It’s Monday, June 4th, 2012….and 70 years ago today, the tide of war began to turn irrevocably in the Pacific. Here, courtesy of our friend John Cotton, is the tale as told by Geoffrey Norman, writing in The Weekly Standard:

The Battle of Midway at 70

 

http://www.weeklystandard.com/author/geoffrey-norman

To borrow a phrase from great Winston Churchill, this was not the end; it was not even the beginning of the end. But it was, most definitely, the end of the beginning.  And it spelled the ultimate defeat of a brutal and barbarous enemy….but only through the unending courage and sacrifice of untold thousands to whom we truly owe a debt which can never be fully repaid.  Hug a WWII veteran today.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, it’s the “You Can Learn All You Need To Know About A Man By The Company He Keeps” segment,….

Venezuela Bans Private Gun Ownership, China Condemns Gun Rights

 

B. Hussein Obama, Sarah Brady, Chuck Schumer, Hugo Chavez….they’ve got your back!

On Friday, the Venezuelan government banned all private gun ownership. Gun shops will no longer be allowed to sell firearms or ammunition to private citizens. Police and members of the military will be exempted from the ban. Officials told the Associated Press that the measure is meant to stem violent crime.

….Meanwhile, the noted human rights authorities in China released a report putting Second Amendment rights on the list of human rights violations in America.

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/helenwhalen%20cohen/2012/06/03/venezuela_bans_private_gun_ownership_china_condemns_gun_rights

Any questions?

Turning to domestic politics, a biting bit of commentary from the Boston Herald, courtesy of Speed Mach:

 

Character question 

 

Do my high cheekbones make my ass look fat?

Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren has come up with yet another version of who knew what about her alleged Native American heritage. You know you’re in trouble when your campaign has to issue written statements, late at night, (heaven forbid the candidate should actually sit down and answer questions) and the explanations have now reached the tortured stage.

Ohhh, probably….

….lie some more!

And as James Taranto reports….

The Boston Globe, meanwhile, notes that Warren’s story has gotten even more elaborate: “In the 1930s, when my parents got married, these were hard issues,” she tells the paper. “My father’s family so objected to my mother’s Native American heritage that my mother told me they had to elope.”

Well bust my buttons!

Why didn’t you say so in the first place?!?  That’s….

….a horse of a different color!  Yeah….like a bunch of Okie’s would go ballistic over a supposed 1/16th of squaw blood Warren herself claims almost everyone in Oklahoma had running through their veins!

In a related item detailing Liberal lies and hypocrisy, courtesy of Joe Flood and Charles Krauthammer, meet….

Obama, the drone warrior

 

The closest The Obamao could ever come to combat.

A very strange story, a 6,000-word front-page New York Times piece on how, every Tuesday, Barack Obama shuffles “baseball cards” with the pictures and bios of suspected terrorists from around the world and chooses who shall die by drone strike. He even reserves for himself the decision of whether to proceed when the probability of killing family members or bystanders is significant.

The article could have been titled “Barack Obama: Drone Warrior.” Great detail on how Obama personally runs the assassination campaign. On-the-record quotes from the highest officials. This was no leak. This was a White House press release.

Why? To portray Obama as tough guy. Why now? Because in crisis after recent crisis, Obama has looked particularly weak: standing helplessly by as thousands are massacred in Syria; being played by Iran in nuclear negotiations, now reeling with the collapse of the latest round in Baghdad; being treated with contempt by Vladimir Putin, who blocks any action on Syria or Iran and adds personal insult by standing up Obama at the latter’s G-8 and NATO summits.

The Obama camp thought that any political problem with foreign policy would be cured by the Osama bin Laden operation. But the administration’s attempt to politically exploit the raid’s one-year anniversary backfired, earning ridicule and condemnation for its crude appropriation of the heroic acts of others.

A campaign ad had Bill Clinton praising Obama for the courage of ordering the raid because, had it failed and Americans been killed, “the downside would have been horrible for him.” Outraged veterans released a response ad pointing out that it would have been considerably more horrible for the dead SEALs.

The Osama-slayer card having been vastly overplayed, what to do? A new card: Obama, drone warrior, steely and solitary, delivering death with cool dispatch to the rest of the al-Qaeda depth chart.

So the peacemaker, Nobel laureate, nuclear disarmer, apologizer to the world for America having lost its moral way when it harshly interrogated the very people Obama now kills, has become — just in time for the 2012 campaign — Zeus the Avenger, smiting by lightning strike.

A rather strange ethics. You go around the world preening about how America has turned a new moral page by electing a president profoundly offended by George W. Bush’s belligerence and prisoner maltreatment, and now you’re ostentatiously telling the world that you personally play judge, jury and executioner to unseen combatants of your choosing, and whatever innocents happen to be in their company.

This is not to argue against drone attacks. In principle, they are fully justified. No quarter need be given to terrorists who wear civilian clothes, hide among civilians and target civilians indiscriminately. But it is to question the moral amnesia of those whose delicate sensibilities were offended by the Bush methods that kept America safe for a decade — and who now embrace Obama’s campaign of assassination by remote control.

Moreover, there is an acute military problem. Dead terrorists can’t talk. Drone attacks are cheap — which is good. But the path of least resistance has a cost. It yields no intelligence about terror networks or terror plans.

One capture could potentially make us safer than 10 killings. But because of the moral incoherence of Obama’s war on terror, there are practically no captures anymore. What would be the point? There’s nowhere for the CIA to interrogate. And what would they learn even if they did, Obama having decreed a new regime of kid-gloves, name-rank-and-serial-number interrogation?

This administration came out opposing military tribunals, wanting to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York, reading the Christmas Day bomber his Miranda rights and trying mightily to close Guantanamo. Yet alongside this exquisite delicacy about the rights of terrorists is the campaign to kill them in their beds.

You festoon your prisoners with rights — but you take no prisoners. The morality is perverse.

No….it’s not perverse….it’s sheer and utter hypocrisy.  Waterboarding’s about as harmful to humans as Alar, DDT or CO2, i.e., as encountered in the real world, it carries no lasting effects whatsoever.  But like herpes, drone strikes are forever….unlike, we hope and pray, The Anointed One’s reign of terror.

In a related item, courtesy of George Lawlor and Mona Charen writing at Real Clear Politics:

The Straws in the Wind

 

“When sorrows come, they come not in single spies but in battalions.” — William Shakespeare

And for good reason, as this next item from Peter Wehner, courtesy of Speed Mach and CommentaryMagazine.com, relates:

Obama Is Simply Overmatched by Events

 

It’s difficult to overstate just how depressing May’s job report is – and how much damage it will inflict on President Obama’s chances for re-election.

It’s not simply that the unemployment rate rose from 8.1 percent to 8.2 percent, or that it’s remained above 8 percent for 40 consecutive months, or that in May we gained less than 70,000 new jobs. Nor is it simply the fact that in May the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) increased from 5.1 million to 5.4 million. Or that the average work week fell to 34.4 hours. Or that, as John points out,  March and April’s jobs reports were revised downward. Or that in May, stocks suffered through their worst month in two years.

All of this matters quite a lot, of course. But what’s particularly injurious to the president’s re-election prospects is that May was the worst economic month in what is turning out to be a very bad economic year. The trajectory of events is down, not up. The economy is slowing down. Consumer confidence is dropping. Virtually every economic indicator is getting worse, not better.

This would be very troubling news for any incumbent president – but for one who has virtually no achievements he can point to with pride, it is triply damaging. Whatever fault one wants to ascribe to Obama’s predecessor, and whatever excuses the president can dream up, what is now beyond any reasonable dispute is that Obama has no clue how to fix things. That is not a political judgment; it’s an empirical one.

Barack Obama may be well-intentioned. (Yeah….like Hitler, Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot were well-intentioned!) He may be a fine father. He may have an excellent jump shot. And he may be a first-rate community organizer. But as president, he is simply — and by now almost undeniably — overmatched by events. By Obama’s own standards – by what he said and by what he promised — he is a failure.

For Obama, that is a politically lethal conclusion for a majority of the American people to come to. They were well on their way to arriving at this conclusion before today. They’re now further along than they were. And soon, very soon, there will be no way to undo it.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch with The Gang That Still Can’t Shoot Straight, here’s today’s Money Quote, courtesy of Balls and Peggy Noonan, regarding Mitt Romney’s continued association with Donald Dick:

“Does he think keeping Trump close gains him some kind of right-wing street cred?  My goodness, who does he think lives on that street?“

Next, News for Cheeseheads, courtesy of John McCormack writing at The Weekly Standard‘s The Blog:

Barrett Can’t Name Any Schools Hurt by Walker’s Collective Bargaining Reforms

 

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker is facing a recall election on June 5 because of the law he signed last spring to limit the collective bargaining power of public employee unions–a reform his opponents said would be a “disaster” and destroy public education in the state. Walker’s Democratic challenger, Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett, acknowledged this morning that the collective bargaining issue was the “flame that started this” recall election, but Barrett couldn’t point to a single public school that has been harmed by Walker’s reforms.

Here’s a transcript from a press conference at Barrett’s campaign headquarters in Milwaukee Wednesday morning:

TWS: On collective bargaining, mayor, the governor and his campaign have pointed to a number of… schools across the state that heave benefited from the reforms in Act 10. Which school districts have been hurt in particular, in your view, by Walker’s policies and his reforms? Are there any that stand out in your mind?

BARRETT: Well, I support the restoration of collective bargaining rights. And that’s what this is all about–whether you support workers’ rights. And I support workers’ rights.

TWS: But are there any school districts in particular, though, that have been hurt by Act 10?

BARRETT: I have talked to prison guards, I can tell you that, who are concerned about their own public safety because of the changes in the law, and I’m very concerned about that as well

TWS: But no school districts—

BARRETT: We can do an analysis and get back to you on that.

See “Clinton, William Jefferson: Liar”

And, as this forward from Bill Meisen informs us, while Rome burns….

Report: Obama Flies Special Barber To WH Every Two Weeks

 

Does this haircut make my ears look big?!?

Reports have surfaced that President Barack Obama is very loyal to his barber. The President is a man of the common people, the report tells its listeners. He hangs out with regular folks, like his barber for example.  The President has been using the same Chicago based barber, who goes by the name Zariff, for the past 17 years.   According to German Public Radio, the President flies Zariff from Chicago to DC for a trim every two weeks.  The president allegedly personally funds these trips. President Obama obviously also does not care much about the massive carbon footprint his haircuts are leaving on our planet which, we are told, is tipping precariously.

The German NDR reporter says: ‘The barber never says a word about what they discuss. Perhaps that’s also a reason why Obama feels comfortable being around him. Otherwise he would not fly his barber in from Chicago to Washington every ten to 14 days.’

At the same time The Obamao’s supposedly “covering the costs” of flying of flying his personal barber into town to trim his hair every two weeks, he has yet to contribute even 10% of his income to worthwhile causes.  Charity may begin at home….but not at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

And in the Environmental Moment, courtesy today of Jonah Goldberg….

All (Green) Thumbs

 

It was interesting while it lasted. But it looks like the “green revolution” has entered the long slide into “What was all that about?”

In January, the Spanish government removed absurdly lavish subsidies for its renewable energy industry, and the renewable energy industry all but imploded. You could say it was never a renewable energy industry at all. It was a government subsidy industry where in exchange for creating conscience-soothing but otherwise inefficient windmills and solar panels, the government gave the makers piles of cash consumers never would.

“They destroyed the Spanish market overnight with the moratorium (on subsidies),” European Wind Energy Association CEO Christian Kjaer told Bloomberg News. The reason the Spanish example is so important is that it demonstrates how the whole green energy “revolution” was really an ideologically driven green boondoggle from the start.

At the beginning of his administration, President Obama insisted that if we didn’t follow their lead, we would surrender the hugely profitable renewable energy sector to those sagacious Spaniards. In 2009, researchers at King Juan Carlos University found that Spain had destroyed 2.2 jobs in other industries for every green job it created. It also calculated that the Spanish government has spent more than half a million euros for each green job created since 2000, while wind industry jobs cost more than 1 million euros apiece.

When asked about the study, then-White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs responded that he hadn’t read it, but, “It seems weird that we’re importing wind turbine parts from Spain in order to build — to meet renewable energy demand here if that were even remotely the case.”

Let’s cut Gibbs & Co. some slack. These were the days before the White House learned there were no shovel-ready jobs, before they discovered that their “investments” in companies like Solyndra were little better than shoveling taxpayer dollars into an industrial mulcher. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Gibbs would find it “weird” that our own domestic phylum of subsidy-seeking sucker fish might want to buy Spain’s artificially cheap products in a scheme to feed off domestic subsidies here at home.

The evidence that this administration put cronyism and ideology ahead of reality is all around us. “Since 2009,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “the Obama administration has awarded more than $1 billion to American companies to make advanced batteries for electric vehicles. Halfway to a six-year goal of producing one million electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, auto makers are barely at 50,000 cars.” Well, that leaves just 950,000 cars to go.

Obama believed he was smart enough to start whole new industries simply by sluicing taxpayer dollars into the right maws. Any suggestion that the transition to inefficient energy sources might come at a cost to taxpayers or economic growth was derided as a “false choice.”

It seems like Obama at least understands the tough choices he faces. In 2009, the president’s Earth Day message was stridently dedicated to climate change. In 2012, it didn’t even mention the word “climate.” The administration wants everyone to believe it supports “fracking” and natural gas development. When Energy Secretary Steven Chu said he prefers high gasoline prices, the administration all but defenestrated the guy. Much to the chagrin of the green lobby, Obama will not be attending this year’s Earth Summit. Heck, the current picture on the White House’s energy and environment page even shows Obama happily walking past a stack of oil pipes. Subtle.

Yes, Obama threw a bone to the greens on the Keystone pipeline, but he more quietly opened up the Alaskan Arctic to new oil development, granting Shell permits to drill offshore. “We never would have expected a Democratic president — let alone one seeking to be ‘transformative’ — to open up the Arctic Ocean for drilling,” Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, told The New York Times.

Now, I have no doubt that Obama’s course correction is entirely political. For instance, if he hadn’t approved the Arctic drilling, Shell almost surely would have sued the administration for the billions it’s spent developing its Arctic leases. That’s not the kind of lawsuit Obama would want in an election year.

But saying Obama has caved to political reality doesn’t change the fact that political reality is largely a function of economic reality. In Europe and America alike, voters increasingly recognize that the benefits of the green revolution aren’t worth the costs, particularly when the revolutionaries don’t have a clue what they’re doing. The only question for voters is whether Obama has really learned his lesson, or whether he plans on reverting to type if re-elected.

On the Lighter Side….

And in the “Another Sign the Apocalypse is Upon Us” segment, we’ve seen the last movie inspired by any DC comic book:

DC Comics’ Green Lantern is now gay

Next, Mayor Booberg should be heartened to learn of yet another fast-food related death:

Elderly New York woman dies after minivan backs into McDonald’s

 

Minivans; about as dangerous as super-sized soft drinks.

Finally, we’ll call it a day with News of the Bizarre….and Largely Unproven, courtesy of NewsCore and some supposedly very ill-tempered arachnids:

2 people dead after swarms of venomous spiders invade Indian town

 

A town in India has suddenly been overrun by swarms of venomous spiders, leaving two people dead after being bitten. It may sound like a B-grade horror movie, but residents of the town of Sadiya, in Assam state, say that on the evening of May 8 as they were celebrating a Hindu festival swarms of spiders suddenly appeared and attacked them, The Times of India reported.

Over the next few days two people — a man, Purnakanta Buragohain, and an unnamed school boy — died after being bitten by the spiders. Scores more turned up at the town’s hospital with spider bites.

Teams of Indian arachnid experts have flocked to the town, hoping to identify the species, but so far they have drawn a blank. They say it could be a tarantula, a black wishbone or even a funnel-web spider — or it could be a whole new species. One thing they agree on is that it is not native to the area as there is no record of venomous spiders in Assam. The black wishbone and funnel-web are native to Australia.

Researchers are also still running tests to find out the toxicity of the spiders’ venom. Dr. Anil Phatowali, superintendent of the town’s hospital, said they had not administered antivenin as they could not be certain the spider was venomous at all.

Now….the REST of the story:

He also pointed out other factors may have contributed to the two reported fatalities. “All the bite patients first went to witch doctors, who cut open their wounds with razors, drained out blood and burnt it. That could have also made them sick,” Phatowali said.

Well bust my buttons….!

Magoo