“British Soldier Beheaded In London By Attackers Shouting ‘Allahu Akhbar’”
One of the attackers then stopped, knife and cleaver in his blood-soaked hands, and spoke to passersby, even pausing to make a statement to a video camera justifying his actions and warning that “you people will never be safe.”
And he may be right. At least, if the many politicians here (mostly Democrats, but some from the GOP) pushing gun control get their way. The proof being that it wasn’t until the police arrived — twenty-minutes later — and were beset by the same attackers that the threat was ended. There wasn’t a Brit around to put down these animals with a pistol or a rifle or a pump-action shot gun.
Which is why those of us in the States who are doing the difficult work of protecting the 2nd Amendment against sneering liberals and cosmopolitan faux-conservatives using the government to attempt to strip us of a natural right plan to remain a helluva lot safer than the people in London who were powerless to stop the attack. Regardless of what laws are passed here.
Multiculturalism as the left has sold it is a pernicious and profoundly stupid attempt to give the appearance of tolerance rather than pushing assimilation and the kind of liberty agenda that actually engenders it in the long term.
It is a divisive strategy disguised as an inclusive one, and will be the downfall of westernized countries who buy into it.
Like everything else the left sells, it is a lie. And a dangerous one at that.
But it’s a lot less dangerous when you still have the means to defend yourselves. As many of us know, and many erstwhile nannystatists may one day come to learn.
(h/t geoffB and Darleen)
“IRS Misses Filing Deadline: Fails to Comply With Congressional Demand for All Communications With WH About Targeting Conservatives”
CNSNews has the particulars.
As for the commentary? See below. Or, as we used to say back in the days of White Out, ibid.
“Lois Lerner pleads the Fifth”
Of course she does.
Lois Lerner, director of exempt organizations at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is pleading her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself in the ongoing Congressional investigation over targeting by the agency of the tea party.
Lerner was set to give testimony before the House Oversight Committee on May 22, but a May 20 letter from her lawyer, William Taylor, changed all of that.
“She has not committed any crime or made any misrepresentation but under the circumstances she has no choice but to take this course,” Taylor wrote in the letter to committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa exclusively obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
Taylor claimed that the hearing would “have no purpose other than to embarrass or burden her.” He asked that Lerner be excused from the hearing, but Issa refused and issued a subpoena.
In her opening statement, Lerner insisted, “I have not done anything wrong,” that she broke no laws or regulations. Members asserted that by delivering a sworn statement to profess her innocence, Lerner waived her right to refuse to give testimony. Issa excused her, reserving the right to recall her pending legal counsel on the question of whether she had waived her rights.
Of course, the purpose of questioning Lerner is to find out who authorized or ordered the targeting of tea party and other organizations applying for 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status for special scrutiny. Also, once the groups were targeted, to find out who authorized or ordered that invasive and improper follow-up questions be asked of applicants. Lerner directs the office responsible for these violations.
Members also want to know why Lerner did not disclose the scandal to the committee even when she knew about it, and instead provided “false or misleading information” four times last year.
According to a Treasury inspector general report, Lerner supposedly discovered the targeting of the tea party in June 2011.
The drama comes as the White House has confirmed it strategized with Treasury officials over Lerner’s disclosure of the scandal by planting a question at an American Bar Association conference.
Delay, defer, deflect, dissemble, distract, demur, discount. And whenever possible, disguise.
This is completely predictable.
For a decade or more here I’ve been pounding the table trying to get people to listen to the role of language in creating the narrative frames that we live within, often without giving those frames any kind of thought that takes us outside them. This current set of scandals reveals more of the same.
The goal here is to string along investigations and inquiries, to try to reduce their concentration both officially and within the public consciousness, and in that way to dilute them inside the news cycles with the hope (and plan) that they will eventually fall away as new stories arise and people lose interest. Which is what happened with Fast and Furious and a host of other scandals that have been largely bracketed in the public mind.
It is the creation of a “reality” that is pre-planned and manipulated by those who control the dissemination of information and the news cycle, and as JournoList and its various new iterations have taught us, it is by its nature a collusion between those in power and their willing propagandists inside the media. There will be fall guys and concessions, loud denunciations and hand wringing, bed knobs and broomsticks, shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings.
It’s theater.
The left’s ideology is at base built upon the idea of anti-foundationalism. That is, each new moment is governed by its own set of rules, not some overarching surrender to consistency or the hoary “logic” or “reason” of the Enlightenment notions of knowledge that demands such things. Capable men with capable messaging create and control what comes to count as reality; and “reality” and “truth” are but two more malleable variables that have been usurped and repurposed for the drive toward Utopian statism.
To the left — and to many who claim to embrace “pragmatism” — the ends justify the means, and forcing one’s will upon the world is the perfect way to ensure those ends are met.
Which is why when they’re caught inside a scandal, they don’t panic. They simply work on reshaping “reality” until it serves their purposes. It’s a kind of narrative chess.
And the real winning move is to refuse to play it.
Maybe one day “our” side will learn this. Because until then, we’ll get more postmodern faculty lounge politicians, and all the illusions that serve to frame them.
Rep Mike Kelly is PI(R)SSED!
It’s a few days old, is Rep Kelly’s (R-PA) thumping of the IRS, but it’s new to me. And I quite enjoyed it.
What’s chilling here, as a kind of subtext, is Miller’s look and demeanor as he’s being berated. The cast of his eyes. He’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes.
It’s time to rid ourselves of the IRS. In fact, it’s been time for a long time. My political “awakening” came, I’ve mentioned before, when I first heard Steve Forbes pushing a flat tax and I surprised all of my perfunctorily liberal friends in grad school by backing Forbes, a Republican, for President, based entirely on what to me was the rather obvious fairness and simplicity of tax system he was proposing. He was, of course, kind of a one-trick candidate, but then we were enjoying the end of history, and it seemed as good a time as any to fix a clumsy and obtrusive tax behemoth, and Forbes was actually running on doing just that.
It seemed American, what he was proposing. Whereas even before I was “political” or had given it any kind of studied thought, the progressive income tax had always bugged me — had always struck me as completely at odds with the ideals laid out in our founding documents.
And now that we know — again! — that the IRS is in many respects a willing political enforcement arm of power-drunk politicians, there’s simply no reason to keep it around in its current, nearly omnipotent state.
That it will be attached very soon to our health care is, in a word, obscene.
Take it out back, put two in its skull, throw some dirt over it, and then come back inside and have a sandwich and an icy cold soda pop. Followed by a well-deserved nap.
(h/t awesomeness)
“Accused Fort Hood Shooter Paid $278,000 While Awaiting Trial”
NBC:
The Department of Defense confirms to NBC 5 Investigates that accused Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Hasan has now been paid more than $278,000 since the Nov. 5, 2009 shooting that left 13 dead 32 injured. The Army said under the Military Code of Justice, Hasan’s salary cannot be suspended unless he is proven guilty.
If Hasan had been a civilian defense department employee, NBC 5 Investigates has learned, the Army could have suspended his pay after just seven days.
Personnel rules for most civilian government workers allow for “indefinite suspensions” in cases “when the agency has reasonable cause to believe that the employee has committed a crime for which a sentence of imprisonment may be imposed.”
Meanwhile, more than three years later soldiers wounded in the mass shooting are fighting to receive the same pay and medical benefits given to those wounded in combat.
Retired Army Spc. Logan Burnett, a reservist who, in 2009, was soon to be deployed to Iraq, was shot three times when a gunman opened fire inside the Army Deployment Center.
“I honestly thought I was going to die in that building,” said Burnett. “Just blood everywhere and then the thought of — that’s my blood everywhere.”
Burnett nearly died. He’s had more than a dozen surgeries since the shooting, and says post-traumatic stress still keeps him up at night.
Burnett is now fighting a new battle; only this one is against the U.S. Army.
The Army has not classified the wounds of the Ft. Hood victims as “combat related” and declines to label the shooting a “terrorist attack”,
The “combat related” designation is an important one, for without it Burnett and other shooting victims are not given combat-related pay, they are not eligible for Purple Heart retirement or medical benefits given to other soldiers wounded either at war or during the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the Pentagon.
As a result, Burnett, his wife Torey, and the families of other Fort Hood victims miss out on thousands of dollars of potential benefits and pay every year.
You know what? Burn this entire governmental monstrosity down, kill the PC cancer that courses through it rendering it moribund and malignant, and start the entire self-governance experiment from scratch.
Only this time, we shore up the Constitution by protecting language and removing the avenues for sophistry whose aim it is to weaken and deconstruct, and we explicitly factor out leftism as alien and not consonant with the founding principles and ideals, nor with a constitutional republic.
I am so thoroughly fed up with the defense of such nonsense as this.
Seriously. I’m done with it. And you know what? So long as the higher-ups in the military continue behaving like risk-averse leftists angling for political promotions, I don’t much care that they are having their budgets slashed.
Looks like the leftists have poisoned our military structure, too. So why bother feeding them?
“Drudge Editor on Obama Scandals: White House Is Sitting on Something That Has Top Aides Terrified”
Who can even fathom what has aides to this bunch terrified, so blase are they about human life, about the suffering they cause, about the molestation they routinely engage in by way of governmental bureaucracies and agencies and regulations and taxes and fees, about the racial and ethnic and economic division they stoke as casually as they breathe.
If I had to guess? It’s the potential whistleblower testimony that will tie ObamaCo to the supplying of weapons to Islamist radicals — even as the same Administration spent time and enormous energy domestically trying to take our (meager) weapons away.
But I don’t suspect that revelation would have them “terrified.” After all, they’d probably just say that Ambassador Stephenson was a rogue agent, and that State and the White House had covered up his tracks to protect his reputation and legacy and shield his family from repercussion from the anti-Islamic bigots that are sure to start burning down mosques here in the US. Now that it’s no longer possible to do so, fuck it: He did it, not us!
So. I got nothing. Any guesses?
(h/t newrouter)
leftist shitboxes who once upon a time politicized a hurricane rush to politicize a tornado
So. Here’s my response to Rhode Island Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who took the occasion of the OK tornadoes to launch a political broadside against the GOP and those who don’t buy into the politically-concocted notion that human exhalation — that is, plant food — nor water vapor are pollutants that cause the earth to warm:
You are fucking loathsome. In fact, you’re worse than loathsome. Much lower. You are the fairground vomit of a redneck teen wrecked on Schlitz and chili cheese fries that gets caught unwittingly in the treads of loathsome’s $400 tennis shoes, then gets tracked across the interior of loathsome’s brand new Escalade and sat in by loathsome’s bitchy girlfriend.
The fact is, sir, that tornadoes and hurricanes and hail storms and blizzards and rock slides and avalanches and tsunamis and typhoons and volcanic eruptions and wild fires and all manner of other natural disasters existed long before the industrial revolution, and it is the height of posturing self-hatred (if you actually believe this garbage) or political cynicism (if you don’t, but find it useful to adopt the pose) to declare that humanity is itself a blight on the earth, that our failure properly to flagellate ourselves (and then pay you for the privilege of making that self-flagellation manifest in taxes and fees and carbon exchange schemes and global wealth redistribution plans designed by transnational progressivists to undermine individual and state sovereignty and secure global bureaucratic power) is the reason school children and others are dead in Oklahoma.
That you would so openly and publicly attempt to tether the death and destruction in the tornado belt to a particular political party is but one of the reasons the people in the US hold their “representatives” in such utter contempt. In fact, you are so beneath contempt that you’d need a fucking snorkel and several compressed air tanks to even approach the surface where contempt begins and your vile and frankly evil opportunism ends.
The Republicans’ stance — or the stance of anyone on anthropocentric global climate change — is responsible for the OK tornadoes in precisely the same way that your having been elected to the Senate speaks to your intelligence: that is, the two are wholly unrelated.
If you wish to cast around for blame, you might wish to start with the very earth and its atmosphere that you pretend your political party alone wishes to protect: because evidently, despite all your posing and hubris, she doesn’t much give a shit, and she goes along doing her thing just as she’s always done. And in the end, she’ll swallow you up in dirt and let the worms crawl through you, too.
On occasion, people die as a result of such natural disasters. Trying to legislate against weather is like trying to legislate against stupidity. And the fact that you are a Senator shows the futility in the latter.
If we had any real decency left as a society — and yes, I realize this will strike the PC crowd as counter-intuitive — we’d pull people like Senator Sheldon Whitehouse out of his cozy, taxpayer-funded digs and put him in some town square in stocks with a dunce cap fixed to his moronic, odious, malicious head, and invite anyone with a desire to to pelt him with rotten vegetables.
Fuck you, you cowardly sack.
Now. In response to the always repugnant leftist hack David Sirota and his offputtingly well-plucked metrosexual facade, who has used this tragedy to intimate that GOP cuts to spending for the National Weather Service are somehow culpable for the death and destruction in Oklahoma: are you for real? The Democrats spend and spend and spend and spend and print and print and print and print — Harry Reid, for fuck’s sake, stood on the floor of the Senate and told America about the real need for governmental spending on Cowboy Poetry Festivals — and we’re to believe that a country over 90 TRILLION dollars in the red, counting unfunded liabilities (read: statist promises to provide social welfare for people with money that they already spent elsewhere) is insufficiently funded when it comes to monitoring the weather?
Let’s say that’s true, even though we all know it isn’t. How about this for a solution, then: we get rid of the billions of dollars wasted on redundant programs; or the billions of dollars the government itself notes is lost to fraud waste and abuse; or the social welfare money we hand out to non-citizens; or the social welfare money we hand out to those who buy pressure cookers and nails with our tax dollars and then use them to blow up children and charity runners at a foot race?
And all that would take would be to get rid of posturing shitbag progressives like David Sirota, to remove them from office, to put an end to their constant attempts to divide and use bloc politics and taxpayer dollars to find client bases for votes.
As with everything in your despicable, self-important, self-aggrandizing life, Mr Sirota, this casual conjoining of the deaths in Oklahoma to a political decision to cut something, anything — all so that you can wave the bloody shirts in the hopes of shaming people into agreeing to spend well beyond their means, all so you can pretend that you are more “compassionate” than the adults who understand that economics doesn’t succumb to the leftist desire to create reality from will and manufactured consent — is what defines people like you: you are petty, opportunistic, shameless. You are a social parasite who cynically makes his living off the essential goodness of the American people, preying as you do upon their readiness to feel guilt, to believe that if they had only done something (and you’ll be there to tell them what that is, be it pay more in taxes, build more bullet trains, fund more Solyndras, provide more taxpayer money for grants given to those looking to deligitimate the very system that makes their comfortable livings possible), no one in OK would have died, that the earth would have bent to your will and technocratic genius, that the tornadoes wouldn’t have stood a chance against your collectivist social engineering schemes.
You are a charlatan. And a loudmouthed punk who stages his outrages for maximum exposure.
In short, you are a pathetic man propping himself up and shining a light on his own self-loathing — disguised as social activism — in the hope that nobody sees the rumpled, sad, clownish and petulant child that lives inside you.
So fuck you, too.
In the squeakhole. Sideways. With a frozen loaf of artisan jalapeno cheese bread.
I am done feeling any kind of guilt or shame. And no, I don’t worry what “independents or moderates” may think of my reaction: it’s those dullards who keep us flush with the Pelosis and the Reids and the Sheldon Whitehouses of the world in positions of power or influence.
It’s long past time we put an end to this social dynamic that provides the world be turned into a perpetual re-run of Revenge of the Nerds.
There’s nothing hip about statism. There’s nothing transgressive about agitating for surrendering to an overreaching government and its lust for tyrannical control over subjects.
And there’s nothing at all in David Sirota’s soul worth salvaging. He’s a fucking punk who once got in the face of an older conservative during a debate and got off on the charge it gave him.
I do so hope that one day he does the same thing to me.
Meantime, I’ll just have to be content to (virtually) piss on him. And not because he’s on fire. But rather because he’s not.
mental and emotional sorbet
I’m of course deeply saddened by the destruction in Oklahoma, but I find myself growing very angry at the same time, for reasons that will become clear shortly.
In the meantime, I figured maybe now is a good time to lighten the mood. And to that end, I present you with this, some of the coolest parents and parenting tips ever.
Pray for Oklahoma [Darleen Click]
Twenty minutes ago, message from a high school buddy of mine who is a teacher in the Oklahoma City Public School system:
I don’t think it’s really hit me yet what happened this afternoon in Oklahoma…. This all started less than an hour before school was to be dismissed, and our administration acted quickly to make sure that everything went as smoothly as possible. I work with some very dedicated and wonderful teachers, and we all did what had to be done – with sirens blaring – to keep our kiddos safe, and we were very fortunate indeed!
From the Facebook Page of The Tribune
TORNADO RELIEF DONATIONS NEEDEDPlease bring water bottles, work gloves, dust masks, “Lunchables”-type food and any other small objects that could aid in tornado relief efforts in Moore to The Tribune’s new office, 6728 N.W. 38th St. in Bethany by noon Tuesday. We’ll be taking everything to Moore in the afternoon.
Someone is there right now to accept your donations.
No money or checks, please.
Please SHARE this on your timeline to help us spread the word.
Call (405) 789-1962 for more information.
At least 51 are dead tonight.
A tornado at least a half mile-wide with 200mph winds churned through Oklahoma City’s suburbs Monday afternoon, killing at least 51 and causing significant property damage for the second day in a row, forcing rescue crews to search for survivors in the debris of flattened homes, businesses and two schools.Amy Elliott, a spokeswoman for the Oklahoma Medical Examiner’s Office, said the death toll is expected to rise. Oklahoma City Police say seven of those deaths were children at Plaza Towers Elementary School, which was hit by the tornado, Fox 25 reports. Oklahoma police also told Fox News’ Casey Stegall, on the ground in Moore, Okla., that at least four people were killed at a 7-11 convenience store.
Television footage on Monday afternoon showed homes and buildings that had been reduced to rubble in Moore, which is south of Oklahoma City. Footage also showed vehicles littering roadways south and southwest of Oklahoma City.
OU Medical Center spokesman Scott Coppenbarger said the hospital and a nearby children’s hospital are treating approximately 85 patients, including 65 children, with conditions ranging from minor injuries to critical.
Both the Salvation Army and Red Cross have activated their disaster response teams.
Please pray.
