If the Obama administration thought last week was a difficult one in its continued efforts to deny, deflect, and obfuscate to keep the growing scandals involving the IRS, the Department of Justice surveillance of Associated Press reporters phones, the cover-up involving the Benghazi massacre (and soon-to-be gun-running scandal), and HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius shaking down private industry for donations to help implement Obamacare, this week is already starting out to be even worse.

Not that I didn’t tell y’all this would happen.

It’s not that there are – at least for now – new scandals on the horizon, but the broadening and deepening of each of these the scandals is presenting a greater challenge for the administration to contain than I’m betting even they ever thought possible. In just the past 48 hours we’ve learned not only that the IRS has been targeting Christian churches in Wyomning, even asking for lists of church members, something that smacks of Nazism’s deepest and darkest days, but you have the first IRS higher-up going before Congrees to plead the fifth rather than give sworn testimony. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out when people start pleading the fifth, you’re talking cover-up and prosecutions somewhere not too far down the line.

In the terms of the AP scandal, we now find that it wasn’t just AP reporters whose phones were targeted for surveillance by Eric Holder’s Department of Justice (something he claims to know nothing about, of course) it was the phone numbers of Fox News reporter James Rosen and other Fox News phones, even Rosen’s own parents line. Again, it doesn’t take a degree in rocket science to figure out that if the government were doing this to AP reporters and Fox News, the practice was pretty widespread, perhaps including CBS News reporter Sheryl Attkisson, whose reporting has helped keep the Obama administration’s cover-up of the Fast and Furious scandal alive.

The problem for the Obama administration on all these fronts at this point is two-fold: 1) the responses of Attorney General Eric Holder and White House spokesman Jay Carney denying knowledge of anything to do with these scandals in any way has even their most loyal supporters questioning their honesty and potential direct involvement (if not their overwhelming incompetence), and 2) scandals such as these tend to take on a life of their own as as people begin to come forward and spill their guts rather than face prison, and journalists invoke their inner Woodward and Bernstein when they sense blood in the water and great story to help break open. Just as the Nixon administration’s efforts to cover-up the Watergate break-in soon became an all-consuming effort that paralyzed the administration and ultimately led to its downfall, the Obama administration risks finding itself in a similar situation if it can’t find a way to rid itself of the stench surrounding itself so early in its second term.

What’s becoming readily apparent is that this administration, in its zeal to further its aggressive left-wing agenda, sought to stifle dissenting views, suppress the activities of conservative groups, and inhibit the ability of opposition forces to support the elections of Republicans in 2010 and 2012 by employing various agencies of the federal government to threaten, harass, and intimidate. It wasn’t just the actions of rogue low-level operatives, it was systemic and originating out of Washington. Whether or not those directions came directly from the White House is still something that will need to be determined, but if it is – and you can say you heard it here first that it did – as Charles Krauthammer says we could be talking about events that are fatal to this administration in every sense of the word.

What the Obama administration is slowly being shown to have been involved in – almost from its inception – will ultimately be shown to make Richard Nixon look like a brash amateur.

It’s stories like this that just tear your heart apart. There’s not much one can say and you can’t rationalize it in any way – bad things happen and good people are victimized through no fault of their own. It’s just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. What really bothers me about tragedies like this is that people with their own agendas will use them to further their own arguments, as if that makes any difference. You get that idiot senator from Rhode Island using it as an argument for man-made global warming, reinforcing my belief that most, if not all, politicians are as dumb as a bag of rocks. And, you inevitably get athiests asking believers where their God was during this event (as if they themselves think they know anything about the God they profess to not believe in). And you get faithful believers who will say stuff like, “there but for the grace of God go I”, as if God preference was with them but somehow not with the victims. Even worse, there are Christians who will say this kind of thing is God’s punishment for things we have done as a nation and a culture, as if senselessly killing children and innocents is God’s unique form of retribution.

I despise anyone who uses this kind of thing for any kind of political or religious messaging because it just shows how ignorant people can be.

The fact of the matter is that none of us know God’s will, but I firmly believe God has a bigger scope and bigger things in mind than re-directing a tornado so it hits, say, an empty 7-11 store instead of an elementary school full of children. We only hear about these kinds of tragedies because it takes place in a country and culture where media is omnipresent; for idiots who think today’s Moore tornado was the worst in history ought to do at least a little homework in order to see that tornado outbreaks in the middle of the U.S. are heardly unusual and it all comes down to technology (and the lack thereof) and being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I don’t mean to make light of the victims of the Moore tornado – far from it, but the fact is death is all around us, even more so if you live in Tornado Alley during the late winter and spring months when killer tornadoes are hardly a rare occurrence. And by its very nature – after all, human beings are instilled with an innate preference of life over death – death is something most people encounter without a lot of anticipation and joy. And while we mourn the deaths of those in Moore and pray for God’s comforting and healing presence on the surviving families and loved ones because of Monday’s tornado, when you get right down to it there’s no difference between their deaths and anyone else’s thousands of miles away as a result of war, disease, religious intolerance and even abortion. Death is death, it’s not a question of if but when and how, who you are, how much you are loved and by whom, and how and by whom you will be remembered in this life. For the believer and non-believer, unplanned death remains the great equalizer – the comfort for us believers comes in the faith that a loving God will surely take care of things in the next.

As a Christian I believe there is a better place beyond this and God has a way or sorting things out in the end. Of course, if the joke is on me and I’m wrong and the atheists are right, then it doesn’t really mattrer, does it? But it doesn’t stop me from saying my prayers tonight for the victims and survivors of that tornado in Moore, OK yesterday. The folks there need our prayers and our support, and as lovers of life itself, how can we not offer anything less to those so much in need of our help. And here’s how you can help.

To those not interested in helping out in any way and or using this tragedy to showcase your own ignorance, keep your opinions and stupid beliefs to yourselves and try not to live up to my expectations. I really have no patience or tolerance for the likes of you.

The headlines from yesterday tell you all you need to know: the Obama administration is imploding before our very eyes and it wouldn’t surprise me to hear the word “impeachment” start cropping out in the days and weeks ahead as more and more is learned about who knew what and who gave the orders involving the following scandals enveloping the Obama White House:

Headline: Budget request denied, Sebelius turns to health executives to finance Obamacare. Talk about your Chicago-style gangster politics:

Her unusual fundraising push comes after Congress repeatedly rejected the Obama administration’s requests for additional funds to set up the Affordable Care Act, leaving HHS to implement the president’s signature legislative accomplishment on what officials have described as a shoestring budget.

Over the past three months, Sebelius has made multiple phone calls to health industry executives, community organizations and church groups and asked that they contribute whatever they can to nonprofit groups that are working to enroll uninsured Americans and increase awareness of the law, according to an HHS official and an industry person familiar with the secretary’s activities. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk openly about private discussions.

An HHS spokesperson said Sebelius was within the bounds of her authority in asking for help.

There’s a fine line between “asking for help” and shaking down private industry to open its wallets, especially when you’re the face of the Obama administration and its legacy and greatest legislative victory is being threatened on all sides due to size, scope, and bureaucratic red tape and incompetence. I’d like to know exactly why Sebelius is “asking for help”, who authorized her to do so, and who made the decision on what industries would be targeted and why.

Headline: Government Taps Press Phone Records. For a White House that has had its ass plastered with lipstick by the mainstream media from day one this is really beyond belief:

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls.

In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

In a letter of protest sent to Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said the government sought and obtained information far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation. He demanded the return of the phone records and destruction of all copies.

All I can say to mainstream media is, you sleep with dogs, don’t be surprised if you wake up with fleas.

Headline: Watch out for Petraeus in Benghazi scandal. Methinks things are about to get damned interesting as far as the Benghazi cover-up probe is concerned, especially since additional whistleblowers have shown their willingness to come forward and testify:

So little is known about what happened in Benghazi: Where was the commander in chief that night? No pictures from the Situation Room this time. Why didn’t the Pentagon authorize a quick-response team to swoop in? Members of the military say they were ready — burning — to go. The call came in: Stand down. Let them die. There were dozens of witnesses to the attack that night: Where are they? What do they know? What really happened that night?

With the White House putting all blame on the agency, expect push back this week — nuclear push back. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the former director forced to resign after a sex scandal, is a dangerous man to the Obama administration. Mad and intent on getting even, he’s already talking, telling one reporter the talking points were “useless” and that he preferred not to use them at all. The floodgates will open this week, and by the end of business Friday, the scandal will be full blown.

Wouldn’t surprise me if the Patraeus infidelity allegations were leaked to the media by Hillary Clinton’s State Department in retaliation for him not willing to play ball in regards to Benghazi. Hell hath no fury than a scorned (and criminally incompetent) Secretary of State.

Headline: House panel to formally question IRS commissioner Friday. And it wasn’t just conservatives and Tea Party groups, it was – get ready for it – pro-Israel Jewish advocay groups!

The House Ways and Means Committee has scheduled a formal hearing Friday to probe the Internal Revenue Service for placing heavier scrutiny on conservative groups that applied for nonprofit status between 2010 and 2012.

IRS Commissioner Steve Miller and Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George are expected to testify Friday morning during the hearing, which committee leaders said would examine the agency’s “practice of targeting applicants for tax-exempt status based on political leanings.”

Taken individually, any of these scandals would be egregious enough that, had a Republican been in the White House the major news networks and left-leaning newpapers and cable networks would be calling for impeachment hearings to start yesterday. Taken together, even these media outlets are going to have a hard time making the case that the Obama White House isn’t up to its neck in scandal, and not of a minor nature either. This is lawlessness, gangster politics, and reckless (likely criminal) incompetence on such a wide scale there’s no way this administration can expect to do anything but ride out its second term and pray to God no one goes to jail and/or gets impeached before it ends.

I hate to sound so self-serving and tell y’all I told you so, but the fact is, I told you so – infact I used the twrm Nixonian before anyone in the blogsphere or media even thought about it. As I wrote as far back as May, 2008, just four months into the administration’s first term:

Robert Samuelson is right: the Obama infatuation by the media is the great unreported story of our time, and, going forward, an incredibly dangerous one for America. If this President truly believes he and his administration are above any form of criticism and immune from any scrutiny by the media or Congress (and it’s clear just months into his administration that this is exactly what they think, and why shouldn’t they?) one can only imagine how far they’ll want to take this.

Taken together, this administration’s actions recall those of a former president, though not necessarily the one the Anointed One loves to compare himself to. Rather than FDR, however, these actions appear to be downright Nixonian – a term I believe you’re going to be hearing a lot more of as this president becomes increasingly power-drunk and more full of himself.

Now you’ve got major Obama supporters using the political “N-word” and a Republican senator hinting at impeachment hearings. As far as I’m concerned, these guys are all johnny-come-latelys, because if they had been listening to The Great White Shank – and no one does – none of the above scandals would have surprised them in the very least. (BTW, I’m still waiting for the courts to order Eric Holder’s Justice Department’s to turn over to Congress those withheld memos on Operation “Fast and Furious”, which will reveal the DOJ’s complicity in allowing guns to illegally “walk” across the border into Mexico, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans and one, perhaps two U.S. Border agents.)

It’s not hard to see how this kind of thing should envelop the Obama White House – this is what happens when, rather than using the power of his office and his “bully pulpit” to bring Republicans and Democrats together to pass legislation and further an agenda that serves the needs the country while providing both sides with political cover, this President has done nothing but create division and hostility by villifying any form of opposition without any push-back from the media and journalists who ought to be responsible for holding the President and his administration accountable. In any organization, abuse of power is in response to the tone set by the person on top, and if this President finds himself immersed in scandal and losing public faith and trust in his administration and its second-term agenda he has only one person to blame – himself.

Perhaps a round or two of golf will help his general disposition. After all, it’s what he does best.

Awesome photo hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ

…on a huge news day (see tomorrow’s post) I can’t let this story go by without brief comment.

You know, I don’t care how pro-infanticide (oops, I mean pro-choice) you are, if you’re not sickened and disgusted by the horrific stories that came out of that trial and the pathetic and disgraceful disregard for human life shown by the doctor and those at the abortion clinic responsible for the deaths of those babies you have no soul. Hopefully he’s convicted to the fullest extent of the law and loses his privilege to live. I can’t tell you for sure if there is a Hell, but if there is surely there’s a spot for monsters like him.

And hopefully the same holds true for that monster who kept those three women in Cleveland imprisoned for more than a decade. Our society and culture long ago devalued life to the point where it has become a purely disposable quantity – so it shall hopefully be for those who have forfeited their privilege to life and personal liberty.

One can only imagine the outcry if a Republican president were in the White House and it was revealed that the IRS was targeting liberal activist groups like Media Matters or Planned Parenthood, or La Raza – why, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and all the nuts at MSNBC would be calling for impeachment hearings to start tomorrow.

Alternatively, when a Democrat is in the White House and the groups being targeted by the IRS are Tea Party and conservatives groups? Ahh, nothing to see here, move along.

Unfortunately for the Obama White House, already up to its neck in scandal and controversy with the Benghazi hearings, this is not going to go away. And it shouldn’t be sufficient for the IRS to apologize – people need to lose their jobs over this. It’s so ironic that the other day at Ohio State University Barack Obama said this:

Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.

Given this latest news I would say this government has revealed itself as a sham that can’t be trusted. There is no greater tyrrany than the government using the power of the IRS to stifle free speech, the right to assemble, and yes, the right to dissent. Given that Congress has promised to go after these people one can only hope we can find out who ordered the IRS to take these kinds of actions. Don’t be surprised if, like the Benghazi scandal, the road leads directly into the Oval Office. You can play gangster politics all you want in Chicago and get away with it, but not in Washington, D.C. – sooner or later the law starts catching up with the lawless and the chickens start coming home to roost.

Two bits of dialogue from my all-time favorite movie “All The President’s Men” come to mind. The first is during that classic staff meeting where they’re discussing the content of the next day’s edition:

Harry Rosenfeld (Jack Warner): “What about the Dahlberg repurcussions?”

Howard Simons (Martin Balsam): “No one cares about the Dahlberg repurcussions.”

…and that scene inside Ben Bradlee’s office where he’s having a hard understanding the significance of Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting:

Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards): Have you seen the latest polls? Most Americans have never even heard about Watergate. No one gives a shit.”

Keep this in mind as the mainstream dino-media does all it can to avoid reporting on the 9/11 Benghazi attacks that left Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others dead. The Obama administration’s story (actually, lies) about how it was the fault of a little YouTube video and how there’s was no time to scramble military assistance to repel the attackers is unraveling before everyone’s eyes; just don’t expect to read or hear about it from the major media outlets – yet.

It’s important to remember that what did Richard Nixon in was not the actual break-in and the illegal wiretapping that the White House and his Justice Department authorized, but the cover-up and obstruction of justice that took place afterwards. If the Obama administration continues to think itself above the law and congressional oversight it may well find itself repeating the same kind of history. As Red State’s Moe Lane writes:

And let us establish once and for all what happened. The screw-up was in two parts. The first was tactical: the administration made a judgment call on whether or not to (metaphorically) send in the Marines. They decided not to. People died. Did that make it a bad call? Maybe. Maybe not. Sometimes the dice hate you. Maybe if the Marines had been sent in the whole thing would have gone spectacularly pear-shaped and we’d have a hundred people dead, not four. But then again, maybe nobody would have died at all. Generally speaking, it’s a lot easier to justify We don’t throw lives away for no good reason than it is to justify We’d rather let four people die than risk a hundred. Still, it’s a hard call to make when it’s you on the scene.

But the second part of the screw-up is less forgivable. The general rule here is Command takes responsibility. JFK survived the Bay of Pigs incident because he embraced that rule. Nixon didn’t survive Watergate because he didn’t. If Obama had said, well, we thought that we had good security up at Benghazi, only we didn’t, so al-Qaeda caught us by surprise and killed our people and that was something that I have to take full responsibility for and I’m never going to let that happen again then, well, he might have lost the election, actually. We didn’t realize at the time, but Obama’s 2012 re-election strategy had pretty much no margin for error. So the administration picked a narrative (it was all due to a YouTube video!) that cynically traded on stereotypes about foreign Muslims and their collective level of impulse control*, and did nothing but push said narrative for as long as they could. Which was, oddly enough, long enough for the election to be over.

It’s debatable what role the President might have played in all of this up to this point, but it’s fairly obvious the reckless incompetence, and ultimate responsibility, for the deaths of the Benghazi four lies at the feet of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s State Department. Powerline blog’s Paul Mirengoff has a powerful post that makes this case by laying out the facts the major print and broadcast media dare not present:

Under these circumstances, it would not do to attribute the Benghazi killings to the terrorism about which top State Department officials had been warned. Much better to lump what happened in Libya together with the protests that occurred in Egypt, and thereby characterize it as a demonstration that went too far, rather than premeditated terrorism.

Was Hillary Clinton directly involved in this cover-up? It’s difficult to see how she could not have been.

As I understand it, when State pushed back against the CIA’s talking points, a White House meeting was scheduled to thrash out the issue. One can imagine Clinton failing to keep apprised of something as mundane as a mounting threat to be safety of her personnel in Libya. But surely she was in the loop when it came to a bureaucratic struggle about how our U.N. ambassador was going to spin the Benghazi debacle. And surely, her representatives would not attend the meeting in which that bureaucratic struggle was to be resolved without being able to state the desires of the Secretary of State.

Hillary Clinton, then, is culpable at the front end of the Benghazi disaster — when she and/or her agents ignored requests for enhanced security — and at the back end — when she and her agents engineered an attempted cover-up. Her culpability during the attacks is doubtful in my opinion, but I would still like to know what she was doing during those tragic hours.

In a serious society, Benghazi, standing alone, would spell the end of Hillary Clinton’s public career.

Of course, in a serious society, the very idea that someone like Hillary Clinton would be qualified to be Secretary of State is laughable. So let’s lay out the facts as we know them:

1. Hillary Clinton lied in her testimony to Congress. Note this was not done under oath and thus not subject to perjury charges, but I have a feeling she’ll be back and forced to sing like a canary under oath before too long.

2. President Obama went to sleep knowing that a U.S. ambassador and other Americans were being attacked by terrorists in Benghazi.

3. President Obama awoke refreshed the next day and headed to Las Vegas to fund-raise knowing his Libyan ambassador and three others were dead.

4. The entire Executive Branch lied repeatedly to the American people in order to save Obama’s chances for re-election.

Like I and many others have said previously, at least when it came to Watergate no one died. What is happening here is an absolute disgrace, but chickens all over the place are coming home to roost. Now that the dam of coverup, dismissal, and denial is breaking and all hell is about to bvreak loose.

And it couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch of people.

UPDATE: I hate to say I told you so, but no one listens to The Great White Shank. It’s amazing how much stuff I post finds its way into the blogsphere the next day. Check this Hot Air post by Ed Morrissey out: now that both ABC and Obama shill Ron Fournier have gotten wind of significant talking point revisions made to the original CIA memo to whitewash (do I hear “cover up”) any references to a terror attack, is there any doubt the dam is truly about to break into scandal territory.

Expect Speaker of the House John Boehner to appoint a select investigation committee with the power to issue subpoenas and then watch all the canaries start to sing. And don’t be surprised if one of the tunes whistled is “Hail To The Chief” – this story is about to go all the way to the Oval Office, where it will become apparent that it was President Obama who gave the orders not to help those poor folks under attack, then tried to cover up his cowardice and lack of command off by blaming the whole thing on a YouTube video, then lied about it repeatedly to the families of the dead and the American people.

The sound you’re hearing is toast being made.

I’ll say this for Barack Obama – dude knows how to turn an elected second term into a lame-duck presidency in record time. Consider in just a week’s time:

1. He holds a press conference with nothing to announce, other than it’s all the Republican’s fault that nothing is getting done in Washington. Thus leading to even his biggest supporters in the mainstream dino-media to wonder what he’s doing and where the leadership is.

2. Obamacare – you know, the Democrat-passed plan to overhaul healthcare in the U.S. with the slogan, “if you like your plan you can keep it” is springing so many leaks it looks like my master bath did yesterday. Not only has one of its original backers called its deployment a “train wreck”, but now you have the Senate Majority Leader whining they – you got it! – need more money to implement it properly and avoid said train wreck.

3. Explosive hearings on the Benghazi whistle-blowers are scheduled to start next week. They will undoubtedly show not just Hillary Clinton’s State Department and the administration’s callous incompetence and carelessness during the embassy attacks that resulted in the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others, but, it now appears there were al Qaeda operatives involved in a plan that was obvious well-coordinated and either missed or ignored by our intelligence community. And it’s not helping that the Obama administration is also showing the same level of incompetence, weakness, and disorganization when it comes to recent events in Syria.

4. The President’s immigration reform bill (yes, it’s his even though the so-called “Gang of Ocho” are the face of it in the Senate) is in the process of imploding, not just for its promise of amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants, but the investigations involving the terrorists who set off the bombs at the Boston Marathon showing (who could have guessed it!) huge holes in our existing immigration laws and intelligence community – both of which could have prevented the deaths and injuries that resulted from even happening.

5. The President and Vice-President’s push for gun control failed miserably – not because there aren’t things that could be done to tighten up current laws, but because the majority of the country saw the push for what it was – to take guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens using the blood of innocent children as political pawns.

6. The President appears at Planned Parenthood’s national conference – the first president to do so at the very time grisly and horrific details about that abortion doctor on trial in Philadelphia leak out despite aggressive attempts by the media to ignore and suppress the events and the truth. As a result, more details about other abortion clinics, and how the industry operates in general, are showing just how far this country has gone down the road to infanticide. Mark my words, this story is not going away – there’s a sea change taking effect across the country, and the pro-baby killing (oops, I mean “pro choice”) lobby finds itself for the first time in decades on its heels.

If you haven’t heard or seen any of these above items being covered on your nightly NBC, ABC, or CBS newscasts, or on the latest “60 Minutes” you shouldn’t be surprised – the Obama presidency is going down in flames before our very eyes but you’ll never get the media to cover it. Can you imagine if a Republican president was in the White House with these kinds of things happening? Why, every morning talk show and evening newscast would have as its headline the fact that the President is now a lame duck and incapable of leading the country forward.

Truth is – and as the Obama administration finds even greater headwinds in its desperate attempt to implement its far-left agenda while it can (i.e., before the 2014 midterms when the Democrats take another 2010-style thumping) – the media is going to turn on the President for not living up to their dreams and expectations. And because the Left is like that, they’ll turn they lonely eyes to Hillary Clinton (!) to rescue their agenda in 2016. Why? Because this community organizer who never ran so much as a lemonade stand in his life, this pretender to the throne, has been revealed to be someone who really isn’t interested in getting his hands dirty in leading the country. Oh, he and his wife love the perks that go along with the job – the vacations, the golf, the fundraising – but it’s pretty clear after this time he’s not just that into being President. It’s, y’know, too much work. And because of his unwillingness and inability to engage the job and instead leave the details to trusted subordinates (who also, as academics and intellectuals, have no experience in either governing or business), his agenda is coming apart in a haze of pettiness, incompetence, sloppiness, and amateurness at all levels.

You won’t hear me complain – frankly, it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

Had another phone argument today with the national Republican Party – this time it was someone from the Republican National Senatorial Committee – thanking me for my past support and if I would consider contributing again. I said no, as long as Republicans in the Senate keep pushing that stupid immigration reform bill the so-called “Gang of Ocho” that Marco Rubio has been pushing so hard for. It’s a lose / lose game for Republicans when you have the media and Democrats all over the place attempting to sell amnesty to Hispanics. They go along with the proposal, you’ve got millions of illegal immigrants (and yes, that’s what they are) taking jobs away from the lower strata of American citizens, they don’t and we’re all accused of being heartless racists.

Here’s something I just don’t understand, but then again, I’m not a liberal, so politics never trumps common sense. Were I a member of the Congressional Black Caucus or the Democratic Party’s African-American leadership I’m trying to figure why on God’s green earth I’d want to support my fellow Democrats on immigration reform, knowing it will further shrink the labor market for African-Americans beyond what it already is.

But then again, as I’ve written numerous times in this space, I really don’t understand African-American allegiance to Democrats and Washington to begin with, for the expansion of government programs economically and legally have done nothing historically to improve their economic state in America. As long as they stay quiet on the political plantation the Democratic Party just takes their vote for granted while it continually supports causes that destroys millions of African American lives and expands entitlement programs that keeps minorites in their place for generations, dependent on a government that thinks they’re doing them so many favors.

Me, I don’t understand why we can’t just enforce the laws on the books. Make it difficult (actually, illegal) for illegals to find work and obtain benefits here the U.S. and you take away their reason to stay. Sooner or later, they’ll return to Mexico or congregate in liberal states that hand out benefits left and right, which will in turn ultimately cause those states to going broke and have to reduce or eliminate those benefits. It’s not magic, just enforce the laws and let reverse migration take place. It sounds simple enough, but that’s me, a simple guy.

I’m not a gun owner, don’t have plans (at least for now, but it’s not out of the question) to own a gun, but it gave me great joy to see the U.S. Senate fail to pass that gun control legislation pushed so hard by Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Make no mistake about it: this was nothing more than a power play to try once again to use horrific events and human misery to push a progressive, ultra-liberal agenda to take away people’s guns, it’s as simple as that. Remember, this was the whole idea behind Attorney General Eric Holder’s failed “Fast and Furious” gun-running program that melted down following the deaths of one, perhaps two U.S. Border agents at hands of guns allowed to “run” across the border into the hands of the Mexican drug cartels.

If you remember – you certainly won’t find this in the mainstream media – the whole idea behind “Fast and Furious” was to create so much gun violence along our southern border that folks there would rise up and demand stricter gun control measures. This was Holder’s idea from the very beginning – talk about flawed and stupid! And if you don’t think Barack Obama knew and even approved of this idea then you’re smoking something now legal in Washington state. If “Fast and Furious” had been done under a Republican president there’s a good chance he would have been impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors. Instead, the Anointed One, Mr. Nobel Peace Prize winner and his AG skate free.

The same thing happened after the Newtown massacre. President Obama and his pathetic, lying toady of a Vice President used the poor families and victims of Newtown as human shields to push once again, with great vigor, gun control legislation even though they knew damned well the legislation they were pushing would have done nothing to prevent Newtown from happening.

I’m going to tell y’all something you’re not going to want to hear, but I don’t care – it’s my blog and I’ll say what I believe in my heart of hearts: Barack Obama and Joe Biden could care less about the Newtown massacre and the families, this was all about exploiting a horrific tragedy for their own political gain. Pure and simple.

You don’t believe me? Check Obama’s angry, juvenile Rose Garden performance after the Senate bill failed. It was never about gun control, it was about his legacy – he’s pissed that the Senate had the nerve to reject his own political agenda. You can hear the anger and spite in his voice – how anyone dare to reject what the petulant prince wants! He’s a pathetic man-child masquerading as a third-world tin-horn dictator, unhappy that as President he can’t get what he wants by simply snapping his fingers. Commentary Magazine’s Peter Wehner has it about right:

What Mr. Obama has been attempting to do throughout this gun control debate is to build his case based on a false premise, which is that the laws he’s proposing would have stopped the mass killing in Newtown. The families of the Newtown massacre are being used by the president in an effort to frame the issue this way: If you’re with Obama, you’re on the side of saving innocent children from mass killings–and if you’re against Obama, you have the blood of the children of Newtown on your hands. But it actually does matter if what Obama is proposing would have made any difference when it came to the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. And the fact that it would not have is what makes Obama’s gambit so shameful and disturbing. (I say that as someone who is somewhat sympathetic to the expanded background checks.)

The truth is, the majority of Americans don’t consider gun control a priority. And I would argue they don’t want greater gun control legislation. Like the upcoming immigration battle, most American just want the existing laws on the books enforced – something that the radical left and the Democrats in Washington simply have no interest in doing.

You want to reduce the amount of gun massacres? Put more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens. I guarantee if any of the school administrators at Newtown carried the number of deaths would have been reduced greatly.

To watch Barack Obama and Joe Biden use the Newtown families as living props for their ultra-liberal agenda to take guns away from Americans makes me want to vomit. But I long ago gave up any idea that this President and his spiteful clown of a Vice-President were anything else but a disgrace to their offices. And anything the Senate or the Congress can do to block any of their attempts to expand the reach and control of the federal government into good, law-abiding people’s lives is a damned good thing indeed.

Now let’s hope the same thing happens with immigration reform.

One of those days that just makes you wonder what this world is coming to. Rather than indulge in specific thoughts about the actual even other than to say that my prayer candle this week burns for those killed and injured in the bombs set off at the Boston Marathon finish site, I have a few thoughts I was thinking about writing on last night while sipping the first Sam Summer Ale on the patio Sunday night.

There was a dusty breeze blowing out of the west causing the palm tree branches to rustle, the happy pineapple lights to rock gently, the ceiling fan to lazily turn counter-clockwise, and the reflection of the trees in the swimming pool to bounce with the roll of the water. The houses around us were all dark and quiet as folks got ready for another work week to start. No different, really, from any number of similar nights I’ve sat outside and enjoyed the warm night air, except tonight there was a certain restlessness caused by a combined sense of sadness and wonder at time passing by. I took a sip of the Sam and tried to get to the bottom of just exactly why I was feeling the way I was, and I thought back to a conversation my friend John and I had earlier that day after we had finished replacing the cracked slab of concrete that had sat under my old pool filter for the past sixteen years (more on that another time).

John and I were just sitting chewing the fat over some ice water and coffee as we admired our finished work when the subject of families came up. He’s around my age and, like me and our friend Jana, has seen some big changes in his family the past couple of years, losing his dad and now his mom who has been living with him since then has advanced Alzheimer’s and the hospice folks visiting on a regular basis. Since I’ve got my mom and a close cousin going through some significant health issues, I mentioned to John that the only thing this tells us is that our turn on the merry-go-round is right around the corner, and that this is God’s way of showing us still living on the green side of the grass just how precious life is.

And that was kind of what was going through my mind sitting under the pineapple lights listening to the night sounds as surf music played softly through the patio speakers. It’s almost like I’m going through a period of heightened awareness of just how important life is and the really, really simple enjoyment I’m getting out of the most ordinary kind of activities that at one time I used to blow through and/or underappreciate while I was busy making other plans. And underappreciate is the operative word, since I’ve never been someone who took for granted the beauty of God’s creation, the privilege of being given an ear for music, or having long-time friends to laugh and share life experiences with. It’s just that I’m a planner by nature – I’ve never been much for spontaneity, and in all that planning I’m sure I’ve allowed stuff to pass by without notice.

Not sure where I’m going with this except to say that, living in a world where you can’t even enjoy watching a freakin’ marathon race without risking yourself being blown to bits by some asshole with no respect for life and the wide range of emotions and experiences that life brings all by itself through joys, sadnesses, births, deaths, anxieties, peacefulness and restlessness, every moment counts and contains within it a certain blessedness that we just can’t allow to pass by unnoticed or, yes, underappreciated. Even if it’s just taking a wonderful sip of a cold beer on a warm desert southwest evening, watching TV with someone you love, mindlessly (or, in my case as I do now, purposefully) hitting a bucket of balls, taking a lazy walk around the neighborhood, or chatting with a friend or family member, it’s all blessed in its own way.

Which is why a while ago I wrote about supporting the death penalty even though my Catholic faith is all about the sanctity of life. My feeling then, as it is now, is that life itself, every facet of it, is sacred, and if you take someone’s life through an act of violence you’ve forfeited the sacredness of your own life. I mean, why can’t people just live and let live? I can truly say I don’t hate anyone – not even people I believe to be inherently evil like my sister-in-law’s second husband who abused her for so many years, or Barack Obama and his wife, who I truly believe are hell-bent on destroying this country. Life is too damned short and too precious to waste your time hating anyone or anything, it just involves too much negative energy. And I don’t, nor will ever, understand people who want to kill and maim and injure for some lark or social, political, or religious reason. I’m not including people who are mentally ill here, I’m talking about people like the terrorists who took down the Twin Towers and bombed the trains in Madrid, or the pathetic creeps who shot up the schools in Newtown and Columbine, and that movie theater in Colorado, or set off those explosive devices in Boston. (Which, BTW, is why the whole gun debate now is so ridiculous – the sad truth is there are people who are hell-bent on killing innocent people like you and me for no freakin’ reason than to just do it. I mean, there’s just no way to eliminate risk in a free and open society.

Which I guess brings me back to the patio, the Sam Summer, the lights, the palm tree branches, the breeze, the pool, and the ceiling fan under the stars and a waxing quarter moon. It was just a moment where I felt so very much alive and so very conscious of how precious, tenuous, and short life is. I’m not special nor a world-changer in any way. Perhaps precious in God’s and my parents’ eyes, but just an ordinary bloke in the grand scheme of things. And yet, even in my own ordinariness, I felt the keenest sense of that moment where everything around you seems precious because it can all be taken away from you in the blink of an eye, for any variety of reasons, under any form of circumstances.

Not sure if this all makes sense. But’s a post anyways. Now back to our regular programming.