WASHINGTON (CNN) — The U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, has closed because of the “fluid” situation there, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said Tuesday.

What Ian Kelley did not say is that the “fluid” situation, which today means near riots in the streets that the government is having to handle with tear gas and water cannons, is something the State Department and the Obama administration caused. Without our attempts to force Honduras to reject its own laws and Constitution, there would be no aborning crisis right now.

Presently, the former President of Honduras, Mel Zelaya is holed up in the Brazilian Embassy in the Honduran capital. His supporters had surrounded the embassy before law enforcement dispersed them. The Honduran authorities have issued an arrest warrant for Zelaya and are asking that Brazil either turn him over to them or grant him asylum. It is very clear that Zelaya’s presence inside the country, after a unanimous Supreme Court decision ordered the military to remove him, is exacerbating the situation and our government has only been heaping the kindling higher each day. Secretary of State Clinton’s claim that putting Zelaya back in office would “get Honduras back to constitutional and democratic rule” ought to stick in the craw of anyone who can read the plain and incontrovertible language of the Honduran constitution. That we will allow a leading member of the wicked Burmese junta to enter our country, but have banned law-abiding members of the Honduran government from doing the same is shameful.

Here is truth. Until the Obama administration, standing alongside Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, tried to force the de jure government of Honduras to ignore its own laws, the country was stable and as peaceful as one could be that was being condemned by petty tyrants and their lickspittle in Washington. Today, it is not and the United States of America is to blame.

These disruptions are occurring because opponents are afraid not just of differing views — but of the facts themselves. Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American. Drowning out the facts is how we failed at this task for decades.
[Emphasis Mine]

Meanwhile, her union thug allies were putting out the call to battle.

Action: Opponents of reform are organizing counter-demonstrators to speak at this and several congressional town halls on the issue to defend the status quo. It is critical that our members with real, personal stories about the need for access to quality, affordable care come out in strong numbers to drown out their voices.
[Emphasis Mine]

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

I need a moment here. Seriously, MKH’s post is one of the funniest things I’ve read in ages. It’s like Pelosi set a trap for those wascally wight wingers, giggled a smug little giggle at her cleverness, turned to walk away, and stepped right into her own snare. If this were a cartoon, she would have been flung toward the horizon, her petulant cry of “I hate those wight wiiiiiiiiiingeeeeeeeeers!” fading into the distance until it was cut off by a muffled thump.

What more is there to say, really? Obviously, Pelosi doesn’t believe her paid goons are un-American any more than she believes that she should resign for her unconscionable and ridiculous rhetoric. However, she’s in a corner now and I, for one, am not inclined to let her skitter out of it.

So here’s my question for the Speaker. Given that the SEIU has expressly called for its members to do the very thing you unequivocally condemned, do you believe the union is un-American?

Jimmie runs The Sundries Shack and is a contributing writer to the American Issues Project. He is also an amateur musician, an aspiring composer, an unrepentant geek and would love you to pay his blog a visit. This post is cross-posted there.

There is one thing you should know, yea two things that should make your decision: One, we simply cannot afford government-run health care. Period. That idea should be the foundation of any plan you see. If a plan involves the government disbursing even one penny, know it is a plan that is unworkable because the Fed already lacks funds. Two, doctors and patients already hate government-run health care. Think VA, Medicaid and Medicare. They are in debt. The care sucks. Patients wait for doctors, if they can find one. Necessary care is not covered. Doctors get paid jack and are about to get paid less if Congress and the Prez have their way, which will result in more doctors quitting as providers causing more misery for patients.

I ran into a gang of government health care aficionados on Twitter last night, and I asked them two questions. The first was, “Do you think you have enough control over your own health care?”. The second was like unto the first, “Do you think that the government will truly give you more control over your health care?”

The truth of the matter is that we have surprisingly little choice over what health care we get and when. Most people, I dare say up over 90 percent, have no idea what a routine doctor’s visit actually costs or what their policy really costs. We get the care we are allowed to have by their doctor and health insurance company (or, worse, by the government).

More importantly, the policies our government have put into place ensure that your health insurance company doesn’t see you as a customer but as an expense.
This article on employer-provided insurance is a good place to start, so at least skim it before you go on.

After you’ve gone over that article, ask yourself if you bought you health insurance plan. If you have insurance through your employer, the answer will be no. You didn’t buy your plan and you have little to no power to influence the price of your plan of what it does and does not cover. Until that changes, health care will continue to be expensive, no matter how much the government controls. The truth of the matter is that, thanks to government intrusion, we have little choice or control over our own health care and Barack Obama isn’t going to make that any better, no matter what he says. Only when the government gets itself out of the health insurance business will you get back the power you need to bring costs down and get better quality care. Nothing else is going to do it.

(Cross-posted at The Sundries Shack)

A few years ago, I heard a highly educated and successful author maintain that living without cigarettes and copious alcohol was a life not worth living. There exists no warning label, no bone-chilling study, no crafty public service announcement that is going to separate me from my sour-cream-and- cheese-infested burrito.

At this point, anyone who doesn’t comprehend that French fries aren’t a suitable vegetable substitute will not be aided by preventive health care — unless it includes the cost of a cerebral transplant.

There are also potential consequences to “prevention” policy. For instance, you can “convince” people to care by coercing them. Increasingly, elected officials are warming to the idea.

Back in the 90s, there was a cartoon called “Tiny Toons Adventures”. One of the recurring characters was a little girl named Elmyra, who loves animals. And when I say “loves”, I mean as in “to death”. She is absolutely sure she knows what’s best for all the animals and showers them with care and affection. There are a couple problems. First, she doesn’t know a darned thing about animals. She puts bunny rabbits in the same cage as a hungry cat, sticks cats and dogs in the same kennel, and drops mice into the pen with a boa constrictor. No animal is safe from her overwhelming and clumsy love, not even fierce jungle cats. The mere sound of her voice causes animals for miles to flee in terror.

The Democrats really, really want to take care of us. They’re convinced that if we’d just slip into this pretty cage, they’ll love us and pet us and make us feel all better, just like Elmyra. And we’ll end up just as abused and enslaved her pets.

I vaguely remember someone once saying that there is no tyrant so terrible as the one who believes he knows what’s best for you. It’s one thing to have to fight mobs of truncheon-bearing goons but quite another to avoid being hugged into slavery.

(cross-posted at The Sundries Shack)

It seems to me that detaining highly-radicalized trained terrorists, fattening them up on halal victuals and giving them top-shelf health care, then turning them loose on the helpless and angry citizenry of an island paradise would make for one hell of an al-Qaeda recruiting pitch.

The Obama decision strikes me as a triumph of politics over national security and common sense. By bashing Guantanamo Bay as hard as he did during the campaign, the President painted himself into a corner. He can’t keep Gitmo open right now (though reneging on his word later still remains a viable option, since the vociferous left has a very short and selective memory) and he’s been forced to maintain his hard line in public speeches. On the other hand, he’s learned that Gitmo is, by far, the best option for keeping potentially dangerous killers from killing again and that it’s far from the Chamber of Horrors the anti-war crowd made it out to be.

What’s a career politician to do? Well, in the President’s case, he figured that farming the detainees out to a bunch of other countries would solve his problems. He didn’t exactly expect the ringing laughter from about 100 countries when he sent his diplomats forth to pitch the idea. It gives me hope to know that most of the world thinks that importing a ready-made terror cell is not the smartest idea in the world.

So, having been turned down by nearly the entire world, the President found Palau. Now, thirteen Islamists doesn’t sound like a lot, but Palau isn’t just any country. It has a smaller population that you find in most major league ballparks. Last night’s Stanley Cup Game Seven drew almost as many people as live on Palau. Adding 13 Uighur terrorists to a nation with a population of about 21,000 would be the equivalent of the United States accepting 188,227 Islamists. That’s more than the population of Salt Lake City (UT), Knoxville (TN), Little Rock (AR), or Fort Lauderdale (FL) and a little less than Mobile (AL) or Augusta (GA).

I’m thinking that al-Qaeda could quit sending out terrorists altogether. The President seems to be willing to take that job over himself.

(Cross-posted at The Sundries Shack)

Thursday was supposed to be the highlight of the year for more than 100 kindergarteners from Stafford County, Va. They got up early and took a chartered bus to the White House for a school field trip. But when they arrived, all the 5-year-olds got was a lesson in disappointment.

The buses from Conway Elementary arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue a little later than planned, and they were locked out.

“We were going to the White House, but we couldn’t get in so I felt sad,” 5-year-old Cameron Stine said.

Parents say they were just 10 minutes late for their scheduled tour. School officials say White House staff said they needed to get ready for the president’s event with the Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers, so they couldn’t come in.

“I was angry cause they were disappointed,” parent and chaperone Paty Stine said.

The White House explained itself thusly: “A spokesperson said the group was actually supposed to be there at 9:30, but they held the gates for the group until 10:30, 15 minutes longer than they told the group, but when they still hadn’t arrived, they had to draw the line.”

That has to be the worst explanation I’ve ever seen. Heck, it’s not so much an explanation as a pushback. It would have been an easy matter for the spokesman to say that there had been some confusion between the staff and the school about the time of the tour and, due to the tour’s late arrival due to unforseen circumstances, the tour had to be cancelled because of another prearranged event.

What you would never want to do in that situation is call the parents and chaperones a bunch of liars, but that’s exactly what the White House did. This admininstration has the inerring instinct for treating the average American like a mud-pounding peasant and it only gets worse if that hapless American should do anything to make the President look like anything but the glittering paragon of Presidential studliness we’re told he is. This time, though, it could blow up in the President’s face. As Moe Lane points out, no politician will ever win an argument against a bus load of crying schoolchildren.

Moe also has some suggestions for how the President should take charge of this and make it right. I couldn’t agree with him more. I’m a football fan, but there’s no way in the world that a bunch of millionaires who could have been feted anytime in the past four months couldn’t have been pushed back an hour. What, they’re going to gripe that they had to give way to a bunch of kids? I bet if the White House had asked them, they would have been more than happy to shake a few little kids’ hands while they were there, don’t you?

Better yet, why not make a great photo op out of it? The President actually put the Steelers to work filling care packages for our soldiers in Afghanistan and that other place he barely recognizes exists these days. How much do you want to bet that some of those little kids have parents who are over there right now? The White House missed a golden opportunity for the kind of press that doesn’t come around every day. Imagine the videos on the cable news channels tonight — the Friday of Memorial Day weekend for goodness sake! — of the president surrounded by the Super Bowl Champions and a bunch of smiling happy schoolchildren waving American flags over the care packages they helped put together for their mommies and daddies oveseas?

But no. The kids went home crying and the White House couldn’t do any more than issue a haughty statement attacking their school.

I can’t help but wonder what the heck Rahm Emanuel was doing this morning while his staff was turning away a kindergarten class and calling their parents and teachers a bunch of liars. A competent Chief of Staff would have been able to fix things to everyone’s satisfaction. As I’ve pointed out before, though, Emanuel has been letting the President down very badly.

Oh, and as an obligatory note about media bias, let me all that had happened a year ago, you know the all-day topic on CNN and MS-NBC would be “The President Who Made Children Cry”. My guess is that you won’t hear much about this story outside of the local DC media outlets or a few blogs.

(cross-posted at The Sundries Shack)

The Democrats defeated it on a nearly party-line vote. Not one Democrat voted to investigate the Speaker’s allegation.

The vote means one of two things: 1) The Democrats in the House do not care to investigate whether the CIA committed at least one felony in the middle of a war; or 2) they believe that Pelosi’s allegations are baseless but aren’t willing to hold her accountable for slandering hundreds of innocent CIA employees.

It doesn’t matter whether the resolution was a political ploy by Republicans or not. The allegation was serious. That it came from the Seaker of the House made it even more serious. Let’s not forget the left’s favorite whipping boy in the 80s and early 90s, Lt. Col. Oliver North here who very nearly faced jail time and a stiff fine for the lies he told Congress. Democrats were hot to investigate his few lies while they’re unanimously opposed to investigate lying that happened, according the Pelosi “all the time”.

Of course, the North investigations helped the Democratic Party. These allegations, which are most likely horse manure, would hurt them very badly. So to heck with truth, law, and the good names of the people who work for the CIA; the Democrats have political points to score.

(cross-posted at The Sundries Shack)

Here’s the story in a nutshell. The University of Notre Dame, the most iconic Catholic college in the country, has invited President Obama to its commencement ceremony where he will give the commencement speech and receive an honorary degree. It is the degree which has caused the problem and those who are protesting the honor have taken great pains to note. Joseph Bottum has a longer, but far better, summation of what has happened thus far at First Things.

To read the news coverage, though, you’d be hard-pressed to know the school was going to give an award at all. You would, however, learn that the protesters didn’t like that the President was going to give the commencement speech. In fact, you’d probably get the idea that was the whole reason for the protest. Time magazine reported it that way. So did the New York Times, Bloomberg, bloggers at the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, National Public Radio, and liberal reporter Johanna Neuman at the Los Angeles Times. The Associated Press got it right once, then got it wrong for the rest of their story. Chris Cilizza waxed disingenuous with his “explanation” of the controversy.

After reading those articles, I’m having a hard time deciding whether the MSM is being lazy or malicious. I think you could make a pretty good argument either way. On one hand, it’s easy to write an article based on what you think you know and what you’ve read elsewhere or seen on television. Given that the majority of reporters read progressive blogs it’s a mortal lock that they’re not going to get much beyond “crazy Christers” from their daily reading. On the other hand, the approximately 20,000 protesters who will likely be in South Bend this weekend have not been particularly reticent or vague. Finding the basic facts about the story isn’t exactly like questing for the Ark of the Covenant and I’d bet it takes a certain amount of purposeful blindness not to see them.

Here is the real meat of the controversy. The Catholic Church considers abortion an “intrinsic evil” which means, simply, that it is always and everywhere wrong. There is no wavering in the Church’s position on the matter. It is impossible to be a Catholic in good standing and advance the cause of abortion rights just as it would be if you were to deny the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. To give the President, an open supporter of abortion who once blocked legislation that would have prevented infanticide, would be an honor that could reasonably be seen as supportive of that “intrinsic evil”. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops ruled such an honor well out of bounds back in 2004.

This isn’t brain surgery, folks, and, so far as the Church is concerned, the dispute over the degree award don’t exist in one of those legendary “grey areas” that moral prevaricators love to inhabit. Like I said at the beginning, I’m not a Catholic. But you don’t have to be a Catholic to learn all that (and, I hasten to note, most of the core facts about elementary Catholic doctrine have been in the news prominently since the 2004 election).

So why focus on the speech and not the degree? Well, that’s where you start to see some grey creeping into things. I suppose some could call the speech invitation an honor but, let’s face it, it’s nothing compared to the honor of, well, an honorary degree. A speech is just a speech, but that degree carries a serious amount of cachet. Also, we can’t forget that Notre Dame is not merely a Catholic institution an educational institution as well. Having a diversity of speakers is not only desirable but required.

Of course, it makes for a more consistent piece of the “Oh, those intolerant right-wing zealot Christians” picture to paint the protesters as opposing the speech and not the award. It’s a lot easier to write a story that dismisses serious Catholics as a bunch of Obama-hating wackjobs than it is to wade just a little bit into Catholic teaching to find out what the real disagreement is about.

(Read more from Jimmie at The Sundries Shack and the American Issues Project)

Once upon a time, I considered Lewis Black one of the three funniest comedians I’d ever heard. His routine about an overheard conversation at IHOP is hilarious. That was before George Bush was elected. For the past few years, all Black can seem to do is tell insult jokes about Republicans that just aren’t all that funny unless you’re already inclined to laugh. That’s not comedy, though; it’s pandering.

Admittedly, pandering does bring in the cash and being a raving leftist seems a sure way to get a show on Comedy Central. There won’t always be a wide audience for that sort of nasty, partisan hackery, though. The gravy train won’t go on forever and, especially in politics, what’s in today is way, way out tomorrow. I would hope that the more talented of the left-wing comedians (Black is one. Sykes is not) realized that before they become bitter D-listers begging to work for drinks at some crappy dive.

(Cross-posted at The Sundries Shack)

You’d be wrong. Anytime Joy Behar is shown to be the braying jackass she is, we’re all winners.

It was a mere four years ago that the Republican Party governed — and I assure you I employ the word “govern” reluctantly — every level of federal government. Few experts construed this to mean that the Democratic Party was forever irrelevant or a rotting cadaver.

What were the future apparatchiks up to as Republicans were busy breaking every promise, crime and piggy bank they could get their paws on?

Well, they did what any enlightened individual should do: They found themselves. They started blogging. Getting angry. Raising money. Marching. Caring. They began purging imposters and crafting catchy platitudes that the non-ideological voter could digest.

Today, a comparable, spontaneous grassroots effort has materialized. This one celebrates free-market principles rather than statism. Not surprisingly, there is also a sudden shift in perception. The once-glorified citizen activist is now nothing more than a radical, slack- jawed, proletariat yokel.

The Tea Parties are ridiculed, their participants demeaned and falsely portrayed as venomous radicals. As we all know by now, deniers of hope and change, by definition, are extremists.

The confidence level of the left is almost tangible. They feel so comfortable that they can let their misogynist flags fly without so much as an aggrieved belch from NOW or anyone else in the She Womyn Man-Haters Club. They can crane their necks upwards at the President’s onrushing tsunami of debt and shrug it off as nothing but a ripple. The left swaggers down the street with our language in one hip pocket and the entire Federal government in the other believing with all their hearts that they have all the power.

But they are very, very wrong.

See, there’s something progressives have forgotten and it’s a very important thing. They have forgotten that America’s voice is not the voice of the self-appointed Keepers of the Almighty Narrative nor does America’s power emanate from the puffed-up panjandrums in Washington.

It is the everyday, average American – the soccer Mom who challenged the powerful pols in her state and won, the beauty pageant contestant who politely and plainly spoke her mind, the plumber who asked a simple question, and the hundreds of thousands of your neighbors and friends – who really control the destiny of our nation. The truth is, until the tanks roll down Main Street and jackbooted thugs start rounding them up into reeducation camps, the real power of our nation still belongs to the very people the left insults, dismisses, and ridicules every single day.

And those people are getting pissed off.

The thing is, the left hears the distant rumble of America’s real muscle and they are worried. You can see it, if you brave the shrill bloviations and glib japes and get close enough to look in their eyes. They feel the real change coming and they know. That’s why they’ve gotten louder and more shrill and are taking shots at anything that moves. The gnawing feeling in their guts is telling them, more and more, that they don’t have the stranglehold on us they think they do.

So take heart, folks. The battle is far from over. In fact, to quote the great Paul Williams, “We’ve only just begun”.

(Cross-posted at The Sundries Shack)