HALF-FULL REPORT 08/09/13

OK – it’s the middle of August, and it’s time for a Fun HFR.  Are you old enough to remember The Coasters?
 

 
Growing up in the Fifties, we knew all their songs by heart, like Searchin’, Poison Ivy, and Yakety-Yak.  And who could forget Charlie Brown?  Every high school had a class clown, and the Coasters’ classic was about him. 

This week, their Golden Oldie became President Zero’s theme song.  Watch and listen to The Coasters’ performing it on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand in March of 1959, to understand why:

All of a sudden, everybody’s picking on our dunce of a president. On Monday (8/05), a George Mason University study showed that Zero is now the most popular butt of late-night show jokes, including Letterman, Leno, Fallon, and Kimmel.   On Tuesday (8/06), he gave a gaffe-tastic interview with Jay Leno, saying, e.g., Charleston SC and Jacksonville FL were ports on the Gulf of Mexico. 

Last week (8/01), Russia’s Czar Putin I gave Edward Snowden asylum after Zero begged him not to – flipping Zero the finger in front of the entire world.  Tough Guy Zero fought back this week (8/06) by "snubbing" Putin and refusing to meet with him as scheduled at the G-20 in September.  The Russian press reported the Kremlin was "disappointed", but actually, Pootie and everyone else in Moscow is laughing their heads off.  Their contempt for Zero is boundless.

Cartoonists are having a field day making fun of Zero’s wimping out regarding the "threat" of Al Qaeda’s "chatter."  Such as:

And then there’s Sama…

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Sama Elmasry is a voluptuous and extremely popular Egyptian entertainer – and much more so this week with her latest video that’s gone over-the-top viral in Egypt and across the Arab world.  You gotta prepare yourself for this as it’ll blow you away.  This is the most extraordinary political video of modern times.

Before you watch it, here’s the context.  A mass uprising in 2011succeeded in overthrowing the corrupt rule of US-backed Hosni Mubarak and the Egyptians got their first actual elections in 5,000 years of history.  But the best organized folks were the Islamist radicals of the Moslem Brotherhood, so they won with its leader, Mohammed Morsi inaugurated as president on June 30, 2012.

Morsi granted himself unlimited powers as the Brotherhood made it increasingly clear they would be forcing Sharia radical Moslem law upon Egyptians.  On the first anniversary of Morsi and the Brotherhood coming to power (last June 30), protests exploded all over Egypt demanding an end to Morsi-Brotherhood-Sharia rule. 

When Morsi refused cooperation with the protestors – numbering in the millions – on July 3 the Egyptian Army, led by General Abdul Fatah al-Sissi, placed Morsi under house arrest, forcibly removed the Brotherhood from power, and installed an interim government with Chief Supreme Court Judge Adly Mansour as acting president.

The next day, July 4, Zero issued a statement denouncing the military’s "arbitrary arrest" of Morsi.  Saying he was "deeply concerned," he demanded the return of "full authority" to Morsi’s "democratically elected civilian government."

Millions of Egyptians responded with rage, contempt, and disgust towards Zero.  The depth of their revulsion is expressed by Sama.

Understand that what happened in Egypt last month was an Arab revolution against radical Sharia Islam.  A revolution that succeeded in overthrowing a Sharia Moslem Brotherhood government.  This is a BFD.  And Egyptians feel the President of the United States spat on them for it.  They hate his guts.  Grasp this fully:  Arab Moslem Egyptians hate Obama’s guts for his being on the side of radical Sharia Moslems.

Now you’re ready for Sama.  Your jaw is still going to drop.  She calls him a terrorist, a dirty man, a stupid bad man, a jerk, and disgusting, while portraying him as a Osama bin Laden look-alike and a baby in diapers.  She calls the US Ambassador Anne Patterson a "bitch woman."  She uses the F word towards him, explicitly and unstated ("Obama, your father, mother" is a literal translation of the traditional Arabic insult with the F word unspoken).  There’s more.  Enjoy.  Millions of Arabs are.

Sama Elmasry is the HFR Hero of the Week.

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Wasn’t it the sales of Indulgences that prompted Martin Luther to launch the Protestant Reformation?  Catholic doctrine specified that for service to the Church, the Pope could grant a remission of punishment for sin (i.e., less time in Purgatory), called an Indulgence.  The practice had become thoroughly corrupt by Luther’s time, with Papal agents called Pardoners selling Indulgences to raise money for most anything, with the more money you gave, the quicker you got a straight shot to Heaven.

And so it was that in the evening of All Saints Day, October 31, 1517, Luther – a priest and professor of theology – nailed a protest against Indulgences on the door of All Saints Church or Schlosskirche (Castle Church) in Wittenberg, Germany (halfway between Berlin and Leipzig), handwritten in Latin and known to history as the Ninety-Five Theses.

With that, the Reformation, the great rebellion against Catholic corruption that metastasized into one against all Catholics, began.

So when does our Reformation begin, a great rebellion against Democrat corruption?  Selling indulgences to their constituencies – tax breaks, subsidies, payoffs – is what Democrats specialize in.  But this week, you’d think the final straw came, as it did for Luther when Pope Leo X sold indulgences indiscriminately for money to rebuild St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and asked in Thesis 86:

"Why does the Pope, whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build the basilica of St. Peter with the money of poor believers rather than with his own money?"

We need a Luther to place a protest on the Capitol Steps asking:  "Why do our Mandarins in Congress receive an ObamaCare Indulgence, so that they do not have to pay the Obamacare health insurance costs they require of long-suffering taxpayers who pay their huge salaries inflated far beyond their worth?"

This is essentially the question the Wall Street Journal asked this week (8/07), in discussing how Zero is enabling Congress to weasel out of Obamacare.  The WSJ summed up Congress’ bailout for Members and staffers regarding O-care thus:  "Illegal dispensations for the ruling class, different rules for the hoi polloi."

We have a Federal Government of crooks and cheats.  Where’s America’s Luther to declare taxpayers have no moral obligation to obey such a corrupt government’s edicts?

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This is a surprise?  The IBD disclosed on Wednesday (8/07) that Obamacare Poses a Massive Privacy Risk.  Who would have ever guessed?  Of course it does, it’s part and parcel of the Surveillance State’s purpose to control and know about every aspect of our lives.  "Nothing is private" was the dictum of Lenin – as it is of Zero and the Washington Fascisti.

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Let’s get out of the DC sweatbox and look at what’s happening on the other side of the Pond to ask:  Why is Spain declaring war on Britain?

Gibraltar has been British since the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 – 300 years.  Its population of 30,000 British citizens living in its 2.6 square miles govern themselves with their own government and currency (the Gibraltar pound), other than defense which is handled by London.  Repeatedly they have voted to retain their status as a British Territory, with no desire whatever to become a part of Spain, as Madrid hysterically demands.

For the past while, Spain has been engaging in a campaign of escalating harassment of Gibraltar – prompting, at last, Britain to announce yesterday (8/08) that next Monday (8/12) the sending of Royal Navy warships, including the aircraft carrier Illustrious, to its besieged colony.   

The London Telegraph is denouncing Spain this week (8/08) for "acting like a schoolyard bully" over Gibraltar – which sounds like whining as Spain is a two-bit power compared to Britain.  Strange also that the Telegraph writer, Niles Gardner, doesn’t mention an additional provocation – that of Spain selling $225 million worth of Mirage F1 fighter planes to Argentina with which to attack and harass the Falklands.

Stranger still is the inability of London – MI6 (the Brit CIA) in particular – to take the offensive and put Spain of the defensive regarding its colonies virtually within eyesight of Gibraltar.

From the Rock of Gibraltar you can see across the Strait of Gibraltar (the entrance to the Mediterranean) to Africa and the coastline of Morocco.  Except that the coastline doesn’t belong all to Morocco.  Between the Strait and Morocco’s border with Algeria, the coast contains a series of Spanish colonies collectively known as the Plazas de Soberania – Places of Spanish Sovereignty in Morocco.

Wholly enclosed within the land and territorial waters of Morocco, they are "a part of Spain in all respects," including being part of the European Union and the EU Schengen trading area.  The two largest colonies are Ceuta, which has 80,000 Spanish citizen inhabitants in its 7 square miles, and Melilla, which has 75,000 in its less than 5 square miles.

There are three others – two of which are tiny islands right off the Moroccan coast:  Peñón de Alhucemas or Lavender Rock, and Islas Chafarinas.  The third — Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera – is joined to the coast by a sand isthmus, the world’s shortest land border, less than 300 feet.  All three are military garrisons, to which no civilians are allowed to travel, with the waters patrolled by the Spanish navy.

How duck-soup easy would it be for the Royal Navy to assist Moroccans in asserting sovereignty – which Morocco claims – over Spain’s colonies in their country?  Spain is open-sesame kick-me vulnerable right on the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar.  It’s about time the Brits started playing hardball with the Spaniards.  And that couldn’t make folks in Morocco happier.

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Back to some more fun.  Being a bureaucrat or working for the government makes anyone stupid, even Chinese. 

When Andy Borowitz wrote a gag column in Tuesday’s (8/06) New Yorker website on how Jeff Bezos made an online Amazon shopping error and bought the WaPo by mistake – to which he had been oblivious until "he saw an unusual charge for two hundred and fifty million dollars on his American Express statement" – the Chicom geniuses at the Xinhua state news agency and the People’s Daily reported it for real.

Everyone in Hong Kong is having a great laugh over it since the South China Morning Post told what happened.

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And lastly, how about some fun over at The Hillary Project – a site dedicated to preventing the PIAPS from ever residing in the White House again.  Click on "Games" in the top bar and you get to play Slap Hillary.  Click the Slap Hillary icon and you get to slap her silly as much as you want.

You’ll get tired of it quickly – but the real enjoyment is how much this annoys the libtards, like those at CBS News.  Fred Wilcox, The Hillary Project’s founder, responds:  "The Clintons and their followers are going to lecture us on the treatment of women?  Thank you for sharing."

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Oh, one last thing before we say goodnight for the week.  A dear friend of mine, with whom I started Students for Laissez-Faire back in 1968 at the University of Hawaii, Vonnie Brenno, has become an artist of truly great talent.  She has taken "photo-realism" to a whole new level.  Her paintings look like photographs from a distance, but a gifted painting close up.

Vonnie is a TTPer of long standing, and she’d like her fellow TTPers to be aware of her new website, vonniebrennocameron.com.  Very cool, Vonnie.