You have all probably heard it before but it’s one of those jokes that, like red wine, only matures with age because, as in Stalin’s USSR, jokes about the leader just aren’t made on the media….so they have to stay underground……

A doctor from France says: “In France , the medicine is so advanced that we cut off a man’s testicles; we put them into another man, and in 6 weeks he is looking for work.”

The German doctor comments: “That’s nothing, in Germany we take part of the brain out of a person; we put it into another person’s head, and in 4 weeks he is looking for work.”

A Russian doctor says: “That’s nothing either. In Russia we take out half of the heart from a person; we put it into another person’s chest, and in 2 weeks he is looking for work.”

The U.S. doctor answers immediately: “That’s nothing my colleagues, you are way behind us….in the USA , about 3 years ago, we grabbed a person from Kenya with no brains, no heart, and no balls….we made him President of the United States, and now……. the whole damn country is looking for work.”

h/t Peter Christie

A lot of disappointment across the board about Obama’s speech at the Democrat’s Convention, even from the liberal left. But was he ever a great orator or was it all a myth generated by a compliant media that almost everyone else was afraid to confront?

After all Iain Martin of the UK Daily Telegraph labelled Obama a “windbag” when he came to London in 2009 but clearly even the DT was shocked and it was blown down the memory hole….you can’t find the article now..

But at t last I have found at least one other person on the planet who agrees with me – Shawn P of Virginia Beach with his comment on this piece.

I always felt that he would have been ideal as one of those actors who are shown in insurance commercials telling us how such and such a policy was great for his family (cue the Obamas)…good for an eighty second spiel spouting a script containing all the buzzwords but no substance – and certainly no chemistry….if you want chemistry, go to Palin…

The Aurora shootings and the aftermath have been media headline fillers here in the UK for several days. Our hacks and pundits love this sort of story because it allows them to pontificate on Americans and guns and how any wingnut is able to stroll into a hardware store and kit himself out with enough firepower to recreate the Battle of the Somme if he is so minded.

This then leads in to the issue of gun control and how sensible folk like President Obama and his liberal/left cohorts in politics and media would just love to wean their fellow Americans off their guns and become an unarmed community like Britain….well not exactly unarmed because criminals are quite heavily armed but hey, they just shoot each other, don’t they?

But wait a minute…..” any wingnut”….hold on that…our media prefers the shooters to be white and middle class and slightly creepy because central casting has lots of guys to fit that role.

Of course if you are Brian Ross of NBC white also equals Tea Party. If you’re Joe Scarborough of MSNBC white = autistic loner. the sort of people who never go to Tina Brown’s parties or read the New Yorker or ski at Aspen.

What the Americans need, according to our media pundits, is much stricter laws on gun ownership and gun carrying – except, as Prof William Jacobson points out there are more people shot by guns in Chicago in one month than were shot in that Aurora cinema…..

…and Chicago has some of the strictest gun control laws in the whole of the USA

But of course you will never learn much about the bloody gun culture in “gunfree” Chicago because there are very few spotty white middle class nerds poncing about the South and West sides of the city. This is black on black crime and usually drugs related so not only does it have little news value but merely mentioning those facts would be declared a racist hate crime – and that would never so….

…..and, eeeeermmm, practically the whole Obama machine hails from Chicago…

BTW…if you want to keep yourself informed about the matters that are concerning American conservatives don’t use UK blogs like Conservative HomeUSA or the Spectator Coffee House – they’ll just retread stuff from NYT and WaPo. Go to Prof Jacobson’s blog at Legal Insurrection – it’s Tea Party friendly , easy to follow and 100% suspicious of the great and the good …..

Governor Mitt Romney, who is likely to be the Republican nominee against President Obama in the forthcoming US elections this coming November will spend the last days of July attempting to burnish his foreign policy credentials with visits to Britain, Israel and Poland.

The aim will be to introduce himself onto a world stage where the other players, on the surface at least, appear not to have bought into the disappointment and disillusion felt by large swathes of the US electorate. The myth of the transformational figure peddled by the US media in 2008 which presented a shallow Chicago machine hack as a latter day Moses who would lead his country and the rest of the world into a global era of peace and honey is still the official party line of the chattering classes outside the USA – except in Poland where Obama is seen as Putin’s poodle and Israel whose government is very wary of repeating the role of the Czechs against Obama’s Chamberlain.

So Romney wants to remind these folk that, come January there might very well be a new face in the White House with a very different world view. A lot of his foreign policy advisors could well be George W Bush retreads with a far more cynical view about resetting buttons and the faces in Warsaw and Jerusalem will be far more comfortable with that.

One would like to say that David Cameron and his London colleagues would also be keeping their fingers crossed for a Romney victory since Obama has been rather disdainful America’s closest ally with his pandering to Russia and Argentina – but, unfortunately, Cameron, like the UK media in general, is still infatuated with Obama the myth. Indeed, during his visit to Washington last March the British Prime Minister was so grovellingly obsequious to the president that Romney surrogates let it be known that they felt an election year line had been crossed.

Romney will be in London for the opening of the Olympics, reviving memories of his own connections when he was drafted in to rescue the Utah 2002 winter Olympics from corruption and confusion. However he will also take the opportunity to press some influential flesh
At his first stop, in London, Romney plans meetings with British Prime Minister David Cameron, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, Foreign Secretary William Hague, and Ed Miliband, who leads the opposition Labour Party. He plans fundraisers, where attendees will likely include bankers and others from London’s financial sector.

For most of this year David Cameron has been particularly gaffe prone. Let’s hope he isn’t stupid enough not to realise that, with the polls still too close to call, he might well be talking to the next US President and a man who almost certainly will have more respect for the special relationship than Obama and his Chicago cronies….

But you never can tell with Cameron. For all his Tory rhetoric you always get the feeling the man is essentially a fully paid up member of the metro elite who still hungers for approval from North London dinner parties and and the UK branch of Obama’s media “palace guard” at the BBC…and, with Michelle Obama heading the US Olympic delegation he might find her beady eye a little discomforting….

Fascinating civil war broke out at Hot Air over a Jazz Shaw post taking House Speaker John Boehner to task for suggesting the November election will really be a referendum on President Obama rather than an endorsement (or otherwise) of Mitt Romney.

Aside from Romney’s “friends, relatives and fellow Mormons,” Boehner said, most people will be motivated to vote for him in opposition to Obama.
The Ohio Republican made the remarks when an unidentified woman asked during a question-and-answer session: “Can you make me love Mitt Romney?”
“No,” Boehner said. “Listen, we’re just politicians. I wasn’t elected to play God. The American people probably aren’t going to fall in love with Mitt Romney. I’ll tell you this: 95 percent of the people that show up to vote in November are going to show up in that voting booth, and they are going to vote for or against Barack Obama.

Opinon seemed evenly divided over whether Boehner was to be congratulated on his honesty or condemned for rocking the GOP boat. But soon one or two posters were declaring that Romney was not only the best thing since sliced bread but would also become Reagan 2 once he got to the White House.

Funny thing is, until the last registration, although there were partisan voices for Palin, Cain, Santorum, Perry etc the general view appeared to be that, far from being another Reagan, Romney was McCain 2 – a stodgy, uninspiring choice who could only be voted for with a peg affixed to one’s nose.

Strangely enough, however,since the most recent registration voices have appeared ascribing Zeus like qualities to a man previously despised for his Romneycare past, his flip flopping on key issues and his failure to stand for re-election as governor of Massachusetts……

But the post of the day came from someone who felt that Boehner had been hoist with his own petard and had no sympathy for his oddly timed whinge

Yeah, John, I wanted to vote FOR someone, someone I agreed with on 90% of the issues, someone I trust to at least fight for the reforms this country needs, someone to make me believe in the promise of America again. Sadly she decided not to run because she knew the deck was stacked against her because you and your ilk never would have her back and would work against her every step of the way. So I am left with Mittoast. And yes, John, I will be among the 95% that is going to be a good little solider, eat my gruel and vote against Obamao. But my vote won’t be FOR something. So John, don’t count on getting either my money or time. Those go for the things I am FOR.

Ouch….I hope that hurt…..

The BBC, acting in its capacity of being the UK extension of Barack Obama’s “Palace Guard” (aka the US mainstream media) led on the website with an item headed

Romney and Republicans raise $100m in June

Under the headline the text confirmed that Mitt Romney, the likely Republican candidate in this coming November’s Presidential election, had raised more money than Obama. At first glance one could have sensed from this the possibility of a Damascene conversion at Beeb HQ…..that they might have actually decided to report a US election in a fair and balanced way by shedding the liberal/left blinkers that for over half a century have coloured their reporting.

But, true to form, as one’s eyes travelled down the page, it became clear that they were performing to the script posted out from the New York Times, Washington Post and the TV alphabets. The Obama campaign is firing all its guns on Romney’s wealth to characterise him as a gold plated fat cat who knows nothing about the everyday problems of ordinary people in a struggling economy – and the reason for harping on the success of the Romney/GOP fundraising was to associate the Republican Party with this fat cat image…

Look, folks, it’s Obama and the people v Romney and the fat cats – and the fat cats hope to buy the election…

Moreover, to darken the image even further, the BBC references a recent Vanity Fair article

And there were negative headlines this week over a Vanity Fair investigation reporting that much of Mr Romney’s personal fortune was hidden in a network of opaque offshore investment havens.

Yes, Vanity Fair, (the one that was so sympathetic to the Occupy “movement”)…..did a full scale investigation into Romney’s wealth (probably using the fifty fact checkers that AP sent to Alaska after Palin’s VP GOP nomination in 2008)…..yet somehow has never managed to send anybody to Chicago to find out more about Obama’s relationship with Tony Rezko, a key figure in his political transfiguration who was later convicted of money laundering and bribery.

But then, since VF is clearly the house magazine of the glitterati, the BBC didn’t spend too much time agonising upon the mixed messages being sent out by Obama’s hobnobbing with the Hollywood elite….

As for the tear stained pleas from Obama and his surrogates about being outspent – smoke and mirrors, anyone?

The only catch is that the actual spending by super PACs so far this year tells a quite different story. The truth is that the super PAC founded by top Obama staffers and its aligned “independent” groups are outspending groups that oppose the president by roughly two to one.

….and behind those pro Obama super PACs are some very shady figures….

But hey, whenever did an honest in depth probe of any liberal/left political structure figure particularly high on the BBC agenda? As for the piece itself just look at the subtle hints offered by the selection of photos……Romney holidaying on an expensive rich man’s toy while Obama is out there talking to horny handed sons of toil….

….and not a single mention of golf….

cross posted at Biased BBC

Great stuff from Mark Steyn on Barack Obama who, like UK Labour Party leader Ed Milliband and Francois Hollande, the new socialist president of France, prefers to operate from outer space where he feels he can safely ignore the laws of gravity and economics…

Soaring rhetoric at a time of earthbound problems — jobs, debt — risks making the president sound ridiculous. Granted, there’s a lot of it about this time of year — commencement speakers assuring kids who can’t manage middle-school math that you can be anything you want to be as long as you dream your dreams. But Obama offers an even more absurd evolution of this grim trope: “I can be anything I want to be as long as you chumps dream your dreams.”

Unfortunately , as the French elections have taught us, there is no shortage in the west of misty eyed optimists always ready to be seduced by the snake oil salesmen who readily tell you what you want to hear. But eventually even the biggest sucker eventually gets to realise that there is no such thing as a free lunch..

Self-pity is never an attractive quality, and in an elected head of state even less so. Obama whines that his opponents say it’s all his fault. One can argue about whose fault it is, but not, as my colleagues at National Review pointed out, whose responsibility it is: It’s his. He’s the only president we have. And he made things worse. He increased the national debt by some 70 percent, and what do we have to show for it? No dams, no railroads, no moon shots. Just government, and bureaucracy, and regulation, unto national bankruptcy.

“Fly me to the moon / Let me play among the stars . . . ” Who needs another moon shot? Obama’s already up there, soaring ever more unmoored from reality. Pity us mere mortals back on Planet Earth, living in the land he made.

The good news is that while out walking the other day I came across just the bunch of fellows who can help Obama (and Milliband and Hollande) keep their feet firmly on the ground…

BTW Actually Earthbound Services is a great example of a successful local business creating jobs….there are thousands of these small businesses in the UK driving the engine of growth (and no, I have don’t have any connection with the company, just liked their lorry and found out more about them later…)

Edward Klein calls her the de facto President, the power behind the throne…

In the White House pecking order, Jarrett has more clout than the president’s chief of staff. During the savage internecine warfare between Jarrett and Obama’s first two chiefs of staff — Rahm Emanuel and Bill Daley — Obama sided most of the time with Jarrett, a classic limousine liberal who believes that Obama was elected president in order to engineer social change. Ultimately, Jarrett emasculated Emanuel and Daley and forced them from their jobs.

Yet her record at the White House has been a one of shambolic incompetence…

She has also been responsible for much of the incompetence and amateurism that have been the hallmarks of Obama’s time in office. Indeed, Jarrett has been on the wrong side of practically every consequential issue to come across the president’s desk.

Very much part of the Chicago political Democrat machine, one of the most corrupt and vicious in America, Jarrett’s inefficiency and ineffectiveness proved no barrier to earning massive six figure salaries from taxpayer funded executive positions.

Despite her impeccable social credentials, Jarrett’s record before she went to Washington was spotty at best. After Mayor Daley made her commissioner of planning, she became embroiled in a massive screw-up in the city’s public housing revitalization plan, which cost Chicago millions of dollars in overruns. Daley fired her without explanation.
After she left city hall, Jarrett became CEO of Habitat Executive Services, where she earned $300,000 in salary and $550,000 in deferred compensation. She managed a federally subsidized housing complex that was seized by the government after inspectors found crime-infested slum conditions and widespread blight.

Before 2008 this wealthy, privately educated woman’s Chicago cv and her very close connection to the Obamas was a matter of public record. Post inauguration the strength of her influence at the White House has been constantly acknowledged by insiders. Yet the media, so quick to fact check Palin’s tanning bed, Perry’s rock and Romney’s schoolboy antics has consistently refused to shine any spotlight the President’s eminence grise…

No wonder the mainstream media is known as Obama’s “Palace Guard”…..

Great news – with the publication of this it is clear that those rumours about the appointment of Thomas C Sharp as a Washington Post 2012 Election consultant appear to have a certain degree of substance. Just as Adolf Eichmann was regarded by the Nazis as an “expert” on Jews so Mr Sharp is an “expert” on Mormons.

War and extermination is inevitable! Citizens ARISE, ONE and ALL!!!—Can you stand by, and suffer such INFERNAL DEVILS! to ROB men of their property and RIGHTS, without avenging them. We have no time for comment, every man will make his own. LET IT BE MADE WITH POWDER AND BALL!!!

Like Eichmann Mr Sharp was also a man of action, playing a leading role in the raid on the Carthage Jailhouse in June 1844 when the Mormon leader Joseph Smith and his brother were murdered. He and others were charged with murder but were acquitted by a sympathetic jury.

Mr Sharp’s role will be to select historical references to Mormons which can be used to suggest that they are strange and a little sinister and therefore putting a Mormon like Mitt Romney in the White House might turn Washington into another Nauvoo.

Mr Sharp has apologised for his untoward behaviour in 1844. “I was a young man and hot tempered. Now I am 194 I have matured in my views…I no longer see Mormons as the devil’s spawn, just as a bunch of weirdoes who don’t like hope and change..”

Indeed at this very moment Mr Sharp has despatched scores of WaPo “investigative journalists” to Utah to track down Romney’s multiple wives currently undercover until January 2013….

It’s official – the BBC obviously decided to start openly pimping for Obama from the beginning of May and, unsurprisingly, the oleaginous Mark Mardell was selected to kick off the campaign with a shameless piece of brown-nosing about the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Since the BBC is financed by a compulsory surcharge levied on practically every household in the Britain you can now add the UK taxpayers to Obama’s list of campaign donors.

His team won’t allow anyone to run away with the idea that the Navy Seals raid was the inevitable result of obvious decisions taken by shadowy figures within the administration.
Instead, they hammer home the view that the president made a courageous and difficult call, going against the advice of many of those around him.
This is pushed explicitly in a new campaign video narrated by Bill Clinton.
There have been several detailed insider accounts which support the idea of a tough and risky decision-maker at the top.

Fortunately at the moment the media influence of the left leaning BBC is counter balanced by a lively and disrespectful right wing press so readers of the UK Daily Mail were able to get a different perspective from Toby Harnden.

Senior military figures have said that Admiral William McRaven, a former SEAL who was then head of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) made the decision to take bin Laden out. Tactical decisions were delegated even further down the chain of command.
Mr Kyle added: ‘He’s trying to say that Romney wouldn’t have made the same call? Anyone who is patriotic to this country would have made that exact call, Democrat or Republican. Obama is taking more credit than he is due but it’s going to get him some pretty good mileage.’
A former intelligence official who was serving in the US government when bin Laden was killed said that the Obama administration knew about the al-Qaeda leader’s whereabouts in October 2010 but delayed taking action and risked letting him escape.

Once the BBC had a reputation for fairness and balance that was unrivalled in any other part of the world. Sadly that gold standard of reporting and commentary has been replaced by a left wing bias more reminiscent of a Polish TV station in the early 1970s.

You know what is even more worrying? They no longer feel the need to even pretend to be neutral….