America 'Harfs' at White House talking points ~ The Conservative Wife

Monday, February 23, 2015

America 'Harfs' at White House talking points

Monday, February 23, 2015 No comments

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf

What a week! Harfing, psaking, shoveling and freezing.

The gang over at the highly-trafficked Powerline blog wrapped up last week’s headlines in pictures that made their way around the Internet.

“This week’s is without doubt the biggest and most politically incorrect Week in Pictures ever,” said Powerline, “and that’s before you get to the special video bonus for folks shivering to death in half the country from climate change. And what’s up with Vice Groper Joe Biden? Is he planning on a post-Obama career in the TSA or something? Harf, harf, harf!”

Out of hundreds of comical illustrations that went viral on social media, Powerline snagged one that depicted various iterations of U.S. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf’s laughable explanation that the Islamic State – aka ISIS – needs jobs so they won’t kill us:

Other notable “news” memes included Vice President Joe Biden’s inappropriate touchy-feely behavior caught on camera when he nuzzled the wife of newly-confirmed U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter during an official White House ceremony. It spawned dozens of photoshopped images like this one:

See them all, and marvel at “The Week in Pictures”!

Twitter aggregator Twitchy also tracked last week’s political shenanigans, including “What are you talking about? Marie Harf goes on the defensive, and off the rails.”

“After facing a well-deserved backlash over her asinine assertion that jobs could help convince ISIS terrorists to stop terrorizing, Marie Harf is on the defensive. Needless to say, it’s not working out too well for her. How do you solve a problem like Marie? You don’t. You just sit back, put your feet up, and watch the wheels come off.”

Are you “home free?”

Depending on where you live, your state might be the most free or the most freedom-restrictive. A report by the John Locke Foundation titled “First in Freedom” compares and ranks all 50 states, measuring them by four different criteria: fiscal, education, regulation, and health care policies.

The graphic below shows Florida as the “most free” state, New York the least:

Graphic: John Locke Foundation

To see how your state ranks in all four criteria, click here.

Also, the George Mason University’s Mercatus Center has released a “Freedom in the 50 States” map with even more variables – 200-plus economic and personal – in their calculations.

Tunneling

Snow, snow, snow. Everywhere you look across the nation’s northern tier, there were mountains of white stuff burying communities. One bored cabin-fever-suffering Canadian decided he’d do something about it. He gave new meaning to the term “digging out.”

And speaking of digging, Massachusetts Facebookers are comparing the tunnel below to Boston’s Big Dig, the most expensive highway project in the U.S., plagued by escalating costs, scheduling overruns, leaks, design flaws, charges of poor execution and use of substandard materials, criminal arrests and one death. (Wikipedia)

Slowly I turn, step by step…

Remember the hilarious Niagara Falls (aka “Slowly I Turned, Step by Step”) bit made side-splittingly popular by The Three Stooges?

Here’s a “Moe” recent twist on it. Not quite as funny, but certainly as entertaining.

Photo: Zuma/Rex

The ugly side of snow

Yet in Boston it’s not quite as funny and lighthearted. One Facebook user noted that seven feet of snow in four back-to-back New England blizzards in just three weeks is “The ugly side of snow” and linked to a piece in the New York Times:

“We are being devastated by a slow-motion natural disaster of historic proportions. The disaster is eerily quiet. There are no floating bodies or vistas of destroyed homes. But there’s no denying that this is a catastrophe.”

The mountains of snow “crushed roofs, burst gutters, destroyed roads and sidewalks, closed schools and businesses, shut down highways, crippled public transit and trapped people in their homes.” It also resulted in the abrupt resignation of the head of Boston’s oldest subway system, prompting this tweet:

But cheer up, northern tier neighbors.

Bits & Bytes

American cities have changed in the past hundred-plus years. Here is a collection of stunning photos, one as old as 1903, that take you back a hundred years in time to the streets of Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., New York, Detroit, and elsewhere.

Got Sharpie? The owner of a white van invited strangers to add their creative designs to his vehicle, using black Sharpie pens. The result? Pretty interesting.

Photo: media.tumblr.com