It’s Thursday, October 2nd, 2014…but before we begin, one quick cartoon which, while almost making us wetting our pants…
…required an rewrite prior to distribution to nationwide outlets. Cartoonist Jerry Holbert saw a tube of children’s watermelon toothpaste, and the flavor stuck with him. Reed Jackson, associate editor at Holbert’s syndicator, saw the potentially racial subtext the line unintentionally introduced and suggested Holbert replace the flavor.
“The veteran cartoonist’s email reply made one thing evident to the editor: No racist slur had been intended.“Yes, he made it very clear via [email] that the racial element hadn’t occurred to him,” Jackson tells Comic Riffs…He was happy to change it.”
Thus “watermelon” become “raspberry”. But not before the specially-filtered glasses of the racial grievance industry saw red.
Oh, by the way…
And Kevin Bacon’s plea for calm was just about as believable as CDC chief’s incredibly lame assurance of the nation’s safety:
Yeah…
In the meantime, don’t forget to wash your hands!
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, Bibi Netanyahu exposes the massive fraud which is The Obamao’s Iranian policy in one short paragraph:
“Ladies and gentlemen, would you let ISIS enrich uranium? Would you let ISIS build a heavy water reactor? Would you let ISIS develop intercontinental ballistic missiles? Of course you wouldn’t. Then you mustn’t let the Islamic state of Iran do those things either, because here’s what will happen. Once Iran produces atomic bombs, all the charms and all the smiles will suddenly disappear. They’ll just vanish. And it’s then that the ayatollahs will show their true face and unleash their aggressive fanaticism on the entire world.“
We only hope The Obamao and his troop of appeasement monkeys are…
…all at ground zero.
Next up, though it took longer than we expected, as The Washington Times reports, here’s the inevitable result of an abject lack of leadership that started back with the completed contrived Tailhook “scandal”:
Navy sailors harbor “widespread mistrust” in the admirals who command them, complaining of poor leadership and a disciplinary environment that tolerates absolutely no mistakes, says a survey of the fleet.
The disgruntlement runs deepest in the officer corps, where scores of commanders have been relieved of duty in recent years. “Senior leadership should stop proactively highlighting the reliefs for cause of commanding officers, command master chiefs, and other senior enlisted advisors,” said the report “2014 Navy Retention Study.” “What was originally intended to demonstrate accountability to the public has, instead, resulted in a significant breach of trust with our sailors and resulting in an almost ‘reality TV’ mentality.”
Not all mistakes; just those of a politically-incorrect nature. And with no care whatsoever given to combat readiness or force effectiveness.
At a time of unparalleled threat from a variety of sources, both conventional and unconventional, America’s Military is one big Progressive social experiment. And it’s largely due to the craven cowardice of senior leadership; Heaven help our rank-and-file troops.
Speaking of unconscionable cowardice, Victor Davis Hanson details…
“Eric Holder’s left many baleful legacies: being censured by the House of Representatives; withholding subpoenaed documents, proving untruthful about a failed gun-walking caper in Mexico; failing to enforce laws on the books, from immigration to the elements of the Affordable Care Act; illegally billing the government for his own private use of a government Gulfstream jet; snooping on Associated Press reporters; giving de facto exemptions to renegade IRS politicos; and trying to create civilian trials for terrorist killers like KSM, one of the architects of the 9/11 attacks. But he will be known mostly for re-teaching Americans to think of race as essential, not incidental, to our characters.
…In other words, in the reprehensible vision of Eric Holder, how we look governs who we are. He either believes in the desirability of such racialist exceptionalism out of cultural and historic ignorance — given the contemporary evidence of where bumper-sticker racial, ethnic and religious jingoism inevitably leads (cf. e.g., Iraq, Rwanda, the Congo, Serbia, Bosnia, etc.) — or he cynically assumes that the more the country is polarized racially, the more elites like himself are called on to adjudicate differences, and thus advance to positions that they might otherwise not have earned either by their prior record or their present display of minimal competence…”
But as Eli Lake observes at The Daily Beast, just like a fish, an Administration rots from the head down:
Reached by The Daily Beast after Obama’s interview aired, one former senior Pentagon official who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq was flabbergasted. “Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting,” the former official said.
Clapper did tell The Washington Post’s David Ignatius this month that he underestimated the will of the ISIS fighters in Iraq and overestimated the ability of Iraq’s security forces in northern Iraq to counter ISIS. (He also said his analysts warned about the “prowess and capability” of the group.)
Still, other senior intelligence officials have been warning about ISIS for months. In prepared testimony before the annual House and Senate intelligence committees’ threat hearings in January and February, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the recently departed director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said the group would likely make a grab for land before the end of the year. ISIS “probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in 2014.” Of course, the prediction wasn’t exactly hard to make. By then, Flynn noted, ISIS had taken the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah, and the demonstrated an “ability to concurrently maintain multiple safe havens in Syria.”
In a related item, Breitbart.com notes that…
“You mean I’m actually expected to READ these things?!?”
A new Government Accountability Institute (GAI)report reveals that President Barack Obama has attended only 42.1% of his daily intelligence briefings (known officially as the Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB) in the 2,079 days of his presidency through September 29, 2014. The GAI report also included a breakdown of Obama’s PDB attendance record between terms; he attended 42.4% of his PDBs in his first term and 41.3% in his second.
“It’s pretty well-known that the president hasn’t taken in-person intelligence briefings with any regularity since the early days of 2009,” an Obama national security staffer told the Daily Mail on Monday. “He gets them in writing.”
The Obama security staffer said the president’s PDBs have contained detailed threat warnings about the Islamic State dating back to before the 2012 presidential election. “Unless someone very senior has been shredding the president’s daily briefings and telling him that the dog ate them, highly accurate predictions about ISIL have been showing up in the Oval Office since before the 2012 election,” the Obama security staffer told the Daily Mail.
Then again, what can one expect from a President far more interested in campaign contributions and a lower handicap…
…than protecting Americans at home and abroad?
Since we’re on the subject, the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger relates the true legacy of this real-life Manchurian Candidate:
“…Universities, public schools, fire and police departments, the financial industry, utilities, state legislatures, orders of nuns, black parents, small-business owners, the electrons inside the Internet, random sections of the U.S. Constitution—all have learned that what they took to be the clear meaning of existing law was wrong.
Messrs. Obama and Holder have attempted to make federal legal authority limitless. The Obama-Holder theory of law—that the needs of justice, as they define it, supersede the law’s boundaries—deserves to be repudiated. It has no precedent outside progressive law journals or various periods in South American history.
Mr. Obama made his intentions clear. In July 2011, the president said in public he’d like to “bypass Congress and change the laws on my own.” The phrase, “change the laws on his own,” is not in the U.S. Constitution. The next year, Mr. Obama made his now-famous and unconstitutional recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. The recess appointments were the tip of the iceberg…“
For more on the subject of The Dear Misleader’s utter contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law, not to mention the general welfare, Conn Carroll details the crony capitalism at the heart of The Unaffordable Care Act:
“…Our story begins just days after Obama’s landslide victory over Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in 2008. Sensing an opportunity to increase profits at taxpayer expense, Karen Ignagni, the president of America’s Health Insurance Plans (the trade association that represents the health insurance industry in Washington), quickly signaled that she was ready to do business with the new occupant of the White House. “No one should fall through the cracks of our health care system,” Ignagni’s November 11, 2008 statement read. “Universal coverage is within reach and can be achieved by building on the current system.”
That last phrase, “and can be achieved by building on the current system” was the health insurance industry’s top priority in the beginning of the Obama administration. And they spent furiously to make sure Obama would protect them. Despite the worst recession since World War II, businesses spent more than $1 billion lobbying on health reform in 2009, a sharp increase from 2008.
…One might think that a mandate forcing all Americans to buy your product, and $1 trillion in taxpayer funded subsidies to buy that product, would be all that was necessary for any industry to turn a hefty profit. But America’s health insurance industry wanted more.
In a capitalist economy, big companies manage their own risks. But in a corporatist economy, big companies use Big Government to help socialize risk and privatize profits. Obamacare is corporatism on steroids…“
And taxpayers are the ones left holding the bag!
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to today’s installment of the “Your Tax Dollars at Work” segment, as The Washington Examiner reports how…
“…Officials admitted Maryland’s 10,000 percent increase over three years in a little-noticed hearing before the House’s Subcommittee on Communications and Technology in April last year. “By the third quarter of 2012, the number of Lifeline subscribers in Maryland had risen almost 100 fold to 645,000” compared to three years prior, industry consultant Billy Jack Gregg told Congress. “Moreover, the current number of Lifeline subscribers in Maryland is almost double the number of low income households in the state” who are eligible.
The FCC says it has since instituted some reforms to put a damper on fraud. Until recently, applicants could self-certify their eligibility, and the FCC found millions of dollars of abuse when it finally checked.
…The profits to telecom companies from the free, government-provided phone service are so great that in Nebraska alone, 51 corporations, many of them who are not even traditional phone companies building infrastructure and attracting paying subscribers, fought for a piece of the pie…”
No Crony Capitalism benefiting the 1%-ers to see here, folks; move along!
Then there’s the latest bit of utter hypocrisy from The Most Transparent Administration in History, brought to us today by The Blaze and the First Marxette:
Meg Kissinger is a seasoned reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Wisconsin’s well-known newspaper. She’s seen a lot in her days. But what she said happened at a speech by Michelle Obama in the state on Monday left her utterly “creeped out.”
Kissinger took to her Facebook and Twitter page to describe what happened. In short, she said, aides for both the first lady and Wisconsin Democratic candidate for governor, Mary Burke, told her she was banned from talking to members of the crowd.
Yes…
…quite creepy!
Turning to the Lighter Side…
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the great Thomas Sowell’s latest…
Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene
Progressives: wrong? They ain’t never been right…EVER…about ANYTHING!
What a non-judgmental society amounts to is that common decency is optional — which means that decency is likely to become less common.
The biggest issue in this fall’s election is whether the Obama administration will end when Barack Obama leaves the White House or whether it will continue on, by appointing federal judges with lifetime appointments who share President Obama’s contempt for the Constitution. Whether such judges will be confirmed by the Senate depends on whether the Senate continues to be controlled by Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid. (Would-be Libertarians, are you paying attention?!?)
Why in the world would any sane American go to North Korea and put themselves at the mercy of a crackpot dictator?
Since Illinois enacted a law permitting more people to carry concealed firearms, more than 65,000 people got permits to do so. Rates of robbery, burglary and motor vehicle thefts have dropped significantly, and the murder rate has fallen to a level not seen in more than half a century. If only the gun control fanatics would pay some attention to facts, a lot of lives could be saved.
If you took all the mumbo-jumbo out of our educational institutions, how much would be left? Students could finish their education years earlier and end up knowing a lot more than they know now.
Why are Americans — and the Western world in general — falling all over ourselves stifling our own self-expression to appease people who chose to immigrate here, and are now demanding the suppression of anything they don’t like, such as public expressions of Christianity or displays of the American flag?
Someone should write a history of political rhetoric, if only to put us on our guard against being deceived into disasters. The First World War, for example, was said to be a war “to make the world safe for democracy.” What it actually led to was the replacement of despotic dynasties by totalitarian dictatorships that were far worse, including far more murderous.
Professor Sterling Brown remains as much a hero to me in my old age as he was when I was a freshman at Howard University. He wrote bitterly eloquent attacks on racism — and yet, when I was preparing to go off to Harvard, he said to me, “Don’t come back here and tell me you didn’t make it ’cause white folks were mean.”
The fatal weakness of most clever people is that they don’t know when to stop being clever. The past cleverness of President Obama is finally starting to catch up with him. (Though we’re of the mind anyone could appear clever with the MSM in their pocket. Were The Obamao twice as clever as he is, he’d still only be half as clever as he believes himself to be!)
Why Republicans would bring up the subject of immigration during an election year is beyond me. Yet Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner seems drawn to the subject like a moth to a flame.
Who says the Obama administration is not transparent? They are constantly telling our enemies overseas when it will pull out our troops and where we will not put boots on the ground.
Heartening as it has been to see Derek Jeter get farewell honors during his last season, as with Mariano Rivera last season, it is also a melancholy thought that we may not see their like again — in their personal dignity and class, as well as their performance on the field. They are throwbacks to an earlier time, in a sports world of spoiled brat showoffs today.
I must have heard the word “diversity” proclaimed in ringing tones as a great benefit to society at least a thousand times — and probably closer to a million — without even once hearing a speck of evidence provided, or even suggested as a way to test whether that is true or false.
Attorney General Eric Holder has picked the perfect time to resign, in terms of his own self-interest. (How shocking!) He will have two years in which to cash in with lucrative fees on the lecture circuit and to make a big-bucks book deal. If he waited until the end of the Obama administration, a former Attorney General would be eclipsed in both respects by a former President of the United States, thereby reducing the demand for Holder.
With the momentous consequences of control of the Senate at stake in this fall’s election, anyone who risks the outcome by running as a third party candidate should not only be voted against this year but remembered for such irresponsibility in future years.
Along with anyone who votes for them. This man has more intellect and common sense in his little finger than the whole of The Obamao’s entire Administration.
Magoo
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