The discussion thread got too long under the original Is Obama a Marsist article, so I closed discussion and opened this new thread.
Generally the topic moved to from the crank report that Obama teleported to Mars in the 1980’s to the more plausible but equally unproven allegation that Obama was a Marxist in college, or that he was gay or that he had his gay lover murdered.
One would expect anti-Obama partisans to sling poo, so the fact that they did so in this case isn’t news in and of itself. One would also expect tabloid-quality books to be published by folks wanting to make a quick buck. One only has to go back to the allegations that George W. Bush used cocaine at Camp David or the “Clinton Hit List.”
The point is not whether such allegations are true but how good is the evidence to support them and what’s the bias of the person making the claim. I generally don’t spend time on these kinds of stories, first because smears make me sick, and second because I don’t think they have much significance. Smear tactics are so very much overused in the political process (going all the way back to the founding of our Republic) that most folks ignore them until something convincing in the way of evidence is published.
The number of comments on this article have exceeded 400, and so I am closing it. The discussion really has nothing to do with this site’s subject matter. If folks want to continue the discussion, find another venue.
Ah the old “Marxism” bogeyman. Of course, that’s just lazy name calling and slinging poo. Too bad it doesn’t match up with anything in reality of how his Administration has operated over the past few years…so, yeah that’s another weak and lousy “conspiracy” fantasy theory FAIL there too.
And again, your “sources” here… are you really that clueless to grasp what types of sites are NOT going to impress anyone here and are just going to be viewed as another unfavorable judgment assessment against you?
American Thinker? Also often jokingly referred to as “American Stinker”… yeah, another biased crap nut blog full of rabid nuttery. Nothing more. Sorry, you’ll find that to be the overwhelming opinion here…and YES we are entitled to our own opinions.
Outside of the same rabid conspiracy right circles that you seem to live in, such sites as that are not paid attention to. You might as well cite WND or Free Republic. Same thing. These are all so rabidly based in their own extreme RW biases and floating in their own myths that they might as well be Cults.
For which really no evidence exists… Fascinating how easy you jump to conclusions that meet your beliefs. In the end, you dislike President Obama, and I understand that thus anything has to be analyzed towards such an outcome, logic and reason be damned, not to mention facts, or lack thereof…
I said who I was FOR. Any current of former managers of a convenience store are fine. In general, it is anyone who hasn’t had their mind corrupted by Marxism, black liberation theology, etc. Of the GOP candidates currently remaining, I like Newt the most. Note this has nothing to do with Obama conspiracies.
Arguing with an idiot is a Sisyphean, task, and so is arguing with an Einstein.
I read the page at philcomp.net. I don’t think it is a rebuttal of Cashill’s research. I’ll list a few examples of flaws I found:
1. It criticizes the lack of evidence by Cashill, meanwhile it is only looking at a small portion of the evidence he’s produced over the years and put into a book
2. Word length is a primitive analysis. Note in addition Cashill says there is evidence that portions of Dreams were not written by Ayers and was written by Obama. So this would also screw up the analysis. Looking at the most common words also doesn’t work because they are stories about different people’s lives.
3. He says this: Cashill says that he “could identify twenty parallel passages just as compelling: this looks like pure bluster, until he has done so explicitly.” Cashill has done that in his book.
There are numerous other errors of facts and logic in his essay.
I did include evidence of there being similarities between Dreams and Obama. This is at least the third time I’ve included a link on this page: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/298382-1
In my opinion, it is the similiarities in anecdotal stories that are the best proof. To pick but one example, how many memoirs tell stories of people talking about the places where tidal rivers meet? If you want the best evidence, I suggest you read Cashill’s book. He’s also produced a bunch of articles.
There is plenty of evidence of Obama’s long-term radicalism. I included the story of a fellow student meeting Obama in a link above. Obama’s Chicago church taught Marxist ideas. As I mentioned above, Occidental taught Marxism. Here is what Obama wrote in Dreams about Occidental:
——–
To avoid being mistaken for a sellout,I chose my friends carefully.The more politically active black students.The foreign students.The Chicanos.The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets.At night,in the dorms,we discussed neocolonialism,Franz Fanon,Eurocentrism,and patriarchy.When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake,we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints.We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure.We were alienated.
———
The quotes about Cashill’s brilliance are quoting other people. You quoting yourself is worthless, but that is not what Cashill did.
Maybe Profiles in Courage is the best book written by a President. I’m not going to argue about which is best. I’m just telling you that many people have SAID Dreams is the best. In addition, it could be that Profiles WAS the best book, but it is no longer. Here is what Wikipedia says about Dreams:
——
In discussing Dreams from My Father, Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison has called Obama “a writer in my high esteem” and the book “quite extraordinary.” She praised “his ability to reflect on this extraordinary mesh of experiences that he has had, some familiar and some not, and to really meditate on that the way he does, and to set up scenes in narrative structure, dialogue, conversation—all of these things that you don’t often see, obviously, in the routine political memoir biography. […] It’s unique. It’s his. There are no other ones like that.”[31] In an interview for The Daily Beast, author Philip Roth said he had read Dreams from My Father “with great interests,” and commented that he had found it “well done and very persuasive and memorable.”[32]
The book “may be the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician,” wrote Time columnist Joe Klein.[33] In 2008, The Guardian’s Rob Woodard wrote that Dreams from My Father “is easily the most honest, daring, and ambitious volume put out by a major US politician in the last 50 years.”[34] Michiko Kakutani, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for The New York Times, described it as “the most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography written by a future president.”[35]
In 2011, the book was placed on Time Magazine’s top 100 non-fiction books written in English since 1923.
——
Dreams played a big role in Obama becoming President.
Speaking of Marx, my final report:
The image posted at home garnered another comment, from my son:
“Who’s that?”
“Karl Marx.”
“He’s fat.”
Poor Karl. At work he did better after lunch, was recognized by 4 people, and got a few comments.
1. The first was our plant manager, a guy in his mid-50s obsessed with keeping the office neat. Bushy Karl did not fit into the Master Plan. He clucked, sighed, and shook his head, as if to say, “Potter, you’re killing me, here.” Having rec’d his initial reaction, I explained its purpose, and he laughingly quipped, “‘You g—d—— socialist pig!’ There, happy now?” and laughed as I wrote that down.
2. Second commenter was older, a well-traveled consultant, and full of suggestions and advice:
“Don’t let Rick Santorum see that!” (not sure what that means…)
“Next time, put up one of Pooootin’, yeah … or, no, swap it for Groucho Marx and see if anyone notices the difference.”
He then added a story about a guitarist photographed in front of a photo of Lenin, and the negative reader reaction to the magazine the image appeared in, and how silly he though all that was; which segued into discussing Imagine and what an idiot C. Lo Green is.
3. A well-read guy from Inspection came by and added: “I am envious.”
Of what?
“I wish I could grow a beard like that.”
Obligatory laughter.
“Isn’t he the founder of Communism?”
Not exactly …. he codified, refined its principles, was an early, prominent, international proponent of socialism.
“Huh. Cool.”
4. Another fellow from Inspection, comes over looking puzzled: “[Coworker] says you’re lookin’ for a reaction to something?”
Although he never notices Mr. Marx, this is a clear indication the experiment is compromised. After a long pause, I point out Mr. Marx.
“I was out drinking last night and met a college kid that assured me capitalism is dead, and that communism is making a comeback.”
The fun things they teach in school these days!
There was a point when I heard someone say, “You might want to take that down …”, which made me think we were getting somewhere … until I realized it was someone making a suggestion to a programmer about a tool path. Oh well.
________________________
So, that was that. Three general observations:
1. People are resistant to the idea that someone they interact with is fundamentally different, much less a potential threat or enemy. Believing terrible things about someone only experienced through media, whether a President or a pop starlet, is second nature. A completely out of place image wetn largely unnoticed, and when noticed, not taken seriously.
2. Presentation is everything (duh). What Mr. Drew’s story, spun completely out of an unsubstantiated germ of an idea, is completely lacking context of any kind. It is therefore, wholly devoid of meaning. If he’s going to peddle falsehoods, he should at least take enough pride in them to flesh them out. When asked for details, he repeats his interpretation … which is a conclusion based on nothing other than personal bias.
If I had title my image, “The Light of My Life, Karl Marx”, I would have expected my fellow Red Staters to seethe and foam at the mouth. Maybe even rip Mr. Marx down (maybe; real life is a highly non-confrontational sport). Had I titled it, “A—hole of the Month, January 2012: Karl Marx”, it would have engendered laughter and a slew of suggestions for next month. Obama would have been high on that list! As presented, in a vacuum per Mr. Drew, well …. it kept a day’s worth of dust off that patch of wall.
In college, the small honors dorm I lived in had a “Hall of Tyranny”, in which we posted photos and blurbs about all the usual suspects: Hitler, Saddam, Mussolini, Bonaparte, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, etc., etc., all as a clever smokescreen for the true target: the Director of Housing & Dining, who was oppressing us (the house was a neglected dump). None of us were Nazis, Commies, brown shirts, French Imperials, or Pol Potheads—and definitely not fans of Housing & Dining!—yet we posted the images anyway.
3. Reality reflects experience, fantasy reflects desire. For whatever reason, a lot of people can’t simply not like someone or something. They have to have a reason for their dislike. They have to rationalize it. Lacking conviction, self-esteem or whatever, they are only able to define themselves by define what they are against. What they are against must be demonized into the other. The more groundless the dislike, or when unwilling to acknowledge the true reason(s), the more vitriolic the demonization becomes. For sufferers of Obama derangement syndrome, those unwilling to acknowledge Obama is many things they likely aren’t, he becomes the Ultimate Other. He must be everything they fear/despise: stupid, fraudulent, illegitimate, homosexual, socialist, godless, ad nauseum. Ironically, the exact opposite of what available, realiable information indicates.
To these hapless ODSers, the germ of an idea—”Obama was [somehow] connected to the public display of an image of Karl Marx [purpose, style, context, duration unknown]”—registers as an image of Obama leading a rabble, red banner in left hand, torch in right, burning churches and bibles, confiscating guns, shoving healthcare down everyone’s throat, and aborting babies in his spare time, all the while leading a hippie band in a punk version of L’Internationale. The good, innocent Americans flee at his approach. That’s all fantasy. In reality, even if Obama made and posted an image of Marx himself, and tried to draw attention to it, it was the action of an anonymous college student. Perhaps he and his friends were protesting Housing & Dining. Had you been there, you would have passed on by. Had you noticed at all, you would have forgotten it within minutes.
Conclusions
Jumping to conclusions is unwise.
Jumping to a conclusion based on bareboned hearsay is doubly unwise.
Attempting to convinces others of your conclusion based on bareboned hearsay will justly reap a harvest of ridicule.
Despite my wannabe provacative display, no co-workers believe I am a socialist. If Mr. Drew cares to polish up his fib and say Obama was leafleting, actively fomenting revolution, etc., then I could try harder next time.
I haven’t noticed any change in my politcal beliefs.
I am near complete ignorance re: Marx’s writings.
Now I sit myself down to a lunch of bacon sandwiches.
Turkey bacon of course.
Cannibalism is not in the current 5-year plan!
Considering the long history of socialist parties, candidates, and, yes, office holders, in this country, I’ll go ahead and say “no” on his behalf. Socialism isn’t nearly as popular as it once was (re: 1900–1940), but it may make a comeback as backlash against current trends.
Of course he means socialism is evil, godless, and all good Christians (of which Americans are just a subset) must oppose it in all fashions. Or something like that.
Better yet, can any of our trolls differentiate between Marxism, socialism, communism, cooperative economincs, collectivism … ? Go ahead, it’s an “open net” exam 😛
You left off 1st century Christianity for a reason?
Dear Dr. Drew;
I just noticed your post here.
I believe what you wrote about Obama. I’ve posted the link several times, but it isn’t clear that anyone has read it. My understanding is that Obama’s Chicago church has a Marxist philosophy so that provides further evidence Obama has not changed since you first met him.
Thanks for your offer to help. However I definitely don’t need it. I know more about Donald Young and Cashill’s research than anyone else here so that debating 10 is no more difficult than debating 1.
Thanks for the new thread, Doc! Maybe Johnny will rebut his critics or provide some supporting evidence on this one…
Since KevinSB was repeating the crap that you had spewed elsewhere, it is unsurprising that the same criticisms apply to both (criticisms that you are either unwilling or incapable of answering, by the way). Your reasoning depends on your implication that KevinSB has come up with these arguments independently–something that is obviously not true (since he linked to your article). Your speculative smears about President Obama’s sexuality are most likely more of a product of your emotional state, your confirmation biases, and your ego defenses rather than accurate assessments and thus they provide much insight into your psyche (and it isn’t pretty) and very little into President Obama’s.
Johnny said:
http://www.obamaconspiracy.org/2012/01/is-obama-a-marsist/#comment-145332
Johnny,
To repeat a comment made on the last thread, could you provide a link to your thesis so that I can see your argument that being gay is the best way to become rich? (since Johnny tells us that having more children makes you poor and gays have the lowest birth rates…)
Again, it don’t think it is plausible to suggest that I’m a “smear merchant.” 🙂 My take on young Obama’s ideological extremism has been found reliable enough to be later reported in Micheal Savage’s Trickle Up Poverty, Jack Cashill’s Deconstructing Obama, Paul Kengor’s Dupes and Stanley Kurtz’s Radical-In-Chief.
An NYT bestselling author, Ronald Kessler, checked out my story regarding debating young Obama and published it. Kessler is an expert on the CIA, FBI and Secret Service.
My take on young Obama was ridiculed at first, but then collaborated by research by the liberal author, David Remnick, in his book The Bridge. For example, I had asserted that Obama’s roommate, Hasan Chandoo, was a Marxist and Remnick verified that Chandoo admits to being a Marxist and that his college era girlfriend, Margot Mifflin, also asserts he was a Marxist.
When I first went public with my story, I asserted that Caroline Boss – another friend of young Obama – was also a Marxist. Remnick’s book verified this comment, in part, by pointing out that the Democrat Socialist Alliance, led by Boss, had hung a large portrait of Karl Marx in the Oxy quad area. (I was dating Boss at the time. In fact I was living with her in Eagle Rock, CA or staying with her at her parent’s home in Portolla Valley, CA.)
Remnick, however, only goes so far as to suggest that Obama shared the same socialist thoughts as his friends without pegging him as a Marxist. My story on young Obama, however, is a much better fit with the available evidence including Obama’s earlier ties to Frank Marshall Davis, and his later ties to Alice Palmer and Bill Ayers. Remnick is a liberal Democrat who would be expected to minimize Obama’s radicalism.
I think the evidence supporting my take on young Obama’s ideological extremism is overwhelming. It is supported by the subsequent research of both liberal and conservative authors. Personally, I’m a published author, a successful business owner, and a Ph.D. in political science with an award-winning doctoral dissertation. I don’t think it makes sense to attack my character in an attempt to undermine the quality of my face-to-face observations of young Obama’s radicalism. No one else, by the way, has offered anything close to my detailed account of young Obama’s thinking while he was a sophomore at Occidental College.
The argument that Obama couldn’t have written “Dreams” because it was beyond his ability reminds me of the argument that the Egyptians couldn’t have build the pyramids without help from space aliens because it was beyond their ability.
John Drew seems to think that something being confirmed by a best-selling author is insurance of it being true. I guess he hasn’t read Jerome Corsi’s works (which are the most egregious collection of crap) and political smears such as Bushworld by Maureen Dowd. And of source citing Jack Cashill is about the same as invoking Adolf Hitler as a character reference.
I don’t find it overwhelming. I don’t find it all.
First, you are a biased observer. Second, your argument is mostly guilt by association and innuendo. If you looked my college roommate, you would probably conclude that I was an alcoholic or the people I hung out with and concluded that I abused drugs (neither is true).
And in any case, Obama’s politics in college is a silly preoccupation, given the fact that people in college try out new views before they settle down.
Perhaps the reason your stuff hasn’t caught on is that the vast majority of people have more mature concerns.
Why does it matter what Obama thought or did in college or who his friends were? Last I checked the roster of Obama’s cabinet and White House advisers, neither Hasan Chandoo nor Caroline Boss were on it. Instead, he has such known radicals as Tim Geithener, Richie Daley and Leon Panetta. If there is a Marxist or even a socialist in the bunch, then I’m the Queen of England.
@
Dr. DreDr. Drew and KevinSB:“Obama is the sort of nut who didn’t quit smoking until he was in his 40s. This alone, by the way, shows there is something questionable about his intelligence…No one of intelligence smokes cigarettes – we know they cause stroke, heart attacks and lung cancer.”
Golda Meir smoked a pack a day, of Chesterfields. My grandfather was a Talmudic scholar, and he smoked a pack a day of Pall Mall. My step-father was a physicist with 10 patents. He smoked a pack a day of Parliament. Your point is…
СлавьÑÑ, ОтечеÑтво наше Ñвободное,
Дружбы народов надёжный оплот!
ÐŸÐ°Ñ€Ñ‚Ð¸Ñ Ð›ÐµÐ½Ð¸Ð½Ð° — Ñила народнаÑ
ÐÐ°Ñ Ðº торжеÑтву коммунизма ведёт!
Long live Lenin!
– Dr. Conspiracy
1. My Bias: If I’m a biased observer, then why has the Obama literature steadily moved in my direction? As more and more new evidence comes in, it appears to many observers that my take on young Obama – which I articulated as early as 2008 – has become the mainstream view on young Obama’s ideology.
2. Guilt By Association: You say that I’m arguing guilt by association, when – in truth – I’m offering my objective observations of young Obama which came from my face-to-face conversations with both him and his closest friends while he was at Occidental College. I don’t think it is fair to label my eyewitness testimony innuendo. Give me a break! I was dating Boss between 1979 and 1981. When she told me young Obama was “one of us” I knew exactly what she meant.
3. My Part of the Puzzle: The significance of my story is only that I’m the missing link between Obama’s time with Frank Marshall Davis – a known Communist and Obama’s time with socialist politician Alice Palmer and leftwing terrorist Bill Ayers. My story is part of a much larger narrative which shows Obama consistently tied to radical extremists between 1979 up to 1995 – about 16 years of his life. As far as I know, I’m the only person to offer a detailed account of what Obama’s thinking was like during his sophomore year of college at Occidental.
“As far as I know, I’m the only person to offer a detailed account of what Obama’s thinking was like during his sophomore year of college at Occidental.”
And yet you ask us to believe Obama is gay because there are no pictures of him with girls.
Yes or no- has any person corroborated your account of your conversation with Obama?
Yes or no- has any person corroborated your version of Obama being a Marxist?
And why have none of the people you mention- not one of them- ever confirmed that these conversations took place?
You infer that their refusal to comment is a verification. I infer that their refusal to confirm your story means no one has confirmed your story.
Now John- why have you repeatedly refused to outline the main concepts of Marxism and shown how Obama rescuing GM and Big Banks is a Marxist action.?
because people do not like Obama and are looking for ways to smear him?
Marsist = Embassy attache from Mars
Drew is answering the wrong stuff, he suggests Obama is a Marxist, this thread is about Obama being the Embassy attache from Mars (Marsist)
.
In college I had a part time job as a studio carpenter, I met and said hello to John Cassavetes on a movie set starring some well known actors, I will be writing a book about that, an in depth study. Thanks for the idea john.
in depth study = stepping in doo doo
Once again Drew, I challenge you to get your head out of 1980 and into 2012. Obama has been President for 3 years. Cite me actions he has taken that are Marxist. Not some speech that you want to spin, but actual concrete actions. Was helping to overthrow Qaddafi a Marxist action? How about a health care reform in which private insurance companies play the lead role? Come on, no one cares abbout ancient history. Obama has long since moved on, but you are stuck in a time warp.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6827163268088648679#
– nbc
Again, if I’m a biased observer of young Obama, then why has the Obama literature moved in my direction and not in the direction proposed by James T. Kloppenberg in Reading Obama?
Authors like David Remnick and Christopher Andersen are not right wing extremists, they are liberal Democrats who happen to create a picture of young Obama has is a lot closer to what I say than what Kloppenberg has to say about Obama.
As an award-winning political scientist, I have seen this thing happen before. When I first started arguing that child labor laws caused welfare programs for children, people ridiculed the idea. Later, I won an award from the American Political Science Association for my idea and the subsequent literature moved in my direction. The same thing is happening here with the Obama literature.
If you tried to publish something that ignored my take on Obama’s extremism, then you would be avoiding full use of the most reliable evidence regarding Obama’s past. Why do you think a liberal author like David Garrow was recently at my home going through old photos and old letters regarding me and Boss?
Dr Drew, does appending Ph.D. after your name make you more credible? Actually, you should lose credibility with discerning people for merely mentioning Michael Savage as one of the people you’re. proud to share your work with.
In 2010, Mr. Savage told his radio audience that President Obama was the first president in history to skip Memorial Day ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery.
Not even close.
The first President Bush skipped all four during his presidency, although to be fair, he had pinch-hit for President Reagan while he was vice president. And to be fair to Mr. Reagan, he was still recovering from severe wounds from the assassination attempt two months earlier as he marked his first Memorial Day as president, and was on a state visit abroad one of his other Memorial Days.
This was discoverable with a simple google search using a few simple terms, but this either did not occur to Mr. Savage — or it occurred to him but he intentionally chose not to check the facts — or he did check the facts, but broadcast his false information anyway.
Take your pick. , And please tell us how someone with such an egregious failure at very simplle scholarly research qualifies as someone you’re proud to be associated with.
Scientist
I challenge you to show me the “conversion story” in Obama’s life where he separated himself from the Marxist ideas of Boss and Chandoo. If Obama had changed his views out of this extremist ideology, then don’t you think his closest friends would have noticed the change in him? I have a dramatic conversion story that explains how I stopped being a Marxist socialist, most ex-Marxists do. Where is Obama’s conversion story? Is it hiding somewhere along with the evidence of Obama’s ex-girlfriends?
JD Reed:
I’ve been featured on Michael Savage’s show at least twice. He interviewed me last month regarding my take on young Obama’s ideological extremism. I’ve read Savage’s work and he seems very accurate regarding young Obama to me. My take on young Obama and his Karl Marx loving friends was also supported by research done by a liberal author, David Remnick, in his book, The Bridge.
Funny but why would there have to be a conversion story as Obama never accepted these marxist beliefs?
Is this your best evidence?… My goodness sakes…
Since you have proven your impotence by ignoring even the simplest of challenges why should anyone care about this completely irrelevant challenge of yours? Prove that if someone ever says something that you believe is “Marxist” (which you wont define) then they will forever be a radical proponent of Marxist ideology (whatever that means to you…) unless they have some magical conversion story. After all, that’s what you seem to be assuming…
So they ‘create’ a picture based on actual evidence and discussion with Obama’s friends, although Anderson provides no evidence of the association with Ayers and has stepped back from any suggestions that Ayers significantly contributed to the book.
On the other hand we have your suggestions which conflict with those who actually knew Obama well, and which conflict with reason and logic as there is no credible evidence for Obama ever have held Marxist beliefs in any meaningful manner, other than your hand waving and appeal to authority, that there is.
Combine this with your hatred and dislikes of our President and those who you blame for your end of your academic career at Williams’ and your inabilities to support your assertions with substantive evidence but rather have to resort to unfounded claims about Remnick or others, combined with a need to self-inflate your importance and yes, there is a good reason to reject your comments.
Sorry Drew… Your claims amount to not much more than a lot of hot air, imho of course.
John, why answer the challenge with your own challenge. To me, it seems you do not have the answers. I am no spring chicken and when I see questions answered with other questions. It usually means there is nothing there, so the deflection is the only response.
or
You have no intention of answering the questions and you are just here to kick the hornets nest.
That is quite a good observation…
nbc
Trust me. I was there. I saw Obama’s extremist ideology with my own eyes. Obama was in 100% agreement with the Marxist views of Boss and Chandoo when I met him in 1980.
What evidence do you have that Obama “never accepted these Marxist beliefs”? Why don’t you demonstrate your scholarship and back up your claim that Obama never accepted Marxist beliefs. Where are you getting that nonsense from?
Drew:
it’s all about you, isn’t it? Everyone has to be like you or their experiences are invalid. Some people evolve slowly over time, some have a sudden revelation.
I challenged you to show me objective actions. You replied once again with subjective impressions from 30 years ago. Obama has not governed as Marxist, a democratic socialist, a social democrat, or even as a garden variety liberal in many cases. He has goverened as a centrist, which, frankly, suits me fine. Therefore, he either was never a Marxist or was, but is not one today, whether he had a conversion moment that satisfies John Drew, PhD or not.
By the way, I have a PhD along with post-doctoral studies and over 20 peer reviewed papers and am inventor on close to a dozen US patents and a whole passel of foreign ones. I don’t put PhD after my name ever.
John’s position reminds me of Speaker Gingrich’s quote from D’Souza’s book describing President Obama as being shaped by the anti-colonialist views of his Father.
First, in my family, being opposed to British colonialism is viewed as a badge of honor.
Second, I can thin k of lots of anti-colonialists. Washington. Jefferson. Adams. The other Adams.
Regarding the Obama literature, I’m applying the same common sense and practical skills that helped me win the William Anderson Award from the American Political Science Association. Kloppenberg’s thesis was that young Obama was always a centrist pragmatic type. Based on my face-to-face observations of young Obama and his friends I disputed that notion and offered my counter thesis that young Obama was a Marxist socialist anticipating a Communist style revolution in the U.S.
The subsequent literature has debunked Kloppenberg’s thesis and supported my own. The fact that liberal writers like Remnick and Andersen have published materials that verify my take on young Obama cannot be ignored by either minimizing their importance or seeking to discredit my take on the event. After all, I have admitted that I was a Marxist socialist myself when I met young Obama.
My story helps solve a lot of other problems in the Obama life story that would be difficult to explain without knowledge that young Obama was a Marxist socialist includintg Obama’s relationship with Chandoo and Boss, his relationship with Frank Marshall Davis, and his ties to the socialist Midwest Academy as reported on in Stanley Kurtz’ book, Radical-In-Chief.
YOU GO GIRL!
So………..
Over time Drews little tale of inanity has started from where he met “The Man who would become the President” once at a party for a short time, to two occassions at parties to an in depth wide ranging analysis of then current to all further political stances of the President.
Apparently Drew was so close to the President at these times that he has perfect recollection of every detail to the extent of having effectively eidetic memory.
Such perfect recall and yet when it comes to any other element of his life the details become terribly vacuous and nebulous.
Not to mention there is not a single person, who was a close acquaintance of the President at that time, who can recall Drew at all.
Not vaguely recall, there is not a single memory of you at all, why on earth could that be, I mean you must have made an impression on someone, surely..?
I mean, since you attended these parties with your rapidly estranging girlfiend, surely she would be able to corroborate your tale of close knit analysis?
If not her then there must have been others, I mean, you don’t get the depth of intimate knowledge of an individual you claim without being close and engaged with them, which by its nature would mean the Presidents ACTUAL colleagues and friends must surely have known you and recall this flashing intellect.
– Scientist
Isn’t it a little odd that I respond to your challenges, but you don’t respond to mine? I think this is a sign that I know what I’m talking about when it comes to young Obama. For the best work the ties my take on young Obama’s ideological extremism to his present day politics, I recommend these two articles at Powerline.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/11/027655.php
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/11/027712.php
I see Obama is still a Marxist because of his use of class conflict rhetoric, his view that the rich are responsible for the poverty of the poor, and his continued appeal to “false consciousness” arguments. If he is reelected and allowed to appoint more radical Supreme Court Justices, then I’m really fearful for our country’s future. As I’ve said, there is no evidence in a conversion story in his life.
the thread title is “Is Obama a Marsist (continued)” not “Is Obama a Marxsist”
it’s about Obama’s stint on Mars in the late 60’s, he served as Embassy attache from Mars, so stop bringing up Marxism, OK? There were 4 Marx’s, Karl, Groucho, Chico, Harpo and a 5th one is often spoken of, that 5th one was not Obama. OK?
– bovril
Oh please. Take the Dr. Drew challenge and call the professors at Occidental College and check on whether they know me or not between 1980/1981. Call Roger Boesche who I taught with at Williams or Larry Caldwell who was one of my professors at Occidental College. They were both teaching there when I was graduating and dating Boss. I have a letter from Boesche that mentions both me and Boss.
Here’s a picture of me with Fox New personality and Occidental College political science professor Caroline Heldman. Give her a call and ask if anyone at Oxy remembers me. http://anonymouspoliticalscientist.blogspot.com/2011/10/visiting-professor-fox-news-liberal.html
Now John- why have you repeatedly refused to outline the main concepts of Marxism and shown how Obama rescuing GM and Big Banks is a Marxist action.?
Asked now for the 4th time.
Still no answer.
Kind of a hurry here. We still have no story other than your own that Obama even was a Marxist. Apparently his closest friends never noticed him being a Marxist or any conversion.
John- how come your supposed ex-girlfriend Boss won’t confirm your story?
Really- this is what keeps popping out to me- that Boss and these other people you supposedly met- none of them will confirm your story. Either its untrue- and they just don’t want to be drawn into your fantasy, or you have really pissed them off and they refuse to have anything to do with you.
Either way- hardly a hearty endorsement.
Scientist,
Real authority comes from your work being found to have merit… over and over again. As someone who’s looked at your list of publications (which impressed the hell out of me…), I would regard anything you said regarding your field of expertise as having the utmost credibility. On the other hand, little doctor johnny “Piled Higher and Deeper” drew , major award winning phd talking about the rationalizations he used as an ego defense when he got his heart broken because his woobie (and apparently meal ticket) didn’t agree with him after his brainwashing*… not so much.
* An apparently quick conversion to a radically different ideology–that’s what I’m calling it…
Johnny,
In the conversations in question you were obviously a boy in the process of getting dumped rather than an objective professional (I don’t believe you’ve ever been an objective, professional political scientist, but that’s just an opinion and not relevant to my point). At this point, you have completely undermined the authority you were trying to build by your failure to make your argument in good faith on its merits (I’ll grant you that lacking any merit in your argument makes that a losing proposition, but if you want to show that you have integrity, you’ve got to take your lumps when you deserve them…).
Sorry you are the very definition of a smear merchant.
All you peddle is pure innuendo and sleazy accusations with no solid evidence to back you up.
Sample applicalble definition of smear:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/smear
Sorry John, when the shoe fits, you’re stuck wearing them.
To be fair, this has always been a thread about John Drew and given how John Drew thinks that everything revolves around John Drew you can hardly expect John Drew to resist talking about John Drew when John Drew was mentioned by name by Doc C* (that name being John Drew which is the name that John Drew’s mother and John Drew’s father gave to John Drew). If the person who mentioned John Drew did not want John Drew around then he wouldn’t have put the name “John Drew” in his post. It is clear that John Drew is the most important person in the universe if you just see all events from the point of view of John Drew.
And everyone knows that Zeppo was the funniest Marx brother (followed by Karl ;-))
* By the way, Doc’s title actually has gravitas in this arena, John, due to his many flagrant acts of integrity, willful commissions of logic, and his wonton citation of source material. Doc has earned our respect and thus his statements are accorded the same credibility that his previous actions have demonstrated–neither you or I have a title which means a damn in this regard and the juvenile egotism you display by beating people over the head with your title (and the major award you won in getting it) speaks very poorly of you.
LOL! So, you cite examples of other widely-disreputable (but more well known) smear merchants in your defense…
Yeah… point out a bunch of well-known smear merchants and compare yourself to them as your defense that you are not a smear merchant yourself…
Worst. Denial. Strategy. Ever.
Perhaps I could if you would only tell me what the characteristics of an ex-Marxist are. Then I could possibly pinpoint where in Obama’s life his ‘road to Damascus’ occurred.
If you could do it, then maybe he did too, but we won’t know until we know how to identify an ex-Marxist, from say an ex-Lenninist (or even an ex-Lennonist).
There you go again John, constantly demonstrating you are a shameless pathological liar. Simply repeating the lie over and over again doesn’t change the reality that Kessler did NOT agree with you. As others have repeatedly shown by actually quoting what Kessler said, his analysis actually REFUTES your claims, not support them.
Keep failing, there troll. Keep failing. All you do is continue to damage yourself in this process of willfully dishonest futility.
There you go again John, constantly demonstrating you are a shameless pathological liar. Simply repeating the lie over and over again doesn’t change the reality that Remnick did NOT agree with you.
As others have repeatedly shown by actually quoting what Remnick said, his analysis actually REFUTES your claims, not support them.
Keep failing, there troll. Keep failing. All you do is continue to damage yourself in this process of willfully dishonest futility.
So you claim. Why can’t you produce Boss to back up your claims?
Barely anything else you’ve said has stood up under scrutiny. So why should we accept this claim by you at face value either?
Keith:
The best articles tracing out the continuity of young Obama’s radical ideology are these two article at Powerline.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/11/027655.php
and
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/11/027712.php
As you will see, my take on young Obama is only a small, but telling piece of a much, much larger history regarding young Obama’s Marxist socialist views. Given all we know about Obama, I don’t think it is fair, at this point, to imply that I’m lying about Obama’s views while he was a sophomore at Occidental College.
The only person who seems to claim you have any crediblity is you.
None of the sources you claim support you turn out to support you, when actually investigated and scrutinized.
Just about everything you claim utterly falls apart at the slightest analysis.
How sad John, you are just the little boy who cries wolf… except there never will be any wolf that shows up, because it is all in your imagination.
g. I can tell that I’m scoring points when you start posting things that don’t deal with evidence I have laid out.
As an award-winning political scientist, I’m used to dealing with people like you who don’t seem to have a normal level of common sense. I have a national reputation to protect regarding my honesty and integrity. My business depends on it.
From a practical perspective, I think my take on young Obama has been vindicated by Ronald Kessler. I spoke with Kessler myself numerous times, he believed me. I don’t understand why you are unwilling to believe I’m telling the truth.
Because it hasn’t, not in any meaningful term.
So, your entire flimsy premise here is that a prominent political figure during a very ideologically divided time in history has an increasing amount of attacks published against him by those who already opposed him…
…yeah…
Sorry, that’s just the reality of haters who are going to hate. Again, all you have is the same self-reinforcing circle-jerk from the same sources spewing bile and smear to the same audience over and over again.
None of these books are coming from legitimate and unbiased mainstream analsysis or historians. They are all from the same usual suspects.
That you are all getting louder and more prolific is simply evidence that you are increasingly fearful of his re-election and desperate in your powerlessness to be able to prevent it.
It is a sign of your utter desepration, nothing more.
That’s really all this comes down to.
Hm, that is one time too many, Misha, so I must reply with my favourite “couplet”:
От южных морей до полÑрного краÑ
ÐаÑкинулиÑÑŒ наши леÑа и полÑ.
Одна Ñ‚Ñ‹ на Ñвете! Одна Ñ‚Ñ‹ Ñ‚Ð°ÐºÐ°Ñ –
Ð¥Ñ€Ð°Ð½Ð¸Ð¼Ð°Ñ Ð‘Ð¾Ð³Ð¾Ð¼ Ñ€Ð¾Ð´Ð½Ð°Ñ Ð·ÐµÐ¼Ð»Ñ!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXgam88RUko&feature=related
The guy singing lived 200 metres form me in 2004. He’s now divorced, moved, and happily bald (it can go fast) and re-married.
He has also been asked a few times whether he knows anything else about Obama’s background, like was Obama boasting that he had a birth certificate from Hawaii while he was really born in Kenya, did he have an Islamic prayer mat in college and so on.
He has always claimed that he of course could not know such things, because he only met Obama twice. But of course, meeting Onama twice and having taught American history for some time makes him the perfect authority on Obama’s political beliefs.
And he actually dares to add the sentence “One wonders what else he has been hiding,”
It is really pure self-aggrandizement. The fact that the authors who mention or hint at him meeting Obama all say something else about Obama at the time than what he is claiming does not even register in his mind. What he writes suggests Semmelweis.
I ran your Russian through the translating software. http://translation2.paralink.com/
Misha’s quote says:
Be famous, Fatherland our free,
Friendship of people a reliable bulwark!
Lenin’s party — force national
Us to a celebration of communism conducts!
Wow! I can’t believe you guys are promoting the ideals of the murderous thugs of the old Soviet Union. How creepy. How short-sighted.
I guess “Dr” Drew still hasn’t grasped the main crux of the whole thing…
Even if everything he’s saying about Obama’s Marxist dalliances in college, or his lack of girlfriends, is true… so what?
Speaking from the Conservative and Republican side, we certainly don’t care. We’re busy trying to defeat Obama based on real issues and policies. WE don’t have time to waste on ridiculous drek that’s of absolutely no importance, and isn’t a hindrance to his eligibility even if it was.
I suspect Moderates or Liberals. and Democrats alike, are even less inclined to care.
So why waste so much time and effort “proving” something that doesn’t matter even if it were true?
Why not investigate something of infinitely more importance to Obama’s administration,… like which leg goes first when he puts his pants on ROFLMAO!!!
Paul Pieniezny:
I’ve taught courses on American government and the U.S. presidency at Williams College in MA between 1986 and 1989. This was about five years after I last met young Barack Obama. As a graduate student in political science, I was well-trained to provide an objective, detailed assessment of young Obama’s ideological beliefs.
Daniel:
What I’m saying is true and the reason it matters is because people want to elect people who have honesty and integrity. Obama lied his way into office and succeeded, in part, because there wasn’t enough information out there about the real Barack Obama. As these website threads grow, it will be much easier for independent and swing voters to research for themselves whether or not Obama lied about his life and his beliefs in his book, Dreams Fromm My Father.
Perry calls Obama socialist, sets Truth-O-Meter aflame
(excerpt) After the debate, PolitiFact National explored the question of whether Obama is in fact a socialist, comparing the president’s tax policies and major initiatives with this definition of socialism: support for “governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.” The upshot: Obama policies such as the health care law and the economic stimulus add up to flimsy evidence for even beginning to show that he’s a socialist.
Conservative economist Bruce Bartlett told PolitiFact: “Socialism means public ownership of the means of production. Obama does not believe this. Therefore he is not a socialist. … Although it is true that the federal government did come to own some private businesses as a consequence of bailout policies initiated by the George W. Bush administration such as (the Troubled Asset Relief Program), the Obama administration sold many of them — such as its shares in GM — as quickly as feasible. A true socialist would have held on to them.”
Put to the Truth-O-Meter, Perry’s claim rates as ridiculous. Obama’s policies may have expanded government, but they don’t justify the hyperbole of Perry’s charge. Pants on Fire!
(source: http://www.politifact.com/texas/article/2012/jan/09/perry-calls-obama-socialist-setting-truth-o-meter-/)
Liar, Liar . . .
I do it to irritate the birthers and conservatives.
Sorry but I’m not irritated lol
Daniel, with all due respect, issues and policies are fine, but they don’t appear on the ballot. A name does. And you guys have: a corporate predator who said today, “I llike to fire people”, a radical Catholic who wants to impose his out-of-the-mainstream views on everybody else, a corrupt former Speaker who after being turfed out of office took several million $s to supposedly write a history of Freddie Mac, a loony libertarian who wants to get rid of Social Security and Medicare and lets neo-Nazis write his newspaper while pretending he bears no responsibility and a Texan who is suffering early stage dementia. It isn’t a pretty picture. The one guy who seems actually sane can’t get his own party to vote for him because he served in the Obama administration. I’m sorry, but given the improving economy (yes folks, it’s real and I am putting money on it) I really question whether any of these guys can win and more importantly whether any of them should win.
You are of course correct that no one cares what the President did in college. I wonder if Herr Professor Doktor Drew, the greatest political scientist of his generation (or any generation) can tell us if anyone has ever beaten an incumbent President by attacking him for what he did in college.
How dare you threaten John Drew’s meme that we’re all ebil libruls here? After all, we’re not allowed to demonize people while John Drew is… so if you are one of us and a conservative that’s going to cause all sorts of problems for John Drew to rationalize away. You don’t want to push him into some sort of fugue state, do you? 😉
It’s not about hitting a home run by convincing neutrals and or Obama supporters that Obama’s a gay, killer commie, it’s about fanning the flames of the existing lunar opposition, trying to plant seeds of negative association, little seeds of doubt, in case any fertile mental soil can be found.
That, and spewing pseudo-inflammatories as an attention-getting strategy. Negative attention is more soothing that no attention.
Or a paycheck as Cashill, Corsi, Hannity and others call it.
John Drew could tell you if John Drew wanted to tell you or if it served John Drew’s interests to tell you but John Drew isn’t going to tell you because it should be enough that John Drew says that John Drew knows because John Drew is just that Marklar.
I would point out that a competent political scientist would understand the likelihood of an incumbent president’s reelection in an improving economy–and I should also point out that this statement has nothing to do with John Drew.
I think that John Drew strongly resembles that remark 😉
What utter BS! You are so obviously driven by petty jealousies and the need to blame the rest of the world for your own problems and failures that you are *overwhelmingly* blinded by your own biases. They seep forward from every petty bit of dreck you spew!
You are about as far from capable of objectivity as it gets. You are just a broken and damaged individual.
You so utterly lack any credibility based on your constant propensity to lie that nothing you say can be taken seriously at all.
Even your claims of dating this “so called” Boss person are suspect. When most of your other claims have not held up to be as you described them under scrutiny, why should anyone even believe this?
You’re not a link at all. Just missing.
You’re stories don’t seem to stand up under even light scrutiny. The guys who claimed they time travelled to Mars with Obama in his youth are about as believable and credible as you. And NO – their wacky fevered dreams are not credible at all either, sorry.
I would point out that Hannity is to Corsi and Cashill what Corsi and Cashill are to the most awesomest best thesis-award winning, future-president-talking-to, affirmative-action-victim* dr. john “it’s all about dr. john drew, phd” drew, phd. Just sayin’ 😉
* johnny has suffered more than any person ever in the history of the world ever at the hands of the evil faculty of the evil Williams Evil College of Evil. You cannot imagine the anguish that poor johnny felt to be kicked out while more qualified colleagues (some of whom were people of color or even women!) were allowed to continue on with the tenure track. And its all Obama’s fault! (I made that last part up ;-))
Sorry. Another clear logical FAIL by you.
No one needs to disprove an unproven allegation in the first place.
I don’t have to find a “conversion story” to show me that he converted away from cannibalism either, as there is no basis for make me to ever think he was a cannibal in the first place.
Sorry, but no one here buys your underlying and unprovable premise of “marxism” fears in the first place. That’s just stupid bogeyman BS.
The only person you are qualified to assess as a Marxist from your past is yourself. So all you are trying to apply here is a bizarre guilt by association that doesn’t have merit. What mistakes you made in your own past are your own and have no direct connections or implications on others you merely happened to bump into at some random parties years ago.
Then again, you somehow claim that you’ve “reformed” from “marxism”…yet can’t make the same leap in thought to consider that if you changed from the views of your youth anyone else easily could too… *duh*.
You are simply so blind in your bitter jealousy and stupidity that you can’t even grasp how your entire example of yourself utterly blows up and contradicts your own biased conclusions…
Don’t you know that all Presidents and candidates never change their opinion after the age of 3. Just ask New-Dealer Reagan and Goldwater Girl Clinton (not to mention, loyalist-served-in-the-British-Army Washington).
Isn’t studying history fun!!
I remind you that President Obama has admitted to ritual, serial cannibalism–he said that he is a Christian.
Yeah, that pretty much says it all.
I would add that the US government didn’t even have true “ownership” of the auto industry, in terms of what such would actually entail.
Simply, like any contractual holder of a loan, they had the right to place certain conditions and expectations of how the industry would conduct itself in order to receive the money.
Really nothing unusual or unreasonable there at all. The people who worked in and ran these companies were still private sector employees all along. Some minor oversight is simply a far cry from truly owning or running anything.
Exactly. That is all it is about.
In other words, he is intentionally playing an open con game…just doing an extremely weak and poor job at it.
Nor is there really much of a “new” receptive audience for such dreck. All this cr@p has been swirling around the drains for a number of years now. Those who are susceptible to drinking swill have already drank from that well.
Everyone who isn’t part of their little Cult of Hate is not because they have proven not susceptible to it already. Those who are “in the middle” and “undecided” for this upcoming election are so because of other reasons. If they were amenable to these types of smears, they would have already jumped on that bandwagon long ago.
Therefore, bottom-dwelling smear merchants like John are simply fighting a battle that was already hopelessly lost a long time ago. He gets to preach to the already converted and that is all.
Touche! 😉
Not only, but also.
It is a vaguely interesting fact that when the hero arch-conservative superstar saint President Reagan was BUYING Amtrak and other railroad assets in the U.S., the center-right Socialist, fellow traveller, former Union Czar and card carrying member of the Labor International Organization, Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke, was SELLING the Government owned airline companies (two of them), railroads, bank, setting the stage to sell off the telephone company (which the next government did) and encouraging the States to sell off their gas and electricity companies.
So who exactly is a socialist?
Bob Hawke is also a republican, by the way.
It is his life long ambition to remove the Queen as the Australian Head of State.
Except that Protestants don’t believe in that particular miracle. It is symbolic of the blood and body, not actually the blood and body as in Roman Catholic belief.
Point taken–make that “symbolic ritual serial cannibalism” ;-P
I would like to present Tom Lehrer – The Vatican Rag:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f72CTDe4-0
I realize that the words “Marxism” and “soc ialism” are to some Americans what holy water was to Linda Blair in THE EXORCIST, but even taking that into account, I’m gobsmacked by the ignorance of John C Drew (claiming a PhD to boot!) and his other minion who somehow equates Teddy Roosevelt with Marx.
In a way, this does correlate with the original topic of the thread (Mars) which was about a totally absurd, unbelievable, fabricated anti-Obama tidbit. In fact, I find the “Marsian” hypothesis more believable than John C. Drew’s lunatic rants because at least, it can’t be disproved with as much certainty.
I have no idea why someone who claims the level of education of John C. Drew would, for all intents and purposes, behave with the same clarity and logic than a smelly old man in a dirty raincoat handing greasy leaflets filled with conspiracy scrawls outside a subway station. What makes such a man?…
He has also expressed ideas here (which he is of course free to do) which I, personally, consider racist and extreme — far more extreme than the tenets of classical Marxism which are pretty much part and parcel of every mainstream political economy theory today.
There are plenty of arguably good reasons to oppose Obama’s moderate conservative policies, from the far right to the left, without resorting to such tripe.
If John C. Drew is representative of anything except his own sick mind, then it really is sad.
Well said, Lupin! Well said!
Since Dreams was written long before Obama ran for office, I don’t think your characterization is fair. It’s a propaganda technique designed to mislead the reader.
What I don’t understand is why Drew goes around the Internet trying to make himself unemployable.
Before I retired, I was painfully aware of the sensitivities of my job and the fact that my company lived or died from state and local government contracts, including those in vital records. I tried to be circumspect in what I said and I tried (and was mostly successful) in keeping my name dissociated from the Obama conspiracy business.
But here Drew goes around with the most viscous and nasty claims, using the worst sliming language. When I was working in state government if a grant writer came selling his wares and I read some of the things Drew said here, I would have security escort him from the building and I would have warned my colleagues to stay clear of him.
Misha becomes “you guys.” Guilt by association again? If you can’t argue without logical fallacy, what good is your PhD?
Then why are you passing yourself off as someone who can’t finish a sentence without a logical fallacy, an innuendo, a false generalization or a smear. You come off as a pompous ass, a pseudo intellectual hiding behind some minor achievements. You paint yourself as a disgusting and odious character here. If someone decided to mail sections of your writing here to your prospective clients (something I would never do), your business would be over.
The best thing you could do for your business is to beg me and other web site operators to delete everything you’ve ever said.
I wonder about whether Drew has not already done so long ago, by his personality and his being trapped in the past. Certainly, someone who told me incessantly about an award he won as a student more than 20 years ago would not be my choice of who to hire.
We have only Drew’s self-characterization as a “successful businessman” to go on. He claimed in one post to make $30,000/month from grant-writing. However, unless he wishes to provide audited financial statements or tax returns, that is simply a claim. And given the questionable nature of many of his claims, let’s just say I’m sceptical.
Perhaps because he is otherwise unemployed. Or subsisting in a field in which it doesn’t matter. There are still unsophisticated employers out there, that don’t do background checks, etc., much less fire up google. Or pay anyone else to do so. My own employer is one of them! But, if Drew were working at the level he claims, in the fields he claims, that would not be the case.
I have yet to write a grant … but $30,000/month? Implying he is the world’s highest paid grant writer. Perhaps he was only paid twice a year, or finished an annual contract that month, haha. Finger got stuck on the ‘0’ key.
Did you mean vicious or viscous? In any event, you’re right on both counts! 🙂
Reagan Library Crowd Goes Wild For Perry’s 234 Executions
Rick Perry was emotionless last week when faced with the 234 executions Texas has carried out on his watch. The case of Cameron Willingham, who was executed on Perry’s watch in 2004 and many experts believe was an innocent man, got Perry into trouble in 2009 after allegations mounted that Perry stifled a state government probe looking into Willingham’s conviction.
Tea Party Debate Audience Cheers Idea Of Letting Sick Man Without Insurance Die
In Tampa, Florida at the CNN/Tea Party Express debate Monday night, the tea party-filled audience literally cheered aloud for the uninsured to be allowed to die. Blitzer asked if under Paul’s libertarian philosophy, a sick man without insurance should be allowed to die in the hospital rather than have the state pay his medical bills. Before Paul could answer that question, shouts of “yes!” and cheering bubbled up from the audience.
How creepy.
http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/09/rick-perry-taken-aback-by-let-them-die-cheer-at-debate.php
Huckabee’s Son and His History of Animal Cruelty
And now here comes Mike Huckabee and his son, David, with their own history of animal cruelty…his subsequent arrest brought a sordid tale of cruelty to animals out of the shadows and into the national spotlight.
It seems young Huckabee spent some time as a counselor at a Boy Scouts camp called Camp Pioneer back in 1998 when he was 17-years-old. Huck happened upon a stray dog that had the misfortune to cross his path. In a move sure to send chills down the spine of parents everywhere, trusting their kids are being cared for by well intentioned summer camp counselors, David Huckabee hung the dog from a tree. He later made Eagle Scout.
How creepy.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/suzy-shuster/huckabees-son-and-his-his_b_77359.html
Mississippi civil rights workers murders
The murders of James Chaney, a 21-year-old black man from Meridian, Mississippi; Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old white Jewish anthropology student from New York; and Michael Schwerner, a 24-year-old white Jewish CORE organizer and former social worker also from New York, demonstrated the dangers faced by civil rights workers in the South, especially during what became known as “Freedom Summer”, dedicated to voter education and registration.
Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were lynched shortly after midnight on June 21, 1964. During the hours they were held incommunicado in jail, Price notified his Klan associate Edgar Ray Killen, who assembled fellow Klan members and planned how to kill the three workers.
Price followed them to the edge of town, where he pulled them over, sounding his police siren. He held them until the Klan murder squad arrived. The KKK took the three men to an isolated spot where they shot Schwerner and Goodman, and beat Chaney before shooting him to death. The Klan drove the CORE car into Bogue Chitto swamp and set it on fire. They buried the bodies in an earthen dam, using a bulldozer to cover them.
On June 4, 2000, the journalist Jerry Mitchell, who had been reporting on the case, published data from the autopsy report. The report stated Chaney’s left arm was broken in one place, his right arm was broken in two places, there was “a marked disruption” of the left elbow joint, and he may also have suffered trauma to the groin area.
During the investigation, searchers including Navy divers and the FBI discovered the bodies of at least seven other Mississippi blacks, whose disappearances over the past several years had not attracted attention outside of their local communities.
They were buried in an earthen dam on Olen Burrage’s Old Jolly Farm, six miles southwest of Philadelphia, Mississippi. Schwerner and Goodman had each been shot once in the heart; Chaney, a black man, had been beaten and shot three times.
Because Mississippi officials refused to prosecute the killers for murder, a state crime, the US Justice Department, led by prosecutor John Doar, charged 18 individuals under the 1870 US Force Act with conspiring to deprive the three of their civil rights (by murder). They indicted Sheriff Rainey, Deputy Sheriff Price and 16 other men. None served more than six years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_civil_rights_workers_murders
How creepy.
Bowling trophy.
As I mentioned twice (a point with John C. Drew pointedly ignored), Jesus’ message of love and tolerance ended up becoming the basis for Inquisition a mere 12 centuries later.
(As a side note, one might ponder that 12 centuries is roughly the same time than between Muhammad and today.)
While I might expect any ignoramus to draw a direct line between Stalin and Marx (and I’m certainly not comparing Marx to Jesus!), I would expect better from a genuine PhD in political science (or whatever).
Defending Marx is a little like defending Newton; they were both incorrect on the future of their disciplines, but it doesn’t mean that what they wrote wasn’t correct at the time and isn’t true under a certain set of circumstances.
Michael Savage’s real name is Michael Weiner. Since 2009, Savage has been barred from entering the United Kingdom, for allegedly “seeking to provoke others to serious criminal acts and fostering hatred”.
Savage is a shonde and a momser, in the tradition of Roy Cohen and Andrew Breitbart.
N.C. panel: Sterilization victims should get $50K
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) – A task force is recommending that people who were sterilized against their will under an old North Carolina state program be paid $50,000 each in compensation.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-01-10/north-carolina-sterilization/52479072/1
How creepy.
A clear case of the blind leading the stupid.
My challenge which was as follows
And you have yet to cite a single concrete action, so you have most certainly NOT responded to my challenge. Not even close.
Nevertheless, despite your non-response, I will answer your challenge, as to why there is no “conversion story”. There are several possibilities, all quite reasonable:
1. Obama never was a Marxist. Now you will, say,”but, but, I spoke with him”, so let’s look at several options
(a) You are deliberately lying. Given some of the stuff you say here, this is quite possible.
(b) You are mis-remembering. 30 years ago, a couple of alcohol-fueled conversations. Under cross-examination in a court of law any competent attorney could rip you to shreds. Hell, even Orly Taitz could poke a hole or 2 in your story.
(c) Obama was having you on. Don’t tell me you have never had someone on and puffed yourself up to try to appeal to an audience. You have done nothing but since you got here.
2. Obama’s views evolved gradually over time. You claim that this is impossible, but you cite no proof. Many people’s views eveolve gradually over time. Mine have and that of many people I know.
3. Obama had a conversion story but decided never to write or speak publically about it. Why should he? And he certainly wouldn’t share it privately with you, someone he met twice and never spoke with again. You haven’t spoke with Obama since 1981, have you?
If Willard Romney is elected and allowed to appoint more radical Supreme Court judges, then I’m freally fearful for our country’s future. Mitt has no “conversion story” in which he foreswears his life’s calling as a rapacious Gordon Gecko and apologizes to the thousands of workers and small business owners he left ruined. And Romney’s corporate vulturism wasn’t done as a naive, unformed college undergraduate, but as a mature adult..
Of course, why would there be a conversion story when he never really was a Marxist. Friends who did know him contradict your recollections of an event that took place 30 years ago.
As to your fears, I understand them but I take solace in the fact that they are often based on irrationality rather than reason and logic.
Dr. Conspiracy:
Compared to you, I’m a real “Doctor” and I’m a courageous person. I think you are seeing, in my comments, the same honesty, integrity and common sense that helped me win the highest possible recognition from the APSA for my research as a young scholar. Itr is the same grasp of reality that makes me a successful business man.
First, Dreams came out in 1995 immediately prior to Obama’s first run for political office – Alice Palmer’s old State Senate seat. It was obviously a political document designed to make Obama appear more linked to his African father. The real Obama, of course, was raised by a white family and probably saw Lolo Soetoro as his father. Sadly, his African-American father abandoned him and simply wanted him put up for adoption.
Second, there is nothing wrong in asking for evidence to back-up Obama’s claims to a heterosexual lifestyle as he indicates in Dreams. As I have said before, we know who Boss was seeing, we know who Chandoo was seeing. Why don’t we have any idea at all about a single girl young Obama dated prior to meeting Michelle. We have no photos, no love letters, nothing at all to demonstrate that Obama was telling the truth about his sexual history when he wrote Dreams.
Finally, I went public with my story on young Obama’s ideological extremism in 2008. Since then the Obama literature – from both liberals and conservatives – has edged closer and closer to my take on young Obama’s political views.
I’ve been vindicated by the subsequent literature.
If you cannot see the honor in that distinction, then maybe you deserve your self-appointed “Doctor” status.
I’ve never understood the people like you who get off calling themselves Dr. Muffler or Dr. Donut.
You are becoming a pathetic example of someone who cannot deal with the facts surrounding Barack Obama.
FYI: My horror at the posters here who are celebrating the violent, murderous, Communist USSR was obviously directed at the posters themselves and not everyone posting here. You need to calm down Dr. Conspiracy. Your hysterical overreactions are clear to any objective observer.
I recently had a class on humanity. One of the assignments was to interview a few people.
One of the questions was “Has your outlook on life changed over the years, and if so, do you expect them to change again later in life.”
All the answers were yes, and some did expect their views to change again.
My outlook has changed, I was originally Republican in my 20s, I switched to independent in my late 30s and wont look back. But who knows, I may change again.
One of my classmates at Duke said that when he used the title “Dr” with airlines he got treated better–so Johnny’s got that going for him… (any professional credibility… not so much).
As I look at this thread, I’m asking myself why am I the only one condemning “Misha” and “Paul” for promoting the ideas of the murderous, discredited thugs who ran the old USSR?
Where is your conscience?
It is frightening to me that so many leftists don’t understand the legacy of mass murder associated with Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Sadly, Obama’s closest friends at Occidental College celebrated Karl Marx – the fellow who inspired the most dangerous mass murderers of the 20th century – according to David Remnick’s book, The Bridge.
I don’t think you understand people very well at all.
Making a woman’s uterus property of the state is the essence of fascism. This lists all the clinic violence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence
Before founding Operation Rescue, Randall Terry was a used car salesman. Do not forget Dr. Slepian. I knew him. James Kopp, a Catholic anti-Semite, stalked Dr. Slepian and shot him through his kitchen window with a rifle, killing him on the spot. “…extreme members of the pro-life community, such as Flip Benham of Operation Rescue, labeled calls for nonviolence “pitiful” and suggested that unless abortion was outlawed, “we are in store for more bloodshed in the streets—the likes of which will sicken even the sturdiest among us.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnett_Slepian
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Charles_Kopp
How creepy.
I have written many times, I was a kibbutznik. We lived Lenin’s maxim: ‘From each, according to his ability. To each, according to his need.’
The kibbutzim prove that communism and democracy are not mutually exclusive; they are a raucous democracy. Every decision was turned into a Talmudic discussion.
Before my stroke, I did not own a car. I just had a Honda bike. I live in a 500 sq ft Chinatown loft. That’s all I need.
For the multi-layered parallels, I’ll call your attempt at that association, The Bridge on the River Whai.
No one’s going to get what isn’t there, Drew.
Because you are the only one here that demonizes your opponents rather than addressing their ideas. Do you have any idea how idiotic that makes you look? The idea that everything Marx ever said is wrong is the thought of a moron, not a scholar–it’s very clear which one you are.
I think that Misha exemplifies values that he should be proud of (and I am proud to share) while dr john “call me doctor–I like it when you call me doctor” drew, phd should be ashamed of the degenerate values and lack of integrity he has demonstrated here and elsewhere.
First, I am not a leftist, nor are many others who post here. I am an empiricist.
Second, I don’t read Russian, and didn’t see your translation (and many of those programs aren’t very accurate) untii now.
Third, if you knew misha, you would know that he believes himself to be a borscht-belt comedian. I don’t read his posts closely, because I have heard all his jokes before.
Fourth, unlike you, I was never a Communist and never had anything but contempt for the USSR or Maoist China.
Fifth, that Communism did evil doesn’t automatically make those opposed to it good. Many of its opponents were and are great men (like the late Vaclav Havel). Then there are those like you who can’t move on.
Sixth, as a political scientist you should give some serious thought to whether Lenin, Stalin and Mao followed Marx or perverted him. There is certainly room for debate.
Seventh, I did you a favor by removing the PhD. It will make a more favorable impression and most of what you say indicates that despite the award, you didn’t learn much.
Marx inspired Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo? Thanks for setting me straight.
Social Security is pure socialism. Roosevelt got the idea from von Bismarck. Bismarck got the idea from Karl Marx. Since Marx invented Social Security, I’m sure you have written to your Representative and both senators, demanding it be shut down.
As an award-winning political scientist, I think I’m more qualified than anyone else posting here to assert the connections between Karl Marx’s ideology and the murderous record of real life Communist regimes in the USSR or China.
(I still can’t believe that I’m the only one outright condemning Misha’s efforts to defend the cruel and evil behavior of Stalin and Lenin.)
Unfortunately, Marxism argues that there is no higher power, no greater moral authority, than power itself. Just as Darwin’s evolutionary theory provided support and cover for Hitler’s holocaust, Marx’s theory removed any barrier that might cause someone to hesitate from murdering their opponents. For a chlling look at how folks like Bill Ayers anticipated murdering millions of their fellow Americans, see http://ironicsurrealism.com/2010/06/10/video-undercover-fbi-agent-infiltrated-and-exposes-bill-ayers-weather-underground-genocidal-plan/
Historical experience indicates it is very dangerous to underestimate the violence associated with leftist, progressive thought. For a great book that explains why the left so easily turns to violence, see Thomas Sowell’s book, A Conflict of Visions.
When I was 11 and 12, my goal was to be another Myron Cohen. Every Pesach we went to a different Catskill hotel, and each night there was a different comedian. I always got to the theatre early, and sat in the front row. Before the stroke, I had a photographic memory, and could repeat each joke and body language flawlessly.
My wife from China once asked me, “do you take anything seriously?” I replied, “why should I?”
– Slartibartfest
Please. You don’t know what you are talking about. Everything Marx wrote was wrong. What exactly do you perceive to be something that Marx said that was correct?
It will be interesting to debate Marxism with you. I studied Marxism in graduate school at Cornell. I wrote my undergraduate thesis at Occidental College on Marxist economics and I can assure you that everything Marx predicted has been disproven by subsequent history and was never true to begin with – all of it – the dialectic, alienation, false consciousness, surplus value, the labor theory of value, scientific socialism and class conflict. All of it was wrong. My own research on the connection between child labor and child welfare programs was a disconfirmation of Marxist theory.
I defy you to demonstrate how any of Marx’s ideas are correct now or were ever correct. It will be interesting to see what you come up with in response to this challenge.
– misha
I think having two people living in a 500 sq. ft. home is messing with your mind. The murders associated with Marxist (and Darwinian/fascist thought) are extraordinarily serious and matters of great importance even today. I don’t think it is at all funny that you are celebrating the USSR and looking the other way at its monsterous past.
It is amazing to me that the other people posting here are not rushing out to condemn your foolishness and to point out the sheer evil of the USSR. My Armenian relatives suffered greatly under the oppression of the USSR. For you to make light of that oppression is profoundly disturbing to anyone with empathy for other people or anyone with even the slightest knowledge of the cruelty and violence associated with the USSR.
Obama’s friend, State Sen. Alice Palmer, attended meetings of the Communist Party in the USSR in the mid-1990s. She should be condemned for that and Obama should be condemned for hanging out with her when he started his political career.
Congratulations. Your use of the Vatellite plural “guys” means you mean I too am promoting the ideals of indeed murderous thugs. Apart from the fact that Misha does not really mean it, you failed to notice that my version is the one that replaces Lenin (who was just a thug fighting off other thugs) with … God.
I will once more point out that given the opportunity to discuss Marxism and how it applies to Obama’s decision to bail out Big Business or to once more discuss Presidential sexual preferences, Dr. John chose to gossip about Presidential sexual preferences.
How the heck did he win that award that he can’t seem to complete a post without mentioning?
I want to analyze John using his own methodology.
John is a Marxist.
John has admitted his undying belief in Marxism in College.
John went to college with Marxists.
John’s girlfriend was a Marxist.
John was subsequently employed by State funded institutions, which are known for having Marxists in their employ.
John rejects working for capitalist employers, as seen by his employment only with non-profit enterprises.
John supports himself by empowering non-capitalist organizations to leech funds from state funded or private enterprise that could have been invested in private enterprise.
While John now says that he is not a Marxist, is there any reason we should believe his supposed conversion story? It is clear that he is opposed to capitalism based upon his work record since College.
Okay now John’s sexual preferences.
John clearly believes he can detect whether someone is Gay.
Gay men say that they can use Gaydar and can tell when someone is gay- see the connection?
John’s supposed Girlfriend in college refuses to acknowledge him- the most likely reason is that she caught him in a homosexual three way with her best friends and has never forgiven him for his lies and betrayal.
We have never seen any pictures of John having sex with any women.
John acknowledges no legitimate or illegitimate children.
John has an unnatural desire to prove that the President is homosexual.
Even John’s wife has never publicly confirmed whether he is gay or straight.
I think the evidence is clear.
Well as clear as any ‘evidence’ John has brought to the table.
Clearly this is all tongue in cheek(bad metaphor?) but since John seems unwilling to engage in substantive discussion…..this will do.
Agreed. In some of the hiring considerations and even vendor relationships I’ve been responsible for over the past few years, info from other online sources (such as MySpace, Facebook or online sites) did sometimes come to my attention or was admittedly part of the background search process we used in screening.
Anything that carried a perceived “risk” – either of stability/trustworthiness in that person/organization or in terms of how it could impact or harm the credibility and professional neutrality of our company was a valid criteria for weeding someone out of consideration and avoiding them.
John’s irrational and unstable behaviors are a huge red flag.
Exactly!
Dr. Drew has spent more far more time talking about the hours he spent with a young Obama than he ever spent WITH Obama. Meanwhile, people who spent considerably more time with Obama (such as conservative Bradford Berenson) don’t have the same notions of Obama’s alleged life-long Marxism.
Dr. Drew’s time in the limelight should be proportional to his interactions with the subject. He’s way past that time.
Love Tom Lehrer. His wife is from Tucson where I grew up, he was in town often to visit family, but was seldom performing by then; I never got to see him live and am poorer for it.
Lore has it that on a tour of Australia the Queensland Boy Scouts were mightily offended by Be Prepared. So when he got to Adelaide, they made him promise not to perform it. So he just substituted even more offensive songs from his second album that nobody had heard yet.
ABC inverview with Tom Lehrer from 2005
I have no intention of trying to debate a term that you refuse to define (not to mention the fact that you haven’t addressed any of the many challenges that you have been confronted with). I will note that the eugenics movement trying to use Darwin’s theory for cover in no way invalidates the theory of evolution–can you follow the analogy?
Don’t hold back, Doc.
Tell’em what you really think.
Poor John. You truly live in a fantasy only within your own deeply insecure mind and are so pathetically desperate to try to convince others that you matter.
Sorry, you’ve utterly failed on those accounts. You’ve demonstrated only the complete opposite of anything remotely approaching “honesty, integrity and common sense”. You are just a sad, self-deluded joke.
Hint: when you have to spend half your efforts touting how “awesome” you are…it is a clear sign that you are not. Your own “impression” of yourself is meaningless. If you can’t garnish positive opinions from others in the broader world without desperate solicitation, then the sad joke is on you.
Sorry, you’ve made so many unfounded and ludicrous statements and claims that nothing you say can be taken seriously by any serious person. We simply don’t believe you. You are just a damaged and broken pathological liar desperate for attention. That’s all.
I’m a courageous person. I think you are seeing, in my comments, the same honesty, integrity and common sense that helped me win the highest possible recognition from the APSA for my research as a young scholar. Itr is the same grasp of reality that makes me a successful business man.
To quote Ronald Reagan, “There you go again…”
By the way, what kind of an Armenian name is Drew?
And Marx was wrong about quite a bit, but the labor theory of value is correct. What has value except the products of human labor? Even natural resources have no value until extracted by humans.
One swallow does not a summer make, and one award does not a smart guy signify.
Sorry, there is no “we” here. “We” simply don’t believe you or any of the claims you make up. “We” don’t even have proof that you were ever even at these inconsequential random parties 30 years ago in the first place, or that “Boss” was even with you.
The only circumstantial independent evidence you’ve provided for a Chandoo or others has turned out to discredit and contradict your version of events.
We have no photos, no love letters, nothing at all that demonstrate Boss was ever with you and romantically involved with you in the first place. Turn your own hypocritical illogical standards of evidence inward on to your own gaping holes in your own story…
No you haven’t. Not in the slightest. Sorry, but the mere appearance of other ODS suffering smear merchants also writing attack literature over time is boringly typical and doesn’t vindicate anything. All that can be concluded from that is that there is a small set of disgruntled ankle biters out there trying to grift off their hack smut peddling. The world’s always had a niche market for such shameless hit pieces by obsessed haters. You simply are part of the same small sewer that has always been around and that only appeals to bottom dwellers and garbage feeders. That’s all. Serious people don’t pay any attention to such blatant hack smut.
*rolls eyes* Oh, stop with the false cry of victimhood, you baby. The only one here in an obvious state of constant hysterical emotional distress and alarmism is you. We’re not responsible for your endless pants-wetting behaviors and over-reactions either.
Just another clear example where you demonstrate that all you are capable of is mere projection. Nothing more.
Sorry, we don’t see the imaginary bogeyman that only you are invoking.
Over time, I’ve learned to grasp Misha’s particular style’s of expression and also humor.
I fail to see anywhere where Misha is “promoting” any of the nonsense that you claim.
Again, your hysterical bed-wetting hype doesn’t match of with the reality of the situation or conversation that took place at all.
You simply see shadows that don’t exist.
Why? I didn’t waste my time studying wrong, outdated biochemistry.
What an utter load of cr@p. And you wonder why no one outside of small diseased circles takes you seriously.
You’re conclusions are pure nonsense and utterly overhyped dreck. Nothing more.
All you do is continue to demonstrate that you aren’t qualified to expound on anything. That you’re supposed to have a degree in this stuff makes your crazy talk all that more pathetic. It sure doesn’t offer you the cover of “credibility” that you profess.
Having a PhD obviously doesn’t prevent someone from completely going off the rails and becoming a stark raving lunatic. That is all that you are today. No wonder you have to reach very deep into the beginnings of your adult life to pull out any credentials of value. You’ve obviously tanked since then and have just spiraled downwards into madness.
I’ve been a huge Tom Lehrer fan since high school. Great stuff!
Hey! You never know when you might need to use the phlogiston theory…
In what way is discussing Marx, a political scientist and economist, somehow construed as defending Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot? That is called a Strawman Arguement, and is the most sophomoric logical fallacy known to mankind, Mr. PhD.
That is like condemning all of modern biological science because they honor Darwin, and Hitler was influenced by so-called ‘social Darwinism’.
Oh, wait. You aren’t one of those, are you?
Well said! I completely agree.
And what Misha has said of his past and his politics seems pretty admirable to me (I may be the only one here who envies him for living in a 500 sq. ft apartment because “it’s all he needs” and I would have loved to have heard some of the “Talmudic” discussion at his kibbutz… ;-))
Geeze,
I wrote my previous reply (awaiting moderation, for some reason, as I type this) before I read this post.
I think I must be starting to read your mind.
“The Horror!”
I got your goat. Thank you. Also, that software needs someone to on it work.
Remember, I’ll be here all week. If you’ve had too much to drink, please don’t hit my car on your way out.
Lehrer is Jewish, and is now 83. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Lehrer
Over on the Fogbow, dr john “me! me! me! me! me!” drew phd indicated that he agreed with some whackjob theory of Ann Coulter’s (who dr john “did you know I won a major award” drew phd did not work for) regarding science having disproved evolution. Given the quality of his scholarship I wouldn’t be surprised if he is a cintelligent designist or a full-blown creationist–he clearly has no understanding of science in any way.
Here’s a picture of my college biology building:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2632/3765120149_c563060f6e.jpg
Being a math major and a physics minor, I didn’t spend a lot of time in the Philosophy department. About all the Marx I got was in my Philosophy of Religion course.
I wrote a paper on Marx’s criticism of Feuerbach that garnered probably the only “A+” I received in college. Thinking back, it might have been an award for “most improved” or maybe it was because I cited a little-known reference book written by my professor 😉 Maybe I deserved it. For a number of years a copy of my paper was linked at the Princeton University Dept. of Religion web site but went away when the site was redesigned a decade or so ago.
Suffice it to say that I know nothing whatever about Marxian economics.
John C. Drew, Ph.D.: As an award-winning political scientist
Yeah, bowling trophy.
Tell that to Arabs, who are attacked continually by Settlers’ pogroms, egged on by evangelicals. The Settlers and their politicians are funded by American evangelicals.
Tell that to Emily Henochowicz, a 21-year-old American Jewish student who lost her left eye after being hit by a tear gas canister shot by Israeli soldiers during a pro-Palestinian protest. Soren Johanssen from Sweden said, in a statement made public by the International Solidarity Movement, that border patrol soldiers shot directly at the protesters. “They fired many canisters at us in rapid succession,” said Johanssen who, according to ISM, stood next to Henochowicz. “One landed on either side of Emily, then the third one hit her in the face,” he said.
Henochowicz was rushed to Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem after losing her left eye, breaking her jaw and suffering multiple wounds to her face…“It is becoming increasingly common for soldiers and policemen to use riot control devices as weapons,” said Michael Sfard, a Tel Aviv attorney who is representing Henochowitz.
Read on: http://www.forward.com/articles/128662/#
This is my article: http://newyorkleftist.blogspot.com/2009/10/jewish-pogrom.html
Right wing anti-science rubbish.
FYI, any appearance of the word “Hitler” will throw your comment into moderation.
Labor is what gives value. If you buy a new car, drive it around the block, and then want to return it, the dealer will give you about 1/2 of what you paid for it. All the labor has been paid for; all that’s left is the residual value.
It was Drewian.
Social Security.
I was raised by Survivors. I don’t spend my day licking my wounds.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised (but I was).
Thanks, I figured that’s what happened–I’ll avoid the H-word from now on… 😉
You could try it over at Dr. Kate’s. With memory water, chem-trails and HAARP, a good theory on combustion could be all the rage. Take a poncho though, it can be a little messy.
We produced Reagan. Russia produced Gorbachev.
Reagan, a B list actor, got good photo opps. Gorbachev risked being shot, and ended the Cold War.
I suspect dr john “pay attention to johnny!” drew, phd has a lot of anti-science attitudes. Over on the Fogbow he held up his taking calculus in high school and his ability to do linear regression analysis as evidence of his badass math and science skillz. Needless to say, I wasn’t impressed and have come to the opinion that dr john “I wouldn’t know science if it masticated my bum” drew phd just doesn’t “get” science.
I’m not good enough at the undercover to fit in over at drk(H)ate’s–I posted a comment defending ACORN there once. Once. 😉
So that’s what an exploding head sounds like.
Shrub lied his way into invading Iraq for oil, and succeeded.
In his January 2003 State of the Union speech, U.S. President George W. Bush said, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries
– Slartibartfest
I knew I caught you in an error when you suggested there was something valuable worth salvaging in the work of Karl Marx. You don’t have clue how the real world works, do you?
– Misha
The people murdered by your hero Lenin are as real to me as my contemporary neighbors. I think you are making a severe mistake in seeking to promote a positive image of Lenin given the death and destruction he brought to the USSR. You are a person who seems to have little compassion for the millions of people imprisoned and terrorized under the Soviet regime. I’m amazed that the other people posting here are not complaining about your calloused attitude toward the victims of Karl Marx’s philosophy.
[Dr. Drew seems to be confusing Marx and Lenin. Lenin is the bald one. This discussion is completely off topic for this web site and will end now. Doc.]
Plus a Siamese cat, and an Afghan hound, both rescued from shelters.
I hereby pledge all my delegates to Misha, from the great state of Damn Right.
Misha +1 😉
The translating software (PROMT) is actually … Russian. I should know, I’ve used it. At one time, it was the best software that did not use translation memory. And yes, it still needed a human hand to copy edit.
He should have googled it (does not matter if it is Cyrillic, it is just a question of copy and paste). That would have taken him to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Anthem_of_the_Soviet_Union (= Misha’s version, note that Misha is quoting the version used AFTER 1977)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Anthem_of_Russia (my version, which mentions God)
Note for someone who knows the music: not mentioned in the Wikipedia article(s) is the well-known factoid that part of the melody (only five notes, less than the seven normally taken as copyright violation) is from “Frühlingsfahrt”, Op. 45 no. 2 by Robert Schumann.
“Hail Pennsylvania” uses the melody of the Russian tsarist anthem.
Sounds cozy.
Look Johnny, I’ve known that you weren’t up to snuff from the moment you bragged on your high school calculus class. You’ve been caught in so many errors of fact and implication that you couldn’t even begin to count them (after all, I doubt you can count past 20 without opening your fly…). Since you are unwilling to agree on a logical framework or definitions of terms or points of fact you are incapable of participating in rational debate. As for my understanding of the real world, if you had any sort of mathematical chops as a political scientist, I would discuss some ideas I have about modeling the economic impact of public policy, but as you wouldn’t understand nor would you be able to contribute to such a discussion, I think I’ll pass. As a matter of fact, you’re getting pretty boring–can you do any new tricks?
– Slartibartfest
Why don’t we work together to bring this thread back on track? The central issue is the extent to which there is evidence that young Obama was ever a Marxist and not a forever a centrist pragmatist as suggested by Kloppenberg in Reading Obama.
Personally, I find it compelling that when I debated young Obama I was a Marxist, my girlfriend was a Marxist and Obama’s roommate, Hasan Chandoo, was an admitted Marxist. In my view, it is implausible that young Obama would engage in a discussion with three Marxists and not be a Marxist himself. What would be the attraction of hanging out with three people, over the course of a day, that you thoroughly disagreed with? I don’t know about you, but I don’t have any liberals in my circle of friends today. Why would I?
Second, the details of my life certainly match the facts as I have stated them. I have date photos of me and Boss together which indicate I was on the west coast during the moments in question, I have dated cards and letters from her in my possession which verify our relationship. Remnick verifies she was Obama’s classmate. Accordingly, I don’t think it is implausible to anyone that I met and debated Obama during the time period I have indicated.
Third, despite what you say about me, there is nothing in my life that indicates I would be a liar. I have no criminal record, I’ve never spent a day in jail, I’m a married man, a business owner who makes a living as a speaker, author and consultant. I have unusual credentials as a political scientist. By all accounts, my wife and I have taken significant personal and financial risks to get this story out. I’ve passed child abuse background checks and worked for public colleges where I was subject to criminal background checks. I’m posting these statements under my own name and not some pseudonym.
Finally, the existing literature has moved in exactly the direction that would have been predicted by my comments regarding young Obama’s radicalism in 2008. I would think that the fact that my story is still being discussed for almost four years now should be evidence that it is credible to a substantial number of people on the left and the right.
No you’re not; you’re a buffoon and a quack.
You’re to political science what Elmer Fudd is to hunting.
be vewy, vewy quiet. drjohndrewphd is hunting for his marbles…
This is of course pure rubbish.
The man is a quack and I’m starting to strongly question his alleged qualifications.
Despite what Elmer Fudd PhD states, these main notions of Marxism (1) are widely accepted, recognized & incorporated in any serious political economic theory, and (2) bear little relation to what the USSR or Maoist China did or didn’t do:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Marxism#Main_ideas_of_Classical_Marxism
No one here is defending Stalin’s USSR or Mao’s China or Pol Pot’s Cambodia, no more than our fellow Christian posters are endorsing the evils of the Spanish Inquisition, or someone who likes to listen to Richard Wagner is a closet nazi.
In my own country, we still revere Voltaire and Rousseau, but no one defends the bloody excesses of Robespierre and the Reign of Terror and Napoleon is fairly criticized in history classes.
Imagine how surprised I was when I called it before he outed himself!
Yikes! As a fan of Wagnerian opera, I’m creeped out that such a dubious connection to nazism could be implied…
So I hereby quickly denounce and reject the Nazi’s. There. *whew* 😉
Well said! Although Napoleon seems to hold up as an interesting character over on this side of the Atlantic. Perhaps because we were fairly removed from the impact of his exploits. He’s still quite a popular and recognizable Halloween costume. (I even dressed up as him for a Halloween party one year…the costume got quite a lot of positive recognition and comments and was quite a “hit” with the ladies…albeit at 6’3″ I wasn’t a very historically accurate representation. 😉
So he’s still a very recognizable figure today, even in our culture. The tragic and despicable Robespierre – definitely a name well known to us in history, but not someone who’s image would be recognizable here and certainly not a good idea for a Halloween costume…
I do feel that both my high school and college history classes did a good job of covering all of those figures and periods of your nation’s history, so there is that to be said for educational awareness in the US of what happened in your part of the world…
It is unproven that Obama is a Marxist like it is unproven that Earth has a moon. People have told me I can look up and see it, but the cosmos are massive and I’m not going to waste my time looking around until I’ve got proof.
I watched an hour long video of someone who claimed to have been to the moon, but he didn’t include any evidence, only allegations. His speech was filled with logical fallacies and false generalizations. The fact that he had been there and is selling books about his experience demonstrates bias. Even if he went to the moon, he would need to also prove that he made it back. He was once interviewed on talk radio which decreases his credibility even further. I think he makes up these wild-eyed stories because he hates the earth. Desperate haters are going to hate. Even if he had been to the moon, it was many years ago so I can’t trust his memory. This astronaut is clearly trapped in the past. And even if it was true, it isn’t necessarily true anymore. People change and so does space.
I googled the moon and got lots of hits, but searching for Obama Marxist returns 9.6 million hits and we know all that means nothing. I could actually read some of the evidence, but why waste my life on these infinite truths when everyone knows it is just cranks who say things like that. It doesn’t matter even if it were true.
I say the moon doesn’t exist, and I have a PhD along with post-doctoral studies and over 20 peer reviewed papers and am inventor on close to a dozen US patents and a whole passel of foreign ones. I don’t write this because I like to brag but because it is evidence I’m correct. I am incapable of admitting mistakes so don’t bother. I will just ridicule you, ignore your evidence, change the topic, ask irrelevant questions and insist you provide something more concrete.
Like in:
Someone who likes to listen to Robert Schumann (double n), Wasily Kalinnikov or Aram Khachaturian is a closet commie.
Someone who likes to sing Hail Pennsylvania is a closet reactionary who wants to return to the good old days before 1776.
Having read something about Rick Santorum’s political ideas, there may be some truth in that one.
http://www.pennband.net/sounds/08-Track-08-Alma%20Mater.mp3
Napoleon’s effects were not entirely negative. He produced a code of laws so admired that it still forms the basis of civil law in non-English speaking countries and provinces (including Louisiana and Quebec). He spread the ideas of republican democracy (even if he often didn’t practice them) and emancipated Jews as well as Protestants. He may have done some of his good for the wrong reasons-personal glory and the consolidation of French empire-but I prefer someone who does god oout of bad motives to one who does bad out of good intentions.
Darn those typos-I prefer someone who does good out of bad motives to one who does bad out of good intentions.
It is unproven that Obama is a Marxist like it is unproven that Earth has a moon. People have told me I can look up and see it, but the cosmos are massive and I’m not going to waste my time looking around until I’ve got some concrete evidence.
I watched an hour-long video of someone who claimed to have been to the moon, but he didn’t include any evidence, only allegations. His speech was filled with logical fallacies and false generalizations. The fact that he had been there and is selling books about his experience demonstrates bias. Even if he went to the moon, he would need to also prove that he made it back. He was once interviewed on talk radio which decreases his credibility even further. I think he makes up these wild-eyed stories because he hates the earth. Desperate haters are going to hate. Even if he had been to the moon, it was many years ago so I can’t trust his memory. This astronaut is clearly trapped in the past. Even if it was true that there was a moon, it isn’t necessarily true anymore. People change and so does space.
I googled the moon and got lots of hits, but searching for Obama Marxist returns 9.6 million hits and we know all that means nothing. I could actually read some of the evidence, but why waste my life on these infinite truths when everyone knows it is just cranks who say things like that. It doesn’t matter even if it were true.
I say the moon doesn’t exist, and I have a PhD along with post-doctoral studies and over 20 peer reviewed papers and am inventor on close to a dozen US patents and a whole passel of foreign ones. I don’t write this because I like to brag but because it is evidence I’m correct. I am incapable of admitting mistakes so don’t bother. I will just ridicule you, ignore your evidence, change the topic, ask irrelevant questions, demand you disprove my evidence, and insist you provide something more concrete. I fit in very well on this site.
Louisiana is the only state that does not use the UCC; they still use the Napoleonic Code.
Also, Joseph-Napoléon Bonaparte, the elder brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, lived here in Philly for several years. When I walk by his house, I sometimes see his ghost. Just the other day, I bumped into Joseph-Napoléon and Elvis in the frozen food isle. Great guys.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Bonaparte
I quite agree but two or three years ago the City of Los Angeles tried to have some kind of Wagner season at their Concert Hall and you should have seen the reactions… I love Wagner, I’m not blind to his nazi connections, but the wounds are still fresh, and yet the music is beautiful. It’s a tough one.
Which is why I get angry at seeing Elmer Fudd PHD tromp like a drunk elephant on a subject where angels tread softly.
In the late 80s I was in Moscow working on a film and the Russians wanted as a visual short cut to use Hitler and Napoleon to symbolize villainy; as the film was a French co-production we had to politely explain that the image of Napoleon may not be seen in such dark light in other countries.
And of course this is all very true. We kind of owe him the Metric System, too.
Johnny,
This thread has never gone off track–the topic is the accuracy of your observations and the reliability of your analysis, both of which have been examined and found wanting. This thread (and the previous one) provides documentation of your lack of integrity and competence which suggests that the reason you are a failed academic is due to your inability to publish rather than affirmative action.
By the way, a work with a measly 7 citations in 30 years isn’t very important in my book.
I suggest that once we pay up (and give back the metric system) we should use the FFF system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFF_system
It’s easy–for instance the speed of light is almost 1.8 Terafurlongs per fortnight
– conspiracy debunker
Thank you. That pretty much describes how a lot of these posters seem to me, at least.
I don’t see how any reasonable person can doubt young Obama was a Marxist socialist. It makes perfect sense given the entire arc of his life story.
If he was not a Marxist socialist, then it takes the genius of Nicolaus Copernicus to make sense of young Obama’s ties to other Marxist socialist friends, allies and mentors.
– Slartibartfest
How am I a “failed” academic? I won a rare, prestigious award from the American Political Science Association. I won a job at the nation’s number one rated liberal arts college. My best academic work is now published as book chapters. I quit being an academic because the pay was ridiculously low, I wanted to live in Southern California, and affirmative action meant that I would have spent the rest of my life in situations where I was afflicted by anti-white hatred and anti-white racial discrimination. I never quit being a political scientist, however. Those skills are on display here as I easily debunked your silly assertion about the value of Karl Marx as a theorist.
In the country we still use fathoms, ells and bushels. I kid you not.
Wagner was a proto-Nazi. His daughter Winifred was an actual member of the Nazi Party.
The top piano in the States is the Steinway. The top piano in Europe is the Bechstein. Frau Bechstein financed Hitler’s early political campaigns.
Kevin
Just lay it out simply for me exactly what principle of Marxism Obama was applying when he bailed out GM and Big Banks, and sold their stock back onto the market?
From what I can see, Obama is to Marxism like Big Bird is to Ornothology.
Please Johnny,
Your “major award” was for your work as a student, your book chapters have been cited 7 times in 30 years and you can’t shut up about how butt-hurt you are over getting canned by Williams three decades ago. In addition, your grasp of political science doesn’t seem to have risen above propagandizing memes that are indistinguishable from FOX News talking points. “failed academic” seems pretty accurate to me.
By the way, “debunking” me would have required you to actually discuss the principles of Marxism and show that they don’t underlie any of modern mainstream political and economic thought–once again “failure” seems to be the word that suits you best…
Many times in college, I sat and talked about Christianity with my Christian friends. Apparently you find it implausible that I was not a Christian.
I don’t know about your college experience, but I for one searched out people who were different from me- I talked- argued- philosophy, religion, economics, the arts with lots of people. I attended Palestinean meetings, and Jewish meetings. I took a class in Marxist Economic theory. I also took a class in folk dancing.
This is the thing I dislike about your posts- its all pure speculation. You make assumptions(if he talked to Marxists or is friends with Marxists, he must be one) that pretty much anyone who went to college knows are not even educated assumptions.
You claim you have memories of a conversation of such a discussion with Obama but none of the other people who you claim were there will corroborate your story.
Nobody else recalls Obama being a fervant Marxist but you- and you claim you met him a total of twice.
The rest are the speculations of ‘an award winning political science’ who shys away from actual discussion of substance about Marxism as it applies to President Obama.
Seriously that is just sad. Your comment “Why would I” is as close minded as that of any fervent Marxist. I happen to have many deeply conservative friends. I have many Christian friends, and Muslim friends. There are good people who disagree with me as to how things should be, but we relate on many other things.
Frankly, I think we now know why you apparently have no friends from your college years.
“Second, the details of my life certainly match the facts as I have stated them. I have date photos of me and Boss together which indicate I was on the west coast during the moments in question, I have dated cards and letters from her in my possession which verify our relationship. Remnick verifies she was Obama’s classmate. Accordingly, I don’t think it is implausible to anyone that I met and debated Obama during the time period I have indicated. ”
Implausible? Did anyone ever say it was ‘implausible’? I think we all pointed out that memories of such fleetings conversations 30 years later seem implausible, and that it seems implausible that no one but yourself remembers such conversations.
Is it implausible that your memory is incorrect? Is it implausible that you are lieing in order to gain a measure of notoriety? No.
“Third, despite what you say about me, there is nothing in my life that indicates I would be a liar.”
Actually there is. You repeatedly claim articles say things they don’t say. Even when the actual quotes are printed you continue to claim the author is inferring something that isn’t printed.
” I have no criminal record, I’ve never spent a day in jail, I’m a married man, a business owner who makes a living as a speaker, author and consultant. I have unusual credentials as a political scientist. ”
The same could be said for Barack Obama. No criminal record, never a day in jail, married with a family. A successful author, speaker and politician, with unusual credentials as a lawyer. Oddly enough though, Barack Obama doesn’t mention being the head of Harvard Law Review every time he speaks.
“By all accounts, my wife and I have taken significant personal and financial risks to get this story out. I would think that the fact that my story is still being discussed for almost four years now should be evidence that it is credible to a substantial number of people on the left and the right.
What personal risks? Seriously what are the personal risks? And this blog is the first time I have heard of you….indicating that ‘a substantial number of people’ isn’t that significant- considering we are in the same state.
No stain is more indelible than an association with Nazism. Thanks to them, the swastika has practically been erased from Western culture. There are turn of the (last) century building all over Oklahoma with the symbol literally in the brickwork.
I don’t think anyone need feel quilty over appreciating Wagner. He isn’t getting royalties anymore …. is he? In pop culture here, he’s probably more associated with Apocalypse Now than the blitzkrieg.
“conspiracy debunker”
Posting the same nonsense on 2 threads under different names. A class act
John Drew (not PhD until shows degree): I note your use of the term “Marxist socialist” implies that there are non-Marxist sociaists.
Thanks for the memories. I still have the VMS 4 microfiche. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFF_system#Microfortnight )
– sfjeff
I guess you went through college seeking a wide diversity of friends. I didn’t do that. Neither did young Obama.
Check out Obama’s own words from Dreams, p. 100. Obama writes:
“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully.”
Obama’s roommate, Hasan Chandoo, was an admitted Marxist socialist according to David Remnick’s book, The Bridge. Are you really arguing that Obama picked Chandoo to be his off-campus roommate simply because he enjoyed the stimulation of talking politics with a fellow he vehemently disagreed with? Please, you are starting to get very silly, even ridiculous. 🙂
So you admit, once again, that you are a Marxist?
In my view, it is implausible that a young Drew, so proud of his awards won as a Marxist student, would abandon the personal philosophy that contributed so much to his one and only life’s achievement.
So you admit, once again, that you are a Marxist?
In my view, it is implausible that a young Drew, so proud of his awards won as a Marxist student, would abandon the personal philosophy that contributed so much to his one and only life’s achievement.
This whole discussion is bogus because it has already been asserted by experts that nobody remembers Obama in College.
Oops. Tricked by the back button.
– Keith
You are missing that I have a fairly detailed and complex conversion story which describes why I stopped being a Marxist socialist. Where is Obama’s conversion story?
I’m a Groucho Marxist.
Hey everyone: new joke. Thank you. I’ll be here all week.
Ah, conversion stories.
I was raised a Southern Baptist which embraced a theology of conversion, or decision — a moment in time where one changed from not being a Christian to being one. Conversions often involved cathartic emotional displays at the altar. This view was one of some confusion to us who were raised Christian and had no clear decisive change.
What I have observed and what I have read is that those who undergo dramatic conversions from one ideology to another tend to be very strong partisans against what they were, and for what they become. I think Dr. Drew is probably a good example of this phenomenon.
What I also find in the “converted” is a certain dogmatism and inflexibility, a very “black and white” understanding of where they came from and what they became.
You’d really think so. How can someone who confuses Marx and Lenin on the one hand and God and Lenin on the other have been a political science scholar?
Oh wait, we are forgetting he got the sack.
He was never a marxist according to logic, reason and as evidenced by his own friends who actually knew him.
Now what?
Michele Bachmann’s conversion from Democrat to Republican via the historical fiction of Gore Vidal, is just one of many examples of the phenomenon you describe.
And you still haven’t shown me how to recognize an ex-Marxist so that I can decide if Obama is an ex-Marxist or not.
If you can be an ex-Marxist, then I suppose Obama can be an ex-Marxist too, maybe. Please help.
According to one theory life on earth was seeded from Mars, so we may all be ex-Marsists.
Since you were a real good friend of Barack’s why don’t you call him and ask? I’m serious. Every so often i will get a call from an old college friend that I haven’t seen in 20 or 30 years. I happened to get one just this past Saturday. Barack may have kept his story private. Maybe even Michelle doesn’t know. But just for old time’s sake, he might be happy to recount it to you. Then you can come back and tell us. Try him tonight. Once Congress gets back he will be busier.
Note: I deleted the PhD from your name. I will continue to do so until you present a transcript.
Or Bugs Bunny:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2VMqQ6XnmI&noredirect=1
Yeah, no surprise there….
FIFY.
Note the pattern in your personal problems here: Very few friends, very little experiece spending time with others outside of whatever kooky extremist over-reactionary views you held at the time…and a “conversion” story that just shows you’ve been nothing but radical and extreme and fringe in your views your entire life. You’ve only transitioned from one high-strung irrational position to another. Sounds utterly unstable.
Sorry, that’s a pretty sad and pathetic life story, IMO.
I completely agree. That is my experience and impression of encountering such people too.
Reminds me also of the extreme attitudes of the “militant” ex-smokers and ex-drinkers out there…
😉
So? I want to go back to Park Slope in Brooklyn. Can’t afford it.
1 – This is not Stormfront.
2 – Are you equally incensed by affirmative action for the wealthy?
I have written several times before about two people I know well, who made substantial donations to endowments, and were admitted with a C average.
Why does affirmative action for the ordinary inflame you, but affirmative action for the wealthy soothes you?
You know one interesting thing I’ve noticed about the birthers and ODS crowd is that when it suits them, they pull something out of “Dreams From My Father” and accord it the status of Gospel truth. But then in the next sentence they will call Obama a liar.
“Dreams” is a memoir. It is impressionistic. Nowhere is there a sworn statement that everything in the book is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It’s Dreams From My Father”,not “Facts About My Father”. My sense of the book is it is not intended to be a rigorous historical work. For example, Obama recounts conversations from early childhood almost word-for-word. Can a person in their 30s actually remember a conversation when they were 5 word-for-word or recall exactly how they felt some day when they were 8? I couldn’t and I doubt anyone else can. It’s a book, a personal story, not a scientific paper or court document.
Note: I took John’s PhD away for bad behavior
That certainly sounds like our johnny. I’m also wondering about johnny’s “complex and detailed” conversion story–it sounds like he’s never heard of Ockham’s razor. I wonder if the dogmatism and inflexibility are a result of the type of person (i.e. someone–like johnny–who is uncomfortable with the power and breadth of the scientific worldview or just doesn’t understand it) or the manner of conversion (i.e. “complex and detailed” vs. “epiphany”). Probably a combination of both along with the inherent dogmatism and inflexibility of whatever belief they are being converted to. Thanks for the insight, Doc.
I stamped his meal card, “NO DESSERT”
How can he have any pudding if he wont eat his meat?
Take away his Smiley Face sticker student award and he’ll probably lose bowel control while collapsing into a fetal position and sobbing uncontrollably.
We don’t need no…. education….
Yeah, but a belligerent, desperate, puerile, pseudo-intellectual, egomaniacal fright wing crusader and Limbaugh wannabe would be much more closely related to the rings of Uranus.
It’s sad to see so much time and effort go into an education that didn’t take. All in all drjohn”iputthe’pesudo’inpseudo-intellectual”drewphd is just another brick in the wall.
I converted to the Episcopal world where we are very dogmatic and inflexible about via media. Our grey area is extremely black and white.
Are there places I can go to be afflicted by anti-white hatred because I don’t seem to get any of that type of lovin’ here? Are the classes I can take so I will know that I am hated for my whiteness?
We don’t need no thought control.
– Scientist
I guess you were the only one posting here noticing that I’m scoring points. ;_)
The issue of this thread, as I understand it, is whether or not there is reliable evidence that young Obama was a Marxist socialist. To me, it is obvious that young Obama was a Marxist socialist because I saw it with my own eyes. Until someone else comes out and verifies my take on young Obama, pro-Obama folks will try to weaken my claim by pointing out I’m the only person in the world providing evidence of young Obama’s ideological extremism.
Of course, I’m also the only one who is providing any detailed information at all about young Obama’s views, I’m certainly the only one reporting actual concepts that Obama argued and actual scraps of conversation with him during the 1980/1981 phase of his life.
The larger issue is my current assertion that it is implausible that young Obama surrounded himself with other Marxist socialists without being a Marxist socialist himself. I think some of the most convincing evidence I can provide is that Obama – in his own words – some 15 years later asserted that he choose his friends with a great deal of consideration. Obama wrote this prior to revelations that the people closest to him at Occidental (like Boss and Chandoo) were committed Marxist socialists.
Obama indicates that he took great care in choosing friends like Chandoo – his sophomore year roommate – on page p. 100 of Dreams. After all, Obama writes:
“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully.”
This piece of evidence is highly consistent with my own story regarding meeting young Obama in 1980/1981. I chose my friends carefully too. I considered myself an enemy of the U.S. government, a revolutionary who was willing to die to bring about a socialist transformation of our nation’s power structure. Why would anyone “carefully” choose an admitted Marxist socialist like Hasan Chandoo for a friend unless they were also a Marxist socialist?
Scientist, I’m a “real” proven scientist with verifiable credentials. I have supplied copies of my transcripts to historians like Stanley Kurtz and David Garrow. For you, however, this link provides you with an article that includes a linnk to the American Political Science Association website. http://anonymouspoliticalscientist.blogspot.com/2010/01/victory-is-so-sweet-for-those-who-have.html
There you can not only verify my Ph.D. but also check on its award winning status. I don’t think it is fair for you to suggest that my status as an award-winning Ph.D. in political science is even an issue.
I never suggested that he vehemently disagreed with anyone. See, when I was in college- which was very much in the same time frame as you and young Barack, the people i met and chose to hang out with were curious, and respectful of one another. We could be friends even if we disagreed philosophically on something.
Now what about room mates?
I never once chose a room mate in college because I agreed or disagreed with his politics. I don’t know how you went about it- since i wasn’t a Marxist- but my journey usually started at the College room board- where people posted looking for roommates. If the price was right, and the place was tolerable, and the guy or guys reasonably tolerable, then that was where I ended up.
Frankly, everytime you post I wonder how come your college experience was so at odds with mine.
Why for instance did I have a wide variety of friends while you admittedly insulated yourself into a very narrow experience.
Why am I still in touch with a large number of my friends from college- and not one of them would hesitate to vouch for any mutual experiences, while you can’t seem to get anyone to admit to knowing you in college?
Why are you still using a student award from 30 years ago to promote yourself? Seriously- who does that?
But most importantly of all- why do you prefer to talk about Presidential sexual preferences instead of lecturing us on how President Obama has been implementing Marxist policy for the last 3 years?
Surely no ‘award winning’ political scientist would miss out on such an opportunity.
Sorry John.
Your story doesn’t ring true to me at all. You continue to inflate your own importance, while minimizing the facts- which is that the only one who is telling your story is you.
None of the others who were supposedly there will confirm your story.
Everything else that is not your direct testimony is pure speculation.
You have attempted to mislead readers here as to what other authors have said, you make references to the ‘great personal risk’ you and your wife have taken- without explaining what the personal risk is- nor why you would put your wife at such risk.
John- I don’t believe you. .
Since I am in the library, I thought I would pull out page 100 of Dreams. Funny how selective you were with that quote.
Hey look- he mentioned foreign students…..like his roommate.
Looks like he hung out with all of the rebels. Imagine that- a college student hanging out with people like this. I have a hard time believing you were ever part of that world.
Me either. The only conclusion I can arrive at is jealousy. Possibly he caught Ms. Boss in bed with Obama, or perhaps he has just, over the years, built up a belief structure that blames an attractive, athletic, black man for being in the same group of acquaintances when Ms. Boss told him he was part of her history and not part of his future.
Or maybe his dick is really small, and he can’t help but be a racist.
Yeah, I said it lol.
Game, set, and match yet?
Dr. C, can we find some new trolls?
– sfjeff
It is tedious to wade through the silly personal attacks on me to address the real issues. The point I’d like to make is that Hasan Chandoo was not just a roommate. He was a lifelong friend. Chandoo attended Obama’s wedding to Michelle, contributed heavily to Obama’s presidential campaign, and has attended events at the White House. I don’t think there is evidence to suggest that Obama’s relationship with Chandoo was a limited as you are asserting in your comments above. As I have said elsewhere, when I first saw Chandoo and Obama the looked like wealthy gay lovers…not random roommates. The bottom line is that young Obama chose his friends “carefully” and a lot of them were Marxist socialists – like me – at the time.
Any fair-minded person reading these posts and the supporting links would conclude that Obama was a Marxist radical in college.
Whatever you say about Dr. Drew, he has spent more hours with Obama than just about anyone on the planet, certainly anyone on this site. Yet you mostly ridicule him rather than attempting to learn something that doesn’t conform to your pre-conceived worldview.
I read enough of these posts to see that many of you are educated and smart, but yet something is wrong. You seem incapable of being rational about certain topics. But even within these topics, you are lucid.
There is a lifetime of data that demonstrates Obama’s radical views, and how they have not changed. Learn about Black liberation theology, the Midwest Academy, his years being involved with Saul Alinsky, his childhood mentors, his voting record in both Senates, his statements and actions as President, etc. Of course he is constrained by political realities, but you can also consider intentions.
I’d also point out that statements by Obama in support of free markets are not necessarily conclusive on the matter because Obama frequently says whatever is politically expedient at the time. This video explains:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjhznUNeHKA
You are asking me to disprove your evidence of non-Marxism. This is one of your tactics of distraction which prevents you from having to consider other people’s evidence.
I would prefer to get you to see all the evidence of pro-Marxism, starting with Dr. Drew’s experiences with Obama in college.
In any case, I think your words disprove your own arguments! Bailouts are a 21st-century Marxist idea. Also, a bunch of the ownership of the car companies went to the unions, which are proto-Marxist. Bailing out banks is a way to take control of them.
There is a lifetime of radicalism in Obama. Learn about: Black liberation theology, the Midwest Academy, his years being involved with Saul Alinsky, his childhood mentors, his voting record in both Senates, etc.
In conclusion: If you don’t think bailouts are Marxist, you don’t understand Marxism and bailouts.
I know you take your shots at Dr. Drew and me, but all I can say is that the evidence for our position is vast. Whatever disorders that satire leads you to conclude I suffer from, you should consider you have them as well. That post is an attempt to mimic your mindset.
Once you consider Obama’s Marxism, you can then consider whether Ayers wrote Dreams, whether Obama was a lover to Donald Young, etc.
You all might be smart and stuff, but Dr. Drew and I are generally way ahead of you on the facts. I meet many people incapable of admitting they were incorrect. I work in the world of software, where the computer constantly points out my mistakes. I could recommend humility as a step towards considering new ideas.
I’ll add that Obama has people who tell him that his worldviews are wrong. He knows his stimulus package was a failure and didn’t live up to its own promises. However, he cannot admit this because it would hurt his approval rating. Because he doesn’t think his stimulus package has failed, he doesn’t propose new ones. Or to put it another way, he can’t offer a new stimulus package without admitting his previous one was a failure.
One day history will know most of the truths about Obama, certainly more than is generally accepted in polite circles and on this site.
“Wake up, little boys. We live in an Orwellian-world. You’ve got the birth certificate issue down, but there is a lot more.”
If William Buckley were here, that is what he would say to you all.
I think at this point we have genuinely exhausted any possibilities of meaningful discussions with Elmer Fudd PHD and his little minion above.
The posters here have repeatedly and incontrovertibly established the following facts:
1) There is nothing intrinsically wrong with being a “Marxist” or a “Soc ialist” and it does not automatically mean that one is a supporter of Lenin, Stalin or Pol Pot. One might instead be a supporter of Golda Meir, Olaf Plame or Francois Mitterand, to name but three enlightened leaders.
2) Whatever economic theories Obama may or may not have believed, or merely researched, while in college — something which has not been factually established — his current policies as President are clearly pro-Wall Street and moderately to the right of the policies of earlier Republican Presidents such as Richard Nixon or George H W Bush, hence he is anything but “radical”.
3) The only thing we know for certain about Obama’s sexuality is that he went out with girls while in college, and that he is, and has been for a long time, happily married to Michelle, according to all outward appearances, and they have two lovely daughters. (Not that there would be anything wrong with him experimenting with bisexuality while in college, but again, we have no evidence to that effect; rather the opposite.)
4) Mars, bitches! (google it)
From the other side of the aisle, we have heard, repeated ad nauseam, irrational and unsubstantiated rumors, extreme racist theories, a lot of ignorant tripe (the prize going to the minion above who equated Teddy Roosevelt with Marx) and a lot of self-aggrandizement.
Once deserves a honest answer; twice or three times becomes tiresome, but we’re now on the fourth or fifth iteration of the same rubbish, by a man who is clearly mildly delusional.
I think at this point we should just stop humoring the crazy man.
The one golden rule of this forum is: if you don’t want to be ridiculed, don’t be ridiculous.
It really is quite simple.
You are asking me to disprove your evidence of non-Marxism. This is one of your tactics of distraction which prevents you from having to consider other people’s evidence.
Swap “which prevents” with “emplyed to protect” and you have a better sentence. Still messy, but better. You are making a claim, and, in lieu of producing support for it, you are demanding others to prove your claim wrong. Until you produce any reason for thinking your claim correct, there is nothing to disprove. You have been provided cause for doubting the case that Obama is a Marxist, and yet you persist. You and your buddy Drew also persist in refusing to define by what you consider to be “Marxist”.
I would prefer to get you to see all the evidence of pro-Marxism, starting with Dr. Drew’s experiences with Obama in college.
We know you would, so produce the evidence already. Define what you object to, and illustrate how Obama embodies it. Drew’s “experiences” are laughable anecdotes. I am sure you have more.
In any case, I think your words disprove your own arguments! Bailouts are a 21st-century Marxist idea. Also, a bunch of the ownership of the car companies went to the unions, which are proto-Marxist. Bailing out banks is a way to take control of them.
You think, but not rationally.
Bailouts Marxists?!? Nationalizations perhaps.
21st Century?!? See Panic of 1792, Panic of 1907, Roosevelt’s Home Owners’ Loan Corp, S&L Crisis, Penn Central Railroad, Lockheed, Franklin Nat’l Bank, City of New York, Chrysler (the first time!), Continental IL Nat’l Bank & Trust, the US Airline industry post 9/11, and perhaps the mother of them all, the South Sea Bubble.
Terms of “bailouts” vary widely. The US Gov’t very specifically did *not* take ownership of the banks you appear to be referring to; reference the gov’t inability to affect even their bonus plans immediately after bailing them out. The FDIC does assume control of failed institutions and organize their sale, generally over the course of a weekend, the gov’t does not retain ownership of those either.
In conclusion: If you don’t think bailouts are Marxist, you don’t understand Marxism and bailouts.
Indeed, the first clause proves you do not.
I know you take your shots at Dr. Drew and me, but all I can say is that the evidence for our position is vast.
A journey of a thousand steps, then. Take your time and lay it all out.
Once you consider Obama’s Marxism, you can then consider whether Ayers wrote Dreams, whether Obama was a lover to Donald Young, etc.
A clear logical fallacy. Your A is prequisite for B or C only in the sense that settling for stupid only hurts the first time. 😉
You all might be smart and stuff …
Gee whiz, thanks.
… but Dr. Drew and I are generally way ahead of you on the facts.
… and you stubbornly insist on keeping them to yourself. One must assume.
I meet many people incapable of admitting they were incorrect. I work in the world of software, where the computer constantly points out my mistakes. I could recommend humility as a step towards considering new ideas.
We’ve been having a rash of earthquakes here in Okieland. Please consider our delicate fault lines when testing the limits of our irony meters.
I’ll add that Obama has people who tell him that his worldviews are wrong. He knows his stimulus package was a failure and didn’t live up to its own promises. However, he cannot admit this because it would hurt his approval rating. Because he doesn’t think his stimulus package has failed, he doesn’t propose new ones. Or to put it another way, he can’t offer a new stimulus package without admitting his previous one was a failure.
What people are those? Republicans in Congress? No bias there!
Unsubstantiated claim re: stimulus which flies in the face of available data.
He hasn’t proposed a new stimulus? Remove head from sand and consider American Jobs Act.
He can’t? He already has!
One day history will know most of the truths about Obama, certainly more than is generally accepted in polite circles and on this site.
Sure we will. Information is collated and refined over time. That’s how scholarship evolves.
Nice implication that the truth is not “polite”, and failure to include OCT under the aegis of “polite circles”.
“Wake up, little boys. We live in an Orwellian-world. You’ve got the birth certificate issue down, but there is a lot more.”
If William Buckley were here, that is what he would say to you all.
Invoking authority! Buckley is intended to impress who? And why?
And what a slip! back to the BC! “It’s not just the BC! It’s not! It’s not! It’s not!” Always more. Are those goalposts R/C?
Yes, you’n’Drew are stuck in an Orwellian hell of your own design. Walk out anytime.
FIFY.
ROTFLMAO!!!
Wow.. seriously??? So, at most 2 brief encounters of merely being in the same room during 2 random parties over 30 years ago is “more hours spent” than “just about anyone on the planet” with someone?
What kind of isolated and imaginary world do you live in? You must really never get out of the house and interact with real people if you truly view that as “contact” with others and somehow “knowing” someone else.
Heck, anyone who’s attended even one of his full stump speeches has spent more dedicated time with him than that! …and that alone would be millions and millions of people.
You keep trying to top yourself in absolute absurdity, don’t you?
Oh KevinSB, rarely does someone merely project as much as you do… you need to stop having these conversations with your mirror in an open forum. All you are doing is merely putting your obvious pathologies on constant display.
LMAO!
Again…oh the IRONY!
Seriously, enough about you. We’re completely aware of your obvious limitations on full display here.
You truly live in a bizarre nightmare fantasy world that only exists within your own head.
Mildly???
You are truly being too kind. This level of obsessed crazy is way beyond “mild”. I would only expect to encounter such rabid delusions in mental wards…
Yep. That should be so obvious that it goes without saying. But then again, those without the mental and social capacity to grasp such concepts will always remain aware of their own faults and shortcomings. It really is a form of mental handicap on public display.
Should read: unaware, not aware. Ah… I need more coffee…
There are probably only a few hundred people who have spent more time with Obama than Dr. Drew. On a planet of 7 billion, that puts him in quite elite territory. One this website, he is by far the most valuable resource about Obama’s youthful thinking.
You should be interested in learning more about what he knows of Obama, instead of making him explain why his academic record makes him worth even listening to. This is just a distracting tactic that wastes everyone’s time, and is used to prevent your having to admit your errors. You should be honored he would spend your time with you, and you should be curious to learn more from him about Marxism, and Obama.
Finding the truth is hard enough when you are looking for it. I can safely say that various of you don’t seem to be. I’m not really interested in explaining Obama to you, but I am very curious to understand why piles of evidence, like this:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/11/027655.php
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/11/027712.php
Seem to not cause you to change your perspective. Beyond all the points we are making, I can say that if you are not objectively absorbing facts, you will not develop. Don’t you know this?
Piles of dung, more precisely.
Or since when is arguing from a false premise (“since Obama almost certainly was already a socialist when he came to New York, it is highly unlikely that Obama attended on that basis”) or from false association (“because community organizing was something socialists did, all community organizers were socialists”) or from false negation (“there is nothing to suggest that Obama stopped being a socialist”) actually “evidence”?
I might just as well say “since GWB almost certainly is a lizard alien, it is highly unlikely he supported NASA for other reasons than being from space” or “because lizard aliens love football, all quarterbacks are lizard aliens” or “there is nothing to suggest GWB stopped raping sheep” and call that “evidence”. Right.
Wow, Kevin, you really amped up the creepy here with the wannabe guru influencer speak. Is this a Scientology routine? You should stop proselytizing for Drew and be your own man. You do sound like you have achieved emptiness, it may be too late … Tip: If a large man carrying a sword takes an interest in your robe, just give him the robe.
Ah, les vacances que j’ai passé en Mars avec mes parents á Mars, Pennsylvanie. (yes, I am one of the die-hards who refuse (or refuses?) to write passées)
Translation in English: the only bar that Orly Taitz could ever conceivably have passed in her whole life, is a Mars bar. Although she once famously claimed she can do a close bar circle element.
Until Drew apologizes for saying I had praised Stalinist thugs, I am only talking about Mars here.
On the planet Mars that would give him a 100% majority.
All the people who were present at those two Drew meetings (and on many more occasions) and who have written about it, have given a totally different picture. It does not matter whether he is one of five or one of three hundred who met him twice. Statistically, John Drew’s acquaintance with Obama is a mote of dust from the planet Mars.
At one meeting with Obama, there were more than a million people present. Are you saying that the number among those who met Obama on at least one other occasion is less than a few hundred? Just using statistics, the number of people from Mars who saw Obama on that occasion must be something like five (probably a bit higher, in view of the proximity of Mars).
You are economical with your mathematics.
Excuse me if I don’t consider political “science” a real science. Nor economics, either. That isn’t to say they aren’t valid intellectual disciplines, but they are not really sciences in which testable hypotheses are fallsified by real-world data. You, sir, may have a PhD but you are no scientist.
Really? By Drew’s own admission he spent a few hours total. So that is absurd.
Really? is there something the great Drew hasn’t told us? He met the guy once, maybe twice, 30 years ago. No one knows another person. Most don’t even really know themselves most of the time. All Drew has is impressions filtered through his own mind. It is possible that Drew had a gay crush on Obama, was rejected and hasn’t gotten over it, all these years later. Drew certainly lives in the past-college and his grad school award are all he talks about. But, really, who knows?
Who bailed out the banks? The Troubled Asset relief program (TARP) was signed by President Bush on Oct 3, 2008, a month before Obama was elected and 3 months before he took office. Although it was supposed to buy assets, on Oct 14,Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson announced that the Treasury would use the money to buy preferred shares and warrants in the 9 largest US banks. It has been reliably reported that at a meeting at Treasury some of the banks said they did not need or want the money and were told by Paulson that they had to accept it.
So were Bush and Paulson Marxists?
FAIL! Obviously, you have little grasp of basic math as well.
Sorry, but John’s embellished claims, even taken at face value, represent such brief and inconsequential encounters with someone that they hardly rise above bumping into someone you don’t actually know in the grocery store on a few occasions and merely recognizing that you’ve seen them there before and noticed what was in their cart.
It is so pathetically tenuous a claim of “knowing” someone that it doesn’t even merit consideration.
So someone like Obama, who’s campaigned all around the country and traveled all around the world, having many real conversations with real people all the time has easily spent more direct “quality” time with many MILLIONS of other people over his lifetime than anything analogous to John’s inconsequential experience.
The efforts to become President and the duties of being President alone puts someone in the position of meeting more people during that timeframe than most people will experience in their entire lifetime. Heck, his job of being a community organizer in Chicago alone put him in more quality contact with hundreds and hundreds of individuals way beyond anything that John can claim. All of those individuals from just those small samples of interaction within his life have stronger direct ties and experiences with Obama than John ever had.
You must really not get out of the house much and interact with people or go to many parties. I can’t think of any other rational explanation for how you can so easily be duped and think such casual and tenuous encounters have any meaning at all.
Heck, for well over a decade I threw some big parties at my own house and there are some people who showed up several years in a row that even appear in pictures with me that to this day that I still have very little idea who they are or who they came with, without a great deal of reminder from someone else who might know. When those others remind me, they’ll point out that this person unknown to me still talks about those parties and can rattle off detailed stories to others of having been at my house and meeting me, but I neither know them nor do they have any idea of who I am or how I live or think or what I believe based on those brief but fun moments.
The bottom line here is that such inconsequential encouters happen all the time in life (or at least in most people’s lives). Especially at parties. That’s a pretty typical and common social occurance that most people experience at many points throughout their life. Merely being in the same room with someone once or twice, even if you ended up swapping some small-talk or shared a joke together, doesn’t mean anything at all and most certainly doesn’t rise to the level of “knowing” someone is any meaningful sense of the term. Heck, it doesn’t even mean that you’ll remember that other person or that fleeting conversation even mere days later…let alone decades.
Simply put, why should I care what some random individual with a blog thinks or says?
What qualifies them to be any authority on a certain topic at all? More importantly, where does their screed interact with observable reality in what has actually taken place in this Administration in any real-world and pragmatic sense at all?
HINT: It doesn’t. You are such a gullible follower and sheep, aren’t you. Simply drawn like a moth to flame to anything someone can merely write or say, because it fits some preformed confirmation bias your own insecurites cause you to constantly seek out to reinforce your own imaginary fears. You lack the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction and just eat up what others say or tell you wholesale and then reguritate their talking points endlessly.
The rational and scientific mind is able to first observe and then evaluate and then judge from that. First you gain knowledge, then you seek to comprehend it, then you can analyse it and learn to apply it. Then you can synthesize what you learned and properly correlate it to other things you’ve learned as well. Only then have you properly gone through all the stages of objective learning in order to evaluate and cast judgement.
Minds like yours seem to simply work backwards. Starting with some preconceived conclusion and accepting any random tale someone “sells” you on gut faith and pure innuendo alone, because it conforms to that preconceived conclusion you have. Then you work to rationalize to yourself that it simply “must be true” and build your excuses to support and shore up that delusion..and repeat the cycle again and again by simply seeking out that which will reinforce your delusion and utterly ignoring everything out there that might burst your little bubble. Hence, why actual critical thinking abilities and even the real basic concept of “evidence” is even beyond your grasp.
Which was both a more entertaining (and sadly even credible) topic than this diversion of bottom of the barrel Trolls. I’d much rather go back to the Mars story too.
Actually, I believe the S & L baiilout was Bush, Sr. Reagan bailed out Chrysler, though (remember Lee Iacocca?).
Now here’s a question for Kevin or the non-scientist Drew-If Obama as a Marxist wants the government to own the means of production, why did he sell all of the bank shares and warrants that the government acquired under Bush/Paulson? Why has he already sold most of the GM shares that were acquired under his Administration and is in the process of selling the rest as market conditions make that profitable.
Sorry, Obama, like me, is a capitalist who wants to buy low and sell high. Smart man. Kevin and Drew, not so much. My guess is that if either of them ever owned a share of any stock, they sold them when Obama took office. Me? I bought hand over fist at the March 2009 lows and am sitting very pretty. Thank you, Barack, for making me $$$$.
Ah, yes. Henry Paulson – former CEO of Goldman Sachs:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/hank-paulsons-crony-capitalism-20111201
And “The Great American Bubble Machine”
(excerpt) By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush’s last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton’s former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There’s John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multi-billion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain’s sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There’s Joshua Bolten, Bush’s chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman . . .
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405
And my favorite:
‘It’s time to enshrine Hank Paulson as national hero’ … what the [expletive deleted]?
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/22177
These are significant facts and actual history you won’t hear about on Fox News or from Limbaugh, Hannity or the fright wing talk radio echo chamber.
Why is that?
Well, I think I can guess why my comment went into moderation.
But perhaps this link is o.k. with regards to:
“So were Bush and Paulson Marxists?”
It’s time to enshrine Hank Paulson as national hero’ … what the [expletive deleted]?
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/22177
I don’t agree with TARP. I think it was a Marxist-like program. So was taking over Chrysler.
The original argument was that bailouts are proof he wasn’t a Marxist. As if the government taking over an industry is somehow not something which leads towards the Marxist goal of the government ownership of the means of production.
Note that Obama is also taking over healthcare, student loans, buying toxic loans, etc. Even how Bush handled Tarp was very different than what Obama has done.
Furthermore, the government is not out of bed with the banks. Here is just one article on that topic:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/aug/26/obamas-next-big-bank-bailout/
Anyway, my point was a simple one: bailouts are NOT proof of someone not being a Marxist. It is like saying that getting drunk is proof of not being an alcoholic. It is a totally nonsensical statement. Now we can go into all these other topics, but I would prefer to go slowly.
I don’t know what you are talking about, all I’m saying is that:
1. Saul Alinsky is a Marxist.
2. He had a powerful influence on Obama, years after Obama quit spending time with Dr. Drew
You ramble on about him, but never discuss the reason why he is relevant. You just change the topic and insult me. It doesn’t bother me or anything, it is very curious.
I am coming to wonder if you won’t consider Saul Alinsky because I bring it up. Is that why you are irrational — because you choose to completely ignore statements made by people who disagree with you? If you research you, you will find he was a Marxist, and he had a major influence on Obama’s development. He taught Alinsky!
I’ll also point out that you don’t see the connection between Black Liberation theology as practiced at Trinity United Church and Marxism. That is because you haven’t read about it.
You didn’t refute the Marxism in the Midwest Academy. I’m presuming it is because you aren’t familiar with it. You say you aren’t aware of any Marxism in Obama’s childhood mentors, but that either means you don’t know the names or background of them. Another example where you criticize me, but I’m the one finding holes in your knowledge. I could add many other data points as well.
Commie Kevin: In your anti-Obama foolishness, you attack the heart and soul of American capitalism, the stock market. Here is a graph showing the performance of the S&P 500 under Presidents since Hoover. http://www.usmessageboard.com/economy/64052-stock-market-performance-by-president.html
Obama isn’t on it, because his term isn’t over yet but his performance to date is up 60%, which ranks pretty well. And yes, I’ve heard the whole list of excuses as to why the market is up under Obama. I don’t care. I want to make money. I have. I don’t care why.
Capitalist Scientist
Commie Kevin: I don’t know if anyone said bailouts are proof of not being a Marxist. I didn’t. Here are the facts:
1. Hank Paulson under Bush acquired shares in banks.
2. Tim Geithener under Obama sold them.
So who wanted to own the means of production?
Capitalist Scientist
So the mar
Now let us gather, and meditate upon this wisdom, class.
Wise words.
To Dr. Drew and KevinSB.
There is a reason why you are here on this blog and are not on FOX, CNN, NBC, ABC (no offense Dr. C). Also, you obviously have a problem with a few bloggers here that will not agree with your stances, for some reason they irk you too much.
Why has FOX never agreed to interview you? They are the most intrigued by negative storied about Obama. Dr. Drew, if your are so esteemed as you say, then you should have no problem landing an interview from any of these news outlets. If they can interview Orly, then you are a shoe-in.
What is the problem going national with this? If what you say is true, then you have nothing to lose. Let the whole world know, and quit hanging around here. For an award winning political scientist, you seem content with obscurity on blogs.(again, no offense to Dr. C)
Here was the point I was refuting.
The stock market is inflated because of the cheap currency, deficit spending, and low interest rates. This point you bring up has nothing to do with whether Obama is a Marxist. This is an example of you demanding me disprove your evidence rather than considering the better evidence that has already been provided.
Part of the reason the stock market is up is that the Republicans are in control of the House. Obama can’t take over any more industries, can no longer raise taxes, can no longer pass any of his 3,000-page pieces of legislation. The Ship of State of the US is not bailing out its water, but it is no longer taking any on. That is an improvement in the situation. You can thank the tea party for the good results of the stock market by installing Speaker Boehner.
I notice you avoided this question earlier, so I’ll ask it again….
KevinSB:
Let’s assume the ridiculous for a moment, and pretend that Obama is a Marxist.
If he is a Marxist, would that somehow preclude him from POTUS eligibility?
Is it illegal to be a Marxist in the US?
Is it illegal for a President to be a Marxist?
That’s all KevinSB could find in the tar-and-feather store.
Blah, blah blah, Pinko Kev. I told you I have heard every one of your excuses before and many others. Losers make excuses, winners make money.
From Jan 20, 2009 when Obama had a Democratic Congress until Jan 3, 2011 when the Republicans took over the House, the S&P 500 was up 58%
From Jan 3,2011 to toady, it is up 1%.
58% up under Pelosi, 1 % under Boehner.
The facts are just devastating to your case. Better stick to conjecture and innuendo, my friends.
By the way Commie Kevin are you a capiitalist? Do you actually invest?
Capitalist Scientist
A number of comments unrelated to the topic “Is calling someone a birther libelous” have been moved to this topic. I probably missed a bunch and fragmented the responses, but it serves folks right for straying off topic.
Doc please delete this from the other thread. Thanks. I would argue that “is Obama part of some shadowy Marxist conspiracy?” is not necessarily off-topic. PS-Have you considered software that would allow posters to edit their own posts within some defined time limit? Many sites have that.
Commie KevinSB: The stock market is inflated
Blah, blah blah, Pinko Kev. I told you I have heard every one of your excuses before and many others. Losers make excuses, winners make money.
Commie KevinSB: You can thank the tea party for the good results of the stock market by installing Speaker Boehner.
From Jan 20, 2009 when Obama had a Democratic Congress until Jan 3, 2011 when the Republicans took over the House, the S&P 500 was up 58%
From Jan 3,2011 to toady, it is up 1%.
58% up under Pelosi, 1 % under Boehner.
The facts are just devastating to your case. Better stick to conjecture and innuendo, my friend.
KevinSB,
You do know that you have lower taxes under President Obama than you did under President Bush, right? Or doesn’t that fit into the propaganda you’re trying to peddle…
The assumption that Commie Kevin knows anything is really out there Slarty. He has his conclusions. Don’t trouble him with facts, especially objectively verifiable ones like numbers, as opposed to “read this blog” or “listen to this video”.
So the Constitution means little to you. Not surprized.
Is it possible to define the term “Marxist” in such a way that does not include elements of nearly every economic school of thought? How do you describe “Marxism” without addressing certain basic fundamental concepts of labor and economics that are universal?
I never specified how I would make Marxism illegal!
It would depend on how it was written. I don’t see a law outlawing Marxism as necessarily being un-Constitutional. Note this is a separate question from the one you asked me. If it would require a Constitutional Amendment to make Marxism illegal, then that is the sort of law I would pass.
I hope you can see how you’ve changed the topic. You started with a moral question, and then changed to a procedural question, and an insult.
Unfortunately, there are not a lot of people working on this problem. People are proposing plans to fix and reform the existing systems. A law stating “Marxism is illegal” would presumably not immediately make Social Security outlawed, as a transition program needs to be created.
So a law to truly outlaw Marxism could be a very big thing, depending on how thorough it was. It is the other parts that are the complexity.
But to jump to some Constitutional question rather than discussing the morality question that you brought up is an example of a scattered thought process.
I have more respect for the Constitution than you do. I repeat that Marxism already is outlawed by the Constitution in a certain way via the doctrine of limited powers. So no law needs to be passed. Put another way, if the Federal government was behaving within the Constitution, the Marxism / collectivist / corporatist problem in the US would be much less.
One of Ron Paul’s major points is that the US government is acting un-Constitutionally every day with all of its big-government programs. You can also look at that as stating that Marxism is already outlawed.
Illegal is illegal my friend… Welcome to the dark side…
Sure, one can pass an amendment making free speech illegal, or return to slavery of our Founding Nation… But that hardly meets the spirit of our founding nation would it not? Why not make religion illegal? Whaddayathink…
58% up under Pelosi, 1 % under Boehner.
I didn’t realize it had grown so little. Note that it has its ups and downs. Right now it is 1%, but it is very volatile. If we had this discussion a few weeks before or a few weeks after, we would have different numbers.
Anyway, you can say that the stock market is holding steady, and that it would be worse off if Nancy were in charge. Our country is going bankrupt. Our credit rating was recently downgraded. That is more Nancy Pelosi’s fault than Boehners!
Anyway, the stock market is just one metric for Obama. All the others show things worse off.
Furthermore, even assuming the stock market gains could be because of Obama’s policies, you’d have to explain why. Do you think Obamacare has helped the stock market? I think it has hurt because mandates raise costs. If you analyze each of his actions individually, you will find out that they all hurt the stock market.
The point is that the success of stock market is in spite of Obama, not because of Obama. I guarantee if we kept on Obama’s course, we would become Greece. How is its market? We are on the titanic and the iceberg is up ahead, and you are confidently stating how find things are right now.
So never mind Obama’s policies are full steam ahead towards bankruptcy and civil unrest, never mind that he’s done very little to help fix the long-standing problems, never mind that he acts only through the realm of helping allies and punishing friends, just look at the stock market and have that be your sole criteria for how Obama’s doing. Sounds scarily simplistic to me.
I understand that you do not want the middle class to be strong. But a welfare state is such a loaded term. Let’s first realize that Capitalism has no regard for the work force, we see nowadays how the Republicans have moved towards destruction of the middle class, the destruction of unions, the destruction of legislation to protect our environment. Republicans have moved towards destruction of regulations, leading to the near collapse of our banking system and our financial systems. Republicans do support the top 1%, after all, those are exactly the people who are financing their ventures into politics.
A trend of total selfishness has overtaken the Republican party, and nothing good has been coming from ‘trickling down’ and other failed ideas.
A ‘welfare’ state cannot exist without a strong government, this is why government was created. To promote the welfare of the people of our nation. Since then we have granted corporations the same status as an individual, totally abandoning the original purpose to have them serve the benefit of the nation.
The government ‘distorting the market’ allows for a stronger middle class, it’s that absent a government, pure market forces would be distorting the market far worse. By any reasonable standards, workers in many european nations are faring much better than our workers who have seen no increase in their income compared to the top 1-2%. Income disparity is increasing, unions are being dismantled by government policies, education is being destroyed by those who believe that the government has no role here.
While I am not promoting Marxism and you are not promoting its logical equivalent of ‘capitalism’ we all agree that a middle of the road approach is needed. You appear to believe that governments have little roles in the market, while I believe that the Government, for the welfare of our Nation has no choice to be involved. And what you consider to be ‘market distortion’ I see as market restoration to have all benefit more equally.
It is not such a simple analysis. Obamacare raises taxes in various ways:
http://www.atr.org/comprehensive-list-tax-hikes-obamacare-a5758
The government doesn’t have one dial for raising or lowering taxes, it has hundreds of dials.
Furthermore, the tax cuts Obama fights for are very small and don’t do much. Mostly what he calls tax cuts are simply keeping laws that were about to expire. Obama doesn’t really believe in tax cuts. He didn’t come to Washington to lower taxes. Lowering taxes is not what motivates him. Unlike Reagan and Bush who did campaign on this platform.
In fact, Obama spends most of his time fighting for raising taxes. So it isn’t that I ignore evidence that doesn’t fit with my worldview. I just put it in a larger context, as one action among many with regards to the tax burden and the general economic results.
You really should put a disclaimer on your posts. Something like:
“Any resemblance to the reality-based world is purely coincidental”
or
“No brain cells were employed in the writing of this comment”
You realize this paragraph is complete rubbish?
I suggest that everywhere you use the word “Marxism”, you instead replace it with “Booga Booga”.
I will then be able to read your posts without shaking my head in amazed disbelief.
More nonsense. The given reasons by Standard & Poor’s for downgrading the credit rating:
1. Political brinkmanship, namely the Republican threats to refuse to raise the debt ceiling and allow the U.S. to default on its debt.
2. The failure to cut spending and raise revenue enough to reduce record budget deficits.
Boehner and the Tea Partiers in Congress are to blame for the brinkmanship over the debt ceiling.
Republicans and Democrats share the blame for spending.
Republicans, led by Boehner, are solely to blame for refusing to raise tax revenue.
Nancy Pelosi’s part in the credit rating downgrade was negligible.
Obama is using a tax policy to drive demand (lowering the tax rate) which leads to larger monthly income, which unlike a lump sum payment (Bush tax credit) is more likely to be used to buy goods rather than pay off debt, which at this moment is the best short term stimulus. Similarly, economic stimulus cost is offset by a small tax increase for those where the additional taxes will make little difference on their behavior, again optimizing the impact of the fiscal policy on immediate effects.
The reason that Obama has to ‘fight for raising taxes’ is because many of the Republicans have taken” oaths” not to raise any taxes, at any cost, having themselves be rendered without any means to influence our economy.
But that does not mean that the overall goal is to raise taxes, it’s to restore equity and balance.
You are right that Obama, on the long term is not that interested in fiscal policy of raising or lowering taxes, but he understands that our Nation is in a position where quick action is to be preferred over the long, and failed concept of ‘trickling down’. And this is where the Government has a role, nay a duty to intervene effectively, and decisively. Which is why the 2012 plans include a tax credit for companies who will return jobs to the United States, again optimizing the use of fiscal policies to drive economic growth and modify the behavior of corporations, who without such, would have no interests in the well being of our nation and our people.
That’s a fascinating example of denial…
The Republicans had plans to put the economy on a better path which would help our credit rating, but they were blocked by the Senate.
The reason Nancy Pelosi is more at fault for the credit downgrade is the massive deficits she ran as Speaker of the House. She moved us a lot closer to the iceberg than did John Boehner. She did other things as well. I measure Nancy Pelosi’s results by the laws she passed. Unfortunately, Boehner has not been able to pass many laws. You can blame him for inaction, but he is just a part of the equation. He can’t pass laws until the Senate acts and the President signs it.
The Republicans plan was Cut, Cap and Balance. It was a bold move that would have put the economy on a better footing and attack the budget deficit problem. So you can see that blaming Boehner when he’s made plans to fix our problems is quite silly and shows a fundamental lack of understanding of what is going on in DC.
We will stand for nothing and fall for everything.
We don’t have 10 Commandments, we have 10 Suggestions.
(I’m a proud Episcopalian)
– El Diablo Negro
My take on young Obama’s extremist ideology has appeared in books by Savage, Kurtz, Cashill and Kengor.
The Fox News website brought attention to my story just recently, see http://nation.foxnews.com/president-obama/2011/12/12/college-mate-obama-was-ardent-marxist-leninist
I was interviewed by Savage just last month on his radio program. My story has also been featured and publicized by Neal Boortz at http://www.boortz.com/weblogs/nealz-nuze/2011/sep/20/class-warfare-according-barack-obama-karl-marx/
Ironically, you maybe underestimating how important the Dr. Conspiracy website is among people who Google information on young Obama.
Whoa, take a step back here. You would first need to define “Marxism” in very specific terms. I find that few people who use the term “Marxism” are willing or able to define it. Defining the term weakens its usefulness, especially when one is forced to confront the fact that some aspect of “Marxism” are embraced in Western Capitalist Republics.
Are you suggesting that the republic currently makes it legal to wage an armed revolution for the purpose of creating a revolutionary proletariat dictatorship that is empowered to control all industrial and agricultural production for the general interests of the state? Because if so, I would suggest that any part of that would be confronted by existing laws, not to mention the defense that would be raised by members of the bourgeouisie, who would probably be able to defend their ownership even in the face of an attempted coup.
I really don’t think there are many people in the United States who are literally calling for a revolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism. And if you know of anyone who does do so, I would recommend that you contact the relevant law enforcement authorities before you allow them to act on their ambitions, and I would go further to say that failing to do so makes you complicit with criminal activity.
Instead of calling for laws against ideas that you haven’t defined or even described well, why don’t you identify the problem, and demand that existing laws be enforced against anyone who commits a crime?
Oh, but Rickey, you haven’t been paying attention to Commie Kevin’s Magical Unreality Tour Here are the 4 fold truths according to Commie Kevin:
1. If the Democrats are in control of any branch of government and something bad happens, it’s their fault.
2. If the Democrats are in control of any branch of government and something good happens it was due to some outside event or due to something the Republicans did in a prior time or will do in a future time
3. If the Republicans are in control of any branch of government and something good happens, they get credit.
4. If the Republicans are in control of any branch of government and something bad happens, it was due to some outside event or due to something the Democrats did in a prior time or will do in a future time
You are full of incorrect statements:
1. Capitalism protects the workers. Companies must compete for workers just like companies must compete for customers.
2. Republicans don’t want de-regulation, and it was regulation, not de-regulation, that caused the current economic crisis. Your mistake shows a massive ignorance of the laws the Congress has passed over the past few decades. The term toxic loan was created by government. Fannie and Freddie are created by government.
“Middle class” is a Marxist idea. He called it the “working class” or the Proletariat. America doesn’t have classes. In any case, the policies of the Republican party help the poor even more than the rich. They help everyone. Consider how lower energy costs help everyone, rich and poor. Consider how Republican ideas to lower healthcare costs help everyone: http://bit.ly/AAkhpU
The idea that Republicans don’t want to help the “middle class” is just simply wrong and it means you don’t understand what the Republican agenda is. I suggest you consider learn more what they are and then you will have the knowledge to decide.
No more than a law outlawing Catholicism or one outlawing the color yellow, I suppose. Why not outlaw gravity to while you’re at it? it reminds me of the old Bugs Buunny cartoon where he does something that defies the law of gravity and he turns to the camera and says, “I never studied law.”
Gee, now why would that be? I mean outlawing an idea is so workable…
But my dear friend, it was you who proposed doing something (outlawing Marxism) which iis blatantly unconstitutional. Dare I say that proposing making an idea illegal is posiitively Stalinist. You skipped Marx and went directlly to Stalin.
Direct quotes? Source?
(Anonymous far right blogs don’t count.)
Our Stalinist friend Kevin is quite a bundle of contradictions, isn’t he?
I was asked if I would make Marxism illegal. I wasn’t asked to define Marxism. Can you see how those are totally separate topics? It is not my responsibility to answer questions that weren’t asked.
Nope, each issue is founded on the concept that we get to outlaw behavior and thought. Marxism and Catholicism are examples of two philosophies and our Constitution protects either one as long as the respect our Constitution, even though the Catholic church has many components which would run against our sensitivities about a Monarch type ruler, with unlimited powers to set policy, with rules which run against our sense of decency and the concept of equal rights etc. And yet, we would not think of outlawing the Church.
So you want to outlaw something that you have not yet defined and thus you may not even know how the term was being used?
I see… Makes total sense.
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You know even less about law than you do about other areas you pontiificate on. You can’t outlaw something that is not clearly defined. That’s what “unconstitutionally vague” means The first section of any law is typically a defnition of terms.
All of the bank shares have been sold. The government retains some shares in AIG, which is an insurance company, not a bank. Since you don’t understand markets in the slightest, I wouldn’t expect you to get why dumping a big parcel of shares in AIG at one time would be dumb.
Guaranteed that Commie Kevin doesn’t have a pot to piss in. Given his complete ignorance of how markets work, if he ever had a nickel, he would blow it.
The color yellow is well defined (light of a given wavelength). You are unable to define Marxism. Therefore is would actually be much more possible to outlaw the color yellow than to outlaw Marxism.
– capitalist scientist
Really, you must live on a different planet than the rest of us…some place more distant than Mars. I understand what KevinSB means by Marxism. It is not that hard to figure out his meaning if you read his comments carefully as he has laid them out.
KevinSB is providing us with links, useful facts, detailed information. At a certain point, it just seems silly of you to slow things down by demanding things from him which are insignificant from the perspective of common sense.
Still more nonsense.
The public debt increased by 47% under the George W. Bush administration. That was Nancy Pelosi’s fault?
Nancy Pelosi isn’t responsible for the fact that we spent roughly $1 trillion on the Iraq War. Nancy Pelosi wasn’t responsible for the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Nancy Pelosi wasn’t responsible for the unfunded Medicare prescription drug program.
Just ban yellow Corvettes. That should be a crime.
I don’t think you have any idea what it means.
Anyone can like anything they want. But, if you wanted to outlaw red roses, you would have to define them and do so in a precise way. Otherwise you might end up banning all roses, all red flowers or even all flowers.
Obama has added as much debt in 3 years as Bush did in 8. That greatly increased rate of spending is Nancy Pelosi’s fault. Boehner is in charge now, but it was Nancy Pelosi who made his situatoin worse.
If you want to talk about whether Nancy Pelosi or Bush was more responsible for the credit downgrad that would be a totally different topic.
I was comparing Nancy Pelosi to John Boehner, and I never brought up Bush. This is another example of you changing the topic.
Even the increase in public debt under Bush is also partially Nancy Pelosi’s fault. Her party always wanted to spend more. If Bush had a more conservative Congress, he could have worked on the deficit more.
“Animal Farm” flashback.
Are you auditioning for a comedy show? The Republicans controlled the House from 2001-2007 and the Senate from 2003-2007. In that time they approved a $1 trillion Itaq war, an Afghan war that will cost something close and the Medicare part D, which costs around $ 50 billion/year. All without a penny in additional revenue. Please find me another case in history where a country went to war while cutting taxes. I won’t hold my breath.
Keep working on your law against Marxism too.
No, he didn’t. Your “math” there includes putting the cost of the wars (which, if you will recall, started under President Bush’s watch and in one case as a result of lies that his administration told the country) on to the books. It is completely dishonest to attribute the cost of Bush’s wars to President Obama because Obama kept a campaign promise about greater transparency by ending a dishonest Bush-era policy. What is it like not to have any integrity or intellectual honesty?
The foolish and disastrous oath of allegiance* Republicans have sworn specifically to lobbyist Grover Norquist is another can of worms.
*Taxpayer Protection Pledge signed by 95% of all Republican Congressmen and all but one of the 2012 Republican presidential candidates—whereby the signer promises to:
ONE, oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rates for individuals and/or businesses; and
TWO, oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.
Good catch! I was mistakinginly merging both the S&L bailout & the Continential Illinois Bank bailout as being part of the same thing in my memory.
The actual “S&L crisis” bailout was in 1989, under GHWB ($293.3 billion). The prior Continential Illinois Bank one took place under Reagan in 1984 ($ 9.5 billion).
As you & Misha have pointed out, there have been a number of other financial bailouts in additional industries by the US government that have taken place as well and that this has been happening ever since Nixon’s administration.
Here is a good summary list of them:
http://www.propublica.org/special/government-bailouts
“In terms of the economy, look, I inherited a recession, I am ending on a recession.” –George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Jan. 12, 2009
Which is quite an exaggeration of what happened. Some small oversight and terms and conditions were temporarily imposed on Chrysler as a result of our government loaning them money, that is all. Not very different from conditions that various venture capital investors or banks will place on giving loans either.
Not the same at all to what “taking over” implies. Sorry, but private industry has remained private industry in all these situations. They never became government institutions.
So vastly different from the “marxism” bogeyman nonsense you are so desperate to imagine and fear. You simply stretch the implication of the term to such ludicrous proportions that it loses all meaning in such application.
I said “more conservative Congress”. Your statements don’t disprove mine. Please read my points more carefully.
I quote from here:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20095704-503544.html
The latest posting by the Treasury Department shows the national debt has now increased $4 trillion on President Obama’s watch.
The debt was $10.626 trillion on the day Mr. Obama took office. The latest calculation from Treasury shows the debt has now hit $14.639 trillion.
It’s the most rapid increase in the debt under any U.S. president.
FAIL! The only person trying to insert the entirely irrelevant Saul Alinsky bogeyman in the conversation is YOU.
YOU brought up such nonsense. I merely pointed out how there is NO actual nor meaningful connection between Obama and Alinsky at all.
Then I simply explained why the right pulled that obscure name out of a hat in the first place. Shorter version – it is simply an outdated and immature smear with no specific association to Obama. There was a limited and weak connection to HRC, but then she didn’t win the election. However, the nuts on the right just lazily went forward with the same smear and inanely tried to apply it to Obama.
Sorry, but you can’t just swap people and and keep the same smears. Doesn’t hold up very well at all. It is as meaningless of an attack as children accusing each other of being a “poopyhead” and having “cooties” on the playground. Nothing more.
I have 10 Questions. (I’m a proud Borscht Beltian)
– If Heaven exists, I have two questions. What are the hours, and do they have change for a twenty?
– Not only is there no God, but try finding a plumber on Sunday.
– To you I’m an atheist; to God, I’m the Loyal Opposition.
– What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.
– What if nothing exists and we’re all in somebody’s dream?
– I’m astounded by people who want to ‘know’ the universe when it’s hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.
– If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.
– If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.
– The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won’t get much sleep.
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/w/woody_allen.html
You are thus moving the entire cost of both wars from President Bush’s tab to President Obama’s–not to mention the fact that most if not all of the increase in the debt is due to the costs of Bush-era programs. Once again, you show yourself completely incapable of intellectual honesty. I guess your mother never taught you that traditional American value.
Federal bailouts started with Nixon, for Lockheed:
The year was 1971. Richard Nixon was in the White House. And Texas Republican John Tower was butting heads with Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire over a bailout … of Lockheed Aircraft.
In early August, the deal came together. The $250 million ($1.3 billion in 2008 dollars) loan guarantee squeaked by the House (192-189) on July 30, but the vote was too close to call as the Senate prepared to vote before a one-month recess. On 2 August, the bill passed the Senate, 49 to 48.
No one called Nixon a socialist, or a Marxist.
Read on: http://uspolitics.about.com/od/economy/a/lockheedBailout.htm
Nope. As usual, the realities of normal conversation between sane adults completely slips beyond your grasp.
There are plenty of conversations that take place on here with people of different views and that I disagree with. Yet, somehow we are able to have those conversations together and examine each others premises in a normal and rational way and there aren’t any problems. I don’t discount them. When the conversations trend from observable facts and into legitimate subjective opinion, we are able to agree to disagree or simply explain why our POV leads to a perception or preference for one thing over another.
You and John however, seem entirely incapable of that type of dialog. You simply throw out blatent falsehoods, myths and glib nonsense that can easily be dismissed on its face, because you lack the credibility of making a proper argument and building a premise to support it in the first place.
You obsess over sources that are nothing but themselves mere biased opinion, conjecture and fully speculative in nature. You seem to have no clue to the difference between speculation and objective fact and reality. You are utterly incapable of building cases built on ACTUAL material evidence and only rely on random rumour-mongering and clearly bias-driven opinion drivel.
All that is easy for any sane and rational person to dismiss offhand, because it has no foundation in material evidence whatsoever at all. Every ignorant a-hole is full of bluster and opinions that they can pull out of thin air at any time. That doesn’t make them worthy of being paid attention to at all.
Sorry, but mere emotionally-driven opinion and speculation is not evidence . Nothing objective, rational or testable there at all.
Therefore, such irrational arguments lack the basic foundation required in order for anyone else to care and are irrelevant and inconsequential at face value. So yes, such fluff can be dismissed right from the get-go and that’s that.
The only irrational arguments being attempted here are by you and John, sorry. As usual, you demonstrate that you are incapable of perceiving how the world works beyond your own personal limitations and failings.
Thus, all you are able to do is project your own flaws onto others.
There is a ton of evidence for Obama being influenced by Saul Alinsky. He is probably one of the most influential people in Obama’s life. Obama taught Saul Alinsky. You can Google “Obama Alinsky” where you will find 1.4 million results.
Alinsky influenced Hillary as well. Alinsky influenced many people and influencing one person doesn’t preclude influencing another.
I’ve never heard Alinsky mentioned by a liberal, but conservatives trot it out all the time. In fact, Gingrich actually mentioned it when he spoke in South Carolina yesterday.
The same goes for the “messiah” label and a few other deliberately offensive conservative tropes.
More importantly, why should I care? In what way does it have any impact on how this country is actually being run. It simply doesn’t.
You are obsessively worried and pissing your pants over matters that don’t in any real way have any impact on life in general for most people. Certainly not me.
Nor do I feel threatened by “Black Liberation theology” impacting my life at all. I’m aware of what it is. I don’t agree with it, but I at least grasp the root causes of where it came from and why it is relatively tolerated and expressed in certain black communities. Minorities with a history of oppression are simply going to have a broader tolerance and perception of persecution-based memes, that’s all.
Such overdramatic angst has been fairly common in many black churches, so being exposed to it is not usual for someone who’s been in that community. Nor does it make those that attend these churches adherents themselves of such dogma, simply because they heard it.
You simply never hear any “Black Liberation theology” expressed or pursued by Obama. Without that, there is no direct connection to him at all.
Guilt by association is meaningless and irrelevant without demonstration of someone supporting or enabling such behaviors themselves. Obama openly kicked his Rev Wright to the curb and rejected and denounced that kind of stuff. So there you go.
In many ways, such over-reactionary anxieties are not that different from the various reactionary emotional huff you seem obssessed with either.
In the end, neither those memes nor yours are anything I’m concerned nor interested in. They have neither relevance nor appeal to me. Simple as that.
“Gingrich idiot: get 5.2 million
“Romney vulture” gets 18.2 million
“Paul racist”gets 105 million
Really? Alinsky died in 1972 when Obama was 12.
You really have a hard time with numbers.
Having taught Alinsky, you can bet Obama brought it up many times in his life.
He doesn’t bring it up now just like he hasn’t brought up Reverend Wright even though Obama went to his church for 20 years.
Alinsky was like a socialist Machiavelli. A president trying to appeal to moderates would not mention such a person as an influence! However, Obama follows the rules. You could consider Alinsky a godfather of community organizing. Obama didn’t admit Alinsky, but he did admit community organizing. It is left to the reader to figure out exactly what Obama meant by community organizing. You will find Alinsky all over community organizing. Acorn is influenced by Alinsky, and Obama was affiliated with Acorn as well.
Look, these aren’t my topics or arguments – they are yours.
You can’t just throw out random terms and generalizations and expect anyone to care.
If you have some point on those, then it is 100% up to you to come prepared with SPECIFC and CONCRETE examples of why they are both “Marxist” and ALSO directly connected to Obama and how he operates.
Without that, you’ve got nothing and have failed to put forth any valid premise in the first place.
I’m not here to do your work for you. If you don’t have the basic competence to put forth an actual argument, based in an actual premise and specific examples to back you up – then you’ve got absolutely nothing and are just another lunatic blowhard ranting in the wind.
So far, that’s all you’ve been.
Making ideas illegal is a feature of totalitarian regimes: fascists, communists, the Taliban. Making Marxism illegal is something the fascists did.
The very idea that outlawing an economic theory is somehow constitutional says volumes about your jaundiced view of the Constitution. Your wanting an amendment to un-do the First Amendment identifies you as a very dangerous person if you ever had any political power. You are a threat to liberty.
Are disorganized communities preferable to organized ones?
“Bigfoot” returns 27,900,000 results.
Limbaugh and liar returns 6,880,000 results.
George W. Bush and idiot returns 6,170,000 results.
Bush and Marxist returns 7,580,000 results.
Gingrich and criminal returns 13,500,000 results.
Ron Paul and racist returns 13,200,000 results.
Santorum and insane returns 5,150,000 results. (Santorum’s first result is self-explanatory.)
Wow. The above results are a LOT more than a measly 1.4 million results.
Thanks for the lesson. My searches must all be true. Good to know.
There is a better case for Hillary Clinton than Obama.
The problem with you KevinSB is that you’ve spouted so much drek on this site that nobody would pay any attention even if you accidentally said something true.
“Obama taught Alinsky” was my shorthand way of saying that Obama taught Alinsky’s ideas. Of course you don’t teach to your mentor, but you do teach your mentor’s ideas to others.
It is like you are criticizing me for saying “someone taught Calculus”. How can someone teach to something that isn’t even alive?
Is influenced?
The same ACORN that shut down in 2010?
But that’s the whole point KevinSB… you have NOT refuted ANYTHING here! Nada. Zip.
Nor have you gotten around to providing any specific and concrete examples that hold up as evidence of real “Marxism” in play.
The whole topic has been driven by you making claims you can’t back up and you trying to glibly throw out generalizations that fall apart and don’t match up to the premise that YOU were trying to set up in the first place!
YOU are the one who, when pressed, introduced the “bailouts” as your example of “Obama marxism” at play.
All the others have done is respond by shredding your implied claim that those were “marxist” or in any way an atypical action for this particular President to take over past presidents.
None of your silly and weak nonsense seems to hold up under the slightest scrutiny at all.
…And yet you still can’t grasp why you constantly fail and are nothing but a joke here with absolutely zero credibility or believability whatsoever.
Seriously, I *urge* you to schedule your next therapy session ASAP and bring this stuff to share with him/her. Clearly you are beyond any “help” that can come from here. At least there, you might have someone who can explain it to you and help you grasp why you’ve been such an utter and constant failure here.
Same here. I never had any interest in Alinsky until those afflicted with Obama Derangement Syndrome began bringing his name up.
Did you know that Alinsky was awarded the Roman Catholic Church’s Pacem in Terris Peace and Freedom Award in 1969? It’s an honor he shares with Martin Luther King Jr., George Kennan, Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu and Lach Walesa, among others.
So, according to you, a teacher should only expose students to one side of an issue. Students should be kept ignorant of non-Commie Kevin-approved ideas? That goes along wiith making Marxism illegal. You believe the way to deal with ideas you don’t like is to ban them. You are a Stalinist.
What utter and non-objective BS that you are simply pulling out of your @ss.
To make any analysis, you need to be able to correlate specific changes in the stock market to specific actions that sparked those rises, dips or clear trendlines.
Hate to tell ya, but the GOP House sure hasn’t accomplished much at all and their few high-profile “acts” haven’t reflected very well in market reactions. The closest the markets came to collapse and lost of faith in the US system happened as a direct result of their insanely irresponsible “hostage crisis” actions during the debt ceiling debate.
To say that neither the markets nor the world’s top financial credit rating agencies appreciated the GOP/Tea Party house antics is to put it mildly…
Those clowns have only introduced instability into the equation, not confidence. Sorry.
Bush was keeping the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan off the books. It was called the Black Budget. The deficit is so much higher, because Obama is including both wars in the general budget, which is the transparency he promised.
When Shrub walked through the door, there was a surplus of $212M. When Obama walked through the door, there was a deficit of $1T.
1. Saul Alinsky was a socialist, just like David Ben Gurion and Golda Meir. When Meir first went to Palestine, she was a Marxist.
2. Alinsky’s two books are required reading for everyone, not just Obama. I read them when I took Sociology courses.
When I started college, I was a Trotskyite. Then I was a kibbutznik; now I am a registered Democrat.
When people say ‘Alinsky was an influence,’ it’s a dog whistle to anti-Semites.
When my father died, alev hashalom, he was a pauper. We went to live in my grandfather’s house. When my grandfather first came here from Russia, he read Der Tag, a Yiddish communist paper. When it ceased publication, he switched to The Forward, a Yiddish socialist paper, which he subscribed to until he died.
My grandfather was generous to a fault, and kept us out of poverty. Because of the stroke, I receive SSD. I actually have had conservatives call me a parasite.
That completely sums up well both his defective behavioral limitations and why he is always destined for failure in his “reasoning” attempts to make an argument.
Colbert said (around the Iowa caucuses) that “Senator Rick Santorum” had become the top hit for “Santorum” on the Google–apparently it was short-lived. I hope that gets Rick all frothy…
I think the RWNJs make the same mistake with Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” that they do with terrorism–they are trying to fight against a tactic. Radicals of all stripes use Alinsky’s tactics–generally because they work. I would note that conservative leadership uses many of Alinsky’s principles on sheep like KevinSB…
The current approval rating of Congress is 10-12%.
It makes me wonder who those people are who approve.
Lobbyists? Other friends? Family members? Corporate boards?
I ask again, Commie Kevin, what is wrong with an organized community, as opposed to a disorganized one? Neighbors helping neighbors. That should appeal to conservatives and libertarians just as much as to liberals and socialists. Your pal Drew writes grants, many of which go to community groups.
I wonder if Doc would let Drew reply specifically and in one sentence to whether he applies for any government grants (federal, state or local) and whether that makes him a socialist, if not a Communist?
I don’t think that his arguments fail so much as they are ill-formed and never made any sense in the first place. If ignorance is truly bliss then KevinSB must be one of the happiest people on the planet.
Oh, the Irony!
You may think you “respect” the Constitution, but you don’t seem capable of understanding it properly or grasping how it works. You seem to have the same failed grasp of “marxism”, beyond some simplistic fictitious “bogeyman” you fear in your own head. (I suspect you just erroneously can’t distinguish between some Cold War generated fear of “commies” and “marxism” at all).
Sorry, but there is nothing in the Constitution that even requires a model of “Capitalism” in order to carry out what the Constitution entails. Nor is there anything in the Constitution that would be violated by the tenants of “marxism”. You are simply operating from whole host of fallacies in your thinking that have no connection to reality or foundation in our system of law.
I found John Drew’s CV online. What I can’t understand is the limited time he spent in each of his employment positions. I thought I changed jobs a lot! Whew, reading this made me dizzy.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/johndrew25
Not sure which fascists you are claiming made Marxism illegal because nearly all of them I can think of were influenced by and practiced Marxism. I can recommend a book explaining this topic if you’d like.
Marxism is a threat to liberty, almost by definition. Making a law to outlaw a threat to liberty cannot also be a threat to liberty.
I’m not proposing to make an “idea” illegal. I’m proposing to make the practice of this idea by the government illegal. It is actually a subtly different point. After this law passed, people could think Marxist thoughts, and vote for politicians to make Marxism legal again.
I view Marxism as a discredited economic theory. I don’t feel guilty about making discredited ideas illegal. It would be like mandating doctors use more advanced medicine than leeches on patients. Such a law would not be a threat to society.
10. No snake handling.
9. You can believe in dinosaurs.
8. Male and female God created them; male and female we ordain them.
7. You don’t have to check your brains at the door.
6. Pew aerobics.
5. Church year is color-coded.
4. Free wine on Sunday.
3. All of the pageantry – none of the guilt.
2. You don’t have to know how to swim to get baptized.
And the Number One reason to be an Episcopalian:
1. No matter what you believe, there’s bound to be at least one other Episcopalian who agrees with you.
And the best one: Where ever you find 4 Episcopalians – you’ll find a fifth!
Johnny has boasted about the $1.5 million (or some such) in funding that grants he has written have received–I’m guessing at least some of that is government swag… The Daily Show had a segment on a community organizer before the 2008 election. She was a republican who was so pissed off with the demonizing of her profession that she did organizing for the Obama campaign.
FAIL!
You are just shown the only “objective test” under your original claim that can be made – to look at the term period perfomance under each of those Congressional terms and compare their overall growth.
That comparison shows *huge* net growth took place under Pelosi during her last term and so far only extremely *anemic* net growth under Boehner.
Yes, you can make the argument that Boehner’s term is not over, so there is still time for his final 2-year performance to improve.
However, you cannot go back to making the claim that it “would be worse off if Nancy were in charge” with any credibilty at all.
The very facts you were just given demolish your very premise! If the market showed net growth of 58% last time she was in charge…how can any serious person look at that and argue “failure” at all… Sorry, you can’t.
Your claims run so contrary to what actual evidence and data reveals, they are beyond laughable!
Then your even more absurd attempt to stick the debt-ceiling hostage crisis debacle that happened completely under the current Boehner/Tea Party house onto Nancy Pelosi… LOL!
Sorry, but ALL the credit agencies have been fairly direct in their criticisms and cited reason for downgrading our credit and the overwhelming bulk of that was because of the debt ceiling hostage crisis situation. That rests entirely on the shoulders of this Boehner/Tea Party term.
I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a better example of someone being “hard of thinking”. There are layers upon layers of misconceptions there with absolutely no hint of objectivity…
Boy, you truly live in opposite land.
The mandates don’t raise costs, they lower and contain them, by both increasing the pool of contributors (i.e. influx of insureds into the private sector market) and more importantly, placing expense ratio caps that insurance companies can pass along to consumers. Failure to adhere to those caps by private insurers who continue to try to simply increase their costs in order to line their own pockets will now result in both penalties and having to issue refunds to consumers for when those rates exceed their actual expense ratio margins.
Sorry. FAIL again. You really don’t know much about anything and how it actually works do you? You just swallow and spout mindless propaganda that your gullible little mind is so easily conned into believing. What a joke!
When I was in college, I talked with the director of the Buffalo ACLU. What he said has stuck for life: what works best of all is the marketplace of ideas.
Again with the unfounded and imaginary histronics!
What utter nonsense. Put forward by an unqualifed idiot who constantly demonstrates he’s got no real grasp of how anything works and makes simplistic and childish comparisons between unrelated events, without being able to build a real case to analyze and compare the two.
Sorry, but your habit to just spout whatever nonsense you hear or come up with off the top of your head is still not impressing nor convincing anyone here. …And yet you remain puzzled why no one takes you seriously… *face palm*
Wow! What a treasure trove! Af ew highlights:
Lives in Laguna Niguel, same town as Orly Taitz.
“John has a 100% success rate (8 out of 8) at writing successful federal grant applications:” Socialist! Sucking at the government teat!
Hope International University.
Leeches have undergone a revival in medicine recently. They are currently the most-used treatment for venous insufficiency, a complication.of microsurgery http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/bloodysuckers/leech.html
Commie Kevin truly has a perfect record of ignorance. He knows absolutely nothing about absolutely everything.
Taxes serve a very necessary purpose. That is the source of revenue to run the government and carry out its obligations and services.
Addressing our nations problems is both a matter of ensuring sufficient revenue (i.e. taxes) and containing costs. It is a balancing act.
On the whole, taxes have only been reduced. The net tax burden is much lower than it was in the 90’s, 80’s. etc on any measure.
Earlier, there were good arguments that the burden was too high. But that argument starts to disappear as they are continuously lowered overall.
Simplistic Grover Norquist type thinking about taxes always being bad and always needing to be lowered is absurd and actually dangerous.
Many would argue that a significant part of our economic woes and debt problems are due to insufficient revenue being taken in to address both our current and future obligations and nees. On a whole, tax rates have been cut too much and that there are way too many loopholes.
So yeah, I have no need of a politician “motivated” on simply wanting to cut taxes at all. I want a sensible and pragmatic balance and a functioning government and sometimes that means taxes have to go UP and not always down. If anything, I view a politician who is overly obsessed or locked into a mindset of always wanting to cut taxes further as out-of-touch with the current economic realities and therefore not equipped to address the long-term debt problem rationally.
Oh – and Reagan raised taxes several times during his terms. That’s how reality works when someone actually wants to govern.
I got a chuckle over that one too.
He also hasn’t explained how or why the state of Hawaii would forge the President’s birth certificate.
So much typing from Kevin, so little contemplation. With such volume, you can be sure you’re getting nothing but reflexive rhetoric. Push this button, get that response. I’ve heard many people mouth soap opera excerpts at each other in place of conversation. Kevin is an echo from winger media.
Don’t be a parrot. Thought must be formed to be expressed.
I personally do not know anyone who Googles young obama, It may be important to them, but it is not mainstream. Get some live interviews with some real anchors. This is all just light whispers here…founded or unfounded.
FAIL!
Boy, you are completely ignorant and live in an imaginary fantasy land.
Try taking a real look at how our debt situation breaks down:
http://www.google.com/imgres?hl=en&biw=1366&bih=673&gbv=2&tbm=isch&tbnid=W0ODvrIHl3X8jM:&imgrefurl=http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/05/chart-day-where-debt-comes&docid=SniCWOrx-WrauM&imgurl=http://www.motherjones.com/files/images/blog_cbpp_public_debt.jpg&w=276&h=330&ei=rk4PT9CnE4rn0QH0__y9Aw&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=955&vpy=127&dur=6532&hovh=246&hovw=205&tx=150&ty=114&sig=105339590726848289379&page=1&tbnh=145&tbnw=121&start=0&ndsp=18&ved=1t:429,r:4,s:0
Sorry, but it is mostly due to unfunded mandates during the Bush Term (the wars, medicare part D, etc) and the economic downturn.
TARP and the Recovery Act were barely a blip in that equation and much of the money from TARP (started under Bush, BTW) has come back. Nor was all the Recovery Act money spent.
Nor do any of the GOP economic plans hold up as realistic “solutions” under scrutiny. Those few attempts that are more detailed than simple “bullet points” haven’t fared too well when scored by the CBO and are often projected to make the problems and debt situation even worse, if they were to be pursued.
So you really need to stop talking out your @ss. If you can’t make your “bold claims” without starting with specific examples and explain your justifications for why that would lead to a certain outcome, then you have no case in the first place and just show you have no idea what you are actually talking about.
Reagan approved stiff tariffs on Japanese big bikes to help Harley recover. No one called him a socialist or Marxist. Nixon had wage and price controls to stop runaway inflation. When is Michele Bachmann going to return the $250K in farm subsidies she took? When are cattle ranchers going to pay market rates to graze on public land?
Social Security has kept millions out of poverty.
Wright is angry about the way slaves’ descendants have been treated.Those descendants did not have civil rights until 1964, 100 years after emancipation.
The kibbutzim are the foundation of Israel. They are a raucous democracy.
Taxes are the price of civilization.
Oh, what simplistic nonsense! And just where do you think *all* the protections for workers come from? That’s right – government regulations that have been imposed over time and were put in place *because* too many companies were not doing this on their own.
Same reason unions emerged as a response to the abuse workers felt once the industrial revolution changed society.
Learn your history. Unfettered capitalism has been a poor protector of its workers in all terms – both in pay and in welfare and value of life. The incidents of abuse were rife and only became addressed once both unions and government finally got involved and put in the necessary pressure, regulations and oversight to prevent such abuse. Mere “competition” is not much of a factor on its own to prevent such abuse.
*WTF?* Wow. What you said is the complete opposite of reality in every sense and every way. You’ve simply got it completely backwards on both accounts.
If “Middle class” is a Marxist idea, then hooray for Marx! I can’t think of anything more important to the stability, health and long-term growth of our nation than having a strong and broad middle class. If that’s the case then we need a lot more Marxism!
If you think America doesn’t have a “class” structure dynamic firmly in place, then you truly are just deluding yourself and not facing reality.
The GOP only cares about the ultra-rich and pays only condescending lip-service to everyone else, especially the poor. I’ve seen many of the GOP plans “touted” over the past few years. The ramifications sure don’t seem to match up to the rhetoric at all. In fact, everything I’ve seen looks like a recipe for disaster that only worsens the problems and not fixes them. I completely disagree with most of their plans and solutions and view them as not just unrealistic or insufficient, but often dangerous.
Yes you were. That’s the whole point and the challenge that’s been directed at you all along to back up.
You keep avoiding defining these bogeyman you bring up and then when called out to do so, YOU are the one who keeps throwing out some glib generalized statement instead of addressing that question head on.
All of these unecessary and endless side-tangent derails from the original points are all because YOU keep tossing out glib excuses and then get called out and challenged on them as well.
Sorry, but the ONUS is completely on YOU on all this. YOU are the one who instigated the original statements. When others call you out and challenge you, they aren’t required to provide the same level of detail or support in simply rebutting you, because they are merely pointing out that YOU still haven’t established any solid foundation for your claims in the first place!
You are long on endless flimsy generalizations that can be easily torn apart and short on bieng able to provide concrete specifics and defend them.
Hence, why you’ve done nothing here but endlessly flail and fail.
It’s interesting that he hasn’t worked in the field of political science since 1998.
Yeah, it is the market doing what capitalist theory says it should do: voting with its feet.
Capitalism is a threat to liberty as well, almost by definition. So now what?
Given your pronouncements that Obama was/is a Marxist, your statements do not add much credibility to Kevin. Was that your intent?
Then maybe you can finally provide a specific and clear definition there, Mr. supposed “doctorate” in this stuff and Mr. supposed “former Marxist”.
You’ve been asked repeatedly to clearly provide a specific and clear definition of what constitutes “Marxism” in order to base your case and still you haven’t had the balls to do that.
No. Both of you poseurs keep ducking and dancing around the topic, because you don’t have any true legs to stand on and all you can do is try to dodge and hope that we somehow don’t notice the endless generalizations you try to pass off as excuses…
So come on smarty-pants. Either of you. In your own words, stake a clear and specific definition of what constitutes “Marxism” to you and then clearly and specifically explain “why” that is a “bad” thing for us to “fear” or be concerned about. Once you’ve finally done that BASIC initial step we’ve been asking for you all along, THEN you still need to be able to specifically link to real world examples of Obama doing that “bad thing”, based on that definition. Until you’ve done that, you haven’t even built a foundation for your case – PERIOD.
Somehow, such Marxism “concern” looms so large in all of your bogeyman premises…yet you are both utterly incapable of specifically laying out what that is and what it means and “why” it matters…
Now why could that be…. oh that’s right, because you *don’t* really know what you’re talking about and are just lazily slinging meaningless and unfounded poop…
Health Care Insurance companies profits are up due to Obamacare.
Do increased profits help the Stock Market?
That by itself is no surprise as our country is still paying for Bush’s ill conceived tax cuts for the rich ($2.6 Trillion) and the unnecessary wars ($2.5 Trillion total tally).
See what is driving projected debt
Oh, what utterly unfounded BS! Cite actual comparative statistics to prove it. All you do is endlessly run off your mouth and come across as a total ignoramus, because you can’t back up anything you say with anything that is concrete and specific. You only hide behind pointing to more speculation by some other random and unqualified a-hole with an opinon…but never any concrete facts.
Put up or shut up already!
…But we know why you can’t. Facts and stats always disprove your nonsense. You can’t back up your arguments, because they are works of fiction. Pure and simple as that.
Obviously, you ignored a very important piece of your own article:
So there you go. All of those are real and tangible long-term cost factors and account for most of the debt increase we are still dealing with. ALL which are results of Bush Admin policies, not changes Obama has made since.
Again, then YOU need to cite YOUR specific examples to make and prove your case.
I’m not here to do your homework for you.
Nor am I impressed that google is full of results on anything. The internet is rife with dysfunctional and delusional people like you spouting made up nonsense and putting up their own merely opinion-based and factually challenged web-sites.
So being able to prove that other idiots out there cling to the same fantasies is NOT in any way evidence of your argument. It only backs up that you are the same type of gullible and delusional idiot as they are.
Again, cite SPECIFIC, CONCRETE and CREDIBLE proof from a legitimate source that isn’t just based on rumor, innuendo and allegations.
Come on there, bright boy. We’re still waiting to see you offer ANY specific example of Obama being directly conencted to Saul Alinsky, whatsoever at all.
Put up or shut up, you hollow fraud.
Sorry, I have to call you on this.
Until the era of Government regulation, unions and legal liability, companies gladly let employees die in order to make money. In almost every industry workers died and were maimed.
This is because of government regulation- companies still fight OSHA, union activism- and of course worker lawsuits.
You are of course against all of these things. If you want to see what America today would like without those things, go visit Shanghai and the factories surrounding it.
Free enterprise without any significant restraints.
Maybe you were still in kindergarten during the shrub’s terms in office, but his wars were off the books. President Obama just got rid of the obfuscation, hence the apparent increase in debt. It was always really there, just hidden.
Again, you just make these statements without backing them up.
I’m simply going to openly call you a pathological liar until you can demonstrate that you can back up anything you say. That is the only reasonable conclusion a sane person came come to for your behavior an inability to back up what you say, despite overwhelming reaction asking you to do so.
Please cite PROOF of Obama “having taught Alinksy”. I call out your lie. Again, you are just making things up.
HINT: If Obama never brings such things up or acts out in a way that supports such beliefs, then there is NO evidence that he supports them or follows them himself.
Get a clue.
*facepalm* Wow…. just…wow… (cue cartoon coo-coo whistle sound here)
You truly are sucked into a fantasy world of conspiracy thought, aren’t you. What a patheticly tenuous “slippery slope” argument that doesn’t meet any basic guidelines of proper correlative analogies.
That is as dumb as making this type of similar illogical connect-the-dots leaps where someone could start with pointing out that Adolph H liked to paint and weaving a convoluted set of irrelevant connections to conclude that Norman Rockwell’s paintings meant he really wanted to gas the Jews… Its just irresponsible and absurdist guilt-by-association – PERIOD.
Sadly, you seem incapable of rising above such absurdity. That truly qualifies as a real mental defect to have your brain so incapable of forming real logical conclusions. You really don’t do well when you have to interact with others over extended periods in the real world, do you?
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was the start of labor reform:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire
Oh and just so my analogy to Shanghai doesn’t get perverted. What worker protections that are actually enforced(as opposed to being on the books but ignored) are the result of Western companies demanding them, after Consumer and government pressures threatened their profits.
I am all for Capitalism- but Capitalism doesn’t care about the environment, about workers health, about your family or anything else except making a profit. Capitalism works very well as an engine for the economy.
But without constraining forces, it will gladly dump its problems on everyone else if it can. Air pollution and water pollution are largely the results of companies just dumping the pollution on everyone else.
(cough)Koch brothers(cough)
By “shorthand” you mean simply being a lazy blowhard and mudslinging unfounded loose allegations without being able to back them up.
Sorry, no actual correlation there either. You cannot provide evidence that Alisnky was Obama’s “mentor” at all.
All you are trying to do is substitute the word “Alinsky” as some bogeyman that only really means “someone has ideas ideologically to the left of you”. None of this has anything to do with there being any direct “real” link between this Alinksy person and Obama himself. You simply are trying to justify that “Obama = bad” simply because your views are to the right of how he operates. When you get down to it, that is all you are actually saying with your over-the-top histronics here.
But you don’t say the truth that way, because it doens’t convey the same sense of false “scary” that you want to invoke…does it?
*blink* *blink*…Umm…say what?
Now that’s a whole new level of stupid from you! Seriously? Calculus is a subject and specifically a particular level of mathematical principals and disciplines.
Calculus “never” was alive and is not a person, it is a subject. …Just like all the other subjects which are taught all the time, throughout the world and are not “people” – living or dead.
What do you think people teach? They are ALL subjects and “not living things”.
They don’t teach TO Calculus. Calculus is the topic, not the audience. They simply TEACH calculus TO their students. *duh*
…Strangest nonsensical defense argument you’ve made yet… and that says A LOT!
More importantly, NOR does it INDICATE influencing another. NOT AT ALL.
Absolutely correct! It bears repeating, because *some* people seem to keep trying to forget the truth of what happened during the last decade…
…Yet if such forms of ignorance was *bliss* then these people wouldn’t be constantly stressing and having obsessive paranoid tantrums on full public display all over the internet….
Yes, I got the intended joke. 😉
However, on a serious note, it is clear that these types of ignorance are the opposite of “bliss” for these delusional people. Their fantasy worlds that they wrap themselves in seem like an an endless nightmare from which they never awaken…and that’s from even their own perspective!
They must truly live miserable lives under the constant obsessive burden of such imaginary fear and loathing…. That kind of constant stress has to manifest in real life-shortening damage to the body and brain over time… Heck, they’re probably better off chain smoking than burying themselves under such unhealthy delusions…
…Again..then GIVE us that DEFINITION and use that definition to explain SPECIFICALLY how it is a “threat to liberty” already!
You simply can’t back up anything you say, can you? What a hollow blowhard you are.
…Must be something in the water there that causes severe brain damage…
Yep. That analysis seems to sum it up pretty well…
Agreed! Kudos for such crisp succinctness.
WELL SAID! I completely agree.
I’m wondering if they have met. Even more, I’m wondering if they are collaborating.
That’s the way I see it, too.
Sorry, but saying that when you refuse to provide a definition takes pointlessly stupid to a whole new level. If something is true by definition, then that thing must be implied by the definition. Nothing can possibly be implied by your refusal to provide a definition (except your lack of integrity) so the statement you just made is moronic.
Here’s an example of what being “true by definition” means:
moron |ˈmôrˌän|
noun informal
a stupid person.
So, hypothetically speaking, if we know that “KevinSB is a stupid person” then we may say that “KevinSB is a moron” is true by definition. See how that works?
I concur! i missed that one. Profit motives must be balanced by preservation instincts. Both are equally indispensable incentives.
Did you catch Drew attempting to dodge defining anything again but tossing the burden onto Keith? Classic! Just waiting for him to toss it back. I would swear Keith is a sockpuppet, but I’m terrible at keeping track of the nitwits. After a while, they all sound like socks!
Actually, I haven’t seen drjohn”definitions…wedon’tneednostinkin’definitions”drewphd do anything but dodge (and mention his “major award”). By the way, I think you mean “KevinSB” and not “Keith”…
I would be happy to use any commonly accepted dictionary definition if Kevin would simply give me a straight answer to the question.
Those two statements are contradictory.
Are you ever going to give me a straight answer to my questions Kevin? Or will you just continue to weasel?
He can’t–he’s trying to invoke boogiemen to get people to fear President Obama and knowledge is an antidote for fear. With any definition he gives people with either say “that’s not so bad” or “that doesn’t sound like President Obama”–either way he looses.
I’m really puzzled by the apparent miscommunications taking place on this website. For example, it was perfectly clear to me – exercising common sense – what KevinSB was saying when he agreed to make Marxism illegal. He is even kind enough to make things more clear when “Scientist” asserts that Obama was Alinsky’s teacher – an obviously silly mistake that no reasonable person would ever assume. KevinSB even clarifies his own comments:
“I’m not proposing to make an “idea” illegal. I’m proposing to make the practice of this idea by the government illegal. It is actually a subtly different point. After this law passed, people could think Marxist thoughts, and vote for politicians to make Marxism legal again.”
In my mind, Marxism is the philosophy that caused the deaths of millions of people in the 20th century. I think outlawing it as a government policy sounds like a safe and healthy thing to do. Abolising private property, as Marx saw it, would not do anything to improve the human condition in the U.S.
You guys all make so many mistakes and accusations and places where you ask for further evidence it is impossible to respond to them all without creating a mess of a conversation.
One person asks me whether I would make Marxism illegal, and the next person says I can’t answer that question without defining it even though I wasn’t asked to define it, and the next person calls me a coward for avoiding defining it and the next person says that Marxism is just a bogeyman term I use to scare people.
Someone asks for evidence Obama was a Marxist and so I mention one data point that he taught Alinsky. One person responds it is impossible for Obama to have taught Alinsky because he died when Obama was 12. One person responds that Obama never mentions Alinsky. One person responds that Hillary was an acolyte of Alinsky. One person responds that teaching different viewpoints is what teachers should do and it is Stalinist to do otherwise. One person suggests that because I didn’t already give a proof of the connection from Obama to Alinsky that I’m a pathological liar. One person says that Alinsky is only a bogeyman brought up to scare people.
Goodbye then. Have a nice rest of your life.
Yes, I was surprised when President Obama himself gave me a flu shot at Walgreen’s…
Should everyone type more slowly for you so you can keep up?
KevinSB:
While I don’t share your views on politics or President Obama, I do share your frustration with trying to conduct a conversation on the “comments” section of a blog. The medium discourages listening, it doesn’t allow for thoughtful give and take, and it brings out a rhetorical aggressiveness.
Of course, things would be different if you weren’t such a F*@#K&NG L%&$M-
B@$%^N!!!!. : )
KevinSB: You guys all make so many mistakes and accusations and places where you ask for further evidence it is impossible to respond to them all without creating a mess of a conversation.
Well done Slarti!
You’ve covered everything I would have responded with and very succinct accuracy!
So, I’ll just echo with a complete “Ditto!” on all points!
He could just hang out in any of several birther echo chambers and be lauded as a visionary and deep thinker.
Well done on all points.
Of course, Obama taught Alinsky! Haven’t you made it to the Gospel of Puke in the Birther Bible yet?
When he was twelve years old … they found him in the coffee houses, sitting amongst Alinsky and his lieutenants, listening to them and asking them questions. Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his theories. When his parents saw him, they were astonished. His mother said to him, “Barry, why have you treated us like this? Your father Malcolm and I have been anxiously searching for you.”
“Why were you searching for me?” he asked. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Papa Marx’s dacha?” But they did not understand what he was saying to them.
Then he went down to Indonesia with them and was obedient to them. But his mother treasured all these things in her heart. And Jesus grew in zeal and rank, and in favor with the Party and his comrades.
– Arthur
I think KevinSB has some valid points. It seems that the people resonding to him use the same tactics over and over again.
KevinSB is one of the people who expresses the least hostility and uses the least foul language or profanity.
He provide facts, personal testimony, links to other websites, references to published sources of information.
In return, much of what is written in response to his comments are silly – even bizarre – personal attacks and charges that boil down to the absurd suggestion that he is a stupid liar.
(In my case, I’m a published author with a Ph.D. in political science – an award-winning Ph.D. It makes no sense to suggest I’m either stupid or a liar given my history.)
Meanwhile, KevinSB is clearly a thoughtful, well-read person who is up-to-speed on the Obama literature as well as key topics in contemporary politics and economics.
I find it really odd that so many folks on this site are anxious to protect Obama’s reputation, but seem unwilling to fight that battle through making logical, compelling arguments that make sense of the information we have about Barack Obama.
If this blog provides us with insight into the coming presidential campaign, then I’m glad that swing voters will see that Obama supporters cannot appeal to history to make their case that Obama is a centrist pragmatist.
Brilliant! Thanks for a hearty laugh!
I beg your pardon.
Awesome! BTW KevinSB — the Founding Fathers were community organizers. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were the results of community organization. His rules didn’t spring fully formed from his head, he synthesized them from historical experience. That’s why they made sense to people — it’s part of our history.
From Reveille for Radicals:
“A People’s Organization is a conflict group, [and] this must be openly and fully recognized. Its sole reason in coming into being is to wage war against all evils which cause suffering and unhappiness. A People’s Organization is the banding together of large numbers of men and women to fight for those rights which insure a decent way of life. . . .”
How is that different from:
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
Keith! A 1000 apologies and a proletarian salute! I meant KevinSB of course. Argh. Me grey hairs are all kinked up and crosswired.
– Whatever4
That’s pretty creepy comparing the Founding Fathers with Saul Alinsky. The people who ran the American Revolution were people of dignity who respected property rights and limited government. Most of them ended up dying in the process.
They embraced freedom.
Moreover, they were highly accomplished national leaders in their own right – men like George Washington.
To suggest that Alinsky was similar to Washington in his objectives or tactics strikes me as juvenile and out of touch with historical reality. It shows a limited understanding of the sacrifices made to establish the United States.
The comparison isn’t even close to those of us who have studied both Alinsky and Washington. Where is the moment, in your mind, where Washington sought to ridicule his British enemies?
FYI: I notice you never got around to critiquing my take on young Obama and his Marxist socialist friends at Occidental College. Nevertheless, my name has been on the Fogbow website for weeks under the heading – Spurious Tales. It seems to me that if you could poke holes in my story, you would have done it by now. I don’t think it is fair to say that my take on young Obama is “spurious” and then never get around to making your argument.
I’ve reread both of those quotes and they are reflecting completely different perspectives. Alinsky is a socialist revolutionary trying to redistribute the wealth. The Founders sought to throw off an oppressive regime – despotism. In reality, Alinsky’s perspective leads to the sort of despotism that the Founders rightly sought to end. I don’t see how you can make the case that they are saying the same thing at all…not if you understand the history and context of those quotes.
If you just refer to him as “Johnny’s* lickspittle” there wont be any confusion.
* that’s dr john “I love me” drew, phd–winner of a major award 20 years ago just as his academic career imploded–most likely due to his own vacuous incompetence.
I just asked a very simple couple of short questions, requireing only simple straight answers. You spent all the time weaselling out from under them, maybe you should take some of the blame for the mess you find yourself in.
Here, I’ll ask them again, and give you another chance to man up and take responsibility for some straight answers
Let’s assume the ridiculous for a moment, and pretend that Obama is a Marxist.
If he is a Marxist, would that somehow preclude him from POTUS eligibility?
Is it illegal to be a Marxist in the US?
Is it illegal for a President to be a Marxist?
I think it probably more accurate to ascribe totalitarianism as the cause of those deaths, whether at the hands of the Nazis (who were rabid anti-Communists) or the Stalinists (who were Marxists). There’s nothing in Karl Marx that advocates totalitarianism or mass murder to promote socialism. Your argument is not unlike the similarly fallacious that religion is the cause of most all the wars.
I can’t even imagine what a law outlawing socialism would even look like, or why anyone in a democracy would want to try. Such legislation would seem to me to be a hopeless entanglement.
That an educated man would continue to spout mindless clap-trap like this is beyond my comprehension. In normal people, education brings humility.
This thread is too long. It’s closed.