Carnage and Survival at Westgate Mall, #Nairobi

At at the National Post, "Graphic: Survivor’s Stories from the Nairobi Mall."

Hat Tip: Trending Kenya.

Sunday Cartoons

At Flopping Aces, "Sunday Funnies."



Also at Randy's Roundtable, "Friday Nite Funnies," and Reaganite, "Reaganite's SUNDAY FUNNIES."

CARTOON CREDIT: Legal Insurrection, "Branco Cartoon – Piling On."

Raw Video From #Nairobi Terrorist Attack

At Pamela's, "SHOUTS, SCREAMS... AND THEN A SPRINT FOR THEIR LIVES: RAW VIDEO FOOTAGE SHOWS FULL TERROR OF MOMENT MUSLIM TERRORISTS STRUCK AT KENYA MALL."



Added: Another version of the video with talking head commentary, at KTN Kenya, "Most chilling video of the Westgate attack."

'Well I tried to make it Sunday...'

I should post America more often.

It's been a couple of years now.

I love their music.

Starting Over With Emily Ratajkowski!

Working on my roundup yesterday I couldn't find a decent Rule 5 post over at Dana Pico's, even in the archives. The pictures weren't loading. Turns out his blog was devastated by a malware attack.

But he's back: "Rule 5 Blogging: Starting Over."

And here's Emily to form a one-woman welcoming committee, lol.

(I'm on on Emily jag, in case you haven't noticed.)

The Cult of #ObamaCare

A majority of Americans disapprove of the law, yet according to some Obama cultists, folks like this should be denied health coverage.

Support for Obama has always been cultish, but calling people who disagree on policy grounds "non-believers" is a new low.

At Twitchy, "Unhinged: UCSF fundraiser wishes death on all Obamacare ‘nonbelievers’; Nick Searcy shreds."

here you are, little girl wishing death on those who disagree with your great socialist overlords. @shandlerr pic.twitter.com/jTLWZ0uI57”

— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) September 21, 2013

@dmbatten @UCSF @shandlerr That she uses word "nonbeliever" is ludicrous and creepy. #obamacare is NOT a belief.

— NancyBellicec (@Nancy_Bellicec) September 21, 2013

Truly creepy. But that's the left in action. Creep-tastic 24/7.

#Dodgers' Clayton Kershaw Tunes Up for Playoffs With 4-0 Victory Over Padres

The Dodgers are playing right now at San Diego.

Yesterday's game was a gem, as reported at LAT.

RECAP: @ClaytonKersh22 Ks 10, @YasielPuig and @AJEllis17 HR in 4-0 win over Padres: http://t.co/n0zfl64ntA pic.twitter.com/rCBQhYXw9A

— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) September 22, 2013

Wife of U.S. Diplomat Killed in #Nairobi Terror Attack

Really, this is a major attack, a breakthrough for al-Qaeda in Africa, represented by al-Shabab.

At Fire Andrea Mitchell, "Wife of American diplomat killed in Kenya as death toll rises to 68."

And at London's Daily Mail, "US Embassy worker's wife among 68 dead in Kenya mall massacre: Witnesses report huge explosion as special forces move in to free dozens of hostages held by Muslim terrorists in siege live-blogged on Twitter."

Also at Reuters, "Islamist gunmen hold hostages in Kenya siege, 68 dead."

Previous coverage here.

Added: More at Gateway Pundit, "Nairobi Mall Terror Attack Continues, Americans Injured, Wife of U.S. Diplomat Killed."

New Rash of Gun Killings Overnight Friday in #Chicago

This should be the national gun debate we are having, but the left is all about lies and deceit, so the social pathologies of urban, black-on-black crime just don't rate.

Sad.

#Chicago bloodshed continues: 6 hurt, 5 dead in separate gun attacks. @DLoesch http://t.co/dDymjlx57x

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) September 22, 2013

Can 'Blurred Lines' Elevate the Culture?

Well, I don't know if Robin Thicke's song can elevate the culture or not, although no doubt Emily Ratajkowski has caused some elevation, IYKWIMAITYD.

From Megan Fox, at PJ Media, "From Rapey to Righteous: Can Robin Thicke’s Controversial Hit Song ‘Blurred Lines’ Elevate the Culture?"



Read it all at the link.

Megan discusses and links this version of the song, "Robin Thicke – Blurred Lines (Freestyle) Lyrics."

And I'll disagree with Megan here: I don't think the original topless "Blurred Lines" is gross. As Emily Ratajkowski puts it, "I think that the video was tasteful, beautiful, and there’s nothing offensive about it."

New York Times' Tyler Hicks Interview at 'This Week with George Stephanopoulos'

I posted on Tyler Hicks' amazing coverage earlier, "Witness to a Massacre in a Nairobi Mall."

And he's interviewed by Martha Raddatz at "This Week."



More at Atlas Shrugs, "*GRAPHIC* SCENES FROM JIHAD MASSACRE IN KENYA."

'You Can Keep Your Plan' — The Left's #ObamaCare Lies

Following up from yesterday, "Leftists Cheer as Anthem Blue Cross Boots Michelle Malkin From Company's Individual Insurance Market."

I'd be remiss if I didn't update with the clip from Linkmaster Smith, at the Other McCain, "Mrs. Malkin Misapprehends: The Underside of the Bus *IS* Your Healthcare Plan."



Keep in mind this "you can keep your plan" lie is just one lie in an epic campaign of lies designed to socialize and destroy the American healthcare market.

Leftism is predicated on lies. Most everyday citizens have little time or inclination to do the enormous fact-checking required to fully expose the deceits of the left. But it is being done by patriots who saw this coming a mile away. Of course, the leftist cluster-k media keeps the lies going for the Democrat-Socialist usurpers -- the clusterf-k media is key to the entire Big Lie deception underwriting the left's totalitarian project for the fundamental transformation of America.

It's all lies. Anti-Americanism and lies. And that's why no matter how successful are the defunding efforts this week, the long-term project of exposing Democrat lies never ends. Patriots will turn this around. So much of the system is working to screw the average person, and the smokescreens of "fairness" have been spread so far and wide that it takes a Herculean effort to bust through. But it's happening. The health care law is a miserable failure. Only epic Orwellian lies have been keeping it going. But we're approaching the reckoning. And patriots don't give up. We can see the whites of their eyes now.

More from Darleen Click, at Protein Wisdom, "#ObamaCare — designed to fail."

Nairobi Terror Continues in Second Day Standoff

At the BBC, "Kenya standoff: At least 59 dead, Uhuru Kenyatta says."



Also at USA Today, "Blast rocks Kenya mall in second day of standoff."

Sarah Palin: Americans Are Fed Up with #ObamaCare

From Governor Palin, at Big Government, "BOMBS AWAY ON OBAMACARE; CRUZ IS OVER THE TARGET":

Americans who are fed up with Obamacare won a victory yesterday. The House voted to defund Obamacare while still funding the federal government to avoid a “devastating” shutdown. (I shall not digress, but it’s beyond distressing to hear liberals try to convince Americans that any government slowdown is comparable to “terrorism.”)

Now the battle goes to the Senate, and we’ll find out if Harry Reid is so committed to the horrendous “Un-affordable Care Act” that he’ll be the one to shut down the government to fund the unworkable Obamacare.

Let’s be clear. Republicans in Congress aren't advocating a government shutdown. That’s why they voted in the House to fully fund our bureaucracy while defunding Obamacare. The conservatives in Congress are listening to the majority of Americans who do not want Obamacare.

Following the will of the people is apparently a novel idea in D.C. these days. Just ask Senator Ted Cruz and his liberty-loving posse on Capitol Hill who have led the charge to defund Obama’s train wreck.

Those of us who hang in there supporting a major political party with our energy, time, and contributions would like to believe that that party would praise principled conservatives like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee for following through on campaign promises. We’d like to believe that the GOP establishment would applaud the way these bold leaders have rallied the grassroots to their cause. But, no, such praise would require a commensurate level of guts and leadership, and the permanent political class in D.C. is nothing if not gutless and rudderless.

We’re now, once again, subjected to the “anonymous sources” backstabbing game. The Capitol Hill cowards are rushing to anonymously denounce Senator Cruz to any reporter with a pad and pen.

Welcome to our world, Ted. The same people have been denouncing conservatives like me for years (right after they ask for help fundraising for themselves or endorsing the latest candidate they’ve suckered into paying their exorbitant consulting fees). We can compare shiv marks next time we meet, my friend.

Continue reading.

More at Memorandum.

PREVIOUSLY: "'A Vote for Cloture is a Vote for #ObamaCare' — Senator Ted Cruz on Fox News Sunday."

'A Vote for Cloture is a Vote for #ObamaCare' — Senator Ted Cruz on Fox News Sunday

The interview this morning with Chris Wallace, via Becca Lower.

Discussion at PuffHo, "Ted Cruz: Republicans Who Vote To Take Up Bill Defunding Obamacare Are Voting For Obamacare."



Also at Politico, "McCaskill: GOP should stop throwing 'tantrums'" (via Memeorandum).

India's Child Slavery Scourge

At Der Spiegel, "Daughters for Sale: Aid Organizations Confront Child Slavery in India":

Millions of Indian children work as slaves in factories, brothels or in the homes of families. Out of poverty and desperation, parents sell their daughters, and human traffickers wait at train stations for runaways and scour for orphans in monsoon-ravaged villages.

On the day that Durga Mala was rescued, she lay crying on the stone floor, where she was attempting to cool her back. She was 11 years old and her skin was covered with blisters, from her shoulder blades to her buttocks. A few days earlier, her owners had poured hot oil over her because they thought she was working too slowly.

Suddenly Durga heard screams and huddled on the floor. Acting on a tip, police stormed the apartment in the heart of Bangalore. When they broke the door down, Durga crossed her arms in front of her chest and closed her eyes. She was only wearing a pair of panties -- that's all the clothing that her owners had allowed her to have. Durga says: "I was ashamed."

One of the men wrapped the small girl in a sheet and brought her to a hospital. Doctors treated her for a number of days. In addition to her burns, she was malnourished, infected wounds covered her fingers and her lips were scarred. "I dropped a glass once," says Durga, "and the woman got angry and pulled my fingernails out, one by one." Sometimes they poked her in the mouth with a needle. Durga was supposed to work, not speak.

It's estimated that millions of children in India live as modern-day slaves. They work in the fields, in factories, brothels and private households -- often without pay and usually with no realistic chance of escaping. The majority of them are sold or hired out by their own families.

According to an Indian government census from 2001, this country of over 1 billion people has 12.6 million minors between the ages of 5 and 14 who are working. The real number is undoubtedly significantly higher because many children are not officially registered at birth -- and the owners of course do their best to keep the existence of child slaves a secret. Aid organizations estimate that three-quarters of all domestic servants in India are children, and 90 percent of those are girls. Although both child labor and child trafficking are illegal, police rarely intervene -- and the courts seldom convict child traffickers and slaveholders.

Continue reading.

And what to say?

India's a developing country with a huge population. Tremendous poverty obviously forces many parents to think of children as burdens and sources of financial remuneration. Hence, parents selling off children to human traffickers, which is something that people would find horrifying in the United States.

Witness to a Massacre in a Nairobi Mall

Very compelling, at the New York Times:

The New York Times staff photographer Tyler Hicks was nearby when gunmen opened fire at an upscale Nairobi mall, killing at least 39 people in one of the worst terrorist attacks in Kenya’s history. He was able to go inside the mall as the attack unfolded.

Check it out at the link.

Hard Times for the Climate Change Alarmism Industry

Again.

I should say "Hard Times for the Climate Change Alarmism Industry" again, since it seems with each passing year there's another devastating setback for the global warming climate shills.

Here's a report on the latest controversy surrounding the upcoming IPCC climate report, at the Telegraph UK, "Row over IPCC report as nations 'try to hide lack of climate change’":

Scientists working on a landmark UN report on climate change to be published this week are at loggerheads over their explanation for why the earth’s surface temperature has stopped rising as rapidly as they previously predicted.

The behind-the-scenes wrangling is likely to cast a shadow over the publication on Friday of the 2,000-page report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The report is still in a draft version and will be finalised over the next five days with heated discussion centring on how to explain the fact that since 1998 the earth’s temperature has barely risen.

It is claimed some governments have even tried to intervene to remove references to the 15 year climate change 'hiatus’ or 'pause’.

The report - the fifth report by the IPCC and the first in five years - is hugely influential because its conclusions serve as the scientific basis for UN negotiations on curbing emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. A global climate treaty is supposed to be adopted in 2015.

A leaked copy of an earlier draft of the report, seen by The Telegraph, will insist that the likelihood that global warming exists and that its cause is man-made has risen from 90 per cent certainty to 95 per cent certainty.

The study will also make predictions for rises in the earth’s temperature and sea levels to the end of the century.

One scenario suggests an average temperature rise of as little as 1.8 F by 2100 while at the most alarming end of the scale temperatures may rise by as much as 8.6 F, according to the draft version.
In the worst case scenario, the sea level could rise by as much as 3ft by the end of the century, the final report is expected to say.

The report will also touch upon solutions to global warming, including a hugely controversial and expensive proposal to put giant mirrors in space which can deflect the sun’s rays in order to cool the earth down.

The report, co-authored by 257 scientists, will be finalised this week ahead of its publication in Stockholm on Friday.

But scientists are “struggling” to explain the slowdown in global warming since 1998, it is being claimed.

Documents seen by the Associated Press (AP) show attempts at political interference in the final report, and that “several governments that reviewed the draft objected to how the issue was tackled”.
In a leaked draft, dating from June, the IPCC said that the rate of warming between 1998 and 2012 was about half the average rate since 1951.

The draft report blames the slowdown on the “natural variability” in the climate system, as well as cooling effects from volcanic eruptions and a change in solar activity.

The draft says that a reduction in warming for 1998 to 2012 compared to 1951 to 2012 is “due in roughly equal measure” to natural variations in the climate and factors such as “volcanic eruptions and the downward phase of the current solar cycle.”

But the documents, according to AP, show Germany called for the reference to the slowdown to be deleted while the US urged scientists to include as its “leading hypothesis” that the reduction in warming is linked to more heat being transferred to the deep ocean. Both countries’ governments have policies which state their belief in man-made climate change.

Belgium meanwhile objected to using 1998 as a starting year for any statistics because it claimed it was a particularly warm year.

The row will fuel claims by global warming sceptics that the issue has become too political and that governments are now spending vast sums of money on policies to combat a phenomenon that may not exist and may not be man-made. The effect of those policies, claim sceptics, is to increase global poverty because the policies are expensive to implement.

Continue reading.

This is simply another case of "hide the decline," only this time it's "hide the tapering temperatures," since they badly disprove all the sky-is-falling predictions of IPCC hacks.

These climate change hucksters are a freakin' joke. They've got their global warming co-religionists backing them, but that's about it. The science is not settled, as it shouldn't be. And as more and more countervailing evidence comes to light, the climate change industry simply must escalate the lies and intimidation to keep the whole house of cards standing.

More on this from Erika Johnsen, at Hot Air, "UN climate panel: Hmm, how can we selectively edit these inconvenient truths to outwit those anti-science denialists?"

Also from Alan Caruba, at Theo Spark's, "Global Warming: The BIGGEST LIE Exposed." Following the links takes us to a big report from the Heartland Institute, "Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science." The executive summary is here.

And somewhere earlier I clicked on this report from the Wall Street Journal last year, "No Need to Panic About Global Warming: Concerned Scientists Reply on Global Warming." A very concise summary of why the alarmism should be rejected.

Expect updates. It's going to be a rough week for the climate hucksters.

Fabulous Kate Hudson Steps Out at iHeartRadio Music Festival in Las Vegas

At London's Daily Mail, "Kate Hudson shows off her sculpted legs in purple playsuit as she supports fiance Matt Bellamy at iHeartRadio music festival":

Having given birth to two children, actress Kate Hudson is one hot mama.

The 34-year old showed off her gorgeously sculpted pins, donning a purple playsuit while supporting her husband at the iHeartRadio music event in Las Vegas on Friday.

Rocking her blonde tresses straight, the married actress made a bold beauty statement, wearing a bright red lipstick.

Definitely hot.

More at the Los Angeles Times, "iHeartRadio 2013: Katy Perry, Elton John roll out the hits."

Video of Heavily Armed Starbucks Customer Thanking Staff Before Policy Change

Via the New York Times:



Following the links takes us "KHOU Houston, "Pastor carries rifle in Hunstville to raise awareness of open carry laws."

The man's group, Open Carry Texas, is here.

RELATED: From Dana Loesch, "Gun Ban Fail: Starbucks Only Frowns Upon Firearms."