Showing posts with label America - Now with More Hope and Change - Banana Republic Edition - 2014. Show all posts
Showing posts with label America - Now with More Hope and Change - Banana Republic Edition - 2014. Show all posts

Friday, January 02, 2015


Imagine if Doonesbury were still relevant or funny or interesting...


....Truesbury - Year in Review.













Monday, December 29, 2014

Let the peasants get married in a Las Vegas Wedding Chapel.

Could you imagine the days of outrage, defining a presidency, if a Republican President had done this?

Obama’s golf game boots bride and groom from Hawaii wedding 

The President's Sunday game at Kaneohe Klipper Golf Course meant Army Captains Natalie Heimel and Edward Mallue Jr. couldn't hold their scheduled wedding ceremony on the greens.

For birdie or for worse.
President Obama’s golf game Sunday forced Army Captains Natalie Heimel and her fiancé, Edward Mallue Jr. to relocate their wedding ceremony.
The lovebirds were set to wed Sunday at the Kaneohe Klipper Golf Course, located on the Marine Corps Base Hawaii, until they learned Obama had his eye on the same course and they would need to find a new spot for their nuptials.
“In less than 24 hours they had to change everything they had planned,” the groom’s sister told Bloomberg News.
Instead, they held the ceremony on green lawn on the base that offered views of the Pacific coastline.

Saturday, December 20, 2014

The lesson of the Obama Presidency is that intentional discrimination is perfectly fine...

...when the discrimination is against whites or men.


//During President Obama’s year-end press conference Friday, he took eight questions — all from women.

Obama took questions from the Associated Press’ Julie Pace, Bloomberg BNA’s Cheryl Bolen, McClatchy’s Lesley Clark, Politico’s Carrie Budoff Brown, Reuters’ Roberta Rampton, the Wall Street Journal’s Colleen Nelson, the Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin and American Urban Radio’s April Ryan.

No one from major TV networks — and no men — were called on. No Ed Henry, no Jon Karl, none.

The move was intentional, according to TIME political reporter Zeke Miller, who quoted Press Secretary Josh Earnest.

“The fact is, there are many women from a variety of news organizations who day-in and day-out do the hard work of covering the president of the United States,” Earnest said. “As the questioner list started to come together, we realized that we had a unique opportunity to highlight that fact at the president’s closely watched, end-of-the-year news conference.”

Considering what turned out to be a poor ending for the year in women’s issues — namely campus sexual assault — Obama needed to bring attention back on women.

Obama tried in April to spearhead a movement this year and continue the momentum of the “war on women” narrative, but it suffered a number of setbacks: Due process supporters piped up, a major story about campus rape was exposed as a hoax, Republicans defeated candidates who overdid the "war on women" theme. To put it briefly, the president needed a win, and this is what he came up with.//


Friday, December 19, 2014

But, then, the Left has been repressing Free Speech in America because of the concerns of foreign crazys for at least the last four years...

...but nobody cared when it was Nakoula Basseley Nakoula.

There wasn't any liberal skin in the game when it was Nakoula Basseley Nakoula.

Who is Nakoula Bassely Nakoula?, you ask.

//The foothold to censorship was established years ago. But Oswalt and his ilk didn’t care about Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. They weren’t screaming about his First Amendment rights when Obama falsely blamed him for a terrorist attack in front of the whole world




They were too worried about the 2012 election to give a damn about free speech.

Now North Korea has successfully proven that the future will not belong to those who slander Kim Jong-un. They didn’t do it by hacking us. They did it by watching how we respond to terrorist threats.

This is the world you’ve made, leftists. Now you don’t like it. If only you were capable of learning something from the experience.//



Thursday, December 11, 2014

Most transparent administration ever!

The torture report has to be released; it only emboldens America's enemies and shows injustice to murderers.

But the IRS investigation of conservatives is completely different; it would embolden Republicans and shows injustice to Americans.

//Sadly, the 18 month investigation into the IRS targeting of conservative groups isn’t over, and it may be worse than anyone thought. A federal judge has broken loose more emails that the DOJ had surely hoped would never surface. The picture it reveals isn’t pretty. The documents prove that Lois Lerner met with DOJ’s Election Crimes Division a month before the 2010 elections.

It has to be embarrassing to the DOJ, which may not be the most impartial one to be investigating the IRS. In fact, the DOJ withheld over 800 pages of Lerner documents citing “taxpayer privacy” and “deliberative privilege.” Yet these internal DOJ documents show Ms. Lerner was talking to DOJ officials about prosecuting tax-exempt entities (yes, criminally!) two years before the IRS conceded there was inappropriate targeting.

Ms. Lerner met with top officials from the DOJ’s Election Crimes Branch in October of 2010. Although Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the DOJ (Judicial Watch v. Department of Justice, No. 14-cv-01239),the DOJ coughed up dirt only on court order. Even then, DOJ  handed over only two pages of heavily redacted emails.//


Friday, December 05, 2014

Apparently, even non-Fox News media is finding the State Department incomprehensible.



This is what happens when your employer does not have a policy that makes sense.


Tuesday, December 02, 2014

"What is wrong with this country?"

Has there ever been a time where more people have been willing to tell more lies when the evidence is more clearly against their lies?

It's like they believe they can change a deuce into an ace by staring at it and having politically correct intentions.

And I have to include the President, who thinks he can make video recordings of this past statements disappear with the waive of a hand and the statement "these are not the droids you are looking for."

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

The Divider.

From NRO:

Obama Has No Praise for the Legal System

 
Text   

Folks on the homepage and the Corner have pretty well covered the appalling violence stemming from Ferguson. Just a footnote that, in neither of his two public statements since the grand jury’s decision, has President Obama uttered a word of praise for the legal system. No comment on its thoroughness, its fidelity to duty, the earnest effort of American citizens both black and white who served on the grand jury to reach a judgment based on facts and not emotion, a process that took weeks and sought out the statements of anyone who claimed to have seen the incident.
No, not one word for the system that sets us apart from banana republics and autocracies. The best our lawyer-president could do was a grudging acknowledgment that, “we need to accept that this decision was the grand jury’s to make.” It was all but a call to question the grand jury’s competence or neutrality, as well as a justification for those who opposed the decision
Instead, Obama shifted his focus to undermining faith in law enforcement nationwide. The president spent his valuable national television time warning local police not to overreact, not to confuse a few bad apples with the whole bunch, entreating all of us to recognize the unfair treatment that rages in our country. All this while the split screen showed dozens of criminals burning down private businesses in Ferguson, most of them minority-owned. Given a do-over on Tuesday, a chance to educate the American public about the grand jury system and try to restore faith in legal process, Obama doubled down on his polemic criticism of law enforcement.
On neither Monday nor Tuesday night did the president use more than a few words from his bully pulpit to castigate, to publicly shame the opportunistic thugs who chose violence for no reason other than their own nihilism. The president said nothing about groups of protesters burning the American flag in Ferguson or D.C. or destroying Christmas decorations in Atlanta. But he took pains to say
So my message to those people who are constructively moving forward, trying to organize, mobilize and ask hard, important questions about how we improve the situation, I want all those folks to know that their president is going to work with them.
The president can choose sides, and clearly has; after all, he identified himself as “their” president. That’s his right. But his subtle and poisonous undermining of faith in our legal system will have consequences for years to come.

Monday, November 24, 2014

Pushing the Constitutional envelope destroyed the Roman Republic.

Have no doubt that Obama is doing something that sets a dangerous precedent.

Democracy relies on two kinds of restraints on ambition.  One restrain is the system of checks and balances.

The more important restraint is the the restraint of habitual disposition on the part of those who wield power.

What we see in Obama's immigration overreach is the culmination of a long developing sea-change on the part of the Left which defines democracy as getting the results that the Left wants rather than the following the process by which the will of the majority is determined.


Sunday, November 23, 2014

Losing his base...

...or his base thinks they have to maintain some self-respect.

SNL makes fun of Obama.

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Monday, November 17, 2014

The Prophet Alvin Plantinga predicts the Democrat Talking-points Robots' defense of Jonathan Gruber on the evening news.

They may think that they are winning, but they are really creating a monster.

Jerry Walls springboards from a quote from Alvin Plantinga to a current issue:

//Unfortunately, however, some environments can be so toxic that our notion of truth can be smothered and squelched to such an extent that we end up with no concept of truth at all. Plantinga went on to give a concrete example of this phenomenon, and this is the passage that left me pondering for days.

“It is said that one of the most serious results of the long Communist tyranny in eastern Europe was just such a suppression of the idea of truth. The truth was officially perverted so often and so cynically (for example, the official organ of the Communist party devoted to the dissemination of propaganda was ironically named Pravda, i.e., truth) that people came to lose the very idea of truth. They were lied to at every level in utterly shameless and blatant ways; they knew they were being lied to, knew that those who lied to them knew they were lying and that those to whom they lied knew they were being lied to, and so on; the result was that the whole idea of truth tended to evaporate. One said whatever would be of advantage; the question of whether it was true no longer arose” (Oxford University Press, 2000, p 216).

Anyone who has even remotely been paying attention for the past few years can hardly fail to note the similarity between Plantinga’s description of Communist tyranny in eastern Europe and a similar pattern of indifference to truth contemporary America.//


Monday, November 10, 2014

More reliable than Pravda.

Democrat operatives with media passes.

George Stephanopoulis kicks off the "War on Women" election campaign with a question about "contraception" while moderating a Republican debate. Candy Crowley interferes in the Romney-Obama debate by taking Obama's side concerning the false Benghazi spin.  And now we know that CBS spiked a newsworthy clip from an interview with Obama that showed him refusing to identify the Benghazi attack as actions by terrorists.

Sunday on Fox News Channel's "MediaBuzz," investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson told the story of CBS executives intentionally hiding a clip from the day after the Benghazi attacks with President Barack Obama refusing to admit Benghazi was a terrorist attack.

Host Howard Kurtz asked, "Let's talk about what happened with '60 Minutes,' the day after the Benghazi attacks with President Obama. and that sounded like -- or some of that interview ended up not being used. after the second 2012 debate, it became a big issue whether or not the president had or had not referred to Benghazi attacks as terrorist attacks." 
During the 2012 presidential debate, Mitt Romney had said it took Obama 14 days to admit the attack was terrorism but Obama bulked saying he did that day, but when asked the next day he is seen refusing to give a terror motive saying, "Well, it's too early to know exactly how this came about, what group was involved. but, obviously, it was an attack on Americans." 
Attkisson said, "Let me say that that exchange should have been pulled out immediately after the debate, which would have been very newsy at the time. It was exclusive to CBS. It would have to me proven Romney's point against Obama. But that clip was kept secret."
"I was covering Benghazi, nobody told me we had it and directed me from the 'Evening News' to a different clip of the same interview to give the impression that the president had done the opposite. And it was only right before the election that somebody kind of leaked out the transcript to others of us as CBS and we were really shocked. We saw that was something very unethical done to have kept that up."
She added, "The 'Evening News' people who had access to that transcript, according to the emails that I saw when it was sent from '60 Minutes' to 'Evening News' the very day it was taken, they, in my view, skipped over it, passed it up, kept it secret. And I think that was because they were trying to defend the president and they thought that would be harmful to him."

Tuesday, November 04, 2014

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Barack Hussein Nixon.

Welcome to the Era of Hope and Change in a Banana Republic:

//Next big moment: Attkisson gets her computer checked out by someone identified as “Number One,” who’s described as a “confidential source inside the government.” A climactic meeting takes place at a McDonald’s outlet at which Attkisson and “Number One” “look around” for possibly suspicious things. Finding nothing, they talk. “First just let me say again I’m shocked. Flabbergasted. All of us are. This is outrageous. Worse than anything Nixon ever did. I wouldn’t have believed something like this could happen in the United States of America.” That’s all coming from “Number One.”

The breaches on Attkisson’s computer, says this source, are coming from a “sophisticated entity that used commercial, nonattributable spyware that’s proprietary to a government agency: either the CIA, FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, or the National Security Agency (NSA).” Attkisson learns from “Number One” that one intrusion was launched from the WiFi at a Ritz Carlton Hotel and the “intruders discovered my Skype account handle, stole the password, activated the audio, and made heavy use of it, presumably as a listening tool.”

To round out the revelations of “Number One,” he informs Attkisson that he’d found three classified documents deep inside her operating system, such that she’d never know they were even there. “Why? To frame me?” Attkisson asks in the book.

So CBS News hires an independent computer analyst whom Attkisson identifies as “Jerry Patel,” also a pseudonym. He finds a massive amount of suspicious activity in the computer, including the removal of all kinds of log messages. The author describes the scene as “Patel” does his work: “Now he’s breathing heavily. It alarms me because it alarms him and he’s not easily alarmed. His voice becomes more formal and he launches into what sounds like a speech for posterity. ‘In my professional opinion, someone has accessed this box … I see evidence that shows a deliberate and skilled attempt to clean the log files of activity.’” Intrusions of this caliber, concludes “Patel,” are “far beyond the the abilities of even the best nongovernment hackers.”//


Friday, October 17, 2014

People get the kind of government they deserve...

...and a people who want to be duped get a government that dupes them.

//And that brings us to President Obama, who seems to show little shame when it comes to shielding us from some of his political calculations. And I don't mean hot mic moments like Obama's comments to then-Russian President Medvedev in 2012: "This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility."

More and more, the president seems uninterested in even trying to hide the fact that he is making policy moves based on political considerations — in confessing he has to act one way until after the next election, at which point he can act another way. The most obvious example was the administration's decision to delay immigration action until after the 2014 election — for admittedly political purposes.

As Politico reported, "President Barack Obama will delay plans to issue an executive order on immigration until the end of the year, heeding the warnings of Democratic senators who feared a voter backlash ahead of the November elections."

Obama isn't even pretending that he's decided not to pursue a politically unpopular move, only to coincidentally have a change of heart after the election. He's explicitly postponing something for political purposes.

The ObamaCare website is also getting in on the action. "Enrollment on the Healthcare.gov website begins Nov. 15, or 11 days after the midterm vote, and critics who worry about rising premium hikes in 2015 say that's no coincidence. Last year's inaugural enrollment period on the health-care exchange began Oct. 1," reports the Washington Times.

Might politics play a role in the timing regarding the naming of a new attorney general? The LA Times notes that "a White House official confirmed Monday that the president would delay the decision. Senate Democrats, who are struggling to hold control of the chamber, had expressed concern that the decision, depending on the nominee, could become a campaign issue."

It seems that the closer we get to an election, the more the Obama administration tamps down on any negative news. As The Washington Post recently reported, the lead investigator in the Secret Service prostitution scandal claims he was told to "delay the report of the investigation until after the 2012 election." Ann Coulter mocked this sort of posture in a Wednesday column under the headline "We'll tell you how dangerous Ebola is after the election."//


Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Most transparent administration ever...

...controls media content.

//Pool reports — those summaries of the president’s public appearances that go to the news media at large and are used in countless news stories — are filed by a rotating group of journalists whose work is intended to be free of content changes by the White House.

The pool journalists, however, must submit their reports to the White House press office, which distributes them via e-mail to hundreds of news organizations and others. The White House maintains the list of recipients.

Reporters have complained that the Obama White House exploits its role as distributor to demand changes in pool reports and that the press office has delayed or refused to distribute some reports until they are amended to officials’ satisfaction.

But now, some journalists are sharing their White House reporting using Google Groups — the digital service that allows registered users to receive and send information within a closed circle. In an early test of the supplemental system, journalists shared pool information about President Obama’s trip to Chicago this month. The system has been used for “advisories,” such as where the pool is assembling, when another pool report will be issued or whether a correction is in the works.//


Thursday, October 09, 2014

One's first job is an experience to grow.

We are in for a lot of trouble over the next two years.

//One of the more interesting political/psychological pastimes these days is to watch how President Obama deals with his crumbling presidency. The answer is: Not well.

Take (via The Daily Caller) his comments last night in which Mr. Obama blamed the press for his travails:

“Frankly, the press and Washington, all it does is feed cynicism,” he insisted, despite getting six years of favorable coverage from establishment newspapers and TV shows.

“Most of you don’t know the statistics I just gave you,” Obama said, after listing a series of cherry-picked data that ignored that roughly 10 million Americans who have given up looking for work, and the $7 trillion in added debt.

“The reason you don’t know [the favorable data] is because they elicit hope. They’re good news … and that’s not what we hear about,” he declared to the roughly 250 supporters who paid up to $1,000 to attend.

“We hear about phony scandals, and we hear about the latest shiny object, and we hear about how Washington will never work,” Obama insisted.

Pobrecito, as the Spanish say. Poor thing.

What is worth paying increasing attention to, I think, is the emotional state of the president. It’s in front of his donors that his most authentic feelings seem to surface, and it’s clear he’s becoming increasingly isolated, embittered, and thin skinned. His excuse making is now chronic and habitual. He’s even displaying some signs of paranoia. Everyone is against him.

Obama is becoming Nixonian.//


Wednesday, October 08, 2014

For me, the worst moment of the Obama presidency was when Obama threw the First Amendment under the bus.

Now we have clear evidence from Leon Panetta of how much of a loathsome lie that was.

And has anyone ever interviewed the "film-maker"?  If this was a Republican administration, that guy would be giving speeches at colleges just like a certain convicted cop killer.

Host Andrea Mitchell asked Panetta, “You wrote in the book that you disagreed with David Petraeus and told the situation room he thought it was a spontaneous demonstration outside the consulate that night. Why did you disagree. What didn’t ring true about that?”

Panetta fired: “I didn’t have any specific information, but the fact was that when you bring grenade launchers to a demonstration, something else is going on. From the very beginning I sensed that this was an attack, a terrorist attack on the compound. I remember saying look, based on the ones I see and the nature of the attack, I think this was a terrorist attack. He said look, the information we are getting from intelligence sources is that it really was a demonstration. I said you know, David, i don’t see it that way.”

Both President Obama and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took the protest point of view. For weeks after the attack both Clinton and Obama blamed the attack on an obscure YouTube video. The producer of that video was later arrested and spent a year in prison on parole violations.

Up to now, Panetta’s criticisms of Obama’s handling of foreign policy, in particular his handling of Iraq and the rise of the Islamic State, could be seen through the lens of Panetta tearing away at Obama to help his longtime friend Hillary Clinton distance herself from the unpopular president as she gears up to run for president in 2016.

But Panetta’s Benghazi comments are different. Clinton stood before the bodies of the four Americans who were killed in the Benghazi attack and blamed the protest. She reportedly told the parents of one of the slain Americans that a video was to blame, and its producer would be prosecuted. He was.//


Friday, September 12, 2014

It sure is a good thing that we have a Nobel Peace Prize Winning Constitutional Scholar rather than that Cowboy...

...or else liberal constitutional scholars writing in the New York Times might be saying that the President is violating the Constitution.

BERLIN — PRESIDENT OBAMA’s declaration of war against the terrorist group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria marks a decisive break in the American constitutional tradition. Nothing attempted by his predecessor, George W. Bush, remotely compares in imperial hubris.

Mr. Bush gained explicit congressional consent for his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In contrast, the Obama administration has not even published a legal opinion attempting to justify the president’s assertion of unilateral war-making authority. This is because no serious opinion can be written.

This became clear when White House officials briefed reporters before Mr. Obama’s speech to the nation on Wednesday evening. They said a war against ISIS was justified by Congress’s authorization of force against Al Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and that no new approval was needed.//


 
Who links to me?