Monday, September 29, 2014

Slamming an old axiom into reverse

A proverb has it that success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. Our current-yet-semi-retired president has turned the saying inside out, claiming that the failure to see the growing threat of ISIS has many fathers – specifically excepting, of course, what we might call the biological father, whose DNA proves conclusively his (Obama’s) direct relationship to the latest Middle Eastern terrorist crisis.

Even some Democrats are now slamming Obama’s attempt to blame the intelligence community for underestimating the ISIS threat (which the president most recently did in a 60 Minutes interview), including, notably, Joe Sestak.

It is faintly amusing when a teenage boy responds to his mother’s discovery of a pack of cigarettes or a package of condoms in his pants pocket while sorting the dirty laundry by blurting out “Hey, those aren’t mine!” One grows weary listening to the president of the United States employing the same knee-jerk juvenile defense when confronted with the expanding list of his administration’s failures.

And speaking of failures, Victor Davis Hanson attempts to get his arms around one of Obama’s worst in this look at the execrable Eric Holder. Doubtless Obama doesn’t see Holder’s appointment as a mistake, and in the context of the Alinskyite-stealth-purposeful-chaos gambit, perhaps he wasn’t, entirely. But Holder’s execution of his activist mission was always clumsy and obvious, not to mention shot through with spectacular hypocrisy, so there’s a chance that his tenure as attorney general will ultimately prove to be a failure in two ways: (1) in the sense of living up to his official job requirements (failing to fairly enforce the laws of the country), and (2)in the sense of consolidating Democratic electoral gains (failing to effectively advance the wider acceptance of certain important progressive myths, particularly in connection with the subject of race). The first item is clearly settled; we’ll have to wait and see about the second.

Can’t wait to see the fellow show up as MSNBC’s in-house legal expert. The colloquies with the Most Reverend Al Sharpton should generate some of the most dishonest (and illiterate) quotes of the next half dozen years.

Monday movie

Gary Cooper is a goofy professor and Barbara Stanwyck is the street-savvy gun moll in Ball of Fire.

Sunday, September 28, 2014

Sunday funnies

Help your cat make a political statement!

Lost in translation.

Hmmm. Must have been mighty big pants.

As I grow older, I think I might definitely benefit from owning one of these.

Mel Blanc is a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders as he plays the role of Jack Benny's violin teacher.



Friday, September 26, 2014

Funniest headline on Eric Holder's departure

Jim Treacher: "Eric Holder Stepping Down To Spend More Time With His Contempt Of Congress Citation".

Correction: That's Derek Hunter filling in for Jim Treacher (H/T: Captain Heinrichs).

Happy Feet Friday

Erroll Garner plays I Get a Kick Out of You (not bad for a guy who couldn't read music).

Thursday, September 25, 2014

Justice for Chuck!

Or Charlotte, as the case may be. NYC mayor drops groundhog, which subsequently dies from its injuries.

A good start

As the old lawyer joke* has it. Too bad, though, that Eric Holder was permitted to head up the Department of Just Us as long as he did (or at all, actually). Still, glad to see him go.

*What do you call a hundred lawyers at the bottom of the sea?

Update: Clueless Chuck Todd bids farewell to this "non-political" attorney general.

Update II: More from J. Christian Adams - "Goodbye, Eric, and good riddance".

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Best duty caliber

Is it the 9mm Luger? This report strongly suggests so.

An interesting read, whether you ultimately agree with the main conclusion or not (H/T: Ace).

BOLO...

It shouldn't be too hard to track down this group of homegrown terrorists.

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Because no living artists were interested?

I know, I know. Music is largely a matter of personal taste. You can’t really argue someone into liking Mozart or Stravinsky or Cab Calloway, Elvis or Ella or Isaac Stern; a person either does or doesn’t.

Which philosophical position acts as a brake on my strong impulse to denounce Barry Manilow’s warbling as elevator music that is only marginally tolerable even in elevators limited to very short rides. Insipid melodies and utterly forgettable lyrics delivered in a voice that is practically invariable as to decibel level (a police siren has more technique).

Ah…I guess that brake isn’t working too well after all. Well, there are people who like him, and if you are one of them, I hope we can still be friends. Nonetheless, Manilow’s announced intention of recording duets with dead singers – many of whom are vastly his superior, and none much, if any, worse – strikes me, as it may even strike some of his fans, as a dubious proposition, very unlikely to shine in the annals of music history. (Barry Manilow and Judy Garland? You might as well punctuate Over the Rainbow with an occasional blast from a vuvuzela). Not exactly a sign of the end times, I suppose, but definitely a caution light on the road to perdition.

Oh boy, another community organizer!

Correspondence between Saul Alinsky and Hillary Clinton surfaces.

Yes, yes. She was young and impressionable then, and now she’s older and wiser. Now, for example, she knows that all that “power to the people” stuff is crap, and that it’s every man for himself woman for herself. So if you’re hyper-ambitious and you don’t have any talent for business or the professions or the arts, then the only outlet remaining for the expression of your massive ego is national politics and the thrill of treating society as if it were your own personal LEGO set. And does anybody seriously suggest that LEGOs have the ability to order themselves? Of course not. They’re just a lot of plastic bricks, serving no function at all without a separate guiding intelligence to assemble them into recognizable structures – according to the exclusive taste of the builder. And you don’t even need an ideology for that. The only thing you need to believe in, if you’re Hillary Clinton, is Hillary Clinton.

A little green around the gills

Climate fabulists infest Wall St.

Update: That shrewd and farseeing man of business, Mr. Bingley, points out that the unwashed never actually got to Wall St., proper, having been halted by the thin blue line (incidentally, considering the quantity of donuts reportedly consumed by the constable class, is "thin" blue line really an appropriate moniker? I merely ask).

Haw!

Reagan and Bush are assisting Obama in his attacks on Syria.

Monday, September 22, 2014

Snazzy!

I didn't have time to attend the Kena Shriners annual automobile show today, but I did stop just long enough to snap a couple of pictures of this sweet Lincoln Cosmopolitan (1949 or 1950). Beeeee-U-ti-ful!





Monday movie

Charming banter between two classy actors, Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn (from Charade).

Sunday, September 21, 2014

Sunday funnies

How to supplement your retirement income.

An unusual artist's model.

Now, here's an award ceremony I wouldn't mind watching: the Ig Nobel Prizes.

Man wakes up in a field of donkeys (yes, alcohol was involved).

Bizarre detention notices.

In Australia, it looks like you're not safe from crocodiles anywhere.

Ace provides a highly scientific tutorial on penguins.

Friday, September 19, 2014

Australia dodges a bullet

"Hundreds of armed police officers and Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) officials moved on suspected terrorists in the biggest ever counter terrorism raid in the history of Australia, a report said."

Happy Feet Friday

The lovely Lola Albright sings A Good Man is Hard to Find (from the classy TV series, Peter Gunn).

Thursday, September 18, 2014

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts

Now I get what that means!

Big talk from Weepy John

Bob Belvedere spots John Boehner referring to some of his fellow Republicans as "knuckleheads". Anybody think he's talking about establishment Republicans?

Personally, I believe Boehner is just jealous; he is a mere chucklehead.

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Happy Citizenship/Constitution Day

We need more citizens who are familiar with the U.S. Constitution, so here's our key document for review.

Today is also the 30th anniversary of Mrs. Paco's U.S. citizenship. She was sworn in along with a massive crowd of other new citizens in a ceremony in the Orange Bowl (presided over by then-Vice President George H.W. Bush).

Ah, 1984! Reagan, prosperity and the beginning of the end for Soviet communism. Not to mention that the Detroit Tigers won the World Series. A great year.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Dear Secretary Kerry

Please define “we”, “real” and “Islam”.

Elsewhere, Victor Davis Hanson details the assumptions underlying the war strategy of Obama’s “bizarro universe” . A sample:
There is no need for consistency in judgment, given that things happen, and the press will largely not collate past assertions with present contradictions. In short, teleprompted rhetoric, with plenty of let-me-be-perfectly-clear emphatics, can sound enough like a foreign policy that enough Americans will believe something is being done while the crisis naturally abates.
Gormless twit. How many years before the moving truck pulls up in front of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Around two and a half? Lordie, hurry sundown.

A man’s home is his fumigation tent

A NYC police officer has some…er…novel ideas about how to protect yourself and your family during a home invasion.

Yeah, a can of Raid would certainly be my first choice when faced with a couple of meth-crazed housebreakers. I suppose the guys would just fall on their backs, their limbs waggling spastically in the air, thus enabling the missus and me to escape. So much more effective than a dose of double-ought, yessirree.

I think conservatives kinda smell like Ponderosa pines on a late spring morning

Or maybe like bacon. Liberals, on the other hand, generally smell like mildewed old newspapers that have been stacked in the garage since the LBJ administration. Or occasionally like cheese.

Monday, September 15, 2014

Bonnie Scotland

P.J. O’Rourke looks at the possibility of Scottish independence and says, grab your popcorn (if you are of Scottish ancestry – as I am on my mother’s side – you should brace yourself for some Irish Schadenfreude).

What iceberg?

Michael Goodwin does a nice job summarizing what we all know (even those liberals who are at least capable of being honest with themselves): “Obama’s ship is sinking”.

Here’s something particularly ominous to bear in mind:
Obama’s fecklessness is so unique that our adversaries and enemies surely realize they will never face a weaker president. They must assume the next commander-in-chief will take a more muscular approach to America’s interests and be more determined to forge alliances than the estranged man who occupies the Oval Office now.

So Vladimir Putin, Iran, China, the Islamic State, al Qaeda and any number of other despots and terrorists know they have two years to make their moves and advance their interests, and that resistance will be token, if there is any at all.

A cloud no bigger than a man’s hand

We scoff, we arch our eyebrows, perhaps we snicker at the efforts by the progressive hive to restrict free speech. But the increasing frequency of these attacks on the First Amendment, and the fact that this and other guarantees of individual freedom are potentially only one or two Supreme Court nominations away from “reform”, if not obliteration, should give us all pause for reflection. Kevin D. Williamson reports on the latest attempt to criminalize political differences.

What now, champ?

Obama has indicated that he wants to arm Syria’s moderate rebels in order to press the fight against ISIS, but that could be a difficult feat to bring off, especially since practically the entire high command of a coalition of moderates has been wiped out in a “mysterious” explosion.

On a related topic, Sec. of State John Kerry claims that 40 countries have joined the coalition against ISIS, but he hasn’t disclosed who they all are. Paco World News Daily (PWND) has uncovered a partial list of heretofore unnamed coalition members:

Oceania
Atlantis
Ruritania
The Grand Duchy of Fenwick
Manchukuo
Lower Slobbovia
Elbonia
Loompaland
The Empire of Lilliput

Monday movie

Charlton Heston is a union officer commanding a rag-tag expedition of federal troops and Confederate prisoners in search of an Apache marauder in Major Dundee. In this scene, he is forced to deal with a deserter.

Sunday, September 14, 2014

Flashy!

I've got a replica of the S&W Russian .44 top-break, but it ain't duded up like this one (too pretty to shoot).

H/T: Captain Heinrichs

Fairfax County wildlife getting wilder all the time

About a year ago, as we were getting ready to turn in, Mrs.Paco and I heard an unusual noise coming from outside, a sort of raspy, yowling whine. We looked at each other quizzically, and said, more or less simultaneously, "Was that a cat?" The sound did put me in mind of a cat, but not your basic Tom. We didn't think much about it until a couple of days later, when we began getting emails from the neighborhood association about a couple of cougar sightings. I figured, "Nah, maybe a bobcat, but surely not a cougar."

And now I see this: "There have been two reports of early morning sightings of a large cat - possibly a cougar - near a Fairfax County elementary school."

Guess I'll have to start packing heat on my neighborhood walks.

Sunday funnies

The bear is loose, and he's chillin' with a coffin nail and some Twisted Tea.

Ok, here's a real bear on the loose.

Grouchy Old Cripple with the joke of the day.

When you change your mind about that tattoo...

Signs of the times. First, this sign-maker in Richmond needs to start using spell-check:



And outside of my office building, I saw this sign (looks like Hillary has some competition!) Part of the message strikes me as a bit...cryptic.



Paco Consumer Products, exclusive distributor of the kickball ice cream maker!

Saturday, September 13, 2014

I hope President Obama follows through on his pledge to destroy ISIS


"Don't worry. My follow-through is much improved!"

No. No, Mr. President, that's not what I mean at all...

Friday, September 12, 2014

Assortment

Andrew Klavan discusses the latest campus horror: microaggression (in a free and tolerant society such as ours, would-be progressive martyrs have to find their oppression wherever they can).

And let’s not forget the dangers to elementary school children posed by…lip balm.

The challenge in “rallying around” our Commander-in-Chief is finding a way to do so without cramping his swing.

Creative goldbricking: “The Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) wants its members to be able to take paid grieving days for ‘aboriginal spirit friends.’” (H/T: Captain Heinrichs).

The English are pretty innovative in this way, too: ”Father-to-be claims to be first in UK to be signed off with sympathy symptoms”

I’ve always heard that diplomacy is an art, but in the hands of Susan Rice it’s apparently art heavily influenced by hip hop.

Barack Obama, theologian.

Happy Feet Friday

The marvelous Billie Holiday sings Now Baby or Never, with an assist from Count Basie and his band.

Thursday, September 11, 2014

In memoriam



The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Interpreting the president's speech

Stephen Green once again drunkblogs Obama's rambling prose.

Perhaps the most irritating of Obama's comments was the announcement that ISIL is not Islamic (presumably they are secret snake-handling Pentecostals).

If you can't, or won't, identify your enemy, how are you going to defeat him?

I can understand why NYC mayor De Blasio hasn’t applied for a security clearance

He probably thinks the results of the background check would land him in Gitmo.

Honestly, why do New Yorkers elect flakes like this guy? I know the voters are mostly liberal and all that, but is this really the best the Democrats can do? Sometimes I wonder if the denizens of the Big Apple don’t heave these bozos into office just to get attention. I’d pray for De Blasio to get the Democratic presidential nomination someday, but the way things are going, who knows, he might just win. As it is, the country might not survive the current White House occupant’s regime with its most cherished institutions intact. Another such left-wing goober might put the final nail in the coffin of our noble republic.

What a turkey!

Daniel Pipes has some interesting observations about Turkey’s new prime minister, whose demonstrated incompetence has proven to be no bar to his climb up the career ladder (in many ways, politics is the same all over).

Honesty is one of the better policies

As a wag once said. IRS commissioner John Koskinen seems to be a strong advocate of what you might call situational ethics.
“Whenever we can, we follow the law,” IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told the House Ways and Means subcommittee on health on Wednesday.
Amazing that this deceitful tax troll is still in office. I understand how impeaching the president could backfire politically, but what’s to stop Republicans from impeaching other individuals within the administration who have lied, covered up, violated the law, or otherwise revealed themselves to be hopeless boobs?

(Answer: pusillanimity).

The warrior

I imagine we can look for increased drone activity, airstrikes, and possibly even boots on the ground to deal with this latest outrage: “Several posh golf courses, including Trump National Golf Club, turned down President Obama’s request to tee off on their links over Labor Day weekend.”

For cryin' out loud

Obama doesn't even have a strategy for invading Canada, either (H/T: Captain Heinrichs).

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Sorry...heh...wrong number

One of Eric Holder's henchmen accidentally calls Darrell Issa's staff in an effort to, er, co-ordinate the undermining of Issa's investigation of IRS wrongdoing.


"Dude, that was just dumb!"

Monday, September 8, 2014

What will our “watershed moment” be?

Breitbart has an interesting interview with Nigel Farage of Britain’s United Kingdom Independence Party. UKIP was formed by conservatives disgruntled over the Tories’ gradual philosophical convergence with pan-European happy talk and the embrace by the Conservative Party establishment of the inevitability of the nanny state. Farage sees a similar disconnect between conservatives and the GOP leadership in the U.S.
There’s no serious talk in grassroots circles of a third party movement, but Farage said that could change if there’s a “watershed moment”—like the passage of amnesty for illegal aliens into law, or a major policy embraced by the establishment half of the GOP that is in direct contravention to what conservatives believe. Farage said there's still a fighting chance in the U.S. that conservatives can eliminate establishment-minded Republicans and save the GOP from them, but that time has long since passed in the U.K.
I’m not sure how much of a “fighting chance” conservatives really have of reversing the tendency toward uselessness of the Republican Party, but I certainly believe it’s worth the effort.

It will be a hard slog, though. As Farage points out, there’s an awful lot of money that flows into American politics, and wealthy donors to the Republican Party, whose goals are increasingly at odds with the desires of the rank and file, seem to have gotten a hammerlock on the party leadership. But whether we retake the GOP, or wind up creating a new party, it will probably be the work of decades – which just goes to show the wisdom of T.S. Eliot’s observation on lost causes:
If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that it will triumph.
And we know that the irreducible minimum requirement for a chance at triumph is keeping the idea alive.

Monday movie

Robert Montgomery and Carole Lombard are wonderful together in Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

Sunday, September 7, 2014

Deer me

I was heading to the supermarket yesterday when I saw these guys - bold as brass, at high noon - grazing in somebody's front yard.

Sunday funnies

This happens to me every time I get pulled over...



Ah, it's great to be alive and a dog!

A very unshrimpy shrimp.

Spider dog!



Q: Why did New Jersey get all the toxic waste and California all the lawyers?
A: New Jersey got to pick first.

Saturday, September 6, 2014

Andrew McLaglen, RIP

Andrew McLaglen, a prolific director of movie and TV Westerns, and the son of actor Victor McLaglen, has died at age 94.

Stacy McCain goes shopping

And he has the knack for figuring out what people need. For example, what better gift for Amanda Marcotte than a crazy cat lady starter kit?

Friday, September 5, 2014

Happy Feet Friday

Big Bill Broonzy sings his version of Key to the Highway.

Thursday, September 4, 2014

Barack Obama: ISIS has no place in the 21st century

Seraphic Secret: “It is Barack Obama who has no place in the 21st century. He and his kind will be left on the ash heap of history alongside Neville Chamberlain and other infamous appeasers of evil.”

More:
Western civilization is at war with the IslamoNazi world.

The problem is that Barack Obama, allegedly the leader of the free world, does not recognize this simple truth. And that’s because he is a radical leftist who is incapable of recognizing, much less confronting, true evil.

To a committed leftist at this time in history, evil is defined as the Koch brothers, the Tea Party, the Ferguson police force. And the gravest threat to civilization is global warming/ global freezing/climate change — in short: the weather.
Too true. Obama and the progressive hive subscribe to a montage of beliefs, attitudes and prejudices that is so staggeringly wrong-headed, so utterly at odds with empirical historical evidence, so deleterious to the preservation of both order and liberty that one’s mind simply reels.

I’m currently reading a series of novels by Blake Crouch (the Wayward Pines trilogy) in which a defect in the human genome has led to a relatively rapid form of devolution, the regression of man to a state of pre-human intelligence and animal savagery. Only a tiny remnant of human beings has survived, the people living in a small town in a rural area behind the dubious security of a 20-ft. high electrified fence. This is looking less and less like a work of highly imaginative fiction and more like a display of prescience every day – particularly with respect to what appears to be a decline in average overall intelligence, most strikingly (perhaps because of the exposure they get courtesy of the news media) in the members of our ruling class. Do I exaggerate? Maybe a little. But let me ask you this question: does, say, Joe Biden really impress you as someone who is a great many steps removed from a hooting lower primate who grooms his fellows one minute and hurls feces at strangers the next?

Ah, well. Perhaps a few hours at the firing range will restore my equanimity.

So does this mean I’ve got a shot at becoming a Sports Illustrated swimsuit-edition photographer?

Donte Stallworth – 9/11 truther, DWI pedestrian killer and former NFL player – has been hired to cover national security for Huffington Post.

And why not? Al Sharpton, Chelsea Clinton and Ed Schultz get to play commentator on television, and I haven’t seen evidence that any of those three rise above the level of a semi-literate immigrant Pakistani cab driver when it comes to knowledge and wisdom (in fact, that trio falls far below the basic common sense level of most cab drivers – Pakistani and otherwise - I’ve had the privilege of talking to).

Perhaps most relevantly, as Lance at Small Dead Animals says, “I'm like....It’s the Huffington Post.”

Earth doomed by global warming

Cats and dogs hardest hit.

H/T: Friend and commenter Isophorone.

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

You mean like high cholesterol or Crohn’s disease?

Obama’s goal is to turn the Islamic State into a “manageable problem”.

What does that even mean? Is there some minimum number of heads we’re willing to let IS lop off on a weekly basis (maybe with a few exceptions: “No limit on Christians”; “American journalists only on weekends and holidays”)? Or perhaps we let them turn a few - but “only” a few - cities into permanent abattoirs? How about insisting on background checks to make sure that their mass murderers and serial killers are at least partially motivated by something other than bloodlust (because that somehow makes the violence less repugnant – you know: eggs and omelettes)?

The worst combination of idiocy, poltroonery and ideological vapor lock I’ve ever seen. Trying to get Obama to act like a Commander in Chief is like pinning a sheriff’s badge on a Quaker and expecting him to clean up Tombstone.

Ok, here’s the solution, and it has the advantage of enabling the president to take decisive action based on a pretext that will appeal to him - action designed, furthermore, not to manage, but to eradicate the problem. Let’s somehow convince IS to require voter ID. Hell, you’ll have Eric Holder, the entire U.S. Marshal’s Service and a couple of deputized Marine battalions chasing those lunatics to the back of beyond in no time flat.

Alabama Democrat J.T. Smith, idiot of the week

This "honor" is bestowed in acknowledgment of the sheer imbecility of this Tweet.

As if we didn’t have enough things to worry about

“Radioactive wild boar roaming the forests of Germany”.

Actually, slow-roasted pig is supposed to be pretty tender, isn’t it?

Elsewhere… cannibal crickets!

Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Savages do, again, what savages do

Another journalist, Steven Sotloff, reportedly has been beheaded by the same psychopathic pig who murdered James Foley.

May God bless the souls of both of these journalists, and comfort their families. May He also visit swift justice on jihadists everywhere.

And may our president, poor lamechop slathered with fail sauce* that he is, awaken to a sense of righteous outrage against these masked sons of the Devil and strive to extirpate them from the face of the earth.

*Swiped from an episode of Psych, and used by me from time to time to characterize weak reeds wherever they flutter.

To hell with that

Filipino soldiers manning a UN outpost in the Golan Heights defy orders to surrender to Syrian rebels, execute a successful escape.

Quite a lull, there, professor

Andrew Bolt points to a paper by professor Ross McKitrick that indicates global warming has been on a 19-year hiatus.

The real plus from reading this article is that I learned a new word: heteroskedasticity. Next week maybe I’ll try to work it into a conversation...

Liberal friend: Paco, you old moss back, surely you can see that the socio-economic trend in our society leads inexorably to socialism?

Me: Oh, I dunno, my dear old Bolshevik, if you look at the data subpopulations, that so-called trend of yours looks a bit heteroskedasticious, wouldn’t you say?

Liberal friend: Er…Hey, try one of these macaroons. Positively delicious!

Me: M’y-e-s. Very good, very good,indeed.

Obama tackles jihadi violence head on

So to speak.

Monday, September 1, 2014

This could be useful

I may consider training the staff of the Paco Command Center to use these tactics against the hordes of door-to-door salesmen we've had this summer.

The Four Stooges in "Foreign Policy Daze"


"Secretary Moe, I hear that Putin is now threatening the Baltic states. When we get back to the White House, I want you to call the president of Yugoslavia and tell him we're behind him a hundred percent."

Monday movie

King Arthur gets backtalk from Dennis the peasant in this classic scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (helpfully upgraded with Portuguese subtitles).