Joan Rivers Gambles With Good Health

Celebrity, Healthcare

The great Joan Rivers, who has undergone countless facial procedures, should not have gambled yet again with her good health for no good reason. There is no such thing as minor surgery, as far as I’m concerned. If it’s meant to fix a “minor” matter, then surgery doesn’t need to happen. Living trumps looking good.

The 81-year-old was having surgery on her vocal cords at a clinic when she suddenly stopped breathing during a procedure. … She remained in a serious condition in a New York City hospital on Friday, one day after going into cardiac arrest at a doctor’s office during a routine procedure. (MailOnline)

From “Joan Rivers: Antidote to PC Totalitarianism”:

Already in her 80s, the octogenarian is best-known nowadays for the sartorial send-up “Fashion Police.” The Rivers repartee is so ribald—it’s fair to say she’s the only woman who can get manly men to watch a show about fashion. While her humor has become a tad tame for me—Rivers once even disgorged, albeit with difficulty, praise for the loathsome Lena Dunham of “Girls” fame—she, nevertheless, stands out as the only public persona who flatly refuses to apologize for her signature wit.

Examples: Joan has compared the guest room she occupies at her daughter’s abode to the basement in which the “Cleveland kidnapping victims, Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight and Amanda Berry, were bound, raped and tortured for years before their escape. ‘Those women in the basement in Cleveland had more room,’ quipped Rivers.

Describing one awful outfit on “Fashion Police,” Rivers ventured that “on the scale of really bad ideas, it falls between marrying Charlie Sheen and using Oscar Pistorius’s bathroom.”

When Madonna accused Lady Gaga of stealing her “music,” Joan wanted to know how you could steal a rash.

And, Ms. Rivers walked in on a football party thrown for her grandson and his rowdy small friends by daughter Melissa. Looking on with disdain at the grubby little boys, Rivers blurted out: “I don’t know how Jerry Sandusky managed to do it.”

All wickedly clever. …

MORE.

Caesar Has Left The Palace

Barack Obama, Founding Fathers

Everyone is a suspect when Caesar leaves the palace to walk among his subjects.

A car the U.S. Secret Service was seeking in connection with an alleged threat against President Barack Obama was located late Friday night in Hamden, state police said.
The Secret Service said it was looking for “a potentially suspicious person and vehicle” in connection with the alleged threat, but did not confirm that the car had been found. No information on the whereabouts of the person was available.
(The Hartford Courant)

Thomas Jefferson, a real prince among men, traveled on horseback and wore plain clothes. Not only was he unguarded, his house in Washington was open to all-comers. Anyone who wrote to Jefferson, received a reply in the great man’s hand. He paid for postage out of pocket.

He Doesn’t Have a Strategy. OMG!

Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Middle East, Neoconservatism, War

Hussein doesn’t have a strategy to police the world. Good. I have one for him: First do no harm. The chicken hawks at Fox News, however, are hot for war. The headlines there practically scream:

Obama on Syria: ‘We don’t have a strategy yet’
Krauthammer: Obama’s strategy ‘is to do absolutely nothing’

What precisely did Obama say that has chicken hawk Chucky so cross with the president: He “told reporters Thursday that ‘we don’t have a strategy yet’ for confronting ISIS on a regional level.”

Megyn Kelly, whose show has degenerated into a rah-rah, flag-waving, hour-long session, bemoaning outrages over diminished US world hegemony, shook her head in dismay at Mike Huckabee’s excellent suggestion: Let the Arab League deal with ISIS.

Yeah, the neighborhood, Israel included, doesn’t seem particularly concerned about ISIS. Or perhaps the US has enabled inertia and apathy with its interventions.

The illogic I don’t get is this: How can media members worry about ISIS in the Levant, when America’s southern border is utterly open? Can they be that stupid? Why not challenge the president about the real danger of failing to defend the homeland’s borders?

Rand Paul Opportunistic—And Wrong—On Race

Barack Obama, Drug War, Fascism, Justice, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Race, Racism, Ron Paul

“Rand Paul Opportunistic—And Wrong—On Race” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

Police brutality? Yes! Militarization of the police force? You bet! “A Government of Wolves”? Yes again! “The Rise of the Warrior Cop”? No doubt! But racism? Nonsense on stilts! So why have some libertarians applied this rhetoric to the murder-by-cop of black teenager Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri? The same people who would argue against color-coded hate-crime legislation—and rightly so, for a crime is a crime, no matter the skin pigment of perp or prey—would have you believe that it is possible to differentiate a racist from a non-racist shooting or beating.

Predictably, BBC News had taken a more analytical look at the “unrest in Ferguson,” pointing out that liberal outrage had centered on what the left sees as racial injustice. Libertarian anger, conversely, connected “the perceived overreaction by militarized local law enforcement to a critique of the heavy-handed power of government.”

As its libertarian stand-bearers, the BBC chose from the ranks of establishment, libertarian-leaning conservatives. Still, the ideological bifurcation applied was sound. With some exceptions, libertarians have consistently warned about a police state rising; the left has played at identity politics, appealing to its unappeasable base.

As refreshingly clever as its commentators are, BBC is inexact. The very embodiment of political opportunism, Sen. Rand Paul has managed to straddle liberal and libertarian narratives, vaporizing as follows:

“… Anyone who thinks that race does not still, even if inadvertently, skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention. …”

The senator from Kentucky is considered “one of the leading figures in today’s libertarian movement.” Even so, on matters libertarian, Rand Paul is a political pragmatist; not the purist his father is. Alas, Rand has imbibed at home some unfortunate, crowd-pleasing habits—the leftist penchant for accusing law enforcement of racism. In 2012, in particular, during the debate between Republican presidential front-runners, in Manchester, New Hampshire, Ron Paul lurched to the left, implicating racism in the unequal outcomes meted by American justice:

“How many times have you seen the white rich person get the electric chair?” he asked. “If we really want to be concerned with racism … we ought to look at the drug laws.”

Laws prohibiting the individual from purchasing, selling, ingesting, inhaling and injecting drugs ought to be repudiated and repealed on the grounds that they are wrong, not racist. But statism is not necessarily racism. Drug laws ensnare more blacks, because blacks are more likely to violate them by dealing in drugs or engaging in violence around commerce in drugs, not necessarily because cops are racists. …

Read the rest of the column. “Rand Paul Opportunistic—And Wrong—On Race” is now on WND.