When did Obama renounce communism?

Dr. John Drew raises a question which I've been wondering about for several years -- what is Obama's conversion story from his embrace of communist revolution? 

The really crucial issue, however, is that Obama does not seem to have a conversion story which explains how he quit being a Marxist. In the experience of me and others, being a Marxist is sort of like being in a religious cult. It ends up controlling what you do with your life, the friends you choose, the mentors you pick and the careers that make sense to you. I have a fairly detailed conversion story. I remember the exact moment when I first realized I was no longer a Marxist. Obama, however, does not seem to have a conversion story in his autobiography.

We know his parents and grandparents were ardent marxists.  He acknowledges that Frank Marshall Davis, an active member of the party, was a key mentor for him as a teenager.  He admits he hung out with radicals in college.  Terrorists, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dhorn, played critical roles for many years in his life.  Ayers wrote his autobiography for him, got him his jobs, and launched his political career.  Obama even joined a marxist political party while in Chicago.

If he stopped believing, it would have been an incredibly life-changing event.  There doesn't appear to be any evidence that he did.  Certainly, his policies as president don't give us any indication that he did.

More Obama Corruption

Screwing non-union Delphi employees out of their pensions while giving sweetheart extras to Delphi union workers.  Obama's abandonment of the law and ad hoc interference with a bankruptcy was political corruption from start to finish.

I wonder if the news media will cover this.  Not.

Fracking

Richard Epstein.  Read it all.

Questions for the news media

Obama's college classmate poses issues that the news media should have had the answers to 4 years ago.

If anyone should have questions about Obama’s record at Columbia University, it’s me. We both graduated (according to Obama) Columbia University, Class of ’83. We were both (according to Obama) Pre-Law and Political Science majors. And I thought I knew most everyone at Columbia. I certainly thought I’d heard of all of my fellow Political Science majors. But not Obama (or as he was known then- Barry Soetoro). I never met him. Never saw him. Never even heard of him. And none of the classmates that I knew at Columbia has ever met him, saw him, or heard of him.

But don’t take my word for it. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2008 that Fox News randomly called 400 of our Columbia classmates and never found one who had ever met Obama.

...

Here’s my gut belief: Obama got a leg up by being admitted to both Occidental and Columbia as a foreign exchange student. He was raised as a young boy in Indonesia. But did his mother ever change him back to a U.S. citizen? When he returned to live with his grandparents in Hawaii or as he neared college-age preparing to apply to schools, did he ever change his citizenship back? I’m betting not.

If you could unseal Obama’s Columbia University records I believe you’d find that:

A)   He rarely ever attended class.

B)   His grades were not those typical of what we understand it takes to get into Harvard Law School.

C)   He attended Columbia as a foreign exchange student.

D)   He paid little for either undergraduate college or Harvard Law School because of foreign aid and scholarships given to a poor foreign students like this kid Barry Soetoro from Indonesia.

A thought unapproved re:Nixon

Conrad Black on Nixon:

In January 1969, there were no U.S. relations with China, no arms control talks in progress with the U.S.S.R., no peace process in the Middle East, there were race or anti-war riots almost every week all over the United States, and the country had been shaken by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy (both in their early 40s). LBJ could not go anywhere in the country without demonstrations, as students occupied universities and the whole country was in tumult.

Four years later, Nixon had withdrawn from Vietnam, preserving a non-communist South Vietnam, which had defeated the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong in April 1972 with no American ground support, though heavy air support. He had negotiated and signed the greatest arms control agreement in world history with the Soviet Union, founded the Environmental Protection Agency, ended school segregation and avoided the court-ordered, Democratic Party-approved nightmare of busing children all around metropolitan areas for racial balance, and there were no riots, demonstrations, assassinations or university occupations. He started the Middle East peace process, reduced the crime rate and ended conscription.

For all of these reasons, he was re-elected by the greatest plurality in American history, 18 million votes, and a percentage of the vote (60.7) equaled only by Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. His term was rivaled only by Lincoln’s and FDR’s first and third terms as the most successful in U.S. history.

Global Warming Scientist Misleads Congress

Pielke, Jr. explains.  Steve Mc comments.

Giving a 'rat's ass' about Chick-fil-A

In 1977, Nazis announced plans to stage a march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie, Illinois.  They chose Skokie precisely because of its large Jewish population many of whom were survivors of Nazi concentration camps or people who had lost family members in the Holocaust.  The town refused a permit to march and the Nazis sued claiming that their right to free speech was wrongfully denied by the government.  The Nazis were represented by the ACLU and lead counsel was Jewish.  (This was back when the ACLU was actually interested in defending civil rights rather than simply serving as an attack dog for left-wing politics.)  As difficult as the decision was, the ACLU knew that even the most abhorrent speech must be protected from government interference.  It is precisely in cases where some disagree with the speech at issue that defenders of liberty must endeavor to stand strong and unyielding against the government bullies and thought police.  The ACLU won the Skokie case, but lost over 30,000 members.  And the Nazis never bothered to march.  Some consider it the ACLU's finest hour as a defender of constitutional rights.

Yesterday, millions of Americans chose to make a statement because government leaders in various large US cities threatened a business because its founder affirmed his Christian faith in an interview.  No doubt many of those who stood in long lines at Chick-fil-A did so because they agreed with Truett Cathy's views opposing governmental endorsement of gay marriage.  What needs to be emphasized, however, is that a large number of people did so despite disagreeing with his views.  They chose to make a statement against governmental bullying, against governments which threaten a business in its exercise of free speech.  This isn't anything remotely like the Skokie Nazi case.  But the principle is the same.  Liberty is fragile.  We must be vigilant in protecting it.  And if we choose to ignore it's deprivation for some because we don't agree with their views, we threaten its vitality and protection for all of us.

I would submit that the people who should most make a concerted effort to give a 'rat's ass' about Chick-fil-A in this instance are those who disagree with Mr. Cathy's views.

[the title of this post comes from a comment left by one of my loved ones on facebook that she didn't give a rat's ass about Chick-fil-A]