Reading The American Spectator today, Norman Podhoertz in the Wall Street Journal and Nile Gardiner of the UK Telegraph, reminded me of Evan Thomas (grandson of that loser but perennial socialist presidential candidate, Norman Thomas) declaring to Chris “tingly leg” Matthews in 2009 that “Obama is sorta god.”
(As an aside, Chris really should have this tingly leg thing checked out. It could be neuropathy caused by undiagnosed diabetes or something and maybe shove himself away from those jelly doughnuts, just in case it is. A weekly workout in the MSNBC gym wouldn’t hurt him, either. His god-dess Michelle will be the first to tell him, and the rest of us, that obesity is the number 1 cause of diabetes.)
But I digress and that’s a whole other blog.
Those were the days, weren’t they? Obama on the cover of every “news” magazine in the grocery store checkout line with the celestial halo around him, head upturned and nose in the air; the frown of determination and decisiveness across his face.
Under the spell of the messiah on Rolling Stone
Yes, Evan, he really was above us – on a ledge of your making. And every journalist in the nation, nay world, was all too quick and willing to acquiesce to their new found god Obama. His was the soaring rhetoric that was going to heal the world:
In the American Spectator, George Neumayr relates that “Obama loomed even larger than Lincoln. He was a “Lightworker,” as San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford put it in 2008, “that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment.” [A bizarre earthly experiment? Does anyone really talk like this? Maybe if you were in a 70’s consciousness raising group, or something…]
Now that the Lightworker has fallen to earth and the glorious new way of being on the planet turns out to be a lowered credit rating, some of his prominent supporters have fallen silent or resentful. Heady Lincoln comparisons have given way to Carter comparisons, sotto voce: “We are watching him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes,” an anonymous Democratic Senator said to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
Yep, well it’s a long, hard fall when you’re up “above the world” looking down. It’s an even harder fall when you start to believe all the mythology about yourself.
The new Emperial president.
There is a disturbing let them eat cake mentality projected by the Obama White House … No US presidency in modern times has been more elitist or out of touch than the present one, which exudes the kind of condescending left-wing snobbery that is normally the preserve of an ivory tower common room. President Obama looks increasingly aloof and out of sync with the American people, three quarters of whom now believe the country is heading down the wrong track – including a staggering 58 percent of Democrats, according to Rasmussen.Nile Gardiner/UK Telegraph
Norman Podhoretz says that his “own answer to the question, “What Happened to Obama?” is that nothing happened to him. He is still the same anti-American leftist he was before becoming our president, and it is this rather than inexperience or incompetence or weakness or stupidity that accounts for the richly deserved failure both at home and abroad of the policies stemming from that reprehensible cast of mind.”
There Goes the Neighborhood
Maybe his presence brought down property values, maybe he got hit by the real estate bubble, or maybe he just overpaid. Whatever the case, London’s Guardian reports Osama bin Laden’s house isn’t worth as much as had been advertised:
After Sunday night’s dramatic raid by US Navy Seals, a senior Obama administration official told reporters that the property, an “extraordinarily unique compound” in an “affluent suburb,” was valued at around $1m.
But two property professionals in Abbottabad–a quiet, military-dominated town–said that much of that was incorrect. Based on the size of the plot and the house, which was built in 2005, and using recent property sales as a guide, they estimated that it would fetch no more than $250,000 on the current market.
Assuming bin Laden made the customary 20% down payment and took out a mortgage for $800,000 in 2005, he’s going to be underwater for a long time.
My brother-in-law is a wheat farmer and reads websites daily about wheat prices, grain news and agri-business in general. He read a story last week, that he since can’t find and I can’t find when I googled it, which makes me wonder if the story was scrubbed, about George Soros purchasing grain elevators in Nebraska. These particular elevators are apparently the last stop before the wheat is shipped out of the county.
Please read on. I did find some interesting stories about Soros and his acquistion of other grain and grain elevators. The name of his company is Gavilon and according to several agri-business sites, it’s the 3rd largest business, now just behind ADM (Archer Daniels Midland) and Cargill. Last fall he also purchased a huge amount of the grain business in Australia. This from Agrimoney.com in December:
AWB [Austrailan wheat] was in talks to sell a stake in its domestic grains handling business to US-based Gavilon before the Australian group became a takeover target.
Gavilon, which is backed by George Soros’s Soros Fund Management has since unveiled its own expansion plans in Australia, the southern hemisphere’s top wheat-exporting target.
Soros is not just a tumor in America, he’s a global cancer.
This from Reuters on March 24th, which makes no mention of Soros:
Gavilon acquisition allows it to support PNW export mkt
* Elevator purchase equates to 8.4 million bushel capacity
(Reuters) – U.S. grain firm Gavilon Grain said on Thursday it will buy Union Elevator and Warehouse’s 16 grain elevators in the Pacific Northwest, the company’s second big purchase of U.S. grain facilities in the last six months.
Privately held Union Elevator, where employees own a significant share of the company, approved the transaction on Wednesday, with sale expected to be completed during the second quarter of 2011.
The purchase of 16 elevators at 12 locations in eastern Washington will expand Gavilon’s grain capacity by 8.4 million bushels.
“The addition of Union Elevator’s grain facilities and origination capabilities position us well to support the growing Pacific Northwest export wheat market and serve the Columbian Basin feed grain market,” Greg Konsor, vice president and general manager of Gavilon Grain, said in a statement.
The Pacific Northwest is the No. 1 wheat export terminal in the United States.
Omaha, Nebraska-based Gavilon — a commodity trading firm formed in 2008 when ConAgra Foods (CAG.N) sold it to investors — purchased grain handler DeBruce Companies last year, making it the third-largest U.S. grain storage network behind Archer Daniels Midland (ADM.N) and Cargill Inc [CARG.UL].
In October (also from Reuters), a deal was made with Soros backed Gavilon to purchase the privately owned and Kansas City based, DeBruce Grain.
The purchase includes DeBruce’s grain handling facilities, fertilizer distribution network, feed mills and a soybean crushing plant.
DeBruce Grain Inc has grain elevators in Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Texas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama, Indiana, Wisconsin and Mexico, with combined licensed storage capacity in excess of 140 million bushels.
The DeBruce purchase will raise Gavilon’s grain storage capacity to nearly 300 million bushels, making it the No. 3 U.S. grain handler after ADM Grain Co., a unit of Archer Daniels Midland Co (ADM.N), and privately held Cargill Inc., according to data from Milling & Baking News, an industry publication.
According to the Wall Street Journal, DeBruce also owns feed-livestock mills – feed for beef and pork. How soon before Soros starts buying up the feed lots, I wonder?
You can find more interesting information on this topic, Obama and other current events at Barnhardt Capital Management. I highly recommend reading her blog.
Big Thank You to my brother-in-law, Mark for bringing this to our attention.
[…] Mr. Armey has one final piece of advice for the new conservative members he has done so much to elect. “The first rule of conservatism,” he chuckles, “is to accept that if you are true to yourself, Hollywood celebrities will never hug you in public. Ultimately, serving the people and upholding the Constitution will be much more satisfying.”
When someone destroys a Bible, U.S. government officials don’t line up to attack him. President Obama bowed lower than a fawning maitre d’ before the King of Saudi Arabia, a man whose regime destroys Bibles as a matter of state policy, and a man whose depraved religious police forces schoolgirls fleeing from a burning building back into the flames to die because they’d committed the sin of trying to escape without wearing their head scarves. If you show a representation of Mohammed, European commissioners and foreign ministers line up to denounce you. If you show a representation of Jesus Christ immersed in your own urine, you get a government grant for producing a widely admired work of art. Likewise, if you write a play about Jesus having gay sex with Judas Iscariot.
. . .
On the advice of the FBI, she’s [Molly Norris] been forced to go into hiding. If you want to measure the decline in western civilization’s sense of self-preservation, go back to Valentine’s Day 1989, get out the Fleet Street reports on the Salman Rushdie fatwa, and read the outrage of his fellow London literati at what was being done to one of the mainstays of the Hampstead dinner-party circuit. Then compare it with the feeble passivity of Molly Norris’ own colleagues at an American cartoonist being forced to abandon her life: “There is no more Molly”? That’s all the gutless pussies of The Seattle Weekly can say? As James Taranto notes in The Wall Street Journal, even much sought-after Ramadan-banquet constitutional scholar Barack Obama is remarkably silent:
Now Molly Norris, an American citizen, is forced into hiding because she exercised her right to free speech. Will President Obama say a word on her behalf? Does he believe in the First Amendment for anyone other than Muslims?
Who knows? Given his highly selective enthusiasms, you can hardly blame a third of Americans for figuring their president must be Muslim. In a way, that’s the least pathetic explanation: The alternative is that he’s just a craven squish. Which is odd considering he is, supposedly, the most powerful man in the world.
The non-liberal press, i.e. Mark Steyn (NJR), James Taranto (WSJ) and Diana West seem to be the only journalists questioning this double standard in our society and speaking out on this atrocity visited on Molly Norris.
Mr. Obama and his people also mischaracterize where most stimulus dollars go. Their constant prattle about “shovel ready projects” is an attempt to leave the impression that most goes to bricks and mortar. Not true: Only 3.3% of the $814 billion stimulus went to the Federal Highway Administration for highway and bridge projects.
The administration’s misleading statements and obfuscations aren’t limited to the economy. On health care, for example, Mr. Obama continues saying that (a) health-care reform will reduce costs and the deficit, (b) no one who wants to keep existing coverage will lose it, and (c) the law’s cuts in Medicare won’t threaten any senior’s health care. These assertions are laughable.
The president’s habit of exaggeration and misstatement has infected other Democrats. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for example, routinely talks about how the recently passed “Stimulus II” spending bill protected the jobs of police and firemen.
But it didn’t.
Stimulus II consisted of two parts: $10 billion for education and $16 billion for Medicaid. States can’t spend Medicaid money for anything but Medicaid, and they can only spend the education money on education, i.e., they can’t shuffle state funds around. Language allowing Stimulus II dollars to pay for police and firemen didn’t make it out of the Senate. Yet Democratic leaders persist in saying that their latest stimulus has helped keep police and firefighters on the job. The claim is flatly untrue.
It’s kinda funny how somethings come together. They might all turn out to be nothing or they might turn into something, as they kinda meld.
The other day I wrote about my friend in Asheville, the RN who is convinced that something bad is going to happen. In her words – “a total collapse” and before the November elections. Completely unrelated to this, I read an article over the weekend in the Wall St. Journal about something I didn’t understand – the Hindenburg Omen. I understood even less after I read the article because I’m not an investor broker and I don’t have an MBA. Then this morning I was watching yesterday’s episode of Glenn Beck and he explained what I had read a couple days before.
And unknowingly, it was all too similar to what Cheryl and I had talked about on Saturday.
As I said, Cheryl is a liberal. I would have to bind and gag her in order to get her to watch even 10 minutes of Beck. But she and I have been able to remain friends, in spite of our very diametrically opposing political views and I sent her the clip from Fox News with Beck explaining the Hindenburg Omen. I hope she watches it.
It’s almost a goofy coincidence that all 3 of those things came together for me in just 3 days.
Watch the stock market and we’ll see what happens.
Keep this in mind Tuesday night, when or if you hear the president address us on the gulf oil gusher:
A great part of America now understands that this president’s sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.
…
It is a White House that has focused consistently on the sensitivities of the world community—as it is euphemistically known—a body of which the president of the United States frequently appears to view himself as a representative at large.Dorothy Rabinowitz/WSJ
The disaster in the Gulf may well spell the political end of the president and his administration, and that is no cause for joy. It’s not good to have a president in this position—weakened, polarizing and lacking broad public support—less than halfway through his term. That it is his fault is no comfort. It is not good for the stability of the world, or its safety, that the leader of “the indispensable nation” be so weakened. I never until the past 10 years understood the almost moral imperative that an American president maintain a high standing in the eyes of his countrymen.
Peggy Noonan is right: there is no cause for joy in this situation. Like Rush, as much as I’ve wanted to see this president’s ideology fail, this is not a happy moment for America. It’s not only sad but it’s disturbing and frightening. Things are unraveling around the world and we seem to have no control over even what’s happening inside our own borders.
Our most valued allies are drifting in the wind because we are no longer strong enough to back them. Israel is under attack from all sides and the entire Middle East is on an edge not seen in years, while the impotent UN is demanding an investigation into Israel’s reaction to being attacked by “humanitarian” terrorists. At the same time North Korea has torpedoed the South and is continuing to bristle with no demands of an investigation by the UN. Have we demanded one? “Entitled” Greeks are rioting because their nation is sinking and they are afraid they won’t get their benefits. I’ve got news for them and the rest of the world: there will be a generation or 2 who will suffer for the entitlements that can no longer be funded. To coin an overused but completely accurate phrase, it simply cannot be sustained. Iran is making and signing deals, in our face with nations in our hemisphere, who plan to support and get a piece of their nuclear action.
States are boycotting Arizona while the majority of Americans support our attempts to control the tide of criminal activity pouring over our border. Mr. Too-cool-to-be-President says he does not support or endorse boycotts. That’s a real firm stand for freedom! And now we have a gushing black hole in the gulf that is bound to ruin the American coast and countless lives (human and animal) and livelihoods.
The coolest and smartest president we’ve ever had is showing himself for what many of us have known he was, emotionless and clueless. He’s had to be goaded into making an appearance on the beach in Louisiana, into granting Governor Jan Brewer an audience and into only his second press conference in nearly a year. This man who stirred the hearts and tears of so many just 2 short years ago, is unmasked as the real wooden headed ventriloquist dummy that he is.
Those folks who voted for this man and accepted his dogma that America is not exceptional are about to be rudely awakened. Outside this nation, America is viewed as exceptional and the world does count on America but we aren’t there for the world today. Read the headlines and watch the news: the world is unraveling at a frightening pace and America is nowhere to be found. She is MIA.
Our allies and enemies stand slack jawed and in awe that America could elect such naivety and incompetence into the office of President of the United States, but no more stunned than millions of newly awakened Americans will be.
I work with a naturalized Romanian and several Filipinas. Last night they brought up the story of teachers being reassigned or laid off because of their accents. Of course when they told me this story, they didn’t mention that it was teachers being let go, because they didn’t know that part of the story. So this morning I looked for the story, online and found it at the Wall Street Journal.
My daughter’s an elementary school teacher. She teaches immigrant children in a program called ELL – English Language Learner.
About 150,000 of Arizona’s 1.2 million public-school students are classified as English Language Learners. Of the state’s 247 school districts, about 20 have high concentrations of such students, the largest number of which are in the younger grades.
Jane is not supposed to speak Spanish in her classroom in order to teach English to these children.
Needless to say, she’s lost some students in the last couple of weeks, since this law in Arizona was passed. Many of these families are fleeing to California. This has been heartbreaking for her. But she also sees the need for these people to do things the legal way.
The Journal story emphasis is on teachers from Latin countries who are teaching in Arizona, and speak with a heavy accent (that’s a subjective criteria and even I don’t see how that can be fair – a heavy accent to me might not be to you) and do not speak in a grammatically correct way (I can see the importance of that.) And Arizona passed a law long ago that English is the language of the classroom and fluency is mandatory: that means grammatically correct.
Ms. Santa Cruz, the state official, said evaluators weren’t looking at accents alone. “We look at the best models for English pronunciation,” she said. “It becomes an issue when pronunciation affects comprehensibility.”
It would be a lot like having a math teacher in the classroom who can’t add or subtract. Teachers must be fluent in English in order to teach our kids. There is no way to be successful in America if you can’t read, write and speak the language. I would never expect to open business or apply for a job in Japan, for cryin’ out loud if I didn’t know the language. This is not hard to understand. A teachers job is to prepare children to be productive members in the American society and if they can’t even speak the language correctly, why would we want to put our children in their hands?
“Brace yourselves, because the war with Muslims has just begun,” 31-year-old Faisal Shahzad told a federal judge. “Consider me the first droplet of the blood that will follow.”
Stop Sharia in America
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Obamas Wisdom and Terror in the Street
"We can absorb a terrorist attack. We'll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever...we absorbed it and we are stronger."
Diary of a Mad Conservative 