Tag Archives: Obama

Conservatism is Calling

In honor of the election tomorrow I’m interrupting my little series on finding a place for my mind. I found this on Power Line Blog this morning, and it is compelling. Power Line blogger John Hinderaker got the link from his daughter, who got it from her college roommate. It made me cry at the end, seeing and listening to Ronald Reagan. Some really cool stuff here.

Endorsements: Romney vs Obama

So on the one hand we have those who have endorsed Gov Romney for President:

Anti-communist hero Lech Walesa

the People of Israel

42 Congressional Medal of Honor Winners

and the Small Business Owners of America

And on the other we have those who have endorsed President Obama for re- election:

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (some say also head of the KGB) who called Obama an “honest man who really wants to change much for the better.”

Venezuela’s dying dictator and megolomaniac Hugo Chavez (“I’d vote for you and you for me.”)

and the Communist Party of America

Hmm. Wonder which one I should choose…

The Creepy Obama Cult

The video at the end of this blog is about the creepiest thing I have ever seen. I found it in a piece on Human Events called “A Short Visual History of the Creepy Obama Cult.

I watched it  in astonishment, unable to fathom the cause of these people’s devotion. Clearly they aren’t really thinking, or even relating to reality. They have — or had — laid their own desires and fantasies into the persona of what was then Candidate Obama.

“We’re going to change the world!”

They say it over and over, but what does it mean? Change the world how? Well, a couple of them say…

“The world will finally respect us.”

Really? I mean… really?

This is delusional. Or perhaps merely naive, a fantasy indulged in by those who have no clue about life, about people, about history, about much of anything, it would seem.

“I want a cleaner world.”

So says a young mother (probably some sort of star but I don’t know who), as if all you need do is get the Ajax and a paper towel. Even then you have to deal with the leftover plastic bottle and the paper. And that’s not even considering where you’re going to get the plastic and the paper and the Ajax in the first place.

For example, I just saw an article in the New York Times today that said wind power will shrivel away without the millions of federal subsidies it needs to survive.  In fact, the industry is already shriveling and soon the tax credit will expire. Without it the wind business “‘falls off a cliff,’ said Ryan Wiser, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who studies the market potential of renewable electricity sources.”

And the biggest thing is that everything these people on the video have, wear, use — their clothing, their cosmetics, their cars, their cell phones, the very system they used to record the video and then to play it back — almost all of it is reliant on oil. Many things come from petroleum, plastic being a huge one.

A cleaner world? If we shut down the oil drilling here, that might make it cleaner here, though I doubt it, but what about in the Middle East? Do they really think that Middle Eastern drilling and refining operations are cleaner than ours? And just because they are on the other side of the world, do they think we can be free of them?

Power Line Blog cited a report that air pollution in the form of aerosol particulates from China is blowing across the Pacific and reaching our shores. “We estimate that the mass of aerosols arriving at North American shores from overseas is comparable with the total mass of particulates emitted domestically,” says an abstract of the report. Which means we could demand zero emissions of particulates from our industries, and it wouldn’t change a thing. Yet here in Arizona liberal politicians are campaigning to shut down the power plants and such, protesting against the building of a new copper mine which will provide hundreds of jobs, and urging for clean energy in solar panels and windmills… which don’t come free, as mentioned above. Not free to make, not free to install, not free to maintain.

The people in this video are like children, really. Living in a fairy tale. And all there is, for them, is the picture they want to see, and none of the nitty-gritty that goes on behind the scenes to make any of it happen. Even in the printing of a Fairy Tale Book you have logging, (or possibly paper recycling plants), machinery, paints, dyes, inks, power, buildings, trucks, oil… And a Fairy Tale movie? The list is endless.

Nothing comes free and easy in this world. And almost four years later now, we can certainly say it didn’t with  O….. BA….. MA!

Obama the Competitor

Yes, it’s another post about politics, though I suppose it’s not surprising, given politics are rising to the fore what with the Republican National Convention last week, and the Democrat Convention beginning today. I’m not exactly a political junkie, but the majority of blogs I read are political in nature, and sometimes I come across things that blow me away.

Like this article in Forbes today, titled “New York Times Proves Eastwood Correct — Obama is a Lousy CEO.” In it Forbes staff writer  Rich Karlgaard references a piece  published in the New York Times by Jodi Kantor called “The Competitor in Chief — Obama Plays To Win, In Politics and Everything Else”

Golf. Bowling. Billiards. Cards. Golf. Basketball. Reading to kids…  Golf…

As Karlgaard points out, both Kantor and the Times  are usually in the President’s camp, so he expresses surprise they’d write what he sees as essentially a hit piece. In fact, he calls it “devastating” and wonders if  “the NYT might just have killed President Obama’s re-election hopes.”

Having read the Times article, I agree that it certainly doesn’t portray the President in an attractive light. However, I’m not altogether sure the Times and Kantor see it that way.

The article’s tone seemed to me more like a paean to Obama’s constant striving to be perfect and to excel in everything, as if this were a good thing; a characteristic that made him a good president and would perhaps give him the edge over that idiot Romney (which is how he clearly perceives his opponent according to Kantor).

The trade-off in time and energy the President devotes to trivialities rather than the weighty issues his office demands were left to Forbes’s Karlgaard to remark upon. And his constant need to correct and teach others, his overweening opinion of his own excellence in every area of life seemed minor inconveniences, not major character flaws as Kantor presented it — that is, irrelevant defects and only to be expected from someone as great as The One.

Certainly she never expressed the sort of conclusions that Karlgaard did, but perhaps that was because she was merely “reporting,” while he was assessing.

In any case, he boiled  it down to the salient points and as I said, didn’t hesitate to draw the necessary conclusions and it’s … rather chilling, actually.

You can read Karlgaard’s Forbes piece HERE.  It’s shorter and links to the Times article if you want to go on from there.

Or if you’d rather go straight to the Times, click HERE.