Juan Williams Smacks Down The Messiah

Juan Williams, Senior Correspondent for NPR as well as a contributor for Fox News, hammers Our Lord and Savior Barack Hussein Obama for gutting the school voucher program for Washington, D.C., as a wet sloppy kiss to the National Extortion Association.

The National Education Association and other teachers’ unions have put millions into Democrats’ congressional campaigns because they oppose Republican efforts to challenge unions on their resistance to school reform and specifically their refusal to support ideas such as performance-based pay for teachers who raise students’ test scores.

By going along with Secretary Duncan’s plan to hollow out the D.C. voucher program this president, who has spoken so passionately about the importance of education, is playing rank politics with the education of poor children. It is an outrage.

Of course, Arne Duncan is only going to do with America’s schools what he did with Chicago’s. You can read our coverage about what a trainwreck he left in the Windy City here and here.

Williams also highlights the hypocrisy of many leading Democrats and liberals in Washington, D.C., who refuse to send their own children to D.C. public schools but block reform of one of the nation’s worst systems.

It is really upsetting to see that the Heritage Foundation has discoverd that 38 percent of the members of Congress made the choice to put their children in private schools. Of course, Secretary Duncan has said he decided not to live in Washington, D.C. because he did not want his children to go to public schools there. And President Obama, who has no choice but to live in the White House, does not send his two daughters to D.C. public schools, either. They attend a private school, Sidwell Friends, along with two students who got there because of the voucher program.

It’s the same all over the place. Government-run education isn’t about education; it’s about maintaining the power for the educational bureaucrats and the teachers union and milking the taxpayers for all they can. Plus, brainwashing the kids to become good wards of the statists.

Says Rachel Abrams of The Weekly Standard:

This unconscionable, indefensible decision to deprive poor minority children of any chance to escape the ghastly conditions and even worse teaching offered up by the District of Columbia public school system–which will not affect Mr. Duncan’s own children, or Mr. Obama’s, or the children of the “38 percent of the members of Congress [who] made the choice to put their children in private schools”–is, as Williams eloquently puts it, a “sin against our children.”

Delaying The Rescue

Navy SEALs would have gotten Capt. Richard Phillips out of the hands of Somali pirates a lot sooner if The Anointed One hadn’t insisted on dragging things out for the sake of negotiations.

That’s right. Our Lord and Savior Barack Hussein Obama actually obstructed rescue operations by delaying dispatching a SEAL rescue team to the area then coming up with strict, non-lethal rules of engagement designed to allow Him to negotiate with the terrorists holding Capt. Phillips hostage.

WASHINGTON – While Barack Obama is basking in praise for his “decisive” handling of the Somali pirate attack on a merchant ship in the India Ocean, reliable military sources close to the scene are painting a much different picture of the incident – accusing the president of employing restrictive rules of engagement that actually hampered the rescue of Capt. Richard Phillips and extended the drama at sea for days.

Multiple opportunities to free the captain of the Maersk Alabama from three young pirates were missed, these sources say – all because a Navy SEAL team was not immediately ordered to the scene and then forced to operate under strict, non-lethal rules of engagement.

They say the response duty office at the Pentagon was initially unwilling to grant an order to use lethal force to rescue Phillips. They also report the White House refused to authorize deployment of a Navy SEAL team to the location for 36 hours, despite the recommendation of the on-scene commander.

The White House also turned down two rescue plans offered up by the Seal commander on the scene and the captain of the USS Bainbridge.

The SEAL team operated under rules of engagement that required them to do nothing unless the hostage’s life was in “imminent’ danger.

Shame on that arrogant, egotistical bastard. It’s all about Him for the most part. To some extent, it’s about the naivete and arrogance of the Left, thinking that there is a diplomatic solution to every problem, that there’s nothing wrong with sitting down and talking to the bad guys. There is, but that’s a topic for another day.

But The Messiah stood in the way of a rescue attempt and tied the hands of the very people who could have rescued Capt. Phillips a lot sooner.

The Cost Of One Latte

The Drive By Media is hyperventilating about Our Lord and Savior Barack Hussein Obama ordering $100 million in budget cuts from His cabinet.

Greg Mankiw via Charlie Sykes reports just exactly what a joke this is:

Just to be clear: $100 million represents .003 percent of $3.5 trillion.

To put those numbers in perspective, imagine that the head of a household with annual spending of $100,000 called everyone in the family together to deal with a $34,000 budget shortfall. How much would he or she announce that spending had be cut? By $3 over the course of the year–approximately the cost of one latte at Starbucks. The other $33,997? We can put that on the family credit card and worry about it next year.

Of course, you wouldn’t expect the MENSA rejects that follow The Messiah mindlessly chanting “O-Baa-Ma! O-Baa-Ma! O-Baa-Ma!” to understand that.

A commenter at Sykes Writes gets it:

I guess they don’t teach math at community activism school.

Hint: it’s the spending, stupid.

Quotes Of The Day

From the late Dr. Adrian Rogers:

You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that, my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.

Right alongside the brilliant words of Sir Alex Fraser Tytler in a quote often incorrectly attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, who has enough insightful quotes of his own:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.

Speaking of de Tocqueville, there is this gem:

America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.

The ‘U.S. Sucks’ Tour

Steven Hurst of al-Associated Press writes an analysis of Our Lord and Savior Barack Hussein Obama’s ongoing worldwide Apology Tour (via Memeorandum).

Some hits of the analysis. Hurst gets it right that this is a huge gamble for The Messiah.

WASHINGTON (al-AP) – President Barack Obama has gone abroad and gored an ox—the deeply held belief that the United States does not make mistakes in dealings with either friends or foes.

And in the process, he’s taking a huge gamble both at home and abroad, for a payoff that could be a long time coming, if ever.

Sure, it scores points with His America-bashing friends on the political Left both at home and abroad. You know those folks. The ones former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick called the San Francisco Democrats and the Blame America First crowd. Not to mention the appeasement and surrender monkeys in Europe.

But what good does it accomplish? None. It has the world’s lone superpower bowing and scraping on its knees before despots and tyrants and third-rate dictators. That’s something I refuse to do. This man does not speak for me.

Hurst’s analysis has its misses as well. Digging up the badly misshapen image of Mikhail S. Gorbachev and comparing The Anointed One to him and continuing this lie of the Left that Gorbachev helped bring down the Soviet Union.

While historic analogies are never perfect, Obama’s stark efforts to change the U.S. image abroad are reminiscent of the stunning realignments sought by former Soviet leader Michael Gorbachev. During his short—by Soviet standards—tenure, he scrambled incessantly to shed the ideological entanglements that were leading the communist empire toward ruin.

I realize it is the wet dream of lefties everywhere that it was the emergence of Gorbachev that helped hasten the downfall of the USSR, but in all reality, it was a corrupt, rotted corpse from Day One that fell all on its own with help from Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and something called SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative. In short, the Soviets tried to keep up with the West’s military rearmament in the 1980s and simply was unable to do so and collapsed as a result.

Gorbachev is no enlightened leader of any sort. He is simply a former Soviet dictator much like his predecessors.

And for an American president to be compared to communist dictator, well, as they say, if the shoe fits …

Critics, especially those deeply attached to the foreign policy course of the past 50-plus years, see a president whose lofty ideals expose the country to a dangerous probing of U.S. weakness, of an unseemly readiness to admit past mistakes, of a willingness to talk with unpleasant opponents.

“I think it was irresponsible for the president to be seen kind of laughing and joking with Hugo Chavez,” said Sen. John Ensign, a Nevada Republican. “This is a person along the lines with Fidel Castro and the types of dictatorship that he has down there in Venezuela and the anti-Americanism that he has been spreading around the world is not somebody the president of the United States should be seen as having, you know, kind of friendly relations with.”

It is irresponsible to be seen and photographed with a goofy smirk on His face engaging in a “homeboy handshake” with a communist dictator who has spewed an incessant amount of anti-American rhetoric — kind of like sitting in the pew of a Black Liberation Theology church listening to a preacher spew the same type of anti-American rhetoric for 20 years.

Here’s the disgusting visual. Have barf bag handy:

More repulsive than the mental image of Janet Reno in a thong.

Cheerfully receiving an anti-American book as a gift from the Venezuelan thug was a real class act as well.

Obama did not make note that the book offered by Chavez, “Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent,” by Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano, blames foreign interests like the United States for exploiting Latin America for centuries.

“It was a nice gesture to give me a book. I am a reader,” Obama said during a solo press conference at the end of a the summit held in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago.

A nice gesture? A patriotic American would have told Chavez just exactly where he could shove that book. But this fits the mindset of the Chocolate Jesus, a true Blame America Firster if there ever was one.

And get a load of this load of Barbra Streisand (B.S.) from The Christos:

We had this debate throughout the campaign. I mean the whole notion was somehow that if we showed courtesy or opened up dialogue with governments that had previously been hostile to us that would show weakness. And the American people didn’t buy it and there’s a reason they didn’t buy it — because it didn’t make sense.

Funny, I was there during the campaign. I don’t remember that debate ever being held or the American people ever weighing in on it. It was all about hope and change. Hope and change. Yes we can! Yes we can! Silly simplistic chants and slogans and idealistic dreams. It was the ultimate in races for class president, which are never anything more than popularity contests. This was the ultimate American Idol, resulting from fawning Drive By Media coverage combined with a dumbed down electorate which checked their minds at the door and became content to chant “O-Baa-Ma! O-Baa-Ma! O-Baa-Ma!” like the good sheeple they were.

It was never about substance. Or matters like having the President of the United States conducting a World Apology Tour.

As Patrick from Badger Blogger notes:

We are seeing the Barack Obama that we tried to warn you about, the man that sat in a church for 20 years as a man spewed hatred against America… Be afraid America, be very afraid.

NewsBusters calls the al-AP analysis praise for Dear Leader knocking down arrogant America.

[N]ot only is the AP inventing news it is inventing an entire national self-image, then batting it down all in an effort to prop up the feckless foreign policy of its messiah Barrack Obama. Obama’s “The U.S. Sucks” tour isn’t over yet and the AP is loving it.

Did you know that everyone in the U.S. has a “deeply held belief” that this country “does not make mistakes in dealings with either friends or foes”? Well, neither did anyone else, but the Associated Press sure does. And what’s more the AP is praising Obama for “goring the ox” of this obviously “deeply held belief” in which we stupid Americans are prone to believe.

Over at Hot Air, Ed Morrissey points out the irony:

Obama’s apologizing for being dictatorial … to Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, and the Castros.

Buy the concert tee for the World Apology Tour. Michelle Malkin is soliciting designs.

Watch Your Lifestyle, Folks

The bashing of the obese and overweight as contributors to global warming has begun and no doubt will soon be coming to a media outlet near you.

LONDON (al-Reuters) – Overweight people eat more than thin people and are more likely to travel by car, making excess body weight doubly bad for the environment, according to a study from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

“When it comes to food consumption, moving about in a heavy body is like driving around in a gas guzzler,” and food production is a major source of greenhouse gases, researchers Phil Edwards and Ian Roberts wrote in their study, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

“We need to be doing a lot more to reverse the global trend toward fatness, and recognize it as a key factor in the battle to reduce (carbon) emissions and slow climate change,” the British scientists said.

They estimated that each fat person is responsible for about one tonne of carbon dioxide emissions a year more on average than each thin person, adding up to an extra one billion tonnes of CO2 a year in a population of one billion overweight people.

Congratulations to the overweight. In the eyes of the environmentalist wackos, you are as evil as an SUV or a Hummer.

Watch for new regulations, bans and taxes to be proposed to deal with this crisis. And for those of you who said the Lifestyle Nazis would stop with smokers, guess what? You were wrong. That’s why I as a non-smoker spoke up for and will continue to defend smokers’ rights. it isn’t about smoking. It’s about lifestyle fascism and a collection of holier-than-thou people determining what the rest of us should be allowed and even required to do and prohibited from doing.

Not Drinking The Global Warming Kool-Aid

Rut-roh.

Looks like the American people are no longer drinking the global warming Kool-Aid pushed by Algore and his zealous disciples.

Just one-out-of-three voters (34%) now believe global warming is caused by human activity, the lowest finding yet in Rasmussen Reports national surveying. However, a plurality (48%) of the Political Class believes humans are to blame.

Forty-eight percent (48%) of all likely voters attribute climate change to long-term planetary trends, while seven percent (7%) blame some other reason. Eleven percent (11%) aren’t sure.

Of course the ruling political elites believe it. Or say they do. They’re the ones with the most to gain in terms of the continuing acquisition of power with the planned radical restructuring of the American economy and American society itself in the name of saving the planet from global warming.

However, now that Our Lord and Savior’s EPA has decided to label carbon dioxide as a pollutant, the tyranny of Imperial Washington poses new threats to the freedoms and God-given rights of Americans.

From Opposing Viewpoints via Charlie Sykes:

If the EPA acts on its endangerment finding to pass regulations that impose a price on carbon, this will result in a energy tax being levied on every American, passed by bureaucratic fiat without any legislative debate.

It will be the 21st Century version of taxation without representation. An EPA imposed tax on carbon will raise the price of energy, transportation, and virtually every item that requires energy to be produced for businesses and consumers alike.

We’re right back where we were in the 1760s and 1770s: government oppressing the people with taxes being imposed by those unelected by the people and unaccountable to the people.

Sure, technically we have “elected” representatives, but just how accountable to the people are they? Given that over 90 percent of members of the House of Representatives win re-election and the re-election rate of incumbents all over the United States is staggering, we have developed a ruling political elite.

Combine that with a growing ignorance of the electorate and a willingness to turn elections into something of a version of American Idol or Dancing With The Stars or some reality show with viewer input and it’s a very real threat to the concept of representative self-government.

Judges Allow Theft Of Senate Seat To Proceed

A three-judge panel in Minnesota has allowed the theft of Norm Coleman’s U.S. Senate seat by Al Franken and the Democrats to proceed.

Even after the recount and panel-findings, the 312-vote margin separating the two men equals about .01% of the 2.9 million votes cast. Even without any irregularities, this is as close to a “tie” as it gets. And there have been plenty of irregularities. By the end of the recount, the state was awash with evidence of duplicate ballot counting, newly discovered ballots, missing ballots, illegal voting, and wildly diverse standards as to which votes were counted. Any one of these issues was enough to throw the outcome into doubt. Combined, they created a taint more worthy of New Jersey than Minnesota.

Clearly, the Democrats learned from the 2000 election in Florida just how to steal an election and get away with it. The governor’s race in Washington. This race. And now the U.S. House of Representatives special election in New York.

Count. Recount. Recount again. Find a friendly judge to let in ballots favorable to the Democrat and keep out voting constituencies favorable to Republican. Ballots appearing out of nowhere: trunks of cars, garages, completely unsecured. Some ballots being counted more than once, some not being counted at all. Stop counting when the Democrat is ahead after multiple recounts. Make the Republican have to challenge in court then rely on liberal judges to block those challenges.

Congratulations. We’ve become a third-rate banana republic thanks to people who cannot win elections legitimately and have to resort to voter fraud and election theft to get in office and stay there.

I’d call those judges Larry, Moe and Curly, but that’s an insult … to the Three Stooges.

If all this sounds familiar, think Florida 2000. In that Presidential recount, officials couldn’t decide what counted as a legal vote, and so different counties used different standards. The Florida Supreme Court made things worse by changing the rules after the fact. In Bush v. Gore, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that this violated Constitutional principles of equal protection and due process, which require that every vote be accorded equal weight.

This will be a basis for Mr. Coleman’s appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court. Should that body be reluctant to publicly rebuke their judicial colleagues who sat on the contest panel, Mr. Coleman could also take his appeal to federal court. This could take months.

Another solution is to hold a special Senate election. Minnesota law does not specifically provide for such a runoff. However, the U.S. Constitution’s 17th amendment does provide states with a roadmap for filling “vacancies,” which might be a legal starting point for a do-over. Even before the shifting standards of the contest trial, the St. Paul Pioneer Press looked at the ballot-counting evidence and called for a revote. It could be that this is where the court case is leading in any event.

Easy solution: every legal vote should be counted. Once. And only once.

Lexington And Concord

On this date in 1775, the Revolutionary War began with skirmishes between the Americans and the British at Lexington and Concord.

The British were ordered to destroy the colonists’ stockpile of weapons and munitions, but by turning back the British regulars at Concord, the militia demonstrated its resolve to fight for independence. It also showed the weaknesses of the British, such as outdated combat methods and a general underestimation of the colonial resolve and capabilities.

This battle also spawned the story of the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, made famous in poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. “One if by land, two if by sea.” Revere, fellow patriot William Dawes and others made the ride to warn the militia that the British were indeed coming, although the riders were detained by the British at one point.

At some point in Lexington, as British regulars squared off against colonial militia, someone — no one knows who — fired the Shot Heard ‘Round The World, and the battle was on. Eventually the colonial militia dispersed and the British continued their march toward Concord.

At Concord, the Redcoats met with stiff resistance at the North Bridge. After a fierce gun battle, the British broke ranks and retreated, losing over 30 soldiers killed and wounded.

Here is a picture of the reconstructed North Bridge in Minute Man National Historical Park:

The beginning of the Revolutionary War is celebrated in both Massachusetts and Maine (once part of Massachusetts) as Patriots Day.

Observances and re-enactments of these first battles of the American Revolution occur annually at Lexington Green in Lexington, Massachusetts, (around 6am) and The Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts (around 9am). In the morning, a mounted reenactor with State Police escort retraces Paul Revere‘s ride, calling out warnings the whole way.

Each year’s events features the running of the Boston Marathon and a Boston Red Sox home game at Fenway Park with an 11 a.m. local time start. In 1990, the Milwaukee Brewers spoiled Patriots Day festivities at Fenway Park, collecting 20 hits in registering the largest shutout in franchise history, beating the Red Sox 18-0.

Burger King Commercial

I don’t watch a lot of TV, but in watching Fox’s Game of the Week — a thriller between the Cubs and Cardinals won by Chicago 7-5 in 11 innings on a walk-off HR by Aramis Ramirez — I saw the latest Burger King commercial featuring the knock off of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.” It has aired three more times on different cable networks already tonight.

It has the creepy Burger King guy and a bunch of dancers with square butts as opposed to, well, uh, you know, since the commercial features toys related to the new Spongebob Squarepants movie. In fact, Sir Mix-a-Lot appears in the commercial.

Spongebob Squarepants is a Nickelodeon cartoon aimed at children. Just what were the geniuses at Burger King thinking creating a sexually themed commercial aimed to sell kids meals?

Watch the commercial for yourself:

Quoting from the Wikipedia entry for “Baby Got Back”:

At the time of its original release, the song caused controversy with its outspoken and blatantly sexual lyrics about the female anatomy, and the video was briefly banned by MTV.

And from Sir Mix-a-Lot’s Wikipedia entry:

MTV aired the video for “Baby Got Back” only during evening hours because of its supposed sexual nature.

Supposed? There’s nothing supposed in terms of sexual content in the video or the song.

The tagline of the commercial has Sir Mix-a-Lot saying: “Booty is booty,” a blatant sexual reference.

Again, what were the MENSA rejects in the ad agency hired by Burger King thinking? Using sleazy sexual innuendo to sell kids toys and draw kids into a movie they most likely will go see anyway?

If you don’t support this type of corporate sleaze, contact Burger King’s corporate headquarters at:

Burger King Corporation
5505 Blue Lagoon Drive
Miami, Fla. 33126

They do respond to public pressure. If nothing else, patronize their competitors.