Conservative Rumblings

Barack Obama’s 2010 State of the Union promises to be more of the same: high soaring rhetoric, heavy teleprompter reliance and Nancy Pelosi most likely clapping like a seal. In order to squeeze at least some entertainment out of this campaign-speech-on-steroids, I’ve developed a nice little list of things Barack is likely to say tonight.

Below are my current odds for these catchphrases/statements. Variations count if they are very close, and I’m also giving 5000/1 odds that the teleprompter breaks and he goes off script talking about breathalysers.

In that vein, if you want to turn this into a drinking game, it’s very easy: longer odds, stiffer drink.

I’ll also be live tweeting commentary from http://www.twitter.com/ianessling. It’ll be epic.

2/1 “Pre existing conditions”
2/1 “Spending freeze”
2/1 “Inherited”
3/1 “Last eight years”
3/1 “Let me be clear”
4/1 “People are angry”
5/1 “I’m fighting for you”
5/1 “Excessive profits”
5/1 “It’s not about me” or “This isn’t about me.”
7/1 “Wall Street Bankers”
10/1 “George W. Bush” or “last administration”
10/1 “I’m fired up.”
10/1 “And that is why…”
10/1 “I have asked”
10/1 “Mess we inherited”
12/1 “Spending freeze” more than 10 times
15/1 “Fatcat”
20/1 “Get this economy moving again.”
20/1 “Ted Kennedy” or any variation
25/1 “Rising deficit”
25/1 “I” more than 100 times
30/1 “War in Iraq”
35/1 “Eric Holder”
35/1 “Stimulus package”
50/1 “Closing Guantanamo Bay”
50/1 “2010 election” or “midterm election”
50/1 “George W. Bush” or “last administration” more than 10 times
50/1 “I don’t want to hear”
50/1 “We’re going to pass healthcare reform”
50/1 “Yes we can.”
60/1 “Janet Napolitano”
75/1 “Campaign”
100/1 “Underwear bomber”
150/1 “Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid” (in the same sentence, any order)
175/1 “Czar”
200/1 “Budget reconciliation”
250/1 “Joe Wilson”
350/1 “Hope” and “Change” in the same sentence
500/1 “My record-breaking deficit”
500/1 “I won”
500/1 “It’s bleeping golden!”
500/1 “I have a dream.”
1000/1 “I hereby resign the presidency”

I thought this was an Onion article at first. Seriously.

WASHINGTON — The group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wants the flyswatter in chief to try taking a more humane attitude the next time he’s bedeviled by a fly in the White House.

PETA is sending Barack Obama a Katcha Bug Humane Bug Catcher, a device that allows users to trap a house fly and then release it outside.

“We support compassion even for the most curious, smallest and least sympathetic animals,” PETA spokesman Bruce Friedrich said Wednesday. “We believe that people, where they can be compassionate, should be, for all animals.”

During an interview for CNBC at the White House on Tuesday, a fly intruded on Obama’s conversation with correspondent John Harwood.

“Get out of here,” the president told the pesky insect. When it didn’t, he waited for the fly to settle, put his hand up and then smacked it dead.

“Now, where were we?” Obama asked Harwood. Then he added: “That was pretty impressive, wasn’t it? I got the sucker.”

You’re kidding right? This can’t be serious. PETA is just messing with us…no one, and I mean no one, even CLOSE to sane would make a press release condemning someone for swatting a freaking fly!

Well, I guess PETA would. Just proves how radical they are, I suppose. They care enough about a fly to make a national scene about it, but not enough about the animals they take in to not slaughter them like fattening pigs. Keep the hypocrisy going there folks.

Interesting side note: it seems that Obama, while soft on terrorists, money launderers and evil regimes bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, it seems he hates insects with a passion. If the planet is ever invaded by large bugs, I guess there’s a better than 50-50 chance that he MIGHT decide the country is worth defending…maybe.

Interesting side note #2: Obama thinks it was “pretty impressive” to nail the fly. No wonder he’s wowed by the supposed “financial genius” of Turbo Tax Timmy if he thinks swatting a fly is impressive. Low standards, baby!

Oh, this article made me so happy. Major kudos to John Crace and The Guardian; this is pure genius.

Barack Obama, the World’s Greatest Orator (™all news organisations [sic]), didn’t exactly cover himself in glory when the BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson asked him a question about who was to blame for the financial crisis. Normally word perfect, Obama ummed, ahed and waffled for the best part of two and a half minutes. Here, John Crace decodes what he was really thinking …

What follows that introduction is a hilarious blow-by-blow recounting of Obama’s stuttering, stammering and “deer-in-the-headlights” response.

Some highlights:

Barack Obama: “I, I, would say that, er … pause [I HAVEN’T A CLUE] … if you look at … pause [WHO IS THIS NICK ROBINSON JERK?] … the, the sources of this crisis … pause [JUST KEEP GOING, BUDDY] … the United States certainly has some accounting to do with respect to . . . pause [I’M IN WAY TOO DEEP HERE] … a regulatory system that was inadequate to the massive changes that have taken place in the global financial system … pause, close eyes [THIS IS GOING TO GO DOWN LIKE A CROCK OF SHIT BACK HOME. HELP]. I think what is also true is that … pause [I WANT NICK ROBINSON TO DISAPPEAR] … here in Great Britain … pause [SHIT, GORDY’S THE HOST, DON’T LAND HIM IN IT] … here in continental Europe … pause [DAMN IT, BLAME EVERYONE.]

The rest of the column is just as entertaining. Go read it. Now.

Nice. Obama and his cronies wanted to make sure they had some nice softball questions to field. It wouldn’t look so good if the Messiah had to take a hard question and stuttered and stammered his way through it now would it?

But while the online question portion of the White House town hall was open to any member of the public with an Internet connection, the five fully identified questioners called on randomly by the president in the East Room were anything but a diverse lot. They included: a member of the pro-Obama Service Employees International Union, a member of the Democratic National Committee who campaigned for Obama among Hispanics during the primary; a former Democratic candidate for Virginia state delegate who endorsed Obama last fall in an op-ed in the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star; and a Virginia businessman who was a donor to Obama’s campaign in 2008.

(emphasis added)

Change We Can Believe In? Sure it is: we’re combining the media and the government into one horrid, multi-tentacled freedom-sapping beast.

The outrage over AIG’s bonus distribution is reaching a fever pitch. Obama and his minions have been whipping the general public into a huge frenzy, trying to rally people as though he was staging a “get out the vote” effort. BHO wants people mad, and he wants them clamoring for the government to do something. What Barack Obama is doing is stirring up a disproportionate amount of rage over these AIG bonuses (which his own Treasury department protected).

The overall goal is not to “right the wrong” of AIG’s bonus distribution, however. No, no…that’s just a front. The real goal is to cap ALL pay in ALL businesses. Obama is using the AIG issue as a cudgel to wield against capitalism itself.

And it’s working. People are screeching for the government to step in and “fix” the situation, and Obama is more than happy to lay a comforting hand on your shoulder, smile slowly and say, “There, there, American people. Dear Leader is here to help you. Pay no attention to the stormtroopers marching in lockstep down the road behind me or the thought police breaking down your neighbor’s door. It’s all part of the plan.”

We need to think a little bit before we blindly wander down the road The Messiah points us toward. Chances are good we’ll end up walking the long walk of communism if we do.

We already know that Obama has made A LOT of mistakes. Now, Don Surber, a columnist with the Charleston Daily Mail, has helpfully put them together in a spectacularly handy list of them for us!

64 mistakes in 60 days…pretty amazing for someone who was supposed to be the “savior of America.”

See the full list here.

Some of my favorites:

15. Using the word “crisis” 25 times in a speech, then later complaining that people are too negative about the economy.
16. Letting Nancy Pelosi write the $787 billion “stimulus’ plan.
17. Relying on Tim Geithner to explain it.
18. Putting Joe Biden in charge of making sure the stimulus money is not — wink, wink, nudge, nudge — misspent.
34. Ticking off Switzerland by having his tax cheat go after the tax cheats in Switzerland. Cognitive dissonance.
45. Sending a “reset” button to Russia, presumably to diss the last 70 years of America standing up to communism.
49. Telling Caroline Kennedy she would, you know, make, um a good, you know, senator.
52. Telling reporters privately: “President Obama has accomplished more in 30 days than any president in modern history.”
55. Signing earmarks while denouncing them.
56. Adding signing statements while denouncing them.
57. Quadrupling the deficits, while denouncing them.
64. Banning the press from covering his acceptance of a press association award.

How long is it going to take for people to realize this man has no business being the Commander In Chief?

Dick Cheney is mad…and rightly so.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday that the Obama administration will “raise the risk” of a terrorist attack by overhauling his predecessor’s approach to the War on Terror.

Cheney sharply criticized Obama’s decisions to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, limit the methods CIA officers use to interrogate terror suspects and suspend military tribunals for alleged terrorists, saying those decisions taken together will make Americans less safe.

And he warned that the administration was transitioning to a pre-9/11 mindset that views terrorism as a “law enforcement problem” and not a military threat.

“When you go back to the law enforcement mode, which I sense is what they’re doing … they are very much giving up that center of attention and focus that’s required, and that concept of military threat that is essential if you’re going to successfully defend the nation against further attacks,” Cheney said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Obama and his crew are naive. They do not understand the threat that radical Islam poses to this country. I pray that their lack of understanding does not lead to the deaths of more Americans.

This is a post-9/11 world. Acting like it is September 10th, 2001 does not make it so, and Obama needs to wake up quickly and realize this. We exist under a constant threat of terrorism. If he lets our guard down for just a moment (by, say, treating this as a law enforcement problem instead of a war), the terrorists will strike again.

Like or hate George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, but no one can argue against the fact that they kept this country safe for eight years. Dear Leader now seeks to undo all the progress the previous administration made in national security.

Obama would to be wise to heed Cheney’s words. I highly doubt he will, however.

It really wasn’t a question of if, just when. Obama had a chance to stand up for the promise he made in his campaign to go “line by line” and eliminate wasteful spending and earmarks.

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama, sounding weary of criticism over federal earmarks, defended Congress’ pet projects Wednesday as he signed an “imperfect” $410 billion measure with thousands of examples. But he said the spending does need tighter restraint and listed guidelines to do it. Obama, accused of hypocrisy by Republicans for embracing billions of dollars of earmarks in the legislation, said they can be useful and noted that he has promised to curb, not eliminate them.

Instead, he meekly signed in the massively overloaded omnibus budget act as it was presented to him, while saying that it was “imperfect” and acting like he didn’t actually want to sign the massive increase in government spending.

I like how NOW Obama is promising earmark reform after just THIS ugly earmarked bill. That’s like a mass murderer promising to quit after he guns down just ONE more group of people. It doesn’t make the crime any better to say you won’t do it again (especially in this case since he ALREADY said he wouldn’t do it in the first place).

Wikipedia is apparently out exercising their censorship legs. How dare anyone question The One! Comrades, there must be no dissent. We will all live in the great paradise he provides us, for he is the Obamessiah, the one we have been waiting for who shall lead us from the darkness.

Or, he might be a crooked know-nothing politician from inner city Chicago who associates with terrorists and has more skeletons in his closet than Ted Kennedy has in the backseat of his car.

I guess the jury is still out, you know?

Wikipedia, the online “free encyclopedia” mega-site written and edited entirely by its users, has been deleting within minutes any mention of eligibility issues surrounding Barack Obama’s presidency, with administrators kicking off anyone who writes about the subject, WND has learned.

A perusal through Obama’s current Wikipedia entry finds a heavily guarded, mostly glowing biography about the U.S. president. Some of Obama’s most controversial past affiliations, including with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and former Weathermen terrorist Bill Ayers, are not once mentioned, even though those associations received much news media attention and served as dominant themes during the presidential elections last year.

Also completely lacking is any mention of the well-publicized concerns surrounding Obama’s eligibility to serve as commander-in-chief.

Where’s the proof Barack Obama was born in the U.S. or that he fulfills the “natural-born American” clause in the Constitution? If you still want to see it, join more than 300,000 others and sign up now!

Indeed, multiple times, Wikipedia users who wrote about the eligibility issues had their entries deleted almost immediately and were banned from re-posting any material on the website for three days.

The first argument I would expect to hear is that the entry was some maniacal attack on BHO, claiming ludicrous theories that had no factual evidence.

Not the case:

In one example, one Wikipedia user added the following to Obama’s page:

“There have been some doubts about whether Obama was born in the U.S. after the politician refused to release to the public a carbon copy of his birth certificate and amid claims from his relatives he may have been born in Kenya. Numerous lawsuits have been filed petitioning Obama to release his birth certificate, but most suits have been thrown out by the courts.”

As is required on the online encyclopedia, that entry was backed up by third-party media articles, citing the Chicago Tribune and WorldNetDaily.com

The entry was posted on Feb. 24, at 6:16 p.m. EST. Just three minutes later, the entry was removed by a Wikipedia administrator, claiming the posting violated the websites rules against “fringe” material.

“Fringe” material? Yeah, I suppose it’s “fringe” to want to know if the President of the United States of America is CONSTITUTIONALLY ELIGIBLE TO SERVE AS PRESIDENT. Somehow, I think that most Americans would be interested to know the answer that that question. This was covered in major news outlets like the Chicago Tribune, so it’s not like it’s just some crackpot theory.

Maybe Wikipedia just wants to not have people insulting the President. You know, maybe it’s one of those pro-America things, where they just want to keep the office clean and not throw mud in a public forum at our highest elected official.

Oops, wrong answer; apparently mud-slinging at President Bush is just fine.

The Wikipedia entry about former President George W. Bush, by contrast, is highly critical. One typical entry reads, “Prior to his marriage, Bush had multiple accounts of alcohol abuse. … After his re-election, Bush received increasingly heated criticism. In 2005, the Bush administration dealt with widespread criticism over its handling of Hurricane Katrina. In December 2007, the United States entered the second-longest post-World War II recession.”

The entry on Bush also cites claims that he was “favorably treated due to his father’s political standing” during his National Guard service.” It says Bush served on the board of directors for Harken and that questions of possible insider trading involving Harken arose even though a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation concluded the information Bush had at the time of his stock sale was not sufficient to constitute insider trading.

Wikipedia can go punch itself in the face. I highly recommend reading WND’s full article here. Obviously it’s their sandbox that we are playing in so they can do whatever they want (in the same way Twitter removed #tcot from their “trending topics” feed), but it’s still just a blatant example of censorship and bias.

You know, we knew that Obama was anti-England since he insultingly sent back the Winston Churchill bust that the Brits GAVE us after 9/11 as a show of solidarity, but this is simply stunning. This newest disaster illustrates one of two things: Obama’s UTTER AND COMPLETE ineptitude when it comes to foreign affairs or his completely arrogant view that we don’t really need to be nice to our allies. After all, we have The Messiah running our country so what does he care? He can single-handedly save the world, didn’t you know?

I guess it could illustrate a third thing too: he’s a clueless bum from Chicago whose lack of class is being exposed on the national stage.

Britain is our staunchest ally in the world, our sister country, and a country that we need to remain in our corner. What do Chicago city-slicker Obama and his classless wife do to welcome British PM Gordon Brown to the country? Read on, but prepare to be disgusted by their sheer arrogance and lack of respect.

First, he canceled the joint press conference that he was going to have with Brown:

No sooner had the Prime Minister’s plane touched down at Andrews Air Force on Monday evening when word was passed to travelling [sic] Westminster correspondents that the press conference they’d been told to expect had been called off “because of snow”. [sic]

Hours earlier, at around 4pm EST on Monday, a British official had told me that there would be a “press conference” after the PM and President Barack Obama had met in the Oval Office and before they had their working lunch in the Old Family Dining Room. Exact timings, however, were vague.

By 8pm, the press conference - if there’d ever been one planned - was officially off. The White House press schedule stated: “There will be a pool spray of the meeting.” .

Rude, but not the worst of it. That’s coming.

It is well understood that visiting diplomatic delegations come bearing gifts and gift giving is returned in like fashion by the host country. It is an ages old human practice in diplomacy after all. Usually the gifts are valuable, representative of the products of the nations involved, or at least symbolic of the history of those nations.

For his part, PM Brown gave two symbolic gifts and one that expressed national pride. Brown came bearing a pen holder carved from the timbers of the sister ship of that which gave the wood to create the famous “Resolute Desk,” the desk that has been in America’s charge since 1880. He also gave Obama the framed commission for that famous ship, the HMS Resolute. His third gift was a seven-volume biography of one of England’s greatest leaders, Winston Churchill.

Those are some damn good gifts. How did Barry and Michelle respond? With garbage.

So, what did President Obama give the British PM? 25 movies on DVD. Yeah, that’s it. Brown gives a symbolic gift like the pen holder fashioned from a famous British warship and Obama responds by sending a staffer to WalMart to pick up a few quick movies.
[…]
Worse, no one is 100% sure that Obama was smart enough to know that DVDs made in America don’t play on European DVD players. American DVDs are created in the “Region One” format while those in Europe play in “Region Two” format. A U.S. DVD just won’t play on a machine made for the English market.

Not to be out done in tastelessness by her husband, Michelle got into the act, too. Mrs. Brown came bearing two outfits for the Obama girls from Topshop, one of Britain’s trendiest and expensive women’s wear retail outlets.

In return, Michelle apparently had a staffer run down to the White House gift shop and grab two toy Marine One helicopter models for the Brown’s boys.

Unbe-FREAKING-lievable. Are these low-class people SERIOUSLY the face of America? Never in their lifetime will these idiots be able to compete on the level of dignity that George and Laura brought to the White House. Regardless of your opinion of Bush’s policies, no one can argue with the character and respect they carried with them throughout their eight years in the White House. This latest act by Obama is disgusting; Brits have a right to be offended.

DVDs that you can get at Wal-Mart? From possibly the wrong region so they can’t be watched? Models? These are commercially available items that convey no deeper meaning than, “Look, here’s some crap! Now go away so I can get back to ruining my country!”

I think I’m going to go with what Glenn Beck said and sent a letter of apology to the British Embassy. They should know that all of America does not stand behind this arrogant twit.

The address:

British Embassy
3100 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington DC 20008

I’m still in shock over this. The lack of respect just isn’t something I am prepared to accept.