For All

Really, things have gotten so ridiculous that it’s a little hard to keep blogging.  After the eternity that has been Obama’s first term, continually explaining why 2 + 2 = 4 becomes a tiresome chore indeed, especially when one suspects that she is only preaching to the choir and making little headway otherwise.  I know, I know, speaking out is still important . . . but the little things get me down.

Like when I ran into a friend from three duty stations ago, and the upcoming presidential election came up.  I was treated to a casual remark that, while the current President’s record is unsatisfactory, she was afraid that an elected Romney wouldn’t let people have the freedom to marry who they want, and also he would require all women to wear skirts. (!?!eleventy!?!)

National security is more important than homosexual “rights,” I said, bringing up the hot mic incident, during which Obama demonstrated that he is willing to say one thing to the electorate, but another thing entirely to Russian leadership.  She had never heard about it.

Sigh.  Since I ran into this person at the commissary, at least I was able to soothe my nerves by buying some extra nonperishables.

Now, don’t you worry or nothin.  I haven’t given up hope.  I’m just running low on steam.  There’s not much for me to add to the conversation right now . . . at least, not anything that you and I haven’t said a hundred times apiece.

Only thing new to me is a little tidbit from Older Son’s curriculum.  I’ll share it, and see if it’s new to you as well.  You see, I’ve heard comparisons aplenty of the Democrat hold on black voters to the slavery of old.  C.L. Bryant made a whole movie on this very idea.  Click here to see if Runaway Slave is playing at a theater near you.

What I’ve never heard before is a positive comparison of slavery with the protective nanny-state progressives are always striving to achieve.  Apparently, though, pre-civil war Southerners made this very argument.  All defensive about their “peculiar institution,” many Southern apologists sought to explain why slavery was not a necessary evil, but actually for the best.  One of those apologists was George Fitzhugh.

Fitzhugh asserted in Cannibals All! or Slaves without Masters that Southern slaves were luckier than free Northern workers.  The Landmark History of the American People by Daniel Boorstin explains Fitzhugh’s argument:

“They were slaves with masters.  They had the best kind of social security.  Whatever happened, it was not their worry.  They did not have to pay any bills.  They had no problem of unemployment.  Slavery, as Fitzhugh described it, was a kind of socialism, where all property was put in the hands of the people (the white people) best qualified to use it, for the benefit of everybody, whites and Negroes.  Three cheers for slavery!”

Hmm.  Property put in the hands best qualified to use it for the benefit of everybody?  For the benefit of all?  Oh, yeah, I get it.  #ForAll.

Cross posted at NoOneOfAnyImport.

 

NBC Today. The Obamarometer.

Want to know how poorly Obama’s lawyer did at the Supreme Court yesterday? Just watch the Today Show.

They talked about the crazy Jet Blue pilot, Trayvon Martin…again, House Speaker John Boehner’s personal relationship with Barack Obama and Christie Brinkley’s catfight with her ex-husband.

The most consequential Supreme Court case in decades is being argued, with the very constitutionality of Obama’s signature piece of legislation in question and not a peep from NBC.

OK. Not entirely true. The brief reading of the headlines mentioned that a part of the law may be in trouble.

Yeah. The part that funds all of Obamacare. Without it, the law is toast.

Nice job, peacock. Nice job.

 

Attention Mitt and Rick: This is how it’s done

I saw this exchange between Newt and David Gregory on “Meet the Press” this morning and this is how the Republicans need to handle the biased left wing media if they are to win in November.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

 

What am I to believe? The Chatter about an Improving Economy or my Lyin’ Eyes?

It is being spoken and respoken.  The Economy is in recovery.

For many years I commuted in and out of Richmond, VA’s far West End, but for economic reasons my Florida company decided that it would be best to close down our little office and have us work from home.  And I thank my lucky stars that I still have a job and a company that is reasonably solvent due to severe layoffs and belt tightening, even if it is in a dying industry.

But because my Internet provider had a malfunction, I temporarily lost Internet access today and had to find somewhere in town to log on to do my job. 

But that’s not the story.  Well, the layoffs and belt tightening, the austerity are PART of the story, but let’s move on.

When I left for home today at my old commute timeI was shocked at the light volume of traffic. 

When Circuit City corporate was here, this commute was extremely heavy and it took 5 or more traffic light cycles to make a left from Cox Rd. northbound onto Nuckols Rd., but then Circuit City died in Feb. 2009 and the traffic lessened considerably. 

Our office closed about 2 years ago, but still, it was a 3 traffic light cycle to get through that intersection.

Today, on a Monday in non-vacation season, it took only 1 light cycle and the turn lane wasn’t even half way filled.

There just weren’t that many commuters anymore. 

OK.  Maybe I was just lucky.  It was peculiar.  I was prepared for the usual vehicular combat from the days of old and I found myself with no competition to speak of.

Are other companies becoming more enlightened and allowing more and more of us to work from home thereby lessening the traffic flow? 

I’m thinking not. 

These are the everyday things that both distress me AND give me comfort that in spite of the spin from the White House and Clint Eastwood and the Obamasseuses from NBC et al.  You can’t escape the fact that the economy simply sucks and everyday people can’t help but notice the closing stores, the defunct retail chains, and the lessening job opportunities.  Properties, both residential and commercial are becoming increasingly vacant.  Prices for energy, food, and essentials are sky rocketing.

Couple all of this empirical evidence with all the people you know personally that have been devastated and it’s a pretty damning picture that’s hard to ignore and all the spin in the world can’t convince a recent victim of a business failure that the president and the Democrats have done them anything but harm.

This is Obama’s fundamental transformation of America.

You know what to do come November.

 

Bill Whittle on Juan William’s Working Class

When Juan Williams threw the race card at Newt Gingrich in the last Fox News Republican debate Williams revealed more about his liberal mindset than he realized. 

No.  Work is not demeaning.  Even janitorial work.

And yes, lying about and living on handouts IS demeaning.

PJ Media’s Bill Whittle dissembles the liberal argument masterfully, as always.

I, too, worked part time as a janitor when I was in High School and it never crossed my mind that I was being demeaned.  I had money in my pocket, which my non-working friends did not and I learned the responsibility of showing up, working hard and reaping the rewards.  These lessons have served me quite well in my adult life.

But, as Whittle points out, the Democratic Party requires poor, defenseless government dependents if they are to win elections.  Without the underclass of they’re own making, the Democratic Party will forever be in the political wilderness.

 

CNN debate format effectively squelched any chance for statesmanship

In this sound bite world of text messages, 140 character or less tweets, and short attention spans, political statesmanship may become a lost art. This week CNN produced a presidential debate that discouraged eloquence and elaboration. The 30 second time limited response more closely resembled a speed dating session. It was hard to tell if John King was suffering from Tourette’s, ADHD or both.

This format was designed to stifle the impact of the candidates and prevent true statesmanship from blossoming. By limiting and minimizing their responses, CNN effectively neutered the Republican hopefuls.

Watch this version of Patrick Henry’s famous oration by actor Dean Jones. It is a fairly brief and extremely remarkable speech of just under 3 minutes but just imagine how unremarkable it would have been had John King been there to grunt him to a halt at the 30 second mark.

 

President Perfect fails at BIG BALLS!!

He showed none with Hu, showed shrinkage before Ahmedinajad, cavorted with Chavez, and prostrated himself before Putin. He’s been emasculated by the weakest tin horn dictators and thugs across the earth, all the while bowing before their presence as the 98 pound weakling posing as leader of the free world.

But this is serious.

This is pop culture, people. He’s been on shows like Oprah, Leno, Letterman, The View, and MythBusters.

Did you know he is going to be on Wipe Out?

Here’s a sneak peak. Let’s just say that it doesn’t turn out well.

I jest, however Scott Wheeler from National Investigative Media drives home my point.

Hu sizes up the White House

By Scott Wheeler

There is jubilation throughout Beijing and Shanghai tonight as a triumphal President Hu returns to China after backhanding the President of the United States in too many ways to count. Actually, Hu didn’t even wait until he got back to China to start celebrating – he began his victory party while still at the White House. According to the Epoch Times, a global newspaper with an emphasis on Communist China, the musical guest performing at the White House state dinner that Obama threw for Hu, a pianist named Lang Lang, played a song widely known in China as an anti-American anthem. It is the theme song of a very famous Chinese movie.

“The film depicts a group of ‘People’s Volunteer Army’ soldiers who are first hemmed in at Shanganling (or Triangle Hill) and then, when reinforcements arrive, take up their rifles and counterattack the U.S. military ‘jackals’,” writes Matthew Robertson of the Epoch Times.

According to reports, millions of Chinese watched Lang’s performance on the Internet after being told in advance about the planned insult.

Just before Hu’s visit, the Chinese unveiled their new J-20 stealth fighter. They’re boasting that it is a great feat of engineering. What I see are stolen pieces of American ingenuity and brilliance cobbled together like they were made in a chop shop.

Much is being made right now of the F-117 stealth fighter that the US lost when Serbs shot it down in 1999 over Yugoslavia during what Serbs call “Monica’s War,” especially in light of the reports that China was there gathering parts from the downed plane. Whatever the Chinese collected from their scavenger hunt simply sped up the development process for what they had already bought or stolen directly from the United States.

The Chinese obtained stealth capabilities from substances that used to be mined and processed exclusively in the United States, where the manufacturing processes could be closely guarded. That is, until the Clinton administration shut down mines rich in material crucial to the development of stealth technology. Clinton then allowed Communist Chinese front companies to walk in and buy the entire means of production – even as they were producing critical parts for our most closely protected weapons systems – and ship those weapons factories to China. Career national security analysts warned the Clinton administration at the time of the dire consequences of allowing these technologies and manufacturing tools to leave the United States. Those analysts were harassed, threatened and fired for simply doing their job – protecting American national security.

It’s likely that parts of the J-20’s wings are made of a miraculous substance invented in a naval ordnance laboratory and stolen from that same laboratory by a spy posing as a student from China. That substance will increase the maneuverability of the J-20, thereby increasing its effectiveness when doing battle with American fighter pilots and in strafing runs at soldiers, or as they like to call us, “jackals.”

Now, media pundits and former State Department flacks insist that it would be bad for President Obama to bring up China’s human rights record in public because it would embarrass President Hu. Those issues, we are told, are best discussed behind closed doors. Not everyone on the Left agrees though. A story in the Washington Post quotes Tom Malinowski, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch, as saying “it’s important for Obama to ‘lay down a marker’ in his conversations with Hu” about how Chinese leaders oppress their own citizens. Whatever stealth markers Obama laid are meaningless because he has done so much to weaken his own country that such warnings are no longer credible. It is safe to conclude, then, that Hu is as likely to heed Obama’s suggestions on how to improve his country’s dismal human rights record as he is to thank the United States for providing China’s military with the technology responsible for its recent meteoric rise to prominence.

So in the end, while our leaders tried desperately to avoid offending Hu, the Chinese premier held a victory celebration in the White House. Obama sat through the entertainment staring down his nose at the spectacle as though the entertainers were his court minstrels performing for his pleasure, apparently oblivious to their flagrant mocking and ridiculing of him in the castle he borrowed from the American people.

 

Journalistic Amnesty and The Society for Professional Journalists

As noted in a recent post on The Culture and Media Institutes website, the Society of Professional Journalists’ Diversity Committee has announced they are launching a campaign to educate journalists about the hurtfulness of phrases like “illegal immigrant,” which is the term currently preferred by the influential AP Stylebook.

The phrase “illegal Immigrant”  perfectly describes those people who have entered and settled in this country without abiding by our immigration laws and have willfully evaded the legal process. I am unclear on how this phrase is hurtful and I am certain  that if we were to use a synonymous phrase like “unlawful settler” or “criminal incomer” it would not be more or less hurtful. However the SPJ’s Diversity Committee does not recommend a synonymous phrase, they wish to twist the language, to control the narrative, to use phraseology which would grant journalistic amnesty to those “illicit aliens”.

The SPJ’s Diversity Committeee insists that because in America the legal system presumes that one is innocent until proven guilty, journalist use the phrase “undocumented immigrant”.  “Undocumented” is not the same as illegal, it is a word that falls short of defining the situation and is intentionally ambiguous. It implies that “undocumented immigrants” are not necessarily illegal. In a sane world this is not troubling and a quick verification process would settle the issue but in our current environment where any suggestion to produce documentation is equated to the Nazi  demand to see your papers the end result is amnesty. Undocumented immigrants are innocent until proven guilty and only a racist nazi would insult them by demanding they produce documentation.

 

Video: PJTV takes on the “Big Green” environmental movement

Did you know that just one major “green” group, the National Resources Defense Council, has a budget that dwarfs those of the American Enterprise Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation – combined?  That fact and a whole lot else are in this video, which is the first of what looks like a promising series from PJTV.  Watch it, link it, share it.

 

Massive voter fraud reported in Houston

Texas Watchdog is all over the story, and it’s a big one.

Voter registration group Houston Votes has inundated the county voter registrar’s office with faulty registrations, including multiple applications for the same voters and for noncitizens, registrar Leo Vasquez said. He likens it to ACORN.

Two Texas activist groups, Houston Votes and Texans Together Education Fund, were accused Tuesday of an organized voter fraud campaign by Harris County Voter Registrar Leo Vasquez, who likened the groups to the now-discredited ACORN.

Read the rest – this is very much in ACORN’s wheelhouse, as it is in the Democrat left’s wheelhouse generally.  And Houston being Texas’ largest city, this is a very big deal to the entire state.

And when I mention the Democrats, I’m not just blowing smoke.

While Lewis maintains his group is nonpartisan, its board is decidedly liberal-leaning, according to research by blogHouston, which noted earlier this month that the Texans Together board included a Bill Clinton appointee, Democratic consultants and an aide to former Gov. Ann Richards.

Yeah.  They’re non-partisan like all the other “non-partisan” groups that, on the one hand attack the Republicans, and on the other hand, attack Republicans.  When they’re not overloading the system with fake voter registrations.

You know who all this was intended to help, don’t ya –

It’s in his city, and just when he’s running for Gov.  Coincidence, I’m sure.

BlogHouston has more on this story, including a note about the obvious silence of the state’s largest outlet solely focused on political reporting.

More: Let’s pick up a shovel and turn a few rocks over.  Texans overwhelmingly want voter photo ID for our elections, as do Americans generally.  But the Democrats have repeatedly crashed the legislature in order to stop any kind of voter photo ID bill from becoming law.  In the 2009 session, they even filibustered the bill until the session ended.  It had passed the state Senate, but the filibuster killed the House version, so it died.  Lots of other worthwhile legislation died in that filibuster, too.

Now, who led that filibuster?  Why, none other than state Rep. Jim Dunnam.  Heard of him? He’s the fellow who does not deign to live in the district that sends him to the state House.

Guess who Dunnam is in cahoots with.  Why, he’s pals and lawsuit allies with Steve Mostyn, the mold and hurricane lawyer from Houston who is bankrolling the crazy attacks on Republicans all over Texas.

There’s more to this story, and why the Democrats have fought so hard to kill voter ID in Texas.  It looks to me like they were setting up to use voter fraud in Houston to steal November for Bill White – who just happens to have reportedly taken massive political donations from Mr. Mostyn.

UPDATE from Saddleburr

An early morning fire in Harris County seems to have destroyed a large portion of the counties Voting Machines and other equipment. 

Houston Fire Department spokesman Patrick Trahan said arson investigators have not yet determined the cause of the blaze.

I hate to use the old cliche’, but I question the timing.