Nobody parties like Obama

For Obama, whose main achievements are getting elected and writing books about himself, life is a wonderland.. Unlike for millions now out of work, the presidency for this man is endless golf, holidaying and party. Hey, who wouldn't like to have a never ending ball at taxpayers' expense?

The Obamas have taken it to a new level - secret partying!

Johnny Depp and Obama at the Alice in Wonderland 2009 White House Halloween party.

The big news over the weekend, that the Obama White House had a secret Alice and Wonderland-themed Halloween party, really didn’t surprise me. The taxpayer-funded event featured Johnny Depp in full Mad Hatter costume prancing on tables in the White House State Dining Room. Someone wore the actual Chewbacca Wookie costume, while guests drank punch from blood vials. (An aside: why is Halloween such a big event for some people, requiring excessive decorations and festivities?) The State Dining Room was turned into a Lewis Carroll-themed house of horrors for the invited guests.

Not surprisingly, the White House deliberately concealed the existence of the grotesque party from the public and the press corp. That pesky 16% real unemployment rate required stealth.

So much for the vaunted transparency.
Also note the complicity of the lapdog media in keeping his quiet. Woof, woof - anything else, master?

So England started WW2?

Russia invades Georgia- and lefties blame the victim!

No, Condoleezza Rice Does Not Blame Georgia for the War
Strangely preoccupied with undercutting the pro-Georgia attitudes prevalent in the American national security establishment’s position on the sometimes-violent Russia-Georgia conflict, leftist writers have sought—unconvincingly—to portray Georgia as the aggressor in the two countries’ August 2008 war.

Read it all.
Turning facts upside down is all in a day's work for left wing scholars and historians. Unfortunately, their joke of a 'history' is force fed to children in text books. Child abuse!

BTW, I missed all those anti-imperialist rallies against Russia. It's as if the lefties didn't care about a small, independent country being attacked by a traditionally imperialist power. Either that or I must have been hibernating in a cave.

Best of the comments

Commentator Bohemond (July 23rd, 2011 at 4:23 pm)-

And yet to this day, liberals refuse to regard Communists as what they are: evil. They're just, well, lefties who may have got a bit carried away, that's all. For a lib, it's "academic freedom" to have Marxist professors, but the same libs would riot if a professed Nazi were on staff. Somehow in their warped view the Communists weren't as bad as their first cousins the Nazis, when in reality they were even worse.

Nor can they admit that Trumbo or Hiss or the Rosenbergs were traitors in the service of the Kremlin.

They fly so that you won't

For several years at the Hindustan Times  Bharti Chaturvedi has been the reliable greenie scold - so predictable that you could almost say aloud her thoughts a second in advance as you read her tedious screed column.

She is/was recently in New York and the denizens of one of the most liberal states of  America did not leave her too pleased-

To further green the city, the mayor Bloomberg has added about or 402 km of bicycle lanes in the last four years. By any standards, it is a fantastic achievement because it encourages cycling and offers one more green option for travel.

But it has been greeted by such protests by car drivers and people in businesses that nearly four km of the lane is actually being removed in Staten Island!

So she does what she does - scolds:

But it seems the Americans won’t make the little adjustments to their lives to help the planet remain healthy. 

But with the greenies "the little adjustments" are a one way bicycle lane. There is no question of Bharti Chaturvedi making these adjustments in her own life, say by not flying off to America in a jet that emits tons of planet killing gases. As with other hypocrites of her kind, she flies so that you won't.


Update -
  missing link to Chaturvedi's article added. My apologies.

Only white people-monkeys allowed

Imagine if the artist had used Obama in this example of how to make caricatures instead of Bush-

For this exercise I chose to caricature US politcian George W. Bush. Bush is invariably caricatured as either a cowboy wearing an oversized stetson or as a chimpanzee - the former because he lives in Texas and the latter because unfortunately for him he resembles one. His body posture also suits either description as he seems to arch his arms away from his body, which makes him look even more like an ape or a cowboy ready to draw in a gun fight.
The next step was to transform this image into human form. Although I wanted his body posture to remain as close to a chimpanzee's as possible I also wanted him to look human, with human limbs and proportions - apart from the oversized head, of course.

There would be such a howl of outrage over "racism" that the publisher would probably recall all copies and the author would be forced to apologize.

That, in fact, would actually be like a burglar shouting "Stop, thief!" Figure this out-
lampooning a white man (Bush)- good! The whole world does it.
lampooning a black man (Obama) -(gasp!)racism!

 It is true that Bush resembles a monkey.So does Obama.Who can deny it? Not anyone honest.

And so does Michelle Obama -she is right out of Planet of the Apes.

In fact for most faces if you stare at them long enough some animal resemblance becomes apparent.Some have a greater animal 'look' than others.Nothing wrong in that.That's just the way it is.
But for the bien-pensants only white people are fit for caricature.

Definition of racism -treating individuals unequally on the basis of race.
So who are the racists?

Note- The pages are from the book Drawing Caricatures by Martin Pope)

If caricaturing is your thing then I recommend this well-written guide.It is a ***WtHA(What the heck is Art?) recommendation***.


Note- posted earlier at What the heck is Art?

From a generally kind review of Avatar by Chris Hewitt-

As he proved with "Titanic" and his graceless Oscar acceptance speeches, Cameron is a better director than writer. There are some cringe-worthy moments and a general lack of humor in the "Avatar" script. Plus, I'm always suspicious of people like Cameron, who probably lives in a mansion with hot-and-cold running champagne, telling me that I need to appreciate the simple things in life. (How about this, Jim: I'll reduce my carbon footprint when you stop acquiring a new wife every five years.)

Amazing!
Whoopi Goldberg, who defended child-rapist Romnan Polanski -in her universe something called "rape-rape" is a milder, gentler and perhaps a benevolent form of rape- is a Toys"R"Us spokesperson!

Watch out kiddo, Whoopi has invented "rape-rape", junior edition

Honest, I didn't know.

Via Gateway Pundit.

An interesting post at the Retributions blog referencing an article by Salil Tripathi -

It might be reasonable and indeed necessary to emphasise human rights. It could also persuasively be argued that India needs more human rights activism. Yet the pursuit of a single goal disregarding all else, including concern for due process and fairness, is fraught with danger. For it relies too much on inherent moral standing of those who have attached themselves to the cause of human rights virtually assuming that they are guided by no other consideration save for a deep belief in their cause. It is particularly worrisome because their message is ostensibly guided by a sense of moral uprightness—a claim human rights activists are quick to make and underlies their basic advantage vis-à-vis the state. And because the message is so inextricably linked with the credibility of the messenger, even the slightest blemish damages the worthy cause of human rights. Ms Setalvad’s alleged improper behaviour falls squarely in this bracket as it strengthens of the hands of her detractors, who, suspicious of Ms Setalvad and her ilk, become dismissive of human rights itself

In a different but similar(no, it's not a paradox) context Melanie Philips says-

It is time now for all decent people of goodwill everywhere to boycott NGOs like Amnesty, War on Want and all the others who are pushing these obscene lies and libels about Israel. No decent person should have anything to do with these organisations. No-one should give money to these inciters of hatred and purveyors of lies. They have sided with the forces of genocide and Islamic fascism against the Jewish people, truth and conscience. They have become a force for evil in the world.

(emphasis mine)

Leftist first, gay later

Gay rights groups in the West have a double standard-

Gay rights advocates make a huge issue of Christian opposition to gay marriage, while remaining indifferent to the Islamic jihad -- or, if they care about the jihad, many are still willing to throw overboard allies who may not be in lockstep with their social agenda. The fact that the Islamic jihadists, once in power, will treat gays far more harshly than Christian conservatives ever dreamed of doing doesn't seem to enter into their calculations.

As with feminists who have abandoned their suffering sisters in the muslim world, they are leftist first, gay later

Times of India, your website is killing the planet!

Those publications and media organizations that tom-tom their greenness, like the Times of India and NDTV, could have a dilemma(if they are honest to their principles) on their hand -

Twenty milligrams; that's the average amount of carbon emissions generated from the time it took you to read the first two words of this article.

Now, depending on how quickly you read, around 80, perhaps even 100 milligrams of C02 have been released. And in the several minutes it will take you to get to the end of this story, the number of milligrams of greenhouse gas emitted could be several thousand, if not more.

This may not seem like a lot: "But in aggregate, if you consider all the people visiting a web site and then all the seconds that each of them spends on it, it turns out to be a large number," says Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross, an Environmental Fellow at Harvard University who studies the environmental impact of computing.

Wissner-Gross estimates every second someone spends browsing a simple web site generates roughly 20 milligrams of C02. Whether downloading a song, sending an email or streaming a video, almost every single activity that takes place in the virtual environment has an impact on the real one.

Will these preachy media entities now shut down their websites to save the planet? If not then can we consider them green hypocrites, like Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri?

Update- Times of India now claims that it "has emerged
as the world's No.1 English newspaper website in terms of page views"
TOI also regularly publishes apocalyptic editorials and articles about Global Warming. In view of the new research above, they are now among top climate criminals among the media.
I ask them to either stop preaching to us unwashed masses or start practicing what they preach. Times of  India, shut down your site at once -it is killing the planet! Or else shut the f*** up about climate change.

U.S. President -chimp no more?

The happy days for cartoonists showing the US president
as a chimp are over. It will not be tolerated in the Obama age.

To those of us on the non-leftist side of the barricade it has been obvious for decades that one of the most potent weapons in the leftist arsenal is their readiness to shoot the charge of 'racism' at the drop of a hat. They have used it to effectively to oppose policies and people they don't like and to defend their own, to induce guilt on a civilizational scale and weaken the moral fabric of a whole way of life.

If we didn't live in an nightmarish Orwellian world, it would be obvious to all that the modern day racism is now an official platform of the left -it is the leftists who clamor for race based quotas in admissions, jobs and contracts and it is the 'rightists' (i.e. libertarians like myself) who would like to live in an absolutely color blind world.

Thus we have another round of grapeshot from the left's favorite weapon. We are told that this cartoon, which is actually quiet intelligent and amusing, is racist-




It allegedly portrays Obama as a chimpanzee, something which is denied by the artist. But what if it were? Why would portraying Obama as a monkey be racist? And if so then why was endlessly comparing Bush to simians not racist?






Different rules for different races. That's racism. And it now overwhelmingly comes from the left.

It is ironical and tragic that the artistic establishment is solidly leftist because the left and artistic freedom are like oil and water -the much vaunted 'pushing of boundaries', the much tom-tommed 'edginess' simply disappear when a favorite leftist project is critiqued. Thus you have thousands of images of Bush as chimp -but one image which is only indirectly suggestive(if even that) of Obama as a simian is intolerable. The cutting edge artistic expression only cuts one way. When it threatens to cut the other way, then the defense of artistic freedom doesn't seem so important anymore.

The cartoonists know they are now walking on a minefield while trying to show Obama -a minefield they fully connived in creating. For years they had full freedom to slander Bush -and they did it with gusto. Despite all the talk of 'police state', no midnight knock ever came for any artist. Yet one innocent cartoon in the age of Obama and the knives are out.

Cartoonists treading lightly when drawing Obama
---------------------------------------

Editorial cartoonists are bending over backwards a lot these days, as they try to satirize the nation's first black president. And when they don't, the result is the kind of outcry that erupted this week after a New York Post cartoon featured a bloody chimpanzee — intentionally or unintentionally evoking racist images of the past.
----------------------------------------
Scott Stantis, editorial cartoonist for The Birmingham (Ala.) News, said he received several complaints this week that his Obama drawings look "simian." As a conservative in a city that's 77 percent black, Stantis has learned to consider the feelings of his audience.

"Being the typical American editorial cartoonist — doughy, white, middle-aged — I'm more than willing to accept that I don't know what may or may not be offensive," he said. "But editorial cartoons are supposed to be offensive, and provocative. We're entering new waters here. What can you use or not use?"

"All my characters look simian," he said. "I don't make Obama look nearly as simian as our former Gov. Fob James, who I DID draw as a monkey, on more than one occasion. And he's a white guy ... I'm sorry, but when it comes to African-Americans, you just don't draw monkeys."

Ted Rall, president of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, said that Obama's race has affected how his colleagues do their jobs: "Without a doubt, people are stepping more gingerly. People are tiptoeing their way through this."

-----------------------------------------------
Perhaps race relations would improve, Lester said, if black people lightened up a bit: "They're not too good (at being) made fun of. We can all take a joke."

No, the race industry hustlers can't.

(As they say, read the whole thing.)


Hey, artists, show some courage -do unto Obama what you did to Bush:




Update -look who is leading the 'Anti-racism' protest-
the infamous race baiter Al Sharpton. If he were a Republican he would have been run out of politics by a hyper-hysterical media mob eons ago. Just a sampler-

1991: A Hasidic Jewish driver in Brooklyn's Crown Heights section accidentally kills Gavin Cato, a 7-year-old black child, and antisemitic riots erupt. Sharpton races to pour gasoline on the fire. At Gavin's funeral he rails against the "diamond merchants" -- code for Jews -- with "the blood of innocent babies" on their hands. He mobilizes hundreds of demonstrators to march through the Jewish neighborhood, chanting, "No justice, no peace." A rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum, is surrounded by a mob shouting "Kill the Jews!" and stabbed to death.

Oh yes, needless to say Sharpton is from Obama's party.

Update 2- John Hinderaker-

Democrats will no doubt continue to use Obama's race to try to silence criticism, but they can rest assured that conservatives will never unleash the kind of mindless hate against Obama (or anyone else) that we have all witnessed from the Left over the past six years.

(emphasis mine)

Ice is melting, the world is ending -and Gore is making a lot of money

Hardly a day goes by when some report or 'expert' or the other doesn't try to scare the wits out of us plebeians.

The Arctic is melting!
The Maldives are sinking!
New York and Bombay will go into sea in a few years(or is it next month?)!

Remember Gore's 20 foot wall of water"inundating the world’s coastal cities in his Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth?"

Remember the (il)liberal Hollywood doing it's bit on inflicting psychological damage on impressionable youngsters by putting out dumb and "breathtakingly paranoid" films like The day after tomorrow ?



Fortunately the disease of Global warming alarmism has a simple and free antidote -just facts.

Here are some-

Global Sea Ice Trend Since 1979 - surprising

Obviously people cannot make the claim that sea ice is being lost. It isn’t. The data shows that our trend is basically flat during this time of unprecedented temperatures. It’s clear that there has been no significant change in sea ice area.

This is almost enough to make me turn in my Skeptic union card, but increased CO2 warming the earth makes some sense to me, the magnitude is in question. The fact that polar sea ice not melting is not an insignificant point. It is also important to realize that the changes are too small to fit with IPCC statements about the trend. Unlike trees, ice does make a good thermometer. I can’t say this strongly enough— This is a strong indication of substantial errors in the computer models and temperature data which needs to be addressed before we throw what’s left of our global economy to the wind. How would Earth’s total sea ice ignore such substantial warming? It’s a good question which deserves an answer.

More facts now(this time from Learning is Fun school of thought).Tom Moriarty has an "easy quiz"-

Here are five false color images of the sea ice in the arctic. The images represent the ice on five year intervals on July 18th of 1988, 1993, 1998, 2003, and 2008. Your task is to use your knowledge of changing conditions in the Arctic to put them in the proper chronological order.

He also spells out what the hacks running your morning newspaper or TV "news" channels don't-

The sea ice area in the Arctic has been monitored by satellite for almost 30 years, since 1979. The area of the ice rises and falls, as you would expect, as the year cycles through its seasons. It reaches its yearly minimum by late September or early October. On the average, this minimum has been declining for the last 30 years. After October the northern sea ice area increases until it reaches a maximum in late March or early April each year. The yearly cycle is huge. Typically, about 60% of the total sea ice area melts away as is goes from yearly maximum to the yearly minimum.

The 2007 melt season was very severe and the Arctic sea ice area anomaly reached its lowest level since satellite tracking began. But that low level was immediately followed by an unprecedented rise in sea ice area in the Arctic in the months following the 2007 summer melt season. The 2008 melt season was quite severe, but not as severe as the 2007 melt season. In order to go from the minimum ice extent of 2007 to zero ice in 2012, the Arctic sea ice extent minimum needs to drop an average of about 600,000 square kilometers per year. But the Arctic ended up with slightly more ice area (about 100,000 square kilometers more) after the 2008 melt season than after the 2007 melt season.

Don't you get the feeling that we are being had?
An old adage tells us to follow the money. While I don't believe that money is the chief cause of Global warming alarmism (they are philosophical and psychological), lets abide by the adage and see where it leads-

Al Gore's Inconvenient Loot

Former Vice President Al Gore has built a Green money-making machine capable of eventually generating billions of dollars for investors, including himself, but he set it up so that the average Joe can't afford to play on Gore's terms. And the US portion is headed up by a former Gore staffer and fund raiser who previously ran afoul of both the FEC and the DOJ, before Janet Reno jumped in and shut down an investigation during the Clinton years............can an individual who stands to make millions from Global Warming really be trusted as an honest broker on that topic?


The Media Ignore Al Gore's Planned Global Warming Profiteering

How is Gore trying to be a climate change profiteer? Essentially, he wants to make a fortune by creating a new market for a product that he is attempting to create by legislative fiat. If he succeeds and carbon emissions trading comes to the United States, Al Gore will be uniquely positioned to cash in. He's made sure of that.
Gore himself is chairman and founder of a private equity firm called Generation Investment Management (GIM). He says the London-based firm invests money from institutions and wealthy investors in companies that are becoming environmentally-friendly, to use green parlance. GIM appears to have considerable influence over major carbon credit trading firms: the U.S.-based Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) and the U.K.-based Carbon Neutral Company (CNC). CCX appears to be the only firm in the U.S. that claims to trade carbon credits.

As a politician, Gore speaks warmly of transparency. But as GIM chairman, Gore has not been forthcoming. Little is known about his shadowy firm’s finances, where it gets funding and what projects it supports.
As reported in the August 2007 issue of Foundation Watch ("Al Gore’s Carbon Crusade: The Money and Connections Behind It," by Deborah Corey Barnes), with help from friends at Goldman Sachs, including Hank Paulson, the investment bank’s former CEO who is now the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Gore has created a web of organizations to promote the so-called climate crisis.

Meanwhile, Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection is pushing for tougher environmental regulations on the private sector. It wants “cap-and-trade” legislation enacted so that companies will be forced to lower their greenhouse gas emissions and buy carbon credits. Untold billions of dollars could be generated in a brand new U.S. carbon market.

When Gore's potential for immense profits is factored in, the $300 million outlay for ads (some of which is likely to come from donations to the Alliance's "We Campaign") seems like a drop in the bucket.

If Gore can keep up the pressure for carbon emissions restrictions, he could end up a very wealthy man.

I suspect, in his own way, Pachauri is doing very well off the warming panic too.
(emphasis mine)

Obama- not his brother's keeper

Haven't seen the much awaited 30 minute Obama-mercial, don't even know if it was shown on TV in India and have no desire to waste time downloading it from You tube.But while reading about it , this stood out for it's stark irony-

Oh, dear. They just showed the clip of him proclaiming, “I am my brother’s keeper.”

I guess O-bama didn't mean his own brother-

Barack Obama's brother lives on less than $1 a month

US presidential contender Barack Obama's long-lost half-brother says he is ashamed of his family ties because he lives in poverty in a violent African shantytown.

The Italian edition of Vanity Fair says it tracked down George Hussein Onyango Obama living in a rundown shack in Huruma on the outskirts of Kenya's capital, Nairobi.

By contrast, his older half-brother, Senator Obama, lives in a mansion he bought for $1.9 million in Chicago.

George Obama, 26, is the youngest of the presidential candidate's seven half-brothers and half-sisters, and while the other siblings are close, he told the magazine he was embarrassed he lived "on less than a dollar a month", and so never mentioned his famous half-brother.

I guess he didn't even mean his aunt-

Barack Obama's Kenyan aunt has been found living in a rundown public housing estate in Boston, an English newspaper claims.

Zeituni Onyango, the woman affectionately called "Aunt Zeituni" in Senator Obama's memoir Dreams From My Father, lives less than 10 kilometres from where the presidential candidate completed his law degree at Harvard.

London's The Times also reports to have identified Senator Obama's mystery Kenyan uncle, Omar, who went missing after moving to Boston in the 1960s and was bashed by armed robbers in one of his convenience stores in 1994.

Their stories stand in stark contrast to the American Dream-type narrative of Senator Obama's life reproduced in the US media.

Or his uncle-

A second relative believed to be the long-lost “Uncle Omar” described in the book was beaten by armed robbers with a “sawed-off rifle” while working in a corner shop in the Dorchester area of the city. He was later evicted from his one-bedroom flat for failing to pay $2,324.20 (£1,488) arrears, according to the Boston Housing Court.

I guess he is too busy devising ingenious ways to redistribute Joe the Plumber's wealth to redistribute any of his own.

But hey, let's give the guy a break: he did help his cousin-

Barack has stated his support for Luo Opposition Leader in Kenya RaRaila Odinga (who signed a Shariah pact with Muslims and claims to be Obama's cousin).....Barack Obama's cousin Raila Odinga is accused of ethnic cleansing

As A Political Dookie says, "Once again charity does not begin at home for the Obama Christ"

Imagine if this were Sarah Palin's family -we would never hear the end of indignant talking heads excoriating her for her meanness.

Update -
From Instapundit-

Bob Krumm emails: "The most damning part of the Obama aunt story is that once his campaign found her living in squalor they told her to not talk to the press until after the election, but they didn’t try to help her."

UPDATE: Some thoughts from TigerHawk: " I have finally figured out why somebody who has been as successful as Barack Obama believes that the government must help people who cannot or do not help themselves: He simply does not understand that helping the poor, unlucky, or incompetent is first the responsibility of family."