Monday, September 9, 2013

Some Syria stuff





We just got back from Vegas and for better or worse we were able to stay connected with the rest of the world and particularly with the latest Syria developments primarily via Twitter.


We've been rather unsparing of our criticism of the relative silence of the liberal-left with respect to a potential military intervention into Syria and though some of the usual suspects like Code Pink for all their odiousness are at least consistent in their anti-war stance, so good for them.


Having said that, hello, there, Hollywood!


John Ekdahl, writing for BuzzFeed has a tremendous piece on 14 principled celebrities that have put it on mute of late concerning Syria while they were in full-throat opposition when ol' you-know-who was in office 10 years ago.


We figure alien abduction, right? These folks were just so strident, earnest and so full of human compassion in making the case against the Iraq War that being spirited off by E.T. could be the only rational explanation.



Fortunately, Ed Asner has his own reason for going AWOL and though we don’t know if he’s speaking just for himself, this isn’t our first time at the rodeo so his explanation may cover quite a few other folks as well.



Liberals in Hollywood are not speaking out against President Barack Obama's call for military strikes against the Syrian government because they fear being called racists, veteran actor Ed Asner says.

"A lot of people don't want to feel anti-black by being opposed to Obama," Asner told The Hollywood Reporter.



Ehhh... We'd always suspected it but this just confirms that for the liberal-left in this country everything is viewed through the prism of racial-identity politics. And everything, including one's integrity and credibility (whatever true amounts of it celebrity-ville possesses) will be sacrificed at the altar of racial-identity politics.


If this is indeed the reasoning for this deafening silence, we suppose we still do have a race problem in this country.


It bears repeating then that going to war because of the hew of the Commander-in-Chief’s skin is the weakest of weak sauce and we've had nothing but for the past two weeks.





And just today, lying, disgruntled Vietnam War vet and current Secretary of State, John Kerry, who has been as incoherent on making the case for war as humanly possible may have actually gaffed his way into throwing his boss a life-line and extricating him from this whole mess when he appeared to be open to backing off military action in exchange for Syria handing over all their chemical weapons and opening up the vaults for U.N. inspectors. But did he really?


The government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Monday said it welcomed a Russian proposal to avert U.S. military strikes by having Damascus turn over control of its chemical weapons to international monitors.

The statement by Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem in Moscow offered the first indication that a diplomatic solution may be possible to the international standoff that has evolved since apparent chemical weapons attacks on rebel-held suburbs outside Damascus on August 21…

Moualem said Syria “welcomes the Russian initiative,” but did not say whether his country would agree to what Russia was asking. “We also welcome the wisdom of the Russian leadership, which is trying to prevent American aggression against our people,” Moulaem said.

Hours earlier, in London, Secretary of State John F. Kerry sketched out a similar transfer-of-control scenario, then dismissed it, after being asked by a reporter whether there was anything that Assad could do to avoid an attack. “Sure, he could turn over every bit of his weapons to the international community within the next week, without delay,” Kerry said. “But he isn’t about to.”


(italics, ours)

Even Kerry seems to be skeptical of this too-good-to-be-true proposal.



An agreement broached by the Russians that would entail a meaningless inspection regime (explain to us the logistics of inspecting in the middle of a civil war) in return for having to do absolutely nothing when the President indeed promised the country we would do our best to do next to nothing.


Our advise to the President on exchanging one meaningless gesture for another: Take it, Preezy, take it!



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Thursday, September 5, 2013

Video clip of the day



We'll defer to B-Daddy but we don't think any interviews with Admiral Hyman Rickover (the father of the U.S. nuclear Navy) which was a condition to entering the Navy nuke program and which were infamous for some of the bizarre line of questioning ever approached this level of "Holy Crap!"


From somewhere in South America:


(h/t: HotAir)







Programming note: We'll be in Vegas starting tomorrow and will return on Monday. We will try to blog as time and gambling on football and the ponies allow.


Ciao.

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

What we and others have been tweeting...





... regarding this whole sorry-ass Syria mess.


We want to start off by saying we are not reflexively opposed to military intervention in Syria. Assad is a bad dude and anything we can do to reduce the planet's population of bad dudes, we are generally in favor of.


The trick however with Syria is the people who want to topple Assad contain among them also bad dudes... very, very bad dudes of the Islamist variety. Perhaps you have heard of them. While there are certainly secular liberals in the rebel ranks, their saner, rational approach to things gets rather overwhelmed in, literally, the heat of battle. Blood-thirsty jihadists tend to have that effect on people.


We appear, then, not to have learned anything from our involvement in either Libya and Egypt that are in varying degrees of chaos at the moment precisely because the "good guys" of the rebel movement didn't have the juice to influence things to more peaceful and democratic ends.


Hence:









Now, as recently as this past Friday evening, the President was prepared to go it alone and by alone we mean with France. Word around the campfire has it that the President had a change of heart after British Parliament's stinging rebuke to PM David Cameron's support of the war on Thursday ending any hope of help in this endeavor from our closest ally.



Obama informed congressional leaders late Friday/early Saturday that he would seek Congressional approval before doing anything in Syria. And unlike delays he applies to laws that he himself wanted to see passed, he and the Veep promptly hit the links.










David Cameron was tres bummed and tweeted that he understood Obama's position on Syria. We were left wondering, however:







What the President has wanted to do from a brass tacks details standpoint has to this very moment not been revealed.



Of course, some people were wondering why Congress was waiting for the President to call them back to session to grant him authorization for doing something military-like in Syria.













Secretary of State, John Kerry went on the Sunday talkies to try to convince a skeptical electorate of the righteousness of the cause and kind of made a mess of things:

















No one, however, seemed to be very impressed with the President's sudden change of heart to go to Congress:





















At least, the President had some bi-partisan support. Unfortunately, for him, it was this bi-partisan support:











Yesterday, Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel went to the Hill for a hearing in order to gin up support for the war effort and failed miserably.




























Complete incoherency.











Such was the randomness and non-sensicalness of the reasons Hagel and Kerry were throwing out there as justifications for going to war in Syria it started resembling Cards Against The World:















Ahd while we heard one thing, others in our trusted MSM we heard another:










This morning the meme for those itching for war was that it was the patriotic thing to do. No lie:















And over in Europe earlier today, the President had the cajones to try to distance himself from the "red line" comment he had made last August:














Yeah, blame everybody else but yourself:











And look how far progressive ideology has come in just a few years. Forward!








At the end of the day, gang, remember this:









We're out of here!







Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Group of people in favor of law wondering why they are being subjected to that law.



In an all too familiar refrain, another set of people have come forward to seek relief from the federal health care law they formerly championed: Big Labor.


From Breitbart.com:



In what is being reported as a surprise move, the 40,000 members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) announced that they have formally ended their association with the AFL-CIO, one of the nation's largest private sector unions. The Longshoremen citied Obamacare and immigration reform as two important causes of their disaffiliation.

In an August 29 letter to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, ILWU President Robert McEllrath cited quite a list of grievances as reasons for the dissolution of their affiliation, but prominent among them was the AFL-CIO's support of Obamare.

"We feel the Federation has done a great disservice to the labor movement and all working people by going along to get along," McEllrath wrote in the letter to Trumka.

The ILWU President made it clear they are for a single-payer, nationalized healthcare policy and are upset with the AFL-CIO for going along with Obama on the confiscatory tax on their "Cadillac" healthcare plan.

The Longshoreman leader said, "President Obama ran on a platform that he would not tax medical plans and at the 2009 AFL-CIO Convention, you stated that labor would not stand for a tax on our benefits." But, regardless of that promise, the President has pushed for just such a tax and Trumka and the AFL-CIO bowed to political pressure lining up behind Obama's tax on those plans.




That sound you are hearing right now is us playing "Our heart bleeds for you" on the world's smallest violin.


When did McEllrath get the memo on the tax on his union's "Cadillac" health plan? It's not like it was snuck in there at the last moment. It's been a prominent feature of the legislation since they started negotiating bribing their way to get it passed and now it's become an issue? (We've been blogging about that aspect of the law for years)


We can only surmise, then, that McEllrath just assumed that because the "Cadillac" tax was the law he was going to be exempted from the law in a similar manner as Congress has been exempted from the law or at least get a one-year delay of the tax similar to how Big Business received a one-year delay on the employer mandate.

Well, no such luck, Mac and now watch him take his ball and go home.



For his part, Trumka concedes that mistakes were made in the crafting of the 2,200 page monstrosity.


From Townhall.com



“It still needs to be tweaked,” said Trumka, who pointed to the possibility that union members will lose their health insurance because of the inability of some union plans to qualify for federal tax subsidies.

“ObamaCare is a major step in the right direction but yeah, I said, we made some mistakes,” Trumka told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast.

“We have been working with the administration to find solutions to the inadvertent holes in the act,” Trumka said. “We are working to try solve problems, just like they tried to solve problems with employers, with large business and small business groups.”


(italics, ours)


This is more from that non-existent clause in the Constitution "consults with businesses" where the President arbitrarily decides which parts of the law apply to whom and Big Labor is freaked out they may not qualify as Preezy's BFF any longer and may be forced to deal with the wretchedness of a law they got behind with full force.


Everything from the economy, energy policy and now his signature piece of legislation has been reduced to picking winners and loser by this administration.


Running a constitutional republic in a random, un-transparent and cronyistic manner is no way to go through life, son.





Monday, September 2, 2013

A civil rights struggle you may not have heard about





Proof positive that the end game for the statist-left isn't merely "equality" nor "equal access" rather equality and equal access to the same crappy status quo.


This country's Justice Department is at it again in attempting to keep children from escaping a failing public education system:





The Justice Department is trying to stop a school vouchers program in Louisiana that attempts to help families send their children to independent schools instead of under-performing public schools.

The agency wants to stop the program, led by Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal, in any school district that remains under a desegregation court order.

In papers filed in U.S. District Court in New Orleans, the agency said Louisiana distributed vouchers in 2012-13 to roughly 570 public school students in districts that are still under such orders and that "many of those vouchers impeded the desegregation process."

The federal government argues that allowing students to attend independent schools under the voucher system could create a racial imbalance in public school systems protected by desegregation orders.




You see, it's all about a social normative rather than parents fighting for a good education for their children. Fine-tuning fully arbitrary racial balances trumps the welfare of the children of Louisiana.


Governor Jindal called school choice a "moral imperative" and he is exactly right. We somehow manage to affix the label of "civil rights" to everything under the sun: from housing to healthcare to, yes, even public education. Yet, somehow, the struggle for black parents to afford their children a decent education away from the failed system by their own choice is not worthy this honor.


This irony may or may not be lost on this nation's political class. Frankly, we don't care. That they have formed an unholy alliance with the teachers' union to block educational opportunities for the less-well-off in our country is the only thing that matters to us.


It's readily apparent that Eric Holder, the miserable hack that runs the Justice Department, is using civil rights era legislation to create a perpetual grievance industry where the educational opportunities of minority children are sacrificed at the altar of "racial imbalances." Again, irony overload.


For the sane among us, it's always 5 o'clock somewhere and for the statist among us that views everything through a racial prism, it's always 1955 everywhere.




h/t: Powerline






Saturday, August 31, 2013

Video clip of the day




Alternate headline: The Long National Nightmare is Over



In honor of football kicking off this weekend all over the country at the high school and college levels (NFL starts next weekend) we've posted a Dick's Sporting Goods commercial that you may have seen over the past month or so.


They did a baseball-themed commercial a while back that was good but this single shot, 360 degree take on a Friday night under-the-lights has it all: intensity, realism, smack-talking and best of all... blitz recognition!



A shout-out to our two older brothers and El Dorado Golden Hawks football.








Exit question: Wonder what high school team(s) got the honor of participating in that commercial?





Thursday, August 29, 2013

What we and others have been tweeting









Some humor and miscellany to start things off:


Seriously, check this out:






















Ethanol back in the news:





















Mark Steyn proving, once again, that he is one of the best:















Gotta click and read. Restore-faith-in-humanity stuff:












The Jets are a mess but you knew that already, right?










Follow this guy:
















We want to be shocked or amazed but we're not... they're simply hypocrites:



















We know how this will play out...






because...








And most people aren't really too stoked about it:









Miley Cyrus happened...



































Dude who buys guns and ammo for DHS is a militant racist homophobe, so guess what?


















Back to Syria:




















The North Korean regime executed Kim Jong Un's former girlfriend and 12 members of a couple of musical groups. They were accused of selling pornos of themselves and some apparently were found with Bibles on them. One person was executed via a mortar round. Charmed, we're sure.















Slate writer: You're a bad person if you send your kid to public school:




















Just one for that hack-fest that was the 50th anniversary commemoration of MLK's "I have a dream speech". What a shame:










We're out. Thanks for reading.










Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Your mid-week, martini-worthy photo images



A departure from our semi-regular Wednesday series when we usually feature some pix and music from mid-century(ish) artists and/or celebs.



The usual August monsoon swell moving northwards from Mexico has produced some massive and spectacular thunderclouds out over San Diego's east county including a super cloud on Tuesday from the combining of three separate thunderstorms.


We saw it coming out of work but never thought to snap off any pictures of the monster that dropped an inch of rain on the Laguna Mountains. These pictures are from today:


(please click to enlarge)















Check out the San Diego Union-Tribune's slide show and write-up on Tuesday's supercloud, here.



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Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Railing against lobbying is so last administration


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What happens when you have a massive and massively complex law that effects virtually everybody in the country of which the regulations for that law are still being written just in front of its start/stop "no just kidding" delayed rollout? You get more lobbyists than you can shake a stick at. A lot more.


Back in 2004, over $2.1 billion was spent lobbying Congress and in 2010 the year the Affordable Care Act was passed, that figure grew to $3.55 billion. This was no coincidence as Congress was er, writing the law, there were going to be people filing into K Street and marching up to Capitol Hill to influence members of Congress into writing a law in a manner that had their best interests in mind.


Of course, the lobbying of ObamaCare did not stop once it became law... Oh, no. As we inferred in the first paragraph, the law is merely the law, it's the interpretation of the law in the form of how the rules and regulations are written is where the money is:


From Reuters via Peter Suderman of Reason.com:



A Reuters review of lobbying records found that more than 500 companies, business groups, consumer advocates, unions and other organizations weighed in on the Affordable Care Act during the second quarter of this year.

A typical issue in Washington attracts 15 interest groups at any one time, according to research by Beth Leech, a Rutgers University political science professor who has written three books about lobbying. At the height of political debate over the law, just before Congress passed the legislation in March 2010, more than 1,000 stakeholders lobbied on the bill.

"The Affordable Care Act, from beginning to end, has had an extraordinary amount of lobbying," said Leech. "All these rules are being made for the first time, so there's a great urgency to have that first rule be a rule you like."



Lobbying... or as the President likes to call "consultation with businesses" was the reason Big Business was granted a one-year reprieve of the employer mandate. The fact that Big Business got this one year delay while the individual mandate is still a go for October 1st is no coincidence, gang. You might have noticed, there is no young, healthy people lobby. And the fact that the entire sustainability of this still-unsustainable law absolutely depends upon them paying into the system to offset the costs that will be generated by the elderly sick is not a coincidence either.


And while candidate Obama bemoaned the influence of K Street and the revolving door between administration positions and congressional staffs and K-Street, his administration has damn near turned it into an art form:


More than 30 former administration officials, lawmakers and congressional staffers who worked on the healthcare law have set up shop on K Street since 2010.

Major lobbying firms such as Fierce, Isakowitz & Blalock, The Glover Park Group, Alston & Bird, BGR Group and Akin Gump can all boast an ObamaCare insider on their lobbying roster - putting them in a prime position to land coveted clients.

Veterans of the healthcare push are now lobbying for corporate giants such as Delta Airlines, UPS, BP America and Coca-Cola, and for healthcare companies including GlaxoSmithKline, UnitedHealth Group and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association
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Don't be too hard on the President, however. All this lobbying is simply the natural response to a sprawling law of which we are still finding out about and which the rules and regulations have yet to be fully written and promulgated. Can you necessarily blame any of these big boys from throwing their weight around to save as much of their hide as possible (or game the system as much as possible) from this wretched law?


We knew if we were running things for the Little Guy Lobby we'd certainly be doing much the same, unfortunately for the little guy, his lobby is very poorly funded.






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Monday, August 26, 2013

Your California high-speed choo-choo update




A little over a week ago we reported out on a Sacramento judge that ruled against California’s high speed rail commission stating that the project had not met the financial nor environmental promises made to the voters of California when the high-speed choo-choo project was put on the ballot 5 years ago.


This was called a “major blow” to the project but we remained skeptical for two reasons: 1) The judge never levied a stop work order and 2) the lawless nature of the state's political class that is all-in on high-speed choo-choos would’ve simply ignored any cease and desist handed down from the bench.


State honchos argued that the lawsuit brought about by Central Valley farmers was moot as the facts on the ground currently didn’t match the conditions under which the Farmers were bringing suit… which is kind of a problem when you think about.


Anyway, here’s what we wrote regarding the subject 9 days ago:


What is meant by “revised its business plan to scale back the cost” is to eliminate the funding of the infrastructure required to power the rail system and to eliminate the funding for the actual choo-choos. No lie, gang. This is how you get a project that was advertised as costing in the $33-40 billion range when high-speed rail was put on the ballot back in 2008 to the current $68 price tag when estimates for a fully functioning rail system has been put in the $100-120 billion range.



The state’s powerbrokers did not disappoint when they went on the record this past week with respect to Judge Michael Kenny’s ruling:


Gov. Jerry Brown said Monday that California's high-speed rail project will not be stopped by a judge's ruling that project officials failed to comply with provisions of Proposition 1A, the initiative in which voters approved initial funding for the project in 2008.

"It's not a setback," Brown told reporters at the Lake Tahoe Summit.

He said the ruling "didn't stop our spending, so we're continuing. As we speak we're spending money, we're moving ahead."


Please note that spending appears to be the main focus of activity rather any actual building. The good statist that Brown is, he is really, really excited about spending California tax dollars.


For his part, Judge Kenney has requested more information from both opponents and proponents of the project before taking up the matter again.


Stay tuned to these pages for the latest on the greatest public works boondoggle in the history of western civilization.


Video Clip of the day



Ninety seconds of ObamaCare fun:









Excellent. Only thing we would've done differently in this video that is obviously geared towards young people is to point out the ObamaCare mandate is forcing those same young people into bed with the big, moneyed, K Street health insurance lobby as the law is working to serve their interests at the expense of smaller insurers who will not be able to keep up with the added complexities and resulting costs burdened by ObamaCare..


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