Mark Goldblatt has an interesting piece in the National Review. He opines that the election of Obama allows us an opportunity to kill off one of our culture’s most awful attributes - White Liberal Guilt.

The article below is excellent, but if you want to listen to the 2006 podcast of my Shelby Steele interview, it’s right here.

MP3 File

Buy the book here.

The Upside of Obama

Many conservatives are licking their psychic wounds at the moment, but an Obama presidency may yet wind up as a healthy development — if it forces us to confront the ways in which white liberal guilt has warped our political landscape for the last four decades, especially since the primary victims have proven, time and again, to be blacks.

Take, for example, the calamitous decision in the 1960s to expand benefits under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. AFDC began during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, intended to assist impoverished widows and their children. But its scope broadened during Lyndon Johnson’s administration to include payments to unmarried mothers with children. Why? Because the out-of-wedlock birthrate among blacks in 1963 stood at a record high of 23.6 percent, and thus many black parents were ineligible for help. The government, in effect, began sponsoring illegitimacy.

Some one should tell the black community just how dangerous it is to follow white liberals’ insane ideas, for nothing destroys the prospects of black success more than the absurd social policies foisted upon blacks. 1960s welfare destroyed the black family just as asuredly as public education destroyed their prospects of getting a good education.

If the election of Obama allows us the ability to shed the idiotic “white liberal guilt” and move on to a REAL dialogue about race, it will have been worth it to elect him.

No one has ever assumed the presidency with the unrealistic expectations Obama faces. Judging from an altogether unscientific sample of conversations I’ve overheard over the last two months — a sample weighted towards college faculty and students, Manhattan pedestrians and diners, and, of course, CSPAN callers — Obama’s white supporters seem to think he’ll single-handedly heal our partisan rifts and make America beloved abroad, bring peace to the Middle East and capture Osama bin Laden, balance the budget and save Social Security. Yet even those absurdly lofty expectations pale (pun intended) beside the hopes that black voters, who cast ballots for Obama at a rate of over 95 percent, have invested in him. Blacks seem to view him as an amalgam of Martin Luther King, Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall, Miles Davis, and Julius Erving — except with a better outside shot.

Obama, therefore, is certain to disappoint as soon as he passes from promiser to decider. But he’s also uniquely situated to effect a genuine change in America’s race consciousness. The fact that his march to the White House resembled less a traditional campaign than a cult of personality — a cult that included much of the media — has a potential upside. Obama will set up shop on Pennsylvania Avenue owing less to his party’s leadership and lobbyists than any president in a century. Think about it. How many Democratic bigwigs endorsed Hillary Clinton before drifting to Obama? How many labor unions initially favored John Edwards? President Obama could, if he were so inclined, tell anyone, anytime, to take a hike.

What good could come of that?

The best-case scenario, though the least likely, is that President Obama, in a Nixon-to-China moment, turns to the NAACP, the Congressional Black Congress, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and the entire ethno-grievance chorus and says, “Enough.” There are, he explains in a primetime speech, no governmental quick fixes to the collective inequalities in American society. Indeed, every time the government intervenes, it sets back the cause of justice for generations. Over time, without government interference, through parental sacrifice and individual initiative, inequalities will even out — unless, of course, you believe that black people and white people are innately different in their potentials.

Again, that’s the least likely scenario. But even without anything so dramatic, Obama can still cause a sea change in racial attitudes. He can do this, first and foremost, by example. He’s a husband and a father. He dresses in suits and ties. He speaks the King’s English. And he’s president of the United States. In other words, he’s no victim. If he’s authentically black — and what black person in America will dare say he isn’t? — black authenticity cannot equate with victimhood.

As the inept Republican Party wanders around in the wilderness arguing with each other about who needs to get “thrown off the bus” to return to power, conservative ideas and ideals are quietly gaining acceptance across the nation.

Poll: Plurality of Americans Want All or Most Abortions Illegal, Want Pro-Life Laws

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — A new Harris Poll finds a plurality of Americans want all or most abortions to be illegal and overwhelming majorities of Americans want more abortion limits in law. The nationwide poll showed just 9 percent said abortion should be legal for any reason at any time during pregnancy — Barack Obama’s position.

The Harris survey included 2,341 adults and was conducted December 10-12.

It found 82 percent of Americans said abortion should either be illegal under all circumstances or would limit its legality.

More specifically, 49 percent of those polled took a pro-life position wanting all abortions made illegal (11 percent) or wanting almost all abortions illegal except for very rare cases of saving the mothers life or in rape or incest (38 percent).

“These findings are remarkable,” said Deirdre McQuade, who is the spokeswoman for the pro-life office of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which sponsored the poll.

In fairness, I’m sure a poll sponsored by Planned Parenthood (an abortion mill) would show support for abortion rights to be strong. Such is the nature of abortion. That said, the fact is that the pro-life argument has slowly been winning the day, and the recruiting and election of “pro-life Democrats” is all the proof you need.

Another 88 percent favor informed consent laws that provide women with information about abortion’s risks and alternatives beforehand and 76 percent say they want laws that protect doctors and nurses from being forced to perform or refer for abortions against their will.

Some 73 percent of Americans in the Harris poll support parental involvement laws, 68 percent favor a ban on partial-birth abortion, and 63 percent favor bans on making taxpayers fund abortions.

“Support for these measures cuts across ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-choice’ positions. Over a third (35 percent) of the small minority who said abortion should be legal for any reason throughout pregnancy nevertheless supported three or more of the six laws presented,” McQuade said.

If Obama wants to be a failure, the fastest way he could do so would be to push FOCA (so-called ‘Freedom of Choice Act’) in his first 100 days. Bush’s lack of support, combined with the financial meltdown, gave us an electorate that decided to give the untested Obama a chance. Many polls indicate that voters don’t realize just how rabidly ‘pro-death’ of a president they just elected.

Nothing will make the electorate more aware of his bloodthirsty views than to push FOCA.

This article is guaranteed to make a progressive’s head explode, but it’s hard to argue with facts. As I’ve asked in previous posts, do you REALLY think a person who raised nearly a BILLION DOLLARS in his run for the presidency is going to represent “change?”

Numbnuts.

Add to all this the likelihood of a TRILLION DOLLAR deficit (I guess deficits REALLY DON’T matter), and we are off to the races for Bush’t 3rd term.

The Making of George W. Obama

On December 1, Barack Obama, who won the U.S. presidency as the candidate of “change,” announced his national security team: President George W. Bush’s secretary of defense (Robert Gates), Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s special envoy for Middle East security (James Jones), and the doyenne of Democratic centrism (Hillary Clinton). Some saw this as the political cover Obama needs to lead U.S. foreign policy in an entirely different direction after Bush. Perhaps. But I doubt it. My hunch, and my hope, is that Obama will be a successful president, not because he’ll totally change the foreign policy he’ll inherit from Bush, but because he’ll largely continue it.

Until just a few weeks ago, I was a part of that foreign policy. As Rice’s chief speechwriter and policy advisor, I traveled with her to 24 countries. And I helped write (and rewrite) her remarks—a body of work I’d estimate to be north of 150,000 carefully chosen words. For four years, I watched as a foreign policy took shape that was quite different from that of Bush’s first term. It was a pragmatic internationalism based on enduring national interests and ideals for a country whose global leadership is still indispensable, even as the world is becoming more multipolar.

Unfortunately, the election didn’t shed much light on what this inheritance means for Obama. The campaign was a two-year referendum on the Bush presidency in which Obama ran against a caricature of Bush’s first term and John McCain ran desperately away from the whole thing. It was as if the past four years never happened.

But because they did, Obama will inherit a foreign policy that is better than many realize. Yes, there will be changes ahead—most likely, to energy and climate change policy (thankfully), to the war in Iraq (winding it down), to the war in Afghanistan (winding it up), and to the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (closing it, which some in the Bush administration tried to do but couldn’t). But despite all that, Obama’s foreign policy likely won’t depart radically from Bush’s.

I’ve been talking about this for quite some time now, and it appears that more an more people are jumping on the band-wagon. This should be a no-brainer for Obama. He will have a honeymoon, and there will never be a better opportunity to enact this important piece of good public policy. If he (Obama) continues down the path of “Cap and Trade” idiocy, he exposes himself as a tool of the corrupt interests who will benefit off of such nonsense.

The Net-Zero Gas Tax

Americans have a deep and understandable aversion to gasoline taxes. In a culture more single-mindedly devoted to individual freedom than any other, tampering with access to the open road is met with visceral opposition. That’s why earnest efforts to alter American driving habits take the form of regulation of the auto companies–the better to hide the hand of government and protect politicians from the inevitable popular backlash.

…

So why even think about it? Because the virtues of a gas tax remain what they have always been. A tax that suppresses U.S. gas consumption can have a major effect on reducing world oil prices. And the benefits of low world oil prices are obvious: They put tremendous pressure on OPEC, as evidenced by its disarray during the current collapse; they deal serious economic damage to energy-exporting geopolitical adversaries such as Russia, Venezuela, and Iran; and they reduce the enormous U.S. imbalance of oil trade which last year alone diverted a quarter of $1 trillion abroad. Furthermore, a reduction in U.S. demand alters the balance of power between producer and consumer, making us less dependent on oil exporters. It begins weaning us off foreign oil, and, if combined with nuclear power and renewed U.S. oil and gas drilling, puts us on the road to energy independence.

High gas prices, whether achieved by market forces or by government imposition, encourage fuel economy. In the short term, they simply reduce the amount of driving. In the longer term, they lead to the increased (voluntary) shift to more fuel-efficient cars. They render redundant and unnecessary the absurd CAFE standards–the ever-changing Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations that mandate the fuel efficiency of various car and truck fleets–which introduce terrible distortions into the market. As the consumer market adjusts itself to more fuel-efficient autos, the green car culture of the future that environmentalists are attempting to impose by decree begins to shape itself unmandated. This shift has the collateral environmental effect of reducing pollution and CO2 emissions, an important benefit for those who believe in man-made global warming and a painless bonus for agnostics (like me) who nonetheless believe that the endless pumping of CO2 into the atmosphere cannot be a good thing.

…

Today we are experiencing a unique moment. Oil prices are in a historic free fall from a peak of $147 a barrel to $39 today. In July, U.S. gasoline was selling for $4.11 a gallon. It now sells for $1.65. With $4 gas still fresh in our memories, the psychological impact of a tax that boosts the pump price to near $3 would be far less than at any point in decades. Indeed, an immediate $1 tax would still leave the price more than one-third below its July peak.

…

What to do? Something radically new. A net-zero gas tax. Not a freestanding gas tax but a swap that couples the tax with an equal payroll tax reduction. A two-part solution that yields the government no net increase in revenue and, more importantly–that is why this proposal is different from others–immediately renders the average gasoline consumer financially whole.

Here is how it works. The simultaneous enactment of two measures: A $1 increase in the federal gasoline tax–together with an immediate $14 a week reduction of the FICA tax. Indeed, that reduction in payroll tax should go into effect the preceding week, so that the upside of the swap (the cash from the payroll tax rebate) is in hand even before the downside (the tax) kicks in.

The math is simple. The average American buys roughly 14 gallons of gasoline a week. The $1 gas tax takes $14 out of his pocket. The reduction in payroll tax puts it right back. The average driver comes out even, and the government makes nothing on the transaction. (There are, of course, more drivers than workers–203 million vs. 163 million. The 10 million unemployed would receive the extra $14 in their unemployment insurance checks. And the elderly who drive–there are 30 million licensed drivers over 65–would receive it with their Social Security payments.)

Revenue neutrality is essential. No money is taken out of the economy. Washington doesn’t get fatter. Nor does it get leaner. It is simply a transfer agent moving money from one activity (gasoline purchasing) to another (employment) with zero net revenue for the government.

Whenever I hear the arguments in favor of Unionization of ANY industry, I’m reminded of Squealer, of Animal Farm fame. The ability to persuade workers to yolk themselves to these lying union bosses never ceases to amaze me.

Autoworkers Union Keeps $6 Million Golf Course for Members at $33 Million Lakeside Retreat

But the Black Lake club and retreat, which are among the union’s biggest fixed assets, have lost $23 million in the past five years alone, a heavy albatross around the union’s neck as it tries to manage a multibillion-dollar pension plan crisis.

Critics call it a resort for union leaders that wastes money from union dues.

“It’s their members’ money that they’re spending on this thing,” said Justin Wilson, managing director of the Center for Union Facts, a union watchdog group. “The union has bigger issues at hand than managing a golf course.”

Managing the course may become a burden for the union. The UAW covers costs for the Reuther Center from the interest it earns on its strike fund, according to tax documents, but massive losses in the past five years have forced the union to make heavy loans to keep the center afloat. Critics call it a poor investment for a group with over $1.25 billion in assets.

It isn’t as if businesses don’t have a history of treating workers poorly. Frankly, they still treat workers poorly in some cases. That said, I’ve never understood the sheep like notion that the “Union” will protect you. They don’t.

For those UAW drones who are lauding Bush’s $17 billion bailout, I have only one thing to say to you.

You’re now welfare queens. You are living off of my tax dollars and George W. Bush’s “benevolence.” Are you proud of yourselves?

Bill Dennis is writing some pretty good stuff over at Peoria Pundit.

I don’t necessarily agree with him on this post, but finding an answer to the fracturing “Republican Coalition” is important.

Conservative Snobs Are Wrong About Palin

Being listed in fourth place for Time magazine’s “Person of the Year,” as Sarah Palin was for 2008, sounds a little like being awarded the Order of Purity (Fourth Class). But it testifies to something important.

Though regularly pronounced sick, dying, dead, cremated and scattered at sea, Mrs. Palin is still amazingly around. She has survived more media assassination attempts than Fidel Castro has survived real ones (Cuban official figure: 638). In her case, one particular method of assassination is especially popular — namely, the desperate assertion that, in addition to her other handicaps, she is “no Margaret Thatcher.”

The article goes on to compare Thatcher and Palin…

Mrs. Palin has a long way to go to match this. Circumstances may never give her the chance to do so. Even if she gets that chance, she may lack Mrs. Thatcher’s depths of courage, firmness and stamina — we only ever know such things in retrospect.

But she has plenty of time, probably eight years, to analyze America’s problems, recruit her own expert advice, and develop conservative solutions to them. She has obvious intelligence, drive, serious moral character, and a Reaganesque likability. Her likely Republican rivals such as Bobby Jindal and Mitt Romney, not to mention Barack Obama, have most of these same qualities too. But she shares with Mrs. Thatcher a very rare charisma. As Ronnie Millar, the latter’s speechwriter and a successful playwright, used to say in theatrical tones: She may be depressed, ill-dressed and having a bad hair day, but when the curtain rises, out onto the stage she steps looking like a billion dollars. That’s the mark of a star, dear boy. They rise to the big occasions.

Mrs. Palin had four big occasions in the late, doomed Republican campaign: her introduction by John McCain in Ohio, her speech at the GOP convention, her vice-presidential debate with Sen. Joe Biden, and her appearance on Saturday Night Live. With minimal preparation, she rose to all four of them. That’s the mark of a star.

I have no idea whether Sarah Palin can overcome the “PDS” (Palin Derangement Syndrome) that has infected the minds of fevered left and some “Romney Conservatives. I hope she does, though. Nothing would be more sweet than to watch veins popping out of foreheads and heads exploding.

2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved

Looking back over my columns of the past 12 months, one of their major themes was neatly encapsulated by two recent items from The Daily Telegraph.

The first, on May 21, headed “Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts” , reported that the entire Alpine “winter sports industry” could soon “grind to a halt for lack of snow”. The second, on December 19, headed “The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation” , reported that this winter’s Alpine snowfalls “look set to beat all records by New Year’s Day”.

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. …

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.

What is so hilarious about the drop in temperatures is that they coincide perfectly with the shutting down of the cycle of solar activity. This is what intelligent people have been saying all along. The idea that carbon dioxide going from 288/1,000,000 to 380/1,000,000 was causing “global warming” has always been ludicrous to anyone with a decent understanding of earth science.

The fact that the entire scientific community openly took part in the campaign of lies is an indicator of just how corrupt America’s institutions have become.

I think it’s high time we banned the teacher strike. I think anyone who disagrees with me hates children. There is another slogan for you throw in the face of the greedy education bureaucracy. If you oppose a strike ban, you hate children. That’s the kind of crap the teachers’ unions have been using for years, and it’s time we rubbed their noses in their crap.

Striking Against Students

Pennsylvania taxpayers aren’t pleased. Last year, a bill to prohibit teacher strikes was introduced in the state legislature by Todd Rock and 28 co-sponsors, only to be sidelined thanks to union opposition. According to a group called Stop Teacher Strikes, 75% of state legislators between 2004 and 2006 received teacher union money. The office of Governor Ed Rendell, who received more than $500,000 in teachers union political action committee cash for his 2006 re-election bid, called the strike ban a “radical response” to the problem.

That “radical” revision is actually similar to the rule in 37 states that have passed laws banning teacher strikes. Under the text of the strike bill, due to be reintroduced in January, teachers would have to give up two days of pay for each day they are out on strike. Under current law, Pennsylvania teachers see no adverse consequences from a walkout. In New York by contrast, the Taylor law punishes unions that walk off the job with fines and other penalties. According to the Allegheny Institute, similar strike laws have been upheld in the courts and have eliminated walkouts in states like Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee.

The time is coming when it will be politically unpopular to have taken cash from greedy Teachers’ Unions. This site takes a backseat to no one in the drive to make that day come sooner.

I’ve noticed that plenty of people on the web, as well as radio hosts, find a lot of funny stuff, use it, and don’t attribute it to the originator. That’s skanky. Here at Extreme Wisdom, I try to “hat tip” every post that I find on the web, especially when the blogger is provides much of the commentary.

That said, I use links that I find on “Brothers Judd” so often, (but provide my own commentary) that I usually just tell my readers that they are the best blog on the web (they are).

Regardless, I finally did find the originator of the “Congressional Motors” post. It is Chicago and Illinois own IowaHawk, and the post is here. I’m adding Iowahawk to my blog roll, and I hope you go there often.

Click the picture to go to the original post.