Monthly Archives: August 2012

American Paintings: Obamanation by Jon McNaughton

Posted on August 31, 2012 | Leave a comment

To those who scoff or wish to trivialize this painting, I challenge you… I DARE YOU… study the links of the various symbols and metaphors that you see. There are over 60 in the painting. No person can analyze this image and learn about these facts and still, in good conscience, vote for Obama in 2012. ~ Jon McNaughton

Click here for the interactive image.

Obamanation (One Painting That Says It All)

I chose to use an undisclosed studio so I could paint privately, without interruption, to focus on the task of embedding in a single painting all the subtle, mindless, radical and dangerous atrocities of the Obama administration.

I am just one person, a citizen of this country using my first amendment rights to speak out through my art. This is my dec
laration that we have never had a president do more to harm our country than Barack Obama.

I do not hate Obama, but I hate the fact that I had to paint this picture. Has the painting gone too far? I knew when I did this that most Obama supporters would reject what I have done. But as a Conservative, I’m fed up with the corruption in Washington. And I’m sick of the political correctness that has derailed our country!

My art is an expression of the times in which I live and people will know how Jon McNaughton felt about being alive in America in 2012.

Take the Challenge! If you still choose Obama, congratulations…you’re a part of the Obamanation.

Go to www.jonmcnaughton.com

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Complete text and interactive image linked here.

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Posted in American Paintings, Obama

Video: Clint Eastwood at the Republican National Convention

Posted on August 31, 2012 | Leave a comment

“But you thought the war in Afghanistan was OK, I mean, you thought that was something that was worth doing. We didn’t check with the Russians on how they did there for 10 years.” Clint Eastwood

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Posted in Clint Eastwood, Conservatism, Middle East, Republicans/Neo-Cons

Inside Higher Ed: Sodom, Gomorrah…Yale?

Posted on August 31, 2012 | Leave a comment

Like most people, I arrived at Yale with the idea that it was an elite institution dedicated to serious intellectual pursuits, with the ultimate aim of training our nation’s cultural and political leaders. I never imagined it would be a place where, for instance, corporate interests from the porn industry would be given a platform to market their products in the classroom. Nor did I anticipate that I would one day take my international relations final exam next to a former Taliban official.

Nathan Harden has left little to chance on people making the connection between his new book and perhaps the best-known critique of Yale University, God and Man at Yale. Harden played with that title for his own, Sex and God at Yale: Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad (St Martin’s Press/Macmillan), and the foreword to Harden’s book is by Christopher Buckley, the son of the late William F. Buckley Jr, the author of God and Man at Yale.

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Via email, Harden responded to questions from Inside HE about his book.

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Q: Yale, like most universities, gives students many options for creating student groups and organising student activities, and it also gives great leeway to professors in formulating courses, to guest speakers in their presentations and so forth. Is it fair to describe events such as Sex Week as being about “Yale” when the administration hardly sought or promoted these events?

A: In my view, it’s unacceptable for Yale officials to wash their hands of what goes on in Yale classrooms. Take Yale’s Sex Week, for example. Yale’s officials say they have no responsibility for it. Yet I witnessed Yale faculty distributing porn and sex toys to students with my own eyes. Furthermore, if a group of students wanted to host a “Holocaust Denial Week” or a “We Hate Gay People Week”, Yale officials would never agree to host such events on campus, and rightly so. Academic freedom, rightly understood, doesn’t mean that any agenda is appropriate or worthy of university sanction. How does something like a graphic how-to lecture on oral sex support the mission of Yale University? Whatever students do or say in the privacy of their dorms is one thing. But what happens in the classroom – Yale officials are responsible for that.

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Posted in Education, Radicals

Yahoo news bureau chief fired for racial comments about Romney

Posted on August 31, 2012 | Leave a comment

Racial tensions in media coverage of Romney were also seen earlier this summer. In June 2012, Politico suspended its reporter Joe Williams after he said on MSNBC that Romney was “only comfortable around white people.”

David Chalian

Yahoo News’ Washington Bureau Chief David Chalian is the latest journalist to lose his job after making racial remarks about Republican presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

On Wednesday, Aug. 29, during an ABC News/Yahoo News broadcast of the Republican National Convention, Chalian was caught on an open mic joking that Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, were “happy to have a party with black people drowning,” reported Politico’s Dylan Byers. Chalian was referring to the Republican convention taking place as Hurricane Isaac passed over New Orleans. Yahoo! fired Chalian and released a statement saying, “David Chalian’s statement was inappropriate and does not represent the views of Yahoo!. He has been terminated effective immediately,” according to Politico.

Chalian apologized on Wednesday, saying he was “profoundly sorry for making an inappropriate and thoughtless joke,” reported the Associated Press.

Political reporter Gwen Ifill came to Chalian’s defense, tweeting, “One mistake does not change this. @DavidChalian is God’s gift to political journalism,” according to Poynter. Ifill and Chalian worked together at “PBS NewsHour” until Chalian left in 2011.

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Posted in Democrats/Progressives, Journalism, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, Radicals, Republicans/Neo-Cons

Brazil Enacts Affirmative Action Law for Universities

Posted on August 31, 2012 | Leave a comment

The legislation was signed into law on Wednesday by President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil.

Brazil’s government has enacted one of the Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping affirmative action laws, requiring public universities to reserve half of their admission spots for the largely poor students in the nation’s public schools and vastly increase the number of university students of African descent across the country.

The law, signed Wednesday by President Dilma Rousseff, seeks to reverse the racial and income inequality that has long characterized Brazil, a country with more people of African heritage than any nation outside of Africa. Despite strides over the last decade in lifting millions out of poverty, Brazil remains one of the world’s most unequal societies.

“Brazil owes a historical debt to a huge part of its own population,” said Jorge Werthein, who directs the Brazilian Center for Latin American Studies. “The democratization of higher education, which has always been a dream for the most neglected students in public schools, is one way of paying this debt.”

As in the United States, affirmative action has stirred controversy and opposition here, even at some of the state universities that are exempt from the new law and have their own programs to admit underprivileged students. Critics contend that enforcing expansive quotas will undercut the quality of Brazil’s public university system, given the nation’s relatively weak public elementary and secondary schools. “You don’t create capable and creative people by decree,” said Leandro Tessler, institutional relations coordinator at the University of Campinas.

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Posted in Affirmative Action, Education, Multiculturalism, South America

Sen. Lindsey Graham: Not Enough ‘Angry White Guys’ to Sustain GOP

Posted on August 31, 2012 | Leave a comment

True enough: In a recent piece on the presidential election’s “racial calculations,” National Journal’s Ron Brownstein noted that Camp Romney needs to secure a likely unattainable percentage of white voters for a chance to win in November.

Try as Republican leaders might to foreground as many minority party members as they can find, the lack of racial diversity in the GOP is evident, and at least one prominent Republican lawmaker is becoming increasingly concerned.

“The demographics race we’re losing badly,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told the Washington Post. “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”

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“A GOP coalition that relies almost entirely on whites could squeeze out one more narrow victory in November,” Brownstein writes. “But if Republicans can’t find more effective ways to bridge the priorities of their conservative core and the diversifying Next America, that weight will grow more daunting every year.”

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Posted in Conservatism, Elections, Republicans/Neo-Cons

Survey of Army leaders: Military not headed in right direction

Posted on August 31, 2012 | Leave a comment

Further, morale is lowest among junior noncommissioned officers and junior officers and stress is a problem for one-fifth of active duty leaders, according to the survey. Those factors possibly contribute to the Army’s highest ever suicide rates, which suggest a deeper problem related to retention as well.

Three in four (74 percent) active duty U.S. Army leaders perceive their service is not headed in the right direction, according to an independent Army-wide survey. That result is partially due to the Army’s “political correctness” and President Barack Obama’s new, but questionable national security strategy.

America’s battle-proven Army leaders either disagree (38 percent) or neither agree or disagree (36 percent) with the survey statement that their service is “headed in the right direction to prepare for the challenges of the next 10 years.” Leader hesitancy to agree with the statement was undoubtedly influenced by challenges beyond the Army’s control.

Specifically, the survey took place in the midst of ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in late 2011, a very public budget battle to shrink the Army, and a shift in the nation’s security strategy that emphasizes naval and air forces at the expense of ground forces.

The Annual Survey of Army Leadership randomly sampled 16,800 commissioned and non-commissioned officers with a sampling error of +/-0.7 percent, which means there is a high degree of confidence in the results. The pollster was ICF International of Fairfax, Va.

Survey respondents identified the following reasons for not agreeing with the “right direction” statement.

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Posted in Government, Military, Obama, Political Correctness

Savage: Republican ‘eunuchs’ avoiding big issues

Posted on August 31, 2012 | Leave a comment

“Not one carefully selected eunuch-speaker has dared to tackle the big problems destroying America,” talk radio host Michael Savage said.

After a parade of speakers over two nights, talk radio host Michael Savage is asking why the Republican National Convention’s podium appears to be devoid of true conservatives.

“Not one carefully selected eunuch-speaker has dared to tackle the big problems destroying America,” Savage said.

Among the virtually avoided issued, he said, are “illegal aliens eating away at the nation’s schools, hospitals and unity”; “welfare and food-stamp leeches”; Afghan soldiers “shooting our boys in the back”; the “corrupt, incompetent America-hating occupant of the White House”; “billions in fraudulent loans to his cronies”; the corrupt senators and congresswomen whose spouses are feasting on our lost taxpayer billions”; and the “executive orders that have stolen our freedoms.”

“All of this has been unmentioned by the eunuchs from K Street,” Savage said.

He noted “not a whisper has been permitted from a true American hero, Congressman Allen West.”

Savage also didn’t think Ann Romney’s portrayal of her husband Tuesday night did much for the Republican nominee’s stature in the world.

Gov. Mitt Romney’s wife, he said, told “the Islamist killers, the Russian gangsters and China’s murderers that her husband, who should lead the free world, ironed his own shirt that very morning and does his own laundry.”

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Posted in Conservatism, Michael Savage, Republicans/Neo-Cons, Tea Parties

Star Wars – This is How Liberty Dies

Posted on August 31, 2012 | Leave a comment

“The magic is as wide as a smile and as narrow as a wink, loud as laughter and quiet as a tear, tall as a tale and deep as emotion. So strong, it can lift the spirit. So gentle, it can touch the heart. It is the magic that begins the happily ever after.” – Unknown

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Posted in Film Clip of the Day

Dovells – Bristol Stomp

Posted on August 31, 2012 | Leave a comment

“The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.” William Shakespeare