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Today the stock market closed under 10,000 after more than a week of heavy selling. Everyone's asking the same question - WHY? EC answers that and explains the heavyweight battle going on inside our government and in our markets... and why the result of this Mexican standoff may well be the destruction of your financial security.
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I ran across this on Free Republic and, well, thought it was interesting enough to pass along. It was written by Gargantua, without whose permission I have reprinted it here, fair use and all - or is it Fair Use? I'm no attorney.
Anyway, one of the things we'll talk about this week is whether the birth certificate issue is hurting us or helping us - and does that really matter in issues of right vs. wrong and our Constitution?
Why The Need To Lie About “Birthers?”
We all, those of us on the ironically enough referred to “right,” understand without any explanation why it is that the Liberal Left and their complicit major Media lapdogs feel a need to demonize and intentionally misrepresent the thrust of what is insultingly called the “birther” movement. According to the ‘straw man’ set up by these disingenuous smut peddlers so that they can easily knock it down, is that this “birther” movement is kooks who insist that there is a ‘vast conspiracy,’ an evil, well-orchestrated cover-up of the fact that Barrack Obama was not born in the United States.
Their need arises from a desperate desire to cloud the issue at hand, and take the trained-seal public’s attention off of the actual question being posed, and focus it instead on those asking the question while simultaneously painting us as crackpots worthy only of ridicule and, eventually, dismissal. Calling any who would ask questions about Barry’s birth “crackpots” does the job quite nicely, and encourages others not to pursue this line of inquiry.
This is not unexpected or surprising, as such obfuscations and sleight-of-hand trickery are mainstays of the Liberal Alinskyites who seek to destroy the America we all grew up in and dearly love, and replace this Constitutional Republic and its omnipotent Manifest Destiny with just another limp 3rd World Banana Republic ruled by dictatorial fiat and One World considerations.
The truth about the “birthers” is that we acknowledge certain inarguable, publicly known facts, and in response to these facts, pose some really simple questions.
The facts which are all a matter of public record, and which we herewith admit into evidence are these;
1. Barack Hussein Obama has spent north of one million dollars in legal fees challenging the release of his original long-form birth certificate, which bears his footprint(s), the name and signature of the delivering physician and at least one witness, and the time and place of the birth. Nobody has ever claimed to have seen this document, and having seen it, specifically verified that it proves Mr. Obama meets the aforementioned “natural-born” requirement.
2. Included as protected in this convoluted legal challenge of secrecy concerning his own founding documents are all of his college transcripts, his applications for college student financing, and all travel records as would have been recorded on his passport(s).
3. His own maternal grandmother (in Kenya) insists that she was present when he was born there.
The three big questions posed by the “birthers” in direct response to this truly unfathomable need for secrecy and the apparent role of the media in either burying the story or demonizing those who might dare to tell it are these:
1. If everything is as you have stated regarding your founding documents, why not just show them and be done with it?
2. Why has Hawaii’s Attorney General come out and publicly refused to back up the statements made by other Hawaiian officials who claim to have seen and verified the information on your long-form birth certificate?
3. How did you travel to Pakistan with your college roommate at a point in time when Pakistan was at war, and it was illegal for American citizens to enter that country? How, if you are a documented citizen of the USA, were you allowed in?
There are many other questions that should be answered, like why did the DNC’s own Elections Certification body not verify in writing to all 50 states (as the law requires them to do) that you were indeed a verified natural-born citizen of the United States of America prior to the 2008 general election?
Why is the Media not asking you these questions?
In over two-hundred-and-fifty interviews and question-and-answer sessions with major Media outlets beginning with your announcing your candidacy for president, no reporters have ever asked you directly about, or reported upon, the highly unusual need for the unprecedented and very expensive secrecy over what for most of us would be rather mundane, everyday documentation. Again, why?
But I digress.
What bothers me is not the way the usual liberal suspects are playing this shell-game. My problem is with otherwise reputable and normally reliable information sources and conservative organizations playing this same game. As an example, Townhall.com currently has an article attacking Joseph Farrah for playing to the “birthers” at the Tea Party Convention taking place in Tennessee this weekend. In it, Townhall posits that such “conspiracy theories” only “diminish” and “hurt” the conservative cause.
How does asking a question, or a series of questions, regarding undisputed facts in the public domain, make those who pose the questions “conspiracy theorists?” Why would conservatives want to caution other conservatives about asking questions that need to be asked, or, worse still, call those querying individuals insulting names for merely asking? I readily admit that there is a small percentage of actual “conspiracy theorists” among the far larger number (according to one recent national poll, nearly 50% of all Americans!) who believe that Obama might not be a naturally-born citizen), but most of us simply want and deserve answers to some rather important questions about this man who openly states that it is his goal to “fundamentally transform” the greatest nation in the history of mankind.
What we do not deserve is to be denigrated or insulted for performing our civic duty as involved citizens. To those “conservatives” who might, for whatever ill-advised reason, want to shore-up the liberal lie and attack us “birthers” I have the following sincere comments.
It is not those of us asking the questions about Obama’s origins who pose biggest threat to America and her conservative causes. It is the Liberal liars smearing us who pose this threat, and it is the misguided “conservatives” who join their screed who aid and abet this vile enemy. If that doesn’t cause you to rethink your motives and your game-plan, then consider this:
Look you now at Tennessee. Look well at the tens-of-millions of independent swing voters represented by those gathered at the Tea Party Convention. You castigate them and urinate on what they deem important at your permanent political peril. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
;-/
One way you can tell that the Tea Parties have really gotten under the skin of the elites, liberals and statists who run DC is how quickly the term "Teabagger" became a pejorative. Now a law firm, best known for its defense of Obama vs. birther lawsuits, is focusing itself on a new objective - making sure that candidates who espouse the "radical" ideas of the Tea Partiers are duly slimed and targeted by the state-run media thugs who populate our airwaves. Lower taxes, smaller government, accountability by elected officials... yeah, pretty radical bunch those Tea Partiers.
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Here's a great one for you - Obama's blaming the Republicans for the miserable year of failure that 2009 was for the Democrat agenda. Perhaps someone should explain to Obama, whose party has had a decisive majority in the House, and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate for the past year, that it was Democrats that stopped the Democrat agenda from steamrolling America like they planned. The Republicans didn't have the firepower. Besides, IMO, this is all a thinly veiled attack on those Obama sees as REALLY responsible for his failure - the American people.
Link to the CNN Blog
Washington (CNN) - President Barack Obama tore into the Republican opposition on Capitol Hill Wednesday, blaming the GOP for what he claimed is politically-motivated opposition on virtually every issue.
Democrats have been willing to incorporate Republican ideas on health care and other issues, he said, but Republicans have not been willing to do the same.
Addressing a gathering of Senate Democrats, Obama promised to "call (Republicans) out when (Democrats) extend a hand and get a fist in return."
Senate Republicans, he said, have employed the filibuster more over the past year than in all of the 1950s and 1960s combined. The GOP's strategy has been "twenty years of obstruction packed into one," he said.
This is an excellent example of how and where Obama wants to lead us, and how the Democrat party is more than happy to promote ignorance of the Constitution and encourage limitations on liberty for no reason other than grandstanding for political points on an issue that they think has "traction" but is really not an issue at all - just an opportunity to educate people. Let me explain.
The recent Supreme Court reversal of the patently unconstitutional McCain-Feingold Act (read as defending the 1st Amendment and the right of all Americans to exercise it) is being twisted by the left, under Obama's direction. Obama tried to make the (dishonest) point last week that the ruling paves the way for unfettered political access by foreign corporations to our political process. Unfortunately, in order for that to be true, we'd have to ignore laws that have been on the books for decades and are still in force because they were particularly NOT addressed in the court's ruling.
Oh well. Now they're on to the loony idea that "free speech is for people, not corporations." Given that many many people ARE corporations (I'm incorporated), I guess the liberals are now calling for most doctors, lawyers, small businesspeople, professionals, entrepreneurs, financial advisers, athletes, and others who use incorporation as a management strategy to be excluded from the nation's political process? Evidently so.
The ignorance is astounding... but why all the posturing for something (a constitutional amendment) that doesn't stand a prayer- oops! It's the DU... I forgot- an incantation of happening? Because they think it makes Republicans look like they're in bed with corporations. Never mind that Dems are getting more than half of all corporate PAC money now anyway...
I've gone to the loony-pit Democrat Underground site so that you don't have to:
Reps Edwards, Conyers Just Put in Constl Amendment to Overrule SCOTUS
Posted by davidswanson in General Discussion
Tue Feb 02nd 2010, 03:11 PM
Congresswoman Donna Edwards has just introduced a Constitutional amendment, together with Congressman John Conyers.
Watch this video:
http://freespeechforpeople.org/edwardsvide...
PUBLIC INTEREST GROUPS APPLAUD REP. DONNA EDWARDS FOR FILING CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT BILL TO OVERTURN US SUPREME COURT RULING ON CORPORATE MONEY IN ELECTIONS
HOUSE JUDICIARY CHAIR JOHN CONYERS, JR JOINS FILING
"Free Speech Rights Are For People, Not Corporations"
WASHINGTON, DC – Congresswoman Donna Edwards of Maryland introduced today a constitutional amendment bill to overturn the US Supreme Court’s recent ruling allowing unlimited corporate money in elections. Congressman John Conyers, Jr. of Michigan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, is a co-sponsor of the amendment bill.
A coalition of public interest organizations and independent business advocates praised the Congresswoman’s action. The groups, Voter Action, Public Citizen, the Center for Corporate Policy, and the American Independent Business Alliance, say the Court's ruling in Citizens United v. FEC poses a serious and direct threat to democracy. Immediately following the Court's ruling on January 21, 2010, the groups launched a constitutional amendment campaign at www.freespeechforpeople.org to correct the judiciary's creation of corporate rights under the First Amendment over the past three decades.
"Free speech rights are for people, not corporations," says John Bonifaz, Voter Action's legal director and the director of http://www.freespeechforpeople.org . "Our history has included prior amendments to the US Constitution which were enacted to correct egregiously wrong decisions of the US Supreme Court directly impacting the democratic process. The Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC demands a similar constitutional amendment response. We applaud Congresswoman Edwards and Congressman Conyers for taking this critical step toward restoring the First Amendment to its original purpose."
"The Citizens United decision is wrong as a matter of law, history, and our republican principles of government," says Jeffrey Clements, general counsel to http://www.freespeechforpeople.org . "The decision is devastating to our democracy, which is already dominated to a dangerous degree by corporate interest money. Congresswoman Edwards and Congressman Conyers are showing the leadership we need in Congress at this hour."
"The First Amendment was never intended to protect the likes of ExxonMobil, Pfizer or Goldman Sachs, nor should it," said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. "Public Citizen thanks Representative Donna Edwards for her courage and leadership in responding to the Supreme Court majority's aggression with a proposal for a constitutional amendment to restore the First Amendment to its rightful purpose: guaranteeing the speech rights of real, live persons."
"An amendment allowing regulation of corporate spending in elections is not only necessary to correct the twisted logic of the Citizens United ruling," says Charlie Cray, director of the Center for Corporate Policy, "but will also go a long way towards rousing us as citizens to assert our authority over the now presumptively untouchable corporations."
"The American Independent Business Alliance is pleased to see Representatives Edwards and Conyers respond to public outrage over the Supreme Court's rewrite of our Constitution," says Jeff Milchen, co-founder of the American Independent Business Alliance. "America's independent businesses are among those which recognize that we need to limit corporations to their appropriate role--doing business. Allowing giant corporations even more power over our elections and government would be as bad for business as it is for democracy."
In addition to the filing of Congresswoman Edwards’ amendment bill, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts joined the call today for a constitutional amendment. In testimony before the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, Senator Kerry said: "We need a constitutional amendment to make it clear once and for all that corporations do not have the same free speech rights as individuals."
With dozens of people losing their jobs at CBS News, and the threat of financial devastation that probably has on all of their families, I thought it may be wise to ignore all that and focus on the real outrage - that Katie Couric is having to take a pay cut!
In fact, she may have some kind of a discrimination suit here if she plays her cards right. After all, why should she have to suffer at all, just because she butched herself up and now can't get anyone with opposable thumbs to watch her slimey brand of journalistic malpractice?
I wonder if the White House is concerned that these idiot journalists may eventually put two and two together and realize that Obama-style economic devastation doesn't help ANYONE... even the elite "chosen" mouthpieces? I guess that's a stretch, being that most journalists are pretty much idiots... and in Katie's case, no one's watching anyway.
From the NY Observer:
On the evening of Monday, Feb. 1, Katie Couric, anchor of the CBS Evening News, was wearing red. For the next half-hour, she tore through the headlines. There were allegations of bigotry among the federal air marshals in the U.S., an American church group accused of trafficking children in Haiti, faulty gas pedals in Toyotas, a suicide bombing in Baghdad, a massacre in Mexico and a bodybuilder in Latvia with a rippled back like a map of Switzerland. “Thank you for watching,” said Ms. Couric, at the end of the broadcast. “I’ll see you here tomorrow.”
Many of Ms. Couric’s viewers would return the following night. Much of Ms. Couric’s staff would not.
It had been a rough day at CBS News. Four and a half years earlier, CBS chief Les Moonves had joked in The New York Times Magazine about bombing the news division. And now, among the seasoned veterans of the newsroom, there was a sense that the detonation had finally gone off. Earlier that morning, CBS News executives and bureau chiefs, led by senior vice president Linda Mason, told their employees that 2009 had been a disastrous year in the ad market. They had no cable operation to buoy the sinking revenues. It’s not you, was the message, it’s us. Dozens of employees—including staff members in D.C., San Francisco, Miami, London, Los Angeles and Moscow—were being let go. The changes were effective immediately. There would be no buyouts. According to one longtime staff member, the network had long ago negotiated away most of the severance clauses in staff members’ contracts.
Word of the layoffs had first surfaced the previous Friday afternoon in the L.A. Times. Over the weekend, CBS staffers vacillated between acceptance of the situation and cautious optimism. Maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as reported? After all, the company was already lean. Where would top brass find 100 or so people to let go? Perhaps there was some stash of employees hidden on the digital side, some long-forgotten deal between, say, 60 Minutes and Yahoo, that would provide some bodies to lessen the blow?
But in the end, the cuts were surprisingly deep. By Monday afternoon, staffers from Washington to L.A. were sputtering in disbelief as they heard of top producers on the chopping block—particularly Mark Katkov and Jill Rosenbaum in D.C. and Roberta Hollander and Barbara Pierce in L.A. These were seasoned veterans, part of the old school known back in the Dan Rather days as “the Hard Corps.” Over the years, they had somehow managed to outlive every big buzz saw to cut through the newsroom. They knew how to get more from less. Each thought of himself as worth five producers at ABC News. Their theme song was Merle Haggard’s “Holding Things Together.” It was hard to imagine what the already third-place morning and evening news operations would look like without them.
The most disturbing news of the day for many observers was that Larry Doyle would no longer be working for CBS News.
Mr. Doyle, according to CBS News legend, joined the organization some 40 years ago, when then D.C. bureau chief Bill Small found him working as a porter at a Washington hotel. Mr. Small promptly made Mr. Doyle the bureau’s go-to “dogrobber”—the guy you sent into nasty situations to stare down snarling subjects and get the job done. From there, Mr. Doyle gradually worked his way up the news ladder, eventually becoming the network’s top war producer, churning out great television from every hellhole on the planet—including Baghdad, where he served as the network’s bureau chief during the early years of the ongoing war.
Reached the afternoon of Tuesday, Feb. 2, Dan Rather recounted various stories of Mr. Doyle’s heroism in the field, including his impressive management of gun-toting teenagers in Somalia. “He’s one of the all-time greats,” said Mr. Rather. “He’s the soul of the place.”
“This is a guy,” he added, “whom Ed Murrow would have been glad to have as his producer.”
For the time being, no on-air reporters or anchors have been asked to leave. But according to multiple sources, the network did inform a handful of veteran correspondents, including Randall Pinkston in New York, Sandra Hughes in L.A. and Sheila MacVicar in London, that they were being reassigned from prominent network jobs to reporting for CBS Newspath.
Historically, the Newspath—a news-gathering service that provides coverage for local CBS stations—was a stepping stone for young correspondents on their way from regional station jobs to the big time at the network. Going from network to Newspath is generally seen as a major demotion. Some sources speculated that the move was made as a passive-aggressive attempt to chase off salary-heavy talent. It had the appearance, as one source put it, of “a slower form of death.”
On Tuesday, CBS staffers were still on guard. Word had it that executives from the news division were still on the move, meeting with staffers at bureaus around the country, bringing more bad tidings.
Reporting on the death of CBS News is an age-old discipline among TV writers. Books have been written on the subject. (See, Boyer, Peter; 1988; Who Killed CBS?) But as the names of the laid-off began to circulate, it looked less like the end of days and more like the end of an era. The final vestiges of the pre–Katie Couric regime were finally leaving the network. “It’s like we’re Lehman Brothers,” said one longtime staff member, “and the JPMorgan guys are finishing moving in.”
What do Canucks do when they have to have a SERIOUS medical procedure done? They come to the USA. But what happens when you're the Canadian Premiere of Newfoundland? Well, that's extra special because it gives people like me a good reason to point out once again the foolishness of Obama's plan to socialize our healthcare system and it makes the liberal squirt-video fantasy of a Canadian-style healthcare system seem like what it really is- just a huge power grab by people who would really prefer we start dying off anyway. As for the Premiere (is there an 'e' on that? I'm not sure), his health is reportedly doing much better than his political prospects, as Canuck media are giving him a hard time for opting out of the junky Canadian system and availing himself of the first-rate healthcare we have here in America. Don't worry too much - we suspect he is some kind of super-wealthy dog farmer... he also rules some place called Labrador. OK, OK, now I'm just baiting Canucks. Seriously. we love you guys.
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EC plays a little game with liberal fantasy and conservative reality - can you tell the difference? Congressman Clyburn vs. Senator Gregg, and later we talk about Rubio's widening lead over Obama-huggin' Charlie Crist.
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Last night's State of Obama's Union address was quite the banana republic-style Chavextravaganza, complete with attacks on the judiciary, phony populism, rampant deception, and calls for LOTS more of what's driving us crazy already. Big government isn't dead... it's running wild in DC. So that got me thinking... and I dug up President Reagan's brilliant 1st State of the Union address from 1982, delivered to a heavily Democrat Congress... not all that much different than this one. Interesting juxtaposition.
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EC previews tonight's State of the Union speech and predicts what most of the Dear Leader's speech will be about... and odds are it'll be ALL ABOUT HIM; Obama's feelings, Obama's fears, Obama's visions and Obama's persecutors. They say when you're in trouble politically to stick to what you know...
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It seems that some people in Indonesia aren't so happy about the new statue depicting Barack Obamain their country. Are they disgusted with the false idolatry of a man who's done pretty much nothing? Or are they just mad because they haven't gotten a stimulus check yet?
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In the wake of comments made by outgoing US Rep. Marion Berry (the Democrat congressman from Arkansas - not the crackhead mayor of DC), and Obama's unparalleled record of failure (six major flops that I can count) EC raises a few compelling questions, not the least of which is whether Barack Obama is fully in charge of his mental faculties... or is our wonderful savior just a little touched?
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I have to admit, I just LOVE this picture of Obama... using a teleprompter to address an elementary school. It has to make Dems just a little bit nervous that the same guy who refuses to "wing it" at an elementary school speech (we all know how critical those pre-teens can be of serious policy initiatives), doesn't mind gambling the Dem House majority in '10. While the GOP steamrolls with wins in Virginia, New Jersey, and now Massa-friggin-chussetts, Obama is redefining lowest-common-denominator political leadership.
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The situation in Haiti is awful. So awful, in fact, that the presidency of Barack Obama is about the only historical event that can compete - in terms of destruction and suffering, at least. And let's give the Haitians a break - at least they didn't VOTE for their disaster.
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