Obama Hid His Father's Socialism From Readers

A scholar at the Ludwig von Mises (pronounced "meeses") Institute reveals the socialist background of Barak Obama's father.

Here is how the article begins:

"There's a big mystery at the heart of Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. What was Barack Obama doing seeking out Marxist professors in college?

"Why did Obama choose a Communist Party USA member as his socio-political counselor in high school? Why was he spending his time studying neocolonialism and the writings of Frantz Fanon, the pro-violence author of "the Communist Manifesto of neocolonialism," in college?

"Why did he take time out from his studies at Columbia to attend socialist conferences at Cooper Union?

"And there is more mystery in the book. Why does Obama consider working in a consulting house for international business like being "a spy behind enemy lines?" Why does he repeatedly find it so hard to explain his political views to others? Why was he driven to become a left-aligned political organizer? It's a question Obama again and again can't seem to answer to the satisfaction of the interlocutors in his own memoir.

"If there is a mystery at the heart of Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father, one thing is not left a mystery, the fact that Barack Obama organized his life on the ideals given to him by his Kenyan father. Obama tells us, "All of my life, I carried a single image of my father, one that I .. tried to take as my own." (p. 220)

[This photo and caption (no part of this scholar's article) were together on the internet. The photo is not doctored, according to my sources. This is a young Barak Obama (Jr.) in Muslim dress, indicating a young man searching his roots. Taken too far, such an image could be prejudicial; however, it does say something of his sensibilities, which must be taken into account during our deliberations of his fitness for the highest office in the land.]

"And what was that image? It was "the father of my dreams, the man in my mother's stories, full of high-blown ideals .." (p. 278) What is more, Obama tells us that, "It was into my father's image ... that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself." And also that, "I did feel that there was something to prove ... to my father" in his efforts at political organizing. (p. 230)

"So we know that his father's ideals were a driving force in his life, but the one thing that Obama does not give us are the contents of those ideals. The closest he comes is when he tells us that his father lost his position in the government when he came into conflict with Jomo Kenyatte, the President of Kenya sometime in the mid 1960s; when he tells us that his father was imprisoned for his political views by the government just prior to the end of colonial rule;...

"...[A]nd when he tells us that the attributes of W. E. B. DuBois, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela were the ones he associated with his father and also the ones that he sought to instill in himself. (p. 220) This last group is a hodge podge, perhaps concealing as much as it reveals, in that it contains a socialist black nationalist, a Muslim black nationalist, a civil rights leader, and (at the time indicated in the memoir) an imprisoned armed [Marxist-Leninist]revolutionary.

"A bit of research at the library reveals the answers about Barack Obama's father and his father's convictions which Obama (Jr.) withholds from his readers."

Go the Mises Institute for the rest of this article: http://blog.mises.org/archives/008007.asp

Also posted at PrestoPundit http://gregransom.com/prestopundit/2008/04/gregs-guide-to-barack-obamas-d.html

Two Bright Angels Sing the Lakme Flower Duet

Of Good Report and lovely is the Flower Duet. You'll recognize it as the British Airways commercial.


Here are the lyrics. But you don't have to know them to understand two beautiful women admiring the flowers in the morning along the river bank.

Sous le dôme épais,
où le blanc jasmin
À la rose s’assemble
Sur la rive en fleurs,
riant au matin
Viens, descendons ensemble.

(Under the thick dome,
where the white jasmine
With the rose gathers,
To the flowered river bank,
with morning laughter,
Come, let us go down together.)

Doucement glissons
de son flot charmant
Suivons le courant fuyant
Dans l’onde frémissante
D’une main nonchalante
Viens, gagnons le bord,
Où la source dort
Et l’oiseau, l’oiseau chante.

(Gently let us slip
from the pleasant rising flow,
Let us follow the fleeting current
In the shimmering stream,
Without any care,
Come, let us reach the bank,
Where the spring waters slumber
And the bird, the bird, she sings.)

Sous le dôme épais
Où le blanc jasmin,
Ah! descendons
Ensemble!
Sous le dôme épais
Où le blanc jasmin
À la rose s’assemble
Sur la rive en fleurs
Riant au matin
Viens, descendons ensemble.

(Under the thick dome
where the white jasmine
Ah! We descendTogether!
Under the thick dome
where white jasmine
With the roses entwined together
On the river bank covered
with flowers laughing in the morning)

Doucement glissons
de son flot charmant,
Suivons le courant fuyant
Dans l’onde frémissante
D’une main nonchalante
Viens, gagnons le bord
Où la source dort et
L’oiseau, l’oiseau chante.

(Let us descend together
Gently floating
on its charming risings,
On the river’s current
On the shining waves,
One hand reaches,
Reaches for the bank,
Where the spring sleeps,
And the bird, the bird sings.)

Sous le dôme épais
Où le blanc jasmin,
Ah! descendons
Ensemble!
(Under the thick dome
where the white jasmine
Ah! We descend
Together!)

What Powerful Love This Father Has For His Son

On first viewing this, I was moved by its power. This man's love for his son is extraordinary, yet recognizable by all who love their children. And all whose hope in Christ reigns supreme.

The song "I Can Only Imagine" adds grace and beauty to their story.

And on viewing it again, I can no more but weep.




For God so loved the world...

Rondine al Nido - A Most Beautiful, Stirring Tenor Aria

The late Luciano Pavarotti left us with a beautiful legacy of songs rivaling the great Enrique Caruso.

This is Rondine al Nido, Return to the Nest. A heart-broken man - triste solo (sad and alone) - watches the sparrows in the primavera (spring) drink-in the air as they fly. Free and liberated their spirits soar with the joy of life. This is their return to the nest.

Only love (solo amore) flies away - se fugida (my Italian is sketchy) and it never returns - torna ni piu. And we can hope in vain (espere in vano), but it never returns.

Then, in an emotional conceit, turning the simile toward his sorrow, he cries...

...Mia picina (my little one) - the love of his life - she has flown away like the sparrow. Never to return again.

For anyone who has lost someone they loved dearly, this stirs deep emotions of loving lost, as longing soars - but of love never to return.

Hollywood Actors Reading Declaration of Independence - Best Yet Found

Of good report is this short film on the Declaration of Independence as read by Mel Gibson, Michael Douglas, Whoopi Goldberg and other film stars.

It is the best rendition I've found ever of this document, bringing us closer to how it must have been when it first was sent throughout the Colonies, and was read to crowds of people.

If memory serves me well, 200 0f these were printed in 1776. The handwritten document was sent to King George, famously signed by John Hancock in script large enough so that the King would not have to put on his glasses to read Hancock's signature.

Some scholars have called the handwritten document "an elitist" document - written by aristocrats to another aristocrat. However, the printed copies (some 200), set to type, just days after the signing, and sent to major population areas in the colonies, best represent the democratic ideal of "the People."

Until relatively recent, there were only about 24 of these original printed copies remaining. Then, in the 1980s, a woman purchased for the frame a cheap piece of art at a flea market. When she got it home and tore off the backing she found another of these original printings of the Decaration of Independence. It sold at auction for several million, I believe.

A Hollywood producer purchased it, because it reminded him of the ideals his father loved as an immigrant to the United States. If my recollection is right, he remembered his father quoting from it often.

This producer (Norman Lear, I think), then pulled together some of the best actors of the age to perform it as a trailer in theaters across the nations.

For teachers, it will keep students' attention and act as a springboard for excellent discussion this July 4th for summer school.

Is this a dead document or a live, vibrant declaration of human rights? What of students at Tianamen Square in China holding banners with the words of Jefferson: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness?

It is great for U.S. History, Constitutional Law, U.S. Philosophical Foundations.

Teachers can do Stop & Starts. Play a section, stop and discuss. Start the next section. Stop, discuss and start, again.

It allows discussion of each grievance. It is indeed praiseworthy.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints & the Sierra Club?

Amazing - the rancor on both sides of the political spectrum in Utah over the recognition the LDS Church received from the Sierra Club for the environment friendly, green design of the plaza the Church is building in downtown Salt Lake.

Go there and read for yourselves - fanatics on both ends of the spectrum who rant and rage. (I just realized I'm a toddler at this ugly political division.)

http://deseretnews.com/user/comments/1,5150,700236376,00.html

As you can see, each has a modicum of truth that is swelled to a grotesque proportion.

Each hears only part of the conversation. Neither hears it fully.

Both rants on about their left-wing vs. right-wing hatred. No one will sit on a wrought-iron bench and hear birds chirr, warble or trill, while cool breezes rustle native species of grasses without fear that someone's cigarette butt will ignite the overly dry cheat grass that's not native to Utah.

May we someday meet there in the Plaza and talk about our differences? I'm the 6'6" (2 meters) tall fellow that used to have a beard. We'll sit under a tree that's not Russian Olive.

And this from someone who's been conservative since Goldwater (AuH2O) ran against Lyndon Baines Johnson, and who still has a couple of Goldwater/Miller bumper-stickers in his den...lying around here...somewhere...

Oh, look at the quail!

Barak for All His Rhetoric is Wrong for America

George Will and William Bennett aside, Barak Obama is still too Left-leaning and who will bring more government into our lives.

We'll have shoddy health care, less freedom of decision, and a horrendous Left-wing Supreme Court that will continue the sanction the murder of millions of unborn children, and institutionalize genderless marriage, thereby de-institutionalizing man and woman marriage.

The sanction of law tends to erase old meanings of marriage to give new meanings to this new social institution that only promises to reap equal benefits, but which is as yet still untried and unproven. I'll list the unique benefits of man-woman marriage in a later missive.

The Hollywood, "close personal relationship" model of marriage will have taken over the man-woman model with its natural result of children and with its focus on the rising generation.

We have become a nation of two joggers and a slew of dogs.

If Ye Love Wealth Better Than Liberty

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen. -Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776

"If You Haven't Suffered Enough It Is Your God Given Right To Suffer Some More" Wm. Aberhart Alberta Premier

In this country you have many rights - the right to free speech, the right to peaceably assemble, the right to bear arms and you have the right to be stupid. That's right, God has given you the right to be stupid, if you so desire. - T.M. Limnbrook

George F. Will on Barak Obama - Maybe, Just Maybe...

Early this morning, conservative commentator, George Will said in a radio interview with William Bennett that Americans are ready to elect an African American as President of the Unitied States.

They are excited at the prospect of laying to rest this racist stigma. They've moved on; and it's time to put it all behind us. America is no longer Selma, Alabama. Nor do police officers stand at the bottom of a bridge and forbid passage across to complete a march for civil rights.

We have in Barak Obama an orator, a man of words who can tell us who we are. Lincoln was a man of words, possibly a greater president than George Washington, who set the tone for the office. Will said that though he does not agree with Obama's politics, nonetheless, here is someone who can possibly unite us.

I was impressed with his speech in New Hampshire, but pulled away on learning that he is the nation's most left-leaning senator; that his wife cannot feel pride for her country, even though she is the beneficiary of a great education, and earns a six-figure income. Additionally, I am disturbed that he would give legitimacy to Iran's president, while cozying up to Fidel Castro.

To sit in a congregation for 20 years, listening to Reverend Wright's inflammatory racist rhetoric, leaves one more than uneasy.

However, if he will tell African American men that they must focus on their responsibilities as fathers, and other such hard to hear positions, then perhaps some good can come of this election.

Still, I'm as wary of dictators on the Left, as I am of fascists on the Right.

A Sad Father's Day for the Tim Russert Family

Our hearts are heavy, and our prayers go out to the Russert family. Tim Russert, host of Meet the Press, dead at a mere 58 years.

It is sobering to brush up against this path - open to us all. The English writer Dickens said it well: We are all fellow travelers to the grave.

These last few years, three good friends of mine passed away, whom I thought would never fade before I would ever see that day.

One whom I knew in Venezuela, fell to his death free climbing on the granite mountainsides of the Wasatch range. Another, who taught sociology came back from a run, laid down and never got back up. And a third, who'd run the Boston Marathon, sitting at his desk, preparing to teach a Sunday School lesson, died of an aneurism to the brain.

All three were beautiful, loving men, with families who loved them - accomplishing, great men who'd impacted our lives forever for the good they did. While only two were active in their faith, all three went about the world doing good. All three were teachers at various times at the university. One, a friend since my teenage years, was a full professor. Though they did not know each other, all three sought to make the world better in their unique ways. All made my life much richer.

They died within a handful of years of each other, and left such a heartache to be filled by no one else. One grace of their triumverate of passing is etched into our hearts - it is this deep truth: God is in charge.

God is in charge! He is the author and finisher of our faith! Only He can wipe away all our tears! And little children, He hath overcome all!

I thank God I ever knew these men; I pray God bless the Russerts in their loss. May His Holy Spirit comfort them in this time of deep sorrow.

Ohio High School Student Honors U.S. Soldiers

Growing up in the 60s, amid the turbulence of that decade, I experienced the ugly hypocritical hatred that many young Americans had for the military. This video, however, represents the best that is in us all. For, hopefully, we shall have overcome that someday of discontent. And made in us a New Day with Depth of Feeling toward friend and foe, reconciled of that Tet Offensive, resolved against that Decadent Age.

Push Play.

One Guitar - Two Players, Must See This Duel

The computer guru, Kim Komando on http://www.kimkomando.com/, features numerous interesting videos, one-a-day, on her website. This guitar duet was written for Chet Atkins by one of his students. These two fellows add an interesting twist to the composition.

Global Warming Dishonesty Revealed on Aussie TV

Al Gore's presentation was the consummate attorney presenting his client's case, but the facts were not balanced, often mistaken and, at times, were outright fabrication.

Here's an example.

Amerca is Planted Thick with Laws; Cut Them Down, Where Will You Stand?

If you don't have enough evidence to keep a person in jail, you follow the law and let them go. The State cannot deprive a man, or woman of their life, their liberty, or their pursuit of happiness without due process of law.

The State cannot deprive the FLDS 400 without evidence or due process of law - even if you think they are the devil.

In the play A Man For All Seasons, Sir Thomas More says he would "give the devil benefit of law for mine own safety sake." This country is planted thick with laws - like trees - to protect us all. And if we cut those laws down to get at the devil, where would we stand when the whirlwind blows, the trees being all cut down.

To my students who are active Communists, who have their Communist youth groups (Young Communists League), listen well to Sir Thomas' argument! Where will you stand when all the laws are cut down, by mindless angry teenagers with AK-47s?

In the recent film, Amazing Grace, about England's fight to abolish the slave trade, is a powerful scene between William Wilburforce and his revolutionary friend who wants to go to France to taste the wine of revolution.

His revolutionary friend tells him that what is true of the slave, is also true of the worker in the field, the miner, the butcher. And finally, it is true of women. Universal suffrage! Yet the dramatic irony, which we know but the characters do not, is that within a few years 40,000 people will be beheaded in an horrific bloodfest that shocked Thomas Jefferson, and made Edmund Burke lament: Where were the thousands of cavaliers who should have come to the aid of their King and Queen?

Radical revolutionaries would do well to contemplate the results of their violent overthrow. Every nation that has cut down the "old regime" to get at the Brave New World has created deadly chaos, poverty and misery. Vietnam and Cambodia lost a whole generation of doctors, jurists, engineers, and professionals who could have helped build their countries. Even that vast utopia of Stalinist Russia, which in the 1930s gave so many intellectuals and idealists in America such hope for the future, was a bloody, 45-million-dead nightmare.

Listen to Sir Thomas' argument!

High School Student Produces Tribute to 9/11

This student would get an A- on her assignment, were she to produce this in my English class. Except for the "your" that should be "you're," she done good.

Caution, dear reader. Some of these photos are sobering, especially those of people leaping to their deaths.

However, the mainstream....no, the Leftist advocacy media - no longer is media seen as objective - this media does not want us to see or to dwell on these images.

Six Year-old Sings Before Simon - the Grinch

This little six year-old sings a beautiful rendition of "Over the Rainbow." The voice is neither forced nor overwrought - sweetly innocent and natural in tone. Listen.

http://videos.komando.com/2008/06/01/amazing-6-year-old-singer/

Tissue, please.

McCain Listens to Woman Who Lost Brother in Iraq

My sister sent me this brief article. Senator McCain went to visit a woman who'd lost her son to a roadside bomb. Senator McCain's son was about to ship out to Iraq.

"One evening last July, Senator John McCain of Arizona arrived at the New Hampshire home of Erin Flanagan for sandwiches, chocolate-chip cookies and a heart felt talk about Iraq. They had met at a presidential debate, when she asked the candidates what they would do to bring home American soldiers - - soldiers like her brother, who had been killed in action a few months earlier.

"Mr. McCain did not bring cameras or press. Instead, he brought his youngest son, James McCain, 19, then a private first class in the Marine Corps about to leave for Iraq. Father and son sat down to hear more about Ms. Flanagan's brother Michael Cleary, a 24 year-old Army First Lieutenant killed by an ambush ... a roadside bomb.

"No one mentioned the obvious: In just days, Jimmy McCain could face similar perils. 'I can't imagine what it must have been like for them as they were coming to meet with a family that ......' Ms. Flanagan recalled, choking up. 'We lost a dear one,' she finished.

"Mr. McCain, now the presumptive Republican nominee, has staked his candidacy on the promise that American troops can bring stability to Iraq. What he almost never says is that one of them is his own son, who spent seven months patrolling Anbar Province and learned of his father's New Hampshire victory in January while he was digging a stuck military vehicle out of the mud.

"Two of Jimmy's three older brothers went into the military. Doug McCain, 48, was a Navy pilot. Jack McCain, 21, is to graduate from the Naval Academy next year, raising the chances that his father, if elected, could become the first president since Dwight D. Eisenhower with a son at war.

"I chose to share this with those who I believe will pass it on, to others who will pass it on. We hear so much inflated trash out there. How about a simple act of kindness ... and dedication to others placed above oneself?

"Has anybody heard if Barack Hussein Obama has served in The American Armed Services? This is for all you Barack voters. From Barack's book, Audacity of Hope:

'I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly
direction.'

"HE DID NOT SAY HE WOULD STAND WITH AMERICANS!!!!!"

These represent messages which never make it to mainstream media, but speak truth with those who have ears to hear.