Why No "October Surprise"?

Every presidential election seems to bring out some "October surprise"; a scandle involving a major candidate revealed in late October to try and sway voters.  That didn't happen this year.  PJ Media has a theory as to why.

In Mitt Romney’s case, the answer is pretty obvious: He’s squeaky clean. His entire adult life has been like a boring treatise on Mormon moral rectitude.  There are no skeletons in Romney’s closet, otherwise we would have heard about them.

But in Barack Obama’s case, the situation is reversed: Everything he’s ever done is scandalous. The reason there was no October Surprise for Obama is that we’re all scandaled out. Anyone’s who been paying attention since 2008 has literally been in paralytic shock every single day. We spent October 2012 exactly as we’ve spent every month of the last four years: Our jaws on the floor, aghast, stupefied, unable to breathe. Almost every single thing Obama has done since he’s been in the national spotlight could have been and should have been a career-ending October Surprise. But the mainstream media, as we all know, has devoted itself to protecting him.

The article then provides an extensive list of scandals that would've ended almost any other politician's career.  Here are a few of them.  And I really mean few.

• $6 trillion in new national debt under Obama…after he promised to decrease the deficit.

• In both the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, the Obama campaign purposely disabled the credit card verification system for its Web site donations, allowing anyone from any foreign country to donate with no limit and no proof of identity

• Operation Fast & Furious — a government-sponsored illegal gun-running scheme designed to purposely go awry so as to induce public outcry for gun control.

• Militarily intervened in Libya in 2011 without the Congressional approval required by the War Powers Act — technically an impeachable offense.

• Under Obama’s watch, for the first time in history America’s credit rating was downgraded, due to his poor economic policies.

• Appointed Van Jones, a former avowed communist who supported a “9/11 Truth” petition, to be “Green Jobs Czar.”

• Appointed Anita Dunn, who said Chairman Mao was her “favorite philosopher,” to be White House Communications Director.

• Appointed John Holdren, who perviously entertained the notion of forced mass sterilzation to stop overpopulation, to be Science Czar.

• Appointed Steven Chu, who openly advocated an artificial increase in gasoline prices to $10/gallon (and similar increases in other energy prices) to be Secretary of Energy.

• Appointed Kevin Jennings, who led a group that promoted X-rated “sex-positive” textbooks for 13-year-olds, instructed teenagers at a conference how to perform “fisting” (anal penetration by fists), who refused to report instances of statutory rape, and who expressed admiration for a member of NAMBLA, to be America’s “Safe School’s Czar.”

The list goes on and on.  If you din't already know all of these, you haven't been paying attention.  Or, you've only been paying attention to the dinosaur media.

But here's the best part; a poem from the comments.

The Sixth of November

Remember, remember, this sixth of November,
The radicals’ treasonous plot.
I know of no reason the radicals’ treason
Should e’er be forgiv’n or forgot.

The Sixties were waning, and Leftists were claiming
That radical changes were due.
Their Marxist solution was armed revolution:
The Weathermen made their debut.

The radicals raged on the national stage, and
Horrific explosions ensued.
Their bombs were dramatic, but also erratic;
They sometimes killed radicals, too.

The Leftists grew older, the underground, colder,
And so they came in from the cold.
“Subvert from within – in the long run, we’ll win,” said
The Leftists, determined and bold.

And thus it began – this nefarious plan – and
The radicals slowly took charge:
Complete infiltration of all education;
The long institutional march.

The journalist schools would produce useful fools, for
The Left would need media shills.
And Hollywood, too, would assist in the coup, with
Its slick propagandizing skills.

“Community action” would build a new faction;
’Twould organize proles on the street.
A smooth politician would front for the mission,
And run for the president’s seat.

The radicals’ goal, which they proudly extol, is
A communist U.S. of A.
Collectivist schemes lead to brutal regimes, and
For this do the radicals pray.

But Jefferson’s aim, with the charters he framed, was
To guard individual rights.
And “redistribution” was not a solution,
But one of the evils to fight.

So let us remember, this sixth of November,
Just what is at stake on this date.
Will Jefferson’s dream, or the radicals’ scheme, now
Determine America’s fate?

Gadsten Flag on a Coal Barge

From the Chicago Boyz:

Here is a coal barge on the Ohio River, today.

I note that they are flying the Gadsden flag.

I hope they and their families, and other like-minded folks in Ohio and Pennsylvania, vote to end the self-inflicted war on American energy production.

Thanks to ChicagoBoyz reader Bob Skinner for the picture. Bob half-expected our Commander in Chief to call in a drone strike on these guys, partly for the yucky coal, but mostly for the flag.

The Nanny State Fails the Sandy Test

What's wrong with bloated, morbidly obese government?  As if the expense and violation of basic rights wasn't bad enough, it turns out that big government doesn't do it's job.  Take New York City, for example.

With an almost eerie foreshadowing, the dangers laid out by scientists as they tried to press public officials for change in recent years describes what happened this week: Subway tunnels filled with water, just as they warned. Tens of thousands of people in Manhattan lost power. The city shut down. . . .

“A fair question to ask is, have we been as focused as we need to be for emergency preparations,” said the former official, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize ties to the administration. “We’ve just been lucky. We need hardening for the risk we’ve always faced. Until things happen, people aren’t willing to pay for it.”

Government has important, limited, legitimate functions in society.  Infrastructure is one of them.  So, why didn't New York City build the infrastructure that could have prevented the destruction caused by Super Storm Sandy? 

Here in New York we have a very busy government. It’s worried about the kinds of fats we eat and the size of the soft drinks we buy, and there is no shortage of regulations affecting businesses, street vendors, and individuals. But in all this exciting fine tuning, nobody seems to have bothered to think about the much greater task of keeping floodwaters out of the subway system. Admittedly, getting public support and finding the money for flood protection would be hard, but it is exactly that kind of hard job that governments are supposed to do. Leadership is getting the important things done, not looking busy on secondary tasks while the real needs of the city go quietly unmet.

Every law, every regulation, every tax requires enforcement, and that requires resources.  When government gets busy regulating every aspect of people's lives, there are no resources left to do what it's supposed to do.  The result is what's happening now at Staten Island.

Even as the city and feds rushed food, water and generators to the borough, residents and their elected officials fumed that Staten Island was being prepped as the starting line for Sunday's New York City Marathon, even as the rest of the island is left to deal with the aftershocks of the mega-storm.

"The notion of diverting even one police officer, one first responder, one asset away from this carnage is beyond irrational,” Councilman James Oddo told the Daily News. Earlier, Oddo called the idea of hosting the marathon as “idiotic” on his Facebook page.

Obviously, NYC's government has its priorities backwards.  But that shouldn't come as a surprise.  That's what happens when government tries to do too much.

UPDATE (04NOV12): The inimitable Mark Steyn puts is far better than I ever could.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/

Even in those few parts of the Northeast that can legitimately claim to have been clobbered by Sandy, Big Government made it worse. Last week, Nanny Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, rivaled his own personal best for worst mayoral performance since that snowstorm a couple of years back. This is a man who spends his days micromanaging the amount of soda New Yorkers are allowed to have in their beverage containers rather than, say, the amount of ocean New Yorkers are allowed to have in their subway system – just as, in the previous crisis, the municipal titan who can regulate the salt out of your cheeseburger proved utterly incapable of regulating any salt on to Sixth Avenue. Imagine if this preening buffoon had expended as much executive energy on flood protection for the electrical grid and transit system as he does on approved quantities of carbonated beverages. But that's leadership 21^st-century style: When the going gets tough, the tough ban trans fats.

Then he relates it to our federal government's inaction in Benghazi.

Back in Benghazi, the president who looks so cool in a bomber jacket declined to answer his beleaguered diplomats' calls for help – even though he had aircraft and Special Forces in the region. Too bad. He's all jacket and no bombers. This, too, is an example of America's uniquely profligate impotence. When something goes screwy at a ramshackle consulate halfway round the globe, very few governments have the technological capacity to watch it unfold in real time. Even fewer have deployable military assets only a couple of hours away. What is the point of unmanned drones, of military bases around the planet, of elite Special Forces trained to the peak of perfection if the president and the vast bloated federal bureaucracy cannot rouse themselves to action? What is the point of outspending Russia, Britain, France, China, Germany and every middle-rank military power combined if, when it matters, America cannot urge into the air one plane with a couple of dozen commandoes? In Iraq, al-Qaida is running training camps in the western desert. In Afghanistan, the Taliban are all but certain to return most of the country to its pre-9/11 glories. But in Washington the head of the world's biggest "counterterrorism" bureaucracy briefs the president on flood damage and downed trees.

However, even within big government, common sense sometimes wins.  Mayor Nanny Bloomberg finally canceled he NYC Marathon.  But he failed to even get that right.

Fresh off his flight from San Francisco Friday afternoon, Leland Kim had just picked up his numbered marathon bib and registration packet at the Javits Center and was headed to the ING New York City Marathon Expo.

Then he got a text message from a friend: "We're so sorry the marathon got canceled."

Confused, Kim asked someone working at the expo about it, and was told the marathon was still going on. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had been saying so all week. And Kim had already spoken to runners who'd come from New Zealand, Argentina, Russia and Ireland.

Politician Tells the Truth...

...Unintentionally, of course.

Speaking before a campaign rally this afternoon, Vice President Joe Biden made a bit of an unfortunate gaffe.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said to the Wisconsin crowd, “there’s never been a day in the last four years I’ve been proud to be his vice president.”

Always good for a laugh.

It Ain't Stealing When Government Does It

So you think government can't take your property without first convicting you of a crime?  Think again.

The federal government wants to seize the Motel Caswell, owned and operated for the past 30 years by Russ Caswell and his wife, because a tiny fraction (.05 percent) of the people who stayed at the motel between 2001 and 2008 were arrested for drug crimes on the property. Local and state authorities who investigated those crimes have never accused the Caswells of any wrongdoing.

If the government succeeds in taking the Caswell's business from them, the bounty from the forfeiture would be split among the very law enforcement agencies attempting to take the property through a program called "equitable sharing," in which the local agency would get 80 percent of the proceeds and the federal government would keep the rest; the Caswells, who have worked their entire adult lives to build and grow this business and who are relying on this business for their retirement, would end up with nothing.

But that's OK, because they didn't build that.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

But, seriously, you know what seems "equitable" to me?  If the Caswells get to keep their entire business, and government bureaucrats keep their greedy paws off it.

This money could be used to pad the budget of the police department, thus giving it a direct financial incentive not to pursue justice, but rather to "police for profit," which is exactly what is going on in the Caswell case. The civil forfeiture action against Caswell family is one of the most outrageous demonstrations of the abuse of forfeiture nationwide.

"Civil forfeiture treats innocent property owners like the Caswells worse than criminals," said Larry Salzman, an IJ attorney on the case. "Criminals must be proven guilty before their property is taken, but once the government targets a property for forfeiture an owner must prove himself innocent to get it back: This turns the American idea that you're innocent until proven guilty on its head and is one of the main perversions of the legal system we're fighting against in this case."

 One would think that this would be a clear-cut, slam-dunk case.  After all, the 4th Amendment to the Constitution states...

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated

And the 5th Amendment states...

No person shall be... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Pretty straight-forward, right?  Yes... if, and only if, one uses logic, reason and common sense; all of which are rare in any large bureaucracy.  And government is the biggest bureaucracy of all.

Diversity, Tolerance & Civility (Updated)

Ah, the "tolerance" of the Left.  We just read about a Leftist pastor who preaches that all whites go to Hell, and calls blacks who don't vote for Pres Obama, "n------".  Now this:

Signorile in a saner moment

Our reader Tim in MT shared this video with us that he had made after catching Michelangelo Signorile on SiriusXM radio yesterday.

The left-wing radio talker, twice in the segment (at about 2:15 & 3:45) advises his gay Romney-supporting caller to drink arsenic or other poison so he can commit suicide. At 2:57, he tells the young man that he should not be allowed to vote.

You can listen to the audio at the link, if you so choose.

You know, I'm beginning to think that Leftists' talk about "civility" is just a ploy to get people with whom they disagree to shut up.

UPDATE (02NOV12): Now compare Signorile's Leftist "tolerance" with Rush Limbaugh's Right Wing "bigotry".

Anyone who's surprised has been living with his/her head in the sand.

All Whites Go to Hell

You've probably heard the saying that "all dogs go to Heaven", but did you know that all white people go to Hell?  That's what the "Rev. Dr." James Lowery preaches.  Who, you might ask, is the "Rev. Dr."* James Lowery, and why should I care?  Oh, he just happens to be the pastor who Pres Barack Obama selected to give the invocation at his inauguration ceremony, 20 January 2009, and to whom Pres Obama awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom on 30 July 2009.

Rev. Dr. James Lowery spoke at St. James Baptist Church as part of a Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) tour across Georgia to encourage black voters to cast ballots for Obama.

Wait a minute.  I thought pastors weren't supposed to do that.  Here's more from the "good Reverend".

"I don't know what kind of a n----- wouldn't vote with a black man running," said Lowery. "All that he did with the stimulus was genius. Nobody intelligent would risk this country with Romney."

Classy.  Use racial epithets against people of your own race who disagree with you.

he urged individuals to look at their own character and conduct.

I seem to recall a sermon I read somewhere about beams and slivers.

Lowery said that when he was a young militant, he used to say all white folks were going to hell. Then he mellowed and just said most of them were. Now, he said, he is back to where he was.

 Funny, I seem to recall scriptures that teach a different doctrine.

"I'm frightened by the level of hatred and bitterness coming out in this election," said Lowery.

There are those beams and slivers again.

Remember, ladies & gents, the "Rev. Dr." Lowery spewed his hatred inside a church, with multiple local pastors present, using the cross of Christ as a prop for his message.  If your pastor invited someone to speak at your church, and that person spewed this kind of racism, would you sit there and listen?  Would you continue to attend that church?

Forsyth Mayor John Howard, a member of St. James who opened Saturday's program, said he was "pretty shocked" by Lowery's comments. He said if a speaker had made the same comments about black people, he would have gotten up and left.

He said the Bible gives set instructions on how to go to heaven and it doesn't say anything about skin color. Hearing the comments he said he looked at the face of his pastor, the Rev. Antonio Proctor, and could tell he was real shocked too. Howard said he and Proctor talked about putting a video of the event on Forsyth Cable TV but decided after his comments that it wasn't a good idea.

I see.  The mayor knows Lowery's message contradicts the Bible, but he sat there and did nothing anyway.  And why, exactly, wasn't it "a goo idea" to put a video of the event on TV, Mr Mayor?

But wait, there's more.

Rev. Antonio Proctor, pastor of St. James Baptist Church, closed the program by saying, "I am grateful for your stopping here with words to challenge us to hold onto this responsibility."

Seriously?  Hang on; here's the best part, from Lowery's invocation at Pres Obama's inauguration.

“And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance,” he prayed in 2009. “And as we leave this mountain top, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family.”

Ah, yes, because nothing "help[s] us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family” like stating that all white people go to Hell.

I also like this part.

Speaking to the group at St. James Baptist, Lowery said he liked giving the benediction because it gave him the last word. The only thing that followed him on the program was the "Star Spangled Banner." He said it was the first time in his life he enjoyed the national anthem

Hey, that sounds a lot like something Michelle Obama said a couple times, doesn't it?

Speaking in Milwaukee, Wisconsin today, would-be First Lady Michelle Obama said, "for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback."

Then in Madison, she said, "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country, and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change."

But then, the Obama's have a long history of association with racist, anti-American, anti-Semitic pastors.

Barack Obama is a member of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ. Its minister, and Obama's spiritual adviser, is the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. In 1982, the church launched Trumpet Newsmagazine; Wright's daughters serve as publisher and executive editor. Every year, the magazine makes awards in various categories. Last year, it gave the Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award to a man it said "truly epitomized greatness." That man is Louis Farrakhan.

Maybe for Wright and some others, Farrakhan "epitomized greatness." For most Americans, though, Farrakhan epitomizes racism, particularly in the form of anti-Semitism. Over the years, he has compiled an awesome record of offensive statements, even denigrating the Holocaust by falsely attributing it to Jewish cooperation with Hitler -- "They helped him get the Third Reich on the road." His history is a rancid stew of lies.

Such is the sad state of the Civil Rights movement today.  We've gone from...

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

to all whites go to Hell.

Speaking of which, I have a few questions for Lowery.  If all whites go to Hell, then...

• What happens to those who are part white?
• Does one drop of white blood condemn them?
• Does one drop of black blood redeem them?
• Do you realize that Pres Obama is half white?

Lowery is a racist nut job, so I'd never expect a coherent answer from him (not that I think he'd read my blog).  But here are a couple of serious questions for the reasonable people out there.

• Why do so many Americans, including whites, tolerate racism directed at whites?
• Is racism always wrong, or is it only wrong when directed toward certain races?

*If you're wondering why I placed "Rev. Dr." in quotes when writing "Rev. Dr." James Lowery, the reasons are that...

1. "Reverend" derives from the word, reverence: "a feeling or attitude of deep respect tinged with awe; veneration".  A person who twists the Scriptures to fit his/her own racist agenda does not revere the Scriptures or the God revealed therein.
2. The term "Doctor" is one of deep respect of which James Lowery has proven himself unworthy.