[Note: This is an extended comment by Scott M to Suppress the Vote! Technique # 1 @ AMERICAN DIGEST]

There is no sense in listening to the polls, following the polls, or trying to guess the outcome of the election.

First, the election is settled state by state. The national accumulated popular vote, which is what the polls attempt to anticipate, is meaningless. Each state will have its vote go to Obama or Romney, whether the candidate wins/loses by one or one million votes. A few states with large populations easily distort reality. Even if everybody in NY and CA vote for Obama, which would distort national popular vote counts, they still account for the same number of Electoral votes.

Second, nobody will know until the Democrats voters show up on Wed Nov. 7 to cast their vote which of these polls turns out to be right. Why let a false conclusion of a poll influence you now? Last time Rasmussen's pre-election polling turned out to be closest to the actual outcome. Before that I think Zogby turned out to be closest to the mark. We won't know which of these polls was right until after the fact. We do know right now that many of these polls will be wrong. We just don't know which will be wrong.

Third, as the news business has gotten more and more dishonest, or at least unmoored from professional standards, polling has used tricks to shade the outcome toward the intended direction. Do you care what 19 people in a Whole Food grocery store parking lot pick for POTUS? Do you know how many people make up the poll you are hearing about? Do you know if these people have ever voted before? It matters a great deal if the poll is sampling people who technically might vote or people that actually did vote last time. Do you know if the polling sampled far more Dems than Reps or Inds? Do you know if the answer has been adjusted to account for a distortion of the sample?

Fourth, the media routinely use reports of polling results, however accurate or not, to signal their audience what they should think. Most people want to be included with the larger group and the media reports are always careful suggest whether their audience should ignore the poll or incorporate the poll data personally.

Michael Medved makes the point no POTUS has ever been reelected to a second term unless his support increased over the support he had in his first election. That's to say, every POTUS reelected gets more votes the second time than the first time or they lose. There is no second term exception in US history. Does anyone think Obama has more support from college kids, black voters, working class voters now than during the Hopeandchange Hurricane of 2008? This doesn't decide who will be the winner in November but it should settle some fears.

Fifth, it will be what it will be. No amount of happiness or despair now will decide anything. It's like worrying if it will rain on your future wedding date. It will or it won't and you can't know in advance. You should prepare for both possibilities.

Lastly, stop watching the media, including Fox. They have 24/7 to fill. That doesn't mean what they put on air is worth knowing. You are in charge of you and you should not let them make decisions for you and your time. Talk to the people around you, don't miss an opportunity for that, but ignore what The Media sends your way. Their job is to convince you that you need to worry and to tune it to get answers. They never provide the answers except to tune in after their 98th commercial of the hour to see if they've answered the concern they've been hawking all day.

The media can't know what it is you probably want to know. They will get the answer about a minute before the rest of on election night. Until then they are guessing.

Now is a good time to note who is claiming what so you can judge their accuracy after the election.

Remember, FOX news is using Karl Rove and Dick Morris as their experts on this matter. Dick Morris of "the election will be between Condi and Hillary" and Rove of "ignore the media GWB, the people will to." Both men have their particular segment of the party they are working for/against. They don't turn that off when they go on Fox. Rove's career will be over if TEA Party types control the party. Morris' vendetta is against the Clinton wing of the Dems. Be wary of anything either man says in those directions.

Overall it's much simpler to just stop watching the media. They don't know any more than you. They just read the same sources you could read and then retell the story on camera. Read it for yourself. That's what a citizen would do.

Posted by: Scott M at September 22, 2012 3:02 PM

"Won't look like rain. Won't look like snow.
Won't look like fog. That's all we know.
We just can't tell you any more.
We've never made oobleck before."
-- Dr. Suess, Bartholomew and the Oobleck

Sean Malone begins a predictably tendentious essay, Arguing with Republicans, with a claim I see, read, or hear all the time when people explain why they actually spend time arguing with the colonized minds of the Left. He cites the irritating situation of

"debating with leftists, liberals and progressives who's poor grasp of economics and annoying tendency to support style over substance has turned a good many of them into socialist weasels.

These boilerplate claims of ‘economic ignorance’ and ‘style over substance’ are as constant as disclaimers in drug ads. But they are either false or ignorant or both. Grown-up and fully functional LeftLibProgs know economics very well indeed, and never mistake style over substance. If this is actually Sean’s experience he’s 1) shoveling seaweed against the tide, and 2) spending too much time debating with LeftLibProg children.

Continued...

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people march:
       "Where to? what next?"
-- Carl Sandburg: The People Yes

IN THE DAYS AFTER THE TOWERS FELL, in the ash that covered the Brooklyn street where I lived at that time, in the smoke that rose for months from that spot across the river, when rising up in the skyscraper I worked in, or riding deep beneath the river in the subway, or passing the thousand small shrines of puddled candle wax below the walls with the hundreds of photographs of "The Missing," it was not too much to say that you could feel the doors of history open all about you.

Before those days, history happened elsewhere, elsewhen, to others. History did not happen to you. In your world, until that day, you lived in the time after history. There were no more doors in front of you, all history lay behind you. It was a given.

Continued...

Some see an insane muslim burning the American flag. I see an oppressed, bonfire-challenged muslim begging for a live, on-site, fly-by demo of American napalm.

There's a widow in sleepy Chester
Who weeps for her only son;
There's a grave on the Pabeng River,
A grave that the Burmans shun,
And there's Subadar Prag Tewarri
Who tells how the work was done.

A Snider squibbed in the jungle,
Somebody laughed and fled,
And the men of the First Shikaris
Picked up their Subaltern dead,
With a big blue mark in his forehead
And the back blown out of his head.

Subadar Prag Tewarri,
Jemadar Hira Lal,
Took command of the party,
Twenty rifles in all,
Marched them down to the river
As the day was beginning to fall.

They buried the boy by the river,
A blanket over his face--
They wept for their dead Lieutenant,
The men of an alien race--
They made a samadh in his honor,
A mark for his resting-place.

For they swore by the Holy Water,
They swore by the salt they ate,
That the soul of Lieutenant Eshmitt Sahib
Should go to his God in state;
With fifty file of Burman
To open him Heaven's gate.

Continued...

Year upon year in this world's forest dark,
Heaped at the foot of the trees,
The tangles and bundles of dead brush increase
Which sunlight shall never seize.

The vampire by sunlight or stake.
The wolfman by silver in bone.
The demon by book, chant and pentagram.
The fascist by fire alone.

The ash that descends in the clearest of skies?
The leapers that swam down the stones?
Best answered by bombs from mid-heaven at prayer
With the fire that hollows the bones.

The vampire by sunlight or stake.
The wolfman by silver in bone.
The demon by book, chant and pentagram.
The fascist by fire alone.

If their god decrees war, God's war shall prevail.
His lessons are seared in the stone.
No dreams shall defer, nor wishes erase,
The answer that's burned in the bone.

The vampire by sunlight or stake.
The wolfman by silver in bone.
The demon by book, chant and pentagram.
The fascist by fire alone.

Only by fire is fascism finished.
This sin is demanded that your line may live.
Only through fire is freedom reborn.
Each generation pulls the sword from the stone.

"Well, it was only 3,000 people and we've moved on. Why can't you? Carpe diem, man."

Simon Dedvukaj, 26, Mohegan Lake, N.Y. janitorial, foreman, ABM Industries / Confirmed dead, World Trade Center, at/in building 2

The huge wound in my head began to heal
About the beginning of the seventh week.
Its valleys darkened, its villages became still:
For joy I did not move and dared not speak,
Not doctors would cure it, but time, its patient still.
-- Thom Gunn, The Wound

EVERYONE WHO WAS IN NEW YORK ON on "The Day" will tell you their stories about "The Day." I could stun you with an eight figure number by running a Google on 9/11, but you can do that as well.

"The Day," even at this close remove, has ascended into that shared museum of the mind to be placed in the diorama captioned, "Where Were You When." The site has long since been cleared and scrubbed clean. There is even an agreement on the memorial which will, I see, use a lot of water and trees. "The Day" has become both memorial and myth.

Less is heard about the aftermath. Less is said about the weeks and months that spun out from that stunningly clear and bright September morning whose sky was slashed by a towering fist of flame and smoke. You forget the smoke that hung over the city like a widow's shawl as the fires burned on for months. You don't know about the daily commutes by subway wondering if some new horror was being swept towards you as the train came to a stop deep beneath the East River. You supress hearing over the loudspeaker, always unclearly, that the train was being "held for police activity at Penn Station." Was that a bomb, poison gas, a mass shooting, a strike on the Empire State building? You were never sure. You carried a flashlight in case you had to walk out of the tunnels that ran deep beneath the river. Terror was your quiet companion. After the first six weeks you barely knew it was there.

Continued...

At the end of April in 2006 a couple of friends asked me to go with them to see "United 93," but I declined both offers saying I wasn't sure that I needed any reminders other than what I saw in New York on that day. In the end, though, I went to it as I went to the funerals, alone.

When people who were in New York on that day talk about it, it always seems to be focused on the day itself. Nobody talks much about the days and the weeks and the months that came after that day in New York City.

In a way, that's understandable because what happened for days and weeks and months after was pretty much a slowly diminishing repeat of that day. Things got better, got back to the new "normal." The wax from the candled shrines was scraped away, and in time -- quite a long time actually -- even the walls and fences full of fading flyers asking if you had seen one or the other of those we came to call "the missing" were gone.

Most of these ghastly portrait galleries were simply washed away by the snows and rains that followed that autumn day. Some were covered in long sheets of clear plastic duct-taped and sealed.

Continued...

New York, NY- WTC heavy winds cause a wind swept dust strom around the ring of honor at the bottom of ground zero during the one year anniversary of the tragic event. Photo: David Ryan

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I.
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.
           -- Christina Rossetti

10,000 FEARED DEAD
-- Headline, New York Post, September 12, 2001

AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY I lived in Brooklyn Heights in, of course, Brooklyn. The opening of the Brooklyn Bridge on May 24 of 1883 transformed the high bluff just to the south of the bridge into America's first suburb. It became possible for affluent businessmen from the tip of Manhattan which lay just over the East River to commute across the bridge easily and build their stately mansions and townhouses high above the slapdash docks below. Growth and change would wash around the Heights in the 117 years that followed, but secure on their bluff, on their high ground, the Heights would remain a repository old and new money, power, and some of the finest examples of 19th and early 20th century homes found in New York City.

When I moved to Brooklyn Heights from the suburbs of Westport, Connecticut in the late 90s, it was a revelation to me that such a neighborhood still existed. Small side streets and cul-de-sacs were shaded over by large oaks and maple that made it cool even in the summer doldrums. Street names such as Cranberry, Orange and Pineapple let you know you were off the grid of numbered streets and avenues. Families were everywhere and the streets on evenings and on weekends were full of the one thing you rarely see in Manhattan, children.

Brooklyn Heights had looked down on Wall Street and the tip of Manhattan from almost the beginning. It hosted the retreat of Washington from New York City during the Battle of Long Island, the first major engagement of the Revolutionary War. To be in the Heights was to hold the high ground and all the advantages that position affords.

Brooklyn Heights today enjoys a kind of armed hamlet existence in New York. Outside influences such as crime, poverty and ghetto life don't really intrude. Since it has long been a neighborhood of the rich and the powerful of the city, it has been spared some of the more doleful effects of city life. It doesn't have walls that you can see, but they are there, strong, high and well guarded.

Traffic, that bane of New York life, is controlled in the Heights. To the west, the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, once planned to cut through the Heights directly to the Brooklyn Bridge, was rerouted by a deft application of money and power; placed below along the harbor. To the east, all traffic coming off the Bridge is pushed along Cadman Plaza to Court Street and off to Atlantic. This forms the eastern border of the Heights whose edge is further delineated by the ramparts of Brooklyn City Hall, Courts of all flavors and a rag-tag collection of government structures that exemplify the Fascist Overbuilding movement of the early 70s when, expecting 'The Revolution,' governments built towards gun-slits rather than windows. The south of the Heights is sharply drawn with Atlantic Avenue, a street given over to a long strip of fringe businesses and a corridor of Islamic-American mosques and souks and restaurants. The north is quite simply the Brooklyn Bridge and its approaches that shelter the now slowly evolving sector devoted to overpriced raw loft spaces and bad art known as DUMBO, for "Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass."

The best thing about the Heights is the Promenade. This is a long pedestrian strolling area that runs from Remsen on the south to Cranberry on the north end. It's a brick walk high on the bluff above the Expressway below. Over the baroque railing you can see far out into the harbor, beyond the Financial District and Wall Street on the tip of Manhattan, beyond the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island to the distant silhouettes of the cranes and wharfs on the Jersey Shore. You can see north up the East River past the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge to, maybe, the merest wisp of the Williamsburg Bridge. Across from the railings are a selection of gardens and backyards with water fountains and shaded benches. It is one of those hidden, off-to-the-side areas of respite that are secreted across all the seven boroughs of the city. You discover it by being taken to it by someone else who has already been there.

Continued...

Their silence keeps me sleepless for I know
Within that smoke their ash still falls as snow,
To settle on our flesh like fading stars
Dissolve into sharp sparks at break of day.

At dawn a distant shudder in the earth
Disclosed the flight of fire into steel,
The shaking not of subways underground,
But screams from inside flowers made of flame.

We stood upon the Heights like men of straw
Transfixed by flames that started in the sky,
And watched them plunging down in death’s ballet
Too far removed to hear their falling cry.

By noon that band of smoke loomed low
Upon the harbor’s skin and made us gasp;
A hand of smoke that in its curdled crawl
Kept reaching to extend its lethal grasp.

The harp strung bridge held up ten thousand souls
Who’d screaming run beneath the paws of death,
Like dusted ghosts that lived but were not sure
If they lived in light or only for a breath.

They’d writhed and spun within that storm of smoke
And stumbled out to light and clearer air,
To find upon the river’s further shore
No sanctuary other than despair.

The sirens scraped the sky and jets carved arcs
Within a heaven empty of all hope,
That marked its epicenter with one streak
Of black on polished bone where silver'd stood.

By evening all their ash had settled so
That on the leaves outside my window glowed
Their souls in small bright stars until the rain
Cleaned all of what could not be clean again.

We breathed that smoke that bent and crawled.
We learned to hate that smoke that lingered so.
We knew that blood could only answer blood,
And so we yearned to go but not to go.

Within that city shrines were our resolve.
We placed them where our grief would best anneal.
Upon our walls and trees their faces loomed
To gaze at us from time beyond repeal.

Their last lost summer faded into ash.
Their faces faded into name scratched stones.
Our years flowed into endless desert seas
Where warplanes prowled in search of bones.

In time their smoke and ash became but words
In stories told at dinner, told by rote,
Or in the comments made by magazines
For whom the "larger issues" were of note.

In time their faces faded with the rains,
The little altars thick with wax were scraped,
But still beneath clear plastic they endure
Reminding us that we have not escaped.

Their silence keeps me sleepless for I know.

---

* For the process of how this came to be written see The Arrival @ AMERICAN DIGEST

[What follows is a slightly edited transcript of what I saw and how I felt on the 11th of September, 2001 from Brooklyn Heights in New York City. On that day I was posting to a West Coast Computer Conferencing system known as The Well. As a result, even though I was writing from Brooklyn Heights directly across the river from the Towers, the time stamp reflects PST. Real time is +3 hours.]

Tue 11 Sep 01 08:07

Saw the first tower collapse from the Promenade across the river in Brooklyn. Fine white and pale yellow ash everywhere. Lower Manhattan covered in smoke with ash still drifting down.

Military jets overhead every five minutes or so.

Lower span of Brooklyn Bridge jammed with people walking out of the city, many covered with white ash. Ghosts. The Living Dead. BQE empty except for convoys of emergency vehicles.

Sirens in all directions. Ferry ships emerging from the smoke heading to the Brooklyn shore riding low in the water fully loaded.

This is monstrous.

Deaths in the thousands in New York.

My body is trembling with sorrow and rage. I saw the first tower fall. Everyone in it would have been killed. This, all this, must be stopped. Those who have done this must be wiped out to the last.

War with whom?

Any and all terrorist organizations, foreign or domestic, must now be brought to a swift and complete halt no matter where they are located.

I watched this happen. The enormity of it cannot be communicated. Vile and bestial.

We need to destroy any and all capacity of anyone living anywhere to do anything like this ever again. There were thousands in those buildings. Thousands.

There is no justice swift enough or sure enough.

All that we have must be brought forward and used without restraint. This is an act of war beyond Pearl Harbor.

Military jets overhead again.

More ash on the street. I am cooled down. Way down.

This is pure evil.

*Tue 11 Sep 01 12:33 *

There is no World Trade Center visible from the Promenade. But you can smell it from there -- a sort of burnt stench as if someone lit newspaper in a trash can and then poured water on it. That kind of wet, burnt stench.

It is bright in the sunshine now except for where the Trade Centers stood, and there is still a plume of thick brown smoke smouldering up from there making the sun behind it look dim and oily.

Just now I saw three large military helicopters land across the river from the Heights on the big pad at the foot of Wall Street. People on the streets are talking quietly -- many of them on cells now that some of those nets are back up.

Everything is as quiet as it was this morning when I got up and began to take a shower.

Showering I felt a vibration shake my building in Brooklyn Heights like a subway train passing deep underneath the structure. I didn' t think much of it. I' ve felt similar vibrations before.

Continued...

He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
-- Easter, 1916 by William Butler Yeats

I've been trying to remember September 10 but it's no go.

I know what I must have been doing, but I don't remember what I did. I kept no notes on that most ordinary of September days. I kept many notes on the day that followed and the days, weeks, months and years that followed that day. What I do know is that whatever might have followed September 10 was taken from us all that day never to be returned or recaptured only avenged. What I do know is that "justice being served" has no part in it, and never did.

I can, of course, assume what I did -- what I must have done -- on a routine Monday in Brooklyn Heights. I would have gotten up and showered in my strange bathroom with half a tub. I would have dressed for work; maybe a white shirt and a tie and a suit. I would have walked a block and a half to the Clark Street Station and taken an elevator 11 floors beneath the surface of the earth, ridden a train deeper still under the East River, and gotten out at Penn Station, walked across the street and taken the elevator up to the eleventh floor, and worked my way through my day before repeating the journey back to Brooklyn Heights. I must have done those things and done them without knowing it would be the last time I would do them in a heedless fashion. It was just the pattern my life had come to in all the long New York years leading to September 10.

I can, of course, look and see what the nation and the world was concerned with on September 10. John O'Neil, the FBI's leading counterterrorism expert was dining at Elaine's Restaurant on the Upper East Side, and telling his fellow diners, “We're due. And we're due for something big. Some things have happened in Afghanistan...." O'Neill would be dead within 24 hours when the South Tower collapsed. On the same day, Iran denied, not for the first or last time, that it was trying to develop nuclear weapons. Down on Wall Street the Dow Jones index remained flat at the close of business and the New York Times wrote, not for the first or last time, of “the darkening economic outlook” while noting that most economists didn't "anticipate a full-blown recession." Overall the hottest news story in the nation concerned Michael Jordan's pending return to professional basketball. The news that day was a case of the banal overshadowing the mundane.

It was against that background of works and days that the doors of history swung open and we all walked through them forgetting to ask, "What fresh hell is this?"

We were soon to know the nature of the new hell and we were all thrust into it without repeal. The days turned to months and the months turned to years and now we have turned around and a decade is gone. What might have been ours, for good or ill, in that decade was forever stolen from us. Stolen from us not -- never doubt this -- by one man alone, but by a host of savages and throwbacks spread around the world and here among us and dedicated to our destruction. A host that will use any means necessary to destroy this nation while this nation "serves justice" up in spoonfuls and creates "Rules of Engagement" with which to hamper those who would defend it with their very lives.

What the nation has become, through death by fire, bravado, war, forgetfulness, treason, and blunt stupidity could not have been foretold on September 10, but here we are -- a lurching ship of state captained by a malicious hater of the American soil. That same captain, maddened by his own stunted heritage, will today disgrace the soil of Ground Zero. It is a difficult reality that has been dealt by the hands of fate; one that is still being played out.

Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death.
-- SEPTEMBER 1, 1939 W.H. Auden

Now over a decade has passed, "a low dishonest decade," since the day after September 10 and the thing that looked like a man, the monster that set the events of the 11th in motion, has been expunged from the Book of Life. Too easily and too quickly for my tastes but my tastes in these matters are rooted in Scots' blood, and that blood demands punishments too severe to write down here or to hold in the mind for long.

Some would say that his death with a bullet to the brain and then the use of the body as food for crabs and worm on the bottom of the ocean means "Debt paid" and "War over" and "Victory." Let that be to them as it will be, but my blood says that it is not paid, not over and not a victory.

My blood says that all of those in his line need to be expunged, and that all of those who emulate and revere his manner of thinking need to be expunged, and all of those in his part of the gene pool need to be drained away and destroyed, root and branch. My blood says, "Carthago delenda est."

From what little I know of history, what little I know of our enemies, I know in the marrow of my bones that there will come a terrible day in which that final judgment will be rendered and that final act shall be done. And as it was on the day after September 10, I remain relentlessly for this reckoning; a reckoning that is still to come, but like September 11 itself, certain to arrive.

In time their smoke and ash became but words
In stories told at dinner, told by rote,
Or in the comments made by magazines
For whom the "larger issues" were of note.

In time their faces faded with the rains,
The little altars thick with wax were scraped,
But still beneath clear plastic they endure
To remind us all we've not escaped.

Their silence keeps me sleepless for I know.
-- The Missing

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. -- Job 38

So elsewhere I've been drawn into, for the X times infinity time, yet another discussion about God.

Is He this? Is She that? Is God's "morality" thin or fat? Does He wear a halo or a hat? Does He care if you crush a gnat? Can you see Him? Would you be Him? If He tells you to kill your kid would you do what Abraham did?

All the usual suspects have shown up with all their usual suspect notions. Some to sell you a Bible, some to sell you a potion, some to sell you a bottle of Atheist lotion. As we learn in the Holy Book of Dylan, "Everybody wants to get you down in the hole that they're in."

Me? I'm a believer because... well because I've really got Nothing Better to do. That's because measuring myself against even the smallest, most finite, and bounded idea of God I can conceive I'm about gnat size in relation to that. I wish others saw it that way, but among the smart monkeys most of us think of ourselves as some sort of gigantic intellect -- at least in comparison to, say, a clam. Interesting that the "intelligent" who are long on stupidity are always short on humility.

The point is that smart monkeys like us are, deep down, stupid and shallow in anything that even starts to compare us to the Creator. At best we've been granted a small, dim sense of the shadow of the afterimage of Creation and are forever limited to that. We cannot go beyond it. For us there is no outside looking in. We simply don't have the wetware.

For many this vague, haunting sense is such an insult to their monkey mind's ego that they cannot endure the humiliation. And so they deny what little light they have and turn, turn away. It's futile of course but so many now are so afflicted that they find, with each other, small and cold comfort in numbers.

It's a shame that in this brief Grace-granted glimpse of the Immense Light between a sleep and a sleep that so many shut their eyes to the unfolding Miracle of each Moment, and think, poor little monkeys, that since none of it is about them none of it needs to be seen as it is -- glorious, compassionate and indifferent. They actually think ... no "believe"... that the Creator should not be beyond their good and evil; that the moral life of Creation should reflect our dim and limited mind.

Given the Gift they use it to curse the Giver.

Poor little limited smart monkeys. All arms are too short to box with God.

Inch. Time. Foot. Gem.

"Not twice this day
Inch time foot gem.
This day will not come again.
Each minute is worth a priceless gem."

Continued...

"Happy Daze Are Here Again!" U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, seen in an image taken from between a video camera and its cameraman, attended a joint news conference with her Chinese counterpart at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing Wednesday.

Continued...

Continued...

"Using pencils, Photoshop and Illustrator, UK-based Mitchell Nelson has created a striking tribute poster to Neil Armstrong. The project shows an illustration of the first man on the moon on one side and a typographic piece of Armstrong's most famous quote, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind," on the other." -- Neil Armstrong / Tribute Poster on the Behance Network

"Until non-liberals understand that hate and violence are the fundamental characteristics of the "liberal" they have no hope of defeating them.

"As someone that grew up poor and lived and schooled among minorities, anti-white racism is endemic among them. In many "communities" the highest achievement is to demonstrate in every way they are apart from Whitey. Not once in private have I heard one minority scold/correct another minority for even vicious anti-white racist statements.

"Today's "liberalism" is about raw power. There may be a few "liberals" that still think "giving stuff away" will help someone. Mostly, being on the left is about getting on the right side of the billy club swing. In their mind all of US history has been you, or people like you, beating them with the billy club. The Left really believes you, and others like you, need to be beaten by any means necessary. You are sub-human in their mind and their pursuit of "social justice" justifies whatever they have to do to you. This is why the bad habit conservatives have of exempting contempt for the liberals near them is so destructive.

"Liberals have the hate to power a 24/7 fight. We think we only need to fight on election day every few years and then go back to our lives. That is how we've gotten into our current position. Things won't change until we change. Stop deciding what is comfortable and then adjusting your action to remain comfortable." -- ScottM: Side-Lines: Male Flight Attendant Down on Glenn Beck? Wonder Why?

I love to contemplate the hours of takes that O had to perform to get this "right."

Continued...

The corrupt media has a constant agenda to help Barack Obama

The reason Obama won in 2008 was because so many white people wanted to feel good about themselves and prove they were not racist that the raced to vote in the first black president.  They were thrilled to do it and wanted to make history.  At the same time, there was a giant slice of Republicans who didn’t like McCain and also somewhat didn’t feel good about standing in the way of the first black president.  So they let Obama win, thinking it would not be that bad.  They joked "What'€™s the worse than can happen?  He can'€™t be worse than Carter!"€.

There'€™s no pressure for suburban white people to prove they aren'€™t racist again by re-electing President Disappointment.  At the same time, those Republicans who stupidly sat the election out in 2008 aren'€™t going to do that again.  If someone is sitting out this year too, that person is just brain dead.  AND that person just wants negative attention and is likely to never vote.  Ignore that person from now on.

Blacks are the most racist voters in this country at the moment and will indeed support Barack Obama in the 90-100% range…but how many will really turn out on Election Day? They won’t vote AGAINST Obama, but they might not bother to go vote for him.

The view of the DNC convention... from the TV screen is one of magnificence, grandeur and lofty ideas.  Near at hand it is dealers in the next motel room and hookers in the lobby. -- Belmont Club » All The World'€™s a Stage

[Republished in honor of the Perverts National Convention now taking place at the doorway to Hell.]

“We are all lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” -- Oscar Wilde

If you could pick up the Northwestern US by the southeast corner of Idaho and shake it, everything loose would roll down into Seattle. So many loose bipeds have rolled into town over the years that the city boasts not one angry and twisted little “alternative paper” but two: The Seattle Weekly and The Stranger. Of the two, The Stranger is the stranger, the more angry, and the more spiteful. Strangely, The Stranger -- in this age of Obama and “springtime for progressive Hitlers" -- grows more angry and peevish every week since the November elections. It no longer competes with the Seattle Weekly to see who can be more revolting. It won that dubious contest long ago. These days The Stranger seems to mostly compete with itself; trying every week to put out more slime and bile than the week before. Most weeks, it wins. This week was no exception.

No matter what the standard Democrat/Progressive line may be, it is never quite good enough for The Stranger. This may be because of it’s editor, one Dan Savage by name, a man who seems to live to reveal that for some, when it comes to being intellectually twisted, there really is no bottom. It may be because The Stranger’s infected bloodlines run from from the ancient wheezings of The Daily Worker, down through The East Village Other, and out onto the news stands of Planet Moonbat with classifieds courtesy of The Berkeley Barb. Or it may be because the editor is simply an awful person with a full load of obsessive-compulsive disorders.It’s difficult to know when it comes to this perfect storm of spit, spite, and smut.

All one can know is that, with The Stranger, you see deeper into the soul of today’s post-modern American quisling than any other “alternative” weekly. And what you see is the utter lock this mindset has on what once we called “The Seven Deadly Sins.” It is positive for all of them and takes no medication. Instead, it showcases them in order to effectively infect every freshman class that arrives in Seattle looking for an “education” in how to be fashionably depraved in worn fleece. I read the paper every so often to keep in touch with how dementia, depravity and degradation are progressing in progressive America.

These days it would seem that the 7 deadly sins are now the 7 cardinal virtues of the progressive left. As I shall demonstrate....

Indeed, the progressive left has cast off all pretense of “progress” and simply reverted to a rag-tag slop bucket brimming over with Americans that hate children, success, happiness, liberty, and life itself. All the local “progressive heroes” will sooner of later get their close-up in The Stranger. Their faces and their ever-extending list of physical and mental diseases will unfailingly reveal the state of souls that have committed to personal and social devolution. Along the way, they've bagged the seven deadly sins with the zeal of hunters, never knowing that it was themselves that was the hunted. Theirs is the socialist Utopian view of life fueled with poppers and propaganda.

Those who have the tragic view of life accept that all humans are flawed. We all, to a greater of lesser extent, have touched on all of the 7 deadly sins. It is in our nature. But those with the tragic view at least struggle against this and strive to leave the world brighter and better than when we came into it, not more depraved and darker.

Continued...

Just pay the money and put this on heavy rotation on all channels for the next 60 days and... mission accomplished

By the one and only i Maksim

Ad Meretricem Caesaris
To abortionist Sandra Fluke, on her campaign tour for Barack Hussein Obama.

Alas, the name has come to wrap itself around
Your putrid frame, a second skin that might astound
All onlookers with eyes of pity as they gaze
At one so lacking shame. If ever you amaze,
Tis not by beauty long since tainted and disgraced
As much by outward use as your polluted thoughts,
(With women, it is from within that beauty rots),
Nor woman's modesty by servile lust effaced,
Much less the antique charms of gentle ladies past
Whose looks commanded armies and their fame outlast;
Oh no! Your fascination is the gutter kind,
But with a special twist for which you're most maligned:
That you should prostitute your leaden mind to Hate,
To service -- in full view -- The Phallus of the State.

-- Kenneth Kyntale on Sandra Fluke

"The DNC's main groups, of course, are lawyers, public sector workers, half-educated college students, African-Americans, part of the Hispanic community, secular Jews, and what Ann Coulter brilliantly called "stupid single women" who want the government to be their husband. All of these groups, with the possible exception of some of the lawyers, are under pressure, worse off than they were four years ago, and not likely to turn out in the numbers seen in 2008.

"The situation is dire for the Democrats. The convention can only be about one thing: hate. They have to generate irrational hate and fear, and trust that will motivate their deteriorating base to vote." -- The DiploMad 2.0: Thinking About the DNC

Large yard blob identified as mushroom

ROCHESTER HILLS, Mich., Aug. 30 (UPI) -- A Michigan family said a "weird looking" white blob they discovered in the yard turned out to be a large mushroom.

Linda Key, 53, of Rochester Hills, and her husband, Glenn, 52, said the blob, which is about the size of a basketball and weighs nearly 2 pounds, was first spotted Sunday among the rocks lining their flower bed, the Detroit Free Press reported Thursday.

"We didn't know if it was going to start walking away or what. It was so weird looking," Glenn Key said.

The couple's son, Wyatt, 13, likened the object to something out of a sci-fi movie.

"The whole experience has been very weird ... looking at it, thinking it's an alien egg," he said.

However, mushroom experts identified the object as a fungus commonly called a puffball.

Ah, those orientals. Masters of imitation!

But darlin', those days are gone
Oh yeah
Stop dreaming
And live on in the future
But darlin', a-don't look back
Whoa, no-no
Don't look back
-- John Lee Hooker

Ah, but we do, don't we? We always look back. Seeing the shapes, getting the measure, going the distance and finding -- if only for a moment -- the safe harbors of your life requires a spiritual sextant for sighting the fixed stars. It's a ghost ship's voyage with what lies ahead a blank white screen while what is behind fades into the smoke of the world well lost. There are shallows, shoals and the fatal allure of Sirens and the lee shore. Times in irons, then storms, then stretches of clear open ocean on a broad reach, but always with the sense of hidden reefs and an unknowable destination. It helps to track others' voyages, to follow similar arcs, to watch if they pass, or seem to pass, the same checkpoints. Some are siblings. Others are friends and lovers. Still others are artists that, at some point, strike us as sharing if not a life then at least a similar trajectory.

Everybody has a different set of charts, but some overlap. Among these are the singer-songwriter / poets of our era. These are our troubadours, the most influential of which in our time, is Bob Dylan. Indeed, I've often thought that it must gall the endless pile of disposable poets stashed in the academy that, for all their pallid effort, the greatest American poet of this era is Dylan. But Dylan, for all his protean output and achievement, misses the music as much as he hooks the mind.

For my money, the singer-songwriter-poet among my contemporaries, that both hooks the ear and brings the music is Van Morrison.

Continued...

• June 2013
  
• May 2013
  
• April 2013
  
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• February 2013
  
• January 2013
  
• December 2012
  
• November 2012
  
• October 2012
  
• September 2012
  
• August 2012
  
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• May 2012
  
• April 2012
  
• March 2012
  
• February 2012
  
• January 2012
  
• December 2011
  
• November 2011
  
• October 2011
  
• September 2011
  
• August 2011
  
• July 2011
  
• June 2011
  
• May 2011
  
• April 2011
  
• March 2011
  
• February 2011
  
• January 2011
  
• December 2010
  
• November 2010
  
• October 2010
  
• September 2010
  
• August 2010
  
• July 2010
  
• June 2010
  
• May 2010
  
• April 2010
  
• March 2010
  
• February 2010
  
• January 2010
  
• December 2009
  
• November 2009
  
• October 2009
  
• September 2009
  
• August 2009
  
• July 2009
  
• June 2009
  
• May 2009
  
• April 2009
  
• March 2009
  
• February 2009
  
• January 2009
  
• December 2008
  
• November 2008
  
• October 2008
  
• September 2008
  
• August 2008
  
• July 2008
  
• June 2008
  
• May 2008
  
• April 2008
  
• March 2008
  
• February 2008
  
• January 2008
  
• December 2007
  
• November 2007
  
• October 2007
  
• September 2007
  
• August 2007
  
• July 2007
  
• June 2007
  
• May 2007
  
• April 2007
  
• March 2007
  
• February 2007
  
• January 2007
  
• December 2006
  
• October 2006
  
• September 2006
  
• August 2006
  
• July 2006
  
• June 2006
  
• May 2006
  
• April 2006
  
• March 2006
  
• February 2006
  
• January 2006
  
• December 2005
  
• November 2005
  
• October 2005
  
• September 2005
  
• August 2005
  
• July 2005
  
• June 2005
  
• May 2005
  
• April 2005
  
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• December 2004
  
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• October 2004
  
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• August 2004
  
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• June 2004
  
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• April 2004
  
• March 2004
  
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• June 2003
  

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• Links
• Links

• On Polls: "Relax don't do it / When you want to go to it."
• Father Do Not Forgive Them. They Know Damn Well What They Do.
• On the Return of History
• More Rubble, Less Trouble: Some Ask "Why?" I Ask "Why Not?"
• The Grave of the Hundred Head | “They Kill Four Of Ours, You Kill 400 Of Theirs”
• Only By Fire is Fascism Finished
• The Wound
• Of a Fire in a Field and a Hole in the Sky
• The Wind in the Heights
• The Missing
• What I Saw: Notes Made on September 11, 2001 from Brooklyn Heights
• September 10, 2001: "Make no mistake, it's not revenge he's after. It's a reckonin'."
• Hallelujah Anyway
• "Verily I say unto thee, That this day, even in this night, before the cock crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice."
• September Song: Hillary Busy Attending a Meeting of Her Real People
• Democrats Reminisce at the DNC
• ObamaZombies: They Only Come Out at Night!
• Neil Armstrong Tribute
• Ending the Endless 2-Minute Hate: ScottM Comments
• [Not A] Parody