Ten Years After Fort Hood Massacre

For Obama, it was “workplace violence.”

And what was heretofore a question became a conclusion.

Read the article: despite repeated instances of Islam-inspired terrorism and violence, America’s Misleader incredibly refused to recognize what was as obvious as the ears on his head, terming it instead “workplace violence“.  Just as he similarly declared the all-too preventable deaths of four Americans in Benghazi the result of a “spontaneous demonstration” inspired by a video, whose producer he then had arrested!!!

And you want to know why we refuse to take the word of any officer testifying against Trump in the Ukraine caper (more on this later)?  THIS is why:

Because so many of them willingly followed a Manchurian Candidate who deliberately decimated our Military through his (curiously) slavish devotion to political correctness and social engineering.

It’s as the Morning Jolt observed this Tuesday of…

“…Gail Collins inadvertently summarizing how a lot of Democrats see the world during Trump’s presidency: “Truly the bottom line rule of this administration is that no news is ever going to be really good. DJT will always find a way to make it awful.”

That’s what separates those of us deeply frustrated with Trump from those who have full-blown Trump Derangement Syndrome. When you cannot take any satisfaction, joy, or other positive feelings in a dead ISIS leader, the end of the Islamic State, low unemployment, a booming stock market, criminal justice reform, Right to Try, or any other development in any realm of social policy, economic policy, or foreign policy, then we are no longer discussing a particular presidency but what criteria you use to see the world. Your lens is permanently darkened and cannot let in light, no matter how brightly it shines. The continued presence of a president you deeply dislike ruins everything for you, and that says a great deal more about you than him.“

Seriously, we at least rejoiced when we bagged bin Laden…Obama’s having to be dragged in off the golf course to witness it notwithstanding.

Since we’re on the subject of the contemporary counterpart of late-19th/early-20th century Yellow Journalism…

MSNBC finally covers Rep. Katie Hill after days of avoiding Dem’s scandals

“MSNBC viewers were finally informed about the troubles surrounding Rep. Katie Hill, D-Calif., after claims of inappropriate relationships she had with staffers ignited a firestorm of controversy in the past week and led to her sudden resignation.

…Despite the growing scandals facing the congresswoman, whom many analysts called a rising star among the Democrats, Hill received no coverage during both MSNBC and CNN’s primetime programming last week. And, while CNN addressed the news story during its daytime programming, MSNBC had a complete blackout of the controversy…”

Even when MSDNC finally covered it, here’s how they misrepresented the very nature of the scandal:

Rep. Katie Hill resigns in wake of revenge porn

Not that she violated House rules by repeatedly having sexual relations with multiple staffers; rather it was due to “revenge porn”.  “Revenge porn“…

Speaking of things we’d prefer not to see…or hear from…again, NRO‘s Zach Evans relates how…

NSC Official With Firsthand Knowledge of Trump-Zelensky Call to Testify Tuesday in Impeachment Probe

“Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, a National Security Adviser who listened in on a July phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, will testify today that he believed Trump endangered national security during the call.

“I was concerned by the call. I did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen, and I was worried about the implications for the U.S. government’s support of Ukraine,” Vindman wrote. “I realized that if Ukraine pursued an investigation into the Bidens and Burisma, it would likely be interpreted as a partisan play which would undoubtedly result in Ukraine losing the bipartisan support it has thus far maintained.”

Vindman said such a result “would all undermine U.S. national security.”…”

In Vindman’s opinion!!!  Sorry, but since when does what a lowly Lieutenant Colonel “thinks“, “believes“, “realizes” or is “concerned/worried about” trump the policies of the Commander-in-Chief and his senior advisors…including the Secretary of State?!?  And since when were members of the National Security Council more concerned about whether a foreign government might be losing “bipartisan support” than the interests of the U.S. President they supposedly serve?!?

Besides, given Obama’s refusal to sell Ukraine weapons with which to oppose an imminent Russian invasion, its support could hardly be considered “bipartisan“.

And if he felt so strongly about the subject, as a member of the NSC, why didn’t he report his concerns to his ultimate superior?!?

Sorry, but such policy decisions are definitely way above Zindman’s pay grade…AND expertise.  Not to mention, given, his girth, it’s our bet, like so many other Obama-era hires, he can’t pass the Army’s minimum physical standards.

Since we’re on the subject of getting paid for a lack of expertise, writing at Best of the Web, Jim Freeman details the further exploits of…

Hunter Biden Worldwide

Have you heard about his work in Romania?

“Should Washington have done more to encourage foreign governments to examine the business activities of Hunter Biden? Hanging out the Biden shingle in jurisdictions where Barack Obama’s vice president was leading U.S. policy appears to have been a more lucrative enterprise than previously believed.

Laura Strickler and Rich Schapiro report for NBC News:

In the final year of the Obama administration, an American lawyer traveled to Romania to meet with a businessman accused of orchestrating a corrupt land deal.

The businessman was Gabriel “Puiu” Popoviciu, a wealthy Romanian real estate tycoon. The lawyer brought in to advise him was Hunter Biden, the son of then-Vice President Joe Biden, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Hunter Biden’s work for Popoviciu in 2016 went unreported at the time, but Joe Biden’s involvement in Romania was very much public. The vice president was among the leading voices pushing the government to crack down on corruption.

Will we now be treated to an explanation of Hunter Biden’s vast expertise in the area of Romanian real estate law and corruption statutes? This column will go out on a limb and suggest that his knowledge of Bucharest property markets was not all that much greater than his familiarity with Ukrainian gas deposits…

…This column may ultimately owe Hunter Biden an apology for assuming that he was not as adept as the Clinton family in monetizing his brand name.

For now there’s a question of whether the Biden family drew the line at China, Romania and Ukraine. If Joe Biden wants to continue to run for President, it seems reasonable for voters to ask for a full accounting of his family’s business operations worldwide.

Meanwhile back in America, Democrats in the House are searching for evidence that President Donald Trump unduly pressured the Ukrainian government to examine Biden actions which the Bidens have promised they will never do again.“

The Bidens blinding business acumen reminds us of Brennan and Dale from Step Brothers: 

Next up, courtesy of the WSJ, Bill McGurn examines...

Trump’s Unfairness Advantage

Pelosi realizes Democrats’ trampling of impeachment norms helps Trump.

McGurn’s column came out this past Monday; talk about a timely opinion piece.  

It’s as Jim Geraghty recently noted:

“Democrats say they have the votes to formally begin the inquiry, and based upon public statements, they have the votes. But for a nervous Democrat in a swing district, there’s a little wiggle room between publicly saying you’ll support an impeachment effort and actually voting for it.“

Understand, a vote to simply reaffirm…”formally” or otherwise…the current inquiry is still a far cry from a formal vote for articles of impeachment.

And in The EnvironMental Moment, courtesy today of Speed Mach and City Journal, one Joel Kotkin reports what’s hiding behind the ongoing anthropogenic global warming hysteria:

Climate Stalinism

Today’s radical green movement demands submission to an elite governing class—and its views are entering the mainstream

“The Left’s fixation on climate change is cloaked in scientism, deploying computer models to create the illusion of certainty. Ever more convinced of their role as planetary saviors, radical greens are increasingly intolerant of dissent or any questioning of their policy agenda. They embrace a sort of “soft Stalinism,” driven by a determination to remake society, whether people want it or not—and their draconian views are penetrating the mainstream. “Democracy,” a writer for Foreign Policy suggests, constitutes “the planet’s biggest enemy.”

…Draconian climate austerity does not threaten the jobs of the so-called “clean rich,” who may benefit as investors in solar and wind energy, the trading of carbon offsets, and other activities of the “climate industrial complex.” Some old-style leftists, like British Marxist historian James Heartfield, see the emergence of “green capitalism” as a new ruse for the upper classes to suppress the lower by creating artificial scarcity in everything from energy to housing and food. Greens seek to restrict air travel for the masses, but climate activists like Prince Charles, Richard Branson, Leonardo di Caprio, the rapper Drake, and Al Gore continue to fly in private jets, even to climate-crisis summits. They enjoy, and develop, luxury resorts far from population centers, and consume prodigiously while imploring the rest of us to curb our more modest habits.

…Once respectable and mainstream, the climate movement now resembles something inspired by religious fervor. Instead of debate, there’s enforced ideological conformity. Climate skeptics of any kind—even those who agree that climate change poses a serious challenge—have been all but banned, with rare exceptions, from the mainstream media. Others, including those in the fossil fuel industry, face court challenges that portray them as so-called “climate criminals.”

Such movements don’t tolerate infidels and have little patience with constitutional limits and procedures. Social Democrat Wolfgang Thierse, former president of the German Bundestag, recently told Die Welt that green militants display an “anti-democratic affection.” A German television reporter covering climate protesters described a movement dismissive of “our understanding of freedom and responsibility” that “borders on a collective psychosis, paired with wild fear and demands. Ever shriller, ever louder, ever faster.”

…Being proved wrong has failed to get greens to rethink their doomsday assumptions. Instead, every decade sees predictions that planet has five or ten years left if extreme measures are not taken immediately. After the election of President Obama in 2009, NASA’s James Hansen, an icon of the climate-change movement, announced that the new chief executive had four years to save the earth. Many phenomena ascribed to climate change—hurricanes and droughts, for example—turn out to have multiple and more complex causes. In the case of California’s wildfires, some of the problem can be traced back to green policies that prevent the thinning of the state’s forests. Similarly, the now-ended drought was made much worse by environmentalist opposition to new water infrastructure. Activists even blame the recent power outages on climate, though the primary cause was lack of investment and maintenance by local electrical utilities…”

In a related item forwarded by Jeff Foutch, writing at Watts Up With That, Larry Hamlin records how the state’s one-party Socialist system continues to attempt to shift the blame for California’s recurring conflagrations (not to mention increasingly-frequent blackouts and sky-high gasoline prices) from where they so squarely and undeniably lie:

California Democrats waste billions on useless climate alarmist schemes while the state burns uncontrollably

“The Wall Street Journal published a superb article that exposes the government lunacy in California where its climate alarmist propaganda driven Democratic politicians have wasted tens of billions of dollars on energy schemes that are totally useless in having any meaningful impacts on global emissions levels while ignoring the statewide wildfire disaster that is destroying massive amounts of property, thousands of homes and taking hundreds of lives.

…Democratic Party politicians in Sacramento have created this colossal wildfire debacle mess by their hugely misguided, monumentally incompetent and totally useless climate alarmist policy priorities wasting tens of billions of dollars on globally meaningless actions while ignoring the disastrous failures of the state to deal with its forest management responsibilities.

No doubt the states Democrats will hide their mind-boggling failures and try to shift blame and responsibility elsewhere most likely with the full support of the state’s corrupt media.“

The MSM: they’re nothing if not consistent: consistently biased.

Here’s the juice: we for one don’t believe human activity has one iota of impact on climate change.  And the “theory” of anthropogenic global warming is just so much junk science, total and absolute rubbish peddled by power-hungry Progressives who will never be happy ’til they’re telling the rest of us what to do, what to eat, what to believe and how to live.

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:

Then there’s this bit of humor courtesy of Mark Tapscott with which Deadskins’ fans can certainly relate…

…this meme from Bill Meisen…

…and this one from George Lawlor…

…a tidbit of history from Ed Hickey…

…these four bits of satire from Fielding Cocke…

…and some Halloween-themed humor:

Finally, we’ll call it a month with the Good Call segment, courtesy today of the Tennessee State Fire Marshal:

‘World’s tallest treehouse’ in Tennessee burns to the ground in just 15 minutes

“What’s said to be one of the tallest treehouses in the world mysteriously burned to the ground last week.

Flames engulfed and destroyed the Minister’s Treehouse, a one-of-a-kind structure located in Crossville, Tenn., in the span of about 15 minutes, according to officials. 

…The Minister’s Treehouse was constructed in the early 1990s by Horace Burgess, an architect-turned-minister, according to the Associated Press. Burgess previously told the media that God commanded him to build the sprawling treehouse as a means of ministry, inspiring him to construct the 97-foot, 10-story treehouse with salvaged woods scraps and recycled metal over the course of 19 years.

The massive structure stretched across several trees and featured 80 rooms, Travel + Leisure reports. It was something of an East Tennessee tourist hotspot until the state fire marshal declared it a public safety hazard in 2012, as the building lacked sprinklers or a fire alarm system — and shut it down…”

Lord knows in the course of our career in real estate development certain fire marshals have frosted our backside with unreasonable requirements; but as we said, this was good call!

Magoo