P.J. Gladnick's blog

We get it, Associated Press. We get it!

Rising gasoline prices are NOT President Obama's fault. Or so you want us to believe. However, could you be just a little less blatant in pitching that line? As it is, your lack of subtlety in hammering home that message is embarrassing to read such as your latest example in which you mention that some people blame Obama along with a lot of other reasons but the only people you actually cite in the article on the subject of presidential responsibility are those who find him faultless in the price rise:

Wheee!!!

Break out the champagne! Put on your party hats! ABC News has announced that we now have the highest gasoline prices ever for March.

Huh? So why the celebrations? Because to watch joyful GMA host George Stephanopoulos in the video below the fold you would think we should all be happy because despite the gloomy news about the high gasoline prices, they MIGHT come down soon. First the harsh reality about current gasoline prices as reported by Zunaira Zaki in this ABC News business blog:

The average price of a gallon of regular is now $3.87, the highest recorded price in March. The average price is up nearly 4 cents from a week ago, and over 30 cents from a year ago, according to the Department of Energy, as more drivers face gas prices of $4 a gallon or more across the country.

Private Joker! What is your major malfunction?

That is what I felt like yelling at Matthew Modine aka Private Joker after watching a bizarre video he produced in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Rather than shed any light on the subject of OWS, all Modine seemed to accomplish was to make the viewer as confused as Lou Costello trying to make sense of what Bud Abbott was attempting to explain about Who's on first, What's on second, and I Don't Know on third. Watch Private Joker's OWS propaganda video below the fold and see if you can make any sense of four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody.

Those whom the gods would destroy they first make proud.

The ancient Greeks warned about the consequences of hubris so perhaps The New Republic contributor, Ruy Teixeira, should take heed since he exhibited this quality in spades which is on full display in his article crowing over what he thinks is the likelihood of another Obama landslide in 2012. The ironic thing is that Teixeira apparently did not learn from his previous comeuppance from the election gods when he gloated over the fate of the Republicans in 2009 on the pages of Time Magazine as revealed by Newsbusters' Rich Noyes:

"The outlook for Republicans is even worse than people think," says Ruy Teixeira, author of The Emerging Democratic Majority. "Their biggest problem is that they really believe what they believe."

Remember all the chip-on-the-shoulder lectures from the left last year in the wake of the Gabrille Giffords shooting? Well, apparently the left has now gotten off its moral high horse and has sunk deep into the sewer of hate as you can see in this sanity-challenged thread at the Daily Kos just oozing with rabid hate at Republicans as you can ascertain from its deranged title: "Murdering, Lying, Thieving, Rat-F*** Republican Pieces of Sub-Amphibian Sh**..."

The text of the message is so chock full of the same hate that the left got on their collective moral high horse about last year that your humble correspondent finds it necessary to post the text after the break. So be warned that you are about to plunge into the nether world of extreme hate where any sign of the rational is mostly absent as we lead off with the rabid rant of the thread's author, Troubadour, who presents us with a case study of the psychotic:

It is the religion that dare not speak its name...at least on NBC News and at the Associated Press among other politically correct circles. Both media outlets reported on a verdict in an "honor killings" case in Canada while managing to avoid mentioning a certain religion whose name starts with "M." To watch or read both reports, you would think that "honor killings" was some sort of bizarre ritual limited to the family in question or perhaps a few other members of an unidentified "patriarchal culture."

First the AP report on the MSNBC site which does mention a religion but not the one you think:

Is it safe?

Is it safe?

No, that wasn't Laurence Olivier as a Nazi dentist drilling holes into Dustin Hoffman's teeth in Marathon Man as he kept repeating that question. In this case it was the Des Moines Register wondering if it was "safe" to mention that a former Obama campaign staffer, Zachary Edwards (see mug shot), who was arrested on Friday for attempted identity theft of the Iowa Republican Secretary of State, Matt Schultz, was a prominent member of a well known Democrat campaign consulting firm, LINK Strategies. On Friday, the day the Des Moines Register first briefly reported the arrest, it wasn't "safe" to mention Link Strategies:

How do you get a liberal talk radio host to do your bidding?

Easy. Just threaten his future invitations to White House events if you are a Democrat president. Such was apparently the case with Tavis Smiley of the Smiley & West radio show which he co-hosts with Cornell West. According to Politico, Smiley was recently ousted as the speaker of the upcoming Martin Luther King luncheon.

The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

Oops! I mean the sea is rising! The sea is rising!

Such is the premise, chock full of laughable hysteria mixed in with premonitions of massive governmental spending based on a theory yet to be proven, in this Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel front page story by David Fleshler. As Chicken Little Fleshler describes, the plan to combat an unproven problem isn't just any plan, it's a BATTLE plan:

Divers all over South Florida were probably drooling last night while watching the huge lionfish that appeared in the 60 Minutes broadcast about Cuba's Jardines de la Reina coral reef off that island's southern shore. The reason is that the state of Florida has declared open season on the invasive lionfish, introduced from Asia, which is known to devastate marine life on coral reefs. Fortunately lionfish flesh is quite tasty and its population has been kept in check in Florida by hungry divers with spearguns.

Not so in Cuba. As you can see in the video at the 15 second mark and later in their full broadcast, the lionfish at the Jardines de la Reina are both quite large and numerous. Why? It seems that Anderson Cooper shied away from asking the question that would have a politically very uncomfortable answer.

George Washington was the father of our country.

Eh! No big deal. Barack Obama is better...at least in his own mind. Such was the laughably absurd claim of President Obama on 60 Minutes last Sunday. What? You didn't see it? That was because 60 Minutes conveniently left it out of its broadcast. If you want to see Obama engage in this latest bit of over the top braggadocio you can only see it at the online 60 Minutes Overtime which has a video of the entire interview. You can catch Obama's excessive praise of himself at the tail end of the interview starting with Steve Kroft's question just before the 55 minute mark:

Remember the OWS protestor, Justin Wedes, who along with his sanity-challenged companion, Ketchup, was featured on the Colbert Report as a spokesman for the Occupy Wall Street movement? Camera hog Wedes was notable for his massive self-righteous chip on the shoulder which caused him to give "down twinkles" to what he claimed as the moral failings of the "One Percent."

Well, down twinkles to Wedes himself who has been exposed in the New York Post as a scam artist forger who tried to cheat the taxpayers out of nearly $5000 for a government grant despite the fact that his "One Percent" family from the plush Michigan neighborhood of Huntington Woods could easily afford to just give him that money:

Oh how your humble correspondent has yearned for his own Marshall McLuhan moment. You might remember that scene from the movie "Annie Hall" when some pompous blowhard on a theater line pontificated about the thoughts of the author of "the medium is the message." An irritated Woody Allen then pulled out McLuhan himself to harshly rebuke the guy.

Well, now I get that opportunity with comics  artist and writer Frank Miller severely criticizing the Occupy Wall Street protests. First let us look at Stephen Kelly of the UK Guardian speculating that Batman could become a hero for the OWS movement:

As reported on Thursday by Newsbusters' Mark Finkelstein, Joe Scarborough and some members of his MSNBC Morning Joe crew shot their mouths off about what Mike Barnicle described as a  "police riot" at the Occupy Oakland protests before waiting for all the facts. And now it appears that the Morning Joe folks have shot themselves in the foot as well since reports from the scene show that it was the police who were clearly provoked by the Occupy Oakland demonstrators.

So were these reports from the usual "rightwing" suspects? Nope. The reports confirming the provocations from the demonstrators came from the leftwing Mother Jones magazine and were supported by the very liberal San Francisco Chronicle. Here is the initial report from the scene by James West of Mother Jones:

"I'm ready for my closeup, Mr. DeMille."

New York Times writer, Corey Kilgannon, chose Occupy Wall Street protester, Edward T. Hall III, as a representative of the OWS protests in an article about an arranged discussion between Hall and Wall Street worker Jimmy Vivona. Although the very thin patina of rationality presented by Hall might have fooled some liberals such as Brian Williams who want to desperately believe in the validity of the OWS protests, almost any normal observer wouldn't have been the least bit fooled by Hall's act. However, should any doubt remain about Hall's mental state, check out this video (below the fold) of Hall revealing his true self at the OWS protests. A word of warning: Not only is the language quite strong but Hall's off the chart Drama Queen antics are so burst out laughing funny from the get-go that you risk covering your monitor with coffee so please put your mug down while watching. A fringe benefit is a brief followup act by a female protester who attempts to match Mr. Hall in the Drama Queen department:

Bush also did it!

Bush also did it!

That is the current talking point desperately being promoted by the Associated Press, and now picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle, to try to explain away the selling of guns to members of the Mexican drug cartel by the Obama administration. The only problem is that the Associated Press left out a key detail as pointed out by Katie Pavlich of Townhall. First the misleading claim by AP:

Let us give credit for honesty (at least temporarily) to the New York Times "conservative" columnist, David Brooks, for his brutal self-recognition of a political flaw. Brooks flat out admits that he is a sap:

I’m a sap, a specific kind of sap. I’m an Obama Sap.

Brooks lays out in some detail his discovery of what most of the rest of us already knew; his extreme gullibility when it comes to believing Obama:

When the president said the unemployed couldn’t wait 14 more months for help and we had to do something right away, I believed him. When administration officials called around saying that the possibility of a double-dip recession was horrifyingly real and that it would be irresponsible not to come up with a package that could pass right away, I believed them.

Reuters appears to have taken the side of the Obama Administration in the Operation Fast & Furious scandal in which guns were permitted by the Bureau of Alcohol Firearms Tobacco and Explosives  to be "walked" across the Mexican border via the sale to straw buyers. The Department of Justice has portrayed this as a mere "botched" operation in which "mistakes" were made rather than the result of malignant intent. And if you read this Reuters article about Attorney General Eric Holder's attempt to distance himself from what has been dubbed "Operation Gunwalker" they go out of their way to emphasize the "botched" nature of the operation which has been the administration line on this matter:

(Reuters) - Attorney General Eric Holder on Wednesday sought to distance himself and other senior Justice Department officials from a botched operation to track guns smuggled to Mexican drug cartels, saying they were not involved.

The U.S. Attorney for Arizona resigns in disgrace this week and Politico writer Josh Gerstein wrings his hands in a show of great concern over the future political viability of this Democrat. First a little background from Michelle Malkin in NewsBusters about  U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke of Operation Fast and Furious notoriety:

There's been only one visible Fast and Furious resignation: U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke in Phoenix, who quietly stepped down on Tuesday. One of his last acts? Opposing the request of murdered Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry's family to qualify as crime victims in a court case against the thug who bought the Fast and Furious guns used in Terry's murder.