In a series of hang-up and follow-up calls that appears to have taken up much of the afternoon, Ros-Lehtinen first received a call on her cell phone, from a Chicago phone number, and was informed by the caller that Obama wished to speak with her. When a man sounding like Obama got on the line, Ros-Lehtinen cut him off, saying, “I’m sorry, but I think this is a joke from one of the South Florida radio stations known for these pranks.” She then hung up, according to a statement issued by her office.

A little while later, Chief of Staff-designate Rahm Emanuel called the congresswoman back.

“Ileana, I cannot believe that you hung up on the president-elect,” Emanuel said, according to the congresswoman’s office.

Her response?

“Ros-Lehtinen told Rahm that she didn’t believe the call was legitimate and hung up on Emanuel,” her statement said.

The quote to keep from this definitely comes from Rahm:

“I cannot believe that you hung up on the president-elect.”

What is the deal with these people? Seems that whenever I read something from the Obama trasition team, the words “president-elect” fly out of their mouths at least two or three times every minute. I want to grab these people by the shoulders and shake them. “President-elect” is not even an official title, its just something the media made up; its nowhere in the constitution. There is no such thing as an “Office of the President-Elect.” Be patient, you’ll get there soon enough.

…Anyway, just wait until Keith Olbermann gets his grubby little fingers on this story. I can hear it now: “This idiot Republican didn’t even know Obama won the election!”

All in all, Ros-Lehtinen shouldn’t feel too bad; if it had been me, I would’ve hung up on them intentionally.

As you can see, I’ve changed the name of my blog again, and I’ve given it a new look. Call me a fickle-minded, wandering soul if you will, but I promise: this is the way its going to stay; I like it.

Second.

In past months, I have hardly updated the blog at all, but I promise this is changing for the better… So, If you like consistency, weep at my simultaneous name/theme change, and then rejoice! Because I plan on posting everyday.

Bill

“The rulings of arbitration tribunals are binding in law, provided that both parties in the dispute agree to give it the power to rule on their case.”

So what if it is consensual?

I could make the argument that there is a strong possibility that men will force their wives to “consent” to a court more lenient to, say… Domestic violence. I could make the argument that if a man is beating his wife for failing to wear a scarf, it would not be very much of a stretch for him to force her to attend a particular court with him. I could make these arguments, but I will not. The proper question to ask about the Sharia court– or about anything, for that matter– is not: is it consented to or not, but rather: is it moral or immoral?

Yes, in order for a British Sharia court to hold any weight, it must be consented to by the parties in question, but this is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether or not they are moral institutions. As governmental bodies, do Sharia courts faithfully uphold man’s right to life, liberty and property? Are you muttering that it does not matter if man’s rights are protected, so long as everyone involved consents to their chains? If so, you are simultaneously holding the following two positions:

• That you believe the moral premises of the Sharia courts to be evil and in opposition to the fundamental rights of man, and:
• That the British government, an institution whose sole purpose is the protection of individual liberty, should enforce said evil.

You are giving your moral sanction to that which you know to be evil.

It does not matter that the slaves consent to their chains; what matters is that you believe that they should be chained by the very institution set up to protect them.

The fundamental error here is the belief that any action is permissible, so long as all parties involved consent to it. This is a position commonly held by Libertarians. While it is true that consent is a necessary requirement for morality, it is not the only requirement; it is not a proper standard by which to judge the morality of an action.

When a man chooses to abuse drugs or alcohol, he makes a conscious choice to do so, a choice that he felt was (out of all of his options) the best one for him at the time, given the context of his knowledge. It was an action that he consented to, that he wanted for himself, otherwise he would not have taken it. All of this is necessarily true about this man, but it doesn’t change the fact that it was the wrong choice. Just because he consented to it does not mean he was making the right decision about his life.

Consent as a moral standard is a necessary result of Libertarianism because it espouses no moral philosophy at all; it is simply the belief that man may do as he pleases, so long as he does not initiate the use of force against others. While this is fine as a political philosophy, it is morally non-prescriptive; it gives no answer to the question: How should I behave? The inevitable result of Libertarianism’s non-answer to this crucial question is an anything-goes mentality toward life, which is so destructive because in life, anything does not go. As Ayn Rand wrote,

Just as man is free to attempt to survive by any random means, as a parasite, a moocher or a looter, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment—so he is free to seek his happiness in any irrational fraud, any whim, any delusion, any mindless escape from reality, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment nor to escape the consequences. (Italics mine)

There was once a time when I thought I’d never understand why Ayn Rand once said that she would rather be a Marxist than a Libertarian; I now understand her completely.

In order for a government to work properly and efficiently, it must govern according to an objective, impartial standard to which all people must adhere with equal consideration; such a standard is commonly referred to as the law. When two governmental bodies operate under different standards, there is a problem of competing governments, which inevitably results in mobbery and thugs with guns ruling hand over fist. What muddles this particular issue so much is that in this case, the conflicting parties are courts sanctioned by the same government. How can one government faithfully execute the laws according to two different standards, two different value-systems? It cannot. To put it simply: “No man can serve two masters.” Mark my words: this flawed system will prove to be a problem for the organs of the British government in the near future; worries over a “parallel legal system” seem small when the potential damage of this move is fully considered.

It must be noted, however, that currently, the Sharia courts are not mandatory for anyone; Muslims who wish to live under normal, British Common Law are free to do so. The choice is theirs. But what is to say that a Muslim man will not force his wife to attend Sharia court, where the beatings he gave her are sanctioned, or are at least met with a much less severe penalty than that of the normal courts of England? In divorce cases, like all others, Sharia law favors men, who are usually permitted retain all of their assets, in addition to some of their wife’s. The British government’s sanction of this kind of tribunal is disturbing, and it sets a dangerous precedent.

What has really happened here is the British have ceded Her Majesty’s Government to Islamic Totalitarians, people (men, mostly) who feel that it is their duty to Allah to convert the entire world to Islam, by force if necessary. But there are two kinds of Islamic Totalitarians; there are those that we see (the gentlemen in masks on television, who fire AK47’s into the air on the streets of Pakistan), and there are those who choose to remain largely unseen. These men do not wear masks or carry AK47’s, they wear suits, and they carry briefcases. They talk about Muslim discrimination, and demand special treatment and rights because of their religion; they talk about benefiting British society as a whole, “through the promotion of Islam and Islamic values,” a quote I pulled off of The Islamic Society of Britain’s website. Think long and hard about what is meant by “Islamic values,” and you will realize that it is men such as this that we should be paying attention to, with equal if not greater intensity than the men with the guns.

We have already seen Muslims attempt to use the force of government to restrict the freedom of speech of individuals in the West. Now the situation has become more severe; a dangerous precedent has been set by the British government, one that cannot go unchallenged here in the United States.

It appears that The Economy™ is in some trouble.

Everyone (all of you) seems to be telling me that if The Economy™ had been more regulated by the government, there wouldn’t be a problem. If you believe that, I have a bridge to nowhere I want to sell you. In short, the problem is not that we have too little government interference, the problem is that we have too much. Please heed this.

Where do you get this idea that politicians, people who not have to do anything of value in order to earn money, have the incredible economic foresight and knowhow to enact the perfect regulations on The Economy™? Most of the men (and Nancy Pelosi) who are brokering The Failout are career politicians, who have no understanding of how the free market works, who have never run a business, or even worked for one for any considerable amount of time. These are the people you are entrusting to fix everything. 

Ladies and gentlemen, I have news for you.

If you honestly believe that our present situation is the result of the unrestrained “greed” of men on wall street (notice how its always men on wall street; of course, there are no greedy women), and that the government needs to step in and save us from them, then you deserve to lose your home and to be poor. 

Any group of people that honestly believes that The Economy™ is suffering because of productive individuals and needs to be saved by unproductive ones, who nominates Barack Obama to be head of state with John McCain as the conservative alternative, deserves to suffer their own contradictions, which means:

America, you deserve to be poor.

But ignore me. Let’s put every CEO and every member of every Board of Directors of every Fortune 500 company in prison tonight, after the debate, with Barack Obama at the head of the mob (John McCain can shoot any that try to escape). After all, they are all greedy, self-interested bastards who contribute nothing to the economy, right? They are only out for themselves, and in today’s economy, we can’t afford anyone who isn’t out to serve the greatest good.

This is a woman who, in the last week, has been the target of multiple, scurrilous attacks. The left wing press has made her into a pariah, a target upon which it can unload all of its hatred for conservatism. Much has been said, and it has been roundly speculated that McCain’s vetting process was anything but thorough. But between Palin and Barack Obama, can there be any question as to whose record has been more carefully examined by the media– by the American public?

Briefly consider the following facts, and ask yourself how many times you’ve heard about them in the mainstream press:

Obama, a black man, is a former member of a church that endorses Black Liberation Theology, a faith that believes that Christianity teaches us to free the “oppressed” through redistributing the wealth– the oppressed, in this case, being everyone who is black; this is a church that he attended for twenty years.

While visiting his father’s homeland, Kenya, in 2004, Obama met with and campaigned on behalf of fellow Lou tribesman and openly socialist Ralia Odinga, who is now the Prime Minister of Kenya.

Obama is a known associate of William Ayers, unrepentant domestic terrorist directly responsible for bombings on both the Capitol Building and the Pentagon; it is in that man’s home where Obama held his political coming-out party in 1995, when he first announced his candidacy for State Senator of Illinois.

Many are familiar with Barack Obama as a “community organizer,” but few seem to know what work he did specifically; Obama worked for the Developing Communities Project of the Calumet Community Religious Conference in Chicago, organizations based around the principles of the Communist writer, Saul Alinsky. Alinsky wrote a book called Rules for Radicals, which Obama says he read in college in his autobiography, The Audacity of Hope. Considered by many to be the Bible of bloodless socialist revolution, Rules for Radicals surely had an effect on the just-out-of-college Obama, considering that he went to work for organizations dedicated to the principles that were laid out in it. Alinsky’s son, L. David Alinsky, recently said to the Boston Globe:

“Barack Obama’s training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness. It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board. When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change and making it really happen. Obama learned his lesson well.

“I am proud to see that my father’s model for organizing is being applied successfully beyond local community organizing to affect the Democratic campaign in 2008. It is a fine tribute to Saul Alinsky as we approach his 100th birthday.”

According to Alinsky, Obama has learned his lesson well. What lesson, and from whom? The answer: how to affect “Change” as taught by an avowed Communist. This is how Obama earned his stripes– organizing.

When Barack Obama, the man who may quite possibly be the next Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States of America, is free from the intense scrutiny that has been given to Sarah Palin’s seventeen year-old daughter’s romantic life, something is not right.

Sarah Palin is John McCain’s running mate; she’s awesome, and as I’ve mentioned in the past, a true conservative. Now, there is this whole controversy with Bristol Palin, her daughter. Almost immediately after McCain announced Palin as his choice, the left wing blogs went crazy with wild speculation as to whether her youngest son, Trig, was not her’s, but in fact Bristol’s– even going so far as to conjecture that pictures of the Alaskan governor when she was pregnant were faked, and to openly consider the possibility that she had been wearing a “pregnancy suit.”

In order to rebut such ridiculous claims, Palin confirmed that it would be impossible for Bristol to have given birth to Trig, since at the time of Trig’s birth, Bristol herself had been pregnant. Unsurprisingly, this has started yet another controversy.

Teenage pregnancy creates a difficult situation for everyone involved. Over the past few days, this poor girl has been dragged through the mud on national television. Now, as someone who is Bristol Palin’s age, I know many girls who have had pregnancy scares; it must be a frightening thing to experience– I can only imagine. But the liberal media is treating this poor girl like a pariah, shamelessly using her to attack her mother.

“If she can’t run her own daughter, how can we expect her to run the country?!”

Is this offensive to anyone else? The implication here is that at seventeen years old, Bristol Palin is wholly incapable of making decisions for herself. Our parents do their best to teach us, to nurture us, and to give us guidance and instruction– that we might be the very best people we can; but at the end of the day, they cannot decide for us. We make our own decisions– sometimes we make good ones, sometimes not.

It would have been easy for Bristol Palin to quietly get an abortion, saving herself the unforgiving scrutiny of the liberal media that she now faces– but she chose life. Liberals talk about pro-choice, pro-choice, as though, for them, the abortion issue is about the choice– but it seems that when a young woman, faced with a difficult decision, chooses life, they can do nothing but pile on the criticism. If things had gone differently, would we not be hearing from the lib media how brave young Bristol is, to make such a difficult decision so boldly, in defiance of her mother?

You see, liberals in this country pretend to be advocates of women and minorities, but when these groups do not live up to the neat little caricatures that liberals draw, they get angry. If anyone doubts me on this, I offer you Clarence Thomas as the stalwart example. And now their doing it to Sarah Palin– oh she’s pro-life! There are no pro-life women in this country! Only misogynistic men are capable of a pro-life stance. Oh! She uses guns! She hunts! She fishes! A woman with a gun? Oh! Not in my vision of America!

Do you see the ultimate sexism that is feminism?

This kind of behavior by the media– the clear bias, has been going on for decades. This is a media that went easy on Kennedy; this is the media that has given Bill Clinton multiple passes; a media that was far too easy on the Soviet Union; this is a media that, as far as I’m concerned, has aided our enemy, by pressuring our military to go easy on them– both on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah and in Guantanamo Bay.

BUT, when a family member of the Republican vice presidential candidate is going through a crisis– no one gets a pass!

I have to point out the stark difference between Barack Obama’s bumbling, backtracking and general verbosity and John McCain’s conciseness of response– this difference is due in large part to the fact that while John McCain has principles (even though I disagree with many of them), Barack Obama has none– at least no consistent ones. But this is to be expected. John McCain has led a life of public service, and Obama hasn’t even finished his first term in the Senate.

If you watched the clip, you’d know that the Junior Senator said that answering the question of when a baby gets human rights is “above his pay grade.” In other words, he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know? A one-year old is a baby– does he have human rights? Of all the things that he could’ve said, this was the dumbest.

Strange words coming from the most liberal, pro-human rights candidate in history. Do you think the folks who presented him with the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award feel a bit… awkward?

But Obama has had plenty to say on the issue of Human Rights; here are some highlights.

At the Council on Foreign Relations in 2004:

In every region of the globe, our foreign policy should promote traditional American ideals: democracy and human rights

Yes, but how, under your leadership, can the US promote Human Rights when you don’t even know at what point people get them? Lets move on. At the ‘Citizen of the World’ speech in Berlin:

Will we stand for the human rights of the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran, or the voter in Zimbabwe?

I don’t know Barry, how can we, under your leadership, if the question of whether they deserve them at all is ‘above your pay grade’?

But Obama did not think that it was above his pay grade in 2001 as a state senator, when he voted against the infanticidal Born Alive Infants Bill, which would require that a child that has been born and has survived an abortion to receive the same care as a child that was born prematurely; Obama would rather the baby be left to die. Ironically, Obama made substantially less money then than he does now: maybe his standards went up?

Perhaps Senator Obama does not realize that as president of the United States, he’ll be making decisions that effect the lives of millions of people, including the unborn. If that question is above his pay grade, then –in all seriousness– maybe he should apply for another job. If I had been Rick Warren, I would have stopped him before he continued into his bloated elaboration, and I would have asked him, “Senator, if its above your pay grade to answer that question, do you believe your daughters have human rights?”

Today, I had a rare conversation with my father. We often talk about politics, since he is the more conservative of my parents, and therefore has more in common with me; but our talk is usually filled with levity– it never takes on a serious tone. Today was different.

I asked my father how much money he makes a year. I thought I had a pretty good idea, but I wanted to be sure. The number that he gave me seemed very low– much lower than I thought, considering my family’s lifestyle. I asked my him if he was sure about the figure he gave me, and he started to talk to me about tax deductions; thats when I realized why the number seemed so low to me– he wasn’t talking about how much money he made each year, he was talking about how much he made after taxes. I asked him how much he really made each year.

“Why does that matter?” He asked.

It was at that moment, looking into my father’s tired eyes, that I realized that when the government takes money from him, it takes so much more than just monetary wealth– it takes a piece of my father’s pride; it robs him of the joy that comes from the achievement of a value. It takes a piece of my father’s spirit.

Just to come to the understanding that my father doesn’t look at how much money he earns each year in terms of how much wealth he was able to create, but rather– of what tax bracket he belongs in, to really understand the full implication of that fact– it truly saddens me.

And to come home and to talk to these people on the internet who are my age, who think they know everything, who talk about how much they are inspired by Barack Obama’s plan for “social justice,” who talk about how they find socialism “interesting,” who speak voluminously about their love for humanity…

I just think about looking into my father’s eyes in that moment.

• Any casual observer learned (and probably already knows) that Barack Obama cannot preform well off-the-cuff, and that John McCain can; this means the debates between these two are going to be interesting, and that this election may be a lot closer than many of us previously thought.
• We also learned that both candidates despise their own happiness– or at least consider it something to feel guilty for, to try to hide from the public.

Case in point: when asked what his greatest moral failure was, Senator Obama mumbled something about drug use, but then went on to say that it was a “fundamental selfishness”

I am proud to say that what Barack Obama lists as his greatest moral failure is the thing that I would consider to be the greatest moral achievement a person could aspire to: selfishness.

When Pastor Rick Warren asked McCain why he wanted to be president, he said that he wanted to,

“inspire a generation of Americans to serve a cause greater than their self interest.”

For all their disagreements (and agreements) on foreign and domestic policy, these two candidates sure do come down together on the issue of whether or not Americans have the right to live for their own sake: the answer, firmly, emphatically, is: no.

John McCain is not the first politician that has called for a generation to bow to a cause greater than themselves; watch the clip. Barack Obama is not the first politician to call for a country that– like in the clip above– “knows no class distinction;” This is not a Change I can believe in– in fact, its not a change at all. Its been done before.

You see, ladies and gentlemen, the actors change, but the course of history stays the same.

John McCain wants you to serve your country; Barack Obama wants you to serve, not just your country, but an amorphous “others.” But what these men forget– or rather, what they do not forget– but instead, what you forget is that where there is a servant, there is a master, ladies and gentlemen.

And don’t comment saying that its inappropriate for me to compare modern day political figures to Adolf Hitler, because it isn’t; watch the video.

Besides, that’s just what I do: I compare people to Hitler.