This is a follow up to my post Cult of Personality. The best antidote to these techniques is to read and analyze the speeches. Bring your rational mind to bear. You might also be interested in this speech by another master of the technique that has themes similar to an Obama speech. H/T the comments […]

Ready or not, it’s Halloween, so I wanted to wish a nightmarishly good time on all my readers. I’m not wearing a costume, but Coco managed to look a little ghoulish for the occasion. And I did manage to carve my pumpkin before the sun completely set. Lucky for me, and lucky for the pumpkin […]

In light of the previous post on free speech (and for innumerable other reasons), I find it tough to see how any libertarian could possibly justify voting for Barack Obama. I understand why McCain could be considered beyond the pale by libertarians, especially the purists of the Large L variety, and I have voiced my […]

M. Simon’s post about the hypnotic qualities of Barack Obama made me recall something which might be of interest, and which may or may not shed light on the human perceptions involved. Basically, I found Barack Obama interesting at first, and the fact that he had a more pleasant voice than Hillary made me favor […]

Tom Maguire asks some good questions about the recent news item involving Barack Obama’s aunt: Barack Obama has an aunt (OK, a half-aunt) living in Boston and we need a British newspaper to tell us this? What else are we going to learn about Obama after we elect him? And will we learn it from […]

The last day or so I have been looking at the The Mass Psychology of Fascism and how to Escape from Freedom. Not the books. Stuff on the net. Let me start with Ali Sina’s discussion of the cult of personality. There are other disturbing similarities. Like Hitler and Khomeini, Obama also likes to create […]

Since we love rumors around here let me pass on another one. According to The Obama File a tape in which Michelle Obama is castigating racists for working for the defeat of her husband will air on FOX some time in the next few days (given the typical election calculations it will be out some […]

I was all set to write a post about the LA Times withholding the video of Rashid Khalidi’s farewell party (which featured the Ayerses and the Obamas among other luminaries), when I saw that WorldNetDaily has stepped right up to the moral equivalency plate with a story about McCain giving Khalidi (or at least some […]

Don’t ask me why. I heard this and had an intense feeling something terrible was about to happen, then a flock of crows flew low overhead, in avian anarchist formation. No going home. MORE: I liked dr kill’s comment to the last post: Human reality is universal only at the border of life and death. […]

I don’t know whether to call this the quote of the day, the quote of the month, or the quote of the year, but I think what Bill Quick says here is brilliant: A free and healthy democracy cannot function when it has no way to determine reality. This has been on my mind for […]

Economist George Newman tears into both candidates, although he offers some advice to McCain: …Nothing reveals Mr. Obama’s visceral hostility to business more than the constant urging of our best and brightest to desert the productive private sector (“greed”) and go into public service like politics or community organizing (i.e., organizing people to press government […]

The Register UK is looking at how Greenpeace views fusion. Greenpeace is suspicious. Yes they are. The (Joint European Torus) JET reactor in Culham, Oxfordshire was completed 25 years ago, and work is underway on ITER in Cadarache, France, a €10bn facility, backed by six countries (including China) plus the EU. The Czech Republic has […]

FedBizOpps.gov has a solicitation for a bid for more experiments by EMC2, Doc Bussard’s company now being run (at least on the experimental side) by Rick Nebel. The Naval Air Warfare Center, Weapons Division, China Lake, CA intends to procure on an other than full and open competition basis a service to provide: 1) Research […]

Kim Priestap reports on early voting in Florida. Democrats seem to have a big advantage in turnout. Democrats are beaming that their party is outperforming the Republicans in early voting, releasing numbers Wednesday that show registrants of their party ahead 54 percent to 30 percent among the 1.4 million voters who have gone to the […]

As Abe Greenwald makes clear, “Something Happened.” One week ago, the Zogby tracking poll had Barack Obama beating John McCain by almost 10 points among likely voters. Today, it’s a four-point game. Yesterday, IBD reported, “After seesawing between 3.2 and 3.9 points over the weekend, Obama’s lead slipped to 2.8[.]” Gallup’s newest traditional poll has […]

I’m getting a bit tired of the fact that every time I write a post about Bill Ayers, I am told that the real issue is somehow G. Gordon Liddy. On the most recent occasion a commenter accused me of Nazism: How is it that you support a neo-nazi fascist like G. Gordon Liddy, who […]

During the discussion of Ayers’ and the Weather Underground’s genocidal plan to murder 25 million Americans, it occurred to me that focusing on tactics (like terrorism and murder) tends to sideline the murderous ideology that drives them. In what I think is an attempt to frame the debate away from ideology, typical “fact check” discussions […]

From the comments at HillBuzz Sara P speaks Ok, I want to clear my conscious a little. Hopefully you could make a blog post to help some fellow clinton supporters out. I work for a campaign and can’t wait for this week to be over. I was doing it for a job. I was not […]

HillBuzz needs your help with their get out the vote effort for McCain/Palin. We need to ask for your help. We’re putting together a canvassing trip into Ohio this coming weekend to bring what we hope will be about 70 DeMcCrats for McCain and Young Republican supporters into Ohio to canvass for McCain/Palin in the […]

The Wall Street Journal has a memo from the McCain Campaign. Let me just give one highlight that touches on something I wrote about yesterday: The PUMA Question. * We are beginning to once again get over a 20% chunk of the vote among soft Democrats. Importantly as well, our long identified target of “Walmart […]