Thursday, January 30, 2014

Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, January 30, 2014


I'm so depressed...

(*SIGH*)

No. Not for myself. All's well here except for a sore neck (which I believe is sleeping position related).

My buddy Todd has a son who has kidney disease. We're talking "need a transplant" kidney disease. I just found out that the kid's expected donor (his half brother) has failed one of the final per-operative tests. No details... all I know is that now the kid's mom is being tested (re-tested?) and that sooner rather than later my friend's son is gonna need someone's kidney.

Politics? Pretty much always depressing...

What will the history books say about the decline and fall of America?

What will our national tombstone read? 

Perhaps... America: 1788-1969 RIP

Why not put the high-water mark at the first moon landing? Where else would you put it? The Reagan years were but the last gasp of traditional American ideals.

We "won" the Cold War. Good for us. Then we squandered our "victory." (Well... Bush and then Clinton squandered Reagan's victory.)

Bush. I hate the name! Two men named Bush share almost as much blame for the fall of America... our transformation into Amerika... as do a man named Clinton and a man named Obama.

The masks are off, now, folks... and few seem to care! 

Obama welds the power of a King. Boehner and McConnell... courtiers of "the loyal opposition" who even when they profess to actually oppose don't in actuality effectively oppose. The media... partisan players in "the game." Business leaders... mainly crony capitalists - and that's at best!

"We the People...?!?!" Have you spoken to the average American lately? "We" are a Sheeple... not a People.

Our children...??? We're... so... screwed...

Ahh... screw it. I may not bother with newsbites today. I'm gonna watch some TV and at 6:15 p.m. it's off to the gym.

Join Me... Put Your Money Where Your Convictions Are!



Via the Senate Conservatives Fund...

Fellow Conservatives:

The 2014 Republican primary elections are ramping up and there are five conservative candidates who will change the Senate...

* IF WE - THE PEOPLE - SUPPORT THEM.

NEBRASKA | Ben Sasse

Ben Sasse (R-NE) is the president of Midland University in Fremont, Nebraska. He's an expert on health care policy and will help conservatives repeal ObamaCare, which he describes as an example of "what government can't do well, wasn't built to do, and inevitably fails at." Sasse has proven himself ready, willing, and able to effectively explain why ObamaCare is destroying our health care system and how free-market reforms will empower Americans with high-quality, affordable care.

* SASSE IS GOING AFTER AN "OPEN" SENATE SEAT - MEANING NO RINO INCOMBANT.

Primary: May 13 - Help Ben Sasse

KENTUCKY | Matt Bevin

Matt Bevin (R-KY) is a Louisville businessman who understands we can't spend money we don't have. He will stand up to the big spenders in both parties.

Bevin has been endorsed by the Senate Conservatives Fund, FreedomWorks, Madison Project, Gun Owners of America and leading conservative voices like Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, and Erick Erickson.

* AND, FOLKS... MOST IMPORTANT... SUPPORTING BEVIN IS OUR BEST WAY OF OPPOSING MCCONNELL! BEVIN IS STAGING A PRIMARY TO UNSEAT MCCONNELL! IF WE CAN UNSEAT THE LIKES OF MCCONNELL... WE HAVE A CHANCE TO SAVE AMERICA!

* FOLKS... I'M SENDING BEVIN A CHECK...!!!

Primary: May 20 - Help Matt Bevin

MISSISSIPPI | Chris McDaniel

Chris McDaniel (R-MS) is a state senator who has consistently earned high conservative ratings and an attorney who fought ObamaCare in the courts. McDaniel recently spoke out against the 1,500-page, $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill, which busts the budget, funds ObamaCare, and includes a number of liberal policy riders. However, McDaniel's primary opponent, incumbent Senator Thad Cochran (R-MS), voted with the Democrats to help pass the bill.
     
McDaniel has also attracted support from top conservative groups. He has been endorsed by the Senate Conservatives Fund, Club for Growth, Madison Project, FreedomWorks, and Tea Party Express and is the only candidate who has won the support of all five.

* FOLKS... COCHRAN HAS GOTTA GO! EVEN IF YOU JUST SEND A TOKEN AMOUNT TO SUPPORT MCDANIEL YOU'LL BE MAKING AN IMPORTANT STATEMENT ABOUT WHOSE SIDE YOU'RE ON... THE RINO SIDE... OR... THE RIGHT SIDE... THE CONSTITUTIONIST SIDE... THE TEA PARTY SIDE!

Primary: June 3 - Help Chris McDaniel

KANSAS | Milton Wolf

Dr. Milton Wolf (R-KS) is board-certified radiologist and President Obama's conservative cousin who will fight to support and defend the constitution.

* A BRILLIANT GUY! I'VE BEEN A FAN FOR YEARS!

* FOLKS... WOLF IS ATTEMPTING TO UNSEAT LONG-SERVING RINO SENATOR PAT ROBERTS. IF WE WANT TO SEE THE RINOs GONE WE NEED TO PUT OUR MONEY WHERE OUR CONVICTIONS RESIDE!

Primary: August 5 - Help Milton Wolf

LOUISIANA | Rob Maness

Rob Maness (R-LA) is a retired Air Force colonel who is determined to stop the politicians in Washington from destroying the freedoms he spent his adult life defending. Col. Maness has now established himself as the true conservative in the race to replace incumbent Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA). He has steadily built support among the grassroots while his chief Republican opponent, Congressman Bill Cassidy (R-LA), has sought the support of the Washington establishment.

* FOLKS... WHAT ELSE DO YOU NEED TO KNOW?!

Cassidy joined Mary Landrieu in voting for the $1.1 trillion omnibus bill and showed voters once again that there is little difference between himself and his Democratic opponent.

* FOLKS... IT'S TRUE... IF WE DON'T DESTROY THE RINOs THEN WE HAVE NO CHANCE OF SAVING AMERICA...

Maness has earned the support of the Senate Conservatives Fund, Madison Project, and Gun Owners of America.

* I TRUST THE SENATE CONSERVATIVES FUND. THAT SAID, I ALSO TRUST FREEDOMWORKS. I TRUST CLUB FOR GROWTH! FOLKS... I CAN'T DO ALL THIS ON MY OWN. I CAN'T DO ALL THE RESEARCH. I CAN ONLY DO WHAT I CAN DO. BUT I'M TRYING!

Primary: November 4 - Help Rob Maness

These candidates need your help to win. Please contribute to the Senate Conservatives Fund today so we can help them get their message out.

* OR CONTRIBUTE CANDIDATE BY CANDIDATE! WHATEVER YOU THINK BEST!

Thanks to freedom-loving Americans like you, we have helped elect strong conservatives like Ted Cruz (R-TX), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Rand Paul (R-KY). We can do it again in 2014 with your help.

* DAMN STRAIGHT!

These primary elections are just a few months away so we don't have much time. Please help us reach our $100,000 goal before the end of the month.

* I'LL BE DONATING! PUTTING MY MONEY WHERE MY MOUTH IS!

Your support will help us promote these candidates with hard-hitting ads and targeted get-out-the-vote campaigns.

Your support will help us change the Senate.

* I PRAY SO...

Please forward this page to your friends and family so they can help elect these candidates and stop President Obama, the Democrats, and the RINOs from continuing to destroy "our" America.

Best regards,

Matt Hoskins

Executive Director
Senate Conservatives Fund

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Kevin D. Williamson puts it better than ever I could...


Even though I have no intention of watching it, just knowing that President Obama will be giving his State of the Union speech tonight has left me with a queasy stomach since awakening early this morning.

I hate Obama.

That said... I also hate John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and the rest of the RINOs.

My disgust is policy driven... policy driven and personality driven - "personality" in terms of knowing we're dealing with "personnel" who put themselves and their petty interests above the interests of the American People and our once great nation.

Ladies and gentlemen... I am convinced... absolutely certain... that no more than a few score in the House and perhaps a bear double-digit number of U.S. Senators put the Constitution above political expediency and partisan self-interest.

Obama though... he is actively "anti-Constitution." Yes. In the same way Woodrow Wilson was. Obama first ran for the presidency promising that if elected he would work to "fundamentally change America." Well, sir... ma'am... that's one promise he kept - and as "reward" a majority of the American electorate gave him a second term.

God help us...

In any case... here's what Williamson writes for NRO:
*  *  *  *  *  *


The annual State of the Union pageant is a hideous, dispiriting, ugly, monotonous, un-American, un-republican, anti-democratic, dreary, backward, monarchical, retch-inducing, depressing, shameful, crypto-imperial display of official self-aggrandizement and piteous toadying, a black Mass during which every unholy order of teacup totalitarian and cringing courtier gathers under the towering dome of a faux-Roman temple to listen to a speech with no content given by a man with no content, to rise and to be seated as is called for by the order of worship — it is a wonder they have not started genuflecting — with one wretched representative of their number squirreled away in some well-upholstered Washington hidey-hole in order to preserve the illusion that those gathered constitute a special class of humanity without whom we could not live.

(*LEAPING TO MY FEET TO GIVE THUNDEROUS APPLAUSE*)

It’s the most nauseating display in American public life — and I write that as someone who has just returned from a pornographers’ convention.

(*RAISED EYEBROW*)

NEVERMIND...

It’s worse than the Oscars.

WORSE THAN THE GRAMMYS!

The national self-debasement begins well before the speech is under way. Members of Congress — supposedly free men and women serving as the elected representatives of the citizens of a self-governing republic — arrive hours early, camping out like spotty-faced adolescents waiting for Justin Bieber tickets, in the hope of staking out some prime center-aisle real estate that they might be seen on television, if only for a second or two, being greeted by the national Pontifex Maximus as he makes his stately procession into the chamber.

When the moment comes and the Sergeant-At-Arms utters the sacred words — “Mr. Speaker! The president of the United States!” — the chamber will erupt, as though the assembled have entirely forgotten that the mysterious entity that is the object of this curious act of national worship only a decade ago was an obscure legislator in a destitute and corrupt state, a man whose most prominent legislative accomplishment was the passage of a bill requiring police to videotape confessions in potential capital cases — in a state in which there were as a practical matter no potential capital cases. (Illinois had not carried out an execution during the century in which the law was passed and was on its way toward abolishing capital punishment categorically.)

But they will listen, rapt, and the media mandarins afterward will evaluate each promise with great sobriety, ignoring entirely that the central promise made during the same charlatan’s first State of the Union address was subsequently labeled “Lie of the Year” by the great man’s own frustrated admirers.

That an entire class of people should be so enthusiastic about being lied to, serially, is perplexing.

SICKENING...

And then there are the human props.

This year’s victim du jour is one Jason Collins, an aging professional basketball player boasting more than $32 million in lifetime earnings who has publicly affirmed his homosexuality. For this act of courage/oversharing, he is to be seated in the first lady’s box. That there is such a thing as the first lady’s box is lamentable in and of itself. There is a royal box at London’s Royal Opera, complete with a private, Victorian-style toilet. And while the antiquated royal toilet may be a perfect metaphor for the State of the Union festivities, this is a republic, not a monarchy, and honors and offices are not accrued through marriage. Michelle Obama is a currently unemployed former part-time hospital administrator and mother to two lovely daughters. That is admirable enough, but she is a figure of public importance through marriage only, which is to say, properly a figure of curiosity, not of policy. She is not a royal consort, and proximity to her in seating should not constitute a message about the direction of government. (Even Lady Macbeth was known to dispense with such pretensions when pressed: “Stand not upon the order of your going,” she advises her dinner guests.)

There will be other totems, of course: victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, the District of Columbia’s teacher of the year (cf. “tallest building in Wichita”), and a kid who built an “extreme marshmallow cannon” for a White House science fair — an act of engineering that almost certainly would have gotten him kicked out of any D.C. teacher of the year’s classroom, if not imprisoned.

The State of the Union has not always been a grotesque spectacle.

George Washington delivered his briefing in person, but he was dealing with a self-respecting Congress that understood itself to be his equal in government.

When President Washington wanted the Senate’s advice and consent for an Indian treaty, he visited the chamber personally to seek it — and was so put off by the questioning and debate to which he was subjected that he vowed never to put himself through that again.

Thomas Jefferson, ever watchful against monarchical pretensions in the federal apparatus, discontinued the practice of delivering the State of the Union in person before Congress, instead submitting a written report. For a blessed century, Jefferson’s example was followed, and, despite civil war and the occasional financial panic, the nation thrived without an ersatz Caesar to rule over it.

It will come as no surprise that the imperial model was reinstated by Woodrow Wilson, Princeton’s answer to Benito Mussolini and the most dangerous man ever elected to the American presidency, a would-be dictator who attempted to criminalize the act of criticizing the state, dismissed the very idea of individual rights as “a lot of nonsense,” and described his vision of the presidency as effectively unlimited (“The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can”). A big man needs a big show, and it is to Wilson’s totalitarian tastes that we owe the modern pageant.

(*NOD*)

The next Republican president should remember why his party is called the Republican party and put a stop to this.

The State of the Union is only one example of the deepening, terrifying cult of the state that has taken root here. Many heads of state — and some royals, for that matter — fly on commercial aircraft. Presidents of the Swiss federation and members of the federal council receive . . . an unlimited train pass.

An American president stages a Roman triumph every time he heads out for a round of golf. The president’s household costs well more than $1 billion annually to operate. The president’s visage is more ubiquitous than was Vladimir Lenin’s in his prime, his reach Alexandrian, his sense of immortality (they call it “legacy”) pharaonic. Washington has become a deeply weird and alien place, a Renaissance court with armored sedans and hundred-million-dollar paydays.

(*PURSED LIPS*)

It’s expensive maintaining an imperial class, but money isn’t really the object here, and neither is the current occupant of the White House, unlikeable as he is. Whether it’s Barack Obama or some subsequent pathological megalomaniac, Republican or Democrat, the increasingly ceremonial and quasi-religious aspect of the presidency is unseemly. It is profane. It is unbecoming of us as a people, and it has transformed the presidency into an office that can be truly attractive only to men who are unfit to hold it.

George Washington showed the world that men do not need a king. We, his heirs, have allowed the coronation of something much worse.

Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, January 28, 2014


Just some rambling to start off the day...

So... how do you like your gas mileage, folks? It's only money... right? Oh, yeah... sure... the extreme cold is part of the equation, but so is that "winter mix" you're likely being forced to run on so as to cut down on...

(*COUGHING FIT*)

...global warming.

(*SNORT*)

Speaking of... er... "global warming"... schools, courts, and government offices throughout the western Florida panhandle plan to close because of anticipated snow and ice...

(*HEADACHE*)

Notice, folks... nothing about Walmart closing. 

(*PURSED LIPS*)

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

Saturday, January 25, 2014

Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., Jan. 25 & 26, 2014


Lung cancer? Double pneumonia? This friggin' cough has been with me off and on since early December!

And now... another "cold" just to add to the mix.

(*SIGH*)

Come Monday... time to call the doc and get a chest x-ray.

(*SHRUG*)

Splurged on pizza last night! My pizza guy is on winter vacation (he's a one man operation; closes the shop) and so Mary and I tried the new "hand tossed" pizza from Pizza Hut - $10 for a limited time only!

(*WINK*)

Actually... it came to $13.25 with extra cheese extra... and tax. (The bacon, sausage, pepperoni, and mushrooms were "free.") It was actually a pretty good pie!

So... anyone who isn't already "friends" with me on FB should send a link request. Until recently I didn't use my FB page for anything besides a placeholder (so folks could find me) and as an access portal to others, but since we've gotten back from the UAE I've been posting photos there. Check 'em out!


Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, January 22, 2014


Still in the midst of a news lull...

On the bright side, I have been making headway getting through Dexter via NetFlix!