Saturday, November 28, 2009

Saturday Afternoon Cigar

A Camacho SLR burned as we continued reading Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow. A book about the first man made famine after the Bolshevik takeover.

Friday, November 20, 2009

To the Future, Comrades!

The future may hold free health care for all, but it will not bring any new posts at Ushanka.us until we return from our trip on Tuesday.



In the meantime, check out the story on this work of art: Worker and Kolkhoz Woman - link.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

The Economy is Better than Ever!

(Don't look at the post from earlier today...)

From Fox News:

A GOP lawmaker, in a tense exchange Thursday with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, called on Geithner to resign immediately, blaming him for rising unemployment, growing federal deficits and accounting flaws in the number of stimulus jobs created, among other economic problems.

The request, made at a Joint Economic Committee hearing, sparked an intense and remarkable back-and-forth between Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, and Geithner, who countered that the economy was in significantly better shape today than it was a year ago when Republicans controlled the White House, a view that was supported by a number of Democrats on the committee.

So if the economy is so much better than it was a year ago, why is President Obama holding a Jobs Summit next month?

Obama's Decline

We'd rename this animated map of recent unemployment to "The Decline: The Geography of a Democrat President". Link



U/T: Instapundit

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Sunday, November 15, 2009

"Generous Legal Punishment"

What will happen if one escapes from prison after refusing to purchase Obama's health insurance, or pay his fines?

Date and location modified from this DailyNK story: Summary Execution of a Runaway from the Camp.

The deserter, when he was still a citizen, pursued his own comfort and profit and embezzled the precious property of the state. For that, he was sentenced to six years reeducation and admitted to Tule Lake No.12 Reeducation Camp in 2013. Having committed an indelible sin against the country and its people, it is only right for the prisoner to admit his offense and take on the reeducating labor faithfully.

However, this person challenged the generous legal punishment, filled his stomach through larceny, neglected his duties and finally betrayed the kind mother country that gave him a chance to repent and ran away. He was, however, detected by the self-conscious people of the village and got caught. Therefore, following the decision of the Democratic People’s Republic of America’s Central Reeducation Department, we sentence him to death!



Is this the change we're supposed to believe in?

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Saturday Afternoon Cigar

Another Rocky Patel Sun Grown went up in smoke today.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Ditherer in Chief

A few items that can be properly grouped under this title:


From Instapundit, quoting a reader:

The towers fell in New York on 9/11/01, Kabul fell to American led forces on 11/14/01. That’s 65 days.

President Obama’s hand-picked replacement commander in Afghanistan, GEN McChrystal, delivered his Afghanistan war plans to President Obama on 8/30/09, and President Obama hasn’t acted on his General’s recommendations as of today, 11/11/09. That’s 73 days, and waiting.

From Denise Sherman, mother of soldier that died last week while trying to save a fellow soldier who had fallen into a river:

I think it is time that a decision is made that this country comes together and supports our troops or whatever (Obama) decides. God will guide him. But it is time. It is time.


Found at Townhall:

1 Out of 50 Governors Agree

So far...

Screenshot from today's Drudge Report:

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Communism in America?

It appears more and more are figuring it out.

A group has emerged on several college campuses called Campus Gulag. They setup fake gulags on campus to educate others on the direction this country is going.

Of course, this lowers the political discourse and should be stopped immediately! In fact, one campus did shut it down. If only campus administrators had that kind of power in North Korea or the former Soviet Union....

Picture from Gateway Pundit:


Link to Campus Gulag

UPDATE 11.2: Video of campus gulag. The liberal progressive communist administrators played right into their hands!! Just like a certain hope & change guy has given credibility to our Commie Obama hat's prophetic warning...

Monday, November 09, 2009

Monday Afternoon Cigar

We smoked a Rocky Patel Sun Grown - our favorite - to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. How did you celebrate?

The Wall That Came Down

20 years ago today. Here are some random items to commemorate the day.

Our movie trailer from last year's campaign. Right prediction, wrong candidate...



From ContraObama:



Doug Ross posts a must-read from an anonymous surviver of communism in Hungary who summarizes: "Citizenship is our birthright, but freedom is not."

SOCIALISM!!!! Seams a perfect, equal system for all, a Shangri-La if you will, not realizing it is nothing but a bridge to Communism, which is total government control! Socialism at its best is corrupt, rotten to the core, a government without overseers! The idea of Socialism is not new in the United States , but it is not openly identified as such in the places it exists. If you live near by, drove through, or happen to live in the projects, you have seen and experienced Socialism in America!

Government housing, government healthcare, government schools, government food stamps, and what you see there is as good as it gets, when the government decides what is good for the people, takes the power out of the hands of the people, and they spread the wealth. Our government imposed full blown Socialism on our inner cities, and in over fifty years hasn’t been able to raise the living standard of those who live there! And look how happy and motivated are those, living in the projects with all that the government is providing for them.

Is that the best we can dream for our children and grandchildren? Is that the America we want to see? I certainly hope not, but that is exactly what the government means when they tell you they want to spread the wealth. They will make us all poor by breaking down our economy, forcing on us taxation on a level never seen before, and if we don’t like it and cause too much difficulty for them, at that point they will have the power to no longer tax us at all, simply take over completely, shut down the borders and impose full blown Communism. Not in America you might say! Think again, look around and see how much we lost just in the last year!



Today's WSJ Editorial Page:

And there was Ronald Reagan, who believed the job of Western statesmanship was to muster the moral, political, economic and military wherewithal not simply to contain the Soviet bloc, but to bury it. "What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term—the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history," he said in 1982, to the astonishment and derision of his critics. Now, there was the audacity of hope.
---
It is a tribute to Reagan's moral and strategic determination, as it was to everyone else who played their part in bringing down the Wall, that they could see through the sophistries of Soviet propagandists, their Western fellow travelers, and the legions of moral equivocators and diplomatic finessers and simply look at the Wall.

"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle," George Orwell once said. That is what the heroes of 1989 did with unblinking honesty and courage for years on end until, at last, the Wall came tumbling down.




Reason.tv's latest video:



UPDATE 4:15pm: Found at Townhall.

Czarnia

Found at iOwnTheWorld:

Friday, November 06, 2009

Unemployment = 10.2%

How's that Hope and Change working out for you?

Here is a screen shot of our survey from today. Says it all, don't you think?



On the bright side: at least "we came back from the brink" and that we're in a "jobless recovery".

As Rush has mentioned, it is easier to get socialized medicine passed when more and more Americans are losing their coverage along with their jobs. It is as if this was all planned....

UPDATED 12:45pm: Found at Townhall:

Thursday, November 05, 2009

Shooting at Fort Hood

Current tally: 12 dead, 31 wounded, three loser gunmen one of which is dead.

It just happened a few hours ago, so with little information to go on we decided to post some pictures.




And we'll wait for more details before we read anything into the dead gunman's name, Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan.

UPDATE 7:15pm:

It appears GatewayPundit has the best list of links to this story so far. Click here to view. Here are his latest updates:

UPDATE: US Army Major Malik Nadal Hasan Identified As Primary Shooter At Fort Hood.
ABC has more on Malik.
He is a convert to Islam.
FOX News: “This was a deliberate act of execution.”
Hasan was an MD psychiatrist.

UPDATE: Malik was previously stationed at Walter Reed.

UPDATE: This was jihad.

Gun Free Zones and Evil do not mix. Libs want to social engineer away evil, GOD bless them. Conservatives? Oh, we want to get rid of every single death trap gun free zone out there. Who's right?

UPDATE 11.9:

LTC Ralph Peters offers his opinion (without the nuance). Link to his New York Post article.



Found at iOwnTheWorld:

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Election 2009

Last night's election results were fun to watch. Finally an election where we feel represented. Here are some special blog-picks we selected:

From American Thinker:


C. Edmund Wright calls it a "Rout" at American Thinker:

The Democrats did not lose a 2-1 squeaker last night. They lost two huge races, saw an overall evaporation of 25 basis points of support -- and lost by nearly 500,000 cumulative votes in the three high-profile elections.

Or put another way, Republicans won two races decided by millions of voters -- and Democrats won a small race dominated by party operatives. In addition, the GOP made some historic gains in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Washington state special elections to boot.

From Contra Obama:


Michelle Malkin comments on NY-23:

Conservatives owe NY-23 candidate Doug Hoffman immeasurable gratitude. He overcame impossible odds (single digits just a month ago) to come within two points of defeating Democrat Bill Owens. Hoffman had zero name recognition. National Republican Party officials dumped nearly $1 million into the race on behalf of radical leftist GOP candidate Dede Scozzafava, who then turned around, endorsed Owens and siphoned off 5 percent of the vote with her name still on the ballot after she dropped out.

Conservatives’ money went to pay for specious attack ads against Hoffman run by the NRCC like this.

Conservatives’ money went to support a GOP candidate who shares the same socialist alliances with fellow SEIU/ACORN/New Party/Working Families Party activist Patrick Gaspard, the Obama White House political director who intervened in the race to secure Scozzafava’s endorsement of Owens.

From iOwnTheWorld:


And John Lott echoes Fox News in their report of ACORN types passing out absentee ballots at a NJ hospital:

The ACORN accusation potentially can be traced in part to an e-mail, allegedly from the husband of a hospital worker, claiming his wife saw and spoke with the activists.

A New Jersey GOP official provided the e-mail to FoxNews.com but could not corroborate its authenticity.

"ACORN is working the hospitals in Orange in Newark. Registering up to 10 people for absentee ballots and submitting it for them on their behalf," the e-mail said.

If true, the official said, this would be a clear "oversight" on the part of the hospital.

New Jersey law allows third parties to collect a limited amount of absentee ballots, but the official said it would be troubling if activists were involved.

"There's no way to tell if there was any pressure involved," the official said.

No pressure whatsoever.

UPDATE: 11.5 7am - Hilarious!



Monday, November 02, 2009

Monday Afternoon Cigar

A Rocky Patel Sun Grown smoldered as we watched the few remaining leaves fall to the ground.