This is what you need to know:

• Sen. Edward M. Kennedy summoned fellow Democrats to rally behind Barack Obama’s pioneering quest for the White House Monday night in an emotional opening to a party convention struggling for unity essential in the fall campaign.

• Obama’s convention planners used a prime time address by his wife, Michelle, to begin the work of casting him as a leader with classic American values.”Among them, she said in prepared remarks; “that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say you’re going to do, that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don’t know them, and even if you don’t agree with them.”

The Democrat Party platform’s hidden Soros Slush Fund

by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2008The Democrat Party platform is like a bag of pork rinds. You never know what high-fat liberal government morsel you’re gonna get.

Buried in the 94-page document is a noble-sounding proposal to create a “Social Investment Fund Network.” The program would provide federal money to “social entrepreneurs and leading nonprofit organizations [that] are assisting schools, lifting families out of poverty, filling health care gaps, and inspiring others to lead change in their own communities.” The Democrat Party promises to “support these results-oriented innovators” by creating an office to “coordinate government and nonprofit efforts” and then showering “a series of grants” on the chosen groups “to replicate these programs nationwide.”

I’ll give you a hint, his bitterhalf can claim this quote: “Sometimes it’s easier to hold onto your own stereotypes and misconceptions. It makes you feel justified in your ignorance. That’s America.”

Answer:   Once again, Obama got off the teleprompter and put his foot directly in his mouth.

UPDATE From Michelle Malkin:

From: Stipicevic, John
Sent: Friday, August 01, 2008 11:39 AM
Subject: WHIP FLOOR UPDATE

Although, this Democrat Majority just Adjourned for the Democrat 5-Week Vacation, House Republicans are continuing to fight on the House Floor. Although the lights, mics and C-SPAN camera’s have been turned off, House Republicans are on the Floor speaking to the taxpayers in the gallery who, not surprisingly, agree with Republican Energy proposals.

All Republicans who are in town are encouraged to come to the House Floor.

End update

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For the first time since the 1950s, Members will skip town today for the August recess without either chamber having passed a single appropriations bill. Then again, Democrats appear ready to sacrifice their whole agenda, even spending, rather than allow new domestic energy production.

It get’s better!

Thus, instead of tackling difficult but pertinent legislation, such as building new oil refineries, allowing oil companies to drill in ANWR and the ocean, and reducing the cost of healthcare by making it nationally competitive (rather than only allowing people to purchase it in their home state), Congress is busy passing legislation requiring diversity in executive agencies, allowing federal government personnel to work 20% of the time from home, and requiring that leftover food at government functions be donated to those who do not have enough to eat. 

While the last is surely a laudable goal, requiring that all government contracts include a clause to “encourage” such behavior is redundant and unnecessary.

Government-run health care rations treatment.

A Filipino nanny with terminal cancer in Toronto has been ordered back to her native country because of healthcare costs to the Canadian government.

Juana Tejada, 38, was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2006 after arriving on a federal three-year work permit as a live-in caregiver in 2003, but the disease has spread to her lungs, and she is now diagnosed as a terminal Stage Four cancer patient, the Toronto Star reported Monday.

Tejada asked Citizenship and Immigration Canada to reconsider her visa renewal but a letter from the agency denied the request.

“In the opinion of a medical officer, this health condition might reasonably be expected to cause excessive demand on health and social services,” the letter said.

Robert Goldberg of the New York Post pointed out:

One day after an MRI detected a tumor, Kennedy was quickly diagnosed with a malignant glioma - a rare and often-fatal form of brain cancer. Less than two weeks later, his tumor was being removed by one of the world’s experts in brain cancer at Duke Univeristy Medical Center. He’ll follow up with chemo and radiation therapy tailored to the genetic makeup of his cancer to keep the cancer from spreading.

He’ll likely take Avastin, a drug that in experiments with brain cancer has extended survival by months. A new cancer vaccine being developed in partnership with Pfizer could extend his life by six years.

That is how our health care system works. But that would not be the case if liberals ‘reform’ our system:

Until I found out he wrote a tell-all about the Administration. He wants to sell it doesn’t he? What Republican remembers him, let alone would want to buy a book he wrote? We were spoiled with Ari, bored to tears by Scott, and then watched with pride as Tony gave as well as he got from the Press Corps.

McClellan says he was in that position because he trusted the president: “The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”

Actually Scott, Ari retired and Tony wasn’t available yet…

Inspired by a 17-year-old gunman sent to prison for life, B.J. Holmes wrote “Donnie and the Little Brown Shoes”.

The illustrated story carries messages about peer pressure and fitting in, targeted to the fourth- and fifth-grade crowd. It also is a parenting primer for parents who may have trouble talking to their children about topics that, left undiscussed, could send their kids down the wrong road.

The book is centered on a young boy who was doing well, but who was sent down the wrong road after making a bad life choice.

“But he became a man and realized he’d lost his focus,” Logan said. “That is a story that all of us can identify with. I see it many times as people come through the court.”

In “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World,” published by Penguin Press, Mr. Greenspan criticizes both congressional Republicans and President George W. Bush for abandoning fiscal discipline.

I happen to agree.

more at memeorandum

Last year, Democrats managed to win the majority in both the House and Senate without offering an agenda to the American people. Instead, they campaigned against the so-called Republican “culture of corruption” in Washington, D.C. With the help of the mainstream media, it worked.

Even now that the Democrats are back in the majority, they still think they can pull off more legislative victories by campaigning against the so-called Republican “culture of corruption.” It’s time to expose the Democrats for who they really are. It’s time to bring balance to the debate and give corruption in the Democratic Party its proper notice.

In their new release, “Caucus of Corruption: The Truth about the New Democratic Majority,” bloggers Matt Margolis and Mark Noonan expose the shocking dirty secrets Democrats don’t want you to know—and that will be sure to outrage the nation.

Phil Kent, is author of the book “Foundations of Betrayal: How the Liberal Super Rich Undermine America“.

Phil was on The O’Reilly Factor discussing George Soros.  Here is the transcript , Watch the segment

In the Talking Points of the show, Bill pointed out how Soros is buying  a radical left agenda

Soros has set up a complicated political operation designed to do two things: buy influence among some liberal politicians, and smear people with whom he disagrees.

Now here’s a chart of how Soros and a few other wealthy radicals who help him are funneling money into the political process. Stay with me on this. Most of Soros’ political money flows through his Open Society Institute. You see it there on the left, which is almost unlimited funding.

BY BRENDAN MINITER

War has inspired some of the greatest works of literature. Writers from Thucydides to Walt Whitman, from Whittaker Chambers to Kurt Vonnegut, have been shaped by what they witnessed on the battlefield or in its immediate aftermath. Leo Tolstoy, the author of “War and Peace,” once noted that great literature often emerges in the years following great wars. But until recently, the National Endowment for the Arts had never run any program to serve our men and women in uniform.

With this in mind, Dana Gioia, the NEA’s director, attended a poetry conference in April 2003 and stepped into that incubator of so many good writing projects: a bar. Over drinks he was prodded by the poet laureate of Connecticut, Marilyn Nelson, to launch a writing project for soldiers fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq and other fronts in the war on terror.

Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr., M.D., a forensic psychiatrist, explains the madness of liberalism in his new book The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness. You can read an excerpt below, and read more at his website.

“Modern liberalism’s irrationality can only be understood as the product of psychopathology. So extravagant are the patterns of thinking, emoting, behaving and relating that characterize the liberal mind that its relentless protests and demands become understandable only as disorders of the psyche.” The Liberal Mind reveals the madness of the modern liberal for what it is: a massive transference neurosis acted out in the world’s political arenas, with devastating effects on the institutions of liberty.

Any questions?

Mark Twain’s classic “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” has been pulled from high school classes after a parent of a black student complained that a teacher had students read portions aloud.

The 1880s novel about a white boy’s first-person account of his adventures along the Mississippi River with a runaway slave named Jim has long been controversial because of its use of racial slurs and its representations of blacks and women.

I have to question the teacher here. When I was required to read it, we were also taught about the story within the story. I was taught it’s about Jim, a slave who breaks the law and risks his life for his freedom and to be reunited with his family. A white boy, Huck, becomes his friend and helps him escape. I was taught that becuase of Huck’s upbringing in the south, he believed that slavery was acceptable, but over time, comes to the realization that it is wrong and will suffer any punishment rather than betray his friend. This book is a wonderful educational tool.