He's Alive!!!

Yes. Not dead.

Went out to California to visit some family for about a week. It was actually a nice vacation (mostly) from the political scene.

Since I was in sunny California I did look around at the political signs and bumperstickers. I did see the occasional McCain sign, but they were vastly outnumbered. I had to roll my eyes when I overheard a conversation in a restaurant on pollution laws and such where the person flat out said "well, we set the standard for the rest of the country."

And what's this I hear this morning about the top donor to date to the Obama campaign was the University of California?

Isn't that a State University? Where do they get almost $1,000,000 to donate to a Presidential Campaign? Inquiring minds want to know. Hopefully, it's some sort of bundle given from faculty & staff out of their own pockets.

So it's finally being talked about in the MSM that Obama is pretty much a socialist, though from a standpoint of incredulity that it's being charged. And people apparently don't care.

And then we have this, from Obama (2001)

"... the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and the more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society, and to that extent, as radical as, I think, people try to characterize the Warren court, it wasn't that radical; it didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers and the Constitution....

[..]

You can craft theoretical justification for it legally, and any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts."

Of course, I've heard this spun off as "oh, he wasn't talking about wealth redistribution, he was talking about "community organizing".

Really? Ok, well to be fair, I left this part out which went between those two excerpts:

"One of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think, there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways, we still suffer from that."

So he was talking about doing "community organizing" to organize voting blocks to vote for "redistribution of wealth" and "redistributive change" and "economic justice".

But naw, it was just the community organizing bit. Community Organizing. That's a good thing. Isn't it? Yeaaaaahhhhhhhh....

One could also argue that the KKK was just "community organizing". So, see, "community organizing" isn't always a good thing.

Actually what he said, taken as a whole, doesn't make any sense at all. It's a bunch of carefully chosen vagueries strung together and seasoned with some tasty buzzwords. Which is pretty much par for the course for Obama. He means whatever you want him to mean. Until he's elected. Then he can argue that he actually meant something completely different.

I remember back in the Mainframe CMS days there was a buzzword generator (just google buzzword generator -- you'll find several. Here's one.) BUZZWORD EXEC actually produced a couple of pages of complete sentences made up of this stuff that sounded great, but said absolutely nothing.

And even if the Warren Court wasn't radical, that it was a tragedy that ... and this is basically what he's saying, but it was a tragedy that voting blocks weren't put together to lift these "essential constraints" that the Warren court, in his opinion, didn't violate. You know, so the courts could do something that those "essential constraints" would have prohibited, but now having been lifted -- wouldn't be violating the new, less ... uh, constraining ... constraints. I suppose it depends on what you think the definition of "essential" is.

But that's the game here that Obama is so adept at playing because people are intellectually lazy. "But he just said they were 'essential constraints'." Yes he did. Practically in the same breath with arguing that the constraints changed via voting blocks of "organized communities". Feh.