Happy New Year!

Sez Gorgo!

Ollie, Is That You?

From Gun and Garden... 

Neighborhood Menace…

He fought, stole, refused to listen, ruled the block, and had no shame—but he loved us.

That's this dog...

Bill's War on Women

Cosby was arrested the other day for an alleged 2004 assault. Bill Clinton declined comment.

Hillary's War on Women

Katherine Timpf argues "Hillary is no feminist." Of course, she's only right if you share her definition of "feminism".

Since Hillary announced that her husband would be joining her on the campaign trail, people have been debating whether or not it’s fair for the GOP to attack Bill’s sexual misdeeds in order to indirectly attack her.

This makes sense. After all, we’re talking about a guy who has been accused of the sexual assault of more than ten women. Think about it: How is her appointing him really any different than if she’d appointed Bill Cosby? 

But here’s the thing: The real issue isn’t whether or not to attack Bill to indirectly attack Hillary — it’s about directly attacking Hillary for how she herself treated the women involved.

From the comments…

does this sound like feminism to you?"
Yes. It does. Feminism isn't about women. Feminism is about Leftist ideology/Democrat power.
The issue is never the issue, the issue is always The Cause.
Big feminist icons of the day, like Gloria Steinem, blithely ignored the so-called feminist doctrine and supported Bill Clinton with every fiber of their being. They were more than willing to destroy the credibility and lives of every woman he had victimized who had the temerity to speak out about it.
Feminism is not and never has been about women. It's about power. It's about making sure that society is changed in ways that benefit the Leftist agenda.

Good point.

As The Year Ends...

… our president exudes this attitude

The best thing about the new year? We get to say "Bye Felicia" to this guy. As in…

A Hypocrite's Hypocrite

Diana West does a nice job pointing out the breathtaking hypocrisy of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other feminist Clinton supporters on the matter of sexual harassment and abuse.

In the summer of 2013, Democratic National Committee chief 

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL)

 called for the resignation of Democratic San Diego Mayor Bob Filner, previously a U.S. representative, after former supporters of the mayor went public with accusations of sexual harassment.

 Wasserman Schultz (emphasis added):

The misconduct Mayor Bob Filner has been accused of is reprehensible and indefensible. I am personally offended by his actions, and I firmly believe no employee should face a hostile environment or harassmentat their place of employment. There is no place for this type of conduct in the workplace and certainly not in our city halls and public offices. For the good of the City of San Diego, I call on Mayor Filner to resign.

He did.
Fast foward to this past Sunday’s “Meet the Press” where Andrea Mitchell asked Wasserman-Schultz:

But if he — Donald Trump is going to raise this issue, as he is warning, of Bill Clinton’s past and sexism, does that give you any pause as Democratic chair?”

Oh, that’s different. Wasserman Schultz replied...

VDH On What Deters Aggressors

The invaluable Victor Davis Hanson gives a history lesson as he explains the importance of deterrence through strength.

When German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann, in a notorious 1917 telegram, offered the government of Mexico all sorts of rewards for attacking the southwestern United States and thereby sidetracking American support for the allies on the Western Front, Mexico balked. But its reason for backing off was not that it liked Americans or thought a preemptive attack would be unfair. Rather, President Carranza worried that Mexico lacked the military clout to take American territory. And even if it could have grabbed, say, Texas, Mexico did not have the power to control it — given a rowdy and armed English-speaking state population, one that Carranza worried was “better supplied with arms than most populations.” In other words, the Second Amendment and a frontier attitude helped to deter Mexico from taking up Zimmermann’s offer.

Read it all.

A Murder Revisited

Interesting story by my old colleague Alex Rose in today's Daily Times about the failed appeal of convicted murderer and death row inmate Wayne Smith.

These paragraphs jumped out at me:

During the initial trial, the prosecution claimed Smith killed Jones, a pregnant mother of two, after she rejected his sexual advances. Smith claimed that he made an arrangement with Jones to trade sex for cocaine. 

Smith told police that the two wrestled on the ground and he feared Jones, who is white, would claim that he had raped her. Smith said he did not believe a jury would believe him because he is black, so he instead choked Jones and put her body in the creek.

So fearing he would be falsely accused of rape, Smith admits to murdering Jones instead. Sounds reasonable.

What it doesn't sound like is a death penalty case. Until you read the part about Smith having done time for killing someone else earlier in his life. Yes, a previous murder can count as an aggravating factor in the sentencing of a convicted killer.

Smith got a second trial a couple of years ago on his death sentence. A Delaware County jury upheld the sentence leading the prosecutor to remark back then...

"The jury appropriately determined that the defendant's prior conviction for voluntary manslaughter of a bar patron with a machete, a commonwealth aggravating factor, outweighed any mitigating factor presented by the defense."

A machete?

The defense raised mitigating factors like the abuse he suffered as a kid at the hands of his abusive father and the lack of Snickers in the household.



Okay, that was tasteless.

No doubt, Smith grew up in a very un-Brady Bunch kind of home. Everyone in this awful story deserves some measure of sympathy, which is not to say the killer doesn't also deserve the death penalty.

Hillary Clinton's Shameless Hypocrisy

Ruth Marcus cringes as Hillary accuses Donald Trump of being sexist. Compared to Clinton's husband, when it comes to abusing females Donald Trump is Wally Cox.

"What is the relevance of Bill Clinton’s conduct for Hillary Clinton’s campaign? Ordinarily, I would argue that the sins of the husband should not be visited on the wife. What Bill Clinton did counts against him, not her, and I would include in that her decision to stick with him. What happens inside a marriage is the couple’s business, and no one else’s, even when both halves crave the presidency.
But Hillary Clinton has made two moves that lead me, gulp, to agree with Trump on the 'fair game' front. She is (smartly) using her husband as a campaign surrogate, and simultaneously (correctly) calling Trump sexist.
These moves open a dangerous door. It should surprise no one that Trump has barged right through it."

Trump is having none of it, which is why he is so popular with a certain cohort of the American public.

Marcus' criticism of Hillary is mostly about her tactics - calling Trump a sexist when her own husband has so much baggage himself. Marcus worries that could backfire. Well, it already has.
Where Marcus misses the boat is that Hillary's tactics allow the other side to criticize HER behavior when her husband behaved badly.

She claims to stand up for all women but when several credible females came forward to say how badly they were treated by her husband, she was part of the Clinton campaign to trash them as liars, sluts and trailer trash.

Earlier this years, Mrs. Clinton said that all women who accuse men of sexual assault deserve to be believed.

As Breitbart's Ben Shapiro wrote after Hillary tweet:

Hillary didn’t just step on this rake. She climbed up a pool ladder, bounced on the high dive, and leapt onto the rake with both feet.
On the very day upon which Breitbart News reported that former Bill Clinton sexual assault accuser Juanita Broaddrick had spoken out about Hillary’s candidacy, Hillary decided to pretend that she’s an advocate for the little people who get raped. Broaddrick alleged on national television that Clinton had raped her in 1978:

Then he tries to kiss me again. And the second time he tries to kiss me he starts biting my lip … He starts to, um, bite on my top lip and I tried to pull away from him. And then he forces me down on the bed. And I just was very frightened, and I tried to get away from him and I told him ‘No,’ that I didn’t want this to happen but he wouldn’t listen to me. … It was a real panicky, panicky situation. I was even to the point where I was getting very noisy, you know, yelling to ‘Please stop.’ And that’s when he pressed down on my right shoulder and he would bite my lip. … When everything was over with, he got up and straightened himself, and I was crying at the moment and he walks to the door, and calmly puts on his sunglasses. And before he goes out the door he says ‘You better get some ice on that.’ And he turned and went out the door.

In the aftermath of the rape, Hillary approached her and essentially threatened her in order to keep her silent, Broaddrick has said.

She told Breitbart News’ Aaron Klein yesterday, “Shame on you, Hillary, that’s disgusting. Shame on you, Hillary. It’s time to be truthful.”

No wonder Democrats are so worried that reminding the public of Hillary's complicity in covering up sex assault accusations could reflect badly on their candidate. Well, it does. And it should.

A Little Gem

Spencerblog gives this four stars

Defining Peace Down

State Department counts bringing "peace to Syria" as a "win" in 2015.
Philadelphia Eagles count bringing peace to the Linc as a "win" for the 2015 NFL season.

CBS's Botched Death Penalty Report

We watched the 60 Minutes expose the other night on the supposedly "botched" lethal injection of an Arizona  inmate last year. (The show originally aired in late November.)

An execution of a man in Arizona with a new cocktail of drugs was supposed to take about 10 minutes. It took almost two hours, the longest execution in U.S. history.

To which America replied, "Big F-ing Deal."

A priest, a reporter, and a lawyer who witnessed the event all voiced their dismay over the fact that the execution took longer to kill its intended victim than usual.  (Understandably, two family members of the murder victims voiced no such feelings. Quite the contrary.)

It is hard to imagine a sizable portion of the American public mustering any outrage over this alleged "botching." But CBS did it's best to gin up those feelings.

Anti-death penalty advocates have made it so tough to carry out death sentences in this country that states have to go great lengths to carry out such sentences. In this case, Arizona allegedly broke federal law by illegally importing the drugs used in the execution.

Federal judge Alex Kosinski, also interviewed, had a solution to the problem. He suggested going back to firing squads and/or the guillotine. When a horrified Bill Whitaker said that sounded "barbaric" Kosinski all but shrugged, "So what?"

As Gary Gilmore, the last killer executed by firing squad, said, "Let's do it."

Taking the life of a convicted killer is a violent and brutal act, said Kosinski. Almost every state that has a death penalty has gone to using lethal injection because it is supposedly more civilized and humane. But that certainly hasn't slowed down the anti-death penalty crowd in their pursuit of banning the practice altogether.

We're ambivalent about capital punishment. It takes decades in some states to actually put a killer down. It costs millions. It's dubious that it has a deterrent effect. The one thing we're not skeptical about is that capital punishment is fundamentally just. It is one of the purest forms of justice there is. You kill - intentionally, brutally and with malice aforethought - you die.

Nothing unfair about that.

As one commenter on the story wrote:

I do not think it is inhuman to kill someone that treated others inhumanly.  I also as a nurse am unclear why they are having trouble finding the right mix of drugs, the two that i saw listed in the brief glimpse of paperwork are independently capable of killing someone if given in a high enough or fast sequence of infusion.  But I am kind of an eye for an eye person, he shot his victims, he should be shot.

Americans support for the death penalty remains quite strong (almost 2 to 1 for) despite the best efforts of liberals and the MSM. Reports like this one, like the Democrats demands for greater gun control, are likely to backfire.

But never mind. What the anti-death penalty crowd can't win in the court of public opinion, it will win in federal courts controlled by liberal judges.

Who Comes Up With This Stuff?

Could happen if Donald Trump wins.

Update: 

Flemish Humor

Some Random Thoughts from Frank J.

Which candidate is finally going to take on the root problem of immigration: the existence of other countries?

You can tell who is an uninformed voter because they’re enthusiastic about one of the candidates.

Bernie Sanders’s backwardness would almost be cute if not for the unacknowledged violence in the system he espouses. 

I keep hearing about billionaire Elon Musk, but I realized I have no idea how he made his fortune. I assume cologne.

Heh. Find more here.

Don't Call the Cops. Get a Gun.

This tragedy in Chicago is further evidence of this. 

Don't think that just because the police are trained in the use of firearms that they are less likely to kill an innocent person. A University of Chicago Study revealed that in 1993 approximately 700,000 police killed 330 innocent individuals, while approximately 250,000,000 private citizens only killed 30 innocent people. Do the math. That's a per capita rate for the police, of almost 4000 times higher than the population in general. OK, that is a little misleading. Let's just include the 80,000,000 gun owning citizens. Now the police are down to only a 1200 times higher accidental shooting rate than the gun-owning population in general.

They Certainly Deserve Each Other

Planned Parenthood's Entitlement Mentality

After the state of Utah decided to cut off funds to Planned Parenthood, the abortion giant sued in court and won a stay, requiring state taxpayers to keep the dollars rolling in.

Recently, a federal judge overturned that decision. 

What's amazing is that a judge ordered the state to keep the funding going in the first place.

Utah to PP: Because of your baby parts selling endeavors, we don't want to do business with you anymore. 
PP to Utah: We like getting taxpayer money. We're used to it. So you have to keep giving it to us.
Judge 1 to Utah: Yeah, I agree. 
Judge 2 to PP: That's stupid. If the state doesn't want to do business with you it doesn't have to.

Planned Parenthood argued that the defunding of its clinics amounted to a denial of the constitutional right to abortion. Since when does not funding the exercising of a constitutional right amount to its denial?

Spencerblog to Judge: I want a gun and I want the state of Ohio to buy me one. Gun ownership is my constitutional right. 
Judge to Spencerblog: That sounds crazy.
Spencerblog: I don't care. Also I want the state to pay me for exercising my First Amendment right by blogging. I want $100,000 a year for my efforts.
Judge: Sounds fair. So ordered.

But probably not.

Rape Couture

Über Butch Intellectual Camille Paglia trashes the concept of "rape culture" being promulgated by wimp feminism…

‘Rape culture’ is a ridiculous term – mere gassy propaganda, too rankly bloated to critique. Anyone who sees sex so simplistically has very little sense of world history, anthropology or basic psychology. I feel very sorry for women who have been seduced by this hyper-politicised, victim-centered rhetoric, because in clinging to such superficial, inflammatory phrases, they have renounced their own power and agency.

Paglia lives about a mile from that hot bed of "rape culture" hysteria known as Swarthmore College. Some brave conservative soul should ought to invite her to speak there, provided they can get their hands on enough fainting couches.

UPDATE: We wrote about this sort of thing years ago. Check it out.

Go Skins!

Our beloved (but ridiculous and butter-fingered) Philadelphia Eagles lost to the Washington Redskins last night to lose any chance to win the hapless NFC East. Ugh!

More importantly, the Skins won a more important victory in federal court the other day. Our betters in the federal bureaucracy were trying to outlaw their trademark name (and others) because some bed-wetting liberal types find it offensive on behalf of the Native Americans from whom we wrested this land we call America.

They aren't the only ones.

The court told the bureaucrats they have no constitutional right to decide what is "disparaging" to a group of people and what isn't. In so doing the court went about one of its most important jobs, that  of protecting the First Amendment.

If there is one thing we like about the Redskins it is that they are still called the Redskins. The team's owner refused to knuckle under to the city's bullying liberal establishment and so did the team's fans.

Congratulations to the warriors from Washington. They may not go deep into the playoffs this season but the fight they inadvertently won in the federal courts is a victory for all Americans.

On Christmas Eve No Less

Not A Game The Whole Family Can Play

A new Twitter game you can play thanks to Donald Trump's creative insulting of Hillary Clinton. It's called #ReplaceAwordWithSchlong. As in...

	Wajahat Ali @WajahatAli	9h
	"We're going to need a bigger schlong" #ReplaceAwordWithSchlongpic.twitter.com/Jd1cOM8GnO
	View photo ·

	David Burge @iowahawkblog	2h
	#ReplaceAwordWithSchlong When all you have is a schlong, everything looks like a nail.
	View details ·

	Liz Gumbinner @Mom101	4h
	"Schlong!" "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." #ReplaceAwordWithSchlongpic.twitter.com/cfq1wDIAk7
	View photo ·

How about this?

"Looking for Mr. Goodschlong"?

Hat tip: iowahawkblog

The Grinch Strikes Back

For the second time, Rob Long goes to bat for one of Christmas' most maligned characters… Sayeth the Grinch…

I have been “othered.”

I have been mocked and ignored. I have been forced to live in red-lined areas of the community. I have been slandered and slurred and libeled and smeared. I have been treated, quite simply, the way one might treat a “monster.”

The hate ends now. It ends today.

You want your Christmas back? Seriously? The colored lights and the jingtinglers and floobfloobers? The roast beast? The Who Whompers? Want to know what I want back? 

I want the land your people stole from me. I want an awareness of exactly how I’ve suffered for the past two centuries. I want an acknowledgment that your Who Privilege has perpetuated a system in which people like me have been kept down (ironically by being exiled above) and forced to accept and use the language of oppression.

Read it all and Ho Ho Ho!

Can't They Just Make Up Their Minds?

NASA is now saying that carbon emissions are causing Global Cooling.

Burning fossil fuels and cutting down trees causes global COOLING, new NASA study finds. Fossil fuel burning gives of aerosols which reflect sunlight.

Environmentalists have long argued the burning of fossil fuels is responsible for global warming and predicted temperature increases because of the high levels of carbon dioxide produced – which causes the global greenhouse effect.

But those arguments have been thrown into doubt after NASA found the Earth has cooled in areas of heavy industrialisation where more trees have been lost and more fossil fuel burning takes place. 

A NASA spokesman said it was “well known” that aerosols such as those emitted in volcanic eruptions and power stations, act to cool Earth, at least temporarily, by reflecting solar radiation away from the planet.

We Feel For Ya, Mr. President!

Deaths of American servicemen threaten to ruin President Obama's holiday vacation.

A deeply conflicted President Obama warned earlier this year when he extended the American troop presence in Afghanistan that he did not support “the idea of endless war.”

For Obama, the deaths Monday of six U.S. soldiers near Bagram air base underscore the perils of his decision to keep as many as 9,800 troops in Afghanistan through much of next year.

A war that Obama had pledged to end before he left office is now increasingly looking endless. That war followed him here to his native Hawaii, where he is on a two-week vacation with his wife and daughters. 

Obama has spoken bluntly of the emotional toll that American military deaths have taken on him as he has dispatched troops to Iraq, Afghanistan and most recently Syria. Last month, he lashed out at critics urging him to do more militarily in Iraq and Syria, saying he wouldn’t send U.S. forces into combat just to look “tough.

The WSJ's James Taranto has a running meme: "Why Do Bad Things Always Happen to Him?" Seems a fitting item for it. In the meantime… "FORE!

The End of the World?

Giant comets may threaten earth.

Environmentalist say the comets are very angry about global warming. Angrier than they were at the Dinosaurs 65 million years ago. So, you know, keep on the look out. Merry Christmas!

UPDATE: A hippie teepee is no match for a comet.

It's Because We're White, Right?

Kevin Willamson goes off on the President's explanation of why "some people" don't like him.

In a pre-vacation interview with NPR, the president argued that (as the New York Times decodes the message) “some of the scorn directed at him personally stems from the fact that he is the first African American to hold the White House.” I.e, “It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?” 

This is kind of clever, in a way. The president says that much of the unhappiness with his administration is “pretty specific to me, and who I am and my background,” which is slippery in that by saying it’s about him, he’s really saying it’s about his critics, and their bigotry and prejudice. “It’s not me, it’s you.” 

Was It To Hug That Rat?

Hillary Channels Ruth

Ruth Marcus sez Donald Trump is a one-man recruiting tool for the Islamic State. A couple weeks later Hillary Clinton says the same thing.

Hillary, if you gonna' steal from a writer, steal from a better one.

Meet the Monmouth Hawks and

… college basketball's most creative bench.

White (Guilt) Christmas at Amherst

The hypocrisy of the White Privilege crowd exposed by D'nesh D'souza at Amherst College. Take the time (15 minutes) to watch the whole thing. It's well worth it.

Merry Obamacare!

Was Ebenezer So Wrong?

Rob Long connects with his inner Scrooge...

Whatever else Christmas is, it’s a lot about receiving. Don’t believe me? Let us return to our other major Christmas text for elaboration.

In the opening sequences of “A Christmas Carol,” hardworking and thrifty Scrooge is bent over his desk delivering value to his clients. In addition, by restricting the use of coal in his office fireplace, he’s also doing his part to clean up London’s then-notoriously poor air quality. 

His nephew enters, possibly drunk, to invite him to Christmas dinner, with a series of blatantly passive-aggressive statements that no sane person could misinterpret. Scrooge then accurately assesses the utility of the Christmas holiday thus:

“What’s Christmastime to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,” says Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!” 

Strong words, yes. But that doesn’t make him wrong.

Read it all.

Weasels Riding Woodpeckers

We blame Global Warming!

Hat tip: Spencerbro

Ungrateful Planet

 Last week, powerful men from all over the world finished negotiating a new climate deal — the “Paris Agreement.” France’s foreign minister, the host of the “COP21” climate conference, called the plan an “historic turning point” in the battle against global warming. Our representative, John Kerry, called it “a victory for the planet. 

Asked for comment Mother Earth replied "Meh."

The Kind Of President We Need

Update: Here ya go Mr. Trump...

Election

Who does she remind you of?

Gun Control Victory in New York

See this? It's been banned in New York state thanks to the efforts of NY's Attorney General. Fortunately for liberals, the Second Amendment doesn't cover toy guns.

Charlie Hustled

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Promises, Promises

Best news for the GOP out of last night's debate…

Trump says he will not run as independent, vows to remain Republican. 

 

Best Sports Celebration Ever

Monmouth bench players celebrate a teammate's three-pointer.

Hat tip: Dave Burge

He's Not Dead Yet!

Chris Christie is coming off the canvas and scoring points.

Chappa-what it?

Millenials who don't know the dramatic story of Sen. Ted Kennedy bravely attempting to save the life of a lowly campaign volunteer Mary Jo Kopecne back in 19

Now thanks to a new movie project, they can learn a little history.

Here's hoping the finished product is at least as historically accurate as Oliver Stone's "JFK."

Get Shortystein

N.J. Rabbi sentenced for kidnapping and beating up reprobate husbands to help their wives get divorce papers (a.k.a. "gets").

Epstein later learned the wife and her brother were undercover FBI agents secretly recording their conversations. According to court records, Epstein advised the female agent it would be expensive - at least $60,000 - to obtain the get using physical means, including torture.

"Basically, what we are going to be doing is kidnapping a guy for a couple of hours and beating him up and torturing him, and then getting him to give the get," the rabbi said during an Aug. 13, 2013, recorded phone conversation.

Can't wait for the movie. 

How Bad Can Carly Fiorina Be If...

The Revenge of the Empire

Wasted!

I knew this guy. Played baseball against him as a kid in Ardmore, Pa. He was good. Played basketball against him as an adult in Ridley. He was good at that too.

What he wasn't good at was running an illegal pill mill in Media. At least not good enough to get away with it.
  

What Will They Think of Next?

Look out criminals, Spencerblog's old hometown Town Watch has decided to start using cell phones.

Still the best dressed town watch in Delco.

The Best Commercial You've Never Seen

Trump Makes Her Sick

Columnist Ruth Marcus is "sickened" after hearing Donald Trump's plan to ban Muslim immigration to U.S.



editor's note: The part of Marcus will be played by Team America's Gary Johnston

The Bell Jar

The Daily Burge

	David Burge @iowahawkblog	1h
	Pakistani mail order brides have privacy rights; pro-life groups, not so much washingtonexaminer.com/congressman-ir…
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	David Burge @iowahawkblog	1h
	"There are no strangers, just friends who haven't killed us yet." - DHS motto twitter.com/thehill/status…
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