BANGALORE: A historic decision to reserve one seat each in its 52 postgraduate departments for transgenders and slapping a penalty of Rs. 5 lakh on 11 B.Ed. colleges for admission and examination malpractices were among the key resolutions approved by Bangalore University’s Academic Council here on Monday.

Vice-Chancellor N. Prabhu Dev said the provision to reserve seats for transgenders under the supernumerary quota would be in addition to the existing reservation. “It will lapse if nobody comes forward,” he said.

Alas, no one taught the boy responsibility.

From a long profile in the June 7, New Yorker of Julian Assange, the force behind WikiLeaks.

…Assange’s mother believed that formal education would inculcate an unhealthy respect for authority in her children and dampen their will to learn. “I didn’t want their spirits broken,” she told me. In any event, the family had moved thirty-seven times by the time Assange was fourteen, making consistent education impossible. He was homeschooled, sometimes, and he took correspondence classes and studied informally with university professors. But mostly he read on his own, voraciously. He was drawn to science. “I spent a lot of time in libraries going from one thing to another, looking closely at the books I found in citations, and followed that trail,” he recalled. He absorbed a large vocabulary, but only later did he learn how to pronounce all the words that he learned.

When Assange was eight, Claire left her husband and began seeing a musician, with whom she had another child, a boy. The relationship was tempestuous; the musician became abusive, she says, and they separated. A fight ensued over the custody of Assange’s half brother, and Claire felt threatened, fearing that the musician would take away her son. Assange recalled her saying, “Now we need to disappear,” and he lived on the run with her from the age of eleven to sixteen. When I asked him about the experience, he told me that there was evidence that the man belonged to a powerful cult called the Family—its motto was “Unseen, Unknown, and Unheard.” Some members were doctors who persuaded mothers to give up their newborn children to the cult’s leader, Anne Hamilton-Byrne. The cult had moles in government, Assange suspected, who provided the musician with leads on Claire’s whereabouts. In fact, Claire often told friends where she had gone, or hid in places where she had lived before.

While on the run, Claire rented a house across the street from an electronics shop. Assange would go there to write programs on a Commodore 64, until Claire bought it for him, moving to a cheaper place to raise the money. He was soon able to crack into well-known programs, where he found hidden messages left by their creators. “The austerity of one’s interaction with a computer is something that appealed to me,” he said. “It is like chess—chess is very austere, in that you don’t have many rules, there is no randomness, and the problem is very hard.” Assange embraced life as an outsider. He later wrote of himself and a teen-age friend, “We were bright sensitive kids who didn’t fit into the dominant subculture and fiercely castigated those who did as irredeemable boneheads.”

When Assange turned sixteen, he got a modem, and his computer was transformed into a portal. Web sites did not exist yet—this was 1987—but computer networks and telecom systems were sufficiently linked to form a hidden electronic landscape that teen-agers with the requisite technical savvy could traverse. Assange called himself Mendax—from Horace’s splendide mendax, or “nobly untruthful”—and he established a reputation as a sophisticated programmer who could break into the most secure networks
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian?currentPage=all#ixzz0uuFjxwtz

Think Progress, a leftist organization, cut together a video purporting to show rabid racists at a Tea Party gathering.

Too bad for them that other video contradicted their point.

Watch the videos here.

Hint to “progressives” — libeling your political opponents as racist is not progress.

The tubby, wealthy polemicist gets called out for stealing video and photos.

Karina Longworth of the Village Voice does not care for Oliver Stone’s latest.

So one-sided that it nearly validates what the Right says about Hollywood’s liberal crusaders, Oliver Stone’s essay/lecture/travelogue South of the Border is propaganda in the form of a home movie, documenting Stone’s summer vacation spent in the collegial company of the figureheads of various South American states.

About 10 minutes in, the iconic filmmaker appears onscreen for the first time alongsideHugo Chávez, the charismatic, controversial leader of Venezuela. This is not a sit-down interview; the filmmaker isn’t directing questions at Chávez, or apparently directing much of anything—they’re just hanging out. Afforded extraordinarily casual access to Chávez, Raúl Castro, the Kirchners of Argentina, Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo, and other heads of state, Stone generally allows his subjects to set the course of conversation, avoiding not only the tough questions about their records on human rights and allegations of corruption, but also pretty much any question that might get in the way of each leader’s sales pitch for his regime, or the notion of the U.S. as the big, bad man holding them down.

Stone and Chávez seem especially palsy-walsy: They kick around a soccer ball, kick it on Chávez’s private jet, and casually shoot the shit about how Chávez is a misunderstood man of the people, unfairly demonized by the media. Later, when it’s mentioned that Lugo owes money to the International Monetary Fund, Stone cracks, “Chávez will loan you that if I ask him.” His crush on Chávez is such that he avoids interrogating not only his politics, but also his demonstrated tendency to pitch those politics via a kind of over-the-top comic public theater.

And yet Stone raises the specter of media manipulation when it suits him, devoting a whole section of the film to sympathetically presenting Chávez’s argument that during the failed coup attempt of 2002, the Venezuelan media were so in the tank for his political opponents that they edited footage of rioting in the streets to make it look as if Chávez’s supporters instigated a fire fight. The construction of false realities for political gain is the subject of much of Stone’s own work—so why is he content to take each leader’s practiced-for-the-camera spiel at face value, never pushing for information or conducting interviews on any deeper level than a photo op? South of the Border’s subjects are masters at cooking bullshit, and Stone just eats it up.

This is how the anti-capitalists behaved at the G20 summit. By contrast, last summer the Tea Partiers left the Washington Mall cleaner than they found it.

Who did the media determine were a danger?

More images here.

Hard core leftists see capitalism as evil, corporations as occupying armies that oppress and manipulate.

Never mind that:

• corporations are owned by free citizens, and are just a way we organize ourselves economically in the modern world
• corporations provide the bulk of our employment
• corporations produce the wealth that makes our lives easy: the plentiful food, the cars, the drugs and medical innovations that allow our longevity, the amusements that enrich us etc.

Furthermore, the Left insists that capitalists run amok and unfettered. That’s particularly rich given the way labor unions have destroyed California and other places.

But progressivism is a religion, immune to logic. Unfortunately, Obama is steeped in this mindset. Consider the video below. That’s Joel Rogers, professor at University of Wisconsin.

Rogers is also one of the founding members of the Apollo Alliance. This group was credited with writing the controversial $787 billion dollar stimulus package for the US Congress in 2009. The Director of the NY chapter of the Apollo Alliance is Jeff Jones, co-founder of the Weather underground that conducted acts of domestice terrorism in the 1960’s.

Got that? The $1 trillion (including interest) “stimulus bill” passed by the Dem Cong and signed by Obama, was in large part the work of these loony left activists.

Oy!

ACORNs are nuts. This is their CEO speaking.

Oh, liberals never run out of ways to be busybodies

Tuesday was a good day for vegetables — and San Franciscans who love them — as the city’s Board of Supervisors passed a nonbinding resolution declaring every Monday as “meat-free.” The resolution, sponsored by Supervisor Sophie Maxell, a vegetarian, urges restaurants, stores and schools to offer “plant-based options” every Monday to improve the general civic health.

Ms. Maxwell tied the measure to the fight against global warning and said it would “encourage citizens to choose vegetarian foods as a way to protect the planet and their health.” The board also passed a nonbinding resolution commending businesses that use only cage-free eggs. Ms. Maxwell invited the entire board to her office “for a vegetarian treat.”

I’ve passed a nonbinding resolution — it won’t leave my computer–that all busybodies be locked up in the stocks for an hour every Monday in front of city hall so we can all jeer.

Meanwhile:

In the past environmentalists, from Lord Stern to Sir Paul McCartney, have urged people to stop eating meat because the methane produced by cattle causes global warming.

However a new study found that cattle grazed on the grasslands of China actually reduce another greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide.

Authors of the paper, published in Nature, say the research does not mean that producing livestock to eat is good for the environment in all countries. However in certain circumstances, it can be better for global warming to let animals graze on grassland.

The research will reignite the argument over whether to eat red meat after other studies suggested that grass fed cattle in the UK and US can also be good for the environment as long as the animals are free range.

About 100 fans came out to hear Karl Rove at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills Monday night to discuss his book “Courage and Consequences: My Life As a Conservative In The Fight,” — but the fight wasn’t contained to his book.

Anti-war protesters came out, some rushing the stage, to call Rove a “war criminal” and worse.

The fans came to get their books signed, but they never got that chance.

One woman, the co-founder of the anti-war group Code Pink, approached him with handcuffs and said she was there to make a citizen’s arrest. Jodie Evans charged him with “outing a CIA agent…you lied to take us to war…” and “totally ruining the country.”

What a twit.

1. Rove is not Bush, and Bush didn’t lie us into a war. See our section The Big Lie for details.

2. Valerie Plame was not outed by Rove. Her CIA employment was known to every player in Washington. Even the Democrat Washington Post concluded that it was self-promoting Joe Wilson – her husband — that drew attention to Plame.

3. Was Iraq ruined? In 2003, it had been in the grip of a genocidal tyrant for decades. Today, that tyrant has been tried, convicted and executed, and the nation has had five democratic elections, with voter turnout higher than the US. If  that’s ruination, too bad Bush didn’t “ruin” a few more.

Meanwhile, Rove got at least one word in, noting:

… that the people shouting him down were an example of the “totalitarianism of the left…they don’t believe in dialog…they don’t believe in courtesy. They don’t believe in first Amendment rights for anyone but themselves.”

Alas, acting talent is no substitute for common sense.

Sean Penn has defended Hugo Chávez as a model democrat and said those who call him a dictator should be jailed.

If Penn thinks someone should be jailed for having the “wrong” opinion, how could Penn ever identify a true democrat? Or dictator?

The Oscar-winning actor and political activist accused the US media of smearing Venezuela’s socialist president and called for journalists to be punished.

“Every day, this elected leader is called a dictator here, and we just accept it, and accept it. And this is mainstream media. There should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies.”

Inside every ardent leftist beats the heart of a dictator.

Penn, who has visited Chávez in Caracas, said Venezuela’s poor majority had willingly embraced his leftist revolution, but that this view was concealed from Americans.

“We are hypnotised by the media. Who do you know here who’s gone through 14 of the most transparent elections on the globe, and has been elected democratically, as Hugo Chávez?”

Hugo was named Dictator of the Month in 2005, and he’s only gotten worse.

Ed Driscoll:

The Atlanta Progressive News rejects your reality, and substitutes their own!

Atlanta Progressive News has parted ways with long-serving senior staff writer Jonathan Springston. Apparently, Springston’s affinity for fact-based reporting clashed with Cardinale’s vision.

And, no, that’s not sarcasm.

In an e-mail statement, editor Matthew Cardinale says Springston was asked to leave APN last week “because he held on to the notion that there was an objective reality that could be reported objectively, despite the fact that that was not our editorial policy at Atlanta Progressive News.”

Pontious “What is truth?” Pilate concurs.

MSNBC’s pompous looney-leftist, Keith Olberman, accused the Tea Party movement of being racist for lack of black involvement. Maybe he watches his own network exclusively.

(Last August MSNBC news edited a Tea Party coverage to disguise the fact that a gun-toting member was black. See here.)

Answer:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez reiterated on Wednesday his denunciation, before the international community, of thousands of soldiers that the United Stated have deployed in Haiti.

“I want to repeat it: the US government is taking advantage of a humanitarian tragedy to take control in Haiti by means of the military forces,” he warned in this capital during the opening ceremony of a cable railway system.

Chavez said that is the only possible interpretation of Washington’s role after the 7.3-degree earthquake that devastated Port au Prince eight days ago, sending thousands of Pentagon troops.

Maybe Obama should call his chum Hugo and remind him about the military saving thousands of Indonesian lives in the aftermath of the tsunami.

“They are occupying Haiti militarily. They even occupied the Government Palace. You can see the marines with machine guns and rifles, shooting the looters,” he said.

The Venezuelan president said the US troops arrived in Haiti with no restriction and with green light to use their weapons.

“They entered that country with permission to kill, whomever they want to and whenever it is,” he said.

Bolivia’s Evo Morales had something equally stupid to say.

Is anyone stupid enough to swallow this? Someone get Danny Glover on the phone and check.

UPDATE: Now Chavez has blamed the US for causing the quake.

The United States apparently possesses an “earthquake weapon” that set off the catastrophic quake in Haiti and killed 200,000 innocents. Don’t believe it’s true? Just ask Hugo Chavez.

Citing an alleged report from Russia’s Northern Fleet, the Venezuelan strongman’s state mouthpiece ViVe TV shot out a press release saying the 7.0 magnitude Haiti quake was caused by a U.S. test of an experimental shockwave system that can also create “weather anomalies to cause floods, droughts and hurricanes.”

Matthew Vaughn in The DC:

You’ve probably never heard of Brandon Darby.

The former community organizer who saved American lives by undermining a left-wing terrorist plot at the 2008 Republican convention used to be a proud member of the radical left.

He called for the overthrow of the U.S. government. He hated cops. He consorted with eco-terrorist tree-spikers, radical feminists and black nationalists. He was approached to rob an armored car and asked to commit arson to fight gentrification. He mouthed politically correct slogans about the Bush administration. Government didn’t care about people, and he thought the botched response to Katrina proved it.

When he learned people were suffering in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, he moved there, defying police orders not to enter the stricken city. With $50 he co-founded Common Ground Relief in the home of a former Black Panther. Despite many obstacles, Common Ground alleviated some suffering in the devastated city, especially the hard-hit Ninth Ward. The group gutted flood-damaged houses and provided free health care and meals. In its first three years it accommodated 22,000 volunteers.

Gradually Darby began to question his political beliefs. After initially having rocky relations with the New Orleans police, he came to realize that they were all on the same side because they wanted to help people.

“Everybody else [in Common Ground] remained with this protest, ‘fight the power’ deal but I started developing relationships with people in the power structure in the city and in different levels of government so my ideas started to really change,” he told “This American Life.” “I was, ‘Why are we wearing masks and protesting? I mean we should go meet with them. I have the mayor’s cell phone number. I eat dinner with their families. Why are we acting this way?’”

After years of in-your-face protests and confrontational tactics, Darby rejected the radical left and its culture of political violence. He came to realize that America, for all its faults, wasn’t such a bad place after all.

“I felt I had a duty to atone after badmouthing my country for so many years,” Darby told The Daily Caller. “I love my country.”

When he learned of a plan to attack the 2008 Republican convention in Saint Paul, Minn., he felt compelled to act.

Darby assisted an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and infiltrated an outfit called the Austin Affinity Group that joined with a larger coalition of progressive organizations wryly named the “RNC Welcoming Committee.”

Did the CIA sacrifice a few of their own just to make Obama look bad?

Okay, stop laughing.  William Tate in the American Thinker says the nuts floated this idea for real.

Just days after seven CIA officers and operatives lost their lives in defense of this country, MS-NBC conspired with unnamed senior White House sources to slander the victims and the rest of the intelligence community, just to try to defend Obama’s incompetence on intelligence.

MS-NBC spent much of its Monday prime-time promoting the spurious contention that intelligence agencies may have deliberately allowed the attempted Christmas Day plane bombing to proceed in order to make Obama look bad.

This contemptible idea was floated during the “Countdown” comedy hour when The Sportscaster reported “Breaking News” that White House sources believe the intelligence community’s failure to stop the plot “might have been intentional and not accidental.” Further, “the information was in some way deliberately withheld from some higher or broader authority to make someone look bad,” leaving little doubt that the victim of this new, vast right-wing conspiracy was Obama.

This brings to mind the scene from “Little Murders” in which policeman Alan Arkin avers that New York’s crime wave was a conspiracy to make the cops look bad.

He delivers that line about two minutes in this clip. (BTW, the preview misrepresents the movie as light and wacky. It was dark and very funny.)

Eight people were under arrest today after several dozen protesters shouting “no justice, no peace” attacked Chancellor Robert Birgeneau’s home on the UC Berkeley campus, smashing windows, lights and planters as well as throwing torches at the home and police vehicles, authorities said.

The attack, shortly after 11 p.m. Friday, followed a four-day occupation of Wheeler Hall and the arrest of 66 people who were protesting state funding cutbacks and a steep increase in student fees throughout the University of California system. They were later released.

No injuries or fires were reported in the latest attack. Those arrested were booked on suspicion of rioting, threatening an education official, attempted burglary, attempted arson, felony vandalism and assault. They were being held Saturday in the Alameda County jail on $132,000 bail each.

“These are criminals, not activists,” Birgeneau said in a statement released by the university. “The attack at our home was extraordinarily frightening and violent. My wife and I genuinely feared for our lives. . . . I urge the community and protesters to find more productive ways to express their points of view. To resort to life-endangering violence is never acceptable.”

UC Berkeley breeds loony leftism. This should come as a shock to no one.

…in 1964 the EEOC was created to make sure that black citizens were given a fair shake when looking for work. My how its mission has grown!

Listen to Chai Feldblum, Obama’s nominee to head the EEOC, who plans “to change the American workforce and revolutionize social norms…Our current public policies undermine the moral and political unit of same sex couples and families and that’s a moral wrong that needs to be rectified.”

Does anyone still believe Obama is not a partisan leftist?

More on Chai at the American Principles Project.

Andrew Breitbart:

Today I received a phone call from my friend, Gary H., who said that ACORN was staging a protest outside the Fox News studios in West Los Angeles. I called someone at the Fox News bureau to find out that there were no protesters there, but quickly realized ACORN had gotten that wrong too. They were protesting in front of FOX Television Center, the home of local affiliate KTTV.

Since I woke up to the news that ACORN had sued the U.S. government to get its federal funding back, it struck me as obvious that ACORN is in the process of trying to get its mojo back absent any real investigations by the Holder Justice Department, the Democratic-controlled Congress, and the Jerry Brown sham investigation in California – not to mention the  so-called “internal investigation” whose chief investigator was picked by number one ACORN defender, John Podesta, and SEIU head Andy Stern, whose union is deeply aligned with the troubled “community organizing” group.

Despite all the evidence we have published that exposes ACORN as both corrupt and criminal, no other mainstream media organization has shown any signs of investigating ACORN despite countless angles and document trails.  So I knew I had to go down to the protest on Bundy Drive to ask ACORN protesters a few questions.

With very little time I got in the car with Big Government Associate Editor Alex Marlow to meet Gary H. down at the protest. When we arrived, the protesters were fifty or so strong, monitored by a few police units standing to the side. Given that the police made me feel safe, I walked straight toward the chanting protesters while accepting an ACORN full-color single page handout entitled, “ACORN MEMBERS — MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN  THEIR COMMUNITIES,” which sung the praises of the organization.

As I walked toward the group I noticed a news camera was filming them, so I stood next to the camera, not only to memorialize what I was saying, but also as a further attempt to grant myself security, given that I was greatly  outnumbered.

I told the group that my website, BigGovernment.com, was the website that had launched the ACORN story and that I was here to answer any questions they had about our investigation.  Instead of engaging me, they backed away, pointed at their ACORN buttons, screamed and chanted. One ACORN leader, a towering African American gentleman, told the group: “‘We don’t want to hear what he has to say.” And began leading them in a group chant:

“Everywhere we go, people want to know, who we are, so we tell them:  We are ACORN, mighty, might ACORN!

Or is it a gift?  White House spokesman Robert Gibbs:

“I will continue to say what I’ve said before. You hear in this debate, you hear analogies, you hear references to, you see pictures about and depictions of individuals that are truly stunning, and you hear it all the time. People — imagine five years ago somebody comparing health care reform to 9/11. Imagine just a few years ago had somebody walked around with images of Hitler.

Where was he during the Bush years?

Zombieblog has a full page of Bush Hitler images from the Bush era. This is one of dozens.

Ed Driscoll has a collection of  Nazi references featuring such luminaries as Al Gore, Kurt Vonnegut and Harry Reid.

Moonbattery:

Sometimes it seems liberal Euroweenies are deliberately testing to see just how much totalitarian moonbattery they can ram down people’s throats before encountering significant resistance. In the latest outrage against liberty and national sovereignty, bureaucrats of the European Court of Human Rights have ruled that Italians cannot have crucifixes on the walls of their classrooms.

The ruling by the court in Strasbourg, which Italy said it would appeal, said crucifixes on school walls — a common sight that is part of every Italian’s life — could disturb children who were not Christians.

That is, Muslim colonists might not like that Italy has been a Christian country since Constantine converted to Christianity in the 4th century.

Even some commies are aghast:

Paola Binetti, a Catholic in the opposition Democratic Party, the successor of what was once the West’s largest communist party, said: “In Italy, the crucifix is a specific sign of our tradition.”

Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini concurs:

The history of Italy is marked by symbols and if we erase symbols we erase part of ourselves.

This of course is exactly why progressive Eurocrats want crucifixes banned. The objective is not just to suppress Christianity, which is hardly even defended anymore; it is to eradicate Western civilization. That’s why no effective measures are taken to save Europe from the ongoing Muslim demographic conquest — and why amnesty will soon open the door to massive Third World colonization of the USA.

For those who distrust the motives of radical environmentalists — the various “crises” being but a pretext for government intrusion in our lives — here are two examples that will either make you cringe or laugh darkly.

First, Lord Stern (great name, eh?) wants the world to cut out meat.

People will need to consider turning vegetarian if the world is to conquer climate change, according to a leading authority on global warming.

In an interview with The Times, Lord Stern of Brentford said: “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”

Direct emissions of methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gases. Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas.

Lord Stern, the author of the influential 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling global warming, said that a successful deal at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December would lead to soaring costs for meat and other foods that generate large quantities of greenhouse gases.

That’s mild compared with Alex Renton, writing in the UK Guardian, who wants the west to reduce babies.

The worst thing that you or I can do for the planet is to have children. If they behave as the average person in the rich world does now, they will emit some 11 tonnes of CO_² every year of their lives. In their turn, they are likely to have more carbon-emitting children who will make an even bigger mess. If Britain is to meet the government’s target of an 80% reduction in our emissions by 2050, we need to start reversing our rising rate of population growth immediately.

And if that makes sense, why not start cutting population everywhere? Are condoms not the greenest technology of all?

World population is forecast to peak at 9.2bn by 2050. According to a report by the LSE for the Optimum Population Trust, the lobbying body currently asking parents to “Stop at Two”, it would cost $220m to provide the family planning that would reduce the 2050 population by half a billion, preventing the emission of 34 gigatonnes of carbon. Introducing low-carbon technology for the same result would cost more than $1 trillion.

So why does population control hardly feature on the agendas of the UN bodies or of the governments now committed to tackling climate change? And why do the development and environmental groups shy away from it? The Guardian’s George Monbiot dismisses the topic as a distraction, the obsession largely of “post-reproductive, middle-class white men… a group more responsible for environmental destruction than any other class in history”. David King, the government’s former chief scientific adviser, argues: “The only way to tackle climate change is to change the way energy is used by those of us that have already been born.”

Guilt, self-loathing, righteous piety — can the return of the hairshirt be far off?

Roger Kimball:

Probably, Anita Dunn would be as horrified as the next person by Mao’s savage wholesale butchery. The same could be said of most of those college students who carried around Mao’s Little Red Book and proclaimed themselves on the side of Revolution. Sure, many exhibited a creepy fascination with violence. But these privileged American kids would have run screaming from the room had they had to confront the merciless slaughter perpetrated by Mao and his merry band of utopians.

That’s neither here nor there. What the left-wing excuse factory wants is for the American people to overlook the radicalism of the people populating Obama’s inner circle, of which Anita Dunn is a prominent member. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, let me once again remind readers of what Obama promised in his campaign. I don’t mean the long string of broken promises about helping the middle class, pulling out troops from Iraq, prosecuting the war in Afghanistan with vigor, etc. Those were just campaign promises, i.e., vote-getting expedients that events have led Obama to renege on.

No, I mean the one big promise that he has every intention of fulfilling: the promise to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” That is what Obama and his lieutenants are about. They are egalitarians — not, perhaps, quite so radical as Chairman Mao, but (as the case of Anita Dunn shows) they have plenty of admiration for Mao’s goals. Obama himself has criticized the U.S. Constitution for being merely a “charter of negative liberties” that fails to promote “redistributive change.”

This is the point: last November, the American people thought they were electing a “post-partisan,” “post-racial” President who would work to restore unity and self-confidence to the country. They woke up on November 5, however, to find that they had elected someone who was deeply ambivalent about America, who distrusted its founding principles of limited government, individual liberty, and local responsibility. Like his radical friends — Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Van Jones, Anita Dunn — Barack Obama wishes to transform the United States according to a model whose basic shape was supplied by the utopian schemes of the 1960s. That’s why Anita Dunn said that Mao was one of the thinkers she most often turned to for wisdom about big-think political problems. It’s not that she admires his penchant for industrial strength homicide: rather, she admires his success at fomenting an egalitarian revolution. It’s not what we bargained for when we elected Barack Obama. But that’s what we’ve got. The question is how much worse will things have to get before the penny drops, before the scales fall from the collective eyes of the electorate? When will voters begin that long countermarch through the institutions in order to take back the country? If not now, when?

For an example of how the left treats dissent (destroy the messenger, don’t debate the issues), Rush Limbaugh is exhibit A.

Racist is a powerful, damning epithet. And if someone isn’t truly racist, just fabricate facts to make it so. Toby Harnden in the UK Guardian nails it:

Which public figure can be quoted as having said something bigoted and disgusting and it doesn’t matter whether he did or not because he might have? Who can Big Media brand a racist without checking the facts? Who has to prove he did not say something racist, rather than the accuser proving he did?

A pat on the back for anyone who guessed the answer: Rush Limbaugh (OK, the blog headline was a clue). From CNN to MSNBC to ABC, it’s been put about that Limbaugh said this:

I mean, let’s face it, we didn’t have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back; I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.

It’s also been spread around that he said this, about the death of the man who assassinated Martin Luther King:

You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honour? James Earl Ray. We miss you, James. Godspeed.

Trouble is, he didn’t say either of these outrageous things. And it wasn’t difficult to check, as protein wisdom shows here. They originated from, er, Wikipedia and Wikiquotes. Both quotes ended up in this book – a hit job that doesn’t cite any sources. They’re also included in this internet list posted a year ago and endlessly ripped off ever since.

The irony is, of course, that the people reporting this as fact are the same types who are always denouncing bloggers and the internet as forces of evil intent on destroying proper journalism – proper journalism being the kind that involves checking facts. In the case of Rush Limbaugh, however, it seems to be enough that the intention (i.e. to show the talk radio host is a racist) is considered pure.

Even those who have been primary movers in spreading these malicious falsehoods – which would lead to payouts of hundreds of thousands in British libel courts if lawsuits were ever filed there – are brazenly unapologetic.

Of course not, destroying Limbaugh — whose influence threatens the left’s statist agenda — is doing God’s work. Truth be damned.

The NFL’s chief weenie, Roger Goodell, said that Rush Limbaugh was too “divisive” to be allowed into his club. Oh?

Powerline notes:

Well: as I wrote last night, it is ironic that Keith Olbermann, who, unlike Rush, is actually a hatemonger, is a network commentator on NFL games. Apparently no one thinks Olbermann is too “divisive” to be associated with the league.

Which raises this thought: has any liberal ever been labeled “divisive”? I can’t recall a single instance. President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are trying to dismantle our health care system, an effort to which most Americans object and about which many millions care deeply. So, why are they not divisive? If that isn’t divisive, what is?

These thoughts are prompted by Olbermann’s latest outrage: another attack on Michelle Malkin, in which he accused Michelle of being a “fascist” and described her as “a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it.” It is impossible to imagine a conservative with a network television contract using language like that about a liberal woman. Impossible. It is, to begin with, misogynistic; it’s also aesthetically ridiculous. Agree with her or not, Michelle is a beautiful woman. One can only wonder what kind of twisted, sick psyche could produce this sort of venom. (Michelle writes about Olbermann’s bizarre outburst here.)

But let’s apply a much lower threshold: by what conceivable standard is Keith Olbermann not a divisive figure? It would be impossible to be more intensely partisan or to be more vicious toward those with whom he disagrees. How can that not be considered divisive, by the NFL’s standards?

The only answer is that “divisive” is a criticism that applies only to conservatives. It is not possible for a liberal to be “divisive,” however crazed he or she may be. This is true even though the whole point of a political system is to decide issues about which people disagree. If people don’t disagree, it isn’t a political issue. So to argue for any political point of view is necessarily divisive. But divisiveness is a one-way street. When liberals express liberal views, that’s just being a patriotic American. When conservatives express conservative views, it’s “divisive.”

That is, sadly, how much of our country’s establishment thinks.

Big Government:

An internal review by the board of directors of the community organization ACORN determined that the amount allegedly embezzled from the community organization was $5 million, well more than the previously reported amount of nearly $1 million, according to a new subpoena in an investigation by Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell.

Washington Examiner:

Kevin Jennings, President Obama’s Assistant Deputy Secretary of the Office of Safe and Drug FreeSchools at the U.S. Department of Education, is in hot water this week for having failed to report that a 15-year-old sophomore student in his school had told him of having sex with an older man.

But failure to report what appeared to be a case of statuatory rape of a child may be the least of Jennings’ worries. Lori Roman of Regular Folks United points to statements by Jennings a decade or more ago when he praised Harry Hay of the North American Association for Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), which promotes the legalization of sexual abuse of young boys by older men.

Roman provides damning details and links here. She also notes that Jennings wrote the forward ”to a book called Queering Elementary Education. And another fellow you may have heard of wrote one of the endorsements on the book jacket—Bill Ayers.” Ayers, of course, is the Weather Underground bomber from the 1960s who is just an ”acquaintance” of Obama.

Every presidential administration ends up with scandals inspired by controversial appointees, but typically those tend to revolve around financial improprieties, conflicts of interest, or some other form of white-collar misconduct. For Obama, the scandals seem to be develping in a pattern of disclosures revolving around radical left ideology that raises questions about their fitness for any job in government. (more…)

Michael Moore, the man who arguably poisoned the political atmosphere the most in the last ten years, returns to the big screen to pee on capitalism.

That his lastest screed was financed by capitalist, John Malone, is beyond irony.

Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” is being co-financed and distributed domestically by Overture Films, which is a unit of Malone’s Liberty Media. Moore, who has been railing against Big Media during press junkets promoting the movie, is, in fact, in bed with the Goldman Sachs of the media world…

Obviously, there is a little something ironic about Moore’s cinematic screed against capitalism being backed in part by one of the country’s richest and most avowed capitalists. Then again, Moore is nothing if not a paradox.

Not a paradox, a hypocrite.

I doubt the 127-minute movie will draw big audiences. But for those gullible enough to swallow Moore’s stale collectivists ideas, consider the case of China.

As detailed in the excellent PBS series Commanding Heights, in the mid-’80s, the Chinese communists recognized the hopelessness of collectivism and saw free market capitalism — albeit under government control — as the way forward.

China’s Communist leadership had embraced markets and welcomed hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign investment. Almost one-quarter of the world’s population was entering the global market for the first time.

Onscreen caption: Economic reforms lifted 300 million Chinese out of poverty.

In villages across China and throughout the developing world, people left their rural homes. They traveled to industrial towns, seeking work in new factories built to serve the global market.

The era of globalization saw the largest wave of human migration in history. Eighty percent of the world’s future economic growth is expected to occur in cities rather than the countryside.

LIN SHENGXIN, Factory Worker, China: I was a schoolteacher in the countryside. At that time I only earned 100 a month. My parents are both farmers, so we lived a very poor life. But now I’m earning 3,000 a month. My life is totally different. My child is going to school here, near the factory. So we are living a much, much better life now.

Got that? Since 1985, China’s economic policies — those that Moore despises — lifted 300 million people out of poverty.

That is nearly the entire population of the United States.

Mao’s policies led to the death of 70 million Chinese — more than the entire population of France.

Can you imagine a hard-right organization that promoted political causes receiving federal funding without a huge sh*tstorm?

Me neither.

Or a hard-right organization illegally registering voters to tamper with elections, the bedrock of democracy?

Me neither.

Some ACORN bits, starting with Tigerhawk:

In a “meaning of ‘is’ is” moment, President Obama asks us to believe that he “didn’t even know that ACORN was getting a whole lot of federal money.” No doubt he also did not know that ACORN was getting a wad of moola, a tin of lucre, a dollop of dough, bread to come and go on, a whole lot of benjamins, or a goodly pile of legal tender. But he apparently did know — we only know this because of his absurd parsing — that the federal government was funding ACORN to some degree.

The Chicago Tribune wants an independent prosecutor:

ACORN is in very deep, very public trouble, and the U.S. attorney general should appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate. What we know so far is due entirely to two amateur reporters, James E. O’Keefe III, 25, and Hannah Giles, 20, who managed to videotape a web of corrupt practices in ACORN offices. Dressed as a pimp and prostitute, O’Keefe and Giles walked into ACORN offices from New York to California and simply asked for business advice. ACORN officials were happy to provide it and were secretly recorded explaining exactly how to evade the law and scam the government. The tapes were riveting. Fox News rolled out a new one each night for a week, creating a firestorm of outrage and a burgeoning political scandal.

ACORN employees, without raising an eyebrow, much less calling the police, explained how the young sex workers could label themselves “performance artists,” underreport their income, evade taxes, fraudulently buy a house to ply their trade, and, worst of all, import underage girls from Central America to use as child prostitutes. One ACORN employee helpfully explained that the teenagers would even be tax-deductible since they would be “dependents,” living in the pimp’s house. Some states, led by California, are saying they will investigate. But this is a national scandal and there ought to be a full-scale national inquiry. To ensure impartiality — and the appearance of impartiality — political appointees at the U.S. Department of Justice should recuse themselves. This case demands an independent federal prosecutor.

Independent prosecutors should not be appointed lightly. But in this case, there are good reasons why Atty. Gen. Eric Holder and other political appointees in the Justice Department should step aside. First, although no allegations have yet touched the Obama campaign, ACORN did have significant ties to the campaign and other progressive causes. Published reports show that ACORN and its subsidiaries received some $800,000 from the Obama campaign to get out the vote. Second, ACORN is intimately tied to the Service Employees International Union, one of President Barack Obama’s most powerful and vocal supporters.

ACORN’s close ties to the progressive movement and Democratic Party mean that there will be little public confidence if Holder decides not to pursue an ambitious investigation and ultimately prosecute.

And the New York Post has some history:

*ACORN is rooted in extreme far-left activism that wants to shut down the US government by overwhelming it with demands for welfare benefits and other forms of assistance.

“They don’t like the American system of government, and would love for it to be overthrown,” said ACORN expert Matthew Vadum, a senior editor at the conservative Capital Research Center in D.C.

“The whole goal is to transform America into a socialist country, or some form of socialist democracy. This group is dangerous.”

*Founder Wade Rathke was a student at Williams College in 1969 and a member of the leftist Students for a New Democracy group when he dropped out to protest the Vietnam War full-time.

*Rathke began working for fiery activist George Wiley, a black radical who started the National Welfare Reform Organization in 1969. NWRO was created to help poor people sign up for more welfare benefits, with the goal of clogging and eventually grinding down US government systems.

*In 1970 Rathke was charged with inciting violence by Massachussetts police after a welfare rally he was leading turned into a riot. He was then sent to Arkansas to open up a new chapter of NWRO. But he began to hear rumors that Wiley was going to oust him from the organization. So he decided to start his own group — the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN.

*In 1972 ACORN launched its first political initiative and backed two of its members who were running for the Little Rock School Board. Its efforts proved so successful that the group expanded beyond Arkansas and opened offices in Texas and South Dakota. Before long, it became a national group and started pushing its progressive political agenda.

*In 1999 Wade Rathke’s brother Dale, also a major figure at ACORN, was caught embezzling nearly $1 million from the organization. His plundering was swept under the rug after the Rathke family promised to repay the debt. Both Wade and Dale Rathke remained on the payroll and the group didn’t inform any of its board members about the theft, or contact authorities.

*In June 2008 two whistleblowers demanded a full accounting of Dale Rathke’s embezzlement, and its subsequent cover-up. When news of it broke, Dale and Wade were forced to leave the organization, which employs hundreds worldwide. Wade remains in control of ACORN International and other subsidiaries of the main group. The two dissident board members were ejected from ACORN and labeled traitors.

What’s a ho gonna do?

Senator Mike Johanns (R-NE) introduced an amendment to the HUD and Transportation appropriation bill to strip ACORN of all federal funding.  A week ago, Johanns wouldn’t have gotten the amendment to the floor.

Today, however, after three straight days of BigGovernment.com’s video exposés of ACORN offices in Washington DC, New York City, and Baltimore offering assistance to pimping, tax evasion, and trafficking in underage Salvadorean girls, Johanns not only got his vote — but he got an impressive bipartisan showing.  The Senate passed the Johanns amendment 83-7.

Net media 1, Big Baloney 0.

UPDATE:

Here’s a photo of filmmaker James O’Keefe dressed up in his pimp costume. If this is what he wore to the ACORN offices and they believed him, they’re not just crooks but stupid. He looks like he’s going to a Halloween party.