Flashback January 28, 2013: Obama called Hillary "one of the finest secretary of states"

To its credit, CBS preserved in "print" the supposedly smartest president ever flubbing the English language yet one more time. But then again how could they not preserve it? It's on tape.

Occidental? Columbia? Harvard? Still hard to make a purse out of a sow's ear, as my mother used to say.

Here:

President Obama: "Well, the main thing is I just wanted to have a chance to publicly say thank you, because I think Hillary will go down as one of the finest secretary of states we've had. It has been a great collaboration over the last four years. I'm going to miss her. Wish she was sticking around. But she has logged in so many miles, I can't begrudge her wanting to take it easy for a little bit. But I want the country to appreciate just what an extraordinary role she's played during the course of my administration and a lot of the successes we've had internationally have been because of her hard work."

Maybe if Obama had had more attorneys general Hillary would have been indicted by now just by luck.

h/t Chris Plante

Flashback to January 2011: Hillary said extremists shot Gabrielle Giffords, you know, extremists like terrorists and Republicans

Reuters had the quotations here, uttered by Hillary Clinton while in the United Arab Emirates :

"We have extremists in my country. A wonderful, incredibly brave young woman Congress member, Congresswoman Giffords, was just shot by an extremist in our country," she added.

"We have the same kinds of problems. So rather than standing off from each other, we should work to try to prevent the extremists anywhere from being able to commit violence." ...

"The extremists and their voices, the crazy voices that sometimes get on the TV, that's not who we are, that's not who you are, and what we have to do is get through that and make it clear that that doesn't represent either American or Arab ideas or opinions," she said. ...

More dogwhistle politics from Hillary: Republicans have extreme views about women just like the terrorists

Video here.

Hillary goes full-on dogwhistle out of desperation, compares Trump deportation policy to Nazi's boxcars full of Jews

Video here.

Hey Hillary! YOU politicized Benghazi by deleting your e-mails!

Video here.

Thirty-five years ago the economy mattered more than actual power

"[Economists] never offer anything but the same command approach to the obvious exception of everything else that used to be easily and conventionally embraced. The willingness of political figures across the spectrum to allow it and even strengthen it defies democracy. Thus Donald Trump".

Jeffrey Snider here.

Take down the fag flag: gay black man murders white news team on camera, tries to start a race war

Their whole point is assault.

"He goes on to say that he has faced both racial and sexual discrimination as a black, gay man and that he was just waiting to explode."

The biggest bloc of voters is undecided in the upcoming September Greek election according to a new poll

Reuters reports here:

Syriza was supported by 23 percent of those polled, with the conservative New Democracy party second on 19.5 percent, according to the survey, carried out by pollsters ProRata and published in Friday's Efimerida Ton Syntakton newspaper. ... Popular Unity, the party formed last week by Syriza rebels who oppose the bailout, was backed by 3.5 percent in Friday's poll - just above the 3 percent threshold needed to enter parliament. But the Independent Greeks, the ally in Tsipras' former coalition government, scored just 2 percent, meaning Syriza would be forced to seek another coalition partner. ... It also showed 25.5 percent of voters were still undecided, making them the biggest bloc.

What nobody talks about in these reports, of course, is that the party polling third is Golden Dawn, well ahead of Syriza breakaway party Popular Unity as well as the communist KKE. Golden Dawn has increased its support from earlier in the year no doubt because Greece is being overrun by refugees from around the Mediterranean and the incompetent left running the show is failing to solve the problem. Golden Dawn is said to draw its support at elections from members of the police and the military.

Scott Walker talks tough on China now, but used to wear a US flag, China flag lapel pin

Video here.

Pesky symbols.

Yanis Varoufakis calls far left party Popular Unity's plan for Grexit and a return to the drachma "isolationist"

In Greece the left calls the left isolationist.

In America the right calls the right isolationist.

Maybe the isolationism is where the real meaning is, the other monikers "left" and "right" being obfuscatory and Orwellian, and useless.

The two candidates for president in America with any energy in their campaigns are against free-trade because it is one-sided trade which slowly impoverishes the American middle class. A more insidious form of Fabianism is hard to imagine. One of the candidates is a patriotic socialist throwback to the FDR 1930s, the other a businessman whose hero was another Democrat in recovery, Ronald Reagan.

In our time it has been only some people from the left who have seemed capable of understanding that our capitalism-in-name-only actually requires the destruction of the economic ladder along which historically Americans have more or less freely traveled both up and down. This is because only people of the left are acquainted with the truth of the observation by Marx how free-trade was to be welcomed because it hastened the revolution. We get absolutely no insight from the American right about this and they run headlong unaware toward their fate. Accordingly we get no sympathy from them either for the plight of formerly prosperous millions of Americans who have crashed onto the rocks of the libertarian free for all. Their few children will become the next proletariat, the wealth of their parents and grandparents only a faint memory. 

The irony of the world situation is that it is creatures of the left who want to stop this, both here in America and in Greece. 

Yanis Varoufakis on the other hand is not one of them. Chalk it up to being an "erratic" Marxist, as he likes to say. What he is is a pan-Europeanist, a world citizen and globalist who is more at home in European capitals than he is on Aegina. He is not for what Greeks need most, which is the ability to feed themselves and export at a profit, for which they must have control over, and responsibility for, their own affairs. 

Seen here:

'The 54-year-old Varoufakis has already dismissed speculation that he would join the far-left Popular Unity party that broke away from Syriza last week, telling ABC that he had "great sympathy" but fundamental differences with them and considered their stance "isolationist".'

Trump surges in Quinnipiac poll, Real Clear Politics average takes him to +13.2 ahead of Carson, Bush slips to third

Jorge Ramos acts just like an illegal alien: Won't wait his turn to ask Trump a question, stealing a march on his fellow reporters, so Trump boots his ass

. . . but you are going away.

Story here:

"Go back to Univision," Trump told Ramos.

Chris Plante: Hunter Biden exposed in Ashley Madison hack

Reports Plante on the air just now:

The son of Joe Biden denies it, says Putin or somebody fabricated it, says he's dropped the email address. Hunter Biden has an unusual business interest in Ukraine.

Update:

ABC News helpfully reminded everyone in the story about the hack that Hunter had left the Navy in 2014 under a cloud for testing positive for cocaine in 2013.

Breitbart reported here that his Ashley Madison profile was set up on June 17, 2014, four months after his discharge.

CNN reported here last October (!) that Biden was discharged in February (!) 2014.

Trump scores first perfect 100 with focus group saying VA is a mess that is still not fixed

Reported here.

Which first lady do you want to look at for four years?

This one?































Or this one?

Obama and McCain reverting to type, calling their respective opponents crazies

John McCain quoted here in Politico in July:

“It’s very bad,” the Republican senator said. “This performance with our friend [Trump] out in Phoenix is very hurtful to me,” McCain said. “Because what he did was he fired up the crazies.”

And here's Barack Obama now at the end of August, also quoted in Politico:

Ruddy from the sun, Obama described himself as “refreshed, renewed, recharged — a little feisty.” And he delivered, recounting the ride he and [Senator Harry] Reid had just taken from the conference to the fundraiser in his up-armored presidential limo, where they talked about old times and getting back to Washington to “deal with the crazies in terms of managing some problems.”

If anyone should know crazy, it's Barack Obama and John McCain.

Scott Walker has nothing up his sleeve

In the last week Governor Scott Walker has stated he's for the 14th Amendment as currently (mis)interpreted, establishing birthright citizenship as the law of the land, for repealing birthright citizenship going forward, and against taking a position on the subject for now!

Scott Walker is a fish out of water, flopping on the pier.

CNN (justly) crucifies him for it, here.

On the merits of the issue Walker's flip-flops clearly show that he perceives the acceptable establishment view to be out of step with what he thinks the voters feel about it. Regular middle class folks with whom Walker identifies hate it that they're footing the bill for people who cut in line, go on government assistance and even commit crimes without serious consequences.

On the politics Walker looks unprofessional and unready for primetime, and when you get down to it, divided in his own mind about the issue.

The real Scott Walker has always been a little soft on illegal aliens but keeps changing his position because he senses voters aren't soft on them.

In view of his previously stated support for a pathway to citizenship, it's pretty obvious Walker has never had the fire in the belly on this subject which the Americans whose vote he's angling for possess.

And it's too late to do anything about it now.

He's done.

If he were wise he'd find a way to bow out, throw his support to Trump, and hope for a position in a Trump administration where he can do to government unions nationally what he's done to them in Wisconsin.

In Greece the popular PM Alexis Tsipras resigned last week in order to consolidate his power

Alexis Tsipras, Greece's hope peddler

Most reports put the resignation of Alexis Tsipras last week down to an act of desperation due to a loss of support in his own coalition in Syriza. 25 MPs have split off to form Popular Unity, basically composed of Syriza's old Left Platform. This party intends to stay true to the Syriza platform of an end to austerity, evidently adding in Grexit and a return to the drachma as planks.

How wonderfully conservative of the lefties. The Greek left has moved so far to the left it's become the bourgeois nationalist right.

True as all this is, Tsipras' resignation was actually an exertion of his power in the current circumstances and a demonstration of his political acumen.

By resigning now instead of sometime later, Tsipras is able to do two important things. One, he can select the candidates himself according to the rules who will replace the defectors, for whom he will use his popularity to smooth their way to election, presumably on 20 September. But he also catches the opposition flat-footed thereby, giving them no time to prepare to stop him. If Tsipras is successful in this gambit, he will be able to form a less leftist government committed to the Euro but also committed to breaking the privileges of the Greek oligarchy, approximating a key leftist political aim of more social equality.

Tsipras is proving himself to be quite adept at discerning politics as the art of the possible, for which he is already much hated by the overly principled figures populating his own and the other political parties, even as the Greek people keep supporting him.

For all the mistakes he has made this year, Alexis Tsipras has proven himself remarkably capable for such a young man.

Greece could do a lot worse, and it has.

Donald Trump lives rent free in Larry Kudlow's mind

Larry Kudlow devoted his entire three hour radio show today on WABCradio.com criticizing, ridiculing and caricaturing Donald Trump's campaign for the presidency. If there was a way to discuss Trump, he found it, and if the air in New York stank, that was Trump's fault, too. It reminded me of the relentless criticism of George W. Bush by the main stream media.

It was embarrassing. The callers to the show supported Trump and Trump's policy on illegal aliens, but Larry was having none of it, marginalizing every single caller as ignorant and uninformed about the real state of affairs despite the fact that they were living it.

That's what Larry Kudlow's big tent Republican Party stands for, inclusion for elite liberals and illegal aliens, but not for working stiffs and law and order patriots.

If Republicans lose in 2016, it will be Larry Kudlow's fault, not Donald Trump's.

Please explain to us how and why "and" is superfluous in the 14th Amendent

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens . . .."

This Amendment had a specific meaning, not a broad meaning. Its intent was to settle the citizenship of emancipated slaves who had hitherto been State-less, that is, in a kind of limbo with respect to jurisdiction because they had been property, not persons. The Amendment meant to state that once freed they became persons who came under the jurisdiction of the United States, whether they were born slaves here or abroad.

Indians were not understood to be subject to the jurisdiction of the United States at the time, but were subjects of the Indian nations, and were thus not granted citizenship by the Amendment in 1868, else the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act making them so had been unnecessary.

Children of diplomats born in the US while their parents were representing the countries whence they came were not thereby granted citizenship either, because they like their parents were subjects of foreign jurisdictions. Senator Jacob M. Howard of Michigan, the author of the citizenship clause, said the Amendment excluded “persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.”

Thus children born here to illegal aliens, like their parents, are subject to the jurisdictions whence they came and should not be granted American citizenship now, unless it please the people to do so.

It's that simple.

And the Congress has every right to make that rule consistent AT ANY TIME if it has not been so in practice or in litigation, as Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution makes clear:

The Congress shall have Power . . . To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;

Meanwhile the importance of jurisdiction for citizenship is otherwise seen to be paramount because no one except an idiot or a malcontent questions the citizenship of a John McCain or a Ted Cruz because they were born to citizens while living abroad.

And even if it could be proven that a Barack Obama was born abroad it wouldn't make any difference to his citizenship because his mother was a citizen of the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.

Anyone in the world can renounce jurisdiction and pledge allegiance to another flag if one chooses, and it is entirely within our rights as Americans to set the conditions for welcoming as well as bidding farewell to those who do so.