Say Anything Blog

By Debra Baker

Claims that there were no links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda are wrong. Documents just released by the Pentagon prove it.

In March 2008, the Pentagon released a document that details some of the classified documents from Saddam’s regime.  This document called the Iraqi Perspectives Project Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents Volume 1 (Redacted) is an overview of “more than 600,000 original captured documents and several thousand hours of audio and video footage archived in a US Department of Defense (DOD) database. As of August 2006, only 15 percent of the captured documents have English translations.”[1]  This document provides insight into how Saddam operated his regime and his ties to terrorism.

[...]

Saddam and State Terrorism

Saddam was in the business of terror.  From the recruitment, training, financing, and support of terrorism, Saddam formed an alliance with terror.  Of course Saddam obtained control of Iraq via his terrorist Baath party, but the Pentagon Papers on Saddam reveal much more to Saddam’s terrorist ties.  The UN sanctions imposed after the 1991 Gulf War,

  “reduced Saddam’s ability to shape regional and world events, steadily draining his military, economic, and military powers. The rise of Islamist fundamentalism in the region gave Saddam the opportunity to make terrorism, one of the few tools remaining in Saddam’s “coercion” toolbox, not only cost effective but a formal instrument of state power.”[10] 

The UN sanctions were working, but Saddam being resourceful saw the jihadist movement as a vehicle to carry out his anti-American and anti-Israeli actions.

Terrorist Training Camps in Iraq

Saddam had terrorist training camps within Iraq.  The Pentagon report on Saddam goes on to say that “captured Iraqi archives reveal that Saddam was training Arab fighters (non-Iraqi) in Iraqi training camps more than a decade prior to Operation Desert Storm (1991).  A Saddam memorandum directed the IIS to submit a list of foreign nationals who were trained in Iraq and carried out operations during the 1991 war against the United States.  In response, the IIS sent a list of one-hundred names of foreign national fighters, categorized by country”[11]

[...]

The Pentagon papers only stated the EIJ link, not specifically the al-Qaeda link.  The second in command of al-Qaeda and the person who masterminded 9/11 is Ayman al-Zawahiri.  Ayman al-Zawahiri was the leader of the EIJ prior to its 1998 merging with al-Qaeda.  This truth has been subverted by the media.  All the major media outlets have just quoted what is written in the Executive Summary of the document which states that there is no “smoking gun[18].”  But upon further investigation of the EIJ, a direct link between al-Qaeda and Saddam’s Iraq is seen.

The truth is out there.  Read the whole thing, which includes an exhaustive bibliography.

By Noel Sheppard

In light of the brouhaha surrounding Barack Obama’s comments about high unemployment in small towns making Americans “cling to guns, or religion,” one has to wonder whether press outlets are going to go gaga over derogatory statements Hillary Clinton made in 1995 about working-class white southerners.

This is especially the case given how media ignored revelations about Bill Clinton’s 1991 and 1992 campaign remarks about “economically insecure white people.”

As reported by the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein Wednesday (emphasis added, picture courtesy AP):
Story Continues Below Ad ↓

  In January 1995, as the Clintons were licking their wounds from the 1994 congressional elections, a debate emerged at a retreat at Camp David. Should the administration make overtures to working class white southerners who had all but forsaken the Democratic Party? The then-first lady took a less than inclusive approach.

  “Screw ‘em,” she told her husband. “You don’t owe them a thing, Bill. They’re doing nothing for you; you don’t have to do anything for them.”

[...]

Politics, leftie style.

Read the whole thing.

By Lee Cary

Populism uses the politics of discontent.(Yet another thing it shares with Marxism-r108) Barack Obama’s recurring comparisons between CEO and average worker salaries is a class-warfare play on resentment with just enough truth to make it work with many voters.

Senator Obama has made frequent reference to the spread between CEO compensation and average worker pay. For example:

1. January 20, 2008, “The Great Need of the Hour” speech on MLK Day

  “We have a [moral] deficit when CEOs are making more in ten minutes than some workers make in ten months.”

2. Radio ad in the Texas primary race

  “Some CEOs make more in 10 minutes than some American workers make in a year.”

3. April 11, 2008, REUTERS article quoting Obama in Indianapolis

  “Some CEOs make more in one day than their workers make in one year.”

The parameters for Obama’s comparison continue to drift, but few notice. His is not an exercise in mathematics. It’s an appeal to voter discontent.

When a politician bemoans the salary-disparity on the Jay Leno or David Letterman Shows the crowds applaud.  Never mind that Jay makes $123,000 and Dave $154,000 for each show - considerably more than the average U.S. worker makes in a year.  Entertainers, including sports figures, are exempt from salary comparisons. They have talent. And never mind that Obama has leveraged his support from Oprah Winfrey to gain votes. At an annual income of $260,000,000, The Oprah makes a million dollars per weekday.

Obama’s floating pay equations have generally been specious.  Here’s how.

Let’s start with the average annual salary (AAS) for a U.S. worker as computed by the San Francisco Chronicle using U.S. Department of Labor statistics: $39,795.33 (Q1 2005). We could use CNN’s computation of a 2006 AAS of $29,544, but they relied on the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy; that lower figure factors in both full- and part-time salaries. Therein is a challenge with computing comparative salaries; not only do the numbers lag behind the calendar, but some sources spin the numbers to support their policy agenda. In October 2005, a third source put the ASS at $40,409. We’ll use $40,000 as the ASS to test Obama’s equations.

Forbes placed the aggregate pay for the CEOs of the top 500 U.S. companies at $5.1 billion, or a CEO average of $10.2 million.  Another source notes that the range of 2005 CEO pay is from $10-15 million.  We’ll use the higher number - $15 million.

In all of Obama’s equations he uses the word “some.” It’s a word that baths generalizations in the warm waters of perceived accuracy. If, for example, you own twin pug dogs that are the only canines that ever learned to play checkers, you could rightly say, “Some dogs play checkers.”  But, truth be told, most dogs don’t.  Obama has said this,

  1. “We have a [moral] deficit when CEOs are making more in ten minutes than some workers make in ten months.”

Here’s the math: The 2005 AAS for 10 months was $33,333.33.  Based on a 40 hour week, a CEO making more than $33,333 in ten minutes ($3,333.33 per minute) would have a weekly (2,400 minutes) salary of about $8 million and an annual salary of about $416 million.  How many CEOs met that qualification?  The answer is (drum roll here) - none.  According the Forbes, the highest CEO salary for 2005 was Yahoo’s Terry Semel at $230 million.  (He’s right there in Oprah territory.)

  2. “Some CEOs make more in 10 minutes than some American workers make in a year.”

Oops. This equation pushes the “some” CEOs annual salary up to nearly $500 million.  That’s equivalent to about what the top three highest paid CEOs made in 2005 combined.  So this equation is clearly bogus. Then, finally, Obama lowers the numbers.

  3. “Some CEOs make more in one day than their workers make in one year.”

Okay, now Obama is into reality with his math, although he was careful not to put the word “all” before “their workers.” But, some CEOs do make $10.4 million a year.  In fact, as we’ve seen, that’s about the average for the top 500 companies.  Some Obama supporters do even better, including Steven Spielberg, who makes $110 million a year; George Clooney, $25 million; Matt Damon, $24 million; Will Smith, $31 million—and good for them. CBS News reportedly gave Katie Couric a five-year contract making $46,149 per evening news broadcast.  So Ms. Couric receives more for 20-odd minutes of teleprompter reading than the AAS of U.S. workers. You suppose CBS News has aired any stories on the disparity between CEO compensation and worker pay?

Where’s Senator Obama going with all these sliding comparative equations?  The answer is that he’s appealing to class envy.

It’s not as though the spread between CEO compensation and worker pay isn’t already under considerable scrutiny.  For a review of proposed and passed legislation pertaining to executive compensation see here.  And, for a comprehensive overview of the issue you can read “Excessive CEO Pay: Background and Policy Approaches,” a February 2007 publication of the Congressional Research Services (CRS).  Here’s a summary from that report describing how the government has been addressing the issue.

  “There have been two general approaches to executive pay reform.  First changes to securities laws and regulations have attempted to strengthen the bargaining position of shareholders by (1) requiring more complete and comprehensive disclosure of CEO pay, (2) making boards more responsive to shareholder interests, or (3) requiring direct shareholder approval of executive pay packages.  Some of initiatives are the result of regulatory initiatives, while others are or were legislatively based. Second, Congress has tried to restrain the growth of executive pay by eliminating the tax deduction for compensation paid in excess of specific caps.” (p. CRS-3)

So it’s not as if Senator Obama is doing the nation a public service by surfacing an issue that’s been ignored. No, he has another agenda.

Quote #1 above came from Obama’s MLK Day speech wherein he said, “Unity is the great need of the hour. Unity is how we shall overcome.”  But exploiting class envy is not a unification tactic. It’s a divisive tactic and represents the same old liberal politics of discontent. It offers no vision for the future of the nation except friction and stridency. 

[...]

SSDD Obama continues the “divide and conquer” strategy and tactics of those who would destroy our way of life, destroy individual independence, and institute State control of America.

By Richard Newcomb

Press Ignore History-making Italian Election: No Commies Elected

Michael Ledeen over at the National Review’s Corner reminded me today that the recent elections in Italy resulted in a historic event- for the first time since World War II, no Communist was elected to the Italian Parliament. And in an equally positive corollary, no member of the fellow-traveling Green party won either. Mr. Ledeen also noticed something that the Big Media around the world managed to miss- the incoming government will be decidedly pro-American and pro-George W. Bush. Ledeen writes,

  Tomorrow’s papers will pretend that this didn’t happen, and warn that Berlusconi’s allies in the Northern League are mercurial and dangerous, and that his majority isn’t as stable as it looks. But it is. And there’s an even more annoying feature to these elections, as seen by the chattering classes: Berlusconi is an outspoken, even passionate admirer of George W. Bush and the United States of America. Reminds one of the elections that brought Sarkozy to the Elysee, doesn’t it? Best to keep that quiet, or somebody might notice that hatred of America doesn’t seem to affect the voters in Italy, France or Germany.

When many foreign governments were in office that enjoyed spiting Mr. Bush’s initiatives, the media reported that Bush’s America was ‘unilateral’, although the U.S. would have liked to work with those countries- it was their incumbent governments who preferred not to co-operate with the United States. Now that Germany, France and Italy are governed by those who are more admiring of Mr. Bush, will the Press report that in fact, the previous issues were mostly caused by the attitudes of the foreign governments, and not Mr. Bush’s supposed arrogance and unilateralism? Will the Press admit that from the first, this Administration has worked well with many other countries, though those workings are not always in plain view?

[...]

So now that many of our traditional allies in Europe have chosen to elect governments with pro-American and pro-Bush sentiments, perhaps all that loud talk about Bush’s ‘going it alone’ was simply blather. But I won’t hold my breath waiting for the media to acknowledge how wrong they were- they never apologize, just move on to the next hit job.

The rest of the world gets it; we can only hope that our electorate is as smart as the Italians.

No Greens, no Commies!

By Noel Sheppard

When Global Warmingest-in-Chief Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, the media’s prideful gushing was so obvious it was almost sick-making.

Now, six months later, a fellow Nobel Peace Prize recipient is part of a group asking the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “admit that there is no observational evidence in measured data going back 22,000 years or even millions of years that CO2 levels (whether from man or nature) have driven or are driving world temperatures.”

Since it is a metaphysical certitude media will ignore this Prize winner, the following is a complete reprint of a letter sent to the IPCC on Monday (with permission):

  14 April 2008

  Dear Dr. Pachauri and others associated with IPCC

  We are writing to you and others associated with the IPCC position – that man’s CO2 is a driver of global warming and climate change – to ask that you now in view of the evidence retract support from the current IPCC position [as in footnote 1] and admit that there is no observational evidence in measured data going back 22,000 years or even millions of years that CO2 levels (whether from man or nature) have driven or are driving world temperatures or climate change.

  If you believe there is evidence of the CO2 driver theory in the available data please present a graph of it.

  We draw your attention to three observational refutations of the IPCC position (and note there are more). Ice-core data from the ACIA (Arctic Climate Impact Assessment) shows that temperatures have fallen since around 4,000 years ago (the Bronze Age Climate Optimum) while CO2 levels have risen, yet this graphical data was not included in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers (Fig. SPM1 Feb07) which graphed the CO2 rise.

  More recent data shows that in the opposite sense to IPCC predictions world temperatures have not risen and indeed have fallen over the past 10 years while CO2 levels have risen dramatically.

  The up-dated temperature measurements have been released by the NASA’s Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) [1] as well as by the UK’s Hadley Climate Research Unit (Temperature v. 3, variance adjusted - Hadley CRUT3v) [2]. In parallel, readings of atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have been released by the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii [3]. They have been combined in graphical form by Joe D’Aleo [4], and are shown below.   

  [...]

For those interested, Hendriksen was once part of the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces, which collectively received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1988.

Read the whole thing.  There is a very cool graph and extensive footnotes and a bibliography.

Here’s a graphic that illustrates the “real context” in which to place Obama’s comments about average Americans:



All his leftie buddies in San Francisco agree with him.

By Klaus Marre

Is this a preview of how he will govern? Is he just another politician who wants to enforce his beliefs on "the proletariat"?

McCain says he believes U.S. is in a recession

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Monday that he believes the country is in a recession, adding that “these are very, very tough times in America.”

[...]

While McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said he thinks the country is in a recession, he noted that he is more worried about helping people who are facing “enormous challenges,” rather than figuring out what the technical definition of a recession is.



The senator indicated that both Congress and President Bush are partly responsible for the situation, but argued that others are also playing a role.

“I think that there’s plenty of that blame to go around, including very greedy people that happen to be in Wall Street today ... like the CEO of Bear Stearns who decided the day before he was bailed out by the federal government to cash in millions of dollar’s worth of stock,” he stated, adding that there needs to be “a lot more accountability” on Wall Street.

So, we have the “Republican” candidate for President, who describes himself as “a proud Reagan conservative”, changing the definition of “recession” to suit his political purposes, downtalking the economy, blaming the President and “Big Business”, and generally parroting the leftie line on the economy. What’s wrong with this picture?

By Noel Sheppard

If recent polls and rumors are correct, two of America’s most prominent women are about to go down in flames, conceivably at virtually the same moment in history.

Predictably, the left and their media minions seem destined to blame it all on men.

Think that’s sexist of me?

Well, before I’m relegated to the sexist pigsty, consider Sunday’s New York Post article written by Vanity Fair contributing editor Leslie Bennetts entitled “Hillary and Katie: Two Women Pioneers…Driven Off A Cliff” (emphasis added throughout, h/t NBer ThisnThat):

  With Sen. Barack Obama poised to seize the Democratic nomination and Couric’s ratings so low that her program is practically on life-support, all that’s left to settle are the departure dates for two of America’s most prominent women.

  The mostly male punditocracy is deconstructing the twin debacles with unseemly glee, and both Couric and Clinton have been widely excoriated for the misjudgments that contributed to their front-page flame-outs. But there’s plenty of blame to go around, much of which belongs to the male advisors whose catastrophic advice helped steer both women to defeat.

I’m surprised it took until the third paragraph for that statement. Aren’t you?

Sadly, Bennetts was just getting warmed up, for now that the object of her disaffection had been accused, next on the docket was sealing an indictment (indigestion alert…consider yourself warned!!!):

  At CBS, Couric was the $60 million talent, but the suits who run the network were the geniuses who decided that one of the toughest interviewers in television should be reduced to a nauseating female caricature whose main contribution to her new role was girlish fatuousness.

Umm, Leslie: Did you ever watch Couric in her previous role as a nauseating female caricature whose main contribution was girlish fatuousness? Were you aware that she was on television before being hired by CBS, and that what you believe the suits who run the network reduced her to was exactly what she had been doing at NBC from 1991 to 2006?

And, when you write that she’s one of the toughest interviewers in television, are you being serious, or is this your impersonation of girlish fatuousness?

Regardless of the answers, Bennetts next blamed Katie’s fate on—wait for it—her clothing:

  Couric’s denuded gams were accorded such prominence that the male honchos masterminding her show seemed to believe that sexy legs in stilettoes were all that viewers cared about.

Fascinating feminist revisionism going on here, dontcha think? Can’t you hear Helen Reddy proudly singing, “I am woman, watch me let men dress me?”

So, Leslie: Do you actually believe Couric had no say in her attire? And, do you think she dressed more demurely and/or less femininely when on the “Today” show?

Furthermore, isn’t this how most women dress in the workplace, and, in particular, on television? Have you seen what female anchors on CNBC, CNN, FNC, and MSNBC wear?

Yet, an exquisitely delicious irony concerning Bennetts’ carping and whining over Katie’s exposed gams is indeed the masculine, largely non-sexual pantsuits favored by Hillary. Oddly, Bennetts mostly ignored Clinton’s wardrobe, and, instead, focused her—and, sickeningly, our!—attention elsewhere:

  But all it takes to rivet attention on the reproductive organs of female politicians is the biological accident of gender. During this campaign, Sen. Clinton had to endure such breathtakingly malevolent excrescences of misogynist popular culture as the South Park episode about terrorists secreting a bomb in her vagina.

My goodness. Such banality. But there was more as Bennetts crescendoed to a disgraceful conclusion:

  It’s too early to know whether the failure of Clinton’s campaign and Couric’s anchordom will actually set back women’s progress, although my guess is that no major television network will rush to install a new female anchor any time soon.

  For now, anyway, the women themselves will shoulder most of the responsibility for having bungled their grab at the brass ring. Yes, Clinton and Couric made mistakes, but America only forgives such human failings in male icons.

  Women have to be perfect - and as long as we keep enforcing a standard like that, it’s going to be a long time before we truly reach the highest levels of success.

Honestly, when’s the last time you read such unbelievable nonsense? Women have to be perfect? Really?

[...]

With this in mind, Hillary and Katie’s career difficulties—contrary to Bennetts’ assertions—might be more of an explanation for the current state of both the Democrat Party and the media than emblematic of the modern state of women and the women’s movement.

Think about it.

The train wreck that is American feminism just keeps getting more and more out of touch with reality.

By Matthew Vadum

Soros Anti-American Horror Propaganda Coming to a Theater Near You

Not too many commentators seem to have noticed that George Soros is slowly but surely becoming the mainstream media that is the focus of the analysis we do at NewsBusters. The liberal billionaire-turned-philanthropist has been buying up media properties for years in order to drive home his message to the American public that they are too materialistic, too wasteful, too selfish, and too stupid to decide for themselves how to run their own lives.

As Capital Research Center (my employer) reported in a recent paper, three years ago Soros acquired 2.6 million shares of the huge diversified media company Time Warner. In 2006 his companies, Soros Strategic Partners and Dune Capital Management, paid $900 million to buy the DreamWorks SKG film library from Viacom, a move that gave Soros the DVD and rebroadcasting rights to films such as Saving Private Ryan (1998), Gladiator (2000), and American Beauty (1999). As James Hirsen noted, the transaction gives Soros “some highly desirable film rights at a time when the marketing and distribution model is changing to video on demand, video iPods and other forms of digital distribution.” But more importantly, it gives Soros “a presence in Hollywood where likeminded libs are ready, willing and able to collaborate in cinematic social engineering.” Soros is also a funder, whether directly or indirectly, of Media Matters for America, the reflexively liberal noise machine and pretended media watchdog whose modus operandi is to mau-mau the media into mouthing the politically correct platitudes that pass for profound insights on the far left.

Soros is also venturing into media overseas. Earlier this year Soros Fund Management plunked down $100 million for 3% of India’s Reliance Entertainment, a $3 billion conglomerate that aims to provide Internet-based TV programs in India. Reliance also churns out movies and owns movie houses, radio stations and social networking websites in the country with one of the fastest growing economies in the world. When in the 1980s Soros set up offices in Eastern Europe for his philanthropy, the Open Society Institute (OSI), he helped to finance publishers, independent TV and radio outlets, and political parties.

Soros has long been a player in Hollywood. As Rondi Adamson reported in “George Soros, Movie Mogul: ‘Social Justice’ Cinema and the Sundance Institute,” (Foundation Watch, March 2008), OSI has been underwriting “social justice” documentaries since 1996, and in 2001 Soros let actor-director Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute take over his Soros Documentary Fund (since rechristened the Soros/Sundance Documentary Fund).

Why is Soros so interested in film? “Documentary films raise awareness and inspire action,” he said. “The Open Society Institute gave vital support to filmmakers working to expose human rights abuses and helped the films find the widest possible audience.” Adamson writes:

Soros, who has given away an estimated $5 billion to various causes since 1991, started his documentary fund as a form of political activism. Gara LaMarche, former vice president and director of U.S. programs for OSI, explained his boss’s motives: “Nonfiction film can spur awareness and action, sometimes touching audiences beyond the reach of other methods.” Movies “teach us about the world, what is happening to our fellow travelers on the globe—what is happening to us—and what we might do about it.” Using the well-worn language of political correctness, LaMarche, who left OSI in April 2007 to head the Atlantic Philanthropies (2006 assets $3.2 billion, grants $748 million), notes that a decade of work by Soros and the Sundance Documentary Fund has helped highlight “marginalized groups and their quest for rights and recognition from one end of the globe to the other.”

Soros’s lieutenant praises the political impact of films like Al Gore’s 2006 global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame, a 1960 TV documentary on the plight of farmworkers. He observes that only film images can adequately reveal the meaning of Rodney King’s police beating, of tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square, and the extent of “Joseph McCarthy’s deficit of decency”—a characterization of the late senator hotly disputed by scholar M. Stanton Evans in his book, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies (Crown Forum, 2007).


[...]


People who want to make inspirational movies about good things Americans have done routinely get the cold shoulder from Hollywood financiers. Action star Bruce Willis is reportedly having trouble getting movie studios interested in his proposed movie about the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry, (known as the “Deuce Four”) that heroically battled Islamist fighters in Mosul, Iraq. Willis wants to spotlight “these guys who do what they are asked for very little money to defend and fight for what they consider to be freedom.”

“Sounds like blockbuster material –but where are the Hollywood heavies who will help him make it and make a buck?” asks Adamson.

And don’t hold your breath waiting for Soros or Sundance to help out conservative movie makers any time soon, because when you love America and American values you’re just not considered hip in Hollywood: Conservatives have to blaze their own path. Govindini Murty and Jason Apuzzo are doing just that with the Liberty Film Festival, and so is Thor Halvorssen’s Moving Picture Institute (MPI).

The Liberty Film Festival has screened Border (2007), about the public response to illegal immigration; Suicide Killers (2006), about Islamists’ terror tactics; and The Road to Jenin (2003), about Israel’s military reply to the Palestinian “Passover bombing.” MPI boosts movies such as Indoctrinate U (2007), an expose of political correctness on college campuses, and Mine Your Own Business (2006), a critical look at environmental elitists fighting gold mining operations in desperately poor Romania – against the wishes of local residents who want the mine and the jobs and economic development that would come with it.

So, now Soros wants to be the lefties’ Minister of Propaganda? It’s time to expose this human cancer for what he is.

Thomas Lifson

Hillary Clinton is getting a big boost from Obama’s bitterness fumble. Her case that he is unelectable got a lot easier to make, and she doesn’t even have to mention race. Not that Hillary ever gave anyone (except maybe Chelsea) the warm and fuzzies, but she has decades’ more practice at hiding her disdain for ordinary folk. After all, moving from Wellesley to Yale to the Watergate hearings, and then going to Arkansas as a politicians’ wife must have been quite a baptism of fire when it comes to camouflaging condescension.

The Party of the Little Guy appears to be caught in what Marxists like to call a contradiction. Their rhetoric is all about compassion and helping, and taking care of the unfortunate. But their political philosophy is anchored in elitism: the notion that the government (and the elites running it) know better than Everyman what is good for him. The entire “What’s the Matter with Kansas” hypothesis rests on the assumption that people are too dumb to understand the complexities of politics, just mindlessly reacting on the basis of false consciousness to the Rovian deceptions of the alternatively idiotic/brilliant GOP.

The first two presidential elections of the new century saw pompous Democrat badidates narrowly losing to George W. Bush, who is regarded on the left as having no conceivable person to whom he might condescend. A regular baseball-loving, pretzel-eating kind of guy so unlike Al Gore and especially the haughty, serial wealth-marrying John Kerry.

Now here it is 2008, and the Dems have given their hearts over to a black guy raised without a father. That must have seemed like a great idea at the time they were caucusing in places like Wyoming. Except that now it turns out that Obama is as much of a snob as Kerry, albeit with a wife who thinks she is poor when they earn a million bucks a year, and feels aggrieved at the cruel way America has treated her.

[...]

The truth is, lefties are elitists, just like all commies. In socialist/communist countries, the elite class is composed of politicians. The Dems want the same for America.

By John Robinson

The Oil Connection

A recent piece of news has shed new light on what could be another storm for both the Clintons. Like an old shipwreck, the crashing waves are slowly revealing more from beneath the sand. Recently, we were treated to the revelation that an agent of Saddam Hussein’s essentially financed a junket to visit Iraq before the war and complain about the sanctions’ effect on the poor Iraqi children.

(Let’s forget for a moment that it turned out that Saddam was actually engaged in a vast criminal enterprise through the oil-for-food program, and was essentially starving his “poor Iraqi children” for PR reasons.) Matt Apuzzo of the AP writes:

  Saddam Hussein’s intelligence agency secretly financed a trip to Iraq for three U.S. lawmakers during the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

  The three anti-war Democrats made the trip in October 2002, while the Bush administration was trying to persuade Congress to authorize military action against Iraq. While traveling, they called for a diplomatic solution.

  Prosecutors say that trip was arranged by Muthanna Al-Hanooti, a Michigan charity official, who was charged Wednesday with setting up the junket at the behest of Saddam’s regime. Iraqi intelligence officials allegedly paid for the trip through an intermediary and rewarded Al-Hanooti with 2 million barrels of Iraqi oil. [emphasis added]

  The lawmakers are not named in the indictment but the dates correspond to a trip by Democratic Reps. Jim McDermott of Washington, David Bonior of Michigan and Mike Thompson of California. None was charged and Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said investigators “have no information whatsoever” any of them knew the trip was underwritten by Saddam.

The one thing that stuck out to me most when I read that was the method of payment for Al-Hanooti: 2 million barrels of Iraqi oil. During the grand old days of sanctions, this was a common method of the Hussein regime to do business.

Then, we learn this week that Hillary Clinton also received a visit from Al-Hanooti while at the White House in 1997. Ira Stoll of the New York Sun writes:

  In a 1997 interview with this reporter, Hanooti said that at the meeting, Mrs. Clinton was “very receptive” to his request for an easing of the American sanctions on Iraq that were in place at the time. He said Mrs. Clinton “passed a message to the State Department” about the need to implement the oil-for-food deal, which was intended to allow Saddam to sell billions of dollars’ worth of oil to pay for food for Iraqi citizens.

It’s interesting that Hillary Clinton not only was behind the formation of the oil-for-food program, but that it was a direct contact with an agent of Saddam that accomplished the task.

So, fast forward a few years. Baghdad has fallen, the doors have been kicked open, and the oil-for-food program has become the oil-for-food scandal. What seems amazing now is not only the extent of the corruption, but how little most Americans even know about it.

[...]

The interesting thing about this (to bring it all full circle) is that the payment Al-Hanooti (and many others) accepted, was oil. Raw crude is not something that you can just bring down to the Exxon station on the corner and “cash in”. Especially when said crude comes from a brutal dictatorship that is currently under UN sanctions prohibiting its sale. The oil has to be laundered, so to speak; filtered through a series of shell companies and its source disguised. The people who did this were very specialized, and had to have a background in international finance as well as diplomatic connections.

One of these men was Marc Rich.

[...]

What I would really like to know now—and I doubt anyone will ever ask or answer these questions—are three things:

1. What, exactly, is the relationship between Marc Rich and the Clintons - especially from 1997-2001?

2. Were the Clintons complicit in the founding of the corrupt oil-for-food program or did they just have their hands in the cookie jar like everyone else?

3. Why was the Clinton administration (presumably) completely unaware of the corruption… especially while considering Marc Rich’s pardon application?

Enquiring minds do want to know.

Why am I not surprised about any of this?

By Bruce Walker

Who’s an Uncle Tom?

As the Democrats’ nomination process descends into the ugly area of racial politics, it may be helpful to explore and to learn about the origin of some of the equally ugly racial mockeries that have become a part of American political life. The term “Uncle Tom” was used extensively during the decade of civil rights reform to describe a black man who simply did what white people wanted. Where did this term come from?

The literary reference, of course, comes from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the passionate and simple anti-slavery novel published before the Civil War. The pejorative term comes out of the decade of Reconstruction. While the Union Army remained in the South, blacks were allowed to participate in state and federal elections. But they could not do that alone. The support of white Republicans was essential .

There has been much written about the horrors of Reconstruction, of illiterate blacks being elected to state legislatures, and the need to withdraw Union troops to bring peace. Unfortunately, that history is largely false. The blacks who could not read were blacks who could not read because slave owners had made it an actual crime to teach blacks to read. Many black leaders in the South came from the North and had excellent college educations. Some had the same electrifying eloquence of Frederick Douglass and nearly all simply wanted to live in peace and have a fair transition from slavery to liberty.

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Blacks and Republicans in the South

Working together, white Republicans and black Republicans were able to elect fourteen black members of the House of Representative during Reconstruction and two blacks Senators. Significant numbers of black Republicans were also elected to state offices.

While black and white Republicans competed with white Democrats in the South for political power, the death of Lincoln caused a similar conflict in Washington. Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s Vice President, was a Democrat and a supporter of slavery. During the 1860 Presidential Election, Johnson had supported Breckenridge, the racist Democrat candidate from the Deep South.

Almost as soon as Johnson took office, he clashed with his anti-slavery Republican cabinet. Democrat Johnson spoke of the need for “White man’s government,” and he told Governor Fletcher of Missouri: “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men. Everyone would, and must, admit that the white race is superior to the black.”

While Democrats in the South and in Washington were fighting to keep blacks down and Republicans were fighting to elevate blacks to full equality, the Ku Klux Klan began to terrorize Republicans as a way of breaking the political stalemate. A federal grand jury in North Carolina in 1871 found that: “The operations of the Klan were exercised in night, and were invariably directed against members of the Republican Party by warnings to leave the country, by whippings and by murder.”[7]

Whites as well as blacks were victims of Klan violence and Klan terrorism, but the only whites who were terrorized by the Klan during this period were Republicans and, to a large extent, blacks who were Republicans were terrorized by the Klan rather than blacks who were Democrats. Why was the Klan, the terrorist arm of the Democrat Party, so intent upon wiping out the Republican Party in the South?

Contrary to what many people think now, the South had a very vigorous two party system in the years following the Civil War. Democrats and Republicans had rough parity in political power. I have studied the congressional election returns from the South during this period: elections were often won by very close margins. As long as black and white Republicans could stand together, Democrats could never establish the sort of one-party state necessary to enact Jim Crow and the utter debasement of blacks.

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But there was one way to disenfranchise blacks: Turn the South into a region in which only the Democratic Party held any political power at all. This is why the Ku Klux Klan focused on the extinction of the Republican Party so much. Blacks could have whatever theoretical rights Washington and Republicans wanted to give them, but if the South was a one-party state and that one party of the Democrat Party, it did not matter.

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And it worked. There was a vigorous two party system in the South in 1876, but by 1896 there were hardly any Republicans elected to any state or federal offices at all. Why? Republican whites left the South and Republican blacks joined the Democrat Party instead. Many black men, supported by strong black women who could not vote but who could speak, resisted as long as they could, but when medical care for their families and purchasing supplies at stores was even denied to them, they relented. Black women had a name for men who quit the Republican Party and became Democrats - this process was known as “Crossing the Jordan” - and that name was “Uncle Tom.”

Will we ever reach a time when Dixiecrat politicians like Bill Clinton cease to own black voters? Perhaps we will, if enough people know the truth about the history of Uncle Tom. Perhaps then Democrats will lose their stranglehold on black America and blacks will begin to see that the party founded to make them free is their friend.

Read the whole thing. As I have posted before, the Democrat Party is the historical reservoir of racism in this country.

By Tom Blumer

Old Media’s Seasonally Ignorant Employment Reporting

Did you know that 574,000 and 1.1 million more Americans had jobs in March than in February and January, respectively?

Seriously, as you can see on the right (data can be retrieved from this BLS page; select the very first “not seasonally adjusted” table).

Now the fact remains, as you can also see, that job growth during the past two months is nowhere near as great as it was during the same two months in 2006 (1.91 million) or 2007 (1.58 million). This goes a long way towards explaining why total employment, when adjusted for seasonality, fell 80,000 during March, and by 232,000 during the first quarter.

There’s no denying that the employment situation has been deteriorating for several months, and I’m not trying to minimize that. What I am saying is that the “employees were thrown out on the streets during March” narrative cooked up by Old Media today, including the Associated Press’s Jeannine Aversa, is clearly false, either because Old Media reporters and their editors don’t understand a concept as basic as seasonality, or they don’t want to.

Here are the relevant offending paragraphs from Aversa’s report (host copy for future reference) today (the relevant raw-data job changes are in italics):

Employers buffeted by talk of recession slashed 80,000 jobs in March (actually, employers added a lower-than-usual 574,000 jobs in March) .....

..... Job losses were widespread in March. Construction, manufacturing, retailing, financial services and various business services all racked up losses (actually, every sector noted except manufacturing had gains). That overwhelmed gains elsewhere, including in education and health care, leisure and hospitality as well as in government (this sentence is thus false on its face).

In March, construction companies cut 51,000 jobs (actual was +49,000), factories eliminated 48,000 positions (actual was -19,000), retailers cut payrolls by more than 12,000 (actual was +53,000). Professional and businesses services lost 35,000 jobs (actual was +67,000) and temporary help firms cut nearly 22,000 jobs (actual was +20,000). Financial firms chopped 5,000 jobs (actual was +5,000).

When government hiring was removed, the numbers looked even worse. Private employers shed 98,000 jobs in March (actual was +474,000; 105,000 jobs were added in government during March, vs. the +18,000 seasonally adjusted amount inferred).

Beyond that, there’s the annoying presumption on the part of Aversa and others that job reductions always occur because employers “cut” jobs. If a person leaves his or her job voluntarily or retires and isn’t replaced, did the employer just “cut” or “chop” a job (with the heavy implication that some innocent person was thrown out of work)? Of course.

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Again, this isn’t to say that the economy isn’t in a rough patch. But it’s a long way from March’s easily reportable reality—unadjusted job growth occurred, but not as quickly as in previous years, causing seasonally adjusted job growth to be negative—to the patent fiction of “blood on the streets” being foisted on the public today.

Thousands of Old Media outlets already have and will continue to mindlessly relay the job-cut narratives of AP, the New York Times ("Unemployment Rate Rises After 80,000 Jobs Cut"), and others. No doubt politicians leverage it and pile on. But all the newsprint used, all the bandwidth burned, and all the uninformed rhetoric won’t change the fact that in the real world, those cuts simply did not happen.

So, employment went up, but not as much as it “should have”. This is like the Dems whining about “draconian cuts” in social programs when the reality was that there was only a decrease in the yearly rate of increase.

By Seton Motley

Randi Rhodes: HRClinton, Ferraro ‘Big F***ing Whores’

To reassign the estimable Bill Cosby’s Fat Albert assessment, Air America’s Randi Rhodes is reminiscent of school on Saturday—no class.

Captured is a five-plus minute video (here below the fold) in which Rhodes—utilizing language and manner more sailor than lady-like—excoriates both the junior Senator from New York and former Vice Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro at length as the “W” word (not “Woman”). She also touches on the Governor Eliot Spitzer story, commenting a bit on his “W” and her over-pricedness, and finds a little time to slam “Dina McGreevey”, wife of disgraced former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey.

Rhodes was so gracefully serving as an emissary for the liberal radio network for the alleged benefit of one of its affiliates. So appreciative and proud was Air America that they suspended her - an apparently rare (in fact unprecedented—big time h/t to The Radio Equalizer) disciplinary move by the network.

What is decidedly less exceptional are similar invective-laden screeds from the hack broadcaster whose show and network have fewer listeners than the number of people who read their VCR operator’s manuals.

There was the time she aired a fake commercial which stated that Mitt Romney supporters were going to go on a mass-murdererous rampage were John McCain to win the nomination (no signs yet of Mormons taking to the streets).

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Please remember all of this the next time Rush Limbaugh accurately describes phony soldiers as phony soldiers and the Jurassic Press - and Congress - have one giant collective conniption fit.

I guess all the hatespew from the lefties is just the way they react when someone disagrees with their totalitarian ideology.

Ann Coulter

If characters from “The Hills” were to emote about race, I imagine it would sound like B. Hussein Obama’s autobiography, “Dreams From My Father.”

Has anybody read this book? Inasmuch as the book reveals Obama to be a flabbergasting lunatic, I gather the answer is no. Obama is about to be our next president: You might want to take a peek. If only people had read “Mein Kampf” ...

Nearly every page—save the ones dedicated to cataloguing the mundane details of his life—is bristling with anger at some imputed racist incident. The last time I heard this much race-baiting invective I was ... in my usual front-row pew, as I am every Sunday morning, at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

Obama tells a story about taking two white friends from the high school basketball team to a “black party.” Despite their deep-seated, unconscious hatred of blacks, the friends readily accepted. At the party, they managed not to scream the N-word, but instead “made some small talk, took a couple of the girls out on the dance floor.”

But with his racial hair-trigger, Obama sensed the whites were not comfortable because “they kept smiling a lot.” And then, in an incident reminiscent of the darkest days of the Jim Crow South ... they asked to leave after spending only about an hour at the party! It was practically an etiquette lynching!

So either they hated black people with the hot, hot hate of a thousand suns, or they were athletes who had come to a party late, after a Saturday night basketball game.

In the car on the way home, one of the friends empathizes with Obama, saying: “You know, man, that really taught me something. I mean, I can see how it must be tough for you and Ray sometimes, at school parties ... being the only black guys and all.”

And thus Obama felt the cruel lash of racism! He actually writes that his response to his friend’s perfectly lovely remark was: “A part of me wanted to punch him right there.”

Listen, I don’t want anybody telling Obama about Bill Clinton’s “I feel your pain” line.

Wanting to punch his white friend in the stomach was the introductory anecdote to a full-page psychotic rant about living by “the white man’s rules.” (One rule he missed was: “Never punch out your empathetic white friend after dragging him to a crappy all-black party.”)

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When his mother expresses concern about Obama’s high school friend being busted for drugs, Obama says he patted his mother’s hand and told her not to worry.

This, too, prompted Obama to share with his readers a life lesson on how to handle white people: “It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied, they were relieved—such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.”

First of all, I note that this technique seems to be the basis of Obama’s entire presidential campaign. But moreover—he was talking about his own mother! As Obama says: “Any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning.” Say, do you think a white person who said that about blacks would be a leading presidential candidate?

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Forget Rev. Jeremiah Wright—Wright is Booker T. Washington compared to this guy.

Obama=Mugabe?  Same racist attitude, same economics.