Say Anything Blog

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Congressional Performance

The percentage of voters who give Congress good or excellent ratings has fallen to single digits for the first time in Rasmussen Reports tracking history. This month, just 9% say Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Most voters (52%) say Congress is doing a poor job, which ties the record high in that dubious category.

Last month, 11% of voters gave the legislature good or excellent ratings. Congress has not received higher than a 15% approval rating since the beginning of 2008.

The percentage of Democrats who give Congress positive ratings fell from 17% last month to 13% this month. The number of Democrats who give Congress a poor rating remained unchanged. Among Republicans, 8% give Congress good or excellent ratings, up just a point from last month. Sixty-five percent (65%) of GOP voters say Congress is doing a poor job, down a single point from last month.

Voters not affiliated with either party are the most critical of Congressional performance. Just 3% of those voters give Congress positive ratings, down from 6% last month. Sixty-three percent (63%) believe Congress is doing a poor job, up from 57% last month.

Just 12% of voters think Congress has passed any legislation to improve life in this country over the past six months. That number has ranged from 11% to 13% throughout 2008. The majority of voters (62%) say Congress has not passed any legislation to improve life in America.

Voters hold little positive sentiment about the future. Just 41% find it at least somewhat likely that Congress will address important problems facing our nation in the near future, while 55% find this unlikely.

[...]

A separate Rasmussen survey found that half of all voters believe America’s best days are in the past. However, another survey found that 64% of voters also believe that the world would be a better place if more countries were similar to the United States.

Interesting stuff.  One way to interpret the seemingly contradictory attitudes reported in the last paragraph of this article could reflect the effects of MSM propagandizing about bad economic news.  While there is an overall impression that we are doing badly, individuals think we are basically good, and that our system works, because that is what they experience in their daily lives.  Could be.

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This recommended diary from the Daily Kos isn’t the usual “I am happy this Republican died and is burning in hell” or “I can’t wait for the revolution so I can murder Republicans” post from Kos, but yet and still, it was such a brilliant window into the liberal mindset that I had to excerpt from it.

You Americans Aren’t Selfish Enough by LithiumCola

You pay all these taxes but you don’t want anything in return for it. You don’t want free health care. You don’t want time off of work. You don’t want anything. You’re not selfish enough.

You get mad when someone is taking welfare and sitting on their *ss. What have you got against sitting on your *ss? The whole point behind having a government and paying taxes is to have more time to sit on your *ss. That’s what technology is for. You Americans work longer than anyone, pay all these taxes, make all these robots, and then not only don’t you sit on your *ss, but you get mad when anyone else does. You’re f*cking crazy.

...Growing up means understanding self-regard. And you got none. You think anything for you must be bad. You’re like a kid whose hand has been slapped above the cookie jar. Thing is, you made the cookies, idiot. This is your country, your government, and your taxes . . . you get to say what is done with it. And here’s a clue: you want to sit on your *ss more. You want free health care.

Here’s the whole post shortened to a sentence; “It’s ok for everyone to be lazy and leech off of your fellow citizens.”

Of course, the big problem with this is that it relies on the same misunderstanding of human nature that the Communists have—which isn’t surprising since most liberals are Commies at heart (why do you think so many of them wear those Che Guevara shirts?). The problem is...drumroll please, because this will be shocking to liberals—people are not going to strive to achieve, create new jobs, and generally move the country forward if they’re getting nothing out of it.

[...]

The reality is that today, the average American citizen is not paying more in taxes than they are receiving in services. We make that up by looting the rich and running a deficit. But, guess what? We can’t run a deficit forever and the rich are not going to keep working like little hamsters on wheel, accumulating more tax dollars for the rest of us to use, as the government takes an ever larger slice of their income.

Eventually, at some point, the corporations will go, “Given the profits we pay after taxes, it’s not worth it for us to continue doing this,” and they’ll drop part of their business or close up shop. Eventually, at some point, the rich people will go, “Given the amount of taxes I’m paying on what I’m earning, it’s not worth it for me to keep working. I might as well just lay back, be lazy like everyone else, and enjoy what I’ve already earned.”

The reality is that this country can’t afford to pay for the government services it’s handing out now. So, the whole idea that we can receive even more while most of the country kicks back in a hammock and lets someone else do all the work is a fraud—and it’s a fraud at the heart of liberalism.

I especially liked the claim of “free healthcare”.  Too funny.

By Andrew Walden

American voters must make up their minds about what Barack Obama really believes in, if anything. His recent rhetorical concessions to the center further muddy the waters. So we must look to his past teachers and associates for help in understanding the inner Obama.

In his first series of national campaign commercials since securing the delegates needed to win the Democratic presidential campaign, Barack Obama struggles to re-introduce himself.  Images focus on the story of lessons learned from his grandparents and his mother, described in his book Dreams from my Father as “a girl from Kansas.... dab-smack, landlocked center of the country,” in towns “too small to warrant boldface on a roadmap.” Speaking in Independence, Missouri, Obama tells his audience: “patriotism can never be defined as loyalty to any particular leader or government or policy.”

First Mentor

But there is another story to be told about loyalties and about Obama’s education.  A story told by Gerald Horne, contributing editor of Political Affairs, a magazine published by the Communist Party, USA.  Speaking March 28, 2007 at the dedication of the Communist Party, USA archive at New York University Tamiment Library, Horne traces the downward spiral of fortune for Communists in the latter half of the twentieth century.  But in the closing paragraphs of his speech, Horne suddenly becomes hopeful, pointing to the arrival of what Obama might describe as “the ones we have been waiting for.”

“...in Hawaii was an African-American poet and journalist by the name of Frank Marshall Davis, who was certainly in the orbit of the CP (Communist Party)—if not a member—and who was born in Kansas and spent a good deal of his adult life in Chicago, before decamping to Honolulu in 1948 at the suggestion of his good friend (and Communist Party member) Paul Robeson. Eventually, he befriended another family—a Euro-American family—that had migrated to Honolulu from Kansas and a young woman from this family eventually had a child with a young student from Kenya East Africa who goes by the name of Barack Obama, who retracing the steps of Davis eventually decamped to Chicago. In his best selling memoir ‘Dreams of my Father’, the author speaks warmly of an older black poet, he identifies simply as “Frank” as being a decisive influence in helping him to find his present identity as an African-American....”

[...]

Certainly, socialists and leftists have flocked to embrace Obama’s candidacy. His campaign even hosts a page for Marxists/socialists/communists for Obama, albeit with a disclaimer at the bottom. And the Communist Party USA backs Obama’s candidacy.

What remains from Marxism in America is a desire to appropriate the wealth of some and distribute it to those who did not earn it in the name of “fairness,” and the arrogant belief that politically correct ideology denotes superiority and the right to wield political power.

Marx theorized a broad uprising of the proletarian masses to create a socialist society. Later American theorists like Frank Marshall Davis saw blacks as a revolutionary vanguard. In advanced countries, followers of Marx have devolved into Gramscian propagandists.  Arrogant nihilists, they seek not to lead, but to confirm their false sense of superiority to themselves by spreading confusion and doubt.

They may await a new leader who fancies himself Nietzsche’s Übermensch—and tells them “we are the ones we have been waiting for.”

Read the whole thing; it is quite lengthy, and gives lots of details about the influence of Communist ideas on Obama’s parents and grandparents, as well as his own words on the subject.  Scary stuff, if you care about America.

By Ken Shepherd

Ho no, here we go again. Gas price hysteria from the MSM.

“Here’s a troubling look at what some people are doing for gas. A 34-year-old Kentucky woman was arrested for prostitution after she was allegedly trading sex for $100 gas cards.”

So began a video story at ABCNews.com, which made today’s top headlines roundup with the teaser headline: “Sign of the Times: Sex for Gas.” While the short video report included a prosecutor calling it a “sign of the times” that someone would trade sex for gasoline, failing to put the phrase in quotes in the headline implies that ABCNews.com agrees with the prosecutor’s personal opinion on gas prices and the criminal desperation supposedly caused by them.

Of course, there’s also more to the story that we don’t learn from ABCNews.com. Alleged hooker Angela Eversole may be a cheating hussy, but she’s no whore, says her jilted boyfriend, according to WCPO-TV.:

“She’s wrong for cheating on me, but that’s what she was doing, so far as that goes. She definitively isn’t a prostitute,” Anthony Schaffner tells the station.

[...]

Of course, whether Eversole traded sex for a gas card or whether it was a gift from a paramour is of little consequence to ABCNews.com, which clearly aimed to present the story as proof of the depths of desperation otherwise law-abiding citizens go to due to high gas prices.

But that’s not objective journalism, it’s whoring out a strange crime story to further a biased media meme on gas prices.

In their desperation to hurt this economy, the MSM is making itself look foolish.  Of course, it’s the Dem Congress that is responsible for the rise in gas prices, with its stupid energy policies, but don’t expect to hear that from the MSM propagandists.

By Justin McCarthy

Barbara Walters with Bashar al-Assad and wife as shown on July 7, 2008 Surprise! Barbara Walters visits an anti-American dictator and returns with very nice remarks about him. Returning from the week long break on “The View” July 7, Barbara Walters described how she spent America’s birthday, and the celebration of a document denouncing tyranny, with an anti-American tyrant.

While most Americans celebrated Independence Day with fireworks and barbeques, Barbara Walters spent the occasion dining with Syrian leader Bashir al-Assad, whom Walters described as “intelligent” and “charming” who wants “very much to have good relations with us.” Perhaps realizing her own gushiness about Assad Walters pre-empted accusations and denied she is “brainwashed.”

The veteran journalist began by noting Syria remains on the State Departments terrorism list because “they are against the war in Iraq.” While she did note Syria’s support for Hamas and Hezbollah, she described them simply as “two groups that we consider unfriendly in Israel.” She did not note the many suicide bombings targeting innocent civilians those groups support.

Barbara Walters boasted of a “total freedom of religion” in the despotic state. The non-partisan international watchdog Freedom House, however finds that although it allows a certain degree of religious freedom, certainly more than many Islamic states, it’s far from “total freedom of religion.”

“Although the Constitution requires that the president be a Muslim, there is no state religion in Syria, and freedom of worship is generally respected. However, all nonworship meetings of religious groups require permits, and religious fundraising is closely scrutinized. The Alawite minority dominates the officer corps of the military and security forces. The government tightly monitors mosques and controls appointment of Muslim clergy.”

Walters added, Syria is “considered a dictatorship.” Just “considered?” Freedom House also rated Syria as “not free” with a “downward trend arrow due to the authorities’ suppression of opposition activities.” While conceding she is “not saying this is...a perfect place,” Walters advocated more dialogue with the totalitarian regime.

Although Walters claimed she went on this trip on her own, without the direction of ABC, it is not unprecedented for ABC News to demonstrate sympathy for Bashir al-Assad. “Good Morning America’s” Diane Sawyer pressed Assad on his favorite movies.

[...]

A major MSM leftie “journalist” praising a terrorist dictator?  What else is new?
And yet they insist they are “patriotic”.  Too funny.

Thomas Lifson

Demands for “tolerance” in the name of multiculturalism apply only to wealthy, predominantly white countries. And within them, only to whites.* A shocking situation in Denmark illustrates the point.

The world yawns as Muslim immigrants in Denmark viciously drive Danish citizens out of a suburb of Aarhus, Denmark’s second largest city. The Danes in question are Greenlanders (Greenland is a province of Denmark), mostly native Inuit people who have come to mainland Denmark, and apparently suffer their own share of social problems already.

[...]

Many Greenlanders living in Gjellerup Park [a suburban high-rise district of Århus, Denmark - translator] are fed up. After several years of racist persecution and harassment by Arab and Somali tenants, they’ve now chosen to abandon the place.

“I couldn’t stand being their target. It was a psychological stress. But I’m angry that we were the ones to leave. After all, they were the ones to attack us,” says Johanne Christiansen.

“A horrific lack of respect.”

[...]

There’s more. Read this and shudder. Police in Europe already are reported to rarely show their faces in certain sectors of various cities, a virtual no-go area. The Muslim Quarter, in other words. Where sharia law applies.

The surrender of the Inuit population of Gjellerup Park, with municipal authorities facilitating the exit, amounts to one more surrender to the growth of Muslim enclaves, de-facto extraterritorial outposts.

No doubt the world’s media averts its collective eyes to this sort of harassment, an ongoing war against another segment of society, because it fears sparking a racist response from whites. The media tolerates racist violence by hiding it from public concern It also fails to report on one of the biggest stories of our time. Before our eyes the seeds of Yugoslavia are being planted on the continent of Europe. Once again ideology blinds the media, and they miss the big story.

*Actually, any successful self-reliant person of any racial background who integrates into the larger economy qualifies as “white” for purposes of targeting.

Actually, tribal cultures(like radical Islam, most of Africa, and the Amerindians of the past) regularly practice what we call “ethnic cleansing”. 

BTW, the definition of "white" in bold type is eerily similar to what is taught as part of "black liberation theology", which is an integral part of Obama's core principles.

The Dems, through their so-called “multiculturalism"(actually a regression to tribalism) want to bring this contagion to the US.

As of my writing this, oil has plummeted $5/barrel just this morning.  When it goes up by $1/barrel, the MSM is preaching wall-to-wall disaster and misery, but when it drops by $5/barrel, the good news is ignored or minimized.
Why is that?  I’m just askin’…

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Disconfirmations Disconfirmed: Saddam Had Nuke Program

By Randall Hoven

The media have been telling us for years that Saddam had no WMD, so “Bush’s War”: was based on a “lie.” And those who believed Saddam did have WMD or WMD programs were delusional or worse.

But today, on July 6, 2008, the Associated Press reports that

* Saddam Hussein had a nuclear program
* At the Tuwaitha nuclear complex just south of Baghdad
* Which included 550 metric tons (over 1.2 million pounds) of “yellowcake”, or concentrated uranium
* And multiple devices that could be used in a nuclear weapon. 

The AP does not say alleged nuclear program.  It does not add “according to military experts.” It simply says “Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program.”

That’s pretty big news, isn’t it?

For about five years now, those of us who thought Saddam Hussein probably had at least WMD programs, if not WMD themselves, have been called not only wrong, but illogical and insane.

One example was an article by Sharon Begley in the Wall Street Journal titled People Believe a ‘Fact’ That Fits Their Views Even if It’s Clearly False .  (Her article series is called, without irony, the “Science Journal”.) Ms. Begley reported that “six months after the invasion, one-third of Americans believed WMDs had been found, even though every such tentative claim was discomfirmed [sic].” She cited psychologists to explain this strange behavior.  They used terms like “world views” and “mental models.”

Jim Lobe at CommonDreams.org (Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community) reported that “Three out of four self-described supporters of President George W. Bush still believe that pre-war Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or active programs to produce them.” He went on to quote the director of the polling company as saying

“To support the president and to accept that he took the U.S. to war based on mistaken assumptions likely creates substantial cognitive dissonance and leads Bush supporters to suppress awareness of unsettling information about pre-war Iraq.”

These findings on people’s beliefs were based on a survey that asked people if they believed Saddam had WMD or WMD programs .  Apparently, Sharon Begley, Jim Lobe and a whole lot of other people not only believed Saddam had no WMD programs, but that anyone who did believe such a thing was clearly illogical or insane.  In fact, the only interesting question to them was what is wrong with our minds.

[...]

Fast forward to today.  Now we hear from the Associated Press that “The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program—a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium—reached a Canadian port.” That last “remnant” was 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium.  That is over 1.2 million pounds of yellowcake!  Also, the military had previously withdrawn “four devices for controlled radiation exposure ... that could potentially be used in a weapon.” All this was located at “the former Tuwaitha nuclear complex about 12 miles south of Baghdad.”

The AP even reminds us that

“Accusations that Saddam had tried to purchase more yellowcake from the African nation of Niger—and an article by a former U.S. ambassador refuting the claims—led to a wide-ranging probe into Washington leaks that reached high into the Bush administration.”

By the way, is it illogical or insane to think that Saddam could not possibly obtain yellowcake, and did not even try to, because one former ambassador went to one country in Africa and said he couldn’t find it there?  What about after they found over a million pounds of it just south of Baghdad?  Is it now considered reality-based to think Saddam “sought” yellowcake, just as President Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address ?

[...]

If you wait long enough, the facts emerge, and the leftie liars are exposed.
Good deal for America.

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Two schoolboys in Britain were punished for refusing to kneel and pray to Allah.

Two schoolboys were given detention after refusing to kneel down and ‘pray to Allah’ during a religious education lesson.

Parents were outraged that the two boys from year seven (11 to 12-year-olds) were punished for not wanting to take part in the practical demonstration of how Allah is worshipped.

They said forcing their children to take part in the exercise at Alsager High School, near Stoke-on-Trent - which included wearing Muslim headgear - was a breach of their human rights.

[...]

It’s amazing, the amount of trouble that is being perpetrated in the name of “diversity.”

What’s even more amazing is the bravery and clear-headedness of these two schoolboys, who understood that there are some things important enough to require defying authority.

Would your kids do the same if they were asked to pray to someone else’s god?

What would you do, under a greater threat?

Is this possible here, under an Obama regime?
When he demands "unity" does that also include having only one religion? If so, what religion would that be?

Thomas Lifson

A supposedly confidential World Bank report is said to blame biofuels demand for forcing world food prices up 75%. Aditya Chakrabortty of the UK Guardian, hardly a right wing publication, writes:

Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than previously estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian.

[...]

The figure emphatically contradicts the US government’s claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises. It will add to pressure on governments in Washington and across Europe, which have turned to plant-derived fuels to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil.

Global warming remains an entirely theoretical prediction, based on climate models that do not approach the complexity of the actual world climate system. But human starvation is a very real phenomenon in the here-and-now, with reports of Haitians eating dirt “cookies” as a way of fending off hunger pangs. The world’s poorest cannot compete with mandates for ethanol content in gasoline in many states.

Nice work, Al Gore. And a shout-out to the Nobel Prize committee, for giving the peace prize to a man who has helped starve the world’s poorest people. Now we know how much respect your prize deserves.

Gore’s chickens...are coming home...to roost!

By Michael M. Bates

Today’s Chicago Tribune carries a front page story on the late Jesse Helms, “5-time senator ‘great patriot’ who held fast to his beliefs.”

The piece’s author, Los Angeles Times staff writer Johanna Neuman, states:

Often he was the lone voice of dissent in the Senate. He was the only senator to vote against confirming Henry Kissinger as secretary of state during the Nixon administration. And he was the only senator to vote against making Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a holiday.

Both assertions are wrong.  MSNBC reported in a 2005 article on secretary of state Condoleezza Rice that Henry Kissinger was approved by the Senate in a 78-7 vote. And the King Center notes on its Web site that the King holiday bill, sponsored by Senator Edward Kennedy, passed in the Senate by a vote of 78-22.

In its eagerness to portray the late Senator as an isolated, extreme extremist, the mainstream media are making up their own “facts.”

[...]

Shame on them!

Fighting leftie racism and hatred.

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The deranged lawsuit of the day has been brought by Aaron Ferguson, a former accountant for Rachael Ray’s TV cooking show, who as an anorexic is demanding $1 million because Ms. Ray is allegedly hostile to his kind.

According to court papers, Ray committed such unconscionable acts as stating that anorexics, who suffer from a potentially life-threatening personality disorder, “are sick in the head.”

[...]

But with a little creativity, anyone can climb aboard moonbattery’s gravy train by claiming to belong to an oppressed minority.

The ultimate outcome of the lefties’ “rights” bullshit.  Victim politics.

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White man convicted of racial abuse after making ‘honky’ jibe at WHITE security guards

By Emily Andrews

Jonathan Wicks was charged with racially abusing three white security guards

A white man has been prosecuted for racially abusing three white security guards.

Jonathan Wicks was taken to court for calling the men ‘honky wannabe cops’.

Wicks, 20, has had to attend court at least five times, at an estimated cost to the taxpayer of more than £5,000.

He was on a night out with friends in Reading last September when the incident happened.

He said: ‘I was outside the Oracle Shopping Centre and as a joke started pushing and rattling one of the bicycles that was locked up outside, as I’d had a few drinks.

‘The security guards told me to move on and that’s when I made the comment - I didn’t think about it, I just said it as a joke.

‘It was in jest, but they took it very seriously. They restrained me and called the police.’

Wicks, of Wokingham, Berkshire, admitted one count of using threatening, abusive or insulting words of behaviour which was racially aggravated, and one count of attempted theft of a bicycle.

[...]

‘Honky is a word that a lot of my black friends use to describe a white person, so I suppose that’s why I was charged with racial abuse. But it’s ridiculous that I was taken to court over it.

Mr Wicks called white security guards at The Oracle shopping centre in Reading, above, ‘honky wannabe cops’

‘I apologised profusely to the security guards and explained that I was having a laugh. I am white and they are white, so I don’t understand how that can make me racist.

‘It does seem a complete waste of time and money. Surely there are better things for the police and Crown Prosecution Service to be spending their time on?’

Wicks, who cares for his father Brian - who cannot work after breaking his back falling from a roof - brother Ben, 16, and sister Billie, 14, said he had pleaded guilty on the advice of his solicitor.

Martin Bryan, defending, told Reading magistrates that that he was being cheeky rather than abusive.

‘He is white British,’ he added. ‘The victims were white British as well. That might make his abuse slightly less offensive on this basis.

‘He was not intending to be malicious. He was being more obnoxious.’

In a statement the CPS said: ‘It’s not a waste of time taking this case to court if he has pleaded guilty.

‘There were some serious crimes on the indictment, so we were right to take action.’ Wicks was bailed and will be sentenced on July 17.’

This illustrates, by ridiculous example, just what is wrong with the concept that words or language can be “racist”.

By Tom Blumer

Rush Limbaugh’s new deal with Clear Channel, as flashed by Drudge (also covered or addressed here and here at NewsBusters; here at the New York Times; and here in a very long New York Times magazine article), is north of $400 million for the next eight years.

Good tax planning too: Maharushie will get his reported nine-figure signing bonus this year before a possible President Obama does his hundreds of billions in damage. Limbaugh’s tax savings, if the bonus is $100 million and Obama gets everything he wants, would be a hair under $17 mil (12.4% Social Security on all but $148,000, plus the 4.6% planned increase in the top rate).

One conclusion you can reach, based on what newspaper industry watcher Newsosaur told us earlier this week, is that Old Media covering the Limbaugh story is like zombies covering the living (link in excerpt was in original):

Newspaper shares slid $23B in 6 months

The value of 11 newspaper companies traded on the public market since 2005 dove a combined $23.7 billion in the first half of this year, falling almost as much in six months as they had in the three prior years put together.

Wall Street’s intensifying repudiation of the industry means that the companies in the group have lost a cumulative $49.7 billion in market capitalization in 3½ years, vaporizing 51% of shareholder value since Dec. 31. 2004.

To date, the decline in newspaper shares has not had a commensurate impact on the compensation (details here) enjoyed by the chief executives of several of the affected companies.

[...]

Limbaugh got to where he is by being entertaining, informative, and 98%-plus accurate. He also famously didn’t jump on to the Internet until it could be proven that he would at least break even.

How many publishers can say that? Therein lie the reasons why Limbaugh and the newspaper business are heading in opposite directions.

In our economic system, things are worth what people are willing to pay for them.