Quickies

A round up of news items, columns and blog posts that caught our attention this past week.






Clueless: Valerie Jarrett, Obama adviser and confidant orders a wine from a General in uniform at an exclusive dinner hosted Monday by the Alfalfa Club.

Why the surprise? What else would one expect of an administration whose top dog refers to Navy medics as "corpse men"



Not dead but almost dead. At least we thought it was...

From the Wall St. Journal:

The last time these columns were lambasted by a presidential candidate in Iowa, he was Democrat Richard Gephardt and the year was 1988. The Missouri populist won the state caucuses in part on the rallying cry that "we've got to stop listening to the editorial writers and the establishment," especially about ethanol and trade. Imagine our amusement to find Republican Newt Gingrich joining such company.

If support of ObamaCare is an automatic DQer in our eyes then support for ethanol subsidies may be a close second. And if New Gingrich is any indication, we may wind up with quite a bit of idle time on our hands during the Republican presidential primaries.










File this under "Things we've known all along that only now have become 'official'":

A new Senate report on the 2009 Fort Hood shooting blames the FBI and Department of Defense for failing to recognize or act on alleged shooter Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s extremist views.

The report, released today by Senate Homeland Security Committee chairman Joe Lieberman and ranking Republican Susan Collins, says the FBI and DOD could have prevented the shooting if they had identified Hasan’s radical Islamist views and disciplined or discharged him before the attack occurred.

“Our report’s painful conclusion is that the Fort Hood massacre could have and should have been prevented,” Lieberman said at a press conference today.

“The fact is that both the FBI and the Army were aware of Major Hasan,” Collins said. “This is not a case where a lone wolf was unknown to the FBI, unknown to the military officials, until he struck – and that is the tragedy of this case.”

The November 2009 shooting killed 13 people and wounded 32 others.

“Although neither DOD nor the FBI had specific information concerning the time, place, or nature of the attack, they collectively had sufficient information to have detected Hasan’s radicalization to violent Islamist extremism but failed both to understand and to act on it,” the senators said in the report. “Our investigation found specific and systemic failures in the government’s handling of the Hasan case and raises additional concerns about what may be broader systemic issues.”

(italics, ours)





We suppose this is what they mean when they talk about the "new civility" in political discourse.









Step away from the salad bar:

They may hope that their love of animals will make them a hit with the ladies.

But vegetarian men are seen as wimps and less macho than those who like tucking into a steak – even by women who do not eat meat themselves, research shows.

The finding will dismay the hundreds of thousands of single men who have given up meat for health, environmental or animal welfare reasons.

If that's the case, how's this for a pick-up line?

Time to get rid of Black History month...?

We tell children that they should not judge people by their color, then confuse them by insisting that they study a person because that person is black. Famous Amos was included in the assignment! Now, I love cookies as much as the next guy, but having kids read about Famous Amos simply because he was a successful black American is nothing short of ludicrous. Many of these same children have never heard of Gandhi, Churchill or even Ulysses S. Grant. And yet we're teaching them about Famous Amos before we teach them about George C. Marshall. This is not only diversity on the cheap, but it's bad educational policy, too.

So the unemployment rate dropped to 9.0% but we only gained 36,000 jobs... what gives? B-Daddy at The Liberator Today has the goods, here.





KT: Elections Were Held In The Confederacy, Too.

A Democracy is only as fit and just as those practicing it.

And do check out the comments at the link provided.



OK, gotta jet - we're on our way to a brewery tour with our boy Max who will, most likely, be regaling you all with pictures and commentary of the visit to Stone, Alesmith and Ballast Point in the next installment of MAXED OUT.



Pax.