CHANGE TO BELIEVE IN #7:Struggling Banks Paid President Clinton $2.1 million for ‘Speeches’

Our new Secretay of States spouse seems to be in the middle of alot!

Change to Believe In!!!

Read about it here:http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=39902

Note it is from CBS - perhaps there is some change coming from the MSM!

Obama Watch: #3

"Aide: Obama May Keep Bush Tax Cuts"

"WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama may consider delaying a campaign promise —..."

The above headline and first sentence is from a Reuters article, November 23.

Do any Obama suupporters feel let down yet? I'm getting happier with him each day!

CHANGE TO BELIEVE IN #6

Oh, well!! At least I could post one "change". Tim Geithner has been picked as Secretary of the Treasury, and look at the paragraph below from MSNBC:

"Barring last minute changes, the nominee for Treasury Secretary will be NY Fed President Tim Geithner -- a career Treasury official under both Bob Rubin and Larry Summers -- who actually had worked at the Treasury in three administrations under five Secretaries -- going back to 1988." (my emphasis)

This is the change you Dems were looking for?

FINALLY! - CHANGE TO BELIEVE IN #5!

Obama finally appoints someone who may be a change: Janet Napolitano as Secretary of Homeland Secutity. She is a border state Governor, not a Washington insider, a woman, etc. etc. etc. Could he be seeing the light?

Or, perhaps she is a problem! Here is an article on her rather controversial past. Worth the read to follow her Senate hearing. Perhaps it will be easier than she tried to make Clarence Thomas' - you'll need to read the article to understand that comment!

http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/Janet_Napolitano/2008/11/20/153420.html

CHANGE TO BELIEVE IN #4!

"Politico.com Breaking News:

Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) will be secretary of Health and Human Services in the Obama administration, a senior Democratic official said."

This gets more humorous as the days go by! Maybe CHANGE has a different meaning in Chicago!

Any of you Lefties feeling betrayed yet?

THE LEFT

David Limbaugh lists the lefts anomalies of thought. Would anyone like to take issue with his points?


""As one liberal academic administrator said in justifying his Draconian action in suppressing a Christian viewpoint, 'We cannot tolerate the intolerable.'

This self-blinding, superior mindset explains how liberals can accuse conservatives of racism for their legitimate political differences with Barack Obama while demeaning, with racist epithets, Condoleezza Rice or Clarence Thomas.

It's how they can mock conservatives for being close-minded while unilaterally declaring the end to the debate on global warming because of a mythical consensus they have decreed. It's how they can demand every vote count and exclude military ballots.

It's how they can glamorize Jimmy Carter for gallivanting to foreign countries to supervise 'fair elections' and pooh-pooh ACORN's serial voter fraud in their own country.

It's how they can threaten the tax-exempt status of evangelical churches for preaching on values, even when the churches don't endorse candidates, but fully support a liberal church's direct electioneering for specific candidates.

... It's how they can oppose the death penalty for the guilty but protect the death penalty for the innocent unborn.

... If you believe the left is tolerant, open-minded and democratic, you're in for a rude awakening."

--columnist David Limbaugh""

Let us hope some reasonableness comes into their thinking!

CHANGE TO BELIEVE IN #3!

Politico documents the aggressive CHANGE that Obama is implementing:

"Gregory B. Craig, a well-known Washington lawyer who quarterbacked President Bill Clinton’s impeachment defense, has been chosen White House counsel by President-elect Barack Obama, according to Democratic officials. "

Comments from any of his supporters? Is this really change? Have you forgotten why W was in the White House for the last 8 years?

I can only sit back and smile (laugh?).

CHANGE TO BELIEVE IN #2!

From Yahoo! News, 11/14/08:

"Reuters – …
President-elect Barack Obama met Thursday with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) at his transition headquarters in Chicago as a growing chorus of advisers pushes her for secretary of state."

The only change I can see with this potential decision is that she will carry the title under Obama while she just served the function under Bill!

Love this change!!

CHANGE TO BELIEVE IN!

From the AP today:

"CHICAGO – Vice President-elect Joe Biden chose as his chief of staff a man who once served in that same role for Vice President Al Gore, Democratic officials said Thursday."...

"Last week, Obama named Rahm Emanuel, a former Clinton political and policy adviser in the White House, as his chief of staff, and former Clinton veteran John Podesta is among those leading his transition team.

And on Wednesday, Obama named a team heavy on experience in the Clinton administration to help guide transition efforts in the State, Defense and Treasury departments. He named two leaders for each of the three agencies, and all six served in some capacity under President Clinton."

Do I see a trend here? Any comments from my lefty friends?

I am beginning to understand why Hillary let herself be outdone by Obama. With the Administration picks so far, she and Bill will be controlling everything, without the hastle of being President!

Is Obama Intellectualism the answer?

How full of themselves can the left get? It seems to have no limits. Read Nicholas Kristof's self congratulatory column on Obama's intellectual capacity.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/opinion/09kristof.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Then read Thomas Sowell's analysis below:

""Intellectuals"

By Thomas Sowell

Among the many wonders to be expected from an Obama administration, if Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times is to be believed, is ending "the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life."

He cited Adlai Stevenson, the suave and debonair governor of Illinois, who twice ran for president against Eisenhower in the 1950s, as an example of an intellectual in politics.

Intellectuals, according to Mr. Kristof, are people who are "interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity," people who "read the classics."

It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

Adlai Stevenson was certainly regarded as an intellectual by intellectuals in the 1950s. But, half a century later, facts paint a very different picture.

Historian Michael Beschloss, among others, has noted that Stevenson "could go quite happily for months or years without picking up a book." But Stevenson had the airs of an intellectual -- the form, rather than the substance.

What is more telling, form was enough to impress the intellectuals, not only then but even now, years after the facts have been revealed, though apparently not to Mr. Kristof.

That is one of many reasons why intellectuals are not taken as seriously by others as they take themselves.

As for reading the classics, President Harry Truman, whom no one thought of as an intellectual, was a voracious reader of heavyweight stuff like Thucydides and read Cicero in the original Latin. When Chief Justice Carl Vinson quoted in Latin, Truman was able to correct him.
Yet intellectuals tended to think of the unpretentious and plain-spoken Truman as little more than a country bumpkin.

Similarly, no one ever thought of President Calvin Coolidge as an intellectual. Yet Coolidge also read the classics in the White House. He read both Latin and Greek, and read Dante in the original Italian, since he spoke several languages. It was said that the taciturn Coolidge could be silent in five different languages.

The intellectual levels of politicians are just one of the many things that intellectuals have grossly misjudged for years on end.

During the 1930s, some of the leading intellectuals in America condemned our economic system and pointed to the centrally planned Soviet economy as a model-- all this at a time when literally millions of people were starving to death in the Soviet Union, from a famine in a country with some of the richest farmland in Europe and historically a large exporter of food.

New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for telling the intelligentsia what they wanted to hear-- that claims of starvation in the Ukraine were false.
After British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge reported from the Ukraine on the massive deaths from starvation there, he was ostracized after returning to England and unable to find a job.
More than half a century later, when the archives of the Soviet Union were finally opened up under Mikhail Gorbachev, it turned out that about six million people had died in that famine-- about the same number as the people killed in Hitler's Holocaust.

In the 1930s, it was the intellectuals who pooh-poohed the dangers from the rise of Hitler and urged Western disarmament.

It would be no feat to fill a big book with all the things on which intellectuals were grossly mistaken, just in the 20th century-- far more so than ordinary people.

History fully vindicates the late William F. Buckley's view that he would rather be ruled by people represented by the first 100 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.

How have intellectuals managed to be so wrong, so often? By thinking that because they are knowledgeable-- or even expert-- within some narrow band out of the vast spectrum of human concerns, that makes them wise guides to the masses and to the rulers of the nation.

But the ignorance of Ph.D.s is still ignorance and high-IQ groupthink is still groupthink, which is the antithesis of real thinking." (my emphasis)

I think I will cry if many on the left really believe Kristof's nonsense! But we will give Mr. Obama an opportunity to show us how his superior intellectualism is our salvation!

Any comments from my lefty friends?

Obama Watch: #1

Obama ran on change. Is this the best he can do? Do you supporters feel a bit betrayed? Give me your justification for not feeling betrayed based on Dick Morris' analysis below:


"Obama's 'Change': Appointing Beltway Has-Beens

Sunday, November 9, 2008 4:46 PM
By: Dick Morris & Eileen McGann

What's with Obama's choice of old-time Clinton cronies and recycled Washington insiders to run the transition to his new politics of change?

Can't the anti-Washington-insiders and the president-elect find anyone who isn't a Beltway has-been?

Judging by the appointments to his transition committee and leaks about possible top staff and Cabinet choices, Obama appears to be practicing the politics of status quo, not the politics of change.

Obama based his innovative campaign on an emphatic and convincing commitment to change the culture of Washington and bring in new people, new ideas, and new ways of doing business.
But now, Obama has definitely changed his tune. As president-elect, he's brought back the old Washington hacks, party regulars, and Clinton sycophants that he so frequently disparaged. Like Jimmy Carter, the last president who ran as an outsider, Obama has reached out to the same old folks who dominate the Democratic Party and represent the status quo.

His transition committee looks like a reunion of the Clinton administration. No new ideas of how to reform the system there. The chairman, John Podesta, was Clinton's chief of staff. He presided over outrageous last-minute pardons and his style is strictly inside-the-Beltway and make-no-waves.

Then there's Carol Browner, Clinton's competent former EPA administrator who became the consummate Washington insider. She's Madeline Albright's partner and recently married mega-lobbyist and former Congressman Tom Downey. During the uproar over Dubai taking over U.S. ports, Browner brought Downey to meet with Sen. Chuck Schumer to plead Dubai's case. Downey was paid half a million dollars to push Dubai's position. He's also a lobbyist for Fannie Mae, paid half a million to try to cover their rears on the subprime mortgage mess. Is this change?

Federico Pena was Clinton's secretary of transportation and of energy. The president felt he was unduly soft on Air Florida after a crash and lost confidence in him. Now he's back as a transition committee member.

Bill Daley, Clinton's former secretary of commerce and the brother of the mayor of Chicago, is the epitome of the old Democratic establishment. Clinton appointed him to the Fannie Mae board and his son worked as a lobbyist for the agency. Aren't these the kind of folks that Obama ran against?

Larry Summers, president of Harvard and former Clinton secretary of the treasury is not exactly an outsider either. He's also alienated more than a few with his bizarre suggestion that women may be genetically inferior to men in math and science.
Susan Rice, assistant secretary of state under Clinton advised John Kerry and Mike Dukakis. Does that tell you enough?

Obama has named one of his big bundlers -- Michael Froman, an executive at Citigroup. Is this supposed to symbolize change?

Obama's choice of a spokesperson for the transition is also surprising; she is definitely not the face of reason and new politics. Stephanie Cutter is the brash and combative former Clinton, Kerry, and Ted Kennedy mouthpiece. The liberal DailyKos.com once described Cutter as "a moron to the nth degree" when she tried unsuccessfully to force The New York Times' Adam Nagourney to treat her unsolicited e-mail criticizing Howard Dean as "background" without mentioning her name.

Speaking of brash, Rahm Emanuel, the new White House chief of staff, makes Cutter look timid. Rahm is also a former Clinton White House staffer -- and a very obnoxious one. He spent his White House years leaking to The Washington Post whenever he didn't like what the president was doing. Even Bill Clinton stopped trusting him. Any hopes of Obama keeping his commitment to reach across the aisle would go right out the window with Rahm's appointment. Instead of extending a hand to the opposition, it would be like raising just one finger. And Rahm's strident demeanor laced with the 'F' word in every sentence will do little to elevate the bipartisan dialogue in Washington.

Christopher Edley, another member of the transition team, is dean of the Berkeley Law School. He was a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission under Clinton, and his wife, Maria Echaveste was Clinton's deputy chief of staff.

Transition committee staffer Christine Varney was a federal trade commissioner under Clinton and worked in the White House.

Throughout the early debates, Obama criticized Hillary Clinton as part of the inside-the Beltway establishment that needed to go. But now he's reaching out to these exact same folks. Some change. "

CONGRATULATIONS TO OBAMA!

He ran a hell of a campaign, disposing of the Clinton's on his way to the Presidency of the United States. We will disagree on why he won. We will disagree on on what his policies will be for the next four years. But he is our President and deserves our support and respect!

Todays Patriot Post Chronicle, Vol. 08 No. 45, summarizes their feelings in a Publishers editorial that matches pretty closely my feelings on his win. This is a right - not center right - publication, but hits the various "nails on the head."

""Fellow Patriots,

Tuesday, 4 November 2008, is a date which will live in infamy. While most presidential elections are followed with calls for unity by both candidates, Barack Obama issued no such call in his speech last night, with the possible exception of his observation, "I may not have won your vote tonight, but ... I will be your president, too."

Of course, none was expected -- liberals have elected a Socialist with deep ties to cultural and ethnocentric radicalism, and his executive and legislative agenda poses a greater threat to American liberty than that of any president in the history of our great republic.

Obama has twice taken an oath to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic" and to "bear true faith and allegiance to the same." He has never honored that oath, and, based on his policy proposals and objectives, he has no intention to honor it after again reciting that oath on 20 January 2009. Obama seeks to, in his own words, "break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution."

For that reason, this morning, the symbol of our national heritage of liberty, the American flag atop the 35-foot mast at our editorial offices, was respectfully lowered, inverted, and raised to full mast as a sign of national distress. It will remain inverted until next Tuesday, when we right it in honor of Veterans Day.

Today, at least 55,805,197 Americans are concerned for the future of our nation's great tradition of liberty. Some 63,007,791 Americans have been lulled, under the aegis of "hope and change," into a state of what is best described as "cult worship" and all its attendant deception.

One of our editors, a Marine now working in the private sector, summed up our circumstances with this situation report. It aptly captured the sentiments around our office:

"It's been tough, fellow Patriots; tough to stomach the idea that more than half of my fellow citizens who vote, have booted a genuine American hero to the curb for a rudderless charlatan. What a sad indictment on our citizenry that some are so eager to overlook his myriad flaws -- his radical roots, his extreme liberalism, his utter lack of experience or achievement. Barack Obama is the antithesis of King's dream: He's a man judged by the color of his skin rather than the content of his character. If it's God's will that Barack Obama is our next president, then so be it. We Patriots will pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and wade back to the war front, intent on liberty or death."

This battle is lost, but the war is not. Let's roll.

Mark Alexander,Publisher""


I do not agree with the upside down flag or some of the more direct adjectives, but I do agree in general with the points they make.

How about a controlled, thought through discussion on their points? Anyone interested?