"I trust a Las Vegas casino with my money more than I trust the government with it"

TEN THINGS YOU MISSED (OR WISH YOU’D MISSED) FROM #SOTU2015

By Emily Zanotti on 1.21.15 

To be honest, I was approximately as jazzed to spend an hour listening to the President yammer on about his policy agenda as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and given her noted history of pre-gaming the event, probably just as drunk. But regardless, in selfless stewardship to the public interest, I watched the whole thing, paid attention through most of it, and only flipped the channel once to check out whether the Travel Channel had a show on that would send my OCD into overdrive. I flipped back because it was something about RVs and camping isn't exactly my forte. Even in an RV.

Anyway, in case you missed it, or blacked out early because you actually followed the rules of a State of the Union drinking game, here are ten things you need to know about last night's rousing example of what happens when a President knows that his policy agenda should have been enacted six years ago when he had a functional Congress controlled by his own party, but plows delusionally ahead anyway.

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Valerie Jarrett the Toad and Liar

Valerie Jarrett Confronted Over Unequal Pay for Women in White House | The Weekly Standard

 JAN 21, 2015 • BY DANIEL HALPER

Possible presidential candidate Carly Fiorina confronted President Obama's top adviser, Valerie Jarrett, over the White House paying female employees less than their male counterparts: [go to link for video]

"Good morning, Valerie," Fiorina said, speaking to Jarrett on MSNBC's Morning Joe. "I think, certainly, every woman on this panel and every woman across the nation agrees that equal pay for equal work is absolutely required. I also think it's just a fact that laws exist on the books today, and if a woman is being discriminated against because of her gender, she should use the full extent of that law. I am struck by the fact the president hasn't really led in this regard. He's not paying women equally by his own measures in his own White House. And I am also struck by the fact that the single greatest impediment to equal pay for equal work is this seniority system, which pays not on merit, not on performance, but on time and grade. And who is it who supports the seniority system? Unions, government bureaucracies, the vast majority of constituencies that the Democratic party represents and who support the Democratic party. So why wouldn't the White House take on the senatority system and say let's pay women by merit and by their results? Because based on my own experience, in those scenarios, women will be paid equally."

Jarrett responded with a whopper: "Let's unpack your question a little bit. So, first of all the first question and last question, let's weave them together: in the White House women do earn equal pay for equal work."

But as the Washington Post reported in July, males get paid 13 percent more than women in the Barack Obama White House:

The White House has not narrowed the gap between the average pay of male and female employees since President Obama’s first year in office, according to a Washington Post analysis of new salary data.

The average male White House employee currently earns about $88,600, while the average female White House employee earns about $78,400, according to White House data released Tuesday. That is a gap of 13 percent.

In 2009, male employees made an average of about $82,000, compared to an average of $72,700 earned by female employees — also a 13 percent wage gap.

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Fixing Broken Windows and Cleaning up Shards of Glass - A Tale of Two Very Different Cities

A Tale of Two Very Different Cities by Heather Mac Donald, City Journal 20 January 2015

Heather Mac Donald  20 January 2015

Who knew that the return of William J. Bratton to serve as New York police commissioner, a position he held from 1994 to 1996, would signal a return of some of the hoariest anti-police conceits from that era as well? In a column blasting Broken Windows policing (which targets public-order offenses like graffiti and turnstile jumping), New York Times reporter Ginia Bellafante dusts off one of the Times’s favorite questions from the 1990s: “Why doesn’t New York police itself like San Diego does?” San Diego lowered its violent crime rate from 1991 to 1998, and again from 2002 to 2012, by more than New York did, Bellafante says, without allegedly employing what she calls “broken-windows tactics.”

Times reporter Fox Butterfield regularly trotted out the same comparison in the 1990s, and it is even more inapt today than it was then. San Diego and New York’s demographics and crime profiles are worlds apart. San Diego doesn’t have a large entrenched underclass, nor did it ever have a serious violent-crime problem. Its murder rate in 1993, a year before Bratton took over the NYPD, was two-fifths that of New York. New York had 1,946 murders in 1993; San Diego had 133. Gang members did not—and do not—regularly gun each other down in San Diego as they still do in New York’s public housing projects. Yet despite San Diego’s much lower violent crime rate, in 1999, the allegedly pacific San Diego police department fatally shot civilians at 15 times the rate of the NYPD.

What about that gap from 1998 to 2002 in Bellafante’s New York–San Diego comparison? …

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Too Bad Democrats in Albany Refuse to Read the 2nd Amendment! New York Sheriff On Handgun Renewal Permits, "Throw Them In The Garbage Because That Is Where They Belong.”

New York Sheriff On Handgun Renewal Permits, "Throw Them In The Garbage Because That Is Where They Belong.” | The Daily Caller

by Mike Piccione 1-20-15

Fulton County, N.Y. is home to a strong hunting and fishing tradition. Guns are everywhere, but life isn’t easy.

Temperatures are often well below zero, and snow piles drift up so high against your home that you have to go to the second floor to be able to look outside a window. Jobs are scarce since the leather industry exited a few decades ago. Taxes are high, and it seems the government solution to the unemployment problem is to move people to public assistance.

It is the perfect example of a bad state government imposing its will on a people that don’t need advice from Albany politicians that have never set foot into the county. The people there want to be able to care for themselves.

As a kid, the only time in 10 years I was ever stopped by the police for carrying a gun through Fulton County was when I was walking home from a hunt with my Ithaca Model 37. The officer pulled over and asked if I was coming or going to hunt. When I told him I was walking home he responded with, “Oh, OK, I get off in 30 minutes and was just wondering if you wanted to go out.”

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Wonders of Government Run Healthcare

24 Unvaccinated Students Banned From OC High School After Campus Measles Exposure

“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.” ― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Warlocks of the world unite. m/r

BBC News - Same-sex couple married in pagan first

19 January 2015

Two male witches in Edinburgh have tied the knot in the UK's first pagan same-sex marriage.

Tom Lanting, 34, and Iain Robertson, 39, were married in a ceremony in the 16th-century vaulted cellars of Edinburgh's Marlin's Wynd.

The couple, who have been together for 12 years, are both hedge witches, who use herbal remedies to deal with medical and spiritual ailments.

The ceremony included handfasting, the sharing of mead and jumping the broom.

After their wedding on Sunday, the couple said: "Getting married in a legal pagan ceremony means so much to both of us. [How surprisingly trite.]

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How Nice and Unconstitutional! Get a Search Warrant!

New police radars can 'see' inside homes

This low administration needs to be put out of its misery - Welcome to Obamaland

Obama's Emissary

Now these barbarians bring their subhuman ways to England with their daily beheadings. And the formerly civilized world "officially" tolerates it. 

Headline:
Poor woman. Why is beheading always in the news, is this really 2015?

If they ever put a bullet in your brain, I won't complain. m/r

How Do You Make an Entente Cordiale? :: SteynOnline

by Mark Steyn  •  Jan 19, 2015

There has been much commentary on the undisputed all-time low of American foreign policy: the official dispatch of James Taylor to Paris to sing "You've Got A Friend" to the French. Many people have said, well, it could have been worse - it could have been Barney the Dinosaur, or the theme song from "The Golden Girls", or "That's What Friends Are For".

There is, in fact, one friendly song that would have been perfect - Cole Porter's "Friendship". These days, you can hear it in the current touring revival of Anything Goes, although you may prefer the rawer version by Ray Charles and Ricky Skaggs. Anyway, in "Friendship", Cole Porter manages to sum up Obama foreign policy in one couplet:

If they ever put a bullet in your brain
I'll complain.

That's the US Government's commitment to Paris on Islamic fanatics… 

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Obama Hasn’t ‘Had the African-American Experience - or Any Other American Experience

Although he excels in the Stalinist Experience. m/r


▶ Megan Kelly Confronts D’Souza for Saying Obama Hasn’t ‘Had the African-American Experience - YouTube

Jan 19, 2015

Dinesh D’Souza appeared with Megyn Kelly tonight to elaborate on his comments about Martin Luther King, Jr. and said something about President Obama that really took Kelly by surprise. D’Souza was on, partially, to address his tweets about Dr. King and drew parallels between King and himself.

He told Kelly that King, unlike Obama, Eric Holder, Al Sharpton, and Jesse Jackson, was a tremendous force on the issue of civil rights. Those other people, he said, have a “completely different attitude toward the color-blind ideal, which they reject.”

And then, in an aside, D’Souza said that Obama “hasn’t actually had the African-American experience.” Kelly was taken aback, saying, “He has black skin and he grew up in America as a black man!”

Islam is incompatible with democracy and Western civilization. - Europe’s Leaders Continue to Misrepresent the Reality of Jihadism

Europe’s Leaders Continue to Misrepresent the Reality of Jihadism | National Review Online



By David Pryce-Jones 1-19-15

The Kouarchi brothers murdered the Charlie Hebdo journalists and then ran into the Paris streets shouting that they were avenging the Prophet Mohammed. The motivation is all too plain, you might think, but François Hollande, the French president, came up with a startling counterfactual view: “Those who committed these acts have nothing to do with Islam.”

Michel Gurfinkiel, one of the most perceptive commentators in France, has taken up this presidential absurdity. “The question is not so much whether one sees the truth or not, but rather what one is supposed to do once truth has been seen.” Four million French men and women turned out for demonstrations in Paris and other cities, presumably because they already had a good idea of the truth. But marching in the front ranks were personalities from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the Palestinian entity, and others who condone expedient violence in practice and continually arrest and suppress journalists whose freedom of speech they were supposed to be defending.

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