The season has switched from not Summer to Summer here in Texas, so here’s a hot, humid LinkSwarm:
In Europe, youth unemployment is climbing to scary, stratospheric heights. So scary I’m going to swipe their chart:
Notice how countries that have kept their deficit spending relatively low (Germany and even the UK, where deficits has at least decreased under Cameron) are doing much better than the PIIGS. Again, Austerity hasn’t failed in Europe, it’s been declared difficult and left untried.
Harry Reid calls his close personal friend and business associate Harvey Whittemore (and his wife) “wonderful people.” Oh, and Whittemore is now also a convicted felon.
Eric Holder: Obama’s sin eater. “The attorney general has done little in his tenure to protect civil liberties or the free press. Rather, Holder has supervised a comprehensive erosion of privacy rights, press freedom and due process. This ignoble legacy was made possible by Democrats who would look at their shoes whenever the Obama administration was accused of constitutional abuses.”
There’s so much information about various Obama scandals that I’m hard-pressed to keep up, but here are a few nuggets of savory scandal goodness (or rather, badness):
The IRS scandal is bad, and it’s nationwide, despite attempts to limit it to the Cincinnati office.
Under a Democratic administration, the IRS was under pressure from Democratic elected officials to investigate political enemies of the Democratic party. The agency did so. Its commissioner lied to Congress about its doing so. When the inspector general’s report was about to make these abuses public, the agency staged a classic Washington Friday news rollout at a sleepy American Bar Association tax-law conference, hoping to minimize the bad publicity. Lerner lied to the public about the nature, scope, and extent of the IRS intimidation campaign.
How Media Matters, the Praetorian Guard of the Democratic Party Media Complex, stays tax exempt through a shell game. Both 501(c)3 and 501(c)4 versions are far more obviously creatures of the Democratic Party than the NRA is for Republicans.
For a shocking change of pace, the Friday LinkSwarm will be on Friday:
“How can we ‘gun people’ honestly be expected to come to the table with anti-gunners when anti-gunners are willfully stupid about guns, and openly hate, despise and ridicule those of us who own them?” Read the whole thing.
The lovely qualities of Jihadi Facebook pages: “The further I crawled down the extremist rabbit hole and the more caved-in skulls and headless corpses I saw.”
“The Euro cannot be destroyed by any craft that we here possess. It was made in the fires of Frankfurt. Only there can it be unmade.” What does it say when Sauron wants the ring, er, Euro destroyed as well? Though once again: Austerity hasn’t failed in Europe, it hasn’t been tried.
“It was one thing to do amnesty during the white hot Reagan economy of the mid to late 80s. It’s quite another to do it in the midst of the Obama depression.”
London mayor Boris Johnson thinks it would be a good thing for democracy if the UK were to just walk away from the EU.
Travis County Democratic District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg is out of the clink after serving half a 45 day sentence for DWI. A jury will evidently determine “whether her drunken driving was habitual or whether the recent arrest was the result of a one-time event.” Because lots of people without alcohol problems suddenly decide “Hey, I’m going to go cruising around town with an open bottle of vodka and a blood alcohol level of .239! That sounds like a great idea!” I might believe that…if Lehmberg was 21.
Silly Joanne Chesimard. If she had just served her time, she’d have tenure by now.
Europe is “bleeding out”. Youth unemployment? “59.1% of those under 25 are unemployed in Greece, 55.9% in Spain, 38.4% in Italy, 38.3% in Portugal, 26.5% in France.” More: “Hope and Change economies are crony capitalist systems which pick winners and losers. They maintain the status quo at all costs — and reward those who have captured government over those who innovate.”
So which is funnier, violence against women, or intimidating crime witnesses? Mountain Dew puts both in the same ad! Hilarity ensues! (Oh, and some people think it’s racist. It is, but not any more than a random gangsta rap video.)
People don’t like being bossed around by the political class. But that’s the Democratic Party’s entire model!
“We found 15 Trial Court cases, and 12 Appellate Court cases, where Shariah was found to be applicable in these particular cases. The facts are the facts: some judges are making decisions deferring to Shariah law even when those decisions conflict with Constitutional protections.”
Former New Mexico Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson says that Ted Cruz isn’t allowed to be a Hispanic because he opposes illegal alien amnesty. Maybe they should just declare that you can’t be Hispanic unless you’re a Democrat and be done with it.
Speaking of Cruz, here’s a piece in The New Republic that, when stripped of standard TNR talking points, boils down to “Yes, Ted Cruz could be elected President.”
Another day, another another 20 dead in an Islamist attack on a Christian church.
I couldn’t go to the NRA annual meeting in Houston this weekend, as much as I would have liked to, because I went to a family even in Houston last week.
But fortunately, Ted Cruz is there.
“The Constitution matters. All of the Constitution matters. You don’t get to pick and choose.”
Republican Senators have been yelling at Ted Cruz. At the top of their lungs, no less. “How dare you make me stand on principle???”
We won the gun control fight because Senators Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and Rand Paul stood up for principle and shamed other Republican Senators into standing up as well.
We sent Cruz to Washington to shame Republicans into acting like Republicans. No, you don’t get to to betray conservative principles and expect us to keep donating and working for you merely because you have an (R) after your name. No, you don’t get to cave into Washington’s permanent liberal establishment without cost. No, you don’t get to enjoying fawning “strange new respect” profiles from the media without getting primaried. “You could just not be a bunch of squishes.”
Does anyone doubt that we’d now be seeing fawning profiles of Senator Dewhurst for his help in forging a “compromise” on gun control?
Manchin-Toomey went down in flames today, a cloture vote falling six votes short (including four Democrats (Baucus (MT), Begich (AK), Heitkamp (ND) and Pryor (AK) voting no) of the 60 it needed.
Let’s catalog what Democrats won’t be getting during the current congress, shall we?
No national gun confiscation regime, like the one imposed in Australia.
No ban on civilian gun ownership, like Sen. Diane Feinstein has admitted she wants to impose.
No universal gun registration act.
No national “high” capacity magazine ban.
No modern sporting rifle (AKA “assault weapon”) ban.
No reinstitution of the Clinton-era cosmetic modern sporting rifle ban.
And, with the defeat of Manchin-Toomey, no “universal background check” as a prelude to a national gun registry.
This is one case in which the Senate’s deliberative style has worked in conservative’s favor. If Harry Reid had been able to ram through a vote days after the Sandy Hook massacre (as happened in New York), it’s very possible some sort of gun control might have passed. But with time for the knee-jerk emotional response to die down, and for the NRA and gun owners across America to mobilize, all Democrats managed to do was endanger a few senate careers, both among themselves and the RINO herd. Remember Michael Moore declaring how the NRA was doomed?
Didn’t work out that way, did it?
Instead, they got…well, let’s Mr. Wonka break it down for them:
That’s some mighty fine political ad targeting you’ve got going on there, Lou.
The same Ted Cruz that pantsed David Dewhurst in the Republican primary runoff because Dew wasn’t conservative enough?
The same Ted Cruz who was endorsed by Gun Owners of America? (You know, the gun rights group that’s like the NRA, but not so squishy and eager to compromise.)
The same Ted Cruz who beat his opponent in the general election by 16 points?
“I am not a consensus politician. I’m a conviction politician.”
“There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”
“We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them re-imposed at a European level, with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels.”
How unions paralyzed Great Britain before Thatcher came in. Check out the giant piles of garbage.
Britain was a disaster: The lights frequently went out, trash was piled up in the streets, and the IMF was called in to bail the treasury out — in response to which the civil service decided that their role was to “manage” Britain’s decline and fall….’Diversity’ types are amusingly silent about her — and for good reason, as her example is utterly lethal to the culture of victimhood on which they rely. The global Left, likewise, has strong motives to disparage her: She realized that decline was a choice….She was right and they were wrong. While they blathered, she helped to defeat Communism, restored democracy to the Falklands, and saved Britain from the reds at home. She was, without doubt, our finest post-war premier and she made an incalculable contribution to the life of my country of birth.
Those on the Left who still probably regard Thatcher as a hate-figure, have either forgotten the history of the Cold War or possibly never understood that Communism meant the virtual enslavement of millions of people in the East European countries, who loathed its ideology as much as Margaret Thatcher herself. It is simply not possible to imagine Thatcher visiting Russia in the 1930s, like certain Left-wing useful idiots from Britain, and being taken in by Stalin’s propaganda machine. Ordinary East Europeans took a different view of her to her critics in this country. For them she symbolised opposition to Communism; indeed she was given a tumultuous welcome by the shipyard workers in Gdansk when she visited them. She wept at the sight.
What did Dianne Feinstein’s gun-grabbing “assault weapons” bill actually accomplish? “These efforts have driven some law-abiding Americans into the loving arms of the NRA.”
“In Harry Reid’s Senate there are more votes against Chuck Hagel than there are in favor of an assault weapons ban.”
“[Ted Cruz’s] infraction was asking the right question. What Cruz wanted to know was this: Why do liberals cherish the First and Fourth Amendments, but trash the one in between – the Second Amendment?”
Louisiana judge rules that ex-felons can own guns. Some caveats: This is based on a newly passed, pro-gun amendment to the Louisiana Constitution, and Louisiana law (as opposed to the other 49 states) is based on the Napoleonic Code rather than English common law.
