Bloodthirsty Liberal

West surprised, disheartened, that Iran is still making bomb

Why do adults refuse to grow up?

Over the past few weeks, there has been growing optimism in western capitals that Iran might be forced into a compromise over its nuclear programme and avoid a war with Israel and the US.

However, after two days of anguished talks this week between Iran and world powers in Baghdad, such hopes were doused in a very cold dose of reality.

As Israel and the US make contingency plans for a possible strike, the six powers – the US, EU, UK, France, Germany, Russia and China – put a proposal to Iran that would have seen Tehran freeze its production of more highly enriched uranium in return for a package of inducements from the US and EU, such as providing parts for Iranian civil aircraft.

But after often fraught bargaining in Baghdad, diplomats left declaring they had made no progress at all. “It’s been a difficult few days,” said a European diplomat in Baghdad. “After our first meeting in Istanbul with Iran a few weeks ago, we were euphoric. Now we’re a lot more realistic about just how difficult this negotiation is.”

What is the matter with us?

- Aggie

The young Obama’s preferred weed:

As a member of the Choom Gang, Barry Obama was known for starting a few pot-smoking trends. The first was called “TA,” short for “total absorption.” To place this in the physical and political context of another young man who would grow up to be president, TA was the antithesis of Bill Clinton’s claim that as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford he smoked dope but never inhaled.

Along with TA, Barry popularized the concept of “roof hits”: when they were chooming in the car all the windows had to be rolled up so no smoke blew out and went to waste; when the pot was gone, they tilted their heads back and sucked in the last bit of smoke from the ceiling.

The Barf Couch earned its name early in the first trimester when a freshman across the hall from Obama [in the Haines Hall Annex dorm at Occidental College] drank himself into a stupor and threw up all over himself and the couch. In the manner of pallbearers hoisting a coffin, a line of Annexers lifted the tainted sofa with the freshman aboard and toted it out the back door and down four steps to the first concrete landing on the way to the parking lot. A day later, the couch remained outside in the sun, resting on its side with cushions off (someone had hosed it clean), and soon it was back in the hallway nook.

What is significant to me is not that Obama was a raging pot-head. Dreams From Bill Ayers’ Imagination told us that he smoked, drank, and snorted with reckless abandon. But what percentage of people know this? Why has the press not only ignored the story, but buried it? Why do we know more about George Bush’s drinking than Obama’s weed whacking?

PS: There’s a lot more at the link, all of it rather desperate. Rule-bound, selfish, obsessive—I thought drugs were about escape, not doubling down. Obama’s high school experience sounds like Parris Island for potheads.

Help is on the way.

Meanwhile, they can’t afford street lights. George Bush’s fault.

Half of Detroit’s Streetlights May Go Out as City Shrinks
By Chris Christoff – May 24, 2012 12:06 PM ET

Detroit Residents Stay In at Night as Lights Go Out

Detroit, whose 139 square miles contain 60 percent fewer residents than in 1950, will try to nudge them into a smaller living space by eliminating almost half its streetlights.

As it is, 40 percent of the 88,000 streetlights are broken and the city, whose finances are to be overseen by an appointed board, can’t afford to fix them. Mayor Dave Bing’s plan would create an authority to borrow $160 million to upgrade and reduce the number of streetlights to 46,000. Maintenance would be contracted out, saving the city $10 million a year.
Enlarge image Half of Detroit’s Lights Might Go Dark as City Shrinks Itself

Other U.S. cities have gone partially dark to save money, among them Colorado Springs; Santa Rosa, California; and Rockford, Illinois. Detroit’s plan goes further: It would leave sparsely populated swaths unlit in a community of 713,000 that covers more area than Boston, Buffalo and San Francisco combined. Vacant property and parks account for 37 square miles (96 square kilometers), according to city planners.

“You have to identify those neighborhoods where you want to concentrate your population,” said Chris Brown, Detroit’s chief operating officer. “We’re not going to light distressed areas like we light other areas.”

Sounds racist to me.

- Aggie

In Michigan, a Unabomber groupie.

A Michigan professor who corresponds with “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski said the murderer’s cause was a noble one, and that the convicted terrorist may even be “a prophet and potentially a kind of savior of humanity and the planet.”

David Skrbina, a professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, has maintained contact with the Unabomber for the past nine years and has published their letters, Kaczynski’s essays and a manifesto about the bombings from the Washington Post in a book called “Technological Slavery,” the Washington Examiner reported.

Skrbina believes Kaczynski didn’t send the bombs because he thought killing people would do any good, but because the act would give him leverage to pursue the publication of his anti-technology manifesto.

Skrbina compared the Unabomber to President Obama. “If I wanted to be sarcastic,” he told his class, “I’d say our president kills people all the time, why should we listen to a murderer called Barack Obama?” he asked. “But we do. OK, it’s a different context and different circumstances, but there’s a kind of parallel there.”

At least he’s not a Republican, right?

- Aggie

I see President Obama is delivering the commencement address at the Air Force Academy today, and good for him.

I just wonder if he’ll make the fighter pilots also feel “stereotyped, simplified, and used”? Maybe come across as “paternalistic”?

Interesting how he picks his opportunities for maximum political benefit, isn’t it? A women’s college, a military academy… is there a gay school? Besides Sarah Lawrence, that is? By the time this is done, he may be begging for an appearance before Bob Jones University!

PS: That three fundraisers are tacked on to the trip—one in Denver, the other two in “nearby” California—is purely coincidental, I’m sure.

I can see him dancing around the ring like Muhammmad Ali in his prime, skipping shuffling, calling out his challengers:

C’mon “Uncommitted”, let’s see what you got! I can take on all no-names and imprisoned felons, and kick all of their asses!

President Obama easily won Tuesday night’s Democratic primary in Kentucky, capturing 58 percent of the vote.

That sounds like a solid victory. But with the president running unopposed in the Bluegrass State that means more than four in 10 voters didn’t pick him.

Who did they choose instead? Forty-two percent of those going to the polls rejected the president in favor of “uncommitted.”

And, according to Louisville’s Courier-Journal newspaper, in 67 of Kentucky’s 120 counties, “uncommitted” received more votes than the president.

Over in Arkansas, where he had an actual opponent, Obama lost a similar percentage of the vote. According to preliminary returns from the state’s open primary, John Wolfe, a lawyer from Tennessee, is polling at about 40 percent.

Though little known, Wolfe is no stranger to politics. The Washington Post reports he was previously on the primary ballots in Louisiana, Missouri and New Hampshire, and will be on next week’s ballot in Texas. He has also run four failed campaigns for Congress.

Both Kentucky and Arkansas are considered solid red states for the general election and their less than enthusiastic support for the president comes as no surprise. Still, as the AP points out, “it’s a bit embarrassing for the Democratic Party and highlights Obama’s political weakness in Southern states.”

Just two weeks ago, more than 40 percent of voters in West Virginia’s Democratic primary chose a federal inmate named Keith Judd over the president.

These were Democrat voters, remember, not Republican neanderthals (tautology!). Primaries tend to bring out the extreme voter—or rather not to exercise the average voter to leave home or work to pull the lever for Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul or whomever. So, these voters came out with a purpose. They may vote “Uncommitted”, but they do so with great commitment.

PS: I was going to comment that this is what happens in states that sue over ObamaCare, but neither Arkansas nor Kentucky has signed on to the lawsuit that 26 other sates have. Obama will win California, New York, and other big electoral college states—but he will certainly lose the majority of states. It remains to be seen whether he can win enough battleground states to eke out reelection, but I am hopeful and growing more convinced that he cannot.

Remember how the New Black Panthers turned out for Obama? Sure you do. Here’s King Shamir Shabazz, Poll Watcher:

Well, that was then:

The small but vocal New Black Panther Party is woefully disappointed in President Barack Obama, and is openly implying that the best way to reach its goals is no longer through “the ballot” but through “the bullet.”

In the Spring edition of the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) newspaper — cover reading “The Ballot or The Bullet: which way for black people?” — NBPP Chairman Malik Zulu Shabazz breaks down the presidential election, concluding the Democratic Party is the “institutional pimp of Black peoples and the Black Nation” and that Obama has “been a real disappointment.”

“Black peoples are the whores and prostitutes of the Democratic Party, and mistreated mistress that is courted in the late of night, but left hanging when it is time for real change in the light of the post election day,” Shabazz wrote, following a dissertation on the need to “Vote for Revolution.”

…

“The black community is at large no better off that (sic) before he was in office. We are curious as to what his agenda is for Black people in America and if he even has one,” Shabazz added.

Wait a minute…. That sounds familiar:

Democrats Rep. Maxine Waters of California, a central member of the Congressional Black Caucus, said Tuesday that “we don’t know why” President Obama is not visiting black communities on his Midwestern bus tour, adding, “We’re supportive of the president, but we’re getting tired.”

…

“The Congressional Black Caucus loves the president, too,” she went on to say. “We’re supportive of the president, but we’re getting tired. We’re getting tired. And so, what we want to do is, we want to give the president every opportunity to show what he can do and what he’s prepared to lead on. We want to give him every opportunity, but our people are hurting. The unemployment is unconscionable. We don’t know what the strategy is. We don’t know why on this trip that he’s in the United States now, he’s not in any black community. We don’t know that.”

It’s not for me to tell people how to vote. But Malik Zulu Shabazz makes a valid point when he declares “Black peoples are the whores and prostitutes of the Democratic Party”. If you want respect, don’t lie down so easily. No one can take advantage of you without your permission.

- 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

We will not join with those small-minded bigots who try to portray the President—our President—as “The Other” because of his funny name (Barry) or the way he chooses to honor his God. No, siree, not us.

If the New York Times can pick and choose when to mention Reverend Wright’s name, so can we:

A report in The New York Times on Thursday exposed a secret plan by Republican strategists and financiers to rekindle questions about the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Mr. Obama’s onetime pastor, and his angry black-power sermons.

Perhaps this news story might justify a three day roll out if, in fact, that narrative were accurate. Sadly, for the New York Times and Barack Obama’s campaign, it is not.

Despite what the Times claims, the undisputed facts are these:

1. There was no “secret plan” by “strategists” or “financiers” to push the Wright story,

2. The super pac in question asked advertisers to bring them ad ideas focused on the federal debt,

3. The ad man who pitched the idea to the super pac conceded that the group did not want proposals that dealt with anything other than fiscal issues,

4. Mitt Romney and his campaign had nothing to do with anything involving this ad.

5. The Republican Party had nothing to do with anything involving this pitch.

If the Republican Party thinks it can outsource its attack ads on the President’s —our President’s—beloved family pastor, they are sorely mistaken.

Reverend Wright’s “black power” sermons have no place here.

Wright’s love of humankind is evident to all who bring an open heart:

You’ll have to go elsewhere to indulge your twisted fantasies in any purported or alleged antisemitic diatribes.

One thing we can all agree on: there is no place for this sort of thing in the nation’s body politic. If there is a separation of church and state, let’s get this kind of theology out of the White House now and forever.