Wednesday, December 18, 2013

The left's war on American business

Dennis Prager; Coercion in the Name of Tolerance 
Thus, under penalty of fines and, potentially, jail:
1. Jack Phillips must participate in an event that the Colorado constitution explicitly prohibits.
2. He must do so against deeply held religious convictions.
3. He must do so despite the fact that there are hundreds of other cake makers in the Denver area.
"Those who support this decision argue that religious principles do not apply here — what if, for example, someone’s religious principles prohibited interracial marriages? Should that individual be allowed to deny services to an interracial wedding? Of course not. Here’s why that objection is irrelevant:"...

Hobby Lobby’s Secular Case    "The plight of Hobby Lobby, the arts-and-crafts business whose owners are being forced to compromise their faith, instantly draws the sympathy of religious conservatives. But why should anyone else care?"

A Visit to Woolwich; The trial of the two men who proudly claim they killed British soldier Lee Rigby is drawing to a close.

By John O’Sullivan  "From Green Park station in central London it takes only 15 minutes to get to Greenwich by the Tube. From there a taxi will get you to Woolwich in another 15. I took this journey a few months ago, and I learned from the taxi driver that I was just the latest member of a fairly crowded pilgrimage to see . . . well, what exactly?"
Not where Drummer (Private) Lee Rigby was brutally murdered last May so much as where the English people in their thousands came to lay wreaths, medals, and other mementoes on the weekends following his death. The taxi driver gave me a running commentary: Here was the road where the banks of flowers had spilled over the pavement into the street; they had now been removed by local government authorities, but visitors kept coming; now they usually left flowers at the entrance to the Woolwich Arsenal.
....
"... But the details of the murder — and the video recordings of it — still have the power to shock. Rigby’s mother and sister had to run in tears from the court to avoid seeing him deliberately run down by a car driven by the two defendants before they went on to cut him up with knives and cleavers."

From the UK Daily Mail: '...Muslim converts ran him down before almost decapitating him with meat cleaver and knives'
"There were gasps in Court Two when video footage of the soldier being mown down by a car, dragged into the road and executed was shown."


Drummer Rigby carried away by comrades from his unit.

The 30 second ad that should terrify incumbent Democrats

American Thinker   ... "Best of all, there's no real way to counter. Obamacare is theirs - they own it. And nothing they say will change that."

 
Obama's Obamacare Lie is Politifact's 'Lie of the Year,' Which Is Always About Obamacare   "There were solid odds that some Obamacare "lie" would be the winner, given that six of the 10 finalists selected by the fact-checking organization (which is part of the Tampa Bay Times) involved the law in one way or another. It was also likely to be this particular "pants on fire"-ranked statement given its significance in the public debate over the past few months. Perhaps if Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius had sworn under oath that Healthcare.gov would work perfectly on October 1, that might usurp the title. But as the supercut compiled by New York magazine suggests, this was pretty inescapable for Obama."   Yahoo News

Alan Caruba; The Power-Mad EPA

Warning Signs
"Barely a week goes by these days without hearing of some new demand by the Environmental Protection Agency that borders on the insane."
....
"The EPA is not about making sense. It is about over-interpreting laws passed by Congress in ways that now continually lead to cases before the Supreme Court. The Court is composed of lawyers, not scientists. In an earlier case, they ruled that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a “pollutant” when it is the one gas that all vegetation requires. Without it, nothing grows and all life on Earth dies."
....
I found this quote particularly interesting:



Dr. Soon and Driessen do not deny that coal-burning power plants emit an estimated 41-to-48 tons of mercury per year, “but U.S. forest fires emit at least 44 tons per year; cremation of human remains discharges 26 tons, Chinese power plants eject 400 tons; and volcanoes, subsea vents, geysers, and other sources spew out 9,000-10,000 additional tons per year.”

Coal Must Embrace All-Out Battle with Eco-Bullies  "Meekly accepting blame for climate change dooms the industry and the greater economy."
Imagine you have been wrongfully arrested, charged with murdering a child. Although the evidence against you is sketchy, the police have no other suspects, and with the government anxious to appease those demanding justice, your case is rushed to trial. Your lawyer decides that with public sentiment strongly against you, the best course of action is to plead guilty and to throw yourself at the mercy of the court.
 
 
  

Chinese navy, we salute you

 
Interesting and familiar.
We were on the transport USS Rockbridge (APA 228) departing Piraeus, Greece in 1961 when a Soviet freighter cut across our bow, causing our ship to swerve. There were a few curses and one-finger salutes thrown by the marines and sailors. 
 I read some time later that incidents such as this were used to test US Navy seamanship, but tend to think it was their way of challenging our presence in that part of the world.TD 

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

"The Comical Conservative" posts

 
Photo: "LIKE" if you Agree.

"Do Nothing" if you Disagree.

 

Victor Davis Hanson on A Culture in Ruins

PJ Media
obamacare_graffiti_11-24-13-3
"Lady Gaga reportedly spent $25 million on pop art to jazz up her new and apparently underwhelming album. In contrast, Miley Cyrus’ sexual twerking at the MTV Music Video Awards earned her more millions by exposing her rather unimpressive anatomy. Both make the once vulgar Madonna seem like June Cleaver, but at least raise an existential question: how much lower can we go?"
....
"I think Barack Obama once promised Americans that we would never lose our doctors or preexisting health plans when his Obamacare was enacted. But I am not sure anymore. He has explained that he never said that, and retroactively added that he had long warned us that our plans were in danger if they did not comply with his new guidelines. Maybe I’d forgotten that. Even if the president of the United States is lying about his lie, what difference does it make? Those who cite the lie, not the untruth teller, are those who seek to impose discriminatory standards."
Political Cartoons by Lisa Benson

After same-sex marriage is approved, where do we go from there?

North Dakota to Let Man in Same-Sex Marriage Wed Woman, Too " North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem filed a legal opinion last week confirming that the state does not recognize out-of-state same-sex marriages, allowing a man married to another man to come to North Dakota and marry a woman without divorcing his husband."

Judge: Two cheers for polygamy
Kody Brown and his four wives
"Kody Brown and his four wives, stars in the hit TLC reality show Sister Wives, filed a lawsuit in July 2011 that claimed they were immune from any legal punishment for living as polygamists. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups agreed. He ruled that a Utah law intended to discourage the creation of polygamous households violates the Brown clan’s constitutional rights."
 
Woman Marries Herself to Prove She Doesn’t Need a Husband to Be Happy  
Self-marriage can be a confusing concept to those who don’t know what it’s all about. Nadine isn’t alone, however, many others have done it before. It was even portrayed on the popular TV show Glee, where ‘Sue Sylvester’ ties the knot with herself. These ceremonies are considered secular and purely symbolic. New Age websites such as Encouraging Priestess even share ideas on how to perform self-marriage ceremonies. The idea behind these marriages is to help a person realize that they do not need anybody else to feel complete.

Grievance Inc.

CNN Guest: Jesus Being Depicted As White A Sign Of “White Supremacy”…  Video

Lib Rag Slate: “Yes, Opposing Gay Marriage Makes You A Homophobe”…

Naomi Schaefer Riley; Women think the workplace is unfair… this is why they’re wrong  "Having children clearly makes all the difference. Hymowitz says the “whole way the conversation is framed is wrong.” Feminists and policy makers, she notes, say that they want “absolute parity and that anything less represents real discrimination and injustice.” In fact, though, the lack of parity is largely the result of the choices so many women make for the sake of the next generation — working part time, taking time off to raise kids, asking for less demanding assignments, etc." 

Pull! Sally Kohn’s ridiculous ‘war on women’ salvo gloriously shot down
"And that’s how you desperately try to save a meme. Remove your side of the aisle from exclusive culpability and bash the other side for not being lucky enough to have the “D” after their names which earns the free pass, then talk about it on TV:"
Sally Kohn @sallykohn
We have a bipartisan sexual harassment problem! Yet policy war on women's rights & freedoms DEFINITELY waged by Republicans
 
Thomas Sowell; Who Is Racist?  Progress in race relations isn’t achieved by having minority leaders.
      
... "Over the generations, black leaders have ranged from noble souls to shameless charlatans. After the success of the civil-rights insurgency, the latter have come into their own, gaining money, power, and fame by promoting racial attitudes and actions that are counterproductive to the interests of those they lead."
 
Three Black Teens Kill White College Student; Racial Grievance Industry Silent

Creepiest Obama story yet

Creepiest Obama story yet 
U.S. Embassy London         @USAinUK
The newly installed tapestry of President Obama casts a warm smile over guests at an event @USAinUK last night.
 
  "Love the groveling by our embassy staff - such a "warm smile," eh?
"I did a little searching and discovered that the tapestry is not new. It was created by an artist named Chuck Close and was part of a two-tapestry display in honor of Obama during the Democratic Convention at the Mint Museum in North Carolina."

Creepiest Obama story yet just got creepier
Rick Moran called the hanging of a huge Barack Obama portrait at the US Embassy in London the "Creepiest Obama story yet" yesterday. But it gets worse. Check out the size and placement (hat tip: Weasel Zippers) of the portrait, a tapestry by renowned Chuck Close, a government-approved (National Medal of Arts winner) artist. Ladies and gentlemen, we are well into Dear Leader territory:"

"That's right, the portrait of The One We Have Been Waiting For is larger than Presidents Lincoln and Washington, who flank him, almost like apostles. The visual message declares that their significance is that they paved the way for the Lightworker. Was there nobody in the London Embassy able to understand how grotesque this is? Or were people siomply(sp) too afraid to speak up?"
More.

He smiles down on us...
 

United States Global Leadership (Updated)

Victor Davis Hanson; Obama’s Ironic Foreign Policy 
... "The election of 2008 changed all that. Barack Obama certainly did not see any special relationship with either Britain or Israel in the fashion of past presidents. He grandly announced that, given his Hawaiian roots, he would be our first Pacific president, and promised a pivot of American attention toward Asia. (That pivot impressed the Chinese as much as the vaunted French army of the 1930s deterred Hitler.)
"Nor was Obama just talk. He almost immediately declared a total exit from Iraq and withdrawal dates from Afghanistan. In Libya, “leading from behind” outsourced leadership to Britain and France. Benghazi was our thanks for bombing Gadhafi out of power."

GlobalSecurity.org   "Global leadership is urgently needed. The United Nations is incapable of providing this, particularly since decisions in its core leadership, the Security Council, often pit the United States against Russia, China, or both. The only nation capable of providing the needed global leadership is the United States, but it is withdrawing from this role, becoming more of an ordinary state, no longer a state forcefully promoting freedom and democracy. At the same time that it needs it badly, the world is rejecting US leadership for several major, and even contradictory, reasons."
....
The author's opinion on the upshot of our present status is this:
"Most of all, the United States must assume a clear and principled global leadership position. No other nation is in a position to do this. Without leadership in a globalized world facing a daunting range of economic, environmental and political challenges, there can only be turmoil, continuing confrontations, and a steady decline in US prosperity."

The president quality of American leadership at home and around the world.

Our Bored President   "Valerie Jarrett, Obama´s Rasputin, unwittingly provided us an answer to the question of why the Obama Presidency is such a man-caused disaster. There are few people who are close to the notoriously insular Barack Obama (a former aide, Neera Tanden, said that "Obama doesn´t call anyone, and he´s not close to almost anyone. It´s stunning that he´s in politics, because he really doesn´t like people") but Valerie Jarrett is among the select few. They have been friends for decades; she introduced Barack to Michelle; she is a constant presence in the White House, and highly unusual for a White House aide, enjoys her own Secret Service protective detail.   And when she described Barack Obama as having been "bored to death his whole life" she helped explained what lies behind a failed presidency." More

Obama Turned Benghazi into Al Qaeda Terrorist Hub   "Obama justified his Libyan War to the American people by claiming that people of Benghazi were in danger from Gaddafi. After he succeeded in overthrowing Gaddafi, Benghazi reverted to its radical roots and became a city run by terrorist militias leading to the murder of four Americans."

These next articles should be taken together as a unit:
1. 2009: Obama cancels missile defence and changes transatlantic politics
"As America disarms, war with Russia and their Chinese, Iranian, communist and Islamic allies gets closer by the day. From MSNNZ: Poland and three Baltic states have voiced their alarm over plans by Russia to move nuclear-capable missiles close to their borders."

2. The allies America had in 2008 react to the news.  "President Barack Obama's decision to ... ballistic-missile defense shield in Central Europe -- drawing immediate cheers in Moscow and criticism elsewhere .
...."The U.S. about-face was a major diplomatic coup for Moscow, which has fiercely opposed the previous plan to put a battery of 10 ballistic missile interceptors in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic."
(Which Czechs opposed in 2009)

3. Russia Ups the Ante  "Poland and three Baltic states have voiced their alarm over plans by Russia to move nuclear-capable missiles close to their borders.
"War with Russia is inevitable – unless (a) America surrenders pre-emptively, or (b) America returns to sanity and the Reagan doctrine of “peace through security.”
"Repeat after me: “Russia is our friend… Russia is our friend… Russia is our friend….”