Normal Tendencies

Earthbound
Much of the early campaign was about allowing Mrs. Clinton to exist in a safe political space, bringing one of the world’s most famous political faces back down to earth from her days as secretary of state so that voters could forge a bond with her. But over the weekend, a half-dozen protesters created an unpredictable environment for Mrs. Clinton as she marched in a parade in northern New Hampshire. At the same time, her aides sought to give her a buffer so that voters could see her, separating journalists with a rope, creating a series of viral photos that ricocheted through Twitter. (New York Times, 7/7/2015)

Apparently the most powerful woman in the world is really a battered girl-child who needs safe spaces and a calm environment. How is that going to work out for America and the world when Putin starts threatening Poland?


Clearly
Mr. Obama’s daybook is clear as far as the eye can see, save for a briefing Monday afternoon with military commanders at the Pentagon and a meeting on Tuesday with the head of Vietnam’s Communist Party. (New York Times, 7/7/2015)

We're betting that he'll find the time to squeeze in a quick eighteen holes.


Lowdown
The Obama administration on Tuesday will announce an initiative to help low- and middle-income Americans gain access to solar energy, part of a series of steps President Obama is taking to tackle climate change, according to administration officials. (New York Times, 7/7/2015)

Because what the poor want more than anything else in the world are solar panels. No doubt you hear it all the time. Give us solar panels! How come only the rich get solar panels?


Lawyers in Love
Lawyers for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was sentenced to death for his role in the Boston Marathon bombing, filed a preliminary motion Monday for a new trial.

The filing in Federal District Court was a procedural motion, described by the lawyers as merely a “place holder,” but it was a prelude to an appellate process that is expected to drag on for years.

“A new trial is required in the interests of justice,” wrote Mr. Tsarnaev’s lawyers, who include the death penalty expert Judy Clarke. (New York Times, 7/7/2015)

"Drag on..." "Interests of justice..." Where to begin?

Obama Determined to Close All-Inclusive Guantanamo Resort

Massive
By land mass, House Republicans now represent about 85 percent of the nation as Democrats become clustered in the more populous metropolitan areas and on the coasts. (New York Times, 1/7/2015)

We are always amazed - and comforted - when we see the Red vs. Blue election maps. It is stunning visual confirmation that Liberalism does not represent the will of the people of America. 


Silently
On Dec. 13, as thousands of protesters blocked the Brooklyn Bridge, two police officers were beaten and hospitalized as they tried to stop protesters from heaving a garbage can on police officers below the roadway.

But with a police demonstration involving a silent turning of backs, the media cheering section that had embraced demonstrators bent on shutting down the city became impassioned defenders of propriety. (Dorothy Rabinowitz, Wall Street Journal, 1/7/2015)

Rabinowitz is one of our favorite WSJ Op-Ed writers. Killer point here....


Intangible
The Palestinian actions won’t achieve anything tangible, and they may help push even more Israeli voters toward hawkish candidates in elections scheduled for March. The ICC move will also put at risk the $400 million or so that the U.S. gives the Palestine government each year. Congress has stipulated that the funds be cut off if the PA uses the ICC to make claims against Israel. (Wall Street Journal, 1/3/2015)

Did you know that $400 million of your money is going to support people that hate America? How does that make you feel?


Bogie
One of the golfers who played with Mr. Obama said the way the president carried himself on the course provided significant insight into his character.

“If you came down from Mars and saw his disposition on the golf course, you would think he would be a pretty good president,” the golfer said. “He’s honest, he keeps his composure through terrible adversity, he’s unruffled, he smiles, and he doesn’t quit.” (New York Times, 1/4/2015)

With Obama heading into the final two years of his White House retirement the New York Times finally reports on the president's golf addiction. Unlike Legitimate Media coverage of George Bush's golfing, the Times gives us this feel-good story on the First Golfer. 


Senseless
In one sense this is curious since as recently as 2013 Ms. Warren voted to confirm Jack Lew to be Treasury Secretary. Mr. Lew’s job in 2008 was presiding over mortgage disasters at Citigroup , which needed one of the largest federal bailouts. Mr. Weiss succeeded on Wall Street as an investment banker, and Lazard didn’t need a bailout. Is financial competence now disqualifying in Democratic administrations? (Wall Street Journal, 1/5/2015)

Lizzie Warren is apparently going to ride this "Wall Street is evil" screed as far as she can. Let's see how many Wall Streeters make campaign contributions to her anyway. We are guessing quite a few.  


Remedial
For years, Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost. But those remedies will now be applied to the Harvard faculty, and the professors are in an uproar.

Members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the heart of the 378-year-old university, voted overwhelmingly in November to oppose changes that would require them and thousands of other Harvard employees to pay more for health care. The university says the increases are in part a result of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, which many Harvard professors championed....The university is adopting standard features of most employer-sponsored health plans: Employees will now pay deductibles and a share of the costs, known as coinsurance, for hospitalization, surgery and certain advanced diagnostic tests. The plan has an annual deductible of $250 per individual and $750 for a family. For a doctor’s office visit, the charge is $20. For most other services, patients will pay 10 percent of the cost until they reach the out-of-pocket limit of $1,500 for an individual and $4,500 for a family. (New York Times, 1/6/2015)

This is priceless. Yet another example of pointy-headed Liberals telling everyone else what to do while they play by different rules. Now - horrors! - Harvard profs will have to do what most other people in country have been doing for years: pay a bit toward their health care. Tragedy on the Yard. Cry us a river....

Spear in Hand

Shock and Awe
Coulter, “Outnumbered” and the puckish sections of the Free Beacon all function in similar ways. The provocations they put out into the world are not untethered from real thinking and emotions. But they exist primarily to evoke shock and then to deny that those provocations were in earnest. It is an awfully clever sort of trap, one that lures critics into spending time and emotional energy refuting seemingly outrageous propositions before it’s revealed that the only people really engaging in the exchange were the critics themselves. (Alyssa Rosenberg, Washington Post, 6/26/2014)

Although her by-line does not say so, we assume that Rosenberg is a board-certified psychologist given her pronouncements on the ulterior motivations of Ann Coulter and other conservative thinkers. Per Dr. Rosenberg, Coulter and others just want to be provocative and drive up their click counts. Well, after - what is it eight? ten? New York Times best sellers - we doubt Coulter is overly focused on how many people read her weekly column.

And then there is: "...to deny that those provocations were in earnest." One of the truly wonderful things about the lithesome Coulter is that she never backs down from anything she writes or says. Ever. RedStateVT does not call her the toughest conservative out there for no reason. 

The provocations that Dr. Rosenberg attributes to Coulter fall well within the mainstream of conservative thinking. A few examples:

• Abortion is the taking of a life.
• If we don't get control of our borders we will all be speaking Spanish in ten years. 
• Ted Kennedy was a drunk who murdered a woman.
• Bill Clinton is a sex pervert.
• Barack Obama is an incompetent buffoon. 

Again, well within the mainstream and hardly controversial positions. Finally, Coulter just happens to be hysterically funny, all while she is carving up Liberals. In political commentary, only Rachel Maddow comes close. Although, of course, people are laughing at Maddow, not with her. 


Optional
The Obama administration has developed three options for further actions, according to government officials: banning any interactions with some of Russia’s largest banks; cutting off technology transfers to Russian energy and defense firms; and shutting down business with Russian defense companies. (New York Times, 6/25/2014)

A fourth option still under consideration: Obama calls Putin up and expresses his profound disappointment. 


Warmly
About 10,000 years ago, temperatures warmed sharply, by eight to 10 degrees Fahrenheit. By that time, the European ice sheets had melted, but the much thicker North American sheets took much longer. While the climate had warmed to today’s levels, allowing mixed oak woodland to grow and humans to recolonize Britain, the sea level remained some 130 feet lower for another 3,000 years.

When it did rise, it would have been traumatic for the population, wiping out whatever settlement there was, and eventually the forest of Borth. The displaced humans of the time, Dr. Bates said, were prehistoric refugees from climate change. (New York Times, 6/24/2014)

Man-made climate change is settled science. Man-made climate change is settled science. Man-made climate change.....


Over Par
On June 14, Sunni rebels threatened Baghdad after seizing much of Iraq — and President Obama fearlessly played a round at the Sunnylands Golf Course in Rancho Mirage, Calif.

The next day, the militants posted pictures of their mass execution of Shiite members of Iraq’s security forces — and Obama boldly teed off again, at Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s Rancho Mirage estate.

These split-screen scenes were reminiscent of the weekend in March when Russia was about to annex Crimea. Obama played golf both Saturday and Sunday at Key Largo, Fla.’s Ocean Reef resort with former NBA star Alonzo Mourning and former NFL player Ahmad Rashad. (Dana Milbank, Washington Post, 6/24/2014)

When Liberals revolt!


Already Against the Next War
If you like the unfolding disaster in Obama-abandoned Iraq, you are going to love Obama-abandoned Afghanistan.

Just two weeks before Iraq descended into chaos, President Obama stepped into the Rose Garden to announce his plan to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2016. “It’s time to turn the page on more than a decade in which so much of our foreign policy was focused on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Obama declared. “Americans have learned that it’s harder to end wars than begin them — but this is how wars end in the 21st century.”

If Iraq is how wars end in the 21st century, we’re in big trouble. (Marc A. Thiessen, Washington Post, 6/23/2014)

Obama has squandered the blood and treasure of America. He deserves his eventual fate as the president who lost both Iraq and Afghanistan, who re-energized the Islamic jihad and who put American lives at risk.

Mark Cuban: Truth Teller

Viva La Cuban
“If I see a black kid in a hoodie and it’s late at night, I’m walking to the other side of the street,” he said in a video interview for Inc.’s GrowCo Conference in Nashville. “And if on that side of the street, there’s a guy that has tattoos all over his face — white guy, bald head, tattoos everywhere — I’m walking back to the other side of the street.”

At a business conference in Nashville on Wednesday, Mark Cuban admitted to being less than enlightened. “I know I’m prejudiced and I know I’m bigoted in a lot of different ways.” It is one thing to initiate a dialogue about racism but something else to spew tone deaf ignorance in an interview. The shooting death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, the acquittal of George Zimmerman and the miscarriage of justice that the not-guilty verdict represented are wounds that, for many, have not healed. (New York Times, 5/24/2014)

Being a self-made billionaire is not enough to insulate you against political correctness as Mark Cuban recently discovered. Cuban incorrectly confessed to bigotry because he admitted to being wary of black gang-bangers wearing hoodies and white, skin-head, neck-tatooed neo-Nazis. We'd call Cuban sensible, not prejudiced. His sin apparently was using the word "hoodie" which opened the door to relitigating the whole Trayvon Martin tragedy. (Note that the New York Times news department has officially concluded that the Zimmerman not guilty verdict was a "miscarriage of justice." This is how the Liberal media creates history, by the way. Climate change is fact; Bill Clinton is a senior statesman; and George Zimmerman got away with murder.)

Quick! What is the natural reaction that anyone would have to seeing youths in hoodies or with shaved heads? Answer: concern for one's own personal safety. In a stunning admission many years ago, no less of an authority on the subject of race than Jesse Jackson confessed to feeling relief when realizing that the people walking behind him on a city street at night were white not black. 

Is Cuban is wrong? We don't think so. He has nothing to apologize for.


Fractionally
As of Friday, the national average for a gallon of regular gasoline was $3.66, a fraction of a cent lower than last year. (New York Times, 5/24/2014)

One of the wonderful things about the Obama presidency is the endless list of things that - whenever we next have a Republican president - can no longer be blamed on that president or even discussed. A partial list includes the following:

- the price of gasoline
- that president's past drug use
- the president's foreign policy experience
- the number of war dead
- the unemployment rate
- the economy in general 
- the president's golf outings

Disenfranchised

Rome Burns
On Saturday, Obama joined former NFL star receiver Ahnmad Rashad ,former NBA star center Alonzo Mourning, and Cyrus Walker, Valerie Jarrett’s cousin, to go golfing in Key Largo, Florida. Obama brought the wife and kids for a weekend getaway. White House spokesman Josh Earnest explained that Obama was relishing warm-weather downtime.  (Breitbart.com, 3/8/2014)

Who called it? RedStateVT called it!

At least Obama will be well rested and better able to stand up to Putin when the latter begins amassing Russian troops on the Polish border...


Dented
But the law will only make a dent in the ranks of the roughly 50 million uninsured people in the U.S. in 2014. By 2020, there will still be 30 million people without coverage, according to projections by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. (Wall Street Journal, 3/8/2014)

So six years from now, Obamacare will have succeeded in providing insurance coverage to 5% of the 15% of uninsured Americans. Or as Democrats would say: a smashing success.

What could have prevented an even greater achievement?:

"I guess all I would say is, given the tremendous obstruction that Obama has been facing on the implementation of this program, it's a miracle that it's off the ground at all," said David Obey, who retired from Congress in 2011.

Yes, it was Republican obstruction which was unable to stop the passage of Obamacare. It was Republican obstruction which led to a favorable Supreme Court ruling upholding the law. It was Republican obstruction which caused the Obamacare website to implode. It was Republican obstruction which resulted in the unilateral actions taken by Obama himself to amend, delay and rewrite the law. 

Beast at Bay

Run Away
If Sen. Bernie Sanders runs for president he could have support from former Gov. Howard Dean.

Dean says right now he is backing Hillary Clinton if she decides to run in 2016. But he said if Sanders got in the race, he'd have to consider supporting the home state candidate.

Sanders says he is 99 percent sure he would not run, but has left the door open, saying there needs to be more focus on the disappearing middle class. (WCAX.com, 11/12/2013)

Oh come on now, Bernie, run! Do not deny the American people the circus that would be a Sanders presidential bid. 

Of course, Dean's motivation is suspect. No doubt he wants to lose the label he now has of "that moonbat candidate from Vermont."


Miami Heat
President Obama appears to have remained overnight in Miami – incurring extra costs for taxpayers – just to play golf in the Florida sunshine.
...
There are no official events on his schedule today, golf seemingly his primary duty. He’ll depart Miami for Washington at 3:25 pm.

This marks the 150th time Obama has played golf as president, and the 39th time this year. (Whitehousedossier.com, 11/9/2013)

Not to worry, Obama has ordered a "tech surge" to fix Healthcare.gov. Thereby freeing himself up to hit the links!

(Great website, by the way.)


Due and Unpaid
All told, about 210,000 people have signed up, about 155,000 for Medicaid and 55,000 others for private insurance plans. Those numbers include people who have picked a plan but have not necessarily paid their first premium, which is not due for another month.

In addition, Oregon has signed up more than 70,000 people for the Medicaid expansion through a “fast-track” program that does not rely on the exchange. And Maryland will automatically enroll more than 80,000 newly eligible people in Medicaid in January. (NYT, 11/13/2013)

It's really Obamacaid, not Obamacare, isn't it?


Side Split
The split between lawmakers and the White House reflects the dilemma the president finds himself in as he seeks to follow through on last week’s acknowledgment about his incorrect promise on health care coverage. (NYT, 11/13/2013)

New York Times Style Book: Republicans flip-flop, Democrats evolve; Republicans lie, Democrats make incorrect promises.


Personal Beliefs
“I personally believe even if it takes a change in the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got,” Mr. Clinton said in the interview, published by Ozy, a web magazine. (NYT, 11/13/2013)

RedStateVT told you - just a week or so ago - that Bill Clinton would get his payback for Obama's slights. We had no idea, however, that it would happen so quickly!


Derivations
Many of the rigged rules derive directly from the Wall Street wing of the (Democrat) party, personified by Robert Rubin, former head of Goldman Sachs who served as Clinton’s economic guru and Treasury secretary. Rubin peddled the bankers’ creed: financial deregulation, fiscal austerity, capital gain tax cuts, corporate globalization, flexible (read anti-union) labor markets, combined with public solicitude for the poor, trumped always by limited budgets. Celebrated during the Clinton years, the combination proved a toxic brew that led directly to the financial wilding that blew up the economy. (Katrina vanden Heuvel, Washington Post, 11/12/2013)

Liberals have been telling us for years - years! - that it was George Bush (and maybe Mitt Romney) who were responsible for blowing up the U.S. economy. Now one of their own 'fesses up: it was Bill Clinton. This is earth-shattering news. 


Dog Days
Call of Duty: Ghosts, developed for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii U and PC, is rated M (Mature, for players 17 and older) for throat knifings, profanity and a dog that feasts on human necks. (NYT, 11/6/2013)

Just keeping readers up-to-date on the latest in video games. 

Repeat after us: video games do not lead to violence, video games do not lead to violence....


Possibilities
Lady Gaga said she was addicted to marijuana in an interview with Elvis Duran on the Z100 Morning Show on Friday, Nov. 8, 2013, and that she decided to speak about it so young people are aware that addiction to the drug is possible. (WSJ, 11/13/2013)

Uh, Governor Shumlin? Governor Peter Shumlin? Governor Peter Shumlin of Vermont? Governor Peter Shumlin of Vermont whose signature legislative accomplishment is the decriminalization of dope?