maddogs hideaway
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About Me
- Name: MADDOG10
- Location: Beautiful Florida
- Country: United States
- Interests: restoring old cars, winning the lottery, avid football fan, and riding my motorcycles... Both (Harleys)...!!
Friday, October 31, 2014
Thursday, October 30, 2014
Hysterical Media Tells Us To Calm Down
Hysterical Media Tells Us To Calm Down
Ann Coulter | Oct 29, 2014
In the past week, The New York Times has ridiculed Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Gov. Chris Christie for having "fed panic" by ordering quarantines for health workers arriving from Ebola-plagued countries.
NBC News' Brian Williams opened his broadcast last Friday announcing that the Obama administration was trying "to restrain the Ebola panic."
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow complained that the "hysteria" over Ebola was getting "stupider."
I haven't noticed any panic. If you want panic, review media coverage of the police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri. That hair-on-fire coverage was based entirely, it turns out, on the media's gullibly swallowing inaccurate accounts of the incident.
For decades liberals have terrified soccer moms about a slew of imaginary terrors: global warming, Alar on apples, breast implants, heterosexual AIDS, nuclear war, and Republicans taking away their birth control.
Nannies rushed to grade schools to yank apples out of little children's hands, elderly married couples got tested for AIDS, and students at Ivy League colleges demanded that their health departments stock cyanide pills in case of nuclear attack. (Because the Russkies were definitely hitting Ithaca, New York, and Providence, Rhode Island, first.)
And then, except for a few heterosexual AIDS victims -- who also happened to be intravenous drug users -- no American ever died from a single one of these liberal-hyped dangers. I do not recall, for example, ever hearing of a nurse acquiring AIDS from treating an AIDS patient, certainly not a nurse wearing a spacesuit, as the Ebola-infected nurses were.
Within the past few years, Rachel Maddow has been panicked about (among many, many other things):
-- Right-wing hillbillies murdering census workers (the census worker committed suicide in an attempted insurance fraud);
-- Republican budget cuts killing us when bridges collapse (the Minnesota bridge collapsed because of a design flaw, not budget cuts);
-- Gun rights supporters plotting another Oklahoma City bombing (they had assembled on April 19, the anniversary of the bombing -- which also happens to be the anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord).
But now, the political party that specializes in hysteria has suddenly become too-cool-for-school about a deadly disease being brought to our country for no reason. Oh, you big pussy, you won't get Ebola.
Let the record reflect, Democrats now oppose "the politics of fear" -- as NBC's Chuck Todd dubbed concerns about Ebola.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire accused her Republican opponent, Scott Brown, of "fear-mongering" about Ebola, but she sure didn't mind fear-mongering on health care. In order to pass the widely unpopular Obamacare, Shaheen carried on about insurance companies' obscene profits and hectored, "We cannot wait!"
The New York Daily News' Denis Hamill wrote five hysterical columns on Ferguson. One was titled, "Is this Selma in 1965?" But when it comes to a disease that kills more than half of the people it infects, he says, "Take a chill pill."
How about telling the deranged protesters in Ferguson to "take a chill pill"?
After years of Republican candidates having to assure voters that it would require several million policemen to take away every woman's birth control kit -- but that was an excellent question! -- it's too much to have to listen to liberals scoff at a disease with a 70 percent fatality rate.
Ebola is a lot more dangerous than any of the fears whipped up by liberals. Peter Piot, the Flemish scientist who discovered Ebola in 1976, recently told the British Guardian:
"I always thought that Ebola, in comparison to AIDS or malaria, didn't present much of a problem because the outbreaks were always brief and local. Around June it became clear to me that there was something fundamentally different about this outbreak. ... We Flemish tend to be rather unemotional, but it was at that point that I began to get really worried."
A few days ago, Piot described the screening being done at arrival airports as "not that effective, to be honest," adding, "The most cost-effective method is to screen people before they take the plane."
(Speaking of which, where did the CDC's Tom Frieden go? Does he have Ebola?)
It's beyond idiotic for the media to keep condescendingly instructing Americans that they are more likely to die in a car accident, from food poisoning, skin cancer or heart disease, than from Ebola.
We know that. We have rationally accepted the tradeoffs in order to get places quickly, dine in restaurants, walk on the beach and eat steak. Those are risks prudently taken in exchange for something we deem more valuable.
What's the upside of bringing Ebola here? And why on earth is the Obama administration preparing to import non-citizen Ebolees? It's perfectly logical for Americans to ask, "What are we getting out of this?" But the only answer they get is: We can't build a fence around the country!
We're not seeing "panic." What we're seeing is rage that the country is having a deadly disease foist on it for no good reason.
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
Scales Finally Falling From America's Obama-Obscured Eyes
In his first few years and beyond, liberal funnymen sometimes complained that Obama was so flawless that he didn't provide them any material. Of course, we knew at the time that this otherworldly caricature of Obama was wholly mythical, but it was nonetheless very real in the eyes of its liberal beholders. They regarded him with a quasi-idolatrous zeal -- almost as though it would be sacrilegious to criticize, much less mock, him.
But on "Saturday Night Live," among other shows, the comics have grown increasingly derisive. In the most recent episode, the Obama character lamented that a New York doctor had been diagnosed with Ebola. He said: "Now, some people want to criticize the way our administration has handled this crisis, and it's true we made a few mistakes early on. But, I assure you, it was nowhere near as bad as how we handled the ISIS situation. I mean, our various Secret Service mishaps or the scandals of the IRS and NSA. And I don't know if you guys remember, but the Obamacare website had some pretty serious problems, too. In fact, if you look at all the stuff that's happened in my second term, this whole Ebola thing is probably one of my greatest accomplishments."
Folks, this would be bad for the least politically correct president ever, but it's devastatingly brutal for the most politically correct president in the history of the universe.
Obama is not just a guy who plays a lot of golf because he has earned his recreation time; he appears to have difficulty working his job duties in between rounds. He's a guy who is largely disengaged, but when he is engaged, he makes an even bigger mess of things.
Many of his shortcomings are no longer just a matter of partisan opinion. They are objectively obvious. On foreign policy, he flounders around indecisively like the Scarecrow in "The Wizard of Oz."
He draws lines in the sand, and then a slight breeze covers them up. He denies that overt acts of jihadi murder are terrorism. He paints the United States into a corner by emphatically pledging there will be no American boots on the ground in the Middle East no matter how great a danger the Islamic State poses to the United States or its allies. He even openly argues with himself, as when he boasted that he would oppose a status of forces agreement with Iraq that would prevent any but an ineffectively small number of troops from remaining there to maintain the stability of our victory and then later complained that it was unfair he was being blamed for the decision. And please don't get me started on the unconscionably fraudulent depiction of the Benghazi, Libya, attacks as being prompted by an Internet video, as opposed to being the planned acts of terrorism that they were.
On the domestic side, his word has proved to be no more reliable. When it was no longer feasible for him to deny that the Internal Revenue Service had specifically targeted conservative groups for discriminatory tax treatment, he feigned outrage just long enough to get through the current news cycle and then later dismissed it, along with other genuine scandals, as something the Republicans had manufactured out of whole cloth.
His administration of the Obamacare rollout would have been even more embarrassing for any other president. The website "glitches" were not glitches at all but a direct consequence of fundamental incompetence and lack of preparation.
Moreover, it was hardly just a computer or processing problem. The entire law has been revealed as an utter failure in every respect, from breaking its promise to reduce premiums for a family of four by an average of $2,500 per year to its pledge that you could keep your doctors and plans to the assurances that our health care quality would increase and the net effect of the overhaul would be revenue-neutral.
If we had time, I'd rehearse for you Obama's stubborn refusal to reform entitlements in time to prevent the bankruptcy of the United States, his war on business and oil, his perennially anemic economy, his shameless diminution of the office of the presidency, and his unparalleled, hyper-partisan divisiveness.
There is plenty enough for me to have written yet a third book chronicling Obama's disastrous presidency, but it is gratifying enough that people have finally awakened to the enormity of this man's destructiveness to the point that he might very well bring his party down with him in the November elections. Even the mega-Democrat Stephanie Cutter advised that if she were a Republican, she'd be making the election about Obama as much as possible.
Everywhere I turn, even normally calm people are asking, "How can we ever get out of this nightmare of a mess Obama has created?"
I tell them, "November will be a good start, God willing."
Monday, October 27, 2014
Monday, October 27, 2014
The True Reason Gas Prices are Falling (Hint: It's Not Because of Green Energy)
The True Reason Gas Prices are Falling (Hint: It’s Not Because of Green Energy)
Photo via Newscom
Stephen Moore, who formerly wrote on the economy and public policy for The Wall Street Journal, is chief economist at The Heritage Foundation. Read his research.
American workers and motorists got some badly-needed relief this week when the price of oil plunged to its lowest level in years. The oil price has fallen by about 25 percent since its peak back in June of $105 a barrel. This is translating to lower prices at the pump with many states now below $3 a gallon.
At present levels, these lower oil and gas prices are the equivalent of a $200 billion cost saving to American consumers and businesses. That’s $200 billion a year we don’t have to send to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other foreign nations. Now that’s an economic stimulus par excellence.
There are many global reasons why gas prices are falling, but the major one isn’t being widely reported. America has become in the last several years an energy-producing powerhouse. And sorry, Mr. President, I’m not talking about the niche “green energy” sources you are so weirdly fixated with.
Oil prices are falling because of changes in world supply and world demand. Demand has slowed because Europe is an economic wreck. But since 2008 the U.S. has increased our domestic supply by a gigantic 50 percent. This is a result of the astounding shale oil and gas revolution made possible by made-in-America technologies like hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. Already thanks to these inventions, the U.S. has become the number one producer of natural gas. But oil production in states like Oklahoma, Texas and North Dakota has doubled in just six years.
Subscribe to updates and alertsWithout this energy blitz, the U.S. economy would barely have recovered from the recession of 2008-09. From the beginning of 2008 through the end of 2013 the oil and gas extraction industry created more than 100,000 jobs while the overall job market shrank by 970,000.
When the radical greens carry around signs saying “No to Fracking,” they couldn’t be promoting a more anti-America message. It would be like Nebraska not growing corn.
We are just skimming the surface of our super-abundant oil and gas resources. New fields have been discovered in Texas and North Dakota that could contain hundreds of years of shale oil and gas supplies.
Here’s another reason to love the oil and gas bonanza in America. It’s breaking the back of OPEC. Saudi Arabia is deluging the world with oil right now, which is driving the world price relentlessly lower. The Arabs understand–as too few in Washington do–that shale energy boom is no short term fad. It could make energy cheaper for decades to come. As American drillers get better at perfecting the technologies of cracking through shale rock to get to the near infinite treasure chest supplies of energy locked inside, we will soon overtake Saudi Arabia as the dominant player in world energy markets.
You can’t have a cartel if the world’s largest producer–America–isn’t a member. OPEC will never again be able to create the level of economic turmoil that the Arab members of OPECs engineered in the 1970s with their oil embargo. And by the way: lower oil prices place increased pressure on Iran’s mullahs to abandon their nuclear program and curb Putin’s capabilities to engage in East Europe aggression.
Yet the political class still doesn’t get it. As recently as 2012 President Obama declared that “the problem is we use more than 20 percent of the world’s oil and we only have 2 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves.” Then he continued with his Malthusian nonsense, “Even if we drilled every square inch of this country right now, we’d still have to rely disproportionately on other countries for their oil.” Apparently, neither he nor his fact checkers have ever been to Texas or North Dakota. And we don’t have 2 percent of the world’s oil. Including estimates of onshore and offshore resources not yet officially “discovered”, we have ten times more than the stat quoted by the president–resources sufficient to supply hundreds of years of oil and gas.
America, in sum, has been richly endowed with a nearly invincible 21st century economic and national security weapon to keep us safe and prosperous. The plunge is gas prices is just one visible sign of this supply explosion. Think of how much bigger this revolution could be if we started building pipelines, repealed the ban on oil exports, expanded drilling on public lands, and stopped trying to punitively tax and regulate the oil and gas.
For much of the last forty years, oil’s periodic price spikes have remained a constant threat to growth. Higher consumer energy costs as well as increased industrial production costs weighted on the economy. Now oil is one of the primary accelerators; the new big drag on the economy is politicians who despise the carbon-based industry.
Sunday, October 26, 2014
Sunday, October 26, 2014
Saturday, October 25, 2014
Friday, October 24, 2014
Friday, October 24, 2014
Friday, October 24, 2014
Thursday, October 23, 2014
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Monday, October 20, 2014
Monday, October 20, 2014
Trusting This Administration On Ebola, Or Anything Else, Is Insanity
Trusting This Administration On Ebola, Or Anything Else, Is Insanity
Kurt Schlichter | Oct 20, 2014
It’s no surprise that things go poorly when there’s no accountability. Leadership sometimes means pour encourager les autres by making an example of a non-hacker who can’t cut it. But if you take accountability off the table, you kind of limit your management options pretty much to just sitting back and watching yourself fail.
Of course, while placing the responsibility for nonperformance on specific individuals within the administration is not an option, generalized slander of elements of the government not generally associated with liberalism is just fine. Take the ISIS, or ISIL, or IS, or whatever’s conquest of Iraq – that was the fault of the intelligence community’s negligent failure to put the President in a half-nelson and force him to read the daily intel briefs that warned him for months that the junior varsity team was heading into the Super Bowl with a very favorable point spread.
It’s remarkable how this administration stumbles from disaster to disaster, each new day a surprise, each new challenge an utter shock. Putin in Ukraine? Who would have thought a revanchist Russian autocrat might try to reconquer the breadbasket of the Old USSR? What’s up with that? And that a wave of unaccompanied children might crest over our non-existent border after the administration practically sent them an engraved invitation? Who could have seen that coming?
Sure, we all understand that the essence of progressivism is the rejection of objective truth in favor of politically useful lies, but this is something more. When an administration is so unbelievably incompetent that it can’t even manage to perform the most basic functions of a government – like defeating our enemies, securing our borders, and not letting the country live out the plot of a Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow movie – there is no alternative. It has to lie. There’s literally nothing else it can do.
No wonder the Democrats’ favorable/unfavorable poll numbers are tanking. People, even the stupid ones who put this freak show in control, dislike being lied to. And they tend to stop believing people who lie to them all the time.
Yet this phenomenon baffles our would-be liberal overlords. For instance, they are in a perpetual tizzy because the American people laughed at John Kerry’s recent announcement that climate change was America’s greatest security threat and refuse to give up their cars and move into caves because of global warming. Or climate change. Or whatever they are calling it this week.
It’s remarkable that the American people resist shoveling heaps of money and much of their sovereignty over to a bunch of liberal elitists whose argument seems to consist of shouting, “SCIENCE!” They cite to the same scientific community that recently assured us that they had this whole Ebola transmission thing totally figured out. In the 70s, the liberals’ pet eggheads assured us that right now we’d be in an ice age.
Perhaps we might understand the evidence better if they shouted “SCIENCE!” at us a few more times.
We liked our health plans, and we got to keep them. Obama was furious that his IRS oppressed his political enemies. The Benghazi video did it.
It’s sheer insanity to believe anything anyone in this administration says, and everyone knows it. Everyone except Chet the Unicorn.
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Saturday, October 18, 2014
Saturday, October 18, 2014
Saturday, October 18, 2014
Friday, October 17, 2014
Friday, October 17, 2014
Thursday, October 16, 2014
Thursday, October 16, 2014
Thursday, October 16, 2014
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Monday, October 13, 2014
Sunday, October 12, 2014
Saturday, October 11, 2014
Friday, October 10, 2014
Thursday, October 9, 2014
Thursday, October 9, 2014
Thursday, October 9, 2014
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
Monday, October 6, 2014
Sunday, October 5, 2014
Saturday, October 4, 2014
Saturday, October 4, 2014
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Friday, October 3, 2014
Friday, October 3, 2014
Can We End the Crazy Diversity Visa Lottery Yet?
Can We End the Crazy Diversity Visa Lottery Yet?
Michelle Malkin | Oct 03, 2014
- Ebola has rached our shores from Africa. Dozens of children are reportedly suffering paralysis from a deadly virus with unknown origins. Medical providers across the country have warned of a looming public health crisis as communicable diseases spread unmonitored and uncontrolled. Other countries are cracking down. But America is stuck on open-borders stupid.
The Diversity Visa (DV) program, to take just one glaring example of government insanity, is still going.
On October 1, the State Department opened the annual DV random lottery to applicants from around the world. Yes, it's completely random like a Powerball drawing. Up to 55,000 lucky winners will snag permanent residency visas (green cards), which put them on the path to American citizenship ahead of millions of other foreigners patiently waiting to come to this country.
The green card lotto winners' spouses and unmarried children under 21 all get golden tickets into the country, too, no matter where they were born.
Illegal aliens are eligible if a legal family member wins the jackpot. Applicants don't even need a high school education. No outstanding abilities, training or job skills are necessary. A handful of countries are excluded if they no longer qualify as "underrepresented." But if you come from a terror-sponsoring or terror-friendly nation -- such as Iran, Syria, Sudan, North Korea and more than a dozen officially designated terror enablers on the State Department's list -- no worries. Thousands from these breeding grounds for jihad will walk through our front doors.
This is what happens when bipartisan panderers in Washington get their way. The visa lottery was championed by left-wing social engineer Sen. Ted Kennedy and signed into law by President George H. W. Bush in 1990 to admit more "underrepresented" immigrant minorities into the U.S. Although originally intended to give a leg up to Irish illegal aliens who had overstayed their visas, most of the winners now hail from non-Western terror hot spots and hostile territories.
You know who else will get in? Untold numbers of "diversity" petitioners from Liberia, Sierra Leone and other West African countries where the Ebola virus is epidemic. If you think the feds will ensure that foreign visa-seekers with communicable diseases stay out, think again. The State Department now allows applicants with HIV to apply and enter. Those who suffer from tuberculosis, leprosy or other afflictions "of public health significance" can apply for waivers.
Reports indicate that before his departure from Liberia to Texas last week, Ebola carrier Thomas Duncan lied at the airport about being in contact with someone exposed to the disease. So far, the White House refuses to impose any travel restrictions from West Africa. It's also not clear whether the U.S. has re-screened West Africans who won last year's DV game and are flying into the country now.
As I've reported for the past 12 years, enforcement and screening procedures are shoddy. The General Accounting Office deemed the DV program a national security risk in 2008, while State Department and Homeland Security officials blamed each other for reckless incompetence.
"Consular officers at six of the posts reviewed -- Accra (Ghana), Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Dhaka (Bangladesh), Kathmandu (Nepal), Lagos (Nigeria) and Warsaw (Poland) -- reported that the availability of fake documents, or genuine documents with false information, such as birth certificates, marriage certificates, and passports, presented significant challenges when verifying DV applicants' identities and the relationship between the principle DV applicants and their spouse and dependents," the GAO reported.
The Diversity Visa lottery program is a public health hazard and a national security risk that leaves our safety to random chance. But pleas to curtail or end the program since the 9/11 attacks have fallen on deaf ears.
In the wake of the Ebola scare (not to mention renewed jihadi threats from abroad), worried Americans are heading to the drugstore to stock up on facemasks, hand sanitizer and gloves. New vaccines are in the works for emerging global contagions.
Unfortunately, there is no antidote for our government's blind and deadly diversity worship. Political correctness is a plague on us all.