Obama's Defense Policy: Ramirez Sums It Up

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The Fiery Badge of Zilla

It isn't every day that this blogger gets credited with "awesomeness," but . . .

In her First Annual Zilla Awards for Awesomeness in the Dextrosphere, the indefatigable Zilla of the Resistance has included yours truly under the category, "Nicest Bloggers," in some very classy company, including Adrienne at Adrienne's Corner, DaTechGuy at DaTechguy's Blog, Jimmie at The Sundries Shack, Jill at Pundit & Pundette, and The Lonely Conservative.

This is one awesome experience!

Thanks, Zilla.

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I Know Who Holds Tomorrow -- Gospel Ukelele by Ken Middleton

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Obama and the I-Word

For once, the I-word appearing in the same headline as Obama's name is not the narcissistic I that Obama usually uses to decorate his limp oratory. Nor is it the word Imperial, Immigration, Idiot, Illegal, Islam, or any other of a number of other words usually associated with Obama's name.

This time, it's the word Impeach, as in: Obama's Recess Appointments: An Impeachable Offense?

I personally do not see the current House of Representatives as capable of sufficient force of character to impeach Obama for crossing "from socialistic extremism into lawlessness" by making recess appointments when Congress is not legally recessed. Judging from past experience, Obama has every reason to rely on an irresolute House (where impeachment proceedings must lawfully begin) to permit his "subjective whim" to override the "clearly written" constitutional power of Congress to determine whether and when they is in session.

Slighted Democrats hoping to even the score by
demanding the impeachment of a Republican,
G.W. Bush, after Ceegar Willie escaped impeachment
convictions for perjury and obstruction of justice.

If the legislative apathy continues, this Molotov cocktail aimed at the U.S. Constitution will have found its mark, and the debris of what once was the Senate's role of "advise and consent" will soon be reincorporated to mean "rubber & stamp."

But, say, patriotic conviction (or even jealous guarding of Congressional or personal power) favorably inclines the ears of House members to the murmurs of impeachment abroad in the land.

That would produce for Obama the victim label that might suit a crafty president--and his political party--quite well in their efforts to revive the passions of their lethargic fans. If there's anything a Democrat likes, it's an underdog--real or imagined. 

And then again, a huge fight over whether Obama is guilty of an impeachable offense might be just what Dr. Soros ordered to replace Obama with a more palatable candidate on the Democrat ticket.

The one thing that Americans can count on, it seems obvious, is that whatever the Socialist Democrats and their top guy are up to, they are up to no good.
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A Patriot Speaks: Bachmann's Magnificent Withdrawal Speech

Howard Chandler Christy's Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States

But make no mistake: I'll continue to be a strong voice. I'll continue to stand and fight for the country and for the American people, and for our freedom because Mr. Franklin and all the founders, all the men, all the women, who have given their last full measure of devotion, and our military, our veterans, are watching us. They're expecting us to stand up and protect what they fought to give us, and so we owe it to them and to our posterity and to the God that we serve Who created us, Who gave us life in our very being, to keep our Republic free. 

 ~ Michelle Bachman, 1/4/12

Words worth hearing:

 

Obama Trying to Earn that Nobel Prize by Freeing Taliban Held in Gitmo?

Hot off the press via Weasel Zippers:

(Guardian) — The US has agreed in principle to release high-ranking Taliban officials from Guantánamo Bay in return for the Afghan insurgents’ agreement to open a political office for peace negotiations in Qatar, the Guardian has learned.

According to sources familiar with the talks in the US and in Afghanistan, the handful of Taliban figures will include Mullah Khair Khowa, a former interior minister, and Noorullah Noori, a former governor in northern Afghanistan.

More controversially, the Taliban are demanding the release of the former army commander Mullah Fazl Akhund. Washington is reported to be considering formally handing him over to the custody of another country, possibly Qatar.

The releases would be to reciprocate for Tuesday’s announcement from the Taliban that they are prepared to open a political office in Qatar to conduct peace negotiations “with the international community” – the most significant political breakthrough in ten years of the Afghan conflict.

The Taliban are holding just one American soldier, Bowe Bergdahl, a 25-year-old sergeant captured in June 2009, but it is not clear whether he would be freed as part of the deal.

“To take this step, the [Obama] administration have to have sufficient confidence that the Taliban are going to reciprocate,” said Vali Nasr, who was an Obama administration adviser on the Afghan peace process until last year. “It is going to be really risky. Guantánamo is a very sensitive issue politically.”

Nasr, now a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, said the Taliban announcement on the opening of an office in Qatar was a dramatic breakthrough.

Read the whole thing here. Lowlights:

• "The next phase will need concessions on both sides." 
• "Even if all five of these people they release went straight back to Quetta [the Taliban stronghold in Pakistan] to rejoin a fight, it wouldn't make any real difference."

Words fail.
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Obama's Night Cap

Remember when Obama wondered whether he could "mobilize the citizenry" into accepting "skyrocketing" electrical rates and bankrupted coal-burning power plants?

The problem is, uh, can you get the American people to say, “This is really important,” and force their representatives to do the right thing? That requires mobilizing a citizenry. That requires them understanding what is at stake. Uh, and climate change is a great example.

You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, uh, you know — Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket

Obama made that statement in an interview with The San Francisco Chronicle as the nation moved into January of the last presidential election year.

Here in Progressive Paradise, even Obama's most ardent supporters never did get entirely "mobilized" into the "really important" desire to suffer from the cold all winter because they couldn't afford to pay for heat.

Regulatory chicanery via unelected czars being what it is, however, Obama did manage to mobilize the owner of my local coal-fired power plant into bankruptcy, and he did mobilize the folks who sell electricity and natural gas to the people in our area to include the following friendly note with our December energy bills. Read it and weep.

Help Avoid Hypothermia

Cold Weather Can Put You at Risk of Hypothermia, a dangerous condition caused by a lowering of body temperature. Symptoms include feeling very cold, tired and weak; shivering and confusion. To help avoid hypothermia:

• Wear a hat indoors, outdoors and even in bed. Half of our body heat is lost through the head and neck.

It used to be that the power company focused on selling energy to consumers. Now, it seems, they are worried that those customers might freeze to death.

Reality check:

Current temperature here in Progressive Paradise: 12F.

Current temperature in Obama's vacation paradise hometown, Honolulu: 79F.

Current temperature in the White House: 80F.

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Turning the Table in 2012

For three long, painful years, the blogosphere has provided evidence aplenty that an increasing multitude of Americans have been longing for the arrival of 2012 to signal the start of our opportunity to remove from office the current president of the United States.

Starting with a trickle of the economically alert and the politically astute whose numbers were soon bolstered by the newly unemployed, underemployed, and the nervous, for at least the past three years Americans have been hoarding money and supplies against the deepening economic winter, even as our stores of faith in the survival of our political system grow thin (along with, ironically, the celebrated "hope" for our future pleasure and prosperity).

Americans greeting 2012 as the opportunity to reclaim our eroding liberties are a special blend: we are a motley crew of descendents of the hardiest and bravest escapees of some of history's most villainous political and economic oppression. It is more than likely that your parents, your grandparents, yourself--or whoever it was in your family who first set foot on American soil--arrived here in the face of incredible odds against them. And, if you look over your shoulder at your family's past, you cannot escape noticing that a whole lot of surviving has been accomplished since then.

In our wait for 2012, those of us who have refused to be partisans of Barack H. Obama have been carrying on a defensive strategy: we have contested and annoyed Obamatons and we have gathered together as TEA partiers to study, entrench, and build and fortify our own networks. Lacking a leader in the executive office and a majority in the Senate, we have resolutely maintained our defensive position, but we are itching to climb of the trenches.

Now is the moment for us to oblige Obama to take full ownership of his gains, not merely in the luxurious privacy of whatever vacation resort he happens to be occupying at the moment, but far less comfortably in the eyes of the Americans on whose suffering he has built those gains.

The songs of schoolchildren establishing Obama as a juvenile superhero have quietened. Nobody believes that Obama is a deity anymore. His fingerprints are on so many of America's current problems that even formerly fierce supporters of Hope and Change have gone AWOL. In conversations in which former Obama supporters complain about their difficulties paying the most recent jump in their utility or food bill or finding a doctor who takes Medicare, a few well placed words can plant seeds of awareness.

Convincing Americans that a gain for Republicans is a loss for America is a game that Democrats have been playing for a long, long, time, using every kind of chicanery at their disposal.

The time is ripe to turn the table on them--but all we need to use is the truth. It is Democrats who ought to be fearing their own legislative or judicial victory because it will cost them the votes of people who recognize that, for them, that Democrat victory creates a real, tangible loss.

Our opportunities are everywhere. 2012 is a year in which I plan to make use of those opportunities.

Happy New Year to All!
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Psalm 67 -- Lionel Valdellon

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A New Year's Resolution We Can All Share

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A Snow Globe in My Pocket

Back at my desk today, transitioning from my Christmas interlude, a time of shutting out the world and taking up the pleasures of showering family and friends with tokens of love and care and receiving same.

A shower of love trapped in a holiday, like a snowstorm trapped in a snow globe.

How difficult it is to open the door to the world again.


  
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Oh Holy Night -- Mahalia Jackson

Merry Christmas, Dear Friends.




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And a Tax on My Christmas Tree . . .

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Taxpayers pay $257,000 for each Chevy Volt

At more than $250K a pop, it's really the U.S. taxpayer who's being charged.

This article, linked by William Jacobson, caught my attention today:

If you’ve been revolted by the fact that every $40,000 electric Chevy Volt sold by Government Motors enjoys a $7,500 rebate at the expense of taxpayers, then better have some Dramamine before you read any further. James Hohman of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy has calculated that the total subsidies—direct and indirect, federal and state—poured into this white elephant could add up to $3 billion or $250,000 for every Volt sold to date. And this is not counting the 26 percent ownership that Uncle Sam still has in the company.

Nor does it count the subsidies that taxpayers like you and I provide to the manufacturers of the batteries used in the Volt. Add on an additional nearly $7,000 for that.

I say, if you want to drive a "green car," you should pay for it yourself.

This government swindle of the rest of us has got to stop.
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A Baroque Magnificat -- Ensemble européen William Byrd

This astonishing composition by Polish composer Mikolaj Zielenski was published in Venice in 1611, four-hundred years ago. Here it is performed by the Ensemble européen William Byrd under the direction of Graham O'Reilly.

The Magnificat, also known as the Canticle of Mary, is one of the oldest hymns in Christendom, recording the words used by the Mother of God as she announced her pregnancy to her cousin Elizabeth, who was also pregnant with a son who would grow to become John the Baptist.

Luke 1:46-55

And Mary said, "My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for He has regarded the low estate of His handmaiden. For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed; for He who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is His Name. And His mercy is upon those who fear Him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with His arm, He has scattered the proud in his imagination of their hearts, He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree; He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He has sent away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of His mercy, as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his posterity forever."

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I Sure Do Like Those Christmas Cookies -- George Strait

An annual favorite about those annual favorites!

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Money Money Money Money: The Candidates Address Global Warming

Global warming alarmists fail to mention that the up-and-down trends of Earth's climate made the planet much warmer than today when the Ancient Egyptians built their pyramids, the Romans built their empire, and Medieval British Islanders made wine from grapes they grew in their gardens.

Blaming a temporary warming trend (that has since reversed to a cooling trend) on a trace gas that is conveniently impossible to remove from the atmosphere, Europeans developed "emissions trading" schemes that Obama, his Obamatons, and the founders of fledgling "climate science" recognized as extremely lucrative to the "right" people, and I do not mean conservatives.

How has emissions trading been working out for Europe? According to a study by the Swiss bank, UBS:

The EU's emissions trading regime . . . has already cost European consumers $283 billion....

And what did Europe get for that money? "Limited benefits and embarrassing consequences," according to the report. 

Anything Europe can do, the US can do better: 

In a separate study, the U.S. Energy Department said the domestic cost could reach as much as $570 billion a year. And it would kill nearly 5 million jobs here. 

So what kind of climate policy leadership can the American people expect from the various presidential candidates?

The following quotes, I think, pretty fairly sum up the expressed views of the people who hope to be in charge of U.S. policies on climate spending beginning in 2012.

Purveyors of Climate Alarm

• Barack Hussein Obama: Not only is [climate change] real, it's here, and its effects are giving rise to a frighteningly new global phenomenon: the man-made natural disaster.  

Obama wants to cut carbon emissions by 80% through governmental regulations that sidestep Congress and thus the voters who are required to pay for the "hope and change" through higher taxes; lost jobs and individual freedoms; more expensive energy, goods, and services; more highway fatalities in "greener" (smaller and lighter) cars.

• Newt Gingrich: Our country must take action to address climate change.

Gingrich has made numerous public statements supporting cap and trade legislation, if it were to include bi-partisan incentives for "development of new technologies . . . to achieve significant reductions in carbon loading." Read: money, money, money, money for "green" energy producers, even if they don't actually produce energy or produce it much more inefficiently at much higher cost.

• Mitt Romney: I can't prove that, but I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer . . . ." "[I]t's important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may be significant contributors. 

Under Romney, Massachusetts set strict state limitations on CO2 emissions from power plants, but Romney has opposed cap and trade.

• Jon Huntsman, Jr.: To be clear, I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.

Huntsman is named after his billionaire father, Jon Huntsman, Sr., who made his fortune manufacturing chemicals. Huntsman Corporation holds global leadership positions in, among a number of other chemicals, ethylene and propylene carbonates. which are used in the production of lithium batteries.

Call me crazy, but I can think of certain financial benefits accruing to Huntsman Corporation from massive increases in the use of lithium batteries resulting from government subsidies for "green" automobiles, windmills, and solar devices and government restrictions on conventional energy production.

Climate Realists

• Rick Perry: [The climate change scare] is all one contrived phony mess that is falling apart under its own weight.

Last year, Perry sued the Environmental Protection Agency in an attempt to prevent their regulation of CO2.

• Michele Bachmann:  The big thing we are working on now is the global warming hoax. It's all voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax. 

Bachmann has called the cap-and-trade bill "tyranny, and the EPA "the job-killing organization of America."

• Ron Paul: Washington bureaucrats have classified the very air we exhale as a pollutant and have gone unchallenged in this incredible assertion.

Paul sponsored or cosponsored legislation that would allow drilling in U.S. waters and ANWR, increase tax incentives for investing in oil refineries, streamline federal approval for oil refinery construction, and suspend the federal gas tax when retail gasoline prices hit $3 pr gallon.

• Rick Santorum: [The climate change scare is] just an excuse for more government control of your life, and I've never been for any scheme or even accepted the junk science behind the whole narrative.

As a representative of a coal mining state who believes that "coal is not a dirty word," Santorum has vowed to reverse Obama's goal of "shutting down 60 coal fired power plants" and to "open up energy in America."

Although CO2 levels have been gradually rising, global warming stopped 12 years ago. Isn't it time we stopped paying for it?
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Come, Let Us Go Back to God -- Sam Cooke & the Soul Stirrers

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Sunset & Vine Shooter More "Workplace Violence"?

Uh huh.

According to a recent determination by the Defense Department, the Fort Hood Massacre of 14 people (including one unborn child) and the wounding of 29 others, was "workplace violence," not terrorism.

By that standard, the gunman who stood on the corner of Sunset and Vine in Hollywood, picking out motorists to shoot at, was an irate worker too: both he and Nidal Malik Hasan were reported by eyewitnesses to have shouted out their rationale for the shootings as "Allahu Akbar!"

Not that the mainstream media or the Obama administration want you to know that.

I imagine word will get around Hollywood, though, thus testing the Hollywood crowd's capacity for denial.

In the following video, an on-the-scene reporter makes much of the fact that the shooter was shouting, but shows little curiosity about the content of those shouts. One of the eyewitnesses sets him straight (around 2:40).

The names of the shooter's two victims, one of whom is in critical condition after being shot in the neck, the other of whom suffered a minor gunshot wound in the leg, have been made public.

The name of the gunman, who was killed by police fire, has not yet been released. (UPDATE: The shooter's name has now been released. It is Tyler Brehm, age 26.)

Zilla of the Resistance reminds us that, since September 11, 2001, nearly EIGHTEEN THOUSAND incidences of workplace violence "deadly islamic jihad terrorist attacks have transpired."

The long list of the Obama administration's aggressive support of Islam includes Eric Holder's lawsuits supporting Shariah law, Janet Napolitano's cleansing of mention of Islam and jihad from counterterror materials (via Zilla), and Tim Geitner's use of taxpayer funds to help Muslim religious authorities collect religious taxes.

The 2012 Republican primaries will soon be at hand, and it is of utmost importance that the Republican nominee who will challenge Obama for the Presidency is not only cognizant of, but willing to fearlessly fight against the ever increasing force of islamic supremacist infiltration of the United States and the global threat presented by islamic supremacist conquest to freedom loving people everywhere.

Zilla offers a very convincing argument that Rick Santorum understands the threat of jihad and should be that nominee. Read her endorsement here.

Want more convincing? Start at The Other McCain's Santorum Sunday Express, which I found via Santorum supporter teresamerica.
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Global Warming Scare Dying Death of 1,000 Cuts

This December I'm following up on some of the news stories I've covered in this blog in 2011.

One of my pet peeves has been the Progressive War on CO2 as an agent of global warming, a fiction used to bolster countless money-grabbing schemes through the simple method of frightening schoolchildren and their parents with the supposedly evil specter of CO2, which is in fact a rare gas essential to life on Earth.

Here's an interesting climate reality check from Climate Depot via Watts Up With That:

The global warming movement is suffering the scientific death of a thousand cuts. . . .

The Antarctic sea ice extent has been at or near record extent in the past few summers and the ice is expanding, the Arctic has rebounded in recent years since the low point in 2007, polar bears are thriving, sea level is not showing acceleration and is actually dropping, Cholera and Malaria are failing to follow global warming predictions, Mount Kilimanjaro melt fears are being made a mockery by gains in snow cover, global temperatures have been holding steady for a decade or more and many scientists are predicting global cooling is ahead, deaths due to extreme weather are radically declining, global tropical cyclone activity is near historic lows, the frequency of major U.S. hurricanes has declined, the oceans are missing their predicted heat content, big tornados have dramatically declined since the 1970s, droughts are not historically unusual nor caused by mankind, there is no evidence we are currently having unusual weather, scandals continue to rock the climate fear movement, the UN IPCC has been exposed as being a hotbed of environmental activists, former Vice President Al Gore is now under siege by his fellow global warming activists for attempting to link every bad weather event to man-made global warming and scientists from around the world continue to dissent from man-made climate fears at a rapid pace.

Reality Calls: The Antarctic Summer Ice Melt Actually is at the Lowest Levels in the Satellite Era

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