Thanksgiving week, and the first snow is on the ground in my hometown of Rochester. If past is prologue it’s going to take the idiots around here at least 48 hours before they learn how to drive in this stuff.
I wonder if they’ve managed to catch the producer of that YouTube video that caused the Paris attacks. Maybe we can ask Hillary Clinton the next time she pops out of her self-imposed exile.
Thanksgiving week means a short week for me, and the short pay check to go with it. I suppose I’ve got vacation time coming, but I’m a little reluctant to use it for fear of some emergency or other popping up between now and the end of the year
I am becoming more convinced than ever that Ted Cruz is probably the individual we need in the White House given the circumstances. Thing is, I wonder if the GOP is smart enough denominated. Again if past is prologue, I tend to doubt it.
Most certainly, this next election is going to be a referendum on the direction that Obama and company have forced us. If his approval numbers are of any indication, there is a ground swell against the Democrats even among Democrats. As such, this election is the GOP is to lose. Trouble is, we’re not going to get out of the message that Obama has left this country and end the world with it by way of half measures.
Is that an endorsement? No, not yet. But frankly, Cruz is the only one so far that from an operational perspective I have not seen any negatives on. The only one. That said we got a long way to go yet.
For those of you who have been asking about how my wife is doing, first thanks for asking. Secondly she’s doing fine. Her situation is not ideal but far more under control than we thought. I must say, it’s gratifying to know I have such friends who are concerned about the welfare of me and mine. You will not be forgotten.
When Karl Marx was busy writing Das Kapital, it was about at the same time that Charles Darwin was busy writing”Origin of the Species”. Engles,, who was Marx’ sole source of income, advised Marx to dedicate his book to Darwin, because as Engles put it, He has given you the scientific understanding for socialism.
I mention all of this in case any of you wonder why it is that so many cars you see on the highway with done with stickers about you know how was the fish with legs, also have a fair collection of stickers supporting leftist candidates for election. Supporting abortion. Have those nutty coexist stickers and things like that. On at least a subconscious level, such people understand the relationship between Marx and Darwin.
I’ll leave the implications on the argument about creationism to your thoughts.
Ponder also the left and its mislabeling of global warming as science in its attempt to grab yet more power.
It’s only when you truly understand history that you understand the links between current events.
You know, some things that I see coming from this administration simply defy commentary.
Addendum, (DavidL): Even a blonde is not always wrong. There are two types of people who support terror. There are those who support terror and a willing to die for it. Think Yasser Arafat’s Palestinians. There nothing wrong with killing them. Then there are those who support terror, but are not themselves willing to die. Think the late Arafat and his family. It is even better to kill those. To win the war on terror, we must not distinguish between those who commit terror than those that support terror. It is not that killing terrorists is ineffective. It is that killing their supporters is even more effective.
Me, elsewhere this morning.
The thing is, it’s not Muslims disavowing Isis, it’s Americans. Leftist Americans.
It’s always so precious when leftist Americans who have no understanding of religion, claim none, indeed, claim atheism, also claim to have intimate knowledge of what constitutes both Christianity and Islam. They will claim that allowing invaders to masquerade as refugees is Christian, but people following the tenants of Islam as outlined in the graphic I posted earlier and shouting “Allah is great” in the process of doing so, aren’t Islamic.
Clearly, the attempt is being made to manipulate something they just don’t understand. Or at least, they hope a large number of American people don’t. The question though to my mind as I asked earlier this morning is what they hope to gain by it
Elliott Abrams in the Weekly Standard as regards this John Kerry quote, is the read of the day…
There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of—not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that. This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people. It was to attack everything that we do stand for. That’s not an exaggeration. It was to assault all sense of nationhood and nation-state and rule of law and decency, dignity, and just put fear into the community and say, “Here we are.” And for what? What’s the platform? What’s the grievance? That we’re not who they are? They kill people because of who they are and they kill people because of what they believe. And it’s indiscriminate. They kill Shia. They kill Yazidis. They kill Christians. They kill Druze. They kill Ismaili. They kill anybody who isn’t them and doesn’t pledge to be that. And they carry with them the greatest public display of misogyny that I’ve ever seen, not to mention a false claim regarding Islam. It has nothing to do with Islam; it has everything to do with criminality, with terror, with abuse, with psychopathism—I mean, you name it.
….
And that’s why when some people—I even had a member of my own family email me and say, “More bombs aren’t the solution,” they said. Well, in principle, no. In principle, if you can educate and change people and provide jobs and make a difference if that’s what they want, sure. But in this case, that’s not what’s happening. This is just raw terror to set up a caliphate to expand and expand and spread one notion of how you live and who you have to be. That is the antithesis of everything that brought our countries together—why Lafayette came to America to help us find liberty, and all of the evolutions of the struggles of France, the governments, to find the liberté, égalité, fraternité, and make it real in life every day. And all of that peacefulness was shattered in the span of an hour-plus on Friday night when people were going about their normal business. And they purposefully chose a concert, chose restaurants, chose places where people engage in social dialogue and exchange, and they object to that too.
Abrams, writing in the Weekly Standard responds to this in part by saying…
The more shocking message he delivered was that the November killings in Paris are more terrible than those of January. Why? Because the earlier killings, of cartoonists and Jews, were .??.??. were what? First he said the previous attacks “had a legitimacy in terms of” and then stopped himself. Even Kerry realized that what he was about to say was indefensible: that they had a legitimacy in terms of the beliefs of the attackers, who were offended after all by nasty cartoons of Muhammad. And as to the Jews, well, perhaps the attackers were offended by the mere existence of Jews, or perhaps in Kerry’s misguided view they were deeply moved by the real or imagined plight of Palestinians.
Kerry himself has repeatedly linked Islamic terror to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and come very close to justifying it. At Harvard last month he had this reaction to the terror spree of Palestinians stabbing Jews in and near Jerusalem: “There’s been a massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years. Now you have this violence because there’s a frustration that is growing.” Like his statement that ISIS and its terror have “nothing to do with Islam,” this one was also plainly false
Clearly, the Democrat Party has been doing this equivalency thing for a long time now. Ponder for example the idea that Hillary Clinton and a lot of other Democrats including some of the White House have been busy for how long, now, pushing the line that Benghazi was about a video and that therefore their anger was justified. So invested in this are the Democrat party in this myth that they are keeping the producer of that video…. (which precisely three people have seen)…. in jail to support the myth.
And so the question becomes, logically, why in the world are Liberal Democrats so interested in justifying what is clearly unjustifiable without the myths?
That the American people are being lied to by the Democrats is beyond question. The question remaining is what they hope to gain by it.
Mrs. Clinton imagines herself fit to be Commander-in-Chief. Yet she is unable to distinguish enemy from ally, from Daily Mail(UK):
An acid-tongued Hillary Clinton ripped into conservatives on Thursday for what she said was an ‘obsession in some quarters’ with the notion that the global spread of terrorism is a byproduct of the Muslim faith, denying that the two are connected in any way.
‘Islam itself is not our adversary,’ the former secretary of state said during a campaign speech outlining her foreign policy objectives.
‘Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.’
Reading her speech at a brisk clip from a teleprompter at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, she slowed momentarily to mock three words – ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ – that Republicans often accuse President Barack Obama of purposefully avoiding.
While Mrs. Clinton does not see any connection between radical Islam and terror, she does, in her fervid imagination, see a connection between the National Rifle Association and terror Word Trade Center, first and second; Paris, Fort Hood, there seems to an endless string of attacks perpetuated by irate Muslims. I can’t seem to recall the last time the NRA organized a terrorist attack. Can you?
More over, Mrs. Clinton characterized Muslims as tolerant. This is direct contrast to Pew Research Center finding wide spread support among Muslim populations for the imposition of Sharia Law:
Support for making sharia the official law of the land varies significantly across the six major regions included in the study. In countries across South Asia, Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East-North Africa region most favor making sharia their country’s official legal code. By contrast, only a minority of Muslims across Central Asia as well as Southern and Eastern Europe want sharia to be the official law of the land.
Sounds like a plan to me. Banish the NRA but promote Sharia Law.
Candidate Barack Obama told us as president he would unite us. It appears he’s gotten a good start with the Senate.
Think about this one. When even Senate Democrats vote against the far leftist President, you know he’s overstepped his bounds.
This has become so typical of the political and social left over the last 10 years that it hardly bears mentioning.
From the Washington Examiner, this morning.
A crew member from “The Hunting Ground,” a one-sided film about campus sexual assault, has been editing Wikipedia articles to make facts conform with the inaccurate representations in the film.
Edward Patrick Alva, who is listed on the film’s IMDB page as part of the camera and electrical department, has been altering Wikipedia entries for months, in violation of the website’s conflict-of-interest guidelines. Alva is the assistant editor and technical supervisor for Chain Camera Pictures, the production company associated with “The Hunting Ground” director Kirby Dick.
Wikipedia guidelines state: “Do not edit Wikipedia in your own interests or in the interests of your external relationships.” As a member of the film’s production team, Alva should not have been editing pages about the film or
related to the film.
Well, no kidding he shouldn’t have been. But the fact is this kind of bending of facts to fit the agenda happens all the time with these people. It’s simply the way it gets done anymore.
Wikipedia certainly is less than reliable on such matters, and always has been for the reasons listed above. But they’re not alone in this. PolitiFact, (run by a left wing paper)…Snopes, (funded by among other leftists, George Soros) and of course CBS NBC ABC PBS etc are all subject to agenda reinforcement at the cost of truth as well.
I suspect that one of the current administration is gone, we are going to find that the number of times and ways we’ve been lied to in support of the leftist agenda by like stepping liberals in the supposedly trustworthy press and other sources as I’ve listed above, is far higher than we would have possibly imagined.
Hat tip: Mad Magazine
It is quite apparent that Mrs. Clinton, formerly known as the Smartest Woman in the World, lacks a fully functioning brain. Now apparently she lacks any sense of humor, from Judicial Watch:
In what appears to be a first for a serious presidential contender, Hillary Clinton’s campaign is going after five comedians who made fun of the former Secretary of State in standup skits at a popular Hollywood comedy club.
A video of the short performance, which is less than three minutes, is posted on the website of the renowned club, Laugh Factory, and the Clinton campaign has tried to censor it. Besides demanding that the video be taken down, the Clinton campaign has demanded the personal contact information of the performers that appear in the recording. This is no laughing matter for club owner Jamie Masada, a comedy guru who opened Laugh Factory more than three decades ago and has been instrumental in launching the careers of many famous comics. “They threatened me,” Masada told Judicial Watch. “I have received complains before but never a call like this, threatening to put me out of business if I don’t cut the video.”
The video:
Hat tip and reax, Right Wing News:
Hillary has jokes all day long…and she seems to find EVERYTHING down right HILARIOUS..the type that laughs at a funeral. BUT…when the jokes are about her, it appears Mrs. Clinton can dish them, but has no “Tolerance” to be dealt them…
Two points, first Mrs. Clinton doesn’t have much use for the First Amendment, witness her threat to pack the Supreme Court to reverse Citizens United.
Second, Mrs. Clinton has a history of hysterical over reactions to tepid internet videos. Witness her blaming the Benghazi attacks on a putrid internet video, “Innocence of Muslims.”
So why wage an public war on the First Amendment which will have the effect of giving an otherwise obscure video more attention and more views? I say It because the Laugh Factory video crosses a Mrs. Clinton red line, to wit her sexuality. I mean is easier to find pictures of Mrs. Clinton with long time aide Huma Abedin, and it is with husband, B.J. Clinton, plus far more emails.
Apparently a jury has decided not to indict the driver. This is good news, but where does the truck driver go to get his life back?
I said at the time…..
I already took up this argument about the culpability of the state in the case of the accident involving Tracy Morgan along the Jersey Pike
But now comes an even stronger case. This time,http://7online.com/news/nj-officer-killed-on-duty-in-route-17-wreck-driver-arrested/193906 involving truck vs police car, where the cop died.
Now, let me preface all this by saying I do feel a bit sorry for the cop and his family.
That said, however, I think the fault lies with the cop, and his supervisors and the state. I would urge you to do a little investigation on your own. You will find the following.
Route 17 in New Jersey is a VERY busy highway. Most of it is unlighted, including the area where the accident occurred.
The accident occurred in the early morning hours. It was dark, in short.
The entire area is posted with “no parking” “no standing” “no stopping signs, including the area in which the cop was parked running his radar. With all that, it wasn’t going to take much for an accident to happen.
Now…. why was the cop sitting in the dark, running radar, in an area that was clearly dangerous to both he and other drivers? Because the state needs money. No, he was not protecting us. This was not about keeping folks safe. Clearly, if safety was the reason he was doing enforcement, he’d not have been parked in the dark with no lights under a no parking/no standing sign. I mean, the accident is a reminder that those signs and those road markers are there for a REASON.
Yet, they have the truck driver on fire for his death. And the cop, and the government that sent him out to do what he was doing, apparently gets the governmental magic wand waved over them, in which they share none of the blame at all.
This is justice?
And, again,, who was the cop protecting us from, since he himself was unarguably creating a danger? While his death is a tragedy that is felt by his family, what shall we say of the truck driver and. HIS family, who will also be feeling the pain because of the dangerous action of the police and the ever money-hungry state?
It’s always so very precious , so very entertaining to see atheists and other leftists who don’t believe there is a God, other than Obama, trying to translate the Bible for us. Of late such mistranslations have been offered in support of the idea that we should be allowing Syrian invaders to masquerade as refugees.
And once again we have the specter of Obama preaching to us about what we are as Americans.
When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted … that’s shameful…. That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.
It’s clear that Mr Obama has no idea of the American ideal, or if he does he’d just as soon as didn’t exist or we didn’t remember it. In any event, I destroyed the majority of his comments yesterday with the help of Andrew McCarthy. But let’s examine the “its not American” nonsense.
What are these people calling for? Justice, or so they claim, among other things. The trouble is, what is their brand of justice rooted in?
Ravi Zacharias raises an intriguing question on this point ….can anyone he says, cry for justice, without knowing the justifiable source for all law?
I do not propose to get into a religious discussion here, but it seems sensible to approach this also from the standpoint of what that source is not.
One need not be a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon to figure out that as an issuer and an enforcer of law in the pursuit of justice, man has invariably been an abject failure. This is particularly true where men in government have been unfettered by restraints of some kind…. Be they constitutional, or the threat of revolution. Which of course is why our founders fought to limit the power of government. Our entire Constitution is written for the express purpose of placing limits on government. The founders saw firsthand what happens when government is not better restricted in its actions, and went to great lengths to make sure that our government was so restricted.
But, if government is restricted, then we must assume that the founders held that there was a higher power than government. A power that superseded government. I submit to you that it was that understanding that informed everything that they did, everything that they wrote, everything that they felt, as regards our founding documents. They understood that there was a force that transcended government.
If there is an objective moral law, then must we not assume that there is an objective moral law giver? Given the history of humanity, we cannot assume that all that objective moral law is given by man himself. Indeed, given man’s record of immorality, and immoral laws, quite the opposite. For example, let’s remember Martin Luther King reminding us that everything that Hitler did was legal. It all had the force of law behind it. Immoral law, but law. Of course, history provides us with a plethora of other examples of immoral laws, but given recent discussions that seems the loudest example. So the idea of man being the objective moral law giver, is washed away.
What, then? What is the source of objective moral law? What is the source of the laws of nature if you will? Certainly, the founders had differing views on that. But the idea that they all operated from and indeed our culture as a whole operated from for most of its existence, is that there is force of some kind that transcends the laws of man.
That understanding that there is a force, whatever you call it, that transcends the laws of man was deeply embedded in the psyche of the common American even prior to the time when those ideas were codified in our founding documents, or, I contend that they would never have been so written… and certainly would not have been adopted. It is that which gave us the system of government, the culture, the country that is the most respectful of individual rights of any on the planet, in all of human history.
I submit to you that we as a nation and as a culture are in trouble to the precise degree that we have intentionally walked away from that understanding both as a culture and as a nation. Certainly, the cause of individual rights is not well served by doing so.
We now have someone in the White House for example who does not operate without understanding. And can anyone, with any sense whatsoever tell us that his actions over the last several years have made America stronger, or done anything to protect the freedom of the individual? I will dare to call his actions unAmerican. And, I’ll leave it at that.
And we see the rabble rouser in chief, trying it again to defend exposing Americans to Islamic invaders…
When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted … that’s shameful…. That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.
First of all he is using the standard leftist diatribe about anything that reinforces the American culture, or demands that people coming to this country adopt that culture. That being beside the point, our pansy in chief obviously hasn’t bothered looking at the law.
Along comes constitutional scholar Andrew McCarthy in today’s National Review, who has been absolutely brilliant about this stuff
Really? Under federal law, the executive branch is expressly required to take religion into account in determining who is granted asylum. Under the provision governing asylum (section 1158 of Title 8, U.S. Code), an alien applying for admission must establish that … religion [among other things] … was or will be at least one central reason for persecuting the applicant. Moreover, to qualify for asylum in the United States, the applicant must be a “refugee” as defined by federal law. That definition (set forth in Section 1101(a)(42)(A) of Title , U.S. Code) also requires the executive branch to take account of the alien’s religion: The term “refugee” means (A) any person who is outside any country of such person’s nationality … and who is unable or unwilling to return to … that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of … religion [among other things] …[.] The law requires a “religious test.” And the reason for that is obvious. Asylum law is not a reflection of the incumbent president’s personal (and rather eccentric) sense of compassion. Asylum is a discretionary national act of compassion that is directed, by law not whim, to address persecution. There is no right to emigrate to the United States. And the fact that one comes from a country or territory ravaged by war does not, by itself, make one an asylum candidate. War, regrettably, is a staple of the human condition. Civil wars are generally about power. That often makes them violent and, for many, tragic; but it does not necessarily make them wars in which one side is persecuting the other side.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/427262/refugee-religious-test-shameful-and-not-american-except-federal-law-requires-it-andrew
The community organizer approved response to report of a single Swastika on the University of Missouri, Columbia campus was demand the resignation of the school’s dean and shut down the entire campus. It fits the narrative. It need not be true.
Contrast with the Islamist murder of over hundred twenty civilians in Paris, France. From Peter Beinart. via Hot Air:
“The attacks in Paris,” Rubio began, “are a wake-up call.” Forgive the pedantry, but this is among the stupidest clichés in politics. Wake-up calls are things you plan yourself because you want to be awoken from your slumber at a set time, usually by a hotel clerk. The Paris attack was a horrific surprise orchestrated by France’s enemies. It wasn’t a “wake-up call” unless you believe its ultimate author was France itself.
In other words, one University of Missouri Swastika, perpetuated by an unknown perpetrator is a wake-up calls, solely because it fits the liberal narrative. On the other hand, six score plus of civilians dead because of an Islamist terrorist attack is not a wake-up call, solely because it does not bit the liberal narrative.
Note to the media from Donald Trump, keep repeating your regime issued talking points all the way to election day.
Even the New York Times has decided that Obamacare is worse than useless.
But for many consumers, the sticker shock is coming not on the front end, when they purchase the plans, but on the back end when they get sick: sky-high deductibles that are leaving some newly insured feeling nearly as vulnerable as they were before they had coverage.
“The deductible, $3,000 a year, makes it impossible to actually go to the doctor,” said David R. Reines, 60, of Jefferson Township, N.J., a former hardware salesman with chronic knee pain. “We have insurance, but can’t afford to use it.”
Leaving aside for the moment the disaster that is Obama foreign policy, this business with Obamacare alone should be enough to keep any Democrat out of the White House now. That is assuming of course that we actually get a conservative that we can vote for as opposed to Democrat light. GOP, are you listening?
I pose an impossible, but never the less, amusing question. Are the University of Missouri student stupid, self-centered, or both, from Frank Lea, Right Wing News:
The protesters at Mizzou are 100% worse than the KKK. The protesters perpetrate violence towards the media, disrupt education, and cause people to lose their jobs. The KKK just sits around camp fires yelling slurs, which isn’t much different than anyone in America watching a Dallas Cowboys game yelling “F*ck Dallas.” Before calling out a hate group, maybe look inside your own people and see where the most crime towards black folks originates from. I’ll just say look at Chicago’s murder rate and races involved, then count the number of black babies pulled apart by tweezers at Planned Parenthood. That’s a black thing. Fix yourself before blaming everyone else for your lack of…well…everything.
More from the Sharp Tack, Clarice Feldman, American Thinker:
Unnoticed by these geniuses, all of whom probably cheered the passage of ObamaCare, is that ObamaCare regulations forbid universities from paying health insurance for graduate students. Support an ill-conceived law administered by an out-of-control administration and then wreck the institution which had no direct relationship to your grievance. No wonder employers aren’t hiring them.
Education should about studying past problems to better solve future problems. The Mizzou protesters are too stupid to see past their vanity. May god have mercy on their souls.
