The weed-loving group NORML is having some fun with an old picture of Obama from his Occidental College days. He is puffing away in dope-smoking style wearing an atrocious hat on what may or may not be a joint. Well NORML has made certain in their version it is a joint in a poster for their annual conference.

Well I happen to know besides still smoking cigs Barry still enjoys a taste of the ganja as he came to my birthday party last October and sparked up a mega-fatty. Pics and video below the fold. Oh yeah and this poster and my video are undeniably racist (just beating the left to the punch)
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Posted by: Uncle Jimbo at 08:56 AM | Add Comment
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Good question: "Do you work for us or do we work for you?"

You'll be happy to know these mob tactics won't be allowed to continue.

Who'll stop the bullying and intimidation by these mobsters, you ask?

Why, the unions, of course.

Our famously non-bullying, non-intimidating, non-mob-connected unions.

The nation's largest federation of labor organizations has promised to directly engage with boisterous conservative protesters at Democratic town halls during the August recess.

In a memo sent out on Thursday, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney outlined the blueprint for how the union conglomerate would step up recess activities on health care reform and other topics pertinent to the labor community. The document makes clear that Obama allies view the town hall forums as ground zero of the health care debate....

"The principal battleground in the campaign will be town hall meetings and other gatherings with members of Congress in their home districts," reads the memo. "We want your help to organize major union participation to counter the right-wing "Tea-Party Patriots" who will try to disrupt those meetings, as they've been trying to do to meetings for the last month. ..."

I'm so glad we're finally going to see some real, spontaneous, non-coordinated grassroots responses to these astroturfed displays Republicans are putting on.

Posted by: Ace at 08:35 AM | Add Comment
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Oh, damn, the Media Bubble isn't protecting us from reality.

Let's make a stronger, more durable bubble for ourselves.

Members of Congress are increasingly turning to virtual townhall meetings--conducted by telephone--in an effort to reach more constituents while avoiding the potential that informational meetings might be disrupted by angry and persistent questioners or protesters.

One advantage to these telephone townhalls, whether any particular member of Congress actually has this intention, is that the Member of Congress can control the audience and the questioning.

As lawmakers head home for the August recess to meet with constituents, the contentious health care issue awaits them, and many are opting to conduct their townhall meetings over a telephone line rather than in an actual hall where their constituents can see them, speak directly to them, ask repeated followup questions--and shout unsolicited commentary from the back of the room.

Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) is using a tele-town hall meeting in her only scheduled interaction with constituents, and various other lawmakers from both parties have held the live mass teleconferences lately, focusing largely on health care.

Rep. Walt Minnick (D-Idaho), whose district encompasses nearly one-third of the large western state, held a tele-town hall meeting with reporters and constituents July 24, saying it provides him with immediate feedback while in Washington.

“These ‘virtual’ town hall meetings have been a very useful way to get immediate feedback from my constituents when my work as a Congressman keeps me from being home in Idaho,” Minnick said in a statement announcing the event.

That's fine if you don't mind being a "virtual" Congressman come January 2011.

Remember, all of this hostility to ObamaCare is fake and astroturfed, but for some reason Congressmen need to hide themselves from constituents.

Thanks to momma.

Really an Update to the Last Post But No One Reads Updates to Older Posts: A reader at Instapundit asks,

Glenn, isn’t the attached Politico story, discussing how President Obama is asking all of his supporters via email to support his healthcare bill and respond to attacks upon it, an example of the dreaded phenomenon of “Astroturfing?” Doesn’t this mean that all support for Obamacare is now the product of a top-down mandate for activism? And doesn’t that delegitimize any support for health care “reform?”

Or, instead, is it legitimate, nay inspiring, when Democratic bigwigs organize support for liberal policy objectives, but illegitimate, even sickening, when Republican bigwigs organize opposition to such objectives?

Also found at Instapundit, but appearing on Hot Air.

Earlier, a video of Barbara Boxer dismissed protesters at town-hall meetings as obvious fakes because, as Boxer explained, theyÂ’re too well-dressed to be sincerely angry about health care. The College Politico has an answer in this clip from Steny HoyerÂ’s attempt to pontificate to a hostile and casually-attired crowd. The older voters in this row wear shorts, t-shirts, and apparently Democratic Party registration cards...

Although that's true, and a good point, I am a little concerned about buying into their assumptions.

We are quick -- all of us, not just Ed or anything -- to respond to claims that "oh these are Republicans protesting" by saying "No, there are a lot of Democrats against this."

That's true... but the assumption contained herein is that Republican opposition is somehow illegitimate and "doesn't count," and it only matters when Democrats oppose.

The facts should be offered, always -- there are a lot of Democrats against this, including Democratic Congressmen, who have the votes to push it through on party lines but refuse to do so -- but we should always also point out the fundamental anti-american assumption in the liberals' constant refrain that "only members of the state-sanctioned party count."

The Check Is In the Mail: Andrew's Dad attempted to get on the list of one of these, after his "representative" announced the town hall and the sign up on the same day.

So far he hasn't scheduled another one.

Posted by: Ace at 07:30 AM | Add Comment
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It is to laugh, in an urban Heath Ledger sort of chilling way.

So just to sum up, Obama enlists the aid of a small group of liberal bloggers in the health care fight, and then those same bloggers write posts echoing White House and DNC talking points -- and in the very process of doing that, accuse their political opponents of astroturfing!

At Iowahawk, a new directive from Under-Minister of Truth Linda Doulass.

Greetings citizen! By now you may have heard scattered rumors of state and party officials encountering reactionary resistors at local health care reform information programs. Do not be alarmed, for our 5-year plan for citizen health proceeds without delay. Remain stalwart! The truth can be told at last, that these so-called "protests" are merely the desperate rear flank mob actions of dead-end bandits and saboteurs in the pay of enemy insurance agents.

Pay them no heed, for these outside agitators in no way represent any threat to our great patriotic push forward for increased citizen heathfulness! These well-dressed prep school gangsters of reaction seek only to frighten and demoralize and intimidate you, with their confusing "facts" and hob-nailed Sperry Topsiders. Unfortunately they are joined in conspiracy by a well-financed network of unlicensed blogs and talk radio traitors, who exaggerate their numbers and percolate disinformation -- even cleverly staged YouTube videos of an impostor President Obama saying "quotes"!

Remain strong, citizen, for the day of their comeuppance is near! Patriotic spontaneous volunteers from MoveOn.org, Organizing For America, HCAN, SEIU, AFSCME, ACORN, NPR, and MSNBC have all pledged independent grassroots efforts to spread the word about the health-hating tricksters and their transparent astroturf agitation campaign!

You too can help by remaining ever-vigilant for health traitors in your local sectors. But beware: though small in number the state health reform enemy is clever, and well trained in subterfuge and disguise by his monopolist paymasters. Your job is to recognize his signs, and report any fishy-seeming protest or blog activities to me or other official authorities within the Health Care Truth Ministry. Here is a visual training course to help you in the execution of this important patriotic duty.

I'm not sure exactly why, but I am quite certain that posting this video is racist.

Maybe Pop Goes the Weasel by 3rd Bass would have been more urbane.

Thanks to AHFF Geoff.

Update: The supposedly non-partisan creature of Obama, Organizing for America, puts out the Bat Joker Signal to fill town halls with bodies sympathetic to Obama.

But it's not astroturfing if it's leftist agitation.

Posted by: Ace at 06:27 AM | Add Comment
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Obama is perceived as the "urban" Heath Ledger style Joker by 42% of the public, while 50% see him as the good, benevolent, "urbane" Jack Nicholson style Joker (you know, the one who urbanely attempted to murder tens of thousands of people in a WMD gas attack).

8% responded either "no opinion" or "Caesar Romero," the not-fully-urban-but-still-suspiciously-Hispanic-Joker.

(See Gabe's post if you don't get what I'm referencing.)

No word yet on how many people view him on foreign policy as the good, benevolent "urbane" Frank Gorshin style Riddler as opposed to the viral, apparently-black "urban" Jim Carrey style Riddler.

Exactly half of the registered voters surveyed from July 27 to Aug. 3 by Quinnipiac said they approve of the job Obama is doing, compared with 42 percent who disapprove. ThatÂ’s down from 57 percent approval and 33 percent disapproval in a poll taken in late June, according to results released today.

Americans are upset about rising unemployment and worried that health-care plans making their way through Congress will add to the U.S. budget deficit, said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Hamden, Connecticut-based polling institute. The combination has helped drive down the presidentÂ’s ratings.

A “willingness to give him the benefit of the doubt is, among some voters, evaporating,” Brown told reporters in Washington yesterday.

The poll found that voters disapprove of the way Obama is handling the economy by 49 percent to 45 percent. On his effort to overhaul of the health-care system, 52 percent disapprove of his handling of the issue while 39 percent approve.

That doesn't mean this Joker -- whether "urban" or "urbane" or Casear Romero -- is done yet. A key Senate committee continues to make bipartisan progress on this disaster (whether urban or urbane is unspecified).

Senate negotiators are inching toward bipartisan agreement on a health-care plan that seeks middle ground on some of the thorniest issues facing Congress, offering the fragile outlines of a legislative consensus even as the political battle over reform intensifies outside Washington.

Fragile outlines? Seems not exactly a done deal.

The emerging Finance Committee bill would shave about $100 billion off the projected trillion-dollar cost of the legislation over the next decade...

$100 billion in urbane cuts in a trillion-dollar urban package? That's not much progress at all.

... and eventually provide coverage to 94 percent of Americans, according to participants in the talks. It would expand Medicaid, crack down on insurers, abandon the government insurance option that President Obama is seeking and, for the first time, tax health-care benefits under the most generous plans. Backers say the bill would also offer the only concrete plan before Congress for reining in the skyrocketing cost of federal health programs over the long term.

50% chance of an urbane outcome, 50% chance of an urban one:

"Call me an optimist in spite of all the evidence, but I think the chances are, you know, better than 50-50 that we'll get this done," Bayh told reporters after the session. "But it's tough, it's complex. It's taken a little time, which is not surprising."

Well, how about those "cuts"? Well, they're not cuts. They've agreed to (wait for it) higher taxes.

The group is closer to resolving other major questions and has already agreed to about $500 billion in changes to existing federal health programs, including Medicare and Medicaid. For example, negotiators would require wealthier seniors to pay more for prescription drug coverage under Medicare, and they would charge co-payments for clinical lab procedures. The lab co-pays are potentially lucrative, raising about $20 billion over 10 years.

Other new sources of revenue include penalties on individuals who do not obtain health insurance, and a "free-rider" provision that would require employers that currently offer health insurance to continue to do so, or to reimburse the federal government for workers who switch to subsidized coverage through an insurance exchange. Both provisions could yield about $43 billion over 10 years.

The rest of the additional revenue -- about $250 billion -- would come from new taxes, primarily from an excise tax of up to 35 percent on insurance companies that sell extremely generous policies worth at least $21,000 a year for family coverage or $8,000 a year for individuals, according to aides involved in the discussions. About 7 percent of taxpayers hold such policies.

Lawmakers said insurance companies are likely to pass the cost of such a tax to policyholders, raising the price of those plans. That would create a strong incentive for employers to stop offering them, thus driving down overall health-care costs. With employers paying less for insurance, tax analysts predict, they would pay workers more in wages, increasing income tax collections by as much as $180 billion over the next decade.

Another disguised tax. How Heath Ledger of them.

Posted by: Ace at 06:00 AM | Add Comment
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Is this what Obama, in his inaugural speech, meant by putting "an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas?"

Hope and change!

The White House request that members of the public report anyone who is spreading "disinformation" about the proposed national health care makeover could lead to a White House database of political opponents that will be both secret and permanent, according to Republican lawyers on the Senate Judiciary Committee who are examining the plan's possible implementation...

Senate Judiciary Committee lawyers studying the proposal say that although there is no absolutely settled law on the matter, the White House plan is likely not covered by the Privacy Act, which prohibits government agencies from keeping any records "describing how any individual exercises rights guaranteed by the First Amendment unless expressly authorized by statute or by the individual about whom the record is maintained." Therefore, it appears the White House can legally keep records of the emails and other communications it receives in response to Phillips' request.

Those lawyers also point out that the White House is not covered by the Freedom of Information Act, which means it would not have to release any information on the plan to members of the public who make a request.

Courage more...

Posted by: Slublog at 05:34 AM | Add Comment
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Doctor Zero, writing at HotAir's Greenroom, sets out a conservative manifesto. A taste:

We don’t like having to fight desperate battles to save our freedom and future from socialist politicians every ten or twenty years. We don’t like having our time wasted with trillion-dollar statist fantasies, when our government is already trillions of dollars in the red. We’re tired of checking the papers each day, to see which group of us has been targeted as enemies of the State. We’re growing impatient waiting for the Democrats to come up with ideas that don’t require their supporters to hate someone. We’ve had our fill of “progressives” who act as if we’re living in 1909, and none of their diseased policies have ever been tried before.

Read the whole thing.

Also: You want to get your liberal coworkers riled? Find an opportunity to be overheard saying "I could never be a Democrat even if I agreed with Democratic politics because I don't have that much hate in me." It is certain to be a crowd pleaser.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:28 AM | Add Comment
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Greeeeeeat.

I'm sure it was just an oversight. Nothing to worry about. Because if there's anything I've learned at all about this administration, they alway tak the extra time to think things through.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 05:25 AM | Add Comment
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BTW: There may be a substantial confrontation today between "the mob" at Nancy Pelosi's healthcare townhall in Denver and leftists who are deliberately seeking to create an incident. The Lefty blogs have been organizing (yes, horrors, organizing) their Colorado readers to attend and confront anyone speaking out against Obamacare.

You might keep one eye on the TV around 4pm eastern (2pm at the event in Denver). To any of our Denver readers who might like to attend:

Washington, D.C. – Speaker Nancy Pelosi will join Congresswoman Diana DeGette, Vice Chair of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and Congressman Jared Polis tomorrow afternoon, August 6, for a tour of the Stout Street Clinic in Denver. The tour will be followed by a press conference to highlight critical investments in health care services made by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the need for health insurance reform.

Stout Street Clinic Tour and Press Conference
Thursday at 2pm Mountain Time
2100 Broadway
Denver, CO 80205-2526

Bring a camera and let us know what happens.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:10 AM | Add Comment
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How else to explain the conclusion that when Philip Kennicott sees the "'urban' makeup of the Heath Ledger Joker", he automatically thinks "black" "deformed product of urban violence." No, really, and it gets ugly:

By using the "urban" makeup of the Heath Ledger Joker, instead of the urbane makeup of the Jack Nicholson character, the poster connects Obama to something many of his detractors fear but can't openly discuss. He is black and he is identified with the inner city, a source of political instability in the 1960s and '70s, and a lingering bogeyman in political consciousness despite falling crime rates.

The Joker's makeup in "Dark Knight" -- the latest film in a long franchise that dramatizes fear of the urban world -- emphasized the wounded nature of the villain, the sense that he was both a product and source of violence. Although Ledger was white, and the Joker is white, this equation of the wounded and the wounding mirrors basic racial typology in America. Urban blacks -- the thinking goes -- don't just live in dangerous neighborhoods, they carry that danger with them like a virus. Scientific studies, which demonstrate the social consequences of living in neighborhoods with high rates of crime, get processed and misinterpreted in the popular unconscious, underscoring the idea. Violence breeds violence.

Oh, but Kennicott's quick to reassure that he doesn't believe blacks carry the violence within them (like...in their blood? I told you this was ugly.). Rather, he claims that is what "a certain sort" think when they see the Joker. ...And why a certain sort fear the Joker. And why a certain sort fear Obama in Joker makeup. Or something.

He's just stretching to reach the same old refrain, repeated to the point of "oh, who cares anymore": the Obama as Joker poster is racist and so is anyone who appreciates it. Oh, but it's "subtly coded", which, I suppose, is why it took racialist Kennicott almost a thousand words to decode it for us.

Now we know.

As if we needed any more evidence that Kennicott is a drooling idiot, look no further than his analysis of the other element of the poster:

The new Obama poster has two basic thrusts. Obama is a socialist, or a crypto-socialist. And Obama is somehow like the Joker, unpredictable and dangerous. But joining these two messages together yields more questions and contradictions than good poster art can sustain. The Joker is violent and dangerous, but a socialist? And didn't we see George W. Bush depicted as the Joker not so long ago?

Yes, in an image by Drew Friedman published online by Vanity Fair on July 29, 2008. That drawing at least played into a view of Bush popular among his detractors, that the former president was unpredictable and fast on the draw when it came to geopolitics. But the danger many of Obama's detractors detect is more of calculating, long-standing deception, that he is quietly and secretly marshaling a socialist agenda, a view that would be better served by imagery that recalled "The Manchurian Candidate."

What's this about "quiet, secret socialism"? President Obama is CEO of Government Motors. He's the Champion of Single-Payer Healthcare and the Scourge of Wall Street. And it's not like this is new. Back in 2001 he lamented that the Supreme Court had never approved of broad wealth redistribution. What planet is Kennicott living on where Obama is secretly working on a socialist agenda?

My advice to Phil Kennicott is to take his shamefully ignorant self off to a corner and sit quietly while people less apt to trip over "coded" racism every time they step out their front doors get on with discussing reality. He's just embarrassing himself.

Via Sean M.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 09:59 PM | Add Comment
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