Two sporting extravaganzas, a record-breaking medal haul for Britain, disabled sport showcased as never before … no wonder even the Aussies say it was better than Sydney...
Charlotte, N.C. - Julian Castro is no Barack Obama. And for that, Democrats have themselves to blame.Continue reading.
The focus of this week's Democratic convention was President Obama. Lost in the adulation was the diminished state to which he has brought his broader party. Today's Democrats are a shadow of 2008—struggling for re-election, isolated to a handful of states, lacking reform ideas, bereft of a future political bench. It has been a stunning slide.
The speech by Mr. Castro, the young and charismatic mayor of San Antonio, was the Democrats' attempt to recapture the party optimism that then-Senate candidate Obama sparked at the 2004 convention. John Kerry didn't win, but that year marked the start of an ambitious Democratic plan to revitalize the party.
In 2006, Nancy Pelosi muzzled her liberal inclinations to recruit and elect her "Majority Makers"—a crop of moderate and conservative Democrats who won Republican districts and delivered control of the House for the first time in 14 years.
Democrats in 2006 also claimed the Senate, with savvy victories in states like Montana and Virginia. The party thumped Republicans in gubernatorial races, winning in the South (Arkansas), the Mountain West (Colorado), and in Ohio (for the first time since 1991). A vibrant candidate Obama further boosted Democratic ranks in 2008.
By 2009, President Obama presided over what could fairly be called a big-tent coalition. The Blue Dog caucus had swelled to 51 members, representing plenty of conservative America. Democrats held the majority of governorships. Mr. Obama had won historic victories in Virginia and North Carolina. The prediction of liberal demographers John Judis and Ruy Teixeira's 2004 book, "The Emerging Democratic Majority"—lasting progressive dominance via a coalition of minorities, women, suburbanites and professionals—attracted greater attention among political analysts.
It took Mr. Obama two years to destroy this potential, with an agenda that forced his party to field vote after debilitating vote—stimulus, ObamaCare, spending, climate change. The public backlash, combined with the president's mismanagement of the economy, has reversed Democrats' electoral gains and left a party smaller than at any time since the mid-1990s.
Of the 21 Blue Dogs elected since 2006, five remain in office. The caucus is on the verge of extinction...
Overall, the Democrats put on an effective show. With the possible exception of the McGovern convention, this was the most left-leaning Democratic gathering in memory. Some of that may have been counterproductive, particularly on social issues. To the extent that Republicans dismiss this convention as either a failure or relatively meaningless, however, I think we’re fooling ourselves.More at the link.
This election could go either way. If Obama squeaks by, he will have done so with the help of a Democratic party that has taken a large, open, and disturbingly leftist turn. I think we’re missing the significance of that. It is completely accurate to say that the Democrats are pushing a bogus reformulation of the American way of life — slapping a bunch of flags on their Julia ad and turning classic conceptions of civic and religious community into covers for a cradle-to-grave welfare state. Unfortunately, this way of thinking is becoming the new normal in this country, and Obama and his convention have only helped to cement the change.
Conservatives can puncture these arguments all we like, but we can’t cut through the media filter. More than that, the conservative case can’t break through the left-controlled education system that has profoundly shaped the Millennials. True, youth unemployment is giving many second thoughts about Obama, yet it’s been more a matter of sapping Millennial enthusiasm than of changing attitudes and ideas.
Do demographics doom the expansive liberal welfare state, regardless? In some sense, they do. Yet if Obama is in the driver’s seat as our fiscal woes mount, he will use the crisis to further his restructuring. California is our advance guard — our Greece — yet their budget crisis is two months away from prompting one of the boldest redistributionist transformations this country has seen in years (even if barely anyone knows it yet).
Only the Romney campaign can cut through the cultural, educational, and media filters and force a debate over the Obama Democrats’ bogus redefinition of the American dream. The media can ignore what conservatives say, but they still have to cover the candidate. With the exception of his welfare ads, however, the Romney campaign has avoided an assault on Obama’s ideology. Romney’s entirely plausible strategy is to downplay the ideological battle (Ryan nomination notwithstanding).
I usually don’t devote much time to thinking about the third tier Democrat enablers who make up much of the press. This includes anyone at Buzzfeed, anyone at Politico, Ezra Klein, Greg Sargent, and, of course, Dave Weigel.Well, it's not just "this fall," but otherwise a very nice summary.
Today I’m going to make and exception for Weigel because his recent article in Slate is really instructive on how the media operates and how it expects us to operate....
According to Weigel, it is “trolling” to report on the Democrats excising God from their platform and their kowtowing to their radical islamist element by not acknowledging Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is somehow “distracting.” He thinks that the goat rope that followed, the booing of the mention on God and the hapless, befuddled Anthony Villaraigosa’s declaring against all evidence that two-thirds of the body had voted to restore both God and Jerusalem to the platform. It is “trolling” to mention a prominent California delegate compared us to Nazis.
In short, for conservatives to report anything that interferes with the organized fellatio of Obama that passed for mainstream media coverage of the Democrat convention is equivalent to internet trolling.
This is what we are up against this fall. We aren’t fighting bias in the media, we are contending with palpable hostility from a media that is viscerally committed to the re-election of Barack Obama.
MALIBU, Calif. (KTLA) -- Prosecutors on Friday charged a homeless man with animal cruelty, accusing him of killing a pelican with his bare hands.And at Los Angeles Daily News, "Hungry homeless man sentenced to 60 days in jail for choking pelican to death."
Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies arrested 30-year-old Sergio Alvarez late Wednesday afternoon after horrified witnesses claimed they saw the man trying to choke a pelican near the Malibu Pier.
The pelican struggled briefly before going limp in Alvarez's hands, according to sheriff's reports.
The evidence is overwhelming that acceptable anti-Semitism has moved from right to left on the political continuum, and that its philosophical home now resides in the Democratic party, which has become less the party of liberals than of leftists. Even before Al Sharpton stood as a presidential candidate last year, Democratic politicians genuflecting for black votes--Al Gore, Bill Bradley, and Hillary Clinton, for example--often trekked up to Harlem to kiss his ring. And yet, this was a man who in previous years had either led or instigated two anti-Jewish demonstrations, one in Crown Heights and one in Harlem, which together resulted in the deaths of eight people. Does that matter to Democrats and John Kerry? Apparently not. Sharpton was rewarded with a choice slot at the Democratic National Convention, something that is impossible to imagine being given to the likes of former Republican David Duke, whose incitements have frankly born far less blood than Sharpton's.Yeah, well, Sharpton's a star on the far-left hate-channel MSNBC, so there you go.
Maybe Democrats have some slick salesmen, like Bill Clinton and our current president, who can sell you swampland and have you convinced that you’ve bought choice beachfront property.Hmm...
But the omission of any mention of God and recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital from the Democratic Party platform, which were in it in 2008, and then the almost failed attempt to add them after the fact, showed the clear truth about the 2012 Democratic Party.
It took three boisterous floor votes to add these principles to the platform – and listening to the ayes and nays in the third vote, it is questionable that they actually got the two thirds that were needed.
The omission of these key principles from the Democratic platform was the party equivalent of what journalist Michael Kinsley calls a political gaffe – when a politician inadvertently says what he really believes.
Party operatives panicked when they realized that the platform, as initially drafted, showed today’s Democrats exactly for who they are – the home base for the nihilism, radical moral relativism and welfare statism that defines today’s far left.
But the Democrats are the party of the entertainment industry. They know how to create fiction and appeal to fantasies.
So the party of the radical left brands Republicans as extremists...
Dinesh D’Souza found a theory — the anti-colonialist ideology of Obama’s Kenyan absentee father — which explains Obama. I found the theory interesting, but unnecessary.Continue reading.
There are plenty of left-wing politicians and academics who share the same desire to bring American down several notches, who accept the rise of Islamists as necessary to counter the West and Israel, and who view government as a tool for redistribution of wealth both domestically and internationally … and who did not have an anti-colonial Kenyan father.
Whether Obama is a product of his desire to emulate his father’s anti-colonialism, or just another leftist product of our educational system and a left-wing upbringing, the result is the same. We have a disaster on our hands.
The film demonstrates how Obama cunningly used race both for his advancement and to deflect scrutiny of his ideology.
I did not need this movie to know that. Almost four years ago I saw that Obama’s use of race as a political weapon was the defining byproduct of the 2008 campaign
The most depressing aspect of the film was the cover-up by the mainstream media. Obama was the least vetted candidate ever, someone with associations which would have been disqualifying for anyone else.
That too was no surprise.
The TV spot, helmed by director Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive), was shot in the iconic Sheats Goldstein Residence in Beverly Hills. This longer version also features shots of a desert landscape.
If you’re going to read the whole article at Gawker, be prepared to cope with feelings of outrage at how the “born that way” theory of homosexuality has been extended to pedophilia.The Gawker article in question is "Born This Way: Sympathy and Science for Those Who Want to Have Sex with Children." It's so unmentionably depraved I prefer not to link. I did read Ta-Nehisi's post and was frankly surprised he doesn't go there --- surprised, because if you're progressive and favor homosexual rights it's not a stretch to legitimize pedophilia, which is, of course, child rape. Oh, you can get in trouble for saying it (that pesky thing called political correctness), but again, read that depraved piece at Gawker and you'll see what I mean.
The writer of the article, Cord Jefferson, is at pains to distinguish between the term pedophile and the term child molester and, although few parents will give a damn about such semantics, it is enlightening in this regard: The scientists interviewed by Jefferson are interested in determining how crime can be prevented by persuading pedophiles not to act on their “sexual orientation.”
Yet this possibility — that persons need not act on their idiosyncratic sexual impulses – is entirely rejected by the rights-oriented legal philosophy that inspired Justice Kennedy’s Lawrence decision or Judge Wolf”s ruling in the Kosilek case. Both Kennedy and Wolf seem to presume that people have a right to satisfy their sexual desires, and there was an entire caucus at the Democrat convention dedicated to defending such rights.
If, however, the safety of citizens requires that certain sexual desires be sternly repressed, the objection of “rights” loses its force, and even such a liberal as Ta-Nehisi Coates is outraged by the tone of moral neutrality with which Cord Jefferson examines the claims of scientists about pedophilia as a sexual orientation.
Noel Sheppard notes that the Gawker writer is a “self-professed progressive,” and it is remarkable how the logic of progressivism inexorably leads to conclusions that even progressives find themselves compelled to reject — at least for now, that is.
Perhaps, as with homosexuality, our academic, legal, scientific and cultural elites can successfully destigmatize pedophilia, upending society’s moral consensus in such a way that our dread of child molesters is replaced by a horror at the benighted bigotry of those who fail to understand the science that proclaims that they’re “born that way,” and that this endows pedophiles with rights which no well-meaning person can oppose or criticize.
Oh, what wonders the “emerging awareness” provides!
There are two reasons for Americans' enduring interest and concern about Israel. And they were both revealed this week at the Democratic National Convention when the story broke about how this year's Democratic platform differs from its 2008 platform. First it was reported that the platform contained no mention of God.No doubt. And read it all at the link.
Then it was reported that unlike the 2008 platform, this year's Democratic Party platform made no mention of Jerusalem as Israel's capital.
This year's platform watered down the language on Israel in other significant ways as well.
It did not refer to Israel as the US's "strongest ally" in the Middle East. It did not call for the continued eschewal of the Hamas terror group by the international community. It did not mention US opposition to the Palestinian demand for the so-called "right of return" - through which Israel would be destroyed by an influx of millions of foreign Arabs in the framework of a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians. But whereas these other deletions were generally ignored, the platform's silence on Jerusalem generated a maelstrom of criticism that exceeded even its deletion of God.
Significantly, rather than treat the deletions of God and Jerusalem as separate issues, the media and the Democrats themselves presented them as two sides of the same coin. When on Wednesday the party's leadership decided to restore the language of the 2008 platform on God and Jerusalem - but not on Hamas, the so-called "right of return," and Israel's strategic significance to the US - they opted to do so in the same amendment.
The widespread perception of God and Jerusalem as related issues tells us something important about the American character. And it tells us something equally important about Obama and the party he leads.
Prof. Walter Russell Mead described Israel's place in the American mindset last year. As he put it, "Israel matters in American politics like almost no other country on earth. Well beyond the American Jewish and the Protestant fundamentalist communities, the people and the story of Israel stir some of the deepest and most mysterious reaches of the American soul. The idea of Jewish and Israeli exceptionalism is profoundly tied to the idea of American exceptionalism. The belief that God favors and protects Israel is connected to the idea that God favors and protects America."
Mead continued, "Being pro-Israel matters in American mass politics because the public mind believes at a deep level that to be pro-Israel is to be pro-America and pro-faith. Substantial numbers of voters believe that politicians who don't 'get' Israel also don't 'get' America and don't 'get' God."
By removing both God and Jerusalem from the platform, Obama and his fellow Democrats stirred the furies of that American soul at its foundations.
They showed they don't "get" Israel or God. And by extension, they don't "get" America.
Caballero Video in Canoga Park, one of the area's oldest pornography studios, sought to pay homage to Ben & Jerry's with its X-rated "Ben & Cherry's" flicks. The ice cream maker wasn't impressed.Well, Ben and Jerry couldn't be reached for comment because they're probably out packing fudge at a nearby Occupy Wall Street protest, the damned pervert freaks!
The Vermont company, known for frozen treats such as Boston Cream Pie, Peanut Butter Cups and Chocolate Fudge Brownie, sued Caballero this week in federal court alleging trademark infringement.
The DVDs, according to the filing, involve "blatant and outrageous copying and misappropriation of the Ben & Jerry's intellectual property." Ben & Jerry's won a court order temporarily halting the studio from marketing and selling titles such as "Boston Cream Thighs," "Peanut Butter D-Cups" and "Chocolate Fudge Babes."
The DVD producer, known officially as Rodax Distributors Inc., must stop offering the 10 titles in its Ben & Cherry's series as the case proceeds and remove all online mention of the X-rated products, according to the court order.
Caballero also was ordered to get rid of packaging that mimicked Ben & Jerry's distinctive containers, which feature cows, grassy fields, puffy clouds and the slogan "Vermont's Finest." Caballero's version incorporated similar elements as well as actresses posing seductively under the phrase "Porno's Finest."
Neither Caballero nor Ben & Jerry's could be reached for comment.
Sadly the Democrat party has moved so far left it knocking on the door of communism and I really don't believe the rank and file party members understand the day of the blue dog is gone now we're left with misfits and radicals.So true.
Sandra Fluke has been blessed with a quarter-million dollars of elite education, and, on the evidence of Wednesday night, is entirely incapable of making a coherent argument. She has enjoyed the leisurely decade-long varsity once reserved for the minor sons of Mitteleuropean grand dukes, and she has concluded that the most urgent need facing the Brokest Nation in History is for someone else to pay for the contraception of 30-year-old children. She says the choice facing America is whether to be “a country where we mean it when we talk about personal freedom, or one where that freedom doesn’t apply to our bodies and our voices” — and, even as the words fall leaden from her lips, she doesn’t seem to comprehend that Catholic institutions think their “voices” ought to have freedom, too, or that Obamacare seizes jurisdiction over “our bodies” and has 16,000 new IRS agents ready to fine us for not making arrangements for “our” pancreases and “our” bladders that meet the approval of the commissars. Sexual liberty, even as every other liberty withers, is all that matters: A middle-school girl is free to get an abortion without parental consent, but if she puts a lemonade stand on her lawn she’ll be fined. What a bleak and reductive concept of “personal freedom.”
FRANKFURT — The European Central Bank on Thursday took its most ambitious step yet toward easing the euro zone crisis, throwing its unlimited financial clout behind an effort to protect Spain and Italy from financial collapse."Unlimited financial clout."
Mario Draghi, the president of the central bank, won nearly unanimous support from the bank’s board to buy vast amounts of government bonds, a move that would relieve investor pressure on troubled countries but also effectively spread responsibility for repaying national debts to the euro zone countries as a group.
The decision propels political leaders farther down the uncertain and winding road toward a Europe with centralized control over government spending and economic policy, instead of a collection of nation states that sometimes seem to share little more than a currency and a slumping regional economy.
Mr. Draghi demonstrated once again that he may be Europe’s most powerful leader, perhaps the only one capable of brokering an accord among politicians whose national concerns and mistrust of one another have allowed the crisis to boil for two and a half years.
But there is a risk once again that monetary policy is moving faster than political leaders are able to create the institutions, such as a European bank supervisor, needed to ensure the survival of the common currency.
For the central bank itself, the pledge on Thursday to buy bonds from sovereign states, in conjunction with a fund financed by governments in the 17 European Union nations that use the euro, is a major evolution from its original narrow mandate to restrain inflation.
The bank and Mr. Draghi had the quiet support of all European leaders in taking this latest action, aimed at keeping bond speculators from driving Spain and Italy into budget-blowing borrowing costs. “The euro is irreversible,” he repeated several times Thursday.
