I WILL NEVER, EVER, EVER! BUY ANYTHING FROM PEP BOYS, EVER AGAIN!!!

I noted, in this footnote, that I would be taking my truck to Pep Boys for two new steering tires and a front-end alignment. I called then around 0845 and set an appointment for 1100; I had to work this morning, and didn’t think I could get there much earlier than that. Setting an appointment is something that Pep Boys offers, and you can do so online, so this was not something some low-level clown did over the phone for which he had no authority.

I arrived at the Pep Boys at 1901 MacArthur Road in Whitehall, Pennsylvania at about 1040, well before my appointment; I was not late. I went to the service desk and checked in, noting that I had an appointment for 1100.

1100 arrived, and they hadn’t put my truck into the service bay. While I am not a patient person, I was certainly willing to cut them a break on fifteen minutes or so.

At 1130, they had not pulled my truck into the service bay, and there was no empty bay. By this time, I was starting to get annoyed.

At noon, they had still not pulled my truck into the service bay. Now, I was getting seriously annoyed. At 1215, I got up and walked/stalked over to the service desk and the gentleman guy who had checked me in said, “They’re pulling in into the bay now.”

I walked outside. No, they were not pulling my truck into the service bay, and all of the bays were still full, though it did look like they were finishing up on a couple of vehicles. At 1225, 85 minutes after my appointment was scheduled, they pulled a car out and came for my truck.

Now, when I had set the appointment, I specifically asked how long it would take, and was told about 1½ hours. I went back to the waiting area, with its uncomfortable chairs and dearth of reading material about anything other than cars. At some point over an hour later, I went outside and looked, and there was my truck, outside. I thought it was done. WRONG! They had to pull it into another service bay to do the wheel alignment . . . and that bay was still occupied.

In the end, my 1½ hour service appointment, set for 1100, finished at 1430. And I will tell you, right now, that I will never go back to Pep Boys, I will not buy so much as a valve stem cap from them ever again, and I urge everyone who reads this to never, ever, ever! give Pep Boys any of your business, ever again.
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Cross posted on THE FIRST STREET JOURNAL.

Especially for Foxfier!

And it might take someone as ruthless as a Cardassian to solve the mess Barack Obama is leaving us!

Just who is waging a war on women?

This story has been making its way around the blogosphere. This one from Donald Douglas:

Jeez, this dude needs to put on a raincoat — either that, or keep it holstered permanently.

See the Los Angeles Times, “Man who had 30 kids with 11 women wants child-support break” (via Memeorandum)

As Darleen Click put it, “Dependency is the new freedom . . . .”

I have seen this story floating around, and while the irresponsibility of Desmond Hatchett is obvious, what I haven’t seen is anyone asking:

• Don’t the women involved have any responsibility for contraception; and
• Just what kind of self-respect do the ladies in question have if they are copulating with a guy who has been fornicating with that many other women?

The feminists who normally comment on just about anything relating to sex and families have been notably quiet: Amanda Marcotte has, at least thus far, said nothing, Feministing has been completely silent, despite having an article up about maternal health still being a feminist issue, and is concerned about the possible sexism on a picture of a woman riding two dolphins, Melissa McEwan was very busy condemning those who are concerned about the recent demographic news that more non-white babies were born in the US than white ones, including a condemnation of anybody who is in any way critical of contraception, yet hadn’t a word about the Hatchett case, and Think Progress and the Lost Kos and the Delaware Liberal were all silent.

Why? Well, if any of our friends on the left even questioned this case, it would raise questions about the women’s responsibility as well as the man’s. Thirty children by eleven different women means that most of these women had to have multiple children by the same man to whom they were not married and could not support. Were our friends on the left to raise this topic, it would call into question their abandonment of the apparently quaint and surely anti-feminist notion that sex has natural consequences, that women bear the greater burden of these consequences, and the old-fashioned norms that women shouldn’t screw around were for their own protection and well-being.

Contraception? It’s inexpensive and widely available. Abortion? Yes, I would like to outlaw it, but it is still perfectly legal, and a large city like Knoxville, Tennessee (which is the home of the University of Tennessee) has two abortion clinics, with inexpensive fees, along with a link to an organization which can help poor women with those fees.

Dr Douglas concluded:

And it is. The report indicates that some of the mothers of Hatchett’s children get as little as $1.50 a month. Somewhere along the way, probably as early as the first child, Hatchett and his hookups were relying on government to pay for their children, the hospital costs, for example (and pre-natal care), and unless the mothers are living with family members and self-sufficient, there’s no doubt that the kids are being supported through public assistance. Indeed, that’s why the county is all over this dude to get with the program. And I can guarantee you that if you say one word about the breakdown of individual responsibility in this case you’ll be attacked as racist. It’s almost unbelievable to think about what’s happened to this country. That’s almost unbelievable. As long as marriage is ridiculed by the enlightened progressive, and as these same left-wing idiots insist on perverting the institution through gay marriage radicalism, things will only get worse before they get better.

The county “is all over this dude to get with the program?” How? He makes minimum wage which, if the reports are accurate, means he is making $7.25 an hour, or $15,080 a year. Supposedly half of his income is being taken for child support, but, divided among thirty children, doesn’t go very far. If some of the children’s mothers get $1.50 a month, the administrative costs alone are higher than what the recipients get.

The war on women? It was waged with not by Republican policies, but with Desmond Hatchett’s dick, and the people who are suffering the casualties are the eleven women who have children for whom they receive virtually no child support (they were willing casualties), for the thirty children growing up without their scumbag father, and the taxpayers who are going to have to pay for the irresponsibility of Mr Hatchett and his eleven sluts.
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Cross posted on THE FIRST STREET JOURNAL.

Utter madness

Thanks to William Teach, I found this article, from The Washington Post:

Secret U.S. program releases high-level insurgents in exchange for pledges of peace

By Kevin Sieff, Published: May 6, 2012

KABUL — The United States has for several years been secretly releasing high-level detainees from a military prison in Afghanistan as part of negotiations with insurgent groups, a bold effort to quell violence but one that U.S. officials acknowledge poses substantial risks.

As the United States has unsuccessfully pursued a peace deal with the Taliban, the “strategic release” program has quietly served as a live diplomatic channel, allowing American officials to use prisoners as bargaining chips in restive provinces where military power has reached its limits.

But the releases are an inherent gamble: The freed detainees are often notorious fighters who would not be released under the traditional legal system for military prisoners in Afghanistan. They must promise to give up violence — and U.S. officials warn them that if they are caught attacking American troops, they will be detained once again.

There are no absolute guarantees, however, and officials would not say whether those who have been released under the program have later returned to attack U.S. and Afghan forces once again.

“Everyone agrees they are guilty of what they have done and should remain in detention. Everyone agrees that these are bad guys. But the benefits outweigh the risks,” said one U.S. official who, like others, discussed the issue on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the program.

The story Mr Teach referenced was magnified by another:

U.S. hostage appeals to Obama in video released by al-Qaeda

WASHINGTON (AP) – In a video released Sunday by al-Qaeda, American hostage Warren Weinstein said he will be killed unless President Obama agrees to the militant group’s demands.

“My life is in your hands, Mr. President,” Weinstein said in the video. “If you accept the demands, I live; if you don’t accept the demands, then I die.”

Weinstein was abducted last August in Lahore, Pakistan, after gunmen tricked his guards and broke into his home. The 70-year-old from Rockville, Md., is the country director in Pakistan for J.E. Austin Associates, a Virginia-based firm that advises a range of Pakistani business and government sectors.

In a video message posted on militant websites in December, al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri said Weinstein would be released if the United States stopped airstrikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. He also demanded the release of all al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects around the world.

I was strongly reminded of President Reagan’s misguided notion that he could somehow find some “moderate” Iranians with whom to negotiate for the release of American and other Western hostages being held in Lebanon, and that he could trade military weapons for those hostages. Some hostages actually were released, but, in a development which should have surprised no one, more Americans were then abducted to serve as replacement hostages. After all, seizing and holding American hostages now had a concrete value.

And yet another story in today’s news:

Recidivism rises among released Guantanamo detainees

By Mark Hosenball

(Reuters) – The proportion of militants released from detention at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay who subsequently were believed to have returned to the battlefield rose slightly over the last year, according to official figures released on Monday.

In a summary report, the office of the Director of National Intelligence said that 27.9 percent of the 599 former detainees released from Guantanamo were either confirmed or suspected of later engaging in militant activity.

The figures represent a 2.9 percent rise over a 25 percent aggregate recidivism rate reported by the intelligence czar’s office in December 2010.

The increase in the apparent recidivism rate, while not large, comes at a delicate time for President Barack Obama, and could further complicate his attempts to negotiate a peace deal with Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.

As a “confidence building” measure, the Taliban have insisted on the release of five specific Taliban leaders currently held at Guantanamo. The Obama administration has been working on a plan under which the detainees could be transferred to the Persian Gulf state of Qatar but still held in detention.

I will eschew diplomacy here, and speak very plainly and bluntly: this is madness! We know that at least some of the released Guantanamo prisoners have returned to the battlefield, to fight against the United States. And while the first story noted that “officials would not say whether those who have been released under the program have later returned to attack U.S. and Afghan forces once again,” a recidivism rate of over 25% from the released Guantanamo prisoners strongly suggests that at least some of the prisoners released in Afghanistan have returned to the battlefield. President Obama is commander-in-chief of the United States armed forces, and is ultimately responsible for their safety and security; how many soldiers and Marines have died because of an idiotic policy to release the enemy, captured on the battlefield, back into the war zone?

I’m trying to picture President Roosevelt telling General Dwight Eisenhower to release some of the German troops captured during World War II as some sort of good will gesture, and somehow, I just can’t.

The notion that we can somehow negotiate a peace agreement with the Taliban is just as stupid as the notion we could find “moderate” Iranians with whom to negotiate. The idea that we can extract promises from prisoners about to be released that they will make nice and not shoot at Americans again, and that those promises will be kept is one that would be rejected as folly by a freshman — a high school freshman — but is, apparently, some sort of sophisticated wisdom by high ranking officials in the Obama Administration, including the President himself. The final line quoted in the first story is instructive:

“Everyone agrees they are guilty of what they have done and should remain in detention. Everyone agrees that these are bad guys. But the benefits outweigh the risks,” said one U.S. official who, like others, discussed the issue on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the program.

No, he wasn’t discussing the issue “on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the program,” he was discussing the issue on the condition of anonymity because he didn’t want to be publicly identified as a fool. Please tell me just what benefits here outweigh the risks to the soldiers and Marines who are being put at greater risk of being killed by returning enemy fighters to the battlefield.

If I sound angry here, it is because I am. I have two daughters in the United States Army Reserve, and while they are not deployed to Afghanistan, either or both could be ordered there tomorrow if the needs of the Army require it. Women are not assigned to combat units, though they can be “attached” to such units if required, and female soldiers and Marines have come under fire in Iraq and Afghanistan, and some have died. My daughters knew that there were risks involved in enlisting in the Army, as did John Hitchcock’s daughter, when she served, including fifteen months of duty in Iraq. It is one thing for soldiers and Marines to risk their lives in defense of our country and its missions, when they are under strong, sound leadership that cares for their safety, and puts their safety as paramount as it can be in pursuit of the mission.

It is something else entirely when their commander-in-chief is an idiot.
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Cross posted on THE FIRST STREET JOURNAL

Line of the Day

Smitty, writing on The Other McCain, and commenting on Williams College, a private school in Massachusetts, inviting porn star Jiz Lee to speak on campus, said:

That a whore is being elevated to a position of honor as a speaker at the college isn’t news; politicians travel the lecture circuit all the time.

What more needs to be said?

Oh, that unbiased professional media!

Not one story, but two, from Sister Toldjah:

#Trayvon: @NBCNews blames “error in production process” for doctored Zimmerman 911 call

Posted by: ST on April 3, 2012 at 5:58 pm<
Via WaPo’s Erik Wemple:

NBC has completed its investigation into the mishandling of the police dispatcher’s conversation with George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin case. And the process ends with a finding of error, plus an apology. Here is the statement just issued by the network:

During our investigation it became evident that there was an error made in the production process that we deeply regret. We will be taking the necessary steps to prevent this from happening in the future and apologize to our viewers.

That apology addresses the “Today” show’s failure to abridge accurately the conversation between Zimmerman and the dispatcher in this high-profile case. This is how the program portrayed a segment of that conversation:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.

And here is how it actually went down:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.

Dispatcher: OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic?

Zimmerman: He looks black.

“Error made in the production process”? What a flimsy, lame excuse. And completely unbelievable. Heads should roll over this. Not only that, but NBC should also be apologizing to George Zimmerman and his family for the doctored tape, which I would bet money was deliberately doctored before airing. Hey, they’ve pulled racially sensationalistic crap like this before.

As I’ve said before, when all is said and done and assuming Zimmerman isn’t put in jail for the rest of his life over killing Trayvon Martin, both he and his family should sue the mainstream media for the outright falsehoods they’ve reported and the unsubstantiated speculation some members of the press corps have shamelessly tried to pass off as “fact.” The dereliction of duty by “straight news reporters” on this case is simply staggering, and it is paramount that they be held to account.

Isn’t it amazing that an “error made in the production process” would just so happen to put a comment by George Zimmerman in the racism category rather than as a response to a question from a police dispatcher? Quite a coincidence there, wouldn’t you say?

But nobody is perfect, and mistakes can be made, even by professionals. But now comes the second story:

#Trayvon: @CNN cleans up “racist” Zimmerman 911 audio – he says “It’s f–king cold”!

Posted by: ST on April 5, 2012 at 12:44 am

This is absolutely HUGE! The national mainstream media, race pimps and liberal commentators galore have been declaring for weeks that George Zimmerman is guilty of a “vicious hate crime” because he allegedly said “f–king coons” on his 911 call before he “murdered” (their words) Trayvon Martin on Feb. 26th. CNN has cleaned up the audio clip and if you listen to it it sounds very clear that he says “It’s f–king” cold. Listen and watch (via @informedblackmn):

http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/apps/cvp/3.0/swf/cnn_416x234_embed.swf?context=embed&videoId=crime/2012/04/05/ac-tuchman-zimmerman-audio-enhanced.cnn

People may be wondering why Zimmerman would say it was “cold” in south Florida. It was rainy and in the low 60s that night, and that IS cold for south Florida.

More at the link.

There was, as we all remember, the video presented by ABC News in which we were told that there was no visible injury to the back of George Zimmerman’s head, as one would have expected given the claim that Trayvon Martim bashed Mr Zimmerman’s head to the ground more than once. Then, lo and behold, the tape was enhanced, by someone other than ABC News, and, amazingly enough, the wound one would expect to be there, was there.

Now, none of this either proves nor disproves whether Mr Zimmerman acted legally in self-defense, or committed a crime; that determination awaits a professional investigation by trained personnel at the scene. Those of us looking at the case from a distance simply do not have the evidence or the professional skills to know what happened.

What these stories do indicate is that those of us looking at the case from a distance cannot even trust the partial evidence we have, because the supposedly professional media have been making mistake after mistake after mistake, to the point at which it is reasonable to believe that these aren’t just mistakes anymore, but deliberate attempts to influence people’s judgement by giving them false or misleading or deliberately incomplete information. And, just as importantly, it took individuals from the right of the political spectrum to discover these “mistakes” on the part of the professional media!

Nor is this even the first time. CBS News used forged documents, documents which were such obvious forgeries that the conservatively biased bloggers from Powerline were able to spot them from video tapes, before high-definition television, even though CBS News somehow couldn’t, with the documents in their hands. CBS News was shilling for Democratic presidential nominee Senator John F Kerry (D-MA) at the time, and one of the CBS News people, the since-fired Mary Mapes, even contacted the Kerry campaign in advance of this story.

Why did it take conservative bloggers to discover the fraud? The answer is simple: because the liberals liked the story, and weren’t going to check it any further. The same thing is happening today.

The moral of the story is clear: if it comes from ABC, CBS or NBC, check their stories before you believe them.
__________________________________
Cross Posted on The First Street Journal.

Unfortunately, you cannot idiot-proof government.

From

Regulatory Insanity, 2: A $17,000 Dumpster Ramp for the Handicapped

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:31 am

A reader from somewhere in Southern California writes to lament the regulatory roadblocks that are severely delaying the opening of his business:

We submitted our building construction plans for the restaurant last year to the county. We had over fifty revisions including a request that the trash dumpster have an enclosure. We stated that the dumpster had a walled enclosure of six feet in height and that the dumpster was rain proof. The County stated that we must have a roof over the trash dumpster. We had the architect draw it up. The plans returned rejected.

The County now rejected the dumpster enclosure because it violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. They required that we build a ramp with a locking gate at the top of the ramp for any wheelchair-bound employee. We argued that the public did not have access to the enclosure and we would not ask any employees in a wheelchair to throw out the trash. The County stated that the lack of a ramp would create a barrier to hiring a handicapped person.

The additional ramp with locking gate increased construction costs by $17,000 and it will take my employees longer to throw out the trash on a daily basis.

Much more at the original, as well as some sound discussion, but Patterico is primarily concerned with the idiocy of foisting unnecessary regulations in a manner which will increase costs to businesses. Roughly five out of every six Americans who have jobs work for private businesses, and adding additional, unnecessary regulatory burdens places additional costs on just the people we want, and need, to create new jobs.

I noticed something a bit different.

We stated that the dumpster had a walled enclosure of six feet in height and that the dumpster was rain proof. The County stated that we must have a roof over the trash dumpster.

Think about how a dumpster is emptied. The truck comes, with the forks, which it puts in the slots on the side of the dumpster. The driver then picks it up and dumps the contents into the truck. If the dumpster pad has a roof on it, the truck must pick up the dumpster a few inches, then back out before it can raise the container and dump the garbage into the truck, lower the container, and then pull forward to place the container back in the enclosure. This is an additional burning of Gaia-harming diesel fuel, spewing yet more CO2 into the atmosphere where it will melt Antarctica and drown all of the penguins!

That, of course, is if the business owner is lucky. If he isn’t lucky, the truck won’t back up far enough, and when it raises the dumpster, it will tear the roof all to pieces, spreading debris and rusty nails and splinters all over the parking lot, where some customer will step on a nail or puncture a tire. And if he is really unlucky, in the process of destroying the roof, it will somehow snag the dumpster, and throw it to the ground, upside down, scattering all of the garbage through the parking lot.

In construction, you try to idiot-proof as much as you can. Unfortunately, you cannot idiot-proof government.
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Cross posted from THE FIRST STREET JOURNAL.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu addresses Congress

From

PM: Israel has acted against US advice before

Netanyahu tells congress Israel has historically acted in its own interests against American advice; Boehner pledges Congress will never let Jewish state ‘stand alone.’

By Herb Keinon, JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENT
03/07/2012 00:39

WASHINGTON – Citing historical precedents in which the US and Israel did not see eye-to-eye and Israel acted according to its own perception of its interests, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told congressional leaders Tuesday that Israel viewed things differently than the US did at times, because it was not a global power and was more vulnerable.

Israeli sources said Netanyahu, meeting congressional leaders before flying back to Israel Tuesday evening, noted that David Ben-Gurion declared independence against the advice of the US; Levi Eshkol launched a preemptive attack in 1967, against Washington’s counsel; and Menachem Begin decided to bomb the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 despite US opposition.

America has global interests, while Israel is “on the ground and more vulnerable,” Netanyahu said in reference to Iran, saying that this made for a very different perspective.

A very different perspective! While the United States has global interests, Iran does not pose an existential threat to the United States; if Iran succeeds in building nuclear weapons, she would pose an existential threat to Israel.

This is not to say that the United States has never faced an existential threat. Russia has enough nuclear weapons, mounted on sophisticated delivery systems, to turn this country into a radioactive black hole in the ground. And while Russia seems like more of a remote threat now than the old Soviet Union was, the threat still persists.

But Americans really know very little about existential threats. The threat of a sudden Soviet nuclear attack, which was always possible, was still a sort of unrealistic, hazy, implausible, and just plain unreal thing. I am old enough to remember nuclear attack drills in kindergarten, where the teachers would have us scramble under our desks, on the red mats on which we’d take our daily kindergarten naps, but those were back in 1958, when Nikita Sergeievich Khrushchev was Premier and Cпутник was our new orbiting moon. For Americans, the existential threat was always just a threat, something never carried out, and something very unlikely to ever be carried out.

For the Israelis, an existential threat is all too real, because the Jews have faced a real, actual attempt to kill every last one of them, and though now quite elderly, there are still Holocaust survivors living in Israel. Even after the end of the Third Reich and the liberation from the concentration camps, the recovering Jews still faced real opposition in their attempt for form a new state, not just from the hostile Arabs in the Levant, but from the British, who, fearing the Arab reaction if too many Jewish refugees were allowed into the Levant, threw many of them into the Atlit detainee camp. Israel was formed again not by peaceful Jewish refugees from the devastation of Europe, but by an armed struggle against the British Mandatory Authority. This is part of the history that every Israeli child learns, is part of the culture that every Israeli knows, and is still attested to by some of the now very elderly men, and women, who fought for Israeli independence.

We Americans don’t understand the Arabs, and cannot see the appeal that political Islam has for Muslims in the Middle East. The Israelis, being much closer to Western civilization than the Arabs, are a people with whom we can more closely identify. But if we more closely identify with them, many of the Israelis really are cultural strangers to us. While we can kind of, sort of picture the Israeli settlers as analogous to our Western pioneers, they were actually quite different, rarely safe, scratching out an existence in a barren land, surrounded by hostile natives who could not be driven far off, and with the women just as responsible for the defense of the community as the men.

The Israelis are somewhat closer to us than the Arabs, culturally speaking, but only somewhat. When Prime Minister Netanyahu notes that Israel has gone its own way on certain issues of critical importance to them, it has often been because the Israelis believed there was no other choice. Some Americans believe that the Israelis ought to be willing to take chances for peace; that is easy to say when your country is safe and secure behind 3,000 miles of blue water. When your country is a small nation, one that can be driven across in an hour, it may not seem that there is a lot of room to take chances.
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Cross Posted on THE FIRST STREET JOURNAL.

This is not a surprise

Patterico once had a mocking post about finding someone to nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize, after it was revealed that convicted murderer Stanley “Tookie” Williams had been so nominated. It was all an effort to prevent the state of California from relieving Mr Williams of the pains of this mortal vale, of course, but the blatantly political reasons that some people — and I use that term loosely — who have the privilege to make nominations were revealed for all to see.

Bradley Manning, U.S. soldier accused of leaking material to WikiLeaks, among those nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

231 nominations have been submitted for this year’s award

By The Associated Press / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Monday, February 27, 2012, 9:03 AM

OSLO, Norway — A spokesman for the Nobel Peace Prize jury says 231 nominations have been submitted for this year’s award, with publicly disclosed candidates including a former Ukrainian prime minister and the U.S. soldier accused of leaking classified material to WikiLeaks.

The secretive committee doesn’t reveal who has been nominated, but those with nomination rights sometimes announce their picks. They include Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private charged with the biggest leak of classified information in U.S. history, Russian human rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina and former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.

Norwegian Nobel Committee secretary Geir Lundestad told the AP on Monday that “The list of nominees is a mixture of repeated nominations and some new names.”

PFC Manning does not face the death penalty, so there’s no claim that the nomination was made to save his life, as was the case with Mr Williams. Rather, this was a clearly political attempt to glorify someone who stole and then had published American classified information, without even having comprehensive knowledge of what he was divulging. PFC Manning simply dumped hundreds of thousands of documents, which could have contained information which led directly to the deaths of Americans for all he knew, into the lap of Julian Assange, an accused rapist, who published much of them.¹

That there are quack nominations is unsurprising. Heck, there have been Nobel Peace Prize winners whose awards call into question the intelligence and sincerity of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee: Yassir Arafat,, in 1994, a Palestinian terrorist responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands; Le Duc Tho, in 1973, who at least had the decency to decline; Al Gore, in 2007, for his efforts to scam the world on global warming; Jimmy Carter, in 2002, for his persistent criticism of President George W Bush; and Barack Obama, in 2009, for not being George W Bush. Former President Bush, who led the liberation of fifty million people from Ba’ath Party and Taliban tyranny, will never be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The only real surprise is that we haven’t heard of a Nobel Peace Prize nomination for Mumia abu-Jamal Wesley Cook.

______________________________________
¹ – Though PFC Manning has not yet been convicted, he does not deny that he took this action. His defense, such as it is, is that he was a troubled individual who should never have been granted access to classified information in the first place, and that the Army failed to remove him from his sensitive post when it was obvious that such should have been done.

Deployment

I noticed that our esteemed host’s left sidebar image has had a slight addition:

My Daughter Used To Serve

My daughter, now an Iraq War veteran, was in the Army for roughly 5.5 years.

We all honor Laura’s service to our country.

Now comes my older daughter’s turn: her Army Reserve unit, the 476^th Engineering Detachment, will be heading to Fort Bliss, Texas, on Tuesday, before shipping out to Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti, the operating base of the Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa. She is scheduled for nine months in Africa.

The 476^th Engineering Detachment are primarily surveyors, though they have other duties.

Great news! The national debt has not risen by $200 billion since the beginning of President Obama’s third year in office!

As of Thursday, 23 November 2012, the last day for which figures are available, the national debt stood at $15,435,694,556,033.29, and that’s only $199,422,676,240.51 higher than it was on 20 January 2012, the beginning of the third year of Mr Obama’s term.

And the national debt is still $290,282,803,488.23 lower than the amount it would have to be to match the amount added under President Bush.

Assuming that the additions to the national debt continue at the same rate as they have since the beginning of President Obama’s third year in office, he will have tied President Bush’s national debt addition — which took him eight years to accomplish, it should be noted — on 13 April 2012. I was snarkily hoping he’d tie the record on April 15^th, income tax day, but 15 April 2012 falls on a Sunday this year, and income taxes are now due on April 16^th.

Still, if the debt will manage to accumulate just slightly less rapidly, maybe President Obama can hit that number on the 16^th! That should give him a goal for which to strive.

A political cartoon from The Miami Herald

One of my high school classmates, who is a die-hard Democrat, recently posted this cartoon from the Miami Herald on his Facebook page:

Well, reading the sign held up by the Jackass, I have to wonder: why, when the Democrats held large majorities in both Houses of Congress, including a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, didn’t they actually do any of that? The real reason, of course, is that it’s all a lie: those are the things the Democrats campaign on doing, but, once in office, they never actually try to do them. A shorter term for it would be populism.

Cut spending, the first item on the list? In FY2007, the last year that the Republicans controlled the Congress, total federal outlays were 19.7% of GDP, which was way too high, and produced a $160.7 billion deficit. Since the Democrats won control of the Congress, total federal outlays have shot up, to 20.8% of GDP in FY2008, when George Bush was still our President, to over 24% every single year since Barack Obama was inaugurated. President Obama’s proposed budget calls for total spending of 23.3% for FY2013 and in the mid 22% range for as far into the future as he can project, including years in which he projects steady economic growth and that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be only memories.¹

Even the last item, the one the Democrats like so much, Raise Taxes for the Super Rich, the Democrats could have done, in 2009 and 2010, when they had solid majorities, but they didn’t even try! The 2001/2003 tax cuts were scheduled to expire at the end of 2010, yet the Democrats who controlled the eleventy-first Congress never even brought a bill to retain those cuts for everyone below $250,000, and let them expire for above that income — one of Mr Obama’s 2008 campaign promises — until after the 2010 elections, after they had already lost. Warren Buffett, the billionaire who says that we should raise taxes on the rich, runs a corporation, Berkshire-Hathaway, which owes the IRS a billion dollars in back taxes, dating from 2002, because he’s nothing but a hypocrite.

Cut small business taxes? The President’s FY2013 budget proposal calls for increasing taxes on above $250,000 earners, but ²/₃ of those filers are actually unincorporated small businesses! The Democrats say that they want to cut taxes for small businesses, but actually propose increases on taxes which impact small businesses, and then let companies like Berkshire-Hathaway, run by an Obama supporter, withhold their legally-owed taxes for years and years.

Cut corporate welfare and big business subsidies? Most people have heard of Solyndra, because it failed so badly after Obama Administration porkulus plan loan guarantees, but it turned out that there were 11 other solar-energy firms which did the same damned thing, all failing, because the Democrats weren’t ending corporate welfare or business subsidies, but simply moved the subsidies to companies which they favored.

The people for whom good, rank-and-file working class Democrats have been voting for all of these years have been lying to them, lying to them all along. They say the things their voters want to hear, and then once they have their votes in their pockets, don’t do any of the things their constituents voted for them to do.

This is the part that Republicans just don’t understand. The Democrats treat their supporters like absolute idiots, lying to them continually, and yet their supporters keep supporting them! Republicans lied to their supporters, too, about cutting spending, but that resulted in the abandonment of the Republicans in the 2006 elections, and the rise of the TEA Party faction in 2010, something the Republican leadership never anticipated, and some Republican officeholders discovered wasn’t to their liking in the 2010 primary elections.

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¹ – All figures in this paragraph are from the President’s proposed FY2013 budget, from Table 1.1—Summary of Receipts, Outlays, and Surpluses or Deficits (-): 1789–2017 and Table 1.2—Summary of Receipts, Outlays, and Surpluses or Deficits (-) as Percentages of GDP: 1930–2017.
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Cross-posted on The First Street Journal

She could have wished to meet Justin Bieber; instead she just wanted to be a soldier!

Cystic fibrosis is a terrible disease, one which compromises lung function and leads to systemic organ degradation, slowed growth and physical weakness. Once nearly always fatal in early childhood, the condition can be managed via modern medicine, but the sufferer will always be in a disease management regimen.

For someone with cystic fibrosis, what we would consider a “normal life” is just not a reality. Alyssa Braden, 13, of Garland, Texas, suffers from cystic fibrosis, and wanted nothing more than to be a soldier in the United States Army. For three days, the Make A Wish Foundation, and the 193^rd Infantry Brigade at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, made her wish come true.

Private wish: Teen fulfills dream of being a Soldier

By Cursha Pierce-Lunderman, Fort Jackson Leader

FORT JACKSON, Sc.c. — Alyssa Braden could have had any wish in the world fulfilled. But — in lieu of meeting a celebrity or visiting a theme park — the diminutive teen chose to get down and dirty.

Her wish? To join the Army.

The 13-year-old from Texas has spent the past week training with battalions in Fort Jackson’s 193rd Infantry Brigade through coordination with the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Alyssa participated in morning physical training sessions, rappelled down Victory Tower, conducted convoy training missions, qualified on an M16, and saw the life that she would live as a Soldier in training.

The Make-A-Wish Foundation allows children to dream big by granting a “wish” to those suffering from a life-threatening medical condition. Alyssa said she chose joining the Army as her wish because her cystic fibrosis makes it impossible for her to enlist in the future due to Department of Defense medical restrictions.

“My uncle was in the Army and he’s my favorite uncle,” Alyssa said. “When I saw him, I just always thought of him as a hero and I wanted to be like him.”

During recent family discussions, Alyssa and her family realized that she would have some trouble joining the Army.

“We have been talking to recruiters with her older sister,” said Alyssa’s mother, Maggie Braden. “When Alyssa found out about asthma issues in the Army, she was devastated because she knows what she has is much worse than that.”

According to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, cystic fibrosis is a chronic disease that affects the lungs and digestive system characterized by the body’s production of unusually thick, sticky mucus that often clogs the lungs, leading to life-threatening lung infections. Those who suffer from the disease often deal with wheezing and shortness of breath, frequent lung infections and persistent coughing.

Now, more than 13 months ago after being referred to the Make-A-Wish, she was able to see her wish fulfilled. She said her time with the Soldiers and drill sergeants at Fort Jackson has lived up to her dreams.

More at the link.
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Cross-posted on THE FIRST STREET JOURNAL

Another Obama Administration “green” investment goes bankrupt.

 

From Ed Morrissey:

Another green-tech stimulus recipient files for bankruptcy

posted at 3:40 pm on January 26, 2012 by Ed Morrissey

In last year’s State of the Union speech, Barack Obama hailed the great investment he made with taxpayer dollars in the manufacturer of advanced solar panels, only to have Solyndra go down the tubes — taking more than a half-billion dollars in taxpayer money with it.  In this year’s SOTU speech, Obama bragged about having sunk money into “partnership” with the private sector to become a world leader in car-battery sector.  Right on time, that “partner” filed for bankruptcy, too:

An Indiana-based energy storage company that received a $118.5 million stimulus-law grant from the Energy Department filed for bankruptcy Thursday.

Ener1 is asking a federal bankruptcy court in New York to approve a plan to restructure the company’s debt and infuse $81 million in equity funding. …

The Energy Department, in 2009, approved a $118.5 million stimulus-law grant for EnerDel, a subsidiary of the company that develops lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles. The grant was part of a broader program aimed at promoting the development of electric-vehicle battery technology.

President Obama touted the program in his State of the Union address this year.

“In three years, our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be the world’s leading manufacturer of high-tech batteries,” he said.

We saw this coming last October, when CBS first reported on Ener1′s shaky financial position.  At that time, the company had spent $53 million of the grant and had pledged to create 1700 jobs from it in total.  When the story got reported, Ener1 traded at 11 cents a share, down from its December 2008 peak of $9.40 and the $3 per share price when the Department of Energy decided to invest in a company that had lost two-thirds of its value.  The share price was five cents by the beginning of this month, and is now at two cents a share.

Don’t forget, too, that the $53 million spent by October created jobs … 33 of them.

Perhaps green-tech stimulus recipients should call on Obama to refrain from giving them SOTU shout-outs.

And what does the Obama Administration say? Jen Stutsman, spokesman for the Energy Department, said:

The Department of Energy’s grant to EnerDel is supporting a cutting-edge battery manufacturing plant that is producing batteries in America that are being sold across the country and around the world. This grant is part of the department’s efforts to commercialize promising vehicle technologies that will help America to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and ensure U.S. companies can compete in the global auto industry. While it’s unfortunate that Ener1, the parent company, has entered a restructuring process, the new infusion of $80 million in private capital demonstrates that the technology has merit. As the company has said, the restructuring is not expected to impact EnerDel’s operations and they do not expect to reduce employment at the site.

NASDAQ delisted Ener1′s stock (HEVV) last October:

Earlier this week, Ener1 was notified by the NASDAQ Stock Market LLC that it has not complied with the exchange’s filing requirement for continued inclusion in Listing Rules 5250(c)(1). The rule requires the timely filing of period financial reports with the SEC. The company failed to file its form 10-Q for the three-month period ended June 30, 2011, on a timely basis, violating the rules set by NASDAQ.

And there’s even more:

According to the SEC filing, Ener1 failed to meet an Oct. 17 deadline to file a quarterly report for the period ended June 30. In addition, the company said NASDAQ determined that Ener1 violated shareholder approval requirements in amending a line of credit.

Ener1 already was in danger of losing its NASDAQ listing because its stock price has not met the $1-per-share minimum price requirement to trade on the exchange since July. NASDAQ warned the company in September that it was not meeting listing requirements.

Ener1’s shares tumbled from more than $4 a share in January, when Vice President Joe Biden visited EnerDel’s Greenfield battery plant, to less than a dollar in a matter of months. Shares traded at 20 cents each Wednesday morning, down 6 cents since Tuesday’s close.

The company has experienced a series of setbacks this year. Most recently, several lawsuits have been filed, claiming the company misled investors about its financial condition.

Investors began filing the suits in August, days after Ener1 said it would restate earnings for 2010 and for the first quarter of this year. Ener1’s 2010 financial loss of $69 million eventually was restated to a loss of $165 million.

And, to top it all off, the company has even applied for $290 million in federal loan guarantees.

So, what do we have? A company that the Obama Administration thought should get a grant, because they were in an approved kind of business, that failed to make legally required filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and which allegedly misled its shareholders about its financial condition. How is it that the regulation-and-oversight-happy Obama Administration could give Ener1 a $118.5 million grant yet somehow fail to monitor what was going on with the company?¹

EnerDel develops lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles, something the Obama Administration really, really likes. But, as THE FIRST STREET JOURNAL has reported previously, General Motors’ Chevrolet Volt has not been selling very well, and in the United Kingdom there are actually more public electric car charging stations than there are electric cars on the road. The Obama Administration, for political reasons, invested over a hundred million in taxpayer dollars in a company which couldn’t pay its bills, wouldn’t meet its legal requirements, and possibly misled investors, because it was in the business of developing batteries for cars that nobody wants to buy.

This is the kind of thing that happens when the government gets involved in picking winners and losers, based on what kind of business proposals the companies can make: some are going to turn out OK, and others are going to turn out bad. And that’s why the government shouldn’t be involved in this kind of thing at all: if Ener1 had been a good business investment, it shouldn’t have needed the $118.5 million grant, but would have attracted that kind of investment from the private sector.

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1. To be fair about it, “the company has received support from Republicans as well. The Bush administration awarded Ener1 $10 million in grants, and Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels awarded EnerDel $7.1 million in tax credits.” ↩

Of course they were double-crossed! The only surprise is that they didn’t know it would happen.

In debates that I had, primarily on liberal websites, about allowing same-sex couples to marry legally, my primary concern was that including same-sex relationships under the definition of marriage would open a legal hornet’s nest, in which a same-sex couple could sue a church which refused to perform a wedding ceremony for them. My friends on the left ridiculed that idea, saying that the First Amendment would prevent that. Well, the following story isn’t that, but it’s creeping closer:

Obama Administration Mandates Religious Employers Cover Contraception Cost, Catholic Bishops Furious

Posted on January 20, 2012 at 8:21pm by Tiffany Gabbay

The Catholic Bishops of the United States are reportedly furious over what they call the “literally unconscionable” decision by the Obama Administration to require that contraception be included in virtually all health plans provided by religious-affiliated institutions to their employees.

The announcement means that the mandate and its narrow exemption will not change. Rather, there will be a delay in enforcement against some employers.

“In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences,” said Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan, archbishop of New York and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Much more at the link.

From

Catholics Fight Health Rules

Social-Service Agencies Say They Need Broader Exemption From Requirements on Contraceptives
By KRIS MAHER, SEPTEMBER 29, 2011

Catholic organizations have ramped up opposition to new federal health-care requirements to cover contraceptive services, saying the rules may prompt them to drop insurance or shut down.

Beginning next August, employers have to provide coverage for contraception and other preventive services for women such as screening for gestational diabetes and domestic-violence counseling under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, part of the federal health-care law passed in 2010.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services exempted religious organizations that employ and serve people of the same faith from having to provide contraception services, but this exception has been criticized as too narrow by church leaders, as well as some members of Congress.

“Jesus himself, or the Good Samaritan of his famous parable, would not qualify as ‘religious enough’ for the exemption, since they insisted on helping people who did not share their view of God,” said Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston.

Catholic social-service agencies, universities, hospitals and nursing homes wouldn’t be exempt because they frequently employ and serve non-Catholics. “The point is we’re being asked to pay for services that go against our beliefs,” said Pittsburgh Bishop David A. Zubik in an interview. “This looks like the government telling us what we can and can’t believe and what we can and can’t do.”

It’s a perfect storm: the Affordable Care Act requires employers to provide health care coverage, and the Department of Health and Human Services is trying to push regulations which would require religious organizations to include items to which they are theologically opposed. And it’s also the perfect double-cross: the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops supported President Obama’s health care reform legislation, with only the proviso that freedom of conscience exemptions be included; they were very happy with the Stupak Amendment, which specified that the ACA would not require abortion coverage. The Stupak Amendment was required to get a sufficient number of Democrats to vote to pass the legislation, but then it was stripped out in the Senate. The Bishops who had given their support to the bill as long as abortion wasn’t included. Then, in March 2010, well after the Senate cloture vote in December of 2009, they had to send a statement to parishioners, because the language prohibiting the forced coverage of abortion had been deleted:¹

As long-time advocates of health care reform, the U.S. Catholic bishops continue to make the moral case that genuine health care reform must protect the life, dignity, consciences and health of all, especially the poor and vulnerable. Health care reform should provide access to affordable and quality health care for all, and not advance a pro-abortion agenda in our country. Genuine health care reform is being blocked by those who insist on reversing widely supported policies against federal funding of abortion and plans which include abortion, not by those working simply to preserve these longstanding protections.

• On November 7, the U.S. House of Representatives passed major health care reform that reaffirms the essential, longstanding and widely supported policy against using federal funds for elective abortions and includes positive measures on affordability and immigrants.
• On December 24, the U.S. Senate rejected this policy and passed health care reform that requires federal funds to help subsidize and promote health plans that cover elective abortions. All purchasers of such plans will be required to pay for other people’s abortions through a separate payment solely to pay for abortion. And the affordability credits for very low income families purchasing private plans in a Health Insurance Exchange are inadequate and would leave families financially vulnerable.
• Outside the abortion context, neither bill has adequate conscience protection for health care providers, plans or employers.
• Congressional leaders are now trying to figure out how the rules of the House and Senate could allow the final passage of a modified bill that would satisfy disagreements between House and Senate versions.

The Catholic bishops are trusting souls, and they are in the forgiveness business; perhaps they never expected that President Obama would double-cross them, but more worldly Catholics knew all along that such would happen.

And now the bishops are complaining that the Affordable Care Act will force them to abandon the Church’s position on artificial contraception, but those oh-so-compassionate and forgiving clerics brought it on themselves! By supporting increased federalization and control of health care coverage, for the good and noble motive of seeing to it that everybody had coverage, they put themselves and their Catholic institutions under the authority of people who have absolutely no qualms about abortion or paying for abortion or artificial contraception, and mandating its inclusion; the bishops gave to Democratic politicians and federal bureaucrats who believe that the Church’s position on contraception is ridiculous authority over health care insurance offered by Catholic institutions.

The bishops are pretty much left with two options: they can support the Republican presidential nominee, since every Republican candidate has promised to do away with the health care reform legislation, or they can pray that the Supreme Court, which has taken the case and will decide on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, will declare it to be unconstitutional. With five of the Justices being Catholics,² it’s always possible that the Obama Administration’s position on this will be more encouragement for them to toss out the whole abysmal thing.
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Also writing on this:

• William Jacobson at Le*gal In*sur*rec*tion
• Darlene Click on Protein Wisdom

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1. The link is to Ed Morrissey’s column on Hot Air discussing it, because the internal link directly to the USCCB has expired. ↩
2. Chief Justice John Roberts, and Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy are the Catholic Justices; they are also the most intelligent and conservative ones. ↩