DOCTOR'S NOTES FROM A SESSION OF THE MODERATE REPUBLICAN SENATOR SUPPORT GROUP

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The Long View   •   April 08, 2013

Bethesda Mental Health Clinic
 

By Rob Long 

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE

                          

                           DOCTOR’S NOTES

                      Moderate Republican Senator

                                Support Group

Tuesday’s Session:


Once again, late to get started due to J. McCain and L. Graham’s arriving late from Palm Steakhouse. Have repeatedly told them to leave the restaurant earlier — hard to do, apparently, because they’re always forced to enjoy large desserts sent to them from a large national teachers’ union. When I suggested to them that perhaps this is part of the problem they’re experiencing with rank-and-file members of their own party, they called me a crackpot. Also: They were carrying leftovers, which made the session room smell like an Outback Steakhouse. Session did not start well.



Some members of the group related, during the sharing session, that they found the term “RINO” to be hurtful and offensive. A senator from a midwestern state mused aloud about the possibilities of adding the term to a list of forbidden “hate speech” terms in a bill currently being written by Representative Maxine Waters (D., Calif.). There was general enthusiasm for this kind of thing. “Reaching across the aisle” was a phrase many members used.



Therapist attempted, at that point, to use this as a teachable moment. Could it not be, therapist asked, that the whole point of being a Republican was to oppose this exact kind of legislation? So in this case, “reaching across the aisle” wouldn’t be compromise as much as capitulation. How does the group respond to that?
Patient McCain flicked leftover mashed potatoes on therapist.
Session ended early.



Friday’s Session:


Once again the session started late, this time due to several members’ arriving from a lengthy closed-door negotiation meeting, in which serious budgetary matters were discussed. Several of the more “conservative” members of the group were frustrated by some of the other members’ intransigence on the matter of taxes. Again, therapist chose to re-frame this discussion through the lens of the members’ ongoing feelings of “displacement” and “not fitting in” to the prevailing mood of their own party. What would, therapist asked, a rank-and-file member of the party view as an
acceptable middle-class tax rate? J. McCain and others muttered, “Zero!” with great irritation.
And what was the sense of the group, therapist asked, in terms of an effective middle-class tax rate?
The group displayed great consensus and agreement. “Ninety percent,” said one member of the Senate Republican caucus.



Therapist then tried to illustrate effective compromise techniques: How about somewhere in the middle, he asked. How about a middle-class tax rate of 45 percent?
The entire group of moderate Republicans nodded enthusiastically. They saw how compromise was possible, and how a certain decision can be framed for the electorate as a “win” for both sides. All members of the group were comfortable predicting that their counterparts in the Democratic party would embrace this idea. Several left early to leak the plan to their contacts at the New York Times.
The session ended on a high note.


  

Monday’s Session:


Several members arrived early, during office hours, to request an increase in the dosage of their anti-depressants. Apparently, some members of the group are experiencing increased levels of anxiety and depression as they attempt to integrate themselves into the framework of their own party. The stress of raising taxes and increasing government programs and oversight has led several members to display erratic and irrational behavior. L. Graham and J. McCain, especially, have complained about being “dislocated” and “confused” due to the cognitive dissonance of their current position.
A few of the senators wondered if perhaps there was a sense that they had been in Washington too long, that they had become part of a system that seeks, as its primary goal, not the guarantee of the liberty and freedom of our citizens but the enlargement and solidification of the federal behemoth. Perhaps it was not the voters who needed to be educated, they suggested, but the ossified and complacent senators. These senators spoke eloquently to the group, and managed to create a powerful impression on many of the members until it was discovered that they had wandered into the wrong session room.
They were directed to the Southern Democrat Support Group session, and the Moderate Republican Senator Support Group recommenced.



Session ended early, when J. McCain and L. Graham left to attend a film screening at Arianna Huffington’s house.

BRAVO MAINE GOVERNOR PAUL LePAGE

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Meet Maine 's New Governor --- In case you haven't heard about this guy before, his name will stick in your mind! The new Maine Governor, Paul LePage is making New Jersey 's Chris Christie look like an enabler. He isn't afraid to say what he thinks. Judging by the comments, every time he opens his mouth, his popularity goes up. He brought down the house at his inauguration when he shook his fist toward the media box and said, "You're on notice! I've inherited a financially troubled State to run. Observe...cover what we do...but don't whine if I don't waste time responding to your every whim just for your amusement." During his campaign for Governor, he was talking to commercial fishermen who are struggling because of federal fisheries rules. They complained that 0bama brought his family to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park for a long Labor Day holiday and found time to meet with union leaders, but wouldn't talk to the fishermen. LePage replied, "I'd tell him to go to hell and get out of my State." The Lame Stream Media crucified LePage, but he jumped 6 points in the pre-election poll. The Martin Luther King incident was a political sandbag, which brought him National exposure. The 'lame stream' media crucified him, but word on the street is very positive. The NAACP specifically asked LePage to spend MLK Day visiting black inmates at the Maine State Prison. He told them that he would meet with ALL inmates, regardless of race, if he were to visit the prison. The NAACP balked and then put out a news release claiming falsely that he refused to participate in any MLK events. He read it in the paper for the 1st time the next morning while being driven to an event and went ballistic because none of the reporters had called him for comment before running the NAACP release. He arrived at that event & said in front of a TV camera, "If they want to play the race card on me they can kiss my ass", and he reminded them that he has an adopted black son from Jamaica and that he attended the local MLK Breakfast every year that he was mayor of Waterville. (He started his morning there on MLK Day.) He then stated that there's a right way and a wrong way to meet with the Governor, and he put all special interests on notice that press releases, media leaks, and all demonstrations would prove to be the wrong way. He said any other group, which acted like the NAACP could expect to be at the bottom of the Governor's priority list! He then did the following, and judging from local radio talk show callers, his popularity increased even more: The State employees union complained because he waited until 3 P.M. before closing State offices and facilities and sending non-emergency personnel home during the last blizzard. The prior Governor would often close offices for the day with just a forecast before the first flakes. (Each time the State closes for snow, it costs the taxpayers about $1 million in wages for no work in return.) LePage was CEO of the Marden's chain of discount family bargain retail stores before election as governor. He noted that State employees getting off work early could still find lots of retail stores open to shop. So, he put the State employees on notice by announcing: "If Marden's is open, Maine is open!" He told State employees: "We live in Maine in the winter, for heaven's sake, and should know how to drive in it. Otherwise, apply for a State job in Florida !" Governor LePage symbolizes what America needs; Refreshing politicians who aren't self-serving and who exhibit common sense. THE LAW IS THE LAW So "if" the US government determines that it is against the law for the words "under God" to be on our money, then, so be it. And "if" that same government decides that the "Ten Commandments" are not to be used in or on a government installation, then, so be it. I say, "so be it," because I would like to be a law abiding US citizen. I say, "so be it," because I would like to think that smarter people than I are in positions to make good decisions. I would like to think that those people have the American public's best interests at heart. BUT, YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE I'D LIKE? Since we can't pray to God, can't Trust in God and cannot post His Commandments in Government buildings, I don't believe Government (Federal, State and Local) and its employees should participate in Easter and Christmas celebrations which honor the God that our government is eliminating from many facets of American life. I'd like my mail delivered on Christmas, Good Friday, Thanksgiving & Easter. After all, it's just another day. I'd like the" US Supreme Court to be in session on Christmas, Good Friday, Thanksgiving & Easter as well as Sundays." After all, it's just another day. I'd like the Senate and the House of Representatives to not have to worry about getting home for the "Christmas Break." After all it's just another day. I'm thinking a lot of my taxpayer dollars could be saved, if all government offices & services would work on Christmas, Good Friday & Easter. It shouldn't cost any overtime since those would be just like any other day of the week to a government that is trying to be "politically correct." In fact....I think our government should work on Sundays (initially set aside for worshipping God....) because, after all, our government says that it should be just another day.... What do you all think???? If this idea gets to enough people, maybe our elected officials will stop giving in to the "minority opinions" and begin, once again, to represent the "majority" of ALL of the American people. SO BE IT...........Please Dear Lord, Give us the help needed to keep you in our country! 'Amen' and 'Amen' These are definitely things I never thought about but from now on, I will be sure to question those in government who support these changes.



IN WASHINGTON IT IS NOT THE SHARKS BUT THE MINNOWS (AKA DINOSAURS) WHO NIBBLE GOOD MEN TO DEATH

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MARCH 8, 2013
The tall talker and the old geezers

BY WES PRUDEN



Talking is the national sport in Washington. For the old geezers in Congress it’s more fun than watching baseball, complaining about the weather or remembering sex.



Nobody drones on like a United States senator and nobody loves the sound of his raspy voice like a senator. Rand Paul, the freshman from Kentucky who stars in the bad dreams of every Republican geezer in town, talked for almost 13 hours on the Senate floor this week to delay a confirmation vote on John Brennan as director of the CIA, and earned only the scorn of the geezers.


Mr. Paul’s remarks occasionally strayed a few degrees over the top (enough of the Hitler comparison), decrying the prospect of using drones against American citizens in America, but he strayed no farther over the top than almost any congressman on almost any day on Capitol Hill. Mr. Paul argued at length (though not at record length) that killing an American, even an evil terrorist with an American passport, deprives him of the due process guaranteed by the Constitution.
Challenging Barack Obama on anything will earn anybody the sneers and scorn of Democratic senators, but some of the Republican geezers joined the din of disdain, mostly about the temerity of a freshman senator talking when he should be listening to a housebroken geezer talk. It’s not the sharks who trouble the waters in Washington, but the minnows who nibble good men to death.


John McCain of Arizona rebuked the filibusterer just as he was sitting down, and just after Mr. McCain and a few of his Senate pals emerged from a cozy dinner with President Obama in the glow of fine wine and the warmth of a full belly of beef. Mr. McCain had a little patronizing advice for his talkative colleague: “Calm down, senator, the U.S. government cannot randomly target U.S. citizens.”

The presidential loser of '08 sent further advice on how to win friends and influence voters. “If Mr. Paul wants to be taken seriously he needs to do more than pull political stunts that fire up impressionable libertarian kids. I don’t think what happened is helpful to the American people.”


Nobody expected Mr. Paul’s filibuster to stop the confirmation of John Brennan, the senator least of all, but he set out to sound an “alarm” about the use of drones in what he calls the threat to Americans by their own government. He had written to the White House to inquire whether the government could order a drone strike against an American on American soil, and Attorney Gen. Eric Holder replied with reassurance that does not necessarily reassure. He said drones are limited to killing in conflict zones in Pakistan and Yemen, and the government has “no intention” to bomb any place specific.


So far the argument is about drones and the word “random.” How vague can the word “random” be? The U.S. government can, and already has, targeted American citizens without due process. The government had no drones at Ruby Ridge, where government agents targeted and killed a teenage American boy, and had no drones at Waco, where government agents set fire to a religious compound and 76 men, women and children burned alive, Americans all. The government’s record is not a good one. The government’s “intentions” can change, and “random” is a word even a jackleg lawyer could parse far into the next decade. It’s just not cricket to say so, and a geezer never would.


The confirmation hearings of John Brennan and Chuck Hagel reveal a lot about how Washington works, how weak and well-meaning geezers can conflate the good of the country with the good of their own biases. John McCain and Lindsay Graham took Chuck Hagel apart at his confirmation hearing, leaving him humiliated as few nominees have been humiliated. But when crunch time came, they fell into line, voting to confirm him despite all the flags they raised at his hearing, as if to say, “just kidding, guys.”


John Brennan escaped close scrutiny over his role in the fiasco at Benghazi, where four Americans, including an American ambassador, died because the Obama White House could not or would not send the help the ambassador begged for -- not even a drone.




The geezers know better, but it’s easier, quieter, and more refined to do nothing. When Rand Paul, over the top or not, stood up to demand answers to some of the questions the geezers themselves raised, he was ridiculed and told, like an irritable child, to calm down. Geezers think their role is to pour oil over troubled waters, when they should be striking a match.


Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

IT TAKES BIG BUCKS TO MEET WITH THE PRESIDENT

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MARCH 5, 2013


The fire sale at the White House

BY WES PRUDEN



Bubba was a piker. The Clinton White House sold sleepovers in the Lincoln Bedroom that were cheap at the price. Barack Obama is auctioning off access to His Grandiosity for really big bucks. Unlike Hillary, Michelle doesn’t even have to straighten up the room and make up the bed when the guests leave.



The White House reacted with considerable heat Monday to editorials in the New York Times and the Washington Post scolding the president for putting “major campaign donors” on an “advisory board” and giving them frequent “access” to the president. This little perk was said to be going for a half-million dollars.



“Any notion that there is a set price for a meeting with the president of the United States is just wrong,” Jay Carney, the president’s mouthpiece, told reporters at the White House.




The wording of Mr. Carney’s remarks, which are usually carefully measured to make sure the spokesman’s brain is engaged before his mouth moves, raises speculation that the price of the access is set on a sliding scale. This could pose problems for the president and his men. If the CEO of Ajax Widgets LLC pays $500,000 for a cup of coffee and a breakfast bagel with the president, he won’t be pleased to learn that the CEO of Acme Anvils, Inc., got the president’s ear for $475,000, and maybe got two bagels and a strawberry shmear on the side.


The Washington Post, in its editorial, decried the sale of access as “behavior that has become all too common in this town and carries more than a whiff of influence-peddling.” The New York Times detected more than a whiff, of something like genuine stink. An advisory board, the newspaper said, “is nothing more than a fancy way of setting a price for access to Mr. Obama.”


This contretemps, so far the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, is nevertheless enough to shake the president’s supreme self-confidence, rattle the White House dishes and make the floor tremble beneath Mr. Obama’s feet. This scolding comes not from right-wing websites, but from two of the most prominent pillars of the cult. Prominent pillars are not supposed to behave like that. On what other meat might an awakening media feed?


This followed Bob Woodward’s falling out of love with Mr. Obama, partly over the president playing games with the sequestration but mostly over the president’s failure to deploy the carrier USS Harry S. Truman. Mortuary Bob, who burnished his considerable reputation with his famous interviews with the dead and the comatose, tried to make it up to the president at the end of the week with an invitation to the Obamas to dine at the Woodward manse.


Taken all in all, these are not particularly happy days for His Grandiosity. After weeks of crying wolf, the White House retreated Sunday from the president’s fervent predictions that the world as we know it would end at midnight March 1, when the sequestration cuts would take effect. The sky remained resolutely overhead, though in some places there were deep gray clouds and in some places rain, but not the sky, fell.


The track record of the doom-criers, even the president, is not good. Geezers remember when were told that airplanes would fall from the sky, everybody’s bank account would be erased, and restaurants would decline to honor dinner reservations after the beginning of the new millennium because all the computers were programmed to die at midnight on Dec. 31, 1999. Even the ancient Mayans got into the act when someone thought they remembered that their calendar predicted death, destruction and other inconvenience for the modern age. Only yesterday, everyone was about to fall off the fiscal cliff. The sequestration rescued us.


“We lost the bet on just how intransigent the Republican majority can be,” a Virginia Democrat told Politico. “We made a mistake betting on reasonable compromise ultimately prevailing. We bet on that and lost.” The president bet he could come up with the idea of sequestration and when it actually happened nobody would remember that he was the elusive daddy.



The president and his partisans in Congress were high on a champagne buzz a month ago when they thought the Republicans, dazed by the election results, had been permanently scared into raising taxes whenever the president felt a whim coming on. Mr. Obama imagined that he could cry wolf twice a day and get a new tax increase each time. The “shock” of sequestration has given the Republicans a booster shot of testosterone. And just in time, too.


Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

WE HAVE SEEN THE BOOBS AND THEY ARE US

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March 1, 2013

GOVERNMENT-BY-FAKE-DISASTER-MOVIE

By MARK STEYN 




A few weeks ago, Ann Coulter announced that she was bored of American politics and spending her days watching Turner Classic Movies. I confess that, when it comes to Beltway melodrama, I, too, am fighting vainly the old ennui, and minded to plump up the pillows and settle back with a bucket of bonbons and a beribboned Shih-tzu for an all-night Norma Shearer marathon. At least, unlike Washington, there's a chance you may catch something you haven't already seen a hundred times before. For example, I've a yen to see "Roberta" (RKO, 1935), in which Irene Dunne sings:   “Yesterdays.”

"Yesterdays
  Days I knew as happy sweet sequester'd days..."

I believe that was the last known use of this blameless and mellifluous word until it was conscripted by the political class for this month's dreary Mayan Apocalypse of the Month thrill ride. Say what you like about those Mayan guys, but they only schedule an apocalypse once every 5,126 years. Only Washington would try to pull it off every six weeks.

If I understand correctly, by the time you read this, the planes will be dropping from the skies; the drip-feeds in every emergency room will be dry; every creature on the endangered species list will have broken free from our pristine federally manned national parks to be left for roadkill in the potholed asphalt of America's crumbling interstates; you'll turn on your bathroom faucet only to find the town reservoir choked with fecal coliform; the ebola virus will be rampant across Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire and other swing states, where it will nevertheless enjoy higher approval ratings than Marco Rubio and every other prospective GOP nominee. The sequester supposedly cuts $44 billion from the federal budget – or from the rate of growth of the federal budget. Whatever. $44 billion is about what the United States government borrows every nine days, so it's not a lot. But it's apparently responsible for everything that matters in American life.


That being so, maybe it would be easier to reinstate this critical $44 billion and cut the other $3.8 trillion, which is apparently responsible for nothing other than Harry Reid's beloved federally funded cowboy poetry festival and the cost of the dress uniforms for the military detachment accompanying the First Lady at her Oscars appearance. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, warned of "over 170 million jobs that could be lost" thanks to the sequester. There are only 135 million jobs in America, but the sequester gods are so powerful they can eliminate every job in Canada, Britain and Germany, too. Why, because of this weekend's looming Mayan Apocalypse, President Obama declined to deploy a carrier to the Persian Gulf, concerned that it might be left on the other side of the planet, completely sequestered with no fuel to limp back home and insufficient stores in the mess hall larder to cook up federally compliant slop. So, when the mullahs go nuclear and drop the big one on Tel Aviv, it will be the fault of the Republicans for failing to agree to a prudent, balanced, fiscally responsible plan - like the Senate's latest deficit reduction proposal, which, as is traditional, increases the deficit (by $7 billion).


It's not just the U.S. fleet and air traffic control and clean water that have been swept into the garbage can of history by Sequestageddon, but even the most venerable Beltway colossus. In time the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble, but surely Bob Woodward is here to stay – or so we thought until he ventured some very mild criticism of the president's negotiating technique, which appears to be a cross between a suicide-bomber and Cleavon Little taking himself hostage in "Blazing Saddles." In a flash, Woodward's four decades of loyal service were forgotten, and the court eunuchs of the Obama media turned on their own: He's about one news cycle away from being revealed as on the take from the Koch brothers and the real father of Trig Palin.


Speaking of the First Lady's Academy Awards appearance, I see she gave the Oscar for Best Film to Ben Affleck's movie "Argo." If you haven't seen the picture, it's about a group of government operatives whose ingenious plan to achieve their objectives depends on creating a fake movie as a cover story. Obama seems to have taken this inspiring tale to heart.


In the Affleck version, the fake movie is a space opera for which John Goodman rustles up a few cheesy costume designs for some generic aliens. They make a promotional brochure, take out an ad in Variety and hold a well-attended press conference, awash in cocktails and canapés. But there is no movie. And so it goes with Obama's monthly cliffhangers. The White House press corps show up for the reception, and they all excitedly report the intriguing teasers about the white-knuckle thriller coming soon to your town: This weekend, "Les Sequesterables," starring Maxine "I Dreamed A Dream" Waters and a cast of hundreds of millions of downtrodden laid-off extras; next week, "Zero Debt Thirty," in which Paul Ryan proposes cutting $30 from the federal budget, and all civilized life comes to an end; next month, "Django Short-Changed," in which a retired bounty hunter discovers his Social Security check is a buck seventy-three lower than usual because cruel plantation owners like Mitt Romney aren't willing to pay their fair share; and, coming soon, "No Silver Linings Playbook," in which Barack Obama warns yet again that total societal collapse is just around the corner but at the 11th hour manages to avert it by swooping in with a daring, last-minute tax increase.


Government-by-fake-disaster-movie seems to be going swimmingly for Obama. Every Republican attempt at fiscal discipline now ends with both higher spending and more taxes: that's the way it went with the Christmas blockbuster "Fiscal Cliff," and that's the way to bet with "Les Sequesterables," too. Even the IRS can't keep up: "tax season" is upon us, and yet they're not accepting tax returns from millions of Americans because the IRS hasn't yet managed to process the tax changes passed in the dead of night at New Year. American government is a joke – and, sadly, not one of those jokes that everybody takes seriously and kicks up a fuss about, like Seth MacFarlane's "We Saw Your Boobs" song that the New Yorker attacked for its "hostility to women in the workplace," or Joan Rivers' joke about Heidi Klum's Oscars gown that Abraham Foxman's Anti-Defamation League is busy issuing stern denunciations of. No, in an America in which every throwaway gag is a hate crime, Obama's fake disaster movie of the month is the only joke we all go along with, even though he's insulting our intelligence far more than Seth and the Los Angeles Gay Men's Chorus singing "We Saw Your Boobs" to Anne Hathaway and Halle Berry.


Can you pierce the mists of time and go back all the way to the year 2007? Back then, federal spending was 40 percent lower than it is today. In a mere half-decade, has all that 40 percent gravy become so indispensable to the general welfare that not even a teensy-weensy sliver of it can be cut?


If you really believe that, then America is going to die, and a gullible citizenry willing to give this laughable charade the time of day will bear ultimate responsibility. We have seen the boobs, and they are us.

©MARK STEYN

THE BIRD THAT CAUGHT A SPY

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Prothonotary Warblers sing "sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet!" But logging and agriculture in the U.S. and destruction of mangroves in Central and South America threaten this beautiful bird.

Back in the days of the cold war Whitaker Chambers, the Editor of Time Magazine who was formerly active in the Communist Party USA, told the FBI that he had served as a contact with a traitor in the State Department, Alger Hiss.  The FBI and Congress questioned Hiss for hours on end, but they could not get him to say anything that linked him with Chambers.  Then one of the agents of the FBI recalled that Chambers had said that in idle conversation with Alger Hiss, Hiss had said that one of the proudest moments in his life as an avid bird watcher was when he spotted and recorded a Prothonotary Warbler, a relatively rare bird.

The next time Hiss was questioned under oath the FBI interrogator asked him what his hobbies were and Hiss said that he was an avid bird watcher.  The interrogator shared with Hiss some his own successes in bird watching and Hiss not to be outdone boasted of the time that he spotted a Prothonotary Warbler.

With this confirmation of the testimony of Whitaker Chambers, the FBI was eventually able to obtain sufficient evidence to convict Hiss and send him to prison for espionage for the Soviet Union.

For this reason and for others, we should do all we can to protect this beautiful little bird.

- Leo Rugiens

TEXANS KNOW A TYRANT WHEN WE SEE ONE

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Texas Independence Day March 2, 2013

Dear friends of liberty, Texas was born one hundred seventy-seven years ago today. It was not an easy birth. The Texians, encompassing both the Mexicans with deep roots in the land and the Anglo-American settlers invited to colonize the vast country, had worked hard to sustain their ties with Mexico. They sent emissaries and petitions -- they begged for recognition of their rights -- and the majority among them counseled peace among themselves, even to the utmost extremity. But when it became clear that the tyrant in Mexico City, General Antonio López de Santa Anna, was intent upon destroying Mexican federalism and replacing it with a quasi-military dictatorship, they knew that the time had come to fight. So they fought. And in the epic fall of 1835, they swept away the instruments of power and oppression, expelling the Mexican garrisons, seizing the fortifications and armories, and restoring, for a brief moment, the liberties they had expected to enjoy when invited to build their homes and seek their fortunes in Texas. What began with a bold invitation to "Come and Take It" in Gonzales ended the year with San Antonio de Bexar in Texian hands, and an army forming to take the revolution southward to Matamoros -- and perhaps beyond. But this fight for liberty was not yet a fight for independence. Over the Presidio at Goliad, the Texians flew a flag with the red-white-green of Mexico, and the year "1824" emblazoned upon it -- the year of the federalist Mexican constitution that Santa Anna overthrew. Like the American revolutionaries of 1775, the Texians of 1835 fought to restore their rights, not to secede -- and like their predecessors, they would soon find themselves forced into a cause more grand and consequential than any they had envisioned. The arrival of Santa Anna's army changed everything. The despot had first set foot in Texas nearly a quarter-century before, where as a Spanish officer he helped crush a filibustering expedition at the 1813 Battle of Medina. The brutal suppression of that early revolt taught the tyrant his method: lay waste, terrorize, and kill all who resisted. This was the technique he brought to Texas when he crossed the Rio Grande with his solders on February 16th, 1836. One week later he laid siege to the Alamo, and sent a grim message to its defenders: surrender or die. William Barret Travis answered with a cannon shot: "Victory or Death." As the doomed garrison at the Alamo held against repeated assaults, bombardments, and harassments, the Mexican armies fanned out across Texas. The Texians, having won everything in 1835, now lost everything in 1836. They lost at San Patricio. They lost at Agua Dulce. And as February ground on into March, it was increasingly apparent that they would lose at the Alamo too -- and after that, who knew what fate held in store? The Mexicans commanded thousands -- and the Texians commanded hundreds. The flame of liberty in Texas flickered badly. This was the dark scenario that confronted the Texians gathered at Washington-on-the-Brazos on March 1st, 1836, sent to the Convention to decide what to do. Would their revolution falter? Would Texas surrender? Would they attempt to negotiate? Would the cause of the Lone Star be extinguished in the face of superior force? The men assembled at the little cabin in the little town on the Brazos River took stock of the situation, and did the only common-sense thing left:    They declared independence. On March 2nd, 1836, with nothing standing between them and the power of Santa Anna but a desperate garrison and a prayer, the word went out to the world:    "We, therefore, the delegates with plenary powers of the people of Texas, in solemn convention assembled, appealing to a candid world for the necessities of our condition, do hereby resolve and declare, that our political connection with the Mexican nation has forever ended, and that the people of Texas do now constitute a free, Sovereign, and independent republic, and are fully invested with all the rights and attributes which properly belong to independent nations; and, conscious of the rectitude of our intentions, we fearlessly and confidently commit the issue to the decision of the Supreme arbiter of the destinies of nations." Texas, a nation in full, was born. But it was not yet won.    The same day, Texas lost at Agua Dulce.    Four days later, Texas lost at the Alamo.    Seventeen days later, Texas lost at Coleto.    Nineteen days later, Texas lost at Copano.    Twenty-five days later, Texans were massacred at Goliad. But exactly fifty days later, on April 21st, 1836, Texas won at San Jacinto. And that won it all. Today, 177 years later, we honor the men and women who stood and fought against impossible odds in the harrowing passage of spring 1836. Their spirit, born in the American heritage and made real in the Texas experience, remains our example today. They did not waver and they did not cease in their defense of liberty -- and we, who walk in the paths they blazed, can do no less. Liberty and independence, no matter the odds. That is who they were. And because of them … it is who we are.    In liberty -- and in Texas -- Brooke Rollins President & CEO TEXAS PUBLIC POLICY FOUNDATION

NEW YORK, NEW YORK! THE BIG APPLE HAS A WORM!

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Mayor Michael Bloomberg


FEBRUARY 26, 2013

The Gotham nanny who jerks sodas

BY WES PRUDEN


These are frantic days for the man the Manhattan tabloids call the Soda Jerk. Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, is reviewing his troops, readying the SWAT teams for his campaign to beat back the crime wave sweeping over Gotham.



The mayor begins enforcement of his new rules about how much soda is good for a New Yorker on March 12, vowing to take neither prisoner nor excuse. Hizzoner wants to be remembered as the mayor who stopped the gulping, slurping and burping that threatened to make Gotham unfit for human habitation. Gotham was in fact unfit for habitation not so long ago. Then Rudy Guiliani cleaned up the city, chased the crooks and thugs to wherever they went, probably New Jersey, wiped away most of the graffiti and washed the dirt off the face of the city that never sleeps. 


Mike Bloomberg wants to be remembered as the mayor who swiped Mary Poppins’ bloomers and became nanny to the world. The soda smackdown follows earlier campaigns against sins of the palate – New Yorkers were eating too much sugar, salt, fats, cigarettes. Even babies were guilty. The New York Post surveyed the battlefield of today and reports that Hizzoner is after a lot more than an 18-ounce container of Coke, Pepsi and other drinks Hizzoner deems too sweet.


“If you order a pizza,” the Post reports, “you cannot get a large bottle of soda delivered with it. Already, Domino’s locations across the city are doing away with 1- and 2-liter bottles of soda . . . they’ll sell smaller bottles instead, costing you more money and increasing plastic waste.”


Pizza restaurants typically charge $3 for a 2-liter bottle of Coke or Pepsi, the Post says, and after March 12 a customer would have to buy six 12-ounce cans for $7.50. This will put a crimp in a lot of family occasions, but that’s a sacrifice the mayor, a billionaire, is willing to take.


An anonymous blogger has put together a comparison of what life in America was like before the mayor and his ilk came to make things tedious and tiresome for the rest of us. You don’t have to be a geezer to appreciate the simpler life in the days before the nannies arrived. These scenaries of past and present illustrate.


Only yesterday, Jack pulls into the parking lot at Happy Valley High, in from an early-morning quail hunt, and his shotgun is proudly displayed in the gun rack in the rear window. The vice principal walks over to admire the gun (much as Joe Biden might have done), and goes to his car to get his own shotgun out of the trunk. He and Jack compare guns, talk of bird hunts, and put them away when the bell rings.


Fast forward to Not-so-Happy Valley High, circa 2013. Jack’s grandson pulls into the parking lot with his shotgun showing in the gun rack. Lockdown! Someone calls the cops. The FBI arrives to arrest Jack. He spends two days in jail and never sees his truck or gun again.


Scenario Two: Fred wakes up with a headache, takes a small bottle of aspirin from the medicine chest and when he arrives at school his pal Jerry has a headache, too. Fred gives him two aspirin and within an hour they’re both OK.


Fast forward again: Fred’s grandson, also named Fred, is not so lucky. He has a headache, too, and takes a bottle of aspirin to school, circa 2013, and when his friend Glenn complains of pain in his knee he gives him an aspirin. The teacher sees it, calls the principal, who calls the cops. Fred is thrown out of school, charged with dealing drugs.


Or consider what happened to Francisco when he flunked English on the eve of graduation day at Venice High in the long ago. Having recently arrived from Mexico, he was allowed to graduate on his promise to make it up in summer school. He went on to college and became an astronaut .


His nephew Pedro, newly arrived from Quintana Roo in 2013, flunks English, too. He sues the teacher, the principal and the school, arguing that requiring a knowledge of English to graduate is racist. The ACLU joins the suit; Pedro wins. He gets his diploma by court order and English is taken out of the core curriculum. Pedro mows lawns for a living because he cannot speak English and cannot get a job.


Nothing like this can happen, of course. Not in New York, anyway. The Soda Jerk will guarantee it.


Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

ARCHBISHOP VIGANO BEWARE OF YOUR NEIGHBOR ACROSS THE STREET

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THE APOSTOLIC NUNCIATURE IN WASHINGTON, D.C.





FEBRUARY 22, 2013

Beware of good ol’ Joe and his guns

BY WES PRUDEN



Joe Biden, a gun nut. Who knew?

The veep never fails to entertain, even when he’s trying not to, and this time his boss is probably not amused. Joe famously pushed President Obama to endorse same-sex marriage by sniffing the orange blossoms first, but if his advice for Americans to buy a shotgun to protect the homeplace was an attempt to convert the president to a Second Amendment aficionado, he’ll no doubt fail.
Joe’s endorsement of domestic mayhem in the cause of survival predictably infuriated those who are so terrified of guns that on certain playgrounds even little boys who make an imaginary gun with tiny thumb and forefinger risk having their hands seized, or at least a sentence to a trip to the principal’s office, followed by suspension.
Firing from the hip is always dangerous. When someone named “Kate” asked the veep, on a Facebook forum sponsored by Parents magazine, whether the president’s attempt to disarm America would make “law-abiding citizens become more of a target to criminals,” good old Joe’s working-class instincts from his origins overcame diplomacy, tact and discretion.
“Is this Parents magazine?” he asked in disbelief. “I have Parents magazine in my home, I’ve never heard anybody in Parents magazine ask these kinds of questions, but I’m delighted to answer them. Kate, if you want to protect yourself, get a double-barreled shotgun.
“I promise you: Whoever’s coming in is not going to [make it]. You don’t need an AR-15 [assault rifle], it’s harder to aim, it’s harder to use, and in fact you don’t need 30 rounds to protect yourself. Buy a shotgun. Buy a shotgun.”
Unlike some politicians faking an appreciation of guns and the Second Amendment, good old Joe makes a persuasive case that in his heart he’s a good ol’ boy. He owns two shotguns and a handgun, a Beretta.
The advice he gave to “Kate” and to his wife, Jill, about when and how to use a shotgun, was actually not so good. If Mrs. Biden hears a bad guy in the woods outside their home, he told her, “fire two blasts outside the house.” Firing inside the house is not a good idea unless you mean really serious business.
The veep and his missus aren’t likely to hear anything suspicious in the back yard, either at the official residence on Massachusetts Avenue or at their own house in Delaware. The Secret Service patrols around the properties are ample and adequate. The peril in firing a Beretta off the porch in Washington is that she might hit a passing car, bicyclist or even the pope’s ambassador at the Vatican embassy across the street.  [The official residence of the Vice-President is across the street on Massachusetts Avenue from the Vatican Nunciature.]
However, the veep’s instructions about how to use a shotgun, to “fire two blasts outside the house,” go athwart common gun sense. Shotguns are not ideal for firing warning shots because once both barrels are fired there’s nothing left for a second round short of fumbling for two more shells. A shotgun is meant to kill, and one advantage of the weapon is that it isn’t necessary to take careful aim.
If the veep really wants his wife to use a shotgun to protect herself he should give her a sawed-off shotgun. They’re illegal in the District of Columbia, and indeed in most jurisdictions, just because they’re so lethal. (If a television host waving an illegal ammunition clip on camera can get a pass from the District cops, surely a vice president can, too.) The shortened barrel reduces the gun’s range, but scatters the shot in a wide arc. The blasts from a sawed-off model can usually dispense with an entire roomful of bad guys.
Though forbidden to civilians, sawed-off shotguns are often used by the mob (particularly movie mobsters), police swat teams and the military. Sawed-off shotguns were a weapon of choice for Confederate cavalrymen in the Civil War, prized supplements to saber and carbine in close combat. Sicilian farmers used them for varmint hunting in the Nineteenth Century, and when their progeny came to America, they brought sawed-off shotguns with them. Hell’s Kitchen and the streets of Chicago soon echoed with deadly noise.
Bonnie and Clyde loved their shotguns. Clyde shortened the barrel of his Browning A-5 by 6 inches to make it easy to conceal and get to – he called the gun his “Whippit” because he could easily “whip it out” – and the sight of Clyde whipping it out terrified hundreds of bank customers in the ‘30’s.

Clyde and his shotgun wouldn’t have frightened good ol’ Joe. The veep would have cracked a gaffe and Clyde would have fallen down laughing until the sheriff arrived.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

THE WASHINGTON MONUMENT STRATEGY IS OPERATING FULLTIME

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				NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE Morning Jolt – February 21, 2013 By Jim Geraghty

President Obama on Tuesday painted a dire picture of federal government operations across the United States should automatic budget cuts hit on March 1: F.B.I. agents furloughed, criminals released, flights delayed, teachers and police officers laid off and parents frantic to find a place for children locked out of day care centers.

"Federal prosecutors will have to close cases and let criminals go," Mr. Obama said, flanked by law enforcement officers at the White House. "Tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find child care for their kids."

While the effects may ultimately be significant, many are unlikely to be felt immediately, officials said Tuesday after the president's remarks. Rather, they will ripple gradually across the federal government as agencies come to grips in the months ahead with across-the-board cuts to all their programs. . . .

But officials conceded that day care centers are almost certainly not going to be padlocked on March 1. Border patrols will be staffed throughout that day and the days to come. Federal agents will continue to conduct investigations, and criminals will not immediately be "let go," as Mr. Obama suggested.

This is the Washington Monument strategy:

Named after a tactic used by the National Park Service to threaten closure of the popular Washington Monument when lawmakers proposed serious cuts in spending on parks.

Roll Call calls it "an old legislative ploy where an agency threatens to close popular services first."

The strategy is used at all levels of government in an attempt to get the public to rally around government services they take pride in or find useful. Closing libraries on certain days of the week or reducing days of trash pick up appears to have the same effect.

Will some of these cuts stink? Yes. I dread 800,000 civilian employees of the Department of Defense working four days a week.

The GOP message is, and should continue to be, "Hate these cuts? Then let's take on the biggest issue, entitlement spending."

As Yuval Levin recently spotlighted, one tweak to the cost-of-living adjustment to Social Security effectively saves that program for the foreseeable future:

We might pay wealthier individuals with higher Social Security benefits lower annual cost-of-living adjustments than those receiving lower benefits. A progressive COLA could reduce high-end benefits by reasonable amounts in the near term while generating incentives — not disincentives — to work or save. A policy in which the highest third of beneficiaries received no COLA, the lowest third received a full COLA, and the middle third received half the current COLA would reduce Social Security outlays by around 12 percent over the first ten years. In fact, the savings from this measure alone would be enough to balance the program's finances over the long term.

IF JEWS WERE TO DO EXCOMMUNICATIONS, THE FIRST PERSON THEY SHOULD EXCOMMUNICATE IS SENATOR CHUCK SCHUMER

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COMMENTARY MAGAZINE

Contentions

Schumer’s Dishonest Hagel Sob Story

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary 02.20.2013 

Following the latest string of revelations about Chuck Hagel’s defamatory comments about Israel and its supporters, a lot of attention has been focused on whether New York Senator Chuck Schumer would change his position on President Obama’s nominee to be secretary of defense. But any hopes that Schumer would prioritize the principles that he has always claimed he was elected to the Senate to defend over political expediency have now been dashed. At a New York City event this morning reported by Politico’s Maggie Haberman, Schumer doubled down on his support for Hagel claiming the former senator cried when discussing his slurs about the “Jewish lobby.”

 The account of Schumer’s fateful meeting with the nominee was fascinating but more important than that was his decision to repeat the claim that “not a major Jewish organization” was against Hagel and to assert that the issue driving opposition to him was anger about his opposition to the war in Iraq. Both claims are not only false but are a transparent attempt to deflect attention from the real issue in the debate over Hagel: the president’s choice of an incompetent nominee who is also a well known antagonist of Israel with a record of opposition to getting tough on Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah.
Schumer’s discussion of Hagel’s tears when he explained to him that his crack about the “Jewish lobby” was rooted in prejudice may be a truthful but the idea, as the New Yorker put it, that “I’m sure you didn’t mean it” is patently disingenuous.



When Hagel used that term in 2006  (at his confirmation hearing he said it was the only time he said it “on the record”) or made other disturbing comments about the Israeli Foreign Ministry controlling the U.S. State Department or that Israel was on its way to being an “apartheid state,” he knew exactly what he was saying. Far from a misunderstanding, there is a clear pattern in Hagel’s record and it speaks to his contempt for the U.S.-Israel alliance and its supporters. Indeed, the context of the “Jewish lobby” remark showed that he considered it a point of honor to stand up to Israel’s supporters.



The notion that Hagel’s contrite interview with Schumer or any of his other fumbling attempts to walk back a long record of antagonism should outweigh a record replete with votes and statements demonstrating his desire to stand apart from the bipartisan pro-Israel consensus is absurd.



Just as dishonest though is Schumer’s claim that “no major Jewish organization” opposes Hagel. Just this past weekend, the American Jewish Committee — a large liberal-leaning group that more or less defines the term — demanded that the Senate not vote before it further reviewed Hagel’s record in the wake of recent revelations of more prejudicial statements by the nominee.



In the weeks prior to Hagel’s disastrous confirmation hearing, Schumer had attempted to use the strategic silence of many Jewish groups on Hagel as cover for his own decision to go along with the president on the nomination. But after the AJC statement and Anti-Defamation League leader Abe Foxman’s questions about Hagel’s statements, that line of defense no longer works. For Schumer to go on pretending that Jewish groups are neutral about Hagel can only be characterized as blatantly dishonest.



But it is not any more dishonest than Schumer’s attempt to claim that the motive behind the opposition to Hagel is “neocon” anger about his critique of the war in Iraq. Senator John McCain may still hold a grudge about Hagel’s foolish opposition to the Iraq surge (and contrary to Schumer’s comments, Hagel — who voted in favor of the war — was wrong about the surge) but that is not an issue that interests anyone else who cares about this awful nomination.



Neoconservatives may have disagreed with Hagel about Iraq but if that were the only issue about his candidacy he would already be sitting in his office in the Pentagon. It is, as Schumer well knows, Hagel’s terrible record on Israel, Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah that has scared many Americans about his fitness for office. Even more think his performance at his confirmation hearing when he was unable to demonstrate a grasp of the issues before the nation or defend his positions shows he’s just not up to the job.



When faced with a choice between doing the right thing about Hagel and demonstrating loyalty to President Obama, Schumer had done the latter. That is bad enough and a terrible commentary about the willingness of pro-Israel Democrats to put their party’s interests above principle. But for him to back up this decision with lies and distortions speaks volumes about his own character.

Topics: Chuck Hagel, Chuck Schumer, neoconservatives

PRESIDENT OBAMA DISOWNS HIS ILLEGITIMATE CHILD, SEQUESTER

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Morning Jolt – February 20, 2013

By Jim Geraghty
Here's your Wednesday Morning Jolt.
Enjoy!
Jim

National Review Online



The Sequester Pester



It's kind of fascinating to see President Obama pursue a strategy of rallying the public in opposition to the sequester, because I think most observers would agree that the American people have a severe case of Washington Crisis Fatigue.



The president's rallying cry is, "Rise up and call Congress to stop this!" And the American people look at what seems like a rerun of previous spending fights, shrug, and say, "meh."
I'll turn to an unexpected source, Megan Carpentier of Raw Story, to set the stage of our national exhaustion and cynicism:

The latest fight -- over what is termed "sequester" inside the Beltway and which politicos and reporters alike have repeated ad infinitum without much explanation to their constituents and readers -- is in fact just another continuation of the ongoing budget fights over which Republicans and Democrats have threatened government shutdowns for more than two years.
Eighteen months ago, after months of threats and posturing, President Obama suggested and Congressional Republicans and Democrats agreed to create a magical deadline to get their [stuff] together or else be forced to explain a rash of immediate spending cuts to the American people. Both sides agreed to the deal, figuring that the other would face a humiliating defeat in the 2012 elections; instead, the elections insured a continuation of the dysfunctional status quo and the continued unwillingness of anyone to behave like a political leader rather than a political brawler.
And yet, somehow, very few people outside the echo chamber can be forced to care. Why? Because we've all seen this little one-act play out before, enough times that it's hard to take it seriously. There's no dramatic filibuster where a Senator stands for hours reading from a cookbook or The Federalist Papers, no video footage of GSA workers being locked out of their offices or postal sorting machines sitting idle, no actual effect on anyone's day-to-day life, the political rhetoric on the Hill or the situation of the federal budget. We all assume that they'll sit around pointing fingers and calling one another names like a bunch of school kids until the very last minute, when they'll hammer out another reasonably foolish compromise that keeps the government open for another six months without solving the fundamental dispute, pat themselves on the back and go back to naming post offices and arguing about gun control and trying to land tortured one-liners on the Sunday talk shows until they're forced to repeat the posturing all over again.
It's tiresome, it's foolish, it's (deliberately, one starts to assume) difficult for most Americans to follow, let alone care about, and it does nothing to solve any of the varying problems identified as such for either side. And the more they do it, they more they'll earn the disapproval and disrespect of Americans on all sides of the political spectrum.

One wonders if we'll get another Chris Christie tirade in the coming days, when you see the fact that Sandy relief funding may be cut as a result of this:

In a statement, Rep. Michael Grimm said, "President Obama has no one to blame but himself for the consequences of sequestration. He proposed it and he insisted on it. As a result, we are faced with reckless, across-the-board cuts that will hurt important local programs, cost us jobs and decrease the amount of Sandy relief funding we fought hard to move through Congress."
"Shifting the blame to Congress is a shameless political tactic," added Grimm (R-Staten Island/Brooklyn). "The House has twice passed legislation to replace the president's job-killing sequester with targeted, common-sense cuts. I voted for both proposals; however, the Senate refused to act on them. If the president is serious about finding a solution, he will reach out to Congress to identify responsible ways to cut $85 billion, something the House has already done. . . . No one should be talking about another round of tax hikes, when sequestration can be easily avoided through responsible cuts."

By the way, one reason nobody believes the "CRISIS!" rhetoric can be found in the sentence that immediately follows Grimm's remarks: "Obama's remarks came a day after he returned to Washington from a three-day golfing weekend in Florida."



The sequester must be stopped . . . but only after 18 holes with Tiger!



Charlie Spiering reminds us that back in November 2011, Obama was pledging, "I will veto any effort to get rid of those automatic spending cuts to domestic and defense spending. There will be no easy off ramps on this one."



Here's a projection of the economic fallout of the sequester: GDP growth in 2013 shrinking from 2.6 percent to 2 percent, costing roughly 700,000 jobs (including reductions in armed forces), pushing the civilian unemployment rate up one quarter of one percentage point, to 7.4 percent. The MacroAdvisers urge, "By far the preferable policy is a credible long-term plan to shrink the deficit more slowly through some combination of revenue increases within broad tax reform, more carefully considered cuts in discretionary spending, and fundamental reform of entitlement programs."



Simpson and Bowles Present, ‘A Good Day to Cut Hard'



Simpson-Bowles held a reunion tour Tuesday.



Derek Thompson of The Atlantic hurls the Scarlet "R" at the pair, declaring that their revised plan looks . . . Republican! (Doesn't he mean it looks more fiscally conservative? As we all know, "Republican" is not a synonym for "person who cuts spending.") Thompson writes:

Whereas the first plan was a roughly even mix of higher taxes and lower spending, the new plan calls for 44 percent* less revenue. When you count the interest payments saved by running smaller deficits, both plans would cut around $4 trillion within a decade.

(Hey, didn't we just enact a whole bunch of income tax hikes on January 1?)

The swing toward spending cuts is pretty shocking to me, and I have emailed some budget analysts to make sure I'm fairly comparing the plans.
Why might Bowles and Simpson have proposed such a radically different mix of new taxes and spending cuts? Two reasons.
First, there aren't enough people in Washington who want to raise taxes on anybody making less than $250,000 to make the original $2.6 billion figure work. Second, Congress has demonstrated a fairly strong appetite for scheduling budget cuts. This plan -- which builds on the spending cuts under the Budget Control Act and the new higher tax rates on income over $450,000 -- shifts the weight of deficit reduction toward spending cuts.

Despite the scarlet "R" over at The Atlantic, the Heritage Foundation is offering an unimpressed face worthy of McKayla Maroney:

Doubling down on tax increases. The outline disguises a tax increase in the language of tax reform. Like a wolf in sheep's clothing, the proposal to eliminate or reduce many unidentified tax expenditures would consume an additional $600 billion of taxpayer's money -- on top of the $618 billion already enacted in the fiscal cliff deal. Simpson and Bowles suggest lowering marginal tax rates slightly as well, but only to call this a bipartisan proposal in name. The substance amounts to another massive tax hike on investors and small businesses that would drag down growth.
No structural entitlement reforms. On Medicare, the outline calls for some of the very same price-fixing policies that we know don't work. There is some common ground on increasing Medicare premiums for higher earners, reforming cost sharing, and adjusting benefits to account for population aging -- if that means increasing the age of eligibility. On Social Security, adopting the chained consumer price index (CPI) as a more accurate inflation measure would help program finances. But much more needs to be done.

Heritage's Romina Boccia concludes, "Simpson and Bowles have reappeared on the scene most likely only to see their proposal ignored once again." Yeah, but this is the deficit-reduction version of the latest Die Hard movie: tired stars from past decades doing their old schtick again, hoping new audiences will find it exciting and fresh.



An Actual New Joe Biden Quote: ‘Buy a Shotgun. Buy a Shotgun.'
And now, part of our continuing series, Joe Biden's Tips for Home Defense, and/or Spree Shooters.
In our last episode . . .

"A shotgun would keep you a lot safer -- a double barrel shotgun -- than the assault weapon in somebody's hand who doesn't know how to use it, even one who does know how to use it.
You know. *Points to the camera*
It's harder to use an assault weapon to hit something than it is a shotgun. So, if you want to keep people away in an earthquake, buy some shotgun shells."

And now, today's exciting installment:

Vice President Joe Biden said people don't need high-capacity weapons to protect themselves and that the Obama administration's efforts to reduce gun violence amount to gun safety, not gun control.
"If you want to protect yourself, get a double-barrel shotgun," Mr. Biden said Tuesday in an interview with Parents Magazine. The White House has proposed banning certain high-capacity weapons and Mr. Biden, who says he has two shotguns, said most military-style weapons aren't good for home defense.
"You don't need an AR-15," Mr. Biden said, referring to an assault-style rifle. "It's harder to aim, it's harder to use, and in fact, you don't need 30 rounds to protect yourself. Buy a shotgun. Buy a shotgun."

Nathan Wurtzel asks, "Now what if three people break into your house?"



ADDENDA: Lachlan Markay: "NOT THE ONION: Hamid Karzai and Bob Menendez meet to discuss the scourge of public corruption."

IT IS TIME FOR THESE DINOSAURS TO JOIN THEIR RELATIVES IN THE MUSEUM

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Sen. John McCain (Photo by Frank Plitt)

FEBRUARY 19, 2013

A march up the hill and down again

BY WES PRUDEN


Nobody does tough-talking better than a Republican senator. It’s not easy talking tough, and the follow-through can be even harder.



Last week John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina roasted and toasted Chuck Hagel, as if the republic would be in deadly peril if he were confirmed as secretary of defense. This week they’re assuring the White House that, well, they were just kidding. (“Can’t you guys take a joke?”)



Mr. McCain, a key Republican wise man on defense issues, insists he still thinks Mr. Hagel is not qualified to be the main man of the U.S. military, “but I don’t believe that we should hold up his nomination any further, because I think [we’ve had] a reasonable amount of time to have questions answered.”



Right on cue, Mr. Graham, who describes Mr. Hagel as not only “unqualified” but “radical,” said he had at last received a letter from Mr. Hagel in response to the questions he asked during the confirmation hearings, and he’ll take Mr. Hagel’s word that he didn’t mean all that nice stuff he said about Iran and the nasty stuff he said about the war in Iraq, the Jews and Israel.



Senators are tigers about process, less concerned about content. Standing tall when all about him, fairies and elves are losing their heads, makes a senator’s chin whiskers ache and his teeth itch. The Constitution assigns to the Senate the unique duty to “advise and consent,” but it’s a lot easier in Gasbag City to “advise and submit.” The idea behind “advise and consent” was that sometimes a president’s nominee would be so dreadful that consent must be withheld to nudge a president to reconsider his sin and repent with another nominee.



To listen to the Republicans at the Hagel hearing, you would think that both John McCain and Lindsey Graham were sure this was one of those occasions – and that the reasons were so important and so obvious that every weapon at hand, including the filibuster, must be employed to keep “one of the most unqualified, radical choices for secretary of defense in a long time” as far from the Pentagon as possible.



Maybe these worthies were just blowing smoke at the president and his choice. Maybe it was partisan scorn at a rogue and turncoat. Maybe they just didn’t like the cut of his jib. But if they really, really think Mr. Hagel is not qualified to serve, then withholding consent, even if the withholding requires parliamentary tricks and schemes, is a bounden duty.



Just why the president wants the rambling, bumbling, stumbling Chuck Hagel as his secretary of defense is a puzzle. He already has Joe Biden for comic relief. Unless it’s true, as many in Washington believe it is, that the president is determined to substitute squish for strength and Mr. Hagel shares his dream of dismantling the nation’s defenses and trusting the nation’s defense to international organizations like the United Nations. Who needs the Army, the Navy and the Marines when U.N. peacekeepers from both Upper and Lower Slobbovia could be called in to man the ramparts?



The military chiefs are doing their part, sounding the usual threats to close the orphanage and throw the kids into the cold, rainy streets unless they get the money they want. There’s enough unsequestered money for the Navy to pay a $2 billion bonus to run its ships on biofuels, instead of conventional fuel, and for the Army to continue funding a $28 billion “battlefield intelligence processor,” but not enough to send the new carrier Harry S. Truman to sea. The president thinks decisions like these will be right up Chuck Hagel’s street.



The Republican senators who sounded so fit to fight only a week ago may think they’re standing on principle and process now, but to the rest of us it looks like the same old Washington game of endless palaver and expensive pretense. Why did these guys make such a big deal of something they knew they wouldn't get genuinely excited about in the end?


Messrs McCain and Graham should now lead a chorus of that old English folk song about the Duke of York, who sounds a lot like a Republican senator: “Oh, the grand old Duke of York, he had ten thousand men; He marched them up to the top of the hill, and he marched them down again.”




Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

THE WORLD CONTINUES TO MAKE GREAT PROGRESS UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF ISLAM

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Happy Warrior   •
 
February 25, 2013, Issue

Ghost Cities

By Mark Steyn

https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/340075/ghost-cities?pg=1


In a dispute between Hamas and Fatah, it’s tempting to take the old Kissinger line re the Iran–Iraq War: It’s a shame they can’t both lose. But, in fact, only one side wins: In Gaza, al-Aqsa University has just announced that female students will be required to attend in proper Muslim garb from head to toe — i.e., the full body bag. At present, some still wear headscarf, trousers, and a long coat, but that’s too revealing for the new Gaza, so time to get fitted for your burka, niqab, or abaya. Al-Aqsa University is funded by the Palestinian Authority — i.e., Yasser Arafat’s old Fatah — but it’s controlled by Hamas. The higher-education minister, Ali Jarbawi, fumed impotently from Ramallah that the new dress code is illegal and must not be implemented, but the hard men on the ground in the Gaza Strip regard him as just another irrelevant member of a shriveling personality cult for a dead kleptocrat with a taste for Aryan rent boys.




And so it goes across the region: Regimes that represented nothing but their Swiss bank accounts have fallen, and in their stead arises the only alternative — an Islam purified by decades in opposition to the secularists and distilled to a scorching 175o proof. What else is left?



Some years ago, for a telly documentary, the BBC sent the novelist Lawrence Durrell back to Alexandria, the setting of his eponymous Alexandria Quartet, his “prose poem to one of the great capitals of the heart.” Durrell had lived in Egypt during the war years, and did not enjoy his return. “The city seemed to him listless and spiritless, its harbor a mere cemetery, its famous cafés no longer twinkling with music and lights,” wrote Michael Haag in Alexandria, City of Memory. “His favourite bookshop, Cité du Livre on the rue Fuad, had gone, and in others he found a lamentable stock.”



Only on the Western fringe of the Ummah, in a few Moroccan redoubts, can you still discern the flickers of the way it was. Otherwise, to anyone who knew the “Muslim world” of the mid–20th century, today’s Maghreb and Levant are dull places, drained of everything but Islam. And Durrell was returning in 1977: Another third of a century on, and Alexandria’s stock is even more lamentable. Indeed, his cast of characters would be entirely bewildering to contemporary Alexandrians: an English writer (of course), a Greek good-time girl, a homosexual Jew, a wealthy Copt. In the old days, Alexandria bustled with Britons, Italians, and lots and lots of Greeks. All gone. So are the Jews, homo- and hetero-, from a community 50,000 strong down to some four dozen greybeards keeping their heads down. I got an e-mail a year or so back from the great-grandson of Joseph Cattaui, a Jew and Egypt’s finance minister back in the Twenties: These days, the family lives in France — because it’s not just that in Egypt a Jew can no longer be finance minister, but that in Egypt a Jew can no longer be. Now, in the absence of any other demographic groups to cleanse, it’s the Copts’ turn to head for the exits — as in Tripoli and Benghazi it’s the blacks’. In the once-cosmopolitan cities of the Arab world, the minority communities are confined to the old graveyards, like the rubbish-strewn Jewish cemetery of broken headstones, squawking chickens, and hanging laundry I wandered through in Tangiers a while back. Islam is king on a field of corpses.



Nowadays, for the cosmopolitan café society Durrell enjoyed, you have to go to the cities of multicultural Europe, where “diversity” is not a quirk of fate but the cardinal virtue. At Westminster, the House of Commons has just voted in favor of same-sex marriage. Almost simultaneously, a group calling itself the Muslim London Patrol posted a YouTube video of its members abusing a young man for “walking in a Muslim area dressed like a fag.” Another Londoner is made to empty his beer can: “No drink in this area.” An insufficiently covered woman is warned, “This is not so Great Britain. This is a Muslim area.”



The “moderate Muslim” Maajid Nawaz writes in the New York Times that his youthful European-born coreligionists, back from Islamic adventuring during the Arab Spring, are anxious to apply the lessons learned abroad. The Danish group Kaldet til Islam (Call to Islam) has introduced “Sharia-controlled zones” in which “morality patrols” of young bearded men crack down on underdressed and bibulous blondes. In the Balearic Islands, Muslims took against the local meter maids, and forced the government to withdraw them. In Dagenham, 20-year-old Naomi Oni, a black Londoner, suffered horrific burns after a woman in a niqab hurled acid in her face. She was returning home from her job at Victoria’s Secret. Not secret enough.



Meanwhile, the BBC reports that February 1 was the first World Hijab Day, in which non-Muslim women from 50 countries took a stand against “Islamophobia” and covered themselves to show how much they objected to society’s prejudice against veiled women. From Gaza to Alexandria to Copenhagen to London, I don’t think we’ll have to worry about that. As Balthazar, Durrell’s homosexual Jew, muses, “Narouz once said to me that he loved the desert because there ‘the wind blew out one’s footsteps like candle-flames.’ So it seems to me does reality” — for the footsteps of Copts in Egypt, meter maids in Majorca, and Victoria’s Secret clerks on the streets of the East End.



– Mr. Steyn blogs at SteynOnline (www.steynonline.com).

LET'S GET THE DINOSAURS OUT OF OUR GOVERNMENT

!!!!

Mother American and Uncle Sam

Term limits.

 www.ricantotheright.blogspot.com


Why doesn't the entire government have term limits. The president does, thank goodness. Every sector of the government including the judiciary should have an expiration date.



The majority of our problems are with multiple bodies of the government staying in power way too long. The whole idea of being a life long politician doesn't make sense for a republic like ours. The only systems you see these life time appointments are in totalitarian states and monarchy's. What does a man know about his constituents if he spends the majority of his time in the capitol, or in Senator Menendez case Santo Domingo. This entrenchment leads to stagnation then to corruption.



Our citizens should be the makers of our rules and regulations, not a politician. Politics should not even be a profession, it should be a hobby or temporary duty like jury duty. You're called, you serve, your out.



 If you have been under a rock for the past forty years, you may have not noticed how the federal government is slowly centralizing it power. The states are losing their independence and autonomy by being blackmailed by federal funding. The federal government gives itself more and more of the power that our founding fathers believed were the states.


The nanny state has been in place for about thirty years, we are now coming into the era of "Mother America". This is a dysfunctional and codependent relationship that is evolving since the arrival of his majesty BHO. "Mother America" will do everything for you. Feed you, clothed you, medicate you and bury you if needed. Your new mother will watch you from the sky, over your computer, and will take you weapons so you can't hurt yourself. Your mother will never let you grow up and take a risk by fending for yourself. I suspect that like a mother of old "Russia", our new American mother will tell you where and when to work.



See what we need is our good old Uncle Sam back. We all had that uncle. The uncle that would hear your mom tell you something, then he'd tell you about real life and the real world. The uncle who'd teach you how to ride a bike without training wheels because you'd learn faster if you knew you where going to fall. Years later you had scars on your knees that were like war medals and you were proud you succeeded. Uncle Sam would let you work along side of him, but you'd better work hard and earn your keep. The harder you worked the more you made. As you got older he'd rarely interfere, but if you came to him in a pinch, he would straighten you out then send you back out on your own. Uncle Sam we need you more than ever.

Posted by Arnaldo Rivera at 1:24 PM