It’s Friday, April 1st, 2016…and we wish this headline was an April Fools gag, but it ain’t:

Obama Family 2015 Honolulu Christmas Vacation Cost Taxpayers $3,590,313 in Flight Expenses Alone

 

196049

Congratulations, Obama-backers; you bought into the American equivalent of the Nigerian prince scam.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, the WSJ’s Dan Henninger details what may well end up being…

Obama’s Greatest Triumph

He is six months away from destroying both the Republican Party and Reagan’s legacy.

 

obama demon prayer smear christians

“Barack Obama will retire a happy man. He is now close to destroying his political enemies—the Republican Party, the American conservative movement and the public-policy legacy of Ronald Reagan.

Today, the last men standing amidst the debris of the Republican presidential competition are Donald Trump, a political independent who is using the Republican Party like an Uber car; Ted Cruz, who used the Republican Party as a footstool; and John Kasich, a remnant of the Reagan revolution, who is being told by Republicans to quit.

History may quibble, but this death-spiral began with Barack Obama’s health-care summit at Blair House on Feb. 25, 2010. For a day, Republicans gave detailed policy critiques of the proposed Affordable Care Act. When it was over, the Democrats, including Mr. Obama, said they had heard nothing new.

That meeting was the last good-faith event in the Obama presidency. (Albeit very one-sided!) Barack Obama killed politics in Washington that day because he had no use for it, and has said so many times. The Democrats survived the Obama desert by going to ground. But frustrated Republicans outside Congress eventually started tearing each other apart.

bg033016dAPR20160330044530

After Mr. Obama won in 2008, Democrats controlled the Senate and House with large majorities. Normally, a party out of power is disabled but not destroyed by the presidency’s advantages. Democrats, when out of power, historically remain intact until the wheel turns again. Their ideology has been simple: tax and spend.

The minority Republicans began well. In 2010, ObamaCare passed with zero Republican Senate votes, and Dodd-Frank with only one Republican Senate vote. It was a remarkable display of party discipline. In the first term, Republicans and conservatives fought Barack Obama. In the second term, they decided it made more sense to fight each other…”

Only time will tell; though we must observe, the utter tone-deafness of the Boehners, McConnells, McCains, Rubios and Preibusi of the GOP certainly did far more to decimate their party and disaffect those who voted them back into power to effect real change than any internecine squabbling.

Speaking of The Gang Who Still Can’t Shoot Straight, writing at Commentary Magazine, Noah Rothmann offers the play-by-play as…

The Last Pro-Trump Argument Implodes

 

Donald-Trump-Washington-DC

“Why’s everybody always pickin’ on me?!?”

At root, every argument in favor of Trump’s competence is a presumption based upon faith.

It is presumed, for example, that Donald Trump would be a decent manager, if only because he has managed a relatively large corporate enterprise for years. After the discerning figure discounts Trump’s profligacy, his bad investments, and his serial bankruptcies – one of which, miraculously, was a casino – that argument’s last cogent thread is essentially a statement of faith. Trump, these true believers contend, will hire those who deserve hiring and fire those who deserve firing (as though this was how government functioned). This is the crux of the argument Trump himself made regarding the scandal-plagued Department of Veterans Affairs.

“You fix it with good management; you fix it by getting Trump elected president. That’s what you do,” said Trump, deploying all the depth of which he is capable. “I’d fire everybody, I’d get it — it would be so good. It would be so good.” Many believe this, but they should not presume that anyone else see that belief as something beyond their capacity for self-delusion. On Tuesday, Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, was arrested and charged with the alleged battery of former Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields. Even following this arrest, Trump was determined to defend his associate and invite all message-derailing media scrutiny that will accompany this development. If Trump cannot even bring himself to fire a liability like Lewandowski, anyone who believes he will gut an embarrassingly incompetent department as America’s chief executive is only kidding themselves…”

In a related item, inserted in its entirety, Jim Geraghty recounts how, in a sudden Road to Damascus moment…

A Few Trump Fans Suddenly See the Man They’ve Been Defending

 

Image 3-30-16 at 11.16 AM

Something odd is going on among Trump’s most ardent defenders. Start with Ann Coulter in this podcast interview with Breitbart.com’s Milo Yiannopoulos.

COULTER: Moreover, I’m a little testy with our man right now.

YIANNOPOULOS: You are? Daddy’s annoyed you?

[Yes, Yiannopoulos calls Trump “Daddy.” Because that’s perfectly normal.]

COULTER: Our candidate is mental! Do you realize our candidate is mental? It’s like constantly having to bail out your 16-year-old son from prison. Let’s move past last night’s tweet — you know perfectly well what tweet I’m talking about.

This is the worst thing he’s done. I mean the McCain thing — I would say there are only really two, liberals would say, “Oh, every day,” no, everything else I could probably defend. I could. I think. Most of that is them overreacting . . . But the McCain thing, that was a dumb joke, it didn’t work. Oh, well. Didn’t kill him. But that tweet last night . . .

YIANNOPOULOS: And he’s retweeting these images that are, like, ‘I don’t need to make implications, you know, the pictures speak for themselves.’ And a picture of Cruz’s wife and a picture of Melania!

COULTER: That’s exactly the tweet I’m talking about! No, you can’t defend it! This is when we’re bailing out sixteen-year-old out of jail!

YIANNOPOULOS: It’s so outrageously funny! (If Yiannopoulos still finds Trump’s immutable immaturity funny, she’ll split a gut when he costs Republicans the White House, the Senate and the Supreme Court!)

Then Newt Gingrich and Sean Hannity:

GINGRICH: Tweeting about, or repeating a Tweet about Mrs. Cruz is just utterly stupid. It has frankly, weakened everything that Trump ought to be strengthening. It sent a signal to women that is negative, at a time when his numbers with women are already bad. (And growing immeasurably worse!) It sent a signal of instability to people who may be beginning to say, “Maybe I’ve got to get used to it, maybe I’ve got to rely on him, maybe he could be presidential.” And frankly, it energized Cruz. The interview you just did is as good as I have ever seen Ted Cruz. He was clear, he was vigorous, he was prepared to be combative but at the same time he was getting into big issues and big ideas. My guess is he’s going to do well in Wisconsin. This ought to be a wake-up call for Trump that he had better rethink what seem to be the underlying patterns of his campaign.

HANNITY: For the life of me, I can’t understand when families and wives are brought into it. I’m sure he’s mad about the ad about Melania, I’m sure he assumed it was the Cruz campaign.

Gingrich added, “I’m not sure anybody in the Trump campaign understands yet what a big mistake this is. They can’t keep doing this stuff and think they’re going to get the nomination.”

trump1c

Now look at Stephanie Cegielski, formerly the communications director of the Make America Great Again Super PAC:

He doesn’t want the White House. He just wants to be able to say that he could have run the White House. He’s achieved that already and then some. If there is any question, take it from someone who was recruited to help the candidate succeed, and initially very much wanted him to do so.

The hard truth is: Trump only cares about Trump.

And if you are one of the disaffected voters — one of the silent majority like me — who wanted a candidate who could be your voice, I want to speak directly to you as one of his biggest advocates and supporters.

He is not that voice. He is not your voice. He is only Trump’s voice.

Trump is about Trump. Not one of his many wives. Not one of his many “pieces of ass.” He is, at heart, a self-preservationist.

Just FYI, Trump supporters, no one should let you off of that bandwagon now. You should be handcuffed to that Titanic you volunteered to crew.

Donald Trump didn’t suddenly change in the past few days, weeks, or months. He’s the same guy he always was, the same guy that most of us in the conservative movement and GOP have been staunchly opposing for the past year. He didn’t abruptly become reckless, obnoxious, ill-informed, erratic, hot-tempered, pathologically dishonest, narcissistic, crude, and catastrophically unqualified for the presidency overnight. He’s always been that guy, and you denied it and ignored it and hand-waved it away and made excuses every step of the way because you were convinced that you were so much smarter than the rest of us. You were so certain that you were on some superior wavelength giving you special insight into the Donald; only you could tell that it was all an act. Only you could grasp that his constant courting of controversy was just to get attention from the media. Only you could instinctively sense that his style would play brilliantly in the general election and win over working-class Democrats. (SPOILER ALERT: It isn’t.) You insisted that you could “coach him.”

AP_77036966252-1024x683

All three of them…including Melania and Ivanka!

You came to those conclusions not because you’re smarter than the rest of us, but because you’re actually more foolish than the rest of us. You insisted Occam’s Razor couldn’t possibly be true — that Trump acts the way he does because this is who he is, this is the way he is all the time, and he will always be like this. You fooled yourself into believing that Trump was playing this nine-level chess game that only you and a few others could perceive and understand. Only you could see the long game.

But there is no long game. He’s winging it. There is no grand strategy. There is no master plan. Trump doesn’t look ahead to the next sentence, much less the next step in getting elected.

Our candidate is mental?” No Shinola, Sherlock; some conservatives said this from day one and all we got for it was the alt-Right vomiting forth endless vitriol and profanity and threats.

Oh, what’s that? Trump’s Twitter behavior is “utterly stupid,” Newt? Thanks for noticing; six days ago you were telling the media there was absolutely nothing about Trump that worries you. Maybe your previous comparison of Trump to Reagan was frankly, fundamentally, profoundly wrong from A to Z.

“Trump only cares about Trump”? Gee, thank you, turncoat former insider, for this shocking bit of secret intelligence. News flash: some of us didn’t need to work for Trump for several months to figure that out. We saw it, we said it, and you called us liars for saying it.

Technically we’re supposed to welcome previous Trump fans-turned-foes with open arms. But barring some miraculous comeback by Ted Cruz, the Trump campaign will have cost the Republican party the presidency after eight years of Obama, and perhaps the Senate and even the Housenot to mention Scalia’s replacement on the Supreme Court. (And likely three others!) Years of effort spent attempting to dispel the accusations of inherent Republican misogyny, xenophobia, hypocrisy, ignorance, and blind rage have been undone by Trump’s campaign. And every Trump advocate in front of a camera (And behind a microphone, Rush!) had a hand in this.

We’re not just gonna hug it out.

No hugs…but we will continually ask any Trumpeteer, right up until their dying breath…

Turning from hugs to hags, courtesy of NROAndrew McCarthy offers some facts to ponder regarding…

The Justice Department’s Hillary Stonewall

 

2015-01-29-b56c2ef8

When it comes to Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal, the most important thing to bear in mind — even more than classified information — is this: It was all about avoiding accountability.

It still is. Mrs. Clinton did not set out to damage national security and compromise defense secrets, although she obviously had no compunction about doing so as necessary to serve her higher personal interests. For a generation, she has been a public person whose most intimate companion has been scandal. She knew her State Department stewardship would be no different. Her motive in designing a communication system that circumvented government record-keeping and disclosure laws was to avoid a day of reckoning as she campaigned in 2016 for the power of the presidency she craves.

And that is where Loretta Lynch comes in.

That would be the same Loretta Lynch who came to prominence in 1999 by being appointed United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York by none other than Mrs. Clinton’s husband. Loretta Lynch, who had a history of significant political contributions to Democratic-party candidates before President Obama reappointed her as U.S. Attorney for the EDNY in 2010, and then elevated her to U.S. attorney general in 2015. Loretta Lynch, who said in her confirmation hearings that she supports the Democratic president’s lawless executive actions and non-enforcement of federal law. Loretta Lynch, who very much likes being attorney general of the United States and would be well positioned to continue in that powerful post in a Hillary Clinton administration.

The known evidence that Mrs. Clinton committed federal crimes is abundant, perhaps even overwhelming. It is manifest that she lawlessly transmitted and stored classified information outside its secure system, and that she caused her underlings to do so. But remember, there is also the evidence that is unknown to the public — though it is being pored over by the FBI: the 32,000 e-mails Clinton refused to turn over to the State Department (which involved converting them to her private use) and attempted to destroy by trying to delete them (i.e., to wipe her private server clean).

As I’ve previously pointed out, the federal embezzlement statute makes it a felony to destroy government files or convert them to one’s private use. The FBI has reportedly been able to recover at least some and possibly all of the e-mails Clinton tried to erase. Unless you really believe that one of the busiest high officials in the U.S. government had time for 32,000 e-mails about yoga routines and Chelsea’s wedding dress, it is inevitable that some of those e-mails, probably a goodly portion, related to State Department business — i.e., they were government files. With such neon indicators of serious wrongdoing, it seems highly likely that the FBI, which has reportedly devoted substantial time and resources to the investigation, will recommend prosecution. For all we know, that may have happened already. Once such a recommendation has been made, the ball is in the Justice Department’s court: It will be up to Attorney General Lynch — with whatever direction she gets from her boss, the president — to decide whether to indict Clinton. An indictment would be devastating to the Democrats’ chances of retaining the White House in the November election. Thus, the conventional wisdom holds that Lynch will decline prosecution, which the executive branch has the unreviewable constitutional power to do, regardless of how damning the proof of crimes might be.

But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? And to be clear, I am not suggesting that Lynch will shock the world by approving an indictment against her party’s candidate for the presidency.

What if Loretta Lynch simply decides to . . . do nothing?…”

It’s worth noting, after six years of the most partisan and racist Attorney General…

holder-oath

…in American history, how many “Republican” Senators…

Slide111

supported Loretta Lynch, his literal female clone…

15753823855_7d7d6f159f_b

…to succeed him.  With friends like these, who needs Dimocrats?!?

Since we’re on the subject of racists in high places, as Leah Barboukis reports at Townhall.com

UN Condemns Israel As Worst Violator of Women’s Rights in the World

 

Useless Nations

It should probably come as no surprise that the resolution, which was adopted 27-2, was co-sponsored by Palestinians. The United States and Israel were the only two countries in the 45-member commission to vote against it, while all European Union members abstained…”

Any question one of the first things WE would do as President?!?

And in a follow-up to our Wednesday item detailing the Connecticut legislature’s plan to tax Yale’s endowment, Steve Boss forwarded the L.A. equivalent:

City of LA to repair sidewalks for now, but it’s on property owners in the future

 

la-ed-sidewalks-20140223-001

“…Under the plan approved Tuesday, Los Angeles will repair all broken and cracked sidewalks, and then turn over responsibility to owners. Homeowners have a 20-year “warranty,” in which they can get their sidewalk repaired — just once — by the city. Commercial property owners have a smaller window of five years…If property owners fail to maintain their sidewalks after the warranty expires, the city will fix the sidewalk and send the owner a bill.

Tuesday’s action seeks to unwind a long-standing city ordinance. Under California law, property owners are responsible for sidewalk repairs, but a law passed in 1974 makes the city responsible for sidewalks damaged by tree rootsBut in recent years, the city failed to make repairs, which led to a network of faulty sidewalks, and eventually prompted the lawsuit by disability groups…”

Thus Los Angeles, having failed to perform one of its basic and primary functions, is now looking to property owners to solve a problem the city itself created.  Is this a great country or what?!?

Which brings us to The Lighter Side

RAMclr-040116-little-chance-IBD-COLOR-FINALmrz033016dAPC20160330014706tmdsu16032820160329115613cb032916dAPC20160329104514payn_c14003120160331120100gmc14004720160330102700gv033016dAPR20160330044517lb0330cd20160329090430sk032916dAPR20160329084520download (1) download (2) download

Finally, in the Sports Section, courtesy today of our middle son Mike, five videos you have to see to believe:

2016 WSL Wipeout of the Year Nominees Announced

 

article-1346736-0CBE382E000005DC-370_964x631

Cowabunga, dude; now THOSE are gonna leave a mark!

Enjoy your weekend!

Magoo



Archives