Monday, September 30, 2013

Open thread

I'll be offline for a few days, so feel free to cavort in the comments section.

You might consider adding to this long (and apparently endless) list: Things Biden Can't Understand.

Liberalism carried to its logical conclusion


(H/T: Moonbattery)

Monday movie

Snappy patter from Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in this scene from His Girl Friday.


Sunday, September 29, 2013

Sunday funnies

Be careful with those bumper stickers.

You can create art out of anything - even old clothes.


(H/T: Instapundit)

That's using your, er, noodle.

"So far, so good."

Guangdong man arrested for fraudulent guangdonging.

Wine prose.

Are We Lumberjacks? has a field day with the White House's cute-animal ObamaCare campaign (much more of the same at Twitchy).

I've got my own Deplorable Health Care poster:



That wild man of the worldwide web, TimT, launches his own sting operation.

Saturday, September 28, 2013

God bless the heroes

During the horrible terrorist attack in the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, two men - a former Royal Marine and a former Irish Army Ranger - risked their lives to save hundreds of people.

Good vs. evil doesn't get any starker than this.

I think I could outrun that

What? You mean it's not for speed-limit enforcement?

Ratcheting up the rhetoric

Democrats are definitely starting to froth at the mouth over the fact that at least some Republicans have demonstrated the intestinal fortitude to challenge their power and their socialist agenda. The words "terrorists" and "anarchists" are being flung about with abandon, and you know the donks are not thinking of John McCain or Lindsay Graham, but, rather, the staunch defenders of Tea Party values like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee who have not devolved into invertebrate time servers. Nerve hit, bellowing ensues.


The Fairfax Tea Party gathers at the Paco Command Center for its weekly Sunday morning brunch.

Friday, September 27, 2013

Leftist mayoral candidate thinks the NYT is mean for reminding people that he has always been a leftist

Ah, New York, New York…
“I thought the story clearly could have been more balanced and I thought the particular use of terminologies–I found it surprising, let’s just put it that way,” responded, Mr. de Blasio, likely referring to the paper’s mention that he had described himself back in 1990 as an advocate of “democratic socialism.”

…….

“I think that article didn’t fully represent what I feel except for one passage,” he said, “that very accurately noted that one part of me is a New Deal Democrat–just an updated version of it–one part of me is probably similar to a European Social Democrat, and I’m also very deeply influenced by liberation theology, which I learned a lot about in the years I worked on Latin America.”
So, philosophically, he’s two parts foreign socialist and one part American socialist. Not sure I understand his beef against the Times.

How long before Detroiters start sending care packages to the Big Apple? Might be a while, yet, but if New Yorkers elect this knee-jerk, parlor socialist they’re sure not casting a vote for a rosy economic future.

Happy Feet Friday

Kay Starr’s got those Sharecropper Blues.


Thursday, September 26, 2013

Man, everybody's trying to get a piece of the action

Obama Enterprises?

Viva la revolución!

Good stuff from Michael Walsh at NRO on the growing rebellion against the GOP’s ancien régime.
Win or lose, the battle is now joined: First the struggle for the GOP and then the battle for control of Congress and the presidency. Cruz just struck at the kings he could reach — the Republican “leadership” — and has most likely dealt them a fatal blow. Now the Tea Party hordes must back him up by eliminating his opponents (who tend to be geriatrics, and thus “leaders” by longevity rather than talent or commitment) through the primary process wherever possible. If he can carry off this coup, he and Senator Paul will very quickly find themselves elevated from back-benchers to commanders.
More along the same lines can be found at CHQ.

Super salesman

Nice goin', Barry!

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

What if the much ballyhooed “consensus” on climate change is a consensus of ignoramuses?

Miranda Devine permits global warm-monger David Suzuki to (largely) condemn himself out of his own mouth.

Elsewhere, among the climate illiterati, Al Gore moves one step closer to clinically-certifiable insanity by arguing that “denialists” should be silenced:
Former vice president Al Gore on Monday called for making climate change "denial" a taboo in society.

“Within the market system we have to put a price on carbon, and within the political system, we have to put a price on denial,” Gore said at the Social Good Summit New York City.

“It is simply not acceptable for major companies to mimic the unethical strategy of the tobacco companies in presenting blatantly false information in order to protect a business model,” Gore added, alleging that’s what some oil and coal companies are doing. “There needs to be a political price for denial.”
He continues in the same vein (lord, does he ever):
He urged attendees to challenge denial of climate change in conversations in families and communities and elsewhere. “We can win this conversation and winning a conversation can make all the difference,” Gore said. “Don’t let denial go unchallenged.”

Gore noted how racism and later homophobia have become increasingly unacceptable.
First, how does one “win” a “conversation”? In fact, under Gore’s prescriptive abolition of the free exchange of ideas and opinions on this subject, how do people go about having a conversation at all? Secondly, trying to link skepticism about climate change with racism and homophobia has got to be one of the most preposterous non sequiturs uttered by any public figure in history; it is mere name-calling. Why stop with racism and homophobia, Al? Why not draw parallels between skepticism and, say, pedophilia or, perhaps even more horrifying to your natural constituents, between skepticism and membership in the NRA?

This is nothing but quasi-religious hysteria, with Big Al stepping out as the Vicar of Gaia on Earth, or perhaps the Mohammed of Bad Weather (or maybe Daddy Warmbucks is a better handle - one should never overlook the possibility of simple greed). Why should anybody accept his pompous bloviation in lieu of facts? I’d love to see this clown debate somebody like Lord Monckton (Pardon me, did I say “debate”? That is not really the mot juste. “Whacked explosively, like the world’s largest piñata, by an unblindfolded Miguel Cabrera” is more descriptive of the probable result of such an encounter).

Gaia: “Thou art Al, and upon this bag of rocks shall I build my highly lucrative church; and the gates of reality shall not prevail against it.”


Thar’s gold in that thar globaloney!

A big H/T to Small Dead Animals for the first two links.

Thank you, Senator Cruz

It is with admiration and gratitude that I extend thanks to one of the few Republicans who believes that the GOP should be something other than the low-calorie version of the Democratic Party. Establishment Republicans will continue to do nothing and hope that victory will simply fall into their laps, someday – which, even if it did, they would squander on perpetuating their pointless existence in Washington. It is to people like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee that conservatives must look if they wish to preserve the Republican Party as a vehicle for real change. And if the McCain/Graham/Boehner axis of fossils persists in monopolizing power and influence within the Party, then may it wither and die, and its ashes fertilize the growth of a new organization, a new movement dedicated to the restoration of our nation’s first principles.

Here is Cruz speaking with Rush Limbaugh today on what he was trying to accomplish (and on what many of his colleagues have given up on trying to accomplish). A sample (Cruz is talking about some of his fellow Republicans):
I don't know that you could -- as bad as you might think it is, and listen, these are good men and women. I respect them. I like them. Many of these are my friends, but they've been here a long time, and they're beaten down, and they don't believe we can win. They don't believe it can happen, and the answer they say on every issue is, "No, we can't do it. We can't do it."
Update: Chris "Tingle-Pins" Matthews views Ted Cruz as an enemy of the state. So you know Cruz is doing something right.

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Sensitivity training

Not just for humans, anymore:
A sexist gorilla has been evicted from a zoo in Dallas, and he will now be forced to undergo therapy to address his behaviour.

Patrick, the name of the gorilla, apparently sneered at various female gorillas and then also bit one of them too.

Gun control in Mexico

It doesn’t work very well there, either.

Related: Whew! Good thing all my guns with high-capacity magazines were stolen. Otherwise, I’d be pretty worried about Terry McAuliffe becoming governor of Virginia.
McAuliffe "will support mainstream and majority supported gun control measures like universal background checks, limiting the size of magazines, and a return to the 1-gun-per-month rule."

The limitation on magazine capacity is a Colorado-like gun control measure that will put law-abiding Virginians at a disadvantage the moment it is enacted. This is because criminals will not obey it but will keep their "high-capacity" magazines so they can outgun their victims.
Think about this, Terry. Am I really more of a potential danger walking around with a single, compact 9mm pistol loaded with a 17-round magazine than I would be festooned with high-caliber six-shooters? Because, I swear, if you’re elected and you do manage to get your gun-grabbing law passed, I’m gonna be looking like some border pistolero from an old time Texas range war.

Senator Harry Reid

"It's the law".

Elsewhere: Our "calvinist" president (H/T: Captain Heinrichs).

Monday, September 23, 2013

Hillary-ous

Joshua Shnayer at The American Spectator puts on his hazmat suit and wades into Clinton World, with amusing results.
The former first lady and secretary of state described some of the pleasures that she and Bill have been able to enjoy since her departure from the Obama administration. “[W]e laugh at our dogs; we watch stupid movies; we take long walks; we go for a swim,” Hillary says. She often has an opportunity to “[let] loose one of her loud, head-tilted-back laughs” and keep “doin’ what we’re doin.’”

And if that image isn’t ghastly enough, Hagan describes Clinton as experiencing a kind of “weightlessness,” “midair, launched from the State Department toward … what?” The thought of Hillary Clinton floating through space with the ponderous strains of the Blue Danube Waltz playing—a kind of homage to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey—must be terrifying to most readers.
Indeed. A Hillary Clinton administration would represent a crazy-quilt combination of Huey Long, the Cosa Nostra, Animal Farm, Animal House, old Jerry Springer episodes, Peronism and the Snopes family, creating one phantasmagorical news cycle after another, for years on end, the whole gaudy circus blinding the country to the fact that, every day, we would be poorer, weaker and less free than the day before. And if the Great American Experiment perishes after a sustained orgy of Clintonian corruption, power-lust and peep-show socialism we will probably not even have the solace of seeing our society expire with the dignified trappings of classical tragedy; the country will simply topple off the stage in the vulgar tradition of low comedy.

If true, then this is the biggest (and unfunniest) joke in history

According to this piece at Politico, ObamaCare was spawned as the result of a campaign gimmick: it was practically nothing but an aside in a speech.
“We needed something to say,” recalled one of the advisers involved in the discussion. “I can’t tell you how little thought was given to that thought other than it sounded good. So they just kind of hatched it on their own. It just happened. It wasn’t like a deep strategic conversation.”
So, here we are, stuck with the worst piece of legislation in our history, a thing that will ultimately cost untold trillions of dollars, deprive many, if not most, people of their right to choose insurance policies and doctors, and wind up leading to subpoenas to appear before death panels, and it was all because Obama “needed something to say”?!? I guess we should be glad that he didn’t come out, as an afterthought, for cannibalism or mandatory disco music in government buildings.

The zeal of the convert

Word is spreading through various news media that the murderous Muslim rampage in the mall in Kenya may have been directed by the “White Widow”, Samantha Lewthwaite, wife of Jermaine Lindsay, the man who masterminded the London Tube bombings in 2005.

She has, indeed, been busy:
Having converted to Islam as a young woman and married a man who went on to be a 7/7 London suicide bomber, she has become a key figure in the terror group behind this weekend’s attack.

Lewthwaite has even been involved in training a group of all-female suicide attackers at camps in lawless neighbouring Somalia.
And lest the news get lost in the focus on Kenya, 85 people died outside of a church in Peshawar, Pakistan in two suicide bomb blasts carried out by the Pakistani Taliban.

Strange, I thought I heard the President saying something awhile back about these guys being on the run. Maybe he meant “running amok”.

I need a vacation

Something relaxing. Like maybe a cruise.

(Via Captain Heinrichs, travel director of Paco Enterprises)

Monday movie

Kevin McCarthy makes with the pitchfork in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.


Sunday, September 22, 2013

Sunday funnies

Just about anything is collectible. Anything.

A comic dance routine featuring Lynn, Royce and Vanya, from the 1942 movie, Seven Days Leave (faking ineptitude is sometimes hard work).



Useful words from abroad.

If you drink, don't drive. Anything. Including a lawn mower.

From the Department of People Are Idiots (H/T: Captain Heinrichs).

I'd sure like to see this hooked up at our chairman's next "all hands" meeting.

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Friday, September 20, 2013

The irony of it all

The working class poor are the ones presently getting hammered the hardest by ObamaCare, Ted Cruz wants to do something about it, and all the media and the Republican establishment can do is fault his tactics.

My view is this: if ObamaCare is, as I believe, the worst piece of legislation written in my lifetime - a socialist wrench tossed into the machinery of a free society, an idiotic and staggeringly costly program that will ultimately wind up giving us something along the lines of Britain’s disastrous National Health Service, the wedge by which a free people are ultimately to be parted from their liberty in what is arguably the most important realm of their private lives – then shutting down the government temporarily might be the only way to bring the Democrats to the negotiating table and force the realists in the party (there must be some) to work with the Republicans to devise something intelligent and workable that is consistent with individual freedom. We’re not talking here about a mere pork barrel issue: this legislation fundamentally redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state, to the detriment of the former, and if the state cannot be brought to heel through the normal process because of the partisanship (or the apathy) of its elected representatives, and the expansionist zeal of its bureaucrats, then, by all means, shut it down by any legal means necessary. This nation is not inextricably bound to a deterministic interpretation of legislation that posits the immutability of whatever absurd and deleterious laws a bunch of ignorant, overreaching fatheads contrives to pass in what typically is (and certainly was, in this instance) a very transitory moment of power. We, the people, do not exist for the purpose of serving as lab rats in the experiments of ideological projectors, nor are we obligated to stand by interminably, bearing the weight of crushing costs, while these self-styled social scientists futilely attempt to transform excrement into its palatable antecedents.

I don’t know when government of, by and for the people became government without, in spite of and against the people, but to continue in this vein is madness. If it comes to such a pass –and it yet may not – then it is better to shut the government down now rather than have to tear it down later.

And I daresay that most of us, Congressman Moran, are not moved by frenzied appeals to caress the boot that lies so heavily on our collective neck.



Hey, that right there’s fascism

“High School Forces Student To Remove ‘Duck Dynasty’ Shirt Because It Was Deemed ‘Threatening’”.

Happy Feet Friday

The fabulous Gene Rogers makes the transition from classical to boogie look as easy as falling off a log. Even if you don’t particularly care for boogie woogie (or classical, for that matter), you’ll be amazed at this artist’s technique (plus, the sheer joy he obviously takes in playing warms my heart).

Swell

Now we've got to worry about space germs.

(H/T: Resident astro-biologist, Captain Heinrichs).

"Dear Mr. Brandon"

Jeff Goldstein receives an email from a congressional candidate, in which the latter unmasks himself as a garden-variety gun-grabber. Hilarity, as they say, ensues.

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Clintons and scandals

They go together like stink on s**t.

We’re not really up for another eight years of this crap, are we? On top of eight years of Jug Head McHopey Pants? Leaving aside the grim consequences for our nation, economically and politically, of even more liberal fascism, imagine the deepening seaminess of public life: the sheer sordidness of Bill’s sexual buccaneering; the grasping cupidity of Hillary’s personal financial schemes; the endless shattering of lamps heaved in anger; the red-eyed Secret Service personnel staggering into each new day, their ears still ringing with the cacophonous profanity of call and response from the sleepless night before. It is a scenario that takes me, as Wodehouse would say, to another and dreadful world. May God deliver us from such a fate.

The most unsurprising story you will read today

The city of Chicago registered more homicides than any city in the nation in 2012, surpassing even New York — despite the fact that the Second City has only one third as many residents as the Big Apple.”

Update: This ain’t how it works, Chicago…



(Image pinched from Gateway Pundit).

Step right up off



Via Moonbattery

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

The gravediggers of American liberty have a falling out, begin whanging one another with shovels

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has collected some juicy snippets from a variety of sources dealing with the inside baseball of Obama’s campaign and White House management teams, including bits describing – not all that surprisingly – their little tin god’s shocking ingratitude and dubious loyalty.

One reads about such people – their machinations, plots, greed and heartbreak, all devised or sustained in service to the low calling of politics, and the even lower calling of statist expansionism – and marvels at the capacity of human beings for expending their lives and talent in the pursuit of such base and worthless things, driven by political hallucinations picked up in the ideological fever swamps of their youth, or perhaps simply compelled by their private demons to channel their neurotic prejudices and hatreds into the public sphere, the better to strike back at a world that they find cruel and unfair (particularly in its assessment of their own worth). One might cringe in thinking of the work a garbage man does, but still acknowledge the necessity of the profession, appreciate the value of the employment , and respect the worth of the man. I have great difficulty in working up similar sentiments about professional politicians and their handlers. In fact, I am understating the difficulty; I find the exercise well-nigh insuperable.

Update: Hypocrisy with a (black) cherry on top.

Pandermonium!

The Master of Distraction comes off a bad couple of weeks bungling the Syria question, briefly pivots to the economy (trashing Republicans while a mad killer massacres people at the Navy Yard), zigs to ObamaCare (Americans are wrong in their assessment, the president says), and now zags to immigration.

Shameless, clueless, feckless…what is that word the Brits use? Ah, yes…gormless.

I recollect a rather chilling scene from the 1941 movie, The Devil and Daniel Webster, in which Old Nick (played by Walter Huston) withdraws from his vest pocket a man’s soul he has taken in return for favors rendered; it is a thing about the size and shape of a moth. I suspect that Barry’s vital force is something along the same lines. A small man in a big job, the former trying to cut the latter down to his size. An arrogant little Procrustes hacking at the greatness of the nation in order to fit our country into his myopic vision of the future.

Even crony capitalist Warren Buffett has become disenchanted with ObamaCare

Scrap it.

I’m not sure exactly what alternative Buffett has in mind – possibly something equally inimical to personal choice – but at least by dint of squinting hard, he has seen the handwriting on the wall concerning the law as it is now. It is a profound lesson in the folly of letting politicians monkey around with complex economic matters that possess the additional dimension of an encroachment on life and death issues.

I like to think that we, as a nation, have the backbone to overturn a catastrophically bad law whose existence at this point serves no purpose but to prop up an incompetent president’s ego. Time will tell.

Tough school

Ohio State University's police force has added something new to its arsenal.

I guess fraternity hijinks must be getting out of hand.

(H/T: Captain Heinrichs).

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Yet another reason to reject Terry McAuliffe

McAuliffe's ok with keeping substandard abortion clinics open.

So, it's not really about keeping abortion "safe", is it? It's about cynically playing up to the notion that abortion isn't so much a right as it is some kind of fetish or totem that is inextricably bound up with the radical feminist's self-identification, and thus must never, under any circumstances, be altered or restricted, no matter what the cost (in dead infants or in dead or mutilated women).

Seriously, Virginians, are we going to do this thing? Are we really going to heave this sleazy capo from the Clinton mafia into the governor's mansion? If this happens, I'm going to start a movement to compel Northern Virginia to secede from the rest of the state. The place has been filling up with federal bureaucrats, lobbyists, left-wing think-tankers, and assorted progressive hangers-on - in other words, Democrats. Democrats, furthermore, who are contaminating the politics of the Old Dominion, and turning her into a hideous shade of purple, trending blue.

"But, Paco," you say, "that would leave you behind enemy lines!" Fine with me. That's where guerrillas belong. Besides, I already feel like I'm behind enemy lines; that's why I refer to it as "Occupied Northern Virginia".

My, but you Australians are a feisty bunch!

"Feral pig ‘drinks 18 cans of beer, fights cow and then passes out drunk under tree’".

Celebrate!

Today is Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, and, while both our founding document and the concept of citizenship are under attack by hosts of leftist parasites, the country we love may yet be preserved through the courage of people who are willing to speak up and who disdain the notion of losing themselves among the compliant herd.

The Constitution is well worth rereading once in a while, and there's no time like the present.

I was off work yesterday

Well, back to the salt mine.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Washington massacre

12 people are reported dead in a shootout at the Washington Navy Yard. One suspect is dead, and there may be two more shooters on the loose.

God have mercy on the souls of the fallen, and comfort their families, and may the guilty be apprehended and justice be done.

The main problem is not that Obama and his team are pseudointellectuals...

...the main problem is that they're genuine "ineffectuals". Mark Steyn on Obama, Kerry, Putin and Syria:
In London this week, John Kerry, America’s secretary of state, capped his own impressive four-decade accumulation of magnificently tin-eared sound bites by assuring his audience that the military devastation the superpower would wreak on Assad would be “unbelievably small.” Actually, the problem is that it will be all too believably small. The late Milton Berle, when challenged on his rumored spectacular endowment, was wont to respond that he would only take out just enough to win. In London, Kerry took out just enough to lose.
Update - This threat just got a whole lot less believable: "President Obama declared that the United States is still prepared to act militarily to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons despite the decision to pursue a diplomatic deal and not strike Syria over its alleged use of chemical weapons."

Monday movie

In Les Diaboliques, a woman and her husband’s ex-mistress conspire to kill the brutal spouse – but something goes terribly awry.



Sunday, September 15, 2013

The broken record

Al Gore's alarmist predictions took another hit recently, as the Arctic icecap - which Gore claimed, in 2007, would be practically gone by 2013 during the summer months - increased by 60% this year.

Al Gore needs to stop dreaming of climate change apocalypse.



He might want to get those other dreams checked out, too.

Sunday funnies

Key and Peele engage in a little workplace competition.

Abbott and Costello's "Who's on first?" routine, updated.

Animals: yeah, they're cute, but they're thieves.

Meh, sounds like pushing your luck, to me.

It's a miracle!

A few people still preserve the old skills (H/T: Captain Heinrichs).

Saturday, September 14, 2013

Tea Partiers = Anarchists

So says Senate majority leader Harry Reid:
“We’re diverted totally from what this bill is about. Why? Because the anarchists have taken over,” Reid said on the Senate floor. “They’ve taken over the House and now they’ve taken over the Senate."
And soon, Harry, they'll be coming for you. Bwahahahaha!!


Just another day in the legislative branch.

Assortment

I'm thinking these fellows probably didn't graduate at the top of their class at the police academy.

Primitive primate (Pithecanthropus bidenii) sneers at his betters.

Oh, yeah, that sounds appropriate: a Muslim poem "replaced the Pledge of Allegiance over the intercom at Concord Carlisle High School in Boston—and on 9/11 of all days."

More great moments in TSA credibility.

Global politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

Reason number one I support Ted Cruz: he worries David Brooks (the image of Brooks lying in his bed at night - dressed in heliotrope pajamas, clutching his Obama doll, tossing and turning in sleepless anxiety - is not aesthetically pleasing, but it is balm for the soul).

Inspiration! Paco Enterprises' toy-manufacturing unit could probably make a bundle selling Obama Inaction figures to the children of liberal parents.

Obama's abstract foreign policy.


Friday, September 13, 2013

Gross injustice

A singing hot dog vendor for the Detroit Tigers appears to have been fired because he was passionate in expressing the opinion - held by all civilized people - that you don't put ketchup on a hot dog.

I see no way that this miscarriage of justice can be allowed to stand. And here's the legal precedent, philosophical underpinning and cultural imperative, all in one:

First Lady pushes new miracle drug

Dihydrogen monoxide.

Experts, however, have been quick to point out the dangers of this compound.

Barry's not as graceful as this young lady...

...but he can pirouette with the best of 'em.

Happy Feet Friday

Billie Holiday sings Any Old Time, accompanied by Artie Shaw and his orchestra.

Million Muslim arithmetic

The rally attracted, er, somewhat less than one million participants.

Good picture at the linked post of Cornell West wearing his well-known Frederick Douglas Halloween costume.

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Stupid birds

They obviously deserve to die. Because, green energy.

Buy and hold

The first Mustang that was ever sold to the public is still in the hands of the original owner.

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

So, riding a horse while under the influence is against the law?

Guess it makes sense:
University of Colorado police have arrested a 45-year-old man suspected of going on a drunken horseback ride through the city of Boulder.

Police spokesman Ryan Huff tells The Daily Camera that witnesses saw the man hit his horse and then occasionally wander into traffic near the school Monday afternoon. Patrick Neal Schumacher of Colorado Springs faces several charges, including animal cruelty and riding under the influence of alcohol.

Police say he had a small pug named Bufford in his backpack, as well as beer cans and a black-powder pistol in his saddlebag. Officers say he told them he was traveling from Larkspur, Colo., to his brother's wedding in Bryce, Utah, and that he had to make the 600-mile journey by horse because he lost his driver's license.

Need another reason to vote against Terry McAuliffe?

Try this on for size: “Bloomberg May Court McAuliffe to Bring Gun Control to Virginia”.

McAuliffe or no McAuliffe, we ain’t standin’ for that crap, are we boys?



“Hell, no, Cap’n Paco!”

Boehner, Cantor firing blanks

This gimmick – passing a defunding measure for ObamaCare that is not linked to the proposed continuing resolution – is not only a hollow gesture, but one that is so hollow that it is insulting. It’s like the Republican establishment’s equivalent of Obama’s “red line”.

Boehner, Cantor and the other so-called pragmatists apparently believe that we are all bound to honor this national suicide pact, enacted by a previous Congress in the teeth of public opposition, and now so unpopular that major union organizations, as well as hundreds of businesses, both large and small, are attacking it.

I think it was Jonah Goldberg who first referred to the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”. Boehner and Cantor seem to have adopted this epithet as their emblem.

In memoriam

September 11, 2001.

(Link courtesy of Protein Wisdom).

Sound recall

Two gun-grabbing state senators in Colorado have lost recall votes.

When the people unite, who can stand against them?

Obama's speech

Of course I didn't watch it, but Stephen Green did, fortified by constant doses of alcohol. Check out his drunkbloggoing here.

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Up is down, light is dark….

…smart power is cluelessness: “Russian Parliament gloats as Putin checkmates Obama over Syria”.

So, not only does Obama wind up portraying himself as weak and vacillating, with his famous red line drawn in disappearing ink, he also manages to allow Russia’s would-be czar to pose (however cynically and insincerely) as a statesman and peacemaker – and the whole thing midwifed through a John Kerry gaffe!



Will Obama and his PR machine try to spin this episode as being part of the master plan? You bet they will.

Beware of Democrats bearing coconuts

Just sayin'.

Monday, September 9, 2013

Missing

Gee, has anybody heard anything from Jessica Lange, Sean Penn, Martin Sheen or Danny Glover lately?

One of the very few upsides to the Obama administration is that Hollywood liberals have all seemingly developed a case of laryngitis (one of the principal side effects of hypocrisy, I guess).

Monday movie

John Wayne pulls a fast one on Richard Boone in Big Jake.

Time to lob Al Gore into Syria

The conflict in Syria may have been exacerbated by, you guessed it, global warming.

H/T: Etcetera.

Sunday, September 8, 2013

Sunday funnies

Penalty for landing your plane on the wrong carrier? Merciless sarcasm (H/T: Captain Heinrichs).

Man, looks like everybody's trying to get out of California before the big bust.

Architectural death ray!

Hey, it's cooler than a garden troll.

Ace of Spades really, really has it in for Kaboom cereal.

I think liberalized concealed carry laws are more practical, but women who live in states (or countries) which make the carrying of guns difficult or illegal might want to consider these anti-rape devices.

Kevin Rudd apparently tried to filibuster the Australian election results.

Update: Suspected spy detained, released, eaten.

Manned flight: the early and, er, innovative years.



Friday, September 6, 2013

At least there's still Australia

The Labor Party looks to be toast on Saturday, and I can imagine no better place to enjoy the fun than Tim Blair's blog. See you there!

Update: The conservatives have won! Congratulations, mates! (And, no, Kevin Rudd cannot settle in the United States).

MSNBC: Mental, spiritual, neurological basket cases

Is it just me, or does Ed Schultz always come across like a butcher grousing about yet another short order of head cheese from his supplier?

Note that Ed agrees with the Republicans he cites in not wanting to bomb Syria; however, Ed’s motives are pure, whereas Republicans simply hate Obama – so, presumably, Republicans should support Obama in carrying out his really bad plan, because it’s more important for them to avoid looking like obstructionists than to do the intelligent thing and say “no” to the president’s really bad plan, which Schultz, himself, opposes (???)

I don’t know what sustains that fine head of hair on top of Schultz’s thought-box, but it sure ain’t logic (I’m thinking some kind of cerebral humus consisting of atrophied gray matter, a petrified corpus callosum, and the dead dreams of a failed Oakland Raider).

Happy Feet Friday

Asleep at the wheel? This version of Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar ought to wake you up.



Thursday, September 5, 2013

Groveling obsequious pusillanimity

Wait, is that what GOP means? I thought I had read somewhere that it stood for "Grand Old Party". Well, I guess someone must have been pulling my leg. Although it makes sense, now. Any Republican congressman who believes that going along with Obama on his Syrian adventure means that the president will be more tractable during the upcoming budget negotiations should be indicted on a charge of terminal stupidity, removed from office, and denied food, water and shelter within a hundred-mile radius of Washington, DC. If bombing Syria turns out to be ineffectual, but a non-disaster, Obama and the press his public relations machine will find a way to spin it as a "moral" victory, Obama will take full credit, and he'll be barking at Republicans this fall like a junkyard dog who's just spied a meth-head trying to steal some scrap copper.


My beautiful victory.

(Image gratefully lifted from Peter From Texas, via Are we Lumberjacks?)

The whiff is gone

I have previously cited Belloc’s famous line that civilization is “living on a whiff from an empty bottle”. We seem to be getting closer and closer to the time when we will even have lost that:
Nicole Zanlith, a Danish citizen, was waiting for a taxi in the Spanish town of Marbella. A group of North African Muslim immigrants attacked her for the fun of it. They slashed her face with a broken vodka bottle causing permanent blindness in her right eye.
And in France, Muslim immigrants seem to be responsible for, er, a “slightly” disproportionate amount of crime (H/T: Captain Heinrichs).

Immigration only works when (a) the immigrants are willing to assimilate, or at least accommodate themselves to, the cultural norms of their host country, and (b) the host country actually has cultural norms it deems worthy of upholding. Our own cultural relativists might want to bear this in mind.

Good news

Ok, so, for now, at least, you can defend yourself against an attempted armed robbery by beating the crap out of the perpetrators.

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Really?

Scarlett Johansson just got engaged to some French dude.

Those frogs! They're always so smooth and sophisticated.



See what I mean?

Update: Ok, maybe not all of them are smooth and sophisticated...

Update II: You, too, can be a suave boulevardier! Just be sure, when you're speaking French, to avoid these common mistakes (H/T: Captain Heinrichs, Chief of Protocol for Paco Enterprises).

Revolution and devolution

The long winding down of our constitutional republic, our glory captured before and after.





The gentlemen in the first picture created America. The people in the second certainly “look more like America”, but what of it? Was there ever a clearer illustration of the superiority of character and ideas over the mere arithmetical parceling out of privilege and power based on group identity, superficial diversity and trendy ideology?

Update: Playing dodge ball with responsibility
”I didn’t set a red line, the world set a red line”, Obama said. “My credibility’s not on the line. The international community’s credibility is on the line. And America and Congress’s credibility is on the line.”
Scene: the presidential living quarters in the White House

Michelle [picking the presidential pants off the bathroom floor and stomping into the bedroom]: Wha…? Barack, what’s this?

Obama: Z-z-z…huh?...whazzwhat?

Michelle: What’s this pack of cigarettes doing in your pants pocket?

Obama [suddenly alert to danger, sits bolt upright]: It’s not mine! It’s Joe Biden’s! I’m just holding it for him!

Michelle: Joe doesn’t smoke.

Obama: Uh, no, no, I meant to say John Kerry. Yeah, those are John Kerry’s cigarettes!

Michelle: Oh, really? John Kerry smokes Virginia Slims? Menthol?

Obama: I didn’t buy them. Oh, I remember now. I think they’re John Boehner’s. He left them laying around the Oval Office the other day and I picked them up with the intention of giving them back to him. Here, let me see ‘em. Sniff, sniff. Yeah, doesn’t that smell like tanning lotion to you?

Michelle: No, it smells like tobacco. You said you gave these things up.

Obama: But they’re not mine!

Michelle: You’re pathetic, you know that? You sound just like you did when you were talking about the red line in Syria. “I didn’t draw it! Somebody else did!”

Obama: I never said I drew a red line. I just said that there is one, drawn by somebody else. I just saw it - you know, like in your peripheral vision, when you just barely catch sight of something for a second and then it’s gone? That’s how it was. So, here, just, um, give the cigarettes back to me and I’ll see that they get back to John.

Michelle: Fat chance, little man.

Obama: C’mon, Michelle! Think of your credibility.

Michelle: My credibility?

Obama: Sure. You don’t want John to think you’re swiping his cigarettes, do you?

Michelle: Swiping his…What are you talking about? He knows I don’t smoke.

Obama: Maybe he thinks you just recently gave them up, and now you’re having a relapse.

Michelle: Why on earth would he think that I just recently stopped smoking?

Obama: Well, the bad temper, the weight gain…

Michelle: The "weight gain"?!? [angrily shakes several cigarettes out of the pack into her hand] Ok, B, how about a chaw?

Obama: A what? A…Mmph! ‘ey, whar doin’? Fop ‘at!!! Hawp! Hawp!

Update II - As usual, Thomas Sowell goes directly to the heart of the matter:
Why are we even talking about taking military action in Syria? What is that military action supposed to accomplish? And what is the probability that it will in fact accomplish whatever that unknown goal might be?

What is painfully clear from President Obama’s actions, inactions, and delays is that he is more or less playing by ear what specifically he is going to do, and when. He is telling us more about what he is not going to do — that he will not put “boots on the ground,” for example — than about what he will do.

Oh, no!

More outrageous outrage that, if anything, is more outrageously outrageous than the last outrageous outrage!

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Some old-time Hollywood snark

As Alice Roosevelt Longworth once said, “If you haven't got anything good to say about anybody, come sit next to me.” Robert Avrech has some choice observations on actors by actors. A taste:
Burt Lancaster on Kirk Douglas: Kirk would be the first to admit that he’s difficult to work with—and I would be the second.

Marilyn Monroe on Montgomery Clift: He’s the only person I know that is in worse shape than I am.

The tedious asininity of John McCain

John McCain is now just making stuff up (“the Free Syrian Army is viable, it’s strong, and it’s moderate”). But why? Is he simply an idiot, or is he playing what he takes to be some deeper game? (I acknowledge that there’s no reason both explanations can’t be true).

And I see that John Boehner is now willing to help out in what is rapidly becoming nothing more than a face-saving exercise for His Serene Ineptitude, Preshizzle and Demander in Chief, Barack Obama. And, of course, next week Obama will be back to damning Republican obstructionism, and Boehner, having received nothing in return for his agreement to make the GOP complicit in the absurdity of the Syrian adventure, will be laboring behind the scenes to shove an amnesty bill down our throats (tell it, Matt!).

Elsewhere, the rotational program between “journalism” and the Obama administration continues apace.

Also elsewhere, anybody connected with the spreading of the ridiculous “The video made them do it!” story should be barred from holding elective office (that’s right, Cankles, I’m lookin’ at you).

Oh, for retirement, and my own private berm, and the therapeutic planting of lead in sand!

Update:


That's not a flamethrower...

That's a flamethrower!

Bashar's Assad's grandfather and his interesting view of Muslim extremism

From a letter written in 1936 to Leon Blum, then-Prime Minister of France. A taste:
The spirit of fanaticism and narrow-mindedness, whose roots are deep in the heart of the Arab Muslims toward all those who are not Muslim, is the spirit that continually feeds the Islamic religion, and therefore there is no hope that the situation will change.
H/T: Blazing Cat Fur and the ever-vigilant Captain Heinrichs.

Sick of these two

Wake me when somebody figures out how to turn a "top" Republican into a bottom Republican.

Monday, September 2, 2013

Happy Labor Day!

Time, once again, to salute the employees of the Paco Enterprises corporate empire, without whose strong commitment to quality and service, we would not exist.

Need some more air, fellas?


"No, we're fine, Mr. Paco. And thanks for the Labor Day bonus. That extra bar of soap will come in handy!"

Hey, Barry

How does it feel to get slapped around by Canadians? Here's a perceptive look at our "incredible shrinking president" by Alan Caruba.

H/T: Gateway Pundit.

In Egypt, birds watch you

Another bird was briefly detained on suspicion of spying in Egypt.

Monday movie

A bear cub narrowly escapes a hungry cougar in this scene from the remarkable 1988 film The Bear.

Sunday, September 1, 2013

Sunday funnies

If you're not watching Sunny TV regularly, what are you waiting for? (I highly recommend Episode 3; the Chuck Hagel bit is (a) hilarious, and (b) brilliantly symbolic of the Obama administration's loss of credibility and influence abroad).



More money-making opportunities for the budding entrepreneur.

When angry renters get creative.

Japanese pranks: predictably over the top.

Although, Oklahomans aren't far behind.

Swampy speculates on Obama's misinterpretation of Teddy Roosevelt's famous advice.

Please, Lord, don't let me ever piss off Ace.

Update (H/T to Anonymous): Bacon cologne. Now that, Mr Fukuyama, is the end of history.