This is rich (pun intended)

By now, you've heard about how actress Scarlet Johansson, who was working dual spokesperson roles for Oxfam and Sodastream, was dropped by Oxfam, a relief NGO with a decidedly leftist inclination, because Sodastream's plant is in the West Bank.  (And by the way, kudos to Ms. Johansson for choosing to stick with Sodastream.)

Have you paused to wonder what Sodastream's Palestinian employees say about critics of their workplace?

Over 500 Palestinians are able to earn three times as much as the average Palestinian worker—and even more than Israel's own minimum wage. 

One worker told NPR: "It's an excellent place to work. It provides a good salary and they treat us very well. At SodaStream, they do not discriminate between Arabs, Jews, or any ethnic group."

But there are those for whom the status quo and the "pro-Palestinian" lobbying that goes along with it is more important than Palestinian jobs and economic liberties. 

MSNBC's Chris Hayes, while not the worst of all culprits, illustrates how ignorant yet politically exigent statements contribute very little to a solution in the region. Earlier Thursday he stated, "Well I'm sure the Hollywood actress getting paid $ for sponsorship and not the NGO that feeds people is right about this particular policy."

One wonders if the liberal media darling getting paid $ for pushing a particular narrative and not the Palestinian worker is right.

Another Palestinian told CSMonitor what he thought of Oxfam and many other organisations' boycotts of Israel and Israeli companies operating in the West Bank: "Before boycotting, they should think of the workers who are going to suffer." The man previously is said to have earned 20 shekels ($6) a day plucking and cleaning chickens but now he makes nearly 10 times that at SodaStream, which also provides transportation, breakfast, and lunch.

One of his fellow Palestinians remarked: "I would love to work for SodaStream. They’re quite privileged. People look up to them. It’s not the people who want to boycott, it’s the officials.”

When the free market is greatly blessing you, it's hard to get very worked up about an abstract ethnic "injustice."

The actual solution is so simple: just don't talk about immigration at all in this election cycle

Mark Krikorian at NRO goes through the House Pubs' list of "guiding principles" regarding immigration principle by principle and debunks them handily.

Memo to Boehner, Ryan, et al:  There is no reason to bring this issue up at all right now.  Drop it and focus on FHer-care and the dismal economy.

Bill O'Reilly - the weak, weak - did I say weak? - link in the Fox news prime-time lineup

He actually advocated raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour on his show last night.  Said that Pubs who opposed that are "pinheads" who will lose elections as a result.

He shows his deficient economic chops like this from time to time.  Whenever there's a spike in the price of gasoline, he's quick to accuse "big oil" of "gouging."

I realize he has amassed many academic and career accomplishments, that he's well-travelled and has had historic encounters with world leaders, but there is a thread of sloppy "Hey-I'm-just-an-Irish-cop's-son-from-Levittown-lookin'-out-for-the-folks" default setting to his take on a lot of issues.  And this whole business of inventing his own "traditionalist" label to characterize his ideological orientation is pretty shaky.

Kudos to Kate Obenshain for standing her ground against his characteristic dismissiveness toward the substance of the pro-freedom argument.

For Freedom-Haters, it's all about meme perpetuation, and the truth be damned

MSNBC got immediate and massive backlash over its juvenile, snarky tweet about how the Right would hate the new Cheerios commercial featuring a biracial couple.  Whole lotta biracial conservative families jumped on that dog vomit big-time.

Fighting back works.  MSNBC deleted the tweet and apologized.

This doesn't smell good at all

Malik Obama seems to have some pretty strong notions about the dynamics of the Middle East:

Malik Obama is Barack Obama’s half-brother, but he is close enough to the president to have been the best man at Barack and Michelle’s wedding. He has also visited the White House, and is president of the Barack H. Obama Foundation.

On the foundation's website there appears a 2010 photograph that is rather noteworthy:

The Barack H. Obama Foundation was fast-tracked to IRS tax-exempt status at the same time that the IRS was abusing numerous Tea Party and conservative groups. While those groups’ tax-exempt applications were taking two years and mountains of paperwork and invasive queries about their memberships and activities, the Barack H. Obama Foundation won its status in just 30 days. That status was back-dated 38 months, which is against the law.
The scarf is a Hamas scarf. Hamas is a designated terrorist group according to the US State Department. It has held that status since 1997.

The text on the scarf that the president’s brother is wearing in the 2010 photo reads, “‘Jerusalem is ours – WE ARE COMING!’” It also includes a map of Palestine that reads “From the river to the sea!” 

Is the Most Equal Comrade cool with this?

Our enemy president

The Most Equal Comrade is going to use an executive order to raise the minimum wage for federal contractors.  So many layers to peel back on this one.

I'm not a constitutional scholar, but I do know that spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives, and this is a spending decision, is it not?

To reiterate something I've found occasion to assert fairly often here at LITD, the minimum wage is bad and wrong for the following reasons:

• It is government telling a private organization how to conduct its affairs.
• It distorts the true market value of an hour of a given type of labor
• It elbows those who are in most need of a way to enter the world of work - young, unskilled people, particularly minorities - out of the job market

Then there is the Freedom-Haters' understanding that the minimum wage issue is a tailor-made focal point for their overall class warfare.  It is essential to their propaganda that the cattle-masses never consider the fluidity of income brackets or the effect of ambition on an individual's upward mobility.  The FHers must paint a scenario of fixed groups within society: some kind of mythic " the man"-type stratum that has all the power and prestige and holds the fates of various victim groups in its hands.

The Most Equal Comrade will play this to the hilt tonight.  We must make sure our weapons - clear, reasoned explanations of how freedom actually works and how prosperity happens - are cleaned and loaded.  This is a particularly intense battle in the war for America's soul.

Why we call them freedom-haters - today's edition

Get a load of Chuck Schumer's prescription for making the world a better place:

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) proposed using the Internal Revenue Service to curtail Tea Party group funding during a speech on how to “exploit” and “weaken” the movement at the Center for American Progress on Thursday.

Arguing that Tea Party groups have a financial advantage after the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, Schumer said the Obama administration should bypass Congress and institute new campaign finance rules through the IRS.

“It is clear that we will not pass anything legislatively as long as the House of Representatives is in Republican control, but there are many things that can be done administratively by the IRS and other government agencies—we must redouble those efforts immediately,” Schumer said.

That's how it is in post-America.

Finding a red-hot sound bite and creating their own (utterly fabricated) context for it

Great Charles C.W. Cooke piece at NRO on what is at the heart of the Huckabee dust-up:

Those who are still riffing off of Huckabee’s speech are not offering an original opinion, a different interpretation, or a unique analysis of what he said, but are indulging deliberate, willful, unadulterated mendacities, the propagation of which is intended to feed the agenda of one of the country’s political parties and to do nothing more. 

[snip]

What chance, indeed. Huckabee explicitly contended that “women I know are smart, educated, intelligent, capable of doing anything anyone else can do.” He said that his “party stands for the recognition of the equality of women and the capacity of women.” He argued that “women are far more than Democrats have made them to be.” He reasoned that “women across America have to stand up and say, ‘Enough of that nonsense.’” What sort of chance does it give our politics if a speech in which a man says “I believe the opposite of this” can be so easily turned into “I believe this”?
The consensus seems to be that public figures of Huckabee’s experience should know better. As a matter of practical politics, I can’t disagree. For better or for worse, we live now in the world of UpWorthy and Twitter — in a culture of soundbites and of instant communication. Our political life keeps pace with the lightning. Since the days of the first newspapers, headlines have been screamed in 36-point font and corrections whispered in diminutive and unsaluted fashion. But in the age of short attention spans and instantly replicated misinformation, this has become all the more important, rendering truer than ever the old maxim that “a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its boots on” and meaning that, in 2014, context and argument are not as important as avoiding certain words. Day in, day out, teams of busybodies occupy themselves by scanning each and every sentence for verboten and controversial terms and then, smugly, they pounce: “Can you believe what that guy just said?!”

So, I’ll say it, as I am expected to do. Yes, it was unwise for Huckabee to have used the words he did. Yes, given that they’ll inevitably be twisted, it’s foolish for politicians to talk about certain topics at all. Yes, if one wishes to “win the news cycle,” one shouldn’t use words that crackle with potential charge. Still, one has to ask whether the fact that words will be twisted in any way excuses that twisting. One rarely hears added to the observation that politicians should be careful an explanation of why they need to be careful — which, in this case at least, is because their opponents are happy to lie shamelessly about them in the pursuit of a narrative that has been manufactured from whole cloth.

Nobody but leftist women are allowed to say anything about women, particularly women's libidos, but everybody is damn well expected to pony up for women's contraception.

 

This regime has not principles at its core but rather a steaming chunk of dog vomit

Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson tells the US Conference of Mayors that illegal aliens have "earned the right to be citizens."

The regime's partner in patty-cake

A bracing enumeration of the many remarks Iranian president Rouhani has made over the years that give the lie to the notion that he is any kind of moderate foil to his predecessor.

And meanwhile, what is the only tangible result so far from the lifting of sanctions?  Planeloads of European business people heading to Teheran to ink deals.

The total disconnect between our overlords and us

Check out the results of this Quinnipiac poll:

When Quinnipiac asked voters "What do you think should be the top priority for President Obama and Congress in 2014?" -- income inequality earned 1%, class inequality earned 1%, gun issues earned 1%, and immigration earned only 2%.

More bad news for a media desperate to further their Global Warming hoax through the dark art of portraying everyday weather as The Worst Ever, is that only 2% of the public see the environment as a priority.

Issues the American people unsurprisingly do list as top priorities are the economy (15%), jobs/unemployment (16%), and healthcare (18%). And it is in all three of those areas where Obama's standing with the American people is in the dumpster. On the economy and healthcare, the president is upside down on approval 39-56% and 36-59% , respectively.

But, you see, what we're concerned about doesn't matter.  It's not on the agenda right now, and as far as the Most Equal Comrade and his junta are concerned, the agenda will be followed.

Well, then, wouldn't it make sense to err on the side of caution?

The Pentagon - I repeat, the freakin' Pentagon - says the US is incapable of telling whether another country is building nukes.

Doesn't that make patty-cake with known rogue regimes doubly foolish?

The UN, which created the modern state of Israel in the late 1940s, now wishes it didn't exist

Claudia Rosett at PJ Media reports that a Paris exhibition entitled "People, Book and Land - the 3,500-Year Relationship of the Jewish People to the Holy Land," co-sponsored by the Simon Weisenthal Center, has been "postponed" by UNESCO.

The UN agency was not without other alternatives:

UNESCO’s secretariat — namely, its director-general, Irina Bokova — could have replied that any peace process that could be remotely endangered by a display of the long history of  Jewish ties to the Holy Land is no peace process at all. 

Bokova could have told the Arab states that UNESCO has no interest in trying to delegitimize the state of Israel at their behest, which is what this UNESCO delay is really all about. Bokova could have proclaimed that anti-Semitism has no place at the UN, and for any of UNESCO’s member states to insinuate it into the agenda is a jarring affront at a cultural agency dedicated, in the words of its motto (condensed from UNESCO’s charter and amended for political correctness), to “building peace in the minds of men and women.” She could have added that it is thug politics for many of UNESCO’s member states to employ the cultural agency as a vehicle for passing round after round of resolutions singling out Israel as a target of UNESCO condemnations. Bokova could have shown backbone and leadership by giving her blessing to the exhibition, “People, Book, Land — The 3,500 Year Relationship of the Jewish People to the Holy Land,” and insisting that it open on schedule. She could have turned up to celebrate it as an important element in the history of the Middle East, a genuine contribution to any real hope of peace.

Instead, UNESCO’s secretariat put out a press release last Friday, announcing that in the context of the Arab protest, “regrettably, UNESCO had to postpone the inauguration of the exhibition.” The press release went on to attribute this decision to UNESCO’s “relentless efforts to achieve consensus between Member States on all issues falling within UNESCO’s educational, scientific, and cultural mandate.”

And what was going on at the headquarters of the overall UN?

Meanwhile, as UNESCO last week began shunting the Jewish history display out of the way in the name of the “peace process,” the UN in New York, also in the name of the “peace process” was launching an International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. More on that in my Forbes article on “‘Peace’ and Prejudice at the United Nations” — where evidently some people are more equal than others.

 

Way past time to dismantle this force of darkness.

 

Those who cherish US sovereignty are not going to lie down and let the Reasonable Gentlemen fling open our borders and ruin chances for a sweeping GOP 2014 victory

Staffers for several House conservatives had a get-together with Senate counterparts to devise a plan to thwart any aims Boehner, Ryan et al may have to raise the amnesty-for-illegal-aliens issue this year.

Marvelous to behold.

Is there no US ally the Most Equal Comrade won't alienate?

Great Krauthammer piece at NRO saying that, in the same spirit with which the MEC sullied relations with other allies ("It seems not enough to have given the back of the hand to Britain, Israel, Poland, and the Czech Republic, and to have so enraged the Saudis that they actually rejected a Security Council seat — disgusted as they were with this administration’s remarkable combination of fecklessness and highhandedness."), he now frustrates our neighbor tothe north. ("Must we crown this run of diplomatic malpractice with gratuitous injury to Canada, our most reliable, most congenial friend in the world?")

THe Keystone XL pipeline is ready to go.  The studies have been conducted.  Still, the MEC regime dithers.   Krauthammer points out two things that will happen if this continues: Canada will route the pipeline westward, and sell the oil to China, and any of it that makes its way to the US will come by rail, an exponentially more dangerous way to transport that energy source.

Why is the MEC stalling?

The only rationale for denying the pipeline is political — to appease Obama’s more extreme environmentalists. For a president who claims not to be ideological, the irony is striking: Here is an easily available piece of infrastructure — privately built, costing government not a penny, creating thousands of jobs and, yes, shovel ready — and yet the president, who’s been incessantly pushing new “infrastructure” as a fundamental economic necessity, can’t say yes.

A sliver of the American populace in thrall to a fantasy is holding up genuine progress on all levels.

This is how it's done

Wisconsin, recently encumbered with a huge debt, now has a nice surplus, so Governor Walker is proposing a tax cut:

Half of the cuts will be achieved through property tax reductions, and the other half will consist of lower payroll taxes, as well as lower income tax rates for the lowest state bracket. 

"What do you do with a surplus?  Give it back to the people who earned it.  It's your money," Walker will tell the state legislature in his annual "State of the State Address," according to an excerpt released to the press. The tax cuts will be a core part of Walker's new budget for the state, entitled the "Blueprint for Prosperity."

Walker has presided over a remarkable turnaround in Wisconsin's finances. When he took office in 2011, the state was running a $3.6 billion deficit. One of his first acts was to pass a corporate tax cut, which Democrats derided as a giveaway to the rich, but which helped grow the local economy and attract businesses and jobs.

The collective bargaining reforms that Walker subsequently enacted, over vehement Democrat and union opposition, also helped state and local governments save money while preserving public sector jobs. To that achievement, Walker can now add a tax cut--something few other governors, even Republicans, have achieved.

Textbook conservatism in action.  Go Scott.

Sorry, NAACP, but you're not the arbiter of who qualifies as authentically black

Tim Scott pushes back on the NAACP's toe-our-line-or-you-have-no-right-to-speak-praisingly-about-MLK  / you're-a-ventriloquist-dummy insult.

Israel: serious about the jihadi threat; the Most Equal Comrade: not so much

Israel's Shin Bet thwarts an al-Qaeda plot to blow up the US embassy in Tel Aviv and the Jersusalem Convention Center.  Tammy Bruce reports this and then asks us to consider it in light of the MEC's remark in the Remnick New Yorker interview, in response to a question about al-Qaeda, about Kobe Bryant and junior-varsity teams.

The MEC thinks all post-Americans share his all-about-me ethos

Get a load of the White House statement on the Roe v. Wade anniversary.  It's about "fulfilling your dreams," doncha know.  Never mind the dreams that the son or daughter you conceive might have.

Julia Nation.

Shredding the Constitution to appease our enemy

Get a load of this:

The White House has been exploring ways to circumvent Congress and unilaterally lift sanctions on Iran once a final nuclear agreement is reached, according to sources with knowledge of White House conversations and congressional insiders familiar with its strategy.

The issue of sanctions relief has become one of the key sticking points in the Iran debate, with lawmakers pushing for increased economic penalties and the White House fighting to roll back regulations.

While many in Congress insist that only the legislative branch can legally repeal sanctions, senior White House officials have been examining strategies to skirt Congress, according to those familiar with internal conversations.

Sen. Mark Kirk (R., Ill.), who is leading the charge on new sanctions legislation, said that it is unacceptable for the White House to try to bypass Congress on such a critical global issue.

“The American people must get a say in any final nuclear agreement with Iran to ensure the mullahs never get the bomb,” Kirk told the Washington Free Beacon. “The administration cannot just ignore U.S. law and lift sanctions unilaterally.”

It's this kind of thing that has made  the likes of Nat Hentoff call for the Most Equal Comrade's impeachment.

It is supremely important to mention all of this in any discussion about the legacy of Nelson Mandela

A long-lost prison manuscript reveals just how deeply he embraced Marxism-Leninism and worked for the Soviet side in the Cold War.

HT: Ronald Radosh at PJ Media.

This one is so important to read in its entirety that I won't even attempt to quote excerpts

Victor Davis Hanson's lastest essay at PJ Media is upside-the-head bracing.  If ever the blogger's exhortation to "read the whole" thing was to be taken seriously, it is now.

His last few pieces for the various sites for which he writes have had a thematic thread that has been gaining prominence with each one.  The lifelong Californian couches it in terms of the chasm between the world views of the Bay Area / Silicon Valley / Los Angeles area set and the hinterland farmers, timber-cutters and heavy equipment operators.  The basic point is that there is a huge and culturally dominant class of post-Americans who have never, in the course of their work lives, operated machines (other than their cars) powered by fossil fuels, who have never looked at a blueprint and planned how to make  - to specification - what was drawn on it, and who have never spent an entire workday in adverse weather conditions.  They are utterly divorced from those who are immersed in such activity.  Still, they reserve the right to make pronouncements on all manner of aspects of such activity, from "contribution to climate change" to "stereotypes of masculinity."

I see this a lot in the community where I live. It is one of those post-American places the economy of which is still largely driven by manufacturing and farming.  I write regularly for a local business magazine, and often, when I visit the facility of a company I am to profile, I am drawn back into a world I left behind years ago.  (My participation in that world was as a metal-stamping press operator and then stamping-company executive.)  I see guys standing around the plant or warehouse, blowing on their hands, mounting their forklifts, putting on goggles to do some laser cutting or arc welding.

A lot of the manufacturing is pretty high-tech, and most of it serves world markets of one kind or another.  It is mainly carried out by folks who know what they're doing.  In fact, our smallish city has, per capita, the highest concentration of mechanical engineers in the country.  But there has arisen a bureaucratic class that has laid down the ultimatum on what kind of cultural climate they will be operating in.  It is expected that such companies will "give back to the community," will be "diverse," and will be "green."  Our city being the size it is, several faces and names within this class recur throughout the maze of boards, commissions, councils and coalitions that tout pre-K education, bike paths, establishment of an arts district, and a welcoming atmosphere for the transgendered.

Most executives from these firms would say that their involvement in all this is purely volitional, but one has to ask what their civic involvement would look like if this busybody infrastructure weren't dictating the terms.

As Dr. Hanson says in his essay, the actual makers in our society may press on for a while, but at some point the numbers won't pan out.  We will then be a nation of pointy-headed overlords, cattle-like sort-of-humans, and bewildered craftsmen who looked up from their work one day and asked, "What happened?"

Wow.  For a post on someone else's essay, I wound up having a lot to say myself.

"My language should be tighter"

Wendy Davis lied in her campaign biography and under oath about her background.

Davis may even have lied under oath, testifying in a federal lawsuit over redistricting that "I got divorced by the time I was 19 years old," when in fact she was divorced at age 21.

Other missing details have included: her second husband paid her way through law school and she divorced him the day after the last payment was made; her ex-husband accused her in initial court filings of adultery, and was awarded custody of their two daughters; and she first ran for city council in Fort Worth as a Republican. 

"My language should be tighter,” she said, admitting her campaign biography has been less than truthful.

It's shaping up to be Elizabeth Warren redux.  The Freedom-Haters will carry her water to the bitter end.  Hell, the stinking Girl Scouts love her.

A new movie brings out the recently somewhat dormant West-as-warmonger aspect of the American Left

David French at NRO on the hurl-inducingly disgusting reviews that Lone Survivor is getting in various FHer quarters.

Any attempt to paste some kind of condensation of French's piece would not do it justice, but here are a few examples.

He takes on the LA Weekly summation of what it says the film is trying to get across: "Brown people bad, American people good":

Really? You say that after the film shows how Americans actually gave their lives rather than kill an innocent “brown” person? Make no mistake, this is an accusation of the most vile racism, and it slanders these SEALs. Indeed, it slanders more than the SEALs involved in that firefight. Friends of mine died in Iraq — including, and this will be a news flash to L.A. Weekly (which apparently views our forces as all-white), “brown” friends — because of their concern for and respect for the lives of local citizens. We erred on the side of saving local lives, to the point where people very dear to me paid the ultimate price.

Addressing Salon's assertion that the film says American deaths are qualitatively different from Taliban deaths, he says this:

This statement is simply disgusting. I wonder if the writer would say it to the face of the “comely” widows or the grieving “moppets?” I will tell you this: The suffering and death of honorable men is qualitatively different from the suffering and death of men who murder, rape, and terrorize as a matter of course and as a matter of jihadist religious principle — especially when the honorable men die in an effort to protect others from terror. There is no moral equivalence in this fight, and there is no moral equivalence in their deaths.  

Focusing on the portion of the review in The Atlantic that says the film goes to some length to maximize the villainy of a beheading in a village, French says this:

Let’s talk reality: When the film shows jihadists storming into a village and lopping off a man’s head, it understates their atrocities. I don’t know what has to be done to penetrate the thick skulls of the willfully ignorant, but the Taliban and their al-Qaeda allies are evil to a degree Americans (obviously) have trouble comprehending. I’ve relayed this litany before, but it bears repeating. Here’s a (partial) list of al-Qaeda actions in my unit’s area of operations between 2007–2008: Decapitating women and children, recording the murders up-close, and shrieking “Allah Akhbar” as they sawed off each innocent head; shooting an infant in the face with an AK-47 as a warning against collaboration with Americans; raping women to “dishonor” them, then strapping bombs on their bodies as the only way they could redeem themselves; and putting bombs in unwitting children’s backpacks then remotely detonating them at family events. Let’s also not forget the years-long suicide-bombing campaigns where civilians weren’t collateral damage – they were the target.

Oh, and if the “viewer’s sympathies” weren’t already sorted out before they saw this movie (Taliban or SEALs? Is that really a difficult choice?), then the viewer had lost their moral compass.

So it's back - the most foul form of this hatred for its own civilizational foundations among the array of forms of the Left's self-loathing.  I guess we can take heart from the box-office numbers, which would indicate that the Freedom-Haters have not convinced a majority of us of their dark, grim worldview.

Having absorbed the lessons of that rough teacher, experience, Europe backs away from green foolishness

The European Commission will no longer issue guidelines for emission controls and renewable energy and all such hooey.  The continent will now welcome fracking, too.

The UN is an utterly worthless organization - today's edition

Ban Ki Moon invites Iran to be part of next week's Syria "peace conference" in Geneva.  Many others as well, many of which seem to have a tangential stake in the Syrian situation at best.  But is Israel part of the line-up?

They brought the culture war to us, not the other way around

To anyone who is still using the phrase "our friends on the Left," knock it off.  It has no place in the current cultural climate.

Ask New York Governor Cuomo, who says those who oppose the extermination of fetal Americans have no place in his state.

Ask Maria Conchita Alonso, who was let go from her latest acting gig for endorsing Tea Party California gubernatorial candidate Tim Donnelly.

Ask actress Tamera Mowry, who has endured all manner of degrading slurs and accusations that she's not authentically black becuase she's married to a white Fox News reporter.

They will not tolerate us.  They are our enemies.

"Just adding complexity"

What proportion of FHer-care exchange enrollees did not previously have health insurance?  Less than a third.

I'm not going anywhere near the stinking thing

Not after the experts have confirmed what we already pretty much knew:

Cybersecurity researchers slammed HealthCare.gov's security during a House hearing on Thursday, saying the site is still riddled with problems that could put consumers' sensitive health details at risk.

“The reason we’re concluding that this is so shockingly bad is that the issues across the site are so varied,” David Kennedy, founder of the information security firm TrustedSec, told NBC News. “You don’t even have to hack into the system to see big issues – which means there are [major problems] underneath.”

Kennedy was the first of a group of so-called "white-hat hackers" who testified before the House of Representatives Science Committee on Thursday. He previously testified on November 19, when he said he was able to identify 18 major issues with the site – without even hacking into it.

“Nothing’s really changed since our November 19 testimony,” Kennedy said during the hearing. “In fact, it’s worse.”

No way they're getting my Social Security number, address or birth date.

Secretary Global Test still goes in for that poverty-is-the-root-cause-of-jihad dog vomit

Michelle Malkin looks at how pathetic and dangerous our Secretary of State's understanding of the world is.

While meeting with Catholic Church officials at the Vatican in Rome on Monday, Kerry expounded on their "huge common interest in dealing with this issue of poverty, which in many cases is the root cause of terrorism or even the root cause of the disenfranchisement of millions of people on this planet." In other words: If only every al-Qaida and Taliban recruit had a fraction of Kerry's $200 million fortune, they'd all be frolicking peacefully with infidels on jet skis sporting "Coexist" bumper stickers.

This wasn't a one-off. Kerry delivered a similar Kumbaya-style discourse at the Global Counterterrorism Forum last fall: "Getting this right isn't just about taking terrorists off the street. It's about providing more economic opportunities for marginalized youth at risk of recruitment." Naturally, the Foggy Bottom apple doesn't fall far from the Pennsylvania Avenue terror-excusing tree. President Obama subscribes to the very same "midnight basketball" theory of counterterrorism. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Obama asserted that jihad "grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair."

The chronic cluelessness of the root-cause apologists of jihad never ceases to amaze. Britain's MI5 reported in 2011 that two-thirds of the U.K's jihad suspects were from middle-class backgrounds, "showing there is no simplistic relationship between poverty and involvement in Islamist extremism." Thorough reviews of the empirical evidence shows, as the RAND Corporation reported, that "(t)errorists are not particularly impoverished, uneducated or afflicted by mental disease. Demographically, their most important characteristic is normalcy (within their environment). Terrorist leaders actually tend to come from relatively privileged backgrounds."

She then goes on to specify the advanced degrees in fields such as medicine, engineering and urban planning held by major jihadists, and the wealth held by many of them.

And then there's the assessment of this four-star general

A thematic consistency is shaping up:

Retired four-star Army Gen. Jack Keane, who co-authored a policy paper that inspired the Iraq surge in the George W. Bush era, told the lawmakers “it is not true that our alliances are stronger, indeed, they are weaker because our allies are fundamentally questioning the ‘will’ of the United States; many allies believe the U.S. will not be there for them in a time of peril and, sadly, U.S. standing in the world is at its lowest since prior to WWII.”

“When American leadership is strong in the world, the world is a safer place. And when American leadership is inconsistent, indecisive, and we are willing to permit others to lead who do not have the capacity or when we are paralyzed by the fear of adverse consequence, then American leadership is weak and the world is a more dangerous place,” Keane continued. “As such, our adversaries are emboldened, they become more aggressive, they take more risks and the results are more death, more casualties and the security of the American people is threatened. Tragically, this is where we are today.”

The general stressed “the harsh reality is that radical Islam and the al-Qaeda affiliates are on the rise and the evidence is overwhelming.”

Keane highlighted the “strategic blunder” of leaving no residual force in Iraq and the danger of making the same mistake in Afghanistan, noting without support for Kabul the Taliban will “truly threaten the regime” and al-Qaeda will “return to their most desirable sanctuary, the mountains of Afghanistan.”

“Because of the failure of American leadership the term radical Islam or Islamic extremism is not mentioned in U.S. policy, which is quite astounding,” Keane said. “…What makes this movement the most threatening we have ever faced is their stated objectives to use WMD against the people of the U.S. Unchecked, radical Islam is an ideological struggle with the U.S. and its allies that will dominate most of the 21st century.”

Under questioning from lawmakers, Keane further stressed that “al-Qaeda becoming decentralized has always been part of the plan” with a strategy of spreading out across the globe in countless affiliate networks.

“Sometimes the world doesn’t cooperate with a presidential narrative and I think that’s where we are,” Lieberman said, noting there’s “something in between” sending in military forces “and just pulling out.”

Everybody smells weakness.

Another ally disses the Most Equal Comrade's regime

The other day, you'll recall, the Israeli defense minister ripped Secretary Global Test a new one.  Now comes a UK defense advisor with this unsparing assessment of the MEC:

Sir Hew Strachan, an expert on the history of war, says that the president’s strategic failures in Afghanistan and Syria have crippled America’s position in the world.

President Obama is “chronically incapable” of military strategy and falls far short of his predecessor George W. Bush, according to one of Britain’s most senior military advisors.

Sir Hew Strachan, an advisor to the Chief of the Defense Staff, told The Daily Beast that the United States and Britain were guilty of total strategic failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Obama’s attempts to intervene on behalf of the Syrian rebels “has left them in a far worse position than they were before.”
The extraordinary critique by a leading advisor to the United States’ closest military ally comes days after Obama was undermined by the former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who questioned the President’s foreign policy decisions and claimed he was deeply suspicious of the military.
Strachan, a current member of the Chief of the Defense Staff’s Strategic Advisory Panel, cited the “crazy” handling of the Syrian crisis as the most egregious example of a fundamental collapse in military planning that began in the aftermath of 9/11. “If anything it’s gone backwards instead of forwards, Obama seems to be almost chronically incapable of doing this. Bush may have had totally fanciful political objectives in terms of trying to fight a global War on Terror, which was inherently astrategic, but at least he had a clear sense of what he wanted to do in the world. Obama has no sense of what he wants to do in the world,” he said.

Pathetic.  Everybody smells weakness.

You're not alone, dear Freedom-Cherisher

Our people and our groups are wasting no time in letting Congress know it acted way too hastily in passing this omnibus spending bill.

Stay loud and fierce.

The full horror of a second-term Most Equal Comrade on display

Fully take in his "I've-got-a-pen-and-a-phone" remark from yesterday.

Of course, there is the naked disdain for the Constitutional separation of powers.  But there is also the meat of what his intentions are.  A role for government in deciding trends of economic activity ("advanced manufacturing").   Hiring the long-term unemployed.  I guess that kind of dovetails with the government involvement in economic-activity trends - probably involves "job training" for those whose skills have atrophied due to the dismal economic climate caused by the regime's regulatory stranglehold.

Perhaps the phrase that makes me bristle the most is "if we're all working in the same direction."  Most of us have other ideas, pal.  Most of us consider your "direction" poisonous in the extreme.

In case you doubted that we really are in a war for America's soul

Last month, a California first-grader, per the assigned class activity of students sharing their families' holiday traditions, began reciting the scriptural passage - I'm assuming from Luke 2 - that her family would read as they put the star of Bethlehem on their tree.  The teacher interrupted her and told her to go take her seat and be quiet.  She was the only kid who did not get to finish her presentation.

The stinking school district appears to have the teacher's back rather than the student's.

So much for the recent attempt by the NYT to revive the "it-was-the-video" meme

From the very first briefing the Most Equal Comrade got, the Benghazi attack was depicted as terrorism.

What the Israeli defense minister thinks of Secretary Global Test's attempts to broker "peace"

Get a load of this:

"Secretary of State John Kerry, who came here very determined and operates based on an unfathomable obsession and messianic feeling, cannot teach me anything about the Palestinians…I live and breathe the conflict with the Palestinians. I know what they think, what they want and what they really mean," said Ya'alon, himself a former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff.

In private conversations, Ya'alon reportedly called the security plan presented by U.S. Gen. (ret.) John Allen untenable for the Jewish state.

"The American security plan presented to us is not worth the paper it's written on," he said. "It contains no peace and no security. Only our continued presence in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] and the Jordan River will guarantee that Ben Gurion Airport [Israel's main international airport] and [the northern coastal city] Netanya do not become targets for missiles from every direction."

Ya'alon criticized the notion that technology could replace soldiers in the field.

"You presented us with a plan based on smart technologies, satellites, sensors, war rooms with television screens, without our forces being present on the ground," Ya'alon continued.

"And I ask you, how will your technology help us when a Salafist terror cell or one from Islamic Jihad tries to carry out a terror attack against Israeli targets? Who will take care of them? What satellites will take care of the rocket industry developing in Shechem [Nablus], and the rockets that will be launched at Tel Aviv and the central region?"

Ya'alon called negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority illusory.

"There are no negotiations with the Palestinians. The Americans are holding negotiations with us and in parallel with the Palestinians," he explained. "So far, we are the only side to have given anything -- the release of murderers -- and the Palestinians have given nothing."

On releasing more convicted terrorists, Ya'alon said "enough is enough."

Give it up, Global Test.

No longer in the top ten

The WSJ / Heritage Foundation annual ranking of the world's nations with regard to economic freedom has demoted the US to Number 12.

And what was Iran's foreign minister doing while his country and the P5+1 were back in Geneva for more patty-cake?

Laying a wreath on the grave of notorious Hezbollah military commander and terrorist Imad Mughniyeh.

Mughniyeh, the leader of Iran’s global terror network, in fact began his career as the mastermind of the deadly 1983 attacks on the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, killing more Americans than any terrorist except Osama Bin Laden. He subsequently engineered the hijacking of TWA Flight 847, as well as the kidnapping, torture and murder of Americans in Lebanon throughout the 1980s, including the CIA’s Beirut station chief William Buckley, who was eventually slaughtered after 15 months of beinghorrifically tortured on film by Mughniyeh and Iran’s terrorist army, Hezbollah.

Orde Kittrie – a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a tenured professor of law at Arizona State – quickly noted that, as a sign of where Iran stands on the eve of medium-term negotiations with Washington over the Islamic republic’s illicit nuclear program, Zarif’s move to honor the terrorist “signals insincerity.”

The controversy over Zarif’s gesture is likely to criss-cross multiple levels of the political and policy debate.

Most straightforwardly, it threatens to heighten criticism that the Obama administration is walking on eggshells to avoid offending Iran, while the Iranians are indulging in anti-American extremism at the highest levels.

The only reason to take our overlords seriously is that they are going to get us all blown up.

The sexual absurdity of post-America

Great Mona Charen column at Townhall this morning on the rapid deterioration of society's understanding of masculinity and femininity - and the issues that arise from that, such as the indulgence of whims in children that they wouldn't have if the culture wasn't saturating their minds with them, as well the indulgence of people who have turned their gender identities into grotesque self-inventions and then decide they want to become parents.  Take this example:

The New York Times brings us the "next frontier in fertility treatment." It's about dissolving the prejudice against transgender people having children. "Andy Inkster, a transgender man, had always wanted biological children. So when he embarked on the transition from female to male at age 18 -- changing his name, taking testosterone and eventually undergoing surgery to remove his breasts -- he left his female reproductive organs intact. In his mid-20s, he decided it was time. He stopped taking testosterone and started trying to get pregnant."

Baystate Reproductive Medicine turned Inkster away, explaining that it didn't have enough experience with transgender people to provide the hormones and donor sperm required. "Mr. Inkster eventually found another clinic that helped him conceive via in vitro fertilization and donor sperm, and in October 2010, he gave birth to a daughter, Elise. A month later, he sued Baystate for sexual discrimination." The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination agrees with Inkster.

Again, this hits home, and I may go local in a post later today.  The community foundation in our city is going to give out grants for the second year in a row to groups undertaking projects designed to make ours a more "welcoming community."  Based on the public remarks about it by foundation officials so far, it looks like there's going to be increasing emphasis on LBGTQ outreach.

What arrogance - assuming we have the ability and right to determine our own sexual identity and even change our minds - perhaps only partially, only enough to still claim maternal yearnings, as in the case of Mr. (?) Inkster.

It is so very late in the day.

Exposing the agenda of those who would cook up a "Palestinian cause" at the expense of real Arab unity as well as real peace with Israel

Ever heard of a Jordanian guy living in exile in London named Mudar Zahran?  Where he's coming from has momentum.  Heads up, people.

Israel has no "partner" in any "peace process"

Abbas reiterates his position that no deal is acceptable that doesn't make East Jerusalem the capital of a Palestinian state, and also reiterates his refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

Trey Gowdy is one of the coolest people in Washington - today's edition

He rips the State Department a new one over the length of time it has taken for them to acknowledge which particular terror group orchestrated Benghazi.

The overlords care so little now for public outrage over their machinations that they proceed with them quite openly

Do you think they give a diddly what anybody says about the appointment of Barbara Bosserman to head DoJ's investigation of IRS targeting of conservative groups?

Bosserman donated a combined $6,750 to President Obama’s election campaigns and the Democratic National Committee between 2004 and 2012, according to federal campaign finance records.

And do you buy this crap?

The Justice Department said that it cannot take political leanings into account when assigning cases and that making legal political contributions does not prevent its attorneys from fulfilling their duties without bias.

She was hardly picked in a logical fashion:

What makes Bosserman’s selection doubly odd is that she doesn’t even work in the Public Integrity Section of the Criminal Division, which is responsible for investigating and prosecuting public corruption. Rather, she’s a lawyer in the Civil Rights Division, the most politicized division within the entire Justice Department. It’s certainly possible that the IRS practices under investigation may be civil-rights violations, but it’s curious that Attorney General Holder chose to dip into that talent pool for this particular lawyer to lead this investigation, rather than tap someone from the Public Integrity Section.

 

Doesn't pass the smell test, but what will come of it?

Held in utter contempt by those who ought to be eternally grateful

Afghan president Karzai orders the release of 72 high-profile detainees.

U.S. officials say the prisoners pose a threat to both Afghan security and American servicemembers based here, claiming their exoneration proves not only the dysfunction of the Afghan judiciary, but also the government’s inability to cooperate on even the gravest matters.

President Hamid Karzai declared Thursday that the evidence against the 72 men — which had been collected by both the Afghan intelligence service and the U.S. military — was insufficient to warrant formal trials, according to a statement from the presidential palace.

The release, which is expected within days, was ordered after a “thorough and serious review of the prisoners,” the statement said.

In an attempt to keep the detainees behind bars, U.S. officials had handed over reams of evidence against them — enough, they said they assumed, to at least justify formal trials.

But presidential spokesman Aimal Faizi said Karzai and a panel of senior officials had decided that was not the case. “The Americans didn’t have any proof against them,” Faizi said.

Bilateral relations, tense before the prisoner release, are expected to worsen, casting doubt on a pact that would permit U.S. troops to remain in Afghanistan beyond this year.

During a visit to Kabul last week, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said the release “would have an unbelievably negative impact” on U.S.-Afghan relations and would prompt “a backlash in the U.S. Congress.”

U.S. military officials said at the time that the decision would fly in the face of a 12-year effort to bolster the Afghan legal system. The prisoners were transferred to Afghan custody last year, a move intended to show confidence in the Afghan judiciary.

This is what you get when Afghanistan policy is formulated and executed by a president who doesn't give a flying f--- about any Afghanistan.

It's on purpose - today's edition

One thing the Freedom-Haters have down cold is planned decline.  Today we're seeing another dismal jobs report:

The worst news comes in the workforce numbers. Those not in the workforce increased by 525,000 in December (91.808 million), after a one-time drop in the figure for November (91.283M from 91.756M in October).  That’s a big exodus of people from the workforce, dwarfing the meager number of jobs added in the economy. Part-time work remained essentially constant at 7.8 million, so the exodus points to an ugly, ugly trend.

Not surprisingly, that lead to a decline in the workforce participation rate, back down to 62.8%. That matches the 36-year low hit in October, which is one reason why the unhinged U-3 continues to drop.  The workforce number acts as the denominator for U-3, which means that the result will “improve” as the workforce declines. The U-6 metric, which considers more of those who are only marginally attached to the workforce, remains at 13.1%.

The overlords are well on their way to the goal of a nation of cattle.

UPDATE:  Even the regime's own propaganda arm can't spin this one. 

Again, they do it because it allows them to feel good in their self-perception as champions of beleaguered demographics

Great George Will column at WaPo this morning entitled "Liberalism by Gesture."  He cites several examples of why FHers go to such lengths to stand their ground on points of such little consequence.

He cites the lame rhetoric with which he FHer apparatus has tried to make interest levels in the Chevy Volt - vis-a-vis Ford F Series pickups - seem encouraging.

He looks at the situation with the Little Sisters of the Poor:

It is unimportant to the structure of Obamacare. It has nothing to do with real insurance, which protects against unexpected developments — car insurance does not pay for oil changes. The mandate covers a minor expense: Target sells a month of birth control pills for $9 . The mandate is, however, a gesture affirming liberalism’s belief that any institution of civil society can be properly broken to the saddle of the state.

On minimum wage:

Less than 3 percent of the workforce earns the minimum; more than 60 percent of those who do earn it get a raise within a year; more than half of minimum-wage earners are students or other part-time workers from households with average incomes of $53,000. Never mind. Raising the minimum is a gesture of devotion to “equality.”

Then he moves on to the current obsession with pre-K schooling.

Read the whole thing.

 

A climate scientist who doesn't have the heebie-jeebies

Great profile of MIT's Richard Lindzen in The Weekly Standard.

But they still feel good about the virtue of their intentions

Freedom-Hater politicians, and presidents in particular, love to obsess about poverty.  The current prez may be more preoccupied with it than any since Lyndon Johnson, whose War on Poverty was declared 50 years ago.

Aren't, then, the following stats exquisitely ironic?

Although the president often rails against income inequality in America, his policies have had little impact overall on poverty. A record 47 million Americans receive food stamps, about 13 million more than when he took office.

The poverty rate has stood at 15 percent for three consecutive years, the first time that has happened since the mid-1960s. The poverty rate in 1965 was 17.3 percent; it was 12.5 percent in 2007, before the Great Recession.

Enlarge Photo

About 50 million Americans live below the poverty line, which the federal government defined in 2012 as an annual income of $23,492 for a family of four.

As we always point out here at LITD, though, it's not accurate to call it failure. The MEC's real interest regarding poverty is how to make sure it continues to self-perpetuate.  Previous Freedom-Hater leaders such as LBJ may really have swallowed the do-gooder rationale.  Not so today's professional FHer.  Yes, their supporters generally still go in for that "fairness" hoo-ha, no matter how dismal the actual results, but the overlords see it as a vehicle to power.  The point of spouting the rhetoric is to keep the base on board by flattering them on how CAAAAAARING they are.

We left it to metastasize

The post immediately below, about Robert Gates's new book, confirms what we've known for a long time:  the MEC is a declinist, but also a lazy narcissist who basically finds foreign policy boring, and the entire Freedom-Hater party is actively orchestrating Western decline, for a mixture of reasons including ideological conviction and cynical political calculation.

So shameful developments will continue to come down the pike.  Of course, there is the ongoing economic collapse of Egypt, the de facto legitimization of the Assad regime's rule in Syria, a new wave of rocket attacks into Israel, Iran's nullification of the Geneva agreement, political chaos in Turkey, and the still-unanswered questions about the September 2012 jihadist attack in Benghazi, Libya.

Add to that list the beginnings of an al-Qaeda state on either side of the Iraq-Syria border, and Karzai's dithering on signing a secutiry agreement that would provide at least a glimmer of hope that Afghanistan will be characterized by order, safety and what passes for freedom in Muslim countries as the US winds down its presence there.

The West has essentially no influence in the most dangerous yet strategically important area of the world.

It's long past time to shed the mindset of our youth, when, even as the cultural, economic chaos and global challenges of the last three decades of the 20th century unfolded, we could be confident that American leadership could be roused on short notice and employed to thwart the unthinkable.  Let's be clear: Even more than the nation's economic prowess or cultural influence, our basis for such an assumption rested on its military might.  We may still outnumber and out-fancy the rest of the world in terms of battleships, fighter jets, and elite teams of highly-trained assassins and rescue personnel, but, as the Gates memoir drives home, that whole apparatus is rife with resentment of, and contempt for, the commander-in-chief of it all.

We're not safe at all.  We need national prayer - and lots of it - for a three-year breather from the kinds of consequences of the FHer worldview that, while unthinkable, are - admit it - likely.

Woo hoo! Talk about a must-read!

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has published his memoirs, and the assessments of the Most Equal Comrade, the H-Word Creature and Joe Biden are deliciously damaging:

According to the New York Times, which obtained an early copy of the memoir, Gates calls Biden “a man of integrity,” but questions his record. “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” Gates writes, according to the Times.

Gates, the only high-level holdover from the Bush administration to the President Barack Obama’s Cabinet, reveals he nearly quit his post in September 2009 while Obama reviewed his Afghanistan strategy. According to the Times, Gates writes he was “deeply uneasy with the Obama White House’s lack of appreciation — from the top down — of the uncertainties and unpredictability of war…I came closer to resigning that day than at any other time in my tenure, though no one knew it.”

Gates was a backer of a substantial troop increase for Afghanistan early in Obama’s first term, while Biden argued for a smaller counter-terrorism mission in the country.

The Washington Post quotes a separate exchange in the book between Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, where they discussed their opposition to the 2007 Iraq surge in the context of politics. “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. . . . The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.”

Wonderful kickoff to the 2014 political cycle.

When the team's had a losing season, often the coach has to go

Robert Wilde at Breitbart looks at all the cannings of executives going on in the world of greenie ideology:  Maggie Fox at Climate Reality Project, Larry Schweiger at National Wildlife Federation, Frances Beinecke at Natural Resources Defense Council, and Greenpeace USA's Phil Radford.

Medicaid Nation

Three great columns today about how expanded Medicaid and FHer-care's reliance on it is driving up ER visit numbers, in direct opposition to the way it was sold:

Editorial at Investor's Business Daily

Mona Charen at NRO 

Star Parker at Townhall

The Freedom-Haters made up the term "trickle-down economics"

Thomas Sowell says that when you hear totalitarian Leninists like the Most Equal Comrade  or Bill DeBlasio try to justify the punishment of achievement by using the term "trickle down," remember that it appears nowhere in any actual economist's writing.

Of Rachel Maddow, Koch Industries and the need for the need for the left to lie to enact its agenda

In this John Hindraker piece at Power Line, he refers to Eliana Johnson's report the other day at NRO on how, amidst all the chaos at MSNBC, Rachel Maddow is not just considered an outpost of stability, but a major behind-the-scenes decision maker.  He rightly asks, in light of last Thursday's installment of her show, whether that's something the network ought to find reassuring.

Here's the basic scenario:  45 minutes before the show was to begin, the show's producer e-mailed the Koch brothers' legal counsel asking if their clients wished to appear to discuss a court's striking-down of the Florida law requiring drug tests for welfare recipients, a law pushed by a group called the Florida Foundation for Government Accountability.  The e-mail said that, given that "the Koch Brothers have donated to the State Policy Network, of which the FFGA is a member," they might want to offer their views.  The legal counsel responded fairly immediately, saying that his clients wouldn't have anything useful to add to the discussion, since they weren't involved in any way.

She went on the air with her premise anyway, complete with a slick-looking chart that purported to make a connection.

God damn it, Rachel what part of "no connection" don't you understand?

[Maddow's chart] is an utter non sequitur. The State Policy Network–let alone the Koch brothers!–had nothing to do with the Florida legislation. Ms. Maddow perhaps was trying to suggest that the State Policy Network is a funding source for FFGA, so that the Koch brothers have indirectly supported FFGA, albeit to a ridiculously small level (nowhere near $1,000 on a pro rata basis). But that isn’t true either. I happen to know a little bit about this, since I was formerly the Chairman of the Board of a think tank that is a member of the State Policy Network. The SPN is like a trade association of conservative think tanks, with members in every state. The SPN doesn’t support the local groups, like FFGA; on the contrary, the local think tanks pay dues to support SPN. So there is no connection–not even a minute, indirect one–between Koch and FFGA. I repeat: as far as we know, no one at Koch had ever heard of FFGA before Rachel Maddow’s show on Thursday of last week, and Koch did nothing–zero, nada–to support the Florida legislation in question.

So Rachel Maddow’s entire segment was one big lie. Her central premise, that the Florida welfare statute was an initiative of the Koch brothers, was false, and she knew it. She made the whole thing up to fool the low-IQ viewers who form MSNBC’s base. But the story gets even worse.

In an email dated January 3–follow the link above–Koch asked MSNBC to retract, and apologize for, Maddow’s fabrications. Instead of correcting her misrepresentations, Maddow, in her show on Friday, triumphantly refused, saying “I don’t play requests.” Or, in other words, “I lie with impunity, and MSNBC gives me cover.” The left-wing echo chamber swooned. Daily Kos–remember them?–headlined, “Rachel Maddow Speaks Truth to Powerful Koch Brothers.” Raw Story’s sycophantic take was, “Maddow scorches Koch brothers on ‘correction’ demand: ‘I don’t play requests.’” So if you are a left-winger, blatant lies about conservatives make you a hero.

Little Miss Defiant must not realize how rich in irony her lie is:

But the corruption goes deeper still. Rachel Maddow says that any company that supports the State Policy Network is “affiliated with” the Florida Foundation for Government Accountability, and is responsible for everything FFGA does. That is wrong, but let’s go with it. Who else, besides Koch, has supported the State Policy Network? You might be surprised: the list includes Microsoft, Facebook, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, GlaxoSmithKline, Kraft Foods, and many more. So Maddow randomly singled out Koch as opposed to any of these other companies as the sponsor of the Florida legislation which, as far as we know, Koch wasn’t even aware of. Well, not randomly, because MSNBC is obsessed with Koch, but you get the point.
But wait! A final level of deception remains to be revealed: one of the many companies that have contributed to the State Policy Network is Comcast, which owns MSNBC and is Rachel Maddow’s employer. So in her Thursday broadcast, Maddow could equally well have said that MSNBC “ha[s] been promoting forced drug tests for people on welfare,” and that FFGA is an “MSNBC-affiliated group.” She didn’t do this for obvious reasons. She knew that she was addressing a stupid audience that would never know the difference.
If Rachel Maddow is the best that MSNBC has to offer, MSNBC is in even deeper trouble than its steep ratings decline would indicate.

I sure hope to hear from some of the respected Beltway / media / pundit world insiders quoted in Eliana Johnson's NRO piece address this.  I don't care if she's willing to do lunch with known righties.  In a sane world, this would expose her for the steaming chunk of freedom-hating dog vomit she is.