"...history’s happy predestination..."

I found this term amusing, and so apt as it applies to the delusions of Obama: the childlike belief that history favors him and his fantasies.

Speaking recently about the Islamic State’s beheading of an American journalist, just before another tee time, President Barack Obama assured the country that “the future is won by those who build and not destroy.”

At a news conference on Thursday Obama admitted in so many words that “We don’t have a strategy yet” for dealing with the Islamic State, but he seemed to retain his usual faith in history’s happy predestination nonetheless. He and his Secretary of State have dismissed Russia’s massive land grab as a sign of weakness and an embarrassingly out-dated way of doing things, assurances have been made that all of that even more old-fashioned beheading and crucifying and slaughtering that the Islamic State gang has been up to certainly “has no place in the 21st Century,” and thus far these messes have dominated the news thoroughly enough that no one in the administration has been obliged by the press to explain why another aircraft carrier is needed in the South China Sea. “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” as the president is fond of saying, to the point that he had it woven into the Oval Office carpet, and we are expected to share his confidence that the aphorism will prove true no matter what befuddled efforts America might make.

A couple of smarter fellows over at National Review have already written convincingly about Obama’s childish faith that the good guys always win in the end, no matter how wimpy their good guy ways nor how ruthlessly bad the bad guys might be, but we would add that such fantastical notions are characteristic of modern liberal thinking about almost everything. Not just foreign policy, but economics, social issues, and the very nature of man.

I have written prior to these columns about this very subject:What is it with Obama's blind faith in the inevitable march of history? 

Allow me to quote myself:

Barack Obama gave a speech, the thing he does best, with a ridiculous premise embedded therein, something he does almost every time he opens his mouth. Often it’s fields of straw men he’s destroying. This time he’s referring to that inevitable march of history he and his Secretary of State, John Kerry, is fond of invoking.

It goes something like this:

“This is the 21st Century and X is just not done in this century. So X will inevitably fail.”

The fact that this is the 21st Century was supposed to have stopped Putin from swallowing the Ukraine piece by piece.

In Obama’s last statement in Martha's Vineyard, before heading back to finish his round of golf, was that

"One thing we can all agree on is that a group like ISIL has no place in the 21st century."

Who is this "We" Mr. Obama? ISIL disagrees. And, in fact, it’s reported to be attracting thousands of young people who have spent most of their lives in the 21st Century. They think ISIL is the path to the future and are willing to die for ISIL and their Muslim faith.

...

Is that reference to the 21st Century a theme that Obama’s speech writers throw in because it polls well. Or is this what the Obama really believes. It would not surprise us because the “March of History™” is a familiar theme in Marxist thought. And versions of Marxism were part of Obama’s formative years before he became President.

Victor Davis Hanson:

He also believes history follows some predetermined course, as if things always get better on their own. Obama often praises those he pronounces to be on the “right side of history.” He also chastises others for being on the “wrong side of history” — as if evil is vanished and the good thrives on autopilot.

When in 2009 millions of Iranians took to the streets to protest the thuggish theocracy, they wanted immediate U.S. support. Instead, Obama belatedly offered them banalities suggesting that in the end, they would end up “on the right side of history.” Iranian reformers may indeed end up there, but it will not be because of some righteous inanimate force of history, or the prognostications of Barack Obama.

Perhaps it's Obama's personal path to the highest office in the land, as totally undeserved as his Nobel Peace Prize, that gives him the feeling that he, like King Canute, controls the tide. There is a sick feeling that the man is not only a deluded narcissist, but a dangerous fool. A belief which seems to conflict with the observation that he is so fundamentally corrupt that he's evil.  But that may be a false choice.  There is no rule that says the deluded cannot be evil.  There are at least three prominent examples in the 20th Century and they ruled Russia, Germany and China.  I am quite sure that the 21st Century will be no different. 

LIFE IN POST-RACIAL AMERICA: Mississippi man beaten after he’s warned restaurant wasn’t safe for whites, witness says.

David Knighten of West Point told AP earlier by phone that he and Weems had gone to a Waffle House early Saturday. He said a man waved him over outside the restaurant and told him politely that people were upset by the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and it wasn’t a safe place for whites. When he went in, he said, Weems was inside and was arguing with other men. . .

Knighten said some people blocked him from leaving with Weems. When he got out, he said, Weems was down and people were kicking him. Knighten said others attacked him, adding “I do remember racial slurs being yelled from the crowd.”

Knighten says he has broken bones in his face, a cut over his left eye and a blood clot in his right eye

If the MSM bothered to cover this the crowd who did this would be described as "mostly peaceful." Th epolice chief tells us thatit was not a hate crime.

Winooski celebrates diversity by shutting a shopkeeper up.

WINOOSKI, Vt. —A sign on a lamp post at the bottom of the Winooski Circle displayed the words "Yield Sneakers Bacon" until Friday morning. The bistro owners took it down.
Related

It got there as part of "Operation Bloom."

A city program put it in place to keep its flower beds beautiful. If businesses do some gardening they can post an advertisement where they do it, but the word "bacon" on the Sneakers Bistro sign started a discussion about diversity on the Winooski Front Porch Forum.

It started with a post from one woman who wrote that the sign was insensitive to those who do not consume pork. She said as a Muslim she is personally offended by it.

The City Manager applauded the move to enforce political correctness.

Winooski's city manager spoke on behalf of the city. She said:
"The cool part of living in a diverse community is that it's not always comfortable. It's a fascinating place with lots of opportunities for conversation. The City has to pay attention to a lot of factors while acting within what we can regulate," said Katherine "Deac" Decarreau.

Wait, I thought that "diversity" included people of various belief systems, skin color, ethnic backgrounds all living and expressing their own lives without being forced to stifle the free expression of their beliefs. Show you how old-fashioned I am. The New Diversity means ... shut up.

The second Obama Term

World chaos was not supposed to be on the midterm. #unfair
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) August 21, 2014

Making ISIS afraid

Cower in fear, ISIS - you're up against our crack hipster-glasses brain trust of campaign van drivers and coffee fetchers.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) August 21, 2014

Obama's fundamental transformation of America

Well, he doesn't have to worry about his personal wealth, does he?  Barack Hussein Obama has done very well for his contributors in the 1%.

Median household net worth decreased by $5,046, or 6.8 percent, between 2000 and 2011. ... Between 2000 and 2011, experiences of households varied widely depending on their net worth quintile (See Figure 1). Median household net worth decreased by $5,124 for households in the first (bottom) net worth quintile, $7,056 (or 49.3 percent) for the second quintile, and $5,072 (or 6.9 percent) for the third quintile. Median household net worth increased by $18,433 (or 9.8 percent) for households in the fourth quintile, and by $61,379 (or 10.8 percent) for households in the highest (top) quintile.

Sanitizing terror: Has the press distorted Islamic radical’s crusade against gay men?

Brown killed two gay men in Washington, and a third man in New Jersey. He used a gay website to lure his victims and then shot them.

Brown’s homicides made news in June, but his story fell off the radar until Wednesday when King County prosecutors charged him with murder. Brown’s prosecutors made it clear that the accused killer’s motives were to terrorize, though he did appear to operate according to a perverse code of conduct:

This is the FOX News report. The rest of the media, silence.

Losing the third Iraq war

So far the US has fought two wars with Iraq.  The first waged under Bush #1, the second under Bush #2.  We could be getting round three.  The first ended with the defeat of Saddam without toppling him.  The second occupied Iraq and created a relatively stable country.  But then Obama pulled all the troops out, giving the US no leverage over subsequent events.  And when the newborn Iraqi leaders were unable to unite the disparate tribes, there was no one to set things right.

That's when Islam reasserted itself in the form of ISIS, and announced the creation of the Caliphate.  

As long as ISIS was lopping off the heads of Iraqi government supporters and exterminating Christians,  the people who set the agenda for discussion in the US didn't care.  But all of a sudden they picked on the wrong victim, a tribe no one had ever heard of who ran to shelter in a barren mountain.  Now that's the sort of thing that can get the NPR types exercised.  And the media noticed so Obama had to notice.

And it's made a difference.  A poll that shows 54% of Americans backing airstrikes on ISIS is exactly equal to the 54% who opposed direct military action in June. 

Why only 54% wishing to do anything to oppose ISIS?   In my opinion there are two reasons. The first one is that the war in Iraq has been vilified by the Democrats and the media even more than the war in Viet Nam. It takes courage today to come out and say you supported the war and continue to support it.

But there’s a second reason, and that ‘s Obama’s demonstrated that he has a reverse Midas Touch. There is nothing that I can think of that Obama has done that has not made events worse.

The big issues of the day: the economy, domestic politics, foreign relations, race relations, government corruption have been made worse, much worse, by the Obama administration. Wars, to be fought successfully, must be waged as much by a united people as by troops in the battlefield. At this stage of this presidency, this inconceivable that Obama could pull the American people together. And don’t forget that the military is being decimated even as Hagel and Dempsey are talking of war.

Let us pray that the enemy will give us time to find new and more inspired leadership.

What is it with Obama's blind faith in the inevitable march of history?

Barack Obama gave a speech, the thing he does best, with a ridiculous premise embedded therein, something he does almost every time he opens his mouth. Often it’s fields of straw men he’s destroying. This time he’s referring to that inevitable march of history he and his Secretary of State, John Kerry, is fond of invoking.

It goes something like this:

“This is the 21st Century and X is just not done in this century.  So X will inevitably fail.”

The fact that this is the 21st Century was supposed to have stopped Putin from swallowing the Ukraine piece by piece.

In Obama’s last statement in Martha's Vineyard, before heading back to finish his round of golf,  was that

"One thing we can all agree on is that a group like ISIL has no place in the 21st century."

Who is this "We" Mr. Obama?  ISIL disagrees. And, in fact, it’s reported to be attracting thousands of young people who have spent most of their lives in the 21st Century.  They think ISIL is the path to the future and are willing to die for ISIL and their Muslim faith.

He went on to say

“And people like [ISIS] ultimately fail. They fail, because the future is won by those who build and not destroy and the world is shaped by people like Jim Foley, and the overwhelming majority of humanity who are appalled by those who killed him."

Today’s Wall Street Journal notes that

But Foley is dead and his killers won't fail on their own. They will not fail because Barack Obama reached out his hand in peace on Inauguration Day. They will not fail because of a progressive vision that mankind has finally in the 21st century reached some higher level of being. Like every evil in human history, ISIS will stop only when it is forced to stop. This means only when enough of its fanatics have been killed.

Is that reference to the 21st Century a theme that Obama’s speech writers throw in because it polls well. Or is this what the Obama really believes. It would not surprise us because the “March of History™” is a familiar theme in Marxist thought. And versions of Marxism were part of Obama’s formative years before he became President.

Let's try an experiment, at the next Tea Party rally throw rocks at the press

Glenn Reynolds says:

I DUNNO, IT’S ONLY CONJECTURE WITHOUT AN EXPERIMENT: Yep: MSNBC would react quite differently if Tea Partiers threw rocks at them.

Here's the baseline: MSNBC's Larry O'Conner gets rocks thrown at him by masked members of the race riot in Ferguson. He's quite calm about it and keeps spinning.



Now let's have the same scenario, but the rock throwers are participating in a Tea Party rally. Then we can compare and contrast. But you really don't need to run the experiment, do you?

Ferguson in Perspective: Jason Riley Tells Hard Truths

I do not doubt that racial prejudice still exists, but it does not constitute a serious obstacle to African-American advancement. The most grievous problems that African-Americans face today have little or nothing to do with the conduct of ordinary white people. Of course, they may well have something to do with white conduct in the past, which has a lingering effect. But nothing can be done about that. Long before they encountered George Zimmerman and Darren Wilson, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown were on the downward path. Given their taste for dope, their instinct for defiance, and their predilection for violence, they were both likely to end up as killers or as killed.

Another march, another demonstration, is not going to fix the problem that much of the Black population faces.   Maybe the newer generation is sorry that it missed out on the civil rights struggle of the 1960s.  They want to pretend that whitey is the problem.  It's time for Blacks to take a "selfie" and get real.  This is you, committing cultural suicide.

How To Spin Like a Professional: Juan Williams on the Race Riots in Ferguson

Juan Williams guests an editorial in the Wall Street Journal today.   It's a classic example of media spin because it begins subtly.  Williams admits that, yes, there are black criminals and yes, some civil rights leaders are making excuses for criminal behavior.  But then he begins his spin and it's a sight to behold.

 Let’s see how Juan does it, because he’s a professional; and he does a professional spin job.

He refers to the “imbalance of political power” of what he refers to as racial groups but by which he means Blacks. How this kind of political blindness can persist in the face of a Black president, Attorney General and Cabinet members as well as many big city Mayors is astonishing.

Fears of angry Black mobs and race riots are dismissed by Williams.  He uses as an example the  reports of looting, not to mention riots and rapes during Hurricane Katrina and attributes it to “white paranoia.” That must mean that the Black mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, and the reporters who brought us these reports are all white paranoids. I will admit that the Liberal media hyped a lot of “facts” that were not true, and that they are mostly lily white, so maybe he has a point. However, to this day, Nagin stands by his claims of rapes. Must be that “white paranoia” peeping out from under Nagin’s deep tan.

He claims that “the Ferguson Police Department released its video [of Brown robbing a store and manhandling a little clerk half his size] in an apparent attempt to play to those fears.” Nice spin Juan. I heard that the tape was released at the request of the press. But the media was spinning the lie that Brown was a “Gentle Giant™” on his way to his grandmother’s house blissed out on the dream of starting college when he was shot in the back by a racist cop. That video humiliated the media’s narrative and made the race hustlers mad. Apparently Williams is still not over his snit.

That “possible struggle” Williams refers to led to a facial fracture the police officer suffered when Brown hit him in the face while struggling for the officer’s gun. Williams then refers to “… the policeman incredibly firing his gun six times, killing an unarmed teenager.” Reports have the Gentle Giant™ (6 ft. 4 in. 300 pounds) rushing back at the injured cop after taunting him. It took six shots to bring the Gentle Giant™ down, a number of them in the arm, the last in the head. The reference to six shots is the latest spin from not just Williams but the rest of the Liberal race hustlers. If they are going to shoot, the police are trained to shoot until the person who’s being shot at is down. Commentators like Williams, who have no responsibility for public safety can complain about the number of bullets it takes to stop a Gentle Giant who has just broken your face.  He’s never going to be in that position.

Oh, did you know that Brown was “unarmed?” That’s become as much of a cliché as the reference to John Kerry having served in Viet Nam. No one in the media refers to the man who was killed as  Mike Brown, his official title is “Unarmed Mike Brown, Gentle Giant™.”  Just like Trayvon Martin got a new name and became "Unarmed Trayvon Martin" with pictures of him as a thirteen-year-old angel.

And the last point about the media’s “Gentle Giant™” is that he’s a teen-ager. Yes, someone who’s 18 is technically a “teen.” Somehow the press doesn’t refer to the members of the military who are under 20 as teens very often. Referring to Brown as a teen helps create the press narrative of the innocent black child gunned down by the evil racist bigoted cop.

From there Williams moves his narrative to the national level, the table having been set, the villains identified as white racist paranoids keeping blacks from jobs in the police forces and unions.  The victims simply seeking justice by marching in the streets.  Those references to dysfunctional Black culture at the beginning of his article totally forgotten.  And that how it’s done by a professional.

Who Will Stand Up for the Christians?

WHY is the world silent while Christians are being slaughtered in the Middle East and Africa? In Europe and in the United States, we have witnessed demonstrations over the tragic deaths of Palestinians who have been used as human shields by Hamas, the terrorist organization that controls Gaza. The United Nations has held inquiries and focuses its anger on Israel for defending itself against that same terrorist organization. But the barbarous slaughter of thousands upon thousands of Christians is met with relative indifference.

Read the whole thing in the NY Times.

I recently wrote about this, prompted by an essay by Bud Norman. I ended with the following comment:

The secular Left really doesn't have a problem with the destruction of Christianity. They may be a little squeamish about the graphic way and enthusiastic way it’s being done by the followers of the Prophet. Just as they would prefer not to see their meat slaughtered, but if you avert your eyes you can approve of the result. I have seen more than one comment on the Internet when this subject is brought up saying that the problem is not Islam but religion, as if Presbyterians represent a mortal danger to Americans. A large part of the Left hates Christians because Christianity is a living rebuke to their faith in themselves.

A little history from 2027

For more than a century and a half, black people in this country have been battling their oppressors. But we have forgotten something important. We have been so busy fighting oppression that we have forgotten to ask just who our oppressors are.

Maybe at one time our oppressors were white people. But that is not true any more. I have never seen a slave owner, or a slave dealer, or even a slave. They were all dead long before I was born, before my father and his father were born.

I have never met a member of the Ku Klux Klan. There may still be a few of those somewhere, but I doubt if there are any within a hundred miles of Newark. If I did meet a Klansman in his white sheet, I would laugh.

I have never been oppressed by a white person. But I have been oppressed by other black folks almost every day of my life. So has everyone in this church.

We are oppressed when we fear to walk home from the bus stop, because another black man may rob us. We are oppressed when our schools are wrecked by black hoodlums. We are oppressed when our children are shot by another black child for their jacket or shoes. We are oppressed when our sons are turned into crack addicts or crack dealers by other blacks, or our daughters are raped by other blacks, or taken into prostitution by other blacks.

We Christian black people are oppressed today worse than we have ever been in our history. Our lives are worse than they were in the deep South under segregation. They are probably worse than they were when we were slaves, because then we were at least a valuable piece of property. The black toughs with guns who terrorize this city and every black city in this country do not value us at all. They shoot us down for any reason, or no reason at all.

It is time for us to fight our real oppressors, the drug dealers, the whore-mongers, the gang members. The fact that they are black makes no difference. They are our black oppressors. They are not our brothers. They are worse enemies than whites ever were. It is time for us to battle them, and to take our city back from them.

Read the whole thing.

Meet Amanda Curtis, Democrat's Choice for Senator from Montana

Curtis, 34, was chosen Saturday as the Democrats’ replacement candidate for Sen. John Walsh, who withdrew from the race earlier this month over plagiarism allegations. She is a high school math teacher from Butte whose political experience amounts to a single term in the Montana Legislature, but she is touting her relative inexperience and blue-collar roots as assets, not liabilities.

Note her postion on guns, government debt, Christians, families, socialism, ObamaCare and her fellow legislators.

Caller says she has the officer's side of the Ferguson shooting

There is no "hiatus" it's a failed prediction!

Tweet by Kate at Small Dead Animals:

There's no "hiatus". It's a FAILED PREDICTION. MT @hockeyschtick1 NYT: What accounts for the global warming hiatus? http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/science/in-the-ocean-clues-to-change.html …
12:20 PM - 14 Aug 2014

The global warming mongers have pulled another fast one, and this time many of those who know that it’s a fraud are falling for it. It’s all the talk about the 17 year “hiatus” during which the globe has not warmed.

But here’s the point: it’s not a “hiatus.” Calling it a hiatus means that it’s an interruption of an ongoing event. It’s NOT a pause .... a gap, .... an interval .... before global warming starts up again. To accept the term hiatus is a concession to a lie.

The global warming fraudsters predicted that the earth would heat up. It did not. It’s a failed prediction. 

It’s like the Dead Parrot sketch where the shopkeeper pretends that the parrot is not dead.

With apologies to Monty Python:

Mr. Praline: Never mind that, my lad. I wish to complain about this global warming prediction what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.

Owner: Oh yes, the, uh, the Climate Change Special...What's, uh...What's wrong with it?

Mr. Praline: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. 'E's stopped, that's what's wrong with it!

Owner: No, no, 'e's uh,...it’s his hiatus.

Mr. Praline: Look, matey, I know a when a prediction is dead wrong when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.

Owner: No no it’s not wrong, it’s, it’s a hiatus! Remarkable prediction, Climate Change, idn'it, ay? Predicts everything, higher temperatures, lower temperatures, droughts, floods, hurricanes, even good weather!

Mr. Praline: The Climate don't enter into it. It's stone wrong.

Owner: Nononono, no, no! 'E's hiatin’!

Mr. Praline: All right then, if he's hiatin', I'll see if he will change! (shouting at the “warmers”) 'Ello, Mister Warmer! I've got some great new federal grants for you if you show...

(warmers “adjust” data)

Owner: There, the temps are up!

Mr. Praline: No, it’s not, that was you fudging the numbers!

Owner: I never!!

Mr. Praline: Yes, you did!

Owner: I never, never did anything...

Mr. Praline: (yelling and hitting the thermometer vigorously) ‘ELLO NASA, ‘ELLO MICHAEL MANN!!!!! The Great Lakes froze over! Leaves are turning in August! There’s still a pile of snow in Winnipeg! Testing! This is your nine o'clock alarm call!

(Takes thermometer and slams it on the counter. Throws an article about New Yorkers depressed by cool summer at clerk.)

Mr. Praline: Now that's what I call a failed prediction.

Owner: No, no.....No, 'e's hiating!

Mr. Praline: HIATING?!?

Owner: Yeah! He’s just hiating, just as he was getting’ read to heat up! Global Warming hiates easily, major.

Mr. Praline: Um...now look...now look, mate, I've definitely 'ad enough of this. You told me that the earth was warming due to greenhouse gases; that New York City would be under water when I listened to your not more than a year ago, you assured me that its total lack temperature increase was due to it hidin’ in the ocean deeps following my driving around in an SUV.

Owner: Well, he's...he's, ah...probably pining for the fjords. The fiords will soon be under water mate.

Mr. Praline: Look, I took the liberty of examining the global warming data when I got it home, and I discovered the only reason that the temperature on the chart had been going up was because you fudged the numbers and HID THE DECLINE!

Message to people who live in Realville, when you hear someone calling it a hiatus, tell him to shut up.  It's a failed prediction.  Just like when the weatherman tells you it's going ot rain and it doesn't.

Was Michael Brown one of the Bloods Street Gang?

You can't believe everything you read on the Internet, but this is not the kind of thing you'll find in the MSM. It doesn't fit the narrative. So, FWIW.

A Bias Against Humanity

You have a problem with that?

Nightlife in Ferguson -Friday

Ferguson police stand down; Looters run wild again; Local store owners plead for help: ‘Where the cops at?’

At the Reformation II

Science fiction or the foreseeable future?

The triumph of the Recovery was marked most clearly by the burning of the Episcopal bishop of Maine.

She was not a particularly bad bishop. She was in fact typical of Episcopal bishops of the first quarter of the 21st century: agnostic, compulsively political and radical, and given to placing a small idol of Isis on the altar when she said the Communion service. By 2055, when she was tried for heresy, convicted, and burned, she had outlived her era. By that time only a handful of Episcopalians still recognized female clergy, it would have been easy enough to let the old fool rant out her final years in obscurity.

The fact that the easy road was not taken, that Episcopalians turned to their difficult duty of trying and convicting, and the state upheld its unpleasant responsibility of setting torch to faggots, was what marked this as an act of Recovery. I well remember the crowd that gathered for the execution, solemn but not sad, relieved rather that at last, after so many years of humiliation, of having to swallow every absurdity and pretend we liked it, the majority had taken back the culture. No more apologies for the truth. No more “Yes, buts” on upholding standards. Civilization had recovered its nerve. The flames that soared above the lawn before the Maine State House were, as the bishopess herself might have said, liberating.

She could have saved herself, of course, right up until the torch was applied. All she had to do was announce she wasn’t a bishop, or a priest, since Christian tradition forbids a woman to be either. Or she could have confessed she wasn’t a Christian, in which case she could be bishopess, priestess, popess, whatever, in the service of her chosen demons. That would have just gotten her tossed over the border.

But the Prince of This World whom she served gives his devotees neither an easy nor a dignified exit. She bawled, she babbled, she shrieked in Hellish tongues, she pissed and pooped herself. The pyre was lit at 12:01 PM on a cool, cloudless August 18th, St. Helen’s day. The flames climbed fast; after all, they’d been waiting for her for a long time.

When it was over, none of us felt good about it. But we’d long since learned feelings were a poor guide. We’d done the right thing.

So far the Obama Presidency has been a slow motion disaster. Now things are speeding up.

It took a while to get rolling. Beginning with the “stimulus” that, to the surprise of those who believe bumper stickers, did not provide shovel ready jobs. So the economy was left to heal itself. It did so by shoving lots of people out of the work force … permanently.  It's in the process of decimating the Middle Class.  What do you do when there’s no chance of getting a job and you’re young. I dunno. Move to Ferguson and try a little looting? And what is the answer when the black community starts blaming the "Kenyan" black president? We’re about to find out.

Meanwhile Democrats focused like a laser beam on taking over America’s health care system. The image of competence in this sphere exploded when the website blew up. The real disaster, the greatest part of the destruction is not here yet, but it’s getting closer.

The Federal Reserve thought it would be a great idea to create so much money (Qualitative Easing they called it) that everyone would be a millionaire and bankers would have garage sales as they peddled their extra money. That didn’t happen but the effect of printing a few trillion dollars is beginning to be felt in the grocery store, and soon it will spread to the rest of the economy. We won’t be using wheelbarrows to take our money to the grocery store; we use credit cards which makes the trip a lot easier.

Meanwhile in another part of the forest, the group of people Obama called the “JV Team” suited up and decided that it would be fun to rid the world of everyone who didn’t bow to Allah. It’s attracting recruits from all over the world who like nothing better than to have their kids hold up the severed heads of their enemies. As a plus, they have revived the ancient practice of crucifixions. When a large group of their intended victims managed to escape from their mountain refuge, Obama took a victory lap, announced mission accomplished, and played another round or two of golf.

Despite assurances to the contrary, Ebola appears to be spreading. Perhaps nature is heeding the call of the Greens who have called for reduced population by depopulating Africa … or perhaps other parts of the world. We’ll soon know.

And in Europe it’s hard to tell the difference between the old USSR and modern Russia. Mr. Putting seems to see the loss of the old empire so much that he’s busy working to recreate it. The Ukrainian military may be just strong enough to begin World War 3. It's not strong enough to finish it.  Stay tuned, news at 11.

And the “leader of the free world?” He’s checked out. There are a few more parties to host, some golf to play and fundraisers to attend. But for the rest, don’t bother him. He’s got his eye set on a great house in California.

This woman is going to be prosecuting Rick Perry

Perry tried to get her to resign, so the Democrats are going to put him on trial.



DRUDGE
.

 

Texas' Perry indicted for coercion over veto threat?
Demanded drunk official step down...
VIDEO: Rosemary gets Revenge!
Jailers had to restrain... 
Perry Lawyer: 'Political abuse of court system'...

Eric Holder, Living Like A Billionaire On Your Dime

Eric Holder wanted to see the third leg of the Triple Crown of horse racing recently, the Belmont Stakes. Taking along his bodyguards, two daughters and their boyfriends.


Holder, family and friends boarded a government owned Gulfstream V and flew to Elmont, NY.

Gulfstream V is an all-weather, long-range, high speed aircraft powered by two Rolls-Royce BR 710-A2 turbofan engines with thrust reversers. The aircraft has an executive compartment with accommodations for six passengers and a staff compartment with accommodations for eight passengers.

The trip cost you, the taxpayer, $14,400. It cost Holder $955. That $955 was the coach airfare for his family and friends.  Here is what the government rule (A-126)  says about the use of government aircraft and, specifically, reimbursement.

Full coach fare means a coach fare available to the general public between the day that the travel was planned and the day the travel occurred.

That looked like a pretty good deal on airfare, so I decided to check what it would cost me to fly from Washington, DC to JFK Airport (near Elmont, NY) round trip the same day.   The lowest discounted airfare I found via Kayak  was $401 per person which meant that Holder should have paid $1604 for his daughters and their dates.

Or he could have watched the race on TV and save you, the taxpayer, $13,445.  But when you're $17 trillion dollars in debt, what difference, at this point, does it make?

H/T The Daily Caller

I am sick to death of hearing about Robin Williams.

Via Vander Leun:

I am sick to death of hearing about Robin Williams. Funny guy. Sad guy. Rich guy. Famous guy. Dead guy. Buh Bye.

While it doesn't take a literary genius to understand John Donne's Meditation 17 ("No man is an island..." ), I'm pretty sure that when Donne penned:

Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,

the poet was not watching some blonde bimbette and her beta boys in blue blazers blather without stop about the endless amusement to be found in somebody who got his big break breaking out of a giant egg and then went on to a brief and hilarious classic comedy career of cocaine abuse. (Known forever after as, "When Robin Williams was really funny.")

It's really, really tough being a movie star with a $30+ million estate, three wives and forced to make movie after movie.

The Anti-Sharpton

Nothing against Yazidis, as we mentioned earlier, but we’d like to think that America still regards a Christian’s life as having equal value.

The headline is a quote from Bud Norman who writes a column on the Internet almost daily.  He has a good point.  Until recently neither I nor anyone else had ever heard of the Yazidis.  And they were not the first to be told to convert or die.  The fact that Christians were so strong in their faith that many were actually crucified - and this is the 21st Century as Team Obama is fond of telling us - made the ho-hum attitude of the people who work in news industry very telling.

We have nothing against Yazidis, never having even heard of the people until we heard the alarming news that they were being slaughtered in Iraq by the terrorist army calling itself the Islamic State in Levant, but it does strike us a strange that they seem to enjoy such a favored status in the west. Many different kinds of people are being slaughtered by ISIL, after all, but it seems to have taken the Yazidis’ extreme misfortune to draw the rest of the world’s attention to the situation....

The apparent lack of concern for the rapidly diminishing population of Christians in a country where Christianity has been faithfully practiced since the Apostle Thomas first evangelized there in the first century will likely go unexplained.

Perhaps we're paranoid, but we think that there's some validity to this explanation:

Perhaps it’s just the paranoia that is begin to infect the American Christian community, but we suspect it has more to with the modern left’s antipathy to our faith. The same administration that has made no mention of ISIL’s genocidal efforts against Christians has been in court arguing that evangelical businessmen and Catholic nuns should be obliged to pay for their less sexually repressed employees’ contraception, and is as insistent that “America is not a Christian country” as it is that “The future should belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” Islamists might be beheading homosexuals and adulterers elsewhere, but here in the United States some Christians are still opposing gay marriage or declining to pony up for Sandra Fluke’s contraceptives, and the left has made clear its preference for the exotic “other.”

The secular Left really doesn't have a problem with the destruction of Christianity. They may be a little squeamish about the graphic way and enthusiastic way it’s being done by the followers of the Prophet. Just as they would prefer not to see their meat slaughtered, but if you avert your eyes you can approve of the result. I have seen more than one comment on the Internet when this subject is brought up saying that the problem is not Islam but religion, as if Presbyterians represent a mortal danger to Americans. A large part of the Left hates Christians because Christianity is a living rebuke to their faith in themselves.

Women: Don't Go To College to Avoid Being Raped.

We are told that one in five women in college have been raped. 

That's an epidemic! 

College is the epicenter of Rape Culture.

No where else do you have a 20% chance of being raped in just four years.

College presidents across the country are presiding over "Rape Factories."

Women, don't go to college.  It's not worth it.  Most graduates don't get a job.  Over half leave with huge debts. 

And the chances of being raped are worse on college campus than being a woman in Iraq.

I'm doing my part to keep you from being raped.  Stay home, get a job.  Fewer waitresses at Hooters are raped than co-eds on campus.

Every single person whose skin is not black must constantly monitor his and/or her words and behavior to make sure someone who is black (or a race-baiting liberal Democrat, for that matter) does not take offense.

Do you comprehend what occurred? Miss Peterson originates from a demographic of people who thrive on victimhood. Every single person whose skin is not black must constantly monitor his and/or her words and behavior to make sure someone who is black (or a race-baiting liberal Democrat, for that matter) does not take offense. Heck, I, a brown-skinned Asian American, once got rebuked for referring to black people as ‘colored,’ despite the fact that the NAACP stands for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Here’s the kicker: Though I happen to be a high-functioning autistic male who suffers from social anxiety disorder, I often get called ‘spoiled’ and ‘privileged’ by black Americans simply because I managed to be successful in life via work work and due diligence.

Read the whole thing.

"I don’t think being a media whore on matters of race should be a profession"

Brian Anderson on Jesse Jackson:

Jesse Jackson knows racism. It’s his job. He’s so good at spotting it that he can find it where others would not. The one knock on him is not that he sees things in black and white but rather just in black. The champion of racial injustice has taken considerable flak for ignoring the horrible hate crime in Detroit where white motorist Steven Utash was beaten nearly to death a group of black thugs.

Where the races reversed in this case, Jackson surely would have condemned the attackers, but for two weeks now, he has been silent. Social media and the blogosphere have lit up calling Jackson a hypocrite. After all, a hate crime is no less abhorrent if the victim happens to be white. With his credibility on the line, Jackson finally broke his silence this week, saying in a phone interview:

It was an act of meanness and evil that must be handled. What they did was wrong. I know it was morally wrong. There’s ignorance based in knowledge. That’s why you have to pull the walls down and live together. Our climate is so racially charged… It’s a product of the sickness of culture.

Not only can’t he bring himself to call this a hate crime, he excuses the attackers from any culpability. You see, it’s not their fault they beat an innocent man into a coma because will live in a sick racist society. What an asshole.

And what’s with that line: there’s ignorance based in knowledge? What the hell does that mean?

Read the whole thing.

"It wan't my decision to bug out of Iraq"

Bud Norman said it best:

We find it interesting that the president finds it interesting such an obvious question keeps coming up, and quite surprising that he would now claim it wasn’t his decision to bug out of the country. He ran for election on promise to do so, ran for re-election on the boast that he had kept that promise, and had cited the stable and peaceable Iraq that he had left behind as one of his administration’s greatest achievement.

What if Osama bin Lanen Wanted to Cross the Mexican Border Into America

Listen To What Obama Said About Presidential Vacations Before He Was President.

Securing the Obama Legacy

Walter Isaacson is concerned about Obama’s legacy. Writing in TIME, Obama Can Still Secure His Legacy, Isaacson urges Obama on to even greater heights.

Lauding him for his accomplishments so far:

President Obama has scored two monumental achievements: helping to restore the financial system after the 2008 collapse and making it possible for every American to get health care coverage …

He urges Obama finish out his term and rescue these “triumphs” with a burst of political rhetoric designed to save ObamaCare from being emasculated by that rascally Supreme Court and the halt the rise of income inequality.

Isaacson is the pluperfect illustration of the Limbaugh Theorem: nothing that happened during the Obama administration is his fault because he’s not in charge, except when he is. Isaacson gives him credit for “restoring the financial system” but rising income inequality is not his fault. And exactly how has Obama restored the financial system? The stimulus that did not provide the “shovel ready jobs” that we were promised? Quick, what else did Obama do to restore the financial system? Take over General Motors to keep it from bankruptcy? Oh, wait, GM did go bankrupt and the shareholders were wiped out.  Remember that billion dollar stimulus bill that was supposed to kick-start the economy by creating jobs by building schools and repairing roads and bridges?  This (see chart below) is what really happened. You may well ask where the money went.  It went to groups and people that supported Obama.

Isaacson gives Obama credit for “… making it possible for every American to get health care coverage…” Calling ObamaCare a success requires you to lie or have a kind of moral and political blindness that can only be found in the Salons of the power brokers on the Left. Ignoring the fact that Obama lied – repeatedly - about being able to keep your doctor and your plan, the rollout was an unmitigated disaster, many lost the coverage – and doctor - they liked and wanted, and 30 million people don’t have coverage. And this brilliant triumph is so bad that Obama postponed much of  its implementation until after this fall’s election.

Do you want to know what causes income inequality? It’s not having a job. It’s exiting the job market and living on welfare. And under Obama the Benevolent tens of millions have joined the jobless and exited the Middle Class.

You want to know what else causes income inequality? It’s making the cost of college unaffordable for millions of our young people graduating from high school. It's forcing students to go into debt.  It’s mal-educating those who go to college with courses that don’t prepare them for life after college. It’s allowing people to obtain degrees with “studies” courses that teach them to hate. To hate people with different skin colors, to hate people who don’t think the way their professors do, to hate the country they grew up in and hate the people that made this country great.

You want to know what else causes income inequality? It’s telling people that the careers they ought to be pursuing are in government or in the “helping” professions instead of in the “making” business. It’s the false notion that being a teacher is nobler than building a new car, building a home, starting a plumbing business or designing a new way of communicating.

But back to Isaacson and his hope for Obama’s legacy. He’s urging him to begin a crusade of “moral clarity and patriotic resonance: that every kid in the country deserves a decent shot.”

I’m not kidding; this is the plan. Where are the forces arrayed against every kid getting a decent shot? Who’s standing in the way of kids getting a decent shot? What does this mean as a policy?

Universal preschool, so that no child starts off behind. Quality after school activities and summer internships. Apprentice programs like the bill proposed by Senators Cory Booker and Tim Scott. What also could be included is a public-private effort to create a service year program so that every kid after high school or college has the opportunity to spend a year serving their country in a military or domestic corps.

Isaacson never really ponders if universal pre-school will make kids equal. Just what are those “quality” after school activities and internships? Combined with that “service year” program it looks as if your kids will be run by Big Brother from the day they begin to toddle. It’s the Life Of Julia for everyone. 

That’s Walter Isaacson’s hope for Obama’s legacy and the future of America.  Liberal Fascism.

14 ways to avoid Obama Care (90% of the nation's 30 million uninsured won't pay a penalty)

Remember that the primary objective of Obama Care was to get every American insured?  

Well, fuggedaboutit.  

Obama Care was supposed to fine you if you didn't get insured under one of the plans.  But reality intruded.  From the Wall Street Journal.

Almost 90% of the nation's 30 million uninsured won't pay a penalty under the Affordable Care Act in 2016 because of a growing batch of exemptions to the health-coverage requirement.

Here's a partial list of exemptions that allow you to avoid the fines:

• domestic violence
• property damage from a fire or flood
• having a canceled insurance plan
• be an illegal immigrants
• be a Native American
• be part of  religious sects
• be a low earner

There are at least 14 ways you can ignore the Obama Care mandate that you have insurance. The insurance industry supported the law, figuring that they could get millions of new customers.  It looks as if they were also taken in by Obama's lies, along with the rest of America.

The exemptions are worrying insurers. The penalties were intended as a cudgel to increase the number of people signing up, thereby maximizing the pool of insured. Insurers are concerned that the exemptions could make it easier for younger, healthier people to forgo coverage, leaving the pools overly filled with old people or those with health problems. That, in turn, could cause premiums to rise.

 ...

"If your pajamas don't fit well, you don't need health insurance," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office and president of the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank. "It basically waives the individual mandate."

The primary effect of Obama Care for most Americans has been in sharp increase in the cost of insurance, the loss of their doctor, the loss of the policies they liked chaos in America's health delivery system. 

Racist Dan Wilbank enlists in the war on white people.

Dana Wilbank, Washington Post, racist:

Whiteness has less and less to do with being American.

Juan Williams enlists in the war on white people.

Liberal commentator Juan Williams touched off a firestorm on “Fox News Sunday” by suggesting racism drives the “white, older group of people” that support President Obama’s impeachment, with Heritage Action head Michael Needham accusing him of “demonizing good people.”

Joe Biden was supposed to bring foreign policy experience to this administration

Thinks Africa's a " Nation."

Obama's White House Guest List

Bud Norman comments about the selective outrage of the Left. Hot and bothered about the Israelis defedning their homes against a rain of rockets aimed at their women and children, a ho-hum pass for the Arabs and Islamist thugs offing Christians and each other in far greater numbers. In fact you will have to go to specifically Christian sources to find more than the occasional brief mentions of the "ethnic cleasing" of Christians in the Middle East and Africa. We get the sneaking suspiction that Liberal/Left America really approves of it.

Turning to Obama's White House

The guest list at that fancy White House gathering of African leaders is a similarly curious example of selective outrage. Among those getting the red carpet treatment and presidential promises of massive wealth redistribution are Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Oblang Nguema Mbasago, fresh from a killing spree that left all of his prominent political opponents dead, and Gambia’s Yahya Jammeh, who advocates a policy of beheading homosexuals, along with the usual assortment of seedy Afro-Marxist thugs who have made such a mess of post-colonial Africa. These elegantly embossed invitations to the White House were handed out by the same administration that routinely derides its domestic political opponents as extremists bent on dirty air and dirty water, and who are implored in faux-hip-hop fashion to “Just stop hatin’,” and it strikes us as odd. Even the most stubborn American adherents of the millennia-old notions about same sex-same marriage draw the line well short of beheading homosexuals, and thus far even the kookiest musket-weilding and tricorner-hat-wearing “tea party” types haven’t offed anybody.

If today's New York Times editors were in charge in 1943

Making Impeachment Thinkable

Democrats are making lots of money by telling their supporters that that Republicans are planning to impeach Obama. Republicans deny it. Speaker of the House John Boehner has done everything except hire a plane with a banner saying that “we will not impeach Obama.”

The Democrats think that this is a winning issue for them, helping to raise money and revving up their base. But they could be too smart by half.

After a while, ordinary people will start talking about impeachment.

The reasons for impeachment.

Past attempts at impeachment.

After a while people who refused to think about impeaching Obama will start to become comfortable with the thought.

After all, making up laws, refusing to enforce laws, presiding over an administration creating scandal after scandal, sending the IRS after conservatives, Fast & Furious, lying about Benghazi, lying about ObamaCare, may begin to sound like reasonable reasons to remove Obama from office.

BRAISED LAMB MEXICAN PIZZA & OCCUPYING THE FUSION MOVEMENT

My favorite part about Obama’s presidency was when he single-handedly ended domestic racismI don’t remember the exact moment racism ended, but it was sometime after Obama’s inauguration, and before Macklemore came out with “Same Love”, which, as we all know, permanently ended homophobia. But before we take a moment to pat ourselves on the back, deserved as it may be, there’s still one group in America that seems to feel they’ve been wronged: the poors. (Honorable mentions include: women, students, veterans, the transgender community, immigrants, political refugees, the mentally handicapped, union workers, Filipino tilt-a-whirl operators, and the Jews).

Now read the recipes.

Did Islam really build America?

It's a silly question to ask; of course we're a Muslim nation with a deep Islamic tradition - it should be enough that Barack Obama says Islam built America. But, as everybody knows, the history books were written by Islamophobes.

Many Americans, especially the notoriously ignorant home and private schooled types, actually believe our country was built on a Christian tradition. Nothing could be farther from the truth. A quick tour of American history should put the argument to rest once and for all.

Let's begin with the Muslim pilgrims on the Mayflower in 1620, who left England to seek religious freedom in the New World. On the way, they wrote the Mayflower Compact to institute Sharia Law in the Plymouth colony. The Mayflower Compact famously begins with, "In the Name of Allah, the Beneficent…" and then goes on to explain how they will expand the Caliphate.

In 1630, the great imam, John Hussein Winthrop, wrote "A Model of Muslim Charity," a speech just peppered with quotes from the Qur'an. This is the speech from which we get the famous "Cordova on a Hill" metaphor, signifying what America stands for before the yet unconquered world.

Read the whole thing.

Racism in the Age of Obama

The Return of the Natives

Richard Fernandez brings us the reality of who actually makes the Middle  East work.  It's not the Arabs, it's the "guest worker," many from the Pillipines.

Libya has warned of a “total collapse” of its health care system as the chaos plaguing the country threatens to send into flight many of the Filipino and Indian staff on whom its hospitals depend. …

Now, 3,000 health workers from the Philippines, making up 60 percent of Libya’s hospital staff, could leave – along with workers from India, who account for another 20 percent.

The question is, where did the other non-Asian 20% come? What did Libya do with all their oil wealth these last decades, besides learn to build bombs to bring down jetliners over Lockerbie?

The flight of the Filipinos is representative of the exodus of expats from the war-torn areas of the Middle East. The last die-hard Filipinos have fled Syria. They are bugging out of Iraq citing “crisis warning number 3″, which appears to mean ‘the beheading is now starting in your neighborhood’. And when they go its a sure sign the other Third Worlders are heading for the exits too.

The degree to which the oil-rich countries of the Middle East are dependent on Filipino ‘slave’ labor is so astonishing that it’s funny. The Guardian writes “Qatar’s foreign domestic workers subjected to slave-like conditions”.

While the useless eaters in academia, the press and government pontificate, the real work is done by people they despise.

The history of the Philippines is by and large locked up in the experiences of the silent, semi-literate poor. They settled the land, fought the Moro wars, constituted the great bulk of the resistance against the Japanese, went down with ship as generations of US Navy men. They went out to the four corners of the earth to earn money as overseas workers.

In that capacity they've lived in steel containers in the desert; on rigs out at sea; worked as chambermaids in London or Moscow. They ply the ocean as sailors; are playing endless rounds of cards as captives on ships in pirate Somali harbors.

They drove supplies as contractors in Desert Storm, sleeping in hammocks underneath their trucks at night. They are the baggage handlers, gofers and utility men in a hundred different climes, including equatorial Africa. The men who wave goodbye to the last helicopter which never comes for them.

They've poured the coffee for every US president in modern history and nobody even knows their name.

If you go past a middle eastern airport or Hong Kong you will see them in their teeming peripatic millions. Squatting on airline seats, cadging the salt and the pepper from the airline meal, on their way to some blessed job, even if it means living chained under a sink or housed in a camping tent in the indoor courtyard of a desert home.

They are the nation. Not the upper class people most Westerners meet in Manila, who are largely useless. It's the poor and lower middle class that make it go round; the unlovely and the unremembered. And the object their journeys is found in the many malls that dot the Philippines, where their relatives go to cash the remittance they send each month at the money-changer and to have a good time at the Jollibee's hamburger outlet conveniently located near the money shop.

I have often been moved to inexplicable tears at the sight. Not because they are perfect or even nice. But because it reminds me of how little humanity needs to be happy. A little love, a handful of rice and the hope that Jesus, if no one else, will not forget them.

How did Mark Warner become the second richest man in Congress?

Step 1: become a multimillionaire by selling cellular licenses that the government gave away for free.

• The FCC gave away licenses to people who wanted to provide cellular services to American consumers. The licenses were free, awarded by a lottery.
• Warner got rich by winning some licenses and going into the business of “flipping” winning licenses, much like some unscrupulous real estate speculators got rich, using other people’s money by “flipping” houses.
• The people who flip houses usually do some work to spruce up a house before selling it to a new owner. Mark Warner made his millions by pushing paper. Warner got rich at the expense of the taxpayers. The U.S. government had given away the radio spectrum for free, and now the winners were promptly flipping it for a huge profit. Representative Ed Markey (D-Mass) said the lottery system was “abused by unqualified applicants whose sole objective was the trafficking of licenses” and said described the process by which Warner made his money as looking “ . . . more like ‘Let’s Make A Deal than a government-sanctioned procedure to allocate the radio spectrum.’” Former Representative Don Ritter (R-PA) said, “‘The speculator profits, the FCC plays Santa Claus and the taxpayer gets zip.’”
• Due To The Abuses, The Federal Communications Commission Changed Its Lottery Rules. “Rules now prohibit the kind of licensing-flipping that helped make Warner wealthy, requiring those awarded new licenses to operate a wireless service for a least a year before selling the license”
• But Mark Warner Violated Those Rules. And used his political connections to avoid the penalties.

Step 2: Buy a seat in the Senate.

Mark Warner, the face of crony capitalism.