Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, June 27, 2012


Pray for the people of Colorado Springs!

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9 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2012/06/26/rep-rangel-looking-strong-after-slow-start-in-primary/

Rangel declared victory over his opponent Tuesday night.

* DOESN'T THAT JUST TELL YOU EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT TODAY'S DEMOCRATIC PARTY... AND TODAY'S DEMOCRATIC VOTERS?

(*SHRUG*)

Rangel was convicted of 11 ethics violations in 2010, including failure to pay some taxes and using congressional resources to raise money for an academic center bearing his name.

* YEP... AMERICA 2012 - THE AGE OF OBAMA.

June 27, 2012 at 9:16 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/politics/54364398-90/hatch-spent-senate-campaign.html.csp

The tea party, big-spending PACs and challenger Dan Liljenquist failed Tuesday to force 78-year-old Orrin Hatch into retirement. The self-proclaimed "tough old bird" flew easily through the GOP primary...

* MY FRIENDS... ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE "THE STUPID PARTY."

* NOPE. OBVIOUSLY THIS ISN'T ON A PAR WITH SUPPORTING AN ACTUAL CROOK (SEE NEWSBITE #1 - RANGEL), BUT IT DEMONSTRATES ALL THE ODIOUS TRAITS OF YOUR AVERAGE REGISTERED REPUBLICAN.

June 27, 2012 at 9:22 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/new-disability-regs-limit-slope-mini-golf-holes-require-businesses-admit-mini-horses

Although the Justice Department has extended the deadline for America’s hotels to comply with regulations regarding handicap access to swimming pools, new Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) guidelines are already being applied at miniature golf courses, driving ranges, amusement parks, shooting ranges and saunas.

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

Among the provisions in the "Revised ADA Standards for Accessible Design," which went into effect on March 15, is one requiring businesses to allow miniature horses on their premises as guide animals for the disabled.

Another limits the height of slopes on miniature golf holes.

* YEAH... UNFORTUNATELY... NOT A JOKE... NOT A SATIRE... NOT AN "ONION" STORY...

(*SIGH*)

The 2010 ADA standards for Accessible Design require that at least 50% of golf holes on miniature golf courses be “accessible” – with a ground space that is “48 inches minimum by 60 inches minimum with slopes not steeper than 1:48 at the start of play.”

Gyms – at least one of each type of exercise machine must be positioned for use by a person in a wheelchair.

* BUT... BUT... BUT... IF YOUR LEGS DON'T WORK... (*THINKING OF ALL THE BIKES AND LEG MACHINES*)

* SERIOUSLY, FOLKS... IT'S INSANITY!

A section of the guidelines regulating commercial facilities states that, “a public accommodation shall make reasonable modifications in policies, practices, or procedures to permit the use of a miniature horse by an individual with a disability if the miniature horse has been individually trained to do work or perform tasks for the benefit of the individual with a disability.”

“Miniature horses were suggested by some commenters as viable alternatives to dogs for individuals with allergies, or for those whose religious beliefs preclude the use of dogs,” the rules state. (Also mentioned as a reason to include the animals is the longer life span of miniature horses – providing approximately 25 years of service as opposed to seven years for dogs.)

* FOLKS... (*SIGH*)... THIS IS OUR FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IN THE AGE OF OBAMA.

June 27, 2012 at 9:33 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jun/27/gao-1-billion-in-tax-credits-went-to-cheats/

Tax cheats were given $1.4 billion in government-backed mortgage loans under President Obama’s economic stimulus, and the government doled out at least an additional $27 million in tax credits to delinquents who took the first-time-homebuyer tax break, according to a government audit released Tuesday.

(*SARCASTIC CLAP-CLAP-CLAP*)

* NOW HERE'S THE DEAL, FOLKS: DOES THIS SORT OF SHIT HAPPEN UNDER REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTS AND REPUBLICAN CONGRESSES? SURE! BUT HERE'S THE DIFFERENCE... ALL ELSE BEING THE SAME... CHANCES ARE THAT REPUBLICANS WILL SPEND LESS IN THE FIRST PLACE AND THEREFORE (JUST GRABBING A NUMBER OUT OF A HAT) IF 10% OF GOVERNMENT SPENDING IS GONNA BE WASTED... AIN'T IT BEST TO SPEND LESS AND THEREFORE WASTE LESS?

Under government rules, delinquent taxpayers are supposed to be ineligible for the mortgage insurance program unless they have reached a repayment agreement with the Internal Revenue Service. But the Federal Housing Administration didn’t have the right controls to weed out bad applications, said the Government Accountability Office, Congress‘ chief investigative arm.

(*MORE SARCASTIC CLAPPING*)

“In the name of ‘stimulus,’ the federal government gave mortgage insurance to thousands of people we knew were tax cheats and had a bad track record paying their debts,” said Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, who joined a bipartisan group of other lawmakers to request the investigation. “The federal government needlessly put taxpayers on the line to help tax cheats buy homes.

* AND BY "FEDERAL GOVERNMENT" HE MEANS THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION... THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH... THE ADMINISTRATIVE BRANCH...

(*SIGH*)

In addition to the mortgages, the auditors found that more than half of the tax-delinquent borrowers claimed the first-time-homebuyers’ credit, worth up to $8,000.

* FOLKS... YA CAN'T MAKE THIS SHIT UP!

June 27, 2012 at 9:54 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304765304577483133930695476.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Will it matter if Republicans take over the Senate this November?

Not much if you judge by the TV ads trashing Paul Ryan and the House budget reforms, courtesy of Republican Senate candidate Denny Rehberg.

The six-term Montana Congressman is gunning for Jon Tester, in what is one the GOP's best chances to defeat a Democratic incumbent. The Montana Republican Party has been running 30-second TV spots touting Mr. Rehberg as an "independent thinker," and neither word is true.

(*LAUGHING OUT LOUD*)

The ad goes on to note that "Rehberg refused to support a Republican budget plan that could harm the Medicare program so many of Montana's seniors rely on..."

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

Rehberg's claim to independence is a vote for Beltway business as usual on entitlements, which makes him another wildebeest in the herd that has created trillion-dollar deficits.

Mr. Rehberg is well-known in the state as Montana's at-large House Member and in the most recent poll, from Rasmussen, he is ahead of Mr. Tester 49% to 47%. But he apparently thinks the way to beat the incumbent is by sticking something through the ribs of his supposed friends.

What's the point of electing Republicans like Mr. Rehberg if they're going to vote like Democrats and block reform in the 113th Congress? Better to let Mr. Tester keep the seat, if only for truth in advertising.

* WOW...

June 27, 2012 at 10:51 AM
William R. Barker said...

* THREE-PARTER... (Part 1 of 3)

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/is-the-country-unraveling/?singlepage=true

Polls change daily; gaffes and wars may come aplenty. But Barack Obama has lost the American center and now he is reduced to the argument that Mitt Romney would be even worse than he has been, as he tries to cobble together an us-versus-them 51% majority from identity groups through cancelling the Keystone Pipeline, granting blanket amnesty, ginning up the “war on women,” and flipping on gay marriage.

The Obama memoir is revealed not really to be a memoir at all. Most of his intimate friends and past dalliances that we read about in Dreams From My Father were, we learn, just made up (“composites”); the problem, we also discover, with the president’s autobiography is not what is actually false, but whether anything much at all is really true in it. If a writer will fabricate the details about his own mother’s terminal illness and quest for insurance, then he will probably fudge on anything.

(For months the president fought the Birthers who insist that he was born in Kenya, only to have it revealed that he himself for over a decade wrote just that fact in his own literary biography. Is Barack Obama then a "birther?")

Has any major public figure (57 states, Austrian language, corpse-men, Maldives for Falklands, private sector “doing fine,” etc.) been a more underwhelming advertisement for the quality of a Harvard education or a Chicago Law School part-time billet?

Has any presidential candidate or president set a partisan crowd to laughing by rubbing his chin with his middle finger as he derides an opponent, or made a joke about killing potential suitors of his daughters with deadly Predator drones, or recited a double entendre “go-down” joke about a sex act?

* TO BE CONTINUED...

June 27, 2012 at 3:00 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 3)

As we see in New Jersey, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin, the cure for the present economic malaise is not rocket science — a curbing of the size of government, a revision of the tax code, a modest rollback of regulation, reform of public employment, and holding the line on new taxes. Do that and public confidence returns, businesses start hiring, and finances settle down.

Do the opposite — as we see in Mediterranean Europe, California, or Illinois over the last decade — and chaos ensues.

Obama took a budding recovery in June 2009, and through massive borrowing, the federal takeover of health care, new expansions of food stamps and unemployment insurance, the curtailing of oil and gas leasing on public lands, new regulations, and non-stop demagoguery of the private sector slowed the economy to a crawl.

Obama's goal seems not to restore economic growth per se but to seek an equality of result, even if that means higher unemployment and less net wealth for the poor and middle classes. ... Nowhere is the Obama model of massive borrowing, vast increases in the size of the state, more regulations, and class warfare successful — not in California or Illinois, not in Greece, Spain, or Italy, not anywhere.

Culturally, Obama might at least have played the Jimmy Carter populist and eschewed the elite world that had so mesmerized Bill Clinton. Instead, Obama proved a counterfeit populist and became enthralled with the high life of rich friends, celebrities, high-priced fundraisers, and family getaways to Martha’s Vineyard or Costa del Sol.

President Obama somehow has set records both in the number of meet-and-greet campaign fundraisers and the number of golf rounds played. As Obama damned the fat cats and corporate jet owners, he courted them in preparation to joining them post-officium. [Quite frankly,] it simply is unsustainable for a Hawaii prep-schooled president to talk down to black audiences in a fake black patois in warning about “them,” only to put on his polo shirt, shades and golf garb to court “them” on the links.

Race? We live in a world where either the president or the attorney general will too often weigh in, and clumsily and in polarizing fashion, on any high-profile white/black legal matter. We live in an age of a daily dose of the provocateur Al Sharpton and the nearly daily shrill accusations of the Black Caucus.

No president ever entered office with more racial goodwill and no president has so racially polarized the country. Anyone who read the racially obsessed Dreams From My Father or reviewed the race-baiting sermons of the demented Rev. Wright could have predicted the ongoing deterioration in racial relations.

(*NOD*)

The most recent de facto amnesty is not just politically cynical, but unworkable. Consider that Obama himself warned on two earlier occasions that it would be legally impossible to do what he just did, and so he did not do it — even when he had Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress — until he was at 50/50 in the polls in a reelection fight.

If we are to extend to roughly one million illegal aliens blanket amnesty on the premise that they are in or have graduated from high school and have not been convicted of a crime, then are we to deport now those who dropped out of high school (the Hispanic drop out rate in general in California is over 50%) or those who have been arrested and convicted?

Will this loud and public effort by the Hispanic elite to achieve amnesty for over 11 million illegal aliens moderate the MEChA/La Raza university writ that the United States is a culpable place — for how can they desire so what they so criticize?

Given that Asians are now the largest immigrant group (almost all arriving legally, with either education, skills, or capital), will yet another group adopt lobbying efforts as well to increase the numbers of kindred arrivals, given that immigration policy is now predicated on ethnic and identity politics?

* TO BE CONTINUED...

June 27, 2012 at 3:02 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 3 of 3)

Solyndra, the reversals of the Chrysler creditors, the GSA mess, the Secret Service embarrassments, and Fast and Furious were not the new transparency. But "Securitygate" proved a scandal like none other in recent memory, trumping both Watergate and Iran-Contra — albeit ignored by the press. (Usually administrations fight leaks from self-proclaimed whistleblowers, but do not themselves aid and abet violators of government confidentiality to promote a pathetic (reading Thomas Aquinas while selecting drone targets?) narrative of heroic wartime leadership.)

Usually liberal reporters convince themselves into thinking they publish leaks as a way of speaking “truth to power,” not as near accomplices in promoting a partisan agenda.

Usually leaks happen after events, not in the middle of an ongoing war against terrorists.

How odd that the Obama administration has done more harm to the country than did Wikileaks. Why would the president not release subpoenaed documents to the U.S. Congress while he leaked national security secrets to the world?

Appointments?

Where does one find the like of an Anita Dunn (her hero was Mao), the truther Van Jones, or Al “Crucify” Armendariz?

Do we remember guests to the Bush White House being photographed flipping off portraits of Bill Clinton?

Usually Treasury secretaries are models of tax probity, not tax violators themselves. Why is the secretary of Labor issuing videos inviting illegal aliens to contact her office when lodging complaints against employers? Even John Mitchell did not violate so many ethical standards as has Eric Holder, who sees nothing wrong in appointing an Obama appointee and Obama campaign donor to investigate possible Obama administration legal violations. Why was grilling Alberto Gonzalez not racism, but doing the same to Eric Holder supposedly is? From where did “Shut the f— up” National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon appear? Fannie Mae and K Street? Do Commerce secretaries usually drive Lexuses as they promote U.S. industry?

* AND ON AND ON AND ON IT GOES...

Can there be good news in this era of Obama’s managed decline?

In less than 40 months, Obama destroyed the greatest bipartisan good will that any recent president has enjoyed, and has done more to discredit Keynesian neo-socialist politics than have all of talk radio, Fox News, and the internet combined.

In just two years, he took a Democratic Congress and lost the House in the largest mid-term setback since 1938.

In other words, the People — 50% of whom either do not pay federal income taxes or receive some sort of state or federal entitlement or both — saw the best face of modern neo-socialism imaginable, and they were not quite sold on it.

[I]t is hard to screw up America in just four years.

Look at it this way: gas and oil production has soared despite, not because of, the federal government. The rest of the world — the unraveling European Union, the Arab Spring, Putin’s Russia, aging Japan, authoritarian China, the recrudescent Marxism in Latin America — reminds us of American exceptionalism.

The verdict from Wisconsin is that the statist model is over. The public union, big pension, non-fireable employee model is left only with an “après nous, le déluge“ sigh. The private sector is not doing fine, but shortly will be when it is assured taxes won’t soar, energy will be cheaper, and ObamaCare will cease.

The irony is that the last four years have reminded us of what we still can be, and how we differ from most other places in the world.

June 27, 2012 at 3:02 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/biden-rips-reagan-line_647902.html

* JOE BIDEN MAKES AN ASS OUT OF HIMSELF - AGAIN!

June 27, 2012 at 3:04 PM

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