It’s Wednesday, September 9th, 2015…but before we begin, one brief observation: as Dick Cheney observed yesterday, “any legislator who supports this “shameful deal” should not be serving”.  At the risk of seeming overly reactionary, we’d go one step further and suggest they be shot.

And while those who supported The Dear Misleader in his act of anti-Americanism prior to Babs Mikulski’s sycophantic sell-out are bad enough, Progressives such as Ben Cardin and Joe Manchin, who came out in opposition only after their positions were moot, are particularly deserving of complete and utter contempt.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of Commentary Magazine, Noah Rothmann offers an opinion, absolutely accurate in our assessment, as to why…

Liberalism Doesn’t Deserve the Benefit of the Doubt

“Sure, their approach to governance may be of dubious efficacy, but their hearts are in the right place. Judging the left by their intentions and not whether their policy prescriptions succeed on their own terms is how liberalism has managed to avoid critical introspection and soul-searching for much of the modern era – even when it is cast into the political wilderness by the electorate. As the Obama era comes to a close and liberalism faces another time out of the public’s favor, its contemporary leaders seem fit to ignore the lessons of its period in ascendance. Liberalism is utterly undeserving of the benefit of the doubt from which it has so unduly profited. That was always the case, but this summer has so plainly demonstrated this reality that it would be pathologically self-deceptive for the left to continue to ignore it. 

Carey Gabay, a Harvard-educated lawyer and aide to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was walking with his brother down a Brooklyn street near a well-traveled parade route when he was shot over the weekend. Gabay was caught in the crossfire that erupted between two rival gangs in Brooklyn. It is a spate of violence that had already taken the life of a 24-year-old man who was fatally stabbed in that same part of Brooklyn just hours earlier. Gabay remains in critical condition as of this writing. No arrests have been made in either his shooting or the deadly stabbing incident.

Hopefully, Gabay’s family was not watching MSNBC on Tuesday morning. If they were, they would have seen the city’s callous and indifferent Mayor Bill de Blasio affirming the tranquility of his city. “Crime is down almost five percent over last year,” a smiling de Blasio averred. “We have had the safest summer in over 20 years.” While overall crime is lower than in previous years, the murder rate is not. By mid-August, killings had risen by almost 10 percent over last year. De Blasio’s New York is not alone in experiencing a substantial increase in the homicide rate. In America’s Democrat-led metropolises, the murder rate is almost uniformly up from last year. Chicago is up 20 percent; New Orleans is up 22 percent; Washington D.C. is up 56 percent. Baltimore and St. Louis – two cities that were rocked by racial violence over the course of the last year – are up 56 and 60 percent respectively. Milwaukee has experienced a staggering 76 percent increase in the murder rate…”

Hells bells; we’d sooner walk the streets of an ISIS-controlled city in Syria wearing a crucifix than the streets of Chicago under any conditions!

Since we’re on the subject of Liberals undeserving of anything, be it the benefit of the doubt or the highest office in the land, NRO‘s Shannen Coffin highlights the utter absurdity of Hillary’s latest excuses:

Hillary Clinton Spent Lots of Time ‘Not Thinking’ about Her Secret E-mail Server

Hillary Clinton told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell in an interview last week that she just didn’t think about things when she set up her private server to use exclusively as her official e-mail while secretary of state. She “was not thinking a lot when [she] got in. There was so much work to be done. We had so many problems around the world.” Understandably, she “didn’t really stop and think what kind of e-mail system will there be.”

So she didn’t think when she paid a former campaign staffer to build the server and set up “Clinton.com” e-mail addresses for herself and close State Department aides, including her deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin.

She didn’t think when she hired that campaign staffer at the State Department, but continued to pay him off the federal books for his services in maintaining her secret server.

She didn’t think when she neglected to report her server to the Department of Homeland Security, as required by law, so DHS could audit the security of her system as part of its mission to protect the government’s Internet security.

She didn’t think, when she instructed all overseas State Department officials not to use private e-mail to conduct official business, that the same rule applied to her. Nor did she think too hard before firing an ambassador, in part, for using private e-mail to conduct official business.

She didn’t think when she operated that server and her e-mail addresses for several months without a security certificate, so that her communications were entirely unencrypted for even the least skilled of Chinese, Russian, and Romanian hackers to find.

She didn’t think when she gave her e-mail address to foreign diplomats, such as Tony Blair, who communicated with her in confidence about sensitive international matters over unsecure systems.

She didn’t think when her own diplomats and staff shared similar foreign communications and even satellite intelligence over unsecure e-mail systems.

She didn’t think to classify any of that information under the classification authority granted her by law.

She just didn’t think that President Obama’s executive order on classification and her own State Department’s foreign-affairs manual — which presume that the disclosure of confidential “foreign government information” will harm the national security — applied to those e-mails.

She certainly didn’t think to handle any such classified information — approaching 200 e-mails now classified by the State Department (and still counting) — under the security procedures required by law.

So she definitely didn’t think when she told a staffer, “Just e-mail it,” when he informed her that a particular document was classified.

She didn’t think to search any of her e-mails in response to countless Freedom of Information Act requests.

And she surely didn’t think that congressional committees wanted her secret e-mails when they demanded State Department records in the days and months after the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

She didn’t think, when she resigned from the State Department, to return all of her federal records, like every other employee of the department is required to do. As busy as she was, she couldn’t be bothered with attesting to the completeness of those records, again like every other employee is required to do.

She didn’t think to report a security breach to the State Department when her communications with Sidney Blumenthal — a secret adviser rejected from official State Department service by the Obama White House, but nonetheless paid on the side by Clinton’s foundation — were hacked by Romanian hacker Guccifer in 2013 and published online by Gawker.com.

She didn’t think about her obligations to protect the classified information on her server when she turned it over wholesale to Platte River Networks, a private Internet company that lacked proper security clearances.

She didn’t think when she continued to keep the existence of her server — and thousands of official e-mails — from the State Department and the public for almost two years after leaving office.

She didn’t think when she let her lawyers decide which of nearly 60,000 e-mails were federal records required to be preserved by law.

She surely didn’t think when she directed her lawyers and aides to delete permanently half of those e-mails (more than 30,000) — so that no one would ever know what was in them.

And she also didn’t think to tell the truth in response to the public outcry.

You can hardly blame her. It was a lot not to think about.

The truly scary part…other than the fact she seriously thinks she deserves the presidency? 

As Jim Geraghty notes in his Morning Jolt…

“Planning spontaneity“; yeah…

…THAT oughta work!  So, at least according the The Old Grey Nag, Dimocrats should just…

Ruh roh…

I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Scoob!  Time for Plan “B”, as in…

…Biden. Yeah…

In a related item detailing additional deliberate Dimocratic dissimulation, courtesy of PJMedia, Victor Davis Hanson goes out on a limb to predict the pertinancy of…

‘Black Lives Matter’—a Year From Now

Exploring the many reasons why the slogan “Black Lives Matter” will be gone within a year. What will replace it?

Idiots on Parade.

“…Black Lives Matter is based largely on a lie. President Obama has referenced “Ferguson” as if it automatically invoked some sort of racial solidarity or was synonymous with bias. But what exactly does Ferguson mean? That Eric Holder’s Justice Department found no criminal culpability in the Michael Brown shooting? Note the quick disappearance of “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” as a national rallying cry, given that it was a total fabrication based on a mythical account from a disreputable witness with a criminal record…”

And remember, particularly as it’s now September 9th…

With all due respect (which is none whatsoever!) to the racists running Black Lives Matter, we offer a slogan with as much bearing on reality as theirs:

Here’s the juice: we’ve said it before and we’ll say it again.  Black Lives Matter has as much interest in preventing the primary cause of violence against Blacks…

…as the gay marriage movement has in the institution of marriage; i.e.,

Speaking of Liberals and their lives of lies, in today’s edition of the Environmental Moment, writing at the WSJ, Patrick Moore, co-founder and 15-year leader of Greenpeace calls out the recipe for…

Obama’s Half-Baked Alaska

Yes, the glacier of Glacier Bay is receding—as it has from time to time for centuries.

When President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry visited Alaska this week, they pointed to the receding glaciers as evidence that humans are the cause of “dangerous,” even “catastrophic,” climate change. Messrs. Obama and Kerry have been seriously misinformed by their advisers, including chief science adviser John Holdren, who is a leading alarmist on the subject. If only the president had consulted the history of Glacier Bay, where the Huna Tlingit people have lived for more than 4,000 years, he would have found a different story.

It is a historical fact that the glacier in Glacier Bay began its retreat around 1750. By the time Capt. George Vancouver arrived there in 1794 the glacier still filled most of the bay but had already retreated some miles.

When John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, visited in 1879, he found that the glacier had retreated more than 30 miles from the mouth of the bay, according to the National Park Service, and by 1900 Glacier Bay was mostly ice-free. All of this happened long before human emissions of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, could have had any impact.

In the oral tradition of the Huna Tlingit people, it is said that the glacier has advanced and retreated a number of times during their occupation of the area. Each time the glacier advanced they would move to the village of Hoonah in Icy Strait outside Glacier Bay. When the glacier retreated, many of them would move back into the bay. These multiple migrations were certainly caused by climate change, but it had nothing to do with human activity.

The fashionable tendency to blame every change in climate and every extreme-weather event on human emissions is doing a grave disservice to the scientific tradition. (Even when such “extreme-weather events are wholly fabricated!) We know that the climate has been changing for millions of years due to a multitude of perfectly natural factors. There is no reason to believe that those factors have suddenly disappeared and now humans are the all-powerful shapers of global climate destiny. Yet this entirely unproven hypothesis of catastrophe is compelling to those who would control our beliefs.

Politicians want us to believe they are saving us from ruin; religious leaders want to reinforce original sin and the need for repentance; some business leaders want us to subsidize their expensive “green” technologies; and the climate activists want their money-machine to keep on giving. This powerful convergence of interests ignores the fact that carbon dioxide is essential for all life on Earth, that plants could use a lot more of it, and that the real threat is a cooling of the climate, not the slight warming that has occurred over the past 300 years.

Not only half-baked, but altogether deliberately deceptive.

Which brings us to the WSJ‘s William McGurn, who wonders…

Why Must Kim Davis Be Jailed?

A federal judge chose the nuclear option instead of finding a reasonable accommodation.

“…It’s easy to feel superior to Kim Davis and her messy personal life, which has included three husbands, four marriages and two children out of wedlock. Not to mention her talk about how she can’t do what the law requires because she “surrendered [her] life to Jesus Christ.” She even finds herself compared with George Wallace, the Alabama governor who in defiance of another federal court order stood on the front steps of the University of Alabama in 1963 to deny African-American students entry.

But even if one rejects all her arguments, it remains an extraordinary thing in America to see an elected official who chooses jail over violating her convictions.

Which raises what ought to be the key question here: Is the priority ensuring that Rowan County’s gay couples can get the marriage licenses they are entitled to, without hassle? Or is it breaking a Kentucky woman asking for an accommodation?

If the goal is the former—to ensure the issuing of licenses—there are any number of solutions. Because though Ms. Davis makes clear that she believes same-sex marriage a violation God’s law, she’s not asking the state of Kentucky to share this view or even to deny couples their licenses. What she objects to is that the marriage licenses come with her name “affixed to the certificate.” She asks the state to find a way around this.

U.S. District Judge David Bunning opted to send her to jail. Plainly this is within his discretion, inasmuch as Ms. Davis didn’t follow his earlier order. But plainly it is also the nuclear option. It’s hard not to notice, the contrast with 2004, when other clerks and mayors were cheered for issuing marriage licenses to gay couples in defiance of the state laws against it.

There is a view in polite society that if the issue is simply forced, opposition to same-sex marriage will wither away. Then again, polite society may not be that familiar with people who have a fear of God and are willing to suffer for it. This is not to say that Ms. Davis has it right about the law—federal, state or God’s. But a better appreciation for what is driving this woman might lead us to the kind of reasonable accommodations American families make every year at their own Thanksgiving dinner tables…”

We can see both sides of this particular subject.  But in view of the leniency accorded Sanctuary Cities in defiance of federal immigration law, and those who granted marriage licenses to gays before the blatantly unconstitutional SCOTUS decision which legalized homosexual unions, we have to conclude Judge Bunning is as crazy as…

…his father.  Only in Kentucky, home of…

…the original horse’s ass!

On the Lighter Side…

Magoo