Gotta Love Irish Humor!

A 'wee bit' of Irish humor:

Definition of an Irish husband:  He hasn't kissed his wife for twenty years, but he will kill any man who does. 

    

  • Murphy told Quinn that his wife was driving him to drink.  Quinn thinks he's very lucky because his own wife makes him walk. 
    

  • The late Bishop Sheen stated that the reason the Irish fight so often among themselves is that they're always assured of having a worthy opponent. 
    
 • Question - Why are Irish jokes so simple?
 Answer - So the English can understand them. 
    

  • Reilly went to trial for armed robbery.  The jury foreman came out and announced, "Not guilty."
 "That's grand!" shouted Reilly. "Does that mean I can keep the money?" 
    

  • Irish lass customer: "Could I be trying on that dress in the window?"
 Shopkeeper: "I'd prefer that you use the dressing room." 
    

  • Mrs. Feeney shouted from the kitchen, "Is that you I hear spittin' in the vase on the mantle piece?"
 "No," said himself, "but I'm gettin' closer all the time."
    

  • Q. What do you call an Irishman who knows how to control a wife?
 A. A bachelor. 
    

  • Finnegin: My wife has a terrible habit of staying up 'til two o'clock in the morning.  I can't break her of it.
 Keenan: What on earth is she doin' at that time?
 Finnegin: Waitin' for me to come home . 
    
 • "O'Ryan," asked the druggist, "did that mudpack I gave you improve your wife's appearance?"
 "It did surely," replied O'Ryan, "but it keeps fallin' off!"
    

  • Did you hear about the Irish newlyweds who sat up all night on their honeymoon waiting for their sexual relations to arrive? 
    

  • My mother wanted me to be a priest.  Can you imagine giving up your sex life and then once a week people come in to tell you the details and highlights of theirs?

and then some British humor:  https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10154636606720713
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Will the Lebanese Army, in conjunction with Hezbalah, create another threat to Israel? Growing belief it might.  (See 1 below.)

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Al Hunt is a raving liberal. What he writes should energize those who do not want Harry Reid to be in control of The Senate.

Michelle Nunn will  hug  Michelle Obama for votes but refuses  to embrace Obama's Healthcare plan but tells voters she wants to go to D.C. in order to  bring fresh air to that foul city.

Nunn speaks out of both sides of her mouth and thus comes across as  another community organizer. She just happens to be white and female.  That is not enough if it means continuing Harry Reid. in control of the Senate.(See 2 below.)
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Apparently Emory students learn more than biology:WSB-TV: Jewish fraternity house vandalized with swastikas http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/jewish-fraternity-house-vandalized-swastikas/nhcXF/

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John Podhoretz is our SIRC, President's Day Dinner keynote speaker, Feb 9, 2015. 

I generally agree with John, but I part ways with him this time.  

Obama has come up with a lot of original ideas in my opinion. The problem is they are all bad.  (See 3 below.)
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Dick

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1)

Report: Concerns mount that Hezbollah, Lebanese army could cooperate against Israel

Channel 10 quotes defense sources as saying they believe that the cell which tried to infiltrate from Lebanon intended to carry out a terror attack on Israeli territory.

A day after IDF soldiers opened fire on a cell trying to infiltrate Israel from Lebanon, concerns are mounting among the defense establishment over the possibility of the Lebanese army and Hezbollah operatives cooperating against Israel, Channel 10 reported Monday.

In the incident in question, soldiers opened fire on men they identified crossing the border, hitting one of them. The men then fled back into Lebanese territory. 

According to Lebanese accounts of the incident, Israeli cross-border fire injured a Lebanese soldier.

Channel 10 quoted defense sources as saying they believe that the cell intended to carry out a terror attack on Israeli territory.

A senior military source said last month that, although a war is unlikely at this time, the IDF is preparing to fight Hezbollah, which has developed new offensive cross-border capabilities alongside its massive arsenal of rockets and missiles.

Hezbollah plans to send dozens and perhaps hundreds of terrorists into Israel in any war, while targeting the home front with many projectiles, in a conflict that could last as long as four months, according to the officer.

The Shi’ite group’s focus will be to rain rockets and missiles down on Israel, but it also plans raids based on lessons it has learned from its intervention in the Syrian civil war. A preemptive Israeli ground offensive could prevent such raids, he said.

“Hezbollah’s confidence is growing, along with its combat experience in Syria,” the officer said. “The battlegrounds of Syria have enabled Hezbollah to upgrade its capabilities. Hezbollah plans to send many combatants into Israeli territory near the border and seize it.” This has prompted Israel to make “dramatic changes” to its border-defense plans, he added.

Yaakov Lappin contributed to this report.

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2) Georgia's Unexpected Senate Nail-Biter
By Albert R. Hunt

Michelle Nunn, the Democratic Senate candidate, stated her case cogently in Columbus, Georgia, last week: If elected, she vowed to "change Washington in a collaborative way."

Her Republican opponent, businessman David Perdue, also is running as the "change" candidate, but he's skipping the collaborative stuff. He says he'll go to Washington to attack President Barack Obama and Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid.

How this argument plays out matters. An upset by Nunn in Georgia, which has been solidly Republican for more than a decade, was long considered just a bonus possibility for her party. Now Democrats have six or seven very vulnerable Senate seats in the Nov. 4 elections, and a loss of six would cost them the majority. The party needs to win in a couple of Republican-held states. Georgia, where the incumbent Republican senator, Saxby Chambliss, is retiring, is one of the two best options for a Democratic victory.

Democrats hoped to run against one of Georgia's House incumbents. Instead, they face a political newcomer, a corporate executive and cousin of former Governor Sonny Perdue.

This race is surprisingly close because of the state's changingdemographics. As recently as 2004, whites, who vote overwhelmingly Republican, accounted for 71 percent of the electorate. In 2012, they comprised a little more than 61 percent. The black vote, almost all Democratic, grew to 30 percent from less than 25 percent, and the small Hispanic vote is increasing. The Atlas Project, a Democratic organization that studies voting patterns, projects that this trend will continue.

There has been speculation that Texas, with its fast-growing Hispanic population, could turn from a reliably Republican state to a battleground or purple one. That's likely to happen in Georgia first.

Democrats say they're competitive in Georgia this year because of two candidates with impressive political pedigrees. Nunn is the daughter of a much-admired former senator, Sam Nunn. The Democratic gubernatorial aspirant is Jason Carter, the grandson of President Jimmy Carter.

This year "is a gift," says Stacy Abrams, the Democratic leader in the Georgia House of Representatives who spearheaded the registration of 120,000 new voters and will lead the turnout drive. "The demographics are not yet sufficient, but we have two strong candidates with strong names."

The math is simple. Nunn needs close to 30 percent of the white vote -- Obama got about 23 percent in Georgia in 2012 -- and she needs a turnout of black voters only slightly smaller than the 30 percent level blacks represented in the 2012 presidential election. Perdue needs to get 75 percent of the white vote to at least match the share of the total electorate whites represented two years ago.

He's running against Washington, the president and the immigration-reform bill, which he calls amnesty. He also wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Nunn has a tougher tightrope to walk: She needs to appeal to the base by embracing pay equity for women, a higher minimum wage, immigration reform, and mend, not end, the Affordable Care Act. Simultaneously, she has taken as a model her father's record as a fiscal moderate and national-security realist, promising to "reach across the aisle" to seek bipartisan accords.

She has impressive business supporters, such as Mitesh Shah, the chief executive officer of a private-equity real estate firm. A lifelong Republican, Shah says he is bothered by his party's rightward drift on social issues such as immigration.

"I may not always agree with her, but I think Michelle is different and can make a difference in Washington," Shah said.

Three debates will make a difference. The first, on Tuesday, will probably include a mention of Nunn's role as the head of former President George H.W. Bush's Points of Light foundation. Last month, Bush endorsed Perdue. Later, the Republican campaign broadcast anad that accused Nunn of favoring amnesty for undocumented immigrants and suggested Points of Light funded organizations linked to terrorists.

Independent analysts have dismissed the charge as bogus. Nunn, sensing that the ad has backfired, pounced on it.

"This is what people are so tired of in politics," she said in an interview. Perdue, in an interview, defended the ads. "This is about national security and border security," he said.

Perdue has run as a job creator. On Friday, however, a nine-year-old deposition came to light in which he readily acknowledged that as a chief executive he had outsourced jobs.

Polls show a tight race, which includes a libertarian candidate expected to get 3 to 4 percent of the vote. If no candidate gets 50 percent, Georgia law requires a runoff on Jan. 6.

Both camps agree that would be a nightmare, especially if control of the Senate is at stake. Experts predict that $100 million in campaign funds would pour into Georgia during the two-month runoff.

To contact the writer of this article: Al Hunt at 

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3) 

Obama hasn’t come up with one original idea yet

By John Podhoretz

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Obama created a minor dustup when he wore a tan suit to speak to reporters about ISIS in late August.Photo: Reuters

Just before Labor Day, controversy erupted over President Obama’s garb at a presidential press conference — should he or should he not have worn a light tan summer suit when talking about ISIS? That was beside the point.

The issue isn’t the weight or color of his suit. The issue is that the suit is empty.

With almost six years of the Obama administration under our collective belts, the time has come to acknowledge a painful truth: This is an astoundingly idea-free presidency.

At that press conference, Obama stunned the world by saying, out loud and openly, that “we don’t have a strategy yet” on how to deal with ISIS. No president before him had ever said such a thing out loud, and for good reason: Having a strategy is the president’s job.

In the parlance of the universities where Obama spent so much of his time before 2004, when it came to a terror army running rampant through Iraq and beheading Americans, Obama was admitting he hadn’t done the reading, needed an extension on the paper, had to take an “incomplete.”

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At a press conference in August, Obama said, “We don’t have a strategy yet,” on dealing with ISIS.Photo: AP

Well, there was no one there to grant him his incomplete — which is why, two weeks later, he found it necessary to give a nationally televised address to inform the American people and the world that, hey, guess what, he’d come up with a strategy at last. It involved sending arms to the very same Syrian rebels, which just happened to be a policy he had derided only a month earlier as “a fantasy.”

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Secret Service Director Julia Pierson resigned a day after Obama’s press secretary said Pierson had the president’s full confidence.Photo: AP

This maddening directionlessness was also on display in the American response to Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza in July — which would involve statements of support for Israel, followed by statements of anger about Israel’s conduct, which would be followed by more statements of support for Israel, and then word that the administration had delayed a standard-issue arms replenishment for Israel as punishment for its bad behavior.

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Obama’s administration was slow to inform the American people on the exact details of who Thomas Duncan, the first person in the US to be diagnosed with Ebola, had come in contact with.Photo: AP

This kind of policy and public-relations whiplash also characterizes the White House’s behavior when it comes to the failures of the Secret Service, with Obama press secretary one day saying the USSS’s director had the president’s full confidence and the next day announcing her resignation as though it had been what the president wished for all along.

And, of course, there’s the handling of the Ebola patient in Dallas, with the administration so desirous of not causing a panic that it spent several days misinforming Americans about whom the patient had come in contact with, how many people there had been, how many plane flights he’d been on, and so forth.

This inconstancy is the result of the administration’s elevation of cool and calm above all other qualities — leadership qualities like urgency, firmness, focus and determination.

The hard truth is that the Harvard Law Review editor and University of Chicago professor with two bestselling books to his name can’t formulate a policy to save his life, can’t oversee the implementation of the policies his administration has put in place and can’t adapt or rejigger them in a convincing way to take account of changing conditions.

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Photo: Getty Images

This has become startlingly evident even to his friends in recent days, but it actually dates back to the beginning of his tenure.

Consider his two signature legislative accomplishments (one 5 ½ years old, the other 4 ½ years old): The post-meltdown stimulus and ObamaCare.

These, arguably the two most expensive domestic programs ever put on the books, weren’t carefully formulated and rigorously conceived.

They were jerry-rigged assemblages of ideas, policies pulled down off the shelves of congressional subcommittees.

Because the stimulus was so poorly designed, the stimulus was used in large measure by states to pay down their own debts rather than on “shovel-ready” projects intended to employ the unemployed. And ObamaCare’s manifold sloppinesses and disasters both in the drafting and in the execution have gone off like time bombs every few months ever since the law was passed.

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Photo: UPI

Or consider one of the issues nearest and dearest to his heart and to his party’s base — immigration reform. In the most dramatic case of the law of unintended consequences in our time, the president’s decision to grant permanent-resident status to the children of illegal aliens led to the border crisis of 2013-14, with tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors flooding across the border under incredibly dangerous conditions.

Beyond our shores, we were told back in 2011 that this administration was redirecting American policy to take the full measure of the challenges of the 21st century.

The new approach was called “the pivot to Asia,” and would require a thorough revision of our military and foreign policies to deal with the rise of China and the destabilizing behavior of North Korea.

Well, guess what? By March of this year, assistant secretary of defense Katrina McFarland let slip that “right now, the pivot is being looked at again because, candidly, it can’t happen.” Why? It was just too expensive.

So much for the biggest foreign-policy idea of the Obama era. Poof.

We can all name the ideas of presidencies, from the New Deal to Reaganomics to the Bush Doctrine. Obama’s self-described strategy for world affairs is “don’t do stupid s – – -.”

His economic strategy is “print money.” These aren’t ideas. They aren’t even ideology. They’re voting “present.”

What matters most to this administration is surface. It’s why Obama made such a spectacular subject for a “HOPE” poster and why his choice of suit provoked so much discussion. As a two-dimensional object, he’s endlessly fascinating. Add the third dimension and he’s lost.

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