The CDC managed to change the subject from breakthrough cases to masks in one stroke, and the right has glommed on to it like the suckers they are

AP Obama last week:

Health officials on Friday released details of that research, which was key in this week’s decision by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend that vaccinated people return to wearing masks indoors in parts of the U.S. where the delta variant is fueling infection surges. The authors said the findings suggest that the CDC’s mask guidance should be expanded to include the entire country, even outside of hot spots.

The findings have the potential to upend past thinking about how the disease is spread. Previously, vaccinated people who got infected were thought to have low levels of virus and to be unlikely to pass it to others. But the new data shows that is not the case with the delta variant.

The outbreak in Provincetown — a seaside tourist spot on Cape Cod in the county with Massachusetts’ highest vaccination rate — has so far included more than 900 cases. About three-quarters of them were people who were fully vaccinated. ...

People with breakthrough infections make up an increasing portion of hospitalizations and in-hospital deaths among COVID-19 patients, coinciding with the spread of the delta variant, according to the leaked documents. ...

The CDC report is based on about 470 COVID-19 cases linked to the Provincetown festivities, which included densely packed indoor and outdoor holiday events at bars, restaurants, guest houses and rental homes.

Researchers ran tests on a portion of them and found roughly the same level of virus in those who were fully vaccinated and those who were not.

Three-quarters of the infections were in fully vaccinated individuals. Among those fully vaccinated, about 80% experienced symptoms with the most common being cough, headache, sore throat, muscle aches and fever.

The whole thing is here.

The real story here is about vaccine failure, not masks.

The idea that we could find a cure for this ramped up cold virus, in a year!, is as preposterous as finding one for the original thing. Ever. Same with the flu. Every year you get a new flu shot because . . . you have to. The damn things mutate.

So they guess which strain will be dominant and you pays your money and you takes your chance. Often there are several shots to choose from, targeted at different strains. Inevitably they choose wrong, and so do you.

That's what the future holds for COVID-19. We'll most likely be faced with an infinite series of mutations. With any luck the things will concentrate on mutating to survive instead of to kill, and become less deadly. That's already the take on the Delta variant.

But The Powers That Be know how to get your goat if you are right of center and turn an imminent prospect of political disgrace over vaccines into something else: Distract you from the facts and make it about something else, in order to maximize the political opportunity the political disaster presents. It's pure Alinskyism. Pure Rahm Emanuel. Nothing has defined the stupid political polarization between Republicans and Democrats on the street currently better than masks.

Remember how it used to be the Red Hat?

The more things change the more they stay the same.

The left is playing the right like a fiddle.

CNBC story on conservative anger with Trump deliberately omits the centrality of differences over illegal immigration policy

That's what Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter are all about, after all, but CNBC just dances around this as if it didn't really exist.

Ann Coulter only tweets almost every day a "border wall lack-of-progress" update.

Conservatives are outraged also that Trump would trade a wall for DACA-type amnesty. DACA is illegal. Obama's executive order was unconstitutional. Trump acts like it's no big deal, just like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin becoming dictators for life is no big deal to him, either.

It's a propaganda technique: Pretend something doesn't exist, and it doesn't. It's called marginalization. The communist Alinsky made it one of his rules for radicals. To talk about what your enemy wants to talk about is to assist your enemy by publicizing his issues, so don't do it.

See for yourself here.

Trump overwhelms the enemy just like the Alinskyite Obama, except Obama was lazy

With an outrage a day (to the left), sometimes two or three, Trump is overwhelming the enemy in the MSM and Democrat Party (but I repeat myself) just as Obama did us. Most of us were busy working jobs at the time, if we still had them, or trying otherwise to survive the transformational diktats with which that tag team of codependents sick with liberalism tried to subvert the country. We had no allies except ourselves.

The difference now is that Trump is the Energizer Bunny Obama could only dream of being. Trump isn't doing this just from 10AM to 2PM Monday through Friday hyphenated by lunch, content to have organized the hive to do the heavy lifting so that he can head for the links or the next soirée with the rich and famous. Which is another important difference between Trump and Obama. Trump is already rich and famous, and owns the golf courses. Been there. Done that. He doesn't need the presidency to gain access to that life. He has bigger fish to fry.

Trump's vigor has already made Obama's legacy the size of a golfball in the sand trap Newt Gingrich predicted, but after only one week in office not three months.

And he works weekends.

It's going to be a long eight years for the left.

And I hope the right can keep up.

Trump uses Al Smith dinner to get out his message against the establishment and their candidate, Hillary Clinton

See him here, and boy did they not like it.

What that was was Trump turning Alinsky against the Alinskyites.

By using the Al Smith venue he went outside the experience of the enemy. He was supposed to be funnier. Instead he was vicious. He used the unexpected event of the period to be unexpectedly less funny than he could have been. Such humor as there was was very good, and proves he's capable of it. He just didn't use it. Instead he chose confrontation.

And what really pissed the opposition off was that they were forced to listen to it, and broadcast it.

Advantage Trump.

The Republicans' condom senator, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, joins the Alinskyites, can no longer support Donald Trump

Reported here:

Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire was the first Republican senator facing a competitive re-election to say she would no longer back Mr. Trump, announcing in a statement that she would write in Mr. Pence for president instead. “I’m a mom and an American first, and I cannot and will not support a candidate for president who brags about degrading and assaulting women,” she wrote on Twitter. ... Mr. Trump, after monitoring television coverage, realized he was becoming isolated by his party.

Trump audio: Democrats follow Alinsky rules to neutralize Trump

Rule 4: The Democrats are trying to make the Republican enemy live up to its own book of rules, which state that Trump's sexual immorality will not play well in Peoria. 

Rule 6: It's a good tactic because Democrats especially enjoy embarrassing Republicans as hypocrites to their religion, which is Democrats' real enemy.

Rule 10: If enough Republicans can be turned to denounce Trump the target will have been effectively personalized, frozen and polarized, ensuring a Democrat victory.

Why it's not a coincidence the polls now favor Hillary

Because Trump touted his poll successes throughout the primaries. So, poll now to make him look like a failure. A simple strategy. Don't measure opinion, shape it!

Pick the target . . . easy, there's only one in this circumstance.

Freeze it . . . attack him from all sides, media, academia, Congress, Hollywood, donors, Democrats, Republican establishment. Keep up constant pressure from every angle.

Personalize it . . . never talk about the issues he talks about, about all the people thronging his appearances, only talk about the man, how "unfit" he is, what a clown he is, how inarticulate, offensive and classless!

Polarize it . . . caricature him as if he didn't belong, like he was beneath us, you know like Mar-a-Lago Club didn't belong in Palm Beach. Treat him like people who work for a living, not like one of us. Accuse his movement of being violent, outside the mainstream, while having your thugs do actual harm to his supporters.

Make him and them feel all alone, like strangers in their own country. 

Lucifer, the very first radical according to Alinsky

New York Times Magazine discusses the history of "radical" in America without mentioning Obama's and Hillary Clinton's devotion to Alinsky's Rules for Radicals

Here in "Who’s Really ‘Radical’?" by Emily Bazelon, who does discuss the pair:

"President Obama and Hillary Clinton live in the world of politics, where rhetoric is often more heated, but they avoid using ‘‘radical Islam’’ or ‘‘jihad’’ to describe the terror driven by ISIS."

What else do you call wanting to fundamentally transform America if not radical?

Ebola Virus Divides America: Alinsky's Rule of Polarization as practiced by Obama comes straight out of Aristotle

Most of these ordinary safeguards of tyranny are said to have been instituted by Periander of Corinth, and also many such devices may be borrowed from the Persian empire. These are both the measures mentioned some time back to secure the safety of a tyranny as far as possible [including] . . .  to set men at variance with one another and cause quarrels between friend and friend and between the people and the notables and among the rich . . ..

-- Aristotle, Politics, 5, 1313ab

Rule 13: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.

-- Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

Rules For Radical Republicans: Bush Tax Cuts Edition

Rule 1: Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.

The enemy knows the Congress is a coequal branch of the government. The problem is the Republicans and the Speaker of the House do not. You actually have more power even than that. You have 30 Republican governors. Start using them.

Rule 2: Never go outside the experience of your people.

"New revenues from the rich" is the enemy's idea, not Republicans'.

Rule 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy.

Bush is ancient history. Time to make your own and repudiate the past. Pass something in the House which goes farther than Bush ever dreamed, and send it to the Senate to enrage the enemy.

Rule 4: Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.

The enemy is funding gold-plated union jobs and pensions for federal and state workers at the expense of middle class Americans in the private sector who enjoy neither. It's time you reminded the middle class about that.

Rule 5: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.

Use surrogates saying: Moochelle. Crony capitalist. Ideologue. Bolshevik. Dictator. Muslim sympathizer. Race baiter. Panetta flies cross country too much at taxpayer expense. The vice president thinks FDR talked to a television camera.

Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy.

Republicans can campaign, too. Go frequently to friendly territory and bring 2016 hopefuls with you.

Rule 7: A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag.

The idea of compromise became a drag a long time ago. Stop waiting for it. Go on the offensive instead.

Rule 8: Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period.

The enemy is trying to combine everything into one event, "the fiscal cliff", which tells you they perceive they are at a disadvantage. They are. You need to keep the events separate and do things piecemeal. Raising the debt ceiling should come later, crossing the tax rates fiscal cliff should come first. Fight for spending cuts later with the debt ceiling, not now. Sequestration already gave you some spending cuts, which you should embrace.

Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself.

The greatest fear of the Democrats is a debt ceiling fueled government shutdown over spending cuts, but it wasn't the end of the world under Bill Clinton, and it won't be the end of the world if it happens in 2013. You actually won that in 2011. Do it again, except bigger, to satisfy the ratings agencies. Besides, it's red meat for the base.

Rule 10: Maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

No more appearances with the enemy, especially on the golf course. You are third in line for the presidency. Start acting like it. Visit Afghanistan to encourage the troops.

Rule 11: If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside.

The place you need to get to is the same place you were at two times when the president extended the Bush tax rates, so you should know the way. An uncompromising new insistence on tax reform and much lower tax rates might get you there. It changes the subject and focuses the argument on relieving the taxpayers. The president upped the ante. You need to see him and raise him. Aim for the moon, and you might get into orbit.

Rule 12: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

You might not get the radical tax reform, about which you must be deadly serious, but settling for making the Bush tax cuts permanent is a constructive alternative.

Rule 13: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.

Focus your attention on answering the partisanship of individuals in the pundit class. Don't fire Tea Party men. Enlist them in attacking the enemy. They are good at it, and they will repay you with support later.

Libertarian Mish Is Happy Republican Mourdock Lost In Indiana

Mish is on the side of the Democrats, plain and simple, here, referencing a story at the Christian Science Monitor:

Yet this is what happens when views are too extreme. I am very pleased to report "'Red' Indiana sends Democrat to US Senate, as women fled Mourdock".

Of course Mish is happy the Democrat won in Indiana. Libertarians ran a spoiler candidate in that race to throw the race to the Democrat. When it comes down to it, social freedom is more important to libertarians than economic freedom. They cry "Freedom" all the while they mean only "License!"

Libertarians are not on the side of conservatives or Republicans. They are on the side of the Democrats, the party of death to the unborn, and soon the party of death to the elderly under ObamaCare, and eventually the party of death to the middle class, which will not long exist because of Obama.

The middle class stands in the way of the Alinskyites' real objective: the rich. Middle class people, after all, would like to be rich some day, too, not poor. So they must go first in order to get at the rich. If the middle class had any brains they'd understand that Obama's invective against the rich is primarily aimed at them because, compared to the poor, the middle class is rich. Unfortunately, they went to public schools. 

One thing at a time, making use of the useful idiots, the libertarians.

Obama Has Deliberately Obscured His Life-long Marxist Extremism

From Investor's Business Daily:

The videotape of Obama praising and hugging his America-bashing, Constitution-trashing law professor Derrick Bell isn't the only evidence that's been hidden from the public. A 1998 video of Obama praising the late Marxist agitator Saul "The Red" Alinsky alongside a panel of hard-core Chicago communists also exists. ...

[A] 2003 video of Obama speaking at a Chicago dinner held in honor of former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi. ... [T]he radical Khalidi — a close friend and neighbor of Obama, who held a 2000 political fundraiser in his home for him — has strongly defended the use of violence by Palestinians against Israel, while expressing clearly anti-American views. ...

[W]hy did Obama disguise the name of his radical Alinsky trainer Jerry Kellman in his memoir? And why did he also try to shield from readers the identity of his Alinsky mentor John McKnight, who wrote him a letter of recommendation to Harvard? ...

[W]hy did Obama leave out his weeks-long training at Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation in Los Angeles? This station of the cross for Alinsky acolytes is strangely missing from all 500 pages of his tediously detailed memoir. For that matter, the late Alinsky is not cited by name in either of the president's autobiographies, even though leftist activists confess this father of community organizing had a powerful influence on Obama.

Moreover, if communist Frank Marshall Davis wasn't a controversial factor in Obama's life, why did Obama also mask his identity in his first memoir? If listening, spellbound, at the feet of a known subversive isn't a red flag, why keep his real profile a secret?

Obama also couldn't find room in "Dreams From My Father" to mention the most striking thing about his father's politics. Obama Sr. was a pro-Soviet socialist, who as a government economist wrote a communist tract for Kenya in 1965. If this published paper wasn't a big deal, as Obama apologists have suggested, why is it conveniently missing from the 143-page section Obama devoted to boast about his father's career in Kenya? ...

[Obama] never mentioned Bell or the Harvard strike he led on his beloved professor's behalf in either autobiography. If he wasn't trying to fool people, why leave this seminal event out?

Even more radical — and influential — than Bell was Harvard law professor Robert Unger, who taught Obama a couple of courses, including one called "Reinventing Democracy." Like Bell, Unger called U.S. jurisprudence a sham system designed to protect the rich at the expense of the poor. But Unger also taught Obama how to dismantle it. He argued for seizing all private capital and redistributing it.

Obama kept up communications with Unger long after he graduated, but those contacts stopped in 2008. "I am a leftist, and by conviction as well as by temperament, a revolutionary," Unger explains. "Any association of mine with Barack Obama in the course of the campaign could do only harm."

Read the complete op-ed here.

Sarah Palin Wonders Why the So-Called Right Now Uses the Tactics of the Left Vs. Newt

She comes out in defense of Newt tonight here, and this is more true than she knows:

What we saw with this ridiculous opposition dump on Newt was nothing short of Stalin-esque rewriting of history. It was Alinsky tactics at their worst. ...

Well, "former" leftists, otherwise known as neo-conservative Israel-firsters, did this to Newt, and they ought to know! They are now comfortably wedded to the Republican establishment after co-opting formerly reliable conservative bastions like National Review.

Gov. Palin concludes with this:

I question whether the GOP establishment would ever employ the same harsh tactics they used on Newt against Obama. I didn’t see it in 2008. Many of these same characters sat on their thumbs in ‘08 and let Obama escape unvetted. Oddly, they’re now using every available microscope and endoscope – along with rewriting history – in attempts to character assassinate anyone challenging their chosen one in their own party’s primary. So, one must ask, who are they really running against?

Isn't it obvious? They're running against us.

Rules For Radicals

The Tea Party Has Already Made The Democrats Blink on Tax Increases

"They’ve moved in other words, the Senate Majority Leader, far in their direction."

-- George Will, here

An excellent point, the premise of which is that politics is the art of the possible.

In point of fact not just once, either. The extension of the Bush tax rates from this crowd of left wing fanatics was no mean achievement.

The Tea Party speaks for many in wanting the deficit spending to stop. In view of the fact that deficit spending and enthusiasm for taxation are the cornerstones of the opposition, getting Democrats to relent on taxes late last year and again now is pretty good for just 20 or 30 fiscal extremists in the US House.

It should remind us all that imagination is important to political success. Michael Steele didn't have any in early 2010 when he opined that Republicans probably couldn't take back the House. Boy was he mistaken.

It would be a mistake to stop imagining that we can reduce spending. The only caveat is whether Obama  possesses enough character to refrain from defaulting on the debt. If he doesn't and does default, it could be blamed on overreaching by the Tea Party.

At a minimum, Obama's persistent extreme rhetoric threatening such a default should trouble more people. Even left of center types here and there are upset by his behavior, which is a good sign. It is nothing short of disgraceful that a president should talk this way, and it gives everyone over the age of forty pause.

I say that's a tactic, not a promise. Obama is going outside the experience of the enemy, one of Alinsky's rules.

The Tea Party should keep pressing the issue. And Republicans need to buck up and go on the rhetorical offensive. The farthest they should go is a clean debt ceiling increase of $1 trillion, which buys more time but doesn't give the president the space he wants, and needs.

The next crisis date is October 1, by which time we must have a budget agreed to by the Democrats to fund the next fiscal year. 

Obama Regime's Default Alarmism is Straight out of Saul Alinsky

Caroline Baum notices that the Obama regime is acting strangely:

Instead of dangling the default threat every chance they get, Obama and Geithner should be telling the world that the U.S. has every intention, and the resources, to meet its debt obligations. They should shout it from the rooftops, put a banner on the Treasury Direct website, and use the Sunday talk shows to reassure investors, not frighten them.

Rule 3 for Radicals: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy.

And make no mistake about it, you are the enemy.

Remembering When Obamacare Wasn't Some Bolshevik Plot

When Obamacare looked impossible at the end of January 2010 because its two versions looked irreconcilable and a 41st vote against it suddenly appeared in the Senate, within days Obama quickly resorted to Alinsky's rule #5, marginalizing dissent by ridiculing it.

With the help of those at the top of the hierarchy in the House, especially Speaker Pelosi, and the propaganda arms of the government, union, academic and media establishments, he succeeded and shoved the Senate's version down the throats of the rest of the House and the American people.

Almost a year ago Obama said to the House Republican Retreat:

"Now, you may not agree with Bob Dole and Howard Baker, and, certainly you don't agree with Tom Daschle on much, but that's not a radical bunch. But if you were to listen to the debate and, frankly, how some of you went after this bill, you'd think that this thing was some Bolshevik plot. No, I mean, that's how you guys -- (applause) -- that's how you guys presented it."

-- President Obama at the House Republican Retreat, January 29, 2010, here.

As with so many such denials, he was telegraphing not just the ends, but also the means, as students of Bolshevism know well.

The good news is that the House has more clappers now, but the country is still in great danger. The ridicule offensive must be joined and counterrevolution pressed in order to have the hope of success.

Republican fellow travelers sitting among the opponents for the State of the Union is not the way to begin. Party leadership should immediately enforce discipline, and require the caucus to sit apart.

They might even withhold all applause, to teach Obama what a real memorial service looks like. Real Americans, after all, are still in mourning for their country.

Equal Division of Unequal Earnings

The title summarizes one inspiration for this blog's existence, which dates to last September, and illustrates what is more and more becoming the open description from Democrats of their own, and Obama's, political philosophy: equal division of unequal earnings.

Many in the center and on the right have shrunk from calling Obama a communist out of fear of being labeled McCarthyites, despite the fact that with the fall of the Soviet Union it has become clear that the senator from Wisconsin underestimated the depth of pro-Soviet penetration of the U.S. government at the time. The task has been left to our court jesters instead.

Even our most unsympathetic critics on the right today shrink from calling Obama a communist because Obama's mentor, Saul Alinsky, would not identify himself as such, even though that duck walked and quacked like one. We remind our contemporaries, however, that it was at Antioch that the followers of The Way were first called Christians. It was an outsider's estimation, and later an accusation, not a term of self-identification. So it is here.

It is not necessary to link communists to a no-longer extant political entity for them to be such now anymore than it was then, in the Victorian age. Communists already existed in the popular British imagination of the time because they existed in fact, long before the philosophy found political expression in a national government in Russia.

That Democrats today, like Max Baucus, Howard Dean, and Barack Obama readily and openly identify with communist ideas should make the blood boil in every American patriot's heart. These ideas mean death to our way of life, and death to us who hold to the immemorial rights of Englishmen in America. Not a dime's worth of difference between the two political parties? More than ten times the difference, and a world: "Idler or bungler or both he is willing to fork over his penny and pocket your shilling."

In "Obamacare Was Mainly Aimed At Redistributing Wealth," which appeared here, Byron York points out:

It hasn't attracted much notice, but recently some prominent advocates of Obamacare have spoken more frankly than ever before about why they supported a national health care makeover. It wasn't just about making insurance more affordable. It wasn't just about bending the cost curve. It wasn't just about cutting the federal deficit. It was about redistributing wealth.

Health reform is "an income shift," Democratic Sen. Max Baucus said on March 25. "It is a shift, a leveling, to help lower income, middle income Americans." ...

At about the same time, Howard Dean, the former Democratic National Committee chairman and presidential candidate, said the health bill was needed to correct economic inequities. "The question is, in a democracy, what is the right balance between those at the top ... and those at the bottom?" Dean said during an appearance on CNBC. "When it gets out of whack, as it did in the 1920s, and it has now, you need to do some redistribution. This is a form of redistribution."

You'll want to read the rest, at the link.