6 Jan 2013: SoS Kerry and Staff Schedule

There's nothing posted for 6 Jan 2014, as of 9:10 am mountain time this morning.

Here's Kerry's schedule from yesterday.

SECRETARY JOHN KERRY

Secretary Kerry is on foreign travel to Jerusalem, Amman, and Riyadh. He is accompanied by Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations Martin Indyk, Spokesperson Jen Psaki, and Vice Admiral Kurt Tidd, JCS.

7:15 a.m. LOCAL Secretary Kerry holds a solo press availability, in Jerusalem.
(POOLED PRESS COVERAGE)

10:00 a.m. LOCAL Secretary Kerry meets with Jordanian King Abdullah II, in Amman, Jordan.
(POOLED PRESS COVERAGE)

4:00 p.m. LOCAL Secretary Kerry meets with Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
(POOLED PRESS COVERAGE)

6 Jan 2014: President and Vice President's Schedule

Obama's schedule

11:00 am
The President and the Vice President receive the Presidential Daily Briefing
Oval Office
Closed Press

2:00 pm
The President meets with senior advisors
Oval Office
Closed Press

VP's schedule

11:00 am
The President and the Vice President receive the Presidential Daily Briefing
Oval Office
Closed Press

Apologies for being away so long...

If I have any subscribers left.... thanks for your patience...

I'll be getting back to posting here starting on Monday...lots to go over in the New Year!

If "I Was Raised Poorly By My Parents" is a Defense, then Put the Parents in Jail

People are responsible for their own actions.

I just saw a video on the white trash teen (yes, his parents are rich - but that doesn't make him any less white trash) who stole beer, got drunk, killed 4 people and injured 2 others - including one who is apparently going to be a vegetable for the rest of his life - and he gets probation because he's a victim of "affluenza," his parents never disciplined him when he was a kid so he didn't know that his actions were wrong and certainly musn't be punished for them.

Well then, if he doesn't have to go to jail for murdering 4 people and crippling two more, then send his parents to jail for raising him up to "affluenza."

In the two days since Texan teen Ethan Couch, 16, received an astonishingly light sentence for a drunk-driving accident that killed four people, outrage over the ruling has only deepened. Couch’s defense called the teen a victim of ”affluenza.” In case you haven’t heard, affluenza is apparently a disorder that goes something like this: because the boy’s parents were wealthy and careless to the point that Couch never understood that his actions have consequences, he couldn’t be held fully accountable for his crime. Couch was sentenced by Judge Jean Boyd to 10 years’ probation and an extended stay in a rehabilitation facility that Anderson Cooper described as a “spa.”
Back in June, Couch stole beer from Walmart with his friends, and crashed his car into a broken-down vehicle on the road. Four people died in the accident, and ten more were injured. Toxicology reports revealed that Couch was three times over the legal drinking limit, and had Valium in his system to boot. At sentencing, Couch’s defense team insisted that rehabilitation would be more useful for the teen than incarceration (Couch was initially up for 20 years), and the judge agreed. Couch’s parents will put up the funds for his stay in the rehabilitation clinic, which costs almost half a million dollars per year.
Judge Boyd hasn’t yet publicly commented on the outrage following her sentence, and was already planning to retire from the bench next year. The assistant district attorney and juvenile prosecutor in the case released an angry press statement: “We are disappointed by the punishment assessed but have no power under the law to change or overturn it.” Couch had elected to have Boyd sentence him herself.
At the sentencing, Boyd heard testimony that Couch had “essentially raised himself,” had an emotional age of 12, and had never understood consequence because his parents compensated with money when he, or they, did wrong — hence ”affluenza.”

Another member of Couch’s defense team noted that due to the lengthly probation sentence, Couch could be ”under the thumb” of the justice system longer than if he’d served jail time. (Which sounds a little fishy to us.)
As for the victims’ families, reported the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, there was a “lot of disappointment in the room.” Judge Boyd had said that no amount of time spent in prison could bring the victims back or heal their families’ suffering, an argument that Eric Boyles strongly contests. Boyles’ wife and daughter were killed in the crash.
On Anderson Cooper 360, Boyles explained: “For 25 weeks, I’ve been going through a healing process. And so when the verdict came out, I mean, my immediate reaction is — I’m back to week one. We have accomplished nothing here. My healing process is out the window.”

Cooper and Nancy Grace, amongst others, covered the case on their Wednesday night shows. Grace implored viewers to contact Texas governor Rick Perry about the sensational sentence.
Jacquielynn Floyd wrote in the Dallas News: 

It wasn’t the first screw-up for this model young citizen. According to trial testimony, he has been arrested on other alcohol-related charges. At one point, he was caught with an underaged girl, undressed and passed out, in his car… A psychologist hired by the defense testified, in an elegant rendering of courtroom logic, that because he has gotten off without serious punishment in the past, he cannot be seriously punished in this case either.

During the trial, Boyd explained that she doubted he will get the treatment he needs in the state’s correctional system. “Whether [Couch] needs to be introduced to the novel concept of punishment was not addressed.”

 I'm not a fan of civil lawsuits, but here's a case where every single victim of this idiot piece of dirt needs to sue his parents for everything they possess.

If you don't like what they pay.... get a different job...

A couple of days ago, a live version of the play Sound of Music was aired on TV. Apparently Walmart sponsored the airing.

In reading a message board this morning, someone commented:

 I love that fact that Walmart, in way too many commercials, rammed down our commercial throats a large family saving money shopping at Walmart while their employees can't support their families on what Walmart pays.

 Okay, here's the deal.

Why should Walmart have to pay enough to make sure that someone can support their families?  Why does someone who has to work at Walmart have more family than they can afford to have?

It's just like people who work at fast food restaurants.

You're not supposed to be trying to support a family on minimum wage!!!

Minimum wage, and Walmart wages, are for students and people who want to get out of the house to earn money.

Once the workers have graduated from school - they then go out and get well paying jobs! That's how it work.

It is not Walmart's fault if some of their workers have 10 kids and no education so a job at Walmart is the best they can do.

Don't get me wrong, by the way. Just based on the hassle that fast food workers have to go through (I worked at both McDonalds and a Wendy's when I was young) they should be paid $20 an hour! And that kind of work isn't really easy - at least not working as a cook - especially with the lousy training provided - but the fact remains that you don't need any special skills to do the work, which is why you don't earn $15 an hour for doing it.

I'm actually not sure what Walmart pays its people -  but the same thing applies. If you don't like what they pay, get a better education and get a better job.  And don't saddle yourself with three or four or five kids while you're trying to get a better job. Your lack of planning is not Walmart's fault.

Rush on Obamacare

I don't have time to write much tonight, so I'm going to share a longer snippet of a transcription form Rush's site:

Will comment on this appropriately after Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving, all!

Well, here we are, folks, on November 27th, and the real turkey is nowhere near ready yet.  That's the Obamacare website.  In fact, it isn't gonna be ready on November 30th.  They said it would be.  They said it'd be fixed and then they said it would be ready for 80% load, and now they are saying that it's not gonna be ready on November 30th, and Kathleen Sebelius is now saying that she never said it would be.  So we just dreamed all that.

It's kind of like Mark Halperin of TIME Magazine.  One of these guys that goes on campaigns with candidates, gets a lot of information, and saves it all for a book after the election.  He learns things that could have impact on elections, but he saves them, and then he publishes them with his buddy, John Heilemann, in books that follow the election.  And Mark Halperin was on with Steve Malzberg the other day at NewsMaxRadio.com in which he said that Obamacare has death panels and that are there people that are gonna determine who gets treated and who doesn't, that there will be rationing.
And everybody picked up on that because of course the Regime has been denying from day one that there were death panels, and Sarah Palin, of course, coined the phrase.  So now Halperin is saying (paraphrasing), "No, I never said that.  I never said death panels.  I never said that."  But he did, and he clearly implied it.  He's a highly reputed journalist within the realm of reputed journalists.

Now, we all heard the Regime say their website was gonna be ready on November 30th.  We all heard it.  We heard Sebelius say it.  We heard Obama say it, after he said he didn't know it wasn't working.  The fact of the matter is -- and there's even more documentation of this today -- Sharyl Attkisson, CBS News, the Regime knew in 2010 that everything that's happening was going to happen.  Yeah, Malzberg said to Halperin, " Alright, so you believe that there will be rationing, AKA death panels." And Halperin said, "It's built into the plan. It’s not like a guess or like a judgment. That’s going to be part of how costs are controlled."

Well, we've all known this from the beginning.  It's right in the plan, for anybody that's read it.  And Obama even admitted it. If you recall that woman at the ABC prime time special from the White House who stood up and asked the president if it'd be okay for her mom to get a pacemaker, she's a hundred years old. The woman wanted to know if Obamacare would pay for it because of her mother's spirit and will to live, and Obama said (paraphrasing), "Nope, nope, we can't take things like that into account. We can't accommodate for a will to live or spirit."  I'm paraphrasing. "At some point we're just gonna have to give 'em the pain pill and tell 'em to enjoy the rest of their lives."

I said this over and over.  I was literally stunned that in the United States of America a citizen was even asking anybody in government, much less the president, if her mother would be treated medically.  A citizen of the United was actually asking the president if her mother would get a pacemaker at a hundred years of age under Obama's plan.  Folks, no president ought to ever be involved in that kind of a family decision.  Government's got no business being there, but, boy, there was Obama just eager as he could to say nope, can't take that into account.  Will to live, spirit, too nebulous, too hard to measure.  Just give 'em the pain pill.

What he meant was, we can't afford to give 100-year-old people pacemakers, and that's the death panel, that's the rationing.  It clearly is there, and there's this board called the IPAB, and it's a bunch of people assigned by the health care act to actually make these decisions.  So after confirming, yeah, death panels, yeah, it's built into the plan, it's not like a guess or like a judgment.  That's gonna be part of how costs are controlled.  Now, Halperin knew this when the bill was being debated. 

This is my point. All these people in the media knew this.  This is one of the many ways they shielded Obama from any vetting or any scrutiny or his bill.  They knew.

OT - ever wanted to start a blog?

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