the Founders are probably rolling in their graves

"Walt Disney World unveils incredibly scary, robotic version of President Obama" -- Engadget

showing the stimulous sham -- unemployment rates

Innocent Bystanders | July 2, 2009
Finally. Finally the slowing of the unemployment rate increase has arrived. We’ve been waiting for months for unemployment to show signs of topping out, and it looks like it may be happening at last.

The unemployment rate for June only went up 0.1%; much less than in previous months, and finally deviating from the near-linear increase we’ve seen since last year.

Is it the stimulus finally taking effect? The natural recovery of the economy? Just an anomaly?

Whatever. Tomorrow I’ll dissect it. Today I’ll just enjoy it (though it appears at first glance that the rate increased so slowly because a number of people dropped out of the labor market).

[It is assumed that by now this chart is self-explanatory. If not, delving into the posts over the past 3 months will tell you more than you need to know about the chart's pedigree.]

videos for a Friday before Independence Day

Black Reporters on the Beat of Michelle Obama Does Race Play a Role in Coverage?

By Howard Kurtz | Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 2, 2009

“Imagine the reporting on Sarah Palin if she were covered by only pro-life, church-going, mothers who live in small towns. I guess that’s why she didn’t have many ‘girlfriend to girlfriend’ moments with the press.”

the Obama show -- not even reality TV can beat this!

A Pitch on Health Care To Virginia And Beyond
Obama Hears From Guests and Twitter
By Michael D. Shear and Jose Antonio Vargas
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, July 2, 2009

In the stage-managed event, questions for Obama came from a live audience selected by the White House and the college, and from Internet questions chosen by the administration's new-media team. Of the seven questions the president answered, four were selected by his staff from videos submitted to the White House Web site or from those responding to a request for "tweets."

The president called randomly on three audience members. All turned out to be members of groups with close ties to his administration: the Service Employees International Union, Health Care for America Now, and Organizing for America, which is a part of the Democratic National Committee. White House officials said that was a coincidence.

transparency? what transparency! Press is catching on to Obama's manipulation of the media.

From July 1, 2009. CBS News' Chip Reid and Hell's Helen Thomas teamed up to hit Obama lackey Robert Gibbs with questions about President Barack Obama's pre-packaged press opportunities. The specific problem today is the pre-screening of questions from the public for Obama's phony pre-screened internet Health Care town hall meeting.

Anarchist Cookbook for Leftists and wannabe commies

The Coming Insurrection
by The Invisible Committee

Written in the wake of the riots that erupted throughout the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005 and presaging more recent riots and general strikes in France and Greece, The Coming Insurrection articulates a rejection of the official Left and its reformist agenda, aligning itself instead with the younger, wilder forms of resistance that have emerged in Europe around recent struggles against immigration control and the "war on terror."

Hot-wired to the movement of '77 in Italy, its preferred historical reference point, The Coming Insurrection formulates an ethics that takes as its starting point theft, sabotage, the refusal to work, and the elaboration of collective, self-organized forms-of-life. It is a philosophical statement that addresses the growing number of those—in France, in the United States, and elsewhere—who refuse the idea that theory, politics, and life are separate realms.

why they'll never build the fence: justification to confiscate your guns

Federal agents hunt for guns, one house at a time
By DANE SCHILLER Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
June 30, 2009, 9:36PM

In front of a run-down shack in north Houston, federal agents step from a government sedan into 102-degree heat and face a critical question: How can the woman living here buy four high-end handguns in one day?

The house is worth $35,000. A screen dangles by a wall-unit air conditioner. Porch swing slats are smashed, the smattering of grass is flattened by cars and burned yellow by sun.

“I’ll do the talking on this one,” agent Tim Sloan, of South Carolina, told partner Brian Tumiel, of New York.

read the whole thing

Iran, Honduras: Is Obama “objectively pro-fascist”?

Roger L. Simon | June 30th, 2009 10:47 pm

I don’t know much about Honduras, but I do know something about Iran. And Obama’s bizarre behavior, taking days to come to the conclusion any decent person knew immediately, indeed other world leaders like Merkel and Sarkozy had demonstrated as much - that there were very clear good and evil sides in the Iranian election, even though the good wasn’t perfect. (Is it ever?) So when I heard that our President had joined Chavez and Castro in condemnation of the supposed coup in Honduras, this time with immediacy, I felt a tightening in the gut. Chavez particularly was on the side of Ahmadinejad in the recent Iranian brutality.

This was a side I didn’t want to be on, didn’t want our country on. I heard many suspicious things about Zelaya, the booted Honduran president, including allegations of drug ties. Also, he was running for succor to the UN, the very organization just weeks ago I had personally seen embrace Ahmadinejad in Geneva. So when I read this message from a Honduran on The Corner, I wasn’t surprised.

Obama has strange friends. He equivocates and equalizes in disturbing ways. Is he “objectively pro-fascist” as George Orwell memorably wrote in his famous essay “Pacifism and the War“?

I give you Eric Arthur Blair. Make of it what you will. For me, the word “pacifism” could be replaced by some coinage (it’s too late here in LA for me to come up with one, if I could anyway) that encapsulates Obamaism in its supposedly even-handed international policy: “Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other.”

Energy Leninism

Is the Democratic Party's energy policy overreach setting up another 1994?
Ronald Bailey | June 30, 2009

"The worse, the better," Vladimir Lenin is said to have observed. What Lenin meant was that the worse social conditions became in Russia, the more likely he and the Bolsheviks could foment a communist revolution. President Barack Obama's White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel recently updated Lenin's maxim, saying, "Never allow a crisis to go to waste."

Last Friday, the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives took those maxims to heart when they pushed through their 1,200-page American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act by a vote 219 to 212. The bill is supposed to address the twin crises of economic recession and climate change by creating millions of new "green" jobs. Instead of an old-fashioned Soviet-style five-year plan, ACES can be thought of as 50-year plan to radically transform how Americans produce and use energy.

read the rest