology. This strategy is called taqiyya.

Just like Muslims, both national Socialists and international Socialists totally lack respect for Socratic Dialogue, the reasoned search for truth which has been a hallmark of Western culture at its best. This is why such a large percentage of Western converts to Islam are either neo-Nazis or Marxists: These groups already think a great deal like Muslims. Their creed is the Absolute Truth, which should rule the world and must be imposed on others by brute force if necessary. They consequently have no need for reasoned debate. Others should submit to their rule or be violently squashed.

[...]

Let me add that I don’t think all Leftists have a well-thought-out plan to destroy the West. I have some in my immediate family, and they don’t think like this at all. They sincerely believe that what they are doing is the right thing. The hardcore ones who deliberately want to kill the West might be a minority, but at the end of the day this distinction matters little.

In many cases you can compromise, but in others you cannot. If somebody tries to poison you then you have to resist. It doesn’t matter in the long run whether those who do this do so because they deliberately want to kill you or because they are fools who accidentally kill you while intending to do something noble. The bottom line is: You die. You cannot be slightly dead, just like you cannot be slightly pregnant. If the Leftists and the Globalists have their way then our civilization will die, plain and simple. [...]

Our civilization, as we have known it, is dying every day. It's called change, and it's inevitable. All that we know is in the process of becoming something else. Fjordman, who wrote this article, is perhaps too pessimistic. Barry warns me that many of the writers at the Brussels Journal have Nazi sympathies. I can see that potential. The problem is, that any white person who sticks up for European culture can easily be called a Nazi, just to shut him up. But that doesn't mean that someone who sticks up for European culture is someone who wants to hate and exterminate other cultures. True multicultural tolerance would include European culture, not seek to destroy it. These are distinction worth making, for anyone who considers themselves to be a classical liberal.

If European culture is destined to be assimilated and become something else, so be it; those who make the most babies inherit the future. If America's complexion, and the complexion of the whole western world is destined to become something other than white, it matters little. What does matter to me, is the survival and advancement of the best elements of Western Civilization. Things like The Golden Rule, and Socratic thinking. Liberty and freedom, self-governance and sovereignty, the rule of law, not of kings or dictators. The Ideals set forth in the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Such things hold no value for Leftists or Jihadists. Only their ideology matters, and they have no qualms about lying to advance their agendas. Even when they tell the truth it's like a lie, because they never ask themselves "is it true?". They only think "What do I need to say to get what I want?". The ends justifies the means. They often don't say what they mean, nor mean what they say. Thus neither Leftists or Jihadists can be trusted, because they have no respect for objective truth, and no respect for anyone who does not support their flawed ideologies. Muslims who practice taqiyya, are no different from Leftists who practice "the ends justify the means". Both believe they are allowed to lie to further the spread of their ideology. Both are liars of the worst kind.

I haven't much use for liars, of any description. This article does a good job of showing the dishonesty and intolerance of these extremist ideologies, that would use any means possible to impose themselves on others. I'm generally a pretty tolerant person, but I see no need to tolerate the completely intolerant. Tolerance is supposed to be a two-way street. I tend to be as tolerant of other people as they are of me. It would be unwise to be more so.


Also see: Islam's Nowhere Men


     

Permanantly Marginalize the GOP?

Is it working? If the Dems have their way, it will:

Obama strategy: Marginalize most powerful critics

This is the first of a two-part look at the marginalization of the GOP. Tomorrow: GOP officials fear that the party's image is being defined increasingly by boisterous conservative commentators.

President Obama is working systematically to marginalize the most powerful forces behind the Republican Party, setting loose top White House officials to undermine conservatives in the media, business and lobbying worlds.

With a series of private meetings and public taunts, the White House has targeted the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the biggest-spending pro-business lobbying group in the country; Rush Limbaugh, the country’s most-listened-to conservative commentator; and now, with a new volley of combative rhetoric in recent days, the insurance industry, Wall Street executives and Fox News.

Obama aides are using their powerful White House platform, combined with techniques honed in the 2008 campaign, to cast some of the most powerful adversaries as out of the mainstream and their criticism as unworthy of serious discussion.

[...]

The campaign underscores how deeply political the Obama White House is in its daily operations — with a strong focus on redrawing the electoral map and discrediting the personalities and ideas that have powered the conservative movement over the past 20 years.

This determination has manifested itself in small ways: This president has done three times as many fundraisers as President George W. Bush had at this point in his term. And in large ones: Beginning with their contretemps with Limbaugh last winter, Obama’s most important advisers miss few opportunities for public and highly partisan shots at his most influential critics.

It’s too early to tell if the campaign is working, but it’s clearly exacerbating partisan tensions in Washington.

“They won — why don’t they act like it?” said Dana Perino, former White House press secretary to Bush. “The more they fight, the more defensive they look. It’s only been 10 months, and they’re burning bridges in a lot of different places.”

White House officials see things differently. They see an opportunity to corner critics of the president’s policies, especially on health care and financial regulations, and, in the process, further marginalize the Republican Party.

Privately, officials have talked with relish for months of the potential to isolate the GOP as a narrow party of white, Southern conservatives with little appeal to independent-minded voters.

This won’t happen overnight, but a combination of demographics — especially the explosion of a Hispanic population that has been voting for Democrats — the near-extinction of Republicans in the Northeast and the steady rightward drift of the GOP’s grass-roots activists at least makes it a plausible goal.

By design or not, nearly every Republican whom Obama has nominated for a White House job — Ray LaHood for Transportation, Judd Gregg for Commerce and John McHugh for the Army — represents an area Democrats can take back if the sitting Republican is gone. None is from the South.

So is the strategy working? White House officials point to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll to argue the answer is emphatically yes. Only 20 percent of those surveyed identified themselves as Republicans, the lowest in 26 years of asking the question. [...]

Of course, the "Uber" conservatives who want to kick all the "RINOs" out of the party are playing right into the hands of this strategy. I've heard Leftists talk about this during the many years I lived in San Francisco.

They would say that the best way to destroy the Republican party is to first marginalize them. The best way to do that, is to encourage the most shrill and intolerant among the GOP to take the lead, and make them as visible and publicized as possible; make them the "face" of the GOP, to drive away moderate and independent voters.

It's a strategy they've been using for a long time, with the help of the MSM, most of whom are Democrats. And it looks to me like it's definitely working.
     

President Obama's fake Town Hall meeting

It seems the questioners were preselected plants:

STACKING THE DECK

Do you remember that town hall meeting PrezBO held in the East Room of the White House last week? Now the Washington Post is reporting that perhaps all was not as it seemed at that meeting ... especially insofar as the questioners who were actually there.

The Post is reporting that there were five questioners in the East Room who were fully identified. All of them turned out to be Obama plants. They were there to ask a question designed to allow Obama to deliver the message he wanted to deliver. The Post provides the following information:

Questioner 1 was Sergio Salmeron: Self-description at the White House: "My name is Sergio Salmeron. I want to find out about health care."

It turns out that Salmeron worked with the Obama campaign since early 2008. His blog was "my.barackobama.com. He did volunteer canvassing for the campaign as well as voter registration work. He was also a campaign translator.

Questioner 2 was Tom Sawner: Self-description: "Sir, I'm Tom Sawner. I'm a service-disabled veteran, small-business owner in Arlington, Virginia. My company, Educational Options, works with public schools."

He was more than a disabled veteran. He was also an adviser on Obama's education platform committee.

Questioner 3 was Carlos Del Toro: Self-description: "My name is Carlos Del Toro. I served in the Navy for 26 years, retired four years ago, and started a small business."

Del Toro was also a candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates last year. He endorsed Obama in an op-ed in the Fredricksburg (Virginia) Free Lance-Star.

Questioner number 4 was 4. Linda Bock: "My name is Linda Bock and I'm a registered nurse just in Prince George's County, Maryland -- been there 34 years at a free senior health center. And I'm here with my fellow nurses from SEIU."

Bock campaigned and canvassed for Obama during the election.

Then there was No. 5: 5. Bonnee L. Breese: "Hi, Mr. President. Thank you so very much for having me, a public school teacher from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, here to be with you.

Simply another Obama supporter. A teacher's union member, by the way.

There was another questioner but they only got her first name, "Elle." The White House won't reveal her surname.

So ... every questioner at the town hall ... at least the questions from the people who were there ... were from pre-selected Obama supporters. No big deal, folks .. but let's not forget that Obama likes to stage his press conferences; and apparently his town hall meetings as well.

Totally staged. How fake can you get? It's hardly surprising though, since it happened throughout his campaign as well, and was hardly ever reported in the MSM, just like it isn't being reported by them now.

A Republican could never get away with this. Democrats get a pass, though. I've often heard Leftists say that they don't care what the politicians on their side do, as long as they are Politically Correct. Here is proof that it's true.

How long are the majority of the American people going to keep swallowing this BS? We have almost four full years of this horse and pony show ahead of us, so I guess we shall see.
     

Sharia Law now legal in Great Britain?

Unbelievable. From A. Millar at the Brussels Journal:

From Magna Carta to Sharia Law – Britain’s Decline

[...] It is almost unbelievable that this should occur in a modern, democratic, Western country, and, moreover, under a government that claims to be liberal, and to care about the right of women and homosexuals among others. But, tracing the actions of the pro-Islamic Labour Party, and of modern liberalism more generally, it should have been predictable. Modern liberalism is not a force for human rights and equality (though it still uses these terms where they can be of use in breaking down British tradition); it is a selfish urge for freedom for one’s own self – others be damned. Multiculturalism frees the liberal from the demands of ‘culture.’ Mass immigration frees him from the need to know his history. Invoking the Inquisition of three hundred years ago frees him from having to confront the reality of Islamic fundamentalism. The establishment of sharia law no doubt frees him from holding any position whatsoever.

I have pointed out before, that the Labour government has colluded with extremist Muslims, even employing a Holocaust denier as an advisor on Muslim affairs. Ken Livingstone, the former Left-wing Mayor of London, has also openly embraced Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a man who believes that wives can be beaten into submission, that homosexuals should be executed, and pregnant Israeli women should be murdered. The UK’s Left-wing Respect Coalition Party asserts that opposition to radical Islam is “the new racism,” and this dangerous sentiment is now received wisdom among those closer to the center of the political spectrum. But Islam is neither a race nor ethnicity, but a religion, and one that has Asian, Black, and White followers. A 2006 UK government report entitled ‘Young Muslims and Extremism,’ notes that a significant number of White Britons were being drawn into Islamic terrorism, and we have seen a few example of White Muslim jihadis since then.

The sharia courts operating in Britain, will hear and pass legally binding judgment on cases involving divorce, financial disputes, and even domestic violence. But, it will not end there. According to the Daily Mail, sharia court officials have said, that they hope, “[…] to take over growing numbers of 'smaller' criminal cases in future,” and extremist clerics have already asserted their aims to establish sharia law for everyone in Britain.[...]

The Left has never been interested in the rights of women, gays, or other minorities. They simply foment and exploit discontent wherever they can find it, and use it as a weapon to fight the status quo. They will dump support for the rights of women and gays, the moment it becomes expedient for them to do so.

[...] Conservatives and Christians have criticized the so-called “gay lifestyle,” and liberals have always furiously denounced those conservatives and Christians for saying this. But liberals are those who have remained utterly silent when extremist Muslim clerics have called for the execution of homosexuals or the beating of women. The liberal establishment generally, and the Labour government in particular, has betrayed their professed belief in human rights and equality, and are ushering in extremism and intolerance. [...]

(bold emphasis mine) As if this isn't bad enough, there is a bill pending passage that would give religious minorities additional rights, possibly reinforcing sharia. I recommend reading the whole thing for the details.

Here is a link to a post I did a while back, about the alliance of Western Leftists with Islamic Extremists:

Socialism in Islamic hands: a tool to make the present world order unworkable

Socialism has plenty of dangers inherent to it in it's own right. But what if it were infiltrated and used by a third party, one with no interest in using Socialism as a stepping stone to Communism, but as a stepping stone to an Islamic Sharia-law state? Recent election results in European countries indicate this may be happening on a larger scale than anyone imagined, as Socialist parties there make large gains by running Muslim candidates to gain Islamic votes. [...]

Their plan seems to be working. This is not the first time this tactic has been used. The ayatollah Khomeini was swept to power in Iran on a wave of Leftist power and support. He promised to institute a secular, socialist state. Instead, he instituted a theocratic sharia law state. The Leftist leaders were killed or driven out, and their followers subjugated. There is a lesson in that for the European socialist elites, but they seem blind to it.


Related Links:

The truth about Sharia based societies

Is Islam compatible with a free society?

Islam Fails Muslims by Impeding Democracy and Economic Development

"Honor" killings of Muslim women in Europe

Do we need a "Star Wars" strategy for Islam?

Sharia Law in Minnesota?

     

More reasons for not visiting Portland, OR

I live in rural Oregon, but I'm not at all tempted to visit Portland. The following article by Takuan Seiyo at the Brussel's Journal gives me many reasons to feel that way:



Postcard from Zinnlandia

I am on the MAX Red Line light rail car going from downtown Portland to the Airport. Some things socialists do better. Among them are public transportation, recycling, French poetry readings, yoga, coffee, artisan food and arthouse cinema. Would it that the counterscale were not so much more loaded.

Two hefty women in Birkenstocks and Nordic sweaters sit on the bench in front of me. They are either academics or lesbians or both. Portland is a babe magnet for this kind of babes.

One of them, silver bangles jangling, is showing a souvenir purchase to the other. It’s a garden gnome, complete with a red cap and a Walt Disney tunic stretched taut over a rotund belly. The face, though, is less jovial than one expects on a gnome. An etched inscription on the base reads, “Howard Zinn.”

We are leaving Zinnlandia, after all – that great land of the Pacific Northwest, rich in good wine, including zinfandel, and other bounties of nature. Howard Zinn and his doppelgänger, Noam Chomsky, are to the coastal zones of this blessed land what St. Patrick is to the Emerald Isle. And, like Finlandia, Jutlandia and Hollandia, Zinnlandia too has much Northern European DNA.

Zinnlandia is in Amerikka – that racist, capitalist land of injustice, sexism, specieism, lookism, theism, militarism and homophobia. As a material and cultural Marxist, and skillful propagandist, Zinn – a master of sieving American history for its worst nuggets – is the perfect avatar for the self-flagellating white inhabitant of this land.

A Zinnlandian I met on this trip, a WASP physician endowed with the best education much money can buy, told me that he does not celebrate July 4th because the Declaration of Independence had been written by a slave owner and signed by other slave owners. He was just as hotly critical of the “racism” of Americans in dealing with the growing Muslim immigrant minority. The conversation unfolded over a bottle of Oregon Vino Pinko, with the likeness of a notorious Cuban mass murderer on the label.

Besides the pervasive lefty obtuseness as to the true nature of Che Guevara, there is one central paradox in this Zinnlandian, as there is in all of them. [...]

He goes on to describe his experiences in "Zinnlandia", and the history of crimes committed on the very train he is riding on. They all tie together. In the end, he compares Portland with many other cities he's visited. I enjoy the authors wit, but it's not a pretty picture for a Sunday. I think I need to go work in the garden now... thank God I live in the country.


Related Links:

Attracting a crowd means what exactly?

Anti-American "Art" at Portland Oregon Airport
     

When you can't debate, restrict your opponent

This is what the left does all the time. They can't advance their ideas through debate because they won't hold up to scrutiny. So they try to control the terms of the debate, to prevent their opponent from actually debating. Rich Lowry at Townhall.com gives us a perfect example of this, with Obama's campaign:

The Obama Rules

[...] After his blowout win in North Carolina last week, Obama turned to framing the rules of the general election ahead, warning in his victory speech of "efforts to distract us." The chief distracter happens to be the man standing between Obama and the White House, John McCain, who will "use the very same playbook that his side has used time after time in election after election."

[...]

Forget "bitter"; Obama must believe that most Americans suffer from an attention-deficit disorder so crippling that they can't concentrate on their own interests or values.

Obama has an acute self-interest in so diagnosing the American electorate. His campaign knows he's vulnerable to the charge of being an elitist liberal. Unable to argue the facts, it wants to argue the law -- defining his weaknesses as off-limits.

The campaign can succeed in imposing these rules on the race only if the news media cooperate.

[...]

Here are the Obama rules in detail: He can't be called a "liberal" ("the same names and labels they pin on everyone," as Obama puts it); his toughness on the war on terror can't be questioned ("attempts to play on our fears"); his extreme positions on social issues can't be exposed ("the same efforts to distract us from the issues that affect our lives" and "turn us against each other"); and his Chicago background too is off-limits ("pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy"). Besides that, it should be a freewheeling and spirited campaign.

Democrats always want cultural issues not to matter because they are on the least-popular side of many of them, and want patriotic symbols like the Pledge of Allegiance and flag pins to be irrelevant when they can't manage to nominate presidential candidates who wholeheartedly embrace them (which shouldn't be that difficult). As for "fear" and "division," they are vaporous pejoratives that can be applied to any warning of negative consequences of a given policy or any political position that doesn't command 100 percent assent. In his North Carolina speech, Obama said the Iraq War "has not made us safer," and that McCain's ideas are "out of touch" with "American values." How fearfully divisive. [...]

Lowry goes on to say that we could take these rules by Obama in good faith, if Obama also applied them to the way the talks about John McCain. But does Obama follow his own rules? Or do they only apply to John McCain and Republicans? Read the whole thing and find out.

When a Mosquito is a GOOD thing

From Tammy Bruce:
Noise Audible Only to Teens Used Against Loiterers

A wall-mounted gadget designed to drive away loiterers with a shrill, piercing noise audible only to teens and young adults is infuriating civil liberties groups and tormenting young people after being introduced into the United States...

The high-frequency sound has been likened to fingernails dragged across a chalkboard or a pesky mosquito buzzing in your ear. It can be heard by most people in their teens and early 20s who still have sensitive hair cells in their inner ears...

It's been used successfully in Europe, where of course it's now being challenged by some politicians as "racist". From the Brussels Journal:

European Parliament Should Not Ban Mosquito, Says Inventor

A letter from Howard Stapleton

Dear Sir,

My name is Howard Stapleton. I am the inventor of the Mosquito. The main drive behind my invention was that my 15-year-old daughter was unable to enter our local shop owing to a gang of badly behaved teenagers loitering in the doorway and making a nuisance of themselves. As I discovered later, and sales of my device have proved, this was not an isolated case. Can the Members of the European Parliament who are campaigning to ban my device offer an alternative so that the blight of anti social teenage behaviour can otherwise be resolved without involving millions of Euros?

[...]

I find it extraordinary that an inexpensive solution to a serious problem is at risk of being cast aside for what I can only assume are political motives. Every time I have been interviewed on radio or T.V. where members of the public have been asked their view more than 70 per cent were in favour. Many went on to suggest the Civil Liberties campaigner or the M.P.s who wanted to ban the Mosquito come and live at their address. They would then get a taste of what it was like to visit local shops or children’s play areas trying to avoid often drunken and abusive teenagers. They want our streets returned to law-abiding citizens and will support anyone who can help. [...]

Should people be forced to tolerate anti-social behavior, physical attacks and crime, and have their businesses disrupted by gangs driving away their customers, just to avoid being called racist? Many Leftists think so. Yet far more disturbing than the device, is the fact that it's become necessary for so many people to use it just to maintain safety and protect their businesses. There was a time when such devices were not needed. What's happened to the concepts of law and order and a civil society?

Read the whole thing for more details of this fascinating and simple invention, and the political attempts to stop it.
     

Barack Obama; the larger, complete picture

From Thomas Sowell: A Living Lie

An e-mail from a reader said that, while Hillary Clinton tells lies, Barack Obama is himself a lie. That is becoming painfully apparent with each new revelation of how drastically his carefully crafted image this election year contrasts with what he has actually been saying and doing for many years.

[...]

Speaking privately to supporters in heavily left-liberal San Francisco, Obama let down his hair and described working class people in Pennsylvania as so "bitter" that they "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them."

Like so much that Obama has said and done over the years, this is standard stuff on the far left, where guns and religion are regarded as signs of psychological dysfunction -- and where opinions different from those of the left are ascribed to emotions ("bitter" in this case), rather than to arguments that need to be answered.

Like so many others on the left, Obama rejects "stereotypes" when they are stereotypes he doesn't like but blithely throws around his own stereotypes about "a typical white person" or "bitter" gun-toting, religious and racist working class people.

[...]

However inconsistent Obama's words, his behavior has been remarkably consistent over the years. He has sought out and joined with the radical, anti-Western left, whether Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers of the terrorist Weatherman underground or pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli Rashid Khalidi.

Obama is also part of a long tradition on the left of being for the working class in the abstract, or as people potentially useful for the purposes of the left, but having disdain or contempt for them as human beings.

Karl Marx said, "The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing." In other words, they mattered only in so far as they were willing to carry out the Marxist agenda.

[...]

It is understandable that young people are so strongly attracted to Obama. Youth is another name for inexperience -- and experience is what is most needed when dealing with skillful and charismatic demagogues. [...]

(bold emphasis mine) This describes so well what I was trying to explain about the wealthly San Francisco Democrats Obama was addressing: they purport to be for the working class, but they actually despise them. It was hard to pick excerpts from this, Thomas packed in so many relevant points, about Obama's senate record and much more. It's well worth reading the whole article.


John Fund at the WSJ also looks at Obama's flaws, and some of the reasons that they are only being examined now:

Obama's Flaws Multiply

Barack Obama's San Francisco-Democrat comment last week – about how alienated working-class voters "cling to guns or religion" – is already famous. But the fact that his aides tell reporters he is privately bewildered that anybody took offense is even more remarkable.

[...]

Mr. Obama has prospered in Democratic primaries. But as John Harris and Jim VandeHei note in Politico.com, that's in part because these primaries have "been an exercise in self-censorship" about Mr. Obama's weaknesses. It is "indisputably true," they write, that "Obama is on the brink of the Democratic nomination without having had to confront head-on the evidence about his general election challenges."

There are many. His statements that he wants to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq, combined with his lack of foreign policy experience, could hurt him. And his aides are hard pressed to come up with any deviations in a voting record the nonpartisan National Journal calls the most liberal of any U.S. Senator.

As a state legislator he was even more off-center. In 1996, he opposed the Defense of Marriage Act, which the Senate approved 85-14 and President Clinton signed into law. He twice voted "present" on a bill to ban partial-birth abortions. In 1999, he was the only state senator to oppose a law that prohibited early prison release for sex offenders.

Mr. Obama also backed a total ban on handguns, a move his campaign now says was the result of a rogue aide filling out a questionnaire. But Mr. Obama's own handwritten notes were found on the questionnaire, calling into question the campaign's version of what happened.

Everyone knows Mrs. Clinton's electoral vulnerabilities – GOP consultant Mike Murphy jokes that "half of the country thinks she rides a broom." But Mr. Obama has shown weakness with key Democratic constituencies. He's had to fend off concerns about his Middle East policies with Jewish voters; he's also won only a third of Hispanic primary voters.

Then there is trade, where his insincerity is at least as clumsy as Mrs. Clinton's. During the San Francisco episode, Mr. Obama had a throwaway line about how working-class voters fixate on "anti-trade sentiment" in order to vent their frustrations. But isn't it Barack Obama who has been spending months stirring up "anti-trade sentiment?" He has threatened to yank the U.S. out of the North American Free Trade Agreement unless Canada and Mexico renegotiate it. Last week, he denounced the Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

According to Canadian diplomats, top Obama economic adviser Austan Goolsbee admitted to them that they could dismiss his man's anti-Nafta rhetoric. All of this makes Democrats wonder if Mr. Obama is ready for prime time.

But they have themselves to blame for letting him get this far largely unexamined. While Republicans tend to nominate their best-known candidate from previous nomination battles (Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and now John McCain), Democrats often fall in love during a first date. They are then surprised when all the relatives don't think he's splendid. [...]

That's almost laughable, except that the Democrats have take "emotional thinking" so far that Obama is practically already nominated, without even being thoroughly vetted and examined. I'm not sure which is more disturbing: the fact that he made it this far without being questioned and examined, or the fact that none of this seems to matter in the polls, as there seems to be a large mass of emotional thinkers who are going to follow their "feelings" and vote for him no matter what.

Also, I'm sure many of the Democrats running the party these days knew all these things, and didn't care. The Party has gone so far left, and they believe the American Public is so stupid, that they could ignore the inconvenient truths about him, and sell Obama "emotionally" as a Rockstar/Messiah/American Idol. Facts don't matter anymore, IF you can distract enough people from looking at them.


Neal Boortz has some more info on Obama's finances:

OBAMA'S DONATIONS

Interesting facts ... for anyone who thinks it matters.