It’s Friday, July 5th, 2013…but before we begin, a quick personal note.  While we’re certainly no fan of the bloated, bloviating bovine who heads the Chicago teachers union, but we’re even less fond of reporting, or blogging, which deliberately misrepresents or misstates facts in pursuit of a particular political agenda.  Case in point, this recent item featured at EAGNews.org:

CTU President Karen Lewis laughs about lying to parents, turning students into ‘hostages’

 

Why is our government education system so dysfunctional? Perhaps because parents often don’t get the truth and administrators and teachers are constantly fighting each other. That much can be discerned from the words of Karen Lewis, president of the radical Chicago Teachers Union.

Lewis appeared before the New York Collective of Radical Educators (an appropriate audience, to be sure) March 16 to give the keynote address at the group’s annual conference. Lewis reminisced about her teaching days, when she would lie to parents when it came time to discuss their child’s performance. She then said – because of her lies – the student became her “hostage” who would do what she wanted.

Is this what parents want? Teachers lying to them about their children’s performance and behavior in school? Should the leader of one of the nation’s largest teachers unions be advocating such behavior?

Sound sufficiently sinister?  Most certainly; except that when one actually listens to the video clip accompanying the article, it’s neither what Lewis actually said, let alone meant:

Like most Liberals, Lewis’ speeches and public statements offer a veritable cornucopia of ill-advised remarks and sound bites; so why take her out of context?!?  Conservatives cannot afford to offer the Left cover by resorting to the same disingenuous distortions Liberals have developed into an art form.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, it’s the “Fool Me Twice, Shame On Me!” segment, courtesy of The Hill via Patriot Update, and one very desperate…and sorry excuse for a…Conservative:

Report: Rubio to introduce Senate bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks

 

“Yaaarr!  Cap’n Marco sez, lyin’ ’bout immigration reform be thirsty work!”

“Unlikely”?!?  No, the Ravens repeating as Super Bowl champs is “unlikely”; any restriction on abortion whatsoever passing the Senate is friggin’ impossible!!!

Sorry Marco; as we said, fool us twice, shame on us.  And we’ve enough to be ashamed of without backing a RINO for higher office.  Marco, meet Chris Christie.

We’ll never contribute a dime to either one…ever again.

And since we mentioned Chris Christie, let’s check in on his bestest friend, courtesy of Michael Goodwin writing at the New York Post and George Lawlor:

What, Obama worry?

 

Can the United States survive the remaining 3 1/2 years of the Obama presidency? That was the question I asked a well-known veteran of Washington politics and national-security issues. Though a Democrat, he is trusted and respected by both parties for his many years of advice and troubleshooting service to the nation.

I asked the question because our long conversation reflected shared worries about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and America’s retreat. We discussed the disasters of Syria, Benghazi and Obama’s strange support for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi in Egypt. We agreed the odds were growing that Iran would get a nuclear weapon and feared what it would mean for Israel and our Arab allies.

Forecast: Cloudy…with a definite chance of Douche!

We expressed shock at the lasting damage done to our intelligence agencies by Edward Snowden, the sloppy background check that enabled him to get security clearance in the first place and the Keystone Kops effort to capture him. We winced that our nation’s reputation was an international punch line as Russia and China mocked our president.

Given that context, my question of whether America can survive Obama was not just a figure of speech or an exaggerated musing. I meant it literally.

My friend understood my meaning. “I don’t know,” he said. When I pressed him, he reviewed the scope of the global disorder we had just discussed, and repeated his answer. “I don’t know,” he said a second time. The exchange happened last week, and my heart skips a beat when I recall it. His answer wasn’t what I expected or hoped for.

Despite my pessimism, I wanted to be talked out of it. I wanted this wise man, with his experience and calm temperament, to tell me not to worry, that we had been through worse before and America would be fine.

Maybe we will be fine. But the sense that the walls are closing in on us and that we are showing weakness to an emboldened, hostile world fills me with dread. I have a growing fear we are on the verge of a catastrophe. (Only now Goodwin has this feeling?!?)

It didn’t help that the Army announced it will trim our forces by 80,000 troops over five years and said more reductions might also be necessary to meet budget reductions. Nor does it help that our president seems somewhere between indifferent and oblivious to growing global threats. His $100 million, weeklong family trip to Africa, no doubt to be followed by an August vacation, seems off-key. (“Off-key”?!?  How ’bout hopelessly out-of-tune, not to mention totally tone-deaf!!!)

Der Obafuhrer showing off his assassination insurance.

And his answers at a press conference in Senegal to questions about Snowden were beyond bizarre. As my colleague Geoff Earle wrote from Washington, the president adopted a “What, me worry?” tone. “I’m not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker,” Obama said. His answer was classic Obama — setting up a straw man by falsely suggesting somebody had proposed he send jets, then minimizing Snowden’s crime by calling him a “hacker,” as though he had played a computer prank.

In fact, Snowden has been charged in a federal indictment with espionage, among other counts.

The president also disparaged suggestions he should be more involved, saying he had not spoken to the leaders of either China or Russia. “I shouldn’t have to,” he said, because the case “is not exceptional from a legal perspective.”

With enemies like these, who needs friends?!?

You would think White House reporters traveling with the president would push him on his listless approach to the crisis, but you would be wrong. Obama spent 14 minutes with the press corps as Air Force One flew later to South Africa, but got no questions about Snowden. Instead, according to The Weekly Standard, reporters asked only about the Africa trip.

So the mainstream media, like Obama, isn’t worried about anything. Which means the rest of us must continue to sound the alarm while counting down the days until Jan. 20th, 2017.

Meanwhile, as the once-touted Greatest Piece of Liberal Legislation in the History of Man…er,…Humankind takes another giant leap backwards, the MSM ponders whether…

Move to delay ObamaCare employer mandate could upend Republicans’ 2014 strategy

 

Yeah, now they’ll only be able to stress Der Obafuhrer’s wars on the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, affordable energy, the IRS, Benghazi, Fast & Furious, Solyndra, MF Global, the national debt, the Africa trip; etc, etc, etc…ad infinitum & nauseum!

As The Washington Times Wes Pruden details, courtesy of Speed Mach…

Obamacare called ‘The fiasco for the ages’

 

Nancy Pelosi told us there would be days like this. The only way to find out what was in Obamacare was to pass it and see what happens. Congress passed it, the messiah signed it, and we’re beginning to see what happens.

Barack Obama and the gang that can’t shoot straight aren’t having much fun, but if they think they aren’t having fun now, just wait. The “best” is yet to come.

The best the Democrats can say about Obamacare is that it’s an approaching train wreck, in the memorable description of Sen. Max Baucus of Montana.

Douchus “Max”imus!

Mr. Baucus was one of the authors of the legislation and now he’s hurrying home to Montana for good, anxious to avert his eyes from all the hair, teeth and eyeballs soon to be scattered along the railroad right-of-way.

In the immortal words of Maggie O’Hooligan…

Next up, in today’s installment of Tales From the Darkside, we learn...

North Carolina city OKs curfew after 400-teen melee

 

“Youths”; yeah, “youths”…of no particular pigmentation!

In a related item, James Taranto offers his take on the Left’s attempt to lynch George Zimmerman:

Murder, She Wrote

 

In a news story today on the George Zimmerman trial, the New York Times informs its readers that the prosecution’s case is going very well for the defense. But reporter Cara Buckley (or perhaps her editors) can’t help but throw in some anti-Zimmerman bias:

Prosecutors say that Mr. Zimmerman, who identifies as Hispanic, racially profiled Mr. Martin, who was black, and followed the teenager through the town house complex where Mr. Zimmerman lived and Mr. Martin, of Miami, was visiting.

So Zimmerman merely identifies as Hispanic, while Martin was black. In fact, Zimmerman’s mother is an immigrant from Peru, which would make him Hispanic by any definition we are aware of. That complicates the prosecution’s “racial profiling” narrative–which was a media narrative first. By insinuating that Zimmerman’s ethnic identity is questionable, Buckley shows her allegiance to the narrative over the facts.

Then there’s this passage:

Last week, a young woman who had been on the phone with Mr. Martin that night testified that he told her he was being followed by a “creepy” man, and that she later heard her friend crying, “Get off, get off.”

To quote Martin as describing Zimmerman as “a ‘creepy’ man” is deceptive almost to the point of dowdification. In fact, as we noted Monday, the witness, Rachel Jeantel, said that Martin had called Zimmerman a “creepy-ass cracker,” the last word being an antiwhite slur. (If Barack Obama had a son, would he talk like Trayvon? Probably, given where the Obamas took their daughters to church prior to 2008.)

Now maybe the word “ass,” “cracker” or both is too coarse for a family newspaper like the Times. But Buckley could have at least informed her readers that Martin used a racial slur. Again, though, that may be a fact, but it wouldn’t fit the narrative.

Lynching: present participle of lynch; verb, (of a mob) Kill (someone), esp. by hanging, for an alleged offense without due process or a legal trial.

And in the Environmental Moment, courtesy of the Los Angeles Times via AEI, Jonah Goldberg asks what inquiring minds want to know…though in this case, he’s obviously ill-informed:

Inhospitable earth — compared to what?

OK, things have gotten a wee bit warmer outside. But inside they’ve gotten vastly more hospitable, as we live longer, eat better, have more leisure time and have fewer deadly occupations.

 

You just can’t out-gloom an environmentalist. The Atlantic invited some luminaries to answer the question “How and when will the world end?” Some contributions were funny. Others simply plausible — a volcanic eruption from underneath Yellowstone National Park is frightfully overdue. But only an environmentalist like Bill McKibben could be a killjoy about the apocalypse itself.

The environmental activist and writer declares the question moot. “In a sense, the world as we knew it is already over. We have heated the Earth, melted the Arctic and turned seawater 30% more acidic. The only question left is how much more fossil fuel we’ll burn, and hence how unfamiliar and inhospitable we’ll make our home planet.”

It’s difficult to imagine a more absurd overstatement. I’m not referring to the exaggerated claim the Arctic has “melted.” And the acidification of the oceans is a real concern (though there’s reason to believe it’s not as bad as some say). But even Chicken Little wouldn’t call it proof the world is already over.

What’s truly ludicrous is McKibben’s use of the word “inhospitable.”

For something like 99% of human history, the world was really inhospitable. Strangers everywhere were greeted with bloodshed and attacked with cruelty. Dying from premature violence was more commonplace than dying from heart disease or cancer is today. In his classic, “War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage,” Lawrence Keeley provides mountains of data documenting that in prehistoric societies, up to half of the population died from homicide, though 10% to 20% was closer to the norm.

In “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,” Steven Pinker shows that the world has become immeasurably more hospitable since the Industrial Revolution. Even World War II was an improvement. If the death toll had been equal to that of tribal societies, 2 billion lives would have been lost instead of a “mere” 60 million to 100 million. In the United States, violent crime is the lowest it’s been in nearly half a century.

Of course, McKibben is speaking of the physical environment. But by any conceivable measure — save, arguably, outdoor temperatures (?!?)— the Earth is a vastly more hospitable place for humanity. When Pilgrims came to North America, it was often described as an inhospitable wilderness. Malaria, smallpox and yellow fever decimated immigrants (not to mention untold millions of Native Americans). Backbreaking labor was the only means of subsistence for millions of Americans for generations. Drudgery and toil — have you ever tried to churn butter? — were necessary for even the simplest pleasures. And does anyone dispute the improved lot of blacks and women?

Ironically, as global warming fears have risen, America and the Earth have gotten more, not less, hospitable. Since 1990, global poverty has been cut in half, and since 1970, extreme poverty has dropped 80%.

Rich and poor alike are eating better, despite global population growth. According to UNICEF, more than 2 billion people gained access to improved water sources between 1990 and 2010. In the developing world, meat consumption has more than doubled since the 1990s (after having doubled already since the 1960s). That’s because new technologies allow us to grow more with less. From 1940 to 2010, U.S. corn production quintupled while the land used for the crop shrunk.

“Globally,” writes Matt Ridley, “the production of a given crop requires 65% less land than it did in 1961.” And, he notes, the acreage required for all crops is falling 2% a year.

And how does the theory of anthropogenic global warming explain what’s been happening on Mars?!?

OK, things have gotten a wee bit warmer outside. (By what estimation?!?) But inside they’ve gotten vastly more hospitable, as we live longer, eat better, have more leisure time and have fewer deadly occupations. And even outside, the environment in the developed world has gotten vastly cleaner, healthier and more enjoyable since the 1970s as rich nations devoted more wealth to making things more hospitable. We can only hope poor countries get hospitable as quickly as possible.

Well, most of us can hope for such things. Others seem to think such gains come at too high a price.

On the Lighter Side…

Then there’s this from our eldest son Jon:

Finally, we’ll call it a week with the “MSM Bias…WHAT Bias?!?” segment, and a sordid story which really belongs in the pages of the Crime Blotter:

Only 47% of Adults Have Full-Time Job

 

The release of the June Jobs’ Report Friday was something of a relief for the markets. The Labor Department reported that the economy gained 195,000 jobs in June, which beat economists’ expectations. The Department also reported that the economy gained 70,000 more jobs in April and May than it originally estimated. The report, however, also provides clear evidence that the the nation is splitting into two; only 47% of Americans have a full-time job and those who don’t are finding it increasingly out of reach. 

Of the 144 million Americans employed last month, only 116 million were working full-time. Friday’s report showed that 58.7% of the civilian adult population of 245 million was working last month. Only 47% of Americans, however, had a full-time job. 

The market’s positive reaction to Friday’s report is another sign of how far our economic expectations have fallen. If today the same proportion of Americans worked as just a decade ago, there would by almost nine million more people working. Just in the last year, almost two million Americans have left the labor force. With a majority of the population not holding a full-time job, it isn’t surprising that economic growth has been so weak. In June, the number of Americans who wanted to work full-time, but were forced into part-time jobs because of the economy, jumped 352,000 to over eight million.

The Jobs’ Report is increasingly measuring only a part of the American economy. While Friday’s report was better than expected, it only measures those who are working or actively looking for work. There is a growing number of Americans slipping through the cracks of the job market. 

Meanwhile…

More of the laser-focus on the important problems-at-hand which has characterized The Obamao’s Administration since his first inauguration.

You know…like earlier this week…when Egypt was erupting and America’s Secretary of State was right on top of things:

Secretary of State John Kerry Was Boating While Egypt Fell Apart

 

And would it shock anyone to know Foggy Bottom denied Kerry being there before a Twitter feed showed his motorcade stuck in Nantucket traffic?!?

Magoo