And Now, For the "Talent" Portion of the Pageant, Finalists Will Recite Their Favorite Verses From the Koran

Oh, there she is, Miss Hijab Indonesia...

King? Emperor? Oh, Pshaw, That's Tiny Taters for a POTUS With Super Powers

Here's Mark Steyn on the topic:

I'm getting weary of the monarchical comparisons, which are a bit of an insult to real monarchs. The Obama model seems to owe more to Judge Dredd, the popular comic-book figure with the power to arrest, convict, sentence and execute as he does what's necessary to bring hope and change to a dystopian megalopolis. Likewise, President Dredd: "He is the Law, and you'd better believe it!" A contempt for the people and for constitutional and legal restraints is what ties the President's actions on Thursday night to Eric Holder's corrupt justice department to Lois Lerner's corrupt revenue agency to Jonathan Gruber's corrupt health commissariat (merely to skim the surface of the most recent additions to the unending Obama-scandals document dump). 

To express common-or-garden contempt for the will of the people, Obama could have simply repealed another handful of inconvenient paragraphs from Obamacare or made Lois Lerner Attorney-General, but the form of contempt he chose is especially exquisite: "legalizing" millions of foreign law-breakers and setting them on the path to US citizenship. The chief of state has heard the voice of the people and his message to them is: "Yeah, whatever, I can always get another people. Hey, here comes five million or so right now, plus another ten million in chain-migration relatives down the road..."

To paraphrase a line from a 60s song: American voters fought the Law and the Law won.


Update: From the "You Can't Please All the People All the Time" Department: While thousands of undocumented immigrants celebrated the President Barack Obama's historic immigration plan, others were stunned and disappointed over being left out.

Update: Andrew McCarthy says that Obama is a disciple of Saul Alinsky. For someone of that bent, the end always justifies the means, even if the means include lying one's head off to the American people:

We’ve endured six years of “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan,” “How dare you call Obamacare a tax,” “The video did it in Benghazi,” “Of course we’d never let guns walk to Mexican gangs,” “Workplace violence,” “Kinetic military action,” “The IRS harassment is outrageous and intolerable,” and “not a smidgeon of corruption” from “the most transparent administration in history.” Yet what so astonished the commentariat about Obama’s decree of amnesty for illegal aliens was the sheer audacity of hoax. 

“I’m the president of the United States, not the emperor of the United States,” our would-be emperor repeatedly explained in the months and years before Thursday’s edict. Again and again, in more than two dozen recorded public statements, the president emphatically denied that he had the power to pronounce law unilaterally. “My job,” he huffed, “is to execute the laws that are passed.” His mere say-so could not suspend deportations or grant illegal aliens lawful status, he explained, because that would transgress “laws on the books that Congress has passed.” 

In fact, nearly two years ago, Obama said he and his subordinates had already “stretched our administrative flexibility as much as we can” for the benefit of unlawful immigrants. Yet this week, he abruptly discovered enough elasticity to dictate a new legal regime — actually, an illegal regime — for conferring lawful status on illegal aliens, a power our quaint Constitution vests in Congress. 

In Thursday’s speech, Obama was not just brazen but remorseless, not deigning to offer a word of explanation for his sudden 180. Another day, another story line in the soap opera, as if the prior episodes had never happened.

Somewhere down in Hades, Saul is shepping naches over his progeny's chutzpah.

Unintentionally Amusing Headline Du Jour

Iran talks stalled, despite Kerry efforts

You don't say. And here I thought old stone face was the Ayatollah whisperer. ;)


Worst case scenario: this kook has a nuke.

Toronto Star: "Canada Losing Friends" Over Climate Change Stance

The Star's Carol Goar wants us to be vewy, vewy afwaid about the "loss," but I say who needs these--sorry, but I have to calls 'em as I sees 'em--fair weather friends?

The "Path Forward Towards Peace"...Is Obstructed By Megalomania

Following this week's synagogue bloodshed, President Obama said that "obviously, we condemn [the attack] in the strongest terms." At the same time, however, he called upon "Israeli and Palestinian leaders and ordinary citizens to work cooperatively together to lower tensions, reject violence, and seek a path forward towards peace."

"Too many Israelis have died. Too many Palestinians have died," he concluded (evenhandedly, of course).

Daniel Greenfield explains why the "path forward" will remain forever blocked:

A thousand foreign policy experts are dug out, suited up and marched into studios to explain what specific set of un-Islamic Muslim grievances caused this latest beheading and how the surviving non-Muslims need to appease their future killers. And then another tree falls. And another head rolls. 

The appeasement never works. No non-Muslim country has ever reliably made peace with Muslim terrorists inside its own borders. Even the Muslim countries have a shaky track record. Most have settled for either massacring them, like Algeria and Jordan, or secretly allying with them, like just about every Muslim country from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia.

And yet Nigeria is expected to cut a deal with the Boko Haram rapists of its little girls, Israel is expected to negotiate with the mass murderers of its Rabbis, Hindus in India are expected to negotiate with the Jihadists who burn them alive and somehow arrive at a peaceful settlement. And if the peace doesn’t come, then it won’t be the fault of the rapists, the axe-wielders and arsonists, but of their victims.

It is never the Muslim terrorists who are at fault for not being appeased by any compromise and any concession. It is the fault of their victims for not appeasing them hard enough.

Compromise with Muslim terrorists is impossible because the issue is not really about Jerusalem, oil revenues in Nigeria, Kashmir or Syria. It’s always about Islam. The territorial claims are unlimited and uncompromisable because they are backed by Islam. No concession can ever suffice because Islam promises its followers not merely some land in Syria, Israel or India… but the entire world.

There's a term for "the desire to dominate the entire world." You'll find it in the above headline.

Melanie Phillips Excoriates the Brits' "Impeccable" Evenhandedness Re the Shul Massacre

She writes:

In the face of unspeakable depravity, the British respond with impeccable even-handedness. After pious expressions of horror over the carnage in Jerusalem this morning, where four rabbis were slaughtered during morning prayers and several o...thers badly injured by Arabs screaming “Allahu akhbar”, Britain’s Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond and his Labour shadow Douglas Alexander called on “both sides” to “de-escalate” tensions.

“Both sides”, eh. How exactly do those who are being targeted for mass murder in a never-ending terror war “de-escalate”? The inescapable suggestion is that the Israelis have escalated these tensions in an equivalent manner to the Arabs.

This morning’s BBC reports of the atrocity went one stage further, blaming it on the “old dispute” over who gets to pray on Temple Mount and the recent tensions arising from the renewed Jewish campaign to do so. So the slaughter of Jews was all the Jews’ fault.

This was a grotesque, indeed obscene distortion. There was never the slightest chance of this forlorn campaign to allow Jews to pray on Temple Mount getting anywhere with the Israeli government. Israel didn’t escalate anything at all. On the contrary, the violence was initiated by the Arabs as they lit the petrol trail of lies and incitement.

This process was kicked off by Mahmoud Abbas when, at the UN a couple of months ago, he promulgated the demonstrable and ludicrous falsehood that Israel was committing genocide against the Palestinians. Last month, he fanned the flames of conflagration by claiming entirely falsely that Jewish “settlers” were planning to desecrate the al Aqsa mosque, and calling for them to be prevented.

Falsely he claimed that there were “many attacks on al Aqsa repulsed by religious leaders”. But there were no such Israeli attacks. Instead, Arabs lured the Israeli police into the complex by throwing rocks and shooting fireworks towards police officers stationed near the entrance to the Temple Mount area from the Western Wall plaza. The police chased the rioters who ran inside al Aqsa, which had been turned into an ammunition store. From there, pitched battles were fought with Israeli police, firing small rockets at them and hurling stones and other projectiles.

But the BBC didn’t mention any of this today. Instead, it blamed the victims and thus excused their attackers...

Typical Beeb. Supine in the face of jihad. Suffused with--and rotted by--Zionhass.

Mute Imams Leave Moderate Muslim Farzana Hassan Dazed and Confused

Toronto Sun columnist Farzana Hassan can't fathom why imams have remained silent re the butchery in a Jerusalem synagogue. After all, she writes,

The Qur'an defines churches and synagogues as places of legitimate worship which invoke Allah. These places are to be protected.

Maybe so. But since, in the words of David Nirenberg, author of Anti-Judaism, the Qur'an "is extensively structured as a polemic against the Jews," and since the whole point of Islamic theology is to supersede both Judaism and Christianity, the monotheistic faiths that preceded it (and which have long been accused been accused of removing all references to Islam's founder in their holy texts, an act of malice and duplicity claim many Islamic theologians), one can understand why mum's the word for imams. And, given half a chance, no doubt more than a few of them would give thumbs up to these murders, which quite clearly were acts of jihad, and therefore fully in line with Qu'ranic teachings. And given that that's what "moderate" Jordan did—regret the death of the jihadis but not their victims—why wouldn't not-so-moderate imams do the same?

For the Sake of Mother Earth, Fido Must Go!

Now the climate change cretins want to guilt you into eschewing man's best friend due to your dog's prodigious production of poopy.

Mike Nichols, 'Graduate' Director, Dead at 83

Of course, he'll be remembered for all the films he directed--some good (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), some not so much (the eminently forgettable What Planet are You From?). But even though it was before my time, I prefer to remember him as one half of angsty/neurotic comedy duo Nichols and May.

Will Anything Change Because of Gruberstorm-gate-quiddick-palooza?

Nope. Because the con wasn't perpetrated by wicked, trickydicky-Bushitler Republicans, all the lying, conniving and chicanery will pay off (because the media will feel free to ignore it), and ObamaCare will forever remain the crappy law of the land.

In homage to that reality, everybody sing!:

Grubered.
Got grubered, got conned by Obama.
You're grubered.
Grubered because you were "dumb."
They knew you'd love O as long as he needed
And that one day
ObamaCare'd finally come.

Stupid,
Gruber kept calling you stupid.
Knowin'
How eas'ly his scam would slip through.

Oh, grubered
For thinking that O's the messiah.
So Gruber got lyin',
And Gruber got flyin',
Now you're grubered
And thoroughly screwed...

Ceeb Denizen Linden MacIntyre Diagnoses the Mothercorp's Sickness: A Toxic Culture of Narcissism, Celebrity and Entitlement

He's retiring after many years, so he can say this stuff without fear of an employer backlash:

“CBC is now sustained in the trenches by a whole lot of new recruits who are enthusiastic and ambitious and gifted, and who desperately want to get a foothold in media. And desperation and vulnerability will go together, and then if you put that in a place where there is an influence driven by ego, narcissism, a kind of abusive personality, you start moving along a continuum. It starts with just a sort of obnoxious, ‘Run down and get me a coffee.’” Unchecked, he says, “It moves into a sense of entitlement that allows you to make greater demands and be a bigger bully.” 

And even through MacIntyre spent decades on TV, he says he never lost the sense he had cultivated during his first 12 years in the business, as a lowly print reporter for a regional paper. “There was no horseshit there, boy,” he says with a chuckle. “Entitlement wouldn’t get you a cup of tea. 

“The problem with the culture is that it nurtures that kind of celebrity, and it nurtures that kind of entitlement, because stardom tends to put a rosy glow over the whole institution, and makes the managers who cultivate the stardom look competent, and effective. And it makes them a little bit starry, too,” MacIntyre says. “So the Ghomeshi thing was always a problem. Because Ghomeshi has always been arrogant, he’s always been obnoxious – in the sort of the passive way, where he’s always been so vulnerable: ‘You can’t hurt Jian,’ even though he hurts other people. And his tantrums and his workplace relationships: ‘Well, he’s very rigorous, he’s a perfectionist, you know?’ So he is allowed to bully and abuse people. You know, that’s the way it works, that’s what you put up with, whether it’s Mansbridge, Gzowski, whatever. They were not like shrinking violets, either. So along comes Ghomeshi: ‘Oh, yeah, he’s in the tradition of that. But somewhere along the way, it crosses a line. It does cross a line.”

So Mansbridge is a bully too, eh? Oh snap!