Thursday mid-day round-up and Open Thread

Victorian posy of pansiesYesterday, my blog traffic was double my normal traffic. Today, it’s on track to be triple my normal traffic. I think it’s a bot . . . but maybe not. If you’re a new reader, feel free to leave a comment introducing yourself.  Here’s an FYI about commenting:  Although this is a WordPress blog, it’s on a dedicated server. This means that if you have a WordPress.com ID it will not work here. To leave comments at Bookworm Room, please register here.

And now, to the news!! (I could swear that I heard a trumpet call and the word “charge,” just now, when I said that.)

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As I’ve done for the past few days, I’ll start with the Bowe Bergdahl round-up. I’m beginning to wonder if, after a series of disastrous steps (IRS, NSA, VA, etc.), this might be the president’s “killer rabbit” moment (i.e., the moment the press turns on him). What will be interesting to see, if it is a killer rabbit moment, is whether the media can shelter Hillary, or if she’ll be caught in the fall-out. But on to Bowe….

Tim Cavanaugh’s amusing analysis of the White House’s myriad Bergdahl missteps may explain why even NBC is sounding like FOX: “It was a failure of communication, and an outrage to the honorable profession of image management and crisis public relations.”

Ann Coulter never pulls any punches. That’s why we like her, and that’s why we like her post about Bergdahl’s status as a deserter — along with mentions about the way in which America has traditionally treated deserters (and it’s not with their parents praying to Allah on the White House lawn).

A lot of people have been mentioning Michael Hastings who, in 2012, wrote the Rolling Stones’ article about Bowe Bergdhal that first revealed Bergdahl’s intense hostility to the United States. What I had forgotten, and what is only now getting attention, is the fact that Hastings died last year in an inexplicable car accident that was preceded by Hastings’ telling friends that he was being spied on. It turns out that he was right: the FBI was investigating him regarding the Bergdahl article. (Or as the FBI coyly explained, they weren’t investigating him, just his article.) I have no conspiracy theory on tap, but I’m pretty sure that, with these dots to connect, we’ll start hearing some interesting theories very soon.

It was Hastings who let the public know about Bowe’s openly stated disgust for the United States. At the same time, he also let the public know that Bowe, and others, were none too pleased with his platoon’s training, leadership, and conduct. Conservatives have focused on the first aspect, but the White House is gearing up a defense that focuses on the platoon itself. Nancy Pelosi’s daughter is tweeting about investigations into a “dysfunctional” platoon, while an administration official is saying that the platoon was filled with psychopaths. In other words, if Bowe did indeed desert, he was driven to it, not by his love for the Taliban, but by a mental breakdown brought about by having to live with psychopaths who are now busily deflecting blame from themselves.

The truth, if it ever comes out, should be interesting. In the meantime, David Burge (Iowahawk) is having fun:

 

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Noting Iowa Senate candidate Joni Ernst’s excellent performance in the primary, the WaPo is asking this question: “Will Joni Ernst be Iowa’s first female senator?” That is a quintessentially Leftist question, one that focuses on Ernst’s place in the gender/victim hierarchy.

When I scroll down my Bookworm Twitter and Facebook feeds, I see something entirely different: No one makes any mention at all about her gender. They’re all excited by her principles. Thus, it’s “Yay, a true conservative rose to the top in the primary,” not “Yay, a woman rose to the top in the Republican primary.” Those two sample sentences point to a yawning chasm between the way DemProgs and conservatives view both people and politics.

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The Congressional Budget gave Obamacare a passing grade because the CBO was forced to rely on all the economic premises Democrats insisted were going to be inevitable realities once the law got passed. All those premises were wrong, of course, and now the CBO says it’s impossible to produce a fiscal analysis of Obamacare’s impact upon the federal budget. Jim Yardley says that, because of the way the Left thinks, this isn’t the first and certainly won’t be the last time the public gets economically reamed thanks to all those “unexpected” variables in any Leftist prediction.

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One mother is outraged that doctors and nurses insist upon seeing her children without her being present. The medical establishment will say that this is necessary to reveal in-home child abuse. Maybe. But the mother is right that what will come of it is that the doctors can counter family values about adolescent and premarital sex and about guns. This poster seemed apropos:

Abortions and aspirins at school

I’ll add, as I always do, that those birth control pills that the doctor’s and nurses hand out like candy are also very dangerous. Putting powerful hormones into growing bodies can cause terrible developmental destruction.

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Tom Del Beccaro says that the recent California primary outcomes justified his opposition to Open Primaries. As someone who was also opposed for the same reason (although not so pithily expressed), I agree.

I’m beginning to suspect that the DemProgs’ fealty to the pro-choice idea doesn’t extend much beyond abortion.  (I’m being sarcastic.)

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Victor Davis Hanson is always great and, on regular occasions, spectacular. He’s spectacular this time, as he says that America’s colleges and universities more closely resemble closed medieval systems than they do the glories of Western education that they once were.

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SeaTac, outside of Seattle, introduced a high minimum wage some time ago. Seattle did the same in the recent election. Perhaps if Seattle-ites had seen this receipt, they might have rethought their vote. Then again, maybe not.

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Kim Zigfeld, a seasoned Russia observer and commentator, says that Putin is returning Russia to its Soviet past with great speed. Ultimately, Russia will have everything but the communism: it will be a prison state, held together by paranoia, and ruled by oligarchs. This is what happens when Americans elect a weak president.

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Only DemProgs would find this logic confusing:

Cars and guns

While I’m on the subject of gun deaths, my sincere condolences go to the family and friends of the police officers shot by a gun-wielding maniac. I guess I should mention here that Canada’s gun crime rate has ascended steadily as the government has created stricter controls. Correlation is not causation, so there could be other reasons for that change, of course.

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It’s fascinating to see New Yorkers go crazy, because they never seem to do it in a good or useful way.  Progressives on the City Council want to turn away millions in charitable spending from Walmart, while other DemProg hysterics are planning to screen Koch Brothers Exposed (Pelosi’s and Reid’s favorite movie), by projecting it onto the side of David Koch’s New York apartment.

I have a suggestion for Charles and David Koch and for Walmart: Stop sending your charity to New York. Why don’t you help other communities that are Purple or Red, rather than bright Blue?

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Did a Loma Linda hospital start a chain of events that ended with an employee killing a veteran by stomping on his carotid artery, causing a later stroke, when the veteran tried to leave the hospital after waiting four hours for treatment? That’s what the vet’s survivors are alleging in a lawsuit.

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Obama supports a Palestinian merger with Hamas, a designated terrorist group. So Israel, which is damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t, just authorized building 1,800 new homes in Samaria and Judea, construction that has never been related to the Palestinians because Israel would never give that land. I applaud Israel. My philosophy if you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, is to DO.

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Conservatives, as well as many fairly apolitical Americans, got a good laugh out of Obama’s lackadaisical workout with girly weights. Newsbusters reveals how the drive-by media’s TV talking heads handled Obama’s metrosexual workout. My favorite is Maurice DuBois, on CBS, who gushed “Fighting off fatigue, the man who carries the weight of the world on his shoulders stays in shape by hoisting dumb bells over his head over his head, and he got in some cardio, too, on an elliptical trainer.” I bet DuBois also believes in the Tooth Fairy.

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And finally, a video both fascinating and scary, about a new kind of bullet: