French Amb and Israel. It So Happened. How To Debate. Saved Dagny From Political Career? Ms. Lucy and Me.

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Talk about identity politics. This may be informative and even correct but it ain't what America should be about:

Click here: "Liberals With Guns!" - YouTube
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Many years ago the French Ambassador to Great Britain was at a dinner party and made a derogatory comment about Israel. He was subsequently relieved of his position.

He also was wrong on his  facts.

The French government should have assigned him to Israel.(See 1 below.)
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History of fake news.  (See 2 below.)
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It just so happened. (See 3 below.)
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I was listening to a debate between a liberal and a conservative about why Trump's demand that he be given $1.8 billion, to build a wall, over the next ten years, is a ploy to avoid doing anything about DACA because the Democrats will not accept Trump's demand. Therefore, Trump is forcing  the government to close because the parties will not be able to agree on  a budget.

The response by the conservative made the usual mistake of accepting the premise of the adversary.

First of all, I would have responded that every illegal immigrant who is prevented from coming to our country because of walls, fences and increase enforcement personnel actually  means the wall will pay for itself because we will not be subsidizing them as we now do. In other words preventing more illegals is a way of self financing.

Second, compromise means quid pro quo so if Trump accepts legislation allowing for those designated under DACA to work towards citizenship Trump is entitled to something in return.  If Democrats refuse to engage in a quid pro quo then they are the ones shutting down government.

I am always mystified why one accepts the opponent's premise.  To do so  means losing leverage.

I may have to agree with my adversary's facts once I accept their premise but I do not have to accept their premise.  When I do I have sunk my own boat.
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Tonight we took Dagny to see the ballet and the performers were all Russians.  Though I have no intention of running for office I may have harmed her ability should she choose to do so once she is an adult. We did not shake their hands, talk to any of the performers but we did applaud them.

Now that I think more about it, I actually may have done her a favor. Who, in their right mind, would want their grandchild to enter politics?
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In May of 1956, I was stationed in France and had applied and been accepted by The Univ. of Alabama's Law School. In those days you did not have to take the Lsats.

Shortly after my acceptance, the University barred Ms. Lucy.  Without discussing the matter with my father, I sent a letter to the then Dean of the Law School informing him that any school that could not obey the law probably could not teach it and requested that he withdraw my acceptance.  This is how I came to go to the Univ of Miami's Law School.

The dean, who knew my father, responded that he would accede to my request and ended by saying  I did not understand the situation.

I mention this not only because ot the article cited below but because , as I have always said, if you want to get rid of a bad law, enforce it.

Atty. General Sessions has decided to allow his deputy attorney's to decide what they want to do about marijuana in states that have disregarded federal laws which even Obama, our constitutional professor. chose to ignore.

Whether I agree with legalizing marijuana is not the issue, as I see it.  The issue is whether our government should allow laws to be disregarded. How can we tell Middle Eastern nations, ruled by dictators, they should give their citizens  freedom and then ask them to support the rule of law when we are failing  increasingly do so? (See 4 below.)
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I could certainly be wrong but I suspect Mueller is engaged in an attempt to widen his net from the more narrow purpose of  determining which Republicans were involved in The  Russian Collusion.  I believe the reason is because the more Mueller digs the more he finds the collusion shoe is on the other foot and eventually it is going to ensnare the Clinton's and many of their cronies and if Mueller reaches high enough it could even ensnare Obama and his cronies.  Just my opinion.
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More humor.(See 5 below.)
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Off to Orlando, taking Dagny back home in time for school's re-opening.
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Dick
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1)

SHITTY LITTLE COUNTRY

• The Middle East has been growing date palms for centuries. The average tree is about 18-20 feet tall and yields about 38 pounds of dates a year.
• Israeli date trees are now yielding 400 pounds/year and are short enough to be harvested from the ground or a short ladder.
• Israel the 100th smallest country, with less than 1/1000th of the world's population, can lay claim to the following: The cell phone was developed in Israel by Israelis working in the Israeli branch of Motorola, which has its largest development center in Israel.
• Most of the Windows NT and XP operating systems were developed by Microsoft-Israel.
• The Pentium MMX Chip technology was designed in Israel at Intel.
• Both the Pentium-4 microprocessor and the Centrino processor were entirely designed, developed and produced in Israel.
• The Pentium microprocessor in your computer was most likely made in Israel.
• Voice mail technology was developed in Israel.
• Both Microsoft and Cisco built their only R&D facilities outside the US in Israel.
• The technology for the AOL Instant Messenger ICQ was developed in 1996 by four young Israelis.
• Israel has the fourth largest air force in the world (after the U.S., Russia, and China). In addition to a large variety of other aircraft, Israel's air force has an aerial arsenal of over 250 F-16's. This is the largest fleet of F-16 aircraft outside of the U.S.
• Israel’s $100 billion economy is larger than all of its immediate neighbors combined.
• Israel has the highest percentage in the world of home computers per capita.
• According to industry officials, Israel designed the airline industry's most impenetrable flight security. US officials now look (finally) to Israel for advice on how to handle airborne security threats.
• Israel has the highest ratio of university degrees to the population in the world.
• Israel produces more scientific papers per capita than any other nation by a large margin - 109 per 10,000 people -- as well as one of the highest per capita rates of patents filed.
• In proportion to its population, Israel has the largest number of startup companies in the world. In absolute Israel has the largest number of startup companies than any other country in the world, except the U.S.! (3,500 companies mostly in hi-tech)
• With more than 3,000 high-tech companies and startups, Israel has the highest concentration of hi-tech companies in the world -- apart from the Silicon Valley, U.S.
• Israel is ranked #2 in the world for venture capital funds right behind the U.S.
• Outside the United States and Canada, Israel has the largest number of NASDAQ listed companies.
• Israel has the highest average living standards in the Middle East.
• The per capita income in Israel in 2000 was over $17,500, exceeding that of the UK.
• On a per capita basis, Israel has the largest number of biotech startups.
• Twenty-four percent of Israel's workforce holds university degrees, ranking third in the industrialized world, after the United States and Holland and 12% hold advanced degrees.
• Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.
• In 1984 and 1991, Israel airlifted a total of 22,000 Ethiopian Jews (Operation Solomon and Moses) at Risk in Ethiopia, to safety in Israel.
• When Golda Meir was elected Prime Minister of Israel in 1969, she became the world's second elected female leader in modern times.
• When the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya was bombed in 1998, Israeli rescue teams were on the scene within a day -- and saved three victims from the rubble.
• Israel has the third highest rate of entrepreneurship -- and the highest rate among women and among people over 55 - in the world.
• Relative to its population, Israel is the largest immigrant-absorbing nation on earth. Immigrants come in search of democracy, religious freedom, and economic opportunity. (Hundreds of thousands from the former Soviet Union )
• Israel was the first nation in the world to adopt the Kimberly process, an international standard that certifies diamonds as "conflict free."
• Israel has the world's second highest per capita of new books.
• Israel is the only country in the world that entered the 21st century with a net gain in its number of trees, made more remarkable because, this was achieved in an area considered mainly desert!
• Israel has more museums per capita than any other country.
• Medicine... Israeli scientists developed the first fully computerized, no-radiation, diagnostic instrumentation for breast cancer.
• An Israeli company developed a computerized system for ensuring proper administration of medications, thus removing human error from medical treatment. Every year in U.S. hospitals 7,000 patients die from treatment mistakes.
• Israel’s Given Imaging developed the first ingestible video camera, so small it fits inside a pill. Used to view the small intestine from the inside, cancer and digestive disorders.
• Researchers in Israel developed a new device that directly helps the heart pump blood, an innovation with the potential to save lives among those with heart failure. The new device is synchronized with the camera helps doctors diagnose heart's mechanical operations through a sophisticated system of sensors.
• Israel leads the world in the number of scientists and technicians in the workforce, with 145 per 10,000, as opposed to 85 in the U.S., over 70 in Japan, and less than 60 in Germany. With over 25% of its work force employed in technical professions. Israel places first in this category as well.
• A new acne treatment developed in Israel, the Clear Light device, produces a high-intensity, ultraviolet-light-free, narrow-band blue light that causes acne bacteria to self-destruct -- all without damaging surrounding skin or tissue.
• An Israeli company was the first to develop and install a large-scale solar-powered and fully functional electricity generating plant, in southern California’s Mojave desert.
• All the above while engaged in regular wars with an implacable enemy that seeks its destruction and an economy continuously under strain by having to spend more per capita on its own protection than any other county on earth.

. . . . AND THE FRENCH AMBASSADOR IN ENGLAND SAYS: "ISRAEL IS NOTHING BUT A SHITTY LITTLE COUNTRY."

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2)  The History of Fake News In The United States

By Jarrett Stepman

Stepman is an editor for The Daily Signal

Fake news isn’t suddenly ruining America, but putting government in charge of deciding what news is fake will.

In the wake of President Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, numerous media outlets ran stories claiming that many websites had published false stories that helped Trump beat Hillary Clinton.

Since then, left-leaning opinion writers have called for a solution to this alleged epidemic. The New York Times reported last January that Silicon Valley giants Facebook and Google will team up with legacy media outlets to fact-check stories and curtail the proliferation of “fake news.”

However, intentionally misleading news has been around since before the invention of the printing press. In fact, our Founding Fathers grappled with this very issue when they created our system of government. They saw that while it was tempting to censor fake stories, ultimately, the truth was more likely to be abused by an all-powerful government arbiter than the filter of unimpeded popular debate. Attempts to weed out factually incorrect news reports can quickly morph into fact-checking and manipulating differences in opinion.

Americans need an alternative to the mainstream media. But this can't be done alone. Find out more >>

Fortunately, there have been few serious calls in the United States for official censoring of political news or media, in contrast to most of the world, including Europe. Freedom of thought, freedom of the press, and even the freedom to be wrong make America great and exceptional.

In addition to preserving liberty, our free-wheeling tradition gives the United States an edge in adapting to the increasingly decentralized media landscape that is a natural product of the Internet Age. Most importantly, it produces a more critically informed populace in the long term.

The Founders and the Free Press

The Founding Fathers were well aware of the power of the press, for good or ill. After all, many of them, such as Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine, were newspapermen and pamphleteers. The revolutionary ideas they disseminated throughout the colonies found eager readers, putting them high on King George III’s enemies list.

Three years after the Constitution was ratified, the American people amended it by adding the Bill of Rights, which included the First Amendment and its protections of the media. However, the Founders understood that a free press was not an entirely unqualified blessing; some had reservations.

Elbridge Gerry, who was present at the Constitutional Convention, lamented how con artists in his home state were manipulating the people. “The people do not [lack] virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots,” Gerry said at the convention. “In Massachusetts it had been fully confirmed by experience, that they are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions, by the false reports circulated by designing men, and which no one on the spot can refute.”

The Founders saw that while it was tempting to censor fake stories, ultimately the truth was more likely to be abused by an all-powerful government arbiter than the filter of unimpeded popular debate.

Franklin also warned about the power of the press, which the public must put so much trust in. In a short essay, Franklin explained how the press acted as the “court” of public opinion and wielded enormous unofficial power.

For an institution with so much influence, Franklin noted that the bar for entry into journalism is remarkably low, with no requirement regarding “Ability, Integrity, Knowledge.” He said the liberty of the press can easily turn into the “liberty of affronting, calumniating, and defaming one another.”

The Founders wrote constitutional protections for the press with open eyes, as their written remarks record. Yet, the evils that come through the occasional problems of a free press are heavily outweighed by its benefits. Lies may proliferate, but the truth has a real chance to rise to the top.

Thomas Jefferson said that the most effectual way for a people to be governed by “reason and truth” is to give freedom to the press. There was simply no other way. He wrote in a letter to Gerry:

I am … for freedom of the press, and against all violations of the Constitution to silence by force and not by reason the complaints or criticisms, just or unjust, of our citizens against the conduct of their agents.

Liars and scandal mongers may occasionally have success in a system without censorship, but truth was ultimately more likely to be found when passed through the people as a whole. Jefferson wrote:

It is so difficult to draw a clear line of separation between the abuse and the wholesome use of the press, that as yet we have found it better to trust the public judgment, rather than the magistrate, with the discrimination between truth and falsehood. And hitherto the public judgment has performed that office with wonderful correctness.

Despite full knowledge of the media’s often unscrupulous power over public opinion, the Founders chose to grant broad protections to a decentralized press, opting to place their faith in newspapers checking one another with more efficacy and less risk of bias than heavy-handed government crackdowns.

When the Federalist Party passed the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts under President John Adams to clamp down on “false, scandalous and malicious writing” against the government in the midst of the “Quasi War” with France, there was an immense backlash. A few journalists were arrested, but the governing party was crushed in future elections and ceased to exist shortly thereafter. In the United States, press freedom would become an almost unquestioned element of American culture and policy.

Things worked out differently across the Atlantic. In France, a popular uprising, stoked by a rabid press, led to mob violence, tyranny, and oppressive censorship. Revolutionary scribblers initially brought an end to the Old Regime and the royal restrictions on speech, but freedom of the press didn’t last. After the monarchy was crushed, the revolutionaries censored the press even more ruthlessly than had the Bourbon kings. The radicals argued that press freedom was leading people astray and impeding their revolution.

Maximilien Robespierre, leader of the Jacobin party, called journalists “the most dangerous enemies of liberty.” Robespierre and his allies in the French government created a state-sponsored newspaper to counter what they saw as the media’s lies. Then, seeing that even that was not enough to prevent alternative opinions from growing, began to arrest and execute those who opposed the policies of the government. Robespierre’s “Reign of Terror” gripped France for more than a year, during which 16,594 official death sentences were handed out.

Calls for liberty ended with censorship and ultimately the guillotine for unbelievers. Clearly there was a difference between the American and French regimes and cultures, both nominally standing for liberty, but arriving at radically different ends.

A Frenchman who was a keen observer of both systems explained why freedom of the press worked out so differently in these sister republics.

Tocqueville, the United States, and France

Alexis de Tocqueville caught on to why liberty of the press worked so much better in the United States than in his home country. One system was almost entirely free from suggestions of government censorship and the other perpetually in danger of falling prey to the “instincts of the pettiest despots.”

Americans understood, wrote Tocqueville in his book “Democracy in America,” that creating a government body with the power to assess the truth in media would be far more dangerous than any system of press freedom. They instinctively knew that:

Whoever should be able to create and maintain a tribunal of this kind would waste his time in prosecuting the liberty of the press; for he would be the absolute master of the whole community and would be as free to rid himself of the authors as of their writings.

In other words, the creation of such an official “court” to oversee media truth would logically end in absolute tyranny. Tocqueville concluded that “in order to enjoy the inestimable benefits that the liberty of the press ensures, it is necessary to submit to the inevitable evils that it creates.”

Fortunately, America had a diverse and highly decentralized press from the beginning. Not so in France, which had a highly centralized press both in terms of geography and number of media organizations. Therefore, Tocqueville wrote, in a centralized media environment such as France, “[t]he influence upon a skeptical nation of a public press thus constituted must be almost unbounded. It is an enemy with whom a government may sign an occasional truce, but which it is difficult to resist for any length of time.”

France never really changed. It continued a cycle of crackdowns on the free press as new regimes took power. Instead of decentralizing the press of the monarchical regime, each successive set of revolutionaries seized the central apparatus for their own purposes. In 1852, when the Second Empire under Napoleon III took power, the government said that censorship would be implemented for public safety.

A petition message to the legislative body concluded: “As long as there exists in France parties hostile to the Empire, liberty of the press is out of the question, and the country at large has no wish for it.”

Though Trump has caused concern by calling members of the press “enemies of the people,” his threats against the press come through mockery and rebuke rather than official sanctions. Presidential media hating has been around since George Washington was in office, but there have been few serious proposals to actually crack down on reporting.

By contrast, the press is treated quite differently in France, where citizens are placed on a 44-hour legal media blackout on the eve of elections. As USA Today reported, in the days leading up to the French presidential election, the media were warned not to report on data leaks from candidate Emmanuel Macron’s campaign. The French election commission said that the leaks likely contained some fraudulent data, i.e. “fake news,” and any reporting on it or even passing it along on social media could lead to criminal charges.

Jim Swift of The Weekly Standard pointed out the obvious: “This is censorship, plain and simple. In the Internet Age, reporters and citizens around the globe can share information—be it about the Macron hack or not—on Twitter, Facebook, or on their websites. The French press and citizenry? Repressed.”

But The New York Times praised the reporting ban, and emphasized the benefits of the centralized French system over the more freewheeling ones in Britain and the United States. In a recent article, the Times noted:

The contrast may have been amplified further by the absence of a French equivalent to the thriving tabloid culture in Britain or the robust right-wing broadcast media in the United States, where the Clinton hacking attack generated enormous negative coverage.

“We don’t have a Fox News in France,” said Johan Hufnagel, managing editor of the left-wing daily Libération, according to The New York Times. “There’s no broadcaster with a wide audience and personalities who build this up and try to use it for their own agendas.”

A similar scandal occurred in the United States when WikiLeaks published thousands of emails from the Democratic National Committee that cast the Clinton campaign in a negative light. Yet, there was no censorship of the information; the American people would not have stood for it.

Who has the better system? Since the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, France has gone through five republics, two empires, and four monarchies. Despite the bumptious nature of American politics and media, it would be foolish to bet on France’s fifth republic outlasting America’s first.

Americans have been lucky to have a decentralized media through most of their history and a culture that strongly embraces the idea of a truly free press. Those arrangements have had a long-lasting impact on American institutions and have made the country resistant to authoritarian impulses. However, in the mid-20th century, the American press became more centralized and the country opened its media sector to many of the same problems that had plagued European media.

Some glamorize the era in which a few television companies and big newspapers became media gatekeepers, similar to the model that currently exists in France. This nostalgia for “more responsible” journalism ignores the fact that some of the most egregious fake news blunders were perpetrated by an unchecked centralized press. Perhaps the worst offense of all came from The New York Times.

The New York Times and the Fraud of the Century

Today, a 30-foot-long bronze wall stands in Northwest Washington, D.C., and on this wall is the simple image of a wheat field. It is a monument to the victims of the Holodomor, a monstrous genocide committed by one of the most ruthless and authoritarian regimes in human history.

In 1932, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, frustrated that he could not crush Ukrainian nationalism, ordered that grain quotas for Ukrainian fields be raised so high that the peasants working the fields would not be left with enough food to feed themselves. NKVD troops collected the grain and watched over the populace to prevent them from leaving to find nourishment elsewhere.

As a result of these policies, as many as 7 million Ukrainians died of starvation in 1932 and 1933.

But while Stalin was conducting an atrocity with few equals in human history, The New York Times was reporting on the regime’s triumphs of modernization.

Walter Duranty, the Times Moscow bureau chief, won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence for his 1931 series of articles on the Soviet Union. Pulitzer in hand, he proceeded to perpetrate perhaps the worst incident of fake news in American media history at a time when Americans relied on the Times and a handful of other large media outlets to bring them news from around the world.

Duranty’s motivation for covering up the crimes taking place in Ukraine has never been fully ascertained. However, it undoubtedly gave the Bolshevik sympathizer better access to Stalin’s regime, which routinely fed him propaganda.

While privately admitting that many Ukrainians had starved to death, Duranty sent numerous reports back to the United States praising the good work of the Soviet government. He reported that there had been some deaths from “diseases due to malnutrition,” but called the suggestion that a widespread famine was taking place “malignant propaganda.”

These reports were highly influential in the United States and had enormous impact on U.S.-Soviet relations. Historian Robert Conquest wrote in his book, “The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine,” that due to the perceived credibility of The New York Times, the American people accepted the fraudulent accounts as true.

Sally J. Taylor wrote in her book “Stalin’s Apologist” that Duranty’s reports helped convince President Franklin D. Roosevelt to extend official diplomatic recognition to the Soviet government in November of 1933. She wrote: “[A]lmost single-handedly did Duranty aid and abet one of the world’s most prolific mass murderers, knowing all the while what was going on but refraining from saying precisely what he knew to be true.”

Though Duranty’s reporting was a lie, The New York Times never questioned its authenticity and dismissed charges that its reporter was cooking up false reports. Famed British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge wrote of this willful self-deception in his autobiography:

If the New York Times went on all those years giving great prominence to Duranty’s messages, building him and them up when they were so evidently nonsensically untrue … this was not, we may be sure, because the Times was deceived. Rather it wanted to be so deceived, and Duranty provided the requisite deception material.

In the more centralized national media landscape of the mid-20th century, a fraudulent story like that published in the Times was both more likely to be believed and less likely to be debunked.

The Truth Cannot Be Centrally Planned

But America’s evolving media landscape is again moving toward decentralization. And, fortunately, the First Amendment is a mighty weapon against the suffocating and stultifying suppression of speech that frequently occurs in other nations.

The system the Founders created and intended for the United States was one that they hoped would lead our civilization to the truth. We have acquiesced to the fact that there will always be a great deal that the smartest and the wisest simply don’t know. No earthly, impartial arbiter has the capacity, or should have the capacity, to determine absolute fact for us—especially in the realm of politics, philosophy, and man’s relation to man.

For all the uncertainty and chaos that an unfettered media seem to engender, Americans have been best at ultimately veering closer to the truth than any other people. The First Amendment is one of the greatest of many gifts the Founding generation bequeathed us and has been a truly defining feature of American exceptionalism with few comparisons around the globe.

Through all the angst over fake news, fraudulent journalists, and media hyperbole, the American republic will survive. In the end, fake news peddlers will only damage their own reputations and bring doubt on their reporting. Fortunately, our freedom isn’t dependent on the musings of the White House press corps. It hinges on the Constitution and the liberty it was created to protect.

This article originally appeared in the fall edition of The Insider.

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3)There are NO coincidences

Any one of these 'coincidences,' when taken singularly, appear to not mean much but when taken as a whole, a computer would blow a main circuit if you asked it to calculate the odds that they have occurred by chance alone.

Sit back, get a favorite beverage, and then read and ponder the Obama-related 'coincidences', then superimpose the bigger picture of most recent events; i.e., Fast and furious, Benghazi , the IRS scandal and the NSA revelations..

Barack Hussein Obama (Barry Soetoro)

just happened to know 60s far-left radical revolutionary William Ayers, whose father
just happened to be Thomas Ayers, who

just happened to be a close friend of Obama's communist mentor Frank Marshall Davis, who

just happened to work at the communist-sympathizing Chicago Defender with Vernon Jarrett, who

just happened to later become the father-in-law of Iranian-born leftist Valerie Jarrett, who Obama
just happened to choose as his closest White House adviser, and who

just happened to have been CEO of Habitat Company, which
just happened to manage public housing in Chicago, which
just happened to get millions of dollars from the Illinois state legislature, and which

just happened not to properly maintain the housing which eventually just happened to require demolition. *** Not to mention that this is the property that would have been the grounds that hosted the Olympics, had Obama's efforts been successful**

Valerie Jarrett also

just happened to work for the city of Chicago, and

just happened to hire Michelle LaVaughan Robinson (later Mrs. Obama), who

just happened to have worked at the Sidney Austin law firm, where former fugitive from the FBI Bernardine Dohrn also just happened to work, and where Barack Obama
just happened to get a summer job.

Bernardine Dohrn

just happened to be married to William Ayers, with whom she
just happened to have hidden from the FBI at a San Francisco marina, along with Donald Warden, who

just happened to change his name to Khalid al-Mansour, and Warden/al-Mansour who
just happened to be a mentor of Black Panther Party founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale and a close associate of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, and al-Mansour
just happened to be financial adviser to a Saudi Prince, who

just happened to donate cash to Harvard, for which Obama
just happened to get a critical letter of recommendation from Percy Sutton, who just happened to have been the attorney for Malcolm X, who

just happened to know Kenyan politician Tom Mboya, who

just happened to be a close friend of Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., who
just happened to meet Malcolm X when he traveled to Kenya .

Obama, Sr.

just happened to have his education at the University of Hawaii paid for by the Laubach Literacy Institute, which

just happened to have been supported by Elizabeth Mooney Kirk, who

just happened to be a friend of Malcolm X, who

just happened to have been associated with the Nation of Islam, which was later headed by Louis Farrakhan, who

just happens to live very close to Obamas Chicago mansion, which also
just happens to be located very close to the residence of William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who

just happens to have been occasional baby-sitters for Malia and Natasha Obama, whose parents

just happened to have no concern exposing their daughters to bomb-making communists.

After attending Occidental College and Columbia University, where he

just happened to have foreign Muslim roommates, Obama moved to Chicago to work for the Industrial Areas Foundation, an organization that

just happened to have been founded by Marxist and radical agitator Saul the Red Alinsky, author of Rules for Radicals, who

just happened to be the topic of Hillary Rodham Clintons thesis at Wellesley College, and Obamas $25,000 salary at IAF

just happened to be funded by a grant from the Woods Fund, which was founded by the Woods family, whose Sahara Coal company

just happened to provide coal to Commonwealth Edison, whose CEO just happened to be Thomas Ayers, whose son William Ayers
just happened to serve on the board of the Woods Fund, along with Obama.

Obama also worked on voter registration drives in Chicago in the 1980s and
just happened to work with leftist political groups like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Socialist International (SI), through which Obama met Carl Davidson, who

just happened to travel to Cuba during the Vietnam War to sabotage the U.S. war effort, and who
just happened to be a former member of the SDS and a member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, which

just happened to sponsor a 2002 anti-war rally at which Obama spoke, and which

just happened to have been organized by Marilyn Katz, a former SDS activist and later public relations consultant who

just happened to be a long-time friend of Obamas political hatchet man, David Axelrod.

Obama joined Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC), whose pastor was Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a fiery anti-America orator who

just happened to preach Marxism and Black Liberation Theology and who delivered anti-white, anti-Jew, and anti-American sermons, which Obama 
just happened never to hear because he
just happened to miss church only on the days when Wright was at his most enthusiastic, and Obama

just happened never to notice that Oprah Winfrey left the church because it was too radical, and

just happened never to notice that the church gave the vile anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan a lifetime achievement award.

Although no one had ever heard of him at the time, Obama just happened to receive an impossible-to-believe $125,000 advance to write a book about race relations, which he

just happened to fail to write while using the cash to vacation in Bali with his wife Michelle, and despite his record of non-writing he just happened to receive a second advance, for $40,000, from another publisher, and he eventually completed a manuscript called Dreams From My Father, which

just happened to strongly reflect the writing style of William Ayers, who
just happened to trample on an American flag for the cover photograph of the popular Chicago magazine, which Obama

just happened never to see even though it appeared on newsstands throughout the city.

Obama was hired by the law firm Miner, Banhill and Galland which just happened to specialize in negotiating state government contracts to develop low-income housing, and which

just happened to deal with now-imprisoned Tony Rezko and his firm Rezar, and with slumlord Valerie Jarrett, and the law firms Judson Miner

just happened to have been a classmate of Bernardine Dohrn, wife of William Ayers.

In 1994 Obama represented ACORN and another plaintiff in a lawsuit against Citibank for denying mortgages to blacks (Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank Federal Savings Bank), and the lawsuit just happened to result in banks being blackmailed into approving sub-prime loans for poor credit risks, a trend which
just happened to spread nationwide, and which

just happened to lead to the collapse of the housing bubble, which

just happened to help Obama defeat John McCain in the 2008 presidential election.

In 1996 Obama ran for the Illinois State Senate and joined the New Party, which

just happened to promote Marxism, and Obama was supported by Dr. Quentin Yong, a socialist who
just happened to support a government takeover of the health care system.

In late 1999, Obama purportedly engaged in homosexual activities and cocaine-snorting in the back of a limousine with a man named Larry Sinclair, who claims he was contacted in late 2007 by Donald Young, who 
just happened to be the gay choir director of Obamas Chicago church and who shared information with Sinclair about Obama, and Young

just happened to be murdered on December 23, 2007, just weeks after Larry Bland, another gay member of the churchjust happened to be murdered, and both murders
just happened to have never been solved. In 2008 Sinclair held a press conference to discuss his claims, and

just happened to be arrested immediately after the event, based on a warrant issued by Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, who

just happens to be the son of Joe Biden.

In 2003 Obama and his wife attended a dinner in honor of Rashid Khalidi, who
just happened to be a former PLO operative, harsh critic of Israel , and advocate of Palestinian rights, and who Obama claims he does not know, even though the Obamas

just happened to have dined more than once at the home of Khalidi and his wife, Mona, and
just happened to have used them as occasional baby-sitters. Obama reportedly praised Khalidi at the decidedly anti-Semitic event, which William Ayers

just happened to also attend, and the event Obama pretends he never attended was sponsored by the Arab American Action Network, to which Obama
just happened to have funneled cash while serving on the board of the Woods Fund with William Ayers, and one speaker at the dinner remarked that if Palestinians cannot secure a return of their land, Israel will never see a day of peace, and entertainment at the dinner included a Muslim children's dance whose performances

just happened to include simulated be-headings with fake swords, and stomping on American, Israeli, and British flags, and Obama allegedly told the audience that Israel has no God-given right to occupy Palestine and there has been genocide against the Palestinian people by (the) Israelis, and the Los Angeles Times has a videotape of the event but

just happens to refuse to make it public.

In the 2004 Illinois Democrat primary race for the U.S. Senate, front-runner Blair Hull

just happened to be forced out of the race after David Axelrod just happened to manage to get Hulls sealed divorce records unsealed, which just happened to enable Obama to win the primary, so he could face popular Republican Jack Ryan, whose sealed child custody records from his divorce

just happened to become unsealed, forcing Ryan to withdraw from the race, which

just happened to enable the unqualified Obama to waltz into the U.S. Senate, where, after a mere 143 days of work, he
just happened to decide he was qualified to run for President of the United States.

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4)The University of Alabama Earns a Victory Over an Ugly History

Autherine Lucy was kept out in 1956 because of her race. She eventually got a degree—and a monument.

By 

Bob Greene

A big college football game will be played Monday night between the Alabama Crimson Tide and the Georgia Bulldogs. But in the ways that truly count in life, the University of Alabama has already scored a comeback victory for the ages.

At the beginning of the current football season, on the day before Alabama was to host Colorado State in Tuscaloosa’s 101,821-seat Bryant-Denny Stadium, there was a quiet ceremony held on a patch of grass not far from the field. In front of several hundred people, a monument was unveiled. Its purpose was to honor a woman named Autherine Lucy Foster.

There was a time when such a moment on Alabama’s campus would have seemed impossible. But times, and institutions, change.

In 1956, Autherine Lucy—her name before she was married—arrived at the University of Alabama to attend her first day of classes. She had already graduated from Miles College, a historically black school, but she wanted to become a teacher, and she believed the University of Alabama was the finest school in the state. She hoped that a degree from Alabama would help her find a fulfilling teaching job.

She was met by violence and viciousness. The university had offered admission to both her and a friend, Pollie Myers, without knowing they weren’t white. When the school discovered this, it rescinded the offers. The pair fought the ruling in court; one of their attorneys was a young Thurgood Marshall, who would later become a Supreme Court justice. The university succeeded in keeping out Myers on grounds that she had allegedly conceived a child before getting married, which the school decreed made her unfit for admission.

Autherine Lucy, however, won her court case. When she showed up for classes, she was met by rioters, both students and townspeople. Her life was threatened: The mobs hurled objects at her, followed her down the street as she tried to get to classrooms, screamed vile epithets at her. Police officers were called in to protect her. While in class, she could hear the crowds gathered outside angrily chanting insults. At one point she had to find shelter in the annex of a university building from those who wanted to hurt her. Three days after she arrived, the university suspended her, purportedly for her own safety.

She still hoped to earn a University of Alabama degree. She went back to court and prevailed again, but the university expelled her for allegedly maligning it by the points she made in pursuing her legal case. For a time, feeling defeated, she gave up.

In 1963, two other black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, finally were able to attend the university after the famous episode during which Gov. George Wallace, standing in the doorway of the building where they were to register for classes, tried to block their path. In 1988 the school, wanting to make amends for its treatment of Autherine Lucy, officially rescinded her expulsion.

She had found work as a teacher in the meantime, but she returned to the university as a graduate student in the College of Education. She received her master’s degree in 1992 on the same day her daughter graduated from Alabama with a bachelor’s degree.

Vivian Malone, James Hood and Autherine Lucy Foster have received various recognitions from the school in the years since. But last September the school decided to do something especially for Ms. Foster. Not far from the spot on campus where some six decades ago her life was threatened and she was forced to leave the university, the monument-unveiling ceremony was held.

Ms. Foster is 88 now. With a smile in her voice, she said to the people who had gathered: “To the student body and to all of you standing around, I want you to know that the last time I saw a crowd like this at the University of Alabama . . .”

Those in attendance laughed warmly along with her and applauded. They knew what she meant.

What happened in 1956 at times seems like ancient history. When Alabama plays Georgia (where African-American students were first admitted in 1961) for the national championship Monday night, fans probably will not give a second thought to the fact that, as Alabama takes the field, three of the team’s four captains are black. It’s a nonissue.

Which makes what University of Alabama president Stuart Bell said at the unveiling of the monument to Ms. Foster all the more meaningful: “Quite frankly, without your courage and without your bravery, we would not enjoy the great university as we have it today. We stand in awe.”

The plaque that now honors her on campus proclaims that her “courage made the University of Alabama truly ‘one for all.’ ”

Regardless of who wins the football game Monday night, if you’re ever in Tuscaloosa you might want to stop by and take a look at Ms. Foster’s monument. It’s on the grounds of Graves Hall, home of the College of Education, just across University Boulevard from Bryant-Denny Stadium. There are champions, and then there are champions.

Mr. Greene is completing a new novel, “Yesterday Came Suddenly,” about an America with no internet.

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5) While on a road trip, an elderly couple stopped at a roadside restaurant for lunch.

After finishing their meal, they left the restaurant, and resumed their trip. When leaving, the elderly woman unknowingly left her glasses on the table, and she didn't miss them until they had been driving for about forty minutes.

By then, to add to the aggravation, they had to travel quite a distance before they could find a place to turnaround, in order to return to the restaurant to retrieve her glasses. All the way back, the elderly husband became the classic grumpy old man.

He fussed and complained, and scolded his wife relentlessly during the entire return drive.. The more he chided her, the more agitated he became. He just wouldn't let up for a single minute.

To her relief, they finally arrived at the restaurant.  As the woman got out of the car, and hurried inside to retrieve her glasses, the old geezer yelled to her, “While you're in there, you might as well get my hat and the credit card.”

This coming week is National Senior Mental Health Week.

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