Is It Racist To Suggest Obama Is Stupid? Ask Racist Liberals Who Spent 8 Years Calling George Bush Stupid

I can find a thousand pull quotes from “journalists” who serve as the court eunuchs for the Democrat Party, but I’ll just stick with one from Bob Schieffer:

“I want to go on to what Donald Trump said after he said ‘this is out’ and everything. He said, ‘we need to look at his grades and see if he was a good enough student to get into Harvard Law School.’ That’s just code for saying he got into law school because he’s black. This is an ugly strain of racism that’s running through this whole thing. We can hope that that kinda comes to an end too.”

I mean, obviously, Schieffer is 100% correct.  I mean, the left would NEVER suggest that Republican president might be stupid, right?  And so for conservatives to suggest that Obama might not be the sharpest tack in the box can only be a code for “racism.”  Right?

Well, not quite.

The left tore into George Bush the way one of Michael Vick’s pit bulls tore into a piece of bloody meat.  And one of their favorite memes was the one that Bush was stupid.

Which demonstrates by their own warped, depraved and perverted logic that liberals are racist.

And there are a gazillion articles like this that asked questions and came to conclusions about George Bush that must not dare be asked and answered about Barack Obama.  [Updated, 4/30]  Here’s one that shows that the attack on Bush’s intelligence – which we now know is a racist, racist, racist thing to do – was so widespread that it essentially formed the centerpiece of the Al Gore campaign:

Gore Camp Targets Bush’s Intelligence
By Carter M. Yang
ABC News, Oct 9

With his truthfulness under fire and his opponent gaining in the polls, Al Gore’s surrogates are openly questioning George W. Bush’s intelligence.

Since this weekend, the Gore team has been ratcheting up its efforts to paint Bush as “confused,” “bumbling,” “babbling” and “ignorant.”

“George W. Bush seems incapable of talking about the important issues in this campaign in a coherent way,” Gore spokesman Mark Fabiani said today, just one in a series of statements from the Democratic candidate’s team drawing attention to the Texas governor’s mispronunciations and misstatements on the campaign trail.

“George Bush is routinely unable to string together a coherent sentence to explain his own proposals,” another Gore spokesman, Douglas Hattaway, said in an earlier statement this weekend. “Americans will decide whether Bush’s uncertain command of the facts and his garbled language bear on his ability to be an effective leader.”

Could that argument only be applied to Bush?  Let’s put that ugly little critter to bed:

We know that Obama uses his teleprompter far more than George Bush or any other president in the history of the republic.

We know that Obama even needs his prompter to speak in elementary schools:

We also know that Obama isn’t exactly coherent without the “TOTUS.”

And we know that in fact the man is an idiot:

“It is wonderful to be back in Oregon,” Obama said. “Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go. Alaska and Hawaii, I was not allowed to go to even though I really wanted to visit, but my staff would not justify it.”

But how dare you acknowledge the obvious, no matter how obvious it is.  It’s RACIST to recognize the obvious.

Because, you see, liberals souls swim in a deep racist ocean, and the unadulterated hypocrisy which quintessentially defines them means that you can tee off on a white man, demonize him for his stupidity, his values, his greed, etc., but you must grovel in the sackcloth and ashes of white guilt at the feet of the black man.

Well, as long as that black man is a liberal.  Becuase if he’s a conservative, liberals are allowed – encouraged, even – to allow the racism that also defines them full-throttled expression:

Liberals often respond by pointing out that it isn’t just black liberals or Hispanic liberals who constantly demonize white men; white liberals demonize white men, too.  So it clearly can’t be racist.

I respond by pointing out that just as Karl Marx was a self-hating Jew and Adolf Hitler was in all probability a self-loathing Jew, white liberals are merely caucasian-hating caucasians:

Take Karl Marx.  The man was profoundly anti-Semitic.  He was also a Jew.

Here are some quotes from the VERY Jewish “intellectual” Karl Marx:

“The Jews of Poland are the smeariest of all races.” (Neue Rheinische Zeitung, April 29, 1849)

“Ramsgate is full of Jews and fleas.” (MEKOR IV, 490, August 25, 1879)

“What is the Jew’s foundation in our world? Material necessity, private advantage.

“What is the object of the Jew’s worship in this world? Usury. What is his worldly god? Money.

“Very well then; emancipation from usury and money, that is, from practical, real Judaism, would constitute the emancipation of our time.” (“A World Without Jews,” p. 37)

“What was the essential foundation of the Jewish religion? Practical needs, egotism.” (Ibid, p. 40)

“Money is the zealous one God of Israel, beside which no other God may stand. Money degrades all the gods of mankind and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal and self-constituted value set upon all things. It has therefore robbed the whole world, of both nature and man, of its original value. Money is the essence of man’s life and work, which have become alienated from him. This alien monster rules him and he worships it.

“The God of the Jews has become secularized and is now a worldly God. The bill of exchange is the Jew’s real God. His God is the illusory bill of exchange.” (“A World Without Jews,” p. 41)

And what about the most rabid anti-Semite of all time?

Hitler ‘had Jewish and African roots’, DNA tests show
Adolf Hitler is likely to have had Jewish and African roots, DNA tests have shown.
By Heidi Blake 6:25AM BST 24 Aug 2010
 
Saliva samples taken from 39 relatives of the Nazi leader show he may have had biological links to the “subhuman” races that he tried to exterminate during the Holocaust.

Jean-Paul Mulders, a Belgian journalist, and Marc Vermeeren, a historian, tracked down the Fuhrer’s relatives, including an Austrian farmer who was his cousin, earlier this year.

A chromosome called Haplogroup E1b1b1 which showed up in their samples is rare in Western Europe and is most commonly found in the Berbers of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, as well as among Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews.

“One can from this postulate that Hitler was related to people whom he despised,” Mr Mulders wrote in the Belgian magazine, Knack.

Can you be of a certain race and yet actively despise that race?  I think we’ve established that you most certainly can, if you’re vile enough.

And it doesn’t surprise me at all that rabid leftwing socialists like Marx and Hitler would be the models for radical leftwing socialists right here and right now in America.

And if you want to see naked racism, I’ll gladly show you naked racism.

We constantly hear conservatives and Republicans compared to the Ku Klux Klan.  Because liberals are either too stupid or too dishonest (and I personally believe both too stupid and too dishonest) to understand that the Klu Klux Klan was the terrorist arm of THE DEMOCRAT PARTY and in fact the Klan continued to be profoundly and directly associated with the Democrat party well into the 20th century.  And all the Democrat Party did was understand that if they couldn’t own black people by slavery, they could eventually own them by political patronage through welfare and socialistic redistributionism.

What did Frederick Douglass, one of the great moral intellectuals of any race, have to say about what is THE policy of the Democrat Party back when “stupid” white men were literally dying by the hundreds of thousands to free the slaves?

Frederick Douglass ridiculed the idea of racial quotas, as suggested by Martin Delany, as “absurd as a matter of practice,” noting that it implied blacks “should constitute one-eighth of the poets, statesmen, scholars, authors and philosophers.” Douglass emphasized that “natural equality is a very different thing from practical equality; and…though men may be potentially equal, circumstances may for a time cause the most striking inequalities.”  On another occasion, in opposing “special efforts” for the black freedmen, Douglass argued that they “might ‘serve to keep up very prejudices, which it is so desirable to banish’ by promoting an image of blacks as privileged wards of the state.”

Liberals are people who project and mirror their own hate.  And they reduce human beings to the absolute lowest common denominator, rather than try to lift people up and help them become better.  Bottom line.

Racism and race-baiting isn’t the last resort of the left; it is their first knee-jerk response.  And that is because THEY are the racists.  Racism defines them; it is the essence of their beings.  Whereas Martin Luther King dreamed of a society in which his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”  But liberals angrily refuse to do that, and demand that color is everything, and that everything must be viewed through the lenses of race and racism.

I couldn’t be more disgusted with the vileness that characterizes the left.  I have as much right to call Barack Obama a stupid man as any liberal had to call George Bush a stupid man.  And you can easily identify as a racist the person who shouts that I don’t have that right.

And I don’t give a flying fig what color your skin is, and what color the skin of the person you’re defending or denouncing is.  If you play that game, you are a racist.  And a nasty hypocrite racist at that.

Get Ready For $7/Gal Gas To Meet Obama’s Target

You may not be smart enough to realize that you voted yourself right out of your car in voting for Obama.  But that’s pretty much what you did:

March 2, 2010, 6:35 pm
Fuel Taxes Must Rise, Harvard Researchers Say
By SINDYA N. BHANOO

To meet the Obama administration’s targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, some researchers say, Americans may have to experience a sobering reality: gas at $7 a gallon.

To reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the transportation sector 14 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, the cost of driving must simply increase, according to a forthcoming report by researchers at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

The 14 percent target was set in the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget for fiscal 2010.

In their study, the researchers devised several combinations of steps that United States policymakers might take in trying to address the heat-trapping emissions by the nation’s transportation sector, which consume 70 percent of the oil used in the United States.

Most of their models assumed an economy-wide carbon dioxide tax starting at $30 a ton in 2010 and escalating to $60 a ton in 2030. In some cases researchers also factored in tax credits for electric and hybrid vehicles, taxes on fuel or both.

In the modeling, it turned out that issuing tax credits could backfire, while taxes on fuel proved beneficial.

“Tax credits don’t address how much people use their cars,” said Ross Morrow, one of the report’s authors. “In reverse, they can make people drive more.”

Dr. Morrow, formerly a fellow at the Belfer Center, is a professor of mechanical engineering and economics at Iowa State University

Researchers said that vehicle miles traveled will increase by more than 30 percent between 2010 and 2030 unless policymakers increase fuel taxes.

This insane result of Obama’s policies comes in the wake of the fact that global warming, or climate change, or whatever you want to call it, is a documented fraud based on the worst pseudo-science and demagoguery.  Far from being scientific, the global warming agenda is now being blasted as a blatant danger to the field of science itself by the Institute of Physics.  Just look at their first two points as they confront “ClimateGate” and the collapse of even a facade of scientific legitimacy:

1. The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.

2. The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital. The lack of compliance has been confirmed by the findings of the Information Commissioner. This extends well beyond the CRU itself – most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change.

The Institute of Physics continues to damn “climate change research” up one side and down the other for a total of 13 points.  Climate change is a sick, twisted joke that has fundamentally eroded trust and credibility of the entire scientific enterprise.  Not that Obama cares.  He is a true believer who will destroy our economy by massively redistributing American wealth to the rest of the world in order to “fix” the planet.

Obama’s irrational energy policies also comes in the wake of the fact that the United States has massively more domestic oil than Democrats previously claimed.  Which is to say that any energy policy that does not include the concept of “drill baby, drill,” simply isn’t rational.  We have abundant oil, natural gas, and coal resources.  In this time of economic difficulty, let us finally use them!!!

Democrats have always dreamed that America would become more like Europe.  And soon it will: we’ll be taking buses because we can’t afford to pay the same skyhigh prices for gasoline that Europeans have to pay because THEY elected socialists.

Nobody should be surprised.  The same guy who said that energy prices would necessarily skyrocket under his agenda has taken position after position that will have us freezing in the dark.

You voted for “change,” America.  So go change out of your nice comfy car to a long, nasty, bumpy bus ride.

Maybe we should start watching Flintstones episodes so we can learn how to build cars in the age of Obama.

Obama In The ‘We Don’t Mind ‘Cause You Don’t Matter’ Sub-50% Polling Range

One of the most readily understandable political calculus equations is the presidential poll: as long as a president is above 50% in the polls, he continues to hold a majority; but if he falls below 50%, he becomes increasingly irrelevant.  The nation is no longer behind him.  The lower he gets under 50, the more irrelevant he becomes.

Six months into the Obama presidency, Americans are already starting to say, “You see, Barry, it’s all a question of mind over matter.  We no longer mind because you no longer matter.”

For what it’s worth, the first time President Bush dipped below 50% according to Rasmussen was February 2004.  So Barry has to have set some kind of record for “sucking speed.”

Democrats and liberals feasted on George Bush like a herd of swine feasting on a trough full of carrots.  And in the case of the Barack Obama presidency, suppertime is coming very, very early.

Daily Presidential Tracking Poll

Friday, July 24, 2009

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows that 30% of the nation’s voters now Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Thirty-eight percent (38%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -8 (see trends).

Just 25% believe that the economic stimulus package has helped the economy.

The Presidential Approval Index is calculated by subtracting the number who Strongly Disapprove from the number who Strongly Approve. It is updated daily at 9:30 a.m. Eastern (sign up for free daily e-mail update). Updates also available on Twitter.

Overall, 49% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President’s performance. Today marks the first time his overall approval rating has ever fallen below 50% among Likely Voters nationwide. Fifty-one percent (51%) disapprove.

Eighty-three percent (83%) of Democrats continue to approve of the President’s performance while 80% of Republicans disapprove. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 37% offer a positive assessment. The President earns approval from 51% of women and 47% of men.

These updates are based upon nightly telephone interviews and reported on a three-day rolling average basis. Most of the interviews for today’s update were completed before the President’s nationally televised press conference on Wednesday night. The first update based entirely upon interviews conducted after the press conference will be released on Sunday.

Zogby has Barry Hussein at 48%.

Now, the last paragraph of the article becomes interesting because this means the poll does not take into account Obama’s truly suck performance at his July 22 press conference or the subsequent flap over his racially biased and frankly incredibly stupid comment about the Cambridge police “acting stupidly” in arresting an emotionally out-of-control African-American Studies professor.

So the easy money is betting that Sunday we’re going to see Obama down even more.  And then more.

Hot Air has a couple of insightful paragraphs describing the poll’s nuances on just why Obama is starting to poll as badly as he is:

It marks the first time that Obama has gone underwater since he started his remarkable run for the presidency in early 2007.  Undoubtedly, voters have now put the responsibility for the economy squarely on Obama’s shoulders after six months of worsening indicators.  The steep decline in support for his health-care bill represents in part a lack of confidence in his ability to deliver after the failure of the massive stimulus package, which he promised would put America back to work.

Even the Democratic gender gap has mostly been wiped out for Obama.  Although crosstabs are not available on daily tracking reports, Rasmussen’s poll shows an approval rating of 51% among women, just two points above the overall average.  If Obama had hoped to maintain the traditional Democratic inroads with women with his focus on health care, that appears to have backfired, as the survey on that issue earlier in the week showed women opposing it by a 50%-46% edge, with men more clearly in opposition at 53%-44%.  Why? Pluralities among both genders believe that their personal coverage will get worse under ObamaCare.

Unemployment is at 9.5% – and is expected to rise to 10% and beyond by the end of the year.  That sure isn’t going to help Obama become “Mr. Popular.”  And if that isn’t bad enough for him – and for the country he’s misleading – a new employment forecast by Obama’s own Federal Reserve foresees high unemployment numbers for at least the next five years.

But wait, as they say: there’s more.  Respected Wall Street analyst Meredith Whitney predicts that unemployment will rise to 13% or higher.  She’s the analyst with the nickname, “The woman who called Wall Street’s meltdown,” so right now I’m giving her more credibility than Obama’s people who said that if their stimulus passed unemployment wouldn’t rise above 8%.

And there’s yet even more.  We don’t calculate unemployment the way we used to.  We used to calculate unemployment based on the number of people who would like to have a full time job but don’t have one.  Bill Clinton changed the way unemployment was tabulated.  But if this were in the 1980s, we would be reading about 16.5% unemployment.  And if THAT number doesn’t frighten you enough, how about the possibility of 20% by the end of the year?

Remember all the talk about Barack Obama being compared to FDR?

Now we’ll get to celebrate Obama-as-FDR right – with Great Depression levels of unemployment, which will likely lead us into another Great Depression.  The first FDR didn’t fare so well with the first Great Depression; and I think the second FDR will do an even lousier job.

It will be fun watching Barry “ride the slide” to political hell.

It won’t be so much fun watching the Late Great U.S.A. sliding into economic hell right along with him.

Who ‘Acted Stupidly’? The Cop, The Professor, Or The President?

We have a situation in which a police officer placed a man who turned out to be a Harvard professor of African-American Studies under arrest for disorderly conduct.  And then we have a situation in which the President of the United States of America decides to directly involve himself in his role as Racial-Arbiter-in-Chief.

The best place to begin is with the facts.  A neighbor saw two men attempting to force their way into a home that had already sustained an attempted break-in previously that week.  The police arrived.

And then, from excerpts of the police report (the full actual report is available in PDF format here):

On Thursday July 16, 2009, Henry Gates, Jr. – -, of Ware Street, Cambridge, MA) was placed under arrest at Ware Street, after being observed exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior, in a public place, directed at a uniformed police officer who was present investigating a report of a crime in progress. These actions on the behalf of Gates served no legitimate purpose and caused citizens passing by this location to stop and take notice while appearing surprised and alarmed.

…When I arrived at Ware Street I radioed ECC and asked that they have the caller meet me at the front door to this residence. I was told that the caller was already outside. As I was getting this information, I climbed the porch stairs toward the front door. As I reached the door, a female voice called out to me. I looked in the direction of the voice and observed a white female, later identified {} who was standing on the sidewalk in front of the residence, held a wireless telephone in her hand arid told me that it was she who called. She went on to tell me that she observed what appeared to be two black males with backpacks on the porch of• Ware Street. She told me that her suspicions were aroused when she observed one of the men wedging his shoulder into the door as if he was trying to force entry. Since I was the only police officer on location and had my back to the front door as I spoke with her, I asked that she wait for other responding officers while I investigated further.

As I turned and faced the door, I could see an older black male standing in the foyer of {} Ware Street. I made this observation through the glass paned front door. As I stood in plain view of this man, later identified as Gates, I asked if he would step out onto the porch and speak with me. He replied “no I will not”. He then demanded to know who I was. I told him that I was “Sgt. Crowley from the Cambridge Police” and that I was “investigating a report of a break in progress” at the residence. While I was making this statement, Gates opened the front door and exclaimed “why, because I’m a black man in America?”.   I then asked Gates if there was anyone else in the residence. While yelling, he told me that it was none of my business and accused me of being a racist police officer. I assured Gates that I was responding to a citizen’s call to the Cambridge Police and that the caller was outside as we spoke. Gates seemed to ignore me and picked up a cordless telephone and dialed an unknown telephone number. As he did so, I radioed on channel I that I was off in the residence with someone who appeared to be a resident but very uncooperative. I then overheard Gates asking the person on the other end of his telephone call to “get the chief’ and “what’s the chiefs name?’.   Gates was telling the person on the other end of the call that he was dealing with a racist police officer in his home.  Gates then turned to me and told me that I had no idea who I was “messing” with and that I had not heard the last of it.  While I was led to believe that Gates was lawfully in the residence, I was quite surprised and confused with the behavior he exhibited toward me.  I asked Gates to provide me with photo identification so that I could verify that he resided at Ware Street and so that I could radio my findings to ECC. Gates initially refused, demanding that I show him identification but then did supply me with a Harvard University identification card. Upon learning that Gates was affiliated with Harvard, I radioed and requested the presence of the Harvard University Police.

With the Harvard University identification in hand, I radioed my findings to ECC on channel two and prepared to leave. Gates again asked for my name which I began to provide. Gates began to yell over my spoken words by accusing me of being a racist police officer and leveling threats that he wasn’t someone to mess with. At some point during this exchange, I became aware that Off. Carlos Figueroa was standing behind me. When Gates asked a third time for my name, I explained to him that I had provided it at his request two separate times. Gates continued to yell at me. I told Gates that I was leaving his residence and that if he had any other questions regarding the matter, I would speak with him outside of the residence.

As I began walking through the foyer toward the front door, I could hear Gates again demanding my name. I again told Gates that I would speak with him outside. My reason for wanting to leave the residence was that Gates was yelling very loud and the acoustics of the kitchen and foyer were making it difficult for me to transmit pertinent information to ECC or other responding units. His reply was “ya, I’ll speak with your mama outside”. When I left the residence, I noted that there were several Cambridge and Harvard University police officers assembled on the sidewalk in front of the residence. Additionally, the caller, Ms. Walen and at least seven unidentified passers-by were looking in the direction of Gates, who had followed me outside of the residence.

As I descended the stairs to the sidewalk, Gates continued to yell at me, accusing me of racial bias and continued to tell me that I had not heard the last of him. Due to the tumultuous manner Gates had exhibited in his residence as well as his continued tumultuous behavior outside the residence, in view of the public, I warned Gates that he was becoming disorderly. Gates ignored my warning and continued to yell, which drew the attention of both the police officers and citizens, who appeared surprised and alarmed by Gates’s outburst. For a second time I warned Gates to calm down while I withdrew my department issued handcuffs from their carrying case. Gates again ignored my warning and continued to yell at me. It was at this time that I informed Gates that he was under arrest. I then stepped up the stairs, onto the porch and attempted to place handcuffs on Gates. Gates initially resisted my attempt to handcuff him, yelling that he was “disabled” and would fall without his cane. After the handcuffs were property applied, Gates complained that they were too tight. I ordered Off. Ivey, who was among the responding officers, to handcuff Gates with his arms in front of him for his comfort while I secured a cane for Gates from within the residence. I then asked Gates if he would like an officer to take possession of his house key and secure his front door, which he left wide open. Gates told me that the door was unsecurable due to a previous break attempt at the residence. Shortly thereafter, a Harvard University maintenance person arrived on scene and appeared familiar with Gates. I asked Gates if he was comfortable with this Harvard University maintenance person securing his residence. He told me that he was.

And then there’s the President of the United States, feeling the need to directly involve himself in a report of a break-in and a disorderly conduct arrest:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Recently, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested at his home in Cambridge. What does that incident say to you? And what does it say about race relations in America?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, I — I should say at the outset that Skip Gates is a friend, so I may be a little biased here.

I don’t know all the facts. What’s been reported, though, is that the guy forgot his keys, jimmied his way to get into the house; there was a report called into the police station that there might be a burglary taking place.

So far, so good, right? I mean, if I was trying to jigger into — well, I guess this is my house now, so — (laughter) — it probably wouldn’t happen.

(Chuckling.) But let’s say my old house in Chicago — (laughter) — here I’d get shot. (Laughter.) But so far, so good. They’re — they’re — they’re reporting. The police are doing what they should. There’s a call. They go investigate. What happens?

My understanding is, at that point, Professor Gates is already in his house. The police officer comes in. I’m sure there’s some exchange of words. But my understanding is — is that Professor Gates then shows his ID to show that this is his house, and at that point he gets arrested for disorderly conduct, charges which are later dropped.

Now, I’ve — I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.

And number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcing disproportion ately. That’s just a fact.

As you know, Lynn, when I was in the state legislature in Illinois, we worked on a racial profiling bill because there was indisputable evidence that blacks and Hispanics were being stopped disproportionately. And that is a sign, an example of how, you know, race remains a factor in the society.

That doesn’t lessen the incredible progress that has been made. I am standing here as testimony to the progress that’s been made. And yet the fact of the matter is, is that, you know, this still haunts us.

And even when there are honest misunderstandings, the fact that blacks and Hispanics are picked up more frequently, and oftentime for no cause, casts suspicion even when there is good cause. And that’s why I think the more that we’re working with local law enforcement to improve policing techniques so that we’re eliminating potential bias, the safer everybody’s going to be.

We find out in addition that the police officer, Sgt. James Crowley, actually teaches courses on racial profiling at Lowell Police Acadamy, and has been teaching the course there for five years.  We find out that Sgt. Crowley receives no pay for teaching the class, and that he drives from Cambridge to Middlesex Community College in Lowell.  And we find out that he is an incredibly well-respected police officer.

Okay.  So here’s your test: WHO was “acting stupidly”?

For the record, it is black men like Henry Louis Gates who make the charge “racist” utterly meaningless to me.  Because the only way I could be any more racist than Gates is if I went to weekly meetings wearing a white robe and a pointy hat.

Personally, I have to give a tie to Professor Henry Louis Gates and President Barack Obama.  Gates is clearly an arrogant hard-core racist jerk who deserved to be seriously beaten with a baton, let alone arrested.  And Barack Obama is clearly an arrogant, hard-core fool who should have kept his stupid mouth shut rather than join Gates in throwing around charges of racism.

Mouthing off to police officers is a bad idea, and Henry Louis Gates officially disqualified himself from the roles of reasonable and intelligent people for having so remarkably mouthed off with so little provocation.  And Harvard University is clearly an inferior academic institution for having such pathetic, angry, bitter, nasty, racist psychos on its payroll as “faculty.”

I am a law-abiding citizen, yet I have had several similar encounters with the police.  On one occasion, I was ordered off my motorcycle (back when I had one), and ordered to interlock my fingers behind my neck and drop to my knees on the side of a highway.  I hadn’t mouthed off in any way, or given any cause to believe that I was a threat when the black police officer gave me the order.  And the officer’s tone had been, “Do it now or I will shoot you.”  He inspected me for weapons and inspected my bags, before clearing me to stand up.  When I asked why he had treated me this way, the officer curtly answered, “You matched the general description of a robbery suspect.”  No, “Gee, I’m really sorry.  It must have been kind of embarrassing kneeling on the side of the road with your arms over your head like that and all them cars driving by.”

I thought the officer was a complete jerk.  But it never even occurred to me to think that this black authority figure was a racist out to get even with whitey.  Primarily because I’d already had three earlier unfortunate wrong-place-wrong-time situations with rude police officers who were white.  Once I’d been loudly cursed at by a police officer who was manning a perimeter check point when I tried to tell him I’d just seen the man they were probably looking for and noted the direction he was running.  Another time I was ordered out of my car at literal gunpoint out in the desert.  I had gone out there to walk my Rottweiler, and the officer was treating the situation as a possible stolen car incident.

It’s partially because police officers are always potentially about to be shot at, and partially because law enforcement just too often attracts men and women who get off exercising authority, that civilians often feel like they are being treated rudely.

In the particular case of Sgt. James Crowley and Professor Henry Louis Gates, it seems clear to me that Crowley was in the former category of “potentially about to be shot at,” while Gates was in the latter category of “get off exercising authority.”

Blacks often talk about racism being about an unequal power relationship.  Well, the racists in this particular situation are the powerful men in society: a privileged Harvard University professor, and a President of the United States.  And the victim of racism is an honest, blue collar working man.

How dare you accuse such a man of racism, Professor Gates?  How dare you, President Obama?  You were the two men who acted stupidly, and you are the two men who should feel ashamed of yourselves.

Is Barack Obama a racist? As far as I’m concerned, he’s now got three strikes.  Strike one was belonging to a thoroughly racist church under Jeremiah Wright for 23 years.  Strike two was his appointment of a “wise Latina judge” who had imposed a racist ruling penalizing white firefighters just for being white.  And strike three is standing up for a racist bigot like Gates – who apparently becomes the next thoroughly racist extremist bigot Obama would no more disown than his own white grandmother – and associating Sgt. Crowley with racism and racial profiling when he didn’t know the facts of the case by his own admission is strike three.

It’s not the police officer who should be defending himself against allegations of racism.  It’s Henry Louis Gates.  And it’s Barack Obama.  Obama should be asked every single day, “How dare you defend the kind of racist behavior your good friend Henry Gates exhibited toward that poor white police officer who was just trying to do his job?”

Health Care Bankruptices: More Liberal Lies

What was that line from Mark Twain?  “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.”

In the course of the last two days – and watching mostly Fox News, no less – I have at least four times heard an advocate for the Democrats’ health care boondoggle recite the crap statistic that “60% of bankruptcies are due to health care costs,” with nary a reply by the journalist who should be able to separate fact from fraud.

If you’re going to interview a liberal, be aware that lies tend to accompany the movement of their lips.  When you have the latter, you almost certainly have the former.

It’s not that this hasn’t been repeatedly refuted.  It’s that the lies are piling up far faster than the refutation can keep up with them.  Democrats know from Hitler and Goebbels that if they keep telling a lie over and over again, people will eventually believe it.  So we just keep hearing about this massive number of bankruptcies over and over again.

It’s not true.

From ABC News:

Medical Bankruptcies: A Data-Check

March 05, 2009 12:37 PM

(3 p.m. update: See italicized items with responses from the lead author of the Harvard study, Dr. David Himmelstein.)

President Obama’s kicking off his health care reform today in the worst possible way: with a mischaracterization of data.

“The cost of health care now causes a bankruptcy in America every thirty seconds,” Obama said at the opening of his White House forum on health care reform. The problem: That claim, based on a 2001 survey, is simply unsupportable.

The figure comes from a 2005 Harvard University study saying that 54 percent of bankruptcies in 2001 were caused by health expenses. We reviewed it internally and knocked it down at the time; an academic reviewer did the same in 2006. Recalculating Harvard’s own data, he came up with a far lower figure – 17 percent.

A more recent study by another group, approaching it another way, indicates that in 2007 about eight-tenths of one percent of Americans lived in families that filed for bankruptcy as a result of medical costs. That rings a little less loudly than “one every 30 seconds.”

The extrapolation of Harvard’s data to “a bankruptcy every 30 seconds,” which Obama also mentioned in his address to a joint session of Congress last month, comes, per the White House, from a 2005 Washington Post op-ed by Prof. Elizabeth Warren, a co-author of the Harvard paper. Fact-check.org has noted that even using Harvard’s numbers, it’s more like a bankruptcy every minute; indeed if you add up all bankrputcies in a year you barely get one every 30 seconds. (I’ve e-mailed Warren for comment.) But more to the point is that the Harvard data are clearly inflated, or at best, mischaracterized.

Himmelstein tells me that the reason for the difference is a change in federal law that sharply reduced the number of bankruptcies. In 2005, the year he and Warren wrote their op-ed, there were just over 2 million bankruptcies. Data out just today say that in 2008 there were 1.1 million (up sharply, by the way, over 2007). So this error in the White House claim stems simply from the fact that it’s using out-of-date information. The next question is whether the estimate of “medical bankruptcies” is reliable in the first place.

A good part of the problem is definitional. The Harvard report claims to measure the extent to which medical costs are “the cause” of bankruptcies. In reality its survey asked if these costs were “a reason” – potentially one of many – for such bankruptcies.

Beyond those who gave medical costs as “a reason,” the Harvard researchers chose to add in any bankruptcy filers who had at least $1,000 in unreimbursed medical expenses in the previous two years. Given deductibles and copays, that’s a heck of a lot of people.

Moreover, Harvard’s definition of “medical” expenses includes situations that aren’t necessarily medical in common parlance, e.g., a gambling problem, or the death of a family member. If your main wage-earning spouse gets hit by a bus and dies, and you have to file, that’s included as a “medical bankruptcy.”

When I asked the lead author, Dr. David Himmelstein, about his definitions of medical bankruptcy back in 2005, he said, “It’s a judgment call,” and added that any death, for example, “to our mind is a medical event.”

A last problem was sampling: The Harvard researchers surveyed bankruptcy filers in five federal court districts accounting for 14 percent of bankruptcies nationally; projecting this to the other 86 percent is sketchy. Said Himmelstein: “Obviously the extrapolation is rough.”

Of such rough extrapolations are presidential pronouncements made. […]

“It stinks to be uninsured. I don’t want to be quoted saying anything else,” Dranove says. “But there are correct studies, and incorrect studies. For academics, the validity of the research methods matters.”

It should for the rest of us, too.

So you see a horrible study – absolutely horrible – that is clearly biased and filled with faulty assumptions and questionable definitions.  But it’s from Harvard, so it must be true.  Let’s run with it.  I noticed CBS and NBC news articles that did just that.  Factchecks?  We don’t need no stinkin’ factchecks.

ABC took that Harvard study, did their own review simply by recalculating the Harvard leftist professor’s own data – and came up with 17%.  But they were also able to find another study that concluded: “about eight-tenths of one percent of Americans lived in families that filed for bankruptcy as a result of medical costs.”

A professional named Steve Elias who specializes in bankruptcy cases comes to a similar conclusion regarding his own practice — that health care costs are at best a very minor part of our bankruptcies.

So every time I hear someone say “sixty percent of all bankruptcies are the result of health care costs, so we need to pass Obama care right now!” I know I am dealing with an ignoramus, or an ideologue, or both.

And every time I see that comment uttered to or in front of a journalist who doesn’t respond by correcting the record, I know that there’s yet another journalist out there who isn’t good enough at his or her job to pass muster.

Now, I could have stopped here.  But let me go on – because there are WAY too many lies being told by Democrats.

(CBS) Today the President again insisted that his health care reform won’t force you to switch plans or doctors.

“What I’m saying is the government is not going to make you change your plans under health reform,” said Mr. Obama.

That’s technically correct – but what the president didn’t say is that reform could lead your boss to change your health care plan, reports CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson. Here’s how: 160 million people are insured through work and their employer actually picks up most of the cost. Under the president’s plan, Americans would be required to carry a certain level of coverage, which means many people would have to increase their insurance.

“Employer premiums will go up, and employers might respond by dropping coverage entirely,” said Michael Cannon, with the Cato Institute. “So if you’re one of those unfortunate workers then it will be a government policy that ousted you from your health plan.”

And if you do choose a public plan, you may want to keep your favorite doctors but they may not want to keep you. Under government health care, they could be paid 20 to 30 percent less.

Here’s another gargantuan Obama lie.  And – while I’m surprised and grateful that CBS took a swipe at it – I fear they didn’t go far enough, and won’t come back to the truth often enough.

A Wall Street Journal article absolutely destroys any claim to credibility Obama has in claiming that his plan won’t force tens of millions of people out of their private health care.

The last thing Obama and his Democrat allies have repeatedly lie about is that “Republicans are opposing reform.”

I would confront Obama by saying, “Name one.  Name one single Republican who is on the record opposing any kind of health care reform.”  It is demagogic rhetoric.  And the president is clearly becoming unhinged to rely on such demagogic attacks to force a clearly unpopular agenda down the country’s throat.

President Obama went after Senator Jim DeMint for his “Waterloo” remark.  DeMint, to his credit, fired right back, and pointed out that as a Senator Barack Obama voted against every Republican effort to reform health care.  So, in point of fact, who’s really against “reform” here?  And why doesn’t anybody remind Democrats how THEY were the party of “no” when Republicans were in charge prior to 2006 (which I might point out was prior to when our economy tanked).

There are way too many lies masquerading as truth claims going on.  It’s time to recognize who is lying to you, and to demand a fair presentation of the facts.