More Thuggery

Missed this before. Via .

Paid Obama hacks. This is what speaking out may get you.

Apparently being a community organizer is not without its perks.

Obama's Paid Hacks.

Now, if only the GOP were organized enough to think of things like this. Criminy.

Twice as Hard

"Punch back twice as hard," sayeth Papabama's peeps. Punch back? Surely you mean with arguments, to counter the arguments raised by the loyal opposition, Deputy Chief of Staff Messina?

After all, according to the Politico article linked above, you played a video exhorting the senators at your little pep rally to "do more prep work than usual for their public meetings." Sounds reasonable, right? You'd want the Senators to bone up on the legislation and have the facts at their disposal so they could present a reasonable defense of President Obama's vision for nationalized health care.

But wait, that's not exactly what you meant by "prep work," is it? Because the sentence in the article actually reads:

They showed video clips of the confrontational town halls that have dominated the media coverage, and told senators to do more prep work than usual for their public meetings by making sure their own supporters turn out [emph. mine], senators and aides said.

Hit back twice as hard...and make sure you've got plenty of your own people there. That doesn't sound at all provocative, does it?

But don't worry, average joe conservative, as you head out the door to the town hall in order to participate in this grand experiment called democracy. I'm sure our democratic friends are just as interested in a civil and cool-headed exchange of ideas as we are. I'm sure the Deputy Chief of Staff wasn't at all implying that there is any place for intimidation or the threat of violence at these events when he used language like "punch back twice as hard," and stressed the need for democrats to have their people there.

After all, the republicans are the mob, remember? They are the crazies. They are the ones who get out of hand. And those high-minded democrats, brimming over with self confidence and good will, surely realize that reason and common sense are the best weapons. There will be none of these heavy-fisted, GOP-style tactics among the democrats, who, armed with logic and facts, are liberated to simply allow their ideas to speak for them.

Therefore, this incident in St. Louis, where a black conservative was called racial slurs and beaten by an angry mob, simply did not happen.

Neither this obviously faked video from Rep. Kathy Castor's town hall meeting in Tampa, in which it appears to the untrained eye that some of Castor's goons are roughing up her critics. (Is there no low to which these shameless and deceitful republicans will not stoop?)

Because no reasonable person could construe that these two fictitious events in any way embody the spirit of the message sent by the Obama administration that democrat politicians should have "their supporters" on hand should the need for "punching back twice as hard" emerge.

You don't need to see his identification. These aren't the droids you're looking for. Move along.

Sonia Schmidt on Obama's Friends

I am truly hard pressed to say who my favorite personality on PJTV.com is. I truly think the entire team is fantastic. And Sonia Schmidt is no exception. Here's her latest clip, in which she delves into the company our President keeps.

David Bazan

Just read this article in the Chicago Reader about former Pedro The Lion frontman David Bazan. Ten second bio: Bazan was raised in a Christian home, went to bible school, married young, rose to international fame with PTL (ironic acronym), lost his faith, became a drunk, and is now more or less an agnostic trying to get his life and career back on track.

The author of the piece, Jessica Hopper, is Bazan's former publicist. She is to be commended for a decent piece of journalism. Her writing is professional, and devoid of the bald faced hostility so often reserved for Christ followers by liberal art-fart rags like the Reader. Her portrait of the young Christians she interviews at Cornerstone--many of whom, clearly in denial, resort to superlative acrobatics in their attempt to understand Bazan's lyrics as somehow still "Christian"--could almost be said to be tender. David Bazan, former Christian, present agnostic (if perhaps back door seeker) is depicted as he is, without glorification of his "liberation" from "dogma."

That said, there is one thing that drives me absolutely bat-guano about the piece. It's this quote from liberal Christian writer David Dark:

when [Bazan] is addressing his idea of his God, the one that he fears exists but refuses to believe in, when he is telling him, 'If this is the situation with us and you, then fuck you—the people who love you, I hope they see you for who you are,' when he's doing that, he is at his most biblical.

Set the Bible aside for a moment, and let me use an analogy that involves what would at first appear to be a less-provocative document: The flight manual for your average commercial airline pilot. Now, I've never seen a flight manual for a 747, but I'm quite certain some sort of book exists. I imagine a thick spiral bound tome, about 500+ pages long, with a thick, shiny, gloss card stock cover. Something that would be a bear to fit in the glove compartment.

As I say, I've never seen this book, but I'm sure it has a thing or two to say about, oh, how to land the plane properly and whatnot. It may not say exactly what not to do in any and every situation, but "what not to do" can easily be inferred by someone smart enough to become an airline pilot. For example, if the book says something about aiming for the center line down the middle of the runway after you've begun your descent and have opened the landing gear, it's probably a safe assumption that you shouldn't attempt--at that particular time, anyway--that loop-de-loop you've been itching to try. Nor should you buzz the tower, pull up to play chicken in another incoming plane's landing path, or get on the intercom and scream "we're all going to die." Again, the book probably doesn't expressly state not to do those things. But if a pilot engaged in that sort of behavior, would his associates, superiors, and passengers refer to him as the "most by the book" pilot they'd ever met?

Like the flight manual, the Bible has a number of things to say about what one should and should not do. And among the list of "don't dos" are things like don't take God's name in vain, don't put God to the test, fear God and treat him with reverence, etc. Logically, since the Bible says these things, it would be "biblical" for one to abide by these rules and principles.

So how is it that someone who says to God,"'If this is the situation with us and you, then fuck you,'" is at his most biblical at that moment? Dark says his definition of "biblical" has to do with "the deep strains of complaint and prayers and tirades against conceptions of God in the Bible." He doesn't elaborate on what he means by this, but I assume he's referring to any number of passages in, say, Psalms, or Job, where the author is expressing his pain, panic, complaints, etc. to God. However, the difference between what Dark finds in Bazan's lyrics, and what is actually going on in the Bible, is this: the one bringing the complaint in the Bible never casts aspersion on God's integrity or righteousness--or if he does, he eventually repents (or gets fried). The sort of self-righteous telling-off of God as described by Dark assumes that the human in question is more morally righteous than God. I don't really know of an example of a God follower approaching God from this perspective in scripture, at least not without an eventual recanting and repentance from that erroneous stance. So if Dark thinks that Bazan is at his "most biblical" when his lyrics are openly blasphemous, what must he (Dark) think of as unbiblical?

Anyway, I wish David Bazan the best. I'm glad that he appears to be sober. I like what I've heard of his music and I hope he keeps working. I hope, most of all, that he dedicates himself relentlessly to pursuing the truth.

Are You Listening, Mr. President?

This was the response Arlen Specter got when he used the word "fast" in relation to the health care bill.



The fact that there is mass outrage over the impending socialized medicine bill, coupled with the President's ever plummeting poll numbers, leads me to one conclusion:

President Obama knows that Americans by and large reject his socialist agenda the more they learn about it. As a good ideologue, he is trying to rush his ideology through and get it enacted into law before he is voted out of office. It appears that the President's favorite word--"change"--is actually more important to him than getting re-elected. I'm serious. If he were more interested in a second term, if the polls really were a concern to him, he would have quietly let the bill derail by now. Instead aide-de-camp Rahm Emanuel has been moving heaven and earth to at least get this bill out of committee in the House, and he has succeeded.

Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps August, with it's drum beat of ever-dipping polls and oft repeated scenes of outrage in town hall meetings, will take its toll and persuade the President that this issue is a loser. But I doubt it.

There's actually a third possibility I haven't considered, and it is probably the most likely: Barack Obama is so blinded by his own arrogance that he's determined to just give us what's good for us, whether we like it or not, and defeat in 2012 is simply in his mind an impossibility. For in order for him to be defeated, he would have to will it so.

And arrogant he is. Note the response to how poorly Obamacare has been received: There's greater need to "get out there and explain" the plan to the American people because they obviously "don't understand" what's in there. Well, a little hard to have a total grasp on a bill that hasn't even been written in it's final form. However, we get the basics, Mr. President. We get that it will cost, per the CBO's latest and no doubt deliberately underestimated budget, a bare minimum of $1 Trillion over the next decade (for a more realistic number, tripling the figure would probably get closer). We get that private insurance is to be phased out. We get that business owners, looking to recoup the "surtax" sodomizing that will be levied against the "rich," and already struggling to maintain their work force in a crap economy, will start dumping their employees into Obamacare by the bushelfull. We get that private insurers, faced with the loss of a huge percentage of their client base and unable to compete with the sweetheart deals that the government will negotiate for itself with healthcare providers, will steadily go out of business. We get that the medical profession will be dumbed down, because the best and the brightest aren't going to go into a profession that will make them little more than postal workers with stethoscopes. We get that care will be rationed, and that deadbeat relatives of contributors to political campaigns will soon be on the other end of our phones, explaining to us why our "cost-ineffective" procedures are being denied.

We get it. Obama knows we get it all too well. And so the need for speed. The need to rush it through now, before we can stop it.

Good Likeness