Entry #8 in the publication’s “Top 10 RINOs” list at the time:

8. Gov. Mitt Romney (Mass.)
Has said, “I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country.” Supports civil unions and stringent gun laws. After visiting Houston, he criticized the city’s aesthetics, saying, “This is what happens when you don’t have zoning.”

Among the many noted RINOs at the time Human Events didn’t consider to be as bad as Romney: Ohioans Bob Taft, Mike DeWine, and George Voinovich.

Yet during the campaign, Human Events gave Romney several extended softball interviews. In this one on December 28, 2007, Romney was never asked about civil unions, didn’t challenge his previous support of stringent gun laws, and only asked about whether women who have abortions should be prosecuted — a position no presidential candidate that I know of held.

And there was this powderpuff:

Governor, what’s your reasoning behind saying that questions about your faith are un-American?

What could possibly (po$$ibly?) explain this?

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UPDATE: Related and strangely forgotten – Romney did not participate in a “Values Voter” debate in September 2007 (neither did Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, or John McCain).

Romney’s empty chair was asked the following question:

Unfortunately, that’s the best answer he could have given, present or absent.

But what about the “pornography” part of the question? Where did that come from?

Well, here (”Romney Criticized for Hotel Pornography”) and here (a Salt Lake City Deseret News editorial, “The nasty taint of porn”).

According to a July 2007 Associated Press article carried in the Washington Post (never disputed by Romney, as far as I can tell):

Romney said his current concern is not about pornography per se, but children unwittingly stumbling upon it on the Internet or television.

Even though this position directly contradicts that of alleged social conservatives, Romney is now getting support from many of them, including some who were criticizing him in the July 2007 AP article (yeah, I’m talking to you, Tony Perkins).

What could possibly (po$$ibly?) explain this?

Quote 1 is from Guy Benson at Townhall:

Whether it was Obama’s radical policy preferences, blind partisanship, or some combination of the two that motivated his vote is unclear. Although it’s offensive that Obama spun false excuses to try to justify his vote, what ultimately matters most is that he voted “no” on a bill that simply stated killing a living, breathing baby is not acceptable. That vote, in and of itself, is far worse than any political cover-up could ever be.

Quote 2 is from Ed Morrissey at Hot Air. His post at Hot Air is a read-the-whole thinger (”BAIPA unnecessarily burdens doctors with … babies”), but here’s the money quote:

Obama protected infanticide in order to protect abortion on demand.

How does someone who “thinks” this way get this far?

Note: This was originally posted at Pajamas Media on Monday. Also see this previous BizzyBlog post announcing the column for related commentary and updates.

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It is impossible to overestimate the importance of the literary works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died Sunday at age 89.

At the same time, without diminishing their importance, as well as his courageous personal example, it is too easy to exaggerate Solzhenitsyn’s role in defeating the historically unprecedented tyranny that was the Soviet Union.

After all, the legendary author won his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.”

Solzhenitsyn’s seminal work, the three-volume Gulag Archipelago, was published near the end of 1973. Solzhenitsyn’s obituary in the New York Times describes it this way:

“Gulag” was a monumental account of the Soviet labor camp system, a chain of prisons that by Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s calculation some 60 million people had entered during the 20th century. The book led to his expulsion from his native land. George F. Kennan, the American diplomat, described it as “the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times.”

Solzhenitsyn’s invaluable and irreplaceable contribution to mankind was to unmask the fundamentally heinous and evil nature of Marxist-Leninist Communism for all who wished to comprehend it. His exposure of the truth about the Soviet Union’s history, its living conditions, and its fundamental tenets of oppression and repression, set the table for those who would have the courage to confront and defeat it.

Many, sadly, had no such desire to comprehend, or to confront.

In the US, a man who felt that “detente” was the way to deal with ruthless thugs was elected president just three years after “Gulag’s” release.

Seven years later, the next president, Ronald Reagan, elicited a tidal wave of outrage when he very accurately called the Soviet regime “the focus of evil in the modern world.”

To make his case throughout his presidency, Reagan invoked Solzhenitsyn and other Soviet dissidents early, often, and to powerful effect. Ultimately, and without firing a shot, Reagan, Pope Paul II, and Lech Walesa, with considerable assistance from the American union movement and Margaret Thatcher, all stepped up and so weakened the evil empire that, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was forced to release its grip as its satellites demanded it.

A stumbled-upon story from the May 31, 1988 New York Times shows just how relentless Reagan was.

1988 was the last year of his administration, but there was no coasting. Reagan went to Moscow for a summit with media darling Mikhail Gorbachev. While there:

Reagan …. publicly clashed over human rights issues ….. quoting Alexander Solzhenitsyn, appealed for increased civil and religious liberties in the Soviet Union.

….. From the gilded halls of the Kremlin to the white-walled compound of the Danilov Monastery, Mr. Reagan used his first visit to the Soviet Union and his fourth meeting with Mr. Gorbachev to campaign for greater freedom.

….. Mr. Reagan’s comments here are the most sustained criticism of internal Soviet policies by a foreign visitor since Mr. Gorbachev assumed power in March 1985, and raised potentially sensitive political problems for the Soviet leader as he faces an important Communist Party meeting next month.

….. Mr. Gorbachev’s remarks about ‘’sermonizing” were apparently made in response to a meeting earlier in the day between Mr. Reagan and a group of dissidents at Spaso House, the residence of the American Ambassador.

….. At the meeting, described by the White House as a gathering of ‘’selected Soviet citizens,” Mr. Reagan said Moscow has made progress on human rights in recent years but still falls short of acceptable international standards for freedom of religion, speech and travel.

Many of those in attendance were Soviet Jews who have been denied permission to emigrate to the West.

”I’ve come to Moscow with this human rights agenda because, as I suggested, it is our belief that this is a moment of hope,” Mr. Reagan told the gathering at Spaso House, where he and his wife, Nancy, are staying during their five-day visit.

….. Addressing a group of (the Danilov Monastery’s) monks and church leaders who were dressed in the traditional black robes and cylindrical caps of the church, Mr. Reagan used the words of Mr. Solzhenitsyn as he called for a renewal of religious faith in the Soviet Union.

Reagan never let up on the pressure, even near the end of his term. Gorbachev, contrary to the fawning media portrayals, was dragged kicking and screaming every step of the way.

If we would have continued to listen to those who wished to “accommodate” this evil empire, the world would be a much different and much more dangerous place.

Evil empires don’t just “fail,” as some historical revisionists would have it. For proof of that, one only needs to look at North Korea and Cuba. The people in those two countries are arguably in a worse economic situation than the Soviet Union as a whole ever was. Their intrinsic evil is clearly visible to all who will open their eyes. Yet those dictatorships have not, and will not, collapse on their own.

Sadly, no one has had the courage mustered by Reagan et al against the Soviet Union to deal similarly with these two rogue nations.

Perhaps a president who spent five years in a North Vietnamese gulag will.

Solzhenitsyn had something to say about that war, too:

….. the most cruel mistake occurred with the failure to understand the Vietnam war. Some people sincerely wanted all wars to stop just as soon as possible; others believed that there should be room for national, or communist, self-determination in Vietnam, or in Cambodia, as we see today with particular clarity. But members of the U.S. anti-war movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there? Do they understand their responsibility today? Or do they prefer not to hear?

Their responsibility, and their preference not to hear, continue to this day.

It is telling that Ronald Reagan’s name is nowhere to be found in Solzhenitsyn’s New York Times obit.

A more thorough approach to the key elements of the case against Mitt Romney will have to wait until the early part of this week, when there will presumably be a larger weekday audience.

In the meantime, let’s contrast Kathryn Jean Lopez’s fawning, hopelessly naive defense of Mitt Romney’s flagrant and frequent flip-flopping, taken apart at this BizzyBlog post yesterday, with this cautionary column from Examiner.com’s Mary Katharine Ham.

We should be thankful that MKH seems to have suffered no permanent damage from the time she spent second-fiddle blogging a few years ago at chief Romniac Hugh Hewitt’s place. Despite clinging to many popular conceptions about Romney’s credentials, and probably not having a complete handle on why her observations and instincts are reliable, she nevertheless “gets it” when it comes to his non-contribution to a GOP national ticket. Given how far into the tank for Romney other right-wing talkers and commentators have gone, I’ll take it — for now (bolds are mine):

I Am Not Brimming With Enthusiasm

….. But Mitt Romney is an “in theory” candidate. In theory, he was the obvious conservative alternative to John McCain. In theory, he hit all the fiscal con and social con marks in a way no other Republican did. In theory, he looked the part and could walk and talk the walks and talks, respectively. In theory, he had the money, the know-how and the headstart to crush all comers.

In practice, he had every advantage– money, early support from a small group of incredibly influential conservatives (notably National Review), great buzz, a competent organization, a veritable arch-enemy of the base to run against– but it simply did not translate into a swell of support for him among rank-and-file Republicans. It didn’t translate into a swell of support for him among conservative leaders until they were faced with the suddenly real spectre of a McCain candidacy just weeks before Mitt Romney’s campaign finally came to an end in front of CPAC. ….. (talk radio pundits’) relative lack of enthusiasm was indicative of a larger lack of it within the base. The evidence is that late support of Romney among many conservatives was much more anti-McCain than it was pro-Romney. Romney ‘08 was a rampart, not a rallying cry.

….. The best argument I’ve heard for a VP slot for Mitt is that he might be able to turn Michigan red. What with Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s depolorable economic leadership, McCain’s historic strength in the state, and Mitt’s obvious economic creds and hometown appeal, the chance at 17 electoral votes might be worth any perceived downside of giving Mitt the job.

All that’s true, in theory. But never since the day we saw Mitt Romney enter the primary race have we seen him capitalize on an “in theory” calculation. Why does anyone believe he’ll deliver now?

Give me Mitt as a close adviser on economic issues. Give me Mitt as a competent surrogate. Give me Mitt as a vanguard of Republican organizing and fundraising. Give me someone else as VP.

If influential types within conservatism and the GOP were as far along as MKH, we wouldn’t be facing the code-red threat of Romney becoming McCain’s running mate.

Others need to be taken there, and for more powerful reasons than those Ham just articulated. She, and many others, including the presumptive nominee himself, need to be disabused of the notion that Romney should have any kind of meaningful role in a McCain administration. I’ll work on that in the next few days’ posts.

In yesterday’s New York Times (”Obama Supporters on the Far Left Cry Foul”), about the presidential candidate I refer to as “Mr. BOOHOO-OUCH” (Barack O-bomba Overseas Hussein “Obambi” Obama - Objectively Unfit Coddler of Haters), an Obama supporter comments on her candidate’s Frequent, Flagrant, Flippant Flip-Flopping:

“We’re frustrated by it, but we understand,” said Mollie Ruskin, 22, who grew up in Baltimore and is spending the summer here as a fellow with Politicorps, a program run by the Bus Project, a local nonprofit that trains young people to campaign for progressive candidates. “He’s doing it so he can get into office and do the things he believes in.”

Translation: He’ll do anything to get elected.

Now there’s a different kind of politician (/sarc).

The name of Ms. Ruskin’s group ought to be changed to the “Throw Under the Bus Project.”

A nearly comprehensive list of Obama Flip-Flops (one can never be sure if it’s totally comprehensive) is at Weapons of Mass Discussion.

Y’know, I really need to go over there more often for gems like this, on the difference between McCain and Obama:

Let’s compare the two:

John McCain was so loyal to the men he was imprisoned with he endured torture on their behalf.

Barack Obama associates with those who can help his career, and throws them right under the bus when they become inconvenient to his aspirations.

That single issue of character matters more than all the others combined. You can trust John McCain. You can trust Barack Obama to use you as a stepping stone.

Alan Caruba (Wiki entry here), in going after the disgraceful “report” by Associated Press writers Alan Fram and Eileen Putman (”Everything is seemingly spinning out of control”) that I criticized yesterday, makes an important point — namely, that the problem goes well beyond the pathetic pair of jaded journalists:

World to End. Vote Democrat.

….. If Fram and Putnam are not on the payroll of the Democrat Party, then they surely should be for writing tripe like this. It screams at the reader to vote Democrat and, in particular, for Sen. Barack Obama, the wizard of hope and change.

This is not journalism by any stretch of the imagination. It is a blatant use of scare tactics to influence the outcome of an election. One expects a political party to engage in such tactics, but a major newswire syndicate should have a layer or two of seasoned editors who make sure such tripe does not move to newspapers and other media.

One has to conclude that the AP agrees that such “tripe” is “journalism,” and that there’s nothing out of order in what these two sad sacks wrote.

(Sidebar: SourceWatch doesn’t like Caruba, which is a sign that he’s likely an OK guy. Regardless, his critique is dead-on.)

From Politico.com:

Hmm. I wonder if that turnaround has anything do with that party’s selection of the candidate I refer to as “Mr. BOOHOO-OUCH” (Barack O-bomba Overseas Hussein “Obambi” Obama - Objectively Unfit Coddler of Haters) as its presidential nominee?

I have a guaranteed solution for restoring the Democrats’ lead: In the polling question, ask who is “the stronger leadership farce in Washington.”

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UPDATE: The Gallup detail:

Note: I had a post up for two hours that was meant to be held until after the Pajamas Media blackout. This happened because PJM put off publishing the article until tomorrow (it was originally targeted for Wednesday), and I didn’t reschedule my post accordingly. Apologies to PJM for the brief oversight, and to BizzyBlog readers for having to pull the post. The following on Lawrence Lindsey’s Wall Street Journal op-ed covers some of the same ground, but not with the specifics you’ll see in my column.

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Lawrence Lindsey’s op-ed in the Wall Streeet Journal today strongly criticizes Barack Obama’s proposed Social Security tax increase, and confirms what I surmised earlier this week, namely that Obama wants a historic de-linkage of taxes from benefits (bolds are mine):

Obama Turns FDR Upside Down

Sen. Barack Obama has a bad idea for “extending the life of Social Security.” He has proposed applying the Social Security tax to incomes above $250,000, in addition to the current tax on incomes up to $102,000. It’s unfair, he explained, for middle-class earners to pay Social Security tax on “every dime they make” while the very rich pay on “only a very small percentage of their income.”

Reporters cited the Obama statement without asking for the logic behind having someone making $100,000 pay on every dime and someone making $250,000 pay on just 41% of income, while someone making $10,000,000 would pay on 98.5% of income. There is no economic principle or theory of tax law that would endorse such a result.

…. Neither Franklin Roosevelt, who started Social Security, nor the intervening three dozen Congresses thought they were imposing an “unfair” system on the middle class. There is a very good and principled reason why Social Security taxes are paid on just $102,000 of income: Benefits are calculated based on that same $102,000 of income.

The fundamental principle of linking taxes and benefits was established when Roosevelt designed Social Security. He wanted to make sure that it was not a welfare system….

…. Although the formula connecting benefits to tax payments or “contributions” has evolved slightly over time, it still adheres to this basic message. Today, what Social Security terms a “low-wage” worker will pay (in present value terms) $77,197 over his or her lifetime and get $112,261 in benefits. A median-wage worker earning $42,000 will pay $171,550 and get back $187,085. A “high-wage” worker making $67,000 will pay $274,480 and get back $245,085.

Note that the previous paragraph shows that Social Security is already a bit of a welfare program already, in the sense that “high-wage” workers are subsidizing “low-wage” workers. This is a point I’ve made several times, all the way back to the beginning of this blog, and that the vast majority of Americans don’t understand. I know this, because every time I explain it in the classroom, the room temperature goes up by about 10 degrees.

But at least the current system maintains the link between taxes paid in and benefits received. The more you pay in, the more you get, even though the “more you get” diminishes at higher taxable earnings levels.

Obama would throw all of that overboard, as Lindsey notes:

Sen. Obama would do away with this principle by requiring higher-end workers to pay taxes without getting any extra benefits linked to their higher contributions. This would be a big step toward turning Social Security from a contributory pension scheme into just another welfare program.

Given who is affected, I would call it “the nearly final step.” And does anyone really believe Obama’s “doughnut hole” would survive very long in the next “fiscal crisis”? In fact, given the history of Bill Clinton’s “middle class tax cut,” I wonder if it will even survive a first draft if Obama were elected.

Lindsey also points to the incentive effects, and you really should go the final section of his piece to see how he gets to this crucial conclusion, along with his perhaps unintended slap at the candidate (in bold):

It is shocking to think that we have a presidential candidate who would make the private sector $5 poorer in order to make the government $1 richer. More likely, given the calculated political design of the proposal, no one in the Obama campaign told the candidate about the economic, ethical or historical consequences of his suggestion.

What????!!! Is Barack Obama such an ignorant newbie that he needs to be TOLD these things?

O. M. G.

From a Thursday Wall Street Journal editorial:

$4 Gasbags

Anyone wondering why U.S. energy policy is so dysfunctional need only review Congress’s recent antics. Members have debated ideas ranging from suing OPEC to the Senate’s carbon tax-and-regulation monstrosity, to a windfall profits tax on oil companies, to new punishments for “price gouging” – everything except expanding domestic energy supplies.

Amid $135 oil, it ought to be an easy, bipartisan victory to lift the political restrictions on energy exploration and production. Record-high fuel costs are hitting consumers and business like a huge tax increase. Yet the U.S. remains one of the only countries in the world that chooses as a matter of policy to lock up its natural resources. The Chinese think we’re insane and self-destructive, while the Saudis laugh all the way to the bank.

And what do we prove by locking things up?

The oil situation and other matters are leading me to believe that we have a ruling class that, on balance, is no longer serious about our survival as a free, viable country.

Shiver didn’t use those words, but by the time you get through this excerpt from her read-the-whole-thing column, you’ll see that it’s her conclusion:

….. One of the first lessons Barack Obama learned in Chicago, doing Alinsky-style political organizing between Columbia and Harvard, was that the religious communities were where the action was.

The first real power connection that Saul Alinsky himself made in his own class-struggle efforts in the 1930s was with the Archbishop of Chicago. And it was in the churches and synagogues that Alinsky’s initial efforts to organize labor were successful.

What Obama found in Chicago churches in the 1980s, however, was not Martin Luther King’s ole time religion, the traditional Christianity of most of our ancestors, both black and white. No, what Obama found was a religion perfectly compatible with his own, already well-formed, far-left worldview.

The Black Liberation Theology of James H. Cone. Marxism emblazoned with a cross and a pulpit, pretending to use the Bible for its authority.

Before Obama even left Chicago for Harvard Law school, he had been embraced by the strange cabal of some of Chicago’s most radical and activist religious leaders, Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan and Michael Pfleger. Liberationists all.

….. After 20 years, Obama has resigned his membership at Trinity United Church of Christ. He did so after Rev. Michael Pfleger’s rants against Hillary Clinton’s white privilege made such a splash on the internet and television news.

But Obama’s attempts to distance himself now from Trinity, Wright, Pfleger, Farrakhan and Cone mean nothing to me. He can, in my mind, no more disown them now, than he could months ago.

The Black Liberation Theology of TUCC that he chose as an adult is the only religious foundation, save the Islam he learned as a young child in an Indonesian school, that Barack Obama has ever had in his life.

Discovering Black Liberation Theology in Wright’s church was the one thing that enabled Obama to see that those believing in a far left political ideology could also have religion. Obama’s mother had taught him this wasn’t the case.

Wright showed him another way, a Third Way.

And Obama seized it, has used this Third Way to catapult himself into powerful positions, and now is stunningly within reach of the most powerful political position in the world, the Presidency of the United States of America.

And wherever Obama speaks in public, strains of Black Liberation Theology are ingrained in his message.

….. (Obama’s concept of) “Collective salvation” is an idea that comes from Marxism, Liberation Theology in particular, and is absolutely antithetical to traditional Christianity. When it comes to facing God on one’s own judgment day, there is no hiding in groups, no “collective” anything.

The idea of “collective salvation” or “collective redemption” is pure Marxism; there is nothing whatsoever Christian about it.

….. Black Liberation Theology, and all Liberation Theologies, as well as every type of Marxism — whether Lenin’s, Stalin’s, Hitler’s, Mao’s, Castro’s - have all begun with appeals to the people to create a just world, or rather to create a world in keeping with that particular leader’s concept of what a just world should look like. A society that would right the wrongs inherent in God’s design and those that are manifest from age to age on account of man’s own sin.

….. The essential difference between Obama’s liberation theology and traditional Christianity would seem to be not the presence or the absence of hope.

The difference is where individuals choose to put their hope.

Will we continue to hope in God, while each working to achieve individual redemption for our own souls, and in the process make the world a slightly better place?

Or will we, in a massive protest of impatience with God’s way, choose to put our hope in the people, the movement, the collective salvation offered by Obama and his liberation theologians?

Obama is by far the furthest-left radical ever nominated by a major party. This election really is about whether voters give in to the lovely-sounding but ultimately freedom-stealing idea of government-directed “collective good,” as defined by people who won’t specifically define it for us.

Unless they are forced — which is why the cult of personality meme is so all-important to the Obama campaign. It distracts from the questions that must be asked and answered in front of the American people. Will they be?

From Christopher Booker in the UK Sunday Telegraph (second major topic at link; bold is mine; HT Benny Peiser’s CCnet e-mail):

There is something comically forlorn about the BBC’s continued efforts to promote its frenetically one-sided belief in global warming. It was inevitably quick, for instance, to pick up on that bishop who suggested anyone who refuses to save the planet from global warming was morally comparable with Josef Fritzl, the Austrian who fathered seven children on the daughter he kept for 24 years in a dungeon. But how about these headlines?

“Globally, 2008 significantly cooler than last year”, “Global temperatures dive in May”. Not a word about this on the BBC, although they summarised two items on the Watts Up With That website run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts, reporting the latest data from Dr Roy Spencer, formerly head of climate studies for Nasa.

Based on satellite and balloon temperature readings taken at various levels up to 135,000ft, the first item showed that global temperatures in the first months of 2008 were on average between 0.4 and 0.5 degrees Celsius lower than they were at the same time in 2007. The second said that temperatures in May again fell sharply, by nearly 0.2 of a degree, bringing the drop since January 2007 to 0.77 degrees.

In other words, in just 16 months we have seen global cooling greater than the 0.7 degrees net warming recorded by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the whole of the 20th century. Yet it was on this figure more than anything else that the whole warmist theory has been based. Those IPCC computer models never predicted anything like this recent drop in temperatures.

….. Before the world commits economic suicide, it might be an idea to look at the theory again in the light of those latest temperature figures.

Booker also quotes a Lieberman-Warner cost figure of $6.7 trillion (with a “tr”) by 2050. Betcha haven’t seen that figure until now.

I’d like to “look at the theory again” long enough to throw it into the circular file. Under “globaloney.”

Don’t be surprised if, 50 years from now, objective history teaches that Al Gore was the Walter Duranty of the environmental movement. Like Duranty, Gore will probably live very well on his hype long after it has proven to be false. As Duranty never has had his Pulitzer revoked, even though he lied for years about conditions in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, Gore will likely get to keep his Nobel Prize long after his complete foolishness has become clear to all but the most willfully blind.

U.K. Business Secretary John Hutton speaks, and in this case people should listen.

From Bloomberg, a quote from (HT the indispensable CCnet e-mail from Benny Peiser):

“We must strongly resist the temptation to demonize the new Asia economies,” Hutton told executives in Hong Kong today, according to a text released in London. “Those who think the answer to dealing with the challenges of climate change is to tell the people of China or India to sacrifice the sort of living standards that we have enjoyed are deeply misguided.”

….. “It is the right of every person and every nation to strive for a better way of life,” Hutton said.

The environmental movement ought to be renamed the “Y’all Stay Poor Coalition.”

Peiser scolds Hutton in his e-mail:

Well said, Mr Hutton! But what about the British people? Don’t they also have the right to strive for a better way of life, without having to sacrifice their standards of living on the altar of green taxes?

Indeed.

Irrelevant indeed:

It is amazing how seriously the media are taking Senator Barack Obama’s latest statement about the latest racist rant from the pulpit of the church he has attended for 20 years. But neither that statement nor the apology for his rant by Father Michael Pfleger really matters, one way or the other. Nor does Senator Obama’s belated resignation from that church.

For any politician, what matters is not his election year rhetoric, or an election year resignation from a church, but the track record of that politician in the years before the election.

Despite clever spin from Obama’s supporters about avoiding “guilt by association,” much more is involved than casual association with people like Jeremiah Wright and Father Pfleger.

In addition to giving $20,000 of his own money to Jeremiah Wright, as a state senator Obama directed $225,000 of the Illinois taxpayers’ money for programs run by Father Pfleger. In the U.S. Senate, Obama earmarked $100,000 in federal tax money for Father Pfleger’s work. Giving someone more than 300 grand is not just some tenuous, coincidental association.

Are Barack Obama’s views shown by what he says during an election year or by what he has been doing for decades before?

The complete contrast between Obama’s election year image as a healer of divisions and his whole career of promoting far-left grievance politics, in association with America-haters like Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, are brushed aside by his supporters who talk about getting back to “the real issues.”

There is nothing more real than a man’s character and values. The track record of what he has actually done is far more real than anything he says, however elegantly he says it.

The objectively unfit Obama should get swept away if the election is even remotely about character. And of course it is, regardless of the outcome.

….. and where communists and their socialist sympathizers went when they lost 20 years ago:

For a century, an ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class — social planners, scientists, intellectuals, experts and their left-wing political allies — arrogated to themselves the right to rule either in the name of the oppressed working class (communism) or, in its more benign form, by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving the highest social progress by means of state planning (socialism).

Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher’s England to Deng’s China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history.

Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but — even better — in the name of Earth itself.

Environmentalists are Gaia’s priests, instructing us in her proper service and casting out those who refuse to genuflect ….. And having proclaimed the ultimate commandment — carbon chastity — they are preparing the supporting canonical legislation that will tell you how much you can travel, what kind of light you will read by, and at what temperature you may set your bedroom thermostat.

Only Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented, under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe.

There’s no greater social power than the power to ration. And, other than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy, the currency of just about everything one does and uses in an advanced society.

….. to reduce our carbon footprint in the interim ….. The most obvious step is a major move to nuclear power, which to the atmosphere is the cleanest of the clean.

But your would-be masters have foreseen this contingency. The Church of the Environment promulgates secondary dogmas as well. One of these is a strict nuclear taboo.

Rather convenient, is it not? Take this major coal-substituting fix off the table, and we will be rationing all the more. Guess who does the rationing.

Call these people what they are: Enviro-tyrants.

From Townhall.com:

Now that another Earth Day has come and gone, let’s look at some environmentalist predictions that they would prefer we forget.

At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.” In 1968, Professor Paul Ehrlich, Vice President Gore’s hero and mentor, predicted there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and “in the 1970s … hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Ehrlich forecasted that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million. Ehrlich’s predictions about England were gloomier: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

In 1972, a report was written for the Club of Rome warning the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987 and petroleum, copper, lead and natural gas by 1992. Gordon Taylor, in his 1970 book “The Doomsday Book,” said Americans were using 50 percent of the world’s resources and “by 2000 they [Americans] will, if permitted, be using all of them.” In 1975, the Environmental Fund took out full-page ads warning, “The World as we know it will likely be ruined by the year 2000.”

Harvard University biologist George Wald in 1970 warned, “… civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” That was the same year that Sen. Gaylord Nelson warned, in Look Magazine, that by 1995 “… somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

It’s not just latter-day doomsayers who have been wrong; doomsayers have always been wrong. In 1885, the U.S. Geological Survey announced there was “little or no chance” of oil being discovered in California, and a few years later they said the same about Kansas and Texas.

But we should trust the alarmists’ descendants today, because they now have Nobel Prizes, and government contracts, and cushy jobs at NASA. Oh, and Old Media treats what they say as accepted wisdom. (/sarc).

Inflammatory rhetoric and other content in the weekly bulletins of the Trinity United Church of Christ have the credibility of the claims by Barack and Michelle Obama that they have not been aware of the objectionable beliefs of their pastor and of his theology for the 20 years they have been church members hanging by a thread.

Posts:

• (link) “The TUCC Bulletins: ‘European Dominance’ and the Church’s Black-Power Roots.” The quick answer to the question, “Is TUCC another mainline denomination with just a smidge of ethnic emphasis, or, as Mark Steyn described it today, the home base of a “a neo-segregationist huckster?” Uh, it’s the latter.
• (link) “Selected History and Economics Lessons from the Wright-TUCC Bulletins.” Highlights include “the most heinous act of terrorism since chattel slavery (was) the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” “Pat Buchanan’s ancestors did not build this country; they stole this country,” and other gems.
• (link) “MORE Selected History and Economics Lessons from the Wright-TUCC Bulletins.” Includes “lack of respect given to Black people is still America’s pastime,” “Since 1619 …. not much has changed either when it comes to the rights of Africans living in this country,” and much more.
• (link) “Selected Quotes from Others in the Wright - TUCC Bulletins.” Features “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” “the firestorm of racism is far from over,” and other choice items.

(If you are on the home page, click on “more” to get to the body of this post, which is about the motivation for it and provides some background.)
(more…)

Part of the May 5, 2008 series – “The Obamas and the TUCC Bulletins,” the point of which is that the claims by Barack and Michelle Obama that they have not been aware of the objectionable beliefs of their pastor and of his theology for the 20 years they have been church members are greatly lacking in credibility.

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M. Linda Jaramille, Executive Director, National UCC’s Witness for Justice; November 25, 2007, on the Southern California fires:

“Caught in the firestorm of racism” — On the Southern California fires: “In the midst of the physical fires, I was reminded of the firestorm of racism erupting as immigration debates continue.”

…. “The firestorm on the U.S. border is more than an inferno of flames.” ….

“Thankfully, the fires in Southern California are subsiding, but the firestorm of racism is far from over.”

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Rev. Dr. Samuel B. McKinney Pastor Emeritus Mount Zion Baptist Church, Seattle Washington; March 23, 2008:

when we look at the story of our people through the eyes of the resurrection of the Christ, again, in the words of Dr. Jones, “we are a resurrection people.”

Given all to which we have been subjected as a people, we should be extinct. We have been subjected to forced deportation from our homeland, chattel slavery, Jim Crow, separate and unequal institutional policies, racism and unfair administration of justice in this land—which our ancestors built. However, we have not been overcome by the injustices to which we have been subjected. African people in America are a “resurrection people.”

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Kanye West, quoted in Reginald Williams’s “Thought for the Week” in his “To Do Justice” section of the September 18 and 25, 2005 bulletins:

George Bush doesn’t care about black people.

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James Baldwin, quoted in Reginald Williams’s “Thought for the Week” in his “To Do Justice” section of the December 17, 2006 bulletin:

All the western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism.

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Sojourner Truth, quoted in Reginald Williams’s “Thought for the Week” in his “To Do Justice” section of the November 6, 2005 bulletin:

“There is a debt to the negro people which America can never repay. At least then, they must make amends.”