Michael Medved in Townhall refutes arguments that find resemblances between the career of President Lincoln the Republican and Candidate Obama the Democrat.  (Read the whole thing here.)

 Aside from the vast differences in the scope of their political involvement, Lincoln and Obama followed sharply divergent paths in pursuit of their private sector careers. Obama chose to devote himself principally to the non-profit world: spending years as a community organizer, lecturer at the University of Chicago, and civil rights lawyer. Lincoln, taking a break from full-time politics in 1849, aggressively built up his reputation and personal wealth as a business lawyer, particularly for railroads. He handled more than 5,000 cases, and became known as one of the top corporate attorneys in the state, if not the nation.

  Lincoln also compiled another experience that Obama never approached. In 1832, he responded to the governor’s call for volunteers and enlisted in the militia to battle a bloody Indian threat in the Black Hawk War. He quickly won election as captain of a company of volunteers, and years later said he “cherished that honor…more than nomination for the presidency.” Though he never experienced a major battle in his ninety days of service, Captain Lincoln learned the responsibilities of command and the need for quick decisions and adaptability in dangerous situations.

  Finally, Lincoln displayed admirable consistency in his approach to the issues of the day throughout his political and business career. He remained a proud American nationalist determined to strengthen the union, as well as a dedicated foe of the extension of slavery. He pursued these goals relentlessly on the state and national level and the same commitments, obviously, animated his eventful presidency.

  Obama’s career, on the other hand, shows no evidence of long-term engagement with particular issues or even broad aims. Hillary Clinton could boast of her leadership for more than sixteen years in efforts to reform the health insurance system but Obama (beyond eloquent backing for a deliberately vague concept of “racial justice”) can point to no lodestars that guided him in his wanderings and adventures, no national controversies that consistently engaged his attention. The backtracking, revisions and gauzy evasions characterizing the nineteen months of his presidential campaign look anything but Lincolnian in terms of predictability.  

  In short, the dramatic contrasts with Lincoln reveal far more about Obama than do the strained efforts to recast him in the sixteenth president’s image. At the time he announced his presidential candidacy, Obama remained so little known, so novel and exotic and unprecedented, that his campaign itself claimed to deliver some sort of radical change. Lincoln, on the other hand, had become such a familiar fixture (and fixer) in American politics by the time he ran for president that his campaign took on a reassuring, well-worn aura: they called him “Old Abe” despite his relatively youthful age of 51. No contemporaries questioned Lincoln’s candidacy on the basis of lack of experience while all impartial observers of the contemporary season note Obama’s absence of preparation for the world’s most challenging job.

  Today, of course, Old Abe’s immortal words and deeds remain so compelling and fresh that even 143 years after his death, they seem perpetually young. For Obama, on the other, the gimmicks and platitudes (“We are the ones we have been waiting for!”) that seemed so fresh and vital a year ago have already begun to wear out their welcome and seem increasingly stale, tarnished, tired – and old. 

Saul Alinsky was the Marxist whose doctrine has been learnt and followed by both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Melanie Phillips has an excellent column about him and them in The Spectator.   

The seditious role of the community organiser was developed by an extreme left intellectual called Saul Alinsky. He was a radical Chicago activist who, by the time he died in 1972, had had a profound influence on the highest levels of the Democratic party. Alinsky was a ‘transformational Marxist’ in the mould of Antonio Gramsci, who promoted the strategy of a ‘long march through the institutions’ by capturing the culture and turning it inside out as the most effective means of overturning western society. In similar vein, Alinsky condemned the New Left for alienating the general public by its demonstrations and outlandish appearance. The revolution had to be carried out through stealth and deception. Its proponents had to cultivate an image of centrism and pragmatism. A master of infiltration, Alinsky wooed Chicago mobsters and Wall Street financiers alike. And successive Democratic politicians fell under his spell.

His creed was set out in his book ‘Rules for Radicals’ – a book he dedicated to Lucifer, whom he called the ‘first radical’. It was Alinsky for whom ‘change’ was his mantra. And by ‘change’, he meant a Marxist revolution achieved by slow, incremental, Machiavellian means which turned society inside out. This had to be done through systematic deception, winning the trust of the naively idealistic middle class by using the language of morality to conceal an agenda designed to destroy it. And the way to do this, he said, was through ‘people’s organisations’.  

The whole thing is a must-read.   

 From Russia Today:

Obama’s brother lives in a Kenyan shack

U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama’s lost brother has been tracked down in Kenya. George Hussein Onyango Obama, aged 26, was found by journalists from the Italian edition of Vanity Fair. He reportedly lives in poverty in a shack on the outskirts of Nairobi.

He has the same father as the U.S. senator, Barack Hussein Obama, but a different mother.  Her name has been given as Jael.

The youngest of Obama’s half-brothers says he lives on less than a dollar per month in a 2m x 3m shack. Its walls are decorated with posters of famous footballers and a calendar featuring exotic beaches. The magazine also noted George has a newspaper picture of his brother.

He has only met his famous brother twice. Once when he was five and then in 2006 when Senator Obama visited Nairobi. George admits their meeting was very brief and cool.

It seems to us that if Barack Obama wants to redistribute wealth, he could start by redistributing his own. He could give some to his own brother, for instance. 

From the Wall Street Journal :

Reader, when your toilet breaks, do you wait around for some Ivy League hotshot to show up and organize a meeting so that you can use your collective strength to wring concessions from the powers that be?

Or do you call a plumber?

As a "community organizer," Obama toiled within a subculture of such abject dependency that even home repairs were "social services," provided by government (or, in Obama’s Chicago, not provided). It was an utterly bizarre intersection between the cultural elite and the underclass. By Judis’s account, Obama’s Columbia degree was useless. He would have been more helpful if he’d gone to vocational school instead.

Judis quotes an Altgeld resident as telling Obama, "Ain’t nothing gonna change. . . . We just gonna concentrate on saving our money so we can move outta here as fast as we can." Certainly no one can fault Obama for doing the same thing. But what did Obama move outta there to do? To become a politician–specifically, an "idealistic" politician who wants "to make major changes in poverty." Guys like that created this mess in the first place.

In his political career, has Obama done or even said anything to suggest that he has a different approach to "poverty," one that would reduce dependency rather than promote it? His recent rediscovery of the glories of "community organizing" certainly isn’t an encouraging sign.

Read the whole thing here.

 Thanks to Indigo Red (see comments on the post below) for directing our attention to this report on ‘Public Allies’.

Though the report means to be favorable to Michelle Obama, you can get a sense of her victim mind-set from it.  In particular I was struck by this:

‘As a Harvard Law School graduate, Ms Obama said, she had struggled to get off the path that was leading her toward becoming a partner at a corporate law firm.’

You gotta feel sorry for her – don’t you? 

A nasty  Communist idea was proposed for America by Barack Obama in that acceptance speech at Denver. 

Investor’s Business Daily makes it clear that his ‘Universal Voluntary Public Service’ program involves Communist-style re-education camps :

Barack Obama was a founding member of the board of Public Allies in 1992, resigning before his wife became executive director of the Chicago chapter of Public Allies in 1993. Obama plans to use the nonprofit group, which he features on his campaign Web site, as the model for a national service corps. He calls his Orwellian program, "Universal Voluntary Public Service."

Big Brother had nothing on the Obamas. They plan to herd American youth into government-funded reeducation camps where they’ll be brainwashed into thinking America is a racist, oppressive place in need of "social change."

The pitch Public Allies makes on its Web site doesn’t seem all that radical. It promises to place young adults (18-30) in paid one-year "community leadership" positions with nonprofit or government agencies. They’ll also be required to attend weekly training workshops and three retreats.

In exchange, they’ll get a monthly stipend of up to $1,800, plus paid health and child care. They also get a post-service education award of $4,725 that can be used to pay off past student loans or fund future education.

But its real mission is to radicalize American youth and use them to bring about "social change" through threats, pressure, tension and confrontation — the tactics used by the father of community organizing, Saul "The Red" Alinsky.

"Our alumni are more than twice as likely as 18-34 year olds to … engage in protest activities," Public Allies boasts in a document found with its tax filings. It has already deployed an army of 2,200 community organizers like Obama to agitate for "justice" and "equality" in his hometown of Chicago and other U.S. cities, including Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York, Phoenix, Pittsburgh and Washington. "I get to practice being an activist," and get paid for it, gushed Cincinnati recruit Amy Vincent.

Public Allies promotes "diversity and inclusion," a program paper says. More than 70% of its recruits are "people of color." When they’re not protesting, they’re staffing AIDS clinics, handing out condoms, bailing criminals out of jail and helping illegal aliens and the homeless obtain food stamps and other welfare.

Public Allies brags that more than 80% of graduates have continued working in nonprofit or government jobs. It’s training the "next generation of nonprofit leaders" — future "social entrepreneurs."

The Obamas discourage work in the private sector. "Don’t go into corporate America," Michelle has exhorted youth. "Work for the community. Be social workers." Shun the "money culture," Barack added. "Individual salvation depends on collective salvation."

"If you commit to serving your community," he pledged in his Denver acceptance speech, "we will make sure you can afford a college education." So, go through government to go to college, and then go back into government.

Many of today’s youth find the pitch attractive. "I may spend the rest of my life trying to create social movement," said Brian Coovert of the Cincinnati chapter. "There is always going to be work to do. Until we have a perfect country, I’ll have a job."

Not all the recruits appreciate the PC indoctrination. "It was too touchy-feely," said Nelly Nieblas, 29, of the 2005 Los Angeles class. "It’s a lot of talk about race, a lot of talk about sexism, a lot of talk about homophobia, talk about -isms and phobias."

One of those -isms is "heterosexism," which a Public Allies training seminar in Chicago describes as a negative byproduct of "capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and male-dominated privilege."

The government now funds about half of Public Allies’ expenses through Clinton’s AmeriCorps. Obama wants to fully fund it and expand it into a national program that some see costing $500 billion. "We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded" as the military, he said.

The gall of it: The Obamas want to create a boot camp for radicals who hate the military — and stick American taxpayers with the bill.

 

 The Wall Street Journal tells how Governor Sarah Palin beat  the establishment. 

And so it came as no surprise in 2004 when former Republican Gov. Frank Murkowski made clear he’d be working exclusively with three North Slope producers—ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and BP—to build a $25 billion pipeline to move natural gas to the lower 48. The trio had informed their political vassals that they alone would build this project (they weren’t selling their gas to outsiders) and that they expected the state to reward them. Mr. Murkowski disappeared into smoky backrooms to work out the details. He refused to release information on the negotiations. When Natural Resources Commissioner Tom Irwin suggested terms of the contract were illegal, he was fired.

What Mr. Murkowski did do publicly was instruct his statehouse to change the oil and gas tax structure (taxes being a primary way Alaskans realize their oil revenue). Later, citizens would discover this was groundwork for Mr. Murkowski’s pipeline contract—which would lock in that oil-requested tax package for up to 40 years, provide a $4 billion state investment, and relinquish most oversight.

Enter Mrs. Palin. The former mayor of Wasilla had been appointed by Mr. Murkowski in 2003 to the state oil and gas regulatory agency. She’d had the temerity to blow the whistle on fellow GOP Commissioner Randy Ruedrich for refusing to disclose energy dealings. Mr. Murkowski and GOP Attorney General Gregg Renkes closed ranks around Mr. Ruedrich—who also chaired the state GOP. Mrs. Palin resigned. Having thus offended the entire old boy network, she challenged the governor for his seat.

Mrs. Palin ran against the secret deal, and vowed to put the pipeline back out for competitive, transparent, bidding. She railed against cozy politics. Mr. Murkowski ran on his unpopular pipeline deal. The oil industry warned the state would never get its project without his leadership. Mrs. Palin walloped him in the primary and won office in late 2006. Around this time, news broke of a federal probe that would show oil executives had bribed lawmakers to support the Murkowski tax changes.

Among Mrs. Palin’s first acts was to reinstate Mr. Irwin. By February 2007 she’d released her requirements for pipeline bidding. They were stricter, and included only a $500 million state incentive. By May a cowed state house—reeling from scandal—passed her legislation.

Read the whole impressive story here. 

 Women like Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, and Sarah Palin owe nothing to the lefty feminist movement.

Brains, competence, courage, character, and the right understanding of political issues equip them for  leadership, for directing whole nations, for steering the ship of state.   

The Wall Street Journal contrasts Sarah Palin with Hillary Clinton: 

Many younger women didn’t learn what it means to be an achieving woman from dormitory feminism. She didn’t abandon her hometown for the big city. She stayed home, had babies, helped her snowmobiling husband with his commercial fishing business and with him, tried to assemble a life.

She got into politics in Wasilla with zero connections – no famous father, no financing husband, no mentor, nothing. She got elected mayor. She got into politics to improve her community, not to launch herself on some career path she had figured out while in college.

Then came the interesting part. Under the standard model, you deploy your superb IQ to maneuver upward around the oppressors. Sarah Jock, learning her self-discipline in such weird pursuits as morning moose-hunts with her dad, ran at the system. Doing something few women and no males would do, she went after the men who run Alaska’s inbred politics, the machine. And cleaned their clocks. The people elected her governor.

I asked a number of women this week to account for Sarah Palin’s sudden appeal. Here are the common threads.

The angry woman-as-victim drives them nuts. They hate victimology. As one woman said, "The point is that across the ages women have been doing pretty much what Sarah Palin has been doing: bearing children, feeding families, bringing in an income, working to improve their communities."

Another woman said, "Her story reflects a more normal reality" of active women; "the harder you work, the luckier you get." Hillary Clinton still plays the victim card. Sarah Palin gives off no victim vibes. These women mentioned her grit, determination and character.

Read the whole thing here.

 In relation to the issues of energy and national security, Alaska is right now the most important state in the US, not only for America but also for its allies in Europe and the Far East. In this consideration alone, Palin is an excellent choice of McCain’s to be his running-mate. 

 Investor’s Business Daily explains:  

Palin knows energy. She’s already figured out how to deliver energy to the U.S. without Congress — by championing state legislation to create a 1,712-mile natural gas pipeline across Canada to the U.S.

It was a major feat, negotiating with the Canadian government, educating lawmakers and getting the public behind her. In a decade, the $30 billion project will ship 4.5 million cubic feet of gas a day from the North Slope to Houston’s air conditioners, Iowa’s farm machines and Boston’s winter furnaces.

There’s little doubt this is the kind of leadership the U.S. needs. Not only will getting serious about Alaska help the economy, it will also help our allies in Europe and the Far East whose economies are severely battered by high energy prices and who are seeing some of the most direct threats from the petrotyrants.

John McCain’s pick of Palin shows he’s serious about energy — and about securing America’s future. Congress mustn’t ignore Alaska any longer. Petrotyranny is moving beyond economics and becoming a national security issue. Alaska is a big part of the answer.

 

 Investor’s Business Daily carries this in an editorial today:

Forget warnings of catastrophic melting polar ice and rising sea levels, though, and consider for a moment the effects of a warming Earth.

Food output would increase as growing seasons become longer and climates now too cold for agriculture evolve into temperate zones that can support crops. With a world population that is expected to grow from its current 6.7 billion to 8.9 billion in 2050, harvests will have to become more abundant to keep up with the demand.

A warming Earth would also mean a healthier human race. Heat kills, but it’s not as deadly as cold. A 1990s study found that cold-related deaths kill 80,000 year in the United Kingdom — 100 times the number of those who die heat-related deaths.

Cold weather is lethal because it increases blood clots, which can lead to heart attacks and strokes, and promotes the transmission of respiratory diseases, such as pneumonia and influenza, that are among the top causes of death in the U.S. and other developed nations. Thomas Gale Moore of the Hoover Institution figures that a temperature increase of 2.5 degrees Celsius would cut deaths due to respiratory and circulatory diseases by roughly 40,000 a year.

While global warm-ongers talk in gloomy tones about SUV-induced droughts, higher temperatures would actually boost precipitation. There is little or no argument among scientists about this. On a planet with a growing population where as much as 40% of the human race could be living in regions with insufficient water supplies by 2035, an increase in precipitation is not insignificant.

Finally, a warmer planet would be a greener planet as well. Isn’t this what the environmentalists want — more green? Or is their real goal to roll back concrete, asphalt, steel and glass, the building blocks of human advancement and prosperity?

No one can be sure how the sun will behave in the coming decades. There’s even disagreement over August’s solar activity. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now thinks it saw a small sun spot on Aug. 21 while UCLA researchers still say it was a spotless month.

But if historical patterns hold, the sun is entering a down cycle that will make ours a more frosty world. The facts are enough to make Al Gore shiver.