ObamaCare sends out Mom Day cards … [Darleen Click]
… using the White House’s own site.
What other Obama policy can be anthropomorphized? Maybe Earth Day cards from CAFE Standards?
Suggestions welcome.
Gayest statement evah [Darleen Click]
Clinton was our first Black President, so it’s left that Obama is, according to Andrew Sullivan, our first Gay President.
And President Obama has much in common with the gay community. “He had to discover his black identity and then reconcile it with his white family, just as gays discover their homosexual identity and then have to reconcile it with their heterosexual family,” Sullivan writes.
Sully asserts that our essential identity is our melanin content and/or the preference of our libido?
What happened to being judged on our character? As I recall from the sixty’s, the argument was that gays or lesbians or blacks or [group du jour], were just like everyone else. And said characteristic was not defining and no more important than height or eye color.
However, collectivists don’t really care for individuals, but are concerned only about the political power of group identity.
Shorter Sully: Gays! Out of the closet and into the Ghetto!
h/t Pablo
Happy Mother’s Day [Darleen Click]
Ran across this duo a few week’s ago from Britain’s Got Talent. This was the final from yesterday and a beautiful, moving performance …
My prayers and good wishes to all the moms out there this beautiful Sunday morning.
The Essential Authoritarian: “Personal responsibility” is a fetish [Darleen Click]
Yes, really. Not only is it a fetish, but it absolutely reeks of Xtianity, too.
It’s that it introduces the concept of “sin” into a discussion about public health. I realize that Sam surely didn’t intend it that way. It’s telling that Christianity is so pervasive that its ideas even penetrate atheist circles. “Self-discipline” can’t really be extracted meaningfully in this debate from the concept of sin and punishment. [...]But if you reject this notion and instead view negative health effects of overeating as a public health problem to be solved, then the question of “self-discipline” becomes silly.
Certainly it does. In order to manage the herds, you must convince individuals they are not only hopelessly outmatched by their own impulses …
Self-control is neither a fixed quality nor completely under (oh irony) our control.
… but their problems exist outside themselves and can only be “solved” by the benevolent, wise Master who really does know how to better run your life than you do.
When you’re engaging in problem-solving, it’s best to start by looking at things you can control, and leave the discourse of sin and redemption to the wayside. [...]We can’t fix people’s impulse control, but we can fix their environments through collective action. [...]
What I would like is for public health discourse to simply get over this fetish for “personal responsibility”. It’s a red herring. First of all, it’s not really a static quality you either have or you don’t. Second of all, it’s not something that’s responsive to scolding, which is the only solution people who love to trot out “personal responsibility” will accept. If we actually give a shit about people and their health, then we have to look at what we can do and what we can fix.
Don’t you just love that royal “we”? Especially when only a few of the anointed will be holding the whip.
This isn’t really about trying to find the best way to help those who need it, this is about precluding every way of helping that isn’t under Big Government auspices. Mandy asserts that Christianity’s only response to “sin” is “punishment” — dismissing the whole gamut of Christian (and Jewish) charity, large and small, that operate from the premise that all humans are sinners and it is individual duty to help fellow sinners to find it within themselves to transcend our nature.
Incidentally, the sexual health debate suffers from the same problem. Even if you accept (which I don’t) the premise that abstinence is inherently good, and that’s what people “should” do, I have the same response: So what? You can say “should” until you’re blue in the face, and people are still going to fuck. If you actually want to fix the problems of STD transmission and unintended pregnancy, you have to deal with people how they are, not how they “should” be.
The essential authoritarian must destroy individual initiative and responsibility in order to make The State the only god of the masses.
There is nothing innocent about it at all.
Obama’s Enemies List getting results [Darleen Click]
Nixon never had it so good …
Businessman Frank Vandersloot, the CEO of Melaleuca, has been targeted by the Obama campaign after donating money to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. “Three weeks ago, an Obama campaign website, ‘Keeping GOP Honest,’ took the extraordinary step of publicly naming and assailing eight private citizens backing Mr. Romney,” Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal reported. “Titled ‘Behind the curtain: a brief history of Romney’s donors,’ the post accused the eight of being ‘wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records.’ Mr. VanderSloot was one of the eight, smeared particularly as being ‘litigious, combative and a bitter foe of the gay rights movement.’”
The attacks are working. Vandersloot revealed in an interview on Fox News that his business practice is being hurt by the attacks from the Obama team.
“Those people that I know well weren’t affected by this [attack],” said Vandersloot. “But for people who didn’t know me, who are members of our business or customers, and they were reading this, then we got a barrage of phone calls of people cancelling their customer memberships with us.”
“Really?,” the Fox News host asked. “How many did that?”
“A couple hundred that we can track,” Vandersloot replied.
Vandersloot also reports his children have been targeted and harassed. Kim Strassel has a further updated with Trolling for Dirt
About a week after that post, a man named Michael Wolf contacted the Bonneville County Courthouse in Idaho Falls in search of court records regarding Mr. VanderSloot. Specifically, Mr. Wolf wanted all the documents dealing with Mr. VanderSloot’s divorces, as well as a case involving a dispute with a former Melaleuca employee.Mr. Wolf sent a fax to the clerk’s office—which I have obtained—listing four cases he was after. He would later send a second fax, asking for three further court cases dealing with either Melaleuca or Mr. VanderSloot. Mr. Wolf listed only his name and a private cellphone number.
Some digging revealed that Mr. Wolf was, until a few months ago, a law clerk on the Democratic side of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He’s found new work.
Funny thing, how Obama loves him some divorce records
the only reason Obama became a U.S. senator — allowing him to run for president — is that David Axelrod pulled sealed divorce records out of a hat, first, against Obama’s Democratic primary opponent, and then against Obama’s Republican opponent.One month before the 2004 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, Obama was way down in the polls, about to lose to Blair Hull, a multimillionaire securities trader.
But then The Chicago Tribune — where Axelrod used to work — began publishing claims that Hull’s second ex-wife, Brenda Sexton, had sought an order of protection against him during their 1998 divorce proceedings.
From then until Election Day, Hull was embroiled in fighting the allegation that he was a “wife beater.” He and his ex-wife eventually agreed to release their sealed divorce records. His first ex-wife, daughters and nanny defended him at a press conference, swearing he was never violent. During a Democratic debate, Hull was forced to explain that his wife kicked him and he had merely kicked her back.
Hull’s substantial lead just a month before the primary collapsed with the nonstop media attention to his divorce records. Obama sailed to the front of the pack and won the primary. Hull finished third with 10 percent of the vote.
Luckily for Axelrod, Obama’s opponent in the general election had also been divorced.
The Republican nominee was Jack Ryan, a graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard law and business schools, who had left his lucrative partnership at Goldman Sachs to teach at an inner-city school on the South Side of Chicago.
But in a child custody dispute some years earlier, Ryan’s ex-wife, Hollywood sex kitten Jeri Lynn Ryan, had alleged that, while the couple was married, Jack had taken her to swingers clubs in Paris and New York.
Jack Ryan adamantly denied the allegations. In the interest of protecting their son, he also requested that the records be put permanently under seal.
Axelrod’s courthouse moles obtained the “sealed” records and, in no time, they were in the hands of every political operative in Chicago. Knowing perfectly well what was in the records, Chicago Tribune attorneys flew to California and requested that the court officially “unseal” them — over the objections of both Jack and Jeri Ryan.
Your honor, who knows what could be in these records!
A California judge ordered them unsealed, which allowed newspapers to publish the salacious allegations, and four days later, Ryan dropped out of the race under pressure from idiot Republicans (who should be tracked down and shot).
It’s The Chicago Way!
Spinal Tap as serious performance “art” [Darleen Click]
Recall the description of the cover art Spinal Tap wanted for their Smell the Glove album:
We laughed. We chuckled.
Now David Thompson points out:
You will, therefore, be thrilled to the tips of your nipples by Mr Fabre’s recent curatorial triumph. Sweat is a performance piece by Peter De Cupere, in which five fellow narcissists spend fourteen minutes rolling about and jumping up and down – naked, obviously – while attempting to fill their transparent plastic overalls with all manner of body odour. “The intention,” we’re told, “is to catch the sweat from the dancers and to distil it. The concrete of the sweat is sprayed on a wall of the dance lab and protected by a glass box. In the glass is a small hole where visitors can smell the sweat.”
Why yes, you unappreciative Philistines, you red-state-Norman-Rockwell-loving-bet-you-bowl-too anti-hipsters … Smell The Artist
Peter De Cupere is creating his smell. Not just a smell, but a composition of the smells of his body, skin of different parts, breath, sweat, sperm, spittle, nose drops, blood and many more smells you can imagine with a person. The smells are and will be subtracted on different times, after different moments, after special dinners made for himself by himself. A research that will go on his whole life. His first edition of his perfume will be soon available… The perfume is called ‘Peter’.
If you dare, David has a 14-minute video of Sweat …
Democrat Training 101: No matter what a Republican says, “it’s racist.” [Darleen Click]
Ok, we knew this anyway, but now they even have training materials
House Democrats received training this week on how to address the issue of race to defend government programs, according to training materials obtained by The Washington Examiner.The prepared content of a Tuesday presentation to the House Democratic Caucus and staff indicates that Democrats will seek to portray apparently neutral free-market rhetoric as being charged with racial bias, conscious or unconscious. [...]
As samples of race-coded rhetoric, Wiley reminded the Democrats of statements by Republican presidential candidates Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich. Of Gingrich’s famous comment about President Obama, her distributed remarks note, “Calling a Black man ‘the food stamp president’ is not a race-neutral statement, even if Newt Gingrich did not intend racism.”
h/t William Jacobson
RIP Carroll Shelby [Darleen Click]
The man was a legend in more ways than one.
Carroll Shelby, the legendary auto racer and car designer who built the fabled Shelby Cobra sports car and injected testosterone into Ford’s Mustang and Chrysler’s Viper, has died. He was 89.Shelby’s company, Carroll Shelby International, said Friday that Shelby died a day earlier at a Dallas hospital. He had received a heart transplant in 1990 and a kidney transplant in 1996. [...]
The one-time chicken farmer had more than a half-dozen successful careers during his long life. Among them: champion race car driver, racing team owner, automobile manufacturer, automotive consultant, safari tour operator, raconteur, chili entrepreneur and philanthropist.
“He’s an icon in the medical world and an icon in the automotive world,” his longtime friend, Dick Messer, executive director of Los Angeles’ Petersen Automotive Museum, once said of Shelby.
“His legacy is the diversity of his life,” Messer said. “He’s incredibly innovative. His life has always been the reinvention of Carroll Shelby.”
Wow, didn’t see that coming! [Darleen Click]
Polygamist family applauds Obama’s evolution on same-sex marriage
In the wake of President Obama declaring his support for gay Americans’ right to marry each other, prominent polygamists the Brown family of TLC’s “Sister Wives” – consisting of Kody and his wives Meri, Janelle, Christine and Robyn – gave their 10 thumbs up to same sex nups.“It is something I have thought about a lot, and I feel very blessed that I have been able to chose love and the life that I want to live and be married to the people that I want to be married to. It’s not for me to decide or stop anyone else from marrying the person they love,” Kody told FOX411’s Pop Tarts column, while Janelle added that she too feels blessed to have chosen love from deep in her heart, and wishes the same for others regardless of sexual orientation.
When the demand that civil marriage is a “right” and is based, not on what is the ideal configuration of a public-sponsored institution, but only on who (or how many) you love, then anything goes.
Obligatory Time magazine cover post [Darleen Click]
… because, while the Praetorian Media is tongue-bathing Obama over his same-sex marriage “evolution” and WaPo’s “troubling” piece on teen-ager Romney itself is in trouble, Time manages to garner quite the buzz with a quasi-child-pr0n cover –
Now there’s some family values!
