It’s Friday, May 4th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

Leading off the last edition of the week, two late-breaking developments which could signal major trouble for Team Tick-Tock….assuming of course the stories are ever covered by the MSM.  First, on the domestic front:

Issa sends out draft contempt order against Holder, says ‘Furious’ response ‘cannot stand’

 

Second, in International News of Note, this forward from the Washington Times, courtesy of Bill Meisen:

Russia threatens to strike NATO missile defense sites

 

Guess the Russians don’t feel the need to wait for “greater flexibility”; The Obamao’s quite spineless enough today!

Russia’s most senior military officer said Thursday that Moscow would strike and destroy NATO missile defense sites in Eastern Europe before they came online if the U.S. pushes ahead with deployment. “A decision to use destructive force pre-emptively will be taken if the situation worsens,” Russian Chief of General Staff Nikolai Makarov said at an international missile defense conference in Moscow attended by senior U.S. and NATO officials.

The threat comes as talks about the missile defense system, which the U.S. and its allies insist is aimed at Iranian missiles, appear to have stalled. “We have not been able to find mutually acceptable solutions at this point, and the situation is practically at a dead end,” Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov said.

Ellen Tauscher, the U.S. special envoy for strategic stability and missile defense, insisted the talks about NATO plans for a missile defense system using ground-based interceptor missiles stationed in Poland, Romania and Turkey were not stalemated. But she acknowledged Wednesday that the recent elections in Russia and the upcoming elections in the U.S. make it “pretty clear that this is a year in which we’re probably not going to achieve any sort of a breakthrough.”

She reiterated that the U.S.-built system, still in development, is being designed to shoot down Iranian intermediate-range missiles aimed at Europe, not Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).

Russian officials insist that the system has the capability to shoot down their ICBMs, thus robbing their nuclear deterrent of its credibility and destabilizing the Cold War-era balance of mutually assured destruction.

Neither the State Department nor the Pentagon had any immediate comment on the Russian threat Thursday.

There’s no doubt Darrell Issa is acting in earnest; the Russians are another story.  Although the Kremlin ultimatum may appear as yet another disastrous failure of The Anointed One’s panty-waist diplomacy, we’re not so certain this isn’t part of a carefully choreographed act, a fabricated farce.

Putin stares down the United States, extracting additional concessions in a show of strength intended for the Russian electorate, while allowing The Obamao to personally intervene and diffuse a staged crisis with his legendary interpersonal skills.  Both would-be dictators solidify their re-election bids while no one at home is any the wiser.

Far-fetched you say?  We’d agree….assuming we were having this discussion a scant 3-1/2 years ago.

Speaking of far-fetched, James Taranto offers his observations regarding The Dear Misleader’s latest flight of fancy:

The Lonely Life of Julia

In Obama’s ideal world, men are replaced by bureaucrats.

 

Barack Obama has a new composite girlfriend, and her name is Julia. Her story is told in an interactive feature titled “The Life of Julia” on the Obama campaign website. Julia, who has no face, is depicted at various ages from 3 through 67, enjoying the benefits of various Obama-backed welfare-state programs.

As a toddler, she’s in a head-start program. Skip ahead to 17, and she’s enrolled at a Race to the Top high school. Her 20s are very active: She gets surgery and free birth control through ObamaCare regulations, files a lawsuit under the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and pays off her student loans at a low interest rate. We get updates at age 31, 37 and 42–and then the narrative skips ahead 23 years when she enrolls in Medicare. Two years later, she’s on Social Security, at which point she can die at any time.

In a column amusingly titled “Who the Hell Is ‘Julia’ and Why Am I Paying for Her Whole Life?” (http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=51265) David Harsanyi raises an obvious objection to the story: “What we are left with is a celebration of a how a woman can live her entire life by leaning on government intervention, dependency and other people’s money rather than her own initiative or hard work. It is, I’d say, implicitly un-American, in the sense that it celebrates a mindset we have–outwardly, at least–shunned.”

This may explain why, in the campaign’s telling, nothing happens to Julia between 42 and 65. That period includes the typical peak earning years–the time at which, assuming Julia is gainfully employed, she will be paying the biggest price for “Obama’s” generosity.

Yes, Republicans do in fact want to do away with any form of health insurance or prenatal to ensure babies are delivered in back alleys.

At 31, the story tells us, “Julia decides to have a child. Throughout her pregnancy, she benefits from maternal checkups, prenatal care, and free screenings under health care reform.” In due course she bears a son named Zachary, the only other character in the tale.

Harsanyi is right. Obama is setting forward a vision contrary to the American tradition of self-sufficiency–a welfare state that runs from cradle to grave. And it’s a dishonest vision, because it presents all of these benefits as “free,” never acknowledging that they are paid for through coercive taxation.

Not to mention unsustainable levels of debt: Commentary’s Alana Goodman charts the life of a now 3-year-old “Julia” and compares it with debt projections at various stages of her life: “Julie [sic] hits a milestone around 2084, when publicly held debt will be just about 200 percent of [gross domestic product]–and rising.”

The most shocking bit of the Obama story is that Julia apparently never marries. She simply “decides” to have a baby, and Obama uses other people’s money to help her take care of it. Julia doesn’t appear to be poor; at various points the story refers to her glamorous career as a Web designer, and it makes no mention of her benefiting from poverty programs like Medicaid or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

In 1999 Lionel Tiger coined the word “bureaugamy” to refer to the relationship between officially impoverished mothers of illegitimate children and the government. “The Life of Julia” is an insidious attack on the institution of the family, an endorsement of bureaugamy even for middle-class women.

But as this next item from Victor Davis Hanson details, insidious attacks on long-standing, bedrock institutions of America and her families is what this Administration’s been about from the beginning.

Cabinets Gone Wild

 

We’ve had some unusual Cabinet secretaries in past administrations — Earl Butz, John Mitchell and James Watt come to mind — but never anything quite like the present bunch.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has overseen some $5 trillion in new debt. To help pay for it, he wants the rich — the top 1 percent already contributes more in income taxes than does the bottom 90 percent — to pay more for what he calls “the privilege of being an American.” Geithner, whose department oversees the IRS, should have taken his own advice: As a rich American one-percenter, he once failed to pay his own self-employment taxes, and improperly claimed his children’s camp costs as a dependent-care deduction.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has pulled off the near impossible: At a time when the known gas and oil reserves of the United States on public lands have soared, he has cut back on federal leasing of them to just about 2 percent of available offshore lands and 6 percent of onshore. Meanwhile, huge new amounts of oil are now found on private lands despite, not because of, the Interior Department. When he was a U.S. senator, Salazar claimed that even $10-a-gallon gas would not change his mind about voting to increase offshore drilling. And although he controls the leases of the richest oil and gas reserves in the Western world, he just recently shrugged that no one knew whether gas would hit $9 a gallon.

 Then there is the even stranger case of Energy Secretary Steven Chu, whose department helped oversee millions in bad loans to green companies like Solyndra, First Solar and Solar Trust of America — the Teapot Dome scandals of our times. Chu once infamously quipped before assuming office that he wanted U.S. gas prices to reach European levels. Apparently Chu wanted to force less fossil-fuel burning — although he later confessed that he does not drive a car.

 Chu also once warned that the California’s Central Valley agriculture might disappear due to global warming. True, it could decline, but more likely due to the Obama administration’s decision to divert irrigation water in hopes of helping out the 3-inch San Francisco Delta smelt. Chu should realize that private-sector California farmers create thousands of jobs, while his own Cabinet’s Solyndra-like projects have done precisely the opposite.

Attorney General Eric Holder dropped charges against the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation. That may explain why he said nothing when the same group put out a dead-or-alive bounty poster on George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin shooting case. Holder’s department is suing the state of Arizona for passing a law to enforce the largely unenforced federal immigration law. Holder suggested that the Arizona law was racially inspired even as he admitted that he had never read it. Holder has praised the race-baiting Al Sharpton for his “partnership” and called the country “cowards” for not holding a national conversation on race on his terms. The attorney general has referred to African-Americans as “my people,” and he has characterized congressional oversight of his office’s failure to rein in the Fast and Furious scandal as racially motivated attacks on himself.

In HolderWorld, no whites died in the Civil War freeing HIS people….and no other immigrants ever suffered acts of racial hatred.

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis just tried — and failed — to draft a proposal prohibiting kids under 18 from working “in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials,” even on family farms. And she wanted to turn over some farm training programs now run by the Future Farmers of America and the 4-H to the government. Most Americans raised on a farm believe that the times spent doing chores with their parents, siblings, and neighbors were the most important and rewarding years of their lives.

 Yet more worrisome, Solis is selective in her enforcement. She envisions new rules for businesses, but she first should have ensured that her family had followed old ones. When Solis was nominated, it was learned that her husband had several tax liens against his business, some of them 16 years old. And not long ago, Solis’ department posted a video advising illegal aliens to call her office if they felt they were treated unfairly by employers. Abusing workers is wrong, but then so is entering and residing in the United States illegally — as a Cabinet official should know.

The common theme with these Cabinet secretaries is loud, uninformed rhetoric; a lack of practical experience; a certain utopian zealotry — and an expectation that there are rules for government grandees and quite different ones for the rest of us.

And Hanson didn’t begin to recount the misadventures of the rest of The Obamao’s brain trust: “Killer” Sebelius, “Big Sis” Napolitano, “Honker” LaHood and “Carbon Queen” Jackson.  This could truly be the most clueless collection of confidantes to advise a White House since Jimmy Carter sat alone with his own thoughts.  Like their leader, the vast majority have no prior experience which qualifies them for their assigned duties….other than a complete commitment to the triumph of government, the Socialization of America.

Add it all together and you understand why the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger thought it appropriate to pen a….

Memo to the Youth Vote

Unless they plan to be union lifers, what’s in an Obama vote for young Americans?

 

Why would anyone under the age of 25 vote for Barack Obama in November?

Mr. Obama resumed his College Tour 2012 last week, visiting campuses in Iowa, North Carolina and Colorado for the purpose of replicating his 66% youth-vote total from 2008. In 2008, he reeled them in with promises of hope and change. In 2012 he’s offering cash, promising to protect 3.4% interest on their college loans. We’re about to find out if it’s true that when you’re young, hope springs eternal.

Put differently, the past three years have been a Peter Pan presidency for Peter Pan voters. If you’re going to college, it’s good to vote for Barack Obama again, so long as you’ll never have to turn 23. But for many young Americans, there will be no Tinker Bell showing them how to land a job with lovely thoughts.

The youth unemployment rate for Americans has hovered around 16%. Anecdotal stories abound of college graduates living in the bedroom they grew up in, jobless. But hey, the president they voted for as freshmen is promising 3.4% interest on the average $25,000 or so of college debt they owe four years later.

At his appearance before students at the University of Iowa, President Obama ran straight at those who’ve criticized his student interest-rate gift as small beer: “These guys don’t get it. . . . This is the economy!” Mr. Obama shouted. “This is about your job security! This is about your future! If you do well, the economy does well. This is about the economy!”

We get it: The election really is about the economy. If so, the job market for many young people during the Obama presidency has bordered on, well, social Darwinism. Many students who did well in school either don’t have a job or took one far below their expensive skills.

Last May, the Nobel laureate economist Robert Lucas, an expert on economic growth, put together a lecture on the economy because so many people asked him why the U.S. economy’s post-recession growth rate was struggling around 2%. He noted that in the years after World War II, both the U.S. and Europe grew at an annual rate of about 3%. But in the mid-1970s, Western Europe dropped below that growth rate and stayed there, creating a 20% to 40% gap in income levels between Europe and the U.S. Prof. Lucas suggested this had to do with the cost of maintaining the social-welfare commitments Europe accumulated in the postwar years.

He then looked at the levels of U.S. social-welfare commitments, including the new Obama health-care entitlement, and ended with a simple observation: “Is it possible that by imitating European policies on labor markets, welfare and taxes, the U.S. has chosen a new, lower GDP trend? If so, it may be that the weak recovery we have had so far is all the recovery we will get.”

That stark assertion—this may be all the growth we’re going to get—is something the youth vote should think about. And there’s a good place to do that: Backpacking through Europe. But this time try to get a look behind the fabulous theme-park façades in Italy, France, Spain, the U.K., Portugal and Greece. In Spain the youth unemployment rate is 50%; in Italy it’s 36%.

Don’t miss visiting Europe’s famed and beautiful universities. The Chronicle of Higher Education this week has a nightmarish story about what low economic growth has done to the Continent’s intellectual seed corn. In Spain, 300,000 of last year’s graduates left the country. A Portuguese professor says the system there is falling into “a sort of third-world pattern.” A side-bar story is headlined: “In Italy, a Dysfunctional University System Sinks Deeper Into Decay.”

For new American college graduates, there is an alternative to that job you thought you’d have: Join a union.

If your new goal in life is to join the United Auto Workers (saved by Mr. Obama with your parents’ taxes) or work for a government agency somewhere for the next 40 years, the president is your candidate. The modern Democratic Party from top to bottom is the party of all unions, hardly different than the European political parties whose union members and unemployed college graduates filled city squares Tuesday in forlorn May Day demonstrations. If a career inside an American union is what it’s all about, then an Obama vote (“Forward”) is a no-brainer.

But aside from the aspiring union lifers, what’s in an Obama vote for the rest of the youth vote? The U.S. annualized growth rate in the first quarter this year was 2.2%. Perhaps the life raft is that provision in ObamaCare that extends health-insurance coverage to children living at home until the age of 26. If Barack Obama wins another four years, you may need it.

The Obamao: he’ll be right there with you….in spirit!  But you’ll be here….

….while HE’S over there:

What could be more “fair”?!?

Meanwhile, Der Schlickmeister makes one more attempt at relevance:

Bill Clinton to U.S., Europe: quit bickering over spending

 

Slick Willy….when he’s not tooting his own horn.

U.S. and European politicians are squabbling over austerity measures to resolve deep-seated economic problems, but instead need to set aside entrenched views and take a longer-term approach to find real solutions, former President Bill Clinton told a financial conference.

In Europe, the key to battling its economic malaise is in taking the long view: promoting growth instead of a current plan to pare debt by cutting spending and raising taxes, Clinton told the Milken Institute Global Conference.

“The prescription of austerity continues to be pushed in the face of evidence that it won’t work,” said the president who held office before George W. Bush and Barack Obama. He called on leaders in both Europe and the United States to work on a strategy “of what would work in a five-year period, a 10-year period, instead of three or six months.”

Is that supposed to be a plan, or is there something we missed?  No, seriously; because what he said makes no sense at all, economic or otherwise.  It’s akin to Timmy the Taxcheat telling Paul Ryan Team Tick-Tock can’t offer a plan of its own….but is certain they don’t like his.  It’s meaningless jargon masquerading as serious fiscal policy; and it’s dead-ass wrong to boot.

Seeing the last of William Jefferson Clinton: another benefit of ensuring The Obamao’s first term in office his last.

Next we turn to Tales From the Darkside, and this item from Todd Starnes and FOX News, courtesy of Jim Gleaves….

Reporters Beaten by Mob of Blacks and Their Newspaper Stayed Silent

 

Ethical questions are being raised both inside The Virginian-Pilot and in the Norfolk, Va. area after two of the paper’s reporters were attacked and beaten by a mob of at least 30 blacks, but was downplayed by police and withheld from the public for more than two weeks by the newspaper’s editors.

Reporters Dave Forster and Marjon Rostami were leaving a concert on the night of April 14 when a crowd of around 100 young people gathered on the sidewalk near their car. Rostami reached over to lock the door. According to a police report obtained by Fox News, a black male hurled a rock at the car. Forster got out and tried to confront the individual who damaged his car. Instead, a gang of attackers began punching and pound the reporter. Police would not confirm the exact number — but at least one account put the number at 30.

Rostami tried to pull him back inside the car, but others in the crowd began attack her, the police report stated.  She was beaten a half dozen times by an unidentified black man. Rostami was eventually able to call 9-1-1. Police officers responded, they wrote an incident report and labeled it “simple assault.”

The reporters had to take a week off to recover from their injuries. To date no one has been arrested for the crime.

There was no mention of the attack in the pages of The Virginian-Pilot until Tuesday – more than two weeks later – when columnist Michelle Washington wrote a detailed story on the police department’s handling of the attack and she raised questions about her own newspaper’s lack of coverage.

And she also mentioned another previously undisclosed component to the story. The day after the attack Forster searched Twitter and found a chilling tweet Washington wrote:

“I feel for the white man who got beat up at the light,” one person wrote.

“I don’t,” wrote another, indicating laughter. ‘(do it for trayvon martin) (sic)”

“Were Forster and Rostami beaten in some kind of warped, vigilante retribution for a killing 750 miles away, a person none of them knew?” Washington wrote. “Was it just bombast? Is a beating funny, ever?”

A police spokesman tells Fox News that the incident is still under investigation and they are also looking at whoever wrote the tweet. But as of now – the case is still a simple assault – and does not rise to the level of a hate crime.

But James Duane, a law professor at Regent University, said he is troubled by the police department’s categorization of the crime. “This is cause for serious concern,” he told Fox News. “It sounds like it’s much more than a simple assault. Any sort of criminal activity that is engaged spontaneously by a large crowd of individuals especially individuals who are merely strangers to them is a cause for serious concern and ought to be on the part of any police officer or police department.”

Washington wrote that police seemed dismissive when they arrived at the crime scene, telling the injured Rostami to “shut up and get in the car.” “Both said the officer did not record any names of witnesses who stopped to help,” Washington wrote. Rostami said the officer told them the attackers were ‘probably juveniles anyway. What are we going to do? Find their parents and tell them?”

Duane said it was a “surprising characterization” and said the attack would warrant more charges “and at a minimum a more serious attempt at investigation than what we are led to believe happened here.” “Even simple assault is still a criminal offense,” Duane said.

….The Virginian-Pilot’s editor told Fox News there was debate in the newsroom over whether to cover the story – but in the end they decided not to – because they don’t cover simple assaults. “We bend over backwards not to treat ourselves any differently than the rest of the community,” Denis Finley told Fox News. “We don’t cover simple attacks. The fact that we know these folks doesn’t make any difference. We don’t want to be perceived as doing something different for ourselves than we would do for the rest of the community.”

Finley strongly denied accusations the newspaper was covering up the story because of the racial component. “We have no indication that this is racial, no indication that this was anything other than – so far – a simple attack,” he said. “There have been all kinds of innuendo, assumptions, prejudices, you name it revolving around the story but the fact is it was a simple attack and we didn’t put it in the paper.”

He also defended their decision not to cover the tweets that suggested the attack may have had something to do with the Trayvon Martin case. “That’s another complication,” he said. ‘I don’t know where those tweets came from. I don’t know who said them. Anybody can say anything they want on social media after the fact. I have no idea what those tweets mean – if anything. They’re no different than the attacks that have been leveled on me and the newspaper from some of my readers who have assumed some things that just aren’t true.”

Finley said the incident is a “sticky situation” for the newspaper. “What would I have to gain by protecting someone who attacked my reporters?” he said. “That’s a preposterous statement to make.”

Michael Finch, a journalism professor at Lee University, believes The Virginian-Pilot did a disservice to their readers. “It would seem to me this would definitely be a story,” he told Fox News. “In journalism there are seven news values and it seems like this story really meets all seven of them – which is rare.” “It’s a timely story, it has impact, it relates to a prominent event, it’s in close proximity to their news outlet, it’s a little bit bizarre, it includes conflict and it deals with public concern,” he said. “It’s as good as a news story as you can get.”

Finch said he certainly understands the newspaper’s dilemma “because it was one of their own.” However, he said, the sheer size of the attack mob elevated the story’s newsworthiness.

And Finley promised that if the police department elevates the crime – they will certainly give the story “due diligence.”

If only the MSM had exhibited similar self-control while authorities sorted out the Zimmerman/Martin affair.  Need we tell you the magnitude of the firestorm which would have erupted had the skin color of the reporters and the mob been reversed?

And in the Environmental Moment, the WSJ‘s Kimberly Strassel relates why EPA’s chief proponent of crucifixion was far from a lone ranger:

The ‘Crucify Them’ Presidency

Al Armendariz, the EPA official who resigned in disgrace this week, was no outlier among the Obama administration’s regulators.

 

Al “Crucify Them” Armendariz resigned from the Environmental Protection Agency this week, for the mistake of telling it like it is. All he leaves behind is an entire administration of Al Armendarizes.

EPA chief Lisa Jackson was quick to assure the public that her regional administrator—who was caught on video describing his desire to “crucify” oil and gas companies—was not “representative of the agency.” Mr. Armendariz’s views, she said, “don’t reflect any policy that we have, and they don’t reflect our actions over the past two years.” At least she didn’t say it under oath.

The Armendariz story matters precisely because he is the model Obama regulator. Hamstrung by both public opinion and Congress, President Obama has turned to these types to enact his broader agenda.

The regional EPA administrator was no rogue appointee. Rather, “there are Armendarizes all throughout this administration” says Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, who first drew attention to the “crucify” video. They were chosen for a purpose.

Consider the broader tale of Mr. Armendariz, lost in the wake of the sensational video. Prior to being appointed by President Obama in late 2009 to serve as EPA’s point man for south-central states, Mr. Armendariz was at Texas’s Southern Methodist University. His then-résumé showed a scant three years of private-sector experience, with far more time devoted to his work as an adviser to the militant fringe of the environmental community.

Mr. Armendariz’s expertise—take note—was working with groups like the Environmental Defense Fund and “Downwinders at Risk” against hydraulic fracturing. Among his achievements: a cameo appearance in “Gasland,” the anti-drilling propaganda film, as well as authoring a 2009 study making the wild claim that gas drilling was the cause of more air pollution in Dallas than even cars.

In other words, he was a perfect general for Mr. Obama’s war against natural gas. The White House is hostile to fossil fuels, yet it has been unable to get Congress or the public to act. So it has unleashed the EPA to crack down on those industries.

The bonanza in natural gas has nonetheless been tricky for the feds, since hydraulic fracturing regulation is technically left to the states. The agency’s solution has been to invent enforcement actions out of existing federal law to harass drillers.

Mr. Armendariz was on the front lines. By early 2010, the EPA boss was already making his “crucify them” comments at a public-meeting-cum-activist-rally in Dish, Texas. At this gathering, Mr. Armendariz also bragged that one of his “really special moments” had been getting the overall chief of EPA enforcement, Cynthia Giles, to watch “Gasland.” He lamented that he did not have a “Way of Life Act” that he could enforce—to deal with the “truck traffic,” “noise,” “water use” and “waste pits” associated with natural-gas drilling. Though he reminds the crowd that the laws he can use, like the Clean Water Act, aren’t exactly “toothless.”

As he proved. Within a year of arrival, Mr. Armendariz had found his first target: Fort Worth-based gas driller Range Resources. While Texas regulators had found no evidence that Range had polluted local water wells, Mr. Armendariz in December 2010 publicly bypassed them and issued an emergency order giving Range 48 hours to begin supplying water to residents and to clean up.

Emails show that Mr. Armendariz was communicating with his activists on the day of the action. “We’re about to make a lot of news,” he crowed in an email, advising them: “Time to Tivo Channel 8.”

As it happens, “Channel 8” had the news before an aide for Mr. Armendariz had bothered to notify the state. One of Mr. Armendariz’s email buddies (who included members of the Environmental Defense Fund and Public Citizen) wrote back: “Yee haw! Hats off to the new Sheriff and his deputies!” When a Texas official told Mr. Armendariz that he felt the action was “premature,” the EPA appointee forwarded the email to his staff with this word: “Stunning.”

Or not. Fifteen months later—after Texas regulators unanimously concluded that Range was not the cause of natural gas in local wells, after Range had sued, and after EPA was unable to find any evidence of wrongdoing—the agency withdrew its order. Turns out Mr. Armendariz had nothing more against Range than his, and his activists’, disdain for fossil fuels.

His actions are no aberration. This is the “Crucify Them” presidency. Mr. Obama couldn’t get a card check law passed, so his National Labor Relations Board’s union lawyers sue Boeing for locating in a right-to-work state. He couldn’t outlaw offshore drilling, so Interior activists continue a permitorium in the Gulf. He can’t make ObamaCare work, so Health Department officials threaten to exclude insurers from exchanges if they raise premiums. He couldn’t outright kill nuclear energy, so his top nuclear regulator has shut down the Yucca Mountain waste repository to strangle industry growth.

Mr. Armendariz apologized for his “words,” though you might wonder why. He was picked to do a job—to “crucify” industry—and he did it. His real mistake was admitting it.

Forget taxes….forget Obamascare….forget Iran….forget anything else; America’s energy security and independence DEPENDS on driving this Socialist simpleton out of office.  Four more years of this fool will forfeit the future….for you….your children….their children….and every generation to come.

On the Lighter Side….

Finally, we’ll call it a week with another sordid story of government overreach ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter:

FAA rips Delta passenger for filming bird strike with iPad

 

A Delta passenger who filmed birds striking his plane over New York City’s John F. Kennedy International airport received a scathing letter from the Federal Aviation Administration condemning his use of an electronic during flight takeoff. Grant Cardone, 54, became a viral hit after posting a video of birds being sucked into the engine of his Los Angeles-bound Delta flight on April 19. The plane was forced to turn back to the airport and landed safely, the New York Post reports.

Soon afterward, Cardone received an official letter from the FAA complaining the video was taken illegally because he used his iPad to film the strike, and use of portable electronic devices is prohibited during “critical” phases of a flight, such as takeoffs. Electronic devices also cannot be used during an in-flight emergency.

“Your failure to comply with flight attendant instructions during a critical phase of flight and an aircraft emergency could have affected the safe outcome of the flight,” the letter says.

….Cardone, a Los Angeles business consultant and frequent flier, will not be fined, but the letter “will be made a matter of record for a period of two years,” the FAA said.

To which we can only respond to the FAA….

Magoo