Sunday Morning Talk Show Thread 21 January 2007

#240, I think there will be plenty of Bloggers that are not screened out of Hillary's listening sessions. After one or two start in on her, she will probably chose another strategy, and let us not forget you have Major Egotistical varmints competing with her, and they do not have her baggage or her Husband's baggage. The rats want to win this one.

I wonder how much of bubba's book he is actually writing.

No... it's ok. I'll figure it out now.

Pregame ....

;-)

Went to to a party last night and the conversation eventually swung around to Iraq. Many of those involved in the discussion , like the Democrats, believe that Iraq is just the Sunnis fighting the Shiites. Period. An internal squabble.

I know exactly what you are experiencing. I am getting tired of refuting these fantasies, myself. When a large faction of a country refuses to come to terms with the danger that has been stalking it for decades, disaster follows. The Civil War comes to mind.

Ironically, Middle Eastern elements may come to the realization that Iran is a dire threat before America can wake up to the danger. And, yes, it could be too late anyway.

Do not forget the double digit unemployment rates.

Ah, An Analysis of the Alinsky Model. Sure you know all this already... it's for the gang.

Hil's College Thesis
Reveals Her Mind

By BARBARA OLSON

"He who fears corruption fears life."
— Saul Alinsky, "Rules for Radicals"

This quote immediately came to mind after my reading of Hillary Rodham's Wellesley College senior thesis — a document kept under lock and key since the 1992 elections.

Back then, when researchers and journalists were searching for information on the newly elected First Couple, Wellesley suddenly declared that it would seal the thesis of any graduate who became President or First Lady.

A few weeks ago, however, I came into possession of Hillary's suppressed thesis. In those 75 pages, the future First Lady reveals herself as someone steeped in the political lore and history of one of America's most political cities. No, not New York — Chicago. There she began her political journey from Goldwater girl to leftist icon.

The thesis' title, "There is Only the Fight ... An Analysis of the Alinsky Model," exposes Clinton's strong ideological attachment to her most influential mentor, Saul Alinsky.

Reading this work makes it clear why she had to remove it from public view, for Alinsky, who died in 1972, was a radical social activist who preached grass-roots organizing and intense, confrontational politics.

While Clinton was studying under Alinsky, he was preparing what would be his final and most important book: "Rules for Radicals," published less than two years after Hillary graduated from Wellesley and only one year before his death.

Alinsky's hold on Hillary is astonishingly evident in her thesis, which is replete with his yet-unpublished political tactics. The thesis reveals that he was moving from local organizing efforts to a new arena — the national stage.

She wrote: "His [Alinsky's] new aspect, national planning, derives from the necessity of entrusting social change to institutions, specifically the United States government."

Alinsky, we can now see, taught Hillary the political tactics that she successfully deployed in Arkansas and the White House and is now beginning to use in New York.

What were his lessons?

Alinsky defined "obtaining power" as a key tactic of organizing his "mass jujitsu." His formula for attack: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it."

This principle has become the essence of the Clinton rapid-response tactic and a key aspect of Hillary's attacks on what she has dubbed "a vast right-wing conspiracy."

The Clinton White House has adhered to Alinsky's rule that "ridicule is man's most potent weapon" and followed his advice to "let nothing get you off your target."

Hillary discusses another Alinsky rule — "power is the very essence, the dynamo of life" — in her thesis. Clearly, she had absorbed his lesson that one must first obtain power to achieve real change.

But nowhere in her thesis — or in her later life — does she seem to recognize the classical liberal critique that the relentless pursuit of power is antithetical to democracy.

Perhaps the most prescient part of the thesis is a quote from a profile of Alinsky in The Economist: "His charm lies in his ability to commit himself completely to the people in the room with him. In a shrewd though subtle way, he often manipulates them while speaking directly to their experience."

Although her thesis was written several years before she cornered Bill Clinton in the Yale Law School library, Hillary had come to recognize the potential power of a man of exceptional charm.

Alinsky recognized the potential of his student and offered her a paying job to develop organizers for "mass power-based organizations." Hillary's thesis confirmed the offer and called it "tempting." But she decided law school was a better place to develop the skills necessary to effect the changes in government she has spent so much of her life trying to achieve.

Hillary's thesis received an A. So far, her political acumen in New York has yielded her at best a C-. But her story continues to unfold.

Olson is the author of "Hell to Pay:
The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton."
----

Alan Schecter, her thesis advisor at Wellesley also had Diane Sawyer and Cokie Roberts as students.

Behold, there's a pic out today with Di and Hill, and Cokie dug on Hill's anger... even though see said she raises more money than God and is all things wonderful.

That's at newsbusters as well.

God bless her, Barbara Olsen didn't get a chance to show it to us... but this commencement speech should hold you.

Wellesley College
1969 Student Commencement Speech
Hillary D. Rodham
May 31, 1969
Ruth M. Adams, ninth president of Wellesley College, introduced Hillary D. Rodham, '69, at the 91st commencement exercises, as follows:

In addition to inviting Senator Brooke to speak to them this morning, the Class of '69 has expressed a desire to speak to them and for them at this morning's commencement. There was no debate so far as I could ascertain as to who their spokesman was to be -- Miss Hillary Rodham. Member of this graduating class, she is a major in political science and a candidate for the degree with honors. In four years she has combined academic ability with active service to the College, her junior year having served as a Vil Junior, and then as a member of Senate and during the past year as President of College Government and presiding officer of College Senate. She is also cheerful, good humored, good company, and a good friend to all of us and it is a great pleasure to present to this audience Miss Hillary Rodham.

Remarks of Hillary D. Rodham, President of the Wellesley College Government Association and member of the Class of 1969, on the occasion of Wellesley's 91st Commencement, May 31, 1969:

I am very glad that Miss Adams made it clear that what I am speaking for today is all of us -- the 400 of us -- and I find myself in a familiar position, that of reacting, something that our generation has been doing for quite a while now. We're not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest and I find myself reacting just briefly to some of the things that Senator Brooke said. This has to be brief because I do have a little speech to give. Part of the problem with empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn't do us anything. We've had lots of empathy; we've had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have used politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible. What does it mean to hear that 13.3% of the people in this country are below the poverty line? That's a percentage. We're not interested in social reconstruction; it's human reconstruction. How can we talk about percentages and trends? The complexities are not lost in our analyses, but perhaps they're just put into what we consider a more human and eventually a more progressive perspective. The question about possible and impossible was one that we brought with us to Wellesley four years ago. We arrived not yet knowing what was not possible. Consequently, we expected a lot. Our attitudes are easily understood having grown up, having come to consciousness in the first five years of this decade -- years dominated by men with dreams, men in the civil rights movement, the Peace Corps, the space program -- so we arrived at Wellesley and we found, as all of us have found, that there was a gap between expectation and realities. But it wasn't a discouraging gap and it didn't turn us into cynical, bitter old women at the age of 18. It just inspired us to do something about that gap. What we did is often difficult for some people to understand. They ask us quite often: "Why, if you're dissatisfied, do you stay in a place?" Well, if you didn't care a lot about it you wouldn't stay. It's almost as though my mother used to say, "I'll always love you but there are times when I certainly won't like you." Our love for this place, this particular place, Wellesley College, coupled with our freedom from the burden of an inauthentic reality allowed us to question basic assumptions underlying our education. Before the days of the media orchestrated demonstrations, we had our own gathering over in Founder's parking lot. We protested against the rigid academic distribution requirement. We worked for a pass-fail system. We worked for a say in some of the process of academic decision making. And luckily we were in a place where, when we questioned the meaning of a liberal arts education there were people with enough imagination to respond to that questioning. So we have made progress. We have achieved some of the things that initially saw as lacking in that gap between expectation and reality. Our concerns were not, of course, solely academic as all of us know. We worried about inside Wellesley questions of admissions, the kind of people that should be coming to Wellesley, the process for getting them here. We questioned about what responsibility we should have both for our lives as individuals and for our lives as members of a collective group.

Coupled with our concerns for the Wellesley inside here in the community were our concerns for what happened beyond Hathaway House. We wanted to know what relationship Wellesley was going to have to the outer world. We were lucky in that one of the first things Miss Adams did was to set up a cross-registration with MIT because everyone knows that education just can't have any parochial bounds any more. One of the other things that we did was the Upward Bound program. There are so many other things that we could talk about; so many attempts, at least the way we saw it, to pull ourselves into the world outside. And I think we've succeeded. There will be an Upward Bound program, just for one example, on the campus this summer.

Many of the issues that I've mentioned -- those of sharing power and responsibility, those of assuming power and responsibility have been general concerns on campuses throughout the world. But underlying those concerns there is a theme, a theme which is so trite and so old because the words are so familiar. It talks about integrity and trust and respect. Words have a funny way of trapping our minds on the way to our tongues but there are necessary means even in this multi-media age for attempting to come to grasps with some of the inarticulate maybe even inarticulable things that we're feeling. We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us even understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty. But there are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living. And so our questions, our questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government continue. The questions about those institutions are familiar to all of us. We have seen heralded across the newspapers. Senator Brooke has suggested some of them this morning. But along with using these words -- integrity, trust, and respect -- in regard to institutions and leaders we're perhaps harshest with them in regard to ourselves.

Every protest, every dissent, whether it's an individual academic paper, Founder's parking lot demonstration, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age. That attempt at forging for many of us over the past four years has meant coming to terms with our humanness. Within the context of a society that we perceive -- now we can talk about reality, and I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and what we have to accept of what we see -- but our perception of it is that it hovers often between the possibility of disaster and the potentiality for imaginatively responding to men's needs. There's a very strange conservative strain that goes through a lot of New Left, collegiate protests that I find very intriguing because it harkens back to a lot of the old virtues, to the fulfillment of original ideas. And it's also a very unique American experience. It's such a great adventure. If the experiment in human living doesn't work in this country, in this age, it's not going to work anywhere.

But we also know that to be educated, the goal of it must be human liberation. A liberation enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity so as to be free to create within and around ourselves. To be educated to freedom must be evidenced in action, and here again is where we ask ourselves, as we have asked our parents and our teachers, questions about integrity, trust, and respect. Those three words mean different things to all of us. Some of the things they can mean, for instance: Integrity, the courage to be whole, to try to mold an entire person in this particular context, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. If the only tool we have ultimately to use is our lives, so we use it in the way we can by choosing a way to live that will demonstrate the way we feel and the way we know. Integrity -- a man like Paul Santmire. Trust. This is one word that when I asked the class at our rehearsal what it was they wanted me to say for them, everyone came up to me and said "Talk about trust, talk about the lack of trust both for us and the way we feel about others. Talk about the trust bust." What can you say about it? What can you say about a feeling that permeates a generation and that perhaps is not even understood by those who are distrusted? All they can do is keep trying again and again and again. There's that wonderful line in East Coker by Eliot about there's only the trying, again and again and again; to win again what we've lost before.

And then respect. There's that mutuality of respect between people where you don't see people as percentage points. Where you don't manipulate people. Where you're not interested in social engineering for people. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences. And the word "consequences" of course catapults us into the future. One of the most tragic things that happened yesterday, a beautiful day, was that I was talking to woman who said that she wouldn't want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn't want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she's afraid. Fear is always with us but we just don't have time for it. Not now.

There are two people that I would like to thank before concluding. That's Ellie Acheson, who is the spearhead for this, and also Nancy Scheibner who wrote this poem which is the last thing that I would like to read:

My entrance into the world of so-called "social problems"
Must be with quiet laughter, or not at all.
The hollow men of anger and bitterness
The bountiful ladies of righteous degradation
All must be left to a bygone age.
And the purpose of history is to provide a receptacle
For all those myths and oddments
Which oddly we have acquired
And from which we would become unburdened
To create a newer world
To transform the future into the present.
We have no need of false revolutions
In a world where categories tend to tyrannize our minds
And hang our wills up on narrow pegs.
It is well at every given moment to seek the limits in our lives.
And once those limits are understood
To understand that limitations no longer exist.
Earth could be fair. And you and I must be free
Not to save the world in a glorious crusade
Not to kill ourselves with a nameless gnawing pain
But to practice with all the skill of our being
The art of making possible.

http://www.wellesley.edu/PublicAffairs/Commencement/1969/053169hillary.html

Hillary's Biggest Coverups
http://www.aim.org/publications/aim_report/2003/15.html

Hillary Rodham Clinton as Feminist Heroine
(a discussion panel)
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleID.17297/article_detail.asp

I am not a bit surprised....Obama may come out with yet another book..

Hillary just re-released her book, "It takes a Village", only this time...put her picture on the cover.

Bill's book about his life was pretty well panned, wasn't it?? I bet that the agency responsible for this new one, would like to not have to give him a dime to write this one....LOL

I still want to see if any one on talk radio goes after it.

Maybe Hillary has told him he CAN'T go to Davos...because she can't go with him...and she doesn't want him caught with his Canadian girlfriend, or another girlfriend, or for him to say anything remotely "wrong" during the convention??

You too, huh???

Strange but I get the feeling that Bubbas gal/pals would only add to the victimization of Hillary if he gets "busted" again.

Taking down McCain this early is a panic move, like Hillary jumpstarting her "springtime" announcement.

That's a rather prescient comment. Folks should think about it, it makes good sense. Not something I was thinking at all. But I like it!

#259, I just wish "Goober" had asked "Leaky" about being kicked off the intelligence Committee for his betrayals. I wish anyone would ask him, anytime. He gets a pass on this mess.

Yes he does work pretty hard. I just know that if Mark Steyn were on three hours a day, five days a week, we most likely would have MANY more people coming over to the conservative side. That is what we need.

Rush spends way too much time ridiculing the opposition, blowing his own horn, and being sanctimonious. The worst thing is ............ he serves to energize the "opposition". We do not need an energized opposition, and that is exactly what we had before the past elections.

Rush needs to improve.

Now..... I gotta get serious...... it's FOOTBALL TIME!!

p.s. This kid who just sang the National Anthem ought to be bound and gagged.

Off to dish dinner now - see you next week

Roast turkey breast with veg and Yorkshire pudding followed by pumpkin pie and fresh cream

Here is the pumpkin pie which I made yesterday. The quiche in the photo we ate yesterday.

Danke ...... ping!

I remember playing baseball in the vacant lot next to our house in January in 1976 or so. January in Minnesota. So you are absolutely correct, weather runs in cycles. 10 years ago we had a blizzard here in MN that stalled out over mid central Minnesota for a whole week. It got to be something like the Rockies. People had to dig DOWN to get to their front doors.

Another example of how superficial and shallow the average American has become. They just mindlessly accept what ever is screamed at them by the Junk Media culture as "fact".

Thank you very much...

Yeah...the unions are VERY strong...and I also remember when one of Pres. Bush's BEST plans, IMHO...the OPTION to have PART of one's social security put in a private account...was run out of town NOT by the dems...but by his own party not backing it.

They also kowtowed to the unions re: the Dubai ports deal..and also amendments to the Homeland Security bill to make it illegal to hire someone to work at the ports if they have a felony record...

NO WAY did the unions want that..and it was voted down.

True........ I guess Bubba would be glad to comply.

Can you imagine the leash he's on???? Oh ... poor widdle Billy ...LOL