Michelle Obama's water torture
Carol Brown
Just when you thought the Nanny State couldn't get anymore drunk with patronizing power over people, along comes Michelle Obama with a most urgent plea: Make sure you drink water!
Who knew?! Apparently we now need the government to tell us to do the most basic of things.
To
get the word out, the First lady has pre-recorded messages that will
air on numerous television shows including the Today show and Good
Morning America. And also on Un Nuevo Dia. I wonder if she'll find
another way to insult the Latino community, perhaps telling them a
second time that their kids are too fat. But no worries. The
government's here to save the day with The Water Diet.
But that's not all. Mrs. Obama plans to fly to (warning: something super clever up ahead) Watertown, Wisconsin. So cute!
And
there's more. Actress Eva Longoria will be accompanying her. Nothing
like traveling with A-list celebs to help spread the Gospel of
Government.
While
his wife is in Wisconsin, the president "plans to ask cities all over
to make their town a Water-town." I'm not even sure what that means, but
I'm confident the left has found this vision to be complete and total
genius. We are all Watertown now.
And not to be outdone by a meaningless obtuse phrase, wife Michelle's got a few wild and crazy claims of her own.
You are what you drink," Obama concludes. "And when you drink water, you're at your best...so drink up!
Wow! I don't know about you, but this is news to me. I am what I drink?! Holy smokes!
But
the snake oil pitch doesn't end there. Did you know that increased
water drinking is the single most important thing that families can do
to improve their health? As an entire family unit, I guess.
I've
come to realize that if we were going to take just one step to make
ourselves and our families healthier, probably the single best thing we
could do is to simply drink more water," Obama notes in a press release
regarding her "#drink H2O" initiative. "That's it - it's really that
simple.
Hmm. It's that simple.
Apparently
some scientists have searched for evidence to support Michelle Obama's
water rants and it seems her claims have come up short.
There really isn't data to support this," Dr. Stanley Goldfarb of the University of Pennsylvania tells Politico.
"I think, unfortunately, frankly, they're not basing this on really
hard science. It's not a very scientific approach they've taken. ... To
make it a major public health effort, I think I would say it's bizarre.
And there's this.
Goldfarb,
a kidney specialist, is troubled by White House claims that drinking
more water boosts energy, calling that conclusion "quixotic." "We're
designed to drink when we're thirsty," Goldfarb adds. "There's no need
to have more than that."
But
no matter. Michelle Obama is undeterred. She is a woman on a mission
and, as such, has enlisted a host of big name designer water brands to
back up her message. And in a bit of moving personal revelation, we now
know that Mrs. Obama is quite the water drinker. I don't know about you,
but I find that deeply touching.
She
is a water drinker from morning until night," Kass said. "Obviously,
I'm not with her all day, so I don't know exactly how much. She drinks
water throughout the day. She pretty much has water with her whenever I
see her.
Oh, and just so you know, we've been told that Mrs. Obama's "message will be nearly inescapable." Thank goodness it will be nearly inescapable. When I find the escape route, believe me, I'll let you know.
Thomas Lifson adds:
Mrs.
Obama is exhibiting a kind of neurosis that seems to be at the heart of
contemporary progressive politics: a compulsion to tell other people
how to live their lives. I actually encourage her to continue in this
vein, as it is educational for the rest of us to see how our political
masters think.
It
would not surprise me to see the First Lady begin to offer advice on
how to dress ourselves. After all, the media claque has been telling us
for years that she has a fashion sense that is superb, so in her
delusions she could easily come to believe she has an obligation to tell
us to accessorize carefully, and button up our overcoats on chilly
days.
Good Lord, the vanity of this crowd is mind boggling.
by
Thomas Lifson
Teachers
in Kenosha, Wisconsin - the third largest school district in the state
-- have voted overwhelmingly to free themselves from the clutches of the
teachers union, the Kenosha Education Association, which will now
disband. Thanks to the reform bill, Act 10, pushed by Governor Scott
Walker, public employee unions are limited to bargaining over base pay,
and must be re-certified every year.
Erin Richards of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel writes:
Teachers
in Kenosha, as well as in Milwaukee and Janesville, all came under the
authority of Act 10 starting July 1 when their teacher contracts
expired. Under the law, the unions are required to file for annual
re-certification by Aug. 30 if they wished to remain a recognized
bargaining unit. (snip)
Christina
Brey, speaking for the Wisconsin Education Association Council,
downplayed recertification, calling it just another hoop for local
unions to jump through.
Much more interesting details are provided by the MacIver Institute:
The
Kenosha Education Association (KEA), the state's third largest teachers
union, was officially decertified on August 31, 2013 according to the
Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission.
Mark Belling, who broke this story on Thursday , said that the decertification came after a recent vote by members in which only 37 percent voted to reauthorize the union.
KEA
is the largest teachers union to disband since Act 10 was signed into
law in 2011. The union had 2,400 members according to their website. Act
10 limited collective bargaining rights for public employees and
required public unions to have an annual vote to recertify.
Let
it sink in for moment: only a little more than a third of the Kenosha
teachers wanted the union. By disbanding the union, their income goes up
as they no longer are forced to pay dues, a large portion of which are
then laundered into campaign funds for Democrat candidates. I do not
know the exact amount of dues paid by Kenosha teachers, but I do know
that teachers union dues typically are more than a thousand dollars a
year.
If
Act 10 reforms were adopted nationwide, the involuntary collection of
money from government workers, and the laundering of said funds into
Democrat campaign funds would be attenuated.
I am pro-choice when it comes to union membership. End the involuntary servitude to the union bosses.
Three-and-a-half More Years of Obama!
By J.R. Dunn
So
the Syria "crisis" is reaching its culmination. Syria's WMD's are
likely to be placed under the control of its patron, Russia, perhaps
even with the cooperation of other disinterested, responsible states
such as Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela. The world's only superpower, for its
part, will loiter on the curb outside, asking hurried questions while
the big boys come and go, stepping aside quickly to avoid being shoved
into the gutter by their bodyguards.
This
situation is the sole handiwork of Mr. Barack H. Obama, successor in
office to Washington, Lincoln, Truman, and Reagan. Pondering the better
part of a day, I can think of no previous episode to compare it with.
It has similarities to the isolationism of the 1920s, with the United
States reduced to irrelevance on the global fringes, but that was a
deliberate result of policy, while this... this product of ineptness
coupled with ideology, is something you can scarcely put a name to.
There
are three-and-a-half years of agony lying ahead. It won't be pleasant,
but there is a saving grace. Barack Obama and his childishness,
incompetence, and fanatical fixation on dead political ideas constitute
the apotheosis of a longer-term conundrum, that of a liberal/left that
has infiltrated this country's institutions to a point that state power
and interference with individual liberties increases steadily no matter
who is in office.
Obama
offers us a chance to reject all that decisively. I want every single
train of events set in motion by Obama, his administration, and his
supporters, down to the last halfwit college undergrad, to play out in
full. I want every disaster that fool and his parade of twitches have
triggered to blossom in bleak completion. I want to see all their
trains collide, all their ships sink, all their airships burnt to
cinders.
We're
talking tragedy and retribution, in the absolute Greek sense -- the
Furies howling at midnight. Maybe that's what it takes to cleanse this
nation of this doctrinal pestilence. I want to see every Row A voter
reduced to remorse. I want to see their noses rubbed in it. I want to
hear each victim of this regime cry out to heaven for vengeance. If all
this comes to pass, we may even see Democrats, fearful for their own
political hides, wanting to be rid of him.
But if Obama were impeached,
none of this would happen. Instead the focus would shift to Congress
and the GOP, who then would be blamed for everything that occurs, no
matter who -- likely Smilin' Joe Biden -- inhabits the Oval Office.
When the disasters come -- and they will (most of them are on track at
this moment and can't be turned around except through drastic action
which Obama and all other visible Democrats are incapable of) -- they
will be dumped into the laps of the Republicans. No other group in
modern history has proven more adept at shifting blame than the liberal
left, just as no other political party has proven more apt to stumble
into the spotlight at the worst possible moment than the GOP.
Looking
back from our fine vantage point here at the edge of the Abyss, we can
trace the path clearly. Despite popular belief, the New Deal solved
nothing. There was a second crash -- one that makes none of the history
textbooks -- in October 1937 that wiped out all gains made in the
previous four years and left unemployment higher than it had been when
FDR entered office. By January 1938, Roosevelt was reduced to pleading
with his advisors "Can no one tell me what to do?" Nobody could, and the
country continued its downward spiral.
It
was saved by Adolf Hitler, who in March annexed Austria, rolling into
Vienna behind a spearhead of Panzers. This wakeup call revealed that
war was inevitable, and the tariff barriers that had prevented
international economic recovery fell as the nations of Europe scrambled
to purchase weaponry and supplies. In the U.S., plants reopened
(despite an insane attempt -- by the GOP, no less -- to stifle this
using the Neutrality Act), industry began to gain ground, and by 1940
the U.S. was back on its feet.
Roosevelt
found his sweet spot in leading the Allied coalition to victory,
something nobody would have believed him capable of even ten years
earlier. The success of FDR the Warlord covered the failure of his
economic policies. The New Deal became a retroactive success due to WW
II. By this means, the legend of liberal triumph entered American
consciousness.
Skipping
over Harry Truman, the last practical Democratic president, and John
F. Kennedy, the last conservative Democratic president, we come to
Lyndon Johnson. LBJ was a pure ideologue, a product of the New Deal who
believed its dogma (which, not coincidentally, fitted his
paternalistic, controlling persona to near perfection) implicitly. Amid
the reaction to JFK's murder, LBJ was able to pass a barge load of
ultraliberal programs that would never have seen a vote under ordinary
circumstances.: Medicare, Medicaid,
the War on Poverty, all comprising what he called his "Great Society".
Thanks to Keynesian financing, LBJ managed to suck the life out of the
1960s boom in little more than four years, leaving the nation headed
for economic ruin. Along with the Vietnam War and his fumbling of the
racial question, this left him as one of the most despised presidents of
the century. He abdicated office in 1968, having served only one and a
third terms.
But
Richard M. Nixon effectively extended Johnson's term in office,
continuing his disastrous economic policies ("We are all Keynesians
now."), and putting into effect whatever wild-eyed liberal programs
Johnson had missed, including affirmative action and establishing the
Environmental Protection Agency. (Tom Wicker, ultraliberal New York Times reporter, later wrote a book examining Nixon's record under the title One of Us).
Elected
as a reform candidate in the wake of Watergate, Jimmy Carter proved so
incompetent that his ideology scarcely mattered (though he was nearly as
much as New Deal liberal as LBJ).
Reagan,
of course, turned the country around in short order with his
commonsense conservative reforms carried out in the teeth of opposition
from both liberals and his own party. This set the stage for Bush the
Elder, whose liberal tendencies were strong enough to nearly derail the
Reagan reforms ("I guess I f***** up in 1980," Reagan responded). Bush
allowed himself to be pressured into raising taxes just as the economy
hit a soft patch following the dramatic 1980s expansion. The resulting
shallow recession wrecked his reelection effort despite his personal
popularity.
As
for Bill Clinton, he began his first term as a typical New Left clown,
out to "tame" Wall Street, and inevitably throw the country back onto
the skids. (It was none other than Al Gore who put a stop to this, to
give credit where it's due). At the end of that term, Clinton shifted
right under pressure from Newt Gingrich's GOP Congress along with the
guidance of political operative Dick Morris. This bought him a second
term, which he spent chasing women, eating cheeseburgers, and paying the consequences. The country went its own way regardless.
Despite
distinct signs of the family liberalism, George W. Bush governed well
enough to restore prosperity after a brief recession bequeathed to him
by Clinton. His quick action in 2008 was instrumental in saving the
economy from complete collapse (the Obama administration added nothing
but far huger piles of cash). Then came Obama.
What
we see clearly from this record is that American liberals have always
managed to avoid responsibility. Global war saved Roosevelt and
established the myth of triumphant New Deal liberalism. None of the
liberal presidents thereafter -- excepting Clinton -- served two full
terms, leaving the consequences of their actions - and the blame -- to
be borne by their Republican successors. Clinton avoided this only by
shifting to the right. Add to this the fact that several GOP presidents
-- Nixon and the Bushes -- stumbled along in a "center" that was
actually far to the left, muddying the political record considerably,
and it's evident how the narrative has been tilted leftward.
Liberals
have never had to pay the piper. They have never had to face their
failures or come up with explanations for what went wrong. Neither
Johnson nor Carter served second terms in which their errors would have
become manifest. Instead, Nixon and Reagan had to bear the
responsibility. And of course, the GOP has never made a point of this.
But
now we have Obama. The first true progressive to achieve a second term
since FDR. There's no "triangulation" needed by the man who knows
everything, and no war, it seems, to pull him out of this swamp. Obama
will have to take full responsibility for his policies. He will have to
stand in the dock, and with him, for the first time in seventy years,
liberalism as a whole.
Obama
is less lucky than FDR, less competent than Jimmy Carter, and less
flexible than Bill Clinton. With Obama, all the failures of liberalism
are coming to a head. He has put more liberal policies into effect in a
shorter period than any other president, but thanks to his unique
combination of ineptness, ignorance, inexperience, and arrogance, every
last one of them is doomed. All of them are failing as we watch. His
economic policies have repeated the failures of FDR's New Deal, with
worse to come. His health care "reform" is in a state of collapse
before it has even started. His stewardship of race relations has
returned the country to a state of nearly open hostility and panic not
seen since 1968. His Hallmark card foreign policy has killed tens of
thousands overseas and will almost inevitably lead to the deaths of
millions, as did the policies of Jimmy Carter in countries as unrelated
as Nicaragua, Iran, Ethiopia, and Cambodia.
Do
we really want to give him an out? Do we want to release him to a
well-paying sinecure position to become the black Jimmy Carter, an
international pest and embarrassment? Do we want to allow the liberal
left to slide one more time? To scamper out of the line of fire only to
return to mock and sabotage the efforts of better men to clean up the
heartbreaking mess they left behind, as they did in the early 1970s, the
Reagan 80s, the Bush Oughts? Do we want to see them pop back up in 2020
or 24 with the same nonsense programs given different names and the
same insults and attacks for their opponents exhausted and in despair at
attempting to repair what can no longer be repaired?
I
say no. I prefer that we drink this cup to the dregs, take this road
to its lonely end. The liberals need to undergo the whipping that they
have dodged for over seven decades. The voters of this country, who
have treated politics like a reality series, need to be backhanded by
the world as it exists. We require a rude awakening. This country's
pols, both left and right, need to be overwhelmed with worry as to what
the next day will bring. The people of this country need to be buried
up to their necks in the results of their own infantilism. All the
fantasy castles need to be demolished to the last stone. Liberalism
must be discredited and humiliated, its adherents defeated and
dispersed. The leader of the whole circus must be tormented to the
human limit and beyond, forced to break down in front of the cameras as
he begs for help that will not come.
I
am not talking about apocalypse. I am talking about shock therapy.
There are dreadful days to come, and they are locked in. We have
another recession on its way, perhaps even a stagflation on the 1970s
model, which swallowed the entire decade. Having taken in Obama's
disgraceful performance as regards Syria, our enemies will now make a
move: Russia, China, and Iran, and possibly all three at once. We will
not win this round. We have a national security system that is run by
wannabe trannies and later-day beatniks. We are operating under the
delusion that major military units can be led in battle by gays,
transvestites, and what have you. We have convinced ourselves that the
21st-century world can be mastered by weapons purchased in the 1980s.
We have sown the wind. We will reap the whirlwind.
We
have got it coming. But at the same time, the seeds of resurrection
are evident. As I have said elsewhere, I am a disciple of Adam Smith -
"There is a lot of ruin in a nation." But we cannot recover in any
meaningful sense as long as the same processes are allowed to continue;
as long as any cheap demagogue can trot around mouthing the same old
slogans and be taken seriously.
Liberalism has outlived its time. Obama is in the process of destroying it. Let it come down.
When I was a rich kid, we were all pro-communist
By David Lawrence
When
I was a rich kid living in Great Neck, NY, I remember standing on the
lawn of my girlfriend's house and listening to her parents talk about
how my girlfriend's grandfather fought for the communists in Spain.
They were proud of him. While the father puffed his pipe on the lawn of
their estate, they pontificated on their sympathy for poor people and
their desire to have a classless society.
They
actually didn't know any poor people except the maid and the
gardeners. They feigned sympathy for the poor because it made them feel
more generous. Gramps thought that by taking from the rich and giving
to the poor, he was bettering society. He gave about ten percent of his
income to charities and acted like he was donating ninety percent and
had switched living establishments with the poor. He didn't know that
communists wreck the fabric of ambition and destroy Darwin's principle
of the survival of the fittest, substituting it for survival of the
weakest, which makes society feeble and non-productive.
My
dad was sympathetic to socialism, and due to his influence, I
semi-agreed with my girlfriend's family. I believed in communism and
what would eventually become Obama's simplistic fair share. I thought
that Senator Joe McCarthy was a beast because he was tough on communists
and made it difficult for some spoiled screenwriters to get jobs after
betraying our country. Hollywood cries; people in communist countries
die. I didn't realize that Senator Joe was defending the American way
and supporting Emerson's self-reliance rather than the nanny state.
In
my sixties I played tennis with Ben Gitlow, the son of the original
president of the American Communist Party. Even he had turned against
the party. The party was not kind. It hurt those it pretended to
help. Only inexperienced fools who knew nothing about government
remained loyal to the Communist Party. People like Ben and his dad, who
had actually met with Stalin, knew that communism wrecked the economy
and stole one's life force, one's soul.
Communists
back then pretended, like Obama today, to defend the middle class and
spitefully attack the rich. But communism actually decimated the middle
class and created a new power-class out of the communist faithful. It
is a party built on jealousy. The communists, like the Occupy Wall
Street crowd, are so jealous of the rich that they are willing to
destroy the business structure of Wall Street without leaving themselves
a viable path to success. Imagine those unemployed rich kids and
rapists setting up a new business model on Wall Street. Failure, thy
name is inexperience and youth.
Jews,
of which I am one, are particularly prominent among American
communists. Maybe it's because they feel that communism is the antidote
to fascism. They don't care that communism killed five times as many
people as fascism. Nazis were small potatoes compared to communists.
Communist
Jews follow communism's founder, anti-Semite Karl Marx. They forget
that Jews were never really popular in communist countries. It was
ironic to see communists rationing their food in the USSR while rich
limousine liberals in New York insulted capitalism as they pretended to
be men of the people.
How
stupid that many communists are academics. You'd think that they'd be
smarter than that, but they can't get out of the way of their own envy
and hatred of successful people.
What's
ironic is that Nazism bears a terrible reputation, whereas communism
gets a pass. Communism hides behind the lie that it is trying to give
everyone a fair shake and improve life on earth. Liberals are
derivative of communism and also think of themselves as great healers,
when in reality they are wreckers of society and destroyers of the
competitive urge of capitalism.
Both
Nazism and communism hate the bourgeois and bury themselves beneath a
blanket of totalitarianism. Both are government-heavy and restrict
individual freedoms. Nazism, communism, socialism, and liberalism are
imperialistic and create an ideological theocracy on Earth. It's like
deductive logic -- everything from the top, no inductive pragmatism.
It's time we woke up and realized that communism is as bad as Nazism,
that Obama's liberal policies are the death knell of society.
In
the seventies, my liberal parents visited Russia and discovered long
lines for bread and bedbugs in their supposedly four-star hotel. In
fact, they could get water only every second day and had to brush their
teeth with Coca-Cola or lemonade. Yet all the liberals back in America
looked up to the USSR. They believed that communism was nice to the
masses who were really starving in the streets. Yet I don't remember
any New Yorkers brushing their teeth with soda.
Communists have done more ill than fascists. Yet the liberals still pat them on the back. They make anti-Nazi movies like Inglorious Basterds. They make pro-communist movies like Warren Beatty's Reds. They make Nazis out to be monsters and communists into loving people who give out bread to the poor.
Back
in the real world, Che Guevara, America's rock star, was shooting
people in the back of the head. And Fidel Castro has taken a thriving
economy and buried it in his arrogant demand for power.
The Nazis starved many Jews to death. Chairman Mao starved more of his own people.
Communism
is fascism's sister. It's time that they were recognized as twins and
that the liberals stopped seeing communism through rose-colored
glasses. Democrats remind me of the Beatles' Strawberry Fields, where
"Nothing is real and nothing to get hungabout."
What
they don't realize is that when you don't "get hungabout" the failures
of communism, you end up hanging from a tree of your own neglect, dying
in a noose of naïve optimism and the sophomoric fair-sharing of an
unworkable society.
