Our enemies fill the power vacuum on the world stage - today's edition

Dawn of Libya, a jihadist group in that country, has "secured" the post-American embassy compound in Tripoli.  Video at link shows them diving into the pool and having a grand time.

Freedom-Haters are having their core memes dismantled all over the place - today's edition

Ain't no arctic meltdown:

To put it another way, an area the size of Alaska, America’s biggest state, was open water two years ago, but is again now covered by ice.

The most widely used measurements of Arctic ice extent are the daily satellite readings issued by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, which is co-funded by Nasa. These reveal that – while the long-term trend still shows a decline – last Monday, August 25, the area of the Arctic Ocean with at least 15 per cent ice cover was 5.62 million square kilometres.

This was the highest level recorded on that date since 2006 (see graph, right), and represents an increase of 1.71 million square kilometres over the past two years – an impressive 43 per cent.

Other figures from the Danish Meteorological Institute suggest that the growth has been even more dramatic. Using a different measure, the area with at least 30 per cent ice cover, these reveal a 63 per cent rise – from 2.7 million to 4.4 million square kilometres.

So don't let 'em shut down the coal plants, dither on Keystone, empower the EPA (instead of working urgently to dismantle it). and subsidize "companies" in the business of selling play-like forms of energy.

You have nailed it, Scott

In the course of a blog post about the MEC's remarks at a Freedom-Hater fundraiser yesterday (mentioned in an LITD post below called "Compare and Contrast") Scott Johnson of Power Line sums it all up exquisitely tidily:

We have never confronted a world crisis with an ideological numbnuts at the helm.

And we are about to see what results from that.

The West's efforts to influence Russia's behavior have been inadequate

Peter Foster at the UK Telegraph has an article up entitled, "Vladimir Putin Has Absorbed the West's 'consequences' and Stepped Up His Aggression."  He says there's been no tamping-down of Vlad's nose-thumbing ways:

By ordering a de facto invasion of Ukraine a week before Nato leaders meet for their summit in Wales, Mr Putin was flaunting the fact that he well understood the limits of European and American efforts to dissuade him from action.

As any strongman would, when sentenced to recession by Washington and Brussels, Mr Putin has taken the stinging slap without showing a trace of pain (even though his economy is hurting) and then hit back again, daring the West to go further.

This was not a gamble on the Russian president's part. As one US official despaired privately: "If Putin is immune to economic pain and we are not willing to use military force, then he's got us in check mate, doesn't he?"

Given events in Ukraine, the Baltic leaders could be forgiven for feeling more than a little nervous about the quality of Western assurances these days.

Ukraine is not a member of Nato, so we don't - to quote Mr Obama last week - stand "shoulder to shoulder" with them in the same way that we stand "shoulder to shoulder" with Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia under Article 5 of the Nato treaty.

European leaders talk tough - David Cameron threatens "consequences", Angela Merkel demands more sanctions, Francois Hollande says the Russian incursion is "intolerable" - and yet, as with the annexation of Crimea, that is exactly what we are being forced to tolerate.

We have clearly - and correctly most people would agree - made the calculation that we are not prepared to go war over Ukraine. Nor (unlike Mr Putin) are we prepared to suffer the recession and energy crisis that would be precipitated by inflicting extreme, crippling sanctions on Russia.

And that de facto invasion is well underway, according to Annie Gowan at The Washington Post.  There's a town in eastern Ukraine that has been softened up by pro-Russia rebels for the arrival of actual Russian troops.  Russia is distributing leaflets instructing residents on how to behave when the troops get there:

The nine-point list of instructions on the leaflet — the authenticity of which could not be verified — includes directions to “not under any circumstances hinder the movement of Russian troops,” to “only communicate in Russian,” to “prepare lists of servicemen of the Ukrainian army, participants in the Maidan, civil groups and leaders of national communities to be forwarded to employees of the Russian Security Service,” and to “be ready at any time” to give up living space to “peacekeeping forces of the Russian Federation.”

As I said the other day, what the hell is the Most Equal Comrade doing this very moment?  If it's not focusing on Russia's war machine and the IS threat, this taxpayer wants his ass fired.  Have that chef and that state-propaganda chick tied the knot yet?  Then put the champagne glass down and get your sorry tail end to the Situation Room.

Addendum to my Ferguson post from earlier today

I still concur with Cooke's assessment that the Ferguson dust-up has fizzled, but that's not going to stop the likes of Missouri state senator Jamilah Nasheed from threatening prosecutor Bob McCulloch that if officer Darren Wilson isn't found guilty, there will be worse riots.

Compare and contrast

The Lithuanian prime minister doesn't mince words about the big bear to her country's immediate east:

Russia is at war with Ukraine and so effectively at war with Europe, Lithuania's president claimed today as European leaders threatened to impose further sanctions on Vladimir Putin.

The comments from Dalia Grybauskaite come after officials in Kiev accused Moscow of using tanks to 'flatten' the border town of Novosvitlivka.

British PM Cameron has this to say about the IS threat:

Britain faces the “greatest and deepest” terror threat in the country’s history, David Cameron warned as he pledged emergency measures to tackle extremists.

The UK threat level was raised to “severe” — its second highest — meaning that a terrorist attack is “highly likely” in light of the growing danger from British jihadists returning from Iraq and Syria.

And the Saudi king gets real as well:

 King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has warned that the West will be the next target of the jihadists sweeping through Syria and Iraq, unless there is "rapid" action.

"If we ignore them, I am sure they will reach Europe in a month and America in another month," he said in remarks quoted on Saturday by Asharq al-Awsat daily and Saudi-backed Al-Arabiya television station.

Now, compare those bracing assessments with yesterday's remarks by the man-child ruler of post-America:

"Second reason people are feeling anxious is that if you watch the nightly news, it feels like the world is falling apart. (Laughter.) Now, let me say this: We are living through some extraordinarily challenging times. A lot of it has to do with changes that are taking place in the Middle East in which an old order that had been in place for 50 years, 60 years, 100 years was unsustainable, and was going to break up at some point. And now, what we are seeing is the old order not working, but the new order not being born yet -- and it is a rocky road through that process, and a dangerous time through that process.
"So we’ve seen the barbarity of an organization like ISIL that is building off what happened with al Qaeda and 9/11 -- an extension of that same mentality that doesn’t reflect Islam, but rather just reflects savagery, and extremism, and intolerance. We’ve seen divisions within the Muslim community between the Shia and Sunni. We continue to see an unwillingness to acknowledge the right of Israel to exist and its ability to defend itself. And we have seen, frankly, in this region, economies that don’t work. So you’ve got tons of young people who see no prospect and no hope for the future and are attracted to some of these ideologies.
"All of that makes things pretty frightening. And then, you turn your eyes to Europe and you see the President of Russia making a decision to look backwards instead of forward, and encroaching on the sovereignty and territorial integrity of their neighbors, and reasserting the notion that might means right. And I can see why a lot of folks are troubled.
"But -- and here’s the main message I have for you -- the truth of the matter is, is that American military superiority has never been greater compared to other countries. Our men and women in uniform are more effective, better trained, better equipped than they have ever been. We have, since 9/11, built up the capacity to defend ourselves from terrorist attacks. It doesn’t mean the threat isn’t there and we can’t be -- we don’t have to be vigilant, but it means that we are much less vulnerable than we were 10 or 12 or 15 years ago. 
"And the truth of the matter is, is that the world has always been messy. In part, we’re just noticing now because of social media and our capacity to see in intimate detail the hardships that people are going through. The good news is that American leadership has never been more necessary, and there’s really no competition out there for the ideas and the values that can create the sort of order that we need in this world."
.

The guy waxes senior seminar when the rest of the world has pulled the fire alarm.  I particularly found the business about Russia looking backward instead of forward and a new Middle East "order" not being born yet to be classic MEC.

I do not retreat one micro-inch from my  assertion that the Most Equal Comrade is the most poisonous, destructive figure in American history.  I didn't say president, I didn't say elected official, I didn't say politician.  I said "figure," as in individual, as in person.

Sorry, FHers, Ferguson wasn't the igniting spark of the revolution

Charles C. W. Cooke at NRO says, quite rightly, that the recent Missouri episode was just another garden-variety instance of barely-consequential race-hustling and fearmongering about law enforcement:

Ferguson has fizzled out, the general public having politely declined to draw any significant conclusions, the lack of available facts having stalled the media’s hype. Polling on the topic, meanwhile, does not tell a tale of a country that is unhappy with the status quo. Only 14 percent of Americans (22 percent of blacks and 9 percent of whites) consider police to be institutionally “racist”; just 16 percent believe that they have been “discriminated against” by lawmen on the grounds of their “race or ethnic background” (55 percent of blacks reporting no discrimination at all); and trust in the police remains reasonably high, with just one in four blacks expressing apprehension and one in nine whites admitting to the same. This may help explain why a majority does not consider it necessary for police departments to reflect the racial makeup of those they serve.

General attitudes toward the police seem to be similarly unaltered. Not only does the majority deem that the United States needs more — not fewer — cops, but almost three in five are happy with the state of police tactics. As for the Ferguson response per se, a New York Times/CBS survey revealed that only 32 percent supposed that police had “gone too far.” Research tells us that, in the abstract at least, Americans do not approve of police militarization. Nevertheless, they seem to have a funny way of showing it, having broadly approved of the behavior of both the regular Missouri cops and of the National Guard. If voters are gearing up to say “enough” to the MRAPs and automatic weapons that are flooding into their towns, they’re keeping it pretty quiet.

It's obvious to even the lo-fo cattle-masses of post-America what the deal was:

Most Americans, Rasmussen reports, suspect that the story is gaining special attention only because the victim is black. Nearly 60 percent consider the rioting unjustified. And, despite the hyperbole and prejudgment that we have seen from the press, two in three respondents confirmed that they simply did not have enough information to draw any lessons from the incident, let alone to pronounce upon the officer’s guilt.

All told, this should serve as no surprise. It is always tempting to regard the more dramatic of our transient political events as the ground zero of radical change. But, in truth, this incident never had about it the quality of the game-changer. If one is going to throw around terms such as “execution,” “lynching,” and “gunned down” — or to charge that a particular episode is indicative of a wider “war on young black men” — one had better hope that the facts quickly bear out one’s positions. As of yet, they have not. 

Eric Holder and Al Sharpton are no doubt rather frustrated guys along about now.

 

Henry says the postwar world order has unraveled

The elder statesman among world-affairs thinkers makes a sobering assessment:

The years from perhaps 1948 to the turn of the century marked a brief moment in human history when one could speak of an incipient global world order composed of an amalgam of American idealism and traditional European concepts of statehood and balance of power. But vast regions of the world have never shared and only acquiesced in the Western concept of order. These reservations are now becoming explicit, for example, in the Ukraine crisis and the South China Sea. The order established and proclaimed by the West stands at a turning point.

He looks at the pressures faced by the nation-state as an entity for societal organization, the role of an increasingly globalized economy, and the lack of a body to actually do what the UN is ostensibly for.

A strategy would have been nice

Feds warning of an immanent ISIS / al-Qaeda attack on the southern border.

Rockin' the anthems

Oh, hell yeah!  Gene Simmons brings a little rock and roll to the patriotic classics for a receptive and rowdy audience.



If this doesn't get ya teared up, you need to get your head on straight.

How the West was lost

Certainly in the dusty cacophony of the Caliphate that spans northern Syria and Iraq, but also in a quiet little Vermont town:

In Winooski, Vermont, a small town northeast of Burlington, a restaurant was awarded a sign placement for its participation in a beautification project. Proud of its bacon (among other things, I’m sure), Sneakers Bistro chose a sign that said “Yield for Sneakers Bacon.”

A Muslim woman, fond of neither pork nor free speech, complained online, garnering a sufficient contingent of busybodies to pressure the restaurant to take down the sign.

The restaurant caved. The sign is gone. The restaurant and town officials sound very pleased at how this has all worked out.

They could not be more wrong. This story is horrible at every level. Let’s begin with our offended resident.

Religions may have whatever dietary restrictions they wish. Adherents may follow such limitations as strictly as they choose. But when a person of faith runs across a display indicative of the habits of others, there is no basis for objection.

Something truly bizarre has happened when someone sees imagery related to other people’s choices and hears an inner voice saying: “That is not my choice. But not only do I seek to make choices in my own life, I seek to inhibit the expression of those who choose differently.”

When the enemy gets here in sufficient numbers to take over, will the proprietors of Sneakers Bistro gladly strip to their underwear and be frog-marched to a place of mass execution? 

It's also crunch time in Ukraine

The understanding among European nations that has held since the late 1940s - than no sovereign nation would militarily aggress upon a neighbor - has been shattered.  Poroshenko has felt the need to institute a draft to address the situation:

Supported by NATO satellite imagery showing Russian forces on the move in eastern Ukraine, its president accused Russia on Thursday of an invasion to aid the separatists, and his national security council ordered mandatory conscription to help counter what he called an “extremely difficult” threat.
The assertions by the president, Petro O. Poroshenko, came two days after he had met with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in attempts to find a way to end the nearly six-month-old crisis roiling Ukraine. The conflict has escalated into the worst East-West confrontation since the Cold War, and the developments on the ground in the rebellious east along the Russian border suggested it would worsen.

Lotta hardware involved:

“Columns of heavy artillery, huge loads of arms and regular Russian servicemen came to the territory of Ukraine from Russia through the uncontrolled border area,” Mr. Poroshenko said. Mercenaries, along with regular servicemen, were trying to overrun positions held by the Ukrainian military, he said, according to a statement on his official website.
“The situation is certainly extremely difficult and nobody is going to simplify it,” Mr. Poroshenko said.

What will the Reset Gang have to say about this?

 

Is there anything the Most Equal Comrade could ever feel a sense of urgency about?

(Well, yes, there are a few - bankrupting the coal industry, dissolving our southern border, imposing socialized heath care.)

The ISIS threat?  Hey, don't sweat!

Before leaving for New York for a series of fundraisers, President Obama held a press conference at the White House to discuss his lack of strategy on Syria.

Obama told reporters that his strategy was still developing, and that he would continue to consult with congress and the American people about any action in Syria.

“I don't want to put the cart before the horse,” he said. “We don't have a strategy yet.”

Obama criticized the news media for “getting a little further ahead of where we're at than we currently are” on confronting ISIL in Syria.

“I think that's not just my assessment but the assessment of our military, as well,” he said.

Obama said that to solution to the situation in Syria was not simply a military issue but also a political issue.

He suggested that the United States would support a “moderate opposition” inside of Syrian to give the country’s citizens a choice.

“We have to give people inside of Syria a choice other than ISIL or Assad,” he said, “And I don't see any scenario in which Assad somehow is able to bring peace and stability to a region that is majority Sunni.”

There's the world the rest of us live in, and then there is the world of the MEC's imagination.  Would he like to say where he sees this viable "moderate opposition in Syria?"

Dithering away a grand opportunity because it doesn't fit with his worldview

John M. Ellis at The American Thinker points out that the main reason real victories in our war against jihad have been so elusive is that, until the advent of the IS caliphate, there was no real field of battle on which to squarely face them, but that now that is the case:

n late 2001, America faced a frustrating situation. An enemy had declared its intent to destroy us, and had struck a devastating first blow. We had the most powerful military in the world and could easily defeat any power on the battlefield, but this enemy didn’t form up as an army on a battlefield. Our wars have been against states, but this was not a state; it was a loose but extensive network of individuals spread across and hidden among the populations of many countries, including our own. The exasperating result was that while we had a powerful force to defend us, for the most part we couldn’t deploy it. We were able to invade Afghanistan to clean out a sanctuary there, but that was all.

Good intelligence might let us take out a few individuals from time to time, even one as important as Osama bin Laden, but no serious engagement on a field of battle seemed possible. If our enemy ever managed to kill tens of thousands of us by using poison gas in the New York subway, all thoughts would turn to a retaliatory counter-strike, but we would probably have no idea how or where to accomplish that.

If we keep our eyes on this wider context, we can see immediately that what is happening now in Iraq is an absolute game-changer. Our deadly enemy, radical Islam, has taken to the battlefield! At last, they are out in the open, fighting a conventional war as an army and a state. This is the opportunity we could only wish for during the last thirteen years. Jihadis from all over the world are pouring into Iraq to join them, leaving the cover of their surrounding civilian populations and forming up as an army. They are fighting on our terms, on the battlefield, where we are supreme. At last, after years of frustration, we have the chance to engage and crush them.

The hang-up is that the Most Equal Comrade sees his mission as extricating post-America from the ickiness that is Iraq.

Determined to avoid doing anything that could appear to undermine what he sees as his achievement, or worse yet look like an admission that he had been wrong, Obama lets his boasts shackle him. And yet there is a simple and convincing answer to all of his hesitation: he is seeing these events in the wrong context. This is about the long struggle between modern civilization and a cruel, barbarous force that wants to destroy it, not about George Bush’s Iraq war. It may be true that Obama¹s premature exit from Iraq led to what ISIS is now doing, but that doesn’t matter. All that matters is that a hitherto elusive enemy is suddenly out in the open on the battlefield.
Obama obviously senses that something is wrong with his stance, and so he commits air power to attack ISIS, all the while claiming that this is only for humanitarian reasons, or for protection of the few Americans who are in the area. And yet it’s clear that he hopes his limited moves will stop ISIS without having to admit that this was his real goal. But in so critical a situation we can't afford self-deception. It is in our national interest to destroy this first organized trans-national jihadi army, and that means bringing  all the resources that we have to the task immediately.

At this moment, there are sane, not to mention deeply alarmed, people in Washington trying to convince the MEC to do what is necessary.  This is a moment of real testing.  Is the guy so headstrong in his insistence that "getting out of Iraq" be his legacy that he'll squander the chance to put a stop to the peril that this nation is in?

A top comandante in the Most Equal Comrade's junta finds a way to combine two of the Left's fave bogus causes

Those would be "carbon emissions" and ""justice for communities of color," and the comandante in question would be the EPA's Gina McCarthy:

The Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed global warming regulations aren’t just about stemming global temperature rises — according to agency’s chief, they are also about “justice” for “communities of color.”

“Carbon pollution standards are an issue of justice,” said EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy in a teleconference call with environmental activists. “If we want to protect communities of color, we need to protect them from climate change.”

McCarthy is referring to the EPA’s proposed rule that would limit carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants. The agency says the rule will not only help fight global warming, but will also improve public health as coal-fired power plants are shuttered. McCarthy, however, put special emphasis on how the rule would reduce asthma rates, which affect African-American children.

“Asthma disproportionately affects African-American kids,” McCarthy added. “In just the first year these standards go into effect, we’ll avoid up to 100,000 asthma attacks and 2,100 heart attacks — and those numbers go up from there.”

Need a little background on the group putting on the teleconference call?  Here 'tis:

The teleconference was hosted by the environmental group Green For All. The group bills itself as an outreach organization seeking to educate “communities of color” about fighting global warming. But Green For All also describes itself as “radical enough to push a deeply justice-based agenda.”

“Green For All acknowledges the need to disrupt the current economy, because we understand that our current economy was based upon human trafficking, the exploitation of labor, and violent racism,” according to the group’s website. “We are safe enough to be invited into spaces where power-building groups are not, and radical enough to push a deeply justice-based agenda in those spaces. We are radical enough to partner with grassroots organizations when other national groups are turned away, and enough of an ally to offer resources and support in those spaces.”

Your tax dollars pay the salary of this jackboot who is cool with speaking to such a dog-vomit group.

"Need to disrupt the current economy."  Let that sink in for a while.

Many in Israel are not convinced the ceasefire is a good deal

Haviv Rettig Gur at the Times of Israel says that Netanyahu's popularity has taken a beating, and it's not because folks became war-weary, but rather because the IDF did not once and for all wipe Hamas out:

. . . his critics span the political spectrum. His most vocal critics are not in the opposition, but sit in his inner security cabinet – with Economy Minister Naftali Bennett slamming the prime minister’s ceasefire talks in Egypt as “negotiating with terrorists,” even as Bennett’s Jewish Home party saw its popularity rise by 50%, from 12 seats in the current Knesset to the equivalent of 18 seats in wartime opinion polls.

The day after the ceasefire, critics castigated the conduct of the operation from both sides. “In the next round, we must win,” insisted Jewish Home MK Yoni Chetboun.
“Quiet is always preferable to fire, but for God’s sake, we went through all this just to get back to the understandings from [2012’s Operation] Pillar of Defense?” lamented Labor whip Eitan Cabel.

He analyzes Bibi's reasons for putting this round in the history books:

Netanyahu did not set out on July 8 to uproot Hamas – for two reasons. First, he believes time is on Israel’s side. Hamas is mismanaging Gaza into economic and political oblivion (even those who blame Gaza’s dire condition squarely on Israel have trouble defending Hamas’s decision to drag Gaza’s economy and last open border into the Egyptian civil war, leading to the huge blow caused by the shuttering of that border over the past year). Hamas’s permanent belligerency also forms Exhibit A in Netanyahu’s explanations to the West as to why his security demands in the West Bank are so high.
Second, according to sources familiar with his thinking, Netanyahu believes, as do the IDF chief of staff, the defense minister and others in the Israeli security establishment, that the cost of the sort of military reconquest of Gaza required to root out Hamas is too high to be worthwhile. The IDF believes it could take years to “pacify” such a crowded, politically hostile territory, at the cost of hundreds of IDF dead and untold thousands of Palestinian dead, massive international opprobrium, and vast drains on the IDF’s manpower and financial resources that could limit its operational flexibility on other dangerous fronts, especially Syria-Lebanon and Iran.

Still, there is the matter of citizens' anticipation of final victory:

Netanyahu’s strategy has much to commend it. It recognizes and addresses the challenges posed by terrorism and irregular conflict – the civilian toll, the political traps, the importance of the psychological battlefield.
But it may suffer from one overwhelming flaw: in the minds of Israelis, it doesn’t look like war. It is hard to explain to millions of Israeli voters under rocket fire, to the families of dead children and dead soldiers, to a nation that expects decisive action from its leaders in wartime, why an enemy as derided and detested in the Israeli mind as Hamas can sustain rocket fire on a country as powerful as Israel for 50 days.
This gap is starting to have political consequences for Netanyahu. The growing chorus of critics, and the plummeting of Netanyahu’s approval rating, show the extent of the disparity between the government’s Gaza strategy and the nation’s expectations.

If there is a solid upside to the way this chapter is being concluded, it is that al-Sisi-era Egypt, a regime that seems to have a fairly decent head on its shoulders, has emerged as once again the power to be reckoned with in the eastern Mediterranean.  And Saudi Arabia's foreign minister, surely largely motivated by the undiminished strategic threat from Iran, is calling for the Islamic world to recognize Israel.  

So the Middle East's lone Western nation may enjoy more parties having its back than it has had in some time.  Not a bad situation to be in, given that Iran and its proxies still loom large, and that the alliance with post-America is pretty much worthless.

The Most Equal Comrade, our Constitution-shredder-in-chief

Quite clearly this blog is not the only outlet in the world to notice what a state of chaos and peril the world is in.  So many front-burner issues that we'd better get right, or it's grim times ahead.

So what is the MEC regime preoccupying itself with at the moment?  Yet another push at an international pow-wow to address "climate change" and make everybody reduce carbon emissions.

Wait?  Wouldn't that require a Congressionally ratified treaty?

Not in post-America:

The Obama administration is working to forge a sweeping international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions, but without ratification from Congress.
In preparation for this agreement, to be signed at a United Nations summit meeting in 2015 in Paris, the negotiators are meeting with diplomats from other countries to broker a deal to commit some of the world’s largest economies to enact laws to reduce their carbon pollution. But under the Constitution, a president may enter into a legally binding treaty only if it is approved by a two-thirds majority of the Senate.

 To sidestep that requirement, President Obama’s climate negotiators are devising what they call a “politically binding” deal that would “name and shame” countries into cutting their emissions. The deal is likely to face strong objections from Republicans on Capitol Hill and from poor countries around the world, but negotiators say it may be the only realistic path.

“If you want a deal that includes all the major emitters, including the U.S., you cannot realistically pursue a legally binding treaty at this time,” said Paul Bledsoe, a top climate change official in the Clinton administration who works closely with the Obama White House on international climate change policy.

Those who push this hooey readily admit it's not Constitutional:

“There’s some legal and political magic to this,” said Jake Schmidt, an expert in global climate negotiations with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group. “They’re trying to move this as far as possible without having to reach the 67-vote threshold” in the Senate.

Oh, that it were politically feasible to impeach this guy.  The grounds for it proliferate by the hour.

American education is a sewer of indoctrination - today's edition

Get your kids away from this poisonous system pronto:

The College Board, the private company that produces the SAT test and the various Advanced Placement exams, is effectively requiring that AP U.S. History be taught from a hard-left perspective. It is doing so through a newly-issued “Framework” for its AP U.S. History exam. I warned of this development here.

Stanley Kurtz provides the back story. He points out that the co-chairs of the committee that redesigned the AP U.S. History Framework, Suzanne Sinke and Ted Dickson, worked closely together on a project whose goal was to reshape the U.S. History Survey Course along the lines recommended by Thomas Bender and the La Pietra Report.

Bender, a history professor at NYU, is (in Kurtz’s words) “the leading spokesman for the movement to internationalize the U.S. History curriculum at every educational level.” He is also a leading critic of “American exceptionalism,” which celebrates America as a model, vindicator, and at times the chief defender of ordered liberty and self-government in the world.

By contrast, Bender views America as (in his words) just “a province among the provinces that make up the world.” It is this view (and worse) that he has successfully urged the College Board to coerce high schools into teaching to our nation’s best young history students.

The La Pietra Report was the fruit of a project to create an internationalized U.S. history curriculum. Kurtz says that approximately one-third of the participants who forged the new curriculum were non-Americans. One of them was Cuban.

The co-chairs of the committee that redesigned the AP U.S. History Framework are also enthusiasts of the “internationalization” of U.S. history and enemies of American exceptionalism. According to Kurtz, Dickson was an original member of the joint panel seeking to advance the goals of the La Pietra Report.

Keep the name Lawrence Charap ensconced in your memory bank:

Lawrence Charap, the College Board’s AP Curriculum and Content Development Director who was in overall charge of the AP U.S. History redesign process, also holds the United States in low esteem. Kurtz notes that he contributed a piece on American cultural imperialism toAmerica on the World Stage: A Global Approach to U.S. History:

Charap’s essay highlights America’s commercial advertisements and anti-Soviet propaganda efforts in the Middle East during the Cold War. Charap seeks out off-putting examples of American propaganda and then suggests that students to put themselves in the places of people in the Soviet block or developing world as they respond to the American presence.

This, indeed, is teaching students to see their country through the eyes of its alleged “victims” and enemies.

And for Charap, our “victims” include the people in Central and Eastern Europe who were oppressed by the Soviet Union. This narrative goes beyond denying American exceptionalism. It is squarely anti-American.

This is what your kids will be subjected to if they get placed in AP history classes. AP, what "serious" students aspire to, because it's where you "seriously" immerse yourself in the subject matter.

Between the jihadists and the declinists, it looks like awfully grey on the horizon.

 

Here's a foreign-policy head-scratcher for ya

Why is the post-American State Department criticizing Egypt and the UAE for teaming up to conduct air strikes against the Islamist militia that has taken over Tripoli and much of Libya?

Jen Psaki says it's an interference in Libya's "democratic transition."  Huh?  Neither word in that stunner of a phrase depicts present-day Libya.

Excuse me, but they're doing pretty much what we've commenced doing against the IS caliphate a few miles to the northeast.

 Tripoli isn’t beingliberated by democrats, but captured by radical Islamists who will impose another dictatorship on the ancient city.

That’s the outcome that Egypt and the UAE want to prevent, and that’s especially important to Egypt. Sisi’s military government has outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, the parent organization of these radical terrorist networks, after Mohamed Morsi tried to impose a shari’a state on Egypt after an election. They want the secular militias to emerge as the controlling clique instead. That may not sound palatable to the Obama administration — but that’s precisely the outcome that the administration favored in Syria, and the strategy which it’s attempting to follow there now after the rise of ISIS.

To call this finger-wagging incoherent is an exercise in understatement. It’s difficult to know what “democratic transition” this administration believes is in process in Libya, because it exists only in their fantasy world where their foreign policy has enjoyed the entirety of its success.

Just what we need: an alienated al-Sisi regime in Egypt.  Post-America is running out of allies, let alone friends, at a rate I've never seen.

The American Legion wasn't digging the Most Equal Comrade

Received with something less than adulation at the group's national convention in Charlotte:

After the customary introductions and thank-yous to dignitaries, Obama spoke for nearly eight full minutes on Tuesday without a single clap.

He touted his foreign policy bona fides, boasting that 'even countries that criticize us – when the chips are down and they need help, they know who to call. They call us. That's what American leadership looks like.'

Silence.

'Sustaining our leadership, keeping America strong and secure, means we have to use our power wisely,' Obama cautioned, in keeping with his slow approach to battling ISIS and other terror groups overseas.

'History teaches us of the dangers of overreaching and spreading ourselves too thin, and trying to go it alone without international support, or rushing into military adventures without thinking through the consequences.'

Crickets.

Ouch.

'You know that we should never send America's sons and daughters into harm's way unless it is absolutely necessary and we have a plan and we are resourcing it and prepared to see it through.'Tepid clapping followed pregnant seconds of emptiness.'We removed more than 140,000 troops from Iraq and welcomed those troops home. It was the right thing to do.'Nothing. Obama couldn't muster sustained applause for a declaration that 'in just four months we will complete our combat mission in Afghanistan and America's longest war will come to a responsible end.'Not even when he paused to honor 'every American who served to make this progress possible, every single one, especially the more than 2,200 American patriots who made the ultimate sacrifice in Afghanistan to keep us safe.'

Apparently, the crowd did express some enthusiasm when he vowed to get to the bottom of the VA scandal.

Not exactly an SEIU-type bunch.

Friends, allies, and tactical partners

One favorite tactic of lefties seeking to discredit the beginnings of our involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq is to hearken back to the Reagan era and cite aid to the mujahedeen, who became the Taliban, and providing weapons to the Baathist regime led by Saddam Hussein during Iraq's war with Iran.

The basic principle that counters such a line of argument is that the moments comprising history often make for alliances borne out of urgency.  The case in point I've generally employed is the alliance of Churchill and Roosevelt with Joseph Stalin.

But we're seeing it again now.  If we engage in any kind of military mission - surveillance flights, air strikes - in Syria against the Islamic State, we are de facto on the side of Assad, who was in disfavor with the Most Equal Comrade and Secretary Global-Test scant months ago (which was after Global-Test had been dinner buddies with Assad at the presidential palace in Damascus).  We have a stake in his prevailing over IS.  (There just isn't an adequate "moderate rebel" faction to get behind.)

My only point here is to say to those who bring up the "well-we-aided-the-guys-who-later-became-our-enemies" line, "Oh, knock it off.  Put on the big-boy pants and live in the real world."

As I say, there was a time when Assad was considered by libbos to be the least-bad-and-actually-kind-of-intriquing dictator in the Middle East. Ophthalmologist with a fashionable wife.  Spread in Vogue.  Visits by Global-Test and Pelosi.

Does that mean that if post-America can get someone into the office of president who is actually a serious human being, we wouldn't want to get firm big-time with Assad if the IS can be rolled back?  Probably, depending on all other circumstances of such a time.

But it's about strategic objectives, national interests, and, indeed, standing for principles - in this case, the principle that it's not okay for a fanatical army-state to behead, crucify and enslave its way across the territory of two sovereign nations.

But it's not about wearing badges for the sake of preening.  In this world, friends are few and far between, so you sometimes pick your allies on a least-bad-option basis, and you don't make too much of it.  It ain't no kumbaya moment.

"Too onerous," doncha know

That's the excuse the IRS is giving regarding Lois Lerner's e-mails now that it's been ascertained that they're not lost.

Thanks to a determined federal judge, the country learns that all government emails are preserved in a doomsday kind of database. Lerner's emails never were lost.

But here's the kicker: According to Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, government lawyers told U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan on Friday that "this back-up system would be too onerous to search." Yes, too onerous.
"This is a jaw-dropping revelation. The Obama administration had been lying to the American people about Lois Lerner’s missing emails," Fitton added.
"There are no 'missing' Lois Lerner emails – nor missing emails of any of the other top IRS or other government officials whose emails seem to be disappearing at increasingly alarming rate," he said.

 

Cough 'em up, you Freedom-Hating thieves.

Why we call them Freedom-Haters - today's edition

By now you've heard about Burger King buying the Canadian fast-food chain Tim Horton's, Inc., mainly so it can move its headquarters to Canada and pay a lower tax rate. Pretty much Econ 101: capital flows to where it can best flourish.

Well, Ohio FHer Senator Sherrod Brown feels that this is something to publicly speak out about.  He calls for a boycott of Burger King, getting into all that Elizabeth Warren-type crud about taxpayers funding the infrastructure that made BK's success possible.

For exposing  this "argument" for the totalitarian dog vomit that it is, I cede the floor to Thomas Sowell:

People who run businesses are benefiting from things paid for by others? Since when are people in business, or high-income earners in general, exempt from paying taxes like everybody else?

At a time when a small fraction of high-income taxpayers pay the vast majority of all the taxes collected, it is sheer chutzpah to depict high-income earners as somehow subsidized by “the rest of us,” whether through paying for the building of roads or the educating of the young.

Since everybody else uses the roads and the schools, why should high achievers be expected to feel like freeloaders who owe still more to the government, because schools and roads are among the things that facilitate their work? According to Elizabeth Warren, it’s because it is part of an “underlying social contract.”

Conjuring up some mythical agreement that nobody saw, much less signed, is an old ploy of the Left — one that goes back at least a century, when Herbert Croly, the first editor of The New Republic magazine, wrote a book titled “The Promise of American Life.”

Whatever policy Herbert Croly happened to favor was magically transformed by rhetoric into a “promise” that American society was supposed to have made — and, implicitly, that American taxpayers should be forced to pay for. This pious hokum was so successful politically that all sorts of “social contracts” began to appear magically in the rhetoric of the Left.

If talking in this mystical way is enough to give you control of billions of the taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars, why not?

It's going to be a daunting task indeed to disabuse the post-American public of the notion that "it" in some kind of collective sense is entitled to the money of individual people and organizations.

The Most Equal Comrade and the H-Word Creature both get mark-leaving smackin's from a fellow Dem

Jim Webb has some choice words for the architects of our current disaster:

As Obama considers enacting amnesty "by the end of summer," Webb, the former Virginia Senator, blasted Obama's extensive use of executive actions to labor leaders, reportedly saying that Obama "has gone way too far away from the legislative branch." 

"It certainly is outside all precedent, and the Congress should have stepped in," Webb later said, according to the Associated Press.

Iowa reporters also asked Webb about Hillary Clinton's foreign policy, and Webb said that "there's time to have that discussion later." He then said the "actions in the Arab Spring were probably detrimental" and indicated that he needed more time than the 25-minute program allowed to criticize Clinton's foreign policy failures.

"It would probably take up the whole show," he said on Iowa Press.

Said this stuff in Iowa.  Interesting.

And now, for a couple of developments that transpired as you were enjoying your Sunday

It's not just the international airport at Tripoli that has fallen under jihadist control, but Libya's entire capital city.

And a major Syrian air base - the last government-held outpost in IS-controlled territory - has fallen to IS.

Oh, and here's a tidbit to cap off your digesting of the above developments:

According to a new Sunday Times report by Toby Harden,"Pentagon sources said Foley and the others might well have been rescued but Obama, concerned about the ramifications of US troops being killed or captured in Syria, took too long to authorise the mission."

It's claimed that Obama was concerned about his administration being Carterizedhad the mission failed. 

For President Barack Obama the decision to send in the Night Stalkers was an agonising one. The audacious bin Laden raid in Pakistan had been a success but also preying on his mind was the failed 1980 Delta Force operation to rescue American hostages in Tehran. Sandstorms and mechanical troubles led the mission to be abandoned and eight American troops were killed when two aircraft collided. The debacle cast a shadow over Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

However, it also seems worth noting that the eventual timing of the mission may have made for a nice July 4th weekend announcement for Obama had the mission succeeded. Instead, Obama played golf on July 5th, as well as an additional six times in the month he is said to have spent agonizing over his decision, the delay of which may have cost journalist Foley his life.

Anthony Shaffer, a former lieutenant-colonel in US military intelligence who worked on covert operations, said: “I’m told it was almost a 30-day delay from when they said they wanted to go to when he finally gave the green light. They were ready to go in June to grab the guy [Foley] and they weren’t permitted.”

Just wow.

More exposure of climate "science" funny business

Seems the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has some 'splainin' to do:

THE Bureau of Meteorology has been accused of manipulating historic temperature records to fit a predetermined view of global warming.

Researcher Jennifer Marohasy claims the adjusted records resemble “propaganda” rather than science.

After a description of some of the problems, the BOM responds to explain the adjustments. Most of it the usual argument from authority, and handwaving about how they are experts and a very complicated technique (that produces odd results) is “likely” right:

“‘BOM has rejected Dr Marohasy’s claims and said the agency had used world’s best practice and a peer reviewed process to modify the physical temperature records that had been recorded at weather stations across the country.

There’s a suggestion that the changes don’t matter much:

‘It said data from a selection of weather stations underwent a process known as “homogenisation” to correct for anomalies. It was “very unlikely” that data homogenisation impacted on the empirical outlooks.

Except we know from Ken’s work (and many others in the informal BOM audit team) that the homogenization and adjustments do affect the trends – pushing minima trends of over 100 stations up by nearly 50% compared to the raw data.

‘”In a statement to The Weekend Australian BOM said the bulk of the scientific literature did not support the view that data homogenisation resulted in “diminished physical veracity in any particular climate data set’’.

‘Historical data was homogenised to account for a wide range of non-climate related influences such as the type of instrument used, choice of calibration or enclosure and where it was located.

“All of these elements are subject to change over a period of 100 years, and such non-climate ­related changes need to be ­accounted for in the data for ­reliable analysis and monitoring of trends,’’ BOM said.

‘Account is also taken of temperature recordings from nearby stations. It took “a great deal of care with the climate record, and understands the importance of scientific integrity”.

Translated: We are careful people, “trust us”

Despite Amberley being a good station (as far as anyone can figure) it was adjusted to fit “neighbours” hundreds of kilometers away:

‘BOM said the adjustment to the minimums at Amberley was identified through “neighbour comparisons”. 

Those wily truth-haters, it requires eternal vigilance to stay on top of what they're up to.

Clown time is over

Been thinking about four recent remarks by public figures.

There's SecDef Hagel's remark that the Islamic State is "beyond anything we've seen" and that we must "get ready."

There's former deputy CIA director Mike Morrell's remark that "if an ISIS member showed up at a mall in the United States tomorrow with an AK-47 and killed a number of Americans, I would not be surprised.”

There's Senator Inhofe's remark that "they're developing the method of blowing up a major US city, and people can't believe that's happening."

There's retired Lt. General McInerney's remark that this country needs to be on DEFCON 1 alert level.

Yikes.  That's imminent-nuclear-attack level.

These four individuals represent varying degrees of alignment with my overall outlook on public policy and the world generally.  But none are considered any kind of beyond-the-pale wack jobs.  These four disparate figures are not just trying to generate buzz and make their brands more visible.

The fact that someone like Hagel, whose recent past includes such demonstrations of cluelessness as pushing to reduce our military strength to a 1940 level, seeks to convey his message with maximum urgency means that the situation has his full attention.  He and the others have seen something that alarms the hell out of them.

Are there any reports of how the Most Equal Comrade has spent his day?  That's not usually among my top ten concerns in life, but it's real important at the moment.  Maybe we'll hear that he's been hunkered down with Hagel as well as his national security advisor, the head of the CIA, Chairman Dempsey, and, I suppose, since it was a bureaucracy created for such times, although, like all gummint bureaucracies, it has become bloated and rather worthless, the top folks at DHS.  Hell, for what it's worth, Global-Test ought to be there, too.

It would really bolster my outlook to hear that such is the case.

And if I hear he's been on the damn golf course again, my disgust level will rise substantially.

Anti-Assad coalition in Syria lays blame for IS rise on the Most Equal Comrade

They say the red line thing sealed the deal:

Mohammed Qaddah, vice president of the Syrian Coalition, said that the terrorist attack on the United States did not begin with the murder of journalist James Foley, as was stated by deputy national security advisor to the White House Ben Rhodes,” the statement began.

Qaddah put the blame on Washington. “Rather, the terrorist attack against not only the United States but against all humanity began with the Assad regime’s murder of the Syrian people amid an unprecedented silence by the international community,” he said.

The United States bears much of the responsibility for this horrible crime when it did not react to the Assad regime’s repeated crossing of the red lines it had drawn and warned against crossing. Therefore it is now imperative for of us to realize that the silence towards the wholesale killings and state terrorism committed anywhere in the world which has produced ISIS and other extremist groups is a real indicator of the expansion of extremism not only to the rest of the region but the entire world. From the very beginning we have many times warned the international community that Assad seeks to carry out its threat and set the region ablaze in case popular uprising against his rule.

The statement goes on to note the many times in which the world was warned that growing instability in Syria would lead to regional violence. The Syrian opposition did, however, express great grief for the United States over Foley’s murder.

“James Foley was also one of our sons, and our grief over his murder was not less than that of the United States,” the statement read. “This horrendous crime is a terrorist attack not only on the Unites States, but also on Syria, the whole region and humanity in general.”

At a time when it seems like Obama will be forced to finally undertake military action inside Syria, although with muddled objectives and conditions on the ground far less favorable than they were a year ago, it seems imprudent of the Syrian Coalition to be antagonizing the president. That being said, if I were engaged in a more than three-year-old civil war characterized by the use of weapons of mass destruction in which nearly 200,000 had died and is only now going to be subject to foreign intervention after an American journalist was gruesomely beheaded, I would be understandably churlish, too.

One more force on the world stage that has no respect for the MEC.  We're in a pickle, folks.

No one's saying "Everybody just chill out" anymore

The second-to-last Sunday morning of August 2014.  Seems like an appropriate time for a quick roundup of world-stage events, does it not?

There's the tweet from Iran's supreme leader Khameini urging people to buy Roots, which would no doubt please race hustler Alex Haley to no end.  Black pundits from left to right have exposed Haley for the opportunistic guilt-monger that he was:

Black commentator Stanley Crouch doesn’t mince words when it comes to Alex Haley.  Haley, Crouch insists, was a “ruthless hustler” and “one of the biggest damn liars this country has ever seen.” Crouch likens Haley to Tawana Brawley, the young black woman who infamously lied about being raped and humiliated by a white police officer.  Like the lie concocted by Brawley and abetted by the likes of Al Sharpton, Haley’s story is also a “hoax” that beautifully illustrates “how history and tragic fact can be pillaged by an individual willing to exploit whatever the naïve might consider sacred.”

Crouch explains: “Haley came on the scene when Negroes were becoming obsessed with their African ancestry and were having overwrought reactions to a tale of slavery that always, conveniently, left out the crucial role of the cooperative and profiting Africans.”

Black thinker Thomas Sowell, who has written prolifically on race and slavery, makes the same point as Crouch — even if not quite as bluntly. Regarding the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, Sowell remarks that Roots “presented some crucially false pictures of what had actually happened — false pictures that continue to dominate thinking today.”

For instance, “Roots has a white man leading a slave raid in West Africa, where the hero, Kunta Kinte [supposedly, Haley’s ancestor] was captured, looking bewildered at the chains put on him as he was led away in bondage.” Moreover, even “the village elders” likewise appeared perplexed by the sight of these “white men” who were “carrying their people away.” In glaring contrast to this depiction, Sowell correctly asserts, the location from which Kunta Kinte was taken — West Africa — had been “a center of slave trading before the first white man arrived there — and slavery continues in parts of it to this very moment.” He adds: “Africans soldvast numbers of other Africans to Europeans. But they hardly let Europeans go running around in their territory, catching people willy-nilly.” (Emphasis added.)

According to Sowell, Roots did more harm than good in fueling “the gross misconception that slavery was about white people enslaving black people.” In reality, “the tragedy of slavery was of a far greater magnitude than that.” Slavery knew no racial boundaries. “People of every race and color were both slaves and enslavers, for thousands of years, all around the world.” Sowell likens slavery to cancer in that it transcends time and place. He concludes: “If reparations were to be paid for slavery, everybody on this planet would owe everybody else.”

A jihadist militia has taken over Tripoli International  Airport in Libya after a monthlong battle.

NATO says that Russian artillery units have moved into Ukraine.  And pro-Russia rebels who control the Ukrainian city of Luhansk have killed a Lithuanian envoy there.

And China has been strutting its stuff in international airspace:

"The intercept was aggressive and demonstrated a lack of due regard for the safety and well-being of the U.S. and Chinese aircrews and aircraft," the Pentagon said in a statement."This incident is the most recent in a rising trend of nonstandard, unprofessional and unsafe intercepts of US aircraft that we have observed since the end of 2013."

The Navy's P-8 Poseidon aircraft are designed for long-range missions including intelligence collection and reconnaissance.

The Chinese fighter jet showed off its belly, deliberately behaving as provocatively as possible.  The planes were so close the pilots could see each other.

Hamas fired 200 rockets into Israel in the last 2 days. Also executed some more suspected informants.

Then of course there's the existential and imminent threat from the Islamic State.

And, of course, the Most Equal Comrade's dash back to the golf course after his inadequate statement on the Foley murder.  Even Maureen Dowd has had enough of it.


You know what I'm not seeing from any quarters worth noting?  That attitude one has until recently found among libs and libertarians of various stripes that expresses itself along the lines of, "Oh, everybody needs to calm down.  Life on our planet is proceeding within the parameters of what has been considered normal for a long time."

Anybody with a brain, a heart and a soul knows we're in territory vastly different from that.  I'll bet, way underneath the golf-cart giggles, the Most Equal Comrade even knows it.  But he's scared that he might have to actually rise to the occasion and do the job of a US president.

That's who we've elected, people.  An escapist little man-child who wanted the job to feed his narcissism and, yes, promote his utterly mad ideology - as long as it didn't put him in any icky situations.

It is so very late in the day.