Blogs For Victory

The editors of The Atlantic ponder:

What hidden issues like this lurk in a Citigroup bankruptcy? Compared to Citigroup, Lehman was a simple entity; it borrowed some money, it issued some securities, it bought and sold some other securities. Citigroup is a bank, a trading operation, an insurer . . . and it has commercial banking operations in something like 119 countries, all of whom have their own opinion about what should happen to the company, and regulatory authority over at least a piece of it. It’s tempting to think that the Lehman bankruptcy has already exposed the potential problems from any collapse.

The actual answer: its assets will be picked up for a song by other enterprises which weren’t as boneheaded as Citi and after a few years, most people will forget there ever was a Citi for us to worry about. Its called life – and some times it doesn’t work out the way we like.

Attempts to keep failed corporations like Citi alive via infusions of taxpayer dollars are foolish and counter-productive. They just put off the day of reckoning and ensure that when it does come, it will be worse than otherwise.

He was railing in the campaign about high corporate profits and how they need to be stopped.

Mission Accomplished, Mr. President.

Is this straight out of George Orwell’s 1984, or much ado about nothing?

ChangeTracker, our handy tool that watches for changes on White House Web sites, noticed wide changes to the whitehouse.gov biography of George W. Bush.

References to Bush creating “prosperity” through “an ownership society” are stripped in the new version, and praise of the No Child Left Behind Act has been softened.

We contacted the White House for comment, and a spokesman told us that the version of the biography currently on Whitehouse.gov is actually not new, but an old one written at the end of the Bush administration.

Our research says otherwise. The biography preserved in the National Archives is a near-perfect match for the old version, suggesting that the version now on Whitehouse.gov is, indeed, new. (Peter Bray, founder of Versionista, the system that drives ChangeTracker, just wrote a piece in Slate about the changes.)

Politics and Critical Thinking finds the whole thing suspicious…

Is this standard practice or even a big deal? I don’t know, but for some reason I found this unsettling because of the sneakiness and denial. There is much truth in the statement, “To the victors go the spoils.” But that is usually left to a conqueror, not a publicly elected official. I just wonder how many more “changes” they are going to enact when it comes time to start covering for their failures?

Good question.

Obama took a question from the New York Times asking if he was a Socialist. He brushed off the question and later felt the need to call reporters from the Oval Office to “clarify” his response.

oF course, the question is rather silly… we already knew he was (and is) a Socialist.

Can someone say “too little’ too late?”

President Barack Obama has chided his attorney general, Eric Holder Jr., for describing America as a “nation of cowards” when discussing race, wading into a tumult that flared over Holder’s indictment of the way this country talks about ethnicity.

“I think it’s fair to say that if I had been advising my attorney general, we would have used different language,” Obama said in a mild rebuke from America’s first black president to its first black attorney general.

In an interview with The New York Times on Friday, the president said that despite Holder’s choice of words, he had a point.

“We’re oftentimes uncomfortable with talking about race until there’s some sort of racial flare-up or conflict,” he said, adding, “We could probably be more constructive in facing up to sort of the painful legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and discrimination.”

In fact, not only was this too little too late, but Barack Hussein Obama essential agreed with Holder’s ridiculous assertion.

It seems like everyday Obama is determined to prove to the country that he wasn’t ready to be president. Between his failure to put a cabinet together or nominate individuals who aren’t ethically challenged, abandoning his campaign promise of bipartisanship, blatantly lying about earmarks in the stimulus bill, growing the national debt in 8 weeks quicker than any past president has, attacking his media critics, or insulting the UK, it is quite clear this guy is an amateur who has no business in the White House.

The disgusting nature of liberalism, at its worst:

…now the philanthropic world has something else to worry about. Today the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP), a research and advocacy group, will release a report offering “benchmarks to assess foundation performance.” Its real aim is to push philanthropic organizations into ignoring donor intent and instead giving grants based on political considerations.

The committee is part of a rising tide of politicians and activists who are working to change the face of American philanthropy — and not for the better.

The report, titled “Criteria for Philanthropy at its Best,” advises foundations to “provide at least 50 percent of grant dollars to benefit lower-income communities, communities of color, and other marginalized groups, broadly defined.” The committee looked at 809 of the largest foundations in the country, whose combined three-year grants totaled almost $15 billion, and concluded that the majority of foundations are “eschewing the needs of the most vulnerable in our society” by neglecting “marginalized groups.”

Two years ago, an advocacy group in San Francisco called Greenlining began releasing similar reports. Greenlining’s aim then was to pass legislation in California mandating that foundations report to the public the percentage of their dollars given to “minority-led” organizations and the percentage of their boards and staffs made up by racial and ethnic minorities. The legislation was dropped when several foundations promised to donate money to causes Greenlining favored.

Now Greenlining has put out reports in Florida, Pennsylvania and New York trying to shame foundations into distributing grants differently, as well as pressure them into recruiting more “diverse” board and staff members. The NCRP report picks up on this theme to suggest that foundation boards and staffs should include people with a “diversity of perspectives.”

To translate from the liberalese: “This is a nice, little charity you have going here – be a shame if something were to happen do it. Know what I mean?”

Real charities – to differentiate from the more bogus charities which go by the name of ACORN and PUSH, for instance – have to achieve results in order to keep the donations coming in…and there are just tens of billions of dollars floating through these hard working and dedicated charities. And what the heck does all that money do? Buy food and clothing? Provide a little medical care? What’s that all about? Liberal layabouts need some swag – and so the shakedown is on. Having already held up the government and corporations for ransom, the only large pot of money untapped by corrupt liberal “charity” groups is, well, charity money. You kick in that $5 to United Way, and now you can be pleased to know that 10 or 20 cents of that money will flow over to some “community organizer” who lives in a rich neighborhood while “organizing” a poor neighborhood.

Cool, huh?

Welcome to Barack Obama’s America, boys and girls.

The must-see video of the year.

8,000 in Orange Country, California:

They’re revolting. Families with children, bikers, seniors, pirates – by the thousands descended on a Fullerton bar Saturday to join talk show hosts John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou of KFI in protesting tax increases recently approved in Sacramento.

Police estimated that some 8,000 people came to the Slidebar Café in downtown Fullerton to listen to The John & Ken Show.

“I expected a lot and it was way more than I expected,” said co-host John Kobylt.

The talk show hosts put forward an ambitious goal for their Tax Revolt 2009 live broadcast that ran for more than three hours.

“The purpose is to vote down Prop 1A on May 19 because it’s a two-year tax extension,” said Kobylt. “The purpose is to tell people how their Republican legislators lie about their votes. The purpose is to get support to recall Schwarzennegger, (Assemblyman) Anthony Adams, (Assemblyman) Jeff Miller, and everybody else.”

Some wore buttons. One man brought a bloody effigy head of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and waved it from the end of a pike, while the crowd joined their hosts in a chant of “Repeal, recall, revolt.”

Please note the ire being directed at “moderate” Republicans who are trying to be bi-partisan and do the people’s business and make the hard choices and yadda, yadda, yadda…Democrats are beneath contempt on this issue, but the GOP is expected to be the party of the people, and the people are demanding the GOP live up to its ideals. And a good thing, too.

Let this be a warning to any GOPer out there who wants the GOP to pursue a more liberal line on things – that nonsense might sell in New York and DC, but it isn’t going to sell anywhere else.

UPDATE: Click here for the picture which really captures the moment.

Amnesty International enters the Prop 8 debate:

Amnesty International is calling on the California Supreme Court to overturn California’s Proposition 8, the voter-passed amendment that enshrined the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman in the state constitution

In anticipation of a case challenging the validity of Proposition 8 being heard this week in the California Supreme Court, Dalia Hashad, Amnesty International (AI) USA Policy Director issued a statement, outlining AI’s position in favor of homosexual “marriage” and demanding that the court ignore the referendum that passed the Proposition.

“Amnesty International opposes discrimination in civil marriage. But this case is not just about same-sex marriage,” reads the statement. “It is about the basic human right to be treated equally under the law, without regard to an individual’s sexual orientation, race, religion or gender.

“States should never withhold rights based on minority status. Denying equal civil recognition of same-sex relationships compounds the effects of discrimination, undermines other rights, such as the right to housing or social security and tragically, stigmatizes those relationships in ways that can fuel further discrimination.”

There are two equally insane strands of liberal thought converging here:

1. A constitution, of any sort, must secure the broadest, most liberal concept of what human rights are.

2. A constitution does not in any way, shape or form permit the people to do anything liberals disagree with.

Even supposing you believe that same-sex marriage is a basic human right (which, in itself, is an insane idea because you can’t have a right to do a thing which requires the voluntary cooperation of more than one person), it is still a fact that governments are instituted among men to secure basic human rights and derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. The enforcement of the Amendments to our constitution is non-controversial because they were placed in the constitution by the consent of the governed – the reason we’re still involved, more than three decades on, in a contentious debate over abortion is because a few judges placed abortion rights in the constitution without the consent of the governed. Now along comes liberalism with its new-found right to same-sex marriage and an insistence that the consent of the people is not required to enforce this alleged right.

The anti-human nature of liberalism is starkly displayed here – so in love with the concept of humanity, liberalism finds it impossible to love actual, individual humans. If a human is opposed to liberalism it is, according to liberals, the result of wickedness or idiocy, in neither case should liberals consider dissent from liberalism to be valid. Human beings, after giving it careful consideration over many years and hearing the argument well presented from both sides of the issue have repeatedly and by strong to overwhelming majorities decreed that whatever else anyone wishes to do, marriage shall be a union of one man and one woman. This is, of course, in contravention of liberal thinking, and thus the people have to be taken out of the equation – and so we have the liberal resort to judges to try and over turn the will of the people.

Some years back I opined on a blog that modern liberals are junior-league Leninists – meaning they are just as sure of themselves as Lenin and just as insistent upon the crushing of dissent, but they thus far lack the sheer insanity of a Lenin which allowed him to murder millions of people to advance his cause. I begin to wonder if the junior-league Leninsts are trying to graduate to the major league…

The news story:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Thursday he’d seriously consider running for president in 2012.

With the mantle of the Republican Party still unclaimed, Gingrich told reporters in Ashland, Va., before a speech to Randolph-Macon College that he and his family would examine the political environment in early 2011, and “look seriously at whether or not we think it’s necessary to do it.”

“And if we think it’s necessary we’ll probably do it. And if it isn’t necessary we probably won’t do it,” he said, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Certainly, Gingrich is one of the most intelligent men in American politics, but I think his negatives are waaaay too high for him to actually win, should he secure the nomination. On the other hand, he’d swiftly raise the level of debate in the GOP primary were he to run, even if he didn’t get the nomination. And if Obama is riding high in 2012 (highly unlikely), then a Gingrich campaign would shred Obama, even if Obama won in the end – nothing like having a real intellect take on a phony like Obama.