Obama loves capitalism like he opposes gay marriage.  That is the larger lesson I take from President Obama’s recent decision to stop defending DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act).  What does gay marriage have to do with capitalism?  It’s all about Obama’s true beliefs.

About a week before Obama’s inauguration, the Windy City Times (“the voice of Chicago’s gay, lesbian, bi and trans community”) revealed that on February 15, 1996, in the midst of his first campaign for the Illinois State Senate, Obama told a local gay paper in answer to a questionnaire: “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.”  That was news in early 2009, because Obama maintained steadfast opposition to gay marriage throughout his 2007-08 presidential run.  (The Windy City Times reporter who found the original questionnaire with Obama’s statement claims to have stumbled upon it only just after the election.)  So it turns out that if you unearth previously hidden documentary evidence of what Obama believed about same-sex marriage in 1996, you have a better guide to his actions as president than his own campaign promises or early presidential statements from 2007-2010.

Joining us this week as Ricochet’s Guest Contributor is author, journalist, and anthropologist Stanley Kurtz.  A Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Stanley is the author of the recently published Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism, which was met with high praise from everyone who matters.  Of Radical-in-Chief, Paul Mirengoff says,

For me, [Stanley’s] book is as irresistible as the Cooper Union socialist event was for Barack Obama during the period when he says he grew as much as he ever has intellectually.

In his recent hour-long screech on a Tripoli balcony, Muammar Qaddafi vowed to hunt down his own rebellious people “inch by inch, house by house, room by room, alley by alley” and to wipe them out “to the last drop of blood”. An Israeli musician and journalist named Noy Alooshe — who is of Tunisian descent, by the way — caught the speech. He noted the rhythmic repetitions, the zany clothes, and the trippy way Qaddafi kept raising his fists, and said to himself: “Classic hit!”

Alooshe cranked up Auto-Tune and remixed Qaddafi’s speech as a mash-up with “Hey Baby,” a song by American rappers Pitbull and T-Pain. He overlaid the video with footage of a scantily-clad young woman apparently dancing to Qaddafi’s words, tossed it up on YouTube, and put the word out about it on Facebook and Twitter.