From The Vault: No-Go-Tiations

Hope n' Change  "Here's the Hope n' Change cartoon and commentary exactly as it appeared on July 13, 2011.  Sadly, the reference to Barry threatening to withhold Social Security checks is as timely today as it was over two years ago..."
"There's a time-honored saying that "When the going gets tough, the tough threaten defenseless little old people." Mind you, it's only a time-honored saying in the Democratic party, but it's still as true - and despicable - today as it ever was.

"In his effort to blackmail Republicans into agreeing to potentially job-killing tax hikes on businesses and investors, Barack Obama has announced that he may choose to not send out Social Security checks to senior citizens on August 3rd, sneering "there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it.' "

Millions of elderly people like this are afraid of losing their Social

Security checks and...no, wait. This is just Obama's taxpayer-supported

 Aunt Zeituni who is watching her soap operas. She'll be fine.

 

Emphases in the original.

The way out; If only Obama will allow negotiations

Why is Obama so full of malice and intransigence with Republicans yet such a docile doormat for America's enemies?

Charles Krauthammer   "For all the hyped indignation over GOP “anarchism,” there has been remarkable media reticence about the president’s intransigence. He has refused to negotiate anything unless the Republicans fully fund the government and raise the debt ceiling — unconditionally.
For all his protestations about protecting the full faith and credit of the United States — jittery markets are showing that his brinkmanship could have precisely the opposite effect — the president’s real intent is to score a humiliating victory over the GOP."
Can the Republicans hold out with all this media pressure?
....
"Even worse for Democrats, their current partisan advantage is a wasting asset. The rule is simple: shutdown good, debt ceiling bad. Every day the debt ceiling approaches, President Obama’s leverage diminishes."

Obamacare Workers Offering Help Also Threaten Identity Theft

The Galen Institute   "A blockbuster report by the House Oversight Committee staff shows the threats Americans will face when an army of ObamaCare workers begins to fan the country to enroll people in the new health insurance exchanges.

32 Cats Who Are Way Too Curious For Their Own Good

Buzzfeed  15. This cat who has learned he hates the bathtub perhaps more than anything else in the world.

 

32. And this cat who will never trust the laser pointer EVER AGAIN.

Meaning of Words Have Changed Under the Obama Administration

Breitbart  "Representative Steven Pearce details the changing rhetoric under the Obama administration and how the power of words have affected the debate." 

Hat tip to Margi Hawks; Liberty, MO

Don’t Detroit America; We need to tell the story of Detroit — and of its opposite, Texas.

Michigan Central Station From Time
Detroit's main train station, opened in 1913, has not been used since 1988
 

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE "People and businesses didn’t just move from Detroit, they fled. And what they were fleeing was liberalism, the accumulated detritus of 50 straight years of Democratic leadership. They kept fleeing until there was so little left for city leaders to tax — so little business left there from which to extract revenue — that Detroit was forced to declare bankruptcy.

"Detroit is the Left’s Ground Zero. And it was caused not by a terrorist strike or an invading army but by a combination of union greed, government incompetence, bad policies, broken promises, outright corruption, and a lot of bad faith."
Not a failure of capitalism, but a failure to practice capitalism.

United Artists Theater
This spectacular Spanish Gothic theater, built in 1928, was closed in the 1970s.

 Looks much like undersea photos of the Titanic

Our Peevish President

Storming the Barry-cades

It’s within his power to avoid the ludicrous scenes of this “shutdown.”  

..."The more important point to grasp here is not that the various heavy-handed antics in which the Park Service has seen fit to indulge itself since last Monday are unimaginable absent a shutdown, but that almost none of them had to happen because of the shutdown. The offending behavior has, in other words, been a choice — a deliberate ploy contrived and prosecuted by a man seeking to make a public point."...

More to the point:

....“It takes federal action to close the sites,” this website’s editorial noted, “and none to keep them open. This is not what an inactive government looks like, but a spiteful one.” An anonymous Park Service ranger confirmed that malice ... Staff, the employee said, had “been told to “make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.”....

National Review Online

 

 Who Do Students At University Of Colorado Blame For Gov Shutdown?

 

Petulant, vindictive and...tacky! Obama’s Park Service Removes Handles From Water Fountains In Park Frequented By Joggers And Bikers…

"Doesn’t get any more spiteful than this."

Comment to this post by xerocky

"What a very very small man this 'Obama' is."

Expunging Oswald: JFK and liberalism’s descent; Now we have "Punitive Liberalism"

“He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It’s — it had to be some silly little Communist.”
— Jacqueline Kennedy, Nov. 22, 1963

George Will  "Hitherto a doctrine of American celebration and optimism, liberalism would become a scowling indictment: Kennedy was killed by America’s social climate whose sickness required “punitive liberalism.”

"That phrase is from James Piereson of the Manhattan Institute, whose 2007 book “Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism” is a profound meditation on the reverberations of the rifle shots in Dealey Plaza.

"The bullets of Nov. 22, 1963, altered the nation’s trajectory less by killing a president than by giving birth to a destructive narrative about America."....

Via Rush Limbaugh: George Will on the JFK Assassination and the Advent of Punitive Liberalism
" 'Punitive liberalism preached the necessity of national repentance for a history of crimes and misdeeds that had produced a present so poisonous that it murdered a president," and that's what they created.  Punitive liberalism.  Punish.  We're going to punish people.  We need, as a nation, to repent for our sordid history of crimes and misdeeds that had been so bad and so noxious that they created an aura and a universe and an atmosphere and a culture capable of killing the most popular beloved president ever."....

Name the names now!

American Thinker   "We, the people, demand that our elected representatives compel the White House  to release the names of those who came up with the idea to withhold the military death benefit, and those in the White House who authorized this heinous act. In military matters the buck stops in the Oval Office. Until Jay Carney tells us who these folks are, and who in the White House authorized that choice, the American people shall irrevocably hold our Commander in Chief, B.H. Obama, personally responsible for this horror.
....
"We, the people, demand that our elected representatives compel the White House  to release the names of those who came up with the idea to withhold the military death benefit, and those in the White House who authorized this heinous act. In military matters the buck stops in the Oval Office. Until Jay Carney tells us who these folks are, and who in the White House authorized that choice, the American people shall irrevocably hold our Commander in Chief, B.H. Obama, personally responsible for this horror. "....Emphasis added

 

Obamacare Angles For Starring Role On Primetime TV

Deadline   "Will Obamacare become plot fodder for CBS’ Hostages and Under The Dome? A $500,000 grant awarded this week to USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center’s Hollywood Health & Society program certainly suggests it’s a possibility. In the latest push to get Tinseltown to promote President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, the decade-old program has received the money from the private California Endowment to give Hollywood producers, writers and execs details about the newly launched health insurance initiative."....

French journalist is prosecuted under 19th century press law for questioning Islam during a radio debate

UK Daily Mail   "He was summoned to court under strict press laws which date back to the 19th Century following a complaint from a pressure group called the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF).
‘In seeking to undermine liberty of expression, a sacred principle of our civilisation, the Collective against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) takes the risk of appearing like a menace to democracy,’ said Mr Rioufol.

We Are The Nation: The poster by the Collective Against Islamophobia In France, which Mr Rioufol referred to in the radio debate

....
"A spokesman for CCIF said it had a duty to challenge ‘Islamophobia’ and the
press laws were a logical way of challenging journalism it objected to."

The Park Police; Another Obama Scandal. Did anyone notice?

Weekly Standard
“We are a nation that has a government—not the other way around.”
—Ronald Reagan

"The conduct of the National Park Service over the last week might be the biggest scandal of the Obama administration. This is an expansive claim, of course. Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the IRS, the NSA, the HHS mandate​—​this is an administration that has not lacked for appalling abuses of power. And we still have three years to go.

 

"Even so, consider the actions of the National Park Service since the government shutdown began. People first noticed what the NPS was up to when the World War II Memorial on the National Mall was “closed.” Just to be clear, the memorial is an open plaza. There is nothing to operate. Sometimes there might be a ranger standing around. But he’s not collecting tickets or opening gates. Putting up barricades and posting guards to “close” the World War II Memorial takes more resources and manpower than “keeping it open.”

 

"The closure of the World War II Memorial was just the start of the Park Service’s partisan assault on the citizenry. There’s a cute little historic site just outside of the capital in McLean, Virginia, called the Claude Moore Colonial Farm. They do historical reenactments, and once upon a time the National Park Service helped run the place. But in 1980, the NPS cut the farm out of its budget. A group of private citizens set up an endowment to take care of the farm’s expenses. Ever since, the site has operated independently through a combination of private donations and volunteer workers.

 

"The Park Service told Claude Moore Colonial Farm to shut down."....

....

"It’s one thing for politicians to play shutdown theater. It’s another thing entirely for a civil bureaucracy entrusted with the privilege of caring for our national heritage to wage war against the citizenry on behalf of a political party."

They all work for Obama.