Free Republic

Great photoshop from the americanelephant blog...meet the Messiahs new foreign policy advisor.

WASHINGTON: Every day around 8 a.m., foreign policy aides at Senator Barack Obama's Chicago campaign headquarters send him two e-mails: a briefing on major world developments over the previous 24 hours and a set of questions, accompanied by suggested answers, that the candidate is likely to be asked about international relations during the day. One recent Q. & A. asked, for example, whether Obama supported the decision by Iraq's prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, to include a timetable for American troop withdrawal in any new security agreements with the United States. The answer, provided to Obama with bullet points, was...

June 21, 2008 Exclusive: Barack Obama and the Blustery Day Satire by Shawn GoodwinChildren's stories.They lift up dampened spirits and create flights of fancy for both the young and the young at heart.Everyone needs an escape from reality once in a while, even the most powerful men and women in the free world. Of course, it is expected that these movers and shakers would take a trip to Fantasy Island when they were in the privacy of their own homes.To think that potential members of a possible Presidential administration would turn to a children's book to make policy decisions is...

"Winnie-the-Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security." --former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, one of Barack Obama's key foreign policy advisers, June 11 The gathering of oh-so-sober pro-Obama foreign policy experts was drowning in solemnity and earnestness. Speaker after speaker had laboriously dilated on the important distinction--unappreciated by the oh-so-stupid-and-bad Bush administration--between soft power and hard power. And this is to say nothing of the synthesis of soft and hard in ... smart power! Richard Danzig, the luncheon speaker, hoped to wake the slumberers from their torpor. So he took A.A. Milne rather than Joseph Nye...

June 20, 2008Know your enemy By Raymond Ibrahim Barack Obama's National Security Advisor Richard Danzig recently made a fool of himself by claiming that Winnie the Pooh is a "fundamental text on national security." His flippancy only emphasizes the fact that doctrinal writings influence the conduct of war. To anticipate the enemy's thinking, you have to know the foundational texts in which his mind has been marinated. Although military studies have traditionally valued and absorbed the texts of classical war doctrine -- Clausewitz's On War, Sun Tsu's The Art of War, even the exploits of Alexander the Great as recorded in Arrian...

A runaway metaphor is not the worst sin in the world. But if former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig really is a potential national security adviser under President Obama, he's doing his potential future boss no favors when he talks like this: Richard Danzig, who served as Navy Secretary under President Clinton and is tipped to become National Security Adviser in an Obama White House, told a major foreign policy conference in Washington that the future of US strategy in the war on terrorism should follow a lesson from the pages of Winnie the Pooh, which can be shortened to: if...

Let me be the first to defend the good name and honor of one Winnie the Pooh. He is indeed smarter than the average bear. According to my two-year old son, this is no empty slogan. So mighty is the wisdom of Pooh, it now even informs the philosophy of Barak Obama military advisor and former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig. The Honorable Mr. Danzig offered us the following observations about my little boy’s favorite story book character and stuffed animal model. Mr Danzig told the Centre for New American Security: “Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental...

SAN FRANCISCO - Officials in a Northern California school district might not think Tiggers are such wonderful things after agreeing to pay $95,000 in lawyers' fees to five families who sued the school over its dress code. The parents went to court after a student was disciplined for wearing socks with the "Winnie the Pooh" cartoon character Tigger on the first day of school last year. The district's superintendent said Thursday that the settlement money is for the plaintiffs' lawyers; the district is also on the hook to pay the lawyers it hired. The settlement also says Redwood Middle School...

We take on Fox's new satire show and we have some grammy gossip in this Pop Culture post. The inventor of a guy's most cherished object died this past week. Also, talking urinals and Eminem's not so good in the sack so we hear. Scott Baio of Joanie and Chachi tells us about his love life, aren't you beyond excited? Finally, Media Nuggets and Snopes defuses that wildly popular Internet myth about Reverse PIN numbers and ATM's.

ANKARA (AFP) - Turkey's public television TRT, controlled by the Islamist-rooted government, has barred the popular Walt Disney cartoon "Winnie the Pooh" from air because it has a piglet as one of its main heroes, the Turkish press reported. Several other cartoons featuring pigs also failed to win the green light from TRT management, according to the left-wing Cumhuriyet daily. The station initially considered scissoring the scenes showing Piglet, but abandoned the idea because the small pink-skinned character, one of Winnie the Pooh's closest friends, appeared too often, Cumhuriyet and the mass-circulation Sabah newspaper said. TRT officials were not immediately...

Winnie the Pooh, one of the world's best loved characters, is celebrating his 80th birthday. Pooh - based on the bedtime stories by Alan Alexander (AA) Milne - first appeared in the London Evening News on Christmas Eve 1925 in a story called The Wrong Sort of Bees. The honey-loving bear's many adventures - along with his friends Tigger, Piglet and Eeyore - have since been translated into more than 40 languages. Walt Disney, which owns the rights to Winnie the Pooh, is planning a year of celebrations, beginning early in the new year. Before he created Pooh, Milne was...

A unexpected new character is coming to the Hundred Acre Wood. Disney is working on a new Winnie the Pooh TV series, to come out in 2007, that will replace Christopher Robin with a 6-year-old girl. Its new animated series, My Friends Tigger and Pooh, will have the same gentle spirit as the much-loved A.A. Milne classic, Disney says. But Disney hopes to attract an older audience by introducing a six-year-old tomboy as friend to Tigger, Pooh the bear and tiny Piglet. The Disneyfied characters also will have a new look. Though the stories will still emphasize trust, friendship and...

After 80 years in Hundred Acre Wood Winnie the Pooh is to get a female friend, replacing Christopher Robin, according to reports. The Walt Disney Company has decided to pair Pooh up with a red-haired six-year-old tomboy for its 2007 series, newspaper USA Today reported. Disney said My Friends Tigger and Pooh will keep the "trust, friendship and happiness" of AA Milne's stories. Pooh is being re-branded as part of its 80th anniversary celebrations. Active side "We got raised eyebrows even in-house at first, but the feeling was these timeless characters really needed a breath of fresh air that only...

Winnie the Pooh’s owner just attractive enough, so Disney turned him into a 6-year-old girl POOR Christopher Robin. For 80 years there has been an enchanted place on the top of the forest where a little boy and his bear would always be playing. But though Winnie the Pooh became a hugely successful brand, Christopher Robin just wouldn’t sell. “There’s only one thing to be done,” said the executives at Disney, and replaced him with a six-year-old girl. Among the frantic merchandising activities laid on to mark the 80th anniversary of Hundred Acre Wood, Disney has commissioned an animated series...

A "Short" History of Pooh and Winnie A.A. Milne always acknowledged that it was his wife, Daphne, and his young son, Christopher Robin, who inspired him to write the poems and stories – the literary journey began in 1924 when the Very Young Christopher Robin was introduced to an American black bear at the London Zoological Gardens. My searches for the origins of Pooh have led me along many paths for 'the truth,' as there are various versions of Pooh's beginnings. My very dear friend, the late Sir Basil Bartlett, Bart, formerly married to Mary Malcolm, the first BBC Television...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - The judge who dismissed a civil suit against The Walt Disney Co. in March in a Winnie the Pooh royalty dispute was biased and should have been disqualified, lawyers for the plaintiffs in the case said Thursday. Attorneys for Stephen Slesinger Inc. have asked that Superior Court Judge Charles W. McCoy Jr. recuse himself or be disqualified from the case. They also want his March ruling vacated and a new hearing before a different judge. McCoy has disqualified himself in the past in cases where one party was represented by the judge's old law firm and...