Omar Thornton Murderer in Connecticut Hate Crime

The following comes from the CBS website:

“A high-ranking union official says a man who fatally shot eight co-workers and himself at a beer distributorship in Connecticut had been caught on videotape stealing beer. At least two people were also wounded, one critically.

Union officials say Omar Thornton, 34, had worked as a driver for a couple of years and had been called in for a disciplinary hearing Tuesday and asked to resign. He instead opened fire at a warehouse in Manchester, entering the business with a rifle and a red satchel filled with ammunition.

Family members told CBS News affiliate WFSB-TV in Hartford, Conn., that Thornton was a quiet, hard-working man who wasn’t a violent person, but was simply pushed to the breaking point by harassment at work.

Thornton’s mother, who lives in East Hartford, told WFSB-TV she received a phone call shortly after 7 a.m. Tuesday. It was Thornton.

She said he told her he had shot several people at the beer distribution plant where he worked, and that he planned to take his own life. She said she spent 10 minutes trying to talk to her son, pleading with him to change his mind, but she said she couldn’t.

Minutes later, Thornton was dead.

“He said, ‘I killed the five racists that was there bothering me,’” Will Holliday, Thornton’s uncle, told WFSB-TV. “He said, ‘That’s it. The cops are going to come in so I’m going to take care of it myself.’”

Holliday said Thornton had been complaining to relatives that in several years he worked at Hartford Distributors he was confronted with blatant racism.

Holliday said, “He had some instances of racism at the company. They were hanging nooses in the bathroom and writing stuff like that. They were singling him out because he was the only black person there in that area.”

Teamster official John Hollis said the shooting was perfectly timed for when the most people would be in the building. He said employees were shot both inside and outside the business. He said victims were found throughout the office, warehouse and loading docks.

CBS News Correspondent Ben Tracy reports from Manchester, Conn., that as employees were loading beer onto trucks Thornton ran along the loading platform selectively shooting, killing some and sparing others.

Police found Thornton with a fatal gunshot wound, Manchester police Lt. Joe San Antonio said. A police sharpshooter had approval to fire on Thornton when he killed himself, an official with knowledge of the scene told the AP on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss it.

Union representatives said among the dead were Brian Cirigliano, the shop steward for the union. Workers said Cirigliano would have been the one to escort Thornton into the building for Tuesday’s disciplinary hearing.

Also killed was Craig Pepin, of South Windsor. A family friend of Pepin’s said he recently celebrated his wedding anniversary. The friend said Pepin was a soccer coach and was very popular. According to the friend, Pepin loved his job and never had any work-related problems.

Truck driver Victor James was also among the murder victims. James had 30 years on the job, union officials said. Gloria Wilson, James’ mother, said he would have turned 60 years old this month. She said he loved his job and was planning on retiring soon. Wilson said James had two grown daughters and four grandchildren.

Thornton called his mother after shooting his co-workers, his girlfriend’s mother said.

“He wanted to say goodbye and he loved everybody,” said Joanne Hannah, whose daughter Kristi had dated Thornton for eight years.

Hannah described Thornton as an easygoing guy who liked to play sports and video games. She said he had a pistol permit and had planned to teach her daughter how to use a gun.

Thornton had complained to his superiors about harassment, Joanne Hannah said. A picture of a noose and a racial epithet had been hung on a bathroom wall at the beer distributorship, Hannah said. She said her daughter told her that Thornton’s supervisors had not responded to his complaints.

“Everybody’s got a breaking point,” Hannah said, adding that her daughter was with Thornton on Monday night and had no indication he planned the shooting.

Kristi Hannah did not return calls for comment.

James Battaglio, a spokesman for the families who own the distributorship, said he had no immediate information about the allegations of racial harassment. But a union official tells The Associated Press that Thornton had “made no complaint of racism to us or to any federal or state agency.”

About 50 to 70 people were in the warehouse during a shift change when the gunman opened fire around 7 a.m., said Brett Hollander, whose family owns Hartford Distributors. Adding to the chaos was a fire at the warehouse, about 10 miles east of Hartford, that was put out. Police did not know whether the fire was related to the shootings.

Among the victims was Hollander’s cousin, a vice president at the company who was shot in the arm and the face. Hollander said he thought his cousin would be OK.

“There was a guy that was supposed to, was asked to resign, to come in to resign and chose not to and shot my cousin and my co-workers,” Brett Hollander told the AP.

Receptionist Marissa Busiere said she heard another coworker screaming after shots rang out inside the business.

“‘He’s shooting! He’s shooting! Call 911.’ And everyone started running out of the building,” Busiere said.

State Firearms Bureau records show that an Omar Thornton purchased two firearms in January.

Mark Quattropani, a long-time employee at the business said he was startled to learn that the business was the center of a SWAT team operation.

“I worked there for 29 years, lots of friends there,” Quattropani said. Quattropani said he went to the business after the shooting because his son now has a summer job there.

A few dozen relatives and friends of the victims gathered a few miles away at Manchester High School. Outside, people talked, hugged and cried. Others talked on cell phones.

The rampage was the deadliest in the U.S. since 13 people were fatally shot at Fort Hood, Texas, last November. A military psychiatrist is charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder in that case.

And in Connecticut, a state lottery worker gunned down four supervisors in 1998 before committing suicide, and six people were killed in 1974 in botched robbery at a bakery in New Britain. Two men were convicted of that crime.

The Hollander family is widely respected in Manchester, said state Rep. Ryan Barry, a lifelong resident. He said the family-owned Hartford Distributors sponsors local sports teams and the family is civic-minded.

“Everybody knows the Hollanders as good, generous, upstanding people,” Barry said. “They’re embedded in the community. Everyone knows Hartford Distributors. They treat their employees very well and they’re part of the fabric of the town.”

In a statement, Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell offered condolences to the victims’ families and co-workers.

“We are all left asking the same questions: How could someone do this? Why did they do this?” she said.”

Comment:  Mr. Thornton, black, committed a horrendous HATE CRIME!  We shall see how the main stream press will twist this one.   

Dennis Prager’s View of Luck in Life and God’s Role in Distributing “Luck”

I am a huge fan of Dennis Prager:  He most recent article at Townhall .com has to  do with Luck.

“There’s a lot of luck in life.”  He writes.

“The longer I live — Aug. 2 was my birthday — the more I come to realize how much of life is affected by luck.

Let’s begin with life itself. Whether one lives to 62 — or to 92 (my father’s age) — and whether in health or in sickness is largely a matter of luck.

I strongly believe in taking care of one’s health, but for most people, living long and in good health is a matter of good luck.

My wife’s sister died of cancer at 35. The brother of my radio show’s producer died of a brain tumor at 57. Friends of mine lost their son at the age of 13.

None of these people did anything “wrong.” Whether you get a brain tumor or not is identical to whether you win at roulette. Either the ball falls on your number or it doesn’t.

The subject of the role of luck — good and bad — depresses many people. And well it should. To realize how much happens to us and others that is not in our control is sobering, if not depressing. And some reject it outright.

Some people — many who believe in karma or various expressions of New Age thought, for example — believe that everything that happens to us we bring upon ourselves. Even if we are hit by a drunken driver, we somehow caused it.

That, of course, is irrational. And it is even cruel, as it causes some people to blame themselves for suffering they had no hand in.

And many religious people resent the notion of the role of luck since it seems to minimize the power of God in this world.

As a religious person myself, I reject this outlook. Are we to believe that God chose every one of Mao’s 75 million victims to die? That He willed the deaths of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust? That every person who suffers from Lou Gehrig’s disease or Multiple Sclerosis was chosen by God to suffer until death?

That may indeed be the case. But for those of us who do not believe in such a God — and I respect those who do — all these people simply had terrible luck. I am alive because my grandparents came to America instead of staying in Eastern Europe, where they would have almost certainly been murdered in the Holocaust. They were lucky. And if one insists that they were wise rather than lucky, that somehow they realized that calamity awaited them in Russia and Poland, then my parents and I were lucky that they were wise.

There is not enough space in a column for a discussion of theodicy, the problem of reconciling a good God with unjust suffering. Suffice it to say, then, that I believe God exists; that He is just; that for reasons I cannot understand, He made a world in which injustice abounds; that He knows every one of us and that He works out these injustices in an afterlife.

But whatever one’s view of God’s role (except that He directs every single thing that happens), luck permeates life.

My parents were married 69 blissful years. I asked them and many other couples who had long and happy marriages what was the secret to their marital success. And the answer boils down to … good luck. Virtually every person involved in a long and happy marriage — long and unhappy marriages don’t count — simply had the good fortune to find the right person for themselves. That is why happily married couples are usually more understanding of those who divorce than unhappily married ones are. (The latter often resent the fact that others left bad marriages while they remain unhappily married.)

As for the notion that “we make our own luck” through hard work and responsible living, it is only partially true. You can do all the right things in life and still not end up successful. And many people do a lot of wrong things and end up quite lucky. I know great parents who have a very troubled child, and dysfunctional parents who have magnificent children. I will never forget overhearing someone say to my father after I gave a lecture, “You must have been a terrific father to produce such a son.” And my father simply answered, “I was lucky.”

So where does all this power of good and bad luck leave us?

It should leave those who have been largely fortunate in life humble about their success, not to mention their health, longevity, children, etc. And those who have been hit with more than their fair share of bad luck should understand that if it really was bad luck and not their own actions that caused them misery, what happened to them was not a punishment (from God or from life).

The role of luck notwithstanding, there remains one area of life in which we are in charge: how we react. I learned this in high school when I read the great book “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl. As a Jew in a Nazi concentration camp, he learned that there was only one thing about an inmate’s life that the Nazi guards could not control: how the inmate reacted to what happened to him.

If that was true in Auschwitz, it is true for most of us.”

Comment:  There should be millions more fans of Dennis Prager.  

I was raised American Protestant.  I cannot think of a single significant item of politics and life in which I am not in nearly complete agreement with Dennis.   Yet…

He smokes.  I do not

I garden.  He does not……. I forgive him for he was raised in Brooklyn. 

I believe in Luck and God much the same as he believes in Luck and God. 

He thinks much more about God than I do.   I have never had much of an argument with myself about the matter.   I was taught early in my public school life that for every force there is  a counter force.  If there is evil, and I know there is classic evil, there is good……therefore there is God.

Rather simplistic, I admit.  But I do not believe there is  God without mankind……relying on the old saying, “There is neither good nor bad.  Only thinking makes it so.”  

I was born in a Protestant nation and raised Protestant by the King James Bible …….and my great luck began there.   I will be 76 years old next month and every day I wonder how could it be that I should be so lucky to have lived my life even though I didn’t always feel that way when I was trudging through it.

I have honestly always felt a human life is in God’s hands and luck is not shared equally.   Knowing why is simply not knowable.  No one is equal to another.   We are all unique souls.

More About Communist Howard Zinn, American High School and College “Educator”

I picked the following article from Pajamas Media…..written by Ron Rodish about Communist radical Howard Zinn, popular Peoples History of America historian whose texts have become an essential part of the eduation of our America’s young people.

Mr. Zinn died this past spring…..He died an enemy of the people’s truth.  I have written a number of articles about his Soviet enthusiasms.  The question remains, why are his texts, richly endowed with Soviet type anti-American propaganda passed off as another reliable view of Amerian history?

Stop by your local high school or junior high school to ask about Mr. Zinn and his publications.

It should also be noted that when the KGB, (the Soviet secret police) files were opened to the public in the 1990s,  it was revealed that almost all of the “Front” organizations in America were all or in part funded by the Stalinist government.  The purpose was to overthrow the democratic government by whatever means possible to establish a Marxist state. 

In comparison with the tricks of the trade now operating under the sheets to maneuver America into Shariah rather than Communist dictatorship, the new Muslim schemes  of  intimidation and propaganda makes the old Soviets appear profoundly  second rate.

Even during the Great Depressions, Americans were more American in those days.  They recognized the snakes in the grass better.  Both Democrat and Republican political parties were more faithful to the American dream and being, unlide the Democrat Party of today.

The Pajamas Media article, by Ron Rodosh:

“The announcement last week by the FBI that it was releasing the FBI files of the late radical historian, Howard Zinn, was not met with universal acclaim.  In fact, many leftists were enraged.  Typical was the reaction of Noam Chomsky, who was quoted by writer Clark Merrefield. Zinn’s  files, Chomsky said, were “mostly a mixture of things that they’ve picked up here and there which is mostly false, things they’ve gotten from informants that are mostly false. We took for granted that obviously we were being monitored by the FBI.” For Chomsky, anything coming from the FBI obviously has to, by definition, be lies.

The most recent comment from the ranks of the Left is by frequent Nation writer Chris Hedges, whose column in Bob Scheer’s inappropriately named Truthdig reflects the most common take on Zinn’s work by liberal/left intellectuals. Hedges writes how he used Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States as a text for the American history class he was giving to prison inmates. “We’ve been lied to,” students would comment at the end of class. He assigned Zinn’s work because he says it opened the “eyes of young, mostly African-Americans to their own history and the structures that perpetuate misery for the poor and gluttony and privilege for the elite.” (Wonder no more about why so much of the American underclass get a bad education.)

So what is in these files? First, the FBI had evidence that Zinn was a member of the Communist Party of the United States, and lied about his membership when being interviewed by FBI agents. The first file on the subject appeared in March of 1949, when an informant noted “that he (ZINN) is a Communist Party member and attends meetings five days a week.” Zinn was then employed by the American Labor Party, which itself gives credence to the informant’s report. By that date, the ALP — created in the early forties to give NYC labor a left-wing ballot on which to vote for FDR — had been taken over lock, stock and barrel by the CP. It never would have hired non-Party members as full-time employees.

Another informant described Zinn as a “person with some authority” in the CP group to which they belonged. Zinn, he said, taught a course for his comrades on “basic Marxism.” On June 12, 1957, another informant told the Bureau that when he was transferred to the Williamsburgh branch of the Party in 1949, “HOWARD ZINN was already a member of that section.” It was his impression that  “ZINN was not a new member, but had been in the CP for some time.”

Zinn, however, denied he was a Communist when questioned by the FBI in 1953. It is important to note here that unlike those who testified before Congressional investigating committees, Zinn was not under oath. The reason Zinn denied his membership was the same as that for other  Communists. The Party instructed them not to, even when asked to testify before committees like HUAC. As some of the Hollywood Ten members revealed years after their own investigations, if they said they were Reds, that would only prove that the Red-baiters were right when they called them Communists! It would undermine their pose as good liberals, who were only taking pro-Soviet positions because they genuinely believed in them, not because it was the Party line.

And this is precisely the pose Zinn took to the agents who questioned him in 1953. Zinn “acknowledged that perhaps his activities in the past had opened him to charges that he was associated with the CP as a member; however,” he told the FBI, “he was not. … He stated that he was a liberal and perhaps some people would consider him to be a ‘leftist.’” He admitted that he participated in the work of groups that had been considered CP fronts — in fact, he belonged to and worked in scores of them, not just one or two; “but his participation was motivated by his belief that in this country people had the right to believe, think and act according to their own ideals.” He went on to note that if he had knowledge of anyone who sought to overthrow the U.S. government by force or violence,  he would advise the Bureau.  Zinn added that “he would advise the FBI if he observed persons committing acts of sabotage or espionage against the Government.” He also declared that he “would defend this country in the event of war against any enemy including the Soviet Union.”

What can one say about these statements? First, Zinn had defended his country, serving as a bombardier in the US Air Force during World War II. Indeed, it was that experience that led him to view the US as a nation that committed atrocities against the people of the world, and he obviously never lost a sense of guilt about the civilian injuries he had caused as a result of his wartime bombing raids .

Secondly, Zinn, like other leftists, protested the innocence of all those accused of espionage, like Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs. Since he viewed any of the people so accused as innocent victims of a witch-hunt (like Christopher Hedges today), he did not have to worry about the facts. He automatically assumed they all had been framed up. Would he have defended the US if indeed the Cold War had escalated into a real war with the USSR? Note he says “any enemy,” and in his eyes at that time, the Soviet Union was a peacemaking power and a friend of the American people, hence not an enemy. So as he obviously saw things, a result like that would never take place.

Finally, he acknowledged to the agents that he belonged to obvious front groups, and that “some of the members…with which he had been associated might be CP members,” but he was “certain that not all of the members” were. This too was obfuscation, typical of how CP members talked. The fronts to which he belonged included The American Veterans Committee, the Committee To Repeal the Mundt-Nixon Bill, and others. These groups were then entirely made up of Communists, with rare exceptions, and these members were often Communists in all regards except formal membership. No one in that period in the democratic Left and anti-Communist Left joined or worked with such Communist dominated or controlled groups. No one in the FBI was fooled.

The file stops, and resumes in the early ‘60’, when as the Bureau’s press release notes, “the Bureau took another look at Zinn on account of his criticism of the FBI’s civil rights investigations.” The FBI, in fact, had much to account for, and took a rather passive role in protection of civil rights workers. The new investigation reflects a great deal about J.Edgar Hoover’s paranoia that any actual threats to America’s security may have come from those opposing segregation.

By this time, it is clear that Howard Zinn had long departed from CP ranks. If anything, he was far to the left of the official American CP. During the war in Vietnam, they backed the moderate group known as “Negotiations Now,” which sought a negotiated settlement of the war, and had the support of people like Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and Irving Howe. Zinn became the architect of advocacy of unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam and a North Vietnamese victory. In 1968 he and others went to North Vietnam in a solidarity trip, and to arrange the release of a tiny minority of American POW’s, a propaganda coup for the North Vietnamese government.

Internally, Zinn gave his support to the black radicals in SNCC, as well as the militant new group, the Black Panther Party. He called all blacks in American prisons “political prisoners,” and said that the United States “has been a police state for a long time.” He also gave his backing to myriad far left groups, including the Maoist Progressive Labor Party, the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, and the Third World revolutionary nations of Cuba and North Vietnam.  One did not need FBI reports to learn what he stood for. In a 1965 article found in the files, Zinn praised the New Left for having “no illusions about Reds,” and for seeing “Stalinism unmasked.” His position was one of “moral equivalence,” in which he equated the totalitarian East with the democratic West as evil centers of power, the United States being the most culpable.

Before long, he would write his book on America’s history which has found its way into many American homes and classrooms.  A mega hit, the book put Zinn’s name before the public as a major cultural figure. No longer a Communist, history became a more effective vehicle for presenting his ideas.”

“He who controls the past controls the future.”  George Orwell, 1984

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Medusa” Maureen Dowd Talks Woman Talk About Mrs. Obama

“Medusa” Maureen reports on the woman’s concern about matters in Washington, DC…….her opinion at the New York Times:

…….”Michelle Obama is the most popular figure in the administration, but last week she had her first brush with getting brushed back in the press.

Some of the women anchoring news shows on MSNBC debated whether the first lady was being “mean” to her husband by deserting him on his birthday for a girls’ getaway to Spain, and whether it was sort of sad, as one put it, that the president, drowning in troubles, had to go to Chicago to find friends (including Oprah) to celebrate with.

Andrea Tantaros, a Fox contributor and former Republican operative, wrote a harsh Daily News blog post calling the first lady a “material girl” for going on a glitzy vacation at a luxury resort in Marbella with a cavalcade of Secret Service agents, friends, children and staff, even as “most of the country is pinching pennies and downsizing summer sojourns — or forgoing them altogether.”

In politics and pop culture, optics are all. And Michelle’s optics sent a message that likely made some in the White House and the Democratic Party wince.

She seemed to be gigging her husband a bit: I’m going to do what I want to do. I can’t worry about whether it gives the Tea Partiers ammo or makes Democrats (including you) campaigning against the excesses of the rich look hypocritical. Even if the country is sliding into a double-dip recession, I’m going abroad to a five-star hotel on Air Force Two and give a boost to another country’s economy.

To defray possible criticism of their upcoming 10-day trip to Martha’s Vineyard, Michelle belatedly agreed to a weekend family vacation on Florida’s gulf coast. On Friday, Spanish police closed a public beach for the American entourage. If Michelle had wanted a closed beach, she could have headed to our gulf sooner. There are plenty of multi-star hotels there, and she and the girls could have cleaned a few pelicans.

Certainly, as Obama adviser David Axelrod says, “not everything is political theater.” The Obamas shouldn’t have to poll, as the Clintons did, to figure out where to go on vacation.

“Folks in the public eye are also human beings,” Axelrod told me. “If you have the ability to show your kid a part of the world and you can do that together before they get to the age where they don’t want to do anything with you, I don’t think it’s right that you have to defer it because of the politics.”

But as Michelle and friends frolicked in the land of flamenco, the birthday boy got few gifts from the news.

More Democratic candidates shied away from appearing with him. The latest disappointing jobs report prompted evening news reports about Americans’ fears of falling into what one called “the abyss.” And a CNN poll showed that a quarter of Americans still doubt the president was even born here.

The job of first lady, tightly constrained by convention, is hard for modern women. Michelle is a gutsy Harvard Law School grad who started as her husband’s mentor. Any coloring outside the lines can cause problems, as Nancy Reagan and Hillary Clinton learned when lampooned as Marie Antoinettes.

Michelle has done such a good job that she silenced her vituperative conservative critics for a year and a half. But perhaps the strain of debunking that “angry black woman” stereotype by playing the smiling, conventional first lady, talking to Ladies’ Home Journal about vegetable cleanses and portion sizes, made her want to assert her independence in the one place she could: her schedule.

The inimitable columnist Mary McGrory once said that if a first lady simply made her husband toast, that was enough, given how hard his job was.

And because his predecessor mucked things up so royally, President Obama’s job is ridiculously hard. But at moments when you think Michelle might make her husband toast, or better yet a martini, she’s often off on a girls’ trip.

When health care passed after a difficult year and the president celebrated with his staff on the Truman Balcony, the first lady was with her daughters on Broadway to see “Memphis.”

When the BP oil spill stained the White House, making the president seem so impotent that he had to make his first national address from the Oval Office, the first lady was playing with her mother and daughters in Los Angeles, staying at the Beverly Wilshire. She was taking in a Lakers game the night of his address.

During the campaign, Michelle tried to offset her husband’s existential detachment with familial warmth. Now that he holds the world’s loneliest office, he needs that more than ever.”

Comment:  Maureen forgot to mention a few nicks in the Michelle perfection about her country…….such as the first time she was ever proud of her country……wealthy, pampered, spoiled…..sour, but never quite made it to like America until her husband was elected, not into the Illinois Senate, or the United States Senate, but to the presidency itself.     That tells America a great deal about this woman.

Maureen also forgot to total up the costs of Michelled splurging for her White House needs.

Then, Maureen forgot to include in her article the minimum price tag for her little jaunt to Madrid to be away from her husband…..starting at $375,000.

At least Maureen wasn’t her usual nasty self  with this particular opinion printed above.

To Democrats, Voters Are Dumb

from the Washington Times opinion page:

“Missouri’s overwhelming rejection of Obamacare made it clear Americans will resist the federal government‘s power grab, but Democrats aren’t getting the message. Despite being a middle-of-the-road swing state, an overwhelming 71 percent of Missourians voted against federal mandates over their personal health care choices. Ignoring the clarity of this protest, top Democrats maintain that the problem lies with American voters, who aren’t smart enough to know what’s good for them.

On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, chimed, “It’s very obvious that people have a lack of understanding of our health care reform bill.” Facing a revolt in her own home state, Sen. Claire McCaskill, Missouri Democrat, agreed it’s largely just a misunderstanding. “I know that there is a lot of work that we need to do on not just the provisions of the law,” she said, “but most importantly [to] make sure that everyone knows what is in the law.”

Contrary to the Democrats’ delusional attempts at self-justification, American opposition to the federal health care takeover is based on a very clear understanding of the law and its implications. For example, President Obama and Democrats in Congress incessantly promised that Obamacare would lower health care costs. Although as a candidate Mr. Obama vowed that nobody would be coerced into buying insurance, the president now says mandates to force people to purchase policies through “exchanges” are necessary to make the insurance pool larger to achieve lower costs through economies of scale.

No matter what the spin, claiming government bureaucrats will make health care more efficient is as absurd as saying FedEx would be better if it were run by the Post Office. It’s obvious Democrats deliberately concealed that cost savings they promised never existed. Hundreds of billions of dollars were left out of their initial estimates of government costs, and savings from projected reductions in Medicare spending were double-counted. On top of all that, discretionary spending in the package ended up being twice as high as what the Congressional Budget Office originally estimated.

Defiance in the Show Me State is the tip of the iceberg. According to the latest Rasmussen polls, 58 percent of Americans are in favor of repealing Obamacare. Because they are so tone deaf to the electorate, come November, Democrats will be iced out of office.”

Comment:  To be fair, I often feel that voters are dumb too.  I only used to be a Democrat.   

Voters  elected Barack Hussein Obama, the dumbest vote in American history if one believes in America.  Americans are uninformed.  Most don’t know where Canada is.   They don’t know how milk arrives at the kitchen table or what living vegetation,  weeds or pretty shrubs and trees,  provide for the betterment of all mankind.   Voters don’t know much about the Constitution either, and know nothing about America’s struggle much less the struggle of mankind itself. 

Yeah…..I think voters are kind of dumb, too.   But they did elect George W. Bush over the empty suit, J.F. Kerry.

Many Americans these days, would rather stay in a room and smoke pot.  

Many voters who choose Democrats are already dead.   How dumb can one get?

So Many Words from New York Times “Writer”, Frank Rich, SlGNIFYING NOTHING

SuperLefty, Frank Rich, note for his knowing nothing but writing words, reports yet again.

Dear Reader…..please waste your time to test your skills.    Read this 1500 word essay by SuperLefty analyzing the 2010 political contest.   Like the president himself Mr. Rich seems to enjoy practicing words.   It’s no matter if they mean what they are supposed to mean, refer to anything truthful or useful or even helpful in any way for understanding anything even something not intended by Mr. Rich himself. 

Mr. Rich performs his  language as Jackson Pollock performed his  art.   One stands up on a ladder and drops paint, in Mr. Rich’s case, words,  when in the mood and where in the mood flake-like on the canvas below.   

Mr. Rich’s canvas of 1500 word flakes:

“COULD George W. Bush be a kind of Gipper-in-reverse and win yet one more for the Democrats? Clearly this White House sees him as the gift that will keep on giving. The 2010 campaign against the Bush administration is in full cry, with President Obama leading the charge. The Republicans are “betting on amnesia,” he confidently told the claque at a recent fund-raiser. “They don’t have a single idea that’s different from George Bush’s ideas.” It’s now the incessant party line.

Sounds plausible, but it’s Obama who’s on the wrong side of that bet, to his own political peril.

Betting on amnesia is almost always a winning, not a losing, wager in America. Angry demonstrators at health care town-hall meetings didn’t remember that Medicare is a government program, and fewer and fewer voters of both parties recall that the widely loathed TARP was a Bush administration creation supported by the G.O.P. Congressional leadership. So many Republicans don’t know Obama is a natural citizen — 41 percent in a poll last week — that we must (charitably) assume some of them have forgotten that Hawaii was granted statehood. The G.O.P. chairman is sufficiently afflicted with amnesia that he matter-of-factly regaled an audience with the counterfactual observation that the war in Afghanistan, Bush’s immediate response to 9/11, began under Obama.

The president is also wrong when he says that every single current G.O.P. idea is a Bush idea. Many are not. And those that are not are far more radical.

A political campaign built on Obama’s faulty premises cannot stand — or win. The polls remain as intractable as the 9.5 percent unemployment rate no matter how insistently the Democrats pummel Bush. To add to Democratic panic, there’s their “enthusiasm gap” with the Tea-Party-infused G.O.P., and the Rangel-Waters double bill coming this fall to a cable channel near you. Some Democrats took solace in one recent poll finding that if Republican economic ideas were branded as “Bush” ideas, the pendulum would swing a whopping 49 percentage points in their favor. But even in that feel-good survey, only a quarter of the respondents were worried that a G.O.P. Congress would actually bring back Bush policies.

Bleak as this picture looks for the Democrats, it is so only up to a point. No one knows what will happen on an Election Day almost three months away. One encouraging sign for the party in power is the over-the-top triumphalism of the right. Conservative pundits are churning out daily prognostications with headlines like “Ten More Reasons Dems Are Toast.” A recent Wall Street Journal front-page news story hyping a far-fetched Republican scenario for retaking the Senate was something of a nostalgic throwback to the kind of wishful thinking that inspired “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

But rather than wait for miracles or pray that Bushphobia will save the day, Democrats might instead start playing the hand they’ve been dealt. Elections, the cliché goes, are about the future, not the past. At the very least they’re about the present. It’s time voters were told just how far right the G.O.P. has lurched since Bush returned to Texas. And the White House might also at long last — at very long last — craft a compelling message, not to mention a plan, to offer real hope to the jobless. Repeated boasts of a resurgent auto industry (where the work force is 30 percent smaller than prerecession) won’t persuade anyone, and neither will repeated assurances that legislation passed months ago will kick in over the long haul. Some 16.5 percent of America’s workers are now either unemployed and trying to find a job, involuntarily working part time, or have stopped looking for work altogether. That figure doesn’t even include the many Americans who’ve had to settle for jobs for which they are overqualified.

For Obama even to stipulate that the G.O.P. has ideas about how to deal with this crisis is generous. Consultants are telling Republicans to advance no new programs at all, given how far a simple no to the president has taken them thus far, and they are following orders. But what we can discern of the Republican “ideas” lying in wait almost makes Bush’s conservatism actually seem compassionate.

The public is largely unaware of this because the conservative establishment in both Washington and the press has been relentless in its effort to separate the G.O.P. from the excesses of the Palin-Fox-Beck-Breitbart bomb throwers and from wacky Tea Party senatorial candidates like Sharron Angle of Nevada and Rand Paul of Kentucky. To hear most non-Fox conservative pundits tell it on Sunday talk shows or op-ed pages, these unruly radicals are just a passing craze. The new post-Bush G.O.P., we’re told, is exemplified by responsible, traditional small-government conservative governors like Mitch Daniels (of Indiana) or Chris Christie (of New Jersey).

But it’s Daniels and Christie who are the anomalies. The leaders who would actually take over should the Republicans regain Congress are far closer to the revolutionaries than most voters imagine. Take Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who has been relentlessly promoted by the right as the intellectual golden boy of the G.O.P. and who would be elevated to chairman of the powerful budget committee in a Republican House. His much publicized “Roadmap for America’s Future” — hailed by Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard as “the most important proposal in domestic policy” since Reagan’s voodoo economics — not only revives the failed Bush proposal of partially privatizing Social Security but tops him by replacing Medicare with a voucher system that, like Ryan’s skewed tax cuts, would benefit the superrich while raising taxes and medical costs for everyone else.

Ryan’s proposal has only 13 co-sponsors in the House (out of 178 G.O.P. members). That number is low, he recently conceded, because his colleagues are “talking to their pollsters, and their pollsters are saying: ‘Stay away from this. We’re going to win an election.’ ” Once that election is won, the road will be clear and the ideologues will take over the asylum. Ryan’s radicalism will be abetted by the new House speaker, John Boehner, who didn’t even wait for the BP well to be plugged to announce that “a moratorium on new federal regulations” would be “a great idea.”

In the theoretically more sober Senate, the G.O.P.’s rightward shift is arguably even more drastic. The pernicious Bush economic orthodoxy — tax cuts as a magic elixir to both create jobs and reduce deficits — remains gospel even as two veterans of Reaganomics, Alan Greenspan and David Stockman, have gone public over the past week to disavow it. But factor in the Senate’s rush to xenophobia, and Bush, who pushed hard for immigration reform, starts to look like Nelson Mandela.

Now we have a Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, joined by such onetime “moderates” as John McCain and Charles Grassley, calling for hearings to “look into” the 14th Amendment. That Reconstruction landmark, guaranteeing citizenship to anyone born in America, was such a prideful accomplishment of the old Party of Lincoln that the official G.O.P. Web site has been showcasing it to counter the Republicans’ current identity as a whites-only country club. Even Lindsey Graham — who could rightfully be anointed “This Year’s Maverick” by The Times Magazine as recently as July 4 — has joined the 14th Amendment revisionists and is slurring immigrants as baby machines who come to America to “drop a child” for nefarious purposes. The Hispanic-bashing has gotten so ugly that Michael Gerson, the former Bush speechwriter, wrote last week that Graham and McCain “may never fully recover” their reputations.

Given this spectacle, Obama and the Democrats are, if anything, flattering the current G.O.P. by accusing it of being a carbon copy of Bush. But even if the Democrats sharpen their attack, they are doomed to fall short if they don’t address the cancer in the American heart — joblessness. This requires stunning emergency action right now, August recess be damned. Instead we get the Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, offering the thin statistical gruel that job growth has returned “at an earlier stage of this recovery than in the last two recoveries.”

The tragically tone-deaf Geithner is on his latest happy-days-are-almost-here-again tour. He made that point in multiple television appearances as well as in a Times Op-Ed page article in which he vowed to “do more” to give workers “the skills they need to re-enter the 21st-century economy.” On the same day his essay appeared last week, The Times ran a front-page report on “99ers,” the growing band of desperate jobless Americans who have exhausted their 99 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits. The 99er featured in Michael Luo’s article, a 49-year-old unemployed corporate worker named Alexandra Jarrin, is a late-in-life college graduate and onetime business school student who owes $92,000, as she put it, “for an education which is basically worthless.” She’s on the verge of homelessness not because she lacks the skills she needs to re-enter the 21st-century economy. She and countless others like her, skilled and unskilled, lack jobs, period.

The Democrats have already retreated from immigration and energy reform. If they can’t make the case to Americans like Alexandra Jarrin that they offer more hope for a job than a radical conservative movement poised to tear down what remains of the safety net, they deserve to lose.”

Comment:  I wonder of Mr. Rich went to Columbia and Princeton, Yale or Harvard?

Harold Estes, U.S. Navy, Age 95 To Obamas: “I am ashamed of both of you!!”

(I received the following from friend and neighbor , Arlene Taber.  I trust the content is true, for it sounds authentic.  I am only 75 years old, was in military service for only 2 years, taught school and have tried to manage a small business.  Mr. Estes’ sentiments are my sentiments entirely). 

I am sharing his ‘letter’ to Mr. and Mrs. Obama with pleasure.

 ”My name is Harold Estes, approaching 95 on December 13 of this year.  People meeting me for the first time don’t believe my age because I remain wrinkle free and pretty much mentally alert. 
 

I enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1934 and served proudly before, during and after WW II retiring as a Master Chief Bos’n Mate..  Now I live in a “rest home” located on the western end of Pearl Harbor , allowing me to keep alive the memories of 23 years of service to my country. 
 
One of the benefits of my age, perhaps the only one, is to speak my mind, blunt and direct even to the head man. 
 
So here goes. 
 
I am amazed, angry and determined not to see my country die before I do, but you seem hell bent not to grant me that wish. 
 
I can’t figure out what country you are the president of. 
You fly around the world telling our friends and enemies despicable lies like: 
         ” We’re no longer a Christian nation” 
         ” America is arrogant” – (Your wife even 
            announced to the world,” America is mean- 
            spirited. ” Please tell her to try preaching
            that nonsense to 23 generations of our 
            war dead buried all over the globe who 
            died for no other reason than to free a 
            whole lot of strangers from tyranny and 
            hopelessness.) 

I’d say shame on the both of you, but I don’t think you like America, nor do I see an ounce of gratefulness in anything you do, for the obvious gifts this country has given you.  To be without shame or gratefulness is a dangerous thing for a man sitting in the White House. 
 
After 9/11 you said,” America hasn’t lived up to her ideals.” 
 
Which ones did you mean? Was it the notion of personal liberty that 11,000 farmers and shopkeepers died for to win independence from the British?  Or maybe the ideal that no man should be a slave to another man, that 500,000 men died for in the Civil War?  I hope you didn’t mean the ideal 470,000 fathers, brothers, husbands, and a lot of fellas I knew personally died for in WWII, because we felt real strongly about not letting any nation push us around, because we stand for freedom.. 
 
I don’t think you mean the ideal that says equality is better than discrimination.  You know the one that a whole lot of white people understood when they helped to get you elected. 
 
Take a little advice from a very old geezer, young man. 
 
Shape up and start acting like an American.  If you don’t, I’ll do what I can to see you get shipped out of that fancy rental on Pennsylvania Avenue .  You were elected to lead not to bow, apologize and kiss the hands of murderers and corrupt leaders who still treat their people like slaves. 
 
And just who do you think you are telling the American people not to jump to conclusions and condemn that Muslim major who killed 13 of his fellow soldiers and wounded dozens more. You mean you don’t want us to do what you did when that white cop used force to subdue that black college professor in Massachusetts , who was putting up a fight?  You don’t mind offending the police calling them stupid but you don’t want us to offend Muslim fanatics by calling them what they are, terrorists. 
 
One more thing.  I realize you never served in the military and never had to defend your country with your life, but you’re the Commander-in-Chief now, son.  Do your job.  When your battle-hardened field General asks you for 40,000 more troops to complete the mission, give them to him.  But if you’re not in this fight to win, then get out.  The life of one American soldier is not worth the best political strategy you’re thinking of. 
 
You could be our greatest president because you face the greatest challenge ever presented to any president.  
You’re not going to restore American greatness by bringing back our bloated economy.  That’s not our greatest threat..  Losing the heart and soul of who we are as Americans is our big fight now. 
And I sure as hell don’t want to think my president is the enemy in this final battle… ”
 
Sincerely, 
Harold B. Estes