The extreme importance of the 2012 presidential election is recognized by (among millions of others, we hope) Diana West, who warns at Townhall that “Election 2012 is anything but politics as usual. It is an existential crisis.”

She writes:

This election is for keeps. If Barack Obama doesn’t lose his bid for a second term, he and his vast, left-wing support network of Marx-inspired think tanks, strategists and elected officials will fulfill Obama’s 2008 campaign promise to “fundamentally” transform this nation, thus bringing the American experiment in liberty to what could be the final curtain…

Americans are about to decide whether to empower the increasingly dictatorial executive branch of Barack Hussein Obama, whose future plans to distort “checks and balances” promises to transform the U.S. government out of all recognition, or to break the momentum of government centralization by electing Romney-Ryan.

Yes. And we find signs that are good; signs that there is a swing to the right in public opinion, considerably boosted since Paul Ryan was selected as candidate Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential choice.

This is by Scott Johnson at PowerLine:

GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan appeared at a rally this morning at Deep Run High School in Glen Allen, Virginia. … An audience of more than 2,000 turned up for the rally. More impressive than the size of the crowd is the fact that supporters started lining up for the event around 2:00 a.m. Recent alumni of Deep Run High School, where Ryan spoke … joined the line around 7:00 a.m. with [Chick-fil-A] breakfast in hand.

In these faces we can see what optimism looks like:

Ryan is a star. Romney’s pick of him for his vice-president has energized the Republican Party and brought excitement to the electorate. Even the heavily left-biased British newspaper the Guardian has to concede that:

Democrats’ nerves start to show as Ryan fires up conservative voters …

And:

The Democrats have been sending out panic-laden appeals for donations, one of them expressing concern over the size of the crowd. One of the appeals, for $3 or more, said of Romney-Ryan attacks: “This could cost us the election.”

And quoting American pundits with a message the left canot be happy with, the Guardian raises the prospect of Republican government for the next 16 years:

 If Romney wins, then Ryan, as vice-president, will be well placed as a Republican presidential candidate for the future. …

Roger L. Klavan writes at PJ Media that the Democrats are scared of Ryan:

Obama’s main man David Axelrod looks depressed. Why wouldn’t he be? Forced to run a campaign based on lying about or distorting what the other side says, fanning the flames of non-existent racism, etc., is a sure loser, even if you win — perhaps especially if you win. Winning ugly in this instance will not be a triumph of any sort. Obama, at his worst, may succeed in destroying America as we know it, but he would destroy himself and everyone around him in the process. At this moment, I’m betting none of this will happen. Romney’s choice of Ryan, for me, saved the day.

But the black vote – that’s remaining pretty solid for Obama, isn’t it?

Or is it? A formerly prominent black Democrat has gone over to the Republicans. Former Democratic Representative Artur Davis, who was also a candidate for the governorship of Alabama in 2010, and was one of Barack Obama’s campaign managers in 2008 – making one of the nominating speeches for him at the 2008 Democratic National Convention – is to speak this year at the Republican National Convention in support of the Romney-Ryan ticket. (Read more about this in the Washington Post here.)

And there’s this (also from the Washington Post).  The story of a black community organizer’s disillusionment with Obama. He is “disillusioned” for the wrong reasons, and he probably will not be coming over to the right, but if he decides to cast his vote for Obama, it won’t be with any enthusiasm. The point is, redistributive economics and collectivist politics don’t work, and the Obama episode in American history has proved it. Once Obama has gone – and go he absolutely must with the coming election – his bad four years in the White House can be seen as a lesson millions of Americans needed to learn.

He still walks the same streets here as his old acquaintance Barack Obama once did. That is about all they have in common anymore. At 50, Chicago activist Mark Allen … [is] the head of a small, community-assistance organization called Black Wall Street Chicago. Allen regards his personal survival alone as a small victory, grateful he can pay the rent on his modest office space, aware he is doing better than many on this city’s restive South Side.

“Things haven’t gone the way we’d hoped after Barack got elected,” he says. Surveys place unemployment rates above 25 percent here, and indications are that South Side residents such as Allen aren’t nearly as passionate about the 2012 election as they were during Obama’s trailblazing 2008 campaign.

Historically, community organizers such as Allen have wielded outsize influence in the black-majority neighborhoods of the South Side, with none better known than Obama, who directed a group called the Developing Communities Project for three years during the 1980s. But old bonds between the two have frayed. Allen, who as a member of another group worked on community issues with Obama during their organizing days, has grown frustrated with his former ally in the Oval Office.

Obama’s much ballyhooed 2009 stimulus package has failed to touch ordinary South Side residents, says Allen, who has reached out to Obama administration officials, including fellow Chicagoan and prominent White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, to express his dismay. …

Allen, who views the South Side’s pain as common to U.S. inner cities, also offers a political warning for Obama’s campaign strategists. The disillusionment of once fierce Obama admirers, he suggests, may hamper the president’s reelection chances by subtly dampening black voter turnout.

Best of all there’s this:

The Muslims’ “holy month” of Ramadan has now ended.

This is from The Religion of Peace:

Yesterday, August 17, the South African police opened fire on striking miners, killing 34 and wounding 78 according to press reports.

The incident recalls another South African miners’ strike which began way back in December 1921, when the gold-mining companies reacted to a drop in the world price of gold by lowering the wages of white miners, and, in defiance of the color bar, proposed to employ black miners in the more skilled jobs that the whites held to be their prerogative.

Under the leadership the Communist Party the strike escalated into a violent revolt.

The slogan of the Communist Party was: “Workers of the world unite and fight for a white South Africa”.

In March 1922 the prime minister, Jan Smuts, called out the army and air force to crush the uprising. With the use of heavy artillery, tanks, and bombing from the air he succeeded. More than 200 men were killed.

The political outcome was that trade unions for whites only were recognized, and the color bar was reinforced.

Blacks were kept in poverty. There was no way they could rise by their own effort. The system of apartheid, which was to be entrenched in law some twenty years later, was launched by the demand of the Communist Party.  

The present strike, put down with guns, began with a dispute over wages.

The miners were armed with spears and machetes. The police say some had guns, but that remains to be ascertained.

Will the world that claims to abhor apartheid (as it should), also condemn a massacre of black miners under the predominantly black and leftist government of post-apartheid South Africa?

Why do we hardened skeptics doubt it?

Move…

Move…

Gotta dance

Gotta dance…

If you’re blue and you don’t know

where to go to why don’t you go

where fashion sits

Puttin’ on the Ritz…

Puttin’ on the Ritz…

Puttin’ on the Ritz…

Thanks to our reader and commenter Frank who sent us this video, we can reveal that there is hope for humanity, and even for civilization!

As Frank says: ” What an amazing, delightful and ever changing world! Who would have thought that in 2012 young people in Moscow would put on a ‘flash mob’ event, dancing to an 83 year old American song written by a Russian born American-Jew (Irving Berlin)?”

Find all the words here.

Sing it, and dance, and jump for joy, why not?

This is from the MailOnline:

President Barack Obama called Huma Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, an ‘American patriot’ at a White House Iftar dinner celebrating the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

His praise came after a group of Republican lawmakers accused her of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist political organization.

‘She has been nothing less than extraordinary in representing our country and the democratic values that we hold dear,’ Obama said.

‘The American people owe her a debt of gratitude because Huma is an American patriot and an example of what we need in this country – more public servants with her sense of decency, her grace and her generosity of spirit.’

“And her intimate connections with the Muslim Brotherhood,” he did not add. But see our post immediately below, The State-whisperer.

The Muslim Brotherhood is the parent of Hamas, which is on the US government list of officially recognized terrorist organizations. 

Huma Mahmood Abedin is Deputy Chief of Staff and a very close and highly valued adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She served on the Executive Board  of the Muslim Students Association (MSA), a Muslim Brotherhood front group, and on the Board of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA), headed by al-Qaeda financier Abdullah Omar Naseef.

Watch this video and listen to the MSA’s pledge of allegiance.

For more on Huma Abedin, whose mother is even more deeply involved with the Muslim Brotherhood and whose brother is tied to its leadership, see our posts: What he keeps secret, June 15, 2011; and The conquest of America by the Muslim-Marxist axis, July 25, 2012.

(Also see this article by Andrew C. McCarthy at PJ Media.)

Here and here at RedState, Ben Howe writes about the Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act (FARRM), better known as the Farm Bill, providing $15 million for more catfish inspection:

The FDA [Food and Drug Administration], which already inspects catfish, needs help [with inspecting catfish]  from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) … It seems that the Agriculture Committee found it too important to America to allow us to be limited to only one gigantic bureaucratic monstrosity regulating catfish.

Howe points out that –

The $15 million price tag far surpassed the $700,000 that FDA spends annually on inspection of all fish. Yes, fifteen times the cost the FDA is currently spending to do the same thing. This is what Republicans and Democrats agreed was too important to slash from their pork riddled Farm Bill. …

Are catfish dangerous if allowed to go uninspected? Apparently not.

All this for a low risk food…

Furthermore, “the Government Accountability Office (GAO) flatly acknowledged” that inspection would likely “not enhance the safety of catfish”.

And finally it is noted that no catfish have yet been inspected.

Some reports are saying that the USDA has spent $20 million tax payer dollars to inspect zero fish and is on track to spend a jaw dropping $150 million over the next ten years.

What is that smell hanging about the federal capital of the USA?

Could it be the stink of corruption?

*

For more on how your tax dollars are being wasted, take a look at this “infographic” which graphically displays information on HEALTHCARE FRAUD.

We are partly in agreement and partly in disagreement with leftist atheists. Obviously we share their atheism. Equally obviously we do not share their political opinions. “American Atheists” seemed to us to have a leftist bent (as Richard Dawkins certainly has), but we may be wrong. (Visit their website and see what you think.) In any case, we like their  activism against religion.

This article comes from USA Today, by Cathy Lynn Grossman.

Hey, President Obama and contender Mitt Romney, the American Atheists want your attention. They’re unveiling a new in-your-face-to-the-faithful billboard campaign, timed to the national presidential nominating conventions.

The billboard ads do not seem to be carrying a political message.

Today’s press conference revealed signs that call God “sadistic” and Jesus “useless” as a savior (his image is shown as toast, literally) and conclude that Atheism, by contrast, is “simply reasonable.”

The Gods depicted in the bible are sadistic. The “Old Testament” tyrant punishes five generations of descendants of anyone who offends him. The vague “Father” of the “New Testament” has his “Son” condemn countless millions to burn forever in hellfire on sheer whim.

And why should people need a “savior” of any stripe?

Presumably, Catholics such as Vice President Biden and Romney’s running mate choice Paul Ryan, are covered in this hit on Christians such as Obama, a mainline Protestant.

Obama “a mainline Protestant”? You reckon, Ms Grossman? Why is he so partial to Islam then?

But evidently the American Atheists don’t consider Mormons to be Christians, since they prepared a separate billboard attack on their faith. …

What can it matter whether they are Christians or not? They are as irrational in their belief as any self-styled Christians are. Are there better and worse systems of irrationality?

But GOP delegates won’t see the attack on their faith on their way to nominate Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan in Tampa. Spokeswoman Teresa MacBain says no one in Tampa would rent them billboard space. So watch for both texts in Charlotte, N.C., where the Democrats will gather in September.

American Atheists is the group that created and produced the Reason Rally in March on the National Mall – an event president David Silverman billed as a fun gathering starring raging atheists such as Richard Dawkins. …

So atheists who do not believe the unbelievable “rage” about it?  Whereas believers sweetly keep their farfetched opinions to themselves?

The same group flew a banner over New York City on the Fourth of July proclaiming, “Atheism is patriotic.”

Now … the billboards are aimed at mocking the “silliness” of religion. In an email before today’s press conference, [Teresa MacBain] wrote that questioning the religious views of men who want to lead the free world is essential because,

“If a person believes stupid things, then we have every right to question his or her judgment, and that directly impacts how the non-religious voter votes.”

She’s right. The amazing fact is that people can be highly intelligent, well-educated, sensible, and yet believe in the supernatural! It is something we find very hard to understand. But as every candidate for the presidency has to avow some religious belief, we see no point in making too much of his religion unless he does.

More demands – like non-religious people to be appointed to the Cabinet and the Supreme Court – are at their website.

We concur with those demands

Interestingly, for all the increasing public presence of unbelievers – billboards, rallies, conventions, etc. – the attention has not boosted their percentage of the U.S. population significantly in the last decade.

How does Grossman or anyone know that?

Most people who say they have no religious identity also call themselves spiritual but not religious …

Whatever that might mean, it does suggest more people may be atheist than get counted as such …

… and many give the entire topic a big “so what” shrug.

That’s atheism too, by default.

But the billboards planned for Charlotte, N.C., may not be well received. In 2010, when free thinkers posted an edited version of the line from the Pledge of Allegiance without the phrase “under God,” vandals added it with spray paint.

Grossman asks:

Do you think … the billboards will convert anyone away from religion? Is it “simply reasonable” to mock belief?

We reply: yes, they may turn some away from religion. We only hope they will not turn some away from voting for Romney.

And yes, of course it is reasonable to mock religious belief. It’s an urgent and perpetual necessity. Religious belief is absurd yet lethally dangerous to the well-being of humanity.

Newt Gingrich skewers a CNN lefty host, Piers Morgan, neatly summing up how the Reagan-Romney-Ryan way to economic recovery from the Obama ruination will succeed .

Of course the Left dreads the free market. It can bring the poor to prosperity, and whatever would the Left do without the poor to weep their crocodile tears over as they loll in their luxurious halls of power?