Deleted scenes from American politics?

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Another gotcha moment for the administration in a week that has been full of them.

A healthcare advocacy group run by physicians is preparing to file a petition calling on President Obama to stop eating hamburgers, hot dogs and other unhealthy foods before cameras.

"As role model to millions of Americans, the president has a responsibility to watch what he eats in public," said Susan Levin, nutrition education director with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM).

Obama's occasional stops at Washington, D.C.-area burger joints always receive press attention.
He famously treated staff to lunch at Good Stuff Eatery on Capitol Hill in August 2011.
A year before that, he and then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev grabbed food at Ray's Hell Burger in Arlington, Va.

And in March, during a visit to Ohio with British Prime Minister David Cameron, he ate hot dogs while watching college basketball.

Levin said in a statement that processed meats like hot dogs "kill more Americans every year than tobacco does, and they cost taxpayers billions of dollars in healthcare."

She cited increasing rates of obesity in the United States. A study out this week projects that 42 percent of Americans will be obese by 2030.

"The White House would never set up a photo op showing the president buying cigarettes, so why is it OK to show him eating a hot dog?" she added.

Obama, an ex-smoker, kicked the habit in 2010, the first lady has said.

Despite Obama's taste for unhealthy foods, some media outlets have reported that the president appears to have lost weight since beginning his term.

(italics ours)

Before we get to our narrative, allow us to state that the last paragraph there is simply idiotic as the stress of being the Commander-in-Chief will have far more to do with any weight loss/gain than the occasional burger run.

But putting aside any dietary deficiencies, what's better for the mind and soul than a cheese burger and an ice cold beer? Nothing.

We don't begrudge the President one bit for what we see as highly petty if necessarily life-affirming indulgences but we will note that the motivation behind this petition is the result of a nanny state mentality of which the President is both a product and a proponent.

If the federal government is going to shoe-horn us all into a one-size-fits-all healthcare scheme, then the man responsible for it should not chafe against some well-intended nagging from people whom, obviously, know better than us.

After all, it's for his/all our own good.



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We'll have some thoughts on the President's (r)evolution regarding gay-marriage later.

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Photo image of the day

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This was the scene last week on Harbor Dr. here in San Diego and it was a symbol of the efficacy of green/alternative energy in its current state.


(please click to enlarge... the camera-in-phone did not cooperate on the first take)

This is a wind turbine blade on Harbor Drive here in San Diego. Transported on a big ol' flat bed towed by a big ol' diesel and escorted by a couple of chase vehicles. They do have a tendency to tie-up things on Harbor as they are matriculating their way down the street. Problem is - it's heading the wrong way. Instead of heading out to the desert or east county where the bird-wacking turbine farms are, it's heading back towards the 10th St. terminal from whence it came. Whatever the problem is, it's a pretty costly mistake. Not that the wind and solar industries probably care - they're the chosen ones. Check out the subsidies granted to these two sectors as compared to other engergy sectors:

Not too shabby, huh? Maybe when the government decides to stop conferring 1% status on not-yet-market-ready technologies and stops depending upon places like China with their deplorable environmental policies for the lithium needed for wind and solar, perhaps we can avoid scenes like the above.


Time's short... we'll have an update later.

Buxom opponent of gay marriage, once again, under scrutiny

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Her again..?


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No, no, no... We're talking about this guy.

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After Joey "Choo-choo" Biden spoke truth to power in support of gay marriage over the weekend, it left his boss and his evolving crystal clear evolving shamelessly cynical view on gay marriage open to renewed criticism.

Here's ABC's Jack Tapper grilling White House spokesperson, Jay Carney, on the matter:

(skip ad after 5 seconds and apologies for the crappy visuals)

And here's Dana Milbank of the WaPo chiming in:

If Vice President Biden continues to make public appearances during this campaign, White House press secretary Jay Carney should be offered a membership in the janitors’ union.

As things stand, the spokesman does not have the supplies necessary to clean up the mess Biden made in his appearance Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Biden gave his full support to same-sex marriage — a position conspicuously at odds with the public stance of his boss, President Obama, who is widely assumed to share Biden’s views but who says that his own thinking is “evolving.”

The vice president said he is “absolutely comfortable” with same-sex marriage, committing the classic Washington gaffe of accidentally speaking the truth. This bit of straight talk made Obama’s position — neither for nor against such unions but in an evolutionary state, not unlike the Galapagos finch — all the more untenable. On Monday, Biden took off for a campaign event in Tennessee, leaving Carney on cleanup duty. But the more Carney swabbed the mess, the more it spread.

CNN’s Jessica Yellin asked whether Obama was trying to “have it both ways before an election” and whether he should “stop dancing around the issue.”

ABC’s Jake Tapper said that “it seems cynical to hide this prior to the election” and that “I don’t want to hear the same talking points 15 times in a row.”

NBC’s Chuck Todd said with a grin, “So help me out here. He opposes bans on gay marriage, but he doesn’t yet support gay marriage?”

You can read the full article at the link.


Disengenuous or just political reality? Not that the two are mutually exclusive of one another. Afterall, there are only so many progressive causes one can push in a single term, or even half term. The 2010 midterm elections bore that out.

Still, the President has been remarkably teflon-coated when it has come to this issue and it is nice to see the press, for once, doing their job in calling out the administration on apparent contradicting agendas/views of gay marriage.

Alinsky's rule for making your opponent live up to their standards at work here, again.

Gotcha of the day

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Wasn't one of Saul Alinsky's rules for radicals making your opponent live up to its own standards? Live by racial and gender quotas, fail by racial and gender quotas.

Civil rights lawyers told The Daily Caller that President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign managers may have violated employment law by hiring an overwhelmingly white office staff for his campaign headquarters in Chicago.

That skewed workforce is starkly visible in an April photo released by Obama’s Chicago office, which shows roughly 100 of the office’s staff.

Only two of the people in the photo, far in the back, are clearly African-American, far below their 13 percent of the national population, and their 33-percent representation in Chicago.

“Were I the general counsel of an employer in Chicago with the workforce in the picture … I would be concerned,” said Charles Shanor, a law professor at Emory University and the former general counsel at the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission.

“The workforce is overwhelmingly made up of young white males [and is] a demographic profile that could raise red flags under both Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act,” he told TheDC.

If asked by managers, “‘Do we run a risk of legal liability?’ I would say ‘Sure,’” if a company’s picture showed only two African-Americans in a staff of 100, said Northeastern University’s Roger Abrams, a left-of-center law professor and former dean of the Rutgers School of Law.

Let the record show we personally care not a lick just how absolutely white bread Obama's campaign staff is but for cryin' out loud, wouldn't a few more blacks or Hispanics pop up just by accident if we're talking statistical averages, here? That campaign staff is whiter than a dry erase board.

And people said the tea party lacked diversity. Cripes, Team O in Chicago makes a Charlie Daniels concert look like an EEO convention.


Oh, well. As we said, we don't care but we just wished some people would practice what they so smugly and condescendingly preach all the time.

Video image of the day

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Saturday night and several thousand folks saw the christening and launch of the USNS CESAR CHAVEZ (T-AKE 14), the newest of the Navy's multi-use general purpose cargo ships.

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We weren't able to be there for it but it looks like she was a little reluctant to dip into the waters of San Diego Harbor. We'll check in with our peeps to see what the deal was.

Images of America

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Plymouth Rock... Mayflower Compact... French-Indian War... Stamp Act... Bunker Hill... George Washington the Constitution... Lewis and Clark... War of 1812... Andrew Jackson... Missouri Compromise... Dred Scott... Jayhawks... Border Wars... Civil War... Gettyburg... Ford Theater... Reconstruction... Walt Whitman.. John Wesley Powell... Conestoga Wagon... Go West Young Man... Remember the Maine... the Great White Fleet... Woodrow Wilson... the Marne... Louis Armstrong... Flappers... Babe Ruth...F. Scott Fitzgerald... Dust Bowl... Okies... Woodie Guthrie... Pearl Harbor... Bataan Death March... Midway... D-Day... George Patton.... Henry Kaiser... Sun Records... Elvis... Selma... Dr. King... Cuba... the Packers...the Colts... Martinis... 1968... Tet... Hue City... Yasgur's Farm... Walter Cronkite... 18-1/2 minutes... 3 Mile Island... Miracle on Ice... Ronald Reagan... LA Lakers... AIDS... Gulf War... Oklahoma City... blue dress... bin Laden... 9-11... Afghanistan... Iraq... Recession... Barack Obama...




... and now to culminate... to put the cherry on top of our post-constitutional Republic... Julia: statist love child.



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Keep dreaming ladies: your womb to tomb dependence upon a paternalistic and patriarchal male-dominated governance may soon be a reality.

Now, how did that taste?

Radio KBwD is on the air

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We had to bid farewell to a close friend from work just yesterday. We hope and pray things work out for her in her new location.



A bittersweet moment calls for a bittersweet song off of one the moodiest and bittersweet (and greatest?) albums of all-time: The Beach Boys Pet Sounds.




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... doobay-doobay do...







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Fast and Furious update

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Again, unlike the Secret Service/Columbian hooker fiasco, it's a shame no one got laid as a result of Fast and Furious as more people might be paying some attention to it. As it is, even we think Congressman Issa has allowed himself to be distracted a bit by the twin godsend scandals of the aforementioned hooker-gate and the GSA/Las Vegas follies. Time to get back to work:







From Fox News:

Republican Rep. Darrell Issa has circulated a lengthy pair of documents making the case for holding Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress over his "refusal" to cooperate in an investigation of the ill-fated Fast and Furious operation.

Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, on Thursday sent to every member of his committee a 64-page draft contempt order against Holder, as well as a 17-page memo outlining the history of the scandal.

"Operation Fast and Furious' outrageous tactics, the Justice Department's refusal to fully cooperate with the investigation and efforts to smear and retaliate against whistleblowers have tainted the institutional integrity of the Justice Department," Issa wrote.

The committee is not citing Holder or holding the attorney general in contempt at this point. However, the documents lay out the case for contempt should members be called to vote.

Word around the campfire is that Issa is not getting a whole lot of support from GOP leadership (read: John Boehner and Eric Cantor) as a leveling an actual contempt charge would be "off message". It remains unexplained just what message that is absent getting to the bottom of what that miserable hack that runs the Justice Department knew and when did he know it. Holder lied and people have died?: Would that not be the message?

The Justice Department, itself, has admitted to releasing documents that were deliberately misleading with respect to Fast and Furious and there is credible evidence from within the Justice Department that there was never any intention of tracking those weapons sold in the U.S. back across the border supporting the contention that this scheme was carried out in order to support a narrative of an unchecked flow of guns across the border to Mexican drug cartels.


Oh, and you will love this:

"Holding someone in contempt is one of the most serious actions Congress can take, but it is being used in this case as part of a partisan election year witch-hunt," Cummings said in a statement.

He's getting old so you can forgive him some forgetfulness as this investigation has been going on for a year, stretching back well into 2011.


Mr. Romney would be well-served to make this the center-piece of what is a crowded field of examples of this administration's corruptness and ineptitude.

Wasn't this the big idea all along?

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For those of you out there whining that ObamaCare didn't include a public option, relax... as we have said all along, the perverse incentives built into ObamaCare via design or outright incompetence (isn't it strange how the lines blur when it comes to grand statist schemes?) are making the public option a defacto reality.

A new survey of Fortune 100 companies finds that the health care overhaul, contrary to the claims of its authors, created some perverse incentives for employers to drop workers from company insurance plans.

Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee surveyed the top 100 companies about how much they spent on health care -- a total of 71, covering 5.9 million employees, responded. The results suggested it would be far more attractive for companies to drop workers from those plans than keep them.

Even after paying a penalty of $2,000 per employee, the companies stand to save $28.6 billion in 2014 alone by shifting employees to health insurance exchanges governed by strict federal standards. The companies stand to save more than $422 billion over the first 10 years of the law by doing this.

"The penalties for the employers who drop coverage are very low, and the subsidies for the workers in the exchanges are very high," said James Capretta, with the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

If the companies indeed take this step, the move would fly in the face of pledges by the law's backers, including President Obama, that U.S. workers would not lose their employer-provided health plans.

Hey, it's just politics, right? A few promises will necessarily have to be broken in the name of the greater good, right?

A greater good that is also yet another entitlement program and if you have been paying any attention you know the fiscal trajectory of our other three big entitlement programs.

As we cannot tax our way into prosperity, we cannot legislate our way to better health. Healthcare decisions and lifestyle choices that should be left at the most personal level have now, because of this law, become ever more bureaucratized and left in the hands of others not sharing your name.

Again, statism is sexy because statism is easy. Why make tough calls when someone else can do it for you and then you can turn around and blame them later? A true post-constitutional double-whammy.

Video clip of the day

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Reason.tv presents their "Nanny of the Month"





Ya know... not too sure if we have a problem with the drug testing of welfare recipients. Despite our evolving views on the matter of drug legalization over the past 20 years, it sets well with our social/paleo-conservative roots.

But "I believe we may be setting a trend because we have received many requests... about how our system works" is kind of freaky. Precisely, who is it that wants to know how it works?

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May 1st: Victims of Communism Day

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Of course, May Day is the perfect day for this.

We have a familiar meme around here with respect to the 20th century and that is last century was not much more than serial and parallel failed experiments in statist/collecvist ideologies which produced historically unprecedented human misery. Communism (Fascism and Imperialism) lied and many, many people died.

Communism is the hands-down winner for the most deadly, deplorable and anti-human ideology of all-time. From the Volokh Conspiracy:

May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their regimes. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes’ millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century’s other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so. I suggest that May Day be turned into Victims of Communism Day….

The main alternative to May 1 is November 7, the anniversary of the communist coup in Russia. However, choosing that date might be interpreted as focusing exclusively on the Soviet Union, while ignoring the equally horrendous communist

And B-Daddy sees a definite correlation between May Day "celebrations" and similarly-themed horrible ideologies:

Meanwhile, I guess the Occupy movement will be protesting along with the rest of the communists tomorrow. It's always a sure sign that a movement has allied itself with the second most evil political philosophy in history when they choose May 1 as a day of national protest. I remember that the open borders/amnesty types did so a few years back. There is surely a political rule that all May day protests are in league with forces of darkness. The Occupy protestors had a single valid complaint buried beneath their socialist clap-trap, that some of the banksters had enriched themselves through federal largesse, either in the form of Federal Reserve pay outs or from the U.S. Treasury. As a tea partyer, I can be sympathetic to that complaint; but they piled on with so much socialist b.s. and they behaved in such an abhorrent manner that no one could take them seriously.

Go to the link where B-Daddy makes the case for inequality as in a truly fair society, people who work harder and demonstrate more initiative than others most certainly should benefit from that creating a natural and just inequality of material and property in that society.



For those of you who still have a soft-spot in your heart for the anti-capitalist and anti-freedom rhetoric and actions of the Occupy movement, check out the uncaptioned/unexplained picture below that is on the website of Anarchistnews.org

Who is the girl? Her name is Rebecca Black. She is 14. To our knowledge, she has taken no public political stances. Her crime? Making a self-produced song and video that went viral last year, blowing up all over the internet. For this, she is to be clubbed.

Sickos.


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To end on a positive note, join us, The Volokh Conspiracy and many other web sites on the internet (liberal blog/web sites are more than welcome to join the party as well), in making May 1st Victims of Communism Day.