Adding to all of the beyond ridiculus Obama coins, dolls, buttons, underwear, halos and toast comes Obama Fingers. No, you won’t be able to put batteries in them and massage your back to the self-enriching sounds of Obama’s “Yes we can!” voice in your ears. These fingers taste like chicken.
A company in German(sic) has just introduced a line of snacks called “Obama Fingers”: frozen chicken fingers with curry dip. To Americans, marketing a fried chicken dish with the name of our first African-American president instantly tingles our sensitivity to racial stereotyping and racist imagery.
The author prattles on about the apparent racism in such a move. Then asks if it is racist if the company putting out the product claims it was ignorant of such stereotypes?
It’s only “racist” to someone who looks at them and thinks… “oh lord, that is racist!” I look at them and see the chicken fingers are breaded and fried, and come with a curry dip. I then think… mmm yummy. Then I think, what an incredibly stupid name for a food product.
I can certainly see how someone may be offended by Obama Fingers, but don’t we have more to be worried about than whether or not a German company puts out a product that may or may not be offensive?
It seems that America is always at war with some country or some thing. We have the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, and the War on Terror. The media made a point to mention that the Obama administration has chosen to cease using the term “War on Terror”. That’s certainly a good move, but semantics matter little when the soft-spoken administration continues to act hard, like drone bombing Pakistan and increasing troop levels in Afghanistan. There is another unspoken war going on right now from the Obama administration. Obama and his Keynesian minions have declared a War on Capitalism.
For our sake I hope it is a complete failure like the government’s other perpetual wars. Though I fear that with the popularity of Obama and his “wolf in sheep’s clothing” words it may end in success. If that happens, America will no longer be America as we once knew it. Some may argue that America is already gone, capitalism is dead, and those of us who fancy liberty should self-immolate. Thank god the nature of liberty coexists with the burning desire to keep it intact. Rather than self-immolate we should immolate, through the ballot box, all of those in DC who are enemies to liberty. As Chuck Norris has suggested, Ron Paul could be the arbiter of which of his colleagues deserve to be choked out of office.
There’s an AP article circulating today that Barack Obama is facing a country in crisis like Lincoln and FDR did. How nice it is to read something like this to calm my fears of further liberties being removed from individuals and given to the state. Those paying attention will know that I’m being sarcastic. Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt were two of the worst champions of liberty in history. Let’s focus on Lincoln this time. From the AP article:
Like Abraham Lincoln, Obama is trying to patch up national divisions. To ready himself for the job, Obama said Friday he is reading some writings by Lincoln, “who’s always an extraordinary inspiration.”
Lincoln locked up journalists who didn’t agree with him. He lobbied for deporting “negroes” to Liberia. He makes George W. Bush look like a saint. As for “always” being an “inspiration” as Barack Obama says. Well, I’m curious if Obama happened upon this quote from Lincoln during the fourth debate he had with Stephen Douglas in 1958:
“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races – that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything.”
Way to go Obama. How inspirational. “Yes we can!” has officially become “Oh No, He Didn’t!”
We can only assume Obama is picking and choosing only the “good” things Lincoln said. Much like he’ll only pick and choose the portions of the Constitution that he happens to agree with and ignore or twist the rest of our so called supreme law of the land. Remind me again how this is “change” from the last eight years?
As for Roosevelt, well it is starting to become a more mainstream opinion amongst economists that many of his policies prolonged the Great Depression instead of shortening it. We don’t hear that from just the Austrian economists anymore.
Many of the same decisions made by FDR are being pushed today to help with our financial “crisis”. The more we regulate the longer it will take the market to deregulate itself. This is the economics equivalent of the bigger they are the harder they fall. Can Obama prolong the inevitable failure until he is no longer in office? I guess we’ll find out soon enough.
While watching Neil Cavuto rip apart Bill O’Reilly on The O’Reilly Factor, my blood pressure rose a few points when I heard Bill O’Reilly call for the government to “watch over” banks and businesses to make sure they’re not preying on unsuspecting innocent people. He ranted that “it was wrong for those banks to lend to people who can’t pay it back” and my my blood pressure shot through the roof. While in chat with a friend, I ranted: (slightly edited to remove cursing)
(12:32:26 AM) LibertarianMikeM:I get so (bleep)ing pissed off when liberals (and apparently also neocons like Bill O’Reilly) say that “it was wrong for those banks to lend to people who can’t pay it back” when in fact it was Clinton Administration (thanks to the Community Redevelopment Act in the late 60′s) who FORCED the banks to give out loans to “underprivileged” buyers. So the banks did what they were told even though it was a bad idea, and then when things went wrong, they blame the banks. WTF? (12:32:45 AM) LibertarianMikeM:Here in Baltimore, the exact thing is happening. Wells Fargo was coerced (by threat of being called racists) to make loans available to many people who didn’t have the means to pay back to the loans. Then the housing bubble burst, and people started defaulting on their loans causing this huge mess, and now the city is suing Wells Fargo for being “greedy” and handing out these loans. (12:32:58 AM) LibertarianMikeM:What a (bleeped) up situation!
While I’m sure there were some cases of overly-zealous loan officers taking advantage of the “good times” at the height of the bubble, it cannot be denied that many banks were coerced into handing out questionable loans against their will. They were forced by legislators to go against their own policies in the name of “social progress”. Then when all the foreclosures came, nobody seemed to remember it was the government’s intervention that cause the problem in the first place. It’s oh so convenient to blame the “greedy” bankers.
But it was the Clinton administration, obsessed with multiculturalism, that dictated where mortgage lenders could lend, and originally helped create the market for the high-risk subprime loans now infecting like a retrovirus the balance sheets of many of Wall Street’s most revered institutions.
Tough new regulations forced lenders into high-risk areas where they had no choice but to lower lending standards to make the loans that sound business practices had previously guarded against making. It was either that or face stiff government penalties.
The untold story in this whole national crisis is that President Clinton put on steroids the Community Redevelopment Act, a well-intended Carter-era law designed to encourage minority homeownership. And in so doing, he helped create the market for the risky subprime loans that he and Democrats now decry as not only greedy but “predatory.”
Yes, the market was fueled by greed and overleveraging in the secondary market for subprimes, vis-a-vis mortgaged-backed securities traded on Wall Street. But the seed was planted in the ’90s by Clinton and his social engineers. They were the political catalyst behind this slow-motion financial train wreck.
Nevertheless, the media constantly repeats the lies and the drooling masses suck it all up. Then all these unconstitutional bailouts, and we’re way over our heads in debt. There’s no doubt in my mind that the only possible end result of all of this is economic collapse.
Yeah, it’s just a number, but why not celebrate with Ron Paul and Aimee Allen, the Muse of Revolution? A musing why we should continue to grow over the next year, the principle of Same-Same.
It’s official! The total size of the army of the free world has hit 6 figures. The Revolution is 100,000 strong and growing, not bad for the first summer! As I wrote here, it’s a struggle of attrition, but as McBama prances about bragging about the goodness that next wars will bring our nation, hope is building at www.CampaignForLiberty.com, not the least of which is the mysterious announcement Ron Paul will make concerning the presidential campaign on September 10th. Well, according to both the Neocons and the Barackcuda, Russia is next in line to get beat down after Pakistan and Iran, and hopefully more and more wars will mean more and more Americans will leave the mainstream lemmings and join our Revolution. Some of our patriots (apparently a new species of lawyer with principles and backbone) are even renewing their efforts to arrest Bush and Cheney this last weekend.
Earlier today Bob Barr appeared on FOX News on “America’s Election Headquarters”. He was asked the usual spoiler question, but the most interesting exchange involved the question about McCain’s charge of Obama playing the “race card”. Bob Barr correctly pointed out that such questions are not substantive with respect to the campaign and that the focus should be on actual issues affecting the American people. Barr taps in to the anger most of us feel when watching these “non-issues” get discussed ad nauseam in the news.
Bob Barr sat down for a rather lengthy grilling from GQ magazine’s Wil S. Hilton. Hilton approached the interview with an obvious sarcastic bias and attacked Barr with some of his questions. They even argued a bit, but Barr held his own, as usual. Here is a particularly argumentative excerpt:
Why shouldn’t the government interfere in the market and rein in corporations?
Is that the job of the federal government? I would say absolutely not. The government is not there to guarantee that the market is going to operate in a certain way.
Isn’t the government there to do whatever the people want? Isn’t that the whole idea of a democracy?
In a pure democracy, yes. But we don’t have a pure democracy. We have certain principles on which the nation is founded. The basic philosophy—the reason the government was set up the way it is—is to keep the government out of those areas. In our system, it’s not the job of the federal government to do those things. It is the job of the government to ensure free commerce.
Do you actually believe free commerce will cap pollution and keep the water pure and the air clean?
It may or may not.
Don’t you think the public has a right to keep its water clean?
I wouldn’t equate public concern with the appropriate role of government. The public, by and large, would like government to do all sorts of things.
And this is a democracy, and the government should do what they want.
It’s not a democracy. We have certain principles. The government exists to provide very limited functions—for example, free commerce.
The government exists to do whatever people want it to do.
Part of the problem is that we no longer have a truly educated public. The Founding Fathers lived in a very different world. They lived in a world where people understood and cared about the written word. They had a much more educated citizenry.
The reason the “citizenry” was more educated was because the “citizenry” excluded everybody who wasn’t a white male landowner.
Abigail Adams was one of the brightest people around back then.
But she couldn’t vote, and neither could slaves, or anybody who didn’t own land.
But Abigail Adams still influenced public policy through her interchanges with her husband. Part of the problem today is that we don’t have an educated citizenry like that. The citizenry may clamor for the government to do all sorts of things. That does not provide an appropriate basis for the government to do it.
Who else is going to decide what the government should do, if not the citizenry?
We don’t live in a democracy! This was not intended to be a country where the citizenry decides what they want government to do! We have a structure of government that is based on principles, independent of the vagaries of public opinion.
I’m not sure that’s true at all. The citizens can elect representatives to do whatever they want. If the citizens want to take away their own right to free speech, they can do it.
They could.
They can make government come to their doors every morning with a newspaper and donuts if they want.
Well, we’re almost at that point.
And so it goes. One wonders if they would treat Obama and McCain to the same line of opinionated questions, sarcasm, and assumptions. Read the full interview here at GQ.
Ben Adler writes on Politico.com about the likely destination for Ron Paul supporters in the November election. In doing so he recaps Paul’s campaign and brings up the racist newsletters again. I guess he needed some filler for his article. Of course he has to use one of the most negative aspects of Paul’s campaign. He also erroneously reports that $5 million was raised in one day for a money bomb, when in fact more than $6 million was raised.
Overall the article concludes that Ron Paul supporters will be split amongst McCain, Barr, and Baldwin via quotes from Ron Paul volunteers and campaign staff.
“Unless McCain does make changes in his platform,” including abandoning his support for the Iraq War and renouncing deficit spending, “I don’t think [Paul supporters] will be voting for him,” said Hart, who hopes to attend the Republican Convention as a delegate for the state. “They will more likely be voting for the Constitution Party or Bob Barr.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of the disaffected Republicans would cast their vote for Bob Barr because he’s much more conservative than John McCain,” said Jeff Greenspan, Paul’s Nevada state coordinator.
Here is another good interview with Bob Barr on the Bloomberg Channel’s “Night Talk” show. The interviewer, Mike Schneider has interviewed Ron Paul and Judge Andrew Napolitano in the past few months. He always asks insightful questions and allows ample time for his guests to answer, which is unfortunately rare in the media these days.
Barr’s drug warrior past is discussed along with the Defense of Marriage Act, the Libertarian Party, the Iraq War, Iran policy, role of religion, white supremacist supporters, and big government spending. Ron Paul even makes an appearance in a clip from his previous interview. Watch the interview in 3 parts below.
Reason Magazine is reporting that after the Barr campaign noticed a white supremacist forum post showing support for Barr they responded with the following.
The Barr campaign is not going to be a vehicle for every fringe and hate group to promote itself. We do not want and will not accept the support of haters. Anyone with love in their heart for our country and for every resident of our country regardless of race, religion, nationality or sexual orientation is welcome with open arms.
Tell the haters I said don’t let the door hit you on the backside on your way out!
One of the major criticisms of the Ron Paul campaign was that they did not reject similar support. I defended Ron Paul on his decision on that to many people, including here at Liberty Maven. The Barr campaign response on this gives his supporters the benefit of not having to defend him on it. They reject it immediately.
One of Ron Paul’s undoings was the newsletters that went out under his name, perceived to be full of racist rhetoric. That coupled with his denial to return a donation from Stormfronter Don Black could be viewed by some surface-dwellers as a supporting racism yesterday and today. The truth of course is that Ron Paul is a pure liberty minded individual. He will defend your right to say it, even if he vehemently disagrees with you. This kind of purity is respectful, but ultimately is a political campaign killer.
I applaud Ron Paul for his actions for purity.
I applaud Bob Barr’s actions today for doing the right thing.
Liberty Maven
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