Republicans and Democrats in Washington Conspire to Exempt Themselves from Obamacare

If this happens, the nation needs to collectively march on Washington, DC, burn it to the ground, and spread salt over the ground.

According to the Politico, in super secret “high-level, confidential talks”, Harry Reid, John Boehner, the Obama administration, and other lawmakers are working to exempt themselves and their staffs from Obamacare.

They want to rush it through, probably sneaking it through on some other legislation that no one cares about, and get it all done before anyone can say anything about it.

If the Republican Party leadership in Congress goes along with this ride, there will need to be a new third party that challenges both the GOP and Democrats.

HOW TERRY MCAULIFFE GOT SO RICH

The Global Crossing company is bankrupt, but not before former CEO Gary Winnick took out $734 million after selling his stock when the price was high. Winnick's golfing pal, DNC chief Terry McAuliffe, made about $18 million on Global Crossing stock and sold shortly before its dissent.

Changing the Democrat memes

Here are the Democratic Memes that changed After Boston:

A) Before Boston....Benghazi means nothing; The War on Terror is Over
After Boston....The Brothers went after America because of the continuing wars;

B) Before Boston...the new Immigration bill will make things better,
After Boston...If we brought the bombers in under the same circumstance, how many others will do the same? The Immigration Bill now comes to a halt;

C) Before Boston...the Gun issue was the Main issue of the Obama Administration;
After Boston....the Senate couldn't pass a Bill with the President's support.

Subsidizing Terrorism: Boston Bombers on Welfare

Did you ever notice that as reporters delved into the story about the brothers Tsarnaev, there was no mention of a job?  Yet they went to school and Tamerlan spent his time boxing ... and going to bars, paying for things and, in the words of a former friend, He'd give them rides in his nice car and he would pay for things.   How could he afford to do that?

Marathon bombings mastermind Tamerlan Tsarnaev was living on taxpayer-funded state welfare benefits even as he was delving deep into the world of radical anti-American Islamism, the Herald has learned.

State officials confirmed last night that Tsarnaev, slain in a raging gun battle with police last Friday, was receiving benefits along with his wife, Katherine Russell Tsarnaev, and their 3-year-old daughter. The state’s Executive Office of Health and Human Services said those benefits ended in 2012 when the couple stopped meeting income eligibility limits. Russell Tsarnaev’s attorney has claimed Katherine — who had converted to Islam — was working up to 80 hours a week as a home health aide while Tsarnaev stayed at home.

In addition, both of Tsarnaev’s parents received benefits, and accused brother bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan were recipients through their parents when they were younger, according to the state.

(H/T Instapundit)

Rush Limbaugh has questioned where the Tsarnaev brothers got the money for their fancy cars (Mercedes & BMW)  and travel to Russia.  The suspicion was that they were supplied money from Islamofascists overseas. Now we know that at least part of it came from taxpayers.

And this appears to be part of a patterns. Mickey Kaus:

Does Welfare Cause Terrorism?

 

Here are some suspected terrorists in the news:

Zacarias Moussaoui, the French North African charged with conspiracy in connection with the 9/11 attack, became an Islamic radical living in London "while drawing welfare benefits and studying economics," Newsday reports.

 

Ahmed Ressam, the member of Algeria's Armed Islamic Group who was arrested crossing the U.S. border with bombs designed to blow up L.A.'s airport, moved to Canada in 1994 where he "survived on welfare payments" and petty crime, according to terrorism expert Peter Bergen.

 

Metin Kaplan, who heads a German radical Islamist sect suspected of attempting to fly a plane into the Ataturk mausoleum in Turkey, "claimed social [welfare] benefits in Cologne for many years until 2m Deutschmarks ($1.2m) in cash was found in his flat," reports the BBC.

 

Abu Qatada, the cleric who taught Moussaoui and is accused of having links to al-Qaida agents in six countries, avoided extradition to Jordan on terrorism charges by settling in England, where "[l]ike many other London-based Arab dissidents, [he] has received regular welfare checks from the British government—and government subsidized housing," according to the Washington Post. Abu Qatada's welfare payments were stopped when it was discovered he controlled a secret bank account containing approximately $270,000.

 

Do you see a pattern? There's a story here!

 

So, are Western nations subsidizing terrorism?  The answer appears to be YES.

Kaus makes the point that welfare may actually be an essential ingredient in the promotion of terrorism.

In fact, there's a good argument that "welfare benefits + ethnic antagonism" is the universal recipe for an underclass with an angry, oppositional culture. The social logic is simple: Ethnic differences make it easy for those outside of, for example, French Arab neighborhoods to discriminate against those inside, and easy for those inside to resent the mainstream culture around them. Meanwhile, relatively generous welfare benefits enable those in the ethnic ghetto to stay there, stay unemployed, and seethe. Without government subsidies, they would have to overcome the prejudice against them and integrate into the mainstream working culture. Work, in this sense, is anti-terrorist medicine. (And if you work all day, there's less time to dream up ways and reasons to kill infidels.)
 

Welfare permits people, not just immigrants, to avoid useful work in order to dream up ways to get into trouble, gather a harem, or brood on how their (adopted)  country is persecuting them, even as he draws a check from his alleged persecutor.

Sydney Morning Herald assumed the Boston bombers were associated with the Tea Party

Glenn Reynolds: HUNT FOR THE ELUSIVE TEA PARTY MURDERER CONTINUES:

The headline of the aqrticle in the Sydney Morning Herald by Waleed Aly read Bomb response refreshingly honest

He noted that the American media did not blame the followers of Islam before the perpatrators were caught.  Waleed is right, the American media desperately wanted the bombers to be conservatives.

 

The American media's attitude was perfectly captured by David Sirota who famously wrote that Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American .

 

And then of course there's that impeccably PC NPR who declared, in the absence of proof that the bombers were Right Wingers celebrating Hitler’s birthday, feeling bad about Columbine, sorry that Tim McVeigh was executed, crying in their beer about the death of David Koresh, so they decided to blow up Boston. 

Enabling Jihad in America

There are a few things we know about the Tsarnaev brothers. They came to the US when they were youngsters. Tamerlan was 15, Dzhokhar was 8. They have been American residents for a decade. They went to school here. Tamerlan was a student for three semesters at Bunker Hill Community College from 2006-2008. Dzhokhar received a scholarship to the University of Massachusetts. Tamerlan got married, had a child and wanted to be part of the American Olympic boxing team. Both were Muslim.

And on April 15, 2013 the brothers Tsarnaev set off bombs that killed three and maimed 178 at the finish line of the Boston marathon.

While some may wonder what was behind the attack, you have to be willfully blind not to assume that the same impulses that caused the 9/11 terrorists to highjack four airliners and fly them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon also motivated the Tsarnaevs. The brothers were not terribly interested in getting away after the bombing or they would not have followed up with a carjacking and the murder of an MIT cop. They were on a mission that was going to leave a trail of blood before they died.

It was not as complicated or high-tech as 9/11, but every bit as Jihadist inspired.

Some will claim that the bombing was somehow tied to the conflict in Chechnya between the Russians and the rebels. This is nonsense on stilts. As Barry Rubin pointed out, if the brothers were

“acting as Chechens and not as Islamists they would have attacked a Russian target. The United States has not — even by the usual stretch of radical Islamist imagination — had anything to do with the conflict in Chechnya.”

What should be pointed out is that a decade spent in America, in the heart of Boston – the epicenter of American Academia, at least one of the brothers hated America enough – again quoting Rubin

“They went to the best schools. What did they learn there about the greatness of America? Was the seed of rage fertilized by U.S. education’s tendency to demonize American history as evil, greedy, racist, and imperialist?

…

These two young men … had a free choice. They had to actively close their minds to everything good they experienced and to adopt an ideology of hate. Only a very powerful force could move them in that direction.”

I have to extend what Rubin is saying. They had help in closing their minds to everything good that they experienced. They had the best professors, the most powerful political leaders, the most influential members of the press and the top stars in Hollywood telling them that America was fundamentally flawed, its people and institutions conceived in sin: " ...evil, greedy, racist, and imperialist."    And while breaking down any idea that America was fundamentally good, these leaders were simultaneously promoting the very things that Muslims consider to be among the greatest sins; hedonism, sexual promiscuity and homosexuality.

Put yourself in the shoes of the Tsarnaev brothers. Your devotion to Islam has been reinforced in your mosque and on your travels, the leaders of the American culture you swim in tells you that the people you see around you are corrupt. And you see these same people proudly proclaiming that what you believe are the worst sins in your culture are to be embraced and celebrated. Planting a bomb and giving your life for your faith may seem like the right thing to do.    Since the cream of American culture dislikes this country enough to want to fundamentally change it, why should you disagree?

Golden Gate Park pot party a major mess

After the pot party they worshipped Gaia ... (oh wait)





Compare that with the aftermath of the Tea Party rally.

Tim McVeigh was an atheist Democrat

Tim McVeigh is the name every Democrat and media figure (but I repeat myself) mentions when violence breaks out. That's why I found this comment that followed an excellent essay on Eric Erickson's Red State.

I clubbed a liberal like a baby seal over this very issue.

He started in on right-wing violence and my counter, from Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground to the Black Panthers to the SDS to Loughner, to Democrats Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols to Leftist nutbag Ted Kaczynski to the pilot who crashed his plane into the IRS building, the professor who shot her collegues, and on and on left him speechless.

I'd sooner leave my kids with ANY TEA Party member than let Bill Ayers babysit them!

 

 

I have no idea what religion McVeigh had, or what his political affiliation was, but I know of no-one who can honestly claim that his bombing was motivated by either his religion or his party affiliation.

Why Does Evil Make Liberals Stupid?

 

John Hinderaker fillets a really stupid article in The Atlantic about the Boston Marathon bombers titled “The Boston Bombers Were Muslim: So?”

To give the writer, Megan Garber, a clue he suggests some other headlines:

“The Cole Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The Embassy Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The First World Trade Center Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The September 11 Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The Madrid Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The London Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The Shoebomber Was Muslim: So?” The Underwear Bomber Was Muslim: So?” “The Fort Hood Shooter Was Muslim: So?” “The Beslan Child-Murderers Were Muslim: So?” “The Times Square Bomber Was Muslim: So?”

The were not just mass murdering terrorists, they were much more complicated than that.

They had friends and families and lives. They had YouTube accounts and Twitter feeds. They went to class. They went to work. They came home, and they left it again.

And then they did something unimaginable.

Hmm, yes, that’s the problem, isn’t it? The only reason why any of us have heard of them is that they stuffed pressure cookers full of ball bearings and tried to murder as many people as they could. With all due respect to their Twitter feeds, that does seem to be the most salient fact about them.

 

Read the whole thing. 

A nation of promiscuous prudes

Victor Davis Hanson on current American culture (read the whole thing).

Criminal sexual activity is sometimes not as professionally injurious as politically incorrect thoughts about sex and gender. Former New York governor Eliot Spitzer — found to have hired prostitutes on a number of occasions during his time in office — was given a CNN news show despite the scandal. But when former Miss California Carrie Prejean was asked in the Miss USA pageant whether she endorsed gay marriage, she said no — and thereby earned nearly as much popular condemnation for her candid defense of traditional marriage as Spitzer had for his purchased affairs.

Critics were outraged that talk-show host Rush Limbaugh grossly insulted birth-control activist Sandra Fluke. Amid the attention, Fluke was canonized for her position that federal health-care plans should pay for the contraceptive costs of all women. Yet in comparison to Fluke’s well-publicized victimhood, there has been a veritable news blackout for the trial of the macabre Dr. Kermit Gosnell, charged with killing and mutilating in gruesome fashion seven babies during a long career of conducting sometimes illegal late-term abortions. Had Gosnell’s aborted victims been canines instead of humans — compare the minimal coverage of the Gosnell trial with the widespread media condemnation of dog-killing quarterback Michael Vick — perhaps the doctor’s mayhem likewise would have been front-page news outside of Philadelphia.

Boston and America … Where the Fish Rots from the Top

Roger Simon points out that the FBI under Obama has downplayed Islamic terrorism and played up "Right Wong" terrorism.  Pehaps that's why NPR told us that their sources believe that the Boston Marathon bombing was somehow related to Hitler's birthday. 

Apropos of the #BostonBombers, CNN’s Jake Tapper tweeted this weekend: Big q is why FBI didnt keep an eye on/talk to Tamerlan Tsarnaev after he returned from Chechnya last year. So far from FBI: crickets. 
 

Tapper’s right. The FBI is not looking particularly good as far as their surveillance of murderous Caucasian Islamists on our soil is concerned. And Tamerlan, evidently , left quite a trail, from domestic violence to reportedly attacking an imam for holding up MLK as someone to emulate. Not exactly subtle. They were even warned about Tamerlan by the Russians apparently.
 

The Feds must have been pretty clueless to ignore all this.
 

Probably. But I offer in their defense one of the hoariest of cliches: The fish rots from the top.
 

The Obama administration and most of those working for it have taken Islamic terrorism about as seriously as I am taking the Memphis Grizzlies/L.A. Clippers game currently on my TV — in other words, at best mildly interested. Not being a fan of either team, I could watch — I could switch to something else.
 

And when Islamic terrorism does rear its head, as in Benghazi, the administration evinces something worse than disinterest — dishonesty, lies, coverup and prevarication (sometimes aided by Tapper’s CNN cohort Candy Crowley).
 

And they don’t stop. They haven’t offered anything yet even remotely resembling a transparent account of the Libyan events or of their motivation. The secretary of State has told us it’s not even important. (How does that look in the light of Boston?)
 

So why would we expect the nation’s police department — the Federal Bureau of Investigation — to take these matters with the requisite seriousness? The message they are getting from the top is …meh. Until something happens, Islamic terrorism is way down this administration’s list of priorities. And when it happens, the “t-word” is only mentioned under the most extreme duress (or possible political fallout). And the word “Islam” is abjured even when someone yells “Allahu Akbar!” while shooting everyone in the room.
 

The press, the Praetorian Guard of the Obama Regency,  is already beginning its job of minimizing the role of Islam into turning the brothers into mass murderers.

Meanwhile, we have the worst possible president to deal with the situation. And even after an event as heinous as Boston, he is supported by a media desperate to preserve his narrative at all costs. It’s already started. On Saturday the Boston Globe published an article titled — I kid you not — “Islam might have a secondary role in Boston attacks.” (Don’t look for what might have the primary role. You won’t find it.) That stupefying essay is a harbinger of what’s to come as soon as the atmosphere dies down, perhaps as soon as next week.

Keep the truth alive. And your eyes open. Your life — or that of someone you love — may depend on it.

Oh oh!

Group linked to Tsarnaev brothers...
Pair 'specially trained' for attack...
'No doubt brothers not acting alone'...
Two from Kazakhstan in custody...


<! MAIN HEADLINE>
REPORT: FBI HUNTS 12-MAN 'SLEEPER CELL'

Gunfire erupts at Colo. pot event, 2 wounded

Glenn Reynolds comments:  FUNNY, THIS NEVER SEEMS TO HAPPEN AT TEA PARTY RALLIES



BUZZKILL: GUNFIRE ERUPTS AT POT DAY...

Police lack witnesses: 'Everybody fled.'...

BOARDER: 'Thought I was going through anxiety thing'...

Some people yelling 'Explosion!'...

VIDEO...

Perhaps the Boston marathon bomber will be offered a teaching job at Columbia University.

Forty-three years ago last month, Kathy Boudin, now a professor at Columbia but then a member of the Weather Underground, escaped an explosion at a bomb factory operated in a townhouse in Greenwich Village. The story is familiar to people of a certain age.

Three weeks earlier, Boudin’s Weathermen had firebombed a private home in Upper Manhattan with Molotov cocktails. Their target was my father, a New York state Supreme Court justice. The rest of the family, was presumably, an afterthought. I was 9 at the time, only a year older than the youngest victim in Boston.

One of Boudin’s colleagues, Cathy Wilkerson, related in her memoir that the Weathermen were disappointed with the minimal effects of the bombs at my home. They decided to use dynamite the next time and bought a large quantity along with fuses, metal pipes and, yes, nails. The group designated as its next target a dance at an Officer’s Club at Fort Dix, NJ.

Despite the misgivings of some, it is reported that Kathy Boudin urged the use of “anti-personnel bombs.” In other words, she wanted to kill people not just damage property. Before they could act, her fellows were killed in the townhouse explosion. The townhouse itself collapsed; Boudin fled.

She reappeared over a decade later driving the getaway car for the rag tag mix of Weathermen and Black Panthers who held up a Rockland County bank in 1981, murdering three in the process. Survivors of the ambush along the New York State Thruway recount how Boudin emerged from the driver’s door, arms raised in surrender, asking the police to lower their guns. When they did, her accomplices burst from the back of the van guns blazing.

 

Of course the academics at Columbia would welcome her. She is what they wanted to do but lacked the money and the guts.  To paraphrase Obama's words, she is the one they have been waiting for.

When reality bites. The real cost of Norfolk's light rail revealed.

The local big-wigs have been proclaiming the overwhelming success of the their light rail system and have been pushing Virginia Beach to participate in the wonder of it all.

But the federal subsidy is ending.  The brokest government in the history of the world is ending its subsidy of The Tide, revealing - for the first time that I know of - that the fares collected from paying passengers covers a mere 14% of the cost of running the system.

Light-rail passengers are expected to pay $1.3 million in fares next fiscal year, which starts July 1. That covers only about 14 percent of the cost to run the 7.4-mile route that opened in August 2011

And without examining the numbers we can't be sure whether that 14% number isn't inflated.  Is that the cost of just the operation, or does that include the cost of maintenance and replacement of equipment that wears out?

The Virginian Pilot has been a cheerleader for this project, telling us how great the ridership is, that it's exceeded expectations and that the future looks bright.  But if Uncle Sugar in Washington DC or Uncle Bob in Richmond don't come through, the people of Norfolk are going to bear the full cost.  And why should the residents of Iowa or of Charlottesville be forced to cough up the cost of transporting Norfolk residents on a glorified trolley? 

The city has covered a significant amount of light-rail operating costs with millions of dollars in federal startup money. The city could have spread the federal grant money over three years but instead opted to spend it in two years...

In 2012-13, there is $4.6 million in federal assistance for The Tide; in 2011-12, there was $6.4 million. Only a residual amount of federal money, about $858,000, will be left to go toward the $9.1 million cost to operate light rail in Norfolk in the 2013-14 fiscal year,

 

The fact that The Tide has been subsidized by big grants from DC and Richmond were mentioned as footnotes in otherwise generous praise of this experiment in "back to the future."  Behind the scenes the backers always knew that it was never financially sound and could only succeed politically if they managed to rope other communities into joining the Tide Follies.   Today the out-of-town gravy train has stopped and the real costs are beginning to emerge.  In my opinion, that 14% number that the paper is using is actually going to shrink to less than 10%.  That means that the people of Norfolk are going to be providing transportation welfare to those who don't have cars or who live close to a Tide stop. 

The sad state of the newspaper business.

The headline screamed: Virginian-Pilot named best of state's largest papers.

That's just sad.

Knowing that the Virginian Pilot is a crappy paper, we're disturbed to learn that the others are worse.

NYPD vindicated. Will the AP apologize?

As soon as Presbyterians begin to preach that planting bombs and killing infidels is the way to heaven, they need to be the subject of police surveillance.  Until then, we'll just have to settle for keeping an eye on the "Religion of Peace."

Looks like it’s time for the Associated Press to give back its Pulitzer Prize.

Just as it’s time for politicians — and especially the press — to stop chewing on Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s leg over the NYPD’s so-far-enormously-successful anti-terrorist surveillance programs.

Knock wood on the “successful” part, of course. If America has learned anything about terrorism since 9/11, it’s that the threat is incessant, though hugely unpredictable as to source, specific motivation and any given terrorist’s tool kit of choice.

That is, no one knows what tomorrow will bring, just as no one suspected what was in store for Boston on Monday — Patriots’ Day in the Bay State.

...

Operating fully within the bounds of a mid-’80s consent decree meant to guide NYPD oversight of radical political activity — as modified by a federal judge post-9/11 — the department went on the lookout for Islamist-inspired terror plots.

...
But the Associated Press, in particular, was offended, and the agency dogged the department for months. Its stories — some naïve, most just wrong and all oblivious to the legality of the program — clearly were intended to shut the Kelly effort down.

That the news agency collected a Pulitzer for its efforts reflects as badly on the judgment of those who run the contest as it does on motives of the AP itself.

Boston Marathon Bombing from the NPR perspective.

Dina Temple-Raston in NPR’s All ThingsConsidered blames the Boston Marathon bombing on Right Wingers celebrating Hitler’s birthday. 

 

Transcript:

ALL THINGS CONSIDERED APRIL 17th.
Dina Temple-Raston provides insight into the Boston investigation.

The thinking as we’re reporting is that this is a domestic extremist attack. And officials are leaning that way largely because of the timing of the attack.

April is a big month for anti-government and right wing individuals. There’s the Columbine anniversary. There’s Hitler’s birthday. There’s the Oklahoma City bombing. The assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco.

So according to NPR we Right Wingers were having a party celebrating Hitler’s birthday, feeling bad about Columbine, sorry that Tim McVeigh was executed, crying in our beer about the death of David Koresh, so we decide to blow up Boston.

 

You really can’t parody these people because their fantasies burst though the outer limits of our imagination. 

 

And what the hell is right-wing about a couple of nut-job Goths in Columbine who decided to act out their rage about being rejected by the “cool kids?”

 

If committing acts of terror to try to bring down the government you hate is the mark of being a right-winger, that must make old Joe Stalin a right winger for this part in 1907 Tiflis bank robbery. Proving that NPR is not just delusional but ignorant.

Hubble telescope takes stunning new nebula photo for 23rd birthday

Something Wonderful: Van Morrison - These Are The Days

These are the days of the endless summer
These are the days, the time is now
There is no past, there's only future
There's only here, there's only now....

Oh your smiling face, your gracious presence
The fires of spring are kindling bright
Oh the radiant heart and the song of glory
Crying freedom in the night

These are the days by the sparkling river
His timely grace and our treasured find
This is the love of the one magician
Turned the water into wine

These are the days of the endless dancing and the
Long walks on the summer night
These are the days of the true romancing
When I'm holding you oh, so tight

These are the days by the sparkling river
His timely grace and our treasured find
This is the love of the one great magician
Turned the water into wine

These are the days now that we must savor
And we must enjoy as we can
These are the days that will last forever
You've got to hold them in your heart.