A TMR Monday Musical Update: Unembarrassing Rap

Christian Rap is only going to get you in trouble at an atheist's convention. (I mean, why anyone would want all this jargon taking up space in their heads is beyond us. Then again, why anyone would want all this jargon taking up space in their heads - so they can knowledgeably comment on it - is also a pickle we'd be better off tackling at another time.) Anywhere else, I guarantee you, this Q + A will get you pats on the back - no problem.

People listen to bad messages in music because they lack imagination. It's not their fault. They don't live in a stimulating environment (Even animals prefer being hit to no stimulation at all). Crate Diggers are driven by a desire for understanding the world of music's contours. Being exposed to everything destroys the hype. There's only two kinds of music - good and bad. The subject matter is up to you.

This isn't an unembarrassing Rap record, but Elvis Costello hooking up with The Roots' (and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon's) ?uest Love - who seems as determined as Elvis to hook up with everybody. Together they came up with this threadbare, oh I don't know, authentic fake I Am The Walrus rebellion, from Jamaica, for the masses. Or something. It's hard to tell because it just kinda lays there. I poked it with a stick and found it's not a bad song, if a bit under-produced. In the suburbs, on decks across the country, it has a shot at defining cool for a while. Everywhere else, it will be put out of it's misery quickly, except for the memory it happened. And that, too, will go soon enough. I can see why these two might share long phone calls, but not this.

Both this Rap and it's beat are throwbacks to the 70's tribal style of Gil Scott Heron and The Last Poets. Let's call it the sound of Rap's Community Organizer Contingent. The place where Obama feels deep, NewAgers start dancing (but not listening) and unarmed conservatives nervously start eyeing each other, remembering tales of cannibalism and old Tarzan movies. Not to fear. It's just a beat. Plus Democrats feed on themselves, which is why this guy's talking. You want to hear a message of self-reliance? Well here it is, twisted, on a Monday morning:

"Let's build,..."

Believers, Believers, Everywhere, & They Vote!

Well, well, well. This isn't exactly a shock, unless you take into account what side we're on:

A recently published study on religion in America found that the country is becoming increasingly divided between those who are fervently religious on the one hand, and those who are not so religious or even hostile to religion on the other. But at the same time, the study's authors say Americans have never been more tolerant of one another.

Based on a random sampling of 3,000 people from all faiths and walks of life, they found that a "God gap" has formed. Very religious Americans tend to be Republican and conservative, while more secular people tend to be progressive or vote for the Democratic party.

Yet every one of these geniuses thinks they can fool us into thinking they're only following their politics. Riiiight - they're only fooling themselves.

Instead, to us, they all look like insulting shallow idiots who assume we're as stupid as they are. Both the conservatives, because they can't stand up for American values without their "ancient teachings", and the liberals because they can't either - they just use NewAge, instead, to (what else?) fight the conservatives.

Or was anybody dumb enough to think all that "Jesus was a community organizer" bullshit was either Christianity or a statement of disbelief?

Fucking losers.

Pigs In A Blanket: The D's "Race" To The Bottom

Now here's a damn good opportunity to catch a bunch of Democrats with their hands in the cookie jar - hurry - do it now:

Congress is frantic to pass “Pigford” before Republicans take control of the House next January. The race bill was passed last week by the Senate and now Pelosi is screaming the House will ratify it in time to send it to Obama’s desk for signature before Christmas.  But in the meantime, Republicans are making a fuss.  Well, some of them are – namely, Michele Bachmann, Steve King and Bob Goodlatte.

Haven't we - almost alone - been telling America to focus on fraud? Well, it seems - almost alone - only Andrew Breitbart is listening:

For those unfamiliar with the story, in July, when liberals, the media, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) were slamming Tea Partiers as racist, Breitbart released a now infamous video of United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) official Shirley Sherrod’s speech before the NAACP describing how she had discriminated against a white farmer. Her comments were met with nodding approval by the members of the audience.

In the wake of the release, the USDA wasted no time in forcing Sherrod’s resignation, despite the fact that Breitbart says his intent was never to harm Sherrod, but rather to expose the NAACP as a racist body.

While the partial video ended Sherrod’s career at USDA, the second half, the portion of Sherrod’s anecdote in which she explained that she learned the error of her ways, was not included in the initial video Breitbart had released. The incomplete video lost Sherrod her job and resulted in a mass demonization of Breitbart for not showing the full context of her remarks.

Since that time Breitbart has worked to understand the full story behind Sherrod’s hasty ousting and believes he has an answer. According to Breitbart, the answer lays in a piece of legislation President Barack Obama signed Wednesday — which provides $1.15 billion in funding for a case known as Pigford II. The money will be doled out in payments of $50,000 for more than 90,000 alleged black farmers as retribution for alleged discrimination on the part of the USDA.

From the initial class action suit, Pigford vs. Glickman, Shirley Sherrod and her husband received $13 million. In addition to the $13 million, the USDA gave her a job in their ranks.

With Sherrod on the outs, her defenders came out in droves, charging that Breitbart’s video release had been an ill-fated attempt to bring more attention to Pigford. Despite these adamant claims, Breitbart says that at the time he was ignorant of any such suit.

“They were trying to show that my intention was to get Pigford defunded,” Breitbart told The Daily Caller. “And, I had never heard of Pigford, so for the last four and half months, all I’ve been doing is eating, breathing, sleeping Pigford, researching Pigford, finding whistleblowers who are hiding in plain sight who have been wanting to tell the story of how this was rigged.”

Breitbart since has embarked on a mission to expose Pigford for the outrageous fraud he and others have found it to be, namely how 400 black farmers in a class action suit ballooned to over 90,000 claimants when even one of the most energetic advocates for Pigford, John Boyd, founder of the National Black Farmers Association, has admitted that there are only 18,000 black farmers in the country.

The coming weeks will find Breitbart’s site, Biggovernment.com, replete with exposes, research papers, and opinion pieces on Pigford designed to fill in the gaps he and anti-Pigford whistleblowers — such as Jimmy Dismuke, a black farmer who actually experienced discrimination, Minnesota Republican Rep. Michelle Bachmann and former Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer — believe the government and media have overlooked.

Indeed there have been reports that USDA employees and FBI officials estimate that the number of fraudulent claims from Pigford — exacerbated by ambitious trial lawyers and community organizers — range from 50 percent to 95 percent.

Former Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer has been closely involved in exposing Pigford as a fraud. Though he had his doubts about Breitbart, he has given the news mogul assistance with his push for transparency. Schafer explained that while Breitbart appears to have rallied to the Pigford cause as a means for redemption from the Sherrod incident, his claims are entirely valid.

Eventually - bad reputation or no - you people are going to end up listening to TMR as well. Because, if you haven't figured it out yet (after all the times we've called things correctly) like Breitbart, if we didn't have a bad reputation in times like this, we'd be doing something wrong.

Is Not Smoking Starting To Get To The President?

"Your publication and website have documented Obama's ties to the teachings of Saul Alinksy while he was community organizing in Chicago. Here is Rule 13 of Alinksy's Rules for Radicals:

'Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.'"

-- Rush Limbaugh, nailing the creepy political philosophy of President Barack Obama - which calls for attacks on individuals and private citizens - while responding to the president's claim that Republicans "can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done," to The National Review.

Obama And Oprah Have Organized His Aura

[The New Republic's] John Judis tracked down Jerry Kellman, who in 1985 "hired Obama to organize residents of Chicago's South Side." Kellman describes a conversation the two "community organizers" had at a conference on "social justice" in October 1987:

"[Obama] wanted to marry and have children, and to have a stable income," Kellman recalls.

But Obama was also worried about something else. He told Kellman that he feared community organizing would never allow him "to make major changes in poverty or discrimination." To do that, he said, "you either had to be an elected official or be influential with elected officials." In other words, Obama believed that his chosen profession was getting him nowhere, or at least not far enough. . . .

And so, Obama told Kellman, he had decided to leave community organizing and go to law school.

Another way of putting this might be that Obama left community organizing because he wanted a job in which he had actual responsibilities (and, of course, earned more money).

But Obama did not decide only that "community organizing" was not for him. Judis reports the future senator took part in a September 1989 symposium in which he "rejected the guiding principles of community organizing: the elevation of self-interest over moral vision; the disdain for charismatic leaders and their movements; and the suspicion of politics itself." Later, Obama "would begin to construct a political identity for himself that was not simply different from his identity as a community organizer--but was, in fact, its very opposite."

-- James Taranto, breaking down how the world's #1 "community organizer" behaved before we knew him, for the Wall Street Journal

The Naked Lunch

"The community Barack Obama has organized is,...the community of those who admire Barack Obama. He is mayor of Obamaville and aspires to be president of Barackistan. At the center of it all is a man who, like Hans Christian Andersen's naked emperor, may or may not believe that his veneer of accomplishment is real."

-- James Taranto, putting a bit more political polish on the "Cult of Obama" apple, in the Wall Street Journal.