Where the Syrian cluster-you-know-what stands on the last day of August 2013

A few thoughts, in no particular order, on the current juncture of the Syria situation.  It seems the US wouldn't be so completely behind the eight ball if we'd pursued a different course in a few areas:

Israel has been quite effective at thwarting the Assad regime's mischief for some time.  We'd be in a far better position if we'd acted like an ally to Israel over the last few years:

According to media reports, the IDF has conducted numerous strikes inside Syria to prevent the transfer of advanced weaponry, including missiles from Syria to Hezbollah.

Rather than assist Israel in its efforts that are also vital to US strategic interests, the US has been endangering these Israeli operations. US officials have repeatedly leaked details of Israel's operations to the media. These leaks have provoked several senior Israeli officials to express acute concern that in providing the media with information regarding these Israeli strikes, the Obama administration is behaving as if it is interested in provoking a war between Israel and Syria. The concerns are rooted in a profound distrust of US intentions, unprecedented in the 50-year history of US-Israeli strategic relations.

During that time frame, the Most Equal Comrade also should have been speaking sternly to Putin instead of volunteering to be his bitch.  Russia would not be treating us with at least quite such contempt at this point.


The Most Equal Comrade and his minions should not have been gutting the defense budget.  It would be nice if the Pentagon could pay for any Syria action out of its operating funds rather than having to go to Congress hat in hand for extra money.

We are experiencing UK PM Cameron's humiliation secondhand.  Did you know he is the first PM to have a call for military action turned down by Parliament since 1782?

NATO is not on board, either.

SO the MEC is going it alone, and hasn't done himself any favors given the way he's telegraphed his intention to respond inadequately.

And Nancy Pelosi's new hawk stance is rather rich, given her coffee klatsch with Assad during the W era.

So there you have it.  Whether the MEC regime does or doesn't lob missiles at sites in Syria, the Mideast is guaranteed to become yet more inflamed, the US and the West generally experience yet a further diminished stature on the world stage, and there is no justice for the thousand-plus gassed Syrians.

Feel free to use this the next time some Kool-Aid drinker attempts to defend the Most Equal Comrade's foreign policy.

 

Electrifying

Not much time to blog right now, but thought it was important to provide at least a brief report on the first day of the Americans for Prosperity Defending the American Dream Summit - Right Online Conference at Universal Resort in Orlando.

Loaded up a bag with literature from exhibitor booths.  Met a lot of fellow bloggers, whom I'm now following on Twitter.

Breakout sessions in the morning.  One on how the left uses its conferences and tech savvy, and what we can learn from them.  Panelists: Francesca Chambers, Patrick Ruffini, Michael Moroney.  Next up, social media activist bootcamp with Erik Telford, Jason Cline, Abigail Alger and Melissa Clouthier.  Then "Get Past the Gotchas" with Dana Loesch, Lars Larson and Tom Jenney.  Learned a lot about how to stay in control of a debate and frame a message in terms of the point you want to make.

After lunch, the opening session of the Summit.  Nonstop thunder from Bobby Jindal, Rick Scott,  David Koch, Marco Rubio, David Horowitz, Rick Perry, Arthur C. Brooks.

Fabulous, all, but for me, the real lightning crackled when Horowitz not only upped the volume level but spoke plainly about just who the Most Equal Comrade and the Freedom-Haters are.

Now, off to dinner with the Indiana AFP folks and then a party in the park at which Michelle Malkin will speak.

Red lines impulsively drawn are no substitute for principle-based policy

Great Stanley Kurtz post at NRO's The Corner today.  He says that the MEC, guided  by a Samantha Powers-ian to mideast policy, shooting off his mouth about chemical weapons, isolated from any larger context other than the mixed signals sent by previous cozyings-up to Assad, put us in the position where "if we go light, we'll seem like paper tigers," but if we strive in earnest to depose Assad we kick over a geostrategic hornet's nest.

Don’t draw red lines ahead of time based on non-strategic considerations. Insofar as Power’s commitments diverge from our strategic interests, America will be harmed by following through on them. If, on the other hand, we protect our interests, undercutting Power’s message in the process, the cycle of failed deterrence will start again.
This is the dangerous mess Obama’s utopianism has landed us in.

And as if you'd thought Libya was not still a middle eastern hot spot

"Armed groups" have seized a very major oilfield in the western part of the country.

Why meetings of the kind I attended last night are so important

They give firepower to rank-and-file conservative House members to stand up to John Boehner:

The House GOP’s conference call last week turned “ugly,” in the words of one Republican on the call, after Speaker John Boehner announced his intention to pursue a short-term continuing resolution to fund the government, hinting it would not use the bill to pick a fight over the implementation of Obamacare.

Representative Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia, one of about a dozen voices who said they were feeling the heat back home, told Boehner to “go back to the drawing board.”

“We hear it in our town halls, we hear it our one-on-one meetings with constituents. We hear it when we’re at county fairs or events we’ve attended during the August recess, of which there are many. And the message all over the country, at least as relayed by members on that phone call, is that this is the overriding issue that is being discussed. Way more than immigration, way more than the debt,” says Representative Cynthia Lummis, who spoke up on the call herself.

They listen to us.

 

No, he wasn't, Senator

Jeffrey Lord at The American Spectator does a superb job of debunking Scott Brown's approving claim that Dutch had Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome.

Because the MEC regime didn't bother with earning our adversaries' and enemies' respect early on

Senior officials in Syria and Iran say Israel gets it if we let loose with the missiles.  Israelis are taking it seriously.  They're stocking up on gas masks.

Russia and now China warn of "catastrophic" consequences of the West acting without consulting the UN Security Council.

And Saudi senior intelligence official Prince Bandar has offered Russia an odd but disturbing half-extortion-half-bribe scenario if it drops its alliance with Syra.  He says he can make Russia an irreversibly major player on the world oil market, but then adds this:

 [H]e also hinted at Chechen terrorist attacks on Russia’s Winter Olympics in Sochi if there is no accord. “I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics next year. The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are controlled by us,” he allegedly said.

Prince Bandar went on to say that Chechens operating in Syria were a pressure tool that could be switched on an off. “These groups do not scare us. We use them in the face of the Syrian regime but they will have no role in Syria’s political future.”

When you don't do the right thing early on, doing the right thing late in the day can have unsavory consequences.

All it takes is courage and principle

Heritage Action's Defund Now tour rolled into Indy this evening.  Here's Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint offering strategy ideas for grassroots involvement.  Raphael Cruz (Senator Ted's dad) was there to open things with a prayer and close the occasion with a rousing speech.  The main thing I got from the evening was that it is really going to take everyday folks getting vocal, getting involved, in order to pull the plug on FHer-care.

The toxic confluence of patty-cake and reset

So the Russian foreign minister is warning Secretary Global Test against a US military action against the Assad regime.

Once again, as in Egypt and Libya, we find ourselves in a situation in which we're now waxing indignant against a middle eastern dictator, perhaps getting ready to lob cruise missiles at his strongholds, - but only after we've passed the kind of global test from whence the Secretary of State gets his moniker - after having regarded him as a key strategic asset in regional affairs.

In fact, when Global Test was a Senator, he was downright cozy with the Alawite Baathist in Damascus.

In February 2009, Kerry led a delegation there to engage Syria. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told visiting US members of Congress on Saturday that the United States should ‘move away from a policy based on dictating decisions.’ Assad's guests on Saturday included US Senator John Kerry, who headed the third delegation this week to call on the Syrian president's door as Washington reviews its policies toward countries the previous administration regarded as hostile. Assad told his visitors that future relations should be based on a ‘proper understanding’ by Washington of regional issues and on common interests, SANA news agency reported,” AFP reported at the time.

AFP followed up with this report after the visit stating that Kerry believes "Syria is an essential player in bringing peace and stability to the region":

“President Barack Obama's administration considers Syria a key player in Washington's efforts to revive the stalled Middle East peace process, US Senator John Kerry said in Damascus on Thursday. ‘Syria is an essential player in bringing peace and stability to the region,’ Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a speech after meeting President Bashar al-Assad. ‘Both the United States and Syria have a very deep interest... in having a very frank exchange on any differences (and) agreements that we have about the possibilities of peace in this region,’ he said in the statement.”

[snip]

Kerry praised Assad later in 2011 as being a "very generous" man. "Well, I personally believe that -- I mean, this is my belief, okay? But President Assad has been very generous with me in terms of the discussions we have had. And when I last went to -- the last several trips to Syria -- I asked President Assad to do certain things to build the relationship with the United States and sort of show the good faith that would help us to move the process forward," said Kerry at a think tank.

The linked Weekly Standard  has a photo of the Assads and Senator and Mrs. Global Test having an intimate dinner.

And, of course, through all of our half-cocked attempts at consistent, grown-up policy, Russia has been Assad's staunch ally.  It's also been over this period of time that Putin and the Most Equal Comrade have established a relationship wherein the MEC is Putin's bitch.

Because this regime so utterly disdains America's leadership role on the world stage, it never occurred to any of our declinist overlords to pursue a policy of sternness toward Assad - pressuring him to not be a threat to Israel, and to back out of his alliance with Iran - and have actually frank discussions with Russia on these matters.

And so here we are.  Another scenario in which all good options are gone.

 

Because FHer fantasies of a "fair" world are more important than actual lives of individuals in supposedly disadvantaged demographic groups

Along the lines of yesterday's post about school vouchers, Heather MacDonald, writing at NRO has a really heart-wrenching story about a high school senior from South Central Los Angeles who was admitted to UC Berkeley under affirmative action circumstances and quickly went from belwilderment about the whole notion of college-level standards to a self-esteem in utter shreds.

A counselor in the campus psychologist’s office urged him to scale back his academic ambitions. “Maybe he didn’t have to be the straight-A kid he’d been in high school anymore,” the counselor advised him. This “be content with mediocrity” message is hardly a recipe for future success, but it sums up the attitude that many a struggling affirmative-action “beneficiary” has adopted to get through college.

The black-themed dorm and student center also operated exactly as one would expect, confirming their members’ belief in their own racial oppression:

“Sometimes we feel like we’re not wanted on campus,” Kashawn said, surrounded at a dinner table by several of his dorm mates, all of them nodding in agreement. “It’s usually subtle things, glances or not being invited to study groups. Little, constant aggressions.”

Of course, the only reason that Kashawn and many of his fellow dorm mates are at Berkeley is because the administration “wants” them so much, regardless of their chances of success. It is unlikely, however, that African American Studies 5A discussed the academic-achievement gap in Berkeley’s admissions between black, white, and Asian students. That gap, not racism, explains why Kashawn is not a sought-after addition to study groups. (Kashawn came to Berkeley through one of the University of California’s many desperate efforts to evade California’s ban on governmental racial preferences: an admissions guarantee for students in the top decile of their high school classes, regardless of their test scores or the caliber of their school.)

MacDonald tells it like it is:

Racial preferences are not just ill advised, they are positively sadistic. Only the preening self-regard of University of California administrators and faculty is served by such an admissions travesty. Preference practitioners are willing to set their “beneficiaries” up to fail and to subject them to possible emotional distress, simply so that the preference dispensers can look out upon their “diverse” realm and know that they are morally superior to the rest of society. 

New Mexico's Supreme Court is at war with the First Amendment right to freedom of religion

You've probably heard by now about the NM Supreme Court deciding that a wedding photographer had to take the business of a lesbian couple.  Tom Trinko at American Thinker looks into the deeply flawed "reasoning" behind the ruling:

The first glaring error is the Court's assumption that the New Mexico state legislature can make laws unconstrained by the constitutional rights of the citizens of New Mexico.

Liberals in general agree with that idea to the extent that it is useful for their agenda -- which is why, when asked, so many liberals in government can't explain how their legislation is within the powers given to them by the Constitution but can quickly explain why the Constitution requires that pornography be legal.

But given that Americans have repudiated neither the rule of law nor the Constitution, it is unclear how any rational judge can conclude that forcing people to do things they believe to be immoral is consistent with those individuals' First Amendment rights. 

The second glaring error is that this decision is content-based.  We all know that if a liberal photographer had refused to photograph a neo-Nazi skinhead wedding, the New Mexico Supreme Court would have ruled differently, assuming the case had even come to trial.  Even more importantly, note that given the New Mexico Supreme Court's ruling, if a gay photographer refused to photograph a Christian wedding, he'd be protected by law because Christians, unlike gays, do not enjoy special status under New Mexico law.  No reasonable person can believe that the Constitution supports fundamental rights only for specially protected groups, but not for citizens in general.

The third glaring error is the assumption that one group of citizens must surrender its rights so that another group can have special rights.  It's critical to note that the gay couple in question were easily able to find another wedding photographer, so they did not suffer in any real way.  Second, note that the issue in question was not the photographer's attacking the gays in any way, nor was the photographer trying to prevent the gays from being "married."  Rather, the couple apparently has the right to compel the photographer to violate her deeply held religious beliefs.

Trinko doesn't take on the public-accomodation aspect of the court's argument, but that doesn't hold water, either.  The restaurants and lunch counters of the 1950s deep South denied service to blacks, not on the basis of objecting to being a party to sin, but rather on the basis of - well, racism, the belief that blacks were not fit biologically to take sustenance in the same environment as whites.

This is a prime example of why I cede not an inch in calling these people freedom-haters.

Martin Luther King III opts for vulgarity over greatness

He had to go there. At yesterday's 50th anniversary commemoration of his father's speech, he played the Trayvon card.

Bookworm examines the levels of the wrongness of this:

Here are a few facts to challenge MLK III’s infantile remonstrance against “racism” in America:

1. Content of character: The undisputed facts show that Trayvon Martin was a hulking thug who used drugs, played with guns, got into fights, skipped school, and talked trash. The same undisputed facts show that George Zimmerman was a neighborhood favorite who went the extra mile for everyone, regardless of the color of their skin – so much so that he spent enormous time trying to help a young black man he believed the police had unjustly targeted.

2. Stand Your Ground laws: Neither the prosecution nor the defense breathed a word about Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law (also known as the Castle doctrine). Instead, this was an out-and-out case of old-fashioned self-defense. The evidence showed that Trayvon was sitting on top of Zimmerman trying to bash his brains out on the pavement. Zimmerman didn’t have the choice of standing his ground or trying to flee when he was shot. The situation had devolved in “it’s either him or me.”

3. There was no profiling. Police profile. Zimmerman is not a police officer. He is an ordinary citizen. Ordinary citizens observe, make decisions, and react as they see fit. You cannot enact federal laws imposing on all ordinary citizens some bizarre standard by which they’re not allowed to defend themselves against black aggressors, because to do so is “profiling.”

The only thing the MLK III got right is that racism lives today. But the racism in the Zimmerman case wasn’t Zimmerman’s racism against Trayvon. Every bit of evidence introduced at trial or revealed by fact-finders showed that George Zimmerman was a mixed-race man who treated all races with respect.

The real racism in this case was that shown by the race hustler’s in the Democrat party and the media (but I repeat myself), who made the decision to lynch George Zimmerman during that brief window of time when they thought he was white. Even when they were corrected, and learned that Zimmerman self-identifies as Hispanic, they created a bizarre new racial classification called “white-Hispanic” so that they could play out their revolting racist fantasies against him.

And so the memory of another moment of national greatness gets profaned.

What ought to be the most impartial cabinet-level department, but is in fact Eric Holder's fiefdom, thinks racial balance is more important than kids getting the best possible education

DoJ is going after Louisiana's school voucher program, on - are you ready for this? - the grounds that if those vouchers are used in any district that is still under a federal desegregation order.  Because that would create "racial imbalance," doncha know.  And fairness by the FHers' standards is more important, doncha know than actual people of the black race getting the best education possible.

The overlords actually think this way.

These people outdo themselves on a daily basis now

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius says amnesty for illegal aliens is necessary for FHer-care to work properly.  Comes right out and says that, in addition to amnesty's power to make Freedom-Haters feel good about themselves for being compassionate, it swells the ranks of those shopping on the exchanges.

Oh, and, for good measure, she is sending government agents into the dark corners of American society where illegal aliens understandably go to keep a low profile and reach out to them, doncha know:

According to CNS News, Sebelius recommended that, until illegal immigrants can access ObamaCare, they continue to obtain medical care at community health centers where they will find federally funded, “culturally competent” health care providers “who actually speak the language and can reach out to a neighborhood.

”Sebelius also announced that the Obama administration has doubled the size of the Public Health Service Corps, “which, to me, is one of the great, well-kept secrets in America. It’s like the Peace Corps for health workers,” she said.

“If you agree to serve in an underserved area, the federal government helps pay off the student loans and debt that a lot of health professionals carry,” Sebelius explained. “And what we find is that when people actually take up service in the National Health Service Corps, they stay in the communities that they are serving long beyond their assignments. So there will be continued access for undocumented.”

And, as always, this crud is being paid for with money seized from you at gunpoint.

The MEC's modus operandi on full display

With all that is on our national plate, the Most Equal Comrade has decided that this is the time to unveil a new approach to making higher education affordable.  No, really, this is a new approach, newer than the one from his first term, because the failure of that one to solve anything has to be obscured with a new, new plan:

"We've got a crisis in terms of college affordability and student debt," said Mr. Obama, without a trace of irony at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The same man who three years ago forced through a plan to add $1 trillion in student loans to the federal balance sheet over a decade said on Thursday, "Our economy can't afford the trillion dollars in outstanding student loan debt, much of which may not get repaid because students don't have the capacity to pay it."

True to form, his need to deflect blame from himself requires a willingness to throw some of his loyal fellow Freedom-Haters under the bus:

Mr. Obama specifically blamed colleges and universities for charging too much. "Not enough colleges have been working to figure out how do we control costs, how do we cut back on costs," he said. His solution is for the federal government to rate colleges on their effectiveness and efficiency, and then to allocate federal subsidies to the schools that Washington believes are providing the best education at the lowest cost.

Particularly jarring for Mr. Obama's fans in the faculty lounge, he talked about them on Thursday in the same disrespectful manner that he normally reserves for entrepreneurs. "And I've got to tell you ahead of time, these reforms won't be popular with everybody, especially those who are making out just fine under the current system. But my main concern is not with those institutions; my main concern is the students those institutions are there to serve," said the President.

Conservative readers may be tempted to chuckle here. And we concede that this latest Obama regulatory onslaught couldn't happen to a nicer bunch than the university elite who did so much to elect him. But while shifting control of universities from lefty professors to the U.S. Department of Education may seem like a transition between six and a half-dozen, it is not.

As maddening as it can be to see how liberal academics spend the wealth created by hard-working citizens, Americans should think long and hard before allowing the federal government to dominate a system of higher education that is still by all accounts the envy of the world. If the feds are deciding what a quality education is in order to dole out billions in annual aid—in an era when most students can't afford to matriculate without some form of aid—Washington will certainly dominate. Tying aid to whatever the bureaucrats decide is the right tuition is a back-door form of price controls. Even more disturbing is the idea that a federal political authority will decide which curricula at which institutions represent a good educational value. 

 

And on top of that, he proposes capping the paying-back of student loans at 10 percent of the incomes of those bearing the obligation.

These people will try anything, no matter how convoluted and lacking in hoss sense, to avoid the normal-people free-market solutions to society's dilemmas.  And the reason why is pretty plain to see:  There's no role for them if people make their own economic choices.

 

Why control of the culture is so important

The cultural arbiters of Freedom-Hating Post-America have really outdone themselves this time.  NBC_TV's Law and Order SVU series is filming an episode in which Cybil Shephard plays a beloved Southern chef who guns down a hoodie-wearing black kid.

Their vulgarity and willingness to foment the unraveling of civil society knows no bounds.

Meanwhile, here's what's going on in Reality-Land: this and this.

Notice that the story from Washington state doesn't mention the suspects' race until the second-to-last paragraph.  The story from Oklahoma doesn't mention it at all.

Along with entertainment, education is, of course, a huge component of our culture.  Chuck Ross at The Daily Caller looks into just who the hate-crime-hoax perpetrators at Oberlin College were:

One of the two students removed from Oberlin College earlier this year for allegedly circulating virulently racist, anti-Jewish and anti-gay messages around campus  is an ardent leftist and committed supporter of President Barack Obama, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.

Dylan Bleier, one of the two students, organized a voter registration drive on behalf of Obama before the 2008 election. That voter drive is still listed on the website for Organizing for Action, the non-profit group whose mission is to advance Obama’s agenda.

[snip]

On his now-defunct LinkedIn page, Bleier noted that he was the founder and president of the Ithaca High School for Obama club. He also identified himself as a member of the Oberlin College Democrats.
Bleier also listed his participation in a group called Ithaca White Allies Against Structural Racism. He joined the group in May of this year, he reported. He said the group’s goal is to “eradicate structural racism in Tompkins County [NY], via forums discussing racism.”
On his Twitter account, which he protected after TheDCNF reached him on Tuesday, Bleier hailed Obama’s comments on George Zimmerman, tweeting: “Zimmerman is just the tip of the iceberg, a single highly visible symptom of the racist system that is ‘succeeding’ in the US.”
Bleier also describes himself on Twitter as an “atheist/pacifist/environmentalist/libertarian socialist/consequentialist.”

[snip]

[A recent Obelin grad who knew both perpetrators] thinks that Bleier and Alden were likely behind all of the hateful graffiti that marred that campus during the string of incidents in February. He also said that Alden and Bleier had been suspended and removed from campus before the March 4 report of someone wearing KKK attire.

What would it take to bring the societal temperature back down?   That's not a rhetorical question.  I don't have the answer.

Really get your brain around this; I implore you

A Department of Homeland Security employee in charge of buying ammo for the government runs a hate-whitey website.

Ayo Kimathi, who calls himself the “Irritated Genie,” told his supervisors that the website was set up to sell concert and lecture videos.

But the report showed the site's content strayed far beyond concert promotion, warning about a coming race war. His website, “War on the Horizon,” declares, “in order for Black people to survive the 21st century, we are going to have to kill a lot of whites – more than our Christian hearts can possibly count,” the Alabama-based SPLC said in its report. 

One of Kimathi’s former supervisors at DHS told SPLC’s Hatewatch that, “Everybody is the office is afraid of him,” and that his co-workers are “afraid he will come in with a gun and someday go postal.”

The supervisor, who was not named, continued, “I am astounded he’s employed by the federal government, let alone Homeland Security.”

Kimathi, who works for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is a division of DHS, reportedly got the go-ahead from the government to create and maintain his website. 

That’s because as a law enforcement agency employee, he is required to get permission in writing if he engages in outside activities which includes everything from working a second job to volunteering.

The SPLC says Kimathi obtained official permission but did it by misrepresenting the true nature of his site.

I had real reservations back in 2001 about creating yet another cabinet-level bureaucracy.  This is the kind of fallout you get.   DHS hasn't panned out to be worth it, it seems to me.  We already have a Defense Department and a slew of intelligence agencies.  Those organizations seem less conducive, I think, to situations in which a clear wacko is in charge of procuring massive amounts of ammo.

The regime's most exquisite tactic for fomenting fundamental transformation: trivialization

Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Libya are in flames.  Hizbollah is firing rockets into Israel from southern Lebanon.  Our relationship with Russia is in tatters.  Unemployment is going back up dramatically.  Major American cities are going bankrupt.  One in six Americans is on food stamps.

The White House thinks this is an appropriate time to host a roundtable on issues affecting bisexuals.

“Participants and administration officials will discuss a range of topics including health, HIV/AIDS, domestic and intimate partner violence, mental health, and bullying,” White House LGBT liaison Gautam Raghavan said.

The stinking MEC White House actually has one of those.  And we pay the mother------'s salary with money seized at gunpoint from us.

Eric Holder's fiefdom hates fair elections

The DOJ intends to sue Texas over its voter ID law. 

Is anybody going to do anything about it?

The chemical weapons attack in Syria, that is.  Claudia Rossett says we shouldn't hold our breath.  The post-American MEC regime?  Not likely.  The UN?  Less so.

And, she says, it's even less likely that anyone will fully explore the Syria - North Korea link.

It's on purpose - today's edition

How's this for an eye-popper?

`Outside of the federal government's Bureau of Labor statistics, the Gallup polling organization also tracks the nation's unemployment rate. While the BLS and Gallup findings might not always perfectly align, the trends almost always do and the small statistical differences just haven't been worthy of note. But now Gallup is showing a sizable 30 day jump in the unemployment rate, from 7.7% on July 21 to 8.9% today.

This is an 18-month high.

Wowee zowee!

The MEC regime is right on track with its aim to bring the masses to their knees, begging the leviathan state for a bit of daily gruel.

Looks like LITD has to post about race again

Looks like one of the Oklahoma killers of the Australian athlete / student had posted an expression of general hatred toward white people on Facebook just hours before the foul deed.

Some refreshing departures from FHer orthodoxy on the part of some of Hollywood's most well-respected

There was Ashton Kutcher's speech about opportunity looking a lot like work.

Now comes James Woods's tweets about the Benghazi scandal and what the H-word Creature has to answer for.

Kudos to these guys for the courage to speak the plain truth.

The toxic fruits of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome

American Action Network is an outfit run by former Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman.  It thinks amnesty for illegal aliens is a good thing.  Well, okay, but what's up with its use of FHer data to try to substantiate its claim that amnesty would create jobs?

According to the information about the data that the group has disclosed, what is known about AAN’s work is that it used economic data that President Barack Obama’s White House has touted after the Institutional Left funded the production of the research. The Ford Foundation and the Unbound Philanthropy, two different liberal foundations that are connected with and support the George Soros-funded National Immigration Forum (NIF), and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, another bastion of the Institutional Left, funded research and a report by Regional Economic Models, Inc. (REMI), according to a disclosure at the bottom of the first page of the report. That REMI report, published on July 17, 2013, argued would create hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the first few years after an amnesty.

President Obama’s White House then took that report and on August 1, used it to arguethat “[c]ommonsense immigration reform will strengthen the U.S. economy and create jobs.”

“Independent studies affirm that commonsense immigration reform will increase economic growth by adding more high-demand workers to the labor force, increasing capital investment and overall productivity, and leading to greater numbers of entrepreneurs starting companies in the U.S.,” the White House wrote on its official website, before again endorsing the Senate “Gang of Eight” bill as one that it argued would economically boost the country and individual states.

Pro-rule-of-law folks in Congress are hip to what's going on:

In response to these revelations, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) told Breitbart News on Tuesday that the group needs to either release the relevant information or pull it down from its website. “The American Action Network should either release their methodology or remove the claims from their website,” Sessions said in a statement provided to Breitbart News.
Sessions also told Breitbart News that the Senate Gang of Eight bill’s failure to stem the tide of future illegal immigration—according to the same CBO report that AAN says it cited here, the Senate bill will only at best reduce illegal immigration 30 to 50 percent from current levels—and President Obama’s demonstrated willingness to not enforce laws like E-Verify, many illegal immigrants would continue taking jobs away from American citizens and legal immigrants.
Sessions’ communications director Stephen Miller told Breitbart News, too, that even if one were to believe these jobs numbers from AAN, that purported increase in the amount of jobs would still not be enough to match the number of new people the Senate bill or a plan like it would bring into the country via legalization or via new unprecedentedly massive increases in legal immigration to ensure American citizens and legal immigrants get jobs first.
"Based on conservative CBO projections, the senate bill would add approximately 46 million immigrants by 2033,” Miller said in an email. “Even using AAN's inflated claim of 6 million jobs - for which they provide no supporting data - that's not nearly enough to keep up with the expansion of guest workers and low-skill immigration contained in the proposal.  That's why CBO reports that joblessness will grow, wages will fall, and per-capita GNP will shrink for the next 25 years.”
Rep. Steve King (R-IA) told Breitbart News that “whatever the logical basis for” AAN’s claim that passing an amnesty would “create” 13,298 “jobs” in his district, Iowa’s fourth, “I’d like to see it.”

You don't blur lines.  You act according to your principles.  Somebody needs to tell Norm Coleman, Douglas Holtz-Eakin and their ilk that that's an indispensible part of the definition of a conservative.

 

Gradually getting the masses accustomed to the muddying of the distinctions between the three branches of government

Very important Charles C. W. Cooke piece at NRO today on the recent trend toward crafting legislation that is open-ended and leaves much - way too much - to the discretion of cabinet-level department secretaries, executive-branch agencies, and regulation-happy bureaucrats.  Cooke cites FHer-care, Dodd-Frank and the current approach to immigration as glaring examples.

Obamacare, which makes the Senate’s immigration bill look like an exercise in legislative restraint, contains over 2,500 references to the secretary’s discretion, 700 cases in which the secretary “shall,” 200 instances in which the secretary “may,” and 139 cases in which the secretary “determines.” Its twin, Dodd-Frank, which effectively allows an unelected Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to police the personal-finance sector, is little different, aggregating the power of the three branches into one, stripping Congress of its traditional capacity to set an agency’s budget and severely limiting the courts’ opportunity to review the CFPB’s legal interpretations. This is law, Jim — but not as we know it.

Have we become so inured to this blurring of boundaries that we think nothing of this kind of statement?

“If you look at the polling” on Obamacare, David Axelrod explained on MSNBC’s Morning Joe last week, “the majority of the people say let’s move forward and fix it along the way — and that’s exactly what the president will do.” This, to say the least, is a rather novel theory of the American political system. Whether the “majority of the people say let’s move forward” on a particular project or not is rarely the salient question. The United States is a republic. It is not a monarchy, it is not a majoritarian democracy, and it is certainly not a direct democracy. Its highest value, in fact, is “nomocratic” — that is to say, that the rule of law and the overarching constitutional system trumps pretty much everything else.

As Cooke points out, the way the regime sells this stuff is by portraying every issue as being so pressing and so urgently requiring governmental action, that we're perfectly justified in dispensing with Constitutional niceties.

It has to stop.

 

Squeezing the masses so they'll have to turn to government

UPS is dropping 15,000 employee spouses' health-insurance benefits, specifically citing FHer-care.

Because we're so ecumenical, doncha know

The timing of al-Jazeera's launch of its US network is rather exquisite, is it not?  It comes just as the Arab world turns against the pro-Muslim Brotherhood country that owns al-Jazeera, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia says it is taking note of who is supporting Egypt's military and who is supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.

Talk about a tinder box.

Meanwhile, we tacitly endorse the position of the one country in the middle east that the rest of the region is none too pleased with.   As if we need to be the object of any more raw feelings.

An actual policy to foster actual stability

It's pretty obvious to nearly everyone that the "Arab spring" was no such thing, and that Jeffersonian democracy is not in the cards for Egypt for the foreseeable future.  That is why the US ought to be supporting Egypt's military.

Two cogent arguments for such a course appear today: one from Bret Stephens at the WSJ, and one from Thomas Sowell at Townhall.

Preening and posturing ain't gonna cut it.  We have a certain array of options in this situation, and it doesn't include any that we'd rather have.

The meticulous editing of reality by the social-justice crowd

The activist arm of the Quaker denomination, the American Friends Service Committee, has a long history of fellow-traveling and taking up causes that don't exactly further the pacifism it claims to be motivated by.

Is it aware of this, and therefore really about some other agenda?  Perhaps so motivated by this other agenda that it is willing to spoil real peaceful cooperation, as well as the fostering of prosperity, between groups with a history of tense relations?  A current project of the group would indicate so.  Along with Jewish Voices for Peace, it held a Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions camp this summer.  But the aim was not to target Israel as a nation, doncha know:

There’s a very telling remark at the end of Philadelphia Jewish Exponent’s Philly-Based Quaker Group Criticized For BDS Camp:

Alexis Moore, an AFSC spokeswoman, said her group rejects “the idea that BDS is anti-Semitic. We are not targeting a country.” Instead, it is targeting specific companies like Israeli-owned Sodastream, that has its home fountain soda maker factory on the West Bank. “We see nothing anti-Semitic in the use of these non-violent tactics. Our work is rooted in human rights and equal justice for everyone.”

By mentioning SodaStream she gives away her game.

You see, SodaStream is a prime example of coexistence. Palestinian workers there make good salaries and have room for advancement. If there was a place in the Middle East that demonstrated “equal justice,” SodaStream would be an excellent example of that.

Willing to foul up economic opportunity for the group it claims to champion, all in the name of an abstract ideological principle.  That's the Freedom-Hater way!

 

Vintage MEC

His weekly radio address yesterday was a classic exercise in vulgar caricature and fear-mongering as only the Most Equal Comrade can dish out.  The subject was FHer-care, and his method of persuasion was one that is quickly becoming the technique of choice for FHers on any subject: Those who oppose statism want anyone besides themselves to be marginalized.

Not that my first inclination today is to post about race, but circumstances necessitate it

There's the rodeo clown embarrassment.  There's the still-fresh Zimmerman acquittal, kept so by the four different "we-are-Trayvon" covers of the current issue of Ebony. There's the O'Reilly-Sharpton feud.

And now comes this new movie, The Butler.

Get ready to be subjected to a barrage of gushing about its powerful honesty and unflinching look at America's flaws and testimony to the steadfastness of the human heart from the usual sources.

Look, the script was inspired by a 2008 Washington Post profile of an actual White House butler named Eugene Allen, who worked there from 1952 to 1986.  Director Lee Daniels and screenwriter Danny Strong (of Palin-bashing Game Changer fame) have used that actual person as the launching point for creating the fictional protagonist Cecil Gaines, and the departure from the inspiration becomes immediately complete.

But The Butler is not really about Eugene Allen; that much is clear from the opening seconds, in which the camera drifts over a Georgia plantation while Forest Whitaker intones with quiet majesty, “The only thing I ever knew was cotton.” Never mind that Allen was actually born in Virginia.

Never mind, either, that Allen’s mother and father were notrespectively raped and murdered by a cartoonishly brutal white landowner — or that such depredations would not have been casually dismissed in the early 1920s, even if carried out against black sharecroppers.

Sounds like it's going to be unabashedly cheesy and vulgar, too:

Strong’s script offers not so much a plot as a row of clichés, arranged with such appalling neatness that the mind aches for something, anything, original. It is almost refreshing when the narrative occasionally swerves from bromidic NPR progressivism into something a bit nastier — as when Martin Luther King Jr. explains that he opposes the Vietnam War because “the Viet Cong don’t call us niggers,” or when Cecil equates American slavery with genocide: “America’s always turned a blind eye toward what we’ve done to our own. We’ve heard about the concentration camps; but these camps went on for 200 years right here in America.”

Even the score is hackneyed: Classical piano concertos by Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Schumann fill the White House, while the Gaines family and the other black characters in the film groove to the strains of James Brown, Shorty Long, and the O’Jays. With due reverence to the Godfather of Soul, might not the real Allen family have put on a Schumann record too, once in a while?

And, of course, the fact that Gaines' tenure extends into the mid-1980s provides Daniels and Strong with the perfect opportunity to latch onto a contortion of fact to make Ronald Reagan look like, at best, indifferent and, at worst, a bigot:

Though Dwight Eisenhower (played by Robin Williams) is favorably portrayed in The Butler, fellow Republicans Richard Nixon (John Cusack) and Ronald Reagan (Alan Rickman) are thrown under the bus because the modern Left is obsessed with the fiction that Republicans are enemies to black people.

Reagan, in fact, is denounced as having damaged or dismantled all Civil Rights policies in the country — an absurd claim that the movie doesn’t even attempt to justify.

The only Reagan-related racial issue that The Butler can muster is his veto of sanctions against apartheid-era South Africa, which wasn’t even a U.S. Civil Rights issue and which Reagan believed would worsen conditions for blacks in that country. The movie portrays this entirely understandable decision (which was overridden by Congress) as simple heartlessness toward black people. 

Mike Flynn at Breitbart makes plain the chasm between fact and fantasy regarding the relationship between the historical Allen and the historical Reagan:

This is pure fiction. A Washington Post profile in 2008 noted that Allen and his wife kept framed photos of Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy in their living room. Pictures of the other presidents Allen served were hung in the basement. Why would the real-life Allen keep pictures of Reagan in the most prominent place in his home if he had quit his job over policy disagreements with the Administration? 

The closeness between Allen and the Reagans is evidenced by another anecdote in the profile. Allen was the first butler to attend a state dinner as a guest. The Reagans invited Allen and his wife to attend a state dinner for West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.  

I'm glad I had ample warning before I had any occasion to subject myself to this garbage.  About a year ago, my wife and I, searching iTunes for something to watch on the iPad one evening, rented The Help, and that was enough Hollywood racial-guilt-mongering to last me for a good long while.

One of our times' principle frustrations is the futility of pointing up the disconnect between real-life post America and the fantasy world the Freedom-Haters strive so mightily - and, often, all too effectively - to convince us that we inhabit.  The Most Equal Comrade is richly deserving of all the derision that is ever heaped on him - by rodeo clowns, talk show hosts, me, or anyone else.  He is the worst president in US history.   He has not a patriotic bone in his body.  He is deliberately dismantling America's leadership role on the world stage, and dismantling economic freedom and its resultant prosperity at home.  The FHers' only hope of preventing a critical mass of this nation's citizenry from seeing that is to immediately infect all conversation about it with the accusation of bigotry.

Is it vulgar and childish?  Of course, and that says much about how far we have fallen from our peak as a civilization.  You don't just "get away with" such a position; it's quite easy to depict it as the norm, departure from which is, in this portrayal, indication of an irredeemable character flaw.

There's only one thing to do.  Keep reporting what is actually going on.  Keep reminding all who still have free minds just how late in the day it really is.

You don't cross the H-word Creature, especially in matters of covering up her corruption

We all know it doesn't take much to bring out her shrill side, but an instance from last September shows that that's especially so when someone tries to insert the truth into a conversation:

'Two days after this attack,' said Rep. Adam Kinzinger, 'we were in a briefing with Hillary Clinton and she screamed at a member of Congress who’d dare suggest that this was a terrorist attack.'

[snip]

The congressman appeared on the Fox News Channel on Friday, recalling Clinton 'basically, in a very loud, angry voice, [saying] "It's irresponsible to even suggest this is a terror attack. This is a YouTube video. We know that there are protests all over, and we need to be very careful how we're saying this" -- and basically chided this member of Congress.'

This throws a wrench in those coronation plans, does it not?

Defending conservative principles on Facebook

Just had an interesting exchange - in fact, I doubt if it's done yet - on Facebook.  A "friend" who is of the pretty darn hard left variety (Unitarian, feminist, climate change Kool Aid swallower, zealot for caricaturing the Tea Party as a bunch of inbred illiterates) thought it would be clever to taunt me with a "news item" about a Tennessee Tea Party activist named Hal Rounds and his group's efforts to get the state's history textbooks to place the Founding Fathers' vision and courage front and center, rather than the fact that some of them were slave owners.

In these situations, the first step  is to do some digging.  I Googled Hal Rounds.  I swear, I'm convinced that someone at Google manipulates the ranking for links in searches to put the lefty ones first.  I had to scroll to halfway through the second page to find one non-lefty link about him.  It was from black conservative Kira Davis, and it was just what I needed to fire a return salvo.

But the kind of sense Davis makes is buried among a plethora of accusatory, nuance-lacking diatribes.

Here is what the Tennessee Tea Party wants to see as the criterion for dealing with the fact that some Founders owned slaves:

“No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.”

No assertion that textbooks shouldn't mention the slavery issue.  Just that it shouldn't be so front-and-center as to obscure the main point about the Founders:

 Where is the demand for the Tea Party seeking to remove the teaching of slavery from textbooks?  It becomes obvious that the TP is leveling the charge that public schools are purposely playing down or omitting the Founding Father’s great contributions to American history.  Such great contributions include the importance of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.  Never in the history of mankind has a country founded its government on the premise that the right to life and liberty derive from our Creator and that these rights are unalienable.  Additionally, it has never been truly established that government’s primary function is to merely protect those rights as the Constitution is like no other founding document in the world.  Countries such as Rome, Sweden, France, Germany etc. have had several forms of government (i.e. monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, etc.) – not America though.  The United States, on the other hand, is the only nation in the world that has had a Constitutional Republic that has lasted for over 220 years.

The liberties and opportunities of the United States have attracted many immigrants to come here.  Even illegal aliens recognize that America is like no other country in the world as many risk their lives to come here for job opportunities.  I have never heard of an American floating on an inner tube while fighting off sharks of the ocean to escape America; but I have certainly heard of a Cuban doing such a thing to flee the socialist whelms of Fidel Castro in search of freedom.
Then there’s also the charge from the Tea Party affiliate that information is being purposely omitted; which adds negative light to some our great revolutionaries.  For example, modern textbooks hardly ever acknowledge the fact that some founders never owned slaves.  John Adams, Signer of the Declaration of Independence, immediately comes to mind as he stated, “My opinion about it has always been known…never in my life did I own a slave.” (Letter to George Churchman and Jacob Lindley on January 24, 1801)
Some simply changed their position and later denounced slavery.

Stay tuned.  I doubt if my "friend" will let this be the end of it.  If it gets juicier, I'll fill you in here.

UPDATE:  My "friend" wants to expand the argument to include the Texas textbook dust-up.  This time I had to wade through six and a half pages of Google search to find Rick Moran's American Thinker piece, the first really substantive refutation of claims such as, for instance, that Texas conservatives wanted to impart a stature equal to Lincoln's to Jefferson Davis.

Here's my latest comment in our thread:

Anyway, on to the Texas component. Lefty accounts of what went down try to make it sound as if the point was to establish some kind of moral equivalency between Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. What actually was implemented was the inclusion of Davis's inaugural address, so that students might have the opportunity to compare and contrast it to Lincoln's. Davis did, after all, se himself as president of a sovereign nation. I might have a criticism that this is not the highest priority element of the Civil War years for eighth graders to focus on, but it hardly rises to an advocacy of a view of black inferiority.

Caudillo talk

If it's been a while since you've seen an exhaustive list of the MEC's instances of circumventing the Constitution, Charles Krauthammer presents one that's maddeningly comprehensive.  Read it and get angry all over again.

When even the WaPo sees the need to address it in a house editorial

There is yet another interestingly right-headed editorial from the Bezos-era Washington Post.  Probably too early to make a connection or predict a long-range turnabout in orientation, but the editors clearly don't think too highly of Terry McAuliffe's play-like car "company" and its cavalier attitude toward its financial losses.

A quintessential MEC move

The Most Equal Comrade's redistribution brain trust came up with a doozy that immediately appealed to him:  Have the federal government go into the nation's school's, local control be damned, and upfit them with the fastest wireless technology available, so as to have greater access to the kiddies' brains.  Leave Congress out of the picture.  Pay for it with a cell phone fee hike, which does two things - takes more of people's money, always a Freedom-Hater objective - and enable the regime to run the whole scheme through the FCC.

Classic.

Egypt in chaos

The clearing out of the pro-Morsi protest encampments has led to several deaths.  The army is employing some major hardware. The Islamists, not having the resources to take on the military, decided to focus their ire on Coptic Christians, whom they have fingered as culprits in their man's demise.  Several churches torched as a result.  It's so out of control that the Ministry of Antiquities has closed the Giza pyramids area, as well as the museum in central Cairo that houses the country's most important artifacts.

Syria redux?

A carrier of the most virulent strain of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome

That would be Ana Navarro, who relishes opportunities to brashly diss Rep. Steve King, Sens. Lee, Paul and Cruz, and Heritage Action in the Lamestream Media, and whose employment record includes McCain and Jeb Bush.  For which she's gushed over by FHers, of course.

It's not like we need further proof that FHer-care is a complete failure, but here is some

After the waivers, the delay in Medicare cuts, the delay in the employer mandate and the reliance on the honor system for determining subsidy eligibility, now comes a delay until 2015 on capping out-ofpocket insurance expenses such as deductibles and co-pays.  Somebody in the leviathan had to face the fact that it was going to drive up premiums.

You see, the money has to come from somewhere.

Our freedom-hating overlords will not leave us alone

The USDA - which has no justifiable reason to exist - is instituting two new public-outreach programs, MyPlate for Kids, aimed at the elementary-school set, and MyPlate on Campus.  Once again, the aim is "promoting healthier eating.

MyPlate for Kids, because the attempt to put rabbit food into the nation's public-school cafeterias has been such a roaring success.

MyPlate on campus, because nineteen-year-olds are so receptive to exhortations from finger-wagging peers about eating food with no appeal instead of what they want.

It is on such seemingly inconsequential battlegrounds that the war for Western civilization is either lost or won.

All except one

An interesting list at Salon.com of the 15 Most Hated Bands of the Last 30 Years.  It was refreshing indeed to see this asserted by someone who is probably far savvier about pop culture in the those last three decades that I am.  (I am academically credentialed as a cultural historian, but my claim to expertise stops about where this list begins.)

Most of the musical acts on this list are exactly why I tuned out pop culture, and I'm glad to see that the passage of some time has imparted that perspective to some observers acknowledged to be seasoned.

One exception: Phish.  Yes, the whole follow-them-on-tour / trade-recordings-and-playlists-of-shows business was indicative that the core of their fan base needed to get a life, but I have a soft spot for freewheeling hippie music going back to the Bay Area scene of the late 1960s.

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

Of course, everyone reading this has always known that the endgame for FHer-care was to make it impossible for private insurance companies to make a profit in these exchanges, so that they'd pull out of the health-coverage biz and the American people would be driven to the sole remaining provider of coverage: government.  Single payer.  Socialism.

But if anybody ever needs plain substantiation in a situation where someone has doubts about that, Harry Reid has provided it.

The orchestrated decline of post-America

Russia's foreign minister tells the US to "start behaving like grownups."

It's all jihad

Well, okay, so the U.S. "has ruled out a connection between the threat against its consulate in Lahore, Pakistan, and the current stream of troubling information that prompted closures of American diplomatic facilities this week through the Middle East and Africa."  Perhaps that's true at the tactical level, but there is an overarching connection at the level of ideology.

Jihadists smell weakness like they haven't in years.  They see the Benghazi scandal, the closing of 19 embassies, the utter indifference of the MEC as manifested by his choice of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno as his first forum to discuss the heightened threat level, his vacation on Martha's Vineyard, the sputtering of yet another attempt at Israeli-Palestinian "peace,"  the completely ineffectual US policy toward Iran, the al-Qaeda-driven deterioration of public order and safety in Iraq (from which we withdrew with no plan for preventing this eventuality), and the classifying of Nidal Hasan's act of jihad as "workplace violence," and they conclude that this is an ideal time to pounce.

Is there the tiniest shred of evidence that they're mistaken?

This is delicious

You may have heard about The Nation magazine urging its readers to sign an open letter to Walmart demanding that it pay its employees a minimum wage of $12 an hour.  Well, a company executive had a little fun with that.

But it looks like someone in Bentonville finally snapped: Steven Restivo, a Walmart senior director of communications, sent out a email yesterday with the subject line: “people who live in glass houses…”

The Nation—“America’s leading progressive print and online magazine”—recently encouraged its readers to sign an open letter demanding that Walmart increase wages to $12/hour and this article called our company one of the “biggest abusers of low-wage labor.”

In an ironic twist, ProPublica recently reported that starting this fall, “interns at the Nation Institute will be paid minimum wage for the first time in the history of the 30-year-old program.” As ProPublica noted, The Nation has been paying its full-time interns a weekly stipend of $150 per week—less than the current federal minimum wage rate of $7.25 per hour.

This is great.  I know people who try to make something ideological out of the fact of Walmart's existence.  I'm glad such folks are coming in for some spot-on tweaking.

It's on purpose - today's edition

The Most Equal Comrade wants to revisit the policies that led to the mortgage bubble and its subsequent bursting.

This socialist is going to pursue his mad vision of what's fair even if it brings down our civilization.

When bureaucracy becomes the enemy of plain old hoss sense as well as the defense of freedom

Wrap your brain around this.  The U.S. Army has contractual relationships in Afghanistan with al-Qaeda-tied companies - at least 43 of them - and will not break those off, per the urging of a Special Inspector General.

The Army suspension and debarment official has taken the position that suspension or debarment of such individuals and entities would be a violation of their due process rights if based on classified information or if based on findings by the Department of Commerce which placed them on the Entities List.

SIGAR has referred 43 such cases to the Army, and all have been rejected, despite detailed supporting information demonstrating that these individuals and entities are providing material support to the insurgency in Afghanistan. In other words, they may be enemies of the United States, but that is not enough to keep them from getting government contracts.

This story had better have legs.

Why Robert Reich gets paid the big bucks

Wanna hear his proposal for rescuing Detroit?  Expanding its city limits to include the suburbs.

A hair-raising harbinger

 . . . especially for a guy like me who writes for a media company that owns several newspapers.

There's been some feedback from longtime associates of the WaPo.  Bob Woodward says it's sad, but Sally Quinn kind of shrugs and says it's just part of the change that is one of life's central features.

Bryan Preston at PJ Media offers an observation that could be the start of an interesting parlor game: 10 things that cost more than the Washington Post.

Even for the hard cases, we must press on in the search for a pro-freedom solution

Interesting hashing-out of what conservative health-care policy should look like going on over at NRO.    Henry Olsen and Brad Wassink of the American Enterprise Institute have penned a piece announcing a new AEI proposal that, if you carefully parse its gist, still involves gummint subsidies.

Now, I love AEI.  It's been home to some of my favorite thinkers over the years.  But it does employ some folks who get into some too-clever-by-half wonkery.

What I dug was a scrolldown through the comments:

A proposal that finances health coverage for the poor - not the destitute like Medicaid, but the 15-50k poor, and provides some subsidies to middle class, will never pass the Rep House

This is essentially the "public option" - and if the Reps wanted it, they could have had it in a heartbeat

[snip]

Instead of eliminating the employer tax exemption and providing subsidies, why not allow individuals who buy their own policies to take a tax deduction as well?

[snip]

No. No government involvement at all. Especially no government promoted or subsidized insurance. Anything the government provides or subsidized goes up in cost and becomes entangled in red tape.
Health care is a service like any other service. In a free market this service would be available at many different price points and the overall cost would be lower.
Health insurance is only marginally related to health care. It is a means by which a prudent person can plan for emergencies. It has absolutely no business having anything whatsoever to do with routine health care.
Providing health care for the poor who are truly unable to pay for a doctor's services -- as opposed to those who would rather pay for cable TV or a smartphone or drugs or alcohol or ... -- is not a job for the government but, rather, a job for private charity. If any government health care of any kind is to exist at all it should be provided at the local level of the city or the county.

I am hoping that the mini-thread underneath this person's comment will garner further exchange.  It presents us with one of those what-to-do-about-the-hard-cases scenarios, and the discussion must look squarely at them to be worthwhile:

As an acute leukemia and bone-marrow transplant survivor, I received well over one million dollars in treatment. If I were "truly" poor, what charity would have helped me? My local 200 plus member church? The little town in which I live? Should I have just died?

Still, my instincts tell me that any proposal that involves gummint subsidy reveals at least the mild symptoms of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome.