A tale of two networks

What is it with MSNBC?  Hosts getting suspended / fired, having to apologize after shooting off their mouths - not occasionally, but routinely?   Think about the list of Freedom-Hating wackos that has constituted their lineup of on-air "talent".  Melissa Harris-Perry, Ed Schultz, Al Sharpton, Alec Baldwin, Keith Olberman.  It's the kind of outfit about which you have to say that Rachel Maddow is as close as it comes to reasoned discourse.

Compare and contrast to FNC, the organization that causes the Freedom-Haters to come absolutely unglued. Is there even an isolated instance of host behavior there that remotely compares with what occurs routinely at MSNBC?  Certainly, I like some better than others.  I get a little tired of the line between the sharp-observer-of-cutlural-and-economic-trends pose and the yeah-some-of-my-conceptualization-is-overly-broad-to-the-point-of-being-sloppy-but-that's-the-way-Irish-guys-from-Levittown-speak pose that O'Reilly tries to strike.  Hannity goes in for a bit of that, too, and adds to it a style of confrontation that undermines the very arguments he's clearly trying to make.  Still, they're clearly smart guys who clearly lead what we'd call traditional lifestyles.  And the other hosts - Greta, Megyn, the panelists on The Five, Cavuto - are nothing short of fabulous.  Articulate, razor-sharp, principled, devoted to freedom, common sense and decency.

I always wonder how failing networks stay on the air.  I guess it's because the revenue is assured, since they're bundled by cable-service providers, so it doesn't matter how many people watch them.  Still, it's disgusting to think that it guarantees jobs to weirdos and haters who aren't qualified to participate in any kind of activity in our economy that actually adds value to anything.

I've been waiting for this: a smackdown of Neal Boortz for his dismissive attitude toward social conservatism

I didn't personally hear it, but I've been reading about Boortz's rant, when he subbed for Hannity on the radio the other day, against the swath of the rightie movement that emphasizes the Judeo-Christian view of proper sexual relations, as well as people who aren't born yet.  I heard many such diatribes when Boortz had his own show.  They made my teeth grind.

Trevor Thomas offers an effective takedown of the Boortz - and John Stossel (mentioned by name in his piece) - position at The American Thinker today.  He points out that conservatives prior to the late 1960s didn't speak of "social issues" because certain morals, mores and customs were universally recognized in American society:

Contrary to what self-described libertarians such as Boortz and John Stossel would have us believe, if conservatives simply shut up about issues like abortion and marriage and focus on things like debt and fiscal responsibility, there's no guarantee when it comes to election time. It is a long-held myth, typically perpetuated by self-described liberals in the mainstream media but also by self-described libertarians, that whenever the moral issues are prominent in elections, conservatives lose. As I have noted before, Jeffrey Bell in his book The Case for Polarized Politics helps dispel this myth.

"Social issues were nonexistent in the period 1932 to 1964," notes Bell. "The Republican Party won two presidential elections out of nine, and they had the Congress for all of four years in that entire period. . . . When social issues came into the mix -- I would date it from the 1968 election . . . the Republican Party won seven out of 11 presidential elections."

Bell concludes, as have many others, that American social conservatism began in response to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Thus, it is unsurprising that all of the most significant "social" issues in America today are sexual issues. Abortion, homosexuality, marriage, contraception, and the like, are not hot political topics merely because they relate to people's personal lives. They are hot political topics because they reside deep within the moral realm of our culture.

I have long thought that there was a glaring irony in the Boortz position.  He loves to rail against the "moocher class" and the entrenched bureaucracy that permeates American institutions from government to education to industry, yet he fails to make the connection between its rise and the deterioration of the family structure and the legitimization of unusual sexual practices the extermination of fetal Americans.

You can't assert that "what the neighbors are doing is none of your business" and then get outraged when all of those neighbors - up and down the block and across the country - are living in ways that drain the nation of its economic vitality and erode the freedoms that are actually important.

How come no mention of these guys?

Thomas Joscelyn at the Weekly Standard asks this about David D. Kirkpatrick's NYT piece claiming that the video was a big factor in the Benghazi attack and al-Qaeda wasn't:   Why did he not even mention Muhammad Jamal al-Kasher, a longtime al-Zawahiri loyalist, and Faral al-Shibli, who, according to US intelligence sources, was Osama bin-Laden's bodyguard in the 1990s?

And Bing West at NRO wants to know why ringleader Abu Khattala - dismissed by Kirkpatrick as a "second-tier Islamist" - is still roaming free?

And Paul Mirengoff at Power Line spoke with one of Kirkpatrick's interviewees whose assessment of where Kirkpatrick was coming from was this:

Kirkpatrick’s heavy reliance on self-serving comments by Libyans that also serve the purposes of Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, etc, suggests that he had a story he wanted to write and was looking for confirmation of that story.

This suspicion was confirmed to me by one of the people Kirkpatrick interviewed. This person, probably as well informed about the Benghazi attack as any American, tells me that during the interview with Kirkpatrick (which occurred many months ago), it quickly became clear that he “had his conclusions and simply wanted me to confirm them, not refute them.” It also became clear, my source adds, that Kirkpatrick “was off the rails.”

Carrying water for the H-word Creature seems to be what really drove Kirkpatrick.

Why is the EU cool with Morocco's occupied territory but not with Israel building homes in Samaria and Judea?

Bookworm Room discusses the dismissive reply EU foreign policy chief Cathereine Ashton gave to Professor Eugene Kontorovich of Northwestern University and Israeli ex-ambassador to Canada Alan Baker when they asked why it considered Morocco's occupation since 1975 of a swath of the Sahara desert legit but constantly beat up on Israel for its incorporation of lands it won after being aggressed upon by Syria in 1967.

Israel puts up with a double standard not applied to any other nation on earth.

A piece of propaganda from the regime's house organ so egregious that it draws a bipartisan response

House members Mike Rogers and Adam Schiff, Pub and Dem respectively, slam the NYT report that the video was indeed a major factor in the Benghazi attack as inaccurate.

Narcissism vs. an orientation of incarnation

Elizabeth Scalia, who blogs at The Anchoress, has a great piece at NRO on how modern "holiday" greetings seldom reflect a sense of anything greater than a desire to let recipients know what a great year the sender has had.

Not sure how it occurred to her to use Duke Ellington as a launching point for her overall observation, but it works out  great:

The story goes that if the legendary composer and orchestrator Duke Ellington had met you, and gotten his hands on your mailing address, you’d have gotten a Christmas card from him. It may not come at Christmas, but at some point during the year, his personally written and signed greetings would grace your mailbox.

“Duke Ellington and I exchanged Christmas greetings each year,” wrote Joe Delaney of the Las Vegas Sun. “Mine were sent in mid-December. Duke sent his when the spirit moved him.”

She then cites her own example of what most of us experience as we open our mail in December:

The cards we are receiving at our house this year, though timely, have seemed relentlessly self-absorbed and unseasonal; the majority of them are not even cards, but photographs. They are pictures of families — or at least of the children, no matter how old — posing in bathing suits on a beach, or with a parrot on a cruise, and with nary a manger or an angel in sight.
Well, why would there be when, in fact, these messages are not really about Christmas at all. They’re about the selfie-ness of the senders, for whom even the recipient has become an irrelevant detail — an acquaintance confirmed via printed label stuck to the envelope. Not a pen is lifted, nor a name scrawled; not a warm sentiment is betrayed. The message is, in essence, “We had a nice vacation this year and liked this picture so here it is, and oh yeah, Happy Holidays.”
There is something profoundly anti-Incarnational about it all.
Incarnation is a process; it is actually a succession of processes — an ongoing pursuit of becoming. Incarnation involves intention and then consent, but not in isolation, and not just once; the consent happens again and again. It is a consent to be present; a consent to see, to hear, to listen, to respond, to love, to ache, to surrender in order to attain the fullness of that intention with which it all started.

The narcissism on display in these “holiday greetings” suggests no intention to seek out a greatness beyond ourselves; it consents to only the barest engagement with an ever-diminishing sense of social obligation. As such, it is empty and void; the “nothing” that is only possible without God. For with God — the angels tell Mary — “nothing” is “impossible.” 

Then she riffs off (excuse the pun) the signature sign-off to audiences with which Duke closed concerts over the course of his 50-plus-year career: "Thank you.  We love you madly."

In the noise of the world and our harried distractions and self-absorption, we lose track of the mystery and message of Christmas: that we are meant to be an Incarnational people, a people of intention, consenting to be aware of each other, fully present to each other, alive to each other, affirming each other, for God’s sake.
Duke Ellington used to tell his audiences that he loved them, and madly. Nat Hentoff, in a fond piece, quoted him: “It’s true. I love those people madly. . . . Maybe 30 years ago I used to think, ‘I play for myself. I express me.’ And an artist has to please himself first. But . . . when someone else happens to like what you’re doing too, this brings on a state of agreement that is the closest thing there is to sex, because people do not indulge themselves together unless they agree this is the time.”
Intention, consent, seeing, listening, being present, affirmation. It is an Incarnational way of living that perhaps only someone like Ellington, who kept Christmas well and understood its secret, could manage.
In 1974, Hentoff was the glad recipient of an April Christmas card from the Duke, who died weeks later, in May. “What came back to me as I looked at that card was what sideman Clark Terry told me: ‘Duke wants life and music to always be a state of becoming. He doesn’t even like definitive song endings to a piece. He’d often ask us to come up with ideas for closings, but when we’d settled on one of them, he’d keep fooling with it. He always likes to make the end of a song sound as if it’s going somewhere.’”

That’s the Incarnational process.  

As I said in my own Christmas post a few days ago, I am nobody's expert on Christian living, but as this season and year draw to a close, I am increasingly inclined to see the point of a human existence as finding ways in each moment to give.  Not generic giving.  We are not generic individual creatures. And, as Scalia points out, a sense that we "ought" to give is what leads to greetings that really come closer to saying "dig me" rather than "I love you."

The glaring unanswered question surrounding the Brooklyn mall mayhem

Why have there been no arrests yet?

And I consider the bastardized spelling of words used as names for rappers (this riot broke out because someone named Fabolous was presumed to be performing there) to be evidence of the advanced state of rot of our culture.  And, should someone point out that The Beatles got the ball rolling on that 50-plus years ago, let me state again that I am a paid and academically trained cultural historian and I still blow hot and cold on a number of developments of that nature.

Everybody's posting about this, but it's a major culture-war victory (as well as free-market economics victory), so let's post about it here, too

A&E says Phil is welcome to return for next season's taping of Duck Dynasty.

The kind of thing you get when Pubs don't put up a strong conservative candidate for a legislative office

The almost certain reelection of freedom-hating empty-suit demagogues like Al Franken.

It looks like the mullahs don't consider the six-month period spelled out in the Geneva accord to be underway yet

Iran's nuclear chief announces the development of a new generation of uranium-enrichment centrifuges.

I'm sure Secretary Global Test considers this unhelpful and a hindrance to Iran joining the community of nations.

Excellent ammo for your battles with redistributionists

A Heritage blog post chock full of charts that tell the real picture about government revenue and spending.

The first one shows what kind of a situation a family with an annual income of $52K would be in if it spent $64K per year (the proportions that characterize the federal government's intake and outgo).  It would be putting $12K on the credit card every year despite already being $312K in debt.

Yikes!

Another chart spells out Freedom-Hater-care's tax bite.

Another one shows that "entitlements" comprise 45 percent of federal outlay - far more than defense, net interest, education, or any other thing the gummint shells out your money for.

Some other charts as well.  Keep handy.

Striking themselves right out of jobs

When the workers at a Chcago specialty sandwich shop struck for higher wages, they got this e-mail from the owner:

1. Due to increased competition and losses, ownership has decided to consider remodeling and reconcepting the store at 600 West Chicago Ave.

2. The store is closing, effective tomorrow, December 23, 2013 for an unknown period of time for this remodeling and reconcepting.

3. All staff is terminated, effective Monday, December 23, 2013.

4. All staff may apply for unemployment, if eligible.

5. Return any keys and Company property to Will Ravert at 600 West Chicago Avenue on Monday, December 23, 2014 during normal business hours.

6. Payroll will be processed as usual this week and paid on Friday, December 27, 2013.

7. Keep an eye out for the grand opening of the new store.

8. Ownership appreciates your service and wish you well in your new endeavors.

Doug Besant

Director of Operations

Hee hee.

The great leveling enterprise gets personal

Here's another one of those societal developments that a mere five years ago would still have seemed weird as hell: gender-free bathrooms.

It is important to note that some places in America now require gender-neutral bathrooms, including Philadelphia and acounty in Oregon. However, these locales have not replaced traditional bathrooms but have rather added a third, gender-neutral option.

Those initiatives do not go far enough, according to Slate writer Izzy Rode. Although the author is only an intern, her (Rode describes herself as "female-bodied yet androgynous," so it is unclear what pronouns would be appropriate) piece defending gender-neutral bathrooms is one of only two pieces the Slateeditors have chosen to publish (along with a piece arguing that monogamous marriage and families should not be encouraged).

Rode clearly sides with the students at Brown and Wesleyan, who want to eliminate all gendered spaces. If the ordinary channels of advocacy do not bend to the will of this minority, then the activists may turn to vandalism and destruction of school property.

So the libertarian remedy - just tune those people out and do what you want with your own life - is utterly ineffective against these militants.  Pajama Boy and Julia, merrily eliminating in front of each other as they chat about "getting covered."  This is post-America.

Stage Four Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome

What the hell is the RNC doing sending out a damn Kwanzaa message?

Today's reason why the NCC is a garbage organization

Just who is behind the group that helped GLAAD prevent comedian Bob Newhart from speaking at a Catholic conference in Orlando?

Newhart backed out after the gay rights group GLAAD launched a targeted campaign to pressure the legendary comedian and his representatives to disavow his association with Legatus, a supposedly homophobic group that believes in traditional marriage. GLAAD double-teamed Newhart with the gay Christian activist group Faithful America, which launched a petition to force the “Elf” star off the stage.

[snip]

So who’s bankrolling the anti-Newhart effort?
Faithful America was formed in 2004 by the left-wing National Council of Churches of Christ to serve as a “religious version of MoveOn.org,” Faithful America kicked off with an ad on the Al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya networks condemning the Bush administration’s Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. Soros was heavily involved that year in building the progressive activist and media establishment, deemed by writer Byron York as “the vast left-wing conspiracy,” targeting President Bush’s re-election effort.
Faithful America was co-founded by Tom Perriello and Ricken Patel, who the previous year founded the Soros-funded globalist group Res Publica, for which Obama’s new White House counselor John Podesta is still listed as an Advisory Board member.

Soros’ Open Society Institute awarded two grants, each totaling $400,000, to Faithful America during Obama’s election year in 2008, according to the institute’s calendar year 2008 990′s.

Soros’ West 59th Street New York City institute enabled Faithful America to join in coalitions pushing for health-care reform and to pressure American Catholic Archbishop Timothy Dolan to “crack down on partisan political activity in his parishes” during the 2012 election year, an effort that was supported by The New York Times.

Hungarian-born billionaire Soros “identifies himself as an atheist” according to the FAQ’s page on GeorgeSoros.com.

As in the Duck Dynasty dust-up, it is encouraging to see that not all homosexuals are on the militantly FHer side of the issue:

But some Christians refused to be intimidated.
“For those who don’t know, I currently serve as chairman of GOProud, an organization of right-leaning gays and their allies. I am very disturbed by the group-think that dominates the Gay Left (heck, the Left in general).  They’ve made it their mission to publicly shame anyone who associates with any Christian/Catholic groups or teachings,” wrote conservative activist Lisa de Pasquale in an op-ed for Breitbart News.
“At no time did Newhart endorse any specific beliefs of this organization, yet he was publicly maligned for accepting a gig with a Catholic organization.  What’s next?  Shaming hotels for hosting their event?  Printers for accepting their business?,” de Pasquale wrote.

Tolerance, by definition, is not something you can shove down anybody's throat.

 

Just what we need: another mideast country flirting with instability and looking to blame the West

Erdogan's Turkey is roiling with a major corruption scandal, the lurch toward Islamism is unpopular, and Erdogan is trying to implicate the U.S. in his nation's problems.

Um, isn't the whole idea of a society having laws pretty much grounded in a sense of right and wrong?

Great Neo-neocon post on Jonathan Turley's Washington Post column about the outcome of a Utah case having to do with cohabitation in which one man has a sexual relationship and lives with multiple women.  Polygyny without the matrimony.  I think she does a great job taking on the way he sniffs at what he calls "morality laws."  As she points out, does he think such laws are imposed by some kind of outside force that swoops down and decrees behavioral parameters that are at odds with deeply rooted notions of what is and is not moral?

Merry Christmas from LITD

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

John 1:5



One of the big impetuses of the quest among many Americans over the last 45 or so years to find some spiritual path unfettered by tradition (Western tradition, anyway) was the yearning for something authentically "mystical."  The trajectory of this quest is rather embarrassing to recount.  It began on a serious enough tone.  Guys like Alan Watts, who was an ordained Episcopalian priest, sincerely sought to grasp the essence of Buddhist doctrine.  He was followed by the likes of Leary and Alpert, who likewise poured over ancient Eastern texts in search of their core wisdom.  But, even in this early stage of the quest I speak of, let us remember that good old partying was an element of the activity.  Girls and booze and hip music.  Let's be clear that both Watts and Leary were alcoholics.  And, by the early seventies, the quest was no longer so serious, devolving into wince-inducing juvenile flirtation with "channeled entities" and preoccupations with diet and exotic forms of relaxation and exercise, not to mention chaotic personal relationships resulting from disregard for bonds among the people so engaged.

I recount, with one-paragraph brevity, the arc of this phenomenon because it really has permeated our culture quite thoroughly.  Look at your Facebook newsfeed this morning.  Unless all your friends are Christians, you will see postings of the "Coexist" poster, well-wishes for a happy day "no matter what you believe," and maybe even a greeting related to that fraud among holidays, Kwanzaa.

It's all led to much disillusionment.  As one after another "spiritual path" has not panned out, people have baled and become agnostics who feel they don't have much time to consider spiritual questions at all.

The irony is that the most mystical event in all of human history is at the core of the Christianity to which most Americans were exposed in their childhoods.  How much more mystical can you get than a moment at which there was a joining of the realm in which things are transitory, in which things rise and fall, and live and die, with the realm in which things are eternal and not subject to decay or defilement?  It happened.  It happened when the power of the Highest overshadowed a Jewish girl at her prayers and conceived in her a son, made of cells and organs but also a Spirit that was not bound by the laws governing them - because that Spirit had authored those very laws.

Heaven and earth, nirvana and sangsara, the temporal and the eternal - we have proof that they are one. He overcame the world - by loving it.  He invites us to use his greatest gift to us, our free will, to love it likewise, to give up our defilement of it.  If we can do this, its natural beauty is restored, and all creation exalts its unmistakable divinity.

Shortly before his death, Johnny Cash described himself as a "C minus Christian."  That probably describes me, and may even be aiming a bit high.  In any event, as far as your humble correspondent has thought this through - and it's been on my own, since, at present, I'm not a steady church-goer - this seems to be what today is all about.

Merry Christmas.

Because the MEC still insists on chasing a phantom nuke deal with Iran

Jay Carney tells the press corps that the bipartisan sanctions bill Congress has crafted will get a veto from the Most Equal Comrade.  The sanctions wouldn't kick in unless, after a year of negotiations, we still weren't living in a world of unicorns and rainbows, but Jay says it would still send the wrong message to the mullahs.

Never mind that the mullahs don't think there is a binding agreement, and that the six-month period the non-agreement establishes has not yet begun.

And they try to sell it with Pajama Boy

. . . even as the MEC regime admits that FHer-care is prohibitively expensive.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services the other night issued a press release that outlines new options for the nearly 5 million Americans who have received cancellation notices from their health insurers.  Not surprisingly, these Americans are “finding other coverage options to be more expensive than their cancelled plans or policies,” CMS explains. 

Courtesy of the administration ad hoc announcement, these 5 million Americans—regardless of their age—may now enroll in Obamacare-compliant catastrophic plans, which were previously limited to people younger than 30 years old.  But these plans aren’t cheap, in part because they must still provide preventive services—such as contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients—at no cost to the policyholder.  Indeed, a 26-year-old in Milwaukee faces a $1,983 premium for the least expensive catastrophic plan.  And in Philadelphia, the cheapest catastrophic plan for a 29-year-old carries a $2,189 premium. 

No wonder more Americans than ever hate Freedom-Hater-care.  And most of the most recent surge in opposition comes from women.

And there is no backup plan for when it fails.

Some bracing candor to start your Monday

Fox News's Greta Van Susteren was a panelist on ABC's This Week and had this to say about the Most Equal Comrade's most recent presser:

“The president’s most powerful weapon has been his ability to inspire. That’s his greatest strength. Then he comes out last Friday in the press conference. He was depressing. He was pathetic. He sucked the oxygen out of the room. The media had bad questions. They kept punching him. He ends the year where you just want to slit your throat almost, because he’s so depressing.”

Here's the video.

How did she come to such a different conclusion from The Daily Beast's Eleanor Clift?

Back to the basics: it is essential for human liberty that government's reach be circumscribed to the maximum extent possible

You must read this entire essay in The Federalist.  It's the kind of piece that's indisputably thematically cohesively, but explores a number of points in the process of establishing its overall point that could be expanded into full-lenght treatment themselves.

It starts with the charge we have all heard from FHers that our (conservative) world view would result in a kind of Dodge City anarchy.  (I've even had one lefty with whom I occasionally tangle on Facebook say the end result of our vision is warlord-dominated Somalia.)  They trace the roots of what this blog calls Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome back to Herbert Hoover, who, even before he was president, a good hundred years ago, when our culture was beginning to succumb to the influence of progressives such as Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Brandeis and Holmes, granted those figures ground and basically apologized for the conservative exaltation of individual sovereignty.  (I learned a great deal about Hoover's RGS from Amity Shlaes's great tome The Forgotten Man.)  The Federalist piece quotes Hoover: "In our individualism we have long since abandoned the laissez faire of the 18th Century – the notion that it is “every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.” We abandoned that when we adopted the ideal of equal opportunity . . . We have indeed gone even further in the 20th Century with the embracement of the necessity of a greater and broader sense of service and responsibility to others as a part of individualism."  The authors then outline the predicament Hoover put us in:

Republicans and many of their conservative allies have been fighting an uphill political battle ever since. Having misunderstood, maligned, and willingly ceded the higher ground of the Founders’ project of constitutional liberalism, they have been left arguing for Hoover’s progressive individualism on the utilitarian basis that it is better for the average American than the more explicit statism peddled by the American Left.

And, relatively speaking, it probably is. But having granted that it is the federal government’s job to provide a comprehensive social safety net, moderate income inequality, and guarantee “real” equality of opportunity, Republicans have little room to complain when they are characterized as cold-hearted for wanting to do these things for a few dollars less than the Democrats. After all, as President Obama reminds us regularly, there’s always “more work to be done.”

The authors take a square look at how the Progressive vision plays itself out in our time, quoting from a chilling prescription from modern FHer Thomas Edsall that includes a demand for full employment, "the replacement of means-tested programs [with] universal benefits," and that favorite  ruse of the modern Freedom-Hater, "protecting the environment."  Then they spell out the tepid wonkery with which conservatives tend to fight back:

Here Republicans are tempted to reach for their own economists’ studies and actuarial tables. A high minimum wage stunts job growth; high income tax rates discourage enterprise; trade restrictions increase consumer costs and keep workers in failing industries; we’ve already put more on our social welfare spending credit card than future generations can pay.

True, true, true, and true. But if the argument stops there, the Progressives have already won: all we’re debating is the practicability of their chosen means to their millennialist ends. The good news is that today a new fusionism forming within libertarian, conservative, and populist circles offers a deeper critique–a reexamination of both means and ends and a reaffirmation of the virtue of treating equals equally, grounded in the founders’ moral and political realism.

They then take a look at the national debate of the 1780s.  The Articles of Confederation clearly weren't making it.  But it was Alexander Hamilton who pointed out to the others involved in the debate that a Constitution should not expand a central government's power, but merely fully grant the power that the Articles had conferred:

Hamilton believed, like the others, that history and experience suggested a limited role for the federal government that amounted to four easily-defined, essential tasks: “the common defense of the members; the preservation of the public peace as well against internal convulsions as external attacks; the regulation of commerce with other nations and between the States; the superintendence of our intercourse, political and commercial, with foreign countries.” Almost all of this was already the responsibility of the national government under the Articles. But that charter had not provided the power necessary to accomplish these important ends.

The Constitution, in other words, would succeed where the Articles had failed not by expanding the role of the federal government, but by granting it the authority to fulfill its responsibilities. Nothing could be more “absurd,” Hamilton argued, than expecting the government to make bricks without straw.

True enough, but, if misinterpreted by a public being fed distortion by FHers, the beginnings of a slippery slope:

Today’s Progressives, however, are not content with bricks; in the spirit of medieval alchemists they dream of turning baser human metals into silver and gold. While their success is equally improbable, the consequences of their attempt are much more serious. They’ve gone a long way into transforming a city of free men into a city of pigs.

What would it take to solve the problem of income inequality? What would it take to actualize Obamacare’s promise of cheaper, better healthcare for all? Power: more and more and ever more raw, arbitrary power. And when, despite all their efforts, we’re still no more than a lump of lead? More power still.

It comes down to a question of the proper locus of power.  Does it lie within the sovereign individual, or an overarching structure that is only properly designed to ensure public order?

We see the results all over America today of a people willing to shift that locaus or power away from themselves.  You see it on the sidewalks of Detroit, where hollowed-out former men sit in front of abandoned storefronts sipping Thundrbird from brown paper bags.  You see it in the panicked conversation at kitchen tables on which lie cancellation notices from insurance companies.  You see it in the utterly passive countenance of the eunuch Pajama Boy, a being utterly incapable of thinking about the question of what's important in life.

As I say, the entire essay is your required for today.  Its overall point is the essential question that any and every post here at LITD, no matter the specific topic, deals with:  does human power properly rest with you, or with a state that can ultimately only use it to strip you of your humanity?

Ammo for your climate-change arguments

Commit this list of seven global-warming alarmist setbacks in 2013 to memory so you can shove them down the throats of any FHers who try to start something at your Christmas gathering.

A tacit admission by the MEC and Sebelius that FHer-care has failed

A WSJ editorial says that the Most Equal Comrade has basically repealed Freedom-Hater-care.


And us Tea Party types would appreciate some acknowledgement of what we were trying to do last summer:

Mr. Obama's actions are as damning about ObamaCare as anything Senator Ted Cruz has said, and they implicitly confirm that the law is quarter-baked and harmful. Mr. Obama is doing through executive fiat what Republicans shut down the government to get him to do.

***

The President declared at his Friday press conference that the exemptions "don't go to the core of the law," but in fact they belong to his larger pattern of suspending the law on his own administrative whim. Earlier this month he ordered insurers to backdate policies to compensate for the federal exchange meltdown, and before that HHS declared that it would not enforce for a year the mandates responsible for policy cancellations. Mr. Obama's team has also by fiat abandoned the small-business exchanges, delayed the employer mandate and scaled back income verification.

To employ one of Cass Sunstein's favorite terms, we just need to nudge the MEC to go that last little step and make the death of his signature "achievement" official.

Just when you thought FHer-care couldn't fail any worse

Seeing a lot of commentary on HHS's announcement about qualifying for "hardship" already today.  So far, I think Ed Morrissey's roundup and observations at Hot Air are the most cogent.

Among his points:

• It exacerbates the already-looming problem of younger, healthier people opting out of the insurance industry's risk pool.
• One form in which we will see that development is those younger, healthier people who have "enrolled" not actually sending in that first premium for their newfangled FHer-care plans.
• Because Justice Roberts's tortured reasoning established that the penalty for not buying insurance is a tax, the regime is in the interesting position of calling one of its own taxes a "hardship."

The pointy-headed bureaucrats of this regime painted themselves into a corner by lacking the cajones to employ the ruthlessness characteristic of the regimes they admire, preferring instead to try to sell their vapid initiatives with dazzle-dazzle and blather about "fairness."

At least I am personally off the hook for either paying a fine or buying a gummint-grade plan.  Except that I'd better not come down with a major health issue after February 28, when my current plan, with which I am perfectly satisfied, gets cancelled.  Damn it.

How can the FHer-care situation get any more pathetic?

Robertson roundup

As much as I'd like to come up with something stunningly original to say about A&E firing Phil Robertson, enough others articulate my position quite effectively, so it's probably most efficient for me to link to their statements:

John Nolte at Breitbart.

Bookworm Room.

Gov. Bobby Jindal.

Sarah Palin.

Matt Lewis at the Daily Caller.  This one is good because he juxtaposes Phil and Pajama Boy.

Selwyn Duke at The American Thinker.

Bottom line:  He didn't say anything that expressed bigotry.

"Because THAT is where we are today in America"

The Chicks on the Right spell out to a squirm-inducing level the juncture at which our civilization finds itself.  They invite you to consider the implications of the people of this country electing an openly socialist mayor for New York City and an openly socialist city council member for Seattle.  They close the linked post with a grimly snort-inducing MSNBC Krystal Ball video clip singing the praises of a guaranteed minimum income.

Taking shark-jumping to a whole new level

I guess we should have had a solid clue about how this regime viewed various American demographics - consider the Julia Powerpoint - but, really?  You think young adult American males are typified by this?

American people finally waking up?

Per a new Gallup poll, a record high number of Americans say big government is the biggest threat to their way of life.  72 percent.

Taking the measure of John Podesta

We know what an ideological sewer his Center for American Progress is.  But if it's been a while since you heard any remarks directly from the man himself, consider what he thinks of Republicans in Congress and the role of the legislative branch in governing.

UPDATE: Republican Study Committee chair Steve Scalise (R-LA) is not amused.  Neither is Speaker Boehner's office.    And now Podesta has issued the obligatory apology.  But the horse has left the barn.  We know he considers us his enemies.  Which is fine, because we damn sure consider him, this regime, the Freedom-Hater party, and the Western left ours.

The disconnect between the regime's propaganda arm and normal-people America

Barbara Walters tells Piers Morgan that back in 2008, "we" - and I'd be interested in hearing her clarify who she means by "we" - expected the Most Equal Comrade to be "the next messiah."  As the linked Newsbusters article says, it's a rather stunning admission given the MEC's Nixon-level public regard now.  Although, one must consider that Walters has made a career out of gushing over celebrities.

Maybe now that the light of public awareness is shining on the raw truth, Paul Ryan will reconsider

I know that look on is face, as well as the faces of Patty Murray and Jeff Sessions as they emerge from their meeting, indicates that words were not minced behind closed doors.

But something has to give, now that everyone knows that the Ryan-Murray deal takes money from veterans' retirement benefits to protect a tax credit that is notorious for being exploited by illegal aliens.

Take the cure, Representative Ryan.  Now is the moment for reversing your symptoms of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome.

A very nice victory for freedom

The regime's attempt to destroy the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of our civilization took a blow to the gut today:

Yesterday, Judge Brian Cogan of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, not onlystruck down Obamacare's contraception mandate as applied to religious non-profit organizations, but also sent a strong signal that federal courts were losing patience with President Obama's many stitches of executive power.

Previous courts had ruled against President Obama's contraception mandate as applied to for-profit entities (see Sebelius v Hobby Lobby), but this was the first court to hold that participating in Obama's scheme to provide free birth control is a substantial burden on the free practice of religion (specifically the Catholic Archdiocese of New York and its affiliate organizations).

The contraception mandate "directly compels plaintiffs, through the threat of onerous penalties, to undertake actions that their religion forbids," Cogan wrote. "There is no way that a court can, or should, determine that a coerced violation of conscience is of insufficient quantum to merit constitutional protection."

Normal-people type Americans still know how to assert what is right and true in the face of Freedom-Hater vitriol and thuggery.

Sweet indeed!

Jim Matheson has announced that he'll retire from the congressional seat he's held in Utah for seven terms.

Can you say "Representative Mia Love"?

Patty cake may score Secretary Global Test and the MEC some points with the kumbaya crowd, but it has a whole different value to the mullahs

As far as they're concerned, there is no binding treaty:

Originally, Iran’s official media had presented the accord as a treaty (qarardad) but it now refers to a “letter of agreement” (tavafoq nameh).

The initial narrative claimed that the P5+1 group of nations that negotiated the deal with Iran had recognized the Islamic Republic’s right to enrich uranium and agreed to start lifting sanctions over a six-month period. In exchange, Iran would slow its uranium enrichment and postpone for six months the installation of equipment for producing plutonium, an alternate route to making a bomb. A later narrative claimed that the accord wasn’t automatic and that the two sides had appointed experts to decide the details (“modalities”) and fix a timetable.

On Sunday, an editorial in the daily Kayhan, published by the office of “Supreme Guide” Ali Khameini, claimed that the “six month” period of the accord was meaningless and that a final agreement might “even take 20 years to negotiate.”

It was, therefore, no surprise that Iran decided to withdraw its experts from talks in Geneva to establish exactly how to implement the accord. “Now we have to talk about reviving the talks on modalities,” says Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi.

Translated into plain language, the new Iranian narrative is that talks about implementing an accord that is not legally binding have collapsed and that, in the words of the head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Agency, Ali-Akbar Salehi, there is no change in the rhythm and tempo of Iran’s nuclear project. “Our centrifuges are working full capacity,” Salehi said last Thursday.

Ironically, the mullahs and I have something of key significance in common: utter contempt for Secretary Global Test, the Most Equal Comrade, and the Freedom-Hater party.

Horace Silver, RIP

Discovered in 1950 by Stan Getz playing in a Connecticut club.  An essential element in the Art Blakey group - with Clifford Brown on trumpet - that made the landmark 1954 Live at Birdland album, leader of so many great groups on his own, composer of such classics as "Nica's Dream," "Song for My Father," "Nutville," and this 1965 romp.

He was one of those jazz greats with a strong visual presence.  He made such great facial expressions while he played, and was generally photographed smiling.  The arc of his life exhibited abundant warmth and a delight in continual discovery of ever-deeper levels of the meaning of human existence.

Freedom-Hater-care: the ever-flowing fount of bad ideas

 . . . such as not vetting and training navigators.  What you get as a result is a bunch of radicals, shysters and sleaze merchants.

Nothing more delicious than a smackdown of Robert Reich

He has to be on anybody's list of the most repugnant columnists in the US or Europe writing today.  (Other contenders - and this could become a time-consuming parlor game: Joan Walsh, Paul Krugman, Sally Kohn.)

He recently lit into America's wealthy for - get this - their private, voluntary charitable contributions.  It did not go unnoticed by NRO's Kevin Williamson.  He begins his piece by looking at why envy is the tawdriest of the seven deadly sins:

To be possessed by envy is to admit a humiliating personal inadequacy: We do not envy others those attainments that we think we too might achieve, but those we despair of ever possessing. Wrath, greed, pride, lust — all assume a certain self-possession. Sloth and gluttony are practically standard issue in times of plenty such as these. Wrath and pride are the sins of great (but not good) men. Envy is the affliction of the insignificant. It is the small man’s sin.

And then he shows how Reich is all about envy:

 . . . he scoffs that America’s rich philanthropists are phony and self-serving, investing too much in opera and ballet and fancy colleges, and too little in feeding the hungry and housing the homeless. He particularly resents the fact that our tax code encourages such giving, with deductions that reduced federal revenue by some $39 billion last year — federal revenue that could have gone toward employing men such as Robert Reich.This calls to mind Edmund Spenser’s description of Envy personified: “He hated all good works and virtuous deeds / And him no less, that any like did use / And who with gracious bread the hungry feeds / His alms for want of faith he doth accuse.”

Professor Reich being Professor Reich, you can guess how his argument unfolds. (If you have read one Robert Reich column, which is one too many, you have read them all.) He writes: “As the tax year draws to a close, the charitable tax deduction beckons. America’s wealthy are its largest beneficiaries. According to the Congressional Budget Office, $33 billion of last year’s $39 billion in total charitable deductions went to the richest 20 percent of Americans, of whom the richest 1 percent reaped the lion’s share.” It goes without saying that he makes no attempt to compare the apportionment of charitable tax deductions with charitable donations — that would only complicate things and invite an unpleasant encounter with reality. 

For a sense of perspective, consider that that $39 billion in tax deductions was associated with $316 billion in charitable donations. Our innumerate class warriors dismiss philanthropy as a complicated tax dodge for the rich, but in fact tax deductions amount to about 12 percent of total charitable donations, meaning that our wily robber barons have figured out a way of beating the taxman by . . . giving away far more money than they receive in related tax benefits. Even if Professor Reich got his way on tax rates and they went up to 90 percent at the top, you still don’t come out ahead by giving away money.

Beyond stealing altar offerings from the almighty god of revenue, our philanthropists offend Professor Reich’s sensibilities in another way: They don’t give to the sort of enterprises he wants them to give to. “A large portion of the charitable deductions now claimed by America’s wealthy are for donations to culture palaces — operas, art museums, symphonies, and theaters — where they spend their leisure time hobnobbing with other wealthy benefactors. . . . These aren’t really charities as most people understand the term. They’re often investments in the life-styles the wealthy already enjoy and want their children to have as well. Increasingly, being rich in America means not having to come across anyone who’s not.” Unsurprisingly, Progressive America’s favorite non-economist-who-plays-an-economist-on-TV does not bother to document what he means by “a large share.” Giving to art-and-culture organizations amounted to just over $14 billion in 2012, or about 4.5 percent of charitable contributions, far less than was given to health, human-services, or public-benefit organizations. There are a fair number of single organizations that run into the billions per year, including YMCA ($6.24 billion), Goodwill Industries ($5 billion), Catholic Charities ($4.4 billion), and the Red Cross ($3.12 billion).

Williamson points out two very ironic facts about charitable giving in America: guys like Reich may ry to characterize arts-and-culture giving as acts of snobbery, but they get downright self-congratulatory when the government puts up tax money for such things, and the much-despised Koch brothers give one hell of a lot to the nation's arts-and-culture sector:

If spending on art, music, and culture is self-serving when private citizens do it, what is it when government does it? Essential, necessary, crucial — of course. The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs by itself spends some $150 million a year on precisely that sort of thing. The state spends dozens of millions more. A good deal of that money goes to subsidizing theater, including big-ticket theater. In my role as a theater critic, I am constantly surprised by how many shows selling tickets for north of $100 are publicly subsidized. It isn’t huge money — without public support for the Manhattan Theater Club, that $120 ticket to see Laurie Metcalf in The Other Place (excellent, be sorry if you missed it) might have been $125 instead. But it adds up: a few dozen millions from the state, a hundred million from the city, a billion and a half from Washington.

Try cutting a piece of that and you’ll hear howls about how vital every farthing spent in the service of culture is. Unless you’re David Koch, in which case it’s “Thanks for giving the New York ballet a nice place to perform, now please die.” I wonder how many New York balletomanes know that the David Koch in the David Koch Theater is that David Koch. Perhaps it is the urge to put one’s name on things that so offends Professor Reich and his colleagues at the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy.

Begrudging others their wealth is pretty much the long and the short of One-Note Robert's putrid career.

 

Memo to the gluten-intolerant - and just plain intolerant: you have no right to gluten-free food

The restaurant industry operates on razor-thin margins and must retain as well as attract customers.  That's why restaurants usually kowtow to cultural trends, no matter how inconvenient to them.  ANd trying to placate the anti-gluten crowd is proving inconvenient indeed.  And, as is the case with every Freedom-Hater cultural phenomenon, no gesture of good will is ever enough.

Many chains say they would like to offer gluten-free food to attract a growing base of customers who believe it is healthier. But ensuring food is free of gluten is difficult: In the chaos of commercial kitchens, ingredients can easily mix, making restaurants reluctant to promise. 

Under a new Food and Drug Administration regulation that goes into effect next year, foods labeled "gluten free" must contain fewer than 20 parts per million of gluten, a protein composite found in wheat, barley and rye. While the rule primarily targets packaged food, an FDA spokeswoman said the restaurant industry should "move quickly to ensure that its use of 'gluten-free' labeling is consistent with the federal definition."

[snip]

About two million to three million Americans, or nearly 1% of the population, suffer from celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder in which the ingestion of gluten interferes with the absorption of nutrients, according to the Center for Celiac Research & Treatment in Boston. The National Foundation for Celiac Awareness estimates that another 18 million Americans have a gluten sensitivity, meaning they experience diarrhea, anemia and other symptoms similar to those of celiac disease, but lack the antibodies and intestinal damage found in those with the disease.

Millions more who don't have a specific health issue are eliminating gluten from their diets. Nearly 30% of Americans surveyed by market research firm NPD Group Inc. said they are trying to avoid gluten, up from 25.5% three years ago.
Many chains have learned the hard way how vocal the gluten-free community can be. California Pizza Kitchen rolled out pizzas made with a gluten-free crust in late 2010. Customers were furious when they realized gluten was in other parts of the pizza, although the chain said it made it clear that the toppings weren't gluten-free.

"They were very loud in voicing their displeasure with us," said Brian Sullivan, the chain's senior vice president of culinary development. 

California Pizza Kitchen pulled the pizzas off the menu about six months later and then spent more than a year working with the Gluten Intolerance Group of North America, a nonprofit that certifies products as gluten-free, to revamp its kitchen operations and train employees. The company in October began offering four new pizzas that each contain fewer than 10 parts per million of gluten.
When someone orders a gluten-free pizza, a manager is called to the pizza station to supervise its preparation. The gluten-free crusts it buys arrive at its more than 200 restaurants in sealed bags and don't require stretching. The restaurant uses rice flour for stretching its regular pizza dough, to prevent any wheat from getting into the kitchen's air. Color-coded bins ensure ingredients for gluten-free and regular pizzas are kept apart.
Gluten-free pizzas are assembled in a designated area, with separate sauce ladles and cutting wheels. Before they go in the oven, the pizzas are placed on disposable aluminum tins with a half-inch border on all sides so they don't touch regular pizzas. The tins reduce heat exposure, so the gluten-free pizzas take about 12 minutes to cook—double the usual time.
"It's a pretty intense process," Mr. Sullivan said.
Mr. Sullivan said the changes weren't that costly; the real investment was the time it took to train managers and cooks. So far, he said, California Pizza Kitchen is selling about 35 gluten-free pizzas per store each week, or less than 5% of restaurant sales. The chain charges $2 extra for gluten-free pizzas.
California Pizza Kitchen said the adjustments were worthwhile because the demand for gluten-free products is here to stay. Restaurant managers around the country have consistently reported that gluten-free pizza was the single most-requested item. "I don't believe it is a fad," Mr. Sullivan said.

Other chains have opted for simpler responses. After Texas Roadhouse first introduced a gluten-free menu six years ago, some customers claimed they tested some of the menu items and determined they weren't entirely gluten-free, and others reported they had gotten sick.

Texas Roadhouse pulled the gluten-free menu after a year. The chain now trains staff how to answer customers' questions about how the food is prepared. They are supposed to list 10 menu items that could appeal to someone concerned about gluten, including a grilled chicken with no marinade, unseasoned steaks and certain salads.

"There won't be printed menus at this time," Mr. Doster said.

Domino's Pizza Inc. last year introduced a gluten-free pizza crust along with a lengthy online disclaimer explaining that due to the size of its kitchens, it can't control for cross-contamination. Domino's website says it "DOES NOT recommend this pizza for customers with celiac disease. Customers with gluten sensitivities should exercise judgment in consuming this pizza."

"That just makes me want to throw my hands up and say, 'Really? You're not going to take any extra effort to make sure it is a safe product?'" said Bonnie Harrison, a Seattle-area resident who was diagnosed with celiac disease four years ago. "I don't eat at those kinds of places."

Cynthia Kupper, executive director of the Gluten Intolerance Group of North America, criticizes the decision by some chains to simply describe certain menu items as made without gluten ingredients rather than calling them gluten-free. "That would be very confusing to the consumer," and potentially dangerous to someone with a serious gluten sensitivity, she said.

Bonnie Harrison may not realize it, but she has put forth the solution and it's disarmingly simple:  "I don't eat at those kinds of places."  There you go, dear.  Vote with your feet and your pocketbook.  And leave restaurant chains that want to focus on the 95 percent of their market that doesn't have to worry about this stuff alone.

Businesses may have a strong incentive to cater to persnickety sectors of their markets, but someone needs to make it very clear to the Gluten Intolerance Group of North America (by the way, when did this outfit come into existence, and how did humankind ever thrive and advance without them?) that they are under no obligation to do so.  Just as with health care, environmental matters and matters of sexuality, they are free to say the hell with it and  close up shop.

 

 

 

Can't the normal-people cops do something about this?

I've seen coverage of this - Muslim protestors in London's Whitechapel section threatening to punish booze-selling shop owners with 40 lashes - in several outlets, and still, I have not seen any statement from a public official to the effect that he city's government will not brook any kind of assertion of play-like authority on the part of non-governmental groups.  Isn't there someone on the scene saying, "Like hell you will"?

Add Syria to the list of the regime's foreign-policy failures

The head of the Supreme Military Council - the only really viable non-Islamist anti-Assad force in Syria -  has fled the country and the Islamists have captured its warehouses. So the MEC regime is suspending non-lethal aid to it.

 Naturally, the Obama administration does not want to supply groups that are too weak to protect their supplies from radical forces. But it was the administration’s unwillingness to arm the non-radical groups early on that ensured their weakness. The American-backed rebels have been on life support since Obama pulled the rug out from under them by negotiating with Assad over his chemical weapons instead of punishing him for using them.

As Max Boot says:

That the non-Islamist opposition is collapsing is utterly predictable given the administration’s hesitancy to provide it with more backing. The Islamic radicals are the obvious winners on the rebel side, while Hezbollah and the Iranian Quds Force grow stronger on the other end.

Where do Obama and John Kerry go from here? They would like to go to, you guessed it, Geneva for “peace talks.” But the Islamist rebel forces have no interest in making peace with Assad. And the more moderate forces are now too marginalized to be partners in a meaningful peace agreement.

An agreement between those forces and Assad, in the unlikely event one were reached, would essentially ratify Assad’s triumph over them. It would thus help consolidate the power of the regime and its partners Hezbollah and Iran.

Out of control, on middle-east policy as with everything else.

They smell weakness - today's edition

China makes good on its assertion that we're entering a post-American world by trying to force a US warship to stop in international waters.

The regime to insurance companies: come on, let's bend the rules a little bit

Megan McArdle reports on the conference call HHS held for journalists yesterday:

Over the course of the conference call, it became clear, as Sarah Kliff writes, that “Much of Health and Human Services' plan is less about new requirements, and more about pushing insurance plans to take certain steps to smooth the transition into new health-care law plans. The administration is ‘encouraging’ insurers to allow people who sign up after the Dec. 23 deadline to start coverage on Jan. 1 -- and urging them to accept payments for those January policies after the first of the month.”

They are also “encouraging” insurers to provide coverage to anyone who has made partial payments -- one person called them “down payments.” Though no one seemed quite clear what this meant; do people normally make down payments on a monthly insurance premium? Were people having trouble making their full payments through the system? My best guess is that they’re asking insurers to cover people whose subsidy calculations were off until the paperwork can be straightened out. But I didn’t really hear a good answer on the call.

This tells us a few things, I think. The first is that the administration is deeply worried about people who had insurance they liked who are now going into January with either no insurance or with insurance that doesn’t cover doctors and treatments they’re receiving. And because the administration has access to the enrollment data, this further suggests to me that the enrollment spike we saw at the very end of November and the beginning of December has not reached a pace at which they can reasonably expect that the 5 million people who had their plans canceled will have replaced their coverage by Jan. 1. There’s no way to know for sure, of course, but if enrollment was still rapidly accelerating, they wouldn’t need to basically beg insurers to help them eke out as many December enrollments as possible.

The second thing it tells you is that the administration has reached the limits of its November strategy of using last-minute rule-making to implement on-the-fly changes to the law. Most in the latest round aren’t even rules, or even changes to rules; they’re requests. The insurers may well go along -- they, too, have a big stake in Obamacare’s success. But by making the request in public, the administration has given itself room to blame insurers when people lose access to doctors, drugs or insurance. Now they can say, “Well, we asked them not to do that.”

Are there still water-carriers out there willing to call something this pliable "the law of the land?"

The Boehner outburst

There are so many levels of consideration to this that the answer to the question "why" turns out not to be so simple.  All kinds of pundits are parsing the matter of where the Speaker was coming from, as well as the implications for the possibility of Pub party unity.

It seems to me gut instinct serves one as well if not better in a situation like this than weighing the cogent arguments of spokespeople for scores of different viewpoints.  I'm familiar with Jonathan Tobin's best-deal-they-could-get / time-for-a-truce-in-budget-wars take.  I can see the point of Rick Moran's well-duh-Mr.-Speaker-interest-groups-exist-to-hold-out-for-their-interests emphasis, although I think to just call the conservative base (Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, Heritage Action et al) an "interest group" falls short of fully characterizing it.

The conservative base is in the role of sounding the alarm bell.  This deal does nothing to reduce our $17 trillion in debt and the hundreds of trillions of unfunded liabilities of the Big Three entitlement programs.

That is what so frustrates some in the base that they take to the comment threads of opinion sites and subject Boehner to the vilest attacks.  The whole "Let's-get-the-best-deal-on-this-particular-situation-and-move-on-to-fight-another-day" approach to dealing with our enemies the Freedom-Haters -  and, let's be clear, we are talking about enemies - gets old. It's made for five years of dismantling what America had been since the 1770s.

That Boehner made no effort to incorporate conservative-base dismay and alarm at what this country is really facing into any remarks on the Ryan-Murray deal goes far to cement for me the conclusion that he is now fully a creature of the Beltway, with any conservative bent so dulled as to no longer be a factor in how he operates.

Thank you, Mark Levin

 . . . for holding Paul Ryan's feet to the fire, no matter how much he squirmed.

Levin cut Ryan off to point out that spending increases under the agreement are “immediate” while spending reductions are “over time,” which means “we may never see them.”

“That’s not true,” Ryan replied. “This is unfortunately the nature of what we call mandatory spending. For instance, I’m saying right away federal employees…are going to have to pay more for some of their pensions. That law changes now, but over time it accumulates a lot of savings.”

After allowing Ryan to elaborate, Levin spoke his mind.

“This is really Mickey Mouse,” he said. “I don’t mean to be offensive. You’re claiming a $23 billion savings on the deficit and increasing spending by, what, the same amount in the next two years?”

Ryan argued the federal government will save $85 billion and “give back” to the sequester $63 billion. 

“We have a $90 trillion unfunded liability that goes up about $7 trillion a year. We have $17.3 trillion fiscal operating debt — and the Democrats wouldn’t let you really address that would they?” Levin asked.

“That’s right,” Ryan responded.

With President Barack Obama in the White House, the congressman explained, it is unlikely that Congress will be able to fix the country’s fiscal problems. Obama is not “willing and able to do that,” he added. However, Ryan said it is in the nation’s best interest to avoid another shutdown and keep the focus on the important issues like Obamacare and the IRS.

“You guys are all worked up about that,” Levin said of a potential government shutdown. “Lots of us don’t really care about that.”

Levin is one of those who understand we can no longer have one subatomic particle of tolerance for the argument that "you have to understand Washington culture and be realistic about what you can accomplish on any given initiative."    Rather, we must take our cue from Winston Churchill, who said, "You have enemies?  Good.  That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life."