Bloodthirsty Liberal

I’ve taken to listening to NPR. I’m not sure why, or even when this deviant behavior began, but I’ve developed an interest in the culture. For example, a couple days ago, on the BBC News Hour, which NPR presents locally, I heard a wonderfully obnoxious interview/discussion between a male British vegan and a female American vegetarian. The interviewer was quite fascinated in what sorts of people each of them would consider dating. The vegan wouldn’t have anything to do with anyone who consumed meat or animal products. What if he kissed someone who had animal parts in her teeth? The vegetarian said that she didn’t care, she would potentially date a butcher, even a hunter! Maybe on the hunter. Plus she herself consumes fish. The vegan bitterly explained that consuming fish caused great suffering to the fish. There was a certain level of animosity between them, and to my ears, the vegetarian at least sounded sane. But then, but then… the vegetarian pipes up, rather defensively I thought, and proclaims, I would date a hunter but there is one person I would never date – a Republican.

Ew, right?

So the following day I heard a bit of an interview with Tom Ashbrook, who does a talk show for our local NPR affiliate, and the subject was the fact that there were more babies-of-color than babies-of-white born in the US last year. Mr. Ashbrook was interviewing some “experts” on race relations. The part I heard had to do with the novel idea that young people across races are in more agreement with their peers on this topic, than with elders within their own “race”, their specific “of-color”. (Strange, I thought. Young people feel differently than older people, and more like each other. I don’t recall that phenomena in the 60s and 70s.) Then, out of the clear blue sky, an arrow sailed into my car window, just missing my jugular. The Tea Party, we learned, is both older than 40, and racist. But they will die. To be replaced by young people who are not at all racist. And all will be good. Seriously, they talked about a racist Tea Party that would die soon. I am not exaggerating.

Oh my, I thought. The Tea Party has nothing to do with race, everything to do with fiscal responsibility. Why is a federally tax supported radio station putting on programming that slams perfectly reasonable citizens? Or, put another way, why are we certain that on NPR we won’t hear a sentence like: The Black Church is both older and racist. But they will die. … Or one person I would never date is a Democrat? I would never even hang out with a Democrat.

Finally, last night I heard a bit of Terry Gross interviewing an African American actor. Mostly what they discussed was race. That’s fine, except when you consider the context that all is race on that station. Is this about the election, or do they really just talk about race all day, every day? I am reminded of the period in the 90′s when John Grisham books were very popular. At one point, it looked as if his were the only books that could possibly sell – ever. All anyone wanted to read was legal thrillers.

So I thought it might be fun to remember and record some of these nasty little attacks that our tax dollars provide. If you, or any of your friends, ever listen to this claptrap, we would like to hear from you. Send us a short description of the offensive, race-baiting, tearing us apart from the inside-out, conversation and we’ll start a regular feature.

Thanks,

Aggie

- Aggie

Bringing us one step closer to war

Iran is dedicated to annihilating Israel, the Islamic regime’s military chief of staff declared Sunday.

“The Iranian nation is standing for its cause and that is the full annihilation of Israel,” Maj. Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi said in a speech to a defense gathering Sunday in Tehran.

His remarks came on the day International Atomic Energy Agency director Yukiya Amano flew to Tehran to negotiate for inspections of Iran’s nuclear program. They were reported by the Fars News Agency, the media outlet of the Revolutionary Guards Corps.

While many within the Islamic regime, including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have often stated that Israel should be annihilated, until Sunday no one in the nation’s leadership has announced Iran’s determined intention to carry it out. (RELATED: Iran rattles sabers: ’11,000 missiles ready to launch’ at Israel, US targets)

Josh Block, a Middle East expert and former spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, told The Daily Caller that it’s unwise to shrug off the threats of a top Iranian military commander.

“When they say it, they mean it,” Block said. “That is the lesson of history. We had best heed that reality. You can be sure the Israelis already understand it.”

Block is a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute who worked in the Clinton administration’s State Department. He told TheDC that the U.S. should be concerned about “an Iran that could give nuclear technology to their terrorist allies, including those like Al Qaeda and Hezbollah.”

Who knows? Maybe Israel will tolerate this, but I wouldn’t be shocked to wake up some morning to war.

- Aggie

53,000 removed from the Florida roles, but other states take no action.

I have learned that Florida election officials are set to announce that the secretary of state has discovered and purged up to 53,000 dead voters from the voter rolls in Florida.

How could 53,000 dead voters have sat on the polls for so long? Simple. Because Florida hadn’t been using the best available data revealing which voters have died. Florida is now using the nationwide Social Security Death Index for determining which voters should be purged because they have died.

Here is the bad news. Most states aren’t using the same database that Florida is. In fact, I have heard reports that some election officials won’t even remove voters even when they are presented with a death certificate. That means that voter rolls across the nation still are filled with dead voters, even if Florida is leading the way in detecting and removing them.

But surely people aren’t voting in the names of dead voters, the voter fraud deniers argue. Wrong.

Consider the case of Lafayette Keaton. Keaton not only voted for a dead person in Oregon, he voted for his dead son. Making Keaton’s fraud easier was Oregon’s vote by mail scheme, which has opened up gaping holes in the integrity of elections. The incident in Oregon just scratches the surface of the problem. Massachusetts and Mississippi are but two other examples of the dead rising on election day.

Aggie, how do you know that the dead will vote for Obama? Simple. I know a fair amount about Chicago.

- Aggie

If you have time, this is pretty interesting.

- Aggie

This guy answers the question I was wondering about.

Unless you’re a credulous rube, it sure does look like Obama told his literary agency that he was born in Kenya for some reason. And the false information wasn’t corrected until April 2007, a couple of months after he launched his presidential campaign.

“But wait,” you protest. “How do you know Obama wrote that? How do you know he ever even saw it? Shut up!” Well, we all know that Obama is the exception to every rule, so maybe he’s the exception to this one too. Author and television producer Steve Boman writes at Breitbart.com about his own mid-’90s working relationship with literary agent Miriam Goderich, the woman who now claims the “born in Kenya” misinformation was somehow a “fact-checking error”:

Now let me say right up front: when it comes to Obama, I’m not going to speculate who wrote what, when. Dystel had assistants, one of whom is now her partner, Miriam Goderich, who says the whole Obama-born-in-Kenya thing was a fact-checking mistake by her. And I cannot speak specifically to the mechanism of Dystel’s publicity. (Alas, Dystel was unable to sell anything I wrote, so she had no reason to promote me, but I’m getting ahead of myself.)

I can speak of what she was like to work with and how she generated material. In my dealings with Dystel, I found her exceptionally thorough and very professional. She had a template she wanted non-fiction writers to follow, and my writing partner and I followed her template closely. She was rather fastidious, going so far as to mail a personal “Season’s Greetings” card in December.

All material she used in our proposals came directly from me and my writing partner. She edited our rough-draft proposals and gave us feedback, but the final versions were all ours. Our final versions, bio included, were then simply photo-copied, by us, and distributed to potential publishers. This was back in the pre-Google days, recall.

It is helpful that the writer worked with the same agent and was able to provide the basic template. I just can’t figure out how anyone could confuse Kenya with Hawaii.

- Aggie

Great piece.

It used to be a lot simpler. As E.C. Bentley deftly summarized it in 1905:

“Geography is about maps.

But Biography is about chaps.”

But that was then, and now Biography is also about maps. For example, have you ever thought it would be way cooler to have been born in colonial Kenya?

At the link he ties Warren and Obama together in a neat little package.

- Aggie

So much for $75/share.

All the hype in the world…

- Aggie

His agent had his birthplace in Kenya until a couple of months AFTER he announced his run for President

According to archive.org, a website that caches websites on a regular basis, the Dystel.com website – the official website for Dystel & Goderich, Obama’s literary agents – was using the Barack Obama “born in Kenya” language until April 2007, just two months after then-Senator Obama declared his campaign for the presidency.

Archive.org shows that the Dystel website used the following biography for Obama as of April 3, 2007:

BARACK OBAMA is the junior Democratic senator from Illinois and was the dynamic keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He was also the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. He was born in Kenya to an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister and was raised in Indonesia, Hawaii, and Chicago. His first book, DREAMS FROM MY FATHER: A STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE, has been a long time New York Times bestseller.

Obama launched his presidential campaign in February 2007.

By April 21, 2007, the Obama bio had been changed to state that Obama was born in Hawaii:

BARACK OBAMA is the junior Democratic senator from Illinois and was the dynamic keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He was also the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. He was born in Hawaii to an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister and was raised in Indonesia, Hawaii, and Chicago. His first book, DREAMS FROM MY FATHER: A STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE, has been a long time New York Times bestseller.

Obama had already been a national figure for three years, since the Democratic National Convention in 2004, by the time the biography was changed; he had been a sitting Senator for over two years.

And the media is doing everything possible to help the poor guy out

Whatever.

- Aggie

Obama born in Kenya.

H/t Rush, who directed his listeners to Drudge.

Note from Senior Management:

Andrew Breitbart was never a “Birther,” and Breitbart News is a site that has never advocated the narrative of “Birtherism.” In fact, Andrew believed, as we do, that President Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961.

Yet Andrew also believed that the complicit mainstream media had refused to examine President Obama’s ideological past, or the carefully crafted persona he and his advisers had constructed for him.

It is for that reason that we launched “The Vetting,” an ongoing series in which we explore the ideological background of President Obama (and other presidential candidates)–not to re-litigate 2008, but because ideas and actions have consequences.

It is also in that spirit that we discovered, and now present, the booklet described below–one that includes a marketing pitch for a forthcoming book by a then-young, otherwise unknown former president of the Harvard Law Review.

It is evidence–not of the President’s foreign origin, but that Barack Obama’s public persona has perhaps been presented differently at different times.

So was he or wasn’t he?

Breitbart News has obtained a promotional booklet produced in 1991 by Barack Obama’s then-literary agency, Acton & Dystel, which touts Obama as “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”

The booklet, which was distributed to “business colleagues” in the publishing industry, includes a brief biography of Obama among the biographies of eighty-nine other authors represented by Acton & Dystel.

It also promotes Obama’s anticipated first book, Journeys in Black and White–which Obama abandoned, later publishing Dreams from My Father instead.

Obama’s biography in the booklet is as follows (image and text below):

Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation. He served as project coordinator in Harlem for the New York Public Interest Research Group, and was Executive Director of the Developing Communities Project in Chicago’s South Side. His commitment to social and racial issues will be evident in his first book, Journeys in Black and White.

The booklet, which is thirty-six pages long, is printed in blue ink (and, on the cover, silver/grey ink), using offset lithography. It purports to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of Acton & Dystel, which was founded in 1976.

Bingo!

They are not even showing this on yahoo finance at the moment, and several other sites fail to mention that the numbers were revised upward by 3,000 new applicants.

The DOL reports:

In the week ending May 12, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 370,000, unchanged from the previous week’s revised figure of 370,000. The 4-week moving average was 375,000, a decrease of 4,750 from the previous week’s revised average of 379,750.

The previous week was revised up from 367,000 to 370,000.

So we were right. And on the theory that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, I’ll wager that this week’s claims will also be adjusted upward by roughly 3,000 poor sods.

- Aggie

One Republican PAC is considering running ads explaining Obama’s relationship to Reverend Wright.

The NY Times is panicked.

A group of high-profile Republican strategists is working with a conservative billionaire on a proposal to mount one of the most provocative campaigns of the “super PAC” era and attack President Obama in ways that Republicans have so far shied away from.

Timed to upend the Democratic National Convention in September, the plan would “do exactly what John McCain would not let us do,” the strategists wrote.

The plan, which is awaiting approval, calls for running commercials linking Mr. Obama to incendiary comments by his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose race-related sermons made him a highly charged figure in the 2008 campaign.

“The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way,” says the proposal, which was overseen by Fred Davis and commissioned by Joe Ricketts, the founder of the brokerage firm TD Ameritrade. Mr. Ricketts is increasingly putting his fortune to work in conservative politics.

Is this a good idea, or will it backfire?

- Aggie