Obama talks to Putin.

Bringing America Down a Peg? This is how it feels.

It's a sign of the times. Medea Benjamin, peace activist extraordinaire, Code Pink founder and all around San Francisco screwball, gets manhandled by Egyptian police, her arm broken and sent out of the country on the next plane.  

Whatever happened to that long ago line “you can’t do this to me. I’m an American”? Maybe times have changed.

Richard Fernandez:

Too many people frittered away the Design Margin. It was spent and squandered by those both who felt it was immoral to be so rich and while simultaneously convinced these riches were inexhaustible. It happened because too many worked tirelessly to take America down a peg or two, out of spite; and from a sense of unassailable superiority. People who thought it was OK to blow the stash; open the borders; downsize the armed forces. Guys who believed you could churn out paper dollars and issue empty threats ad infinitum. Because like Paul Krugman once said: we can invent an alien invasion from outer space if we need to.

And now they find their arms being broken by Cairo police. When and how did Medea Benjamin become a nobody? Maybe it happened this way: when those who dreamed of a weaker, helpless America forgot that in so doing they would also be bringing down themselves.

I wonder how Obama likes being kicked to the curb by a man who is in charge of a poor country inhabited by alcoholics with a 63 year life expectancy? He worked all his life, hid his past, lied about his intentions and turned the IRS into a political weapon to get where he is. And now the prize he wanted, the office he sought, is crumbling, and he's the one who made it crumble.

Refusing to Photograph a Gay Wedding Isn't Hateful

I rarely agree with Conor Friedersdorf, but this article is fair.

Chris Matthews mocks Mitt Romney for calling Russia #1 Geopolitical Threat.

This Isn't High School. Does Obama Think He's Leader of the Plastics?

President Obama called Russian ruler Vladimir Putin Saturday afternoon and threatened to blackball him from the Mean Girls club.

“President Obama made clear that Russia’s continued violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity would negatively impact Russia’s standing in the international community,” the White House said.

This is lame. Who does Obama thing he is, Regina George?

Apparently Obama is unfamiliar with Napoleon's famous maxim: "When you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna."  Putin wants Ukraine and intends to take Ukraine.

“The United States calls on Russia to de-escalate tensions by withdrawing its forces back to bases in Crimea and to refrain from any interference elsewhere in Ukraine,”

Why would Russia do that? Who is in a position to stop him? This isn't high school.  He's not afraid that Obama will talk behind his back.

There is only one possibility that would make Putin back up and appear to give Obama a win. Remember that Obama is in the process of gutting the military to pass out more food stamps. A militarily belligerent Russia could cause a backlash in congress and foil this plan. A secret deal between Putin and Obama, with Russia appearing to back down from the Ukrainian invasion, could set the stage for further military cutbacks and give free rein to Russia, no matter who the American President is in 2016.

Obama Commerce Department Overstated Economic Growth by 25%. What Else Is A Lie?

It was revealed that the Obama Commerce Department overstated the amount of economic growth in the fourth quarter of 2013 by over 25%. They admitted that the economy grew at an annual rate of 2.4% instead of 3.2%. It is not known whether the earlier reports were the result of a deliberate lie or simply the result of incompetence.  It is, however, part of a pattern of deception, lies and outright fabrication on the part of the Obama Administration.  

Remember how often Obama promised you could keep your health insurance if you liked it?  That you could keep your doctor?  That ObamaCare would save you $2500 per year?  That was not a simple slip of the tongue, or miscalculation.  That was a blatant, deliberate, deadly lie.  

The Obama Administration has learned from dictatorships overseas that lying about the economy will often work to quell popular discontent.  The people of Venezuela, for example, have been lied to about the economic disaster that is overtaking that oil-rich country ... until shortages began to appear and, for example, it became impossible to buy toilet paper.  

Few American either know or care about economic statistics being cooked up in Washington.  What will it take here?  A toilet paper shortage?  More probably seeing your wife, your daughter or your parent dying because ObamaCare denied them life-saving treatment.  

Perhaps that's what Harry Reid's outrageous lies on the floor of the Senate are all about.  Could it be that they are preparing the battle-space for the time, in the not-too-distant future when people are actually dying because of ObamaCare.  In a country of 300 million, with a compliant media, the Democrats can spread the word that those stories about people dying are lies.  After all, Paul Krugman has already told his readers that all those stories about England's dysfunctional health care system are lies.

Residents Explode on Superintendent, School Board During Emergency Meeting: ‘This Is Crazy!’

If you ever wondered why California is in the financial mess it's in, here's one reason ... they're nuts!

Jose Fernandez, who oversees the Centinela Valley Union High School District in Lawndale, Calif., reportedly earned $663,000 in 2013, according to KCAL-TV.

His district includes only three high schools with a combined total of 6,500 students.

The district also reportedly floated Fernandez a loan of more than $900,000 at 2 percent interest over 40 years. The loan was granted at a time when the superintendent had already declared bankruptcy.

Obama would rather Ukraine go away.

Obama declares ‘happy hour’ with Dems minutes after Ukraine tough talk after promising Putin there will be no repercussions

There, fixed that for you.

OUR MODERN TIMES

"Holding the view that Obama had when he was elected in 2008 is now hateful and bigoted."

The way people look at things and react today is just absurd.  I've commented on this a few times, and it always bears repeating.

Black pride is always laudable and heroic. White pride is always horrific and racist.  Celebrating black culture is diverse and cool. Celebrating white culture is lame, pathetic, suspicious. Whiteness is portrayed as a sign of shame: he's so white. White influences and culture are thought of as at best dull and probably destructive, oppressive, and awful.

Homosexuality is heroic, noble, good, and fun. Gay people are smarter, better dressed, wiser, and funnier. You didn't know that? Watch some TV and a few movies, and you'll get your head on straight. That's the lesson we're taught. Straight people are neurotic, silly, confused, slovenly, and need their magic homo mentor to straighten them out. Being glad you are not homosexual means you're probably secretly queer

Read more at the link.

H/T American Digest

The Honest University Commercial

Let It Go (Disney's "Frozen") Vivaldi's Winter - ThePianoGuys

Losing Control of the Narrative

Former Virginian Pilot Publisher, Obama and McAuliffe Appointee, Maurice Jones, Breaks Federal Law

When you're part of the Obama Administration, fresh from publishing the Virginian Pilot, and being used to telling people what to do, a little thing like the law doesn't stop you.

An internal federal probe has concluded that Maurice Jones, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s new commerce secretary, improperly lobbied Congress while he was in the Obama administration last year.

Mr. Jones, who was a deputy secretary at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, sent an email to more than 1,000 recipients — including 46 people at HUD — asking them to contact senators to “defend against efforts by some Republicans” to prevent a housing bill to come up for a vote, according to the internal probe. The message also asked “friends and supporters” to tell senators to vote “no” on another amendment.

A monthslong investigation by the HUD’s office of inspector general concluded that Mr. Jones and four others at HUD appear to have violated anti-lobbying laws, which restrict the use of funds for publicity or propaganda directed at pending legislation before Congress. The probe also concluded that Mr. Jones violated internal HUD policy on lobbying by federal employees.

Jones claimed ignorance.

“[Deputy secretary]{Jones} stated that it was articulated to him that ‘I could do things that others could not,’” investigators wrote in the report obtained by The Washington Times.

 Laws are for the little people.

The Obama DOJ - the most politicized in history  - declined to prosecute its own employee.   and the investigation is busy being swept under the rug.  I confidently predict that Jones will not be prosecuted.

One last point, this tireless advocate of the working man, managed to do very well for himself even as he was throwing others out of work.

In 2012, The Washington Times reported that a federal financial disclosure form showed Mr. Jones pocketed more than a quarter-million dollars in bonus compensation as publisher of the Virginian-Pilot about the same time he was slashing newsroom jobs.

The Virginian Pilot did not cover this story.  But then they have a history of refusing to cover the mishaps of their own employees, even when those employees are the victims of an unprovoked attack by a gang of black youths.

They speak like Marx, rule like Stalin, live like the Rockefellers while the people suffer.

Christine O’Donnell: I was a victim of the IRS

Whether Democrat or Republican, do you really want your private tax information leaked with impunity?

On March 9, 2010, around 10 a.m., I announced my plans to run for senate representing Delaware.

Later that same day, my office received a call from a reporter asking about my taxes.

It’s since come out, after a halting and unenthusiastic investigation, that a Delaware Department of Revenue employee named David Smith accessed my records that day at approximately 2 p.m. — out of curiosity, he says.

That these records ended up in the hands of the press is just a coincidence, the IRS claims.

To add insult to injury, the tax records given to the reporters weren’t even accurate. I had never fallen behind on my taxes, and a supposed tax lien was on a house I no longer owned.

The lien was highly publicized and used as political ammunition by my political opponents. The IRS later withdrew the lien and blamed it on a computer glitch but, at that point, the damage — and the invasion of my privacy — was done.

I wasn’t the only one preyed upon by the IRS, of course. The agency admits to targeting conservative nonprofits, asking them for membership lists and other data not required while delaying their tax-exempt status. And opponents of President Obama have been subjected to audits soon after criticizing the administration.

What we all have in common: no answers.

In January 2013, a US Treasury Department special agent told me that my tax records were compromised and misused. That was three years after my campaign. Now, in the 12 months since, no one has been called to testify, no more answers given.

Read the whole thing.  It turns out that two congressional Democrats - Congressmen Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.) and Matthew Cartwright (D-Pa.) - are working hard to make sure that the truth is never told. 

Virginian Beach Woman Sentenced to Death By ObamaCare; Virginian Pilot Silent

Today's Wall Street Journal has an article about a woman's fight with cancer and how ObamaCare is depriving her of her treatment. Stephen Blackwood: ObamaCare and My Mother's Cancer Medicine.

When my mother was diagnosed with carcinoid cancer in 2005, when she was 49, it came as a lightning shock. Her mother, at 76, had yet to go gray, and her mother's mother, at 95, was still playing bingo in her nursing home. My mother had always been, despite her diminutive frame, a titanic and irrepressible force of vitality and love. She had given birth to me and my nine younger siblings, and juggled kids, home and my father's medical practice with humor and grace for three decades. She swam three times a week in the early mornings, ate healthily and never smoked....

Carcinoid, a form of neuroendocrine cancer, is a terminal disease but generally responds well to treatment by Sandostatin, a drug that slows tumor growth and reduces (but does not eliminate) the symptoms of fatigue, nausea and gastrointestinal dysfunction. My mother received a painful shot twice a month and often couldn't sit comfortably for days afterward.

As with most cancers, one thing led to another. There have been several more surgeries, metastases, bone deterioration, a terrible bout of thyroiditis (an inflammation of the thyroid gland), and much more. But my mother has kept fighting, determined to make the most of life, no matter what it brings. She has an indomitable will and is by far the toughest person I've ever met. But she wouldn't still be here without that semimonthly Sandostatin shot that slows the onslaught of her disease.

And then in November, along with millions of other Americans, she lost her health insurance. She'd had a Blue Cross/Blue Shield plan for nearly 20 years. It was expensive, but given that it covered her very expensive treatment, it was a terrific plan. It gave her access to any specialist or surgeon, and to the Sandostatin and other medications that were keeping her alive.

And then, because our lawmakers and president thought they could do better, she had nothing. Her old plan, now considered illegal under the new health law, had been canceled.

Because the exchange website in her state (Virginia) was not working, she went directly to insurers' websites and telephoned them, one by one, over dozens of hours. As a medical-office manager, she had decades of experience navigating the enormous problems of even our pre-ObamaCare system. But nothing could have prepared her for the bureaucratic morass she now had to traverse.

The repeated and prolonged phone waits were Sisyphean, the competence and customer service abysmal. When finally she found a plan that looked like it would cover her Sandostatin and other cancer treatments, she called the insurer, Humana, HUM +5.62% to confirm that it would do so. The enrollment agent said that after she met her deductible, all treatments and medications—including those for her cancer—would be covered at 100%. Because, however, the enrollment agents did not—unbelievable though this may seem—have access to the "coverage formularies" for the plans they were selling, they said the only way to find out in detail what was in the plan was to buy the plan. (Does that remind you of anyone?)

With no other options, she bought the plan and was approved on Nov. 22. Because by January the plan was still not showing up on her online Humana account, however, she repeatedly called to confirm that it was active. The agents told her not to worry, she was definitely covered.

Then on Feb. 12, just before going into (yet another) surgery, she was informed by Humana that it would not, in fact, cover her Sandostatin, or other cancer-related medications. The cost of the Sandostatin alone, since Jan. 1, was $14,000, and the company was refusing to pay.

The news was dumbfounding. This is a woman who had an affordable health plan that covered her condition. Our lawmakers weren't happy with that because . . . they wanted plans that were affordable and covered her condition. So they gave her a new one. It doesn't cover her condition and it's completely unaffordable....

The "Affordable" Care Act is a brutal, Procrustean disaster. In principle, it violates the irreducible particularity of human life, and in practice it will cause many individuals to suffer and die. We can do better, and we must.

Once I finished reading this article, I was outraged ... for two reasons.

 

First, ObamaCare is barely off the ground and already we are learning that the infamous Death Panels are a reality.

The second reason is that the woman with cancer is a resident of Virginia Beach, but this is the first I've heard about it. America’s news media are as much to blame for this fiasco as the Democrats in office. Why do I have to read about this in the Wall Street Journal, published in New York? I reside in the Virginia Beach area and the leading area newspaper, the Virginian Pilot, has long been a vigorous advocate of ObamaCare. Not a word about this woman’s situation has appeared in the local press. In fact, the Virginian Pilot has not bothered to do any stories about the way ObamaCare has affected local residents even though thousands of stories like this have appeared nationally and on the Internet. It just doesn’t fit their narrative.

 

As Glenn Reynolds says, the MSM are Democrat Operatives with Bylines.

UPDATE: The American media, by acting as unpaid propagandists for the Obama regime has its counterpart in Ukraine as John Fund explains. There, the Inter network is the main TV organ. When protests broke out in Kiev and elsewhere in Ukraine, Inter gave the people government propaganda. And finally things took a turn on a live broadcast that could not be edited when a brave reporter told the truth.

Reporter Halya Coynash points to the Yanukovych regime’s record of media control and censorship: “It proved unnervingly easy within a matter of months of Yanukovych’s [2010] election to remove most critical analysis, negative reports about those in power, and inconvenient information from television.” Whatever new government is formed, that sorry record must not be repeated in a new Ukraine.

It proved unnervingly easy to create a news media in America that is the willing handmaid of the regime. The American media fell in love with the Obama image and has stayed smitten despite economic failure, foreign policy disasters, horrible war losses, and the weaponization of government agencies like the DOJ, IRS, CIA, DHS, and the FBI to destroy or stifle the political opposition. And now they cover up the disaster that is the hallmark of the Liberal dream: ObamaCare.

Must the always be blood in the streets before the truth comes out?

What were they thinking?

The FCC said they were backing off their investigation of America's newsrooms ... not because the MSM put up a fuss, but because the blogosphere, some at FOX News and Rush Limbaugh raised a fuss and that way many in the public heard about it.

So what were they thinking?  The government agency like the FCC does not commission a study for no reason.  the reason for this one is obvious: to establish the need for government control of editorial and news content in the media. To suggest otherwise it to insult our intelligence.

As for the MSM?  They stopped being a news gathering operation a long time ago.  Today they are simply political partisans on the side of the Left.  They are not worried about Team Obama imposing new rules on the media because they figure it will only affect those who oppose Obama's polices, and they're good with that.

Some in the media who bother to notice, like Howard Kurtz, wonder what they were thinking. I can't imagine that he's really asking that question because it's obvious. So he's pretending to be stupid.

The Anchoress has a good summary of the situation.

“What are they thinking?” Mr. Kurtz, it’s pretty obvious; they’re thinking no one in the mainstream press has asked them a difficult or challenging question in 7 years, so why would they start now.

They’re thinking an obsequious press that couldn’t be bothered to sustain outrage over intrusions into its own phone and internet records won’t have a problem with the government parking itself into the newsroom.

They’re thinking that if the mainstream press could forgive them for considering espionage charges against a member of the press — for doing what reporters are supposed to do — and then re-commence their habitual boot-licking, there is no real risk of media folk suddenly calling out a “red line”, or even being able to identify one.

They’re figuring that with this president, the mainstream media has no idea what “a bridge too far” might mean. Nor, “abuse of power”; nor “cover-up”; nor “mendacity”, “incompetence”, “ineptitude” or “constitutional illiteracy.”

They know that half the people in the newsroom are either married to (or social buddies with) influential members of this government, and that everyone is all comfy and nicely settled in for the revolution.

They know that the press willfully surrendered its own freedoms some time ago, in the interests of ideology, and so they really won’t mind a little editorial supervision from the masters:

What's surprising is that - with the supine acquiescence of the MSM, the FCC still backed down.  Barack Obama obviously needs to have a talk with his FCC Commissioner.

A Friendly Visit From the FCC

It appears, per Bud Norman, that with the exception of FOX News and the editorial pages of the Wall street Journal, the MSM really isn't bothered by the FCC's announcement that they're going to be checking up on what stories are being reported and how they are covered. Well, when your already the organ of the ruling party, that doesn't bother you.

The Fox New Network is on the story, possibly because they’re the ones whose reporters have treated as criminal co-conspirators and excluded from the White House news pool and routinely criticized by every level of the administration, and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and the radio talk shows have been paying some attention for obvious reasons of their own, but otherwise the story has gone largely unnoted. In our years of journalism we endured many a journalist’s self-righteous sermon about the obligation of the press to bravely resist any governmental interference, but that was mostly during Republican administrations, when nothing like the FCC’s current curiosity and the nation’s slide down the rankings of press freedom ever occurred, and at this moment of hope and change none of the over-the-air networks seem terribly concerned that their notions of the news consumers’ critical information needs will differ much from the government’s.

If proof is needed that the MSM is composed of Democrats with bylines, this is all the proof you really need. A watchdog doesn't growl at his master.

Leftism

As good a definition as I have found for a long time.

Nothing lives there because Leftism is not a political philosophy or a way of thinking; it is a social mechanism for enforcing uniformity of opinion, and a psychological mechanism for accusing others of one’s own flaws in order to award oneself unearned moral superiority.

Think the Leftist superstitions of Climate Change, Multiculturalism, Diversity, Free Speech (for me but not for thee), Sexism, Feminism, Separation of Church and State (so religion has to be stamped out of the public sphere).   It is the Empire of Lies.

The IRS Is at a Tipping Point: Under Attack, Distrusted, and Underfunded

Week after week, Republicans on Capitol Hill have ratcheted up their drumbeat of discontent with the Internal Revenue Service, alleging that it targeted conservative groups and can’t be trusted. Six investigations are underway, ensuring the matter will drag on for months or years.

But there is a bigger question about America’s least-loved federal agency that barely gets asked: Is the IRS, which collects 90 percent of the nation’s revenue, up to the basics of its job? The surprising answer is that it often is not.

A Globe review of dozens of government reports and audits, as well as interviews with key officials, found a series of fundamental problems:

The IRS makes billions of dollars in potentially fraudulent payments because it lacks the ability to check whether many returns are accurate before refunds are mailed.

And these same people are the gatekeepers to your health. The IRS is in charge of ObamaCare.

Take the test: Feminist shenanigans or satire? I KNEW SOME OF THESE BUT FAILED TO TELL WHICH WAS THE SATIRE.