Sweet indeed!

Take that, Sandra Fluke!

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Today in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that a key regulation in President Barack Obama’s signature health care legislation is illegal as applied to millions of Americans of faith, as well as their businesses or organizations.

In Obamacare’s second round before the nation’s highest court, Justice Samuel Alito wrote the opinion in the 5-to-4 rebuke of the Obama administration for violating the individual rights of American citizens, holding the so-called HHS Abortion Pill Mandate violates religious liberty protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA).

Obama’s beleaguered Affordable Care Act includes a requirement that all employers offering insurance must make “preventive care” part of their healthcare package. The White House decided that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services would issue a regulation declaring “preventive care” includes numerous forms of birth control, including at least four that cause abortions in pregnant women.

Two Christian-owned companies—home retail giant Hobby Lobby and a much smaller business, Conestoga Wood Specialties—filed suit. Hobby Lobby is owned by the Green family, who are Evangelical. Conestoga Wood Specialties is owned by the Hahn family, who are Mennonite.

Employers who provide healthcare without the abortion-pill coverage face a fine of $100 per employee, per day (meaning $36,500 per year for each worker). For Hobby Lobby, that would mean a penalty of $1.4 million per day, or approximately $500 million per year.

Because the Court held that this regulation violates a federal law, it did not need to reach the larger question of whether this Obamacare mandate also violates Americans’ First Amendment right to freely exercise their religion.

Pretty huge.

In post-America, "sensitivity toward other belief systems" is a one-way proposition

George Will's NRO column today is about how the dust-up over the Washington Redskins' name is simultaneously silly and chilling, but in the last few paragraphs, he ties it to a larger cultural phenomenon, and rightly so:

William Voegeli, a senior editor of the Claremont Review of Books, writes that the kerfuffle over an NFL team’s name involves serious matters. They include comity in a diverse nation, civil discourse, and “not only how we make decisions, but how we decide what needs to be decided, and who will do the deciding.”

Time was, Voegeli writes, a tolerant society was one with “a mutual nonaggression pact”: If your beliefs and practices offend but do not otherwise affect me, I will not interfere with them if you will reciprocate regarding my beliefs and practices. Now, however, tolerance supposedly requires compulsory acknowledgment that certain people’s beliefs and practices deserve, Voegeli says, “to be honored, respected, affirmed, and validated” lest they suffer irreparable injury to their sense of worth. And it requires compelling conformity for the good of the compelled.

When two Oregon bakers chose, for religious reasons, not to provide a cake for a same-sex wedding, an Oregon government official explained why tolerance meant coercing the bakers: “The goal is to rehabilitate.” Tolerance required declaring the bakers’ beliefs and practices intolerable. We are going to discover whether a society can be congenial while its government is being coercive regarding wedding cakes and teams’ names.

It has occurred to me, in the days since federal district judge Richard Young, using some grotesque imitation of clear reasoning, found that Indiana's 2004 law reaffirming the millennia-old and exclusive component of the term "marriage"'s definition assuming union between men and women to be in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal-protection clause, that the biggest takeaway is this:  Henceforth, Christians are to zip it tight and be invisible in society.  Oh, mainline Protestant "churches" will be hanging rainbow flags for public display, but real adherence to Romans 1 now has the viability of the piles of books going up in flames in Germany circa 1933.

The stakes get higher in the war for America's soul by the hour now.

UPDATE:  Good grief.  Simon Waxman of the Boston Review pens a WaPo column saying that the US military needs to change the names of vehicles such as the Apache helicopter.

Veterans are none too pleased:

Readers at the popular military news gathering website Doctrine Man reacted Friday.

“I suspect that the author is less unhappy that our choppers have Indian names, and more unhappy that there is a U.S. military,” wrote Alex Kuhns.

Kevin Schooler wrote: “What floors me is that for the most part, it isn’t American Indians who are offended. It is guilt-ridden white liberals being offended on their behalf. How’s that for paternalism?”

Even the website’s moderator weighed in, saying that the names the military chooses for weapons platforms “are anything but derogatory, they convey strength, honor, and courage. @SimonWaxman is grossly uninformed.”

Conveyances of strength have no place in post-America.

The fruits of planned decline - today's edition

Pro-common-sense and pro-ongoing-viability-of-Western-civilization folks have been pointing out for years that if Canada felt spurned long enough regarding the Keystone XL pipeline, that nation would look across the Pacific for customers for that oil.

We're there now.  

Claiming it could no longer abide the Obama administration's five-year refusal to approve construction of the Keystone XL pipeline designed to bring 830,000 barrels a day of much-needed Alberta shale oil to U.S. refineries, the Canadian government recently approved plans for a huge new pipeline and port project to ship that oil to Asia instead. 

When completed, the $7.9 billion Enbridge Northern Gateway Project, approved by Canada’s federal government on June 17, will consist of an environmentally safe, 730-mile oil pipeline. It will be capable of moving 600,000 barrels a day of Alberta oil to the pacific coast town of Kitimat, British Columbia, where a new state-of-the-art super tanker port facility will be built to ship the oil to thirsty Asian ports. 

For FHers, the weaker post-America is, the better.

Why Nancy Pelosi is every bit as poisonous a Freedom-Hater as the Most Equal Comrade

This pro-fetal-death pretender to Catholic faith had the temerity to show up on the Texas-Mexico border and say that "every child, every person, has a spark of divinity within them and is therefore worthy of respect."

And then get a load of how she distorts the meaning of the term "community."

"This is a community with a border going through it. And this crisis — that some call a 'crisis' — we have to view as an opportunity," Pelosi told reporters at a press conference. 

Rock-festival people have been trying to peddle that line since Woodstock in 1969.  No, you're not a community. You're a bunch of late-adolescent and early-"adult" attendees of a music festival for which you either paid for a ticket or crashed the gate.  And the same here.  This is no "community."  But the use of the word can reinforce some kind of notion of "solidarity" among the kids hopping on those trains in Honduras and El Salvador and heading northward.  Like what binds them as a "community" is some kind of entitlement to the blessing of life in what they still imagine to be the United States of America without having to give a s--- about the founding principles that made those blessings possible.

This one has to be on any top ten list of her most vulgar utterances.  What shameless pandering to thousands of desperate people and those post-Americans who are desperate to seek out desperation and have "compassion" toward it.

But we can't make her go away because she represents an unassailable stronghold of such dog vomit, and will get re-elected as long as she chooses.

Heere's one playwright who won't stand for having his artistic vision messed with

A theater in Milwaukee tried to do some gender experimentation with a work by David Mamet.  He played his trump card and the theater company is out of a project:

David Mamet doesn’t play around when it comes to others taking liberties with his works. In this case, a Milwaukee theater tried to take liberties with the gender of one of Mamet’s characters.

Mamet wasn’t having any of it. The outspoken conservative probably doesn’t like having his cultural works appropriated by the left for purposes that have nothing to do with the original intent of the work.

Milwaukee’s Alchemist Theatre has canceled its production of the David Mamet drama “Oleanna” after one performance after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from the playwright’s representatives over the theater company’s decision to cast a male actor in the play’s lead female role.

“Oleanna,” introduced to audiences shortly after the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991, centers on the relationship between a professor and a female student who accuses him of harassment and rape. MORE…

Note to lefty creatives: If you spend the time and cash to stage a performance, make sure you don’t anger the artist who created the work by changing it and taking the whole meaning away just to suit your progressive agenda. You’ll get shut down and lose your cash, integrity, and credibility.

A delightful if rare win for us in the cultural realm.

The tawdry Pub establishment victory in Mississippi

Two important NRO pieces today about Tuesday's primary runoff in the Magnolia State.

John Fund says the main tactic used was race-baiting:

The tactics used to convince black Democrats to vote for Cochran included the same kind of race-baiting that Republicans have complained about for decades. “The Tea Party Intends To Prevent Blacks From Voting on Tuesday” was the headline on a flier that indefatigable journalist Charles Johnson (twitter #chuckcjohnson) discovered had been distributed in heavily black precincts before the June 23 vote. Along with that unfounded incendiary message was a list of issue comparisons between Cochran and Chris McDaniel. Cochran was credited with such unconservative positions as support for federal pork projects and food-stamp funding. The flier carried no identification as to who produced it, a violation of federal law.

Curiously, another flier put out by the pro-Cochran Mississippi Conservatives PAC last week described Cochran’s positions in nearly identical language as the anonymous flier and even carried an identical photo of the senator. The slogan that Thad Cochran “Supports All Mississippians” is the same in both fliers.

 “I don’t know who put it out,” former governor Haley Barbour, who raised boatloads of money for the Mississippi Conservatives PAC, told my colleague Eliana Johnson. “I can’t imagine the Cochran campaign did that.”

But the Mississippi Conservatives PAC did engage in its own questionable tactics. A mysterious robo-call went out to thousands of Democratic households just before the June 23 vote. The female narrator’s message was as follows: “By not voting, you are saying ‘take away all of my government programs, such as food stamps, early breakfast and lunch programs, millions of dollars to our black universities . . . everything we and our families depend on that comes from Washington will be cut.”As the Washington Examiner reported: “It turns out that former Republican Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s pro-Cochran Super PAC, Mississippi Conservatives, shelled out $44,000 for an offensive robo-call urging black Democrat voters to vote for Thad Cochran in the Republican primary Tuesday.”
There has been much speculation about the offensive robo-call, which trashes theTea Party for “their disrespectful treatment of the first African American president.” The female narrator claimed that Tea Party candidate Chris McDanielwould cause “even more problems for President Obama.” 

As I said, the wounds from all of this are likely to be long lasting. 

And Eliana Johnson introduces us to Mitzi Bickers:

Meet what appears to be one of the keys to Thad Cochran’s black-turnout operation, Mitzi Bickers.

She is, from all appearances, something of a renaissance woman: She is not only the pastor of Atlanta’s Emmanuel Baptist Church but also a former president of the Atlanta school board, a former construction-company executive, and a Democratic staffer and political strategist with a checkered past. Last year, she left her job as a senior adviser to Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed after news surfaced that she had filed a fraudulent financial-disclosure statement.

In a bizarre turn of events, it seems that Bickers was in the middle of a bitterly contested Republican Senate primary. Two Atlanta-based entities affiliated with Bickers, The Bickers Group and the Pirouette Company, were paid thousands of dollars to make robo-calls on Senator Cochran’s behalf by a super PAC that backed Cochran in his bid for reelection. Documentsfiled with the Federal Election Commission show that Mississippi Conservatives, the political-action committee run by former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour’s nephew Henry, paid the groups a total of $44,000 for get-out-the-vote “phone services.”

Our enemies in the war for America's soul are legion.

Steven Goddard outs himself

He's a whistle blower:

My name is Tony Heller. I am a whistle blower. I am an independent thinker who is considered a heretic by the orthodoxy on both sides of the climate debate.

I live in Columbia, Maryland – an amazing city where I can ride my bicycle everywhere through the forest, and never need to get in a car.

I am a lifelong environmentalist. I testified at my first Congressional subcommittee hearing at age 15 in Kanab, Utah, in support of  a wilderness area – very close to the one which President Obama recently set aside. I worked to get the Clean Air Act passed. I worked as a volunteer wilderness ranger for two summers in the Cibola and Santa Fe National Forests in New Mexico. I worked on the Safety Analysis Report for DOE’s nuclear waste disposal site in New Mexico. I probably have the smallest electricity bill in Columbia, Maryland because I am very careful not to waste. I have never turned on my heat or air conditioning.

I have degrees in Geology and Electrical Engineering, and worked on the design team of many of the world’s most complex designs, including some which likely power your PC or Mac. I have worked as a contract software developer on climate and weather models for the US government.

I do not receive any funding other than small donations on my blog, which have worked out well below minimum wage. I have tried to obtain funding, but skeptics with money are terrified of political attacks directed by the White House and/or being targeted by the IRS. They openly state this to me.

My position on global warming:

The claims of 97% consensus are a massive lie. Only 52% of American Meteorological Society members believe that man is the primary contributor to global warming.

Pray for this man.  Now that he's revealed his real identity, he can expect to come in for ire of a degree that would sear the souls of timid men.

One of those Freedom-Hater utterances we should take deadly seriously

Next up on the executive-order agenda: amnesty for illegal aliens.

The Obama administration is "not bluffing" in its intent to take executive action on immigration policy if House Republicans don't act soon, top Democratic leaders warned Thursday.

President Obama has delayed any potential changes to his deportation policy to allow House GOP leaders time to bring legislation to the floor this summer. But if the Republicans don't act in July, the Democrats say, unilateral changes by Obama are inevitable.

"We're at the end of the line," Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said Thursday during a press briefing in the Capitol. "We're not bluffing by setting a legislative deadline for them to act.

"Their first job is to govern," Menendez added, "and in the absence of governing, then you see executive actions."

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) piled on. Noting that a year has passed since the Senate passed a sweeping immigration reform bill with broad bipartisan support, he urged House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to bring a similar bill to the floor.

"I don't know how much more time he thinks he needs, but I hope that Speaker Boehner will speak up today," Durbin said. "And if he does not, the president will borrow the power that is needed to solve the problems of immigration."

At the core of the progressive strategy is the relentlessly trumpeted message that there are no valid opposing viewpoints.  Anyone who has ever pointed up the actual data on the global climate, or pointed up the fact that marriage has nowhere at any time been defined to include homosexual bonds, or pointed up that an individual has the right to keep all his money, save for what government needs for clearly specified basic functions, or, to the point of this news story, pointed up that laws regarding national sovereignty are to be followed as written, is told that there is no room for his or her value system in the new order and that there is no alternative to keeping his or her mouth shut.

The war for America's soul has not reached maximum ugliness by any means.

SCOTUS gets one right

The Most Equal Comrade was way outta bounds with the recess appointments:

The U.S. Supreme Court curbed the president’s power to make temporary appointments without Senate approval, backing congressional Republicans and dealing a blow to PresidentBarack Obama.

The justices ruled unanimously that Obama exceeded his constitutional authority when he appointed three members of the National Labor Relations Board in January 2012. Four Republican-appointed justices would have gone further in limiting the appointment power.

The case was the court’s first look at a constitutional provision that lets the president make temporary appointments to high-level posts during Senate recesses. The decision leaves the Senate with broad power to thwart the president’s nominations, letting lawmakers all but nullify the recess-appointment power by holding brief, “pro forma” sessions every few days.

“We must give great weight to the Senate’s own determination of when it is and when it is not in session,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in the court’s majority opinion.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito would have ruled on broader grounds. They said the recess-appointment power applies only after a year-long congressional session ends and before the next one begins, not during breaks within a session.

We shall see if it has any kind of chastising effect.

Lois Lerner, you slimy bitch

She tried to use the IRS to get a sitting US Senator in trouble:

The emails show former IRS official Lois Lerner mistakenly received an invitation to an event that was meant to go to Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.

The event organizer apparently offered to pay for Grassley's wife to attend the event. In an email to another IRS official, Lerner suggests referring the matter for an audit, saying it might be inappropriate for the group to pay for his wife.

"Perhaps we should refer to exam?" Lerner wrote.

It was unclear from the emails whether Lerner was suggesting that Grassley or the group be audited — or both.

The other IRS official, Matthew Giuliano, waved her off, saying an audit would be premature because Grassley hadn't even accepted the invitation.

"It would be Grassley who would need to report the income," Giuliano said.

The name of the event organizer was blacked out on copies of the emails released by the House Ways and Means Committee because they were considered confidential taxpayer information. Grassley and his wife signed waivers allowing their names to be released.

If you cherish your freedom, Lois Lerner is your enemy.

Because federal judges are enlightened in ways Hoosiers and Utah residents can't begin to understand

A federal district judge in Indiana declares the universally recognized and old-as-the-human-species definition of marriage, as codified in Indiana law, unconstitutional.

As my astute sister points out:

Love the part where the judge says if you ignore the gender and sexual orientation, they are just like the couple down the street.  Sure, and if you ignore the feathers and fur, the bird and dog couple are just like down the street.  Some things can't be ignored out of existence.

And a three-judge panel in Utah acts likewise.

The H-Word Creature will surely regret having written Hard Choices

Its Amazon rating is 2.1.

Lots of bad reviews, including this gem:  “Excruciatingly Boring, Overly Long, Insipid Pabulum”

It's on purpose - today's edition

The Commerce Department has downwardly revised the assessment that the post-American economy contracted by 1 percent in the first quarter of this year.  Looks like it contracted by 2.9%.

Wow!

And the internals don't provide any help to any regime water-carriers wishing to gloss it over:

This time the news is bad across the board. Exports dropped 8.9% in Q1, a huge drop from 2013, which wasn’t exactly spectacular either. Real final sales of domestic product dropped 1.3%, where in earlier estimates it had remained in positive territory. Business investment also fell . . .

And it ain't because of some snow and cold temps.  The May durable-goods report shows a contraction of 1 percent.

And non-defense and defense orders are off considerably, and inventories are increasing.

I know!  Let's subsidize some solar-panel companies and hold a conference on fostering transgender acceptance in the workplace!  

Thoughts on the Cochran - McDaniels race

First off, Mississippi needs to revamp its open-primary provisions big-time:

CNN chief political correspondent Dana Bash stated that sources at Sen. Thad Cochran’s (R-MS) victory party admitted that non-GOP voters probably put Cochran over the top in his primary campaign against Chris McDaniel. 

Bash reported from Cochran’s victory party in Jackson, MS that “the Cochran people here are saying that if this was just a truly Republican race, if the law here in Mississippi did not allow Democrats to vote, then he probably almost certainly would be losing to Chris McDaniel.”

Mississippi may be a decidedly red state, but somebody's been asleep at the switch.  In post-America, Freedom-Haters know that nominal Pubs afflicted with Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome, especially if combined with a touch of senility, are the way to ensure that such states don't get the chance to send real conservatives to Congress.  FHers may be mad, but they're often politically savvy.

Another noteworthy aspect of the race is the way it tightened toward the end. That's no doubt why McDaniels is challenging the results.  There's merit to the idea, but also a downside:

The McDaniel campaign may end up rethinking this promise in the cool light of day. McDaniel has a long career ahead of him in Mississippi, and Cochran doesn’t, this win notwithstanding. Launching a quixotic challenge over party identification in an open primary won’t win McDaniel any love from the Republican Party, and might end up alienating at least a few of those people who saw him as a better alternative to the pork-barrel politics of yesterday that Cochran represents.  Better to regroup now and fight another day.

This view makes sense to LITD.  FHers do these things.  Let's learn the lesson real thoroughly this time and not let it happen again.

Sharia practitioners sure don't like Christian women

A Christian mother and daughter in Mosul, Iraq are raped for failing to pay Jizya, the tribute dhimmis are expected to pay in radical Islamic societies.  ISIL thugs raped them in front of the husband / father, who shortly thereafter committed suicide.

And Meriam Ibrahim, along with her husband Daniel Wani, has been re-arrested by Sudanese authorities, at Khartoum International Airport.

It's officially an outlaw regime

What was revealed during the course of an exchange between Representative Tim Walberg (R-MI) and David S. Ferriero, archivist for the National Archives and Records Administration:

The House Republican asked if the IRS’s refusal to inform Mr. Ferriero's department immediately about the missing documents broke the Federal Records Act -- which, according to the witness's own sworn testimony, states that “when an agency becomes aware of an incident of unauthorized destruction, they must report the incident to us.” Ferriero, for his part, also testified that he learned about the "alleged unauthorized disposal [of emails]" in a letter from the Senate Committee on Finance, which was sent to NARA on June 13, 2014.

“Any agency is required to notify us when they realize they have a problem,” Ferriero claimed, reiterating what he had said in his opening statement.

“But they didn’t do that?” Rep. Walberg asked.

“That’s right,” Ferriero admitted.

Rep. Walberg then asked if the agency broke federal law.

“I’m not a lawyer,” Ferriero replied.

"But you administer the Federal Records Act," Rep. Walberg quickly pointed out.

"I do."

"[So] if they didn't follow it, can we safely assume they broke the law?” Rep. Walberg asked.

”They did not follow the law,” Ferriero replied.

But you damn sure better send them every penny they say you owe them exactly when they say to send it.

Trey Gowdy is so good

If you want to corner a Freedom-Hater and leave him no way to conceal his foulness, sic Trey on him!

James Delingpole's delicious takedown of Hank Paulson

At Breitbart, he provides a point-by-point refutation of the former Treasury Secretary's NYT op-ed on "climate change."

Here are a few highlights:

"The solution can be a fundamentally conservative one that will empower the marketplace to find the most efficient response. We can do this by putting a price on emissions of carbon dioxide — a carbon tax. Few in the United States now pay to emit this potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere we all share. Putting a price on emissions will create incentives to develop new, cleaner energy technologies."

This position you outline: it is not a conservative one. Conservatives do not believe in higher taxes; conservatives do not believe that governments can pick winners or, as you weasellishly put it, "empower the marketplace". Maybe it's time you and you had a serious chat about this with David L Brooks in the New York Times canteen. If you both joined the Democrats together, they might give you a two for the price of one deal.

"It’s true that the United States can’t solve this problem alone."

Indeed. The word you're looking for is "China." And guess what? They're building a new coal-fired power plant every five days. That's how much they care about your plans to stop global warming.

"Looking back at the dark days of the financial crisis in 2008, it is easy to see the similarities between the financial crisis and the climate challenge we now face."

Yes,they're both classic examples of Enron economics: a gigantic Ponzi scheme in which rent-seeking corporations, faux experts, and low-down shysters exploit government regulation and incompetence to fleece everyone else.

"Our experts (financial experts then, climate scientists now) try to understand what they see and to model possible futures."

So let me get this right: you're using the example of all those useless "experts" who failed to predict the 2008 crash as a justification for trusting the widely discredited models of "climate scientists"? Good luck with that.

Really liked this one:

"I'm a businessman, not a climatologist"

No shit, Sherlock!

Many more, so read it all.

Keep the VA scandal on your radar screen

Senator Tom Coburn's report, released today, makes clear just how ugly things are at that agency:

• Female patients received unnecessary pelvic and breast exams from a sex offender.

• Delays are endemic. In addition to care waiting lists, the VA is behind on processing disability claims and constructing facilities.

• Some VA health care providers have lost their medical licenses, but the VA hides that information from patients.

• The federal government has paid out $845 million for VA medical malpractice settlements since 2001.

Mr. Coburn included a photo from one VA facility in North Carolina that couldn’t find proper storage for 37,000 benefit claim folders. They were piled on top of filing cabinets, apparently in random order, making it not only poor case management, but also a fire hazard, Mr. Coburn said.

In the stunning case of the police chief, Richard Meltz, head of security at the Bedford VA Medical Center, pleaded guilty in January to involvement in what the FBI called “two sadistic kidnapping, rape and murder conspiracies.” Meltz advised two others on how to avoid being tracked, such as not using toll roads, and where to dump bodies, according to the FBI.

Throwing more money at the problem is no solution.  Give vets vouchers.  And, of course, repeal Freedom-Hater-care.

Why any of the Clintons is admired stumps anybody who's not a lobotomized cow

When Hard Choices first came out, one of my Facebook nemeses, a 75-year-old artist lady with whom I actually share a strange mutual respect, having met her when I did a magazine article on her, quite some time before we found out each other's ideological orientation, crowed about what a great prez candidate and president the H-Word Creature was going to make.  Later in our exchange about the matter, I was able to provide some good skunk-at-the-garden-party fare, such as book sales dropping off precipitously, and some of the unfortunate interview moments during launch week. But my first volley in the HRC exchange was a simple question:  Can you please name a major accomplishment from her stints as an attorney, Senator or Secretary of State?  The artist lady came back with some mush about "She's had lots of accomplishments."  I repeated my question.  Someone else chimed in, a  rather accomplished folk singer and actor (several CD and tours, some TV and movie roles) who, again, is someone I see around town and in musical situations, and with whom I have cordial relations.  He could do no better at naming a HRC accomplishment.

Well, actually, in 1975, she represented an accused rapist and got him a plea-down and laughed on a tape about the ineffectiveness of polygraphs, and according to the rape victim, tried to smear her as emotionally unstable.

But anything that would qualify as bold, visionary, historic?  Just ain't there.

She does step in it with a fair amount of frequency, however.  On the heels of the "we-were-flat-broke" remark, the backlash from which would presumably make a public figure rethink any talk about her financial situation at any point, she has now let loose with this:

In an interview with Britain's Guardian published over the weekend, Clinton reignited the debate over her wealth by comparing herself to other wealthy people who Clinton said were "truly well off."

Asked by the paper whether she would represent the populist strain of her party, Clinton said, "They don't see me as part of the problem because we pay ordinary income tax, unlike a lot of people who are truly well off, not to name names; and we've done it through dint of hard work."

It's almost enough to make want one to tell her, out of pity, for the sake of a reputation above buffoon level, to put a sock in it.

Then there's Chelsea, who had brief gigs as a hedge-fund consultant and an NBC special correspondent at a salary of $600K.  Now she's at her parents' foundation.

You see, she's learned that she just doesn't care much about money.

“I was curious if I could care about (money) on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t,” she told UK’s The Telegraph, explaining why she gave up lucrative gigs to join her family’s philanthropic foundation.

So she appears ready to settle into the life of an elite symbol of do-gooderism.

Her mom may have to likewise settle.


At least Billy Jeff the Zipper has always come across as a gregarious, engaging personality.  The H-Word creature is the polar opposite:

Hillary, by contrast, never seems anything but vain and testy.  That comes across on television.  No presidential candidate in the last half-century appears so unpleasant.  Moreover, that image is pretty well fixed in the public mind, and every effort Hillary makes to counter that image has the additional problem of looking phony.

Hillary also is physically unappealing.  She was never pretty, but now she is old and tired.  While many of us may pine for the days before looks counted so much to our countrymen, it is undeniable that visual response is now the primary source of information for most American voters.  When is the last time that someone ugly won a presidential election?

Carl Cannon may believe that identity politics will trump all in 2016, but his view is the outlier.  It's June 2014, and the H-Word Creature shows nearly daily that she's not invincible, much less inevitable.

Far more likely that the three empty suits from Little Rock will spend the remainder of their days floating around the world being icons of vague feel-good-ism, and occasionally making trouble with comments that do Western civilization a grave disservice in one fashion or another, as all Freedom-Haters are wont to do.

Meriam's out of jail

But the Sudanese Christian physician who had her second child while incarceration and had been sentenced to be flogged 100 times and then hanged is still in some kind of safe house in Sudan.  It's important to get her, her husband and the kids America-bound pronto.  There are lots of threats to her safety, including a half-brother who threatens to kill her if he gets the chance.

I was pretty sure Rand Paul wasn't in my top 20 prez candidate possibilities, but this clinches it

On Meet the Press, he tells David Gregory he blames W for the current juncture at which Iraq finds itself.

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line is more blunt than I'd be, but let's hear from him:

Rand Paul is a fool. Chaos exists in much of the Middle East and North Africa. Did the Iraq invasion cause the chaos in Libya? Did it cause the chaos in Syria?

Of course not. The chaos we see in these countries and elsewhere is the result of uprisings against dictatorial regimes following the Arab Spring. The uprisings would have occurred in or around 2011 regardless of whether the U.S. had invaded Iraq in 2003.

Indeed, it’s extremely unlikely that an Iraq still controlled in the spring of 2011 by Saddam Hussein would have been immune from such an uprising. Iraq, with its multiple sectarian fault lines, was as vulnerable as any nation in the region to the type of civil wars we’ve witnessed since that time. Why would he have fared better than Assad?

As for Iran, its increase in influence is also largely independent of the Iraq invasion. Working through Hezbollah, Iran has become a key player in Lebanon and in Syria, where it played a huge role in saving the Assad regime. Iran has also increased its influence by moving ever closer to developing nuclear weapons.

None of this has anything to do with the Iraq invasion (if one believes the CIA, the invasion actually caused Iran to suspend its nuclear program for several years). As for Iranian influence in Iraq itself, again it’s difficult to imagine that, absent the 2003 invasion, Iran wouldn’t have stirred up and abetted a rebellious Shiite majority population in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

But even if one believes (1) that the continuation of Saddam Hussein’s regime would have been, on balance, desirable and (2) that his regime would have skated past the Arab Spring, it’s still ridiculous for Rand Paul to let Obama off the hook. Obama must be judged independently of Bush. Even if he made merely a bad situation worse, Obama is to blame for that.

[snip]

Bush isn’t to blame for the fact that Obama pulled our military entirely out of Iraq. Bush isn’t to blame for the fact that, thereafter, al Qaeda reemerged. Bush isn’t to blame for the fact that, in the face of intelligence that al Qaeda was “becoming more and more dangerous,” Obama did nothing.

I'd been concerned about insufficient daylight between Rand's foreign policy views and those of his father.  His ability to see what the Most Equal Comrade has wrought in the middle east is too clouded to trust his judgement on any world-affairs issue from this point forward.

 

Solidifying the caliphate

Now it's the Iraq-Jordan border that has been rendered null and void.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met Iraq's prime minister in Baghdad on Monday to push for a more inclusive government, even as Baghdad's forces abandoned the border with Jordan, leaving the entire Western frontier outside government control.

Sunni tribes took the Turaibil border crossing, the only legal crossing point between Iraq and Jordan, after Iraqi security forces fled, Iraqi and Jordanian security sources said.

The tribes were negotiating to hand the post over to insurgents from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant who took control of two main crossings with Syria over the weekend.

Kurdish forces control a third border post with Syria in the north, leaving central government troops with no presence along the entire Western frontier which includes some of the most important east-west trade routes in the Middle East.

For the insurgents, capturing the frontier is a dramatic step towards the goal of erasing the modern border altogether and building a caliphate across swathes of Syria and Iraq.

Of course, there's been a lot of debate about whether our 300 special forces in an advisory capacity can be effective in any meaningful sense, or whether that's 300 too many.  From this blogger's perspective in the middle of North America, it looks like what we'd better do is prepare to address the new reality of an entirely new jihadist entity spanning what had been three "countries," as well as an Iran that has the same orientation it has had since 1979.  In short, we will see two entities, each of which has an intention to destroy the West, vie for dominance.  I know the temptation is to indulge the hope that they will so thoroughly decimate each other with their well-known tools of catastrophic terror that neither will be in a position to cause trouble in places beyond their own neighborhood.  But that is to forget how central obliterating the West is to the mission of each.  That accomplishment would go far to seal the dominance of the party so obliterating.  Each side is already plotting such attacks, after all.

I do think it's a little late to preoccupy ourselves with shoring up an al-Maliki-led coalition.

The fruits of planned decline - today's edition

Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski says his country's relationship with post-America "isn't worth anything."

Infantilizing established norms of grammar in order to coddle confused narcissists

When English-speaking societies decided that there was something fundamentally inequitable about using "he" and "his" for singular pronouns, a couple of solutions surfaced.  In some quarters, basic grammatical rules were bent a bit and "they" and "theirs" became acceptable usage.  Others went in for the slash ("him / her").  "One" often worked quite adequately.

But, no, the Vancouver school board now wants to impose the stupid and awkward "xe," "xim" and "xyr" on all the tabula rasas in its charge.

How much more in your face can our overlords be?

The IRS scandal gets more ultra-sinister by the day:

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) cancelled its longtime relationship with an email-storage contractor just weeks after ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s computer crashed and shortly before other IRS officials’ computers allegedly crashed.

The IRS signed a contract with Sonasoft, an email-archiving company based in San Jose, California, each year from 2005 to 2010. The company, which partners with Microsoft and counts The New York Times among its clients, claims in its company slogans that it provides “Email Archiving Done Right” and “Point-Click Recovery.” Sonasoft in 2009 tweeted, “If the IRS uses Sonasoft products to backup their servers why wouldn’t you choose them to protect your servers?”

Sonasoft was providing “automatic data processing” services for the IRS throughout the January 2009 to April 2011 period in which Lerner sent her missing emails.

But Sonasoft’s six-year business relationship with the IRS came to an abrupt end at the close of fiscal year 2011, as congressional investigators began looking into the IRS conservative targeting scandal and IRS employees’ computers started crashing left and right.

Sonasoft’s fiscal year 2011 contract with the IRS ended on August 31, 2011. Eight days later, the IRS officially closed out its relationship with Sonasoft in accordance with the federal government’s contract close-out guidelines, which require agencies to fully audit their contracts and to get back any money that wasn’t used by the contractor. Curiously, the IRS de-allocated 36 cents when it closed out its contract with Sonasoft on September 8, 2011.

Lois Lerner’s computer allegedly crashed in June 2011, just ten days after House Ways and Means Committee chairman Rep. Dave Camp first wrote a letter asking if the IRS was engaging in targeting of nonprofit groups.

Yet this tyranny-imposing agency will continue to exist by this time next week.  That is wrong.

Why the divest-from-Israel movement is nothing short of evil

Because it's all about picking on the lone outpost of righteousness and human advancement in a region that is otherwise given over to an exaltation of chaos and brutality:

What is it they want Americans to divest from? A rare, functioning Middle East democracy that operates under the rule of law and treats all its citizens — men, women, Arab, Jew — with justice and respect.

A nation enduring an average of nearly one rocket attack a day launched by Palestinian militants and their supporters; many of those rockets are targeted at schools and residential neighborhoods.

A nation forced by an international community that purports not to negotiate with terrorists to sit across the bargaining table with those who have slaughtered their children in vicious terrorist strikes.

A nation surrounded by neighbors who are pledged to its extermination, and yet is blamed for all of the instability and unrest in its region.

And still under today’s bizarre hierarchy of victimhood, it’s the Palestinians who wear the mantle of the oppressed.

Israel is blamed for the stagnant peace process, even though the Palestinians have repeatedly broken the conditions established for resuming talks, most recently by forming a unity government with Hamas, the terrorist group that controls Gaza — the primary launching pad for those rockets.

You could use any number of issues - human sexuality, atmospheric science, national sovereignty, gun policy - to illustrate the utter abandonment of morality among our mainline Protestant denominations, our universities, our "news outlets" and even far too many of our corporations, but none make it so crystal-clear as where a person or organization stands on the Israeli-Palestinian matter.

The prospect of amnesty is what keeps 'em coming

So says the president of Honduras:

The president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, recently said that the tidal wave of illegal immigrants crossing into the U.S. from Central America can be attributed to the fact that many believe they will get amnesty. The Obama Administration's rhetoric and actions surrounding the immigration surge have led many in Central America to think they will not be deported if they come into the U.S. illegally--and indeed, most of the thousands of children that continue to cross the border will likely get to stay in the country. 

Why is the message to these people not unmistakably clear that there will be no amnesty?  What is the real reason? 

Perhaps we should ask Valerie Jarrett and Rupert Murdoch.

The denomination of my upbringing is now a hate group

The Presbyterian Church USA votes to divest from Israel.

George Will remains George Will even after losing his main gig

The sensitivity-enforcement mob recently claimed a high-profile scalp:  Columnist George Will.  Got him canned from the Washington Post and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

He's responding with courage and principle:

Conservative columnist George Will wouldn’t give an inch over his apparently offensive column on college sexual assaults, telling CSPAN host Brian Lamb it’s his “job” is to discount “dubious statistics” and blasting “jerry-built, improvised campus processes” to deal with sexual assault.

Will appeared Thursday on CSPAN’s “Q&A” program, which airs Sunday on the nonprofit news channel but was published on YouTube Friday.

Lamb asked Will about one of his recent columns lambasting misinformation and hyperbole over rape on college campuses. Tens of thousands contacted The Washington Post urging them to drop Will’s column for excusing, if not encouraging, “rape culture” at American universities.

And on Thursday, his column was removed from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, with the paper calling the column “offensive and inaccurate.” (RELATED: George Will Dispatched By Dispatch For Sexual Assault Column)

“What is the impact of the column that has people raging about you at this moment?” Lamb asked, pointing out the St. Louis paper’s decision to sever their ties with him.

“Yes, they have,” Will noted. “They know how to propitiate the rabble. But this is my job, is when dubious statistics become the basis of dubious and dangerous abandonment of due process, to step in and say, ‘Take a deep breath everybody.’”

The columnist explained how the White House and other advocacy groups are — based on their own numbers — demonstrably inflating campus rape statistics.

Will repeated his claim that he “takes sexual assault more seriously than I think they do . . . when someone is accused of rape, it should be reported to the criminal justice system that knows how to deal with this, not jerry-built, improvised campus processes.”

The Freedom-Haters are raising the stakes for being an agent of common sense and real justice.  This situation is a guide on a moral level on how to deal with it.

What's really going on in the Scott Walker pseudo-situation

Gabriel Malor at The Federalist looks at what has really gone down in the campaign-contributions situation that the MEC regime's propaganda arm has tried to turn into a smear of one of the nation's best governors:

 in 2012, Democratic district attorneys in Wisconsin launched a secret probe known as a John Doe investigation with the goal of proving that conservative groups illegally coordinated activities during Gov. Scott Walker’s recall election. They issued more than 100 subpoenas, demanded the private information of conservatives and conservative groups, and actually conducted secret raids. And under state law, individuals who were targeted or witness to the investigation were forbidden from making knowledge of it public.

Fortunately, judges saw right through this partisan abuse of power. Early this year, a state judge, ruling in a secret proceeding, quashed the subpoenas and all but ended the investigation. According to the judge, “the subpoenas do not show probable cause that the moving parties committed any violations of the campaign finance laws.” This started the unraveling of the John Doe investigation that had many conservatives fearing they would be targeted for subpoenas and raids next.

After a short trip to a federal appeals court, the federal judge reissued his order that the John Doe probe cease. Most recently, that appeals court has ordered some of the previously secret probe documents disclosed to the public, including an unsuccessful defense that the John Doe investigators made to one of their secret subpoenas. In their attempt to get a subpoena, which was rejected by a judge for lacking probable cause, the partisan investigators claimed that Walker was involved in the so-called conservative conspiracy.

And that is where the litigation stands as of today. Having launched a secret probe that has now been shut down by both the state and federal courts, the Democratic district attorneys find themselves the subject of an ongoing civil rights lawsuit for infringing the First Amendment rights of conservatives. But that is not how the media have reported the case.

Upon the unsealing of some of the probe documents by the federal appeals court, the media worked itself into a frenzy claiming that Walker was part of a criminal conspiracy. The media claim was based entirely on the subpoena document that was denied by the state judge as failing utterly to demonstrate probable cause to believe a crime occurred.

Knowing what you now know, it becomes easier to fully see the agenda of the truth-hating propaganda machine:

the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel kicked off this infuriating libel with a piece that claimed, “John Doe prosecutors allege Scott Walker at center of ‘criminal scheme.’” The more accurate word, of course, would have been “alleged,” past-tense with the addition of the words “in denied subpoena request” or perhaps “in failed partisan investigation” or even “in politically-motivated secret investigation rejected by the state and federal courts.”

The New York Times, trumpeting the story on today’s front page, also uses the present tense to give the wrong impression. The piece begins “Prosecutors in Wisconsin assert that Gov. Scott Walker was part of an elaborate effort to illegally coordinate fund-raising and spending.” Again, the true story is that this took place last year and was ended by the courts. You’d have to read all the way down to the tenth paragraph to learn that the subpoenas weren’t granted because there was no probable cause to believe that a crime had occurred. Oddly, the Times piece muses on the electoral consequences for Walker in the third paragraph. 

Shameful, yes, but now you're fully armed to quash any trumpetings of the truth-hater version of events.

Freedom-Hater-care is only a good deal for those who qualify for gummint gravy (also known as your tax dollars)

Byron York at the Washington Examiner looks beyond the crowing of the regime's propaganda arm regarding how "success" has finally come to characterize FHer-care.  It boils down to folks without much wherewithal getting coverage and the rest of the folks getting a bill of goods:

Of the eight million, about 85 percent, or 6.8 million, actually paid for coverage. Of those, about 87 percent, or 5.9 million, receive taxpayer-paid subsidies to help them pay.

In other words, nearly everyone who has bought insurance through the Obamacare exchanges has done so with money from the government. And the subsidies are significant — an average of $264 a month, according to HHS. The average monthly premium is $346, according to the report, so minus the $264 subsidy, the average subsidy recipient is paying a net cost of $82 a month for coverage. The government pays the rest.

"It would appear from this data that it is the lowest income people who are most often signing up for coverage," writes insurance industry analyst Bob Laszewski. "That explains why the average consumer subsidy is so high and the average net cost is so low."

The problem is, for those who are not eligible for subsidies, or for those eligible only for smaller subsidies, Obamacare still presents higher premiums, higher deductibles, and narrow networks of doctors and hospitals. "The Obamacare plans are unattractive to all but the poorest who get the biggest subsidies and the lowest deductibles," writes Laszewski. "The working class and middle class are not getting access to attractive benefits."

So they have not purchased coverage. The Democrats who created Obamacare planned to pressure them into doing so by imposing an individual mandate -- a penalty euphemistically called a "shared responsibility fee" -- on those who go uninsured. The idea was, the mandate would not only increase the coverage rate but also raise revenue for the federal government.

But now comes word that very few will pay the penalty. In a study released this week, theCongressional Budget Office said that of the 30 million people estimated to be uninsured in 2016, only about four million will be required to pay. The rest -- 26 million people -- will be exempt from the mandate under various regulations issued by the Obama administration.

So this is one vision of Obamacare's future: Lower-income Americans purchase insurance because they receive the biggest subsidies. Others with somewhat higher incomes are priced out of the Obamacare market. The individual mandate is meaningless. The net result is tens of millions remain without coverage.

And you will have noticed if you've ever challenged some Freedom-Hater who boasts about how great the program is finally turning out on how it gets paid for, their "counter-argument," such as it is, amounts to trying to shame you for not being willing to part with your money to address the particular needs of fellow citizens you don't even know.