Obama Pursues Royal Prerogative as MSM Remains Silent

One thing we have to remined the American people is that when the members of the Presidents family travel, they don't travel alone. If costs a lot when the go anywhere.

On Monday, Breitbart's Matthew Boyle broke the story that First Daughters Sasha and Malia Obama are spending their spring break at a resort in the Bahamas. Breitbart's Mike Flynn followed up with an analysis showing how this reflected President Obama's budget priorities. There is enough money in President Obama's post sequester FY 2013 federal budget to provide Secret Service protection for his daughters vacationing outside the country, Flynn noted, but not enough to keep the White House open for tours for the children of average American taxpayers.

Throughout the 2008 and 2012 campaigns, President Obama promised to transform America into something better, a land filled with hope and change. It appears, however, that the man who vacations in Martha's Vineyard, golfs with Tiger Woods, and sends the Secret Service to accompany his wife and daughters on international vacations to Spain, Mexico, and now the Bahamas has another agenda in mind. He seeks to transform constitutional presidential authority into royal prerogative. Judging by the failure of any media source other than Breitbart, Drudge, and Instapundit to cover this story, it is also quite clear that the mainstream media has decided to play the role of dutiful courtiers to this expansion of presidential powers.

Louis the XVIth would be envious.

Biden's $321,665 Limo Bill

After two items last week on the cost of lodging for Vice President Joe Biden's early February trip to Europe, other news organizations began to investigate further. Wolf Blitzer's show The Situation Room on CNN uncovered a contract apparently also related to the same visit to Paris:

Also on the receipt was $321,665 for a limousine company.

The CNN report went on to explain that the limousine costs did not seem out of the ordinary:

Well, that's one of the problems, isn't it?

LaPierre Is ‘Tired, Old White Guy That Is Clinging on to Something of the Past’

It's Politico, what do you expect?

ByronYork Wayne LaPierre, white, age 64, versus Michael Bloomberg, white, age 71. Who's the tired old white guy? ow.ly/jp7n0

‘Sodomy: We All Have To Pay!’

Ann Coulter:

When Roth made the claim that bans on various unhealthy activities are warranted because “we pick up the tab” for other’s bad habits, Coulter countered that “I think you’re going to have to do something about the gay bathhouses.”

“AIDS is very expensive, and if I’m paying for it, how about discouraging that behavior?” she explained.

What’s the matter with Cyprus?

A good explanation.

Geopolitical ADHD

Mark Steyn's excellent column on Iraq and America.

Ten years ago, along with three-quarters of the American people, including the men just appointed as President Obama’s secretaries of state and defense, I supported the invasion of Iraq. A decade on, unlike most of the American people, including John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, I’ll stand by that original judgment.

None of us can say what would have happened had Saddam Hussein remained in power. He might now be engaged in a nuclear-arms race with Iran. One or other of his even more psychotic sons, the late Uday or Qusay, could be in power. The Arab Spring might have come to Iraq, and surely even more bloodily than in Syria.

At the beginning of the war I believed that we were committed to changing the area profoundly. What happened? We won in Iraq but the Left in this country, the drumbeat of defeat and lies, resistance by the powerful forces of Liberalism combined to take the victory and make it hollow. It made it impossible to follow-through and so we find ourselves today with a Middle East that is on the cusp of becoming an resurgent Islamic Caliphate. All because the Left in the US hated George Bush more than Satan.  And did not believe that winning the peace was better than the destruction of Bush.

And so a genuinely reformed Middle East remains, like the speculative scenarios outlined at the top, in the realm of “alternative history.” Nevertheless, in the grim two-thirds-of-a-century roll call of America’s un-won wars, Iraq today is less un-won than Korea, Vietnam, or Afghanistan, and that is not nothing. The war dead of America and its few real allies died in an honorable cause. But armies don’t wage wars, nations do. And, back on the home front, a vast percentage of fair-weather hawks who decided that it was all too complicated, or a bit of a downer, or Bush lied, or where’s the remote, revealed America as profoundly unserious.

Biden's One-Night Paris Hotel Tab: $585,000.50

Austerity and sequester are for the little people.  The Ruling Class lives well.

That's after a $459,388.65 hotel bill in London.

 

 

God the almighty Patsy, version 999

I rarely read the “news” section of the Virginian Pilot. That’s not what newspapers are for any more, specially this Liberal fish wrap. I read the editorial pages to find out what new idiocy the people who produce this daily contribution to physical and mental pollution are thinking. It’s also fun to read the letters they print.

 

Today we are treated to another in the series of “God the almighty Patsy” letters. In it the writer inveighs against people who oppose the latest Liberal fads: abortion, divorce, and homosexuality in all it physical and legal manifestations prominent among them. It ends by denouncing people who do not believe that an “all-loving God” would have a problem with any of this.

 

I have a sneaking suspicion … no, I total conviction … that people who invoke an “all-loving God” to justify whatever they favor don’t really believe in God, “all-loving” or otherwise. It’s just a handy tool they use whenever they run into someone who is informed by his religious faith to define what was once called sin, but is now labeled and alternative lifestyle.

 

Because, you see an “all-loving God” loves everyone and everything unconditionally. Kill 6 million Jews? Welcome to paradise Adolf. Kill 50 million Chinese in a Great Leap Forward? Hello Mao, here’s your golden harp. Starve millions, shoot millions more and send millions more to death in the Gulag? Saint Peter greets Stalin at the Pearly Gates knowing he simply tried to create a New Soviet Man.

 

Of course this reductio ad absurdum really doesn’t occur to the letter writer, the editors who print this piffle or people who nod their heads and agree. But let’s be clear. Christians believe that God is foremost just. That is the essence of Christianity because it validates Christ’s death on the cross, so that those who believe in the Son of God may be cleansed of their sins and forgiven. The writer’s “all-loving” God is an artifact, a figment of an atheist’s misunderstanding of what Christians believe. Which explains why letters like this appear so frequently in the Virginian Pilot.

Senate GOP proposals would force Obama into health law exchanges

And how about ex-Presidents having the same police protection as their fellow citizens? 

Nine Percent of Yale Students Surveyed Say They’ve Accepted Money for Sex

Well,  Yale is expensive.

Senate votes to keep White House closed

Senators nibbled away what they considered the worst parts of the sequester, but they declined to undo President Obama’s decision to cancel White House tours — a move he made earlier this month as one of the casualties of the budget sequesters, ...

 

Carney defends.

Ted Turner's Son: CNN Is So Far Left I Mostly Watch Fox

Via News Busters

Republican Teddy Turner, the son of media mogul Ted Turner, made news last month when he blamed his father's liberalism on actress Jane Fonda.

He made more news Wednesday on NewsMax TV's Steve Malzberg Show saying that CNN is "pretty much to the left" and that he has such a "hard time watching them" he mostly watches Fox (video follows with transcript and absolutely no need for additional commentary ...

Andrea Mitchell: Obama and Netanyahu Have 'One of the Worst Relationships I Can Remember'

I just saw pigs flying!  Andrea Mitchell actually placed the blame for the relationship on Obama.

So nobody, none of the independent critics would say that the White House has not bungled this relationship, but a lot of people put blame on the Israeli side as well. It's gotten off on the wrong foot and they’re trying to fix it, but it is one of the worst relationships I can remember, and I’ve covered every president going all the way back to Ronald Reagan. These, these leaders do not get along. They are not simpatico.

 

Of course she can't leave it there because she loves Obama so much.

WHERE'S LUCA BRASI WHEN YOU NEED HIM?

Ann Coulter on Republicans (red the whole thing.

Republicans need to be like Luca Brasi and tell Sanford: "You screwed up; we didn't do anything to you. Have fun, I'm sure Maria's fantastic, but you can't run for Congress."

We don't have to use every campaign trick of the Democrats -- vote fraud and character assassination-- but one thing we could learn from them is to stop letting idiots destroy our party.

Democrats don't reward candidates who hurt them. Where's John Edwards' comeback campaign? If you so much as mention his name on MSNBC, they'll cut to a commercial break.

Where's Howard Dean's TV show? The only place that would employ Dennis Kucinich is Fox News. (That is, as soon as Keebler lets him out of his contract.)

 

I tend to vote Republican because the Democrats are scary, but my enthusiasm for the candidates the Republicans  put up is low.  They are, mostly, decent men and women but don't set my heart to racing.

PETA killed more than 1,600 cats and dogs at its Virginia headquarters last year - almost 90% of the animals handed over to the charity's American shelter

Of course.  PETA is a well funded scam.

The women’s studies crowd looked constipated

Nothing says free speech like pulling the fire alarm. It was a quarter past seven last night when police emptied U of T’s George Ignatieff Theatre. Keynote speaker Dr. Janice Fiamengo, an English professor at the University of Ottawa, rolled her eyes and adjusted her blouse as the crowd poured out of the building and onto the sidewalk to mingle with the small throng of protesters—pretty girls with big placards and little patience. They wanted Dr. Fiamengo to take her message elsewhere. But firemen came and went, and the professor, once a radical feminist, proceeded to do what the University of Toronto Men’s Issues Awareness Society, and the Canadian Association for Equality invited her to do: denounce women’s studies.

Read the whole thing.

First, They Came For The Cypriots...

Via Investors Business Daily

Rule Of Law: Markets tumbled after Cyprus and the EU said they might tax private bank accounts to pay for a bailout. Arbitrary property grabs are a new low and a bad precedent in this crisis. Worse still, it can happen here.

As bad as tumbling markets around the world are, they seem to be the only signal strong enough to catch the attention of Europe's otherwise unaccountable bureaucrats who have long since learned to ignore street riots.

As stocks fell from Tokyo to New York, Europe's leaders are scrambling to say they had nothing to do with the cause — the shutdown of all Cyprus banks and ATMs for at least three days and the expropriation of a large chunk of each now-captive account, as a "tax" to pay for Cyprus' $13 billion EU bailout, Europe's fifth.

It appears that Cypriot banks made very bad investment decisions costing them billions. Without a bailout they will go bankrupt. So the EU demands that the Cypriot government confiscate a large part of every saver's account in return for enough money to bail out the banks.

Which teaches everyone a valuable lesson. The government can do anything to you if you can't defend yourself. Banks accounts are not safe from government confiscation. Neither are any other accounts held by any other financial institution and not held by you personally.

Suddenly the Second Amendment and stuff under your mattress become increasingly important.

Already Congressional Democrats are plotting the expropriation of Americans' private 401(k) and IRA retirement savings accounts in favor of "a guaranteed income." If bank accounts can be casually expropriated in Cyprus to pay for big-spending governments and bailouts, there is no reason a nice slice of the $19 trillion in retirement accounts can't get the same treatment.

If it happens, it will signal the end of individual freedom and the return of feudalism.

Frederick Hayek had a phrase for this: "The Road To Serfdom." Let's hope there will be more than just markets to make this state theft of private property stop.

From Glenn Reynolds:

Like I said, an enterprising GOP member of the House or Senate would introduce a bill immediately to make such shenanigans illegal — and dare the Dems to oppose it.

This is a golden opportunity for Rand Paul or Ted Cruz.

The Hockey Stick, Broken Again

John Hinderaker at Powerline discussed the latest attempt to resurrect Michael Mann's "hockey stick" with what appears to be fraulent data.

He asks:

One more thought: the publicly available evidence suggests that alarmist scientists have repeatedly committed fraud in research conducted and papers published that were paid for by United States taxpayers. It seems inconceivable that felonies have not been committed in connection with those frauds. Are there not criminal statutes that prohibit the publication of fraudulent data in taxpayer-supported research? Eric Holder, obviously, will not pursue any such line of inquiry, but there must be state law enforcement authorities who could look into this question. Fraudsters like Bernie Madoff, for instance, have tried to hide the decline in the value of funds invested with them. But that is nothing compared to the fraud that the global warming alarmists have perpetrated.

Actually John, one tried. Virginia’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli tried to open an investigation into the research conducted by Michael Mann while he was at the University of Virginia. His efforts were roundly denounced by the media, he was pilloried as an anti-science zealot opposed to academic freedom, stonewalled by the UVA administration and his investigation was stopped by the state Supreme Court. I suspect than anyone who attempts to do what you suggest would get the same treatment.

 

Here's another interesting fact from John's article. 

 

We are reminded of the NOAA/NCDC weather data on the U.S., which are routinely relied on by alarmists who claim that the last few years have been the warmest ever. In order to justify this assertion, NOAA has gone back and revised the data for prior decades. Instead of reporting temperatures for prior decades, like the 1930s, as it did at the time and for many years thereafter, NOAA has now changed those temperatures downward to support the politically-motivated claim that the last years of the 20th century were the warmest ever. If you look at NOAA data today for the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, etc., you will have no idea that the numbers NOAA now reports are not the ones that were measured by thermometers at the time.

They told me if I voted for Mitt Romney, our president would be mocked by the Brits for sucking up to the rich. And they were right!

Via the UK Telegraph

Once, only nobles were granted an audience with the King.

In America, we've prided ourselves on abandoning those privileges of class some 237 years ago, following that little uprising in the 13 colonies.

And we again congratulated ourselves at 12:01 pm Eastern Time on January 20, 2009, just moments after Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States and as he committed to making his administration the most transparent and open in history.

But more than four years later it is time to ask questions. The most transparent administration ever? The most transparently political, yes. The most open government? If you have the money to buy access, yes.

Since last weekend, Mr and Mrs Regular Citizen have been denied the access people used to be granted to tour the White House, purportedly because of the clampdown on federal spending since the "sequester" that imposed cuts across the board.

These tours, most recently guided by volunteers though monitored by paid Secret Service staff, have been an American tradition since John and Abigail Adams, the first White House residents, personally hosted receptions for the public.

And their cancellation is an austerity measure that saves a pittance, while more frivolous taxpayer funding for items like the White House dog walker continues.

Meanwhile, noble Americans can buy time with the president for a suggested donation of $500,000 to his new campaign group, Organising for Action.

Yes, the announcement offering access to the president for cold, hard cash was made openly and with total transparency. But it was also made without shame.

It's the third version of Obama's original monster campaign machine, Obama for America, which then morphed into a re-election campaign machine, Organising for America, on the third day of his first term.

It has now re-launched again as Organising for Action (OFA) - a non-profit, tax-exempt group headed by his former campaign advisers. Apparently no longer "for America", the group might just as well be called Organising for Obama's Agenda.

Its mission: to support the president in his attempt to achieve enactment of gun control, environmental policies and immigration reform.

At the two-day kick-off event last week for the new OFA's founding summit, attended by 75 folks for the "bargain" rate of just $50,000, Obama at least acknowledged the concerns raised by others about the funding, purpose and influence of the organisation.

However, he brushed them aside. With greater humility than new Pope Francis, Obama said he prided himself on feeling no obligation in the past to the interests of the generous donors who made his election and re-election possible. Though paradoxically he also said he wanted "to make sure the voices of the people are actually heard in the debates that are going to be taking place". So, he'll take money to listen to the voices of the privileged, but not do their bidding?

May I humbly suggest he could hear more voices, more clearly if he mingled with the public he serves? Perhaps the White House could hold open tours for the public! Why has no one in his administration thought of that? And volunteers could manage those tours, to keep costs down!

But, of course, those are what have just been cancelled. Meanwhile, three calligraphers reportedly remain on staff. I suppose their services are needed for the special hand-lettered, gold-foiled invitations sent to the nobles who are willing to pay for an audience with the King.

As someone once said: "it's good to be the king."  Do I need to add that the outrage remains limited to the conservative blogosphere.  The ObamaBots in MSM are predictably silent.

American University Professor hate tweets Dr. Benjamin Carson

Let's admit it, Conservatives are happy to have a prominent, articulate black man who shares their values.  Do I need to add "courageous" to that list?   Because incredible pressure is exerted on you if you have back skin to toe the Liberal line.

 

Deen Feeelon is one of academia's Liberal enforcers, one of a multitude who punish you  if you stray.

 

 

John Hayward:

Besides being stupid and offensive, people like this are so drearily predictable. What a surprise it would be if they paid due respect to Dr. Carson and offered stimulating moral or intellectual disagreement with what he said. But no, it's just the usual stern order to return to the liberal plantation immediately, or Carson's racial identity will be revoked.

Being White in Philly

What are white people allowed to say and think about race? The answer may surprise you.

I’ve begun to think that most white people stopped looking around at large segments of our city, at our poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods, a long time ago. One of the reasons, plainly put, is queasiness over race. Many of those neighborhoods are predominantly African-American. And if you’re white, you don’t merely avoid them—you do your best to erase them from your thoughts.

The mayor of Philadelphia thinks this article ought to be investigated.

Rush Limbaugh's "Friend"

Rush Limbaugh recently recounted a conversation he had with a friend who is afraid for the future of America. Specifically this friend was afraid for the future of his children; that they would not have the opportunities that he had. The answer, The Friend concluded was to focus totally on the economy and forget about the social issues.

I can see why this could be the case. Haven’t we been told relentlessly that the social issues are poison to the Republican Party? That women support abortion, that religious faith is off-putting, that supporters of traditional marriage are just like racists. So strip the pro-life plank, the reference to God and support for male-female marriage from the political platform and focus on … what? Tax rates? Employment? The national debt?

 

How’s that working out for President Romney?

I wanted to call in to Rush’s show and tell him that The Friend could not be more wrong. Great movements and political coalitions have always been about moral issues. Even the counting-house issues that concern The Friend are, at the root, moral issues.

Debt may be expressed in dollar terms but sliding deeper and deeper into debt without concern is a moral issue. The Left doesn’t believe that the national debt is a bad thing, the Right does for both moral and prudential reasons.

 

The subject of taxes is always framed by the Left as a moral issue; a path to “fairness.” The actual level of taxation is never discussed and most people underestimate how much of their income the so-called “rich” are actually giving up. Polls show that The Right makes the big mistake of making the case that higher taxes inhibit growth and employment. This may be true, but it’s irrelevant when the case is being made, and won, as a moral issue.

If economic issues were the deciding factor in elections, Romney would be President today. Obama managed to transform one of the most decent and capable men ever to run for public office into a moral reprobate who hated dogs, killed a man’s wife with cancer, hid his ill-gotten gains in the Cayman Islands, failed to pay his income taxes and hated poor people. The election was won and lost on the issue of morality.  Don't misunderstand, Obama is a profoundly immoral man who ran an ugly, base and immoral campaign, but he won by slandering the morality of Mitt Romney; the economy was a distant second.

All of the major issues of our time, indeed of most times, are fundamentally, moral. A virtuous nation, one that honors it mothers and fathers; honors work instead of sloth; honors law-keeping over law-breaking; trusts its citizens with weapons because it treats its citizens fairly and in which it’s citizens don’t casually kill each other; maintains traditional moral codes on the sanctity of life, of marriage, of sexual morality is one in which The Friend can be certain his children and grandchildren will have the opportunity that he had.

 

Economic opportunities are not irrevocably linked to a free society.  History provides countless examples of people who amass great wealth in tyrannies and in immoral ways.  An immoral nation can provide wealth to those who are favored by the ruling class.  Just recently we have the example of Al Gore's wealth based on the Global Warming scam.  We need go no further back than current events and the millionaires and billionaire enriched by Obama's green energy "loans" to his political supporters.  But in corrupt cultures only the corrupt thrive.  Perhaps that's the problem that The Friend should focus on.

Virginian Pilot: Voter fraud is in your imagination

Cincinnati poll worker indicted for voting for Obama six times

It was all for the right cause:

“I’ll fight it for Mr. Obama and Mr. Obama’s right to sit as president of the United States,”

These things only happen in Cincinnati, right?  The Virginian Pilot is absolutely sure it's never happened in Virginia, or if it happened it never affected an election, and ... racist!

 

This Democrat, this woman, deprived five of her fellow citizens of their vote.  By her illegal votes she disenfranchised five of her fellow citizens.  But this doesn't bother the Virginian Pilot.  No big deal.  How can we guarantee that the "right " people win if we can stuff the ballot box or have my dead grandmother vote?

Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky says that she wants to ban all handguns.

Look at Our Dead Dictators!

So there are plans now to embalm Hugo Chavez’s body and put it on permanent display. What is it with awful dictatorships and creepily displaying dead bodies of their leaders?

DRUDGE: Feb Job Numbers

Notice that the more you vote for Obama, the worse off you are?

Or is it that the worse off you are the more you vote for Obama?

FEB JOBS NUMBERS...

+236,000...

7.7%...

WHITES: 6.8%...

HISPANICS: 9.6%...

BLACKS: 13.8%...

TEENS: 25.1%...

Santelli: 'Are We THAT Far Down the Hole?'

Washington as "Hunger Games"

"I really think American politics today has migrated from an NFL atmosphere to 'Hunger Games,' " he pointed out. "Even in the NFL, an athlete will reach down and lift their opponent back up. In 'Hunger Games,' you make sure your opponent is never ever capable of getting up again."

A perfect example of this is the relentless destruction of Sarah Palin, a talented politician and effective Governor who was ruthlessly mocked for the way she talked, for things she never said and things she never did.

 

I think that politicians are beginning to see that they are turning the country against them. It's why Rand Paul's filibuster was such a huge hit: it was a stick in the eye of the Ruling Class.

But Washington as the capitol of the Hunger Games is much more that members of the Ruling Class conspiring to destroy those who presume to speak up.

Right thing to analogize, but wrong analogy. The analogy is how Washington DC is the gleaming rich capital city in the Hunger Games and the rest of us live in the ever poorer provinces paying ever growing tributes to those in the capital. Like in the Hunger Games those tributes of course are also paid for by our children in that it is they that will be getting the bill for the last four year's trillion plus borrowed and printed deficits for which the political class is constantly clamoring for more "revenue".

The ostentatiously and glittering parties that Obama throws,  the golfing, the vacations, Air Force One, the $40 million Hawaii estate, the servants and guards are more reminiscent of the court of Louis XVI than the president of a republic. It's not all Obama's fault, the Imperial Presidency has been accreting the trappings of royalty for some time, but the Obamas have taken it to a new level at precisely the time when the rest of America is suffering, income is shrinking, people are cutting back and the evidence is all around us that political connections are the key to wealth for many.

Global warming ... errr ... climate change explained.

Al Gore has clarified that the issue isn't just about global warming, but about climate change. Human activity is responsible for warming, cooling, or staying the same, and we must DO something -mostly funnel money into Al's investments - before it becomes unbearably warmer, or cooler or overly the same.

Prager University: The Middle East Problem

Virginian Pilot: Why can't the UVA Oversight Board be more of a rubber stamp?

The Virginian Pilot has a problem with an oversight board actually, you know, overseeing. Especially true when it comes to education.

Read this editorial and see if you find in it any indication that the people appointed to the UVA Board of Visitors has a role other than to be cheerleaders for the University or provide unqualified support for it's administration. At U.VA., a return to tense leadership

Perish the thought that they should act as a Board of Directors instead of a pep band.

In the field of education, the Virginian Pilot believes that the issues should be left to the professionals; you know, the ones who manage the institution. Skyrocketing costs? No problem, have the State chip in more because everyone knows that the state doesn’t get its money from people’s paychecks; it has a secret stash.

Academic fraud? Don’t be silly, academics don’t lie or make stuff up and if you want to check it out you are a threat to academic freedom.

Academia is a bubble whose costs have gone ballistic and whose results are cratering but the Virginian Pilot demands that those who are appointed to oversee should be fired and the inmates running the asylum be given free rein.



Until the collapse, when we confidently predict that the Virginian Pilot will be there to shoot the wounded.

Obama: Gun Grabber

Despite Obama's statements since becoming President "I have said consistently that I believe that the Second Amendment is an individual right." Most people remain unconvinced. It is most likely that Obama's position on gun confiscation is much like his position on homosexual marriage. He ran as an opponent on this issue and after it was "safe" to pivot, he told claimed that his positon was evolving. This bit of bullshit convinced only the terminally stupid, but was unbelievable to both his supporters and opponents.

In his new book, At the Brink, economist and author John R. Lott Jr., assesses the presidency of Barack Obama and recalls conversations regarding gun laws they had while working at the University of Chicago.

In Chapter Three, Mr. Lott discusses gun-control and takes the reader back to his time at the University of Chicago, where he and then-professor Barack Obama spoke on numerous occasions about guns in America.

"I don't believe people should be able to own guns," Obama told Lott one day at the University of Chicago Law School.

Lott explains that he first met Obama shortly after completing his research on concealed handgun laws and crime.

"He did not come across as a moderate who wanted to bring people together," Lott writes.

After he introduced himself to Obama, Lott suggested that they have lunch one day to discuss their views on guns. According to Lott, Obama "grimaced and turned away." That was the way many conversations with Obama ended, Lott says.

Although the Law School was famous for the openness of its faculty and friendly engagement, Lott says, "Obama...preferred silent, scowling disdain to collegiality."

 

What makes Lott's claims believable is not only the fact that Obama's gun-grabber position is in line with the Left's position on guns, but he has Obama's manner exactly right. 

Meanwhile, In Louisiana, a conservative backlash against gun control. It's easy to fool the glitterati (see Dennis Rodman in North Korea or any Hollywood celebrity on Hugo Chavez), but it's harder to fool the people in flyover country. They have a nose for lying charlatans.

Why a Founding Father of Postwar Capitalism Spied for the Soviets

Harry Dexter White, Soviet Spy.

In the essay, hazily titled "Political-Economic Int. of Future," White describes a postwar world in which the Soviet socialist model of economic organization, although not supplanting the American liberal capitalist one, would be ascendant. "In every case," he argues, "the change will be in the direction of increased [government] control over industry, and increased restrictions on the operations of competition and free enterprise." Whereas White believed in democracy and human rights, he consistently downplayed both the lack of individual liberty in the Soviet Union ("The trend in Russia seems to be toward greater freedom of religion. . . . The constitution of [the] USSR guarantees that right") and the Soviets' foreign political and military adventurism ("The policy pursued by present day Russia [is one] of not actively supporting [revolutionary socialist] movements in other countries").

In the essay, White argues that the West is hypocritical in its demonization of the Soviet Union. He urges the United States to draw the Soviets into a tight military alliance in order to deter renewed German and Japanese aggression. But such an alliance, White lamented, faced formidable obstacles: "rampant imperialism" in the United States, hiding under "a variety of patriotic cloaks"; the country's "very powerful Catholic hierarchy," which might "well find an alliance with Russia repugnant"; and groups "fearful that any alliance with a socialist country cannot but strengthen socialism and thereby weaken capitalism."

After sweeping away internal politics, religion, and foreign policy as honest sources of Western opposition to the Soviet Union, White concludes that the true foundation of the conflict must be economic ideology. "It is basically [the] opposition of capitalism to socialism," he writes. "Those who believe seriously in the superiority of capitalism over socialism" -- a group from which White apparently excluded himself -- "fear Russia as the source of socialist ideology." He then ends his essay with what, coming from the U.S. government's most important economic strategist, can only be described as an astounding conclusion: "Russia is the first instance of a socialist economy in action. And it works!"

It seems that friends of White are now in control of the American government, academia, entertainment and the press.

Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and his legacy of plunder

Miami Herald editorial

Hugo Chávez’s folksy charm and forceful personality made him an extraordinary politician. His enviable ability to win a mass following allowed him to build a powerful political machine that kept him in office from February of 1999 until his death on Tuesday. But as a national leader, he was an abject failure who plunged Venezuela into a political and economic abyss.

Dead at 58, Hugo Chávez leaves behind a country in far worse condition than it was when he became president, its future clouded by rivals for succession in a constitutional crisis of his Bolivarian party’s making and an economy in chaos.

A former paratrooper, Mr. Chávez had a radical vision for “21st Century Socialism,” which was never fully explained. His skillful rhetoric, which filled supporters with utopian dreams, was used to justify the methodical destruction of Venezuela’s democratic institutions and the free market.

Shortly after coming to office, he rewrote the constitution to his liking and aggressively set out to rig elections and stifle adversaries in the legislative branch and the courts. Unable to brook criticism, he turned his fire on the independent news media, eventually silencing most voices of opposition by bully tactics and economic intimidation.

His Bolivarian regime rewarded supporters and punished opponents, giving rise to enormous corruption and the creation of a new class of greedy oligarchs with political connections. Unfortunately for Venezuela and for all his political skills, the president was both an incompetent executive and a worse economist.

In an energy-rich country that once knew no blackouts, electrical shortages are frequent, the result of Mr. Chávez’s plundering of the country’s public oil company. In a country that once enjoyed a thriving free market, prices are controlled and food items often scarce.

In recent weeks, while Mr. Chávez was hospitalized, Venezuela was once again forced to devalue its currency, this time by one-third. This was the inevitable outcome of a series of disastrous economic decisions that included nationalizing the telephone company and other utilities, which scared off foreign investors and spurred capital flight.

For Venezuelans, the worst aspect of the Chávez years was the soaring crime rate. Venezuela has become one of the most violent countries in the world, with nearly 20,000 murders recorded in 2011 and a homicide rate that some experts say is four times greater than in the last year before Mr. Chávez took power.

On the international front, Mr. Chávez eagerly accepted Fidel Castro as his mentor, providing Cuba with cut-rate oil and making common cause with Iran and other rogue regimes. His departure leaves the anti-American front leaderless on a hemispheric level and could eventually threaten the subsidy that Cuba relies on to keep its economy barely functioning.

As a result of all this, Venezuela today is a polarized society divided between the intolerant supporters of Mr. Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution and a democratic opposition that, against all odds, has waged a courageous fight for a democratic alternative.

The president’s death means a new election must be called soon. Under Hugo Chávez, the electoral machinery was stacked against the opposition and that will doubtless be the case again, but the United States and democracies throughout the hemisphere should insist on a fair and transparent electoral process to select the new president.

The Organization of American States, which was once seen as a defender of political and civil liberties in the hemisphere but has made itself largely irrelevant in recent years, could regain some of its stature by taking a prominent role in ensuring that the people of Venezuela can make the most of this opportunity to restore their democracy.

None of Mr. Chávez’s would-be successors, including Nicolás Maduro, his vice president and designated political heir, possesses the fallen leader’s forceful personality or political skill, though his popularity may extend beyond death to give the regime’s official candidate an edge in the next election.

But without discarding “Bolivarian” principles and restoring the country’s democratic institutions, no one will be able to stop the downward spiral of Venezuela that began the day Hugo Chávez was elected president.

When you create the machinery of control and corruption, there will always be someone who wants to get rich and powerful who is willing to grab the reins and using age-old demagoguery, is willing to grind the faces of the poor ... all in the name of the poor.

Democrats try to disarm Blacks .... Again.

Via Gateway Pundit:

On September 28, 1868, a mob of Democrats massacred nearly 300 African-American Republicans in Opelousas, Louisiana. The savagery began when racist Democrats attacked a newspaper editor, a white Republican and schoolteacher for ex-slaves. Several African-Americans rushed to the assistance of their friend, and in response, Democrats went on a “Negro hunt,” killing every African-American (all of whom were Republicans) in the area they could find.

 

The blacks didn’t have guns. Democrats took them.

With that in mind, The Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE) created this video: Never Again

Hugo Chavez Dead

Listening to NPR mourn Chavez’ death this morning I was struck by a comment made by a reporter for the New Yorker who once interviewed Chavez and asked him why he came to Socialism so late. Since socialism and its sibling, Communism, has led to so much poverty, misery and death throughout the world the question why anyone would come to Socialism - late or early - is baffling to me. But the question itself reveals something about the questioner. It would not have occurred to the reporter to ask a Fascist dictator why they had come to Fascism “so late.” The question would have been phrased to ask why he was a Fascist, that discredited political movement, at all. But asking a Socialist thug about a political philosophy that was destroying his country seemed to this reporter to be as normal as asking him why he became a Presbyterian so late in life.

One of the aspects of the lives of Left wing dictators like Chavez and Castro that the NPR crowd averts its eyes from is that the rulers of these “people’s republics” manage to become ultra-wealthy.

Criminal Justice International Associates (CJIA), a risk assessment and global analysis firm in Miami, estimated in a recent report that the Chávez Frías family in Venezuela has “amassed a fortune” similar to that of the Castro brothers in Cuba.

According to Jerry Brewer, president of CJIA, “the personal fortune of the Castro brothers has been estimated at a combined value of around $2 billion.”

“The Chávez Frías family in Venezuela has amassed a fortune of a similar scale since the arrival of Chávez to the presidency in 1999,” said Brewer in an analysis published in their website.

Beyond the criminal mismanagement and corruption that's a feature of all Socialist states, that's two billion dollars that was not used to alleviate the misery of Venezuela's poor and crime ridden people.  The life of Socialist Leader is the royal road to riches.

 

The New York Times, a reliable cheerleader for Socialism of all stamps tells us that ...

Mr. Chávez, 58, changed Venezuela in fundamental ways, empowering and energizing millions of poor people who had felt marginalized and excluded.

 

Exactly how he "empowered and energized millions of poor people" is not explored.  Exactly what does that mean?  "Empowered" how?  "Energized" how?  In the same way that a large group of people in the US believe that Obama "cares about them" while unemployment, wage losses and poverty among these same supporters increase?   Possibly.  The Times goes on to explain what these empowered and energized people are experiencing in oil-rich Venezuela. 

At the same time, the country struggled with an out-of-balance economy, troubled by soaring prices and escalating shortages of basic goods.

 

Scenes like this must bring back memories to people who are old enough to remember the 1930s.  To others, like the readers of the NY Times, it will seem entirely normal

 

Mr. Chávez’s new six-year term began on Jan. 10, with the president incommunicado in Havana. In his absence, the government held a huge rally in the center of Caracas, where thousands of his followers raised their hands to pledge an oath of “absolute loyalty” to their commander and his revolution. Officials promised that Mr. Chávez would have his inauguration later, when he had recovered.

Random Thoughts: Sequester, Jeb Bush, and Mousetraps

According to his own lawyers, absolutely nothing was preventing Obama from taking out both Kim Jong Un and Dennis Rodman with a drone strike.
 

Also

“Faux-bama.” I just want to get that out there in case there’s a situation where it’s useful so I can claim credit for coining the term.

Obama, the Abusive Boyfriend

Frank J. Fleming explains:

I’ve before compared Obama to an abusive boyfriend, as his whole reelection campaign was based around convincing an America with low self esteem that the horrible state the country was in was what they deserved and that they’d never find anyone better than him. Well, the abusive boyfriend analogy goes a bit further, because apparently Obama has his cronies verbally abuse his sycophants in the press all the time, and I guess the reporters reaction is to work even harder to get his love.

This is ridiculous, people. You people in the press need to just pack up and leave Obama. He doesn’t love you; he loves power. And golf. You have to get away from him for your own good. This starts out as verbal abuse, but the guy has a violent side and access to drone strikes. This isn’t going to end well.

CANCER: "It was a long and tough battle, but I'm happy to announce that doctors have declared me 100% Hugo Chavez free."

Free at last!

Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video: 2nd Attempt

Cleveland. We're not Detroit!

Click on the headline for a link to the 2nd attempt.

Here's the first attempt.




This is the reason that Cleveland celebrates not being Detroit.

Ant Caused Global Warming

Al Hunt's Deceptive Smear of Steve King

Al Hunt has always been a Democrat hack.  Before he retired he was the Wall Street Journal's Washington Bureau chief and made the news pages of the Journal less useful as a guide to Washington than the Editorial pages.

Now the he's "retired" Mr. Judy Woodruff is still smearing Republicans.  Breitbart's Big Journalism calls him out. 

Columnist Al Hunt smeared Rep. Steve King (R-IA) in an attempt to paint the potential GOP Senate candidate as an intolerant bigot. In a New York Times column last week, Hunt portrayed King this way:

Mr. King has made a name for himself with anti-immigrant rants. Last year, he said Americans should select eligible immigrants the same way they would go about picking a 'good bird dog.' That means choosing 'the one that's the friskiest, the one that's engaged the most, and not the one that's over there sleeping in the corner.' He later explained that he meant this as a compliment - he likes bird dogs.

This statement is riddled with lies. Allow me to break them down. First, watch the one minute statement that is the center of this trumped up charge. It was part of a town hall Rep. King was hosting for constituents and captured on video by a left-wing tracking organization, American Bridge.

 

Read the whole thing.

School Offers Counseling for Students Troubled by Pastry-Gun Incident

The teaches and the people who run this school should be dismissed and run out of town.  Tar and feathers needs to make a comeback.

As you know if you have been following this dramatic story unfolding in Brooklyn Park, Maryland, seven-year-old Josh Welch has been suspended for two days after he allegedly fashioned his breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun.

 

And now that the brutal rampage of Josh with his Pop Tart  is under control, it's time, according to school administrators, to call in the psychologists to council the students traumatized by pastries.

Dear Parents and Guardians:

I am writing to let you know about an incident that occurred this morning in one of our classrooms and encourage you to discuss this matter with your child in a manner you deem most appropriate.

During breakfast this morning, one of our students used food to make inappropriate gestures that disrupted the class. While no physical threats were made and no one [was] harmed, the student had to be removed from the classroom.

* * *

As you are aware, the ... Code of Student Conduct and appropriate consequences related to violations of the code are clearly spelled out in the Student Handbook, which was sent home during the first week of school and can be found on our website, www.aacps.org....

If your children express that they are troubled by today's incident, please talk with them and help them share their feelings. Our school counselor is available to meet with any students who have the need to do so next week. In general, please remind them of the importance of making good choices.

Josh's dad seems to be the only truly sane person in this drama.

But Josh's dad is not happy saying, "I would almost call it insanity. I mean with all the potential issues that could be dealt with at school, real threats, bullies, whatever the real issue is, it's a pastry.., Ya know?"

Benghazi was strictly trouble on training wheels.

More on that book by Vasili Nasr.

We have a president whose self-esteem and regal taste for power is exceeded only by his naivety about the rest of the world. Now the question isn’t whether we’ll face foreign crises — perhaps, disasters — but which crisis will strike first or hit the hardest.

Richard Fernandez remarks that Ralph Peters expressed the same beliefs in the NY Post.

Unfortunately Nasr is writing under the goad of professional self-preservation. He probably knows, better than most, how bad things are. How high the water in the hold of the Titanic is. To mix the metaphors he can hear the powder train creeping ever closer to the magazine and would like more than life itself to make sure than when it blows that someone besides Hillary and Richard Holbrooke are holding the bag.

His account, however self-serving, has the authentic ring of fear. Still it sheds new light on some of the foreign policy mysteries that have puzzled observers. If Nasr right, the administration spends more time infighting than combating America’s enemies. And it spends more time politicking than anything else.

Therefore events in Libya, Syria, North Korea and China ought to be viewed not through the prism of national interest calculus but through the lens of domestic political advantage for President Obama. Only then can they be properly understood. None of that game theory crap. It’s “who sent you?” The foreign policy of a great state is being run not by foreign policy professionals but by political hacks from Chicago.

Which countries and trouble spots can explode?

1. Russia;

2. Venezuela;

3. Mexico;

3. The Arab Spring Revolutions;

4. Afghanistan (“we’ve lost”);

5. Pakistan;

6. Islamist extremism;

7. Syria;

8. North Korea;

9. Iran;

10. China.

And one area that could go up in flames is Europe. Already rioters are in the streets in Greece. Parts of France are no-go zones for French police. Major European cities are now more Muslim than native European. And overshadowing it all is European bankruptcy as the Welfare State model runs out of other people's money. Those American troops in Europe may find themselves besieged before the end of Obama's rule.

The Golden Age of Obama

Bud Norman raises a point that others also wonder about. 

As much as we hate to be the gloomy sort who find dark clouds within every silver lining, we just can’t shake an unsettling feeling that there’s something fishy about this bullish stock market.

By the time you read this the Dow Jones Industrial Average might well have surpassed its all-time high, in which case the usual media cheerleaders will be singing “Happy Days Are Here Again” and claiming vindication for Obamanomics. Such gloating is understandable, as the stock indices provide a pleasant diversion from more depressing numbers, but those more depressing numbers make it all seem rather unaccountable.

The reigning record of 14,164 was set back in Oct. 9, 2007, in the dark days of the Bush administration when the economy was suffering through 4.9 percent growth in gross domestic product and a 4.7 percent unemployment rate, with personal income rising four-tenths of a percentage that quarter. In the Golden Age of Obama the Dow is back within shouting distance of that closing figure, but unemployment is at 7.9 percent, the latest quarterly GDP growth has recently been revised from a contraction of 0.1 percent to a slightly more robust gain of 0.1 percent, and personal incomes are dropping by 3.6 percent. Throw in another $7 trillion of national debt, a few credit downgrades for the federal government, higher taxes, a weakened global economy, and assorted international crises, and the current bull run becomes very hard to explain.

Revolutionary Reason

"Zero tolerance" for guns leads to college educated adults becoming irrational.

 

(1) Place: White Marsh Elementary School, Tabot County, Maryland

Tiny Terrorists: Two six-year-old boys (kindergartners)

“Weapons”: Fingers

Punishment: One-day suspension

Facts: The boys were pointing their fingers at each other during recess while playing “cops and robbers.”

(2) Place: Mount Carmel Area School District, Pennsylvania

Tiny Terrorist: A five year-old girl (kindergartener)

“Weapon”: None

Punishment: 10-day suspension for making a “terroristic threat”

Facts: The girl told a classmate she wanted to “shoot” her and herself with a “Hello Kitty” bubble gun, a tiny, pink, cartoon ray-gun shaped bubble blower. She was searched, but left the “gun” at home. She was hectored in front of her class by the teacher and threatened with arrest.

 

Read the whole thing.

JEEZ, COULD YOU GROVEL ANY MORE? It’s funny how sometimes its edgy to be offensive to religious people, and sometimes it’s unforgivable to be offensive to religious people.

Headline courtesy of Glenn Reynolds.  Grovelling from Martha Shanahan, Editor-in-chief , The Tufts Daily.

Obama’s Thirteen Words

Remember George W. Bush’s famous “16 words”? They came from Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech, where Bush said: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” That was a true statement, but it caused immense controversy, for reasons that are now hard to remember.

Fast forward to 2013, and President Obama’s State of the Union, where he said, talking about global warming: “Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and floods – all are now more frequent and intense.” That statement was demonstrably false, as SEPP’s The Week That Was points out:

The claim is so factually challenged that it is a wonder it got by the White House staff. Looking at the weather stations that have 80 years of data shows heat records were set in the 1930s, the Palmer drought index shows the 1930s and the 1950s were hotter and dryer with the 1930’s dust bowl lasting a decade. … Increased floods are not supported by the data, and, according to the National Interagency Fire Center, wildfires are declining.

For some reason Obama's lies never cause any controversy in the MSM.

After Selling A Startup For $70 Million At Age 25, Founder Blows Through Fortune And Heads To Prison

Thirteen years ago, things looked brighter for Jennifer Sultan.

Then, Sultan was a recent New York University graduate who sold a tech startup, Live Online, for $70 million. That summer she rented a summer house in the Hamptons and purchased a penthouse in Manhattan's Union Square....

Last Friday, Sultan, now 38, pled guilty to selling painkillers and for trying to sell a firearm, The New York Times reports. She'll be spending four years in prison, which isn't bad considering her sentence was initially five times that. NYT says she's blown through her fortune too.

 

Smart and wise are totally different.  I have experience with individuals who worked very hard and made a lot of money fairly quickly.  I also know people who didn't work hard but won the lottery.  The thing that I noted is that being able to start and run a successful business, or buying a winning lottery ticket doesn't make you any smarter about finances or investments.  It often means that your mistakes are bigger and more expensive.

Barack Obama a 'dithering, controlling, risk-averse' US president

Barack Obama is a "dithering" president whose controlling tendencies and extreme risk-averse attitude to foreign policy has damaged US interests in the Middle East, according to a new book by a senior former State Department adviser.

"The president had a truly disturbing habit of funnelling major foreign policy decisions through a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisers whose turf was strictly politics," Mr Nasr writes in The Dispensable Nation: America Foreign policy in Retreat.

 

It looks as if the rumor that US foreign policy is directed by a radical Left wing ideologue coupled with a corrupt Chicago pol, Valerie Jarrett.

Obama lied in debate about sequester.

Gene Sperling tries to lie about Obama's lie.  Strangely enough David Gregory follows up.



David Gregory? David "I can break the law with impunity because I'm a member of the press" Gregory follows up?

We still have a problem.   Gregory does not call it a lie, he says "is there some responsibility he bears for that?"  What kind of a question is that?  The issue is not that he bears some responsibility, the issue is that he is flat out lying.  And who was the moderator?  Was it "Obama's Right" Candy Crowley?

Imprisoned Dutch Killer Impregnates Girl

Why would any woman have sex with a man who killed at least one, probably two other women?


Report: Imprisoned Dutch Killer Impregnates Girl by associatedpress

The Virginian Pilot and State Run Media

The Virginian Pilot delivered its editorial opinion on the sequester and it's devastating. 

The way forward: off another cliff

It quotes experts who predict economic calamity and lays the blame squarely at the feet of Congress.  The editorial names John Boehner twice and no other politician by name.  Conspicuously absent from any discussion of this problem is the name of the man who proposed the sequester in the first place: Barack Obama. 

The press likes to tell us how brave and independent they are.  "Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" and "speaking truth to power." 

The press denies it's adopted role as the State Run Media.  If that's true, I have a question: can anyone tell the difference between this editorial and an Obama administration press release?

Shepherds and Sheep - Cass Sunstein and the Ruling Class

John Stuart Mill's classic essay "On Liberty" gives reasons why some people should not be taking over other people's decisions about their own lives. But Professor Cass Sunstein of Harvard has given reasons to the contrary. He cites research showing "that people make a lot of mistakes, and that those mistakes can prove extremely damaging."

Professor Sunstein is undoubtedly correct that "people make a lot of mistakes." Most of us can look back over our own lives and see many mistakes, including some that were very damaging.

What Cass Sunstein does not tell us is what sort of creatures, other than people, are going to override our mistaken decisions for us. That is the key flaw in the theory and agenda of the left.

Implicit in the wide range of efforts on the left to get government to take over more of our decisions for us is the assumption that there is some superior class of people who are either wiser or nobler than the rest of us.

Yes, we all make mistakes. But do governments not make bigger and more catastrophic mistakes? ...

Even in the United States, government policies in the 1930s led to crops being plowed under, thousands of little pigs being slaughtered and buried, and milk being poured down sewers, at a time when many Americans were suffering from hunger and diseases caused by malnutrition.

Read the whole thing.

Are teachers and students more violent than the general population?

 

If one bothers to think about schools as "gun free zones" for more than a moment, does it strike you as logical?  Why should schools or college campuses prohibit the carrying of guns by people who are licensed to do so? 

 

The only logical reason to prohibit guns on school or college grounds is if teachers teachers and students are more apt than the general public to commit violent crimes with guns. 

 

Is that what educators and legislators believe?

High School Student Disarms Gunman…Gets Suspended?

A Florida high school student wrestled a loaded gun away from another teen on the bus ride home this week and was slapped with a suspension in return....

The school’s referral slip said he was given an “emergency suspension” for being involved in an “incident” with a weapon. Lee County School District spokesman Alberto Rodriguez said in a statement that “If there is a potentially dangerous situation, Florida law allows the principal to suspend a student immediately pending a hearing.”

I have a suggestion: have a Zero Tolerance Policy for Zero Tolerance Policies. Any school that has a zero tolerance policy must immediately fire the superintendent of schools and anyone who enforces such idiotic conduct.

Six Reasons to ride a polar bear to work.

Read the other five.

Obama wrong on janitors' pay cut

Let me correct the headline from CBS News:  Obama wrong lies on janitors' pay cut.

I'm really surprised the CBS, which along with every other member of the MSM has been in the tank for Obama should point out when he lies, even to call it "wrong."

During his news conference to announce that he and congressional leaders failed to avert the sequester cuts going into effect tonight, President Obama gave several examples of people who will be directly affected by the cuts. It turns out, however, that one of those examples was in error. 

"[A]ll the folks who are cleaning the floors at the Capitol -- now that Congress has left, somebody is going to be vacuuming and cleaning those floors and throwing out the garbage -- they're going to have less pay," Mr. Obama said. "The janitors, the security guards, they just got a pay cut, and they've got to figure out how to manage that. That's real."

Of course, this is anything but real.

The president's mention prompted Carlos Elias, the superintendent of the U.S. Capitol building and the Capitol Visitors Center, to email his employees within hours of Mr. Obama's comment.


"The pay and benefits of EACH of our employees WILL NOT be impacted," Elias wrote.

"There was a specific mention in the news today by a high ranking official that said 'The employees that clean and maintain the US Capitol will receive a cut in pay' (not specific quote but very close to it)," Elias continued.


"This is NOT TRUE," wrote Elias. "Therefore, I request that you please notify all of our employees about the importance of ignoring media reports."

Of course that "high ranking official" was Mr. Big himself.  I wonder if Obama is shocked that the media is correcting him? 

More Black Men in Jail Than in College? Wrong

When a myth is useful, it has a long life.

What does the line "There are more black men in jail than in college" have in common with the Jheri curl? Answer: They were invented by white men (Jheri Redding and Vincent Schiraldi, respectively) and adopted enthusiastically by black people, and they left a nasty stain on the shoulders of millions of black men.

However, just as a Jheri curl would be wrong no matter how you dressed it up today, the line "There are more black men in jail than in college" is wrong no matter how you contextualize, qualify or articulate it.

Famous lies

Rachel Maddow Fake Twitter Accounts and the MSM's lies.

Via Free Republic and Riehl World News. 

Being noticed is the key to ratings in the broadcast entertainment world.  So getting a lot of mentions on Twitter raises your visibility.  At Free Republic "tenger" comments:

Happens ALL the time in the twitter world. Millions of fake accounts out there being used to generate “social signals” for the search engines.

Lots of Twitter mentions is supposed to signal that Rachel Maddow is popular, that lots of people watch her, and that you should look in to see what all the excitement's about.  It's a form of "AstroTurf," a fake way of appearing to be a grass roots movement which actually is orchestrated by an organization that remains behind the scenes and has very few actual supporters.  It's the way the media builds itself up in importance and the way the Ruling Class maintains its power.

 

Here's a comment from Celebrity Sentry:

MSNBC MADDOW 1,052,000
That was her ratings on Wednesday night.
She finished 11th out of 11 cable news shows.
 

Jon Stewart's Daily Show draws about 1.3 million viewers, lagging behind Family Guy, a cartoon show and something called Robot Chicken (a show I had never heard of) which uses stop-motion animation.   There is a more complete list of ratings here.  But give Stewart some props, he's way ahead of Stephen Colbert, another Liberal comedian/pundit who hosts the Colbert Report with less than a million viewers.

What I love about these posts that prove our clown-emperors are not only naked but media-created emperors, is that people get all angry over my reporting of this fact. I know, I know -- I'm supposed to be so outraged by Bill Maher that I don't focus on these two sacred cows, but I just can't help myself.

 

In my opinion, the real power influencing the "low information" voters are the local newspaper and the local news shows. They run the stories that reinforce the Liberal line.

As an example, I received a call late yesterday afternoon from a local TV station asking if I wanted to appear on a segment they were doing later that evening. The report was going to be on what to do after you get your layoff notice because of the sequester. I declined for several reasons, but among them was the fact that I did not want to contribute to the panic that the media was trying to create about the horrors that were going to happen because the rate of increase in government spending was not going to be as large as originally planned.

 

Here is the news version in the Virginian Pilot with quotes from all the horrible things that can happen unless the government is given more money.  And here is Donald Luzzatto telling us the end is nigh. Here's his version of the Apocalypse. 

• ... imagine 10 or 15 Ford plants closing. 
• ... this region is going over a fiscal cliff.
• ... Congress can't tie its shoes (Obama isn't around).
• ... take a machete to the budget .
• ... rock-throwing and tantrums.
• ... worst threat to the welfare of Hampton Roads that most of us have ever seen.
• ... One of every 20 working folks would lose their jobs.
• ... Two parents in every classroom [would lose their job].
• ...One house on every block [would lose it's job?].
• ... eviscerate the nation's safety net.

Do a little test;  look for the name Obama in that editorial. 

You won't find it.

In the press and most other media today Obama has nothing to do with anything that that goes wrong.  If you read or hear them, he is trying to prevent all that those evil, rich Republicans are doing to you.  That is why the low information voter still blames Bush after he's been out of office for over four years and for part of that time Obama and the Democrats have controlled the House, the Senate and the White House.  And still Donny Luzzatto can't make himself say that Obama's part of the problem.  If there is a problem, it's the generic "Congress." 

What incredible bullshit!

 

When Obama Says He's Not, He Is.

I AM NOT A CROOK DICTATOR

 

Other lies by Obama:

"I'm not a socialist"

"The overwhelming majority of the people support me."

"My proposals are reasonable"

"I killed Osama"

"Fair and balanced"

"I want to compromise"

"It's never my fault"