Remember the seventies? Remember the energy crisis of the seventies, with its long gas lines and high prices?

Remember the picture of Carter, sitting in the Oval Office in a cardigan sweater, telling us to turn down our thermostats to conserve energy?

Carter claimed to the press that he was saving energy by having solar panels installed on the roof of the White House to heat hot water. “It would not generate enough hot water to run the dishwasher in the staff mess,” a White House staffperson says. “It was a fiasco. The staff mess had to go out and buy new equipment to keep the water hot enough. That blew any savings.” Carter did not manage to broker an adequate energy policy. He tried to promote conservation by example, turning down the thermostats at the White House and in other government buildings, wearing cardigan sweaters, and installing solar panels and a woodstove at the White House. He also deregulated energy prices, launched a program to develop synthetic fuels, and successfully legislated fuel-efficiency standards. But in an era of soaring oil prices and long lines at the gas pumps, it did not add up to a policy.

I thought about our friend Jimmah today, when I heard yet another variation of “I’ll start getting serious about global warming, just as soon as its proponents do”. You have to hand it to Carter, that at least he made a show of turning down the thermostat* and wearing the Charlie Brown sweater, and installing the not-ready-for-primetime solar panels** on the White House roof.

In an age when public shame is practically unheard of, except for when you violate political correctness, there seem to be no excesses to which the global warmists will go, oblivious to the enormity of their own carbon footprints. Al Gore flies all over the world in a private jet, infamously having his limo drivers keeping the motors running in his limos while he delivers his phoney baloney message on global warming, so that he doesn’t experience even any momentary discomfort between his plane and the air conditioned lecture halls.

Remember that Live Earth concert recently? They had to fly bands, and even the audience to Antarctica, just so that they could say they covered all seven continents. How large a carbon footprint did that require? For a mere symbolic gesture. I’m sure the penguins appreciated it! If the threat of catastrophe caused by man made global warming were real, don’t you think that even one of these Apostles of Apocalypse might alter his life style accordingly?

Obama takes a gas guzzling, carbon spewing 747 from Andrews AFB to the swampland of Florida, so that he can address literally dozens of people on the perils of global warming. Haven’t these people ever heard of Skype? Conference calls?? Go to meeting???

All of the scare mongering of the seventies and eighties that foretold the oceans dying, oceans rising, millions starving, ice caps melting, and after all the increases in manufacturing and farming and population increase over the last half century, the temperature needle barely wavered. Ted Danson was very specific. He said we only had ten years to save the oceans…about forty years ago now. How’d that work out for us, Ted? And the scientists whose funding is directed to locate global warming, find it only with the help of forged and faked data.

The extent that global warming did not occur forced its ardent disciples to try to change the name of the movement. Same doom and gloom, but now any “change” in the climate indicates the need for a Marxist curtailment of all capitalistic human activity. Record heat? Global warming, er, “climate change”! Record cold? Record snowfall? “Climate change”!

I guess the closest nod to some sort of show of modest travel by this president, is when he loads his Canadian built, campaign bus on a plane, along with his staff, Secret service and multiple car entourage and flies them to some location to where he can roll out the bus and show the peasants his humble roots. Because nothing says ‘I’m saving energy’ like flying your bus to meet you at a campaign stop.

Since Obama is taking the mantle of “Worst President Ever” from Jimmy Carter, couldn’t he get the cardigan to go with it?


 *As opposed to Barack Obama, who reportedly kicks up the thermostat somewhere between “toasty” and “parboiled”!
**As I have said elsewhere., I’m not opposed to solar energy where it is feasible.  My own solar panels generate more energy than I use, nearly every single day.

Original art by John Cox. More at John Cox Art

   “Ant-Man or Anti-Man?”   *My apologies to the Adventures of Superman

Original art by John Cox. More at John Cox Art

You remember Polaroid? The first "instant" camera? You took a picture, waved it in the wind for a minute or two and saw a developed image of whatever picture you just snapped. These were the days when an LCD screen on the back of your camera (or phone) wasn't even a credible dream. Oh, and phones were still plugged into a landline…with a cord.

So, how does that fit with our President Selfie? Today, I was going over the long list of Obama's "accomplishments", and what most of them had in common. You will forgive me if I don't include such things as "Obamacare" as an accomplishment. Sure, he accomplished lying to 300 million people about keeping their plans and doctor, and accomplished the cancellation of millions of insurance policies, causing the victims, er, recipients of his policies to have to purchase more expensive plans, with larger deductibles, with coverage that many of them neither needed nor wanted.

But, consider his handling of the Keystone XL pipeline extension (covered here): Obama dithered and pandered to special interest groups for six years so far, yet, at one point, hauled himself out to a segment of the pipeline that did not require permission from his State Dept. and…had his picture taken there. Problem solved!

In the aftermath of Sandy Hook, he poses in the Oval Office with his head bowed. For Nelson Mandela's funeral, he took a selfie. He celebrated the birthday of Rosa Parks with a picture of…himself on the bus she rode. When pioneering astronaut Neil Armstrong passed away, Obama commemorated his life with a picture of…himself, looking up at the moon.

The Polaroid camera filled the niche of instant gratification.

… at being President in a country near you!

Fans of "Blazing Saddles" will remember Cleavon Little as the sheriff taking himself hostage. That was the impression that fist came to my mind after hearing President Obama's plan to normalize relations with Communist Cuba.

But, did the President take himself hostage? Just his credibility (if there were any left!) Step into the Wayback Machine with me to 2009:

President Obama marked his 100th day in office Wednesday by holding a prime-time news conference from the White House. Obama said the Bush administration’s use of waterboarding was torture…

OBAMA: What I’ve said — and I will repeat — is that waterboarding violates our ideals and our values. I do believe that it is torture. I don’t think that’s just my opinion; that’s the opinion of many who’ve examined the topic. And that’s why I put an end to these practices.

At the very beginning of his presidency, Obama made known his erroneous and disparaging views on enhanced interrogation, falsely calling it torture, which has specific meaning and connotation around the planet, casting the 'land of the free and the home of the brave' as being morally equivalent with nations that pr actice genuine torture.

There was much public debate about the subject in 2009. A number of reporters volunteered to be waterboarded, (more reporters were waterboarded than terrorists, it turns out!) The lines were drawn. The Left disparaged everything George W. Bush did, so there was no reasoning with them. The furor eventually died down and people were soon inundated with a barrage of scandals, economic malaise and foreign policy debacles unabated by a White House obsessed with celebrities and golf, with an occasional funeral selfie.

President Obama and his sycophantic supporters have made the argument ad nauseum, that since the House failed to pass a certain Senate bill, within a certain amount of time, that President Obama was free to act on his own to unilaterally "fix" the immigration problem. Conservatives, however, keep bringing this "Constitution" thingy into the argument.

Where in the Constitution does it say that any particular piece of legislation passed in the Senate must be voted on in the House within a certain amount of time, or the President gets a free pass to write his own legislation? Moreover, all the faux indignation and self righteous intonation of "two whole years", "seventeen months*", or "514 days", since the Senate passed an immigration bill, completely overlooks the fact that the House did pass a number of immigration reform bills which Senator Harry Reid (Dimbulb- Searchlight) refused to bring up for a vote in the US Senate. The fact that your opponents will not necessarily vote on a bill they disagree with,  also does not give you carte blanche to do whatever you please.

Even though there is no "shot clock", "pass them or else" time limit on Senate bills, you'd think that sooner or later, the US Senate might get around to actually passing a budget.

Statement by President Barack Obama on Attack in Selma, AL

Source: WH, 11-18-1962

I strongly condemn today’s terrorist attack, the burning of a black church in Selma, which killed four innocent people, and injured several more. There is and can be no justification for such attacks against innocent civilians. The thoughts and prayers of the American people are with the victims and families of all those who were killed and injured in this horrific attack and in other recent violence. At this sensitive moment in Selma, it is all the more important for blacks and Klan leaders and ordinary citizens to work cooperatively together to lower tensions, reject violence, and seek a path forward towards peace.

Fortunately, our leaders back then did not suffer under a sense of false moral equivalency.

Cross posted at Proof Positive

Cross posted at Proof Positive

By Proof

One thing that ought not to surprise us, but still does, is Barack Obama's uncanny ability to tell whoppers with a straight face. Alongside "the police acted stupidly" and "If you like your doctor you can keep him", are his remarks over the resignation of attorney general Eric Holder. Via the Washington Post:

And through it all, he's shown a deep and abiding fidelity to one of our most cherished ideals as a people, and that is equal justice under the law.

George Zimmerman and Darren Wilson might have something contrary to say about that. Justice for Black Panthers, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Henry Louis Gates…what do all these heroes of  the oxymoronically named Obama Justice Department have in common?

As younger men, Eric and I both studied law, and I chose him to serve as attorney general because he believes, as I do, that justice is not just an abstract theory, it's a living and breathing principle. It's about how our laws interact with our daily lives. It's about whether we can make an honest living…

An honest living? Apparently the answer to that was "no".