Archive for December 28th, 2009
Is Obama reading "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows"?
We personally don’t believe any President should ever take a vacation. We know 99% of you out there don’t agree, but the job’s too important to be screwing around in Hawaii for two weeks, or even to be screwing around at Camp David. You wanted that desk in the Oval Office, now sit your a** in it and do your g-damn job.
That said, it’s disconcerting to believe the current president, Dr. Utopia, is reading the latest Harry Potter adventure, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”.
J.K. Rowling is a wonderful person. We are delighted for her success, and never missed a single “Harry Potter” midnight release party whenever any of her books debuted. Yes, we dressed up in wizarding costumes, ate chocolate frogs in line, snuck Bertie Botts’ nasty flavor beans into other people’s jars of Jelly Bellys, and devoured every Potter book in less than 24 hours after buying them.
We see people reading these all the time on the trains or buses here in Chicago. It’s definitely nothing to be ashamed of.
But, is that really a Harry Potter book the current president is carrying?
Isn’t there something more important he should be reading — like, for instance, reports on just how dramatically and detrimentally the Healthcare Rationing his Senate is forcing onto Americans will affect this country?
Should the President of the United States REALLY be wandering about carrying children’s books?
The MSM excoriated George W. Bush for reading to actual children on 9/11. As Muslims plot to take more of our airliners out of the sky, the current president is reading children’s books by himself, no children in sight.
Is this unsettling to anyone else?
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NOTE: We just realized this, but if you look at the photo above, you’ll see it’s taken of Dr. Utopia’s “forbidden side”, from the angle the press is prohibited from photographing him. In shots of the back right side of his head, you can clearly see scarring from some sort of massive head injury or operation he had at some point.
The press has never talked about this, and the current president has repeatedly refused to release his medical records (unlike all presidents before him), so no one has any idea what those scars are from. Apparently, massive head injuries and cranial operations were not mentioned in the books William Ayers wrote for him.
It’s a mystery what happened to him.
And very rare to get a good shot of those scars.
Unlike Harry’s lightning bolt, we don’t believe these things make him “The Chosen One”, no matter what Oprah tells you.
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Here’s a better shot of that scar:
What is that from?
Great Merciful Zeus: Tavern on the Green closing for good
We just heard Tavern on the Green is closing for good.
Great Merciful Zeus.
Apparently, it’s not the economy that’s forcing this, but New York City deciding not to renew the lease on the space in Central Park. There has to be a bigger story to that.
Last Christmas, we ate at Tavern for what now looks like the last time, on a morning when we strategized and tried to run into HRH Princess Caroline of Kennedy somewhere in the city to try to get her on film refusing to answer questions as she tried to elbow her way into Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat.
Through the years, we’ve celebrated a few birthdays, holidays, and other random occasions there. We remember it being like eating in the garden department of Home Depot, but not in a bad way. Guess this is why we’re not food writers by trade, but it’s the best way to describe the place: it was cavernous, with lots of plastic sheeting covering various entrances and exits onto the park, with garden furniture under tons of “crystal palace” glass bubbles that were so popular in the Victorian era.
Strangely, there were plans in the late 1800s to turn the White House into something similar, adding “crystal palace” accents to the landmark. It’s a rare occasion when cooler heads prevailed in the capital.
We don’t remember the food at Tavern AT ALL, though. One morning, we had Irish oatmeal with cinnamon there, while someone at our table had eggs Benedict. Both were adequate, but not worth the price we paid. Breakfast at the hot buffet at Whole Foods is much, much better.
We’re sad, though, to see this place close — just as we were sad when the Rainbow Room shut down in the late 90s and was rebirthed as whatever it is now, a party space, or cocktail lounge, or whatever. The Russian Tea Room is gone, too, which is sad. Here in Chicago, Minnie’s restaurant disappeared in 2009, and our beloved Pie Hole Pizza Joint will shutter next May.
It’s all a reminder to continue to support the local businesses you like while you still can, because they can all go under at any time.
Above everything else, our thoughts are with the staff of Tavern. Waitering gigs are pretty hard to get in New York, with all the competition from the actors/models/singers. Just try working in a restaurant or bar in Chicago without looking like you fell out of a catalog — so we imagine how tough things are going to be for the old timers of Tavern.
If anyone out there knows the FULL story on Tavern’s closing, please chime in. As usual, our “journalists” didn’t bother to include that as part of the story linked above. We wonder why New York City didn’t renew the lease on a landmark like this. Tavern was struggling financially for a while, but the article said this was not their decision to close, but the City’s.
We wonder what Bloomberg is up to, and what he wants to put in Tavern’s location instead.
Could the "Underwear Bomb" herald the coming "Diaper Bomb"?
About ten years ago, one of us here wrote a paper in college for a political science class on Terrorism speculating on what Muslim terrorists would do in the future to attack Americans.
We remember the professor writing “Chilling” on it, and adding “I hope to God this never happens” at the end.
We detailed five things we expected Muslims to do to America in the relatively near future, back in 1999, including hijacking airplanes and using them as missiles to crash into buildings. No one here is a psychic or genius. All of this is pretty easy to figure out using common sense. If they already have hijacked jets, why haven’t they taken the next logical step to use those jets as weapons to take down buildings and kill more people? All they would need is pilots well-trained enough to change the plane’s course and destroy a target. Obviously, we didn’t know they would do that to the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 9/11/01 — in our paper, we thought it would be the White House, Congress, or Statue of Liberty.
“The Diaper Bomb” is what scored “Chilling” from the professor, because it’s what we believe Muslims will use in the next few years to take out a large number of planes in mid-air. We’re thankful they haven’t done this yet, but wonder what’s stopping them, as we doubt airport security could stop this.
Muslims sewed explosives into underwear in their attempt to blow up the Delta/Northwest flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas.
What if they used diapers instead — items that are bulky, filled with lining and material, and carried quickly through security with babies?
Would Muslims use infants as living bombs like this, strapping them into diapers packed with explosives, knowing TSA agents would wave mothers with small children through screenings quickly?
Diaper bags themselves have immense opportunity for the smuggling of everything needed to make a bomb in-flight. Isn’t infant formula omitted from the list of restricted liquids that aren’t allowed through screening checkpoints?
There are websites that teach how to turn a plastic coke bottle with liquid inside into a stash can to hide marijuana or money. You can Google those for yourself, but they show you how to split the bottle in two, with an empty section for whatever you want to hide there. Baby bottles could easily be used in a similar way, to hide some other liquid in a chamber within the bottle itself.
So, in this scenario, a baby diapered with explosives could pass through security sucking on a bottle of formula with a hidden chamber in it containing whatever liquid needed to be combined with the explosives to create the bomb.
We hope experts on K-9 training will chime in here, because in our paper we speculated dirty diapers could possibly throw off any bomb-sniffing dogs, too. Wouldn’t a ripe diaper throw off more scent than explosives? Couldn’t a particularly fudged diaper mask whatever Muslims wanted to hide in the diaper?
TSA agents are human. They are often harried, and want to move that line of people through as quickly as possible. An infant screaming its head off would be quite a distraction; we know we’ve tried to concentrate on something with babies screaming and have not been able to. We’ve personally seen women fidgeting with babies, almost dropping them, being waived through security lickety-split, especially by TSA agents who are parents themselves and sympathize with the plight of parents traveling with infants.
It’s surprising to us that Muslims haven’t used all of this to their advantage.
There are, no doubt, thousands of attempted attacks foiled every day around the world that we never hear about.
No matter how angry we all are over 9/11 and the bombings of airlines, we all must remain forever grateful to the eternally vigilant men and women who have preventing catastrophes from happening all around the world. Maybe they are on constant lookout for Diaper Bombs. Maybe Muslims, as hellbent on destroying the West and establishing an Islamic Caliphate to conquer the world as they are, never would stoop to using infants as bombs. They’d also, of course, have to employ female operatives to carry the children onto the planes — as we assume they’d know men traveling alone with children always draw tons of attention (though, that’s because people notice men with children thinking the men are trying to abduct them…it looks out of place, and we’ve found people to at least glance at men with babies when women carrying children would be totally invisible).
The women and children could, actually, be totally in the dark about what’s going on, too. Really, the Diaper Bombs just need to make it through screening — so they could also be smuggled through on the babies, then removed after the checkpoint and placed in a Muslim’s own carryons, with the women and children getting on separate flights to somewhere else. Or, the bombers could just never tell the women that they were going to be blown up in the air: the husbands could just weaponize the diaper bags in flight and never let on what’s happening.
Underwear was always an obvious place to hide explosives, considering how easy it would be to make a fuss about being searched in the genital area, and how reluctant TSA agents would be to “go there” with passengers over and over again all day. It would not be socially acceptable to have dogs sniff everyone’s nether regions like that all day either.
The Diaper Bombs are the other really glaring area of concern as Muslims continue to look for new ways to game the system and murder hundreds of people on airplanes.
We’ve seen clearly what “The Religion of Peace” finds acceptable…and wonder when, not if, they really will start weaponizing diaper bags and Diaper Bombing airplanes.
MUST READ: Regular Americans Turning Away From Democrats
Please read this article by Carol Platt Liebau, “Why Regular Americans Are Turning Away From Democrats”.
It’s another take on what we have been saying to you for the last two years.
It’s what every Democrat we know has been saying: “We are through with the Democrat party as it exists now”.
If you’ve been reading us for any length of time, we’ve been speaking out against the Democrat Party since May 31st, 2008, when the Rules & Bylaws Committee in DC so egregiously shifted rules in favor of Dr. Utopia’s candidacy that any loyalty we had to the Democrat Party was extinguished.
But, you need to understand that prior to 2008, we were the most committed and partisan Democrats any of us knew. We were FERVANT Democrats, dyed in the wool, and sided with Democrat candidates blindly time and time again.
Look where we are today. We want to see every Democrat ejected from Congress. Every last one of them, because these lunatics ram through legislation that will destroy this country without even READING IT.
What we want to note here is this, and it hasn’t been picked up by the political commentators yet: but if people like us, Democrat loyalists, have now completely turned against the party to the point where we no longer selectively pick and choose which Dems to support, but are actually going to vote straight-ticket Republican and will work to defeat Dems we once actually supported in the past, then we wonder what else is happening out there in formerly Democrat households.
“We’re done” is what we’re hearing from all Dems we know. Granted, our friends were never Liberals…we’re moderates and centrists, and so our our friends and family. So, when we speak, we speak from this perspective. When we tell you the Dems we know have had it with this party, we’re talking about these moderates.
We have no idea what’s going on in Leftist loony land, as we don’t associate with that crowd.
Done. Done. Done.
We hear that every day.
We have no idea what’s going to happen in 2010, but don’t see any possibility at all this rift will be healed by the next election.
It is truly unlike anything we have ever seen before.
The Future of America
Here’s an excellent guest post from our friend Eric, bumped up to a post in its own right as it’s too well-presented just to leave as a comment in another thread:
Here’s what I feel is important for the future of America:
1) Congress doesn’t read the bills. John Conyers’ incredible admonishment of those who expected him to read a bill he voted on was a shocker, even to me, and I was already a cynic about Congress.
What to argue for: Every bill must be read into the record prior to voting. Every member of either house of Congress must be present for the entire reading, or they are not allowed to vote. Pipe it into the bathrooms so there are no excuses. The only way to override this requirement is a 2/3 majority, thereby having a provision in case of an emergency.
2) Nobody knows who writes the legislation that gets passed. The gigantic stimulus bill was apparently written in a matter of days… maybe hours. How? Congress had ready-made legislation just sitting around for plugging into various bills, most of it written by the Apollo Alliance. Prior to this, I assume Congressional staff wrote the bills at the direction of the sponsor(s).
How to argue: Why should private, non-governmental groups get to be involved in the creation of legislation, and the American public doesn’t know who was involved or to what level? If ever there should be transparency in Government, this is the place. Why not require that each individual person, along with their private and/or public affiliations, be included as an author on any bill they’re involved with, and that information is fully published along with the bill online?
3) Congress can ram legislation through using stupid procedure rules and vote trading. The Health Care bill is just the latest example. Obama promised 3 full days for the public to review everything online before he signed it, so far it hasn’t appeared.
Solution: Every bill must be posted for a minimum of three business days, plus an additional one full day for every 100 pages beyond 300 BEFORE CONGRESS VOTES FOR FINAL PASSAGE. This will give the public and the media ample time to review the bill before it even goes to the President. This should be law. Congress can bypass it with a 2/3 majority in case of emergency.
4) Congress doesn’t care about Constitutionality of bills. They pass legislation and leave the legality of it up to the Constitutional lawyers later. Most members of Congress view the Constitution as an obstacle that must be overcome, instead of a guiding document.
Solution: An non-authoritative review panel should be set up, just like the CBO, to evaluate the Constitutionality (or lack thereof) of every piece of legislation that goes through Congress. The “Congressional Constitutionality Office” would of course be non-partisan and unofficial, and Congress could pass the bill regardless of the office’s scoring, but the act of evaluation and the opinion would be released publicly and BEFORE the vote, rather than privately and after.
5) Congress exempts itself from most bills. Whether it’s health care reform/public option, right-to-know laws, equal pay laws, insurance control laws, etc… Congress is generally exempted. This may be technically legal, but it’s definitely a huge violation of the public trust and the vision of a true and just nation as set forth by our Founders.
Solution: Congress cannot exempt itself from ANY law. Who can argue this would be a bad thing?
6) States rights are being trampled by the federal government. States no longer have any representation in Congress and, therefore, no power to protect their own rights or limit the growth of the Federal government.
Solution: Repeal/replace the 17th Amendment, which turned Senate elections into popular elections instead of State legislative elections. We need to develop a more states-rights-centric approach to electing Senators, but also need to prevent the possibility of deadlock, so some thought and care would have to be given to the process. Alternately, a State legislature could, by majority vote or maybe 3/5 vote, start a recall effort which would then go to the ballot, thereby making accountability to the State a factor in Senatorial conduct.
Question of the Day: What will be the driving national narrative in 2010?
One of the biggest questions we have currently is if Sarah Palin will rise to the challenge in 2010 and become the voice of the people that’s needed right now, the person who will clearly articulate a driving national narrative that will sweep liberals from power in November’s elections.
We believe Palin is on a collision course with destiny. The stars are aligning, with Fate conspiring to set the stage for a loud, pro-American, patriotic voice to become a larger-than-life, history making figure in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt. Dr. Utopia’s effeminate, prostrated, prolonged global apology tour and the reckless, irresponsible, unconstitutional behavior of Democrats in Washington demand a realignment of American politics as we know it: with the country waking up to the realization that most Democrats, after all, really do hate this country and want to see it destroyed.
The 60 Democrats in the Senate deserve to be removed from that body in handcuffs, for voting on legislation they have not fully read or bothered to comprehend, which usurps the Constitution and requires Americans to purchase products against their will. It’s sickening they rammed this through the Senate in the dead of night, with as much secrecy as possible, knowing full well if they operated transparently the people would revolt and march on Washington to stop what they are doing.
We are ashamed of how the Democrats have abused their power and violated the public trust.
We will be voting straight-ticket Republican in 2010, to teach the DNC a lesson we hope it never forgets.
But, obviously, we are more involved in all of this emotionally than the average person. We wonder what you are hearing from your less politically-minded friends and neighbors. How upset are they at this point?
What do you think the narrative needs to be next year to guarantee Democrats are driven from office?
Do you think it’s possible for Democrats to lose “safe” seats like those in New York, Illinois, California, and other Democrat strongholds?
If the Contract with America engineered by Newt Gingrich was so effective in 1994, what do you think needs to be put into public discourse to create a tidal wave against Democrats even greater than THAT?
As lifelong Democrats, this is the first time in our lives where we honestly want every Democrat in elected office to be fired. Every last one of them. Even people we genuinely love. The fact they refused to stop the madness of the Healthcare Rationing Bill is proof positive they are all unfit for office.
Once we came to this conclusion, it became obvious we need to do something to guarantee the largest losses any party has ever suffered in an election year. This must be a tsunami against Democrats of epic proportions.
For that to happen, the Republicans need a good message, and a solid national narrative that convinces voters to get off their lazy butts and drive the liberals from Congress like snakes from Ireland.
Once in a generation, a hero rises when her people need her most. We believe Sarah Palin could be that hero if she decides to be…and we believe all she needs now is a sword and shield of sufficient emotional heft to rally Americans to her cause. Those armaments are something like the Contract with America, but this time delivered by someone more persuasive and talented than Gingrich. Someone like Palin who not only could rev people up on policy points, but who could summon the emotional tide needed to turn states red coast to coast, even in allegedly permanently blue domains.
What points should be included in that anti-Liberal narrative?
What will most effective in convincing people America really is at stake, and they must all do their duty to defeat the Liberals once and for all in 2010?
What think you?
One of the hardest things we've ever had to write: Martha Coakley should NOT be the next Senator from Massachusetts
This is, truly, the most difficult essay we’ve ever had to write, but after an agonizing internal debate, we need to ask everyone who reads this to support Republican Scott Brown for US Senate in Massachusetts.
In any other year, in any other election, we’d work our hearts out for Martha Coakley. We like Martha Coakley. We’d love to see her be a United States Senator. But, this Massachusetts special election to fill the seat of deceased murderer and disgraced drunk Ted Kennedy is a chance to knock the Democrats down to 59 seats in the Senate, meaning the unconstitutional train wreck they’ve put this country on with Healthcare Rationing will come to a screaching halt the moment Scott Brown is elected.
Years ago, we had a choice like this to make that literally made us sick to our stomach with conflicting interests. A good friend of ours asked us to be a reference when she tried for a job with the CIA. Though she had been a friend of ours for many years, and though we would have done just about anything for her, we knew she used drugs like ecstasy and cocaine through the 90s, she dated married men and ruined a few marriages, she routinely went crazy over minor problems and threw things, deliberately broke everything expensive of her boyfriends’ when mad at them, and went out of her way to get people she didn’t like fired from their jobs over things she perceived as wronging her. In short, this person was not of the moral quality the CIA claims it’s seeking. We did not believe she was up to the job, based on her peformance at every job she’s ever had. So, we were faced with a horrible decision: either tell this friend we could not recommend her, and would have to tell the truth about her past if asked, or lie to the CIA by omission and not say a bad word about this person. We could have dodged any questions about her past that necessitated negative responses by saying, “Oh, it’s been so long. We weren’t really around for that, maybe you should ask her about that” and things of that nature. We would have NEVER directly lied and said we didn’t know about any of those things, but we could have been cagey. That was the end of that particular friendship because we told the person we couldn’t recommend her, so she stopped talking to us.
But, the thought of this person becoming part of the CIA, when she would have been terrible in the job, and would have posed a security risk in our opinion (since, we truly believe, she would have abused her access to sensitive materials to get back at exes), was enough for us to take the stand we did.
Our decision to support Scott Brown has nothing to do with Martha Coakley.
We would not support any Democrat running for that Senate seat, because for the sake of the country we believe Democrats should lose the 60-vote edge they currently are abusing.
Every Democrat blindly voting for the Healthcare Rationing bill is doing a great disservice to this nation. They have not read this bill. They do not know what’s in it. They are not executing their sworn duties as representatives of the people to work in their best interests. This is a pork-laden bill filled with hundreds of millions in bribes. It is a bill that will, for the first time in history, usurp the Constitution to force Americans to purchase products against their will. It is a bill that dictates how Americans can spend their own money. It is a bill that will eliminate the Flex Spending Accounts so many families we know of depend on to make ends meet in their household budgets.
It is a tragedy of legislation, rushed through Congress for no valid reason. Instead of behaving in a considered and responsible way, Democrats are ramming this junk through the Senate at full speed while they have those 60 votes. They know that, without that 60-vote edge, they would never be able to wreck the havoc they intend for this country.
So, it is thus with a very heavy heart that we say, clearly, that Martha Coakley must be defeated — this time — in her bid for the Senate.
Coakley has said she will vote the party line on the Healthcare Rationing Bill. That’s enough for us to say she should not be installed in the Senate next month.
Democrats should not have more than 59 votes, so that bills this massive and economy-changing cannot be shoved through in secret in the dead of night.
Support Scott Brown, and stop liberal tyranny from destroying this nation, while we still have a chance to do some damage control.
