"Little-Noticed" is the New "Unexpected"

From Legal Insurrection:  "

Unexpected" has become the term of choice for the mainstream media to excuse the Obama administration's economic failures.

Yesterday I read an article in The NY Times about something unexpected in Obamacare, and one term jumped out at me (emphasis mine):

About one-third of employers subject to major requirements of the new health care law may face tax penalties because they offer health insurance that could be considered unaffordable to some employees, a new study says.... It suggests that a little-noticed provision of the law could affect far more employers than Congress had assumed.

That term, "little-noticed," sure sounded familiar. It seems that we hear that term a lot.

I didn't intend on this post being so long, but the examples are so numerous:

Click on the link for the rest.

"... there is apparently no milquetoast like a reporter stiffed" by Obama

From Powerline:

It's been almost a year since Obama's last press conference, and the White House Press Corpse is OK with that.  So is the local press since we hear no peep about this. 

Obama treats them with contempt because he knows that when big tests come, they've always been on his side. There's no reason for him to think they won't be there in the future. "Most of you covered me," he told the media elite at the 2009 White House Correspondents' Association dinner. "All of you voted for me."

That's how a pimp treats his hos ... with contempt. 

That's the attitude coming out of the Oval Office every day. Why does Obama do it? Because he can.

And why should we care?  Knowing what we know about the desire of the MFM to roll in the hay with Obama, do we expect the White House Press Corpse to get any more information, to do any more digging, than the White House staffer who interviewed Kagan for the White House web site? 
I pass along this insight from Powerline not because I expect the Press Corpse to be resurrected as a news medium, they are too far into their graves.  Unlike Lazarus, they will not rise again.  But it's a marker along the road that we pass to tell us how far we've come, a clue as to how badly we are served, a warning light on the dashboard telling us the engine is failing ... pick your metaphor.

And it's a constant reminder that the Internet has now become indispensable as the primary source of information to the American people.

Obama White House probe of Obama White House finds no Obama White House impropriety on Sestak

Not the sort of headline you expect in the LA Times.

Liberal commencement speaker gets bood; pig fly.

Get in their faces; punch back twice as hard.

Good for them!
Only a horrible liberal hack would lecture Arizona students about perceived “racism” at their commencement.
Unfortunately, for open-border-supporting crackpot Professor Soto, this group of graduates were not the little leftist clones she thought they were…
They booed her selfish agenda-driven speech:

We'll get around to it when we're good and ready. Until then shut up, peasants.

El Maximo Presidente Obama presents Versailles on the Potomac while hosting El Presidente Calderone


(Masque of the Red Death Ball at the White House)


Meanwhile in "another part of the forest" we see the detritus of the population of Mexico as it enters Arizona via the Sonoran desert.


This is on an 'illegal super - highway' from Mexico to the USA (Tucson) used by human smugglers.


It is estimated over 5,000 discarded backpacks are in this wash. Countless water containers, food wrappers, clothing, feces, including thousands of soiled baby diapers. And as you can see in this picture, fresh footprints leading right into it.


As we kept walking down the wash, we thought for sure it was going to end, but around every corner was more and more trash!



Oh, and lest we forget, there are real flesh and blood people involved and some of them, the prettier ones get to decorate the "rape trees."

A rape tree is what Mexican illegals create with the panties and bras of the women they have raped along the trail to America. After they have had their way with the women and young girls, they force them to hang their panties or bras, on the trees as a sign of their conquest.

As Michelle Obama would say: "Let the eat Wagyu."

Katyn: the long cover-up

From the New Criterion

In the spring of 1940, the Soviet political police, NKVD, carried out a secret killing of at least 22,436 Polish prisoners; 4,421 of them were executed in Katyn. Among the countless crimes of World War II (some of them much greater in scope), this mass murder has become subject to arguably the most persistent cover-up in the twentieth century—not only by the Soviets but also, initially, by their wartime Western allies.

Read the whole thing.

Versailles on the Potomac

What is it about the Obamas that causes people peering through the glass at the White House to start seeing flashbacks to the excesses of life under the French court before the Revolution? I don’t mean casual “dates” via Air Force One to catch a Broadway show in Manhattan, inconveniencing the country’s largest city. And I certainly don’t expect the American President and his wife to have leftover meatloaf for dinner. But the image we see of the Obamas via the besotted press is one of wretched excess.

In a time when nearly a quarter of America’s population is either unemployed or underemployed, the Obamas can’t seem to help themselves.


(Masque of the Red Death Ball at the White House)

From the Torrington, CT., Register Citizen: No Taco Bell for this in-crowd

Maybe it wasn’t quite the equal of Versailles in the heydays of French monarchial extravagance. But the White House state dinner in honor of Mexico’s president certainly impressed the courtiers of the media. And why not? The gala social event did, after all, attract the top glitterati of Hollywood’s limousine liberal community.

And as if that weren’t more than sufficient cause to ooh and ahh, First Lady Michelle Obama made her regal entrance garbed in — the gawking, star-struck media chroniclers tell us — “a one-shouldered, sky-blue gown by designer Peter Soronen, cinched at the waist with a sparkly crystal-adorned belt.” For the occasion, her hubby was smartly decked out, of course, in a tux. Tables for the 200 guests were covered in triple-striped linens in “hues of Mayan blue,” and centerpieces were “handmade woven baskets gilded and filled with bouquets of fuchsia and purple gray roses, orchids, geranium foliage and prickly pear cactus.” The vittles were whipped up by guest chef Rick Bayless and included “Oregon Wagyu beef in Oaxacan black mole.”

You get the picture. No corn chips and dip out of the supermarket jar for this in-crowd. Meanwhile, President Obama and Mexico’s Felipe Calderone took a moment to offer appropriately supercilious remarks regarding the increasingly restless Tea Party peons in places like Arizona. They have turned to “potentially discriminatory” measures out of their “frustration,” said the president north of the border. This frustration apparently stems from their unschooled belief that their government ought to make at least a half-hearted effort at enforcing the nation’s immigration laws rather than ignoring these laws as a gesture of pandering to the growing Hispanic portion of the electorate.

The president south of the border subtly suggested that perhaps the Arizona ruffians’ judgment has been clouded by over-imbibing the firewater of bigotry.

You might have thought the president of Mexico would have had other concerns in the forefront of his mind besides an Arizona state law. With the nodding Obama serving as his amen corner, Calderone complained that there are divisive troublemakers in the United States who are bent on “criminalizing immigration.” Actually, it’s the United States that holds illegal immigration to be a misdemeanor and Mexico that holds illegal entry onto its soil to be a felony.

Before anybody could take exception to El Presidente’s point, however, it was time to be seated and dig into the “salad of jicama with oranges, grapefruit and pineapple citrus vinaigrette and the herb-green ceviche.”

What about the millions of destitute south of the border and the millions of unemployed or under-employed north of it?

As Marie Antoinette might have said had she been included on the guest list: “Let ’em eat tacos.”

Now that you mention it, there is an amazing similarity between Marie Antoinette and Michelle Obama.

UPDATE:  Doug Ross comments: "Let them eat Wagyu."

Video News Report on "Rape Trees" Found in The Desert

According to his report: 

A rape tree is what Mexican illegals create with the panties and bras of the women they have raped along the trail to America. After they have had their way with the women and young girls, they force them to hang their panties or bras, on the trees as a sign of their conquest.

There is something cold blooded and perverse about an American President who celebrates in a grotesque night of excess with the President of Mexico while this is going on.

U.S. Implicates North Korean Leader in Attack

WASHINGTON — A new American intelligence analysis of a deadly torpedo attack on a South Korean warship concludes that Kim Jong-il, the ailing leader of North Korea, must have authorized the torpedo assault, according to senior American officials who cautioned that the assessment was based on their sense of the political dynamics there rather than hard evidence.


The officials said they were increasingly convinced that Mr. Kim ordered the sinking of the ship, the Cheonan, to help secure the succession of his youngest son.

Not a very good sign. But then, he knew that he was facing down the Obama administration who will make this "go away."

Obama on Daniel Pearl: It's an inconvenient truth.

Who but Mark Steyn can write like this? 

Barack Obama’s remarkable powers of oratory are well known: In support of Chicago’s Olympic bid, he flew into Copenhagen to give a heartwarming speech about himself, and they gave the games to Rio. He flew into Boston to support Martha Coakley’s bid for the U.S. Senate, and Massachusetts voters gave Ted Kennedy’s seat to a Republican. In the first year of his presidency, he gave a gazillion speeches on health-care “reform” and drove support for his proposals to basement level, leaving Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to ram it down the throats of the American people through sheer parliamentary muscle.

But back to Obama and his Daniel Pearl speech:

Like a lot of guys who’ve been told they’re brilliant one time too often, President Obama gets a little lazy, and doesn’t always choose his words with care. And so it was that he came to say a few words about Daniel Pearl, upon signing the “Daniel Pearl Press Freedom Act.”


Pearl was decapitated on video by jihadist Muslims in Karachi on Feb. 1, 2002. That’s how I’d put it.


This is what the president of the United States said: “Obviously, the loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is.”


Now Obama’s off the prompter, when his silver-tongued rhetoric invariably turns to sludge. But he’s talking about a dead man here, a guy murdered in public for all the world to see. Furthermore, the deceased’s family is standing all around him. And, even for a busy president, it’s the work of moments to come up with a sentence that would be respectful, moving, and true. Indeed, for Obama, it’s the work of seconds, because he has a taxpayer-funded staff sitting around all day with nothing to do but provide him with that sentence.


Instead, he delivered the one above. Which, in its clumsiness and insipidness, is most revealing. First of all, note the passivity: “The loss of Daniel Pearl.” He wasn’t “lost.” He was kidnapped and beheaded. He was murdered on a snuff video. He was specifically targeted, seized as a trophy, a high-value scalp. And the circumstances of his “loss” merit some vigor in the prose. Yet Obama can muster none.
...
But what did the “loss” of Daniel Pearl mean? Well, says the president, it was “one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination.” Really? Evidently it never captured Obama’s imagination, because, if it had, he could never have uttered anything so fatuous. He seems literally unable to imagine Pearl’s fate, and so, cruising on autopilot, he reaches for the all-purpose bromides of therapeutic sedation: “one of those moments” — you know, like Princess Di’s wedding, Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction, whatever — “that captured the world’s imagination.”

Referring to Daniel Pearl's murder as if it were a natural catastrophe: 

The latest appropriation is that his “loss” “reminded us of how valuable a free press is.” It was nothing to do with “freedom of the press.” By the standards of the Muslim world, Pakistan has a free-ish and very lively press. The problem is that some 80 percent of its people wish to live under the most extreme form of Sharia, and many of its youth are exported around the world in advance of that aim. The man convicted of Pearl’s murder was Omar Sheikh, a British subject, a London School of Economics student, and, like many jihadists from Osama to the Pantybomber, a monument to the peculiar burdens of a non-deprived childhood in the Muslim world. The man who actually did the deed was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who confessed in March 2007: “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi.” But Obama’s not the kind to take “guilty” for an answer, so he’s arranging a hugely expensive trial for KSM amid the bright lights of Broadway.


Listen to his killer’s words: “The American Jew Daniel Pearl.” We hit the jackpot! And then we cut his head off. Before the body was found, The Independent’s Robert Fisk offered a familiar argument to Pearl’s kidnappers: Killing him would be “a major blunder . . . the best way of ensuring that the suffering” — of Kashmiris, Afghans, Palestinians — “goes unrecorded.” Other journalists peddled a similar line: If you release Danny, he’ll be able to tell your story, get your message out, “bridge the misconceptions.” But the story did get out; the severed head is the message; the only misconception is that that’s a misconception.

Obama left the signing ceremony without taking a question.  Because he did not want to be there.  The severed head of Daniel Pearl was to him an "inconvenient truth." 

Rush Limbaugh explains "net neutrality"

If there is one thing that Rush is an expert on it's communication.  He know that inside and out.  His explantion of "net neutrality" is spot on and blood chilling.  And it's what our new overlords want to enforce.

He quotes of Obama Czar Cass Sunstein:

Sites of one point of view agree to provide links to other sites so that if you're reading a conservative magazine, they would provide a link to a liberal site, and vice-versa, just to make it easy for people to get access to competing views, or maybe a pop-up on your screen that would show an advertisement or maybe even a quick argument for a competing view. The best would be for this to be done voluntarily, but the word "voluntary" is a little complicated and sometimes people don't do what's best for our society unless Congress holds hearings or unless the public demands it. And the idea would be to have a legal mandate as the last resort and to make sure it's as neutral as possible if we have to get there, but to have that as, you know, an ultimate weapon designed to encourage people to do better.

Ann Althouse's blog deserves another look.

Constitutional Scholar Obama? –Not so much

With so much hype and so much of Obama's past undocumented things like this make you go "Hmmm."

In what is being called ‘the biggest hustle in human history,‘ a special investigation has discovered numerous bogus claims on Barack Obama’s resume, including the outright lie that he was a ‘Constitutional scholar and professor.’


The claim turns out to be false.

If you are forced to do something are you still volunteering?

Ann Althouse asks the question and points out that our new masters are lawyers and are fully capable of torturing words until they confess:

the word "voluntary" is a little complicated

Ann Althouse appears to be (in her blog) a reasonable person (for a Law Professor in incorrigible Madison Wisconsin), but someone who managed to find enough "nuance" to vote for Barack Obama.  I think it's probably Palin derangement syndrome.

The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity had all its assets, $15.2 million, invested with Madoff

The Washington Post headline reads: Theater J pulls Madoff play after objections from activist Elie Wiesel.  What caught my eye was this:

The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity had all its assets, $15.2 million, invested with Madoff and lost them when the Ponzi scheme unraveled. In addition, Wiesel personally lost several million dollars to Madoff.

Somehow I never pictured Elie Wiesel a multi-millionaire.  Neither did I picture him at the center of a foundation worth tens of millions of dollars.  Or someone foolish enough to put all of his eggs in one basket.  That part of being a famous Nazi hunter was never discussed in the things I had read about him.

Which leads me to say "Hmmm."  I never associated Nazi hunting with money making.  It goes to show my lack of imagination.

Reading is a good thing.

But, as we have seen this year, as multi-thousand page laws are passed and signed by Obama without anyone ever reading them, reading has become a lost art. And members of the Obama administration are not ashamed to admit they can't read.

via the Exurban League.

The Obama Strategy: "We're killing terrorists because we have no place to put them."

Richard Fernandez reports that :

Killing wanted militants is simply “easier” than capturing them, said an official, who like most interviewed for this story support the stepped-up program and asked not to be identified. Another official added: “It is increasingly the preferred option.” …


By some accounts, the growing reliance on drone strikes is partly a result of the Obama administration’s bid to repair the damage to America’s image abroad in the wake of Bush-era allegations of torture and secret detentions. …


Some current and former counterterrorism officials say an unintended consequence of these decisions may be that capturing wanted militants has become a less viable option. As one official said: “There is nowhere to put them.”...

‘We killed them so that we would not be accused of violating their human rights.’

Well, that will get the civil libertarians to shut up. If they have not already shut up because a Democrat's in the White House. Of course if you kill them you can't get any info0rmation out of them, making it harder to find out who their friends are. But the logical end of this policy will be to kill all the Islamofascists. I never though that Ann Coulter's policy prescription after 9/11 would be implemented by Barack Obama.

Fernandez on Obama's foreign policy: 

Faced by the linked yet separate crises in the Middle East and in Northeast Asia the Obama administration is acting like it was shot through the central nervous system, acting in uncoordinated jerks. The alliances with Korea and Japan and the special relationships with Israel and Britain lie almost forgotten like neglected toys on the floor of a spoiled child distracted by his latest bauble. Gone are the heady prospects of Grand Bargains with the Muslim world kicked off by dramatic speeches in Cairo. Gone is the idea of a swift drawdown from Iraq; or of a comprehensive solution in the Middle East. Gone is the promise of catching Osama Bin Laden. Gone is the notion that Europe, which once hated America because of George Bush, would turn like a blossoming rose to Obama. In their place are half-finished begun threads without closure: a growing Hezbollah menace in Lebanon; a defiant Iran; a belligerent North Korea; a buffoonish but menacing Chavez; a drug war on the southern border; an Eastern Europe with the shadow of the Russian bear growing ever longer across it.

Obama: "We don't Need No Stinking Border Security Laws"

Faithfully executing the laws is for little people.

The fact that the Obama administration does not give a shit about border security, but it does like to squander money with glorious abandon is seen in three vignettes.

The first is their plan to spend seven millions of dollars upsizing and aggrandizing a Canadian border crossing, located in the middle of a Vermont farm, that accommodates 2 ½ cars per hour. They are so determined to do this that they have threatened to condemn roughly five acres of a dairy farm because the family that owns the farm does not want to sell. Claiming that this must be done for urgent national security reasons,

"Our airports, seaports, and land ports of entry are all part of an interconnected security network to facilitate entry and exit to and from our country," the agency said in a statement Tuesday. "When we fail to fortify one, we weaken the entire system, putting our national security at risk."

Meanwhile, in another part of the country, people in remote parts of the Southwest lie awake at night listening to the sounds of Illegal aliens crossing their land.

Says Mark Steyn:

They lie awake at night frightened for their children and listening for footsteps in the yard. In effect, the sovereignty of the United States of America no longer applies in this territory - and John Morton and the Department of Homeland Security are entirely cool with that.

A top Department of Homeland Security official reportedly said his agency will not necessarily process illegal immigrants referred to them by Arizona authorities.

John Morton, assistant secretary of homeland security for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, made the comment during a meeting on Wednesday with the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune, the newspaper reports.

"I don't think the Arizona law, or laws like it, are the solution," Morton told the newspaper.

When I read that, I had a flashback to a time many decades ago: resistance to desegregation following the Supreme Court Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation decision had Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus deploying the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the law from being implemented. President Eisenhower sent in the 101th Airborne, nationalized the Guard and the black students were enrolled.

Today we seem to have another racist as president. And he’s deploying his troops like Orval Faubus did, to block the law of the land. As we get old enough, we see history repeating itself and we shake our heads.

What has been will be again,

what has been done will be done again;

there is nothing new under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 1:9

The final vignette is this picture of the Obamas partying with the President of Mexico whose people are fleeing his poor, corrupt and dangerous country; a country that is fast becoming a failed state. Does it bring to your mind, as it did in mine the Masque of the Red Death?

 Brack Obama as Prince Prospero partying while his subjects live in fear and die.

Detainees Barred From Access to U.S. Courts

Remember when this used to bring howls of outrage and denunciations of Nazi Fascist Dictatorship and "Trampling on the constitution" and the arrival of the dark night of the Long Knives?  Is this the change you were looking for? 

Rubes!  (Or were you just playing politics, demonizing your political opponents, but not meaning a word of it?)

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court ruled Friday that three men who had been detained by the United States military for years without trial in Afghanistan had no recourse to American courts. The decision was a broad victory for the Obama administration in its efforts to hold terrorism suspects overseas for indefinite periods without judicial oversight.

Documents: Ruling on Detainees by Appeals PanelThe detainees, two Yemenis and a Tunisian who say they were captured outside Afghanistan, contend that they are not terrorists and are being mistakenly imprisoned at the American military prison at Bagram Air Base.

Here's a link to the Liberal Bible, the NY Slimes.  Not a hint that the prophets of Liberalism disapprove.

MARK STEYN: As lazy, feckless, corrupt and violent as Greece undoubtedly is, it’s not that untypical

Mark Steyn: 

From the Times of London: “The President of Greece warned last night that his country stood on the brink of the abyss after three people were killed when an anti-government mob set fire to the Athens bank where they worked.”

Almost right. They were not an “anti-government” mob, but a government mob, a mob comprised largely of civil servants. That they are highly uncivil and disinclined to serve should come as no surprise: they’re paid more and they retire earlier, and that’s how they want to keep it. So they’re objecting to austerity measures that would end, for example, the tradition of 14 monthly paycheques per annum. You read that right: the Greek public sector cannot be bound by anything so humdrum as temporal reality. So, when it was mooted that the “workers” might henceforth receive a mere 12 monthly paycheques per annum, they rioted. Their hapless victims—a man and two women—were a trio of clerks trapped in a bank when the mob set it alight and then obstructed emergency crews attempting to rescue them.

Unlovely as they are, the Greek rioters are the logical end point of the advanced social democratic state: not an oppressed underclass, but a pampered overclass, rioting in defence of its privileges and insisting on more subsidy, more benefits, more featherbedding, more government.

Demographics is destiny:

The problem facing the Western world isn’t very difficult to figure out: we’ve spent tomorrow today, and we can never earn enough tomorrow to pay for what we’ve already burned through. When you’re spending four trillion dollars but only raising two trillion in revenue (the Obama model), you’ve no intention of paying it off, and the rest of the world knows it. In Greece, the arithmetic is starker. To prop up unsustainable welfare states, most of the Western world isn’t “printing money” but instead printing credit cards and pre-approving our unborn grandchildren. That would be a dodgy proposition at the best of times. But in the Mediterranean those grandchildren are never going to be born. As I pointed out in my bestselling hate crime America Alone four years ago, Greece has one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet—1.3 children per couple, which places it in the “lowest-low” demographic category from which no society has recovered and, according to the UN, 178th out of 195 countries. In practical terms, it means 100 grandparents have 42 grandkids. Greek public sector employees are entitled not only to 14 monthly paycheques per annum during their “working” lives, but also 14 monthly retirement cheques per annum till death. Who’s going to be around to pay for that?

Welcome to My Big Fat Greek Funeral.

On the Falsehood of ‘The Vital Center’

Stacy McCain points out that Liberals are forever putting themselves out as "centrists" so that they can then call everyone else as "extremists."  That, for example, is why Liberals will denigrate and vilify the overwhelimg majority in this country who want to end illegal immigration from Mexico, calling them "racists." "Fascists" and as bad as Hitler. 

This is why I roll my eyes whenever anyone employs the term “center-right” to describe the political aims of conservatism. Chasing a ”center-right coalition” is to pursue a will-o’-th’-wisp into a swamp of confusion. It’s a snipe hunt, because so long as liberals have any influence in defining the terms — and their dominance in media and academia assure them that influence – the “center” will always be someplace acceptable to liberals.

Instead of fretting about the center, then, conservatives should aim to build a conservative majority. And one key to building that majority is to speak blunt truth about the idiocy of “centrism” — the kind of idiocy that permits people in Pennsylvania’s 12th District to vote for Mark Critz and think the result will be anything other than the advancement of a liberal agenda.

It is time to say good-bye to The Vital Center. Damn the Blue Dogs, and to hell with the RINOs. Let’s define the distinctions between conservatism and liberalism so clearly that nobody who pays attention can doubt what side they’re on.

The still-popular concept of American conservatism as a form of crypto-fascist neurosis dates back to the same era when Schlessinger wrote The Vital Center. Accusing liberalism’s critics of harboring secret totalitarian longings, of opposing liberalism because they are emotionally stunted or sexually repressed, neatly averts any discussion of whether liberal policies actually work.

I’m curious about the Democrats and the MFM (but I repeat myself) who continue this attack. Do they believe that they can turn a 70-80% majority into a minority with a ceaseless bombardment of propaganda? At one time, decades ago, that may have been possible and the American people, lacking the internet infrastructure that allows them to communicate freely and easily, may have been cowed into accepting the Party Line. But the MFM has exhausted its reservoir of credibility. The Obama Administration is no longer riding the wave of euphoria that got the Affirmative Action President elected. It’s now “US” against “THEM” and the communications structure exists to allow US to speak to each other without the censors of the MFM blocking us. The internet allows atomized individuals to meet and coalesce into groups and form power centers. Perhaps that’s the impetus behind the FCC desire to control and regulate the internet. All tyrannies try to control the means of communication. Free communication between people is a threat to a totalitarian or authoritarian government.