Blog Heap of Links for the day 21 July 2011

Among the donors to the Obama reelection campaign: Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, Vogue magazine editor Anna Wintour, and former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine all raised more than half a million dollars. National Journal reports Katzenberg and Wintour each raised more than $500,000 for the president in 2008.

Wayne La Pierre, Executive Vice President and the long-time major force at the National Rifle Association, gave the presentation to the United Nations yesterday. He spoke before a committee that has made pretty nakedly obvious their desire to remove handguns from the possession of all government subjects, so that only governments have guns. [I AGREE! Of course, in America, WE ARE THE GOVERNMENT!] "Our Founding Fathers long ago rejected that notion and forged our great nation on the principle of freedom for the individual citizen — not for the government."

Obama finally solved the budget crisis the White House really cares about yesterday when he announced that he hauled in $86 million in campaign contributions for the three months ended June 30th. The budget crisis facing the rest of us? Obama's really mad at the rest of us because we are all acting very immaturely by withholding a blank check for the bills he's run up. ... It's one thing to try to act like an adult in the room, but when you try to act like the only adult in the room by holding your breath and stomping your feet, your cover's been blown.

Well, I knew all this passing the buck was unhealthy for the president. It appears that Obama has had Bush on the brain for so long that that he now has Bush on the head too. If you look closely at this photo I took at Monday's press conference, you can see that a W has formed on the far left side of Obama's forehead.

Congress cannot even impeach him because, not being the actual President, he cannot be "removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors" ... Despite all the noise out there by Obama's supporters, it is crystal clear the putative president was born with dual citizenship and is forever ineligible to be president. ... To impeach would also accomplish this: Every piece of legislation he's signed into law would remain on the books. ... Will he ever be indicted for his crimes? With enough public pressure, it can happen because his handlers would simply throw him under the bus as a liability.

As a matter of fact, according to their own records, the social security number in question was never issued. So even if we were willing to believe that it was issued, we see this number associated with an individual born in 1890 who would have been 121 years old now and presumably deceased at this time. Obama started using this number around 1980, and he's been using it for most of his life, but there is no information showing that he is the lawful holder of this number. As a matter of fact, all the information that we have shows that he is illegally using this number.

Ryan says that he is very frustrated with how President Obama has handled the negotiations, especially in how he has painted Republicans as intransigent. Recent presidential press conferences, Ryan says, have notably soured the White House's relationship with the House GOP, perhaps to the point of no return. Such a development, he sighs, is unfortunate for the country, which wants the president to work with Congress. ... "[Obama] has made it harder to establish trust, which will make it harder to find compromise," Ryan says. "As much as he wants to come off as a leader, every time he talks about Republicans holding out to save fat-cat corporate-jet loopholes — which he knows is false — or leaks alleged spending cuts to the press, he reduces his leadership. He knows how that damages his credibility up here. Yet he continues to spin." Indeed, in almost every sense, Ryan says, Obama has been "fundamentally un-presidential" throughout the summer, "dragging his feet, failing to address the looming debt crisis — which he knows is coming — because he remains committed to his ideology." "This is, unfortunately, the way he operates," Ryan says. "This is his pattern of behavior, this is his personality. For the next 18 months, it will probably be like this. It'll be in-your-face class warfare, with bitter appeals to envy, fear, and anxiety, plus the demonization of the other side's motives." ... "Whenever I hear him speak now, I just shake my head and think, there he goes again," Ryan says. "When it comes to actually governing, leading and fixing fiscal problems, he is not in the game."

The Obama Administration has something of a decision to make. Will it respond to Iranian aggression and enforce Iraq's internationally recognized borders, or will it allow the Iranian thugs to use military force against an American ally with impunity?

Allen West: "I must confess, when I see anyone with an Obama 2012 bumper sticker, I recognize them as a threat to the gene pool."

This time round, the frenzied mob consists not of the public but members of Parliament, the BBC and the left-wing media baying for the blood of Rupert Murdoch. That difference aside, the similarities with the Great Diana Derangement are very striking. It's not just the hysterical delirium, the loss of proportion and rationality in depicting Murdoch as a figure of diabolical power — of which Gordon Brown's speech to Parliament, as deludedly selective as it was viciously enraged, was an all-too apt encapsulation rather than the weird aberration that it has been painted. No, the really striking similarity with Diana Derangement is the toxic combination of the cult of the victim, mass credulity and pathological projection and displacement neurosis that is fuelling the frenzy.

By now, you likely have heard of Dr. David Ludwig, Harvard professor and child obesity specialist at Children's Hospital in Boston. He and attorney and research partner Lindsey Murtagh authored a piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggesting that severely obese children might require the government to remove them from custody of their parents. If this doesn't convince you that liberals support a nanny state, nothing will. As a child psychologist with over 20 years of experience, I can say with supreme confidence that taking a child from his or her parents is almost always traumatic. Sometimes it is justified, of course; in cases of physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, the child is sometimes far better off living without the offending parent. Similarly, when a parent evidences a profound inability to provide the basic needs of a child, the child might be safer with a relative or, rarely, with a foster parent. But removing a child from the home because the parent doesn't adequately assist the child in losing weight? This is nothing short of ridiculous.

The government's ability to make us buy light bulbs we don't want is crucial, he says, because "if we take away government and society's tools to even attempt to respond to a world of limits in a collective fashion, I'm not sure how we'll survive." Let me try to unpack that argument as charitably as I can.

Fluorescent lighting makes me feel like I'm dead, and am just haunting whatever room I happen to be in. It makes me feel like the top of my head has been replaced with something clammy and toxic. It makes me feel like filling up my 15-passenger van with overpriced gas and barreling nonstop to Al Gore's house and smacking his silly, fat face around until he admits that his main goal is and always has been to make each and every day for the entire human race a little less bearable.

Lamb and Lynx Gaede, the dimpled tween rockers whose Nazi-themed pop band, Prussian Blue, sparked an exuberant media firestorm several years back have grown up — and had a change of heart. "I'm not a white nationalist anymore. My sister and I are pretty liberal now." "Personally, I love diversity," Lynx seconded. "I'm stoked that we have so many different cultures. I think it's amazing and it makes me proud of humanity every day that we have so many different places and people."

"After [9/11]… Over 35,000 Americans Embraced Islam"

Islamic extremism is indeed a serious global problem today, to a degree unmatched by the radical fringes of other major religions. ... All around the country, right-of-center activists and politicians are trying to use government force to limit the property rights of Muslims and repel the alleged menace of Shariah law. Islamophobia has crossed the line from fringe rhetorical hysteria to active discrimination against U.S. citizens of the Islamic faith.

Those Algorithms That Govern Our Lives (video)

Even in the West, in places like England, France, and now parts of the USA (and many other western countries) there are islamic enclaves, or "no go zones", where they ban music (and booze, and gays, and women outdoors without being buried under cloth, and pretty much all things representing freedom and beauty). I say, screw that crap! Let's rock, anti-jihad fatwa-worthy style!

"The jihadists seem to be having a problem ... finding people who can master the terrorist tradecraft" and travel freely to the West. They've been reduced to urging potential sympathizers who already live here to stock up at gun shows and shoot some infidels at the mall. But, as Stratfor observes, "the very call to leaderless resistance is an admission of defeat." We may be winning, but don't dare imagine that "victory" will take the form of a restoration of lost liberties. That's "defeatist" thinking. I suppose that's why, shortly after SEAL Team 6 killed bin Laden, Congress and the president's autopen got together to reauthorize the Patriot Act. The threat recedes, but the surveillance state must live on.

It's no secret that comics sales are declining. The numbers of readers are declining, the numbers of stores are declining, the amount of cash being made is declining. It happened once before when comics were sold only on the newsstand, back in the Neolithic Era for you who are too young to remember. What saved it then was the Direct Market but that's now killing it; the market is constricting and the numbers of readers are finite. What may save it this time is going digital — comics here on the web. The reason is this is where the eyeballs are. — John Ostrander

Adam Mueller, aka Ademo Freeman, stood inside the Keene District Courthouse in New Hampshire, waiting for Judge Edward Burke to step inside so he could ask him a question. Less than two minutes later, he was arrested for threatening the judge, a felony charge called "improper influence."

Scientists in Israel say they have invented a way of turning traffic into electricity. ... a road that generates power when vehicles pass over it. ... 'piezo' electricity

A flying car retailing for $227,000 could be on roads in a matter of months -- and customers are already lining up to be the first to get their hands on one, its maker claims. Just over a week ago, the Terrafugia Transition passed a significant milestone when it was cleared for takeoff by the U.S. National Highway Safety Administration. It's taken Terrafugia founder Carl Dietrich just five years to realize his dream, with some media outlets reporting that the Transition could now be on U.S. roads by the end of next year.

Police arrested a Bartlesville woman Saturday evening after the residents of a house on Seminole Avenue came home to find the pink pajama-clad woman in their house destroying their possessions... asked by the residents what she was doing in their house replied, " I don't know!" ... had broken a few "very expensive" porcelain Indian collectables and had poured "an entire case of water" on a flat screen television ... said she went into the house and "tore (expletive) up" because she was angry from all the voices.

When it comes to sexual relationships and cohabitation among consenting adults, Utah takes a permissive approach. If a guy wants to shack up with a lady, that's fine. If he wants to shack up with several, no problem. He can father children by different roommates, with no fear of the law. But if he marries one woman and represents three others as his "spiritual wives," like Kody Brown? Then he's committed a felony. Not because of the stuff that goes on behind closed doors. It's the public act of claiming to be part of a lifelong "plural marriage" that raises the specter of jail. … Brown went to court claiming that his constitutional rights have been violated in various ways. Though it may come as a surprise to hear, he's got a perfectly reasonable argument. … Brown isn't asking the state to officially accommodate his chosen form of matrimony. He's just asking to be let the hell alone. … Other people, after all, are exempt from such control. Turley says Brown and his women "would not be prosecuted if they claimed no religious obligation and merely had casual or purely sexual associations." He notes, "Monogamists are allowed an infinite number of sexual partners, and consequently have the right to bear children with multiple partners, so long as they do not claim to be committed to such partners in a union or family."

CERN Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer told Welt Online that the scientists should refrain from drawing conclusions from the latest experiment [which] examines the role that energetic particles from deep space play in cloud formation. ... Why? Because, Heuer says, "That would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate. One has to make clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters." Oh … "only one of many parameters", eh? So nice to see him admit that. Does he mean like that big yellow thing that hangs in the sky each day?

Oh Scotty, Montgomery Scott, Master of Transporter Controls. How we loved you. They didn't let you command the ship very often, but we know that's because Kirk knew you were the fuckin' balls and so he bitch-rapped you like McCartney did to Pete Best who was too good-looking and so he got Ringo Starr who was not. Although he did bang Barbara Bach. …

Thune and Klobuchar's bill takes the tax revenue gained from ending the VEETC (which, again, doesn't help ethanol producers), and dedicates most of the money to other ethanol subsidies, such as tax credits for small ethanol producers and for ethanol blender pumps to be installed at gas stations. The bill, of course, leaves in place the mandate, which is by far the biggest ethanol subsidy. Lobbyists for the American Coalition for Ethanol and the Renewable Fuels Association applaud the bill -- which tells you just about all you need to know.

People who supply drugs must appear reluctant and pious; people who use drugs must appear reluctant and ashamed; and the medical pot business must embody this paradigm. Everybody has to pretend not to want it. This is the key to being a goverment-approved drug dealer in America.

Victoria Brice Magnum has brought a $1 million suit against three deputies and former Sheriff Weldon Tucker for forcing her to abandon her child during a roadside arrest. ... [Officer] was reportedly monitoring Magnum's car from his patrol unit until Magnum's mother arrived. According to reports, the urgency to leave the scene was to avoid a jurisdictional conflict with Pct. 3 Constable Don Walters, who was in a relationship with Magnum's mother and en route. "They were arresting her for an expired driver's license, this wasn't criminal murder," Cortez said in a previous interview. "They did leave the kid unattended. Saying it was reasonable to leave the kid sitting there is ludicrous...in order to avoid an argument, [the deputy] decided to abandon a 2-year-old." Cortez said when Magnum's mother and brother arrived, the child was awake and trying to get out of her car seat.

A Salinas car manufacturing company that was expected to build environmentally friendly electric cars and create new jobs folded before almost any vehicles could run off the assembly line. The city of Salinas had invested more than half a million dollars in Green Vehicles, an electric car start-up company. All of that money is now gone

Stop worrying about Shariah. Christian fanatics are the ones using the government to restrict individual liberty. [Uh, yeah, flying planes into our buildings, massing troops on and infiltrating through our unsecured Southern border, beating gays and mutilating women and using cultural terrorism. Those darned Baptists!]

My name is Angela. I am 28 years old, an Army wife, the mother of a darling little boy, and a recovering Useful Idiot for the Left. ... I went about my life, comfortable in my second- and third-hand assumptions; smug in my supposed intellectual superiority. And then something happened that I did not expect. ...

"Online learning means fewer teachers (and union members) per student," Terry Moe points out in The Wall Street Journal. And Greg Forster reminds the techno-innovators that "only school choice can prevent the blob from neutralizing any reform you throw at it."

A certain lieutenant colonel at Luke AFB deserves a big pat on the back. Apparently, an individual who lives somewhere near Luke AFB wrote the local paper complaining about a group of F-16s that disturbed his/her day at the mall. When that individual read the response from a Luke AFB officer, it must have stung quite a bit.

Palin doesn't think the candidate that can beat Obama has emerged. She does not think any of the current or potential candidates are the strongest to beat Obama. Her family seems to be on board. And she told Hannity that her timetable for an announcement was August or September. Based on this evidence, Palin will announce for the presidency in August or September.

Ben Howe, a contributor at Redstate.com, has penned a review of Stephen Bannon's film, The Undefeated, which is being released nationwide today (ticket information here). As many of us know, Redstate has not been the most Palin-friendly blog in the conservative sphere. If Howe's review is any indication, however, that may be about to change. At least for Howe. ... "...what had me and my wife blown away by the time it was over, was the avalanche of information and perspectives that had been hidden from us over the years. ... about how we had handled our vetting of Mrs. Palin, shame was the word that best described it."

Sen. John McCain, the very model of a progressive Rockefeller Republican, lambasted a surging GOP presidential hopeful, Rep. Michele Bachmann, for her uncompromising stance on the debt ceiling. By McCain's Big Gummint lights, Bachmann is an extremist for refusing to indulge the notion that we should inflate by $2,500,000,000,000 (that's not a typo) the credit line of a bankrupt nation that is officially $14,300,000,000,000 in the hole. (The true debt is more like $130,000,000,000,000 if we look beyond Uncle Sam's Enronesque accounting practices.) And mind you, the $2.5 tril is just what's necessary to get us through President Obama's reelection

Republican presidential primary candidate Herman Cain says front-runner Mitt Romney cannot win the party's White House nomination next year because of his religion. "Romney would be a good choice, but I don't believe he can win,"

'The primary process is more likely to produce a loser in November 2012 than a conservative who can unite the country and win'

Political leaders who stand up against the media mob deserve a badge of courage. That goes especially for Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and Herman Cain -- because in some perverse way the left reserves special abuse for the women and blacks it tries to control. It's the slavemaster's rage at liberated slaves.

Several long-time Republicans dissatisfied with the crop of candidates running for president have developed an unorthodox plan to upend what they consider a flawed GOP nomination process. The other half of Garlington's troubles: Because his missing driver's license is still valid, the DMV won't issue an alternative photo ID to use at the polls. "If they had an election today, I couldn't vote," said Garlington, 59. Garlington was among more than 40 people who appeared at an NAACP town hall meeting Monday where opponents said they would do everything in their power to see that the state's new voter ID law never gets used. Many said it is no more than an attempt to rekindle Jim Crow through a modern-day poll tax. [GREAT BLUBBERING BOO HOOS! What a bunch of nonsense!]