Danielle Quayle . I listened to a lot of commentary by pundits and others on the newstalk shows last nite, and received a hostile email to my own commentary yesterday:

what exactly is your problem with women? You seem to have a border line hatred of any women that hold high office, I never met a gay man that who was misogynist but you sure seem like your one.

I did not point out the various grammatical errors in that message but sent this reply:

YOU may be confused about gender. I am not. Nature didn't make men larger, stronger, smarter, faster, and more powerful (better able to deliver strength with speed) to be inferior to women in the social order. Matriarchy is extremely unhealthy: witness the condition of blacks in the United States. Female domination [in the human species] is unnatural and is found NOWHERE on Earth, not presently, not in history. A female commander-in-chief is not what any country wants, and the idea of a woman issuing compulsory orders that send men to their death is repugnant to sane people.
+
I don't know if you are a heterosexual sado-masochist who likes being dominated by women, or just a maladjusted homosexual, be it mama's boy or 'transsexual', or female heterosexual or lesbian. I don't care. But there are appropriate things for women, and inappropriate things. Radical Feminism devalues traditional women's roles, and says that women aren't good enuf as real women, but must be imitation men to have any value. People who like real women appreciate their traditional roles, and know that nurturing, educating, nursing, and other traditional women's pursuits are good enuf. Women don't have to be combat troops or commanders, and shouldn't be. People should listen to and follow their nature, not deny themselves to be something they were never intended to be. You are entitled to believe what you will, however, so if you disagree with me, don't read my blog. Don't trouble or irritate yourself. And do not trouble me again.

Gay men, unlike straight 'men', don't have to worry about women's sensibilities. We are not emotionally nor sexually dependent upon women, and most of us aren't financially dependent upon them either. So we can speak our mind on all things feminist. The bulk of straight 'men' in this country are not men at all, but mama's boys, often raised in the effective absence of fathers away at work, and dominated into adulthood, even till death, by mama-replacements. To the bulk of this planet, "American man" is a contradiction in terms. Most American 'men' are psychologically castrated losers who don't dare upset their wives or girlfriends, lest they "cut them off" sexually, at least figuratively and, in an age when Lorena Bobbitt was not only not convicted of a horrible crime against her husband but actually made into a "hero" (not, of course, "heroine") of the feminist movement, possibly literally. As far as I'm concerned, a lot of straight 'men' are what they eat, so it is only proper for them to give 'lip service' to Radical Feminism.
+
If any straight man reading this doesn't like that, I suggest that straights man-up rather than get angry with me. I'm not the one who makes you live in a house with a pink bathroom and sleep on a bed with a dust ruffle and, during the daytime, 7 pillows.
+
Matriarchy has been a catastrophe, or calamity ("calamity" seeming to me more disastrous), to the black community. Between 6 and 8 times as many blacks as whites are in PRISON; black men have a higher unemployment rate than black women, 9.5% vs. 8.5%; and an appallingly high proportion of black males die early ("young black males between the ages of 15 and 34 years are nine times more likely to die of homicide than their white counterparts and nearly seven times as likely to suffer from AIDS" (which is to say, drugs)), many of violence in their teen years, many others as victims of crime or drugs in their early 20s, many others to disabling maladies produced by years of bad choices in youth.
+
Radical Feminism as the New Conservatism! The rabid partisanship of the Radical Right has produced a chorus of praise for John McCain's choice of a woman to be "a heartbeat away from the Presidency". If McCain dies in office, his veep will become President of the United States and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. When Hillary Clinton ran for that office, Radical Rightwingers were horrified at that prospect. But all of a sudden, anti-Radical Feminists are now rabid Radical Feminists! What is wrong with these people?
+
Conservatives are supposed to value and preserve our traditions. Are female Presidents our tradition? They are not. We have had 43 Presidents, exactly 43 of which have been men. So how is it "conservative" to want to end that tradition and make a woman President? That is not a conservative value. That is so Far Left as to be, let's say it, Communist. Indeed, it's LEFT of Communist, because no major Communist country has ever had a woman dictator. Lenin wasn't a woman. Nor was Stalin, nor Brezhnev, nor any of the other heads of the Soviet state. Nor was Mao Zedong nor any of his successors a woman. So these Radical Rightwingers who are eager to make Sarah Palin Vice President of the United States so she can ascend to President of the United States if John McCain has a heart attack or recurrence of his past cancers, or is assassinated by some Rad Fem loon, or dies in a car crash or plane crash, are to the LEFT of Lenin and Mao Zedong! Astounding.
+
Nor is it conservative to give women a job so demanding that it will take a mother away from her children, and subject those children to motherless neglect. How on Earth can Focus on the Family endorse giving a woman who has five children, including one with "special needs" (Down's syndrome), a position that will require her to spend 12-hour or even 16-hour days on the campaign trail, and push all her maternal responsibilities off onto other people? How is that "conservative"? "Family-friendly"?
+
Rabid partisanship has driven some Republican "conservatives" out of their minds, into self-confuting stances absolutely inconsistent with everything they have ever stood for — until yesterday! Rightwingers really are stupid slime.
+
Paul Begala, a pundit of the Democratic Left, observed last nite that John McCain has had four occurrences of (skin) cancer. AOL recently hilited a story warning that skin cancer may precede other, fatal forms of cancer.
+
Begala also pointed out that eight Vice Presidents have become President due to the death of the President. Four Presidents died of assassination; four of natural causes. One President, Nixon, resigned and his Vice President, Ford, ascended to the Presidency. So of the Nation's 43 Presidents, 9 became President before their term as Vice President ended: 21%.
+
John McCain was 72 years old yesterday. At the end of his first term, if he is elected and survives thru 2012, he will be 76 years old. Of the four Presidents who died in office, Tyler died before age 72, Taylor before 66, Harding before 58, and FDR at little more than 63 years old.
+
I don't care that the present life expectancy of a healthy man of 72 is 83. John McCain is not exactly healthy. He has had four occurrences of cancer; skin cancer often precedes other cancers; and not all cancers are curable. I don't like the odds.
+
Begala was right in wondering aloud how McCain, a man who has spent his entire adult life in service to his country, could have been so foolish as to put the future of the Nation in the untested hands of a person (of either gender) who is utterly unqualified to become President if something happens to him. And it doesn't even have to be death. A President could become so seriously and permanently disabled that the 25th Amendment would come into play to create the Veep into Prez.
+
So the question again arises, as I asked yesterday, did McCain make this choice, or was it made for him by the Invisible Hand that has given us all recent Republican Presidents? Before yesterday, the most egregious and ridiculous choice for veep in recent memory was Dan Quayle, supposedly selected by George Bush the Elder but perhaps actually chosen by the Invisible Hand, which wanted to balance an old man with a young one, a Southerner of New England ancestry with a Midwesterner, a beautiful young man who was assumed to appeal to the superficial women's vote to balance a craggy, wrinkled old face that would not. And Quayle's family owned a bunch of influential newspapers. Say what you may about Dan Quayle, but he at least had Federal Government experience, which Palin has not had.
+
(Sidebar: Quayle is best remembered for two things: criticizing the single-mother storyline on the sitcom Murphy Brown and 'correcting' a kid, during a schoolroom visit, for spelling "potato" without a final-E. Because Dan Quayle was generally regarded as almost a mental defective, his defensible criticism of 'Murphy Brown' for getting knocked up and having a child out of wedlock, spurning an offer to marry, was dismissed as lacking intellectual substance, even ridiculous. Not because it was invalid but because the person who uttered the criticism was a dope. As for the "potatoe" mistake, how silly was that, really? How do you pronounce the word "to", which may seem to a young reader to end "potato"? With a long-O? No. With a long-U. The way we spell a long-O sound after T is indeed OE: "stub your toe". Quayle's error was silly, but, again, defensible. It is because spelling is so very hard in English — a huge number of errors in comment areas all over the Internet should demonstrate that beyond doubt — that I am a spelling reformer. Spelling doesn't have to be hard. It really can be easy, for every single word in the English language.)
+
Republicans desperate to rationalize McCain's / the Invisible Hand's ridiculous choice of Sarah Palin have asserted, ludicrously, that she has "executive experience" that would easily transfer from her current and past political offices to the Presidency. Of course she has. She was the mayor(ess) of Wasilla, Alaska, population of between 6,700 and 8,500. Wow-wee! It sure must be hard to make executive decisions for such a bustling metropolis. And just think of all the areas of policy that such an exalted office in such a metropolis would have to deal with!
+
Moreover, we are reminded, she is the Governor (Governess) of an entire State! Never mind that Alaska, tho physically huge (about twice the size of Texas), has a population of only 684,000, which works out to 1.2 people per square mile. Wow. How impressive!
+
To show how qualified she is to lead the Nation in reducing taxes, the Radical Rightwingers pretend she balanced the Alaska state budget against all odds. These people rely upon people in the Lower 48 knowing NOTHING about Alaska. This is the truth you are not to know:

Alaska has the lowest individual tax burden in the United States, and is one of only five states with no state sales tax and one of seven states that do not levy an individual income tax. To finance state government operations, Alaska depends primarily on petroleum revenues.

How large is the State's income from Alaska's oil industry? So large that:

From its initial principal of $734,000, the [Permanent F]und has grown to $38 billion as a result of oil royalties and capital investment programs. Starting in 1982, dividends from the fund's annual growth have been paid out each year to eligible Alaskans, ranging from $331.29 in 1984 to $1963.86 in 2000.

In short, not only do Alaskans basically pay NO State taxes, but they also get free money from the State Government, which comes from the oil industry. How is that comparable to the financial situation of the United States generally? It's not. Not in the slitest. How 'tuf on the oil industry' has she been? Not at all. She didn't establish the Permanent Fund; she didn't have to fite to expand it. Alaska's oil industry is a captive industry that is making money hand over fist and didn't mind a modest increase in oil taxes. The Republican storyline about Governess Palin's tufness in dealing with financial crises and cutting taxes — what taxes? — is all bullsh(asterisk).
+
Dan Quayle too had some executive experience, in the Indiana State government and in his family's publishing business. But he didn't make a great vice-presidential choice, did he? Indiana is a real state, with a substantial population (6.4 million), urban and other real American problems, and no windfall revenue source like Alaska's unearned petrodollars.
+
Alaska has fewer people than the COUNTY I live in, Essex County, NJ. Indeed, the total state population is less than that of 16 individual cities in this country. New York City alone has 12 times as many people as all of Alaska.
+
And Ms. Palin has been Governess for 22 months, not even two years. I'm not impressed. Nor should anyone be impressed by so thin a resume. And some of what she has done is outrite outrageous, such as awarding the contract to build a new natural gas pipeline to a CANADIAN company! Think about that: she awarded a government contract to a foreign company. Americans can't even get GOVERNMENT contracts anymore under the globalist Republicans.
+
Palin is also involved in a controversy (or scandal) involving a decision to fire the State's public-safety director because he wouldn't fire her former brother-in-law who was then involved in a divorce and child-custody dispute with her sister (whose married name, curiously, was Molly McCANN). Did she abuse her authority, or is it just a coinkydink? Oh, please, she's not a vindictive bitch misusing governmental power to attack her ex-brother-in-law. She can be trusted with the most powerful job in the world, if it comes to that. Sure she can.
+
Ms. Palin apparently has no political writings nor intellectual accomplishments of any sort, even tho she has a Bachelor of Science degree — science, not arts — in communications-journalism. She put that communications training to work in sports broadcasting. The broad is deep!
+
This nomination has all the trappings of an Invisible Hand appointment to which McCain merely assented, on the supposition that these people know what they're doing. They have, after all, won the White House 6 of the last 8 times. "If they think Sarah Palin will fly, I'll have to go along." I'd hate to think that McCain's own judgment is that bad.
+
The Republican Party has a chance to save itself from this embarrassment and reject Sarah Palin in convention, but the 'buzz' among "conservative" (albeit newly Radical Feminist) Republican commentators suggests that the party will rush full steam ahead to put that empty-headed nobody "a heartbeat away from the Presidency". I'll have none of it.
+
The Republic may yet save itself from the dreadful choices both major parties have made, by electing Ralph Nader President. Few people see that as possible, because the major parties have done a very good job of making everyone think it absolutely impossible for a third-party candidate to win the White House. But Nader will be on the ballot in 45 states, and all but one of the remaining states permits write-ins. Oklahoma feels no obligation to count write-in votes. Imagine that: Oklahoma refuses to count some votes. Amazing.
+
If enuf people are disgusted with the choice they have been handed by the major parties, "take it or leave it" style, they can indeed "leave it", and vote for Nader. In 2004, 122 million people voted for the major parties. That represented only 60.7 percent of eligible voters:

although turnout reached new heights, more than 78 million Americans who were eligible to vote stayed home on Election Day.

How does that compare with the votes for the major parties? Bush got 62,028,719 votes; Kerry, 59,028,550. If Nader were to get 1/4 of the combined major-party vote (30.5 million) and 1/4 of the people who didn't vote last time but were eligible to do so (19.5 million), he'd have 49.5 million votes. He would also take away about 9.5 million votes from each party, which would bring the Republican tally down to 52.5 million, and the Democratic tally down to 49.5 million — the same as Nader! Given that the Nation's population may be up by 12 million since 2004, if Nader were to get a good portion of that group too, he'd be very close to triumph. And if we were talking about taking away 1/3 rather than 1/4, we'd be talking about 40.7 million votes from the two major parties plus 1/3 of people who didn't vote last time (26 million) and 1/3 of new voters (3 million). That would add up to 69.7 million votes, substantially more than either major party drew in 2004, and hugely more than either major party would get once votes for Nader were deducted from their tallies (about 20 million less for each of the Democrats and Republicans). So Nader would have almost 70 million votes, compared to about 42 million for the Republicans and 39 million for Dems if the same ratio applied this time as last time. If the Republican-Democratic split were pretty much even, Nader would have 70 million to at most 43 million each for the Dems and Republicans, assuming a modest increase in overall vote totals because of increased population but not a significant increase in new voters from disaffected groups that refused to vote last time.
+
Plainly, the idea that a third-party candidate cannot win the White House is true only if people believe it and waste their votes on voting for the lesser of major-party evils — or stay home out of hopelessness. But if people refuse to believe that a third party cannot win, and large numbers of people who usually stay home instead come out and vote for that third party, the third party candidate can not just win but win in a landslide.
+
I'm not wasting my vote by voting for the lesser of major-party evils. I'm voting for Nader.
+
P.S. TV viewers may see a lot of the Minnesota State Capitol Building in the next few days. It is a magnificent structure, designed by St. Paul's, and Minnesota's, most distinguished architect, Cass Gilbert. Other great buildings by Cass Gilbert include the Woolworth Building in Downtown Manhattan, the United States Supreme Court Building in Washington, and the Old Essex County Courthouse — and two other structures — in my city, Newark, NJ.
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,150 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:51 PM

 
Snatching Defeat from the Mouth of Victory? John McCain has astounded the world with an incomprehensible choice of veep, the dyky woman governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. Until this choice, McCain was the foregone conclusion for President in November. Now, millions of conservatives will stay home, having absolutely no one to vote for in a society that has become thoroughly radicalized, despite the rise of voluble Radical Right media.
+
I warned that this was possible. I have said here repeatedly that the only way McCain could lose is if he made an insane choice for veep, and that John McCain is completely out of his mind so, left to his own devices, he might very well make an insane choice. But I thought (hoped) that the collective leadership (Invisible Hand) of the Republican Party would not let him make an insane choice.
+
That makes McCain's choice even more astonishing, because it had seemed in recent weeks that the Invisible Hand that has given us a series of innocuous, Teflon Presidents since the days of the puppet Reagan, had taken over the McCain campaign. You'd think they'd have better sense than to make a Radical Feminist choice. So did they make that choice, or did McCain, famed maverick, make that insane choice and the Invisible Hand couldn't control him?
+
Perhaps the collective leadership decided that McCain is unlikely to die in office, so they don't have to worry about a woman President, which their base decidedly does not want, and can thus do 'lip service' (you should pardon the expression) to Radical Feminism and choose an unknown woman from a remote, unpopulous state and not incite open revolt in Republican ranks, and by so doing, capture the disaffected Radical Feminists offended by the exclusion of Hillary Clinton from the Democratic ticket.
+
This was an act of desperation by people who should have understood that they were in no danger of losing to a black man in 2008, as the polls plainly showed (given that any small advantage to Obama was more than offset by liars who would not admit to voting against him because of his race). Now no one can know the outcome of a race that has suddenly become actually competitive. All bets are off.
+
This is a historic day in the history of this Republic — in the way that the election of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany was a historic day in the history of that republic: the day when radicals took over the heights of electoral politics, despite a predominantly moderate public. Americans are now presented with two alternative radical futures for society: black-dominated or female-dominated.
+
Conservative white people will have to decide which they hate more, just stay home — or get out their guns and shoot the people who have brought us to such a pass.
+
Republican thinking was apparently that racist white people have been eager to declare women a "minority" in order to evade "affirmative action" that was intended to benefit blacks, Hispanics, Indians, and other genuinely disadvantaged minorities. This reclassification and reconceptualization of "minority" empowered white people to give jobs to white women and pretend that they were somehow in conformity with both the letter and the spirit of equal-opportunity legislation. They could hire their wives and dauters, yet pretend that they were hiring "minorities". The Invisible Hand apparently concluded that every white man has female relatives but few have black relatives, so they will accept being forced to choose Radical Feminism over black domination, in the hope that McCain doesn't die during his Presidency.
+
What happens if McCain is elected by those crypto-racists who pretend to be open-minded in hiring their dauters, if some Radical Feminist shoots John McCain in order single-handedly to create the first female President of the United States? Do the white men who are perfectly happy to pretend to be open-minded in putting a woman into the Vice Presidency quietly sit by and take the rise, from assassination, of a woman to the Presidency without doing a thing about it? Or do they get out their guns and kill her in response? If Nancy Pelosi is still Speaker of the House, they will have to kill her too, because unless the assassins wait for the Vice Presidency to be filled by operation of the 25th Amendment, the Speaker of the House becomes President on the death of the President.
+
Americans must decide whether to be radicalized by the stupefying choices of the major parties and their new politics that turns society on its head, or to be radicalized into abandoning electoral democracy and voting by bullet. Or we can vote for Ralph Nader, even tho on one crucial social-policy issue, abortion, the current Nader campaign is silent. (In 2004, he said: "This is something that should be privately decided with the family, woman, all the other private factors of it, but we should work toward preventing the necessity of abortion.")
+
One thing is plain: the United States of August 29, 2008 is not the United States of August 28, 2008 or any other date in history. And a traditionalist, moderate populace that has been unhappy with what has been happening in the past eight years and more, which despises Congress (the House of Representatives of which is dominated by a woman) even more than the radical-conservative-dominated White House, is left with the worst choice they have ever been presented with: black domination or female domination.
+
For my part, I am reduced to voting for Nader/Gonzalez in the Presidential contest. I might have voted for Obama before he started selling out basic principles in his "move to the center", which showed him to have absolutely no principles — Barack the Faithless. But when I discovered that Obama never heard of an abortion he didn't like, it became impossible for me even to think of voting for him. The Democrats really do have to stop being the party of childslauter.
+
I need not vote at all in the House of Representatives race, because in my area it is essentially not contested but an automatic Democratic win. As for the Senate, I definitely won't vote for the Democrat, Frank Lautenberg, an ancient, Zionist Jew. Alas, I can't vote for the Republican either, because he too is Jewish! and Zionist! That is to say that 8 million preonderantly Christian New Jerseyans have as their choice for United States Senate, Zionist Jew A or Zionist Jew B. Our elections are about as real nowadays as those for Saddam Hussein or Fidel Castro used to be. How did the major parties become so completely unrepresentative of the people? Plainly the primary system, which multiplies the power of tiny minorities, has much to do with it. We've got to abolish the primary system.
+
I fear that people at the highest levels of society, whose power is the result of the utterly unrepresentative nature of our present political system, are completely out of touch with the real United States. They appear to have no understanding nor respect for what this country really is. They give us "choices" we don't want, over and over, and now they are giving us a choice between radical ticket A and radical ticket B. What are we to do?
+
I fear that a population that is substantially disenfranchised and presented with utterly unacceptable choices may fall into an unpleasant pattern of the past, in which assassination determines our politics. We have had a number of major assassinations in the past (do I really need to list them?), and would like to believe that it can't happen again. It can. There are 200 million guns in the United States, and many million more deadly weapons here and abroad. How, exactly, do you think the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and other Islamists around the world are going to react to the rise of a woman to the position of commander-in-chief of the "Crusader" armies stationed in Moslem countries?
+
To those who think it impossible that John McCain will be killed by female assassins, I have only two things to say to you: Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore.
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,150 — for Israel.)



- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:38 PM

 
So, That's What Jews Think. What Do Americans Think? I am very tired of all the Jews in the panels of pundits put together by media. There is almost never a newstalk panel that does not include Jews. Let's be clear: Jews comprise only 2% of the U.S. population. They should thus be no more numerous than 1 in 50 commentators on the air. In reality, they are at least 1 in 4, and sometimes 2 out of 3 in panels of pundits. Why is that?
+
Larry King, a Jew, convenes a panel of 3 to discuss Topic X. One of those 3 is also a Jew, which is already too many. Added to Larry King, the panel is 50% Jewish: in such an instance, Jews are 25 TIMES too numerous.
+
I tune in to a discussion of the Democratic Convention on CNN. There is a panel of 3 pundits, including Mort Zuckerman and David Gergen. If, as I believe I read some years ago, David Gergen is Jewish, 2/3 of this panel is Jewish, 33 TIMES the appropriate level for Jews in evaluating public opinion. Again and again we are lectured by the Jews. How big is the problem? Here's a list from a Liberal Jew who resents the way Jewish opinion is misrepresented in media, as in being superhawkish on all things Mideast:

Irving Kristol, William Kristol, Seth Lipsky, Martin Peretz, Norman Podhoretz, John Podhoretz, Richard Perle, Richard Cohen, Mortimer Zuckerman, Alan Dershowitz, Jeffrey Goldberg, Lawrence Kaplan, Charles Krauthammer, David Horowitz, Jonah Goldberg, David Gelernter, Ruth Wisse, David Brooks and David Frum.

The last-named, David Frum — whom NNDB.com credits as the speechwriter who coined Dumbya's term "Axis of Evil" — is also Canadian (as was Charles Krauthammer until he was naturalized), so should not be regarded as a spokesman for AMERICAN Jews. This also poses the question of why a U.S. President is hiring CANADIANS to write speeches. If even the U.S. Government is hiring foreigners, what jobs can Americans expect to get?
+
The compiler of that list, Eric Alterman, in The Nation December 20, 2007, expresses concern that the Jewish "usual suspects" put on-air or interviewed for print stories by media, do damage to American Jews in misrepresenting the larger Jewish community's generally much more liberal and much less hawkish views.

Given the scare tactics the neocons routinely employ — from their frequent deployment of the intellectually vacuous term "Islamofascism," to Perle and Frum's warning that the nation's only choice is "victory or holocaust"--it is a remarkable tribute to the good sense of American Jewry that it remains a bastion of liberal humanism despite such naked attempts to manipulate longstanding fears and insecurities.

But what of the damage such Jewish pundits do the Nation more generally? Add to Alterman's list of Jewish pundits endlessly on the air some other pundits/political comedians:

Jonathan Alter
Lewis Black
Howard Fineman
Thomas Friedman
Mark Green
Paul Krugman
Dick Morris
Dennis Prager
Geraldo Rivera
Steven Roberts
William Safire
Gloria Steinem
Jon Stewart

In a class by himself is Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report website.
+
It's not always possible to find the religion of public people (or their ancestral religion, in which not presently religious people were raised) . That information is sometimes suppressed by the persons themselves or by media that don't want to point it out. Often, tho, people whose religion is not given in places like NNDB.com are Jewish or were born Jewish but may not presently be religious, so do not call themselves Jewish, even tho their upbringing affects (dominates) their worldview.
+
I believe, for instance, that I saw somewhere years ago that David Gergen was Jewish, but now I see no religion assigned to his entry in NNDB. Same with Neal Gabler, an author about Jews in media whose specialized interest in that subject (e.g., his book An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood) suggests most powerfully that he was raised Jewish.
+
The open and secret Jews who pop up in panels on all topics, from politics to celebrities, seriously affect public opinion. A large number of prominent film critics are Jewish (e.g., Leonard Maltin, Michael Medved, the late Joel Siegel, Jeffrey Lyons), so we are supposed to take our ideas about filmmaking from Jews.
+
Why, exactly, so much of U.S. opinion should be affected by Jews is not openly discussed in most places. The website VDARE, however, did address it April8, 2007. [ ]

In their 1995 book Jews and the New American Scene, the late Seymour Martin Lipset of the Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Studies and Earl Raab of the Perlmutter Institute for Jewish Advocacy pointed out that, while Jews had comprised only about three or four percent of American adults,

"…during the last three decades, Jews have made up 50% of the top two hundred intellectuals, … 20 percent of professors at the leading universities, … 26% of the reporters, editors, and executives of the major print and broadcast media, 59 percent of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982, and 58 percent of directors, writers, and producers in two or more primetime television series." [pp 26-27]

The reference to 3- or 4% is presumably inaccurate, since Jews overall comprise less than 2% of the U.S. population. How the CIA World Factbook defines "Jewish" for this purpose, I do not know.
+
The suggestion in the VDARE item that Jews are smarter than other people is dubious at best, even given the supposition that inbreeding intensified certain good qualities as well as multiplied genetic defects. IQ tests are notoriously dependent upon language, which in turn is dependent upon learning, not inborn aptitude. So a group that puts great stress upon reading-heavy education can be expected to do well on IQ tests.
+
A better explanation for why there are so many Jews in academia and media is also far simpler: mutual assistance, ethnoreligious "affirmative action", whereby Jews who have "arrived" bring their own kind in, in preference to people outside the group. It is still true, in almost every area of human endeavor, that WHOM you know is more important than WHAT you know, and having "a friend in the business" or a "contact" is crucial to one person's success as against another's. Thus, when it comes time to cast a film, Jewish casting directors and Jewish filmmakers choose Jews in preference to non-Jews. When it comes to deciding which books to publish and which to pass on, Jewish editors and publishing executives favor other Jews. Then the Jewish-selected authors/actors/etc. go on Jewish-controlled media to promote those books/films/what-have-you, so again Jews favor Jews.
+
Over time, the circle of Jews in positions of power grows, and the number of Jews favored grows, at the same time as non-Jews are passed over (you should pardon the expression) and the number of their non-Jewish contacts in this industry or that shrinks. It's a self-extending phenomenon. How else do you explain the success of minimally talented people like Adam Sandler and Jack Black? They are hired even for animated films, where their voice often isn't even recognized. Meanwhile, unknown Christian, Moslem, Hindu, etc., actors are shut out. The same few Jews are given multiple jobs; the vast unemployed horde of Gentile actors who don't know anybody in the business can't get a foot in the door.
+
Thus it is that the United States hears endlessly what Jews want us to hear; reads what Jews want us to read; sees on TV and in films what Jews want us to see. We derive our ideas about politics from a hugely disproportionately Jewish punditocracy, and hear reviews of films, books, and TV shows from Jewish critics. What do the rest of us, that insignificant 98% of the Nation that is not Jewish, think, feel, or want? Who cares? Not media, that's for sure.
+
More AIDS Bullsh(asterisk). AOL hilited today a story from Britain about poor inbred Scottish hemophiliacs supposedly dropping like flies from AIDS because they got contaminated Factor VIII. Unfortunately for this storyline, the story speaks of one such hemophiliac who was 'infected with AIDS' as early as 1980 but was perfectly healthy until nearly 2000, without even knowing he had 'AIDS' — but really only "HIV" — and didn't take any anti-HIV drugs in all that time. He is still alive now, some 28 years(!) after being given this "death sentence" (and yes, the news story does use that exact language). We are to believe that the hemophiliacs in Britain would have lived a long, healthy life if they had not been 'infected with AIDS', because hemophilia is trivia. No, hemophilia is FATAL. People with severe hemophilia have ALWAYS died young, but you are not to think about that. Nor are you to think about the fact that less than 1/3 of the 'infected' British hemophiliacs have died — in nearly three decades.
+
Further, all the time this man was supposedly "infected with AIDS", he continued to have normal sexual relations with his wife, and — guess what! — she did NOT become "infected with AIDS", even tho HIV is supposed to be readily transmitted thru sexual fluids. Why is that? You are not to ask. How many wives of the 'infected' hemophiliacs died from "AIDS"? before they took supposed anti-HIV/anti-AIDS drugs? after they started taking such drugs? You are not to ask, and you won't be told. The word "wives" does not appear in the news story. The only wife we are told about is this one man's wife, and she is HIV-negative. Nonetheless, the article ends with this astounding bit of idiocy:

he spoke quietly when he spoke at all, but he did raise his voice at one point to tell the committee that doctors had endangered the safety of his wife and son by holding back his HIV status.

And exactly how was his son's health to be endangered by his father's having HIV? HIV is not passed by casual contact. Hell, in this guy's case he apparently couldn't even have passed it if he'd been having SEX with his son regularly!
+
There is just so much bullsh(asterisk) bandied about to this day about 'HIV' (which is of course a misnomer because it has nothing to do with "Human Immunodeficiency", the first two words of the three words, with "Virus", of its mis(name).
+
And here's another inconspicuous (not to say "hidden") gem in that story: the man also has hepatitis C, so for all we know, all his symptoms of illness are due to hepatitis C (if that's even real), not HIV!
+
Bullsh(asterisk) about Hillary. One of the newstalk channels had a promo about the then-upcoming speech by Hillary Clinton, using fotos of her captioned with various BLOCK-CAP words that are supposed to describe her, like "POWERFUL" and "SAVVY". What a bunch of baloney. Hillary Clinton is not, herself, either powerful or savvy. Her only act of political "savvy" was to marry Bill Clinton. That's it. She lost the Democratic primary contest to a BLACK MAN.
+
Nobody but a few bulldykes actually voted for Hillary. The vaunted "18 million" votes 'she' got were actually for BILL Clinton. And everybody knows it. That 18 mil tried to put Bill into the White House for an unconstitutional third term, but were stopped. They should be ashamed of themselves. And all the nonsense about Hillary Clinton being the real candidate should end. She was NEVER what most CLINTON supporters meant when they voted for "Clinton". They voted for BILL, not Hil.
+
Cutting thru the Crap. By the way, if pollsters really want to know how people feel about Obama, let them ask this question: "Are you comfortable with the idea of a black President ruling over you?" Then we might find out how some reticent people really feel — except of course that the worst cowards would choose not to answer that question. It hits too close to home.
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,147 — for Israel.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Another Obama Betrayal. On August 19th, I guessed here that Obama would choose Governor Timothy Kaine of Virginia as his running mate. I gave Obama too much credit for clear thinking. He chose Joe Biden of Delaware, of whom I said:

Biden is a bore. Competent, amiable, but a bore. He has no charisma at all. ... Biden is also a Washington insider who has been in the Senate for 35 years(!). If Obama wishes to keep railing against the Old Politics, he can't very well choose as the man "a heartbeat away from the Presidency" a Beltway Boy. However, Obama has betrayed so many commitments central to his message since he (apparently) clinched the nomination that he probably feels that one more won't break him. * * *

So, tho Biden would be a bad choice, he's not impossible for the Obama of today."

Obama made a bad choice, an indicator, again, of his habitual bad judgment. He had the option to go with someone outside the Beltway (if only by a hundred miles in the case of Governor Kaine) but chose someone firmly entrenched in Washington — for 35 years. Yes, Obama sure is hostile to the Old Politics. Now, how exactly is he going to complain about John McCain's 26 years in Washington when he chose as his running mate a man who has 35 years in Washington?
+
Obama is not to be trusted. I shall have to see if Ralph Nader will be on the November ballot here in New Jersey. If so, and the election looks remotely close here, I will have a decision to make: Nader or McCain. If Nader is not on the ballot, I will vote for McCain. I am a registered Democrat (because my party, the Expansionist Party of the United States, is at present only a party of ideas, not a functioning electoral party) and I really hate to vote Republican for anything, but when Democrats give us unacceptable choices, the only way Democrats can tell the powers that be that we're unhappy is to vote for someone else. I will not vote for the Democrat, Frank Lautenberg, for Senate either, because he's Jewish and Zionist. A website summarizes his stance thus:

New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg claims that the 3 billion dollars America gives Israel is "not a high cost" in comparison to a good relationship between the countries.

A good relationship is vital, Lautenberg states, to protect American interests in the volatile and violent Middle Eastern region.

He continues by saying America needs Israel just as Israel needs America and primarily good will come from this symbiotic relationship.

Astounding. The U.S.-Israeli relationship has cost us over a trillion dollars in two wars in the past 7 years alone, plus 3,000 dead Americans in the 9/11 attacks, another 4,146 dead in Iraq, and 580 in Afghanistan; plus the attacks on the U.S.S. Cole, the U.S. embassies in Africa, and on, and on. It has poisoned relations with the Arab world and Moslem world more generally; produced an Arab oil embargo in the Seventies; and turned a billion people against us. That serves "American interests"? Bullsh(asterisk).
+
And what of what one might call our "national soul"? We have killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis for Israel, perhaps as many as 1.25 MILLION since the current war against Iraq began in 2003 plus more than another half million in the first Iraq war ("Gulf War") and in the hideous sanctions between the first and second Iraq wars. Oh, but I forgot. Americans don't ever count the "enemy" dead! No, only American lives matter. Because we have no decency anymore. That's what Rev. Jeremiah Wright was talking about — so of course Obama repudiated him, more of Obama's perfect judgment: all wrong, all the time. But who listens to criticisms of the United States? No, we're all rah-rah, sis-boom-bah jingoists when it comes to war and the Olympics. Mustn't think about morality. That's a downer.
+
Frank Lautenberg is an Israeli agent in the U.S. Senate. His country is Israel, not the United States, and he and all other American agents of Israel should be rounded up and prosecuted for treason, then beheaded and chopped up for parts for decent people.
+
What a terrible time in history this is, when traitors dominate the national government, in both major parties, and people won't hear of third parties. No, things are going so well with the alternation between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Why would we want to get rid of the Zionist Twins?
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is \ — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:46 PM

 
Veep Guess. Media are abuzz with speculation that Barack Obama is going to announce his choice of running mate this coming Saturday in Springfield, Illinois, where he announced his own candidacy in February 2007. Will that person be in Springfield too? Not if Obama wants to keep his/her identity secret to the last minute, because all the 'usual suspects' will be under pervasive media surveillance. So unless ALL of the "short list" candidates head for Springfield, the cat would be out of the bag as soon as someone booked a flite. Not even Evan Bayh, from nearby Indiana, could head off in his personal car for Springfield without being followed by a convoy of reporters.
+
The pundits' best guesses on newstalk channels tonite were all from the media's own "short list", and most pundits seem to think Senator Biden of Delaware is the likely choice, even tho he said today first, "I'm not the guy" and second, that he didn't know any more than media do because he hasn't been told a thing. I do not pretend to know what Joe Biden does not, but let me take a guess and explain why I make it: Governor Timothy Kaine of Virginia.
+
The other member of the media's three-member shortest list, in addition to Biden and Kaine, is Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana. Others on earlier, and longer, versions of the media's short list include Governor (Governess) Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, and even the odious Senator Hillary Clinton of New York. Hillary has been outrite rejected as a possibility by most commentators of late (even tho many said, delusionally, that she would be the strongest choice), because Obama doesn't like her and she would tend to take attention away from him. At least so say the media. Never mind that Bill Clinton would be a huge liability on the campaign trail for Obama, as he was for Hillary. Some of the more delusional Democrats, a delusional lot in general, keep talking nonsense about a "dream team" — of a black man and white woman. In the United States. In 2008. Such people need to be in a mental institution.
+
The same madness as to a black man and white woman, with a different white woman, the Governess of Kansas, was put forward for a while as a sort of watered-down "dream team", bringing out the youth vote, the women's vote (which actually means the Radical-Feminist, lesbian vote), the black vote, and the Democratic "base". Never mind that the WHITE Democratic base includes a lot of white men who would feel completely alienated from such a black-female ticket and would vote for the white guy, McCain, in huge numbers.
+
So, if Obama and his advisers are at all sane, we can dispense with all talk of a female veep.
+
Bill Richardson has everything Obama needs, including a deep résumé filled with distinction in the area of foreign affairs, which most Americans feel Obama is weak in. But, the media have told us in recent days (only), Obama thinks of himself as an expert in foreign affairs and expects to be able to persuade voters of that before November 4th. Richardson also offers some geographic diversity, being from the Southwest, and ethnic diversity, being a white Hispanic. BUT again Obama must consider whether a black-Latino ticket would alienate non-Hispanic whites in places like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and in "battleground" states, the definition of which varies depending upon the degree of deludedness of the observer. When he was clean-shaven, Richardson, with his Anglo name, was seen by most Americans as white. Now, however, he has a full beard and mustache, and recently acquired a deep suntan, as makes him look (too) Latino. A black-brown ticket again alienates a large part of the Democratic base, even tho Richardson, as a Catholic, does offer a connection with some of those ethnic whites of the Northeast and Rustbelt Heartland who are also Catholic (Irish, Poles, Italians, some Germans, etc.). The Latino minority may be the largest in the Nation in overall numbers, but they are not all citizens, and have a historically low participation rate in elections. To win Latino (minority) votes at the cost of worrying (the majority) Anglos about the 'takeover' of the United States by, er, Hispanics might be seen by Obama and his advisers as unwise. Would Obama stand with a 'fellow minority' against such 'bigoted' considerations, and choose him as best-qualified? He might, if Obama were about principle. But, as we have seen of late, in Obama's many changes of stance in 'moving to the center', Obama is not about principle. He is about Obama. And even if Bill Richardson would be the best man to succeed him if Obama were, oh, let us say, assassinated, Obama may feel (a) I have to be elected before I can worry about my successor, and if Richardson would as much hurt as help in that task, he can't be on the ticket, and (b) If I'm shot by some redneck, I don't give a f(asterisk) what happens to this f(asterisk)ing country after I'm dead.
+
Had we to do it all over, as might happen if that bitch, Hillary Clinton, is somehow able to throw the convention into chaos and the delegates deadlock into a no-Barack/no-Hillary deal, the best ticket for the Democrats at present might well be Richardson as President and Biden as Vice President. But that seems unlikely. Before his recent controversy, John Edwards as President and Bill Richardson as Veep would have been unbeatable. That was then. This is now. And while I think adultery is no bar to the Presidency — especially given John McCain's own admitted adultery, which turns out to have been multiple, not single — the Democrats don't have the courage to put a recent adulterer up against a long-ago adulterer.
+
Biden is a bore. Competent, amiable, but a bore. He has no charisma at all. While I don't see Obama as the slitest charismatic, some people seem to feel he is. I am certain that 90% of what passes for charisma and celebrity nowadays is media hype that attaches irrationally to people who have very little actually going for them. Is Britney Spears actually the most fascinating woman in the world? Media seem to think so. I do not.
+
Biden is also a Washington insider who has been in the Senate for 35 years(!). If Obama wishes to keep railing against the Old Politics, he can't very well choose as the man "a heartbeat away from the Presidency" a Beltway Boy. However, Obama has betrayed so many commitments central to his message since he (apparently) clinched the nomination that he probably feels that one more won't break him. Besides, he has no chance in hell of winning the White House unless McCain makes an insane choice of running mate himself (see below), tho one must assume that Obama doesn't accept that. Certainly we never hear him say that he is running on principle, to prepare the way for someone else to succeed some other day. None of that MLK 'I may not get there with you' stuff for BHO(bama).
+
So, tho Biden would be a bad choice, he's not impossible for the Obama of today. Biden is from a tiny, almost empty state, Delaware. He does not live in Washington but commutes by Amtrak to his home in Wilmington (I saw him on the train once, sipping a glass of milk on his way home perhaps 15 years ago). Delaware isn't even influential in its region. It's a border state geographically and perhaps culturally, but has no sway over anyone's political feelings, in other border states or anywhere else.
+
Evan Bayh is a physically attractive white guy, young, wholesome, your white-bread-and-mayonnaise guy from a politically important Indiana family. His father was Birch Bayh (that always makes me think of "birch beer", a great soda that our local supermarket chain Pathmark used to offer in a store brand but no longer does), himself a Senator from Indiana, who ran for President against Jimmy Carter. (Maybe he would've been better than Jimmy Carter, but we'll never know.)
+
BUT Indiana is right nextdoor to Illinois, Obama's home state, so offers no geographic diversity whatsoever. People in Indiana have probably heard about Obama for years longer than the Nation generally, so wouldn't need Bayh as interlocutor for Obama. Bayh is not from a small town (he lives in Indianapolis, 13th largest city in the Nation), not the boy next door. He comes from money, fame, and privilege (his full name is Birch Evans Bayh III, and his son is ~ IV). What does he bring to the campaign? He's only 6 years older than Obama, and has been in the Senate only 6 years longer. He is also perceived, at least by newstalk pundits, as unexciting/something of a bore. If one's standard for selection of a veep is, first and foremost, that he do no harm, Bayh would be a safe choice. But he brings so little to the table as to be a bad choice if this election is a real contest, and not the cakewalk that it would be for almost any white Democrat at the top of the ticket.
+
Tim Kaine is young (only 3 years older than Obama), amiable, and unknown outside his region. He would likely do no harm. He might do some good, in cracking the Solid South, because if any state of the Old Confederacy might vote Democratic, it could be Virginia. Of course, no state of the Old Confederacy is really going to vote Democratic, but Democrats live in perpetual delusion. Hope springs eternal, and they keep hoping against reason that the South has changed, or the Nation has changed — that something, anything that could make a difference, has changed. Alas, almost nothing has changed.
+
Still, with any ordinary Democratic candidate, this election should be a foregone conclusion: any Democrat should trounce any Republican. Well, any WHITE Democrat should trounce any Republican.
+
The economy is bad; the sitting Republican President is the most unpopular President in the Nation's history; there are two wars going on and being funded by deficit spending, hugely increasing the national debt and producing massive indebtedness to foreigners; one of those wars, the more important in the task of fiting terrorism, is going very badly; consumer confidence is at historic lows; the stock market is tanking. "All things being equal", any Democrat should procéss to a coronation by veritable acclamation, in a landslide. But the polls show Obama at 45% and McCain at 43%. The media say that is a "statistical dead heat" because the polls have a margin of error of 3%.
+
"All things being equal", the polls SHOULD have an error margin of 3%. All things are not equal. When you factor in race, the margin of error is perhaps 12%, because lots of people lie to pollsters if they think that what they really feel is so 'politically incorrect' as to be morally reprehensible, as would bring down opprobrium upon them from the pollster. So lots of white people pretend that they are thinking of voting for a black man who will NEVER, to the day they die, vote for a black man (or, even more emphatically, black woman) for President.
+
They don't have to say that race is why. They can say that they don't trust Obama, or doubt his patriotism, or feel he doesn't have enuf experience, or is arrogant and too full of himself, or any of a large number of other excuses. And they will indeed believe some of those things. But they're not the real reason. The real reason is very simple: he's black. And that is why Obama has done well among white people only in areas not devastated by blacks in the Sixties, Seventies, and on to today.
+
Go, however, to those parts of the country ravaged by race riots and black crime, those black central cities surrounded by white suburbs in the Northeast, Middle Atlantic states and Rustbelt Midwest and find out what white people there think, and you will see that scores of millions of white people have been so traumatized and are so furious with blacks and what 'They' did to cities they loved that they will never vote black for President or anything else.
+
The pretense is that the United States is now "post-racial". Oh? How many black Governors do we have? Two, one of whom was not elected but ascended from the Lieutenant Governorship when New York's disgraced Governor Eliot Spitzer resigned. That's the most we've ever had at any one time, out of 50 states. In fact, there have been only 4 black governors in the entire history of the Nation, total, and one of those was in office for only 36 days in 1872-73, during the Reconstruction Era. How many black Senators do we have? One, out of 100. That too is the most we have ever had at any one time, even tho blacks comprise 13% of the Nation's total population. There are 40 present black members of the U.S. House of Representatives, out of 435 total members: 9%. How many black mayors of major cities do we have? The mayors of the 10 largest cities in the Nation break down thus: 1 black (Philadelphia), 1 Latino (L.A.), 8 white, much like the Nation overall.
+
The bulk of black officeholders come from black-majority towns and legislative districts. Blacks vote mainly black; whites vote mainly white; Hispanics, where they amount to a large portion of the population and have Hispanic candidates, vote Hispanic. The United States is 80% white. Which way do you think the election is going to go?
+
McCain's Masterful, Magical Media Misdirection. The McCain camp has gotten the media to speculate wildly about his making a drastic, thinking-out-of-the-box, "Hail Mary" play in choosing a veep, from feeling that he is doomed unless he does something desperate. In actuality, he is practically assured of winning the Presidency by a landslide. Still, the talk is that he is thinking of selecting as running mate a pro-abortion Republican 'moderate' (or Liberal, as most Republicans would see him), like Tom Ridge, or even the Jewish, nominal Democrat, pro-abortion beast Joe Lieberman. Rush Limbaugh has reacted to such talk by declaring that such a selection would destroy the Republican Party and ensure the election of the Democrat, as the Republican base stays home in droves.
+
Another rumor making the rounds is that McCain might dramatically announce that he cares so much about doing the right thing, without regard to the electoral consequences, that he will announce at the same time as he announces a 'daring' choice for veep, that he will not seek a second term. Oh? McCain himself said very publicly that a President elected on such a pledge would be a "lame duck" the instant he took office, so could accomplish nothing (especially if both houses of Congress are won by Democrats, altho he didn't say that part).
+
Could McCain possibly be so deluded that he would see himself in danger of losing to a black man? — and that that danger is not just real but so great that he has to do something drastic that would drive away the Republican base in hopes of appealing to moderate Democrats and independents in sufficient numbers to make up for the loss of his own party's voters? I have said before that McCain is out of his mind, so you can never know what he will do. But, you see, McCain is no longer in charge. You didn't know that, did you?
+
What is actually happening with all this speculation is that a campaign that was dull and going noplace has reignited media interest by implying that something startling is about to happen. And so the media are all taking much more active interest in McCain than they had been doing recently. And while the media are looking here, the people in charge of McCain are acting elsewhere. I don't know where yet, but they seem to me to be diverting attention in the manner of a magician or making a feint in the manner of a military commander, the better to deliver an inspired stroke of genius (or what will seem so after the pointless wild goose chase the media have been led on) when they finally make their actual move.
+
McCain, you might think, isn't smart enuf or devious enuf to pull off something like that. But, as I say, McCain is no longer in charge of his campaign, and those who are, are indeed smart enuf to carry off something just like that.
+
At some point, the real powers of the Republican Party decided they had had enuf with the Romneys and Huckabees and Giulianis, and other unelectables, so settled on McCain. That is when the McCain campaign, nearly 'dead', suddenly came to life, and he came from behind to win the nomination. It is the same Silent Hand of the Republican string-pullers as created Reagan from whole cloth and put forward the amiable goofball Dumbya because he was so malleable and so deeply coated in Teflon that no matter how much people disliked his policies, they would never dislike him, and thus never move to impeach him or even use him as an electoral devil. (Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's ultra-critical satirical revue, The Daily Show, recently said of Bush after some goofy bit of video, "He is ADORABLE." And then followed it up with a disclaimer like, "If only he didn't ...".)
+
The same people who pull George W. Bush's strings and wrote every word Reagan said have now seized control of McCain, and that's why he has now changed his tune on a host of issues, because he's no longer in charge. McCain wants desperately to be President, and the Invisible Hand told him, "You can be President, but only if you do exactly as we say." So he's doing exactly as they say.
+
(Senator McCain has admitted in print that the ambition to be President was his ultimate motive in 2000, but he was criticized for that admission last nite and again tonite by Keith Olbermann of MSNBC because McCain accused Obama of saying what he says only because ambition to be President has seized control of him. McCain was speaking from experience. Obama IS dominated by personal ambition, just as is McCain, just as was every single candidate for the Presidency this time and every other time in recent history. It is never about us, never about principle, never about a crusade for the Nation or the world. It is always about personal ambition. If Keith Olbermann doesn't understand that, perhaps it's because he has never aspired to be President. But Olbermann's well publicized (and copiously self-publicized) competition with Bill O'Reilly should give him, if he is at all self-aware, some insight into what ambition can do to a person.)
+
Keith Olbermann and others have been struck by recent statements from the McCain campaign HQ that corrected McCain's own statements on the stump, and summarized their stance as "The candidate does not speak for the campaign." No, he doesn't. McCain is a puppet on slitely looser strings than Dumbya, who is so intent on becoming President and so convinced that he cannot do so on his own (after all, he almost lost the Republican nomination, before the Silent Hand stepped in) that he has yielded sovereignty over his own campaign to the insiders who gave us Reagan and Bush (at least Bush the Younger, and possibly Bush the Older as well, tho they might have abandoned him when he proved too much his own man, letting him fall to Clinton the Elder).
+
The key factor in the selection process of the Invisible Hand is likability, which makes for a Teflon President. And Teflon is what all Republican Presidents must be coated with to survive the terrible things they try to do to us. John McCain is likable. He has spent years making appearances on late-nite television and elsewhere to make himself a household name, regarded even by people who can't stand his politics (to the extent they know them) as a good guy and good sport who can make fun of himself. He sits across the table from Jon Stewart and other people of hugely different political orientation, and banters and jokes, and gets along with everybody. That is what it takes to be a Republican President. You take care of the likability; we will take care of everything else, says the Invisible Hand. And they do.
+
So no, the candidate really does not speak for the campaign now. And that is why he is unlikely to make an insane choice of running mate. Because even tho McCain himself is such a loose cannon and so changeable that he might make a bizarre choice, he is not in charge of making that choice. It will be made for him. It has probably been made already.
+
So who will it be? Romney? Romney's a Mormon. Aaaaa! (That's as close as I can come in print to the sound of the "wrong" buzzer in game shows.) Giuliani, a Catholic from the detested New York City? Aaaaa! Jindal has taken himself out of consideration, as tho a man born Hindu stood much of a chance of being selected by the anonymous controllers of the Republican cabal. Pawlenty? No buzzer, no clamor. (We could be facing a "Battle of the Tims" if Pawlenty and Kaine are chosen as veeps.) Crist? Somebody whose name has not been mentioned by media pundits putting together their short list (or long list)?
+
Think young, think Teflon. Of the people on media's short list, Pawlenty seems to fit the bill. He meets the first criterion: do no harm. He's not a dunce, like Dan Quail. He's from the North, but the Republican Powers That Be don't need to worry about losing the South if they don't choose a Southerner, because the South is not voting for a black man. Not even Florida, with all its transplanted Northerners, is going to vote for a black man. Many of those Northerners left places in the North not just because they were cold in the winter but because they had become "too black" year-round.
+
Kaine vs. ?? My guess as to Obama's choice of running mate is Governor Kaine of Virginia. I would prefer Richardson, but Obama's advisors may have told him that two minorities on one ticket is one too many. Besides, if, as I suspect, the Obama campaign goes down in flames, in an electoral catastrophe for the Democratic ticket (tho things should still go well for Dems in both houses of Congress), it might be better for the Nation and for a chastened Democratic Party if Richardson isn't dragged down by Obama, in order that he might rise in 2012, as President or Veep to a reconstructed and forgiven John Edwards. As for the Republican veep? We'll just have to wait for August 29th. And the media will keep wondering aloud all that time, giving intense attention to a campaign to which for weeks they had given very little attention. That Invisible Hand knows what it's doing.
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,144 — for Israel.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Logo's Militant Antimale Propaganda. Most people may not be aware of it, but there is now supposed to be a "gay" cable channel, called Logo. Unfortunately, Logo is, quite the contrary of what you might expect, viciously anti homosexual. Gay men are marginal to Logo's concerns. Most of its schedule is given over to women and "transsexuals", and the bulk of its programming about gay men shows them (well, us) as diseased and dying, or as murderers. Yes, you read right: murderers.
+
While channel-surfing at 3:30 this morning, I checked Logo, and, once again, it is showing Swoon, a 1992 movie about the Leopold and Loeb case, in which two demented Jewish faggots in 1924 Chicago abducted and killed a little boy just to see how it felt. Oh, that's very gay, and gives us such a warm feeling about ourselves, doesn't it?
+
Another Logo offering about gay men is a lovely little 1997 film called The Delta, which ends with a gay Vietnamese man in Mississippi luring a gay black man to a boat, then strangling him to death! Isn't that charming?
+
Again and again, Logo shows gay men as peripheral to the "gay" (meaning "lesbian") world, dying from AIDS, and killing people. How on Earth did this happen?
+
The 'people' responsible for Logo need to be beaten, preferably to death, or at the very, very least, sued for hundreds of millions of dollars for group slander against gay men. The picture of gay men on Logo is unrelentingly negative: we are supposedly confused about gender, shot thru with disease that kills us (rightfully, it would seem from Logo's endless focus on AIDS as "gay plague"), and filled with homicidal rage toward each other — not homosexual lust.
+
I have tried to watch Logo, on average, twice a day every day since it started operations on June 30, 2005, but have had to turn it off in disgust, or rage, essentially every time, within at most 5 minutes. Typically, the first thing you see and/or hear when you tune to Logo is a woman. If there's not a woman onscreen that moment, there will be within three minutes. Never are men alone with men on Logo for more than five minutes. The commercials are essentially all straight. And Logo even shows HETEROSEXUAL commercials for "male enhancement", not just victimizing but also attacking gay men in trying to defraud them.
+
Logo has ONE program for gay men on its entire schedule, Noah's Arc, which is all-black. White gay men have no place on Logo, even tho we are the bulk of the community.
+
Queer as Folk, Showtime's odious Canadian "lesbigay" drama, takes up much of the time that is supposed to be devoted to programming for gay men, but it is heavily lesbian and heterosexual. Men's relationships with men are completely subordinated to the various heterosexual or lesbian plotlines, and, again, the longest that men are shown alone with men is approximately three minutes. Ever. The men (several, including the most central character, played by straight actors) are shown involved in various combinations of self-destructive behaviors, from smoking to using hard drugs: to quote Wikipedia, "(cocaine, methamphetamine, ecstasy, GHB, ketamine, cannabis)". But the AIDS developed by the drug-soaked "fast lane" homosexuals who used most of those drugs, in combination!, had nothing to do with the chemicals in drugs but only with sex. (Of course it did.) Some of the characters are effeminate. Some are airheads, even prostitutes (hustlers). Ah, so accurate a portrayal of our lives and loves.
+
Not surprisingly, Wikipedia says:

The American version of Queer as Folk quickly became the number one show on the Showtime roster. The network's initial marketing of the show was primarily targeted at gay male (and to some extent, lesbian) audiences, yet a sizeable segment of the viewership turned out to be heterosexual women.

Certainly Queer as Folk is unfit for gay men's eyes and ears. It is horrible, horrible, antigay garbage that should be destroyed in every copy.
+
Logo is a project of Viacom, one of the world's largest media companies, which, according to Wikipedia, comprises:

Film Production and Distribution: Viacom International, Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks, Republic Pictures, MTV Films, Nickelodeon Movies, Go Fish Pictures
Television Networks: Comedy Central, Logo, BET, Spike, TV Land, Nick at Nite, Nickelodeon, Noggin, The N, Nick Jr., TEENick, MTV, VH1, MTV2, CMT, MHD
Television Production and Television Distribution: DreamWorks Television
Video Gaming: Xfire, Harmonix, GameTrailers, Neopets

It plainly has the resources to create quality programming directed to self-respecting, well-adjusted gay men. The refusal to create such series or even TV movies speaks volumes about media hatred of gay men.
+
If comparable, viciously negative stereotypes about blacks were aired by a cable network proclaiming itself "black", the Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons would be leading demonstrations in the streets. Gay men, almost completely absent from mainstream media, are expected to shut up and accept crumbs, even if those crumbs are laced with rat poison.
+
Logo's sole real focus is lesbians and "transsexuals", who are praised explicitly and implicitly. Gay men are NEVER to be seen unless their presence is 'balanced' (overbalanced) by equal or greater numbers of lesbians, within seconds or at most a very few minutes. The idea of so much as a half hour being given over to gay men, WITHOUT women, is unthinkable. Again and again the message is sent: women with women is OK; men with men but WITHOUT women is just plain wrong, utterly evil and insane.
+
Gay men who choose to keep their genitalia are viciously and repeatedly defamed, and encouraged to redefine themselves as women, then have themselves castrated to conform to the anti-gay, antimale prejudices of the lunatics who control Logo.
+
A firebomb or three tossed into the executive offices of the subhuman scum responsible for Logo, at the height of the business day, could do a lot of good.
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,141 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:57 AM

 
'October Surprise' Two Months Early? The Russian invasion of Georgia (the country) has handed the Republican Party a huge gift. The question is whether it is too early to guarantee a Republican landslide in both the Presidential and Congressional elections.
+
The timing of this particular episode of Russian militarism / imperialism / adventurism is interesting, coinciding with both the start of the Olympics thousands of miles to the east and the vacation of the Democratic Presidential candidate further thousands of miles east.
+
PussyBoy Obama issued a namby-pamby statement calling for 'mutual restraint' and multilateralism to find a peaceful settlement of the conflict. Georgia is invaded by its former colonial overlord, which appears intent on ripping part of its territory away, but is supposed to show restraint. I suppose that if Russia invaded Alaska, another former possession of the Russian Empire, we too should show restraint and seek international mediation to arrive at a peaceful resolution — as by giving back to Russia oh, say, a fifth of Alaska. At gunpoint.
+
Tuf Old Guy McCain came out fiting, indicating that nobody would dare do such a thing if he were Commander-in-Chief.
+
The Bush Administration, as soon as the "President" (First Puppet) was safely back in the White House from his own vacation in the stands in Beijing, staged a very gutsy maneuver, sending the U.S. military to provide "humanitarian assistance" to the people of Georgia. This puts U.S. soldiers very nearly in harm's way. Brilliant brinksmanship. Or is it merely showmanship?
+
Is Russian Premier Putin's government "in on it"? Have they carved out a chunk of Georgia for pro-Russian forces in preparation for eventual reunification of Ossetia, South (Georgia) with North (Russia), and staged a phony mass invasion of Georgia to allow them to withdraw graciously only from Georgian territory outside Ossetia, while staying in Ossetia, yet still look benevolent? (By the way, despite what you may have heard on television, the proper pronunciation of "Ossetia" is os.sée.sha.)
+
Is such (partial) withdrawal in synch with Bush Administration / Republican Party purposes?
+
Or is this "Regime Change, Russian Style"? Moscow doesn't like the current President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, and his plans to take Georgia into NATO. By forcibly separating South Ossetia and, it now turns out, Abkhazia, from Georgia and perhaps bringing them into formal or informal union with Russia; and by humiliating Georgia militarily, the Putin Government may hope to turn the Georgian electorate against Saakashvili. And in showing that NATO is too gutless to protect Georgia from its main threat, Russia, they may intend to show the people of Georgia that joining NATO would be worthless in a positive sense and dangerous in a negative sense for angering their powerful neighbor.
+
Perhaps NATO should respond by admitting Georgia NOW, and sending NATO forces to guard its borders, including the northern edge of South Ossetia and Abkhazia (that is, keeping them inside Georgia), and daring Russia to attack NATO. But the Bush Administration seems unlikely to favor that. Like most bullies, they are willing to take on only people they are certain are weaker than they are.
+
Whom would the Russian Government prefer be in charge of the United States Government, Obama or McCain? Hard call.
+
On the one hand, McCain, a "Cold Warrior" with deep personal reasons to hate the old KGB man now in the Russian premiership, might give Russia a hard time with its drive for greater prestige and influence.
+
On the other hand, however, Russia may feel it gains by standing up to the United States and competing for influence in the Third World and Europe if the U.S. is dominated by regressive forces. An Obama Presidency (hard tho it is to conceive of an Obama win) may be seen as confronting Russia with a new Kennedy, a political rock star and lite unto the world who will change the reputation of the United States and bring out a new, PRO-American surge around the planet, in key areas that with McCain in charge could instead be ripe for Russian picking.
+
Putin may regard McCain as a known entity, and Obama as The Great Unknown, so prefer the known. Putin knows that the U.S. under McCain will continue to be bogged down in Iraq, and may even embark upon another disastrous war, in Iran, which would drain away U.S. resources, further devastate our reputation, and continue the slide of worldwide sentiment into seeing the United States as a hypocrite and spent force, while Russia — and China, and India, and Brazil — come to be seen as the Wave of the Future, the people everybody needs to cozy up to.
+
I certainly have no inside info as to what Putin is thinking. Nor do I know what he is being told about the likely result of the upcoming U.S. election. He may have been told that, "all things being equal", the Democrats should win in a triumphal landslide, giving them the White House and both houses of Congress as would empower them to make massive changes in U.S. finances, healthcare, and social policy as could restore much of the Nation's lost power and self-confidence, which could be very dangerous to Russian ambitions on the world stage. The Republicans, by contrast, (Putin might be told,) would continue the slide into eclipse of the United States, the undeniable and permanent end of the American Century, and thus produce a Russian Century, or at least a century that Russia can share with China and other incipient major powers with whom Russia would have great influence if the U.S. were rendered weak and irrelevant.
+
Russia can keep up the tension all the way up to the election. Or it could appear to back down in the face of decisive action by the Republicans. Or it could stage a referendum on outrite secession in South Ossetia to be held before the U.S. election or shortly after, and keep this issue before the American electorate.
+
What it is unlikely to do — tho you can never know, with the Russians — is provoke an armed confrontation with the United States, as by firing upon U.S. military personnel or aircraft as they are providing humanitarian assistance to people in Georgia. But what, let's think a moment, would happen if they did decide to push things to a military confrontation?
+
Hm. In terms of the election, McCain wouldn't back down. Would Obama rally to decisive military action by the Bush Administration?
+
In terms of governmental behavior, would the Bush Government move combat-ready troops from Iraq into Georgia? Now that would create a quandary for Obama, wouldn't it?
+
It would, after all, constitute a drawdown or partial withdrawal / expedited withdrawal from Iraq. But it would create a new front in a military approach to the whole planet. In that such a move would be a genuine response to a call for assistance from a democratic government (unlike the nonexistent call from the Iraqi people for the U.S. to invade to "liberate" them), how could Obama object? If Obama says that multilateral action is far preferable, and that the U.S. should merely provide logistical aid to a United Nations peacekeeping force drawn from, for instance, the European Union, which brokered the current ceasefire, would the electorate praise him for his restraint or damn him as a pussy who is giving the EU greater prominence and hastening the day when the EU is a second superpower, causing us problems all across the planet?
+
And what will China do? China has been trying to create a two-nation Eurasian axis of China and Russia as counterweight to the United States in world affairs. If Russia pushes, will China back it up? Stranger things have happened, for instance, Adolf Hitler declaring war on the United States after Japan staged the Pearl Harbor attack. He didn't have to do that, and shouldn't have, strategically speaking, but he did, and thus sealed his doom.
+
China may feel that it is in the catbird seat in any confrontation with the United States, because, it reasons, the U.S. economy is now so dependent upon imports from China, and China holds so much U.S. Government debt, that the U.S. could not possibly retaliate against China without producing a catastrophic Great Depression II that would make current economic problems look like The Good Old Days.
+
The Chinese (or is it merely pseudo-Chinese?) curse — which could actually be a blessing — "May you live in interesting times" seems to be upon us. The kids and empty-headers have video games. The rest of us have world affairs. Maybe the Georgian crisis will set the 24-hour newschannels to their proper task and knock the crap out of their programming.
+
'Liberal' Self-Destruct. Speaking of 24-hour newschannels, something very odd has happened to Keith Olbermann and his cohorts. So rabidly anti-McCain are they that they have seemed to place themselves in the most-illiberal position of favoring Russian imperialism and opposing a hard stance against it. I have, two nites in a row, sat in astonishment at the hypocrisy of Mr. Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and others in Olbermann's stable's attacking John McCain for standing courageously against Russian aggression. They are acting as tho McCain is the aggressor, Russia's actions are perfectly reasonable and defensible, and McCain's reaction against them is extremist.
+
Olbermann has taken the incomprehensible stance that because a senior policy adviser to McCain has worked as a lobbyist for Georgia, therefore there is some kind of "conflict of interest" in McCain's standing with Georgia against Russian aggression. Huh? Hiring as an adviser someone whose worldview agrees with yours, and then acting in accord with that shared worldview is not remotely a "conflict of interest". For Olbermann, who is usually a very rational man, to utter such an asinine non sequitur is astounding. Extreme partisanship has driven him out of his mind. Let's hope his insanity is temporary.
+
To aid Americans in deciding whether McCain is out of line and extreme in his reaction to the Georgian invasion, we need ask only one question:

If Russia had done to Israel what it has done to Georgia, would Olbermann & Co. think a strong stance by McCain against Russia extremist?

I suggest that a Russian invasion of Israel would produce a virtual unanimity of opinion on the part of both media and political officeholders that the most vigorous countermeasures were called for, even if that were to risk World War III. The United States has embarked on two wars for Israel and is apparently planning for a third, but just one for Georgia? Even to think of such a thing is, we are to believe, extremist. That is taking kneejerk anti-McCain partisanship to a ridiculous extreme, and Obama supporters cannot really expect everyone to conform to such mindless rabidity.
+
The Liberal movement has turned on itself before. In the Vietnam era, Communists promoted the idea of the "Liberal-Left", in which Liberals were to be seen as the vanguard of the Left, of which they were an integral part, in promoting worldwide Communist revolution. The "Left" drove anti-Communist "Liberals" out of the Liberal movement. Are we about to see a replay of those Bad Old Days, when strict conformance to some official party line is enforced by expulsion of people who take different stances? All 'true Liberals' are to oppose McCain no matter what he says.
+
Standing against Russian militarism is a good thing. If Obama won't do it, but McCain will, then actual true Liberals — those who stand for "libertas" for the people of Georgia — will abandon Obama for McCain in record numbers. Who, then, will be 'left' to vote for Obama?
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,141 — for Israel.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Puritanism, Racism, and Hypocrisy. The media of late have been filled with fake indignation about John Edwards having had an affair, that story vying with an odd tale about a woman whose 2-year-old child disappeared and the mother did not report that disappearance to the authorities. Mind you, hundreds of black children a year disappear, hundreds of black women disappear, but the major media pay absolutely no attention to that. No, the media are interested only in white children, and white women. And scandal from politicians, not ordinary people nor non-political celebrities.
+
Quite the contrary, the Hores of Hollywood get a free pass when they screw around, have babies out of wedlock, and destroy one marriage after another thru infidelity. That's fine. No problem, no moral issue. Just wall-to-wall coverage without any moralizing.
+
A politician does precisely the same kind of thing as a Hollywood Hore, and all of a sudden the media find their moral voice and express the (presumed) outrage of the community. What a bunch of bullsh(asterisk).
+
Trying to justify their imitation indignation, the media poke their noses into the financial arrangements involving the woman who dallied with Edwards, trying desperately to find some financial wrongdoing in the payments made to her for her work for the Edwards campaign and the assistance she received to live well in a lavish setting. They plainly hope to uncover diversion of campaign contributions to "hush money", but seem not to be getting very far in that.
+
Nor is the disparagement of the Internet documentaries she produced as not being worth the $114,000 she was paid in the slitest sensible. Who is to set the value of any filmmaker's work? Hollywood films cost millions and millions and millions of dollars, and not all even turn a profit. When the value is not money but votes, or the good feeling about a candidate that might lead to votes, the amount that a campaign pays anyone is the campaign's business, not some self-appointed film critic in political media. One editor of film criticism, Maria Russo in the Los Angeles Times, said the idea of webisodes was all very new at the time, and cutting-edge, untested. Who is to place a value on new ideas?
+
Lacking for genuine public-policy issues in this affair, media fall back on scandal for the sake of scandal, and question the paternity of Ms. Hunter's baby dauter. Edwards says the timing is wrong for him to be the father, and expresses willingness to take a paternity test. Ms. Hunter demurs. The media find another 'candidate' for the position of baby daddy, but no one knows.
+
Pundits speculate whether this will end Edwards' political career or he can emerge, down the road, from the cloud of shame that his behavior has cast on his future, to become a viable candidate for something, at some level of government.
+
And the rest of us, the sane and sensible among us, at first dismiss the story as trivia, then become indignant at the absurdity of so much attention and so much mock shock and dismay that a man in the public spotlite would dare to have an extramarital affair. What about those Presidents of recent memory who had affairs, from Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Democrat) to Dwight D. Eisenhower (Republican) to John F. Kennedy (Democrat) — three out of four Presidents in the relatively decorous Forties and Fifties — to Bill Clinton (Democrat) most publicly? Jimmy Carter admitted to 'lusting in his heart', but not following that lust into action. John McCain is said to have been unfaithful to his first wife, over 30 years ago. I never heard any extramarital scandal associated with Richard Nixon, but that didn't make him a good guy, did it?
+
What about the behavior of Americans in general? Altho the great preponderance of ordinary people think "cheating" is immoral, studies indicate that around 25% of men and 15% of women engage in extramarital sex at least once in the course of their marriage, and 17% of divorces result from the discovery of cheating. Fully reliable statistics are of course impossible to get, because people lie about things they are ashamed of. So these figures reflect what people admit to. The divorce rate is sturdier, statistically speaking, but not as well established as you might think.

The divorce rate in America for first marriage, vs second or third marriage
50% percent of first marriages, 67% of second and 74% of third marriages end in divorce, according to Jennifer Baker of the Forest Institute of Professional Psychology in Springfield, Missouri.”

According to enrichment journal on the divorce rate in America:
The divorce rate in America for first marriage is 41%
The divorce rate in America for second marriage is 60%
The divorce rate in America for third marriage is 73%

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:09 PM