Barack the Faithless Strikes Again. The Obama Administration has announced its decision to permit a lot more offshore oil drilling, in open defiance of Obama's environmentalist supporters, in yet another attempt to mollify the President's enemies. A lot of people, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann among them, are puzzled by Obama's endless attempts to achieve bipartisanship, even tho his enemies have absolutely no desire to cooperate with him on anything (Olbermann thinks Republicans are willing to cooperate on issues of national security, but I have my doubts). I'm afraid I do understand.
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All members of minorities have to deal with a lack of general acceptance. Different individual members of minorities deal with their minority condition in different ways, sometimes at different times. Some hide (gay men and lesbians). Some cast off all distinguishing features, to the extent possible, to become as "white bread" as possible. Some become militant and in-your-face. Some adopt the stance that "the best revenge is living well", and turn their energies to making the best life they can, without regard to what other people think or do.
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Barack Obama is a double-minority, which makes everything worse.
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Bluntly put, Barack Obama is an "inter-race" or "biracial". As such, he has had to cope all his life with trying to be all things to all people, and insist on tolerance for himself, which has obligated him to be tolerant of others in return. He is certainly not white-enuf to white people to be considered "one of us", and not black-enuf to black people. He has had to try to make a virtue and positive out of what everyone else regards as a negative. Having had to slog thru various societies and subsocieties all his life — remember that he lived for years in Indonesia, a uniracial society, as a non-Moslem in a dominantly and intolerantly Moslem society — Obama simply cannot give up the idea of prevailing over time. And he became President of the United States, so has, to his mind, manifestly been confirmed in his belief system and habitual behavior. So this is no time to stop trying to get everybody to get along.
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Obama did not have to go thru a police beating to take the attitude of Rodney King: "Can we all get along?" (Usually remembered, inaccurately, as "Can't we all just get along?" See King's statement on YouTube, at the 0:57 mark.) Obama went thru decades of small indignations, rejections, questions, and challenges to his authenticity, which prepared him well for the challenge by "birthers" to his authenticity as an American. He knows what's behind all of it, as we all know what's behind it. Call it "clannishness" (or "Klannishness"); call it racism. Call it "small-mindedness" or "discomfort with outsiders" or "unease with change". It all comes down to Them vs. Us, and for the Republican Party, despite its token-n* minstrel-show RNC Chairman Michael Steele, 'colored people' are Them, not Us.
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Barack Obama won over a majority of the electorate, but that's not good enuf. He could ram thru a program over Republican objections, but that's also not good enuf. Because he has to win over the people who hate him. It is his deepest psychological need. "See past race. See me. Accept me." If to win over present-day, seemingly intractable enemies he must pander to them, while pretending he's not selling out his principles, he will pander. The question becomes, does Obama HAVE any principles? Or is it all about him, about his deep need to be accepted — even loved — by everybody?
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It is in the nature of American politics that the only people who can put up with the sh* are profoundly damaged people who not merely crave attention but need to be loved. It's not their principles they need people to love. It's THEM. And if to be loved, they have to sell out their principles, that is, for all too many major politicians, a very small price to pay. For the rest of us, who vote for someone because of the principles the candidate claims to espouse, we are continually surprised that they don't stick to their principles and fite for them — and thus fite for us. We shouldn't be surprised when we are sold down the river — or in the case of the offshore-drilling issue, pushed out to sea. But we shouldn't tolerate it, either.
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George Bush was a likable, even adorable guy. But he allowed himself to be used by his masters to do terrible things, in our name. Barack Obama is also likable — because he needs to be liked — but we mustn't let him do terrible things in our name. NO to nuclear power; NO to offshore drilling unless there is NO possibility of accidents creating oil spills to coat seabirds, poison marine life, and foul beaches. Mr. Obama, we don't care about your psychological needs. WE care about principles, even if you do not. Do what we elected you to do. See a shrink to help you accept not being universally adored.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,386 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:43 PM

 
Single-Issue Legislation. Why on Earth was a change in college-loan and -grant procedures enacted in the same bill with healthcare "fixes"? This is utterly improper. No law should cover more than one subject, unless the two subjects cannot rationally be separated. Health insurance and college financing are easily separated. It is abusive to merge two such different matters into a single act of legislation, in order to force thru a less-popular measure by piggybacking it onto a more-popular measure. Congress should legislate each issue on its own merits.
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As to the substance of the college-financing reforms, it is reverse-privatization, predicated on the expectation of savings to the government from NOT letting private banks do college lending but from having the Government handle these loans itself. I have always been puzzled as to how we could possibly expect that an entity that needs to make a profit could lower costs as against an entity that does NOT need to make a profit. How can costs + profits come out to be lower than costs alone? It makes no sense, and privatization of government functions has proved, in many places, to be an outrageous transfer of wealth to the rich from the rest of us, that has given the public no benefit. In my state, New Jersey, a private water-and-sewer authority was paying HUGE salaries to dozens of people until the new Republican governor, Chris Christie, forced the CEO out. But Christie seems inconsistent about privatization. On the one hand, he recognized that in NJ it has gone very wrong; but on the other, he wants to see more privatization! Grow up. Our Department of Motor Vehicles was apparently privatized for a while (perhaps before I moved back to NJ from NYC), and it proved a DISASTER, of long waits and unresponsive "service". The DMV was returned to public control, and works brilliantly now. Privatization is just another scam by the rich to steal from the poor and middle class. It is NEVER reasonable. Government responsibilities must be performed by GOVERNMENT.

Kathleen Sebelius, Heroine. Yesterday, health-insurance companies announced their intention to ignore the intent of the new healthcare law and continue to refuse to cover children with pre-existing conditions until 2014, because of what they claimed was a defect in drafting of that provision. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius was having none of it. She sent what NBC News called a "strongly [harshly?] worded letter" to the health insurance trade association to tell the heads of the defiant companies in no uncertain terms that HHS would not let them get away with any such defiance, but would issue regulations making plain that such defiance is ILLEGAL. One day later, the health-insurance scumbags backed down. Good for her! I'd have had them flogged, but this achieves the same end, if without the satisfaction of beating the crap out of those enemies of society.
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Huh? The present Prime Minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, is appealing the results of an election his government presided over. Is he out of his mind? If his government couldn't run an election, why does al-Maliki think he should be allowed to run the nation's government in all things? Absurd. YOU held the election. If it wasn't clean, it's your fault, and you have no right to complain. Accept the results, and move on. That's what little-d democrats do, and a peaceful transfer of power is something Iraq very much needs. George Washington stunned the world in actually giving up power to John Adams after two terms as President. Let al-Maliki stun the world too by transferring power to a democratically elected successor with grace and good humor.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,386 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:42 PM

 
Soccer Stupidity in L.A. David Beckham, the highest-paid soccer player on Earth, sustained an injury during a period when he was on loan to a European team. That injury will very adversely impáct the Los Angeles Galaxy (team of Major League Soccer), from which he gets a preposterous amount of money for a player in a minor sport.

LA Galaxy is paying Beckham $32.5 million over five years. He is expected to make about $200 million more in endorsements and merchandise fees.

How stupid is the management of the L.A. Galaxy, to permit their biggest star to play for another team and get injured so badly in doing so that he can't play for the Galaxy?
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"Major League Soccer" is of course no such thing in the United States.* Soccer is a foreign sport that has been pushed by government and media for two generations, without ever becoming a major sport in the United States. I don't know why the U.S. and the various state and local governments in this country keep pushing the U.S. to become a soccer nation. I suppose media want another major sporting event with which to build ratings and charge high fees for advertising to men. But why would governments push soccer? This insistence on imposing soccer upon people who want no part of it bespeaks a hatred for the culture of the United States by our ruling elite, but where did their contempt for American culture come from, and how did it so thoroughly saturate government at all levels that almost every town and college campus has soccer fields today?
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Soccer is perhaps the stupidest game in the world, in not allowing players to use the things that made the human being human, capable of mastering the environment: hands.
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Soccer is intimately connected with massive violence and mass death all around the world.
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But still people who hate this country keep pushing soccer at us, year after year after decade. All for naught. Children are pressured into soccer teams, and stupid, anti-American people insist on calling housewives "soccer moms". But when all those kids who were intimidated into playing that supremely stupid, supremely foreign game grow up, they abandon soccer forever. They never attend a game of pro soccer or any school soccer that their kid is not playing in. They never watch soccer on television. They become Americans in their adulthood, after a childhood being brainwashed by our alien governments into becoming little pseudo-foreigners.
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I hope the L.A. Galaxy loses every cent of Beckham's remaining contract — and goes out of business — because Beckham has been rendered incapable of playing that stupid game on our shores. He's not happy here, anyway, because he's not a superstar here, because soccer is nothing here. He wants to go back to Europe. Let him buy an airplane ticket — he's certainly got the money for it — and good riddance to European rubbish. Now, if we could only load the entire leadership of MLS and the game of soccer itself onto that plane, we would be well rid of them all.
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* My area, Newark, NJ, will see the opening of the "New York" Red Bulls' new arena just across the Passaic River from Downtown Newark (in NJ, despite the NY in the team's name, just as both "New York" football teams, the Giants and Jets, actually play in NJ). The audience to fill (or is it only fractionally fill?) this beautiful new structure (see fotos on my Newark fotoblog at June 9, 2009 and February 13, 2010) will likely come mainly from immigrants in North Jersey (including Newark's very large Portuguese and Brazilian community) and NYC, not from people born in the United States.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,383 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Kicking Obama in the Balls by Kicking Biden in the Teeth. Smiley Joe Biden went to Israel and (other parts of) Palestine this week, and while he was all toothy grins, making nice to the Radical Zionists, the Israeli Government announced that it would build 1,600 more units of Jewish housing in the Palestinian West Bank, effectively telling Biden, and Obama, to go f* themselves. Smiley didn't realize that he was being stabbed in the back, because he was facing the Israeli Prime Minister, and the attack was launched by a junior henchman from behind. Mind you, the PM in no way disowned the action announced the very day Biden arrived, so while one Israeli official stabbed Biden in the back, the other kicked him in those pearly whites, and Smiley just kept on smiling.
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Surely Biden realized that he had been set up and betrayed in an extremely public way, but he kept on telling the world that there is no space between the United States and Israel, and pretending aloud that the Middle East's security is best served by leaving no doubt that the United States is 100% Zionist, and will never do anything to injure Israel in any regard, not even if Israel tells the U.S. very publicly to go f* itself a thousand times over.
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The Palestinians did what they had to do. They told Smiley that Israel is not serious about peace, and Smiley's 13,000-mile roundtrip was a complete and utter waste of time and fuel — and, tho the Palestinians probably did not make this point, a profligate contribution to "greenhouse gases". What the Palestinians really need to say, in so many words, is

Israel doesn't want peace. It wants Palestine.

There will never be peace until Israel is dissolved, and merged into a democratic, multiethnic and multireligious Unified or United Palestine, in which Jews have absolutely no special rights and which cannot be called "The Jewish State", because that is racist, theocratic, and factually wrong. It is grotesque for the United States, which is fiting a worldwide war against Islamic theocracy, to embrace and finance Jewish theocracy.
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So what will the U.S. do about the calculated, deliberate offense Israel visited upon Smiley Boy? Nothing.
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Why not?, you may wonder. Because the Israel Lobby is a potent Fifth Column in the United States that owns Congress lock, stock, and barrel. If Obama wants healthcare to pass, he cannot defy Israel, because Jews in Congress will vote to humiliate Obama and render him a hugely unpopular, one-term, failed President, that's why.
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The thought of a vote for Obamacare very soon worries Radical Zionists, because if Obama's version of universal healthcare passes any time soon, while the insult to Biden, Obama, and the people of the United States is fresh in people's minds, Obama might actually take revenge on Israel, by ENDING U.S. financial support of all kinds and distancing itself from the present Israeli Government, putting all kinds of space between the two countries — which might well bring down the Government that attacked Biden and Obama, instead of the other way around.
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So don't be surprised if the Zionist Lobby holds up a vote on healthcare for several weeks, to give time for stupid Americans, who remember nothing very long, to forget that Israel sprang a trap on the Vice President of the United States, lest a few Americans find their b ... guts, and teach Israel a badly needed lesson. We can be a very good friend, or a catastrophic enemy. You kick us in the teeth, we beat you to death. Iraq isn't the only country we can bomb mercilessly in two or three weeks of Shock and Awe, then invade, occupy, and fundamentally change. Believe it or not, Israel, there are limits to what we will tolerate.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,382 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:28 PM

 

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:46 PM