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So you won't think I steal my stuff from Ann Coulter.

In her column today she said:

The minimum wage is the perfect Democratic issue. It will screw the very people it claims to help, while making Democrats look like saviors of the working class, either by getting them a higher wage or providing them with generous government benefits when they lose their jobs because of the mandatory wage hike.

(My emphasis)

Well, okay, so she says it better than I do, but I . . . my blog is . . . at least I . . . but . . .

Shut up.

You get this. Raising the minimum wage is going to hurt the very people that the democrats are pretending to try to help. You don't need me to post all the links. You've informed yourself about what George Will said and the CBO report and all that happy horse hoo-haw.

It's the same old thing. Something that looks fantastic on the surface, but falls apart if you spend a minute or two looking at it (like those expandable hanger space maker things that you ordered from the TV commercial).

I understand that Realityville and Theory Junction are different towns. Ideally we wouldn't have any minimum wage law, and if somebody wasn't paying their workers enough the employees could leave and work for someone who appreciates their contribution.

Not going to happen.

We have minimum wage laws because we don't have a rousing economy where people can do that, and there will always be employers who take advantage. We have to deal with that.

That's why democrats are able to move these sorts of things along—'cause they're based on something that's not horrible. That's why you never hear them pushing proposals for more rat poison in children's breakfast cereal. They just propose poisons that are sugar-coated based on their experience that people are too stupid to understand the issues and too lazy to think them through.

The point is that it doesn't take much contemplation to see how destructive the whole thing is, so you have to wonder: Are the people pushing this stupid, or are they evil?

I refer you back to Ann Coulter's remark: If Obama did hate America and was trying to destroy it, what would he be doing differently?

Flat. Get it? Flat? The temperature trend has been flat since 1997.

Read the article. it goes into the science that Kerry refuses to look at or is too stupid to understand. I'm not ruling out the possibility of both, you understand.

You know the deal with these WSJ links. If it wants you to subscribe, just Google up the title of the article. Consarned capitalists, anyway.

I can see Obama giving him marching orders. "We've gotta' get our hands on this money. I need you to go out and push Climate Change."

So Kerry, the consummate brown-noser, goes out and applies his patented Barney Fife approach to impress the boss. "I'm gonna push it so hard! I'll say . . . I'll say it's the biggest weapon of mass destruction on the planet. I'm gonna get a big ol' star on my forehead. I'll say . . . I'll say . . . well, I'll just make it up as I go along."

Dave Barry couldn't write fiction as ridiculous as the crap that falls out of Kerry's mouth.

Really? Leaping out at us like a scene from a 3D movie? That's what passes for brilliant oratory in his mind?

What a buffoon.

It's really kind of sad watching him bumble around not even realizing what an idiot he's making of himself. It's actually a little bit uncomfortable talking about him, like I'm making fun of the special ed kid on the bus.

And, I feel really horrible about comparing beloved characters like Lassie and Barney Fife to such a moron.

As Ann Coulter would say. While people are all excited about the first black President they've overlooked another milestone. The first mentally retarded man as Secretary of State.

You remember the deal. If you want to hear about Sochi or Kiev you've already checked it out elsewhere.

If I were smart I'd come up with some cool cartoon showing Kerry as an amateur trying to skate in the Olympics. Well, I guess if I were smart I wouldn't be wasting time posting my thoughts on an obscure blog . . .

"Figure skating? How hard can it be? I'm married to a rich woman."

"I am better than 97% of all figure skaters." (You can hear Winston Thurston Kerry the Third's voice saying that)

Kerry in a heap on the ice. "I don't have time for this Flat Ice Society."

Actually, this is the one place I can hide anything I want with absolute certainty no one will ever see it. Thank God. I would be horrified if I thought anyone would ever see those Joycian thought experiments on John Kerry cartoons.

You've seen it before. Someone will say "Did you hear what Obama did?!" followed by something totally ridiculous that can't possibly be true.

C'mon, people! There are enough real things that are wrong with Obama that we don't need to undermine our credibility making stuff up.

You got the e-mail that said "Obama said 'I never met Blagojevich, I just saw him once at a Bears game.'" Then it has a dozen pictures of Obama with Blagojevich.

Obama was obviously lying when he said he never met the man. We have photographic evidence that he has.

Except . . .

Obama never made the statement that he never met Blagojevich.

So you learn to be careful. You got the e-mail that claimed Obama didn't put his hand over his heart during the National Anthem. It had a picture of Obama standing there holding his crotch while Richardson and Hillary had their hands on their hearts. Okay, so maybe the picture was snapped before he got his hand up there.

So you checked it out. There was a video.

Sure enough, Barack Obama, the man who would be king of the nation, stood there the entire time that nation's national anthem played, holding his crotch.

Let me just save you the trouble of checking out the latest ridiculous charge that sounds like a hoax. It's true.

Obama, the same Obama who constantly bypasses Congress then tells us time and time again he intends to keep doing it, really did blast Bush saying:

The biggest problems that were facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all, and that’s what I intend to reverse when I’m President of the United States of America!

Do these people not understand that we have recording devices?

It's genius, really. When your opponents say that you've done some kind of absurd thing, it undermines their credibility, not yours.

But how do you get them to keep saying that you're doing bizarre and preposterous things?

Keep doing bizarre and preposterous things.

Obama gets to be an extremist and as a bonus his opponents lose credibility by sounding like nut jobs.

The beautiful thing from Obama's point of view is that there's no downside.

He does outrageous things, then we sound like nut jobs for talking about the outrageous things he does. He's not afraid of what we say--no one is ever going to wake up to his treachery just because we point it out. In fact, he's gotten to the point where he just admits it himself. "I will bypass Congress, I will act on my own, I will circumvent the system, I will do it myself without Congress."

If you had a dollar for every time he has said something like that you'd have . . . well, about three dollars and eighteen cents after Obama took his taxes out of it, you filthy rich buzzard trying not to pay your fair share.

Whether we point it out or his own media does or he just brags about it himself, he has never once been held accountable for any of the outrages that he commits.

These people know we have recording devices, they just don't care. What's going to happen to them when the evidence surfaces? When's the last time anything they said or did ever came back to bite them? That's right. Never.

Seriously, what are we going to do? Honestly. You hear people bloviate about "We have to impeach Barack Obama!"

Get real.

Whether or not what he does warrants impeachment—or any type of recrimination—we look like idiots when we bring it up. Why do it? It will never happen. Never ever.

No matter how much you disagree with Obama or how alarmed you are at his dictatorial reign, can you honestly picture him suffering any consequence for anything? Be honest. Imagine the worst possible thing he could conceivably do. Now try to form a picture in your mind of anything happening to him as a consequence.

Can't be done. Cannot be done. You cannot close your eyes and imagine a newscaster saying "A spokesperson for President Obama announced today that The President will step down amidst the mounting evidence in the allegations swirling around him regarding . . . " I can barely type it. Stephen King couldn't come up with a scenario where it happens.

I would bet every cent I have in the bank and throw in my last can of WD40 that that will never happen. There is nothing more certain in this world.

Did John Kerry really say that Global Warming is the new Terrorism and the most dangerous weapon of mass destruction on the planet?

Status: Kerry is a moron.

This ties into our discussion of hoaxes and credibility . . .

Really, if I told you John Kerry, the top diplomat the United States has, said that, you'd never believe anything I ever said again. "Dude, you just makes up ridiculous stuff about people."

But he said it. Dave Barry and I are not making this up. John Kerry said it. Multiple times.

But you know, he was for global warming before he was against it.

Do you get more silly than John Kerry?

I work with a guy who doesn't cuss. So to convey the thought that something is crazy he always says "asinine" because it's cathartic for him to hiss out "ass" without technically swearing.

I'm not kidding.

It just builds up inside him and he has to say it, but it's against the rules, but it's building and he needs an outlet and he can't because he has rules, but . . . but . . . but . . . ass! . . . –inine.

That's the Obama administration.

The administration that has a stated policy prohibiting referring to terrorists as "terrorists" is now using the word to describe a bogeyman in a fairy tale.

On the upside, at least we finally got them to use big boy words like "terrorism."

George Will made this brilliant observation:

"When a politician on a subject implicating science . . . says "the debate is over," you may be sure of two things: The debate is raging and he's losing it."

But he pointed out what the real agenda is here. It has nothing really to do with "Climate Change" or the environment. It's just the latest democrat rape hoax to get their hands on our money.

"So I think frankly . . . the only questions is, how much money are we going to spend? How much wealth are we going to forego creating in order to have zero or discernible effect on the environment?"

You can read more here.

You understand this. Obama's new emissions controls have nothing to do with the environment. Obama's dictatorial edicts and Kerry's buffoonery are aimed at getting their hands on money that wealthy liberals are passing out to people they think support their causes.

Here's what else you can expect. The next target is going to be light trucks--pickups. They are already imposing more stringent restrictions on small diesels, and it's going to get worse. In addition to getting money from rich whack jobs, their intent in going after pickups is exactly what the effect will be: to make less Americans own light trucks.

I told you about this when Obama was campaigning against Scott Brown.

The pickup truck represents the American spirit. It's the tool we use to get the job done, to do things for ourselves. That is not in keeping with Obama's vision of what America should be. Unions should have trucks and people should mind their own business and let the experts do stuff, like pour concrete and hang sheet rock and have opinions on politics.

Again, I'm not sure Obama is smart enough to even understand that's what he's doing. He may be, but maybe he's just acting on instinct like other brain stem-guided life forms. Dinesh D'Souza kind of postulated that he had some kind of grand plan he was implementing, but I kind of thought that gave him too much credit. I totally agree that he wouldn't be saddened by the outcome, but I'm not sure he's demonstrated that he's competent enough to execute that sort of program.

I could accept either explanation, but remember Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Here's your reward. Enjoy.

:-/

"Look at this," my son said. "Is this real?"

I looked at his phone. A Facebook post said

Justin Bieber has done it this time!
His career is over!
He hit and killed a 7-year old boy while driving drunk

"Nope," I said. "It's not real."

I've seen enough of those hoaxes to recognize the specific flavor they have. I've just ignore them and don't pass them along with an editorial "Can you believe this?!!!"

So I'm not going to pass along your nonsense when you say "Can you believe this?!! Obama's spokesman said that it's a good thing when jobs are lost due to Obamacare, 'cause then they can pursue their hobbies." Clearly that's too crazy to be real.

What's that?

That's not a hoax? He really said that?

Hang on a second . . . let me check something . . .

Wow. My apologies. I just . . . wow.

Jay Carney really did say that the upside to Obama killing jobs is that people can do what they want now instead of having to go to stupid ol' work. As Krauthammer said, that comment will be emblazoned on the tombstone of liberalism.

ANN COULTER: I know, you know, we’ve spent seven years trying to persuade right-wingers, no, he really was born in Hawaii, we have his birth certificate, stop with the crazy conspiracy theories.

But, let’s just think, you know, for a thought experiment for a moment: if Obama were born in another country, had no love for this country, and had set out to destroy America, what would he be doing differently?
(Howie Carr Show, February 10, 2014)

See? It's actually brilliant.

I'm trying to calm people down telling them their radical ideas are crazy. All the while Obama is trying his best to prove them right.

The crazier he gets the crazier the people who expose what he's doing sound.

I don't know that I could have identified Scarlett Johansson last week. I know, I know, but it's going to take someone a helluva lot bigger than you to take my man card away from me. But I really like her now. I really like her.

You already know about her SodaStream deal. I'm not even going to make that a link, 'cause if you cared you already knew and it's not worth the trouble to include a link that I would bet my last can of WD40 not one person is going to click on.

She told some two-bit anti-Israel outfit called OxFam to take a hike 'cause they didn't like that she represented an Israeli company. Good for her.

In the Wall Street Journal I read an interesting take. Wouldn't it be nice if our own Secretary of State had the sense and courage and decency of Scarlet Johansson?

Yes, I respect her that much. I looked up the proper spelling of her name.

If the link says it's a subscription deal, just Google "Secretary ScarJo" to get the article.

Hah. I slay me. As if anyone is going to click on the link.

:-/

One of the stock responses to any criticism of obamacare is that it's "settled law." The suggestion is that it's just like the Bill of Rights or the IRS or the direct election of senators. It's a concrete part of the foundation of American codified law.

What a joke.

This "settled" law keeps getting changed to whatever the Tin-pot Dictator feels like making it say. The liberals idea of "law" is whatever is convenient for them.

That idea is explained in this article from the Wall Street Journal. If the link says it's a subscription deal, just Google "Introducing the Affordable Care Act" to get the article

The money quote from the article is this: "The law increasingly means whatever President Obama says it does on any given day."

. . .

I was just going to post a link a leave this alone, but now I have to tell a story. Gimme a break, I'm an old man. I tell stories.

Thirty years ago I pulled into my apartment complex parking lot to find my space taken. The lady in apartment 6 was having a party and one of her guests had chosen my spot to park in. I knocked on the door of apartment 6 and explained my situation.

The charming owner of the offending vehicle came to the door and I asked him to move his car. I said he could park behind me, that way I wouldn't block him in when I parked. I was probably a dick about it. What? You think I just turned the way I am when I got old?

Then I said something about the rules were that those nine spaces were reserved for the nine tenants of the building.

He said "Oh, yeah? Well the rules say they are also for their guests."

I think he's scheduled to get out of traction next year sometime.

The point is, I was amazed at how he just lithely made up absurd rules on the spot that happened to benefit him at the inconvenience of others.

It's the exact same way I feel when I hear liberals talk about their "settled law."

You've heard me flap my gums about this concept before. It kind of ties into the idea that counterfeits are possible because the authentic article exists. What we're discussing here is that the danger of political correctness is that it's based on good things. But they're twisted into something that ceases to become a virtue.

I know, enough already. Here's the link.

The Obamas are hypocrites. Stop the presses!

This speaks to a fundamental characteristic of liberalism I'm always boring you with: Whatever liberals pretend to protect is what their policies destroy. It's the housing development idea: Housing developments are named for the habitats they destroyed to be built. Breezy Pines, Oak Ridge. Quail Hollow . . .

You get this; you understand how it works. Let's implement socialism! Then everyone will be equal! Yayyy! Great idea.

But the purpose of socialism isn't to make everyone equal. It's to exalt a few.

Castro lives in a palace while the entire country starves. With his skill set he'd be cleaning swimming pools in the US. But he's smart enough to sell his people on the idea of communism. So instead of living in a cheap apartment in LA, he's got his choice of palaces.

That's the way it works. The politburo had their dachas while the Russian people starved. They weren't stupid, they understood. They were evil. The people who buy the concept are stupid. They aren't evil, they just buy into the lie. Socialism? Everybody equal? What could possibly be wrong with that? They don't get it.

The very name "democrat" is the perfect example of the deception. Democrats have no interest in democracy. Just try to imagine John Kerry mingling with the masses and getting their input on how he should do thing. His chauffeured limousines whisk him through where those kind of people live. He never wrings his manicured hands about what's good for them.

Anyway . . .

Michelle Antoinette Obama is the poster child for that concept. She believes we aren't paying our "fair share" because she needs to fly her staff out to Hawaii and Europe more.

So when she and her elitist husband met with the socialist president of France, she made sure to wear a dress that one in a million of the people she lords over would ever buy.

Read about the irony of Michelle's $12,000 dollar dress.

This is just . . . uh . . . bonus material.

I want to reiterate what elitists the Obamas are.

Liberals see Obama as a black man. That's all they ever talk about. "Blah blah blah blah blah bla-be-bla-blah conservatives hate black people blah blah be-bla-blah."

The liberals who are always reminding conservatives that Obama is black don't have any black friends, unless they are token blacks that they keep in their contacts to raise their cosmopolitan quotient when they need to.

Conservatives don't even think of Obama as black. If it weren't for the liberals wetting their panties about it all the time we would have forgotten long ago that he was (half) black. We don't care.

Conservatives see him as a socialist. We see him as incompetent, inexperienced, sophomoric, and arrogant. We see him as uncompromising, unoriginal, unintelligent, amateurish, condescending, silly, manipulating . . . there's a huge list of things that come to mind before "Oh, that's right. I guess he is black, huh?"

You know who else doesn't think Barack Obama is the representative American Black Man?

Barack Obama.

You'll never see him hanging around with the black steel mill worker or the southern black or the urban black. Oh, he hangs around with rappers and athletes who happen to be black. But not 'cause they're black. It's because they're celebrities like him. He doesn't hang around with white steel workers or farmers or shopkeepers either. He's above that.

Barack Obama is a celebrity. Period.

Busy day yesterday. Sorry.

Don't you want people to have Health Care? Don't you?

This is a favorite old tried and true tactic of the left. You just lie by naming things what they aren't. "Crime Bill." "Jobs Bill."

Bullcrap.

What the left has done—again—is to reframe the debate by renaming. And the good guys just walked right into the trap—again. Dup doop doop du doop (actual audio of the sing-song noises a clueless guy makes when he's walking along not paying attention).

We are not talking about Health Care. We are talking about health care insurance, specifically nationalizing health care insurance.

C'mon, people, this is not a stage in the game where we can be stupid.

The Broncos were so incompetent Sunday that they are now being recruited by the Obama administration.

As an aside, a liberal friend was telling me a story about a friend who was using the 'f' word like crazy in a fast food place. A lady asked him if he might not use that word in front of her kids. He looked at her and started saying the word over and over and over again. He thought that was pretty funny. I didn't.

He said that if the lady didn't like it she could leave. I wondered why she had to leave instead of the kid who wasn't house-broken.

He came back with the stock liberal line "it's just a word."

I was ready. "Oh, yeah? Well what about the N-word?" (Thank you Bob Lonsberry.)

Obviously the discussion wasn't over. Of course that was completely different and there is a reason to be offended at that word, but not at a good hearty intelligent word like the f-word.

The point wasn't to shut him down, just to Wild Weasel him into revealing that what he was saying wasn't really his position.

I had never heard of Jack Reacher before the Tom Cruise movie. Then I started reading the novels.

Lee Child is what David Baldacci wants to be when he grows up.

A lot of people who had read the novels first shook their head at the choice of Tom Cruise. He's not a big guy and Jack Reacher in the novels is. He's 6'5" and 250 lbs. and has no reason to be afraid of anyone. Lee Child explains why he made Jack Reacher invulnerable.

He didn't want to do what others were doing. Others were making heroes that were flawed and vulnerable. Part of the reason was (this is now my wording) that makes them more heroic. Is Superman brave? How brave do you have to be when you're bulletproof?

So Child came up with a character who didn't have to be afraid of anyone, and here's why. "Real life is rarely satisfactory." He says that if your house or car gets burgled they aren't going to catch the guy and you're not going to get the stuff back. Bullies in real life don't get what's coming to them.

That's why we read fiction. So we can get satisfaction vicariously from some unstoppable force like Jack Reacher.

Reacher would walk up to a punk with a foul mouth in a fast food restaurant, punch him hard in the gut, then pick him up by the belt and throw him out on the sidewalk to finish throwing up. Then he looks at the kid's friends and says "Anybody here going to call the cops on me?"

I find myself between two factions. On the one hand I'm trying to placate people, telling them "Obama is just one man. No, he's not going to suspend the 22nd Amendment. We have to be careful about crying conspiracy—it just disqualifies us from participating in the discussion when we sound crazy."

On the other hand, you don't get much more dramatic than faking government reports to sway elections and using the power of the US Government to target political enemies.

I told you about the most dangerous cliff in the forest. It's the one that just gradually gets steeper and steeper. By the time you realize you're in danger it's too late to scramble to safety.

Read this article listing a few of the people and groups that have been abused by the federal government as punishment for opposing the Amerikan dictator.

Did you see this? Some public official had to apologize because he made innocuous comments on Twitter about changing gender.

This is why I'll never be an elected official. The proper response to this is "lighten up."

These people want to be mainstream but they don't want to be talked about.

Just stupid.

I haven't flapped my gums about this one for awhile. It's the idea that the reason you can use counterfeits is because the genuine article exists.

Someone made an innocuous funny comment on Twitter and someone else pretends to be offended. In this case it's a person who wants us to leave her/him/whatever alone by taking every opportunity to scream in front of the cameras "Why won't you just leave us alone?!!!!"

In the aforementioned case the proper response is "No one is hurting you, you have no need to be offended, go away."

That's perfectly valid.

Since it is perfectly valid, you get people who want to mis-apply the response and say that someone constantly saying the f-word in front of your kids is the very same thing.

Done. If you gave a crap you already figured this out long ago.

I like this one because it depicts the little putz as sleeping with his widdow teddy beaw. There's no more apt portrayal of the man than as a child.

Read this great article by Thomas Sowell about the Inequality Bogeyman that the putz in the Oval Office and the liberals are always trying to scare us with.

The money itself is not wealth. Otherwise the government could make us all rich just by printing more of it.

What Rockefeller did first to earn their money was find ways to bring down the cost of producing and distributing kerosene to a fraction of what it had been before his innovations. This profoundly changed the lives of millions of working people.

Too many discussions of large fortunes attribute them to "greed" -- as if wanting a lot of money is enough to cause other people to hand it over to you.