Friday, April 15, 2011

Moe Marr--My HERO!


Every so often I like to take a 'controversial' position. My Stalinist wife and daughter think that I have political Turrets Syndrome and try to keep me locked in the garage when we have company. I'll admit it, I'm a bit right of center but given the current state of affairs what sensible person could be otherwise? In fact, I've become convinced that a reelection of The Worst President In American History and a sufficient quantity of his extremist Commiecrat buddies will be the end of this country as a free and prosperous nation. They've done so much damage in just the last two and a half years and are making proposals that show that they are committed to even worse policies that we need to embrace anything or anyone, regardless of who they are, who will serve to further discredit The Worst President In American History and his clique of clueless radicals and contribute to their defeat next year.

In my last post, written six weeks ago (yes, I'm lazy) I opined about the wisdom of calling for Gaddafi's ouster and then not backing the rebels, leaving an angry maniac in power with revenge on his mind. Because I assume that people who have clawed their way into power have some kind of expertise in strategy and diplomacy calling for Gaddafi's ouster and then leaving the rebels on the ground to be slaughtered was as bad a policy as I could imagine. But of course The Worst President In American History and his pathetically incompetent Sec Of State have so far exceeded my estimation of how bad these Ivy League half-wits can screw things up that I'm worried that my raging tirade against them a few weeks ago might be mistaken by some for implicit support.

Who would have imagined that they would intervene and figure out a way to lose? In my wildest dreams I couldnt have imagined such a shameful display of cowardice and bungling as the clownish antics of our pathetic Sec Of State, the Arab League, the UN, and NATO as their feeble and confused intervention advertises the flagrant weakness of the 'developed nations' to the hungry dictators of the world. The elitist dopes running the US and NATO were reading 'Rules For Radicals' when they should have been reading Sun Tzu, Zinn instead of Gibbon. Thanks to the takeover of the 'elite' universities by the politically correct America-hating radical Stalinists critical thought and even common sense have been completely abandoned by our Yale and Harvard graduated leaders. The bungling series of missteps in the Middle East could only have been committed by people who have NO knowledge of history.

'Kinda' bombing somebody is worse than not bombing them at all. Especially if that 'somebody' blew up an airplane full of your citizens the last time you bombed him. Gaddafi has some other issues; getting kicked off a UN Human Rights Council that includes such sterling examples as China, Russia and Cuba points to a troubled human rights record; he's a transvestite who has a forty-member buxom virgin (yeah sure they are) security squad; his delightful son and heir promised 'rivers of blood' will flow, and its a promise that's likely to be kept; there are a whole host of reasons to not like this guy.

And one big reason to like him; he is revealing the absurd fiction of NATO, an organization unable to mount a coordinated and effective military effort even on such a microscopic scale; he is underlining and capitalizing the complete cluelessness and lack of competence of The Worst President In American History and his pathetic Sec Of State. If our country is to be saved sacrifices must be made. For that reason I am hoping for the day when Gaddafi's forces brush aside the abandoned and betrayed rebels and take control of Benghazi. They were walking dead men anyway; they listened to Hillary Clinton and now they're going to die. It will take a year to wind down the Peace Symposiums at the UN and an olive branch could be held out to Gaddafi in thye form of returning his treasured seat at the UN Human Rights Council.

Gaddafi will recover politically and socially but The Worst President In American History will not. The coming elections in Egypt and its emergence as an Islamic Republic allied with Iran, the fall of the rebels in Libya, the bloody triumph of the Syrians over their own hapless citizens and the slide of Iraq into the arms of Iran will point out what a complete and total FAILURE The Worst President In American History's foreign policy, and especially his foreign policy in the Middle East, has been. With Moe-marr cruising the streets of Tripoli in what appears to be a wardrobe he purchased at the Michael Jackson Estate Sale waving and blowing kisses can anyone be befuddled enough to still think that The Worst President In American History is anything but that? Thanks Moe-marr and keep on smiling...President Trump will settle the bill later.

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Al Jazeera? Now THAT'S News!


Hillary Clinton is right. Al Jazeera does have 'real news'. It isnt like the fake news we are getting from our news media. What is it about that dandy Al Jazeera journalism that Madame Secretary is so taken with? The anti-semetic, anti-Israel rants? Possibly, but somehow I dont think that's what she's talking about. I think Hillary was just doing the lefty-elitist-Yale-radical-arrogant-egotistical-politically-correct suck-up to Muslims. Its Muslim so it must be good.

But like a blind Justice Dept. official finding an ACORN ballot, like a stopped watch syncing with the correct time for a minute, Dame Clinton has stumbled into the truth. As far as the Libyan story goes the US media, from Fox to MSNBC, is total and complete hogwash and Al Jazeera is telling the truth.

The Western media is broadcasting the hand-wringing leaders of NATO as they talk endlessly about 'no-fly zones' and 'military options' as though these pack of spineless multiculturalists were gearing up for a bit of Blitzkrieg. Its all hot air given a tenuous reality by the solemness of the pronouncements. However, its clear that they will watch the Libyan people be massacred under their noses and are not going to do anything or lift one single finger. Now we have a situation where US interests have been put on the line by a bigmouth president who likes to flap his gums and then do absolutely nothing. The 'Give Peace A Chance' crowd was able to bamboozle Ben Ali out of Tunisia and Mubarak out of Egypt after an alarming series of flubs and missteps. They thought they could do the same with Gadaffy-duck. So they made the same braying noises telling him to step down and come on over to the Hague for a nice twenty-year-long war crimes trial (ala Milosevic) and expected him to come crawling.

But Gadaffy-duck was not educated at Harvard or Cambridge. He didnt do the seminar on advanced diplomacy at the Sorbonne. When he first took power he surrounded himself with Soviet bodygaurds and acted as a Mediterranean Fidel, invading his neighbors and fomenting revolts and terrorism at every opportunity, aided and abetted by his KGB handlers. Then after Reagan bombed him he retreated into insanity and cowardice and kept his nose clean. He was afraid of Reagan, sent troops to Desert Storm and was afraid of W. Libya was forgotten and gained enough respectability to be given a seat on the UN Human Rights Commission by a doting diplomatic community. Of course the Western media never wrapped their minds around the concept that a groovy, flamboyantly-dressed, Third World leader who talked of 'Jamahira', sharing, brotherhood, peace, might be an evil, vile, hate-filled dictator whose people hated his guts.

Libya looked so permanent. Egypt can fall. Tunisia? Sure. A whole long list of Arab states are on the death-watch list from Oman to Saudi Arabia. But not Libya. But Gadaffy-duck wasnt counting on Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera showed what flimsy houses of cards these authoritarian Arab regimes were. The second the old regimes tried to get really tough the 'World Community' stepped in. No, no, no! Dont be brutal. With their hands securely tied the more moderate regimes collapsed. The crowd was willing to go all the way and the police forces were ordered to hold back. What kind of a fool is going to put his life on the line following orders like that? You either kick ass or you leave. The cops took a powder, as anyone given an order inspired by Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama is obliged to do if they want to survive.

But in Libya they got the Al Jazeera message. The people rose against the hated regime. They killed the informers and party hacks and it looked as though the regime was on its last legs. An obviously stoned Gadaffy-duck would do some bhong-hits and go out in front of the cameras and rail against Al Qaida, drugged-out foreigners and George W Bush. His ultra-creepy son Sayif, who had his mega-million dollar pad in London ripped off in a storm of fake outrage by politicians who will likely turn it into a secret party pad, went on TV and threatened to kill everybody. Well, that's a sign of the end, isnt it?

But now viewers of Al Jazeera are seeing something completely different. They are seeing that Sayif was not talking out of his hat, he is coming to kill everybody who had the urge to commit suicide by protesting his family's rule. The Libyan dictator, after a few weeks of chaos, has gotten his act together even as the foolish Obama calls daily for his resignation. Brutal counterattacks have begun to get rolling. Tanks, aircraft and foreign mercenaries given carte blanche to kill anyone they feel like killing. Arms and mercenaries are arriving from Syria and Iran without the Western media making a squeak of protest. The volume of the hand-wringing hasnt changed in content or tone.

The truth that Al Jazeera is reporting for everyone to see is that if you have the ruthless will to slaughter your own people, and troops who will follow any order, no matter how savage, you can overcome this 'democracy movement'. Furthermore, no one will do a single thing to stop you. The traitorous lefties have so neutered the politicians in the 'civilized' countries, the brains of these 'leaders' have been so softened by their 'elite' educations, that they are completely incapable of taking any kind of action, even when their vital national interests are at stake. Now the world is going to sit back and watch the very public video-slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands more will soon be fleeing on camera to squalid refugee camps just across the border and an entire nation will soon be living in stark terror, their lives dependent on the will of their angry masters. Within a year the oil companies will be back. So will the parasitic ex-pats. Have they even kicked Libya off the UN Human Rights Committee?

And what lesson will Gadaffy-duck have learned? Only that Iran and Syria will act when its necessary and Barak Obama and NATO will not. This vicious, brutal murderer has now been given a graphic lesson that as far as Europe and the US is concerned he can do anything he wants without any consequence. That floppy-eared, incompetent bozo in the White House will listen to Farrakhan, a good bud of Gadaffy-duck, before he'll listen to his country's interests and is too feeble to take any action in any event. Obama doesnt even recognize that his country has interests that need to be protected. As for the pathetic Hillary, a person who in the middle of this carnage is writing ponderous articles about how these Middle Eastern mobs need to consider women's rights, nothing more need be said. She is a hopelessly befuddled academic mediocrity. These 'Green' lefties have given Gadaffy-duck the 'Green' light to do whatever he wants to do. Sending hit squads to murder exiled opponents of his regime in European cities in public and broad daylight? Sending terrorists into crowds to kill hundreds of people? Why not? Who's going to do anything about it? The Dutch? The Norwegians? Hillary Clinton?

This is like the end of the Roman Empire under the Emperor Honorius. An aging and soft population living in an oppressive welfare state run by a hopeless incompetent whose obsession is with court politics renounces childbearing and militarism and is set upon by its savage, brutal, young neighbors. Al Jazeera has broadcast the gutless cowardice of the US and NATO to the world for every eye to see. It only remains for the empty-shell regimes of Europe to crumble under the onslaught from without. Its a story as old as human history.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Critical Mass


In 'Decline And Fall' Gibbon at one point remarked that to a common citizen at the time of the Roman Empire the rule of the worst emperors appeared as powerful and stable as those of the greatest. People couldnt see the slow decline of Roman power on a day to day basis. But all of a sudden the barbarians were at the gates. Everything that seemed so permanent turned out to be resting on foundations that had been undermined.

Its called 'Critical Mass'. The laws of physics can be applied to history. A compromised system can keep working on momentum for a while but a point arrives where it stops working. The Bastille falls, the Gothic mercenaries mutiny. The old certainties collapse, the old relationships are instantly redefined.

Now, the United States, the preeminent power in the world from the beginning of World War 2, in the hands of a ruling class that has become effete and ignorant and led by a president who is misguided and talentless, has declined to point where the order engendered by its former power and greatness is collapsing around it. Symptoms of that collapse echo in its own domestic affairs as the absurdities of the welfare state cause chaos and misery.

For eight years the leftists, in the name of opposing the hated US hegemony over the world, made, in their minds, common cause with the Islamic nihilists who sought the overthrow of the Pax Americana in the Middle East. Of course the Ivy League-educated were unaware of the savage nature of the Islamic mobs that have now been unleashed; it is the hallmark of an elite education that one not be judgmental of different cultures and realize that there is no objective good or evil when it comes to a conflict between belief systems. We think that strip clubs are constitutionally protected free speech, they think that six year old girls should have their clitorises removed with an exacto knife by the local witch woman so that they wont enjoy sex and become whores. Its just a simple difference of opinion.

Unfortunately, in a Madrassa-based curriculum the accent is less on mutual understanding and conflict resolution and more on killing the verminous infidel. Now, as we watch the Middle East dissolve into flame and chaos, as our 'leaders' blurble on about 'the rise of democracy' and stand with their hands clasped deploring violence, we see the end of sixty years of US influence in the ME. We'll soon get to see what these people are like without the restraint of colonialism or imperialism or whatever the hell it was that we forced on them. I'll bet their natural proclivities arent towards 'democracy'. A brief glance at Arab history before the arrival of the brutal Ottoman Turks in the 16th century, which cowed them into submission for three centuries, is a tableau of murderous, unstable regimes; vendettas and blood feuds conducted through centuries; human rights not even dreamed of by the terrified serfs who lived hypnotized in an Islamic torpor until some maniac stirred them to mindless violence for a brief moment.

Who cares, anyway? Well...we should care a whole bunch. The same geniuses who dismantled our human intelligence capabilities, stood by grinning and winking while our national secrets were posted on the internet, and who ignored the true nature of our adversaries, at the same time these visionaries very vigorously pursued a policy of suppressing energy development in our own country. Coal, petroleum, natural gas, and nuclear power were all attacked by a bureaucracy that was going to use ample government subsidies to create a revolution in 'renewable' fuels. They were saving the planet. After spending tens of billions of dollars and sacrificing all domestic energy development for nearly three decades the production of energy overseas is increasingly in the hands of thugs whose negotiating and conflict resolution skills are minimal but who understand weakness when they see it. Persuading them to 'listen to reason' might be a bit tough. As Gibbon remarked, 'Persuasion is the tactic of the weak but the weak are rarely persuasive.'

Now our government, mortgaged to the hilt and hamstrung by commitments to subsidize everyone and everything, has resorted to the final poison pill that clueless socialists always resort to in the end...they're printing money. With no rise in economic activity this wave of luckybux has touched off an anemic suckers rally on Wall Street, a rally about to be bludgeoned into reality by soaring energy prices.

A black hole has opened and all the old realities are being sucked into its vast gravity field. Public employee unions, once sacrosanct, find themselves painted into a political corner. They are trying to hold on to a position that has ceased to exist. That their contracts are as worthless as any of the other flood of words issuing from the mouths of the Best And The Brightest is obvious to everyone. The situation has changed. They ignored the actuarial tables for decades...until critical mass arrived. Contract canceled.

What is money but a contract? The words of our ruling class are increasingly seen to be worthless; their economic statistics, their spitting on ancient alliances, the solvency of all their social engineering schemes, their budgets, the census they just took, their phony poll numbers, even the data from the weather agencies have become conflicting and politically biased. If your word is worthless then your contracts are worthless. If your word is worthless and your contracts are worthless then your money is worthless.

The Obama Implosion continues.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Pretzel Logic


Has anybody noticed that any time any Democrat talks about anything involving a number its either been made up out of thin air or is so twisted and convoluted that it is worthless? The 'raw' numbers on unemployment bear no relation to the 'adjusted' ones released by the Labor Dept. The 'raw' weather data bears no relationship to the twisted numbers that are used to try to make the case for Global Warming. Most especially the president's budget baloney is so reprehensibly dishonest that even the foolish clowns on Wall Street, frolicking in a wave of Quantitative Easy Money printed up fresh by the Fed, are asking questions about the ludicrous assumptions and ridiculous 'cuts' contained in a document so mendacious that BJ Clinton's autobiography is a masterpiece of honesty by comparison.

Unemployment and almost anything related to the economy is one of the most distorted parts of the Obama narrative. The feeble 'recovery' of profits isnt related to any increase in economic activity. Housing starts are down, foreclosures are up, fewer goods are being sold, many more people are out of work or under-employed than at any time since the Depression that the government caused in the 1930's by adopting similar policies to those that are driving the current one. Two years out the Stimulus and the entire Keynesian paradigm has obviously failed but it is still the Party Line as the Obamunists wax eloquent about 'the recovery' that doesnt exist.

The worst lie coming from the economic geniuses of The Regime is their chronic understating of the inflation rate. They accomplished this by not counting food, health care, energy and taxes in the calculations. So while Chase Bank rakes in billions and borrows money at zero percent from the Fed, while Archer Daniels Midland collects billions in agricultural and ethanol subsidies, while all public employees get hefty pay increases, Grandma and Grandpa on Social Security have effectively had their benefits frozen while the prices of things they buy shoot up. So the Obamunists dont want to talk about the agencies whose funding they have doubled in the last two years; whenever anybody mentions cuts they point to Grandma and Grandpa and say, "This is a problem with entitlements." Its not. Social Security is funded by a tax and is running a tiny deficit, amply covered by the IOU's written by Congress as they looted the trust fund. Medicare has risen somewhat but Medicaid...free health care to illegal aliens and welfare recipients...has risen by 40% in two years.

Another rising cost mentioned by NO ONE in government or business but mentioned very much by regular people is what is happening to interest rates. Not mortgage rates, which are low for the solvent cash-rich few who can qualify, but credit card and consumer loan rates. My wife and I had never been late on any of our payments on a card that charged 6% interest on balances. Imagine our surprise we received a letter telling us that the rate was hiked to 13%. When we complained to our friends they laughed at us. People are paying 25%, 30%, I even heard a story from a bankruptcy lawyer of a 37% rate. These rates would have gotten a usurer crucified in the Roman Empire, an entity not noted for its debtor-friendly policies. People who ran huge balances and retired that debt occasionally by refinancing their mortgage and rolling their credit card debt into the new mortgage have now been caught holding the bag. They are barely paying the interest on huge balances. They are effectively slaves of a bank that can borrow money interest-free from the Fed. The Financial Reform Bill passed last year not only didnt do anything about this it made it worse by shutting down competition between banks.

So as we look at a budget, described by The President this morning as 'bare bones' and 'filled with cuts', but which in effect continues the current mad dash to insolvency you have to ask, "Do these guys believe their own numbers? Are they that stupid or do they just think we're that stupid?" What did they think all that ruckus last year was about? Do the Dems think that all that has just gone away, that we cant read our doom in the pages of this budget? There are still people in this country who can read history and a balance sheet. They rioted last year at the polls. The Obamunists think that they can dance to the polls on a wave of ignorant voters and phony ballots like they did in 2008...the phony polls in the NYT and Time magazine prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt but like any other number put out by liberals Obama's solid shot at reelection is a chimera generated out of thin air. Our strength is that the libs actually believe their own lies.

Saturday, November 6, 2010

Republiclowns Fail To Fail


The polls were surging. The voters were furious at the failed left-wing economic policies and unpopular legislation nationalizing health care the supposedly centrist Demo-rats had arrogantly foisted on this nation. In the Dem landslide of 2008 the Republiclown Party had been reduced to the status of one of those fake opposition parties that dictators keep alive to pretend that their country isnt really a one-party state. If the Obamunists had had any sense they would have thrown a few scraps to the cringing cowards across the aisle to keep them quiescent. Thats what LBJ did when he had a similar majority. But LBJ had spent a lifetime shepherding legislation through congress. He knew the shifting nature of coalitions and how to horse-trade with everybody.

The Obama Gang, clueless academics from universities where no opposition is tolerated, was cut from a different bolt of cloth, and the people who ran the new Dem majority in congress were different as well. They had the whip-hand and being ideological types they didnt respect their opponents; they hated them and viewed them as enemies. Pathetic enemies with no power and no hope of ever regaining power. In one of the most foolish political mistakes ever made the Dems used their ascendancy in both houses to lock the Republiclowns completely out of the legislative process. So instead of humble eager-to-please aisle-crossers they created a unified, angry bloc of opponents. The Dems forced the Reps to stand up straight and show some gumption for once.

Something else was happening in the country. Without any prompting from anyone from any part of the ruling class the citizens of the country, longtime conservatives who had abandoned McLame in 2008 and independents who had gone for the feelgood advertising campaign of Hope And Change arose, furious at the radicals in the now wholly Dem-run government who were enacting outrage after outrage while the economy crumbled. The Tea Party was born from a rant by Rick Santelli on CNBC early in the process that went viral on U-Tube, an ominous sign of the declining power of the Official Media to control what people get to see and hear about. This rebellion was dismissed as a few of the usual malcontents by all the Inside-The -Beltway types in both parties. They all were upset and frightened as townhalls turned into angry yelling mobs and legislators were forced to turn and run from their furious constituents.

In ultra-blue New Jersey, the same insurgents overthrew a well-entrenched, generations-old Demo-rat cleptocracy and installed a reformer who was ready to take on the establishment. In Massachusetts Ted Kennedy's old seat was taken in a surprise uprising by these very same people and virtually without any help from the confused DC Republiclowns. The Dem's arrogant folly of insulting Olympia Snowe and Lindsay Graham and their ilk became apparent when the 60-vote lock-solid, filibuster-proof Dem hold on the Senate disappeared. The health care nationalization bill had to be finagled through on a very suspicious procedural vote where the contents were keep secret so they could be rewritten later.

The anger grew. Obama and the elitist fools around them made political mistake after political mistake. Obama didnt even rise to the low standard set by the corrupt and incompetent BJ Clinton when it came to keeping up appearances. As the 2010 primary season approached the rebellion was faced with a question...stay in the liberal Republican Party and reform it from within or strike out as their own third party. The decision was made by the only two people with any claim to leadership that the new insurgents had; Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin.
They encouraged and supported insurgency against the decrepit Republiclowns.

Old liberal warhorses like Bennet in Utah, Murk-COW-ski in Alaska, McConnell's hand-picked stooge in Kentucky and The Weasel Crist in Florida, the mangy varmint who had sealed the deal for McLame in '08, were taken on in the primaries and defeated, along with many, many others. It was by no means total, plenty of insider Republiclowns survived but the party had taken a huge jump to the right. Candidates emerged to challenge old-time Dem stalwarts who had never run in a competitive election before.

The Republiclowns, eager as always to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, launched vicious attacks on conservatives in the primaries and refused to fund them in the election itself. Some candidates were considered so beyond the pale that they were openly attacked in the media by Republiclown operatives. The Republiclowns refused to nationalize the election by attacking Obama and the Demo-rats and their left-wing policies. That too was left to talk radio and people like Sarah Palin. Candidates like Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman in California never mentioned that their opponents were liberals or attacked any aspect of liberalism in the time-honored Republiclown mistake of debating after you accept your opponent's premises.

But in spite of the stupidity and cluelessness of the DC Republiclowns the wave could not be stopped. It didnt start in DC and no one from inside the beltway had any real influence over it. A great victory was won. A huge setback was dealt to the radicals and their feckless leader. A large group of energized and motivated conservatives will take their seats in congress in January. Boehner and McConnell, both fairly sensible and effective politicians had taken note of the feeling in the country and had used that emotion to make the best of the bad hands they had been dealt in '08.

Meanwhile the Republiclown bureaucracy, liberal and corrupt, had been handed a gift; a victory they did nothing to achieve. They immediately moved to insult and denigrate the people who had given them this gift. Why hadnt they won ten seats in the Senate instead of six? A hundred seats in the House instead of a mere sixty? It was those danged Tea Party extremists! If only we had had a few more spineless, wishy-washy candidates we would have won more, gotten our majority back in the Senate. Then they began announcing initiatives to make sure that Sarah Palin didnt get the nomination in 2012 and talking of bipartisanship to aid the failing Demo-rats.

But this is a new day. The time of the quibblers is over. As the Republiclown Party moved to the right the Demo-rats, their moderates massacred in the election, became a party dominated by ultra-blue-state politicians from safe districts, a very much more left-wing crewe than before. McLame's aisle that he crossed again and again has become like the Green Line in Beirut; you cross at your peril. Even Olympia Snowe, up for reelection in 2012 in a state that just elected a very conservative governor has to be mindful of a primary challenge and also of the fate of traitor weasels like Jumpin' Jim Jeffords, Arlen Sphincter and The Weasel Crist. But the main thing working against the libs now is that no one wants to bet their career on the inept political skills of Barak Obama, who is rapidly morphing into a tall, better-spoken version of Al Sharpton.

The coming fight will be for the whole enchilada. A reelection of Barak Obama will be the end for democracy and prosperity in this country forever. We must recapture the Senate and hold the gains in the House. This will be much harder if the fools who run the Republiclown National Committee remain undisturbed in their clueless incompetence. They cannot be allowed to inflict a Pawlenty or a Romney or any other equivocating moderate on the party as its nominee in 2012. The whole premise of Hope And Change has to be questioned and fought and defeated. The Republiclowns, inspired by their tremendous losses in '06 and '08, courted failure in this last election but they failed to achieve it. It has given them a new resolve that they wont be allowed to not fail again by a bunch of yahoos screaming about the Laffer Curve and massive program cuts. They're all about jobs...their jobs, their place at the trough and believe me, these pigs will bite, squeal, and totally sell-out to keep their noses in the mash.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Deficits Is Too Damned LOW!


I heard there was a Right Wing wave out there somewhere. The map on Fox glowed with what TV professionals call 'illegal red' ; a red so hot that it bleeds out of its borders on TV screens. It looked like somebody took a red paint bomb and threw it at the map. I guess I should congratulate all you Americans and share your happiness. But I'm not happy. I'm really upset.

Larry Sabato was on TV last night and very rightly noted that 'you never win them all'. He's right. There never was much hope for O'Donnell with both parties against her in an indigo-blue state that Jon Stewart described as a 'rest stop'. Westlemania didnt put the effete Connecticuttians in a headlock? Not surprised. The Reid machine goes into overdrive and crushes a housewife from Ely, Nevada? A bummer, but again the pros usually win against amateurs. Lousy Murk-COW-ski parlayed corrupt big donors and a vicious media into a win? Sad but I can deal with it.

Lots of good stuff happened, too! Barak Obama's home state turned red for the moment. What a humiliating defeat. The Ohioans seemed to have regained their sanity. Feingold got the boot. Even states like Michigan kicked the Dems in the pants. Old time Demo committee chairmen in the House were given their walking papers. We're all waiting for President Barry's press conference. Will he do a Clinton and triangulate a little? Not a chance. This election wiped all the pretend moderates off the Democrat landscape, leaving the Waxmans and Hoyers in charge. Nancy will probably retire to her latifundia in Napa and sip wine to the sound of whips smacking onto the backs of her illegal alien grape-pickers. Nan's replacement will be picked by our new Democratic Governor.

And that's why I'm sad. No, not because anyone appointed to replace her by our new gov will be even more obnoxiously loony than Nancy, look at the mutated pond he will have to select from, but because of who that new gov will be. The rest of the country realized they had been bamboozled by Hope And Change and moved to rectify that grievous error. Not us, not here. The same barrage of union-paid ads motivated the same crowd of simpletons to return just about every deranged left-wing radical to their rightful places in Sacramento and armed them with Prop 25, a measure that removed the 2/3 requirement to pass a state budget.

Jerry The Jerk. As if Arnold and this commie legislature wasnt bad enough. $40 billion in revenues, $60 billion in expenditures. If California was a business would you buy its stock? And that was the past. Arnold is a schmuck and a RINO, married to a Kennedy. He passed a Global Warming bill that makes the federal cap-and-tax bill look moderate. The voters were offered a chance to reject it yesterday but they rejected the rejection. As bad as The Governator has been his stupid excesses and crawling to the Dems are right-wing obstructionism compared to what's coming. As Arnold retires he should say only one thing, 'Apres moi, le deluge!'

Jerry The Jerk. The 2/3 requirement removed. A huge Dem majority in both houses of the legislature; all of them beholden to the greediest, most short-sighted public employee unions on the planet. Let me mention to you non-Californians who might not be up to speed on the nature of the Democrats who make up our legislature what a pack of criminally insane socialist radical idiots these guys are. Democrats in your state, the ones you think are extreme liberals, would be condemned as right-wing Tea Party extremists in this state. Money is no object, the laws of physics no barrier, common sense and logic are abandoned if the cause is sufficiently groovy. They're wrecking agriculture to save a handful of minnows; high-tech industries are fleeing Silicon Valley, even the film industry is being chased away by high taxes and ridiculous work rules.

Windmills and solar panels are heavily subsidized to produce 1% of the state's energy while coal and natural gas plants in other states produce the rest. AB32 will soon show the morons of this state that the Greenies mean to get them out of their cars and onto a nice, stinky, crowded bus but it wont matter because there wont be any jobs to commute to anyway. Who knows what new outrages Jerry The Jerk and Jerry's Kids in the legislature will come up with? They will enact every piece of the Obama agenda that the rest of the country rejected last night and more.

France? Italy? Greece? You think you've seen chaos? Hah! We're Americans! We can go crazier, make more insane demands, be more stupid and self-defeating, get more violent and still vote to re-elect the same pack of idiots to make the same gross errors. You think a 33% budget deficit is high? Well DEFICITS IS TOO DAMNED LOW!

So if you want to smoke some great bud or marry your same-sex life partner and then get him/her an abortion paid for by the taxpayer; if you want to see people who collect 110% of their pay in retirement paid for by taxpayers who have no pension other than Social Security; if you want to watch a crowd of naked aging hippies doing a nude bike ride and attacking any carbon-spewing motorist who dares honk at them; if you want to pay a couple of bucks more per gallon to stop Global Warming; if you want to see what it looks like for a civilization to come completely unglued then you should move here.

Monday, November 1, 2010

Waxman--Stop the Smears!


There's a new Tea Party-ish face in town. We all call him Charley! He's a fresh face with a winning smile and dazzling, hypnotic eyes! Waxman and the liberal media are trying to bring Charley down with personal attacks and ancient history but I can tell you its not going to work. From the gay bars on Santa Monica Boulevard, the Jewish old folks homes in the Fairfax District, through the mansions of Beverly Hills and Bel Air to the toney suburbs of Woodland Hills and Calabasas it seems Hank has worn out his welcome. Move over Waxman, Charley's in town!

OK, he partied in the sixties, we all did that, made some mistakes, but hey, 1969 was a long time ago! Not far enough away for Waxman's opposition research, apparently. Hey! He never was in the damned Tate house so stop the guilt by association! This election isnt about personalities, but issues!

When it comes down to it Charley is just a lot more rational than Hank. He cares about what you and I think and feel. I love his campaign slogan "I'm inside your head, man!" That's a guy who really cares. Hank's too busy investigating oil executives and baseball players to care about our petty concerns.

We want to send Charley to Capital Hill because we know he'll shake things up like never before. He's no RINO, heading for DC to make a deal with the libs. He wants to burn the place to the ground...I'm not kidding! That might be just what it needs. When Charley and his wonderful family get to town you can bet there will be many who sit up and take notice. He's not one to get lost in the Helter Skelter of political life. You can see he's pulling ahead in the polls. Even in this hard-core left-wing district the failure of Obamunism is so flagrant that these long-shot candidates are literally coming out of the woodwork. Yeah, I know Charley probably wouldnt have much appeal in your town, but this is Los Angeles. You should see the people we elect. Look at Hank! Charley might not be a Strict Constructionist in the usual sense but he's as good as its going to get in this district and, lets face it, he's got a way more realistic take on things than the professional politician Waxman.

So now we see that Charley is pulling away from the worn out ideas of Henry Waxman, a candidate so awful that just about anybody would be preferable. Just about.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Driving Lessons



Its been cloudy in LA recently. Light drizzle a lot of the time. Its only the end of October and there's already been nearly a half-inch of rain since the 'rainy season' began at the end of September. In a lot of places a half-inch of rain in a month or so would be cause for celebration but here people wander around wringing their hands asking 'when is this going to end?'

But Thursday's weather report showed a gap in the clouds for Friday! The news warned of massive traffic jams downtown because Obama's coming to town! Most of the time when the prez shows up we only get the traffic jam but never get to see him. California is usually a safe Demo state and the national parties use it as a cash cow. They do fundraisers here and ship the cash to the battleground states. Not this year. California is a battleground state this year. Both Babs Boxer and Jerry Brown are long past their 'sell by' date and even in this commie state the granola-eaters are off their feed and much less likely to vote than they were two years ago.

So Obama and the Dems announce an open-to-the-public presidential speech at USC, about fifteen miles from my house. I decided to go and my daughter Emily and her boyfriend Nate decided to come along. We didnt want to take a car into the predicted jam so we drove into Hollywood, parked and took the subway and a shuttle-bus to the event. We went through security in pretty good time.

The crowd was mainly USC students. There were a few always-scowling union types, all with t-shirts identifying the various groups they were associated with. I had had the foresight to wear my union t-shirt which caused puzzlement on a few faces. The Animation Guild Local 839 was a bit of an anomaly amongst all those SEIU and ASCME shirts and even though I could easily drop twenty five pounds as union t-shirt wearing types go I was svelte and skinny. What is it about union membership that makes you bloat? Maybe there's some money in the stimulus bill to study why that happens.

We tried to find a spot where we could see the podium. The event was in a quad, an open square,and whoever put it together hadnt considered the crowd at all. Apparently Obama can only be photographed from one angle, straight on. It makes sense when you consider that he has the two teleprompter screens that he turns back and forth to read from. What this means is that unlike every other event like this that I've ever been to the press stands were erected dead center in the quad. This blocked the view from a large part of the area and squashed the crowd into two packed groups along the sides. The podium was low on the steps of the building behind it. A bunch of people with Hope and Change signs were lined up behind the podium. Nice for the press, bad for the crowd.

We tried to get close but that was impossible so we finally found a little rise where we could get a view of the speakers through the heads in the crowd. By that time the show had started. They always lead off with the local activists. These people mistake shouting for oratory. The males bellow and the females attack your eardrums with shrill, high-pitched cliches that are so stupid that you're embarrassed to be in a crowd that isnt jeering at these idiots.

But the crowd wasnt listening enough to jeer or cheer. They were milling around, yakking, throwing the free water bottles around or just staring stupidly at each other. Not focused on the Center For Childrens Prosperity founder's heartfelt plea for more money from those evil rich people. Apparently the clueless evil rich people like the student body of USC who are paying $40k per annum to party in the groves of academe and who are just fine with their parents getting a big fat tax hike to support The Center For Childrens Prosperity and their ilk. They must have suspended classes that day to get this apple-cheeked, fashionably-dressed crowd of kiddies. Do universities still have classes on Fridays? Its an awful burden on the professors to not have a three day weekend to rest up from the grueling four-hour days they put in during the week and the students need some home time to download their term papers off the internet.

Then a local rock band came on. Fat white guys who did rock, rap, reggae...a wide range of styles, all of it bad. Emily and Nate, hardcore concert-goers, had their fingers in their ears. In the old days these buffoons would have been described as 'schleppers'; noisy, upbeat and awful! But they opened the real event. as the pain in our ears from the 'music' subsided the big names came on.

The first speaker was Kamila Harris, the Dem candidate for Attorney General, a woman so left wing that she had worn out her welcome in San Francisco. Thats left-wing. Her one aim in the campaign is to keep the Blue Staters focused on the 'D' next to her name and ignorant of her appalling record. The crowd treated her flat nasal whining with the contempt it deserved. No applause, no nothing.

Next was Jerry The Jerk (Jerry Brown to you out-of-staters) who has the same problem as Harris; anyone who knows what kind of a left-wing, incompetent, egotistical moron he is will be voting for his somewhat less liberal, possibly less incompetent but equally egotistical opponent. These USC kiddies were conceived long after Brown's disastrous two terms as governor and are too busy downloading free music to pay any attention to politics. Real Hope And Change types, Brown's core constituency. A couple of people clapped.

They should have had Jerry introduce Barbara Boxer but couldnt resist turning it over to another shouting nonentity, Hilda Solis, who completely lost the crowd within two seconds. But Babs arrived at the podium at last and began her rousing rhetoric. Babs is short. Too short for that venue and no one thought to bring a box for her to stand on. She was invisible to most of the crowd and her speaking style is monotonous and boring. Every so often she rises to an atonal squawk at the end of a sentence. Every word was a twenty-five year old potboiler progressivist cliche. The crowd was lost. Nobody came here to see any of these doofuses, of course, but even minimal courtesy was breaking down.

Finally Babs wrapped up and introduced The Man. The crowd perked up like the ears on a doberman when it hears the burglar jumping the fence. He's here! The first burst of actual enthusiasm occurred as El Presidente took his place between the teleprompters. People were climbing the trees in the quad and the crowd compressed forward. The speech began.

How did this guy ever get a reputation as a good orator? He has Jesse Jackson's policies but I've heard Jackson speak and now I've heard Obama speak and believe me there is NO comparison. The speech itself would have been a challenge to someone of Jackson's talents and was lead in the mouth of a much lesser speaker.

It turns out that the car is in the ditch and was so stuck there by the Bushies that when Obama got there he didnt have time to get the car out of the ditch but you see that when you want to move a car forward you put it in 'D' and backwards you put it in 'R'. The college-educated crowd was easily able to grasp this taut metaphor but by that point they werent listening.

OK dont listen to Kamila Harris or Jerry or Babs, that's understandable. But hadnt these people come to see Obama? The biggest cheer he got was when he arrived, always the sign of a bad show. In this milling crowd I was thinking about the driving metaphor...if the Republicans had driven the car forward into the ditch wouldnt putting the car in 'D' make it go deeper into the ditch? That seems to be the direction we're moving in with Obama. But I digress.

The most interesting thing about this whole speech was the complete lack of attention by the crowd. All the pleas to vote and tell all your friends to vote fell on deaf ears. I had gone to the first Tea Party rally on April 15th, 2009 and that small crowd, faced with what we all knew was the coming disaster, was focused and as enthused as it could be faced with the situation we were in. This Obama rally was nothing like that. This was a freak show. The crowd was here to see the Prez, not to listen to boring speeches. They saw him. That made them happy. But applause line after applause line got sparse applause; laugh line after laugh line got no laughs. This reminded me of a speech by Bob Dole I saw in the 1996 campaign. It was that bad.

I know this is anecdotal, that I'm often wrong, but I smell Dem disaster. The people at this rally were not filled with a grim resolve to go out and vote to save the Obamunist agenda. They didnt even have enough resolve even to listen to Obama when he was standing there right in front of them. There was no big traffic jam; the vast majority of the audience were USC students out for a lark. Will they vote? Not like 2008, you can be sure of that. The magic is gone, the dream has failed. The ADHD electorate barely remembers two years ago and they can clearly see the current failure. Obama's excuse that things were so bad when he arrived and that the Dems have made lots of progress fixing it got no applause at all, even from this crowd. They havent fixed anything. On November 2nd they will get skunked. Brown and Boxer will lose. The non-political default Democrats will not show up. They dont even want to think about whats going on around them. Bye bye Babs!

Thursday, October 21, 2010

The October Dip


Oh no! If you look at the polls it seems that there has been a minor 'counter wave' to the Republican wave of 2010. Some races that were Republican blowouts a couple weeks ago are now described as 'tightening up'. With the Dems making every political mistake in the book, with Obama running around the country saying things that can only be described as bizarre, with a raging population angry at just about everything the Demos have said or done in the last two years, with an economy that ensures that school-leavers and middle-aged downsize victims are looking at more or less permanent unemployment, what could be the cause of this unlikely surge towards the Party Of Compassion?

If you have a brain in your head you can see that nothing has changed in the political tide in the last year, except that people have gotten more mad and more frustrated with what has been going on. So where has this mysterious 'surge' come from? What has caused the tidal flow to start running in the direction of the Demos? All their negative attack ads? The ones in my state, Gollyvornia, have reached the point of absurdity. Barbara Boxer is attacking her opponent for supporting 'job-killing offshore oil drilling' and quotes the president of the Sierra Club to underline the seriousness of this charge. Its scary to live in a place where that is considered a winning argument. What kind of a moron do you have to be to swallow that? It turns out that Babs and Jerry Brown are the two most powerful engines of job creation since Henry Ford died.

With this Demo surge the Dems are acting very strangely. Instead of counterattacking into states that had formerly been leaning Republican that are now 'in play' according to the polls the Dems are sending their big guns and moola into places that have supposedly been sewed-up Blue. Why are they all going to Delaware? Did BJ Clinton hear about the herd of plump interns grazing in the fields just outside of Wilmington? Did Obama hear of a must-play golf course near Dover? Did Biden get lost trying to drive to West Virginia? If that creepy critter Coons had this seat in the bag why are the celebs all crowding into this hard-core Blue State?

And look at West Virginia. Manchin's numbers were tanking. All of a sudden some off-brand leftist group releases a poll that has him ten points ahead, it gets averaged into the RCP average and whoa! Manchin is ahead! There was some phony made-up story about Raece's ad agency casting 'hickey' actors but in a state worried about Cap And Trade anti-coal rules and super high unemployment is that 'hickey' piece of WaPo-NYT wonk-chow likely to change a single vote?

Here in my beloved home state of Gollyvornia there has been the same Demo bump but it seems to be sagging. Babs Boxer is a hard sell, probably because the assonance of her name makes it easy to snarl 'BAR-bra BO-xer!' in the ads attacking her. Even the most Photoshopped photos of her cant conceal her overripe condition and dwarf stature. Boxer has never polled at fifty percent. Now Fiorina is neck and neck and Babs knows that a low Demo turnout will Scott Brown her into the trash can of history.

Meanwhile back at the desert depression, there has been a mainstream media news blackout since Sharron Angle took the sniveling Majority Leader to the woodshed in their only debate. She's polling over fifty, the lines of Older White Males are around the block at the early voting stations and the hapless Reid campaign has shown its completely unable to come up with a new message that has any resonance. If there was a Dem surge surely the supposedly razor-tight Nevada Senate race would be up in the air. But it aint.

So what's with the Demo bump? Its easy. First, this happens in every election. In the last one there was a McLame bump a couple of weeks before the election. It was probably generated by a bunch of McLame-hating Tea Party-types who told the pollsters 'yeah, I guess I'll go vote for that moron' who were then counted as 'likely voters'. When it came right down to it they just couldnt get past the lines of glue-sniffing Hope And Change voters and the baseball-bat-wielding New Black Panthers to cast a vote for a stuttering liberal that everybody knew was going to get skunked.

The same thing is happening now. After being begged by Obama, Biden, BJ Clinton (not Hilly BTW), and every local Democrat that they can round up the Hope And Change voters are feeling guilty that they are having such ambivalent feelings about what's going on and are telling the pollsters that 'yeah, I guess I'll go vote for those morons.' So what has happened is that people who have seen that 800 number on their screen and picked up the phone and stayed on the line for the interview have included more Dems than there have been lately. This has generated a slight bump for the Dems.

The Dems need a bump like this two weeks out. What it does is generate money and volunteers for campaigns that are actually terminal. Sestak, Boxer, Feingold, Manchin, Murray all are watching the real numbers slip away. Boxer and Murray are also worried that the polls in their states will still be open while the Dem wipeout back East becomes crystal-clear, suppressing the Dem turnout in their states. The coming O'Donnell victory in Delaware could cause loses in Senate seats in CA and WA as Dems shrug and say 'whats the point?'

What will happen? In the last few days the pollsters, worried about their reputations, will tighten up their methodology. The last poll is the one that everyone looks at when they are judging how accurate any polling organization is. What these last weekend polls will show, when its too late to make a difference, is a huge Scott Brown-type surge all over the country but especially in places like Delaware, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Colorado and Illinois. And dare we hope New York? They will show a sudden surge towards the Repub candidates when in fact they are only showing what was there all along.

Republicans will vote this time and Dems will stay home. The real numbers on Nov. 2nd will bear this out. There wont be some huge turn on the last weekend; there was a huge turn the day that the stimulus failed to lower the unemployment numbers, the day that people realized that the Health Care Bill was going to raise their insurance rates to the breaking point, the day Obama stood up for the GZ mosque, the day the Dems jumped all over Arizona. The anger that was always there will still be there on Nov 2nd. The despair amongst the Hope and Changers will still be there. The X Factor in all this polling, turnout, will be shown to be all on the side of the Repubs.

And I will be in front of my TV set watching a weeping Chris Coons, a brave-in-defeat Bloomberg, a shocked Gianouliaus, a shell-shocked Harry Reid saying 'the election is lost' to a crowd of weeping public employees, a Mom In Tennis Shoes cursing the voters in Washington and most of all I will be dancing and cheering as an over-coiffed, sawed-off little shrimp of a haggard Marxist dwarf berates the Tea Party extremists here in Gollyvornia who wouldnt let her return to the Senate.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Harry Goes To Girlie World


I tell myself I dont believe a word in the mainstream media. I sat down to watch the Reid-Angle debate thinking myself free from that little curling-lip sneer of contempt that Chris Matthews has when he talks about Sharron Angle. But you know what? I was resigned. I know she's right and he's wrong but c'mon guys, this is a housewife from Ely, Nevada going up against the Senate Majority Leader.

Have you even been to Ely, Nevada? Its small. Its real small. The big bragging point is that its right near the largest open pit copper mine in North America. The only time I went there I took a great panorama of the copper mine but no shots of Ely itself. A couple of tiny casinos, a couple of legal whorehouses; other than that it could be any small western town. Bigger than Searchlight, I'll grant you that, but to my urban eyes Ely is a tiny cow town.

So this Ely housewife has the audacity, after twenty or thirty million bucks worth of ads branding her as a mental defective, after Chris' rolling eyeballs and contemptuous curling lip, after the news media highlighting every stumble, every slip and weaving the tapestry of a mentally-challenged extremist lunatic; after all that this woman has the temerity to walk onto the stage with the third most powerful person in a country of 300 million people and debate him? I was prepared to weep. To explain things away. To be charitable. But my heart sank at the thought of what I was going to see. The Big Lie wins again and control of the Senate is lost. Chris' curling lip had gotten to me. I live in LA. I'm way closer to Chris than I like to think.

But Mama Angle walked into the Debate Kitchen and opened up a family-sized can of Whuppass and she served it to the mighty Majority Leader piping hot. From being resigned to Angle losing and hoping against hope that she would do well enough to survive I began to feel sorry for Harry Reid. Yes, you read it, I felt sorry for the guy. It was like on the elementary school playground watching the class sissy get beat up by one of the tough girls from one of the upper grades. I literally couldnt believe it! She didnt take any of his crap.

She whupped him, she whupped him bad. There wasnt one single Harry Reid moment in the entire debate. This was the Rodney King beating, debate-style. Watching Harry, quivering like my chihuahua does in the vet's waiting room, twisted onto the podium like he needed a giant dose of Preparation H, trying to run away from himself, was painful. He didnt take credit for any of the last four years. Or blame. You would have thought that the guy who was on the air in commercials every five minutes on every channel talking about how Nevadans needed the influence of a powerful man in the Senate would at least admit that he had occasionally visited the place. He was like one of those career criminals who infest MSNBC after the commies go home, guys that describe the crimes they've committed in the most neutral terms, as though they had only observed that a 7/11 had indeed been robbed and somehow a bullet had found its way into the clerk.

The two big zingers were the one about Social Security and the one about how Reid made his money. Sharron Angle turned to that weedy, lying, Uriah Heep-like varmint as he toted out the shopworn liberal lie that she wanted to take away every senior citizen's Social Security checks and told him to fess up about the theft of a trillion dollars from the so-called trust fund to pay for his giant useless government programs. She painted that low-down weasel as the Bernie Madoff of Social Security and she did it in hot colors. She said it mad! Man up you skinny little chicken...you stole everybody's money! I dont remember his answer. Who cares what he said? This was reality TV at its finest! Sharron Angle is the Snookie of politics!

Then she said it. At first I didnt believe my ears. I know Reid didnt believe his ears. If this had been a fight the referee would have stopped it. No one ever dares to ask big time politicians this question...'How have you managed to become one of the richest men in the Senate on the government salaries you have earned all your life?' Willie Brown lived in a mansion, drove a new Porsche and wore $1000 hand-tailored suits on his income of $40k per annum and nobody ever asked him that question. Reid's eyes bugged out. He looked like he had gotten his wing-tip stuck in an electrical socket. It was Dan Quayle after Lloyd Bensen said, "You're no Jack Kennedy."

"That was a low blow..." he gasped before he explained that he was lawyering and investing in his spare time, dontcha know. See, the guy that not only read the danged Health Care Bill but wrote all 2,000 pages of it and wouldnt let anybody else see it until after they voted on it, Mr. Obsessive Knit-Picker Detail Man has got plenty of time on his hands and he uses this spare time to earn hundreds of millions of dollars. Thats like one of those ads that used to be on the backs of comic books; 'Earn Thousands In Your Spare Time.' Harry's the right age. Maybe he clipped that coupon, mailed off his $1.98 and got the secret to earning huge amounts of money in his spare time. And I thought I was so smart not being dumb enough to send my meager allowance off to an obvious fraud. An obvious fraud like Reid's answer. We all know how he got rich...he's a crook, that's how!

None of the rest matters. In those two magic moments Angle paid Reid back for every insult, every attack ad, every lie he tells about her. The curled lip the next day on Chris Matthews' face was for Reid, not Angle. The panel shook their heads solemnly. How could Reid let himself get sucker-punched like that? And then silence. How could this have happened? He got into a debate with a media-certified retard...and he lost! You can tell how badly she beat Reid by observing that within 24 hours of the debate there was almost total media silence about the debate or the candidates. The state of Nevada disappeared from political maps behind the noble commentators.

Too late. Angle has destroyed the narrative that Reid and his advertising geniuses had spent tens of millions of dollars constructing. His aura of competence was destroyed as was hers of extremism. She asked the questions any person would want to ask one of these big shots, and now one of us got the chance to do it. I was convinced Angle would win the election before this but she could have lost the debate and the election. It took a lot of guts to come at Reid like that, not many people would have been able to keep it going the whole time. A miracle might still save Harry Reid but no one will ever be able to say that Angle didnt have the Mighty Majority Leader whining and on the ropes. You go girl!