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The U.S. Capitol after the burning of Washington during the War of 1812 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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American Ingenuity Bypasses Incandescent Ban

White House Foreign Policy Blasted as "Amateur"

Major Fixes Coming to U.S. Capitol Dome

Doubling the Minimum Wage Actually Hurts Employees

Bloomberg Bans Another Harmless Perk of Adulthood

Health Plan Sticker Shock Ahead for Some Buyers

The Suddenly Competent Incompetents

White House foreign policy blasted as 'amateur'
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/12/white-house-foreign-policy-blasted-as-amateur/#4M6oEOkBTDcVqpHq.99

White House foreign policy blasted as 'amateur'
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/12/white-house-foreign-policy-blasted-as-amateur/#4M6oEOkBTDcVqpHq.99

White House foreign policy blasted as 'amateur'
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/12/white-house-foreign-policy-blasted-as-amateur/#4M6oEOkBTDcVqpHq.99

White House foreign policy blasted as 'amateur'
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/12/white-house-foreign-policy-blasted-as-amateur/#4M6oEOkBTDcVqpHq.99

White House foreign policy blasted as 'amateur'
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/12/white-house-foreign-policy-blasted-as-amateur/#4M6oEOkBTDcVqpHq.99

White House foreign policy blasted as 'amateur'
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/12/white-house-foreign-policy-blasted-as-amateur/#4M6oEOkBTDcVqpHq.99

Utter Chaos: White House Exempts Millions From Obamacare's Insurance Mandate, 'Unaffordable' Exchanges - Forbes

Insurance (Photo credit: Christopher S. Penn)

It’s hard to come up with new ways to describe the Obama administration’s improvisational approach to the Affordable Care Act’s troubled health insurance exchanges. But last night, the White House made its most consequential announcement yet. The administration will grant a “hardship exemption” from the law’s individual mandate, requiring the purchase of health insurance, to anyone who has had their prior coverage canceled and who “believes” that Obamacare’s offerings “are unaffordable.” These exemptions will substantially alter the architecture of the law’s insurance marketplaces. Insurers are at their wits’ end, trying to make sense of what to do next.

Utter Chaos: White House Exempts Millions From Obamacare's Insurance Mandate, 'Unaffordable' Exchanges - Forbes

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The Royal Presidency - Mark Steyn - National Review Online

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From the New York Daily News:

“Snooki Gives Kate Middleton Advice on Being a New Parent.”

Great! Maybe Kate could return the favor and give Snooki and her fellow Americans some advice. About fiscal prudence, for example. Say what you like about a high-living, big-spending, bloated, decadent, parasitical, wastrel monarchy, but, compared to the citizen-executive of a republic of limited government, it’s a bargain. So, while the lovely Duchess of Cambridge nurses her baby bump, the equally radiant president of the United States nurses his ever more swollen debt belly. He and his family are about to jet off on their Christmas vacation to watch America slide off the fiscal cliff from the luxury beach resort of Kailua. The cost to taxpayers of flying one man, his wife, two daughters, and a dog to Hawaii is estimated at $3,639,622. For purposes of comparison, the total bill for flying the entire royal family (Queen, princes, dukes, the works) around the world for a year is £4.7 million — or about enough for two Obama vacations.

According to the USAF, in 2010 Air Force One cost American taxpayers $181,757 per flight hour. According to the Royal Canadian Air Force, in 2011 the CC-150 Polaris military transport that flew William and Kate from Vancouver to Los Angeles cost Her Majesty’s Canadian subjects $15,505 per hour — or about 8/100ths of the cost.

Unlike a republic, monarchy in a democratic age means you can’t go around queening it. That RCAF boneshaker has a shower the size of a phone booth, yet the Duchess of Cambridge looked almost as glamorous as Snooki when she emerged onto the steps at LAX. That’s probably because Canada’s 437 Squadron decided to splash out on new bedding for the royal tour. Amanda Heron was dispatched to the local mall in Trenton, Ontario, and returned with a pale blue and white comforter and matching pillows. Is there no end to the grotesque indulgence of these over-pampered royal deadbeats? “I found a beautiful set,” said Master-Corporal Heron. “It was such a great price I bought one for myself.”

 

Nevertheless, Canadian journalists and politicians bitched and whined about the cost of this disgusting jet-set lifestyle nonstop throughout the tour. At the conclusion of their official visit to California, Their Royal Highnesses flew on to Heathrow with their vast entourage of, er, seven people — and the ingrate whining Canadians passed the baton to their fellow ingrate whiners across the Atlantic. As the Daily Mail in London reported, “High Fliers: Prince William and his wife Kate spend an incredible £52,000 on the one-way flight from LA to London for themselves and their seven-strong entourage.” Incredible! For £52,000, you couldn’t take the president from Washington to a state visit to an ice-cream parlor in a Maryland suburb. Obama flew Air Force One from Washington to Williamsburg, Va., requiring a wide-bodied transatlantic jet that holds 500 people to ferry him a distance of a little over 100 miles. And, unlike their British and Canadian counterparts, the American media are entirely at ease with it.

Just for the record, William and Kate actually spent an “incredible” £51,410 — or about $80,000 — for nine business-class tickets on British Airways to Heathrow. At the check-in desk at Los Angeles, BA graciously offered the Duke and Duchess an upgrade to first class. By now you’re probably revolted by this glimpse of disgusting monarchical excess, so, if it’s any consolation, halfway through the flight the cabin’s entertainment consoles failed and, along with other first-class passengers, Their Highnesses were offered a £200 voucher toward the cost of their next flight, which they declined.
By contrast, in a republic governed by “we, the people,” when the president of the United States wishes to watch a film, there are two full-time movie projectionists who live at the White House and are on call round the clock, in case he’s overcome by a sudden urge to watch Esther Williams in Dangerous When Wet (1953) at two in the morning. Does one of them accompany the first family on Air Force One? If the movie fails halfway across the Pacific, will the president and first lady each be offered a $2 million voucher in compensation?

In his recent book Presidential Perks Gone Royal, Robert Keith Gray, a former Eisenhower staffer, revealed that last year the U.S. presidency cost American taxpayers $1.4 billion. Over the same period, the entire royal family cost British taxpayers about $57 million. There’s nothing “royal” about the current level of “presidential perks”: The Obama family costs taxpayers more than every European royal house put together.

In the American republic, even the dogs cost more. The Queen is a famous corgi lover and has been breeding them since she was a young girl. Now in her late 80s she’s slowing down and only keeps four. The president has one pooch, a photo-op accessory called Bo, who unlike the corgis requires a full-time handler. In contrast to the stingy remuneration offered by the royal household, the presidential dog-walker is one of 226 White House staff earning over $100,000 a year. For many centuries, the King had a courtier whose somewhat intimate duties were reflected in his title: the Groom of the Stool, a position abolished in 1559. Now, after two and a third centuries, the American presidency has evolved to the point that it has a full-time six-figure Groom of the Canine Stool. Will he be accompanying the president on Air Force One to liaise with the Keeper of the Privy Flatscreen over screenings of Lassie?

In 2003, the advance team for President Bush informed Buckingham Palace that he would only be able to stay there if they took out all the windows and replaced them with blast-proof glass. The Queen, keeping a straight face, politely refused, and the president was forced to spend three nights in an insecure palace. Happily, in Hawaii, the flood-the-zone “security” can proceed unimpeded by cheeseparing monarchs who feel the job of head of state entails assuming a modest amount of risk or at least a passing acquaintance with reality. So local residents who will never catch a glimpse of their hermetically sealed-off sultan are expected to put up with walled-off neighborhoods, closed beaches, and residential streets clogged by 40-car motorcades. The Secret Service is installed in luxury hotels, no doubt with their Colombian hookers, and their hookers’ Colombian glaziers, fresh from installing bombproof windows on Bo’s kennel.

The fish rots from the head down, and so do republics. A $1.4-billion president has a defense secretary with a private plane to fly him home every weekend, and a chair of the “White House Council on Women and Girls” with her own Secret Service detail, and all of them ever more detached from the rhythms of American life. In the wake of the Cartagena hooker scandal, the Secret Service with predictable obtuseness imposed a new rule prohibiting agents from having “foreign nationals” in their rooms. The salient fact surely wasn’t that they were “foreign” but that they were hookers. Yet now, at the luxury Moana Surfrider resort, Obama staffers passing through the lobby and bumping into minor princesses and arch-duchesses staying in the cheap rooms on the lower floors won’t even be able to ask them up to their federally mandated ocean-view suites for tips on deficit reduction. In the Brokest Nation in History, it would be unreasonable to expect the president to pretend to have a regular all-American family Christmas for less than five million bucks.

As Ben Franklin famously said: “A republic, if you can keep it in the style to which it’s become accustomed.”
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn

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• Thus Spake Obama: Mark Steyn

Friday Funnies

Christmas: The Most Important Pagan Holiday

Hump Day Hunnies

Somebody Picked The Wrong Girl

Monday Miscellany

(Photo credit: SalFalko)

Click on the text to read the full story.

Look out for your retirement account.

NEW YORK – A report by the Washington-based National Institute on Retirement Security that found a significant racial disparity in retirement savings among working-age households appears to be setting the stage for introducing “income redistribution” concepts into the next round of debate over cutting Social Security benefits.

What appears to be taking shape in Washington is an argument that 401(k) plans are a tax advantage enjoyed disproportionately by the rich. Meanwhile, cuts contemplated to Social Security to reduce future unfunded federal budget liabilities would be disproportionately disadvantageous to the poor.


It's the Law

There’s nothing funnier than watching an ObamaCare apologist describe it as a “law,” usually in a tone of high dudgeon that any treasonous saboteurs would even dare think of repealing it.  It should be obvious to even the dimmest left-wing partisan by now that ObamaCare is not a “law,” but of course that doesn’t bother them, because they don’t think their beloved all-wise all-knowing super-government should be bound by laws.  The will of our benevolent aristocracy should not be thwarted by the sort of legal speed bumps, tar pits, and bear traps that routinely impose trillions of dollars in cost upon private industry.  Not even the dusty old Constitution should be an obstacle when a duly credentialed Great Man or Woman of the Left has a really swell idea that would benefit society.




“I love how you guys just can’t wait to get your teeth into Republicans throwing mud at Republicans on a week when this administration… unilaterally, lawlessly changed every deadline in the ObamaCare law without any legal authority, in a way that is absolutely astonishing – but you won’t hear about this on this show, so try Fox.” 

Kwanzaa Is The Ultimate Fraud

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From Yid with Lid

If you are like me you woke up one day and the "holiday season" Christmas and New Year's became a trio with the addition of something called Kwanzaa.  Oh  sure there were rumblings of a new holiday, but who would have thought that something invented by a Black separatist group in 1966 will now be considered by some people in this overly politically correct world as a holiday on par with something like Christmas.

The man who created the holiday, Maulana Karenga was a convicted violent felon. In 1971 Karenga was convicted of torturing two women who were members of US (United Slaves), a black nationalist cult he had founded.

A May 14, 1971, article in the Los Angeles Times described the testimony of one of them: "Deborah Jones, who once was given the Swahili title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis' mouth and placed against Miss Davis' face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vise. Karenga, head of US, also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said."

Karanga was convinced that the women were trying to poison him. He and three members of his cult had tortured the women in an attempt to find some nonexistent "crystals" of poison. Karenga thought his enemies were out to get him.

Some how I cannot see rational people wanting to observe a holiday created by such a sick violent man.  But this part of the Kwanzaa story is rarely mentioned by the MSM.

When he invented the holiday, Karenga said his goal was to

"give Blacks an alternative to the existing holiday and give Blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society." 

So, arguably this holiday raised by the PC media to the level of Christmas, has the totally opposite purpose. While Christmas is meant to unify, Kwanzaa is meant to divide. Or as the 16 year old Rev. Al Sharpton explained the feast would perform the valuable service of "de-whitizing" Christmas

Heck even Karenga admitted it was a fraud

“I created Kwanzaa,” laughed Ron Karenga like a teenager who’s just divulged a deeply held, precious secret. “People think it’s African. But it’s not. I wanted to give black people a holiday of their own. So I came up with Kwanzaa. I said it was African because you know black people in this country wouldn’t celebrate it if they knew it was American. Also, I put it around Christmas because I knew that’s when a lot of bloods (blacks) would be partying!”

The late Tony Snow laid out what was so wrong about the holiday 33 years after it was founded:

Now, the point: There is no part of Kwanzaa that is not fraudulent. Begin with the name. The celebration comes from the Swahili term "matunda yakwanza," or "first fruit," and the festival's trappings have Swahili names -- such as "ujima" for "collective work and responsibility" or "muhindi," which are ears of corn celebrants set aside for each child in a family.

Unfortunately, Swahili has little relevance for American blacks. Most slaves were ripped from the shores of West Africa. Swahili is an East African tongue.

To put that in perspective, the cultural gap between Senegal and Kenya is as dramatic as the chasm that separates, say, London and Tehran. Imagine singing "G-d Save the Queen" in Farsi, and you grasp the enormity of the gaffe.

Worse, Kwanzaa ceremonies have no discernible African roots. No culture on earth celebrates a harvesting ritual in December, for instance, and the implicit pledges about human dignity don't necessarily jibe with such still-common practices as female circumcision and polygamy. The inventors of Kwanzaa weren't promoting a return to roots; they were shilling for Marxism. They even appropriated the term "ujima," which Julius Nyrere cited when he uprooted tens of thousands of Tanzanians and shipped them forcibly to collective farms, where they proved more adept at cultivating misery than banishing hunger.

Even the rituals using corn don't fit. Corn isn't indigenous to Africa. Mexican Indians developed it, and the crop was carried worldwide by white colonialists.

The fact is, there is no Ur-African culture. The continent remains stubbornly tribal. Hutus and Tutsis still slaughter one another for sport.

Go to Kenya, where I taught briefly as a young man, and you'll see endless hostility between Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya and Masai. Even South African politics these days have more to do with tribal animosities than ideological differences.

Moreover, chaos too often prevails over order. Warlords hold sway in Somalia, Eritrea, Liberia and Zaire. Genocidal maniacs have wiped out millions in Rwanda, Uganda and Ethiopia. The once-shining hopes for Kenya have vanished.

...Our treatment of Kwanzaa provides a revealing sign of how far we have yet to travel on the road to reconciliation. The white establishment has thrown in with it, not just to cash in on the business, but to patronize black activists and shut them up.

So what is Kwanzaa, its the ultimate fraud.  It is a holiday created by a man responsible for violently torturing two women, with a purpose not to celebrate the role of the African-American in the United States but with a fascist goal of separating the races. If the Black people in America would like to come up with a holiday that celebrates, their valuable contribution to America I would not object. Nor would I object to a celebration of the rich Western Africa culture that many of them lost when they were dragged from their homelands to become slaves in America. and to our culture I have no objection. But what I don't understand is why anybody would want to follow a violent felon in a made-up holiday  that mistakes segregationism for spirituality and fiction for history.

Related articles

• No. I don't celebrate the fake holiday called Kwanzaa

When the Bill Comes Due

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Though a decade ago civil servants and union members would never have believed it could happen, the stark reality of the situation came to pass yesterday morning.


We now know the answer to the question: What happens when a government makes promises it can’t keep and borrows so much money it can never be repaid?

Yesterday morning a judge overseeing the City of Detroit’s fiscal sustainability ruled that the City can be afforded bankruptcy protection, meaning that all 100,000 of its creditors now stand to lose a significant portion of monies owed to them.

The most notable victims are the tens of thousands of retirees living off of pensions – many of whom will see an 80% obliteration of the retirement funds they believed they’d receive until they died.

Read the full story.

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• We now know the answer to the question: What happens when a government makes promises it can't keep and borrows so much money it can never be repaid? - shtfplan.com via David Icke