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Hope and change claims another victim.
(NY Times) — After nearly 20 years of “Choose or Lose,” MTV is changing the name of its election season campaign.
The youth cable channel’s coverage will be labeled “Power of 12,” a nod to both the election year and the notion that 18- to 29-year-olds have a lot of political power if they choose to wield it.
The name change is, in part, a statement about the cynical mood of the youth voting bloc. While young people turned out in unusually high numbers to support Barack Obama in 2008, MTV’s research into “Choose or Lose” found that many felt they had lost anyway.
“They were so passionate,” said Stephen K. Friedman, the president of MTV. “And then they hit this wall of the economy.”
The “Power” campaign, to be announced on Monday, implies that choosing is not all that matters. “Voting is one step in the process — just one step,” Mr. Friedman said. “The question for this generation is, they’ve got this power, will they exert it?”
For MTV, a unit of Viacom, presidential election cycles provide opportunities to show off the channel’s relevance to its youthful demographic and motivate young people to take action.
The “Choose or Lose” campaign started in 1992. That year, at a town hall symposium sponsored by the channel, then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton was asked whether he had ever tried marijuana and he famously replied, “I didn’t inhale.” The campaign has used the “Choose or Lose” label ever since.
There have been interviews, voter registration drives, news reports, online chats and parties. On the eve of election day in 2008, for instance, MTV showed a 30-minute question-and-answer session with Mr. Obama.
But this year, staff members at MTV’s initial meeting about the coming elections agreed that a name change was required.
“We felt like it no longer truly represented the complexity and the issues that face our audience,” Mr. Friedman said.
Young people, he said, are generally disillusioned about the present and about politics, yet still hopeful about the future. “It is almost a topic they’d rather not think about,” he said.
A recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that 18- to 29-year-olds were backing Mr. Obama more than any other demographic group, yet they were also paying less attention to the campaign than any other.
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Obama’s Christmas messages this year not only ring out with insincerity and offer goodwill to none, but are more vile than ever.
As he prepares to head out to Blue Hawaii on a trip that one Hawaiian newspaper says will cost recession-bound taxpayers a whopping $4million, this is the email he sent out yesterday:
“Friend—
“Early this morning, the last of our troops left Iraq.
“As we honor and reflect on the sacrifices that millions of men and women made for this war, I wanted to make sure you heard the news.
“Bringing this war to a responsible end was a cause that sparked many Americans to get involved in the political process for the first time. Today’s outcome is a reminder that we all have a stake in our country’s future, and a say in the direction we choose.
“Bringing this war to a responsible end was a cause that sparked many Americans to get involved in the political process for the first time?”
If that were truly the case, there would have been no need for “Barack” to send out Sunday’s message.
People were involved in the political process in America long before Obama ever came into office, and will be involved long after he’s gone.
Barack, who many insist on calling Barry, as in Soetoro, is preaching to the already converted lib-left.
Barry thinks he can cover in one glossed-over line how “we honor and reflect on the sacrifices that millions of men and women made for this war.”
But he wanted to make sure you heard the news that it was “early this morning” when “the last of our troops left Iraq.”
The loudest cheers to be heard over America’s departure from Iraq come from Obama’s radical friends Bill Ayers and Code Pink.
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An old adage reads, “If it quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck.” The push by the Obama Administration to progressively strip Americans of basic liberties in the pursuit of political objectives has now taken on more draconian overtones, and no one seems to have noticed.
While the media quibbles over Romney versus Gingrich, the Occupy movement, and other diversions, President Obama continues to undermine law and order, dismantling the US Constitution piece by piece. When public officials seek to limit freedom, it can be concluded that these officials want to rule instead of govern. Cloaking seizures of power in clever misnomers does not validate the abuse of public office. What else can we conclude when Obama claims the illegal power to assassinate citizens at his whim? If citizen assassination were the only example of executive malfeasance emanating from Washington, Americans could breathe easier, except that citizen assassination, e.g. Awlaki, has opened the floodgates for a barrage of new power seizures. The ground softened, the first brick laid, Obama can now proceed unchallenged.
As I warned repeatedly in multiple articles over the last two years, the machinery put in place to thwart Islamic terrorism could be turned against citizens for political purposes, due to the broad constructions used in terror definitions. Only no one could have imagined the speed at which these things would come to pass:
The broad and ambiguous language found in the PATRIOT Act gives the president, whoever that may be, the power to determine what is and is not “terror.” Section 411, G, vi, II of the PARIOT Act defines a terrorist as anyone “designated, upon publication in the Federal Register, by the Secretary of State in consultation with or upon the request of the Attorney General.”
Everything that follows is contingent on this loose definition — i.e. warrantless wiretapping, warrantless entry, human tracking, access to bank statements and phone records, access to internet records, “enhanced” interrogation, and now assassination.
Illustrating the danger of such a legal construction is the fact that “terrorism” is increasingly used as a subjective slur to intimidate opponents. Recall that Democrats recently accused Republicans of “terrorism,” in place of presenting actual solutions to America’s budget crisis. The definition is adaptable it seems.
When the first citizen was felled by President Obama’s new citizen assassination program, the act was lauded by members of both parties as a tough and needed measure to successfully prosecute the war on terror. I counseled that this new and self-declared power would quickly morph into something dangerous to both democratic dialogue and the expression of ideas, potentially putting anyone with the temerity to criticize the President at risk. Since no one has seen the names of the persons supposedly on the classified “hit list,” there is no accountability in the way the new program is leveraged or organized.
And as CIA General Counsel Stephen Preston said to the American Bar Association (ABA) this past week, “I will make this observation that citizenship does not confer immunity on one who takes up arms against his own country. It didn’t in World War Two….” Preston conveniently forgets Supreme Court precedent voiding the actions of President Roosevelt against American citizens of Japanese descent. This kind of semantic bantering though avoids the real issue: public officials, especially unelected ones, do not have the constitutional authority to decide when or under what circumstances to revoke the rights conferred by citizenship. Citizenship is, or it is not, but bureaucrats cannot be permitted to make citizenship conditional. If citizenship can be redefined by self-appointed political overlords, then the social contract that undergirds the American system ceases to exist. Besides, the Constitution already provides the mechanisms by which to address treason and rebellion. The attempt to make citizenship conditional then is a thinly-veiled means of silencing those standing in the way of total control, a goal apparently prized by Obama. Recall when Obama instructed his staff to “identify all those areas in which we can act administratively without additional congressional authorization and just get it done.” And consider that every major legislative “achievement” attributable to Obama has consisted of massive transfers of power to the executive branch from Congress and the American people.
I wish I had been wrong about my predictions. But legitimized citizen assassination has paved the way for even more Orwellian designs. Several weeks ago, Senators Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) advanced legislation in the Senate that would designate the continental United States as a “battlefield.”
Read the article here.
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The next president MUST reverse all of Obama’s power grabs, fiats and executive orders. Congress must be restored as one of the three branches of government. Then the newly elected members must keep their power after they are sworn in on January 2013. That will take resolution, fortitude and strength from congress, so we need to elect those who believe in the Constitution.
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“Hanna Montana is the filth of the planet, worse than animals,” says Muslim Brotherhood front group spokesman…
The Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), satellite organization of the Muslim Brotherhood, deplores Disney and American culture in general. (So, how about getting the Hell out of our country? Nobody wants you here anyway.)
Read more HERE and do read the rest of this blog!
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And a cartoon that hits right at Obama and Napolitano and the administration version of profiling.
Perry: “The Wall Street bailout was the single greatest act of thievery in American history”
Inside the 1,200-page omnibus: Spending still goes up in 2012
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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hinted at Islamic fear of a religious debate at an international conference last week on religious freedom, according to Neil Munro of the Daily Caller. The effects of the first phase of the “Istanbul Process,” a multinational debate on balancing religious freedom and the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation’s [OIC] demand for an end to all criticism of Islam wrapped up behind doors without clear results.
“I mean, every one of us who is a religious person knows that there are some who may not support or approve of our religion. But is our religion so weak that statements of disapproval will cause us to lose our faiths?” Clinton asked in what Munro termed a “daring and novel” rebuke of Islamic governments. “And so there is no contradiction between having strong religious beliefs and having the freedom to exercise them and to speak about them and to even have good debates with others,” she added.
Many call the meeting a “very bad idea,” pointing out how it gives the OIC a platform to continue lobbying against Western ideas of free speech.
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As if Islamic armies could fight their way out of a wet paper bag.
(MEMRI) — Following are excerpts from an address by Jordanian Sheik Nader Tamimi, Mufti of the Palestine Liberation Army, which was posted on the Internet on December 15, 2011:
Nader Tamimi: In the Levant, we are involved in a fierce battle, and we will bring about a change in Syria and in the Levant in its entirety. The infidels divided the Levant into four states, and we will reunite them into a single state. The Safavid enterprise that led to Iran occupying Iraq, along with the Americans and the Zionists, will end in the garbage bin of history. The Caliphate in the path of the Prophet will return.
We await the caliph who will address the leaders of the US and Europe and say: From the Emir of the Believers from Jerusalem. . .
Crowd: Allah Akbar.
Nader Tamimi: to the rulers of the West, this is the religion of Allah. Either you pay the jizya poll tax, or else you will bring the sword to your necks. . .
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AW, will they go and file bankruptcy and go out of business?
(Ynet) — While Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah appeared to be in high spirits recently during a rare public appearance in a suburb of Beirut, his organization is experiencing a severe financial crisis, French daily Le Figaro reported over the weekend.
According to the article, which was based on information obtained by French intelligence agencies, the civil uprising against President Bashar Assad in Syria has significantly reduced the flow of money to the Lebanese terror group.
Moreover, the report said, Iran has recently cut its financial aid to Hezbollah by 25% due in part to the international sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic over its nuclear program.
Le Figaro said the financial crisis has led some Hezbollah terrorists to deal drugs in north Lebanon. Just last week US prosecutors indicted a Lebanese national who they said led a massive international drug smuggling ring with links to Hezbollah.
Hezbollah’s financial woes are also the result of corruption, the report said. According to Le Figaro, the terror group’s investment manager had embezzled close to $1.6 billion.
The report said that during a speech in Beirut two weeks ago Nasrallah chastised the organization’s female members for becoming, as he put it, too “bourgeois” and spending too much of the organization’s money. Le Figaro said this was yet another indication of Hezbollah’s dire financial situation.
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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wants to change how it analyzes problems and makes decisions, in a way that will give it vastly expanded power to regulate businesses, communities and ecosystems in the name of “sustainable development,” the centerpiece of a global United Nations conference slated for Rio de Janeiro next June.
The major focus of the EPA thinking is a weighty study the agency commissioned last year from the National Academies of Science. Published in August, the study, entitled “Sustainability and the U.S. EPA,” cost nearly $700,000 and involved a team of a dozen outside experts and about half as many National Academies staff.
Its aim: how to integrate sustainability “as one of the key drivers within the regulatory responsibilities of EPA.” The panel who wrote the study declares part of its job to be “providing guidance to EPA on how it might implement its existing statutory authority to contribute more fully to a more sustainable-development trajectory for the United States.”
Or, in other words, how to use existing laws to new ends.
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