Blog Heap of Links for the day 13 April 2012

Barack Obama is my college classmate (Columbia University, class of '83). As Glenn Beck correctly predicted from day one, Obama is following the plan of Cloward & Piven, two professors at Columbia University. They outlined a plan to socialize America by overwhelming the system with government spending and entitlement demands. Add up the clues below. Taken individually they're alarming. Taken as a whole, it is a brilliant, Machiavellian game plan to turn the United States into a socialist/Marxist state with a permanent majority that desperately needs government for survival ... and can be counted on to always vote for bigger government.
[h/t Chrissy at PoliNation]

Bottom line: For the last three years, Hilary Rosen has met nearly three dozen times with top Obama communications and political strategists from Valerie Jarrett to David Axelrod to Anita Dunn to Jim Messina to the president himself.

Any notion that her frontal assault on GOP women was an accident or lone wolf move is contradicted by the long paper trail of her intimate working relationship with the White House campaign/media team. The data also puts the disavowals of Messina/Axelrod last night into much-needed perspective.

They can’t disassociate themselves from one of their most frequent visitors and associates.

They just never expected the fierce online/social media pushback they got from conservative women, who are beating them at their own medium.

...that is a real problem. a lot of good bass parts are hypnotic. my problem is they tend to hypnotize the bass player. too. But, we are not alone. I remember an interview where BB King said he doesn't play and sing at the same time cuz he has 'stupid fingers....'

The real major expenses for publishers are the Manhattan offices and other perks, like hiring English lit majors at 80K a year to do proofreading any decent high school grad could perform for a few hundred bucks per book. (Also, an established author can easily crowd source a book's proofreading to a small group of fans. I was part of such an effort recently. We produced an almost perfect draft in less than 24 hours in terms of correcting basic text errors and continuity issues.) The big publishers are going to die. It's that simple. There is simply no reason for them to exist any more. Many small agencies will emerge from the wreckage and earn their keep with meaningful service with a low overhead. A home office in the suburbs is just as good as a Manhattan skyscraper for this purpose.

America is addicted to chocolate. Foreign chocolate.

A majority of us consume chocolate each day. Although the U.S. produces only 6% of the world’s cocoa, we consume more than 20%.

The threat is obvious. It’s time for government to step in and promote alternatives.

[Former Okla. Congressman Ernest Istook, chocolate-covered tongue in cheek]

Reagan, Bush, and Obama, the whole story in three pictures