Sometimes the MEC's attitude infuriates me as much as his ideology

At a presser with South African president Jacob Zuma, he speaks of "my press," meaning the US media covering his visit. and tells it to "behave."  Compares it to the South African press, which as Joel Pollack at Breitbart goes on to clarify, has the Zuma regime breathing down its neck all the time.  Still, Zuma wouldn't consider telling South African journalists to "behave."

Some of our last few sorta-kinda friends anywhere and we gotta go and p--- them off

The EU is none too happy about the NSA bugging their offices on both sides of the Atlantic.

A welcome development

The NFL says "no thanks" to the regime's request that it show pro-Freedom-Hater-care propaganda during commercial breaks during this fall's games.

Whatever she decides to do with her future, she's indispensable

Upon learning that the Most Equal Comrade called Marco Rubio to congratulate him on helping to craft the Senate-passed pork-and-amnesty debacle, Sarah Palin sends out a Tweet directed at Rubio: "Hope it was worth the 30 pieces of silver."

Talk about prescient

Back in March, Robert Stacy McCain saw how the SCOTUS decisions on Prop 8 and Windsor were going to come down, and how Kennedy was going to be the skipper with his hand on the tiller.

Oopsie!

The Most Equal Comrade's continental-solidarity ploy only goes so far.

Senegalese president Macky Sall says his nation sees this whole homosexuality thing quite differently:

Sall gave no ground. Senegal is "very tolerant," he assured Obama, but is "still not ready to decriminalize homosexuality." Sall said countries make decisions on complex issues in their own time, noting that Senegal has outlawed capital punishment while other countries have not - a pointed jab at the U.S., where the death penalty is legal in many states.

As if our situation needed to get more daunting

Senate passes Gang-of-8-esque immigration bill.

So far, Boehner's sticking to our principles.

What actually went down

I was trying to explain to my wife yesterday exactly how Paula Deen's career got ruined, and it occurred to me that I didn't know the real details.  In the course of a great column looking at the difference in the way the culture has treated her and the way it gives the likes of Al Sharpton and Bill Maher a pass, Larry Elder spells out just how this all became the issue that it did:

In a deposition given in a harassment lawsuit filed by a white ex-employee at a Deen family-owned restaurant, Deen admitted using the "n-word" in the past, during a private conversation: "When a black man burst into the bank that I was working at and put a gun to my head," she said, "I didn't feel real favorable to him." Deen says she didn't use the word during the holdup, but "probably" used it later, "in telling my husband."

Asked if she ever used the word again, Deen responded, "I'm sure I have, but it's been a very long time." When pressed to recall specific instances, Deen could not, saying: "I don't know, maybe in repeating something that was said to me. ... But that's just not a word that we use as time has gone on. Things have changed since the '60s in the South. And my children and my brother object to that word being used in any cruel or mean behavior, as well as I do."

Deen has, so far, apologized, apologized and apologized.

That the ex-employee is white, not black, and worked for her for five years did not seem to matter. Nor does it seem to matter that others have not come forward to corroborate her alleged racism. Does she refuse to hire blacks? Has she mistreated them or paid them below the wages of white workers? And, for what it's worth, Deen supported and campaigned for President Barack Obama.

But, you see, she celebrates Southern culture.  That's one of those no-nos in post-America, like being an actual Christian or an actual Jew.  The chance to destroy her presented itself, and the Freedom-Haters were all over it.

The spaces between the words

Greg Kandra - an interesting guy, former CBS journalist and now Roman Catholic deacon of the Brooklyn, NY diocese  - examines what the Most Equal Comrade did not say in his gloatfest after the SCOTUS DOMA decision:

At no point in the section on religion does he say churches are safe, that they shouldn’t be concerned, or that he will defend religious freedom from any legal threats (threats that are sure to come.)

At no point does he say that personal conscience is protected.

At no point does he say that he wants to reassure people of all faiths that their freedom to practice their religion as they wish is secure, and that they will not be compelled to violate their teachings or change them.

The last sentence, in fact, notes that this decision changes nothing. But we’re left to wonder about decisions yet to come.

One thing you have to hand the Freedom-Haters: they're upfront about their agenda

Remember this quote from Valerie Jarrett (who, by the way, gave the keynote address at the Pentagon's Gay & Lesbian Pride day ceremony today)?

"After we win this election, it's our turn. Payback time. Everyone not with
us is against us and they better be ready because we don't forget.
The ones who helped us will be rewarded, the ones who opposed us will
get what they deserve. There is going to be hell to pay. Congress
won't be a problem for us this time. No election to worry about after
this is over and we have two judges ready to go."

When you step out your front door, you are in a war zone.

The latest bit of evidence that our overlords hate America

What the hell is the regime doing hosting Sheikh Abdullah bib Bayyah at the White House?

Bin Bayyah is the principal deputy to Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s chief sharia jurist and the driving force of the IUMS. In addition to being behind the 2004 fatwa, Qaradawi also promotes suicide bombing against Israel. The IUMS strongly supports the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, Hamas, the terrorist organization designated as such under American law. Indeed, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh – a close ally of both Qaradawi and Turkey’s Islamic supremacist prime minister (and Obama fave) Recep Tayyip Erdogan – was welcomed into the IUMS as a member in 2004. As detailed here on other occasions (see, e.g., here), Hamas’s charter explains that the group’s imperative to destroy Israel is an Islamic obligation, and it cites authoritative scripture – frequently repeated by Qaradawi – stating that the world will not end “until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: ‘O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!’”

News of the White House meeting with bin Bayyah was broken last night by Steve Emerson and John Rossomando of the Investigative Project on Terrorism. The meeting took place at the Obama administration’s request, according to an account of it posted – along with a photo – on bin Bayyah’s website. Since its original posting, the account has been edited to omit mention of Obama National Security Adviser Tom Donilon’s participation.

Get your brain around that.  The god-damned national security advisor was in the meeting.

The war to preserve normalcy just got a little more daunting

Moments after the SCOTUS decision invalidating DOMA, homosexual activists let it be known that they are emboldened afresh in pursuit of their goal to make homosexual "marriage" legal in all 50 states.

The war for the soul of Western civilization has taken a dark new turn.

Are we ready?

It's on purpose - today's edition

Economic growth for the first quarter of 2013 revised downward from 2.4% to 1.8%.

The overlords are well on their way to realizing their vision of a nation of neutered cattle.

And just how did the Most Equal Comrade arrive at his assertion that there is overwhelming consensus on climate change?

Through fudging the numbers:

Obama based his asinine apercu, and then his daft climate speech, on one of the most ingeniously half-baked papers ever written in the dismal but mercifully short history of climastrology.

The paper, pompously entitled “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature,” was written by a lavishly taxpayer-funded propagandist – a soi-disant “Climate Communications Fellow” – of the head-bangingly politically correct “University” of Queensland, Australia.

Not one of the authors is a climate scientist. But all are self-confessed members of the hard left. The paper on the basis of which Obama proposes to set America at a still greater economic disadvantage against other nations than he already has is political, not scientific.

And it is wrong. Hilariously, utterly bogus.

The authors surveyed the summaries of a sample of 11,944 scientific papers about climate change published over the 21 years 1991-2011. Wow! That’s a lot!

Trouble is, their results were bent. They fudged and dodged to travel from the truth to where they wanted to be. And here, exclusive to WND, is how they did it.

First, fewer than 1 in 7 of the scientists who wrote the 11,944 papers replied to their survey. The Trots made up the rest from the summaries. They did not read the full papers, only the summaries.

Next, when they found that fewer than a third of the summaries said or even implied that humans had anything to do with global temperature, they arbitrarily excluded the two-thirds that did not say whether we were to blame. You couldn’t make this up.

But at least they admitted they had done that – not that Black Jesus bothered to read that far.

It is what happened next that was truly outrageous – and may even be fraud. For the propagandists at Queensland “University” found, no doubt to their dismay, that only 64 of the 11,944 papers whose summaries they read – or just 0.5 percent – said that humans had caused most of the late-20th-century global warming that stopped more than 17 years ago.

So they decided not to publish the fact that only 64 papers even went so far as to say that we were the primary cause of recent warming.

Instead, they pretended that all of the 3,896 summaries that had said we have caused some warming had really meant we had caused more than 50 percent of it. Those summaries constituted 97 percent of the 4,014 summaries that had expressed some sort of opinion one way or the other on Man’s influence on global temperature, after they had carefully excluded the 7,930 that had expressed no opinion at all.

And that was how they got the headline “97 percent consensus” they wanted.

Then Black Jesus came along and pretended that they had shown 97 percent of scientists believing global warming might be “dangerous.” But they had been very careful not to ask that question, because not one of the 64 summaries they said had attributed more than half of recent global warming to us had also said that warming – if continued – might prove dangerous.

It gets worse. Once I had found out that only 64 of the 11,944 summaries in their sample had actually blamed more than half of recent global warming on us, I decided to read all 64 summaries. Of these, only 43 said Man had caused more than half. The others did not say what the Queensland propagandists said they said.

Bottom line: the much-vaunted climate catastrophe “consensus” represents not 97 percent of all scientists whose papers were surveyed, but just 0.3 percent. And not one of those 0.3 percent said global warming might one day be dangerous, much less that it might prove catastrophic.

And the son of a bitch is counting on you to be gullible enough to swallow his dog vomit so he can ruin the US economy.

You're not, are you?

A refutation of the Freedom-Hater meme that America still has a prominent bigotry streak in its culture

Supreme Court decision today strikes down Section 4 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which has, since then, put the federal government in charge of determining which states and districts within them are too bigoted to be left in charge of changing their own election rules as they see fit.

And whooeee, are the FHers ever steamed.  The Most Equal Comrade, Donna Brazile, Al Sharpton, the hosts on MSNBC - they did not expect this kind of rebuke to their power.

Putin finds his bitch mildly annoying, but less so all the time as the bitch becomes increasingly irrelevant

Great Commentary blog post by Peter Wehner entitled "Putin is Cleaning Obama's Clock."

Of course, this matters not to the Most Equal Comrade, since his agenda is something entirely different from shoring up America's stature in the world.

Bridget Johnson at PJ Media has a good piece on this as well.

The embodiment of all that's wrong with our educational system, our court system, and our culture generally

Lee C. Bollinger is supposed to be quite the muckety-muck.  He's president of Columbia University and former dean of the University of Michigan law school.  That's scary, given the guy's views on the function of legal opinion.

On the NYT op-ed page today, he weighs in on the Supreme Court's decision to kick the affirmative-action case back down to the appellate level to re-examine the "strict scrutiny principle."  He then offers some pretty ripe pronouncements:

The court is as much an educator, a moral instructor, as an interpreter of the fundamental law of the land. In construing the constitutional issues so narrowly, the decision can be read as taking a reluctant, even begrudging, stance toward affirmative action.

Part of this hesitance is, no doubt, a product of judicial compromise. But for ordinary Americans, the linkage between race-conscious college admissions and the larger project of social justice is at risk of being lost amid the minutiae.

"Larger project of social justice."  Chew on that a while.

He cites disparities school-population patterns  as something it is proper for courts to address.  Hey, buddy, are you a jurist or a stinking sociologist?  Are you sure you know for certain the myriad reasons for these disparities?

Then he gets all gooey in the BVDs over the opportunity for legal decisions to make for dramatic moments in American history:

The greatest moments of jurisprudence have never been merely dry legal analysis, but have been linked to broader principles — and historical and social realities — from which they derive.

Look pal, you want some high drama to make the heart swell and the skin tingle?  Read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

I hope I see lots of other outlets taking down this dog vomit as the day goes on.

The intentional orchestration of America's rapid decline

Daniel P. Scrag, White House climate advisor and director of Harvard's Center for the environment says, in remarks about the Most Equal Comrade's upcoming energy-and-environment address that "a war on coal is exactly what's needed."

It is so very late in the day.

Our bloodthirsty patty-cake partners - today's edition

Explosions rock the presidential palace in Kabul.  Taliban claims responsibility.

Our bloodthirsty new patty-cake partners

Taliban executes ten foreign mountain climbers in Pakistan.  Ties up their guides first.

You don't have to be a genius to see that our policy toward this outfit is suicidally foolish.

That's because the normal--people way of responding to life's vicissitudes tends to prevail in spite of attempts to impose something unnatural

New poll finds that New Jersey residents feel that friends and neighbors were more helpful than government in the aftermath of Sandy.

A Monday morning barrage of links and thoughts

Yes, I'm aware that I did no blogging over the weekend.  My excuses are legitimate: a magazine deadline on Friday, an out-of-town music gig on Saturday, a couple of social activities that, I'm not ashamed to admit, were fun, sundry other matters to attend to.

And now, on Monday morning, there is a cornucopia of fodder for posts.  I may examine some of them in post-length form, but a quick roundup gives an indication of the breadth of what's happening out there:

• It looks like the Senate has the votes to pass another one of those pass-it-then-read-it FHer monstrosities that purports to address an ostensible pressing problem in our society - in this case, comprehensive immigration reform.  Any Pub Senator who votes for it is in the throes of advanced-stage Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome and is no longer to be taken seriously as a defender of freedom or America.
• Snowden is apparently on his way to Ecuador from Russia.  His coziness with the Chinese as well as associates of Julian Assange make it pretty clear he's nobody's hero.
• The Supreme Court is hearing supremely important cases this week: the role of affirmative action in college admissions and whether there is such a thing as homosexual "marriage."  As of this writing, the affirmative action case decision has come down, and it kicks it back to the lower courts.
• The DIJA, the S&P 500, and the NASDAQ are all quite woozy this morning.  Seems to be global and to have started with a 5 percent drop in the Shanghai Index amid concerns over China's credit situation.
• Just because unrest in Turkey and Syria (and to include a non-Muslim example, Brazil) have been getting the attention, it doesn't mean that Egypt has calmed down.

I'd also like to pass along some pieces I came across this morning at Real Clear Politics.

 One is rather long, so plan ahead to take the time to include it in your reading for the day or week.  It's "The Higher Education Hustle" by William Voegeli, a senior editor at the Claremont Review of Books.  Much of the  first several paragraphs is devoted to an overview of how modern academia became a repository for demographic balkanization, speech and thought control, dismissal of the great canon of works that define Western civilization, and general moral relativity.  It's not rehash of what you already know, however; it's the details behind what you already know.  For instance, I learned that the big push for "diversity" has its roots in a 1985 statement by the American Association of Colleges that points the compass:  "Colleges must create a curriculum in which the insights and understandings, the lives and aspirations of the distant and foreign, the different and the neglected, are more widely comprehended by their graduates."

Voegeli makes it clear how that declaration of mission has played out:

The acquisition of such comprehension became the justification for immersing students in the study of abuses committed throughout history by those—principally white, heterosexual males—who felt at liberty to disdain the insights and understanding, and trample the lives and aspirations, of the different and neglected. This commitment to a secular salvation has recently expanded to include "sustainability." Colleges now work to make sure that, whatever else its students do or don't learn, they graduate with a profound awareness of, revulsion for, and dedication to reversing the appalling violations committed against a fragile planet.

He concludes his essay by asserting forthrightly that higher education as we've known it for the last few centuries is a model in need of replacement.

The other piece is by Robert Samuelson and is entitled "Cheap Money Can't Buy a Strong Economy."  He enumerates three main factors preventing a robust recovery.  One is "the legacy of the financial crisis and Great Recession. Their suddenness and magnitude sobered and frightened people in ways that sapped vitality and optimism. Households, companies, bankers, government regulators - just about everyone - became more cautious and, in economics jargon, "risk averse." Consumers skimped on spending; companies limited hiring and investment. Debts that seemed bearable quickly became burdensome. Firms and families "deleveraged."  Another is the faltering of technological advancement, and the third is demographics - that is, the aging of the Boomers.

Finally, though, I must be candid about another reason why blogging slowed way down over the last few days.  The truth is that I haven't been doing so hot attitudinally - indeed, spiritually.  It got to the point that I was not able to consistently see the point to this thing called my life.  I was staying on top of basic daily obligations, but I was going through the motions to do so.

I can honestly say that I'm coming out of it now, and one big reason is that I've allowed myself to follow a trail of clues that have been left for me in recent days.

I've started including, fairly consistently, the reading of Jon Acuff's blog, in my morning perusal of online content.  He's one of those get-clear-on-your-life-mission-and-then-roll-up-your-sleeves guys, and he's quite good.  (For instance, read today's post, "The Best Thing to DoWhen You Fail.")  It seems to me there are two types of folks in that bag: the fluff-o, New-Agey types that invoke pretend forces and drive you nuts exhorting you to see reality as something other than what it is, and the ones who offer solid advice, inspiration and encouragement, based on their own trials by fire.  Acuff is in category two.

The other day, I was reading a comment thread under one of his posts, and I came across a comment by one Gary Morland.  Now, that's not the most common of names, so I immediately wondered if it could be the Gary Moreland who used to live in this city and with whom I spent countless hours half-heartedly working on concepts for radio shows or trying to write songs.  And mostly drinking beer.  After years of working at ding-dong jobs he had no passion for, he did get a toehold in the radio industry.  He got a job, first in Iowa, and moved his family there, and then to South Carolina.  I lost touch with him around the late 1980s.

But going to the website URL this Gary Morland had underneath his name at that comment thread not only confirmed that it was my old buddy, but that he's now in the business of life-mission inspiration himself.  Check out his site - his bio, his e-books, and his blog.  He's turned out to be a great writer, among other things.  He's also become a serious Christian, which informs what he has to say to a large extent, although what he has to say is so generally insightful it would help even agnostics who were in a place where they were asking the questions he addresses.

His work led me, via a link, to that of yet another guy in that field: Seth Godin.   Great stuff. Check out his recent post entitled, "The Lab or the Factory."

Speaking of Christianity, a Facebook post by a buddy of mine that I saw this morning really spoke to me:

Anyone have suggestions for good bible companion readers? I have to admit that I'm having a tough go of it. I hear the sermons and the messages our pastors and elders derive from the scriptures and I think they are beautiful and inspiring beyond words.... But when I read them on my own I usually get nothing. I want to be able to dive deeper in the text but, most of the time, I can't seem to. Any help would be a blessing.

Someone in his comment thread suggested that he check out the biblical commentary of Tom Wright.  Don't know about my FB buddy, but I checked him out, and I will be checking him out more.

So I'm back among the living.  A little skinned up, as is usually the case after one of my dark nights, but ready to see possibility again.

If there's anything that ties together this entire post, it's that we're free.  You can look at the fact that each moment of your life presents you with a choice as exhiliarating and delicious, or as a burden.  But your destiny is largely in your own hands.  Maybe even completely.  The occasional tornado, earthquake or armed robbery may intrude on your daily existence, but there's always your response, and that's yours and yours alone.

Now, let's all get out there and treasure our freedom.

A bit of good news, at least for the moment: the farm bill ain't happening

Erika Johnsen at Hot Air does an exceptional job at explaining why gummint coddling of agriculture going back to the 1800s is a market-distorting drag on the nation.  So her coverage of the House's thumbs-down on the current farm bill is the go-to piece for seeing the full dynamics of the situation.

Just wow - this hour's edition

Ever heard of a gummint program called Insider Threat?  It's intended to stop leaks - which seemed to be fine under the W administration, but are now a terrible thing.  Among other provisions, it encourages regime employees to watch co-workers for "indicators" - signs, such as marital problems or financial stress - that could mean they are leaking info to the media.

"People's right to know"?  How quaint.

Nothing affordable about it

We know about the businesses that are cutting employees' hours to avoid insuring them under FHer-care, but here's a rather extensive list of municipal governments, school districts and community colleges that are scaling back the hours as well.

Part-time nation.

The MEC is true to form in two European speeches

Tells a Berlin audience that that overwhelmingly discredited pseudo-crisis climate change is the "threat of our time," as well as that he is determined to weaken the US strategic nuclear position, and tells a tells a UK audience that there is no need for Catholic schools.

That's our West-hater-in-chief.

It's on purpose - today's edition

A new Gallup poll finds that FHer-care is already killing small-business jobs.

The "bumps in the road" came along right away

The Taliban stages a rocket attack on Bagram Air Force Base, killing four US soldiers.

Rock star no more

The Most Equal Comrade may have thought that going to Europe would provide a respite from the spate of scandals and the collapsing approval numbers, but he got a decidedly lackluster reception from his counterparts there.

Young adults are going to run the numbers and take a pass on FHer-care

As Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito points out, they look at the $854 per year they're paying now for health care and compare it to the $5400 that a gummint-approved policy would cost, and then factor in the piddling penalty they'll pay - or maybe get out of paying - and say, "No thanks."

Holman Jenkins at the WSJ says that one thing missing from most MSM coverage of how FHer-care is going to "work" is an examination of why prices for health-care goods and services are much more distorted than one sees in other economic sectors:

For 30 years, journalists have been "investigating" hospital pricing, which is neither competitive nor closely related to cost, invariably throwing up their hands and saying government must fix matters. Yet any reasoned analysis shows that government policy is why we have such a byzantine payment system in the first place, in which an ever-inflating health-care bill is allocated among "payer" groups via opaque political bargaining.

Why isn't the same mess seen in other realms of the economy? In the automobile market, dealers publish prices on their websites and in ads that are always lower than the sticker prices. Why?

Independent websites like Edmunds.com, AutoTrader.com and Kelley Blue Book publish detailed pricing information for consumers and do so for free. Why?

The answer is obvious. Consumers want such information and businesses see opportunity in providing it, even for free, in order to attract eyeballs for advertising.

Such information doesn't exist in health care because consumers don't demand it, because somebody else is almost always paying for our health care. Those of us who aren't subsidized directly by Medicaid, Medicare and the Veterans Administration are subsidized through the tax code to channel all our aches and pains through a third-party payment mill, disguised as employer-provided "insurance."

The fact that this makes such immanent sense is probably why it has such a difficult time getting an airing in our society's public-policy conversations.  Sensible solutions don't permit any interested parties to get a leg up on everybody else.

Not exactly folk songs around the campfire, rope swinging at the swimming hole and making figurines at the crafts barn

For hundreds of thousands of Arab kids in Gaza, Hamas-run summer camps have a very particular mission.

Real swift move

Well, one person who is none too pleased about bilateral talks between the US and the Taliban is Afghan president Karzai.  He has suspended talks on security arrangements for the draw-down of US troops.

Looks like the kumbaya crowd just inflamed things.

Why do we call this land Post-America?

Because America was a country that took itself seriously, that remembered its unique place in human history, and understood how reality works.

That's clearly been tossed out the window, given the Senate's rather abrupt rejection of a secure-the-damn-border-first amendment to the current immigration bill (especially given the fact that that amendment ought to be the long and short of the entire law), and post-America's rush to play patty-cake with the God-damned Taliban, which hates music and women's beauty.

These are, of course, just two examples.

"Regime pillar"

Important Lee Smith article at the Weekly Standard on why Rowhani is no moderate.

Then again, if they'd chosen any other kind for the position, that would have been a man-bites-dog surprise

Samantha Power as UN ambassador is a perfect choice from the standpoint of the MEC regime.  She's a transnationalist, a redistributionist, and she thinks there's something about the history of US foreign policy for which it should feel guilty.  Secretary Global Test is no doubt pleased to have her on board.

As always, the MSM is salivating at the prospect that history has been stopped in its tracks

Okay, so moderate Hasan Rowhani has won the Iranian election in a landslide, and his victory was followed by big celebrations in the streets of Teheran, at which the authorities didn't even try to stop the playing of pop music and the western dress.

Several thoughts:

1.) It seems that the mullahs knew they could not risk another publicity disaster a la 2009.

2.) Even as this election transpires, Iran is sending 4,000 troops to Syria to support the Assad regime, even as the US ups its support of the rebels.  And let us not forget that the rebel coalition, which is comprised, out of its nine main fighter groups, of seven that are explicitly Islamist, includes those who would shoot a 15-year-old boy to death for insultign Mohammed, and would pull Christian villagers out of their homes, line them up in the village square, and execute them.  We're not only pitted squarely against Iran, regardless of the supposed moderation of its new president, but we're sawing off the branch on which we've decided to perch.


3.) As of now, there is no indication there will be any slowdown of Iran's nuclear program.

4.) Supreme Ayatollah Khameni remains the real decision-maker on policy and strategy.


The current gushfest about a new era of unicorns and rainbows - just Google Rowhani's name and scroll through pages of world headlines about "moderate" and "era of new possibilities" - will quickly morph into bewilderment, as this election's place within the grand regional and global scheme comes into view.

As if the post-American version of the Stasi hadn't already wasted enough of the money it seizes from us at gunpoint on line dancing and Star Trek spoofs

Now the IRS is hiring a "diversity and inclusion" specialist at $123 K a year.

The totalitarian thug regime breathes down the necks of the nation's last few remaining actual journalists

CBS hired a cyber-security firm to look into the claim that Sheryl Atkisson's computer had been hacked, and the findings are: Hell, yeah, and multiple times.

If you'd always thought there was a suspect odor wafting off the American Friends Service Committee . . .

 . . . you now have confirmation of the stink.  At its camp in upstate New York, it will train campus activists in the boycotting, divestment and pushing for sanctions against Israel.

This outfit's been on the wrong side going clear back to its making bedfellows with Communist-front "peace" groups.

Religion of peace - today's edition

Syrian rebels whip and shoot a 14-year-old boy to death for insulting the prophet Mohammed.

In France, a guy eating a ham sandwich in public is set upon by a gang of Muslim youths.

Ratcheting up the Great Cultural Dare

The White House hosted some kind of LGBT "pride" event yesterday, and the Most Equal Comrade appeared onstage with two eight-year-old human props.  I guess they have two "mommies" or something.

He says we've become a more "loving" nation.

It's on purpose - today's edition

Yet another supporter of FHer-care concedes that "there will be horror stories" as it's implemented.

Yessir, that's the sign of viable public policy - that it brings about horror stories and train wrecks.

It's so obvious what the endgame is: driving exasperated and panicked people into government coverage, achieving single-payer circumstantially without any legislators having to scare their constituents.

A nation of neutered cattle.  That is what the Freedom-Haters want.

It's nothing more than a means for Freedom-Haters to infect Pubs with Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome

I haven't doen much posting about the immigration push and the Gang of Eight.  That's because it's one of those situations where the essence of the matter is so simple and straightforward that it seems like an unproductive use of mental energy to follow the twists and turns of committee hearings and who said what on what talk show.  (I will say that Marco Rubio's stock has gone way south with me. He's pretty much cooked his goose, in fact.)

There is no pressing need for comprehensive immigration reform.  You seal the border and make sure not one more illegal alien gets across it.

Period.

Then there's plenty of time to deal with the illegal aliens who are already here.

And that's all there is to say about the matter.

But it feels good to "give back to the community"

In its 20 years of existence, AmeriCorps has basically been a colossal waste.

Mostly, its projects have been along the lines of exhorting citizens to recycle and such.

Any real, results-yielding work it's done could have been done by volunteer organizations.

It's the folks in charge

I get - I really do - where the likes of Andrew C. McCarthy an John Bolton are coming from on the subject of NSA surveillance.  I'm quite certain it's foiled a number of terrorist plots, some of them possibly apocalyptic in potential magnitude.

But consider George Will's argument.  The leviathan state is infested with this type of operative:

The case for the National Security Agency’s gathering of metadata is: America is threatened not by a nation but by a network, dispersed and largely invisible until made visible by connecting dots. The network cannot help but leave, as we all do daily, a digital trail of cellphone, credit card and Internet uses. The dots are in such data; algorithms connect them. The technological gathering of 300 billion bits of data is less menacing than the gathering of 300 by bureaucrats. Mass gatherings by the executive branch twice receive judicial scrutiny, once concerning phone and Internet usages, another concerning the content of messages.

The case against the NSA is: Lois Lerner and others of her ilk.

If there were some way to keep rabid FHers away from the opportunity to misuse the power that comes with all that data, I'd be a lot more comfortable with the government having it.

Adam Winkler is one sick dude

The UCLA law professor says in a piece at The New Republic that the court challenges springing up around the country to parents objecting to having "transgendered" (yes, here at LITD we still put that term in quotes) kids in school restrooms with their own kids of the actual gender inscribed on the door is just what we need to nudge us past our final set of hangups about obliterating normalcy.

Bravo Florida!

Says no mas to the seizing of citizens' assets at gunpoint for the purpose of propping up play-like energy production.

In a hair-trigger world, Secretary Global Test has some strange priorities

A few weeks ago, he was putting "climate change" front and center.  Now he thinks it's a grand mission to use America's resources to hold the hands of those around the world who resent the genitals they were born with.

Much still to learn about this guy

Let's proceed cautiously in drawing conclusions about Edward Snowden.  His alarm at the scope of what the US government is keeping tabs on is shared by many of us.  But read through the Glenn Greenwald interview and one sees that his motives are driven to a large degree by moral equivalence - China keeps tabs, the US keeps tabs, no dif - and by a deliberate effort to ignore the ideological essence and global interconnectedness of jihad (says that the police handled the Boston bombing fine and that was that).

I'm also none too keen on his admiration for Bradley Manning.

Racism isn't a real problem, but it makes a dandy tool for "fundamental transformation"

Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish does a great job of analyzing the layers of implication of Martin Bashir's infantile outburst the other night on MSNBC.  It was pretty vulgar, but I'm so inured to race-card antics, I nearly passed on blogging about it.  Then I saw this essay.

For one thing, he makes very clear just how Bashir deliberately mangled what the lat Lee Atwater had to say about race in politics:

As supporting evidence Bashir quoted the widely misrepresented Lee Atwater interview. In the interview, Atwater was saying that politics was becoming deracialized because even racist voters were backing non-racist agendas, even if for racist reasons, making racist politics abstract.

That quote has been endlessly misquoted to "prove" that when Republicans support lower taxes, it's really coded racism. Atwater clumsily said that racial politics were becoming abstract, and the left responded by racializing all politics, including the politics of the IRS.

Atwater was right that racism in politics has become abstract, but he was wrong in assuming that it was going anywhere. Real racism in politics is hard to find, but the political abstraction of racism is everywhere. Any attack on Obama is immediately racist, whether it's calling him a Socialist or demanding an investigation of IRS abuses, because Obama is, in Bashir's words, "the black man in the White House."

And he makes the important point that, for the Most Equal Comrade, race is merely a vehicle for good old  equal-opportunity hard-left fundamental transformation:

Race for Obama is abstract. His identity isn't racial, it's political. Race is only a tool for his politics, it doesn't define his politics. In this he is no different than the rest of the left for whom race, gender, class, profession and any other aspect of identity are tools to be used to promote the ideas and policies of the left, but can never be allowed to truly define those policies.

Obama represents the symbolic union of racial grievance and leftist politics; but there is no doubt which one of these is in the driver's seat. 

The left played the black community, bribed their leaders, tossed a few trinkets to the masses and then plundered their heritage and history. The economic potential of the black community was destroyed to leave them with few options but to serve as the cannon fodder of big government. Black history and politics have been so thoroughly hijacked that a media personality on the propaganda channel of big government can claim with a straight face that IRS is a racial slur.

The leviathan state becomes an untouchable golden calf.  Question it even gently and you're advocating ethnic cleansing.

Not so fast, pardner!

Darrell Issa wastes no time in refuting Elijah Cummings's claim that the IRS-targeting-conservative-groups scandal has been adequately dealt with and that it's now time to move on.  Calls the assertion "outrageous," and says, "Fortunately, that's not his decision to make."

Memo to my doctor and all health care providers

Per the post below, surveys show physicians have none too rosy an outlook about their profession's future, and the main reason is all the bureaucratic doo-dah that detracts from the attention they can give patients.

Well, here's one patient who likewise has a pronounced aversion to red tape.  How about if I help you keep life simple by paying cash?

I was perfectly prepared to handle the transaction in a free market manner, but the seller wanted to dissuade me

The other day, I had an experience that raised a number of questions for me about the prevalent mindset that, even before FHer-care's passage, seems to have characterized health care in our country, and the blurring of clear free-market dynamics.

I went to see our family physician to discuss a few issues. Nothing major, and he just recommended a regimen of Vitamin D and a few minerals.  Didn't prescribe anything.

After our visit, I went to the front-office lady to check out.  She told me the visit would be $85, which I knew beforehand and had brought with me.  I started to get my wallet, and she asked, "Do we have an insurance card on file with you?"  I responded, "Boy, I don't know."  She checked, and they didn't, so she took the information from my Assurant Health card.  I told her, "Now, that's just a catastrophic-care policy."  She said, "I know, but let's see if they'll pay any of it."

I thought, I came prepared to pay you eighty-five dollars in cash.  Doesn't your practice prefer cash as a form of compensation?

Perhaps there's some esoteric missing element in the situation, but I'm not seeing it at present.

Does anybody have any insight into why the office lady was so quick to encourage me to see if insurance would pay for a simple consultation I was perfectly ready to pay for on the spot?

The technocrat overlords, their dogs, their Maseratis,their bumper stickers and their lemonade

The Most Equal Comrade went to leafy, tranquil Palo Alto to attend a Freedom-Hater fundraiser at the home of Michael McCue, a tech entrepreneur, on Thursday.  Zombie's photo essay of the event and its spillover into the neighborhood's streets provides an insightful glimpse into a particular slice of American society you don't find everywhere - the sharp, clean-cut go-getter entrepreneur and his adorable flag-waving kids and pets, and their radical, America-dismantling ideology.

(Well, maybe you do find it everywhere now.  See my rants from earlier today.)

Take a scroll though the photos for an on-the-ground look at where power in post-America is being channeled.  The smiley face of the thug regime.

Why we call it post-America - today's edition

A chaplain at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst put together a video tribute to First Sergeants and uploaded it to YouTube.  The Air Force made him take it down because it mentioned God.

How in the hell would you reach out to this demographic and retain your principles anyway?

I kind of dashed off the post below.  I needed to get cleaned up and head out to the radio station, and collecting my thoughts was a bit of a challenge.

The point is not that one individual - this Barro fellow - has this smart-ass view of how to, in his estimation, drag the Republican party into the modern era.  He warrants discussion because he is symptomatic of a bizarre and warped mindset that has so permeated our culture that it has elbowed aside the entire range of what had previously been considered normal, and established itself as the premise from which society's agenda will be set.

I use the term "east coast" a lot when discussing people of his ilk, the trendsetters among whom do indeed mostly live in that geographic designation.  But it's also a metaphor.  Longtime LITD readers know that I'm occasionally compelled to go local.  "Local" is a smallish but growing midwestern city that is home to the world headquarters of a multinational Fortune 200 corporation (whose newly appointed worldwide director for corporate responsibility is an avowed atheist, I might note), as well as several other fairly high-tech firms that have sprung up as a result of the technocratic atmosphere fostered by the big company's presence.  This may be flyover country, but the Brave New Postmodern Human has consolidated its rule here.  (The use of a non-gender specific possessive is deliberate.)  There is an active Human Rights Council, a panoply of ethnic "affinity groups," an active young-professionals organization with ample overlap in membership with the the above, a gay-straight alliance, and Interfaith Forum that holds peace-pipe ceremonies and the like, and a Healthy Communities Initiative that, as documented in a piece I wrote for The American Thinker in 2010, has taken federal stimulus money to put eat-your-broccoli posters in area daycare centers.  The up-and-coming "community leaders" are a sharp lot.  Out city has the highest per-capita concentration of mechanical engineers in the country, but these go-getters want bike trails, arts activity and good restaurants.

They are, like Barro, "utilitarians" who, by golly, just want things to "work for everybody."  They are considered by mainly themselves to be the hope of the city's, and country's, future.

Cancel my order for the kind of world that their vision culminates in.  On the surface, it looks like a place of great contentment and robust community interaction, where vitality-filled engineers, doctors, art-gallery owners, teachers and government officials regularly convene to assess what is needed to make everybody feel good in every way it's possible to feel good.  It's also a world in which any art produced is sterile and pointless because it came about as part of a grand plan rather than springing up organically.  It's a world where there's a Six Sigma project for every aspect of human existence.  It's a world in which the very deeply embedded, difficult and intricate questions about the nature of God and humans' relationships with Him get glossed over because churches no longer have time for such uncomfortable conversations, busy as they are with all manner of "outreach."  It's a world in which the family structure that has informed all viable societies throughout human history becomes just one more "lifestyle option" among an infinite array.  It's one of endless coalitions and partnerships leave no aspect of human experienced unaddressed.

These people are the nicest folks you'd ever want to meet - being "inclusive" and "welcoming" being foremost among their values, after all - unless you want to talk about basic concepts like immutable maleness and femaleness, or the primacy of private property, or the constant presence of evil in human history.  Then you're not quite as welcome to their party.  You're either shunned or ridiculed.

We are in the midst of a reinvention of what it means to be human. Of course, that's folly, but the really frightening part is that you can no longer say so without getting into trouble with the overlords.

Snakes in the grass

Do you ever have names of public figures - in any realm that interests you; it could be sports, film, or business, but here we're talking about public policy thinkers - that are filed away in some corner of your mind because they've come to your attention once or twice, and then one day occupy a position front and center?

Such is the case for me of one Josh Barro.  I'd seen his byline and/or mentions of him for a while, but then today I had to check out a provocatively titled piece by him at Real Clear Politics ("I'm Not a Conservative and You Shouldn't Be Either").  It only took a few paragraphs to get the odor of his basic worldview.  He's one of those David Frum-esque types who maintain their Republican affiliation so as to try to legitimize their put-down of core conservative principles.  You can read the piece I'm talking about if you want to.  He calls himself a "utilitarian," defining that as an advocacy of "whatever works for the largest number of people."  Says the fact that conservatives don't take climate change or some perceived need to address health care on a macro level seriously means they themselves can't be taken seriously.  Goes on to address the question of whether this wouldn't move the two parties to a state of a fair amount of similarity by saying, Sure it would, and that's what you have in most other Western representative democracies, and it's a good thing.

Did a little poking around to get some background on the guy.  Former real estate banker and Manhattan Institute fellow.  His departure from that think tank was over ideology.  Now he writes for Business Insider and Bloomberg.

I found a recent Red State post by Erik Erikson about him that I think gets to the heart of what Barro represents within our current landscape.  Guys like Barro are so completely removed from the way flyover-country people who still have traditional families and ways of making a living - and maybe even go to church - that it has rendered them unable to grasp basic principles at work in economics and human affairs.

In short, guys like Barro don't know how to stand for anything, much less have anything they stand for.  In a sane world, that would be enough to discredit them from participation in our national conversation.

And post-America is rendered even less relevant on the world stage

Charles Krauthammer says that the fall of Qusair on Wednesday to Assad's forces on Wednesday signifies a shift within the broad scope of world affairs.  Iran and Hezbollah have a strengthened hand.  Russia's Mediterranean port is assured for the time being.  A loser is Turkey, which had been siding with the rebels (and is now reeling from its own riots).

And the US?   Not even a player.

This regime owns this one

James Sensenbrenner, main author of the original Patriot Act, says that what the NSA is doing now - obtaining phone records en masse and now this PRISM program - is way beyond the scope of the law he crafted.

A cold splash of reality on the eve of the US - China summit

The US government has determined that China hacked into both the MEC and McCain campaigns during the 2008 election cycle and made off with sensitive documents.

Why we call it post-America - today's edition

Along the lines of yesterday's post about the chicken sandwiches at the promotion party, there comes to my attention a very disturbing story about one of our military's foremost experts on jihad.

Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley has taught a course for some time at National Defense University on how to understand Islamic culture and radical Islamic ideology.  Well, it seems some self-appointed tolerance police of an Islamic stripe found out and leaned on the MEC regime.  Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Martin Dempsey got involved.  The course has been 86ed, and Dooley's career path has been affected.

And we're less safe as a nation.

On not glossing over the nitty-gritty of the social issues

It would be interesting to know if any cultural historians have ever looked into the first usage of the terms "social conservative" and "social issues" in our national conversation.  My sense is that it occurred at some point during conservatism's emergence into the political and cultural mainstream in the 1980s.  The irony of that period is that at just about the time comprehensive conservatism, equally emphasizing the three pillars of foreign policy, free-market economics, and traditional norms, customs and moral notions, fully introduced itself to the American public, it began to fray. Certainly within the foreign-policy realm, you had paleocons like Pat Buchanan and radical isolationists like Paul Craig Roberts and Joe Sobran resolutely divorcing themselves from the neoconservative position championed by Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Elliot Abrams, Richard Perle and the like, with Nixon-style "realists" like Scowcroft and Baker offering a sort of muddled middle way.  And some of this spilled over into the economic realm, with a certain brand of protectionist disparaging international trade agreements and the free flow of jobs throughout the world.  And there was overlap with, as well as a complete distancing from,  people in these various camps and those we have come to call social conservatives.
By the time Mitt Romney lost to the Most Equal Comrade in November 2012, some deeply disappointed folks, notably self-described homosexual conservatives, were stressing the prescription, which had been around for a while, that the first thing that involved, committed, right-of-center citizens needed to do was shelve the "social issues" and focus on debt, taxes, job creation, and American global leadership.  They were clearly bolstered in this assertion by the idiotic campaign mistakes of Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, which shifted the dynamics of the election at most levels.
This way of thinking has been reinforced by two recent documents, the RNC's "autopsy" and the College Republican National Committee's report on why young Americans are soured on the GOP brand.  Both of these papers point out a widespread public perception that Republicans, insofar as they embody any kind of commonly held definition of conservatism, are "out of touch" and "intolerant."
While there's much to criticize about both the methodology and the conclusions of these reports, they appear to be on to something, if the anecdotal evidence of a scroll through one's Facebook newsfeed is any indicator.  Just today, one of my "friends" posted a five-panel comic strip about an exasperated God - portrayed as He often is, sitting on a cloud with a long-flowing beard -  griping about humans still persecuting each other over their different approaches to Him, and still "hating on gays."
Here the whole thing hits close to home, and it seems that that which I observe and experience and reflect on daily is forcing me to a point of conclusion.
The difficulty for me is determining whether I am qualified to speak for Christianity, since, as I often say, I am "leaning towards" it.  And the matters that have invited such vilification of it in our time are precisely why I go that far, and that far only.
Real Christianity - and I mean the doctrine that spells out the way God designed human sexuality, as well as the universal need for salvation, not the "Jesus-was-a-man-of-peace-and-an-activist-for-the-poor" pop outlook that secularists trot out in a faux-defense of it - is tough.  It is enormously challenging.  It brings up your stuff.  It says that our imperfections - and we all have them, according to this doctrine - must be dealt with before we can stand before God, and that Christ's sacrifice on Calvary was the only way it could be dealt with, due to our free will.  (This is one of my sticking points; more often than I'd like, it looks like a rigged game to me.)
There are very clear prohibitions, in both the Old Testament and New, against homosexual behavior and, indeed, any sexual behavior that is licentious.  It's quite clear from Mosaic law, the letters of Paul, and, indeed, the teachings of the Nazarene himself, that sexual intimacy has a very distinct purpose in human life - that is, to make the two opposite forms of human nature one, and thereby make possible the injection of yet more human souls into this realm.
The main sticking point that occurs at this juncture is the whole born-this-way / behavioral-choice dichotomy, and the fact of the matter is that no geneticist or psychiatrist has ever conclusively resolved it.  It's pretty clear that most people who live as homosexuals, certainly those who enjoy long-term committal relationships similar to marriage, have been primarily or even exclusively attracted to their own gender for as long as they can remember.  So there's no denying that Paul's admonition in Romans I: 26-27 comes across as harsh to them, and maybe even to all of us.
Then there's the perhaps even stickier matter of hierarchy within a marriage.  Again, there is abundant scriptural confirmation of the man's leadership role in matrimony.  While one rarely hears the term "obey" in vows exchanged in church ceremonies anymore, several ritual vestiges remain that confirm that the shift in life circumstances is going to be bigger for the woman than for the man: the still-much-practiced giving away of the bride by the father, the fact that she is the focus of attention, with the groom and his groomsmen, as well as the minister and even all the bridesmaids that precede her turning to gasp at her splendor as the music suddenly turns to something appropriately anthemic.  Joe Smith the groom is going to continue through life as Joe Smith, working and saving and making strategic decisions about where to live and what to do, with the implication being that Suzy the bride is going to take her cue from that and figure out how she fits into his vision.
Studies on single parenthood or how the modern educational system affects boys and girls differently are important and point out trends that must be grappled with.  But there is a further level that such inquiries do not address, perhaps for fear of complicating things beyond the intended scope of discussion.
And by complication, part of what I mean is having to wade through the whole "hater" discussion.  The difficulty is that to a postmodern secularist unacquainted with the particulars of scripture, it does indeed look an awful lot like hate. 
But a Christian - and, again, I mean a we-are-all-sinners-in-need-of-grace Christian, not the Jesus-just-wants-us-to-be-nice kind - will tell you that he or she is as far removed from hate, bigotry or a desire to oppress anybody as possible.  He or she is not judging or casting aspersions upon, but merely engaging the world informed by the Word of God.  For the Christian, Mosaic law, the letters of Paul and the teachings of Christ are as much fact as what a rudimentary science text has to say about the temperature at which water freezes.
Therefore, a much stronger argument could be made that it is the secularist, perfectly comfortable with tossing millennia-old institutions and norms - institutions and norms that are foundational to the formation of broader institutions such as the nation-state -  overboard who is the one being judgmental and seeking to curb others' freedom.
Still, until I resolve for myself my remaining sticking points, I don't know that I am the best one to make the case for this.
I can say unequivocally that for some reason it hurts personally when I see Christians subjected to dismissiveness, scorn, contempt and vitriol.
It just doesn't seem right, and the search for what is absolutely right, it seems to me, lies at the heart of the whole realm of "social issues."

Why we refer to this country as post-America - today's edition

A US Army master sergeant gets a letter of reprimand for serving Chik-Fil-A sandwiches in honor of the Defense of Marriage Act at his promotion party.

Glad to see this great Senator's core principles kicking in

Breitbart has it on good authority that Marco Rubio not only would not vote for an immigration bill based on the current premise, but wants out of the Gang of Eight.

As IRS-gate continues to unfold, these names bear close scrutiny

Former White House and MEC campaign counsel Robert Bauer, and several people who came to see him when he was in those capacities: Tova Wang, Richard Hasen, Meredith McGehee.

J. Christian Adams at PJ Media provides links in his article about this web of thuggery that will fill out your understanding of who these people are.

They are all bound by a common zeal for that campaign-finance-reform hoo-ha and weird notions about the First Amendment.  And none of them are too keen on anybody snooping around particular elections to make sure they're being carried out fairly.

The Most Equal Comrade regards you with utter contempt and laughs at your fear of what he's doing to the country

No other way to look at the appointment of Susan Rice - she of the multiple Sunday-show assertions that the video caused the Benghazi attack - as national security advisor.

The "totalitarian" label is not hyperbole

Tea Party group wants to stage a rally at the Capitol on June 19.  DC police say, "We want to see what kind of presence you have on Facebook and Twitter first."

This is really dirty

We are all now well aware of the arcane hoops through which Tea Party, conservative, pro-life and pro-Israel groups were made to jump, but this business of letting the Human Rights Campaign have the National Organization for Marriage's donor list is a new low.

Not presidential material

Chris Wysocki at Wy Blog says that Chris Christie's pedigree as a principled conservative is even more shot to hell with his decision to hold a special election for Lautenberg's Senate seat.  Why not give the state of New Jersey some good old, pre-seventeenth-amendment representation on Capitol Hill, instead of, as Wysocki puts it, giving the FHers time to put together "Corey Booker's coronation while slinging mud at another RINO?"

How do you square these two assertions?

The one from Qassim al-Rimi, al-Qaeda's military chief in Yemen, who says that attacks on the US are "within everyone's reach," and the one from our, ahem, highly effective, blessed-with-a-dandy-track-record State Department that there are no active al-Qaeda or Hezbollah cells in the Western hemisphere?

We're not the fools they think we are

We didn't fall for the video excuse for the Benghazi attack, and we're not falling for the narrative that a couple of rogue IRS employees in Cincinnati were behind the targeting of Tea Party, pro-life and pro-Israel groups.

We know better:

'Did [your supervisor] give you any indication of the need for the search [for tea party groups], any more context?' one IRS witness was asked in a closed-door interview.

'He told me that Washington, D.C., wanted some cases,' came the reply.

The employee, who said he or she was evaluating 40 such applications for tax-exempt status from conservative organizations at the time, said 'some went to Washington. D.C. ... I sent seven.'

[snip]

'[The] allegation has been made, I think as you have seen in lots of press reports, that there were two rogue agents in Cincinnati that are sort of responsible for all of the issues that we have been talking about today.,' the investigator noted. 'What do you think about those allegations?''It's impossible.,' the employee replied. 'As an agent we are controlled by many, many people.  We have to submit many, many reports.  So the chance of two agents being rogue and doing things like that could never happen.'Asked whether the problem 'was originated in and contained in the Cincinnati office,' as some Obama administration officials in Washington have claimed, the agent replied that 'I still hear people saying we were low level employees, so we were lower than dirt, according to people in D.C. So, take it for what it is.''They were basically throwing us underneath the bus.'

[snip]

Another Cincinnati IRS employee, whom the oversight committee described Sunday as 'more senior,' told the investigators that he or she applied for another job in July 2010 out of a desire to avoid connections with a program that targeted certain Americans because of their political beliefs.

'It was the whole tea party. It was the whole picture,' the senior agent said.

'I mean, it was the micromanagement. The fact that the subject area was extremely sensitive and it was something that I didn't want to be associated with.'

And just how radical is Susan Anderson, wife of former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman?

This radical. 

I know one thing.  LITD is completely vindicated in its use of terms like "Freedom-Hater" and "post-America."

This is only different in degree from what has been going on for fifty years.  The number of Democrats, both in politics and among the voting public, who object to any of this is dwindling to the point of being negligible.

This is no time to keep one's head down and shut up.

Welcome aboard, Senator!

Louisiana State Senator Elbert Guillory, who had been a Dem, becomes a Pub.  Says good-bye to tyranny, decline and dehumanization and hello to freedom, American greatness, commonsense and decency.

If al-Qaeda is, as the Most Equal Comrade has maintained for some time now, vanquished, how to explain this little discovery?

Iraq has uncovered - and busted the perpetrators of - an al-Qaeda plot to make sarin and mustard gas and smuggle them to the US and attack us with them.

There is no aspect of this regime's foreign policy which has not been an utter failure.

Well, now, isn't this cozy?

Had you ever thought about who former IRS commissioner Douglas H. Shulman - he of the 157 White House visits - is married to?  Well, she's Susan L. Anderson, the senior program advisor to Public Campaign, a group that works to reduce the influence of "special interest" money in American politics.

Where does her outfit get its money?  Ford Foundation, Streisand Foundation, Health Care for America Now! (a joint project of several labor unions), among others.

Another signal from the regime that intends to keep destroying freedom

Get a load of Ernest Moniz, the guy replacing Steven Chu as Energy Secretary.  MIT physicist, lifelong academic except for service as Energy undersecretary to Billy Jeff the Zipper.  Says he will not brook any questioning of the "settled" climate change "science."  Also says that his priority will be to make even more types of products even more energy-efficient - i.e., tell privately owned manufacturing companies how to make their products.

And I don't go to this level very often, but, I'm sorry, this guy has dweeb written all over him.

And if Gina McCarthy squeaks through her hearings to be the new EPA administrator, we're going to feel the pressure of the jackboots on our necks every time we dare to make sense.