Nom de plume: Rivrdog

A second face

...to spread that egg on will always seem best to a secular progressive.

I guess that's why Bloomberg News penned this piece on the NSA-spies-on-Europe scandal.

Two Wrongs always make a better Right, according tho liberal policy on spinning.

Impeach Jack Lew

I do conflict management. I did it professionally, in two careers, for a total of 47 years, and I do it as a hobby now that I'm retired.

Any good conflict manager studies the aftermath of great conflicts, to see where lessons may be learned, what mistakes were made, where conflict can be better managed.

I find that the biggest single mistake made in the two-week stalemate between the Left and the Right was the handling of the threat of "default".

Let's look at default. Default would have occurred if the United States Treasury (led currently by Jack Lew) had failed to pay interest/dividends on the various lending instruments it had issued. The monthly cost of that interest is currently $23 billion dollars. On average, Treasury takes in tax receipts of $230 billion per month. How then can it be said that the United States was ever in danger of being in "default"? The US had income of ten times the expense which had to be paid to avoid default!

The fact that "default" was ever an issue at all was because President Obama wanted to raise a boogeyman to threaten and cow the House of Representatives with. The President, along with his fawning media corps, managed to convey the lie that the United States was sure to default if the borrowing limit was not eased. The dumbed-down electorate, which should have been shouting "pants on fire" at the President ever since he began this Big Lie campaign, said nothing, never challenged the basic assumption, even when many, many economists and respected economic-evaluation institutions raised the bullshit flag on "default" several months ago.

President Obama appointed Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, and he was confirmed by the Senate. Article One, Section Three, last paragraph of our Constitution says, 

Judgment in Cases of Impeachments for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives, shall not extend further than removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.

The Senate would not be involved in the Impeachment of Jack Lew.

What was Jack Lew's offense? When confirmed, he was charged with the absolute duty to protect the faith in, and credit of, the fiscal obligations of the United States. When forced by circumstances to put US Treasury operations on a cash-receipts basis, meaning that he would have to prioritize spending according the the importance to the credit of the US of his expenditures, he failed to do so. That is a deleliction of his duty, a complete dereliction of it.

Were I Speaker Boehner, I would immediatley direct the House Counsel to prepare those Articles of Impeachment, and summon Jack Lew before the House for his trial.

How would this action affect President Obama? There are a number of possibilities, but the first would be that the President would probably ask Jack Lew to resign, and he probably would. The President cannot afford to expend any political capital protecting his appointee. Speaker Boehner should then schedule a hearing in the Oversight Committee, or the Finance Committee, offer Jack Lew full immunity, and ask him under oath if he was ordered not to prioritize payments that Treasury had to make, so as to make it appear that "default" was a certainty on October 17th. If his answers provide ANY inkling that the President, or a trusted advisor such as Val Jarrett issued such an order, the Speaker should commend him for his honesty, and prepare to impeach President Obama.

In the meanwhile, Speaker Boehner needs to draw up a Federal Law requiring that the Treasurer of the United States have such a payment priority in case of such situations. That law should be passed and sent to the Senate, with pressure to have it heard in the Senate. It would be very interesting to see what "justification" would be rolled out to oppose such a common-sense law.

 

Thursday Thuds, Burst-option selected on my unregistered Assault Thud Gun

Thud Subject One: Syria: Three-round burst selected:

• The US wants "teeth" in Putin's UN proposal to divest Assad's military of it's Chem weapons. Channeling Jack in "A few good men", "Teeth, you want teeth? You can't handle teeth".
• Note that Russia was the vendor for all these gas weapons, can fake up "1,000 tons" of them very easily. There is NO way to effectively inspect after the "hand-over". WE will have to trust Putin...and he has bridges for sale.
• Note that the US CIA has been giving "traceable" weapons, mostly AKs and LMGs, to the Free Syrian Army (but only the "good" militias"). Yeah, we really know how to do that "traceable" weapon thing. Just ask Eric Holder how that's done...

Thud Subject Two: Colorado anti-gun recall: Two round burst selected:

• Read the actual results. The recalls succeeded, but only because they were polling-place elections, had less than 20% turnout. Okay then, two GFW* pols are gone. The gun laws aren't, and the Kingfish, Gov. Hickenlooper, who signed the laws after hinting he'd veto them, wasn't touched. Phyrric Victory. Magpul's departure from CO is a much harder hit than this.
• Now we get to see how the NRA-ILA will use this "victory" to keep the save-the-2A ball rolling. My guess: a money solicitation is in the mail. Not being a member of NRA, I won't get one, but I'd bet on it happening. If the NRA would double-down now, and go after Hickenlooper, I might send some shekels their way, but I bet they don't go after the real prize.

Thud Subject Three: US Public Schools: Three-round burst selected:

• Just saw on Fox News this ayem that the idea of paying dropouts to come back to class is upon us again, like a bad 'Nam foot-rot that won't go away forty years later. Let's see, what do we REALLY accomplish with this idea: Nothing! These louts and loutesses who would come back for a $100 gift card will stay only until it's spent. While they are there, they will either sleep off their dope in class or worse, be disruptive to those who are there voluntarily to learn. Portland Public Schools tried this out up in the North End. It failed.
• Have you noted the drumfire of liberal writers in the liberal blatts trying to shoot down the No Child Left Behind testing? The harassing fire is getting louder. You will recall that this "program" was passed during the Bush Administration, when the (D)s had a lock on both houses of Congress. 
• NCLB is a Liberal-owned program, and even it's watered-down testing shows that schools are doing a worse and worse job on the kids all the time. The entire Liberal approach to education, that is, to just keep dumbing the lesson plans down until the dummies finally can "get" them, has failed.

Thud Subject Four: Obama masked bandit: Full-auto, empty the magazine!

• Check it out. Now stay tuned on this subject to see if this WHITE guy is charged with racial intimidation for wearing an Obama mask during a bank robbery. Get your bets down!

Thud Subject Five: Climate Hooey: Reload, fire another full-auto magazine:

• New study finds that out of 117 recent model-based climate studies, only three were "roughly accurate", and the other 114 "over-estimated the amount of warming" on the average, the over-estimations averaged on the order of double. That is not science, that is propaganda, and not very good propaganda at that.

That's it, readers. Your thud-gun recoil therapy for this week.

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* GFW (Gun Fearing Wuss), a term coined by the former gun-blogger and 2A-defender Kim duToit. 

 

Wednesday whoppers - L.O.T.Ds

Yep, we've become a prevaricating society. How else do you explain getting up in the ayem, awoken by the usual Wednesday fleet of garbage/recycling trucks at 0530, climbing into some clothes, going downstairs and outside to put away the empty carts, and picking up the fishwrap, only to be insulted by the FIRST lie of the day, in the main headline on Page One:

"Owl ethics: 1 dies; 1 survives:

The folks that killed the Oregon economy thirty years ago with the Spotted Owl fiasco are at it again, only now they are killing another species of owl, the Barred Owl, because it uses the same habitat as the Western Spotted Owl and might chase the spotted owls out. Poor spotted owls! So here we are, constantly told by the Animal Rights Community that we must respect ALL species, killing off a superior species of owl to preserve an inferior one, mainly because to NOT do that would be an admission that they got the whole Spotted Owl thing wrong in the first place (gotta protect those envirowhacko egos, they can do NOTHING wrong, ever). For decades, we've been "protecting" (read: shutting down) the Oregon, Washington and Northern California forests from logging to save an owl that Ma Nature has now shown us to be an inferior species, and Gaia's own obvious plan is to replace that inferior owl with the superior Barred Owl? The fishwrap then lies with it's headline: this is NOT "Owl Ethics", it is HUMAN ethics, and the ethics do not prove out, Ma Nature has shown us the correct way.

The SECOND Lie Of The Day is brought to us courtesy of CBS News, which showed this video from SloDivers.com, an outfit which runs a dive boat off Morro Bay, CA. Watch the video. It comes out that far from the "divers were surprised by the whales", it appears that the divers set up the whole thing by finding or attracting a "Bait Ball", a dense school of small fish such as sardines, that the whales feed on, then they waited in the water by or in the bait ball for the whales. Next, note the loud chuckling by the deck crew on the dive boat. Those are NOT the remarks of people who were surprised/horrified by the whale encounter, those are the remarks of people who were happy that a plan worked the way it's supposed to. Why get interested in this little lie, you ask? Well, for one, it is illegal to harass whales like this, and second, the CBS crew had to know that, went along with the dive-crew's little conspiracy, and the video went viral. But hey, it's CBS, what more can we say?

The THIRD L.O.T.D. simply HAS to be Anthony Weiner, the New York "Peter Tweeter" whose sexting forced him to resign his NY Congressional seat 25 months ago. Now, it turns out, that Weiner is still sexting to gullible young women, or, at the least, failed to tell the world the extent of his past peckerdillos when he gave us the tearful "apology". We can't know because he refuses to clear up the matter of this sordid practice by presenting a diary of the transgressions, which any therapist would consider the FIRST step in recovery. This means that the voters in NYC, where Weiner is the front-runner in the Democratic Primary race for Mayor, have no idea whether they are getting ready to vote for an active or a reformed sex fiend. There is one way to find out though. Weiner will tell us that he has no record of his sexting, but since the question of whether he has halted the practice or not is vital for voters, we know someone who COULD provide that answer - the National Security Agency, which has a record of every text message that Weiner ever sent. How about it, President Obama: could you help out a fellow Democrat here and whistle up that sexting list from the NSA? Weiner is trying hard to get everyone to believe that he is reformed, and that all of these instances of the bad practice are in the past. I'm sure that with his permission, this could all be cleared up quickly. If Weiner HAS actually overcome his fondness for broadcasting his manliness to strange women, it's a sign of a healthy recovery from that affliction, and, under current Democratic Party ethical standards, he should remain a candidate. OTOH, if the NSA list were to show he's still doing it, he's a very dangerous man to elect to high office, since he would be not only a sex fiend but a liar to boot.

While we wait...?

While we wait for Obama to decide whether to play more failed race cards or just fold his bad hand, how about we have a discussion on Race?

Gasps, I can hear the gasps, the astonishment.

"We must heal from this insult", say the less-loud race-pimps. "We must drive this racial insult home to white America", say the major race-pimps. "Get Whitey" say the rioters in Oakland.

Since the Zimmerman verdict yesterday, cable news channels (well, CNN and Fox, those are the only two I watch) have trotted mikes out to every race pimp they could find, there are quite a few, and not a single one of them has admitted what has to be seen as the blinding truth by now: this case wasn't about race at all, it was about Zimmerman having to defend his personal freedom against a charge of homicide when all the investigators' evidence pointed to his use of deadly force as being a legitimate use of force. Race only got injected from the White House, then the DOJ, then down to the FL Attorney General, and then the Seminole County DA. That avalanche of doo-doo, all rolling downhill, simply smothered common sense and the calm, sane legal reflection that screamed "DO.NOT.PROSECUTE." We got the Zimmerman media circus then.

The prosecution ensued anyway, and the mainstream media did their utmost to inject race, never once looking back to see if this really WAS a case where race should have entered into the argument, which it never should have.

What do sane people take home from this case?

We take home the obvious fact that no one yelling "race case" can be trusted, ever again.

We take home the obvious fact that race has become a simple political tool, the purpose of which is to keep the races apart, not allow them to blend and homogenize, as should be the case.

We take home the obvious fact that the political parties have both failed in their duty regarding race: the Left, represented by the Democrats, has failed because of their use of race as a political tool of societal division, and the Right has failed because we let them do it, instead of being proactive and showing the way to homogenize the races. The Left took the wrong path, and the Right refuses to budge from that fork in the road. Both are wrong.

I learned my racial tolerance in the military. I did NOT learn it at home, for while both my parents were otherwise the best parents they could be, they were both racially prejudiced, and remained that way until their deaths.

In the military, I learned that acceptance of racial unity was crucial to operational success, and I personally helped to break down some racial barriers to that success by joining a racially-integrated bomber crew and helping them achieve the top level of success available within the measuring systems of the time. My mixed-race bomber crew proved to everyone's satisfaction that the highest levels of competence could and would be achieved by racial minorities, something new at the time in the USAF's Strategic Air Command in 1982.

I'm a geezer now, approaching 70 years of age, but in my cognizant lifetime, I've seen the country first recognize that it was racially divided, then spend agonizing decades attempting to address that divide, almost succeeding, but then falling back to a racial divide again because of the wrong values being taught to racial minorities. Minorities of today are taught, by our Government, that personal work ethic and personal success is secondary to expressing or "celebrating" their minority racial status.

Until we can break out of the gangsta-rap era, wear our hoodies up only in blizzards or bad rainstorms, and celebrate success, not color, we will never be a racially-homogenized Nation. That's sad to say, but it's true.

YOU know it's true.

Discuss the given points, not the author, when you comment.

Snowden redux

Legitimate question: Is Edward Snowden a double agent? That would be a double agent who only "went double" to protect his primary loyalty, to the Chinese?

We need this answer, but in the meanwhile, let us NOT forget that the entire machinery of our huge Government is now organized against Snowden for one purpose, and one purpose only:

to protect the intrusive nature of big government itself against individual Liberty

It's tough, staying on task to use the information Snowden gave all of us, at considerable risk to his life (and very little to ours, contravening what the Bigs are trying to tell us). But stay on task we must, and we must not get buried under this avalanche of disinformation aimed only at putting the sheeple back in their sheep-pen so more wool can be sheared, or so the sheeple can be turned into mutton chops.

So, in the meanwhile, continue to view any and all of Snowden's attackers as foes of Liberty, and continue your tactic of whenever a Big Government wallah tells you or anyone else that NSA surveillance has saved our bacon, many times, yell back at the wallah, "Details, please". When no details are forthcoming, or the details are lied about as General Clapper did before Congress and the Nation, the very least you should do is run up the big red Bullshit Flag on your signal halyard.

NYT gets caught with a slimy Weiner

Hmmm....seems that some of the Grey Lady's staffers had an assignment to do a follow-up on Anthony Weiner's peter-tweeting victims, so they did, and put it online, but then the "Paper of Record" almost immediately withdrew their article. Thanks to Google, there is no such thing as denying that you posted something online, if you did, but the New Jack Slimes is trying mightily to do just that. Newsmax gleefully put the lie to the higher NYT staff who pulled the story.

This little chuckle brings up a bigger question, though: Weiner, being the laughingstock he is, is nevertheless running for Mayor of New York City. He's obviously hoping for a Clintonesque defense to his peter-tweeting past. Could it be that he has a powerful ally in the Editorial Board of the NY Slimes?

Here's how we put that idea into the dustbin: fire up your stock trading program and buy a share of:

 

The New York Times Company

 

NYSE: NYT (running about ten bucks today)

As a shareholder (even more than as a subscriber), you have the right to communicate your frustration with company policy. Let them know that, as a shareholder, you will object mightily to any endorsement of Weiner for Mayor, and will contact other shareholders to organize them towards doing expressing the same frustration.

More Global Warming alarmism

Part Deux? Soixante Deux (62) is more like it. 

Here is some totally garbage alarmism from Ass Press.

Here is the opening statement:

"TELESCOPE, Grenada (AP) — The old coastal road in this fishing village at the eastern edge of Grenada sits under a couple of feet of murky saltwater, which regularly surges past a hastily-erected breakwater of truck tires and bundles of driftwood intended to hold back the Atlantic Ocean.

For Desmond Augustin and other fishermen living along the shorelines of the southern Caribbean island, there's nothing theoretical about the threat of rising sea levels."

Okay then, let's apply a tiny filter called Truth to this.

• Nowhere in the entire story does it ever say how much the sea level has risen.
• It does say that the Grenadans have done some ill-advised dredging in the area.
• Nowhere does it say that their man-on-the-scene has ANY credentials as either an engineer or a climate scientist, but...
• The article goes on to blame climate change anyway.
• The simple fact here is that there are two ways to flood a coastline: raise the sea level or lower the seashore. It definitely appears that the latter was done here, but yet the alarmism still continues.

This whole Ass Press article is a crock of crap.

I challenge the Global Warming Alarmist Fraternity to adopt the following manifesto of Truth:

• Every article on the subject of rising sea level damage shall be opened with a statement of just how high the sea level has risen, over a stated period of time. Not in storm surges, but permanent sea level rise, the ONLY indicator that can (or can't) show the truth of such claims. 
• When talking about sea level changes, ANY alteration to local ocean floors MUST be discussed, with an engineering-level statement of how those changes, natural OR man-made, affected flooding of the coastline.
• Water seeks a constant level, and is easy to measure. We know about tides, we can predict and measure storm surges, and all of those factors can be discounted to give us a true base water level. According to this interactive chart by NOAA, the sea level rise in Grenada's part of the Caribbean Sea is from 3 to 6 millimeters per century. The entire US East coast has a sea level rise of 3 millimeters per century, maximum. That's one-eighth of an inch, and one quarter of an inch, MAXIMUM,  in the South Caribbean Sea. Note that in AK, some sea levels are trending DOWN by a half-to 3/8" per year.

This alarmist article by Ass Press does no one any good.

Have you ever asked yourself just why, if all the Earth's coastlines are in danger of inundation from rising sea levels, that engineering to "save the coastline" hasn't even started yet, anywhere? Can you guess why that is?

In every engineering analysis of solutions to a potential crisis, the engineers will first ask the question, "is this crisis actually happenning or can it realisticically be expected to happen, and when?"

Of course there's no engineering, because that question has already been asked, and the answer is, always, "come back to the engineers when you have data showing an actual threat".

That's the name of THAT tune, "Actual Threat". As currently measured, the actual threat, if present trends continue, will not occur for several to many centuries.

BTW, the Ass Press article tries to blame "ferocious storm surges made worse by climate change". That's an apples and oranges discussion, and again, the alarmists will lose, because when you stack up hurricanes by the century or epoch, there's little to no change to report. Weather is weather and climate is climate, and there are few links between them.

Ass Press, get real or get out of here.

End of discussion.

 

 

The police are your enemy?

...contrary to what the Left would have you believe, law enforcement is firmly on the side of our Constitution, as they have sworn to be.

Via Uncle, this interesting survey of law enforcement professionals who have to prove their actual police status to join this group which surveyed their members.

Quoting from the survey summary:

• 92 percent feel that banning semi-automatic firearms, or “assault weapons,” would have no effect or a negative effect on reducing violent crime
• 71 percent support law enforcement leaders who have publicly refused to enforce more restrictive gun laws within their jurisdictions
• 91 percent support the concealed carry of firearms by civilians who have not been convicted of a felony and/or have not been deemed psychologically incapable
• 91 percent said the use of a firearm while perpetrating a crime should lead to a stiff, mandatory sentence with no plea bargains.
• 86 percent feel the currently proposed legislation would have no effect or a negative effect on improving officer safety.
• 80 percent feel that legally-armed citizens would likely have reduced the number of casualties in recent mass shooting incidents

Several "truths" that are promoted by Bloomberg* and his ilk are directly refuted by this survey:

1. "Cops all want less guns in the community, especially semi-automatic rifles and high-capacity pistols" This is a lie, a direct lie.
2. "Real police leaders are all in favor of gun control" Another direct lie. Since the survey is done within a police-only organization composed of all ranks of cops, and nearly 3/4 of the responding officers support those police leaders who Just Say No to anti-2A laws, we can put this frequent mantra of both Bloomie and the POTUS to the lie. Every time you see an anti-gun pol standing for a photo-op with a bunch of ranking police officials, that pol(s) are doing a deliberate distortion, and those cops are in a very small minority of LEOs.
3. "Cops just want you to let them control crime, they don't need your armed help". A very insidious lie. Several of the above points in the survey (as I listed them, the first, second and last) address this canard of Bloomie's, and all those points give it the status of a lie.

I found another excellent article on refuting Bloomberg's and the Left's gun control ravings. Forbes Magazine is one of the best business magazines out there, and the ten points which their article lists to refute Bloomie speak for themselves.

You have to ask yourself, as I have been asking from the start, just why do these lefties all want to restrict the Second Amendment?

As I have told you before, but now with added proof, "Gun Control" is not about controlling guns, it is about controlling Gun Owners, about nullifying the very intent of the Second Amendment, which granted the status of a Permanent Civil Right to those seeking arms to form Militias to act as a check on the power of our Central Government..

When are we, the Unorganized Militia duly authorized, going to hold our Governments responsible for directly attempting to subvert our Constitution?

We need to think about our duty and responsibility to our Constitution, for if we do not take steps to defend and uphold it, it will soon be gone.

It's tempting to write and promulgate Amendments to the Constitution for purposes of restricting the National Debt and other worthy causes, but in MY humble opinion, the next (28th) Amendment should deny all criminal immunity for any politicians who want to remove any of our enumerated Civil Rights as written in the Bill of Rights. This Amendment needs to provide for immediate removal from public office, any elected or appointed official other than a Judge of the Supreme Court, who proposes or advocates for any restriction of the Constitution and it's amendments as originally promulgated and adopted by the several States in 1787. The new Amendment should leave open the possibility of a Constitutional Convention calling for a NEW Constitution, but unless the politician or Administrator's proposals lead directly to such a Constitutional Convention (without advocating for the denial of the present Constitution), their proposals to alter the present Constitution must be considered treasonable.

Our Constitution is presently under attack by those who have assumed that they have the right to advocate for it's destruction, in whole or in part. There.Is.No.Such.Right., nor has such a right ever existed. The First Amendment gives us the right to air our opinions, but when those opinions begin to sound like they are proposals for reducing the Constitution's basic enumerated Rights, the right to make those utterances, to propose those laws, simply does not exist. When those utterances and proposed laws become the focus of a political party or a political Administration, both of those groups have exceeded their Constitutional authority, and it is then up to the 2A-authorized Militia to take appropriate action to protect our Constitution.

Yes, it is really supposed to work that way. The Founders actually imagined that a Federal Government might have to be removed to restore the Constitution, and those musings led to the Second Amendment being written as a shield for the Constitution. You may read, in the Federalist Papers, Federalist # 28 and 29 by Alexander Hamilton and #46 by James Madison, just why these Founders believed the Second Amendment to be so important to our very survival as a Nation of free people.

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* Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, possesses huge wealth, and uses it to try to destroy several Constitutionally-guananteed freedoms, notably the freedom to Keep and Bear arms. It occurs to this writer that we have Federal laws to seize the funds that terrorists use to make war upon this Nation and it's Constitution, so why haven't Bloomberg's funds been seized?

Still Dancing...

...no, not Louisville, although they will still win it all despite the loss of their point guard.

I mean the Boregonian fishwrapper still dancing in the blood of the dead woman from the Clackamas Mall shooting last December.

Your blogger took the liberty of correcting their attitude with this editorial letter submission:

Editors:

All people of strong moral fiber share the grief of Robert Yuille and his step-daughter at the senseless murder of Cindy Yuille last year. Those same people of strong moral fiber do not find that their grief forces them to reject an enumerated civil right of the US Constitution. This newspaper's continuing effort to promote the rejection of that civil right puts the Oregonian squarely in the penalty box for serious moral mistakes.