An odd old saying

There is an old tripartite saying that sticks in my mind -- mainly because I don't understand the second part, I think. It was said to be fatherly advice given by a British aristocrat to his son:

1. Never drink port after champagne.

2. Never hunt south of the Thames

3. Never give your lady one in the morning. You never know what might come up during the day.

I would be interested if anybody knows other versions of that advice and if anybody knows who first uttered it. I remember reading it long ago in a book but have quite forgotten which one.

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Under Barack Obama, US is obsessed with race but can't talk about it

Barack Obama's election did not usher in a post-racial America. Instead, speaking honesty about race is taboo

A year ago, Americans were basking in what many believed was a post-racial new dawn. The United States was just about to inaugurate its first black President. Across the world, those who had pronounced the country too mired in its past to elect an African-American were being forced to reassess.

Fast forward to last week and the American chattering classes were engaged in the kind discussion about race that makes one despair. I use the term "discussion" but that's over-egging things - it was really a mud-slinging contest in which Republicans and Democrats shouted tired old slogans at each other. The matter at issue was comments by Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, made during the 2008 election campaign. Obama was electable, Reid observed, because he was "light-skinned" and did not "speak with a Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one".

Reid knew he was in big trouble and immediately rushed out a statement of apology when his words, quoted in a new campaign book, became public. He had forgotten that race was a taboo subject. His use of the term "Negro" was a little anachronistic, though the National Council of Negro Women and United Negro College Fund still exist. But it wasn't exactly the other N-word.

Reid, who is fighting for his political life in Nevada, where polls have him trailing badly in his November re-election contest, has said many stupid things. Three years ago, he declared that the Iraq war "is lost". Last month he compared Republicans who opposed healthcare reform to those who once clung to slavery. But this time his sin was really to speak the truth. Part of candidate Obama's special appeal was that he was a black man who made white people feel exceedingly good about themselves - not least because he was half white and had been raised by a white mother and grandparents.

At the same time, Obama showed himself to be at ease among blacks who had, unlike him, lived through the civil rights area and were descended from slaves. Thus, Obama walked the tightrope between being too black and being not black enough. One of the ways he did that was to alter his tone and cadence depending on the audience he was speaking to - as many politicians do. He was elected partly because of a huge black turnout in which 95 per cent of blacks voted for him. But he also improved on the proportion of white voters who had backed the white Democratic candidate in 2004.

It was Republicans who jumped on Reid and accused him, with stultifying predictability, of being a racist. But Democrats have played the same game. Allies of the Obama campaign insinuated that Hillary Clinton was racist when she stated that it took President Lyndon Johnson to turn Martin Luther King's vision into reality. Even Bill Clinton, the much-vaunted "first black president", was branded a racist (the code used was "playing the race card") for declaring Obama's candidacy a "fairy tale".

Ditto for the Clinton operative who stated that Obama was like "your cool black friend". Ditto for the Republican congressional candidate said of Obama "you can have your Tiger Woods" (and that was when Woods was Mr Squeaky Clean). They had both broken the unspoken rule that white politicians should avoid talking about race beyond the occasional homage to "diversity".

When Congressman Joe Wilson yelled the intemperate accusation "You lie!" at Obama during a presidential speech to Congress last year, former President Jimmy Carter said that he was motivated by racism. Columnist Maureen Dowd opined that Wilson really meant: "You lie, boy!" Last July, Obama didn't exactly help matters by publicly leaping to the conclusion that a white policeman arresting a black Harvard professor was acting "stupidly".

Republican operatives confide that one of the reasons why Michael Steele cannot be ousted as party chairman just yet - despite widespread dissatisfaction with his performance - is because he is black.

So what happened to treating people not "by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character"? Ironically, Martin Luther King Day will be marked across the country tomorrow but this dream of King's is not being fulfilled. American politicians have got themselves into a real bind. They have to fret constantly about race but cannot talk honestly about it.

SOURCE

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Evil, Capitalistic, Bigoted America Comes to Haiti’s Assistance

Just as it is always ready to assist in natural disasters worldwide

Thursday morning I was watching Fox & Friends to see what was going down in the aftermath of the apocalyptic earthquake that rocked Haiti. As I sat there in my shorts drinking my coffee, I was gobsmacked as I viewed the insane carnage inflicted by the 7.0 death-dealer that crushed that little nation seven hundred miles from my Miami bunker.

As the horrendous before and after satellite images of a city flattened by mother nature rolled, I became prouder and prouder of how the U.S., our magnificent military, and a stack of high-quality Christian organizations are flying into high gear with millions of dollars and thousands of people to sacrificially help—as in risk their lives—to do whatever they can to assist during such unimaginable suffering.

Basking in the warm glow of the American spirit in such a tragic event, I started getting kinda, sorta ticked off regarding how the Lefties repeatedly pitch our nation as an evil, bigoted, greedy, capitalistic, militarily-oppressive regime that loves to squish the underdogs.

Y’know, in reality—as in a blistering, natural disaster reality—one always finds that it is America that rocks the hardest in regard to real relief. We blow away other nations. Yep, whether it is a tsunami or an earthquake, you can count on evil, mean, nasty, bigoted, murderous, Christian American men and women to be the first responders to offer no-BS help in time of need.

It’ll be interesting to see how many (and at what level) Muslim organizations and nations, atheist organizations, Code Pink, PETA punks, Chavez and Castro, GLSEN, euro-socialist dillweeds, Green Peace, and Avatar’s woodsy blue people pony up and help the Haitians through their hellish nightmare. I wonder if they’ll even come close to our American Judeo-Christian largesse?

It’s also really interesting to me how mean, white America runs to relieve a city that’s 99.9% black without blinking. At least we’re not going around like Reid, Biden and Byrd and calling them “clean Negroes” who can turn their black slang on and off.

This just in! A buddy of mine Facebooked me a moment ago about how a couple of his evil Christian friends just got back from a 10-day missions trip to Haiti and are trying to head back. He continued to say that it is, no doubt, just a show they're putting on to advance the conservative agenda and subvert the Religion of Peace.

In addition, my co-host on ClashRadio.com, Steve Pauwels sent me this note on Friday regarding his Marine son Sam saying, “We seek your prayers for our middle son, Sam, who is now awaiting his newest deployment down to Haiti … When I asked Sam how he was doing one hour ago, he said: "Fine. We just want to go." (Note; he and his unit have been back in the states for ONE MONTH after being overseas for six months).” Ah, our evil wicked soldiers, eh Lefties?

You know, at the end of the day, countries and people who need true aid and who long for authentic liberty always look to the massive helping hands of the Judeo-Christian rooted, God blessed American men, women and military—and not to secularists, atheists, Islamists and grimy hippies who regularly blather about how bad America is.

SOURCE

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Republican Brown drives hard for Kennedy's seat

During last fall's tepid GOP primary, Scott Brown's campaign was overshadowed by a feisty four-way Democratic fight _ stoking Republican fears he'd be unable to catch winner Martha Coakley during the general election for the late Edward Kennedy's Senate seat. But Brown, whose basketball skills helped him win college admission, has proved as nimble on the campaign trail as the parquet floor.

When Coakley faded from the campaign trail over the holidays, Brown held daily press events, then posted the first television ad of the final election stretch, comparing himself with the late President John F. Kennedy. Coakley's air of inevitability evaporated.

For Brown, the breathing room let him define himself as a truck-driving everyman, a doting father and the candidate best suited to push back against a Democratic-dominated Senate. "If you want someone to lower your taxes and bring common sense back to Washington, then join with me," Brown said in a campaign ad that showed him shaking hands in the working-class neighborhood of South Boston.

Reinvention is a skill Brown has used throughout his career, seizing opportunities where he found them. As an undergraduate, he didn't just rely on his athletic skills, but also delved into singing and acting. He traded on his matinee good looks for work as a model, and while still in law school, he posed nude for Cosmopolitan magazine _ in a photo spread with a strategically placed crease in the magazine. Later he enlisted in the National Guard and launched a political career that took him from the Wrentham Board of Selectmen to the Massachusetts House and Senate.

Brown said his dedication to hard work and family grew out of a difficult childhood. "I didn't come from a lot of money," he said in a recent debate. "My parents are divorced a few times. My mom was on welfare for a period of time. I really came from nothing and worked my way up."

That work ethic has helped Brown come within striking distance of Coakley. He's crisscrossed the state with the stamina of an athlete training for a triathlon, which Brown does between real estate closings and legislative work. On the campaign trail and in debates, Brown has drawn bright lines between himself and his Democratic opponent _ something Democrats now believe Coakley should have also been doing.

Massachusetts Democratic political consultant Mary Ann Marsh said Brown has been able to capitalize on his strengths during the brief six-week sprint to the special election in part because Coakley and her supporters sat back after she won the Democratic primary. "In a six-week race, he was given the advantage of having the field to himself for the first four weeks," she said. "He was able to define himself, define the race and define her, and nobody questioned him."

Brown, who defeated businessman Jack E. Robinson to win the GOP nomination, has vowed to be the 41st vote in the Senate against President Barack Obama's health care initiative. He's portrayed Coakley as a big-spending liberal who's naive on foreign policy and soft on the treatment of terrorism suspects. "To think that we would give people who want to kill us constitutional rights and lawyer them up at our expense instead of treating them as enemy combatants to get as much information as we can under legal means _ it just makes no sense to me," Brown said....

More HERE

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Obama's first year by the numbers

7,949.09 -- Dow Jones Industrial Average close on Jan. 20, 2009.

10,609.65 -- Dow Jones Industrial Average close on Jan. 15, 2010.

13 million -- Number of people 16 and older unemployed as of January 2009.

14.7 million -- Number of people 16 and older unemployed as of December 2009.

7.7 percent -- Unemployment rate January 2009

10.0 percent -- Unemployment rate December 2009

$787 billion -- Cost of economic stimulus approved by Congress.

$10.6 trillion -- Outstanding public debt Jan. 20, 2009.

More here

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ELSEWHERE



US Navy en route to make Haiti seaport usable: "The Navy is going to try to get the wrecked seaport in Haiti's capital up and running. A Navy commander says the salvage ship Grasp is en route to Port-au-Prince with divers and underwater construction personnel to assess the damage to piers and other port facilities. Rear Admiral Victor G. Guillory said Saturday the Navy will help build temporary piers and other facilities. Guillory is Navy commander for the U.S. Southern Command. For now, the Navy is moving supplies from the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, and sailors are helping to move supplies from Haiti's airport to distribution centers, Guillory said. Denis McDonough of the National Security Council says the destroyed port makes it harder to distribute aid.

A straw in the wind: "Just got off the phone with a friend of mine who lives near Boston. He and his wife are not Republicans (and very clear on that point!) but they are voting for Scott Brown. Why? Because they think "the whole Reid-Pelosi machine is scary." That's interesting to me. Perhaps it's not only Republicans who have looked at the way Democrats have pressed on with health care, impervious to (even contemptuous of) public opinion, and recognized the very real threat it represents to our body politic."

Ratings soar for O'Brien: "Conan O'Brien's ratings are soaring as he nears a bitter exit from NBC's "Tonight" show, his ridicule of his network executives apparently resonating in a country filled with the unemployed. His ratings Friday were 50 percent higher than they've been this season, and he beat CBS' David Letterman, according to a preliminary Nielsen Co. estimate based on large markets. In the 18-to-49-year-old demographic that NBC relies on to set advertising prices, O'Brien even beat Jay Leno's prime-time show".

Another newspaper folds for good: "The holding company for MediaNews Group Inc. newspapers, including The Denver Post and San Jose Mercury News, says it plans to file for bankruptcy protection. Affiliated Media Inc. said Friday it would file a "prepackaged" plan already approved by lenders, which should allow it to emerge from bankruptcy more quickly. It would be at least the 13th bankruptcy filing by a U.S. newspaper publisher in the past 13 months. The owners of dozens of newspapers have been pushed into bankruptcy protection as the recession and competition from the Internet have sapped advertising revenue."

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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