Monthly Archives: January 2013

Bad bosses: Texas Democrat Rep. Shirley Jackson Lee

Lee has always been, as Amy Alkon puts it, a honking moron, but now we know the imperious Houston b***h is also a terror to her employees and the ranking congressional rep in terms of staff turnover.

“I’m a queen and I demand to be treated like one,” the Washington Times quotes one of her former congressional staffers quoting Lee in a characteristic hissyfit. Each year, the paper reports, “an average of [more than] half of Mrs. Jackson Lee’s staff quits, and one year, all but six of 23 staffers quit.”

Insufferable she may be but at least Barry has yet to nominate her for anything serious. The paper reports that his Secdef nominee Republican Chuck Hagel is described by some former Senate staffers as paranoid and abusive “who would rifle through staffers’ desks and berate them for imagined disloyalty.”

I do find it dismaying that third on the paper’s calculated congressional staff turnover list, at an average of 46 percent (well above Hagel’s 33 percent], is Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann. I expected more from her.

Thank you, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz

Texas senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn voted against John Kerry’s confirmation as secretary of state. Didn’t stop him from confirmation, of course, but it was nicely symbolic.

Any opposition to Lurch, the lying clown who slandered a generation of Vietnam veterans and caused us unending problems in the post-war job market, is a very good thing. Now we’ll watch to see how the pol who never met a dictator he didn’t like, gets his international comeuppance. I hope.

Although I would prefer he not get any ambassadors killed, like Clinton did.

Chest candy

Probably a photoshop joke, although this is North Korea, and police states do tend to do power things like this to excess. But it’s one reason why I’m having trouble getting very exercised about Barry’s plan to downsize the Pentagon.

We haven’t seen anything quite this ludicrous by American military officers (altho we have plenty of sheriffs and police chiefs who seem to think they are four-star generals) but I do recall that General Petraeus’s chest candy climbed up to and almost over his shoulder. And most of his medals were for pencil-pushing, the kind that senior officers award each other. Now that old Betray Us has been retired, hopefully some of his pals will be downsized.

Via Simply Jews.

Why I always turn to Fox News first

Because our Affirmative Action president hates them and he has been hating them out loud since the first year of his pathetic, Muslim Brotherhood-lovin’ reign. Not unlike many leftist “journalists” who can’t stand the thought of anyone not marching in lockstep with them or their beloved NYTimes.

“Recently, the White House has kept Fox News off of conference calls dealing with the Benghazi attack, despite Fox News being the only outlet that was regularly reporting on it and despite Fox having top notch foreign policy reporters.”

No problem. Fox will get there first anyhow. Journalism is supposed to be about objective competition. It really isn’t and never was, which is why I will always turn to a contrary outlet like Fox News before I’ll wade through the sandbox of the sycophants, particularly Barry’s adoring pets in the alphabet media.

Your House Is On Fire, Your Children All Gone

Scott at The Fat Guy recently asked me for some book recomendations. He was more interested in scifi than anything else, and I gave him a bunch of those, but this small-town horror tale by Stefan Kiesbye also is a winner.

I picked up on it from PJMedia’s Andrew Klaven and decided to give it a try through the Kindle sample at Amazon. I was immediately hooked by the seemingly-effortless writing style and the surprise of a character literally peeing on a grave after a funeral.

It’s a coming-of-age tale about a post-WWII German village’s adolescents whose parents and peers brutalize each other so casually that none of it rings false. Sounds awful? All of that sneaks up on you, actually, and by the time it makes its appearance you’re already invested in the story and the characters. It is far less violent than many other novels these days, thanks to Kiesbye’s clever choice of words.

It helps if you know German so you realize the English meaning of some of the place names, but it’s not strictly necessary. Haunting, Klaven calls it, and I agree. I’m still thinking about it, three books later.

Barry kills more jobs

This time it’s the loss of an estimated 3,900 direct and indirect jobs for construction of a new coal-fired electric power plant in Corpus Christi. Barry’s EPA doesn’t like coal, remember, so they killed the permit for the project, despite the fact that most 42 percent of American electricity is created by burning coal.

I suppose the EPA would rather folks in Corpus cut back on their use of electricity or else hook up to such intermittent (and very expensive) power sources as wind generators and inefficient solar cells. More likely, though, the bureaucrats simply don’t care. D.C. is enjoying an economic boom on our taxes, though it’s mainly the pols and the rest of the 1 percent who are rolling in the dough.

UPDATE:  This is only the latest Texas power plant to be closed by King Putz’s EPA. Five others also are on the block. One in Pasadena, one in Lone Star, two in Mount Pleasant and one in Pittsburg.

DiFi’s assault weapons lies

Not that she’s the only one. The Clintons also have been telling “assault rifle” lies since 1994. No one with a loud-enough voice, other than the NRA, certainly no one in the Democrat media, has ever called them on it.

Comes now Ted Cruz, our newest Texas senator, to set the record straight:

“Real assault weapons—machine guns—are already functionally illegal, and they have been since 1934. [DiFi’s gun bill] would have done nothing to prevent the terrible murders in Newtown, but it would limit the constitutional liberties of law-abiding citizens.”

DiFi’s life in the Leftist bubble worlds of D.C. and San Francisco has led her to try to ban tens of millions of commonly-owned AR-15s,  shotguns and handguns. She’s blind to the real world of gun ownership these days, says Mr. Eddington at Shooting For Liberty:

“The popularity of guns like the [semiauto] AR-15 has exploded in the last decade, with millions of Americans using ARs for hunting, target shooting, competition, and home defense. The AR-15, a relatively uncommon rifle when I was growing up, has become mainstream among shooters.

“The power of the gun rights movement has grown since the 1990s because gun culture has been spreading far and wide among people who defy the stereotype of what a gun rights supporter is supposed to be. Just as an anecdote, when I go to the NRA Headquarters Range in Fairfax I see blacks, whites, and Asians all shooting together—not just overweight white guys in John Deere hats.”

Will this stop DiFi? Of course not. But I doubt even she expects her proposed law to pass. She’s probably mainly trying to fire up the base for the congressional elections of 2014. Meanwhile, she’d settle for banning manufacture of 10+ round magazines, and some spineless Republicans doubtless will go along with that. Enough of them? Maybe.

And that would be a pity. Because it will only limit law-abiding people, not criminals, not the insane, and not even the body guards who protect the pols who always hold themselves immune from the laws they create for us.

The magazine makers, meanwhile, already are on double shifts making new 10+ ones that can be grandfathered in to any ban. One thing old DiFi is good for is capitalistic profits. All you have to do is keep the 10+ magazines cleaned and oiled and they’ll last for decades. So even that law is stupid.

But then, maybe, Cruz or someone like him finally will launch a workable effort to get insane monsters like the Newtown shooter off our streets and into the help they need. And take down those damned “gun-free zone” signs at school entrances. You know, a real solution to our intolerable mass killings instead of more attempted disarming of the law-abiding?

UPDATE:  In New York State and Canada, defiance of new gun registration laws already is gathering strength. This is what government overreach will do. The bureaucrats, even the cops, are simply outnumbered. Molon Labe, suckers!

MORE: DiFi’s gun ban exempts herself. No surprise, really. The pols always exempt themselves from the new laws the rest of us must obey.