Sunday, July 8, 2012

Beatings to Continue Until Morale Improves...

Matthew - 7/8
Matthew's Weekend Commentary

Watching the news lately it becomes painfully obvious as to what the Obama re-election strategy is: simply to deny, deny, deny the facts of failure, and to continue to push a false narrative, more fairy tale than reality. There will also be a concurrent campaign to paint Mitt Romney, and republicans in general, as a bunch of reckless, patrician douchebags, lacking in both basic common sense and human compassion.
This idea came to me, yet again, while watching our Commander-in-Chump make a series of stump speeches -- in between mega-million-dollar fundraisers with the very same reckless, patrician douchebags of the sort he's supposed to be running against -- where the old, Obamaesque, tingle-up-the-leg-inducing lofty rhetoric has been replaced by a constant drumbeat of outright lies.
Obama talks up the Economy, Part One: the the private sector keeps adding jobs, neglecting to point out that the private sector is hiring at a snail's pace. The supposed continued stream of anemic, yet always just perceptibly upward, movement on employment in private business is supposed to represent a steady, if slow, indication of economic recovery. The truth is that if we're talking a healthy economy, these employers would be hiring by the hundreds of thousands each month, and not at the average of about 70k a month. All the while, even more unemployed simply drop off the grid as their benefits run out, or they get discouraged.
Obama talks up the Economy, Part Two: Green Energy is still the wave of the future, despite the fact that it doesn't work, and so far has only proven that as an industry the only thing it can produce is government subsidies which mysteriously disappear. The jobs created -- so few of them, to begin with -- largely turn out to be temporary in nature, for as soon as the subsidy money dries up, so to the companies that depend upon it for survival.
Obama talks up the Economy, Part Three: Obama "saved" GM, much in the same way that Peter Arnett once described a Vietnam-era debacle by saying of a certain village that "it was necessary to destroy it in order to save it.". GM is not "saved"; auto workers are being laid off just as they were before the government "bail out". The stockholders have been shafted. the bondholders were blatantly robbed in broad daylight with the blessing of the courts. The concept of a free market was well-and-truly pissed upon. GM now builds cars that no one wants, can't be supported by the present infrastructure (gas stations abound, recharge stations, not so much), and which are so expensive that even the few that have been purchased came with a large, taxpayer-funded bribe attached.
Obama talks up the Economy, Part Four: According to President Odoofus, there's more oil being pumped, there's more exports, there's a higher stock market, and all of that is, somehow, his triumph, and yet, employment is at a record low since anytime after the Great Depression. The Keystone Pipeline remains in limbo. Gulf Coast Oil drilling has, for all intents and purposes, ceased after the oil spill.
Obama on Health Care: He wins, and yet, he still loses. Primarily because the Supreme Court figured out a way to make the Affordable Care Act legal for him, primarily by pointing out that what Congress euphemistically calls a "fee" and the Obama administration calls "a penalty" is rightfully defined as "a tax". In fact, the entire ACA, when fully activated, will be the largest tax increase in American History.It is a great indication about how inept, how devious, how dysfunctional the Obama administration is, that even their victories invariably carry with them the seeds of defeat, whether it's healthcare, stimulus, bail-outs or giveaways.
Obama talks up his Questionable Foreign Policy Achievements, Part One: Iran is still arming itself with nuclear weapons, sending weapons and extremists across the border into Iraq, and threatens to close the Straits of Hormuz, while Obama lets the Europeans talk for us in front of the Ayatollahs. The opportunity to really stick it to the Iranian regime, perhaps to even change it, was squandered as Iranian protesters died under Islamic-terror-sponsor bullets. Russia is flexing it's muscles in Eastern Europe and Syria, and Obama caves on missile defense so that Vladimir Putin will like him again. The Arab Spring, supposedly a harbinger of nascent democracy (even if it was infected with theocrats) turns out to be a Khomeini-lie exercise in fundamentalist stupidity. After decrying the Iraq and Afghan wars for a decade, Obama starts a third -- with no clear American interest at stake -- in Libya. As for Afghanistan, the Taliban might as well be back in charge, since we're no longer fighting anyone, the only purpose behind keeping this sham going is because one must burnish one's anti-terror credentials, because even after shooting Bin Laden in the fucking face, no one believes you're serious about cracking down on terrorists.
Obama talks up his Questionable Foreign Policy Achievements, Part Two: there's still a dictator in North Korea building missiles and nuclear weapons, selling them all over the planet, and thumbing his nose at Uncle Sam. China has made it clear that it considers itself to, finally, be a power on par with America, and even arrests a dissident inside the American Embassy. Pakistan is not our friend, and has become more hindrance than help in the War on Terror, and yet, Obama will not call out whichever Kim is in charge of Munchkinland, not deploy an aircraft carrier to make the Chinese think twice, or cut off all the American aid to Pakistan. We are universally laughed at in the United Nations, where President-Won-the-Nobel-Peace-Prize-for-being-Half-Black is eager to sign away American sovereignty over the fake threat of Global Warming, Sea Treaties, Nuclear non-proliferation agreements which we assiduously keep and no one else does, and Human Rights commissions chaired by the worst sorts of despots. The Obamabots talk a good game, but reassure their enemies in vague, ineffectual statements and non-action that they are, indeed, weak.
Obama Talks Up Questionable Foreign Policy Achievements, Part Three: Obama blames much of the American economic malaise on Europe. Mostly because the old litany of excuses -- republicans, George W. Bush, Japanese earthquakes and tsunamis, bad horoscopes, bad hair days, Michelle being on the rag just before a certain key economic report is issued -- have worn thin. The economic genius who spent a trillion dollars on a stimulus package which produced something like 37 jobs nationwide, and ensured that turtles can cross busy interstates with safety -- assuming they can follow the signs to the new underpasses built specifically for their use -- now lectures Europe on the need for "austerity'.
The man who believes that pouring half-a-billion dollars into a company which produced useless solar panels at $6 per, and sold them for $3 retail (Solyndra), is now handing out economic advice to the leaders of the countries that produced Hayek, von Mises and Smith. The man who promised to cut the federal deficit in half, and then planned to borrow another $5 trillion to fund an expanded welfare state, is going to tell Greeks and Spaniards that they must do with a smaller welfare state, so that Wall Street can recoup it's loses, or at least slow it downward slide? Fat fuckin' chance, bub!
 And yet Barack Obama would have you believe that not only is his way working, and bettering, our lives, but that a reversal of his policies (which have only served to bankrupt us, make us look stupid in the eyes of the world, and confuse the ever-loving fertilizer out of us) would be the next-best-thing to child rape, is out there stumping for a second term? On what planet, one wonders, does this incredible idiot live on?
This is all you will hear for the next four months: under Obama everything is better, or soon will be; under his opponents, things will only go back to the way they were. Which, in retrospect, bearing current experience in mind, doesn't seem to be all that frightening a proposition.
Crossposted @ The Lunatic's Asylum 

Matthew is a friend and weekly contributor to DMF
Please stop by and give him a shout at the above link
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Saturday, July 7, 2012

I'm Taking the Weekend Off....

See Ya Monday Morning....
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Friday, July 6, 2012

GM unveils the 2013 Baracko


And just like its namesake......

*Location of Production - unknown
*Cost tax payers a fortune
*Limited Edition  - creates few jobs
*It's instruments lie constantly  
 *Obscured vision of the road ahead
 *Designed to make left turns only
*Smokes when no one is looking
*Can change color to fit the situation
*Requires expensive upkeep and frequent downtime
*Will be sold to America on television by shysters

(Available with eco- friendly Nancy Pelosi plastic head hood ornament)


And Coming this Fall: 

The 2013 Biden

'Plugster'


***Required four D cell batteries not included***
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Fishnet Friday


Thursday, July 5, 2012

A Brief History of Useful Idiots

Diogenes - 7/5
The phenomenon of intelligent people saying stupid things about tyrants is a constant of 20th century history and continues unabated into the 21st.
Take Mussolini for instance. You might think he was just a blustering fool in a fez, but once upon a time many people took him very seriously. I learned once from my history teacher that Churchill had spoken approvingly of the black shirts in the 1920s. This week I was reading a biography of the first Fascist and learned that Winston was not alone. Franklin Roosevelt praised the Italian dictator as a gentleman; Chiang Kai-shek asked for a signed photograph; and even Gandhi (yes lovely, non-violent, vegetable-munching Gandhi) described him as the “Savior of Italy.” Hmmmm. That’ll be the guy who let his soldiers use live Ethiopians for target practice and ended his political career shipping Jews to Hitler for extermination? All right then!
The USSR under Stalin is a Klondike of intellectual embarrassment and/or mendacity, ranging from the reporting of Walter Duranty, the Pulitzer Prize Winner who defended Stalin’s show trials and denied the Ukrainian famine, to the bumptious witterings of George Bernard Shaw who in 1932 declared (as millions were starving) that reports of a famine in the USSR were “nonsense.” How did he know? “I have never eaten as well as during my trip to the Soviet Union.”

It was Lenin who first identified the genus of Western intellectual known as “the useful idiot,” but it was Stalin who showed how incredibly easy it was to seduce them: a free holiday, dinner, a little flattery and wa-hey- the knickers are off! But then Stalin died, the USSR became much less violent and the useful idiots lost interest.
Searching for a new utopia, many pinned their hopes on revolutionary Cuba, where a bearded mega-bore named Fidel Castro was in the process of transforming a corrupt satellite of America into a corrupt satellite of the USSR, even poorer and less free than before. Like Papa Joe, Fidel knew how to flatter and soon he had the likes of Picasso, Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag (“the Cuban revolution is astonishingly free of repression”) eating out of his palm. My favorite Castro quote comes from Abbie Hoffman, a justly forgotten 60s radical bed-wetter who compared Castro to… well, read for yourself:
“Fidel sits on the side of a tank rumbling into Havana on New Year’s Day… girls throw flowers at the tank and rush to tug playfully at this black beard. He laughs joyously and pinches a few rumps. .. He is like a mighty penis coming to life, and when he is tall and straight, the crowd immediately is transformed.”
Then there was Castro’s pal, Wee Ernie Guevara, a totalitarian loon who praised Mao, invaded the Congo and died in Bolivia after attempting to inspire revolution among people he knew nothing about. Jean-Paul Sartre declared him “the most complete human being of our age.”
Speaking of Mao, he had his celebrity admirers, too. In 1973, Shirley MacLaine, who was very good in The Apartment with Jack Lemmon, went on a tour of some Potemkin villages in China and wrote a glowing report afterwards. She was especially approving of the absence of advertising billboards, and the general atmosphere of calm which left her feeling “serene.” She never thought that perhaps China was quiet because 60 million people had just been murdered and everyone was very, very scared. Mao was a big hit among 60s students and one of his erstwhile fanboys, Jose Manuel Barroso, is today president of the European Commission.
But Mao and Castro weren’t the only totalitarian despots considered groovy in the 60s and 70s. Eldridge Cleaver, a prominent Black Panther leader, declared that while America was a hell-hole of oppression, North Korea under Kim Il-sung was the best place in the world. In the run up to the Iranian revolution, Michel Foucault, a Frenchman, paid several visits to Iran and later praised the “political spirituality” of the Ayatollah Khomeini who, given the chance, would have had him executed for his homosexuality.
And so on, and so on. These days, it’s not quite as bad though I hear Hitler has his fans in the Middle East and Hollywood morons, inspired by 60s nostalgia, still show up in Cuba from time to time. But it’s hard to find the pure strain of tyrant admiration, though for a while I was fascinated by a blog entitled Reflections on the Ruhnama, written by “Steve from Wisconsin” who apparently took at face value all the gibberish the deceased Turkmen tyrant Saparmurat Niyazov had scrawled with a colored crayon in his notorious book.
Maybe it has something to do with the loss of religious faith. You know, these intellectuals no longer believe in paradise, so they project their yearning for redemption onto some exotic place, then climb through the wardrobe of their imaginations and emerge in magical lands governed by wise talking lions. Yes, I like that, though surely vanity also comes into it. It pleases certain intellectuals to adopt counter-intuitive positions, believing it gives them “depth” and “sophistication.” And thus clever people are often the easiest to fool.
And what about today.....Just look around.
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Michelle Obama Readied for Madame Tussauds Wax Museum

The Big Feed

The U.S. first lady Michelle Obama will be the next resident in Madame Tussauds Wax Museum in Washington D.C. A clay head mold of Michelle Obama is in the final touch up at Merlin Studios in London before the senior sculptor Colin Jackson “makeup” for her.

Here's photos of the progress:

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Compensating Justice Roberts

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Monday, July 2, 2012

A Good Monday Morning

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The 10 Grooviest New Obamacare Taxes

It's a tax! It's a penalty! It's a mandate!

"...Obamacare will impose higher taxes totaling $4 trillion between now and 2035, with substantial hits on working Americans. That works out to more than $1.7 trillion over a decade—more than triple the original 10-year score."

Doug Ross has the details here...

Sunday, July 1, 2012

Morpheus on the ObamaCare

Eye of Polyphemus

"Which color pill do I take in order to forget about all this?  Can I still get the pill through my preferred insurance provider?"
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