The DJIA finished down 428 points. Can you imagine if this had happened after McCain was elected? The front pages would all scream, 'Stock Market Votes NO on McCain!'
It is National Ammo Day. The idea is to buy 100 rounds of your favorite ammunition today. Let me offer a bit of advice: buy as much .22 caliber long rifle ammunition as you can, whether you shoot a .22 or not. Why?
There isn't anything better for putting meat on the table.
The venerable .22 is not susceptible of being reloaded.
When hard times come, .22 ammo will become useful as currency.
Hard times may be just around the corner. Survivalists and veterans of previous economic disasters also remind us that coffee and cigarettes can become trade currency as well. Good advice, but you can't hunt small game with cartons of Marlboros or cans of Folgers. --- I heard about it at Babalu Blog. Others noting the occasion include The Heartless Libertarian and Michael Bane.
--- Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel is soon to be out of work. He says he is 'retiring' from the Senate, but in reality, he has been shown the door. Hagel is known here in his home state as a duplicitous, selfish, vindictive turncoat. He must perceive these qualities to be just what an Obama administration needs. If Barack appoints Hagel to anything, it will be in accord with this perception: an act of punishment directed at Nebraska Republicans.
You can work less, keep any assets you bought with your re-fi and get your mortgage payments significantly reduced. All you need to do is qualify. Follow the links above to see how you can live better at your neighbor's expense. --- Tomorrow, Congress will vote on the Big Three Automakers - United Auto Workers bailout boondoggle. Call your congresscat and order your new car first thing in the morning.
From Stop the ACLU: Rahm Emanuel on Compulsory Civil Defense Service…Its Coming. Are you ready for compulsory national service for yourself and your children? STACLU: "You better be, or it will make you ready! I can’t wait to see what color shirts everyone gets!"
Don't say the Plains Feeder didn't - warn - you. Call me a paranoiac, on over-reactor, an alarmist. Go head, criticize me for likening the coming changes to National Socialism. I don't care. The time has come to decide if you want to go along or not. --- The old feeder is not going to submit. I'm not going to be available for conscription nor will I participate in a socialist society. There will be no place at the table for cats like me that love liberty more than security in the America of tomorrow.
red-rag and pink-flag blackshirt and brown strut-mince and stink-brag have all come to town
some like it shot
and some like it hung
and some like it in the twot
nine months young --- e.e. cummings
More: Protein Wisdom - No worries on Compulsory Civil Service, folks: “Obama’s Call for Community Service Is Not Marxism”
Dow Jones Industrial Average change to date: since the huge economic bailout plan passed October 3, 2008: -2,042.72 since the votes were counted Election day November 4, 2008 : -1,342.9 --- Other world and national news is worse. --- At least we are all in this together. Or not.
Its Veterans Day. Don't forget to fly your flag. Honor the men and women who fought and died to keep America free. We owe them a debt that can never be paid in full. --- Please take a moment to view the feedlot's previous Veteran's Day posts. --- Ignore Barack Obama today. He is no friend of the veteran, the active duty soldier or even of the USA.
All previous statements on Watergate are "no longer operative"
From the Washington Times: EXCLUSIVE: Agenda disappears from Obama Web site. First the 'community service' went from being compulsory to optional. Then other features of Barack Obama's change.gov website began to disappear. Now all of the 'guts' of the site which claims to originate from the non-existent but official sounding Office of the President Elect have been ripped out according to the Washington Times. Obama's minions say the site is being re-tooled.
For an interesting. if not frightening. insight into how Obama's supporters reacted to this piecemeal whitewashing of the web site, read the comments at these two posts over at the Gateway Pundit:
Barack's rabid tools are themselves presumably re-tooling today. --- It doesn't matter. Obama is "ready to rule" with or without another duplicitous website.
Osama bin Laden is planning an attack against the United States that will 'outdo by far' September 11, an Arab newspaper in London has reported.
And according to a former senior Yemeni al-Qaeda operative, the terrorist organisation has entered a 'positive phase', reinforcing specific training camps around the world that will lead the next 'wave of action' against the West.
The warning, on the front page of an Arabic newspaper published in London, Al-Quds Al-Arabi - and widely reported in the major Italian papers — quotes a person described as being 'very close to al-Qaeda' in Yemen.
The paper is edited by Abdel al-Bari Atwan, who is said to be the last journalist to interview Osama bin Laden in 1996. According to the report, bin Laden is himself closely following preparations for an attack against the US and aims to 'change the face of world politics and economics'.
We can only guess why America's most deadly enemy would announce that his underground Mohammedan Jihad terrorist outfit has now "entered a positive phase" that will facilitate new and more horrific attacks on the US and its allies in the War on Terror. You don't suppose Osama bin-Laden's new war cry is Change You Can Believe In? The old feeder wonders if Hope will be enough for us.
I never thought I'd be a draft dodger. Check this out: Gateway Pundit: Change... Obama Announces Creation Of His Marxist Youth Corps. And it isn't just the youth. Obama's new change.gov website wants "Citizens of ALL ages" compelled to serve. The mandatory service obligation starts in middle school and continues, I assume, until euthanasia. Veterans aren't left out, either. --- More: Ed Morrissey at Hot Air and Michelle Malkin think the dot-gov domain is fishy. Ed says:
[T]his site has a .gov top-level domain (change.gov). That is reserved for “qualified government organizations and programs”. The incoming administration technically has no status as a government organization or program until January 20, 2009. The “Office of the President-Elect” doesn’t exist within the government.
The site looks much like Obama's campaign website. Michelle points out that:
It’s being run by Blue State Digital, the left-wing Internet fund-raising company that presided over the credit card fraud-friendly Obama campaign site.
The phony Office of the President-Elect is also taking names. Ed Morrissey asks:
Why does the government need to collect e-mails and addresses from citizens in order to share their stories with the President-Elect? What purpose does the OPE have for this information? Are they hoping to build a list to sell to political allies, or perhaps just to telemarketers to help pay off the deficit? Since this is hosted as a government site, I think they need to explain what official use they will make of this information.
Its as audaciously pretentious as the made-up presidential seal Barack Obama tried to use during his campaign. The difference is, that campaign goofiness seemed funny at the time. This new premature power grab isn't the least bit laughable. --- After all the nasty things I've said about Canada, I don't suppose they'll have me.
The post-election bounce in the US stock market continues unabated. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which fell 486.01 points the first day after the votes were counted, was down another 443.48 at today's close. That is a 929.49 point loss, in spite of government bailouts, incentives and promises of more costly government intervention schemes economic programs to pump the market back up.
Of course, this record breaking post-election market collapse hasn't got anything to do with Barack Obama's election. To suggest that investors are worried about Obama's Marxist plans might be, well, racist. Got to get behind our new leader, right? --- In yesterday's post, the old feeder opined that the investors might not have liked what they saw at the Obama rally outside the White House election night. Scenes like this:
Communists for Obama - out from under our beds
Of course there was our new flag, the red one with the hammer and sickle that Barack's delirious supporters were waving. That sort of thing wouldn't make investors think those stories about nationalizing our banks and major industries might be true. Would it?
The old feeder wouldn't be surprised to see an uptick any time now. Surely there are still suckers out there that see this implosion as an opportunity to buy cheap. I fear their fate will be "Buy Low - Sell Lower" though, unless they are peculiarly adroit day-traders.
Voters in Cheyenne County, Nebraska, removed judge Kristine Cecava from the bench in yesterday's election. Nebraska judges must stand for retention by local voters every two years. 63% of voters in her jurisdiction voted not to retain judge Cecava. The Plains Feeder noted the public's displeasure with her decision to sentence convicted child molester Richard Thompson to probation because she thought he was too short to survive in prison. The story received embarrassing national attention.
Thompson was found guilty of two counts of molesting a 12 year old girl. He is 5' 1" tall, as the mug shot above indicates. He was sentenced by judge Cecava in May of 2006. The Nebraska State Patrol evaluated him as a Class III sex offender, the highest risk for becoming a repeat offender. He could have received up to 10 years in prison under Nebraska's relatively weak child molestation laws.
The probation sentence was appealed by the state, but was upheld by the Nebraska Court of Appeals because the sentence wasn't "clearly" too lenient. Local folks got 900 signatures on a petition to have her fired, but the Nebraska Judicial Qualifications Commission decided that they lacked the authority to remove her from the bench for bad judgment. Go figure.
No doubt her poor judgment in the Thompson case was a major factor in yesterday's "Do Not Retain" vote. It might seem a high price to pay for one unpopular decision, but Nebraskans feel strongly about seeing child molesters taken off the streets. Nebraska law is notoriously hit or miss when it comes to jailing child rapists and molesters, many of whom are likely to be repeat offenders.
Some Nebraska prosecutors have resorted to getting federal prosecutors involved where appropriate. This usually ensures prison time for the perpetrator. Molestation cases that 'went federal' include internet predator John Monetti who traveled from New York to molest an underage Nebraska girl, and teacher Kelsey Peterson, who began a sexual relationship with a student when he was 12, then fled Nebraska to Mexico with him when she was found out.
Former judge Cecava can now find work as a criminal defense attorney if she wants. Perhaps that is a more appropriate venue for her to work at keeping little criminals out of jail. --- Previously in the Plains Feeder: May 26, 2006 - Nebraska Judge: Child Molester too short for prison July 15, 2006 - 'Too Short for Jail' Molester Gets Class III Sex Offender Rating August 22, 2006 - 'Too Short for Jail' Child Rapist's Sentence Appealed July 18, 2007 - Nebraska child molester still too short for prison
Nobody likes a sore loser, but that won't stop me. When the disappointment passes, the path ahead will remain clear, the objective unchanged: to live free in an unfree world. --- More loser self-analysis: David Kahane: We got this the old-fashioned way: we earned it. The other side took the fight to us, and we never took the fight to the other side, except coyly and obliquely. That's not a mistake we should make the next time. "Honorable campaigns" are for losers. Next time, call 'em as they really are, not as you wish to see 'em. Mark Steyn: We need to rediscover a coherent conservatism and find someone who can pitch it to sufficient numbers of people. We didn't have either in this campaign. Henry Luis Gomez: Hopefully our party has gotten the bipartisan bug out of its system and will begin to think about WINNING rather than compromising for a change. [Sometimes you have to step in shit to know that it is shit.] --- At least America won't have to put up with being called a racist nation anymore. --- Addendum: A frequent commenter from a third-world countrydeveloping nation Canada suggests that I lay some blame for John McCain's defeat yesterday. Always eager to please regular Plains Feeder readers, I hereby blame the Republican Party leadership. They wanted to re-brand the party to attract the less conservative voter. Their effort to water down Republican values went over like New Coke. Fewer Republicans voted for McCain this year than voted for George Bush in 2004. Six million less, according to this report from the Gateway Pundit. Patterico's blog numbers the disaffected GOP voters at seven million.
Keep it flying over the land of the free - VOTE TODAY
Get out and vote today. Don't let anything discourage you. Don't disappoint the brave men and women gave their lives to win and preserve your right to vote. --- A few tips:
Be honest with yourself. There is no peer pressure or group-think in the privacy of the polling booth.
--- Some unsolicited advice:
The Plains Feeder urges you to vote for John McCain and Sarah Palin. Even so, its still a free country: vote your own informed conscience. A vote for McCain-Palin will help ensure That America is still a free country when the next election comes around. --- Nebraskans: Don't forget to vote YES on Initiative 424. Help rid Nebraska of race and gender bias.
This is from a speech Sen. Obama gave in Colorado in July, 2008. Watch it and ask yourself what in the world he's talking about.
Here's the long version (24 min) from the Obama Campaign site. You might want to skip to the 14 min mark or so for a reasonable lead in.
So why would we need a "civilian national security force that is just as powerful, just as strong, and just as well-funded" as the military? We already have the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, National Guard, TSA and various federal and state law enforcement agencies. Since Defense is about 20% of regular federal spending (whatever that means these days), this suggests a massive spending project without any apparent purpose.
Taking the relatively benign interpretation of Obama's proposal, he may be suggesting, as the Left is wont to do, that all desired spending is a matter of "national security." He doesn't really have anything useful for them to do, but he's sure it needs to be done in a big way. In this interpretation the plan is only a colossal waste of money, to be spent on make-work projects like the FDR administration promulgated during the Great Depression. These kinds of programs were ineffective then, and they might well precipitate a depression if tried now.
Looking beyond that, we can guess that this may be a vehicle for channeling more federal money into favored "community organizations" such as ACORN, Nation of Islam, etc. Such a powerful, strong, well-funded civilian force would be very handy to have in the future for stealing elections, intimidating opponents, and perhaps busting a few heads, as needed. Anyone for pogroms? Another cross-post from DLMSY.
Interesting Tales from the Future: satirical takes in the New York Post on where we would be in year four of an Obama administration:
Jonah Goldberg - "It's hard to believe that just four years ago, some were talking about Barack Obama as a national savior, a secular redeemer, a 'light worker.' Even more shocking, President Obama lost the nomination of his own party to none other than Hillary Clinton. How did we get here?"
Ralph Peters - "His Triumphs Abroad: Our Greatest Foreign Policy President. Looking back on the four years of his first administration, President Obama can be proud: He made the US welcome among the family of nations again; he reduced our reliance on military force; and he gave us peace by reaching sensible accommodations with our enemies."
--- Abe has opened the door for the old feeder to add more links to this post. Here are a few more Good Links:
24ahead.com: The Non-Partisan Case Against Barack Obama.
IBD Tipp Poll - Independents who'd been leaning to Obama shifted to McCain to leave that key group a toss-up. Obama 46.7% - McCain 44.6 %- Not Sure - 8.7%
--- At the risk of being called a racist yet again, I note that the Gateway Pundit post linked above states that most undecided voters at this late date are white people. Because I'm not a racist, I won't suggest that most of these undecided voters will reflexively vote for the white candidate. Sure, over 90% of black voters say they will pull the lever for Obama, but what if there is an inverse Bradley effect among black voters? Will some black voters, in the privacy of the voting booth, break with the overtly racist notion that real blacks must vote for another black, no matter what? --- Get out and vote. Take your less motivated friends to the polls. Don't be discouraged by the blatantly biased news media - they want Republicans, Independents, Libertarians and the great Undecided to stay home tomorrow. Lets make Gore Vidal angry! He and his greasy little friends advise Obama not to concede the election regardless of outcome.
While much of the media has been studiously ignoring Barack Obama's past outside of his two autobiographies, Stanley Kurtz of the National Review has methodically examined the record. Kurtz has documented Obama's days as a "community organizer," Obama's funding of radical leftwing causes through Bill Ayers' Chicago Annenberg Challenge and the Woods Foundation, Obama's membership in the socialistic New Party, and the stealthy redistributionism of the the Gamaliel Foundation. The article on the latter has just been updated online:
Senator Stealth by Stanley Kurtz on National Review Online: "Beyond its revelation that Obama’s original community organizer home-base is pervaded by anti-Americanism, “Senator Stealth” foreshadows today’s debates over redistributionism, and shows that concerns over Obama’s radical “associations” cannot be separated from the most significant policy disputes of the campaign.
“Senator Stealth” also lays out a way of resolving the contradiction between Obama’s radical past and his apparently moderate present. After learning that incrementalism, rhetorical disguise, and ideological stealth are second nature to Obama’s community organizer compatriots, it’s tougher to take his current self-presentation at face value. More than two months later, the same issues play out in the latest flap over Obama’s ties to the NEW PARTY.
Finally, I couldn’t have guessed, more than two months ago, that the Obama campaign, abetted by the press, would have taken refuge in near-total denial of his unsavory associations, from the question of his New Party membership, to the relationship to Bill Ayers, to the links to ACORN. Obama has downplayed or denied these many ties to an extent that is shockingly at odds with the public record, while the press has played along."
Many people now accept Obama's pose as a moderate at face value and Hope, if elected, his Change will be moderate. Kurtz's research shows that posing as a moderate is an explicit part of the radical organizations and individuals that Obama has allied himself with during his rise to political power. Hoping for Change in Obama on that score is a long shot gamble that he is something other than what he has been throughout his adult life.
I should be voting for you. Groupthink demands it of me. But I can’t do it. No way, nohow. I’m a card-carrying member of the American intelligentsia, and I’m being asked to turn off my brain and put my trust in you, blindly. And this frightens me to the core.
Change. Lots of change. That’s what you promise. Today, for the first time, I saw a television ad of yours that didn’t simply promise change, but actually breached the levee and spoke of permanent change. No specifics, of course. And that’s the rub, Barack. I have trouble with unspecified change, especially of the permanent sort.
And I also have a lot of trouble with the fact that Fidel Castro has endorsed your candidacy and is loudly rooting for you, along with his entire military junta. Here’s my problem, in a nutshell: Fidel Castro ruined my country and my life, and imprisoned, tortured, and killed far too many of my relatives, so I can’t vote for anyone endorsed by that genocidal imp. To make matters worse, some of my highly-placed contacts in Cuba tell me that the privileged elite who run that island as a giant slave plantation and penal colony are openly boasting that you have spoken with his brother, King Raul, and have already struck deals with him.
It’s just a rumor, I know, but the fact that it’s being spread by Cuba’s ruling class says a lot about your candidacy, and what may lie in store for us all if you become president. The slaveowners in Havana want the world to believe that you are on their side. That’s not good, any way you look at it. So, I have a question: why is it that you won’t you deny the rumors? Your silence gives them the ring of truth.
Even worse, you have links to all sorts of unsavory characters, most of whom remind me of the brothers Castro and their Argentine friend, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who lived in a huge mansion that he had stolen from its owners, and was driven around Havana in a Mercedes Benz. Redistribution of wealth, Che called it. And his favorite way of ensuring such change was the firing squad, and the coup de grace that he gleefully administered with his own pistol.
I’m deeply troubled by your association with far too many people who idolize Che and and sing Fidel’s praises. At the top of this list we find your colleagues Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dorn, and your pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Further down on this list there are hundreds of celebrities who fawn over the brothers Castro and their Venezuelan crony, Hugo Chavez. Then, there are all of those supporters on your campaign website who quote Fidel, Che, Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Ho Chi Min, and Mao, as inspirational figures. Finally, there’s that campaign worker in your Houston office, who proudly displayed Che’s image superimposed on a Cuban flag.
I hoped you would denounce her, your soaring prose laced with indignation, just as if she had carved a Swastika on her forehead. But your silence was deafening. As if all this were not bad enough, I worry about your esteem for liberation theology, which you say has shaped your life. I know that there’s no such thing as a liberation theologian who isn’t in some way a Marxist. Forget Reverend Wright’s rants, which you must have heard hundreds of times. Forget his devout pilgrimage to Cuba. Forget that your dismissal of Wright rings false. What vexes me more than anything else is that your core beliefs have this intimate connection to Marxism, and that you make light of that fact, and so many are fooled by your evasions.
When you dismiss all of these disturbing items as trivial spitballs hurled at you by desperate, unethical opponents, my brain sounds an alarm, and the noise inside my head is as loud as all the sirens of all the fire trucks in lower Manhattan on September 11th, 2001. You’re much too smart not to know about the Marxist bent of liberation theology and of some of your closest associates. It doesn’t take much effort to notice: I just took a look at Bill Ayers’s website, and it sent chills down my spine. It instantly transported me back to Cuba.
You skirt every serious question on this issue, pretend to be clueless, even. But let’s grant for a minute that you are really as clueless as you say, and can’t recognize Marxism when it stares you in the face. If that’s really the case – and I can’t believe it because you admit in your memoir that you preferred Marxist professors -- then you scare me even more, Barack. I wouldn’t want someone that dumb in the White House.
Everyone around me tells me I should be happy, even delirious about your chances for victory. It’s expected of me, as an egghead. It’s also demanded of me as a “person of colour,” just like you. An undesirable. God knows how many times I’ve been called a spic. But the truth is, Barack, that you’re asking me to be brainless, like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, and that you scare the stuffing out of me. Your campaign and your supporters evoke memories of the communist correctspeak forced upon me at school back in Cuba, and of George Orwell’s warning in his prophetic novel, 1984: “Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
So, please, give me reason to turn off the alarm. Renounce Castro’s endorsement, and then heap scorn on all Fidelistas, as any decent person would on Nazis, or Stalinists, or Maoists, or the whole Ku Klux Klan, and put a great distance between you and them, measured in trillions and trillions of light years. Do it now, and do it with conviction.
Do the right thing.
But I fear you won’t; not now, not ever. And that’s what’s keeping me up late at night, and forcing me to scour world maps, looking for some other place of exile. Or, in my worst nightmares – which happen to be quite frequent– planning my trek to the hills, to join the resistance, or to start it. And it’s that likelihood of having to duck out of sight that makes me withhold my name. No point in risking too much before it’s really necessary.
My ISP has apparently blocked access to a well-known and heavily trafficked blog that has been critical of Barack Obama. The site is zombietime.com. I am able to access the site using my backup telephone modem connection. I have not asked or agreed to allow my broadband ISP, MicroLnk, aka SpeedNet to apply any sort of filtering to my internet access. I beleve this may be a politically motivated decision at my ISP's corporate level, or it may just be a hack implemented by a pro-Obama employee of the company. In either case, I am outraged.
Because my broadband ISP has no real-time support on weekends, there is no way for me to report this apparent censorship. If you are a MicroLnk or SpeedNet customer, I would ask you to try to connect to zombietime. If you are blocked, please let me know. I am sufficiently sophisticated technologically to know that the problem is not at my end.
Brownshirt tactics have become so commonplace with the Obama camp that I would not be surprised if this is not another egregious example of the type of suppression of dissent that we may expect to become the norm in an Obama administration.
What it is ain't exactly clear. To quote the old Buffalo Springfield lyric. We're bombarded with "news" reports suggesting Obama has this election sewn up and the actual ballots are just a formality. Apparently the only questions left to answer are how large Obama's victory will be and how massive the Democrat majority in Congress will be. Yet there are many signs, for those who look closely, that the race is much closer than it is made to appear.
We wrote here about this topic and an excellent analysis of it by Zombie. A major element of the Obama campaign's strategy is to make an Obama victory appear to be a foregone conclusion. There are two benefits they are seeking: 1) to discourage opposition voters, so they give up prematurely and 2) to capture "go along" voters who will vote for whoever seems to be ahead.
It seems to be working so far, but is it really? All the polls show an amazing amount of "undecided" voters at this late date. It's less well-known, but there is also a large percentage of people who are refusing to participate in polls when contacted. There is reason to believe that both of these groups, when they actually vote, will be lopsidedly in favor of McCain/Palin.
Wynton Hall : Obama's Spiral of Silence - Townhall.com: "If Sen. Barack Obama loses the presidency or wins by far narrower margins than the double-digit lead some mainstream media polls predict, his weak performance will not be the result of the so-called “Bradley Effect,” which holds that black candidates underperform at the polls due to latent racism. Rather, the true culprit will be something public opinion scholars call the “Spiral of Silence Theory.”
In the 1970s, German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann introduced a provocative and startling theory of mass communication she called the “Spiral of Silence.” Noelle-Neumann argued that when mass media create an impression that the majority of society holds one view on a topic, those who hold minority opinions are cowed into a “spiral of silence” for fear of reprisal or isolation from those in the majority."
Goodness knows it's hard to stick up for conservative ideas on the heels of George W. "No Government Spending Program Left Behind" Bush's administration. Add in the widespread attitude that anyone who would vote against Obama, or criticize him in any way, is a racist and/or dangerously angry. Most people will choose just to say nothing.
So will this Obama strategy work? It's up to us. Don't let yourself be deluded into not voting. Remember an election is not a "bet" where you win by voting with the majority. If a bad candidate wins, we all lose. Period. It could very well be that next Wednesday we'll wake up to the biggest election surprise since Harry Truman failed to lose to the inevitable President Dewey. Wouldn't that be fun to see. Even if Obama wins, at least you'll know that the disastrous results of his policies won't be your fault. Remember Republicans vote on Tuesday. Democrats vote on Wednesday. :) Another cross-post from DLMSY.
