And to think he'll probably still squeak through

Hagel did himself no favors today in his SecDef confirmation hearings.  The man clearly has no core principles, no fealty to any idea of Western civilization.

The guy pretty much did nothing but step on his you-know-what all day.

But he will soon be the go-to guy for seeing to the ongoing viability of all that freedom-cherishers hold dear.

Once again catching hell for merely trying to ensure its survival

Iran and Syria are threatening retaliation for Israel's zapping of the military research facility that was a known nest of mischief.


Russia says it was unacceptable and Hezbollah weighs in as well.


The Arab press is full of outrage as well.

And that cesspool of evil known as the UN Human Rights Commission deems this an appropriate time to demand that Israel withdraw from Judea and Samaria.

Tyranny doesn't come cheap

Dare to compare.  The MEC regime's regulatory assault is costing post-America a bundle:

. . . the costs of “major” regulations — those estimated to cost at least $100 million in any one year (in 2001 dollars) — issued by the Obama administration in its first three years nearly tripled the cost of those issued by the Clinton administration in its first three years, nearly quintupled the cost of those issued by the George W. Bush administration in its first three years, and nearly doubled the cost of those issued by Bush and Clinton combined.  Again, that’s according to the Obama White House’s own tallies.

Schechter Brothers redux

A Missouri dairy operation that makes cheese from raw milk and has been in a yearlong tussle with the state's milk board was raided by gummint agents who shut it down and seized assets.

Leviathan is making an example of Morningland, much as it did in the 1930s, in the case of the Schechter brothers, kosher poultry producers in Brooklyn.  They eventually won the suit they filed, but not before burning through lots of money and time.

When I was a kid, we had a Latvian neighbor who had escaped with his wife when the Communists took over.  Many is the time that he regaled his sons and their friends including me with accounts of the singularly chilling experience of getting "that knock on the door."

In post-America, people are getting that experience now.

In post-America, the real reasons for problems can't be pointed out

Tom Blumer at PJ Media says that the AP's contortions in the attempt to avoid blaming the MEC regime's policies for the continuing economic malaise have led it to that old canard, technology rendering human labor obsolete.  He then lists - the temerity of it! - the real top ten reasons the economy is still in the toilet.

And Michael Tanner at NRO says that the world's Krugman's disingenuously talk about the portion of our debt held by the public and studiously leave intragovernmental debt out of their discussions.

No wonder consumer confidence has been plunging

The economy contracted at an annual rate of 0.1 percent in the last quarter of 2012.

It's on purpose - today's edition

Consumer confidence has experienced three sharp monthly drops in a row.  It was at 73.1 in October.  Today it's at 58.6.

The Freedom-Hater regime wants us demoralized and desperate.  The next stage - in which we all become cattle, staring blankly as we're corralled into the pen - is not far off.

Big thumbs down

Roundup of views on the Gang of Eight bipartisan (read: rotten with the stench of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome) immigration-reform proposal unveiled yesterday:

Daniel Horowitz at Red State

Mickey Kaus at the Daily Caller

Heather MacDonald at NRO

The recommendations of that commission of southwestern law-enforcement, political and civic leaders would have a non-binding status.  More to the point, the deal still puts amnesty before a secure border.

More to the point, it's another case of a conservative being dragged into an anti-American move by Freedom-Haters and Reasonable Gentlemen.

I really think there's a conversion experience in her future - today's edition

Kirsten Powers represents a breed that is just about extinct - the common-sense Democrat.  She says that the MEC - H-Word Creature sit-down with Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes came across like "state-run media."

Sheriff David Clarke gets it

Releases a public service announcement for Milwaukee radio urging citizens to take firearms safety training so that they can be proactive agents in their own defense if their homes are ever violated. Says not to depend solely on 911.

This is rich indeed; excuse the pun

But don't excuse the hypocrisy.  Can you believe this?  FHer Senators moaning about how a "No budget no pay" arrangement would affect their own household . . . budgets.

Oh, sheesh . . .

Now the Most Equal Comrade gives an interview to The New Republic in which he says that he has mixed feelings about watching football, and that the NCAA will probably eventually have to take steps to "reduce the violence."

This is just a suggestion, of course, like the reminder to doctors that there is nothing in Freedom-Hater-care that prohibits them from discussing gun storage with patients.

To revisit the subject of my Gender Post below, men are aggressive creatures.  Without ritualized yet compelling situations in which to channel it, they will terrorize the world with their brutishness.  As George Gilder asserted in the seminal classic Men and Marriage, the most dangerous type of human being on Earth is the unmarried young adult male.

Men are also more analytical and quantitative by nature than women.  Men like to measure things, inquire into what they're made of, see if they can fit the raw materials of this world together so as to build things with ever-greater utility.  So it is that the diamonds, tracks, courts and fields of the world's most popular athletic games came into being.  In each case, a man considered how to ritualize the competitive - dare I say warring? - instinct in his gender, and considered a given chunk of space and how to section it off in various zones that would be defended by one team or the other in a contest of strength, focus, hierarchically based teamwork and - this is the most germane point - establish rules to ensure fairness and determine how to proceed when there is a disputed occurrence.

In football, there is an entire infrastructure of team doctors, physical therapists, fitness trainers, nutritionists and sports-science experts at the ready for every play.  Nothing in this world is more scrutinized in real time than the action on a football field.

Lately I've been on something of a "consider-the-sum-total-of-various-events-of-the-last-few-days" kick, and that's because the thread of continuity connecting them becomes ever more obvious and ominous.

Think again about the transgendered 11-year-old, the edict opening combat positions to women soldiers, the push to get rid of guns, and . . . the decision of the MEC to weigh in on the sport of football.  In a passive-agressive way, the FHers are acting the alpha male, attempting to eradicate any kind of resolute masculine energy that could pose a threat to their great leveling project.

When big becomes all-encompassing

Conn Carroll has a great piece at the Washington Examiner this morning on the entirely different relationship that America's small businesses have with government from that of large corporations.

We all know the prominent examples of the coziness of the government - megacorporation axis: Jeffrey Immelt of GE and his role on the MEC's "jobs council."  (By the way, is that body ever going to meet again?  It's been over a year.)  Google's long-acknowledged bias in the way it sets up its search mechanisms.  The obsequiousness with which engine and vehicle makers respond to ever-more stringent environmental edicts.

By their very natures, small businesses and large corporations are going to have different organizational cultures.  The sprawling leviathans see themselves as being in the business of "making this a better world."  Again, I refer you to the world's premier diesel engine maker that has its headquarters in the city where I live.  It has a policy of expecting employees to "give back to their communities," and even devotes a page on its website to examples of how its staffpersons in such far-flung places as Brazil and India are helping villages with clean water and schools and such.  The big companies are the ones pushing "green" initiatives and "diversity."  If their small suppliers seem to be getting on board, it's because such activities are now as much a requirement of doing business as having satisfactory prices, or assuring that their processes are stable within the six-sigma parameters.  Left to their own devices, small businesses are much more concerned with matters such as getting the raw material in on time, and the finished parts out on time, and making sure the finished work measures out like the blueprint calls for.

Another interesting factor in all of this is the role of trade associations.  Small businesses band together in order to ry to counteract the regulatory onslaught from Washington and state capitals.  Such associations for the large corporations are more inclined to see things in terms of "partnership," to the point of taking a cue from the Beltway as to what's of societal high priority and where it ought to next direct its marketing energies.

At some point - and we're now there - the goose-and-golden-egg phenomenon becomes a factor.  Small businesses, where everybody shows up at a certain hour, and job titles are not much of a big deal, given that everybody pitches in where needed, where birthday celebrations have the personal touch because people actually know each other, do most of the hiring in this country.  Or did.

That Chicago way

The Godfather leans on banks to quit loaning money to gun manufacturers unless they get behind his specific idea for gun "control."

These Freedom-Haters, they play hardball.

The gender post

At the conclusion of a week that marked Leon Panetta's announcement about military women in combat roles, the essay by the 11-year-old "transgendered" girl in response to the MEC's inaugural address (see my "Hey, did any of you other frogs . . . " post below for links re: these developments), and the  40th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, my thoughts turn to the matter of what, if anything, is intrinsically masculine of feminine.

As regular readers know, I'm adjunct faculty at one of our state universities.  On my way to the mailroom, I pass by a bulletin board devoted to new course offerings.  Recently, the big excitement there was the fact that one can now get a minor in women's studies at our campus.  The flyer announcing this flatly stated as a given that gender is merely a social construct, that expectations based on biological distinctions are arbitrary, with no roots in how males' and females' respective hormonal ratios drive perception or behavior.

It's nothing that hasn't been commonplace for some time.  I recently posted about a situation at the school from which I got my master's degree in history, Butler University in Indianapolis, in which a young man drew the ire of his political science professor for daring to question her instruction at the beginning of the semester to approach assignments in her class without regard to one's gender, ethnicity, religious affiliation or American citizenship.  Look for this deconstructionist presupposition to become ever more codified as the new "Common Core" curriculum comes to prevail.

Feminism expects today's university students to be big boys and girls about coed dorms with unrestricted visitation, to keep arousal under wraps no matter how close the quarters.  Not that there isn't frolicking going on.  Actually, "frolicking" may be an inaccurate term.  According to Helen Rittelmeyer's article "Sex in the Meritocracy" in the February issue of First Things, the point nowadays is not to congratulate oneself on his or her degree of liberation, but to, as with everything else about the highly focused modern student, to bring one's A game to the table:

every admitted student believes he must be excellent at anything he tries. In the old Yale, campus culture developed from the upper-class traits that most students shared and the rest hoped to adopt. In the new, more diverse Yale, the only thing students share is ambition, and it determines attitudes toward grades (anything below an A-minus can be disputed with the professor), extracurriculars (hardly anyone spends four years in a club without achieving a leadership position), and even drugs. Instead of marijuana or cocaine, Yale’s pharmaceutical network now traffics mostly in Adderall, the wonder drug that, as one girl told me, “makes you want to work.” Surely this is the first generation of college students in which even the drug users are more interested in working hard than getting high.

This overachiever’s mentality has also determined campus attitudes toward sex. Few notice the connection, because the end result—sexual permissiveness—is the same as it was in the sixties and seventies, when the theme of campus culture was not overachievement but liberation, and the eighties and early nineties, when it was postmodernism and the overthrow of all value judgments. The notorious Yale institution known as Sex Week—a biennial series of sex toy demonstrations, student lingerie shows, and lectures by pornographers—wouldn’t have been out of place in either of these eras. Consequently, Yale’s sexual culture is often mistaken for mere depravity by outside observers who assume that it is just another byproduct of moral relativism. 

It would be more accurate to say that Yale students treat sex as one more arena in which to excel, an opportunity not just to connect but to impress. Every amateur sonneteer secretly believes his verse to be as good as the United States poet laureate’s, and every undergraduate programmer suspects his code rivals the best in Silicon Valley. It’s not very different for Yale students to say that, if pornography is the gold standard of sexual prowess, then that is the standard to which they must aspire.

I've also, in previous posts, mentioned that a Fortune 500 company has its world headquarters in the city where I live.  It runs a day care center / preschool that does a booming business.  Certainly it facilitates its employees' ability to check in with the offspring, but the point is to make it convenient for mom or dad to put in the long hours with a bit less parental anxiety than would be the case with some other child-care arrangement.  This corporation also has, as I've found out in the course of working on articles with a diversity angle for local magazines, a system of "affinity groups," which address not just nationality or gender, but "orientation" or whatever it's called these days.  The point here is that this company is, in its own estimation, a world-class, ISO-certified, seriously excellent organization that brings on board the best and brightest human beings regardless of demographic identity.  Just in case someone within its ranks gets to feeling the need to have that identity affirmed, however, he or she can seek out the appropriate affinity group.  And the company offers a convenient way to address those mommy feelings that can arise in the course of meeting benchmarks and continuously improving.

Which, of course, brings us to the most highly-focused, excellence-driven realm of all, the military.  We are assured that our nation's defense apparatus can surmount such already-established glitches in warrior equality as the effect of eros on matters ranging from unit cohesion to pregnancy rates, to the impact of the menstrual cycle, to the role of dignity in the circumstances under which one relieves oneself.

The usefulness of gender-blurring is not a new tactic for the Left.  In his memoir Radical Son, red-diaper baby David Horowitz recounts a night at a Communist Party summer camp when he was a kid, when the bunk-bed chatter turned to a comely female counselor.  A make counselor came to the cabin door and admonished the lads to watch the "male chauvinism."

This can't be had both ways, though.  There is a group of women in Congress that includes RINOs such as Collins and Snowe but some FHers as well, and it is on record as wishing it had more influence, since women legislators are more inclined to be collaborative than confrontational.  In other words, they like the way it feels to reach compromise, even if their supposedly immutable principles get the short shrift.

So women, in college, in the industrial world, and in the military, are supposed to  focus with ruthless objectivity, or fight with a fierceness that leaves no room for this collaborative inclination, and men are supposed to subdue, to the point of rendering it as good as nonexistent, their instinct for protection and chivalry.

It's just not going to work for the reason that men and women, the assertions of the world's gender-studies professors notwithstanding, are different.  They exhibit two different ways of being human.  Eventually, this manifests itself anywhere and everywhere, as has been noted by even some of the proponents of women in combat who acknowledge that not a whole heck of a lot of women are going to sign up for that duty.

It should also be noted that those in the leadership positions among our enemies are, to a person, men.  Ultimately any conflict has to be concluded, and that means strategically addressing its instigation at its root.  That, in turn, means thoroughly understanding the degree and kind of ugliness that only a male human being is capable of.

We can increase the ratio of technocrats, bureaucrats and focused soldiers to other kinds of human beings, but there will always be some feral creatures among us, and they do not respond to re-education, indoctrination or sensitivity training.  The civilized portion of our species has to take them out, and that requires resolute manliness on somebody's part.

Fleeting glimmers of hope - today's edition

The D.C. appeals court determines that the MEC's appointments to the National Labor Relations Board were unconstitutional, because Congress was indeed not in recess.

The EPA: one of the regime's most chillingly effective tools for planned decline

At the WSJ today, Kimberly Strassel looks at Barbara Boxer's (whoops, I forgot to call her "Senator," didn't I?) indications of what the regime plans to do through environmental regs that it would not be able to do through legislation.

And it's happening in real time.  Witness Chase Power's cancellation of its Las Brisas power plant project in Corpus Christi, Texas.  That's 3900 jobs that won't be created.

Hey, did any of you other frogs notice some bubbles in this water?

I don't do a lot of "here's-a-news-roundup"-type posts here, but take in the sum total of these current developments:

The NBA - a flippin' sports league, for cryin' out loud - has launched a green initiative.

In one of his last acts as SecDef, Leon Panetta removes the last barriers to women serving in direct combat roles.

The regime's propaganda arm is calling the H-word Creature's appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee "charming and combative"  and "vigorous and fired up."

North Korea will conduct a third nuclear weapon test, calling it a "new phase of the anti-US struggle."

An 11-year old "transgendered" "girl" has written an essay in response to the Most Equal Comrade's inaugural address, and it's getting a fair amount of Internet coverage.  "Sadie" "transitioned" when she was 6.

Her mother's statement of support is a ripe example of therapy-speak indeed:

Sage says she encouraged Sadie to write the essay because she thought "it might help empower her and overcome any feelings of oppression." In the end she says that she wants Sadie "to know that she has a voice. My dream for her is that she will be happy. That's all, really. I just want her to be happy."

Consider the thought experiment of taking a rundown of headlines like this back in time to, say, ten years ago.  Thirty.   (That would have been the Dutch era.  Really hard to imagine that kind of wackiness going down then.)  Fifty years ago?  Forget about it.

And consider this:  There are fewer and fewer situations in which one is communicating with one's fellow human beings in which you'd be certain it wasn't inappropriate to opine, "That's just plain weird."

I just plain don't recognize my country anymore.

The FHers have this deflection thing down to a fine art

An agent of the regime's propaganda arm - specifically, Terry Moran of ABC News - fires off a tweet making Rand Paul the focus of today's Senate hearing instead of the H-word Creature.  Read the linked article about it to the bottom.  Kirsten Powers responds to Moran with exquisite succinctness.  I really think she has a conversion experience in her future.

UPDATE: Someone who works for the regime's propaganda arm but is ignoring the memo about falling in line is CBS's Sheryl Atkisson.  She tweets a list of questions that the regime has not yet answered about Benghazi.

Just what would it take for post-America to hold off on shipping those F-16s to Egypt?

Certainly not the jailing of the family that converted to Christianity.  Certainly not Morsi's remarks making plain his Jew-hatred.

No, the MEC regime feels it's necessary to shore up Egyptian "democracy," doncha know.

When I think of all the times I've been taken to task for calling them Freedom-Haters . . .

Soon-to-be-CIA-director Jon Brennan argued in his 1980 University of Texas graduate thesis that it was possible for "the masses" (his term) to have "too much freedom," and that in some cases government censorship was advisable.

Perhaps she had momentarily forgotten what Charlene Lamb said in November

That could explain the H-word Creature's whine during this morning's Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that lack of funds for overseas security was a factor in the Benghazi debacle.  Surely she was aware that a representative of her Department has stated otherwise mere weeks ago.

For the time being, there is still one reliably Western country in the West

Good analysis of the political implications of Bibi's re-election by P. David Hornik at Frontpage.

The MEC may say "war is over," but jihad says otherwise

An Algerian official says that some of the Egyptian jihadists who attacked our consulate in Benghazi also participated in the attack on the Algerian oil field.

This is what you get when you declare the war on jihad over and tell your masses that the world is all unicorns and rainbows:

If confirmed, the link between two of the most brazen assaults in recent memory would reinforce the transborder character of the jihadist groups now striking across the Sahara. American officials have long warned that the region’s volatile mix of porous borders, turbulent states, weapons and ranks of fighters with similar ideologies creates a dangerous landscape in which extremists are trying to collaborate across vast distances.

Perhaps we should have consulted Algeria a bit more closely before choosing the sides we did in the Arab Spring:

“This is the result of the Arab Spring,” said the official said, who spoke on condition of anonymity because investigations into the hostage crisis were still under way. “I hope the Americans are conscious of this.”

Algeria was firmly opposed to the Western intervention to help topple Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya in 2011, and this nation’s conservative leadership viewed the Arab Spring with deep suspicion, making no secret of its desire to avoid any such occurrences.

As we know, the H-word Creature is set to testify about what she knew about how all this went down. Will she squirm and obfuscate or sit tall and give us the straight skinny?

The stench of death in post-America

Per a NBC/WSJ poll, a majority of the post-American masses is now cool with the extermination of fetal post-Americans.

And for a taste of how polarized the nation's populace is, check out the comment thread under the linked Hot Air post.

Another front on which a post-second-election-victory MEC will now act without restraint or regard for image

Daniel Pipes at NRO says that we can expect the Most Equal Comrade's disdain for Israel to be expressed more openly.  In fact, it already is.  Read Pipes's bullet-point list of the ways in which he has done so in the last two months.

Seems like so many of our problems go back about forty-five years, don't they?

A new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis demonstrates that both the taxation rate and the government spending rate really began to accelerate around the beginning of the 1970s, with spending quickly outpacing revenues.  The die was cast.  Profligacy became structural, a given.

And, of course, we're now at the point, because of the exponential acceleration over the last four years, where no amount of taxation could allow governmental income to catch up with outflow.

And, of course, the planned-decline Freedom Haters don't give a flying diddly.

Look!  There's the precipice!  Pass the flask and floor it!

Glad I missed this puddle of dog vomit

From what I'm reading, the MEC's inaugural address was quite the fetid commode-ful of collectivism and raw identity politics.

Oh, and the assertion that a decade of war is ending is quite a chunk.  As David French at The Corner says, tell that to the jihadists behind the attacks on the Benghazi consulate and the Algerian oil facility.

Another sign that we have moved into the post-American age

Charles C.W. Cooke at NRO notes that gun clubs and rifle teams used to be commonplace in the nation's high schools.  Now, not so much.

You buying it? Me neither

Here is the problem with the way the State Department operates: it takes any old words from the world's most repulsive figures at face value, clinging to some shred of ephemeral "evidence" that the one so uttering has had a change of heart and that therefore policy can proceed on the basis of his latest flimsy attempt at a reversal of what he's previously on record as saying.  Latest case in point: the department's statement about Morsi's backtracking of his 2010 remarks about Jews.

And the regime's propaganda arm no longer has any reason to soft-pedal its real agenda, either

CBS News political-affairs director John Dickerson wrote a piece for Slate in which he gleefully said that for the MEC to fully achieve his aims, he will need to "pulverize" the Republican party.

On inauguration eve, he has no reason to give a flying diddly about America

It's becoming clear to an increasing number of folks - mostly those who are disturbed by it, but some who think it's great as well - that the Most Equal Comrade is emboldened in the extreme now.  The cockiness and vulgarity of his executive-order-on-guns announcement was a major confirmation of this, but other signs abound.

One is the tone of his remarks about Benjamin Netanyahu in the Jeffrey Goldberg interview in The Atlantic.   There are two great columns about that - one by Mona Charen at NRO and one by Nile Gardner at the UK Telegraph.  

What a dangerous combination: supreme arrogance and the lack of a moral compass.  That he would be willing to call the last principled leader in the Western world a coward ells us everything about the degree to which he has jettisoned any last molecule of regard for those who cherish freedom.  He says Netanyahu is cowardly because of his unwillingness to "compromise."  Two things about that:  Bibi has already compromised more than is really advisable, employing rhetoric that anticipates a two-state solution.  And, more centrally, what kind of compromise would satisfy the dictator of post-America?  Is  Israel supposed to come to some kind of an accord with the likes of Mahmoud Abbas?  Or perhaps Hamas, wtih which Israel just engaged in a fierce battle caused by Hamas rockets raining into Israel by the scores per day?

Then there's the brazen push for yet a higher level of taxation, coupled with a refusal to look at what has our country owing $16-plus trillion dollars, and running annual trillion-plus operating shortfalls.  I'd wager that we're not even going to hear the term "balanced approach" so much from now on.  The MEC has no interest in addressing the nation's debt / deficit crisis.

And the son of a bitch has the wind at his back.  Acceptance of "political realities" is so entrenched that no one in the entire legislative branch of the federal government is willing to even plainly address that which is our actual problem.  Even the pro-freedom-and-pro-American-greatness forces - call them "Tea Party conservatives" for shorthand, if you'd like - seem resigned to a glacially incremental, shamefully timid mode of officeholding.

This entire juncture is a real spiritual test for those of us who would like to see the United States of America restored, to see it replace this monstrosity that the Freedom-Haters are imposing.  Despair seems like such a natural response to where the country is.  Most of us are mere microinches away from it.  For me, anyway, it takes sitting calmly, meditatively, one more minute each time despair breathes down my neck, until the thunderous "No!" has sufficiently welled up from the core of my being.

The cradle-to-grave nanny state is not a permanent fixture.

Radical Islam and totalitarian socialism will not achieve final victory over Western civilization.

A person's money and property are truly his or hers.

Men and women are fundamentally different and designed by God to unite in marriage and form families.

The global climate is not in any trouble.

The Departments of Education, Energy, Labor, Commerce, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development should be immediately dismantled.

American culture can once again be characterized by aesthetic richness, nobility, decency and wisdom.



You can't even put a list of truths like this up at Facebook.  Seventy-five percent of your "friends" would think you'd gone nutty.  Especially if you called them truths rather that just your own opinions.

I don't know that the Republican party is up to the task of defeating this enemy.  It may require some as yet unforeseen form.  Maybe not.  I do know that the task begins on the individual level.

Permit yourself to experience the cleansing, renewing power of reclaiming your resolve.

Since anyone resolved to strive for a cultural atmosphere in which most Americans understand that the above assertions are true has, by definition, truth on his or her side, it ultimately trumps the hollow resolve of a MEC, no matter how invincible he looks today.

They smell weakness - today's edition

Those Who Sign With Blood, the al-Qaeda affiliate behind the Algeria attack, has named its price for releasing American hostages: the release by the US of the Blind Sheik and Lady al-Qaeda.

LITD likes this

Texas's attorney general has place an ad in several media outlets in the state of New York inviting law-abiding NY gun owners to move to Texas, where taxes are low, opportunity abounds and folks are cool with firearms.

Memo to the regime: al-Qaeda is far from extinguished

It's alive and well in Mali and Algeria.

Not exactly what you'd expect a health-food magnate to say during an NPR interview

 . . . but it was great nonetheless.  Whole Foods CEO John Mackey says that FHer-care has all the trappings of fascism.

The Freedom-Hater regime furthers its insidious reach into every aspect of your life

One of the Most Equal Comrade's 23 provisions announced this morning is "clarifying" that "nothing in the Affordable Care Act prohibits" a doctor from discussing gun storage and safety with a patient.  Talk about veiled threat. "Nice little medical practice you got there, shame if something were to happen to it."  This is no suggestion.

FHer-care is morphing into an all-pervasive means of once and for all bringing about the MEC's promised "transformation."

It's on purpose - today's edition

Fitch's Rating may downgrade its estimation of the USA's creditworthiness. The announcement is spurred by the debt-ceiling situation.

The Most Equal Comrade is no president of mine, but his zeal for destroying Western civilization can't be denied - today's edition

Says that Israel doesn't know how to act in its own best interest.

This isn't temerity or hubris or brashness or cockiness.  This is freedom-hatred pure and simple.

In this apocalypse-bound world, there are worse places to live than my state

In his first official act, newly sworn-in Governor Mike Pence signs an executive order halting all regulation of business indefinitely.

About those big savings we were suppose to see from the health-care industry converting to electronic record-keeping . . .

 . . . they ain't happening.

The Chevy Volt of the stethoscope sector.

The little pointy-headed functionaries who carry out the Leviathan's bidding may be cordial and appear sympathetic, but remember, they truly do not see things your way

Great Roger Kimball piece at the WSJ today on his attempt to return his Sandy-damaged house to its pre-storm condition.  He takes the reader through the Kafkaesque labyrinth of requirements cooked up by levels ranging from his local zoning board to FEMA.

I'm reminded of a story that I'm not sure I've told at LITD before.

In a former life, I spent some time at my family's manufacturing company.  Contract metal-stamping.  Coils of steel fed into punch pressed fitted with dies.  (Press  operator during college summers, then cost estimating, culminating in taking over as president. It was long ago and a miserable time in my life.  I sold the company, finished my master's degree in history and went a markedly different direction.  Not all of us are suited for everything.)

One day, an OSHA inspector came a-calling.  An affable sort, very cordial.  During a brief conversation in the front-office foyer it was revealed that he had some private-sector industrial experience.  We listened politely, and then my father informed him that he would need to see a warrant signed by a judge.  The inspector grinned slightly and said, "You do realize that this extra formality only delays my inevitable audit by a day."  My dad said, "Indeed we do.  We're just doing it because we can."

Now, my relationship with my father was multi-layered and complex, but I can say I was never prouder of him than in that moment.

Speaking of Steyn . . .

 . . . at Commentary, he weighs in as part of the magazine's symposium on the future of conservatism.  His take is pretty much mine.

You can't avoid the stuff

My morning surf led me to a Mark Steyn New Criterion piece from 2007 that I had lost track of and always wanted to find again.  (Link actually takes you to a Free Republic reprint.  Original article didn't seem to want to come up.) The whole thing is well worth your time, but I want to draw your attention to a section in which he talks about the ubiquity of rock music in our postmodern daily life.  A few sentences after discussing what Allan Bloom had to say about pop music in The Closing of the American Mind, he says this (my emphasis added):

But Bloom is writing about rock music the way someone from the pre-rock generation experiences it. You’ve no interest in the stuff, you don’t buy the albums, you don’t tune to the radio stations, you would never knowingly seek out a rock and roll experience—and yet it’s all around you. You go to buy some socks, and it’s playing in the store. You get on the red eye to Heathrow, and they pump it into the cabin before you take off. I was filling up at a gas station the other day and I noticed that outside, at the pump, they now pipe pop music at you. This is one of the most constant forms of cultural dislocation anybody of the pre-Bloom generation faces: Most of us have prejudices: we may not like ballet or golf, but we don’t have to worry about going to the deli and ordering a ham on rye while some ninny in tights prances around us or a fellow in plus-fours tries to chip it out of the rough behind the salad bar. Yet, in the course of a day, any number of non-rock-related transactions are accompanied by rock music. I was at the airport last week, sitting at the gate, and over the transom some woman was singing about having two lovers and being very happy about it. And we all sat there as if it’s perfectly routine. To the pre-Bloom generation, it’s very weird—though, as he notes, “It may well be that a society’s greatest madness seems normal to itself.” Whether or not rock music is the soundtrack for the age that its more ambitious proponents tout it as, it’s a literal soundtrack: it’s like being in a movie with a really bad score. So Bloom’s not here to weigh the merit of the Beatles vs. Pink Floyd vs. Madonna vs. Niggaz with Attitude vs. Eminem vs. Green Day. They come and go, and there is no more dated sentence in Bloom’s book than the one where he gets specific and wonders whether Michael Jackson, Prince, or Boy George will take the place of Mick Jagger. But he’s not doing album reviews, he’s pondering the state of an entire society with a rock aesthetic.

This is what makes the way I teach rock history so difficult.  Aside from the occasional student who is in my age range, the classes have no point of reference by which to relate to a phenomenon such as the Ed Sullivan show, the Sunday night ritual from 1948 to 1971 in which the American family - mom, dad, kids and Fido - would do the supper dishes and then gather in front of the Zenith or the Sylvania and collectively fix their eyes on an hour of true variety - acrobats, stand-up comics, Broadway show casts, magicians, and, yes, a weekly rock and roll act.  Every aspect of the entire scenario - a family collectively availing itself of an hour of entertainment, the entertainment being devoid of anything lewd or violent, the breadth of the variety being presented - has disappeared as even a faint vestige of the way we have lived for decades.

One example of what Steyn is talking about that I have found noteworthy is the way loud, harsh rock music is used to sell classy automobiles.  There was a time when conveying status meant showing a tall, well-groomed man in a tuxedo taking the keys to his Cadillac from a valet and opening the door for his evening-gown-clad date, while lush strings provided the background music.

I'm really glad I found this article.  I may try to find a way to work it into my course material toward the end of the semester, when I invite the class to take a big-picture look at the music's cultural impact.

The FHers had better fully consider the implications of this

Americans bought enough guns in November and December 2012 to outfit the entire Chinese and Indian armies.

I'm starting to get a much clearer handle on why I've never cared much for this guy

When Colin Powell first came to my attention, he was a Desert Storm general, and, for a brief time, I admired him greatly.  The press conference in which he pointed to a map of Iraqi troop movements and said "The objective is to cut it off and kill it" was pure gold.

Then he retired from the Army and embarked on his civilian career.  He was harmless enough during his stint running that foundation dedicated to helping kids read better or whatever, but, because he went that route rather than into actual think-tank work, my interest level waned rapidly.  He spoke at Republican conventions and his name was even floated as a presidential candidate, but it was those circumstances that brought his ideological squishiness to the fore - being on board with affirmative action, being cool with the extermination of fetal Americans.  Hence I was uneasy about his placement as Secretary of State in the first W administration, a feeling compounded when stories about his tense relations with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld began to surface.

Since then, he's become downright obnoxious.  Of course, that's my feeling about anybody who has publicly waxed enthusiastically about the Most Equal Comrade - and, yes, I realize that, by that definition, in more than half the encounters in my daily life, I'm dealing with obnoxiousness.

But his appearance on Meet the Press this morning, so aptly covered by Ben Shapiro at Brietbart, is a new low.  The guy is either disingenuous in the extreme or appallingly ill-informed.  What the hell prompted him to utter the inanity - with no substantiation - that a major problem with today's GOP is the prevalence of birtherism?  And trotting our a chip on the shoulder over various Pub figures' use of terms like "lazy" or "shuck and jive" is a tactic worthy of Cornel West, not an ostensibly distinguished statesman.

Do us a favor, General, and go the full Charlie Crist / Lincoln Chafee/ Arlen Specter.  We're trying to cultivate a pro-Western-greatness party here, and it's clear you have a whole other set of values.

Could they make it any more blatant?

Senators Reid, Durbin, Schumer and Murray, that is, regarding their contempt for the Constitution and their utter indifference to our nation's insolvency.  Their letter to the MEC saying that they're cool with him unilaterally raising the debt ceiling ought to send chills through any citizen with the slightest vestige  of love for America.

When the Most Equal Comrade signals weakness, America's enemies oblige him

The Taliban is working from an entirely different script from that of the MEC regime.

UPDATE:  But that doesn't mean that the MEC, per his joint presser with Karzai yesterday, isn't cool with the Taliban opening a diplomatic office in Qatar. 

Speaking of surreal . . .

. . . the National Father's Day Council names Billy Jeff the Zipper as its Father of the Year.

Another humdinger of a cabinet pick

The Most Equal Comrade wants Jack Lew for the next Treasury Secretary - he of the 2011 Senate hearing in which he claimed that the MEC's approach to gummint finances wouldn't add to the debt.

More surreal by the day.

The gun post

There are a few issues that, while I understood that there were left and right takes on them, went for years without making it to my front burner.  Immigration was kind of like that.  While I was aware that the influx was gaining momentum, my sense was that America was big and absorbent enough to keep it from exhibiting really disturbing cultural implications.  It was only when it was brought home to me that the crux of the matter was the country possibly deciding en masse to disregard its own laws about such a basic matter as what qualifies a person to be here that my concern level began going up.  I also started to consider its role in voter fraud and the fading of our cohesive sense of identity.

It was like that with guns, too.  Maybe I bought into the stereotype a bit before my ideological evolution was complete.   I think my reaction to gun-rights zeal at that point was along the lines of, "Isn't such an emphasis on the right to own and carry a gun based on an undue suspicion that one's fellow human being is going to mess with you?"

Then I started considering something that's not often brought up in polite company: brute force is implicit in every human action.  Even the most sublime and tender.  If a deeply-in-love-couple gets married and subsequently splits up, there will be some sort of contractual arrangement for sending each party on its way with some of the material goods it has jointly acquired.  Of course, remedies for failing to comply will start out at the level of court orders and lawsuits, but if the intransigence reached its logical conclusion, a gun could eventually be drawn.  Other examples abound.  An unruly school kid's disciplinary measures (this example resonates with me, given my lifelong authority issues) may start out with detention, and, below a certain age, progress to paddling, but, should he, say, go wild in the principal's office and endanger the lives of authority figures, the ultimate societal remedy would be available.  Employment plays itself out the same way (hence the need for security personnel to see dismissed employees to the exit), as does behavior in a crowd.

My wife and I are friends with a couple who live on a wooded hilltop.  We don't get together socially with them as often as we once did, but there were a few summers during which pretty much every Sunday afternoon was spent floating in their pool, with blues and reggae emanating from the stereo speakers, the aroma of grilled food wafting across the environs, drinks aplenty and a general atmosphere of laughter and good conversation.  One day while standing in their kitchen, I noticed a tiny sticker in the corner pane of the door opening to their driveway.  It read: Anyone entering this house illegally will be shot.  It took me aback at first.  It seemed so incongruous to their lifestyle and demeanor.  My first thought was, "What's the motivation for such a hardass statement?"

Further reflection, however, got me thinking deeply about home as a concept.  You know, the castle image.  Home really is the space within which, provided your mortgage or rent is current, no one can mess with you.  (Again, this assumes that anyone with whom you share your home is at least relatively delightful company.  If not, see the first of the examples in my implicit-brute-force paragraph.)  You and yours do things your own way within your walls, and you don't need anyone's permission.  You also don't anticipate any interference.

A gun is the final confirmation of the individual human being's sovereignty.  Your will and your breath are your own, and there must be a recourse if violation seems imminent.

The current nationwide push for various gun-control measures in various locales enables those behind it to waffle on the basic issue of what the second amendment guarantees.  "We're just talking about certain kind of sizes or capacities," they say, or "we just want to tighten up background-checking procedures."  Do you think there's not an ultimate aim lurking behind such parsing? Me neither.

So how about me?  I've never owned a gun.  I've enjoyed the few times I've done some target shooting with various weapons.  The other day, though, I stopped into a firearms store just to ask some questions.  I also bookmarked a firearms-terms-glossary website.  It looks like I will be taking a safety-and-handling training class this spring.  That's about as far as I've gone. For one thing, I don't know how my wife would feel about any further steps.  There's also the affordability issue.  Getting into weaponry ownership requires some bucks.

Still, given the rapidly changing cultural and political landscape in this country, I'd like to at least know a thing or two about how to assert my sovereignty.

Reflections on my teaching gig

Anyone coming to this site for the first time and checking out the available information on me will surely conclude that I make an unlikely conservative.  I am a freelance writer - some business journalism and even agricultural journalism, but mostly lifestyle features and arts coverage - and a jazz guitarist.  I'm also an adjunct lecturer at a local community college, in an area the school describes as "special topics in music."  That means I teach jazz history, blues history and rock and roll history.

I've long since become inured to facial expressions and "you-teach-the-fun-courses"-type remarks that make it plain that my area of academic focus is generally regarded as fluff.  And, indeed, that's often the way these courses are structured, particularly rock history.

I have wrestled with the question of whether the state of Indiana ought to be using its resources to pay me a stipend for this activity.  I've concluded that, given the powers that be that determine the academic menu at my institution, someone would be teaching this stuff, and pretty much anyone else would teach it in a manner I'd find objectionable.

Indeed, I know of a rock-history instructor - I think he may be a full professor - at the main campus for my institution who is well-regarded by peers and students, a situation I find most lamentable.  I came across an article about him some time back that reported on a Pink Floyd tribute band he fronts.  He was quoted as saying that plaing "The Wall" in local clubs and auditoriums is an effective way to teach young folks about the "sense of alienation" that that song / album conveys.  Sorry, but it looks a lot more like a waste of everybody's time to me.  I may mention "The Wall" during the course of a rock-history semester, but it's not likely.  My feeling is that it is emblematic of the music-industry bloat and jadedness that signaled the draining of the last vestige of any sparkle from the whole cultural force know as rock and roll.

The text I use for that course is Flowers in the Dustbin: the Rise of Rock and Roll 1947 - 1977 by Robert Palmer.  It was published in 1992.  Why would I use a book over twenty years old, when developments in the music have supposedly continued apace, as well as the publication of newer perspectives on the music's history?  Because Palmer asserts that by 1977, any developments that were to impart any new elements of the music's defining character had already been introduced into it, and anything that has occurred since has been a recycling of one sort or another.

 Tonight is the first class session of the new semester.  I basically give the same lecture in the first class for rock history and jazz history, although I bring things a little farther along - to 1945, specifically - in rock history.  I start with the Bay Psalm Book and take the class through minstrelsy, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, ragtime, the development of American popular song from Paul Dresser through Victor Herbert, Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, and Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh, marching-band music, the beginnings of country (Ralph Peer's pioneering recordings of Fiddlin' John Carson, the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers), Kansas City and the territory-band circuit, the contributions of the legendary record producer John Hammond, the founding of BMI and changes in the radio industry, and the effect of World War II's shellack rationing and the draft on American music.

I typically get two types of reactions.  Some students' eyes widen and start blinking.  They start looking around to see if anyone else is as shocked as they are.  Others tend to arch their eyebrows, registering an element of delight in their surprise, indicating relish at the thought of so much discovery.

I love teaching jazz history, because jazz is so closely tied to American popular song, which is the body of musical works that express a real breadth of genuine grown-up human experience.  Rock, of course, came along in the very late 40s as a rowdy form of blues-based dance music that provided an alternative to the cerebral turn jazz took with the beboppers. That part of the rock course is fun to teach, in no small part because I get the chance to expose students to the lives of some colorful entrepreneurs  - the owners of the postwar record labels - who exemplify enterprise in its purest form.  Guys operating on a shoestring out of cramped facilities, building business empires by the seat of their pants.  Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic, Syd Nathan at King, the Chess brothers.  Guys who loved music and loved to make money.

Around the middle of the semester, I get a little sad.  That's when we have to squarely face the point at which the music and the culture got ugly.  Radical politics, rampant drugs, the casting of all sexual mores to the wind.  The Velvet Underground, The Doors, The Mothers of Invention, The Stooges.

Even at that juncture, though, I have important work to do.  I take the class through the development of the New Left, the moral-equivalency doctrine of historian William Appleman Williams, the work of C. Wright Mills and Eugene Genovese, and how these professors' students were the ones who took to the streets in the 1960s, and went to North Vietnam to make common cause with those whose aim was the West's destruction.

In the last week or two of the semester, I find a way to work Diana West's indispensible 2007 tome Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested Development is Bringing Down Western Civilization into the proceedings.  I get some blank stares, usually from the ones whose eyes had widened that first week.

In short, I think it's pretty clear by the course's conclusion that I'm no advocate.  In fact, I think I probably present my material as impartially as any humanities teacher on my campus.

But I make sure they get all the material.   It's quite a story when you take a sufficiently wide perspective.

These things matter

Iran's Foreign Ministry is on record as seeing the Hagel appointment as a signal of a more accommodating stance on the part of the People's Republic of Obamica toward the mullahcracy.  Israel, in the meantime, is on record as being concerned.

Just how mad is the vision of this regime?  Spending not a problem and the MEC "getting tired of hearing" the House Speaker "say that"?  Wind energy subsidies included in the agonizingly-arrived-at fiscal cillf deal?  Benghazi?  Fast and Furious?

As I said in the post below, there's nothing surprising about a president like the MEC making a SecDef pick like this.  Surprising, no.  Scary as hell, most definitely.

The Frente's incoming comandantes

I suppose if the MEC had nominated John Bolton, Allen West and Bill Gertz to head the Departments of State and Defense and the CIA respectively, that would have been the man-bites-dog story.  No, it's no big surprise that he's going for the likes of John "Global Test" Kerry, Chuck Hagel and John Brennan for those positions.

Still, it just brings home once again the extent of the damage being done in real time.  There are good reasons to talk about what we need to do in 2014 and 2016, but in the hours and days that transpire between now and then, much grotesque transformation will take place.

Hey, wait a minute!

Weren't folks of modest income supposed to continue to see the same levels of take-home pay after the wizards of the Beltway worked their fiscal magic?  That's not how it's playing out in real life.

That would explain a lot

Clarice Feldman at The American Thinker says that it's pretty apparent why al-Jazeera would pay such big bucks for the failed Current TV network: to foster anti-oil and anti-natural gas propaganda, so as to thwart any acting on the part of Americans on the realization that they are sitting on enough stores of fossil-fuel to render Saudi Arabia irrelevant to our energy needs.

"Fooled" is no longer an accurate term to describe any kind of surprise at the FHer agenda, since only willful ignorance could explain anybody not getting it

The Freedom-Haters were all over the Sunday shows today, making it as plain as the nose on your face that redistribution is their sole aim.  They don't give a flying diddly about the debt, the deficit, incentives for inventiveness or productivity, or American greatness.

You don't have to carefully parse their words.  They're being quite upfront about what they intend.

Ted Cruz gets it.  He says that it's not the time for compromise in Washington.  I just hope that whatever is in the Potomac water supply doesn't get to him, as it routinely seems to do to Pubs.

"Richard Windsor" and the kneecapping of the normal-people energy industry

The sudden departure of Lisa Jackson as EPA head doesn't smell so good.  It looks like he alter ego was using the official gummint e-mail system to coordinate anti-coal activity with greenie activist groups.  But inquiring minds who want to know more about it, such as Chris Horner at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, aren't getting much help under the Freedom of Information Act.

The nation's ever-more-elusive ability to muster even the most rudimentary seriousness

What does it tell us about the state of America when a supposed storm-relief package gets loaded with billion and billions - and then billions more - in unrelated pork by the Senate, and then when Pub officeholders who ostensibly embody the principle of fiscal responsibility howl when the House declines to vote on it?

Greens can't take yes for an answer

Robert Zubrin at NRO has a piece today that speaks volumes about the intolerance and downright lack of logic that characterizes radical environmentalism.

The gist:  The Haida tribe in British Columbia enlisted the help of Russ George, a scientist - entrepreneur, to help them kick-start their salmon-fishing industry, a major part of their livelihood.  George developed a project to harness iron sulfate in the service of creating a proliferation of phytoplankton.  It seems to have been a success.

Zubrin then offers quotes from the diatribes of several outraged greenies who think it's creepy to manipulate nature, even if it brings back the salmon population, helps a Native American tribe, and does so without leaving a carbon footprint.

Just read their howlings.  What the hell do these people want?

The enemy

We have always known that the Most Equal Comrade was steeped in the class-warfare strategies of Michael Harrington and Cloward and Piven.  What we are seeing now is the accelerated enactment of such a vision.

Your freedom is in grave danger.  Options for preserving it are dwindling.

It's really kind of a binary set of ways to proceed that is available to us: fight or despair.  Breezing through life whistling a carefree tune is not an option avaliable to us.  That is escapism, and is tantamount to surrender.  One might as well despair.

I guess I have chosen to fight.  I wouldn't bother to blog if I'd chosen otherwise.

An era of utter madness makes even the presumably principled susceptible to Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome

Some really jaw-dropping endorsements of the McConnell-Biden deal:

Jennifer Rubin at the Wapo.  Uses the adjective "bullying" to describe Heritage Action, and describes Rubio's "no" vote as "chest-pounding."


Hugh Hewitt on Twitter.  Says if he were a House member, he'd vote for it even though he admits it winds up raising taxes "in a harmful way."

Quinn Hillyer at The American Spectator.  Calls it a "tactical mini-retreat" that is "not a bad option."


Memo to these folks:  As pundits, one of these days, you're going to need reserves of credibility when you finally do feel urgent about something.  Those you will be asking to ascribe it to you will not have forgotten your position on this.

That's the last time we give Mitch McConnell the benefit of the doubt about having a spine

The CBO has scored the deal that passed the Senate at 1:39 this morning.  $41 in increased spending for every $1 in tax cuts.  In other words, a $330 billion increase in spending over ten years.

What happened to the Mitch McConnell who laughed in Tim Geithner's face mere weeks ago?

The House must kill this monstrosity.