Nary an Original Thought

“You didn’t endorse Obama? Find your own ride.”

That was the message Obama had for reporters from three major newspapers who didn’t give him their endorsement. Reporters from The Washington Times, The New York Post, and Dallas Morning News, some of whom have been traveling with the Obama campaign since 2007, were notified last night that they were no longer welcome on Obama’s campaign plane. The Washington Times gave their endorsement to McCain just two days ago.

This is the sort of change we can expect from Obama. If you refuse to bow down before the ObaMessiah, there will be consequences.

Read the full story here, here, and here.

From despair.com:

HT: The Point

Just keep tellin’ yourself that Palin is the one who lacks experience…

Obama Undertakes Presidential Internship To Ease Concerns About His Lack Of Experience

Yogi gets it right again:

“Spreading the wealth” around only leads to less wealth for everyone.

When a childhood friend of mine joined the Marines, I got a call from Uncle Sam. He wanted to know how long I’d known Dan. He wanted to know if Dan had ever espoused any radical beliefs, or if he had associated with any groups that had. He asked if Dan had ever lived overseas, or if he had ever said anything that would indicate disloyalty to the U.S.A. They wanted to make sure that he was qualified to receive security clearance he would need to become an intelligence officer. As I understand it, Dan spent the next few years watching a whole lot of al Jazeera.

The point is, the military takes their security pretty seriously. If you come from a radical background, including associations with people or groups that are less-than-patriotic, you probably won’t be granted any meaningful level of security acceess. With this in mind, John Washburn, who is ex-military, makes a great point:

[B]ased on Obama’s prior associations, I can safely say that obtaining an upper-level security clearance would be impossible for him. The minute the Pentagon discovered his Wright association alone – never mind the one with a domestic terrorist – he would be denied access to any significant national security information. If he joined the military, he would not be granted the most basic security clearance. Yet, as President and Commander in Chief, Obama would have access at the highest level. This man wouldn’t be qualified to be a White House staffer, much less President unless, of course, the American people voted to put him in charge. And there are some who believe his associations don’t matter? Yeah, right.

This reminds me of that old saying about the fox guarding the hen house. Use your vote wisely, American.

Walter E. Williams reminds us that we should think twice before jumping on the “affordable” (i.e. socialized) health care bandwagon:

One of the campaign themes this election cycle is “affordable” health care. Shouldn’t we ask ourselves whether we want the politicians who brought us the “affordable” housing, that created the current financial debacle, to now deliver us affordable health care?

If Barry and his democratic congress force socialized health care on us, be sure to watch out for signs of an impending crash of the system. One clear sign would be seeing Barney Frank on CNN assuring us that there’s not a “cwithith” to be worried about.

Go read this article: Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

Two of the best parts:

Isn’t there a story here? Doesn’t journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren’t you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. “Housing-gate,” no doubt. Or “Fannie-gate.”

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled “Do Facts Matter?” ( http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com] ): “Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury.”

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was … the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was … the Republican Party.

[...]

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That’s what you claim you do, when you accept people’s money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that’s what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don’t like the probable consequences. That’s what honesty means . That’s how trust is earned.

Seriously, go read the article.

HT: Jeff Meyers

Roe v. Iraq:

On one planchette, thousands of persons per year are being killed unintentionally as a consequence of a conflict waged against a genocidal tyrant and enemies whose military strategy is to target innocent civilians in an effort to annihilate Israel, overthrow Western civilization, and impose an oppressive, theocratic world government. On the other, thousands of persons per day are being intentionally murdered in a Holocaust waged against individuals deemed inconvenient by society….

In the end, the moral comparison of pro-abortion and pro-Iraq war policies is like that of an unrestricted, ongoing ethnic cleansing, against the inadvertent deaths caused by medical interventions, despite the best intentions and state-of-the-art care of physicians.

Barney Frank, one of the guys that got us into the mortgage mess, speaking about his support for a second stimulus package and how he would fund it:

Yes, let’s go after those scalawags who invest in our economy and give other people jobs., and then profit from it! Why should we let them keep that money so they can keep the economy moving when we can just take it from them to keep the economy moving? Frank’s plan seems so much easier, right?

The only question I have is… what happens when we run out of rich people?

Anthony Esolen lays it out like this. We all hate taxes, but on some level everyone pretty much agrees that they are necessary. While we don’t like it, most of us are willing to pay up a bit to support a government that can “do some things that we cannot do, or can hardly do, on our own.” Everyone pays in, everyone benefits. It’s a fair deal all around.

But what happens when taxes are used not for the sake of something we each have a share in, as roads and armies? Then we might see the tax code used, for instance, as a powerful weapon of social control — and examples of this are everywhere to be found in our country; in fact, it’s hard for me to determine whether the tax code as it stands is primarily a revenue gathering device for Washington, or a behavior controlling device…. One can collect taxes in order to rig up a vision of what a utopian society would look like, regardless of the fact that the vision is not shared by everyone, or that there is no tangible and immediate good that the taxes would purchase, in whose benefit everyone would share (as is the case with roads, and possibly with schools). And that’s no more than state sanctioned theft.

This is what Obama has in mind when he tells a plumber that it’s better for everyone when we “spread the wealth around”. When the government can take your money by compulsion (pay up or lose your house and go to jail!) in order to support its social engineering agenda, they (not you) get to decide where that money is spent. While it may make you feel good to think that your tax dollars go to support a homeless shelter in some big city somewhere, have you thought about your tax dollars that went to the Planned Parenthood down the street from it? If you think you have a duty to vote for the guy who will help out the homeless, you might also want to think about your duty to not participate in the slaughter, by the millions, of babies who typically are from the same neighborhood as the homeless guy. You can’t take credit for one, but not the other.