Vocal Minority

Liberal Lie #6: Liberals Are for Free Speech, Conservatives Are Not: Google Censors "Atlas Shrugs"

Let’s be clear. The left is not for free speech, and never were. It is for unrestricted liberal speech. Period. I have yet to see a prominent liberal/Democrat defende the right to free speech of its ideological opponents. Quite the contrary, when it comes to the free speech of a conservative/Republican, you will likely find a liberal/Democrat acting to stifle that speech. Ask the demogogue NY Senator Chuck Schumer (D). In a recent interview during which he defended the Fairnerss Censorship Doctrine he incredulously compared conservative talk radio to pornography. Then, to add insult to injury, he accused conservatives of hypocrisy for wanting to restrict pornography, but not conservative talk radio.

To say that those whose thinking is as twisted as Chuck Schumer are extremely dangerous is an understatement. But what about those censors of free speech who are unelected and unaccountable? I speak specifically of the internationally popular search engine Google.

In the past the owners of Google have been known to block references to websites whose political positions are in opposition to theirs. Now they have done it again with the conservative/libertarian site “Atlas Shrugs.” Stogie at the blog Saberpoint suspects it’s retribution against AS blog owner Pamela Gellar, who has been attempting to get to the bottom of unanswered questions pertaining to Barack Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate:

Geller has attempted to get an explanation from Google but has been treated shabbily by Google staff. They say that the primary owners of Google are liberal Democrats and big supporters of Barack Obama. Apparently, the censorship of AS is due to the fact that Google doesn’t want any publicity or discussions over Obama’s birth certificate. Geller was an early critic of Obama for refusing to supply an official copy of his birth certificate. She was also the primary investigator of the forged document (a Certificate of Live Birth from Hawaii) supplied by a liberal website.

Democrats can be very Machiavellian, as I have said many times on this site. They are not for “freedom of speech” per se, they are for freedom of liberal speech. Those with something to hide will find ways to hide it. And Google has.

This kind of soft fascism has been seen before in prior decades. President Woodrow Wilson had the Post Office refuse to deliver newsletters and magazines that did not support his policies. He even had people arrested and jailed for failing to support them. The details are covered in Jonah Goldberg’s book “Liberal Fascism.”

Welcome to Obama’s America.

Indeed. I’m reminded by reader “LoudLion,” (who’s sitting next to me right now) that Obama has already stifled free speech by kicking potentially rabble-rousing reporters off of his airplanes, has avoided taking questions from Fox News and other non-Obama-worshiping news stations during press conferences, and routinely tried to silence opponents by calling every criticism racist.

Liberal Hypocrisy: The Obamas Send Their Kids to Sidwell While D.C.'s Public Schools Continue to Suck

So, our president-elect and his wife have decided to enroll their children in the Sidwell Friends School. This would make perfect sense, since this school is the alma mater of the children of many Washington ultra-elite machers. But what’s wrong with the D.C. public schools. Taxpayers fork over $13,000 per pupil—the third-highest amount per pupil in the country; as the liberals keep telling us, “it’s for the children.” Right, Nancy Pelosi? But in reality, Washington D.C. public schools are among the worst and most dangerous in the country. How could that be??? Ask the teachers unions and D.C. administrators.

Jonah Goldberg writes today about the Obamas and the failed D.C. schools:

The true school scandal
By Jonah Goldberg

… In Washington, we have these arguments every time a rich Democrat sends his kids to private schools, which is very often. The real issue is why the public schools are unacceptable to pretty much anyone, liberal or conservative, who has other options. Maybe in the rich suburbs of New York or Los Angeles, wealthy opponents of school choice run less risk of being labeled hypocrites; they can skip the pricey private schools because their public campuses aren’t hellholes.

But most Washington public schools are hellholes. So parents here—including the first family—find hypocrisy a small price to pay for fulfilling their parental obligations.

According to data compiled by the Washington Post in 2007, of the 100 largest school districts in the country, D.C. ranks third in spending for each student, around $13,000 a pupil, but last in spending on instruction. More than half of every dollar of education spending goes to the salaries of administrators. Test scores are abysmal; the campuses are often unsafe.

Michelle Rhee, D.C.’s heroic school chancellor, in her 17 months on the job has already made meaningful improvements. But that’s grading on an enormous curve. The Post recently reported that on observing a bad teacher in a classroom, Rhee complained to the principal. “Would you put your grandchild in that class?” she asked.

“If that’s the standard,” replied the defensive principal, “we don’t have any effective teachers in my school.”

So if Obama and other politicians don’t want to send their kids to schools where even the principals have such views, that’s no scandal. The scandal is that these politicians tolerate such awful schools at all. For anyone.

The main reason politicians adopt a policy of malign neglect: teachers unions, arguably the single worst mainstream institution in our country today. No group has a stronger or better-organized stranglehold on a political party than they do. No group is more committed to putting ideological blather and self-interest before the public good.

Rhee has been pushing a new contract that would provide merit pay to successful teachers. The system is voluntary: Individual teachers can stay in the current system that rewards mere seniority or opt to join a parallel system that pays for superior performance. Many talented teachers would love the opportunity.

Alas, the national teachers unions insist that linking pay to results is an outrageous attack on the integrity of public schools. They have insisted that D.C. teachers not even be allowed to vote on the contract.

The Democratic Party continues to tolerate this sort of thing because public school teachers continue to be reliably liberal voters. And their unions cut big checks.

Obama, however, bragged about being different during his campaign. He declared himself independent from teachers unions and boasted his support for Rhee. But his recent appointment of Stanford professor—and teachers union apologist—Linda Darling-Hammond to head his education transition team is seen by many as a sign that reformers like Rhee can expect little support from the new White House.

That last part is exactly right. We heard Obama constantly promise that his administration would not be beholden to the “special interests.” But there is probably no more influential special interest than the teachers unions.

Toward the beginning of his article, Goldberg says that he doesn’t fault the Obamas for choosing the Sidwell Friends school for their girls because their primary obligation is to do right by their children.

With this sentiment, I must respectfully but adamantly disagree. The bottom line is that liberal Democrats—including Obama—endorse policies that have made public schools among the least effective and most dangerous in the nation. Obama knows that D.C. schools are among the worst in the country. And it is unequivocally his and his party’s fault. So the fact that he is not sending their children to crappy schools that he helped bring about is hypocrisy and worse. Sorry, Mr. Goldberg. I don’t give Mr. Obama a pass. He’s a “Do as I say, not as I do” Democrat, just like most Democrats in Washington.

So, where does the “it’s for the children” and “we care about the little guy” part come in? As long as big money for your party is at stake, it doesn’t.

Washington D.C. is the microcosm of what the entire U.S. could turn into now that we have a Democrat president and a Democrat majority in both houses of Congress. Think I’m kidding? D.C. is one of the highly concentrated Democrat areas of the country. And it’s a dump. Same with Detroit, New Orleans, etc. Is this the hope and change the American people really wanted when they pulled the lever for the Golden Calf.

Incidentally, the residents of Washington D.C. are far from innocent. Election after election they vote overwhelmingly Democrat. And their schools suck. Serves them right. Ya think maybe one day District residents would wise up? Let the suckers keep paying $13,000 per pupil. As long as it’s not my money.

I’m not saying the Republicans’ hands are completely clean in this; Bush’s well-intentioned No Child Left Behind wasn’t successful. But you know why? Because the Republican president was acting like a Democrat! There was nothing conservative or Republican about NCLB! Why the hell do you think Bush bring Ted Kennedy on board to help him with it?

The ironic thing is that Democrats should have loved Bush for NCLB. But for the past eight years to be a Democrat has meant to hate Bush and oppose everything he strives for (The Democrats’ treasonous behavior during the War on Terror is even a better example of this.)

So spare me the “hope and change” garbage. More like just another Democrat giving his own children gold, while supporting policies that give the rest of the country’s children crap. Wake up, people.

Liberal Media Bias: Jodi Kantor, the NY Times' Head Obama Cheerleader, Whitewashes Transition Co-Chair's Failed Background

With every day, the folks at The New York Times show they are nothing less than whores for Barack Obama. During the presidential election they behaved like an unpaid PR firm for the Obama campaign, and even after thr election of their candidate, they still throw objectivity out the window and continue to be his compliant media lapdog.

Don Surber discusses the sordid past of Valerie Jarrett, the co-chair of Obama’s transition team, which even the Chicago Tribune covered. But one of the Obama Times’ biggest cheerleaders, Jodi Kantor, completely whitewashes her, as Surber informs us:

Barack Obama looks for management advice a woman under whose management a housing project “flunked a federal inspection with a score of 11 points out of a possible 100.”

Valerie Jarrett is the co-chairman of the Obama transition team. I guess that means she does the vetting. She’s from Chicago. Born in Iran. Stanford. University of Michigan Law and connected.

Bill Daily, son of Hizzoner and brother of the mayor, told the Chicago Tribune: “I can’t think of another female on everybody’s list for a corporate board seat.”

The Trib noted: “She has already begun to step down from an array of civic boards and from corporate directorships that have brought her more than $350,000 a year in cash and benefits.”

She also is CEO of Habitat Co., which manages luxury properties and HUD complexes.

Noted the Tribune:

Things didn’t work out as well when Habitat stepped in as manager of two federally subsidized housing projects with a long history of problems.

But Grove Parc Plaza on the South Side and Lawndale Restoration on the West Side fell into deeper disrepair on the company’s watch.

In 2006, five years after Habitat became manager at Grove Parc, the 504-unit development flunked a federal inspection with a score of 11 points out of a possible 100. An official at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development told the Tribune the complex was in “deplorable” condition, citing code violations and resident complaints about roaches, rats and bad plumbing …

… Similar problems surfaced at Lawndale Restoration, after Habitat became co-manager of the 1,200-unit complex in 1999. In 2004, city inspectors found 1,800 violations, and a judge ruled several of the buildings were uninhabitable and beyond repair.

Hope. Change. Rats.

People, this is the person Obama has chosen to co-chair his freaking transition team. And the lying Obama Times couldn’t care less! Even if they do know Jarret’s loser past—and it’s highly unlikely that they dont—they don’t want you to know. Their job is to make sure you love Barack Obama and Democrats, and that you continue to hate Republicans.

In a follow-up post on the shoddy NY Times coverage, Surber reports:

If anyone thought that the press’ glossing over of the Friends of Barack ended once the election was over, think again.

From the people who passed over the race-baiting, anti-American sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who dismissed Bill Ayers as an old hippie and who ignored the trial of Tony Rezko comes Clean Up on Aisle Obama II, comes a profile of another slumlord FOB.

Today’s episode centers on the puff piece the New York Times published on Valerie Jarrett, the money man for Obama. She headed Habitat Co.

The New York Times version: [written by Kantor]

A protégée of Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago, Ms. Jarrett served as his planning commissioner, ran a real estate company, the Habitat Company — whose management of public housing projects has come under scrutiny with Ms. Jarrett’s rise [Oh, OK. That sounds innocuous enough. Never mind.]  — and sits on too many boards to count. [Oooo, how impressive!] She is an expert in urban affairs [Really? If she's considered an expert in unban affairs, I'd to see what thinks she really sucks at!], particularly housing and transportation, in an administration expected to lavish more money and attention on cities than its predecessors.

Surber then reaches the completely understandable conclusion:

If it had been Sarah Palin’s money man, this would have broke in September.

Bingo! If this had been Sarah Palin’s campaign or administration, what a field day the Times would have had destroying her.

Incidentally, Jodi Kantor has come under scrutiny for her blatant liberal bias before - even from her own side. On Monday, Clay Waters at TimesWatch.org writes:

Time Magazine journalist Mark Halperin thinks his colleagues were guilty of “extreme pro-Obama coverage” during the 2008 campaign, and the New York Times came in for particularly detailed criticism. Politico’s Alexander Burns quoted Halperin at a Politico conference at the University of Southern California on Friday:

It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war,” Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. “It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage.”

Halperin, who maintains Time’s political site “The Page,” cited two New York Times articles as examples of the divergent coverage of the two candidates.

“The example that I use, at the end of the campaign, was the two profiles that The New York Times ran of the potential first ladies,” Halperin said. “The story about Cindy McCain was vicious. It looked for every negative thing they could find about her and it case her in an extraordinarily negative light. It didn’t talk about her work, for instance, as a mother for her children, and they cherry-picked every negative thing that’s ever been written about her.”

The story about Michelle Obama, by contrast, was “like a front-page endorsement of what a great person Michelle Obama is,” according to Halperin.

Times Watch also caught the Times’ double standard, and in particular noted the slant of reporter Jodi Kantor, who co-authored the Michelle Obama profile with Michael Powell and the hostile McCain profile with David Halbfinger.

When not targeting Cindy McCain with rehashings of old negative tales, Kantor also went trolling Facebook for teenagers willing to dish on Cindy McCain’s parenting skills, and even reheated its own discredited allegations about a John McCain affair.

By contrast, Kantor lauded Michelle Obama in a June 2008 profile that portrayed criticism of Barack’s wife as either hurtful or out of line. Her controversial campaign comment, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country,” which suggested for many both a lack of pride in America and an unpleasant self-absorption, was dismissed by the Times as a mere “rhetorical stumble,” with the implication that the media overplayed it (the Times certainly didn’t).

This is unbelievable. Jodi Kantor, you are a disgrace to your profession and to your country. But we all know she isn’t going to get as much as of a hand slap for her journalistic malpractice, and liberal Obama-worshiping NY Times readers will continue going about their lives thinking that Barack Obama and his associations are perfection personified and that anyone related to John McCain is evil, stupid, and corrupt.

What a lying pathetic worthless piece of trash this paper has become. I wouldn’t even line my cats’ litter box with it.

Bottom line: If you read the NY Times, you are not being informed; you are being lied to and filled with left-wing crap. Don’t give me that “Fox News isn’t really fair and balanced” garbage. This is shameless liberal bias run amok.

Stop patronizing this disgusting excuse for a newspaper and let their stock shares continue to go down the toilet. The country will be a better place if the NY Times ever goes under.

Liberal Stupid-Ass Comment of the Day

Here’s a new segment. Hope you like it. There’s probably gonna be a lot of them!

First quote out of the gate is a doozy:

“War Machine.” The best song on the new CD, it starts with a slow, lumbering, tank-attack beat and quickly builds to atom-bomb intensity, with Angus shredding his guitar as if it was the U.S. Constitution during the Iraq War.

Classy. (By the way, shouldn't it be “as if it were”?)

The burning question “Who said this and in what context?” is answered by James Taranto in yesterday’s instalment of “Best of the Web Today”:

As you might have guessed, that’s from a review of the new AC/DC CD.

Well, that figures. More specifically, the review appeared in the Entertainment section of yesterday’s Minneapolis Star-Tribune and was penned by Chris Riemenschneider.

Congratulations, Chris. Rock on! You sure know your Constitutional Law and American History. (That’s why they made you the music reviewer.)

Rite Books: Larry Schweikart & Michael Medved Take On Liberal Lies About America

”We put too much faith in conventional wisdom.
Insist on the truth or you will never be free.” - me

Rush Limbaugh has said that our most expensive commodity is ignorance. And the cost of that ignorance could not be better illustrated than by the fact that the American people have just voted an America-despising terrorist-coddling Marxist-socialist into the White House.

Well, enough of that. ‘Tis the season of truth, my friends. The season of myth debunking. The season of setting the records straight, once and for all.

I've recently treated myself to two books that looked really fantastic and really important. Having read the intro and skimmed some of the chapters, I was not disappointed.

The first book is 48 Liberal Lies About American History (That You Probably Learned in School), by professor Larry Schweikart. Schweikart is also the author of a history textbook called A Patriot's History of the United States, whose title is presumably meant to counter Howard Zinn's widely used anti-American textbook A People's History of the United States.

The best thing about this book is that it tackles a wide range of topics. It was designed so you don't have to read straight from beginning to end. You can scan the table of contents and just read those chapters you're interested in. The chapters aren't even ordered chronologically. In other words, it seems to be set up like a reference book, giving overviews rather than really digging deep into each topic.

Because of the number of issues, 48 can only devote a few pages to each lie, otherwise the 320-page book would be much larger. The benefit of this is that each chapter contains just enough information for one to absorb and memorize. On the other hand, I found myself hungering for more information in some chapters, such as the one addressing the JFK assassination, as well as the one discussing Reagan, Gorbachev, and the ending of the Cold War.

That is why I was pleasantly surprised to learn of last week's release of the second book: The 10 Big Lies about America: Combatting Distructive Distortions about our Nation by Seattle-based radio host Michael Medved. These lies include “America was founded on Genocide against Native Americans” (Big Lie #1), “The Founders Intended a Secular, Not Christian, Nation” (Big Lie #3), and “America Is an Imperialist Nation and a Constant Threat to World Peace” (Big Lie #7).

With 288 pages to play with, Medved has a lot more space to delve into the those big myths we’re always hearing liberals spread or teach our children in school. Where possible, Medved explains where the myths originated, and why, and methodically debunks them point by point.

The chapter about the genocide of American Indians is particularly apropos, with Columbus Day a few weeks back and Thanksgiving just two days away. Reminiscing about his school-day Thanksgiving pageants, Medved laments how liberals have totally distorted the meaning of this holiday and transformed it into a club with which to beat the American people into a state of shame and self-hatred. Medved suggests liberals actually ask some American Indians what they think about Thanksgiving, because there are tribes that celebrate it as well, the way it was originally intended: as a way to thank God/Nature/etc. for the gifts we are given. In short, today’s American Indians don’t mourn Thanksgiving, so why do we? Plus, virtually every nation of the world has a history of cruelty and barbarism that dwarfs ours, but you never see the French mourning Bastille Day or the Mexicans kicking themselves over Cinco de Mayo.

Medved—a Rite Jew, by the way—has a degree from Yale in history and also went to Yale Law.

I highly recommend these books to anyone. Get them for yourself. Get them for a friend or relative. Get them for Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, Grandma Lee’s birthday, whatever. Time to get the word out. I’m so tired of liberal/Democrat liars who have been trying to tear down this, the greatest nation on God’s green earth!

Ways the Left Has Screwed Up My Country Today: California Courts Thwart the Will of the People

Nowhere is the result-oriented, to-hell-with-principle nature of liberalism more visible than when a rogue heavily liberal activist court trumps the will of the people. In the past couple weeks there have been two such examples in the state of California.

First, Prop 8, which would keep marriage in the state as between one man and one woman. That proposition passed on election day, to the chagrin of homosexuals and same-sex-marriage proponents nationwide.

Whatever one's stance on Prop 8, one can't deny that Californians have spoken through the democratic process. Isn't that what liberals/Democrats always want? Not when the result of such a democratic process is the opposite of what liberals want. When Barack Obama was elected president on November 4, liberals/Democrats celebrated the democratic process and declared "The People have spoken." But when liberals don't get their way, such as the passing of Prop 8, somehow liberals couldn't care less about The People speaking or the democratic process; in come the lawsuits and in comes the ever-compliant activist liberal judiciary.

I am going to play Switzerland and not take a side in the same-sex-marriage issue. I have many gay friends with significant others and understand their side. But I have also heard and considered the arguments against same-sex marriage. In any case, there are two things that really hurt the anti-Prop 8 cause. One is the vitriolic over-the-top response of same-sex-marriage proponents across the nation. Hateful rallies calling blacks the n-word, physically harming people going to or from church, and even crashing church services is the opposite of tolerant. The second is the overreaching by the activist liberal judiciary. Right now the California Supreme Court is reviewing legal challenges to Prop 8, and the nation will be watching.

If the Supreme Court overturns the will of the people of California, it might be a victory for gays, but a defeat for the American democratic system.

The next issue is in many ways more outrageous and even life-threatening: Recently liberal justices on both the California Supreme Court and Federal Supreme Court have vetoed Presidential and Congressional Nationial Security policies, claiming that sonar being used in U.S. Navy training exercises in coastal waters off of Southern California might endanger marine mammals.

You can't make this stuff up.

Stuart Taylor, writing for the National Journal, supplies a list of other ways activist liberal justices have acted the way the California Supreme Court has. It's not pretty.

• In 2003, Breyer, Ginsburg, Souter, and Stevens not only joined now-retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in upholding the University of Michigan Law School's racial preferences in admissions but also voted in dissent to uphold the undergraduate school's even more rigid, 150-point "selection index." That system penalized all white and Asian applicants because of their race by effectively subtracting a full point from their high school grade point averages. For example, a poor white applicant with a straight-A average was automatically classified as having worse grades than a rich black applicant with a B-plus average. And that was fine with the liberal justices.

• In June, the same four joined sometime-liberal Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion barring the death penalty in the rape of an 8-year-old (or any other) child, in part on the ground that there is a "national consensus against capital punishment for the crime of child rape." This "consensus" was a sham, as the dissent demonstrated; as both Obama and McCain (not to mention public opinion polls) confirmed by immediately denouncing the decision; and as Congress had shown in 2006 by authorizing the death penalty for child rapists under military law.

• A federal Appeals Court in California, including the same Stephen Reinhardt who voted against the Navy in the sonar case, ruled in 2002 that it was unconstitutional for students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in schools unless the phrase "under God" was deleted. The Supreme Court's more liberal members -- who knew that the Appellate decision was supported by their own (badly reasoned) precedents -- ducked the merits and dismissed the lawsuit on technical grounds in 2004.

• In 1994, over Republican opposition, the Senate confirmed President Clinton's elevation of H. Lee Sarokin to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit. Sarokin, a self-described "flaming liberal" District judge known for eloquent opinions, had previously been excoriated by the 3rd Circuit for "judicial usurpation of power" and for ignoring "fundamental concepts of due process." Among the now-retired Sarokin's greatest hits had been a 1991 ruling that the Morristown, N.J., public library could not remove a homeless man whose offensive conduct and foul odor were driving other patrons and librarians away.

So much for the democratic process, right liberals?

Most Americans Get Failing Grade in Civics

OK, pop quiz, people. An organization called the Intercollegiate Studies Institute gave this civics test to 2,508 Americans of all ages, income, education, and political affiliation. The test is “33 questions designed to measure knowledge of America’s founding principles, political history, international relations, and market economy. While the questions vary in difficulty, most test basic knowledge. Six are borrowed from U.S. government naturalization exams that test knowledge expected of all new American citizens. Nine are taken from the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests that the U.S. Department of Education uses to assess high school seniors. Three are drawn from an “American History 101” exam posted online by www.InfoPlease.com. Two were developed especially for this survey and the rest were drawn from ISI’s previous civic literacy tests.”

The results? Unfortunately, Americans did terribly, with over 70% failing (59.9% or below). The overall average score was 49%. And if you think that’s pathetic, less than 1% of Americans got 90% or better). It made very little difference how much schooling one had. And, most depressingly, Conservatives/Republicans—supposedly the gung-ho “my country, love it or leave it” party—did only slightly better than liberals/Democrats.

Incidentally, your humble blogger took the test on-line and answered 25 out of 33 correctly — 75.76%. Not fantastic, but considerably higher than the average score. Not bad consideringly the last time I took an American history or government course was junior year of high school.

Here is an abridged version of the conclusions gathered from the test scores, but a warning: If you plan on trying the test yourself, take it now before reading on, as there are some spoilers below.

Americans Fail the Test of Civic Literacy

The results reveal that Americans are alarmingly uninformed about our Constitution, the basic functions of our government, the key texts of our national history, and economic principles.

• Liberals score 49%; conservatives score 48%. Republicans score 52%; Democrats score 45%. [I'm crying.]

• Fewer than half of all Americans can name all three branches of government, a minimal requirement for understanding America’s constitutional system.

• Less than half can name all three branches of the government.

• Only 21% know that the phrase “government of the people, by the people, for the people” comes from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

• Although Congress has voted twice in the last eight years to approve foreign wars, only 53% know that the power to declare war belongs to Congress. Almost 40% incorrectly believe it belongs to the president. [This one I got wrong; I thought the president had the authority to declare war, but Congress’ power was only limited to funding it.]

• Only 55% know that Congress shares authority over U.S. foreign policy with the president. Almost a quarter incorrectly believe Congress shares this power with the United Nations. [No surprise. That’s probably what John Kerry thinks too.]

• Only 27% know the Bill of Rights expressly prohibits establishing an official religion for the United States.

• Less than one in five know that the phrase “a wall of separation” between church and state comes from a letter by Thomas Jefferson. Almost half incorrectly believe it can be found in the Constitution. [This is the least surprising statistic, but still depressing. I have heard extremely intelligent, well-educated adults say that separation of church and state is in the Constitution.]

College Adds Little to Civic Knowledge

Earning a college degree does little to increase knowledge of America’s history, key texts, and institutions. The average score among those who ended their formal education with a bachelor’s degree is 57%, or an “F.” That is only 13 percentage points higher than the average score among those who ended their formal education with a high school diploma.

• Only 24% of college graduates know the First Amendment prohibits establishing an official religion for the United States.

The average score on the American civic literacy exam for those who ended their formal education with a bachelor’s degree is 57%, or an “F.” That is only 13 percentage points higher than the average score earned by those who hold high school, but not college, diplomas.

College graduates in all age brackets—except Baby Boomers (ages 45 to 64)—typically earn an “F” on the exam. Baby Boomers who ended their formal education with a bachelor’s degree score an average of 61%, or a “D-.”

On average, Americans who ended their formal education when they graduated from high school correctly answer 14.4 of the 33 questions on the exam. Those who ended their formal education when they graduated from college typically answer 18.9 of the questions correctly. An American with a four-year college degree, in other words, typically gains only about one correct answer for each year in college.

Only one in five college graduates earns a “C” or better on the exam, and only 42% of those with graduate degrees earn a “C” or better. Thirty-two percent of those with graduate degrees fail.

Television—Including TV News—Dumbs America Down

ISI examined whether other factors add to or subtract from civic literacy and how they compare with the impact of college. The survey revealed that in today’s technological age, all else remaining equal, a person’s test score drops in proportion to the time he or she spends using certain types of passive electronic media. Talking on the phone, watching owned or rented movies, and monitoring TV news broadcasts and documentaries diminish a respondent’s civic literacy.

In contrast to these negative influences, the civic knowledge gained from the inexpensive combination of engaging in frequent conversations about public affairs, reading about current events and history, and participating in more involved civic activities is greater than the gain from an expensive bachelor’s degree alone.

• Over twice as many people knew [Paula Abdul] was a judge on American Idol as know that the phrase “government of the people, by the people, for the people” comes from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. [56% to 21%]

What College Graduates Don’t Know About America

By the time an American earns a bachelor’s degree, it is highly unlikely that he or she will have a solid command of the founding and Civil War eras, core constitutional principles, and market economics. Pre-college education tends to increase knowledge of themes from twentieth-century American history at the expense of economics and pre-twentieth-century themes that tend to be the foundation of much subsequent political discourse. Colleges begin to reverse this trend, but not enough to close significant gaps in these crucial categories of civic knowledge.

• Only 54% can correctly identify a basic description of the free enterprise system, in which all Americans participate.

ADDITIONAL FINDING: Elected Officials Score Lower than the General Public

Officeholders typically have less civic knowledge than the general public. On average, they score 44%, five percentage points lower than non-officeholders.

Thirty percent of elected officials do not know that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are the inalienable rights referred to in the Declaration of Independence.

Among the 2,508 respondents, 164 say they have been elected to a government office at least once. This sub-sample of officeholders yields a startling result: elected officials score lower than the general public. Those who have held elective office earn an average score of 44% on the civic literacy test, which is five percentage points lower than the average score of 49% for those who have never been elected. It would be most interesting to explore whether this statistically significant result is maintained across larger samples of elected officials.

The elected officeholders come from the ranks of Democrats (40%), Republicans (31%), Independents (21%), and those who say they belong to no party or indicate no affiliation (8%). None were asked to specify what office they held, so the proportion in which they held local, state, or federal positions is unknown.

In each of the following areas, for example, officeholders do more poorly than non-officeholders:

• Seventy-nine percent of those who have been elected to government office do not know the Bill of Rights expressly prohibits establishing an official religion for the U.S.

• Thirty percent do not know that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are the inalienable rights referred to in the Declaration of Independence.

• Twenty-seven percent cannot name even one right or freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment.

• Forty-three percent do not know what the Electoral College does. One in five thinks it either “trains those aspiring for higher political office” or “was established to supervise the first televised presidential debates.”

• Fifty-four percent do not know the Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. Thirty-nine percent think that power belongs to the president, and 10% think it belongs to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

• Only 32% can properly define the free enterprise system, and only 41% can identify business profit as “revenue minus expenses.”

Rush Limbaugh occasionally says that America’s most expensive commodity is ignorance. And when it comes to basic civics, we seem to have a surplus of it.

P.S. My stepdad just took it and got 27 out of 33 (81.82%)

Al Gore's Right-Hand Man James Hansen Caught Fixing Climate Data AGAIN

Does anybody remember the freezing October we just had? Record freezing temperatures worldwide. Record snowfall worldwide. Kinda hard to forget.

So, what’s to make of the recent breathless statement of Al Gore’s consiglieri James Hansen of NASA? Hansen has announced that October 2008 was the hottest on record.

Unless you’re a zombie man-made global warming believer, then your Bravo Sierra detector (as Tammy Bruce calls it) should be blaring deafeningly loud right about now.

Bottom line: October 2008 was pretty damn cold for the world population. So how did Hansen come to the conclusion that it was the hottest on record? Simple: He fixed the data! More specifically, Hansen re-used September readings from thermometers in Russia for the October data. Nice, huh?

These revelations were reported in this past Sunday’s U.K. Telegraph (on the Opinion page! Why???):

The world has never seen such freezing heat

By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 16/11/2008

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

Are you taking this in? In reality, it was the 70th hottest—i.e., the 44th coldest—in 114 years? Record snowfall records worldwide? That’s not a blunder; that’s fixing the data. Big time. No way is this an innocent mistake.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs—run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious “hockey stick” graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new “hotspot” in the Arctic—in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen’s institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)

This is un-freaking-believable. Even criminal. Yet, I still don’t expect anybody in this Alice in Wonderland world of ours to come forward and say, “Hmm. Ya know what? Al Gore’s little scientist friend is a fraud. He’s cooked the data to suit his own agenda. And don’t tell me Al Gore doesn’t know about this. The man has made seven figures off this man-made global warming scam; he has to know what his boy at NASA is up to.

In addition, as the Telegraph article goes on to say, this is not the first time Hansen has been caught fixing the climate data! As Christopher Horner (author of the book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism) reported last September that the very same Anthony Watts caught NASA fixing the data by placing thermometers “… in Arizona parking lots, overhanging black asphalt pads, near cell towers and hot-air blowing air conditioner exhausts or next to trash burn barrels, … setting one just away from a chimney directly above a Weber barbecue grill …”

Horner goes on to explain:

This embarrassment came amid NASA also having to correct its data since the year 2000, which has been used to support many of the global warming alarmists’ “money claims”, such as Al Gore’s line that 9 of the 10 hottest years on record occurred in the past decade.

Well, no. We now know that this is false and that NASA has corrected the record to reflect that the warmest year in the U.S. was 1934, 4 of the 10 warmest here occurred in the 1930s, 3 during the 1990s, and one each in the 1920s, 1950s and this decade. That this claim has now been debunked, like most every other statement of substance in Mr. Gore’s movie, will no doubt be disregarded by activist educators using the propagandistic movie in school curricula.

Regardless, as a result of all of the controversy a clearly not amused National Climatic Data Center suddenly pulled the actual locations of the temperature measuring stations from publicly available resources! Mr. Watts took them to task. As of this writing, the locations are again publicly available.

This brazen act nonetheless prompted me to file a request under the Freedom of Information Act seeking the internal deliberations behind such apparent trickery. NCDC has yet to respond, but watch this space, for I also sought internal discussion of a related, potential scandal picked up by climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr. That is NCDC’s continuing decision to not make photos of particular Historical Climate Network sites, that are in their possession, publicly available (see Pielke’s blog post, “NOAA Cover Up Of US Historical Climate Network Surface Station Photographs”).

First of all, why the heck is none of this ever reported in the U.S. mainstream media? Never mind; I already know the answer: The same reason they didn’t report on Barack Obama’s sordid connections until after he safely won the election.

And second of all, why does James Hansen still have a job? Not once, but twice he has been caught fixing the data in order to further his own radical anti-capitalist agenda. He should at least have his doctoral degree revoked.

People, the Global Warming hoax is worse than pissing on your leg and telling you that it’s raining. It’s telling you that it’s raining without even pissing on your leg. It’s a lie. A L-I-E. And our President-elect and VP-elect (and, God help us, the failed Republican presidential candidate too) believe in man-made warming completely.

Discussing the Telegraph article, Dennis Prager bet on his show the other day that in his lifetime Al Gore and James Hansen would end up written in history as buffoons. I really hope he’s right!

Will Obama Be Able to Tame Osama? Osama Doesn't Think So

With just a couple months before George W. Bush leaves office, it is pretty safe to say he has failed to deliver on a promise made shortly after the September 11 attacks: that he will find Osama bin Laden, dead or alive.

Ever since then, we have heard the Left taunt and criticize him, asking mockingly, “Where’s Osama bin Laden???” Countless politicians, as well as Hollywood and media types have also accused Bush of “taking his eye off the ball,” claiming that starting the war in Iraq has distracted us from that single goal.

To their credit, Bush and his defenders have clarified that finding OBL was only one of our goals in the War on “Terror.” Had Adolf Hitler been captured early in World War II, it wouldn’t have necessarily meant that the Nazis would have immediately surrendered. Hitler might have been the head of the snake, but the snake would have been strong enough to wreak havoc. So the Allies went after all the Nazis and killed as many as they could. It was only after that, when Hitler was at the point of desparation, that he took his own life.

And so it is with al Qaeda. Even though you’d never hear it from a Democrat politician or the mainstream media, the coalition under Bush has been extremely successful taking out high-ups in the al Qaeda machine. In fact, just today it was reported that a senior al Qaeda commander was killed in a missile strike in Pakistan.

Enter President-elect Obama. His rhetoric about al Qaeda and OBL is as hawkish as Bush’s. He has said he would capture and kill OBL and that he would "stamp out al Qaeda once and for all."

What’s Obama going to do differently than Bush? He’s already promised to talk without preconditions with the terror of Iran A’jad. What’s he going to do with OBL, invite him to tea?

Ralph Peters, in yesterday’s NY Post, said he doesn’t buy Obama’s OBL rhetoric anymore than he evidently did Bush’s:

Osama may be found and killed tomorrow or on the day after the inauguration—or never. But if we do nail him, it won’t be because of presidential posturing.

Bush has done all he could to finish off the al Qaeda leader (for Bush, it was personal; for Obama, it’s just political). There’s no new magic formula waiting to be applied: This effort is still about skill, persistence and luck. […]

We’d all love to see Osama lying dead in the dust. But, please, Mr. President-elect: Don’t make claims that, if unfulfilled, allow our enemies to declare victory.

That’s doubly applicable as regards Obama’s promise to “stamp out al Qaeda once and for all.” He might as well claim he’ll eliminate crime or drug abuse. […]

The campaign’s over. President-elect Obama needs to stop making campaign promises that invite a perception of failure if unfulfilled. A trumpeted commitment to eliminate al Qaeda means that if a single terrorist cell survives, al Qaeda gets to declare victory.

Win first; brag later.

And now, sure enough, just today a new video has just come out in which OBL’s right-hand man al-Zawahiri refers to Obama as a “house slave/Negro” and the “direct opposite of honorable black Americans.”

Looks like Obama is being tested even before he takes office.

Merv at Prairie Pundit has an interesting take on the new al Qaeda video:

Obviously Obama did not represent the hope and change Zawahiri had in mind. Zawahiri has always been a religious bigot and you see that in his discussion about Obama's religion. But, he adds a racist element because of what he sees as Obama's apostasy of rejecting Islam. Ultimately his hatred is directed toward anyone who does not accept his weird religious beliefs even if they are Muslims. The device of referring to Malcolm X may have been intended to play some mind games with Obama who, as I recall, makes some reference to him in his books.

By treating Obama like he does Bush he elevates both to leaders of his enemy. It may occur to some on the left that Bush was not the problem after all. That would be the beginning of their enlightenment about our enemy.

Personally, I don’t think al Qaeda’s disdainful treatment of Obama will make the left any more sympathetic of Bush; on the contrary, the left will probably blame Bush for setting the tone in which al Qaeda is addressing Obama. But we’ll see.

Indeed, it might be even worse for Obama than Bush for a reason virtually unnoticed by the MSM. The terror watch site Debka released a statement over the weekend that al Qaeda has been ordered to carry out a strike on a U.S. interest “bigger than 9/11.”

So what, right? We’ve had OBL threaten terror strikes before and they were never carried through. But this part of the Debka announcement is the most frightening:

The day after the new president’s election, al Qaeda issued a little-noticed statement declaring Barack Obama a murtad, i.e. an apostate whose betrayal of Islam is judged the most heinous. Believers have the duty to execute a murtad unlike other non-believers whose death sentence is optional.

A clearly annoyed Chicago Ray laments:

So now America has placed a Muslim Apostate in it’s highest office and has now made the White House an official target for destruction and it’s main occupant more of a target than ever before by our devout enemies in the Islamic world that the left thinks George Bush invented.

So as predicted America and or its interests around the world just asked 66,760,924 times for Al Qaeda to attack, and as asked for it appears they will get their wish and according to most people in the know it’s just a matter of what day they planned.

Maybe Americans in the meantime can question the MSM for why they would ignore a statement from Al Qaeda the day after the election calling for the execution of Obama.

Exactly. In other words, in the thunderstorm called the War on “Terror,” the American people have just voted to put the biggest lightning rod right in the White House.

Like I said, it’s going to be a fun four years.

Leftist Indoctrination in College to Blame for Young People Voting Overwhelmingly for Obama (P. Kengor)

No one should be surprised that college campuses—one of the most steadfast bastions of leftism in the country—were overtly pro-Obama zones. It should also come as no surprise that such an environment resulted in young people voting overwhelmingly for Obama over McCain. (To be sure, that was the main goal of the pro-Obama professorate and campus activists.)

And they succeeded: MSNBC exit polls showed that voters aged 18-29 (approximately 20% of all voters) pulled the lever for Obama over McCain 66% to 32%.

Author and professor Paul Kengor calls out universities for fostering this unbalanced pro-Obama and anti-McCain environment. His main thesis is that most college students, who were born after the falling of the Berlin Wall, have been deliberately shielded by their leftist professors from learning the evils of communism.

How the Academic Left Elected Obama
By Paul Kengor

These youth live and learn on college campuses where “diversity” and “tolerance” and “multiculturalism”—bogus buzzwords that apply only to ethnic, gender, and sexual diversity, not genuine diversity of ideas—reign supreme. Racial diversity is at the crux of this academic trinity, the source and summit of the faith. It is the molten, golden calf, where much of the intelligentsia and their disciples gather to worship. Political correctness has supplanted traditional religion.

Thus, when the university community was presented with Barack Obama, a charismatic, impressive, seemingly excellent Democratic presidential candidate—who happened to be African-American—the reaction was nearly reverential, bordering on idolatry. The good senator’s bracing radical associations—enough to deny any other American a security clearance—and which were not coincidental to a man ranked the most leftist member of the most leftist Senate in U.S. history, didn’t matter to the academic world. Quite the contrary, those who dared to point out these associations—FoxNews, talk-radio, the McCain-Palin ticket—were deemed loathsome Neanderthals deserving of being burned in effigy from the nearest dorm.

That brings me to another factor in this milieu: McCain-Palin. Neither John McCain nor Sarah Palin resonated with this gang. Given the prevailing orthodoxy in the academic asylum, John McCain’s moving personal narrative of military valor had little impact on the college crowd. That McCain was tortured by communists for six years didn’t matter much to these people—the same individuals who endeavor to boot ROTC from their campuses. And as for Sarah Palin, she represented the worst of pariahs at the faculty club: an evangelical so consistently, comically pro-life that she chose to do what 90 percent of women don’t do when they’re informed of a prenatally diagnosed Down syndrome child—she delivered the baby. The feminine Palin is seen as an ideological ogre—an eagerly acceptable target for a torrent of bigotry by the open-minded professoriate and its acolytes.

This is the atmosphere in which these young people are being educated. That’s what they’re learning. Equally crucial to this election, however, is what college students are not learning:

As I noted earlier, Americans don’t care about Barack Obama’s radical past, including his links to the likes of Bill Ayers, Frank Marshall Davis, and Saul Alinsky, because of the failure of our educational system to teach the lessons of the Cold War and horrors of communism. This is especially true of higher education, where the leftist worldview is so extreme and so upside down that America’s professors share a hearty contempt not for communism but for anti-communism.

Think about this: The current generation of college students was born after the fall of the Berlin Wall. These modern products of elite education are not Reagan babies. They were not inspired by the Westminster Address of June 1982, by the Evil Empire speech of March 1983, by Reagan meeting with Pope John Paul II to topple communism in Eastern Europe throughout the 1980s, or by Reagan in front of the Brandenburg Gate in 1987, demanding that Mikhail Gorbachev tear down that cement tombstone to human freedom. No, today’s freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors, who voted for the first time on November 4, 2008, were born after these historic events. They’ve received their education on communism from their professors, which means they’ve received either no education at all on the unparalleled slaughter formally known as Marxism-Leninism, or, to the contrary, they’ve heard only dark, dire lectures about the malevolence of anti-communism—of McCarthyism.

A deliciously fitting—albeit depressing—symbol of this came at the very moment that Obama’s coronation was announced by the networks. A FoxNews camera-crew was outside the White House, where a contingent of hysterical students from George Washington University hopped up and down in sheer ecstasy. This was a most appropriate image, in light of the fact that it was such voters who delivered the presidency to Obama. I was struck, however, by the conspicuous presence of a beaming student wearing a red t-shirt with a giant Soviet hammer and sickle. No doubt, the young revolutionary was thrilling at the spectacle, awe-struck amid this sea of what his mentor, Vladimir Lenin, considered “useful idiots”—i.e., naïve liberals incapable of realizing when they are supporting the communists’ intentions.

Ironically, the dupes of, say, the 1950s, would have recognized the young Bolshevik for who he was, but I seriously doubt that the typical student in that crowd had any idea of the true loyalties of their comrade, or sensed that they were celebrating arm-in-arm with a Marxist: Hammer-and-sickle? What’s that?

What’s more, I would bet a $100 that if some disgruntled conservative within the throng yelled out, “Hey, that guy is a communist!” one of the well-trained university brethren would have quickly denounced the conservative—the anti-communist—as the real villain in the mix. They have been carefully trained to view Joe McCarthy as more insidious than Joe Stalin.

This is an abbreviated way of explaining why Barack Obama’s communist connections didn’t matter in this election, and how the Ivory Tower paved the road to victory. We won the Cold War but seem to have lost the long-term, crucial ideological struggle at home. We lost not on the battlefield but in the classroom. On November 4, it finally came back to bite us, and at a time (economically and politically) that couldn’t be worse.

Finally, I should add that I’ve received emails in the last couple of weeks from distraught conservative parents saddened to learn that their college-student children voted for Obama. They shouldn’t be surprised; sadly, these parents have unwittingly paid for precisely this. In the vast majority of the nation’s colleges, this is what their children are learning at a cost of the parents’ lifetime savings. I’m reminded of the statement from the late atheist philosopher Richard Rorty, who said that the job of professors like him was “to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own” and “escape the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.”

This has been the personal mission of many professors for decades now—in flagrant violation of the scandalously fraudulent mission statements of the colleges where they teach. They’ve been enormously successful. The left’s gradual takeover of academia is complete—the Long March a stunning success. Behold: the presidency of the United States of America.

The fruits of the left’s dogged work were on display on November 4, 2008. And now, alas, to paraphrase the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, America’s chickens have come home to roost.

Frightening, but unfortunately true.

Vladimir Lenin once said: Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.

The leftist professorate that dominate our universities understand that quite well.

Eastern Europe Rejects Communism, Nearly 20 Years Later America Votes for It

... Bet no one saw that one coming!

Today is the 19th anniversary of an event that the American left would have you forget, if you ever knew it at all. This day in 1989 began the "Velvet Revolution" in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia). Here is an account of the Velvet Revolution from the website of Radio Prague:

It all started on November 17, 1989—fifty years to the day that Czech students had held a demonstration to protest the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. On this anniversary, students in the capital city of Prague were again protesting an oppressive regime.

The protest began as a legal rally to commemorate the death of Jan Opletal, but turned instead into a demonstration demanding democratic reforms. Riot police stopped the students (who were making their way from the Czech National Cemetery at Vyšehrad to Wenceslas Square) halfway in their march, in Narodní třída. After a stand-off in which the students offered flowers to the riot police and showed no resistance, the police bagan beating the young demonstrators with night sticks. In all, at least 167 people were injured. One student was reportedly beaten to death, and—although this was later proved false —this rumor served to crystallize support for the students and their demands among the general public. In a severe blow to the communists’ morale, a number of workers’ unions immediately joined the students’ cause. […]

Massive demonstrations of almost 750,000 people at Letna Park in Prague on November 25 and 26, and the general strike on the 27th were devastating for the communist regime. Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec was forced to hold talks with the Civic Forum, which was led by still- dissident (soon to be President) Václav Havel. The Civic Forum presented a list of political demands at their second meeting with Adamec, who agreed to form a new coalition government, and to delete three articles—guaranteeing a leading role in political life for the Czechoslovak Communist Party and for the National Front, and mandating Marxist-Leninist education—from the Constitution. These amendments were unanimously approved by the communist parliament the next day, on November 29, 1989.

Well, the old saying that ‘if you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile’ held true, and the communist capitulation led to increased demands on the part of the demonstrators. A new government was formed by Marian Calfa; it included just nine members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (several of whom actively cooperated with the Civic Forum); two members of the Czechoslovak Socialist Party; two members of the Czechoslovak People’s Party; and seven ministers with no party affiliation—all of latter were Civic Forum or Public Against Violence activists.

This new government was named by Czechoslovak President Gustav Husak on December 10. The same evening, he went on television to announce his resignation, and the Civic Forum cancelled a general strike which had been scheduled for the next day.

At the 19th joint session of the two houses of the Federal Assembly, Alexandr Dubček—who had led the ill-fated Prague Spring movement in the 1960’s—was elected Speaker of the Federal Assembly. One day later, the parliament elected the Civic Forum’s leader, Václav Havel, President of Czechoslovakia.

Despite their many shortcomings—not the least of which were political inexperience and serious time pressures—the new government and parliament were able to fill in many of the most gaping gaps in the Czechoslovak legal framework—concentrating in particular on the areas of human rights and freedoms, private ownership, and business law. They were also able to lay the framework for the first free elections to be held in Czechoslovakia in more than 40 years.

The results of the 1990 local and parliamentary elections in Czechoslovakia, which were likened at the time to a referendum which posed the question “Communism, yes or no?” showed a sweeping victory for the soon to be extinct Civic Forum (OF) in the Czech Republic, and for the Public Against Violence (VPN) in Slovakia. In other words, “Communism, no thanks.”

The turnout for the local elections was more than 73 percent, and for Parliamentary elections more than 96 percent of the population went to the polls!

Hmm, a country’s own people turning against its tyrannical government? Citizens going to the polls at rates dwarfing even American voter participation? And liberals barely celebrating any of it? That sounds vaguely familiar … Oh, yeah: Iraq.

By the way, there’s a reason the former countries of the Soviet bloc, and Czech Republic in particular, are vehemently pro-American, pro-Bush, and pro-Iraq War: They know what it’s like to exist under totalitarianism and understand the sacrifices need to end it.

This was one of the most amazing events of the 20th century, yet American students undoubtedly know nothing about it. Yet, yours truly raises a hand in solidarity with the former Czechoslovakia, a place I’ve visited personally a number of times in the 90’s.

At the time no one could have imagined that Communism was going to fall so quickly in Eastern and Central Europe. Just like, nearly 20 years later, no one could have imagined the American people would elect a president whose ideology and policies are just as hard-line economy-depressing and speech-suppressing as Uncle Joe Stalin loved.

Who knows, maybe after four years of President Obama, Americans will be prepared to have a Velvet Revolution of their own!

P.S. For anyone who doesn’t mind reading subtitles, I highly recommend a heartwarming Czech movie called Kolya, which is set against the background of the Velvet Revolution. The 1996 movie, which won an Oscar for best foreign film that year, is about a Prague bachelor Franta (Frank) who agrees to have a “fake” marriage with a Russian woman so she can get papers to leave Communist Europe. She takes off across the Iron Curtain forever, leaving Franta the involuntary guardian of her 5-year-old son Kolya, neither of them speaking the other’s language. By the end of the film, the Velvet Revolution has started and the mother is able to return without penalty to Prague and retrieve her son, who by then has grown quite attached to Franta and vice versa.

Even those not into the political background of the movie will be touched by the main story line. In fact, I think I’m going to pop in the video right now …

Liberal Lie #12: Liberals Are Tolerant and Open-Minded; Conservatives are Not

Quite frequently the much-touted but never witnessed tolerance of liberals comes up on Dennis Prager’s show. When it does, he wonders what would suffer more damage: a car in a heavily red state with an Obama bumper sticker, or one in a heavily blue state with a McCain sticker. Of course, Prager already knows the answer to his own question, but still I wish someone would actually conduct that experiment, just to make it official.

Well, it seems someone did conduct a similar experiment: A suburban Chicago eighth grader went to school before the election wearing a “McCain Girl” shirt, and then the next day with an “Obama Girl” shirt.

John Kass at the Chicago Tribune (good for them) reports the results the following two-day article:

Tolerance fails T-shirt test
John Kass
November 13, 2008

As the media keeps gushing on about how America has finally adopted tolerance as the great virtue, and that we’re all united now, let’s consider the Brave Catherine Vogt Experiment.

Catherine Vogt, 14, is an Illinois 8th grader, the daughter of a liberal mom and a conservative dad. She wanted to conduct an experiment in political tolerance and diversity of opinion at her school in the liberal suburb of Oak Park.

She noticed that fellow students at Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama for president. His campaign kept preaching “inclusion,” and she decided to see how included she could be.

So just before the election, Catherine consulted with her history teacher, then bravely wore a unique T-shirt to school and recorded the comments of teachers and students in her journal. The T-shirt bore the simple yet quite subversive words drawn with a red marker:

“McCain Girl.” […]

“People were upset. But they started saying things, calling me very stupid, telling me my shirt was stupid and I shouldn’t be wearing it,” Catherine said.

Then it got worse.

“One person told me to go die. It was a lot of dying. A lot of comments about how I should be killed,” Catherine said, of the tolerance in Oak Park.

But students weren’t the only ones surprised that she wore a shirt supporting McCain.

“In one class, I had one teacher say she will not judge me for my choice, but that she was surprised that I supported McCain,” Catherine said. […]

One student suggested that she be put up on a cross for her political beliefs.

“He said, ‘You should be crucifixed.’ It was kind of funny because, I was like, don’t you mean ‘crucified?’” Catherine said.

Other entries in her notebook involved suggestions by classmates that she be “burned with her shirt on” for “being a filthy-rich Republican.”

Some said that because she supported McCain, by extension she supported a plan by deranged skinheads to kill Obama before the election. And I thought such politicized logic was confined to American newsrooms. Yet Catherine refused to argue with her peers. She didn’t want to jeopardize her experiment.

“I couldn’t show people really what it was for. I really kind of wanted to laugh because they had no idea what I was doing,” she said.

Only a few times did anyone say anything remotely positive about her McCain shirt. One girl pulled her aside in a corner, out of earshot of other students, and whispered, “I really like your shirt.”

That’s when you know America is truly supportive of diversity of opinion, when children must whisper for fear of being ostracized, heckled and crucifixed.

The next day, in part 2 of The Brave Catherine Vogt Experiment, she wore another T-shirt, this one with “Obama Girl” written in blue. And an amazing thing happened.

Catherine wasn’t very stupid anymore. She grew brains.

“People liked my shirt. They said things like my brain had come back, and I had put the right shirt on today,” Catherine said.

Some students accused her of playing both sides. [...]

Catherine never told us which candidate she would have voted for if she weren’t an 8th grader. But she said she learned what it was like to be in the minority.

“Just being on the outside, how it felt, it was not fun at all,” she said.

Don’t ever feel as if you must conform, Catherine. Being on the outside isn’t so bad. Trust me.

Girl’s lesson: Bias, like shirts, picked out at home
John Kass
November 14, 2008

… Since many liberal journalists live in Oak Park, I expect to receive many snarky reviews. My crime? I dared to illustrate, through the actions of a brave 8th-grade girl, that even high-minded liberal communities can be intolerant, no matter how many times parents gush on about “diversity” at their cocktail parties.

So much for the audacity of hope.

But it’s also true that if Catherine lived in a beet-red community and wore an Obama shirt, she’d get a similar negative, intolerant and ugly reaction. And certainly some Republican children would outrage their grammar/lit teachers by wanting her crucifixed as well. [I disagree, Mr. Kass, and so would Dennis Prager. But until we actually conduct that experiment in a predominantly white area of the Bible Belt, we can’t prove it.] […]

At school Thursday in Ms. Cassin-Pountney’s class, they discussed Catherine’s experiment and my column. […]

There were some rough patches on Thursday. The phone rang off the hook at home. She had her big tests and that tryout. And her parents—liberal Democratic mom and conservative Republican dad—had to run down to school to stave off an impromptu imposition of the Fairness Doctrine.

“Some parents were upset that one teacher remarked about her shirt. And other parents were upset that the experiment was conducted in the first place, and didn’t go through ‘proper channels,’” said Catherine’s mom, Pamela Webster.

“So we rushed down to school to say we were backing the principal and all the teachers and not to make a big thing of it,” she said. “It was just crazy. There was no crime committed here.”

Not even a thought crime? […]

Just what I was thinking.

Van Helsing at Moonbattery says:

When liberals gloat sanctimoniously about “inclusion,” what they mean is, we will all be included in the Obamaborg — no exceptions permitted.

Exactly. Bunch of mindless sheep.

Liberal Media Bias: Suddenly MSM Notices an Obama-Ayres Connection

From the “No sh*t, Sherlock” department: The mainstream media suddenly interested that William Ayres and Barack Obama are just a tad more than “friend in the neighborhood.”

Before the election, the mainstream media wanted nothing to do with radical Marxist William Ayres. Barack Obama scrambled for months trying to distance himself from the domestic-terrorist-turned-education-professor and the MSM let him get away with it. During the campaign, Obama said Ayres was “just a guy in my neighborhood.” This copout was good enough for the same media that, within hours of John McCain’s seleciton of Sarah Palin as his running mate, headed to Wasilla, Alaska to dig the dirt on the conservative Republican pro-life female governor. Yet, for some reason we ignorant rubes aren’t supposed to question, the MSM had no interest in the fact that Obama was close friends with this bomb-setting, cop-killing, American-flag-stomping bastard for 13 years, served on two boards with him, had dinner at his and his terrorist wife’s home and vice versa, and let his children play with his.

For months before the election, Obama and the compliant media had us think that the Obama-Ayres connection with either an exaggeration or even a concoction made of whole cloth by racist Republicans trying to derail Obama’s campaign.

Now that election is over and Barack Obama has been elected by 62 million people, now the MSM is suddenly interested in the insignificant, Republican-created bogeyman William Ayres. In this past week, Ayres appeared on Good Morning America. At least interviewer Chris Cuomo didn’t give a totally softball interview; there were time he held Ayres’ feet to the fire.

Next, Ayres has an updated version of his 2001 book "Fugitive Days" coming out, compliments of the Chicago Tribune.

Hmm, why didn’t the Tribune—or any other paper for that matter—report on Ayres’ new book until after Obama was elected? For the same reason the LA Times still hasn’t released the video of Obama at Israel-hating terrorism-supporter Rashid Khalidi’s 2003 party: To have actually done their job by informing the American people of their chosen candidate would have probably lost Obama the election.

If that isn’t journalistic malpractice, I don’t know what is.

By the way, in the new Afterword in Ayres’ book, hacknowledges Obama as a “family friend.”

You can judge a person by the company she keeps. Obama has been friends for years with the likes of William Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Jeremiah Wright, Michael Pfleger, Tony Rezko, and Rashid Khalidi. That says more than enough to me.

I don’t know how Obama supporters can look themselves in the mirror.

More info on Ayres latest GMA appearance and book re-release can be found at:

Brutally Honest

Michelle Malkin

Ron Radosh @ Pajamas Media

Jammie Wearing Fool

Liberal Media Bias: Obama Media Continues Pushing Lie That We're in the Worst Ecomonic Crisis Ever

The media template, both before and after the election of Barack Obama, is that the U.S. is witnessing an unprecedented economic catastrophe. But the Great One Mark Levin reiterated on his radio show last night, virtually every problem the economy is experiencing right now—mortgage foreclosures, bailouts, bank failures, company layoffs—can be directly connected to Democrats: From Obama to Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Schmuck Schumer, etc., etc. 

You wouldn't know this fact listening to the mainstream media. During the campaign, Barack Obama was very skilled in deflecting any blame for the very crisis Obama promises to be able to fix. The mainstream media, the self-admitted shills for the Obama campaign and upcoming presidency, also helped provide cover for Obama and projecting the economic crisis onto Bush and Republican policies.

Not buying the lie that Obama is inheriting a Bush-created economic crisis, black conserva-tarian Larry Elder puts things in their proper context:

Take the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Many Americans were alive when FDR took over in 1933. At the low point of the Great Depression, 25 percent of adults were unemployed, including nearly 50 percent of urban black adults. Economist David Wheelock, of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, says that by 1934, almost half of urban homes with mortgages were in default, and 7.3 percent of housing structures had been foreclosed. Today 6.4 percent of mortgages are delinquent, 2.75 percent are in the foreclosure process, and 0.6 percent of all housing units are bank-owned.

What about when Ronald Reagan took over the presidency in 1981? He inherited an economy with unemployment at 7.5 percent (versus 6.5 percent today); annualized inflation at 13.5 percent (versus today’s about 4 percent annualized — through the first three quarters — and dropping rapidly); prime interest rates peaking at 21.5 percent (versus 4 today); and conventional mortgage interest rates of 15 percent (versus 6 today). Reagan inherited a presidency in full Cold War mode; the Islamic country of Iran just released 52 hostages held for 444 days; the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan; and the communists had infiltrated many countries in South America (our Western Hemisphere). Because of outgoing President Jimmy Carter’s price controls and the imposition of oil company “windfall profits” taxes, Americans waited for hours in gas lines.

Raising taxes on the so-called rich is bad. Giving welfare “tax credits” to those who pay no federal income taxes is bad. “Bailing” out homeowners and lenders who made ill-advised decisions is bad. Rewarding the Big Three domestic auto companies from decades of poor management is bad. Obama wants to do some or all of this — and more.

What will the pro-Obama media say about all of this? “Hey, come on, after the evil/incompetent/dictatorial Bush, anything is better, right?” “Look, what do you expect? Things are as bad as they’ve ever been, so give Obama a break!”

It’s going to be a long four years.

Indeed it is. Granted, this is not the best of economic times in this country or the world, but as Elder has cogently argued. It’s far from the worst.

And President Barack Obama is going to make it worse!

Liberal Rage: Gay S.F. Radio Host Fired for Profanity-Laced Tirade Wishing "Joe the Plumber" Dead

[H/T NewsBusters] The San Francisco Examiner reports that on November 1, a gay radio host, Charles “Karel” Bouley, was fired from his KGO/San Francisco show following an obscenity-laced tirade about how he wanted Joe the Plumber dead. Bouley made these remarks during a station news break. His microphone was supposed to be turned off, but the engineer apparently forgot to, so listeners heard his rant just loud enough behind the news broadcast.

Listen for yourself (The remarks start about 55 seconds in and lasts only 10 seconds or so.):

I have to admit to being torn in this case. Clearly, I don’t agree with this guy’s politics, but I might be willing to give him a pass. It was an honest mistake. We’ve all said outrageous things, albeit not near a live mic. But Bouley was technically off the air and his rent-an-engineer forgot to turn it off. I think if he made an apology on the air—a sincere one, not that non-apology apology like “I’m sorry if anyone was offended”—he should keep his job. As a free speech advocate I believe this would be the right choice.

A more interesting question than “Should Bouley have been fired?” is “Did he get fired because of his profanity or because of his sentiment?” In other words, had Bouley simply said “I want Joe the Plumber dead,” period, would he still have his job?

Profiles in Liberal Ignorance, Hate, and Intolerance: Joy Behar (Again!)

Joy Behar continues to be a fount of liberal ignorance, hate, intolerance, hypocrisy, and chutzpah all rolled into one. And for that, she gets to be featured in this category twice in two months!

The joyless yenta last graced the pages of this modest blog on October 23 when, for no apparent reason, she called Rush Limbaugh a “terrorist” to an audience of applauding liberals on “The View.”

This time the joyless yenta has gotten her feathers ruffled over Limbaugh calling Barack Obama and his newly chosen Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel “good old-fashioned Chicago thugs.” Behar demanded that Rush apologize for those supposedly unsubstantiated and mean-spirited comments.

It’s a pretty safe bet to say that irony is wasted on the likes of Joy Behar. As Justin McCarthy at NewsBusters recounts:

Joy Behar, under her own standards, ought to issue several apologies. Beyond the Rush Limbaugh “terrorist” smear, Behar also made such outrageous charges as labeling the Bush administration “liars and murderers,” accused Republican presidential candidates of attending “Klan meetings,” and called former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld a “Hitler type.”

Yes, she does have a lot to apologize for if she abided by her own standards. But, as Dennis Prager often says: Being a liberal means never having to say you’re sorry.

Incidentally, does Rush have any basis for calling Obama and Emanuel “Chicago thugs”? Let’s look at a well-known event in Emanuel’s past when he served under Bill Clinton. As Rush explains on Monday’s show:

On the night of the Clinton election Rahm Emanuel was so angry at the president’s enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, Rahm Emanuel grabbed a steak knife, and he began rattling off a list of betrayers. And as he listed their names he shouted, ‘Dead! Dead! Dead!’ and he plunged the steak knife into the table after every name.

Sounds like a thug to me.

Now, one may argue that Barack Obama might not himself act like a thug, but that’s because he outsources his thug tactics to various flying monkeys.

Like Rahm Emanuel.

Like those Black Panthers blocking doors in Philadelphia on Election Day.

Like those speech suppressors, er, “Truth Squad,” in Missouri who tried to censor McCain campaign ads.

In other words, like a Mafia boss who doesn’t himself get his hands dirty, Obama has a whole team of lackeys to do his dirty work for him. Quite clever.

And this is what we have to look forward to over the next four years. Are you as excited as I am!?

But wait, there’s more. With regard to Rush’s use of the term “Chicago thug” to describe Barack Obama, turns out the joke is on Behar. Y’see, Rush was not the first to use that attribution. Bill Clinton was, as Rush explained:

I must confess, ladies and gentlemen, thinking of them as “Chicago thugs” was not my idea. Normally, I’m a very original guy, as you people know. I come up with my own stuff, my own observations, but I must admit that I stole the “Chicago thug” business. Let me give you a quote from The Politico, August 26th of this year: “Bill Clinton believes the Democratic nominee, far from practicing a unifying, transformational brand of politics, has the political instincts of ‘a Chicago thug,’ one longtime associate said.

“Clinton has told people that Obama allowed surrogates to try to suppress Hispanic turnout in the Nevada caucuses, and played ‘the race card’ in reverse against the Clintons in South Carolina and other states.” So when I saw that story on the Politico by John Harris on August 26th, that’s the first time I made the mental association of Obama and “Chicago thug.”

So, looks like not only does Rush not need to apologize for anything, but Behar should apologize to him for libeling him on national TV. In addition, maybe Behar will ask Bill Clinton to apologize for the thug comment too.

And maybe pigs will fly outa my tuchas.

Liberal Media Bias: MSNBC Falls for Palin Africa/NAFTA Hoax -- But So Does Fox News

Even after losing the election, VP candidate Sarah Palin has continued to be in the news for various reasons. Among them was the claim that Palin is so stupid that she thought Africa was a continent, not a country. She was also said to not be able to name the three NAFTA countries. The source: “Unnamed former McCain advisers.”

Makes sense, right? After all, Sarah Palin is your typical simple-minded, non-Ivy-League-educated, baby-making, hick conservative Republican, right? She was John McCain’s middle finger to the American people, right libs?

Well, turns out the whole story is false, a hoax, a scam.

Only this time, one of the guilty parties is Fox News. Carl Cameron, whose producer was the source’s contact, reported the false information. Maybe Cameron was trying to keep up with FNC’s “fair and balanced” moniker by doing a negative piece on Palin. Who knows?

But then David Shuster at MSNBC did a “Breaking News” story on it. Then Olbermann had a field day with it, not to mention the blogosphere.

Now enter Martin Eisenstadt. Turns out he’s the “unnamed former McCain adviser,” who admitted on his website that he leaker. Mr. Eisenstadt is supposedly employed by the “Warren G. Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy” (which doesn’t exist; who would name an institute after a failed president who served for only two-years?). But no one at MSNBC or FOX picked that up.

On his site, Eisenstadt brags:

By now you’ve all heard the Fox News report last week that “unnamed” former McCain advisers leaked that Sarah Palin was confused about whether Africa was a continent, and which countries were in NAFTA. I was perfectly happy staying under the radar as an anonymous source for Fox News‘ Carl Cameron, but now that Palin has accused accusers of being “unprofessional…jerks…cowards… taking things out of context, and then tried to spread something on national news” and begun to cast doubt on the Fox News report, maybe she’s right to a certain extent. For those of us on the McCain campaign who thought that she acted like a rogue diva and lost John the election, maybe we DO have a responsibility to come out in public. But Sarah … careful what you ask for: some of us may have more to reveal.

This guy is completely unashamed. On the contrary, he’s proud of the smear he perpetuated that he put one over on Fox (And you know what? They deserve it). Oh, what a contribution to the human race. Eisenstadt’s parents must be proud.

Rick Moran blogging at the American Thinker site makes an important point:

Sarah Palin is not stupid despite every effort to portray her as such in the media. This is the same tactic used by the left for 60 years against Republicans and one would think they would tire of it.

That’s exactly right; there’s the conventional wisdom among the rabid left Palin-hating media that any plausible juicy tidbit about her must be true. Which is why it’s a shame that even Fox fell for the hoax; they should have known better.

Tony George, also blogging at AT, makes the following interesting observstion:

The “Palin doesn’t know Africa is a continent” turns out to be a lie. But it should remind us that the anti-war left were in fact the ones who didn’t understand basic geography of Africa.

In his State of the Union speech in January of 2003, President Bush talked about aspects of Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs and stated that the Iraqi dictator had “sought quantities of uranium in Africa.” Somehow, this generated a boondogle investigation by Joe Wilson to the country of Niger the following summer, after which he pronounced in a July 2003 op-ed piece in the NYT that Bush was wrong about an Iraq-Africa uranium connection.

That a former US Ambassador could possibly provide an assessment about an entire continent based on a visit to one country on that huge land mass is mind-boggling.

What I find mind-boggling is how the media—even Fox News in this case—has gone so so down into the gutter, and will probably get not even a wrist slap for this journalistic malpractice.

Article of Note: Obama's Economic Plan Dangerously Wrong (J. Stossel)

In his latest article, John Stossel cogently presents both theoretical and historical arguments as to why the Obama’s government-centered economic solutions are dangerously wrong:

… The infatuated chattering classes now demand “action” on the economy. They use positive words like “bold steps.” The insufferable New York Times suggests the choice is “between a big-bang strategy of pressing aggressively on multiple fronts versus a more pragmatic, step-by-step approach .... “There is endless talk about how FDR ended the Great Depression and how Obama will apply similar “stimulus.”

There’s also been talk about how Obama is like JFK (e.g. here and here or Ronald Reagan (e.g., here and here .) Oh yeah, when it comes to raising taxes and cutting and running from every international conflict, JFK and Reagan are the two presidents that come to my mind!

Sorry, John, you may continue:

Please. FDR’s “bold” moves didn’t end the Depression. They prolonged it by discouraging capital investment. Hoover and Roosevelt turned what might have been a brief downturn into 10 years of double-digit unemployment.

Now Obama says, “we don’t have a moment to lose,” and he and the Democrats insist that government must unionize most of America by passing “card check” and taxpayers must throw even more money at American automakers.

This is the conceit of what Thomas Sowell calls “the anointed”. The politicians know best how our money should be spent. The “road to serfdom” is paved with such good intentions.

Obama promises:

“We will change the world ... There is nothing we can’t do, nothing we can’t accomplish if we are unified”.

Who is this “we” politicians always cite?

We can change the world for the better if “we” means hundreds of millions of free people pursuing their interests, inventing, building, parenting, helping.

But the politicians’ “we” is different. It means government. “We” will take your money by force and order you about. A democracy can become the tyranny of the majority. That’s no way to create prosperity.

Obama is an extraordinarily talented man. But there is one thing he can’t successfully do: ignore the laws of economics. No one can do that. That’s why we call them “laws.” […]

[W]e cannot raise wages or create jobs or eliminate poverty by executive order. We can do so by freeing people to save and invest and accumulate capital. We can’t make medical care universal and inexpensive by legislative fiat. But we can approach that goal by permitting a free market in medicine to work.

Government is force, not eloquence. And force is an attempt to defy economic logic. The consequences are often opposite of those intended. […]

What will happen when the unintended consequences hit? F.A. Hayek warned that a government serious about enacting its economic plan must be prepared to use heavy-handed measures. Is that what we want?

I fear that today’s “forceful actions” will not only be a painful assault on our freedom, they will exacerbate whatever economic troubles we face.

Stossel makes so much sense that the Anointed One and his disciples wouldn’t get it. They’re also so drunk on their newly acquired government power that they wouldn’t dream of letting the American people and the free market steer the economic ship away from the icebergs.

That’s what happens when you have a socialist for a president.

Morons.

If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

— Abraham Lincoln, Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1838

WND: Obama Advisers Met with Hamas Before He Was Even Elected

From an ever-growing stack of “I Told You So” files comes this report from today’s World Net Daily:

Hamas: We met Obama advisers
Terrorist group says campaign asked it to keep contact secret until after election

Posted: November 11, 2008 | 9:39 am Eastern

By Aaron Klein
© 2008 WorldNetDaily

JERUSALEM – Hamas held a meeting in the Gaza Strip several months ago with aides to President-elect Barack Obama, but the terror group was asked to keep the contacts secret until after last week’s elections, according to a senior Hamas official.

Ahmed Yousef, Hamas’ chief political adviser in Gaza, told the leading Al-Hayat Arabic-language newspaper Hamas has maintained regular communication with Obama aides that even continued during the past week.

“We were in contact with a number of Obama’s aides through the Internet, and later met with some of them in Gaza, but they advised us not to come out with any statements, as they may have a negative effect on his election campaign and be used by Republican candidate John McCain (to attack Obama),” Yousuf told Al-Hayat.

Yousuf said Hamas’s contact with Obama’s advisers was ongoing, adding that relations were maintained after Obama’s electoral victory last Tuesday.

Yousef could not be reached by WND for immediate comment. It wasn’t clear which Obama aides Hamas is claiming to have met in Gaza. Obama’s transition team did not immediately respond to a WND e-mail and phone message requesting comment.

Yousef gave WND a series of recent interviews in which he praised Obama as the leading candidate. Last week, he called Obama’s win a “historic victory” for the world and told WND that Hamas was sending a letter of congratulation to the president-elect.

Six months ago, Robert Malley, a Mideast expert described as an ancillary adviser to Obama, resigned amid a report in a London newspaper that he had contact with Hamas. According to media reports, Malley is again working for Obama. This time he is being dispatched to Egypt and Syria to explain Obama’s positions.

Hamas is responsible for scores of suicide bombings, rocket attacks, shootings and cross-border raids. Its official charter calls for the murder of Jews and destruction of Israel. Just today, Hamas members took responsibility for launching dozens of rockets from Gaza aimed at Jewish civilian population centers.

Last week, Yousef told WND of Obama’s win: “This is a historic day, a turning point. I think this is the very first time in history that one country’s election concerned everyone everywhere all over [the] world. Everybody is looking forward to Obama’s change, for a change in the U.S. policy, particularly in the Israeli-Palestinian equation, which is the mother of all conflicts.”

Yousef said he believes an Obama administration will be more willing to engage in dialogue with Hamas.

He said Obama’s job will be to “restore America’s dignity in the world and put an end to the wars in the region.”

Yousef took the occasion to blast the policies of President Bush, commenting he hopes “that after January the Bush administration will not be heard from again.”

“We are sick of wars and conflict,” the Hamas official said. [Sure. That’s like pedophiles saying, ‘We are sick of children and sex.’ How stupid do they think we are?]

Yousef seemed aware his comments may generate some negative publicity for Obama, but he said he feels it important to “reach out and to express our thoughts and engage.”

“I praised him six months ago, some people tried to use that against him. But I knew he would win. Like everyone else, we expected this important victory,” he said.

Yousef was referring to an interview he gave to WND and WABC Radio in April in which he praised Obama and then found his comments had fueled a firestorm of accusations in the presidential campaign.

In April, Yousef stated he hoped Obama would become president, comparing the Illinois senator to President John F. Kennedy.

“We like Mr. Obama, and we hope that he will win the election,” Yousef told WND at the time.

“I hope Mr. Obama and the Democrats will change the political discourse. ... I do believe [Obama] is like John Kennedy, a great man with a great principle. And he has a vision to change America to make it in a position to lead the world community, but not with humiliation and arrogance,” Yousef said. [Meanwhile, at this moment JFK is rolling in his grave because of the Left obliterating his once-honorable party.]

Sen. John McCain repeatedly used Yousef’s remarks to criticize Obama’s judgment foreign policy. [All for naught, apparently.]

Anyone know the Hebrew for, “Boy, are we screwed are what”?