Where Are My Keys?

So the Press DOES know how to do some background reporting..

After not giving a hoot about Barack Obama's college grades, teachers, or classmates, the MSM "discovers" how to do some journalism:

But in his classes, some professors said they never saw the same level of focus on schoolwork. In introductory French, for instance, Walker routinely barged into the room after the lesson had begun, loudly making excuses.

“He would talk to me, you know, say, ‘I’m very sorry, I had very important business’ ” with the student government, instructor Marc Boutet recalled. “I’m like, ‘En français ! En français!’ ”

Boutet said the other students tired of the daily disruptions. They started preemptively stealing Walker’s favorite desk, so he had nowhere to sit when he arrived.

“I think I gave him a D-minus,” Boutet said, adding that he saw Walker years later, and the two laughed about the class. French, Boutet said, “was not his thing.”

Even in politics class, Walker could appear disengaged.

“He seemed utterly bored,” said Michael Fleet, who taught him in a class on the politics of the Third World. Fleet said he’d hoped to get Walker into debates with the liberals in the room. But it didn’t work. Walker would only give occasional short speeches that made conservative arguments.

“It wasn’t always on key. It wasn’t always in response to anything,” Fleet said. “He wasn’t engaged. It was like he came in with a script.”

I don't recall comments from any of then-Senator Obama's instructors, do you?

I actually think this helps Walker.  I bet there are a ton of potential voters out there who have a similar history as the Governor - they went to a "regular" college (not Ivy League), didn't care much for what school offerede, and went on to begin their lives.  I think it is identifiable with people, and since Walker hasn't run away from his history, it becomes a non-factor for the guy on the street.

Our intellectual betters inside the beltway will laugh at his pedigree, and tell us why a guy like Walker isn't qualified to be President because he didn't graduate, but they won't be able to discount the successes he has had as a Governor and a politician.

Walker will resonate with the masses because of this.

If Walker stays true to his history (and why wouldn't he?), he'll do fine.

So if you are scoring at home, if you question the academic credentials of a Democrat, you are racist; if you look into a Republican's educational background, that is good journalism.

POTUS is sure lucky this guy isn't in the Senate anymore..

This guy was really pissed about how unprepared the USA was to deal with "bird flu", and took the Bush Administration to task for it:

The failure to prepare for emergencies can have devastating consequences. We learned that lesson the hard way after Hurricane Katrina. This nation must not be caught off-guard when faced with the prospect of an avian flu pandemic. The consequences are too high.

The flyways for migratory birds are well-established. We know that avian flu will likely hit the United States in a matter of time. With the regular flu season coming up shortly, conditions will be favorable for reassortment of the avian flu virus with the annual flu virus. Such reassortment could lead to a mutated virus that could be transmitted efficiently between humans, which is the last condition needed for pandemic flu.

The question is will we be ready when that happens? Let’s make sure that answer is yes. I urge my colleagues in the Senate and the House to push this Administration to take the action needed to prevent a catastrophe that we have not seen during our lifetimes.”

The current Ebola outbreak is significantly worse than H5N1 was.  Where is that young Senator now, to hold this Administration's feet to the fire?

It's almost as if there is a double-standard, or something..

Why is Hope Solo allowed to play, while NFL stars are not?

Ms. Solo is the starting goalie for the U.S. national soccer team and has amazingly held this position since Bill Clinton was president (2000). Along the way, she’s won two gold medals and has recorded the most shutouts in U.S. women’s soccer history. She can add some distance to that record when the U.S. hosts Mexico in Rochester tonight.

Solo is also a 33-year-old woman charged with two counts of misdemeanor domestic violence in the assault of her sister and teenage nephew. The Washington native has pleaded not guilty. Her trial is set to begin in two months. But unlike Rice and Peterson–who both absolutely deserve to be nowhere near a football field right now–Solo continues to play.

Here’s the way USA Today described the moment she broke the U.S. women’s shutout record on September 13 in Sandy, Utah:

In the waning moments of the U.S. women’s rout of Mexico, the crowd behind Hope Solo’s goal began chanting her name. They knew she was on the verge of making history. With the 8-0 U.S. victory, Solo, playing while facing domestic violence charges in Washington, collected her record 72nd shutout with the national team.
“The best part about it is the best is yet to come,” she told cheering fans when the milestone was announced at Rio Tinto Stadium on Saturday night.

So while the star goalkeeper plays again tonight under the media radar, cable news and ESPN continue their soapbox sermons on the evil NFL, where if you weren’t paying attention, would conclude is the only organization in the country to employ characters like Peterson or Rice. The fact is that domestic and child abuse are epidemics in this country. If it takes two major athletes from America’s most popular sport to bring more attention to it, that’s only a good thing. But to pretend domestic and child abuse is a one-way street in terms of gender is another example of media twisting a narrative to satisfy the ends to the means.

Is Solo guilty? Only three people–the ones directly involved–know that. But what if Solo played not for the U.S. women’s soccer team, but the National Football League as, say… a kicker (think of Kathy Ireland as a college kicker in the 1991 flick Necessary Roughness). Does she really get a free pass via being ignored? Does U.S. Soccer President Sunil Gulati avoid calls for his termination by almost every pundit in the country? Here’s what he had to say when a reporter–one of very few–actually asked a question about his decision to allow Solo to play recently:

“We looked at all the facts that we had in front of us, we talked to Hope, and are going to wait until the legal proceedings come to a conclusion before we take any action, if it’s needed.”

Adrian Peterson also has legal proceedings upcoming. No conclusion has been made in a court of law (the court of public opinion proving more powerful in the meantime).

If we as a Country truly want to eliminate domestic violence, shouldn't all be held to the same standard?  And what of Hollywood actors that have had brushes with the law and domestic violence?  Shouldn't they also be banned for life?

"Plastic" turkey*, version 2.0..

Hillary! won't get anything close to the mockery Bush did with her photo-op, because she's a Democrat. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*The turkey was real, and not made of plastic, for those that don't know.

But Sarah Palin was too dumb to be Vice President, right?

Behold, the moron that sits one heartbeat away from the most powerful chair in the World:

 

Note that he is reading from a teleprompter.

And the Media collectively yawns..

The US Embassy in Libya gets evacuated, the President goes golfing.

Do your damn jobs.

Ginsberg says Obama "has ventured into a minefield"...

The Supreme Court voted 5-4 to allow certain companies to opt out of certain requirements of Obamacare.  Justice Ginsberg took issue with the ruling:

But in a blistering dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justice Sotomayor, lambasted the majority opinion—delivered by five male justices—as "a decision of startling breadth" that would allow corporations to "opt out of any law … they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs."

The majority view "demands accommodation of a for-profit corporation's religious beliefs no matter the impact that accommodation may have on third parties who do not share the corporation owners' religious faith—in these cases, thousands of women employed by Hobby Lobby and Conestoga or dependents of persons those corporations employ" wrote Ginsburg, a stalwart member of the Court's liberal wing.

Didn't President Obama allow certain segments of the population to "opt out" of the law?  Didn't his decisions to allow those groups to opt out have "impact" on "third parties"?  Hasn't the President also applied his decisions on who must follow, and who is exempt with "startling breadth"?

Isn't Obama "guilty" of doing the exact same thing that Ginsberg is mad at Hobby Lobby for doing?  And if so, shouldn't he be held to the same level of disgust she is leveling at Hobby Lobby?

Hobby Lobby is merely following the example that the President of the United States has set (multiple times, in fact).  In this instance, Hobby Lobby even has a better reason than Mr. Obama.

"Le Deluge"..

 

Why have any advisors or meetings??

The President has shown a pattern of not knowing anything about his Administration, until it hits the news:

Preferring to look ignorant rather than irresponsible, President Obama said last week that he only recently learned of scandals at the Department of Veteran Affairs through news reports. He spoke of the problems at the department as if they had blindsided him, despite the fact that as a candidate in 2008 he railed against the “the broken bureaucracy of the V.A.” and decried outrageous delays in treatment for veterans.

He didn’t need news reports to inform him of the depth of the department’s flaws; he could have reviewed his own campaign speeches. His long familiarity with the department’s problems gave his press conference last week an air of adding insult to injury. Somehow he was at once aware of the department’s deplorable condition and unaware of it.

Obama doesn’t mind appearing as the hapless spectator on the sidelines of his government if that saves him from the charge of dereliction of duty about a known problem. Yet the plight of veterans at the hands of indifferent bureaucrats clearly lost its urgency for him once the 2008 campaign ended and only now resumes urgency for him as an annoying political problem.

He said last week that he won’t “tolerate” mistreatment of veterans but he managed to tolerate it easily enough since he gave those speeches over five years ago. His aides claim he is “madder than hell” about the scandal, but at last week’s press conference he implied that his anger was provisional. He is still not sure if the “allegations” of mistreatment are true and needs to wait for more investigations in order to determine whether or not “accountability” is required.

Learning about problems in his own government through random news reports has become one of Obama’s common refrains. Last year he said that he learned of the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups through glancing at the newspaper and he made a similar claim about his knowledge of various Justice Department scandals. Historians, looking for a simple snapshot of his administration’s fecklessness, can cite the frequency of Obama’s admission.

Obama also learns of non-events through news reports, as evident in his administration’s reliance upon fragments of reporting from the foreign press to claim that the Benghazi terrorist attack was a demonstration over an Internet video that turned violent. Former Obama administration spokesman Tommy Vietor commented to Fox News, “What I’ve seen is, in a number of outlets, reporters talked to people on the scene that night… who said they were there because they were upset about this video.” Vietor suggested that “guys quoted in newspapers saying that’s why they were there” was the reason for the bogus storyline.

All of this contributes to a picture of an administration that is hopelessly superficial, dishonest, and incompetent. It also exposes Obama’s ideology as false: the federal government is clearly too big to know and too dysfunctional to control if he can only keep up to date on its failures through news accounts.

Quite the unsustainable model, isn't it?

86 million full-time workers support 148 million "takers":

Buried deep on the website of the U.S. Census Bureau is a number every American citizen, and especially those entrusted with public office, should know. It is 86,429,000.

That is the number of Americans who in 2012 got up every morning and went to work — in the private sector — and did it week after week after week.

These are the people who built America, and these are the people who can sustain it as a free country. The liberal media has not made them famous like the polar bear, but they are truly a threatened species.

It is not a rancher with a few hundred head of cattle that is attacking their habitat, nor an energy company developing a fossil fuel. It is big government and its primary weapon — an ever-expanding welfare state.

First, let's look at the basic taxonomy of the full-time, year-round American worker.

In 2012, according to the Census Bureau, approximately 103,087,000 people worked full-time, year-round in the United States. "A full-time, year-round worker is a person who worked 35 or more hours per week (full time) and 50 or more weeks during the previous calendar year (year round)," said the Census Bureau. "For school personnel, summer vacation is counted as weeks worked if they are scheduled to return to their job in the fall."

...

This brings us to the first category of benefit receivers. There were 49,901,000 people receiving Social Security in the fourth quarter of 2011, and 46,440,000 receiving Medicare. There were also 5,098,000 getting unemployment compensation.

And there were also, 3,178,000 veterans receiving benefits and 34,000 veterans getting educational assistance.

All told, including both the welfare recipients and the non-welfare beneficiaries, there were 151,014,000 who "received benefits from one or more programs" in the fourth quarter of 2011. Subtract the 3,212,000 veterans, who served their country in the most profound way possible, and that leaves 147,802,000 non-veteran benefit takers.

The 147,802,000 non-veteran benefit takers outnumbered the 86,429,000 full-time private sector workers 1.7 to 1.

How much more can the 86,429,000 endure?