Drop The Charade

Moonbattery » Obama Grants Highest Civilian Honor to Radical Socialist Dolores Huerta: "What else can Obama do to disgrace the office of the presidency? I know — award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a commie:

President Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Tuesday to Dolores Huerta, an 82-year-old labor activist and co-founder of the United Farm Workers union.

Huerta is also an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America.

DSA describes itself as “the largest socialist organization in the United States, and the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International.”

Readers might remember Huerta as the unhinged moonbat who shrieked at Tucson schoolchildren that “Republicans hate Latinos.”

She has said of socialist dictator Hugo Chavez’s oppressive and disastrously failed policies, “Why can’t we do that here in the United States?”

By now we can drop the absurd charade that Barack Hussein is not a socialist."

Read More......

The LBJ Way

The Times on Obama - By John Yoo - The Corner - National Review Online: "Pointing out the hypocrisies of the Obama administration is becoming a sport, and the New York Times is only providing more targets. Candidate Obama promised to close Guantanamo Bay, but President Obama had no plan for an alternative prison. Candidate Obama criticized the Bush-administration interrogation policies (on which I worked), but President Obama sought to create exceptions to Miranda warnings (which he demands) for terrorists so that FBI questioning can continue. Candidate Obama criticized the Bush administration’s war approach to terrorism, but President Obama has ramped up the use of drone attacks to kill terrorist leaders.

But the most disturbing aspect of the latest NYT insider’s account of the war on terrorism, no doubt timed to shore up Candidate Obama’s national-security credentials for his re-election campaign, is the selection process for drone targets. Apparently President Obama personally selects the targets and approves each operation. This is both an incredible misuse of presidential time and a serious distortion of proper war management. Does no one remember the problems created when Lyndon Johnson took a similar hand in the Vietnam war?"

Good God what an ignorant doofus.

Read More......

30mph

RealClearPolitics - 'Meaningful Work': ""Education" is a word that covers a lot of very different things, from vital, life-saving medical skills to frivolous courses to absolutely counterproductive courses that fill people with a sense of grievance and entitlement, without giving them either the skills to earn a living or a realistic understanding of the world required for a citizen in a free society.

The lack of realism among many highly educated people has been demonstrated in many ways.

When I saw signs in Yellowstone National Park warning visitors not to get too close to a buffalo, I realized that this was a warning that no illiterate farmer of a bygone century would have needed. No one would have had to tell him not to mess with a huge animal that literally weighs a ton, and can charge at you at 30 miles an hour."

Or: As Eric put it they are living in a "bourgeois illusion bred of money and security". At least until the buffalo stomp them.

Read More......

Lunatic Deceptions

Belmont Club » Friday Night Follies: "From that point of view, Operation Babarossa was just a means to an end. Not even a strategical end, but some darkly religious one. The result was a monstrous tail wagging the geopolitical dog. In a smaller sense the campaign in Afghanistan may also have been fought for inverted reasons. It became useful a “war of necessity” simply because someone needed a talking point to contrast to the “war of choice” which was Iraq.  The battles were useful as political statements to rival factions in Washington and in politics.  Their significance on the ground was perhaps entirely incidental. In the end, Afghanistan proved a war of choice too, and as such disposable.

It seems strange but true that things are often undertaken for reasons other than those given. As the common European currency crumbles, it is instructive to reflect that it was never created for itself. As an act of economic policy it was lunacy. What it had to recommend it was political ambition. When the simple common market idea became transformed into the  project to build a new European superstate, they needed a cement to glue everything together and the Euro was it."

And the sheep continue their bleating.

Read More......

Memorial Day 2012, 3pm

Articles: A Day to Remember Our Fallen: "On Memorial Day, many Americans have a barbeque, spend the day in a department store looking for sales, or otherwise enjoy a day off work.  What often does not happen is a reflection on the true meaning of the holiday.

Memorial Day is intended to be a day of remembrance for those who have died serving this great nation during war.  In December 2000, the National Day of Remembrance was founded to help re-educate and remind Americans of the true meaning and tradition of Memorial Day, by asking that at 3 pm local time, a moment of remembrance and respect be observed with a moment of silence."

Read More......

Stone Age Trinity Update: Mimetic Desire

Thou Can’t Not Covet - Science News: "As every kid knows, the very best toy is the one that someone else is playing with. A new study on covetous adults explains why other people’s possessions always seem better.

Seeds of this desire are sown in the mirror neuron system, a part of the brain that is activated in a similar pattern whether a person is performing an action or merely watching someone else do it.

“Mimetic desire” was first articulated by the French philosopher René Girard in the 1980s. Envy can spread among people like a disease, a force that explains much of human behavior, Girard proposed. Now, French neuroscientists have verified the phenomenon and even attempted to explain how it happens."

It's short, RTWT.

And of all days we learn the French are making a useful contribution on Memorial Day. Of course, socialist envy had just reared it head (even stronger) again in France so I guess it IS the laboratory for this sort of science, non?

Oh yes, about that title...

Read More......

Nudge, Nudge, Wink, Winking Out (Detroit Edition)

Moonbattery » Detroit Goes Dark: "Nothing could be more emblematic of the contrast between leftism and liberty than this famous night view of the Korean peninsula:

Detroit — America’s most liberal city — is close on North Korea’s heels:

Detroit, whose 139 square miles contain 60 percent fewer residents than in 1950, will try to nudge them into a smaller living space by eliminating almost half its streetlights.

“To nudge” — liberalese for “to corral” — is a favorite term of Comrade Obama’s Regulatory Czar Cass Sunstein."

Read More......

On Truly Effective Regulation

Glad We Saved 'Em - Ricochet.com: "Okay, stipulated: JP Morgan is a publicly-traded company.  If the shareholders want to get rid of the incompetents who manage the bank, they should move to do so.  None of my business.  (Well, actually, it's some of my business: I own some JP Morgan shares....)

But let's all remember this episode the next time the banks come, hat in hand, for taxpayer-subsidized bailouts.

I've said it before in this space, but it bears repeating: the only -- only -- banking regulation that's effective is the sight of bankers selling apples on the street.

Next time, let them sink."

Skin. In. The. Game.

Read More......

Into The Sea….

Instapundit » Blog Archive » FROM BILL WHITTLE: Afterburner: Into The Sea….: "FROM BILL WHITTLE: Afterburner: Into The Sea.

Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 8:50 am"

Read More......

A Little History They're Trying To Stuff Down The Memory Hole

Next ice age « Calder's Updates: "Those who rewrite the history of climate science to suit the man-made global warming hypothesis hate to be reminded that global cooling and the threat of a new ice age rang alarm bells in the 1960s and 1970s. In the Orwellian manner they try to airbrush out the distinguished experts involved, and to say it was just a scare story dreamed up by stupid reporters like me.

No, we didn’t make it up. I was present in Rome in 1961 when global cooling was already the main concern at a conference of the World Meteorological Organization and Unesco (see the Unesco reference). The discussions were led by Hubert Lamb of the UK Met Office, who went on to found the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

A persistent concern of Lamb and others was that the world might return to a Little Ice Age like that of 300 years ago. But the improving knowledge of glacial history, and especially the apparent brevity of warm interglacials, prompted anxiety about a full-blown ice age. George Kukla, together with Robert Matthews of Brown University, convened a conference in 1972 entitled “The Present Interglacial: How and When will it End?”, and reported it in Science magazine."

This is a definite RTWT.

Read More......

Innumeracy (Part 4,893,921)

The stunning chart that shows the Obama spending binge really happened « The Enterprise Blog: "But there were a few problems with Nutting’s numbers. Nutting’s methodology assumes spending in the first year of a presidential term should be credited to the previous president. OK, fine. But he attributed a $410 billion spending bill in March of 2009 to George W. Bush even though it was signed by Barack Obama. Nutting also didn’t use inflation adjusted numbers.

But I did both of those and got wildly different results from Nutting, as seen in the chart at the top of this post. (Note: I looked at absolute spending as opposed to the rate of increase.)

My numbers show that spending under the ’10-’13 Obama budgets far outstrips spending by a generation of presidential predecessors. This should not be surprising since spending as a share of GDP under Obama is the highest in U.S. history outside of World War II."

Oh yes. And then there's Mark Levin's point from "Liberty and Tyranny" that in inflation adjusted dollars WWII cost something like $3.6B. Obama's deficits are already on the order of $5T.

And never mind that if FedGov used accrual accounting as it should, the deficit this year alone would be $5T ... according to ... USA Today.

Ugghh.

But don't worry, they'll still be endorsing O Duce.

Read More......

Second Class

Mary Ann Glendon: Why the Bishops Are Suing the U.S. Government - WSJ.com: "This week Catholic bishops are heading to federal courts across the country to defend religious liberty. On Monday they filed 12 lawsuits on behalf of a diverse group of 43 Catholic entities that are challenging the Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) sterilization, abortifacient and birth-control insurance mandate.

Like most Americans, the bishops have long taken for granted the religious freedom that has enabled this nation's diverse religions to flourish in relative harmony. But over the past year they have become increasingly concerned about the erosion of conscience protections for church-related individuals and institutions. Their top-rated program for assistance to human trafficking victims was denied funding for refusing to provide "the full range of reproductive services," including abortion. For a time, Catholic Relief Services faced a similar threat to its international relief programs. The bishops fear religious liberty is becoming a second-class right."

Read More......

Debacle

Obama's Debacle - By David Rothkopf | Foreign Policy: "He cut out the generals. He cut out the secretary of defense. He cut out the secretary of state. And in the end, he produced a schizophrenic policy that will almost certainly go down as the greatest foreign-policy debacle of his administration.

Afghanistan may not be Barack Obama's Vietnam, but that is only because it has failed to stir national tensions in the way the war in Southeast Asia did. He may therefore get away with his errors in judgment and his victimization by circumstance to a degree that Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon could not. But it is impossible to read accounts like David Sanger's in the New York Times this weekend without concluding that the primary drivers behind U.S. AfPak policy for the past three years have been politics, naivete, and intellectual dishonesty. "

Read More......

Annular Solar Eclipse 2012

Annular Solar Eclipse 2012 – data and images | Watts Up With That?: "What you may see (with a proper filter) is this:"

What I "saw" in New Mexico over the internet was this (yes, someone let me post to Pinterest -- the rest are here):

Source: events.slooh.com via Studio on Pinterest

Read More......

Bain or Bane?

Bain or Bane? | Power Line: "That’s my hope, anyway. Michael Ramirez sees it the same way. Here he contrasts Romney’s successful leadership of Bain with Obama’s failures as the bane of our economy:"

Read More......

Composite All The Way Down

Instapundit » Blog Archive » MARK STEYN: The Eternally Shifting Sands of Obama’s Biography. So the lunatic theory that Barack…: "Whereas Kenya puts you at the heart of what, in an otherwise notably orderly decolonization process by the British, was a bitter and violent struggle against the white man’s rule. Cool! The composite chicks dig it, and the literary agents. . . . In a post-modern America, the things that Gatsby attempted to fake – an elite schooling – Obama actually had; the things that Gatsby attempted to obscure – the impoverished roots – merely add to Obama’s luster. Gatsby claimed to have gone to Oxford, but nobody knew him there because he never went; Obama had a million bucks’ worth of elite education at Occidental, Columbia and Harvard Law, and still nobody knew him (“Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him”). In that sense, Obama out-Gatsbys Gatsby.

The thing about Obama is, there’s no there there. It’s composite all the way down.

Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 7:40 am"

Click through and read Steyn's whole thing. Expertly done.

Read More......

All 57 States

Ace of Spades HQ: "From JohnE..."

Read More......

Was Obama Himself the First Birther?

Ed Driscoll » Was Obama Himself the First Birther?: "Related: Jim Treacher squares the circle: “Obama wasn’t born in Kenya, except when he claims he was born in Kenya:”

Either Obama was born in Kenya or he wasn’t. I remain skeptical that he was. The question is, then: Why did he claim to be? What advantage did he think it gave him at the time?

Maybe Elizabeth Warren can tell us…

To coin a popular Blogospheric phrase, heh."

Indeed.

And you need to watch Jack Cashill:


But Jack is too optimistic. This will all die out within the next few days and there will most definitely be no questions asked in the press room. Even if corpses are required to make it so. Say, I wonder if Jack has a convenient heart condition like Andrew did?

Read More......

The histOry

Obama’s record « A Brief History…: "I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:

“He said, ‘Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator.’”

“Oh, you are? Who might that be?”

“Barack Obama.”

Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.

“I took all the beatings and insults and endured all the racist comments over the years from nasty Republican committee chairmen,” State Senator Rickey Hendon, the original sponsor of landmark racial profiling and videotaped confession legislation yanked away by Jones and given to Obama, complained to me at the time. “Barack didn’t have to endure any of it, yet, in the end, he got all the credit."

Read More......

COTD^3

The PJ Tatler » Fauxcahontas and Faux Kenyan? Liberals and False IDs: "Elizabeth Warren – Cherokee contributed recipes to the cook book Pow Wow Chow"

This is one of the most hilarious comment sequences I've ever seen (click to enlarge):

Read More......

Do I Have Say Du'O Anymore?

Obama’s bin Laden leaks angered military | Washington Examiner: "When they published their revealing book last August about the nation’s fight against terrorism, the authors, two New York Times national security reporters, immediately felt heat from the Pentagon for dishing too much operational info about the killing of Osama bin Laden.

“I was stopped by a very senior officer in the special operations community who basically wanted to rip my lungs out,” said Thom Shanker, who co-authored “Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda,” with Eric Schmitt.

But, he revealed at a counter terrorism expo this week, the info came directly and officially from the White House, not some garbage can digging operation. “I said to him, ‘Sir, that information came officially to us from the podium at the White House,’” Shanker said."

Read More......

And A Good Thing Too

iowahawk: One Afternoon In a Garage in Reno, Nevada: "When I heard about how this innovative $23,000 public-private partnership was helping Paul and Val, I couldn't wait to fly out here on Air Force One and see all these incredible bargains for myself. Bargains like this 4.5 horsepower Briggs & Stratton go-kart for only $6,000! So who wants to step up and buy this fun...

Bob, please, I'm just getting to the sale, and... oh. Are you sure? Well, okay. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm sorry, I'm going to have to go ahead and pull the sale on that go-kart. Apparently they were outlawed by the Comprehensive Go-Kart Emissions & Safety Act I signed 2009. And a good thing too, because nothing matters to me more than safety, the environment, and also the economy. But don't worry, there are plenty of other great bargains here. Like this commemorative Obama-Biden Inauguration collector's plate, made of real porcelain! And only $50! Who wants to be the first to buy this piece of history?"

Heh.

Read More......

Humor Break

NewsBusted 5/11/12 - YouTube: "NewsBusted 5/11/12"

Read More......

Depression In The Memory hOle

Fast response: RNC already up with Obama-forgot-the-recession spot « Hot Air: "Don’t expect the RNC or Mitt Romney’s team to get amnesia over this, either.  “Sometimes I forget” will likely accompany every spot on the economy both organizations produce from now until the election."

Read More......

Propaganda

Instapundit » Blog Archive » BLOG COMMENT OF THE DAY: “We may not quite be living under communism, but we are certainly living un…: "BLOG COMMENT OF THE DAY: “We may not quite be living under communism, but we are certainly living under its media apparatus.”

Posted by Ed Driscoll at 4:55 pm"

Yup.

Read More......

Sit Down And Shut Up

Ace of Spades HQ: "Richard Nixon's got nothing on Barack Hussein Obama.

Frank VanderSloot is the CEO of Melaleuca Inc. The 63-year-old has run that wellness-products company for 26 years out of tiny Idaho Falls, Idaho. Last August, Mr. VanderSloot gave $1 million to Restore Our Future, the Super PAC that supports Mitt Romney.

Three weeks ago, an Obama campaign website, "Keeping GOP Honest," took the extraordinary step of publicly naming and assailing eight private citizens backing Mr. Romney. Titled "Behind the curtain: a brief history of Romney's donors," the post accused the eight of being "wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records." Mr. VanderSloot was one of the eight, smeared particularly as being "litigious, combative and a bitter foe of the gay rights movement."

About a week after that post, a man named Michael Wolf contacted the Bonneville County Courthouse in Idaho Falls in search of court records regarding Mr. VanderSloot. Specifically, Mr. Wolf wanted all the documents dealing with Mr. VanderSloot's divorces, as well as a case involving a dispute with a former Melaleuca employee."

Can't you tell my shock is palpable?

Read More......

Not What Alinsky Was Aiming For...

Mitt Romney, community organizer | Power Line: "Romney didn’t stop there. About a year later, it became apparent that the park would need regular maintenance and repairs. “The next thing I know, my wife calls me up and says, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but Mitt Romney is down with a bunch of Boy Scouts and kids and they’re working on the park,’” said O’Donnell. . . .”He did it for like the next five years, without ever calling to say, ‘We’re doing this,’ without a reporter in tow, not looking for any credit.”

Perhaps these sorts of actions signify what it meant to be a community organizer before the left politicized the concept."

RTWT.

Read More......

Parasites

Au Revoir, les Enfants - By Michael Walsh - The Corner - National Review Online: "Yesterday’s forced retirement of Senator Richard Lugar of “Indiana” should prove a bracing lesson in the use of the pike for didactic purposes. It’s also one of the best arguments for the repeal of the 17th amendment in a long time.

As I’ve said before, senators no longer represent their states to Washington, they represent Leviathan to the states, handing out either goodies or punishments as their whim and the political winds dictate. Their primary allegiance is not to the voters back “home” but to their cloakroom colleagues (hence the “bipartisanship” fetish that is particularly virulent in the Senate) on Capitol Hill, and to the Beltway parasites who feed off them.

Indeed, Lugar didn’t even live in Indiana."

RTWT.

Read More......

And A Knucklehead

Moonbattery » Conservative Reality and Liberal Fantasy: "Anyone who can’t see the difference must be blind as a moonbat:"

Read More......

The Genius

If Romney’s Nostalgic for the Cold War, He’s Not the Only One - By John J. Pitney, Jr. - The Corner - National Review Online: "At a $20,000-a-plate fundraising event on April 29, President Obama said: “But when you’ve got the leading contender, the presumptive nominee, on the other side suddenly saying our number one enemy isn’t al-Qaeda, it’s Russia — (Laughter.) — I don’t make that up. (Laughter.) I’m suddenly thinking what — maybe I didn’t check the calendar this morning. (Laughter.) I didn’t know we were back in 1975. (Laughter.)”

A few days later, the BBC reported:

Russia says it is prepared to use “destructive force pre-emptively” if the US goes ahead with controversial plans for a missile defence system based in Central Europe."

Read More......

The Shafted Young

The War Against The Young | Via Meadia: "An analysis of recent jobs figures at Investor.com reveals a disturbing development: the biggest beneficiaries from the economic recovery are Boomers, while everyone else is getting the shaft.

Since the Obama administration took office, there has been an epochal shift. Young workers have continued to lose jobs and incomes, while older workers have actually gained ground."

But will the obedient young lambs lie down on the altar? My guess is yes. Pictorial evidence here.

Read More......

Obedience

Inspired by ‘Julia’, proposed new ‘Women for Obama’ campaign poster | Twitchy: "Inspired by the incredibly creepy “Julia” campaign, comes a proposed Obama campaign poster created by @ExJon that is eerily accurate. It’s a brave new world!"

Read More......

Just Getting Sad Now

People Not In Labor Force Soar By 522,000, Labor Force Participation Rate Lowest Since 1981 | ZeroHedge: "It is just getting sad now. In April the number of people not in the labor force rose by a whopping 522,000 from 87,897,000 to
88,419,000.  This is the highest on record. The flip side, and the reason why the unemployment dropped to 8.1% is that the labor force participation rate just dipped to a new 30 year low of 64.3%.

Labor force participation Rate:"

Read More......

Congratulations Europe

First Official Greek Exit Polls: Pro-Bailout Parties Plunge; Anti-Bailout Radical Left, Neo-Nazis Soar | ZeroHedge: "As we expected, the previous unofficial poll forecasts were total rubbish, and according to exit polls from NET TV, the results are as follows:

New Democracy: 17-20%
Pasok: 14-17%
In a stunner, Syrizia, or the coalition of the radical left - a vehement anti-Bailout party - gets more votes than the ruling PASOK party: 15.5%-18.5%
Independent Greeks: 10-12%
Finally, and not surprisingly in the aftermath of the French results, the ultra right Golden Dawn gets 6-8% of the vote and will make it into Parliament

Tallied across, up to 60% of the new parliament will be anti-bailout (at least according to exit polls), and hence "Domino toppling." Good luck with that pro-bailout coalition government. Needless to say these results are very ugly and make any prospect of a pro-bailout coalition cabinet virtually impossible. Suddenly the fate of the European experiment is in the hands of the ultra right and the far left - yup, Neo-Nazis will determine the future of Europe. How quaint... again - congratulations Europe."

Read More......

Extinction hO

Blue Smoke and Mirrors: Tobacco Bond Meltdown Heralds Worse | Via Meadia: "But unfortunately tobacco isn’t the only cow the blue model is trying to kill and milk at the same time. Blue model governance involves relentlessly escalating costs, proliferating environmental and other forms of regulation, and an inexorably increasing tax burden to cover the costs.

That is basically the attitude of many cities and states toward small business in particular: they regulate it to death even as they scramble to figure out how to wring more taxes out of an increasingly sickly beast.

Hunting your prey to extinction is not a wise move; too often, though, that is where the logic of blue model governance leads."

Blue = jack*sses O course should you have not figured that out yet...

Read More......

Steyn Strikes Again

Going Native - By Mark Steyn - The Corner - National Review Online: "This may be the drollest diversity scam since an Englishman called Archibald parlayed himself into global celebrity as the Ojibwe Indian “Grey Owl“. Unlike “self-identifying” as Hispanic, “Native American” identity requires a formal namecheck on tribal rolls. Yet, on the basis of a (possible) great-great-great-gran’ma, Elizabeth Warren presented herself as Harvard’s token redskin with nary a blush – and nobody called her on it.

Andy Warhol got it wrong: In the future everyone will be a disadvantaged minority for one thirty-second.

For the record, I am the only Fijian tribal elder at National Review."

Read More......

Good Lord, People!

Ace of Spades HQ: "Lest you think this is only his new routine because he has launched his reelection campaign today (snortle!), there is a chronological archive.

If you search back in this archive, you come to one inescapable conclusion: it is virtually impossible for this man to get any actual work done, with all these trifling and petty interruptions to his duty as head of state! Good Lord, people!

Why, there are large, lofty, looming decisions to be made, and yet - somehow - always there is another fundraiser that takes precedence. Always more jetting around, always more brief remarks to be delivered to some crowd of high schoolers or trade unionists. This must be intensely frustrating to driven, workaholic Obama."

Read More......

Paul vs Paul

Paul vs Paul: Round 2 | ZeroHedge: "Readers are free to make up their own minds who won that one."

Read More......

The Race To Blindness -- Deafness And Dumbness Go Without Saying O Course

Ace of Spades HQ: "Via Instapundit, American Thinker, and, I guess, I Own The World, originally."

UPDATE:

Mark Steyn: Fauxcahontas and the melting pot | great, warren, elizabeth - Opinion - The Orange County Register: "Just in case you're having difficulty keeping up with all these Composite-Americans, George Zimmerman, the son of a Peruvian mestiza, is the embodiment of endemic white racism and the reincarnation of Bull Connor, but Elizabeth Warren, the great-great-great-granddaughter of someone who might possibly have been listed as Cherokee on an application for a marriage license, is a heartwarming testimony to how minorities are shattering the glass ceiling in Harvard Yard. George Zimmerman, redneck; Elizabeth Warren, redskin. Under the Third Reich's Nuremberg Laws, Ms. Warren would have been classified as Aryan and Mr. Zimmerman as non-Aryan. Now it's the other way round. Progress!"

Read More......

Debacle

The Chen Debacle - By Michael Auslin - The Corner - National Review Online: "The Chen Guangcheng saga gets stranger and stranger, but also is becoming a major diplomatic embarrassment for the Obama administration. What was already a confusing tale of “he said, she said” moved into the realm of near-parody this afternoon, when Chen himself called his U.S. supporter and activist Bob Fu during a congressional hearing, was put on speaker phone, and directly asked to be let out of China. What has particularly spun the case out of control is the growing assertion by many that U.S. officials relayed threats by Beijing toward Chen’s wife to the blind activist, thereby forcing him to accept a deal to leave the U.S. Embassy and remain in China. Within 48 hours of a supposed deal to ensure Chen’s safety in the country, the lawyer’s friends began spreading the word that he had feared for his wife’s life and agreed to leave the embassy, but now wanted to flee the country. "

Read More......

The Death O Julia

‘Julia’ - By Kevin D. Williamson - The Corner - National Review Online: "23 years: Being a bartender, Julia works late at night. Under Obama, the federal government supports laws that make it difficult or impossible for a private citizen to own a gun in many places. Leaving her bar one night, the defenseless Julia is killed in the street. Ironically, the gun used to kill her was sold to a Mexican drug cartel under a program run by President Obama’s Department of Justice."

RTWT.

Read More......

Good God (Edition O, Part 49,491)

Instapundit » Blog Archive » THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED REPUBLICAN THINGS LIKE THIS WOULD HAPPEN — AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Man abando…: "THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED REPUBLICAN THINGS LIKE THIS WOULD HAPPEN — AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Man abandoned in DEA cell steps forward. “An engineering student stepped forward with his lawyer Tuesday to say he was left alone in a federal holding cell for five days with no food or water, apparently forgotten by the federal drug agents who detained him.”

Tar and feathers isn’t enough punishment for something like that.

Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 6:47 pm"

Read More......

Barry’s Imaginary Girlfriend ... And Most Excellent Dichotomies O Bullsh*t

Barry’s Imaginary Girlfriend | Power Line: "Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?

That, folks, is not a parody. It may provide a hint as to why Obama’s college and law school grades remain a well-kept secret."

Read More......

Good Grief

Secret Service problems much bigger than prostitutes - The Washington Post: "The Secret Service suspends screening at one in five major presidential and vice presidential events, according to another current agent. Think about that: A terrorist could bring in a grenade and take out President Obama or Biden.

Other examples of corner-cutting include management not insisting that agents pass firearms requalification and physical fitness tests. The agency covers that up by routinely asking agents to fill out their own test scores.

One agent on the president’s detail regularly fails handgun tests but has not been removed, agents with firsthand knowledge have told me. Another agent on the detail is so out of shape that she cannot open the heavy doors to exit the president’s limousine, I’m told.

Instead of removing her from the president’s detail and requiring her to pass the fitness tests that all agents are supposed to take every three months, Secret Service management has told drivers to try to park so it would be easier for her to swing open the vehicle door."

Read More......

Nothing To See Here (Part 39,493)

The Bridge Bombers - By Jonah Goldberg - The Corner - National Review Online: "First of all, you’ve got to check out their mugshots in this Bloomberg story over at the Washington Post. But while you can find them, you know what you won’t find? Any mention of Occupy Wall Street.

I’m sure if five libertarians plotting to blow up a bridge were arrested during a countrywide Tea Party protest, the press wouldn’t note the connection either."

Why of course they had nothing to do with the Occupy *sshats...

Read More......

Your Family Budget

Riell Truth Radio Show | Facebook: "Why the U.S. was downgraded:
• U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
• Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000
• New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
• National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
• Recent budget cuts: $ 38,500,000,000

Let's now remove 8 zeros and pretend it's your household budget:
• Annual family income: $21,700
• Money the family spent: $38,200
• New debt on the credit card: $16,500
• Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
• Total budget cuts: $385"

Read More......