Barry In Charge: Communism Around The Corner

This is his shot across the bow.

Just 10 days into power, and he is already harkening back to Leninist-Stalinist prose. This is quite a show for a new president. No other man to occupy this office has been so presumptuous to make these sweeping declarations and warnings in such a short time.

And Barry used WHAT kind of accounting methods, balance sheets, or P&E ratio to make this grave declaration? Ledger books? Quickbooks? Did he do like the rest of us do and look to see what kind of car the CEO's drive to determine what he's making?

Nope. This Harvard graduate uses newspaper articles to sell us on the idea of having the State step in to the board rooms, where the decisions on how much the shareholders would allow their CEO to make are already being made, to make it for them, and, of course, take their pinch along the way.

Obama's famous for pointing a finger at CEO's who have spent a lifetime to produce their services, but just WHAT does Barry and the rest of government's beaurocrats do to deserve THEIR take of the business? Absolutely nothing. Yet somehow, this smug little man-boy who has never worked with his hands for a living, doesn't bear the wounds of a lifetime of toil, can actually stare at the camera with his look of indignation and determination to say that his soft hands know what any of US should be earning?

To remedy what he's railing about in the video above, Barry would have to have the same federal government that got us here in the first place fix the private sector wages of CEO's. Will qualified, talented people want to take the job if it comes at a government-mandated salary? That's not how those of us in the free market become motivated to excel and produce. Our economy is driven by those of us reaping the benefit of our hard work and ingenuity.

In the financial/sales jobs I have had in the past, there is always an incentive attached to your earnings. The commission that you earn per sale is all some of us have lived off of for years. When I painted cars for a living, I was paid only by commission. If I didn't spray a car that day, I didn't get paid at all.

I'm no CEO, but it works the same way for them: they have a set of skills that allows them to negotiate their contract, just like I used to do every time I negotiated with my skills. If you can get a business to agree to the conditions you desire (bonus, commissions, etc), then you are not to blame for working within your contracted parameter, no matter how much you excel.

Barry has been aloof and condescending to the private sector, according to most of what I have read of him through his two books, and the excellent biography by Jerome Corsi, as well. We hear the refrain occasionally, still, that poor Barry was destined for a life of wealth and power because of the school to which he was admitted (which was a legacy admission, thanks to his father first attending there), but that *sniff* he gave it all away to work as a "community organizer". [cue the violins and harps]

Did Barry make these claims about CEO's and their bonuses when he was accepting 600 million dollars in corporate payments to his campaign for the last two years? What about the EXCESSIVE money that Barry and Michelle will pocket from the leftover campaign war chest? Does Barry DESERVE millions and millions of dollars for "running" that campaign?

What fat cat do you and I, Mr.and Mrs America, benefit MORE from: Bank Of America's CEO or Barry Obama? At least with BOA, I get a safe place to direct deposit my paycheck, online details of every thing I do with this product, and money-making plans into which I can choose to invest my hard-earned cash.

What did you and I get with Barry and Michelle's millions?

Hamas Murders Its Own

Palestinians search through the rubble of their home in the northern Gaza Strip.

Members of a Gaza family whose farm was turned into a "fortress" by Hamas fighters have reported that they were helpless to stop Hamas from using them as human shields.

They told the official Palestinian Authority daily newspaper that for years Hamas had used their property and homes as military installations from which the group would launch rockets into Israel, dig tunnels and store arms. According to the victims, those who tried to object were shot in the legs by Hamas operatives.
Palestinian children play on top of a drinking water balloon in eastern Jebaliya, northern Gaza strip.

Palestinian Media Watch quoted the official Palestinian Authority daily, Al-Hayat al-Jadida as reporting on January 27, "The Abd Rabbo family kept quiet while Hamas fighters turned their farm in the Gaza strip into a fortress. Right now they are waiting for the aid promised by the [Hamas] movement after Israel bombed the farm and turned it into ruins."

A policeman walks in front of a float showing mock missiles sticking out of a giant photograph of the city of Tel Aviv during a protest in Jerusalem.

According to the report, the hill on which the Abd Rabbo family lives overlooks Sderot, making it an ideal military position for Hamas fighters.

The Abd Rabbo family members emphasized to the paper that they were not Hamas activists and that they were still loyal to the Fatah movement, but that they had been unable to prevent the armed squads from entering their neighborhood at night. (source)

Doonesbury's G.B. Trudeau Turns In His Liberal Membership Card

This strip mostly speaks for itself, but you have to have been reading the last few days to know the backdrop: The African American character is an out-of-work black conservative politician that Lacey (white woman sitting with him, whom he believes has some connections with Obama) used to work with in Congress. He is looking to get back into the Washington scene, and hopes to inject himself into Obama's circle of influence.

Lacey, an old Democrat, treats this black person like ALL liberal Democrats do: Use them when it's to your advantage, then toss them aside when it's not:

Nanci Pelosi: Idiot Queen Of The Left Defends STD Prevention In Economic Disaster Bill

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she didn’t come to Washington to be “bipartisan”, one day after shuttling through an $819 economic stimulus bill without a single Republican vote.

“I didn’t come here to be partisan, I didn’t come here to be bipartisan,” Pelosi told reporters at her weekly press conference. “I came here, as did my colleagues, to be nonpartisan, to work for the American people, to do what is in their interest.” (source)

The Cloward-Piven Strategy: Forcing Political Change Through Orchestrated Crisis

The natural cycle of the economy in a quasi-free market such as ours is accustomed to encountering recessions of varying degrees, punctuated by a longer cycle of deeper recessions, known as depressions. The market is best left alone, given the degree that we have to ensure against snake oil salesmen and such. It should be a lesson to future economies, daring to break the neck of the goose that laid the golden egg.

This crisis we are in currently has its roots in, of all places, governmental agencies. The HUD secretary in the late 90's under Clinton, Andrew Cuomo, as only mafia bosses and agencies can do, used great pressure in order to micro-manage the lending practices of major banks, threatening them with not only fines and judgements, but public condemnation as a "racist lender" if they didn't. The goal: force banks to look past bad credit, no job history, bankruptcies, judgements, collections, etc for the sake of putting African Americans in houses, whether they could afford to pay for them or not.

I will not take up the space of this entry to research the origins of the HUD/Fannie Mae/Freddy Mac-induced crisis we're in right now, but you can read it here. This blog is merely a cursive account of the day's events, as seen through my own prism. We need to start taking our blinders off to the codes and doublespeak that Obama and his inner circle use.

Words like "community organizer" don't mean the same thing to rural, farmer-class folks as they do to the inner-city folks in southside Chicago. It's easy for a nation of well-meaning rural people in America to look past words like "community organizer" in order to elect someone president of the USA.

What is the manufactured crisis, you ask? The housing crisis. It started this entire process. Too many sectors of the economy were trading derivatives on housing loans. Too many of them were toxic. People started mailing the house keys in to the lender a couple of years ago. This financial condition we're in now was due in large part to leftist fascism, where government controled the banks and their procedures for doing business.

[True free market banks won't lend to you unless you can meet their debt-to-income ratio, prove two years of steady employment, and have a credit score of their choosing. I know, because I've tried to apply for a loan but was declined because I was a credit risk.]

In summary: The housing crisis will be the Left's excuse for spending unprecedented amounts of "bailout" money, then claim that since it's not working [which it isn't], they will need to step in as controlling authority:

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven's early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. "Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules," Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system's failure to "live up" to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist "rule book" with a socialist one.

All three of these organizations -- ACORN, Project Vote and Human SERVE -- set to work lobbying energetically for the so-called Motor-Voter law, which Bill Clinton ultimately signed in 1993. The Motor-Voter bill is largely responsible for swamping the voter rolls with "dead wood" -- invalid registrations signed in the name of deceased, ineligible or non-existent people -- thus opening the door to the unprecedented levels of voter fraud and "voter disenfranchisement" claims that followed in subsequent elections.

The new "voting rights" coalition combines mass voter registration drives -- typically featuring high levels of fraud -- with systematic intimidation of election officials in the form of frivolous lawsuits, unfounded charges of "racism" and "disenfranchisement," and "direct action" (street protests, violent or otherwise). Just as they swamped America's welfare offices in the 1960s, Cloward-Piven devotees now seek to overwhelm the nation's understaffed and poorly policed electoral system. Their tactics set the stage for the Florida recount crisis of 2000, and have introduced a level of fear, tension and foreboding to U.S. elections heretofore encountered mainly in Third World countries.

Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend heavily on financial support from George Soros's Open Society Institute and his "Shadow Party," through whose support the Cloward-Piven strategy continues to provide a blueprint for some of the Left's most ambitious campaigns. (source)

Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., warns that Obama will demagogue the crisis to get governmental control of it:

Del Toro Angered That His Movie "Che" Stirs Memories Of Survivors

180 DOCUMENTED MURDER VICTIMS OF CHÉ GUEVARA IN CUBA: 1957 TO 1959

Starting in the first grade, all Cuban children are members of the Young Pioneers--a group that Cuban exiles claim imparts communist ideology, but which parents say also teaches social skills and responsibility. Although they begin each day reciting 'Pioneers for communism will be like Che!' few children give it much thought, parents said." -John Ward Anderson, Washington Post

"The revolution is all; everything else is nothing" - Fidel Castro

Hatred is an element of struggle; relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machines. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy. - Che Guevara

While the Cubans were trying to squeeze into overcrowded buses in the August heat to get to jobs where they had to work an average twelve-hour day, my comrades and I enjoyed a lobster and shrimp luncheon in the best hotel in Cuba, the Havana Libre, formerly the Havana Hilton, built the year before Castro's victory. There I drank wine...in the sacred presence of Che Guevara'a widow and other members of his family. -Ron Radosh, former American communist

But don't tell all of these things to Hollywood actor Benicio del Toro. If you start to ask him about the concentration camps that Che and Fidel operated during the revolution, this very important, renowned, box office talent will storm away, claiming that his new movie portrayal is the best that could be done in a short 4 hours! Read the story here.

In all of that time, not once is Che portrayed to have done anything near as monstrous as what his survivors know all too well that he committed. Does the 4-hour film touch on the 180 documented murder victims of Guevara? No. In fact, here's an excerpt from a recent review of Che, citing the tone and portrayal we are asked to believe:

In the movie, Guevara is shown executing a man. But the man is executed for raping a child, not for being disloyal to the cause of revolution. Troops are offered a chance to desert, and get nothing more than a scolding for their
cowardice. (source)

Toro tries to act like he's balanced in his view of the monster Guevara, by stating that:

"We have to omit a lot of stuff about his life," he said, "but we're not omitting the fact that he's for capital punishment, which is the essence of that."

"Capital punishment"??? That's like saying that quarantining all victims of HIV on an island nation that forbids departure is a "model state-run health care system".

What del Toro and this movie try to do is to whitewash this murderous thug coward who killed people for not being "pro revolution" enough, then call the sham "trials" an example of "capital punishment"!

Del Toro is a useful idiot for the cause of murder and tyranny. He claims to know more about the real Che, having never met him or lived with his results, than the victims of Che who watched him murder unarmed political prisoners.

Because he's an actor, he is in the business of fooling himself into believing that he is someone else. What this high-paid pretender fails to remember is that just because he's deluding himself to think that Che deserves a sympathetic look, the rest of the world hasn't.

Appalachian Journal: Lucy Atkinson's Story

From left: Phyllis Epperly, Tim Atkinson, Connie Hall and Vivian Semones hold quilts made by mother and grandmother Lucy Atkinson.

By Sean Kotz
CHRISTIANSBURG, Va. -- She was called Mommy and Grandma by her family and "Aunt Lucy" by just about everyone else.

She was known for her hard work and soft heart, but Lucy Atkinson, in the last year of her life and at the age of 96, did something remarkable.

She hand-sewed 18 quilts.

"If you didn't get one, that was your fault," joked daughter Vivian Semones as she gathered with her family to tell her mother's story, "because all you had to do was ask."

By most people's estimation, Atkinson lived a hard life and might have had every right to feel weary in her later years. Her father was a sharecropper who lost the ability to feed his family after a drought, and Atkinson had to go to work at a mill at 14. She never had anything that one might call leisure time, spending much of her day cooking, washing, making and repairing clothes, and hand-churning butter for extra income.

In fact, her daughter Phyllis Epperly noted that people would come from as far away as Roanoke on a weekly basis to get her butter.

"I don't care what time of the morning you got up, the woman was up," recalled her grandson, Tim Atkinson. "The fire was going and the woman was up. And you go to bed at night, and the woman was still up."

Her hands were often raw from cleaning, scratched by blackberry thorns, or frozen from doing laundry in the winter. And after a lifetime of hard labor, she learned to drive a car at age 59 and went to work at a regular job.

So there was little time for pleasure sewing while she was raising her family -- for Lucy Atkinson, sewing was a matter of survival, putting clothes on her family's backs and quilts on their beds to fight off frigid nights.

However, in her later years, life afforded more time to sew for pleasure, and she was able to produce more quilts.

And while she had a sewing machine, she chose to hand-stitch each one to ensure quality. On this point, in near unison, the family repeated one of her favorite sayings: "If it is worth doing, it is worth doing right."

Her youngest daughter, Connie Hall, called her hand-sewn quilts a "gift of herself." Displaying a tag sewn into her quilt that reads, "Made with love by Mommy," and Hall pointed out that when Atkinson knew her time was getting short, she set to work on making a quilt for each member of the family.

In relative secrecy, she began working on quilts for each person individually, choosing colors and themes to fit each personality.

After she died Oct. 29, they were presented this past Christmas posthumously ... all except for one. The quilt for her grandson, Tim Atkinson, had disappeared.

A lifelong fan of Virginia Tech's sports programs, his was an orange and maroon quilt with Tech logos patched in. But on Christmas morning, it was nowhere to be found.

It occurred to them that the quilt might have been given away to the Roanoke Rescue Mission with her own clothes as was part of her final wishes. They called and found that a VT blanket had come through there and been sold.

At that point, Tim Atkinson's wife, Penny, went into action, organizing a search party for the missing quilt, offering rewards and a buyback, and contacting the media to help retrieve this piece of family history. And then, out of nowhere, it turned up at Tim Atkinson's mother's house.

It was like a second Christmas for Tim Atkinson, who said he had not let his initial disappointment get the better of him and had quietly resigned himself to live with the loss of her last gift to him.

But with admiration and emotion showing through his smile, he said:

"I guess for me, this makes it all the more special, especially knowing that this was one of the last things she did in her life." (source)

Nanci Pelosi: Birth Control And Abortions Are Part Of The Bailout

At a time when crisis spending on essential services and little else should be included in any of my tax dollars-built bailout solution(?), Nancy "Stretch" Pelosi snarls back at Stephanaplolous on yesterday's This Week when he asked her about the House Democrats' efforts to include family planning funding in the economic stimulus package being used to stave off the same thing that's causing the UK to possibly declare bankruptcy, and the world's markets to plunge in a perfect storm of economic collapse.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family planning services. How is that stimulus?

PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children's health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those - one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So no apologies for that?

PELOSI: No apologies. No. we have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy. (source)

Barry In Charge: What Economic Crisis? I Want To Force Taxpayers To Pay For Your Abortion

WASHINGTON, President Barack Obama on Friday lifted restrictions on U.S. government funding for groups that provide abortion services or counseling abroad, reversing a policy of his Republican predecessor George W. Bush. (source)

Leave it to Reuters to minimize the length of time this restriction has been around, as if only an idiot like George Bush could put a restriction on using taxpayer money for abortions.

Of course, it is the Great Ronaldus Magnus who first put the ban in place in 1984, then it was rescinded by Clinton, replaced by Bush, now lifted again by Barry.

Why are we surprised? Like he told us during his campaign, if his daughters up and get pregnant, he doesn't want them being "punished" with a baby.

Can you believe that we already spend $400 million annualy on family planning for other countries? In dire times of economic stress like this, it seems imprudent to use ANY money of our hard-earned paychecks for this endeavor. After all, we're all concerned with population control, but it isn't an imperative that a recession-stricken America has to be the only "control" in the whole mix.

Ann In The MSM: Dr Phil With Colmes And McClellan