This and That...

[Warph]

Arizona Governor Fears Government Regulation Could Ruin Bigotry and Hatred

Gov. Jan Brewer

PHOENIX (The Borowitz Report)— Arizona Governor Jan Brewer said today that she was reluctant to sign an anti-gay "religious freedom" bill passed by the Arizona state legislature this week, telling reporters, "I believe that bigotry and hatred should be free of government regulation."

She said that while many Arizona business owners currently enjoy employing hateful practices, "I worry that if big government gets involved, that'll ruin everything."

"Don't get me wrong—I think the anti-gay bill that the legislature passed was well-meaning," she said. "All I'm saying is, let's leave it to the private sector."

Offering an example, she added, "Look at how Obamacare has messed up health care. I'd hate to pass a new law that results in government wrecking bigotry."

But Governor Brewer got some pushback today from Republican legislator Harland Dorrinson, who told reporters, "I'm as opposed to big government as anyone. But promoting hate-based bias is one area where I believe government has an important role to play."

For her part, Governor Brewer remains unconvinced by that argument. Noting that the current system of hatred and bigotry in place in Arizona has worked well for decades, she said, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

[Warph]

Sub-Par President

Obuma Street Art

Seen around the Northern Trust Open PGA event in Pacific Palisades, CA. 02-14-2014

Obama Street Art - Riveria Country Club

The perfect photobooth picture!

[Bullwinkle]

      I heard your Senator Flake stranded himself on an island for a week with a spear, magnifying glass and camera.

      Oh, for Warph.

[Ross]

Muslims
Demanding Their Own Sharia Patrols
in Michigan

February 22, 2014 |  Filed under corruption,Culture,Culture Of Corruption,Democrats,Evil,Islam,Islamic Fascism,Liberals |  Posted by Warner Todd Huston

During the public comment time at the Dearborn city council meeting, a Muslim stood to demand that the city institute sharia patrols to keep young people out of parks and to prevent the sale of "offensive" magazines in stores.

http://wizbangblog.com/2014/02/22/muslims-demanding-their-own-sharia-patrols-in-michigan/
The man named Hassan took his place in line during the public comments and when it was his turn to speak he prefaced his comments with loud chanting of Islamic prayers. He then went on to demand that the city begin patrols of the parks because people used them for "sexual activities."

The Muslim would not tell the council where he lived claiming he feared for the safety of his family but said he lived near Westland.

As reported, "Hassan also stated that there were magazines and newspapers at the public libraries and civic center that can 'cause colossal damage to a child's health,' asking the city to review and monitor literature before they are distributed."

So, Mr. Hassan wants sharia compliant patrols to prevent people from using parks and he wants the city to perpetrate sharia compliant censorship at libraries.

Fortunately, the city council shot down Hassan's demands. This time.

But this is how we begin to lose our nation to invading Islam just as it has happened in Europe, Britain, and elsewhere. Muslims use our own system against us, using democracy to destroy democracy.

First they have a few people complain at a public meeting. Next they have a dozen. Then they shame the government to concede in a few demands. Next they demand more and government gives them, more. Then they are allowed their own enclaves where they have full power and can ignore the rule of law (this has happened in Britain). Then they branch out from their enclaves and begin to force other areas to observe their medieval rule.

Be ware of this, America. Sharia is coming if these Muslims have any say at all over it. Sharia is un-American, anti-democratic, anathema to freedom and liberty and it must be stopped.

(H/T Creeping Sharia)

[Warph]

      I heard your Senator Flake stranded himself on an island for a week with a spear, magnifying glass and camera.

      Oh, for Warph.

Unfortunately, yeah... Sen. Flake is living up to his name: FLAKE!  Between Dumb (McCain) and Dumber (Flake), weez in alot of deep do-do.

[Warph]

As you may have heard, an Academy Award nomination for the title song from the movie "Alone Yet Not Alone" has been rescinded.  Naturally, even the Motion Picture Academy lacked the nerve to say it was because the song and the low-budget film promoted Christian values.  Instead, they insisted it was because emails had been used to help promote the song to Academy voters.  That's the sort of bald-faced lie that should even have secular liberals in Hollywood chuckling.

The fact is that everyone in Hollywood campaigns for nominations and awards.  It would take a Jesuit to explain why it is okay to mail DVDs to voters and to take out any number of ads in the Hollywood trade papers, but employing the far less expensive alternative of emails is strictly verboten.

The irony is that the person who sings the song, Joni Eareckson Tada, is the sort of person Hollywood loves to make schmaltzy movies about.  A quadriplegic, Ms. Tada taught herself to paint by holding a paint brush between her teeth, and is also an author and inspirational speaker.  I can assure one and all that her appearance at the Academy Awards would have been far likelier to stop the show than any of the over-produced laser-enhanced dance numbers they come up with year after year, courtesy of choreographer Debbie Allen.

I suppose there are still some people who don't believe that Hollywood is at war with Christianity, just as there are those who are convinced that Islam's war with western civilization is a fantasy concocted by conservatives.

Over at NBC, somebody should tell Bob Costas that when you're 62, your toupee should have at least a smidgen of gray in it. But the rug aside, Mr. Costas actually spent several minutes of air time smooching Vladimir Putin's heinie. Unless he feared being tossed in a gulag while covering the Olympics, there is no explaining why he felt compelled to describe Putin as a peacekeeper who has done God's work in Syria and Iran. Fox's Kimberly Guilfoyle summed it up as "a gigantic man crush." But it may be something as simple as both of them being opposed to the Second Amendment.

Russia's deputy prime minister announced they had surveillance cameras in hotel bathrooms that showed tourists were turning on their showers, aiming them at the walls and then leaving the room. Later, Russia's version of Jay Carney said he had been mistranslated. My initial reaction is that nobody has ever mistranslated "surveillance cameras." My second reaction after having seen the toxic waste coming out of those showerheads was surprise that the walls survived the chemical blast.

As for Putin, he spent several billion rubles in order to introduce the new Russia to the world, proving only that, one, he is as adept at wasting other people's money as Barack Obama and, two, that the new Russia apparently looks and smells a lot like the old Russia. The only thing that ever changes over there is the name of the dictator.

Speaking of he who is the most dangerous demagogue in American history, Obama and his favorite henchman, Eric Holder, have rolled out the red, white and blue carpet to those people from the swamps of the Middle East who have "only a tangential connection to terrorists." The question that leaps to mind isn't how and who decides the difference between actual terrorists and those who merely aid and abet them, but why on earth do we need additional immigrants from nations that breed jihadists the way Holland breeds tulips?

What's more, there has been found to be fraud involved in 70% of the cases involving political asylum, most notably in the case of the Boston-bombing Tsarnaevs.

Proving that the world doesn't exactly quake in fear when Obama speaks, no sooner had the Pipsqueak-in-Chief called for North Korea to release Reverend Kenneth Bae than the poor guy was promptly transferred from a hospital to a labor camp.

On the other hand, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, in one of those rare inspiring moments in the world of diplomacy, apparently said, "F--- the European Union!"

Inasmuch as the two things one can safely say about the EU is that Germany, France, Spain and its other spineless members are willing to kiss Iran's heinie and will take every opportunity to collude with Arabs and Muslims against Israel, I would love to see her replace her boss, John Kerry, who could then be retired once and for all to stud duty at a horse ranch.

By the way, she made her remark during a private phone call to our ambassador to the Ukraine, a conversation that was tapped by the Russians. It makes you wonder if the Russkies also have any of those pesky surveillance cameras in Ms. Nuland's bathroom.

In the wake of the government report that ObamaCare will eliminate well over two million jobs, the Democrats rushed to spin the news, telling us that all those people would be free to pursue their dreams, unless, of course, their dreams consisted of having a fulltime job and making a decent living.

It is merely the latest case of life imitating art, in this case a comic strip. "The Wizard of Id" ran a strip a while back in which the little wizard is standing on his balcony, addressing the crowd below. He says, "Elect me and I promise you free health care, free housing, free clothing and free food stamps! And jobs for everybody! Any questions?" "Yes," responds a voice from below, "what do we need jobs for?"

In Obama's America, the short answer is that half of us need to keep working so that the freeloading half that vote for Democrats needn't bother

...Burt Prelutsky

[Ross]

Wrong Attitude Officer !

[Ross]

As the World Grows More Dangerous,
America Retreats

by Noah Rothman | 1:18 pm, February 25th, 2014

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the Warsaw Pact dissolved, America's forward positioning and nearly 700,000 strong Army became instantly anachronistic. In 1990 – 1996, Congress passed measures designed to facilitate a drawdown of American forces in accord with a new peace. In spite of the fact that the world has grown more dangerous in the intervening decades, those incentives to facilitate the reduction in America's armed forces personnel, which expired in 1996, were reinstated in 2012.

On Monday, the Pentagon announced a dramatic reduction in Army personnel to levels not seen since before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. These reductions are not being made to account for reduced threats abroad. Instead, they are being made in spite of the numerous and increasing threats to American interests.

The Army had planned to reduce troops levels to 490,000 by the end of 2017 but accelerated that planned reduction so that it would be completed by the end of 2015 late last year. Monday's announcement further accelerated that drawdown and aimed to reduce troop levels to approximately 440,000. The Pentagon further announced that it would retire weapons platforms like the A-10 "warthog" fighter plane and the U-2 spy plane and reduce benefits available to military personnel and their families, though they would keep the bloated F-35 fighter plane program rolling along.

Supporters of the planned force reduction defend the move by saying that the United States no longer has the need or desire to conduct protracted ground wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, the military will focus on maintaining forces that are more nimble and can quickly project limited power into volatile regions.

RELATED: Hagel: American Military Dominance 'Can No Longer Be Taken for Granted'

This shortsightedness sounds familiar to Max Boot who, writing in Commentary on Tuesday, recalled how history is littered with examples of cautious and sober men convincing themselves that a new era was upon them and mankind had evolved beyond conventional land wars.

"If history teaches anything, it is that the era of land wars is not over and that we will pay a heavy price in the future for our unpreparedness–as we have paid in blood at the beginning of every major war in American history," he wrote. "Throughout history, supposedly enlightened elites have been able to convince themselves that the era of conflict is over and a new age is dawning. The fact that they have always been wrong before does not, somehow, lead them to question those assumptions in the present day, because this is such a convenient belief to have."

And history feels set to make a comeback in a big way.

While America draws its forces down amid a policy of retrenchment, the People's Republic of China is modernizing its maritime and paramilitary forces. Furthermore, Beijing is flexing its muscles in its neighborhood and is only one miscalculation away from drawing the United States into a regional conflict.

"Oil survey ships operating in [Philippines territory of] Reed Bank under contract have increasingly been harassed by Chinese vessels," reads a recent Council on Foreign Relations strategic memo. "The Philippines lodged a formal protest with Beijing Tuesday after a Chinese law enforcement vessel blasted two Filipino fishing boats with water cannons in a disputed area of the South China Sea," the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, noting that the United States has a mutual protection treaty with that Pacific nation.

Following the deposition of Russian-backed Viktor Yanukovich in Ukraine, the Russian Federation has reportedly deployed warships and troops to the Crimean peninsula – a Ukrainian territory that is home to the largest Russian naval base on the Black Sea coast. The Crimean people and separatist parliamentary ministers are actively flirting with annexation into the Russian Federation, a move which expressly violates treaties that both Moscow and the West have guaranteed for decades and would be resisted by NATO and Kiev.

Speaking on the Senate floor on Tuesday, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) observed that the Cuban government is actively facilitating the destabilization of Latin America by propping up the "thugs" in Venezuela who are repressing and murdering dissenters. Cuba was recently caught exporting weapons to North Korea in express violation of United Nations-imposed embargoes on that murderous state, a move which will almost certainly not result in any action by the facile U.N.

In spite of the White House's assertions to the contrary, the Islamic Republic of Iran continues to enrich uranium with the aim of creating a fissionable device – a move that Israel has intimated they will not permit. The civil war in Syria continues to spill over its border, exporting violence and refugees into its already unstable neighbors. And there remains the ever present threat to the American homeland posed by non-state actors, any of whom could execute a successful strike on the homeland which would necessitate a military response.

Announcing the new force reduction strategy, Defense Sec. Chuck Hagel warned the public that American troops will incur "additional risks" in the future when they encounter a well-prepared enemy threat. "The development and proliferation of more advanced military technology of other nations – it means that we are entering an area where American dominance in the seas, in the sky, and space can no longer be taken for granted," he announced.

America's enemies have been counting on that.

[Photo via AP]
http://www.mediaite.com/online/as-the-world-grows-more-dangerous-america-retreats/

[Ross]

What a shame.
We war against our own.

[Ross]

Want to stop violence over the American Flag?
Stop violence over Cinco de Mayo.
Send Cinco de Mayo back to Mexico.
This is the United States of America and it is considered patriotic to celebrate the American Flag.
It is not patriotic to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, is it?
Let's get back to the real BASICS.

Court: School Can Ban US Flag Shirts

Calif. school wanted to prevent Cinco de Mayo fights

By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Feb 28, 2014 12:57 AM CST

(Newser)  – A history of violence between white and Latino students justified a California high school's 2010 decision to order students wearing American flag T-shirts on Cinco de Mayo to turn them inside out or go home, a federal appeals court has decided. "Our role is not to second-guess the decision to have a Cinco de Mayo celebration or the precautions put in place to avoid violence," a judge wrote for the unanimous three-judge panel, which cited previous cases where school safety was judged more important than students' First Amendment rights, the AP reports.

Lawyers for students at the suburban San Jose high school who were wearing the shirts plan to appeal all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. "This is the United States of America," the parent of one Live Oak High School student who was sent home tells the San Jose Mercury News. "The idea that it's offensive to wear patriotic clothing ... regardless of what day it is, is unconscionable to me."

http://www.newser.com/story/183056/court-school-can-ban-us-flag-shirts.html?utm_source=part&utm_medium=united&utm_campaign=rss_topnews

This is a pretty sad commentary. Here we have a school saying it's too dangerous for students to wear an American flag to an American school. - UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh