October 31, 2014

CDC puts up poster saying Ebola can be caught from a sneeze, takes it down when called on reversal

This, as they say, is some funny bullshit.  The fastidiously accurate (sarc) CDC had been assuring us that Ebola couldn't be caught just by "casual contact."  Instead they claimed it required an "exchange of bodily fluids."

People who know even the basics of virus transmission were justifiably skeptical, since they knew of other viruses that survived nicely in droplets, such as are expelled by the millions in a single sneeze.  But CDC was adamant.

Whoops.  Just a couple of days ago the CDC put a "poster" on its website saying that it WAS possible for the Ebola virus to survive in "airborne droplets."  The NY Post jumped on this, and asked the CDC if this represented a reversal of their original claim.

CDC refused to answer.  But the poster vanished from their website, and the link that originally went to it now goes somewhere else.

But you reeeeally have to believe 'em--whatever they say.  Cuz they're part of the great Obozo administration, so they wouldn't ever lie.  Reeeally.  I mean, what reason would they have to claim that Ebola can't be spread easily if that wasn't true?  It'd be like claiming Benghazi just sorta spontaneously happened--a demonstration that got out of hand.  They'd never be that stupid.

October 26, 2014

The newest buzz-phrase to convince you Islam is not a threat

If you've read any news stories about the black muslim in New York who attacked a group of cops with a hatchet, or the muslim who intentionally ran over two members of the Canadian armed forces, killing one; or the muslim who fatally shot another member of the Canadian armed forces before running into the Parliament building and shooting at anyone in range, you've heard the newest buzz-word:

"Self-radicalized."

For example, here's the NY Post:
The self-radicalized madman who attacked four rookie Queens cops with a hatchet had more than just ­jihad on his mind — he also wanted to kill white people.
This asshole had been a Muslim for seven years.  He was *not* "self-radicalized but was "radicalized" by Islam.  Period.

And if you think he's the only one you're an absolute fucking moron and too damn dumb to breathe.  Hopefully you'll overdose on something before you reproduce.

Who am I kidding?  People who believe that shit started reproducing at age 15.

Sociopaths vs. normal people

Someone noted that the average person is differentiable from a sociopath by the qualities of introspection and empathy.

I'll think about that, but my first impression is that it sounds pretty reasonable.

October 25, 2014

Hypocrisy by the Left, part 354,395

Once again Republicans are caught on live TV carrying out a "war on women."  In this latest episode a young woman was physically assaulted by a man at a party.  After the assault the tearful victim was recorded on police audio reporting the details.

The next day a heartless female talking head on a national TV network prepared to play that audio.  She clearly found the audio highly amusing--and presumably was untroubled by the assault, cackling merrily that "This is quite possibly the best minute and a half of audio we’ve ever come across.  So sit back and enjoy!" 

Oh, wait...I got part of that wrong:  The network talking-head female wasn't a Republican but was a hard-left liberal on CNN, Carol Costello. 

But what in the world would move a feminist leftist on a national TV network to chortle about a man assaulting a woman?  Isn't that forbidden?

Normally it would be.  But in this case the victim was Bristol Palin, daughter of conservative Republican v.p. candidate Sarah.

Clearly, the left only supports women victims of male assault if the victim is a member of the right party.

Here's the revolting clip of Costello gleefully setting up the audio clip:



Costello followed the clip by saying "You can thank me later."

Hideous.

Team Obozo finally responds to FOIA lawsuit filed two years ago--claims executive privilege on 15,000 docs

Here we go again.

In June of 2012--over two years ago--the watchdog organization Judicial Watch made a Freedom of Information Act request to the Obama administration, asking for documents related to the scheme to sell military-grade guns to Mexican drug cartels.  Team Obama told 'em to fuck off, and invoked Executive Privilege for all documents and communications between Holder and Obama.

Most legal scholars viewed this claim as unlawful, since Holder had earlier testified to Congress that he had not discussed F&F with the president.  But since the defense of executive privilege is based on the president being able to withhold advice or counsel provided by executive-branch employees it's hard to reconcile these two claims.  

On June 28, 2012, the House of Representatives voted to hold Attorney General Holder in contempt of congress over his refusal to turn over records subpoenaed by congress which might have proved that he lied to congress about the gun running operation.  It marked the first time in U.S. history that a sitting Attorney General was held in contempt of Congress.

A week before the contempt vote, to protect Holder from criminal prosecution and to try to get congress to scuttle the contempt vote, President Obama asserted executive privilege over the Fast and Furious records the House Oversight Committee had subpoenaed eight months earlier.

Judicial Watch filed its FOIA request two days later.  Holder’s Justice Department wouldn’t budge (or follow the law), so JW filed a FOIA lawsuit on September 12, 2012.

But Holder's "Justice" Department convinced U.S. District Court Judge John D. Bates to stay JW's lawsuit, in part to allow the Justice department and the House Committee to continue "settlement negotiations."  Those negotiations dragged on for 16 months and accomplished nothing other than to run the clock.

Fed up with the endless stonewalling, JW renewed its request to the Court to allow the FOIA lawsuit to continue.  This past July Judge Bates ended the 16-month delay and ordered the Obama administration to produce a Vaughn index of the alleged “executive privilege” records by October 1.

The judge noted that no court has ever “expressly recognized” President Obama’s unprecedented executive privilege claims in the Fast and Furious matter.

Not willing to risk political damage by releasing damaging records before the mid-term elections, Justice Department lawyers asked the judge to give them an extra month, until November 3 (the day before Election Day!) to produce them. 

On September 23 Judge Bates rejected this gambit, but gave Justice until October 23rd to produce the requested index.  He also suggested that Holder--his nominal boss--didn't take the suit seriously.

Two days later Eric Holder announced his resignation.

Two days ago--October 23rd, 2014, i.e. two years after the lawsuit was filed--the Ogabe regime finally delivered, not the documents requested, but an index of 15,662 documents related to the FOIA request.  The index alone ran to 1307 pages, or about the size of the ghastly Obamacare act.

Team Obama refused to provide any of the actual documents on this index, claiming it was legally entitled to withhold every one of them--on the ground of executive privilege.

The index--called a Vaughn index--is required by law to identify each record withheld; to state the legal justification for the government's claim that the document is exempt from the FOI request; and to state why disclosure would damage the interests protected by the claimed exemption.  The Vaughn index arguably fails to provide all of this required information but does provide plenty of interesting information for a public kept in the dark for years about the Fast and Furious scandal.

Based on a preliminary review of the 1307-page index, Judicial Watch released some conclusions:
  • The index lists several emails showing Attorney General Holder’s direct involvement in crafting talking points, the timing of public disclosures, and handling congressional inquiries in the Fast and Furious operation.
  • Obama has claimed executive privilege for nearly 20 emails between Holder and his wife.
  • Numerous entries detail DOJ’s communications (including those of Eric Holder) concerning the White House about Fast and Furious.
The smoking gun here is the assertion of privilege for the emails between Holder and his wife--who is not a government employee.  It's hard to imagine how those emails can qualify for executive privilege.  By contrast, it's easy to see how Holder might have admitted something to his wife that would expose illegal acts or mere lies to congress by Holder or other administration agents.

Also, many of the documents in the index are publicly available such as letters from Congress, press clips, and typical agency communications.  It's hard to avoid the suspicion that the reason for including these public records in the index was to make it harder to find actual smoking guns.  Another strategy is that if "only" 20 or 30 documents out of 15,562 show lawbreaking by Team Ogabe, the friendly media will cite this "tiny fraction" as evidence that the incriminating documents were actually insignificant as a percentage of the entire mass of evidence.

The major takeaway from this is that Team Ogabe was able to successfully stonewall a valid lawsuit for two years, and clearly has no intention of complying with the Freedom of Information Act if doing so would hurt Democrats.

A nation of laws?  Not anymore.  Most transparent administration ever?  Utter bullshit.  But exactly what we've come to expect from Team Ogabe.

So I'm curious:  Had you heard about this before?  If so, how did you find out about it?

If not, do you think this story is newsworthy?

One reporter--one--had the balls to ask Ogabe's press secretary a pointed question about this bullshit.  You can guess what happened.  Here's that exchange:
Reporter: “The conservative group Judicial Watch has just put out a statement yesterday  saying that the president months ago invoked executive privilege on Fast & Furious included 20 e-mails between the Attorney General, his wife, and his mother. And I was wondering, did the Attorney General talk about this sensitive gun-running operation with his wife and his mother and that’s why you had to invoke executive privilege?”
Ogabe press sec: “Well, Ed, I refer you to the Department of Justice.”

Reporter: “It wasn’t Department of Justice privilege, it was executive privilege. It was invoked by the president, not the Attorney General.”
Press sec: “I can tell you that it’s the Department of Justice that can discuss those e-mails with you. What is clear is that this lawsuit that has been filed by Judicial Watch actually doesn’t have anything to do with the actual Fast & Furious operation. It has to do with e-mails and documents related to the operation. More than 7,500 pages of those documents have already been turned over to Congress, which obviously has thoroughly reviewed this situation. They’ve conducted countless interviews. the Inspector General has as well. This is something that has been thoroughly investigated.”
Reporter: “But if there was nothing sensitive in the e-mails that the Attorney General sent to his wife and mom, presumably they could have been turned over.”
Press sec: “Well I know that, again, 7,500 pages of documents were turned over both to the Inspector General as well as to Democrats and Republicans in Congress who were investigating this issue. So we have demonstrated a pretty clear commitment to legitimate oversight on this matter and others.”
Not only does the press secretary's response not answer the question the reporter asked ("Why did Obama invoke executive privilege over documents including communications between AG Eric Holder, and his wife and his mother?") but it is also breath-taking in its brazen falsity.

The Ogabe regime has made every effort to conceal, lie, stonewall and otherwise hide the truth.
Not only will "the most transparent administration ever” not tell Americans the truth, they're quite happy to stonewall a federal judge to continue to conceal a damaging truth.

The "Justice" department can't assert executive privilege.  Only the president can do that.  The reporter properly asked the secretary for the president's reasoning.  The press secretary told the reporter to ask Justice.  But as should be obvious, Justice can't assert the privilege.  In essence the press secretary refused to answer.

But for all the liberal reporters present, that "answer" was totally fine.

October 24, 2014

This may be the last gasp of American ballsi-ness.

Welcome to the last gasp of the ballsy, independent American:  The pic below is of one of the Blue Angels aerial demonstration team flying over the Golden Gate bridge--below the tops of the twin towers that support it.



Yes, yes, this prolly breaks a few FAA regulations.  Cry me a fuckin' river.

And my apologies:  After watching the Obama administration fucking up at every turn this past week, I am not feeling all that charitable to liberals, Democrats, "progressives" and those who are not our countrymen.  So...the less said the better.

Is Hillary Clinton really this dumb or is she just pandering to the Left?

Hillary Clinton was recently caught on video saying something astonishingly stupid even for her.  Take a look:



Let's re-play that:  "Don't let anybody tell you that it's corporations and businesses that create jobs."

Girls, if this is what passes for "the world's smartest woman" (yes, major publications actually did write this about her just two decades ago) y'all are in way more trouble than we thought.

Wait, I got it!  She doesn't really believe that but is just saying what she knows her hard-left supporters love to hear.

Yeah, dat's it.

October 19, 2014

Actions have consequences? Not according to liberals.

Do actions have consequences?

Most people would say the answer's obviously yes.  But it appears that many liberals and "progressives" disagree.  At least the policies they push--relentlessly--suggest they think results and outcomes are totally unrelated to choices/actions.  Or at least that poor choices shouldn't cause negative consequences.

Example:  For most people there doesn't seem to be much correlation between moderate use of, say, alcohol and future prospects of success.  But is there an obvious causal relationship if we change the drug to heroin or cocaine or meth or crack?  Most rational adults agree that there is.

Most non-liberals conclude--rather effortlessly--that if you want to succeed in life, avoid those drugs.

But to liberals and "progressives" this simply isn't fair.  Thus they will quickly argue that all difference in the outcomes of drinking alcohol vs. using meth is due to the fact that alcohol is legal while the other drugs listed above aren't.  In other words, any negative outcomes from using, say, heroin stem from this arbitrary difference in the law.

Oh, and that this different treatment is obviously caused by...wait for it...racism.

Thus the obvious idea that bad choices produce bad outcomes is ignored amid the far more incendiary charge of racism.

Or take fathering kids outside of marriage.  Despite endless studies showing that children raised by single mothers have far greater chances of dropping out of school, joining gangs, using drugs and becoming unwed mothers themselves, virtually no one in the "progressive" camp voices any criticism of this.  After all, both biological parents are consenting adults, so what makes you think you have the right to criticize their free choices?  You insist on making choices yourself but you deny others the same right!  Hypocrite!

And once again the obvious lesson--that certain choices produce...let's avoid "bad outcomes" and instead say "personally difficult outcomes"...is drowned out by the charge of racism.  Even though every one of the numerous studies show the same grim statistics apply to fatherless kids of all races.

But the government's official numbers show that the incidence of these choices is far higher among certain groups.  For example, the most recent figures available (ironically, from the CDC) show that  the percentage of births to unwed mothers, as the CDC drily notes, "vary widely by race."  For 2012 unwed mothers accounted for 40.7% of all births in the U.S.  But 72 percent of black births were to single mothers, compared to 29 percent for whites.  [page 9 at the link, 3rd 'graf] 

While being raised by two parents hardly guarantees a child will become a well-functioning adult, it's hard to find anyone who thinks single mothers are more likely to raise children with solid moral values and a strong work ethic.  And it's even harder to find a liberal who will speak out against having children outside of marriage, other than to claim that racism is somehow to blame.

Of course it's hard to see how racism causes the 29% of white births to be to unmarried mothers, but that never makes it into the debate.  Instead the race card stops all discussion.

This is not an indictment of sex, including sex outside of marriage.  When I was a young man I was fortunate enough to enjoy--immensely--the charms of wonderful, lovely girls.  I'm not remotely claiming to be "holier than thou."  My point is simply that innumerable, careful studies show that statistically, children of unwed mothers have a much smaller chance of achieving a good outcome in life.

The problem was expertly summarized by a British doctor writing under the pen name Theodore Dalrymple.  Dalyrymple had spent 14 years working as a psychologist, part of this counseling prisoners and part counseling troubled patients in the UK's government health service.  Writing a decade ago he noted that crime in the U.K had risen 12-fold between 1941 and 2011.  He noted that in 1921 there was one crime reported for every 370 inhabitants of England and Wales; 80 years later, it had skyrocketed to one reported crime for every ten residents.

His work with both abusers and multitudes of depressed young women gave him a pretty good idea of the cause of this disaster.  Surprisingly, it wasn't poverty:
I believe having children by men without considering even for a second whether the men have any qualities that might make them good fathers is a huge evil. Mistakes are possible, of course: a man may turn out not to be as expected. But not even to consider this question is to act as irresponsibly as it is possible for a human being to act. It is a thoroughly bad thing. And sooner or later it will have consequences.

My patient [a young woman who had had three children with three different men without ever marrying] did not start out with the intention of abetting, much less of committing, evil. And yet her refusal to act on the signs she saw and the knowledge she had was not due to ignorance. It was utterly willful. She knew from her own experience--and that of most of the women around her--that her choices, based on the desire of the moment, would lead to the misery and suffering not only for her, but also for the children she would have with these men.

This is not so much the banality as the frivolity of evil: choosing brief pleasure for oneself at the cost of long-term misery for one's own child. What better phrase than the frivolity of evil describes the conduct of a mother who turns her own 14-year-old child out because her latest boyfriend does not want him or her in the house?

And what better phrase describes the attitude of those intellectuals who see in this conduct nothing but an extension of human freedom and choice, just another thread in life's rich tapestry?

The men in these situations also know perfectly well the meaning and consequences of what they are doing. The same day that I saw the patient just described, a man of 25 came into our ward, needing an operation to remove foil-wrapped packets of cocaine he had swallowed in order to evade being caught by the police in possession of them. As it happened, he had just left his latest girlfriend--one week after she had given birth to their child. They weren't getting along, he said; he needed his space. Of the child, he thought not for an instant.

I asked him whether he had any other children.

"Four," he said.

"How many mothers?"

"Three."

"Do you see any of your children?"  He shook his head.

It is supposedly the duty of the doctor not to pass judgment on how patients have chosen to live, but perhaps I raised an eyebrow slightly. At any rate the patient caught a whiff of my disapproval.

"I know," he said. "I know. Don't tell me."

These words were a complete confession of guilt. I've had hundreds of conversations with men who had abandoned their children like this, and they all knew perfectly well the consequences for both the mother--and more important, for the children. They all know that they are condemning their children to lives of brutality, poverty, abuse, and hopelessness. They tell me they know this. And yet they do it over and over again.

The result is a rising tide of neglect, cruelty, sadism, and willful malignity.

Where does this evil come from? Clearly something is flawed in the heart of man that he should behave in this depraved fashion. But if there was a time--not that long ago--when such conduct was far more rare than it is now (and in a time of much less prosperity, which must be remembered by those who think poverty explains everything), then something more is needed to explain it.

It seems to me one obvious root of this problem is the welfare state, which makes it possible--often advantageous--to behave like this. The state, guided by the seemingly humane philosophy that no child should be deprived, gives assistance to the mothers. Considering just the matter of pocketing benefits, it is actually advantageous for a mother to be single and have no support from her child's father, as this exempts her from local taxes, rent, and utility bills.

As for the fathers, the state absolves them of all responsibility for their children. The biological father is therefore free to use whatever income he has for his own pleasure. He becomes petulant, demanding, querulous, self-centered, and violent if he doesn't get his own way. The violence escalates and becomes a habit. A spoiled brat becomes an evil tyrant.

But the welfare state is only part of the cause of the spread of evil.  To produce current rates of social pathology--the rates of public drunkenness, drug-taking, teenage pregnancy and crime in the U.K. are the highest in the world--requires something more than just the welfare state.

The answer lies in the realm of culture and ideas. For it is necessary not only that it be economically feasible to behave irresponsibly and selfishly, but also that people believe it's *morally permissible* to live this way. And this idea has been peddled by the intellectual elite in Britain for many years, more assiduously than anywhere else, to the extent that it is now off limits to question it.

Many of those on the Left claim man is endowed with rights but no duties. If this is true, people have the right to have children outside of marriage, and the children have the right not to be deprived of anything, at least anything material. How men and women choose to associate and have children is then merely a matter of consumer choice, of no moral consequence.

The Left claims the state must not discriminate among different forms of association and child rearing, even if the result is shown to be catastrophic.

The Left has convinced us that we are not allowed even to consider the consequences of such choices--to the children, and ultimately to society.  Instead it becomes the task of the state to redistribute wealth (via taxes) to minimize the material costs of individual irresponsibility to the adults involved, and to ameliorate its inevitable emotional, educational, and spiritual effects by employing an army of social workers, psychologists, educators, counselors and the like.

Significantly, this army have themselves come to form a powerful vested interest in continuing the pattern of dependence on the government.

So while my patients know in their hearts that what they are doing is terribly wrong, they are encouraged by the Left to do it anyway--that they have the right to do it--because everything is merely a matter of value-free choice, with no consequences to themselves for making poor choices.
Almost no one in Britain publicly challenges this belief, nor has any politician had the courage to demand a withdrawal of the public subsidy that allows the intensifying evil I have seen over the past 14 years-- violence, rape, intimidation, cruelty, drug addiction, neglect--to flourish so exuberantly.

With 40 percent of children in Britain now being born out of wedlock--a number that continues to rise--soon it will no longer be possible to reverse these policies by electoral means.  Even now politicians consider advocating any change along these lines to be electoral suicide.

My only cause for optimism during the past 14 years has been the fact that most of my patients can be brought to see the truth of what I say: that they are not depressed but just unhappy--because they have chosen to live in a way that makes it impossible to be happy. Without exception they say they wouldn't want their children to live as they have lived, but the role model they provide makes it likely that their children's choices will be as bad as theirs.

The greatest factor in the continuing social disaster that has overtaken Britain--a disaster whose full social and economic consequences have yet to be seen--is the moral cowardice of the intellectual and political elites. The elites cannot even acknowledge that we *have* a disaster--obvious as it is--for to do so would open the door to recognizing their responsibility for it, and that would make them feel bad.

Better that millions should live in wretchedness than that the elites should feel bad about themselves--yet another aspect of the frivolity of evil. 
To this insight I can only add that when Dalrymple wrote the above article in 2004, 40 percent of all births in the U.K were to unmarried women.  In the U.S. we've now reached 40.7 percent of all births--and an astonishing 72 percent for blacks.

The figures are even worse when you look at births to teenage girls, since these girls are arguably the least-prepared to undertake single motherhood.  According to the CDC a stunning 90 percent of all births to teenage girls were to unmarried girls.

But don't worry, citizen:  The emperor has everything under control.

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CNN slips up, quickly covers to make enterovirus outbreak into a non-issue

Sometimes the information managers on Team Obama get careless, and a piece of information gets into print before they can stop it.  That appears to be the case in CNN's reporting on enterovirus D68.  Here's what CNN had to say on September 9th:
It's a type of enterovirus that's uncommon but not new.  It was first identified in the 1960s and there have been fewer than 100 reported cases since that time
So...this particular variant has only caused 100 cases since 1962.  But just a week later--September 16th--here's CNN again.  See if you can spot the difference.

(CNN) -- Since mid-August, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed more than 100 cases of Enterovirus D68 in 12 states: Alabama, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, New York and Oklahoma.

Enteroviruses are very common, especially in the early fall. The CDC estimates that 10 million to 15 million infections occur in the United States each year.
Wow, now the CDC estimates that "enteroviruses" cause ten to 15 million infections every year??  Gosh, that seems odd, since just a week earlier CNN reported that only 100 cases had been reported since 1962.  What could account for such a huge discrepancy? 

What this is is damage control.  CNN's earlier story--only 100 cases since 1962--accidentally made it clear that Obama's order to let 66,000 illegal immigrant kids into the country was a disaster, because there have now been well over a hundred cases in just the past four months.  And we're not even close to stopping the spread.

The story had to be countered, and fast, or the Democrats were gonna lose even worse in November.  Solution!  Run a story that makes it look like the new cases are totally, ridiculously insignificant.  They did it by blurring the difference between the D68 strain of the virus and other, far less dangerous enteroviruses.  By noting that "enteroviruses are very common" and "cause 10 to 15 million infections in the U.S. every year" the average reader is persuaded that there's no real danger.

And just like that, a potentially costly issue becomes a non-issue.


October 18, 2014

There's a precedent for how Team Obama will handle Ebola: Enterovirus D-68

As every well-informed American should know, three years ago Obama unilaterally decreed that U.S. immigration law was no longer operative.

You say you didn't know that?  Not entirely your fault--the Obama-loving media didn't tell you.  Because if they'd screamed about that as they would have if Bush had done the same thing, congress would have had to seriously consider impeachment.  Cuz the Constitution just doesn't allow a president to do that.  But Obama--who doesn't think the Constitution constrains him--did it anyway.

But that lawless act--which Obama, his Democrat supporters and the lying media cleverly gave the totally innocuous name of "Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals"--was just the first round.  Begining in October of last year Obama also ordered federal employees to allow all “unaccompanied minors” illegally entering the U.S. at our southern border to stay here indefinitely.  In fact, Obama ordered immigration agents to fly the illegals to dozens of U.S. cities far from the border.

Between Oct. 1, 2013 and Aug. 31 of this year Obama's order allowed 66,127 illegal alien minors to enter the U.S.  And note that this is the official figure released by the Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP).  Again by order of federal officials, most of the illegals are now attending U.S. public schools.

Earlier this year U.S. schools began seeing  cases of a new infection, called "enterovirus D-68."  The symptoms included breathing problems and sometimes paralysis.  Because most of the infections occurred where illegals were in schools, the suspicion was that they'd brought the virus with them.

Now some proof has been uncovered:  In 2013 the Defense Department conducted a study of 3,375 patients in Central and South America with flu-like illness, and found EV-D68 in some of the test subjects.  All test subjects were age 25 or under.

The CDC now reports that cases of EV-D68 have been seen in 43 states as well as the District of Columbia.  The virus has now killed four U.S. kids and has left others with breathing problems and limb paralysis.

So this is why you shouldn't worry about Ebola, citizen.  Cuz the excellent experience the emperor's administration has gained with D-68 shows that they've got what it takes to control Ebola.

Western liberals largely silent as ISIS tortures and kills Christians and takes their women as prisoners

It would seem that many Western liberals and "progressives" hate Christianity so much that they're willing to ignore or even condone atrocities committed by Muslims against Christians.  As far as western libs are concerned, they have the same goal of defeating/eliminating Christianity as ISIS terrorists, so why would they object to Muslims helping their joint cause?

Of course you think that's just tinfoil-hat paranoia, but consider this:  Western liberals are huge supporters of gay marriage, the gay lifestyle and women's rights.  But you never hear a peep of protest from them when Iranian mullahs execute gays in Iran, or support the stoning of rape victims on the outrageous charges of adultery.

Their actions--or inactions--speak eloquently to their true beliefs and goals.

We already had a "health epidemic" czar. Why hasn't anyone heard from her?

Yesterday, with huge fanfare and swooning from the Lying Media the emperor appointed an "Ebola czar"--a Democratic hack with zero medical experience but a lush background in funneling taxpayer cash to Democratic donors.

As the liberals and "progressives" were shouting their praise for the emperor's brilliance a couple of folks noted that the government already has an "office for public health threat preparedness and response."  In fact, it's such a big deal that the Department of Health and Human "Services" has an "assistant secretary for preparedness and response," tasked with developing plans and strategies to counter threats like Ebola.

So why did Obama need a new czar when the gummint was already paying this assistant secretary for preparedness and response?  And who is this assistant secretary for preparedness and why haven't they been on the nightly news every evening reassuring everyone about how well prepared the Obama administration is to respond to this threat?  As the government official in charge of preparedness, why hasn't the Lying Media been getting hourly statements from her?

The assistant secretary for preparedness and response is Dr. Nicole Lurie.  And a search shows she's been totally invisible during the current crisis.  Why would that be?

To find out you need to read a story in Los Angeles Times from three years ago.  “Cost, need questioned in $433-million smallpox drug deal: A company controlled by a longtime political donor gets a no-bid contract to supply an experimental remedy for a threat that may not exist.”

No-bid contracts are huge warning signs, for obvious reasons.  If a company owned by a Republican fundraiser had gotten a $433 million no-bid contract for some military procurement item, Democrats and the media would have screamed bloody murder--and reasonably so.  But in this case the company was controlled by billionaire Democrat Ron Perelman.

The contract was arranged and awarded by Dr. Lurie's office.

Competitors complained about the contract on several grounds, which is why the Times wrote the story.  The Times article revealed that during the fight over the no-bid contract Lurie wrote to the company’s chief executive, Dr. Eric A. Rose, to tell him that someone new would be taking over the negotiations with the company. She wrote, “I trust this will be satisfactory to you.” Later she denied that she’d had any contact with Rose regarding the contract, saying such contact would have been inappropriate.

BTW, I know you'll be shocked to learn that the "experimental remedy" the no-bid contract was awarded for didn't pan out, and the company has filed for bankruptcy.

There's no way to tell if this is the reason Team Obama has been keeping Lurie in isolation, but it's a good bet.  A competent administration would have fired her, but of course that would have called attention to the very scandal they wanted to cover up.  Better to let her keep her position, salary and retirement benefits, and just keep her out of the public eye.

Optics, see.  If they just manage the optics, all threats and scandals will just vanish, all by themselves.

Hey, you've got an emperor who said that when he was elected the rise of the seas stopped.  It doesn't take any more stupidity to believe that managing optics and news actually solves problems.
===

Kudos to Mollie Hemingway for breaking this story.

October 17, 2014

Leftist writer for Slate oozes contempt for volunteer missionary medical care in Africa

One of the most consistent behaviors of Leftists is their demonization of Christians.  The list of examples is endless.  Talk-show hosts on MSNBC have accused Christians of being as barbaric as members of ISIS--and they seem to be serious about that.

Last week Slate writer Brian Palmer gave us yet another example, whining about those awful Christian missionaries and the awful, substandard, unregulated, uncontrolled medical care they give--give--to sick people in poor countries.  How dare they!  Here are a few of his remarks:
Missionary doctors and nurses are stationed throughout Africa, in rural outposts and urban slums.  A large number of them have undertaken long-term commitments to address the health problems of poor Africans.  And yet for secular Americans—or religious Americans who prefer their medicine to be focused more on science than faith—it may be difficult to shake a bit of discomfort with the situation. 
He just implied that Christian health volunteers base their "treatment" more on faith than on science.
Our historic ambivalence toward missionary medicine has crystallized into suspicion over the past several decades. It’s great that these people are doing God’s work, but do they have to talk about Him so much?
He's complaining that missionaries who provide volunteer medical treatment talk about God too much?  What a whiny son of a bitch.
Missionaries have been dealing with this kind of criticism for a very, very long time. More than a century ago the undercurrent of discontent with missionary work had already become so widespread that experienced missionary James Levi Barton penned a book-length defense of his career. Many of his points are, even to my modern ears, reasonably persuasive. No one complains when the West crams its commercial values down the throats of Africans, Indians, and Chinese, he pointed out in 1908. We insist that these unfortunate, uncivilized people buy our wheat flour and bicycles, even though rice and rickshaws are probably just as good. How is that different from what missionaries do?  They simply offer Christianity rather than consumerism.
It doesn't surprise me a bit that a leftist believes we "cram" our values--both commercial and religious, according to this guy--down the throats of locals.  Seems to me that having a machine that mills wheat into flour frees up a lot of time for anyone who eats wheat products.  One expects that the next complaint from this asshole will be about refrigerators, or buses.  After all, "rickshaws are probably just as good," right?

I'll bet you the drink of your choice that this asshole Palmer has never, ever pulled a rickshaw.
The Ebola crisis, and the role missionaries are playing in it, has brought dislike of missionary work out into the open. When an infected American missionary was flown back to the United States for treatment, Donald Trump griped that do-gooders trying to save Africa should be prepared to “suffer the consequences.” Ann Coulter called the doctor “idiotic,” and asked of his mission to Africa, “What was the point?”
Obviously Trump and Coulter don’t speak for the majority of Americans. Trump is a publicity-obsessed birther who says he “couldn’t care less” what doctors say about vaccines. Coulter somehow manages to be more offensive than Trump, calling the president childish names and insisting that God wants us to “rape” the earth.
Still, a fair number of Americans were thinking a less offensive form of what those two shock merchants wrote. I’ll hold my own hand up. I don’t feel good about missionary medicine, even though I can’t fully articulate why.
Let me take a shot at that one, Brian:  You're scornful of missionary medical volunteers because you hate Christians, because as an athiest you've made a tacit bet that God doesn't exist; that Christ was a hoax, that the Bible is allegory, total fiction.  You have absolutely no evidence for any of this but all your cool, trendy friends think the same way, so why would you buck the popular kids?

Plus, it's so easy to mock Christians as being dumber than you.  Uneducated.  Gullible.  For someone with your vast intellect this is like shooting fish in a barrel.
There are a few legitimate reasons to question the missionary model, starting with the troubling lack of data in missionary medicine. When I write about medical issues, I usually spend hours scouring PubMed, a research publications database from the National Institutes of Health, for data to support my story.

You can’t do that with missionary work, because few organizations produce the kind of rigorous, peer-reviewed data that is required in the age of evidence-based medicine. A few years ago in the Lancet, Samuel Loewenberg wrote that there is “no way to calculate the number of missionaries currently operating in Tanzania,” the country he was reporting on. How can we know if they’re effective, or how to improve the health care systems they participate in, if we don’t even know how many missionary doctors there are?
 Exactly!  We don't know how many there are!  This makes the whole enterprise suspect!  We can't quantify any benefits!  We have no way to compute the standard deviation of the frumious hypotenuse!  So they're worthless!  Worse than worthless, because they...talk about God!  Or even worse...Jesus!

And Palmer is just getting started.

There are serious questions about the quality of care provided by religious organizations in Africa. A 2008 report by the African Religious Heath Assets Programme concluded that faith-based facilities were “often severely understaffed and many health workers were under-qualified.” 
Wait...you mean to tell us that missionary medical volunteers aren't all graduates of Hahvahd med school?  Why, that's awful!  And you say that a report says they're often "severely understaffed"?  Why that's...that's...disgraceful!  I think the Obama administration should ban all missionary work until they can pass OSHA exams and keep time cards and pay overtime to all their volunteers!
There is also a troubling lack of oversight. Large religious health care facilities tend to be consistent in their care, but the hundreds, if not thousands, of smaller clinics in Africa are a mystery. We don’t know whether missionary doctors are following international standards of care. (I’ve heard murmurs among career international health specialists that missionaries may be less likely to wear appropriate protective equipment, which is especially troubling in the context of the Ebola outbreak.) We don’t know what happens to the patients who rely on missionary doctors if and when the caregivers return to their home countries. 
Exactly!  If and when the...we'll be generous and call them "caregivers" even though we're very skeptical that they actually provide any actual medical "care"...return to the U.S., what happens to their patients?  Because even though we're pretty sure Christian missionaries aren't really providing any real, you know, medical care--at least not the "science-based" care we use here in the U.S.--we're gonna complain that if the Christians have the gall to return to the U.S., their uncared-for patients will be left, uh...without care.  Which they weren't getting from the missionaries, you understand, but now it'll be worse than before.

And you have to believe us because we went to Hahvahd, and we work for the emperor!
There are extremely weak medical malpractice laws (and even weaker court systems to enforce them) in much of sub-Saharan Africa, so we have no sense whatsoever of how many mistakes missionary doctors are making. We don’t know how many missionaries are helping to train new doctors and nurses in the countries where they work—the current emphasis of international health delivery.
Exactly!  Because everybody knows that without lots of malpractice lawsuits we can't be sure people are getting effective medical care!  Those bumpkins may be making just boatloads of mistakes with their patients, and our government has no way of knowing!  Us liberals think we need a new gummint agency to monitor the quality of care these charlatans are giving people overseas.
And yet, truth be told, these valid critiques [really?  says you?] don’t fully explain my discomfort with missionary medicine. If we had thousands of secular doctors doing exactly the same work, I would probably excuse most of these flaws. “They’re doing work no one else will,” I would say. “You can’t expect perfection.”
So he flatly admits that if exectly the same work were being done by secular docs he'd "probably excuse most of these flaw."  Utter hypocrisy.
I’m not altogether proud of this bias—I’m just trying to be honest. In his Lancet article, Lowenberg quotes a missionary who insists he does not proselytize, even though he tells his patients, “I’m treating you because of what God has given me and his love for me.” That statement—which strikes me as obvious proselytizing— suggests that some missionaries are incapable of separating their religious work from their medical work. Whether implicitly or explicitly, some missionaries pressure their patients, at moments of maximum vulnerability and desperation, to convert.
And there we have it:  Palmer's other charges are transparent bullshit, but this is the nexus:  the fear that the Christian missionaries might take advantage of a patient's illness to "pressure" them to--gasp!--convert.
That troubles me. I suspect that many others have the same visceral discomfort with the mingling of religion and health care.
One suspects that in Palmer's perfect, left-ruled world, desperately ill patients would be barred from praying.  Although he'd probably agree that they could pray to some government agency.
Like it or not, we are deeply reliant on missionary doctors and nurses. The ARHAP report found that in some sub-Saharan African countries 30 percent of health care facilities are run by religious entities. That system is crumbling due to declining funding, possibly motivated in part by growing Western suspicion of missionary medicine. We have a choice: Swallow our objections and support these facilities, spend vast sums of money to build up Africa’s secular health care capacity immediately, or watch the continent drown in Ebola, HIV, and countless other disease outbreaks.


How'd that "#BringBackOurGirls hashtag program work?

Six months ago Muslim terrorists in Nigeria kidnapped more than 200 school girls from their government school.
 
Team Obama--outspoken supporters of the rights of women and girls against the terrible depredations of Republicans--immediately mobilized...who?  Special Forces?  Air Cav?  Specter gunships?

Oh no.  Because Obama won a Nobel peace prize, so...you know, he doesn't like to use force against bad guys.  Plus, Boko Haram aren't really bad guys.  Just...oh, freedom fighters.  Or something.

So Team Ogabe mobilized a brigade of...writers.  Who came up with...a hashtag: #BringBackOurGirls.  Because Obama is a better foreign policy analyst than his analysts.  So he was sure this would work.

And whaddya know?  Just one month later the Muslim terrorist group released the girls!

Oh, wait, my bad:  They didn't.  One managed to escape but the rest are still missing. 

But by golly we sure won the P.R. war!  Yep, totally cleaned their clocks!

And for progressives, that's the most important thing:  Winning the PR war.

The al-Qaeda affiliate dashed across the border into Cameroon, kidnapping the wife of Vice Prime Minister Amadou Ali. Sahara Reporters revealed this weekend that Boko Haram got four of its commanders released from prison in exchange for her return and the release of other hostages, along with at least $400,000 and a nice cache of arms and ammunition.

But Team Obama's State Department has everything under control.  Our ambassador to Nigeria, James Entwistle, offered this keen insight on the terror group:
“There are still some open questions on who they are, what they want,” he said.

Sorry, what?  You say you don't know "who they are"?  Let me help you: the group recently hailed self-proclaimed caliph Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi and al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.  So, um...it would seem they're an al-Qaeda affiliate.

But Entwistle wasn't finished: 
A year ago I would have said they were religiously motivated. But as they killed more and more Muslims, it’s hard for me to believe that they were motivated by religion.  I don’t think we really understand them.
And there you have the official position of Obama and minions:  'We have no idea who these people are but we're absolutely sure they have nothing whatsoever to do with Islam.'

And by the way, Mr. ambassador:  The girls kidnapped by the Muslim terrorists were overwhelmingly Christian.  The Muslim terrorists have been attacking Christian towns.  So while the terrorists may have killed some Muslims by accident or carelessness, their main targets have been Christians.  But we wouldn't expect you to be candid about that.

October 13, 2014

Joy Reid is an idiot. Here's the evidence.

If I understand correctly Joy Reid is a) a far-leftist; and b) dumb as a box of rocks.  As proof, she recently tweeted that
so far, the only "spread of Ebola" in the U.S. was caused by a private hospital in a red state.
Got that?  The spread was caused by a private hospital.  Oh yeah.  Had nothing to do with Obama refusing to ban commercial flights direct from infected countries to the U.S.

Has nothing to do with the fact that even though the so-called experts still aren't totally sure that the virus can't be spread through the air, they've *claimed* that it can't, and assured y'all that it's perfectly safe to be near people who are infected.  But they don't know for sure.

Eh, move on, citizen.  Nothing to see here.  The emperor and his minions have everything under control.  All is going as planned.

October 12, 2014

CDC director writes long piece on why banning commercial flights will make things worse. But...

CDC Director Tom Friedman wrote an article for Fox News on why we should NOT ban flights from nations with large numbers of Ebola patients.

The article is filled with contradictions and faulty logic.  One possible but unlikely explanation is that Friedman is really that stupid.  The other is that Friedman is a standard Democrat hack who believes Americans are stupid and can be lied to brazenly and with impunity.  You decide:
The first case of Ebola diagnosed in the United States has caused some to call on the United States to ban travel for anyone from the countries in West Africa facing the worst of the Ebola epidemic.

That response is understandable. It’s only human to want to protect ourselves and our families. We want to defend ourselves, so isn’t the fastest, easiest solution to put up a wall around the problem?

But...[that would be] wrong. 
We don't want to isolate parts of the world... [1]
Nice use of the "royal we."  That's your and Obama's unsupported assertion.  Obviously you didn't ask the American public.
...or people who aren't sick, because that's going to drive patients with Ebola underground, making it infinitely more difficult to address the outbreak.
You claim banning travel will drive patients underground?  Sorry, that's bullshit.  As it stands now people who believe they're infected will deny being in a risk group if it will get them on a plane to the U.S.  What new and more damaging reaction do you claim will happen with a ban?
A travel ban is not the right answer.  It’s simply not feasible to build a wall – virtual or real – around a community, city, or country.
Simply not feasible?  That sounds like bullshit.  If you mean it's not possible to have one that's 100% effective, fine.  But 95% would help, as you surely know.  You're using non-sequiturs because the low-info voter and the gullible fraction of the elite will buy your argument.
A travel ban would essentially quarantine the more than 22 million people that make up the combined populations of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea.
That's the point, eh?  Besides, didn't you just claim it "simply wasn't feasible to build a [virtual] wall"?  Why yes, you did.  Which way do you want to go?  Another clue that you're blowing smoke.
When a wildfire breaks out we don't fence it off. We go in to extinguish it before one of the random sparks sets off another outbreak somewhere else.
When a wildfire breaks out, people bulldoze firebreaks to help keep the fire from spreading.  Ever heard of 'em?  Does that mean firefighters can't go into the hot zone?  Of course not.  Again, your transparently faulty arguments suggest you're bullshitting us.  Surely you don't believe the shit you're spouting.
Stopping planes from flying from West Africa would severely limit the ability of Americans to return to the United States or of people with dual citizenship to get home, wherever that may be.
First, you say "stopping *planes* from flying..."  As you know, that hasn't been proposed.  Instead the proposal is to stop *commercial flights.*  Chartered jets could still operate, as could military and government flights.  You're deliberately misquoting the proposal to support your point--yet another indication that you're bullshitting.
In addition to not stopping the spread of Ebola, isolating countries [2] will make it harder to respond to Ebola, creating an even greater humanitarian and health care emergency.
Nonsense.  Again, what's been proposed is to stop commercial flights.  Governments can fly in any amount of medical supplies and specialists.
Importantly, isolating countries [3] won’t keep Ebola contained and away from American shores.  Paradoxically, it will increase the risk that Ebola will spread in those countries and to other countries, and that we will have more patients who develop Ebola in the U.S.
Again you misquote.  The proposal is NOT to "isolate" but to keep sick people from boarding commercial flights.  No one claims this will *prevent* infected people from making it to the U.S but it will most certainly reduce the number who do so.  As for your claim that "isolating" (as you misconstrue it) "will increase the risk that the virus will spread in those countries, and to other countries, and that we will have more patients who develop Ebola in the U.S," this is just bullshit.  Again, you're free to fly in all the aid you and Barack want to to help end the epidemic.  Stopping commercial flights won't hinder you one iota.  And you know it.
People will move between countries, even when governments restrict travel and trade. And that kind of travel becomes almost impossible to track.
Clever.  Hard to disagree that "People will move between countries," but every time I've travelled overseas people had to have things called "passports," which neatly logged all transit points.  Of course it's possible that under Obama's open-borders policy that's now been scrapped.  Wouldn't surprise any of us.
Isolating communities [4] also increases people’s distrust of government, making them less likely to cooperate to help stop the spread of Ebola.
Isolating communities and regions [5] within countries will also backfire. Restricting travel or trade to and from a community makes the disease spread more rapidly in the isolated area, eventually putting the rest of the country at even greater risk. 
Again, mischaracterizing the proposal.  And can you provide *any* manner of support for your claim that restricting outbound travel will make the disease spread more rapidly?  Take your time.  We'll wait.
To provide relief to West Africa, borders must remain open and commercial flights must continue.
Oh, so you *do* recognize that the proposal is only a ban on commercial flights!  But you just mischaracterized that five times as "isolating."  So you evidently know there there's a difference.
There is no more effective way to protect the United States against additional Ebola cases than to address this outbreak at the source in West Africa. That’s what our international response—including the stepped-up measures the president announced last month—will do.
To claim "there is no more effective way to protect the U.S." is an unsupported--and illogical-- assertion.  And again, no part of the proposal--which you finally correctly described--will prevent any amount of "addressing" the epicdemic at the source.  As. You. Well. Know.
What works most effectively for quelling disease outbreaks like Ebola is not quarantining huge populations.
Illogical and unsupported assertion.  How many times will you repeat that?
What *works* is focusing on and isolating the sick and those in direct contact with them as they are at highest risk of infection.
You just wrote that "What *works* is...isolating the sick and those in direct contact with them..."  Wait, surely that has to be a typo--because you just got through writing *five times* above that
    "We don't want to isolate parts of the world..." [1]
    "Isolating countries will make it harder to respond..." [2]
    "isolating countries won’t keep Ebola...away from American shores. [3]
    "Isolating communities also increases people’s distrust of government, making them less likely to cooperate to help stop the spread...[4]
    "Isolating communities and regions...will...backfire." [5]

So you inveigh against isolating "parts of the world" and "countries" and "communities" but then say that isolation *works*--as long as we're merely isolating "the sick and those in direct contact with them."  Yes and yes.  And that's what the ban on easy exits by commercial airline will do.

And. You. Know. That.
This strategy worked with SARS and it worked during the H1N1 flu pandemic. Casting too wide a net, such as invoking travel bans, would only provide an illusion of security and would lead to prejudice and stigma around those in West Africa.
Sorry, but if it comes down to a choice between letting more people with Ebola board commercial flights to the U.S. and allowing "prejudice and stigma around those in West Africa," as far as I'm concerned that's no contest.  But I understand that for you and your boss, preventing more Ebola from coming to the U.S. is far less important than keeping the floodgates open.
Americans can be reassured we are taking measures to protect citizens here.  Today all outbound passengers from Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone are screened for Ebola symptoms before they board an airplane.
Really?  Cuz the people on-scene report the only screening methods being used are asking passengers if they're at risk or feel sick, and scanning 'em with non-contact thermometers.  The latter is laughable because the people operating the scanners don't know how to use 'em, having reported body temperatures equivalent to 80 degrees F.  I.e. not possible for living humans.
Staff from CDC and [DHS "Border Protection"] will begin new layers of entry screening, first at [JFK] and in the following week at four additional airports -- Dulles, Newark, Chicago and Atlanta.  [T]hese U.S. airports receive almost 95 percent of U.S.-bound travelers from the Ebola-affected countries.
How canny of you to tell sick Liberians which airports will have the screening.  Lets 'em choose Miami, Dallas or Detroit instead.  But hey, we've come to expect that sort of moronic behavior from Obozo's appointees.  You guys know politics infinitely well; street smarts a bit lacking.
Travelers from those countries will be escorted to an area of the airport set aside for screening. There they will be observed for signs of illness, asked a series of health and exposure questions, and given information on Ebola and information on monitoring themselves for symptoms for 21 days. Their temperature will be checked, and if there’s any concern about their health, they’ll be referred to the local public health authority for further evaluation or monitoring.
But by then they're already here, eh?  And have already had a chance to infect who knows how many fellow passengers.  But of course you're fine with that because...how did you put it?  Oh yeah:  We don't want to allow "prejudice and stigma around those in West Africa."
Controlling Ebola at its source – in West Africa – is how we will win this battle. When countries are isolated, we cannot get medical supplies and personnel efficiently to where they’re needed...
There you go with the "When countries are isolated" crap again.  That has not been proposed.
As the WHO's Gregory Hartl said recently, “Travel restrictions don’t stop a virus. If airlines stop flying to West Africa, we can’t get the people that we need to combat this outbreak, and we can’t get the food and the fuel and other supplies that people there need to survive.”
Again, stopping commercial flights doesn't prevent medical workers and supplies from getting in or out.  Plus no country flies in fuel or food.  As. You. Well. Know.  The volumes needed are orders-of-magnitude too large.  Those things are coming in by land or sea.
We know how to stop Ebola: by isolating and treating patients, tracing and monitoring their contacts, and breaking the chains of transmission.
Again, after claiming six times above how counterproductive and/or useless "isolation" would be, you're now fine with isolating *patients*--which of course is the purpose of banning commercial flights:  Don't let sick people get out of the affected area.  Stop the transmission.  Yes.  We agree.  But for political reasons alone, you claim banning commercial flights won't accomplish that.  Yet all your objections to that measure are specious.

Short answer:  You're spouting bullshit--likely because that's what your boss wants.

Either that or you're dumber than a box of rocks.

Oh, and...UPDATE!  A nurse who treated the Liberian patient in Dallas has tested positive for the virus.  CDC director Friedman says "We may see more cases in the next few days" and claims the nurse's infection was caused by a "breach of protocol."  But...get this...he was unable to say what the alleged "breach" was!  In fact, here's the quote:
"The fact we don't know of a breach in protocol is concerning, because clearly there was."
Locals say there was no breach of protection protocol.  So who should you believe?

Friedman's lengthy article cited above shows that he's a bald-faced liar who's willing to say anything--no matter how absurd, illogical and unscientific--to please Obama, which suggests he's probably not a reliable source of accurate information.

But hey, don't worry, citizen!  The emperor and his minions have everything totally under control.  Cuz...well, faith in God is absurd but all cool, hip people believe in "hope and change."  So there ya go.

Hey, that's cool.  Democrats think we have too many people in the world anyway, so I'm guessing they'll be delighted with current events. 

Believe the Emperor, bitchez.  He knows best.  You bet.

Obama fellators whine that their Precioussss "has endured a brutal two years.." Really?

According to that Dem-loving rag The Hill,
Obama has endured a brutal two years since his reelection, with a legislative agenda stalled and his approval ratings in the dumps.
Say what?  Let's see here: 
   Has he actually introduced any legislation and lost a vote on it?  No. 
   Has any mainstream newspaper or network blasted him?  No.
   Have any of the dozens of major scandals--illegal behavior by the IRS, breaking U.S. laws to ship heavy guns to Mexican drug cartels, a huge no-bid contract granted to a Canadian IT company whose V.P. was a college friend of Moochelle, clearly fraudulent draft registration card released by the White House as authentic Obama registration; Obama directing Hawaii officials not to release his "long form" birth certificate; disastrous rollout of Obamacare; clear and repeated lies about "If you like your doctor and your insurance you can keep them," Benghazi--the list is huge--but has the press gone into attack mode on ANY of those?

Not only no but hell no.  The mainstream media is still defending him at every turn.

So cry me a fucking river, Democrats.

So what if his approval rating is under 40%.  How, exactly, does that make his life worse in any tangible way--let alone "brutal"?  It doesn't.

And yet there are The Hill's editors:  Waaah!  Our Preciousss has endured a *brutal* two years since his re-election. 

He's endured jack-shit.  He's played 200 rounds of golf.  Taken tons of vacations.  Brutal how, exactly? 

You worthless jackoffs.  "Brutal," my ass.

October 07, 2014

Does the emperor know the difference between good and evil?

Like many of us, Roger Simon is stunned by the number of Obama policies that seem to be either designed to produce bad result or are just incompetent.  He wondered whether Obama knew the difference between good and evil.  Which prompted a commenter there to ask,
When in Obama's life would he have been taught that there was a difference?  Certainly not from his socialist mother, or from his series of fathers, nor from his K-12 schools.  Certainly not from his Occidental or Harvard faculty, not from Bill Ayres or Jerimiah Wright or any of the Chicago Way crowd. Not from his Idi Amin dorm wall poster. Not from his original New Left Party, and not from the New Left Democrats. Not from the news media. Not from his slum lord confidante Valerie Jarret.

There doesn't seem to be a single person in his entire circle of relatives, friends, advisors, teachers, mentors, and stooges who possesses a moral compass.
 But he's a great community organizer.  So there's that.

October 06, 2014

The elites respond to Ebola. Wait...


The World Health Organization is a bureaucrat's dream:  get paid a lot and no one checks to see if you really show up.  In a recent interview in the Guardian, the virologist who discovered Ebola criticized WHO's response to the deadly outbreak in West Africa.  He believes the bureaucrats at WHO were, um...less than effective, and cites a reason:
it was because their African regional office isn’t staffed with the most capable people but with political appointees.
Details appeared an article in NDT, citing Medecins Sans Frontieres officials who say the regional directors of WHO simply didn't respond to Ebola. “In all the meetings I attended...I never saw a representative of the WHO,” said the deputy director of operations for MSF Switzerland.  WHO claims they didn't react because their subordinates didn't give them details of the bad news.

In a crisis the first instinct of bureaucracies is to maintain the appearance of control.

When a threat appears, bureaucracies usually go through 3 phases.  Denial, then confident half-measures, and finally panic. These phases are remarkably constant throughout history.

When reality finally overcomes denial a surprised and embarrassed bureaucracy applies half-measures to defeat the insolent threat.  Half-measures because taking fully effective steps--steps that would scare the public--would be a tacit admission they made a mistake in their earlier denials that there was a serious threat.

And admitting error is something they simply cannot bring themselves to do.  Admitting error is hard for most people and damn near impossible for bureaucrats and others who are accustomed to being "in charge" and to being deferred to by "ordinary" humans.  Thus the threat is treated as a minor nuisance and flunkeys are sent to deal with it so that the ballroom music can resume.

"Don’t worry ladies and gentlemen, we have the situation completely under control."

For example, having only recently assured Americans that ISIS/al-Qaeda was "a JV team" Obama could only bring himself to authorize a limited response of airstrikes against them.

Finally, when the half-measures don’t work there is finally panic;  full-blown, shameless panic which typically results in the demand by "authorities" for absolute power to contain a crisis which only last week they declared did not exist or wasn't a threat.  So now the very same WHO that denied a problem and then low-balled the numbers is now warning of catastrophe unless the world [?] gives it billions.

Whether it is the Blitzkrieg in France or the Fall of Singapore or Black April in 1975 or … perhaps today, the stages of a rout are depressingly similar:  Denial.  Confident half-measures.   Panic.

The elites assume everything is under their control.  When events show up to prove the error in their thinking, the shock is often paralyzing.

Always before, issuing a directive or executive order or sending an agency chief to do the Sunday talk show tour was enough to fix things--at least until they were safely out of office.

Eh, it'll probably work this time too.  You just have to have the right people in power.
===

(Credit to Richard Fernandez for the basic ideas here.  His post is well worth reading in full.)

Why can't Obama ban commercial flights from Ebola-infected countries? Because...shut up.

If you want to know how totally Obama-fellating the media are, look no further than this line in the Washington Post two days ago:
More flight restrictions will only make it more difficult for life-saving aid and medical professionals to reach West Africa. 
Some context:  With the ebola virus reportedly killing 3000 or so in Africa, and a Liberian man with ebola making it to the U.S. via commercial airliner, many Americans suggested that the president ban commercial flights between the U.S. and the most-heavily-infected countries.  Everyone knew this wouldn't prevent people from doing a two-step through a different nation but it would at least increase the amount of time it took to get here--which would increase the chance of detecting symptoms and keeping an infected person from making it to the U.S.

Obama didn't want to do that, so the cover story was disseminated:  "You just can't do something like that!  Not only would that be raaaacist, it would also cause insurmountable problems getting life-saving aid and doctors into the hot zone!"

Low-info voter, or hi-info liberal:  "Oh, yes, I didn't think about that last part!  I see.  Makes perfect sense now that you've said it."

But as everyone with a brain knows, it doesn't.  Banning *commercial* flights doesn't prevent chartered planes from taking in anything needed--including doctors and medical supplies.  Not enough for ya?  Then let the U.S. Air Force use some of its airlift capability.

But of course, Team Obama doesn't want to ban commercial flights, so they put out the totally bullshit story that doing so would make it hard to get people and supplies in.  Uh-huh.

Next you'll be sending minions out to swear that our border with Mexico is "more secure than it has ever been in history!"

And the media dutifully repeats what the White House feeds it.  Anything for Democrats.

October 05, 2014

He was right about one thing...

"Cash for Clunkers"? 
"Red line" in Syria?
Amnesty for illegals? 
Benghazi "caused by a video on the internet"? 
Any IRS harassment of conservative organizations "all done by a couple of rogue agents in Cincinnati"?
"If you like your doctor..."
Obamacare "deemed passed"?
"Not a smidgen of corruption"?

Obama's been wrong about damn near everything.  But one thing he said has certainly proven true:
“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
 — Barack Obama, October 30, 2008

October 04, 2014

PIlot flies perfectly good aircraft into a mountain. Story at ten.

In another life I flew jets for a living.  During those years I would read the details of every aircraft accident, hoping to find a tiny clue or detail that would keep me from making the same mistake that that pilot made.

Some of the reports brought tears to your eyes, when mechanical failure made the accident totally unpreventable.  No matter how good you were--no matter how hard you studied or practiced the emergency procedures--you could be the best pilot in history and you were still gonna die that day.

But sadly, most of the time the cause of crashes was pilot error--often a pilot's failure to recognize some tiny quiver of a needle on an instrument.  But sometimes--fortunately rarely--the crash was due simply to an absolutely stupid mistake by the pilot.

Now, that's a kind of incompetence.  I realize the crew was *technically* competent, in that they all passed checkrides and so on.  But when crunch time came, they failed to take the saving action.

That's tragic, of course, but it also ticked me off:  How dare they kill a bunch of people and crash a perfectly good airplane, when using their heads more could have saved everyone?

That's how I feel about our utterly mendacious, incompetent government.  And sadly, just as the passengers on the ineptly piloted jetliner, we're stuck with the current flight crew, who will be the ones making the decisions all the way to the ground.  Short of devising some magical way to change the crew in-flight, we're fated to ride this baby in with 'em.

Eh, no big deal.  I'm sure something will keep us from crashing.  Surely.  Because everyone loves captain Obama.  Or something like that.

Western feminists condemn ISIS' indescribable brutality against Christian women. Wait, they're still silent.

Western feminists scream that they--and all women--are "oppressed by the patriarchy."

Yeah.

We'd take your complaints more seriously if you were consistent in what you choose to scream about instead of just bashing America--and thus helping leftists and socialists and so-called "progressives" destroy the most egalitarian society ever.

You gals wanna see a REAL "oppressive patriarchy"?  Take a look at every Muslim society in the middle-east.  Islam is the most fierce, implacable, unforgiving patriarchy ever.

They rape women who aren't Muslim.  They sell women for use as sex toys.
  
Startin'  to see reason yet, cupcake?
Nah, I didn't think so.  Like all leftists, all that matters is screaming about how fucking awful the United States is.  You use the phrase "oppressive patriarchy" as a club to bash the U.S. while letting the real women-stoners skate without so much as a word of criticism.
It’s hardly surprising that the "womyn" of NOW, and outraged members of feminist college clubs have no problem screaming at other Americans for imagined offenses, while ignoring real slaughter, rape and enslavement of women in the mid-east.  I suspect one big reason is that Americans--no matter how much they're irritated by shrieking feminists--normally won't kill them or sell them into sex slavery.  Whereas ISIS and other Muslim societies have no problem doing so.
Like other leftists, feminists simply can't bring themselves to support the millions of women who are actually, physically, literally, being oppressed because it would instantly show the absurdity of their hysterical indictments against American society.  Condemning Islamic atrocities against women and girls would tacitly acknowledge that women in western societies have it better than women in virtually every other nation.

As a result libs, leftists and feminists stay silent on Muslim atrocities.  That's why Brandeis withdrew an honorary degree they had originally offered to female activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, allegedly due to her “islamaphobia” in speaking truths she and all the women of her native Somalia know from bitter experience.  Brandeis refused to honor Hirsi Ali because she would have spoken out against Muslim atrocities--and thus shown how hollow feminist complaints about our society are.

To all feminists:  Stop being so coy.  Tell us all why you've been silent about the *real* patriarchy--the one that stones women, supports institutionalized rape and selling women as sex slaves.  Tell us why this seems to be perfectly fine with you--at least judging from your refusal to condemn such acts.

Or maybe, wake up.

Nah, that's expecting too much.

Good night and good luck

The unparalleled Mark Steyn notes that Birmingham, England--the U.K's second-largest city--now has more Muslim children than Christian ones.

Of course if you're a Democrat or so-called "progressive" this is no problem at all, but actually something to cheer:  "We're starting to outnumber those awful, awful Christianists!  Hooray!"

Uh...you bet, sparky.

Steyn notes that since one of those two groups is, as he puts it, "boundlessly aggressive in its appropriation of the public space," Birmingham will in short order be a Muslim-run city, with all that implies.

Dancing?  Forget it.  If you're a Muslim female you're in for an arranged marriage, and being killed by your own family if you take exception to the arrangement.  But of course that's no different than at present.  On the other hand, if you're non-Muslim you can look forward to being raped by Muslim men and having the police--thoroughly Muslim-run--ignore your complaints.

Of course like many Americans you may think this is all hyperbole.  That's because you have no idea what's going on beyond your local city.  You may be smart, but far too many of you are "useful idiots" in every sense of the word.  Willfully ignorant.

Eh, no matter.  You'll be fine.  Most of you aren't particularly religious so "converting" to Islam won't be a problem at all.  No big deal.  Sure, they'll ban alcohol, but then we've known for decades that booze is bad for you anyway, so they're really just doing it For Your Own Good.  Which after all has been the governing principle of Team Obama and the Democrats for, oh, two or five decades now.  So no real problem there.

Music?  You won't miss it.  Most modern music was crap anyway--buncha crap-rap that no one with taste really liked anyway, so good riddance.

Cigarettes?  Liberal and so-called "progressives" have been trying to get rid of them out for years now, so they'll welcome the policy of your new overlords.  You probably don't smoke anyway so why should you care? 

Guns?  If you're Muslim, no problem.  Any kaffir carrying will be shot on sight, but then you never cared about that First Amendment thingy anyway, right?  Libs and progs think gun-lovers are a buncha knuckle-dragging Neanderthals anyway.  Besides, other than rape (which can never be proven since shari'a law discounts testimony from female victims), Muslims assure us there isn't any crime in Muslim societies, so why would anyone need a gun?

Obama has appointed heads of the divisions of the almighty government who will lie brazenly--outrageously, obviously--to support anything uttered by Duh Won.  Plus most of 'em have had so little real-world experience that they'd never consider the possibility their understanding of things might be wrong in any case.

Case in point:  Obama assures us that ISIS is "not Muslim."  Well that's funny, since ISIS itself says 'We are the only true, authentic Muslims.'

Who should be believed:  The muslims doing the mass executions, or Obama?

Wrecking a priceless, irreplaceable society?  Try this:  Before Obama's coronation the Bush administration had drafted contingency plans to screen and detain obviously ill airline passengers, and to track, contact, and advise passengers exposed to such infected travelers.  In 2010 the Obama administration quietly scrapped those contingency plans.

Kid swinging a sledgehammer at the Lincoln memorial?  Consider the deliberate insertion by Team Obama of more than a hundred thousand un-screened illegal aliens to communities around the nation, often without even notifying local elected officials in those communities about it.

Some punk setting fire to the Mona Lisa?  Consider Obama and the Dems' bribed passage of Obamacare, rapidly destroying the best medical system on the planet.  And passed by the totally outrageous parliamentary loophole of "deemed passed."  (Google it.)

You people are beyond belief.  Most of you utterly deserve what you're about to get.  The rest of you have my sympathy.

Funny thing is, all the idiots/liberals/progs will be able to watch as formerly Great Britain is slowly destroyed--and they'll STILL claim their policies had nothing to do with it.

Sure, a few of you will fight.  But with 95 percent of the sheeple meekly going with the flow, unwilling to risk life or limb to join you, it's gonna be extremely tough.

You think our technological advantage--which is indeed huge--will save us.  But the problem is, when Team Obama and the Dems order the armed forces not to take action on some crisis, no member of those forces will be permitted to act.  No matter how talented a pilot might be, you can't start a jet fighter without the help of LOTS of folks on the ground.  And anyone helping will get a fast court-martial and prison.

I've been there.  I know the military.  Most military members are ready to sacrifice their own lives, but if you think they'll sacrifice their families you're crazy.  In fact, the very thing that makes them so willing to sacrifice themselves is what makes them do virtually anything to save their loved ones.  And that will include obeying--and enforcing--an order to stand down.

Again, you have to have been there to understand what I mean.  Ask almost anyone who's served.  And no, not that bizarre Bradley/Chelsea Manning creature.  There are a tiny percentage of bizarre outliers in any outfit.

Eh, no matter.  With any luck I'll be dead before the nation actually falls.  I've done my part.  It's all yours now.  I can give you some recommendations and ideas, but it's up to you to decide whether you're ready to convert to or not.

Good luck.

October 03, 2014

Ebola and Obama

In response to the canny flight by Patient Zero from Liberia to Dallas, many Americans have called for the U.S. government to ban flights to the U.S. from infected African nations.  This has produced howls of outrage from our liberal elites, who wail that this is simply unfair.  We simply cannot do that because...because...it would be raaaaaacist!  Or something.

Hmmm... I notice almost no one is saying it would be ineffective.  Just...unfair.

I also hear a few libs saying Oh the government just can't do that!  Really, cupcake?  Read the damn papers:  Just months ago Obama ordered the FAA to ban U.S. flights to Israel, ostensibly over safety risks but clearly just to pressure Israel to stop its military action in Gaza.

Did liberals scream bloody murder about halting those flights?  Of course not.  But this Africa thing is, like, well...it's just totally different! 

Some people think it's not possible to predict the future.  But many, many things are easily predictable.  One is that Obama would never ban flights from Africa to the U.S, no matter how proven and serious the threat--because to do so would open the door to comparison between an African ban and his total, absolute refusal to act to stop an equally large influx of people crossing illegally into the U.S. at the Mexican border.

Obama--in case you hadn't noticed--is frantically averse to criticism, and will do anything and everything to avoid blame.  Banning flights to reduce the Ebola risk would turn the spotlight on his hypocrisy in utterly refusing to secure the southern border.

Blogger Iowahawk notes there's a pattern here:  Team Obama always tells you things that, on closer inspection, turn out to be utter bullshit. 
If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.
"It was a spontaneous reaction to a slanderous video posted on the internet."
Any IRS policies you are concerned about were solely carried out by "Rogue Agents in Cincinnati".
Intruder didn't get in WH.
"We totally have Ebola under control.  And it's very unlikely any case will reach our shores."


Bullshit from top to bottom.  But of course no one in polite, liberal company ever calls 'em on it.

Well, enjoy living in the epidemic.

ISIS thugs kill female rights activist. U.S. feminists silent.

According to wire-service reports, ISIS ghouls have executed a female rights activist, after torturing her for five days.
ISIS thugs executed a female Iraqi human rights lawyer and activist just days after she posted a message on her Facebook page describing ISIS' destruction of mosques and shrines in Mosul as "barbaric."

Samira Salih al-Nuaimi was executed by a masked firing squad in a public square in the city of Mosul. She had been tortured before being executed, according to a U.N. spokesperson.

Samira was accused by the self-styled Islamic court of apostasy and sentenced to death by ISIS terrorists, who then warned her family not to conduct a funeral ceremony, according to a local journalist.

So are American feminists outraged?   Screaming bloody murder over this ghastly torture and killing of a woman simply for criticizing ISIS' idiotic destruction of mosques?

Not a word so far.  Not a peep.  Cuz there's a *real* war on women going on, right? But it's not being waged by ISIS.  Or by Islam.  Or in the mid-east.

No, citizen, it's being waged right here at home, by...radical Republicans!

Yep.  Just ask any good democrat shill.

ISIS  torturing and killing female rights activists?   Meh.  But Rethuglicans wanting to let owners of closely-held companies follow their religious beliefs by not paying for abortifacient drugs for their employees? 

That's a war on women, baby!

Oh, and if you think the report above is just Islamophobic propaganda from a wing-nut right-wing website with zero credibility, you're partly right:  It's from NBC news, which most of the time *does* have zero credibility.  But while they make shit up all the time to tarnish Americans and Republicans, they'd never invent a story that would damage Islam.  Cuz they're scared they'd get killed.

Like this brave Iraqi woman.

What if...

If you saw a kid taking a hammer to a priceless statue--an irreplaceable, one-of-a-kind artistic treasure--would you
  a) laugh and remark to your companion, "Kids will be kids!"
  b) look away and walk away;
  c) take the kid's hammer away and yell at him for being a stupid, malicious, ignorant, thoughtless savage?

Actually, lawsuit-drunk parents of stupid, malicious bastard kids, aided by attorneys looking for deep pockets have pretty much insured that most people won't take the third option.  But in fairness, that's the only adult response.

Wait, let me amend that:  Progressives and Democrats, I have the feeling you want to avoid option C, so tell me:  What's your take on that hypothetical situation?

Okay, while we wait:  I contend that Team Obama--with the aid of most Democrats and all so-called "progressives"--is destroying an irreplaceable, one-of-a-kind nation as surely as a kid taking a hammer to the Pieta.  Whether they're doing this from malice or simply from incompetence doesn't change the outcome a whit.  It does change what I'd do about it, but that's another story.

Democrats and "progressives" wail that humans are destroying the earth by emitting CO2.  They understandably regard this with horror and consider it a great crime, even though the alleged "evidence" is full of holes and getting more tattered with each passing day.  But when it comes to destroying our amazing country, they simply don't see it, or don't care.  Hard to say which.

I think there should be a new icon, like the anarchist's black A:  a kid with a crazed look swinging a hammer.