Harvard & Liberal Dem Senate Candidate Speak with Forked Tongue in Diversity Fraud

Oops.  Fraud is such strong language, but if the shoe fits....  Let's see -- years ago, liberal Harvard comes under flak for not having enough minorities on its Law School faculty, so poof! it offers up a woman named Elizabeth Warren as part American Indian, and wallah! Diversity!  Problem (link):  she can't prove it, apparently relying instead on "family stories", and fantastically claims that despite contemporaneous Harvard publications touting her minority status, she remembers nothing about it all.  Besides, she now says to questioners, “You’re trying to raise something from 15 years ago.”  You see, she's a law professor and knows the statue of limitations on fraud has run.  Warren is also embroiled in another kerfuffle about a 10-year interest-free loan she has received from Harvard for reasons unclear.  Hmmm.

Oh, this ultraliberal Native American and Obama acolyte Warren is running as the Democrat candidate for Senate in the Bay State. 

John M Greco

Notre Dame Profs Outraged Over Bishop’s Criticism of Obama, Infanticide Protector and Notre Dame Honoree

Finally, over a hundred professors of the apparently nominally-Catholic University of Notre Dame have found something to be outraged about.

They weren't outraged when Notre Dame honored (link; link) Barack Obama, one of the, if not the, leading defender (link; link; link; link; link) in the Illinois legislature of infanticide, where hospital nurses placed viable infants born alive after botched abortions alone in storage rooms to die without medical care, a practice famously publicized by a nurse who had witnessed it at the incongruously-named Christ Hospital in suburban Chicago.

But let a Bishop criticize Obama and the Notre Dame faculty erupts like Mount Vesuvius.  The Chicago Tribune reports (link) that “More than a hundred University of Notre Dame professors have demanded that Illinois Bishop Daniel Jenky renounce comments he made criticizing President Barack Obama's stance on religious liberty that compared him to dictators Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin....”  The Bishop is a Notre Dame graduate and sits on the ND Board of Fellows and Board of Trustees, says the Tribune.  “In his homily, Jenky compared the administration's stance to anti-religious figures in history such as Hitler and Stalin who 'have tried to force Christians to huddle and hide within the confines of their churches.' " 

Infanticide?  To each his own.  Late Term Partial Birth Abortions?  Who am I to judge?  Criticize Obama?  HOW DARE YOU?  So goes the Catholic University of Notre Dame, a great institution that has fallen of late into some very bad hands.  

John M Greco

The Obama Eating Dog Story Looks To Have Legs

What does Obama call Romney’s dog?  Meals on Wheels

Obama has been “hoist with his own petard”, to recall Shakespeare’s phrase.  How apropos.  I’m getting a big kick out of the way the Democrat’s cruelty to dogs smear against Romney has boomeranged to smash them squarely in their collective head. 

If I had a dog, it would look like the dog Obama ate*

Recap:  on a family car trip, Romney placed their dog on the car’s roof in a secured dog carrier fitted with a wind shield.  Word from the Romney family is that not only did the dog do fine, the dog liked it.  This would come as no surprise to any sentient being who would have observed that dogs love to stick their heads out of car windows at high speeds, something that has always amazed me.  But the Obama campaign Democrat brain trust seems somehow to have missed ever seeing such a thing. 

New Obama Campaign Theme ....How Much Is That Doggie In The Window

And of course, since Obama can’t run on his record by a long shot, all they can do is dredge up 30 year old tiny stories like this one in a desperate and surely pathetic attempt to gain traction with inattentive and easily fooled voters – i.e., the kind the Democrat controlist elite depends on for votes but whom they secretly despise.

Harry Truman: if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.  Good thing Obama wasn’t around then.

Well, not only does turn out that the Romney dog loved the rooftop carrier, but that Obama wrote about eating dog as a child with his Muslim step-father in Indonesia in his memoir “Dreams From My Father.”  The Obama Smear Brain Trust  Missed that one too – obviously no one actually read, or at least remembered, Obama’s book.

   Perhaps we should refer to the President as Bark Obama

Amidst all this humor, David Goldman sees (link) a deeper, and longer-lasting meaning:

What a careful reader will take away from Barack Obama’s memoir “Dreams From My Father” is not only that the president used to eat dog meat, but more importantly, that he identifies with dog-eaters. He wants us to understand that he is one of them....  [T]here is something far more visceral, more existential to the president’s dislike of the United States, and that arises from his early residence in the Third World, and his identification with the people of the Third World whose lives are disrupted by the creative destruction that America has unleashed.

It really isn’t unfair at all to bring Obama’s canine consumption to public attention. The president isn’t really one of us. He’s a dog-eater. He tells the story in his memoir to emphasize that viscerally, Obama identifies with the Third World of his upbringing more than with the America of his adulthood. It is our great misfortune to have a president who dislikes our country at this juncture in our history.

The bottom line is that for the Obama team, the Romney canine-on-the-roof  smear is one dog that won’t hunt.

After his defeat in November, Obama won’t eat crow -- he'll want collie

John M Greco

* a reference of course to Obama’s inappropriate, inflammatory, and prejudicial comment on the Martin/Zimmerman affair

** The quips and jokes aren’t mine -- I’ve seen them at various webs sites

The Prosecutor Takes Sides in the Martin/Zimmerman Affair, and Justice Sighs

I caught today on radio the first few minutes of special prosecutor Angela Corey’s news conference in the Martin/Zimmerman affair, at which she announced (link) second degree murder charges against George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin, and I was shocked to hear her opening remarks refer to speaking with the family of the dead young man and her sympathy for them.  Prosecutors are supposed to examine the evidence in a dispassionate manner and make determinations in a fair, impartial manner without even the appearance of impropriety or bias.  Well, not so here, not at all so here.   

Here are special prosecutor Corey’s opening words after introducing herself:

“Just moments ago we spoke by phone with Sabrina Fulton and Tracy Martin.  It was less than three weeks ago that we told those sweet parents that we would get answers to all of their questions no matter where our quest for the truth led us.  And it is the search for justice for Trayvon that has brought us to this moment.”

“Those sweet parents”?!  “Search for justice for Trayvon"?!  And the prosecutor's on an intimate, first name basis already with the deceased?!

We have already seen, in this highly politicized affair, black liberal Democrats such as Obama, Sharpton, and Jackson foment a lynch-mob atmosphere, and major liberal news organizations NBC and ABC distort the facts through highly deceptive and prejudicial editing of audio and video tapes.  We have seen some news organizations, such as the New York Times and Gwen Ifill, a black liberal public TV commentator, refer to the half-Hispanic and half-white Zimmerman as “half-white” and “white” respectively, terms apparently never before used by them for a person at least half Hispanic.  We have seen the New Black Panthers, a racist organization already on video record for intimidation of white voters in Philadelphia in a case that black Obama Attorney General Holder ignores, issue “Wanted Dead or Alive” posters for alleged shooter Zimmerman.  So much for Obama’s Hope and Change and a new era of race relations in America.  And now the local prosecutor in Florida has joined the mob.     

Attorney William Jacobson writes (link) at Legal Insurrection blog:  “What irked me was to hear the prosecutor thank the Martin family attorneys....  For the prosecutor to embrace the Martin family attorneys with thanks at the press conference, and for AG [Obama Attorney General] Eric Holder verbally to praise Sharpton today, tells me that a case which should be about facts of who did what to whom is going to turn into an even bigger racial narrative for a variety of purposes which have nothing to do with the guilt or innocence of the accused.”

A commenter to the above-referenced post wrote: ‘The [prosecutor’s] comment about seeking “justice for Trayvon” did not sit well with many attorneys that I know who heard the comments. It was unprofessional at best on the part of a prosecutor who should KNOW better with a case this potentially charged. The prosecutor attempted to mitigate through her later comments, but the damage was done.  It is not to seek justice for an individual, but simply to do justice (whatever that happens to be).’

It’s the Duke Lacrosse racial lynch mob hysteria all over again – for some, dispassionate examination of the facts is avoided, and all that matters is for blacks to get a sacrificial offering to make up for past injustice. Whether or not the actual accused is guilty matters not.  Here are comments from today from a law professor, a law professor for God's sake, in the Obama Administration (link):

Christi Cunningham, an associate secretary of regulation at the [Obama Administration] Department of Labor and a law professor at Howard University, spoke today at the National Action Network’s conference in Washington, D.C. Cunningham started her speech by calling for “justice for Trayvon Martin” and preempting the impending trial of George Zimmerman by asking rhetorically, “Why are people acting like this is a confusing situation and we don’t know what happened? We know exactly what happened, because it’s happened before.”

In reaction to the second degree murder charge based on how the facts known so far match up against what is required for the prosecution to prove second degree murder, one commenter at National Review Online said “How disgusting the State Attorney denied a grand jury the opportunity to review the evidence and determine what, if any, charges it supported against Zimmerman in order to make a craven, politicized, possibly unethical charging decision on her own.” 

I have no idea what happened that night, but I'm repelled by the lynch mob atmosphere and the stated effort of the special prosecutor to "search for justice for Trayvon".  I want to see justice done, not justice for Travon Martin or justice for George Zimmerman.  Just justice.

John M Greco

Show Boat at the Lyric Opera

Chicago's Civic Opera House

The seminal work in American musical theater begins with loud, uncomfortable notes, filled with foreboding, as the curtain opens on black stevedores loading cotton while singing “Niggers all work on de Mississippi, Niggers all work while de white folks play ....”  Whoa!  Imagine sitting in the audience on opening night, December 27, 1927, expecting the usual light fare.  Mark Steyn writes in Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: “From that first shocking word, confronting mid-town Manhattan with aspects of their society they preferred not to think about, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II presented their audience with something new: drama in music, with neither element constrained by the other.  It is the ultimate opening number, because it is the opening number for all [in American musical theater] that follows.”   Show Boat was the first work to take serious themes and tightly integrate music and lyrics into the narrative, where they advance and expound on the story line, a serious story line – resulting in what Steyn calls “the most important work in American musical theater, [as] it sums up what’s gone before and points the way ahead.”  

Show Boat Backdrop on the Stage of the Civic Opera House

A couple of weeks ago at Chicago’s Lyric Opera I took in the season’s last staging of the work that became Hammerstein’s masterpiece – actually, the first of many for the greatest lyricist in musical theater and perhaps its greatest dramatist.  The production was well-done and spirited, although to bring the running time in at a brisk 3 1/3 hours it by necessity didn’t include every one of the many scenes and songs written by Kern and Hammerstein for the original and for various stage and film reprises (for that we have the excellent 1988 compilation by John McGlinn featuring Frederica von Stade, Jerry Hadley, Teresa Stratas, and Karla Burns, among others).  The singing and acting were very good and the music and lyrics, of course, incomparable, although the sparse set was disappointing for a Lyric production, granting the challenges of frequent scene changes and the invariable budget constraints.  The ensemble of supporting black singers and dancers was exceptional, and Ashley Brown as Magnolia and Angela Renee Simpson as Queenie particularly stood out. 

The narrative spans several decades, and, against the backdrop themes of racial privilege and discrimination and the timelessness of the River, at the core is the sad story of a young woman who, despite being warned of the danger of falling in love with a “no-account river fella” because when “a girl like you starts to love a man, she don’t stop so easy,” nevertheless falls in love with a no-account river fella who later abandons her and their young daughter, proving that indeed, to her lifelong detriment, she couldn’t help lovin’ dat man.  
    
R Balsamo