Please note that you can leave a comment on any of our posts at our Facebook page.  Subscribers can also comment at length at our Angel's Corner Forum.

PRE-ELECTION SUBSCRIPTION DRIVE – IMPORTANT!

This message is especially for readers who've joined us recently:

Do you like Urgent Agenda?  Would you like to see us survive and grow?  Would you like to have special Urgent Agenda features delivered right to your computer?

If the answer is yes, please become a subscriber. 

Subscriptions are the life blood of Urgent Agenda.  Without them, we vanish.  We have a superb subscriber base whose support is vital, and we have many, many new readers, but we need more subscribers to maintain our level of service and expand beyond it.

As a subscriber you 1) support our work and 2) become a member of the Angel's Corner.  Members receive a private e-mail twice a week with features not published on the free site.  Members also participate in our Forum, which we think is the most provocative on the web.  You can write at length on anything you wish.  There are special essays.  And it's at the Angel's Corner where we give the coveted Pompous Fool Award, every bit as revered as the Worst-Dressed Actress Award. 

Unless you subscribe, you're only getting half of Urgent Agenda, and missing a good part of the fun.  We hope, in the future, to expand the Angel's Corner to three times a week.

So please subscribe through PayPal in the right-hand column under SUBSCRIPTIONS.  Or, in that same place, you can donate what you please.  If you don't like PayPal, let us know and we'll send you a mail address.

This election is crucial.  Your support is vital if we're to be there every step of the way.  Help us see the fight through.

We really must make progress if we're to sustain and enlarge our work.  If you are, in particular, a new reader, please consider subscribing.  If you decide you don't like your subscription, we'll gladly return the unused portion.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2010

COMMON SENSE FROM THE UK – AT 7:23 P.M. ET:  Readers Mike Scully and Thomas Wharton refer us to a superb article by British journalist Janet Daley, who was born in the United States, and was a leftist at Berkeley before seeing the light and moving right toward the Truth.  Daley understands European and British anti-Americanism perhaps better than anyone else.  From the Telegraph:

Anti-Americanism has a new pin-up. “Pastor” Terry Jones, whose congregation may number as many as 50 on a good week, is holding the world in thrall with his on-again, off-again Koran-burning stunt. In spite of his idiotic proposal having been condemned by everyone in US public life, including the President, Sarah Palin, the secretaries of state and defence, the Pentagon, and the spokesmen of every respectable religious group, this wacko fantasist would have been capable (we were told) of destroying any prospect of peace between the West and the Islamic world...

...That this absurdity became the immediately accepted received wisdom suggests that the world (and not just the Muslim parts of it) must be very eager indeed to find a plausible excuse for casting America as a cartoon country whose heartland is dominated by bigoted know-nothings. Never mind that this is the same America which, only two years ago, was being hailed by ecstatic European liberals for having elected a black president, whose father and stepfather had been Muslims. I remember saying at the time that the victory of Barack Obama would provide only the most fleeting respite from the dominant anti-American mythology which is so essential to European self-regard.

And Janet was correct.  The left is a never-changing religion.  Even the election of Barack Obama won't move the parishioners.

The failure to make any serious attempt to understand the United States and its political culture is now more than smug, stupid and cynical (although it is certainly all those things). The perverse ignorance which allows the British liberal establishment to caricature America’s obsessive concern with its constitutional integrity as simply a front for bigotry (note the BBC’s derisive treatment of the Tea Party movement) is beyond silly: it now presents a real threat to the common cause which the nations of the Enlightenment must make if they are to see their way through the present danger.

Superb point.  The European and British elitists would rather bash America than those forces that threaten their very existence.  Much easier, you know.

What is unique about the US – and indispensable to the understanding of it – is that it is a country of the displaced and dispossessed: a nation which invented itself for the very purpose of permitting people to reinvent themselves, to take their fate into their own hands, to be liberated from the persecution and the paternalism of the old cultures they had left behind.

And...

Not only is hatred and suspicion of over-powerful government embedded in the consciousness of ordinary Americans, it is inscribed in the Constitution, which provides, probably more than any document in human history, a literal embodiment of political values and a bond between disparate people which gives them a sense of national identity.

Finally...

I wonder if the Obama liberals – in their eagerness to turn the US into a European country, complete with paternalistic interventionism and bourgeois guilt – realise what is in the rest of that package: passivity, resignation and the corrosive cynicism that makes it impossible for Europeans to believe that ordinary people can use words like “freedom” and “justice” without smirking, and are not prepared to give up on the attempt to reconcile their ideals with the difficult realities of human behaviour.

COMMENT:  This is a truly fine piece by Janet Daley.  Please read the whole thing and send to your friends, if you wish.

September 12, 2010      Permalink

HILLSDALE – AT 1:10 P.M. ET:  Hillsdale College, in Michigan, is one of the few conservative bastions in higher education.  It's amazing that the thought police haven't closed it down.  In fact, it's thriving.

Urgent Agenda reader and subscriber John McDaniel refers us to an upcoming Constitution Day celebration at Hillsdale that readers in the area may wish to attend.  Others may attend by webcast.  Information is here.

September 12, 2010     Permalink

NAILING OBAMA – AT 11:02 A.M. ET:  The great Ed Lasky of American Thinker refers us to an insightful piece about Barack Obama's strange comments on the 9-11 attacks.  We can truly ask, "Is this an American president speaking?"  From Jennifer Rubin at Contentions: 

Obama’s remarks on 9/11 were about what you would expect from a president who has ridiculed his countrymen for overreacting to the most lethal terrorist attack on our soil and who can’t manage to utter the worlds “Islamic fundamentalists” or “jihadists.”

Really, let’s not dwell on the bad stuff, he tells us. “On this day, it’s perhaps natural to focus on the images of that awful morning — images that are seared into our souls. It’s tempting to dwell on the final moments of the loved ones whose lives were taken so cruelly.” Yes, it is tempting — because that is what the day is all about, to recall the diabolical work of our enemies and recommit ourselves to the defense of our civilization. But no, in his book, it’s about diversity training: “They were white and black and brown — men and women and some children made up of all races, many faiths. They were Americans and people from far corners of the world.”

As for the Islamist fascists who killed so many and made orphans and widows of many more, he has this to say:

It was not a religion that attacked us that September day — it was al-Qaeda, a sorry band of men which perverts religion.  And just as we condemn intolerance and extremism abroad, so will we stay true to our traditions here at home as a diverse and tolerant nation. We champion the rights of every American, including the right to worship as one chooses — as service members and civilians from many faiths do just steps from here, at the very spot where the terrorists struck this building.

Oh, good grief. Yes, it was a religion — fundamentalist Islam that attacked us. Al-Qaeda is one organization but the jihadists attack because of religious beliefs. And they are anything but pathetic or, as he put it, ”sorry” — they did slaughter thousands, after all. And one cannot but wretch at the moral equivalence — just as we condemn Islamist zealots, we must rebuff those who don’t appreciate the desecration of “hallowed ground” ? Also, notice the sleight of hand: the Pentagon chapel he refers to is not a mosque, not the exclusive providence of Muslims but an interfaith facility that bears no religious monikers. (Hey, why not the same at Ground Zero?) His tone is one of condescension, revealing that his mission is to talk Americans out of their righteous anger.

COMMENT:  We'll answer our own question.  No, that's not an American president speaking.  It's a man who considers himself above us, a man of the world, a man who appreciates other "cultures," especially Islamic culture.  He may not have noticed the women stoned to death for not showing proper obeisance to their husbands.

Obama will not stand up for American civilization because he doesn't believe in it. 

And the pity is that we have an academic world and a press corps that still embraces him...because they share his values, and his contempt for the American people.

September 12, 2010     Permalink

ARE WE FINALLY BEING TOLD THE TRUTH? – AT 10:46 A.M. ET:  Uh, wasn't this supposed to be Recovery Summer?  Uh, wasn't the job rate supposed to go down with the stimulus package in place?  Uh, isn't prosperity just around the corner?

Well, uh, maybe not.  Now a new White House appointee may have slipped and told the truth.  This may be a criminal offense:

Austan Goolsbee, the new chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, acknowledged on “Fox News Sunday” that the country may face an enduring job shortage.

“I don't think the unemployment rate will be coming down significantly at any time in the near future,” Goolsbee told host Chris Wallace.

Goolsbee did not respond to Wallace’s question about whether the rate –9.6 percent in August -- could hit 10 percent.

COMMENT:  It isn't just the unemployment rate, it's the underemployment rate, and the shattered dreams that go with it.  Millions of Americans can only find part-time work, or have had to settle for new jobs far below the income level of their last ones.  The Obamans don't seem terribly concerned about them.  There's no sense of urgency.  After all, those people out there – the "flyover people" – are the ones clinging to their guns and their religion.  Isn't that what Obama said during the campaign?

The American people are really suckers.  They were suckers in 2008.

September 12, 2010      Permalink

NOW, HOW DO YOU THINK THE OBAMANS WILL HANDLE THIS?  – AT 10:11 A.M. ET:  We've all been preached to about being sensitive to Islam, genuflecting before Islam, not "offending" Islam.  But what happens when the U.S. Government, in order to act decently, must "offend" an Islamic country?  This, from AP, ranks high on the "juicy" scale:

WASHINGTON — A Saudi diplomat in Los Angeles reportedly has asked for political asylum in the United States, claiming his life is in danger if he is returned to Saudi Arabia.

What?  You mean the Saudi kingdom isn't perfect?  Why, that's offensive.

The report Saturday by NBC News quoted the diplomat, Ali Ahmad Asseri, as saying that Saudi officials have ordered him back to his country because he is gay and had become a close friend to a Jewish woman. Asseri in a letter also reportedly criticized the role of militant imams in Saudi society.

Oh, now the truth comes out.  The man made friends with a Jew, and he criticized Saudi society.  Now that really is offensive. 

NBC said that Asseri, who is first secretary of the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles, was questioned by the Department of Homeland Security after he applied for asylum.

We'll try to follow this story, to the degree that information is released.  Where are the civil liberties groups?  Where are the gay activist groups? 

If the facts in the story are right, this man should be granted asylum, just as we granted asylum to Soviet defectors during the Cold War.  But will the Obama administration "offend" the Saudi king to whom Obama bowed down in that now-famous picture?

Soap opera ahead.

September 12, 2010     Permalink

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2010

9-11, THE MIXED MESSAGES – AT 10:33 P.M. ET:  By reasonably common consent, today's was the most contentious of the 9-11 commemorations.  Is it entirely coincidental that division has increased on the watch of Barack Obama?  I don't think so.

The Politico, which tilts somewhat left, tries to put the best face on Obama's performance today:

President Barack Obama used the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to try to reduce the temperature on a pair of heated controversies over Islam and religious tolerance, even as others staged rallies that could further inflame the very tensions Obama tried to avert.

Speaking at a memorial service Saturday morning, Obama seemed eager to stem what some polls show is rising anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States, nine years after Islamic terrorists affiliated with al Qaeda hijacked four passenger planes, crashing two into the World Trade Center in New York, the third into the Pentagon, and plunging the fourth into a field in rural Shanksville, Pa.

What polls are those?  The polls I've seen show opposition to the building of the mosque at Ground Zero, but no great wave of anti-Muslim hatred.  This is an example of a generation of reporters trained to believe that America is a racist society.  Even after the election of Barack Obama, the party line remains. 

After a week in which an obscure Florida pastor drew his attention for his plans to desecrate Qurans - stoking a still-simmering controversy over plans to build an Islamic community center and mosque near ground zero in New York - Obama called for national unity.

If Obama really wants unity, he might do a little work toward that end.  Insulting the 70% of Americans who oppose the location of the mosque doesn't lead to unity.  Declaring that America is at war only with Al Qaeda, when we know that Al Qaeda is only the tip of the terror iceberg, also doesn't lead to unity.  Nor does going around the world bowing to Saudi potentates and apologizing for the United States.

Obama is reflecting the behavior of America's chattering class in his patronizing comments about unity.  It has now become trendy among the drawing room/faculty room axis to say that America overreacted to 9-11, that we have temper tantrums, that we really aren't sophisticated enough for this world.  There are probably plenty of people around Obama, like Samantha Power, who think that.

And, of course, TIME, one of the kingpins of establishment journalism, has pretty much declared America to be Islamophobic.  You may be sure that TIME's writers and editors will now get even more party invitations. 

I'm afraid unity is a long way off.  But if you want to look at the major source of disunity, look no further than the man in the White House, and the establishment he leads.

September 11, 2010     Permalink

BEST SHOW IN TOWN – AT 8:37 A.M. ET:  The town is Chicago, and the best show is politics.  Chicago will soon crown a new mayor – and crowning is what they do there. 

Rahm Emanuel wants the job, but arms in Chicago are less than open.  Emanuel has the warmth of Don Rickles and the gentleness of Sylvester Stallone.  Not everyone is an ally.  And there are some other famous names waiting to get into the race.  From The Hill:

Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-Ill.) and his wife Sandi, a Chicago alderman, are considering entering the city's open mayoral race.

Sandi Jackson told NBC Chicago that both she and her husband are weighing a bid in the race to replace six-term Mayor Richard Daley (D), who decided this week not to seek reelection.

"I'm considering it," she said. "I love campaigns."

She said that she and her husband would sort out any potential conflict over the matter.

"My husband and I will sit down and decide if either of us will run," she said.

I'm not quite getting this.  Are you?  I get the sense that both of them could run.  Now that would be fascinating.

Rep. Jackson, the son of civil rights leader the Rev. Jesse Jackson, is among several Washington politicians who are reportedly thinking about running for Chicago mayor, first among them being White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), who represents parts of the Chicago's south side, is also reportedly weighing a mayoral bid. Gutierrez has been a critic of the Obama administration, especially on immigration policy.

You can see immediately that race and ethnicity will overshadow the campaign.  Emanuel is Jewish, the Jacksons are African-American, and Gutierrez is Hispanic...and they're all quite prepared to knife each other.  What a country!

For entertainment value alone, the Chicago mayoralty race will be one of the most fascinating to watch.  And to think, it will probably be decided by voters whose funerals were held years ago.  What a city!

September 11, 2010      Permalink

THE DEBATE – AT 8:34 A.M. ET:  One of the most fascinating elements of today's political picture is the debate within the Republican Party.  Should it be a true conservative party, or should it try to be a larger tent, with, theoretically, a greater chance of victory at the polls.

No one symbolizes that debate better than the new governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, who has worked wonders in stopping his state's drift toward the left.  He is a credentialed conservative, who doesn't look back, and he has advice for his party.  From The Politico:

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) described himself Friday as “the tip of the spear” in a “conservative renaissance” that he predicts will soon sweep the country.

Ten months after he and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie won their off-year elections, an early warning sign of trouble for Democrats, McDonnell suggested that the national mood is so favorable now that Republicans can win by running as true conservatives.

That itself is a controversial idea.  Remember, in 1980 there were many Republicans who thought Ronald Reagan was too conservative to win, and wanted to surround him with more "respectable" people.  You know, the civilized type, like George Bush the elder.  Indeed, some in the party proposed a co-presidency with Reagan and former President Gerald Ford, to keep Reagan under control.

“So it is the time where you should be unashamed and unabashed to stand up for those principles in the public square, and I really think –if you do that—that you will get the results that you want on Election Day,” he told hundreds of enthusiastic activists at the Faith and Freedom Conference in Washington. “And then the challenge is to hold your officials accountable to govern like they campaigned.”

That is becoming a big theme on the GOP right – demanding that conservaitve candidates govern the way they campaign.  Governor Chris Christie, elected a conservative Republican governor last year in the Democratic state of New Jersey, has won wide praise from conservatives for sticking to his principles. 

McDonnell’s obviously trying to build up a brand as a conservative reformer with results. And, on Friday, he happily engaged on issues far outside his bailiwick. He went after government’s bailout of General Motors, criticized recent changes to federal student loan programs and blasted the financial reform bill for “regulating Wall Street like never before.”

He saved some of his strongest ire for the new health care law, which he calls unconstitutional.

“We’ve got this one-size-fits-all, big government, womb-to-tomb, Washington-knows-best approach in this Congress that is, I believe, trampling on the 10th Amendment,” McDonnell said. “It’s why we see states like Virginia standing up for the 10th amendment by suing the federal government in federal court over this health care mandate.”

COMMENT:  Don't be shocked if McDonnell, despite limited experience, emerges as a presidential candidate.  The conservative wing of his party is growing in power.  If it can pull off some major wins in November, and even engineer some upsets, it may well name the presidential candidate in 2012. 

September 11, 2010       Permalink

ON THIS DAY – AT 8:32 A.M. ET:  We had settled into a kind of routine in commemorating the attacks of September 11, 2001.   This year it's different.

Incredibly, unbelievably, the accusing finger this year isn't pointed at Al Qaeda, or Islamists, or the teachings of radical Islam.  No, under the leadership of the president who promised to unite us, we have become more divided than ever before during the war on terror, and we, as a people, are being accused of bigotry, racism, Islamophobia, and just about every sin that the far left and its accomplices in the press can muster from their remarkably limited vocabulary.

Who would have thought, nine years ago today, that America would have a president on September 11, 2010, who didn't care much for his country, who considered himself a citizen of the world, and who would not say a word, not a word, in defense of those who ask for a little sensitivity toward the victims of the terrible day? 

We are now instructed, by TIME magazine and other self-appointed members of the ethnicity police, to reflect on ourselves.  As women wait to be stoned to death in Iran, as suicide bombers threaten civilization in Afghanistan, as Christians and Jews are still labeled as human vermin in many Muslim countries, we are informed that, in reality, it's all our fault, and that we are inherently racist.

Thus, the dream of many in power today is being fulfilled – a return to the 1960s, and that adolescent mentality that paralyzed our effort in Vietnam and brought forth Jimmah Carter not many years later.  Think about it:  If it were not for Ronald Reagan, what would have happened to our country?

So on this September 11th, let us pledge to restore our society, something that can begin through the most noble of our traditions, a free election in less than two months.  We have a clear choice, between the drift toward mediocrity and regimentation inherent in our current course, or a restoration of the nation that we fear we are losing.  It will either be morning in America again, or it will be an America that many of us will be embarrassed to leave to our children.

September 11, 2010     Permalink