Let's review a basic principle: culture is upstream from policy

And that's true whether you're talking about economic policy, foreign policy, energy policy, education policy, or any other kind.  You're not going to craft a cure-all for some aspect of modern life if you leave the spiritual, moral, aesthetic and civic premise for it unaddressed.

That's the aspect of this conversation between economist Jerry Bowyer and PayPal founder and Zero to One author  Peter Thiel I found most interesting.  The whole exchange is worth your time; they touch on the nature of bubbles (dot-com, housing, etc.) and the question of the pace of technological innovation (they concur that it has slowed over the past few decades, which, once again, has its roots in cultural causes).

I liked the way Bowyer couched the mindset of the gung-ho entrepreneur who doesn't have much regard for the context in which he acts:

Because you're in a Silicon Valley-type environment where it's not just technophilia, it's almost a Utopian technological ideology, what I would call ‘The Church of TED Talks': "Here, we've got a solution and this will fix everything and everything is just going to be great [and] it's going to be great really soon." 

Along with the tendency of some tech wizards to hang their hat on a big discovery that's going to let human kind off the hook for its foibles, there is a type of super-wonky free-market champion who claims that if we just lower the corporate tax rate and restore King Dollar to its stature as the world's predominant currency, all will be ducky.

And I'm glad that, when their conversation turned to that kind of economic cheerleader, they used Larry Kudlow as their example:

Jerry:"Alright. So, libertarians [or] free market economists in general have this long-running argument with Malthusians, on the left largely (although there are Malthusians on the right as well, but socialist-Malthusians), starting really in the 1970s where they gained real sort of cultural influence in elite institutions."
Peter:"The Club of Rome, the Paul Ehrlich Population Bomb, that whole line of thinking."
Jerry:"Precisely. Right. And Julian Simon argued the other side of that debate and we can debate about who won it and the bet that they made, but I think what happened is at some point the free market libertarian supply-side movement (that's where I'm coming from) got stuck on that idea, got stuck on that debate, and therefore it sees any form of pessimism or even a lack of optimism as treason in the Ehrlich vs. Julian Simon debate. I see this in the thought of Larry Kudlow; optimism and free market economics sort of got welded together so that anybody who's free market but not particularly optimistic at the moment is seen as committing some kind of treason against the ideology."
Peter:"And what's of course always very odd about it is that when you get these same people to talk about politics in the U.S., they are often despondent: "The country's becoming socialist," they think of Obama as a terrible president. And so there is this extraordinary disconnect where they are unreflexively optimistic about economic trends, they are deeply pessimistic about political trends, and it's as though these two things are happening in separate worlds. It's a little bit unfair to debate Kudlow since he's not here, but it's always like this question of, "Does the politics matter at all or will all these problems just solve themselves or is the politics toxic?" And so I find there to be a lot of confusion about this topic."

Jerry: "Yeah, there's a complete compartmentalization of the economic scenario from the political scenario. I mean if Obama is as bad as all that, then why are we all held to the cult of optimism?"

I've long found myself shaking my head at Kudlow's there's-a-pony-in-here-somewhere faith in economic growth as a cure-all for civilization's basic ills.  I recall a column he wrote in the spring of 2010 called "The Coming V-Shaped Boom," which was, as we have had confirmed, about as off the mark as is possible.

Kudlow is not a number-crunching robot.  He's a recovering cocaine addict and devout Catholic who says he takes Jesus with him wherever he goes. Still, I think he gets overly excited about positive signs in the various indicators - housing starts, manufacturing output, exports, employment - and loses sight of the main reason we haven't had 1950s and 60s-level sustained vitality since - well, the 1960s.

Something awful has happened to the American spirit in the last 50 years, and examining that takes a kind of reflection that no graph or chart can provide.

Certainly, free-market economic solutions are the only real solutions to anything specifically economic. But, as Bowyer and Thiel understand, that realm of activity is inextricably part of a larger setting that reflects whether we, as individuals and participants in society, give a flip about how we're doing as human beings.

The final stages of Western civilization's rot - today's edition

A high-ranking Anglican proclaims to all the world that there is no true and false, no right and wrong, and nothing worth preserving about the civilization in which he's lived his entire life.  And Prince Charles has no idea why there should continue to be a United Kingdom of which he would become king:

Prince Charles's coronation should include a reading from the Koran, a Church of England Bishop has said. Lord Harries of Pentregarth, a retired Bishop of Oxford, said that such a gesture at the traditionally Anglican service would be "creative" and make Muslims feel "embraced" by the nation.

Speaking in the House of Lords yesterday, the retired bishop, who continues to serve as an assistant in the Anglican diocese of Southwark, said that the Church of England should be "exercising its historic position in a hospitable way."

Speaking of a civic service held at Bristol Cathedral last year, he said that authorities had agreed that a passage from the Koran should be read out before the Christian service started. "It was a brilliant creative act of accommodation that made the Muslim high sheriff feel, as she said, warmly embraced but did not alienate the core congregation," he said.

"That principle of hospitality can and should be reflected in many public ceremonies, including the next coronation service."

Prince Charles has previously stated that when he becomes king he wants to be seen as "Defender of Faith", rather than "Defender of the Faith" – a title traditionally used by British monarchs, first bestowed on Henry VIII by Pope Leo X in 1521.

However, some Christian groups have criticised the idea. Simon Calvert of the Christian Institute told the Daily Mail: "Most people will be amazed at the idea that a Christian leader would consider the use of the Koran at a Christian service in a Christian abbey. 

"People are just so disappointed when senior Church of England figures lose confidence in the claims of the Christian faith."

Subsuming the nation that was once the standard-bearer of the West's essence into the Caliphate is going to be a walk in the park for the enemy.

The fading hopes for a moderate opposition to Assad

The West really ought to be thinking about a Plan B for the multilayered melee in Syria that has its roots in the Arab Spring.  That was the catalyst; like other Arab nations, there was an uprising against an autocratic ruler. But then came the various jihadist groups, and then came their consolidation and increasing power.

And now we're at this juncture:

Seventy-two Syrian rebel groups on Saturday announced a new coalition to battle the government of President Bashar Assad. But hopes that moderate rebels would dominate the meeting were dashed when extremists gained more of the 17 executive positions than had been expected.

Col. Muhammad Hallak, who represented a moderate faction attending the three-day organizational meeting, accused Islamists, especially Ahrar al Sham, which is known to work closely with al Qaida’s Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front, of capturing more positions than its influence in the rebellion deserved.

A review of the names by McClatchy indicated that moderates hold only six or seven of the 17 executive positions.

Hallak also expressed skepticism toward the October document on which the new group, the Revolutionary Command Council, is based, saying it was written to ensure an Islamist government after Assad is toppled.

The announcement of the new umbrella group comes at a time when moderate rebels have lost territory to the Nusra Front, especially in Idlib province, where groups associated with the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army coalition used to hold sway.

“The covenant itself doesn’t mention the idea of free elections and most of the groups represented in the executive office don’t believe in the original democratic values of the revolution,” Hallak said.

On Friday, as the groups were meeting here, the Nusra Front stormed the bases of two moderate rebel groups in Syria’s north: the Ansar Brigades in Idlib and the Haqq Front in Hama. The two groups, both of which were receiving U.S. support through a covert CIA program, surrendered to Nusra, delivered their weapons to Ahrar al Sham and returned to their homes. 

Foreign policy and national security may bore the Most Equal Comrade, but he's going to have to focus on his array of options fairly soon.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/11/29/248482_islamists-come-out-on-top-in-new.html?sp=/99/117/&rh=1#storylink=cpy

Ferguson as symbol and Ferguson as a local law-enforcement incident

I'm so up-to-here with, as well as embarrassed about, Ferguson that I hesitate to post about it yet again.  It's just identity politics of the rankest sort, which leads to absurdities such as a white protestor in Los Angeles (these out-of-state and overseas outbursts prove my point that Wilson and Brown are mere vehicles for stoking the fires of balkanization) lecturing a black cop about racism.  Some chick wanted to mire him in a conversation about a "system" and a "structure of power."  I thought the officer handled it splendidly:

The officer answered that he had grown up in Jackson, Mississippi during the Jim Crow era. "I know racism. I can spot it," he said. 

She was not satisfied. "Do you accept that there are covert types of racism?" she asked, citing an example of a woman clutching her purse tightly when he entered an elevator. "Racism is a structure of power," she insisted. "You are a black man. You are kept down by your race, even if you won't accept it."

He threw the challenge back at her. "Think about it. There are people who don't like me--they don't know me--because of my uniform. Is that discrimination or not? Yes or no?" 

"That's a bias," she said. "Job discrimination is different. I'm talking about your race. The color of your skin...You're a black man. You'll never reach the same pinnacle as a white man in this system, because you are black." Others, gathered nearby, applauded loudly.

The officer then asked the student what she did in her free time, noting that he tutored students in his community. 

"Are you helping your black community out?" she demanded. 

"It doesn't matter what the race is," he replied. "Yes it does!" the demonstrators shouted. 

"So I should go to a school and volunteer with all African-American kids...but all the others--the Asian, the Hispanic kids--not help them out? That's wrong," he replied.

"Color is color," she insisted. 

I guess the main question that interests me is the extent to which this thing has legs.  I don't think the blocked freeways or the disrupted shopping are winning any converts.  Side stories, such as the fund to help Natalie's Cakes-n-More rebuild, are stealing oxygen from the Left's narrative.  It seems that Brown's step-father - he of the "burn this bitch down" rant and the beatdown of the tee-shirt-selling granny - has connections to the Bloods gang.

Plus, the world continues to turn.  Iran is crowing about having "defeated" post-America.  Russian warships are conducting exercises in the English Channel.  Pubs have the Constitutional ammo needed to pull the plug on the Most Equal Comrade's amnesty scheme, per the Congressional Research Service.

Identity politics is essential to the Great Leveling Enterprise.  Individuality is an obstacle of the highest magnitude.  Existing and maneuvering through one's life without prior approval from the arbiters as to whether that life is sufficiently black, or female, or gay threatens the plan to redistribute resources from the supposedly privileged to the supposedly aggrieved.  And then the supposedly aggrieved have no reason to feel gratitude and loyalty to the state.  How do you overload the system, per Cloward and Piven, if you don't have an overwhelming mass of recipients of largesse?

That's the deal.  There is no other reason to make a story about a cop who asks a couple of guys to walk on the sidewalk instead of down the middle of the street, gets attacked by one of the guys and has his gun grabbed for, and winds up shooting the guy, about race.

The facts make it plain:  Michael Brown was the bad guy in this incident.

Billy Jeff the Zipper got a stern talking-to and behaved himself long enough to get elected

So says Clinton insider Susan Thomases.  She gave it to him straight up in 1992:

“I told him if I found him having sex on the campaign, he was dead, that I was leaving and taking everybody with me,” Thomases, now 70, said, according to the Mail.

“I said, ‘You’re stupid enough to blow this whole presidential thing over your dick. And if that turns out to be true, buddy, I’m going home, and I’m taking people with me. If you don’t have enough self-control to keep yourself straight, then it’s just dumb.’”

While Clinton’s lack of self-control in the face of randy, ready intern Monica Lewinsky nearly proved to be the undoing of his presidency six years later, Thomases believes her scolding caused Clinton to mend his ways on the 1992 campaign trail.

Yet more confirmation of what everybody knows.  And still the exorbitant speaking fees and foundation pow-wows and warm regard from the flippin' Bush family come his way.  Yet another front where narrative has trumped reality.

Some candid hindsight from a major Freedom-Hater

Dig this:

Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer threw Obamacare under the bus Tuesday, charging that Democrats should not have passed the law in 2010.

Schumer, the third-ranking Senate Democrat, spoke Tuesday at the National Press Club in Washington about the Democrats’ losses in this year’s elections. He encouraged Democrats to embrace government despite their electoral crash but also admitted that the Democratic House and Senate should not have passed Obamacare.

Democrats should have focused on directly helping the middle class, Schumer argued.

“Unfortunately, Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them” by electing President Obama and a Democratic-controlled Congress in 2008. “We took their mandate and put all our focus on the wrong problem.”

“The plight of uninsured Americans and the hardships created by unfair insurance company practices certainly needed to be addressed,” Schumer said. “But it wasn’t the change we were hired to make” in the 2008 election. ”Americans were crying out for the end to the recession, for better wages and more jobs — not changes in health care.”

There's the regime's agenda, and then there's the reality lived by actual human beings.

Goading the masses into societal deterioration

Now, this is an interesting turn of events.

Just as there is a lucrative race-hustling industry in this country, a lot of feminists have found a source of busy work by fabricating a "rape crisis" on university campuses.  Part of an overall "war on women," doncha know.

Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute has examined the phenomenon:

The campus rape industry’s central tenet is that one-quarter of all college girls will be raped or be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years (completed rapes outnumbering attempted rapes by a ratio of about three to two). The girls’ assailants are not terrifying strangers grabbing them in dark alleys but the guys sitting next to them in class or at the cafeteria.
This claim, first published in Ms. magazine in 1987, took the universities by storm. By the early 1990s, campus rape centers and 24-hour hotlines were opening across the country, aided by tens of millions of dollars of federal funding. Victimhood rituals sprang up: first the Take Back the Night rallies, in which alleged rape victims reveal their stories to gathered crowds of candle-holding supporters; then the Clothesline Project, in which T-shirts made by self-proclaimed rape survivors are strung on campus, while recorded sounds of gongs and drums mark minute-by-minute casualties of the “rape culture.” A special rhetoric emerged: victims’ family and friends were “co-survivors”; “survivors” existed in a larger “community of survivors.”
An army of salesmen took to the road, selling advice to administrators on how to structure sexual-assault procedures, and lecturing freshmen on the “undetected rapists” in their midst. Rape bureaucrats exchanged notes at such gatherings as the Inter Ivy Sexual Assault Conferences and the New England College Sexual Assault Network. Organizations like One in Four and Men Can Stop Rape tried to persuade college boys to redefine their masculinity away from the “rape culture.” The college rape infrastructure shows no signs of a slowdown. In 2006, for example, Yale created a new Sexual Harassment and Assault Resources and Education Center, despite numerous resources for rape victims already on campus.
If the one-in-four statistic is correct—it is sometimes modified to “one-in-five to one-in-four”—campus rape represents a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. No crime, much less one as serious as rape, has a victimization rate remotely approaching 20 or 25 percent, even over many years.

An interesting parallel can be drawn to the environmental movement.  As LITD has noted, we could go to an all-wind-farm-and-solar-panel energy system in this country, and it wouldn't move the needle on average global temperatures worth a diddly.  So it is with the measures the feminists have taken with regard to the "rape crisis."

Such a crime wave would require nothing less than a state of emergency—Take Back the Night rallies and 24-hour hotlines would hardly be adequate to counter this tsunami of sexual violence. Admissions policies letting in tens of thousands of vicious criminals would require a complete revision, perhaps banning boys entirely. The nation’s nearly 10 million female undergrads would need to take the most stringent safety precautions. Certainly, they would have to alter their sexual behavior radically to avoid falling prey to the rape epidemic.

But token measures are adequate and then some, because the "crisis" is phony:

During the 1980s, feminist researchers committed to the rape-culture theory had discovered that asking women directly if they had been raped yielded disappointing results—very few women said that they had been. So Ms. commissioned University of Arizona public health professor Mary Koss to develop a different way of measuring the prevalence of rape. Rather than asking female students about rape per se, Koss asked them if they had experienced actions that she then classified as rape. Koss’s method produced the 25 percent rate, which Ms. then published.
Koss’s study had serious flaws. Her survey instrument was highly ambiguous, as University of California at Berkeley social-welfare professor Neil Gilbert has pointed out. But the most powerful refutation of Koss’s research came from her own subjects: 73 percent of the women whom she characterized as rape victims said that they hadn’t been raped. Further—though it is inconceivable that a raped woman would voluntarily have sex again with the fiend who attacked her—42 percent of Koss’s supposed victims had intercourse again with their alleged assailants.
All subsequent feminist rape studies have resulted in this discrepancy between the researchers’ conclusions and the subjects’ own views. A survey of sorority girls at the University of Virginia found that only 23 percent of the subjects whom the survey characterized as rape victims felt that they had been raped—a result that the university’s director of Sexual and Domestic Violence Services calls “discouraging.” Equally damning was a 2000 campus rape study conducted under the aegis of the Department of Justice. Sixty-five percent of what the feminist researchers called “completed rape” victims and three-quarters of “attempted rape” victims said that they did not think that their experiences were “serious enough to report.” The “victims” in the study, moreover, “generally did not state that their victimization resulted in physical or emotional injuries,” report the researchers.

MacDonald, and others, have pointed out the irony that, parallel to the rise of the rape-crisis industry, there has been a proliferation of Sex Weeks on campuses, featuring demonstrations by porn actors and workshops on all manner of exotic human interaction.  Campus health clinics hand out condoms and other contraception at many schools.   You kids have fun, but be careful!

Well, its seems some Take Back the Night marchers at one institution were jeered and heckled and pelted with said condoms, and, doncha know, the were offended.  And as a result, the entire Greek system on the campus has shut down all social activities.

The suspension involves 14 fraternities, but all 44 fraternity, sorority and community groups involved in the Greek system plan to participate, he said. About 3,000 of the campus' 34,000 enrolled students are part of Greek life.

The voluntary decision by the fraternities comes after a series of ugly incidents in the past week. 

On Friday, a Take Back the Night anti-rape march by about 35 people from the Concerned Students and Take Back the Night groups was met by egg-throwing, sex toy-waving members of two fraternities, according to Concerned Students coordinator Jordan Busse. 

Busse said that the next night, a woman was reported to have been sexually assaulted at a fraternity house. San Diego State University police confirmed there was a sexual assault report but declined to identify the fraternity involved.

"Aggressive and violent and abusive behavior from fraternity members goes unchecked," Busse said. "This year there have been 14 sexual assaults at SDSU, five of them at fraternities and not one arrest has been made."

Why no arrests?  Did the alleged victims go to the police?

This is another aspect of the whole phenomenon that contributes greatly to its murkiness.  Campuses encourage alleged victims to first contact administrative personnel.  A violent crime is a violent crime, is it not?  Police have the investigative chops, not agenda-driven counselors.

But the main point is the glaring irony.  A culture that has pretty much uniformly  jettisoned all notions of sexual mores is running headlong into a pervasive denial of differences between men and women, a fiction that cannot withstand a few drinks, giggles and kisses.  The result is a whole lot of confusion and accusation, not to mention brittle world views devoid of tenderness or romance.

The cycle of militancy and backlash is the same one we see with regard to racial shenanigans.  And it gets so tiresome.

We'll have to keep an eye on this one.  Hope someone close to the situation is asking the "why" questions.  Some Concerned Students Coordinator's take on it is surely not the last word.

 

 

Then do it

Per a Congressional Research Service letter, at the request of a Pub Congressperson, Congress does indeed have the authority to defund even fee-based agencies.  So squish-o Hal Rogers just lost his excuse.

Time to put on the big-boy pants and starve this beast.

Propagandizing against you with your own tax dollars

Nanny-state intrusion into people's lifestyles?  Check.

Demonizing of corporations? Check?

Pandering to a faux surge of self-absorbed phony bohemians? Check.

A government agency taking ideological sides?  Check.

This story's got 'em all:

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is spending nearly $5 million to get hipsters to quit smoking by starting “commune” dance parties in bars across California.

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) are using taxpayer dollars to bring anti-tobacco marketing into bars by selling posters and t-shirts, including those that deride the views of neoconservatives, saying the political philosophy is as bad as world hunger.

The $4,904,466 grant was awarded in 2011, and runs through 2016.

“In our prior research, we identified a high-risk subpopulation of young adults in San Diego, CA: the ‘hipster’ subculture, a group focused on the alternative music scene, local artists and designers, and eclectic self-expression,” the grant explained. “We developed a yearlong pilot social branding intervention to decrease smoking among this group, using social events and social leaders to promote a strong nonsmoking lifestyle.”

Pamela Ling, a professor at UCSF School of Medicine, is leading the project. Ling was the “medical student who got her way” in the 1994 season of MTV’s “The Real World” before becoming a doctor.

Now Ling wants to help UCSF’s Center for Tobacco Control Research create a “smoke-free world” by appealing to hipsters’ concerns about “social justice.”

“Saying ‘Smoking is bad for you’ isn’t relevant to them,” Ling told the University. “But they do care about self-expression and social justice.”

For the NIH study, Ling partnered with Rescue Social Change Group, a company that tries to alter youth behaviors through social branding, to start “the Commune.”

The group holds events, known as “Commune Wednesdays,” every month at bars in San Diego, San Francisco, and Burlington, Vt., trying to appeal to hipsters through artwork, alternative bands, and Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Aw, ain't that nice?  Flatter the ninnies and beat up on the pro-freedom-and-common-sense crowd.

This is rich, isn't it?  Government money being used to perpetuate the notion that there is some kind of viable "alternative" arts world.

I wrote for an "indie music" website for over a decade, and I can tell you that the only thing "alternative" about that world is the big badge it wears that says, "We're not Columbia, Warner Brothers and EMI."  Believe me, all these "hipsters" want to make it big every bit as much as the acts that strived to get signed to those labels in their heyday.  They've just set up their own infrastructure for peddling their product. They live for the day a few bars of one of their tracks is heard on a TV show episode.

But it makes for a nice segue into corporation-bashing generally:

“We have rejected big corporations for a long time, like Big Music that hinders creative freedom and Big Fashion that runs sweatshops,” the group’s website, “Join the Commune,” explains. “Our stand against Big Tobacco is even more important, since the industry contributes to things like world hunger, deforestation, and neo conservative policies.”

“Even worse, the tobacco industry’s pervasive marketing in the art and music scene has manufactured an image that people like us smoke,” it continued. “So now young people that look up to us believe that smoking is more important than creativity, music and self-expression to fit in. We’re out to change this distorted image of the scene.”

Check out the narcissistic alternatives to a ciggie suggested by this "commune" outfit:

The group sells t-shirts and posters with anti-tobacco messages. One poster offers alternatives to hipsters wanting to take a smoke break, including “riding your fixed gear bike,” “styling your sweet mustache,” “practicing your next Instagram pose,” “listening to your favorite band that no one else has heard of,” and, surprisingly, “taking a refreshing shower.”

For crying out loud.  How many of these "hipsters" are mush-brained enough to take the bait?

I guess they probably have done research that concludes this bunch goes in for extermination of fetal Americans, paying lip service to lifestyle changes deemed necessary to stave off "climate change," and "equal rights," whatever that is (presumable the "right" of homosexuals to "marry").

“Altria (makers of Marlboro) is the third largest political contributor in the U.S.,” reads a poster fashioned off a campaign style ad. “Millions of dollars from cigarette consumers are used to get conservative politicians elected. The tobacco industry’s millions support politicians who vote against equal rights, women’s right to choose, and environmental protections”

“Your money. Their policies. You decide,” it said.

Jack Kerouac is rolling over in his grave.

  

The delusion at the core of the patty-cake with Iran

Bret Stephens at the WSJ looks into the glaring chasm between the State Department's view of Iran's participation in these pointless and seemingly endless patty-cake sessions, and those of less agenda-driven observers:

 . . . what are we to make of an American administration that is intent on providing cover for Iran’s coverups? “The IAEA has verified that Iran has complied with its commitments,” Wendy Sherman, the top U.S. nuclear negotiator, testified in July to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “It has done what it promised to do.” John Kerry went one better, telling reporters Monday that “Iran has lived up” to its commitments. 

The statement is false: Yukiya Amano, the director general of the IAEA, complained last week that Iran had “not provided any explanations that enable the Agency to clarify the outstanding practical measures” related to suspected work on weaponization. Since when did trust but verify become whitewash and hornswoggle?

The real reason, behind the confident strides into the negotiating hall, the straightening of the suit coat lapels, the crisp tone of voice, is shameful in the extreme:

The real problem is cowardice. As a matter of politics it cannot acknowledge what, privately, it believes: that a nuclear Iran is undesirable but probably inevitable and hardly catastrophic. As a matter of strategy, it refuses to commit to the only realistic course of action that could accomplish the goal it professes to seek: The elimination of Iran’s nuclear capabilities by a combination of genuinely crippling sanctions and targeted military strikes. 

And so—because the administration lacks the political courage of its real convictions or the martial courage of its fake ones—we are wedded to this sham process of negotiation. “They pretend to pay us; we pretend to work,” went the old joke about labor in the Soviet Union. Just so with these talks. Iranians pretend not to cheat; we pretend not to notice. All that’s left to do is stand back and wait for something to happen. 

That's it.  The thinking is that it's going to happen, so let's rationalize that maybe it won't be so bad. Comparisons with the Cold-War standoff and all that.

We're paying these people our hard-earned tax dollars to squarely face the world as it is, and it turns out, to borrow a term from an unnamed administration official, they're a bunch of chickens---s.

The no-indictment-of-Wilson post

You know the result.  Perhaps also about Missouri State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadali's rant on MSNBC about "St. Louis's race war" and "systemic racism."  About Brown's mother's post-announcement rant about how "you motherf-----s think this is a joke!"  About the miles-long traffic back-up on Interstate 44 due to its being blocked by "protestors."  About the 25 structural fires in Ferguson.

What reaction does this invoke in you?  The main component of my attitude is embarrassment.

I'm so damn tired of preoccupation with race.  I was tired of it before Eric Holder called us a "nation of cowards."  Before Soledad O'Brien's multi-installment series on race for CNN.  Hell, I was tired of it back in 1987, when Al Sharpton hustled his way to fame in the Tawana Brawley fraud.

There was a time when a distinctly black take on American life was a rich contribution to American culture.  That's what the great musical comedies of Will Marion Cook and Bob Cole and J. Rosemond Johnson and Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle were all about.  That's what the Harlem Renaissance  - Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington et al - was all about.  The great musical forms - jazz, jump blues, doo-wop, classic soul both southern and northern - without which twentieth-century America would have had an entirely different feel.  The distinct take on cuisine.

When did all that begin to deteriorate?  About the same time as American culture overall began to deteriorate.  In the case of Americans who happened to be black (the "black community," as it's generally called), Daniel Patrick Moynihan sounded the alarm - and caught no small amount of flack for it - in 1965, with his report on the perilous state of the black family.

And that has continued apace. We all know the statistics about out-of-wedlock births, unemployment, incarceration rates.

Along with drugs and welfare, a major culprit is the race-hustler industry, led by the aforementioned Sharpton. It has its barricade-manners, as well as its intellectuals (Cornell West, Stanley Crouch).  There's quite a pantheon of very rich music moguls who have provided the soundtrack for it.

This cabal of poison-dispensers has tried to perpetuate a notion of a "black community" way out of proportion to the realities of twenty-first-century American society.  While countless Americans who happen to be black are living proof that anybody of any color can become successful, prosperous contributors to this world, there is an increasingly desperate attempt on the part of the hustlers to keep pigmentation front and center.  I discussed this in a recent post on race, citing the new ABC-TV sitcom about an advertising executive, husband and father who is worried that his kids aren't growing up "black enough," along with some other examples.

The raw truth is that an undeniable, distinguished, distinctly black strain of the overall American heritage has been blown way out of proportion so that a few loudmouths can make lots of money and wield lots of influence.  And so a lot of barely civilized people can do dope and screw on the government dime.

The only answer is to just plain not play in that.  Whatever your color.  Build a life of achievement, family and real personal growth, whoever you are.  If you're black, that will come through.  After all, you cook dinner in the evening, and you have a music library. If your background is Irish, that will come through.  Ditto Italian.  Ditto Mexican.

But knock it off with this crud about how your demographic identity makes it impossible to just get up in the morning and live an American life, like most of your fellow citizens are doing.

It's a crock, and, hopefully, it's ringing increasingly hollow.

Has any nation ever had a more absurd foreign policy than post-America?

Patty-cake with Iran is extended once again, this time through March.

More time for Zarif to scream at Global-Test.  More time for Khameini to declare post-America the number-one enemy.  More time for the Revolutionary Guards to swear that Israel will be obliterated.  More time for the centrifuges to keep whirring, for work to continue at the Arak heavy-water plant, and for ballistic missile testing.

It looks like failure to us, but to guys like Global-Test and the Most Equal Comrade, this means planned vulnerability is right on track.

Hagel departure round-up

Can't disagree with such assessments as those of Bing West at NRO's The Corner ("out of his depth from the start") and Gateway Pundit  ("too stupid for even Obama"), but I think West's going on to see where this leads policy-wise is an important part of the conversation:

The Islamic State issue will come to a boil over three questions:

1) Will advisers go into combat? (Yes.)

2) Will our aid flow directly to the Sunni and Kurdish tribes instead of through the corrupt government in Baghdad? (This will end in a frustrating compromise.)

3) Will we insist upon a status-of-forces agreement so that we stay for the long term? (No, we will fight and then leave, with Baghdad in the orbit of Iran.)

The war against the Islamic State will rage for many years. When it is over, Iraq will be divided into three parts — Sunni, Kurd, and Shiite. 

The next SecDef will have much better working relationships with the military, but the White House policies will remain a mess.

Joel Pollack at Breitbart speculates that Hagel's alarm at the rise of ISIS clashed with the preferred complacent-confusion mode the regime was hoping to skate by on for as long as possible:

 . . . there is no immediate or urgent failure that ought to have triggered Hagel's departure. Until he began to "go rogue" on ISIS, he had faithfully carried out Obama's policies. Perhaps the threat of ISIS became too urgent for even Hagel to ignore, as senior military leaders began pushing for ground troops. 

Bryan Preston at PJ Media says that last week's interview with Charlie Rose may have sealed Hagel's fate:

“I am worried about it, I am concerned about it, Chairman Dempsey is, the chiefs are, every leader of this institution,” Hagel said, including Pentagon leadership but leaving both President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden’s names out of his list of officials who are worried about the U.S. military’s declining capability. Hagel said that the Congress and the American people need to know what while the U.S. military remains the strongest, best trained and most motivated in the world, its lead is being threatened because of policies being implemented now.
Hagel went on to note that a good leader prepares their institution for future success, saying that “the main responsibility of any leader is to prepare your institution for the future. If you don’t do that, you’ve failed. I don’t care how good you are, how smart you are, any part of your job. If you don’t prepare your institution, you’ve failed.”

 

 I can speak from experience that it is playing with fire to express misgivings about your workplace in public forums.

Twitchy reports that ISIS has already created a hashtag to gloat about the resignation.

My takeaway from the sum total of this is that, while the guy was nobody's idea of a genius, he truly was disturbed by the fact that the Most Equal Comrade was gutting the military even as the ISIS threat was reaching an existential level.  He said so publicly, and his days were numbered.

 

The Cosby post

Well, now.

It can't be any fun to reach the age of 77 after over a half-century of being adored and regarded as a symbol of avuncular wisdom and a wry-yet-playful maturity only to have it unravel in the space of a month.

The I-Spy breakthrough, the Cosby Kids Saturday morning cartoons (interesting footnote: in addition to Weird Harold, Fat Albert et al, the old Philadelphia neighborhood bunch included one future free-market economist named Walter Williams), the fundraising for Temple University, the PhD, the Jello Pudding commercials, the Cliff Huxtable character, and the upbraiding of hip-hoppers - in any discussion of the man, ever, the sordid sex life will assume prominence.

To draw parallels to, say, O.J. and the shock the American public felt upon discovering that The Juice, he of the Buffalo Bills, Hertz Rent-a-Car commercials, funny movies and NBC Sports commentating, turned out to have a view of intimacy and gender relations not unlike a feral thug would probably invite charges of a racial agenda.  So let's state for the record that sexual Neanderthals come in all races.  Witness the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, or John Lennon's remark that Beatles tours greatly resembled Fellini movies.  To cite a political example, much of America tried its damnedest to look the other way regarding Billy Jeff the Zipper until he had to fess up to a tryst with an intern.

Actually, taking a good long look at how expansive the club of revered public figures with dark sexual sides has the bracing yet healthy effect of prodding us to freshly examine the overall concept of celebrity.  Some public figure becomes so ubiquitous we see and hear them at least as often as people who are actually in our lives and know us in return (which celebs generally don't).  The difference is that you don't know a damn thing about the view out some celeb's dining room window, or his or her relation with a stepchild, the glimpses provided in Esquire or Glamour gushfest softball articles notwithstanding.

This raises an important point: the ability to become a celebrity has advanced hand-in-hand with technology.  Copernicus and Galileo had to present groundbreaking scientific papers that challenged our basic body of knowledge about the world to get famous.  Shakespeare and Marlowe had to be damn good playwrights.  Whitfield and Wesley could draw big crowds, but bear in mind those crowds were eager for a bracing dose of stern messages about redemption.  Once passenger sea travel was commonplace and the towns and cities of the American frontier erected theaters, a Jenny Lind or a Lily Langtree could become something of a star.  But once Edison's great inventions took off, the field got considerably more crowded.  Television exponentially expanded it.  Ditto the internet.

For one thing, it meant that a wider variety of criteria for celebrity emerged.  Vaudeville jugglers, opera singers and those who could knock a baseball out of the park were able to reach and wow us.

Celebrity status inevitably came to have an intoxicating effect on those who achieved it.  The phenomenon of the sycophantic entourage of hangers-on fed this.  It was not much of a leap from "this is all so amazing" to "I have quite a bit of power, don't I?"

Things changed for us spectators, too.  As entertainment and information became increasingly portable,  these figures assumed a greater presence in our daily lives.  We could selectively project aspects of who they were into our assumptions.

It was no secret even in the early years of Cosby's career that he led a fast life, hanging out at Hef's mansion and at Vegas casinos.  It was a weird time.  There was still a fairly monolithic sensibility in our society regarding what made for character, and he seemed to embody it in the way he carried himself most of the time.  Add to that the novelty of such phenomena as Playboy clubs and mansions - the cha-cha-cha wink-and-nod vibe of the earliest days of the sexual revolution - and much of America was willing to see the fast-lane portion of his life as an extension of the playfulness we found so charming.

That all has to be reconsidered now, doesn't it?  There was more to Hef's tit-soup, witty-repartee-and-neck-massages pool parties than was indicated in his magazine's pictorial spreads.  The truth involved a fair amount of exploitation  - read, date-rape drugs.

Cosby burst onto the national consciousness at a time of get-togethers of this sort, of go-go boots and miniskirts, elevation of popular music (rock, folk, jazz, country, Broadway) and entertainment generally into a sacrosanct expression of the noblest of truths and the attendant increase in influence of the industry that dispensed it to us, and pop psychology with a strong element of moral relativism.

Month by month, year by year, the good guys and gals flashing on our television screens chipped away at the standards we'd held for their behavior.  It was the basic pushing-the-envelope phenomenon.  And why not?  As the foundation for the old standards - the body of Judeo-Christian values that had been so bedrock as to be assumed as society moved forward - was more marginalized, what was to stop the chipping-away?

It's a bit like what I imagine the Genesis serpent's line to have been with Eve:  Come on, now, do you really see any difference between the apples on this one tree from those on the others?

The rapidly changing America of fifty years ago made it possible for us to come up with a rather sickly blend of admiration and behavior-excuse for celebrities that couldn't help but lead to the kind of nihilistic hypocrisy from which Bill Cosby cannot now hide.

We gave Cos a pass.  We're enablers.

The futility of patty-cake - today's edition

The nuke aspirants say there won't be a deal by the deadline:

Nuclear negotiations between Iran and Western nations are likely to be extended beyond Monday’s deadline, according to Iranian officials who said that it would be “impossible” in ink a final pact before Nov. 24.

While U.S. official have yet to brief reporters in any capacity, Iranian diplomats have been making comments that highlight the substantial differences that remain between Tehran and the West as the clock ticks down.

“Considering the short time left until the deadline and number of issues that needed to be discussed and resolved, it is impossible to reach a final and comprehensive deal by Nov. 24,” a senior Iranian official involved in the talks was quoted as telling the country’s state-controlled media on Sunday.

And apparently Zarif has a lively negotiating style:

Iran’s foreign minister and lead negotiator in nuclear talks is known to frequently scream and shout at Western diplomats, including Secretary of State John Kerry, a practice that has caused alarm among bodyguards stationed outside the negotiating room, according to a member of the Iranian diplomatic team who spoke to the Farsi-language press.

Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif—who is scheduled to hold one-on-one talks with Kerry this evening in Vienna—”frequently shouts at Western diplomats” in such a forceful manner that bodyguards have hurriedly entered the negotiation room on occasion worried that an incident might occur, according to one Iranian diplomat involved in negotiations who spoke anonymously with the Iranian press earlier this week.

On one occasion, Zarif’s shouts were so loud that a member of the Iranian delegation entered the negotiation room to check on the players, according to the report, which was independently translated for the Free Beacon.

Upon entering, the Iranian official was informed by European Union Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton, a chief western negotiator, that Zarif was just shouting and she had gotten used to it, according to an independent translation of the report.

The report of Zarif’s aggressive behavior is consistent with previous reports claiming that Iranian negotiators tend to treat their Western counterparts—particularly the Americans—with scorn.

Take off the kick-me sign, Secretary Global-Test.   Come on home and let's all get ready for Israel to do the grown-up work.

The Most Equal Comrade goes overseas and embarrasses post-America - today's edition

The MEC can play patty-cake with the Iranian mullahs, do a reset with Russia, accept a Noam Chomsky book from Hugo Chavez and coddle a Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt, but when it comes to those that had been allies when this was the United States of America, he can't conceal his contempt:

Lost in the shuffle of Obama’s immigration diktat and his sham of a farce of a travesty of a climate agreement with China was his speech about climate change in Canberra, Australia, where Obama went out of his way to insult Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott.  Apparently our embassy personnel in Canberra advised Obama against this course, but naturally Obama knows better.

Australian newspaper columnist Greg Sheridan reports on the matter in an article that is behind the newspaper’s paywall (but easily gotten around through Google if you want to), so here are the important excerpts from it:

BARACK  Obama defied the ­advice of his embassy in Canberra to deliver a stinging attack on the Abbott government’s climate policies in Brisbane last weekend.

The US embassy, under the leadership of ambassador John Berry, advised the President, through his senior staff, not to couch his climate change comments in a way that would be seen as disobliging to the Abbott government, sources have revealed. . .
It is normal practice when the US President makes an overseas visit that the ambassador in the country he is visiting is consulted about the contents of major speeches. It is unusual, though not unprecedented, for an embassy’s advice to be ignored.

Because a scientific fiction, being so useful as a took for imposing totalitarian collectivism, is more important than shoring up strategic alliances in a world full of wacko jihadists and unfriendly Communists.

That's why we call him a Western civilization-hater.

Religion of peace - today's edition

This went down in Nigeria:

Boko Haram Islamists kidnapped 48 fish vendors in Borno State this week. The terrorists tied them up, slit their throats and drowned them in a lake.

And this transpired in Afghanistan:

A suicide bomber blew himself up Sunday amid a crowd at a volleyball tournament in eastern Afghanistan, killing 45 people and injuring dozens more in the deadliest attack since a new government took power, officials said.

The evening explosion in Paktika province was a chilling reminder of the violence that insurgents continue to inflict on Afghanistan despite the inauguration of a national unity government two months ago and the impending withdrawal of most U.S.-led international troops.
Mokhles Afghan, spokesman for the provincial governor, said the bomber was mingling with spectators at a local volleyball tournament when he detonated a vest packed with explosives.

“There are children and teenagers among the dead,” said Najib Danesh, a spokesman for the interior ministry. An unknown number of police officers were also killed, but the vast majority of the casualties were civilians, Danesh said. 

And here's the latest from Kenya:

Twenty terrorists from al-Shabab, the Somali Islamic group, ambushed a bus near Mandera, Kenya, with 60 passengers on board. They segregated those who didn’t look Somali and–since al-Shabab has nothing to do with Islam, as President Obama likes to assure us–demanded that they recite the Shahada. The 28 who couldn’t do so were lined up on the ground and shot. 

Almost as bad as those Amish and Buddhists!

Benghazi: still a scandal, the House Intelligence Committee report notwithstanding

Okay, there was no stand-down order, no intelligence failure, and no further military resources that could have been deployed.

But Joel Pollack at Breitbart says that these three matters are still very much unresolved:

1. President Obama's dereliction of duty. We know that after being briefed early in the evening at a prescheduled meeting, Obama failed to monitor the attacks in the Situation Room, or even to maintain contact with his national security team. He claims to have issued "three directives," but there is no evidence of that, and some testimony contradicts that claim. He went to a fundraiser the next day, declined for days to refer to the events as a terror attack (despite later claims to the contrary), and blamed a YouTube video for the attack.

2. Hillary Clinton's dereliction of duty--and intimidation. In addition to failing to provide additional security to Benghazi when requested, Clinton enthusiastically promoted the story about the YouTube video, long after it was known to be untrue. She also allegedly tried to stop witnesses from cooperating with Congress.

3. The media's role in the cover-up. CBS News covered up the fact that Obama had lied to the public, and CNN's Candy Crowley famously intervened in the second presidential debate to help that lie along. Instead, the media targeted Mitt Romney's criticism of the administration's reaction to an attack on the Cairo embassy.

So, to answer a question that a key player histrionically posed at a Congressional hearing some time back, it makes a hell of a lot of difference.

"Nixonian," even "Orwellian," doesn't begin to cover it

Sharyl Attkisson has come in for a hefty dose of intimidation and attempts to circumscribe her professional latitude as an investigative journalist.

It just got creepier by a quantum leap.  A 2011 email exchange between Tracy Schmaler, Eric Holder's press secretary, and White House deputy press secretary Eric Shcultz has come to light.  Schmaler calls Attkisson, then working for CBS News, "out of control," and that he was going to call CBS News anchor Bob Schieffer to see about getting her muzzled.  Schultz responds with approval.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air remarks on just how chilling this is:

We know (or should by now) that all sides in Washington play hardball when it comes to media courtship and spin control. Documents get leaked for a reason by Democrats and Republicans alike. Reporters get nuggets when they appear to be friendly or when it suits a politician, and get frozen out just as easily. That’s just life in the Beltway, and one doesn’t have to be marinated in the culture to know how business as usual operates.

This, however, goes beyond that — in a couple of ways. First, it goes way beyond the normal carrot-stick relationship with reporters on getting favored stories, and moves into a place where reporters are pressured to keep quiet about government abuse and incompetence — or lose their jobs.  That’s flat-out intimidation of the kind one would normally associate with, say, the Nixon White House and its notorious Enemies List. It’s the kind of gangster-government environment more associated with banana republics. If it succeeds, it guarantees the complete removal of accountability and transparency, and turns the media into stenographers.

There’s another troubling aspect to this, too. The DoJ and White House seemed to be surprised that no one other than Attkisson ran with the documents that got leaked (other than Fox, of course). Why wouldn’t they report on leaked documents from Fast & Furious? It’s certainly not because DC reporters suddenly got ethical reservations about using leaks. John’s point is well worth considering, not just because of the media bias it demonstrates, but also because that media bias allowed the Obama administration to focus its sights on just one journalist. It’s not just that the White House went after a reporter, but also that the failure by most of Attkisson’s colleagues in the industry to “speak truth to power,” “afflict the comfortable,” or whatever tiresome cliché they routinely use to describe their work in heroic terms, when it counted. They left Attkisson isolated, an easy target for the power they claim to challenge.

Maybe some of them like being stenographers. Or maybe some of them didn’t want to end up without a job.

Information, it seems, is dispensed in post-America in much the same way as health care, or energy, or even job opportunities:  Leviathan determines what you need, and you consume what it ladles out.  Those with other ideas are, to paraphrase Alinsky, targeted, personalized and attacked.

Attention cattle-masses: the line for the holding pen forms here

Leviathan knows you find making choices a drag.  That freedom stuff is so overrated, isn't it?

So, not to fret when you find out your Freedom-Hater-care insurance premium has gone up.  The overlords will take care of it:

The geniuses who brought us the dysfunctional website healthcare.gov are in a panic because just about every Obamacare policy is going up in price. So rather than having American citizens deal with such unpleasantness, our intrepid bureaucrats have hit upon a brilliant scheme: why not change the auto-renewal rules of Obamacare premiums by automatically shifting a consumer from a policy that went up in price over to a cheaper policy? Of course, the cheaper policy will have fewer benefits and a larger deductible. And some people may actually like the policy they have now.

But what does that matter to the jamokes at HHS? They know what’s best for you. Just ask them.

Consider that it was a scant four years ago that you could do your insurance-shopping without government involvement, and with a wide range of options.

But you were stupid.  Jonathan Gruber said so.  You couldn't be trusted with that kind of liberty.

Here's your gruel.

Dense and cheap beats diffuse, intermittent and subsidized every time

Play-like energy forms are a confirmed dud:

  . . . a pair of top boffins from uber-green Google's research department have reached the same conclusion.

Ross Konigstein and David Fork, both Stanford PhDs (aerospace engineering; applied physics) were employed on a Google research project which sought to enhance renewable technology to the point where it could produce energy more cheaply than coal. But after four years, the project was closed down. In this post at IEEE Spectrum they tell us why.

We came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach. 

Why is renewable energy such a total fail? Because, as Lewis Page explains here, it's so ludicrously inefficient and impossibly expensive that if ever we were so foolish as to try rolling it out on a scale beyond its current boutique levels, it would necessitate bankrupting the global economy.

In a nutshell, renewable energy is rubbish because so much equipment is needed to make it work - steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage - that it very likely uses up more energy than it actually produces.

Yet our political class remains committed to the fantasy that the emperor's green clothes are perfectly magnificent. Earlier this week, for example, the British government chucked £720 million of taxpayers' money into a cesspit labelled the Green Climate Fund.

 The Freedom-Haters still ride it for all it's worth, though.  Hard to beat as a tool for imposing tyranny, as long as you maintain it as the trendy "spiritual" stance du jour.

Corrupt as it is, the MEC's own DOJ rendered an objective assessment as to whether he's on solid Constitutional grounds

And he's not:

The most interesting aspect of the legal advice President Barack Obama got on the immigration executive action he announced Thursday night may be what lawyers told the president he could not or should not do.

A 33-page Justice Department legal opinion made public just hours before Obama spoke concluded that he doesn't have the legal authority to offer broad deportation relief to parents of so-called Dreamers—people who came to the U.S. illegally as children and won a reprieve from deportation in a program known as DACA that Obama created in 2012.

"As it has been described to us, the proposed deferred action program for parents of DACA recipients would not be a permissible exercise of enforcement discretion," Justice Department attorney  Karl Thompson wrote in the Office of Legal Counsel opinion.

The opinion also reveals, in a footnote, that Justice Department lawyers informally raised concerns about Obama's initial 2012 DACA program before it was enacted.

The MEC didn't seem particularly concerned when he handed down his edict, did he?

About that "pass a bill" remark

The Most Equal Comrade's edict pronouncement was every bit as hurl-inducing as anticipated.  David Harsanyi zooms in on a particularly teeth-grindingly egregious aspect of his Constitution-disdaining smugness:

Obama acknowledges his overreach openly every time he argues that he intends to do the job of an obstinate Republican congress. In his speech, Obama scolded those who question whether he has the authority to change the legal status of millions of people, offering this: “I have one answer: Pass a bill.”

Pass a bill?

1) Congress has no obligation to pass a bill. Ever. Who knows? Maybe immigration ranks 50th on the GOP’s to-do list. Maybe the GOP is dysfunctional and incapable of pulling together comprehensive legislation. Maybe the Republicans are nothing more than irrational nativists. And maybe all of that threatens the GOP’s future. That’s why we have elections for presidents to ignore.

2) If Congress passed a bill, Obama would veto it, anyway. So what Obama meant to say was, “I have one answer: Pass a bill I like.”  No bill will pass, especially after this cynical ploy to prod clumsy GOPers into reactions that might benefit him politically.

Think about his remark.  In his estimation, the only possible policy orientation for Congress to have is an exact replica of his.  He insists on a rubber-stamp legislature.  Like Kim Jong-un has..  Like Raul Castro has.  Like HItler and Stalin had.

That's not the kind of Congress the American people just elected.  And now we know that is irrelevant to him.

I fear for this country's future.  Its immediate future.

How this evil plays itself out on the ground right off the bat

A California immigration lawyer puts it thusly:

Immigrants in the country illegally already are flooding attorneys’ offices with calls to see if they can qualify under President Barack Obama’s yet-to-be-announced plan to shield as many as 5 million immigrants from deportation.

Obama said he’ll reveal the long-awaited order on Thursday. Alex Galvez, an immigration lawyer in Los Angeles, said he’s going to need to add phone lines to keep up with the demand. Orange County, California-based immigration lawyer Annaluisa Padilla said she’s getting twice as many calls as usual since buzz intensified over the plan, which would also grant the immigrants work permits.

“It’s like the golden ticket,” she said. “Everybody who is calling my office is asking how can I get a workpermit under Obama’s program? I am like, there is no Obama program yet.”

So we fight.