News from the Obamaphate: Obama Ill No More, Clinical Narcissism is No Longer a Disorder

In a classic CYA maneuver, America's shrinks have de-listed Narcissistic Personality Disorder as a condition warranting treatment. My understanding is that the condition is impervious to treatment protocols (i.e.: incurable), so I can sort of understand why America's "The rapists" have decided to absolve themselves of the responsibility of dealing with narcissists. Presumably, Obama is relieved that he doesn't have a treatable condition.

A deep Hat Tip to Weasel Zippers who treats this news more thoroughly than I.

UPDATE: Weasel Zippers' link is 4-ought-4. Here's a new source link.

FREE AASIA BIBI !!!

Discussing this Story:

Eric Dondero at Libertarian Republican who has quite properly chastised most of the other Libertarian bloggers for their silence on this. Here

Ran at Si Vis Pacem. Here

Les Carpenter for Left Coast Rebel. Here

"Walt", A Follower of my Friend Chris Fountain's Blog Concocts the PERFECT Bomb Screening Solution for TSA - Move Over Michael Chertoff

As some of my more regular readers know, I have a blogging friend in neighboring Greenwich, CT. He's Chris Fountain and runs the very often funny (or should I say, rarely disappointing) and wildly eclectic blog For What Its Worth.

In the Comments section of one Chris' most recent posts ("We focus on bombs, Israelis look for terrorists ... And that’s the difference. Here’s how Israel screens plane passengers."), one of his readers, a certain "Walt" came up with a bloody brilliant screening solution for the TSA that I'm quite sure would win the support of all but those who's life mission is to blow up airplanes in mid-flight. Walt's solution is genuinely elegant in its poetic justice, efficient and extraordinarily cost effective. Enjoy!

Walt

November 24, 2010 at 6:33 pm

Weasel Boy -
So I have been noodling this whole pat down screening issue, and I finally figured it out. Here is what we need to do.
All we need to do is develop a booth that you can step into that will not X-ray you, but will detonate any explosive device you may have hidden on or in your body. The explosion will be contained within the sealed booth. This would be a win-win for everyone. There would be no racial profiling and the device would eliminate long and expensive trials. This is so simple it’s brilliant! I can see it now: you’re in the airport terminal and you hear a muffled explosion. Then an announcement comes over the PA system, “Attention standby passengers, we now have a seat available on flight number…
Talk about a win-win!!
Your Pal,
Walt

Hey Walt! Hire the engineers, find a VC company to fund the start-up, and let me in on the first and subsequent private placement offerings.

Rasmussen Reports: 27% View U.S. Society As Unfair and Discriminatory

From Rasmussen Reports comes this interesting piece:

27% View U.S. Society As Unfair and Discriminatory
Saturday, November 20, 2010

More than one-out-of-four Likely U.S. Voters (27%) now believe American society is generally unfair and discriminatory, the highest negative finding in over a year.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 60% of voters believe U.S. society is generally fair and decent, but that’s down 10 points from October and is also the lowest level found since October 2009. Another 13% are undecided. (Read the rest here)

Interestingly, this is the same percentage of respondents who, as of today, Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president in Rasmussen's Daily Presidential Tracking Poll.

Click the image to enlarge

While the background numbers may not reflect a perfect correlation between the political viewpoints of the respondents to the respective polls, I would not be at all shocked to learn that there is a very high degree of overlap between responders who believe that U.S. society is "unfair and discriminatory" and those who strongly approve of Obama's performance.

Ottmar Edenhofer, Co-Chair of UN's IPCC Admits That "Climate Policy" Really is Just a Big Redistributionist Theft Scam

A hearty tip of the beret is due to Ran at Si Vis Pacem who put me on to this story.

Background: Ottmar Edenhofer is a German economist who deals with climate change policy and environmental and energy policy and energy economics. He is currently professor of the Economics of Climate Change at the Technical University of Berlin, co-chair of Working group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and deputy director and chief economist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research as well as Fellow of the Academy of Sciences in Hamburg, Germany.

...

In 2004, Ottmar Edenhofer was a lead author for the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President of the United States Al Gore. See, Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottmar_Edenhofer

In an interview with Germany's NZZ Online, Edenhofer freely admitted that the goal of Climate Policy is to transfer wealth from the West to the Third World by imposing economy eviscerating carbon caps on the West. If you're lucky enough not to be worried about keeping your job, paying your rent or mortgage and feeding your children now, just wait until this elitist skank pushes through his socialist agenda. You'll be lucky if you can afford a tent, sleeping bag, alcohol stove and pinto beans.

(NZZ AM SONNTAG): The new thing about your proposal for a Global Deal is the stress on the importance of development policy for climate policy. Until now, many think of aid when they hear development policies.

(OTTMAR EDENHOFER, UN IPCC OFFICIAL): That will change immediately if global emission rights are distributed. If this happens, on a per capita basis, then Africa will be the big winner, and huge amounts of money will flow there. This will have enormous implications for development policy. And it will raise the question if these countries can deal responsibly with so much money at all.

(NZZ): That does not sound anymore like the climate policy that we know.

(EDENHOFER): Basically it's a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization. The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War. Why? Because we have 11,000 gigatons of carbon in the coal reserves in the soil under our feet - and we must emit only 400 gigatons in the atmosphere if we want to keep the 2-degree target. 11 000 to 400 - there is no getting around the fact that most of the fossil reserves must remain in the soil.

(NZZ): De facto, this means an expropriation of the countries with natural resources. This leads to a very different development from that which has been triggered by development policy.

(EDENHOFER): First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.

Well, at least Ottmar is being honest about his objectives in this regard, unlike that other-smartest-guy-in-the-room and serial grad school drop-out Al Gore.

Read more at NEWSBUSTERS.

Elitist Demoncrat Sen. Jay Rockefeller Wants to Discard the First Amendment

Real Clear Politics has a video up (here) of Sen. Jay Rockefeller saying:

"There's a little bug inside of me which wants to get the FCC to say to FOX and to MSNBC: 'Out. Off. End. Goodbye.' It would be a big favor to political discourse; to our ability to do our work here in Congress; and to the American people, to be able to talk with each other and have some faith in their government and more importantly, in their future."

HEY JAY, ONE BIG FAT ROADBLOCK FOR YOU. IT'S CALLED THE FIRST AMENDMENT TO OUR FEDERAL CONSTITUTION, YEAH, THAT THING YOU SWORE TO UPHOLD AND DEFEND. SINCE YOU'VE OBVIOUSLY FORGOTTEN WHAT IT SAYS, I'LL REMIND YOU, EMPHASIZING IN PERTINENT PART WITH BOLD TEXT SO THAT YOUR APPARENTLY DAMAGED BRAIN CAN GRASP WHY YOU CAN'T SILENCE FOX NEWS OR MSNBC.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

UPDATE:

Weasel Zippers has a similar post up here:

Al Sharpton Demands Dems Push FCC to Limit Rush Limbaugh’s Freedom of Speech So People Aren’t “Subjected” to What He Says…

We Are The Ones We've Been Waiting For....

Well, this says it all. No additional analysis required.

Stupid is as Stupid Does. Three Democrat Voters Who Won't Get to the Polls Today

While combing my hometown paper's stories, I came across the following piece on three complete idiots. Enjoy!

Police: Mistaken identity most likely prompted carjacking

Daniel Tepfer, Staff Writer

Published: 10:45 p.m., Monday, November 1, 2010

BRIDGEPORT -- A case of mistaken identity nearly cost a city man his life and resulted in a carjacking and wild ride through six towns.

It all began Friday afternoon when, State Police said, when a 30-year-old city man was driving along Sanford Avenue here.

Police said as the victim was driving his 2004 Hyundai sedan toward the intersection with Harral Avenue two men and a woman ran up to his car.

Nicole Bowen, 27, had arrived at her Sanford Avenue apartment a short time earlier from her job in Yonkers, N.Y., to find it ransacked, police said. Enraged, police said she had enlisted the aid of two friends, Tye Thomas, 20, and 18-year-old Lavar Perry, to get back at the people she believed burglarized her apartment.

Bowen left her apartment armed with a handgun and a roll of duct tape. As the victim was driving by, police said Bowen mistook him for being one of the burglars and she and her two companions charged his car.

Police said the trio stopped the victim's car and ordered him at gunpoint to move into the front passenger seat. Bowen then got into the driver's seat while Thomas and Perry got into the back seat, police said. They said Bowen then began driving while pointing the gun at the victim.

"I told the guy in the front passenger seat that everything was going to be all right. I just needed to get back to New York," police said Bowen later told them.

Bowen pulled off Interstate 95 in Darien to get gas. While either Thomas or Perry held the victim in a headlock, police said the other man removed cash from the victim's pocket and used it to pay for gas in the car. They then continued south on I-95.

As they neared exit 2, police said the victim became convinced the trio would kill him and he made the decision to try and jump out of the car as it slowed for traffic. They said he managed to get the passenger-side door open but Bowen realized what he was trying to do and began hitting the victim with the butt of the gun while yelling to Perry and Thomas to grab him.

Police said the car began swerving from lane to lane as the four struggled inside. At one point, they said the victim managed to get a hand on the gun and it went off, shattering the back window.

As the four continued to struggle, police said Bowen lost control of the car and it crashed into the median barrier. The victim, taking advantage of the dazed condition of his attackers, managed to get out of the car and began running along the highway. Police said a passing motorist stopped for the victim and stayed with him until police arrived.

Meanwhile, Bowen, unable to restart the car, got out and began to run. At some point police said she told them she looked back to see her two companion still standing by the car. "I yelled back to them, 'what are you doing, let's go,' police said she related. They said she threw the gun over the cement barrier into the opposite lanes only to see a car stop and someone inside get out of the car, pick up the gun and continue driving.

Bowen, Thomas and Perry were arrested a short later after causing near pandemonium in downtown Greenwich.

The three were charged with first-degree kidnapping, first-degree kidnapping with a firearm, first-degree robbery, third-degree assault and third-degree larceny.

They were each being held in lieu of $500,000 bond.

Linda McMahon: Why didn't you run on this from the beginning?

Below is a new embedded radio advertisement from Linda McMahon advising that she'll (1) self limit her service in the senate to two terms, (2) take no government salary and (3) refuse congressional benefits for herself.

All I can say Linda, is that you should have started your campaign with this promise. I'm certain it would have helped your chances enormously. I'll be voting for you because the alternative of pathological liar and narcissist Dick Blumenthal is intolerable.

Good luck Linda!

From the Reaganite Republican...

My blogging friend James who writes Reaganite Republican has a great post up.

Here's a tease.

Cross Post from Simple Justice: Blogger Warren Redlich Meets Political Insanity

Scott Greenfield, a criminal defense lawyer in New York City who writes Simple Justice - easily one of the finest blawgs on the net - posted this piece this morning condemning a political character assassination flier attacking New York Libertarian gubernatorial candidate Warren Redlich as a dangerous sexual predator. Scott was kind enough to let me re-post it here in its entirety. I agree completely with Scott. What do you think?

Blogger Warren Redlich Meets Political Insanity

When I first heard that Warren Redlich, a DUI lawyer up in Albany who blogged for business, was running as the Libertarian candidate for governor of the State of New York, I chuckled. Talk about an endeavor without a payoff. Of course, I had no idea at the time that the alternatives would be a zombie and the only one of Mario's offspring who got his good looks. Suddenly, Warren doesn't look nearly as silly.

Apparently, others are concerned about Warren as well. In order to screw with him, this appeared:



There are place[s] no one should go, and this is one of them. Is there a word, lie, defamation, libel, that captures just how twisted this is?

The purported basis for this "attack" is a blog post of Warren's that questions the prevalence and hypocrisy of Puritanism in America.

The story also hits on how Puritanism is still so prevalent in America. The greatest love interest in the history of romance is at least arguably Juliet from Romeo and Juliet. Juliet was 13 years old. For some reason females become fertile in their early teens and peak before the age of 18. You would think those who believe in the theory of evolution would see this as the design of the species. And in an interesting alliance with Darwin, shouldn't religious people (and not just those in cults) believe teenage girls should be sexually active (in marriage of course), as that would appear to be the intent of the intelligent design? Instead both groups appear to be together on the opposite side.

Another take is the notion that men who find teenage girls attractive are perverts. If you look at literature like Shakespeare, and at some historical figures like Sir William Johnson (a prominent pre-revolutionary leader in New York), you get the impression that it used to be normal for men, even much older men, to be interested in teenage girls.

While this isn't something I would have written, and I frankly find it distasteful and, well, wrong, the flier is just outrageous. Rough politics is hardly unheard of in New York, but this goes beyond the pale and hits a new low.

Warren blames the Paladino campaign for the flier.

Redlich said Paladino was responsible for the ad, without backing up this claim. Paladino spokesman Michael Caputo rejected it on Sunday.

Redlich has said his goal is to get more votes than Paladino on Tuesday, which would give the Libertarian party the second highest spot on the ballot, a big advantage in voting, just below the Democratic Party.

The Paladino campaign denies responsibility.

"That would be like Bill Clinton jabbing Pat Paulson in the 1996 New Hampshire primary," Caputo said, referring to the joke campaign of Paulson, a comedian. "Never wrestle the comic relief _ you just get clown white smeared all over your suit."

However, one-time Nixon and Paladino campaign strategist Robert Stone, rather than disavow the flier, argued that it was fair:

Roger Stone, a former campaign consultant to President Richard Nixon who now advises the anti-Prohibition party candidate Kristin Davis and once worked for Paladino, but no longer does, said neither he nor the Davis campaign produced the mailer. But Stone defended its content.

Stone said Redlich has "exotic views on sex with teens," citing postings on Redlich's blog. Stone also said Redlich is "crying crocodile tears" after calling Davis a prostitute, when the former Manhattan Madam has repeatedly said that although she ran a prostitution enterprise, she was never a prostitute.

The minor party candidates in New York have been appreciated for bringing some fun moments into an otherwise moribund campaign. Heck, anything is better than being forced to watch Paladino's face of death on the telly, and no one will ever forget the Rent Is Too Damn High candidate, whose party name alone said all that needed to be said. But this gutter politics, outright defamation, goes way too far. Way, way too far.

Given the views of many in the criminal defense community toward sex offender registries, the gross over-reach of sex offender laws and designations, and the unreasonable prohibitions heaped on those given our modern day demonization, there aren't many criminal defense blawgers who wouldn't be staring down a flier just like this should they run for office against someone sleazy enough to smear a candidate in this way.

What cannot be tolerated is the inability to express oneself in the blawgosphere on these controversial issues without exposing oneself to such a wholly unjustified and flagrantly false smear campaign. To say that whoever did this is a disgrace is insufficient. The line has been crossed by a mile.

The Daily Telegraph Gets It, Why Can't The New York Times?

This piece by Janet Daley in the British Paper The Daily Telegraph captures the real mood of the nation on the eve of this historic election.

Its a shame that America's print media has slipped so far into the ditch of progressive ideology, that its now completely incapable of producing any objective pieces on political phenomena.

H/T Left Coast Rebel

Midterm elections 2010: Prepare for a new American revolution

Popular rage against the elite could change the nature of US politics, says Janet Daley.

By Janet Daley
Published: 9:00PM BST 30 Oct 2010

More than three centuries ago, the residents of America staged a rebellion against an oppressive ruler who taxed them unjustly, ignored their discontents and treated their longing for freedom with contempt. They are about to revisit that tradition this week, when their anger and exasperation sweep through Congress like avenging angels. This time the hated oppressor isn't a foreign colonial government, but their own professional political class.

In New York last week I was struck by the startling shift of mood since my last visit, during Barack Obama's first year in office. This phenomenon took varying forms, of course, depending on the political orientation of my interlocutor, but the underlying theme of despair and disgust was almost universal. Liberal Democrats (who hugely outnumber most other factions in that city) were despondent and disappointed with the collapse of Obama's popularity. A few of them (remarkably few, actually) were ready to blame this on a "Right-wing conspiracy" of vaguely racist motivation. But most of them were frankly critical of the strategic mistakes they believed the White House had made, and the baffling inability of their President to connect with the people in an engaging way. His shocking lack of emotional expression during last month's commemoration of 9/11 – a point of particular significance to New Yorkers – was remarked upon by a number of people I met.

There was a general sense that his personality was over-controlled and repressed, and that this was perhaps a function of his self-invention: the effect of having made a conscious choice to adopt an identity and a history (the Chicago black activist) which was unconnected to his real past. It occurred to me that, in an odd way, he was a Gatsby-like figure who had reinvented himself but whose new persona could be sustained only with a tremendous act of will. This psychological analysis seemed not unconnected to the political one, which revolved around his peculiar inability to sense what most Americans would regard as alienating and contrary to their own values and culture.

My Republican friends, perhaps surprisingly, were not gloating. They were too furious. But contrary to the superficial British assumption (heavily promoted by the BBC), they were not devoting their excoriation exclusively to the Obama Administration – or even to its clique of Congressional henchmen, led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. That they were opposed to the Big State, European social democratic model of government which Obama had imported to Washington went almost without saying. But they were at least as angry with the leadership of their own party for having conceded far too much of the argument.

And this anger – again, contrary to the general understanding in Britain – is not new: it goes all the way back to the Bush presidency. It was widely known in Europe that the American Left hated George Bush (and even more, Dick Cheney) because of his military adventurism. What was less understood was that the Right disliked him almost as much for selling the pass over government spending, bailing out the banks, and failing to keep faith with the fundamental Republican principle of containing the power of central government.

So the Republicans are, if anything, as much in revolt against the establishment within their own party as they are against the Democrats. And this is what the Tea Parties (which should always be referred to in the plural, because they are not a monolithic movement) are all about: they are not just a reaction against a Left-liberal president but a repudiation of the official Opposition as well.

Nor are they simply the embodiment of reactionary social conservatism, which has been the last redoubt of the traditional Republican Right. There were plenty of people in New York who wanted to believe that Tea Partiers were just a new incarnation of the gun-totin', gay-bashing right-to-lifers whom they found it so easy to dismiss as risible throwbacks. This is a huge political miscalculation, which quite misses the point of what makes the Congressional midterm elections this week such an interesting and historic political event. This is so much more than the predictable to-ing and fro-ing of party control midway through a presidential term. What the grassroots rebellion is really about is an attempt to pull the Republican party back to its basic philosophy of low-tax, low-spend, small government: the great Jeffersonian principle that the best government is that which governs least.

One of the more electorally far-reaching effects of this is that Republicanism could become the home once again of a plausible political and economic programme, rather than simply an outpost for those who seem to reject many of the features of modern life. The gun-toters and gay-bashers and pro-lifers may have jumped aboard the bandwagon, and Sarah Palin may be frantically attaching herself to the parade, but this is not their show: the Tea Party protests began (as their name suggests) as a campaign against high taxation and the illegitimate intrusiveness of federal powers. That is what they are still about.

As some astute commentators have observed, the ascendancy of the Tea Parties has meant that fiscal conservatism can replace social conservatism as the raison d'être of the Republican cause. So rather than being a threat to Republicanism, the election of Tea Party candidates might be its salvation. It represents a rank-and-file rejection of what many Americans see as a conspiracy of the governing elite against ordinary working people. All of which makes clearer the appeal of even the naivety and inexperience of some of the Tea Party contenders who have challenged incumbent Republican candidates. If what you are rebelling against is a generation of smug, out-of-touch professional politicians, then a little dose of amateurishness or innocence might strike you as positively refreshing. (In a poll last week, more than 50 per cent of voters said that they would be more willing this year than usual to vote for someone with little political experience.)

The Democrats, too, are experiencing internal turmoil, with the Blue Dog congressmen (who represent conservative Democratic states) having to fight all their natural instincts to support Obama's healthcare and cap-and-trade policies. If they are annihilated in these midterm elections, their resentment against the White House will be terrible to behold. This could be a seminal moment in American post-war history, when popular rage against the political elite brings about realignments within parties which change the whole nature of the country's democratic choices.

The New American Hero: You!

Be an American Hero

H/T Judy Aron at Consent of the Governed