The state is your family now, little comrade

Heather Wilhelm at Real Clear Politics uses the topic of bullying to point out just how close to boiling the water is for all of us frogs.

Keeping young human beings from aggressing on one another for the purposes of establishing a pecking order, shaking down some lunch money, or just to be mean, is an age-old challenge for adult authority figures in any and all societies.  The most effective way to deal with it is to keep an eye on the urchins and step in and quell each particular situation as it arises.

As Wilhelm points out, though, as the FHers have conquered our entire culture, the effort to put the kibosh on bullying has undergone mission creep.  To be fair, as technology has advanced, bullying has taken on insidious new forms.  Still, parental involvement would be the most effective way to address that.  But the FHers have seen an exquisitely ripe opportunity to impose acceptance of all manner of "lifestyle choices" that were considered, as recently as fifty years ago, the kind of thing one ought to quietly pursue and not shove in others' faces.

She cites a recent book, “Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy,” by Slate editor Emily Bazelon, and is admirably charitable about ascribing the most benign of motives to Bazelon, who, predictably, winds up, in her tome, advocating the placing of "Heather Has Two Mommies" on kindergarten bookshelves.

But Wilhelm does get to the core of what is really going on here - namely, supplanting family and faith with the leviathan state:

The common-sense solution to bullying, of course, would be to monitor kids, discipline them in a consistent manner, and have a well-communicated zero-tolerance policy. (Bazelon, to her credit, offers a thorough profile of a program, called the Olweus method, that does just that.)

You could also teach kids that all human beings are worthy of respect and love and should not be tormented, but that might be too simple for the people who brought you Obamacare. Plus, it’s just not as fun as social engineering. “You’re asking a school to do something differently than what’s done at home and church,” Whitney Pellegrino of the Justice Department tells Bazelon. “It’s a long process.”

If that quote doesn’t scare you, nothing will. Sadly, many families appear to have checked out of the whole “child-raising” thing, and it shows. Nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum, and so, apparently, does the government’s education establishment. When families check out or disintegrate, something will move in to take their place.

In other words, meet the new parents . . . and be at least a little afraid. 

Playing more deadly sequester games

The MEC - through ICE, so it doesn't have his direct fingerprints - releases a bunch of illegal aliens that had been incarcerated for various crimes, because Congress won't cave to his demand that the regime be able to seize yet more of our assets at gunpoint.

Peter Wehner at Commentary sums up what the MEC is up to as the clock ticks toward March 1:

The president’s greatest fear is that the sequester cuts will kick in and life will go on. So he’s threatening to pass over wasteful programs in order to target more essential ones. 

The thuggery is now on full display.

Thug nation

Woodward says a "very senior" official in the MEC regime told him he'd "regret having criticized the sequester ploy.

These people play for keeps.

Memo to all my little professional-class / serve-on-boards-of-civic-organizations / support-the-arts / want-life-to-be-"fair" "friends":  These goons over whom you gush so are not nice people.

His perspective on presidential history leads him to a noteworthy conclusion

Bob Woodward, appearing on the Morning Joe TV program, calls the MEC's pulling an aircraft carrier out of the Persian Gulf "a kind of madness."  Ask if we can imagine any previous president - and he names Reagan, Bush 43 and Clinton - so increasing our vulnerability just to score points in a budget battle with Congress.

The kick-me sign on America's back

The Senate confirms bigot and appeaser Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense.  Now that Secretary Global Test is already on his first tour of world capitals, the signal being sent to those entities probing for signs of weakness are exponentially more clear than they were in even the last days of the H-word Creature, who at least knew how to talk tough when it was to her advantage, and the rather squishy Leon Panetta.

There are, of course, a few proper objects of rage and contempt to list here.  Turncoat Pubs, the Most Equal Comrade, and the appointee himself.

I came close to blogging several times today, what with the ongoing sequester scare-mongering, the bestowing of the Best Picture Oscar by post-America's premier food desert crusader, and such local manifestations of Western civilization's death as the regional hospital in our city imploring Gov. Pence to rethink his rejection of Medicaid expansion and my city's human-rights council (the existence of which, as a taxpayer, makes my teeth grind) pushing through a redifinition of the term "family" (you know exactly how they redefined it) for purposes of "fair housing."  Alas, I focused on paid writing concerns instead, eyeing the clock for the onset of cocktail hour, which, happily, is now here.

Where my will to continue fighting comes from is something I don't entirely understand.

Lincoln bedroom redux

Organizing for America, the revolutionary socialist group that morphed into the MEC's campaign machine last year, and is now back to a general dismantling of our country, is offering those who donate half a million bucks or more a seat on an "advisory committee" that will meet on a quarterly basis with the MEC.  When asked about it today, Jay Carney was none too keen to discuss it.

One of those little vignettes that serves as a microcosm of the whole present implosion

Sandra Fluke is now pushing for transgendered soldiers.

Whee!  Let's just make up our own reality!

Never mind such immutable facts as that people have one or the other set of particular kind of genitals between their legs, and that the human condition has always involved brutish aggression threatening the happiness of those attempting to live peaceably and productively, and that the United States would quickly be overrun by such aggressive brutes if they sensed a diminished focus on the part of our defensive apparatus.

Sandra Fluke has clearly never actually held anything dear or regarded anything as sacred in her entire pathetic life.

Maybe the post-American regime will make people become doctors to deal with situations like this

Florida doesn't have enough doctors to accommodate the Medicaid expansion that Gov. Scott wimped out and signed on to.

Man, if this trend plays itself out, I'm gonna miss my knishes, blintzes, latkes, matzo soup and pastrami on rye

Two recent pieces - one by Austin Hill at Townhall, and one by Neo-neocon at her blog - that are responses to a recent LA Times piece on the demise of the Jewish deli.  There used to be thousands in New York, and now that's down to a couple of hundred.

Neo-neocon's main point is that delis have had an authenticity problem for some time.  She says that the dough for their bagels and rye bread had undergone a decrease in chewiness, for example.

Austin Hill raises some interesting points.  He doesn't mention Joseph Schumpeter's concept of creative destruction, but he's clearly addressing it:

Consider, for example, the notion of “too much competition.” What exactly does this mean?

Obviously the more competitive a marketplace is, the more difficult it is for any particular business entity to survive and thrive. But how do we know when the level of competition is appropriate, and when it is “too much?”

Americans are accustomed to fierce competition in other arenas – in sports, especially, and even in the arts and entertainment. Similarly, most of us would never say “my favorite team didn’t make it to the Super Bowl this year because there was too much competition in the NFL.”

But when it comes to local small businesses, we often succumb to this vague, un-defined notion that there is this magical amount of competition that’s “just right,” and if our favorite business can’t compete, then therefore there is “too much” competition.

And he points out that delis, as small businesses, are facing the ravages of Obamanomics typical of that type of organization:

 And guess what the LA Times article about the delis completely ignored? The impact of government policy on small businesses. Nowhere did it reference the expansive and onerous mandates placed upon business via Obamacare, the impact on business owners of the President’s payroll tax hike, or his income tax increases on “rich people.” 

No, the LA Times apparently wasn’t interested in how the President’s income tax hikes have taken money away from what the I.R.S. designates as “Subchapter S Corporations” (sometimes abbreviated as “S-corps”), and how this has effectively taken money directly out of small corporations, many of which operate small businesses. Likewise, the article made no reference to the fact California voters approved an increase in state income tax rates for “rich people” (thus leading to even less revenue in Subchapter-S Corporations) on their ballot last November, nor did it acknowledge that California has for years been on a trajectory of higher and higher unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation mandates for businesses.

Hitting the delis is always a must on any trip I take to New York, so this is a sad development.  Not only will I miss that particular kind of chow, but the continuing fading of the particularities of our culture as well. As we all assimilate by virtue of the homogenization of our food, music and customs, it will be left to the "diversity"-hustlers to keep the rich and distinct ways of living one found in the various types of neighborhoods in America -  when it was America -  alive.  Alas, that will be done in the manner of museum-curating, trotting out the delectables from the country's various cultural tributaries at "ethnic festivals" and in the form of offerings found in the frozen-food section of the supermarket, and there no doubt prepared with the kind of nodding to health persnickety-ness and mix-and-match whimsy typical of a culture that no longer has a grasp of its own heritage.

I wonder how Shapiro's in Indianapolis and Katzinger's in Columbus, Ohio are doing.  My two fave midwestern oases for this type of fare.

Why do some people feel like they have a vested interest in spinning Iran's nuke program as no big deal?

Compare and contrast this Foreign Affairs article by a USC professor of international relations with the latest IAEA report which says that Iranian installation of upgraded uranium enrichment equipment is underway.

The FA piece, if you read it all the way through, is clearly just a garden-variety attempt to make the West look trigger-happy.  That's the whole point of it, to speak candidly.

Why identifying someone as a Republican sure as hell tells you nothing about whether he or she is a conservative

Today's exhibits:  Senator Richard Shelby, who says he will vote to confirm Hagel as SecDef, and Florida governor Rick Scott, who made opposition to FHer-care core to his very political identity, and is now going to accept federal expansion of Medicaid in his state.

We are truly on our own.

It's come to light that the terminally ill patient known as Western civilization has yet more complications

Savvy sort that you surely must be if you check in with LITD, by now you know about Samuel Betances's indoctrination sessions at the US Department of Agriculture.

Yes, of course, your reaction, like mine, is "Just wow."  Well, yes, it's gone this far.

How to unpack this development?  Do we start with the fact that the US Department of Agriculture mainly exists to dole out SNAP coupons (formerly known as food stamps), subsidize crop insurance, and put floors under commodity-price fluctuations?  Or maybe take a look back at how all this "diversity training" dog vomit insinuated itself into our society's schools, corporations and governmental bodies?  Or do we look at the fat stipends these balkanization-hustlers pull down?

How did this crud find its way into the USDA, which ostensibly exists to serve farmers, who, for all the bureaucracy that has become part of their lives, are still generally a hail and hardy bunch who slip on a tee shirt and pair of jeans and a pair of boots before dawn, down a cup of coffee and head out to the tractor barn to begin fourteen hours of busting their tails?

Well, that gets us back to the nature of the USDA, which, for all the specifics of its functions, is primarily characterized by the fact that it is a large, unwieldy governmental organization.  Such entities, for all their supposed services, really exist for two purposes: to perpetuate the job security of those working within them, and to spread the leftist agenda.

Okay, so we caught this one and brought it to light.  The videos have gone viral and talking heads on radio and television are keeping it front and center for the time being.

Just remember: squishing one cockroach like Betances does not make our house pest-free.

War is a slog, and celebrations of any victories in the skirmishes that comprise it must not distract us from the still-arduous task ahead.

Another humdinger Hagel speech from 2007

This one was to the Cato Institute, and he said that negotiations with North Korea were headed in the right direction.

What FHer-care is really all about

Universal Studios Resort in Orlando, Florida drops health insurance coverage for a big swath of its employees.  Can't afford compliance with FHer-care's regulations.

There's no point in getting all indignant about the falsity of the MEC's claim that we'd get to keep our insurance if we liked it.  The son of a bitch is orchestrating the circumstances by which we go to a single-payer system.

The goofy priorities of our overlords - today's edition

File under WTF: Secretary of State Global Test gives his first major foreign-policy on global change.

How much more blatant a sign of Hagel's disdain for his own civilization do we need?

In a 2007 address to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, he berates the presidential primary candidates in both parties for what he saw as competition to take the hardest line against Iran, while he advocated engagement.  Said the US was acting like a "schoolyard bully."

John Boehner squanders yet another chance to convey our message

He uses the highly valuable lines of a Wall Street Journal column to give low-information voters the impression that he agrees with the Most Equal Comrade that the sequester must be avoided.  Um, John, how about using the first couple of paragraphs to call the MEC's bluff, and tell the nation that this is all about seizing yet more of Americans' money at gunpoint?  And use the rest of the piece to offer up some real proposals, the kind that the MEC wouldn't like at all?

I get so tired of this "the-president-needs-to-lead" crud we hear so frequently from Boehner.  The "president" needs to take a flying leap.  He needs to be rendered irrelevant.  Hell, doing that to us is his top priority.

The Most Equal Comrade is a uniquely stinky type of dog vomit chunk

He openly admits that his energy policy will make energy costs go up.

Because his fantasy is so noble, you understand.

They'll accuse us of anything

Great NRO editorial on the scurrilousness of the charge that Ted Cruz is engaging in McCarthyite tactics.

But do you think the Most Equal Comrade gives a flying diddly?

Alan Simpson - as in Simpson-Bowles - says that if the MEC doesn't deal with the big two entitlements - Social Security and Medicare - he will have a failed presidency.

Here's the question: What is North Korea doing being allowed to participate in the UN disarmament conference?

That's the venue in which it just threatened South Korea with final destruction.

The latest humdinger utterance from John McCain

How's that again? The ultimate Reasonable Gentleman says that Chuck Hagel is not qualified to be SecDef, but that the Senate shouldn't hold up his nomination.

Why the departments of Education and Health & Human Services ought to be dismantled pronto - today's edition

HHS deliberately tried to bury its own report on the ineffectiveness of Head Start and Ed delayed the release of its report on DC's Opportunity Scholarship program.

The leviathan wants its claws in the kiddies' skulls at an ever-earlier age, and will not tolerate the choice to not permit it.

Why our times are so scary - this hour's edition

Just because the regime's propaganda arm isn't covering it doesn't mean the Benghazi disaster has gone away.

The White House finally had to send a letter to Congress fessing up that the MEC did not make any calls to State, Defense or the CIA on the night of Sept. 11.   That would be the night before he flew at our expense to Vegas to bask in the adulation of his zombies.

In a sane world, he'd be at least impeached.

The immorality and the economic damage of the minimum wage

There is no Freedom-Hater policy that sticks in my craw more than the minimum wage.  My primary point of opposition is informed by the principle of liberty:  It's government telling a private organization how to conduct its operations.  But there's also real devastation among those who might wish to join America's ostensibly prosperity-generating organizations.  Celia Bigelow at Breitbart focuses on its impact on unemployment numbers, and they ain't pretty.

Already out of money

You know those high-risk insurance pools that were a feature of FHer-care, a temporary measure designed to carry over the uninsured until 2014?  They're turning away new applicants because the funding is gone.

They're just getting started

China summoned North Korea's ambassador for what it anticipated would be a stern talking-to after the recent nuke test.  What it got was the announcement that NorKor intends to conduct two more nuke tests and a missile test yet this year.

Now, come on, you guys.  That's unhelpful and will only further isolate you.  Plus, by golly, we'll impose even tougher sanctions, and then you'll be sorry!

If Hagel makes it through, it will tell us a lot about just how far gone this country is

Two important pices today about Chuck Hagel:

 Quinn Hillyer at The American Spectator notes that it's not just the remarks over the years that stink of Jew-hatred, or the cozying up to Iran, but the insinuation that the W administration wasn't just acting on mistaken intelligence about Iraqi WMDs but had some kind of ulterior motive for its invasion thereof.

Jonathan S. Tobin at Commentary says that if America's major Jewish groups would come together and speak out against this ridiculous and dangerous nomination, they could be the force that pulls the plug on it.

Reason no. 1259 to keep your kids out of government schools

The principal of Soumakian and Camarillo High School in California got a group of cheering students at a basketball game in trouble for chanting "USA!" and wearing American-flag bandanas.  The students were suspended, but that's been rescinded.  Still, he says the administration wants to look further into the incident to make sure it wasn't "racially motivated."

Government schools are now indoctrination centers for post-America.

This is the same mentality we see behind "hate crimes."  It's not enough for a school, municipality, state or nation to specify behaviors deemed unacceptable.  The thoughts and motives of the person must be parsed.  The inside of one's head is no longer private space.

And what kind of contortions are necessary to view displays of patriotism as possibly "racially motivated" in any circumstance?

I hadn't thought about this . . .

. . . but in the SOTU,  the MEC didn't even mention Chris Stevens or the other Americans killed in Benghazi last September 11.

But then we knew that already

The SOTU was vintage MEC.  "Invest" in "education" and "infrastructure."  Cap and trade come hell or high water, by executive fiat if legislative means prove ineffective.  No more al-Qaeda threat, even as north Africa is overrrun with its murderous zealots.  More minimum-wage totalitarianism and planned decline.  Class warfare.  Tepid, fleeting acknowledgment of the new level of threat from North Korea.  And, of course, more deficit spending.

As you go through your day today, look at and listen to the people around you.  Peruse your Facebook feed.  Are you encountering any enthusiasts for the poison he ladled out?  Some of them may be social friends, or professional associates.  Of course, you have compelling reasons not to regard them as the enemy.  But then ask yourself this: Is there any way they can be persuaded by the elegance of reason, or by appeals to the basic nobility of the individual human being?  If so, marvelous.  Get to work.  If not . . .

Well, they did it

North Korea conducts its third - and most powerful yet - nuclear bomb test.

This is what you get when you fool around with Agreed Frameworks and Six-Way Talks.

Thugs and patty-cake are a bad mixture.

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

The Department of Housing and Urban Development - a nest of mischief that never should have existed - has announced a new "Healthy Housing Initiative."

It's exactly what the image forming in your mind makes it out to be.

Did you know that there is an entire array of "stakeholders" in how clean and energy-efficient your house is?

Juxtapose this with the regime's current push to take away Americans' guns.  Regime agents show up at your door demanding to check your domicile's "healthiness" level, and you have no means to reinforce your demand that they get the hell off your property.

Will they bring USDA and HHS agents with them to poke around in your refrigerator to check the ratio  of broccoli to chimichangas?

Freedom is scary

I've been thinking about this matter of why conservatism is a harder sell than leftism.

It seems to me that the crux of the matter is that freedom is scary.  There's an old Blondie comic strip that has stuck with me through the years that sums up the matter of self-ownership:  Dagwood is seated in a chair, reading, with the phone on a stand beside him.  It rings.  Wife Blondie pokes her head in the room, says something like, "If that's my bridge club gals, tell them I'm on my way."  Okay, got it.  Phone rings again.  Son Alexander pokes head in room.  "If that's Joey, tell him I''ll meet him at the gym in fifteen minutes," or whatever. Okay, got it.  Phone rings again.  Daughter Cookie:  "If that's Jean, tell her I'll meet her at the mall in twenty minutes," or whatever.  Phone rings again.  Dagwood looks at the reader and asks, "It's for me; now what do I do?"

Freedom means determining how you're going to proceed from square one, the particular point where you currently are, and that means choices.  And choices have two unsettling qualities: they come with consequences, and they mean foregoing other options you had right up to the moment of decision.

The leftist says that it's easier for some people than others.  You know, the whole line about "rich muckety-mucks born into privilege don't know what the masses have to deal with every day."  A corollary to this is the claim that some people have insufficient information to make a particular choice in a way that's beneficial to themselves.  Well, sorry, but no one starts life with a baseline of heavenly perfection.  Every human life comes bundled with issues of one sort or another - health, family dynamics, weather and nature events, sudden changes in fortune.  None of us can know the intricate details of another's circumstances.  The starting point for any of us is not zero, but rather some tangled number that goes out many decimal places.

So we have to ascribe to anyone who qualifies as an adult human being the capability to make choices as well as anyone else.  It's the only fair way to regard another person.

I guess what got me thinking about all this this morning was that someone on my Facebook newsfeed had posted a poisonously stupid quote from Rachel Maddow about poor people not wanting to be poor, but lacking the opportunities that rich people have.  What a disingenuous glossing-over of the key point, which is, Who are any of us to define the term "opportunity" for anyone else?  I may have the opportunity to be a shipyard welder, but since it doesn't interest me in the least, it's not really within the realm of my opportunities.

But leftism depends on a one-size-fits-all approach for its attempt at legitimacy.  ""To each according to his needs" and all that.  I don't know what my fellow human being needs, beyond food, water and shelter.  And if we say that that is all he needs, we remove his very humanity.  We reduce human beings to the level of cattle, blankly staring ahead as they are herded into the pen.

But, of course, deciding to be a cow is the easier route.  As long as you're sufficiently amused, you don't miss a thing about your former status.

The Most Equal Comrade is captured on video having to sit still and listen to the plain truth about the free market and health care

He gets an earful from Dr. Benjamin Carson at the National Prayer Breakfast.  This is glorious.  Of course, the MEC is sitting there seething, truth-and-freedom-hater that he is.  He is pursuing the exact opposite of what Dr. Carson so elegantly proposes.

The perfect opportunity to put the squeeze on the Most Equal Comrade

Great Charles Krauthammer column in the WaPo this morning on how the Pubs should do exactly nothing regarding the MEC's call for a short-term fix to avert the March 1 sequestration.

Yes, the tax increases agreed to last month were bad and wrong. Yes, the cuts in the sequestration would be bad and wrong - a meat-axe approach to the domestic side and a danger to our national security on the defense side.  But it's exactly the spot on which to stand on principle.  They can sy, "Damn it, you got tax increases last month.  No more.  This one is all about spending cuts, whether they result from a deal, or from the automatic sequestration.  Your call, m-----------."

How dangerous is John Brennan for our national security?

This dangerous.  Then again, he fits right in with the pro-patty-cake, take-America-down-a-few-notches-for-the-sake-of-"fairness" orientation of the MEC regime.

It's on purpose - today's edition

How many Americans under 30 are employed today?  62 percent.

29 percent more than they estimated last year

Oopsie!

The CBO has a new estimate of the cost of FHer-care over the next ten years, and it's quite a bit more than the previous one.

They smell weakness - today's edition

Iran's Ayatollah Khameini responds to Joe Biden's offer of another round of patty cake with utter contempt, as usual.

This development coincides, of course, with Ahmadinejad's state visit to Egypt for a summit of the Jew-haters.

And coincides with North Korea's state media's release of a video showing a missile attack on the US that incinerates New York - as it gears up for two more actual nuclear tests.

The Beyonce post

Again, I'm faced with one of those popular culture developments that makes me wonder how many layers of the onion to peel back.  I'll do what I can to keep it succinct and on point.

It's interesting to juxtapose the results of a poll Conservative HQ conducted about whether Beyonce's Super Bowl halftime show was appropriate with a post and the resultant comment thread at Acculturated, a site dedicated to pop-culture observations.   The poll participants give a big thumbs-down to the performance.  The Acculturated post author and lots of the comment-thread participants want to focus on the singer's personal value system.  I wasn't aware of this - and I ought to muster some  level of sheepishness about my ignorance, given that I get paid to be a scholar of American popular music - but apparently Beyonce never slept with a man until she got together with her husband, JayZ.

Hey, that's great.  But why does the term "glaring disconnect" loom so large in my thought process about all this?  To once again reference my level of ignorance about pop-culture developments of the last 35 years, once I saw the performance and started to pick up on conversation about it, I knew I needed to bring myself up to speed.  So I read the Wikipedia article on Destiny's Child, the "R&B" group (I'll explain the quotation marks in a bit) with which Beyonce began her career, and I went to YouTube and availed myself of some of the group's videos / songs.

She's been all about this tarted-up, fishnet-hose-bustier-writhing-pelvic-thrust persona from the launching point of her career.

Maybe in some more general post I will put on my American-music-history-adjunct-lecturer hat and more deeply examine where that whole aesthetic impulse originates.  On a particular level, we can go back to the mid-1980s, when the Detroit-area-born daughter of a Chrysler engineer who made her way to NYC and, with fierce determination, made her way into the dance-club scene - I'm speaking of the singer known as Madonna - and brought the debate about whether, how, to what degree, and for what purpose, cartoonish slutiness empowered the modern woman.

Ah, but you start into all that. and link to the requisite Camille Paglia articles, and then you have to introduce the question of yet deeper levels.

Let's introduce this, for instance, and it's not a digression.  I love Ted Nugent. He is that magnificent combination of the articulate, the principled, the knowledgeable and informed, the fierce, and the funny - and, yes, humble.  There's a video on his website in which he talks about the joys of grandfatherhood.  He says his grandchildren look at him as "Santa Claus with a machine gun."

But I hate his music.  As a guitarist, I can tell he has a working knowledge of the instrument, which leads to the question, why doesn't he use it?  Why has he chosen to make a 45-year career based on such a limited vocabulary?

And now we can begin to come back to the original point.  What bothers me so much about Nugent's music?  It's the mechanized, repetitive, slammed-home nature of it - combined with the animal-level way it treats sexuality, replacing the Great-American-Songbook awareness of the delight and magic of courtship with a notion of sex as basically an athletic undertaking.

Such is the case with the music of Beyonce, her old group Destiny's Child, and what has passed for R&B for the last 30 years.

At this point, I must prepare to be taken to task for what was clearly part of the ethos of R&B going back to its origins.  The tale of Marvin Gaye wrestling in the grass in a fit of jealous rage beside the tour bus with Titty Tassle Toni, the hoochie dancer on the R&B tour with The Moonglows, Etta James and other acts in 1959, is the stuff of legend.  Much of the greatest early R&B depends for its relevance on its raunchiness: "Keep on Churning" by Wynonie Harris, "Big Long Slidin' Thing" by Dinah Washington, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" by Big Maybelle.

Okay.  I don't have the dealt-with-once-and-for-all response to that at this moment.

I guess I would introduce one more element into the discussion to make sure we don't foreclose on the big picture as the drawing of conclusions becomes a possibility - and that would be the element of razzle-dazzle.  Wynonie Harris and Big Maybelle didn't set off fireworks and test the capacity of huge stadiums' power systems to present their artistic visions.  In fact, they wore suits and gowns respectively as they sang to their audiences.

And that's why the Acculturated consensus that the point is to defend Beyonce's personal value system falls short of a productive take on her performance.  She got up there and offered not a note of music that anyone in 60 years will find hum-worthy, and she offered up a frightfully animalistic interpretation of human intimacy to boot.

It further reduces my level of encouragement about where we're headed that the obvious aesthetic aridity of the Beyonce halftime performance goes unaddressed even in conservative forums.  That she is a once-married wife and mother who takes that role seriously is not the main point at a bizarre and terrifying juncture such as that at which we currently find ourselves.

There was and ever will be only one Dutch

I can't think of a better way to commemorate the 102nd birthday of the most beloved conservative icon of all time than to offer his most thunderously articulate speech ever - and that's saying something.

As if there were currently some kind of window of opportunity

New Secretary of State Global Test says that the window of opportunity for achieving Israeli-Palestinian peace may close if we don't act with urgency.

You mean there is such a window currently open?  Oh, and just who is the party on the Palestinian side that is interested in this peace business?

This is a direct quote from Paul Krugman

On the subject of how to pay for FHer-care: "Death panels and sales taxes is how we do this."

It's in times of testing that what one is made of becomes discernible

Ohio's John Kasich becomes the fifth Pub governor to cave and take federal money to expand Medicaid per the provision in FHer-care.

Where is the line going to be drawn?  Who in this world really embraces the principles they say they do?  What was the final compelling factor that made these five make this choice?

Muddle-heads who think we have forever to solve our problems

Well, now.  All one has to do is juxtapose these two takes on Karl Rove's Conservative Victory Project  - Rick Moran's at PJ Media and that of Michelle Malkin at her own blog - to see that "rift" is probably a woefully understated way to characterize the current juncture of the Republican party.

It may not be immediately apparent if you live in a city with a Republican mayor and city council in a state with a Republican governor and legislature (as I do), where the emphasis is on the policies, reforms and strategies that one yearns for on the national level.  But methinks that can lead to an insular perspective that can erode any local or regional gains for freedom and common sense.

And even at this late date you can get the occasional glimmer of of excitement on the national level, such as Ted Cruz, who didn't feel the need for an easing-in period as a new Senator, but rather began on day one confronting the regime and forthrightly standing for our principles.

Let me do a bit of cutting to the chase and say that I side with Malkin over Moran in the dichotomy they represent.  I've been wary of Moran for a few years, ever since I read something he wrote for his blog disparaging Rush Limbaugh.  And in the current piece he betrays his willingness to accomodate Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome when he characterizes Richard Lugar as " a conservative pragmatist whose collegiality with Democrats made him suspect with the paranoids who see any collaboration with the enemy as treason."

You just knew where the conversation in the comment threads was going to go on that one - a passionate, yet beside-the-point debate about whether the Pubs need to jettison "social issues" and focus on "fiscal issues," since it was Mourdock's abortion remark that self-immolated his campaign.

But back to Moran himself: He feels the need to sound the alarm about a supposedly significant element within Tea Party-ism as the " kind of hysteria [that] gives the right wing the deserved reputation of being disconnected from reality. Is there anything wrong with marginalizing Tea Party people who believe that Obama is a Muslim or that he’s out to “destroy America”? Or constitutional conservatives who believe our founding document is akin to holy writ? Or libertarians who embrace objectivism? These people don’t have to be shunted off to the fringe. They are the fringe already. Not all Tea Partiers, constitutionalists, or libertarians share these ridiculous views, but shouldn’t an effort be made to kick the crazies to the sidelines?"

Well, no, because it would be a time-waster in a moment of great urgency.  There just aren't enough people who think the Most Equal Comrade is a Muslim, or who put objectivism at the center of their worldview to get worked up about.

Now, he really wanders onto shaky ground with that business about the Constitution.  It is indeed our supreme compass for America's direction, and there is some justification in calling it a sacred document - perhaps not sacred in quite the same way as holy writ, but something that must never be held in relativistic regard.

And then let's get back to the guy whose latest move seems not to discomfort Moran at all.  As Malkin reminds us, Karl Rove is the guy who was:

 behind the disastrous Medicare prescription drug entitlement expansion that created an unfunded liability of $9.4 trillion over the next 75 years, No Child Left Behind federal education expansion, steel tariffs, ag subsidies, the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law and the Bush-Kennedy-McCain illegal alien amnesty attempt.

Rove and his boss abused their power and sacrificed core conservative principles at the altar of “compassionate conservatism.”

I  recall an on-air conversation the recently-retired talk show host Neal Boortz had with the Beltway observer with whom he regularly checked in, Jamie Dupree, about what freshmen PUB Representatives and / or Senators might feel, in their Cruz-like confidence, they could tackle.  He asked Dupree, with the requisite tone of facetiousness, knowing the answer beforehand, "How about the Department of Education?  Could they start moving to dismantle that?"  Dupree said tersely, "Ain't gonna happen."

And that's the problem in a nutshell.  The things that this nation actually needs to be addressing aren't being addressed at all.  That was the principle problem with the Ryan long-term budget plans, versions 1.0 and 2.0.  They were long-term.  They didn't achieve a state of balance until 2040, and who knows what kind of electoral and geopolitical twists and turns could be setting the parameters of the possible by then?

The metaphor about drinking Potomac Kool-Aid has been around long enough to have become hackneyed, but it is maddeningly true that principled politicians and wonks go to Washington and begin submitting their deeply held beliefs and values to erosion all too quickly.  The fact that the Washington area is one of the few boom regions in the country even though nothing but laws and regulations are made there is ample evidence of a self-perpetuating entrenched ruling class.

Where Moran, and, more to the point, Karl Rove, seem to either have lost sight of, or, more probably, come to deem irrelevant, is the utter determination of the left side of this entrenched class to obliterate any other elements within it.  Shall I speak plainly?  I think it seems advisable, as a number of folks need to be reminded of a simple fact:  Freedom-Hating Democrats want to stamp out conservatism once and for all.  They hate our guts.

I am not the first blogger nor will I be the last to chime in on Rove's move this week.  The main point I would like to contribute to the mix at this time is that conservatism can ill afford the kind of arrogance he's demonstrating.  The gall.  Who is he to determine which primary candidates are electable?  What qualifies him?  His stinking track record?  His only real accomplishment was to manage the career of George Bush, a nice enough man, but, ultimately, not one of us.


And a quick memo to Moran: collaborating with the enemy is by definition treason and the Most Equal Comrade is indeed out to destroy America.

Will any teacher or administrator be made to explain just what was "offensive" about this?

An Arizona high school student who aspires to military service after he graduates chose a picture of a rifle lying on an American flag as his desktop background on his school-issued computer and got in a fair amount of trouble for it.

Shades of Phil Michelson

Sports celebrities in the People's Republic of Obamica are clearly not allowed to have social or economic views outside a carefully circumscribed range.  Straying from the Party line on the subject of intragender relations can result in sensitivity training for NFL stars.

It's on purpose - today's edition

A London-based medical company called Smith & Nephew is laying off 100 workers at its Tennessee and Massachusetts facilities, citing the prohibitive cost of FHer-care.

And 1200 Daimler Trucks North America folks are set to get the axe.

The high cost of tyranny - today's edition

By 2016, the cheapest health care plan available in America will cost $20,000.

And the Freedom-Haters had the gall to call it the Affordable Health Care Act.

The regime prevaricates as prosperity doesn't occur

It will be at least June before the regime deicides whether to move forward with the Keystone XL pipeline.  The Nebraska governor did a laudable job of trying to force the MEC's hand by addressing the geographic concerns that had been put forth, but the howls of the radical greenies carry more weight  with the MEC, and he hasn't figured out how to keep them from getting mutinous.