Obama’s Patriotism

By Lauri B. Regan | June 20, 2012 | American Thinker

 Last week, I attended a luncheon hosted by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, at which I sat next to former Navy SEAL, Leif Babin.  Among Leif’s numerous and impressive accomplishments is his completion of three tours in Iraq, earning a Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and a Purple Heart.  Not only was I proud to have an opportunity to talk with one of our nation’s heroes, but I was in awe of his bravery, candor, and pride in serving our great country.  Leif is a true patriot.

Upon my return to my office, I read of the repulsive comments of liberal radio show host Bill Press, calling the national anthem “stupid” and stating, “I’m embarrassed, I’m embarrassed every time I hear it.”  This abhorrent garbage followed on the heels of the news of a New York City elementary school principal who prohibited kindergarteners from singing “God Bless the USA” at their graduation ceremony, replacing it with Justin Bieber’s “Baby.”  After drawing national attention, the Bieber song was also dropped from the event, but the NYC Schools chancellor refused to reinstate the singing of “USA,” which includes the following lyrics:

Obama Campaign Sends ‘Dreamers’ Fundraising Email Hours after Amnesty Announcement

By Penny Starr | June 18, 2012 | CNS News

“Right to Dream” students and supporters block the street outside the federal Metropolitan Detention Center Friday June 15, 2012, in Los Angeles to celebrate the Obama administrations decision to stop deporting younger illegal immigrants. Obama says his plan to stop deporting younger illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children will make the system “more fair, more efficient and more just.” (AP Photo/Nick Ut)

(CNSNews.com) – Seven hours after President Barack Obama announced that some illegal aliens would be allowed to stay in the United States and could be allowed to work here, Katherine Archuleta, Obama’s national campaign director, e-mailed a fundraising letter seeking donations to his re-election effort.

The e-mail, with the subject line “wonderful news,” contains links to the website, where visitors can listen to Obama’s speech on immigration he gave at 2:08 p.m. on Friday in the White House Rose Garden.

Archuleta – who was hailed as the first Latina to run a major presidential campaign when she was named director in June 2011 – sent the e-mail at 9:08 p.m.

“Thanks to our president, this nation’s immigration policy just became more fair and more just,” the letter begins.

Liberalism Is Terminally Ill

By J. Matt Barber | June 11, 2012 | CNS News

It’s been a pitiful sight – a sad week for progressives and “Big Union” Democrat-shilling thugs. In the wake of last Tuesday night’s devastating recall smackdown in Wisconsin, tens of thousands of “Occupy” hippies across the nation have simply been too depressed to get stoned and not look for work.

On Wednesday the White House released President Obama’s detailed itinerary through October:

1. Worry

2. Lie

3. Obfuscate

4. Golf

5. Fundraise

6. Worry

Indeed, the president has much to worry about. No honest politico can deny that liberals’ Wisconsin debacle likely represents a shadow of things to come – a precursor to November.

Wintour is Coming: Obama Sides with Fashion and Privilege [Video]

Obama’s Data Advantage

By Lois Romano | June 9, 2012 | Politico

CHICAGO — On the sixth floor of a sleek office building here, more than 150 techies are quietly peeling back the layers of your life. They know what you read and where you shop, what kind of work you do and who you count as friends. They also know who your mother voted for in the last election.

The depth and breadth of the Obama campaign’s 2012 digital operation — from data mining to online organizing — reaches so far beyond anything politics has ever seen, experts maintain, that it could impact the outcome of a close presidential election. It makes the president’s much-heralded 2008 social media juggernaut — which raised half billion dollars and revolutionized politics — look like cavemen with stone tablets.

Mitt Romney indeed is ramping up his digital effort after a debilitating primary and, for sure, the notion that Democrats have a monopoly on cutting edge technology no longer holds water.

The Democrat Crime Family War

By Rush Limbaugh | June 6, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.com

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We got Bill Clinton going rogue again, even bigger and even better. And the “criminal enterprise” known as the Democrat Party… Well, “criminal enterprise,” in quotes. Think of it as a mob family. Think of the Democrat Party as a mob family with the head honcho in Chicago.

Bain Attacks Split Democratic Party, Obama’s Incompetence Exposed

By John Nolte May 22, 2012 | Breitbart News

Today at Politico, the left-wing site does a fairly good job of covering the blowback the Obama campaign is facing in its own party over attacks on Bain Capital, a venture capitalist firm once successfully run by Mitt Romney. After the Cory Booker fiasco on “Meet the Press,” followed by the Newark Mayor’s widely ridiculed “hostage video“(that was selectively-edited by Team Obama) the central issue of the Obama re-election strategy is also splitting the party writ large:

One prominent business official, who asked not to be identified, put it this way: “It’s demonization of capitalism. And that makes a lot of Democrats uncomfortable and Cory Booker’s one of them. … I think that anybody with half a brain knows that the story is far more complicated and, in fact, Bain and private equity generally have made some positive contributions.”

The Obama Contradiction

By Tom Engelhardt | April 29, 2012 | TomDispatch.com

Weakling at Home, Imperial President Abroad 

He has few constraints (except those he’s internalized).  No one can stop him or countermand his orders.  He has a bevy of lawyers at his beck and call to explain the “legality” of his actions.  And if he cares to, he can send a robot assassin to kill you, whoever you are, no matter where you may be on planet Earth.

He sounds like a typical villain from a James Bond novel.  You know, the kind who captures Bond, tells him his fiendish plan for dominating the planet, ties him up for some no less fiendish torture, and then leaves him behind to gum up the works.

As it happens, though, he’s the president of the United State, a nice guy with a charismatic wife and two lovely kids.

How could this be?

Crash-and-Burn Dreams and One That Came to Be

Sometimes to understand where you are, you need to ransack the past.  In this case, to grasp just how this country’s first African-American-constitutional-law-professor-liberal Oval Office holder became the most imperial of all recent imperial presidents, it’s necessary to look back to the early years of George W. Bush’s presidency.  Who today even remembers that time, when it was common to speak of the U.S. as the globe’s “sole superpower” or even “hyperpower,” the only “sheriff” on planet Earth, and the neocons were boasting of an empire-to-come greater than the British and Roman ones rolled together?

In those first high-flying years after 9/11, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their top officials held three dreams of power and dominance that they planned to make reality.  The first was to loose the U.S. military — a force they fervently believed capable of bringing anybody or any state to heel — on the Greater Middle East.  With it in the lead, they aimed to create a generations-long Pax Americana in the region.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was to be only the initial “cakewalk” in a series of a shock-and-awe operations in which Washington would unilaterally rearrange the oil heartlands of the planet, toppling or cowing hostile regimes like the Syrians and the Iranians.  (A neocon quip caught the spirit of that moment: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.”)  This, in turn, would position the U.S. to control the planet in a historically unique way, and so prevent the rise of any other great power or bloc of nations resistant to American desires.

Their second dream, linked at the hip to the first, was to create a generations-long Pax Republicana here at home. (“Everyone wants to go to Kansas, but real men want to go to New York and LA.”)  In that dream, the Democratic Party, like the Iraqis or the Iranians, would be brought to heel, a new Republican majority funded by corporate America would rule the roost, and above it all would be perched a “unitary executive,” a president freed of domestic constraints and capable — by fiat, the signing statement, or simply expanded powers — of doing just about anything he wanted.

Though less than a decade has passed, both of those dreams already feel like ancient history.  Both crashed and burned, leaving behind a Democrat in the White House, an Iraq without an American military garrison, and a still-un-regime-changed Iran.  With the arrival on Bush’s watch of a global economic meltdown, those too-big-not-to-fail dreams were relabeled disasters, fed down the memory hole, and are today largely forgotten.

It’s easy, then, to forget that the Bush era wasn’t all crash-and-burn, that the third of their hubristic fantasies proved a remarkable, if barely noticed, success.  Because that success never fully registered amid successive disasters and defeats, it’s been difficult for Americans to grasp the “imperial” part of the Obama presidency.

Remember that Cheney and his cohorts took power in 2001 convinced that, post-Watergate, post-Vietnam, American presidents had been placed in “chains.”  As soon as 9/11 hit, they began, as they put it, to “take the gloves off.”  Their deepest urge was to use “national security” to free George W. Bush and his Pax Americana successors of any constraints.

From this urge flowed the decision to launch a “Global War on Terror” — that is, a “wartime” with no possible end that would leave a commander-in-chief president in the White House till hell froze over.  The construction of Guantanamo and the creation of “black sites” from Poland to Thailand, the president’s own private offshore prison system, followed naturally, as did the creation of his own privately sanctioned form of (in)justice and punishment, a torture regime.

At the same time, they began expanding the realm of presidentially ordered “covert” military operations (most of which were, in the end, well publicized) — from drone wars to the deployment of special operations forces.  These were signposts indicating the power of an unchained president to act without constraint abroad.  Similarly, at home, the Bush administration began expanding what would once have been illegal surveillance of citizens and other forms of presidentially inspired overreach.  They began, in other words, treating the U.S. as if it were part of an alien planet, as if it were, in some sense, a foreign country and they the occupying power.

With a cowed Congress and a fearful, distracted populace, they undoubtedly were free to do far more.  There were few enough checks and balances left to constrain a war president and his top officials.  It turned out, in fact, that the only real checks and balances they felt were internalized ones, or ones that came from within the national security state itself, and yet those evidently did limit what they felt was possible.

Read the full article here.

Related Articles

• Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Global-Profiling President (tomdispatch.com)
• Bush and Obama, Both Wrong About the Middle East (canadafreepress.com)
• Toward a Neo-Reaganite Marco Rubio (spectator.org)
• Dubya Is Back (my.auburnjournal.com)
• Rush: Bush, Cheney Deserve Credit for Getting bin Laden (newsmax.com)
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What is ‘Disruptive Innovation’ and is it a Path to Political De-Polarization?

By Tiffany Gabbay | May 1, 2012 | The Blaze

• On April 27, The Tribeca Film Festival (TFF) hosted its third annual Disruptive Innovation Awards. Honorees included Dr. Steven Curley of the Kanzius Cancer Research Foundation and Twitter Co-founder Jack Dorsey
• The theory of Disruptive Innovation dictates that new applications or utilities to existing products or services will impact — in fact alter — the marketplace in measurable ways 
• TFF Co-founder, Craig Hatkoff, along with others believe that political polarization in America can be mitigated by applying the techniques of Disruptive Innovation, especially through engaging in dialogues with social icons like Glenn Beck
• Further, famed economist Adam Smith’s “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” is weighed against Disruptive Innovation as a means to create a just, Capitalist society

Most people think of innovation in terms of technological, rather than social or political applications, but recent insight gleaned from the Tribeca Film Festival’s (TFF) Disruptive Innovation Awards, held Friday, April 27, may shatter that preconception. What’s more, that very insight may be best illustrated through an ongoing dialogue with Glenn Beck and one of the film festival’s founders. Intrigued?  For reference, first consider the following information on the theory of disruptive innovation.

The theory of Disruptive Innovation 

Coined by Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, the term “disruptive innovation” is perhaps not common in modern day vernacular, but it is something you have experienced before and likely will again throughout all stages of life. Counterintuitively, disruptive innovations do not necessarily find origin in a specific “invention,” rather they foster a different utility for a pre-existing product, service or technology, effectively creating an opportunity for great change that leads to a brand new market. Ultimately, the innovation “disrupts” the status-quo, transforming modern-day life.

The automobile has often been cited as an example of a disruptive innovation. Although a ground-breaking technological invention at the time, its high initial cost prohibited the product from penetrating daily life and commerce. It was not until Ford motor company introduced its affordable Model T in the early 20^th century that the market for horse-drawn carriages was “disrupted” with the widespread adoption of motor vehicles. The automobile itself is a technological innovation, while Ford’s system of mass-producing cost-efficient cars from which the masses could benefit, is a disruptive one. Other examples include the iPod, which disrupted the CD market, and Wikipedia, which disrupted the market of traditional encyclopedic volumes such as the Britannica series.

The Tribeca Film Festival’s Disruptive Innovation Awards

For the last three years, under the stewardship of TFF co-founder, Craig Hatkoff,the Disruptive Innovation Awards have recognized companies and individuals who have distinguished themselves by successfully disrupting markets to effect change in the worlds of business, technology, social justice and the arts. The honorees represented a broad spectrum of innovators from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey to members of DARPA. Notably, one of this year’s honorees was Dr. Steven Curley who has carried on the late John Kanzius’ pioneering medical research in the use of high frequency radio waves to kill cancer cells. You might recall The Blaze and Glenn Beck’s extensive coverage of the Kanzius Cancer Research Foundation, as well as Beck’s involvement in bringing much needed awareness to the project.

While this year’s honorees and the fields they represented made sense from an innovation-standpoint, one of the key questions that emerged is how can the theory of disruptive innovation address the political polarization occurring in modern-day America. It may seem an impossible feat, but Hatkoff, along with Rabi Irwin Cula of the National Jewish Center for Leadership and Learning (CLAL), and The Economist’s Matthew Bishop, led a discussion on this very subject.

Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments” and how it relates to capitalism 

Invoking economist-pioneer Adam Smith’s lesser-known volume, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” the three delved into the power of perception, and more pointedly, “moral judgments.” They dissected the role each play in modern day society and how shattering preconceptions is the key to breaking down the barriers created by polarization.

While many consider Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” his greatest achievement, Smith himself saw the “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” to be his magnum opus, as he intended it to be the underpinning for The Wealth of Nations, explaining how man strives to be virtuous through engaging in moral and proper conduct. This is discerned, according to Smith, through becoming an impartial spectator of others.  He argued that while independent-self interest is in everyone’s nature, humans also innately share the same emotions and instinctual desire to please others while gaining affection, approval and understanding of their own. This, he posited, could only be created through fostering sympathy among even the strangest of bedfellows. Through planting the seed of self-doubt that causes one to question his or her own perceptions and morality, humility is thus fostered.

Shattering perceptions and creating self-doubt

Both Hatkoff and Rabbi Kula argue that the key to forging greater understanding of one’s ideological opposite is through engendering a sense of sympathy for one another. To illustrate this point, they asked participants to share their observations on the following images:

At first glance participants were roughly split fifty-fifty between seeing the duck and seeing the rabbit. A review of the second image revealed that the majority of observers saw a rabbit and by the third image, the results were completely reversed.

To drive the point home, Hatkoff and Kula also used Joseph Albers’ famed green color block image:

The laws of physics dictate that the small box in the right plank appears to be a lighter shade of green than that to the left, when in fact the green hue is exactly the same on both sides.

The exercise is meant to underscore how human beings can look at the exact same object yet see something entirely different. Kula argues that through self-awareness and, more pointedly, self-doubt raised through engaging in simple exercises like duck-rabbit, the very basis for political polarization can be mitigated.

Can Disruptive Innovation mitigate political polarization? 

Taking the lesson further, Hatkoff unveiled a clip featuring someone familiar to Blaze readers, but who was, surprisingly, unidentifiable to many in the audience. While the video featured below first came from a conference hosted by The Economist in late-March, the session I attended featured much of the same content. The point of interest begins near the 12:00 minute-mark.

Read the full article here.

Related Articles

• How to Create Disruptive Innovation (openforum.com)
• OESP’s and (Non) Disruptive Innovations (alstonroadgroup.com)
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• OESP’s and (Non) Disruptive Innovation (highereducationmanagement.wordpress.com)
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The Ryan Test: Demagoguery Versus Ideas

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Jonathan S. Tobin | August 11, 2012 | Commentary Magazine As John wrote earlier today, liberals are convinced that Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan to be his running mate offers them a golden opportunity to savage the Republicans about the Wisconsin congressman’s budget plans. Predictably, the New York Times delivered one of the first such salvos in its editorial posted […]

Smoking Obama’s Crack and Yearning for the Mud

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Vanderleun | August 10, 2012 | American Digest [From 2008. Only the names have been changed because the target has changed.] This downward flight of intellectuals has been going on ever since the Romantic movement began its counter-revolution a couple hundred years ago. No matter how much they flap their lips it’s a fall, not […]