The Lasso of Truth

Handwringing

To kill or capture?  To publish the death shots or not to publish?  Jeepers.  I even hear it took the supposed leader of the free world 17 hours to decide if he even wanted them to go in at all!

But now that the deed is done, I've been hard pressed to find an opinion on the whole brouhaha that sounds right to me.  Until now.

It started last night, when I heard one of the administration apparatchiks detailing the information that was being gathered from the site, and the various agencies sifting through it, and how much of the information was useful, etc.  I though to myself, if I was in charge, I'd probably want to keep the enemy guessing about whether I got anything useful, and how much of it there was.  Make them have to scramble and worry.

This morning though, that instinct went one step further when as a rare treat I heard Oliver North on my daily morning show, opining that the best approach would have been to keep the whole business under wraps.  And he's right.

Keeping the enemy in the dark that their leader is dead, even holing up in his safe house for a few days, to gather more information from live sources (possibly) would have been a much better strategy.

Unfortunately, that is not how Obama and his pep squad roll.  Oliver North was right about that too...this president is all about the victory laps.

Whole interview here...

11_0506_oliver_north

 

Glenn Reynolds characterizes it as blood libel

For the less refined among us, it looks more like they're smearing their hands in the blood of the dead and making cutesy little finger paintings with it...

A lot has been made of Sarah Palin's now infamous graphic showing which Congressmen her PAC was "targeting" for defeat using cross hairs. Politics uses war imagery -- just as any cause does ("war on cancer" "battle against X" and the "fight against Y"). I just don't see a connection between the cross hairs and shooting Gabrielle Giffords and think you have to be an idiot to make such a connection...

Idiot is a charitable way to put it.  I somehow doubt I'm the only person who considered the possibility that Warren typed his post with only one hand.  In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if he types every post that way.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Irrefutable proof that Democrats are stupid.

The question now is, are people who vote for Democrats equally stupid?

This should be good

Sarah Palin says she's considering a Presidential run in 2012 and I'm thinkin'...

How much fun will the debates be, with her and the Big O?  One snippy little comment in that lilting flirty tone and a saucy wink to the camera, and Barry will be left sputtering and dumbstruck.  I predict he calls her "little lady" within 15 minutes of the first appearance.

And Mamma Grizzly will have chocolate eclair for dessert every single day.

Pelosi's Damaging Competence

And one misguided journalist's delusional sycophancy...

But amid the wreckage of Tuesday's GOP rampage, there's one person for whom I feel awful: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She's losing her job not because she does it poorly but because she does it so well.

Pelosi would never ask for, or even accept, my sympathy - that's not her style. Her place in history was secure the moment she became the first woman to take possession of the speaker's gavel. Still, she squeezed every drop out of her four-year tenure. To string together a couple of sports cliches, she came to play and she left it all on the field.

I regret that the nation has never come to know the actual Nancy Pelosi. Most Americans are probably familiar only with the caricature that her political opponents sketched - the effete "San Francisco liberal" who knew nothing of America outside her mink-lined cocoon, where the taps ran with chablis and nourishment consisted of unpronounceable French cheeses, served on silver platters by waiters who were certainly gay, and quite possibly married.

A look into the Obamacare crystal ball

[The] healthcare system is unable to provide sterilized needles, clean water, food and medicine, and patients are forced to undergo agonizing surgery without anesthesia

Thankfully, not the socialized medicine offered in the US and Canada...yet...

"I was screaming so much from the pain, I thought I was going to die. They had tied my hands and legs to prevent me from moving," said a 56-year-old woman from Musan who had an appendectomy performed without anesthesia.

In keeping with its socialist ideology, North Korea once boasted of providing free, universal healthcare with a network of more than 44,000 general practitioners who would even make house calls. Although hospitalization remains free, the facilities are unsanitary and have no food, bandages or medicine.

We used to be closer to the precipice, up here on the north end of the border, but you Americans (ambitious as ever!) are careening past us at lightning speed.

"lack of experience" was on Obama's resume, too

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said Kagan had a "sterling reputation" and was "unquestionably qualified" to serve on the Supreme Court, calling her lack of judicial experience "refreshing."

Lack of judicial experience...because that's what you want on the nation's highest court.

The business of swingin' panties around your ankles...

In light of my somewhat checkered past, I find it interesting to observe the biases and impressions of newer acquaintances, when the topic turns to strippers.  The ones who are not aware of my previous experience in the field tend to display an alarming level of snobbish ignorance on the subject, often fostered by the caricatured cliche offered in TV and movies...

The media image of the stripper is absurd. The girls at the Bada Bing in “The Sopranos” wouldn’t make a nickel in the clubs I’ve worked. Spinning around on a pole? Who tips for that? Better to attend a gymnastics meet. Or take the big scene in the movie “Strip Tease” where Demi Moore works the pole, and whips off her top. Whoopee. She’s a lovely woman, but that’s it? Here in the corn muffin state (really, it’s our official state muffin), customers demand to see more than that, and at much closer range.

Many of our customers are OWH’s (other women’s husbands), and our job is not to seduce them but rather to titillate them. We are not necessarily prettier or sexier than their wives. We are different from their wives. Sex is not allowed in a club, so we provide a variety of skilled, light, tantalizing foreplay. Many customers admit that afterward they rush home to their significant others. We work hard to keep families intact.

How a dancer pleases a customer, though, is up to her so long as it’s within the law. Previously, strippers were independent contractors. We took no salary from the clubs, got no benefits. In fact, we paid the clubs for the privilege of dancing on their stages. This takes the form of a “tip out,” commonly $10 to $50 in the clubs I work for, depending on the shift and the discretion of the management. After that, every tip we garner at the stage (usually singles) and every private dance fee ($20 for a four-minute song is standard in western Massachusetts) is ours to keep. Then there is the “champagne room.” Fees and conditions vary, but a typical CR fee is $200 for half an hour: $150 to the dancer and $50 to the club for the rental of the private room, typically furnished with a couch or two, wall-to-wall mirrors, and sometimes a pinhole surveillance camera to make sure nobody has too much fun.

Yet the ignorance and harsh judgment offered by the stiffs in my new soccer-mommish circle of people I deal with, can't hold a candle to the hubristic, sweeping stool-sniffers in government...

The legislature of Massachusetts, attorney general Martha Coakley, and some savvy lawyers have now put me out of business. It’s not that they don’t like what I do for a living — dancing naked on a stage and giving private dances in a back room. I can keep doing that. What they don’t like is that I did all this as an independent contractor. That I was my own boss. Massachusetts much prefers that I work for somebody else. This came about because of a single verdict against a strip club in Chelsea, Mass., and it affects not only every stripper in the state, but could result in putting many small independent contractors, from painters to writers, out of business.

h/t

Obamacare

Through a science fiction prism...

We've heard a lot of hype, on both sides, about the healthcare reform bill President Obama signed today. But how will it really affect our future? Here are five dystopias it may save us from, and one it could cause.

[..]

Could the new healthcare reform law eventually lead to the government taking over the healthcare industry completely? Sure, it's possible. A lot of people are not so secretly hoping that will happen. We could find ourselves living in 1984, or Brazil, or any of a number of other statist dystopias where the government controls everything.

Just a matter of time..?

I read this book once, where the government passed sweeping regulations, to redistribute from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

When the new laws came into place, many of the educated and hard-working started abandoning their places, or withdrawing their talents. 

In order to stem the bleed of talent, the government made more laws forbidding people from leaving their jobs, restricting their choices and movements, enslaving them, and all for the greater good.

Thank gawd it was only a book.

GASP! Aggressive sanctions?!

They're shaking in their boots, no doubt...

Obama, who had made the goal of pursuing dialogue with Iran a cornerstone of his administration's foreign policy at the beginning of his presidency, said he had been successful in getting the international community to isolate Tehran.

"As we've seen, the Iranian government has been more concerned about preventing their people from exercising their democratic and human rights than trying to solve this problem diplomatically," Obama said in an interview on Fox News Channel's Special Report with Bret Baier.

"That's why we're going to go after aggressive sanctions. We haven't taken any options off the table. We are going to keep on pushing," Obama said.

Keep on pushing...right off the cliff.

de-Arabised: Like delousing, but far more expensive

In my books, if you're ticking off both the missile-lobbing, Semtex crowd and the sympathetic Marxist squish taking their side, it's a fine day's work...

A defiant Mr Netanyahu appeared to be digging in despite clear indications that the Obama administration is now demanding the scrapping of plans for 1,600 new Jewish homes, whose announcement overshadowed last week's visit to Israel by the US Vice-President Joe Biden. Mr Netanyahu's stance appeared to guarantee, after a highly charged week, the protraction of a stand-off in which a full-scale diplomatic row blew up at the start of Mr Biden's visit and appeared to abate at the end of it. But it was then reignited by demands from Hillary Clinton and an angry White House that Israel make amends for the "insulting" announcement just as indirect negotiations with the Palestinians had finally been arranged.

Still awaiting word on when Obama will "run out of patience" with the kidnappings, suicide bombings and constant threats being waged from the other side of that border.

I guess it's all about context

Some would say that trivializing the deliberate murders of thousands of innocent people -- by equating them with the procrastination or apathy of someone who doesn't bother to make provisions for their own health -- would be somewhat in bad taste.

Apparently, some would not...

Geddit?!  Why are we wasting all this money on fighting bloodthirsty jihadis, when we can put a doctor and a rectal thermometer in every household?!

How about suggestions then?

Sayeth the Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism...

Terrorists are not 100-feet tall.

'Tis true.  But they are invariably Muslim.  how about we just start with that for now, hmmm?

Would you want your boss peeping under your tighty-whiteys?

Gone are the days when an employer used to be able to regard an employee's choice of gender as none of their damned business...

Simpson recently served as Deputy Director in Advanced Technology Development at Raytheon Missile Systems in Tucson, Arizona.

At Raytheon, Simpson -- a former test pilot who had worked for the company for more than a generation -- transitioned from male to female and was instrumental in convincing the military contractor to add gender identity and expression to its equal employment opportunity policy.

How does it measure as more equal, to force employers to consider these things, when we've always been told they don't matter?

So confusing.

Well, no...

It's not a "death panel" per se, but at the end of all that rationing the end result is really the same...

The ideas for savings to the health care system are endless! We know already, of course, about the great new idea of not looking so closely at those breasts. What we don't know won't cause us anxiety, and if cancer should come, the later we discover it the better, because there is nothing like death to stop us from running to the doctor for every little thing.

...Isn't it?

H/T

The Rush to Smear

Via Instapundit, a swarm of cranks ruin a very professional and appropriate mea culpa with snarky equivocations and a whole host of "fake but accurate" nonsense in the comments.

Who knew the NFL had moral standards?

I wonder if the moral preening race hustlers, who exercised so much energy to reject a rich Conservative's private investment, would be just as eager to reject his contribution to the tax base.

Or is it only ok to take money from the rich, when you do it by force?

Ain't nothing like a good neighbour

Think that's bad?  You should see what they're doing to your state and country...

John Bailey thought it was great when his neighbor was elected to the House of Representatives in 2007.

"Not everyone lives next door to a congresswoman," he said.

But two years later, he doesn't feel so lucky. The congresswoman's house is abandoned and in disrepair, "a blight on the neighborhood," Bailey said.

He thinks the way that Rep. Laura Richardson (D-Long Beach) has treated her Sacramento home tells far more about her than her voting record. [..]

Things got so bad that in the fall of 2008 rats began breeding in Richardson's backyard and soon moved into L. Kraft's house next door. It took him two months to get rid of them.

Richardson's house, he said, "has become such a hideous place."

The congresswoman has gained a degree of infamy in the Sacramento neighborhood. The two-story house, gray with red trim, is badly in need of paint. The front lawn is a patchwork of grass and weeds with brown splotches of dirt. Much of the once lush ivy covering the chain-link fence has died.

The red wooden gate sprawls on the lawn, unless someone props it up. A toilet sits on the back patio. [..]

Richardson bought the house in early 2007 for $535,000. She already owned two other houses that she had defaulted on six times.

The house went into foreclosure last year and was sold to real estate investor James York for $388,000 in May. Washington Mutual took back the house and returned it to Richardson. York sued. The case was settled privately.