SONG OF THE SOUTH

Kurt Schlicter has something to say about the government shutdown. I think what he wrote just about covers the facts.

To the extent that a shut-down hurts some of the government’s few useful employees, like the members of our military, I eagerly look forward to Chuck n’ Nancy and the other circus freaks who make up the Democrat Capitol Crew explaining to the American people why they chose to make our men and women in uniform suffer so the Democrats can import some new ballot stuffers. “Support the troops unless we need to screw them over so we can ship in foreigners to vote for future Maryland Senator Chelsea Manning” seems like a flawed message, which is why I heartily encourage the Dems to try it out.

We all saw the elaborate kabuki theater of the last shut-down, where Obama’s minions took a break from using our intelligence services to spy on Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit’s political enemies and made sure that the shut-down effects were as public and inconvenient as possible. The Democrat media soiled itself with delight as it covered sad schoolkids forbidden to gaze upon the Washington Monument because the GOP hates children, the Washington Monument, and gazing.

This may prove to be more of a test than people realize because previous government shutdowns have mostly been a contest in the Senate to reach the necessary 60 votes to send a bill to the President for signature. This President may be looking a little further downstream than most of his predecessors who were just plain terrified of a government shutdown (most of them were politicians and deeply worried that the American public might discover just how little they actually needed the government). All the theater now is about getting the 60 votes and few are talking about whether or not President Trump will sign a bill that flies in the face of his base.

President Trump is not a politician and he can look a little further downstream and see that just letting another 700,000 democrats stay here necessarily means, based on current law, that they can drag in 30,000,000 more people like them and let's not forget what kind of people we're talking about. We're talking about the kind of people that voted Hugo Chavez and Maduro into power and undertook the destruction of Venezuela because they thought price controls set by the government would keep prices down and looting the stores was justified if they were hungry. They're the same kind that love rent control and moan and cry about the lack of affordable housing.

I think there might be just one or two men left in Congress that have even a shred of sense when it comes to the future and long term consequences of constantly caving in to the sort of people that think Stalin was a statesman and Chavez and Castro were popular leaders who made good things happen to their countries and constituents. One of them just got back to work after being blind-sided by a democratic thug a couple of months ago while moving his grass.

The one surprise tonight as I watched the government shut down was the total absence of the human stain known as McCain.

The blog title comes from a movie I saw as a boy in Fort Riley. It had the wonderful tale of Br'er Rabbit and what the Senate did tonight looks a lot like the situation Br'er Rabbit found himself in when he appeared terrified of being thrown into the briar patch. As I see it, the democrats just tossed Br'er Trump into the briar patch.

LOATHSOME AND STUPID AND LED BY THE NOSERING

As we watch the democrats fray democracy we are amused by them voting between a fascist criminal elite whossname and an out and out communist. So anyway, we thought this picture was revealing.

Sieg Heil

What does it say about an American that they would choose one over the other?

I WONDER IF THE IRANIANS STAMPED THEIR PASSPORTS

I see from the Daily Mail that Senator McCain is not happy at getting blown off by the Navy and is reacting as is his wont. I don't expect anything will come of it since the Navy will simply refuse to furnish the sailors even if they are subpoenaed to testify, as is their wont. Still, it would be nice to know how exactly two fully armed Navy patrol boats crewed by Riverine sailors managed to gaff off all the navigation information that showed them to be near Iranian territorial seas.

There were at least two, and more likely four, global positioning systems on those two boats. Two military GPS units because the boats constitute a weapon system and need to have MILSPEC GPS and two regular commercial systems because the boats are almost certainly fitted with a Blue Force Tracker that makes use of the friendlier and easier to work with commercial GPS units. And besides, all that navigation equipment they so busily ignored while attending to their grooming really only works with input from commercial spec GPS units that are built to be integrated into the Navigation Plot and the Radar Plot and right there in front of the coxswain and the boat commanders.

A bunch of left handed rubber swabhandles having a bite in Farsi

I get a kick out of the sailor eating with his left hand. Surely he had long enough in-country to know that arabs and their friends the Persians eat only with the right hands because they consider the left hand, 'unclean.' I don't know if he's ignorant or making a point. It is a special point with me that not one of the Riverine sailors could muster up a uniform to surrender in. I wonder if they even had full uniforms onboard anywhere. In my times over there it was unlikely that the Special Boat guys working with us had real uniforms onboard, but they, like us, were permitted to dress pirate while on task in the Gulf. It's not like we were going to surrender to anybody.

COMRADE BERNIE BEATS OFF CRAZY OLD COMMUNIST WOMAN

The two old communists swapped lies tonight.

The cut and thrust of the democratic party debate. Hillary scores another senseless victory over Bernie

A SLASHING APOLOGY THAT BURNS, IT BURNS...

That smug, heartless, b#stard Cruz apologizes for New York values comment. From the heart.

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio have all demanded an apology and I am happy to apologize. I apologize to the millions of New Yorkers who have been let down by liberal politicians in that state. 

I apologize to the hard working men and women of the state of  New York who’ve been denied jobs because Gov. Cuomo won’t allow fracking. I apologize to all the pro-life and pro-marriage and pro-Second Amendment New Yorkers who were told by Gov. Cuomo that they have no place in New York because that’s not who New Yorkers are. I apologize to all of the small businesses who’ve been driven out of New York City by crushing taxes and regulations. 

I apologize to all of the African-American children who Mayor de Blasio tried to throw out of their charter schools instead of providing a lifeline to the American dream. And I apologize to all the cops and the firefighters and 9/11 heroes who had no choice but to stand and turn their backs on Mayor de Blasio because Mayor de Blasio over and over again stands with the looters and criminals rather than the brave men and women of blue.

I'm not sure I want a leader who gives in to sullen liberal demands...

THE FIGHT FOR LIBERTY GOES ON

In a totally expected showdown Sunday night, Senator Paul stood firm and by his own unique action saw to it that some of the more egregious provisions of the vile Patriot Act were sunsetted and left to rot in the field of domestic surveillance and unchecked tyranny.

The White House backs the House bill. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said in a statement: "The Senate took an important - if late - step forward tonight. We call on the Senate to ensure this irresponsible lapse in authorities is as short-lived as possible. On a matter as critical as our national security, individual senators must put aside their partisan motivations and act swiftly." 

But the Senate adjourned without final action on the bill after Paul asserted his prerogative under Senate rules to delay a final vote for a couple of days. And a couple of hours later, the midnight deadline came and went. 

"This is what we fought the revolution over, are we going to so blithely give up our freedom? ... I'm not going to take it anymore," Paul declared on the Senate floor hours earlier, as supporters wearing red "Stand With Rand" T-shirts packed the spectator gallery.

Don't we not get a kick out of this White House spokesman declaring that this was an irresponsible lapse of authorities even as it kicks to death the Constitution's separation of powers and continues to rule by Executive Decree and dream up and enforce regulations of Executive Branch agencies which then have the force of law even though Congress has passed no such laws? Where is the White House on the critical national security implications of a wide open border which millions of undocumented people/terrorists cross every year? When will the Executive Branch and the President enforce the laws of the land? You know, in the name of national security.

I like Mr. Paul. I wish we had a Senate full of members like him and fewer like John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama and almost all the rest.

SPECULATE THIS

Sometimes it is fun to fly over the divide and look at it from 90,000 feet. Here is an article on point.

Even as they vow to fight Republicans at every turn on issues that fundamentally divide liberals and conservatives, left-leaning Democrats insist that they will not do so seeking retaliation against a Republican minority that stymied their economic, environmental and social priorities for so long with filibusters and delay. Those days, they insist, are gone — leaving liberals to somehow find a balance between fighting for their convictions and not drawing the same charges of obstruction that have dominated Democratic messaging for years.

“The best news about a Republican majority in the Senate is that the Republican minority is now gone,” Whitehouse said. “They were just a god-awful minority.”

Conveniently overlooked of course is that Senator Reid NUKED the rules that gave the minority any standing in our democracy and used it to ram through legislation that he could not get even with a loathsome filibuster proof majority.

Sadly, it makes one wonder if we should arm our reps to Congress with swords. I can see it now.

IT WASN'T A TRAINING FILM

I have to admit that when I read this headline this morning I thought it was going to be about Kerry. 

 I instantly thought of Dr. Strangelove where he explains how Doomsday Machines work.

Nobody did it better than Peter Sellers.

SECOND TO NONE

President Obama, second to none. From American Digest.

First President to apply for college aid as a foreign student, then deny he was a foreigner.

First President to have a social security number from a state he has never lived in.

First President to preside over a cut to the credit-rating of the United States.

First President to violate the War Powers Act.

First President to be held in contempt of court for illegally obstructing oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

First President to defy a Federal Judge’s court order to cease implementing the Health Care Reform Law.

First President to require all Americans to purchase a product from a third party.

First President to spend a trillion dollars on ‘shovel-ready’ jobs when there was no such thing as ‘shovel-ready’ jobs.

First President to abrogate bankruptcy law to turn over control of companies to his union supporters.

First President to by-pass Congress and implement the Dream Act through executive fiat.

First President to order a secret amnesty program that stopped the deportation of illegal immigrants across the US, including former convicts.

First President to demand a company hand over $20 billion to one of his political appointees.

First President to terminate America’s ability to put a man in space.

First President to have a law signed by an auto-pen without being present.

First President to arbitrarily declare an existing law unconstitutional and refuse to enforce it.

First President to threaten insurance companies if they publicly spoke out on the reasons for their rate increases.

First President to tell a major manufacturing company in which state they are allowed to locate a factory.

First President to file lawsuits against the states he swore an oath to protect (AZ, WI, OH, IN).

First President to withdraw an existing coal permit that had been properly issued years ago.

First President to fire an inspector general of AmeriCorps for catching one of his friends in a corruption case.

First President to appoint 45 czars to replace elected officials in his office.

First President to golf 73 separate times in his first two and a half years in office, 90 to date.

First President to hide his medical, educational and travel records.

First President to win a Nobel Peace Prize one month into his first term.

First President to go on multiple global ‘apology tours’.

First President to go on 17 lavish vacations, including date nights and Wednesday evening White House parties for his friends; paid for by us.

First President to have 22 personal servants (taxpayer funded) for his wife.

First President to keep a dog trainer on retainer for $102,000 a year at taxpayer expense.

It's going to be very hard for us to find another man like this to put in the White House. Populist presidents don't just grow on trees. We'll basically have to look under every rock in the world to find another man as honest, ethical and transparent as the current ruler. Fortunately for us, Hillary has a record every bit as distinguished as Obama's. One that we can all be proud of and unlike Obama, her spouse is adored by billions.

IMPERIAL SENATOR-AT-LARGE

It is almost impossible to find something impossible to believe about an American politician these days. That said, I do like this campaign blit for His Imperial Senatorship Pat Roberts. I'm sure he'll win re-election but how is he representing the voters of Kansas by living in Virginia?

Overland Park – Pat Roberts has been wildly unsuccessful trying to explain away his lack of residency in Kansas.  After several attempted explanations, it’s time for Pat Roberts to come clean and acknowledge the simple truth.

Truth is, Pat Roberts is a permanent resident of Alexandria, Virginia, and he has been for some time.  Pat Roberts lives in his home in Virginia, he has his mail delivered to his home in Virginia, and he even registers his vehicle, and vanity license plate in his home state of Virginia.

In 2008 Pat Roberts filed for the ballot using the address of his rental property in Dodge City that was occupied by someone else, and he had his absentee ballot mailed to his home in Virginia.  He must have known this didn’t satisfy the Article 1, Section 3 requirement in the Constitution that requires a Senator to be an inhabitant of the state they represent, because the day before Milton Wolf announced a primary challenge last October, Pat Roberts was signing up to rent a room from donors, and changing his voter registration address.

 The Senate was in recess for 214 days last year, and Senator Roberts refuses to tell Kansans how many of those days he spent in Kansas.  After having 6 employees research his schedule, he decided not to release their findings, most likely because the results were damning.

 Senator Roberts’ distance from Kansas has been shown the most in his votes.  Roberts has cast 11 votes to raise the debt ceiling, he voted for Barack Obama’s $600 billion tax hike, and he cast two crucial votes to confirm Kathleen Sebelius to run ObamaCare.  These votes are not consistent with Kansas values, they are consistent with the big-government career politicians that live and work with Pat Roberts in Washington DC.

 Renting a "room" in Kansas. You would think a man who has spent 47 years laboring selflessly for his Kansas constituents as a mere public servant could, after all this time, afford an apartment. I just checked the ads in Junction City and he could get a nice place for under $750.

In addition to his Imperial Senatorship, His Gravitas is also a Prince-Cardinal of the NSA.

A SAKI FUELED DRIVE-BY ON CONGRESS

This short piece by the Federalist is interesting but it doesn't go far enough.  It explains the slightly tortured way the President got an open limit on the deficit ceiling from his friends in the Republican Party.

I think for the president to ask for a clean debt ceiling when we have a debt this size of our economy is irresponsible.” What McConnell should have added then is: but there’s nothing we can do about it right now. We have to work on winning more seats, and then we can stop this endless cycle of irresponsible spending.

If you always cave in to the so-called moderates, it looks like you never do anything except compromise your standards for nothing in return. It's always easier to be a little evil but that isn't the goal now, is it? When you repeatedly slither to the far left in search of 'moderate' support from the likes of Arlen Specter, what use are you to the people who thought they elected the opposition? Remember, Specter was a Democrat from 1951 to 1965, then a Republican from 1965 until 2009, when he switched back to the Democratic Party after a quick bit of betrayal and backstabbery.

Specter conspired with Harry Reid to be the 60th vote in the Senate to pass Obamacare. This was one of the "moderate voices" republicans are ordered to pay attention to lest they abandon the party in the name of principle.

This was not a nameless beach that anybody was going to die on. This was a simple matter of urging your party to vote for its principles and the republican leaderships couldn't even risk that. It may sound like I am advocating another government shutdown but that is not the case. I'm simply pointing out that enough of the men and women elected to the Senate as republicans can always be counted on to vote democrat and spend more money than the nation has. Let them vote their principles in an open unforced vote so the people can clearly see what they elected to represent them in Congress.

Cruz wants people to see that it is not enough to vote Republican since all kinds of low-lifes revel shamefully in that guise. You can see the kind of faith and trust the people have in their government and how it is reciprocated by the government when you look at arms and ammunition sales in this country.

When the revolution comes, it's going to be a bloodbath.

Writing this brought back old memories of reading Saki when I was young. There was just a 2 hour interlude while I reread some of my favorites such as The Storyteller. Here is a smidgeon of what Christopher Hitchens wrote about H H Munro in 2008.

Saki surprised all his elite admirers. His reasons for insisting on signing up for the trenches, when he was easily old enough to evade that fate, were almost comically reactionary. Enraged by the antimilitarist left that thought socialism preferable to world war, he argued in effect that even world war was preferable to socialism.

I don't suppose he would have been amused to see entire ways of life swept away by the World War and the ultimate triumph of socialism in the West. One can read many of the stories of H H Munro here.

TIME TO SHOOT THE WOUNDED

Alas, it is all over but the last little bit. From the Wall Street Journal comes news that we have been expecting for quite some little time.

She's a juggernaut

It says she is going to heal the gaping wounds of the Democratic Party but if she plans on using Obamacare she should honestly think about homeopathy and other more traditional methods. I thought all democrats believe in exactly the same thing. It's part of the blood oath and what's the point of human sacrifice to false Gods if you don't all agree that it's the right thing to do?

Too bad Joe. You coulda been a contender.

STUPID AND PREDICTABLE

I listened to NPR today and read the news and it looks like the media is once again in full cover and deception mode for the administration and allowing the President and all of his non-media spokesmen to lie their heads off about Healthcare.gov and how all the problems are fixed and its all better now and everything is good to go. They're lying.

It's amazing to me how they rely so deeply on the ignorant voters who pull the lever for stupidity every single time. The vile and odious thing is how the media is slavishly lapping it up and passing it along to the stupid when anybody with 2 brain cells can see what is going to happen next month. Millions of people lost their insurance because Obamacare made their insurance policies unlawful. The policies were canceled effective 31 December in accordance with the Democratic Party's Law.

In January, the people with no insurance who enrolled on Healthcare.gov for replacement insurance are going to find that the "backend" of the program never worked and that they DON'T have any insurance after all. The code failed to communicate the policies to the insurers. The government and media aren't just lying about how 4 diplomats were murdered in Libya in the dark. They're lying about millions and millions of people losing health insurance. As it becomes clear that the people who enrolled at the government's web site don't actually have policies it will come out.

I know why Obama is doing it. He's going to blame the insurance companies. I'm sure he's already got the speech written where he condemns the evil bastards for letting Americans twist in the wind without insurance because they are greedy.

STUCK ON STUPID

It says a great deal about the qualifications of a man and his staff who can think of nothing better to do then to try to restart the peace talks between palestinians and civilized people in the Middle East.

We seriously don't have anything else to do? We have to get stuck into this pointless charade? Why?

It goes on for pages and pages and seems to distract any attention from the real news about the Middle East.

It's not like I want the idiots in charge of US foreign policy to do anything else, since what they do best, wreaks havoc on everybody else but couldn't they come up with something a little less stupidly pointless and futile? Couldn't we have new Strategic Arms Limitations Talks with Cuba? Why don't we claim these new volcanic islands forming off the coast of Pakistan and then use them for drone bases as sovereign US Territory?

Photograph from Gwadar Government/AP

The effect would be the same and nobody would seriously believe we were doing it anyway.

THE NEWS WAS INTERRUPTED TONIGHT

I got this pop up ad tonight when I was reading the Union Tribune. I wonder how McCain feels about this.

I updated it.

UPDATE: 
The Park Rangers have closed a State Highway that winds through the park and issued citations to dozens of people for recreating in the park. The morons.

NEGOTIATING WITH THE SENATE

First. Get their attention.