It’s Wednesday, July 25th, 2012….but before we begin, two pictures which say all that need be said:

Quite literally by the grace of God, a mid-afternoon power outage failed to impact the Friday evening festivities, and the rain stopped in Hagerstown long enough for both the wedding and reception.  Our heartfelt congratulations go out to the newlyweds, Liz and Jon McKee.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, contrasting reactions to the Aurora tragedy, courtesy of the AEI‘s Marc Thiessen and Seth Mandel, detailing the thoughts of Mayor Michael Bloomberg.  You tell us who makes sense….and who’s taken leave of their senses:

Aurora is not Fort Hood

 

As Americans try to make sense of the tragic shooting in Aurora, Colo., it is natural to reflect on other similar incidents that have scarred our collective memory. And in recent days, this massacre has been compared to shootings at Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson, the Holocaust Memorial and Fort Hood.

The problem? One of these incidents is not like the others. The Aurora shooting was a senseless act of violence; Fort Hood was a terrorist attack.

The Post quoted a forensic psychiatrist who declared that the shooters in all these cases had a “common motive.” No, Army Maj. Nidal Hasan’s motive was different from that of James Holmes or Seung-Hui Cho. Hasan’s was the same motive that led 19 evil men to fly airplanes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001: He wanted to wage jihad against the United States.

One day before the Aurora shootings, former FBI and CIA director William Webster released a 173-page report on the tragic failure to prevent the Fort Hood attack. It included declassified details of e-mail messages between Hasan and Anwar al-Awlaki, the leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula who was killed last year in a U.S. drone strike. In one e-mail, Hasan asks Awlaki whether he considered Muslims who join the U.S. armed forces and “kill other us soldiers in the name of Islam … with the goal of helping Muslims/Islam (Lets just assume this for now) fighting Jihad and if they did die would you consider them shaheeds” (martyrs).

In another e-mail, Hasan asks Awlaki about “the issue of ‘collateral damage’ where a decision is made to allow the killing of innocents for a valuable target.” The FBI intercepted these and other troubling e-mails but concluded that they posed no serious danger and that an investigation was not necessary. (Any question why?!?)

On Nov. 5, 2009, Hasan entered the Fort Hood deployment center, jumped on a desk and yelled “Allahu Akbar!” as he shot and killed 13 people and wounded 43 others. Soon after the Fort Hood attack, Awlaki stated that while he neither ordered nor pressured Hasan to harm Americans, “I blessed the act because it was against a military target. And the soldiers who were killed were not normal soldiers, but those who were trained and prepared to go to Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Awlaki praised Hasan as a “hero” and declared: “Fighting against the U.S. army is an Islamic duty today. The only way a Muslim could Islamically justify serving as a soldier in the U.S. army is if his intention is to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal.”

When authorities searched Hasan’s home after the attacks, they found business cards that omitted his U.S. military rank but included a cryptic abbreviation, “SoA” – apparently “Soldier of Allah” or “Servant of Allah.”

Hasan was more than a deranged killer; he was a home-grown al-Qaeda terrorist. Yet from the beginning, the Obama administration sought to play down Hasan’s ties to terror. Soon after the shootings, Obama speculated that the attack was the result of an overtaxed military, declaring “everybody understands how outstanding the young men and women in uniform are under the most severe stress. There are going to be instances in which an individual cracks.” And in his memorial speech at Fort Hood, Obama refused to call the killings a terrorist act and declared it was “hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy.”

Hasan’s logic is not hard to comprehend at all. He followed a clear and focused ideology – Islamic radicalism – that is evil but not insane. He studied this ideology, and he committed mass murder in its name. He conspired with an enemy commander – and then killed to advance the enemy’s vision and objectives.

The men and women who lost their lives in Aurora Friday were killed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The men and women who lost their lives at Fort Hood were killed because they wore the uniform of the United States of America. This means the Fort Hood massacre belongs not with Aurora, Columbine, Virginia Tech and Tucson in the pantheon of tragic and senseless killings. It belongs in the pantheon of terrorist attacks against the United States – alongside the bombings of the U.S. embassies in East Africa, the destruction of the USS Cole, the attempted bombings of a commercial airliner over Detroit and an SUV in Times Square, and – yes – the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) have introduced bipartisan legislation to award Purple Hearts to those killed and wounded at Fort Hood – just as Purple Hearts were awarded to the military victims of 9/11. Aurora was a horrific crime, and the victims deserve our prayers. But those who perished at Fort Hood deserve something more as well – the recognition that they gave their lives in service to our country.

Bloomberg: Police Should Strike Until I Get What I Want

 

Mayor Bloomberg hitting his target audience

When it became clear that the Occupy Wall Street encampment in lower Manhattan was a health and safety danger riddled with sexual assaults, Mayor Michael Bloomberg took action… eventually. After a couple of months. New Yorkers already knew that Bloomberg was no Rudy Giuliani, who combined smart conservative policy-making with a dedication to the city’s safety, security, and dignity. But they learned something else as Bloomberg watched businesses close and the violence spread: Bloomberg was willing to sacrifice public safety to make grand political gestures.

And they learned that lesson again yesterday. Bloomberg, who is as pro-gun control as anyone with his own army, went on Piers Morgan’s show and revealed that the Occupy protests seemed to have left a special place in his heart for subjecting the city to periodic bursts of anarchy:

“I don’t understand why police officers across this country don’t stand up collectively and say we’re going to go on strike, we’re not going to protect you unless you, the public, through your legislature, do what’s required to keep us safe,’’ he told CNN’s Piers Morgan.

Bloomberg made this astonishingly dangerous remark in response to the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, demanding new tougher gun control legislation. Let’s put aside for the moment the fact that the suspect in this case was building sophisticated bombs in his apartment, and probably would not have been deterred by gun laws. Bloomberg has always had some difficulty with cause and effect–he suggested the Times Square bomber, a self-proclaimed jihadist, was really just angry about President Obama’s health care bill.

And let’s put aside, also, the fact that just as he doesn’t abide by various prohibitions he tries to force on the commoners, Bloomberg’s own safety would never be in doubt. Just yours. And try to put aside the irony of Bloomberg threatening to figuratively put a gun to the public’s head to pass gun control legislation they oppose.

Actually, don’t put any of that aside. Just remember, the next time someone accuses conservatives of holding the country hostage over policy disagreements, Bloomberg has shown us what that would actually look like.

We report, you decide; but here’s some food for thought.  Chicago, which has some of the toughest gun restrictions in the country, has seen over 1,000 murders in 2012….and the year’s barely half over.  The Windy City has a murder rate higher than Kabul, Afghanistan!  And despite Mayor Boobberg’s protestations to the contrary, the statistics are much the same for New York, or any other major metropolitan area in the country, mainly because criminals….as well as the criminally insane….by definition DON’T OBEY THE LAW!!!  They never have, and they never will.

Consider this recent headline:

14 die when packed pickup truck crashes in Texas

 

Though the Texas authorities and the MSM couldn’t….or as with the case of Major Hasan….wouldn’t connect the dots, the truck was filled to overflowing with illegal aliens.  Existing laws prohibit both illegal immigration and carrying more passengers in a vehicle than the number of available seat belts.

You get the point; added restrictions on the rights of law-abiding citizens would have no more prevented 14 people dying in Goliad….now 15….than it would the Aurora massacre.

We know common sense won’t dissuade the anti-gun crowd from attempting to make hay from the immeasurable loss suffered by the families of James Holmes victims, but this make our point any less accurate.

Next up, it’s the “Your Tax Dollars at Work” segment, courtesy again of the biggest spender we’ve seen since TLJ discovered Nordstrom:

AP Exclusive: Internal documents shows Obama deportation proposal could cost more than $585M

 

The Obama administration’s new plan to grant temporary work permits to many young, illegal immigrants who otherwise could be deported may cost more than $585 million and require hiring hundreds of new federal employees to process more than 1 million anticipated requests, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press.

The Homeland Security Department plans, marked “not for distribution,” describe steps that immigrants will need to take — including a $465 paperwork fee designed to offset the program’s cost — and how the government will manage it. Illegal immigrants can request permission to stay in the country under the plan by filing a document, “Request for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals,” and simultaneously apply for a work permit starting Aug. 15.

Under the new program, which President Barack Obama announced last month, eligible immigrants must have arrived in the U.S. before their 16th birthday, are 30 or younger, have been living here at least five years, are in school or graduated or served in the military. They also must not have a criminal record or otherwise pose a safety threat. They can apply to stay in the country and be granted a work permit for two years, but they would not be granted citizenship.

The internal government plans obtained by the AP provide the first estimates of costs, how many immigrants were expected to participate and how long it might take for them. It was not immediately clear whether or under which circumstances any immigrants would not be required to pay the $465 paperwork fee. The plans said there would be no waivers, but Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told Congress last week that the government would grant waivers “in very deserving cases.” She said details were still being worked out. “We anticipate that this will be a fee-driven process,” Napolitano said.

A spokesman for the Homeland Security Department, Peter Boogaard, said the plans obtained by the AP were “preliminary documents” and the process is still being worked out. Boogaard said processing immigrant applications under the program “will not use taxpayer dollars” because of the fees that will be collected.

Fee waivers could dramatically affect the government’s share of the cost. The plans said that, depending on how many applicants don’t pay, the government could lose between $19 million and $121 million.

Republican critics pounced on that. “By lowering the fee or waiving it altogether for illegal immigrants, those who play by the rules will face delays and large backlogs as attention is diverted to illegal immigrants,” said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas. “American taxpayers should not be forced to bail out illegal immigrants and President Obama’s fiscally irresponsible policies.”

http://www.dailyjournal.net/view/story/a822d4de77c04dbcb5ba0af5db581166/US–Immigration-Deportations-Halted

And since we’re on the subject of the President’s fiscally irresponsible policies (like they come in any other variety!), in a related item the WSJ reports on The Obamao’s blatant buying of votes with your tax dollars:

You Don’t Owe That

An Obama proposal would make it easier not to repay student loans.

 

If only President Obama would treat America’s small business owners as well as he treats delinquent borrowers, the U.S. economy might have a fighting chance at robust growth.

We’ll have to wait until Friday to see how slowly the U.S. economy expanded in the second quarter. But today Team Obama will tell Congress about its latest proposals to spread the wealth around—specifically from private lenders to the people who owe them money on student loans. The goal is to create new ways for borrowers to avoid repayment.

Having recently forced taxpayers to underwrite a series of such measures for loans issued by the government, the White House now wants the shareholders of financial companies to suffer even more when private loans go bust.

Not that there are many private loans left after Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats seized control of this market with legislation that passed along with ObamaCare in 2010. With roughly $1 trillion in student loans outstanding, close to $900 billion are federal loans, and Uncle Sugar is responsible for more than 90% of recent loan originations. But the existence of a market sliver still occupied by private enterprise gives politicians a handy industry to blame for mounting troubles in a government-dominated business.

Even though nearly 90% of defaults are occurring on loans backed by the taxpayer, last week the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rolled out a new report on purported flaws in the private market. To underline the absurdity of focusing on private loans, the White House’s own budget is forecasting default rates above 20% on some types of federal loans issued in fiscal 2013. That means defaults could be in the titanic range above $20 billion. All of the private firms probably won’t issue half that amount in total loans, never mind bad loans.

The new report says that Congress should consider letting borrowers discharge their private student loans through bankruptcy. This would reverse a hard lesson learned during the 1970s. After a surge in former students declaring bankruptcy to avoid repaying their loans, Congress acted to protect lenders beginning in 1977. First it limited the ability of borrowers with government loans to use bankruptcy as a bailout ramp, and later the ban was applied to all student loans (with some exceptions for hardship cases).

This reform also protected future borrowers. Credit miraculously becomes more available when lenders believe they might be repaid.

Yet as with so many other policies, the Obama Administration displays little interest in learning from the mistakes of the 1970s. If there’s not a great outcry over letting borrowers stiff private lenders, eventually you can expect the roll-out of a similar policy for government loans. Most people with difficulty paying back private loans are also struggling with government loans.

While we don’t doubt Mr. Obama’s sincere impulse to redistribute money, the timing of this effort suggests it is one more election-year pander to the young voters who showed up for Mr. Obama in 2008 but may be less enthusiastic this time. Unemployment among Americans age 20-24 hit 13.7% in June, up from 13.3% in January. So first the President made a big deal over cutting student loan interest-rates to save a few bucks, and now he’s telling young voters he’s making it easier for them to avoid repaying at all.

Young voters may appreciate Mr. Obama’s latest efforts to help them weather the Obama economy. But wouldn’t it be easier merely to encourage job creation rather than try to anticipate and make taxpayers pay for every consequence of joblessness?

So at the same time Tick-Tock’s spending your tax dollars in another attempt to woo Hispanic voters with what amounts to work visas for college-age illegals, he’s offering private capital, i.e., other people’s money, to out-of-work American citizens in the very same age group.  Is this a great country or what?!?

Not if, like us, you dipped into your hard-earned savings to send three kids through college.

And in today’s Follow-Up segment, two thoughts on The Obamao’s “You Didn’t Build That” theme, courtesy of the AEI‘s Charles Murray and the WSJ‘s James Taranto:

President Obama’s horrendous political gaffe last week—”You didn’t build that”—triggered the same reaction I had when he insisted on pushing through Obamacare. Then, I had the creepy feeling that I was living in an occupied country. American politics didn’t work that way. Neither Democrats nor Republicans had ever forced through a transformative piece of legislation without substantial bipartisan support. A major American politician had never (to my knowledge) been indifferent to the kind of voter sentiment so clearly expressed in the Massachusetts senatorial election.

“You didn’t build that” is another example of the president’s tone-deafness when it comes to the music of the American culture. The phrase is not taken out of context. It didn’t come after a celebration of the inventiveness and risk taking of individual Americans that has made this country great. The president gave the mildest of acknowledgements to the role of the individual, followed by a paragraph of examples that cast American history as a series of collective accomplishments. . . .

It is as if a Dutch politician—an intelligent, well-meaning Dutch politician—were somehow running for the American presidency, but bringing with him the Rawlsian, social-democratic ethos that, in the Netherlands, is the natural way to talk about a properly run society. We would listen to him and say to ourselves, “He doesn’t get this country.” That’s the thing about Obama. Time and again, he does things and says things that are un-American. Not evil. Not anti-American. Just un-American.

Murray gives the Boy Blunder far more credit than we’d ever extend him.  Now, James Taranto hits far nearer to the heart of the matter:

Explaining Obama’s Ressentiment

Unearned success is the central theme of his life story.

 

The Romney campaign is out with a very effective new ad illuminating and responding to President Obama’s disparagement of individual achievement. The ad constructs a dialogue between Obama and Jack Gilchrist, a political independent who is president of Gilchrist Metal Fabricating Co., a small industrial concern conveniently located in the swing state of New Hampshire.

First we get a medley of Obama quotes sneering at the successful, then a response from Gilchrist, who is shown in various settings: on the factory floor, in his home, with his son and a portrait of his late father. Here are the words:

Obama: “If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, ‘Well, it must be ’cause I was just so smart.’ There are a lot of smart people out there. ‘It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.’ Let me tell you something: If you’ve got a business, that–you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

Gilchrist: “My father’s hands didn’t build this company? My hands didn’t build this company? My son’s hands aren’t building this company? Did somebody else take out the loan on my father’s house that financed the equipment? Did somebody else make payroll every week and figure out where it’s coming from? President Obama, you’re killin’ us out here. Through hard work and a little bit of luck, we built this business. Why are you demonizing us for it? We are the solution, not the problem. It’s time we had somebody who believes in us–someone who believes that achievement should be rewarded, not punished. We need somebody who believes in America.”

That somebody, obviously, is Mitt Romney, who delivers his rebuttal to “You didn’t build that” (we quoted it yesterday).

Meanwhile, @BarackObama tweets a quote attributed to somebody identified only as “Jacob, Michigan”: ” ‘President Obama had the courage to step up and save General Motors, and because of it, I have a job today.’ ” William C. Durant didn’t build GM, but Barack Obama saved it.

The claim that Obama saved GM is fraudulent. What he did was use political muscle to intervene in a bankruptcy process in order to ensure a settlement on terms favorable to his supporters, the United Auto Workers union, at the expense of taxpayers (or “freeloaders,” in the president’s parlance) and bondholders. It would be more accurately characterized as an act of larceny than salvation.

Yesterday’s column discussed the philosophy behind Obama’s belittlement of the successful. Today we’d like to examine the psychology behind it. For it seems to us that Obama’s generalities about success being undeserved are absolutely true in one particular case: that of Barack Obama. Unearned success is the central theme of his life story.

Let’s run through the list of Obama’s achievements.

“The Harvard Law Review, generally considered the most prestigious in the country, elected the first black president in its 104-year history today,” the New York Times reported Feb. 6, 1990. Obama himself understood his election to be a product not of unusual ability but of luck: “It’s important that stories like mine aren’t used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks,” he told the Times. “You have to remember that for every one of me, there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don’t get a chance.”

He was lucky to be privileged and he was lucky to be black. But for the former, in his own telling, he never would have had the opportunity. But for the latter, his election would scarcely have been noticed outside Harvard Yard. In an interview with the Times, Peter Yu, Obama’s predecessor as law review president, used apophasis to raise the possibility that the honor was undeserved: “Mr. Yu said Mr. Obama’s election ‘was a choice on the merits, but others may read something into it.’ “

In 1995, Obama published an autobiography, “Dreams From My Father,” substantial portions of which turn out to have been fictional. Just how substantial has become clear since David Maraniss published his heavily reported biography, but it had not gone unnoticed before, as evidenced by this 2008 piece from the New York Times’s Janny Scott:

His memoir is, as one publisher put it, “the single most vetted book in American politics right now.” Written at a time when Obama says he was thinking less about a career in politics than about simply writing a good book, it leaves an impression of candidness and authenticity that gives it much of its power. Reporters have questioned Obama’s use of fictional techniques like composite characters, but some editors and critics say that is common in memoirs.

“The book is so literary,” said Arnold Rampersad, a professor of English at Stanford University who teaches autobiography and is the author of a recent biography of Ralph Ellison. “It is so full of clever tricks–inventions for literary effect–that I was taken aback, even astonished. But make no mistake, these are simply the tricks that art trades in, and out of these tricks is supposed to come our realization of truth.” . . .

In the introduction, Obama acknowledged his use of pseudonyms, composite characters, approximated dialogue and events out of chronological order. He was writing at a time well before a recent series of publishing scandals involving fabrication in memoirs. “He was trying to be careful of people’s feelings,” said Deborah Baker, the editor on the first paperback edition of the book. “The fact is, it all had a sort of larger truth going on that you couldn’t make up.”

It was in 2004 when Obama came to national prominence. As Chicago magazine recounted three years later:

The keynote speech that Barack Obama delivered on Tuesday, July 27, 2004, galvanized the delegates who packed Boston’s FleetCenter and electrified a nationwide television audience. The 2,297 words uttered over 17 minutes changed Obama’s profile overnight and made him a household name. Before the speech, the idea of Obama running for president in 2008 would have been laughable; he was a lowly state senator from Chicago’s Hyde Park, and while he stood a good chance at winning his U.S. Senate race, he would enter that powerful body ranked 99th out of 100 in seniority. After the speech, observers from across the political world hailed the address as an instant classic, and Obama was drawing comparisons (deservedly or not) to Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy.

It was a good speech but hardly a great one–uplifting but platitudinous. He did not deserve the comparisons to JFK and Dr. King. But even at the time nobody was saying: “If Kerry loses, this young man deserves to be president in four years.”

And he would not have been elected president in 2008 without a series of lucky breaks. As Joshua Green noted in The Atlantic Monthly, strategic errors by Hillary Clinton’s campaign made it possible for the junior senator from Illinois to eke out a narrow victory over her:

One story line that has featured prominently in the postmortems is Harold Ickes’s attempts to alert the campaign to the importance of the party’s complicated system of allotting delegates–a system that Obama’s campaign cleverly exploited, by focusing on delegate-rich caucus states. Ickes wrote a series of memos, fatefully ignored, that drew attention to this matter. Nothing I was privy to suggests that anyone else gave it more than passing attention until just before Iowa (though as a cost-saving measure, the budget team halted polling in many of the caucus states they expected Obama to win). Then, on December 22–just 12 days before Iowa–Ickes tried again, in a memo that seems to be introducing the subject of delegates for the first time.

So Obama had the Democratic nomination in a year when the public was fed up with Republicans. His general-election opponent, John McCain, was elderly and erratic. When the financial panic hit, Obama was able to project an air of competence simply by standing still as McCain flailed. What clinched Obama’s election was not anything he had done, but merely that he had not behaved foolishly when his opponent did.

What gave his campaign much of its appeal also was not what he had done, but what he was. As Janny Scott put it in that 2008 piece: “Out of his story, he has also drawn the central promise of his campaign: if a biracial son of a Kenyan and a Kansan could reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable in himself, a divided country could do the same.”

And of course not only Americans projected their hopes onto this political cipher. So did Norwegians, who awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize after less than a year in office. You may get a kick out of rereading our column of Oct. 9, 2009, titled “Most Embarrassing Moment.” We’ll quote again here from a contemporaneous Reuters dispatch titled “Obama Peace Prize Win Has Americans Asking Why?”:

“It would be wonderful if I could think why he won,” said Claire Sprague, 82, a retired English professor as she walked her dog in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. “They wanted to give him an honor I guess but I can’t think what for.”

Itya Silverio, 33, of Brooklyn, was also surprised. “My first opinion is that he got it because he’s black,” she said. “What did he do that was so great? He hasn’t even finished office yet.” . . .

Some said the choice could damage the Nobel committee’s credibility and that of the award.

“It looks less like an objective award than it does a political endorsement,” said William Jelani Cobb, a history professor at Spelman College in Atlanta and author of a forthcoming book on Obama. “Guantanamo is not closed yet and it makes it difficult for him to increase the number of troops in Afghanistan,” he said.

At least he eventually closed Guantanamo. Oh wait . . .

Obama recently said his biggest shortcoming as president was that he has failed to tell the electorate “the story that tells us where he’s going.” But he’s certainly told a story: a story in which he has personally achieved great things, like saving Detroit and killing Osama bin Laden, whereas everything that’s gone wrong is the fault of somebody else–George W. Bush, congressional Republicans, corporate jet owners, etc.

The problem with this story is that it is manifestly untrue. Obama not only has failed to deliver on the extravagant promises–world peace and racial harmony and receding oceans and free medical care for all. He has fallen short even of a minimal standard of political and governmental competence.

What is the root of Barack Obama’s ressentiment? Why does he insist that men like Jack Gilchrist don’t deserve their success? Not because they are successful. Even if Obama loses in a landslide, he will have enjoyed more success than most people can dream of in a lifetime.

No, Obama resents their modest success precisely because they did earn it.

Meanwhile, as this next video demonstrates, at some point, even the Father of Lies can’t keep his stories straight:

 Speaking of lies, you’ll recall we saw this one coming:

Pentagon lets service members march in uniform at gay pride parade for first time

 

“Everyone will be treated the same”

The Defense Department on Thursday announced it is allowing service members to march in uniform in a gay pride parade for the first time in U.S. history. In a memorandum sent to all its branches, the department said it was making the allowance for San Diego’s Gay Pride Parade on Saturday even though its policy generally bars troops from marching in uniform in parades.

The Defense Department said it did so because organizers had encouraged military personnel to march in their uniform and the event was getting national attention.

The move came only weeks after the Pentagon joined the rest of the U.S. government for the first time in marking June as gay pride month and made an official salute to gay and lesbian service members. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta vowed in a video message to remove as many barriers as possible to making the military a model of equal opportunity and said gays and lesbians can be proud in uniform with the repeal last year of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law.

Last year, San Diego’s Gay Pride Parade had the nation’s largest contingency of active-duty troops participate before the military lifted its ban on openly gay service members. About 200 service members last year wore T-shirts with their branch’s name….

The Pentagon said the allowance is only for this year’s parade in San Diego and does not extend beyond that. Military personnel wearing civilian clothes do not need permission to march in any parades.

We won’t hold our breath waiting for the DoD to grant a special exception for anyone in uniform to march in a Tea Party rally, regardless of how much national press coverage it might draw.

On the Lighter Side….

Finally, in the P.T. Barnum Memorial “There’s A Sucker Born Every Minute” segment, we present yet another Stupid Human trick:

At Least 21 Treated for Burns After Trying to Walk on Coals at Tony Robbins Event

 

Soooo….perhaps not quite unlimited!

Fire officials in California say at least 21 people were treated for burns after attendees of an event for motivational speaker Tony Robbins tried to walk on hot coals. The San Jose Mercury News reports that at least three people went to a hospital and most suffered second- or third-degree burns.

Robbins was hosting a 4-day gathering called “Unleash the Power Within” at the San Jose Convention Center. Witnesses say on Thursday, a crowd went to a park where 12 lanes of hot coals were on the grass. Robbins’ website promotes “The Firewalk Experience” in which people walk on super-heated coals. Witness Jonathan Correll says he heard “screams of agony.”

Two thoughts come to mind: stupid is as stupid does….and you get what you pay for.

Magoo