All those reports you’ve been seeing that Harry Reid will not negotiate with the Republican anarchists is pure bunk, you guys. Harry Reid says that behind the scenes he’s been negotiating his heart out, and even went one step further this week to make “an offer they can’t refuse.”
What’s that you say? You’ve heard Harry Reid say on numerous occasions on tape that he won’t negotiate with the Republican hostage takers?
Iconic and chilling photo of Obama Shutdown optics
Man, what is Obama even thinking with all the stupid Barrycades? Nobody’s buying it and his approval numbers are already tanking just like they did following all the hysteria and scare tactics following the Sequester.
I’ve been posting a lot on this at The Conversation, this week. Here’s my latest:
The scenic overlook pictured above is on the George Washington Memorial Parkway in Washington, D.C. and it’s considered one of the most scenic routes around the nation’s capital. But due to the government shut-down, it’s being “barrycaded” along with other scenic overlooks.
Republicans on both the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the House Natural Resources Committee are looking into the the Obama administration’s decision to shut down national parks and monuments unnecessarily, closures that are becoming known as “Shutdown Theater”.
House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa answered with characteristic bluntness when asked by a reporter whether it was appropriate for Obama to head to Asia if the government remained shutdown.
On Tuesday, the usually unguarded World War II memorial in Washington, D.C. was “barrycaded” with seven National Parks Service employees standing guard. But since then, WWII veterans have easily breached the barriers with assistance from members of Congress.
Are Democrats sure they’re winning? Winners don’t usually have to disavow their own team members’ comments, or apologize for their own…..
Today in an exchange on Twitter with the Politico’s Ben White, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said, “POTUS wants the shutdown to end NOW. Speaker can do that NOW by putting a clean CR to a vote.”
When White asked Carney if he was disavowing the quote in the WSJ that the WH does not care how long shutdown lasts, Carney carefully responded that “we utterly disavow idea WH doesn’t care when it ends. House should act now, no strings attached.”
Note he disavowed the “idea” – not the actual quote. The White House is officially in damage control mode.
Meanwhile, via the Washington Times we have Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid delivering “a striking mea culpa” on the Senate floor as he opened the chamber, Friday, “apologizing for his nasty tone”.
This is how the Regime rolls. According to an anonymous Park Ranger, he and his fellow workers have been told to make life as difficult as possible for people.
The Park Service appears to be closing streets on mere whim and caprice. The rangers even closed the parking lot at Mount Vernon, where the plantation home of George Washington is a favorite tourist destination. That was after they barred the new World War II Memorial on the Mall to veterans of World War II. But the government does not own Mount Vernon; it is privately owned by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association. The ladies bought it years ago to preserve it as a national memorial. The feds closed access to the parking lots this week, even though the lots are jointly owned with the Mount Vernon ladies. The rangers are from the government, and they’re only here to help.
“It’s a cheap way to deal with the situation,” an angry Park Service ranger in Washington says of the harassment. “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.”
And Ace has been “bringing” the Chad Henderson story over at AoSHQ:
His dad says that he definitely didn’t enroll, or wasn’t enrolled by Chad, and that he doesn’t think Chad enrolled himself, either.
John Sexton reports that the media is very much downplaying how intensely partisan Chad Henderson is (and therefore, how unrepresentative he is of young people generally), which is part and parcel of their determination to portray every leftist activist as jus’ an ordinary American citizen.
Chad Henderson: Sure I Lied, But I Wasn’t Really Lying:
Shock and Awful: Conservatives Already Lying About Obamacare Enrollee Chad HendersonChad Henderson, the 21 year-old Flintstonian who has become the media’s go-to early example of an Obamacare exchange enrollee, has already become a talking point for conservatives, and the subject of conservative lies. Most glaringly, The Cato Institute‘s director of health policy studies Michael Cannon introduces Henderson with the lie that “Obamacare Increases Man’s Premiums 300%,” then backs it up with another lie that actually turns out to reveal that Republicans screwed poor Chad.
That headline is a self-evident lie, revealed in the Washington Post article that Cannon artfully cherry-picks. WaPo’s Sarah Kliff reveals that Chad Henderson hasn’t had health insurance for over 14 years, which means he had no health insurance premium to quadruple. That makes Cannon’s headline a complete and total lie, and Cannon never gets around to revealing Chad’s pre-Obamacare status one way or the other.
Ah, yeah whatever. The Cato Institute did not say Chad had coverage — it used the (this is a big word, Tommy, but write it down in your notebook) subjunctive mood or conditional mood to discuss what Chad would have paid pre-Obamacare.
Via genuine AoS Commenters Deety and Tasker, a great catch.
Chad Henderson actually disclosed that he was a partisan paid to post “advocacy” things on social media.
Click on the tweet and blow the picture up.
So who’s the bad guy here? Chad Henderson was not coy about his passionate support of Barack Obama, or his volunteer (???) position with OFA.
And here, he says “Something you should know about me…” and then discloses he’s paid to post advocacy stuff.
I’m often labeled “the guy who always talks about politics” and it normally has negative effects lol so I’m here to clear things up: If you were to hang out with me one night and you’ll see (sic) I’m not that obsessed with politics at all. Yes, I do post political stuff on here and other social networking sites. But it’s for a good reason. For one, I think it’s good if people get some insight into the world they live in. Secondly, I work for an organization that pays me quarterly to posts (sic) the political stuff as “advocacy” (so it’s kind of my job).
All emphases added. And the (sic)’s, of course.
WTF, MEDIA? Your big ObamaCare Poster Boy, who screamed to the world on social media he had “enrolled” in ObamaCare, actually admits he’s paid to post “political stuff” on social media as “advocacy” and it’s his fault you got punked?
Yesterday, Twitchy reported that Chad Henderson, the media darling poster boy for Obamacare who the administration is using as living proof of how easy it is to sign up, is in fact an OFA volunteer.
The media rushed to report Henderson’s story, but many conveniently left out Henderson’s history as a Democratic activist, but the story got even more interesting. Henderson’s father is reported as saying that, to his knowledge, his son has yet to enroll in an Obamacare plan.
As Twitchy reported, the Obamacare poster boy’s been busted for falsely claiming that he successfully purchased health insurance for him and his father early this week. Now that he’s been put on the defensive, he’s trying to change his story. You might think he couldn’t look much worse than he already does … and you’d be wrong.
Henderson, you see, has a history of lazily accusing others of lying:
According to the Obama Administration’s latest eleventh-hour purported rulemaking, Members of Congress and their staff will be able to enroll in taxpayer-subsidized health plans that include coverage of elective abortions.
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) released a final rule this week that will allow Members of Congress and their staff to choose health care plans on Obamacare’s state health insurance exchanges while receiving generous federal premium support. It is clear that the OPM does not even have statutory authority to provide premium support for exchange plans. Further, the final rule disregards longstanding, bipartisan federal prohibitions on the use of taxpayer funds to pay for elective abortions.
For decades, Members of Congress and their staff have enrolled in health plans through the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), receiving significant federal taxpayer contributions toward premium payments. In almost every year since 1983, Congress has attached an amendment, authored by Representative Chris Smith (R–NJ), to the Financial Services appropriations bill, which funds the FEHBP, prohibiting the expenditure of those federal dollars to pay for elective abortions or health plans that provide coverage of abortions.
In a stunning development, some military priests are facing arrest if they celebrate mass or practice their faith on military bases during the federal government shutdown.
“With the government shutdown, many [government service] and contract priests who minister to Catholics on military bases worldwide are not permitted to work – not even to volunteer,” wrote John Schlageter, the general counsel for the Archdiocese for the Military Services USA, in an op-ed this week. “During the shutdown, it is illegal for them to minister on base and they risk being arrested if they attempt to do so.”
This week’s winner, Joshuapundit’sPeace In Our Time . Are my thoughts on Iranian president Hassan Rouhani’s ‘charm offensive’ and President Obama’s reaction to it. Here’s a slice:
President Obama’s latest diplomatic foray involves ‘engagement’ with Iran over its illegal nuclear program. During his recent speech to the UN General Assembly, the president said unambiguously that the U.S. was not seeking regime change in Iran, and spoke about pursuing ‘the diplomatic path’. According to President Obama, he was basing this on Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, who President Obama characterized as “having received from the Iranian people a mandate to pursue a more moderate course”, on Rouhani’s committment not to build a nuclear weapon and on a fatwa against nuclear weapons issued by Iran’s Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei.
The press absolutely jumped on this.NBC News reported that this was “the first time leaders from the U.S. and Iran have directly communicated since the 1979 Iranian revolution.” The always servile AP reported that Rouhani’s speech to the UN was ‘absent anti-Israel rhetoric’ ( it clearly wasn’t) , while CNN went so far overboard as to perform what appears to be a deliberate mistranslation of President Rohani’s remarks to make it appear that, unlike his predecessor, he condemned the Holocaust.
But all that aside, let’s look at the shiny , new diplomatic track President Obama, his media allies and his foreign policy team are so enthused about.
First of all, Hassan Rouhani isn’t Iran’s leader in any sense of the word. Iran is a villayat e’ fiqh, an Islamic theocratic dictatorship, just as the Ayatollah Khomeini envisioned. Iran’s dictator is Supreme Guide Ayatollah Khameneni, head of the Supreme Council of Guardians. It is Khamenei and the Guardians who vet all candidates for office and decide who gets to run for president and who doesn’t, as well as who ends up winning the ‘election’. Rouhani, like his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a carefully vetted regime loyalist who serves at Khamenei and the Council’s pleasure and follows their orders exactly. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been allowed to run for election, let alone be president. Nor is Rouhani a ‘moderate’, whatever that means. Especially not when it come to Iran’s nuclear program. No, he pretty much endorses the Iranian mantra of no compromise on nukes. Or as Rouhani put it to EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton about two weeks before his speech at the UN, Iran “will not give up one iota” on nukes. AFP referred to that as ”echoing his hardline predecessor” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Of course, you didn’t read about that in the New York Times.
When you’re speaking to Rouhani, you’re really getting a PR version of Khameini’s views, with a helpful smile for the gullible western press and politicians.
Now, a meeting between President Obama and the Ayatollah Khamenei would be worth citing as a breakthrough of sorts..except that Khamenei has refused to do anything of the kind. On the other hand, the telephone conversation between President Obama and President Rouhani that the current occupant of the Oval Office is so excited about is the diplomatic equivalent of a noncommittal little chat with Khamenei’s personal assistant.
Even worse was the message President Obama sent to the Iranians with his speech at the UN.
The current Iranian regime is one of the most evil in human history. It has the blood of many of its own people on its hands as well as a being a major state supporter of terrorism world wide, even being implicated in the 9/11 bombing of the World Trade Center. All that aside, President Obama’s pledge not to seek regime change and to in effect recognize the Iranian regime’s legitimacy may have whizzed right by a number of American commentators, but I assure you it did not pass unnoticed by the Iranians. Nor did the president’s apology for U.S. help in ridding Iran of a Soviet collaborator, Mossedegh, who had ignored a call from his own parliament to resign and who would have put the Iranians under communist slavery as part of the Soviet empire if he hadn’t been stopped.
It’s vital to see this not through our western eyes, but through the Iranians.
In Muslim culture, apology is seen as weak and servile, something an inferior does to ingratiate himself with a stronger superior. That’s why the Iranians have never apologized for taking over our embassy and holding our diplomats hostage, allowing al-Qaeda fighters from Afghanistan to move through their territory after Tora Bora, their support for terrorist groups, targeting our troops in Iraq or gathering in howling mobs chanting ‘Death To America!’.
It’s why Rouhani made no pretense of making a concession by doing it in his speech at the UN.
So given all this, what our president referred to as ‘mutual mistrust on both sides’, how well is any attempt at negotiation likely to work? President Obama’s is basing his new diplomatic track on his feeling that the Iranians can be trusted with any agreement they make with America and the west on nuclear weapons, on Rouhani’s moderation, and on a religious fatwa against the use of nuclear weapons by the Ayatollah Khamenei.
Let’s examine these items in turn.
In our non-Council category, the winner was Victor Davis Hanson with Obama: Transforming America submitted by Joshuapundit.It’s Professor Hanson’s superb catalog of exactly how the current occupant of the Oval Office has attempted to change America – for the worse.
OK, here are this week’s full results. Only The Mellow Jihadi was unable to vote, but was not subject to the usual 2/3 vote penalty:
Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote -Bill Whittle –Umbrella Men submitted by The Watcher
See you next week! Don’t forget to tune in on Monday AM for this week’s Watcher’s Forum, as the Council and their invited special guests take apart one of the provocative issues of the day with short takes and weigh in…don’t you dare miss it. And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us onTwitter…..’cause we’re cool like that!
On the House floor, today, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee seemed to suggest that the (reportedly) mentally unstable woman who *went on a reckless driving rampage in her black Infiniti today in DC, might have been spurred on by the government shutdown.
Rep. Lee started out by making it clear that she was against the piecemeal approach to fund the government, saying, “rather than piecemeal, the American dream. Rather than respond in a way that leaves 8,000 federal employees unemployed, and God knows the tragedy of this poor person who came on the Hill in a black car – no one knows what drived (sic) this woman to do this, but what I would say to you is, let’s get our wheels back on and serve the American people – bring them back, and vote for a bill today that will open the government, I will stay here until we get that bill on the floor…”
“Piecemeal is undeserving of America and all that we love!” Lee concluded dramatically.
We are talking weapons grade “cray-cray” as the kids say.
I suspect you will find Rep. Louis Gohmert to be a much more compelling and persuasive speaker.
* FYI: I find this story very troublesome – the fact that Capitol Police shot an unarmed woman with a baby in the car….something seems very wrong, there.
Nice Deb 