This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: “The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves”

  • Yes, they really DO care… don’t they?

    Of course they care. ‘They’ refers to the Democrats and how very much they care about the military.

    This one comes from Poetrooper. I think it kind of speaks for itself.

    http://dailycaller.com/2017/01/25/poll-shows-how-little-democrats-actually-care-about-the-military/

    It kind of belongs in the gigglesnort category, unless you get really ticked off by it.  I would simply throw up my hands.  That ‘can’t we all just get along?’ whine from some unemployed politician isn’t just a whine. It’s the ‘surrender everything’ attitude that annoys me.

  • It’s Thursday – Any Recipes Shared Are Welcome!

    Until the Platoon Sergeant returns to full active duty, the Mess Tent will happily welcome recipes for field rations, hot dogs, brats, open pit barbecues, Grandma’s upside-down pineapple cake, or whatever is in your MRE pack.  I know there’s a way to make skillet cornbread.

    Consider yourselves to be the Ultimate Camp Cooks.  Anyone know how to roast a whole hog over a fire?

  • Guess who was left unpardoned!

    You can thank Poetrooper for this, but put down the beverages before you read it.  Let the gigglesnorts begin.

    Obama has left town, and guess whom he has left holding the proverbial bag for possible criminality occurring during his presidency?  If you guess Hillary Clinton – and, by extension, her husband, her aide Huma Abedin, and her lawyer Cheryl Mills, among many others who hitched their wagons to the Clinton star – you’re right on the money.  Imagine the ominous sense of impending doom that must be spreading through the Clinton domain as all of them realize that they have lost forever the umbrella of protection from prosecution that a last-minute pardon from a friendly president of their own political party would have afforded them.  They now all stand fully exposed to the elements of criminal prosecution that they had thought themselves immune to during an Obama presidency followed by a Clinton election victory.

    Wouldn’t you love to hear some of the phone conversations going on right now within that former empire?  John Podesta’s email revelations likely pale in significance compared to those email conversations underway even as you read this.  You say they couldn’t possibly be that stupid?  Remember, these are liberal Democrat operatives who have already demonstrated their limited grasp of and regard for cyber-security, so don’t be so sure.  What you can rest assured of is that there are a number of those operatives whose minds are working furiously to determine what they can do to save themselves – not their bosses, but themselves.  Surely the FBI agents who have an open investigation into Clinton corruption are at this moment sifting through their perp profiles to determine who will best respond to offers of immunity for cooperation.

    Friday, the 20th of January, 2017 has to be a very dark day within the Clinton realm.  Don’t you just love it?

    Thomas Lifson adds:

    President Trump also has pardon power.  That gives him a lot of bargaining leverage if he ever decides to exercise his artistic skills in deal-making with the Clinton machine.

  • GMAFB, Part . . . Aw Hell, I Lost Count

    Well, the PC crowd is       showing its ass       demonstrating its “wisdom” yet again.  This time, it’s the “enlightened” city government of Bloomington, Indiana, that’s hard at work “saving us from ourselves”.

    It seems that the City of Bloomington has chosen to officially rename two holidays.  Henceforth, in Bloomington, they will not be known by their common – and legal – names.

    The Bloomington city government chose to do this because they deemed the actual names of the holidays to be “culturally insensitive”.  Gotta protect those “special little snowflakes” from being offended, dontcha know.

    The two holidays Bloomington’s ordered renamed?  Good Friday – and Columbus Day.

    I’m not joking.

    Freaking idiots.  Yo, Bloomington:  Hank Hill has a message for you regarding this stupidity.  He kinda sums things up in about 5 seconds, IMO.

    The main campus of the University of Indiana is located in Bloomington, so this really isn’t too surprising.   This kind of libidiotic PC crap is regrettably quite common in college towns.

    Hey, wait a minute . . . “Indiana”.  Isn’t that rather “culturally insensitive”, too?  (smile)

  • Bless Their Pointy Little Leftist Heads

    Ah, Baltimore.  That “glorious” East Coast city with one of the highest murder rates in the nation.

    Per Wikipedia, Baltimore’s murder and non-negligent homicide rate in 2014 was 33.8 per 100,000 population.  That’s the highest on the East Coast, higher even than Newark’s.  And it’s the 4th-highest in the US overall – trailing only St Louis, Detroit, and New Orleans.

    So, what has Baltimore done to try and reduce this rate?  Glad you asked.  The other day, they passed a law banning firearm replicas.  You know, like BB guns which look too much like real pistols.

    I’m serious.  From the linked article:

    City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young said replica guns are contributing to violence on Baltimore’s streets. He said people are using the fake weapons in robberies, and children who carry them are put in harm’s way.

    Yeah, that’s a real quote.  Apparently the Baltimore city council president actually thinks many criminals in Baltimore are committing armed robberies with replica firearms.  Well, either that or he’s dissembling for public consumption.

    But hey – it’s Baltimore.  So it’s entirely possible he really is that freaking clueless.

    OK, here’s the background info on what IMO actually caused this idiocy:  apparently last April a Baltimore teen got into an altercation with a Baltimore cop – and got shot because he flashed his replica BB-gun.  (The 14-year-old dumbass was lucky; he survived.)  To prevent another such “unfortunate occurrence”, Baltimore has by city ordinance now banned the possession of such “replica firearms” by its citizens.

    I guess that shouldn’t be a surprise, though.  Baltimore is indeed a part of the People’s Republic of Maryland.  Idiocy like this seems to be endemic there.

  • Meet Clintoon’s Other, “Private” Admin Assistant

    While FBI Director Comey was readying his bucket of whitewash yesterday, some additional information was being reported about Ms. Clintoon’s handling of sensitive materials while SECSTATE.  Thanks to that additional reporting we now know who often helped her out with the administrative and practical details of doing sensitive State Department business – e.g., sensitive faxes, printing out emails and attachments, and the like.

    Who might that be, you ask?  Wouldn’t that be her protégé, one each Huma Abedin – the Weiner wifey?

    Well, I’d guess Abedin did help her out at times with those kinds of things; Clintoon is reportedly manifestly incompetent when it comes to electronic devices.  But apparently someone else did as well.

    Reportedly, that someone else would be her housekeeper in DC – Marina Santos.  She’s an immigrant from the Philippines.

    Ms. Santos has no security clearance.

    And yet, Ms. Santos apparently was forwarded and often printed out emails and document attachments sent to Ms. Clintoon while she was SECSTATE.  Some of the documents were sensitive – and, on at least one occasion, documents sent to her to be printed appear to have been classified

    Ms. Santos also appears to have had access to the SCIF installed by the State Department in Clintoon’s DC residence.  She reportedly sometimes collected documents sent to Ms. Clintoon via the secure fax in that SCIF.

    Per the FBI, one of the items sent via secure fax to Clintoon on occasion was the Presidential Daily Brief.  Needless to say, that document is typically rather highly classified.

    Ms. Santos has apparently never been interviewed by the FBI during the Clintoon email investigation.  Additionally, her iMac – which Santos apparently used to receive and print documents and emails for Clintoon – apparently has never been turned over to or examined by the FBI.

    It’s also believed that Santos may know the whereabouts of a thumb drive containing a large archive of Clintoon emails – as well as the whereabouts of a MacBook formerly used by another close Clintoon crony, Monica Hanley.  Sometime in 2013 Ms. Hanley reportedly used the MacBook in question to download Clintoon’s emails from her private server, then to copy them to a thumbdrive.  Neither of those devices so far have been turned over to or examined by the FBI, either.

    The NY Post and Empty Lighthouse Magazine today each have articles worth reading.  The Post article discusses the matter described above in some detail, while the Empty Lighthouse article gives additional background on Ms. Santos.

    Too bad we didn’t know all of this some time before Comey      tried to sweep everything under the rug      erroneously and prematurely closed the FBI’s very obviously incomplete investigation some months ago – and then did the same again yesterday.  As I noted above:  Ms. Santos still apparently hasn’t been interviewed by the FBI, and her computer hardware hasn’t been examined.  So there’s no way in hell this so-called “investigation” was legitimately completed.

    Yes, you or I would be in freaking jail by now – deservedly so.  But Clintoon isn’t.

    I guess that’s what happens when you have a political hack as FBI director instead of a LEO that takes his responsibilities seriously.

  • “Only the ‘little people’ follow ethics rules.”

    Well, it appears as if the Clintoon Foundation – and its namesakes – are in the news again.  And not in a good way, either.

    When Clintoon became SECSTATE in 2009, she and her husband – the famous cigar lover – did not divest themselves of their interests in their Clintoon Foundation.  However, Ms. Clintoon did enter into a written ethics agreement with the State Department regarding the financial operations of that foundation.

    Specifically, she agreed that she would “notify the State Department’s ethics official if a new foreign government wished to donate or if a current foreign donor wished to ‘increase materially’ its contributions.”

    In 2011, the government of Qatar gave a $1 million donation to the Clintoon foundation.  Ostensibly, the purpose was to honor Cigarman’s 65th birthday.

    I don’t know about you, but I’d consider a $1 million “donation” to be a “material increase” in anyone’s contributions.  That’s especially true since the Clintoon Foundation itself says that they’ve received donations of “between $1 million and $5 million” from the Qatari government.  That means that the $1 million in question is at least 20% of the Qatari total – and maybe most or all of it.  That damn well seems significant to me.

    But maybe that’s just me.

    In any case:  neither Ms. Clintoon nor the Clintoon Foundation ever notified the proper State Department ethics official of the donation.  And the following April, Qatari government officials sought to meet with Mr. Clintoon personally.

    Hmm.  For some reason the term “pay for play” comes to mind.  Yet again.

    Fox today has a decent article on the matter; Reuters had a similar one a couple of days ago .  IMO they’re both worthwhile reading.

    Apparently Ms. Clintoon has decided to follow the lead of another “paragon of virtue”, Leona Helmsley.  Ms. Helmsley famously once remarked that, “Only the little people pay taxes.”   It certainly seems to me that Ms. Clintoon – and likely Mr. Clintoon as well – feels the same regarding following Federal laws and regulations.

    Hopefully they’ll eventually get the same comeuppance as did Ms. Helmsley.

  • Good Economic News? That Would Be a “No”.

    Well, the latest economic figures are out.  And as has been the case since January 2009, the numbers and trends . . . well, they suck.

    First:  the “official” unemployment rate declined last month – from 5.0% to 4.9%.  That’s good, right?

    Um, not really.  You see, the number of US residents employed actually DECLINED last month – even though the “official” unemployment rate also declined.  While approximately 43,000 people appear to have lost their jobs in October, it seems that that an additional 152,000 also simply quit looking for work during the month.  So though the number of people working declined, because of how the “official” unemployment rate is calculated that number “went down”.

    Yeah, that official “unemployment” rate is a wonderful measure of how well the economy is doing.  Today, 43,000 fewer people are working than the previous month, and 3x that many got discouraged and quit even looking for work – and the number shows “improvement”.  Go figure.

    As I’ve repeatedly said, a much better statistic to look at to determine the US economy’s performance is the labor participation rate.  That is defined as the fraction of the US civilian population that could work that is either working or looking for work.  And that measure DID DECLINE last month – from 62.9% to 62.8%.

    And in case you’re wondering, no – THAT decline is decidedly NOT good news.  What that means is that more than 94,600,000 people who could be working . . . aren’t.

    That’s the second-highest number in US history.  The highest number occurred earlier this year, in May.

    A labor participation rate of 63% or less is, to be blunt, an indicator that the US economy is in the freaking toilet.  Prior to the last several years of economic hard times, the last time the US labor participation rate was 63% or lower was during April 1978 – or 38 1/2 years ago.  That was during Jimmy “We Don’t Need No Steenkin’ Economy” Carter’s  Administration.

    The US labor participation rate was 65.7% in January 2009.  From there, it declined steadily to roughly 63% range, reaching 63% in November 2013.

    It’s been 63% or less ever since then – which means that the US economy has been absolutely in the crapper for a full three years now.

    It’s time to ask this question:  “Are you better off now than you were 8 years ago?”  I’m willing to bet the answer for virtually everyone is, “Oh, hell no!”

    And remember this:  if Clintoon’s elected POTUS next week, we’ll get at least 4 more years of the current Administration’s failed economic policies – or worse.