Missouri's Whopping Whooping of ObamaCare

On Tuesday Missourians passed a proposition to deny the federal government the ability to dictate on health care by a whopping whooping of 71%.

When you click on the map of Missouri, you will have a hard time finding a county that did not support the proposition:

Shall the Missouri Statutes be amended to:

• Deny the government authority to penalize citizens for refusing to purchase private health insurance or infringe upon the right to offer or accept direct payment for lawful healthcare services?
• Modify laws regarding the liquidation of certain domestic insurance companies?

The passage sent a clear message of discontent to the White House and Democratic-led Congress heading into the midterm elections, however the wizards in black dresses will probably reject it, because they know best.

Their day will come. The more the wizards reject, the closer they will bring this society to rebel and end their reign of arrogance.




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August 05, 2010
The Revolt of the States
By Gayle Kesselman
American Thinker

It was with trepidation that I went to the National Immigration Summit held in Phoenix, Arizona on July 30 and 31. The summit was organized by national anti-illegal immigration organizations and was scheduled to celebrate the day that Arizona's State Bill 1070 became law. The National Immigration Summit was planned to send a congratulatory message to Arizonans who were finally able to take effective action to protect themselves from a horrendous crime problem tied to illegal immigration.

As we all know, SB 1070 has become a cause célèbre in the national media. The new law requires, among other things, that foreign nationals carry documentation of their citizenship status. Furthermore, SB 1070 allows local police to check this documentation and to verify an individual's status if, in the course of their routine police activities, they have reason to suspect that that individual is in the country illegally. As a result of these provisions, local police can more easily turn individuals over to federal authorities for deportation.

But last-minute events threatened to dampen the celebration. As a result of a lawsuit brought against Arizona by Attorney General Eric Holder on behalf of the federal government, Judge Susan Bolton was able to file temporary injunctions against several portions of the SB 1070. But instead of being overcome with disappointment, attendees at the summit were jubilant about the fact that significant portions of SB 1070 had actually become law. That this was not reported in the mainstream media should surprise no one. These details were even neglected to a large extent by the conservative media, which tended to be preoccupied with commenting on what commentators saw as the inappropriate nature of Judge Bolton's ruling. But the fact remains that significant portions of SB 1070 were not affected by her ruling and are now law in the State of Arizona.

To take just one example, one section of the bill mandates a fine of up to $5,000 a day payable to the State of Arizona by any city which openly declares itself a so-called "sanctuary city." This would include the city of Phoenix, which, under the leadership of Mayor Phil Gordon, has a policy of not allowing police to question anyone's citizenship status. When Judge Bolton ruled that the federal government had supremacy in the area of immigration law that could not be overturned by states or localities, she effectively ended the ability of Mayor Gordon to thumb his nose at federal immigration law. Of course, if Mayor Gordon feels that strongly about Phoenix remaining a sanctuary city, he does have the option of having his city pay a fine of $5,000 every day to the State of Arizona. The section of SB 1070 that mandates the abolition of sanctuary cities under penalty of law was not struck down by Judge Bolton, and so it stands.

Another section of SB 1070 makes it illegal for an employer to pick up a day laborer on a busy street under penalty of getting his car impounded. This section of SB 1070 was also left standing by Judge Bolton. This provision goes a long way to shutting down public areas where illegal immigrants congregate looking for work and makes Arizona a less attractive state for illegal immigrants to settle in.

The energy and enthusiasm at the Phoenix Summit was palpable. Attendees saw SB 1070 not as a defeat, but as a victory. SB 1070 was not made null and void, as the mainstream media would have had you believe, and the injunctions put in place by Judge Bolton are temporary. At the summit were Arizonans who were fired up and determined to fight all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. There was excitement and a sense that time is on their side.

Events at the summit were reflective of more general political currents swirling under the radar -- certainly of our mainstream media, and even of our conservative media. The fact is that almost every state in the United States has adopted, or is planning to adopt, some sort of measure relating to illegal immigration. And this is happening as a counterpoint to the vacuum of principled leadership on the illegal immigration issue by our politicians in the federal government.

According to Mary Giovagnoli, Director of the Immigration Policy Center, just in the first quarter of 2010, 1,180 immigration bills were introduced in state legislatures, and 206 laws were enacted. To highlight a few examples, Virginia enacted H737, which requires state agencies, public contractors, localities, and private employers with fifteen or more employees to enroll in the E-Verify program by December 1, 2010. E-Verify is a federal program which enables employers to ensure that prospective employees have valid social security numbers and are therefore either U.S. citizens or legal residents. During the same period, South Dakota introduced H1107, requiring evidence of legal presence in the U.S. to renew a nonresident commercial driver license; and Oklahoma introduced H2751, requiring any immigrant unlawfully present under federal immigration law to submit to DNA testing for law enforcement identification purposes if arrested. Both laws were subsequently enacted.

This phenomenon of states asserting their sovereignty in defiance of the federal government is apparent in areas other than immigration. Montana and Tennessee have both enacted legislation which would in effect nullify federal gun laws for ammunition, firearms, and firearm accessories which are manufactured and remain in their respective states. Alaska, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and South Carolina have introduced similar legislation into their state legislatures. And we all know about the lawsuits initiated by numerous states seeking to overturn the recently passed federal health care reform popularly known as ObamaCare.

As Thomas E. Woods points out in his excellent book Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century, the sovereign states that make up the United States were meant to be checks against federal tyranny. Prior to the Civil War, there was an impressive history of states using their power to attempt to nullify federal laws that the states considered unconstitutional because the federal laws impinged on the sovereignty of the states. For many years following the founding of our country, these attempts occurred in the context of a wide range of issues which had nothing to do with the abominable institution of slavery in the South. As Woods notes, however, beginning with the buildup to the U.S. Civil War and up to the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s, the issue of "State Rights" has been associated chiefly with attempts to perpetuate racial injustice. Unfortunately, this has led to demonization of those who believe that sovereign states can play a significant role in blocking the federal government when it oversteps its constitutional boundaries.

In some ways, our present divided country is a mirror-image of the one that plunged into civil war a century and a half ago. In those days, "States' Rights" was the clarion call for those who wished to perpetuate a morally corrupt and oppressive system. In our current era, when it comes to issues including immigration, gun rights, and health care, to name just a few, it is the states who are asserting themselves against a corrupt and oppressive federal government. The revolt of the states is real and growing. It is time to reexamine the issues of state sovereignty with new eyes, free from outmoded canards of the past.

The US Government has become the enemy of the people

The United States of America is not exactly what we are or have become. "United" has connotations of willingness, a choice, it is positive, but that is not how we are today. We are ruled, often by unelected masters. You cannot be honest and call the US a democracy, not when an entire state of supposedly free people vote by referendum and make a decision on how they choose to live only to have it overturned by one appointed wizard wearing a black dress.

That is hardly an isolated incident. It is how we are ruled.

In Arizona, the lawfully elected representative body of the people decided it was past time to protect the property and welfare of the people from foreign invaders. The majority of the people demanded action. Their representatives acted and again, along came another wizard in a black dress. The wizard stared into her crystal ball, saw the ancient document and new words appeared, words never seen before, words invisible to all but our rulers and masters and their wizards.



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August 05, 2010
The Prophet of the Ruling Class
By Jeffrey Folks

So now the EPA has been petitioned to ban the use of lead in bullets and fishing weights.

For hundreds of years, human beings have used lead for those purposes, and life on earth has not exactly come to an end. Now we are told that the lead used in hunting and fishing is harming animals and fish, and it must stop. The scary thing is that one individual, EPA Director Lisa Jackson, has the power to impose such a ban.

It's the same for every aspect of American life: A small group of elite administrators, czars, judges, or politicians -- often just one person -- think they have the right to decide what's best for 320 million Americans.

The political elite has always existed, but in the past, its influence was limited by a national consensus that the democratic will of the people came first. That consensus has broken down, and the elite have stepped in, determined to rule in place of, and in opposition to, the public will. The new Ruling Class.

What is happening was predicted -- and celebrated -- over forty years ago by Robert L. Heilbroner, one of the darlings of the New Left. In The Limits of American Capitalism, Heilbroner laid out a plan by which the innately conservative leanings of the American people could be quashed and replaced by the centralized control of a Marxist state. Heilbroner's book concludes with a chilling vision of the way forward. What he advocates is, in effect, a socialist totalitarian state, where the government controls every aspect of human life. In the name of reform, this statist system would regulate if not nationalize all major industries, but it would go farther than that.

What Heilbroner envisages is the rise of a new elite centralized in government, media, and the universities. This group of decision-makers would operate "on behalf of" the public and on the basis of "scientific principles" of social control. As Heilbroner writes, "Not alone economic affairs ... but the numbers and location of the population, its genetic quality, the manner of social domestication of children, the choice of lifework -- even the duration of life itself -- are all apt to become subjects for scientific investigation and control" (The Limits of American Capitalism, New York, 1966, pp. 129-130).

Heilbroner's books were bestsellers in the 1960s, widely read and admired by liberals everywhere. They were, in effect, neo-Keynesian, pro-statist instruction manuals studied by the likes of Bill Ayers and Cass Sunstein, President Obama's tutors in state control and regulation.

Heilbroner's books popularized the liberal premise that the political elite has the right and obligation to make fundamental decisions on behalf of the mass of citizens. In doing so, Heilbroner understood, the elite must find ways to subvert the naturally conservative inclinations of the people -- especially those lumpen-headed businessmen whom Heilbroner so despised. Decision-making must be shifted from individuals and elected representatives to bureaucrats and judges appointed by leftist politicians. Public opinion must be shaped and molded by elitist academics and journalists. The will of the state must be imposed, by violence if necessary. This was the future of America, according to Robert L. Heilbroner, and it is the vision of America adopted by those young activists in the 1960s and 1970s who now compose the leadership of the Democratic Party.

Heilbroner believed that it would take hundreds of years to overturn democracy in America, in part because of the widespread support of capitalism and the country's pesky tradition of individual rights. He noted, however, that the process could be sped up in the event of a severe economic crisis -- a crisis "too valuable to waste," as Raum Emanual has put it. Another great national depression or prolonged recession would make it possible for government to enact a series of "reforms" that would shift control from the private sector to government. Government would then control not just major sectors of the economy, but also the personal lives of all citizens. Their incomes, their health care, their educations, their home mortgages, their communications and entertainment, their access to news and information would all fall under the control of the political elite. At that point, Heilbroner believed, utopia would be at hand.

Everything that Heilbroner predicted is now coming to pass. In the past nineteen months, a three-judge panel has agreed to decide whether the gay marriage ban enacted by the voters of California should be overturned. The FCC has attempted to impose net neutrality, is considering reinstating the fairness doctrine to silence talk radio, and now speaks of phasing out "free" non-cable TV. Attorney General Holder has waged a virtual war against Arizona's attempt to defend itself against unchecked immigration. Congress has created an office of consumer affairs with broad powers to regulate financial and other transactions. An all-powerful, activist director like Elizabeth Warren will be appointed in the coming weeks. A European-style bureaucrat has been appointed to direct the rationing of Medicare and Medicaid services. And the EPA may now decide on whether to ban lead in hunting and fishing supplies.

The preferred modus operandi, in fact, is to appoint a single individual with the power to control some large part of American life. So much power has now been concentrated in the hands of a small cadre of appointees, most of them reporting ultimately to the President, that it is now doubtful whether America can still be considered a democratic nation. Government has become the enemy of the people because it is now in the hands of left-wing elitists who are opposed to traditional American values and who have only contempt for the democratic process.

Congress and the president have shown an appalling lack of restraint in their own use of power and in the power they have invested in new bureaucracies and regulatory czars. The liberty of every American is not just at risk -- it has already been stolen by elitists within government and the courts. Americans must drive the new elite out of government, out of academe, and out of the media. They should begin by defeating liberals in the fall elections, and by electing a conservative president in 2012.

Dhimmi Jews, Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Democrat Party Chief Jay Jacobs Support Ground Zero Mosque

The killers on 911 were not murderous fanatics, they were Islamic fanatics. They screamed Allahu Akbar as they killed three thousand innocent Americans and they were not the first Muslims or last Muslim fanatics to do so. Islam is a religion of fanatics.

Bloomberg standing in front of the Statue of Liberty, with his hand picked Christian clerics and other left wing fools is simply hard to believe.

Bloomberg makes absurd justification for the mosque by misstating claims about the separation of church and state. No such thing exists in the Constitution. The Establishment Clause was intended to prohibit the federal government from declaring and financially supporting a national religion. That was the case from 1776 until 1947 when Justice Black wrote of the "wall of separation" that the Constitution maintains between church and state. It is not in the Constitution.

The "wall of separation" claim is based on something Jefferson wrote about, but not in the Constitution.

What was in Jefferson's head at one time or another is irrelevant. Jefferson also wrote about his slave gal Sally Hemmings. In 1793. Jefferson specified that she (Sally Hemmings) should live in the nearest of the new 12'x14' log cabins on Mulberry Row, "as oftenest wanted about the house." That has no constitutional basis either regarding let's say housing rights does it? It would be no less absurd than the claim of a "wall of separation" because Jefferson once wrote about it.

There is precedent for stopping the building of a religious building near a national shrine and that was at Auschwitz.


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WTC Mosque, Meet the Auschwitz Nuns
Pope John Paul offers a model of tolerance for a heated controversy.
By WILLIAM MCGURN

WSJ

With every passing day, the dispute over the planned Islamic Center near Ground Zero grows more acrimonious. These feelings will probably only get worse today, when the New York City Landmark Preservation Commission is expected to remove another hurdle by ruling against landmark status for the undistinguished old building the center will replace.

So maybe it's time to look beyond the lawyers and landmark preservation commissions and regulatory agencies. When we do, it will be hard to find a better example than the grace and wisdom Pope John Paul II exhibited during a similar clash involving another hallowed site on whose grounds innocents were also murdered: Auschwitz.

In the 1980s, Carmelite nuns moved into an abandoned building on the edge of the former Nazi death camp to pray for the souls taken there. As with the dispute over the mosque near Ground Zero, the convent's presence escalated into a clash not only between different faiths but between competing historical narratives. As with today's clash too, it seemed intractable until the Polish pope stepped in.

For Jews, Auschwitz is a symbol of the Shoah, and the presence of a convent looked like an effort to Christianize a place of Jewish suffering. Suspicions were further aroused by a fundraising brochure from an outside Catholic group, which referred to the convent as a "guarantee of the conversion of strayed brothers." The protests mounted over the course of several years and various interfaith agreements, and pointed to the real strains that remained between Poles and Jews over a shared history with very different perspectives.

Many Catholics, not just in Poland, could not understand how nuns begging God's forgiveness and praying for the souls of the departed could possibly offend anyone. There was also a nationalist element. Many members of the Polish resistance had also been murdered at Auschwitz. And again like our present controversy at Ground Zero, intemperate reactions and statements from both sides only inflamed passions.

So what did Pope John Paul II do? He waited, and he counseled. And when he saw that the nuns were not budging—and that their presence was doing more harm than good—he asked the Carmelites to move. He acknowledged that his letter would probably be a trial to each of the sisters, but asked them to accept it while continuing to pursue their mission in that same city at another convent that had been built for them.

Let's remember what this means. By their own lights, the nuns believed they were doing only good. They may have had a legal title to be where they were. And it is likely that they never would have been forced to move by local authorities had they insisted on staying.

There's a lesson here. Even those who favor this new Islamic Center surely can appreciate why some American feelings are rubbed raw by the idea of a mosque at a place where Islamic terrorists killed more than 2,700 innocent people. If feelings in Auschwitz were raw after nearly half a century, it's not hard to see why they would remain raw at Ground Zero after less than a decade.

On the other hand, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is right about the law: Our freedom of religion means nothing if it doesn't mean freedom of religion for all. Indeed, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty—a sort of ACLU for freedom of religion—has spent decades defending churches, synagogues, mosques and even a Zoroastrian temple against public officials who have tried to invoke zoning laws or arcane regulations to keep them off a property.

Yet not all big questions can—or should—be reduced to legal right. Living together as neighbors in a free and inescapably diverse society requires more skills than just knowing how to hire sharp lawyers. Sometimes it requires leaders willing to sound a grace note, even yielding to the feelings of others who may not see our plans the same way we do.

For their part, the two people at the heart of this center—Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife, Daisy Khan—defend the center as an antidote to 9/11. "Our religion has been hijacked by the extremists," Ms. Khan told National Public Radio, "and this center is going to create that counter-momentum which will amplify the voices of the moderate Muslims."

Perhaps. But it's hard to argue with the Anti-Defamation League's assessment that the controversy created by building the center at this location "is counterproductive to the healing process."

Without doubt Pope John Paul II did not share the more malevolent interpretations attached to the presence of the Carmelites at Auschwitz. By asking the nuns to withdraw, he didn't concede them either. What he did was recognize that having the right to do something doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.

Write to MainStreet@wsj.com

Shirley Sherrod, Exploiter of Black Farm Workers and Children

Another slime ball in the Obama Administration is being exposed but where is the MSM investigative reporting?
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The Story of Annie Hawkins and New Communities, Inc.

The Other Side of Shirley Sherrod

By RON WILKINS

Counterpunch

Imagine farm workers doing back breaking labor in the sweltering sun, sprayed with pesticides and paid less than minimum wage. Imagine the United Farm Workers called in to defend these laborers against such exploitation by management. Now imagine that the farm workers are black children and adults and that the managers are Shirley Sherrod, her husband Rev. Charles Sherrod, and a host of others. But it’s no illusion; this is fact.

The swirling controversy over the racist dismissal of Shirley Sherrod from her USDA post has obscured her profoundly oppositional behavior toward black agricultural workers in the 1970s. What most of Mrs. Sherrod’s supporters are not aware of is the elitist and anti-black-labor role that she and fellow managers of New Communities Inc. (NCI) played. These individuals under-paid, mistreated and fired black laborers–many of them less than 16 years of age–in the same fields of southwest Georgia where their ancestors suffered under chattel slavery.

When I first noticed the story of her firing and the association of Shirley Sherrod’s name with the rural black poor and concern for “black land-loss”, I wondered if the person being praised was the same Shirley Sherrod whom I knew. One piece posted on the July 23rd Alternet and captioned “Shirley Sherrod and the black Land Struggle” even claimed that she “devoted her entire life to economic justice”. The mistreatment of black workers at NCI under the Sherrods is a matter of record that contradicts this claim.

If confession is good for the soul, then Mrs. Sherrod took a first step toward her redemption by admitting the error of her ways in her earlier attitudes toward poor white farmers. Mrs. Sherrod says she began to see poverty as more central than race. So, should indigent black child farm laborers warrant less reflection by Mrs. Sherrod? What lessons does she have to share from her tenure as management when she had power over her own people working under deplorable conditions at the same New Communities, Inc.(NCI) identified in the current issue? Shirley Sherrod could have included this chapter of her history in the same confession speech. Justice and integrity require at least as much accountability from Mrs. Sherrod to the poor black farm workers of NCI as to the white farmers she came to befriend. This lack of full disclosure of the whole truth is a “sin of omission” that trivializes the suffering of poor black farm workers and exacerbates the offenses of NCI.

Shirley Sherrod was New Communities Inc. store manager during the 1970s. As such, Mrs. Sherrod was a key member of the NCI administrative team, which exploited and abused the workforce in the field. The 6,000 acre New Communities Inc. in Lee County promoted itself during the latter part of the 1960s and throughout the 70s as a land trust committed to improving the lives of the rural black poor. Underneath this facade, the young and old worked long hours with few breaks, the pay averaged sixty-seven cents an hour, fieldwork behind equipment spraying pesticides was commonplace and workers expressing dissatisfaction were fired without recourse.

The unfortunate story of Mrs. Annie Hawkins and her family in particular is instructive. Persuaded by NCI that their lot would be improved, the Hawkins family stole away from the Georgia plantation that they had called home. After suffering abuse meted out to them and others at NCI, Mrs. Hawkins sadly stated that, “We stole away from one plantation, but just ended up on another.” For her courageous role in demonstrations against the Sherrods and NCI management, Annie Hawkins and her family were fired and kicked out of the house that they were promised. My last encounter with an ailing Mrs. Hawkins took place several years ago in a nursing home where she resided.

Worker protest at New Communities eventually garnered some assistance from the United Farm Workers Union in nearby Florida in the person of one of its most formidable organizers, black State Director, the late Mack Lyons. The September 28, 1974 UFW newspaper El Malcriado, page two, reported on the worker’s strike (“Children Farm Workers Strike Black Co-op” www.farmworkermovement.org/ufwarchives) and the UFW stepped in to protect black farm workers from exploitation by NCI. Fearful of both UFW efforts to unionize NCI’s labor force and scrutiny by the Georgia State Wage and Hour Division, the Sherrods and NCI management hastily issued checks in varying amounts to strikers to makeup ostensibly for minimum wage differentials. It is bitter irony that the Sherrods have succeeded in being awarded $300,000 following a discrimination lawsuit, while Mrs. Hawkins and other impoverished NCI black laborers whom NCI exploited were never adequately compensated for their “pain and suffering”.

While it is true that loan discrimination and relentless creditors can be cited for the eventual demise of New Communities Inc. in 1985, NCI’s unfair labor practices and poor leadership, were equally, if not more, to blame. Ask Shirley Sherrod about this part of her history. I know this story well, for I was one of those workers at NCI.

Ron Wilkins is a former organizer in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In 1974, under an assumed name, he hired-on at New Communities Inc. The Emergency Land Fund, an Atlanta-based black land retention organization, which shared oversight responsibility for NCI’s progress, wanted to know the basis for NCI’s continued poor performance. The author’s secondary purpose was to develop agricultural skills. For his role in organizing NCI’s workers, management eventually fired him from his $40 per week position, evicted him from the rent-free shack on NCI property and orchestrated his arrest, on bogus charges, by FBI agents and Lee County, Georgia Sheriff’s deputies in the midst of an NCI labor protest. The charges were later dropped. Presently he is an Africana Studies professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills. He can be reached at: rwilkins@csudh.edu

Mitch Who? Mitch Miller 1911-2010

Checkout the commercials at 5 minutes

It is hard to believe that as a country we were ever that naive and that corny, but I suppose we were. Mitch Miller and the Gang eventually recorded more than 20 long-playing discs, (long playing what?) many of which made the Top 40. By 1966 they had sold 17 million copies.

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Mitch Miller, Maestro of the Singalong, Dies at 99
By RICHARD SEVERO
Published: August 2, 2010

Mitch Miller, an influential record producer who became a hugely popular recording artist and an unlikely television star a half century ago by leading a choral group in familiar old songs and inviting people to sing along, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 99.

His daughter Margaret Miller Reuther confirmed the death Monday morning, saying her father had died after a short illness at Lenox Hill Hospital. Mr. Miller lived in Manhattan.

Mr. Miller, a Rochester native who was born on the Fourth of July, had been an accomplished oboist and was still a force in the recording industry when he came up with the idea of recording old standards with a chorus of some two dozen male voices and printing the lyrics on album covers.

The “Sing Along With Mitch” album series, which began in 1958, was an immense success, finding an eager audience among older listeners looking for an alternative to rock ’n’ roll. Mitch Miller and the Gang serenaded them with chestnuts like “Home on the Range,” “That Old Gang of Mine,” “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” and “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”

When the concept was adapted for television in 1961, with the lyrics appearing at the bottom of the screen, Mr. Miller, with his beaming smile and neatly trimmed mustache and goatee, became a national celebrity.

By then he had established himself as a hit maker for Columbia Records and a career shaper for singers like Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, Johnny Mathis, Doris Day, Patti Page and Frankie Laine. First at Mercury Records and then at Columbia, he helped define American popular music in the postwar, pre-rock era, carefully matching singers with songs and choosing often unorthodox but almost always catchy instrumental accompaniment.

Mr. Bennett’s career took off after Mr. Miller persuaded him to record the ballad “Because of You,” backing him with a lush orchestral arrangement by Percy Faith. It reached No. 1 on the pop charts in 1951.

Ms. Clooney was making a mere $50 a recording session when Mr. Miller asked her to record “Come On-a My House,” an oddity based on an Armenian folk melody written by the playwright and novelist William Saroyan and his cousin Ross Bagdasarian, who later went on to create Alvin and the Chipmunks. Ms. Clooney was dubious. “I damn near fell on the floor,” she recalled.

They had a heated argument. But in the end Ms. Clooney agreed to record the song, and it became a giant hit, establishing her as a major artist.

“Nothing happened to me until I met Mitch,” she later said.

By the end of the 1950s Mr. Miller’s eye and ear for talent and songs had been critical in making Columbia the top-selling record company in the nation.

Mr. Miller was the Midas of novelty music, storming the charts with records like Jimmy Boyd’s “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus and providing singers with unusual instrumental backing: a harpsichord for Ms. Clooney, French horns for Guy Mitchell. One of his earliest hits, “Mule Train,” was recorded by the muscular-voiced Frankie Laine with three electric guitars, and Mr. Miller himself using a wood block to simulate the snapping of a whip.

Mr. Miller was a studio innovator. Along with the guitarist Les Paul and a few others, he helped pioneer overdubbing, the technique by which different tracks are laid over one another to produce a richer effect; he employed it memorably with Ms. Page, whose close-harmony “duets” with herself became her signature. He also achieved what he called a sonic “halo” on numerous recordings by the use of what came to be called an echo chamber — actually an effect an engineer produced by placing a speaker and a microphone in a tiled restroom.

One Miller specialty was developing crossovers from country to pop. He had particular success with Hank Williams’s songs: he transformed “Hey, Good Lookin’ ” into a hit for Mr. Laine and Jo Stafford and did the same for Mr. Bennett (“Cold, Cold Heart”), Ms. Clooney (“Half as Much”) and Ms. Stafford on her own (“Jambalaya”).

His touch was not always sure. When he had bagpipes accompany Dinah Shore on a song called “Scottish Samba” the result was, in Mr. Miller’s own words, “a dog.” And probably the nadir of Frank Sinatra’s recording career came after Mr. Miller left Mercury and took over pop production at Columbia in 1950.

Sinatra complained that Mr. Miller forced him to record inferior material like “Bim Bam Baby,” “Tennessee Newsboy” and, perhaps most notoriously, “Mama Will Bark,” a 1951 novelty duet with the television personality Dagmar that included dog imitations. Sinatra even sent a telegram to a Congressional subcommittee complaining that Mr. Miller had denied him “freedom of selection.” (Sinatra did sometimes veto Mr. Miller’s song choices. When he refused to record “The Roving Kind” and “My Heart Cries for You,” Mr. Miller replaced him in the studio with a young singer named Guy Mitchell. Mr. Mitchell’s versions of both those songs became hits and made him a star.)

Interviewed by Time magazine in 1951, Mr. Miller was less than enthusiastic about the kind of gimmicky pop records that had become his specialty. “I wouldn’t buy that stuff for myself,” he said. “There’s no real artistic satisfaction in this job. I satisfy my musical ego elsewhere.”

Mr. Miller came up with the idea for his singalong albums in 1958, drawing on a repertory that ordinary people had sung in churches and parlors for decades. By the time he recorded the first “Sing Along With Mitch” album, he had already had success with this approach on the singles chart, scoring a No. 1 hit in 1955 with an arrangement of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”

Mitch Miller and the Gang eventually recorded more than 20 long-playing discs, many of which made the Top 40. By 1966 they had sold about 17 million copies.

In 1960 his singalong concept was given a one-time television test on NBC. The response was so favorable that “Sing Along With Mitch” became a mainstay of family television, running — every other week at first, then weekly — from 1961 to 1964, then returning in reruns in the summer of 1966. Viewers were encouraged to sing along and instructed to “follow the bouncing ball” — a large dot that bounced from word to word as the lyrics were superimposed on the screen. Among the singers featured, in addition to the male chorus, was a young Leslie Uggams.

The ratings were good, but the critics were mostly unimpressed. Brooks Atkinson, writing in The New York Times, suggested in 1962 that “Sing Along With Mitch” might best be viewed with the sound turned off.

Even at the singalongs’ height, many Americans considered them hopelessly corny. That sense only intensified as a younger generation came of age in the 1960s and musical tastes changed. There were news reports that shopping malls had begun piping Mitch Miller music on their sound systems as a way to discourage teenagers from congregating. Years later, in 1993, when David Koresh and members of his Branch Davidian cult were holed up in their compound in Waco, Tex., F.B.I. agents tried to flush them out by blasting “Sing Along With Mitch” Christmas carols.

By the time Mr. Miller’s television show left the air, his era of popular music had largely ended with the emergence of rock. He was sympathetic to blues and folk music and had one of his biggest hits in 1951 with Johnnie Ray’s “Cry,” a histrionic performance often cited as a rock ’n’ roll precursor. He had also tried to sign Elvis Presley for Columbia before being outbid by RCA. But he turned down an opportunity to sign Buddy Holly, and he was outspoken in his dislike of rock ’n’ roll in general. “It’s not music,” he was quoted as saying, “it’s a disease.” When Bob Dylan, soon to become one of rock’s most influential artists, joined the Columbia roster in 1961, it was not Mr. Miller but another label executive, John Hammond, who signed him.

Mr. Miller told Audio magazine in 1985 that his opposition to rock ’n’ roll had been based more on principle than on taste. The so-called payola scandal, in which record companies were found to have paid disc jockeys to play rock ’n’ roll records, had dismayed him, he said. He also complained about “British-accented youths ripping off black American artists and, because they’re white, being accepted by the American audience” — although that hardly explained his opposition to rock ’n’ roll in the ’50s, a decade before the advent of the Beatles and other British bands.

His wife of 65 years, the former Frances Alexander, died in 2000.

In addition to his daughter Ms. Miller Reuther, Mr. Miller is survived by another daughter, Andrea Miller; a son, Mitchell; two brothers, Leon and Joseph; two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Mitchell William Miller was born on July 4, 1911, in Rochester, one of five children of Abram Calmen Miller, an immigrant from Russia and a wrought-iron worker, and Hinda Rosenblum Miller, a former seamstress.

Mr. Miller’s own musical career began with the oboe. The composer Virgil Thomson called him “an absolutely first-rate oboist — one of the two or three great ones at that time in the world.”

He took up the oboe almost by chance. Seeking to join the orchestra at Washington Junior High School in Rochester, he showed up late for the tryouts and found it was the only one of the instruments, offered free to students, that had not been claimed.

By the age of 15 Mr. Miller was playing with the Syracuse Symphony. After high school he went to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, graduating cum laude in 1932.

He played with the Rochester Philharmonic and then made his way to New York City, where he played oboe for a season under David Mannes in concerts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He later got a job with the CBS Symphony, performing with it during the notorious Orson Welles “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast in 1938.

He also played in orchestras under Andre Kostelanetz and Percy Faith and performed in another that accompanied George Gershwin on a concert tour as a pianist. When Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” opened on Broadway in 1935, Mr. Miller was in the pit orchestra. He continued to play the oboe after he became a record producer, most notably on the recordings the great jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker made with a string orchestra.

Mr. Miller went to work for Mercury Records in the late ’40s, initially as a producer of classical music and then as head of artists and repertory in the pop division. In 1950, at the invitation of a former Eastman classmate, Goddard Lieberson, executive vice president of Columbia Records, he took the equivalent position there. In the early 1950s he was also musical director of Little Golden Records, which made widely popular recordings for children.

After rock came to dominate the record business and the singalong craze ran its course, Mr. Miller left Columbia and ventured into the Broadway theater, with limited success. He produced “Here’s Where I Belong,” a 1968 musical based on John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden,” which closed after one performance. He was later involved in the production of several other Broadway shows, few of them hits. In the 1980s and ’90s he was a frequent guest conductor of symphony orchestras.

“What pleased me the most,” he said in an interview with The Times in 1981, “was a fellow who came up to me after a concert in Chicago and said, ‘You know, there’s nobody in this whole country who hasn’t been touched by your music in some way.’

“That really made me feel good.”

A Stark Look at The US Constitution

Drudge put up this video up of a citizen asking one of our dumber masters a clear and simple question regarding our rights under the US Constitution. It was a stark comparison between the common sense of an informed citizen and the duplicity of one on the corrupt cadre of those who rule us.

Pete Stark was ambushed by truth and clarity and he wilted. It was indeed, stark.



BreitBart

Islamism is not a movement to be engaged, it is an enemy to be defeated.

I was shocked and awed by George Bush's Ramadan cookie parties, in The White House, the building scheduled for destruction by the 911 Islamists. In fact, George Bush hosted Iftaar dinners every year for eight years at the White House. Mr. Bush gave thanks for the many ways that Muslim Americans enrich the lives of all Americans. (except for the ones that had to jump out the windows of the WTC)

"One of the great strengths of our nation is its religious diversity. Americans practice many different faiths. We all share a belief in the right to worship freely. We reject bigotry in all its forms. And over the past eight years, my administration has been proud to work closely with Muslim Americans to promote justice and tolerance of all faiths."

George Bush

Claiming "strength through diversity" is about as inane an idea as sanctifying virginity through prostitution. The foolishness did not end with the end of the presidency of the vacuous George Bush. It continues under Obama, hardly a surprise, but someone will have to explain to me how a Jewish Mayor of New York City could possibly support the building of a mosque anywhere near the World Trade Center.

What have we done to deserve being ruled by such fools?

_____________________________________

It’s About Sharia
Newt Gingrich resets our national-security debate.
JULY 31, 2010 4:00 A.M., NRO

The 2010 midterms have not happened yet, but the 2012 campaign is under way. For that we can thank Newt Gingrich. Not because Gingrich is a candidate, though he almost certainly is. And not because he can win, because that is by no means certain. We should thank Gingrich because he has crystallized the essence of our national-security challenge. Henceforth, there should be no place to hide for any candidate, including any incumbent. The question will be: Where do you stand on sharia?

The former speaker of the House gets the war on terror. For one thing, he refuses to call it the “war on terror,” which should be the entry-level requirement for any politician who wants to influence how we wage it. Gingrich grasps that there is an enemy here and that it is a mortal threat to freedom. He knows that if we are to remain a free people, it is an enemy we must defeat. That enemy is Islamism, and its operatives — whether they come as terrorists or stealth saboteurs — are the purveyors of sharia, Islam’s authoritarian legal and political system.

This being the Era of the Reset Button, Gingrich is going about the long-overdue business of resetting our understanding of the civilizational jihad that has been waged against the United States for some 31 years. It is the jihad begun when Islamists overran the American embassy in Tehran, heralding a revolutionary regime that remains the No. 1 U.S. security challenge in the Middle East, as Gingrich argued Thursday in a provocative speech at the American Enterprise Institute.

The single purpose of this jihad is the imposition of sharia. On that score, Gingrich made two points of surpassing importance. First, some Islamists employ mass-murder attacks while others prefer a gradual march through our institutions — our legal, political, academic, and financial systems, as well as our broader culture; the goal of both, though, is the same. The stealth Islamists occasionally feign outrage at the terrorists, but their quarrel is over methodology and pace. Both camps covet the same outcome.

Second, that outcome is the death of freedom. In Islamist ideology, sharia is deemed to be the necessary precondition for Islamicizing a society — for Islam is not merely a religious doctrine, but a comprehensive socio-economic and political system. As the former speaker elaborated, sharia embodies principles and punishments that are abhorrent to Western values. Indeed, its foundational premise is anti-American, holding that we are not free people at liberty to govern ourselves irrespective of any theocratic code, that people are instead beholden to the Islamic state, which is divinely enjoined to impose Allah’s laws.

Sharia, moreover, is anti-equality. It subjugates women and brutally punishes transgressors, particularly homosexuals and apostates. While our law forbids cruel and unusual punishments, Gingrich observed that the brutality in sharia sanctions is not gratuitous, but intentional: It is meant to enforce Allah’s will by striking example.

On this last point, Gingrich offered a salient insight, one well worth internalizing in the Sun Tzu sense of knowing one’s enemy. Islamists, violent or not, have very good reasons for the wanting to destroy the West. Those reasons are not crazy or wanton — and they have nothing to do with Gitmo, Israel, cartoons, or any other excuse we conjure to explain the savagery away. Islamists devoutly believe, based on a well-founded interpretation of Islamic doctrine, that they have been commanded by Allah to kill, convert, or subdue all who do not adhere to sharia — because they regard Allah as their only master (“There is no God but Allah”). It is thus entirely rational (albeit frightening to us) that they accept the scriptural instruction that the very existence of those who resist sharia is offensive to Allah, and that a powerful example must be made of those resisters in order to induce the submission of all — “submission” being the meaning of Islam.


It makes no sense to dismiss our enemies as lunatics just because “secular socialist” elites, as Gingrich called them, cannot imagine a fervor that stems from religious devotion. We ought to respect our enemies, he said. Not “respect” in Obama-speak, which translates as “appease,” but in the sense of taking them seriously, understanding that they are absolutely determined to win, and realizing that they are implacable. There is no “moderate” sharia devotee, for sharia is not moderate. Gingrich noted that in response to global outcry against the prospect of death by stoning for an Iranian woman, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, convicted of adultery, the mullahs’ great concession appears to be that she will be hanged instead. Islamism is not a movement to be engaged, it is an enemy to be defeated.

Victory, Gingrich said, will be very long in coming — longer, perhaps, than the nearly half-century it took to win the Cold War. Invoking JFK, he urged that the survival and success of liberty will still require an unwavering commitment to pay any price and bear any burden, for as long as it takes. Will that entail an ambitious project to democratize Islamic countries — notwithstanding that sharia dictates waging jihad against Westerners who try? Gingrich’s embrace of President Bush’s second inaugural address suggests that he may think so.

How we go about it and whether we use our military to spearhead a “forward march of freedom” are matters the former speaker did not flesh out. He also wondered aloud why, after nearly nine years in Afghanistan, we had not tasked military engineers and contractors to blanket that backward land with highways, the roads to advancement and prosperity. But we haven’t defeated the enemy yet. One can agree wholeheartedly with the former speaker that, having taken on a war against Afghan Islamists, it is imperative that America win. But in World War II, which Gingrich invoked repeatedly, and to great effect, we had our priorities straight: unambiguous victory first; then, and only then, the Marshall Plan’s ambitious reconstruction of Europe and Japan.

Debate over all of this is essential. The crucial point is that we must have the debate with eyes open. It is a debate about which Gingrich has put down impressive markers: The main front in the war is not Afghanistan or Iraq but the United States. The war is about the survival of Western civilization, and we should make no apologies for the fact that the West’s freedom culture is a Judeo-Christian culture — a fact that was unabashedly acknowledged, Gingrich reminded his audience, by FDR and Churchill. To ensure victory in the United States we must, once again, save Europe, where the enemy has advanced markedly. There is no separating our national security and our economic prosperity — they are interdependent. And while the Middle East poses challenges of immense complexity, Gingrich contended that addressing two of them — Iran, the chief backer of violent jihad, and Saudi Arabia, the chief backer of stealth jihad — would go a long way toward improving our prospects on the rest.

Most significant, there is sharia. By pressing the issue, Newt Gingrich accomplishes two things. First, he gives us a metric for determining whether those who would presume to lead us will fight or surrender. Second, at long last, someone is empowering truly moderate Muslims — assuming they exist in the numbers we’re constantly assured of. Our allies are the Muslims who embrace our freedom culture — those for whom sharia is a matter of private belief, not public mission. Our enemies are those who want sharia to supplant American law and Western culture. When we call out the latter, and marginalize them, we may finally energize the former.

It’s that simple. Not easy, but simple.

A New Strategy for Afghanistan: Kill the Enemy.

It only took eight years and one trillion US dollars for the cream of West Point to decide that perhaps it was a good idea to target and kill the bastards that murdered three thousand of our people, attacked our financial center, their Pentagon, slit the throats of woman flight attendants and destroyed a good part of the normality of our lives.

The genius of our elected leaders, our political and professional experts, the "shock and awe" generation are finally getting it. If someone kills and destroys a piece of you, kill them back and do so in a way that they will never forget.

Well its, too late for that. Shock and Awe?

Here is Shock and Awe: We could have and should have put two tactical nuclear weapons on every camp and done so with 24 hours of identifying who and where. When we found out they were mostly Saudis we should have called in their ambassador, grabbed him by the fan belt around his sorry ass head, forced his face into carpet in the Oval Office and tell the son of a bitch they owe us $500 billion in reparations with a weekly vig of $10 billion.

Instead we baked Ramadan cookies and fired the Iraqi army. After eight years and $50 billion dollars worth of powerpoint charts, we are down to the wisdom, political genius and military acumen of Joe Fuckin Biden.

____________________

Targeted Killing Is New U.S. Focus in Afghanistan

By HELENE COOPER and MARK LANDLER
Published: July 31, 2010
NY Times

WASHINGTON — When President Obama announced his new war plan for Afghanistan last year, the centerpiece of the strategy — and a big part of the rationale for sending 30,000 additional troops — was to safeguard the Afghan people, provide them with a competent government and win their allegiance.

Eight months later, that counterinsurgency strategy has shown little success, as demonstrated by the flagging military and civilian operations in Marja and Kandahar and the spread of Taliban influence in other areas of the country.

Instead, what has turned out to work well is an approach American officials have talked much less about: counterterrorism, military-speak for the targeted killings of insurgents from Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Faced with that reality, and the pressure of a self-imposed deadline to begin withdrawing troops by July 2011, the Obama administration is starting to count more heavily on the strategy of hunting down insurgents. The shift could change the nature of the war and potentially, in the view of some officials, hasten a political settlement with the Taliban.

Based on the American military experience in Iraq as well as Afghanistan, it is not clear that killing enemy fighters is sufficient by itself to cripple an insurgency. Still, commando raids over the last five months have taken more than 130 significant insurgents out of action, while interrogations of captured fighters have led to a fuller picture of the enemy, according to administration officials and diplomats.

American intelligence reporting has recently revealed growing examples of Taliban fighters who are fearful of moving into higher-level command positions because of these lethal operations, according to a senior American military officer who follows Afghanistan closely.

Judging that they have gained some leverage over the Taliban, American officials are now debating when to try to bring them to the negotiating table to end the fighting. Rattling the Taliban, officials said, may open the door to reconciling with them more quickly, even if the officials caution that the outreach is still deeply uncertain.

American military officials and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan have begun a robust discussion about “to what degree these people are going to be allowed to have a seat at the table,” one military official said. “The only real solution to Afghanistan has got to be political.”

The evolving thinking comes at a time when the lack of apparent progress in the nearly nine-year war is making it harder for Mr. Obama to hold his own party together on the issue. And it raises questions about whether the administration is seeking a rationale for reducing troop levels as scheduled starting next summer even if the counterinsurgency strategy does not show significant progress by then.

A senior White House official said the administration hoped that its targeted killings, along with high-level contacts between Mr. Karzai and Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan’s army chief and a former head of its intelligence service — which is believed to have close links to the Taliban — would combine to pressure Taliban leaders to come to the negotiating table.

A long-awaited campaign to convert lower-level and midlevel Taliban fighters has finally begun in earnest, with Mr. Karzai signing a decree authorizing the reintegration program. With $200 million from Japan and other allies, and an additional $100 million in Pentagon money, American military officers will soon be handing out money to lure people away from the insurgency.

“We’re not ready to make the qualitative judgment that the cumulative effects of what we are doing are enough to change their calculus yet,” the White House official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. But, reflecting the administration’s hope that the killings are making a difference, he added, “If I were the Taliban, I’d be worried.”

Mr. Obama’s timetable calls for an assessment in December of how his strategy is faring. The administration has not yet begun a formal review of the policy. But while several officials said Mr. Obama remained committed to the strategy he set out at the end of last year, they conceded that the counterinsurgency part of it had lagged while the counterterrorism part had been more successful.

That divergence could lead to a replay of last year’s policy debate, in which Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. pushed for a focus on capturing and killing terrorist leaders, while the Pentagon, including the current commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, pushed for a broader strategy that also included a strong focus on securing Afghan population centers with more troops.

Still, in an interview Thursday with “Today” on NBC, Mr. Biden appeared to reiterate his earlier stance.

We are in Afghanistan for one express purpose: Al Qaeda,” he said. “Al Qaeda exists in those mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan. We are not there to nation-build. We’re not out there deciding we’re going to turn this into a Jeffersonian democracy and build that country.”

The administration’s shift in thinking is gradual but has been perceptible in the public remarks of various officials. The incoming commander of the military’s Central Command, Gen. James N. Mattis, was asked last week by Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, whether the administration’s July 2011 date for starting to withdraw American troops implied a shift in emphasis from counterinsurgency to a strategy concentrating on killing terrorists.

“I think that is the approach, Senator,” he replied.

The emerging American model can best be described as “counterterrorism, with some counterinsurgency strategy that forces the hands of insurgent leaders,” said a diplomat with knowledge of the planning. It melds elements of both strategies in a policy that continues to evolve, as conditions change.

Some of the feelers to the Taliban are being put out by the Karzai government and some by the Pakistanis. Some, eventually, will be handled by General Petraeus and other military officials. Contacts are being kept under wraps, several officials said, because any evidence that insurgent leaders are talking to American or Afghan officials could be used against them by rival insurgents.

Another factor that has spurred talk of reconciliation is a classified military report, called “State of the Taliban,” prepared by Task Force 373, a Special Operations team composed of the army’s Delta Force and Navy Seals, which has captured insurgents and taken them to Bagram Air Base for interrogation.

While the report does not offer a silver bullet for how to deal with the Taliban, one official said that for the first time, it gives Americans and their allies “a rich vein of understanding of why the Taliban was fighting and what it would take them to stop.” The report depicts the Taliban as spearheading a fractured insurgency, but one in which conservative Pashtun nationalism and respect for Afghan culture are both at play, this official said.

Despite deep American concerns about Pakistan’s trustworthiness as an ally, Pakistan has also emerged in recent months as a potential agent for reconciliation. Mr. Karzai has held at least two meetings with General Kayani of Pakistan. American officials say they believe that their talks have not yet delved into the details of negotiations with insurgent leaders, but Pakistan is eager to play a role in talks with the Haqqani network, a major insurgent group based in the country that has close ties to its intelligence service.

The links between Mr. Karzai and General Kayani, officials said, helped seal a recent trade deal between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which required concessions on the part of the Pakistani military.

“The best hope for resolving Afghanistan lies in Pakistan, and we have made some progress there,” said Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a frequent visitor to the region.

"Listen up general, if you don't know how to use your big gun, at least give me a light."