One of the saddest aspects of the current election process is that it has been so trivialized. The mudslinging this time around seems to be much worse than usual, though, of course, it’s bad enough in every cycle. With each candidate calling his opponent everything but a wiccan or some other personification of evil, especially considering the outright lies involved, the voter concludes that he is being marginalized because of his presumed ignorance while the candidates trivialize the whole process.
Or…take the appearances of the political celebs on various and sundry talk-shows. The president, in an obvious effort to shore up his weak party, made the unbelievable mistake of appearing on Comedy Central’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart, playing straight man to Stewart’s jibes/mugging and merely looking silly in the effort, hemming and hawing and hamming it up for the crowd, trivializing his own office. Without a teleprompter, he’s toast.
The prez has also done the other shows – Tonight with Jay Leno; the Late Show with Letterman, CBS’s highest-profile self-admitted adulterer (high-class company); Oprah, with Oprah (big White House Christmas show); but perhaps the worst, The View, with the ladies corralled by Whoopi and Barbara, featuring as much cheesecake thigh and cleavage as possible to go along with their inanities. Okay…I’ve seen only brief clips of these shows but I get the picture. Exercises in trivia!
The media helps in trivializing the process by letting celebs (especially Hollywood types) appear on their programs and in the papers spouting words of wisdom as if they are to be taken more seriously than the average joe, who probably knows more about life than they ever will in their make-believe world, where the biggest news of a day might have to do with the latest starlet to get pregnant or enter detox or both. Who cares, for instance, if Sean Penn delivers a broadside against this country from Venezuela? Jimmy Carter makes a practice of that…or at least he did until Obama came upon the scene.
Candidates often display their unfitness for office by doing desperate things that are so transparent to voters that guffaws are the result. The two democratic candidates in Kentucky furnish two examples. Senate wannabe democrat Jack Conway cited a college prank that his opponent, Rand Paul, helped pull off when he was around nineteen…accused Paul of kidnapping a poor girl but, of course, provided no proof, not even a misdemeanor citation.
House sixth-district incumbent Ben Chandler dug up an episode concerning his opponent, Andy Barr, from his college days when Barr, then nineteen, committed surely the worst felony in history by flashing a false ID in order to buy some booze in Florida on spring break back in the long ago day. Barr didn’t mention this in connection with a state job…but so what? A DUI would have been juicier but, alas, no such was available. At least neither democrat accused his opponent of wife-beating but it’s a lead-pipe cinch that they looked for some mayhem. Republicans pull the same stuff, of course. The point: TRIVIALIZATION of the government!
Outright chicanery (probably criminal) was carried out at least twice this year on the part of former POTUS William Jefferson Clinton. Republican-turned-democrat-for-the-sake-of-holding-his-seat Arlen Specter was in a tough primary-fight with Congressman Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania. Specter was Obama’s choice – nothing better than a turncoat republican in grovel-mode. Clinton (denials all around) “suggested” to Sestak that he skip the primary and accept a job in the administration, thus making Specter a shoo-in in democrat stronghold Pennsylvania. Neither Clinton nor Obama knows much about the military man (Clinton loathes the military) and couldn’t have known that Sestak, a former USN vice admiral, would not just drop off the radar. Sestak won.
So…just the other day, former POTUS Clinton made a trip to Florida to help the democrat, Kendrick Meek, win a Senate seat. W-e-l-l…not exactly, according to the scuttlebutt. Florida Governor Crist, recently turned from republican to independent after losing the republican primary to Rubio (using political Specter-philosophy), and a recent visitor to the White House, is Obama’s choice, the assumption being that Meek’s chances are zilch but he could help the cause by dropping out and JUST MAYBE split the vote only two ways, with Crist slipping by and caucusing with the democrats. This didn’t work, either
And then there’s the chicanery in Alaska. Incumbent republican senator Lisa Murkowski lost the primary to Joe Miller so she naturally did what any good senator would do – mounted a write-in campaign the better to split republicans and throw the election to the democrat. More than 100 other Alaskans registered as write-ins, apparently at the urging of a talk-show host. This is super-trivializing of the process…and it stinks. Of course, Murkowski is not as easy to spell as Jones but a girl can’t ask for everything.
Yeah…among the obscene layouts of cash, flagrant lies, pettiness, and outright skullduggery in high places, the process dreamed up by the founders for serious reasons has devolved into a silly season…trivia to the nth degree.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Friday, October 29, 2010
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Jim Gray & His October-Surprise!
October-surprises are just part of the election process as candidates use shock-and-awe in last-minute attempts to sway (make that…snow) the voters. Most of the time, the efforts involve skullduggery and may even smack of desperation. Dan Rather of CBS infamy tried the venal October-surprise in 2004, when he and his partners in crime claimed to have a document somehow denigrating George Bush only to discover that their hoax was easily discovered. The appropriate firings took place even though Rather lasted a bit longer than his fellow conspirators.
Lexington, Ky., vice mayor and current mayoral candidate, Jim Gray, has just tried the same kind of ploy, although he might have been better advised to wait a few days longer to do his shock-and-awe number. As it is, his opponent, Mayor Jim Newberry, has time to expose Gray’s fraud and dig up some dirt of his own, which shouldn’t be hard.
Gray’s outfit contrived a document exactly resembling a water-bill statement, placed it in envelopes made to look entirely official, even to the return-address window, and bearing the caption OPEN IMMEDIATELY – WATER RATE INFO ENCLOSED and mailed copies to the voters. The document purports to inform the public about rate-increases blamed on Newberry but neglects the small item that the main reason for the increase is to defray the $164,000,000-cost of a pipeline desperately needed since during drought-periods Lexington is threatened with water-shortage for its 300,000 people, a population that is growing.
The most ridiculous part of the “statement” has to do with the official-looking box having to do with the water-company’s campaign contributions to Newberry for 2005-2010, a staggering $28,150 in campaign coffers amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars over four years, a drop in the bucket. Gray has “loaned” his campaign $280,000 but if the primary race is counted that figure rises to $380,000. Each candidate has raised about a million but Newberry has “loaned” his campaign zilch.
Gray has a history of “loaning” himself campaign funds during previous races, which, of course, amounts to attempting to literally buy the office, not unusual these days as the comfortably wealthy feel no pain or risk in parting with their cash. Shades of Mitt Romney and his $40 million outlay in the last presidential quadrennial quagmire – all for nothing!
This episode is illustrative of the chicanery involved in seeking office. It becomes more apparent each day that elective offices can be – and are – bought by the wealthy. They make their money while relatively young, get set for being rich the rest of their lives and then, almost as a diversion, use their millions to buy their way into government…sort of like another toy to add to their fun. Disgusting!
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Lexington, Ky., vice mayor and current mayoral candidate, Jim Gray, has just tried the same kind of ploy, although he might have been better advised to wait a few days longer to do his shock-and-awe number. As it is, his opponent, Mayor Jim Newberry, has time to expose Gray’s fraud and dig up some dirt of his own, which shouldn’t be hard.
Gray’s outfit contrived a document exactly resembling a water-bill statement, placed it in envelopes made to look entirely official, even to the return-address window, and bearing the caption OPEN IMMEDIATELY – WATER RATE INFO ENCLOSED and mailed copies to the voters. The document purports to inform the public about rate-increases blamed on Newberry but neglects the small item that the main reason for the increase is to defray the $164,000,000-cost of a pipeline desperately needed since during drought-periods Lexington is threatened with water-shortage for its 300,000 people, a population that is growing.
The most ridiculous part of the “statement” has to do with the official-looking box having to do with the water-company’s campaign contributions to Newberry for 2005-2010, a staggering $28,150 in campaign coffers amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars over four years, a drop in the bucket. Gray has “loaned” his campaign $280,000 but if the primary race is counted that figure rises to $380,000. Each candidate has raised about a million but Newberry has “loaned” his campaign zilch.
Gray has a history of “loaning” himself campaign funds during previous races, which, of course, amounts to attempting to literally buy the office, not unusual these days as the comfortably wealthy feel no pain or risk in parting with their cash. Shades of Mitt Romney and his $40 million outlay in the last presidential quadrennial quagmire – all for nothing!
This episode is illustrative of the chicanery involved in seeking office. It becomes more apparent each day that elective offices can be – and are – bought by the wealthy. They make their money while relatively young, get set for being rich the rest of their lives and then, almost as a diversion, use their millions to buy their way into government…sort of like another toy to add to their fun. Disgusting!
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
And Then There Was Football
As the football season progresses (or regresses, depending on point of view), one is amused at the newer wrinkles in the game. Celebrating is a big deal now. Back in the day, players simply handed the ball to the referee after scoring a touchdown or just got up after making a great tackle or open-field run and assumed position for the next play. Nowadays, a touchdown is celebrated the same way as the end of WWII was celebrated in Times Square (sans the famous kiss, of course). First comes the hip-banger as the celebrant is smashed on his loin by a teammate’s hip, hopefully without incapacitating him. Or, a chest-banger may be employed as torsos are treated to reasonable celebratory trauma in establishing that a veritable god has just descended from Mt. Olympus.
Taunting and teasing are also back. Trash-talk is back, with a vengeance. A player making a tackle can still be seen doing the crotch-waddle-hop (ducks do it naturally) through the opposing team's backfield, pointing to himself and then to God and then to the spectators (as if to say “Did you suckers see that?), and telling the fallen quarterback in no uncertain terms what a low-life he is and how unworthy he is to be on the same field with a genuine he-man.
The lucky scorer may jump into the crowd for some back-slapping worship or whip out his cell phone and call his girl-friend or groupie from the end-zone and tell her what a package from heaven he actually is (and maybe make a shack-up date while he's at it). Elementary-school-age-skipping is in vogue as a scorer dances into the end-zone. This makes sure the crowd has noticed him since the other players are just doing dull slower-than-his running. For their part, the ever-present scantily-clad cheerleaders are still flashing their navels (and anything else that wiggles) at the crowd and waving their pom-poms as if the George Bush axis-of-evil has just been blown away.
Head-hunting is the big thing these days, i.e., effecting success through totally incapacitating the opponent, especially the opponent’s quarterback. The quickest way to do this – besides breaking various and assorted bones – is to simply actuate a concussion, something fairly easy to spot in the stands or on TV. The player sits up and looks blankly into the distance while trying to figure out where he is and what day it is. The trainer asks the standard questions as to his name and date of birth. If he can remember those he’s good for at least another quarter.
Whereas back in the day a tackle was effected on a ball-carrier from the waist down, the methods used now are the helmet-to-helmet brain-rattler or the body-slam (driving head-on and straight-up), which may also include helmet-to-helmet, thus breaking bones while also delivering a concussion and perhaps gloriously removing the victimized player from action for the whole season. The doer of the deed, of course, chances injury to himself but is always prepared for the mayhem he is about to produce and usually comes out okay, in which case he may lean over his victim and sneer.
The NCAA and the NFL try to lighten the mayhem by introducing new rules to “protect” players, as if the crowd comes to see protected players…about like the crowds that watch auto races to see the carnage. On roughly 50% of punt/kickoff runbacks, the return team will be penalized for a “block-in-the-back.” Rarely does any spectator or TV crew see this and most people wonder what it is. Since the players seem to be attempting to murder each other by blocks-in-the-front (legal), one wonders why the opposite blocks are so dreadful. A hundred blocks-in-the-back are not worth one good concussion.
There’s a rule now that penalizes a player for executing a “horse-collar tackle,” the grabbing of the top of a runner’s jersey in the back in order to jerk him off his feet with the possibility of cracking a vertebra or three and eliminating the opposition’s fastest runners. This calls for a 15-yard penalty, which is small potatoes compared to the hospital bill that ensues.
Some attempts at outright manslaughter are so flagrant that players – though in rare instances – are sometimes fined and/or given suspensions for one or a specified number of games. Since the average NFL player-salary is at about $1.8 million, not counting signing bonuses, the fines mean little, just something to mark off on the tax-return, just doing business. What’s a lousy $25,000 fine to a linebacker making $4 mil? As for suspensions…what could be better than dodging the bruises for a game or three, unless, of course, the salary has to be forfeited, in which case that linebacker could cough up $250,000 per game, but that’s just so much less on which to pay taxes in the top bracket.
So the game goes on…about four hours worth, when it could be finished by maybe two-and-a-half hours. The combination of commercials and the time to handle coach-challenges to referee-decisions has made the game into a marathon. This fan has given up watching but a fraction of the legalized mayhem. Watch the beginning and the end and a few segments in-between and the deed is done.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Taunting and teasing are also back. Trash-talk is back, with a vengeance. A player making a tackle can still be seen doing the crotch-waddle-hop (ducks do it naturally) through the opposing team's backfield, pointing to himself and then to God and then to the spectators (as if to say “Did you suckers see that?), and telling the fallen quarterback in no uncertain terms what a low-life he is and how unworthy he is to be on the same field with a genuine he-man.
The lucky scorer may jump into the crowd for some back-slapping worship or whip out his cell phone and call his girl-friend or groupie from the end-zone and tell her what a package from heaven he actually is (and maybe make a shack-up date while he's at it). Elementary-school-age-skipping is in vogue as a scorer dances into the end-zone. This makes sure the crowd has noticed him since the other players are just doing dull slower-than-his running. For their part, the ever-present scantily-clad cheerleaders are still flashing their navels (and anything else that wiggles) at the crowd and waving their pom-poms as if the George Bush axis-of-evil has just been blown away.
Head-hunting is the big thing these days, i.e., effecting success through totally incapacitating the opponent, especially the opponent’s quarterback. The quickest way to do this – besides breaking various and assorted bones – is to simply actuate a concussion, something fairly easy to spot in the stands or on TV. The player sits up and looks blankly into the distance while trying to figure out where he is and what day it is. The trainer asks the standard questions as to his name and date of birth. If he can remember those he’s good for at least another quarter.
Whereas back in the day a tackle was effected on a ball-carrier from the waist down, the methods used now are the helmet-to-helmet brain-rattler or the body-slam (driving head-on and straight-up), which may also include helmet-to-helmet, thus breaking bones while also delivering a concussion and perhaps gloriously removing the victimized player from action for the whole season. The doer of the deed, of course, chances injury to himself but is always prepared for the mayhem he is about to produce and usually comes out okay, in which case he may lean over his victim and sneer.
The NCAA and the NFL try to lighten the mayhem by introducing new rules to “protect” players, as if the crowd comes to see protected players…about like the crowds that watch auto races to see the carnage. On roughly 50% of punt/kickoff runbacks, the return team will be penalized for a “block-in-the-back.” Rarely does any spectator or TV crew see this and most people wonder what it is. Since the players seem to be attempting to murder each other by blocks-in-the-front (legal), one wonders why the opposite blocks are so dreadful. A hundred blocks-in-the-back are not worth one good concussion.
There’s a rule now that penalizes a player for executing a “horse-collar tackle,” the grabbing of the top of a runner’s jersey in the back in order to jerk him off his feet with the possibility of cracking a vertebra or three and eliminating the opposition’s fastest runners. This calls for a 15-yard penalty, which is small potatoes compared to the hospital bill that ensues.
Some attempts at outright manslaughter are so flagrant that players – though in rare instances – are sometimes fined and/or given suspensions for one or a specified number of games. Since the average NFL player-salary is at about $1.8 million, not counting signing bonuses, the fines mean little, just something to mark off on the tax-return, just doing business. What’s a lousy $25,000 fine to a linebacker making $4 mil? As for suspensions…what could be better than dodging the bruises for a game or three, unless, of course, the salary has to be forfeited, in which case that linebacker could cough up $250,000 per game, but that’s just so much less on which to pay taxes in the top bracket.
So the game goes on…about four hours worth, when it could be finished by maybe two-and-a-half hours. The combination of commercials and the time to handle coach-challenges to referee-decisions has made the game into a marathon. This fan has given up watching but a fraction of the legalized mayhem. Watch the beginning and the end and a few segments in-between and the deed is done.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Saturday, October 23, 2010
DNC Memorandum #19
From the office of Tim Kaine, chairman, 23 October 2010
***Just a reminder that everyone needs to be proud of the president and first lady account their unflagging campaigning for the democrats who are considered most vulnerable to defeat 02 November! The president has made the backyard-warm-fuzzy-hug-fest the envy of even John Edwards, who developed this style during the last election cycle. The president has blamed George Bush for every bad thing that has happened since 1946, the year of his birth, but keeps hearing mutterings about the economy and high unemployment rate being his own fault. Therefore, he’s requested a list of new things for which Bush can be blamed and which fit easily on a teleprompter, especially the backyard type that can be folded and carried by a peon. The president has already mentioned Bush’s tree-chopping that results in harmful deforestation but anyone with knowledge of his enhancing global warming by, for instance, not using a hybrid-tractor or exhaling CO2 more than inhaling O2 is directed to report such things immediately.
***The first lady has also requested a red/yellow/black/white (non-discriminating) paper on the reasons she is now proud to be an American, a distinct change from her position in 2008, when she was earning only a paltry $300,000 per year as some sort of vice president or occupying some other seat-warming position at the University of Chicago, and therefore suffering financial persecution and also suffering racial discrimination because she wasn’t the university’s president. Since taking office with the president, sort of like the Clinton twofer, she’s had little time to sort out her reasons for liking the country now, not least because of her travels outside the country to places like Paris and Spain to represent the best of America, and to the beaches in New England to campaign for low-fat diets and high-carbohydrate cars, speaking of which, staffers will soon be using only electric cars, necessitating plans for travel of no more than 80 miles per day. Anyone caught discombobulated on an interstate account a dead battery will be disciplined by having to listen to replays of Glenn Beck radio/TV shows 12 hours a day for a week.
***Michael Moore’s new movie predicated on Beck’s 400,000-person “mall brawl” (his terminology) and tentatively titled The Mad Fool of the Reflecting Pool is in the editing stage. Beck will appear as a wiccan foaming at the mouth and pronouncing curses on republicans, the Tea party, John Boehner, Goldman-Sachs, and then finally executing the founding fathers through channeling them via Eleanor Roosevelt via Hillary Clinton, known for her seances with Eleanor. Three deranged Pentecostals named Faith, Hope and Charity will do the deed and burn the Constitution, the latter as they morph into federal judges in California. Congress, no longer needed, will be annihilated through trauma caused by being made to read the bills it has passed. The movie promises to be a sellout.
***Staffers are warned about duties in California connected with the campaign of Senator Boxer with regard to addressing the senator always as Senator Boxer, certainly not by Ms., Madame, or Fido (little joke there). The senator was forced to reprimand Brig. Gen. Michael Walsh in a Senate hearing concerning Katrina for answering her using the address “ma’am,” which is standard in the army for addressing female officers. She let him know she preferred to be called Senator. If she was being testy then, imagine her state of mind these days in a tough race to keep her seat, so be warned. Anyone who forgets may be on the receiving end in the ear of a copy of the Health-care bill that at 2,000+ pages weighs a ton and can make one feel as if he’s the Cleveland Browns quarterback under full concussion.
***In a conference call last month to a few thousand religious leaders, the president made the statement: “Get out there and spread the word.” Nasty republicans have complained that he was un-separating church and state, a no-no under the First Amendment, even accusing him of putting the tax-exempt status of the churches involved in jeopardy. Press guru Robert Glibs (Gibbs…another little joke there) is putting out a statement explaining that the president was simply exhorting all the folks of the cloth to go out in the highways and the hedges (little scripture there…Luke 14:23) and get on the street corners (Matthew 6:5) to bring the Word and make their prayers…just encouraging them to do their thing…had nothing to do with elections, legislation or anything governmental. However, any staffer who can discover a biblical mandate concerning voting democrat instead of anything else will be rewarded with a three-day trip to Manhattan for the purpose of admiring the future site of the newest Muslim mosque to be built near Ground Zero, with the understanding that she/he will face east five times a day (Harvard grads may need help with this) and listen to the muzzeins’ practice their future call to prayer.
*** Since an effort must be made in the South to gain support, the effort must be made to understand NASCAR, church revivals, and at least a passing knowledge of the names of Confederate Civil War generals. Be sure to accuse Sherman and U.S. Grant of perfidy, but only in the South. Do this with care because there is a handful of media types who might leak this in the North, although most of them wouldn't know Confederate generals from the Notre Dame backfield of 1939. Cultivate a taste for grits and hominy, and DO NOT grimace when eating these foods. While they may appear as poisonous to the palate, former chairman Doctor Dean assures that they will not harm and may even aid and abet the workings of the alimentary canal. If this should overly happen, be sure to have on hand at all times a bottle of Pepto-Bismol or Imodium. If you should actually like these foods, you may need to be reeducated at an indoctrination facility soon to be established, since you may be more red than blue.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
***Just a reminder that everyone needs to be proud of the president and first lady account their unflagging campaigning for the democrats who are considered most vulnerable to defeat 02 November! The president has made the backyard-warm-fuzzy-hug-fest the envy of even John Edwards, who developed this style during the last election cycle. The president has blamed George Bush for every bad thing that has happened since 1946, the year of his birth, but keeps hearing mutterings about the economy and high unemployment rate being his own fault. Therefore, he’s requested a list of new things for which Bush can be blamed and which fit easily on a teleprompter, especially the backyard type that can be folded and carried by a peon. The president has already mentioned Bush’s tree-chopping that results in harmful deforestation but anyone with knowledge of his enhancing global warming by, for instance, not using a hybrid-tractor or exhaling CO2 more than inhaling O2 is directed to report such things immediately.
***The first lady has also requested a red/yellow/black/white (non-discriminating) paper on the reasons she is now proud to be an American, a distinct change from her position in 2008, when she was earning only a paltry $300,000 per year as some sort of vice president or occupying some other seat-warming position at the University of Chicago, and therefore suffering financial persecution and also suffering racial discrimination because she wasn’t the university’s president. Since taking office with the president, sort of like the Clinton twofer, she’s had little time to sort out her reasons for liking the country now, not least because of her travels outside the country to places like Paris and Spain to represent the best of America, and to the beaches in New England to campaign for low-fat diets and high-carbohydrate cars, speaking of which, staffers will soon be using only electric cars, necessitating plans for travel of no more than 80 miles per day. Anyone caught discombobulated on an interstate account a dead battery will be disciplined by having to listen to replays of Glenn Beck radio/TV shows 12 hours a day for a week.
***Michael Moore’s new movie predicated on Beck’s 400,000-person “mall brawl” (his terminology) and tentatively titled The Mad Fool of the Reflecting Pool is in the editing stage. Beck will appear as a wiccan foaming at the mouth and pronouncing curses on republicans, the Tea party, John Boehner, Goldman-Sachs, and then finally executing the founding fathers through channeling them via Eleanor Roosevelt via Hillary Clinton, known for her seances with Eleanor. Three deranged Pentecostals named Faith, Hope and Charity will do the deed and burn the Constitution, the latter as they morph into federal judges in California. Congress, no longer needed, will be annihilated through trauma caused by being made to read the bills it has passed. The movie promises to be a sellout.
***Staffers are warned about duties in California connected with the campaign of Senator Boxer with regard to addressing the senator always as Senator Boxer, certainly not by Ms., Madame, or Fido (little joke there). The senator was forced to reprimand Brig. Gen. Michael Walsh in a Senate hearing concerning Katrina for answering her using the address “ma’am,” which is standard in the army for addressing female officers. She let him know she preferred to be called Senator. If she was being testy then, imagine her state of mind these days in a tough race to keep her seat, so be warned. Anyone who forgets may be on the receiving end in the ear of a copy of the Health-care bill that at 2,000+ pages weighs a ton and can make one feel as if he’s the Cleveland Browns quarterback under full concussion.
***In a conference call last month to a few thousand religious leaders, the president made the statement: “Get out there and spread the word.” Nasty republicans have complained that he was un-separating church and state, a no-no under the First Amendment, even accusing him of putting the tax-exempt status of the churches involved in jeopardy. Press guru Robert Glibs (Gibbs…another little joke there) is putting out a statement explaining that the president was simply exhorting all the folks of the cloth to go out in the highways and the hedges (little scripture there…Luke 14:23) and get on the street corners (Matthew 6:5) to bring the Word and make their prayers…just encouraging them to do their thing…had nothing to do with elections, legislation or anything governmental. However, any staffer who can discover a biblical mandate concerning voting democrat instead of anything else will be rewarded with a three-day trip to Manhattan for the purpose of admiring the future site of the newest Muslim mosque to be built near Ground Zero, with the understanding that she/he will face east five times a day (Harvard grads may need help with this) and listen to the muzzeins’ practice their future call to prayer.
*** Since an effort must be made in the South to gain support, the effort must be made to understand NASCAR, church revivals, and at least a passing knowledge of the names of Confederate Civil War generals. Be sure to accuse Sherman and U.S. Grant of perfidy, but only in the South. Do this with care because there is a handful of media types who might leak this in the North, although most of them wouldn't know Confederate generals from the Notre Dame backfield of 1939. Cultivate a taste for grits and hominy, and DO NOT grimace when eating these foods. While they may appear as poisonous to the palate, former chairman Doctor Dean assures that they will not harm and may even aid and abet the workings of the alimentary canal. If this should overly happen, be sure to have on hand at all times a bottle of Pepto-Bismol or Imodium. If you should actually like these foods, you may need to be reeducated at an indoctrination facility soon to be established, since you may be more red than blue.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Dreams from My Father
Most people have probably expressed to others or at least thought to themselves some opinions about President Obama. I have, as well, but decided recently that to be fair in my assessments of both him and his presidency I should read his Dreams from My Father, written in 1995 and updated in 2004, not that I could get inside his head and hope to know much comprehensively. In this book, Obama recounts the main events of his life virtually from the beginning until his becoming a law-school student in the late 1980s. My conclusions are not remarked pejoratively, merely stated as…conclusions.
Two things stick out – obsession with race/personal-identity and a bent toward being a dreamer. Notwithstanding the fact that Obama’s mother was Midwestern-white, he makes it plain that he is an African American, a black, not a white. Unlike Tiger Woods, who claimed to be multi-racial, Obama made it clear that he identifies with blacks. In his famous “invasion” of Berlin in the summer of 2008 during the campaign, he made it clear that he was a “different” American from those the Germans had recognized previously…black, not white. Indeed, he basked in that revelation.
On page 171 of the paperback edition is a mention of the fact that he had heard that his grandmother was “scared of a black man,” perhaps a precursor to his alluding to it after his famous “race speech” in Philadelphia in March 2008 (typical white person), the speech being largely an unsuccessful attempt to whitewash racist remarks by the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah (God damn America) Wright, his pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Without question, he identified with Wright, having been a 20-year-member of the church and hearing Wright constantly berate white people in his sermons, even accusing them of inventing HIVAIDS in order to kill blacks.
At page 100 describing his time at Occidental College, Obama, to prove his loyalty to blackness, wrote that he chose as friends the more politically active black students, foreign students, Chicanos, Marxist professors, structural feminists and punk rock performance poets. The term he used to describe his “crowd” was alienated, “resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints.” He wrote, “… it remained necessary to prove which side you were on … .” This “class” approach smacked of victimization and may be the driving force in Obama’s world, characterized by some as Marxist or socialist.
In any case, dredging up the race question in the campaign for no discernible reason other than exonerating Wright simply pointed to his obsession with the subject, not to mention his loyalty to Wright, whose phrase he used in titling a later book, The Audacity of Hope. Later, he disavowed Wright but only after the preacher had appeared before the National Press Club a few days after the Philadelphia incident, praising Nation of Islam guru Farrakhan and accusing this country of terrorism.
Obama’s Kenyan father (also named Barack Obama) had multiple wives, but in Kenya, apparently, that was okay. He was already married, with children, when he married Obama’s mother and later abandoned them both, first attending Harvard and then returning to Kenya, where he married yet another white woman. Whether or not polygamy was/is acceptable anywhere, it was certainly acceptable to Obama, Sr., because he was a Muslim. Muslim men are allowed four wives, though Osama bin Laden, the world’s most notorious Muslim, was the son of his father’s tenth wife. Mohammad seems to have had 12 wives, one of them a nine-year-old.
The final segment of the book is devoted to Obama’s first trip to Kenya to visit his relatives, a bittersweet recounting of what he found, especially about his father. By that time, late 80s, his father had died some years before as the result of an auto accident. What he found was tribal tension and poverty, which he may automatically have connected to the slavery matter in this country, thus firming his identification with blackness, never mind that he never suffered more than socially – if that – because of his preferred ethnicity, and had all the advantages he needed to do well.
Obama’s father, with his Harvard doctorate, was successful in business and also held high office for a time in the Kenyan government but was on the wrong side tribally and was later reduced to having practically nothing, though attempting to live as if he did. His relatives did not spare the father in re-introducing him posthumously to Obama, who had met his father only once during a tension-filled month in Hawaii when Obama was ten. Obama learned that his father was a sort of charmer and dreamer, unable to face his failures while being demanding and overbearing with his children.
It might not be fair to say that in this case the fruit did not fall far from the trunk of the tree…or the book might indicate just that. Obama is charming and speaks well enough but perhaps gave away his bent toward dreaming – like his father – when he virtually casually said during the campaign that he would sit down with Ahmadinejad without pre-conditions and talk things out, thus showing a complete misunderstanding of his self-supposed powers of persuasion (charm) or of world affairs. Or…he rather glibly (dreamily) campaigns now for democrats, depending on his charm at a time when this nation demands substance, not charisma.
Hopefully, Obama has matured – at least politically – since his days at Occidental, recognizing that class warfare is not acceptable. Much of the book had to do with his “organizing” activities in Chicago in the 80s, many of which were praiseworthy and effective. He may have mentioned it but did not make much of the fact, however, that the almost total breakdown of the black family lies at the heart of black troubles, not white people or the U.S. government.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Two things stick out – obsession with race/personal-identity and a bent toward being a dreamer. Notwithstanding the fact that Obama’s mother was Midwestern-white, he makes it plain that he is an African American, a black, not a white. Unlike Tiger Woods, who claimed to be multi-racial, Obama made it clear that he identifies with blacks. In his famous “invasion” of Berlin in the summer of 2008 during the campaign, he made it clear that he was a “different” American from those the Germans had recognized previously…black, not white. Indeed, he basked in that revelation.
On page 171 of the paperback edition is a mention of the fact that he had heard that his grandmother was “scared of a black man,” perhaps a precursor to his alluding to it after his famous “race speech” in Philadelphia in March 2008 (typical white person), the speech being largely an unsuccessful attempt to whitewash racist remarks by the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah (God damn America) Wright, his pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Without question, he identified with Wright, having been a 20-year-member of the church and hearing Wright constantly berate white people in his sermons, even accusing them of inventing HIVAIDS in order to kill blacks.
At page 100 describing his time at Occidental College, Obama, to prove his loyalty to blackness, wrote that he chose as friends the more politically active black students, foreign students, Chicanos, Marxist professors, structural feminists and punk rock performance poets. The term he used to describe his “crowd” was alienated, “resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints.” He wrote, “… it remained necessary to prove which side you were on … .” This “class” approach smacked of victimization and may be the driving force in Obama’s world, characterized by some as Marxist or socialist.
In any case, dredging up the race question in the campaign for no discernible reason other than exonerating Wright simply pointed to his obsession with the subject, not to mention his loyalty to Wright, whose phrase he used in titling a later book, The Audacity of Hope. Later, he disavowed Wright but only after the preacher had appeared before the National Press Club a few days after the Philadelphia incident, praising Nation of Islam guru Farrakhan and accusing this country of terrorism.
Obama’s Kenyan father (also named Barack Obama) had multiple wives, but in Kenya, apparently, that was okay. He was already married, with children, when he married Obama’s mother and later abandoned them both, first attending Harvard and then returning to Kenya, where he married yet another white woman. Whether or not polygamy was/is acceptable anywhere, it was certainly acceptable to Obama, Sr., because he was a Muslim. Muslim men are allowed four wives, though Osama bin Laden, the world’s most notorious Muslim, was the son of his father’s tenth wife. Mohammad seems to have had 12 wives, one of them a nine-year-old.
The final segment of the book is devoted to Obama’s first trip to Kenya to visit his relatives, a bittersweet recounting of what he found, especially about his father. By that time, late 80s, his father had died some years before as the result of an auto accident. What he found was tribal tension and poverty, which he may automatically have connected to the slavery matter in this country, thus firming his identification with blackness, never mind that he never suffered more than socially – if that – because of his preferred ethnicity, and had all the advantages he needed to do well.
Obama’s father, with his Harvard doctorate, was successful in business and also held high office for a time in the Kenyan government but was on the wrong side tribally and was later reduced to having practically nothing, though attempting to live as if he did. His relatives did not spare the father in re-introducing him posthumously to Obama, who had met his father only once during a tension-filled month in Hawaii when Obama was ten. Obama learned that his father was a sort of charmer and dreamer, unable to face his failures while being demanding and overbearing with his children.
It might not be fair to say that in this case the fruit did not fall far from the trunk of the tree…or the book might indicate just that. Obama is charming and speaks well enough but perhaps gave away his bent toward dreaming – like his father – when he virtually casually said during the campaign that he would sit down with Ahmadinejad without pre-conditions and talk things out, thus showing a complete misunderstanding of his self-supposed powers of persuasion (charm) or of world affairs. Or…he rather glibly (dreamily) campaigns now for democrats, depending on his charm at a time when this nation demands substance, not charisma.
Hopefully, Obama has matured – at least politically – since his days at Occidental, recognizing that class warfare is not acceptable. Much of the book had to do with his “organizing” activities in Chicago in the 80s, many of which were praiseworthy and effective. He may have mentioned it but did not make much of the fact, however, that the almost total breakdown of the black family lies at the heart of black troubles, not white people or the U.S. government.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
DADT Legislation from the Bench
Legislating from the bench has been an increasing phenomenon in recent years but perhaps the latest exercise involving federal/state statutes being set aside by one person in California (where else?) is the most egregious. Federal Judge Virginia Phillips has ruled that the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy passed during the Clinton administration is un-constitutional and that discharging homosexual members of the military must stop immediately.
Phillips went far beyond making a decision on simply what she construes to be the law by making a personal judgment without any expertise to back it up, not that such would have been a factor in the first place, since a judge’s personal opinions should never enter into the decision-making process. She indicated in her ruling that the DADT policy doesn’t help military readiness and has a “direct and deleterious effect” by hurting recruiting while the country’s at war.
Phillips spent nine years in private practice after finishing law school in 1982, followed ever since by commissioner/judgeships of one kind or another, swilling at the public troughs, until being nominated for her current job in 1999 by Bill Clinton. She’s had no military experience whatever, has probably never been in a barracks or on a navy ship, at least for a significant time, and knows nothing about combat, but obviously considers herself a military genius. This is the kind of arrogant elitism that remarks the liberal mindset. In even presuming to make a military statement, notwithstanding that it was totally unwarranted and unprofessional, she announced to all that she’s as dumb as a gourd. Judges are supposed to know better than that.
Phillips has forced the president’s hand, or at least that of Attorney General Holder, whose responsibility it is to represent the government in appealing this nutcase decision, even though President Obama, who also has had absolutely no military experience, is for the repeal of DADT, just recently denied by a vote in the Senate. Added to the mix is the fact that the top military brass, at least the ones responsible for the everyday operation of the services, have said very publicly (thus perhaps putting their own jobs in jeopardy by nay-saying the commander-in-chief) that DADT should not be repealed…and they don’t give a fig about social engineering, which is what Judge Phillips is all about.
Presumably, the government’s appeal – and there has to be one since the law is the law and Holder is sworn to uphold it – will have to go through the Federal Ninth Circuit (California again), which is practically guaranteed to uphold Phillips, not on the basis of law but on the basis of political correctness, which is all this case is about. Prior to DADT, homosexuals were not even allowed in the military, and asking about it was perfectly okay, as it should be. The reasons are obvious enough, at least to men who’ve served in the military.
Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker (also California, where else?) ruled in August that the constitutional amendment that Californians have just approved defining marriage as between a man and a woman is unconstitutional, notwithstanding, also, that federal law enacted in the 1990s serves the same purpose. One rinky-dink judge has presumed to overturn the California Constitution and federal law – legislating from the bench. Walker is a homosexual himself and for that reason alone should have recused himself from a matter so firmly established as settled law not only federally but in virtually every state and by State Constitutions.
The military services have regulations that proscribe a lot of folks from joining-up. Those with myopia/astigmatism may not fly airplanes. Those with low IQs may not serve at all. Those with other physical disabilities or prior injuries may not serve. It has been accepted for hundreds of years that those with the behavioral/emotional problems connected to homosexuality may not serve, mostly because of the ill effects on the service itself, not the homosexual. Yet, a judge who knows nothing about the military has decided that while some regulations are okay the one concerning homosexuality is not. This makes no sense, but ruling from the bench is the name of the game these days.
In other years, ruling from the bench gave the country forced busing, something that was so detrimental to education that its progenitor, University of Chicago professor James Coleman, pronounced it a failure long ago but school districts have had to put up with the disruptions it caused and is still causing, not to mention the nosedive academically that it helped engineer. Five years ago by a 5-4 ruling (Kelo), even the SCOTUS got in the act, approving a land-grab from a private citizen by local-government condemnation not for governmental use but for private business.
Given the constant drumbeat in the current administration for getting things done by executive order rather than legally through the Congress (admittedly damned by too many opportunists rather than informed legislators), one wonders, assuming the obvious cooperation of the courts comprised of mischief-makers with lifetime tenure, if the nation is about to become a monarchy, i.e., with King Barack on the throne.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Phillips went far beyond making a decision on simply what she construes to be the law by making a personal judgment without any expertise to back it up, not that such would have been a factor in the first place, since a judge’s personal opinions should never enter into the decision-making process. She indicated in her ruling that the DADT policy doesn’t help military readiness and has a “direct and deleterious effect” by hurting recruiting while the country’s at war.
Phillips spent nine years in private practice after finishing law school in 1982, followed ever since by commissioner/judgeships of one kind or another, swilling at the public troughs, until being nominated for her current job in 1999 by Bill Clinton. She’s had no military experience whatever, has probably never been in a barracks or on a navy ship, at least for a significant time, and knows nothing about combat, but obviously considers herself a military genius. This is the kind of arrogant elitism that remarks the liberal mindset. In even presuming to make a military statement, notwithstanding that it was totally unwarranted and unprofessional, she announced to all that she’s as dumb as a gourd. Judges are supposed to know better than that.
Phillips has forced the president’s hand, or at least that of Attorney General Holder, whose responsibility it is to represent the government in appealing this nutcase decision, even though President Obama, who also has had absolutely no military experience, is for the repeal of DADT, just recently denied by a vote in the Senate. Added to the mix is the fact that the top military brass, at least the ones responsible for the everyday operation of the services, have said very publicly (thus perhaps putting their own jobs in jeopardy by nay-saying the commander-in-chief) that DADT should not be repealed…and they don’t give a fig about social engineering, which is what Judge Phillips is all about.
Presumably, the government’s appeal – and there has to be one since the law is the law and Holder is sworn to uphold it – will have to go through the Federal Ninth Circuit (California again), which is practically guaranteed to uphold Phillips, not on the basis of law but on the basis of political correctness, which is all this case is about. Prior to DADT, homosexuals were not even allowed in the military, and asking about it was perfectly okay, as it should be. The reasons are obvious enough, at least to men who’ve served in the military.
Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker (also California, where else?) ruled in August that the constitutional amendment that Californians have just approved defining marriage as between a man and a woman is unconstitutional, notwithstanding, also, that federal law enacted in the 1990s serves the same purpose. One rinky-dink judge has presumed to overturn the California Constitution and federal law – legislating from the bench. Walker is a homosexual himself and for that reason alone should have recused himself from a matter so firmly established as settled law not only federally but in virtually every state and by State Constitutions.
The military services have regulations that proscribe a lot of folks from joining-up. Those with myopia/astigmatism may not fly airplanes. Those with low IQs may not serve at all. Those with other physical disabilities or prior injuries may not serve. It has been accepted for hundreds of years that those with the behavioral/emotional problems connected to homosexuality may not serve, mostly because of the ill effects on the service itself, not the homosexual. Yet, a judge who knows nothing about the military has decided that while some regulations are okay the one concerning homosexuality is not. This makes no sense, but ruling from the bench is the name of the game these days.
In other years, ruling from the bench gave the country forced busing, something that was so detrimental to education that its progenitor, University of Chicago professor James Coleman, pronounced it a failure long ago but school districts have had to put up with the disruptions it caused and is still causing, not to mention the nosedive academically that it helped engineer. Five years ago by a 5-4 ruling (Kelo), even the SCOTUS got in the act, approving a land-grab from a private citizen by local-government condemnation not for governmental use but for private business.
Given the constant drumbeat in the current administration for getting things done by executive order rather than legally through the Congress (admittedly damned by too many opportunists rather than informed legislators), one wonders, assuming the obvious cooperation of the courts comprised of mischief-makers with lifetime tenure, if the nation is about to become a monarchy, i.e., with King Barack on the throne.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Friday, October 08, 2010
Krugman's Angst
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in a recent screed heaved and heaved and delivered himself of what he must have considered both a scoop and a profundity, to wit, that Fox News is not fair and balanced, after all, and, even worse, is in the process of buying up the nation’s politics, mainly by placing wannabe presidents on its payroll…the result of billionaires like Rupert Murdoch simply creating a government bought fair-and-square.
Never has Krugman been more laughable, and that’s saying a lot. He has for the most part merely stated the obvious. People who are interested in success make the effort, especially financially, to gain it. Murdoch may be less interested in influencing politics than he is in (gasp) making money, though politics impinges heavily upon the ability to do anything. Result: Fox outdraws by huge differentials all the other networks and, despite Krugman’s self-serving claim, actually DOES present anybody and everybody who’s willing to take the plunge.
Some of the most unsavoury characters appear on Fox. Who can forget the appearances of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah (God damn America) Wright on Fox or flaky Jon Stewart? Al Sharpton is a regular, as is a certified wacko liberal, Dr. Marc Lamont Hill, professor at Columbia, Obama’s alma mater. Illinois ex-governor Blagojevich has appeared. Office-seekers and/or would-be political commentators of all stripes routinely appear on Fox.
No one doubts that Fox is the other side of the coin to NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC and CNN, all of which carry the water for the democrats. The citizenry, however, is fed up with Obama/Pelosi/Reid and the liberal propaganda they and “their networks,” mentioned above, generate. Murdoch is a businessman (as is Imam Rauf, the mosque-guy in New York, who also invests in Murdoch’s enterprises), and Roger Ailes, who oversees Fox News, is a genius at generating political controversy and cash.
The objective is to retain, with all its warts, the capitalism that has made this country the envy of the world. The liberals, led by Obama, have made it abundantly clear (since 2007 in Congress and 2009 for the anointed one) that they intend to reduce this country to the level of the lowest common denominator globally, but the American people are onto it now.
The same thing was tried in the 1930s by the socialists and communists, who operated with a degree of respectability then, but they failed exponentially because even the working stiffs (just about all wage-earners) would have none of it even when the unemployment rate averaged 19% per year in roughly 1933-39. The current generation is far wimpier than that one, which turned out to be the greatest account WWII, according to Tom Brokaw, but is not dumb/weak enough yet to be led down the primrose path to governmental control of everything.
Conveniently when addressing the theme of “government-by-billionaire,” Krugman didn’t mention the “greatest of them all” – George Soros, who has bankrolled freely the farthest left outfits imaginable. Indeed, presidential “spiritual adviser” Jim Wallis and his rag Sojourners, according to WORLD magazine, have been bankrolled by Soros, an atheist billionaire who has financed groups promoting abortion, atheism, and same-sex marriage, with a $200,000 grant in 2004. Since then Sojourners has received at least two more grants from Soros organizations altogether totaling $325,000, the most recent in 2007. Sojourners revenues have more than tripled – from $1,601,171 in 2001-2002 to $5,283,650 in 2008-2009.
Krugman reaches for exponential absurdity when he claims that “scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change” have essentially been bought-off by a handful of ultra-wealthy families operating through “a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface… .” What rubbish – not least because the global-warming-alarmists have been thoroughly debunked by credible scientists, especially those connected intimately with the United Nations (IPCC, CRU)! Not only has their science been faulty but – even worse – they’ve been exposed – or, rather, exposed themselves – as outright frauds through e-mails understood as cover-up attempts.
Krugman made the same claim vis-à-vis the ultra-wealthy with respect to their buying out economists, strategic thinkers (to come up with rationales for “wars of choice” – EGAD!), and lawyers to defend – don’t laugh – torture. He didn’t explain how wars of choice or torture were improper concerns of the ultra-wealthy. Krugman is a Nobel winner, but that prize means nothing, especially since the Nobel for Peace was awarded to Al Gore and Barack Obama, happenstances that still have people all over the world scratching their heads in consternation.
This is a bad year for liberals of Krugman’s stripe and that may be the reason for the futility that engenders the frustration leading to the foolishness put out by the mainstream media as evidenced in Krugman’s column.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Never has Krugman been more laughable, and that’s saying a lot. He has for the most part merely stated the obvious. People who are interested in success make the effort, especially financially, to gain it. Murdoch may be less interested in influencing politics than he is in (gasp) making money, though politics impinges heavily upon the ability to do anything. Result: Fox outdraws by huge differentials all the other networks and, despite Krugman’s self-serving claim, actually DOES present anybody and everybody who’s willing to take the plunge.
Some of the most unsavoury characters appear on Fox. Who can forget the appearances of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah (God damn America) Wright on Fox or flaky Jon Stewart? Al Sharpton is a regular, as is a certified wacko liberal, Dr. Marc Lamont Hill, professor at Columbia, Obama’s alma mater. Illinois ex-governor Blagojevich has appeared. Office-seekers and/or would-be political commentators of all stripes routinely appear on Fox.
No one doubts that Fox is the other side of the coin to NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC and CNN, all of which carry the water for the democrats. The citizenry, however, is fed up with Obama/Pelosi/Reid and the liberal propaganda they and “their networks,” mentioned above, generate. Murdoch is a businessman (as is Imam Rauf, the mosque-guy in New York, who also invests in Murdoch’s enterprises), and Roger Ailes, who oversees Fox News, is a genius at generating political controversy and cash.
The objective is to retain, with all its warts, the capitalism that has made this country the envy of the world. The liberals, led by Obama, have made it abundantly clear (since 2007 in Congress and 2009 for the anointed one) that they intend to reduce this country to the level of the lowest common denominator globally, but the American people are onto it now.
The same thing was tried in the 1930s by the socialists and communists, who operated with a degree of respectability then, but they failed exponentially because even the working stiffs (just about all wage-earners) would have none of it even when the unemployment rate averaged 19% per year in roughly 1933-39. The current generation is far wimpier than that one, which turned out to be the greatest account WWII, according to Tom Brokaw, but is not dumb/weak enough yet to be led down the primrose path to governmental control of everything.
Conveniently when addressing the theme of “government-by-billionaire,” Krugman didn’t mention the “greatest of them all” – George Soros, who has bankrolled freely the farthest left outfits imaginable. Indeed, presidential “spiritual adviser” Jim Wallis and his rag Sojourners, according to WORLD magazine, have been bankrolled by Soros, an atheist billionaire who has financed groups promoting abortion, atheism, and same-sex marriage, with a $200,000 grant in 2004. Since then Sojourners has received at least two more grants from Soros organizations altogether totaling $325,000, the most recent in 2007. Sojourners revenues have more than tripled – from $1,601,171 in 2001-2002 to $5,283,650 in 2008-2009.
Krugman reaches for exponential absurdity when he claims that “scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change” have essentially been bought-off by a handful of ultra-wealthy families operating through “a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface… .” What rubbish – not least because the global-warming-alarmists have been thoroughly debunked by credible scientists, especially those connected intimately with the United Nations (IPCC, CRU)! Not only has their science been faulty but – even worse – they’ve been exposed – or, rather, exposed themselves – as outright frauds through e-mails understood as cover-up attempts.
Krugman made the same claim vis-à-vis the ultra-wealthy with respect to their buying out economists, strategic thinkers (to come up with rationales for “wars of choice” – EGAD!), and lawyers to defend – don’t laugh – torture. He didn’t explain how wars of choice or torture were improper concerns of the ultra-wealthy. Krugman is a Nobel winner, but that prize means nothing, especially since the Nobel for Peace was awarded to Al Gore and Barack Obama, happenstances that still have people all over the world scratching their heads in consternation.
This is a bad year for liberals of Krugman’s stripe and that may be the reason for the futility that engenders the frustration leading to the foolishness put out by the mainstream media as evidenced in Krugman’s column.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Wednesday, October 06, 2010
Homosexuality & the University
The usually astute columnist, Kathleen Parker, characterized the actions of Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, who spread movies online of Tyler Clementi in a sexual encounter with another man, as an episode of “unforgivable bullying.” Clementi, Ravi’s roommate and a Rutgers freshman, committed suicide apparently as the result of Ravi’s unspeakable behavior.
The verb “bully” is defined thusly: “to treat abusively: to affect by means of force or coercion: to use browbeating language or behavior: BLUSTER.” There seems to be no action on Ravi’s part that fits the definition. It would be more accurate, perhaps, to say that he simply meant to profoundly embarrass his roommate, who was a homosexual.
There’s no argument with the fact that Ravi acted despicably but if there was a crime, was it a hate crime, and, if so, what would be the charge? Can Ravi be charged with something like manslaughter or reckless homicide on the basis of hate, especially when he obviously did not push Clementi off the bridge? Hardly. Can one person be penalized for another’s frame of mind?
Parker made the whole thing into a “privacy matter.” Clementi had made a deal with Ravi to be alone in their room until a certain time. He and his partner were alone, except they were not alone entirely because of Ravi’s web-cam chronicling the episode. The camera was a voyeur unseen by the two homosexuals, who thought they were enjoying their “privacy.”
There are no easy answers, especially taking into consideration that adolescent minds were at work here, though probably none of the actors were minors, including the “partner,” who, as Parker would have it, had his privacy invaded, also. This leads to further considerations concerning what should be done by institutions of all kinds to guard against episodes such as this.
Should an institution knowingly pair a “straight” guy with a homosexual as a roommate? It’s probably fair to say that most straights would rather not be placed in that position. Certainly, no student should be placed in a room where homosexual behavior is practiced, since that behavior, besides being obviously unnatural, involves the use of bodily organs and orifices in ways that are unsanitary, actually filthy. Significantly, known homosexuals are barred from all U.S. military academies and from any branch of service, from which they are discharged immediately upon being “outed,” either by themselves or some other method. The reason should be obvious.
In the 37 states with confidential name-based HIV infection reporting in 2008, diagnoses of HIV infection among adults and adolescents totaled 41,087 with 30,755 diagnoses in males and 10,332 diagnoses in females, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This being the case, especially with males, why should any student be exposed to even the possibility of contacting AIDS, which remains a scourge among homosexual men, known for their promiscuity.
Granted, few homosexuals will admit to their proclivity if asked about it on a college application but each institution should make the effort to put them together if possible, not blindly subscribe to the nutcase diversity nonsense that has blinded the nation. Under no circumstances should a known homosexual be paired with a straight. Nothing could be more repulsive than anal intercourse or the other things endemic to homosexual “sex” and no one should be forced to live with someone engaged in that stuff.
The quick answer is that, after all, both Defense Secretary Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mullen agreed with the president that “don’t ask, don’t tell” should be repealed; however, when a bill to that effect was actually presented in the Senate both men backpedaled at warp speed, counseling a “go-slow” policy. In other words, they had no intention of this happening on their watch. More to the point, the top military honchos who actually run the services have come out strongly against this “promise” made by Obama.
The Clementi suicide constitutes a reminder that known homosexuals in the military are always in danger. Their antagonists will not show movies on the Internet. They can become much more physical. Actual bullying can turn nasty with grown men who resent living in close quarters, such as on a ship, with people who do strange unnatural things.
This is in no way an effort to excuse the insensitivity and stupidity of Ravi and Wei or to disparage Clementi. Rather, it is simply to state some facts that Parker would do well to consider, though she may be at a disadvantage with trying to understand the overall picture such as, for instance, 60 or more men living in a small compartment and sleeping in racks (beds) configured in stacks and using toilet facilities in anything but privacy.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
The verb “bully” is defined thusly: “to treat abusively: to affect by means of force or coercion: to use browbeating language or behavior: BLUSTER.” There seems to be no action on Ravi’s part that fits the definition. It would be more accurate, perhaps, to say that he simply meant to profoundly embarrass his roommate, who was a homosexual.
There’s no argument with the fact that Ravi acted despicably but if there was a crime, was it a hate crime, and, if so, what would be the charge? Can Ravi be charged with something like manslaughter or reckless homicide on the basis of hate, especially when he obviously did not push Clementi off the bridge? Hardly. Can one person be penalized for another’s frame of mind?
Parker made the whole thing into a “privacy matter.” Clementi had made a deal with Ravi to be alone in their room until a certain time. He and his partner were alone, except they were not alone entirely because of Ravi’s web-cam chronicling the episode. The camera was a voyeur unseen by the two homosexuals, who thought they were enjoying their “privacy.”
There are no easy answers, especially taking into consideration that adolescent minds were at work here, though probably none of the actors were minors, including the “partner,” who, as Parker would have it, had his privacy invaded, also. This leads to further considerations concerning what should be done by institutions of all kinds to guard against episodes such as this.
Should an institution knowingly pair a “straight” guy with a homosexual as a roommate? It’s probably fair to say that most straights would rather not be placed in that position. Certainly, no student should be placed in a room where homosexual behavior is practiced, since that behavior, besides being obviously unnatural, involves the use of bodily organs and orifices in ways that are unsanitary, actually filthy. Significantly, known homosexuals are barred from all U.S. military academies and from any branch of service, from which they are discharged immediately upon being “outed,” either by themselves or some other method. The reason should be obvious.
In the 37 states with confidential name-based HIV infection reporting in 2008, diagnoses of HIV infection among adults and adolescents totaled 41,087 with 30,755 diagnoses in males and 10,332 diagnoses in females, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This being the case, especially with males, why should any student be exposed to even the possibility of contacting AIDS, which remains a scourge among homosexual men, known for their promiscuity.
Granted, few homosexuals will admit to their proclivity if asked about it on a college application but each institution should make the effort to put them together if possible, not blindly subscribe to the nutcase diversity nonsense that has blinded the nation. Under no circumstances should a known homosexual be paired with a straight. Nothing could be more repulsive than anal intercourse or the other things endemic to homosexual “sex” and no one should be forced to live with someone engaged in that stuff.
The quick answer is that, after all, both Defense Secretary Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mullen agreed with the president that “don’t ask, don’t tell” should be repealed; however, when a bill to that effect was actually presented in the Senate both men backpedaled at warp speed, counseling a “go-slow” policy. In other words, they had no intention of this happening on their watch. More to the point, the top military honchos who actually run the services have come out strongly against this “promise” made by Obama.
The Clementi suicide constitutes a reminder that known homosexuals in the military are always in danger. Their antagonists will not show movies on the Internet. They can become much more physical. Actual bullying can turn nasty with grown men who resent living in close quarters, such as on a ship, with people who do strange unnatural things.
This is in no way an effort to excuse the insensitivity and stupidity of Ravi and Wei or to disparage Clementi. Rather, it is simply to state some facts that Parker would do well to consider, though she may be at a disadvantage with trying to understand the overall picture such as, for instance, 60 or more men living in a small compartment and sleeping in racks (beds) configured in stacks and using toilet facilities in anything but privacy.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Monday, October 04, 2010
Baseball Criminality Exposed!
The glorious protection provided by the government these days was evidenced graphically the other night when some good citizens in Ohio carried out the communist mantra – TATTLE – with regard to a social and criminal evil practiced by the Cincinnati Reds as they celebrated a victory that made them champions of the Central Division of the National League. The players were spotted (oh, Green-peace, say it isn’t so) actually lighting VICTORY-CIGARS in their clubhouse.
Plainly, this was against Ohio state law patently and totally forbidding lighting up anywhere in a closed space, even if nobody in the space cares or objects. And – HORRORS – some of the smoke might have mingled with the diesel exhaust of the river tugs just outside the outfield and asphyxiated a gnat flying in the glare of the field’s floodlights.
After all, the champagne bottles had already been opened and the bubbly was being both consumed and sprayed all over the closed space…but so what! In Ohio, that’s perfectly okay unless, of course, one of the players decided to drive the clubhouse home and was picked up for drunk locker-room-driving. The Reds pooh-bahs were contacted by the powers-that-be and admonished for behavior that not only was dangerous to the atmosphere of the locker-room but was also simply unlawful, an even worse circumstance.
Without question, Al Gore has been contacted about this (unless he’s been too busy with his latest masseuse) since all that hot cigar-smoke could have provided the proverbial “tipping-point” that will damn the nation into hellish temperatures making the House’s approval of cap-and-trade too late for the learning…or spurning…or whatever. The evil Senate has not acted on the legislation, which no one but the lobbyists have read anyway, but it’s a sure bet that cigar-smoke is covered. This matter could very well go to the United Nations in solemn assembly, thus putting Reds manager Dusty Baker in danger of a trial at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity. Cigar-smoke is known to cover whole populations.
Actually, Baker might be guilty of other crimes, such as overuse of wood account his penchant for chewing on toothpicks throughout an entire game. There’s no telling how many of these miniature logs he goes through, but it could be disastrous since deforestation is said to be killing the planet. His players are at risk, too, with respect to the courts since they constantly chew sunflower seeds or dip snuff during games and consequently spit all over the place, thus spewing everything from possible flu germs to tobacco nicotine into the air and onto the ground, where an unsuspecting fan or groundskeeper, respectively, could become infected/addicted and…who knows…premeditated death by baseball! Just think of the civil lawsuits against whole teams residing, of course, in the Big House.
Baseball players do other bad things…like blowing bubble-gum bubbles during the game. Washington Nationals homerun hitter Adam Dunn blows these germ-ridden bubbles throughout his entire trip around the bases after knocking one over the fence. Every time he emits the saliva and phlegm associated with launching and recapturing a bubble, literally billions of potentially deadly H1N1 viruses that thrive on gum-sugar could attack a whole stadium. Imagine a swine-flu epidemic occasioned by Dunn and all the other players who blow bubbles and/or spit upon the air-waves and terra firma. It’s enough to send one to the ER just thinking about it.
The greatest surprise is that Ohio lawmakers have been remiss in requiring a safer habitat for spectators at baseball games. Whether by law or common sense, racetrack honchos have put up fences to protect spectators from race-cars that occasionally take to the air, usually after one driver has “tipped” the back fender of another driver’s car and sent it off the course, the better to win through elimination of the competition.
Strangely, there have been no laws either disallowing the hitting of a line-drive foul ball or requiring that fences be built reaching the height unto the 75th tier of the stands, thus protecting onlookers from traumatic shock and awe, often accompanied by hospital stays after taking one in the anatomy. It’s a wonder that premier ambulance-chaser John Edwards of the $400-haircut has not homed in on this, but it’s only a matter of time.
Back in the day of 154 games and no playoffs (thankfully), the World Series ended in the first week of October but now the playoffs haven’t even begun. The Series was demanding enough then, but the added pressure of interminable playoff games and the threat of snow for the Series will drive the baseball players into such stress that the increase of spitting, blowing bubbles, chewing toothpicks, launching sunflower seed-pods and errant foul balls at unwary fans will be virtually intolerable – just like Gore’s melting icebergs – and will put tens of thousands of spectators at risk. Lawmakers have not done enough.
Sadly, though, if the Reds should win it all they will be under the strictest scrutiny of the nicotine police and will not be able to celebrate adequately…by lighting up! In Ohio, the law is the law.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Plainly, this was against Ohio state law patently and totally forbidding lighting up anywhere in a closed space, even if nobody in the space cares or objects. And – HORRORS – some of the smoke might have mingled with the diesel exhaust of the river tugs just outside the outfield and asphyxiated a gnat flying in the glare of the field’s floodlights.
After all, the champagne bottles had already been opened and the bubbly was being both consumed and sprayed all over the closed space…but so what! In Ohio, that’s perfectly okay unless, of course, one of the players decided to drive the clubhouse home and was picked up for drunk locker-room-driving. The Reds pooh-bahs were contacted by the powers-that-be and admonished for behavior that not only was dangerous to the atmosphere of the locker-room but was also simply unlawful, an even worse circumstance.
Without question, Al Gore has been contacted about this (unless he’s been too busy with his latest masseuse) since all that hot cigar-smoke could have provided the proverbial “tipping-point” that will damn the nation into hellish temperatures making the House’s approval of cap-and-trade too late for the learning…or spurning…or whatever. The evil Senate has not acted on the legislation, which no one but the lobbyists have read anyway, but it’s a sure bet that cigar-smoke is covered. This matter could very well go to the United Nations in solemn assembly, thus putting Reds manager Dusty Baker in danger of a trial at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity. Cigar-smoke is known to cover whole populations.
Actually, Baker might be guilty of other crimes, such as overuse of wood account his penchant for chewing on toothpicks throughout an entire game. There’s no telling how many of these miniature logs he goes through, but it could be disastrous since deforestation is said to be killing the planet. His players are at risk, too, with respect to the courts since they constantly chew sunflower seeds or dip snuff during games and consequently spit all over the place, thus spewing everything from possible flu germs to tobacco nicotine into the air and onto the ground, where an unsuspecting fan or groundskeeper, respectively, could become infected/addicted and…who knows…premeditated death by baseball! Just think of the civil lawsuits against whole teams residing, of course, in the Big House.
Baseball players do other bad things…like blowing bubble-gum bubbles during the game. Washington Nationals homerun hitter Adam Dunn blows these germ-ridden bubbles throughout his entire trip around the bases after knocking one over the fence. Every time he emits the saliva and phlegm associated with launching and recapturing a bubble, literally billions of potentially deadly H1N1 viruses that thrive on gum-sugar could attack a whole stadium. Imagine a swine-flu epidemic occasioned by Dunn and all the other players who blow bubbles and/or spit upon the air-waves and terra firma. It’s enough to send one to the ER just thinking about it.
The greatest surprise is that Ohio lawmakers have been remiss in requiring a safer habitat for spectators at baseball games. Whether by law or common sense, racetrack honchos have put up fences to protect spectators from race-cars that occasionally take to the air, usually after one driver has “tipped” the back fender of another driver’s car and sent it off the course, the better to win through elimination of the competition.
Strangely, there have been no laws either disallowing the hitting of a line-drive foul ball or requiring that fences be built reaching the height unto the 75th tier of the stands, thus protecting onlookers from traumatic shock and awe, often accompanied by hospital stays after taking one in the anatomy. It’s a wonder that premier ambulance-chaser John Edwards of the $400-haircut has not homed in on this, but it’s only a matter of time.
Back in the day of 154 games and no playoffs (thankfully), the World Series ended in the first week of October but now the playoffs haven’t even begun. The Series was demanding enough then, but the added pressure of interminable playoff games and the threat of snow for the Series will drive the baseball players into such stress that the increase of spitting, blowing bubbles, chewing toothpicks, launching sunflower seed-pods and errant foul balls at unwary fans will be virtually intolerable – just like Gore’s melting icebergs – and will put tens of thousands of spectators at risk. Lawmakers have not done enough.
Sadly, though, if the Reds should win it all they will be under the strictest scrutiny of the nicotine police and will not be able to celebrate adequately…by lighting up! In Ohio, the law is the law.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Mahmoud & the Gang
It’s midnight on the roof of the Hilton Manhattan East Hotel in New York and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is meeting with Malik Zulu Shabazz (born Paris Lewis in Los Angeles), head honcho of the New Black Panther Party, Louis Farrakhan, head honcho of the Nation of Islam, and Jeremiah Wright, FOB (friend of Barack), known hereinafter as A, S, F, and W, respectively…not respectfully. Interpreters are used.
**A: Glad you could…
**W: I don’t care if you do send guns to them Iraqis and teach Stoning-Women 101 to freshmen at that school in Tehran, comin’ all the way up…
**F: Don’t mind Jeremiah there, Mahmoud…you don’t mind if I call you Mahmoud, do you…brothers in the faith and all that…praise Allah? Jeremiah’s been out on the revival circuit rolling in the cash from those love-offerings…LOVE OFFERINGS…oh…hoo-hah…and he’s worn-out baptizing all those suckers into…by the way, Mahmoud, it took me an hour to get through your security…had to take off all my clothes three times…don’t you think that’s a little much, especially since they made my 100 bodyguards pile their guns in an elevator that disappeared?
**S: What’s that awful smell, President A…I’ll just use “A” since I get tongue-tied trying to get out A-a-m-j-d…you can see how it is. In LA, we use code anyway and “A” in an e-mail to a brother stands for “waste a cop” and that just seems to fit you and those Republican Guards that catch all those adultery-type women and…whoopee…blood flyin’…
**A: Brothers, brothers…well, okay, praise Allah, at least you’re a brother, Imam Farrakhan, but Shabazz sounds mighty Islamic, too, Malik, so I guess we’re three-to-one…
**F: Not so fast, Mahmoud…Akbar Allah! Jeremiah is my close colleague and…
**A: Ah, that’s right. He went with you to see Moammar Qadaffi when you were looking for a million dollars…when was that…25 years ago…tell me…you didn’t watch those wicked houris in the dance of the seven vails, did you?
**W: Praise Allah and Buddha, too, and throw in the Hindus! Did we ever watch those houris…is that what they were? I thought it was just a strip-joint like in Chicago and it took Louis five days to remember why he was there.
**A: May Allah look down on you with pity, Allah be worshiped! H-m-m-m…the 72 virgins for the martyrs are also called houris…so…no burqas, huh?
**F: No burqas! Hoo-hah…no anything, Mahmoud. I’ll be sure to be a martyr someday…just assasinate an infidel policeman and get shot…well, Chicago’s full of infidel cops and a suicide bomb would be so messy anyway…not enough left of me for a grand funeral!
**S: but what about that smell…like somebody’s barbecuin’ shoe leather…I can smell it all the way up here in the pure air of New York…ha ha ha…pure air…too close to the UN building for that.
**W: Didn’t you read the paper? Mahmoud brought his own chef and you smelled fricaseed goat. They clean out the best meat and then use the carcass as the puck to play Muslim polo. Half the hotel guests left after the first night and PETA stole all the rest of Mahmoud’s goats and a camel that was supposed to be barbecued last night.
**A: Not exactly true! Only a camel rump-roast is any good. But, tell me, why have you sought out my brilliance?
**S: Our brother Barack is in a bind, A. Even though he claims to be a Christian, a third of Americans consider him one of us and that hurts badly at election time.
**A: Well, isn’t he? He was a Muslim kid for ten years and that’s supposed to make him a Muslim for life…just like the hated Israelis…for life!
**W: But he converted right in my church, Mahmoud…a matter of record, fortunately, except that because I prayed that God would damn America, folks even think I’m one of you and certainly after Barack threw me under the bus for damning America again at the National Press Club. Barack’s doing the backyard circuit now and the Christianity question is always planted after the barbecue but folks still don’t get it.
**A: You mean he’s actually a Christian after all? Allah be mortified…a traitor! When he said he would talk to me anytime without conditions, I thought he was a Muslim, though maybe a hated Sunni so I had a thousand guards trained for the meeting. Mullah Omar and Osama speak to me only when I send guns…they hate us Shiites, like that damnable Saddam did and killed hundreds of thousands of us. The only thing worse than a Sunni is an American.
**S: Well, the crackers all…
**A: Crackers? I thought crackers are good with peanut butter for a snack.
**S: Oh no. Crackers are white people – used to be honkies – but the NBPP changed that…
**A: Now I remember reading it in the paper. One of your brothers, also called Shabazz, screamed in Philadelphia that all the brothers should kill all the crackers and even the cracker-babies. I thought that was odd unless maybe they meant the big Zestas and the little Cheezits ground-up for maybe a fig casserole.
**F: So, as much as we hate to admit it, we need for you to denounce Barack as a hated Christian with maybe a fatwa out against him in the bargain…you know, make it good and get him all kinds of pity for the Congressional vote this year and all the marbles in 2012.
**W: Maybe you could say you learned this in a vision like you had in that UN speech a while back. It was in a vision that I learned that Reagan had AIDS invented to kill off black folk.
**A: Ah yes…that vision…glorious! Later, I spoke at Columbia…hoo-hah…Allah be amused…the school that Barack attended. (pause) Now, about this matter…what’s in it for me?
**F: And it was in a vision that I found out that Bush had the levees in New Orleans sabotaged by the army to let go and kill off black folk.
**A: (stridently) What’s in it for me?
**S: My organization and Louis’s organization, with our thousands of bodyguards, promise you a safe exile if the ayatollahs get mad and issue a fatwa on you or the Israelis bomb your new mosque prepared for the Twelfth Mahdi to rule forever, ruining your power, whichever comes first. (pause) I gotta go…that smell…
**F, W: Me, too…a-a-r-r-h-h-g-g-A-A-R-R-H-H-G-G! (S, F, W, gagging, run out)
**A: Not a bad deal! Hey…wait…oh well…wonder what it’s like in California…
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
**A: Glad you could…
**W: I don’t care if you do send guns to them Iraqis and teach Stoning-Women 101 to freshmen at that school in Tehran, comin’ all the way up…
**F: Don’t mind Jeremiah there, Mahmoud…you don’t mind if I call you Mahmoud, do you…brothers in the faith and all that…praise Allah? Jeremiah’s been out on the revival circuit rolling in the cash from those love-offerings…LOVE OFFERINGS…oh…hoo-hah…and he’s worn-out baptizing all those suckers into…by the way, Mahmoud, it took me an hour to get through your security…had to take off all my clothes three times…don’t you think that’s a little much, especially since they made my 100 bodyguards pile their guns in an elevator that disappeared?
**S: What’s that awful smell, President A…I’ll just use “A” since I get tongue-tied trying to get out A-a-m-j-d…you can see how it is. In LA, we use code anyway and “A” in an e-mail to a brother stands for “waste a cop” and that just seems to fit you and those Republican Guards that catch all those adultery-type women and…whoopee…blood flyin’…
**A: Brothers, brothers…well, okay, praise Allah, at least you’re a brother, Imam Farrakhan, but Shabazz sounds mighty Islamic, too, Malik, so I guess we’re three-to-one…
**F: Not so fast, Mahmoud…Akbar Allah! Jeremiah is my close colleague and…
**A: Ah, that’s right. He went with you to see Moammar Qadaffi when you were looking for a million dollars…when was that…25 years ago…tell me…you didn’t watch those wicked houris in the dance of the seven vails, did you?
**W: Praise Allah and Buddha, too, and throw in the Hindus! Did we ever watch those houris…is that what they were? I thought it was just a strip-joint like in Chicago and it took Louis five days to remember why he was there.
**A: May Allah look down on you with pity, Allah be worshiped! H-m-m-m…the 72 virgins for the martyrs are also called houris…so…no burqas, huh?
**F: No burqas! Hoo-hah…no anything, Mahmoud. I’ll be sure to be a martyr someday…just assasinate an infidel policeman and get shot…well, Chicago’s full of infidel cops and a suicide bomb would be so messy anyway…not enough left of me for a grand funeral!
**S: but what about that smell…like somebody’s barbecuin’ shoe leather…I can smell it all the way up here in the pure air of New York…ha ha ha…pure air…too close to the UN building for that.
**W: Didn’t you read the paper? Mahmoud brought his own chef and you smelled fricaseed goat. They clean out the best meat and then use the carcass as the puck to play Muslim polo. Half the hotel guests left after the first night and PETA stole all the rest of Mahmoud’s goats and a camel that was supposed to be barbecued last night.
**A: Not exactly true! Only a camel rump-roast is any good. But, tell me, why have you sought out my brilliance?
**S: Our brother Barack is in a bind, A. Even though he claims to be a Christian, a third of Americans consider him one of us and that hurts badly at election time.
**A: Well, isn’t he? He was a Muslim kid for ten years and that’s supposed to make him a Muslim for life…just like the hated Israelis…for life!
**W: But he converted right in my church, Mahmoud…a matter of record, fortunately, except that because I prayed that God would damn America, folks even think I’m one of you and certainly after Barack threw me under the bus for damning America again at the National Press Club. Barack’s doing the backyard circuit now and the Christianity question is always planted after the barbecue but folks still don’t get it.
**A: You mean he’s actually a Christian after all? Allah be mortified…a traitor! When he said he would talk to me anytime without conditions, I thought he was a Muslim, though maybe a hated Sunni so I had a thousand guards trained for the meeting. Mullah Omar and Osama speak to me only when I send guns…they hate us Shiites, like that damnable Saddam did and killed hundreds of thousands of us. The only thing worse than a Sunni is an American.
**S: Well, the crackers all…
**A: Crackers? I thought crackers are good with peanut butter for a snack.
**S: Oh no. Crackers are white people – used to be honkies – but the NBPP changed that…
**A: Now I remember reading it in the paper. One of your brothers, also called Shabazz, screamed in Philadelphia that all the brothers should kill all the crackers and even the cracker-babies. I thought that was odd unless maybe they meant the big Zestas and the little Cheezits ground-up for maybe a fig casserole.
**F: So, as much as we hate to admit it, we need for you to denounce Barack as a hated Christian with maybe a fatwa out against him in the bargain…you know, make it good and get him all kinds of pity for the Congressional vote this year and all the marbles in 2012.
**W: Maybe you could say you learned this in a vision like you had in that UN speech a while back. It was in a vision that I learned that Reagan had AIDS invented to kill off black folk.
**A: Ah yes…that vision…glorious! Later, I spoke at Columbia…hoo-hah…Allah be amused…the school that Barack attended. (pause) Now, about this matter…what’s in it for me?
**F: And it was in a vision that I found out that Bush had the levees in New Orleans sabotaged by the army to let go and kill off black folk.
**A: (stridently) What’s in it for me?
**S: My organization and Louis’s organization, with our thousands of bodyguards, promise you a safe exile if the ayatollahs get mad and issue a fatwa on you or the Israelis bomb your new mosque prepared for the Twelfth Mahdi to rule forever, ruining your power, whichever comes first. (pause) I gotta go…that smell…
**F, W: Me, too…a-a-r-r-h-h-g-g-A-A-R-R-H-H-G-G! (S, F, W, gagging, run out)
**A: Not a bad deal! Hey…wait…oh well…wonder what it’s like in California…
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
The Player & the Grades
The big news in Lexington these days has to do not with the Equestrian Games but with whether or not Eric Bledsoe, the star basketball player of 2009-10 at UK and now in the NBA, had grades sufficiently appropriate for even being a student, much less a direct descendent of one of the Greek gods, which is the description awarded to basketball bouncers at UK. The investigation by the NCAA and/or the Birmingham, Alabama, City School System (actually hired a law firm for such a momentous task) has been ongoing for a long time.
A panel instituted by the Birmingham City Schools and headed by a former federal judge (nothing but the best) also looked into the matter and came up with “an independent review” concluding that some grades had been changed; however, the school superintendent decided that not enough evidence was available to declare the player’s transcript to be invalid. In fact, no grade books from his junior year were made available, nor were more than half from his senior year. The grade-books were AWOL from the system, if, indeed, even in existence…probably not.
One of the strangest findings was that Bledsoe received an “A” in algebra 3 before taking algebra 2, according to the Birmingham News. That’s quite an accomplishment. One of Bledsoe’s teachers indicated that a changed grade meant that extra work had been done that required the change. Problem: There was no proof, of course, that any extra work had been done. In any case, unless Birmingham is different, extra work happens BEFORE the grade is given, not afterward.
So what! Well…UK would probably have had to forfeit all the games it won, actually no big deal for the coach since he’s been through this stuff before at other schools and nothing as world-shaking as an NCAA final four appearance, the Mt. Olympus of basketball gods, was involved anyway. At $4 million a year, he had nothing financially to lose, nor did UK since it has faced everything from point-fixing scandals to illegal recruiting practices for decades. NCAA probation is virtually part of the curriculum, hardly worth a healthy yawn.
Strangely, Bledsoe has an attorney, notwithstanding that he didn’t construct his transcript and was not charged with anything. The attorney complained that the panel had not contacted Bledsoe to get his take on the matter, though what could he be expected to say about the panel’s report that 17 of 24 grades “earned” in his senior year had been “conspicuously changed?” The attorney pontificated about an unfounded attack on Bledsoe’s character and integrity, and that the player was not too happy about the whole thing. Still laughing?
One suspects that Bledsoe’s unhappiness is somewhat tempered by the fact that he recently signed a contract with the Los Angeles Clippers for a reported approximately $1.2 million, not bad for a year’s work involving 84 games, a lot of travel and all the rest. In fact, the player has probably been laughing all the way to the bank every time he’s cashed a check. Not many university graduates make that much for many years. And this is just the beginning for Bledsoe, a fine player, who maybe just got “a little help from my friends,” as the Lennon-McCartney song would have it.
It’s worth remembering that Bledsoe’s experience is not unique, especially in the NCAA Southeast Conference, but actually sort of par for the course. Sports fans understand that integrity on the part of coaches, athletic directors, and university presidents, who actually approve of and operate the whole shady enterprise (except at Vanderbilt), is neither expected nor particularly desired. They want a winner, the devil take the hindmost. Coaches and athletic directors become fabulously wealthy in the whole sordid mess and, in fact, make it on the backs of players like Bledsoe, who most likely knew exactly what was going on, but considered himself just another accepted part of the “system.”
College/university sports, with the possible exception of baseball, are accepted as the minor leagues for professional sports, especially football and basketball, the latter including girls teams. Even full scholarships for golf are available. Only a miniscule number of athletes ever make it to the pros but they get a free ride in education…sometimes if they can just sign their names, while actual scholars exiting high schools run up huge debts and flip burgers at McDonalds. This isn’t fair but the name of the game is money and the crazed fans demand their red meat.
And now a crass adjunct: The lead story in the book**"The Stem-cell Quarterback" & Other Stories is all about the SEC and the lengths to which university honchos will go to game the system on the backs of athletes. Read it and weep…or laugh.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
A panel instituted by the Birmingham City Schools and headed by a former federal judge (nothing but the best) also looked into the matter and came up with “an independent review” concluding that some grades had been changed; however, the school superintendent decided that not enough evidence was available to declare the player’s transcript to be invalid. In fact, no grade books from his junior year were made available, nor were more than half from his senior year. The grade-books were AWOL from the system, if, indeed, even in existence…probably not.
One of the strangest findings was that Bledsoe received an “A” in algebra 3 before taking algebra 2, according to the Birmingham News. That’s quite an accomplishment. One of Bledsoe’s teachers indicated that a changed grade meant that extra work had been done that required the change. Problem: There was no proof, of course, that any extra work had been done. In any case, unless Birmingham is different, extra work happens BEFORE the grade is given, not afterward.
So what! Well…UK would probably have had to forfeit all the games it won, actually no big deal for the coach since he’s been through this stuff before at other schools and nothing as world-shaking as an NCAA final four appearance, the Mt. Olympus of basketball gods, was involved anyway. At $4 million a year, he had nothing financially to lose, nor did UK since it has faced everything from point-fixing scandals to illegal recruiting practices for decades. NCAA probation is virtually part of the curriculum, hardly worth a healthy yawn.
Strangely, Bledsoe has an attorney, notwithstanding that he didn’t construct his transcript and was not charged with anything. The attorney complained that the panel had not contacted Bledsoe to get his take on the matter, though what could he be expected to say about the panel’s report that 17 of 24 grades “earned” in his senior year had been “conspicuously changed?” The attorney pontificated about an unfounded attack on Bledsoe’s character and integrity, and that the player was not too happy about the whole thing. Still laughing?
One suspects that Bledsoe’s unhappiness is somewhat tempered by the fact that he recently signed a contract with the Los Angeles Clippers for a reported approximately $1.2 million, not bad for a year’s work involving 84 games, a lot of travel and all the rest. In fact, the player has probably been laughing all the way to the bank every time he’s cashed a check. Not many university graduates make that much for many years. And this is just the beginning for Bledsoe, a fine player, who maybe just got “a little help from my friends,” as the Lennon-McCartney song would have it.
It’s worth remembering that Bledsoe’s experience is not unique, especially in the NCAA Southeast Conference, but actually sort of par for the course. Sports fans understand that integrity on the part of coaches, athletic directors, and university presidents, who actually approve of and operate the whole shady enterprise (except at Vanderbilt), is neither expected nor particularly desired. They want a winner, the devil take the hindmost. Coaches and athletic directors become fabulously wealthy in the whole sordid mess and, in fact, make it on the backs of players like Bledsoe, who most likely knew exactly what was going on, but considered himself just another accepted part of the “system.”
College/university sports, with the possible exception of baseball, are accepted as the minor leagues for professional sports, especially football and basketball, the latter including girls teams. Even full scholarships for golf are available. Only a miniscule number of athletes ever make it to the pros but they get a free ride in education…sometimes if they can just sign their names, while actual scholars exiting high schools run up huge debts and flip burgers at McDonalds. This isn’t fair but the name of the game is money and the crazed fans demand their red meat.
And now a crass adjunct: The lead story in the book
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Saturday, September 25, 2010
The President & the Preachers
Dear President Obama,
As the CEO of the well-known Washington consulting firm known as the Institute for Modifying All Governmental Entities (IMAGE, for short), I’m writing in connection with your recent conference call to preachers, ministers, imams, cult leaders, whatever, concerning your admonition to them to start preaching, purveying, promulgating, popularizing – in short –propagandizing the value of the recently legislated health-care package. According to law, religionists may not do this in the churches and retain tax-exempt status, but I assume that the czar you’ve appointed to regulate morality, spirituality, eating of pork, and the allowed amount of flour in unleavened bread, as well as the proper use of religious icons/idols/institutions, has cleared this with his legal spin-doctors.
Now that you’ve entered the religious realm of governance (I don’t believe the wags who say you jog on the Potomac, but don’t take that personally), you will need help in both style and substance in managing a religious undertaking. One false step, and your undertaking will devolve into a political undertakering – little joke there, but FOX NEWS is always out for some red meat and, as you know, currently has several contracts out on people like Senator Reid and your most avid supporter, George Soros, who helped the clergymen set up a PAC in 2003 to crucify George Bush concerning a second term. Bush, of course, resurrected.
The evil POLITICO listened in on the call (you need better hacker controls) and reported that you made the point that health-care is settled law and that your parishioners had better know this. That sounded like a threat, especially since you also told the preachers to “Get out there and spread the word.” That was so-o-o-o communistic and hate-mongering. This being the case, IMAGE can help you ease up by using materials from its Section for Energizing Righteous Manipulative Oratorical Nuances, known by its acronym SERMON.
The moonlighting head of this agency is the Right Reverend Honorable Exalted Imam Dr. Louis Farrakhan, sometimes known unfortunately and irreverently as Calypso Louie, who – I insist reverently – did NOT have Malcom X assassinated. Farrakhan is a master at manipulation of oily oratory, able without any backlash at all to pronounce that the U.S. government sabotaged the levees in New Orleans to kill all the black folk there in the wake of Katrina. He even pulled off another “Million” something or other in Washinton soon after Katrina and enthroned himself and his daughter as co-messiahs or co-12th Mahdis, depending on Christian, Shiite or Sunni apocalypse-approaches, without any protest-marches or terrorist attacks in the bargain. He’s a master at nativist nuancing and can talk the citizens into and out of anything.
Involving the religious gurus means more than just righteous rhetoric, so IMAGE will help you with substance through its agency called the Section for Promulgating Insured Righteousness Involving Theology Usage and Liturgies, or SPIRITUAL, for short. The term “health-care” has been replaced by “affordable care,” because when the bill was passed three million people showed up at ERs for everything from hang-nails to appendectomies, whether needed or not…just a freebie, warm place to hang out. This means that a theological base is needed to establish that there’s no free lunch, even in the hospital, thus necessitating the need for would-be sickos to obey that scripture insisting that those who won’t work don’t eat. I’m sure you see the connection, especially with the need for a good hellfire/brimstone warning regarding righteous retribution in the form of fines for those who won’t buy insurance. SPIRIT is without a leader now but hopefully Bill Moyers will take the job, being a seminary graduate and member of the one denomination that has officially sanctioned same-sex marriage, an absolute forward-looking background for the “NOW” generation.
Finally, so you will see a greater importance of your religious approach to health-care (consider also religion vis-à-vis cap/trade, “don’t ask don’t tell,” and immigration-amnesty), IMAGE’s agency to help is known as the Bureau for Utilizing Legalistic Liturgies Yoking Pulpiteering Unctions with Legislating Patient-Insured Trauma, known by its acronym Bully Pulpit. You’ve already begun this process. In fact, you sort of began in August 2009 when you had a conference call with 1,000 rabbis and said, “We are God's partners in matters of life and death,” an astounding insight into your role as not only commander-in-chief of the military but as commander-in-chief of sickness, health, and death of private citizens. You have become the voice of everything and in this regard you should always have at hand a BULLY PULPIT teleprompter to help guard against everything from Freudian slips (remember the navy corpse-man) to outright mangling of scripture verses. I’m sure you remember mentioning the 57 states during the campaign when you were tired.
IMAGE has extricated the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright from under the bus to head BULLY PULPIT account his preaching skills, which you well remember from your 20 years listening to him powerfully propound America’s guilt-trip that eventuated in inspiring you to travel the world in 2009 and apologize everywhere for this evil country. Rev. Dr. Wright is already preparing for you a teleprompter sermon guaranteed to convince everyone of sound mind of his insistence that Ronald Reagan had a top scientist invent AIDS for use in eradicating black folk. You can see how this ties in with health-care. In the margins of the teleprompter will be notes by Bill Clinton indicating when you are to shout, whisper, weep, laugh or tell a joke – in other words, feel everyone’s pain. The title of the sermon is, “Yes, We Can.”
I hope to hear from you soon in the affirmative and am already preparing the proper materials to make you the most outstanding Oval Office preacher of all time.
Respectfully,
I.M. Reverself, CEO
IMAGE
As the CEO of the well-known Washington consulting firm known as the Institute for Modifying All Governmental Entities (IMAGE, for short), I’m writing in connection with your recent conference call to preachers, ministers, imams, cult leaders, whatever, concerning your admonition to them to start preaching, purveying, promulgating, popularizing – in short –propagandizing the value of the recently legislated health-care package. According to law, religionists may not do this in the churches and retain tax-exempt status, but I assume that the czar you’ve appointed to regulate morality, spirituality, eating of pork, and the allowed amount of flour in unleavened bread, as well as the proper use of religious icons/idols/institutions, has cleared this with his legal spin-doctors.
Now that you’ve entered the religious realm of governance (I don’t believe the wags who say you jog on the Potomac, but don’t take that personally), you will need help in both style and substance in managing a religious undertaking. One false step, and your undertaking will devolve into a political undertakering – little joke there, but FOX NEWS is always out for some red meat and, as you know, currently has several contracts out on people like Senator Reid and your most avid supporter, George Soros, who helped the clergymen set up a PAC in 2003 to crucify George Bush concerning a second term. Bush, of course, resurrected.
The evil POLITICO listened in on the call (you need better hacker controls) and reported that you made the point that health-care is settled law and that your parishioners had better know this. That sounded like a threat, especially since you also told the preachers to “Get out there and spread the word.” That was so-o-o-o communistic and hate-mongering. This being the case, IMAGE can help you ease up by using materials from its Section for Energizing Righteous Manipulative Oratorical Nuances, known by its acronym SERMON.
The moonlighting head of this agency is the Right Reverend Honorable Exalted Imam Dr. Louis Farrakhan, sometimes known unfortunately and irreverently as Calypso Louie, who – I insist reverently – did NOT have Malcom X assassinated. Farrakhan is a master at manipulation of oily oratory, able without any backlash at all to pronounce that the U.S. government sabotaged the levees in New Orleans to kill all the black folk there in the wake of Katrina. He even pulled off another “Million” something or other in Washinton soon after Katrina and enthroned himself and his daughter as co-messiahs or co-12th Mahdis, depending on Christian, Shiite or Sunni apocalypse-approaches, without any protest-marches or terrorist attacks in the bargain. He’s a master at nativist nuancing and can talk the citizens into and out of anything.
Involving the religious gurus means more than just righteous rhetoric, so IMAGE will help you with substance through its agency called the Section for Promulgating Insured Righteousness Involving Theology Usage and Liturgies, or SPIRITUAL, for short. The term “health-care” has been replaced by “affordable care,” because when the bill was passed three million people showed up at ERs for everything from hang-nails to appendectomies, whether needed or not…just a freebie, warm place to hang out. This means that a theological base is needed to establish that there’s no free lunch, even in the hospital, thus necessitating the need for would-be sickos to obey that scripture insisting that those who won’t work don’t eat. I’m sure you see the connection, especially with the need for a good hellfire/brimstone warning regarding righteous retribution in the form of fines for those who won’t buy insurance. SPIRIT is without a leader now but hopefully Bill Moyers will take the job, being a seminary graduate and member of the one denomination that has officially sanctioned same-sex marriage, an absolute forward-looking background for the “NOW” generation.
Finally, so you will see a greater importance of your religious approach to health-care (consider also religion vis-à-vis cap/trade, “don’t ask don’t tell,” and immigration-amnesty), IMAGE’s agency to help is known as the Bureau for Utilizing Legalistic Liturgies Yoking Pulpiteering Unctions with Legislating Patient-Insured Trauma, known by its acronym Bully Pulpit. You’ve already begun this process. In fact, you sort of began in August 2009 when you had a conference call with 1,000 rabbis and said, “We are God's partners in matters of life and death,” an astounding insight into your role as not only commander-in-chief of the military but as commander-in-chief of sickness, health, and death of private citizens. You have become the voice of everything and in this regard you should always have at hand a BULLY PULPIT teleprompter to help guard against everything from Freudian slips (remember the navy corpse-man) to outright mangling of scripture verses. I’m sure you remember mentioning the 57 states during the campaign when you were tired.
IMAGE has extricated the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright from under the bus to head BULLY PULPIT account his preaching skills, which you well remember from your 20 years listening to him powerfully propound America’s guilt-trip that eventuated in inspiring you to travel the world in 2009 and apologize everywhere for this evil country. Rev. Dr. Wright is already preparing for you a teleprompter sermon guaranteed to convince everyone of sound mind of his insistence that Ronald Reagan had a top scientist invent AIDS for use in eradicating black folk. You can see how this ties in with health-care. In the margins of the teleprompter will be notes by Bill Clinton indicating when you are to shout, whisper, weep, laugh or tell a joke – in other words, feel everyone’s pain. The title of the sermon is, “Yes, We Can.”
I hope to hear from you soon in the affirmative and am already preparing the proper materials to make you the most outstanding Oval Office preacher of all time.
Respectfully,
I.M. Reverself, CEO
IMAGE
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Globalism or Nationalism?
Perhaps the most bizarre and harmful voting process in the nation’s history occurred with the election of Barack Hussein Obama to the presidency in 2008. Largely fueled by the late-teenage and twenty-something crowd gullible enough to be mesmerized by a campaign based on cosmetics and sleight-of-hand, his election has resulted in the delivery of just what he said he would bring to the nation and which older heads could see through as if the entire effort were couched in vapors…an attempt to completely replace the capitalist system with socialism.
The magic word in Washington today is GLOBAL. Whereas this nation was founded on principles designed to create in the United States a compatibility of governance with capitalism – NATIONALISM, in other words – the current establishment would trade that system for everything global, another way of saying primarily socialistic, even to the point of complete disintegration of the system that has made this nation successful beyond comprehension and in spite of gargantuan disruptions such as the Civil War and its consequences, as well as armed conflicts virtually a world away, not to mention a population so diverse as to practically scream for self-destructive class-conflict.
Just a small indication of the global approach was the recent announcement by State Secretary Clinton at something called the Global Initiative conference founded by her husband that the U.S. government is contributing $50 million to something called the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. Cookstoves? Okay…these stoves are supposed to help save the planet from global warming, which the best U.S. climatologists have already indicated is simply in a normal cycle, nothing else.
The president, meanwhile, speaks constantly of a “global economy” while the U.S. economy is going down in flames. He has surrounded himself with “czars,” entities most people call “regulators” of everything from how we drive to what we eat, with an emphasis on acting globally. While my wife looked for an item of clothing recently (I rarely attend these torture sessions) I checked the labels on women’s blouses…made in China, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, Philippines and Jordan. That was in just one small department.
The next day (again, a rare exercise for me), I looked while she shopped for an iron, not a shooting-iron but a pressing-iron. I was very interested in one made in Germany. She chose the one made in China. She, as does Obama apparently by design, contributed to the global economy. Admittedly, the globalization of American industry with regard to actual manufacturing has been taking place for decades on the backs of governments headed by both democrats and republicans, but the obsession with actually bowing to so-called global concerns is overwhelmingly pronounced currently.
Shoes are made in China, electronics in Taiwan or South Korea, cars in Japan or Europe. The consequence is that the U.S. economy is basically service-oriented. Even at that, other nations take technology developed in this country and turn it to their own advantage. Being good global citizens, Americans just go along with this, notwithstanding that many young people in this country are not college material and need jobs that feature manual labor of some sort.
The stock answer as to why this is the case is that in order for other countries to buy U.S. products, as few as they are, the U.S. must buy theirs, never mind that this country’s trade deficit is of enormous proportions and has been for decades. U.S. manufacturers follow the money and relocate their enterprises to places like China, where a worker might make $1.50 a day while his counterpart in this country might make ten times that much or more.
The logical thing to do would be for the Washington crowd, especially the administration, to get management and labor together and iron out some compromises so that U.S. workers can make a livable wage while actually competing with nations that feature barely survivable wages and child-labor, thus bringing jobs back to this country. This would mean some sacrifice on all sides but it would mean long-term benefits. In other words, the time has come for an UN-GLOBAL approach. A good place to start would be the go-ahead on oil-well-drilling, the better to un-globalize the nation’s dependence on often hostile, unpredictable nations for the crude.
The nation is surviving very well, thank you (okay…just temporarily until nearing the financial abyss), on the current work-force reduced by some 8 million jobs, which means that probably millions of those lost jobs are not coming back online, especially anytime soon or at a time when the administration seems hell-bent on running the small-business man off the plantation by taxing/regulating him to death.
This isn’t likely to happen, just as it didn’t happen with Clinton or the Bushes or other presidents. With Obama, the globalist, it would seem to have no chance. The answer is at the ballot box.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
The magic word in Washington today is GLOBAL. Whereas this nation was founded on principles designed to create in the United States a compatibility of governance with capitalism – NATIONALISM, in other words – the current establishment would trade that system for everything global, another way of saying primarily socialistic, even to the point of complete disintegration of the system that has made this nation successful beyond comprehension and in spite of gargantuan disruptions such as the Civil War and its consequences, as well as armed conflicts virtually a world away, not to mention a population so diverse as to practically scream for self-destructive class-conflict.
Just a small indication of the global approach was the recent announcement by State Secretary Clinton at something called the Global Initiative conference founded by her husband that the U.S. government is contributing $50 million to something called the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. Cookstoves? Okay…these stoves are supposed to help save the planet from global warming, which the best U.S. climatologists have already indicated is simply in a normal cycle, nothing else.
The president, meanwhile, speaks constantly of a “global economy” while the U.S. economy is going down in flames. He has surrounded himself with “czars,” entities most people call “regulators” of everything from how we drive to what we eat, with an emphasis on acting globally. While my wife looked for an item of clothing recently (I rarely attend these torture sessions) I checked the labels on women’s blouses…made in China, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, Philippines and Jordan. That was in just one small department.
The next day (again, a rare exercise for me), I looked while she shopped for an iron, not a shooting-iron but a pressing-iron. I was very interested in one made in Germany. She chose the one made in China. She, as does Obama apparently by design, contributed to the global economy. Admittedly, the globalization of American industry with regard to actual manufacturing has been taking place for decades on the backs of governments headed by both democrats and republicans, but the obsession with actually bowing to so-called global concerns is overwhelmingly pronounced currently.
Shoes are made in China, electronics in Taiwan or South Korea, cars in Japan or Europe. The consequence is that the U.S. economy is basically service-oriented. Even at that, other nations take technology developed in this country and turn it to their own advantage. Being good global citizens, Americans just go along with this, notwithstanding that many young people in this country are not college material and need jobs that feature manual labor of some sort.
The stock answer as to why this is the case is that in order for other countries to buy U.S. products, as few as they are, the U.S. must buy theirs, never mind that this country’s trade deficit is of enormous proportions and has been for decades. U.S. manufacturers follow the money and relocate their enterprises to places like China, where a worker might make $1.50 a day while his counterpart in this country might make ten times that much or more.
The logical thing to do would be for the Washington crowd, especially the administration, to get management and labor together and iron out some compromises so that U.S. workers can make a livable wage while actually competing with nations that feature barely survivable wages and child-labor, thus bringing jobs back to this country. This would mean some sacrifice on all sides but it would mean long-term benefits. In other words, the time has come for an UN-GLOBAL approach. A good place to start would be the go-ahead on oil-well-drilling, the better to un-globalize the nation’s dependence on often hostile, unpredictable nations for the crude.
The nation is surviving very well, thank you (okay…just temporarily until nearing the financial abyss), on the current work-force reduced by some 8 million jobs, which means that probably millions of those lost jobs are not coming back online, especially anytime soon or at a time when the administration seems hell-bent on running the small-business man off the plantation by taxing/regulating him to death.
This isn’t likely to happen, just as it didn’t happen with Clinton or the Bushes or other presidents. With Obama, the globalist, it would seem to have no chance. The answer is at the ballot box.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Thursday, September 16, 2010
DNC Memorandum #18
From the office of Tim Kaine, chairman, 16 September 2010
**Staffers are to play down the Primary results of Tuesday, in which incumbents – both parties – or democrats following the party-line may seem to have looked out-of-step with national thinking (everything is national these days, federal government as god). Please refer to Sharron Angle as “that nutcase woman” from Nevada and never mention that she was successful in beating court decisions that attempted to change Nevada’s tax laws, or that she was the republican ramrod in the Nevada legislature. Refer to Christine O’Donnell as that “other woman” or the “Delaware Demoniac.” Her opponent, Congressman Castle, was the Democrat Party’s favorite republican (after Arlen Specter), so in November the Democrats would have won either way. Now, we may have to do serious dirt-digging on O’Donnell as well as Angle. Please always mention that Harry Reid was once a D.C. policeman but never mention his record, especially the whining, in the Senate and his declaration of a lost war a few years back.
**The president and attorney general remain unhappy with all the red/yellow/black/white papers from the DNC defining the typical white person and the typical black person. However, these subjects are not to be further addressed until after the November elections for obvious reasons (because they’re divisive, for recent Harvard graduates). The wag who thumb-tacked the notice describing the typical Muslim person at the bottled-water keg and non-trans-fat, non-hamburger (eating grease okay if Senator Biden does), non-hotdog, non-dairy-product-of-any-kind, non-chocolate, non-smoking (smoking okay if Obama lights up), veggie-fortified, yogurt-enhanced snack-bar and body-mass-chart, carbon-cap-graph, endangered-species-obituary-wall-chart, blue/red-state-map, and Bush/BP/Limbaugh-dartboard as “anyone wearing a shirt or coat five sizes too large” will be punished when apprehended by having to write “Allah Akbar” on the conference-room chalk-board 10,000 times.
**Breaking news in New Jersey papers has to do with Imam Rauf’s acceptance of more than $2 million in tax money to renovate his rental properties but that apparently he just banked it and has been hailed into court. His apartments are full of bedbugs, rundown generally, are rat-infested fire hazards, have no utilities and not even accurate compasses pointing east so that their occupants will know in which direction to pray. One tenant had actually prayed facing west for three months and was speaking Arabic with a San Francisco accent and cross-dressing. Rahm Emanuel has noted that the imam says he did not do all those bad things and will not do them again. The official DNC line is that all the apartment-degradation was taking place while Imam Rauf was busy representing the president in the Middle East, along with George Mitchell, Richard Holbrook, State Secretary Clinton, Senator Kerry, and a homeless man from Kabul, the latter to give the representation diversity. The rumor that Imam Rauf asked to be accompanied by the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders instead of these clowns is untrue, and Rauf has said he will not ask again.
**Be on the lookout for additional accusations against Congresspersons Rangel and Waters vis-à-vis their ethics-trials, which hopefully will not be held before November. Rangel has just won his primary notwithstanding what amounts to actual crimes, not just ethics violations, things of which most if not all the legislators are guilty on a routine basis. Both Rangel and Waters will be reelected in November, notwithstanding their peccadilloes, as was Congressman Jefferson in 2006 despite that $90,000 stashed among the chicken-wings in his freezer and all the rest of the bribery-stuff that has him basking him in federal prison, eating three squares a day, bankrupt and trying to figure out how to pay his legal bills amounting to $4 million. Jefferson has repeatedly denied offering to sell Bourbon Street to the head Nigerian hatchet-man in 2005, just after Katrina hit. The Nigerian has corroborated this, claiming that Jefferson actually offered him the Ninth Ward, which was still underwater…for a long time.
**Michael Moore is planning a new propaganda movie, actually a mystery/thriller docudrama, concerning the Glenn Beck rally at the Lincoln Memorial in August. The working title is: The Mad Fool of the Reflecting Pool. Three deranged Pentecostals named Faith, Hope and Charity have been hired by George Soros- and Rahm Emanuel-characters to infiltrate the crowd, talking in unknown tongues that a Muslim sleeper-cell group on a spy-mission from Dearborn mistakes for a fatwa from Iran’s Khameinei anent Beck and strike matches to their shoes as they rush the stage. Moore hasn’t decided on the rest of the script but he promises suspense that will spin the 400,000-member crowd (unfortunately, the correct attendance) into a group of about a dozen Satanists, with Beck as a wiccan foaming at the mouth and pronouncing curses on republicans, the Tea party, John Boehner and Goldman-Sachs. Moore is planning a séance with State Secretary Clinton (an expert at channeling Eleanor Roosevelt) in an effort to resurrect the Three Stooges. More about this later!
**Do not – REPEAT – do NOT in your town-hall meetings engage in any talk about mosques in any locations. If the term Cordoba House Mosque comes up, simply relate that this is a building in Spain that belongs to the Catholics. If that doesn’t work, simply say it’s the name of an exotic cologne used by men of distinction. If that doesn’t work, terminate the meeting and take the names of the people there for investigation by Attorney General Holder.
**Staffers are warned not to get into the president’s “dogfight” talk. When he strayed off teleprompter in that speech the other day he mentioned that people in Washington “talk about him like a dog.” Obviously, real dogs can’t talk, though they might make more sense than folks if they did. The DNC line is that in Kenya elephants are referred to as dogs, so the president was just using a quaint way while paying tribute to his heritage to declare that the people in Washington who criticize him are republicans. Simple! Remember to keep a straight face when you mention this; otherwise, you may evoke embarrassing snickers.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
**Staffers are to play down the Primary results of Tuesday, in which incumbents – both parties – or democrats following the party-line may seem to have looked out-of-step with national thinking (everything is national these days, federal government as god). Please refer to Sharron Angle as “that nutcase woman” from Nevada and never mention that she was successful in beating court decisions that attempted to change Nevada’s tax laws, or that she was the republican ramrod in the Nevada legislature. Refer to Christine O’Donnell as that “other woman” or the “Delaware Demoniac.” Her opponent, Congressman Castle, was the Democrat Party’s favorite republican (after Arlen Specter), so in November the Democrats would have won either way. Now, we may have to do serious dirt-digging on O’Donnell as well as Angle. Please always mention that Harry Reid was once a D.C. policeman but never mention his record, especially the whining, in the Senate and his declaration of a lost war a few years back.
**The president and attorney general remain unhappy with all the red/yellow/black/white papers from the DNC defining the typical white person and the typical black person. However, these subjects are not to be further addressed until after the November elections for obvious reasons (because they’re divisive, for recent Harvard graduates). The wag who thumb-tacked the notice describing the typical Muslim person at the bottled-water keg and non-trans-fat, non-hamburger (eating grease okay if Senator Biden does), non-hotdog, non-dairy-product-of-any-kind, non-chocolate, non-smoking (smoking okay if Obama lights up), veggie-fortified, yogurt-enhanced snack-bar and body-mass-chart, carbon-cap-graph, endangered-species-obituary-wall-chart, blue/red-state-map, and Bush/BP/Limbaugh-dartboard as “anyone wearing a shirt or coat five sizes too large” will be punished when apprehended by having to write “Allah Akbar” on the conference-room chalk-board 10,000 times.
**Breaking news in New Jersey papers has to do with Imam Rauf’s acceptance of more than $2 million in tax money to renovate his rental properties but that apparently he just banked it and has been hailed into court. His apartments are full of bedbugs, rundown generally, are rat-infested fire hazards, have no utilities and not even accurate compasses pointing east so that their occupants will know in which direction to pray. One tenant had actually prayed facing west for three months and was speaking Arabic with a San Francisco accent and cross-dressing. Rahm Emanuel has noted that the imam says he did not do all those bad things and will not do them again. The official DNC line is that all the apartment-degradation was taking place while Imam Rauf was busy representing the president in the Middle East, along with George Mitchell, Richard Holbrook, State Secretary Clinton, Senator Kerry, and a homeless man from Kabul, the latter to give the representation diversity. The rumor that Imam Rauf asked to be accompanied by the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders instead of these clowns is untrue, and Rauf has said he will not ask again.
**Be on the lookout for additional accusations against Congresspersons Rangel and Waters vis-à-vis their ethics-trials, which hopefully will not be held before November. Rangel has just won his primary notwithstanding what amounts to actual crimes, not just ethics violations, things of which most if not all the legislators are guilty on a routine basis. Both Rangel and Waters will be reelected in November, notwithstanding their peccadilloes, as was Congressman Jefferson in 2006 despite that $90,000 stashed among the chicken-wings in his freezer and all the rest of the bribery-stuff that has him basking him in federal prison, eating three squares a day, bankrupt and trying to figure out how to pay his legal bills amounting to $4 million. Jefferson has repeatedly denied offering to sell Bourbon Street to the head Nigerian hatchet-man in 2005, just after Katrina hit. The Nigerian has corroborated this, claiming that Jefferson actually offered him the Ninth Ward, which was still underwater…for a long time.
**Michael Moore is planning a new propaganda movie, actually a mystery/thriller docudrama, concerning the Glenn Beck rally at the Lincoln Memorial in August. The working title is: The Mad Fool of the Reflecting Pool. Three deranged Pentecostals named Faith, Hope and Charity have been hired by George Soros- and Rahm Emanuel-characters to infiltrate the crowd, talking in unknown tongues that a Muslim sleeper-cell group on a spy-mission from Dearborn mistakes for a fatwa from Iran’s Khameinei anent Beck and strike matches to their shoes as they rush the stage. Moore hasn’t decided on the rest of the script but he promises suspense that will spin the 400,000-member crowd (unfortunately, the correct attendance) into a group of about a dozen Satanists, with Beck as a wiccan foaming at the mouth and pronouncing curses on republicans, the Tea party, John Boehner and Goldman-Sachs. Moore is planning a séance with State Secretary Clinton (an expert at channeling Eleanor Roosevelt) in an effort to resurrect the Three Stooges. More about this later!
**Do not – REPEAT – do NOT in your town-hall meetings engage in any talk about mosques in any locations. If the term Cordoba House Mosque comes up, simply relate that this is a building in Spain that belongs to the Catholics. If that doesn’t work, simply say it’s the name of an exotic cologne used by men of distinction. If that doesn’t work, terminate the meeting and take the names of the people there for investigation by Attorney General Holder.
**Staffers are warned not to get into the president’s “dogfight” talk. When he strayed off teleprompter in that speech the other day he mentioned that people in Washington “talk about him like a dog.” Obviously, real dogs can’t talk, though they might make more sense than folks if they did. The DNC line is that in Kenya elephants are referred to as dogs, so the president was just using a quaint way while paying tribute to his heritage to declare that the people in Washington who criticize him are republicans. Simple! Remember to keep a straight face when you mention this; otherwise, you may evoke embarrassing snickers.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Friday, September 10, 2010
Rauf - Insensitive Imam!
Appearing in the New York Times of 07 September was an article by Muslim Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the main honcho in the Cordoba House mosque-building matter and recent returnee from a swing through the Middle East, with Uncle Sam paying the tab. This is part of his screed: I therefore call upon all Americans to rise to this challenge. Let us commemorate the anniversary of 9/11 by pausing to reflect and meditate and tone down the vitriol and rhetoric that serves only to strengthen the radicals and weaken our friends’ belief in our values.
Yeah…sure. Whose values? How unspeakably self-serving! It’s like commemorating the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, with the rusting sunken USS Arizona, a coffin today for hundreds of sailors as a reminder, except that at Ground Zero, the reminder will be the Cordoba House, sitting on the ashes of some 3,000 Americans. This is the epitome of obscenity.
Reflect and meditate, he said,
Commemorate the dead,
And quell the rhetoric – so mean…
Praise Allah at the scene.
The vitriol…well, it must go,
With Christians all aglow –
There’s nothing radical at all…
Three thousand lives…so SMALL.
Our values…they must be preserved,
And Allah praised…well served,
But Christians must be mollified…
Until they all have died.
With strong belief, do not be weak,
Let Muslims chaos wreak,
As values are immortalized…
With murder idolized.
So build the mosque and build it well,
No martyrs found in hell,
Teach there the martyrs how to kill
The infidel at will.
[tune: Amazing Grace, perfectly fitting!]
Is this too harsh? Does it denigrate all Muslims? NO! It merely points up the fact that in the Islamic holy book, the Koran, is the demand that Muslims kill the infidel when and where they can. Muslims do not deny this, even the “peaceful” Muslims. They can’t because that universal fatwa is extant and can’t be changed.
Throughout the 90s, the fatwa was exercised on this country – the first WTC bombing; Khobar Towers bombing; American embassies bombed in Africa; the USS Kohl. That wasn’t enough, so in the name of Allah and courtesy of al Qaeda the second WTC bombing took place on 9/11 and just last year in the name of Allah as screamed before the fact, Major Hasan gunned down 13 souls at Ft. Hood. He has yet to be tried after nearly a year, so diligent is this administration in actually buying him time.
Imam Rauf will not deny that the fatwa is in force. He can’t, most likely because he would then be the current U.S. incarnation of Salmon Rushdie, with a bulls-eye on his back. Yeah…on his BACK. That’s the way of the terrorists. They kill as cowards and kill women and children – even their own – as if they are frying chickens…in the name of Allah.
Imam Rauf should denounce the jihadists, who actually control his religion. He will say he’s not in favor of all the blood-letting. Most Muslims are not but neither he nor they can lift a finger to stop it. The reason is simple enough, to wit, that the objective of the Muslims who hold supreme power throughout the world is the conquering of the world…nothing less.
The main impediment to this goal is the United States. The three million or so Muslims in this country should band together and form their own version of Islam, probably with Imam Rauf in the lead. After all, Islam is already fragmented into the Sunnis, Shiites and at least seven branches. The U.S. branch could focus on “peace.”
Won’t happen, of course! More’s the pity. This is what Rauf said to Soledad O’Brien on TV: If we move from that location, the story will be that the radicals have taken over the discourse. The headlines in the Muslim world will be that Islam is under attack. … And if we do move, it will strengthen the argument of the radicals to recruit, their ability to recruit, and their increasing aggression and violence against our country. In other words, Rauf is holding the USA hostage. Disgusting.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Yeah…sure. Whose values? How unspeakably self-serving! It’s like commemorating the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, with the rusting sunken USS Arizona, a coffin today for hundreds of sailors as a reminder, except that at Ground Zero, the reminder will be the Cordoba House, sitting on the ashes of some 3,000 Americans. This is the epitome of obscenity.
Reflect and meditate, he said,
Commemorate the dead,
And quell the rhetoric – so mean…
Praise Allah at the scene.
The vitriol…well, it must go,
With Christians all aglow –
There’s nothing radical at all…
Three thousand lives…so SMALL.
Our values…they must be preserved,
And Allah praised…well served,
But Christians must be mollified…
Until they all have died.
With strong belief, do not be weak,
Let Muslims chaos wreak,
As values are immortalized…
With murder idolized.
So build the mosque and build it well,
No martyrs found in hell,
Teach there the martyrs how to kill
The infidel at will.
[tune: Amazing Grace, perfectly fitting!]
Is this too harsh? Does it denigrate all Muslims? NO! It merely points up the fact that in the Islamic holy book, the Koran, is the demand that Muslims kill the infidel when and where they can. Muslims do not deny this, even the “peaceful” Muslims. They can’t because that universal fatwa is extant and can’t be changed.
Throughout the 90s, the fatwa was exercised on this country – the first WTC bombing; Khobar Towers bombing; American embassies bombed in Africa; the USS Kohl. That wasn’t enough, so in the name of Allah and courtesy of al Qaeda the second WTC bombing took place on 9/11 and just last year in the name of Allah as screamed before the fact, Major Hasan gunned down 13 souls at Ft. Hood. He has yet to be tried after nearly a year, so diligent is this administration in actually buying him time.
Imam Rauf will not deny that the fatwa is in force. He can’t, most likely because he would then be the current U.S. incarnation of Salmon Rushdie, with a bulls-eye on his back. Yeah…on his BACK. That’s the way of the terrorists. They kill as cowards and kill women and children – even their own – as if they are frying chickens…in the name of Allah.
Imam Rauf should denounce the jihadists, who actually control his religion. He will say he’s not in favor of all the blood-letting. Most Muslims are not but neither he nor they can lift a finger to stop it. The reason is simple enough, to wit, that the objective of the Muslims who hold supreme power throughout the world is the conquering of the world…nothing less.
The main impediment to this goal is the United States. The three million or so Muslims in this country should band together and form their own version of Islam, probably with Imam Rauf in the lead. After all, Islam is already fragmented into the Sunnis, Shiites and at least seven branches. The U.S. branch could focus on “peace.”
Won’t happen, of course! More’s the pity. This is what Rauf said to Soledad O’Brien on TV: If we move from that location, the story will be that the radicals have taken over the discourse. The headlines in the Muslim world will be that Islam is under attack. … And if we do move, it will strengthen the argument of the radicals to recruit, their ability to recruit, and their increasing aggression and violence against our country. In other words, Rauf is holding the USA hostage. Disgusting.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Tuesday, September 07, 2010
Un-Righteous Rhetoric & Allah
I don’t spend much time looking at blogs but chanced on one the other day by a Campbell University Divinity School professor who, in winding up a blog about the volatile rhetoric connected with non-Muslim’s ideas about Islam (Christians should be nicer), had this to say as his last paragraph: “There may be no tears in heaven, but the Spirit of God on earth, I'm convinced, must be weeping.”
I felt moved to respond thusly: “From the last paragraph, may one conclude a sort of ambivalence on the part of God?” The professor, of course, has no knowledge of what or who concerning Heaven at this time but if God is there and not weeping, why would he, as Spirit in the world, be weeping here? Makes no sense, in other words.
I continued with this: “For words of genuine vituperation, John [the Baptist] set the stage early with this in John 3: “John would say to the crowds that were coming out to be baptized by him, ‘You children of serpents! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?’ (ISV).
But for outright chewing-out in no uncertain terms, check into Matthew 23, virtually the whole chapter, and find out how delicately Jesus tip-toed around the sensitivities of his hearers – hypocrites; twice as much a son of hell; blind guides; blind fools; strain at gnats, swallow camels; full of greed and self-indulgence; whitewashed tombs; full of dead men’s bones; wickedness; snakes; brood of vipers. And that was just one sermon. Imagine his lecture when Jesus lashed animals and men from the temple, that ‘den of robbers’ thing.
The modern-day vituperations pale in comparison with what Jesus had to say, and this is just a small example. Islam is evil…from its roots it’s evil. This is not a condemnation of Muslims, only of their religion, used now as before for purposes of satisfying the mandate of the Koran…kill the infidel.
Someone else reading the blog had this to say to me: “Do you have any Muslim friends? Do you know someone who is Muslim? Most Christians would never be able to separate their ‘religion’ from who they are as a person. So to say that you don't condemn Muslims, only their religion, is too easy. You obviously hate Muslims. Why not be honest?
Matthew 23 was directed at the self described religious faithful by an insider, a member of the family. In other words, it is a word to those who think they have sole possession of divine insight. Perhaps we should all recognize our own hypocrisy before using Jesus' words as justification for our own tirades against others.. The blogger’s name was Scott, someone I don’t know and I’m sure doesn’t know me. Of course, I had already said I didn’t mean Muslims themselves as evil, only their religion, which, indisputably even by them, calls for death to the infidel whenever and wherever possible. Not good enough for Scott!
So…I simply parsed his response:
Too easy? I find it very easy. I condemn Islam for just what it is – evil, and I’m being very honest about it. I made it plain that I was not speaking of Muslims, so your self-righteous escapade into passing judgment and thereby becoming God in your own eyes is very amusing. I don’t know you from Adam but I absolutely refuse to genuflect before you, your claim to Godhood notwithstanding.
Scott: Matthew 23 was directed at the self described religious faithful by an insider, a member of the family. In other words, it is a word to those who think they have sole possession of divine insight.
Okay…so Jesus was hard on the Jews for their wrong-headedness about doctrine and subsequent behavior…called ’em snakes. I’d hate to guess what he’d say to the imams today. After all, they’re just part of the family, aren’t they? You know – Ishmael and his gang…Abraham’s own. As to divine insight…yours or mine?
Scott: Perhaps we should all recognize our own hypocrisy before using Jesus' words as justification for our own tirades against others.
Naw…I’ll recognize yours, but you just leave my hypocrisy alone. And if Jesus could launch into a genuinely good tirade, I feel free to do the same, even using his very words. In Matthew 11, he condemned whole towns, put ’em on a par with old Sodom. The problem with a lot of folks is that they don’t understand that Jesus was as much blood-and-guts as he was sweetness-and-light. I kinda like that. Needless to say, this parsing was not posted on the blog as a response…probably too offensive to both Scott, perhaps a minister, and the professor.
In especially the mainstream denominations that are losing membership in huge numbers, the going thing is to accept that Allah of Islam is just an appellation for Almighty God of the Holy Scriptures. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Islam was concocted by Mohammad who lived 570-632 AD, an illiterate polygamist (probably 12 wives officially, one marriage consummated with a nine-year-old), who somehow co-opted Bible names and events, had someone write his words, created Islam and made Allah the god involved, a figment of his imagination.
There’s nothing wrong with pointing this out, especially at a time when Americans are in the crosshairs of the jihadists, who get their marching orders, including suicide/homicide bombings of women and children, from the Koran. The ministers and academicians who teach that Islam is to be respected as a religion in the same sense as Judeo-Christianity do a disservice to both God and country, as well as the students/congregants who are exposed to them.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
I felt moved to respond thusly: “From the last paragraph, may one conclude a sort of ambivalence on the part of God?” The professor, of course, has no knowledge of what or who concerning Heaven at this time but if God is there and not weeping, why would he, as Spirit in the world, be weeping here? Makes no sense, in other words.
I continued with this: “For words of genuine vituperation, John [the Baptist] set the stage early with this in John 3: “John would say to the crowds that were coming out to be baptized by him, ‘You children of serpents! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?’ (ISV).
But for outright chewing-out in no uncertain terms, check into Matthew 23, virtually the whole chapter, and find out how delicately Jesus tip-toed around the sensitivities of his hearers – hypocrites; twice as much a son of hell; blind guides; blind fools; strain at gnats, swallow camels; full of greed and self-indulgence; whitewashed tombs; full of dead men’s bones; wickedness; snakes; brood of vipers. And that was just one sermon. Imagine his lecture when Jesus lashed animals and men from the temple, that ‘den of robbers’ thing.
The modern-day vituperations pale in comparison with what Jesus had to say, and this is just a small example. Islam is evil…from its roots it’s evil. This is not a condemnation of Muslims, only of their religion, used now as before for purposes of satisfying the mandate of the Koran…kill the infidel.
Someone else reading the blog had this to say to me: “Do you have any Muslim friends? Do you know someone who is Muslim? Most Christians would never be able to separate their ‘religion’ from who they are as a person. So to say that you don't condemn Muslims, only their religion, is too easy. You obviously hate Muslims. Why not be honest?
Matthew 23 was directed at the self described religious faithful by an insider, a member of the family. In other words, it is a word to those who think they have sole possession of divine insight. Perhaps we should all recognize our own hypocrisy before using Jesus' words as justification for our own tirades against others.. The blogger’s name was Scott, someone I don’t know and I’m sure doesn’t know me. Of course, I had already said I didn’t mean Muslims themselves as evil, only their religion, which, indisputably even by them, calls for death to the infidel whenever and wherever possible. Not good enough for Scott!
So…I simply parsed his response:
Too easy? I find it very easy. I condemn Islam for just what it is – evil, and I’m being very honest about it. I made it plain that I was not speaking of Muslims, so your self-righteous escapade into passing judgment and thereby becoming God in your own eyes is very amusing. I don’t know you from Adam but I absolutely refuse to genuflect before you, your claim to Godhood notwithstanding.
Scott: Matthew 23 was directed at the self described religious faithful by an insider, a member of the family. In other words, it is a word to those who think they have sole possession of divine insight.
Okay…so Jesus was hard on the Jews for their wrong-headedness about doctrine and subsequent behavior…called ’em snakes. I’d hate to guess what he’d say to the imams today. After all, they’re just part of the family, aren’t they? You know – Ishmael and his gang…Abraham’s own. As to divine insight…yours or mine?
Scott: Perhaps we should all recognize our own hypocrisy before using Jesus' words as justification for our own tirades against others.
Naw…I’ll recognize yours, but you just leave my hypocrisy alone. And if Jesus could launch into a genuinely good tirade, I feel free to do the same, even using his very words. In Matthew 11, he condemned whole towns, put ’em on a par with old Sodom. The problem with a lot of folks is that they don’t understand that Jesus was as much blood-and-guts as he was sweetness-and-light. I kinda like that. Needless to say, this parsing was not posted on the blog as a response…probably too offensive to both Scott, perhaps a minister, and the professor.
In especially the mainstream denominations that are losing membership in huge numbers, the going thing is to accept that Allah of Islam is just an appellation for Almighty God of the Holy Scriptures. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Islam was concocted by Mohammad who lived 570-632 AD, an illiterate polygamist (probably 12 wives officially, one marriage consummated with a nine-year-old), who somehow co-opted Bible names and events, had someone write his words, created Islam and made Allah the god involved, a figment of his imagination.
There’s nothing wrong with pointing this out, especially at a time when Americans are in the crosshairs of the jihadists, who get their marching orders, including suicide/homicide bombings of women and children, from the Koran. The ministers and academicians who teach that Islam is to be respected as a religion in the same sense as Judeo-Christianity do a disservice to both God and country, as well as the students/congregants who are exposed to them.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Saturday, September 04, 2010
Obama & Niebuhr?
In a recent article appearing in EthicsDaily.com, Colin Harris, a professor of religious studies in Mercer University, said this: “Reinhold Niebuhr is regarded by many as the most influential American theologian and ethicist of the 20th century. … In 1976, the citizens of the United States elected a president who claimed Niebuhr as a significant influence in his theological and political pilgrimage.” That was Jimmy Carter.
This statement has been attributed to Niebuhr: “Evil is not to be traced back to the individual but to the collective behavior of humanity.” It would be hard to imagine a more wrong-headed claim.
Ironically, Glenn Beck mentioned in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial during his “Restoring Honor” rally on 28 August the fact that part of his effort, actually the most important part, was to insist that salvation is not a collective thing, as is the case with “liberation theology,” but a personal, individual thing. Niebuhr had it backwards.
Without Hitler, the individual, there would have been no Nazism/Holocaust; without Lenin, no communism; without Mao, no great leap forward; without Pol Pot, no killing fields; without Saddam, no WMD-use on the Kurds, Shiites and Iranians; without Stalin, no gulag; without Khamenei/Ahmadinejad, no threat to obliterate Israel. There’s no chicken-egg argument in this matter. The individual comes first, then the carnage…or in some cases, just the opposite – good. Think of Lincoln and slavery and perhaps the most profound cultural change in U.S. history.
Collectivism eventuates from the actions of an individual, not the other way around. Jesus dealt with the individual, as did God in the OT, with the “nation,” the collective, taking form/action after the fact. Obama believes in the “collective,” another term for class-ism – us against them, which remarks victimization as the governing element in any enterprise. This is the “liberation theology” espoused by Jeremiah Wright and preached to Obama for 20 years.
In practical terms in the black community, “black liberation theology” amounts to reparations, the oppressor paying the oppressed account of slavery, even though for 147 years no white American has owned a slave. One might as well insist that all citizens in northern states make reparations to all citizens in southern states. Obama knows reparations won’t go down with the American people, at least now, so he alluded to it in his campaign by suggesting that the Constitution be adjusted in order to allow for the proper redistribution of wealth.
Obama, then, has become the individual through which the attempt at socialism – the collective – is being made. It remains to be seen if American citizens will become part of the collective, though they are well on their way down that road. First comes the individual, then the following “herd.” American communist leaders tried to turn the country in the 1930s, but even in the awful Great Depression of that time, the citizens wouldn’t have it.
This is attributed to Niebuhr: “Democracies are indeed slow to make war, but once embarked upon a martial venture are equally slow to make peace and reluctant to make a tolerable, rather than a vindictive, peace.” Perhaps Niehbuhr has a point in some cases but one wonders how he could make that conclusion with the worst war ever fought – World War II. Or the Korean conflict soon after, two of this nation’s better moments!
The United States came in late (at least officially) in both WWI and WWII, proving that democracies (U.S. actually is a republic) use war as a last resort. In neither case was the resultant peace instrument vindictive, since the U.S. acquired no colonies and formed no firing squads for the losers’ citizens (just the bad guys, few in number at that). Indeed, the magnanimity (Marshall Plan) instigated for loser Axis nations of WWII was not only not vindictive but probably the most decent “peace arrangement” in all of history, as evidenced by the prosperity of those countries today.
As part of its beneficence (Niebuhr’s “vindictive” peace) to Germany (despite 405,000 American dead in WWII), the U.S. kept some 300,000 troops in that country to protect it from the Soviet Union following WWII until about 1990 and the dissolution of the Soviet empire. Today, there are still more than 54,000 American GIs in Germany even though Germany has 244,300 active military of its own.
Some 28,500 American GIs remain in South Korea (American presence been there since 1950) in order to protect it from North Korea, which has 1,106,000 active military, nearly 5% of its total population. South Korea’s military numbers 687,000 but would be crushed if the Americans were ever to leave since even the little tyrant that rules North Korea, Kim Jong Il, knows better than to attack an American. Another example of Niebuhr’s vindictive peace?
This is Harris again: “Now we have a president [Obama] who also acknowledges a debt to Niebuhr for his influence in the development of his religious and political philosophy. He has also acknowledged the influence of his faith in his approach to the challenges of his office.” If this is true and with the comparison to be made to the Carter administration, God help us all.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
This statement has been attributed to Niebuhr: “Evil is not to be traced back to the individual but to the collective behavior of humanity.” It would be hard to imagine a more wrong-headed claim.
Ironically, Glenn Beck mentioned in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial during his “Restoring Honor” rally on 28 August the fact that part of his effort, actually the most important part, was to insist that salvation is not a collective thing, as is the case with “liberation theology,” but a personal, individual thing. Niebuhr had it backwards.
Without Hitler, the individual, there would have been no Nazism/Holocaust; without Lenin, no communism; without Mao, no great leap forward; without Pol Pot, no killing fields; without Saddam, no WMD-use on the Kurds, Shiites and Iranians; without Stalin, no gulag; without Khamenei/Ahmadinejad, no threat to obliterate Israel. There’s no chicken-egg argument in this matter. The individual comes first, then the carnage…or in some cases, just the opposite – good. Think of Lincoln and slavery and perhaps the most profound cultural change in U.S. history.
Collectivism eventuates from the actions of an individual, not the other way around. Jesus dealt with the individual, as did God in the OT, with the “nation,” the collective, taking form/action after the fact. Obama believes in the “collective,” another term for class-ism – us against them, which remarks victimization as the governing element in any enterprise. This is the “liberation theology” espoused by Jeremiah Wright and preached to Obama for 20 years.
In practical terms in the black community, “black liberation theology” amounts to reparations, the oppressor paying the oppressed account of slavery, even though for 147 years no white American has owned a slave. One might as well insist that all citizens in northern states make reparations to all citizens in southern states. Obama knows reparations won’t go down with the American people, at least now, so he alluded to it in his campaign by suggesting that the Constitution be adjusted in order to allow for the proper redistribution of wealth.
Obama, then, has become the individual through which the attempt at socialism – the collective – is being made. It remains to be seen if American citizens will become part of the collective, though they are well on their way down that road. First comes the individual, then the following “herd.” American communist leaders tried to turn the country in the 1930s, but even in the awful Great Depression of that time, the citizens wouldn’t have it.
This is attributed to Niebuhr: “Democracies are indeed slow to make war, but once embarked upon a martial venture are equally slow to make peace and reluctant to make a tolerable, rather than a vindictive, peace.” Perhaps Niehbuhr has a point in some cases but one wonders how he could make that conclusion with the worst war ever fought – World War II. Or the Korean conflict soon after, two of this nation’s better moments!
The United States came in late (at least officially) in both WWI and WWII, proving that democracies (U.S. actually is a republic) use war as a last resort. In neither case was the resultant peace instrument vindictive, since the U.S. acquired no colonies and formed no firing squads for the losers’ citizens (just the bad guys, few in number at that). Indeed, the magnanimity (Marshall Plan) instigated for loser Axis nations of WWII was not only not vindictive but probably the most decent “peace arrangement” in all of history, as evidenced by the prosperity of those countries today.
As part of its beneficence (Niebuhr’s “vindictive” peace) to Germany (despite 405,000 American dead in WWII), the U.S. kept some 300,000 troops in that country to protect it from the Soviet Union following WWII until about 1990 and the dissolution of the Soviet empire. Today, there are still more than 54,000 American GIs in Germany even though Germany has 244,300 active military of its own.
Some 28,500 American GIs remain in South Korea (American presence been there since 1950) in order to protect it from North Korea, which has 1,106,000 active military, nearly 5% of its total population. South Korea’s military numbers 687,000 but would be crushed if the Americans were ever to leave since even the little tyrant that rules North Korea, Kim Jong Il, knows better than to attack an American. Another example of Niebuhr’s vindictive peace?
This is Harris again: “Now we have a president [Obama] who also acknowledges a debt to Niebuhr for his influence in the development of his religious and political philosophy. He has also acknowledged the influence of his faith in his approach to the challenges of his office.” If this is true and with the comparison to be made to the Carter administration, God help us all.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Thursday, September 02, 2010
Sharpton, Duncan & the New Black Panthers
The Rev. Al Sharpton seemed to indicate the other day that the “Restoring Honor” rally staged by radio/TV personality Glenn Beck on 28 August and drawing some 300,000 to 500,000 people to Washington violated a day he considers sacrosanct (inviolable) by virtue of the rally headed by Dr. Martin Luther King (I have a dream) on that day in 1963. In other words, he puts the “I Have a Dream” day on a par with Christmas.
Sharpton had his own rally on the 28th in Washington, with a number of speakers who managed to come up with the same line that grew out of the civil-rights era regarding the entitlements, except that the new line insists that the government owes African Americans much more than it has GIVEN them. Sharpton is the guy who gave us the “Tawana Brawley Hoax” back in the day, one of his objectives being the ruination of the career of a prosecutor, who later filed suit culminating in Sharpton and other “advisers” being ordered by the court to pay prosecutor Pagones $345,000, while Brawley had to pay $185,000. Meanwhile, Brawley changed her name to Maryam Muhammad. Interesting, considering Rev. Sharpton’s Christian background.
A speaker in the Sharpton rally was Malik Zulu Shabazz, head honcho of the New Black Panther Party, which is not new at all and not much different from the old Black Panther Party of the 1960s, at least in its rhetoric. In that famous performance at a polling place in Philadelphia in 2008, a member of the NBPP, Philadelphia leader Shamir Shabazz, exploded his hate for the “crackers” (white folk) and called for the murder not only of them but of their babies, too…those “cracker-babies.” Has the term “honky” gone out of style?
In the Sharpton rally, Malik Zulu Shabazz (born Paris Lewis in Los Angeles) came up with a new wrinkle, i.e., that the “black jury” has found “white America” guilty of injustice and racism and called for all black young people, including the black gang-bangers, to unite against the “common enemy.” Who is the “common enemy?” Shabazz/Lewis elaborated, speaking of a “black dream that when we see caskets rolling in the black community…that we will see caskets and funerals in the community of our enemy as well.” Who is the enemy?
This is the kind of hateful rhetoric that incites people to riot. The “common enemy” referenced by the NBPP leader is obviously the white folk, though neither Shabazz/Lewis nor Sharpton wisely seemed to get around to articulating that fact. Suppose Glenn Beck had said something like that and referenced either directly or inferentially that the “common enemy” is the black folk. He would have been hounded into exile by even – especially – the white population.
Perhaps the strangest aspect of the Sharpton rally had to do with the memo put out by Education Secretary Arne Duncan: “staff are invited to join Secretary Arne Duncan, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and other leaders on Saturday, Aug. 28, for the 'Reclaim the Dream' rally and march, … ." Duncan was the head honcho of the Chicago Public School system until tapped by Obama to make Washington his new home. There are about 4,000 federal employees answering to Duncan but, paying no attention to this blatant politicizing of the Department of Education, they didn’t show up.
Besides making a dumb actual threat, considering his power to hire and fire or just harass, Duncan may be so out of touch with reality that he doesn’t realize that while the national average per pupil spending by state in 2006-07 was $9,557, the figure for D.C., his local district, was $16,540, or an increase over the state average of 73%. Blacks make up 54.4% of the D.C. population, thus Duncan was beating a dead horse if he had D.C. in mind regarding some sort of education-neglect for African Americans, not to mention that the D.C system is among the worst in the nation.
Nor is there any reason to believe that blacks are short-changed anywhere else. In the name of education-equity, school systems throughout the nation have been virtually irretrievably damaged by cockamamie ideas/actions – forced busing, for instance, now finally in disfavor – and the U.S. consequently trails many industrialized nations, especially in math and science.
The salient point not made by Duncan was that, beginning roughly with the entitlement laws of the 1960s, the black family unit has crumbled, the men seeming not to care for heading households as they did before 1960 (75%), and black women okay with bearing illegitimate offspring (70% of all black babies currently), perhaps with a view toward the welfare check. The experts on all sides (okay…the National Education Association [teachers union] probably excluded) agree that the lack of family support dooms children to failure in school.
So…was Duncan in the wrong camp? Should he have been in the “Restoring Honor” rally, where the main interests were preserving the family as a unit and a return to faith in God as the support in making that happen? Actually, he should have kept his nose out of the whole business, but with this administration class-distinction and consequent victimization mean everything. Disgusting!
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Sharpton had his own rally on the 28th in Washington, with a number of speakers who managed to come up with the same line that grew out of the civil-rights era regarding the entitlements, except that the new line insists that the government owes African Americans much more than it has GIVEN them. Sharpton is the guy who gave us the “Tawana Brawley Hoax” back in the day, one of his objectives being the ruination of the career of a prosecutor, who later filed suit culminating in Sharpton and other “advisers” being ordered by the court to pay prosecutor Pagones $345,000, while Brawley had to pay $185,000. Meanwhile, Brawley changed her name to Maryam Muhammad. Interesting, considering Rev. Sharpton’s Christian background.
A speaker in the Sharpton rally was Malik Zulu Shabazz, head honcho of the New Black Panther Party, which is not new at all and not much different from the old Black Panther Party of the 1960s, at least in its rhetoric. In that famous performance at a polling place in Philadelphia in 2008, a member of the NBPP, Philadelphia leader Shamir Shabazz, exploded his hate for the “crackers” (white folk) and called for the murder not only of them but of their babies, too…those “cracker-babies.” Has the term “honky” gone out of style?
In the Sharpton rally, Malik Zulu Shabazz (born Paris Lewis in Los Angeles) came up with a new wrinkle, i.e., that the “black jury” has found “white America” guilty of injustice and racism and called for all black young people, including the black gang-bangers, to unite against the “common enemy.” Who is the “common enemy?” Shabazz/Lewis elaborated, speaking of a “black dream that when we see caskets rolling in the black community…that we will see caskets and funerals in the community of our enemy as well.” Who is the enemy?
This is the kind of hateful rhetoric that incites people to riot. The “common enemy” referenced by the NBPP leader is obviously the white folk, though neither Shabazz/Lewis nor Sharpton wisely seemed to get around to articulating that fact. Suppose Glenn Beck had said something like that and referenced either directly or inferentially that the “common enemy” is the black folk. He would have been hounded into exile by even – especially – the white population.
Perhaps the strangest aspect of the Sharpton rally had to do with the memo put out by Education Secretary Arne Duncan: “staff are invited to join Secretary Arne Duncan, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and other leaders on Saturday, Aug. 28, for the 'Reclaim the Dream' rally and march, … ." Duncan was the head honcho of the Chicago Public School system until tapped by Obama to make Washington his new home. There are about 4,000 federal employees answering to Duncan but, paying no attention to this blatant politicizing of the Department of Education, they didn’t show up.
Besides making a dumb actual threat, considering his power to hire and fire or just harass, Duncan may be so out of touch with reality that he doesn’t realize that while the national average per pupil spending by state in 2006-07 was $9,557, the figure for D.C., his local district, was $16,540, or an increase over the state average of 73%. Blacks make up 54.4% of the D.C. population, thus Duncan was beating a dead horse if he had D.C. in mind regarding some sort of education-neglect for African Americans, not to mention that the D.C system is among the worst in the nation.
Nor is there any reason to believe that blacks are short-changed anywhere else. In the name of education-equity, school systems throughout the nation have been virtually irretrievably damaged by cockamamie ideas/actions – forced busing, for instance, now finally in disfavor – and the U.S. consequently trails many industrialized nations, especially in math and science.
The salient point not made by Duncan was that, beginning roughly with the entitlement laws of the 1960s, the black family unit has crumbled, the men seeming not to care for heading households as they did before 1960 (75%), and black women okay with bearing illegitimate offspring (70% of all black babies currently), perhaps with a view toward the welfare check. The experts on all sides (okay…the National Education Association [teachers union] probably excluded) agree that the lack of family support dooms children to failure in school.
So…was Duncan in the wrong camp? Should he have been in the “Restoring Honor” rally, where the main interests were preserving the family as a unit and a return to faith in God as the support in making that happen? Actually, he should have kept his nose out of the whole business, but with this administration class-distinction and consequent victimization mean everything. Disgusting!
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Monday, August 30, 2010
Beck & "Restoring Honor"
By any measure, the “Restoring Honor” rally staged by Glenn Beck on the Washington, D.C., Mall on the 28th was huge. The tip-off as to how meaningful it was came via CBS News soon after the affair was over when that outfit – Dan Rather’s own – indicated the crowd numbered 87,000. CBS suffers from the “sour grapes syndrome.” The New York Times, no lover of conservatives, estimated the crowd at some 300,000 souls and the consensus seems to be in the 250,000 to 350,000 range.
Actually, Beck took the opportunity to turn the whole nine yards into what once was called a “brush arbor revival,” harkening back to the late 19th-century meetings in rural areas featuring fervent preaching. In addition, he was wise enough not to make the observance into a tiring all-day affair, everything over in good order in about three-and-a-half hours. In his advertising of the event, Beck had requested that no signs be brought, and no protest signs were seen, though plenty of American flags were in evidence, as were thousands of young people and children.
Beck did not shock or surprise – there was no bait-and-switch. He had claimed that the rally would be religious in nature, a sort of “turning back to God at a time when the nation is floundering.” He was true to his word. He had also promised that the rally would not in any way be political. It was not…not even remotely, even though Sarah Palin, vice president candidate in 2008, was one of the few speakers.
Beck made a big deal of the M.L. King (“I have a dream”) event on 28 August 1963 in the same place, even flashing film of part of King’s effort on the huge screens set up so people who were far from the action could see it as well as everything else that happened at center stage, which was on a lower level in front of the Lincoln Memorial. A number of African Americans were part of the effort, including King’s niece, Dr. Alveda King, who also spoke. Also on the program were St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa and first baseman Albert Pujols, who received an award for off-field charitable and religious work. Fabulously succesful businessman Jon M. Huntsman received an award for charitable giving…in his case, huge amounts.
Beck could easily be the envy of every preacher in the land…well-prepared and without notes or teleprompter, charismatic, spellbinding and very much in control. Unabashedly, he spoke about his religious faith and that the nation could only be saved from its obvious trend toward self-destruction by a return to the same kind of reliance on God that was evident on the part of the founding fathers. He made it plain, however, that there would need to be sacrifice on the part of the people and disclosed that he and his wife tithe the family income, the better to help the church do its job.
Beck made no pretense to credibility based on academic ahievements, mentioning that his college education consisted of one college course when he was age 30. In light of this, one wonders about other times when religious awakenings have happened in this country. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Billy Sunday, whose father, a Civil War soldier, died a month after Sunday’s birth in 1862, endured privation and orphanages, then became a professional baseball player-turned-evangelist and turned the country upside down with his preaching. Academia had not spoiled him.
In the late-nineteenth century, un-lettered Dwight L. Moody, a onetime shoe-store clerk, became the preeminent evangelist in both this country and the British Isles and later established what became the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. He preached to millions in his weeks-long crusades at a time when there were no microphones and led tens of thousands to belief in Christ.
In the 20th century, Billy Graham, although well-educated in college and seminary, kept his sermons so simple that his peers have ridiculed him for being shallow. His accomplishments as an evangelist are so stupendous as to defy belief. He did not get bogged down in the fine points of homiletics…he merely “brought the word” without trying to pose as a know-it-all. The confidant of presidents, he earned the trust of the nation (the ordinary people, not the sophisticates) and didn’t talk down to anyone.
So…could it be that Beck, virtually self-educated beyond high school and inordinately successful career-wise while being an able communicator, might at least begin another awakening? Without question, while silly church leaders, seminary professors and other religionists argue about whether or not men should marry men (could anything be more off-the-wall?), religion as a force is on the wane in this country. According to Beck, the founders premised the nation on faith in God. He insists that this faith will save us or we’ll go down, not a collective faith but individual faith as each soul trusts. In this corner, the word is that he’s right. All over Washington is the inscription “In God We Trust.” But do we?
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Actually, Beck took the opportunity to turn the whole nine yards into what once was called a “brush arbor revival,” harkening back to the late 19th-century meetings in rural areas featuring fervent preaching. In addition, he was wise enough not to make the observance into a tiring all-day affair, everything over in good order in about three-and-a-half hours. In his advertising of the event, Beck had requested that no signs be brought, and no protest signs were seen, though plenty of American flags were in evidence, as were thousands of young people and children.
Beck did not shock or surprise – there was no bait-and-switch. He had claimed that the rally would be religious in nature, a sort of “turning back to God at a time when the nation is floundering.” He was true to his word. He had also promised that the rally would not in any way be political. It was not…not even remotely, even though Sarah Palin, vice president candidate in 2008, was one of the few speakers.
Beck made a big deal of the M.L. King (“I have a dream”) event on 28 August 1963 in the same place, even flashing film of part of King’s effort on the huge screens set up so people who were far from the action could see it as well as everything else that happened at center stage, which was on a lower level in front of the Lincoln Memorial. A number of African Americans were part of the effort, including King’s niece, Dr. Alveda King, who also spoke. Also on the program were St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa and first baseman Albert Pujols, who received an award for off-field charitable and religious work. Fabulously succesful businessman Jon M. Huntsman received an award for charitable giving…in his case, huge amounts.
Beck could easily be the envy of every preacher in the land…well-prepared and without notes or teleprompter, charismatic, spellbinding and very much in control. Unabashedly, he spoke about his religious faith and that the nation could only be saved from its obvious trend toward self-destruction by a return to the same kind of reliance on God that was evident on the part of the founding fathers. He made it plain, however, that there would need to be sacrifice on the part of the people and disclosed that he and his wife tithe the family income, the better to help the church do its job.
Beck made no pretense to credibility based on academic ahievements, mentioning that his college education consisted of one college course when he was age 30. In light of this, one wonders about other times when religious awakenings have happened in this country. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Billy Sunday, whose father, a Civil War soldier, died a month after Sunday’s birth in 1862, endured privation and orphanages, then became a professional baseball player-turned-evangelist and turned the country upside down with his preaching. Academia had not spoiled him.
In the late-nineteenth century, un-lettered Dwight L. Moody, a onetime shoe-store clerk, became the preeminent evangelist in both this country and the British Isles and later established what became the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. He preached to millions in his weeks-long crusades at a time when there were no microphones and led tens of thousands to belief in Christ.
In the 20th century, Billy Graham, although well-educated in college and seminary, kept his sermons so simple that his peers have ridiculed him for being shallow. His accomplishments as an evangelist are so stupendous as to defy belief. He did not get bogged down in the fine points of homiletics…he merely “brought the word” without trying to pose as a know-it-all. The confidant of presidents, he earned the trust of the nation (the ordinary people, not the sophisticates) and didn’t talk down to anyone.
So…could it be that Beck, virtually self-educated beyond high school and inordinately successful career-wise while being an able communicator, might at least begin another awakening? Without question, while silly church leaders, seminary professors and other religionists argue about whether or not men should marry men (could anything be more off-the-wall?), religion as a force is on the wane in this country. According to Beck, the founders premised the nation on faith in God. He insists that this faith will save us or we’ll go down, not a collective faith but individual faith as each soul trusts. In this corner, the word is that he’s right. All over Washington is the inscription “In God We Trust.” But do we?
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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