The Leaders We Deserve, 2.0

Well, America, you wanted four more years and you'll be getting everything that's coming to you, beginning today.

Quite a Stunning Sunset Last Night

Emotions Are Not A Basis For Law

I'm sure that today's White House push for sweeping gun regulation will be a spectacle worthy of Frank Capra with fresh faced cherubs pleading for their President to protect them from the wave of violence the way that only Barack Obama can.

It's a fools errand of epic proportions, regardless of your stand on gun ownership.

We need to get back to dispassionate governance and leave the emotional heat of the moment out of it. Everything Obama has done has dripped with emotion and immediacy, both of which preclude studied debate and the intellectual exercise that should accompany consideration of any law or regulation. The very worst mindset in approaching legislation is, in fact, the whole of his playbook.

Emotions are fleeting, law is not.

My heart aches for the families of these 20 children, but that doesn’t mean they should have any more influence on law than should any of us here. That’s another BS hallmark of the liberal argument; “moral authority”.

I’m sure that he’ll pull out all the stops this afternoon, pulling at our hearts and ignoring our heads. I’ll be halfway surprised if he doesn’t douse the children in blood, just to drive the point home.

Obama, the Oligarch of Outrage

The shear number of sources for outrage isn this administration almost precludes the success of any of the individual outrages because the opposition is portrayed “obstructing virtually everything” -- clearly this is a planned strategy. In short, if everything is outrageous, then nothing is outrageous.

Obama’s far more interested in discrediting the Republican Party than he is in surrounding himself with competence, and by keeping the level of controversy at a fever pitch he’s effectively casting the Republicans as a party of perpetual naysayers. As a bonus, it keeps the spotlight on the controversy du jour and off of the growing list of administration failures.

Alas, fully aided and abetted by the Entertainment Information Complex, it’s working extraordinarily well.  If you're sick and tired of being sick and tired, then President Obama has you just where he wants you.

Gun Control And The Question Of Motivation

"Liberal Fascism" by Jonah Goldberg

Both crime and murder are down by nearly half in the last 20 years, while gun ownership is up by half, yet the liberals are frantic to enact sweeping gun restrictions as though impending doom will surely consume us if it’s not done immediately.

The fervor with which they are selling “gun control” of late should give even non- gun owning “moderates” pause.

Even if one discounts that this is part of a pernicious and wide-ranging conspiracy on the Left to “disarm and oppress”, It’s hard to discount that it’s about authoritarianism, and that every left-of-center politician in the country seems to be eaten up with it.

They’re not trying to save us, they’re trying to control us, whether it be in the form of guns, french fries, big gulps, or Vicodin in emergency rooms and that’s quite pernicious enough for me, thank you.

Tigers and Hummingbirds

39% Say Government Should Do Nothing For Long-Term Unemployed 

Gawd, what an annoying grin!

More Americans than ever (39%) now think that if people can’t find work for an extended period of time, the government should do nothing at all to help them, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.  

Only eight percent (8%) feel their unemployment benefits should be extended indefinitely, down four points from October and tying the all-time low finding in over two years of regular surveying.  (To see survey question wording, click here. 

Thirty-two percent (32%) of Adults believe the government should pay for their retraining, tying April’s high.  Just  12% think the government should hire the long-term unemployed.

Hmm. A little more than two months ago, Obama was handily reelected and now more than a third say we should just hang the long-term unemployed out to dry.

The disconnect is pretty obvious, and significant.

The President is intoxicated with "mandate" but, as is the case with all intoxicants, what he's seeing may not be reality at all. Were I he, I'd tread lightly…but he won't, of course. As my father was wont to say, he may well be "letting his tiger mouth outweigh his hummingbird ass".

Don't Blame The Messenger

Trailer pulled for reality show starring rapper who fathered ELEVEN children by TEN women after it is branded 'an attack on African-American families' 

A yet-to-air reality show documenting a rapper, who has fathered eleven children by ten different women, has been slammed by critics who have branded it 'disgusting' and 'negative'. 

Do these people look like they're being coerced?

All My Babies' Mamas, set to air this spring on the Oxygen network, follows Carlos 'Shawty Lo' Walker, 36, as he navigates family life in an affluent suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. 

But after a preview of the one-hour, fly-on-the-wall hit the internet thousands of viewers called for it to be scrapped, with many suggesting it plays on racial stereotypes. 

Change.org petition, which has more than 20,000 signatures, states that the show 'stereotypes and demeans black children, mothers and dads'. 

New York-based Sabrina Lamb, who launched the initiative explains: 'This is not just an attack on African-American parents and children….but all parents and children.
…….

Gawd, the sanctimony of these people is annoying, the people that are most frequently trafficking in "black stereotypes" are black people themselves!  Personally, I despise reality TV, but maybe something like this could shed some light onto a generations-long cultural descent that's all but been ignored.  A cultural descent that even talking about can cause you to be branded a "racist".

The "black community" has given this behavior a wink and a nod for decades and now that there are plans to put it on TV for all to see they claim it's "an attack on African-American families"?

Let's remember that the reprehensible behavior inspired the TV show, not the other way around.

Passing Thought; Should America Be a Global Cop?

If not us, who?

There’s too many people on BOTH sides that want the U.S. to become a version of “Fortress America” and divorce ourselves from our role as the preeminent superpower. We simply must be involved, at some level, in the daily havoc lest it become catastrophe. 9/11 happened not at a time of heavy military involvement, but only eight months after the Clinton administration during which such involvement was eschewed. I don’t want direct action in every shitty little war that flares up, but the serious threat of such action can be cause for reflection.

The United States is one of, if not the only country on earth whose very existence owes to specific, and universal principles, and when these principles are violated we have a moral obligation to act by virtue of being who we are.

So, You Think It's Bad Now?

Don't forget the ultimate penalty on the young and the poor - inflation:

As is clear by this chart, inflation was virtually unheard of until the Creature from Jekyll Island (the Federal Reserve) took over.  However, more importantly, things didn’t really start to get bad until the 1970?s right after Nixon took the nation off the gold standard in 1971.  Since that time, America has seen a period of non-existent real wage growth and a huge gap grow between the rich and the poor ever since.  Nothing like livin’ the debt slave dream!

Chart and quote from www.zerohedge.com 

Truly, We Get The Leaders We Deserve

Politics is just the symptom, the malady goes far deeper. Over the past 50 years or so, the basic underpinnings of our culture have been questioned then refracted to mean anything we want them to mean thus rendering the very concept of “principles” worthless. We’ve become so open-minded that our brains have fallen out, our “tolerance” has reached a point where nearly anything is acceptable and even that which is unacceptable is “explainable”. A civilization without limits is no longer a civilization.

As a people, we want profligate spending, if it’s on us, and we want higher taxes to pay for it, as long as we’re not the ones being taxed. We want peace, but we’re not prepared to do what it takes to defeat those who live for war -- we’re not even prepared to call them by name. As a nation, we’re much like Scarlett O’Hara before the war; secure in our own little egg, actually believing we can stave off reality forever. We can’t.

It’s oft said that we get the leaders that we deserve and that’s never been so true as it is today -- faithless pols to represent a faithless constituency. We, as a people, have gotten precisely what we asked for. 

“The fault, dear Brutus, lies not within our stars, but within ourselves”

Send Chesterfields to All Your Friends!

Retronaut

Ready for Christmas, I Guess

Damned shame the world is ending tomorrow, ya know?

A glass room is the perfect environment for a Christmas Tree

Forget Politics, Obama is Just a Bad Value

The 50 years of the Cold War is estimated to have cost the US in the neighborhood of $8 trillion (I’ll stipulate that I have no idea if that’s adjusted for inflation) with historically low deficits, meaning it was pretty much “paid for”. Thus far, Obama has amassed $6+ trillion in deficits alone, in his first four years.

At least we had some very cool hardware, and the most lethal military in the history of the world to show for our Cold War expenditures, what do we have to show for the Obama years, friggin' ObamaCare?

Birds of a Feather

This certainly isn't the first time that the American Left has found common cause with an authoritarian Communist regime, is it?

CHINESE STATE MEDIA DEMANDS US CITIZENS BE DISARMED 

The official Chinese government news agency, Xinhua, has demanded the US immediately adopt stricter gun control measures to reduce the number of firearms the US populace is permitted to possess. 

The Chinese state-controlled media’s statement, titled “Innocent Blood Demands No Delay for US Gun Control,” is primarily focused on the Newtown tragedy in which 26 Americans were killed by a mad gunman. Twenty of the victims were young children. 

The Chinese government stated, “Their blood and tears demand no delay for the U.S. gun control.”

I'm sure their only concern is for the safety of Americans, Right?

Islam: Depravity, Redefined

Much as early Christians “imprinted” holy days upon existing pagan rituals, I believe Muslims have “imprinted” Islam on man’s worst instincts as exhibited by the criminal class. It doesn’t challenge you to forswear abhorrent behavior, just change it’s name and purpose.

The longer we deny what should be obvious to anyone with a modicum of reason, the more we will pay the price for our self-imposed ignorance.

The Inevitability of Tragedy Opportunism

I simply can't help mentally profiling this group, ya know?

Substantially more gun control is in the offing and the best we can hope for is mitigation. Most people are seeing this through emotional eyes and the gun control people are seeing it through opportunistic eyes. 20 dead first graders evokes a far deeper response than a comparable number of teenagers or college students. I disagree that this will go away any time soon; Obama and the gun control lobby will ride this toward sweeping weapons legislation and it matters not that said legislation will be meaningless and ineffective. What will matter is that they’re “doing something”.

Some think it’ll never make it through Congress -- picture on one side of the screen, the nebulous “assault rifle” and on the other side of the screen, pictures of the dead children, does anyone really think arguments based on logic and/or facts are going to win the day? Did arguments based on logic and/or facts with the election? When was the last time we won a single argument based on logic/facts?

Eaten Up With Race

I'm not personally familiar with ESPN commentator Rob Parker.  The only time ESPN is on in my house is when there's a game of particular interest being shown, so I've no knowledge of their on-air personalities (or, in the case of Mr. Parker, lack thereof).  I will say that I have no use for sports commentators who feel that people who turn to sports as a respite from serious issues should be regaled with political or social opinions as Bob Costas did earlier this month.

This week, ESPN's Parker decided to weigh in on the 'black authenticity' of rising NFL star Robert Griffin, III, (known as RGIII) a black man who is engaged to a white woman (which seems to be an issue to Parker), who has publicly stated that he chooses not to be defined by his race and (gasp!) may, just may have right-of-center political beliefs:

I talked to some people down in Washington, D.C. … friends of mine who are around at some of the press conferences, people I’ve known for a long time. But my question, which is just a straight honest question, is he a brother, or is he a cornball brother? … He’s not really, he’s black, he kind of does his thing, but he’s not really down with the cause, he’s not one with us, he’s kind of black, but he’s not really like the guy you want to hang out because he’s off to something else ….

I don’t know because I keep hearing these things. We all know he has a white fiancée, there was all this talk about he’s a Republican, which there’s no information at all. I’m just trying to dig deeper into why he has an issue. Because we did find out with Tiger Woods, Tiger Woods was like, ‘I got black skin, but don’t call me black.’ So people got a little wondering about Tiger Woods ….

To me, [his braids are] very urban, and makes you feel like, I think you’d have a clean cut, if he were more straitlaced or not like, wearing braids, you’re a brother, you’re a brother if you’ve got braids on.

So, RGIII, to his enormous credit, chooses to be judged “on the content of his character rather than the color of his skin” and he’s considered “inauthentic” by this talentless hack, Rob Parker?

So, who are the “authentic” blacks, the gangbangers, the wife beaters and misogynists, the crack-addled, the 13 year-old rapists, armed robbers and murderers?

How about the NFL player who murdered his girlfriend, the mother of his child, then committed suicide in front of his coach? Is HE an "authentic" black man? How about the NFL player who, while driving drunk, killed his teammate in an automobile accident? Is HE "authentic"?

RGIII is a huge bright spot in an increasingly troubled “black community” (oh, how I hate that term) and Parker and his ilk are too vested in their own racism to recognize the value of RGIII, not only to blacks, but to everyone. Too bad our President didn't choose not to be defined by his race.

Oh, What Fools These Mortals Be…..

Obama and the Democrats are treating the American public as exactly what they’ve become; one dimensionally thinking children with limited attention spans -- the electorate has appropriately rewarded them. We have staggering economic woes, foreign policy blunders galore and yet, we discussed crap like “the war on women” and Romney’s income through much of the campaign…now, we’re (reluctantly) beginning to discuss these issues and the bleating, quivering, over-gorged and under-informed masses, better known as the American people nod in agreement like the mindless bobble heads they have become.

Republicans tend to infer some sort of responsibility among the populace and try to impart some sort of useful information regarding our impending demise and the bobble heads are unimpressed, unmoved and, for all appearances, utterly confused.

We’ve assumed minimal maturity and a modicum of common sense in our message and, for all the intellectual impact we had, we might as well have been giving a dissertation on quantum mechanics…..at least then, they could have, maybe, related to Star Trek.

Sunroom Christmas Tree

A rather interesting effect with the glass ceiling and all of the windows.  I think it'll look even cooler with ornaments.

Republicans Aren't the Problem, Your Neighbors Are

What Americans must understand is that the Democrats don’t simply want to defeat Republicans, they want to kill and bury us as a party then salt the Earth where we once thrived…and they won’t rest until that has been accomplished. They will lie, cheat, steal and have no qualms against permanently slandering a good man’s reputation, as we saw in this cycle, to get what they want. We’ve had nasty politics in this country since our founding, but instantaneous modern communication, the inherent vulnerability of electronic voting systems and “data mining”, which the Obama campaign almost pioneered, and definitely perfected (to the delight of Democrats, everywhere), “nasty” has been raised to a level heretofore unknown.

This isn’t about simple mudslinging, it’s about permanent scarlet letters tattooed upon the foreheads of anyone who dares to oppose them. There are those who advocate our descent into the muck and matching them handful for handful, but I’m not convinced that’d work, even if I could convince myself to support a candidate who could excel at such woeful behavior. The Obama campaign ran one of the most vile, negative campaigns in memory, then had the temerity to tag Romney’s campaign as negative….and it stuck!

We can talk all we want about the “messiah” schtick, and it’s absolutely pivotal, but we must talk about how he was able to sell that schtick in the first place as well as the gullibility and low self-esteem of the majority of voters that bought it two cycles in a row.

This isn’t a problem so much with Republicans as it is with the American electorate. Yeah, we’ve had some real duds, but the Democrats haven’t exactly been producing stellar examples of statesmanship either (Elizabeth Warren? Really?). Hell, Obama himself is an urban myth (and yes, I meant that just the way it sounds), wrapped around a set of grievances and sold as a savior -- and people not only bought it, they practical pee on themselves in his presence!

We’re definitely in “Brave New World” territory here -- with the country in shambles, demonstrably worse than when he took over, no president should have been reelected. Again, ascribing this phenomenon to the messiah schtick is only half of the problem, even “messiahs” need loyal followers and in this case, they’re the real issue.