The Tea Party still holds the high ground

JOHN FUND: Three Cups of Tea: The Tea Party still holds the high ground this year for its third national election. “The Tea Party turns five years old this week, and the mainstream media are filled with stories saying it has lost clout and influence. Certainly the unfair assaults on it as racist and extremist have taken a toll, but in terms of where the political landscape is right now, I’d easily take the Tea Party’s tactical position over that of its liberal critics. . . . In politics it helps to be right, and most of the warnings tea-party advocates issued about the Obama administration have been validated by events.”

“Not” new food labels

   “Not” new food labels

At the price of billions of dollars, will the new food label be easier to read and understand? I checked out a comparison photo.  Serving size on the example was the SAME. More realistic it was NOT.  Sugar, fat, vitamins - what consumer will care?  We like what we like to eat and that’s that! Finally, who can read?  

NO POLITICIANS ALLOWED

NO POLITICIANS ALLOWED
WHO REALLY SHOULD BE ON OUR COINS
(Don Boudreaux)

Far too many public memorials and parks glorify politicians (and, I’d add, generals and admirals).  Ditto for (especially U.S.) coins and currency.  I, too, have noticed this sad fact.  I’d rename and rededicate 99 percent of these memorials and parks to historical figures who were generally productive.  Ditto for redoing coins and currency.  Just off of the top of my head – meaning, I reserve the right to change my list in the future – here’s my proposed redoing of U.S. currency and coins; I limit my list here to Americans – a limit that I’m not sure is appropriate:

$1 bill: George Washington.  For all of his flaws, Washington was not as mad for power as is the typical politician.  That character trait was enormously beneficial to the early American republic.

$2 bill: Henry Ford, for being such a pioneering and innovative producer.

$5 bill: John D. Rockefeller, Sr., for being such a pioneering and innovative producer.

$10 bill: Gustavus Swift, for being such a pioneering and innovative producer.

$20 bill: Norman Borlaug, for saving countless millions of people from starvation.

$50 bill: Sam Walton, for being such a pioneering and innovative retailer.

$100 bill: Benjamin Franklin, for his scientific achievements and his bourgeois wisdom.

One-cent coin: Richard Sears, for being such a pioneering and innovative retailer.

Five-cent coin: Steve Jobs, for being such a pioneering and innovative producer.

ten-cent coin: John Bogle, for inventing the indexed mutual fund.

25-cent coin: Milton Friedman, for teaching not only the general public, but fellow economists, economics.

50-cent coin: Gail Borden, for being such a pioneering and innovative producer.

$1 coin: Andrew Mellon, a productive financial genius.

LOOKING AT OUR RULING CLASS:

LOOKING AT OUR RULING CLASS:

    What is more important than the decadence on display is the self-satisfied irony. The elites in Washington and Wall Street seem not to care about their decadence and even take joy in the revealing of their decadence. It is as if a burden has been lifted, that we all in the outside world can now know what they have borne in secret. With the secret out, they can enjoy themselves without guilt.

    This embrace of the revelation of decadence recalls the cultural milieu of Weimar Germany.

From the Hannah Arendt Center.

What dance?

   What dance?

When dealing with terrorists or liberals, we are dancing with the devil.  What dance you ask? What about a jig?  What satisfaction

Right vs. wrong

Right vs. wrong

   Where are the right-thinking, hard-working, honest, common-sense driven Americans that Earl Pitts knows?  Right under our noses. Right?  Where then are those who think wrong?  That 20% who ‘reign’ over us with insane ideas and control-driven agendas? Everywhere power resides.
        

THE ‘ERA OF OBAMA’

 THE ‘ERA OF OBAMA’
TOM BLUMER: Washington’s Pack of Pretenders: Preserving and expanding the government’s (and their) power.

THE HILL: CBO Says Raising Minimum Wage Would Cost 500,000 Jobs.

RULES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Inspector General: 39% of IRS Employee Long-Term Travel May Not Comply With Tax Rules. But given IRS misbehavior, I think Congress should bear down hard on the travel, as it seems very important to the people who run things.

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Chicago Tribune: The IRS targets political speech again: Discouraging debate and curbing information. “The agency does not get, or deserve, the benefit of the doubt in this realm — if only because it got caught targeting certain conservative organizations

HOPEY-CHANGEY: Number of Military Families on Food Stamps Has Nearly Doubled Since Obama Took Office.

Hey, Democrats don’t represent the taxpayers, they represent the tax-consumers, so it’s all fine.

why U.S. presidents emphatically are not worth celebrating.

Gene Healy explains why U.S. presidents emphatically are not worth celebrating.  (Duh!  They’re politicians – members of a profession as worthy of celebration as are, say, house burglars or purveyors of Ponzi schemes.)

Question of the day

Question of the day: Can there be an ugly cat? Not that I’ve noticed. Cat equals innate beauty.  

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.

   “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.  This expresses my idea of democracy.  Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.” What does Abraham Lincoln mean by the ‘extent of the difference’?  Easy.  Every day, in any little way, Obama strips off another layer of our individual freedom.  Closer and closer we move to serfdom under the leader’s commands.  He also grows in power as master over each of our individual fates.
    Lincoln recognized that the role of master over slave, the undesirability and imposition of one’s beliefs and will over another’s actions - ruins our chances for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Unfortunately, we slip and slide downward from a democratic republic every day.

Disemployment effects of Obamacare

Disemployment effects of Obamacare
Charles Krauthammer on the disemployment effects of Obamacare, and on political partisans who lamely try to justify those effects.  A slice:
In the reductio ad absurdum of entitlement liberalism, White House spokesman Jay Carney was similarly enthusiastic about this Obamacare-induced job loss. Why, Obamacare creates the “opportunity” that “allows families in America to make a decision about how they will work, and if they will work.”
If they will work? Pre-Obama, people always had the right to quit work to tend full time to the study of butterflies. It’s a free country. The twist in the new liberal dispensation is that the butterfly guy is to be subsidized by the taxes of people who actually work.
In the traditional opportunity society, government provides the tools — education, training and various incentives — to achieve the dignity of work and its promise of self-improvement and social mobility. In the new opportunity society, you are given the opportunity for idleness while living parasitically off everyone else. Why those everyone elses should remain attheir jobs — hey! I wanna dance, too! — is a puzzle Carney has yet to explain.

Obama's cult of personality has turned US into 'a nation of enablers'

Obama's cult of personality has turned US into 'a nation of enablers'
BY CHARLES HOSKINSON | FEBRUARY 13, 2014 AT 10:03 PM
Law professor Jonathan Turley said he's astonished by how passive Americans especially Democrats have been to President Obama's abuse of executive power, which he said has become so dangerous it's making the U.S. political system unstable.

"I think that we've become a nation of enablers. We are turning a blind eye to a fundamental change in our system. I think many people will come to loathe that they remained silent during this period," Turley, who teaches at George Washington University, told Fox News host Megyn Kelly on Wednesday.

"I'm afraid this is beginning to border on a cult of personality for people on the Left."

This isn't the first time Turley has issued his warning. He told the House Judiciary Committee on Dec. 3 that Obama is "becoming the very danger the Constitution was designed to avoid."

But Turley's a bit late to the party in noticing the Obama cult of personality that has turned the Democratic Party into a bunch of Soviet-style apparatchiks. It's been apparent from the moment Obama claimed what he called a "historic" Democratic nomination victory in a June 3, 2008, speech in St. Paul, Minn., when he said that "this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our Image as the last, best hope on Earth."

The cult of Obama adoration has since become so unbearable the White House press corps

GLUTTON FEST

GLUTTON FEST
HEH: New bill would require WH dinners to follow same as school lunch guidelines.

One Illinois Republican lawmaker has asked the White House and the Obama’s to stop being “hypocrites” and practice what they preach about nutrition.

Tuesday night’s glutton-fest of a White House state dinner for French President François Hollande was the perfect example of why U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis has introduced legislation that would require official White House meals to follow the same USDA mandated guidelines for school lunch and breakfast programs.

Davis’ bill, H.R. 3686, the School Nutrition Fairness Act, is “to make sure this Administration is aware of the real-life impact their regulations are having on kids who are going hungry and our smaller school districts who are struggling to keep up with the increased costs,” he wrote on Facebook Tuesday.

The Washington Times reported that the meal served to guests at Tuesday’s dinner ran an estimated 2,500 calories, “which is almost three times as much as what the first lady and the USDA allow our school kids to eat in the school lunch program,” Davis said. It’s “the height of hypocrisy.”

The dinner’s high-calorie menu shattered the USDA standards of approximately 1,200 total calories per day for students that the first lady touted as part of her anti-obesity campaign.

Not to mention the government mandated, small meal portion size leaving kids hungry, as well as the complaints from students and parents about school lunches that “taste like vomit.”

This is the sort of thing GOP lawmakers should do more of.

OBAMASPEAK: “SMIDGEN” = 100%

OBAMASPEAK: “SMIDGEN” = 100%
Less than two weeks after President Obama insisted that there wasn't even a "smidgen of corruption" involved in the IRS targeting scandal, it appears that the scope of that scandal is widening.
At Washington, DC’s direction, dozens of groups operating as 501(c)(4)s were flagged for IRS surveillance, including monitoring of the groups’ activities, websites and any other publicly available information. Of these groups, 83% were right-leaning. And of the groups the IRS selected for audit, 100% were right-leaning.

That's right -- "somehow," every single 501(c)(4) that the IRS selected to endure the time, expense, distraction and stress of an audit just happened to be conservative.
Carol Platt Liebau | Feb 12, 2014

The Open Society and Its Enemies:

 The Open Society and Its Enemies:
Aestheticism and radicalism must lead us to jettison reason, and to replace it by a desperate hope for political miracles.  This irrational attitude which springs from intoxication with dreams of a beautiful world is what I call Romanticism.  It may seek its heavenly city in the past or in the future; it may preach ‘back to nature’ or ‘forward to a world of love and beauty’; but its appeal is always to our emotions rather than to reason.  Even with the best intentions of making heaven on earth it only succeeds in making it a hell – that hell which man alone prepares for his fellow-men.
Karl Popper’s 1945 study
AND NOW WE HAVE A PRESIDENT WHO OPENLY LIES IN ORDER TO IMPLEMENT THE ERA OF “HOPE AND CHANGE”

injustices of Obama’s power

We need a statesman to correct the injustices of Obama’s power. Without such a leader, America might allow the vision of the Kingdom of Christ to become a luxury of those who can afford to acquiesce in present injustice because they do not suffer from it. And this is just the case with the liberals and Obama’s cronies now in power, who do not suffer from injustice but benefit from it. Doubt me?  Just take a brief listen to Harry Reid or Nancy Pilosi, for example - or any other fellow traveler on the left.  

MICHELLE & BARRACK DID THIS ALL ON WHITE HOUSE ALLOTMENT OF FOOD STAMPS:

MICHELLE & BARRACK DID THIS ALL ON WHITE HOUSE ALLOTMENT OF FOOD STAMPS:

State Dinner Menu Honoring President François Hollande
 
First
American Osetra Caviar
Fingerling Potato Veloute, Quail Eggs, Crisped Chive Potatoes
Second
"The Winter Garden Salad"
Petite Mixed Radish, Baby Carrots, Merlot Lettuce
Red Wine Vinaigrette
Main
Dry-Aged Rib-Eye Beef
Jasper Hill Farm Blue Cheese, Charred Shallots, Oyster
Mushrooms, Braised Chard
Dessert
Hawaiian Chocolate-Malted Ganache
Vanilla Ice Cream and Tangerines
Petits Fours
Cotton Candy dusted with Orange Zest
Lavender Short Bread Cookies
Vermont Maple Fudge
Chocolates

Wines
Morlet “La Proportion Doree” 2011
Napa Valley, California

Chester - Kidder Red Blend 2009
Columbia Valley, Washington

Thibaut-Jannison “Blanc de Chardonnay”
Monticello, Virginia

The Feminist Mystique: It has become simply “I Want!”

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: The Feminist Mystique: It has become simply “I Want!” in the mouths of a minority of women, but the right kind of women.

“Feminism is not an idea or a collection of ideas but a collection of appetites wriggling queasily together like a bag of snakes. Feminism has nothing to do with the proposition that women should be considered whole and complete members of the body politic, though it has enjoyed great success marketing itself that way. . . .

A useful definition is this: “Feminism is the words ‘I Want!’ in the mouths of three or more women, provided they’re the right kind of women.” Feminism must therefore accommodate wildly incompatible propositions — e.g., (1) Women unquestionably belong alongside men in Marine units fighting pitched battles in Tora Bora but (2) really should not be expected to be able to perform three chin-ups. Or: (1) Women at Columbia are empowered by pornography but (2) women at Wellesley are victimized by a statue of a man sleepwalking in his Shenanigans. And then there is Fluke’s Law: (1) Women are responsible moral agents with full sexual and economic autonomy who (2) must be given an allowance, like children, when it comes to contraceptives.”

Have you notice the 2nd basis of feminism?  (1) I want and ((2) whatever I say I want involves a contradiction?

My kingdom for a horse

    My kingdom for a horse
One of the “Arab Horse Maxims” reads: Whoso raiseth and traineth a horse for the Lord, is counted in the number of those who give alms day and night...He will find his reward.  All his sins will be forgiven him; never will any fear come over him and dishonor his heart.”

A bill means spending

            A bill means spending

Just in case you forgot, when you get a bill, you purchased something. No really!  The just-passed farm bill (which cut only 1 billion a year for 10 yrs. from food-stamp funding), will spend $756 billion of the bill’s total $956 billion on nutrition funding.  Good grief!  Some Americans receive money for food (which they should purchase themselves) while other American pay the bill. Who can afford to be indulgent in their tastes?  Those free or those in chains?  

WHY ARE THESE ADMINISTRATORS & TEACHERS ALLOWED IN SCHOOLS?

WHY ARE THESE ADMINISTRATORS & TEACHERS ALLOWED IN SCHOOLS?
EVERY 4TH GRADER HAS MORE SENSE THAN THEM.
IT’S COME TO THIS: School Officials Object To “No Guns” Signs Because They Have A Picture Of A Gun On Them. “Some find the sticker image disturbing.” And yet they probably make fun of the Victorians for sexual prissiness.

ObamaCare Slowing Growth - DUH!

THE HILL: CBO: ObamaCare Slowing Growth, Contributing To Job Losses. “The non-partisan group’s report found that the healthcare law’s negative effects on the economy will be ‘substantially larger’ than what it had previously anticipated. The CBO is now estimating that the law will reduce labor force compensation by 1 percent from 2017 to 2024, twice the reduction it previously had projected.”

regarding ObamaCare we can say to him “you did build that -shame on you”.

Unsilenced Cal
 Obama’s famous line to entrepreneurs was “you didn’t build that”.
But regarding ObamaCare we can say to him “you did build that -shame on you”.
Unsilenced Cal

 Problem with aristocracy      

“Aristocracy was not founded in the natural and respectable distinctions of birth and fortune, but in the most odious of all distinctions, those of religious and political prejudices - distinctions which, more than any other, animate both the insolence of the oppressors, and the hatred and indignation of the oppressed.”  Adam Smith

Unsilenced Cal

   To Obama’s speechwriters

After the occasion of the ‘boring’ State of our Union speech -
“I wish for nothing but to breathe in this our land, in common with my fellow-subjects, the air of liberty.  I have no ambition , unless it be the ambition to break your chain and to contemplate your glory.  I never will be satisfied as long as the meanest cottager in Ireland has a link of the British chain clinging to his rags; he may be naked, but he shall not be in irons.  And I do see the time is at hand, the spirit is gone forth, the declaration is planted; and though great  men should apostatize yet the cause will live; and though the public speaker should die, yet the immortal fire shall outlast the organ which conveyed it; and the breath of liberty, like the word of the holy man, will not die with the prophet, but survive him.”  Grattan to Parliament, 1775 on behalf of Irish independence.  

Double duty for Obama

   Double duty for Obama

First, the ends justify all means, second, distortion of common sense and decency justify government crimes.  Does this remind you of either communism ( under Stalin, for example) or life in America now under Obama?  Aiming for the perfect world, there never will be an ‘I’ in Utopia.

Government Super Bowl score: 66-5

Government Super Bowl score: 66-5

Ohio’s  $66 million Welfare to Work Program has proved to be  “underwhelming.”  Let’s be clear and use the word disaster. A mere 250 candidates were found and 85% got minimum wage but only 5 were employed after 90 days. That score is 66-5.  What a tragic loss of money, a Super Bowl of government waste.  Not a bowl, really, but a barrel of pork, a bin of garbage, a pile of offal, a cup of hemlock  for us taxpayers who must pay for this c... called government assistance.

And now, the Government shall run all of ObamaCare with equal efficiency.

Obama's Weaponization of Government

Obama's Weaponization of Government
By Thomas J. Basile, Contributor
When you analyze the public response to the State of the Union and the latest polling data, it’s clear that the President has lost a tremendous amount of credibility with the American public.  I scarcely think he cares at this point.  A tired, graying Barack Obama stood before Congress this week as a political figure, party leader, and progressive activist to make sure the Members understood one thing – he doesn’t need them.  In fact, he hasn’t needed them in quite some time.  After all, in his mind, it’s his government.  True, the speech wasn’t as “in your face” as conservative pundits predicted. To have done so would have been even less Presidential than we are used to from this White House.

Everyone in the House Chamber knew something that the American people have yet to fully grasp and Republicans have yet to demonstrate an ability to combat – that their government has grown so large, so complex, so involved in virtually every aspect of their lives, that it is now being used as a weapon to by a small segment of the ruling political class.

The weaponization of government is happening and it’s time Americans took notice.  For all the folks – primarily on the left – who screamed and yelled that the Patriot Act was shredding the Constitution, far more intrusive tactics that have nothing to do with the NSA or Homeland Security are being deployed right under our noses during this Administration.  Those tactics reduce every Americans’ personal and economic freedom.

There is a dangerous arrogance of power among the President and senior-level Democrats that should concern every American.

Last week a senior United States Senator gave a speech stating that the IRS should be used to target and punish groups that disagree with the Democratic Party’s political agenda.  Sen. Chuck Schumer stated, “…there are many things that can be done administratively by the IRS and other government agencies — we must redouble those efforts immediately.”  Schumer was also one of a number of Democrat Senators who signed a 2012 letter to the IRS demanding they be more aggressive against conservative organizations.  Sure, it was a story in primarily conservative media for a couple of days but no coordinated action between Republican elected officials and the conservative grassroots against Chuck Schumer is being contemplated. The Senate should be censuring him for suggesting that the IRS be used as a political weapon against conservative organizations.  Americans, however, should be calling for his head