THIS IS MY BLOG!
Owner complains Obama’s beer tent stop cost him $25,000
Was the beer cup half full or half empty?
President Barack Obama’s impact on what is arguably the Iowa State Fair’s most storied watering hole has become a morning-after mini-debate over the breakfast bacon thanks to a tweet from Sen. Chuck Grassley, as well as fairgrounds chatter.
Obama’s fair stop Monday evening required shutdown of the popular Bud Tent, the heart of fairgrounds nightlife at the intersection of E. 33rd Street and Grand Avenue. Fairgoers eager to greet the president were ushered inside, screened and scanned by the Secret Service and penned in by yellow caution tape. The entire production required at least two hours, and the president’s sleek black coach bus pulled away from the Bud Tent by 8:30 p.m.
There are “two sides to this story,” said Mike Cunningham II, the third generation owner of the 65-year-old Bud Tent.
On one hand, Cunningham, 39, appreciated the historical significance of Obama’s visit: His great-grandfather, Lloyd Cunningham, was secretary of the fair board from 1942 to 1962 and was on hand to greet then-President Dwight Eisenhower when Ike visited the centennial fair in 1954 with Iowa’s own President Herbert Hoover in tow. (That was the first of four visits by sitting presidents, followed by Gerald Ford in 1975, George W. Bush in 2002 and Obama on Monday.)
On the other hand, the small business owner side of Cunningham fumes that the president “put a damper on what I’m trying to do here.” His Bud Tent was shut down at the most lucrative time of day, with a popular rock cover band, Hairball, about to perform at the Susan B. Knapp Amphitheater next door with legions of thirsty fans.
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White Baby Threatens To Kill Black Panthers
From Big Hairy News:
CLEVELAND (BHN) – In a shocking rebuke to New Black Panther Party Chief of Staff Michelle William”s threat to firebomb nurseries full of white babies, one outspoken infant is threatening to push back.
“This fat, ignorant, racist b*tch and her retarded flunkies would have to take a three week course just to learn how to construct a Molotov cocktail, let alone figure out how to use it,” said newborn Binky Stoudemeyer. “There’s plenty of white babies like myself who wouldn’t mind capping some New Black Panthers, or should I say “New Black P*ssies? Word.”
Williams said her group will “do whatever we got to do” to defend themselves against the “gangs of cracker babies.”
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| Ohio newborn Binky Stoudemeyer |
More BHN here.
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Four-star general being investigated for lavish trip spending
From FOX News:
A four-star Army general is under investigation for allegedly misusing hundreds of thousands of government dollars on travel, hotels and other unauthorized expense, Defense Department officials said Wednesday.
The general has been identified as William “Kip” Ward, the first leader of the U.S. Africa Command.
Among the allegations are that Gen. Ward allowed family members and other unauthorized people to fly on government planes and that he spent excessive amounts of taxpayer dollars on hotel rooms, transportation and other expenses when he traveled as head of the Africa Command.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is expected to decide on Ward’s military future following the release of a Defense Department inspector general’s report, which is now under legal review and is expected to be out within the next couple of weeks.
Panetta could demote Ward before he is allowed to retire, effectively forcing him to retire at a lower rank and reducing his benefits.
Because Ward’s alleged offenses occurred while he was a four-star general, he could be forced to retire as a three-star, which officials said could cost him as much as $1 million in retirement pay and overtime. It was not immediately clear whether Ward also could face criminal charges or whether he will be fined.
Service members can retire only at the rank at which they served honorably, and a four-star general is the highest rank in the Army.
The inspector general’s investigation lasted about 17 months. Ward did not immediately respond Wednesday to a request for comment.
While the exact amount of alleged misspending was not disclosed, the estimated total raises comparisons with the $823,000 allegedly spent by dozens of employees of the General Services Administration, who were accused of lavish spending during an October 2010 conference at a Las Vegas resort.
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The 9 Weirdest Ways Kids Are Getting High Lately
A Chinese farmer who lost both arms in an accident spent eight years building himself new ones from scrap metal.
The safe sex rap — circa 1993.
From Slate: The thrilling demise of the daily deal business model.
Seventy-seven years after it became law, Social Security is keeping 20 million Americans out of poverty.
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Media Decry Attacks From “Both Sides”
From Alana Goodman at Commentary:
You have a Democratic campaign that’s painting its opponent as a felon, a tax-dodger, a dog-abuser, and a killer who will bring back slavery. On the other side, you have a Republican campaign that’s responding to these attacks as “hateful” and “inappropriate.” The media spin? Both sides need to tone down the “toxic rhetoric”:
“You thought last week was bad? Just when you thought last week’s third grade insults were as low as the campaign could go here, here we go again, the campaign has gotten even uglier,” MSNBC’s Chuck Todd said Wednesday. “It’s not faux outrage, it’s real outrage. Over the last 24 hours, the attacks from both sides have reached a new level of vitriol.”
CNN’s Soledad O’Brien said the campaigns struck a new note of negativity.
“Romney and Obama campaigns going on the offensive at the same time? What that means is nasty rhetoric, really nastier than ever,” she said this morning.
Seriously? Romney has basically stuck to attacks on Obama’s policy, it’s the Obama campaign that’s gone into the gutter. In fact, the only “negative” remarks from the Romney campaign cited in the Politico story were made in response to Democratic smears. Yes, Reince Priebus called Reid a liar — in response to Reid’s baseless accusations that Romney didn’t pay taxes for 10 years. The Washington Post gave Reid’s claim four Pinnochios, and Politifact rated it as “Pants on Fire.” Should they be criticized for toxic rhetoric as well?
But media figures who sold the public on the myth of Obama’s new, upbeat brand of politics back in 2008 apparently can’t admit that he’s the one spearheading the sleazy campaign tactics this time around. Hence, the more comfortable narrative that “both sides” are equally responsible for the negativity. Mark Halperin’s recommendation that Obama call Romney and propose a “truce” seems particularly unrealistic. How can anyone expect Obama to do this in good faith, after his campaign told Politico last year that it’s plan was to “destroy” Romney?
“Unless things change and Obama can run on accomplishments, he will have to kill Romney,” said a prominent Democratic strategist aligned with the White House.
The onslaught would have two aspects. The first is personal: Obama’s reelection campaign will portray the public Romney as inauthentic, unprincipled and, in a word used repeatedly by Obama’s advisers in about a dozen interviews, “weird. …
The second aspect of the campaign to define Romney is his record as CEO of Bain Capital, a venture capital firm that was responsible for both creating and eliminating jobs. Obama officials intend to frame Romney as the very picture of greed in the great recession — a sort of political Gordon Gekko.
Why should it be a surprise that the Obama campaign is doing precisely what it said it was going to do?
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Virgina business owner declines request for Joe Biden to stop in store because he built his business
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Like Allah, Islamic Revolutions Devour Their Own Children
From Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish:
When Muslim terrorists broke into an Egyptian Army checkpoint, stole an armored vehicle and a truck, loaded the latter with explosives and tried to launch an attack on Israel, before being blown away by Israeli forces; there was a general agreement on who was to blame.
While Morsi was somewhat more discreet, the Muslim Brotherhood announced, “this crime may well be the work of Israel’s Mossad” as part of an international conspiracy to destabilize their revolution. On the other side of the border, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh offered a more open-ended explanation. “Israel is responsible, one way or another.”
One way or another, Israel usually ends up being responsible for everything. Meanwhile Egypt has quietly asked Hamas to turn over a few of its terrorists who might have been involved. Because, while Israel is responsible for everything in the philosophical sense of being an omnipotent force of evil, when 16 Egyptian soldiers are killed, it becomes necessary to find the people who actually did it.
Turkey’s Islamist rulers who are facing the threat of an independent Kurdish nation rising out of the ruins in Syria and Iraq also have an explanation for the situation. Turkey’s Interior Minister stated that most Kurdish PKK guerrillas are not Turkish citizens and that quite a few are actually Israelis. So in between somehow recruiting multiple Egyptian Muslims willing to die for Israel, Avi and David took a trip to Kurdistan to take potshots at Turkish soldiers.
Western journalists try not to report on such embarrassing outbursts because it makes their favorite Islamists look like loony bigots who can’t deal with a problem without finding some byzantine way to blame it on their least favorite minority group. The Islamists in Cairo and Ankara know better, but their ideology makes it impossible to fight other Muslims without first declaring them to be heretics or pawns of heresy.
Israel and America are convenient justifications for Muslims to kill other Muslims in the name of Allah. When Bin Laden wanted to overthrow the Saudis, he made war on them as the pawns of America. When the Saudis had overthrown the Hashemites, they had accused them of being the pawns of Britain. Now that the Salafis are confronting the Muslim Brotherhood, they are also accusing them of being the pawns of America and Israel.
“Revolution is like Saturn, it devours its own children,” Danton says in Georg Buchner’s Danton’s Death, a controversial play about the French Revolution. In the modern context that line might be changed to read, “Revolution is like Allah, it devours its own children.” The Muslim Brotherhood has reacted to the attack with all the expected antics of revolutionaries eager to sup at the kiddie table.
One statement urges “the Egyptian people to face up to domestic forces of sabotage and subversion, beware of their sinister calls for strife and sedition”. Another calls on their own government “to implement the law firmly against the instigators of vandalism and subversion throughout the land and against their collaborators and agents involved in causing this deliberate confusion, chaos and mayhem across Egypt under the pretext of exercising freedom.”
Predictably enough, the attack is being used by Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood to crack down on domestic dissent and replace top officials in the Egyptian military. Not to mention repeating calls for dispensing with the Camp David Accords and fully remilitarizing the Sinai. But cynicism will only take the revolution so far.
The Jihadists are the children of the Islamic Revolution. The brats of the upscale millionaire Islamists running networks of companies in Egypt and Turkey funded with Saudi and Qatari cash. But the vested interests that begin revolutions are not always the ones who benefit from them. Germany sent Lenin back in a sealed car under the protection of its soldiers for the short-term goal of taking Russia out of the war. Germany succeeded in toppling a moderate Russian government and replacing it with radical Bolsheviks, and, thirty years later Soviet troops were occupying Berlin.
The Gulf States are already quarreling with the Muslim Brotherhood and accusing it of wanting to take them over. Even while both groups are working together to take over Syria, neither trusts each other. But the real threat to them is the chaos that they have unleashed. The Muslim Brotherhood revolutionaries, like their Bolshevik spiritual ancestors, are returning from exile in the West to carry off their revolutions, but the revolution doesn’t end where they say it does.
The Islamist imperative of the revolution is to purge heresy and secularism, to restore true Islam, but there has never been any consensus on what true Islam is. Even Mohammed was forced to recant some of his prophecies attributing them to “Satan” and, not long after his death, Islam began to fall apart into quarreling factions who gave rise to the Sunnis and the Shiites.
Muslims can’t agree on what Islam is. What they can agree on is that most other forms of Islam are heresy and, depending on the severity of the heresy, their practitioners may be freely killed. Islamic reform movements in their revolutionary purity have treated conventional Muslims as less pure for visiting shrines, using good luck charms or watching soccer. And every Islamic reform movement has opened the door for a new group that thinks they are a bunch of liberal heretics.
“Big fleas have little fleas, Upon their backs to bite ‘em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so, ad infinitum.” Islamic revolutions, like their secular counterparts, have countless smaller fleas who take Islam even more seriously and are even more determined to turn society into an exact ideal replica of 7th Century Arabia.
The Muslim Brotherhood might have been a flea on Egypt’s back, but the Salafis are a flea on its back, and there are fleas on the backs of the Salafis. Revolutions solve these problems with an extended round of purges that ends when no one believes in anything anymore. The French Revolution drowned itself in its own blood, and the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party did likewise. By the time Mao and Stalin’s last butchers were shown the door, Communism was no longer a revolutionary idea, it was just a rotting structure that would take several generations to dismantle.
For the Islamists the challenge is to firmly draw a line to their right and they cannot do that because Mohammed is on the other side of that line. Blaming Israel and “foreign elements” is a convenient way to avoid dealing with the logical consequences of their own ideology. It is also a demonstration of why ideological revolutions never prosper, but decay into paranoid tyrannies that are too afraid to loosen their grip on power because that there is no reason why what they did to the former rulers cannot also be done to them.
No matter how pure an Islamic party may claim to be, there are always newcomers who are even purer and more incorruptible. Every Jihadist gang can point to “extremists” who are too far over the line. And those extremists can point to their own extremists. And so on ad infinitum until all the fleas drinking blood are drowning in each other’s blood.
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Obama’s Educational Excellence Initiative
From Walter E. Williams at the Patriot Post:
President Barack Obama recently wrote an executive order that established a White House initiative on educational excellence for black Americans that will be housed in the Department of Education. It proposes “to identify evidence-based best practices” to improve black achievement in school and college. Though black education is in desperate straits, the president’s executive order will accomplish absolutely nothing to improve black education. The reason is that it does not address the root causes of educational rot among black Americans. It’s not rocket science; let’s look at it.
The president’s initiative contains not one word about rampant inner-city school violence, which makes educational excellence impossible. During the past five years, Philadelphia’s 268 schools had 30,000 serious criminal incidents, including assaults — 4,000 of which were on teachers — robberies and rapes. Prior to recent layoffs, Philadelphia’s school district employed about 500 police officers. In Chicago last year, 700 young people were gunfire victims, and dozens of them lost their lives. Similar stories of street and school violence can be told in other large, predominantly black cities, such as Baltimore, Detroit, Cleveland, Oakland and Newark.
If rampant school crime is not eliminated, academic excellence will be unachievable. If anything, the president’s initiative will help undermine school discipline, because it advocates “promoting a positive school climate that does not rely on methods that result in disparate use of disciplinary tools.” That means, for example, if black students are suspended or expelled at greater rates than, say, Asian students, it’s a “disparate use of disciplinary tools.” Thus, even if blacks are causing a disproportionate part of disciplinary problems, they cannot be disciplined disproportionately.
Whether a student is black, white, orange or polka-dot and whether he’s poor or rich, there are some minimum requirements that must be met in order to do well in school. Someone must make the student do his homework, see to it that he gets a good night’s rest, fix a breakfast, make sure he gets to school on time and make sure he respects and obeys his teachers. Here’s my question: Which one of those requirements can be accomplished by a presidential executive order, a congressional mandate or the edict of a mayor? If those minimal requirements aren’t met, whatever else is done is for naught.
Spending more money on education cannot replace poor parenting. If it could, black academic achievement wouldn’t be a problem. Washington, D.C., for example, spends $18,667 per student per year, more than any state, but comes in dead last in terms of student achievement. Paul Laurence Dunbar High School was established in 1870 in Washington, D.C., as the nation’s first black public high school. From 1870 to 1955, most of its graduates went off to college, earning degrees from Harvard, Princeton, Williams, Wesleyan and others. As early as 1899, Dunbar students scored higher on citywide tests than students at any of the district’s white schools. Its attendance and tardiness records were generally better than those of white schools. During this era of high achievement, there was no school violence. It wasn’t racially integrated. It didn’t have a big budget. It didn’t even have a lunchroom or all those other things that today’s education establishment says are necessary for black academic achievement.
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We have to reverse this trend, fast!
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