I guess in this day and age all big corporations feel like they have to have "environmental advisors," and I suppose if you can get one who knows the regime's attack-dog ways, you'd best hire her

Seth Mandel at Commentary says that that must be the reason Apple hired former EPA head Lisa Jackson:

So why would Apple hire her? Rago [at the WSJ] suggests that Apple executives, who are being dragged in front of congressional committees for obeying tax laws and making money, might think bringing Jackson on board would insulate them from the political attacks. At the Washington Examiner, Tim Carney asks: “Will Jackson’s job be about chasing subsidies for the renewable investments Apple is already making?” Whatever the reason, if her past experience is any indication, even with the best of intentions it will be counterproductive and costly.

Why we call them Freedom-Haters - today's edition

The New York Department of Education is going after the state's school cafeterias for using butter.  Butter.  One of the Western world's indispensible and most exquisite foodstuffs.

Even threatening to discipline recalcitrant kitchens in the Empire State's indoctrination centers, without having any regs on the books that butter usage would be a violation of.  And this has unionized food workers rather irritated.

The FHer way:  Go after those still doing things the pre-transformation way even if there's not yet any laws or rules on the books against them.

What would make someone like her jump the shark?

Few things are as wince-inducing for us conservatives as the spectacle of one of our own - one who has very publicly and visibly championed some of our most important principles - making a move that completely undermines those principles.

That's what we have in Jan Brewer and her attempt to put the squeeze on the Arizona legislature until it authorizes increased Medicaid spending.  National Review Online comes right out and accuses her of "economic illiteracy."

What is she thinking?  What could possibly be her motivation?  She's aware that just because the federal portion to which she has signed on is federal, it didn't materialize out of thin air.  Taxpayers such as me out here in Indiana, as well as all those in her own state who file 1040s, make that money possible.  She's also aware that Medicaid does not increase society's overall health level.

And so the search for a seamless conservative goes on. It ain't Mark Sanford, who was willing to nuke his very own family.   It ain't Marco Rubio, who apparently will not let go of his obsession with doing something "comprehensive" about immigration.

Perhaps it's Ted Cruz, or my own governor, Mike Pence.  Mia Love has announced another run at a Congressional seat.  She seems like the real deal.

I do know this:  Brewer's bona fides may not be redeemable.  This was glaring.

Let's speak plainly; China's not our friend

I've long been perplexed by the headlong zeal with which American business wants to increase its ties to China.

As I've noted here before, there are abundant examples of it in the city where I live.  The world's premier diesel engine maker is headquartered here (actually, it now defines itself as being in the power-generation business), and it has all kinds of plants and joint ventures in China, and hires ample numbers of young Chinese engineers, which has given our community a more international flavor in the last few years. There is also a spinoff from that corporation which is in the embedded-software business, and it has a Chinese makeup all the way to top management.

But the People's Republic is well known for its intellectual property theft, deal-negotiating chicanery, ambiguity about private-sector and governmental distinctions, and overall military ambitions.

The latest example of all this quite an attention-getter:

Designs for many of the nation’s most sensitive advanced weapons systems have been compromised by Chinese hackers, according to a report prepared for the Pentagon and to officials from government and the defense industry.

Among more than two dozen major weapons systems whose designs were breached were programs critical to U.S. missile defenses and combat aircraft and ships, according to a previously undisclosed section of a confidential report prepared for Pentagon leaders by the Defense Science Board.

There's that ambiguity.  Who are these hackers and in what capacity are they operating?

We know what systems have been compromised: the V-22 Osprey, the Patriot missile, and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, among others.

I think the Most Equal Comrade's remark a while back about how the US is not out to thwart China's rise sums up the overarching view of international relations that permeates not only government under this regime, but the office suites of economic development boards across the nation, as well as the market-expansion departments of various corporations.   There persists this notion that the technologies and business models of the last couple of centuries will enable us to transcend aspects of human nature that have characterized the entire history of the species.

It ain't so.  Some states will always have imperialistic agendas, and they're usually fairly upfront about it.

As if FHer-care didn't already have enough totalitarian aspects to it

Now we're going to put "navigators" out into "the communities."  They don't have to be proficient at math or knowledgeable about the way insurance works.  The main credential is demographic affinity with those they'll "serve."  And what they'll know about their "customers" will be exhaustive.

Oh, so now he wants us to believe that he regrets the way his department handled it

Eric Holder gives an interview on "finding the right balance" between journalistic freedom and national security.

How many levels of damage are going on here? I count four

Some of the layers to be peeled back in this story from Utah about a girl, her schoolmate, her father's "fiancé,"and  the girl's teacher: the whole notion of "bullying," sexualization of pre-teens, internal dynamics of the postmodern family, and the sowing of confusion among post-America's youth.

Because an airing of the full array of relevant facts takes a little while, and immediate emotional reaction is so much more gratifying

Well do I remember the purple-faced indignation of several left-wingers on Facebook when the Trayvon Martin - George Zimmerman situation first came to national attention.  Gun policy, race relations, the legal system, the media, and economic disparities all came into the discussion, and you know exactly where the lefties doing the posting were coming from on each front.

This kid was no fresh-faced model citizen, and there were plenty of people in those first days who knew it.  He was a social degenerate whose self-imposed troubles in life were gathering momentum.

Yet another example of the FHer worldview's refusal to see the real-world implications of its obsession with finding supposedly beleagured demographic groups to champion and make excuses for.  Society continues to decay and good people get intimidated into feeling guilty over nothing at all.

The family may be far-flung, but its members are still so committed to the FHer vision that they will overlook the unsavory activities of their associates

Had you ever heard of the Barack H. Obama Foundation?  Well, given its name, you're likely not surprised to learn that, even as hundreds of conservative groups got the runaround and worse from the IRS, this outfit breezed though its application for tax-exempt status.  It is actually named after BHO, Sr, the Most Equal Comrade's father.  It was founded - and is run - by Malik Obama, the MEC's half-brother.  It ostensibly exists to brign literacy and clean water to impoverished third-world villages.

Ya gotta wonder if its agenda isn't, shall we say, broader, given its ties to the genocidal regime that rules Sudan.

Is there anything more sinister than a thug's determination?

One of my favorite parlor games is kicking around answers to the question, "What federal agencies and cabinet-level departments are there whose dismantling would be beneficial to America?"  Certainly the EPA, and the departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, Labor, HHS and Agriculture could go this afternoon, and we'd be on a path of accelerated national revival.

But how about the Department of Justice?  We've had an attorney general since 1789, but we've only surrounded that position with a bureaucracy since 1870.  It exists to be our federal-level law-enforcement apparatus, but since this regime has come to power, we've seen just how easily poisoned its mission can be.

Consider, for instance, how the DoJ went shopping for a judge that would give it a warrant to get James Rosen's e-mails.  Took three forays to do it, but they found one.

Why anybody ever conferred wise-statesman status on this guy is beyond me

Colin Powell says that the MEC's second term is "going reasonably well."

The green folly right here at home

Going local again here.  As I have stated, I do so when a news item in our city has broader implications.

One of my steady writing gigs is the cover story and other local feature in each monthly issue of a local business magazine.  For last year's October issue, my editor had me profile a solar panel manufacturer that had started up a few months before.

As is my routine for embarking on such assignments, I went out to the industrial park where the plant was located.  It was the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, and I was immediately struck by the absence of any cars in the parking lot.  I was able to get into the lobby, though, although, again, there was a dearth of warm bodies.  I rang a buzzer and eventually a gal who identified herself as the plant manager came out to greet me.  I asked her about the appropriate person for an interview.  She told me it would be the CEO, so we began the process, concluded by e-mail, of setting that up.  The day came for the interview and I went back out there.  Again, no cars in the lot. One idle eighteen-wheeler by the receiving bays.

The CEO and I had a nearly hour-long conversation in his office.  He was a good-looking young fellow with a go-getter demeanor.  Told me about his back ground in the overall renewable-energy field.  Spoke knowledgeably about a raw silicon supplier in South Korea, and the different grades of photovoltaic cells.  Talked about how his main market was folks living off-grid and how the firm was expanding into African countries where energy development was still being sorted out.

Very impressive, I thought, but, um, where are the people here?

Anyway, the above-the-fold headline in our local paper this morning was about how this company is suppose  to be paying back a bunch of local money that it obtained in the form of tax abatements, grants and loans, and is not doing so.  The company had told the city that it expected to employ 80 people by the end of 2012.  As of February 2013, it still only had 15.  The city is looking at foreclosure proceedings.

This guy had told me that his model was different from that of companies like Solyndra and that his growth forecasts were solidly backed up.  As I say, he had that charge-ahead way about him and, despite the eerie silence of the place during my two visits, I was ready to be convinced.

Turns out the city, in its efforts to be ever-so green and diverse and amenable to young professionals, blew my hard-earned tax dollars on yet another gravy train rider.   We got took.

How awful was the MEC's recent national-security speech?

It was abysmal.  Full of moral equivalence between jihadists and non-jihadi lone nutters, equivocation about obvious instances of jihad, "all-wars-end" pablum, no mention of Iran.

The true face of this regime: the willingness to eat its own

Tavis Smiley's bona fides as an identity-politics / left-of-center figure are well established.  That didn't matter to the thugocracy, which is now leaning on the sponsors of his various projects because he had the temerity to speak up about the MEC's performance in the area of employment.

Neutering ourselves with our Dionysian whims

Stacey McCain is rightly alarmed by a great swath of the reaction to the Florida case of Kaitlin Ashley Hunt.

She's an 18-year-old high school student whose lesbian affair with a 14-year-old freshman began with a toilet-stall seduction and progressed to the younger girl taking refuge at Hunt's house when she ran away from home.

Hunt faces statutory-rape charges and could be incarcerated for a decade and put on the sex-offender registry.

As she should be.

There is a "Free Kate" movement now that is predicated on such memes as the younger girl's parents being bigots for being distressed about all this, and "Romeo and Juliet" loopholes in the relevant laws.

Get you brain around how far the societal rot has progressed, as evidenced by the particulars here:

1.) Toilet-stall sexual overtures of any type, much less of a lesbian nature, are now regarded as legitimate beginnings to romantic relationships.  The rot has progressed so far that "dating-and-courthship-are-dying-and-being-replaced-by-hookups" observations have a banality to them now.

2.) The dismantling of the age-old notion of family gets a major boost from this case.

3.) Adolescent feelings now prevail over all other considerations, including the basic authority required for maintaining basic public order.

4.) A populace that trivializes genital gratification is sufficiently dehumanized to trade basic human nobility for the all-encompassing guardianship of the state.  Yes, I'm drawing a line from hook-ups to property rights and the rights of free expression and assembly.

5.) Any injection of God into the national conversation about this will instantly marginalize the person so injecting.

6.) Sex becomes an ever more joyless aspect of human existence.

Holder's Waterloo?

He testified that he didn't know anything about DoJ harassment of journalists, but he's the one who signed the damn warrant to get Rosen's e-mails.

The thug tactics of the culture-destroyers

At the meeting at which the Boy Scouts voted to admit openly gay boys, a guy tried to distribute copies of an ad that had run in the Dallas Morning News opposing the move.  He was confronted by BSA officials and a law-enforcement person and escorted out of the hotel.  Turns out the FeEx shop where he'd copied the ad tipped off those in charge of the meeting.

Why we call them Freedom-Haters - today's edition

The principled, eloquent, fierce and erudite blog Lady Liberty 1885 offers a concise and unsparing portrait of the threat that the MEC regime poses to what's left of America in a hugely important post titled "I Am Your Worst Nightmare."

This regime holds the very civilization that spawned the country it rules in utter disdain

This regime is so keen to make Muslims like it that it is willing to give a pass to the the slaughter of Christians in such African nations as Nigeria and Egypt.  It also willing to turn over recidivist jihadists detained at Gitmo to home countries.

On record as standing for American greatness (not to mention common sense)

The House votes to bypass the Most Equal Comrade on the Keystone XL pipeline.

Yes, it's largely symbolic since the Senate won't do likewise, but it sends a message.

Even the nearly hopelessly ate up NYT is getting reality's bitch slap

Editorial excoriating regime harassment of James Rosen.

Ted Cruz is one of the ten coolest living Americans - today's edition

Says he doesn't trust Pubs appreciably more than he does FHers.  Says taking budget talks to a House - Senate conference doesn't amount to diddly unless Pubs stand firm on a debt ceiling.


Damn it, at some point, we quit spending pretend money.

The religion of peace claims another head

Jihadist kills a guy with an axe on a London street and then rants against all infidels into a camera.

Standing up to the overlords

The supremely cool Trey Gowdy rips into Lois Lerner, telling her she can't have it both ways - giving an opening statement and then pleading the Fifth.

Applause follows.

UPDATE:  Issa says, "Not so fast, lady."  Declares her in forfeiture of her fifth amendment rights.

There's a point when squishiness morphs into disgrace

The embodiment of this phenomenon is John McCain, the ultimate RINO / Reasonable Gentleman, someone who should never have entered political life due to the fact that he wouldn't understand conservative principles if they bit him on the ass.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is trying to make an example out of Apple, Inc., one of the most successful and landscape-changing companies in American history, because it takes the profits that it legally can offshore to protect them from taxation.  Mind you, Apple already pays a whopping tax burden on the profits it does have here.

Rand Paul courageously spoke to the Apple executives at yesterday's hearing, telling them that if the subcommittee had any decency, it would quit bullying the company and apologize.

McCain then went after Paul, calling his remarks "offensive."

Feel secure yet?

There are five jihadists running loose in the world today that our government is quite sure were involved in the Benghazi attack.  It just doesn't have quite enough of the kind of evidence that would pass civilian-trial muster, so we're not zapping them. While we're "building a case," they're continuing to act on their hate for our infidelity.

Yes, the free market is the only good economic system - but only if people are good

At NRO, John O'Sullivan responds point-by point to Pope Francis's recent address on money and people.  O'Sullivan's italicized paragraphs are interspersed with the Pope's.

You should read the whole thing to put the following quotes in context, but they stand alone quite nicely as explanations of why the free market is the only system that works for real human beings (I have occasionally emphasized certain points by putting them in boldface):

there is a glaring omission in this pope’s list — namely, that billions of workers, especially in the Third World, have actually emerged from poverty and entered the world labor market in the last 30 years. They are far more prosperous than at any time in history. World poverty may be more evident because of the advance of communications, but it is also less extensive, and markedly so. This is an astounding and welcome development. And it arises mainly from the reduction of barriers to trade and capital investment known as globalization. This produced great social advances until the financial crisis of 2007–08. The recession since then has aggravated the evils the pope describes, but it has been largely confined to the West. Asia, Africa, Oceania, and even parts of the pope’s native Latin America, notably Brazil, emerged quite quickly from it. 

[snip]

Capitalism is often accused of being a system of greed, and classical liberalism of being an ideology of greed, because they rest in part on self-chosen goals that may include greed and other human vices. Hence a free economy, if it is to work well, must work within a moral framework that includes but goes beyond liberal prohibitions on force and fraud. At the same time, anti-liberal social philosophies that promise to eradicate greed may make matters worse. People under Communism were far more acquisitive and materialistic than they and their progeny are today. Because material goods were so scarce, people were willing to sacrifice their integrity and morality for a pair of jeans or a silk tie. The end result was rampant materialism, a general social anomie, and the collapse of any system of morality. In the popular saying, you can’t judge a book by its cover, especially not a book on political theory.

[snip]

An economy — or at least a free-market economy — is neither a thing, nor a system, nor a person. It rather resembles an agora in which innumerable people pursue their different goals than a committee that sets out and pursues a common goal. Insofar as it is “faceless,” that is because there is no single person or group making decisions for all the participants. For the same reason, it is not a dictatorship — though if you have lost your job or seen your business go bust, it is tempting to believe that there must be some decision-makers somewhere who were consciously responsible for these disasters. But “the 1 percent” is a myth that tempts us to think in primitive terms.

[snip]

Bankers on Wall Street are not the only people responsible for the 2008 financial crisis. Many other people contributed to it, notably those in official regulatory agencies that pushed banks into giving mortgages to borrowers who couldn’t afford them. Those in international agencies who devised regulatory rules that perversely encouraged unproductive financial speculation were similarly placed. All these different people believed in (and represent) different economic and political ideologies. We could put some of their faces on the “system,” if we wished (and as we have done with “bankers”); but that would be misleading as to both their motives and degrees of responsibility.

[snip]

As for “the absolute autonomy of markets,” that is simply a myth. Banking in particular was a highly regulated industry before the crisis and it is more tightly regulated today. As we have already seen, perverse regulation rather than no regulation was among the causes of the crisis. Above all, the worst human suffering in the economic sphere inflicted since 2008 until today is that resulting from the creation of the euro, which was the work of “States . . . providing for the common good,” and which has become a new kind of tyranny (though not an invisible one). Finally, solidarity is indeed “the treasure of the poor” when it inspires policies to encourage self-reliance and rescue people from dependency. As the CAP example demonstrates, however, it is sometimes employed to justify dependency, waste, and excessive state power.

[snip]

The demand that God and humanity should be present in all our economic calculations is powerful and obviously correct (from a humanistic standpoint as well as a Christian one), and should be heeded by policymakers and the rest of us, not only financiers, economists, and politicians. We shouldn’t be slaves to our possessions or our passions, including power and ambition, and that is true under any religious or philosophical dispensation. My qualms here and throughout the address are twofold: First, the pope seems tempted here to believe that world markets are consciously manipulated by powerful people. But the fact that some of these powerful people lose money suggests that they are forecasting future trends rather than determining them. Most “speculations” are not purely speculative. They are attempts to ensure, for instance, that productive businesses enjoy financial stability in fulfilling contracts in foreign currencies.

Second, the pope hardly notices the revolution of charitable giving that has been surging since the 1980s. (At most one sentence is devoted, ambiguously, to it.) Yet foundations, NGOs, and charitable institutions of every kind have been multiplying in the advanced world and working to counteract social evils in poorer countries.  

[snip]

In his discussion of the world economy, he advanced an analysis marred by major omissions that, if addressed, would require him to qualify some of his sterner criticisms. But this was a short address, not an encyclical. His rhetoric was allusive, cryptic, and hard to follow at times, but that will presumably be corrected in more formal documents. Even so, the main burden of his argument was readily compatible with a broad free-market approach and with the economic arguments of those Adam Smith liberals who have taken on board the social arguments of Edmund Burke and the social encyclicals of the past century. 

 

 

 

 

No, he didn't, did he? Yes, the sick bastard did

While watching footage of the unspeakably fearsome tornado that ripped though Moore, Oklahoma, the thought fleetingly crossed my mind that some loudmouth leftist would try somehow to blame it on pro-freedom normal people.

Sure enough, Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse did exactly that.

The scariest thing you will have read this year

Check out the story of the Englebrechts.  A couple from Texas.   He is a machinist who started his own CNC shop about 20 years ago, and has grown it to 30 employees.  His wife helped him in the business, but began to get involved in Tea Party activities around 2009.  She started two groups, the King Street Patriots and True the Vote.  What happened next sounds like it occurred in Cuba.  Visits, audits, phone inquiries, fines and fees from the IRS, FBI, OSHA, and EPA.  Mrs. Englebrecht's groups came to the attention of Barbara Boxer, who got personally involved in trying to shut them down.

Get a clue, people.  We're losing America by the second.

IRS: All your freedom of assembly are belong to us

Tells a pro-life group to make its officers swear in writing never to protest outside abortion clinics.

A cool guy confirms his coolness

Gotta love how NRO's Kevin Williamson handled a rude cell phone user at a speaking engagement.

The IRS needs to be dismantled yet this afternoon

It told Tea Party groups applying for 501 (c) status to provide it with log-in access to members-only pages on their websites.

This is getting real, real scary.

No depth to which they will not stoop

The IRS knew before the election about the targeting of conservative groups.

The MEC may not be a genius, but he's become very deft in the ways of tyranny

Kim Strassel at the WSJ points out that it was the role of the MEC and this regime's other overlords as setters of tone that catalyzed the IRS persecution of conservatives.

President Obama and Co. are in full deniability mode, noting that the IRS is an "independent" agency and that they knew nothing about its abuse. The media and Congress are sleuthing for some hint that Mr. Obama picked up the phone and sicced the tax dogs on his enemies.

But that's not how things work in post-Watergate Washington. Mr. Obama didn't need to pick up the phone. All he needed to do was exactly what he did do, in full view, for three years: Publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious deeds; publicly call out by name political opponents whom he'd like to see harassed; and publicly have his party pressure the IRS to take action.

[snip]

As early as January 2010, Mr. Obama would, in his state of the union address, cast aspersions on the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, claiming that it "reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests" (read conservative groups).

The president derided "tea baggers." Vice President Joe Biden compared them to "terrorists." In more than a dozen speeches Mr. Obama raised the specter that these groups represented nefarious interests that were perverting elections. "Nobody knows who's paying for these ads," he warned. "We don't know where this money is coming from," he intoned.

In case the IRS missed his point, he raised the threat of illegality: "All around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates . . . And they don't have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation."

Short of directly asking federal agencies to investigate these groups, this is as close as it gets. Especially as top congressional Democrats were putting in their own versions of phone calls, sending letters to the IRS that accused it of having "failed to address" the "problem" of groups that were "improperly engaged" in campaigns. Because guess who controls that "independent" agency's budget?

And then there's the regime's propaganda arm, which may, ever so incrementally, be beginning to go into "oh-my-god-what-have-we-done" mode.

The sinister methods of our overlords

I'm not announcing any breaking news here.  Talk-show hosts and bloggers and MSM outlets began pointing this out yesterday, but this is huge, so I need to devote a post to it here.

The person who ran the IRS office that deals with tax-exempt groups during the period that conservative groups, pro-life groups and pro-Israel groups were targeted is going to run the IRS's FHer-care function.

Is this regime trying to stoke the final scenario?

It seems to me that the frog is beginning to realize that the water is boiling.

On record as standing for freedom

The House votes to repeal FHer-care in its entirety.  

Of course, the Senate as currently composed would never follow suit, but the House could go the next step and, since per the Constitution, it's the chamber that appropriates the money, it could pull the plug as a means to put teeth into its stand.

Apparently they'd go that far

I had been holding off on posting about this one until some secondary corroboration surfaced, but the first story about it has now been disseminated in such venues as The Hugh Hewitt Show (where it first came to light) as well as Hot Air, Gateway Pundit, The Weekly Standard and Breitbart.  If those sources are comfortable with its veracity level, so is LITD.

The gist: California Congressman Devin Nunes said on Hewitt's show yesterday that the Department of Justice seized House cloakroom phone records.

It's been out there for several hours now, and no one has come along to counter it.

No wonder the regime was reluctant to release the whole e-mail chain

It provides further proof that the State Department and the White House were really driving the eradication of any mention of jihadism:

Carney, in particular, is likely to face tough questioning about the contents of the emails because he made claims to reporters that were untrue. “The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two – of these two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility,’ because the word ‘consulate’ was inaccurate,” he told reporters on November 28, 2012.

That’s not true. An email sent at 9:15 PM on September 14, from an official in the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs to others at the agency, described the process this way. “The State Department had major reservations with much or most of the document. We revised the document with their concerns in mind.”

That directly contradicts what Carney said. It’s also difficult to reconcile with claims made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during testimony she gave January 23 on Capitol Hill.

“It was an intelligence product,” she said, adding later that the “intelligence community was the principal decider about what went into talking points.” (See here for the original version of the talking points and the final one.)

Carney and other top Obama administration officials have long maintained that CIA officials revised the talking points with minimal input from Obama administration officials. The claim made little sense when they made it – why would CIA officials revise on their own a set of talking points they’d already finalized? The emails demonstrate clearly that it isn’t true.

Another CIA email, this one a draft of a message for CIA director David Petraeus, noted that the talking points process had “run into major problems,” in part because of the “major concerns” raised by the State Department. That same email reported that the issues would be revisited at the Deputies Committee meeting on Saturday morning.

The glowing orange ceiling beams begin to bend and crack

The cycles of American zeitgeist don't coincide neatly with the country's electoral seasons.  Conservatives were justifiably dismayed over the last fifty years at the way the countercultural impulse, in all its forms, from libertinism to abhorrence of American greatness to the dismantling of basics of human identity such as gender, to do-it-yourself "spirituality" to idealization of communal peasant life, continued its cultural usurpation even as periods of political relief, such as the elections of Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes, seemed to give them straws at which to grasp.

Of course, that impulse gave every appearance of having achieved its full entrenchment last November.  The previous midterm elections had provided such a hopeful sign of pushback, with the election of so many Tea Party-style Congresspeople, Governors and state legislators, which made the rebuke of it in 2012 - not just in the MEC's reelection, but in the defeats of the likes of Mia Love, Allen West, and Scott Brown - such a bitter pill to swallow.

The events of the past two weeks would seem to bolster the notion that November 2012 did not tell the whole story of our nation's cultural climate.  At the very least, the MEC mystique seems like an ancient phenomenon.  I've pointed out some of the abrupt shifts here, such as those of the New Yorker and ABC, but it now extends to Jon Stewart and even Charlie Rangel.

What the nation is realizing is that there is an end product to the worldview that spawned the Most Equal Comrade.  It's not an endlessly wonky, Cass Sunstein-style cycle of planning and implementation.  Nor is it the seemingly warm and nurturing Michelle Obama-style model of a family, wherein the impeccably healthy offspring are primarily the charge of the parents running the household where they live, but benignly guided by the whole global village, and in which the role of mom still incorporates the old-school virtues of bedtime stories and bandaged owies, but also offers a role model of power and personal sovereignty.

No, that is but a middle stage.  What the collectivist impulse of necessity comes to is what we have now: a state that can not tolerate deviation from its official line, a society in which privacy and personal volition are mortal threats.

I suppose the drawing of parallels to Watergate can have some usefulness, but what appears to be shaping up is the fruition of the denial of nature that has informed all the ill-fated experiments in "common-good" societal organization.  Think about what is at the root of the EPA's agenda: perpetuating the myth of a troubled planet so as to convince people to accept downgraded living standards.  Think about why the IRS is so feared: brute force is implicit in its every dealing with every citizen.  Think about why a truly free press is intolerable to regimes such as the one to which we're yoked: It can expose the truly unseemly lengths to which the state might go to prevent people from considering the full range of perspectives on its activities.

This will play out organically.  The calls for impeachment don't bother me, but they're not necessary, at least not yet.  Developments will continue to unfold, at the brisk clip we've been seeing for the past few days.  Nothing will alter the new-found disgust and alarm on the part of those propagandists whose eyes have been opened.  Rather, that disgust and alarm will deepen.

Besides, it's not as if the course would have been dramatically reversed had the MEC lost in November 2012.  Mitt would have been clueless regarding how to deal with the continuing statist onslaught and the unabated cultural rot.  We'd have wound up here eventually anyway.

It's just what we have to go through, and there's nothing pretty about it.

The best we can hope for is that we won't get fooled again.

And the last Secretary of State was pretty horrible, too

The H-Word Creature has a long history of lying and corruption, going back to her days as as a young attorney on the House Judiciary Committee staff working on Watergate:

Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation – one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman’s 17-year career.

Why?

“Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”

How could a 27-year-old House staff member do all that? She couldn’t do it by herself, but Zeifman said she was one of several individuals – including Marshall, special counsel John Doar and senior associate special counsel (and future Clinton White House Counsel) Bernard Nussbaum – who engaged in a seemingly implausible scheme to deny Richard Nixon the right to counsel during the investigatio

Why would they want to do that? Because, according to Zeifman, they feared putting Watergate break-in mastermind E. Howard Hunt on the stand to be cross-examined by counsel to the president. Hunt, Zeifman said, had the goods on nefarious activities in the Kennedy Administration that would have made Watergate look like a day at the beach – including Kennedy’s purported complicity in the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro.

The actions of Hillary and her cohorts went directly against the judgment of top Democrats, up to and including then-House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, that Nixon clearly had the right to counsel. Zeifman says that Hillary, along with Marshall, Nussbaum and Doar, was determined to gain enough votes on the Judiciary Committee to change House rules and deny counsel to Nixon. And in order to pull this off, Zeifman says Hillary wrote a fraudulent legal brief, and confiscated public documents to hide her deception.

Read the whole thing.

Confirming our conviction that he'd be a horrible Secretary of State

With all the hot situations flaring around the globe right now, Global Test is in Sweden pushing the idiotic line that "climate change" is some kind of urgent matter  - and apologizing for the US to boot, for not mustering the requisite sense of urgency.

If not kept limited with constant vigilance, government always grows cancerously

Because I relish a good argument with lefties, I'm familiar with the conflation of conservatism with anarchism.  Charles C. W. Cooke at NRO does a masterful job of putting this charge to rest, and enlists Madison, Jefferson and G.K. Chesterton for backup.

You mean the stuff plants constantly put out?

James Delingpole is singularly unimpressed with the fact that carbon dioxide level in the Earth's atmosphere has reached 440 ppm.  As are all normal people.  He just expresses it in a funnier way than most of us.

You can be damn sure they weren't Amish or Buddhist

Okay, so they have to appear in court regarding the trespassing charge, and the FBI is looking into it, but I think we can safely say this bunch is up to no good:

BELCHERTOWN (CBS) – Shortly after midnight Tuesday, seven people were caught trespassing at the Quabbin Reservoir.

State Police say the five men and two women are from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore, and “cited their education and career interests” for being in the area. The men told police they were chemical engineers and recent college graduates.

---

Boston gets its water supply from Quabbin Reservoir.

The post-American equivalent of the Stasi

Linchpins of Liberty, a Tennessee-based educational group that presents conservative principles to high school and college students - and is not part of any Tea Party network  - applied for tax-exempt status from the IRS.  That agency responded with 90 questions that it demanded answers to, including the names of anybody who had ever been in its workshops.

That question was part of the tax collection agency's February 14, 2012 letter to Kevin Kookogey. founder of the group Linchpins of Liberty. He had submitted his application 13 months earlier.

'Can you imagine my responsibility to parents if I disclosed the names of their children to the IRS?' he asked MailOnline.

It's 'an impossible question to answer fully and truthfully,' he said, 'without disclosing the names of anyone I ever taught, or would ever teach, including students.'

Consider the agency's increased reach once it becomes the instrument of enforcing Freedom Hater-care. 

Do you think "Nah, we're going to take a pass" was an acceptable answer?

Kathleen Sebelius has been soliciting funds from private health-care organizations to do "outreach," i.e., getting people into the health exchanges.

And then there's the EPA

It has been waiving fees to green groups seeking various kinds of information from the agency, but sticking it to conservative groups.

And then there's the Department of Education

Actually, DoE is conducting its latest assault on freedom of speech in cahoots with the just-discussed-in-the-second-to-last-post DoJ:

Having virtually obliterated procedural protections for those accused of serious offenses and crimes, the Obama administration has now added a new insult -- a restriction on free speech itself. For two decades, universities have struggled with the question of "speech codes," tempted by the left to enshrine political correctness at the expense of the First Amendment. Most campuses have resisted, but through the Obama administration, the censors have triumphed all at once and everywhere.

A letter from the Department of Education and the Department of Justice addressed to the University of Montana but explicitly intended as a "blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country," the government has altered the legal meaning of the term "sexual harassment." The new rule directly contravenes Supreme Court decisions and previous rulings from OCR that harassment "must include something beyond the mere expression of views, words, symbols or thoughts that some person finds offensive." The Supreme Court has ruled that to meet the test of sexual harassment, behavior must be "severe, pervasive and objectively offensive." Note the word "objectively," meaning that a reasonable person similarly situated would be offended.

The reasonable person standard is now gone. The new definition of sexual harassment decreed by the Obama administration is "any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature," including "verbal conduct." The purported victim now has the power to decide whether a young man or woman (but it's nearly always a man) is branded a sexual harasser. It's entirely subjective.

Fundamental transformation in all its glory.

The regime's goal to have you on your knees is right on track

According to a House Energy & Commerce Committee report, 17 of the nation's largest insurance companies said that  premium rate increases are coming, and they're going to be huge.

The report found that individuals will face "premium increases of nearly 100 percent on average, with potential highs eclipsing 400 percent. Meanwhile, small businesses can expect average premium increases in the small group market of up to 50 percent, with potential highs over 100 percent."

One company said that new participants in the individual market could see a premium increase of 413 percent when new requirements on age rating and required benefits are taken into account, said the report. "The average yearly cost for a new customer in the individual market grows from $1,896 to $3,708 -- a $1,812 cost increase," it added.

The key reasons for the surge in premiums include providing wider services than people are now paying for and adding less healthy people to the roles of insured, said the report.

To say that the regime lied would be to state the obvious.  They had to.  Americans don't willingly consign themselves to impoverishment.

Yet another one

As if the MEC regime needed another scandal.  Now it comes to light that the Justice Department obtained pretty much every phone communication of the Associated Press in the spring of last year.  Office phones, home land lines of reporters and editors, cell phones.

Ostensibly, it was trying to find out how AP got info on a foiled terror plot.  But somebody in the regime leaked whatever hot info AP had.  Who and why?

Take a good look at what your overlords are really all about.

Can we resign from this organization yet?

Beyond jaw-dropping.

Iran is going to host the upcoming UN arms-control forum.  As the head of UN Watch says, it's like putting Jack the Ripper in charge of a women's shelter.

Gosnell verdict: guilty

On three of the four first-degree-murder counts and a number of other charges.

Is it too late for his soul to avoid . . . well, you know?  I'm no Christian doctrine expert, but from what I know of it, as long as he's drawing a breath in this realm, he has the opportunity to lay it all bare before his Creator.  But he has to really purge his heart of any resistance to mercy.

And that makes for an interesting challenge for the rest of us.  We ought to pray for an eleventh-hour recovery of his heart, but, face it, we doubt it's what he's going to do.

The innocent souls whose bodily lives he snuffed, are, we can assume, resting in eternal communion with their heavenly Father.

And who signed off on this decision?

You've probably heard by now about the Islamic cleric who let loose with invective about "infidels," referring to the Navy SEALs killed in Afghanistan in 2011at whose memorial service he was speaking.

The parents of at least one of them aren't taking it lying down.  They want to know how how it was that the jihad / sharia wacko was allowed to be at that podium.

It wasn't just groups with the words "tea party" or "patriot" in their names

It looks like the IRS was going after groups that spoke up about the government's debt level or promoted education about the Constitution.

Triggers and bipartisan commissions won't prevent the erosion of our sovereignty

Marco Rubio has seemed like such a principled guy, but I'm leaning toward the camp that finds his basic judgement questionable.  I've heard him defend his immigration views on several talk shows, but it still seems to me to boil down to an arcane version of border-enforcement-plus-a-lot-of-nothing.

John T. Bennett at The American Thinker is convinced of it.   He points out a good reason to believe that the probable scenario of unfolding would remove any bulwark against wholesale amnesty:

If the border effectiveness triggers are not reached in five years, a bipartisan "Southern Border Security Commission" will be established (Sec. 4, p. 14).  This Commission is supposed to "submit to the President, the Secretary, and Congress a report setting forth specific recommendations for policies for achieving and maintaining the border security goals" ([d], 17).

[snip]

Picture the political scene in the near future after amnesty has passed.  The country, and especially the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants here, are eagerly awaiting the upgrade to lawful status.  The GOP's amnesty supporters are convinced that they've locked down the Latino vote, which "should be ours," claimed John McCain.Because no promise to secure the border, properly enforce E-verify, or even deport known criminal illegal immigrants has ever been met, we can be assured that the bipartisan Commission will take over.  Marco Rubio has basically conceded this point.  In his current talk radio campaign, he repeatedly emphasizes the Commission whenever he's reminded that the federal government habitually lies about immigration enforcement.So picture the bipartisan commission, meeting to discuss the future of 11 million people who expect amnesty, and are now getting more upset that politicians are dithering with their perceived entitlement.  (Can there be any doubt that illegal immigrants will develop an entitlement attitude towards citizenship if amnesty is passed?)So we're a few years down the road, the entitled illegal immigrants are angry, and a good number of citizens are still angry that amnesty passed to begin with. The pro-amnesty Republicans are starting to worry a bit as well.  All this pesky border talk could interfere with their rightful hold over the Latino vote.Not to worry -- the bipartisan Commission steps in.  But what do bipartisan commissions do?  The bipartisan budget super-committee failed to reach a deficit reduction deal in 2011.  The bipartisan Simpson-Bowles proposal was rejected by...a bipartisan vote in 2012.

What, I would like to ask the Senator,  is wrong with the basic approach of just enforcing the border now and taking whatever time is necessary to decide how to deal with the illegal aliens already here?  What's the rush?

They should have stood up for their researcher

Robert VerBruggen at NRO says Heritage made a major misstep in accepting Jason Richwine's resignation.  For cryin' out loud, one of the Harvard professors who signed off on his dissertation about IQ and immigration sits on the board of The American Prospect.

When you've lost The New Yorker . . .

East coast left-o institution can no longer avoid seeing the truth:

 For a long time, it seemed like the idea of a coverup was just a Republican obsession. But now there is something to it.

"State-run media" is not some kind of sloppy hyperbole

Why has Sheryl Attkisson had the suits at CBS breathing down her neck for her Benghazi coverage?  Could be that deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes, who was "instrumental in changing the talking points" is the brother of CBS News president David Rhodes.

Burning our bridges along with our consulates

Andrew McCarthy makes a noteworthy point at NRO:  Magarief, the president of Libya since a post-Ghaddafi regime gelled there, is indeed a moderate Muslim.  He went out on a limb big-time, given the radical climate in his country and the Middle East generally, when, right after the Benghazi attack, he called it jihadist terrorism.

He was feeling feeling pretty well insulted and hung out to dry when he saw all those figures from the post-American regime spouting the nonsense about the video.  Along about now, he's none too keen on enhancing relations between our countries.

What a piece of work

This Lois Lerner gal at the IRS is a real humdinger.  For an agency spokesperson, she sure isn't interested in spending much time with media people.  And of course the crown jewel of her conference call with reporters yesterday was the admission that "I'm not good at math."

Transparency, my tail end

What's with this holding a briefing for DC reporters on the Benghazi scandal - off the record?

Still need more evidence in order to draw a conclusion as to what this regime is about?

The IRS has been forced to admit that it specifically targeted conservative groups for auditing.  Oh, the agency has apologized, but the Tea Party Patriots for one are having none of it.

And what the hell is this about?

Secretary Global Test is back in Washington, fresh off his humiliation in Moscow, to tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that diplomacy with the mullahs in Iran is at a delicate juncture and that the US should not impose more sanctions just now.

They smell weakness - today's edition

When a red line thrown down to a US adversary becomes a pink line, that adversary sees a green light for increasing the threat level to our ostensible allies.

With due respect to some savvy observers, Benghazi will not blow over and be forgotten

Yes, I'm aware that there are those whose pro-freedom / pro-hope-for-America bona fides are beyond question who, with regard to theBenghazi scandal, have basically thrown in the towel.  Neal Boortz, in a Townhall column, and Rush, on his radio show yesterday, both said that the combination of a sycophantic media machine and a low-information public will be sufficient to render this debacle inconsequential.

I'm not there yet.  This is big, and no amount of snark, obfuscation and denial from the likes of John Stewart, Rachel Maddow and Eugene Robinson will diminish its actual magnitude.

For one thing, Jonathan Karl at ABC backs up and expands upon the talking-points revision timeline exposed by The Weekly Standard's Steven Hayes.  Then there's the employment of jihadists to guard the consulate.  There is the State Department's attempt to keep Greg Hicks from meeting with Utah Congressman Jason Chavetz.

Questions for the Freedom-Haters in paragraph two:  How is it some kind of partisan spin to disseminate these indisputable facts as widely as possible?  In what kind of "context" could these facts be made to seem acceptable?


Hillary Clinton baldly lied about a jihadist attack that left four people for whom she was responsible dead.  The president of whatever this country should now be called put out a false narrative at an address to the whole world at the podium of the UN General Assembly.

You can talk gun control, amnesty for illegal aliens, the homosexual agenda, bankrupt "green" "companies," prohibition of Christian faith-sharing in the military, Common Core, the debt and deficit, the unfunded liabilities of "entitlements," and lavish White House parties.  But we've got the clearest one of all here.  The rot at the core of Leftism is stinking in the full light of day.

How it's really done, and how the FHers want us to believe it's done

The MEC picked the wrong state for trying to sell his statist economic prescription when he came to Texas.

When your rivals, adversaries and enemies smell weakness, they treat you with contempt

Putin keeps Secretary Global Test waiting three hours in Moscow for talks about Syria.

The Sanford win

Kind of like reality in microcosm.  In this fallen world, anything worth celebrating has some sullied aspect to it.

That's why the political realm cannot be expected to elevate us too much.  A guy like Sanford reveals himself to be capable of the depths of scumbag-ism, but he'll generally vote the pro-freedom way in the House.  We need the numbers, and there's nothing wrong with a sigh of relief about that.

Not that the Pubs as a party shouldn't keep scouting for those who bring character to the table as well as the requisite ayes and nays.

UPDATE: Hillary Towers at NRO's The Corner gives Sanford the ass-kicking he so roundly deserves.

Hey, gang, let's get together and build a people's republic

The Cato Institute's Roger Pilon has a great examination in the Wall Street Journal of the commencement address that the Most Equal Comrade gave at Ohio State the other day.

The MEC has really honed his chops regarding a palatable presentation of collectivism.  He can make it seem like a quintessentially American value.  One tool he's devised is to describe the nation as a family.  Pilon dials in on that:

Not for nothing did he invoke the family, that elemental social unit in which we truly are responsible to one another and to future generations—by law, by custom, and, ideally, in our hearts. But only metaphorically is America a family, its members bound by tendrils of intimacy and affection. Realistically, the country is a community of individuals and private institutions, including the family, with their own interests, bound not by mutual love but by the political principles that are set forth in the Constitution, a document that secures and celebrates the freedom to pursue those interests, varied as they might be.

The MEC has his spiel down to where he can warm up a crowd with his fuzzy nods to patriotic fervor, and then get to his core concepts: "repairing" the middle class, denigrating individual ambition, giving people that "fair shake" of which he's so enamored.

Pure Chicago / Alinsksy-style radicalism.  The MEC learned well at the feet of Heather Booth, Greg Galluzzo, Harry Boyte et al.  Dress up your revolutionary aims in the cloak of tradition and love of country.  And then proceed with the fundamental transformation.

Talk about inconvenient truths

Gun crime in America has plunged since 1993.

Memo to what's left of the rock world: You are the system now

Take a moment to consider the exquisite irony of a government-funded trade mission to Brazil and Japan - for the heads of indie rock labels.

Free school breakfasts: one more way the FHers implement civilizational rot

Great Dennis Prager column on the Los Angeles school district's free-breakfast program and the array of its destructive effects, ranging from erosion of the family to labor-union aggression:

 The program was created to solve a problem that does not exist.

It is inconceivable that there are five, let alone 200,000 or the projected 450,000, homes in Los Angeles that cannot afford breakfast for their child. A nutritious breakfast can be had for less than a dollar. For examples, go to WebMD, which lists five "Breakfast Ideas for a Buck."

[snip]

Even where decent parents are involved, free breakfasts at school weaken the parent-child bond. Hundreds of thousands of parents who are able and happy to provide their child with breakfast have accepted the offer -- because anything free is too enticing for an increasing number of Americans. But what they have done is made the proverbial deal with the devil. They have traded in one of the most fundamental definitions of parenthood -- providing one's children with food -- for a dollar and for a little less work as a parent. As a result, these parents become less of a parent to their children. 

[snip]

The free breakfast profoundly weakens young people's character. When you grow up learning to depend on the state, you will almost inevitably -- even understandably -- assume that the state will take care of you. And you will grow up also assuming -- as do Europeans, who give far less charity than Americans for this very reason -- that the state will take care of your fellow citizens, including your own children. 

[snip]

The public employee unions, which govern the state of California and the city of Los Angeles, have demanded that the program be shifted from the classroom to the school cafeterias so as to employ more cafeteria workers. 

Food is one of those human basics like health care that government should not be within a million miles of being involved with.

 

You have to hand it to the Left: they're fiercely committed to their freedom-hating, America-hating, prosperity-hating agenda

They're willing to go after their state-run organ, the New York Times, for daring to act like it is still a journalistic outlet that will objectively get to the bottom of a given story. If even the Grey Lady exposes something uncomfortably inconvenient to the Great Transformation, the knives will come out.

These monsters have hatred for basic human decency, dignity and common sense at the core of their worldview.

Smellier by the hour

Greg Hicks says that Special Forces were told not to fly to Benghazi.

An aspect of the amnesty-for-illegal-aliens conversation that hasn't gotten much of an airing

 . . . until now.  New Heritage study says it would cost a lot.

Benghazi: smellier by the hour

Mark I. Thompson and another as-yet-unnamed whistleblower will testify that the State Department at its highest levels tried to do an end-run around the department's own counterterrorism unit the night of the attack.

Last October, the unnamed whistleblower said, "You should see what Hillary Clinton did to us that night."

Joe DiGenova, Thompson's attorney, says Thompson is receiving threats and intimidation from people at State.

The Freedom-Haters can't make this one go away.

Memo to the Most Equal Comrade: Maybe you should think twice the next time you're inclined to shoot off your mouth and act like you cherish freedom and have the resolve to defend it

Even the regime's official state organ, the NYT, says that the MEC has put himself in a bind now that it's pretty clear that the Assad regime used sarin gas.

Only problem: he's made our country even more vulnerable as a result.

The real purpose of FHer-care

No, it's not to bring quality, affordable health care to all Americans.  It's to bring all Americans to their knees, desperately begging the all-powerful state for enough of life's essentials to see another day.

As I've said before, I'm no economist, and it's the one subject I wish I'd taken more classes in as a student.  (The college I attended had a great econ department.)  I do study it informally now, and think about it a lot, and, as I've said here and elsewhere before, I've come up with a basic First Rule of Economics: The money has to come from somewhere.

Our overlords such as the Most Equal Comrade, Kathleen Sebelius et al, while not geniuses, are not ignorant of this law.  They damn well knew there was not enough money to run this stopgap program for people with preexisting conditions.  But they were fiercely determined that there would be no consideration of market-based solutions.

A nation of neutered cattle, that's the desired result.

This isn't going away

Powerful stuff at The Weekly Standard by Stephen Hayes.  He has the goods: the original draft of the National Intelligence memo letting Congress know what is permissible to include in its Benghazi talking points, as well as the two subsequent revision (made within the space of 24 hours) in which all references to Ansar al-Sharia, or even Islamic extremism generally, are removed.

This may be the MEC's Watergate, or Waterloo.  Stay tuned for Trey Gowdy's hearings.

Just sing the song

Great John Stark piece at Next Avenue about Harry Connick's role as a mentor last week on American Idol.  He tried to get four young finalist vocalists to get inside the Great American Songbook Standards they were working on:

As Amber started to sing Rodgers & Hart’s “My Funny Valentine,” Connick stopped her. He asked her what the song is about. "What does it mean, 'Your looks are laughable?'" he asked her, or "'Is your figure less than Greek?'" Amber looked blank — she had no idea. She struggled for words. He told her to go do some research on the lyricist, Lorenz Hart, a physically diminutive, closeted homosexual who died of alcoholism at age 48. Before singing the song, Connick sternly told Amber, you need to understand what Hart was writing about.
 
Kree also got stopped shortly after she launched into Harold Arlen’s “Stormy Weather.” She was singing in a loose, bluesy manner, like she said she'd heard Etta James do the song. But for Kree to do those fancy runs, Connick said, were diluting the meaning of the lyrics. The woman in this song, he explained, is sad and depressed; she's lost her man. “You don’t sound depressed,” Connick observed. He wanted Kree to do it more like Lena Horne, who introduced the song in 1940. No frills needed.
 
Not one of the contestants took Connick's "Then" advice when they got on stage. Substance was thrown out the window for pyrotechnic vocal tricks. Angie sang Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” an ode to vulnerability, in full-power voice. She hardly came off as “a little lamb who’s lost in the wood,” as the lyric says. More like a John Deere tree cutter. 

He makes a point about the nature of the American Idol ethos about vocal delivery that could be broadened to characterize our entire culture:

Since its debut in 2002, Idol has always put value on over-the-top vocal performances. Subtlety and intimacy gets you the boot. If minimalists likePeggy Lee or Billy Holiday were to compete on Idol today the judges would eat them alive. 

Over the top.  That's pretty much the story whether you're talking about music, food, sports, public discourse, fashion or courtship.  Perpetual adolescents don't seem to have subtlety in their repertoire.

 

Still in decline

Larry Kudlow, who is usually a pony-in-here-somewhere optimist (about three years ago, he wrote a column called "The Coming V-Shaped Boom," right before the MEC economy took a turn for the worse; perhaps the experience chastened him), demonstrates the ongoing underlying weakness of our situation, despite the upbeat nature of some stats in the April jobs report.

Which, of course, is the desired effect for the architects of the Great Leveling.

A great American organization, going strong as ever

The NRA's annual convention in Houston is on track to be its biggest ever.  Star-studded lineup of cool speakers, too: Palin, Cruz, Bolton, Santorum, Pirro.  Watch the Pirro speech.  She rocks the hall.

A possible encouraging shift in direction for one of America's venerable store chains

Sears used to be heavily involved in the Retail Industry Leadership Association, an outfit that attempts to bog its members down in such ideological nonsense as "sustainability."  But its new CEO seems inclined to think the company ought to focus on its real purpose for existing  - showing a return to its shareholders - and not fool with a lot of extraneous do-dah, and certainly not be coerced into it.  In fact, he thinks America in general is over-regulated.

Taking care of business

Israel strikes a Syrian weapons site with missiles.

Red lines till mean something in some places.

The national sickness in microcosm

Once in a while, I go local at LITD, usually because something I run across has broader implications.

Such is the case with a front-page story in our local paper (disclosure: I write for several of its magazines) today about the upcoming keynote address by the head of the local community foundation at the annual meeting of the local multi-ethnic organization.  She tells the paper that she will say that while our city has made important strides in becoming more welcoming and diverse, much still needs to be done.

She specifically cites two groups - Latinos and the LBGTQ "community" (and I found out that the Q stands for "questioning."  That's how far we have descended into indulging people's self-absorption in post-America.)

My question to the nice community-foundation lady is this: What the hell more would you have us do?

Last year, her foundation awarded grants to twelve groups in town with the intent that they'd use them to make the city more "welcoming." I attended the reception at which the groups' heads got up and thanked the foundation and told a bit about the projects they'd do with the money.  The lady from the Latino group pretty much stated that most Mexicans in our city tend, of their own volition, to stay in their trailer parks when they're not working.   Well, that's their problem.  Nobody's making them not come downtown to Farmers' Market or the summer block party or the Christmas parade or the concerts in the park. I see all kinds of other demographic groups represented at those events - Chinese and Indian folks, hippies, muckety-mucks, and, yes, people whose sexual proclivities are other than hetero.  I don't know why the Mexicans prefer to keep a low profile, but it's their choice.

Speaking of people with other-than-hetero proclivities, just what else are we supposed to do in the way of outreach with them?  We already have a gay-straight alliance for people interested in such things.

I'll tell you one thing.  Christians ought to be concerned. It's not rocket science to see where this is going.  It winds up with busybodies either in the employ of the government or with great influence upon it sticking their nose into what goes on in the area's churches to make sure nothing "judgmental" is being said.

This whole exhortation for us to puke all over ourselves to be ever-more "welcoming" leads to dangerous obscurings of obvious truths.  A recent example is the MEC's statement that "we need to engage communities where people are self-radicalizing."  He was speaking about situations like the Tsarnaev brothers.  Sheeesh!  They were raised in the bluest of blue states, exposed to post-American culture in all its hollowness and glitz, and even lived off the government gravy train.  The reason they attacked the Boston Marathon was that, in spite of the wrestling tournaments, girls, marijuana and college classes, they were jihadists.  They came from a family full of jihadists and kooks.  Of their own free will, they sought out fellow jihadists.

No, here's how it's supposed to work:  You come here as a Muslim, with a goal of someday subjecting the US to dhimmitude, it's you who has to have the change of attitude in order to stay and live among us.  And don't pull that faux-assimilation crap, playing our sports, listening to our music, smoking our weed, and then, when the time is right, turning an American institution into a day of terror, disfigurement and death.

This cultural dare business - the notion that if you hold the same religious and moral beliefs you did fifty years ago, you're some kind of bigot - is a powerful weapon in the hands of the Great Levelers.  How powerful?   That depends on whether our resolve is stronger than their vulgar indoctrination tactics.

The last stash that was truly yours, and now the MEC wants his hands on it

His 2014 budget calls for a cap on IRA savings.

At some point, you have enough money.

Just wow - this hour's edition

The Pentagon announces that military personnel who share their Christian faith could be court-martialed.

We can think a meeting between MEC appointees and snot-nosed smartass Michael Weinstein for this.

It's on purpose - today's edition

Grim news from ADP about private-sector payrolls.

Big Sis: asleep at the switch

Saudi Arabia warned DHS in writing in 2012 about Tamerlan Tsarnaev.  That, of course, is in addition to Russia's warning about the jihadist.

I had my misgivings about setting up a new cabinet-level agency to deal with jihad twelve years ago, and now it seems my concerns that it would bloat into yet another unwieldy bureaucracy preoccupying itself with all kinds of do-dah rather than its original mission have been borne out.