(Overheard in the Obama Bunker: )
(knock)"Mr. President-elect Obama? Sir?
(knock) "Hello? Sir? Sir, this is important.
(muffled voice) "Sir, there's a war going on....
(muffled interrogative) "Yes, there's a war in the Middle East, sir. Yes
sir. War. Israel and the Palestinians, sir. Hamas, actually. Who's
winning? (cough) Are you pulling my leg, sir? You are such a kidder.
Sorry, sir. Sir, the (pause) WORLD (pause) is kind of waiting for
something from you.
(muffled talk) "What was that? What _would_ Bush do? Which one, sir?
(rimshotttttttt....CRASH!)
"Oh, sorry, sir. I was trying to lighten the moment.
(muffled talk) "What _did_ Bush do? Oh, I see now. Sir, he told Hamas
to fold their list of complaints against the Zionist State and jam it
all into a really dark place within their persons, sir.
(muffled reproof, louder) "I'm sorry sir, I was paraphrasing. Sir,
could you come out?
(muffled talking) "Yes, sir, your meeting with your lawyer is very
important.
(muffled talking) "Yes sir, I know he bills $1,000 an hour. But don't
you have that web-funding thing going on?
(bumping, muffled talking) "Sorry, sir, I didn't know that was a
sensitive area.
(louder muffled talking) "I said I was sorry, sir.
(muffled interrogative) "How do you pronounce what, sir? Sir? Oh,
Ahmadinejad, sir. Akkhhhh--yes sir, like gargling. ....mad....good
sir. ....in....ay.....yad. No sir, no "j" sound.
(banging, talking, muffled) "Well, sir, he's not so happy. I think
he'd like to hear from you.
(muffled interrogative) "Sir, he sent you Christmas greetings. You
could say something.
(muffled talking) "Sir, they all say "death to America". Even the
Europeans do that.
(banging muffled talking) "Sir? You want to speak to Senator McCain?
Sir, don't you think we should huddle up with Speaker Pelosi first?
(louder muffled remonstrance) "Sir, I think that is going too far. She's
not that ugly.
(muffled laughter) "Ha ha! Got me there, sir. She is that, certainly.
Sir, Senate Majority leader Reid ain't so happy, neither.
(banging muffled yelling) "Sir, I can't tell him that. Besides, you
can't do that with a phone.
(muffled interrogative) "No, sir, I don't think this is going to blow
over. Look sir, can you send Emanuel out?
(fierce muffled yelling) "Safe house where sir?
(banging) "Sorry, sir, of course, if you told me, then it wouldn't be
safe. What should I do?
(muffled interrogative) "If it's McCain you want, I'll get him.
(muffled talking) "Yes sir, he really did say on TV that you were an
honorable man.
(muffled interrogative) "Yes, sir, we have the tape. I'll send it
over. Yes, I can loop it. Yes, really forever. Yes, sir, over and over
again.
(muffled thanks) "You are welcome, sir. Sir, how is that Illinois thing
progressing? Did Governor Blagojevich really ask for a million dollars
for that seat?
(banging, muffled yelling) "Sorry sir! Sorry! I'm out....
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Friday, December 19, 2008
"Deep Throat" and Press Integrity Die
Mark Felt, Farewell...and A Few Questions
Farewell, Mark Felt. You were a hero. You've left for another place. You held high values of honor and of loyalty to the Constitution, rather than just to a man or a boss. I salute the patriot who has passed, who dared alert the Press to a corruption in a Presidency that needed scrutiny.
But, Mark, I wish I could have had a chance to speak with you about where the bulldogs of the Press were in 2008, and where they chose to go and not to go. Press integrity seems to have died with you. For a man will be President in a matter of weeks who is associated with political gangsters in Illinois, with Weather Underground terrorists, with anti-Semitic PLO spokesmen, and with black racists and racism. But the the Press wouldn't follow those stories Mark, and I'm wondering, as I remember your "Deep Throat" chapter in American History, I'm wondering how this could have happened. Only Aaron Burr had worse associations--he most likely was in the pay of the Spanish government. But let me get back to the point.
Mark, your role came during the Nixon Presidency. I remember it clearly. I had returned to the United States in August of 1968 after two years in Asia. I remember being scared and shaken by the shooting of James Meredith, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. America was at war with something within itself, I saw from afar in Bangkok with an odd war nearby in Vietnam raging.
The sixties spilled into the seventies like a bunch of drunks into the streets at closing time. Bad clothes, bad hair, bad politics. An emboldened Left marched even further Left, keeping company with Communists and terrorists, screaming Stop The War and picking fights with law and order on college campuses all around the country. Kent State erupted in tragic riot and gunfire on May 4th, 1970
that killed four students, widening the rift between generations and Political Parties. Then, came the Presidential Campaign of 1972.
Mark, you then gave us the expurgation that was the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, though it would be decades before we knew you. The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
put the heat on the President. He was forced resign the Presidency in disgrace. The War finally over, we had a hangover from it all including a fuel crisis from our friends the Arabs. A White Knight called Jimmy Carter to make it all better in 1976. What a disaster that turned out to be.
The Post's efforts to get at the truth and the movie that followed seemed to give America back it's soul. We didn't want a scheming, conniving, law-breaking tyrant in the White House. The Press would fight for us. As Hollywood indicates in Three Days of the Condor, when minor CIA contractor Joseph Turner a.k.a. Condor played by dashing Robert Redford, from the James Grady story, lets evil assassin G. Joubert played by Max von Sydow know that he is about to tell all to the New York Times...
Fast Forward here, Mark. What a different world it is in 2008. The Press corps flipped for Barack Obama like never before in history. Senator John McCain named Sara Palin, Governor of Alaska as his running mate, and the Press stormed her home town of Wasilla, Alaska, turning over stones for weeks and weeks, looking for...something, anything to topple her positive affect upon the McCain campaign.
Why else?
Meanwhile, in 2008 in Springfield Illinois, the man Barack Obama helped re-elect, Rod Blagojevich,
was miring himself deeper and deeper in the legendary political corruption of that state, completely without any press scrutiny, as he merrily marched to his destined date with the Federal Bureau of Investigation last week, when he was arrested and charged with corruption.
Why, Mark? The only thing I can come up with is this: Blagojevich and all the elements of Barack Obama's Illinois origins were off-limits, because it would have damaged the Democratic Nominee had the truth of the extent of corruption in Illinois and Chicago ever come out.
The Press corps wanted a change in the White House--a change of Party. Obama was their darling from the beginning, ignoring and dissing political heavy weight Hillary Clinton, junior Senator from New York, all the while legitimizing Barack Obama's nasty baggage.
Mark, there was so much to look at, too. We have Obama's lies and about-faces with his past associations with self-confessed and un-repentant terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn:
1. I don't know them. 2. They're just some people in the neighborhood. 3. I know them. 4. They did things once that I don't agree with. 5. I thought they were "rehabilitated." Bernadine Dohrn once said of the Manson murders: "Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach! Wild!"
Mark, we are all saddled now with a President who will be linked forever with that utterance, and we along with that have a Press corps that neither understands nor cares that someone connected to such statements should never be associated with the office of the Presidency.
Ms. Dohrn, though, wasn't done in the 60s and 70s, nor was husband Bill. She became wanted for questioning in the Nyack Brinks Job,
in which the Weather Underground and Black Panthers murdered three veterans of the American military, one a Brinks Security Guard, Peter Paige 49, father of three, and Nyack police officers Waverly Brown, 45 father of two, and Ed O'Grady 33, father of three (O'Grady-Brown Memorial Fund). The terrorists were well armed and had body armor. Brown was shot at close range with a 9mm pistol as he lay wounded. She refused to cooperate, and fled, leading to her warrant of arrest. Ultimately she wasn't charged. But interesting that she was in New York at the time, according to many reports. Even more interesting was the adoption of the child of two of the convicted bank robbers. Two founding members of the Weather Underground, adopting a child of fellow group members, but having nothing to do with the crime? They had something to do with it, if for no other reason than having founded the group.
So, Mark, we have a president-elect with such friends. Interesting it is, too, that the Brinks Job plan was among other things to distribute money to black causes and organizations. Kind of what Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, and the Dohrn/Ayers' were doing with that Annenberg Grant money. Bill Ayers said about that project to set up "alternative" educational opportunities in Chicago the wanted to tell those young black people "what this country is really all about."
Mark, I'm wondering, why didn't the Press scour those neighborhoods and find out what Reverend Wright, Ayers, and the Obamas were telling those children?
You talked about honor, and honoring the Constitution in explaining your "Deep Throat" role, Mark. What does America care of that, today? In New York, the sitting governor is David Paterson, a legally blind black man. He took office when faux crusader Eliot Spitzer was caught with a high-priced hooker. But Paterson admits immediately that he was having it off with state employees, and that he had given jobs to some of them.
That was in May. Still no calls for his resignation from the New York Times, who was poised there with Robert Redford in 1975 to save us from mad-dog CIA killers; nor from the Washington Post, who in reality took a law-breaking U.S. President out.
Mark, perhaps even worse is, that David Paterson, who will fill a Senate seat soon, doesn't even understand that he is, by virtue of his admission of peccadillo, unfit to govern. President Elect Barack Obama, who has to check with his attorney to see if he spoke to Governor-gangster Rod Blagojevich about filling his vacant Illinios Senate seat, doesn't understand, either, how inappropriate he is.
For you see, Mark Felt, the Press didn't hold up the mirror for them. And they sold us out, and that means the mad-dog killers and corrupt Politicians are going to get a free ride. Deborah Howell, public ombudsman for the Washington Post, wrote in article headlined "An Obama Tilt in Campaign Coverage," that "(s)tories and photos about Obama in the news pages outnumbered those devoted to McCain. Post reporters, photographers and editors -- like most of the national news media -- found the candidacy of Obama, the first African-American major-party nominee, more newsworthy and historic."
Historic...and carrying their pre-history around like a loaded gun, they snuffed out the competition and stayed away from the real story, the story of who is Barack Obama, and why does he say in his autobiography that white people's greed puts the world in need, and what was he doing with Governor Rod Blagojevich two years ago, and what was he doing with Reverend Wright for twenty years, and what was he doing with and for Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, and what was he doing with Ayers, Dohrn and Rashid Khalidi in that video that the Tribune Corporation buried in its vault?
To hell with all of it, Mark. The Press doesn't know what it's job is anymore. It has become the tool of a political party, and its cornerstone virtues of honor and truth have perished in the transformation.
Rest in peace. Though with that corpse labeled "Press Integrity" next to you, I don't see how you will.
Farewell, Mark Felt. You were a hero. You've left for another place. You held high values of honor and of loyalty to the Constitution, rather than just to a man or a boss. I salute the patriot who has passed, who dared alert the Press to a corruption in a Presidency that needed scrutiny.
But, Mark, I wish I could have had a chance to speak with you about where the bulldogs of the Press were in 2008, and where they chose to go and not to go. Press integrity seems to have died with you. For a man will be President in a matter of weeks who is associated with political gangsters in Illinois, with Weather Underground terrorists, with anti-Semitic PLO spokesmen, and with black racists and racism. But the the Press wouldn't follow those stories Mark, and I'm wondering, as I remember your "Deep Throat" chapter in American History, I'm wondering how this could have happened. Only Aaron Burr had worse associations--he most likely was in the pay of the Spanish government. But let me get back to the point.
Mark, your role came during the Nixon Presidency. I remember it clearly. I had returned to the United States in August of 1968 after two years in Asia. I remember being scared and shaken by the shooting of James Meredith, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. America was at war with something within itself, I saw from afar in Bangkok with an odd war nearby in Vietnam raging.
The sixties spilled into the seventies like a bunch of drunks into the streets at closing time. Bad clothes, bad hair, bad politics. An emboldened Left marched even further Left, keeping company with Communists and terrorists, screaming Stop The War and picking fights with law and order on college campuses all around the country. Kent State erupted in tragic riot and gunfire on May 4th, 1970
that killed four students, widening the rift between generations and Political Parties. Then, came the Presidential Campaign of 1972. Mark, you then gave us the expurgation that was the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, though it would be decades before we knew you. The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
put the heat on the President. He was forced resign the Presidency in disgrace. The War finally over, we had a hangover from it all including a fuel crisis from our friends the Arabs. A White Knight called Jimmy Carter to make it all better in 1976. What a disaster that turned out to be.
The Post's efforts to get at the truth and the movie that followed seemed to give America back it's soul. We didn't want a scheming, conniving, law-breaking tyrant in the White House. The Press would fight for us. As Hollywood indicates in Three Days of the Condor, when minor CIA contractor Joseph Turner a.k.a. Condor played by dashing Robert Redford, from the James Grady story, lets evil assassin G. Joubert played by Max von Sydow know that he is about to tell all to the New York Times...
Fast Forward here, Mark. What a different world it is in 2008. The Press corps flipped for Barack Obama like never before in history. Senator John McCain named Sara Palin, Governor of Alaska as his running mate, and the Press stormed her home town of Wasilla, Alaska, turning over stones for weeks and weeks, looking for...something, anything to topple her positive affect upon the McCain campaign.
Why else?
Meanwhile, in 2008 in Springfield Illinois, the man Barack Obama helped re-elect, Rod Blagojevich,
was miring himself deeper and deeper in the legendary political corruption of that state, completely without any press scrutiny, as he merrily marched to his destined date with the Federal Bureau of Investigation last week, when he was arrested and charged with corruption.Why, Mark? The only thing I can come up with is this: Blagojevich and all the elements of Barack Obama's Illinois origins were off-limits, because it would have damaged the Democratic Nominee had the truth of the extent of corruption in Illinois and Chicago ever come out.
The Press corps wanted a change in the White House--a change of Party. Obama was their darling from the beginning, ignoring and dissing political heavy weight Hillary Clinton, junior Senator from New York, all the while legitimizing Barack Obama's nasty baggage.
Mark, there was so much to look at, too. We have Obama's lies and about-faces with his past associations with self-confessed and un-repentant terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn:
1. I don't know them. 2. They're just some people in the neighborhood. 3. I know them. 4. They did things once that I don't agree with. 5. I thought they were "rehabilitated." Bernadine Dohrn once said of the Manson murders: "Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach! Wild!"Mark, we are all saddled now with a President who will be linked forever with that utterance, and we along with that have a Press corps that neither understands nor cares that someone connected to such statements should never be associated with the office of the Presidency.
Ms. Dohrn, though, wasn't done in the 60s and 70s, nor was husband Bill. She became wanted for questioning in the Nyack Brinks Job,
in which the Weather Underground and Black Panthers murdered three veterans of the American military, one a Brinks Security Guard, Peter Paige 49, father of three, and Nyack police officers Waverly Brown, 45 father of two, and Ed O'Grady 33, father of three (O'Grady-Brown Memorial Fund). The terrorists were well armed and had body armor. Brown was shot at close range with a 9mm pistol as he lay wounded. She refused to cooperate, and fled, leading to her warrant of arrest. Ultimately she wasn't charged. But interesting that she was in New York at the time, according to many reports. Even more interesting was the adoption of the child of two of the convicted bank robbers. Two founding members of the Weather Underground, adopting a child of fellow group members, but having nothing to do with the crime? They had something to do with it, if for no other reason than having founded the group.So, Mark, we have a president-elect with such friends. Interesting it is, too, that the Brinks Job plan was among other things to distribute money to black causes and organizations. Kind of what Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, and the Dohrn/Ayers' were doing with that Annenberg Grant money. Bill Ayers said about that project to set up "alternative" educational opportunities in Chicago the wanted to tell those young black people "what this country is really all about."
Mark, I'm wondering, why didn't the Press scour those neighborhoods and find out what Reverend Wright, Ayers, and the Obamas were telling those children?
You talked about honor, and honoring the Constitution in explaining your "Deep Throat" role, Mark. What does America care of that, today? In New York, the sitting governor is David Paterson, a legally blind black man. He took office when faux crusader Eliot Spitzer was caught with a high-priced hooker. But Paterson admits immediately that he was having it off with state employees, and that he had given jobs to some of them.
That was in May. Still no calls for his resignation from the New York Times, who was poised there with Robert Redford in 1975 to save us from mad-dog CIA killers; nor from the Washington Post, who in reality took a law-breaking U.S. President out.
Mark, perhaps even worse is, that David Paterson, who will fill a Senate seat soon, doesn't even understand that he is, by virtue of his admission of peccadillo, unfit to govern. President Elect Barack Obama, who has to check with his attorney to see if he spoke to Governor-gangster Rod Blagojevich about filling his vacant Illinios Senate seat, doesn't understand, either, how inappropriate he is.
For you see, Mark Felt, the Press didn't hold up the mirror for them. And they sold us out, and that means the mad-dog killers and corrupt Politicians are going to get a free ride. Deborah Howell, public ombudsman for the Washington Post, wrote in article headlined "An Obama Tilt in Campaign Coverage," that "(s)tories and photos about Obama in the news pages outnumbered those devoted to McCain. Post reporters, photographers and editors -- like most of the national news media -- found the candidacy of Obama, the first African-American major-party nominee, more newsworthy and historic."
Historic...and carrying their pre-history around like a loaded gun, they snuffed out the competition and stayed away from the real story, the story of who is Barack Obama, and why does he say in his autobiography that white people's greed puts the world in need, and what was he doing with Governor Rod Blagojevich two years ago, and what was he doing with Reverend Wright for twenty years, and what was he doing with and for Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, and what was he doing with Ayers, Dohrn and Rashid Khalidi in that video that the Tribune Corporation buried in its vault?
To hell with all of it, Mark. The Press doesn't know what it's job is anymore. It has become the tool of a political party, and its cornerstone virtues of honor and truth have perished in the transformation.
Rest in peace. Though with that corpse labeled "Press Integrity" next to you, I don't see how you will.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Turn in Corrupt Editors for $$$
Time to be Part of the Deal--of HONEST REPORTING
Journalists of America, I encourage you now to stand up and tell us the truth. Not by pointing at Reader Representatives, like those of the Washington Post and MSNBC, who admitted there was "tilted" coverage toward Barack Obama in the recently completed Presidential Campaign 2008.
As a former newspaperman who worked for Malcolm Forbes, I can tell you that a media slant of the enormity of this past presidential campaign doesn't happen by accident.
You of the Media fooled no one as many polls revealed that people recognized your bias. But you may have influenced many when you hid from us or refused to probe Barack Obama's dangerous past association with black racists like Reverend Wright, and with communists and anti-American anti-Semitic terrorists like Rashid Khalidi, Bernadine Dohrn and William Ayers. You didn't expose Obama's continuing body of lies about these association, so bent and purposed you were on keeping the Republicans from retaining the White House.
Some of you may have not known better, others of you were willing participants (yeah, you, "Hardball" Matthews, you pathetic leg-chillin' hack of a "journalist"). But now that you've had your way with us, it is time for you to do the right thing and put names to those invisible people who directed the bias of Campaign 2008.
Who told you to give Barack Obama a pass on his past associations? Who told you not to dig into them? Who told you to ignore McCain, and to savage Governor Palin? Who outright took incentive money from the Barack Obamam campaign to give him the coverage he wanted?
Go on the record and tell us if your Editor, Publisher or News Director, or any other Corporate Officer gave you or anyone else you know direct orders to either intentionally skew coverage in favor of the Obama campaign or to go easy on him. If you know of kickbacks to reporters from the Democratic Party, from A.C.O.R.N., or from the Obama campaign itself for biased or protective coverage, we want to know, too.
COME FORWARD!
America wants the names of these people. Time to do the patriotic thing, get into the game, be part of the deal--of HONESTY in Reporting.
All of your cannot be corrupt. Many of you probably knew the biased reportage was wrong, even if you had planned to vote for Obama.
Contact me at jim@james-bridge.com, or communicate with me in private via my Facebook account, James A. Bridge. Verifiable journalists with a real story to tell will be reward-eligible.
Journalists of America, I encourage you now to stand up and tell us the truth. Not by pointing at Reader Representatives, like those of the Washington Post and MSNBC, who admitted there was "tilted" coverage toward Barack Obama in the recently completed Presidential Campaign 2008.
As a former newspaperman who worked for Malcolm Forbes, I can tell you that a media slant of the enormity of this past presidential campaign doesn't happen by accident.
You of the Media fooled no one as many polls revealed that people recognized your bias. But you may have influenced many when you hid from us or refused to probe Barack Obama's dangerous past association with black racists like Reverend Wright, and with communists and anti-American anti-Semitic terrorists like Rashid Khalidi, Bernadine Dohrn and William Ayers. You didn't expose Obama's continuing body of lies about these association, so bent and purposed you were on keeping the Republicans from retaining the White House.
Some of you may have not known better, others of you were willing participants (yeah, you, "Hardball" Matthews, you pathetic leg-chillin' hack of a "journalist"). But now that you've had your way with us, it is time for you to do the right thing and put names to those invisible people who directed the bias of Campaign 2008.
Who told you to give Barack Obama a pass on his past associations? Who told you not to dig into them? Who told you to ignore McCain, and to savage Governor Palin? Who outright took incentive money from the Barack Obamam campaign to give him the coverage he wanted?
Go on the record and tell us if your Editor, Publisher or News Director, or any other Corporate Officer gave you or anyone else you know direct orders to either intentionally skew coverage in favor of the Obama campaign or to go easy on him. If you know of kickbacks to reporters from the Democratic Party, from A.C.O.R.N., or from the Obama campaign itself for biased or protective coverage, we want to know, too.
COME FORWARD!
America wants the names of these people. Time to do the patriotic thing, get into the game, be part of the deal--of HONESTY in Reporting.
All of your cannot be corrupt. Many of you probably knew the biased reportage was wrong, even if you had planned to vote for Obama.
Contact me at jim@james-bridge.com, or communicate with me in private via my Facebook account, James A. Bridge. Verifiable journalists with a real story to tell will be reward-eligible.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Yes You Can
When you've worked hard to keep the candidate who won from getting there, it can be a very dark day, indeed.
However large the disappointment in the outcome of the 2008 Presidential election for McCain backers like myself, we must all embrace the symbolic achievement of the accession of a man of color to the Presidency of the United States.
Whether this is the right man (and he's not), or whether the campaign coverage was fair and balanced (and it wasn't) is all fodder for a different day. Today is the day to tell all Americans that there is nothing you cannot achieve in this country. (You don't even have to be honest.)
As I told my High School History classes yesterday, "No matter who you wanted to win, the fact remains that America elected a Black man to be President of the United States, and that fact is the most significant positive event in the political history of the United States of America. There cannot be a Black man or women, or of any ethnicity, for that matter, than can now have any doubts about what they can achieve in this country, if they work hard for it and plan carefully."
Americans, as Obama's victory speech proclaimed, "Yes we can." We can, here, accomplish almost anything we set out to do.
Congratulations, Barack Obama. You have broken through what may have seemed like a barrier of race to many people of color, whether it was real or imagined.
However large the disappointment in the outcome of the 2008 Presidential election for McCain backers like myself, we must all embrace the symbolic achievement of the accession of a man of color to the Presidency of the United States.
Whether this is the right man (and he's not), or whether the campaign coverage was fair and balanced (and it wasn't) is all fodder for a different day. Today is the day to tell all Americans that there is nothing you cannot achieve in this country. (You don't even have to be honest.)
As I told my High School History classes yesterday, "No matter who you wanted to win, the fact remains that America elected a Black man to be President of the United States, and that fact is the most significant positive event in the political history of the United States of America. There cannot be a Black man or women, or of any ethnicity, for that matter, than can now have any doubts about what they can achieve in this country, if they work hard for it and plan carefully."
Americans, as Obama's victory speech proclaimed, "Yes we can." We can, here, accomplish almost anything we set out to do.
Congratulations, Barack Obama. You have broken through what may have seemed like a barrier of race to many people of color, whether it was real or imagined.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Tribune Corp. Covers L.A.Times Tape Cover-up
Weitman, Gary wrote: (Tribune Media Relations)
>
> Thanks for your email. I appreciate your concern regarding this issue. I want to direct your attention to an article that appears in today's Los Angeles Times and offers an explanation for the newspaper's decision not to publish the videotape.
>
> Gary Weitman
>
> http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-video29-2008oct29,0,7568849.story
>
> McCain campaign accuses L.A. Times of 'suppressing' Obama video
Mr. Weitman,
I am pleased to have heard from you. I thank you very much for the response. Of course, I understand a news organization's commitment to its sources.
However, who said you aren't protecting your source? If this person is a Muslim and is afraid of reprisals, he or she must already certainly be under suspicion, simply because of the acknowledged existence of said video.
What this amounts to, sir, is that you have that video in safe-keeping for your source.
The clear implication is that you all at Tribune know the content of the tape, and it will viscerally damage the endorsed candidate of the Los Angeles Times.
Sir, you cannot be blind to the helping hand your brethren in the media continue to give Barack Obama. Here you would suppress evidence of a clear pro-Arab/Muslim bias in his core value system, and stand peaceably by as the ritual denunciations of Jews and Israel rang through the room? A video that will also reveal William Ayers in close proximity? Wouldn't you also find the allegation that Rashid Khalidi, a front man for Saudi money and known terrorist, wrote a recommendation letter for a young Barack Obama in his entrance to Columbia University?
Mr. Weitman, think for a moment about what you may have done here in continuing to run cover for Barack Obama--and what Tribune Corporation has allowed Barack Obama to get away with under your very noses in Chicago. I still want to know what Obama and Ayers were doing with that Annenberg Challenge money. Ayers said he and Obama were telling kids "what this country is really all about." I, Mr. Weitman, think YOU owe me an accounting of what that message may have been and is. Some of that money went to alternative schools associated with Reverend Wright. I found what that message may have been in Barack Obama's own autobiography, now widely believed to have been largely written by the man Barack Obama didn't know, William Ayers. "White man's greed puts the world in need."
You let a man run for President without chopping him into splinters, who wrote in his recent autobiography that white people generically are responsible for need in the world?
You wouldn't write that story? I guess not, because, Mr. Weitman, when you have had sufficient opportunity, you didn't.
No, Tribune Corporation didn't write that story. You didn't pursue his association with a man with him in that video, that is, William Ayers. He is the man who isn't sorry for any of his bombings nor for the Brinks Job in 1981 in which Peter Paige, Brinks guard, and Nyack cops Ed O'Grady and Waverly Brown, all fathers and all veterans of the armed services of our country, were murdered by the well-trained, well-armed urban guerrillas of the Weather Underground and Black Panthers. Ayers may have well masterminded that job. He and cohort Bernadine Dohrn raised the son of two of the people convicted of the massacre and robbery. I guess they knew the perpetrators well, eh?
This willful cover you run for Barack Obama in this matter, and have run for the past two years, is tantamount to conspiracy, Mr. Weitman. And you know it.
You are not allowing the American people a true, clear picture of who Barack Obama is, because you of the Press this campaign season have refused to demand of him direct answers, and have refused to hold him responsible and accountable for his at this point countless untruths and misspoken facts. You then are abetting someone who may have disingenuously represented himself.
A bit of fantasy: Consider, sir, if the Republican nominee, a fictitious Senator Schiessman, had spent 20 years in the association of a White Supremacist pastor....? Would he have a career at all in politics? Perhaps. Compound that to include a best friend who was an unrepentant bomber of abortion clinics. No, you would have destroyed him there. But wait, there is more! He got a real-estate gift worth at least $350,000 from a man who was recently convicted of corruption! You know, buying votes for gifts. Senator Schiessman worked for and helped train a network of radical right Christian fundamentalists, who have been not only community organizing, but actually conspiring to defraud voter rolls throughout America! Eight years ago Schiessman likens the United States to Communist China, and explains how he plans to redistribute wealth from the Middle Class to the Christian right! Then, there is the rumor of a video tape of Senator Schiessman some years ago at a Neo-Nazi rally, with Adolf Eichman's son. And throughout it all, in this fantasy world, Schiessman's birth certificate seems to have been, well, altered. There are rumors that his father, a reported underling of Klaus Barbie and in hiding in South America, and that Senator Schiessman may have himself actually been born to an American mother in Paraguay.
Finally, to close out this fiction, there is that quote in his autobiography, "blacks and Jews, who ever you chose you lose."
Ha! Schiessman, with all that in his dossier, would have been excoriated and eviscerated by reporters and editors of the Tribune Corporation's wide net of media outlets. Yet this fiction is a mirror of Barack Obama's past and present, and you apparently support him despite all of this deleterious luggage.
Since you and I both know that you would have sent your locusts out in hordes to lay bare the fictitious Senator Schiessman, I accuse you of outright class warfare. You, in NOT pursuing the story where ever it leads, are shielding a man you have a political affinity for, are attacking all of us who want to know THE TRUTH ABOUT BARACK OBAMA. You are directing the impetus of your staff, and in that action, you have committed this act of aggression against your own country for you own personal political aims.
I cannot think of a more despicable act in the sphere of journalism. Do you not remember how two reporters in the 1970s took a Presidency to pieces to find where its corruption lay? Is this the legacy of Woodward and Bernstein? Or, tell me, was it really ever only about attacking a Republican or a non-Liberal? Deep throat, indeed. Who said it? "I've seen the enemy, and they are us."
Do the right thing, Mr. Weitman. Give the American people that tape to digest, and please, get back to the work of finding news that is naked of bias. Given the history of your Press Corps in Chicago alone, you have your work cut out for you.
Sincerely,
James A. Bridge
Loud and True
>
> Thanks for your email. I appreciate your concern regarding this issue. I want to direct your attention to an article that appears in today's Los Angeles Times and offers an explanation for the newspaper's decision not to publish the videotape.
>
> Gary Weitman
>
> http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-video29-2008oct29,0,7568849.story
>
> McCain campaign accuses L.A. Times of 'suppressing' Obama video
Mr. Weitman,
I am pleased to have heard from you. I thank you very much for the response. Of course, I understand a news organization's commitment to its sources.
However, who said you aren't protecting your source? If this person is a Muslim and is afraid of reprisals, he or she must already certainly be under suspicion, simply because of the acknowledged existence of said video.
What this amounts to, sir, is that you have that video in safe-keeping for your source.
The clear implication is that you all at Tribune know the content of the tape, and it will viscerally damage the endorsed candidate of the Los Angeles Times.
Sir, you cannot be blind to the helping hand your brethren in the media continue to give Barack Obama. Here you would suppress evidence of a clear pro-Arab/Muslim bias in his core value system, and stand peaceably by as the ritual denunciations of Jews and Israel rang through the room? A video that will also reveal William Ayers in close proximity? Wouldn't you also find the allegation that Rashid Khalidi, a front man for Saudi money and known terrorist, wrote a recommendation letter for a young Barack Obama in his entrance to Columbia University?
Mr. Weitman, think for a moment about what you may have done here in continuing to run cover for Barack Obama--and what Tribune Corporation has allowed Barack Obama to get away with under your very noses in Chicago. I still want to know what Obama and Ayers were doing with that Annenberg Challenge money. Ayers said he and Obama were telling kids "what this country is really all about." I, Mr. Weitman, think YOU owe me an accounting of what that message may have been and is. Some of that money went to alternative schools associated with Reverend Wright. I found what that message may have been in Barack Obama's own autobiography, now widely believed to have been largely written by the man Barack Obama didn't know, William Ayers. "White man's greed puts the world in need."
You let a man run for President without chopping him into splinters, who wrote in his recent autobiography that white people generically are responsible for need in the world?
You wouldn't write that story? I guess not, because, Mr. Weitman, when you have had sufficient opportunity, you didn't.
No, Tribune Corporation didn't write that story. You didn't pursue his association with a man with him in that video, that is, William Ayers. He is the man who isn't sorry for any of his bombings nor for the Brinks Job in 1981 in which Peter Paige, Brinks guard, and Nyack cops Ed O'Grady and Waverly Brown, all fathers and all veterans of the armed services of our country, were murdered by the well-trained, well-armed urban guerrillas of the Weather Underground and Black Panthers. Ayers may have well masterminded that job. He and cohort Bernadine Dohrn raised the son of two of the people convicted of the massacre and robbery. I guess they knew the perpetrators well, eh?
This willful cover you run for Barack Obama in this matter, and have run for the past two years, is tantamount to conspiracy, Mr. Weitman. And you know it.
You are not allowing the American people a true, clear picture of who Barack Obama is, because you of the Press this campaign season have refused to demand of him direct answers, and have refused to hold him responsible and accountable for his at this point countless untruths and misspoken facts. You then are abetting someone who may have disingenuously represented himself.
A bit of fantasy: Consider, sir, if the Republican nominee, a fictitious Senator Schiessman, had spent 20 years in the association of a White Supremacist pastor....? Would he have a career at all in politics? Perhaps. Compound that to include a best friend who was an unrepentant bomber of abortion clinics. No, you would have destroyed him there. But wait, there is more! He got a real-estate gift worth at least $350,000 from a man who was recently convicted of corruption! You know, buying votes for gifts. Senator Schiessman worked for and helped train a network of radical right Christian fundamentalists, who have been not only community organizing, but actually conspiring to defraud voter rolls throughout America! Eight years ago Schiessman likens the United States to Communist China, and explains how he plans to redistribute wealth from the Middle Class to the Christian right! Then, there is the rumor of a video tape of Senator Schiessman some years ago at a Neo-Nazi rally, with Adolf Eichman's son. And throughout it all, in this fantasy world, Schiessman's birth certificate seems to have been, well, altered. There are rumors that his father, a reported underling of Klaus Barbie and in hiding in South America, and that Senator Schiessman may have himself actually been born to an American mother in Paraguay.
Finally, to close out this fiction, there is that quote in his autobiography, "blacks and Jews, who ever you chose you lose."
Ha! Schiessman, with all that in his dossier, would have been excoriated and eviscerated by reporters and editors of the Tribune Corporation's wide net of media outlets. Yet this fiction is a mirror of Barack Obama's past and present, and you apparently support him despite all of this deleterious luggage.
Since you and I both know that you would have sent your locusts out in hordes to lay bare the fictitious Senator Schiessman, I accuse you of outright class warfare. You, in NOT pursuing the story where ever it leads, are shielding a man you have a political affinity for, are attacking all of us who want to know THE TRUTH ABOUT BARACK OBAMA. You are directing the impetus of your staff, and in that action, you have committed this act of aggression against your own country for you own personal political aims.
I cannot think of a more despicable act in the sphere of journalism. Do you not remember how two reporters in the 1970s took a Presidency to pieces to find where its corruption lay? Is this the legacy of Woodward and Bernstein? Or, tell me, was it really ever only about attacking a Republican or a non-Liberal? Deep throat, indeed. Who said it? "I've seen the enemy, and they are us."
Do the right thing, Mr. Weitman. Give the American people that tape to digest, and please, get back to the work of finding news that is naked of bias. Given the history of your Press Corps in Chicago alone, you have your work cut out for you.
Sincerely,
James A. Bridge
Loud and True
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Brinks Job and Obama--and Unrepentent Terrorists
Unrepentent means "I'm proud I did it and I'd do it again."
The Weather Underground and William Ayers bombed the Capitol, the Pentagon, and Police Headquarters in N.Y.C. William Ayers scoffs at our country, laughs at how simple it was for him to escape justice. He is, in his own words, without remorse and unrepentent. That means, that he STILL feels that way today.
Further, he has said, he wishes he had done more..
More? We all know at this point that William Ayers launched the political career of Barack Obama. They're well-connected in Democratic Party of Chicago. Have they done more than that?
Perhaps they have done more than launching the career of Barack Obama, who took money from felonious land develope and influence peddler Tony Rezko. Perhaps they achieved more than even "mere" bombings. How about the Brinks Job in Nyack, NY, on October 20, 1981?
The Weather Underground, in concert with the Black Panthers on October 20, 1981, murdered Brinks guard Peter Paige and made a widow of his wife, Josephine, and orphaned his children, Susan, 19, Michael, 16, and Peter, 9.
The Weather Underground, in concert with the Black Panthers on October 20, 1981, murdered black police officer Waverly Brown, orphaning his daughters and a son, and leaving his mother, whom he helped in her garden, to live the remainder of her life without him.
The Weather Underground, in concert with the Black Panthers on October 20, 1981, murdered Edward O'Grady, widowing his wife and leaving her with three children young children, a son Edward, Jr., age six, and two daughters Patricia, age two and Kimberly, age 6 months.
The robbery was well-organized, the terrorists were well-armed, had body armor, and shot to kill. At least one of the dead men was shot at point-blank range when down.
William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were clearly connected to this event, as founders of the Weather Underground.
Their connections go pretty far, further even than creating the Weather Underground, for they knew the perpetrators well enough to have raised the son--Chesa Boudin--of two people convicted in the Nyack massacre: Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert.
But this isn't about Chesa Boudin, who has expressed remorse about the actions of his parents.
This is about his foster-parents' connection to a burglary that wasn't just a burglary. It was a military action, with training and equipment that nullified the police officers' fire-power, complete with execution-style point-blank murder of the wounded.
You can read the a gripping account of this terror-driven burglary at www.trutv.com, and read about the Paige, O'Grady and Brown--veterans all--at http://www.ogradybrown.com/index.html. You'll read about Joe Trombino, shot up but surviving the gun fight with the terrorists, only to fall on 9/11 2001 at the W.T.C. to another breed of America-hating terrorists.
People have been telling me that Americans are so jaded that they "don't care" about Obama's connection to a terrorist like William Ayers, a man proud of the destruction he committed, and perhaps even murder.
What does that say about us, as a people? I don't want my President linked via friendship to the murder of three cops and veterans of our armed services!
Do you?
One had to wonder about the Che Guevara posters everywhere in the Obama campaign. "Where did this come from, a new kind of Democrat who is a Guevara communist? Can it be true?"
Look no further than Nyack, New York, October 20, 1981, when the club that William Ayers built, the Weather Underground, murdered three Veterans of the Navy, Army and Air Force.
The Weather Underground and William Ayers bombed the Capitol, the Pentagon, and Police Headquarters in N.Y.C. William Ayers scoffs at our country, laughs at how simple it was for him to escape justice. He is, in his own words, without remorse and unrepentent. That means, that he STILL feels that way today.
Further, he has said, he wishes he had done more..
More? We all know at this point that William Ayers launched the political career of Barack Obama. They're well-connected in Democratic Party of Chicago. Have they done more than that?
Perhaps they have done more than launching the career of Barack Obama, who took money from felonious land develope and influence peddler Tony Rezko. Perhaps they achieved more than even "mere" bombings. How about the Brinks Job in Nyack, NY, on October 20, 1981?
The Weather Underground, in concert with the Black Panthers on October 20, 1981, murdered Brinks guard Peter Paige and made a widow of his wife, Josephine, and orphaned his children, Susan, 19, Michael, 16, and Peter, 9.
The Weather Underground, in concert with the Black Panthers on October 20, 1981, murdered black police officer Waverly Brown, orphaning his daughters and a son, and leaving his mother, whom he helped in her garden, to live the remainder of her life without him.
The Weather Underground, in concert with the Black Panthers on October 20, 1981, murdered Edward O'Grady, widowing his wife and leaving her with three children young children, a son Edward, Jr., age six, and two daughters Patricia, age two and Kimberly, age 6 months.
The robbery was well-organized, the terrorists were well-armed, had body armor, and shot to kill. At least one of the dead men was shot at point-blank range when down.
William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were clearly connected to this event, as founders of the Weather Underground.
Their connections go pretty far, further even than creating the Weather Underground, for they knew the perpetrators well enough to have raised the son--Chesa Boudin--of two people convicted in the Nyack massacre: Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert.
But this isn't about Chesa Boudin, who has expressed remorse about the actions of his parents.
This is about his foster-parents' connection to a burglary that wasn't just a burglary. It was a military action, with training and equipment that nullified the police officers' fire-power, complete with execution-style point-blank murder of the wounded.
You can read the a gripping account of this terror-driven burglary at www.trutv.com, and read about the Paige, O'Grady and Brown--veterans all--at http://www.ogradybrown.com/index.html. You'll read about Joe Trombino, shot up but surviving the gun fight with the terrorists, only to fall on 9/11 2001 at the W.T.C. to another breed of America-hating terrorists.
People have been telling me that Americans are so jaded that they "don't care" about Obama's connection to a terrorist like William Ayers, a man proud of the destruction he committed, and perhaps even murder.
What does that say about us, as a people? I don't want my President linked via friendship to the murder of three cops and veterans of our armed services!
Do you?
One had to wonder about the Che Guevara posters everywhere in the Obama campaign. "Where did this come from, a new kind of Democrat who is a Guevara communist? Can it be true?"
Look no further than Nyack, New York, October 20, 1981, when the club that William Ayers built, the Weather Underground, murdered three Veterans of the Navy, Army and Air Force.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Something Completely Different--A Movie Review
Tropic Thunder—Icono-classless
by James A. Bridge
Tropic Thunder is one of those movies that makes one wonder how a talent like Ben Stiller cannot tell when he's up to his neck in untreated sewage.
Or, why he thinks he needs to make his point about Hollywood's foibles by dousing his audiences with buckets of filth.
And talk about reaching backwards—this film is a send-up of a send-up in criticizing the 1979 classic Apocalypse Now, and the 1991 documentary “Hearts of Darkness—A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse”, with quite a few cute pokes at other Nam flicks, notably Platoon (1986) and Hamburger Hill (1987).
Tropic Thunder's doesn't stop with an F-Bomb assault—it sneaks every last expletive and blatant sexual act reference past our apparently brain-dead Motion Picture Association of America film censors' board—hey, MPAA, what the heck are you doing over there? There is practically no place where Ben Stiller's runaway pen doesn't take us, that is, in the realm of offensive language and general bad taste. But Ben had help—the “original story” came from himself and Justin Theroux, and Etan Cohen joined them in this icono-classless act. We can’t blame the MPAA for that—it’s our fault for putting up with it.
They stop at nothing. They tackle the effete politically crowd at the knees, taking on the mentally deficient (dare I say retarded?) when Stiller as Tugg Speedman reprises his fictional film flop, "Simple Jack". Robert Downey Jr. plays Kirk Lazarus, an Aussie playing a black man, and his take on a stereotype is good, and funny at times. They don’t say “nigger” anywhere in the film, and it would have been the least offensive thing I would have heard in that 107 minutes. Ben Stiller’s Tugg Speedman throws an offensive orphan off a bridge (it’s all fine, folks, the kid survives and gets a laugh). Matthew McConaughey’s character Dick Peck, Speedman’s agent, laments being stuck with his own mentally deficient child. And on. And on. And on.
Did I mention Jack Black as the drug-addicted hack actor, Jeff Portnoy? My, what a stretch. And the “real” black man in the movie, Alpa Chino (get it? Al Pacino? another insider's gag that is more annoying than entertaining), played by Brandon T. Jackson? Nick Nolte, as the somewhat odd Four Leaf Tayback, the supposed Vietnam veteran who wrote the supposedly true story, but actually was a sanitation engineer in the Coast Guard? They don’t add much to this film, but maybe I’m expecting too much in 2008.
Stiller and his fellow mallet-wielding writers savage Hollywood’s movie-making industry with practically every breath. Blatant lout of a producer Les Grossman, played by Tom Cruise, is portrayed as repulsively as a character can be played, and his dialog bristles with Fs. Feckless director Damien Cockburn, played by Steve Coogan, is that ubiquitous British director that doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing—and that gag seems again to be a writer’s inside joke. Like Dick Peck's insistence on delivering a TiVO to the jungle shoot, because Speedman’s contract says he’s supposed to have one. Smash! Crash! Sacred Cows in splinters and ruin everywhere, and in so doing, this trio of writers make like the opening chimpanzee act of 2001-A Space Oddysey.
Iconoclasm is one thing. But just the sheer fact that Ben Stiller is intentionally beating into a pulp everything about the movie-making industry does not excuse him, in my eyes, for this assault upon our ears and sensibilities. To call this screenplay and libretto sophomoric would be to pay it a compliment it does not deserve. Tropic Thunder is the filthiest, vilest stab at comedy I’ve ever sat through.
And believe me, I didn't just ride into town in a turnip truck. I grew up around seamen and marines. There isn't much I haven't heard.
Tropic Thunder is too much to take, and we really have to wonder if we want our young people to believe that this kind of language and offensive humor is acceptable. I look around the audience told me that many were breaking the rules of the “R” rating by being in the theater. Ben, you've certainly succeeded in telling us all how foolish the rating system is, since they clearly didn't stop you from saying a blessed thing. This is not humor, though, Ben. This is trash, and you are directing your animus at a young audience that is far from getting the thrust of your Hollywood bashing. They think that you think this highly offensive film is actually FUNNY.
Yes, there were funny moments, and precious few of them. I won't give them away. They are like finding a glass of water in the middle of the Sahara at noon in August—you don't even care if it's cold, you are so desperate for a drink. There is no sustained humor in this movie, just a kind of dread of what the next offensive stream of dialog or monologue will be. Tropic Thunder isn't “Something About Mary”, “Meet The Parents” or “Keeping The Faith”. This will be remembered as one of the worst movies ever made. When the audience that loves it today grows up, or sobers up, they’ll watch it again and know I’m right.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Russia Gambit: the West In Check
When the Berlin Wall cracked and the Iron Curtain fell, the West took a break from the Cold War cynicism that gave spawn to generation of novels and movies. Some of us hoped outright for a world with a Russia that might storm back from its Soviet Dark Age into the midst of the rest of us, it's people rejoicing in their new-found religious and political freedoms.
Not even the most sanguine peacenik among us can now believe that the next twenty years on earth will be remembered for dialog, accord, and a general improvement of humanity. For Russia landed a hay-maker on the West this week with their reaction to Georgia's foray into Ossetia in pursuit of separatists. Georgia, a NATO candidate and an ally of the United States, was overrun by Russia's superior force this week, and Russia will now dictate her terms about the largely Russian breakaway zones of Ossetia and Abkazhia.
There is little we can do about it. Russia has made her move in chess-like fashion. We are in check, we of the West, and we are down a pawn.
Russia has let us know that we are powerless to act. Our military is shackled to Iraq and Afghanistan. Russia has a hand in that too--she has given close cover to Iran in the rising conflict about Teheran's nuclear program, and does a thriving arms and technology business there. She is even playing side by side with China, who likewise ships aid and technology to Iran. And locked into this Iranian sidebar to our own Iraq gambit is the end-game we face.
The end-game is the U.S. and West, pitted against Radical Islam, China, and Russia.
By the way, we are outnumbered.
Russia has chosen this moment to let us know that she swings the balance of power against the West. Europe's relationship with the United States ran aground and sank over the War on Terror. One can hardly imagine a United European fighting force coming into existence at all, for any reason--is there an American that believes that Western Europeans would fight in the face of a Russian onslaught across Eastern Europe? Not I.
Russia knows of our challenges. They know them by heart. First, they know we have the successful but costly Iraq war, in lives 4,000 killed, in money--$600 billion and counting. Then, they know we are a locked into a upward spiral of fuel costs due specifically to the unwillingness of Democrats in Congress to permit an immediate build-out of oil-refining capacity, and to further drill for domestic crude. They also know that we are sending $750 billion a year to largely Islamic countries for oil,while our trade imbalance with China is in excess of $200 billion annually.
They know that we are draining our life's blood into the very veins of people who are at war with our way of life. The Islamic World of 2008 is not convinced that their radicals are wrong, so we feather the nest of potential enemies there. China, for all its "modernization" and "consumerism", is a totalitarian regime that would never tolerate and American freedoms and norms in their country. Even their modernization hurts us, as their added demand due to the pressures of growth have driven oil prices to record highs in the last year.
The Russians know all this. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev (we cannot see you, Vladimir Putin, but we know you are there...) can point to the Russian ethnicity of the Georgian separatists, and can make speeches about ethnic cleansing, but he knows the real score. They know Georgia's counterpart Mikheil Saakaskvili will have to accept the loss of one fifth of his country to Russian aggression, and that the mighty U.S. must stand alone against Radical Islam now, and will again stand alone against China, later.
Russia has made her play, and it's a good one. Even if we'd feel more comfortable playing Texas Hold 'em, we'll have to make a chess move.
At this moment, it is their game.
Not even the most sanguine peacenik among us can now believe that the next twenty years on earth will be remembered for dialog, accord, and a general improvement of humanity. For Russia landed a hay-maker on the West this week with their reaction to Georgia's foray into Ossetia in pursuit of separatists. Georgia, a NATO candidate and an ally of the United States, was overrun by Russia's superior force this week, and Russia will now dictate her terms about the largely Russian breakaway zones of Ossetia and Abkazhia.
There is little we can do about it. Russia has made her move in chess-like fashion. We are in check, we of the West, and we are down a pawn.
Russia has let us know that we are powerless to act. Our military is shackled to Iraq and Afghanistan. Russia has a hand in that too--she has given close cover to Iran in the rising conflict about Teheran's nuclear program, and does a thriving arms and technology business there. She is even playing side by side with China, who likewise ships aid and technology to Iran. And locked into this Iranian sidebar to our own Iraq gambit is the end-game we face.
The end-game is the U.S. and West, pitted against Radical Islam, China, and Russia.
By the way, we are outnumbered.
Russia has chosen this moment to let us know that she swings the balance of power against the West. Europe's relationship with the United States ran aground and sank over the War on Terror. One can hardly imagine a United European fighting force coming into existence at all, for any reason--is there an American that believes that Western Europeans would fight in the face of a Russian onslaught across Eastern Europe? Not I.
Russia knows of our challenges. They know them by heart. First, they know we have the successful but costly Iraq war, in lives 4,000 killed, in money--$600 billion and counting. Then, they know we are a locked into a upward spiral of fuel costs due specifically to the unwillingness of Democrats in Congress to permit an immediate build-out of oil-refining capacity, and to further drill for domestic crude. They also know that we are sending $750 billion a year to largely Islamic countries for oil,while our trade imbalance with China is in excess of $200 billion annually.
They know that we are draining our life's blood into the very veins of people who are at war with our way of life. The Islamic World of 2008 is not convinced that their radicals are wrong, so we feather the nest of potential enemies there. China, for all its "modernization" and "consumerism", is a totalitarian regime that would never tolerate and American freedoms and norms in their country. Even their modernization hurts us, as their added demand due to the pressures of growth have driven oil prices to record highs in the last year.
The Russians know all this. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev (we cannot see you, Vladimir Putin, but we know you are there...) can point to the Russian ethnicity of the Georgian separatists, and can make speeches about ethnic cleansing, but he knows the real score. They know Georgia's counterpart Mikheil Saakaskvili will have to accept the loss of one fifth of his country to Russian aggression, and that the mighty U.S. must stand alone against Radical Islam now, and will again stand alone against China, later.
Russia has made her play, and it's a good one. Even if we'd feel more comfortable playing Texas Hold 'em, we'll have to make a chess move.
At this moment, it is their game.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Memo to Business Week: Cheap Fuel...GOOD (omg...)
Memo to Business Week:
Cheap Fuel GOOD, Expensive Fuel BAD
....omg.....
Business Week trumpets "Should Oil Be Cheap?" on their July 23rd cover, and you have to wonder if the inmates have indeed stormed the front office and taken over the asylum. John Carey writes: "(e)xpensive energy is a powerful medicine. It may hurt when taken, but it brings long-term cures for a host of ills."
Carey's laughable take on high oil prices is thinly veiled in economics, and heavily smeared with the politics of big government and market manipulation, all, he writes, to teach consumers to use less. Business Week should be ashamed of ever having run such a piece as Carey's. His spurious and vague statement that there is "pressure from the left and right" to put a "floor" of taxes under the price of oil borders on science fiction. The pressure from the "right", right now, is to build out our refining capacity, and to drill for more oil. Mr. Carey, are you paying attention? I don't think so.
The fact that a debate about whether we should be strapped for fuel is so ridiculous as to make one wonder if the earth has fallen out of orbit. Business Week, listen up: AMERICA NEEDS MORE OIL REFINERIES. AMERICANS CANNOT AFFORD $10 A GALLON GASOLINE. One political party in this country is onto a solution. The other, like Mr. Carey, seems bent on giving us that painful dose of hurtful medicine that is ever mounting fuel costs due to our inability to process crude into gasoline any faster than our current capacity will allow.
While BW and the Democrats wonder about "whether" oil should be cheap, Republicans are getting serious about becoming the voice for the small guy, and molding the GOP into the Party of Energy Independence, as Sean Hannity has been recommending for months. While traveling with my daughter to visit colleges, I saw a video clip of House Republicans decrying Speaker Pelosi's refusal to allow discussion on fuel costs to come to the floor, and was thrilled to see my own Representative Scott Garrett talking about hearing us and wanting to help us get lower gasoline prices, and even gave an email address of painatthepump@house.gov.
There is no question that the Republican Party is answering the call on this issue, while the Democratic leadership of Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and the blundering Barack Obama, refuse to lead. (Hey, Senator Obama, can I see that tire gauge...?)
What a surprise. According to Mark Levin (forgive me on minor errors of recollection), 92% of House Democrats and 98% of Senate Democrats since 1973 have voted AGAINST adding refineries or drilling anywhere in the U.S. for more oil. This is a generation of Democratic Party leadership, and their leadership has spawned a generation of "industrio-phobes", rabidly environmental, who believe that deer and polar bears will stop procreating if they once smell crude oil or sight a derrick. No wonder Senator Obama's answer to the fuel price crisis is that he'd "rather fuel prices had risen more slowly," nor is it mysterious that he would think that checking tires would save more money at the pump "than drilling for oil ever would."
Simple research about Alaskan oil reveals that one major field only produces half of what it could pump south---because, California cannot process any more than that. We need more refineries, and we must begin building them now.
Some simple economics: First, the announcements of adding refinery capacity and of our drilling for more oil domestically will lead to an almost certain immediate downward pressure on crude prices. Futures will be sold short, and the dynamics of the fuel marketplace will begin to shift. If we begin building out our refinery capacity today, in two years or less we can be delivering more gasoline to the pump, and that will sink gasoline prices to pre-2004 levels without a doubt.
So, Business Week, you keep scratching your head and ponder things like "should oil be cheap," "should it hurt when I fall down," and, "should I bandage an open wound?" The Republican Party knows gasoline CAN be cheaper, and WILL be cheaper, if we build more refineries and pump more AMERICAN OIL.
James A. Bridge
www.loudandtrue.blogspot.com
jim@james-bridge.com
Cheap Fuel GOOD, Expensive Fuel BAD
....omg.....Business Week trumpets "Should Oil Be Cheap?" on their July 23rd cover, and you have to wonder if the inmates have indeed stormed the front office and taken over the asylum. John Carey writes: "(e)xpensive energy is a powerful medicine. It may hurt when taken, but it brings long-term cures for a host of ills."
Carey's laughable take on high oil prices is thinly veiled in economics, and heavily smeared with the politics of big government and market manipulation, all, he writes, to teach consumers to use less. Business Week should be ashamed of ever having run such a piece as Carey's. His spurious and vague statement that there is "pressure from the left and right" to put a "floor" of taxes under the price of oil borders on science fiction. The pressure from the "right", right now, is to build out our refining capacity, and to drill for more oil. Mr. Carey, are you paying attention? I don't think so.
The fact that a debate about whether we should be strapped for fuel is so ridiculous as to make one wonder if the earth has fallen out of orbit. Business Week, listen up: AMERICA NEEDS MORE OIL REFINERIES. AMERICANS CANNOT AFFORD $10 A GALLON GASOLINE. One political party in this country is onto a solution. The other, like Mr. Carey, seems bent on giving us that painful dose of hurtful medicine that is ever mounting fuel costs due to our inability to process crude into gasoline any faster than our current capacity will allow.
BW, honestly, have you lost your grip? Let me suggest a couple of other covers for your editors: "Should America Be Strong?" "Is It OK To Be A Superpower?" "Is The First Amendment Relevant Anymore?" "Is Family Really Important?"
While BW and the Democrats wonder about "whether" oil should be cheap, Republicans are getting serious about becoming the voice for the small guy, and molding the GOP into the Party of Energy Independence, as Sean Hannity has been recommending for months. While traveling with my daughter to visit colleges, I saw a video clip of House Republicans decrying Speaker Pelosi's refusal to allow discussion on fuel costs to come to the floor, and was thrilled to see my own Representative Scott Garrett talking about hearing us and wanting to help us get lower gasoline prices, and even gave an email address of painatthepump@house.gov.
There is no question that the Republican Party is answering the call on this issue, while the Democratic leadership of Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and the blundering Barack Obama, refuse to lead. (Hey, Senator Obama, can I see that tire gauge...?)
What a surprise. According to Mark Levin (forgive me on minor errors of recollection), 92% of House Democrats and 98% of Senate Democrats since 1973 have voted AGAINST adding refineries or drilling anywhere in the U.S. for more oil. This is a generation of Democratic Party leadership, and their leadership has spawned a generation of "industrio-phobes", rabidly environmental, who believe that deer and polar bears will stop procreating if they once smell crude oil or sight a derrick. No wonder Senator Obama's answer to the fuel price crisis is that he'd "rather fuel prices had risen more slowly," nor is it mysterious that he would think that checking tires would save more money at the pump "than drilling for oil ever would."
Simple research about Alaskan oil reveals that one major field only produces half of what it could pump south---because, California cannot process any more than that. We need more refineries, and we must begin building them now.
Some simple economics: First, the announcements of adding refinery capacity and of our drilling for more oil domestically will lead to an almost certain immediate downward pressure on crude prices. Futures will be sold short, and the dynamics of the fuel marketplace will begin to shift. If we begin building out our refinery capacity today, in two years or less we can be delivering more gasoline to the pump, and that will sink gasoline prices to pre-2004 levels without a doubt.
So, Business Week, you keep scratching your head and ponder things like "should oil be cheap," "should it hurt when I fall down," and, "should I bandage an open wound?" The Republican Party knows gasoline CAN be cheaper, and WILL be cheaper, if we build more refineries and pump more AMERICAN OIL.
James A. Bridge
www.loudandtrue.blogspot.com
jim@james-bridge.com
Friday, July 25, 2008
Democrats' Arab Appeasement Lays An Egg
The Democratic Party and its Jewish Constituency Ignore Islamic Bigotry
by James A. Bridge
From ad-Dustur, Jordan, July 22, 2008 (from ADL's website), July
Blogger Ted Belman of Israpundit in his recent post points out that American Jews are likely to vote along party lines in the coming 2008 Presidential election. He says, "(t)hus, for them, party loyalty is preferable to Israel loyalty."
The numbers say that roughly 60+ percent of America's 8 million Jews will vote Democrat, while 30+ percent will vote Republican. This breakdown is hard to believe, given the historical facts of two things:
1. the Democratic Party has been the party of unilateral Arab/Muslim appeasement and inclusion;
2. the Arab/Muslim world is so thoroughly anti-Semitic, that any meaningful peace between Israel and its almost 6 million Jews and the billion or so Muslims in their extended neighborhood between Africa and Indonesia cannot reasonably be seen as a possibility without confronting it.
The facts and history here are troubling. The Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has been linked to terror funding. The FBI named CAIR in the Texas Holy Land Funding mistrial as as "unindicted co-conspirator". CAIR's very leadership founded Hamas, yet this clearly suspicious organization has been embraced and lauded by Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell and Congressman Joe Sestak (D-7th, PA) at a April, 2007 CAIR fundraiser (<=click for Washington Times article), by Democratic Ohio Governor at yet another CAIR fundraiser in June of 2007, reported by NewsBusters but ignored by Ohio's newspapers. CAIR not only ran Keith Ellison's (D-5th, MN) successful Congressional campaign through strategic marketing CAIR-PA staffer Adeeba al-Zaman (reported in an American's Against Hate 2007 blog), but CAIR foot-soldiers are constantly used by Congressman Joe Sestak (D-7th, PA) to hand out his literature throughout his district, by his own admission.
How deep is CAIR's penetration of the Democratic Party? CAIR scores big with Democrats. On CAIR's own comments page , 36 of 39 Federal elected officials and governors listed are Democrats.
Given former President Jimmy Carter's antipathy toward Jews and the state of Israel vis-a-vis Arab/Muslim interest, the fact that Islamic focus groups like CAIR, with its lineage of terror and anti-Semitic hate and violence run to Democrats is no surprise.
(Cartoon right: al-Watan, June 11, 2008, Saudi Arabia)
But why do Democrats abide them in their midst? And why are the Jews of the Democratic Party not directly confronting the anti-Semitic/anti-Israeli sentiments of these Muslim/Arab groups that curry their support?
CAIR's own webite calls the state of Israel "a brutal occupation" of Palestine, and urges Israel's removal--but not with violence. "Illegitimate and counterproductive tactics must not be used in the legitimate struggle to end Israel’s brutal occupation.” How you remove Israel without violence is the conundrum within the statement, but not important. Getting rid of Israel is their declared intent, and is the declared intent of the entire Islamic world, save for Egypt and Jordan, both of whom have recognized Israel.
Arab/Muslim media run regular political cartoons of Jew-hating and Jew-bashing. From al-Quds, Palestinian Authority, titled, "Obama's View":
Thanks for these images to the Anti-Defamation League. But their work to protect the world's Jews from another Holocaust goes on as if in the vacuum of outer space. This image of Barack Obama coming out of the back of Israel's pants is clearly what many "educated" Arabs and Muslims believe. This political expression of religious hatred from what is a Palestinian Intelligencia should ring alarm bells in every Democrat's head, let alone in every Jewish Democrat's heart.But these alarm bells, if heard, are ignored.
These are disturbing yet revealing images of today's Arab and Muslim world. For as Arab vie for the full attention of a America's great Democratic Party when it comes to the Middle East (read: Israel)--and they have accomplished this feat, clearly--Arabs and Muslims essentially, demonstrably, detest Jews and the idea of Israel. As stated above, the Democratic Party embraces CAIR, attends its fundraisers, uses its labor--all without questioning the clear anti-Semitism that permeates the Islamic Media and must even have expression on CAIR's own website in declaring as a legitimate aim the destruction of Israel.
The Democratic Party, and its constituent Jews, must confront this basic, frighteningly pervasion of Arab and Muslim hatred of Jews and Israel. Nearly half of all Democrats support Arabs over Israel, according to a Daniel Pipes 2006 study, while nearly 75% of Republicans support Israel. Republicans seem willing to hold Arabs and Muslims accountable for their Holocaust talk and anti-Semitic diatribe. It is time for the Democratic Party to do the same. Democrats must recognize their folly in working for Arab and Muslim causes without at once demanding an end to this anti-Semitic rhetoric, and then actually stopping it. Tolerating it and ignoring it any longer is akin of itself to Holocaust denial.
(from www.amin.org, a purveyor of cartoons for Arab media)
The Democratic Party, and its constituent Jews, must confront this basic, frighteningly pervasion of Arab and Muslim hatred of Jews and Israel. Nearly half of all Democrats support Arabs over Israel, according to a Daniel Pipes 2006 study, while nearly 75% of Republicans support Israel. Republicans seem willing to hold Arabs and Muslims accountable for their Holocaust talk and anti-Semitic diatribe. It is time for the Democratic Party to do the same. Democrats must recognize their folly in working for Arab and Muslim causes without at once demanding an end to this anti-Semitic rhetoric, and then actually stopping it. Tolerating it and ignoring it any longer is akin of itself to Holocaust denial.
(from www.amin.org, a purveyor of cartoons for Arab media)Wednesday, July 23, 2008
McCain Takes On The Press
Wednesday July 23, 2008
by James A. Bridge
Senator John McCain yesterday squared off against his biggest obstacle to the Presidency--the mainstream media of the United States of America.
The Media Is In Love campaign is a brilliant move in a campaign that has been dragged into the shadows by the editors, publishers and producers of every stripe of the media. Both print and broadcast media have isolated the McCain campaign while chasing after Barack Obama where ever he goes, trumpeting whatever he says. The happy, light slap at the media was done with a call to supporters to vote for one of two videos he will run as adverts: "The Media Is In Love With Barack", version one to the music "Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You", version two, "My Eyes Adored You," both played to identical snippets of Press Icons not only pandering to Senator Obama, but offering words of worship, devotion, and outright infatuation.
Infatuation means, from the Latin: "in a foolish state." And how foolish they all seem, our so-called "news" purveyors.
Brian Williams and Chris Matthews lead the pack of nowhere-near-unbiased media giants as they utter their disgraceful, auto-hypnotic revelations about personal affinity for the mere presence of Barack Obama, and the sound of his voice. Williams: "It's hard to be objective." Matthews, when not weeping about how much he is moved by Obama, says he "feels a thrill coming up his leg." He says he doesn't get it too often. (I'll reserve further comment on that.)
The McCain Press-attack campaign is perfectly timed. Ohio polls reveal that 51 percent of Ohioans think that reporters are trying to get Obama elected. (From Rasmussen Reports (http://rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/election_20082/2008_presidential_election/ohio/election_2008_ohio_presidential_election ) The buzz on the street is that the Press is disgracing itself in ignoring all the issues, while centering only on their perceived charisma of the Democratic Party's presumptive Nominee.
So enamored of him are they that they miss the obvious. Barack Obama has lounged in his journeys to Afghanistan and Iraq upon the soft pillow of a fawning media circus, while, without their taking any notice, he has reversed prior positions, and has controverted the stated Iraq/Afghanistan War policy of Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean and of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (CA, D 8th) and Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid (NV, D).
Now THAT is big news--"Obama Changes Foreign Policy Position of Democratic Party"..."An Adventure No Longer, Iraq Praises Bush's Iraq Success"..."Obama Will Fight al-Quaeda In Afghanistan."
Will we see it today or this week in print or on the air? Will we hear it on the radio?
(My eyes adored you....)
What is that you're humming, Brian? Chris? No, I doubt we'll see the Press rip at this newly opened seam in the Democratic Party's rhetoric about the War Against Terror.
This is no surprise, though, at this point. The Press have generally refused to either tug at the ugly baggage around the junior Senator form Illinois or press him on his own constant flip-flopping on issues.
Those issues are important ones.
On Iraq: He told the world that the troop surge wouldn't work and that the troops must come home, yet while in Iraq, he praises its success, and tells us that we must move those troops on to Afghanistan.
On Jerusalem: He tells Israelis that Jerusalem will never be divided; as soon as he is off Israeli soil, he comes off that position, calling it "unfortunate wording".
On Iran: "After all, Peru, North Korea and Iran, they're all tiny countries. They don't pose much of a threat to us." THREE DAYS LATER: "I have always said that Iran is a serious threat to the security of this country."
On ignoring--or not noticing--over 20 years the racism of his own close friend and pastor, Reverend Wright. On his friendship with self-confessed Weather Underground bomber William Ayers. On the sweetheart real estate deal he got from convicted contractor Tony Rezko, guilty on 16 counts of fraud and money laundering.
The McCain Campaign used a good bit of humor to challenge the swooning, clearly Obama-biased mainstream media to do their jobs. REPORT THE NEWS. BE OBJECTIVE. ASK TOUGH QUESTIONS.
We demand it. We deserve it. Well done, Senator McCain.
by James A. Bridge
Senator John McCain yesterday squared off against his biggest obstacle to the Presidency--the mainstream media of the United States of America.
The Media Is In Love campaign is a brilliant move in a campaign that has been dragged into the shadows by the editors, publishers and producers of every stripe of the media. Both print and broadcast media have isolated the McCain campaign while chasing after Barack Obama where ever he goes, trumpeting whatever he says. The happy, light slap at the media was done with a call to supporters to vote for one of two videos he will run as adverts: "The Media Is In Love With Barack", version one to the music "Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You", version two, "My Eyes Adored You," both played to identical snippets of Press Icons not only pandering to Senator Obama, but offering words of worship, devotion, and outright infatuation.
Infatuation means, from the Latin: "in a foolish state." And how foolish they all seem, our so-called "news" purveyors.
Brian Williams and Chris Matthews lead the pack of nowhere-near-unbiased media giants as they utter their disgraceful, auto-hypnotic revelations about personal affinity for the mere presence of Barack Obama, and the sound of his voice. Williams: "It's hard to be objective." Matthews, when not weeping about how much he is moved by Obama, says he "feels a thrill coming up his leg." He says he doesn't get it too often. (I'll reserve further comment on that.)
The McCain Press-attack campaign is perfectly timed. Ohio polls reveal that 51 percent of Ohioans think that reporters are trying to get Obama elected. (From Rasmussen Reports (http://rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/election_20082/2008_presidential_election/ohio/election_2008_ohio_presidential_election ) The buzz on the street is that the Press is disgracing itself in ignoring all the issues, while centering only on their perceived charisma of the Democratic Party's presumptive Nominee.
So enamored of him are they that they miss the obvious. Barack Obama has lounged in his journeys to Afghanistan and Iraq upon the soft pillow of a fawning media circus, while, without their taking any notice, he has reversed prior positions, and has controverted the stated Iraq/Afghanistan War policy of Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean and of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (CA, D 8th) and Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid (NV, D).
Now THAT is big news--"Obama Changes Foreign Policy Position of Democratic Party"..."An Adventure No Longer, Iraq Praises Bush's Iraq Success"..."Obama Will Fight al-Quaeda In Afghanistan."
Will we see it today or this week in print or on the air? Will we hear it on the radio?
(My eyes adored you....)
What is that you're humming, Brian? Chris? No, I doubt we'll see the Press rip at this newly opened seam in the Democratic Party's rhetoric about the War Against Terror.
This is no surprise, though, at this point. The Press have generally refused to either tug at the ugly baggage around the junior Senator form Illinois or press him on his own constant flip-flopping on issues.
Those issues are important ones.
On Iraq: He told the world that the troop surge wouldn't work and that the troops must come home, yet while in Iraq, he praises its success, and tells us that we must move those troops on to Afghanistan.
On Jerusalem: He tells Israelis that Jerusalem will never be divided; as soon as he is off Israeli soil, he comes off that position, calling it "unfortunate wording".
On Iran: "After all, Peru, North Korea and Iran, they're all tiny countries. They don't pose much of a threat to us." THREE DAYS LATER: "I have always said that Iran is a serious threat to the security of this country."
On ignoring--or not noticing--over 20 years the racism of his own close friend and pastor, Reverend Wright. On his friendship with self-confessed Weather Underground bomber William Ayers. On the sweetheart real estate deal he got from convicted contractor Tony Rezko, guilty on 16 counts of fraud and money laundering.
The McCain Campaign used a good bit of humor to challenge the swooning, clearly Obama-biased mainstream media to do their jobs. REPORT THE NEWS. BE OBJECTIVE. ASK TOUGH QUESTIONS.
We demand it. We deserve it. Well done, Senator McCain.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Senator McCain: a Republican Plea
CONTACT SENATOR MCCAIN:
Phone: 703 413 2008
Website: http://www.johnmccain.com/Contact/
Senator McCain,
I am a recent Republican, having fled the Democratic Party four years ago from its wildly leftist leadership and from its mandates. I had long been a Conservative Democrat, but I have given up on that path. I am for less government than more; I am for more economic freedom and less market control; I am for a strong, independent America, and opposed to Internationalism, Multiculturalism and to any ideology that would diminish our great nation's political culture and freedoms.
Senator McCain, I was an early supporter of your campaign, but I left your team because of your position on immigration reform.
Now, though, you are my Party's nominee. I want to give you my support. But you seem to me to be ignoring the positions of our Party on several key issues.
1. Immigration--sir, I know there are millions of illegals in this country. You want a compassionate solution. But sir, they are stealing our wealth from us by sapping our infrastructure, stealing through insurance and education costs and through not paying taxes. They must be sent home, and that can be done on a state-by-state basis. Regular checks for paperwork by state and local police can make this happen. They can come back, if they can get visas.
2. Energy costs--sir, I detect a Senate-elitist stance in your policy here, and an absence of a compass. Democrats have stifled refineries and drilling for new oil, and that has led now to impossible gas prices. This is economics 101 Senator; we have exceeded our refining capacity, and prices, because of this fact, will not come soon down. We must have more refineries now, and we must drill for more oil now. We need this fuel to keep growing, sir, and OPEC cannot help us refine more oil. The inability to make gasoline will still have an upward pressure on gas prices.
3. Ethanol--this is a boondoggle, Senator. Quash this before every foodstuff in the United States trebles in price in the next six months.
4. Israel
Senator, I think your heart is in the right place on this. We must for the first time in the history of Israel make Israel our right-hand ally in the Middle East.
5. Islam--We must stop pandering to the interests of Islamists to whom we send billions of dollars in aid, and who with that aid often send it back to us in the form of suicide bombs and terror attacks. We must pacify Islam, and help it learn how to pacify itself. These people really believe they will defeat the West and destroy Israel. Have you seen the DVD "Obsession?" You can find it on the internet. Also, we want the trail of Saudi influence money sourced and exposed. The fact that your campaign manager is a former Saudi lobbyist doesn't sit well with many of the people who share my political views.
Please consider my words, Senator. You must offer us Republicans who range from the Center to the Conservative core more. You must give us more of what WE hold true and dear.
I hope you will hear my words and those like me who will follow. We cannot get whole-heartedly behind you if you don't.
Sincerely,
James A. Bridge
Phone: 703 413 2008
Website: http://www.johnmccain.com/Contact/
Senator McCain,
I am a recent Republican, having fled the Democratic Party four years ago from its wildly leftist leadership and from its mandates. I had long been a Conservative Democrat, but I have given up on that path. I am for less government than more; I am for more economic freedom and less market control; I am for a strong, independent America, and opposed to Internationalism, Multiculturalism and to any ideology that would diminish our great nation's political culture and freedoms.
Senator McCain, I was an early supporter of your campaign, but I left your team because of your position on immigration reform.
Now, though, you are my Party's nominee. I want to give you my support. But you seem to me to be ignoring the positions of our Party on several key issues.
1. Immigration--sir, I know there are millions of illegals in this country. You want a compassionate solution. But sir, they are stealing our wealth from us by sapping our infrastructure, stealing through insurance and education costs and through not paying taxes. They must be sent home, and that can be done on a state-by-state basis. Regular checks for paperwork by state and local police can make this happen. They can come back, if they can get visas.
2. Energy costs--sir, I detect a Senate-elitist stance in your policy here, and an absence of a compass. Democrats have stifled refineries and drilling for new oil, and that has led now to impossible gas prices. This is economics 101 Senator; we have exceeded our refining capacity, and prices, because of this fact, will not come soon down. We must have more refineries now, and we must drill for more oil now. We need this fuel to keep growing, sir, and OPEC cannot help us refine more oil. The inability to make gasoline will still have an upward pressure on gas prices.
3. Ethanol--this is a boondoggle, Senator. Quash this before every foodstuff in the United States trebles in price in the next six months.
4. Israel
Senator, I think your heart is in the right place on this. We must for the first time in the history of Israel make Israel our right-hand ally in the Middle East.
5. Islam--We must stop pandering to the interests of Islamists to whom we send billions of dollars in aid, and who with that aid often send it back to us in the form of suicide bombs and terror attacks. We must pacify Islam, and help it learn how to pacify itself. These people really believe they will defeat the West and destroy Israel. Have you seen the DVD "Obsession?" You can find it on the internet. Also, we want the trail of Saudi influence money sourced and exposed. The fact that your campaign manager is a former Saudi lobbyist doesn't sit well with many of the people who share my political views.
Please consider my words, Senator. You must offer us Republicans who range from the Center to the Conservative core more. You must give us more of what WE hold true and dear.
I hope you will hear my words and those like me who will follow. We cannot get whole-heartedly behind you if you don't.
Sincerely,
James A. Bridge
Saturday, June 21, 2008
NY Mets--Firing Across An Ethnic Divide
The Mets fired Willie Randolph just before midnight on June 16th, 2008, and they will not recover this season from the most disgusting display of gutless, no-class upper management behavior a Major League Baseball team has displayed since the SAME team fired Bobby Valentine.
They will not recover because the ugly fact is that this team has two huge problems--one, they have no chemistry; two, there is an ethnic divide on the Mets that is like an ugly, seeping scar on the face of the franchise. This kind of black eye and deep tissue bruising will take months to heal.
Recover in terms of wins and losses? Maybe. But this is not about games in the standings. This is about the after effects of ignoble behavior, about gutter-snipes, shady characters and back-stabbing bureaucratic weasels, about a dirty little secret of double-standards and ethnic prejudices that could fill 10 novels.
It's enough to make you want to dump your popcorn in the aisle, toss your $7 hot dog into the trash can and stalk out of the stadium with your children. Because I, for one, don't want to be around the likes of Omar Minaya. I don't like what I've seen this week, and I wouldn't put one dollar willfully into his pocket.
Omar Minaya's California press conference after his Midnight Massacre proved to all who heard or watched it just what a passel of low-life trash upper management of the New York Mets is made up of, and did nothing to dispel the growing suspicion that there is an ethnic split-personality on the New York Mets.
"This is what you have to do in my business," Minaya said at that press conference when pressed about his hasty flight to California and chasing Willie down with an ax at midnight. Maybe that's how you do it where you come from, Omar. I come from New York, and that's not how people like me think you do things.
What the Wilpons and General Manager Omar Minaya did to a life-long Mets fan, Yankee great, and now ex-Met Manager Willie Randolph is a complete disgrace. Not that you should treat anyone like they have treated Willie, but he is in the Pantheon of the Greats, of the Great New York Athletes, and of Outstanding New Yorkers. The Mets told the world Willie was their manager on a Thursday before Fathers Day weekend, then leaked it all over the place from Friday on, and then they sent the General Manager on a plane BEHIND the team, so he could be laying in wait to blow up the manager at midnight--AFTER A WIN! After, by the way, the Mets had gone 3-1 in their last four ball games.
You can't treat Willie Randolph like that, Mets. WRONG.
Back in the 80s there gleamed through the dark histrionics of the rampaging Steinbrenner Yankees a great talent, and he was Willie Randolph. New York's own, he was a fine ball player. Great, even, perhaps just short of the Hall of Fame, but still, he is at the head of the class. I've never seen a better second baseman in blue pinstripes with NY on the cap.
Then came Willie the manager and in three years, Willie the ex-manager.
Willie made mistakes, the biggest, I believe, in refusing to understand or participate in the Grand Theater of Baseball. Willie, for some reason, couldn't understand how important it is for the people who fill the tens of thousands of seats in ballparks all across this country to get fired up, and the lightning effect that can have on a team. Getting thrown out of a ball game can do it. Breaking a water cooler can do it. He might have learned that lesson this season as manager of the Mets, the team that stopped firing on all cylinders last season in 2007 and swooned out of first place under the thundering hooves of my own Philadelphia Phillies. He might have yet learned this lesson as the Mets continued to display a maddening dysfunction that even to the bluntest of us all was an apparent personality chemistry problem on the field for the Mets.
We all began to wonder about the rumors of an ethnic divide on the Mets, of the whisperings about a Latino pipeline to the General Manager, U.S. Baseball's first Hispanic General Manager, Omar Minaya. Paul Lo Duca's comments last year after a bad loss, "Why don't you ask them" waving at the empty lockers of Beltran and Delgado, then saying, "oh, right, they're gone," or words to that effect, only fanned the flames of this. Management isolated Willie, firing one of Willie's "guys", Rick Down. So, left on his staff were, Sandy Alomar Sr. and Jerry Manuel--whose pocket are these two guys in, I wonder? They are both Minaya guys.
Jerry Manuel didn't know about the impending firing, Alomar also not? Nor erratic stupor-star Jose Reyes? Yeah, right....who didn't know? That is hard to believe, as Tony Bernazard, Minaya's assistant GM, and a reported arch-foe and constant critic of Willie Randolph, dogged Willie's tracks in Anaheim like a stalker. Mike Francesca and Chris Russo to their credit on WFAN in New York City were ALL OVER Minaya about Bernazard's presence with the team in light of the weekend leaks of Willie's impending firing.
Is there evidence that a sector of the team stopped playing for Willie Randolph? How about Jose Reyes at the press conference: "It's too bad we couldn't play our best baseball for (Willie)." That statement, for me, says it all, and I don't think I'm reading anything in to it.
Jose, it should not matter who you play for. You should play your best baseball every time you put on your glove and spikes. If the manager is a black man, or Latino, or white, or Japanese, it should not matter one bit to you.
I hope that the Mets aren't having the ethnic problems that they seem to. But after Minaya's press conference, I for one, am sure they are. Jerry Manuel's hiring is nothing other than a placation of the team's under-performing and unhappy Latino core.
And that is an idea that is hard keep down.
James A. Bridge
They will not recover because the ugly fact is that this team has two huge problems--one, they have no chemistry; two, there is an ethnic divide on the Mets that is like an ugly, seeping scar on the face of the franchise. This kind of black eye and deep tissue bruising will take months to heal.
Recover in terms of wins and losses? Maybe. But this is not about games in the standings. This is about the after effects of ignoble behavior, about gutter-snipes, shady characters and back-stabbing bureaucratic weasels, about a dirty little secret of double-standards and ethnic prejudices that could fill 10 novels.
It's enough to make you want to dump your popcorn in the aisle, toss your $7 hot dog into the trash can and stalk out of the stadium with your children. Because I, for one, don't want to be around the likes of Omar Minaya. I don't like what I've seen this week, and I wouldn't put one dollar willfully into his pocket.
Omar Minaya's California press conference after his Midnight Massacre proved to all who heard or watched it just what a passel of low-life trash upper management of the New York Mets is made up of, and did nothing to dispel the growing suspicion that there is an ethnic split-personality on the New York Mets.
"This is what you have to do in my business," Minaya said at that press conference when pressed about his hasty flight to California and chasing Willie down with an ax at midnight. Maybe that's how you do it where you come from, Omar. I come from New York, and that's not how people like me think you do things.
What the Wilpons and General Manager Omar Minaya did to a life-long Mets fan, Yankee great, and now ex-Met Manager Willie Randolph is a complete disgrace. Not that you should treat anyone like they have treated Willie, but he is in the Pantheon of the Greats, of the Great New York Athletes, and of Outstanding New Yorkers. The Mets told the world Willie was their manager on a Thursday before Fathers Day weekend, then leaked it all over the place from Friday on, and then they sent the General Manager on a plane BEHIND the team, so he could be laying in wait to blow up the manager at midnight--AFTER A WIN! After, by the way, the Mets had gone 3-1 in their last four ball games.
You can't treat Willie Randolph like that, Mets. WRONG.
Back in the 80s there gleamed through the dark histrionics of the rampaging Steinbrenner Yankees a great talent, and he was Willie Randolph. New York's own, he was a fine ball player. Great, even, perhaps just short of the Hall of Fame, but still, he is at the head of the class. I've never seen a better second baseman in blue pinstripes with NY on the cap.
Then came Willie the manager and in three years, Willie the ex-manager.
Willie made mistakes, the biggest, I believe, in refusing to understand or participate in the Grand Theater of Baseball. Willie, for some reason, couldn't understand how important it is for the people who fill the tens of thousands of seats in ballparks all across this country to get fired up, and the lightning effect that can have on a team. Getting thrown out of a ball game can do it. Breaking a water cooler can do it. He might have learned that lesson this season as manager of the Mets, the team that stopped firing on all cylinders last season in 2007 and swooned out of first place under the thundering hooves of my own Philadelphia Phillies. He might have yet learned this lesson as the Mets continued to display a maddening dysfunction that even to the bluntest of us all was an apparent personality chemistry problem on the field for the Mets.
We all began to wonder about the rumors of an ethnic divide on the Mets, of the whisperings about a Latino pipeline to the General Manager, U.S. Baseball's first Hispanic General Manager, Omar Minaya. Paul Lo Duca's comments last year after a bad loss, "Why don't you ask them" waving at the empty lockers of Beltran and Delgado, then saying, "oh, right, they're gone," or words to that effect, only fanned the flames of this. Management isolated Willie, firing one of Willie's "guys", Rick Down. So, left on his staff were, Sandy Alomar Sr. and Jerry Manuel--whose pocket are these two guys in, I wonder? They are both Minaya guys.
Jerry Manuel didn't know about the impending firing, Alomar also not? Nor erratic stupor-star Jose Reyes? Yeah, right....who didn't know? That is hard to believe, as Tony Bernazard, Minaya's assistant GM, and a reported arch-foe and constant critic of Willie Randolph, dogged Willie's tracks in Anaheim like a stalker. Mike Francesca and Chris Russo to their credit on WFAN in New York City were ALL OVER Minaya about Bernazard's presence with the team in light of the weekend leaks of Willie's impending firing.
Is there evidence that a sector of the team stopped playing for Willie Randolph? How about Jose Reyes at the press conference: "It's too bad we couldn't play our best baseball for (Willie)." That statement, for me, says it all, and I don't think I'm reading anything in to it.
Jose, it should not matter who you play for. You should play your best baseball every time you put on your glove and spikes. If the manager is a black man, or Latino, or white, or Japanese, it should not matter one bit to you.
I hope that the Mets aren't having the ethnic problems that they seem to. But after Minaya's press conference, I for one, am sure they are. Jerry Manuel's hiring is nothing other than a placation of the team's under-performing and unhappy Latino core.
And that is an idea that is hard keep down.
James A. Bridge
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Obama's Sunday Hearing Loss
Friends and Family,
Happy Easter today to those who observe it, and an early Passover greeting to the rest of you!
From DAY ONE of his substance-less campaign I have termed the junior Senator from Illinois a cynical, lurking, self-aggrandizing political hack and a fraud. Senator Obama has, I have said, very good hearing when it comes to what he thinks people want to hear. It appears, though, that he goes deaf on Sunday.
Several of you know me from my youth as an aggressive civil rights advocate, I remain so inclined in my life as I have passed the 9th hole on this great fairway of life. I remain a dedicated feminist--equal pay for equal work as a base-line--(despite the treatment men get in divorce court). I continue to think we as a nation should do a better job in erasing the lines of ethnic caste in our society, without throwing our borders open and without losing our National Identity in the process.
But I draw the line in society and politics at racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and totalitarianism.
Back to Senator Obama.
Between the lines of what people are calling is "eloquent" and "beautiful" speech in answering his silence to the racist rants of his pastor of twenty years is an avowal of the right of Blacks to savage White people because of the fact of our Slavery past and the difficult integration of Blacks in our society in the post-Slavery period.
Interesting.
I put my mind to the issue, and came up with a somewhat, if not perfectly, analogous situation. It is entirely fictitious. Nothing in the below "Saga" is even remotely true of any living or dead person.
The Saga of Senator John J. Hawke
Let's talk about a mythic Senator, Senator John J. Hawke, (R-Kansas), who is running away from Mip Romney with the Republican nomination for President. Senator Hawke is a graduate of Princeton, where he studied Foreign Policy and History. He is 45 years old, has two young adults in college, and is married to his high school sweetheart of 20 years. He is a compassionate conservative--which brings him into conflict with the likes of Limbaugh, Levine, and Kudlow on Fox Radio--but he is in good company with Senator's Lieberman and McCain. He can work across the aisle. He is a born-again Baptist, and his pastor has been continuously the Reverend Fred Steelman, at the large, ornate "Christ the Messenger Church" -- not far from Kansas City. Senator Hawke and family have hardly ever missed a sermon; Reverend Steelman is on Hawke's election team.
Some whispers begin to stir, though, as the campaign season draws to a close. A breath becomes a gust, then a gale, then a tornado--Steelman's personal website is laced with White-Supremacist doctrine, and anti-Semitic dogma is unavoidable, and obvious!
In the wake of this brewing scandal, former members of the Christ the Messenger Church come forward to relate how Reverend Steelman regularly included his racism and anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiments. "The Powerful Jew Lobby" is one of his repeated themes, as is the "perils of White people" in the face of the advance of Asian/Hispanic/Black ethnicity in the United States. He has even praised the KKK as "protectors of our women's chastity" in an age gone by.
Soon Steelman withdraws from the Hawke campaign team; Hawke remains silent. The press bangs the drum for comment, and that day comes when the Senator from Kansas must address his attendance at sermons over two decades in which Blacks and other people of color, and Jews of all stripe, are regularly savaged from the pulpit in the place of his Sunday worship.
*****PAUSE*****
Be honest with me, now. If this scenario were a true one, would ANY OF US care to hear one word from Senator Hawke? Someone who has stood silently by the torrential anti-Semitic and White-supremacist doctrine of his pastor for two decades? I would not be receptive, but some people call me cranky....
*****RESUME*****
Hawke gives the speech of his life, and in it reveals that his grandmother (mother's mother) was not only of the Hebrew faith, but was, in fact, "a typical Jew". She would call him a "mischling", that is, she was prejudiced against him because of his mixed heritage, and this left him scarred. He talked about how his father lost his livelihood when a (Jewish) union activist targeted his sweatshop for organization, and the lucrative business of 1,000 employees, many of them Latino and Black, shut down in job action that cost Hawke's father his marketplace niche. He never recovered from the loss, and died an angry, bitter man some years later, without ever meeting his grandchildren. Hawke had to work three different jobs to help support his prostrate father and family, winning a full scholarship to Princeton on merit.
Hawke wipes a tear, hugs his wife, and asks for our forgiveness for listening to a message of hate for twenty years without once speaking out against it.
And he asks for your continued support in his run for the nomination of his party and the Presidency of the United States.
*****FIN******
How many of you could give this man your political support? Would this man even have a political career outside of his home state, or even home town, if this had truly occured? I doubt it. Would the New York Times EVER stop writing about this debacle and scandal? I'd say it would run for years. Would the Republican Party ever recover? Again, this wound would hobble the Republican Party certainly for an election cycle or two.
In our lives and times, we must draw the line. Politicians mustn't be squeaky clean, in my opinion. But someone who will not fight against racism, sexism, anti-Semitism or totalitarianism where ever they find it, is not fit to lead.
Look, the part of me that recognizes my Whiteness doesn't want Caucasian-ness to disappear. I want my kind and where I come from to continue on our earth. As I want those of us around me who would live in peace with me to continue, all of us, with love and mutual, selfless support, regardless of our ethnicity or faith. But to dwell upon my Whiteness and have it a focal point in my life would make me a racist.
Would it not?
If I were black, and I were in fact the junior Senator from Illinois, I should realize that my speech and twenty years of silence in the face of constant White-bashing in the HOUSE OF GOD is proof positive of lurking racism in my makeup. I should step away and correct it.
Immediately.
James A. Bridge
Happy Easter today to those who observe it, and an early Passover greeting to the rest of you!
From DAY ONE of his substance-less campaign I have termed the junior Senator from Illinois a cynical, lurking, self-aggrandizing political hack and a fraud. Senator Obama has, I have said, very good hearing when it comes to what he thinks people want to hear. It appears, though, that he goes deaf on Sunday.
Several of you know me from my youth as an aggressive civil rights advocate, I remain so inclined in my life as I have passed the 9th hole on this great fairway of life. I remain a dedicated feminist--equal pay for equal work as a base-line--(despite the treatment men get in divorce court). I continue to think we as a nation should do a better job in erasing the lines of ethnic caste in our society, without throwing our borders open and without losing our National Identity in the process.
But I draw the line in society and politics at racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and totalitarianism.
Back to Senator Obama.
Between the lines of what people are calling is "eloquent" and "beautiful" speech in answering his silence to the racist rants of his pastor of twenty years is an avowal of the right of Blacks to savage White people because of the fact of our Slavery past and the difficult integration of Blacks in our society in the post-Slavery period.
Interesting.
I put my mind to the issue, and came up with a somewhat, if not perfectly, analogous situation. It is entirely fictitious. Nothing in the below "Saga" is even remotely true of any living or dead person.
The Saga of Senator John J. Hawke
Let's talk about a mythic Senator, Senator John J. Hawke, (R-Kansas), who is running away from Mip Romney with the Republican nomination for President. Senator Hawke is a graduate of Princeton, where he studied Foreign Policy and History. He is 45 years old, has two young adults in college, and is married to his high school sweetheart of 20 years. He is a compassionate conservative--which brings him into conflict with the likes of Limbaugh, Levine, and Kudlow on Fox Radio--but he is in good company with Senator's Lieberman and McCain. He can work across the aisle. He is a born-again Baptist, and his pastor has been continuously the Reverend Fred Steelman, at the large, ornate "Christ the Messenger Church" -- not far from Kansas City. Senator Hawke and family have hardly ever missed a sermon; Reverend Steelman is on Hawke's election team.
Some whispers begin to stir, though, as the campaign season draws to a close. A breath becomes a gust, then a gale, then a tornado--Steelman's personal website is laced with White-Supremacist doctrine, and anti-Semitic dogma is unavoidable, and obvious!
In the wake of this brewing scandal, former members of the Christ the Messenger Church come forward to relate how Reverend Steelman regularly included his racism and anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiments. "The Powerful Jew Lobby" is one of his repeated themes, as is the "perils of White people" in the face of the advance of Asian/Hispanic/Black ethnicity in the United States. He has even praised the KKK as "protectors of our women's chastity" in an age gone by.
Soon Steelman withdraws from the Hawke campaign team; Hawke remains silent. The press bangs the drum for comment, and that day comes when the Senator from Kansas must address his attendance at sermons over two decades in which Blacks and other people of color, and Jews of all stripe, are regularly savaged from the pulpit in the place of his Sunday worship.
*****PAUSE*****
Be honest with me, now. If this scenario were a true one, would ANY OF US care to hear one word from Senator Hawke? Someone who has stood silently by the torrential anti-Semitic and White-supremacist doctrine of his pastor for two decades? I would not be receptive, but some people call me cranky....
*****RESUME*****
Hawke gives the speech of his life, and in it reveals that his grandmother (mother's mother) was not only of the Hebrew faith, but was, in fact, "a typical Jew". She would call him a "mischling", that is, she was prejudiced against him because of his mixed heritage, and this left him scarred. He talked about how his father lost his livelihood when a (Jewish) union activist targeted his sweatshop for organization, and the lucrative business of 1,000 employees, many of them Latino and Black, shut down in job action that cost Hawke's father his marketplace niche. He never recovered from the loss, and died an angry, bitter man some years later, without ever meeting his grandchildren. Hawke had to work three different jobs to help support his prostrate father and family, winning a full scholarship to Princeton on merit.
Hawke wipes a tear, hugs his wife, and asks for our forgiveness for listening to a message of hate for twenty years without once speaking out against it.
And he asks for your continued support in his run for the nomination of his party and the Presidency of the United States.
*****FIN******
How many of you could give this man your political support? Would this man even have a political career outside of his home state, or even home town, if this had truly occured? I doubt it. Would the New York Times EVER stop writing about this debacle and scandal? I'd say it would run for years. Would the Republican Party ever recover? Again, this wound would hobble the Republican Party certainly for an election cycle or two.
In our lives and times, we must draw the line. Politicians mustn't be squeaky clean, in my opinion. But someone who will not fight against racism, sexism, anti-Semitism or totalitarianism where ever they find it, is not fit to lead.
Look, the part of me that recognizes my Whiteness doesn't want Caucasian-ness to disappear. I want my kind and where I come from to continue on our earth. As I want those of us around me who would live in peace with me to continue, all of us, with love and mutual, selfless support, regardless of our ethnicity or faith. But to dwell upon my Whiteness and have it a focal point in my life would make me a racist.
Would it not?
If I were black, and I were in fact the junior Senator from Illinois, I should realize that my speech and twenty years of silence in the face of constant White-bashing in the HOUSE OF GOD is proof positive of lurking racism in my makeup. I should step away and correct it.
Immediately.
James A. Bridge
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