Q. The president’s progress with the battered economy has been both praised and criticized. How well are his efforts measuring up with you?
| Extremely well. We are undoubtedly moving in the right direction. |  29% <<<<<<Who are these idiots? |
| Fairly well. There’s still a long way to go. | 4% |
| Not well at all. His plans are hurting more than helping. | 66% |
| Not sure/No opinion. | 1% |
13866482 votes
You can vote here.
Sweet.
Owens got the big Scozzafava endorsement. Hoffman gets America’s Mayor:
WATERTOWN, N.Y., November 1, 2009 — Doug Hoffman the Conservative candidate for Congress in New York’s 23rd District today received the endorsement of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Rudy Giuliani said: “On Tuesday, the voters of the North Country have a very clear choice when they cast their vote for Congress. It’s a choice between a tax and spend Nancy Pelosi Democrat and a common sense conservative Republican named Doug Hoffman.
Another Johnny-Come-Lately for Hoffman, here.
What will the Democrats do to foil the Hoffmentum? There’s only a day and a half left for dirty tricks.
Hat tip: NorsU on Twitter.
Video of the day: 101 Reasons to love the Corps:
The Marine team remains in the lead, having met 1/3 of it’s goal, but donations have slowed down, so if you haven’t yet donated, please consider doing so, here.
It’s not too late to be a Project Valour-IT Marine Team Member; you can join, here. You might want to shoot our team captain, Cassandra, a note, and she can fill you in on all the particulars.
Jules Crittenden has a fantastic post up about Marines at Walter Reed:
What does it mean to be a Marine when you are one of the maimed at Walter Reed on Veterans Day?
“Everything,” Cpl. Peter Bagarella, 21, of Falmouth said simply.
Theirs is the story of service and sacrifice behind the statistics.
“This place is awesome. They gave me my eyes back,” said Bagarella. A remotely detonated bomb blinded him and vaporized his left leg in a palm grove in Haditha on Aug. 12. As the Iraqi ambushers opened up with machine guns and the Marines returned fire, Bagarella screamed, “Oh God! Oh God!” and used his thumbs to count his fingers. He asked the medics, “What’s gone? What’s gone on my body?”
Read the rest at Crittenden’s place.
You can read about how Project Valour-IT began, here.
In addition to voice-controlled laptops, Valour-IT now helps provide active and whole-body video games such as Wii Sports, which is used to great effect in physical therapy, and personal GPS systems that help compensate for short-term memory loss and organizational/spacial challenges common in those with brain injuries.
Welcome to Obama’s NEA:
Recommended Reading: Saul Alinsky, The American
Organizer
Reveille for Radicals
by Saul Alinsky
Vintage; Reissue edition (October 23, 1989)
Buy ItRules for Radicals
by Saul Alinsky
Vintage; Reissue edition (October 23, 1989)
Buy It
Is Saul Alinsky someone who should be recommended in these glowing terms?
An inspiration to anyone contemplating action in their community! And to every organizer!
Saul Alinski wrote the book on American radicalism – two books, in fact: a 1945 best-seller, “Reveille for Radicals” and “Rules for Radicals” in 1971. The “Reveille” title page quotes Thomas Paine… “Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul.”
Saul Alinsky, who was a labor and civil-rights activist from the 1910’s until he died in 1972, has written here a guidebook for those who are out to change things. He sets down what the goal is: a society where people are free to live, and also aren’t starving in the streets. A society where there is legal and economic justice. Then he sets out to say how to get there.
Alinsky spends a lot of time critiquing the idea that “The end does not justify the means.” What end? What means? He feels that there are circumstances where one can and should use means that in other circumstances would be unethical. I am not sure I agree, but Alinsky certainly speaks with the voice of experience.
Alinsky’s goal seems to be to encourage positive social change by equipping activists with a realistic view of the world, a kind of preemptive disillusionment. If a person already knows what evil the world is capable of, then perhaps the surprise factor can be eliminated, making the person a more effective activist. Alinsky further seems to be encouraging the budding activist not to worry to much about getting his or her hands dirty. It’s all a part of the job, he seems to say.
Yeah, Saul Alinsky “seemed to say” a lot of things. Things that I don’t necessarily want the teachers of my children enacting in the classroom.
Read the Discover the Networks profile of him, if you haven’t already:
Born to Russian-Jewish parents in Chicago in 1909, Saul Alinsky was a Communist/Marxist fellow-traveler who helped establish the dual political tactics of confrontation and infiltration that characterized the 1960s and have remained central to all subsequent revolutionary movements in the United States. He never joined the Communist Party but instead, as David Horowitz puts it, became an avatar of the post-modern left.
Though Alinsky is rightfully understood to have been a leftist, his legacy is more methodological than ideological. He identified a set of very specific rules that ordinary citizens could follow, and tactics that ordinary citizens could employ, as a means of gaining public power. His motto was, “The most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired results.”
Alinsky studied criminology as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, during which time he became friendly with Al Capone and his mobsters. Ryan Lizza, senior editor of The New Republic, offers a glimpse into Alinsky’s personality: “Charming and self-absorbed, Alinsky would entertain friends with stories — some true, many embellished — from his mob days for decades afterward. He was profane, outspoken, and narcissistic, always the center of attention despite his tweedy, academic look and thick, horn-rimmed glasses.”
***
Alinsky died in 1972, but his legacy lives on as a staple of leftist method, a veritable blueprint for revolution (which he and his disciples euphemistically refer to as “change”). Two of his most notable modern-day disciples are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
Obama, himself, taught workshops in the Alinsky method for several years. He started working with the corrupt, Alinskyite organization, ACORN in the mid ’80’s.
Alinsky taught that “The most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired results.” Does that meet the definition of a psychopath?
A psychopath is a person without conscience; someone who constantly breaks the moral rules of the community. Saul Alinsky was a “community organizer” who found a career that fit that personality disorder. In the Orwellian upside-down world of the Left, community organizers disorganize communities. That is the meaning of revolution, to overturn whatever exists today in the raw pursuit of one’s own power.
Normal, decent America is the enemy for these people.
We’ve seen this contempt in the way the left has treated ordinary Americans protesting Obama’s policies. Is this how the NEA would like teachers see the the “materialistic, decadent, bourgeois” etc. parents of their students?***
Alinsky called ordinary Americans “the enemy.” Normal people don’t declare war on all of society. But Alinsky wrote in Rules for Radicals that radicals
“…have contemptuously rejected the values and way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized and corrupt … They are right … “
Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals is considered the bible for left-wing community organizers. Why would the NEA be promoting the writings of this amoral, power-obsessed apparatchik to teachers?
And what community are they organizing?
Hat tip Alinsky Defeater on Twitter.
HMMMMM:
Could these outrageous NEA book recommendations be what Kyle Olsen at Big Government calls “red meat”, or what I would call boob bait for the bubbas?
The White House appears to be continuing to throw red meat out to conservative audiences as a distraction from the real issue at hand: the proposed government takeover of health care.
It’s like a dog trainer pleading with a beagle sitting patiently, waiting to attack the target, while a big, fat steak is plopped by his paw.
At 4:31pm this past Friday, typical fare for this crew, the White House sirens released a partial list of visitors to the West Wing. Why not a full list? Who knows? But some of the names were ones that were in the conservative wheelhouse during the election and the first 10 months of this year: Bill Ayers, Michael Moore, Jeremiah Wright and George Soros.
But MSNBC claims the first three: Ayers, Moore and Wright aren’t the Ayers, Moore and Wright. Then why release the names? Not to mention: the White House staff and the president himself just happen to have other friends named Bill Ayers, Michael Moore and Jeremiah Wright? That’s bizarre.
This is likely Act II in the White House slight of hand to distract from the real issue: Reid and Pelosi’s lengthy bills to takeover health care in America. Act I, of course, was the blatant attack on Fox News, which fizzled, arguably backfired and ultimately died.
Could this be Act III?
Olsen cautions:
Conservatives need to stay focused on the wise words and analysis of those such as Byron York, and not be the distracted by the made-for-TV sideshows the White House has been creating.
Nice Deb 