Is Obama a socialist?

I have gone through this before.  Socialism attempts to prmote Marx's theories in the bounds of democracy, which is to ultimately impossible.  It is obsessed with inequalities, and seeks to "remedy" them by punishing society's achievers through taxation and loss of liberty.  Socialists win elections by encouraging resentment of the wealthy, blaming America, exploiting Western guilt, and castigating opponents as mean-spirited bigots too stupid to understand their compassionate brilliance.  [This is from my favorite Newsletter] 

Remember this when you hear a prominent member of the Democratic party say, "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good," Hillary Clinton in a San Francisco speech.   Or "The truth is, in order to get things like Universal Health Care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more,"   Michelle Obama.

Obama flunks history, again

After receiving a hailstorm of criticism for considering Brandenburg Gate for a public speech, as well as official German dissuasion, Barack Obama moved the venue to the Siegessäule monument.  Obama will speak about “historic” US-German relations, but once again, Obama’s own grasp of history has been proven deficient.  Not only does the site contain a monument to Prussian victories over other American allies in Europe, its placement was decided by Adolf Hitler — in order to impress crowds in his idealized version of Berlin called Germania

The more basic question is why Obama feels the need to conduct a campaign event among Germans.  Meeting with foreign leaders makes sense for a man with no foreign policy experience whatsoever, but that doesn’t require massive rallies among people who aren’t voting in this election.  In his rush to look impressive for no one’s purposes but his own, Obama has made himself look ignorant and arrogant all over again.

Maliki spokesman: His timetable comment was “not conveyed accurately”

Please.

But a spokesman for al-Maliki said his remarks “were misunderstood, mistranslated and not conveyed accurately.”

Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said the possibility of troop withdrawal was based on the continuance of security improvements, echoing statements that the White House made Friday after a meeting between al-Maliki and U.S. President Bush.

As if it’s not bad enough that they’re trying to spin this after the fact, the Times reports that the statement was put out by Centcom, just to make the U.S. fingerprints on it extra legible, I guess. In any event, Maliki’s desire to make any timetable contingent upon further security gains was already clear from the Spiegel translation — or more specifically, the first version of the Spiegel translation, before they went and surreptitiously changed it.

Until the meteor strikes... - Hopefully, everyone's heard the news by now that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a statement today removing all warnings about the safety of tomatoes. While they had cleared virtually every tomato sold in the country last month, few consumers were getting that news.

All varieties of tomatoes are safe to eat. There is no reason to avoid tomatoes or to fear that tomatoes on the market are contaminated with Salmonella Saintpaul, said the FDA.

The other side of the story comes from the conservative Tax Foundation, which reported that Obama would shift more of the tax burden to a relative few families: "Obama's plan would greatly accelerate the decades-long trend toward a federal government that depends for tax revenue almost exclusively on a few high-income people....1.13 million Americans would pay more in all federal taxes than 128 million of their fellow citizens combined."

That's an aspect of tax fairness that rarely gets mentioned by TV reporters who seek out liberal analysts to prove liberal points. A Nexis search shows the Tax Foundation has not been cited on network TV in more than three years.

U.S. nuke summit with Iran accomplishes jack; Updated

Actually, that’s not true. It achieved the very important breakthrough of them telling us to our face that they’re not going to suspend enrichment.

Instead of a gas-tax holiday, Congress considers gas-tax hike

John McCain couldn’t convince Congress to adopt his gas-tax holiday, but Congress does plan on making some changes to the rate.  Unfortunately, the change will go in the opposite direction, if Democrats get their wish.  With Americans driving less, the highway fund faces even more severe shortfalls than expected from lost gas-tax revenue — and so the Democrats plan to hike it up by ten cents a gallon

In the tank: Worshipping media to follow Obama around the world; Update & Bump: AOL Hot Seat Poll

Hillary Clinton’s campaign complained loudly that the media treated Barack Obama like a rock star instead of a presidential candidate.  Saturday Night Live made itself relevant for the first time in a generation by skewering the love affair that the mainstream media had with Obama, finally embarrassing them into asking a few tough questions of Obama — after more than a year.  Now, with Obama embarking on his world tour, all three broadcast networks will have their anchors trailing him, apparently hoping to record every bon mot that escapes from his lips:

Senator John McCain’s trip to Iraq last spring was a low-key affair: With his ordinary retinue of reporters following him abroad, the NBC News anchor Brian Williams reported on his arrival in Baghdad from New York, with just two sentences tacked onto the “in other political news” portion of his newscast.

But when Obama heads for Iraq and other locations overseas this summer, Williams is planning to catch up with him in person, as are the other two evening news anchors, Charles Gibson of ABC and Katie Couric of CBS, who, like Williams, are far along in discussions to interview Obama on successive nights.

And while the anchors are jockeying for interviews with Obama at stops along his route, the regulars on the Obama campaign plane will have new seat mates: star political reporters from the major newspapers and magazines who are flocking to catch Obama’s first overseas trip since becoming the presumptive nominee of his party.

CBS tried to explain this away by underscoring the novelty of the trip. Paul Friedman, senior VP of CBS News, said that if this were John McCain’s first trip to a war zone, the networks would cover it similarly. Unfortunately for Friedman, that’s demonstrably false. McCain has traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan, both before and after announcing himself as a candidate for the Presidency, and the networks mostly ignored his trips.

Maliki: Obama’s 16-month timetable sounds good; Update: Spiegel changes quote

Here’s the exchange from Spiegel’s English translation, duly hyped by Reuters as tacit evidence of Liberal Jesus’s foreign-policy sagacity.

SPIEGEL: Would you hazard a prediction as to when most of the US troops will finally leave Iraq?

Maliki: As soon as possible, as far as we’re concerned. US presidential candidate Barack Obama is right when he talks about 16 months. Assuming that positive developments continue, this is about the same time period that corresponds to our wishes.

The unasked follow-up question: How about the 14-month timetable that Obama wanted to set in January 2007 to start pulling troops out before those positive developments could occur? How keen does that look in hindsight? To repeat a point made yesterday, the only reason a timetable or “time horizon” is arguably a responsible strategy now is because it was properly rejected as being irresponsible then. Maliki hints at that in another part of the interview:

So far the Americans have had trouble agreeing to a concrete timetable for withdrawal, because they feel it would appear tantamount to an admission of defeat. But that isn’t the case at all. If we come to an agreement, it is not evidence of a defeat, but of a victory, of a severe blow we have inflicted on al-Qaida and the militias.

Exactly, which at least partly explains why Bush is more willing to compromise now on some sort of informal schedule. Compare Maliki’s justification for the timetable to Obama’s justification in his big Iraq speech. The pacification of the country is almost incidental, something to congratulate Petraeus on and then quickly move past. To the extent conditions in Iraq seem to affect his rationale at all, he offers this: “In the 18 months since the surge began, as I warned at the outset – Iraq’s leaders have not made the political progress that was the purpose of the surge. They have not invested tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues to rebuild their country. They have not resolved their differences or shaped a new political compact.” I.e. it didn’t work, so let’s get out. . . .

Update: A commenter notes that Spiegel has rewritten the translation of the exchange about withdrawal to read as follows. There’s nothing in the article calling attention to the change; they’re trying to put one over on their readers, it seems.

SPIEGEL: Would you hazard a prediction as to when most of the US troops will finally leave Iraq?

Maliki: As soon as possible, as far as we’re concerned. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.

They’ve dropped the contingency about positive developments continuing, although it’s still implied by the part about potentially changing the plan. Did Maliki contact Spiegel and ask them to drop that part so that the quote would sound more assertive back home? Hard to believe the original translation would have been so off as to include a bit about “positive developments” that he never said.