Getting together

clipped from www.americanthinker.com

Purchase original drawings by Ronny Gordon

Pity Party

The reason the Republican party is dying is that they have lost their conservative souls. They are like walking zombies. (See Bob Hope clip to the right)

clipped from online.wsj.com

DECLARATIONS By PEGGY NOONAN

The Democrats aren't the ones falling apart, the Republicans are. The Democrats can see daylight ahead. For all their fractious fighting, they're finally resolving their central drama. Hillary Clinton will leave, and Barack Obama will deliver a stirring acceptance speech. Then hand-to-hand in the general, where they see their guy triumphing. You see it when you talk to them: They're busy being born.

Terry Shoffner

Clarke Reed

The Republicans? Busy dying. The brightest of them see no immediate light. They're frozen, not like a deer in the headlights but a deer in the darkness, his ears stiff at the sound. Crunch. Twig. Hunting party.

The headline Wednesday on Drudge, from Politico, said, "Republicans Stunned by Loss in Mississippi." It was about the eight-point drubbing the Democrat gave the Republican in the special House election. My first thought was: You have to be stupid to be stunned by that. Second thought: Most party leaders in Washington are stupid – detached, played out, stuck in the wisdom they learned when they were coming up, in '78 or '82 or '94. Whatever they learned then, they think pertains now. In politics especially, the first lesson sticks. For Richard Nixon, everything came back to Alger Hiss.

They are also – Hill leaders, lobbyists, party speakers – successful, well-connected, busy and rich. They never guessed, back in '86, how government would pay off! They didn't know they'd stay! They came to make a difference and wound up with their butts in the butter. But affluence detaches, and in time skews thinking. It gives you the illusion you're safe, and that everyone else is. A party can lose its gut this way.

Many are ambivalent, deep inside, about the decisions made the past seven years in the White House. But they've publicly supported it so long they think they . . . support it. They get confused. Late at night they toss and turn in the antique mahogany sleigh bed in the carpeted house in McLean and try to remember what it is they really do think, and what those thoughts imply.

And those are the bright ones. The rest are in Perpetual 1980: We have the country, the troops will rally in the fall.

"This was a real wakeup call for us," someone named Robert M. Duncan, who is chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the New York Times. This was after Mississippi. "We can't let the Democrats take our issues." And those issues would be? "We can't let them pretend to be conservatives," he continued. Why not? Republicans pretend to be conservative every day.

Gay Rights vs. Democracy

clipped from www.townhall.com

It is the essence of democracy that people should be able to decide the moral rules that govern the nature of a community. If people don't have that power, then they are living under an autocracy.

True, this majority rule is not unlimited. It is limited by what the government has the power to do. Consequently the majority cannot, in general, vote to seize the homes and accumulated savings of rich people. Leaving aside exceptional cases, government cannot mandate how parents how should raise their children. These kinds of power lie outside the scope of government in a free society.

Majority rule is also circumscribed by individual rights. But these are the rights clearly specified in the Constitution. A majority of citizens cannot prevent an individual from voting because voting is a basic right, as is the right to freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and so on. The state is constitutionally prohibited from undermining these enumerated rights.

Sound familiar?

Sounds like Carter and the sweaters

clipped from afp.google.com

"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK," Obama said.

clipped from www.cfif.org

clipped from www.townhall.com

clipped from www.nytimes.com

John Edwards Endorses Barack Obama

At a rally in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Wednesday evening, John Edwards endorsed Barack Obama, who was on the stage with him, to be the Democratic nominee for president.

Sounding a theme of a nation divided into parts by walls, Mr. Edwards said, “The reason I am here tonight is that Democratic voters in America have made their choice and so have I.”

Mr. Edwards then went on to say, “There is one man who knows in his heart that it is time to tear down that wall and make one America, Barack Obama.”

Mr. Obama, who had introduced Mr. Edwards as “one of the great leaders we have in the Democratic Party, ” responded by saying he was grateful to him for coming to Michigan and giving his endorsement.

Mr. Obama also noted how Mr. Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, had emphasized health care as an issue that is of primary concern, then said it would be a major issue in his administration.

John McCain and the Global Warming Train

clipped from www.townhall.com

If John McCain were truly a maverick, he would publicly break from the politically correct culture that demands obedience to its global warming narrative. But sadly, he continues to do the opposite.

Liberals have denominated McCain a maverick because he has taken so many positions contradictory to his party's platform and to the conservative ideology that undergirds it. Now that he is the putative Republican nominee, you don't hear much about his maverick nature, but it's certainly not because he's changed his ways in opposing his party.

Last week, he affirmed his commitment to comprehensive immigration reform, even though earlier he stepped back from it to curry favor with conservatives. One wonders what other shoes will inevitably drop should he win the presidency, especially because he has indicated he would most likely be a one-termer.

An Eye Opener

clipped from mail.google.com

New Jersey once led the nation, and most of the world, in economic development
and the promise of prosperity. Today, we find our state sliding into third world
status. If that sounds extreme, just look at our economic growth versus
countries like former Soviet Block nations Estonia and Slovakia, South America's
Chile, or the sizzling economy of Ireland. The graph below illustrates our
economic slow down and slide into second class status in the world competition
for prosperity.

New Jersey has not been victim of a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina or a
tsunami. We have not faced foreign aggression or internal strife. We have been
blessed to not have been plagued by drought, plague or famine. None of these
obstacles to economic development have hampered our progress. There is only one
cause for our declining strength - The State Government.

clipped from www.townhall.com

Obama on Judges

clipped from www.redstate.com

Protecting the Powerless?

Here is Senator Obama describing what he will look for in a judge if elected president:

[W]hat I do want is a judge who is sympathetic enough to those who are on the outside, those who are vulnerable, those who are powerless, those who can't have access to political power and as a consequence can't protect themselves from being being dealt with sometimes unfairly, that the courts become a refuge for justice. That's been its historic role. That was its role in Brown v Board of Education.

Except for unborn babies, of course.

Those, you can kill with impunity (even after they're born).

UPDATE (Dan McLaughlin): San Diego Union-Tribune cartoonist Steve Breen made this same point with a cartoon worth a thousand words during the Alito hearings:

Hillary's Nuclear Option

clipped from www.americanthinker.com

Most pundits are telling Senator Hillary Clinton that it's all over but the shouting. The math is against her. However, the math is also currently against Senator Obama -- neither candidate can earn the needed majority in the remaining primaries. The decision will be made by the Democrats' superdelegates, who are not obligated to decide whom they support until the convention. And they are empowered to change their allegiance at any time, based on their "read" of what's best for the party.

This means that until the first ballot in Denver in August, Hillary still has a chance.

Conventional wisdom among those who pretend to know why Senator Clinton is hanging in there say she's waiting -- and hoping for -- an Obama scandal that will make Reverend Wright look like a footnote.

Green: The New Color of Catastrophe

clipped from pajamasmedia.com

Malaria deaths in Africa, wildfires in the West, and now food riots in Haiti all demonstrate that "going green" can have some very serious downsides.

Is there an advert on TV that doesn’t claim the product or company involved is “doing its best for the planet” or something like that? I feel like I’m drowning in a sea of green every time a program goes to a commercial break. Yet the recent stories of food riots all over the world and wildfires in California should remind us that there’s a downside to environmentalism — a pretty big downside. It’s a downside I explore in my new book, The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don’t Want You to Know About — Because They Helped Cause Them.

The problem is the way liberal environmentalists work to achieve their policy aims. It’s based on a model that goes back to 1962, when Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring.

Ahmadinejad: Israel a 'stinking corpse'

clipped from www.jpost.com

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Thursday that the state of Israel is a "stinking corpse" that is destined to disappear, the French news agency AFP reported.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Photo: AP

Slideshow:

Pictures of the week

"Those who think they can revive the stinking corpse of the usurping and fake Israeli regime by throwing a birthday party are seriously mistaken," the official IRNA news agency quoted Ahmadinejad as having said.

"Today the reason for the Zionist regime's existence is questioned, and this regime is on its way to annihilation."

Ahmadinejad further stated that Israel "has reached the end like a dead rat after being slapped by the Lebanese" - referring to the Second Lebanon War in the summer of 2006.

RELATED

• 
  
  'Iran's Jews won't mark Yom Ha'atzmaut'
  
  

Iranian Nukes = The End of the World as We Know It

clipped from pajamasmedia.com

If Iran is allowed to build a nuclear weapon, it will destroy the last vestiges of the nonproliferation framework and signal the collapse of an American-led global order.

May 7, 2008 - by Gordon G. Chang

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced at the end of last month that the United States was preparing for “potential military courses of action” against Iranian forces. “It would be a mistake,” he noted, “to think that we are out of combat capability.”

Many, however, would say the real mistake is to think the Bush administration is really contemplating military action. “It is time to admit the truth,” Charles Krauthammer recently wrote. “The Bush administration’s attempt to halt Iran’s nuclear program has failed.” Dubya still has more than eight months left in the White House, but most everyone is ready to close the book on the obviously exhausted president.

Obama's Boss Stomps on the Flag

clipped from suppressednews.com

By SuppressedNews

While Obama rightly claims to have been eight years old when William Ayers was planting bombs at the State Department and the U.S. Capitol, Obama was working for Ayers when this photo was made.

A poem By Barack

It looks like he has the nomination wrapped up .
So lets look a little deeper.
They say that poetry is a window to the soul,
So here is a poem written

by Barack Obama

In 1981, Barack Obama published two poems in the journal Feast…

Pop

Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken

In, sprinkled with ashes,

Pop switches channels, takes another

Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks

What to do with me, a green young man

Who fails to consider the

Flim and flam of the world, since

Things have been easy for me;

I stare hard at his face, a stare

That deflects off his brow;

I’m sure he’s unaware of his

Dark, watery eyes, that

Glance in different directions,

And his slow, unwelcome twitches,

Fail to pass.

I listen, nod,

Listen, open, till I cling to his pale,

Beige T-shirt, yelling,

Yelling in his ears, that hang

With heavy lobes, but he’s still telling

His joke, so I ask why

He’s so unhappy, to which he replies…

But I don’t care anymore, cause

He took too damn long, and from

Under my seat, I pull out the

Mirror I’ve been saving; I’m laughing,

Laughing loud, the blood rushing from his face

To mine, as he grows small,

A spot in my brain, something

That may be squeezed out, like a

Watermelon seed between

Two fingers.

Pop takes another shot, neat,

Points out the same amber

Stain on his shorts that I’ve got on mine, and

Makes me smell his smell, coming

From me; he switches channels, recites an old poem

He wrote before his mother died,

Stands, shouts, and asks

For a hug, as I shink [sic], my

Arms barely reaching around

His thick, oily neck, and his broad back; ‘cause

I see my face, framed within

Pop’s black-framed glasses

And know he’s laughing too.

Hunger link

clipped from www.sphere.com

America’s first mandatory policy to reduce global warming emissions is its biofuels mandate. … At the beginning of the decade, Al Gore said that “by tripling U.S. use of bioenergy and bioproducts by 2010, we can keep millions of tons of greenhouse gases out of the air….”
…
Thanks to the 2007 energy bill signed into law by President Bush last December, it is occurring even faster than Gore imagined. The U.S. is now required to mix 9 billion gallons of such fuels into the gasoline supply in 2008, up from less than 3 billion gallons in 2000.

Around the world people are starving due to higher food prices and Congress is just now beginning to realize the connection between their global warming policies and misery around the world. Heritage scholar Ben Lieberman explains the link:

clipped from www.funoholic.info