Here’s a little comic relief: President Obama ended up getting locked out of the White House when he returned unexpectedly from a trip.

(Now if only we could make it a permanent thing…)

The video on Youtube generated some great comments:

the ghost of lincoln was tired of obama’s crap.

Classic! Come 2013, the American people will change the locks so he will never get back in.

Lock him out for good!

This story from NBC New York is just so bizarre, I can’t even find the words to introduce it:

Man Brings Beer to DWI Court Appearance

A 49-year-old man is in Sullivan County Jail without bail after authorities say he showed up for a court hearing on a felony DWI charge drunk and carrying an open can of Busch beer, plus four more cans in a bag.

The Middletown Times Herald-Record reports that Keith Gruber of Swan Lake was an hour and a half late for his court appearance Monday before Sullivan County Judge Frank LaBuda, who asked him if he enjoyed his “liquid lunch.”

Gruber said he did, then said he was sorry.

LaBuda sent him to jail with no bail.

“It was obvious he was intoxicated,” LaBuda said.

Gruber, who has prior DWI convictions, was arrested on Dec. 27 in the town of Liberty and was out on $30,000 cash bail.

Here’s another musical interlude…

This just takes paranoia to a whole new level.

Britain’s Daily Mail is reporting on a vulture that made its way to Saudi Arabia, apparently from Tel Aviv, and was arrested by the Saudis on suspicion of being an Israeli spy.

You just can’t make this stuff up.

A vulture tagged by scientists at Tel Aviv University has strayed into Saudi Arabian territory, where it was promptly arrested on suspicion of being a Mossad spy, Israeli and Saudi media reported Tuesday.

The bird was found in a rural area of the country wearing a transmitter and a leg bracelet bearing the words ‘Tel Aviv University’, according to the reports, which surfaced first in the Israeli daily Ma’ariv.

Although these tags indicate that the bird was part of a long-term research project into migration patters, residents and local reporters told Saudi Arabia’s Al-Weeam newspaper that the matter seemed to be a ‘Zionist plot.’

The accusations went viral, with hundreds of posts on Arabic-language websites and forums claiming that the ‘Zionists’ had trained these birds for espionage.

The Sinai regional governor last month suggested that a shark that killed and maimed tourists on its Red Sea port may have been intentionally released by Israeli agents in order to sabotage the country’s tourist industry.

‘What is being said about the Mossad throwing the deadly shark in the sea to hit tourism in Egypt is not out of the question. But it needs time to confirm,’ Mohamed Abdel Fadil Shousha said, according to the Sun.

Read more:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1344019/Vulture-tagged-Israeli-scientists-flies-Saudi-Arabia-arrested-spy.html#ixzz1A8JlndnP

This is one hilarious story.

Iranians have only just recently discovered that for the last 3-4 decades, their national airline’s headquarters has been sporting a giant Star of David on its roof! This rude awakening for the Iranians came courtesy of Google Earth… and, wow, are they pissed!

The building itself was built by Israeli engineers before the Iranian Revolution pitted the country against Israel and all ties were severed, and apparently, the Israelis left a little memento of their visit.

You can see the full story here.

Here’s the latest conspiracy theory video from the Iranian regime. Need I say more?

This news item just made me laugh out loud. Literally. The Telegraph and Arutz 7 are both reporting on the hilarious story of a bunch of troublemakers who tried setting out on another flotilla to break the Gaza blockade—only to end up getting “kidnapped” by the ship’s captain who, in a dispute over money, set sail for Greece, trapping them on board before they could disembark.

To add to the hilarity, the idiots on board have reported that the captain had “gone crazy” and had left the ship, taking off on a speed boat heading for a different vessel.

(One wonders if being called “crazy” by people who are apparently crazy themselves is the psychological equivalent of a double negative?)

Anyway, it serves those rabblerousers right!

Here’s an excerpt from the Arutz 7 report:

A small group of foreign activists who had hoped to break Israel’s naval blockade on Hamas are instead heading for Greece. The activists, along with several Libyans, were trapped aboard the ship they had hoped to take to Gaza as the captain set sail for Greece instead.

The Greek captain of the Strofades IV left Libya without permission on Thursday following a lengthy dispute with the foreign Road to Hope activists over payment. Road to Hope organizers reported that the captain was planning to drop the activists off in Greece.

A separate report, from activists aboard the ship, indicated that the captain had “gone crazy” and had left the ship, taking off on a speed boat heading for a different vessel.

Three Libyans, two Irish citizens, seven British citizens and one Algerian were said to be aboard the boat against their will.

By now, we’ve all heard Obama’s car analogy ad nauseam. It’s getting so elaborately bad that I seriously think that Obama and his advisers and speechwriters must be either brain dead… or just that they don’t watch any TV or read any newspapers to know that the whole country is sick of this stupid-to-begin-with analogy. Clueless. And do you really want such a clueless buffoon shuttling you around in a motor vehicle?!?  (Sorry, I just had to borrow the analogy haha.)

The mockery of it (which, again, Obama clearly doesn’t hear about), just gets funnier and funnier in the process. Check out this analysis by the great James Taranto of the WSJ in his Best of the Web Today column:

By defeating Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama was supposed to have supplanted the Clintons. Instead he seems to have been assimilated by them. Lately Bill Clinton has been everywhere campaigning for Democrats. And, as the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reports, Obama turns out to be borrowing heavily from Clinton’s 1994 midterm campaign:

“It’s up to you to remember that this election is a choice,” Obama said in a recent speech. “It’s a choice between the past and the future; a choice between hope and fear; a choice between falling backwards and moving forwards. And I don’t know about you, but I want to move forward. I don’t want to go backward.”

Compare that to this common Clinton passage from ’94: “Ladies and gentlemen, this election, all over America, represents a choice, a choice between hope and fear . . . between whether we’re going forward or we’re going to go back. I think I know the answer to that. You want to keep going forward.”

Of course, this is blandly generic rhetoric. “This election is a choice” is tautological, and it would be highly unusual for a politician to call for going backward in fear. But it also turns out that Obama’s most vivid metaphor bears a striking resemblance to one Clinton used in 1994.

Clinton: “You know, if you drive your car and there’s a lot of stuff on the windshield, you could think it’s dark outside when the sun shining. . . . That’s what they’ve done. They’ve put a lot of dirt on America’s windshield. We got to clean it off between now and Tuesday. Will you help? Will you do your part? Will you go forward? . . . Think about it like this: Every one of you is in the driver’s seat.”

And, of course, Obama: Having driven the car into the ditch, Republicans were “kicking dirt down into the ditch, kicking dirt in our faces, but we kept on pushing. Finally we got this car up on level ground. And, yes, it’s a little beat up. . . . But it’s pointing in the right direction. And now we’ve got the Republicans tapping us on the shoulder, saying, ‘we want the keys back.’ You can’t have the keys back. You don’t know how to drive. You can ride with us if you want, but you got to sit in the back seat. We’re going to put middle-class America in the front seat. . . . I’m going forwards, with all of you.”

Incidentally, Obama has come in for some criticism for that new flourish, “you got to sit in the back seat.” His critics suggest it is reminiscent of the pre-Rosa Parks era, when blacks had to sit in the back of the bus. But as we all know, the only thing Obama does with buses is throw people under them. In a car, as blogger Tom Maguire notes, the guy who drives while others sit in the back is a chauffeur.

Yesterday at the White House, CNN’s Dan Lothian quizzed press secretary Robert Gibbs about the metaphor:

Lothian: Robert, to follow up on the story about the Republicans driving the car into the ditch, the President has now been behind the wheel of this car for two years. At what point does he stop–

Gibbs: Well, just — I would say pushing the car out of the ditch first, right? Yes.

Lothian: Right, but he has been trying to move the car–

Gibbs: Let’s be faithful to the story.

Lothian: So he has been moving the car–he has been moving this car now for two years. At what point does he stop talking about the people who were last driving that car? I mean, does this continue after the midterm elections?

Gibbs: Well, Dan–

Lothian: It becomes his car and he’s behind the wheel.

Gibbs: No, and–look, there’s an Obama bumper sticker on the car; we get that.

So wait a second–there’s an Obama bumper sticker on the car? Wouldn’t that mean the guy who drove it into a ditch was a Democrat, or at least Colin Powell? Or is Gibbs suggesting that the Republicans were driving a Democrat’s car? And could someone please pass the Slurpee?

Then we get yet another metaphor:

Lothian: You would think you would be talking about the incremental steps of getting that car down the road now, as opposed to how that car got in the ditch. It gets to be somewhat of a broken record, does it not?

Gibbs: No–well, the record of the last eight years was pretty broken, I would give you that.

At least now we know the car in question is a 1956 Chrysler.

Anyway, to return to the main road, Clinton was in Chicago yesterday for a “get out the vote rally” that WLS-AM’s Bill Cameron describes, Bob Dolefully, as “the most unenthusiastic WLS veteran political reporter Bill Cameron has ever witnessed”:

Clinton was an hour late for the Tuesday afternoon rally at the Palmer House and droned on for another hour, sending dozens of the few hundred Democrats in attendance for the exits.

“Well, all we’re really asking for is two more years, that’s a total of four, to get us out of the hole and get us into the future. That’s half as much time as you gave them to dig the hole. Seems fair to us,” Clinton said.

Oh no, another metaphor! And a deep question: If it takes eight years to dig a hole, how long does it take to dig half a hole?

In an interview with ABC News during the Chicago visit, Clinton sang another familiar refrain:

The former president said Democrats are having a hard time getting their message out, in part, because the news media focuses more on politics than on the substantive differences between candidates. He said he can relate to President Obama’s troubles.

“Anybody who has ever been there will tell you how hard it is to get a fact-based message out,” Clinton said.

“It’s what happened to me in ’94. When you get in, you are wanting to do things,” he said. “There’s almost an inverse relationship in how much you accomplish and what people know about it.”

Where have we heard that before? Lots of places. From Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker: “It is often said that Obama–in 2008, a gifted orator with minimal national experience–has been better, as President, at ‘governing’ than at ‘politics.’ ” From Kevin Sack at the New York Times: “The Democrats’ inability to control the messaging during the legislative debate [over ObamaCare] bled unstaunched into the campaign, as Republicans appealed to base voters with a bumper-sticker pledge to repeal the law or, if unable, to drain its financing.” Even from the Onion: “Democrats: ‘If We’re Gonna Lose, Let’s Go Down Running Away From Every Legislative Accomplishment We’ve Made.’ ”

The Democrats’ message, in short, is that the Democrats are really lousy at delivering a convincing message. Since nobody finds this message convincing, it has a certain surface plausibility. But “We’re really lousy at delivering a message” is a lousy message–so the problem actually is one of substance, not delivery.

What gives with all the Clinton nostalgia–specifically, nostalgia for the 1994, election, which was the low point of his presidency? Maybe the Democrats have already written off this year’s election and are really nostalgic for 1995 and 1996, when they staged a comeback. “It will be a great mistake to count us out,” Clinton told ABC News. “Reports of our demise have been exaggerated.” That was true in 1994, after the election, and maybe he and his party are hoping it will be true a week from now too.

It’s also possible that they fear even bigger losses. The Hill reports that its latest poll of 42 toss-up districts “points to a massive Republican wave that, barring an extraordinary turnaround, will deliver crushing nationwide defeats for President Obama’s party. The data suggest a GOP pickup that could easily top 50 seats.” The GOP pickup in 1994 was 52 seats. If the Hill estimates are at all cautious, 1994 could end up looking good for the Dems by comparison.

Bill O’Reilly made an appearance on The View today and drove the washed-up, has-been Whoopi Goldberg and Joy “Who?” Behar off the set, with them ranting and sputtering the whole way out. (If only those two nincompoops didn’t bother coming back, it would have vastly improved the show, I’m sure.) At least Barbara Walters pointed out the stupidity of her colleagues to the raucous audience immediately afterwards, most of whom must have thought they came to see The View and ended up at Jerry Springer.

Here’s a video clip of the excitement:

Former vice president Walter Mondale had an amusing appearance on Wolf Blitzer’s CNN show (courtesy of the Washington Examiner):

Former Vice President Walter Mondale said on CNN that President Obama relies too much on a teleprompter — which Mondale called “idiot boards” when speaking to the American people.

In a discussion of whether Obama projects empathy in his speeches, the 82 year-old Mondale said the president “has got to connect with the American people.” When CNN host Wolf Blitzer asked why Obama has not projected more empathy, Mondale answered, “I’ve seen places where he’s done it. The Milwaukee speech, I thought was terrific. I think some of these backyard events are terrific. But I think he — he’s very bright — as a matter of fact, brilliant. And I think he tends to — and he uses these idiot boards to read speeches on television and I think he loses the connection that he needs emotionally with American voters.”

“You’re talking about the teleprompters that he always has when he’s delivering a formal speech?” Blitzer asked.

“Yes, right,” Mondale said.

“And he’s reading it, basically from the teleprompter,” Blitzer said.

“Right.”

“You don’t think that works, is that what you’re saying?” Blitzer asked.

“Yes,” Mondale answered. “You know if you’re looking at the teleprompter, you’re here, you’re here, you’re here, and your audience is right there. And I think he needs to do more of that.”

TheSmokingGun.com reports on a crime where a man got into an argument with two teenagers over their stupid habit of wearing their pants hanging down below their asses, and ended up shooting one of them in the ass.

I can’t say that I blame him.

In fact, I think they should probably give the guy a medal instead of arresting him.

Here’s the story:

Incensed when two teenagers ignored his demands to pull up their saggy pants, a Memphis man allegedly shot one of the youths in the back, according to police.

Kenneth Bonds was arrested Saturday night and charged with two counts of aggravated assault and jailed on $25,000 bond. Bonds, 45, is pictured in the mug shot at right.

Investigators contend that Bonds admitted to shooting Cameron Tucker, 17, following a September 25 argument on a Memphis sidewalk. The teenager was accompanied by Isaac Taylor, a 16-year-old friend.

Tucker told cops that he and Taylor were walking to a candy store when Bonds “began yelling at them to pull their pants up,” according to a Memphis Police Department arrest warrant affidavit. “Bonds got angry when Tucker and Taylor refused and that’s when the three got into a heated argument,” reported police.

At that point, Bonds allegedly pulled out a pistol and fired a shot at the older boy. The shot missed, but as the boys fled, Bonds continued firing at them. One bullet hit the 17-year-old in the buttocks and exited through his thigh (the boy was treated for the wound at two different hospitals).

A witness, Percy Chalmers, told cops that he saw Bonds “pull a large black semi auto handgun from his waist band” and fire several shots. Both Tucker and Taylor were able to identify Bonds in a photo spread prepared by Memphis police.

When contacted by phone, Bonds reportedly “admitted to shooting Cameron Tucker after an argument,” according to the police affidavit. Bonds was scheduled to be arraigned this morning on the felony counts

Check out this hilarious commentary that James Taranto of the WSJ sent out as part of his Best of the Web Today on Wednesday:

The president’s efforts to “educate” the ignorant public have been unyielding. The Washington Post reports on the latest:

Obama was raised in a condominium apartment, and later he lived as an urban apartment dweller. Perhaps that helps explain his new favorite hangout: other people’s back yards.

On a whirlwind trip across this country this week, Obama is venturing into the yards of “real people” to push out several messages on the economy. His backyard visits over the course of Tuesday and Wednesday will each feature a specific topic: education in Albuquerque; fighting for the middle class in Des Moines; tax cuts and deficits in Richmond.

Not in my back yard, responds reader Brian O’Rourke in a masterful email rant:

This is sad-larious. (sad + hilarious) He won’t shut up on TV, so we’ve tuned him out. We just flat-out don’t watch. So now he’s coming over and crashing our backyard barbecues. And if we turn off the propane, put the cooler away, and douse the citronella tiki torches–just leave him in the backyard, that is–will he still be in the backyard when we wake up?

Is it possible to stalk an entire nation, and if so, where do we get a temporary restraining order that covers the president?

You’ve gotta love the scare quotes around “real people” in the second paragraph. A man could write an entire Modern Language Association thesis on that one. Are they “really” “real”? And if so, why the quotes? If not, are they “fake” real people? Are they some “mythological” character rumored to exist, but unknown to staffers or press corps in the White House? What qualifies as real, anyway? And if there are “real people” outside the Beltway, does that imply that there are not inside it? It’s almost tautological to suggest that most people in government are phonies, but who knew they were actual fakes?

The same paragraph says the visits “will each feature a specific topic: education in Albuquerque; fighting for the middle class in Des Moines; tax cuts and deficits in Richmond.” But the third paragraph from the bottom says, “For Obama, though, there is an additional selling point to the backyard events: he simply likes them.” Possibly, since the article makes clear that Obama grew up in condos where people don’t have backyards, the president is unclear on the difference between a seminar and a barbecue. Or possibly Harvard Law School always had themes to its student barbecues and so that’s all he knows.

But honestly, if you lived on Pennsylvania Avenue, wouldn’t you skip the block party knowing what you do now? A neighbor invites himself over and then dominates the conversation with a lecture on a topic of his choosing, the main subject of which is riding his favorite hobby horse about how a political party is ruining America, all in a didactic tone that brooks no argument and that condescends to those who have not yet seen the light. Seriously, we’ve all had a guy on the street or down the hall like this. Yet no one in the White House has the nerve to tell the president that no one likes that guy. Change the subject to “9/11: What REALLY happened” or “There is NO LAW that says you have to pay income taxes!!!!!!” and it is clear what a foolish idea this is.

James Taranto relates a great Obama-Seinfeld comparison in today’s Best of the Web Today column on the WSJ site:

Reader Daniel Loomis sends along his capsule summary of “The Summer of George,” the eighth-season finale of “Seinfeld,” which aired May 15, 1997: “George uses his severance from the Yankees to stimulate the perfect summer–the ‘Summer of George’–but spends it playing frolf (frisbee golf), watching ‘The White Shadow,’ ‘investing’ in a recliner with a built-in refrigerator, taking midmorning naps, banging his head on tables, and having insignificant telephone conversations. Eventually, he ends up in the hospital having to relearn to walk.”

And here is Loomis’s capsule summary of “The Summer of Recovery,” the finale of the first full season of “Obama,” a midseason replacement that premiered to hype and high ratings but is now struggling and may face cancellation: “Barack uses his trillion dollar stimulus to create the best summer ever–the ‘Recovery Summer’–but wastes hundreds of billions on things like studies on how cocaine affects monkeys, investigating the link between yoga and hot flashes, bus-stop art, international ant research, and an upgrade to the statehouse and political offices in Topeka, Kan. Eventually, the economy ends up barely ambulatory.”

There are other parallels. Like “Seinfeld,” “Obama” is a show about nothing. Like George Costanza, Barack Obama is ending his summer with a fall, albeit a figurative plunge rather than a literal one. Oh, and Obama’s “Summer of Recovery” has actually turned out to be a summer of George, though we don’t mean Costanza.

“As Obama Struggles, Bush’s Legacy Recovers” reads the CBSNews.com headline on a picked-up Slate piece. Obama “is not consciously trying to improve the public’s view of the Bush years,” writes Slate’s John Dickerson. “Indeed, he is actively reminding people of the mess he inherited from his predecessor.”

The problem is that Obama’s leadership has been so ideologically extreme, and so politically and administratively incompetent, that every time he reminds us of his predecessor it makes Bush look good by comparison. Little wonder that a new survey of Ohio voters by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm, finds that “by a 50-42 margin voters there say they’d rather have George W. Bush in the White House right now than Barack Obama.”

Last night, in an Oval Office speech, Obama said something nice about Bush for the very first time: “No one can doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security.” At one time, such an uncharacteristically gracious statement might have made Obama look good. But our hunch is that among those who bothered to watch the speech, a common reaction was: I miss having a president whose support for our troops, love of country and commitment to our security no one could doubt.

The show must go on. The network is committed to another 2½ seasons of “Obama.” If the star is hoping for renewal after that, he could do worse than to study another “Seinfeld” episode about George Costanza: “The Opposite.”

This hilarious report from one of last month’s issues of National Review:

A lawsuit has recently been filed over the 2008 Gay Softball World Series, in which a San Francisco team called D2 was stripped of its second-place finish for having three bisexuals on its roster. The rules allow no more than two straight players per team, and in the middle of the championship game, D2 was angrily charged (by a team it had previously defeated) with insufficient gayness. After the game, the accused were taken to a conference room and asked a series of rather personal questions in an attempt to nail down their exact preferences. The ruling: Instead of adding up to one and a half heterosexuals, the fence-sitting trio were considered to be three “non-gays,” thus exceeding the quota. All three were suspended from gay softball for at least a year; it was not made clear how they might reestablish their eligibility.