It wasn't even supposed to look like a coincidence; it was a message

How else do you explain this?

A couple of weeks back, cancer patient Bill Elliot, in a defiant appearance on Fox News, discussed the cancelation of his insurance and what he intended to do about it. He’s now being audited.

Insurance agent C Steven Tucker, who quaintly insists that the whimsies of the hyper-regulatory bureaucracy do not trump your legal rights, saw the interview and reached out to Mr Elliot to help him. And he’s now being audited.

As the Instapundit likes to remind us, Barack Obama has “joked” publicly about siccing the IRS on his enemies. With all this coincidence about, we should be grateful the President is not (yet) doing prison-rape gags.

What does it say about us, the American population, that this regime isn't even trying to do any cosmetics on its heavy-handed means of ruling anymore?

Ooooookay . . .

The federal Freedom-Hater-care website is going to be completely down through 8 a.m. tomorrow.  For maintenance, doncha know.  Wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that tomorrow is the revised deadline the regime gave us for when it would really, no kidding, pinky-swear, sign-over-my-firstborn be ready to go, would it?

We got took

The chairman of Iran's Committee for Foreign Policy and National Security sees the latest round of Geneva patty-cake as a "victory" in an ongoing struggle with the West.

How about it, West?  Do we consider this an ongoing struggle with a mortal enemy as well?

When it's got the gummint brand name on it, it's sure to be utility-grade quality at best

The next time somebody extolls the virtues of states that take federal money to expand their Medicaid programs, ask them why so many doctors don't see Medicaid patients.

The problem with Medicaid, Roy says, is that it simply does not pay doctors enough for them to accept Medicaid patients. Medicaid pays on average 52 cents for every dollar that private insurance pays, due to payment caps instituted by the federal government. Some states pay far less: In New York, Medicaid pays 29 cents for every dollar that private insurance pays.

Given the shortage of doctors in the United States, the results of this payment gap are not difficult to game out. “Now imagine you’re a primary-care doctor with a busy practice,” Roy writes. “Two people call asking for an appointment to see you today, and you have one slot open. Do you give that slot to the patient who has private insurance or to the one who has Medicaid?”

If you're letting the government manage your health care, you're done shopping among competitors for value.  You've reached the bottom rung.  You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.

The Thanksgiving post 2013

¹⁶ Then King David went into the Tent of the Lord's presence, sat down, and prayed, “I am not worthy of what you have already done for me, Lord God, nor is my family. ¹⁷ Yet now you are doing even more; you have made promises about my descendants in the years to come, and you, Lord God, are already treating me like someone great.^[a] 18 What more can I say to you! You know me well, and yet you honor me, your servant. ¹⁹ It was your will and purpose to do this for me and to show me my future greatness. ²⁰ Lord, there is none like you; we have always known that you alone are God. ²¹ There is no other nation on earth like Israel, whom you rescued from slavery to make them your own people. The great and wonderful things you did for them spread your fame throughout the world. You rescued your people from Egypt and drove out other nations as your people advanced. ²² You have made Israel your own people forever, and you, Lord, have become their God.

²³ “And now, O Lord, fulfill for all time the promise you made about me and my descendants, and do what you said you would. ²⁴ Your fame will be great, and people will forever say, ‘TheLord Almighty is God over Israel.’ And you will preserve my dynasty for all time. ²⁵ I have the courage to pray this prayer to you, my God, because you have revealed all this to me, your servant, and have told me that you will make my descendants kings. ²⁶ You, Lord, are God, and you have made this wonderful promise to me. ²⁷ I ask you to bless my descendants so that they will continue to enjoy your favor. You, Lord, have blessed them, and your blessing will rest on them forever.”

Our overlords truly do not understand real-life America

Organizing for America has a primer on how to discuss Freedom-Hater-care at your family's Thanksgiving table tomorrow.  Replete with talking points and timing tips.

Seriously.  That's where we are.

Another fundamental question about the nature of America in the hands of nine unelected arbiters

Seth Mandel at Commentary on the upcoming Supreme Court case on another aspect of FHer-care, namely, whether private businesses must finance insurance coverage that covers contraception.  He says that the Left is wasting no time having a strategic field day with it, distorting the basic definition of terms such as "rights" and diminishing the entire notion of a private human life.

This is why we pay Secretary Global Test the big bucks

So Iran can immediately violate the terms of the Geneva deal by continuing construction at the Arak plant, and accuse the MEC regime of lying about the deal's terms.

Feel free to titter

A New Hampshire ad agency owner named Nancy Clark who served as a spokesperson for FHer-care in a regime promo has been forced, due to cost considerations, to drop her employees' group health insurance plans.  Shopped around on the exchange.  The best deal she could find was to cut them loose and pay them half the cost of the premium for an individual plan of their choosing.  So she and her staff are out more money and an arrangement they'd all liked was disrupted.  And she looks like a fool for shilling for the regime.

And what was going on in Pyongyang while the latest round of patty-cake was happening in Geneva?

This:

Several groups of technicians from the Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group (SHIG), a unit in charge of building Iran’s liquid-fueled missiles, traveled to Pyongyang during the past several months, including as recently as late October, to work on the new, 80-ton rocket booster being developed by the North Koreans, according to officials familiar with intelligence reports.

The booster is believed by U.S. intelligence agencies to be intended for a new long-range missile or space launch vehicle that could be used to carry nuclear warheads, and could be exported to Iran in the future.

Recent U.S. intelligence assessments have said that both North Korea and Iran are expected to have missiles capable of hitting the United States with a nuclear warhead in the next two years.

The Iranian cooperation reveals that the nuclear framework agreement concluded Sunday in Geneva has not slowed Tehran’s drive for missiles that can deliver a nuclear warhead to intercontinental range.

By the way, why wasn't Christian pastor and US citizen Saeed Abedini part of the Geneva deal? 

School him, Bibi!

Get a load of the way Netanyahu unloaded on the Most Equal Comrade in a post-deal phone conversation:

"The prime minister made it clear to the most powerful man on earth that if he intends to stay the most powerful man on earth, it's important to make a change in American policy because the practical result of his current policy is liable to lead him to the same failure that the Americans absorbed in North Korea and Pakistan, and Iran could be next in line." 

That was the message conveyed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to President Barack Obama in a private telephone call Sunday to discuss the interim deal on Iran's nuclear program, according to a senior Israeli lawmaker in Netanyahu's ruling coalition, as reported by the Jerusalem Post.

The White House's own official statement on the telephone call made no mention of any disagreement being aired, merely referring to "their shared goal of preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon."

Israel - ironically, or, then again maybe not, the place where Western civilization began is now the modern nation to whom it falls to preserve it.  Post-America sure ain't up to the task.

Maybe the American people aren't so willing to become cattle-like wards of the state after all

Two new polls would indicate otherwise.

 Gallup says that, once again, as has been the case for years, most Americans are satisfied with their own health insurance.

Sixty-nine percent of people rate their personal health insurance as excellent or good, while only 32 percent view the nation's as highly, according to the Nov. 7-10 poll.

The strong level of personal satisfaction with healthcare contrasts with a jump in the number of people who view healthcare as the nation's second most important problem, behind dissatisfaction with the government.

The rise in concern likely registers awareness of ObamaCare's troubled rollout since Oct. 1, according to the survey.

Pollsters attributed the healthcare law's lack of popularity to people's general contentment with the cost and quality of their own medical care.

"Trends in Americans' assessments of their personal healthcare situation have been highly stable in recent years, suggesting little increase in personal worry," Gallup stated in a memo. 

"These findings may help explain why the healthcare law has never been highly popular, even before the recent troubles in implementing it: many Americans simply feel that their healthcare situation is fine as it is."

CNN finds that only one in four Americans think the Most Equal Comrade can manage the government effectively, and 53 percent question his integrity.

It hasn't gone into effect yet

Iran's not on the clock yet regarding the new agreement.  Technical details to be worked out, doncha know.

The other two made a much better case for a truly human world

Ross Douthat at the NYT offers the must useful perspective I've seen on this 50th anniversary of the legacies of the three historic figures who died on November 22, 1963.

Huxley and Lewis did not share a worldview — one was a seeker drawn to spiritualism, Eastern religion and psychedelics; the other was (and remains) the most famous Christian apologist in the modern English-speaking world. But they shared a critique of contemporary civilization, and offered a similar warning about where its logic might end up taking us.

For Huxley, this critique took full shape in “Brave New World,” his famous portrait of a dystopia in which the goals of pleasure and stability have crowded out every other human good, burying discontent under antidepressants, genetic engineering and virtual-reality escapes.

For Lewis, the critique was distilled in “The Abolition of Man,” which imagined a society of “men without chests,” purged of any motivation higher than appetite, with no “chatter of truth and mercy and beauty” to disturb or destabilize.

In effect, both Huxley and Lewis looked at a utilitarian’s paradise — a world where all material needs are met, pleasure is maximized and pain eliminated — and pointed out what we might be giving up to get there: the entire vertical dimension in human life, the quest for the sublime and the transcendent, for romance and honor, beauty and truth.

Douthat discusses . . .

. . .  the end of “Brave New World,” when a so-called “Savage” raised outside the dystopia confronts its presiding “Controller,” Mustapha Mond. The Savage lists everything that’s been purged in the name of pleasure and order — historical memory, art and literature, religion and philosophy, the tragic sense. And Mond responds that “these things are symptoms of political inefficiency,” and that the comforts of modern civilization depend on excluding them.

“But I don’t want comfort,” the Savage says. “I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”Which brings us back to that notorious sinner John F. Kennedy. What exhausts skeptics of the Kennedy cult, both its elegiac and paranoid forms, is the way it makes a saint out of a reckless adulterer, a Camelot out of a sordid political operation, a world-historical figure out of a president whose fate was tragic but whose record was not terribly impressive.But in many ways the impulses driving the Kennedy nostalgists are the same ones animating Lewis’s Puddleglum and Huxley’s Savage — the desire for grace and beauty, for icons and heroes, for a high-stakes dimension to human affairs that a consumerist, materialist civilization can flatten and exclude.

And one can believe J.F.K. is a poor vessel for these desires, and presidential politics the wrong place to satisfy them, without wishing they would disappear. 

A major reason FHers desire to confer hero status on JFK is that he was the last Dem president that would remotely qualify for it.  One thing that his death marked was the transformation of the Dems into the Freedom-Haters, single-mindedly bent on carrying out the Great Leveling Project and leaving us a world where cheap gratification is good enough for the cattle-like masses.

That's exactly what it is, but don't call it that

Interesting NYT article today on the lengths to which the MEC regime has gone to avoid the taint of the r-word - redistribution.

And Stanley Kurtz at NRO has the top eight takeaways from that article:

1. The White House intentionally hid Obamacare’s redistributive goals.
2. Policy experts knew all along but didn’t tell the public. (NYT filled with policy experts.)
3. Phrases NYT prefers to “intentionally lied:” obscured, the White House cleverly modulated Mr. Obama’s language, a word you just don’t use, the word is particularly toxic, it has been hidden away, semantic sidestep, discredited promise.
4. NYT blames American “political culture” for not calmly accepting Obama’s healthcare lies.
5. David Axelrod blames American political culture for Obama needing to lie in the first place.
6. Republican charges Obama feels must be deflected by disguising the truth: redistribution, socialized medicine, redistributor-in-chief, spreading the wealth around, closet socialist.
7. Republicans say Obama is hiding the truth about who he is and what he does. NYT agrees.
8. Openly admitting redistributive goals is a bad way to get an Obama administration job but a good way to get appointed university chancellor.

Number Eight refers to Rebecca M. Blank, who was passed over for head position at Council of Economic Advisors in 2011 due to the surfacing of a bit of her writing from 1992 in which she spoke plainly about what she felt was the need for redistribution.

In case you were thinking that Western civilization had backed away from its suicidal tendencies

Think again.   The Geneva deal has been inked by the P5+1 and Iran.  The US has formally backed away from the no-uranium-enrichment-at-all position that had characterized its policy previously.

Take Israel seriously when it says that it does not consider itself bound by this agreement.

John Bolton says that those who have opposed the pursuit of patty-cake with the mullahs must now openly hope that Israel attacks Iran, and sooner rather than later:

What can critics of the Geneva deal, in Washington and other Western capitals, do? They can try to advance the sanctions legislation pending in the Senate over administration objections, for the political symbolism if nothing else. Unfortunately, they’re unlikely to succeed over the administration’s near-certain opposition. Tehran judges correctly that they have Obama obediently moving in their direction, with the European Union straining at the bit for still-more relaxation of the sanctions regimes.

Instead, those opposing Obama’s “Munich moment” in Geneva (to borrow a Kerry phrase from the Syrian crisis), should focus on the larger and more permanent strategic problem: A terrorist, nuclear Iran still threatens American interests and allies, and almost certainly means widespread nuclear proliferation across the Middle East. A nuclear Iran would also be essentially invulnerable, providing a refuge that al Qaeda leaders hiding in Afghan and Pakistani caves could only dream of.

So in truth, an Israeli military strike is the only way to avoid Tehran’s otherwise inevitable march to nuclear weapons, and the proliferation that will surely follow. Making the case for Israel’s exercise of its legitimate right of self-defense has therefore never been more politically important. Whether they are celebrating in Tehran or in Jerusalem a year from now may well depend on how the opponents of the deal in Washington conduct themselves.

There is no aspect of governance, no area of policy - none - that the post-American party of West-hatred, the Democrats, is not handling in an overtly destructive way.  Health care, the environment, energy, immigration,  Islamic threats, basic cultural matters such as human sexuality and family formation - these are all arenas in which an evil force is taking the opportunity to maximize the desolation it is wreaking on the best way of life humanity has thus far come up with.

Of course, we've been obstructionists; these judicial nominees are bad news

Arnold Ahlert at Front Page gives us a glimpse of the DC Circuit Court nominees that the regime really want confirmed:

[Nina] Pillard is a radical feminist who wrote a 2007 law review article contending that abstinence-only sex education is not only “permeated with stereotyped messages and sex-based double standards about acceptable male and female sexual behavior and appropriate social roles,” but that it isunconstitutional. She defines ultrasounds as “deceptive images of fetus-as-autonomous-being that the anti-choice movement has popularized since the advent of amniocentesis.”

Yet perhaps the best example of her radical mindset was her discussion of the Supreme Court case “Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church v. EEOC” at a September 2011 press briefing for Georgetown’s Supreme Court Institute. The case was about the right of the Lutheran Church to choose their religious ministers. She characterized the Church’s position as “a substantial threat to the American rule of law,” and predicted the Court would be unlikely to uphold it. The Court ruled 9-0 in the Church’s favor. Thus, it would not be unreasonable to assume Pillard is to the left of even the most leftist judges on the Supreme Court.

Robert Wilkins’ press release reads like a dream. He received his B.S. from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in 1986 and his  J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1989. The Legal Times has named him one of the 90 Greatest Washington Lawyers of the Last 30 Years, and he currently practices “corporate defense/white collar, technology, and commercial litigation.”

What Wilkins’ press release fails to mention is that he led an illegal occupation of a Harvard law school building. He and his fellow students demanded a commitment from Harvard to hire 20 women or minority group members over the next four years as tenured or tenure-track professors. Seven of the professors, including four women, were to be black. That protest was undertaken in support of radical bigot Derrick Bell, whose Critical Race Theory posits that America is, and always has been, an intrinsically racist society. 

This is the future of post-America.

They'd do well to remember the law of karma

Allahpundit at Hot Air looks at the possibility that the Senate FHers could extend this simple-majority business to legislation.  He notes:

Democrats should want the taboo against removing the filibuster for legislation in place if only for that reason. If they nuke the rest of it now, the GOP can pass repeal with 51 votes in a few years and say, quite correctly, that they’re only following the rules made by Obama and Harry Reid. Does [pinch-hitting press secretary Josh] Earnest not understand that? Or has Democratic arrogance about Hillary’s supposed inevitability reached the point where they can’t imagine the GOP taking over the federal government until 2025 at the earliest?

Arrogance can lead to recklessness.

Let's get real: today's cold, hard FHer-care stat

Connecticut is the only state in the whole nation to have more private-plan signups that Medicaid enrollments - and that's only because it started expanding Medicaid in 2010, so a lot of those folks had already availed themselves of the gummint gravy.

All it does is relieve Iran of its vulnerability

Charles Krauthammer on just why the proposed Iran deal (although I did just see a news item that the current round of Iran - P5+1 talks in Geneva are going badly, and that's a good thing) is about as bad as it could be.  Sanctions had been working. The mullahs' regime is truly on the ropes.  This deal bails them out, and that's about all it does:

If at this point of maximum economic pressure we can’t get Iran to accept a final deal that shuts down its nuclear program, how in God’s name do we expect to get such a deal when we have radically reduced that pressure?

A bizarre negotiating tactic. And the content of the deal is even worse. It’s a rescue package for the mullahs.

It widens permissible trade in oil, gold, and auto parts. It releases frozen Iranian assets, increasing Iran’s foreign-exchange reserves by 25 percent while doubling its fully accessible foreign-exchange reserves. Such a massive infusion of cash would be a godsend for its staggering economy, lowering inflation, reducing shortages, and halting the country’s growing demoralization. The prospective deal is already changing economic expectations. Foreign oil and other interests are reportedly preparing to reopen negotiations for a resumption of trade in anticipation of the full lifting of sanctions.

And for what? You’d offer such relief in return for Iran’s giving up its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Isn’t that what the entire exercise is about?

And yet this deal does nothing of the sort. Nothing. It leaves Iran’s nuclear infrastructure intact. Iran keeps every one of its 19,000 centrifuges — yes, 19,000 — including 3,000 second-generation machines that produce enriched uranium at five times the rate of older models.

Not a single centrifuge is dismantled. Not a single facility that manufactures centrifuges is touched.

And even with something this juicy being dangled before them, the Iranians aren't satisfied.  That may be our saving grace.  The best outcome of this current round of patty-cake is that everyone checks out of the Intercontinental Hotel in Geneva tomorrow morning and goes home empty-handed.

Senate rule-change-vote roundup

William Jacobsen at Legal Insurrection sees a silver lining:

Decades of negative and destructive policies can be reversed with a bare majority. Obamacare can be repealed with a bare majority. True Conservative Judges will not be banished due to a filibuster threat.

Yes, it’s true that the absence of a filibuster could accelerate the destructive policies. That fear is justified, particularly as to the judiciary. But face it, we were headed there anyway unless drastic action was taken.

That drastic action took place yesterday. By Democrats.

Now at least we have a chance to achieve previously unimaginable progress in a single presidential term if we also have bare majorities in Congress and a President with the willpower. It will take only one such term.

The ratchet has been broken. And opportunity created, even if dependent upon future electoral success.

John Hinderaker at Power Line says a bit of historical perspective shows us that the filibuster-or-no question looks one way or the other depending on whose ox is getting gored.

The filibuster has always been controversial–senators as far back as Henry Clay have threatened to abolish it by changing Senate rules–and the attitudes of politicians and pundits generally depend on whether their party is in the majority or the minority. When the Democrats were a minority in the Senate, Harry Reid denounced a threat to change the Senate’s filibuster rules as “un-American.” In our early days, we embarrassed the Minneapolis Star Tribune by pointing out that they had editorialized effusively both for and against the filibuster, depending on which party controlled the Senate. But the same could be said of many newspapers and other commentators.

[snip]

Reid’s timing is a little puzzling. In the short-to-medium term, the rule change is more likely to benefit Republicans than Democrats. My guess is that we will have a Republican Senate in 2015 and a Republican president in 2017; if so, the precedent the Democrats set today will come back to haunt them with a vengeance. To cite just one example, it will now be possible to pass Obamacare repeal in the Senate with 51 Republican votes.

Long-term, the filibuster is not a partisan issue. Both parties will be sometimes in the majority, and sometimes in the minority. Arguments for and against the filibuster strike me as inconclusive, so I would keep it. The filibuster has existed for a long time and is part of our political fabric. No one can fully foresee the consequences of doing away with it. The sound conservative approach, I think, is not to alter, without a compelling reason, an institution that has been part of our political life for going on 200 years. 

Mark Levin excoriates Senate Pubs for exhibiting symptoms of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome (says they're "comfortable with tyranny"), saying the tepid "sad-day-for-the-Senate" response was pathetic.   Says what Pubs should do is serve notice to the FHers that they will use this rule change to repeal FHer-care when they take back the Senate in the midterms.

Dana Milbank at the WaPo, who is into that bipartisanship hoo-ha and saw the Senate as the last area of federal government where it could thrive to a least some degree says this move demolishes that.  Cites the Senate floor remarks yesterday of Carl Levin, one of three FHers to vote against it, and cites Joe Biden's 2005 remarks against the nuclear option as well.

I may update this as the day progresses.  The irony is that this move, which deepens and makes more bitter the divide in post-America, seems to have produced a consensus that we will now see even more intensified partisanship.

Much harder to stop wacko judicial and regulatory nominees now

Harry Reid and the Senate Freedom-Haters vote for the nuclear option - the one Reid opposed in 2005 - that prohibits filibusters against the MEC's nominees at levels lower than the Supreme Court.

Resistance to tyranny

Nice to see Eric Holder's fiefdom getting some pushback on the school-choice issue.

Post-America's version of the Stasi

Enroll America doesn't just sign up people for FHer-care.  It shares private information about some folks with political groups. 

Creepy and sinister.

What's really on the table at these UN climate pow-wows

The walkout by 132 countries at the current round makes plain what the real agenda is - wealth redistribution:

The G77 and China bloc led 132 poor countries in a walk out during talks about “loss and damage” compensation for the consequences of global warming that countries cannot adapt to, like Typhoon Haiyan. The countries that left claim to have the support of other coalitions of poor nations, including the Least Developed Countries, the Alliance of Small Island States and the Africa Group.

Poor countries have demanded that the developed world give them $100 billion annually by 2020 to prepare for the impacts of global warming, such as heat waves and droughts. Brazil even put forward a proposal last week that would have made rich countries pay for historical greenhouse gas emissions.

I like the attitude of the new Abbott administration in Australia:

The country did not even send high-ranking officials to the UN summit, saying that they would be busy repealing the country’s contentious carbon tax.
“They wore T-shirts and gorged on snacks throughout the negotiation. That gives some indication of the manner they are behaving in,” said a spokeswoman for the Climate Action Network.
“The carbon tax is bad for the economy and it doesn’t do any good for the environment,” Prime Minister Tony Abbott told The Washington Post. “Despite a carbon tax of $37 a ton by 2020, Australia’s domestic emissions were going up, not down. The carbon tax was basically socialism masquerading as environmentalism, and that’s why it’s going to get abolished.”

Talkin' my language!

Freedom-Haters can't catch a break these days

Painful to watch.  Sort of funny, too.

Sebelius was in Miami yesterday at an event, and she was going to help a couple sign up for FHer-care, and the system crashed immediately.

She responded by saying, "That's okay, it'll come back," but I'll bet she was on the express train to damn-it country when she got out of the public's sight.

Once again, France is out in front of post-America on the most urgent global-affairs issue of our time

The post-American "senior official" said that supreme leader Khameni's characterization of Israel as a "rabid dog" made him "uncomfortable," but couldn't work up the stones to actually condemn it.

France, of all nations, is taking the lead on standing up to the Islamic Republic:

A French government spokesperson on Wednesday condemned the remarks, calling them “unacceptable” and saying that they “complicate” talks.

But our demented overlords are still so stuck in the belief that the world will deify them for a kumbaya foreign policy that they'll endure any outrage to get a piece of paper signed.

Jihadists in Kentucky

That's what you get when your refugee vetting program isn't working right. These particular two got caught in a FBI sting, but how many didn't?

Creepy and sleazy

The very first function of the federal government is to keep the nation secure.  Or it was anyway, when this was the United States of America. Now, not so much:

Documents obtained by The Washington Times and whistleblower accounts from inside the CIS Laguna Niguel field office show that staffers, who said they were acting under orders from senior officials, often rushed or skipped altogether economic reviews of applicants to the EB-5 visa program, which doles out coveted green cards to foreign investors who sink $500,000 or more into a U.S.-based business.

Emails from the Laguna Niguel office show that the EB-5 vetting process was a daily struggle for government analysts charged with, among other tasks, assessing the economic viability of applicants’ investment plans. The internal documents detail repeated violations of agency procedures that allowed foreign applicants to bypass proper economic review.

Economic reviews of EB-5 applicants and their projects are needed, immigration analysts say, because of the security risks posed by investors who have not been screened for links to foreign intelligence services, terrorist groups or organized crime; or whose funds come from, or flow to, unvetted sources.

The violations came to public attention over the summer when Sen. Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republican and the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, revealed that CIS Director Alejandro Mayorkas had become personally involved in the processing of an EB-5 application filed by Democratic heavy-hitter Terry McAuliffe, now Virginia’s governor-elect, related to electric car company GreenTech Automotive.

Mr. Mayorkas has denied any wrongdoing, saying he got involved in Mr. McAuliffe’s EB-5 application because it raised an important issue about a point of law in the program.

Nonetheless, the program is the subject of an audit by the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, of which CIS is part.

Mr. Mayorkas, who is President Obama’s nominee for deputy secretary of the troubled department, also faces a criminal probe by the inspector general, according to documents released by Mr. Grassley.

The FBI and the Securities Exchange Commission are investigating a suspected Ponzi scheme in Texas involving an EB-5 applicant, and the FBI also is looking into foreign business executives who bought into the program, particularly Chinese nationals, who constitute the majority of the program’s investors.

Suspicions of foreign intelligence links of a Chinese investor was one of the factors holding up Mr. McAuliffe’s EB-5 application before Mr. Mayorkas intervened. But that was far from the only time when a case that raised national security red flags was pushed through at the behest of senior officials, according to a federal whistleblower complaint filed by an analyst on the program.

A May 3, 2012, memo that the whistleblower sent to David Garner, chief performance and quality officer for the CIS in Washington, warned of irregularities in processing an EB-5 application filed by an investor in CMB Exports LLC — a firm set up to bundle EB-5 money for an eligible project.

CMB was a “Solyndra-style project with a loan guarantee from the Department of Energy,” the analyst wrote.

The memo alleges that in April 2012 a CIS manager who now serves as special assistant to the director of the Laguna Niguel office took steps to “circumvent the established review process as a means to expedite” the CMB application. Those steps, the memo states, included bypassing the analyst’s required review and ignoring protocols regulating contact between adjudicators and the contract economists reviewing applications.

A multimillion-dollar contract between the Department of Homeland Security and ICF Inc. provided for the economists to be available, on-site, to support the CIS office of fraud detection and national security. That office was a key part of the plan to tighten procedures for granting immigration benefits.

This one brings  in several elements we've seen before: "green" "companies" that turn out to be slush funds for cronies, a nonchalant attitude toward China's aims, pressure from high levels of a government agency.

One to keep an eye on.

A poll and graph of inestimable significance

New Gallup poll shows that, 56 to 42, US adults don't think ensuring that all Americans have health care is the responsibility of government.  From at least as far back as 2000 through late 2008, they did think it was government's responsibility.  From then until mid-2010, they held the view they do now (not gummint responsibility).  They changed their mind for about a year, but since mid-2011, they've had the current view by an ever-increasing number.

And just last month, she was the MEC's poster child for FHer-care's "success"

The 48-year-old single mom who was so excited about getting some health insurance via the state exchange in Washington after going without for 15 years that she wrote the MEC a thank-you note and got mentioned by him in a presser is - well, not getting that health insurance:

"But days, just really three days after she was mentioned by the president, Jessica Sanford started having problems, she was receiving letters from the Washington state health exchange," reports CNN. "The first letter telling her that tax credit was reduced, therefore, increasing the cost of her health care plan and the,n take a look at this, then she received a letter just last week telling her that her tax credit had been taken away all together. Show you another document here, showing what the tax credit worked out to be... zero dollars according to this document that was provided to us by Jessica Sanford. She describes all of this as a roller coaster ride. Now she says she can't afford insurance in Washington state because of the new developments."

Will we hear another peep about her from our overlords?

I guess the son of a bitch gets points for candor

New NYC mayor - he of 1980s support for the Sandinistas and a 1990s honeymoon in Cuba -  tells a gathering of real estate developers "I am not a free marketeer.  I believe in the heavy hand of government."

It's going to be so sad to see the city that strived so mightily- and successfully - to rise from the decay that characterized it in the 1970s revert and become the Detroit of the east coast.

This is why we call Democrats declinists and freedom-haters.

Does the Most Equal Comrade take the Left's entire Great Leveling Project down with him?

Daren Jonescu at the American Thinker does not subscribe to the view - put forth most forthrightly by Charles Krauthammer - that the MEC's crash-and-burn signals the end of American liberalism.  Jonescu makes an interesting case, using the Left's abandonment of Stalin when his monstrousness could no longer be ignored, that the ideology always trumps idolization for the Left.  The Left is perfectly willing to eat its own.

In a paragraph only parenthetically tied to his overall point, Jonescu gives us a comprehensive review of what was known, but impolite to mention, about the MEC circa 2008:

Communist childhood mentors?  Don't go there.  Boasting in print about his university penchant for Marxism and his heavy drug use?  Well, all students are "idealists" and "party-goers."  Explicit statements declaring fully socialized medicine his long-term goal?  Surely he's learned now that Washington is about compromise.  Long personal, professional, and political association with Bill Ayers -- terrorist, avowed communist revolutionary, advocate of Marxist re-education camps, and education "reformer"?  But he says Ayers was just a guy from his neighborhood, and his word should be good enough for us.  Refusing to release his school records?  So what? -- the man has a Harvard law degree.  Spending years in the church of a radical anti-American preacher?  How dare anyone question a man's relationship with his God?  Communist Party endorsement and campaign support?  Well, people are free to support whomever they want -- that's no reflection on the candidate himself.  Criticizing the U.S. Constitution's focus on "negative liberties," and its failure to address what government "must do on your behalf" to bring about "economic" and "redistributive" justice?  That's just abstract theoretical discussion, proving that Obama is a thinker.  "Fundamental transformation" and "spread the wealth around"?  Oh, come on, you know what he meant -- just more optimism and a fairer tax code.

All of the above concerns were raised in dark corners during Obama's 2008 primary and general election campaigns.  And all of those corresponding rebuttals were offered, with almost perfect unanimity, by the mainstream voices of both major parties. 

Now, of course, the bloom is off the rose for what may be a critical mass of the media apparatus.  No president, even one like the MEC, can recover, at least not fully, from what his transpiring for him.

Jonescu predicts a timeline for the intelligensia, the media, and the Left's home party to rush to Hillary and set about rehabilitating her from the Benghazi scandal.

I'm still thinking about this. It occurs to me that, in the case of, say, Stalin, the worldwide left was observing a different kind of country.  The Soviet Union had been a communist dictatorship for about a decade by the time Stalin solidified his power.  The United States in 2013 has an entirely different background.  The Left's advance through the institutions of our society has not had a lot of interruption, to be sure, but conservatism, and the basic American cherishing of freedom from which it emerged, has proven its determination to resist that trend.

So at least right now, I'm more inclined to see it Krauthammer's way.  I'm willing to consider the possibility that that is so because it is a brighter possibility, but the American people, who by and large still have a love of liberty coarsing through their veins, are disillusioned with more than just the current icon of the collectivist enterprise.

The casual dismissiveness with which our overlords regard us

NY Senator Kirsten Gillibrand's remark on ABC-TV's This Week yesterday that "we all knew" that the MEC was lying about people being able to keep doctors and policies if they liked them lays bare the contempt in which we are held by the tyrants who have fundamentally transformed America.

She said it without a trace of outrage.  It's a small side issue to her.  She followed up that remark with a full-steam-ahead prediction that FHer-care will work fine after "this implementation issue" is dealt with.

It's all there in the short space of what she said on that program: the have-to-break-eggs-to-make-omelets mentality, the paternalistic assurance that what the leviathan has lined up for you is far superior to what you thought you were pleased with, the tacit acknowledgement that her ilk has moved us into a post-Constitutional era in which the self-proclaimed morally superior nomenklatura can make up rules as they go.

The whole overlord class was in on it from the get-go.  They don't have the first subatomic particle of respect for you.   The purpose of you, the unwashed masses, the cattle-like populace, is to maximize their power.

And Secretary Global Test and Susan Rice want to pressure Israel into "pursuing peace" with this bunch

Palestinian soccer teams in a tournament at al-Quds University are named for venerated suicide bombers.

West-hatred in high places

Susan Rice says Israel is "increasing tensions on the ground" and echoes Secretary Global Test's characterization of new subdivision-building in Israel as "illegitimate."  And the Reuters story to which Weasel Zippers links is not exactly an objective piece of reportage, calling Judea and Samaria "occupied territories."

Dana Milbank's stark assessment

He even calls his latest WaPo column "Game Over for Obama?"

The last few paragraphs have a real stick-a-fork-in-him tone:

Obama, in his Thursday news conference, spoke of regaining his clout as part of the game. His game plan: “My intention in terms of winning back the confidence of the American people is just to work as hard as I can, identify the problems that we’ve got, make sure that we’re fixing them.”

“There are going to be ups and downs during the course of my presidency,” Obama said. “I think I said early on when I was running, I am not a perfect man and I will not be a perfect president.”

He didn’t seem to consider that this may not be part of the usual ups and downs. And though he deserves credit for his apologies — seven times during his news conference, he said the problems with Obamacare are “on us” or “on me” — it’s not likely that the public’s loss of trust will be repaired no matter how often or how genuinely he says “my bad.”

Even as he accepted responsibility for the debacle, he couldn’t resist transferring some blame to the assembled press (“the things that go right, you guys aren’t going to write about”) and to Republicans (“repeal, repeal, let’s get rid of this thing”).

But Obama seemed genuinely puzzled by the notion that his leadership may have been the cause. He dismissed a question about whether his administration may be too insular (“I meet with an awful lot of folks”).

And, he said, “when I do some Monday-morning quarterbacking on myself,” he concludes that maybe he should have been “breaking the mold” with the rollout earlier because “the federal government has not been good at this stuff in the past.”

Wait a minute: Monday-morning quarterbacking? Maybe the president does understand that the game is over.

Anybody who is still carrying the Most Equal Comrade's water is certifiably delusional.

Not all other nations of the world can be lumped into one big category called "other nations of the world"

Lee Smith at the Weekly Standard on the irony of a group of those nations whose interests most closely align with those of the United States with regard to a search for mideast stability - Israel, Saudi Arabia, France - being a separate party from the Iran-US intent to keep meeting and playing patty-cake.

Allies, after all, are not simply products of power; they are also its signature. The United States owes much of its might to the nature and number of its alliances. Obama seems not to understand that if you really believe in a multi-polar world, if you treat your allies like anyone else, if you treat them the way you do your adversaries, then they may make different choices. He seems not to see that in forging a realignment of the region, it is the United States that is most likely to be realigned, friendless, doubted, and diminished.

China past its demographic tipping point

James Pethokoukis at his AEI blog points out that easing of China's one-child policy comes a little late for resolving what that has done to population trends:

China’s decision to loosen its one-child policy is a moral triumph but unlikely to be an economic one. In theory, a higher fertility rate would give China more workers to financially support the elderly and create a younger, more economically dynamic society.

But here’s the problem: China’s fertility rate is 1.55, even lower in urban areas. It’s an extremely low 0.7% in Shanghai, for instance. Continuing urbanization will continue to push down the overall fertility rate.

And research suggests that once a nation’s fertility rate falls below a certain level, it is nearly impossible to reverse the trend. As Jonathan Last writes in What To Expect When No One’s Expecting:

Fertility trends have the turning radius of battleship not a go-kart. And the further fertility drops, the more unbendable the downward trend becomes. It is difficult to change direction from a rate of 1.75. Below a sustained rate of 1.50, there are no examples of a country returning to replacement level.

Yet another reason why I think China's main strengths are its bellicosity and wiliness  and not its societal health.

The latest presser

The MEC even botches contrition.  He looked even more flailing and desperate than he usually has lately.  And he said some very silly things.  The "fix" is not getting a very good reception.  State insurance commissioners in Washington and Arkansas have already said no thanks.  The National Association of Insurance Commissioners issued a statement basically saying "We don't think the MEC has any idea how close to impossible it would be to reverse course at this point."

Weaker by the day.  And Americans aren't the only ones who notice, you can be sure.

An effort whose time has come

Texas Pub Representative Pete Olson is launching an impeachment proceeding against Eric Holder.  And he's going about it with impressive savvy, quickly seeking out allies among his House colleagues, passing civil-contempt charges in addition to criminal-contempt charges, and taking into account all of Holder's transgressions, not just Fast and Furious:

This time around, Holder is not facing charges related just to Operation Fast and Furious. Since the last Congress, Holder’s DOJ has been embroiled in a number of other scandals, and House Republicans are emboldened heading into this battle with Holder.

Olson’s resolution is divided into four separate Articles of Impeachment. The first deals directly with Fast and Furious, the second with Holder’s non-enforcement directives of laws like the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and drug laws. The third addresses Holder’s refusal to prosecute IRS officials involved with leaking confidential tax return documents of GOP donors, and the fourth pursues Holder for allegedly misleading Congress regarding his involvement with the targeting of media figures like Fox News’ James Rosen.

“He actually selects laws and says, ‘I like this law so I’m going to enforce it,’ and ‘I don’t like this one so I’m not going to enforce it,’” Olson said of the second part of his Articles of Impeachment resolution. 

One to keep an eye on.

Secretary Global Test's sales job seems to have fallen short

His closed-door appeal to the Senate Banking Committee for Congress to hold off on any new sanctions on Iran was apparently long on emotionalism and Israel-dissing, but short on actual compelling reasons for holding off.

The message for Pubs is the same as it's been: don't contribute your fingerprints

The signs of FHer desperation are mounting.  The talk of a "fix" that would help those whose plans are cancelled is pretty empty.  What are they gonna do?  The operative term in that situation is "canceled."  The insurance companies have already triggered the administrative mechanisms that take these people out of the category known as "customers."  Any "reinstated" plans would be nothing more than the plans they told their former customers they couldn't afford to offer - i.e., plans with all the bells and whistles of FHer-care.

Still, Fred Upton offers a proposal that, for this reason, is an empty gesture.  But profoundly frustrated FHers in Congress want to be seen as putting daylight between themselves and the MEC regime, so they are starting to talk of the Upton proposal's appeal.

Over in the Senate, Mary Landrieu's plan seems to have more substance to it, except it, too, basically just returns the focus to the kinds of policies the insurance companies can't afford to provide.  Then comes noise from the regime that maybe there's some way to financially assist people who have been cancelled.  That requires more money, which raises the question of where, in a time of over $17 trillion debt, it's going to come from.  And don't forget that FHers will be reminded, if the Upton or Landrieu plans or any similar approaches go forward, that they'll further drain the exchanges of healthy young people.

The scenario continues to shift, but the message for Pubs remains the same:  don't get excited over Landrieu or Upton.  Don't let the word "fix" pass your lips.  We are finally at the moment where the Freedom-Haters own the one initiative for which they pined for a century, and which is unfolding as a disaster that will be their undoing.  Pubs, if you have to talk at all, speak of free markets, the centrality of the patient-doctor relationship, portable insurance, competition across state lines, savings accounts - and, as always, drastically lower taxes. But right now, mainly all you gotta do is watch this thing crash and burn.

Fifty to one

That's the ratio of cancellations to enrollees under Freedom-Hater-care so far.

This is on purpose.

Just like the non-existent Keystone XL pipeline.

Just like the dying coal industry.

Just like suing Arizona for enacting a law that would merely enforce federal immigration law.

Just like one in six Americans being on food stamps.

Just like the attempt to intimidate Congress into not passing more sanctions against Iran.


This regime hates what the United States of America had been for over two centuries before it fundamentally transformed that blessed nation into something else entirely.

Our only hope is that the Great Leveling Enterprise of the Left in post-America implodes soon. Then perhaps the United States of America can have a shot at a second incarnation, with renewed fealty to the founding principles articulated at the outset of its first incarnation.

One of those issues that makes the line of demarcation between those with Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome and those who cherish freedom and American sovereignty readily discernible

Let's start with the premise that he United Nations is irretrievably flawed and ought to be disbanded today.

But that, like much in this world that ought to happen to day, is not going to occur.

So we get initiatives like the UN Convention on Persons with Disabilities, a measure designed to chip away at member nations' sovereignty dressed up as a compassionate gesture no warm-blooded human being could argue with.

It's having a hard time getting sufficient traction for passage in the UN, but that's not stopping the US Senate from holding hearings on it.

And guess who digs it and wants the US to endorse it?  That's right, John McCain, Lisa Murkowski and at least three others who are poster children for Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome.  (The high hopes I once had for Kelly Ayotte are fading fast.)

An anonymous Pub aide lays out, in the context of this issue, the best description I've seen in some time of how the RGS microbe gains a foothold in the minds, hearts and characters of Pub office-holders:

Some Republicans privately agree that the treaty’s odds of passage are higher this time. One Senate Republican aide close to opponents of the treaty tells National Review Online that he thinks blocking ratification will be more challenging than it was last December, in part because of the shutdown.

“We have a lot of post-shutdown fatigue on the Republican side,” he says. “This is not the easiest issue to be out in front on being opposed to.”

He adds that some Republicans are tired of being perceived as contrarian and obstructionist. “That is my fear, that there’s a little bit of that,” he says.

Fear of being painted with a zeal for marginalizing disabled people.  That's what is causing some folks to float away from the mooring of their ostensible principles.

Fortunately, at least for now, it looks like the position of Jim Risch is the more prevalent:

Senator Jim Risch (R., Idaho), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee and a vocal opponent of the treaty, says he finds the expanding influence of the U.N. to be problematic.

“I have been outspoken and critical of the ballooning reach of the United Nations into every aspect of our lives,” he says. “At the end of the day, this is a matter of national sovereignty for the United States and every other country in the world. We have sufficient problems right here in America to deal with without attempting to meddle in every aspect of the laws of other countries.” 

But this is how the FHers entice Pubs to not be afraid of their brains turning to mush and to be willing to be peeled off and enlisted in the Left's Great Leveling Project.

The empty calories of QE3

Former Federal Reserve official Andrew Huszar offers a mea culpa in the WSJ today.

Trading for the first round of QE ended on March 31, 2010. The final results confirmed that, while there had been only trivial relief for Main Street, the U.S. central bank's bond purchases had been an absolute coup for Wall Street. The banks hadn't just benefited from the lower cost of making loans. They'd also enjoyed huge capital gains on the rising values of their securities holdings and fat commissions from brokering most of the Fed's QE transactions. Wall Street had experienced its most profitable year ever in 2009, and 2010 was starting off in much the same way.

You'd think the Fed would have finally stopped to question the wisdom of QE. Think again. Only a few months later—after a 14% drop in the U.S. stock market and renewed weakening in the banking sector—the Fed announced a new round of bond buying: QE2. Germany's finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, immediately called the decision "clueless."

That was when I realized the Fed had lost any remaining ability to think independently from Wall Street. Demoralized, I returned to the private sector.

Where are we today? The Fed keeps buying roughly $85 billion in bonds a month, chronically delaying so much as a minor QE taper. Over five years, its bond purchases have come to more than $4 trillion. Amazingly, in a supposedly free-market nation, QE has become the largest financial-markets intervention by any government in world history.

And the impact? Even by the Fed's sunniest calculations, aggressive QE over five years has generated only a few percentage points of U.S. growth. By contrast, experts outside the Fed, such as Mohammed El Erian at the Pimco investment firm, suggest that the Fed may have created and spent over $4 trillion for a total return of as little as 0.25% of GDP (i.e., a mere $40 billion bump in U.S. economic output). Both of those estimates indicate that QE isn't really working.

Unless you're Wall Street. Having racked up hundreds of billions of dollars in opaque Fed subsidies, U.S. banks have seen their collective stock price triple since March 2009. The biggest ones have only become more of a cartel: 0.2% of them now control more than 70% of the U.S. bank assets.

So we spent three years on that instead of lowering taxes and unburdening American business from regulatory suffocation.  Funny business instead of the obvious normal-people solution.

Unless something besides restored prosperity and economic vigor was the intent all along.

The MEC is ideologically driven enough; his problem seems to be that he's just a very incompetent leftist tyrant

Two video clips getting wide dissemination today indicate that the Most Equal Comrade is beginning to fail on his own terms.

George Will asks if there's ever been, beside that of Richard Nixon 40 years ago, a worse first year of a second presidential term.

And Billy Jeff the Zipper basically tells the MEC to man up, saying basically, "Look, pal, you may have to make changes to your signature achievement, but if so, so be it.  You have to make good on your word."

Can you imagine the floor-pacing and shouting matches going on at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue today?  Along with orchestrating America's decline, the MEC has orchestrated his own regime's meltdown.

Yet another MEC lie about FHer-care

Remember that crap he spouted in 2009 about being into "choice and competition?"  A load of hooey.

In most states the choices among insurance companies is shrinking from what it was in the normal-people days, as it becomes apparent that standardization of benefits means there's really nothing unique for any private, normal-people insurance company to be offering.

The importance of the big picture regarding Benghazi

Media Matters is having a field day with the lie that security contractor Dylan Davies told CBS News and which that organization went with on its 60 Minutes program.

Ben Shapiro at Breitbart explains that this kind of thing is MM's stock in trade:

Media Matters has been spinning full time for Hillary Clinton, attempting to put Benghazi to bed and quash any media coverage or investigations of the events of September 11, 2012. As Bradley Beychok, new Media Matters president, told Slate, debunking the 60 Minutes report was “priority one, priority two, and priority three.” That’s because it could have served as the tip of the spear for actual media coverage. Beychok admitted as much: “This is a good example of when we’re able to deploy any and all resources needed on a subject of importance…This is a topic we saw coming—as it’s been in the conservative media for months and months. So we were ready for this.”

This is how Media Matters operates: they find one detail of a story, and then blow it wildly out of proportion in order to discredit the entire narrative. It’s an effective tactic. Slate’s Dave Weigel rightly noted, “Media Matters’ win has to be seen as an early sign of Democratic plotting for 2016…. That’s what Media Matters was built for.” Clinton, Weigel notes, was one of the founding forces behind Media Matters.

CBS News blew it. And CBS News’ big error gave Media Matters and their allies in the leftist media just the excuse they were looking for to tar anyone who wants to know what truly happened in the lead-up, events, and follow-up to Benghazi.

It will be a shame if this episode turns out to save the H-Word Creature's bacon.  One thing to consider, though, is that a world infested with West-hating jihadists, more water of some sort will be coming over the bridge before 2016.  

This came from somebody who I'm pretty sure is a Dem - and I think there is much merit to this proposal

Okay, there I said it.  I guess what I would have to say to flesh out my reasons for making this the subject of a LITD post is that there still exist little statistical anomalies - a handful of Democrats here and there who do not hate freedom.

Dylan Matthews, writing at the WaPo's Wonkblog, offers six quite concrete action steps American higher education could take to reduce the cost of accessing it to $10K a pop.  They are:

1.) reduce administration

2.) reduce perks

3.) boost graduation

4.) blended learning (This one struck a chord with me because, as an adjunct instructor of jazz history and rock & roll history at a local community college, I am learning how to keep the online-course offerings from eating my lunch by offering a compelling balance between stuff I post that is very cool and was not available a few short years ago with the always-essential lecture experience, where students are treated to, among other things, anecdotes and resources that occur to me at a moment's notice.)

5.) Fewer majors

6.) Four levels of college

For full elucidation, read the whole linked piece.