Category Archives: Obituaries

Another nice loser pushes us into the fire this time

My mother-in-law said it best, if somewhat sheepishly at using the phrase. Williard, she said, had no balls. No kidding.

That was back in August. I knew she had him pegged after his “me too” approach to Barry’s foreign policy assertions in the third debate. He was just another nice loser, as Thomas Sowell says.

Aided and abetted by obvious Democrat fraud in Philadelphia, Cleveland and Chicago—and possibly Florida’s Gold Coast, as well—which the Republican Party curiously is not protesting. Almost makes you think they  like to lose, they do it so often.

But Sowell, a conservative black economics professor and disciple in his youth of free marketeer Milton Friedman, says their 2012 loss could be disastrous:

“Quite aside from the immediate effects of particular policies, Barack Obama has repeatedly circumvented the laws, including the Constitution of the United States, in ways and on a scale that pushes this nation in the direction of arbitrary one-man rule….

“Obama will now also have more ‘flexibility,’ as he told Russian president Dmitri Medvedev, to transform the international order, where he has long shown that he thinks America has too much power and influence. A nuclear Iran can change that. Forever.

“Have you noticed how many of our enemies in other countries have been rooting for Obama? You or your children may yet have reason to recall that as a bitter memory of a warning sign ignored on Election Day in 2012.”

Let’s hope Sowell is too cynical by half. Hope may be all we have left.

UPDATE:  So much for hope. Barry said he had Israel’s back. He lied. His support for Israel’s self-defense lasted just 48 hours. His public support, that is.

By my reading of the journo tea leaves, he set private guidelines on the first day of U.S. Senate support: i.e. he wants no ground invasion of Gaza to clean out the Hamas rat’s nest and says, BTW, don’t bomb too long, Bibi, ’cause it might endanger the “two-state solution.”

Even W (a veteran who knows military campaigns are not won from the air) waited for a week or two of Gaza ground scouring by the IDF before asking for withdrawal.

UPDATE:  Sure enough, Barry and the Hildabeast pushed Bibi into accepting a ceasefire in which the Brotherhood will decide who the violators are and when. I wonder how much of our tax money Egypt has been promised, not to mention Hamas. Hardly matters. It won’t last a week, if that long, and Bibi’s government may collapse before then.

Ready for $10 gas and a doubling of electric bills?

You better get ready for it. Starting next year, Commissar Barry’s EPA will squeeze our oil and gas industry by declaring carbon dioxide a pollutant. They mean to save us all from global warming by putting out of business oil producers like the owners of this decorated pump jack in Lulling, Texas.

They will likewise kill the coal industry on which most of our electricity-generating plants depend. Wind and solar replacements are pathetic fantasies. That hurricane-caused blackout in NYC still lingers. Take a lesson from it.  Lay in a stock of candles.

“[The EPA] would effectively repeal the Industrial Revolution,” writes Peter Ferrara in his Obama and the Crash of 2013, “an environmentalist-extremist dream but a nightmare for working people and the economy. It would mean the end of the American Dream and of America’s heritage of world-leading economic prosperity.”

Indeed it will. Oh, Congress will stop it, you say. Really? The Republican House can’t do it alone. The Democrat-Progressive  Senate will buck their beloved Barry and the Greens?

Not a good bet, that one.

Image

Let him make himself clear (again)

The Munich Eleven

Members of the Israeli Olympic team (five competitors, four coaches, a referee and a judge) who were slain in Munich by Palestinian terrorists in 1972. Whom the London Olympics chose not to recall even for a minute on this year’s 40th anniversary of their murders. But for whom American Gold medal gymnast Aly Raisman dedicated her performance. Click on the picture to enlarge for easier reading.

For Romney even means ahead, except when it isn’t even

The first part of my headline is the title of an opinion piece by Karl Rove in the WSJ which seems to me to be absolutely correct. Obozo should have run away with the polls by now, if he was going to win, but he hasn’t and apparently can’t.

“Mr. Romney will be on strong ground defending free enterprise as a system that rewards initiative, hard work and sacrifice—and in doing so creates widespread prosperity that he will seek to extend to every corner of the nation…swing voters who’ll make up their minds late [will] decide the election.”

Trouble is, as the Chicago Boyz say, more and more Americans are dependent on the federal government for a check. Initiative, hard work and sacrifice are fast becoming minority practices. Welfare State Socialism is a fait accompli and growing stronger every day.

Thus: “Intrade.com has Obama at 60% odds to be reelected. Other bookmakers are in the same ballpark. It’s possible that these market odds are overly influenced by inaccurate polls. The odds certainly respond to polling data. However, the bookies have a very good record of predicting election results.”

And it gets worse. In the latest Fox News poll, Obozo has an 11-point lead among Independents who make up at least a third of the electorate. Add in the third who are loyal Democrats and we can just about kiss Mittens goodbye. If this sort of thing continues, the game is all but over.

“Cometh the hour, cometh the man. The hour is late, and the man needs to get in the game.” Sez the ever-acerbic conservative Mark Steyn.

UPDATE: And whether enough of these Independents will care about Mr. Ryan as a vice president remains to be seen. He’s certainly smarter than Joey Hairplugs.

MORE:  Dueling polls bring some hope. A new one says Romney has Obozo on Independent voters by 10 points, the same (in this Politico-George Washington University poll) as in May. Obozo has youth by 23 points, despite the high unemployment he’s brought them; Romney has folks over 65 by 6 points. And it’s worth remembering that youth talks but often walks on vote day. Seniors never forget to vote.

AND:  Not two weeks later, a Fox News poll has Romney ahead by one point, meaning within the margin of error. Meaning: even.

“…the culture is poisonous…”

“Some of the sadness and frustration following Aurora has to do with the fact…that no one thinks anyone can, or will, do anything to make our culture better. The film industry isn’t going to change, the genie is long out of the bottle.”

The Dark Night Rises, indeed.

OTOH, if American culture is toxic, something better is happening behind the scenes. Auroras are, in fact, declining. In the 2000s, murders and mass murders have dropped to their lowest levels since the 1960s.

Jerry Sterling Stover, R.I.P.

It’s always embarrassing to miss the death of a friend, particularly when the friend is a relative, however distant. Jerry and I were cousins, by virtue of his being the nephew of my maternal grandfather. And we’d been in touch for more than a decade, only to lose track of each other soon after he passed his 92nd birthday a year ago this month.

His Feb. 15 obituary in the Dallas Morning News is available in full when you go in through Google, curiously, since going directly gets you an advisory to become a subscriber if you want to read the whole thing. And you might, because Jerry was one of the last Army veterans of the Allied invasion of France at Omaha Beach.

I knew that part. He gave me a small vial of Omaha Beach sand after a return he made there a few years ago. But I never heard of the secret stuff which his two sons, apparently, revealed in the obit, which is reprinted free here: his September, 1941 “clandestine [assignment] as a military observer in London [receiving] radar training from the Royal Air Force….He carried a diplomatic passport and was required to dress as a civilian when he was not on a British military base.”

In which he also “flew combat missions over the English Channel with Royal Air Force crews using radar to hunt German submarines that surfaced to recharge their batteries…” Or that he had a hand in helping American troops “liberate a concentration camp north of Munich [possibly Dachau] late in the war.” These things he never talked about with me.

He did talk about much else involving the war, including his participation in the Battle of the Bulge. He was an Army major, a staff officer, by the time the Nazis surrendered. He also talked about the Internet, the Web, and computer technology. He was a devoted Apple user and was always enthusiastic about communications, starting with his shortwave radio experiences as a 13-year-old, right up to his Skyping with an iPad not long before he died of pneumonia on Feb. 7. He was pretty frail by then and frequently ill. The old man’s friend, they used to call pneumonia. I suppose it was.  Rest in peace, cousin.