It’s Friday, August 23rd, 2013…but before we begin, a brief comment on the Bradley Manning debacle. First, we’ll let John Yoo do our talking regarding Manning’s incredibly light sentence:
The real threat to the Republic here isn’t what secrets Manning revealed through Wikileaks, but rather what he was allowed to do prior to being provided the opportunity to offer up some of America’s most confidential intelligence to its enemies on a silver platter.
Manning, by his own admission, is a raging queen. His service history is replete with innumerable hissy fits, including an assault on a female compatriot, which, if pitched by an enlisted man under the “leadership” of anyone but General George “Diversity” Casey and Admiral Mike “Myrmydon” Mullen, would have resulted in a blanket party rather than access to the nation’s most sensitive secrets.
Young Bradley’s performance was so sub-par he was required to repeat Boot Camp; it took him 6 months…the second time around…to complete the 10-week course.
But this is Mike Mullen’s and George Casey’s Obamao-inspired new Military, where a suicidal commitment to “diversity” is worth the lives of 13 soldiers, and the homosexual sensitivities of a misfit private trump national security. And we’ve no doubt the costs of Manning’s sex change procedures will be borne, as has all the rest of Progressivism’s politically-correct insanity, by the American taxpayer.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, one of the “Reverends” displays his deep concern over the death of a unarmed White Australian jogger at the hands of three bored Black Americans:
Don’t bother looking for examples of similar restraint exercised by Jesse when commenting on George Zimmerman’s legitimate exercise of self-defense in response to Trayvon Martin’s drug-induced assault; you won’t find them.
Speaking of patent Progressive hypocrisy, here’s Hope n’ Change‘s thoughts on the recent reinstatement of the four fools granted an extended vacation on the taxpayer dime in the wake of Benghazigate:
Bob Shillfer and the rest of the MSM: sycophants extraordinaire!
Next up, as reported in the Washington Free Beacon via The New Media Journal, apparently…
Welfare Pays More than Minimum Wage, Discourages Work
Welfare benefits and the loss of leisure time still act as disincentives to earning a salary despite improvements in the welfare-work trade-off since federal reforms in 1996, according to a report published Monday.
The report by the Cato Institute found that the equivalent wage value of welfare has increased in 33 states since 1995, when the think tank first released a report on the issue. Benefits in the District of Columbia expanded by $6,850 to a total package equivalent to $50,820 in wages, the second largest increase behind Vermont.
Welfare “pays” more than $15 per hour in 13 states.
In nine states, welfare pays more than the average first-year teacher’s salary and in the six most-generous states, it pays more than the entry-level salary for a computer programmer.
However, the report also notes that welfare recipients in 39 states can accept a job paying slightly less than welfare without losing income. That is a result of state and federal tax credits, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, which are designed to encourage working and childbearing.
Still, those tax incentives for work are often outweighed by the remaining tax burden and the loss of leisure, said Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and coauthor of the report, in an interview. “The benefit package is so large and the tax burden so high that it doesn’t make that much of a difference,” Tanner told the Free Beacon.
Which explains why the Obamaphone Girl and millions of other absolutely uninformed, one-issue voters can say…
…with all sincerity. Particularly when the alternative is actually DOING something…ANYthing…for a living!
Meanwhile, as the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger reports, Der Obafuhrer wants to do for most of the remainder of America what his fellow Dimocrats and he have done for Blacks:
Mr. Obama’s Middle Class
The noblesse-oblige Left invades American life.
But only…
…after my handicap is lower than Nancy Pelosi’s IQ!
The Obama presidency is starting to feel like an out-of-body experience. What, exactly, is going on?
Earlier this summer, Mr. Obama began touring the country—Galesburg, Ill., Warrensburg, Mo., and other down-and-out burgs—outputting speeches about the plight of the middle class. On Thursday he gives the speech in Buffalo and then in Syracuse, N.Y., at Henninger High School, which is named after a Syracuse mayor in the late 1950s—Anthony Aloysius Henninger (no relation to other Henningers who settled in Cleveland).
The president gives essentially the same speech everywhere. In part it is a meditation on the meaning of middle class—”Americans are gritty, resilient and work hard.” In part it is populist paranoia—”forces that have conspired against the middle class for decades.”
Is anyone listening to these speeches? Do they matter? For all the time and effort, his middle-class audience remains unimpressed. Consider the chart nearby, showing the Obama presidency’s job-approval numbers on handling the economy.
After the first year, public approval declined to about 35% and there it sits, bumping along at one third, while disappointment pours forth year after year at 60%. The public (We’d question how much!) likes his historic presidency, but never seems to have believed he knew much of anything about the real economy, which the middle class wakes up to each day.
Lately Mr. Obama has been proposing a “grand bargain for the middle class.” He did so earlier this month in his Saturday radio chat. “This week,” he said, “I put forward common-sense proposals for how we can create more jobs in manufacturing; in wind, solar and natural gas, and by rebuilding America’s infrastructure.”
What are any of the 275 million or so middle-class Americans—young couples starting out, parents in places like Galesburg—supposed to make of this list? Where’s the bargain? What has always intrigued me is how these middle-class jobs speeches always include a prominent reference to . . . the wind.
Windmills, unless one is invested in them, will remain a speck in the future lot of the U.S. middle class. In a presidency whose unemployment rate has been stuck between 7% and 9%, with millions of middle-class people no longer trying to find work, why does Mr. Obama keep pushing the pie in the sky of windmills and solar panels? (Because…it’s all he’s got?!?)
It has become difficult to escape the conclusion that at bottom Mr. Obama is a familiar figure in American public life—an upper-middle-class political Brahmin bent on forcing the masses to participate in his understanding of what is good. The Obama administration is the Ford Foundation on steroids.
The idea that Mr. Obama is mainly a protégé of the community organizer Saul Alinsky and of Chicago’s streets is off the mark. Saul Alinsky would have laughed at the idea of telling out-of-work Chicagoans that what they needed was jobs in “wind and solar.”
Barack Obama is leading the noblesse-oblige left. His Climate Action Plan and the Affordable Care Act (also a relentless opinion-poll loser) are ideas created by people with privileged IQs for everyone else. Like it or lump it.
He complains a lot in these speeches about receiving no support for his ideas from Congress. But recall that the Obama climate-control/kill-coal legislation perished in a Senate controlled by Democrats in 2010, because senators from such heartland states as Ohio, West Virginia, Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, North Dakota, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Minnesota feared middle-class anger over lost jobs and higher energy costs.
Still, one has to credit the steely fanaticism of the noblesse-oblige left. Here last week was Mr. Obama’s new EPA administrator, Gina McCarthy, speaking in Boulder, Colo., about her intention to impose the president’s anti-carbon goals through executive order: “We’re going to do this this year, next year, the following year, until people understand these are not scary things to do.” Let them eat wind.
One cannot avoid the irony of Mr. Obama giving this edition of the speech today in upstate New York—whose gasping local economies resemble Cold-War East Germany because Gov. Andrew Cuomo won’t oppose the anti-fracking sentiments of upper-class New Yorkers such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Yoko Ono and Lady Gaga.
The crown-jewel of the Obama presidency, the Affordable Care Act, is sprung from the same mind-set. Designed on a computer screen by academic architects, ObamaCare will direct millions of middle-class or poor people into public health-care exchanges or expanded Medicaid. None of this law’s deliverers, from the president himself on down, would be caught dead sending their own families to the bargain-basement medical care in these plans.
Teamster President James Hoffa’s recent letter to the White House on ObamaCare could not have been more explicit: “The ACA will shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40-hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class.”
Someday there will be a well-endowed Obama Foundation to pursue what’s left of the various visions that aren’t imposed by executive order in the Obama presidency’s next three years. The American middle class had better lay in plenty of backbone between now and 2016.
Our patience is at an end…along with any prior sugarcoating we’ve given our contempt for Obamaphiles; anyone who continues to support this self-centered Socialist is either:
(a) blinded by racism.
(b) profiting personally from his abasement of America.
(c) an utter imbecile.
(d) all of the above!
Since we’re on the subject of the sorriest Administration in American history, we continue our coverage of the meltdown in the Middle East with this forward from Balls Cotton, as Wahid, Laila, Nader and Sameh Wahba answer the question…
In a related item, courtesy of Jim Gleaves, The American Spectator‘s George Neumayr describes…
Obama’s Jewel of Denial
His Islamophilia contributed to the mess in Egypt.
“Those who cannot remember the past (or never learned about it in the first place!) are condemned to repeat it.”
At the root of America’s disastrous policy on Egypt lies Obama’s Islamophilia, a stance which leads him to mistake friends for enemies and enemies for friends. Even at this late date, he can’t make the most basic distinctions between pro-American Egyptian military leaders and anti-American Islamic terrorists. His foreign policy rests not on America’s interests but on politically correct prattle about a non-existent Islamic spring.
According to Senator Patrick “Leaky” Leahy, the Obama administration has suspended aid to Egypt. Naturally, the GOP’s reflexively interventionist busybodies support this decision. “For us to sit by and watch this happen is a violation of everything that we stood for,” babbled Senator John McCain on CNN’s “State of the Union.” What exactly is “everything that we stood for”? Egging on the Muslim Brotherhood? Delivering up a U.S. ally of three decades to a jihadist mob? Protecting democratically elected terrorists who once in power moved to destroy democracy and persecute Christians?
The truth is that Egypt’s military deserves a bonus for beating back the Muslim Brotherhood. If U.S. aid has in fact gone into that effort, it is money well spent. It is certainly more constructive than any of the asinine international projects McCain normally endorses.
“America cannot determine the future of Egypt. That’s a task for the Egyptian people,” Obama said last week. “We don’t take sides with any particular party or political figure. I know it’s tempting inside of Egypt to blame the United States or the West or some other outside actor for what’s gone wrong.”
It is a little late for Obama to strike this innocent pose. His 2009 Cairo speech was a blown kiss to the Muslim Brotherhood, with its pro-revolution blather about how “Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations” by his odious predecessors. The speech, to which Obama had made a great show of inviting members of the Muslim Brotherhood, laid the groundwork for the overthrow of Mubarak, an American ally, and the rise of Morsi, an Islamic supremacist.
Obama soft-pedaled the problem of radical Islam, treating it as a minor issue that a few good chats could eliminate. Usually not enthusiastic about religion in politics, he suddenly spoke as if the promotion of global Islam qualified as an American value: “So let there be no doubt: Islam is a part of America. And I believe that America holds within her the truth that regardless of race, religion, or station in life, all of us share common aspirations — to live in peace and security; to get an education and to work with dignity; to love our families, our communities, and our God. These things we share. This is the hope of all humanity.”
He somehow thought that he could charm jihadists into better behavior and stabilize American foreign policy on a pillar of Islamophilia. Having learned nothing from this folly, he now gainsays the manner in which Egypt’s military is cleaning up his mess, saying in his statement last week, “we’ve seen a more dangerous path taken, through arbitrary arrests, a broad crackdown on Mr. Morsi’s associations and supporters and now, tragically, violence that’s taken the lives of hundreds of people and wounded thousands more.”
It is hard to take this complaint seriously from a president who still refuses to acknowledge the Muslim Brotherhood as a jihadist operation. According to James Clapper, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, the Muslim Brotherhood is a “largely secular” organization. Maybe Clapper is relying on CIA Director John Brennan’s Oprah-like definition of jihad: a “legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community.”
Such is Obama’s continued faith in the Muslim Brotherhood that he had his Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel repeatedly plead with Egypt’s military to give jihadists positions in the new government. America now finds itself on the same side as Iran in the conflict, with Saudi Arabia on the other side, offering to make up much of the difference in lost U.S. aid.
This is pathetic. Absolutely no American interest can explain it. The only explanation is Obama’s excessive regard for Islam. He was bound and determined to “reset” relations with it, and he got one in the form of scorched embassies, dead diplomats, and a radicalized Egypt, bloodied and torn.
Uhhh…other than that, how’d you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?!?
For more on those whose actions should prohibit their occupying public office, we turn to today’s Money Quote, courtesy of the WSJ, as Camille Paglia Salon.com why Hillary’s already disqualified herself for the presidency:
“…It remains baffling how anyone would think that Hillary Clinton (born the same year as me) is our party’s best chance. She has more sooty baggage than a 90-car freight train. And what exactly has she ever accomplished—beyond bullishly covering for her philandering husband? She’s certainly busy, busy and ever on the move—with the tunnel-vision workaholism of someone trying to blot out uncomfortable private thoughts.
I for one think it was a very big deal that our ambassador was murdered in Benghazi. In saying “I take responsibility” for it as secretary of state, Hillary should have resigned immediately. The weak response by the Obama administration to that tragedy has given a huge opening to Republicans in the next presidential election. The impression has been amply given that Benghazi was treated as a public relations matter to massage rather than as the major and outrageous attack on the U.S. that it was.
Throughout history, ambassadors have always been symbolic incarnations of the sovereignty of their nations and the dignity of their leaders. It’s even a key motif in “King Lear.” As far as I’m concerned, Hillary disqualified herself for the presidency in that fist-pounding moment at a congressional hearing when she said, “What difference does it make what we knew and when we knew it, Senator?” Democrats have got to shake off the Clinton albatross and find new blood.“
We couldn’t agree more; but then, we’ve been saying the same thing for years.
On the Lighter Side…
Then there’s this montage of biting Benghazigate satire courtesy of G. Trevor, Lord High King of All Vietors…
…as well as this Trayvon Toon from Carl Polizzi:
And in the Entertainment Section, why listen to the deliberate lies and misrepresentations of both history and current events on television news when you can pay copious amounts of cash at the theater?
“…When Slate’s, Aisha Harris was asked “How True is The Butler?” her candid answer was “not much.”.”
In fact, very, very little; like there was butler in the White House who was Black. Which reminds us our response when asked how much of Top Gun was true: there once was a Naval Air Station at Miramar…and the Navy actually did fly F-14’s.
Finally, we’ll call it a week with one instance where fact actually confirms feeling:
Magoo
Loading ...
You must be logged in to post a comment.