Friday, December 13, 2013

News for your weekend reading

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Christmas Gift: Eddie Grabowski's Gift: A Marine Christmas Story
Eddie Grabowski’s Gift is a short novella, with an old Marine’s lessons on life, love and giving. All author royalties are donated to the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation to support the National Museum of the Marine Corps.

U.S. Navy-China showdown: Chinese try to halt U.S. cruiser in international waters
Excerpt: A Chinese naval vessel tried to force a U.S. guided missile warship to stop in international waters recently, causing a tense military standoff in the latest case of Chinese maritime harassment, according to defense officials. The guided missile cruiser USS Cowpens, which recently took part in disaster relief operations in the Philippines, was confronted by Chinese warships in the South China Sea near Beijing’s new aircraft carrier Liaoning, according to officials familiar with the incident.

China-Japan rearmament is Keynesian stimulus, if it doesn't go horribly wrong. By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Excerpt: Asia is on the cusp of a full-blown arms race. The escalating clash between China and almost all its neighbours in the Pacific has reached a threshold. All other economic issues at this point are becoming secondary. Beijing's implicit threat to shoot down any aircraft that fails to adhere to its new air control zone in the East China Sea is a watershed moment for the world. The issue cannot easily be finessed. Other countries either comply, or they don't comply. Somebody has to back down.

Excerpt: The December Reason-Rupe poll finds that 55 percent of Americans would choose the health care system that was in place before the Affordable Care Act was passed, while 34 percent prefer the new health care system designed by the 2010 federal health care law. (“If you’ve got a majority of folks who believe in something, then it should be able to pass." --Barack Obama. We can't get it back. They have destroyed the best system in the world. Soon our cancer survival rates will be like the UK. But we can punish the evil-doers. ~Bob)

Obama the oblivious. By Charles Krauthammer
Excerpt: In explaining the disastrous rollout of Obamacare, President Obama told Chris Matthews he had discovered that “we have these big agencies, some of which are outdated, some of which are not designed properly.” An interesting discovery to make after having consigned the vast universe of American medicine, one-sixth of the U.S. economy, to the tender mercies of the agency bureaucrats at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Internal Revenue Service.

Quotes
Get the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything. -- A liberal is man who will give away everything he doesn't own -Frank Dane

The forgotten war. By John Hayward
Excerpt: On Wednesday, three of what the Wall Street Journal describes as “the Obama Administration’s top Afghanistan specialists” trudged into the House Foreign Affairs Committee chambers, where they were flummoxed by a question from Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA). What super-complicated query from the Congressman stumped these highly trained and knowledgeable representatives of the most wise and wonky Administration in history – better able to run every industry than any private citizen, as anyone who’s had contact with ObamaCare can testify? Actually, there were two questions they couldn’t answer: how many American troops have been killed in Afghanistan this year, and how much are we spending there.

Obamacare: One punt after another
Excerpt: Why do Republicans even bother trying to delay Obamacare? President Barack Obama’s doing it all by himself. On Thursday, the Obama administration gave customers permission to pay their premiums as late as Dec. 31 for coverage that starts Jan. 1, and officially gave customers an extra week — until Dec. 23 — to sign up for January coverage. The move was just the latest in a long list of extensions, delays and punts that have plagued the health care law.

HHS 'encourages' insurers to fix problems created by Obamacare. By Philip Klein 
Excerpt: On a conference call, an HHS spokeswoman emphasized: “We are just proposing it as an option and we’re encouraging issuers. There is no requirement.” Translation: HHS has a huge mess on its hands and it hopes that by getting ahead of this news, it can foist the blame for the problems on insurers. Of course, for insurers who have spent years designing plans to comply with the law, this would present huge and unreasonable logistical hurdles.

Excerpt: The “S” in President Obama’s DHS doesn’t stand for “security.” It stands for “sleaze.” In the wake of Dirty Harry Reid’s sabotage of the filibuster, Democrats have rammed through the Senate nomination of a shady Chicago crony associated with dangerous Clinton corruption and at least two visas-for-sale schemes. The White House wants Alejandro Mayorkas to helm the No. 2 position at the Department of Homeland Security. It speaks volumes about this ethics-challenged administration that the most qualified person it could find for this important post is a government DHS hack currently under investigation by other DHS hacks.

Excerpt: There’s been lots of speculation and spin about the “selfie” President Obama took part in at the memorial for Nelson Mandela, but CBS News’ White House correspondent Bill Plante had the funniest.

This Just In: President Obama’s Pants Are on Fire! By Bernard Goldberg
Excerpt: My daughter came home from tennis camp with a trophy when she was just five years old. She walked in the house and immediately dumped it in the garbage. When asked why, she simply said, “They gave one of these to everybody.” About 12 seconds after he took the oath of office, Barack Obama got a trophy too. It was the Nobel Peace Prize. Even he knew he didn’t deserve it. 

Excerpt: Jang Song Taek, the brother-in-law of late Supreme Leader Kim Jong Il, the uncle of current leader Kim Jong Un, and a savvy politician who was thought to have been the second-most powerful man in North Korea, has been reportedly executed for planning a coup. (After the Young-Un had his former girlfriend machine-gunned, Uncle should have taken the hint. ~Bob)

Bangladesh Islamist Abdul Kader Mullah buried after execution
Excerpt: The Bangladesh Islamist leader executed on Thursday after his conviction for crimes during the 1971 war of independence has been buried. Abdul Kader Mullah's funeral took place in his home town of Faridpur in the early hours of Friday morning and was attended by hundreds of mourners.

Yemen says U.S. drone struck a wedding convoy, killing 14
Excerpt: A U.S. drone mistakenly targeted a wedding convoy in Yemen's al-Baitha province after intelligence reports identified the vehicles as carrying al Qaeda militants, two Yemeni national security officials told CNN on Thursday. (Many happy returns on your special day, from Barack. ~Bob)

Santa’s White Privilege. By Daniel Greenfield 
Excerpt: Thanksgiving and Columbus Day are celebrations of genocide. The Fourth of July is a reminder that America was founded by rich white men who didn’t want to pay taxes. Memorial Day is perfect for anti-war statements and Mother’s Day is for denouncing the heteronormative family. Valentine’s Day is an occasion to protest rape and the patriarchy and Halloween is a time to lecture students about cultural appropriation and politically incorrect costumes that offend minorities.

Good Column: Thinking About ‘Racism.’ By Bruce Bawer
Excerpt: In short, I witnessed racism. Real racism, plain as day. I might not have had a word for it, but I knew it was ugly. And wrong. Back then, right and wrong, when it came to such subjects, were clear. But then things changed. Quickly. 

Politifact: On Second Thought, Obama's 'Keep Your Plan' Pledge is 2013's 'Lie of the Year.' by Guy Benson 
Excerpt: President Obama is at long last the recipient of an award he actually earned:

Excerpt: I’ve grown accustomed to stories exposing the staggering incompetence behind HealthCare.gov and the various state exchanges, but this story (via Instapundit) stands out. Turns out that the allegedly successful Connecticut exchange gave 2,408 purchasers inaccurate information about every single individual health-care plan they looked at:

Wichita Airport Bomb Plot: Kansas Man Arrested Over Suicide Bombing Plan
Excerpt: Loewen was described as a white male who self-radicalized himself by reading Islamist literature online, NBC reported. (I'd be okay with blowing him up in an empty field. ~Bob)

Alleged Kansas Bomber Wanted to Be "Obedient Slave of Allah"
Excerpt: An FBI sting has led to the arrest of a Wichita, Kan. man who thought he was about to die in a suicide car bombing that targeted a terminal at the city's Mid-Continent Airport.

Excerpt: That admission came in a new paper by prominent warmists in the peer-reviewed journal Climate Dynamics. They not only conceded that average global surface temperatures stopped warming a full 15 years ago, but that this “pause” could extend into the 2030s. Mind you, the term “pause” is misleading in the extreme: Unless and until it resumes again, it’s just a “stop.” You don’t say a bullet-ridden body “paused” breathing. Remarkably, that stoppage has practically been a state secret. (Why they switched to "Climate Change." Since the climate has been changing as long as there has been a climate, every day's weather "proves" them right. ~Bob)

Supervolcano under Yellowstone larger than previously thought, could doom mankind
Excerpt: The last major eruption 640,000 years ago covered North America with ash and affected the climate of the entire planet. An eruption today would be catastrophic for the entire planet (This would be real "Climate Change." ~Bob)


Gun control is like trying to reduce drunk driving by making it tougher for sober people to own cars.


Obamacare will do more economic damage and kill more people than Hurricane Katrina and Sandy put together.

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