It’s Friday, June 14th, 2013…but before we begin, a brief thought as to how Conservatives can take the fight to the enemy (and believe us, we don’t use the term “enemy” lightly; we’re simply at a loss for a more appropriate term to describe those dedicated to the destruction of our country in the pursuit of personal wealth and power).

Like an updated version of General Winfield Scott’s Anaconda Plan Lincoln used to defeat the South, we need to strangle our enemy’s supply lines.  Since fund-raising is the life-blood of any politician or party, this means limiting the availability of said donations.  Which means restricting the ability of Google, GE, the AARP, unions, the entertainment industry and other solidly Liberal entities to fund Leftist politicians and causes; i.e., we need to vote with both our pocketbooks and boycott…quite quietly…anything or anyone supporting the Dims.

Searching the web?  Use an alternative search engine.  In the market for a smartphone?  Anything but an Android.  Need to replace some light bulbs?  Buy Sylvania.  Shopping for a new car?  GM would be our last choice.  And the list of actors and actresses we won’t pay to see on the Big Screen is almost as large as B. Hussein’s ears.

Will we be inconvenienced and put out?  You bet.  Might it hurt certain of our fellow citizens?  Highly likely.  Will it have an impact?  Most certainly…but only if we all put our money where our mouths are.

Perhaps the Koch brothers would consider funding an effective alternative search engine to Google.  They needn’t make it overtly Conservative, nor should they use any profits to fund Conservative candidates; just advertise it’s apolitical…unlike Google.

Just a thought.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

Leading off the last edition of the week, courtesy of Bill Meisen, an editorial from Investors.com which points out that for all his talk…

Obama’s Snooping Excludes Mosques, Missed Boston Bombers

Homeland Insecurity

 

The White House assures that tracking our every phone call and keystroke is to stop terrorists, and yet it won’t snoop in mosques, where the terrorists are. That’s right, the government’s sweeping surveillance of our most private communications excludes the jihad factories where homegrown terrorists are radicalized.

Since October 2011, mosques have been off-limits to FBI agents. No more surveillance or undercover string operations without high-level approval from a special oversight body at the Justice Department dubbed the Sensitive Operations Review Committee. Who makes up this body, and how do they decide requests? Nobody knows; the names of the chairman, members and staff are kept secret.

We do know the panel was set up under pressure from Islamist groups who complained about FBI stings at mosques. Just months before the panel’s formation, the Council on American-Islamic Relations teamed up with the ACLU to sue the FBI for allegedly violating the civil rights of Muslims in Los Angeles by hiring an undercover agent to infiltrate and monitor mosques there.

Before mosques were excluded from the otherwise wide domestic spy net the administration has cast, the FBI launched dozens of successful sting operations against homegrown jihadists — inside mosques — and disrupted dozens of plots against the homeland.

If only they were allowed to continue, perhaps the many victims of the Boston Marathon bombings would not have lost their lives and limbs. The FBI never canvassed Boston mosques until four days after the April 15 attacks, and it did not check out the radical Boston mosque where the Muslim bombers worshipped. The bureau didn’t even contact mosque leaders for help in identifying their images after those images were captured on closed-circuit TV cameras and cellphones.

One of the Muslim bombers made extremist outbursts during worship, yet because the mosque wasn’t monitored, red flags didn’t go off inside the FBI about his increasing radicalization before the attacks. This is particularly disturbing in light of recent independent surveys of American mosques, which reveal some 80% of them preach violent jihad or distribute violent literature to worshippers.

What other five-alarm jihadists are counterterrorism officials missing right now, thanks to restrictions on monitoring the one area they should be monitoring?

Were radical Jews or Southern Baptists repeatedly killing innocent Americans, does anyone believe this Administration would hesitate a nanosecond before monitoring synagogues or churches?!?

Yet outgoing-FBI Director Robert Mueller has the nerve to suggest were the NSA’s metadata collection effort been in place prior to 9/11, they would have identified one of the hijackers in San Diego and likely foiled the plot.

Yeah…

Authorities (the FBI included) had, or should have had, everything they needed to know about the Tsarnaev boys but a notarized copy of their plan prior to the attack…yet they failed to stop it.

Meanwhile, if his bending over backwards to avoid offending the highly offensive doesn’t convince you B. Hussein isn’t serious about protecting America, this ought to do it:

Obama’s New Deputy CIA Director Has No CIA Experience But Reads Erotic Fiction Out Loud

 

So, when your Deputy CIA Director steps down in the middle of a massive scandal, who do you suppose would be a good person to appoint. How about a lawyer with no intelligence experience who used to read aloud at “erotica nights” at her local bookstore. Yeah, that about sums up what Obama just did… The former host of “Erotica Night” at a Baltimore bookstore will be the first-ever female No. 2 official at the CIA.

Yeah, but she’s a lawyer…and she’s stayed in a Holiday Inn Express!

And remember, The Dear Misleader isn’t concerned about protecting the country from foreign threats; he’s all about preserving unfettered domestic political power.  Two out of two Socialists surveyed agree:

The internal enemy is always the most dangerous!

Next up, Jonah Goldberg describes…

The Two Faces of Barack Obama

One idealist, one pragmatist—neither trustworthy.

 

The contradictions at the heart of the Obama presidency are finally out in the open. As a result, a man who came into office hell-bent on restoring faith in government is on the verge of inspiring a libertarian revival. There have always been (at least) two Barack Obamas. There is the man who claims to be a nonideological problem-solver, keen on working with anybody to fix things. And there is “The One”: the partisan, left-leaning progressive redeemer.

As E. J. Dionne, a columnist who can usually be counted on to make the case for Obama better than Obama can, recently wrote, the president “has been a master, as good politicians are, at presenting different sides of himself to different constituencies. In 2008, he was the man who would bring us together by overcoming the deep mistrust between red and blue America and the champion of progressive change, the liberal answer to Ronald Reagan.”

The dilemma for Obama is that neither is panning out because both incarnations rely on trust. The president never had much trust among Republicans, and he lost what he had when he opted to steamroll the stimulus and, later, Obamacare, on a partisan basis.

Of course, that’s not how most Democrats have seen things. They’ve seen the last five years as a tale of Tea Party–fueled madness and racism. The conviction that conservatives are crazy, stupid, and/or bigoted in their opposition to Obama is what has allowed the two Obamas to exist side by side. Both iterations could blame the Republicans for any shortcomings or failures.

Then came the Benghazi debacle. The president’s base, according to polls and what little MSNBC viewing I could stomach, never wavered in its conviction that Benghazi was a nonscandal. But even if you don’t think it was a scandal (I do), many partisans admit the administration’s response, politically and in real time, was a mess, casting the White House as deeply political and not exactly truthful.

Cue the Justice Department, which deployed the Espionage Act against a Fox News reporter and subpoenaed the records of more than 20 Associated Press phone lines. Obama tried to play the Janus game again, saying that he was “troubled” by the reports of his own administration’s actions. The media have let him get away with this bystander act when it comes to things like the prison at Guantanamo Bay, but not necessarily when it comes to threats to themselves.

And then the floodgates opened. The IRS compromised the integrity of the domestic agency that is supposed to be the most immune to politics. Worse, the White House’s best defense was that it was simply asleep at the switch as the agency went rogue — in ways that just happened to align with the president’s oft-expressed ideological and political preferences.

The IRS scandal is a cancer because if you can’t trust Obama to keep that agency from being politicized, you can’t trust him to keep anything immune from politics — including health care and, more relevantly, the National Security Agency.

I have some sympathy for Obama in that his support of these vast data-mining programs might be a sign that he has matured in office. He naively denounced the “false” choice of compromising our ideals for the sake of security in his 2009 inaugural speech. Now he’s touting such trade-offs as essential.

Or it could be that, like so many presidents before him, Obama thinks there’s nothing wrong with executive power when he’s the executive. Either way, the NSA story undermines trust in both Obamas.

In late May, the president announced in a speech that the War on Terror was essentially over. In early June, he’s defending a data-mining operation that even Representative Jim Sensenbrenner (R., Wis.) — an author of the PATRIOT Act, which authorizes surveillance by the NSA — is denouncing as dangerous overreach he never intended.

The idealist wants credit for ending the war, while the alleged pragmatist wants to keep a surveillance apparatus that has no justification if the War on Terror is truly over. Maybe he’s right on the merits. The problem is that fewer and fewer people are willing to take his word for it.

But even if Goldberg’s right, and Der Obamao is half-idealist/half-pragmatist, one thing’s for certain; he’s a complete…

For more on the subject of our prevaricating President, we turn to Commentary Magazine, where Peter Wehner offers his thoughts on…

Obama’s Ethically Challenged Administration

 

Talk about collapsing standards. When Barack Obama ran for office, his promise wasn’t that he’d simply improve our politics; he would transform them. He would appoint men and women of unblemished integrity who would serve the public interest. Mr. Obama would hold people accountable. He boasted in 2010 that he had put in place the toughest ethics rules in history. His administration would be the most transparent in history. And all of this would restore faith and trust in government.

That was then. Let me tell you about now. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, clearly mislead Congress when in March of this year Clapper was asked by Senator Ron Wyden…

That statement was false, since we know that the NSA has collected phone records of millions of Americans. And so what is Mr. Clapper’s excuse? Try this one on for size. The New York Times reports that in an interview on Sunday with NBC News, Mr. Clapper acknowledged that his answer had been problematic, calling it “the least untruthful” answer he could give.

That phrase–what Clapper said is “the least untruthful” answer he could give–should live on in scandal lore.

“It was only a little lie!”

As you might expect, the Obama administration is expressing support for Clapper as criticism of him mounts. “The president has full faith in director Clapper and his leadership of the intelligence community,” National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden told the Guardian. Of course he does. Why wouldn’t Obama have faith in James Clapper, since his attorney general is Eric Holder (who has misled Congress on multiple occasions)?

Rather than cleanse the political Augean Stables, the president and his administration–with every unfolding scandal, with every misleading statement, with every effort to stonewall and intimidate political opponents–are adding to the filth.

We don’t refer to it as the Offal Office for nothing!

Since we’re on the subject of the ethically-challenged…

Google to DOJ: Let us prove to users that NSA isn’t snooping on them

 

There is a “serious misperception” about the National Security Agency’s PRISM program, Google chief legal officer David Drummond said in an exclusive interview with Fox News. On Tuesday the company pushed back against the layers of secrecy surrounding the agency’s alleged blanket snooping on American citizens.

“We were as shocked about those revelations as anyone,” Drummond told Fox News, in an interview with Fox News’ Chief Intelligence Correspondent Catherine Herridge. On Tuesday the Internet giant wrote on its official blog that it had sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and the FBI Director Robert Mueller, asking the agencies to allow Google to release more information about the national security orders it had received.

Yeah…trust an organization joined at the hip with the guy who’s been using the IRS to destroy his political opposition.  Thus the wolf…

…explains his good intentions to the sheep.

And in the Environmental Moment, as this forward from Jeff Foutch details, while America’s attention is diverted…

Obama Quietly Raises ‘Carbon Price’ as Costs to Climate Increase

 

Buried in a little-noticed rule on microwave ovens is a change in the U.S. government’s accounting for carbon emissions that could have wide-ranging implications for everything from power plants to the Keystone XL pipeline. The increase of the so-called social cost of carbon, to $38 a metric ton in 2015 from $23.80, adjusts the calculation the government uses to weigh costs and benefits of proposed regulations. The figure is meant to approximate losses from global warming such as flood damage and diminished crops. (i.e., like the entire discredited theory of anthropogenic global warming, it’s entirely bogus!)

With the change, government actions that lead to cuts in emissions — anything from new mileage standards to clean-energy loans — will appear more valuable in its cost-benefit analyses. On the flip side, environmentalists urge that it be used to judge projects that could lead to more carbon pollution, such as TransCanada Corp. (TRP)’s Keystone pipeline or coal-mining by companies such as Peabody Energy Corp. (BTU) on public lands, which would be viewed as more costly.

“As we learn that climate damage is worse and worse, there is no direction they could go but up,” Laurie Johnson, chief economist for climate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an interview. Johnson says the administration should go further; she estimates the carbon cost could be as much as $266 a ton.

Even supporters questioned the way the administration slipped the policy out without first opening it for public comment. The change was buried in an afternoon announcement on May 31 about efficiency standards for microwave ovens, a rule not seen as groundbreaking. “This is a very strange way to make policy about something this important,” Frank Ackerman, an economist at Tufts University who published a book about the economics of global warming, said in an interview. The Obama administration “hasn’t always leveled with us about what is happening behind closed doors.”

Industry representatives are equally puzzled. “It’s a pretty important move. To do this without any outside participation is bizarre,” said Jeff Holmstead, a lawyer at Bracewell & Giuliani LLP (1222L) representing coal-dependent power producers and other industry groups. A legal challenge to the determination would be difficult, but could be tried by itself or in a challenge to a specific rulemaking that uses the cost, he said.

In a related item, courtesy of Speed Mach, Powerline.com reports how…

Global Warming Alarmism In Twilight

 

The curtain is coming down rapidly on global warming alarmism, as evidence of the AGW theory’s falsity accumulates on nearly a daily basis. Of course, the global warming machine grinds on, like a dead frog whose legs are still kicking. My 10th grade daughter had her last day of school yesterday. A teacher gave her a sheet of instructions on how to lead a “green,” low-carbon summer. The sheet included suggestions like “hitchhike.” Great idea for a 16-year-old girl! Also, don’t have a baby over the summer. Um, don’t worry: she wasn’t planning to. But not for reasons of climate control. Is our world getting stupider all the time, or what? (No…just the Left side!)

This chart, via Watts Up With That, sums up the hopelessness of the warmists’ position as well as anything. It charts the various projections generated by the models relied on by the U.N., etc, against actual global temperature data as observed via satellites and balloons. The black line represents the mean of the model projections, the green circles represent the average of four balloon data sets, and the blue squares are the average of two satellite data sets. The chart is set so that the mean model projection intersects with empirical observations in 1979:

Any model must either pass or fail the test of empirical observation. The warmists’ models, on which the entire edifice of global warming alarmism stands, fail the test. The warming they predicted just isn’t happening. The alarmists like to say that the science is settled. We are rapidly approaching the point where they are correct: the science is, indeed, settled, only not the way they intended. If you put aside the trivial proposition that it is warmer now than it was during the Little Ice Age, there is no empirical basis for climate alarmism. Dr. Roy Spencer says:

In my opinion, the day of reckoning has arrived. The modellers and the IPCC have willingly ignored the evidence for low climate sensitivity for many years, despite the fact that some of us have shown that simply confusing cause and effect when examining cloud and temperature variations can totally mislead you on cloud feedbacks (e.g. Spencer & Braswell, 2010). The discrepancy between models and observations is not a new issue…just one that is becoming more glaring over time.

Scientific failure will not, of course, put the warmists out of business; not quickly, anyway. There is too much money in it. But the taxpayers’ patience with subsidizing pseudo-science is rapidly running out.

It can’t hit bottom a moment too soon.

Speaking of hitting bottom, meet the next Senator from Massachusetts:

Math: in Massachusetts, it’s not Arithematic!

Turning to the latest from The Gang Who Still Can’t Shoot Straight, Red State‘s Erick Erickson has decided…

No More Games

 

So many conservatives have been dancing around the issue of Senator Marco Rubio’s collaboration with Chuck Schumer to pass comprehensive immigration reform. We have blamed his staff. We have blamed Democrats. We all like and respect the Senator, even if we disagree on this issue. We do not want to blame him for the mess the GOP now finds itself in holding a legislative tiger by the tail.

But having, by virtue of my radio show, listened over and over to those awful pro-immigration reform ads between my monologues, I think we need to stop playing games.

I say this because either Marco Rubio is being played the fool or we are being played the fool by Senator Rubio. He has become the face of support for this legislation and much of the support of the legislation from those on the right has come because of the good will so many of us have for Senator Rubio.

I am in the awkward position of being to the left of the Republican base. I support immigration reform that leaves most non-felon illegal aliens in the United States and provides them a path to legal work, though not citizenship. Citizenship is a step too far – as it unjustly rewards illegal aliens who purposefully chose not to follow our immigration laws.

But, I know a number of illegal aliens and represented a good many of them when I was a lawyer. They, having been unfairly treated by others due to their status, relied on me to redress clear wrongs against them.

These were good, hardworking people who wanted to comply with the law, wanted to work, and wanted to send money home to support families in their native countries. They did not want citizenship. They wanted a paycheck. I am to the left of my readers in supporting their right (“right”…what “right”?!?) to stay here and earn a paycheck. I am to the left of my readers in that I oppose mandatory E-Verify. In my mind, no employer should ever have to ask the government if it can or cannot hire a worker.

But it’s also a country of laws.

But I am to the right of the Senate Republicans and Senator Rubio. The solution they propose will do nothing to stem the tide of illegal aliens coming into this country. This law will expand bureaucracy and will, claims to the contrary notwithstanding, expand the welfare state.

What’s more, Senate Republicans and Democrats are now collaborating on “improvements” to the legislation that do not actually improve the law, but rather provide cover for various Democrats and Republicans to make sure the votes are there for passage while ensuring those in tough spots can still vote against it and claim they opposed what they really, privately support.

Senator John Cornyn, chief among the Republicans now, is playing that game. He is offering up an amendment that supposedly will secure the border before setting up a pathway to citizenship. His amendment really does not do that, but provides a cover for Republicans to claim the amendment, and the law once the amendment passes, would. In truth, all Senator Cornyn has done is take the vast majority of the Gang of 8’s Title 1 “Border Security” Section, make a few modest revisions and slightly beef up security on the margins. The result is to follow instant legalization with a false impression of security, while maintaining the path to citizenship. Smoke-and-mirrors.

That brings us back to Senator Rubio. Is he being played or is he playing us?

Contrary to the Americans for Conservative Reform advertisement in which he appears, the law does not prohibit illegals from getting benefits. Sure, some welfare benefits will be excluded as will, though it is debatable, Obamacare, but a sizable portion of entitlement benefits actually flow through tax credits in the tax code that these immigrants would get.

Contrary to the advertisement, the law does not secure the border in any meaningful way, in fact the “border security on steroids” as the ad claims does not begin until after the citizenship push starts, hence the pretend effort of John Cornyn now that this has been exposed.

Contrary to the advertisement, the law will grant amnesty — it is a big play for citizenship even before the pretend efforts to secure the border take place. It is the amnesty Senator Rubio opposed in 2010, though in the advertisement he says we have right now “de facto amnesty”.

Senator Rubio, you, and I can agree to disagree on the legislation. He is entitled to change his mind. He does not deserve the invective hurled his way, including words like “traitor,” (then simply stupid!) but then neither do those who have opposed this legislation and are cast as modern day eugenicists and racists.

The soundbites used in the Americans for Conservative Reform ads occurred before the markup of the legislation. But now we have the legislation before us as it was amended in committee. We should not have the law misrepresented to us in commercials, press conferences, and floor debates by any Senators on either side of the aisle. Sadly, that is what is happening. Yes, Senator Schumer, you know damn well that this law will not stop, but will encourage continued illegal immigration into this country. But you do not care.

Note the question is regarding “legal status”, NOT citizenship, which is absolutely, positively both totally unnecessary and terribly ill-advised.

I am just shocked, knowing what we now know, that Senator Rubio would continue to support this legislation and that other conservative Senators would too.

This legislation is not the compromise Republicans should sign on to. Republicans in the Senate should stop playing games and vote against the legislation, vote against the Cornyn amendment, and stop giving the Democrats cover to play their own political games with the hopes, ambitions, and lives of immigrants.

This is bad legislation designed to fix a problem it does not fix. No more games; it must be opposed.

And now that Chuckie Schumer admitted on the floor of the Senate it will take “years and years and years” to secure the border, Rubio has no excuse whatsoever for continuing to back this increasingly flawed legislation..

On the Lighter Side…

And in the Medical Section…

Eight-month erection leads to malpractice lawsuit by truck driver

 

“I know I’m your attorney, but no, I don’t want to see it!”

Finally, we’ll call it a week with yet another sign the Apocalypse is upon us, courtesy of our bestest buddy, Chris Wilson:

ALL-CAPS MESSAGES … no more

 

Clearly where the Navy’s headed…along with the rest of our Military.

THE U.S. NAVY WILL NO LONGER COMMUNICATE EXCLUSIVELY IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. OFFICIAL COMMUNICATIONS AND ORDERS HAVE BEEN IN ALL CAPS SINCE 19TH CENTURY.

YOUNG SAILORS ACCUSTOMED TO TEXTING SEE ALL-CAPS ORDERS AS A FORM OF SHOUTING! NAVY WANTS ITS ORDERS AND OFFICIAL MESSAGES TO BE MORE READABLE AND LESS RUDE.

“WHILE THIS DECISION WAS MADE TO SAVE MONEY AND GAIN EFFICIENCIES, IF AN ANCILLARY BENEFIT IS THAT SAILORS READING MESSAGE TRAFFIC NO LONGER FEEL THEY’RE BEING SCREAMED AT…THAT’S A GOOD THING TOO,” SAID A NAVY OFFICIAL.

Reports Blacks may compose their messages utilizing Ebonics, Hispanics in Espanol and Muslims writing from right to left remain unconfirmed.

Magoo