Tennesseefree.com

“The triumvirate of Gates, Clinton and Jones to lead Obama’s ‘national security team’ instills great confidence at home and abroad and further strengthens the growing respect for the president-elect’s courage and ability to exercise sound judgment in selecting the ‘best and the brightest’ to implement our nation’s security policies,” — Retiring Republican Senator John Warner (RINO).

Ahmadenijad, Chavez, Putin and assorted other international figures of distaste are grinning ear to ear.

God help us each and every one.

Question for Republicans: how does it feel to be on the political side of the least educated among us, the political party that has now fallen so far from the mainstream of America that it is now essentially a regional party of white people?

NYT:

Southern counties that voted more heavily Republican this year than in 2004 tended to be poorer, less educated and whiter, a statistical analysis by The New York Times shows. Mr. Obama won in only 44 counties in the Appalachian belt, a stretch of 410 counties that runs from New York to Mississippi. Many of those counties, rural and isolated, have been less exposed to the diversity, educational achievement and economic progress experienced by more prosperous areas. … The Republicans, meanwhile, have “become a Southernized party,” said Thomas  Schaller, a political scientist who teaches at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “They have completely marginalized themselves to a mostly regional party,” he said, pointing out that nearly half of the current Republican House delegation is now Southern… Less than a third of Southern whites voted for Mr. Obama, compared with 43 percent of whites nationally.

The GOP has lived up to it’s reputation here in the south.  Race DID matter in this election, particularly in southern states like Alabama:

“Race continues to play a major role in the state,” said Glenn Feldman, a historian at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. “Alabama, unfortunately, continues to remain shackled to the bonds of yesterday.”  David Bositis, senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, pointed out that the 18 percent share of whites that voted for Senator John Kerry in 2004 was almost cut in half for Mr. Obama.  “There’s no other explanation than race,” he said.

Something to be proud of?

22-year veteran Rep. Chris Shays [R-CT] was ousted giving Democrats every House seat from New England.   Democrats also took control of all of New York City’s delegation in Washington for the first time in 35 years.

This now-famous photo was taken by Sebastian D’Souza, a newspaper photog who witnessed the beginning of the carnage that left 195 people dead in Mumbai, India (previously known as Bombay). Only 10 gunmen participated in the attacks. Nine were killed; one is being…interrogated.

UPDATE: Maybe more than 10 attackers...

“Estimates of the number of attackers have ranged from 20 to 40, with the number depending to a considerable extent on the number of boats involved. As security forces seek to reconstruct how the gunmen managed to inflict so much carnage so quickly, they have been turning their attention to how so many assailants managed to reach the heart of Mumbai undetected and with such a large collection of guns, ammunition and explosives.”

Worst of all, armed Indian policemen would not draw their weapons and return fire; instead, they retreated. From the Belfast Telegraph, Jerome Taylor, who interviewed D’Souza…

“I ran into the first carriage of one of the trains on the platform to try and get a shot but couldn’t get a good angle, so I moved to the second carriage and waited for the gunmen to walk by,” he said. “They were shooting from waist height and fired at anything that moved. I briefly had time to take a couple of frames using a telephoto lens. I think they saw me taking photographs but they didn’t seem to care.”

…

“I first saw the gunmen outside the station,” Mr D’Souza said. “With their rucksacks and Western clothes they looked like backpackers, not terrorists, but they were very heavily armed and clearly knew how to use their rifles.

“Towards the station entrance, there are a number of bookshops and one of the bookstore owners was trying to close his shop,” he recalled. “The gunmen opened fire and the shopkeeper fell down.”

But what angered Mr D’Souza almost as much were the masses of armed police hiding in the area who simply refused to shoot back. “There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything,” he said. “At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, ‘Shoot them, they’re sitting ducks!’ but they just didn’t shoot back.”

As the gunmen fired at policemen taking cover across the street, Mr D’Souza realised a train was pulling into the station unaware of the horror within. “I couldn’t believe it. We rushed to the platform and told everyone to head towards the back of the station. Those who were older and couldn’t run, we told them to stay put.”

The militants returned inside the station and headed towards a rear exit towards Chowpatty Beach. Mr D’Souza added: “I told some policemen the gunmen had moved towards the rear of the station but they refused to follow them. What is the point if having policemen with guns if they refuse to use them? I only wish I had a gun rather than a camera.”

India has draconian gun laws. There’s not enough guns in the hands of citizens, obviously. Even the police were afraid to use their issued weapons. You can’t own a semi-auto weapon, or any bore that is chambered for ’service’ rounds…including .45ACP, 9mm, any of the NATO or military rounds. Those laws certainly stopped these terrorists, didn’t they?

As for the cops..I wonder if their service weapons were even loaded.

~*~

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Hey Lefties! Karl Rove endorses O!’s economic team!

(Image of Barbara Eden and her erstwhile turkey snagged from Theo Spark)

click to enlarge

h/t Dan Collins

James Carville said it best on Larry King last night:

“…this change is breathtaking, we’re going from incompetence to competence, which is quite a sweep in the view of things. What you’re seeing here is change on a scale people are going to find to be unimaginable. And just when we get competence back in this government and we’re going to restore some confidence in people, we’re going to get rid of the Alberto Gonzales and the Michael Browns of the world and replace them with people like Larry Summers and Pete Orszag and Hillary Clinton. It’s going to be a huge difference out there, I promise you.”

Dangerous. Really.  A perfect delivery mechanism for neurotoxins; those are never good things. In the old days of wooden outhouses, these critters would lurk right beneath the seats.

Read more »

Iowahawk writes the funniest Obama satire piece of the year! Bill Clinton is appointed by Barack Obama to…President of the United States. That appointment explains Baracky’s spate of recent all-ex-Clinton appointees; neatly solves Baracky’s inexperience issues; immediately calms the financial market’s uncertainties and gives Baracky time to relax in a back-office with his favorite bong.

Excerpted…

While the naming of Clinton appears to have momentarily calmed jittery financial markets, it sparked ripples of disapproval at liberal websites like Huffington Post and DailyKos. The progressive blogosphere was an early key source of support for Mr. Obama’s candidacy, but a steady stream of Clinton-era appointees since the election has left some charging that he had betrayed his campaign promises to bring them to Washington as part of a sweeping culture of change — a charge that Mr. Obama vehemently accepted.

“Oh, for crissakes. Are you kidding me? Are you friggin’ kidding me?” asked Obama. “Of course I betrayed those goddamned idiots. Have any of you actually spent five minutes with them? I have, unfortunately. Nothing personal, but I wouldn’t trust these internet windowlickers with a plastic spork from Taco Bell, let alone a freaking $3 trillion dollar budget global superpower. Look, I may be naive, but I’m not stupid. And if Kose or Koz or whatever the fuck his name is thinks for one second I give a rat’s ass about who he wants in charge of the Treasury Department, he’s even stupider than he looks.”

Cuts to the chase. KaOS and der Huffinsky can rave all they want to; reality is that this country doesn’t need a dose of far lefty blogthink right now.

It’s now Obama’s turn to realize that his vaporous ‘CHANGE’ was something he can throw out the freakin’ window.  After just a couple CIA briefings and a slap or two from grim advisers who are obviously telling Obonga that “Play time is over; put away your platitudes and your stupid grin and realize that you must now quit pretending to be a ‘Messiah‘ and actually get out there in the minefield and lead this damned country, or you will forever be the man linked to the fall of America.”

With Bill Clinton back in the driver’s seat, at least we’re assured that nubile White House interns will deliver pizzas ( hand-tossed?) at all hours of the day, while Hillary is overseas solving the Joooooooo! problem. Aspirin factories, beware.

..had nothing to do with the Titans.

The Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne, the 160th Night Stalkers, put on a fantastic pregame show.

After that, nothing of note.

More Screaming Eagles pics here (with a couple shots included of the on-the-field action, just to balance the post out, and prove that, yes, I was actually there, and stayed awake for at least some of the game.)

Next game: Thursday, the early show (11:30 AM), in Detroit. I would hope that Jeff Fisher gets his worthies ready and willing to play on such a short rest, and that the Titans don’t bring the turkey.

(Oh, speaking of turkey, did you note the PSMSNBC antics with Sarah Palin over the weekend? It’s as if those pantywaists hadn’t known that turkeys had to be killed to be eaten. What a bunch of metrosexuals they (and their viewers!) are.)

Today is Victory in Iraq Day.

Victory in Iraq Day: Participating Blogs

No matter which ’side’ of the aisle we’re on (Conservative Republicans or the more middle of the road sorts of Republicans, or Independents) let’s not forget our American troops, and their sacrifice. We should never forget the purposes of these wars, and the efforts made by our men and women in uniform to win.

Nor should we forget the..efforts..made by our enemies to drive us to defeat.

You know who you are.

Brian at Six Meat Buffet posts on an insufferable Barack Obama Commemorative Plate: The “Historic Victory Plate™ is a treasured collectible work of art that can be proudly displayed on shelves, table tops or can be hung on a wall.“

Or, as a commenter pointed out, there’s other possibilities. He’ll “use it as a base plate for my chamber pot”.

I, of course, agree wholeheartedly that such an eupeptic piece of work needs suitable framing.

There’s only one place in my house what deserves such an exalted work of art, so I contumaciously (in the spirit of the OUTLAW) present…

(Ummm, carefully decide before you click that. Those of weaker dispositions may want to avoid it at all costs. I’ve put it up at home, in it’s full magnificence, but here I’ll simply leave the link..    )

Or, as I see it, a defeat that damns Americans. Especially those that haven’t had the privilege of being born yet.

Cardinal Stafford of Baltimore just declared in a published sermon that “On November 4, 2008, America suffered a cultural earthquake.” He called Obama’s campaign “aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic” and said he campaigned on an “extremist anti-life platform.”

On the matter of abortion the Cardinal is literally correct. 

I don’t think the Cardinal meant to dehumanize the President-elect, the way that President Bush has been dehumanized so thoroughly by the Left since 2000. But telling the truth is the first step to recovery.

It is incumbent on us to tell the truth, without scapegoating, and without denying the new administration a chance to find the center of American political life. If they are so inclined.

However, judged by the open record, the coming administration will bring to power the most radical Leftist group of political operators in American history. Their unapologetic radicalism on the subject of abortion is only part of their story, but it is surely the single most lethal and irresponsible part. Their entire campaign was built on lies and image-making, shielded by a solid stream of daily cover-ups by the Big Media, and supported by tens of millions of brainwashed followers.

Brainwashed by a cult of personality.

But as I see it, the farther left these neo-fascists go, the faster the pendulum swings to the left, then the sooner the eventual recovery will begin. Let them go.

The latest indicator that we’re seeing a massive anti-business pro-envirowhacko-socialism swing is the elevation of Henry Waxman to chair the House Energy and Commerce Committee, unseating the long-serving John Dingell. The WSJ writes

John Dingell’s fall from power yesterday is an important inflection point in the history of the modern Democratic Party. The House purge marks the final triumph of the Congressional generation that came of political age during the 1970s over the last lion of New Deal liberalism, and it is symbolic of the party’s change in culture and policy priorities in the Barack Obama era.

…

That fissure neatly separates the Waxman Democrats from the old vanguard that Mr. Dingell represents. He was first elected in 1955 and has always tried to protect his hometown Detroit auto makers from the eco-mandates that ultimately helped to land them in their present predicament. Mr. Dingell’s rough-hewn candor about the realities of “doing something” about climate change also helped to make him a green pariah. He knows that carbon regulation and taxes will fall most heavily on domestic manufacturing and Midwest states that rely on coal-fired power. His sympathies lie with the people who work near (or in) factories and drive Fords or Chevys.

Mr. Waxman, speaking for the upscale precincts of Beverly Hills, wants to phase out coal and cars that use gasoline. The coastal elites who now dominate Democratic politics will happily trade the blue collar for the green collar.

…

The irony is that Democrats have found, in Mr. Waxman, an even more extreme antibusiness tribune, who will no doubt use his new powers to go after any concern that turns a profit but refuses to pay his party the obeisance of campaign cash and regulatory submission. In short, the Democrats have ousted the dean of the House for the spleen of the House.

We’re seeing the ebullient extremists controlling the Democratic party. We’ll see this marked shift to the left continue for a couple years, then… the backlash will commence.

Just hang on, and prepare for a Merry Meltdown..

Where is the Republican Party going?   Answer:  into the shitter.

GOP image goes from bad to worse

WASHINGTON (CNN) – The Republican Party has hit a new low.

Just 34 percent of Americans in a Gallup Poll released Thursday say they have a favorable view of the party, down from 40 percent from a month ago, before the election.

What’s worse: 61 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of the Republican Party.

According to Gallup, that unfavorable rating is the highest the polling organization has recorded for the GOP since the measure was established in 1992.

55% currently hold a favorable view of the Democratic Party and only 39% an unfavorable view.

Remember this the next time you hear someone refer to Democrats as the “liberal fringe” or “extremists.”  We can see who the whacko ‘fringe’ is now.

Publius does a nice job summing up what’s at the heart of the liberal/conservative divide on “social conservative” issues:

The social conservatives’ positions tend to empower government over individuals. If they got their way, the public would be forced to submit to the government’s decision-making. The more liberal position, by contrast, allocates power to individuals – no one is forced to do anything. (Admittedly, this is not really a constitutional argument – just an additional explanation for why the Christian Right tends to scare people).

Take, for instance, the granddaddy issue of them all – abortion. The Christian Right position would require every single person in a given jurisdiction to give birth. (Yes, some would argue that it’s simply about letting the states decide – but still, they prefer this position because many states, and virtually the entire South, would ban abortion). Thus, the decision-making power here would belong to the government. Individuals would no longer be free to decide.

The pro-choice position, by contrast, ensures that individuals – not the government – will ultimately make these private decisions. Individuals remain free to have, or not have, abortions as they and their God see fit. And everyone remains free to persuade their fellow citizens of the values of bringing all pregnancies to term. But in the end, the individual – and not the state – would make the final call.

This pattern repeats itself across a number of issues. For example, gay marriage doesn’t require anyone to do anything. It merely allows consenting gay adults to be married. Gay marriage bans, by contrast, grant that decision-making power to the state.

Similarly, rights to contraception don’t require anyone to do anything – the ultimate decision remains with the individual. Contraception bans, by contrast, allocate the decision-making power to the government.

Same deal with school prayer. Banning school prayer in public classes doesn’t prevent anyone from praying privately at the school. But allowing public prayer, by contrast, would force non-Christians to sit through prayer sessions in a publicly funded school. Again, the decision to participate in prayer would be made by the state, not the individual.

The larger point is that these examples illustrate why many people fear social conservatives – simply put, many of the latter’s preferred positions would use the state to intrude on people’s lives and dictate very private and personal decisions to them.

Now, I think this is largely true. But at the same time, if you expand beyond the so-called “social conservative” issues, there are plenty of places where it’s the liberals who would be doing the forcing. Environmental issues, for example, or gun control.

That said, I think the fact that compliance is somehow enforced is not, in and of itself, necessarily a bad thing. It depends upon your view of the thing being enforced.

Conservatives are finally admitting the obvious: Howard Dean was right… it’s the “white kkkristian party.”  The GOP is becoming obsolete.

Townhall.com:

WASHINGTON — As Republicans sort out the reasons for their defeat, they likely will overlook or dismiss the gorilla in the pulpit.

Three little letters, great big problem: G-O-D.  Simply put: Armband religion is killing the Republican Party.

Here’s the deal, ‘pubbies: Howard Dean was right.

Suffice it to say, the Republican Party is largely comprised of white, married Christians. Anyone watching the two conventions last summer can’t have missed the stark differences: One party was brimming with energy, youth and diversity; the other felt like an annual Depends sales meeting.

But, like it or not, we are a diverse nation, no longer predominantly white and Christian. The change Barack Obama promised has already occurred, which is why he won.

The young will get older, of course. Most eventually will marry, and some will become their parents. But nonwhites won’t get whiter. And the nonreligious won’t get religion through external conversion. It doesn’t work that way.

Given those facts, the future of the GOP looks dim and dimmer if it stays the present course. Either the Republican Party needs a new base — or the nation may need a new party.

Told ya

In the debate about whether to bail out the Big Three automakers or let them go into Chapter 11 (an issue about which I’m still genuinely on the fence), one of the commonly-repeated talking points I keep hearing from the anti-bailout crowd is that Chapter 11 would allow the automakers to “dispose of legacy costs.” It’s pretty clear what that actually means, however, and why the Chapter 11 proponents don’t want to call it what it is: Screwing the pensioners.

Now some will doubtless object that the federal pension insurance will cover the pensioners, but there are two problems with this. First, this insurance will only pay a fraction of what the pensioners are currently receiving, and secondly, it makes those payments on the taxpayer dime, which means that from that perspective, we’re screwing both the pensioners and the taxpayers.

Now maybe this is unavoidable at this point — maybe the pensioners can’t fully be saved. I don’t know. But when we’re talking about real people, real benefits, and real jobs, we should at least be honest about what it is we’re talking about doing.

Using the community organizer tactics of Saul Alinsky and the neo-bombing education-indoctrination tactics of Bill Ayers, BHO was swept into the White House by a voting bloc of poorly-educated youth; the latest crop of University Youth that’s heavily influenced by a preponderence of leftist professors and their radical agendas…

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.

Those scornful and elitist leftist professors hate and disdain America’s past and the methodology of our rise to the top of our modern world; their ideology includes derision for the very economic engine that’s provided the means of our ascension: capitalism. Capitalism created the technologies that shoved us up from third world status; without these technologies, we would not be here, nor would these disdainful ‘professors’ have the platform they use so effectively to sow their seeds of ‘CHANGE’.

More, from Paul Kengor’s essay…

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.

Useful idiots, indeed, until something happens that will cause them to actually think about what they’ve created. Until something untoward bubbles up from the past..maybe a new order of socialism (which we know works out so well, eh?)

I don’t think we can sustain our level of culture and reason, because even our economic self-sufficiency will give way to the principles of socialism, and decay, if the ideas that BHO ran with come to full fruition.

Unlike the leftist professors who are polluting the minds of our youth, the principles of the U.S. and those freedoms what brung us aren’t given unlimited tenure. At some point, we’ll have to again prove our worth and mettle, or we will not survive as a nation. Do these progressive leftists have that depth of resolve, to build a newer, better-working America?

No, but they do have nice hammers and sickles…

Well, at least they won the ignorance vote.

The following sign appeared at the Spirit One Christian Center in Wichita, Kansas - deep in the heart of “Real (ignorant) America”

This is one of those ’speaking in tongues’ churches, you know like Sarah Palin’s church.

More from CNN

In honor of Serr8d’s very positive post, I remind you of this statement by the Democratic Leader of the United States Senate. Lest we never forget what the Democratic Party stands for.

Defeat, appeasement, failure, negativism.