A Tale of Two Tragedies

Last week a teenager in Santa Fe, Texas took his dad’s shotgun and .38 caliber revolver and went to school and killed 10 people. A national tragedy, for sure.

Maybe this is the new normal where the American youth, disillusioned with having everything, lash out at the village that gave it to them.

The same thing happened three months earlier in Parkland, Florida. A media frenzy ensued, lasting months.

Maybe it’s because many of the more affluent kids of Parkland where demanding that the society that gave them everything, except for maybe a system to keep them safe, take away their constitutional rights to protect themselves and their families from monsters like the Cruz kid that massacred their classmates and teachers in the future.

The kids from Santa Fe, (Sacred Faith, en ingles), almost as if living up to the name of their home, clung to their faith and prayed-publicly. And for the most part, blamed no one but the evil gunman. Maybe that’s why they didn’t get all that much media attention, 24/7 for months.

But we have seen this before, the media and the elites choose which victims they want to champion.
The “blue” kids of Parkland are more worthy because they have the right attitudes and ideas while the “red” kids of Middle America pretty much got what they deserved. That’s your just desserts for clinging to your guns and religion.

This same phenomenon is evident with Cuban migration. When President Obama, as was his right under the constitution, cancelled the special refugee status given to Cubans under the Cuban Adjustment Act in the waning days of his administration: Crickets. But when President Trump exercised the same executive powers by banning people entering the US from countries with terrorist issues: Mass media and Judicial Hysteria.

Probably for the same reason. Most Cuban immigrants, especially the historical exiles, don’t hold progressive, politically correct views. Plus its payback for 2000 when 537 domino playing, cigar smoking Cuban refugees gave W Florida and the Presidency.

Triggers

Ever hear of the expression hair trigger? How about Hat Trigger?

It seems everyone is triggered lately. Everything is a trigger in buttercup land. It’s all the rage.

I’m not one to ignore trends. I like to think of myself as a man of his time. Hell, if I had hair I’d consider a man-bun.

So I finally felt like I joined the 21st century. I got triggered.

Right there in my own library/den/tv room/man cave/safe space. It happened!

There I was… in front of the screen… in the zone… digesting all of the day’s outrages… letting them all sink in, slowly… just trying to empathize with these poor devastated triggered folks… and Bam!

There’s Hillary Clinton at Yale’s graduation and the buildup was that she took a hilariously funny jab at president Trump and the Russian involvement in the 2016 Presidential Election. The “joke” was that she pretended to put on a Russian hat while whining about losing the election.

And that was the trigger. A hat. Hilarious.

It wasn’t a Russian Hat. It was a Soviet Hat, complete with a hammer and a sickle. Now that must be funny. Everyone was in stitches. It was so funny it made headlines. So clever!


Imagine if the hat’s insignia had been Swastika instead? Or if it had been a baseball cap with a Confederate flag? I would imagine instead of laughter and cackles we would have had screams of horror and tears and melting Ivy League snowflakes stampeding towards the nearest safe space. Maybe not; hypocrisy has no limits anymore.

I saw red. I hate red. I hate the hammer and the sickle. They are the symbols of slavery and tyranny and death. Just like a Swastika. The Hammer and the Sickle has killed over 100,000,000 human beings since this Godless ideology took hold in 1917.

When Mrs. Clinton took out this hat, she wasn’t mocking Mr. Trump, she mocked those 100,000,000 who died and the many hundreds of millions of victims of communism.

How funny.

We’re doomed.

RFK Jr. Throws Dead Kennedys Under the Obama-Cuba Bus

kennedys

The title of the piece is “We have so much to learn from Cuba”.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. opens his latest op-ed, this one regarding the Obama administration’s diplomacy-warming of a U.S.-Cuba relationship by embargo change, by putting blame on two of his own relatives…

In early December, President Barack Obama announced the restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba after more than five decades of a misguided policy which my uncle, John F. Kennedy, and my father, Robert F. Kennedy, had been responsible for enforcing after the U.S. embargo against the country was first implemented in October 1960 by the Eisenhower administration.

RFK Jr., I guess, thinks shaking his head and finger at his father and uncle, AND pointing out his privileged visit to the island, solidifies his views that the embargo is broken and must be scrapped, or something. He manages to basically scold the Castro regime for being bad communists.

However, his belief is the U.S. embargo was behind the Cuban government’s reasoning and justification for treating Cuba’s people like starving prisoners and keeping the country’s economy down. Yeah, we made them do it.

It is almost beyond irony that the very same politicians who argued that we should punish Castro for curtailing human rights and mistreating prisoners in Cuban jails elsewhere contend that the United States is justified in mistreating our own prisoners in Cuban jails.

Imagine a U.S. president faced, as Castro was, with over 400 assassination attempts, thousands of episodes of foreign-sponsored sabotage directed at our nation’s people, factories and bridges, a foreign-sponsored invasion and fifty years of economic warfare that has effectively deprived our citizens of basic necessities and strangled our economy.

No, what’s ironic, Bobby Jr., is the conspiracy theory of Castro’s alleged involvement in your POTUS Uncle JFK’s assassination. But, eh…

The Cuban leadership has pointed to the embargo with abundant justification as the reason for economic deprivation in Cuba.

The embargo allows the regime to portray the United States as a bully and itself as the personification of courage, standing up to threats, intimidation and economic warfare by history’s greatest military superpower.

It perpetually reminds the proud Cuban people that our powerful nation, which has staged invasions of their island and plotted for decades to assassinate their leaders and sabotaged their industry, continues an aggressive campaign to ruin their economy.

Yeah, he said that. The same-old same-old claptrap that has been heard for years. Sort of flies in the face(s) of half a century of countless Cubans climbing into dangerous, leaky rafts to sail deadly shark-infested waters to get here to the great Satan … Doesn’t it?

Oh, and I found this one priceless…

Unlike other Caribbean islands where poverty means starvation, all Cubans receive a monthly food ration book that provides for their basic necessities.

But you read and judge.

A week ago A.J. Delgado wrote, “Arguing with idiots about #Cuba”, where she counters many of the anti-embargo talking points liberals, such as RFK Jr., are constantly regurgitating. The fact is Barack Obama’s new age plan for changing diplomacy with Cuba is yet another one of his foreign policy decisions granting trust where trust is not deserved … and is already evident.

Some thoughts about Gabriel Garcia-Marquez & Fidel Castro

Victor Triay, author and college professor, joins me for a chat about the Latin American left.   We will also hear from Michael Prada.

We will look at the death of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, the well known author of the Spanish language, who died in Mexico City.

My concern is that Mr Garcia-Marquez is another one of those Latin American intellectuals who loved Fidel Castro more than the Cuban people.  How else do you explain his fascination with Castro?  Why the selective indignation?

 

An update about Venezuela and Latin America

We spoke with Fausta Wertz, editor of Fausta’s Blog, about the situation in Venezuela.

Fausta published a new post called “The left and reality“:

“Lefties firmly believe the deceased Hugo Chavez “improved the economy drastically and ameliorated poverty drastically” because GDP went up, and fewer people were living below the poverty line by the time he died last year.

The numbers are there: GDP did go up, and yes, fewer people were listed as living below the poverty line. Whose numbers?

The numbers came from the Venezuelan government.

The International Monetary Fund keeps a List of IMF Member Countries with Delays in Completion of Article IV Consultations or Mandatory Financial Stability Assessments Over 18 Months.

As of the writing of this post, Venezuela hasn’t held an Article IV consultation with the IMF in 99 months.

Let me translate that into plain English: The Venezuelan government has not allowed its own numbers to be verified for almost a decade.”

You can also hear our show with Fausta here:

 

“Duck Dynasty”: El dinero habla y “Abuelo Duck” ganó!

It took less than 2 weeks for A&E to crack:

“The A&E channel said it’s reversing its decision to drop “Duck Dynasty” patriarch Phil Robertson from the show for his remarks about gays.

In a statement Friday, A&E said it decided to bring Robertson back after discussions with the Robertson family and “numerous advocacy groups.”

The channel had put Robertson on what it called “hiatus” following his comments in a magazine article about how the Bible informs his view of gays.

His comments were slammed by groups including GLAAD, the gay media watch organization. But A&E’s decision drew a backlash from those who said they supported Robertson’s comments and others who defended him on the basis of freedom of speech.”

A&E has been running show marathons for the last week, or a very funny way of showing their displeasure with Granpa Phil!

Can we now get serious and talk about real problems?

Like violence in Venezuela?

“The Venezuelan Violence Observatory estimates that 24,763 killings occurred this year, pushing up the homicide rate to 79 per 100,000 inhabitants. It was 73 per 100,000 people in 2012. In 1998, the rate was 19.”

The latest Obama Care problems?

“Some patients who think they have insurance may not get insurance cards on time, and they’re afraid they might fall through the cracks. “

Frankly, I thought that this whole “Duck” story was an intentional distraction from the Obama Care mess and growing disillusionment with President Obama.

“The United States government is the ultimate giant unworkable mess”

Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog puts into brilliant context exactly why government cannot do or build the things a culture with real individual incentive can build, no matter how much money the government continually throws at it…

The ObamaCare website is the natural spawn of that technocracy who love the idea of using modernity to make things faster and easier, but have no idea what anything costs or how it works.

It’s hard to have a functioning technocracy without engineers. A technocracy made in Silicon Valley with its complete disregard for anything outside its own ego zone would be bad enough. But this is a Bloombergian technocracy of billionaires and activists, of people who think that “progress” makes things work, rather than things working leading to progress.

Healthcare.gov showed us that behind all the smoother and shinier designs was the same old clunky government where everything gets done because the right companies hire the right lobbyists and everything costs ten times what it should.

If the government can’t build a health care website, how is it going to actually run health care for an entire country is the obvious question that so many are asking. And the obvious answer is that it will run it the way it ran the website. It will throw wads of money and people at the problem and then look for programs it doesn’t like to squeeze for extra cash.

The Navy had to be cut to the bone and the Benghazi mission had to make do without security so that a Canadian company which began employing a classmate of Michelle Obama’s could score over half a billion to build a broken website. Obama mocked Mitt Romney’s criticism of his Navy cuts by telling him that we don’t fight with bayonets and horses anymore. Bayonets and horses are outdated. In our glorious modernity, we spend fortunes to build websites that don’t work instead.

Modernity has to be built. It has to be constructed brick by bit by rivet by cable by people who know what they are doing. Modernity without competence is as worthless as the ObamaCare website which looked pretty enough to give the illusion of technocratic modernity, but didn’t actually work.

Competence is the real modernity and it has very little to do with the empty trappings of design that surround it. In some ways the America of a few generations ago was a far more modern place because it was a more competent place. For all our nice toys, we look like primitive savages compared to men who could build skyscrapers and fleets within a year… and build them well.

Those aren’t things we can do anymore. Not because the knowledge and skills don’t exist, but because the culture no longer allows it. We can’t do them for the same reason that Third World countries can’t do what we do. It’s not that the knowledge is inaccessible, but that the culture gets in the way.

It’s our very hollow modernity that gets in the way of our truly being modern. We can no longer build big things because the ability to implement vision on a large scale no longer exists. We can still do impressive things as individuals, but that’s also true of Kenya or Thailand. And in China, they can carry out grandiose projects, but those projects have no vision or competence.

Read in full

MORE:

Obamacare Catastrophe Reveals Barack’s Entire Paper-Mache Fantasy World

Seriously, Florida? Seriously? – UPDATED

Why does Florida keep sending Alan Grayson back to Washington DC time and time again? Are the people in Grayson’s congressional district really of like-mind with this unmitigated, uncivil, uncouth buffoon? Or are they just eager to get him off their streets and out of town?

Here is Grayson’s latest email…

grayson email

What a propagandistic, agent provocateur, embarrassment this guy is.
Grayson is the epitome of a useful idiot assclown for the progressive/socialist/communist/Marxist democrat party agenda whose designated job is to go on the TV screen to slobber and spew ugly vitriol, playing to the most willfully ignorant among us … which is why the majority of TV gigs Grayson does are either on that assclown car wreck called MSNBC or HBO’s Bill Maher show. The problem is, the nation is led to believe Alan Grayson is the mirror image and resolute voice of his constituents that sent him to DC. Think hard and carefully in the election, FL-9. You do have a serious choice for sane and dignified representation on the floor of the US Congress … and on TV. “Stop the insanity!” The guy really does write the political ads for his own election opponent(s).

By the way, there are many minority members of the TEA Party, and growing, so, the above disgusting image is, I find, a not-so-subliminal threat to them by Grayson. Yet, people such as Grayson strip them of their skin color and heritage because they are not good little zip-lipped comrades for the “Progressive” cause. They must not think for themselves and expect others to do so as well. Minorities must have a political lobotomy or be skinned alive by the left. The jaded racist history of the nation’s democrat party is something the current democrats and the MSM try very hard to bury every moment of the day. However, since a republican POTUS broke free the chains of slavery, the liberal/leftist democrat party has slapped on new chains of oppression through endless entitlement baiting and addiction, and through ridicule and personal destruction for daring to have and practice free thought and free will … For stepping off the democrat party plantation.

HT: Weasel Zippers

UPDATE:

Grayson is defending his remarks and the KKK analogy citing erroneous claims of racism of the TEA Party (some of which were discovered to be interloping outside ‘plants’ at TEA Party rallies deliberately there for the MSM to do gotcha slams against the TP, and other claims having nothing to do with TEA Party affiliations).

Rep. Grayson blasted over anti-Tea Party email showing burning cross

Keep Ignoring This Particular Problem Until It Swims Up and Bites Us … Again

Shooting At Washington DC Navy Yard Reportedly Leaves Several Woundedmass_shooters

The MSM (and liberals with Twitter accounts) resorted to the typical template with last week’s Washington DC Navy Yard mass murder shooting:

First, get the facts completely wrong, even the person’s name/identity … Just be first with the dirt
Second, continue to push the lie(s) because it fits the gun control agenda
Third, barely, if that, correct the error(s)
Fourth, still push the blame on the gun, even if it is not the gun used
Fifth, find somebody else to blame (always first blame the NRA, then the GOP and/or “Bible-thumping Second Amendment law-abiding Americans)
Sixth, stupidly and wrongly blame the TEA Party/conservatives/”rightwingers” (even though some of the recent shooters have been democrat/liberal-leaners … and Obama and gun control supporters)
Seventh, (“He played video games? Thank Gaia!”) Blame the video games!
*Eighth (continued below the fold), completely ignore the fact that almost all of the mass shootings are happening in “Gun Free Zones” … Yes, even military bases

You see, it is never the shooter’s responsibility, or their history of mental illness and its occasionally volatile medications. It is always a deflection of responsibility and blame and condemnation of the gun(s), the Second Amendment, those who persist in defending the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, the other political party, violence-based entertainment, global warming/climate change…

However, while we are grasping at blame cards, Ann Coulter does find a viable source of blame that absolutely does connect with the mass murderers in America over the last four decades:

There’s been another mass shooting by a crazy person, and liberals still refuse to consider institutionalizing the dangerous mentally ill.

[…]

But Alexis couldn’t be institutionalized because the left has officially certified the mentally ill as “victims,” and once you’re a victim, all that matters is that you not be “stigmatized.”

But here’s the problem: Coddling the mentally ill isn’t even helping the mentally ill. Ask the sisters of crazy homeless woman “Billie Boggs” how grateful they were to the ACLU for keeping Boggs living on the streets of New York City. Ask the parents of Aaron Alexis, James Holmes (Aurora, Colo., movie theater shooter), Jared Loughner (Tucson, Ariz., mall shooter) or Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech shooter) how happy they are that their sons weren’t institutionalized.

Tellingly, throughout the last three decades, the overall homicide rate has been in free fall, thanks to Republican crime policies, from 10 per 100,000 in 1980 to 4 per 100,00 today. (You might even call them “common sense” crime policies.) But the number of mass shootings has skyrocketed from 4 per year, between 1900 and 1970, to 29 per year since then.

Something seems to have gone horribly wrong right around 1970. What could it be? Was it the introduction of bell-bottoms?

That date happens to correlate precisely with when the country began throwing the mentally ill out of institutions in 1969. Your memory of there not being as many mass murders a few decades ago is correct. Your memory of there not being as many homeless people a few decades ago is also correct.

But liberals won’t allow the dangerous mentally ill to be committed to institutions against their will. (The threat of commitment is very persuasive in getting disturbed individuals to take their medicine.) Something in liberals’ genetic makeup compels them to attack civilization, for example, by defending the right of dangerous psychotics to refuse treatment and then representing them in court after they commit murder.

[…]

In the decades since the deinstitutionalization movement began, more and more people kept being killed as a result of that movement — including the deinstitutionalized themselves. According to Torrey, between 1970 and 2004, the mentally ill were responsible for at least 4,700 murders in California.

Liberals will pretend to have missed the news that the Washington Navy Yard shooter was a paranoid schizophrenic. They refuse to acknowledge that the mass murder problem — as well as the homeless problem — only began after crazy people were thrown out of institutions in the 1970s. They tell us crapping in your pants on a New York City sidewalk is a “civil right.” They say that haranguing passersby on the street about your persecution by various movie stars is a form of “free speech.”

Only after a mass murder committed by a psychotic with a firearm do liberals spring to life and suggest a solution: Take away everyone’s guns.

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I Can See The “Community Organizer” From My House…

community organizer

Recall in 2008 during the then presidential election campaigns how all the in-the-know Obama supporters in the democrat party and in the media were so eager to elevate the man, with little to no experience at even an actual job, to a would be indisputable level of “Community Organizer” that would trump anything a crazy Vietnam-vet-McCain/Alaska-hick-Palin ticket could possibly offer the country … or the WORLD!!! As we have seen in recent weeks, when Obama’s claim to supreme expertise in the specialty of ‘organizing communities’ has been called upon, he has shown himself far over-sold even in that job.

Silvio Canto, Jr. holds up the mirror for all to see…

As you may recall, much of Senator Obama’s message in 2008 was about international coalitions. He mocked President Bush for “going at it alone.” I guess that 40-something countries in Iraq was not a big enough coalition. Or, having UK, Canadian and other NATO soldiers take bullets in Afghanistan was not enough either.

Today, President Obama stands alone in the world. He can’t even get the UK in Syria. He has found some “moral support” but no one is offering airplanes or missiles.

President Obama is saying that the world drew a “red line.” However, no one seems ready to enforce it or fight for the innocent people of Syria.

President Obama is painfully learning that it was easier to build coalitions in the campaign trail than from The Oval Office.

This is the latest about the coalition that won’t coalesce:

[…]

We’ve come a long way from that summer of 2008 when Obama was treated like a rock star in Europe.

Frankly, we have a perfect storm here: We have a man who made outregously silly statements about international relations when he was a candidate and a crowd silly enough to believe it.

Silly speaker plus silly listeners equals what we are seeing today.

Continue

Oddly, the strongest ally Obama has been able to organize into his tiny “Bomb Assad/Syria” community is his old 2008 foe Sen. John McCain … with Gov. Palin allowing, “Let Allah sort it out” … Which, of course, is far far worse than bombing the hell out of Syria, or something.

MORE:

“WH Chief of Staff: U.S. Has No Military Allies for Syria Strike”

“Phony Scandals”

Last week, while on his continuing campaign trail, Obama complained about “phony scandals” keeping republicans in the U.S. Congress too busy to pass his economy-wrecking socialist agenda. Shortly after the unconscionable gaffe crossed the live airwaves a large percentage of Americans took a collective gasp. Exactly what is phony about the Obama administration’s scandals, and precisely which of those scandals does Obama consider “phony”?

Benghazi – Christopher Stevens – Sean Smith – Glen Doherty – Tyrone S. Woods + (David Ubben x 20 hours/severely wounded on roof) = phony scandal.

Now, about that phony IRS scandal

tyranny

Embattled Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner and an attorney in the Federal Election Commission’s general counsel’s office appear to have twice colluded to influence the record before the FEC’s vote in the case of a conservative non-profit organization, according to e-mails unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee and obtained exclusively by National Review Online. The correspondence suggests the discrimination of conservative groups extended beyond the IRS and into the FEC, where an attorney from the agency’s enforcement division in at least one case sought and received tax information about the status of a conservative group, the American Future Fund, before recommending that the commission prosecute it for violations of campaign-finance law. Lerner, the former head of the IRS’s exempt-organizations division, worked at the FEC from 1986 to 1995, and was known for aggressive investigation of conservative groups during her tenure there, too.

“Several months ago . . . I spoke with you about the American Future Fund, a 501(c)(4) organization that had submitted an exemption application the IRS [sic],” the FEC attorney wrote Lerner in February 2009. The FEC, which polices violations of campaign-finance laws, is not exempted under Rule 6103, which prohibits the IRS from sharing confidential taxpayer information, but the e-mail indicates Lerner may have provided that information nonetheless: “When we spoke last July, you had told us that the American Future Fund had not received an exemption letter from the IRS,” the FEC attorney wrote.

The timing of the correspondence between Lerner and the FEC suggests the FEC attorney sought information from the IRS in order to influence an upcoming vote by the six FEC commissioners…

[…]

House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp and oversight-subcommittee chairman Charles Boustany are calling on the IRS, in the wake of these revelations, to provide all communications between the agency and the FEC between 2008 and 2012. “The American public is entitled to know whether the IRS is inappropriately sharing their confidential tax information with other agencies,” …

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phony

Because It’s Bad For Their Business

shelby steele

Shelby Steele squarely pokes all this hyped and manufactured outrage over the Zimmerman verdict in the eye with the cold, hard, sharp stick of truth…

The Revs. Jackson and Sharpton have been consigned to a hard fate: They can never be more than redundancies, echoes of the great men they emulate because America has changed. Hard to be a King or Mandela today when your monstrous enemy is no more than the cherubic George Zimmerman.

[…]

The civil-rights leadership rallied to Trayvon’s cause (and not to the cause of those hundreds of black kids slain in America’s inner cities this very year) to keep alive a certain cultural “truth” that is the sole source of the leadership’s dwindling power. Put bluntly, this leadership rather easily tolerates black kids killing other black kids. But it cannot abide a white person (and Mr. Zimmerman, with his Hispanic background, was pushed into a white identity by the media over his objections) getting away with killing a black person without undermining the leadership’s very reason for being.

The purpose of today’s civil-rights establishment is not to seek justice, but to seek power for blacks in American life based on the presumption that they are still, in a thousand subtle ways, victimized by white racism. This idea of victimization is an example of what I call a “poetic truth.” Like poetic license, it bends the actual truth in order to put forward a larger and more essential truth—one that, of course, serves one’s cause. Poetic truths succeed by casting themselves as perfectly obvious: “America is a racist nation”; “the immigration debate is driven by racism”; “Zimmerman racially stereotyped Trayvon.” And we say, “Yes, of course,” lest we seem to be racist. Poetic truths work by moral intimidation, not reason.

In the Zimmerman/Martin case the civil-rights establishment is fighting for the poetic truth that white animus toward blacks is still such that a black teenager—Skittles and ice tea in hand—can be shot dead simply for walking home. But actually this establishment is fighting to maintain its authority to wield poetic truth—the authority to tell the larger society how it must think about blacks, how it must respond to them, what it owes them and, then, to brook no argument.

[…]

One wants to scream at all those outraged at the Zimmerman verdict: Where is your outrage over the collapse of the black family? Today’s civil-rights leaders swat at mosquitoes like Zimmerman when they have gorillas on their back. Seventy-three percent of all black children are born without fathers married to their mothers. And you want to bring the nation to a standstill over George Zimmerman?

Read in full

And this from ABC News: “George Zimmerman Emerged From Hiding for Truck Crash Rescue”

I doubt George Zimmerman first checked to see the race of the victim…