So... the Drudge headline this morning is "USA Grinds To Halt For World Cup Game."
(Kind of amusing, actually - give the piece a read!)
Hey... folks... remember Napoleon III?
(If you haven't watched "The Magnificent Seven" in awhile... pick up a $4.99 DVD at Walmart and convene a family screening...)
Anyway... emerging from my ramblings is the following caution to my fellow citizens:
America is not Europe. Nor do we want to be.
Unfortunately... by "we" I speak of Tea Party Americans, not establishment republicans, certainly not democrats.
Beware, my readers! The top-down highly centralized, bureaucratic European state "ruled" by a fairly cohesive cultural elite... that's what more and more American elites would have us become.
What of Mexico? What was I getting at mentioning "The Magnificent Seven?" Well... that's how the elites view "We The People" - as poor, helpless, pathetic Mexican peasants needing to be rescued.
Here's the problem: Americans are not Mexicans. (However, folks, understand, behind the pro-illegal-immigration push is a desire to re-create "We The People" as a more complaint population... easier to control... easier to exploit.)
Folks... do you want an America symbolized by "The Magnificent Seven" or... by Mexican peasants?
What's any of this have to do with soccer...?
(*GUFFAW*)
The fallback goal of the Left is to make us more "French." (More "European!") Folks... do you really want America to be Greece? Italy? Spain? Even Ireland or the UK? I don't.
Folks... sports, movies, politics, life... if nothing else, Obama and his allies have always been totally frank about one thing; they have, are, and will continue to do all within their power to "fundamentally change America."
Folks... they've been succeeding. Contemplate the "modern" American economy. Examine the deliberate spurring of the growth of the American Welfare State. Consider the cultural assault upon traditional American ideals of right and wrong... good and bad.
Geezus, people... wake up!
7 comments:
http://washingtonexaminer.com/report-90-of-illegals-skip-immigration-court-appearances-135000-will-go-missing/article/2550217
House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte, who on Wednesday held a hearing to raise national security concerns about the new wave of illegals, revealed Thursday that many of the teens are placed with relatives, including parents who are in the U.S. illegally, and then ignore court orders to appear for immigration hearings.
Once they are picked up by immigration officials, “they are given a court date, expected to return, a year or more later,” said the Virginia lawmaker. “The overwhelming majority of them, more than 90%, do not return for their hearings and as a result we have a problem,” he added.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20140626/us-supreme-court-recess-appointment-801860b033.html
The Supreme Court on Thursday limited the president's power to fill high-level vacancies with temporary appointments, ruling in favor of Senate Republicans in their partisan clash with President Barack Obama.
The high court's first-ever case involving the Constitution's recess appointments clause ended in a unanimous decision holding that Obama's appointments to the National Labor Relations Board in 2012 without Senate confirmation were illegal.
* WOW! CALL ME SHOCKED! UNANIMOUS...!!!
Obama invoked the Constitution's provision giving the president the power to make temporary appointments when the Senate is in recess. Problem is, the court said, the Senate was not actually in a formal recess when Obama acted.
Obama had argued that the Senate was on an extended holiday break and that the brief sessions it held every three days — what lawmakers call "pro forma" — were a sham that was intended to prevent him from filling seats on the NLRB.
* AND FOR THE RECORD... I TENDED TO AGREE... TO AGREE WITH OBAMA! IT SEEMED TO ME THAT THEY WERE INDEED "PRO FORMA" SESSIONS. THERE WERE NO QUORUMS PRESENT. NO ACTUAL "WORK" WAS DONE.
(*SHRUG*)
The justices rejected that argument Wednesday. Justice Stephen Breyer said in his majority opinion that a congressional break has to last at least 10 days to be considered a recess under the Constitution.
* AND... WHERE'D HE GET THAT "10 DAYS" FROM?
Neither house of Congress can take more than a three-day break without the consent of the other.
The issue of recess appointments receded in importance after the Senate's Democratic majority changed the rules to make it harder for Republicans to block confirmation of most Obama appointees.
But the ruling's impact may be keenly felt by the White House next year if Republicans capture control of the Senate in the November election. The potential importance of the ruling lies in the Senate's ability to block the confirmation of judges and the leaders of independent agencies like the NLRB. A federal law gives the president the power to appoint acting heads of Cabinet-level departments to keep the government running.
Still, the outcome was the least significant loss possible for the administration. The justices, by a 5-4 vote, rejected a sweeping lower court ruling against the administration that would have made it virtually impossible for any future president to make recess appointments.
The lower court held that the only recess recognized by the Constitution is the once-a-year break between sessions of Congress. It also said that only vacancies that arise in that recess could be filled. So the high court has left open the possibility that a president, with a compliant Congress, could make recess appointments in the future.
Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for himself, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, said he would have upheld the lower court's reasoning. He said Thursday's decision means "the abolition of the Constitution's limits on the recess-appointment power."
* HOW SO...? (I'M CONFUSED...)
Obama was the first president to try to make recess appointments when Congress explicitly said it was not in recess. The Constitution requires that the Senate and House must get the other's consent for a break lasting longer than three days. At the end of 2011, the Republican-controlled House would not give the Democratic-led Senate permission for a longer break.
The partisan roles were reversed during Bush's presidency, when Senate Democrats sought ways to prevent the president from making recess appointments.
In fact, the very basis on which the justices decided the case — that the Senate can use extremely brief sessions to avoid a formal recess — was a tactic devised by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada to frustrate Bush.
* I'M GONNA HAVE TO READ THIS OPINION... BOTH OPINIONS...
http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20140626/civic-center/new-york-workers-get-extended-lunch-break-watch-team-usa
Gov. Andrew Cuomo gave state workers an extended lunch break — from noon to 2 p.m. instead of the typical noon to 1 p.m. — so that they could support the nation's team during Thursday afternoon’s match against Germany, he announced Thursday.
The move came in response to a letter from Jürgen Klinsmann, the coach of the U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team, about giving American soccer fans permission to request time off.
* ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME...?!?!
* IF THIS IS TRUE... IF... THEN CUOMO SHOULD BE IMPEACHED AND THEN SUED TO RECOUP EVERY DOLLAR SQUANDERED!
* FOLKS... DO THE MATH! "X" NUMBER OF STATE WORKERS... EACH RECEIVING AN HOURLY COMPENSATION FOR WAGE, BENEFITS, AND RETIREMENT... AND ALL THESE HOURS AND ALL THAT MONEY GOING TOWARDS SUBSIDIZING TV WATCHING WHEN STATE BUSINESS IS GOING ON...?!?! THIS IS BEYOND INSANE; THIS IS CRIMINAL!
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/381242/looking-back-iraq-victor-davis-hanson
So who lost Iraq?
* OBAMA...
The blame game mostly fingers incompetent Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. Or is Barack Obama culpable for pulling out all American troops monitoring the success of the 2007–08 surge?
Some still blame George W. Bush for going into Iraq in 2003 in the first place to remove Saddam Hussein.
One can blame almost anyone, but one must not invent facts to support an argument.
Do we remember that Bill Clinton signed into law the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 that supported regime change in Iraq?
* I DO...!!!
He gave an eloquent speech on the dangers of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.
* MOST ELOQUENT...
In 2002, both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly to pass a resolution authorizing the removal of Saddam Hussein by force. Senators such as Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Harry Reid offered moving arguments on the Senate floor why we should depose Saddam in a post-9/11 climate.
(*PURSED LIPS*)
Democratic stalwarts such as Senator Jay Rockefeller and Representative Nancy Pelosi lectured us about the dangers of Saddam’s stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. They drew on the same classified domestic- and foreign-intelligence reports that had led Bush to call for Saddam’s forcible removal.
(*SHRUG*)
The Bush administration, like members of Congress, underestimated the costs of the war and erred in focusing almost exclusively on Saddam’s supposed stockpiles of weapons. But otherwise, the war was legally authorized on 23 writs. Most of them had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction and were unaffected by the later mysterious absence of such weapons — which is all the more mysterious given that troves of WMD have turned up in nearby Syria and more recently in Iraqi bunkers overrun by Islamic militants.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
Legally, the U.S. went to war against Saddam because he had done things such as committing genocide against the Kurds, Shiites, and the Marsh Arabs, and attacking four of his neighbors. He had tried to arrange the assassination of a former U.S. president, George H. W. Bush. He had paid bounties for suicide bombers on the West Bank and was harboring the worst of global terrorists. Saddam also offered refuge to at least one of the architects of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and violated U.N.-authorized no-fly zones.
A number of prominent columnists, Right and Left — from George Will, David Brooks, and William F. Buckley to Fareed Zakaria, David Ignatius, and Thomas Friedman — supported Saddam’s forcible removal. When his statue fell in 2003, most polls showed that over 70 percent of Americans agreed with the war.
* ALL THIS SAID... THE WAR TURNED OUT TO HAVE BEEN A MISTAKE.
What changed public opinion and caused radical about-faces among the war’s most ardent supporters were the subsequent postwar violence and insurgency between 2004 and 2007 and the concurrent domestic elections and rising antiwar movement. Thousands of American troops were killed or wounded in mostly failed efforts to stem the Sunni–Shiite savagery.
The 2007–08 surge engineered by General David Petraeus ended much of the violence. By Obama’s second year in office, American fatalities had been reduced to far below the monthly accident rate in the U.S. military. “An extraordinary achievement,” Obama said of the “stable” and “self-reliant” Iraq that he inherited — and left.
* AS HE SHOULD HAVE. (YEP... YOU READ THAT RIGHT...)
Prior to our invasion, the Kurds were a persecuted people who had been gassed, slaughtered, and robbed of all rights by Saddam. In contrast, today a semi-autonomous Kurdistan is a free-market, consensual society of tolerance that, along with Israel, is one of the few humane places in the Middle East.
* AND WE SHOULD PROTECT THE KURDS - SUPPORT THEIR EMERGENCE AS A FREE AND AUTONOMUS STATE!
In 2003, the New York Times estimated that Saddam Hussein had killed perhaps about 1 million of his own people. That translated into about 40,000 deaths for each year he led Iraq.
* NOT... OUR... PROBLEM...
A Saddam-led Iraq over the last decade would not have been a peaceable place.
* I WONDER WHAT GAS PRICES WOULD BE NOW... HOW THE WOULD HAVE EVOLVED ABSENT THE IRAQ WAR...
We can also imagine that Saddam would not have sat idly by the last decade as Pakistan and North Korea openly sold their nuclear expertise, and as rival Iran pressed ahead with its nuclear enrichment program.
* WHAT WOULD HAVE HAVE DONE...? COM'ON... GIVE IT A REST...
Nor should we forget that the U.S. military decimated al-Qaeda in Iraq. Tens of thousands of foreign terrorists flocked to Anbar Province and there met their deaths. When Obama later declared that al-Qaeda was “on the run,” it was largely because it had been nearly obliterated in Iraq.
* THE COCKROACH SUPPLY IS ENDLESS. THE SURVIVERS ARE BATTLE HARDENED.
Launching a costly campaign to remove Saddam may or may not have been a wise move.
* IT WASN'T!
But it is historically inaccurate to suggest that the Iraq War was cooked up by George W. Bush alone — or that it did not do enormous damage to al-Qaeda, bring salvation for the Kurds, and by 2009 provide a rare chance for the now-bickering Iraqis to make something out of what Saddam had tried to destroy.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/381265/suburban-californians-fight-feds-ryan-lovelace
California suburbanites are engaged in a fight with the federal government over its attempt to turn a residential building into a detention center for illegal-immigrant children.
* GOOD!
The Department of Health and Human Services submitted an application to the city of Escondido’s Planning Commission to use a 35,200 square-foot facility to house almost 100 children. On Tuesday night in this suburb of San Diego, the city commission held a hearing to review the request and unanimously voted to oppose the application.
Several hundred people filled the chamber hall to make their voices heard, and people at the meeting say the overwhelming majority opposed the application. The standing-room-only crowd spilled over into an adjacent room and nearby hallways, and onto the grass outside.
“You couldn’t park within two blocks of city hall,” says Jeff Weber, the chairman of the Escondido City Planning Commission. “One of our commissioners was late because he couldn’t get a parking place.” Weber says the event required a police presence, and one officer coached him on how to respond in case of a disturbance.
Mayor Sam Abed (R) says he’s concerned that the children would not receive proper health screening and criminal-background checks before arriving at the proposed facility. “We feel that the federal government should keep housing them in federal facilities and not [be] sending them to the local small communities where land use is very limited,” he says.
Abed says both Republicans and Democrats should be blamed for courting such illegal immigration. “The Republican wants cheap labor and the Democrat wants more votes,” Abed says. “We want people to come and work hard and realize the American Dream and contribute to the success of America versus just crossing the border and depending on government for help.”
(He says he made the effort to assimilate into the United States and thinks other immigrants should follow suit. “If you are an immigrant and your loyalty continues to be somewhere else, I don’t think it’s a good idea to come to America,” he says. The Republican mayor emigrated to the U.S. from the suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon, and worked as an IBM engineer before entering political life. He’s running for re-election in November.)
Kitty Demry, a longtime Escondido resident who lives about a third of a mile away from the facility’s proposed location with her young family, says she doesn’t think it’s a good idea for the kids to stay in the Escondido building because it’s not suitable for children, and the shelter may endanger her own children. “I don’t think people want bad things to happen to kids, I think people want to protect their own kids,” Demry says. “I want to know that [the kids are] safe in the residential communities where they live, and I don’t think they will be — because nobody’s calling this what it really is: It’s a detention center.”
Demry says she blames the federal government for instigating the problem. “It is a humanitarian crisis, but it’s being created by the federal government’s lack of doing their job: The federal government’s primary job is to protect our borders.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/381122/heres-how-little-chelsea-clinton-cares-about-money-dollars-celina-durgin
Chelsea Clinton doesn’t care about money...
(*GUFFAW*)
...as sincerely as her parents struggle to make ends meet.
(*TRYING NOT TO PISS MYSELF*)
In the latest Clinton money quote, the career first daughter pronounced in a Fast Company interview that she has “tried really hard to care about things that were very different from my parents. I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t. That wasn’t the metric of success that I wanted in my life.”
(*SNORT*)
How indifferent is she to the lure of filthy lucre? According to Berkeley inequality specialist and Thomas Piketty collaborator Emmanuel Saez, an annual salary of $394,000 qualifies one to be part of the “One Percent” of wealthiest Americans. Clinton is currently pulling down $600,000 per year for the kind of no-show job you probably thought had disappeared with the demise of the American mafia.
She is officially employed as an on-air correspondent for NBC News even though she hasn’t appeared on NBC for the past four months.
Clips of Clinton’s work for the Peacock Network are hard to find online, and one of the few accessible segments — her interview with the GEICO gecko — reveals that NBC’s coaching failed to improve her affectless voice, lazy delivery and absolute lack of charm, charisma or talent.
According to Associated Press, NBC wanted to avoid an apparent conflict of interest as Clinton busies herself with outside work for her parents’ foundation. Would that all journalists could pocket $50,000 each month merely for not actively souring their employers’ good name.
(*GUFFAW*)
Clinton is so unconcerned with money that she shelled out $10.3 million of the worthless stuff just last spring to buy a swanky pad near Manhattan’s Flatiron Building.
Her 2010 wedding to Marc Mezvinsky cost an estimated $3.3 million.
Chelsea Clinton’s 5,000-square-foot apartment overlooking Madison Square Park features four bedrooms, five-and-a-half baths, oak floors, Italian marble bathrooms, a temperature-controlled storage room, and access to a key-locked elevator, the New York Daily News reported. Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez had been considering the residence before Clinton and Mezvinsky nabbed it.
But does Clinton care about money fundamentally?
You don’t need to care about it fundamentally when you can spend it superfluously.
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