The Nobel Prize Committee is having very public, very angry second thoughts about giving The Lightworker a Nobel Peace Prize to kick off six years of expanded warfare.

Skal Norge.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In the olden days, honest Democrats praised expertise:

Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz) wrote this about “Terrorism” by Benjamin Netanyahu, released in 1986:

“Few are as well equipped to bring us this message as Netanyahu. He currently serves as Israel’s permanent representative to the United Nations. Netanyahu not only distinguished himself as a commander in many operations for his country’s military but served for several years as the executive director of the Jonathan In stitute, a Jerusalem research foundation on terrorism. He has been touched in the most personal way by modern terrorism. His brother, Lt. Jonathan Netanyahu, died leading the historic Entebbe rescue mission and is the namesake of the institute.”

President Obama says Netanyahu lacks credibility because he’s been wrong about Iran before, predicting bad things that haven’t happened yet. Meanwhile, the UN says it can’t finish its inspection because Iran is still lying about its nuclear program

.

Joe Doakes

Just has everything Obama says has a shelf date, so this everything in the Democrat past.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Who’s better qualified to talk to Congress about the risks of terrorism posed by a nuclear-armed Iran?

• Books written by Benjamin Netanyahu.
• Books written by Barack Obama.

Joe Doakes

Or to put it another way:

Either way…
.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Obama Administration wants to ban popular rifle ammunition on the grounds it could be used in handguns.

We saw this under Clinton, too, with the “cop killer” bullet craze and fear of Thompson Center pistols. Then, as now, it was all cover for a ban they wanted all along.

I saw this ammo at Cabellas a while back and thought “I should stock up, for when case they ban it.” But of course, I didn’t own a .223 so I didn’t buy any. Crap, another million dollar investment opportunity, wasted.

Joe Doakes

On the other hand, if you are, or know, a lawyer, litigating the inevitable test cases will no doubt put some peoples kids through Ivy League schools…

The liberal noise machine that largely spent eight years calling George W. Bush “Bushitler” is worked up into a lather because a St. Paul Pioneer press reporter referred to the practice of constantly taking “selfies”(using a snap of Sselfieaddict Pres. Obama as his example) as making one look like a “assclown.”

Sports reporter Kevin Cusick, who wrote the blurb, later walked it back, apologizing for the use of the term, and changing it to “self absorbed celebrity.

He was right both times. I’m not fond of the term “assclown” – or its dumber cousin, “asshat”, both of which sprang out of a trend in the early days of blogging to jam terms together more or less at random to try to insult people. There are many more artful terms that can and should be used.

But while the occasional selfie is a harmless indulgence, Cusick was right the first time; the President is starting to act a little bit like Miley Cyrus.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

it appears true heroism in the Obama era consists not of bravely facing the enemy in combat, but in kowtowing to the party line.

joe doakes

If Obama could run for a third term, we’d see the IRS running the militiary.

Back during the 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain was right about one thing, anyway; despite all of governments foul-ups the fundamentals of the American economy are basically strong.

We have ideas, and entrepreneurial energy, I don’t labor force that (2008 and 2012 elections not withstanding) we’re pretty smart and capable, and one of the worlds larger, wealthier consumer markets. Those, among other things, give the American economy’s a degree of resilience that is going to be hard to extinguish, even after 14 years of flagrant overspending and six years of crypto-socialism.

That’s the economy. Not the governments massive piling up of debt. That’s a whole ‘nother thing.

Why does it matter? Because the fact that the American private market is bigger, stronger, and smarter than its government – for now – may be the only thing that saved it from complete collapse six years ago.

It’s both utterly true, and a fart joke.

What could go wrong?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Obama isn’t Un-American, he’s Post-American.

Before the Constitution, people living here were subject to the whims of the British Crown.

While we’re living here, we’re supposed to be citizens of a democratic republic; but that’s too confining for a person who has the vision and power to stop the seas from rising and start the Earth healing.

We’re headed into a Post-American era, where national geographical boundaries will no longer matter. Anybody who wants to move here should be able to, and should be able to work here, too. And President Obama’s new pick for Attorney General agrees it’s totally legal and constitutional legal and Constitutional for the President to up and decide that, on his own. Worse, she won’t rule out the possibility that President Obama’s actions give illegal aliens greater rights to jobs than American citizens, like Veterans’ Preference points, only for soldiers in the other side’s army.

I wouldn’t mind so much except I keep wondering what else will change in a Post-American era. Will life here become like Europe after the Fall of Rome? That might not be as much fun as some people seem to think.

Joe Doakes

“Progressive” have seen themselves as “post American” for a long time; it was one of the key factors of the 2004 election. It didn’t work for John Kerry; I think people basically ignored it with Barack Obama.

In the State of the Union, President Obama poo-poohed the jobs that would be created by the Keystone XL pipeline as “temporary construction jobs”.

Yet six years ago, his “economic recovery plan” relied on “shovel ready” “infrastructure” jobs that were also “temporary construction jobs” (except for the “permanent government management” jobs, which would go as patronage to members of the political class, natch).

And at the speech, the President asked “Why not have thirty times as many…” of what?  Temporary construction jobs working on “infrastructure” (along with thousands more patronage gigs administering the mess).

…our semi-retired President is going to propose paying for “free” communithy college for everyone…

…by taxing peoples’ savings to put their own kids through college?

Two points, here.

Face Value:  If we take the  President at his (ostensible) word, that means the nation’s community college system will inherit the worst of both worlds; the government control that’s made the public school system such a sclerotic disaster, and the financial firehose that’s led to the “higher education bubble”.  And let’s not even concern ourselves just now with the deepening ideological conformity that this would impose on the higher ed system?

What could possibly go wrong?

Shelf Life:  But fear not.  As with everything else in Obama’s presidency, it’s not about educating young people.  It’s about trying to demigogue the education issue, to give the Democrat Party a chanting point in the next election.   Republicans who vote against taxing people who saved for education to benefit those who didn’t is an ideal demogogueing point.

And that’s really all there is to Obama’s “free community college” proposal.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Why wasn’t President Obama in the photo of world leaders at the massive Paris march protesting the Charlie Hebdo killings?

Maybe he was at the REAL march and missed the fake photo staged at a completely different place?

No, he wasn’t, but I can’t blame him. I wouldn’t have blown off a golf game to fly over for a lame photo op, either.

It’s all Potemkin Villages with these people, nothing is ever what it seems.

Joe Doakes

Potemkin it’s not just a battleship anymore.

Barack Obama is highly unpopular in the military.

And yet many of his policies are going over just fine among the troops:

The long-term effects of Obama’s social policies on the military remain unknown. But one thing is clear: He is a deeper unpopular commander in chief among the troops.

According to a Military Times survey of almost 2,300 active-duty service members, Obama’s popularity — never high to begin with — has crumbled, falling from 35 percent in 2009 to just 15 percent this year, while his disapproval ratings have increased to 55 percent from 40 percent over that time.

And before someone chimes in “it’s just anti-gay bigotry in the military, angry over the lifting of the sanction against gay troops”…:

A Military Times poll in 2009 found 35 percent of troops felt that gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve in uniform. Five years later, that figure has jumped to 60 percent.

Similarly, open opposition to homosexuality in the military has collapsed. In 2009, 49 percent of troops felt gays, lesbians and bisexuals should not be allowed to serve. In 2014, such disapproval fell to just 19 percent. 

Or against women in combat?

From 2011 to 2014, the percentage of survey respondents who felt that all jobs in combat arms units should be opened to women remained unchanged at 24 percent.

But the percentage of troops who felt some combat-arms jobs should be opened up to women — while allowing the military to continue to place some jobs off-limits — increased from 34 percent to 41 percent, while the percentage of respondents who felt the military should not change its policies excluding women from combat arms units fell from 43 percent in 2011 to 28 percent in 2014.

I’m going to suggest that while his policies may not be unpopular among the military, the fact that he’s a terrible leader is.

…when Barack Obama was going to “restore respect for this nation” abroad?

Either does he.    The US was absent, in body and spirit, from a rally that even had Mahmoud Abbas and Benyamin Netanyahu walking together.

He really, really is a terrible president.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

If you still needed proof that Establishment Republicans were just as committed to status quo as Democrats, this would be the clincher.

Joe has a point – although I’m going to wait to see how the GOP conference votes on actual policy issues, rather than internal niggling.

If they screw the pooch on Keystone XL, IRS hearings, defunding Obamacare and the like, wake me up.

Young people are more miserable than ever under Obama, according to the “Young America Foundation” misery index:

Youth unemployment in 2014 was 18.1 percent (18.1 on YMI), with almost six million young people between the ages of 16 and 24 not in school or work. Many young people are simply giving up on finding employment.

Student loan debt for 2014 rings in at a record-breaking $30,000 (30.0 on YMI). Student debt has risen at an average of six percent per year since 2008, and today, 70% of college seniors graduate with student loan debt. In addition, the job market still hasn’t recovered, leaving many recent graduates with little or no income to pay back their loans.

National debt per capita for 2014 is the highest it’s ever been at $58,437 (58.4 on YMI). Young people will be stuck paying for government debt they had no part in creating, and they’ll have to do it with less discretionary income than ever before because of record-high levels of student loan debt.

Add it all up, and the YMI comes out to an astonishing 106.5 up from 98.6 in 2013.

I think the index needs to weight unemployment higher – it’s a much greater contributor to personal misery than the national debt, which is pretty abstract to most people (so far).

But it remains a fact that the kids that voted for Obama have got to be regretting the choice, someday soon here…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails to urge us to “pretend”:

Pretend for a minute that President Obama doesn’t believe the United States ought to be a superpower, that it ought to be equal with other nations (not a big stretch – that belief motivated the Atom Spies to give nuclear secrets to the Russians and no doubt is shared by billions of people worldwide, today). How would he go about bringing America down to second or even third-world levels following the model of, say, Argentina?

• Alienate traditional allies. Check.
• Weaken military power, numbers and morale. Check.
• Nationalize major industry. Check.
• Weaken domestic energy independence, increase foreign dependence. Check.
• Widen wealth gap. Check.
• Reduce earners, increase idlers. Check.
• Use government employees to intimidate political opponents. Check.
• Crush middle class with regulations and taxes. In progress.
• Debase the currency by printing money. In progress.
• Debase the citizenry by flinging open borders. In progress.

So what’s next on the agenda? What will it take to bring the USA down to the economic, military, social and political level of, say, Spain?

Joe Doakes

About the only thing he hasn’t done is enlist Visigoths and Vandals into the military as auxiliaries.

In 1981, Ronald Reagan had to deal with a fairly sharp, intense recession, with some fairly intense “negative growth”:

1981 Q04: -4.5895

1982 Q01: -6.5220

1982 Q02: 2.1923

1982 Q03: -1.4300

For those of you who weren’t around back then?  It was a nasty little downturn, especially coming on the heels of the sluggish, stagflation-addled seventies.

1982 Q04:  0.3890

1983 Q01:  5.3465

1983 Q02:  9.4443

1983 Q03:  8.0625

1983 Q04:  8.5095

1984 Q01:  8.1868

1984 Q02:  7.2118

Long before he started stretching the Constitution out of shape, Obama broke one other, less formal rule – really more of a truism:  as a very broad rule, sharp recessions, left on their own, tend to have sharp recoveries.  Reagan’s recession was a sharp, intense one, accompanied by the worst unemployment since the Great Depression (only tied in late 2009 by Obama’s recession).

And Reagan got out of the way, and let the market heal the economy (except of course the defense sector – but then, that’s never part of the “free market”) heal itself.

And it came roaring back much bigger and better than ever.

Obama, of course, took office in the midst of another sharp, intense downturn.

And six years later, he’s doing the end-zone happy dance as he claims a 5% growth in GDP.

Now, let’s presume for a moment that that 5% “growth rate” is organic (although it most assuredly is not).

It’s six years into a sharp recession.   Left to its own devices – without “Quantitative Easing”, without “Too Big To Fail” and skyrocketing energy prices, without Obamacare – we should have been seeing much better growth than this…

…in 2010 or 2011.

But during the Obama Recession, like the Great Depression, the economy was left to pretty much the opposite of “its own devices”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Rush Limbaugh said, about President Obama: “I hope he fails.”

Naturally, he was ripped for it by every liberal and by every mushy RINO trying to make nice with the press.

Read the linked transcript.  It’s surprisingly prescient.  Looking back on what Obama has wrought these past six years, my question is: was Rush right?  Should we hope President Obama fails in his effort to completely destroy the America that I grew up in?

Joe Doakes

Politically-correct or not, I certainly have been.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Obama is relaxing the Cuban Embargo.  Why?  Why now?  As always – cui bono?

One of the first items changed is that telecommunication companies can do business in Cuba.

The richest man in the world is Carlos Sim who owns the Mexican phone system, is behind the whole “Obama-phone” fiasco and also is a huge contributor to Democrats in general and Obama in particular.

Campaign donor – telecommunications company – Cuban cell phone market – I’m beginning to get an inkling.

Joe Doakes

It’s a great time to be a liberal plutocrat.

33 years ago today, Eastern Europe seemed to be spiraling from crisis into deep crisis.

Poland’s communist government cracked down on the “Solidarity” movement.    In response, many Poles fled across the friendliest borders they could find.

And Poland’s ambassador to the US, Romuald Spasowski defected to the US – a capital offense in that Soviet puppet state.   We told that story a few years ago.

And it was in that moment, 33 years ago tonight, that Ronald Reagan showed what real leadership was. (The beef of the speech starts around 4:00 in)

When Reagan was in office, bad behavior had consquences; the Polish (and by extension Soviet) governments suffered.

Compare this with the vapid empty suit that’s currently in office, and the response the suit has had to provocations similar to the Solidarity Christmas.  Far from Reagan’s sharp, clear, principled response, Obama has propped up dictators like Assad, Castro and Chavez while undercutting the Poles, the Kurds, the Baltic States, the Ukrainians, and other freedom-seeking people around the world.

Compare, contrast, and think for a moment for how far this nation has fallen in 33 years.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

We’re number One – in presidential motorcades. And room service tab.

Absolutely un-blinking-believable.

As my buddy quipped: “For that kind of money, we could have bought Port Au Prince and held all future meetings there, for free!”

Joe Doakes

It’s all getting just a little bit banana-republican.

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

So those of you who follow this post through to the bitter end will be ten feet tall and armor plated in about fifteen minutes.

There’s an election in two years – and the Democrat Party has decided to try to kick off the battle via the medium of the popular song.

There are three contenders, and they’re all pretty freaking awful.

But American needs to know; what’s the worst of the noxious bunch?

Let’s meet the offenders.  Then let’s get down to voting.

Contender #1 – The Hillary Clinton Country-Western Song: This is Hillary’s opening bid for popularity in a part of the country that would rather catch a stream of projectile diarrhea than vote for Hillary Clinton.

It’s got everything that people in America’s heartland look for in a leader: central-casting “country” people; folksy abbreviations on videos (“Learnin’ Hindsight’s Always Right”, “‘Cuz Our American Dream’s At Stake”), because we like our videos to do their local patois the same way Hillary Clinton does it in her speeches – clumsy and patronizing; clunky, greasy references to inside-the-Beltway chanting points (“let’s smash that glass ceiling!”, indeed).

Hard to pick the biggest groaner; for my money, it’s the moment around 1:50, where the hot babe on the motorcycle gives the guy a ride on the back. That’s right, guys – you’ve been living in two-income families for a generation now, but deep down inside you’re all still sexists!

You just know some consultant – in my mind’s eye, “he” looks like Pajama-Boy – got major kudos for this idea. Maybe even got it stolen by a bigger consultant.

The video reportedly cost the Hillary PAC a million dollars to make.  I have a hunch most of it went to AFTRA fees for the guys in the band – the only four males in Los Angeles would could pull of “Country Western Band”.

Or is the worst song…

Fauxcahontas’s Faux Faulk Frenzy:  On the surface, it seems like Elizabeth “I Lied About Being Cherokee” Warren’s song couldn’t be any more different;  lazily-written, badly-sung pseudo-“folk” music is as organic to the cultural left as Whole Foods, Terry Gross or Gluten-Free Coffee.

And whomever produced this atrocity got some of the surface anti-glitz “glitz” as right as Hillary’s crew got “country” wrong.  “Run Fauxcahontas Run” has lots of the veneer of bad coffeehouse folk music; the big chorus stretches eleven syllables to cover fourteen syllables of rhythm; the dork-fingered guitar-playing sounds so much like it’s being played by a Sylvia-Plath-obsessed Vassar women’s studies major…

…that you know it can’t be.  It takes professionals – session musicians earning triple the musicians union scale – to play that badly, that well; it takes a professional singer to to edge that close to sounding like a lesbian slam poet without serving into pure caricature…

…as much as the lyrics do.

Before It Was Hilarious:  Of course, the control for this experiment was this little ditty from 2008, a classic hymn to The One…

…complete with adoring crowds chanting, Nuremberg-style, in the background.

Nothing more needs to be said, right?

Please?

A Time For Choosing:  OK – so what is the worst Hymn to a Candidate ever?

This may be the most important vote you take this year.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Obama is a lame duck with delusions of royalty. He’s going to issue whatever Executive Orders he wants, knowing his hand-picked Attorney General won’t let Republican lawsuits affect his actions for years, if ever.

Republicans could impeach The First Black President, but Democrats have been slavering to be thrown in that briar patch, it’d set the Republican Party back a century.

Republicans’ only power is the purse. Maybe the Republicans should start advertising “Do not plan your vacation to visit any national parks or public monuments, Obama is going to shut them all down on July 1.”

He’ll do it in response to our shutting off the money, true; but why take the heat for it alone? Get out in front of him, for a change. Start telling people right now “There’s only one way to stop an out-of-control dictator so get ready for it, we’re shutting ‘er down.”

Joe Doakes

Watch for a media campaign claiming that the “power of the purse” is racist…

Rock and roller and conservative icon Ted Nugent tweets about Obama’s response to Ferguson:

Obama’s empty neutrality, moral bankruptcy and political cowardice is now undeniable to even his most loyal cheerleaders and boot-lickers!

— Cornel West (@CornelWest) November 25, 2014

Well, Ted Nugent saying that sort of thing about Barack Obama barely rises to Dog Bites Dog, now, does it?

UPDATE:  Wait…