The confluence of big bucks and leftist ideology

Billions of dollars in the hands of utterly mad environmental zealots leads to a stream of pointy-heads moving through revolving door between the EPA and various foundations and advocacy groups.  A Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works demonstrates how:

Agency “Capture.” According to the report, billionaires work with former colleagues in the non-profit sector who are specifically placed at key points within the agency. The report explains, “the Obama EPA has been deliberately staffed at the highest levels with far-left environmental activists who have worked hand-in-glove with their former colleagues.” Furthermore, the EPA sends “grants to their former employers and colleagues.”

The Revolving Door. The report reveals a huge number of EPA officials shuttling into and out of the agency and into and out of associated non-profits funded by the so-called Billionaires’ Club. These include Bob Sussman, Senior Policy Counsel at the EPA under former administrator Lisa Jackson; he came from the Center for American Progress. Other revolving door EPA staffers: Michelle DePass, former Assistant Administrator for the Office of International and Tribal Affairs, who came to her position from the Ford Foundation and actually worked for both organizations simultaneously at one point; Michael Goo, former Associate Administrator of EPA, who worked for Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA); Dr. Al Armendariz, Region 6 Administrator, who worked for the Environmental Integrity Project.

The Secret Emails. Jackson was caught using her private email address to send sensitive material, but she was hardly the only one. Sussman was caught using “his personal email to communicate with environmentalists in violation of EPA policy.” James Martin, former Region 8 Administrator, was similarly caugh “using his personal email account to communicate with environmentalists…about official agency business in violation of official EPA policy.” Michael Goo, former Associate Administrator of EPA, also emailed member so the Sierra Club about how to sink Keystone XL.

The Funding. The report shows that EPA regulators have used their influence to send money back to the Billionaires’ Club charities. Grants from the EPA have totaled $3 billion over the last decade; Obama’s EPA “has given more than $27 million in taxpayer funded grans to major environmental groups.” Organizations like the American Lung Association have received $14 million since 2009, even though ALA has repeatedly sued the Agency.

Special Treatment. The report suggests that Region 2 Administrator Judith Enck violated the EPA’s standards and ethics by giving EPA grantees “special treatment.” 

Your overlords didn't just appear out of nowhere.  There's quite a web of tyranny-concocters that spawns these creatures.

Why Caroline Glick is indispensable to the possibility that the civilized world might survive

This isn't just a wonk's address to a think tank.  You can hear it in her voice.  This is a desperately alarmed lover of truth and freedom telling the world what is at stake as Israel tries to stop the evil being perpetrated against it.  This has a direct effect on you, on your children and grandchildren.



There can be no two-state solution given the nature of the overwhelming Palestinian attitude toward Israel.



When there was a Untied States of America, Israel had a friend.  Now all it has is its own resolve and, hopefully, the protective, righteous, mighty arm of God.

The H-Word Creature's rather sizable conflict-of-interest problem

Seems the State Department under her tenure signed off on a highly questionable contract that sent Billy Jeff the Zipper off on a speaking whirlwind to places like China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the Cayman Islands to do $48 million worth of yammering.

“How the Obama State Department waived hundreds of ethical conflicts that allowed the Clintons and their businesses to accept money from foreign entities and corporations seeking influence boggles the mind,” Judicial Watch’s Fitton said.

“That former President Clinton trotted the globe collecting huge speaking fees while his wife presided over U.S. foreign policy is an outrage,” he added.

“One can’t imagine what foreign policy issues were mishandled as top State Department officials spent so much time facilitating the Clinton money machine.”

You're not surprised, are you?

I'm assuming she doesn't read LITD, then, either

Some 2012 Lois Lerner e-mails that have come to the attention of the House Ways and Means Committee make it clear that Lois is no fan of conservative talk radio.

Whooeee, that's some ripe invective.

Get 'em back out of here

Indiana Governor Mike Pence has written a letter to the Most Equal Comrade about the illegal aliens that the regime has dumped here.  Good move, but I would have worded it more strongly:

“In Indiana last week, we learned from media reports that more than two hundred unaccompanied children had been placed by the federal government with sponsors in our state,” Pence wrote to Obama. “Only after these media reports were published did the state receive notice from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that in fact 245 unaccompanied children had been placed in Indiana during the period from January 1, 2014 through July 7, 2014.”

Pence, a Republican considered to be a potential 2016 presidential candidate, said he has “profound concern” with what he described as “the federal government’s mishandling” of the border crisis.

Pence said for the children’s own sakes, they should be returned to their home countries so they can be reunited with their families. 

“While we feel deep compassion for these children, our country must secure its borders and provide for a legal and orderly immigration process,” Pence said. “Those who have crossed our border illegally should be treated humanely and with decency and respect, but they should be returned expeditiously to their home countries to be reunited with their families rather than being dispersed around the United States in sponsored placement or long-term detention facilities. Failure to expedite the return of unaccompanied children thwarts the rule of law and will only continue to send a distorted message that illegally crossing into America is without consequence.”

Pence told Obama that, given the cost, these illegal aliens will burden the state of Indiana and its taxpayers, and the federal government needs to be transparent about any plans it has with illegal aliens in the future.

Mike has what is sometimes an annoying amount of politeness, but, knowing the family (I was in Boy Scouts with his brother, my wife used to do his mother's hair, and I've met Mike on several occasions), it's attributable to the way he was raised.  Something to be said for civilized ways, I guess, but that's what's at stake here.

When you have a true free market, you don't have this sick, sycophantic relationship between morally compromised businesses and an all-powerful state

Newly revealed e-mails between regime overlords such as Valerie Jarrett and insurance-industry figures  show a cozy relationship based on using taxpayer dollars to bail out health insurance companies in the event of premiums spiking too much under Freedom-Hater-care.

Co-dependence big-time.

And clandestine redistribution.

It's not just another contractual agreement

Ryan T. Anderson at the Heritage Foundation looks at Judge Paul Niemeyer's dissent in the decision by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals that defining marriage as a one man - one woman union violates teh 14th Amendment:

Niemeyer argues that the court “explicitly bypasses the relevant constitutional analysis required.” What would the right constitutional analysis look like? Niemeyer explains:

This analysis is fundamentally flawed because it fails to take into account that the “marriage” that has long been recognized by the Supreme Court as a fundamental right is distinct from the newly proposed relationship of a “same-sex marriage.” And this failure is even more pronounced by the majority’s acknowledgment that same-sex marriage is a new notion that has not been recognized “for most of our country’s history.” Moreover, the majority fails to explain how this new notion became incorporated into the traditional definition of marriage except by linguistic manipulation. Thus, the majority never asks the question necessary to finding a fundamental right—whether same-sex marriage is a right that is “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty, such that neither liberty nor justice would exist if [it was] sacrificed.”

Niemeyer is particularly helpful in seeing why the analogy to interracial marriage fails. He explains that in Loving v Virginia, the case that ended bans on interracial marriage, the couple was “asserting a right to enter into a traditional marriage of the type that has always been recognized since the beginning of the Nation—a union between one man and one woman.”

Anderson says that the Supreme Court has made previous assumptions about the nature of marriage that need to be brought into any current considerations:

Niemeyer explains that there are good policy reasons for citizens to refrain from redefining marriage: “Only the union of a man and a woman has the capacity to produce children and thus to carry on the species. And more importantly, only such a union creates a biological family unit that also gives rise to a traditionally stable political unit.”
Indeed, “when the Supreme Court has recognized, through the years, that the right to marry is a fundamental right, it has emphasized the procreative and social ordering aspects of traditional marriage.” He went further, arguing that “the marriage of a man and a woman thus rationally promotes a correlation between biological order and political order.”
But whatever any individual American thinks about marriage, the courts shouldn’t redefine it. Marriage policy should be worked out through the democratic process, not dictated by unelected judges. The courts should uphold the freedom of the American people and their elected representatives to make marriage policy.

Niemeyer gets the issue exactly right: “The U.S. Constitution does not, in my judgment, restrict the States’ policy choices on this issue. If given the choice, some States will surely recognize same-sex marriage and some will surely not. But that is, to be sure, the beauty of federalism.” The courts should not force states to abandon caution in the face of a social experiment like the redefinition of marriage.

Indeed.  How about if we have this debate in a decentralized, legislatively driven manner and leave the robes out of it?

 

A few important points about why US businesses go overseas

Did you know that if the gummint were able to get its socialist hands on all the money that it currently doesn't because of these "inversions" (corporations merging with foreign companies and establishing headquarters elsewhere to avoid the developed world's highest corporate tax rate), it would only bring in a quarter of one percent of the federal tax base?

That's just one of the noteworthy points Leon H. Wolf makes in his Red State post about this.  Some others:

First, A more rational and doubtless more efficacious method to retain the corporate tax base would be to lower the insanely high corporate tax rate which creates the incentive for companies to perform “inversions” in the first place, especially in light of the fact that attempts to essentially declare that these companies are American companies when they are, in fact, not American companies anymore is a tactic that is both dubious Constitutionally and highly likely to lead to a) widespread noncompliance b) actual outsourcing of jobs as companies physically flee America to remove themselves from American jurisdiction over this question.

Second, I guess it’s understandable why people get their hackles up over companies leaving America to lower their tax burden, at least in a superficial sense. It does really seem like a facially transparent ploy to avoid tax burden by doing nothing that actually benefits the economy. On the other hand, it is considerably less insane as a tax avoidance device than a number of other “loopholes” that the Democrats are NOT complaining about. See here for a partial list just from the last fiscal cliff deal andhere for some of the more bizarre ones overall. Heck, if you are a major donor to the President you can even get tax subsidies to build solar power devices on a business plan that everyone knows will never result in a profit.

Therefore the objection to inversions specifically seems to be that no major political donor has paid good money into the lobbying system for the creation of this “loophole.” Congress has created all sorts of bizarre tax avoidance devices that make little or no rational sense from an economic standpoint, and that very obviously exist for the sole reason that K Street did their job well. No one accuses these companies of unpatriotic behavior for trying to keep more of their own money.

If the Obama Administration really wants to do something that will actually work to stop inversions, they ought to remove the incentive to inversions in the first place and lower American’s insanely high corporate taxation rate. 

But stopping this activity would deprive the overlords of a prime bogeyman, and Freedom-Haters always need to gin up accusations of greed.  It's how they obscure the basic truth that a person's or organization's money is actually theirs and not the state's.

The problem with investing oneself in smiley-face-ism

Consider the case of Michelle Nunn and her current run for a Georgia Senate seat:

Since 2007, Nunn has served as the CEO of Points of Light, a charitable organization founded by George H. W. Bush to encourage volunteerism across the country. Noble in concept, Points of Light — like so many originally high-minded ideas and organizations — has been infected by a left-wing political agenda.

Thus, Eliana Johnson reports that under Nunn’s leadership Points of Light has given money to some organizations that have less to do with fostering volunteerism than with fostering pet leftist causes. These include the Lesbian and Gay Band Association, which seeks to promote a global network of, yes, lesbian and gay bands.

Less innocently, they also include a group with ties to terrorists.

According to the IRS Form 990s that Points of Light filed in 2008 and 2011, the organization gave a grant of over $33,000 to Islamic Relief USA, a charity that says it strives to alleviate “hunger, illiteracy, and diseases worldwide.” Islamic Relief USA is part of a global network of charities that operate under the umbrella of Islamic Relief Worldwide. . . .

Islamic Relief Worldwide has ties to Hamas, which the U.S. designates as a terrorist organization. In June, Israel banned the charity from operating in the country because, according to Israeli officials, it was funneling cash to Hamas. In 2006, Israelis arrested Islamic Relief Worldwide’s Gaza coordinator, Ayaz Ali. They said he was working to “transfer funds and assistance to various Hamas institutions and organizations.”

Ali admitted to cooperating with local Hamas operatives while working in Jordan and, on his computer, Israeli officials found photographs of “swastikas superimposed on IDF symbols,” and of Nazi officials, Osama bin Laden, and al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

And since it's her main credential, she's going to have quite a time of it explaining why she's not a fool.

This Points of Light hoo-ha is a perfect demonstration of O'Sullivan's Law, that any organization not explicitly founded with a right-of-center mission inevitably drifts to a left-of-center raison d'etre.

Recipe for cataclysm

I'm only so keen on "if this were a Republican administration"-type comparisons.  Yes, they can be useful for demonstrating the sycophantic nature of the media with regard to the Most Equal Comrade and his regime, but they can come across like whining unless the matter in question is really substantive.

I think Walter Russell Mead has employed it in a substantive manner in his latest American Interest column:

If Obama were a Republican, the press and the weekly news shows would be ringing with hyperbolic, apocalyptic denunciations of the clueless incumbent who had failed to learn the most basic lessons of Iraq. Indeed, the MSM right now would be howling that Obama was stupider than Bush. Bush, our Journolist friends would now be sayingad nauseam, at least had the excuse that he didn’t know what happens when you overthrow a paranoid, genocidal, economically incompetent Arab tyrant in an artificial post-colonial state. But Obama did—or, the press would nastily say, he would have done if he’d been doing his job instead of hitting the golf course or yakking it up with his glitzy pals at late night bull sessions. The ad hominem attacks would never stop, and all the tangled threads of incompetence and failure would be endlessly and expertly picked at in long New Yorker articles, NYT thumbsuckers, and chin-strokings on all the Sabbath gasbag shows.

Why, the ever-admirable tribunes of a free and unbiased press would be asking non-stop, didn’t this poor excuse for a President learn from what happened in Iraq?  When you upend an insane and murderous dictator who has crushed his people for decades under an incompetent and quirky regime, you’d better realize that there is no effective state or civil society under the hard shell of dictatorial rule. Remove the dictator and you get chaos and anarchy. Wasn’t this President paying attention during the last ten years?

Some of the criticism would be exaggerated and unfair; the Monday morning quarterbacks never really understand just how complicated and tragic this poor world really is, not to mention how hard it is to make life and death decisions in real time in the center of the non-stop political firestorm that is Washington today. And the MSM attracts more than its share of deeply inexperienced but entitled, self-regarding blowhards who love to pontificate about how stupid all those poor fools who have actual jobs and responsibilities actually are.

But luckily for Team Obama, the mainstream press would rather die than subject liberal Democrats to the critiques it reserves for the GOP. So instead, as Libya writhes in agony, reputations and careers move on. The news is so bad, and the President’s foreign policy is collapsing on so many fronts, that it is impossible to keep the story off the front pages. “Smart diplomacy” has become a punch line, and the dream Team Obama had of making Democrats the go-to national security party is as dead as the passenger pigeon.

At this late date, the entropy level on the world stage is still being presented with such banality that people are generally shrugging and getting on with their own daily affairs.  This in itself ought to be alarming.  The world we've all known, particularly on this continent, is changing structurally, definitionally.

From the outset, per its name, this blog has been about pointing out the consequences of letting the Progressive vision gain ascendancy in this country and the West generally.  I title posts "They Smell Weakness" frequently enough that I generally qualify each one as "today's edition."

There's now a real sense among those interested in really observing what's going on that the damage being done to our national identity is deep and getting deeper.  Most people reading this blog are baby-boomers or younger.  What I'm talking about is a degree of damage non of us has ever seen.  This time, it's not as simple as replacing an incompetent Carter with a charismatic and principled Reagan.  For one thing, while conservatism is providing us with charismatic, principled figures, and while the MEC is certainly as incompetent as Carter and then some, none of the conservative figures show the ability to rally the citizenry that widely, and the MEC adds to Carteresque incompetence a radical ideology that has already borne too much rotten fruit.

Brace yourself.  It gets wilder for the foreseeable future.

UPDATE: What Mead does for foreign policy, Tom Blumer at PJ Media does for economic policy.

Mitch McConnell does this one right

He foresees Harry Reid trying to put funding for Israel's Iron Dome into a bad immigration bill, and offers up a stand-alone bill to head it off at the pass.

Rick Perry's observation on the Most Equal Comrade's tone, attitude and lack of regard for the states

He reflects on a meeting he and several other governors had had with the MEC earlier in the day:

Martin says it's serious

The Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman sees a historical parallel in the confirmation that Russia has been shelling Ukraine:

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey said Thursday that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s new use of Russian military force inside Ukraine harkens back to 1939 when Joseph Stalin led a Russian invasion of Poland, and Dempsey predicted Putin was far from finished.

Dempsey was speaking to the Aspen Security Forum and responding to the newsthat the U.S. government is accusing the Russian military of firing artillery from Russian territory into eastern Ukraine in support of separatists there. The latest development represents a dangerous escalation of the crisis on the part of Putin, and the Russia-Ukraine crisis is now a global problem, he said.

“It does change the situation. You’ve got a Russian government that has made a conscious decision to use its military force inside another sovereign nation to achieve its objectives. It’s the first time since 1939 or so that that’s been the case,” Dempsey said. “They clearly are on a path to assert themselves differently not just in Eastern Europe, but Europe in the main, and towards the United States.”

Let's see; today alone, we've covered this as well as the ISIS threat to the West, and Iran's' supreme ayatollah reiterating his view that it's necessary to destroy Israel, and Putin's strategic aims.  This could start to affect my digestion.

Speaking of Israel, its cabinet unanimously turned down Secretary Global Test's ceasefire proposal.
Once again, the world sees him reading from the wrong playbook.  You know the mullahs are saying, "Hell, the guy can't even get the Zionist Entity to heed him."

The dictator of post-America further shreds the Constitution

Carrie Budoff Brown reports at Politico:

President Barack Obama insisted for years that he had absolutely no legal authority — none whatsoever, zero, zilch — to slow deportations on a broad scale.

Forget everything he’s said.

Whatever it takes to obliterate our national sovereignty:

The administration is examining how far it can go, legally and politically, to protect millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation. Despite the flow of young Central American children across the southwestern border, Obama remains committed to taking significant action, according to senior advisers and advocates who have attended recent meetings with White House officials.
In other words, Obama has signaled that he intends to do exactly what he’s long said he’s unable to do.

Read the whole thing.  His minions want to be sure any order can withstand a court challenge.

Dog vomit where his soul should be.

Another reason why the IRS should not exist

It was the instrument through which the overlords conducted the funny business blurring the lines between FHer-care state exchanges and the federal exchange.  Kimberly Strassel explains in today's WSJ:

. . . it wasn't the "administration" as a whole that issued the lawless subsidy gift. It was the administration acting through its new, favorite enforcer: the IRS.

And it was entirely political. Democrats needed those subsidies. The party had assumed that dangling subsidies before the states would induce them to set up exchanges. When dozens instead refused, the White House was faced with the prospect that citizens in 36 states—two-thirds of the country—would be exposed to the full cost of ObamaCare's overpriced insurance. The backlash would have been horrific, potentially forcing Democrats to reopen the law, or even costing President Obama re-election.

The White House viewed it as imperative, therefore, that IRS bureaucrats ignore the law's text and come up with a politically helpful rule. The evidence shows that career officials at the IRS did indeed do as Treasury Department and Health and Human Services Department officials told them. This, despite the fact that the IRS is supposed to be insulated from political meddling.

We know this thanks to a largely overlooked joint investigation and February report by the House Oversight and Ways and Means committees into the history of the IRS subsidy rule. We know that in the late summer of 2010, after ObamaCare was signed into law, the IRS assembled a working group—made up of career IRS and Treasury employees—to develop regulations around ObamaCare subsidies. And we know that this working group initially decided to follow the text of the law. An early draft of its rule about subsidies explained that they were for "Exchanges established by the State."

 

Yet in March 2011, Emily McMahon, the acting assistant secretary for tax policy at the Treasury Department (a political hire), saw a news article that noted a growing legal focus on the meaning of that text.We know this thanks to a largely overlooked joint investigation and February report by the House Oversight and Ways and Means committees into the history of the IRS subsidy rule. We know that in the late summer of 2010, after ObamaCare was signed into law, the IRS assembled a working group—made up of career IRS and Treasury employees—to develop regulations around ObamaCare subsidies. And we know that this working group initially decided to follow the text of the law. An early draft of its rule about subsidies explained that they were for "Exchanges established by the State."

Emails viewed by congressional investigators nonetheless showed that Treasury and the IRS remained worried they were breaking the law. An email exchange between Treasury employees in the spring of 2011 expressed concern that they had no statutory authority to deem a federally run exchange the equivalent of a state-run exchange.

Yet rather than engage in a basic legal analysis—a core duty of an agency charged with tax laws—the IRS instead set about obtaining cover for its predetermined political goal. A March 27, 2011, email has IRS employees asking HHS political hires to cover the tax agency's backside by issuing its own rule deeming HHS-run exchanges to be state-run exchanges. HHS did so in July 2011. One month later the IRS rushed out its own rule—providing subsidies for all.

That proposed rule was criticized by dozens of scholars and congressional members, all telling the IRS it had a big legal problem. Yet again, the IRS did no legal analysis. It instead brought in a former aide to Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett, whose job appeared to be to gin up an after-the-fact defense of the IRS's actions. The agency formalized its rule in May 2012.

Hope all the SCOTUS justices read this.

Back to the thuggery that has always been the norm in world affairs

Simon Shuster at Time says that Vladimir Putin understands that the current world scenario presents him with abundant opportunity, as he defines that term:

His increasingly overt goal is to splinter Europe, rip up the NATO umbrella and restore Russian influence around the world. As if to put an exclamation point on that manifesto, the pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine apparently resumed their antiaircraft attacks less than a week after the destruction of Flight 17. On July 23, two military aircraft belonging to the pro-Western Ukrainian government were shot down just a few miles away from the airliner’s crash site.

And Putin evidently will keep going as long as each new crisis only makes him stronger. The 21st century czar has mastered the dark art of stirring up problems that only he can solve, so that Western leaders find themselves scolding him one minute while pleading with him the next. The crisis in Syria last year is a perfect example. He supplied weapons and training for the armies of President Bashar Assad, propping up the tyrant while Western statesmen demanded Assad’s ouster. Yet when Assad crossed the “red line” drawn by Obama and used chemical weapons against his own people, Putin stepped in to broker the solution. At the urging of the Russian President, Assad gave up his stockpile of chemical weapons. In turn, the U.S. backed away from air strikes in Syria. And guess who still reigns in Damascus? Putin’s ally Assad.

Other world leaders try to avoid crises; Putin feasts on them. 

I again refer you to the dog-vomit remark about a new order based on a common humanity that the Most Equal Comrade made the other day.  He may really believe that fantasy. The rest of the world hears, "We hereby declare ourselves to be irrelevant to anything."

Still post-America plays patty-cake with these monsters

Secretary Global Test has given them four more months to achieve this aim:

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, stated on Wednesday that the only solution for the region is the destruction of Israel, and that the armed confrontation must expand beyond Gaza.

Meanwhile, revolutionary guards announced new missiles which could destroy Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.

Why are the words of this regime's top leaders never taken into account when we keep heading back to Vienna and Geneva and extending the deadline for patty-cake?

Filling the vacuum in a post-American world

ISIS has been acting regionally so far, but it is definitely thinking globally:

Top U.S. officials warned Wednesday that a Sunni extremist group that controls parts of Syria and Iraq has morphed into a threat that is "worse than al Qaeda."

"It is al Qaeda in its doctrine, ambition and increasingly, in its threat to U.S. interests," Brett McGurk, deputy assistant secretary of state, told lawmakers at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing. "In fact, it is worse than al Qaeda."

McGurk said the group, which splintered off from its parent, al Qaeda in Iraq, had strengthened its capabilities and was “no longer a terrorist organization. It is a full-blown army.”

Elissa Slotkin, acting principal deputy undersecretary of Defense for policy, added that the group has threatened: "We're coming for you, Barack Obama."

ISIS has captured huge parts of both countries and threatened to move on Baghdad last month, leading President Obama to authorize deploying nearly 750 troops to Iraq.

Over the weekend, Attorney General Eric Holder said the threat of ISIS fighters infiltrating into the U.S. was "more frightening than anything I think I've seen as attorney general." 

Former Defense Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge told The Hill Wednesday that the threat from ISIS has been "blinking red a long time."

"It's been blinking red but now it's flashing more frequently and is a lot brighter," he said.  

"They've got a lot of fighters who are from European countries that are visa waiver countries, which means all they have to do is shave their beards and look like normal responsible civilians and walk into the United States of America without a visa." 

"So it's a real challenge for our intelligence community to identify them and get their names on a watch list," he said. 

And once again, our overlords were asleep at the switch as this thing grew into a "full-blown army":

In congressional testimony as far back as November, U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials made clear that the United States had been closely tracking the al Qaida spinoff since 2012, when it enlarged its operations from Iraq to civil war-torn Syria, seized an oil-rich province there and signed up thousands of foreign fighters who’d infiltrated Syria through NATO ally Turkey.

The testimony, which received little news media attention at the time, also showed that Obama administration officials were well aware of the group’s declared intention to turn its Syrian sanctuary into a springboard from which it would send men and materiel back into Iraq and unleash waves of suicide bombings there. And they knew that the Iraqi security forces couldn’t handle it.

The group’s operations “are calculated, coordinated and part of a strategic campaign led by its Syria-based leader, Abu Bakr al Baghadi,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Brett McGurk told a House committee on Feb. 5, four months before fighting broke out in Mosul. “The campaign has a stated objective to cause the collapse of the Iraqi state and carve out a zone of governing control in western regions of Iraq and Syria.”

The testimony raises an obvious question: If the Obama administration had such early warning of the Islamic State’s ambitions, why, nearly two months after the fall of Mosul, is it still assessing what steps, if any, to take to halt the advance of Islamist extremists who threaten U.S. allies in the region and have vowed to attack Americans?

In fresh testimony before Congress this week, McGurkrevealed that the administration knew three days in advance that the attack on Mosul was coming. He acknowledged that the Islamic State is no longer just a regional terrorist organization but a “full-blown” army that now controls nearly 50 percent of Iraq and more than one-third of Syria. Its fighters have turned back some of the best-trained Iraqi units trying to retake key cities, while in Syria, it’s seized nearly all that country’s oil and natural gas fields and is pushing the Syrian military from its last outposts in the country’s east.

Now, think back to the Most Equal Comrade's inane remark from the other day, quoted here, about the world groping toward a "new order that's based on a different set of principles, that's based on a common sense of humanity, that's based on economies that work for all people."  He really believes that dog vomit. The result is going to be incinerated post-American cities.

Read more here: http://www.mercedsunstar.com/2014/07/24/3763979/us-and-islamic-state-we-did-see.html#storylink=cpy

How the devil wages war

Hamas extends the use of human shields to sick people:

 Hamas has turned Wafa Hospital into a command center and a rocket-launching site. Hamas has fired at Israel and at IDF forces from the hospital. As a result, the IDF repeatedly conveyed warnings to the hospital staff and urged civilians to leave the area. Hamas continued firing from the hospital. In response, the IDF targeted specific sites and terrorists within the hospital grounds. Secondary explosions can be seen, confirming IDF intelligence about the site.

And the UN's role in this situation is decidedly counterproductive:

the UN takes a bucket of your cash and mine at a time when many people in our country are suffering.  It therefore behooves Congress to make sure this money is being spent for good, or at the very least benign, purposes.

Unfortunately, evidence developing from the ongoing conflagration between Israel and Hamas appears to suggest the reverse.  The UN — specifically the UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency), but other agencies as well — may have  been actively supporting terrorism and terrorists in the Gaza Strip, even aiding with the storage of Hamas weaponry (missiles), whether deliberately or accidentally is unclear.

From the Jerusalem Post:

Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman decreed in a meeting with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday that not only were rockets found in UNRWA schools in Gaza, but also that UNRWA then turned them over to Hamas, rather than to Israel.

UNRWA admitted itself on two different occasions since the beginning of Operation Protective Edge began 16 days ago that they discovered rockets in their facilities.

Liberman said Israel was very “troubled” by these developments. “UNRWA schools were established to educate children in Gaza, but instead they are providing a hiding place for rockets meant to kill children in Israel,” he said.

Just what were those missiles doing in the UN schools and why did Hamas suppose that would be a good place to store them? The UN denies their culpability and says this was the “first time” such a thing has happened. But is that true?

Still, you can count on slime buckets like Gideon Levy to spin this somehow to make the only Western nation in a region given over to barbarism look like the problem.

In a grim world, a happy ending

Meriam Ibrahim and her family are safe in Italy.  They met Pope Francis.  Next stop: America.

If you're looking for an actual war on women . . .

. . . turn your gaze toward Mosul, where ISIS has ordered all girls and women between the ages of 11 and 46 to undergo genital mutilation.

Trey Gowdy is on any truthful list of the top ten coolest people in post-America

Once again, he throws John Koskinen's tender brain tissue on the searing hot grill of the search for truth.

Janet Murguia needs to go someplace besides this country

And right now.

Piss on her.

For one thing, she thinks she has some kind of right not to be offended:

La Raza President and CEO Janet Murguia said it sickened her to hear Americans against illegal immigration chanting "USA! USA!" at protests around the country. 

Singling out the Murrieta demonstrators during her keynote address at La Raza's annual conference in Los Angeles on Monday, Murguia accused them of having "cloaked their hatred in patriotism" by shouting "'USA! USA!' again and again." 

"It made me angry," she said. "In fact, I was outraged."

And she's for coddling law-breakers:

Murguia demanded that the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants who are currently here receive amnesty and said the road to the White House for Republicans goes through the Latino community and La Raza. She also said Republicans who want to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program or do not want to pass comprehensive amnesty legislation will not get Hispanic votes. And she repeatedly claimed that protesting illegal immigration was "un-American."

"What we saw in Murrieta is not patriotism," she asserted. "It is ugly, divisive, and yet another low in a debate I thought could not get much lower." 

Murguia did not say anything about the "Viva La Raza!" chants from pro-amnesty advocates in Murrieta. She also failed to mention that the number of illegal immigrant children who have unlawfully entered the country drastically spiked in the year after Obama enacted DACA in 2012. 

What a sick creature.  Her outlook must be denounced everywhere, at every available opportunity.

Don't think the "we're your overlords and we say Lois's hard drive crashed" line is gonna hold water

Looking more like a blatant coverup all the time:

The IRS has “no excuses” for the latest twist in the saga of its missing emails, says an expert in electronic discovery.

“Whether it’s incompetence or deliberate obstruction, the IRS has no excuses for having handled this so poorly,” said Bruce Webster, partner at Provo, Utah-based IT consulting and expert witness firm Ironwood Experts.

House investigators said Tuesday that a hard drive belonging to Lois Lerner, the former agency official at the center of the department’s targeting scandal, was just “scratched,” not irreparably damaged. The IRS had described the hard drive’s data as “unrecoverable.”

The hard drive, which was recycled, contained roughly two years of missing emails seen as relevant to the investigation into the scandal.

Data, however, can be easily retrieved from scratched drives, according to Webster. “This happens all the time,” he told FoxNews.com. “There are little storefront companies in just about every major city that can do this and there are forensic companies that can restore files and even do higher end recovery of data.”

Webster explained that, even when a drive’s file directory is damaged or destroyed, information still can be recovered from the magnetic disk where data is stored, known as a drive platter.

Maybe someday the United States of America, with its reverence for justice and freedom, can be restored and the IRS can be abolished and Lois Lerner can be frog-marched on worldwide television to the hoosegow.

How low will our enemy in the war for America's soul sink?

This low.  John Hinderaker at Power Line bullet-points his five observations on the implications of the going-to-a-Ted-Cruz-fundraiser episode of HBO's vampire series True Blood:

1) The show’s producers invited Sarah Palin to appear in the episode, apparently for additional “Republicunt” titillation. She declined. These people are beneath beneath contempt.

2) Every time you think the culture can’t possibly sink any lower, it does. But the decline is not uniform: it is inconceivable that any commercial media outlet would describe those who attend a Hillary Clinton fundraiser as “assholes,” or refer to “Democunts,” or whatever the word might be. If, by some chance, such a thing were to happen, it is impossible to imagine the outrage that would follow. That wouldn’t be just a war on (liberal) women, it would be gender genocide.

3) Outrages like this one can’t be attributed to commercial motives. Why would producers of a television program deliberately alienate at least 1/3 of their potential viewers? Well, OK, it is probably less than a third–Republicans aren’t likely to be watching a dumb show about vampires who use bad language in the first place. But still: by any calculation of profit and loss, it is stupid to antagonize members of either major party. This kind of thing is purely ideological.

4) What is it about Ted Cruz? In a very short time, he has achieved a sort of heroic status on the Left. It is greatly to his credit, but I can’t quite figure out how he has done it. Among liberals he seems to be code for something, I am not sure what.

5) There is a serious purpose behind this demonization of Republicans. Many have wondered how the Obama administration keeps its head above water, given its awful record. Likewise, how does a party led by such laughable figures as Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi remain competitive in Congress? Democrats can’t talk about their records, so they do what they can: they demonize Republicans. While “True Blood” is an extreme instance, a large proportion of “mainstream” news reporting serves the same purpose. The Democrats may be bad, the media want ill-informed voters to say, but at least they aren’t Republicans! Or Republicunts, a term that is perfectly acceptable within a certain degraded demographic–a demographic that votes overwhelmingly Democratic.

How are the Freedom-Haters going to react to November's likely clock-cleaning?  We can be sure it will be ugly.  And they won't wait until the children have left the room.

Why it's entirely accurate to say that the Most Equal Comrade is not the president of the United States, but rather the not-so-competent dictator of post-America

From his remarks at a Bellevue, Washington fundraiser the other day:

“Part of people’s concern is just the sense that around the world, the old order isn’t holding and we’re not quite where we need to be in terms of a new order that’s based on a different set of principles, that’s based on a sense of common humanity, that’s based on economies that work for all people."

There are two types of utterances that come out of the MEC's mouth:  doo-doo of little or no consequence, and indications of his worldview and ambitions that ought to be taken very seriously.  This was an example of the latter.

If Liz Warren is such an economic populist, why is she cool with Ex-Im?

Jonah Goldberg at NRO says that Heritage Action, in what really is a rather clever move, recently invited Warren to a confab on how to phase out the Export-Import Bank.  Herpeople declined the gesture, to no one's surprise:

Since Warren is the dashboard saint of left-wing populism these days, denouncing big business and Wall Street at every turn, the puckish policy pixies at Heritage Action thought they could enlist her in their cause. As first reported by Bloomberg News, Heritage sent Warren a letter asking her to speak against Ex-Im “and the political favoritism it engenders.”

“We, like you, are frustrated with a political economy that benefits well-connected elites at the expense of all Americans,” Michael Needham, the head of Heritage Action, wrote. “Your presence will send a clear signal that you are going to fight the most pressing example of corporate welfare and cronyism pending before Congress right now.”

Warren didn’t take the bait. Her spokeswoman told Bloomberg, “Senator Warren believes that the Export-Import Bank helps create American jobs and spur economic growth, but recognizes that there is room for improvement in the bank’s operations.”

Warren’s decision to turn down the invitation sparked numerous charges of hypocrisy from Ex-Im opponents. As one writer for Reason magazine put it, “That’s right: The woman best known for demonizing big businesses nevertheless wants to maintain an outlandishly generous subsidy package for them.”

Goldberg says that the reason the Left simultaneously bashes "big business" while cozying up to it on a bureaucratic level is that that is the means by which it can keep big biz on a leash.

David Harsanyi at The Federalist says that it is this kind of managerial-class incestuousness that proves that Warren is no kind of figure distinct from what the H-Word Creature represents, and therefore does not present the kind of viable alternative to H's left that some folks are speculating about:

Even the most appealing aspect of Warren’s politics, her alleged commitment to weakening Wall Street’s influence over Washington, is a fraud. People were surprised when she offered to support the corporate welfare Export-Import Bank last week. On the surface this looked like hypocrisy. We sometimes confuse those who try to restrict and control markets with those who have genuine anxieties about crony capitalism. It’s similar to the way we often confuse the coddling of rent-seeking corporations with “capitalism.”

So it’s worth noting that Warren was appointed chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel on TARP. Most of her focus, then and later, was on how we spend bailout funds, not if we should spend them. Warren’s anti-cronyism is incidental; a byproduct of a Progressive political agenda that supports the funneling of nearly all serious economic choices (from mortgages to energy policy to health care) through Washington—the kind of policy that breeds the unhealthy relationships she claims to abhor. The “system is rigged,” Warren likes to say. And maybe she’s right. She just wants to rig it her way. Warren doesn’t have a problem with big banks or corporations. She has a problem with banks and corporations that make profits in ways that she finds morally intolerable. She is an opponent of dynamism, not cronyism.

After all, she's a politician, which means she needs campaign funds, and, as we well know, the money has to come from somewhere.

And while we're on the subject of Freedom-Hater-care . . .

Perhaps the core truth that serves as conservatism's foundation is that everything in life is a trade-off.  It's the basis on which we're able to dispel a lot of nonsense about "rights" on the one hand while generally serving as the best vehicle for illustrating the nature of real freedom.

The overlords are up against a big-time trade-off regarding FHer-care:

Anger over limited choice of doctors and hospitals in Obamacare plans is prompting some states to require broader networks — and boiling up as yet another election year headache for the health law.

Americans for Prosperity is hitting on these “narrow networks” against Democrats such as Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, whose GOP opponent Scott Brown has made the health law a centerpiece of his campaign to unseat her. And Republicans have highlighted access challenges as another broken promise from a president who assured Americans they could keep their doctor.

It’s not just a political problem. It’s a policy conundrum. Narrow networks help contain health care costs. If state or federal regulators — or politicians — force insurers to expand the range of providers, premiums could spike. And that could create a whole new wave of political and affordability problems that can shape perceptions of Obamacare.

Just like the subsidies at the center of today's ruling by the DC Circuit Court, if you don't have narrow networks, you don't have any cost control.

Memo to Freedom-Haters:  Isn't it time to quit trying to outsmart the free market?

A major victory in the war for America's soul

DC Circuit Court of Appeals says, "Section 36B, baby!"

Governors who said "nah" to setting up state FHer-care exchanges have been proven to have their heads on straight.


John Nolte at Breitbart points out that this takes much wind out of the Most Equal Comrade's executive-overreach sails:

Once it became clear 36 states could not be bribed with federal dollars or bullied by the media into setting up their own ObamaCare exchanges, rather than go back to Congress to lobby for changing the law, President Obama blithely believed he could ignore and rewrite a law he signed after helping to usher it through a Congress dominated by Democrats.

FHer-care's chances of survival are now very, very slim.  Beautiful and glorious.

The overlords' plan to make your "healthy choices" for you

Just now getting around to posting about the talking shopping carts.  Last week was a busy one for me and the world.  When I had time to blog, I went with the developments on the frontmost burners.

But let's parse the levels on which this is, like most ideas that Freedom-Haters come up with, simultaneously silly and chilling.

There's the jargon factor.  "Choice architecture?"  What pointy-headed dweeb in the bowels of Leviathan came up with that one?

The USDA said the ideas are “intended to change the choice architecture of the food retail environment to make healthier choices more prominent,” which is in line with first lady Michelle Obama’s stated second term agenda to “impact the nature of food in grocery stores.”

Discount, buy-one-get-one-free deals for food stamp - excuse me, SNAP recipients -  and rebates for making what the state deems "healthy purchases."  Won't got into a full rant at this moment on the fact that a ginned-up sense of pity for the cattle-masses who can't hit their own backsides with a yardstick and must be guided through life by the all-wise state is essential to the FHer mission, but that's what we have with that "healthy purchases" business.  (I'll get to the food stamp angle shortly.)

Then there's the post-modern obsession with "branding."  The USDA proposes to cal thse talking, color-coded shopping carts "MyCarts." Like a little nod to that antiquated notion that Grandma and Grandpa used to call individual sovereignty.  You have your own personalized vehicle for maneuvering through the state cattle pen.  Aren't you special!

And then there's the business about a "marketing plan."  When this was the United States of America, private organizations devised and implemented their own damn marketing plans.

And what would it cost the still-at-least-nominally-private supermarket chains to implement this program of smiley-face tyranny?  Safeway estimates $40 million.

I've already considered the argument that this just goes to show that when you become a dependent, as a food-stamp recipient has, the entity doling out your goodies gets to call the shots.  True enough, but the overall aim of our overlords is to turn us all into dependents.  The point is for this to apply to all the cattle-masses.

Will this be laughed out of consideration, or will some form of it become a reality? It depends which side prevails in the war for America's soul.

Water madness in Detroit

It would take more peeling back the layers than there is really space for in a post on this specific aspect of Detroit's situation.  You know the basics:  the 1967 race riot that began driving industry out of the city, 50 years of corruption and mismanagement, unsustainable pension packages in both the governmental sector and the auto industry.

The upshot: shrinkage to the point where what was once America's fifth largest city is now smaller than Columbus, Ohio.  Bankruptcy and a shell government that has had to step aside for a team of crisis-management experts.  Huge swaths of blocks of vacant lots and abandoned buildings, both commercial and residential.

So in March, the city water service served notice that customers more than two months behind on water bills would be cut off.

This led to downtown protests along Grand Avenue last week.

Nurses wanted to work the public-health angle:

A group called National Nurses United, which led a march and protest downtown Friday near Cobo Center, said the shut-offs pose a public health emergency and demanded an immediate moratorium on them. The group’s co-president, Jean Ross, has called the shut-offs an “attack on the basic human right of access to safe, clean water.”

Others wanted to do the demonize-corporations thing, as well as turn their municipal sovereignty over to an obsolete and ineffective global entity:

Demonstrators chanted “Who’s on their side? Corporations. Who’s on our side? United Nations.”

A prominent Freedom-Hater politician wants to make individual households' personal financial business the state's business:

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mark Schauer on Friday called for a moratorium on Detroit’s water shut-offs until city officials can assess who has the financial means to pay off delinquent accounts — and who doesn’t.

Memo to Schauer:  By definition, if they have the means to pay and a lick of sense, their water is still on.

Two main things that need to be yelled at maximum volume about this little scenario:

One is the LITD First Law of Economics:  The money has to come from somewhere.  Just has to.  And, due to the reasons cited in paragraph one of this post, neither producer nor consumer has any.  So the water ain't happening.

The other is that there is no right to water, just like there is no right to health care, a job or "affordable" housing.  It's impossible by definition to have a right to something that requires your fellow human being to do something.

I got into this with somebody on FB and that person tried to tie it in with the right to life.  Here's the relationship between hydrogen oxide: You should be able to seek to obtain water with the expectation that you won't be killed while doing so.

Sheesh.

Detroit is a perfect example of the importance of a geographic and political entity coming to its senses about economics before the consequences are so flippin' dire.

A couple of things about the Iranian nuke-talks extension

Obviously, it is the poster child for the utter worthlessness of the "foreign policy" of the Most Equal Comrade and Secretary Global Test.

But consider the extortion angle:

 The Iranians were allowed access to $2.8 billion of their impounded dollars for agreeing to the extension. 

And consider the political angle:  post-American midterm elections will be over.

Just like Europe's Jews, Iraq's Christians are getting out while they can

. . . but the window is closing fast:

In a region where Christians predate Muslims by centuries, over one million Christians have been killed or have had to flee because of jihadi persecution, while America is basically standing by and watching. This is the sad news that Breitbart’s National Security Editor and one of the world’s leading experts on asymmetric warfare, Dr. Sebastian Gorka, brought to Breitbart News Saturday, hosted by Editor in Chief Alex Marlow on Sirius XM Patriot Radio.

Dr. Gorka explained that “in the last 48 hours, ISIS, which is now called the Islamic State in Mosul, has painted the letter “N” for Nazarene on the houses of all the surviving Christians in the city. ISIS has basically given an ultimatum to all the Christians left: You can either flee or convert to Islam, or we will kill you.”

Gorka points out that, over the last 20 years, America has stood up around the world to save Muslims. “Whether it was to save the Muslims in Bosnia or the Albanians, Kosovars, and Muslims in Serbia, it is now time for a humanitarian operation to save the remaining Christians in Iraq,” he said. “It is time for the American people and our representatives to do something for our co-religionists remaining in the Middle East.”

Marlow observed that the blatant religious cleansing is horrifying and asked Gorka: “Why is it that the mainstream press is not interested in the story?” Gorka first responded by saying "Let's face it, this is a Christian version of the Holocaust and nothing less.” 

Have you seen any MSM coverage of this? Have you heard the Most Equal Comrade even mention it?

Okay, so they "did too little to heed the warnings"; the looming question is, Why?

The Most Equal Comrade's aides knew a year ago we were headed for this hockey-stick-style uptick in illegal aliens:

Nearly a year before President Obama declared a humanitarian crisis on the border, a team of experts arrived at the Fort Brown patrol station in Brownsville, Tex., and discovered a makeshift transportation depot for a deluge of foreign children.

Thirty Border Patrol agents were assigned in August 2013 to drive the children to off-site showers, wash their clothes and make them sandwiches. As soon as those children were placed in temporary shelters, more arrived. An average of 66 were apprehended each day on the border and more than 24,000 cycled through Texas patrol stations in 2013. In a 41-page report to the Department of Homeland Security, the team from the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) raised alarms about the federal government’s capacity to manage a situation that was expected to grow worse.

The researchers’ observations were among the warning signs conveyed to the Obama administration over the past two years as a surge of Central American minors has crossed into south Texas illegally. More than 57,000 have entered the United States this year, swamping federal resources and catching the government unprepared.

The administration did too little to heed those warnings, according to interviews with former government officials, outside experts and immigrant advocates, leading to an inadequate response that contributed to this summer’s escalating crisis.

This gets us back to the the basic inadequacy of the term "incompetence."  It's just not enough to explain this kind of lack of response.