Sinatra time: Sydney, 1961

Judging from these YouTube clips, Sinatra's 1961 concert in Sydney might have been his best ever. This is just wow:


(Cole Porter)

More greats:

I'll Be Seeing You
(Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal)

I Concentrate On You
(Cole Porter)

The Second Time Around
(Cahn and Van Heusen)

You're Nobody Till Somebody Loves You
(Russ Morgan, Larry Stock, and James Cavanaugh)

Come Fly With Me
(Cahn and Van Heusen)

Day In, Day Out
(Rube Bloom and Johnny Mercer)

And this Gershwin beauty:



Lots more here. Enjoy.

Bonus: From Strange Herring, have another.

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"Gee, what do you suppose Obama and Clinton talked about in that 10 p.m. call?"

Who cooked up the lie that the attack on our consulate in Benghazi was provoked by a YouTube video? After reading Andrew C. McCarthy's The 10 P.M. Phone Call, my money is on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton:

At about 9 p.m. Washington time, Hicks learned from the Libyan prime minister that Stevens was dead. Hicks said he relayed all significant developments on to Washington as the evening progressed — although he did not speak directly to Secretary Clinton again after the 8 p.m. briefing.

That is the context of the 10 p.m. phone call between the president and the secretary of state.

We do not have a recording of this call, and neither Clinton nor the White House has described it beyond noting that it happened. But we do know that, just a few minutes after Obama called Clinton, the Washington press began reporting that the State Department had issued a statement by Clinton regarding the Benghazi attack. In it, she asserted:

Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation.

Gee, what do you suppose Obama and Clinton talked about in that 10 p.m. call?

Interestingly, CNS News asked Carney whether, in that 10 p.m. phone call, the president and Secretary Clinton discussed the statement that Clinton was about to issue, and, specifically, whether they discussed “the issue of inflammatory material posted on the Internet.”

Carney declined to answer.

So no, I no longer believe Obama was lounging around watching ESPN or getting his pre-Vegas beauty sleep as the attack progressed. He may be remote, lazy, and self-absorbed, but he was intent on getting re-elected. There's no doubt he was involved in concocting the spin and the lies. As Mr. McCarthy points out:

Enterprises take their cues from the top. Criminal enterprises are no different: The capos do not carry out the policy of the button-men — it’s the other way around.

Undeniably true. Read the whole thing.

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Still-practicing "#TexasGosnell" abortionist faces investigations

Thanks to an offer of a $25,000 reward from Operation Rescue, some assistance from Abby Johnson's And Then There Were None organization, and this video interview from LifeDynamics, an investigation has begun (again -- one was previously dropped by the Texas Medical Board) into the hair-raising alleged crimes of abortionist Douglas Karpen, who, at this writing, is apparently still in business at three Texas locations.

Take a look at what I believe is Karpen's website, which you can find at Texas Abortion Information dot com. I'd rather not link to it. But here are some screen shots:

"Serving Texas & Our Nation For Over 30 Years" -- by allegedly murdering born-alive infants using a variety of means not outlined in flowery cursive on the website: an index finger inserted into the windpipe, Gosnell-style severing of the spinal cord, the plunging of surgical scissors into the baby's skull's soft spot, or into his stomach, or, when the spirit moved him, "twisting the head off the neck."

For the times when the, er, procedure doesn't go so smoothly, there's always the time-honored method of ripping the child apart limb from limb:

“He does a lot of huge abortions. A lot of the times, we would bring the big fetus that were over age, we would re-open the bag and just look at it and be like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s so big,” the abortion clinic staffer adds. “Sometimes he couldn’t get the fetus out. He would yank pieces – piece by piece – when they were oversize. And I’m talking about the whole floor dirty. I’m talking about me drenched in blood.”

The woman who does most of the talking in the video worked as Karpen's "surgical assistant" for fifteen years. Unfathomable and horrifying.

***
Update: New website: Texas Gosnell: Who Is Douglas Karpen?

 In addition to the accounts of the illegal late-term abortions, other abuses Edge witnessed included:

Falsification of ultrasounds to produce younger fetal ages of babies over the legal limit or older fetal ages to extract more money out of women.

Fraudulent billing practices.

Surgical equipment not properly sterilized.

Reuse of disposable instruments.

Unqualified workers drawing and administering drugs.

Late-term abortions done at 28 weeks and later. (Texas law permits only to 24 weeks.)

Lack of adequate nursing staff.

Concealing poorly kept logs from inspectors to prevent deficiency citations.

Hiring nurses through a temp agency to work only on days when inspections are scheduled.

Mistreating heavy women and inappropriately touching attractive women while under sedation.

Sexual harassment.

***

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Podcast: Mark and Milt [Updated!]

Renowned radio interviewer Milt Rosenberg has a new daily podcast and he kicks it off right with #1 guest Mark Steyn. Click and listen, or download for later. (47 minutes.) 

(I tried to link to Prof. Rosenberg's great interview with Mark (touched upon here, here, and here) from March of 2011 but alas, the old WGN link no longer works. I'm hoping the old interviews will be archived on the new site.)

***
Update: I'm so busy these days that it took me this long to get to the very end of the podcast. (Husband caught me asleep with my tablet blaring in my lap yesterday and threatened to tell Mark, who is, of course, never boring -- I was just tired!)

Anyway, do not miss the last few minutes. That's where the optimism is, along with a kind reference to yours truly. It's my greatest media moment since this happened.

If time permitted I'd say something more about Mark's contention that "life is a romance." So true.

Related: Have heart

Back to original post --

***
Bonus: A minute and a half more of Steyn. Fortuitous, isn't it, that Texas is such a large state? All that wide open space may come in handy when the bottom finally falls out. Dennis Miller and Mark Steyn, courtesy of Jeff Poor of the Daily Caller:

“If I ever do flee, don’t think fleeing has to involve you going over to Alice Springs or something,” Miller said. “I’m going to Texas because that’ll be the first place that pushes back. They’re not going down the tubes with this country if this country decides to go down the tubes. I really think I’d head for Texas.”

Steyn, author of “After America: Get Ready for Armageddon,” took it even further and said that the pushback could go beyond just Texas, because he was doubtful the entire country would go along with it.

“I think you’re right there,” Steyn said. “The idea that all 50 states are going to be content to slide off the cliff in a kind of haze and a drone of sort of soporific princess fluffy-bunny socialism is completely false. I mean, there will be — you’re going to have serious secession movements if some of this stuff isn’t turned around, and not just in Texas.”

There's a little more audio here.
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Reports emerge of another Gosnell-esque monster in Texas

Read this, but think before you look at the photos.

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Gosnell chooses life

For himself, that is:

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Clarity

The relationship between American citizens and their government is becoming clearer with each passing day:

At various points over the past two years, Internal Revenue Service officials targeted nonprofit groups that criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution, according to documents in an audit conducted by the agency’s inspector general.

I know it's not funny, but I laughed outloud when I heard that on the radio, it was so perfect.

But never fear, America: We've been assured that was just the work of some local, rogue, low-level IRS employees. Oh, wait:

Knowledge of the practice went at least all the way to the top of the IRS:

Don't blame Doug Powers if he gets a wee bit confused by it all:

How far beyond the top of the IRS this goes remains to be seen. Jay Carney said the White House was unaware of any of this until recently. Carney also said that the IRS’s actions, though inexcusable, weren’t planned in advance and might have been motivated by a YouTube video. Wait, I got that mixed up with something else. Never mind.

Read the rest.

***
Also this: Reporter claims IRS harassment after tough Obama interview

And this: HHS Secretary Sebelius to health industry: How about you make a  donation to help implement Obamacare?

And this: AP stunned as DOJ seizes journalists' records

Video: These IRS and DOJ scandals are among the worst excesses I’ve seen, says … Andrea Mitchell

***
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"The baby factor"?

I don't know what the heck convicted baby-killer Kermit Gosnell's lawyer Jack McMahon is talking about, but here goes. Steve Ertelt reports:

He said he was confident in the legal system but blamed “The baby factor” for the convictions. 

Er . . . that's kind of his client's fault, isn't it? He's the one who chose to kill babies. Perhaps he should have picked on less sympathetic victims, but, of course, bigger, stronger people are a lot harder to kill.

He also blamed the media, which is odd given the stunning lack of attention it gave to the Gosnell murder trial over the last several weeks.

“The media has been overwhelmingly against [Gosnell],” he told reporters.

You mean after they were pushed, prodded, and shamed into covering the trial at all? Even then, they were allergic to the word "baby" and often called the victims "fetuses," sacrificing accuracy for political correctness. I guess it was those horrible images of dead babies and all that testimony about moving, breathing, crying infants that gave it all away.

That defenseless infants can still elicit human sympathy in our cold-blooded abortion-crazy culture gives me some hope.

The jury, it has been reported, was overwhelmingly pro-choice:

According to NBC 10 reporter Jacqueline London, “And to give you some background on the jurors, of the seven women and five men who are on the jury, at least nine told the court that they are pro-choice.  Two say that they are neither pro-choice nor pro-life.”

That leaves one pro-life jury member. I'm assuming they were asked the question before the trial began, perhaps in the selection process? I wonder whether any of them have since changed their minds. If not, they might read up on one LeRoy Carhart, who likens the well-developed children he kills in utero with a shot of digoxin to "meat in a crockpot."

Kermit Gosnell's reaction to the verdict:

According to court observers, as the verdict was read by the jury foreman, Gosnell didn't react at first. However, once the full charges had been announced, he shook his head from side-to-side, trying to make eye contact with members of the jury.

From JD Mullane, who has been a great source of information throughout the trial:

Jury now decides if #Gosnell should die for killing 3 babies at his Phila abortion clinic. This "penalty phase" begins Tues May 21.
— jdmullane (@jdmullane) May 13, 2013

I've never been a big fan of the death penalty but sometimes, lately, I feel like I could be talked into it.

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Four Pinocchios for Obama

Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler gives Obama's claim that he called Benghazi an "act of terrorism" four Pinocchios:

Some readers may object to this continuing focus on words, but presidential aides spend a lot of time on words. Words have consequences. Is there a difference between “act of terror” and “act of terrorism”? [. . .]

Whatever the reason, when given repeated opportunities to forthrightly declare this was an “act of terrorism,” the president ducked the question.

In fact, as far as we can tell from combing through databases, Monday was the first time the president himself referred to Benghazi as an “act of terrorism.”

Kessler documents Obama's statements meticulously, so please read the whole thing before jumping in with an uninformed defense of the president.

Below is the context of that lie, accompanied by several more from yesterday's joint press conference with PM David Cameron. This one is particularly galling:

And so we dishonor them when we turn things like this into a political circus.

No, you and your administration dishonor them when you lie about how they died, even directly to their loved ones in the presence of their remains. Exposing the truth honors them.

Jim Geraghty breaks the lies down for us, starting with this one:

The whole issue of talking points, frankly, throughout this process has been a sideshow. What we have been very clear about throughout was that immediately after this event happened we were not clear who exactly had carried it out, how it had occurred, what the motivations were.

We know the president’s claim that there was confusion is false, because everyone on the ground was clearly telling their bosses that this was a terror attack from the beginning. No one in Benghazi or Libya was saying this was a protest as a result of a YouTube video. Where did that idea come from? Who within the administration decided to take accurate information and start inserting inaccurate information?

The president continues:

It happened at the same time as we had seen attacks on U.S. embassies in Cairo as a consequence of this film. And nobody understood exactly what was taking place during the course of those first few days.

No, the folks on the ground understood what was taking place. They just said so before Congress and a lot of television cameras. Why is the president confused about this?

Obama continues:

And the fact that this keeps on getting churned out, frankly, has a lot to do with political motivations. We’ve had folks who have challenged Hillary Clinton’s integrity, Susan Rice’s integrity, Mike Mullen and Tom Pickering’s integrity. It’s a given that mine gets challenged by these same folks. They’ve used it for fundraising.

The motivations and/fundraising of those who disagree with you are irrelevant to whether or not you’re telling the truth, Mr. President.

Read the rest. Then check out Charles C. W. Cooke's informative and entertaining account of liar-for-hire Jay Carney's recent twitchy, red-faced press conference: Jay Carney's Waterloo: The White House spokesman flounders in front of a newly curious press corps:

Evidently, Carney had not yet realized that things had changed. What had been a fringe story had by now gone mainstream: The New Yorker had written that new evidence “seriously undermines the White House’s credibility on this issue”; ABC News’s Jonathan Karl had averred that developments “directly contradict what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said . . .  in November”; Thursday’s Morning Joe panel had agreed that the news was troubling for the White House; and George Will was gearing up to go onto the Sunday shows and complain that the nation had been “systematically misled.”

Newly intrigued, the assembled press corps ignored Carney’s ploy; so, too, his flippant, Obamaesque insistence that “efforts to re-fight the political battles of the past are not looked on kindly by the American people.” Benghazi might well have “happened a long time ago,” as Carney hilariously assured the media on May 1, but the fourth estate was now interested.

Cutting short the dismissal, Jim Acosta of CNN inquired of Carney why the State Department had removed Anshar al-Sharia’s name from the CIA’s story, and what the discovery of this edit has done to the credibility of the White House. “References to that group are removed from the conversation and don’t make their way into the talking points,” Acosta argued. “That is not a stylistic edit. That is not a single adjustment as you said back in November. That is a major, dramatic change to the information.”

“I appreciate the question and the opportunity,” Carney said, twitching slightly and starting to go red. But apparently he didn’t appreciate it enough to answer it. Nor to take the opportunity to admit that his prior claim that “the CIA drafted these talking points and redrafted” them — and that only “stylistic and non-substantive” changes were made from outside — was demonstrably false. At the fork in the road, Carney once again chose the well-worn low way.

Acosta was visibly unimpressed. Here it became clear that we were in it for the long haul. “Let me just follow up on this once and for all,” he eventually asked. “Do you promise once and for all?” pleaded Carney. “Maybe not,” Acosta shot back. “You are comfortable with the way you characterized this back in November? That this was a single adjustment?”

“I do. I do stand by it,” Carney replied.

It's hard to respect a man who doesn't respect himself.

I'm not so confident that the liberal media is really in it "for the long haul," but it's nice to see them behaving like sentient beings for a change.

***
More shamefulness from the president, via Michelle Malkin: Dead and circuses: Clown-in-chief Obama calls Benghazi talking points a “sideshow;” Flashback to Obama’s U.N. and Letterman sideshows


***
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Steyn on the Benghazi Lie

Just one paragraph from Mark Steyn's excellent column on the Benghazi hearings. The Benghazi Lie:

As Mr. Hicks testified, his superiors in Washington knew early that night that a well-executed terrorist attack with the possible participation of al-Qaeda elements was under way. Instead of responding, the most powerful figures in the government decided that an unseen YouTube video better served their political needs. And, in the most revealing glimpse of the administration’s depravity, the president and secretary of state peddled the lie even in their mawkish eulogies to their buddy “Chris” and three other dead Americans. They lied to the victims’ coffins and then strolled over to lie to the bereaved, Hillary telling the Woods family that “we’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video.” And she did. The government dispatched more firepower to arrest Nakoula Basseley Nakoula in Los Angeles than it did to protect its mission in Benghazi. It was such a great act of misdirection Hillary should have worn spangled tights and sawn Stevens’s casket in half.

Read the rest and pass it on. Then read Steyn's Corner post, Lying in State, which explains how the lie about the video hampered the FBI investigation into the attack.

Meanwhile, Jay Carney, whose salary we pay, continues to lie to us, and in so weasel-like a fashion that even The New Yorker can't take it anymore. Alex Koppelman:

This past November (after Election Day), White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters that “The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.”

Remarkably, Carney is sticking with that line even now. In his regular press briefing on Friday afternoon (a briefing that was delayed several times, presumably in part so the White House could get its spin in order, but also so that it could hold a secretive pre-briefing briefing with select members of the White House press corps), he said:

The only edit made by the White House or the State Department to those talking points generated by the C.I.A. was a change from referring to the facility that was attacked in Benghazi from “consulate,” because it was not a consulate, to “diplomatic post”… it was a matter of non-substantive factual correction. But there was a process leading up to that that involved inputs from a lot of agencies, as is always the case in a situation like this and is always appropriate. 

This is an incredible thing for Carney to be saying. He’s playing semantic games, telling a roomful of journalists that the definition of editing we’ve all been using is wrong, that the only thing that matters is who’s actually working the keyboard. It’s not quite re-defining the word “is,” or the phrase “sexual relations,” but it’s not all that far off, either.

Read the rest. And read Patrick Brennan's account of Carney's performance (with videos of the press conference) and Keith Koffler on the secret (yes, the reporters involved weren't supposed to tell) press briefing that preceded it. Also Daniel Foster: Carney Has to Be Careful:

I suspect they are starting to realize that how they handle the next few days could determine whether this fizzles out or results in heads rolling.

Updated to add this:



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