Thanks much, everybody. See y'all in a bit.

I have some things to take care of. I'm not shutting down, but I'm taking a hiatus.* Hope to get back here soon. Meanwhile...

 

And always...

 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

*I try to avoid personal stuff here, so I'll mention this once, and then we will not speak of it again.

*steps up to the podium* Hi, my name is Anne, and I have bubbly kidneys. Okay, technically, they're cysts, but on the films they look like bubbles. Big bubbles, little bubbles, clear bubbles, dark bubbles. I think Polybubbly Kidney Disease sounds much better than Polycystic Kidney Disease, but I was not consulted. (I admit it doesn't have much gravitas. Still.)

Either way, this dastardly disease has cut a wide swath of  destruction through my family. The men seem to get the worst cases of it--they have problems younger and worse than the women--but in addition to my two older brothers, I also have a sister who's had a transplant. I've known for years I have it, but my denial has stood firm all this time. If I don't acknowledge it, it will not exist.

Luckily for me, my doctors have no such attitude and have regularly tested me for kidney function. It's time for me to step aboard the APKD carousel of medical merriment. My filtration rate (how well the kidneys filter impurities from the blood) has now dropped low enough that action is warranted. Renal ultrasound is scheduled for Monday, but I'm pretty sure I already know what they'll find. Bubbles, and lots of them.

If a transplant is even in my future, it's most likely still a long way off. It's probably just as well, because among other things, all the healthy siblings have already donated kidneys, and I can't afford the black market prices. Of course, there's always the "steal a kidney from a drugged tourist in a Vegas hotel room" option....

Once I'm on an even keel, I hope to get back to vilifying Obama and the liberals on a daily basis. Thank you so much for hanging out here. I hope when I come back, you'll come back. :)

A little perspective on Rubio's sip of water

American Thinker
Thomas Lifson

You want a cringe-inducing gaffe involving a sip? How about this incident of Obama's, now consigned to the memory hole?

In their haste to denigrate Senator Marco Rubio over his sip of water during the State of the Union response, progressive media figures are descending to an adolescent level, in a faux scandal being referred to aa "Watergate," with a large dollop of irony. Meanwhile, nobody seems to remember a truly cringe-inducing gaffe by our commander in chief involving a sip.

The contrast in treatment of Democrat and Republican figures could not be greater.

War on Everything but Islamic Terror

Sultan Knish
Daniel Greenfield

Over a decade after thousands of New Yorkers were murdered by Muslim terrorists, the city's mayor is declaring victory in the War on Salt. Next up he plans to wage a spring offensive on Styrofoam cups. After that, who knows?

We live in surreal times. In the Middle Ages, cats and rats were put on trial. In this modern age, we began by waging wars on poverty and drugs, both of which we lost, and have now retreated to fighting wars on food ingredients, the bags we carry them in and the containers out of which we eat and drink them.

There's no telling what surreal enemy our wise and brilliant leaders will declare war on next. Shoes? Pepper? Umbrellas? Mathematics? The color blue?

There's just no way to know anymore.

The United States has lost the War in Afghanistan, a minor matter that no news outlet can find the time to report on because they're too busy covering a breaking story about a Republican Senator taking a sip of a water. Maybe a War on Water can be next. Was there a Styrofoam cup involved? It's time for one of those hard-hitting investigations that reminds us what a tragedy it will be when the last newspaper is strangled with the entrails of the last news network and the media's commitment to serious journalism is finally replaced by pictures of cats, wardrobe malfunctions and mutual accusations of racism. (And we won't even notice when it finally happens.)

But who can find the time to fight a war against Islamic terrorists, when there are more pressing wars to be fought? Like a war on being fat.

Michelle Obama declared that obesity was a national security threat. And the Pentagon, which now exists only to ratify the latest leftist social experiment from the White House, whether it's Green Energy, Gay Marriage or bombing the fattest state in the country (Michigan), issued a report agreeing that snack foods posed the greatest threat to the military since Global Warming and the lack of Tranny toilets on submarines.

The military has been unable to identify the Fort Hood Massacre as a terrorist attack and fires any instructor who talks about Islam as anything other than a wonderful Religion of Peace practiced by our closest allies in Saudi Arabia and on board a plane headed for the Pentagon, but the political generals are always ready, willing and able to jump on any truly serious national security threat. If only Iran began developing the world's biggest chocolate bar, then the bombing raids would begin as soon as the chocolate enrichment process reached the caramel-nougat line.

Faced with a seemingly unwinnable conflict against the Soviet Union, American leaders began to retreat into smaller social wars that were actually far more unwinnable. Those wars have also gone the way of the dodo. The War on Poverty is one with the ages and the War on Drugs is usually only mentioned in a pejorative context.

But the same government that couldn't get a small percentage of the population to stop doing cocaine and heroin imagines that it will somehow be able to compel 11-year-old boys to stop eating candy and drawing guns. A heroin addict is nothing compared to a normal growing boy seeking a sweet sugar rush before playing a game of cops and robbers. The authorities would have better luck getting Obama's campaign staff to Say No to Drugs.

The government that couldn't stop drug use or defeat Islamic terrorism has set its sights on something easier. Taking candy from a baby.

During his State of the Union Address, in between promising to create hubs full of 3D printers and drag every three-year-old to a preschool so he can get a head start on being indoctrinated in important knowledge skills, like recycling and understanding white privilege, Zero Hussein announced that the mission in Afghanistan had been completed because Al Qaeda was defeated. Then he explained that while the war was over, American soldiers would have to go on staying in Afghanistan to continue fighting the already defeated Al Qaeda in a war that was no longer a war, but an extended vacation with shooting.

Since Al Qaeda did not have a significant presence in Afghanistan at any time during his maladministration, defeating it was fairly easy, and true to form it only cost thousands of lives. But somehow it still isn't defeated. Still if fighting things that don't exist gets applause, put your hands together for the War on Global Warming, which has recently been scaled down to Climate Change, which means that any time the weather changes, it's probably due to people using the wrong kinds of light bulbs, driving the wrong kinds of cars and not paying enough attention to Al Gore's latest plan to fill up the pockets of his cheap oversized suit and those of his Wall Street buddies who care almost as much about the environment as they do about feminism, racism and wiping out entire economies.

The War on Terror may have been a tough nut to crack, but let's focus on the War on Thermometers.

More.

White Liberals Tell Black Lies About Civil Rights

 

The Patriot Post
Ann Coulter

Liberals ignored my book Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama throughout the fall. Now that I'm safely home from my book tour, they feel free to jabber on about their make-believe history of the civil rights movement with abandon.

In the hackiest of all hacky articles, Sam Tanenhaus, the man responsible for ruining The New York Times Book Review, has written a cover story in The New Republic, titled: "Original Sin: Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people."

MSNBC has been howling this cliche for a decade -- or, as MSNBC's Chris Matthews said of Tanenhaus' article, "a bold headline"!

Being interviewed by a giddy Matthews -- who has no black friends, employees or neighbors -- Tanenhaus announced the startling fact that once, long ago, some Republicans supported civil rights!

"In the 1950s, as I say in the piece you read, Republicans looked pretty good on civil rights under Eisenhower. We had the Brown decision, the Central High in Little Rock, where he did the tough thing and sent the troops in, and we had the first modern civil rights act."

It wasn't a "tough" decision for Eisenhower to send troops to Little Rock in 1957.

In the presidential campaign the year before, the Republican platform had expressly endorsed the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The Democratic platform did not.

To the contrary, that year, 99 members of Congress signed the "Southern Manifesto" denouncing the court's ruling in Brown. Two were Republicans. Ninety-seven were Democrats.

As president, Eisenhower pushed through the 1957 Civil Rights Act and the 1960 Civil Rights Act. He established the Civil Rights Commission. It was Eisenhower, not Truman, who fully desegregated the military.

Meanwhile, the Brown decision was being openly defied by the Democratic governor of Arkansas (and Bill Clinton pal), Orval Faubus, who refused to admit black students to Little Rock Central High School.

Liberals act as if Eisenhower's sending federal troops to Little Rock was like Nixon going to China. No, it was like Nixon going to California.

Only someone who knows no history could proclaim, as Tanenhaus did, that the 1957 act "wasn't great, it wasn't what LBJ gave us, but it was something."

If Eisenhower's 1957 civil rights bill was weak, it was because of one man: Lyndon B. Johnson. As Robert Caro explains in his book, "Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson," it was LBJ who stripped the bill of its enforcement provisions. Even after that, the bill was still opposed by 18 senators -- all of them Democrats.

To the easily astounded Chris Matthews, Tanenhaus breathlessly remarked, "Not one Republican voted against that bill!" -- as if the 1957 Civil Right Act was a Democratic idea and they were delighted to get any Republican support at all.

Imagine a modern German historian saying: "Remember -- it wasn't just Germans who opposed the Holocaust. The English and Americans did too!" Such a historian would be beaten bloody, quite rightly so.

The 1957 bill was sent to Congress by Eisenhower, passed with the intervention of Vice President Richard Nixon, and opposed exclusively by Democrats. Not "Southern Democrats," not "conservative Democrats," but Democrats, such as Wayne Morse of Oregon, Warren Magnuson of Washington, James Murray of Montana, Mike Mansfield of Montana and Joseph O'Mahoney of Wyoming.

With absolutely no evidence (because there is none), Tanenhaus then asserted that Republicans decided "they were not going to be pro-civil rights. ... They were going to side with the Southern oppressors." Cretin Matthews seconded this gibberish by saying Nixon was "playing the Southern Strategy electorally with Strom Thurmond and those boys."

Who exactly does Matthews imagine he means by "Strom Thurmond and those boys"? Every single segregationist in the Senate was a Democrat. Only one of them ever became a Republican: Strom Thurmond.

The rest remained not only Democrats, but quite liberal Democrats. These included such liberal luminaries as Harry Byrd, Robert Byrd, Allen Ellender, Albert Gore Sr., J. William Fulbright, Walter F. George, Russell Long and Richard Russell.

Fulbright was Bill Clinton's mentor. Gore was "Al Jazeera" Gore's father. Sam Ervin headed Nixon's impeachment committee. The segregationists who were in the Senate in the '50s were rabid Joe McCarthy opponents. In the '60s, they opposed the Vietnam War and supported LBJ's Great Society programs. In the '90s, they got 100 percent ratings from NARAL Pro-Choice America.

These "Southern oppressors" were liberal Democrats when they were racists and remained liberal Democrats after they finally stopped being racists (in public). If Republicans had a racist "Southern strategy," it didn't work on the racists.

Nor did Nixon -- or Reagan -- ever win over segregationist voters. Republicans only began sweeping the South after the segregationists died.

More.

The Peculiar American Left

American Thinker

As an immigrant to the United States, and thus a sideline spectator of the panorama that is American society, as well as someone who has spent most of his adult life in the field of international finance dealing with a myriad of countries and nationalities, I have been fascinated by the characteristics of the American left as compared to their counterparts in the rest of the world.  While on the surface there may appear to be similarities, at least on a so-called philosophical basis, there are, however, virtually none when it comes to the motivation and personality quirks of the American left.

In 1904 Scottish playwright J.M. Barrie introduced to the world a play entitled: "Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't  Grow Up".   Similar to the central character in that stage production the American left is primarily made up of those who will not grow up.  However, unlike the central character in the play, far too many on the left are self-centered, willfully ignorant and lazy.

Winston Churchill touched on this subject matter when he said: "If you are not a socialist at 20, you have no heart.  And if you are not a capitalist at 40, you have no brains."   Fortunately, he did not live to see the vast bulk of the so-called progressives, of any age, in America of 2013, who are still in their adolescence.

Among the traits expected of those in their adolescent years is the conviction that they are always right and the rest of the world is wrong -- that they are, in fact, much smarter than those silly and inane adults around them.  However, being part of the in-crowd is really, really important thus they must look for guidance to the cool guys to establish what they are supposed to believe in.  And, as in the fairy tales relayed to them while in childhood, there will always be some monolithic entity that will be there to rescue them and insure joy and happiness.  Therein are the basic personality parameters of the entity known as the modern American left.

Membership in the American left is, thus, easily attained.  All one needs to do is believe and accept the following:   

• a) Those at the top of the pyramid, the self-anointed leaders of the left, claim to always be the smartest and most sophisticated people in any room. Therefore to envision oneself as part of this circle all one has to do is to robotically espouse leftist ideology without having the foggiest idea of what it means or its ultimate outcome. 

• b) All the really cool people are on the left since they believe there are no moral absolutes and one can party on having a supposed endless good time. The modern American left is the current in-crowd corralling those mesmerized with celebrity and too lazy to be aware of the world around them. 

• c) Government, that great and infallible monolith behind the green curtain, can solve all of mankind's problems. Its primary function is to make certain the people are taken care of and assured of equal outcomes--as long as it is dominated by the leaders of the left--who are equally infallible. Barack Obama's self-proclaimed role as the "messiah" fits in nicely with this tenet. 

• d) Those on the right are mean and determined to take away not only the good times but make certain government -- see (c) above -- will not take care of everyone and too many true-believers may actually have to find meaningful work. 

• e) It is mandatory, when confronted with an alternative point of view, to throw a tantrum, as one used to do on a school playground, and call conservatives (i.e. adults) any conceivable name or accuse them of anything since the left's cause is just and those on the right are Neanderthals who could never be correct about anything. Actually the country would be far better off if conservatives were made to walk the plank on Captain Hook's pirate ship.

• f) Guilt is the ultimate weapon. (Remember it worked with one's parents) There is always something in the United States to be guilty about and that guilt requires restitution or public humiliation. Besides, just as there is a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, there is a bottomless pit of wealth in America, but only the government--see (c) above-- can distribute this never ending bounty. 

None of these character traits are dominant among the left in the many countries of Europe or elsewhere who have socialist leaning governments or citizenry.  Dependence on government is a common trait but the spoiled child approach to ideology and the opposition is not.  It appears to be the sole preserve of the American left.

More.

Savage Foreign Policy Change: Obama Lifts Ban on Child Soldiers

 

Atlas Shrugs

Here's a couple of Obama changes going unchallenged by the enemedia. I wonder if Obama considers a child who is forced to strap a bomb on a "child soldier." Hitlerian.

Obama Waives Bush Law Banning Child Soldiers | Obama

On October 3, 2008, President George W. Bush signed into law “Child Soldiers Prevention Act of 2008,” a law that made it a federal crime to recruit or use soldiers under the age of 15. The law also gave the United States authority to “prosecute, deport or deny entry to individuals who have knowingly recruited children as soldiers.”

The bipartisan law, which was passed unanimously by both houses of Congress, drew the applause of several international human rights organizations:

“The US is saying to the world that using child soldiers is a serious crime and that it will take action,” said Jo Becker, children’s rights advocate for Human Rights Watch. “Military commanders who use children can no longer come to the United States without the risk of ending up in jail.”

Over the weekend, while most Americans were too busy spending time with their children and keeping up with the latest sporting events to worry about executive orders, President Obama removed the teeth from this law; effectively making it void in the nations most guilty.  The result - thousands of children throughout the Middle East and Africa may be drafted into foreign militaries, with the full blessings of the United States.

Obama Waives Child Soldier Ban in Yemen and Congo ABC News 

Tens of millions of dollars of U.S. military financing will continue to flow to Yemen and three other countries that recruit and use child soldiers, despite a 2008 U.S. law designed to restrict U.S. taxpayer funding of foreign militaries that enlist children to fight in war. The White House issued a memorandum Tuesday evening to allow military funding to Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Chad, three of the six countries on the State Department's list of foreign governments that...Full Story

 

Washinton Examiner: DALLAS, October 3, 2012 – “When a little boy is kidnapped, turned into a child soldier, forced to kill or be killed — that’s slavery. It is barbaric, and it is evil, and it has no place in a civilized world. Now, as a nation, we’ve long rejected such cruelty.”

President Obama uttered these stirring words at the annual Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York last week. He was making reference to the appalling practice of recruiting young children to serve in armed combat, a practice that has long been prevalent in various African and Middle Eastern countries. From the infamous Joseph Kony of the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army to the Libyan youths recruited by both sides in the recent rebellion in Libya, to middle-school aged boys conscripted into the Free Syrian Army, the plight of child soldiers has gained widespread attention over the past few years, with humanitarian organizations working hard to keep the issue in the public eye.

More.

Taking Terrorism and the Arab Spring Seriously

 

The Foundry

In his State of the Union address, President Obama showed a stunning lack of reality on terrorism and the Arab Spring. The President’s statement saluting “the courage and sacrifice of those who serve in dangerous places at great personal risk” unfortunately rings hollow when one considers the Administration’s treatment of the Benghazi terrorist attack. While the Administration has insisted that al-Qaeda is losing steam, the terrorist network and its affiliates are growing in places like Libya and Mali.

Perspective is badly needed. Two years after Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire on the streets of his hometown in Tunisia, the political makeup of North Africa and the Middle East are unrecognizable. The fight against injustice has morphed into a scramble for power. The fight for democracy has deteriorated back to the status quo. And Islamist militants have exploited the gaping power vacuum. Looking at the countries affected by the Arab Spring, a pattern of instability remains.

Tunisia

Following the ouster of the Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali regime, Tunisia experienced an easier government transition than others. With a secular tradition, well-educated population, and sizeable middle class, Tunisia was better equipped to overcome the challenge. Yet, the election of the Islamist Al-Nahda party, previously banned under Ben Ali, exceeded expectations in the legislative elections—a harbinger of what was to come in Egypt and Libya.
The future of Tunisia’s stability is questionable. Last week, protestors took to the streets following the assassination of the opposition figure, Chokri Belaid. Many in Tunisia are dissatisfied with the Islamist-led government and demand that the Tunisian people are better represented.

Egypt

Since Egypt’s dictator Hosni Mubarak was toppled, the Egyptian people have lacked a stable government. The Muslim Brotherhood, banned under Mubarak, took advantage of its broad support and was the clear winner in the country’s first democratic elections. Yet Egypt’s new president, Mohammed Morsi, is little more than an autocrat under a different guise. In November, he granted himself sweeping powers over the judiciary and other branches of government and the Egyptian security forces—who once cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood—are now its enforcers. Additionally, Morsi has set a troubling new foreign policy agenda. His government has distanced itself from Washington while cozying up to China and Hamas (a U.S.-designated terrorist organization), improving relations with Iran, and violating its peace treaty with Israel.

Libya

Since the fall of Muammar Qadhafi in September 2011, Libya’s transitional government has been unable to implement rule of law throughout much of the country. The September 11, 2012, terrorist attack on the U.S. special mission in Benghazi, which killed four Americans including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, was a direct result of the country’s rampant instability. While the Libyan government moved quickly to denounce the attack and has offered its cooperation in finding the terrorists, little has been achieved in bringing the perpetrators to justice.

The instability in North Africa has also trickled to the Sahel and indirectly affected Mali specifically. Last Spring, Islamist militants occupied the northern part of the country, prompting French military intervention last month. Militant violence has also spilled over into Algeria where a terrorist attack, spearheaded by a former leader of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), killed three Americans.

Syria

After a two-year civil war, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad has yet to cave.

More.

Valentines Obama is Sending Out

Happy Valentine's Day!

Mary Jane Anklestraps at iOTW

The Looking Spoon

Liberals