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POPSSaul Akinsky & Obama must be related Alinsky studied criminology as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, during which time he became friendly with Al Capone and his mobsters. Ryan Lizza, senior editor of The New Republic, offers a glimpse into Alinsky’s personality: “Charming and self-absorbed, Alinsky would entertain friends with stories -- some true, many embellished -- from his mob days for decades afterward. He was profane, outspoken, and narcissistic, always the center of attention
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POPSFlu zombies reported in Mexico City The flu zombies first appeared saturday night as the city sewer system failed and manhole covers were seen being shoved aside. The 'walking dead' have been impossible to negotiate with simply because they're dead, but Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has sent a forward team to attempt negotiations as early as Wednesday. Sporadic gunfire could be head as Mexico's Head of National Security urged people in a televised address 'to remain calm and eat an enchillata.' Attempts to bribe the zombies reportedly failed when Treasury Secretary Juan Corona attempted to meet with the zombies and was promptly eaten.
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POPSHillary Clinton: US Wants Israel To Stop Building West Bank Settlements 'Forever' But Clinton has had to do a lot of explaining since last Saturday, when she stood with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem and praised his offer to limit settlement construction without halting it. Clinton has since tried to clarify the remarks, saying that the Israeli offer does not got far enough. Still, she has indicated that the Palestinians should resume negotiations with Israel without a full settlement halt as they demand.
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POPSObama caves to the Zionist Lobby He was doing so well, but then he backed down on his insistence that Netanyahu freeze all settlement building in occupied Palestine. It seems Obama spoke a good game, but he's had his spine removed. Read the whole story at source.
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POPSLiz Cheney emerges, the left's feeding frenzy (and "tolerance"), verging on abject panic So Liz Cheney, just like Palin, unnerves and upsets the Left, not simply because she might run for something and win, and not only because she is one of the most effective conservative spokeswomen on national security. She threatens their claim to the moral high ground and their assertion that women voters belong to the Left. That’s reason enough to send them into fits of rage. And you can bet they’re only getting warmed up. So predictable. Saw this coming a mile away. It's almost boring watching the left piss their pants again over a woman who happens to be a conservative. Maybe we can expect David Letterman to crack a rape joke about Liz and her family, on behalf of the "tolerant" left. Sad. Chinese Proverb: “A wise man makes his own decisions, an ignorant man follows public opinion"
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POPSTroubling Signals on Free Speech The ambiguously worded United Nations Human Rights Council resolution could plausibly be read as encouraging or even obliging the U.S. to make it a crime to engage in hate speech, or, perhaps, in mere "negative racial and religious stereotyping." This despite decades of First Amendment case law protecting such speech. To be sure, the provisions to which I refer were a compromise, stopping short of the flat ban on defamation of religion sought by Islamic nations, and they could also be construed more narrowly and innocuously. It all depends on who does the construing. Is it "negative stereotyping" to say that the world's most dangerous terrorists are Islamists, for example? Many would say yes. more at source
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POPSHonduras This looks like a win for Obama. He did pick the wrong side.
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POPSTime To Man Up, Barry
The sentence for Kian Tajbakhsh was the longest prison term yet in a mass trial of more than 100 opposition figures, activists and journalists in the post election turmoil. The longest sentence so far, yet news accounts offer no explanation as to what Mr. Tajbakhsh did to deserve arrest, let alone a 12 year sentence. Apparently he was arrested at his home, not at a demonstration. News of his sentence was coupled with reports of lenient treatment given to a Canadian citizen: At the same time, Iran allowed another defendant to leave the country--Canadian-Iranian Maziar Bahari, a Newsweek journalist arrested in the same crackdown who had been freed on bail over the weekend. Bahari joined his British wife, who is in the last days of her pregnancy, in London, Newsweek said on its Web site Tuesday. It could be a coincidence. But news accounts certainly raise a question whether the mullahs are publicly sticking their finger in the Obama administration's eye, letting a Canadian go . .
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POPS'Obama Sued in Philadelphia Federal Court' "If", and that's a BIG IF, this isn't all some kind of hoax or a simple case of the Obama campaign not having provided the correct information or certificate, or there's some other legitimate explanation, all hell is about to break out in the Obama campaign and Hillary Clinton will have pulled off a hell of a coup! Update; Factcheck.org (owned by The Annenberg Foundation) has a new birth certificate story. As Texasdarlin suggests in her post, this is interesting timing since Obama has just returned from Hawaii. Indeed, what a coincidence that it's today! Update on Federal Lawsuit (Things may be getting more interesting) (As TD suggests, are there links worth investigating between the Barack Obama campaign, William Ayres, the Annenbergs, and ACORN.) Federal Lawsuit http://texasdarlin.wordpress.com/2008/08/21/update-on-federal-lawsuit/
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POPS The Truth May Be … Out There Anyway, I don’t know if there was a publicity-grabbing hoax plotted, or if an opportunity was seized on the fly, or if it all innocently happened the way Balloon Dad says it did. But whatever happened yesterday, I have a sneaking suspicion the flying Jiffy Pop balloon was not originally conceived, built and being tested as an innovative commuting vehicle. It’s not for nothing Shepard Smith and everyone else was comparing that thing to a UFO yesterday. Maybe, like the Richard Dreyfuss character in ”Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” Richard Heene was just strangely compelled to make his experimental 3DLAV commuting device look like a traditional Roswell-inspired flying saucer hoax.
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POPSPoll: Obama Personal Popularity at New Low Gallup points out that in this latest survey, Hillary Clinton is now more popular than Obama. Sixty-two percent say they have a favorable impression of the Secretary of State, versus 34 percent who have an unfavorable impression. That's a big change from the height of the battle for the Democratic nomination last year; in February 2008, just 48 percent had a favorable impression of Mrs. Clinton, versus 49 percent who had an unfavorable impression. By: Byron York Chief Political Correspondent 10/15/09
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POPS Debacle in Moscow by Charles Krauthammer And what's come from Obama's single most dramatic foreign policy stroke -- the sudden abrogation of missile defense arrangements with Poland and the Czech Republic that Russia had virulently opposed? For the East Europeans it was a crushing blow, a gratuitous restoration of Russian influence over a region that thought it had regained independence under American protection. But maybe not gratuitous. Some brilliant secret trade-off to get strong Russian support for stopping Iran from going nuclear before it's too late? Just wait and see, said administration officials, who then gleefully played up an oblique statement by President Dmitry Medvedev a week later as vindication of the missile defense betrayal. The Russian statement was so equivocal that such a claim seemed a ridiculous stretch at the time. Well, Clinton went to Moscow this week to nail down the deal. What did she get? "Russia Not Budging On Iran Sanctions: Clinton Unable to Sway Counterpart."
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POPSAn Obama speechwriter moves to Massachusetts...she can't afford health insurance An Obama speechwriter moves to Massachusetts, a state with "universal health care," and finds out she can't afford insurance. Turns out that individual mandates and the requirement that insurance cover everything for everybody make insurance super-expensive (exactly what some are warning will happen with ObamaCare.) It's like the saying goes, "If you think health care is expensive now, wait until it's free."
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POPSRussia Refuses Call For Tougher Sanctions On Iran, They Would Be “Counterproductive” President Barack Obama " who visited Russia in July " has vowed to “reset” U.S.-Russia relations. Beyond Iran, Lavrov said U.S. and Russia negotiators have made “considerable” progress toward reaching agreement on a new strategic arms treaty. The 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, expires in December and negotiators have been racing to reach agreement on a successor. The two diplomats also discussed possible cooperation on missile defense following Obama’s decision not to proceed with Bush-administration plans to base such a system in eastern Europe. Russia has welcomed Obama’s new approach, but has said it was eager for more detailed information. Clinton said the U.S. would be as transparent as possible. “We want to ensure that every question that the Russian military or Russian government asks is answered,” she said, calling missile defense “another area for deep cooperation between our countries.”
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POPSTentative Inspection Program Would Allow Russia to Visit U.S. Nuclear Sites "We want to ensure that every question that the Russian military or Russian government asks is answered," she said, calling missile defense "another area for deep cooperation between ourcountries." On another critical issue, Lavrov declared that it would be counterproductive to threaten Iran with more sanctions over its nuclear program -- as he resisted efforts by Clinton to win agreement for tougher measures should Iran fail to prove its program is peaceful. Clinton visited Moscow on her first trip since becoming America's top diplomat, in an effort to gauge Moscow's willingness to join the U.S. in imposing sanctions. Clinton said the U.S. agreed it was important to pursue diplomacy with Iran. "At the same time that we are very vigorously pursuing this track, we are aware that we might not be as successful as we need to be, so we have always looked at the potential of sanctions in the event we are not successful and cannot assure ourselves . . .
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POPSShip of Fools: Obama's Intimates and Advisors 5. Samantha Power -- Senior Director, Multilateral Affairs, National Security Council. Ms. Power, a professor of public policy at Harvard was only seemingly thrown under the Obama campaign bus for referring to Hillary Clinton as "a monster" during the 2008 Democrat primary. In 2009 President Obama, tapped her to occupy her senior White House foreign policy position. Ms. Power, a "fierce critic of Israel,... was indisputably Barack Obama's closest foreign policy adviser during the campaign 6. Charles Freeman -- Nominated, but not confirmed, as Chairman of the (United States) National Intelligence Council - which is responsible for producing national intelligence estimates for the president and his advisors. Mr. Freeman has a distinguished résumé of long service in both the State and Defense Departments... however
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POPS Chicago’s “Good Times” Canceled: DynOmite! All I have to say is, where the hell were our international protocol and intelligence teams? Why didn’t someone over at the State Department tell us about this Danish policy before we put everything on the line to bring the Olympic games to the capital of Pay-To-Play cities? We just assumed that we would be treated to the same fawning adulation and deference we get in the USA: the country that invented free speech. We arrived with soaring expectations, only to have the whole thing blow up in our face. Thanks, State, once again. I’m beginning to think that Hillary didn’t really want that job. Insults are under threat in many countries. The World Press Freedom Committee earlier this year published a survey, "The Right to Offend, Shock or Disturb," which details how laws against insults are being used to squelch free speech, including opposition to the government. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748704471504574451712299324476.html
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POPS Universal Health Care Mecca In the past, I paid attention to the health care debate as a speechwriter who prepared speeches, talking points, op-eds, and debate prep material on the topic at different times for John Edwards, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and others. Now, I'm paying attention because I'm a citizen up the creek without a paddle. Since I care more about my country than my personal pride, here's how I lost my insurance: I moved. That's right, I moved from Washington, D.C., back to Massachusetts, a state with universal health care. In D.C., I had a policy with a national company, an HMO, and surprisingly I was very happy with it. I had a fantastic primary care doctor at Georgetown University Hospital. As a self-employed writer, my premium was $225 a month, plus $10 for a dental discount. In Massachusetts, the cost for a similar plan is around $550, give or take a few dollars. My risk factors haven't changed. I didn't stop writing and become a stunt double. I don't smoke.
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POPSPaul Krugman: The politics of spite More: How did one of our great political parties become so ruthless, so willing to embrace scorched-earth tactics even if so doing undermines the ability of any future administration to govern? The key point is that ever since the Reagan years, the Republican Party has been dominated by radicals — ideologues and/or apparatchiks who, at a fundamental level, do not accept anyone else’s right to govern. Anyone surprised by the venomous, over-the-top opposition to Mr. Obama must have forgotten the Clinton years. Remember when Rush Limbaugh suggested that Hillary Clinton was a party to murder? When Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government in an attempt to bully Bill Clinton into accepting those Medicare cuts? And let’s not even talk about the impeachment saga.… It’s an ugly picture. But it’s the truth. And it’s a truth anyone trying to find solutions to America’s real problems has to understand.
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POPSObama Meeting with The Daliai Lama Is Delayed more @ clip source For the first time since 1991, the Tibetan spiritual leader will visit Washington this week and not meet with the president. Since 1991, he has been here 10 times. Most times the meetings have been "drop-in" visits at the White House. The last time he was here, in 2007, however, George W. Bush became the first sitting president to meet with him publicly, at a ceremony at the Capitol in which he awarded the Dalai Lama the Congressional Gold Medal, Congress's highest civilian award.
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