Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

Recent Comments by Our Readers

I recall during the 2006 elections NLT bloggers made their predictions and they had them posted on one handy page. They were embarrassingly optimistic (probably from Rove's talk of a "permanent" Republican realignment) and way off. Suffice it to say, that was one item that was NOT archived.

I agree with Dan. What is the explanation for ending this blog? It is more than worth saving!

Regular blogging is a time consuming chore, to be sure, but as Scanlon, I'm puzzled about the timing of this announcement. The most momentous and decisive election of our lifetime is upon us, yet this is the time for those at NLT to bail??????

I think there should be a weighing of the merits and the demerits of this blog. And that should occur prior to its conclusion, and be included in the archives.

Pumpkin. Stop. The people who are responsible for the blog have decided to shut it down. The last time I checked, this was still a free country (although that idea is slowly coming to a grinding halt thanks to liberalism) so they have a choice (like abortion) to shut the blog down.

Can you not have a little respect for that and stop the temper tantrum.

Let me explain to you one of the signs of mental illness. For example, the majority of the people who live in the Stupid State keeping electing the same people into office who keep raising taxes and promise big salaries and pensions to state workers. The majority of the people of the Stupid State have been doing that for years. Now the Stupid State is completely broke. Yet I bet in November the majority of the people in the Stupid State will vote for raising taxes and for democrats/liberals.

You have this disease. Stop posting here and get to your local mental hospital as soon as you can.

Certainly NLT/Ashbrook's adoration of Glenn Beck made NLT more fun over the years... Dr. Schramm's high praise of Beck after Beck gave his Ashbrook dinner speech, and Kate's husband going to Glenn Beck's 9/12 rally in DC... And then there was silence when Beck promoted the writings of American Nazi Elizabeth Dilling!

https://nlt.ashbrook.org/2010/07/culture-war-and-liberty.php#comment-70006

Ok, Dain, last chance to 'fess up - was that you playing "cowgirl"?

Have fun over at VDare or whatever...

Yes, it was grand. Fare thee well, all.

I am terribly sorry to hear that NLT is on its way out. For a brief period of time, I was a regular commentator, but have always been a regular visitor. Thanks to all of the bloggers, especially Professor Schramm, Lucas Morel, Joseph Knippenberg, and Justin Paulette. A visit here was always a step back into the world of clear and organized thought. I'll miss the posts, but especially the comments, including Kate, Andrew, John Lewis, and even Craig Scanlon. An excellent run, cheers!

(John Moser, those who have come, come in character. )

Oh yes... good times.

From suggesting the mass deportation of Muslims in America... and having other commenters cheer it on...

https://nlt.ashbrook.org/2007/01/french-baby-boomlet.php#comment-34887

to claiming that Japan never declared war on the US

https://nlt.ashbrook.org/2009/12/on-the-terrorist-attack.php#comment-66609

It HAS been fun.

BTW, I heard that Mack Sandpaper has gone on to a fruitful career in the Tea Party!

Again, can someone explain why this is happening?

This should be like the final episode of some long-running talk show or sitcom, with guest stars popping in to say goodbye. Hey, look everyone--it's Dain! And over there--isn't that Mack Sandpaper? And who could forget Starbuck?

Ah, Hal. We only need a final contribution from REN. Goodbye and thanks for the terrific conversations and God bless you all.

best,

Pete Spiliakos

My theory is that Obammy sent a few of his thugs over to the Ashbrook Center to bust things up.

Thank you Dr. Schramm and all the NLT bloggers who have contributed during the last ten plus years. NLT would have made the Founders very proud. I will certainly miss coming here, and I look forward to the new site.

Thank you Dr. Schramm and NLT contributors. I've enjoyed the blog very much over the years.

Please, Dr. Schramm, don't shut it down. One of the few things I have enjoyed everyday over the past couple years since graduation is seeing if there is a new post on NLT.

I don't have much money to offer, but I am sure others feel the way I do, and if there is something we can do to stop this, please let me/us know.

I'm not sure I understand why you are shutting down the blog. Expense? Legal liability? I have truly appreciated this small island of sense in a world of nonsense, but I'm taken aback that you are pulling the plug.

Thank you.

I agree, there is easily a masters degree worth of value in the posts. I enjoyed reading relatively original essays and insights from so many contributors. Most of all I enjoyed attacking the contributions from any angle I could dream up as I read along. Everyone had a different style, but the verbal sparring was good.

A parting verse from my favorite play ~

Forever, and forever, farewell, Cassius!
If we do meet again, why, we shall smile;
If not, why then this parting was well made.

Thank you, all.

To my fellow writers and, especially, our wonderful commenters, I can't express my gratitude for the years we've spent together. It's odd to feel such warmth and affection for folks one has (in most cases) never met, but we've shared so much that I feel that we know one another well. I've read every word you've written and always been bettered for the reading. You were truly exceptional.

I may write elsewhere in time, but NLT is an irreplacable experience. I would welcome the opportunity to stay in touch with you. Facebook, [email protected], smoke signals, carrier pigeons - I hope to cross paths with you all again.

Thank you, all.

(But if it wasn't done for profit, what's the reason for calling it quits now? Surely the expense of it was pretty minimal...)

There is an election coming up, after all... Isn't anyone - especially all of the conservative readers and commenters who lived by the concept of "No Left Turns" - wanting some kind of reason for this?

I will suffer from Treppenwitz--thinking what he should have said after he has stepped away from a party put on by an incomparable host.

Dear NLTers,

Things come and go, they have their time, and then it's time to move on. This is even more so in the worlds of publishing and internet. So an understandable decision, but a little sad.

For a few years of my life, around 2006-2009, not a few of you were my near-daily internet buddies in the comments section--I enjoyed it immensely, especially as someone who was having to move every couple of years. Probably I should have been going more often to my local bar, church-group, and what-not instead, but the folks there were less interesting than y'all, truth be told.

Best Wishes,

Carl

P.S. I did get to meet Kate once--just as nice and insightful as all her comments would lead you to expect.

P.P.S. Stop by Postmodern Conservative every now and then!

As I was saying to you the other day, I think I learned more writing, arguing, thinking and conversing here than I did in most of my graduate seminars. It has been a blessing in my life and I thank you for it. I will miss it.

There you go again - making excuses..

You used the same flair for excusing the racist Byrd.

So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation— if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. ...

1 Peter 2:1-25

God Bless All.

Cowgirl

Dr. Schramm: I suppose I saw this coming. Blogs of incredibly high quality are yet responsive down to the minute, and their responsiveness is only getting faster. Such is the genuine blessing and the genuine curse of where we stand nowadays... All I have to say is: thank you.

Thank you, Sir, for dragging me - kicking and screaming - into the brilliant and beautiful sunlight of the day! You probably will never know how much it really meant to me. There will be, until my passing days, a peacefulness about my hungry soul that owes a part of its current satisfaction to you.

Thank you so, so much. If God is Truth, then I hope you may rest assured that you steered many young human beings in His direction.

Yes, NLT has been lovely; often a great good time.

Thank you!

I've loved the time I've spent writing for and reading NLT. It was a great and characteristically generous thing you did, Mr. Schramm.

Too bad - I will be sorry to see you go.

Too bad, although this blog last much longer than The Remedy, so congratulations on a long and successful run. Look forward to your new site, which I hope does not have Captcha!

Barack's grandmother was not in middle management - she was the Vice President of the Bank of Hawaii:

IIRC, the common-and-garden commercial bank of which my family made use, which prior to 1984 had no branches outside of the Genesee Valley, had about 40 vice presidents at that time. In a certain era, banks were notable for inflation of titles.

The Bank of Hawaii and the First Hawaiian Bank were at that time the leading institutions in metropolitan Honolulu and tributary areas. Honolulu is a metropolis of middling size, rather like Omaha. They were (still are, I think) largecommunity banks engaged in the usual mix of commercial and industrial lending, commercial real estate lending, home mortgage lending, and consumer lending. I am fairly sure both were engaged in trust administration as well.

As for 'microfinance', it is a high-overhead form of commercial credit. The Grameen Bank in BanglaDesh is the big promoter thereof. We are talking about lending small sums (with high service charges) to women to start a basket-weaving business.


Trying reading the article by Angelo Codevilla again.

You ought to know imaginative literature when you see it. (The bit about the sweatshirt is the main tell). This is the sort of mess Gary Allen used to put out for the John Birch Society. Stop it.

Nothing do with honesty. Just facts. LIberals/Progressives are all - including you pumpkin - elitists (of course a huge percentage of them are extremely wealthy) who believe if everyone would just STFU and do as they say (not as they do) the world would be a better place. In other words - they know better than God how you should live your life.

I think you are "evolving" pumpkin. You may be cured of your mental illness by sheer reality.

"Obama like Geithner tried to present themselves as liberals/progressives out to help the poor man survive against the rich man. When in fact all they are is a bunch of wealth, snobby elitist."

While I don't necessarily disagree entirely with your characterization of these two, I think you've made an unintentional admission about the nature of true progressives in the contrast that you've drawn. Was that a glimmer of honesty from you, cow?

Trying reading the article by Angelo Codevilla again. Barack's grandmother was not in middle management - she was the Vice President of the Bank of Hawaii:

Here is the full context of what obviously you did not read in the referenced article. Read the stuff - maybe your opinion will "evolve".


Self-styled investigative journalist Wayne Madsen reports that Madelyn Dunham, the mother of Barack's mother, Ann Dunham, who became vice president of the Bank of Hawaii soon after her arrival there, was in charge of escrow accounts. Madsen's credibility is certainly checkered. But if he is correct about which department she headed, Madelyn Dunham must have supervised the accounts that the U.S. government used to funnel money to its "gray" and "black" activities throughout Asia. Among the conduits of the CIA money through these accounts to secret CIA proprietaries was a company—Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham & Wong—some of whose officers were serving CIA officers. This is a company whose 1983 IRS audit the CIA stopped. Vice President Madelyn Dunham, in charge of these very matters and hence necessarily "witting" (as they say at Langley), would have had to be more than a small cog in the machine. People do not rise to such stations from one day to the next.

Again, if Madsen is correct, two photos belie the portrait of her husband Stanley Dunham, Barack's grandfather, whom young Barry called father, as an insignificant furniture salesman. One, in the early 1950s, shows Stanley with his daughter, Ann, wearing the insignia of Beirut's elite French language school, Notre Dame de Jamhour. Was the family ever in Lebanon? How did Dad get the sweater? U.S. government influence operations are a likelier explanation than the furniture business for any Lebanese connection in the 1950s. Another photo, published in a Honolulu newspaper in 1959, shows Stanley Dunham escorted by uniformed U.S. Navy officers, greeting Barack Obama, Sr., as he arrived in Hawaii from Kenya. Because Obama was among 80 other Kenyans whom CIA had chosen for sojourns in the U.S. to influence them, it is logical that he and others like him would have been placed around the country in the hands of trusted handlers. The greeting photo suggests that Dunham may well have been one of these, and hence that the Kenyan did not meet Dunham's daughter, Ann, in a classroom. This would fit the chronology: Classes started on September 26. Ann was pregnant by early November. Obama was housed at the University of Hawaii's East-West Center facility funded by the Asia Foundation, itself funded by CIA.

Anyone and everyone knew that Barack Obama, Sr., and others like him had been brought to America to be influenced. How big a part of his attractiveness to her, and hence how big a reason for the pregnancy that produced Barack, Jr., was the foreign affairs angle? The hagiographies, including A Singular Woman, suggest that foreign affairs were the farthest thing from her mind. Yet Ann's second child was born in a marriage to another such person at the East-West Center. The Indonesian government had sent Lolo Soetoro to the East-West Center as a "civilian employee of the Army." But when the shooting started, Soetoro went on active duty, it seems as a colonel. This was arguably the CIA's most significant covert operation, the replacement (between 1965 and 1967) of Indonesia's dictator Sukarno with the Suharto regime that lasted until 1999. Few people on the face of the earth did not realize how important a struggle this was. Suggesting as does A Singular Woman that a very intelligent, very married Ann Soetoro was innocent of and indifferent to the political implications of the struggle she was involved in is incredible.

After the overthrow, Ann ran a "micro-financing" project, financed by the Ford Foundation, in Indonesia's most vulnerable areas. Supervising the funding at Ford in the late '60s was Peter Geithner, whose son would eventually serve hers as U.S. secretary of the treasury. In addition to the Ford Foundation, the list of her employers is a directory of America's official, semi-official, and clandestine organs of influence: the United States Information Agency, the United States Agency for International Development, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank. While running a project for five years in Pakistan, she lived in Lahore's Hilton International. Nothing small time, never mind hippyish.

In sum, though the only evidence available is circumstantial, Barack Obama, Jr.'s mother, father, stepfather, grandmother, and grandfather seem to have been well connected, body and soul, with the U.S. government's then extensive and well-financed trans-public-private influence operations.

His mother's parents, who raised him, seem to have been cogs in the U.S. government's well-heeled,

Seem to have been a man who sold furniture and insurance for a living and a woman in middle management at the Bank of Hawaii.

Stick a fork in this stuff.

I read a couple of days ago, as you have posted, that Stanley Ann Dunham had met and worked with Tim Geithner's father Peter. Peter Geithner oversaw the Ford Foundation's microfinance program in Indonesia which was being developed by Stanley Ann Dunham.

This led me to Wiki Tim Geithner. Much like Obama Geithner spent most of his childhood in foreign countries like Zimbabwe, Zambia and India.

Even more interesting was the fact that Tim Geithner worked for Henry Kissingner early in his career in DC.

Obama like Geithner tried to present themselves as liberals/progressives out to help the poor man survive against the rich man. When in fact all they are is a bunch of wealth, snobby elitist.

The reason why he speaks in French is French law requires all of its public officers to do so. This is why in EU discussions French business groups can speak to the other national parties and thus can sucessfully get what they want in negoations whereas the trade unions who are gov't supported must speak in french and once the translators get turned on no one really pays attention. ;)

The mistake of Sarko was he squandered his chance to do something big.. and if he did something big domestically to change the direction of the French society his domestic issues would have been an interesting and helpful diversion and not the cross that cost him his reelection.