New York Times, Huffington Post Are Turkey Farms

I was just doing a little web surfing.  I Googled the words "tea party" and "racism".  There was an article on Huffington Post recently calling the Tea Partiers ignorant racists. As well, the New York Times had an article about Confederate History Month and someone commented on the Times's  blog about the Woodstock Times article, specifically alluding to my statement on this blog that I am a Confederate. Of course, that has nothing to do with race or slavery. It is an allusion to the 10th Amendment and decentralization.  I conclude from looking at the articles and posters on both the Huffington Post blog and at the New York Times that both are turkey farms. Their readers are turkeys.  And that goes for the so-called journalists as well. And it goes for whoever wrote that dull-witted post.

I celebrated with a letter to Brian Hollander, editor of the Woodstock Times:

----- Original Message -----

From: Mitchell Langbert

To: woodstocktimes@ulsterpublishing.com

Sent: Monday, April 19, 2010 5:28 AM

Subject: Fw: Corrected: American Breakfast Tea

Dear Editor Hollander: 

Thank you and Paul Smart for the coverage of our nascent Tea Party group ("American Breakfast Tea", April 8).  However, a point of clarification regarding Mr. Smart's reference to my belief in the Confederacy, John Calhoun and Andrew Jackson is in order.  I write in part because one of the Woodstock Times's  readers quoted the article and libelously alluded to it on a New York Times blog.  Please note that my reference to the Confederacy, John C. Calhoun and Andrew Jackson had nothing at all to do with slavery or race. This is a common libel concerning the Tea Party among the benighted social democratic press.  It is false that the Tea Party has to do with racism.

If you read my blog regularly you know that Mr. Smart took my point out of context.  My chief interest is in decentralization of government. John C. Calhoun and Andrew Jackson were two of the most important advocates of decentralization. This is closely related to modern management theories of Alfred Chandler and Oliver Williamson. 

Moreover, I am surprised that any of your readers are unaware that the primary issue over which the Civil War was fought was not slavery but states' rights and decentralization. This appears to be one more application of the rule that the more leftists and "progressives" preen themselves about their supposed superior intellects, the more limited their educations turn out to be.  In addition, your reader quoted Mr. Smart's quotation from my blog, which was deliberately selected to be incendiary (we love you anyway, Paul), without having taken the trouble to read it. If your readers wish to read my blog rather than draw libelous conclusions without having done so, it is located at http://www.mitchell-langbert.blogspot.com.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert

Because The Left Voted, These Guys Got In

From top: Mao Tse Tung, Josef Stalin, Barack Obama, Pol Pot.

Obama Offers Payoff for Votes; MSNBC Announcer Defends Split Speeches

Newsbusters and legendary blogger Doug Ross report that MSNBC announcer Jay Barbree was visibly upset when he learned that Barack Obama has staged an audience on a NASA base. Obama did give a speech to NASA employees, but none of the NASA employees were allowed to attend an official speech.  Off camera, Obama told the employees that if they voted for him they could keep their jobs.  Only academics and government officials, Obama's lackeys, were allowed to attend the longer speech. 

Newsbusters reports that another MS-NBC announcer, Alex Witt, justified the direct quid pro quo and split speeches that in effect differentiate Americans into two of the three classes that Obama is establishing, the upper, academic-Wall Street class; the vulnerable and dependent middle class of state employees, not permitted freedom of speech and expression because of their dependence on the socialist state; and the lumpenproletariat, loyal to their Fuhrer and to the socialism that keeps them in their place with a crust of bread and an apartment in a city project.

BARBREE: ...I'm a little disturbed right now, Alex. I just found out some very disturbing news. The President came down here in his campaign and told these 15,000 workers here at the Space Center that if they would vote for him, that he would protect their jobs. 9,000 of them are about to lose their jobs. He is speaking before 200, extra hundred people here today only. It's invitation only. He has not invited a single space worker from this space port to attend. It's only academics and other high officials from outside of the country. Not one of them is invited to hear the President of the United States, on their own space port, speak today. Back to you Alex.

WITT: Alright Jay I can understand why that would certainly get you a bit upset. I will say, on behalf of the Obama administration, they contend that 2500 new jobs will be created, even more, they say, than the 2012 Constellation would have created, that program. So I know all this remains to be seen, but understandably we get why you're upset, right now. Along with many others down there. Let's see if the President clears that up later today. Jay thanks so much.

Is Barack Obama Mentally Ill?

Back in August '08 I blogged that Barack Obama showed signs of sociopathy.  Since I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist, there is no specific reason to trust my call, which was based on intuition derived from various business dealings. Since then I've learned that there is no clinical diagnosis of "sociopathy." Rather, the term is used loosely to suggest psychopathy.  But there is no reason to trust the judgment of psychiatrists or psychologists, who are notoriously incompetent.  A famous book on this subject is Thomas Szaz's Myth of Mental Illness, in which Szaz argues that the term mental illness is vacuous. Szaz's book has become a classic.  In other words, is there really any meaning to terms like psychopath or sociopath?

I interviewed Paul Babiak on workplace psychopaths for the AICPA Career Insider newsletter. Babiak coauthored with Robert Hare a great book on workplace psychopaths, Snakes in Suits.  If you are a Sopranos fan you may recall the name Robert Hare from the third or fourth to last Sopranos episode, when he is quoted at a dinner that Dr. Melfi gives for her psychiatrist friends that leads to her reading an article that in turn leads to her dropping Tony Soprano as her patient.  It must be something of a kick for a researcher to be quoted on the Sopranos.

The psychopathic model that Babiak and Hare develop in their book about workplace psychopaths does not fit Obama.  However, I do not doubt for a moment that most politicians have elements of psychopathy that take the form of conscienceless lying; the ability to send people to their deaths for frivolous reasons; the ability to adopt policies that they know to be wrong but that satisfy popular opinion, and the like.

President Obama seems to have a bit more of this psychopathic quality than most politicians, although in different ways.  There is an alternative diagnosis.  Soon after I wrote my blog Gagdad Bob, a blogger and professional psychiatrist, suggested that Obama suffers from narcissistic personality disorder, which  is probably true of the majority of politicians.  More recently, Live Leak quotes Roger Simon who claims that Obama is mentally ill and his illness is getting worse.  Live Leak writes:


"A recent case in point was Obama's bizarre and meandering 17-minute, 2,500-word answer to the simple question about how he could justify raising taxes for ObamaCare during a recession when citizens are already overtaxed. Obama's wildly inappropriate answer left the audience stunned and led commentator Charles Krauthammer to mockingly say, "I don't know why you are so surprised. It’s only nine times the length of the Gettysburg address, and after all Lincoln was answering an easier question, the higher purpose of the union and the soldiers who fell in battle."

Moreover, points out Live Leak, Obama laughed during a televised discussion of Americans losing their homes.   More recently Obama's discussions about the Tea Party demonstrations have been incoherent and confused.

There seems to be a risk of a serious breakdown that could impact Americans in various important ways.  Too bad no one checked his birth certificate.