Sunday, April 20, 2014

How Obama lost friends and influence in the Brics

The Financial Times
Matt Kenyon, US Brics
 
"When Barack Obama took office, he pledged a new overture to the world’s emerging powers. Today each of the Brics – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – is at loggerheads with America, or worse. Last month four of the five abstained in a UN vote condemning the fifth’s annexation of Crimea. Next month India is likely to elect as its new leader Narendra Modi, who says he has “no interest in visiting America other than to attend the UN in New York”. As the world’s largest democracy, and America’s most natural ally among the emerging powers, India’s is a troubling weathervane. How on earth did Mr Obama lose the Brics?"
...
"Second, the US public is tiring of its country’s global responsibilities. Mr. Obama’s real pivot is not to Asia but to America. In this he is only taking his cue from domestic sentiment. Yet his pivot to home is not going too well either. As Lawrence Summers, the former US Treasury secretary, recently observed, the US has two parties, one of which, the Democrats, refuses to endorse any kind of trade deal; the other of which, the Republicans, appears to detest all international institutions. Neither of the two parties listens to what Mr. Obama wants. If you believe the television ratings, the US public long ago tuned out from what he says.

"Little surprise, then, that the Brics are getting into the habit of talking among themselves."

Given the mood of the American public, I see little chance of a more forceful and competent president being able to reverse America's abdication.

Neal Boortz: Respect THIS President? Are you kidding?

Neal Boortz, Jan. 16, 2014;  "Please … don’t anyone approach me, email me, Tweet me or in any way communicate to me your belief, as moronic as it may be, that I am somehow “disrespecting” the office of the presidency.  It’s the actual president for whom I have no respect --- not the office he occupies.  0bama is a stain, a skid mark on the presidency.

"Frankly, after the disclosures of the past few days I don’t understand why hundreds of thousands of informed Americans aren’t marching down Pennsylvania Avenue with torches and pitchforks right now." 
 
The long and short of it?  Everything that 0bama and his dog washers have told us about Benghazi has been an intentional, premeditated lie.   If lying to the American people were a crime, 0bama would be in jail. 
            Just what have we learned the last few days?  Well, I’ll try to keep it simple here.  After all, informed Americans already know what the score is … so I’ll imagine that I’m addressing the Playstation/skateboard crowd here. 
            Here you go … after Ambassador Chris Stephens and three other Americans were killed in Benghazi, 0bama and his team were telling the American people that this was simply a demonstration that got out of control, a demonstration by Muslims upset with a YouTube video.  It was a lie.  He knew it was a lie. 
            We have now learned that within an hour of the attack on the consulate in Benghazi 0bama was told by then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that a terrorist attack against Americans was under way in Benghazi.  What’s more, our Dear Ruler was told that the attack – the assassination of an American diplomat and the murders of three other Americans -- was being carried out by two al Qaeda terrorist groups.
    
        You see, 0bama had a bit of a problem here.  It was an election year.  He wasn’t even near finished with his “fundamental transformation” of our country.  He had no accomplishments to speak of.  The economy sucked, job creation was lagging, people were dropping out of the workforce, Americans were starting to get an idea that 0bamacare was going to be a disaster.  He had NOTHING .. nothing except the millions of Americans he managed to add to the government teat.  Oh … and he had the media.  Now 0bama had been prancing around the country on the campaign trail telling anyone who would listen that “Osama bin Laden is dead and al Qaeda is on the run.”  The media was dutifully repeating this line at every opportunity.  So suddenly, less than two months before the election, 0bama is presented with a situation that, if widely known, would certainly show that al Qaeda was most certainly NOT on the run.  In fact, it was out there assassinating a U.S. ambassador. 
            So what to do?  After all, 0bama has a fundraiser in Las Vegas, and nothing can be allowed to get between him and some more campaign dollars.  So 0bama gets his brain trust together at the White House, and they come up with this absurd story about some YouTube video getting some Muzzie turbans in a wad over there in Libya --- then 0bama hops on Air Force One and heads for Las Vegas.
            Now to this very day you have liberals slamming George Bush for not erupting into some sort of a frenzy in front of all those school children in Florida when he learned about the Muslim attack on New York City and Washington.  But 0bama running off to Las Vegas?  That gets virtually NO adverse reaction from the media.  And why?  Well .. because the media was 0bama’s other ally when the Muzzies attacked in Benghazi.  Obama didn’t have to worry about what the moochers and parasites would think.  They were and are only worried about their next government checks.  But 0bama had the media, and he knew it.  Whatever story he came up with he could depend on the media to take that story and run with it – to parrot it incessantly and to defend it if and when information to the contrary came forward.  Now we have that information to the contrary – big time.  And the media?  Well, except for Fox News, they’re pretty much ignoring it.  After all, they have Chris Christie and that lane closure thing to obsess over.  Christie, you see, was a threat to Queen Hillary, and if the mainstream media gets to chose between a story that damages Hillary and shows 0bama to be the wretched, unqualified, incompetent liar that he is; or to destroy someone who might present a threat to the media’s next appointee for the presidency ---- well, you know which way they’re going to go.
            Disrespect the presidency?  Get real.  There is no better way to show your respect for the office of the president, and your love for this country, than to do everything you can to expose 0bama.  I may not have a radio show any more --- but there’s always this blog and Twitter --- and I’m just getting started.
 Political Cartoons by Steve Breen

Hitler finds out he can't keep his doctor under Obamacare

 

Hat tip to fellow Marine; Cpl Robert Hope

Obamacare Should Remind Us We Are Not 'Subjects,' We Are People

Laura Hollis is an attorney and professor at Norte Dame University.  

Prof. Laura Hollis    
"The President, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid (with no small help from Justice John Roberts) take away our health care, and we allow it. They take away our insurance, and we allow it. They take away our doctors, and we allow it. They charge us thousands of dollars more a year, and we allow it. They make legal products illegal, and we allow it. They cripple our businesses, and we allow it. They announce by fiat that we must ignore our most deeply held beliefs – and we allow it.
"Where is your spine, America?" ...
Laura Hollis is an attorney and teaches entrepreneurship and business law at the University of Notre Dame. She resides in Indiana with her husband and two children.

He is Risen!

He is risen, indeed!
Happy Easter.
"Easter is not about bunnies or chicks or colored eggs or plastic grass.
Easter is about the jubilation of this."
 
From  Lucianne

You lie! Reporters accuse Obama of deception, demagoguery so he can get attention

Washington Examiner
AP Photo
 
"Prominent Washington correspondents are accusing President Obama and his aides of knowingly stretching the truth on issues like the so-called women's pay gap just to create controversy and keep issues -- and the president -- relevant."
...
"Basically, it’s an effort of creating a controversy for the sake of having a controversy to put an issue before the public and make the president’s position prominent. He wrote that the administration’s made-up claim that women earn 77-cents for every man was “stray voltage in action” because it created a food fight over the 77-cent figure, allowing the White House to strike at GOP foes."

                                               
Slate: The refined cynicism of the president.  "How do I get you to pay attention to this story? I could type out a balanced tale about an incremental change in White House spin and message control, relying on they probably wouldn't stay on the page very long. The second would excite the emotions. Conservatives would approve. Liberals would denounce it and point out the exaggerations. My editor would smile because the controversy would attract more readers."
your discernment, patience, and kindness toward all the creatures of the Earth. Or, I could say that Barack Obama is a cynical and manipulative liar. The first approach would get a modest number of thoughtful readers, but they probably wouldn't stay on the page very long. The second would excite the emotions. Conservatives would approve. Liberals would denounce it and point out the exaggerations. My editor would smile because the controversy would attract more readers.

"This is trolling. I've decided against it, but the White House has not."

First the Green Gestapo Came For our Lightbulbs, Then our Iced Drinks and Hot Showers. Now They're After Our Meatballs...

Breitbart London
 
"A truly emetic announcement from the grim but indispensable Swedish flatpack furniture emporium IKEA: they are considering changing the recipe of their most popular food line - meatballs - in order to help save the world from global warming."
...
"What's worse, though, is that IKEA actually admits to allowing the kind of food it serves in its restaurants to be dictated not by the needs of its customers - who order 150 million plates of meatballs every year - but by activists from a hard-left environmental NGO like the World Wildlife Fund. That's not capitalism. That's not customer service. That's eco fascism."..

Cherokee women want to meet Elizabeth Warren on book tour

Legal Insurrection
 
http://youtu.be/z10qDag_Q_0
 
"To get Warren to understand why they are hurt and angry that she assumed, then discarded, Native American identity."
 
"In Elizabeth Warren’s new book, A Fighting Chance, Warren claims to be “hurt and angry” that people criticized her claim to be Native American, specifically Cherokee.  Warren blamed the Scott Brown campaign, the local Republican Party, and “some blogger.”
"In fact, Warren has no one to blame but herself for her false claim to be Cherokee.  Read Elizabeth Warren Wiki, and these posts responding to the claims in her book:
"Warren will be launching a nationwide book tour.  Someone who wants to meet Warren is Twila Barnes." ...

 Polly's Granddaughter  "A little Cherokee history and genealogy mixed in with a whole lot of truth."
"Elizabeth Warren is a candidate for the U.S. Senate from the state of Massachusetts. She claims she is of Cherokee descent. She has come under fire for possibly using that claim to give her career a boost at a time when Harvard Law was under pressure to hire more minority professors. We have done extensive research on her ancestry and on the stories she has told trying to back up her claim. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest she actually had a Cherokee or American Indian ancestor. Despite repeated requests for her to release her personnel records from the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Law School, she refuses to do so."

Saturday, April 19, 2014

Anti-Bullying Bill Could Jail People Who Criticize Politicians

Reason.com   "School’s out for summer and Nanny of the Month is taking the opportunity to salute the zealots within the otherwise laudable anti-bullying movement. They take a real problem--few things are more loathsome than picking on the vulnerable--and bungle the response, as has been done with most every “get tough!” effort from D.A.R.E., the failed anti-drug program, to all the idiotic iterations of the “zero tolerance” fad."


Hat tip to Thomas Anderson, formerly of the 82nd Airborne Division

"Not only did this month’s top nanny introduce a bill that would criminalize speech deemed to be bullying--up to a year in the clink!--she introduced a bill that, according to UCLA First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh, is not limited to speech about children (despite it being touted with the typical “for the children!” justifications). Volokh notes that the bill, if passed, could punish harsh speech directed at journalists, academics, celebrities, politicians, and the like, if the speech results in “substantial emotional distress.”
 
"Presenting the Nanny of the Month for June 2013: New Mexico State Rep. Mary Helen Garcia!"
 

The Slow Death of Free Speech

A small language advisory here.
Mark Steyn   "These days, pretty much every story is really the same story:
  • In Galway, at the National University of Ireland, a speaker who attempts to argue against the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) programme against Israel is shouted down with cries of ‘Fucking Zionist, fucking pricks… Get the fuck off our campus.’
  • In California, Mozilla’s chief executive is forced to resign because he once made a political donation in support of the pre-revisionist definition of marriage.
  • At Westminster, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee declares that the BBC should seek ‘special clearance’ before it interviews climate sceptics, such as fringe wacko extremists like former Chancellor Nigel Lawson.
  • In Massachusetts, Brandeis University withdraws its offer of an honorary degree to a black feminist atheist human rights campaigner from Somalia.
  • In London, a multitude of liberal journalists and artists responsible for everything from Monty Python to Downton Abbey sign an open letter in favour of the first state restraints on the British press in three and a quarter centuries. 
Universities are no longer institutions of inquiry but ‘safe spaces’ where delicate flowers of diversity of race, sex, orientation, ‘gender fluidity’ and everything else except diversity of thought have to be protected from exposure to any unsafe ideas.
"As it happens, the biggest ‘safe space’ on the planet is the Muslim world." ...

Megyn Kelly exposes Obama’s embarrassing hypocrisy on something he did today…

The Right Scoop
"Today Obama signed Ted Cruz’s bill that banned Iran’s terrorist UN Ambassador from coming into the United States, a bill that passed the Senate and the House without a single nay vote. But Obama apparently also issued a signing statement to the new law that said he would take the legislation as guidance, suggesting he may not enforce it.

"She talks to J. Christopher Adams about it and plays some footage of Obama that Adams called ‘embarrassingly hypocritical’."

Kelley then showed this video: Obama on Presidential Signing Statements


...This bill is a first step toward making it equally clear to Iran’s leaders that if they wish to enter into better relations with us, they should at the very least stop doing things like nominating one of the 1979 hostage takers to be their representative at the U.N...

Good Friday and Easter: Walk Jesus's Steps Through Via Dolorosa From Your PC

Yahoo Business
Good Friday and Easter: Walk Jesus's Steps Through Via Dolorosa From Your PC
 
"As Christians around the world prepare themselves for Easter, here's an opportunity for people to retrace the steps of Jesus as he walked through Via Dolorosa. It happens to be a street in the Old City of Jerusalem, through which Jesus walked, carrying his cross, on the way to his crucifixion.

"The route from the Antonia Fortress west of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which happens to be a distance of about 600 metres, has been a famous and celebrated place of Christian pilgrimage for a long time now.

"How to Explore Via Dolorosa Via PC

"Thanks to Google's Street View technology, this most painful path, also called the 'Way of Sorrows' or 'Way of Suffering,' can be explored fully. Click here to explore the path from your PC.

"After you're done walking along the Via Dolorosa, Google's technology also allows you to see the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, visit the Western Wall and the Mount of Olives.

"Apart from all this, Google also says that users "can explore the narrow streets of Jerusalem's Old City and each of its four quarters, walk along the Via Dolorosa and see the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, visit the Western Wall and the Mount of Olives. You can stop by the Biblical Zoo, then visit the Israel Museum and the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum — and explore more with the Art Project and the Yad Vashem photo archive. Or you can stroll through Tel Aviv's bohemian Neve Tzedek neighbourhood and the ancient port of Jaffa, and take a virtual trip to some of Tel Aviv's scenic beaches or to Haifa's Baha'i Gardens."