Free Republic

Strange, isn’t it? While our MSM is starting to pick up on this, we still get the most comprehensive reporting on The One’s scandals in the British press.

Not long after all this broke out last September I read on another blog (Powerline, if my memory serves) a poem by Rudyard Kipling which, while penned in 1917, still serves nicely to describe the despicable conduct of the administration in this mess:

Mesopotamia ~ by Rudyard Kipling

They shall not return to us, the resolute, the young,
The eager and whole-hearted whom we gave:
But the men who left them thriftily to die in their own dung,
Shall they come with years and honour to the grave?

They shall not return to us; the strong men coldly slain
In sight of help denied from day to day:
But the men who edged their agonies and chid them in their pain,
Are they too strong and wise to put away?

Our dead shall not return to us while Day and Night divide--
Never while the bars of sunset hold.
But the idle-minded overlings who quibbled while they died,
Shall they thrust for high employments as of old?

Shall we only threaten and be angry for an hour:
When the storm is ended shall we find
How softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to power
By the favour and contrivance of their kind?

Even while they soothe us, while they promise large amends,
Even while they make a show of fear,
Do they call upon their debtors, and take counsel with their friends,
To conform and re-establish each career?

Their lives cannot repay us--their death could not undo--
The shame that they have laid upon our race.
But the slothfulness that wasted and the arrogance that slew,
Shell we leave it unabated in its place?

This stuff would be useless against an OWS mob - it would only improve their stench.

The Stockton and other looming municipal bankruptcies will likely collapse the municipal bond market and, equally likely, provide rich opportunities for skullduggery. Wealthy supporters of our corrupt administration cook up a deal with the Chicago thug. The said wealthy donors snatch up Stockton bonds at ten cents on the dollar on the q.t. After a suitable interval, Obama engineers a deal to have the Fed save the bondholders, paying them, say, 75% of par. Stockton is saved! Soros and Buffet pocket hundreds of millions in windfall profits! This is, in fact, a time-honored mode of getting fabulously wealthy off the misfortune of others in our great nation.

When one of these goons gets killed trying to hurt others, the others will think twice.

When one of these goons get killed, the others will be joined by thousands of other amish, who will proceed then to burn down the city, helping themselves along the way to flat-screen TVs, IPads, and lots of other toys at steep discounts. It will be a repeat of the race riots of the seventies.

I lived through two of those, one in Augusta, Georgia, only about 90 miles from Greenville. It will make for an ugly, nasty summer, and many of the folks who have acquired scary-looking rifles over the last year or so will find occasion to use them. I already make it a point to drive 30 or more miles away from urban centers in my travels. I think I'll increase that to 60.

There’s a good chance the dude in the picture could have added “Voted for Obama” as the first line in his sign.

I appreciate you guys gently taking me to the woodshed about my error. I have not had any formal chemistry since sophomore chemistry in 1964 with old Mr Holmes. Holmes was a spry old WWI vet who was still capable of administering a sharp rap to the back of the head with a ruler when an errant student made a dumb mistake like that. He would not have been so gentle.

You can, of course, expect rending of garments and great wailing and gnashing of teeth from the greenies among us, whose most fervent dream is a world populated by a few million starving wretches sitting huddled around fires of buffalo dung. Burning these methyl hyrates produces methane, a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Obama will without a doubt get a handful of GOP squishes in the Senate to go along - there are always a few who lust for those rare editorials professing newfound respect which will magically appear in the NY Times and the Washington Post. The Senate will pass a huge increase, completely ignoring the constitutional mandate that revenue bills originate in the House. (They take some competely unrelated House bill languishing in the Senate awaiting action, strip it of all it’s provisions and substitute their desired tax, and pass it on the flimsy pretext that they are simply amending a House bill, which the Senate may do. That is how we got ObamaCare, after all.) They will likely get away with it. Obama will be able to count on at least Roberts and probably Kennedy on the SCOTUS performing amazing feats of pretzel-twisting logic to rule that the Senate did not in fact violate the origination clause.

Meanwhile, Ryan and other key players in the House, which under our constitution (remember that silly old thing) is where revenue bills must originate, didn’t get a free dinner on the taxpayer dime with Obama. Classic divide and conquer. And I expect it will work.

I’m sorry to say that I suspect Zero is praying for a disasterous mid-air collision to take the lives of hundreds of passengers so that he and his lapdogs in the press can furiously blame the GOP.

I fervently hope that he is only praying for such a calamity, and not engaging in any undertakings to make it happen. I’ve seen entirely to much of his end-justifies-the means shananigans, the type of things so typical of the far left, that I cannot be entirely confident that he wouldn’t do anything like that.

This is well known in government circles as the Washington Monument ploy; at the local level it’s called the firehouse ploy (whenever hishonor wants to frighten the rubes into handing over more of their money, he/she has the council start holding hearings to deliberate which firehouse/EMS stations will need to be closed). In the schools, they threaten to shut down athletics. Nothing new here.

If he runs in the 2016 pubby primaries, he’ll be agin’ it. If he wins, he’ll spin so fast it’ll make the Mittster look like a paragon of consistency.

Six or eight years ago, a relative and I were in the drive of his house and noticed a commotion at the neighboring farm. A car was parked beside the road, hazard lights flashing, and three or four kids were running around screaming beside a couple of tractors in the neighbors yard. We hopped in the car and drove the quarter mile down to his place, and learned that the farmer had got himself wrapped up between the drive wheels of the separate tractors as he tried to jump start one from the other. My relative drove quickly back to his place and got one of his tractors and a chain, which we hooked up to the drive wheel of the smaller tractor. The poor devil, at this point, was still alive and talking to us; I was an army medic and figured I might be able to help. Just as we started to pull the tractors apart, an ambulance pulled up, paramedics rushed out and considered the situation, then ordered us to do nothing, informing us that the medical examiner was on his way. They would not allow us to do anything, threatening us with possible arrest if we tried to pull the tractors apart, despite our protests that he didn’t need a medical examiner, he needed paramedics. Nonetheless, they made us wait. When the medical examiner finally showed up about twenty minutes later, the poor guy was long dead, and once he was pronounced, they let us go ahead and separate the tractors.

It’s not likely that anything could have been done for the guy; when we got him out his guts spilled out on the ground: one of the tractor’s axles had disemboweled him. But to this day I’ll be sorely tempted to refuse to aid a person in this type of predicament if I find out the guy’s a lawyer. The lousy bastards are ruining this country.

Same problem here. I refreshed the page and a new post appreared at the top but one or two disappeared at the bottom. Switched browsers from Explorer to Chrome: same problem.

Amen. I about crapped when I read that: Or, as in the case of Florida teen Trayvon Martin, the guns kill people who the good guys think are bad guys but who aren't actually bad guys.

George was flat on his back with a thug in a hoodie beating his head repeatedly on the cement. I think any reasonable man would be entirely justified in concluding that the perp was a seriously bad guy who needed a well-placed bullet. The author of this article is a fool.

This article purporting to state why Obamacare should not be considered "the law of the land" only barely scratches the surface.

The origination clause of the constitution also provides entirely sufficient grounds to strike the law down, assuming we ever get enough members of the SCOTUS with the spine to endure the scathing editorials which would appear in the Washington Post and the New York Times. (I'm not holding my breath.) If, as Roberts pretzel-twisting logic found, the mandate is a tax, and not a penalty, then the constitution mandates that the bill must originate in the House of Representatives. Instead, it originated in the Senate.

I think we should not call this a secession movement. The US, without 13 states, would be a perfectly governable and solidly conservative country, valuing a strong defense and economic and religious liberty and guarding traditional values.

My proposal: let's start an expulsion movement instead of a secession movement: expel California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii in the west, and New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware and all of New England except New Hampshire and we'd be left with a damn fine country. (I don't know what we'll do with NH there in the northeast; it's a little island of sanity in a deep blue sea of liberal fruit-loopery). There's not one conservative senator among the 26 representing those 13 states, unless I'm mistaken.

We could announce that the constitution of this reset USA would be the existing US constitution (although I'd like to repeal the 17th amendment and strongly rework the ninth and tenth to strengthen limits on the power of the general government). The newly consituted Supreme Court would be charged, in the implementation language, with spending it's first few terms reconsidering the constitutionality of every enactment of the original US since the thirties in light of the newly strengthened ninth and tenth amendments.

The Heartland of this country has always suffered under the bootheels of our bicoastal elite, and been misgoverned by mostly graduates of elite schools in the northeast. Time to cast them away. While we're at it we may also want to make overtures to some of our good neighbors in certain Canadian provinces which have often chafed under roughshod rule by the elites in Ontario and Quebec. (From time to time I've heard rumblings of Canadian separatist movements in the western provinces.) So we could be both expansionist as well as expulsionist.

Imagine a new, "Can-Am" federation stretching from Alaska to Florida - including the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, British Columbia, Alberta, Sasketchawn and Manitoba - and encompassing all the American heartland, the mountain states, old Dixie, the Great Lakes States and Pennsylvania (but not NY). Ontario, Quebec and the Maritime Provinces would probably feel compelled to eventually merge with the now-rump remainder of the old US, with which they have more in common than with the rest of Canada in any event.

Anyway, it's fun to move pieces around on the map. Where do I sign on for the revolution?

I predict a work accident in the Egyptian prime minister’s near future.

The trouble with price controls, rationing, and anti-gouging laws is that they fail to allocate scarce fuel to those who need it most. The fellow with the gas can who wants gasoline for his leaf blower stands in the same relation to the seller as the fellow who needs to put the gasoline in the car to be able to take his wife to dialysis treatments. And the driver of the car behind them may already have half a tank but is panicked and wants to fill up every day. Let the price float to a market clearing rate and the person who really needs the gasoline will dig down deep and spring for it, while the two who want to fill up their leaf blower and top off to quell panic attacks will wait until later.

Let the gummint get involved and they’ll f**k it up every time. Some of the New Jersians lined up to buy gas are probably just trying to make sure they have enough fuel for a planned trip into the Poconos this weekend to check to see if there is any late fall color - they can damn well wait. Let the guy who needs to fuel to make sales calls on his customers pay whatever he can afford to fill his tank.

I don’t think so, but much of the rest of the country might see long lines for gas, no power, people displaced from their homes, and lots of in-fighting (i.e. people vs utility workers), and they might start to wonder whether Obama did any good (politically) visiting the hard hit areas.

You realize, of course, that the rest of the country will only see those things if the thoroughly-in-the-tank MSM chooses to let them see it. Since it doesn't fit the 'Obamamessiah descending from on high to feed the hungry and heal the sick' narrative, I expect that those things will get approximately as much coverage as the Libya fiasco, at least until Wednesday.

I never engage these types of idiots, and seldom frequent the places they hang out. Take George Bernard Shaw's comment to heart: I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.

In 1992, I nearly drove off the road while driving between Durango, Colorado and Farmington, New Mexico on election night: when it was announced on NPR that Clinton had been declared the winner, the newsroom burst into loud and sustained cheering and revelry. I was so furious that I immediately cancelled my payroll deduction to support my local NPR station, and have not wasted a cent on NPR voluntarily (I know they still get into my wallet through the gummint).

Almost all the MSM has completely abandoned any pretext at objectivity. Jefferson's despairing comment in 1807 about newspapers could as easily today be expanded today to include most of the electronic media: It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.

Fortunately, the internet is rapidly driving the MSM into irrelevance, and their inordinate pernicious effect on the body politic is rapidly subsiding.

Actually, if Trump really has anything so earth-shattering, he should hand onto it for a few more days before releasing it. Romney may well not need it. If it appears that R&R’s surge continues and that the GOP will win easily, then whatever it is should be filed away for now. We may need it in 2016, since I fear that Obama will attempt a Grover Cleveland and immediately begin campaigning for the 2016 Democrat nomination if the electorate shoves him aside November 6.

If Obama with the help of a furious media onslaught starts coming back in the polls, however ... bombs away!

While it will not atone for the humiliation the nation suffered at the hands of terrorists in Libya, and the murder of our ambassador and three others, if this debacle does at least forever sink the vile creature who is our Secretary of State then this cloud does indeed have a silver lining.

I wanna be an Airborne Ranger; I wanna live a life of danger.

Not to worry. The Won will let the strike drag on for a week or so while Geitner prints a few billion dollars worth of $100 bills, which will then be airlifted over Chicago and dropped onto the strikers. As the strike ends there will be rejoicing throughout the land and the MSM will pronounce Obama Master of the Universe.

Gallup predicted a few weeks ago that the BLS rate for August will likely stay the same or increase slightly: http://behavioraleconomy.gallup.com/2012/08/august-unemployment-not-looking-good.html

We’ll just have to wait until tomorrow morning to find out.

If Obama is behind this, he has to be impeached!! This would make Watergate look like child’s play..(which it was).

You are kidding, aren't you? Boehner and the wusses in the House GOP wouldn't dare, and you know Reid would never even schedule a vote. Constitutional governmnet cannot work in our nation until we elect some reps with half a spine. Obama could be caught screwing a nine-year old and the GOP wouldn't vote articles of impeachment, after their perceived failure to impeach the serial rapist and convicted purjuror who preceded Bush II.

Sorry. That’s absolutist bunk. If the Mother makes the decision to have and keep the child (and there are many), I say you’re a wonderful human being. But, I refuse to force that decision.

Then I have to put you down as for killing babies.

The pro-life activist who passed away a few days ago said it best: You're either for killing babies, or you're not for killing babies. You can't be a little bit for killing babies. Romney, I fear, is attempting to be a little bit for killing babies. I will reluctantly vote for him in November because the alternative is far, far worse, but my enthusiasm (and what little financial support I can afford to give candidates in Obama's economy) will go to strong conservative canditates in House and Senate races who can be relied upon to defund abortion, support other conservative principles, and torpedo any squish judicial nominees Etch-a-Sketch puts forward.

There may be a place for a third party someday if the GOP keeps nominating the type of squishes we've seen them offer up since Reagan, but not this time. Work on getting a Congress that will pass (and repeal) necessary legislation, and confine the executive to executing the laws so enacted.

While I would not wish tornados and massive flooding on anyone, waves of pleasant schadenfreude would wash over me if, after hearing that Jennifer Granholm and other dems tweeted their belief that the GOP Isaac-related troubles were brought down by God, the dem conventioneers had to huddle under ponchos while torrential rain washed down on them as they waited for their messiah to resume his oration. Better yet if the downpours were accompanied by blinding lightening flashes and crashes of thunder at appropriate points in the speech.

In our wildest dreams, we could hope for massive power outages in the area, dousing everything except emergency lighting in the stadium and requiring the speech to be delayed until, say, 1:30 a.m., after most Americans will have given up and gone to bed, at least those with jobs (I know, that's not the dem base).

Probably won't happen, but we can always dream.

I wouldn't worry about any of this coming to pass. The eGOP just looks at the platform as ad captandum vulgus. Even if the GOP wins massively in November and Etch-s-Sketch is installed as president in January, as soon as these guys and gals get to Washington and are installed in committee and subcommittee positions, the old guard will remind them that these agencies and the laws that created them are the key source of power of our rulers. Eliminate the Department of Energy and the members of various House and Senate committees having oversight of our energy affairs (and there are many with overlapping jurisdictions) will suddenly be stripped of much of their ability to extract contributions and nice junkets from the energy industry. The same is true of every other area dealt with by the various federal agencies and departments allegedly on the chopping block.

Reduce the leviathan to those matters clearly authorized in the ennumerated powers, and enforce the ninth and tenth amendments, leaving all other matters to the states? We could go back to a part-time legislature, pay reps $20,000 and senators $30,000, and give each a staff of two people.

It'll never happen, short of another revolution.

Nooooooo!!! Middendorf’s had some of the best fried catfish available anywhere! I always tried to time my travel up or down I-55 to be able to have lunch or dinner at the place.

They are a Louisiana institution. I’m sure the restaurant will be rebuilt/renovated and reopened within a few months. Check it out if you’re ever motoring along on I-55 on the north side of Ponchartrain.

We need to be very wary of false flag operations. This smells.

Yawn. ZZZZzzzz ....

Got it in one. The man is a moron who was rushed through all of his colleges on the affirmative action fast-track. Only the MSM's slobbering pandering to Ole Jug Ears enabled him to pass himself off as a lettered man of genius. He reads well enough to give a merely adequate speech when the teleprompter doesn't malfunction; otherwise, he becomes a gibbering fool.

The media owe this great nation an accounting for the damages imposed by the momentous falsehoods they perpetrated in 2008. I, like Thomas Jefferson, heartily agree on the importance of a free press, but second the great patriot's view that "It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood."

Amen. If she runs in 2016 “with her husband by her side” they’ll both look like a couple of escapees from the convalescent home. (He already does, and she’s increasingly looking like she’s well past her “sell-by” date.)

Without wanting to be thought of as sexist, I think that issue would be greater with a woman than with a man. A woman, regardless of qualifications, may be unfairly discounted for the presidency if too young and pretty (I think that was a real problem for Governor Palin, particularly with other women) or for being too old and decrepit, as the Hildabeast is increasingly looking.

The trouble with the left’s assumption that, after we’ve “made enough” the government can gobble up an increasingly large chunk of our income is that many, once they reach that point, will simply choose to reduce or eliminate their income for the rest of the year.

I’m self-employed, for example, and my work doesn’t require me to work all year. If we ever get to the point that my marginal tax rate (including federal, state and local taxes) much exceeds, say, 60%, I’ll simply cease striving for the rest of the year and go fishing. This is why the left’s static projections of the revenue they think will be achieved by an increase in taxation levels are invariably wrong. Every increase in income taxes inevitably drives a few more people past the point where leisure is preferable to more income, since so little of any additional marginal income winds up in the taxpayers pocket after taxes.

States like California, Illinois and New York are already well past that point. If Governor Moonbeam shoves his proposed tax increase by California voters in November, I predict that in mere months we’ll be reading stories about state revenue receipts being far lower than projected. In California’s case, not only will more taxpayers have throttled back their work, but more will have gone to Texas.

Here's my proposed solution. Add ten states to the union. Take the top ten urban counties and make them their own states with the remainder of the existing counties remaining as their own state. In this way you could unburden the suburbs and countryside and allow them to thrive outside the undo influence of city liberals. What do you think?

I think the idea stinks. The 10 new senators representing the new "city-states" would be automatically bluer than blue, big government gun-grabbing demoncrats. The states from which these "city-states" were carved would very likely thereby be more conservative, but not sufficiently so to guarantee that all senators elected from those states would be conservative. Your fanciful suggestion would likely swing the balance of the Senate substantially to the left.

Now, if the ten largest cities could be carved out of their states and composed into a single state, this proposal might have some merit. A sufficient number of the senators elected from the new sans-city states would probably be reliably conservative enought to more than counterbalance the two new automatically deep blue senators from the State of Megalopolis. Illinois, for example, might actually elect conservative senators if the entirety of the Chicago metropolitan area were carved away from the remainder of the state.

Perfect pic! I’m printing a copy and hanging it on the wall behind my desk for motivation over the next three months.

Obama, it is certainly true, will not go quietly into the sunset, if allowed to remain on the loose.

... if allowed to remain on the loose. There is more than enough in Obama's record to justify marching him immediately from the inaugural platform, where he will have sullenly watched Romney's swearing in, to the nearest federal holding pen, where he can await trial for the numerous criminalities of his flagitious regime. Romney should devote the full force of his Justice Department to pauperizing Obama with the cost of defending his indefensible regime and see to it that he spends all the rest of his adult life behind bars in federal prison.

If he ever is released, he should be released directly to Mexican authorities for prosecution for his complicity in the deaths of countless Mexican citizens at the hands of Obama-armed drug cartel members as a result of the Fast and Furious scam. Maybe he and Holder can be cell mates.

The doctrine of subsidiarity is akin to Edmund Burke’s “Little Platoons”. Statists always recognize that their initial and most important task in imposing totalitarian control is to break down and destroy these “little platoons” - the church, neighborhood association, family, etc. - to transfer the allegiance of the masses to the state.

Good article on these “little platoons” and their place in conservative thought: https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/amerstud/article/view/2669/2628

I suggest we also call Boehner’s office and demand he call for hearings and a special prosecutor.

Boehner? Call for hearings and a special prosecutor? Boehner! You're kidding, right?

Moments before signing on to check FR and other blogs, I had my nose in Albert Jay Nock's Memoirs of a Superflous Man and came across an acerbic comment on liberals that is as true today as when he penned the lines in the thirties:

When I saw what American Liberals were doing ... I got up a distaste for Liberals which soon ripened into horror. For years I have "sweat with agony" at the sight of a Liberal ... I had rather encounter rattlesnakes, --- far rather,--- for the rattlesnake is a gentlemanly fellow who can be relied upon to do the right thing if you give him half a chance. I have had dealings with him in my time and also with the Liberals, and I speak from knowledge.

This same thinking on the part of Obama and the dems lies behind their continued talk of having the well-off pay more in taxes as "giving more back". Their wealth is not the fruits of their labor or risk-taking, but ill-gotten pelf or swag, which they should be glad to "give back" more of, as simple justice.

Dick Cheney’s dissing of Governor Palin was completely gratuitous and unnecessary, and lowers my regard for him even further. However, this sort of nonsense has to be expected from old-line GOPers. I expect good ole boy Frank Murkowski was very much a Dick Cheney - George W. Bush type of Republican, and Palin ended his political career.

The same consideration is behind much of the establishment animus towards Palin. She aggressively went after corrupt pols on both sides of the aisle, and will likely do the same if she moves into the White House. Establishment pubbies will do everything they can to see that that never happens.

Hey, Harry. What if you lose in November? will you be singing the same song if the GOP fiddles with the filibuster? (Of course, we know the answer.)

What a great way to start the year. Senate agenda:

Day 1, item 1: suspend the filibuster for one day.

Day 1, item 2: repeal Dodd-Frank, Affordable Health Care Act, other laws as deemed appropriate

Day 1, item 3: legislatively repeal all Code of Federal Regulations rules adopted from 2009 through 2012.

Day 1, item 4: disband the United States Departments of Education, Commerce, etc. etc. etc.

Day 1, item 5: legislatively remove jurisdiction from federal courts to hear appeals on any basis whatsoever from convictions in state courts for violations of state laws.

Day 1, item 6: dissolve half of the United States District Courts in the country (courts to be retained to be selected by the Federalist Society)

Day 1, item 7: dissolve the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals

Day 1, item 8: cut congressional salaries to $25,000; senatorial salaries to $35,000. Eliminate current legislative retirements packages, replace with social security and medicare.

Day 1, item 9: recess Congress until next year's one-day session.

Dollars to donuts several megabuck Stocton firefighters live in Honolulu or Tucson or someplace like that. The Cleveland fire administration back in December was scrambling to wipe the egg off their faces when the Plain Dealer revealed that one of the city’s six-figure firefighters lived in San Diego:

http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2011/12/cleveland_threatens_to_discipl.html

The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

Thomas Jefferson, 1807 letter to John Norvel