How can I be offended today?
On second thought, gate guards at Robins Air Force Base in Warner-Robins, Ga., can tell people to "have a blessed day" as long as they "remain courteous and professional" in doing so.
Not long ago, following a complaint to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation from a "non-religious" active-duty Air Force member, gate guards were told they had to stop using the generic slogan.
"I found the greeting to be a notion that I, as a non-religious member of the military community," the complainant wrote, "should believe a higher power has an influence on how my day should go."
Bowing to the request, guards were told to change to a different greeting and began to use "Have a nice/good day, sir/ma'am." But the change was short-lived and the original phrase found to be "consistent with Air Force standards."
Naturally, that didn't sit well with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which was planning to check to see if any clients would like to sue in federal court over the matter.
The "Air Force," organization President Mikey Weinstein said, "has not heard the last of this."
Making it up as he goes
President Barack Obama is so unhappy Americans are still "clinging" to their guns, as he famously said in the 2008 campaign, that he has has begun to make up things to prove his side of the argument.
In a recent event at Benedict College, he blathered that in some places it is easier to buy a gun than it is "to buy a book" or "a fresh vegetable." He also babbled that U.S. homicide rates are "so much higher than other industrialized countries. I mean by like a mile."
The Fact Checker columnist for the Washington Post, a newspaper certainly considered friendly to the president's far left policies, gave Obama three out of a possible four Pinocchios for the comments, but only because he classified the statements mostly hyperbole and exaggerations, not outright lies.
He termed the gun, book and vegetable statement "a very strange comment that appears to have no statistical basis." And on the homicide rates, he noted that while the U.S. rate at 5.2 deaths per 100,000 is slightly higher than the 4.1 per 100,000 for "industrialized nations," it is certainly lower than nations such as Brazil (25.5 per 100,000) or Mexico (23.4 per 100,000).
"The president was playing fast and loose with his language here -- to a group of college students no less," columnist Glenn Kessler wrote.
Paging Richard Windsor
Hillary Clinton may not be the only former or current Obama administration official with an email problem. The free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), after filing freedom of information requests for email records from Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson that at the current pace would take 100 years to fulfill, has sued the agency.
In 2012, CEI requested records from Jackson's alias email account -- under the name "Richard Windsor" -- which she used to communicate with other government officials and green organizations while avoiding federal transparency laws.
CEI eventually got 3,000 emails, but the organization says the emails relating to the request number around 120,000. And the EPA says it can only process 100 per month. It further says it won't handle any other FOIA requests by CEI until the "Windsor" files process is complete.
The EPA's recalcitrance may or may not have anything to do with fact that CEI obtained documents in 2013 showing that since Jan. 2012 the EPA granted fee waivers for 92 percent of FOIA requests from major environmental groups while rejecting or ignoring 81 percent of fee-waiver requests from conservative groups.
"We have shown this administration using whatever tactics it can -- even violating the law -- to hide what is going on in our federal agencies," CEI senior fellow and attorney Chris Horner said.
Well, there's a thought
Democratic Missouri state Sen. Jamilah Nasheed can't imagine the shooting of two policemen in Ferguson, Mo., last week being carried out by the looters, arsonists and other thugs who have been among the protesters in the St. Louis suburb since the shooting of a black man by a white Ferguson policeman in August.
No, the shooters might have been white supremacists, she said on MSNBC, or maybe members of ISIS, which she said "was doing their recruiting" in the area.
"There needs to be cameras pulled down from every corner of Ferguson to see who infiltrated that protest, that peaceful protest," said Nasheed, who has been a fixture at the protests and who was arrested in 2014 for bringing a gun to one of them.