Gang fight gets serious

Wait for it.


via

Ukrainian Parliament fight

The members of the Ukrainian Parliament sure love a good fight.

Members of president Viktor Yanukovich's party stormed the parliament podium last night after supporters of Yulia Tymoshenko, leader of the opposition, currently under investigation for acts of corruption, blocked it, protesting against the political repressions against her. According to reports, 5 members of the opposition were hospitalized.


The Telegraph

Real-life GTA from Russia

Crazy belligerent drunk driver goes bananas on the streets of Moscow. It takes a lot of people to stop him.

(Warning: violent video, real-life GTA)


via

John McCain Fighting Back: Straight Talk, Hard Questions Time

Obama and Issues:
What John McCain must say and ask


McCAIN THE FIGHTER: This photo provided by the Library of Congress shows John McCain, (front, right) with his squadron in 1965. McCain, a former Navy fighter pilot, was captured by the Vietnamese, tortured and imprisoned for more than five years. He was awarded the Silver Star, Bronze Star, Legion of Merit, Purple Heart, Distinguished Flying Cross Medal, Prisoner of War (POW) Medal. McCain, 70, a Republican senator from Arizona making his second presidential run who knows what it's like to have fought before and lost, agrees with President Bush on sending 21,500 more troops to Iraq.

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Barack Obama is wrong on virtually every issue. John McCain will not list the reasons why.

I have pretty much thrown in the towel on the McCain campaign because I am tired of caring more about his winning the White House than he does.

John McCain is a good man. Yet he simply does not make the case. I will again try to make the case for him. I pray that my advice gets heeded.

Barack Obama will raise taxes. That can be stated over and over, but unless it is properly explained, it is a meaningless phrase. Barack Obama claims he wants to cut taxes for 95% of Americans. He also plans to repeal the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. Repealing tax cuts is exactly the same thing as raising taxes. Additionally, it is impossible mathematically to lower taxes on 95% of Americans when only 62% of Americans pay any taxes at all. How do the other 33% have their taxes lowered when they pay nothing? The answer is “refundable tax credits,” which in English means wealth redistribution, aka socialism.

Some will scream that calling Obama a socialist is a slur. No, it is not. What bothers me is not the socialism, but the refusal to admit it.

On health care, Obama wants mandates. How will these mandates be enforced? Will people be fined? Obama says no, but does not answer how he will enforce mandates. Also, Obama claims that 47 million Americans do not have health care. 15 million of those people are illegal aliens. When asked whether he favored covering them during the primaries, he was all over the map. Also, what about young people that refuse to purchase health care for their own selfish reasons? Should they be fined or sanctioned?

On trade, Obama is moving away from the free trade policies of recent democratic and republican Presidents. He blames President Bush for shattering our relationships with our allies. Yet he then says he will veto trade deals with South Korea and Latin American countries, as well as revise NAFTA. Does he understand that rejecting our allies in this manner will push them into the arms of countries that hate America, such as Venezuela? He praises Bill Clinton and the economy of the 1990s. Doesn’t he realize that free trade helped spur this economy?

On Iraq, Obama was against the surge, which worked. Yet this argument is not enough. Obama has stated that he was against the war from the very beginning. Fair enough. This means that if he was in power, he would not have gone into Iraq. This then means that Saddam Hussein under an Obama administration would still be in power.

Is Obama delighted that Saddam Hussein has been removed? No matter how he tries to dance around this, the yes or no question remains whether or not he is glad Saddam is gone. If he finally does say yes, than he needs to be reminded that President George W. Bush made this decision.

When Obama points out that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, remind him that the issue is not Iraq and 9/11. The issue is Iraq and terrorism. Saddam was not behind 9/11. He absolutely was connected to terrorism. He gave $25,000 to the families of Palestinian homicide bombers. Saddam Hussein absolutely was a terrorist. Does Obama agree or disagree with this statement?

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On October 26th, 1967, while on his 23rd bombing mission, a surface to air missile hit McCain's plane, forcing him to eject, knocking him unconscious and breaking both his arms and his leg. He fell into a lake where he used his teeth to inflate his life vest. A North Vietnamese mob dragged him out of the water, where someone in the crowd bayoneted him and turned over to the local authorities. --The 40th Anniversary of John McCain's Capture by the North Vietnamese

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The Saddam Hussein angle absolutely relates to Israel. Obama claims to be supportive of Israel, despite claiming that “nobody has suffered more than the Palestinians.” My Holocaust surviving father would disagree. How can one who supports Israel have a problem with the forcible removal of one of Israel’s biggest enemies? I would then mention every anti-Israel person Obama has relied on for advice. General Tony McPeak blames Jews in New York and Miami for the current world problems. David Bonior, a rabidly antio-israel former Congressman from Michigan, was part of his circle of advisers. So was Samantha Power.

Obama shoves people under the bus after they get caught making anti-Israel statements, but not before. Or he just disavows that they ever are or were advisers. It depends what the meaning of “advisers” is. As for Jeremiah Wright, his position on Israel is well known and available for all to see.

Regarding Iran, the argument that he wants to dialogue with Iran is not enough. A more convincing train of thought is necessary. Would he support a resolution to bring Iranian President Armageddonijad up on war crimes before the Hague Court? After all, he was one of the hostage takers during the 1979 hostage crisis. The fact that he leads a nation does not alter the fact that he is a 30 year fugitive.

Obama wants to close down Guantanamo Bay. Fair enough. Where does he want to keep the detainees? They have to be kept somewhere. Also, would he be willing to turn them over to other governments if he suspected they would resort to methods to obtain information that we would not? After all, we do not have the right to tell other nations how to handle their criminals, do we?

With regards to the current situation on Wall Street, he blames President Bush for a culture of deregulation. While Ronald Reagan did deregulate many industries, George W. Bush did not create any new notable deregulatory measures. Can Obama name three specific examples of deregulation under the Bush Presidency? Also, does he realize that Sarbanes-Oxley increased regulations, and made things much worse?

If he is willing to go after the “bad guys,” does that mean former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines? Will he investigate Chris Dodd? Will anybody notice that Congressional Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank had an inappropriate sexual relationship with a banker he was supposed to be monitoring?

Notice I did not say “homosexual relationship.” If Barney Frank tries to make this a gay-bashing issue in the tradition of Jim McGreevey, stick to the fact that this is no different from the Jon Corzine sexual scandal, which was heterosexual. Also, this is not about sex. It is about undue influence and corruption. The fact that it is sexual, and homosexual at that, is irrelevant. It is no different than bribery or other financial misdeeds.

Does Obama support forcing lenders to make loans to poor people with bad credit? That contributed to the current mess in the first place. Is he willing to demand that a certain percentage of loans go to minorities, regardless of ability to pay? Should the government simply buy the homes for them?

For those who are still taking notes, or are at least cutting and pasting, observe that none of the above has anything to do with William Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Acorn, Louis Farrakhan, Rasheed Khalidi, or others that Barack Obama has shoved under the bus. I personally believe all of these people are fair game if expressed properly. Yet what I am emphasizing is that even if such topics as these make one squeamish, there are plenty of issues above to show that Barack Obama is somebody that simply has a problem with telling the truth.

Nobody of any substance is saying that Barack Obama is a terrorist, a closet Muslim, an Arab, or a hater of America. He is a Christian, a good husband, and a good father. He is also a man that associates with ne’er do wells, and then disavows them once they become hurtful to him. This does not make Obama a criminal. It makes him a conventional Chicago politician.

He does not transcend race. He does not transcend politics. He does not transcend anything. He climbed the ranks of Chicago, which does not happen ethically.

He was a community organizer. So are Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. This is not about race. It is about corruption. Community Organizers are agitators. They are rabble rousers. This is how Obama ended up knee deep in ACORN. They are sympatico in their belief that community organizing, regardless of the law, is fair game.

Some will say he has bad judgment. This is not a fair argument because it implies a certain innocence or naivete on Obama’s part. He may be naive on foreign policy, but with regards to his associations, he knew exactly what he was doing. He got elected in Chicago by getting his challengers thrown off of the ballot. This is neither illegal or unusual. However, it reinforced Obama as a typical politician that will bend the rules to win.

What about Russia? Or Pakistan? What about Obama and cultural issues?

Continue reading: What John McCain must say and ask.

WANT MORE eric and The Tygrrr Express? Try these recent posts: * My Interview with Senator Trent Lott * My Interview With Miss Texas * Ideological Bigotry Part XVI–Yom Kippur and Lesbianism

by eric
images: DBKP file; politicomafioso
Source: What John McCain must say and ask.

Fightthesmears.com: Only Straw Man Obama Rumors Need Apply

"What you won't hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon--that sees our opponents not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to demonize. Because we may call ourselves Democrats and Republicans, but we are Americans first. We are always Americans first." ~ Barack Obmama, June 3, 2008"
--from the header at Obama's Fight the Smears.com

ALSO at DBKP.com: FighttheSmears.com: Obama Site Another Attempt to Limit Discussion

A round-up of predictable headlines from the (largely) usual WWW suspects.

* Ben Smith notes in "Fighting smears, gaming Google" an email by Wired's Thomas Goetz:

By putting their own website out there front-and-center, and then getting everybody to link to it (starting with all the media covering the launch of the site), the result will be to drive fightthesmears.com towards the top of a Google search on, say, "obama muslim" or "michelle obama whitey". Ideally, if enough of the pro-Obama network links to fightthesmears.com, it'll drive the sites that peddle in the rumor-mongering, which are now the first results on said searches, off the top of the results list. Ideal long term result: any curious low-information voter who eventually bothers to google these pesky rumors will immediately be led to the debunking rather than the rumor.

My take: Did the Obama campaign create fightthesmears.com to game Google? If so, they're even more net-savvy than folks give them credit for.

Excellent tech-savvy observation!

* The same Brave New Folks ask "Can Sunshine Help Obama Fight the Slime?" New Republic is certainly an expert on slime: it was the home Baghdad Diarist, Thomas Scott Beauchamp. TNR's Michelle Cottle gushes:

The fabulous Karen Tumulty has a piece up over at Time.com today (sorry, for some reason can't get our blog's link function to work; go to Time.com's home page and you'll see it) about Obama's rumor-fighting initiative, a web site called fightthesmears.com that seeks to confront head on all those nasty flasehoods being whispered--and emailed--about him and his family. In addition to debunking the more pernicious tales, the site asks Obama supporters to, with a click of a button, "Spread the Word" about the truth (or, rather, the lack thereof) behind such rumors.

Too bad about that link function.

* MSNBC chips in with "OBAMA CAMP TRIES TO 'FIGHT THE SMEARS'", where NBC/NJ's Athena Jones also does her bit to add to the Obama fluffery.

Obama's campaign has mastered the use of the Internet for fundraising. His backers have used viral videos like the "Yes we can" mash-up and the 'Empire Strikes Barack'-style videos to rev up supporters. But there have also been instances where the Web has hurt Obama, like the Rev. Wright playing on a loop on YouTube. There have also been numerous emails about Obama being a Muslim and a man who refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance and most recently messages accusing his wife Michelle of uttering a racial epithet at Obama's former church. (The first two are demonstrably untrue, and Michelle has denied the latter and Obama himself has challenged anyone with video of his wife making the remarks to produce it.)

Rather, Obama is challenging anyone to produce a video he first said doesn't exist.

And Time is commenting on its own story, with "TIME: Obama Fights the Smears".

The Illinois Senator launches a “Web-based rumor clearinghouse” to counter the online rumors about his faith, family and connections with controversial figures.

Obama adviser Anita Dunn: “We will not allow Michelle—or, for that matter, Barack—to be defined by rumors.”

Does this mean that anything Obama doesn't want discussed will end up on FighttheSmears.com?

Or do only straw man rumors need apply?

by Mondoreb
images: fightthesmears.com