Archive for July, 2011
Sunday Open Thread: July 17th, 2011
Did you watch the Diane Sawyer interview with Jaycee Dugard last night?
What an amazingly brave person.
How does someone emerge so mature and compassionate after such an ordeal?
God bless Jaycee Dugard.
So….what’s on your minds this Sunday?
What are people talking about in your part of the world?
Eric Holder Frog March Watch: Operation Castaway
H/T SadHillNews.com
First there was Operation Gunrunner, the genius Federal government program whereby a law enforcement agency illegally allowed the illegal purchase and transfer of firearms from legitimate gun dealers to criminals and terrorists in Mexico.
But wait, there’s more!
Turns out that flooding Mexican drug gangs with taxpayer-purchased illegal guns wasn’t enough. “Operation Castaway,” headquartered in Tampa, Florida, funneled dirty guns to criminal gangs in Honduras.
This program drew the attention of Florida Rep. Gus Bilirakis, who generated one of several stinging letters to Holder from Congress:
“In recent days, it has come to light that the ATF and [Department of Justice] have participated in the act of ‘gun walking’ beyond the acts conducted within the scope of ‘Operation Fast and Furious,’” Rep. Gus Bilirakis, R-Fla., wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder and ATF head Ken Melson.
Bilirakis lambasted the idea that the government would “willfully allow weapons to be acquired by dangerous criminal and drug trafficking organizations in direct contravention to our strategic and national interests.”
Attorney General Eric Holder, who like most Obama administration officials is an utterly corrupt fox running a Federal henhouse (see tax cheat Tim Geitner, appointed to oversee the IRS), has been caught lying about the BATF’s Operation Gunrunner and Fast and Furious.
The top law enforcement officer in the United States of America has lied to Congress. He has committed perjury. He has refused to enforce laws that the Obama Regime finds inconvenient, and refused to prosecute some alleged criminals because Holder is apparently biased against white people.
The following editorial in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review is a good first step…of course Holder should be fired. Of course.
Add lying to Congress about his Justice Department’s “Operation Fast and Furious” scandal to the reasons why Eric Holder must be fired as U.S. attorney general.
The idiocy of Fast and Furious — an attempt by Justice’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to link illegally sold guns with Mexican drug cartels — became gravely clear when two such rifles were found at the scene of a Border Patrol agent’s December murder.
Mr. Holder mentioned Fast and Furious essentials at an anti-arms-smuggling symposium in Mexico in April 2009. Last September, a Justice document referenced such efforts — which received a quarter of the Obama stimulus package’s special law-enforcement appropriations, followed by even more funding from the administration.
Yet Holder testified on May 3 before the House Judiciary Committee that he’d “probably” learned of Fast and Furious in “the last few weeks” — a dishonest reply to questioning by U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif. The congressman has been doggedly pursuing Fast and Furious truth through the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which he chairs.
An attorney general who perjures himself before Congress has no business being America’s chief law enforcement officer.
But unlike the Black Panthers who attempted to intimidate voters at a polling place on Election Day 2008, Eric Holder should be frog-marched and prosecuted. Eric Holder should spend the rest of the Obama Regime (and all 8 years of the Palin/Cain administration) in prison.
Saturday Open Thread: July 16th, 2011
(h/t iMaksim)
So….what’s on your minds this Saturday?
What are your weekend plans?
What are people talking about in your part of the world?
Friday Open Thread: July 15th, 2011
So…what’s on your minds this Friday?
What are people talking about in your part of the world?
(ps….I’m on vacation until next Thursday so I’m limited to posting Open Threads only…for now. I have very limited internet access)
Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL): What Courage Sounds Like
Tea Party freshman Joe Walsh from Illinois is one of my new favorite people. In this brief, three-minute monologue he reveals more spine than all the rest of the GOP “leadership” put together.
In three short years, you’ve bankrupted this country and destroyed job creation. You’re either in over your head, you don’t understand what makes this country great, or you’re hell-bent on turning us into some European big-government wasteland. You’ve spent money like a drunken sailor for three years, and NOW you tell US it’s time to get serious about spending?
No matter your motivation, the American people have woken up and they’re better and smarter than you think they are. They sent people like me to Congress in January to stop what you’re doing. …
You want to be useful and lead for a change? Go find 50 Democrats in the House and 15 in the Senate to support the balanced budget amendment.
Boorah! While we’re cloning Marco Rubio in the Senate, we need to make about 50 copies of Joe Walsh for the House.
Thursday Open Thread: July 14th, 2011
The Obama's reading "My First Cavity Search" to a young audience
(h/t Moonbattery)
So….what’s on your minds this Thursday?
What are people talking about in your part of the world?
Sen. Mitch McConnell (Wuss-KY) Punts on Debt Ceiling
The Mitch McConnell robot, remote-controlled from the basement of the West Wing
It was revealed Tuesday that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been kidnapped and replaced with an animatronic figure remote-controlled by the Obama Regime.
Kidding!
Or maybe not…
According to the Huffington Post, Mitch McConnell (R-KY), is standing up for balanced budgets, small government and the Tea Party movement by refusing to raise the debt ceiling and insisting that all Federal government programs and agencies that are in violation of the 10th Amendment be immediately defunded. McConnell also insisted that Congress stop borrowing 43 cents of every dollar spent by the Federal government.
HAHAHAHAHA…KIDDING again! (Had you there for a second, didn’t I?)
Actually, McConnell wants to stand up for for balanced budgets, small government and the Tea Party movement by…transferring Congressional authority to raise the debt ceiling to Teh Won and his corrupt cronies in the White House.
Huh?
WTF?
Yes, you read that right. McConnell’s genius plan, which he called his “last-choice option,” consists of rolling over. Punting, Giving up. Surrendering.
Here’s how it would work. “The White House would request an increase in the debt ceiling and Congress could only block that request with a veto-proof super majority,” according to HuffPo. However, “A super majority would likely be difficult to amass, especially when neither party’s leadership genuinely wants the nation to default.”
So, in other words, McConnell’s plan consists of running away.
Read the series of updates at the Huffington Post, and you’ll get a sense of the frustration that non-cucumber-and-mayo Republicans are feeling with GOP “leaders” like McConnell.
UPDATE: 4:15 p.m.: A Senate GOP aide weighed in on McConnell’s proposal Tuesday afternoon.
“This proposal is not only likely unconstitutional, its the worst possible political strategy for Republicans who promised to fight the debt to now instead give the President unilateral power to borrow to his heart’s content,” the aide told The Huffington Post. “The McConnell plan is a full surrender, white flag approach.”
“Republicans should be fighting for a balanced budget, not running away from the battle to avert bankruptcy,” the aide added.
Well, at least there’s someone in the GOP who still has a brain in his (or her) head. Perhaps we can get this person to run against McConnell in the 2014 GOP primary in Kentucky (assuming we’re still having elections after 2012.)
Now is an excellent time for you to call the Senate switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and share your opinion with your alleged representative.
While we’re all understandably focused on the GOP presidential nomination process, we can’t lose sight of the fact that a GOP-controlled House and Senate can stop Teh Won in his tracks (should the GOP nominate another easily-beatable faux conservative like Mittens Romney, for example.) We need to fill the Senate with Marco Rubio clones.
Wednesday Open Thread: July 13th, 2011
(h/t iMaksim)
So…what’s on your minds this Wednesday?
What are people talking about in your part of the world?
Leftists, Litmus Tests, and Disqualifying Conservative Candidates
Liberals imply that a candidate for office cannot stop from inflicting their personal beliefs on others. That may be true of them, but it is not necessarily true of conservatives.
In the HB post Media Manipulation (And Eeyore Breeding) Alert: Herman Cain on Homosexuality , “greg2213″ commented: “Some people are concerned about Ms. Palin due to her religious beliefs (creationism, etc.) . . . Personally, I don’t care if she believes in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but just like Cain’s remarks can be used by some as a club against him, some will make remarks against Palin like: ‘She believes the world was created 6,000 years ago, so she’s a nutcase…’”
The basic strategy used by the left is to create a series of litmus tests for conservative candidates…litmus tests that only Leftists can pass. Leftists use science and pseudo-science to bash conservatives, evolution, climate change, et cetera. They dumb-down debates to true/false terms, but only the liberal side is pronounced “rational.”
This is a fallacy, a false choice. Many devout Christians, Catholics, Deists, Atheists, scientists and non-scientists have served well in public office.
The real question is whether a person’s beliefs are rational, and how thoroughly they wish to inflict them on others. Many 1960 voters worried that JFK, the nation’s first Catholic President, would take orders from The Pope. They now worry about Christians and Evangelicals. Those who have such worries assume a person is strictly accountable for the entire doctrine of their faith and that doctrine will dictate their conduct in office.
(The only exception is the most bizarre: Leftists live in fear of Evangelicals, but not Muslims—who really are sworn enemies of secularism, freedom of speech, freedom of association, womens’ rights, gay rights, and human rights in general, and whose stated intent really is to destroy democratically elected representative governments around the world and replace them with an authoritarian theocratic Caliphate.)
It is necessary to examine how rational each candidate is in their approach to the topic and the opinions of those who disagree with their own opinion on the topic. The Scientific Method led the world out of the Dark Ages into the Modern Realm of Reason. Superstition (witch trials) gave way to pragmatism.
Sadly, the modern era, with all of its modern inventions, has done little to change human nature. The grass moved; was it a lion, or just the wind? We carry the DNA of our ancestors who ran from everything scary, and lived to breed.
Human nature is still superstitious at its most basic level. Despite our modernism, we–especially liberals–remain prone to emotionally-based beliefs not anchored in scientific principles. One glaring example: among the scientific community, we debate all sorts of topics, but only evolution inspires heated debate. Only evolution is defended or attacked with religious zeal. That is because topics like String Theory and Quantum Mechanics do not touch on theology and morality. Evolution does. If evolution is true, then there is no God, and religion can’t dictate (im)morality. If evolution is false, then God exists, and there may be moral consequences for my actions.
The Scientific Method has become the “Holy Water” blessing to the liberal / “progressive” led group-think of modern society, only “Science” has been greatly misused, co-opted, especially by the alarmists in the “climate change” debate. (Read http://wattsupwiththat.com/ and http://www.climatedepot.com/ to get the scientific skeptic’s side, which the LSM tries to supress.)
Real scientists disagree all the time. The basic Aristotelian principle is Thesis, Anti-Thesis, Synthesis. We have a theory that is pretty good at explaining observed reality, but it is not perfect. Eventually, somebody proposes a new theory. Debate ensues, new experiments are run, and if the new theory is better, we discard the old, and embrace the new. This was the case with physics. Isaac Newton’s Laws were pretty good, but not perfect. Albert Einstein proposed Relativity. Debate ensued. Eventually, it was shown that if gravity–a variable in Relativity–were fixed at a constant of 1, Einstein’s system of physics collapsed (the math is left to the student) to be Newton’s Laws of Physics. Thesis, Anti-Thesis, and Synthesis. Still, Einstein’s physics are an incomplete explanation for the universe. So we have the hunt for the Grand-Unified Field Theory, String Theory, et cetera.
Given that there are scientists on both sides of the evolution debate–not that the LSM will admit–how can we fault Sarah Palin or any other candidate for having an opinion?
It boils down to this: Does the candidate approach the question with an open mind, or have they decided before observing the data, what the answer is? Are they open to new input, or are they dogmatic in their beliefs? Are they open to the possibility that they may be wrong, or do they believe they are infallible?
I believe that the criteria for determining whether someone who holds an opinion on one of the litmus list should be disqualified from holding office is whether their position is rational or simply superstitious. We need rational people to be in positions of public trust. We must not be ruled by the whims of superstition.
So, the question should not be “Does the candidate hold the Politically Correct opinion,” but instead “Can the candidate give a rational explanation for how they arrived at their belief?” And furthermore, “Would this candidate use the police power of the Government to inflict their personal belief system on me, my family, and the economy? Will the candidate use his or her personal beliefs to guide their private behavior, or to set coercive public policy?
America is The Melting Pot, of peoples and beliefs. Science is a melting pot, too.
American culture is based on “live and let live,” where we have Freedom of Religion (or no religion). We must also reject any push to achieve orthodoxy in scientific opinions. Science advances as we disagree with each other and strive for a new synthesis. So too, we should embrace the diversity of opinions of science that occur within our politicians.
The most important point is not what they candidate believes, but whether they are going to inflict their will and opinions of others. (Cap and Trade, anyone?) So, make up your own mind on whether you can support a candidate, but don’t let their personal opinions on science dissuade you, unless of course, the candidate’s explanation reveals that they are deranged and not capable of rational thought.
Tuesday Open Thread: July 12th, 2011
Well…what’s going to happen this week with Fast and Furious?
There’s never a dull moment with those clowns in the White House.
I’ve been neglecting the GOP campaign trail and I’m sorry about that.
What’s on your minds this Tuesday?
What are people talking about in your part of the world?
