Our Perpetually Surprised President

NRO   "Our president’s time in office has been one of wonder and astonishment. He was surprised by the depth of the recession when he came into office. He then became surprised at the duration of the bad economy.
He was surprised to win the Nobel Prize for Peace.
He was surprised there were no shovel-ready jobs.
He was surprised the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was running guns to Mexican drug cartels.
He was surprised S&P downgraded the United States’ credit rating for the first time in history.
He was surprised the IRS was targeting conservatives.
He was surprised the Arab Spring imploded.
He was surprised his CIA director was under investigation by the Justice Department.
He was surprised reporters were under surveillance by the Justice Department. He was surprised  Catholic bishops were upset                   about Obamacare’s contraception mandate.
He’s regularly surprised by bad unemployment numbers.
He was surprised the sequester actually went into effect.
He was surprised Israel’s defense minister excoriated the Iran nuke deal.
He was surprised by the opposition to his plan to strike Syria.
He was surprised the Obamacare website was a debacle.
He was surprised how complicated it is to buy health insurance."

 

ABC Swoons: 50 Ways to Celebrate Michelle Obama’s Birthday

NBC   "In preparation for the first lady’s 50th birthday on Saturday, ABC News has served up a fawning list 50 ways to celebrate the occasion.

"It highlights Michelle Obama’s most memorable and glamorous moments. Below, ten examples from the list, which you can read in full here:" 

 

 The first suggestion: Dance to Beyoncé, followed by these:

Move into a massive new house with your family and invite your mother to move in too

Make the cover of Vogue

Buy a Jason Wu dress

Hang out with your friend, Oprah

Roll your eyes at House Speaker John Boehner or the Danish prime minister

Hug, kiss and fist bump the President of the United States

​Travel the world on Air Force One

​Dine at Spiagga in Chicago

​Hang out in Hawaii for an extra week as an early birthday gift

 FLOTUS        ✔ @FLOTUS Follow

Excited to join Barack in the 50+ club today… check out my @AARP card! –mo

 

Target issues details for signing up for free credit monitoring

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Target released details Monday on how customers can sign up for a year of free credit monitoring from Experian, including identity theft insurance, in light of Target's recent data breach that affected between 70 million and 110 million people.
"Target sent out emails to customers Monday from president Gregg Steinhafel and placed a full page ad in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other major newspapers, apologizing again. The email directs them to a website where they can sign up until the end of April.
....
"All Target customers who shopped at U.S. stores can take advantage of the offer. The free credit monitoring starts once people enroll, Target said.

"Here's how to sign up:
■ To request an activation code, enter your name and email address on Target's website, creditmonitoring.target.com. The deadline to request the code is April 23. Credit reports are for a person, not a credit card number, so people who used multiple credit or debit cards at Target only need to sign up once."  Read more from Journal Sentinel:
 

Obamacare’s Fishy Navigators; In New Mexico, 38 of them turned up in a federal crime database.

More photosnark from Rich Terrell

NRO  "When navigators sign up people for health coverage under the Affordable Care Act, they have access to private information, including Social Security numbers, financial data, and health records.

 

"Certified New Mexico navigators had been charged with crimes including: eight domestic-violence charges, including aggravated battery and aggravated assault of a household member; four drug charges; two larceny charges; one petty-theft charge; one shoplifting charge; and two child-abuse charges. There were also several driving-related charges, including DWIs, DUIs, and speeding or traffic crimes. In at least two instances, navigators had traffic charges for lacking insurance."

"To my friends at The New York Times: Journalism has died at this paper."

Althouse  "Do you really believe this wasn't a pre-planned terrorist attack — preplanned terrorist attack with Al Qaeda affiliates in charge?" asked Lindsey Graham today.

"There's not one report coming from Benghazi about a protest around the embassy.... People in charge of security never reported a protest because there was not one...."

And John McCain, calling the NYT an "ever-reliable surrogate for the Obama administration," said:

"The false narrative that The New York Times has been trying to further is intended to undermine the conclusion that the Senate Intelligence Committee has effectively arrived at, that is, that the administration knew or should have known of the terrorist threat present in Benghazi during the relevant period and should have pre-positioned assets, or made other preparations, that would have prevented Americans there from being harmed or otherwise ensured their security."

The Israel Double Standard

This post was one of several included in a compilation here earlier today titled:
Reading list: Boy, did we ever stiff those Iranians!  We feel it should stand alone.

Victor Davis Hanson  .... "Nazis and racists used to spearhead Jewish hatred using ancient crackpot defamations that date back to the Jewish diaspora into Europe after the Roman destruction of Judea. But lately, anti-Semitism has become more a left-wing pathology. It is driven by the cheap multicultural trashing of the West. Jewish people here and abroad have become convenient targets for those angry with supposedly undeserved Western success and privilege.

"Aside from the old envy, and racial and religious hatred, I think cowardice explains the new selective anti-Semitism. Kanye West would not dare slander radical Muslims, given the violence and threats against European cartoonists and filmmakers who have dared to create work perceived as insulting to Islam. The American Studies Association would not call for a boycott of Russia despite its endemic persecution of gays. After all, Russian president Vladimir Putin is as unpredictable as Israeli politicians are forbearing." ....

(Below) This is how Artintifada ("Artists against Zionism, Artists against Racism, Artist(sp) against Israel") would have us picture Israel.

Artists for Justice

The Communist Party Hails De Blasio

Did you know Mayor De Blasio honeymooned in Castro's Cuba?

American Thinker  "For a long time, the communist left has used the word "progressive" to cloak its agenda. This phenomenon is hardly new. It has gone on since at least the 1930s, not long after the American Communist Party was founded in Chicago."
....
"Unfortunately, thanks to the left's takeover of education and media, it continues unabated, and is moving full steam ahead in Barack Obama's fundamentally transformed America, where the far left seems invigorated unlike ever before. The communist left has sudden new energy in the "progressive" mayoral victory of Bill De Blasio, the New York mayor who once raised money for the Nicaraguan communists and honeymooned in Castro's Cuba." More.
....
This ain't my daddy's Democrat Party.
"Bobby and Jack [Kennedy] despised communists, who hated them in return, and even targeted them for assassination. They would have easily detected the loaded words carefully chosen (and omitted) in De Blasio's speech."...

The Communist Party's publication "is carefully avoiding the "c" word (communism) in favor of the "p" word (progressivism)."

You expected this, didn't you? Hitler finds out he can't keep his doctor under Obamacare

  Youtube; Hat tip to Harley Standlee of Placerville, CA  

Hitler Downfall parodies: 25 worth watching
"Subtitled parodies of Adolf Hitler's last days in the Berlin bunker, as depicted in the 2004 Second World War film Downfall, have become one of the web's most enduring memes."  Language advisory in a number of them, regrettably.
 

More here

Sen. John McCain: Obama Is ‘Absolutely’ Responsible For The Fall Of Fallujah. Brit Hume agrees, wouldn't you say?

Downtrend  ... "McCain, while appearing on Al Jazeera, talked about recent events in Fallujah, Iraq. He said that the, during the second battle of Fallujah, our country lost 96 great soldiers. In addition to that, some 600 were wounded.

"And now, today, there are black flags flying all around that city, an indication that it has fallen to Al Qaeda forces." ... 

Brit Hume: Considerable Strategic Gains In Iraq, Bought With US Blood And Treasure, Are Fast Disappearing    “ 'What was bequeathed to President Obama was an Iraq described as recently as last September, by the U.S. State Department, as a ‘key partner for the U.S. in the region as well as a voice of moderation and democracy in the Middle East,’ but it hardly seems to be that now. Not only did President Obama pull all U.S. troops out of the country, after failing to negotiate an agreement to allow a residual force to stay, he has generally acted since as if Iraq did not exist…' ” 

Congress offers glimmer of hope for incandescent lightbulb

theweek.com

Fox News  "The House's passage of a $1.1 trillion spending bill Wednesday that dictates the budgets for all federal agencies may be a desperately needed lifeline for the lightbulb.
"The bill includes a prohibition on funding for “the administration’s onerous ‘lightbulb’ standard,” as Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers, R-Ky., described it, which had sought to dramatically improve the energy efficiency of ordinary incandescent lightbulbs but ultimately spelled the end of the road for the century-old technology." ...

Wearing your pants down under

Tim Whyatt

"Tim Whyatt is a cartoonist who lives on a remote island
about 10,000 miles off the coast of New Jersey called Australia."
Hat tip to Brian Lindgren;  Casper, Wyoming

Reading list: Boy, did we ever stiff those Iranians!

http://terrellaftermath.com/

 

Gatestone Institute: Kerry's Peace Process Double Standards It is interesting to see how one comment from an Israeli minister has managed to strain relations between the U.S. Administration and Israel, while fiery rhetoric and street demonstrations against Kerry and Obama in the Palestinian territories and Arab capitals are completely ignored by Washington. If Kerry really cares about the peace process, he also needs to ask the Palestinian Authority and Arab governments to lower the tone and stop inciting against him and the U.S. Unless, of course, those statements and protests do not offend him. Khaled Abu Toameh

George Will has this point of view: ‘Iran is Claiming Victory and I Think Probably Rightly So’  

JAWA: John Kerry Opens Mouth, Proves He's Stupid   "Of course, many Leftists would simply call this level of stupidity sophistication, not knowing that to be sophisticated has until recent times been a bad thing.

Your Sec. State:

And so we have a huge common interest in dealing with this issue of poverty, which in many cases is the root cause of terrorism

Michael Rubin in 2008 asked; Can a Nuclear Iran Be Contained or Deterred?

 Ya’alon apologizes for personally offending Kerry, but does not recant   "Israel’s Defense Minister Ya’alon was forced to apologize Tuesday night, Jan. 14, for off-the-record remarks he made to reporters, which relegated US Secretary of State John Kerry’s role in the oft-stalled Israel-Palestinian peace talks to “misplaced obsession and messianic fervor.” He was also quoted as dismissing the US security plan as “not worth the paper it was written on.' ”

John and Joe's Iranian Adventure!

Victor Davis Hanson: The prejudice against Israel in diplomatic matters is as troubling as more crude bigotry against Jews.    ... "The sort of anti-Semitism we see from buffoons like Dieudonné M’bala M’bala is appalling, but the double standard to which Israel is held in matters of foreign policy by those who should know better is in many ways even more galling."

Instructing Iran in Terrorist Etiquette   ... "Iran’s senior officials suffer from no such delicacy toward the U.S. On Tuesday, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani gloated on Twitter that in the recent Geneva agreement, “world powers surrendered to Iranian nation’s will.” Meanwhile, Iran’s foreign minister ... Javad Zarif, made a point while visiting Lebanon of going to lay a wreath on the grave of assassinated Hezbollah terrorist kingpin... Zarif did this before a bevy of photographers, ensuring that his thumb-in-the-eye to the U.S. would make news."

 

Obama Tells Congress to ‘Give Peace a Chance’ After Setting Jan. 20 (in time for the State of the Union address)Iran Deal Implementation  “ 'Given these stakes, it’s regrettable that the president does not want to work with Congress to bolster his negotiating hand with additional sanctions, which would go into effect should Iran fail to meet its commitments. If Iran is committed to comprehensively addressing its nuclear program, there is no reason such legislation shouldn’t be welcomed.' ”