With much hoopla, [Read more…]
hyperbolic times
Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh
Polite debate is no longer the accepted norm in our society. The liberal left is not tolerating divergent opinions, they want them eliminated. Outrageous labels, personal threats, and even violence have escalated during what used to be polite discourse and disagreements of opinion. [Read more…]
When Democrats Talk Like Socialists
By SVETLANA KUNIN
Posted 08/22/2012 06:47 PM ET
‘What exactly is the point of this article?” asked a reader of my last (July 25) column titled “President’s Attack On Success Shows U.S. Falling, Not Rising.” “That the U.S. has a robust private sector and a host of freedoms? That people with good ideas can succeed in America? Who is arguing these points?”
Too many people think that freedom, opportunity and a variety of choices are ever-present features of life in the U.S. — that fundamental transformation of America will not affect accustomed standards. [Read more…]
Occupy ElCo Govt
Occupy Admits Its Real Goal: Communism
The Left: An Occupy organizer admitted over the weekend that the goal of his protest group was to “overthrow the capitalist system and build communism.” So the cat’s out of the bag again on this bunch. Where is the outrage?
The true agenda of the Occupy movement has been revealed — it’s a totalitarian one. Billing itself as a spontaneous people’s revolution and embraced by the media and Democrat political establishment, Occupy is really a destructive band of thugs whose goal is the violent demise of democracy. [Read more…]
Wed 8/8 5:00 p.m. @ Lions Hall
This film documents the socialist conquest of America. Whether Obama is the son of Frank Marshall Davis or not, the history of the totalitarian movement they both dedicated their lives to is an on-going American tragedy that must be seen, must become known, by all Americans.
WND EXCLUSIVE
Filmmaker reveals ‘deeply disturbing’ Obama background
‘Gap between his public narrative … and reality’
Ever wonder why presidents before Barack Obama didn’t feel the need to publicly berate the U.S. Supreme Court during a State of the Union address, even when they disagreed with a decision, as Obama did over the campaign finance ruling?
Did you think why earlier presidents did not demand ranks of unaccountable “czars” in the White House, to address everything from water use to executive pay?
And did you notice the reams of orders emanating from the Obama White House regarding immigration policy, social welfare programs and terrorism policy, issues that logically should be addressed by Congress?
There’s one man who’s noticed it all: Filmmaker Joel Gilbert, who has directed the new “Dreams from My Real Father: A Story of Reds and Deception,” about Obama and his past.
Gilbert purports in his production that Obama’s biological father was not the “Kenyan goat herder” Barack Obama Sr., who visited the United States as a student and later returned to Kenya.
Instead, his evidence suggests that Obama’s biological father was Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party USA propagandist, and who has prevailing influence over White House actions even today.
Gilbert told WND that his background in Middle East and Islamic studies had him working in 2010 on “Atomic Jihad: Ahmadinejad’s Coming War and Obama’s Politics of Defeat.”
He reviewed hundreds of Obama speeches during that research and noted an “odd” pattern of behavior in Obama.
“When speaking of issues relating to the rich and the poor, Obama became very excited, speaking rapidly and louder, always in a higher pitch. On other subjects, he was quite calm. Why would Obama have an inner passion for class struggle? From my knowledge of his background, exclusive prep school, Ivy Leagues, Harvard Law – it didn’t seem to fit,” he said.
But for Gilbert, a film director, writer, and musician who creates documentaries through his Highway 61 Entertainment, the light clicked on when he read Obama’s book, “Dreams from My Father.”
There were multiple references to Obama seeking out Marxist individuals, pursuing socialist events, and advocating for a “community” lifestyle.
His investigation then turned to Davis, whose name repeatedly was mentioned in Obama’s writing.
“His close physical resemblance to Obama was shocking, while Obama little resembled the Kenyan Obama. How could this be?” he wondered on his website about the new “Dreams” production.
“I unearthed two film archives of Frank Marshall Davis, one from 1973, the other from 1987, as well as Davis’ photo collection. I then acquired 500 copies of the Honolulu Record, the communist run newspaper where Davis wrote a weekly political column for eight years. I also obtained seven indecent photos of Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother, taken at Frank Marshall Davis’ house, suggesting an intimate connection between Dunham and Davis.
“I concluded that to understand Obama’s plans for America, the question was ‘Who is the real father?’”
Gilbert, who previously challenged Hollywood’s comfort zone with “Farewell Israel: Bush, Iran and the Revolt of Islam,” said the bottom line is that Obama’s “story” of an inspiring childhood is just not real.
Gilbert told WND, “I felt I could build a case that Obama in fact had a very deeply disturbing family background.”
And Obama is, in fact, pursuing the “dreams” from his “father” – his real father, a “likely Soviet agent,” Gilbert said.
There is an ever-present set of themes about which Obama revolves, he said, including a “top 1 percent taking advantage” and “a proletariat being taken advantage of.”
There are “evil straw men preventing the working class from upward mobility,” he said. “This is classic Marxist ideology.”
Even Obama’s recent claims to small business owners that “You didn’t build that,” align with the ideology of Karl Marx.
“This is all the justification for taking over, redistributing wealth. It’s preliminary talk for telling people they are being oppressed by evil straw men,” he continued.
Gilbert felt he had to tell the story – especially as the primary major media outlets in the nation are isolating and ignoring the issues at hand regarding Obama – and he turned to film.
“My ‘Dreams’ provides the first cohesive understanding of Obama’s deep rooted life journey in socialism. It includes Obama’s indoctrination in Marxism by Frank Marshall Davis, his college years, his job as ‘organizer,’ his involvement with Project Vote and the subprime mortgage crisis, the Ayers family, Alinsky and Reverend Wright, all the way to his campaigns and presidency,” he said.
He said it is “shocking” how the long-independent media in the United States has decided to “support this false narrative” of Obama’s Kenyan father and typical childhood.
He said as part of his effort to get the message out, he’s working on delivery of copies of his DVD to members of the public.
Gilbert told WND his goal is based on the fact that Americans are a great people, and they “deserve to elect … a president on a truthful and honest depiction of both his political foundations, his background and his plans and what he will do.”
“We deserve and must have honesty from candidates as to what they intend to do,” he said. “Barack Obama has violated that trust to their votes.”
Gilbert said Obama needs to speak honestly about those issues.
“Obama must come clean and admit his real background, who is his real father,” he said, so that voters can vote based on who he really is and what he wants to do.
“Obama’s election was not a sudden political phenomenon. It was the culmination of an American socialist movement that Frank Marshall Davis nurtured in Chicago and Hawaii, and has been quietly infiltrating the U.S. economy, universities, and media for decades,” Gilbert warned.
“‘Problem solving’ and ‘fair play’ are the new code words that socialists employ in a determined strategy to move the Democratic party to the far left, and embrace socialism as their natural ideology. Obama’s anti-democratic behavior, including consolidation of power through Czars, going around Congress, intimidating the Supreme Court, and class polarization tactics can be better understood after viewing ‘Dreams from My Real Father.’”
Paul Kengor IBD Viewpoint
Media Cover Up Obama’s Ties To Communist Davis
By PAUL KENGOR
Posted 07/16/2012 06:34 PM ET
He blasted Wall Street, big business, big banks, big oil, “excess profits,” “corporate profits” and “fat contracts,” “millionaires” and the “wealthy.”
He called out the “corporation executive” for not paying his “fair” share.
He attacked “GOP” tax cuts that “spare the rich” and “benefit millionaires.”
He trumpeted the public sector over the private sector.
He advocated wealth redistribution from greedy “corporations” to “health insurance” and “public works projects.”
He favored taxpayer-funding of universal health care. He supported government stimulus to rescue America from (allegedly) another Great Depression.
He wanted to rid America of “huge funds” finding their way into the “pockets” of “Wall Street.” “Instead,” he declared, “money should be spent for the benefit of the people instead of the corporations.”
He supported nationalization and singled out General Motors for government action.
He favored the Russians at the expense of countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia.
He rejected Winston Churchill, and wanted the heralded prime minister nowhere within the White House.
He insisted that American foreign policy was about “big profits” for big oil.
He cited the American Founders and the U.S. Constitution, and described himself and his policies as “progressive,” while his detractors accused him of being a communist.
He adopted slogans like “Forward” and “Change.” He wanted to transform America through what he called “fundamental change.”
Who is this man?
If you answered “Barack Obama,” you’re only half right. The answer is Frank Marshall Davis, Hawaii mentor to Barack Obama, and Communist Party USA (CPUSA) member No. 47544.
And only now, four years into Obama’s presidency, are we finally learning about this mystery man ignored or downplayed by sympathetic Obama biographers and journalists.
Frank Marshall Davis (1905-87) was a pro-Soviet, pro-Red China, literal card-carrying member of the Communist Party.
He edited and wrote for Party-line publications such as the Honolulu Record and the Chicago Star, which included contributors who actually served as agents to Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Soviet Support
Davis did outrageous Soviet propaganda work in his columns, at every juncture agitating and opposing U.S. attempts to slow Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung.
He favored Yalta and Red Army takeovers of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Central and Eastern Europe as a whole.
In China, he urged America to dump the “fascist” Chiang in support of Mao’s Red forces. He wanted communist takeovers in Korea and Vietnam. He was adamantly, angrily anti-NATO, anti-Marshall Plan, anti-Truman Doctrine.
He argued that U.S. officials under President Harry Truman and under secretaries of state George Marshall and Dean Acheson were handing West Germany back to the Nazis, while Stalin was pursuing “democracy” in East Germany and the Communist Bloc.
He portrayed America’s leaders as “aching for an excuse to launch a nuclear nightmare of mass murder and extermination” against the Soviets and the Chinese.
Moreover, in what ought to be an eye-opener to President Obama’s Democratic base, Frank Marshall Davis’ targets were chiefly Democrats, especially President Truman.
Why target Truman? Because Davis’ peak period of pro-Soviet propaganda work was the latter 1940s, when Stalin’s Red Army was rampaging through Eastern Europe. Standing in Stalin’s way was Harry Truman.
And so, Davis’ Chicago Star trashed Truman with headlines like “White House to white hoods: KKK hails Truman’s policy as its own” and “TRUMAN KNIFES HOPE FOR PEACE.”
Davis excoriated the Democratic president as trigger-happy Truman, pursuing “a new world war,” a “program for World War III,” in a bloodthirsty bid to “rule Russia.”
He framed Truman’s Marshall Plan as a new form of “colonial slavery,” intended “to re-enslave the yellow and brown and black peoples of the world.”
Truman was not Davis’ only target. Davis harbored a special hatred for Winston Churchill. He warned of Churchill teaming up with Truman in a two-nation U.K./U.S. alliance seeking “Anglo-American world domination” and “super-imperialism.”
When Churchill came to Fulton, Mo., in March 1946 to warn the world that an “Iron Curtain” was closing across Europe, Frank Marshall Davis was livid.
He and his CPUSA comrades mocked Churchill; they maintained that the only “Iron Curtains” were those being erected by Davis’ worst demons: anti-communists in the American press and General Motors.
The problem was not Stalin’s Iron Curtain, scoffed Davis, but “G.M.’s iron curtain,” being raised by “General Motors’ Hitlers.”
In short, Frank Marshall Davis’ work and writings were irresponsible and outrageous.
Congress certainly noticed. In December 1956, the Democrats who headed the Senate Judiciary Committee summoned Frank Marshall Davis to Washington to testify on his pro-Soviet activities. He pled the Fifth Amendment.
The next year, the Democratic Senate, in an official report titled “Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States,” publicly listed Davis as “an identified member of the Communist Party.”
Davis’ political antics were so radical that the FBI placed him on the federal government’s Security Index, which meant he could be immediately detained in the event of a national emergency, such as a war breaking out between the United States and U.S.S.R.
Influence On Obama
All of that is troubling enough, but how does it relate to Barack Obama?
Frank Marshall Davis influenced Obama throughout Obama’s adolescence in the 1970s. It was Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Dunham, who introduced Davis to Obama for the purpose of mentoring.
In my research on Davis, I quote over a dozen biographers and associates of Obama and Davis describing Davis as a vital, lasting influence. One Davis biographer and close friend, a University of Hawaii professor, says that Davis instilled in Obama a belief that “change can happen.”
In fact, we know about Davis because of Obama’s own lengthy acknowledgment. In “Dreams from My Father,” Obama notes that Davis offered him advice at several significant levels: on race, college, women, his mind, his attitudes, on life.
“I was intrigued by old Frank,” writes Obama, “with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge behind the hooded eyes.”
Obama directly mentioned “Frank” 22 times over the course of thousands of words and every section of his bestselling memoir, from Hawaii — the site of visits and late evenings together — to Los Angeles to Chicago to Germany to Africa, from adolescence to college to community organizing.
Frank is always one of the few (and first) names mentioned by Obama in each mile-marker upon his historic path to Washington.
When Frank is not physically there with Obama, Obama literally imagines him there. Obama felt a connection to Frank that he painfully concedes he was unable to find in anyone else.
Tellingly, though Frank Marshall Davis’ influence on Obama is acknowledged in “Dreams from My Father,” Obama never once disclosed the CPUSA member’s full name. No doubt this was because Obama knew about Davis’ extreme past.
I believe that Davis is reflective, and helps explain, how and why America’s current president is further to the left than any president of our generation.
He sheds light on how our president developed into a man of the left, ultimately ranked the most left-leaning member of the Senate by National Journal in the final year before he ran for president.
And yet, this radical influence on our president has been thoroughly ignored by the media. No Republican president with a mentor this extreme to the right would escape such scrutiny.
Not many presidents can count a card-carrying CPUSA member among their mentors.
The man now in charge of history’s mightiest economic engine was influenced, to some notable degree, by a pro-Soviet communist.
That is unprecedented; a relationship that at long last merits our attention.
• Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College and author of the new book, “The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor.”
Dreams From My Real Father
This film documents the socialist conquest of America. Whether Obama is the son of Frank Marshall Davis or not, the history of the totalitarian movement they both dedicated their lives to is an on-going American tragedy that must be seen, must become known, by all Americans.
I’m ashamed to be called ‘newsman’
by Joseph Farah
After watching the press reaction and “questions” following Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s breathtaking news conference yesterday, I have to tell you I’m embarrassed to call myself a newsman.
If someone asks me what I do for a living, maybe I’ll identify myself as an Internet entrepreneur.
Or maybe I’ll say I’m a “writer.”
Or maybe a publisher or businessman.
I never thought it would come to this. Being a newsman was all I ever wanted to be as far back as I can remember. It’s really all I’ve ever done through adulthood. It’s all I really know and love.
But I don’t ever want to be associated with that pack of jackals from Phoenix who jumped all over Arpaio and his investigator, Mike Zullo, for courageously presenting overwhelming evidence – I would even use the term “proof” – that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is fraudulent and that the state of Hawaii is not only a willing accomplice in this scandal but perpetrating an even bigger one as a virtual factory for phony documents giving noncitizens instant citizenship with a stroke of the pen.
Some 50,000 people across the globe watched the live presentation on WND TV. If you didn’t get a chance to see it unfold, I urge you to take the time to review on demand, at your convenience.
In another era, with another occupant of the White House – someone like Nixon or Reagan or Bush – such an event would have been carried live by ABC, NBC and CBS. The New York Times would have had a half-dozen reporters on the scene. CNN, FOX and CSPAN would have carried coverage and offer instant analysis and debate over the issues raised.
But that’s no longer the America in which we live.
Today, without the Internet, we live in a 100 percent controlled media environment. There are more sacred cows than edible ones. The watchdogs are now lapdogs. The “reporters” are propagandists for the political establishment and the status quo.
I watch in horror as my chosen profession collectively disgraces itself.
Can our nation even survive without a free and independent and inquisitive, watchdog press?
Thomas Jefferson said, “Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.”
Are we “safe” in America today?
On the other hand, Vladimir Lenin said, “When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward – or go back. He who now talks about the ‘freedom of the press’ goes backward, and halts our headlong course towards Socialism.”
Is that where we’re headed in America today – forward to socialism and tyranny?
I feel sympathy for Arpaio and Zullo for the abuse they have endured. I understand it well, because I’ve experienced it firsthand for the last four years in my own commitment to the pursuit of truth regarding Obama’s life story.
The easiest choice to make is to go along with the conventional wisdom, not ask the hard questions, not relentlessly pursue truth. Kudos to Arpaio and Zullo, who didn’t take the easy way out like those clowns in the local Phoenix media and all those in the national media who just ignored what the only law-enforcement investigation of Obama’s birth certificate found.
I may not want to associate myself with the media anymore out of sheer humiliation. But I promise you one thing: I’m not going to stop being a real journalist. I’m not going to stop doing what I’ve been doing for 35 years. I’m not going to stop supporting intrepid, independent renegades like the WND team who make me believe there’s still hope for redeeming the media.
China observations
China is huge and it has an ubiquitous density to it. You rarely find the end of a road or a point where the imprint of man ends and nature takes over. You almost never see an untended patch of ground that is not orderly planted and carefully tended. For example in Shanghai, the largest city in the world, the freeways have a flower box lining on both sides of each direction of the many elevated sections. These are small planter boxes mounted to the concrete sidewalls. They must be watered and pruned. Mile after mile, they all show blooms, no weeds, no dead plants, no brown patches, each one full of colorful blooms. There is no automatic watering system to maintain the miles of flower boxes on the elevated roadways. Alongside the street-level freeways are elaborate ornamental gardens in a buffer zone either side of the road, all maintained by hand labor to a standard you might see in a city park in America. These strips of gardens can be twenty miles long and are maintained because they look good, not because they are used for recreation.
While easy enough to describe, that doesn’t really capture the impression that so much order, so much attempted perfection, makes on you when you see miles of it. Radiating out from Shanghai on the trains, you see many more miles of small farm plots and clusters of homes. The homes are generally drab, the color of concrete or tile. They don’t appear to use much paint on the exteriors of homes, preferring instead to use non-wooden materials that don’t require painting. The surrounding rice fields in various stages of their planting, flooding, growing, harvesting, and burning cycles are meticulous. Shaped and tiered to fit the contours of the land, no square foot is ignored. You see a lot of the work done by hand, some of it done with older farm machinery, and an occasional ox.
Small to medium sized factories are everywhere and they usually have a dual track expansive chrome accordion gate that slowly rolls open and closed with a motorized module at the head, looking like one of those little square service robots in Star Wars, and mounted with a revolving yellow warning light. Crossing through the gate you’ll come to an administration building and then one or more factory buildings. These multi-story buildings usually have wide concrete stairways at one end of the building. You rarely find an elevator. People climb the stairs at work.
Many factories have dormitories, especially if their production involves hand labor. Chinese labor will often contract for a year or two and live on the premises where they work. Contracts usually expire at the Chinese new years and workers take that time to travel across the country to their various homes to reconnect with family. Jobs are competitive in China. Everyone wants one, and everyone wants a better one. The competition is fierce and people work hard.
A home in a city for a young working couple who are moving up from a rental usually begins with the purchase of a concrete space in a residential building. The couple must then finish the space with everything else. That means doors, even front doors, windows, railings, plumbing fixtures, cabinets, wiring, lighting, and of course furnishings and personal effects. Main entry doors are a major investment because most Chinese don’t believe in banks. As a result their front doors are often impenetrable ornate steel vaults.
Title for ownership of these home spaces is for a definite period, usually 50, 65 or 75 years. At the end of the title period, ownership reverts to the state. Homes in these residential buildings can be sold and bought on the market, but the duration of the total title period doesn’t change. So, for example, you could buy a place that might have 35 years remaining on it before it reverts to the state. Notwithstanding this diminishing time limitation, home prices continue to escalate because the force of demand is the stronger price influence. At some point, even demand will not overcome the price effects of imminent reversion and prices should begin to come down to reflect the shorter available terms. When that begins to occur on a large scale, I would expect these property owners in China to revolt in some way. Where property is owned, you see great care taken to maximize the utility of every available square foot, be it living space, garden, or some productive activity. Over 75 years and several generations, people will get attached to their places.
The newer streets outside of the old cities in China are all very wide and straight. Out in the countryside it’s usually a two lane road but in the newer sections of the cities they’re routinely 6 or 8 eight lanes across, often with merging frontage roads. These thoroughfares go for straight lines for untold miles. Think of Colfax eight lanes wide and saturated with human conveyances of all sorts – cars, large trucks, taxis, vans, bicycles, scooters, 3-wheeled construction carts (some pedaled, some motorized), tractors, two wheeled hand carts, wheelbarrows and lastly, walkers. You see all of it on virtually any Chinese street, whether in the city or the countryside. And quite often you’ll see loadings on these various conveyances that can only be described as preposterous. Things stacked and strapped high and wide, balanced on a comparatively tiny conveyance, moving collections of goods from one place to the next.
Public buildings in China, like most things, are massive. Airports, train stations, convention centers, administrative complexes for the communist governments, these are always huge affairs. Even, for example, the train stations in the small towns, places that might not see more than a handful of passengers in a day, are built to huge government standards. We stood on one train platform that could have held 5000 people, with perhaps 10 other travelers. And judging by the surroundings at this particular town, 10 was probably the norm.
That’s an observation worth expanding upon. The communist government’s layout of cities, streets, transportation infrastructure, and public buildings reflect a one-massive-size-fits-all philosophy that perhaps doesn’t really fit anyone. The Chinese people soldier on through this massive spatial consumption knowing no other way. They traverse vast distances to do the simplest of things because that’s the grid they’ve given themselves to live on. They all built it, much of it with hand methods, and they’re very proud of it. It is well maintained, if not well conceived, but they make it work, one way or another.
Economists talk about opportunity cost – what could have been realized had not something intervened to forestall a more economic outcome. In this case, for that image, Taiwan holds the key.
B_Imperial
some China issues
We recently returned from a couple weeks in China. On our travels we read the English language papers to keep up on the news and the latest propaganda.
Here are some interesting Chinese perspectives on the value of life:
These articles illustrate the Chinese view of government revenue which they call “Capital.” The economic fallacies this view engenders have filled many volumes.
These four articles play up Chinese differences from the West. Western politicians do this in their own way too. To be sure, there’s nothing fundamentally different about Chinese and American people. The Chinese government really needs us to be different.
- Xenophobia row belies love affair with the West
- Less power and prejudice
- US Memorial Day marked by excessive patriotism
- Us Still Playing Currency Card
Here are a couple articles on Chinese censorship:
Here are a couple articles on Chinese revisionism:
This article gets a category all its own because it’s a yearly propaganda opus:
These articles offer glimpses into the pervasive role of the state in Chinese and American life:
~
B_Imperial