Script rewrite

Rumours of conservatism's death have been exaggerated

Also of The New York Times hardback, non-fiction bestseller list, numbers 1,3,4,5,7 are by conservatives. There are no liberal books in the top 15.  Glenn Beck is top of the paperback list. 

H/t Hotair.

I, "Birther"

'Birther' is the name given to someone who wants Presidential candidates to show that they are 'natural born citizens' as required under the Constitution. The name is meant to carry the connotation of 'Truther', someone who understands that the Truth about 9/11 is that Bush and Cheney bombed the Pentagon. In the same way "Climate Change Denier" carries a bad smell across from "Holocaust Denier."

Conservative opinion formers like NRO, Powerline, John Hawkins have reflexively dissociated themselves from the audacious idea that Obama is not a natural born citizen, but the tenor of rational commentary by the readers of these articles is that something smells bad. Perhaps the readers feel less peer pressure on this charged subject.

Now the esteemed Andrew McCarthy has revised his stance in a must-read article, "Suborned in the USA." The point of McCarthy's article is that Obama is acting like he's ineligible.

He is shown to have lied materially in his autobiography and to have produced a certification of live birth which means nothing.

He is asked to permit Hawaii to release a routine document often required for business throughout US life in order to show that he is a legitimate President under the Constitution - the certificate of live birth.

In McCain's case there was full discovery and Congressional hearings.

He spends serious money to avoid doing that and to avoid producing other elementary primary biographical documents. It seems he's covering something up, tho not necessarily his place of birth.

There's an anxiety to corral the issue as a tin-foil hat or racist fantasy - ie to make it unrespectable to require that the President show his birth certificate. Bill Maher in the LA Times:

it's so important that we the few, the proud, the reality-based attack this stuff before it has a chance to fester and spread. This isn't a case of Democrats versus Republicans. It's sentient beings versus the lizard people, and it is to them I offer this deal: I'll show you Obama's birth certificate when you show me Sarah Palin's high school diploma.

For this purpose it doesn't matter what Obama's politics are and I'd say the same were it Romney or Palin or Ron Paul. There's an incipient move in Congress to require this elementary qualifying documentation for future candidates. This matters for the 2012 election as well as the deeper Constitutional principle.

Hope, change, race - all irrelevant.

UPDATE: see also.

Down from slavery

The parallel lives of 2 mixed race Americans, Barack Obama and Booker T. Washington, show how degraded has become the once honourable cause of racial equality. President Obama be-clowned himself over the arrest of his Irish-Yoruba friend, Harvard professor "Skip" Gates, "the nation's most famous black scholar", "public intellectual".

Booker T. wrote 100 years ago:

There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs-partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.

Update h/t Powerline: Cambridge Police Profiling Still A Grim Reality for Harvard Faculty Assholes

Because it pays

Spread that wealth around:

"Mr Brown was the first black man ever to stand for Mayor of Alligator and it took Mr Obama’s election to galvanise him into action....After 30 years, I didn’t think an African-American would be able to be mayor. I didn’t think the position was open to me. When he won, I decided that I knew the changes that needed to be made here and I thought that I could make those changes.
"If we don’t look after our youth, what do we have? The population is dying out and I want more people here. I want better living conditions.
I just want the people to be comfortable. Small towns like this depend on government funding and that’s what we’re seeking.
"I mingle with a lot of the young kids here in the community because if you deal with the people and their problems you understand more what’s going on if you’re out with them.”
The town’s facilities were substandard, he said, gesturing towards the humble town hall, where a “No Loitering” sign is nailed next to the door. “There isn’t even a phone or a fax machine in there. How can we communicate with the outside world and ask for things?"

European anti-Americanism in the Age of Obama

Some thoughts on a Powerline post:

Writing as a Briton with American children who have both Jewish and 'aryan' German antecedents, I think that anti-Americanism is strongest in Germany (looking outside America, that is) and motivated by inferiority complex and unexpiated shame. The main attraction of Obama is that he is weakening America and apologizing for America's sheer rottenness, as he sees it. That brings America much closer to Germany. America's alleged war-crimes are totemic to Germans for the same reason. The mood music from Obama on the moral equivalence of Israel to the Palestinians is music to Teutons too.

Britons (I prefer that to 'Brits' which rhymes with 'shits') don't have a complex about this stuff. Once there may have been a slight inferiority complex, but we solved that when all we snaggle-toothed, snaggle-brained charmers took your most beautiful women. The BBC is a problem. It has it's own vast, childish, depraved agenda and over the decades that has infected the British middle-class.....but we have a robust press compared to America and even The Guardian is more heterogeneous than the New York Times. Moreover there's just too much mingling between the USA and the UK for false stereotypes to fool most of the people most of the time unless those caricatures pervade the US media as with Bush and Palin. The mother lode of anti-Americanism is to be found in America.

An example of the mingling is British accents on American ads when there's no British association. It's as tho British accents, even regional British accents, were just regional American accents. We're starting to speak the same sports language too as soccer sweeps America (I know, I know, it's hardly on tv, but in Houston, NYC and NJ where I've lived it's by far the most played sport). If the USA were playing England today, the USA would be favourite to win.

I also have high hopes for the reported friendship between our Queen and your First Lady. Despite Mrs Obama's affirmative action background, life changes people and the simple friendship of an older and younger mother can be a mighty force in this naughty world. Obama and Prince Philip next?

The French, I detect, are actually pro-American, but even more strongly pro-French and need to be assured of their own importance. Obama really should have dined with the Sarkozys at the top of the Eiffel Tower. There's never been a bigger bang for a diplomatic buck than that chance to butter up the President of France and Obama frivolously threw it away. Quel dommage!

We could take it country by country....Russia, India....but the rule is that most elites want a weaker America in order to raise their own self-esteem. Obama's really effective at that, so he's the man. As America switches from hyper-power to has-been and aborts and apologizes and borrows it's way out of history, so the anti-Americanism will become disdain and mockery. But Osama is right..men back the strong horse and Islam looks like that. My guess is that the Islamic power will not be Middle Eastern, but will be France or Germany or Russia. They won't be apologizing.

Palin post-resignation

Sarah Palin generates more emotion than any American politician. That's because it's hard to invent a character more threatening to modern liberals and their faux-conservative pets like Colin Powell. She's authentic, they're cosmetic; she's fertile, they're sterile; she's brave, they have bravado; she smiles, they sneer; she hunts, they snare; she has natural intelligence, they have a law degree; she believes in God, they believe in Obama. Look at her experience - from nothing to mayor to governor to vp nominee; mother of a soldier, mother of an unwed mother, mother of a Down's baby, grandmother, beauty queen, hoopster, hunter, journalist, wife, businesswoman, icon. She overshadows Obama even when he's meeting Putin - ok I'll sling in the obvious on auto-pilot: suppose Palin had said "President Putin".

The woman is a rebuke to everything that modern liberals cherish and they know it and loath it as they loath the truth about themselves. Their religion is growth through gratification and approval; she embodies duty, service and parental love; she's a follower of Christ, damn it. She believes that stuff. She has a servant's heart.

The most telling meme against her isn't that she's a quitter. Her whole life refutes that. It's her supposed inadequacy in the politics of the wider world. Well her understanding of economics is as complete as it needs to be:

"President Obama is growing government outrageously, and it's immoral and it's uneconomic, his plan that he tries to sell America. His plan to "put America on the right track" economically, incurring the debt that our nation is incurring, trillions of dollars that we're passing on to our kids, expecting them to pay off for us, is immoral and doesn't even make economic sense."

The rest is detail. Apart from getting elected Obama has shown himself mega-wrong about strategy, tactics and morality in everything he's touched - a clown as vp, a tax evader running tax, a racialist to the Supreme Court, even-handedness between murderers and democrats in Iran, meddling in Honduras, palling around with Chavez, equivocating between Israel and the demonic gangsters who ruin the Palestinians, showing weakness to Russia, undermining allies...it's endless. Obama is the worst President, but may be necessary to provoke America to throw off its sickness. Meanwhile Europe and Britain are turning right.

Let us now praise famous men

The be-medalled one on the right has never seen combat. The lapel-pinned one on the left, saluting like a pro, has never been in the military, but he has been a community organizer and commander-in-chief. He has views on lapel pins like the one he's wearing today at the D-Day celebrations:

Shortly after 9/11, particularly because as we're talking about the Iraq war, that became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security. I decided I won't wear that pin on my chest.

These folk are phonies of course, but there was one real person who wasn't invited, someone who did serve in WWII, Queen Elizabeth II. She wasn't invited because Sarkozy wanted the D-Day anniversary to be a Sarkozy-Obama event and Brown didn't want to be upstaged. Prince Charles was a last minute insertion as the British public became scandalized. This phoney-fest was memorable however. British veterans booed Gordon Brown:

The veterans booed him because it is thought that Downing Street encouraged Sarkozy to not invite the Queen so that he could get another photo-op with Obama. The Obama obsession seems evidenced by the Prime Mentalist’s renaming of ‘Omaha beach’ to ‘Obama beach'

Gordon Brown is a dead man walking in British politics and it's possible that today will be the last straw for the cowardly, callow, careerists who have been running my country for the last 12 years, so that they finally defenestrate him.

Scatalogical humour

Click on London-SE1 for a tableau in front of Tower Bridge and St Paul's:

Lies,damned lies,statistics and Hope and Change

In the last few days the yield on US government debt has risen dramatically. Lenders are reluctant. Today the decline in the value of the dollar accelerates as gold, oil and Sterling surge up. The US has 4-8-12 more years of Harvard Law School economics to endure, whereas the UK government will be replaced within a year by the Conservatives. So while the credit agencies put the UK on credit watch with negative implications but re-affirm the US as triple-A, the markets realize that in the UK there's hope for change whereas in the US there's Hope and Change. Some difference.

I've queried America's credit worthiness for a while, eg "A trillion here, a trillion there..." , but I'm not as polite as the Chinese:

Another global financial crisis triggered by a loss of confidence in the dollar may be inevitable unless the U.S. saves more, said Yu Yongding, a former Chinese central bank adviser.

It’s “very natural” for the world to be concerned about the U.S. government’s spending and planned record fiscal deficit, Yu said in e-mailed comments yesterday relating to a visit to Beijing by U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

The Obama administration aims to reduce the fiscal deficit to “roughly” 3 percent of gross domestic product from a projected 12.9 percent this year, Geithner reaffirmed today. The treasury secretary added that China’s investments in U.S. financial assets are very safe, and that the Obama administration is committed to a strong dollar.

It may be helpful if “Geithner can show us some arithmetic,” said Yu. “We need to know how the U.S. government can achieve this objective.”

The deficit is projected to reach $1.75 trillion in the year ending Sept. 30 from last year’s $455 billion shortfall, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

By happy chance today GM files for bankruptcy, but will be kept afloat with money borrowed from China to be repaid by our children to the advantage of the UAW and the disadvantage of Americans who work for Ford, Honda, Toyota.

Black is white

Would Obama have been ok with this from Hillary Clinton?

"I would hope that a wise Latina white woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white mixed race male who hasn't lived that life."

No.

Stack that with Sotomayor's perfunctory denial of equality under the law to whites in Ricci v. DeStefano and her tittering affirmation that policy is made in Appeal Courts and her leadership role in La Raza (The Race) and it seems that she's either a racist, a chauvinist or a pc hack or all of the above. Everyone knows that there's no way a conservative could overcome such a record to be appointed to The Supreme Court and no Senator who puts country before politics should approve this awful nomination.

Ironically liberals have their doubts too since no-one knows her view on Roe v. Wade. As a betting man I'm happy to take long odds against this nomination succeeding. Note that The Supreme Court will probably rule on Ricci v. Destefano before Senate hearings are complete. Whatever the ruling, it will include excoriating commentary upon the injustice of Sotomayor's judgement from judges who believe in equality before the law. Just one memorable phrase in that commentary can sink the nomination of this casual racist. Chief Justice Roberts was definitive in 2007:

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race

I do have mixed feelings since something tells me that Sotomayor, once appointed, might decide that Roe v. Wade was a mistake. She is Catholic after all and would make 6 Roman Candles out of the 9. But I nominate another Puerto Rican from the South Bronx, Judge José Cabranes, who wrote of Sotomayor's judgement in Ricci:

This per curiam opinion adopted in toto the reasoning of the District Court, without further elaboration or substantive comment, and thereby converted a lengthy, unpublished district court opinion, grappling with significant constitutional and statutory claims of first impression, into the law of this Circuit. It did so, moreover, in an opinion that lacks a clear statement of either the claims raised by the plaintiffs or the issues on appeal. Indeed, the opinion contains no reference whatsoever to the constitutional claims at he core of this case, and a casual reader of the opinion could be excused for wondering whether a learning disability played at least as much a role in this case as the alleged racial discrimination. This perfunctory disposition rests uneasily with the weighty issues presented by this appeal.

Altogether now sing "Fuhgeddaboudit, he ain't a broad." Well, this is my judgement:

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of gender is to stop discriminating on the basis of gender