If I Were a Terrorist

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1EXKLVgEx0

Remember it’s Congress that makes law not the President.

This email came in three parts: Part 1 In just one year .  Remember the election in 2006?  Thought you might like to read the following:  A little over one year ago:  1) Consumer confidence stood at a 2 1/2 year high; 2) Regular gasoline sold for $2.19 a gallon; 3) The unemployment rate was 4.5%.   Since voting in a Democratic Congress in 2006 we have seen:  1) Consumer confidence plummet; 2) The cost of regular gasoline soar to over $3.50 a gallon; 3) Unemployment is up to 5% (a 10% increase); 4) American households have seen $2.3 trillion in equity value evaporate (stock and mutual fund losses); 5) Americans have seen their home equity drop by $1.2 trillion dollars; 6) 1% of American homes are in foreclosure.  America voted for change in 2006, and we got it!  Remember it’s Congress that makes law not the President. He has to work with what’s handed to him.   Quote of the Day……..‘My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world.  I hope you’ll join with me as we try to change it.’ — Barack Obama  Part 2: Taxes…Whether Democrat or a Republican you will find these statistics enlightening and amazing.   www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/151.html Taxes under Clinton 1999                   Taxes under Bush 2008 Single making 30K – tax $8,400             Single making 30K – tax $4,500 Single making 50K – tax $14,000          Single making 50K – tax $12,500 Single making 75K – tax $23,250          Single making 75K – tax $18,750 Married making 60K – tax $16,800       Married making 60K- tax $9,000 Married making 75K – tax $21,000       Married making 75K – tax $18,750 Married making 125K – tax $38,750     Married making 125K – tax $31,250 Both democratic candidates will return to the higher tax rates It is amazing how many people that fall into the categories above think Bush is screwing them and Bill Clinton was the greatest President ever. If Obama or Hillary are elected, they both say they will repeal the Bush tax cuts and a good portion of the people that fall into the categories above can’t wait for it to happen. This is like the movie The Sting with Paul Newman; you scam somebody out of some money and they don’t even know what happened. PART 3: You think the war in Iraq is costing us too much?       Read this: Boy am I confused.  I have been hammered with the propaganda that it is the Iraq war and the war on terror that is bankrupting us. I now find that to be RIDICULOUS. I hope the following 14 reasons are forwarded over and over again until they are read so many times that the reader gets sick of reading them.  I have included the URL’s for verification of all the following facts. 1.      $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year by state governments.     Verify at: http://tinyurl.com/zob77 2.      $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens. Verify at: http://www.cis..org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html 3.      $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens. Verify at: http://www.cis..org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html   4.     $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English! Verify at:  http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.0.html  5.      $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the  American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies. Verify at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html 6.  $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens. Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html 7.  30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.  Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html  8.  $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare & social services by the American taxpayers. Verify at:   http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.html 9.  $200 Billion Dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused  by the illegal aliens. Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html 10.  The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that’s two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens.  In particular,  their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt.01.html 11.  During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries.  Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and mariju ana, crossed into the U. S from the Southern border. Verify at: Homeland Security Report:  http://tinyurl.com/t9sht 12.  The National Policy Institute, ‘estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of  between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period.’ Verify at:  http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/pdf/deportation.pdf 13.  In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances back to their countries of origin. Verify at: http://www.rense.com/general75/niht.htm 14.  ‘The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States.’ Verify at: http://www.drdsk.com/articleshtml The total cost is a whopping $ 338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR.    Why are we THAT stupid? If this doesn’t bother you then just delete the message.  If, on the other hand, if it does raise the hair on the back of your neck, I hope you forward it to every legal resident in the country including every representative in Washington, D.C. – five times a week for as long as it takes to restore some semblance of intelligence in our policies and enforcement thereof.

The backstory on Obama’s books

Patrick Casey
If one had to name Barack Obama’s chief accomplishments in public life, his two books would outweigh anything he has done in politics. The New York Times had a fascinating article, The Story of Obama, Written by Obama, on the front page of Sunday’s paper. The piece points out that Obama’s attraction to the masses is driven not by what he has accomplished in the real world (especially in the Senate), but by his ability to tell a tale — his own. Unspoken by the NYT is that this phenomena does have its place in history – it is the very definition of “cult of personality”.

Senator Obama understands as well as any politician the power of a well-told story. He has risen in politics less on his track record than on his telling of his life story – a tale he has packaged into two hugely successful books that have helped make him a mega-best-selling, two-time Grammy-winning millionaire front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination at age 46. According to his publisher, there are more than three million copies of his books in print – and two more books on the way.

The story of Mr. Obama’s life as an author tells as much about him as some of the stories he has recounted in his books. It possesses at times the same charmed quality sometimes ascribed to his political ascent – an impression of ease, if not exactly effortlessness, that obscures a more complex amalgam of drive, ambition, timing and the ability to recognize an opportunity and to do what it takes to seize it.

 

But what do Obama’s books really tell you about the candidate? Here’s something that should give us all pause, especially since it was said about his first book, Dreams From My Father, by someone who is presented in the article as a fan of the Senator:

 

“The book is so literary,” said Arnold Rampersad, a professor of English at Stanford University who teaches autobiography and is the author of a recent biography of Ralph Ellison. “It is so full of clever tricks – inventions for literary effect – that I was taken aback, even astonished. But make no mistake, these are simply the tricks that art trades in, and out of these tricks is supposed to come our realization of truth.”

 

Obama’s flirtation with literary circles dates back to shortly after he was elected as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. He was approached by an agent, Jane Dystel, who got him a contract for a book. Obama missed his deadline, and Dystel promptly got him another contract and a $40,000 advance for the same book. And the next time you hear Michelle Obama complain about how hard they had it early on in their life together, the following passage is useful to remember. It happened after Obama had been given free use of an office at the University of Chicago, along with a law school fellowship and the aforementioned advance, to finish his first manuscript – at a post-education time in their lives when most people would be working at real jobs:

 

The two worked mostly by telephone and by manuscripts sent by Federal Express between New York and Chicago. Mr. Obama, an inveterate journal writer who had published poems in a college literary magazine but had never attempted a book, struggled to finish. His half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, said he eventually retreated to Bali for several months with his wife, Michelle, “to find a peaceful sanctuary where there were no phones.”

 

Ah, retreating to Bali after getting a $40,000 advance and while receiving income from a law school fellowship — a tough life indeed. We can all empathize. Oh, and about the “truthfulness of the book”?

 

In the introduction, Mr. Obama acknowledged his use of pseudonyms, composite characters, approximated dialogue and events out of chronological order. He was writing at a time well before a recent series of publishing scandals involving fabrication in memoirs. “He was trying to be careful of people’s feelings,” said Deborah Baker, the editor on the first paperback edition of the book. “The fact is, it all had a sort of larger truth going on that you couldn’t make up.”

 

That’s how we judge “truth” now? Ignore the lies used to build the foundation for the benefit of the quest for the nebulous “larger truth”? This article is looking more and more like an apologia for upcoming disclosures that Obama’s story as told by himself has more than a few holes in it.

 

Barack Obama long recognized the power of the written word, since just the promise of a well-told story had gotten him far early in his career. As such, Obama correctly concluded that the road to his ultimate goal — the Presidency — would be easier if it were paved with books rather than accomplishments. From the article, it’s unclear how much time the Senator actually spent on the affairs of government after being elected to the U.S. Senate from Illinois in 2004. In the first 18 months of his first Senate term he was also writing his second book, The Audacity of Hope. Immediately after finishing that, he built up support for his upcoming Presidential campaign by campaigning for other Democrats in 2006, took part in a book tour, made a few appearances on entertainment shows, and began his campaign for the presidency. Not much time for doing what he was elected to the Senate to do, representing the people of Illinois.

 

As for the originality of The Audacity of Hope, the NYT article contains a few surprises there as well. The individuals that Obama sent first drafts to for comments comprise a Who’s Who of liberal Democratic Party insiders, some of whom are now associated with his campaign: David Axelrod, Anthony Lake, Gene Sperling, Samantha Power, and Cass Sunstien. Sunstein, in particular, notes that he made many comments on the manuscript — a few of which made it into Obama’s book. This differs from the official spin about the book, which is that it is a liberal manifesto penned solely by Barack Obama. One wonders if eventually we will find out more about these collaborations of Obama’s — for an example see Ted Sorenson’s recent admission (May ‘08) of what he had previously denied for 40-plus years verbally and in writing – that he ghost wrote the book that John Kennedy used to win a Pulitzer, Profiles in Courage.

 

The most troubling aspect of the article is, however, how it attributes Barack Obama’s success not to anything tangible he has accomplished, other than getting into a few good schools and winning a few elections, but to his ability to weave a compelling tale. Here’s a quote from Peter Osnos, formerly the publisher of Times Books, the home of Obama’s first book. It’s a comment about Obama’s literary career, but it could just as easily be a comment about the Senator’s political career, as well: 

 

“Barack is worth millions now,” Mr. Osnos said. “It’s almost all based on these two books, two books not based on a job of prodigious research or risking one’s life as a reporter in Iraq. He has written about himself. Being able to take your own life story and turn it into this incredibly lucrative franchise, it’s a stunning fact.”

 

Are 32,000 Scientists Enough to Question Global Warming ‘Consensus?’

Marc Sheppard
The National Press Club in Washington will today release the names of as many as 32,000 American Scientists who reject not only Kyoto-style greenhouse gas limits, but the very premise of manmade global warming itself.

On Saturday, Lawrence Solomon wrote a great piece in the National Post (h/t Benny Peiser) which begged the question:

 

“How many scientists does it take to establish that a consensus does not exist on global warming?”

 

How many, indeed?

 

Solomon, author of The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud**And those who are too fearful to do so, reminds us that 32,000 scientists have now signed the “Oregon petition,” which states that

 

“We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

 

How might anyone of clear mind consider these words from these numbers and still accept claims of scientific consensus?  Or calls for any — let alone immediate — action?

 

Solomon also points out that these dissenting scientists – over 9,000 of whom hold Ph.Ds — now outnumber the environmentalists that attended the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio that actually kicked off the global warming craze.  And, I might add, far exceed the count of UN IPCC “scientists” whose calamitous predictions lie at the very heart of climate hysteria and what Solomon calls “the Kyoto Protocol’s corruption of science.”

 

But will their sheer numbers nullify the “settled science” argument?

 

Not if the alarmists have any say it won’t.  Solomon offers a brief history of attempts to bury all such previous accords. First by mocking the limited number of signatures on earlier appeals, and then — when the original Oregon petition boasted 17,800 signatories — claiming duplicate or fraudulent names.  And even when all names were ultimately verified as authentic (save one actually planted by agents of Greenpeace), the MSM still ignored their consequence.

 

Sixteen years ago, the Rio event attracted over 7,000 journalists who dutifully spread the word of man’s inhumanity to his habitat to an appreciative world.  Will today’s official announcement of 32,000 men and women of science who, by their physical signature, reject mankind’s guilt capture any media attention at all?

 

Or, for that matter, that of climate experts Gore, Boxer, Lieberman, Warner, Clinton, Obama, or, most despicably — McCain?

 

As the science no longer appears to concern any of them — don’t hold your CO₂ polluted breath. 

 

Yet their denials change nothing – the wheels continue to fall off the warmist dungwagon.

Posted at 02:50 PM | Email | Permalink

Is Iran a threat or not, Senator Obama?

Thomas Lifson

Within the space of a day, the candidate has changed his position.

 

May 18, 2008: 

 

[If Iran] “tried to pose a serious threat to us they wouldn’t . . . they wouldn’t stand a chance.”

 

May 19, 2008: 

“So, I’ve made it clear for years that the threat from Iran is grave.”

John Hinderaker asks, ”Can someone explain why it is, exactly, that Barack Obama is not a laughingstock?”

 

I can, John. Two words: media bias.

 

Posted at 10:16 PM | Email | Permalink

The Rule Book for Criticizing Obama

Peggy Shapiro
Barack Obama needs to issue a rule book for exactly what criticism opponents are allowed to make.

Rule 1  Don’t criticize family no matter who they are or what they do.

Although his wife Michelle is an active member of his campaign and a virulent critic of other candidates, she must not be made an issue in the election.  “The GOP, should I be the nominee, can say whatever they want to say about me, my track record,” Obama said. “If they think that they’re going to try to make Michelle an issue in this campaign, they should be careful because that I find unacceptable, the notion that you start attacking my wife or my family.” To criticize Michelle is not part of the normal political fray, but a violation of the sanctity of family. Michelle Obama has immunity from condemnation and free reign to denigrate the country and Obama’s opponents.

Rule 2  Don’t criticize any policy that the candidate might have even if he is not mentioned by name.

The opposition must not challenge Obama’s plan to meet face-to-face with state sponsors of terror, even if the challenge does not mention the Senator by name. A Democratic firestorm broke out when President Bush told an Israeli Knesset audience that negotiating with Iran’s President, who has repeatedly committed himself to the destruction of Israel, is the false comfort of appeasement. Obama, whose policy is just that sort of false comfort, attacked the speech as “a false political attack”  launched on foreign soil. Although Democrats have been critical of the U.S. on foreign soil (Obama’s recently dismissed foreign policy advisor Samantha Power is just the first that comes to mind.), partisan politics past our shores is not protocol.

Rule 3  Don’t imply that Obama’s stunning rise to power was the result of anything less than divine intervention.

As Bill Clinton discovered, referring to Obama’s unprecedented rise from an undistinguished state senator, with a short stop in the U.S. Senate, to candidate for the most powerful position in the world was “a fairytale.” Of course, Clinton did not imply that Obama conjured magical powers, but that unusual circumstances were in play. The “fairytale” remark was distorted and regurgitated as a play of the “race card.” There is no more damning or frightening epithet than to be called a racist. 

Rule 4  Don’t examine any of Obama’s anti-American, racist, terrorist, or criminal associates.
It’s out of bounds to criticize a public member of his campaign in a key foreign policy position. Criticism of Obama’s associations with Reverend Wright, domestic terrorist Bill Ayers and indicted influence peddler Tony Resko are characterized as “witch hunt” and “guilt by association.”  The critic is stained by association with two of America’s darkest periods in history: the hysterical unfairness of America’s Salem Trials and Joe McCarthy’s prosecution of Americans for their “suspected” associations with Communists.

So let’s clarify the rules for the general election so that Republicans are not labeled as destroyers of families, indecent purveyors of false attacks, racists, or McCarthyites. Don’t make negative mention of Obama’s wife, his policies, his inexperience, or his associations.

What’s left? The GOP had better contact the Obama campaign to issue a list of permissible topics.

Posted at 01:00 AM | Email | Permalink

The Obama-Ahmedinejad Summit

By Ed Lasky

“Obama is the only major candidate who supports tough, direct, presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions.”
  – Barackobama.com

Barack Obama has enshrined the principle of unconditional summitry with Iran as one of the central foreign policy planks of his campaign for President. This despite recent efforts by Obama surrogates to confuse the electorate.

 

The statement above is found on the campaign website of Senator Obama and reflects his view — repeated a number of times by himself in debates and question and answer sessions — that the thrust of his foreign policy will be personal Presidential engagement with tyrannical regimes across the globe,  including Hugo Chavez in Venezuela or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran. But the focus clearly will be on Iran as the campaign moves along. Iran is the leading state sponsor of terror and is developing the means to construct nuclear weapons.

 

What would be the consequences of such a Presidential meeting between President Obama and President Ahmadinejad?

 

Michael Gerson has written eloquently about the moral stain that will color the mere act of meeting with a Holocaust denier who boasts of his yearning to repeat the effort to exterminate the Jews.  Obama, a man who on the campaign trail has declared that “nobody has spoken out more fiercely on the issue of anti-Semitism than I have,”  will be extending the honor of a Presidential meeting to the most dangerous anti-Semite of all.

 

For what benefit? As Gerson wrote,

 

“having made Iranian talks without precondition: his major foreign policy goal, Obama is left with little leverage to extract concessions, and little choice to move forward”

 

There will inevitably be pressure to offer concessions to Ahmadinejad to help ensure a successful summit. To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, who will bear the burden? Who will pay the price?

 

Ahmadinejad has been crystal clear about his goals. He is fanatic towards Jews and toward Israel — a type of obsession the world has witnessed before. Israel will certainly be on the agenda of any presidential meeting.* Obama would meet and perhaps even shake hands with a man who has repeatedly condemned Israel, has called it “filthy bacteria” and will hear the ritual denunciations of Israel.  Perhaps, he has become inured to such bombast. He has heard it all before.

 

When a summit meeting occurs, there is considerable pressure to “accomplish” something, to come to an agreement. What exactly would a President Obama be willing to give to Iran in order to get back something that could be touted as an achievement of his summitry?

 

The boost a summit (even one that led to no agreements) would give to the image of Ahmadinejad would embolden him within Iran (he faces internal pressures that directly blame him for Iran’s diplomatic problems) and without. Furthermore, reformers throughout the region will be demoralized and our relations with Sunni nations,including Saudi Arabia, will be damaged as these Sunni regimes also seek to accommodate Iran.

 

More significant will be the impact on the one group in the region that has warm feelings toward America: the Iranian people themselves. There is a huge Baby Boom generation that is restive and angry towards the regime. As a consequence of pro-natalist policies formulated in the wake of the Iran-Iraq War, there was a surge in births in Iran. Two-thirds of Iranians are now estimated to be under the age of 30; and, significantly, only 40 percent of them are ethnically Persian. They resent the regime.

 

Iranians are also heirs to a culture that was historically very cosmopolitan and proud of its sophistication and openness to the outside world. Already many Iranians complain of Ahmadinejad’s policies that have led to global isolation  In a poll taken by the regime itself, one half (and this is probably understated because the regime was running the poll) affirmed that Washington’s attitude towards Iran are “to some extent” correct. As much as they abhor the regime, they also have the most positive feelings towards America of any population in the region.

 

There is an old Middle Eastern aphorism: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. If Obama meets with Ahmadinejad, it will be a sign to Iranians that the world is willing to accept and to respect their regime. The reservoir of goodwill — the hope for the future as this bulge of youth moves forward — will be drained. They will feel the sting of defeat — a betrayal they can lay at the feet of President Obama and America.

 

But what will be the reaction of the rest of the world? The consequences have already been presaged by the world’s reaction to the release of the deeply flawed National Intelligence Estimate late last year. When the NIE was released, it infamously stated, “in the fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program”. The report was immediately criticized across the political spectrum in America and by foreign leaders among our allies in Europe.  Notably, Barack Obama endorsed the conclusions of the NIE and has continued to do so despite its revision a few months later. Paul Mirengoff of  Powerline  noted the  irony of his accepting the validity of the earlier intelligence findings because they conform to his political plans and rejecting later revisions because they would challenge his views and plans. .

 

Nevertheless, the mere release of the report, with its imprimatur of government approval, had a disastrous effect on efforts to restrain Iran.

 

Over the last few years America, working with our allies and with the United Nations, assiduously (if all too slowly) has worked to impose a sanctions regime against Iran. While the breadth and strength of the sanctions have not been what many would have wanted — and their enforcement has been spotty — the release of the NIE all but squashed any efforts to move forward with a tougher set of sanctions. Nations rushed with an unseemly alacrity to reach deals with Iran. Russia resumed nuclear cooperation on the Busher nuclear reactor in Iran. China stepped up its opposition to further sanctions. And European nations slid back toward apathy to Iran’s threat. The sanctions regime had lost its rationale and has all but collapsed.

 

The conclusions of the report have been all but repudiated and certainly have been superseded by Iran’s success in enriching uranium and developing ballistic missiles. Yet all forward momentum toward further sanctions against Iran has halted. The NIE gave all parties who opposed the sanctions — business interests, Russian oligarchs in charge of their nuclear export program, Chinese leaders eager to extend their influence — a reason to oppose further efforts to halt Iran’s nuclear program.

 

But the world’s powers until now have diplomatically isolated the regime. Other world leaders have refrained from meeting with a leader who has continually issued a string of odious statements such as “Israel will be wiped off the map” and “Israel is a stinking corpse” and who denies the Holocaust.

 

A meeting between President Obama and President Ahmadinejad would trigger a parade of other foreign leaders to Tehran. They are merely waiting for a pretext, an excuse, that would absolve them from the shame of meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Our strongest allies in Europe, Angela Merkel in Germany, Nicolas Sarkozy in France, Gordon Brown in England, face internal pressures to engage in Iran from commercial interests and political and diplomatic figures within their nations.  Until now they have courageously resisted this pressure. No leader wants to bear the burden, the odium, the shame, of being the first Western leader to grant respectability to Ahmadinejad. Diplomatic pressure from America has provided them with another reason to deny such a bestowal of prestige upon Ahmadinejad. President Obama would radically change these policies.

 

When other high profile political leaders will come a calling, they may not bear the bowler of Neville Chamberlain, but they will bring hats in hand, newly ready and able to strengthen diplomatic (and hence all) ties to the mullahcracy. Under the cover of diplomatic outreach, sanction-busting deals will naturally follow. European nations are eager for energy deals that will provide the wherewithal for Iran to step up its nuclear weapons program.

 

Indeed, just this past week, OMV, an Austrian energy company with a multibillion dollar deal with the tyrants of Tehran, gave us a glimpse into the future. The chief executive officer of the company has openly declared that a political change in America — one that he apparently believes in and hopes for — will make it far easier to transact deals with Iran. Most assuredly he is not referring to John McCain.

 

If President Obama believes in the value of such meetings, perhaps he will be bold enough to meet with Iranian dissidents and reformers, to use the prestige of his office and that of America (remember Iranians admire America) to help them and not their oppressors. President Reagan — whom Barack Obama professes to admire — offered such support to Soviet dissidents.

 

So far, Barack Obama has not shown any signs that he is willing to do so.

 

* This meeting will be good preparation for the Muslim nations summit that Barack Obama has called for convening when he becomes President so he can hear their “grievances”.  Israel will be on that menu, too.

Ed Lasky is news editor of American Thinker.