Obamalings at NBC’s “Meet the Press” Discuss ObamaTough and Putin

Every Sunday’s the harmony gals at Obamaling Dick Gregory’s NBC meet to praise ObamaCourage, ObamaWisdom, and ObamaLeadership.

Yesterday the name Putin ‘came up’.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/03/02/meet_the_press_panel_does_the_world_take_obama_seriously.html

Killer Wave, the Shock of Death Ahead for Americans under Age 30

Prager University class:

AMERICA’S DEBT CRISIS EXPLAINED

Course Description
Fact: America’s national debt stands at $17 trillion. That’s a tough number to grasp. Most people will never come close to making $1 million in any given year. How can we understand the magnitude of the hole our country is in? Well, imagine you owed your credit card company $200,000. On top of that you have to pay them about $4,000 per year in interest. You are bringing in $150,000 per year, but you are spending way more than that. How are you going to ever pay back that $200,000 debt? And what happens if you default? Well, that is America today. The problem is clear. And we brought Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, to propose a solution.

http://prageruniversity.com/Economics/Americas-Debt-Crisis-Explained.html

Attend Prager University learning truths every American should know. Learn more about Prager University at:

https://www.google.com/search?q=prager+university&rlz=1I7GGIE_en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7#q=prager+university+youtube&revid=770596094

“THE BIGGER THE GOVERNMENT, THE SMALLER THE CITIZEN” became a popular Pragerism early in Dennis Prager’s creation, called appropriately, Prager University. Occasionally, Dennis appears as a ‘guest’ instructor as occurs below:

http://www.youtube.com/user/PragerUniversity

Gender, Discrimination, and Marriage

Gender, Discrimination, and Marriage

by Kelly Bartlett at the Witherspoon Institute
article sent by Mark Waldeland:

“In the name of equality, same-sex marriage seeks to codify gender discrimination. But marriage welcomes everyone: husband and wife, father and mother, grandfather and grandmother.”

Read further:

http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2014/03/11678/#

2014 Detroit….Biden…..Obama…..the Unreal

Detroit, Mon Amour
Remember the liberal war on the automobile?

BY GEOFFREY NORMAN at the Weekly Standard

article sent by Mark Waldeland:

Seems like this is the season for showing the American automobile some love. Also, the town that the automobile built—Detroit, aka the Motor City, where packs of feral dogs now roam the streets and den up in vacant lots between the abandoned buildings. Detroit, these days, seems far more deserving of pity than celebration.

Still, Vice President Joe Biden showed up for the annual Detroit auto show in January and delivered the usual talking points. American manufacturing is back. “We bet on American ingenuity, we bet on you, and we won.”

“We,” of course, being the Obama administration. Biden has some credibility with what remains of the car culture. His father worked for a GM dealership, and Biden owns a Corvette. That makes him the red-headed stepchild of his extended political family, which has long considered what Detroit built as the -devil’s ride and the city itself as Satan’s workshop.

The correct sentiment (call it “liberal” for lack of a better term) in certain lofty circles has for decades been to hate the automobile and all it stood for. The American car was, in the view of John Kenneth Galbraith, the ne plus ultra of conspicuous consumption with its useless tail fins and its obscene bulk, power, and luxury. The car was an indulgence that favored the individual over the community. It was also a deadly killer and designed to be so, according to Ralph Nader, who lectured like a Puritan divine that it was “unsafe at any speed.” And it was, as any number of commentators told us, a vehicle that would ride us to economic perdition, guzzling gas and polluting the atmosphere all the way. So with Jimmy Carter in the White House, Detroit was told to make its cars go further on a gallon of gas.

This was the original and self-evident sin of the American car. It burned gasoline refined from petroleum that comes from the Mideast or, worse, from Texas, where it makes people like J. R. Ewing and the Koch brothers rich. Oil is the most hated of all substances in this worldview. Oil supplies energy and so does coal. But while people like the late Pete Seeger sang mournful ballads about coalminers, nobody had a song for those who worked in the oil patch, making it possible to drive those awful cars that create sprawl, spew pollution, and “disincentivize” the masses from riding the train, thus making America less like Europe than it should be.

After Washington started telling Detroit what kind of car it should (and could) build, the American consumer either bought a car made in Japan or an SUV or pickup, exempt from the mileage requirements. Then, the government started telling people that if they really must drive, they would not be permitted to do so at speeds above 55 miles per hour. This, of course, was for their own good. It was safer. Studies proved that this was not so, but .  .  . well, never mind, just slow down, leadfoot.

The decline of the American car was celebrated by those who believed salvation lay in mass transit; in getting people to move from the suburbs, back into the central cities, so they could walk to work. Or ride a bicycle. Anything but drive a filthy car.

There were still parts of America where you could openly declare your love for the American automobile. The South, of course, where people by the tens of thousands would drive hundreds of miles to spend a weekend watching tough men race big, American cars. Half the men in the South wanted to be Richard Petty. The other half wanted to be Dale Earnhardt. And drive whatever they were driving.

There were other parts of the country where it was still permissible to love your wheels. To love cars in general and in the abstract. For a long time, it was still okay even in California. The Beach Boys were into cars almost as much as surfing. Motion was the mantra in the West. Freedom was the road. And, then, the off-road. All the way down Baja.

But the people who lived, physically or psychically, in that other, liberal America couldn’t imagine loving a car. You might like a Volvo or some other version of the anticar. Nobody would even think of painting a Volvo in gaudy colors, sticking a bunch of STP logos on it, and driving it around in circles, banging the hell out of other cars on the way to the finish. A Volvo was engineered to be safe. Not fun. It was blasphemous to equate cars with fun. The attitude of, say, the Joan Claybrooks of the world to cars resembled that of the Puritans to sex: to be indulged in only when necessary. Claybrook was the chief proselytizer and enforcer of the 55 mph speed limit, the defeat of which was a rare victory for the pro-car forces.

Read further: http://m.weeklystandard.com/articles/detroit-mon-amour_781558.html?page=2

MN Dems to Spend $80 million for New Senate Office Building

Here in Minnesota:

House casts skeptical eye on Senate office building

by Jennifer Brooks

If Minnesota senators want a new office building, they may need to convince their colleagues over in the House.

The proposed $90 million office building and parking facility hinges on the approval of the House Rules Committee.

It’s a great deal of money and committee members had a great number of questions at their first hearing on the subject Thursday night: Why was the project included in a tax bill conference committee report at the end of session, instead of working its way through the usual series of public hearings? Why do plans for the $63 million office building only have office space for 44 of the 67 Senators, while the rest will remain in offices in the crowded Capitol across the street? Would it be possible to scrap plans for a new office building and simply rehouse senators in an existing state office building?

But on one topic, most of the state Representatives seemed to agree: If the Legislature shells out millions of dollars for a new Senate office building, Senators should move into it. All of them.

“I’ve heard both from Democrats and Republicans a fair amount of skepticism and also, I think, a lot of alignment around the idea that if the building is to proceed, that there should be 67 senators in that building, or 67 offices, even if the senators aren’t all in them to start,” said House Majority Leader Erin Murphy, who chairs the Rules Committee. “I think we have a question before us that needs some thought.”

The informational hearing concluded without a vote from the committee members.

House Republicans have been vocal critics of the project. House Minority Leader Kurt Daudt took to the House floor Thursday to criticize the process that wrapped plans for the Senate office building into the $2.1 billion tax ominbus in the final days of the 2013 session.

“Here we are. Democrats in St. Paul are about to spend between $60- and $90 million dollars of taxpayers’ hard-earned money to build themselves an office building,” Daudt said. “This looks horrible.”

The Senate Rules Committee has already approved plans for the new office facility, and Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk, DFL-Cook, has warned that delaying construction of the new office could hamper the $272 million restoration project now undeway at the century-old State Capitol. Those plans were drafted with the assumption that senators would shift out of the Capitol and into the new offices midway through the renovation project.

The Minnesota Department of Administration has estimated it would cost between $2.4 million and $2.9 million a year to rent temporary office space for senators, and tens of millions of dollars more in to retrofit them, if the new office building is not built. Senators and staff will need at least 135,000 square feet of space near the Capitol during the renovation. Moreover, the renovations will carve into the office space the Senate currently holds in the Capitol.