Perhaps the last legislator to refuse the beltway Kool-Aid

Byron York has pretty much eked out a niche for himself as a "hey-I'm-just-sayin'-these-are-my-observations-about-what's-going-on-politically"-type observer.  Oh, you can tell from certain flourishes in his writing that he's right of center, but he generally winds up any given piece on a "you-have-to-be-realisitc-about-the-way-Washington-works" note.

Such is the case with his piece about what he thinks is likely to happen with FHer-care in the next few months.

Even though the whole damn thing is built on naked redistribution - seizing Citizen A's assets at gunpoint to address some particular need of Citizen B (as York points out, "A family of four with income as high as $88,000 will be eligible for subsidies.") - the Freedom-Haters, true to form, are going to play the pity card:

When people begin receiving that entitlement, the dynamics of the Obamacare debate will change.

At that point, the Republican mantra of total repeal will become obsolete. The administration will mount a huge public relations campaign to highlight individuals who have received government assistance to help them afford, say, chemotherapy, or dialysis, or some other life-saving treatment. Will Republicans advocate cutting off the funds that help pay for such care?

That's going to kick in January 1.   And that's why Ted Cruz, far and away the coolest guy in the U.S. Senate, is shouting about the small window of opportunity available to us from the rooftops:

“On Jan. 1, the exchanges kick in and the subsidies kick in,” said the Texas Republican in a speech Saturday at the Western Conservative Summit. “Once those kick in, it’s going to prove almost impossible to undo Obamacare. The administration’s plan is very simple: Get everyone addicted to the sugar so that Obamacare remains a permanent feature of our society.”

And also why he feels an urgency to call out those in his own party afflicted with Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome:

“I think there is a powerful, defeatist approach among Republicans in Washington. I think they’re beaten down and they’re convinced that we can’t give a fight, and they’re terrified.”

Now, which view of FHer-care imbues you with more hope and more fighting spirit?

Oh, sheesh, now it's Pakistan

This mass jaibreak thing seems to be a burgeoning trend in Muslim countries.  Now the Taliban has freed 250 of its fighters from a jail in Dera Ismail Khan.

Well, you slimy bastard, you can always move to North Korea or Cuba

Michael Shulan, the creative director for the 9/11 memorial museum, wanted to nix the photo of firemen raising an American  flag at Ground Zero.  He opposed it for being too "kitschy" and "rah-rah American."

Anyone at this late date who claims doubt that he is orchestrating America's decline is a declinist as well

The Most Equal Comrade makes it plain that he is opposed to the Keystone XL pipeline.

What kind of pervert derives glee from kneecapping the greatest nation in history?

The MEC's lawlessness exquisitely exposed

Great Pete DuPont column in the WSJ about delaying FHer-care's employer mandate.

Of course, we know hat House Pubs wanted to force his hand by passing legislation legalizing such a delay.  This brings us to a strange juncture indeed:

Leaving aside for a moment whether it is legal for an administration simply to decree that a law won't be enforced until next year, such action keeps ObamaCare in the news. Earlier this month the House passed legislation that would make it legal to delay the employer mandate. The House passed another bill to delay the individual mandate by a year, with the logic that individuals and families deserve the same break busineses are getting. Both bills will languish in the Senate, but they have led to the rather odd situation of the president actually vowing to veto legislation that would put his extralegal action on solid footing.

He'd rather do it under current circumstances.  What a guy.

Huma may be sticking around . . .

. . . but Mrs. Spitzer has had it.

They're going to be instrumental in foisting it on us, but they want no part of being subjected to it

IRS employees and FHer-care, that is.  The Treasury workers's union is urging members to write their Congressional representatives saying they don't want to get their little "plans" from the little "exchanges."  You see, gummint folks have a different arrangement from the masses.

Because foreign policy bores him, he regards ambassadorships as bones to throw to cronies

The MEC has sure put some, um, under-qualified people in ambassadorial positions: Nicole Avant for the Bahamas, Howard Gutman for Belgium, and now Caroline Kennedy for Japan.

Hey, MEC, I attend parties well. Got one of those appointments for me?

We're definitely rooting for one side in this one

When it's Perry / Cruz / Cornyn / Abbott vs. Eric Holder on the matter of whether Texas has the right to determine its own election laws (geez, didn't we just have a Supreme Court decision about this sort of thing?), there's no question who's wearing the white hats and who's wearing the jackboots.

Why Huma sticks around

She's taken the wronged-wife-working-things-out-with-the-kinky-husband role to an unprecedentedly proactive levee, offering somewhat lengthy remarks apparently full of difficult soul-searching and searing candor, at the presser the other day about the new revelations.

Why does she do it?

Is it just because she is hungry for the coattail power that comes from connection to a once-and-hopefully-still-powerful politician?  For some, the humiliation that is the price for securing a hoist up to the next level of maneuvering is worth it.

Or is it a case of marching orders from some folks who see an opportunity to burrow into the heart of American political power like never before?

What can you say? That's the MEC

He hosts Vietnamese president Truong Tan Sang at the White House and, in a joint-remarks situation for public consumption, gets into some kind of a shared-values thing, talking about a letter Ho Chi Minh wrote to Harry Truman in the 40s.

At this point, there's a strong temptation to shrug and say, "True to form."  When that impulse strikes, though, hold on until the "damn it, this is not okay with me" impulse comes along.

Why Detroit died

At this juncture in Detroit's sad history, its city council is preoccupied with a resolution calling for a civil rights investigation into George Zimmerman.

Lunacy . . . nihilism . . . I'm trying to come up with adequate words for this.

What is there to say about the Most Equal Comrade's pivot-back-to-the-economy speech?

Not much, actually, beyond noting that it was a bland rehash of themes, memes and schemes he's touted throughout his foul career.  Collectivism, pouting about Pubs daring to even occasionally stand for their principles, and dismissal of his own failures.

Americans still love freedom and American greatness more than you might presume

Per a CBS poll, more Americans than ever want FHer-care repealed.  A solid majority also wants the border secured before anything is decided about the illegal aliens already here.

Very good point

Florida Congressperson Mario Diaz-Balert makes a noteworthy observation: Beyonce and Jay-Z make a big show of boycotting Florida over the acquittal resolution of a local shooting case, but are fine with vacationing in Cuba.

The desperate need of Freedom-Haters to keep believing in their false idols

Okay, so the New York Times has said, in an editorial, that it's time for Weiner to go.  (By the way, the one bit of fun to be had in all this is another round of double entendres.  Drudge is particularly on it.)

But it was just a few months ago that the paper's magazine published an 8,000 word cover puff piece with a strong changed man / genuine remorse / still-true-to-his-principles meme.

Speaking of fun with the double entendres, here's one that's - drum roll, please - particularly juicy.

This just might be an e-mail chain too far for even the most stalwart Freedom-Hater water-carriers

More online shenanigans from Anthony Weiner.  He and his wife looked pretty desperate and barely composed at their presser.

Iraq on the brink of another round of cataclysm

A jihadist jailbreak at Abu Ghraib frees 500 vicious terrorists, most of them senior al-Qaeda members.

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

HUD spending money seized from you at gunpoint to institute a new "neighborhood mapping" program to determine just how diverse every last neighborhood in America is.  Then comes a rating system.  Then comes distortion of the housing market a la the Community Reinvestment Act.

Another arm of the overlord leviathan state making a mockery of our privacy, addressing supposed problems on an impossible macro level, distorting the market and balkanizing society by demographic classification even as it drools about "diversity."

Even the name is creepy

How does a gummint body called the Federal Data Services Hub strike you?  Now consider that it's being cooked up by HHS.

"Navigators" who will "help" people with the FHer-care exchanges will be - ostensibly  - the main functionaries using it.

In the wake of the recent IRS, DoJ and NSA scandals, are you cool with that?

I'm embarrassed for my species - today's edition

Yes, Melissa Harris-Perry has a history of being ridiculous.  (She's the "children-belong-to-everybody" gal.) Yes, the network for which she hosts a show has pathetic ratings.  Yes, she was raised in a hard-left bubble.

Still, is it too much to ask a Tulane University professor and employee of a storied broadcasting corporation to keep things a notch above the infantile?  Isn't there some way she could remark on the recent abortion debate in the Texas legislature without wearing tampon earrings?

A real champion of academic freedom

Facebook posts by leftist "friends" are often my starting point for a pursuit of the core truth of a given news story.

Such was the case with this claim in an AP article that Mitch Daniels, former Indiana governor and now president of Purdue University, had engaged in some kind of general "censorship" of textbooks for the state's public universities and high schools.  Several people trumpeted the piece, and I smelled a certain kind of odor wafting from their common outrage.

All one had to do was read the AP story to see that the headline and lede were misleading.  This wasn't about general censorship; it was about the most dangerous, reprehensible, ideologically filthy book currently being used - and is it ever being used - in the nation's history departments, namely, A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn.

The waiting period between when this kind of thing first surfaces and when a proper defense of the target of the news story appears can be frustrating.  Such was the case here, but the wait is finally over. Roger Kimball at PJ Media offers up a full-throated hurrah for what Daniels did.

Note well, Daniels doesn’t say Zinn’s book oughtn’t to be allowed to be published. He doesn’t want to censor the book. He merely says it shouldn’t be taught as history.  He would, I’d wager, say the same thing about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  And he’d be right.

The Left is skirling that Mitch Daniels wants to deny academic freedom. No, he wants to support it. But he understands that academic freedom is not a license to engage in political propaganda. It is the freedom to pursue the truth. This is a point that Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, gets exactly right.  “Academic freedom,” Wood writes in a column on the controversy for The Chronicle of Higher Education,  ”is a principle that thrives only when it is sturdily woven together with academic responsibility. That’s what Daniels in his plain-speaking e-mails called for.”

[snip]

Academic freedom is not the same thing as free speech. It is a more limited freedom, designed to nurture intellectual integrity and to protect those engaged in intellectual inquiry from the intrusion of partisan passions. The very limitation of academic freedom is part of its strength. By excluding the political, it makes room for the pursuit of truth.

I think I'll do a little Facebook posting of my own.

How to deliberately ruin an economy

That Washington D.C. city council is really something.  It's passed a bill, now awaiting the mayor's signature, that would raise the minimum wage to $12.50 an hour for companies with sales over a certain level.  Walmart, which had been planning a number of new stores in D.C., says if the mayor signs it, they're pulling out, leaving some 300 jobs at each location uncreated.

And those desperately in need of acquiring skills and experience will be denied the chance and will remain idle and dependent on the government.  Demagogues and hustlers will use them as props for victimhood-perpetuating rants.  Congresspeople will feel compelled to "do something."

We've seen this script before.  Many, many, many times.

The Most Equal Comrade lied to you

We've passed it, now we're finding out what's in it.  HHS backpedals on the MEC's promise to us that we'd definitely be able to keep our current doctors.  All depends on what "plan" you go with.  Here's a plan, you stinking Marxists:  How about I go to the doctor when I have a health issue and pay for it myself, and if it's a big-time expense, file a claim on my catastrophic-care policy?  End of story.

Blues for Detroit

I don't suppose it's really novel to look at a city as a metaphor, but Detroit, Michigan seems to have served as a few different kinds of metaphors over the last century.

The most obvious sense in which this is so is its role as the symbol of American industrial might from about 1905 to about 1970.  The various car manufacturers in the area, and various types of companies in their supply chains, consolidated into the Big Three auto makers.  It was one of those cities that drew huge waves of immigrants, from the American South and Europe, primarily.  They provided the muscle that shaped the sheet metal and gave twentieth-century America another shot at mobility in the aftermath of the end of the frontier.

With the rise of the Motown recording empire, Detroit became a metaphor for a couple of things: black entrepreneurship done right, and the gathering of various elements of black American music into a streamlined form of pop that made crossover an unprecedented possibility for black American cultural contributions.  Who didn't love the Supremes and the Four Tops, with the possible exception of the architects of Southern soul, Motown's down-home main competitor?

As the 1970s progressed, it became a metaphor for something else: unchecked union power.  Lots of people knew the benefits packages negotiated by the UAW were unsustainable.  There were rumblings that Japan had taken the quality-assurance concepts of Americans such as J.M. Juran and W. Edwards Deming and run with them, and were about to strike a serious blow at Detroit's status as the world's car capital.  Chrysler was where the first concrete evidence of that appeared in 1979.

Then it came to serve as a metaphor for how human frailty got the better of the civil-rights movement.  The city has for all intents and purposes had a black government for four-plus decades, and antics such as those of Kwame Kilpatrick and Monica Conyers came to characterize the way things were done.

All these metaphors really wind up folding together.  There's no denying that soot and noise and blazing foundries and the mindless repetition of the assembly line were characteristics of Detroit's rise to automotive greatness.  Like a lot of northern cities, it was loud, sweaty and cramped.  Let's not forget that, along with its black-music legacy (certainly Motown, but also black gospel, as embodied by C.L. Franklin's New Bethel Baptist Church, and jazz, from the days of McKinney's Cotton Pickers through the postwar wave of hard boppers such as Kenny Burrell, Tommy Flanagan and Yusef Lateef), it had a  white rock and roll tradition distinguished by a harder edge than, say the rock of New York or Southern California or Britain.  Witness the MC5 and The Stooges.  This tradition continued through the rap-era emergence  of Eminem.  The sense of a barely-tamed urban landscape goes way back in Detroit's history.

The city's black population saw Detroit's musical prominence and saw political predominance as a logical next step.  There was one small problem.  Berry Gordy built Motown the free-market way.  He started it with an $800 loan from his parents.  (His sister had, at that time, just accepted a much larger loan from Leonard Chess of the Chicago-based r&b Chess powerhouse, but Berry was too proud to jump on her bandwagon.)  Public administration in Detroit became predicated on the notion that there would never be any end to the flow of public gravy.  Welfare became easy to obtain, and the well-documented crumbling of traditional family life followed in short order.

Now Detroit, in 1950 the fifth largest city in the US, and 10th largest as recently as 1990, is smaller than Columbus, Ohio.    And, as we know, it is bankrupt.

A couple of years ago, the city was celebrating the fact that its high school graduation rate had clawed its way back to the point where only one-third of students were dropping out, but its student-achievement gap vis-a-vis the country at large, and the gimme mentality of the teachers' union tell the real story.

Ultimately, and most scarily. Detroit serves as a metaphor for where post-America is headed: a power structure made possible by the foment of societal division and the exalting of dependency, a retreat from  basic literacy and decency, and a once-rich popular culture turned to junk.

These things happen because of the conscious choices of multitudes of individual human beings.  People take some huckster's notion of what is valuable, or righteous, or hip, and completely turn their backs on their own inner moral filters.  The buying-in gains momentum, and civilizational death is well under way.

Obfuscation vs. clarity on Capitol Hill

This week's House hearing on the IRS scandal was basically an arena in which truth and absurdity were pitted against each other like gladiators.  The cast of characters was memorable: Carter Hull, the tax-law specialist who revealed that it went up to the level of a political appointee at the agency, Elijah Cummings, whose capacity for asking ridiculous questions was on full display, and the thunderously marvelous Trey Gowdy, who never attempts to hide his disgust with the regime that has pretty much replaced the American government.

One new name now attains the status of regular mention in discussions of this scandal: William Wilkins.  He is that White House-appointed IRS counsel fingered by Hull.

And, no, Representative Cummings, the Most Equal Comrade did not pick up the phone and call the Cincinnati office.  If you want to know how these things work, you now have Mr. Wilkins with whom to inquire.

How's this for vulgar?

Kathleen Sebelius says that those who oppose FHer-care are of the same stripe as those who resisted civil rights advancements in the 1960s.

A nation of neutered cattle.  That's what they're after.

Give it up, you putrid Freedom-Haters

Some kind of "activists" are protesting near Florida Governor Rick Scott's office because he's not calling a special session of the state legislature to revamp the state's self-defense laws.

Knock it off.  Zimmerman and his legal team didn't even employ stand-your-ground as the basis for their defense.

Disarm America.  Turn it into a nation of neutered cattle, totally dependent on the state.  That is the goal of the left-of-center among us.

Post-Morsi Egypt is none too fond of Anne Patterson

One politician says flat out that she's a Muslim Brotherhood sleeper cell operative.  Does that seem outlandish?  Maybe not in light of her call for all MB members detained by the government to be released, a demand to which al-Sisi responded, basically, "Go pound sand."

A Washington Post editorial - editorial, not signed column by a particular pundit - says the MEC regime brought this on itself:

This collapse of U.S. prestige and influence in Cairo is in part the result of a growing xenophobia that has been stoked by all Egyptian parties. But it also reflects consistent missteps by the Obama administration, which over the course of two years has repeatedly failed to speak up clearly against human rights abuses or to use the leverage of the $1.3 billion in annual U.S. aid delivered to the military. Despite a law requiring a suspension of aid to countries following a coup against an elected government, the administration is refusing to designate the coup as a coup and is proceeding with a new delivery of F-16s to the armed forces.

The generals’ position is logical: Why heed advice from Washington if rejecting it will not stop the flow of U.S. arms? The contempt of civilian politicians for U.S. envoys is understandable as well: Why respect a government whose pro-democracy rhetoric has no connection to its actions?

Indeed.

Follow-up on the matter of the North Korean vessel impounded by Panama

Norks demanding release of the freighter and the crew.  Says Panama used a false pretext to detain it, and that the armaments on bard were old and had been refurbished by Cuba per an ongoing contract for such work.

Shouldn't be long until this is used as a pretext for something provocative.

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

The Most Equal Comrade ask his aides, a couple weeks after reelection, how to implement the FHer agenda without having to involve that messy legislative branch of the federal government.

Well, isn't this a noteworthy nugget of information?

Black Floridians disproportionally benefit from the state's stand-your-ground law.

The kind of deal you settle for when you've swallowed your principles with a big gulp of Potomac Kool-Aid

So the Senate avoided a showdown over Harry Reid's gut-the-filibuster machinations, but it came at a price.  Yes, the two present nominees to the NLRB will be withdrawn, but does anyone doubt that their replacements, which the deal obligates the Senate to vote on during this session, will have just as egregious a Freedom-Hater pedigree?  And the deal is already achieving results for the regime: Cordray is confirmed as CFPB head.

It's on purpose - today's edition

A new upside-the-head survey from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says that 74 percent of small businesses plan to cut hours and / or jobs as a result of FHer-care.

There's more:

— 77 percent continue to think the U.S. economy is on the wrong track. However, small businesses are more optimistic about their local economy and individual business.

— The majority (61 percent) of small businesses do not have plans to hire next year.

— Concerns about regulation have increased significantly from 35 percent last quarter to 42 percent now.

Small businesses are looking for leadership on issues that will remove barriers and encourage growth.

— 88 percent of all small businesses support addressing entitlement spending to resolve America's growing financial challenges and escalating debt.

— 83 percent support congressional efforts to reform the tax code — with the majority focusing on making it less complex.

— 81 percent of small businesses surveyed believe the immigration system is broken and needs to be reformed.

— In contrast to the president's recent speech pushing new energy regulations, 90 percent of small businesses support easing EPA regulations and opening up more federal lands for drilling.

Cloward and Piven time in post-America.

You're paying to be tyrannized

DoJ soliciting civil rights groups for anything they can use to make a civil case against Zimmerman.

That's what time it is, people.

In case you'd been wondering what had been happening with this regime . . .

Panama busts a North Korean ship - en route from Cuba - trying to pass through its canal carrying sophisticated missile parts.

When I read the original article, something just didn't sound like the author really bought her premise in her heart of hearts

Ashley McGuire at Acculturated on the NYT piece I posted about the other day.  She cites some important stats about date rape, sexually transmitted diseases, the number of women who feel out of control during hookups, and abortion among those under 24.

And then she gets to the real emptiness of NYT writer Kate Taylor's desperately arrived at conclusion:

Instead of continuing to regurgitate the same trope about how hooking up with someone with whom one can’t even stand to have coffee “is so empowering for women” (in the words of one woman profiled in the Times piece), could we all just back up and ask one question: Are serious relationships and marriage incompatible with career?

As a career-minded woman who fashioned herself marrying sometime at 30 after a couple years of dating, but instead met The One at 24 and got engaged after five months of dating, married six months later, and was pregnant 11 months after that, I can speak for myself: No. My career took off after getting married, and accelerated even more after having a baby.

Think about it. Having emotional support from a committed and lifelong partner, being liberated from the perils and anxieties of the dating world, spending your evenings and weekends with your best friend and love of your life is like constant defibrillation. Bad day at work? You have someone who will always take your call. Nervous before a speech? You have someone to listen to you rehearse over and over again. Just feeling down? You have someone to pop the cork off a bottle of wine and sit down and just listen.

Or you could sext or drunk dial your sex buddy?

As I said in my post the other day, I guess these gals have a pretty clear idea of where they want to go in life, but do they have any idea why?

Race hustlers eating their own - today's edition

The prez of the Norfolk, VA NAACP admits that Trayvon had a "shaky" past and, in remarks just before the verdict was reached, calls for his membership to react "logically" to whatever the jury decides. For this, calls for him to step down have commenced.

The wrong man in a job that shouldn't exist

The Senate is set to confirm Richard Cordray as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a position he assumed with a recess appointment - at the same time the Most Equal Comrade was making those unconstitutional appointments to the NLRB.

The CFPB is of recent vintage, having been creating as part of the ghastly Dodd-Frank behemoth.  Since it got busy under Cordray's leadership, its potential to be a privacy-obliterator has been realized in  spades.

Hope there's plenty of vocal opposition in the world's greatest deliberative body.

Where's Mr. Smith when we need him?

It looks like Harry Reid is pretty determined to gut the filibuster.

Just remember, pal, what goes around comes around.

At least the target demographic is starting to wake up and find this insulting

Leftist social policy has as its foundation condescension.  Make that feigned pity.  It's the tyranny of soft expectations codified into programs in areas such as education.

Take Alabama's Plan 2020, which last month got the nod of approval from one of the federal government's premier should-not-exist cabinet-level departments, namely, education.

Students will now be broken into predominantly race-based categories — American Indian; Asian or Pacific Islander; black; English language learners; Hispanic; multiracial; poor; special education; and white — and expectations will be lower or higher depending upon the group.

For example, 91.5 percent of white third-graders should be proficient in mathematics, whereas only 85.5 percent of Hispanic students and 79 percent of black students will be expected to pass, according to the Tuscaloosa News.

But some parents are pretty outraged:

“I think it’s dumbing our race down and preparing our boys for prison,” said Tim Robinson, a black man and father of two elementary school children. “The teachers aren’t even going to teach all of them anymore. Not the black boys and girls. And if we sit by and let this happen, it’s on us.”
Other minority parents echoed his concerns.

I so wish I never had to remark again on nonsense about "systemic injustice" and "racial privilege" and "historical disadvantage."  It makes me embarrassed for our entire society.  The entire forward movement of our culture is predicated on the most vulgar and childish notion imaginable.  Both guilt-ridden whites and opportunistic blacks perpetuate it.  I guess the big question is, what would be required to remove any enticements for them promulgating this dog vomit?

Division stoking is a lucrative line of endeavor

Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish explains how grievance theater works:

Grievance theater has been going national. It's no longer just extraordinary cases like Bernie Goetz's Death Wish moment on the number 2 train that briefly catch hold of the national conversation. The obsessive coverage of the so-called Jena 6 case, an incident of so little internal meaning, signaled that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would no longer just be able to drive a local controversy, they now had the freedom to drive national controversies any time they wanted to.

Trayvon Martin was their big moment with grievance theater being used as part of a presidential campaign on a national level.

The fortunes of too many black politicians have been tied to white guilt and black rage. The worst sort of black politician channels black rage to score points with black supporters while playing on the guilt of white voters promising to heal the social conditions that bring out that rage and protect them from its ravages. But never before has that game been played out of the White House.

The current occupant of the White House is a veteran of the corrupt urban political machine where there are only two games in town and when the money runs out, this is the one you play. The money is running out and accordingly we have been treated to an episode of grievance theater, with the man in the White House playing the familiar Sharptonesque role of healer and inciter.

What does it say about America that what was once a form of political theater rising out of the grimy urban blocks of failed cities is now a national art form? A local dysfunction has become a national dysfunction, not because every city has become New York and Chicago, but because the people at the center of power know urban politics, community organizing and racial consciousness theories and little else. Like some Third World communist backwater, we are being governed by men and women with no understanding of anything practical, but a thorough grounding in Marxism-Leninism. 

The overlords and self-appointed cultural arbiters know all about class oppression and gender fluidity and environmental justice, but they have no idea how to actually offer the world something of value and thereby make an honest living.

Our stark future

Wow.  Was this NYT feature on how there are lots of women in American colleges who are as comfortable with the hookup culture as men ever indicative of what we're becoming.

The hookup culture was already established by the mid-70s, when I was in college.  Back then, though, it was mostly hippie-type chicks who went in for random encounters.

Apparently the norm now is the driven, career-focused gal:

Ask her why she hasn’t had a relationship at Penn, and she won’t complain about thedeath of courtship or men who won’t commit. Instead, she’ll talk about “cost-benefit” analyses and the “low risk and low investment costs” of hooking up.

“I positioned myself in college in such a way that I can’t have a meaningful romantic relationship, because I’m always busy and the people that I am interested in are always busy, too,” she said.

“And I know everyone says, ‘Make time, make time,’ ” said the woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity but agreed to be identified by her middle initial, which is A. “But there are so many other things going on in my life that I find so important that I just, like, can’t make time, and I don’t want to make time.”

Clearly, this is making everybody hard - and, no, I don't mean it that way.  In fact, quite the opposite.  This attitude is not exactly conducive to rising libido, let alone good old romantic feelings:

 Some women also want to wait to see how men turn out as they advance through their 20s.

A., for example, said that she did not want to settle down until she could choose a partner knowing that his goals and values were fixed.“‘I’ve always heard this phrase, ‘Oh, marriage is great, or relationships are great — you get to go on this journey of change together,’ ” she said. “That sounds terrible.“I don’t want to go through those changes with you. I want you to have changed and become enough of your own person so that when you meet me, we can have a stable life and be very happy.”In the meantime, from A.’s perspective, she was in charge of her own sexuality.“I definitely wouldn’t say I’ve regretted any of my one-night stands,” she said.“I’m a true feminist,” she added. “I’m a strong woman. I know what I want.”

What kinds of guys do they find to hook up with?  I'd venture to say any guy who participates in a midnight tryst with the likes of these ladies has to be operating from a premise of at least a little misogyny.  You know, "She's hot and a great lay, but, man, is she a tough competitor in our business-case-study class.  I can't blink when we're presenting projects."  Gratifying at night, an opposing gladiator by day.

There's the future of post-America.  Technocratic young cell phone addicts networking and jockeying for position in the world of high achievement, while the rate of family formation and population replacement plummets to the levels of Greece or Italy.  Automatons who "fit sex in" the way they do workouts or errands like picking up the dry cleaning or getting the oil in their cars changed.  A generation so consumed with grabbing what it has always been told is the quality life that it can't bear to face the question of whether that life has any purpose whatsoever.

The reactions commence

Some are real humdingers:

New York Giants wide receiver Victor Cruz tweets that "George Zimmerman doesn't last a year before the hood catches up with him."

Beyonce calls for a moment of silence for Trayvon at her concert in Nashville.

NAACP calls on DoJ to pursue "civil rights charges."


Jesse Jackson says Trayvon was denied a jury of his peers because - well, do you really need LITD to spell out for you why Jesse has this view?

This wouldn't have happened when we were the United States of America

By now, you'v no doubt heard about the Community Relations Service, an obscure little agency within the Department of Justice, going to Sanford, Florida last year to, well, basically, stoke the racial angle of the Zimmerman case.  John Fund at NRO has the best coverage I've seen of what was really going on.

The website for the CRS claims it “does not take sides among disputing parties” and only provides “impartial conciliation and mediation services.” But the evidence of its activities in Sanford shows that it placed a large thumb on the scales of justice in the Zimmerman case. What can providing support for a “March for Trayvon Martin” rally headlined by the rabble-rousing Reverend Al Sharpton have to do with “conciliation and mediation”?

As Fund points out, this is Alinskyite community organizing, pure and simple.  Being done on your dime by the one department of the federal government we count on above all to be impartial.

It is so very late in the day.

So let them call us obstructionist

Here's an item on another subject (FHer-care) that demonstrates why Boehner's apparent position that the House "must do something" about immigration is so much ding-dong.

MSM poo-bahs like Chick Todd are calling Pubs obstructionist for not helping FHers to implement FHer-care.

And exactly why should we feel obligated to do so?  The public hates it and always has.  None of our folks supported it.  And

Since when do Republicans have some moral obligation to lay down their arms and embrace a destructive policy they oppose in their bones?  Do liberals ever behave this way?  Think of their furious response to the successful Iraq surge, their fight against Prop 8, their failed recall attempt in Wisconsin, and their disruptive abortion horde in Austin.  Atypical opposition is fine, so long as the Left’s wielding it.

Why?

Why "must" the House "do something" about immigration, as John Boehner apparently told a closed-door gathering of House Pubs?

Did any of those present ask this question, and, if not, why not?

We must consider the possibility that it is too late

It won't brighten your day, but David Solway's piece at PJ Media today is essential reading.  He's not the first to pose the question of whether we are at the tipping point, but he takes probably the broadest and deepest range of factors into consideration of any such thinker I've encountered.

The difference between history’s winners and losers obviously depends on the criteria we adopt to discriminate between success and failure on the level of nation, culture and civilization. For the purposes of this article, I will leave the display of military splendor and the creation of great art out of the equation. Neither military parades in a public square nor architectural wonders constitute a boon for ordinary people, even if they produce a feeling of national pride. Rather, I define success as a function of three complementary factors: the ability to survive intact for extended periods; the achievement of approximate prosperity in a largely impoverished world; and the fostering of a relatively free, confident and vigorous citizenry. 

He quotes fellow PJ Media writer Roger L. Simon at a particularly chilling juncture in the examination he develops (emphasis mine):

When one examines the social and political conduct of the United States today, one sees both anarchy and absolutism at work: a divided citizenry, giving the impression that America comprises really two — or more — competing nations, with the threat of secession floating in the air and economic chaos in the offing; and an increasingly autocratic political administration governing via executive privilege, the bypassing of Congress, the proliferation of draconian laws and regulations, internal espionage, stygian secrecy, constitutional delinquency, bureaucratic engorgement and the assumption of elitist privilege converging in the person of a “great leader.” The octopal state has its tentacles everywhere and its citizenry is subject to the invasive probing of a panoptic and all-encompassing entity. “1984 is here,” writes Roger Simon, “Someone is watching me, monitoring whatever I do. If I make a mistake, I will pay for it. My future will be bleak.” “And here’s the big problem,” he continues, “it’s hard to see how it’s going to get better.” 

There is a person in the comment thread underneath who chimes in a few times, trying to assume an offhand demeanor and hew to a "now-let's-not-get-all-doom-and-gloom-here" message, but his (or her, I suppose) choice of substantiation comes across as pinched and shallow in comparison to the fullness of Solway's perspective:

When people talk of "America in decline," just what are they referring to?

In an absolute sense, America continues to lead the world. The whole world uses Microsoft/Adobe software, Apple computers, Boeing aircraft.

But in a relative sense, the rest of the world is catching up. China and Japan are manufacturing powerhouses. India is starting to be a software development powerhouse. But we know how to fix that. We need to do more to improve our own economy, infrastructure, and education of the young, just as they are doing. 

So why are folks on PJ Media so upset?

In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon (who ran as a conservative Republican) had proposed universal catastrophic health insurance based on guess what? An employer mandate, and Medicaid cost sharing with the states! What Nixon was proposing wasn't all that different from ObamaCare today.

So why are some conservatives freaking out over ObamaCare? They didn't freak out over Nixon's similar proposal.

What I think is upsetting folks around here is not that America is in decline. It's that *Reaganism* is in decline. The voters re-elected Obama who is trying his best to end the Reagan free-market approach. Even in the GOP there is growing disenchantment with globalization.

For one thing, this commenter displays a very basic ignorance.  Nixon neither ran nor governed as a conservative.  More to the point, though, this technocratic view of what American (or Japanese) success consists of completely overlooks Solway's criteria for a successful civilization.  Japan and India and China hardly embody the fealty to freedom that distinguishes America from every other of history's nation-states, kingdoms or empires.  As I've said before here, a populace of IT whizzes and engineers and Six Sigma black belts hardly tells us whether the nation in which that populace lives has the spiritual fortification to thrive.

But that's the kind of "meh"-type shrugging that passes for deep examination these days.

Fortunately, real intellects like Solway continue to look into this matter of how long we have, and what might be done.

Why the IRS needs to be dismantled pronto - today's edition

In addition to the deliberate repression it engages in, it f---s up in really unacceptable ways, such as inadvertently posting 100,000 Social Security numbers on one of its websites.

Pubs have had a number of opportunities lately to torpedo FHer-care, but this one is the best yet

Last Friday's document-dump-style announcement that HHS will rely on people's own assertions about their eligibility for the "exchanges."

If Republicans were smart, they’d draft a bill based on the following mantra: “No Subsidization Without Verification.” That is, they should take a stand that nobody can receive subsidies through Obamacare before the government has a system in place that can independently verify the information as accurate.

If such a piece of legislation becomes law, it would effectively delay one of the central provisions of Obamacare indefinitely, because after more than three years, the government has not been able to figure out a way to meet the technological challenge of verification. As stated in the HHS rule published Friday: “After reviewing and considering the appropriate public comments and completing a technical analysis, we have concluded that the service described in the proposed rule is not feasible for implementation for the first year of operations. This service would involve a large amount of systems development on both the state and federal side, which cannot occur in time for October 1, 2013.”

Of course, Obama and his fellow Democrats would likely block such an attempt by Republicans. If they do so, they will be put into the position of explaining to the American people why they are willing to hand out aover a trillion dollars of taxpayer subsidies without proper procedures in place to prevent fraud. Preventing fraud in government programs can easily be a 70/30 issue with the American public. What makes this an especially indefensible position for Obama and Congressional Democrats is that they are already on record supporting tougher anti-fraud measures than the ones HHS just adopted, which is why they were originally a part of Obamacare. These anti-fraud measures are only being abandoned in the mad rush to shove as much taxpayer money out the door as quickly as possible.

Let's hope we hear from a Pub legislator on this real soon.

A wrench in the works

The al-Nour party, the only Islamist group to back Morsi's ouster in Egypt, is pulling out of talks with the military about structuring a return to civilian government.  It's in response to the massacre of Islamists. Two years ago, the party was a ragtag startup, but today, it wields considerable influence - and ability to complicate any moves toward democracy:

The party played a starring role in the military’s choreographed presentation of its takeover as the chance to reunify a country on the brink of civil war between opponents and supporters of Mr. Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood. But while Al Nour’s leaders say they intend to build bridges, some liberals say the party is pushing potentially divisive demands, from picking a new prime minister to keeping Islam prominent in any new constitution.

Over the weekend, Al Nour tested its leverage for the first time to force the retraction of an announced plan to name a liberal icon, the Nobel Prize-winning diplomat Mohamed ElBaradei, as interim prime minister.

“You just can’t do something like that, after we had appeared right next to you on the scene” at the televised announcement, Younis Makhyoun, a Nour party leader, said on Sunday. “We have grass roots,” Mr. Makhyoun added, “and they don’t agree on the choice of ElBaradei.”

Instead, state news media outlets reported on Sunday that the interim government was close to naming as acting prime minister Ziad Bahaa el-Din, a former head of Egypt’s investment authority. A Nour leader blessed him in a radio interview as “one of the liberal figures that we greatly respect.”

The party’s ability to block Mr. ElBaradei from the premiership raised new alarms from liberals about what the ultraconservatives, known as Salafis, might demand next, even after the expulsion of the more moderate Brotherhood.

“This stage of the revolution was against this type of Islamist party,” said Shady el-Ghazaly Harb, one of the organizers of the anti-Morsi protests. “We will not have any concessions when it comes to writing the constitution, and we will die for that,” he added, vowing that the charter should include “a separation of religion and politics, because parties should not be built on religion.”

And that's the thing about Arab countries.  Even their "moderates" are bad news for the West.  El Baradei, you'll recall, was the IAEA guy who helped doctor that agency's findings about Iran's nuclear program to make it look harmless.

So, if it has an acting general counsel, it doesn't need a quorum?

Kimberly Strassel at the WSJ on the autocratic style of the National Labor Relations Board's acting general counsel, Lafe Solomon.

In the last half-year, two Circuit Courts of Appeals have declared the NLRB's ability to issue rulings null and void, because the Most Equal Comrade's appointments to the board were unconstitutional.  That hasn't deterred Mr. Solomon.

The NLRB issued 550 decisions with just two board members before the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling in New Process Steel that the NLRB must have a three-person board quorum to operate. Mr. Solomon brags that of these 550, only about 100 were "impacted" by the Supreme Court's ruling—which, he writes, proves that the NLRB is justified in continuing to operate even at times when its "authority" has been challenged.

Mr. Solomon is in fact celebrating that of the 550 outfits harassed by an illegal, two-member board, only about 100 later decided they had the money, time and wherewithal to spend years relitigating in front of the labor goon squad. The NLRB is counting on the same outcome in Cablevision and other recent actions.

The board will push through as many rulings and complaints against companies as it can before the Supreme Court rules on its legitimacy. And it will trust that the firms it has attacked and drained will be too weary to then try for reversals. This is why the Obama administration waited so long to petition the Supreme Court to reverse Noel Canning. The longer this process takes, the more damage the NLRB can inflict on behalf of its union taskmasters.

Forget Congress.  The edicts of the NLRB, the EPA, the HHS Department and a sprawl of similar agencies, boards and departments answerable only to the overlords  is where the action is.

An idea worth dying for

Mr. Jefferson's document is a bit like the Bible: it loses none of its thunder with the passing of years.

The endgame of leftism: reinventing the definition of the human being

Robert Oscar Lopez at The American Thinker has a piece that, in layers, covers the implications of the newly energized push for normalization of homosexuality: judicial activism trumping legislative action, the further depletion of state and federal resources to subsidize sperm banks, the expansion - that is, distortion to the point of unrecognizability - of the notion of rights to include the "right" to parenthood, no matter by what route, and, finally, the blurring of gender distinctions to the point where identifying people as male or female is invalidated.

"Genetics is neither necessary nor sufficient."  That's a universalizing statement, and it points to a swollen state apparatus that will deem what is necessary and sufficient for parentage.  There's no mystery as to which interest groups will likely hold decisive sway over the government entities empowered to "assign" parentage in a world where parents are no longer the mother and father who produced a child by making love.

That's the essence of the matter.  By annihilating basic aspects of human identity, we're not merely redefining marriage and family, we're abolishing them, because we are assigning a new definition made up out of whole cloth to an even more basic term: love.


It's as ugly a world as anyone could imagine, and it's what we're rushing headlong into.

Our bloodthirsty partners in patty-cake - today's edition

The Taliban shoots up a Kabul guest house for US engineers and defense contractors, killing eight, in a pre-dawn attack.

That would be the same Taliban that the MEC regime intends to negotiate one-on-one with, a move which infuriated Karzai and caused him to pull out of talks about security arrangements for US troop drawdown.

Exactly why the whole damn thing needs to be scrapped

So the regime has decided, on its own, as it does in most situations, without involving the legislative branch, to delay FHer-care's employer mandate until 2015.  Isn't that convenient?  Takes a major problem with the whole undertaking off the table for the midterm election.  Except that planners at America's companies will take the delay in implementation into account, thereby perpetuating the on-hold status of much of the nation's business activity.

It's like the ultimate waiver, of which the regime has already dispensed many.

You bet this bunch is engaged in orchestrated decline.  They know their policies hobble America.  It's implementing them in a way that's at least minimally palatable that requires a bit of art and timing.

The individual mandate stays in place, though.  Any healthy twenty-something who, say, two years ago, did a bit of shopping for a health insurance policy and has a spectrum of numbers and options to compare is in for a major sticker shock when he or she does another round of shopping.  It's a different ballgame, now that he or she is made to subsidize a wave of older, less robust comrades.  I doubt if America's young adults are stupid enough to swallow that one.

Secretary Global Test's - and the MEC's - obsession with small potatoes in a time of multiple crises

There's Syria, Iran, Egypt, Snowden, to name the top-tier examples.

But what has Global Test all energized?  Flogging the dead horse of renewed peace efforts between Israel and Fatah and / or Hamas:

 he’s making it clear that he either doesn’t care much about what are obviously far more critical problems or illustrating that the president has given him the green light to concentrate on a dead-end diplomatic shuttle because in this administration the secretary of state doesn’t have much influence on American foreign policy.

The simplistic and vulgar appeal to demographic victimhood is not carrying the day in this instance

Andrew C. McCarthy at PJ Media on why the prosecution's case in the Zimmerman trial is collapsing like a cheap card table.