Weekend Entertainment: Rush

It doesn’t get any better than this – a little new and little old.

F the Rock’n'Roll Hall of Fame.

Quote of the Day

As an American I am not so shocked that Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize without any accomplishments to his name, but that America gave him the White House based on the same credentials. – Newt Gingrich

via Quotes

Love seeing that headline

via DRUDGE REPORT 2012®.

“America’s gone soft”? The pot calling the kettle black…

via The Weekly Standard

“I mean, there are a lot of things we can do,” Obama said. “The way I think about it is, you know, this is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft and, you know, we didn’t have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades. We need to get back on track.”

I guess he completely fails to see that he is both an example of the softer America and a cause of the problem worsening.

Talk about ignorant.

Dirtnap for vermin: Anwar al-Aulaqi reported killed

via The Washington Post:

Anwar al-Aulaqi, a radical U.S.-born Muslim cleric and one of the most influential al-Qaeda operatives wanted by the United States, was killed Friday in an airstrike in northern Yemen, authorities said, eliminating a prominent recruiter who inspired attacks on U.S. soil.

In Washington, a senior Obama administration official confirmed that Aulaqi is dead.

A U.S. counterterrorism official said intelligence indicates that the 40-year-old cleric, a dual national of the United States and Yemen, perished in an attack on his convoy by a U.S. drone and jet, the Associated Press reported.

The news agency later reported that a second U.S. citizen, who edited an al-Qaeda magazine, was killed with Aulaqi in the airstrike.

You can run, but you’ll only die tired.

Way to go, Joe!

Biden: Voters should blame Obama, not Bush, for economy

Vice President Joe Biden told Florida radio station WLRN on Thursday that voters should hold President Barack Obama, not former President George W. Bush, accountable for the poor state of America’s economy.

Conservative PAC American Crossroads circulated the startling statement Thursday afternoon, expecting it will take Democratic campaign strategists by surprise.

“Right now, understandably — totally legitimate — this is a referendum on Obama and Biden and the nature of the state of the economy,” Biden said.

Polls indicating that more Americans blame Bush for the economy than Obama are not relevant, Biden said.

“Even though fifty-some percent of the American people think that the economy tanked because of the last administration, that’s not relevant,” Biden stressed. “What’s relevant is we’re in charge. And right now we are the ones in charge and it’s gotten better, but it hasn’t gotten good enough.”

“I don’t blame them for being mad. We’re in charge,” Biden explained.

Guess who’s not going to be invited to be on the ticket next year? LOL

Pelosi’s office responsible for massive lie in defending the indefensable

Via Hot Air: Politifact, WaPo: No, Obama is the “undisputed debt king”

Earlier this week I got a couple of e-mails about a chart du jour attempting to argue that Barack Obama increased the debt the least among the last five Presidents, and wanted to get a response from me. Frankly, the argument seemed so absurd after Obama’s three massive budget deficits and his failed Porkulus spending that I assumed the chart came from a fringe lefty desperate for a defense of Obama. As it turns out, I was right, in a way — it came from Nancy Pelosi’s office. Here’s the chart:

Right off the bat, one can see a basic problem in this chart, which is that we’re comparing apples and oranges. Reagan, Clinton, and Bush 43 all served for eight years, while Obama had barely cleared two years by the time this chart’s data was published in May 2011. Even if this was accurately depicting the data, it would still be a misleading graphic comparison.

As two different fact-checkers have found, though, it doesn’t accurately depict the data. Politifact gives Pelosi and her allies a “Pants On Fire” rating for pushing this chart as reality…

Let’s not forget that the Democrats kept Bush out of the loop on the 2009 budget, too, by passing continuing resolutions until Obama took office. He signed the massive omnibus bill passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress in March 2009 to finish that budget. And who ran the House of Representatives at that time, and for the last two years of the Bush presidency? Why, none other than Nancy Pelosi, that’s who.

Politifact then points out that deficits as a percentage of GDP is actually the better measurement, and recalculates the debt on those terms. Guess who winds up the winner?

Reagan: Up 14.9 percentage points
George H.W. Bush: Up 7.1 percentage points
Clinton: Down 13.4 percentage points
George W. Bush: Up 5.6 percentage points
Obama: Up 21.9 percentage points (through December 2010 only)

Politifact isn’t the only media fact-checker working on this chart. Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post gave Pelosi four Pinocchios, even for her amended chart:

If the chart actually used public debt rather than gross debt, it would have put Obama and George W. Bush virtually in the same league — 60 percent increase (as of September 2011) for Obama versus 70 percent for Bush — even though Bush served as president much longer.

But the biggest problem is that this is just dumb math. What really counts is not the raw debt numbers, but the size of the debt as a percentage of the gross domestic product. The GDP is the broadest measure of the national economy and directly indicates the nation’s ability to service its debts. In fact, the White House budget office historical tables portray much of the data as a percentage of GDP, because that is the best way to truly compare such numbers over time.

If the chart were recast to show how much the debt went up as a percentage of GDP, it would look pretty bad for Obama after not even three years in office. In fact, Obama does almost twice as poorly as Reagan — and four times worse than George W. Bush.

Bless you, a-hole

Teacher penalizes students for saying “bless you”

A Northern California teacher says he doesn’t want to hear a common courtesy in his classroom.

He’s even lowering students’ grades if they say “bless you” after someone sneezes.

Steve Cuckovich says the practice is disrespectful and disruptive. He’s banned saying “bless you” in his high school health class in Vacaville.

He even knocked 25 points from one student’s grade for saying the phrase in class.

Cuckovich says the policy has nothing to do with religion, but says the phrase is just a outdated practice and disrupts class time.

“When you sneezed in the old days, they thought you were dispelling evil spirits out of your body,” Cuckovich said. “So they were saying, ‘god bless you’ for getting rid of evil spirits. But today, I said what you’re doing doesn’t really make any sense anymore.”

After parents complained about students losing points for saying “bless you”, Cuckovich says he decided to stop the practice.

However, the teacher says he will just find another way to discipline students for saying “bless you” in class.

Vacaville = cow town

I wonder if this idiot is any relation to another Vacaville resident, Cindy Sheehan.

Quote of the Day

It is ridiculous to assume you can tax the people that are working and give the money (to people) who are not working and somehow this creates economy activity. You are destroying as much by taking from those who are working and creating.  – Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute

via Governments Don’t Create Prosperity

Pelosi gets payday for Bro-in-law

The Weekly Standard:

Despite the growing Solyndra scandal, yesterday the Department of Energy approved $1 billion in new loans to green energy companies — including a $737 million loan guarantee to a company known as SolarReserve:

SolarReserve LLC, a closely held renewable energy developer, received a $737 million U.S. Energy Department loan guarantee to build a solar-thermal project in Nevada.

The 110-megawatt Crescent Dunes project, near Tonopah, Nevada, will use the sun’s heat to create steam that drives a turbine, the agency said today in a e-mailed statement. SolarReserve is based in Santa Monica, California.

On SolarReserve’s website is a list of “investment partners,” including the “PCG Clean Energy & Technology Fund (East) LLC.” As blogger American Glob quickly discovered, PCG’s number two is none other than “Ronald Pelosi, a San Francisco political insider and financial industry polymath who happens to be the brother-in-law of Nancy Pelosi, the Minority Leader of the United States House of Representatives.”

[...]

It’s increasingly hard to tell the government’s green jobs subsidies apart from the Democrats’ friends and family rewards program.

‘Let’s play “if Bush did it”‘

Pajamas Media: MSM Sheep: Ignoring the Scandal of the Century

Monday’s revelations by Mike Vanderboegh at Sipsey Street Irregulars and David Codrea at the Gun Rights Examiner, corroborated here at PJMedia and expounded upon at Fox News, comprise a “smoking gun” of the one of the most stunning political scandals in U.S. history.

As William Lajeunesse writes at Fox:

Not only did U.S. officials approve, allow and assist in the sale of more than 2,000 guns to the Sinaloa cartel — the federal government used taxpayer money to buy semi-automatic weapons, sold them to criminals and then watched as the guns disappeared.

I don’t wish to understate it: elements of the U.S. Departments of Justice, State, Homeland Security, and Treasury are responsible for supplying an arsenal to narco-terrorists waging a civil war against an American ally. Our federal government may bear responsibility for at least 200 murders committed with “walked” firearms, in what Mexican Attorney General Marisela Morales describes as a “betrayal” of her country by the Obama administration.

Are there legal ramifications? Perhaps. According to Title 18, 2331 of the U.S. Code, Operation Fast and Furious may amount to international terrorism, which carries with it stiff penalties for conspiracies that result in homicide. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act — which was originally used to prosecute the mafia — and the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) may also fit, as may assorted state and federal charges. Charges may also result from two investigations launched by Mexican authorities, and Mexico could conceivably file charges with the International Criminal Court.

This is objectively the most important political and legal story in America right now.

But despite the revelations from of documents and testimony obtained by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and repeated calls for full disclosure from senators and congressmen, mainstream media organizations have done everything in their power to bury the scandal. This can only be viewed as a partisan media’s attempt to protect a criminal executive branch.

Let’s play “if Bush did it.”

If thousands of firearms had been provided to the Sinaloa cocaine cartel by the Justice Department; and if those guns had been blamed for not one or two, but hundreds of murders by Mexico’s lead prosecutor, would there not be wall-to-wall front page coverage every day on the pages of the New York Times … if Bush were still president?

Liberal Newsweek Editor Admits: Obama ‘Wasn’t Ready’ to Be President

File this one under ‘no shit’.

via HotAirPundit

And this administration was supposed to be something better…

via Michael Ramirez Political Cartoons

‘Watergate didn’t have a body count. Gunwalker has hundreds.’

The Everlasting Phelps: Way Past Watergate

For those who don’t know, the Gunwalker scandal goes like this: For whatever reason, the ATF decided that it was a good idea to let guys that they knew were buying guns in mass quantities to give to the Cartels in Mexico… go ahead and do it. Those weapons were then used to murder at least a couple of hundred people, including American federal agents, like Border Guard Brian Terry. They were giving guns to guys that were, in the words of the ATF, “stone cold killers.”

The DoJ initially denied knowing anything about it. As the investigation has proceeded, not only did the DoJ know, but the FBI was probably involved in destroying evidence in the Terry case, and the connections go all the way to the White House.

Now, it turns out that the ATF didn’t just let them buy guns — they went ahead and bought a few of them directly and swept the paperwork under the carpet. This goes way past Watergate. This is like deciding to replace the “plumbers” with FBI agents, and they happened to kill a few security guards at the hotel on the way.

Watergate didn’t have a body count. Gunwalker has hundreds.

This is domestic terrorism. Pure and simple.

RnR Hall of Fame becomes bigger joke

Rush is a Band Blog: Rush once again snubbed by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Just take a look at what the HoF considers worthy of nomination:

· Beastie Boys
· The Cure
· Eric B. & Rakim
· Rufus with Chaka Khan
· The Spinners
· Donna Summer

Rock’n'Roll? Beastie Boys? Eric B. & Rakim? Donna Summer?

Holy crap.

I think asking Rush to join the HoF would only demean the band and the musical integrity they have been able to maintain and the HoF obviously has not.